more scatalogical talk

One of Kate's classmates kept asking her if she ate rice, if all the chinese in the world ate rice and how much rice did the Chinese eat. Finally Kate said that she was a spokesperson for the x#billion chinese in the world. Good answer. Puts closed to one episode of racial bullying.

But I just read another example of how to deal with this in which you make the example to your kids that bullies equate to poop. and what do you do when you see poop? Or smell poop? You walk away. So you walk away from bullies of any stripe. Even when the bullies are black, too.

Reminds me of how we dealt with nightmares when Kate was much younger and that was to shout: Get out of my Dreams. And at anytime she felt threatened she would say that: Get out of My dreams. We used to walk the dogs at night and kick all the garbage bags lined up on the street for the trash guys and shout: Get Out of My Dreams.

worked like a charm. That and pretending your mind is like a television channel and when you have a nightmare, you just change the channel.

But how would you do that if you lived in a society where you could be challenged at any moment about who and what you are. What police state might you be living in. We've talked alot recently about this new Arizona law and feel that illegal immigration is illegal. But just walking down the street in casual clothes with a darker skin should not qualify you for a show of identification.

The Art of Blogging, tweeting, facebooking, etc.

I am expert now, you know. Well, almost an expert. Well, in fact if there is a group gathering and it breaks down along the lines of tweeters and non tweeters, you know where I am. I have twitter followers and very recently I began to get regular messages in Japanese everytime I blogged. Very exciting. so I put the message into a translation and guess what? It's porn.

Why should the republicans be the only ones to publicly mess with porn. I, too, have been visited by the scourge of foreign porn. Ok, ok. Actually it made me laugh.

I've finished my course up at the Columbia Journalism school on tweeting which is why I now proclaim my brand as champion tweeter. in fact I am no longer a private person, I am a brand. Buy me.

The Heat of Summer

I feel the heat of summer. I may even begin to haul out my summer clothes because my winter clothes are so over for me. And we're planning trips and activities for the summer which is always a good thing. New persective and new interests.

Kate taught us both how to fence last night as we were standing around in the kitchen waiting for dinner to heat up. We lunged and parried with a death grip on our long wooden spoons. success dinner was ready so we weren't faced with any more ignominious foot faults.

A computer? I'd rather have a butler...

I read that quote this weekend in the wedding announcements and just choked. Made me really laugh out loud. I, like many other professionals I know, are struggling valiantly to get with the program and harness their skills which they have finely honed over the years with the new world of social media. Here is a woman who couldn't give a damn about anything that has happened, or so it would seem, in the last 20 years. But then me, too, I'd like a butler. But i'm happy to say I'd like also to be connected to the larger and ever larger world.

Kate went to a bat mitzvah on Saturday at Central Synogogue which is just drop dead gorgeous with brightly colored mosaaics, intricate tile work and turrets. It's all very moorish and a landmark here in the City. I had never been in the building before and i8t immediately brought me to tears. Beautiful things just affect me like that. So Kate said, "You should cry everytime you look at me."

Indeed.

Taking Care of Myself

I took Kate downtown to school and then turned right around and came uptown to the doctor's office and as I strode through the shiny lobby, I caught a look at myself in the mirror and said, "Who is that woman? That woman looks incredibly pulled together with her good hair cut, chic green quilty jacket, appropriate heavy silk scarf and carrying only two small bags. Efficient and intimidating.

OMG that must be me. But I started my day at 5:15 am this morning taking the dog out in my dog walking costume which is a nightgown hidden under a coat and hoping that I have on two shoes of the same kind. I no longer use an alarm clock because mostly I can wake up without that sudden jolt of noise and start my day. But then i fixed Kate her breakfast and she didn't like the taste of the milk and so i had to do it again because maybe the milk was spoiled. And then got shot down when i suggested a quick dinner of spaghetti before her Chinese lesson when she pointed out that she has been eating spaghetti bolognese for breakast for several days. and then mys most severe critic volunteered that she didn't think I did a good job with time management.

Frankly I didn't have time to kill her -- bad planning of my time -- and so I was able to arrive at the dreaded mammogram appointment looking totally like this other woman I described...Who was she" ME! ME! ME!

The Mammogram mill was crowded as usual. I arrived at 8:00 am to get a jump on my own appointment. Please don't get me wrong because these doctors are very very efficient but it takes for ever. Please fill out the same forms you filled out last year, park your coat in a closet, allow yourself to be herded to another area when you swap your clothes for that pink robes -- open in the front, dear -- and when you are finally able to leave, they say: Checking out? Hell yes. I left at 10:00 am a full two hours after I arrived.

This year the form has a new another question in addition to the the normal age, birth date address, anything different, etc. It asks how would you like to be addressed. This year I ran into a group of 4 friends who schedule a reunion to have mammograms/sonograms/whatevergrams on the same day every year. One of them asked to be addressed as Queen. Love that. These friends have time to talk, dish about their husbands, their portfolios, their children and wait for each other to finish this marathon medical adventure. Then they all go to see Stuart.

That would be Stuart Weitzman, the shoe shop, down the street.

Meditation

Arnie and I have been meditating when we can find a short block of time to sit quietly without having Miss Murray or Kate interrupt us. For good causes though these interruptions may be....Well it sounds as if we've become serial meditators when actually we've just done it together twice. The first time I relaxed enough to take myself off on a bike trip to Eastern Long Island on a very sunny and hot summer day when the bees were busy and the flowers along the road kept hitting me in the face. One of my favorite rides. And yesterday I decided to mix it up alittle and so Aladdin and I took off on a small red turkish carpet and flew over the trees in Africa so that we could watch the elephant migrations. It was a great trip.

I'm a little jet lagged now and have to restrict some of my travels to my office.

The following day

Well, forty lashes because I neglected to say that yesterday was Arnie's birthday. Not telling how many years old he is because those of you with a need to know know.
Some small celebratory noices, cards, presents and those all important cross country telephone calls from his children on the West Coast.

Today I had to boogie on downtown to Friends during lunch for a parent teacher meeting to hear how Kate is doing in school and: she is doing splendidly. She is doing so well, in fact, that I will be going out after work to buy myself a present I'm thinking I, too, need to make a statement and the red wedgie shoes she selected are definitely making a statement for her. Maybe they will help me too.

Went up to Columbia last night for class #3 about social media and finally I think I'm getting it. I can now almost twitter in style. It's hard and you have to think about it rather than just writing any old thing which will not drive traffic to your site or to you. Ok, that's enough channeling Sree, my Columbia teacher,.

Rutherford Square

Kate and I took a moment to really enjoy Rutherford Square this morning with its variety of old and stately trees, vivid tulip plantings and sparkling fountain right in the middle as a focal point. It is such a hidden gem.

While it's still cool I am looking for more tranquil spots and think the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum may be my next stop for this kind of calm. But that's the weekend.

going up to Columbia for class # 3. I now know enough to know how little I really knew at the beginning. All clear?

The Day After

Finally all the hoopla about the Museum dance and the tension that it carried is over. And everybody in my office was just slammed. However I did get a new cell phone that could probably fly me to the moon it has so many gadgets embedded in it.

What did we do this weekend? We bought a new vacuum cleaner after the relatively new vacuum cleaner quit. Just up and stopped. It's all about being able to clean Miss Murray's hair because she sheds quite a bit. And that last vacuum we had was described as being for Pets. So this one is a Dyson and it's really quite a machine with some very strategic engineering that enthralled Kate. She says now that she wants to be an architect but I'm thinking that in her brain lurks a very good industrial designer....She broke the machine out of its box, put it together and demosntrated it to everybody including one of our neighbors.

Then she and I came up to the Museum because I was minus some essential hardware for my new phone -- the right plug -- and had lunch up here and then went over to Lilly Pulitzer because I want her to have a dress for a dinnr we are having with Grandma Dot in a couple of weeks at the Cos Club. Lilly Pulitizer is all pink, green, blue and yellow which caught Kate's eye until she kept seeing small bows attached to everything which she denounced as being kiddish and good only for running in the grass. Suddenly the sales woman found a really vibrant pink dress with tigers on it that seemed to fit the bill. Kate liked it, I liked it and we could afford it. Of course Kate poor darling just happened to see a dress that she liked better as we were almost out of the door and when she tried it on declared it a triumph. I declared it too expensive and something I would try to find when the sales came along. But I felt so sorry for her because who hasn't been there. You see it, you want it and how can it be that you can't have it! Zounds.

Well that was our Mommy daughter day which we capped off by watching Auntie Mame and we all loved it. Brought back alot of memories for me.

A Mad Hatter Kind of Day

Busy, very busy. Somehow it is a Mad Hatter day with friends writing to ask how to take care of bed bug infestations, concentrating on how to twitter 15 times from a Museum event for my social media homework and just dealing.

Last night was the Museum Dance which is a pretty flossy fund raiser and it was sponsored in part by Lilly Pulitzer which meant the ration of pink/green/yellow was very very high. Many attendees dug out their Lillies and showed up. But there were also many many really pretty, really thin model types in long dresses that skimmed their bodies perched on the god damn highest 4 & 5 inch heels. Then there was me in my "I am a prada saleswoman black pants suit with low heel boots" wandering through the crowd shadowing NYTimes photog Bill Cunningham who arrives at these events on his Schwinn. His entrance while quiet always sets up a little buzz with people wanting him to take their picture but he is his very own person and so I do little herding. And this time of course I was totally focused on my blackberry out so that I could twitter on for 15 tweets. Actually I realize now how difficult it can be if you don't pick your words carefully because then you have no story. Just misspellings. I'll have to go back and see if I can edit them into something compelling.

Doubtful.

Twitter

Ok, so I tweeted up a storm> it's hard for me to realize that the mutterings of my mind would make interesting reading for anybody!

Yesterday was like a spa day for me topped off by dinner with Arnie at a downtown French restaurant which was nice, relaxed but not worth a repeat visit I'm thinking. Then while we were turfing the baby sitters out -- they sometimes come in matched pairs -- they began a conversation about this 7 year old Russian child who was sent back to Russia like a misplaced fed Ex package by his adoptive parent. Hard to know what was really going on. My take is that the parent was an idiot. 7 months hardly allows you any time to do anything with a child and the referring agency in russia lied like crazy about what the child was really like. But the entire story makes me unhappy and I was trying to ignore it so that kate heard nothing about it. Not possible and perhaps all to the good that i could interpret it for her. It has nothing to do with her life but we both feel very very strongly about issues like this. It's hard enough when you don't have control over your life to have something so damn dumb happen...

sleeping

I seem to be stricken with sleeping sickness and have taken 1 to 2 hour naps every day over the weekend. we took Miss murray to the Park yesterday and then I was done for the day. Napping straight through until we took Kate off to her bat mitzvah.Her new hair cut made her look very chic and grown up while we, her parents, struggled along in blue jeans and made sure not to be too visible. However all the parents looked like us and we saw them escorting their kids to the party because we staked out some seats in the City's new tables and chair which they put up in the middle of broadway. I can't beleive that anybody with a brain could condone this kind of urban planning insanity. In fact I should twitter about it. Also it's my homework: twittering twice a day. Which I ain't really done yet.

And today was also beautiful so we took MM out early and walked downtown looking for an outdoor restaurant as a perch to observe the comings and goings. Apparently outdoor restaurants don't really start serving until 11:00 am. However we found one and then swanned over to buy pastries for the ride home.

Kate has been locked into her room reading and I am now about to Twitter!

What happened? Who turned off the heat?

Most important: Today is my 5th wedding anniversary and my first call of the day was from Arnie to wish me a happy anniversary.

He was in Chicago where the weather was cold and I was in New York where at least yesterday the weather was still warm and balmy. I had a fabulous dinner with Anne Gray last night at an cuban/brazilian restaurant in the village with outdoor seating. My idea of heaven. And it was a girls night out which is also quite special. Right now New York is full of beautiful green flowering trees with what looks like a lace overskirt. Eventually the white lace part drops off and the trees just stay green and lush all summer. I always think that they are Linden trees but I was told recently that they are somekind of pear tree. I walked to the subway after dinner and really had a great time without feeling as if I had to beanywhere in a particular time constraint. Define Luxury: Not having to be anyplace at a particular time. Define Luxury: Having a place to go or something to do without feeling that you don't have enough time...

But today it is damn cold and grey and grim.....

Some Things Never Change

All my life I have been told that my attitude wasn't quite right. In fact it was quite wrong. Even when I thought my attitude was tip top, my attitude wasn't good, or I curled my lip and rolled my eyes. Teenagers have nothing on me. and you know what, apparently after being a bone fide grown up with 100 years of therapy nothing has changed. This morning Kate told me she didn't like my attitude. I'm a Mother now and so how can this be? Nor did she like my tone of voice. When can I escape this character flaw that has followed me throughout my life. Kate tackled me this morning about having a Facebook account and I said: No. but I think I made the mistake of TMI because I went on to explain why. Because your job is to do well in school and we can talk about it after school ends on June 6. In otherwords you can have a facebook account after school is over.

But she didn't like my attitude. Or my tone of voice. So I shrugged my shoulders and rolled my eyes. But then I smiled and gave her a kiss.

But then my bad attitude was rewarded by reading about a frenchman who has a more cynical attitude....his quote which I love and abhor at the same time is this: Yesterday's truth is not always today's truth!

Mommy Daughter Days

Kate came up to the Museum after school and we took off for a shopping trip that was a splendid success. Neither of us are such inveterate shoppers and I have a really short attention span for shopping. I see it, I want it, it fits mostly and i buy it. There is none of this looking and walking away, consulting about price and then trying to find it someplace else. I am totally ADD about shopping. But Kate is a teenager dear reader and you know what that means. It means that she is getting taller, almost my height, and she wants, nay demands to look at EVERYTHING.

zzzz

Ok. She really needed shoes and was down to her last pair of handmedown flats. What kind of a mother am I that I could allow that to happen. So we swanned off down the Avenue and made our first stop at Crocs which had just put out all its new spring merchandise. 'Ah hay, I spy with my little eye: robins egg blue flats. And Kate saw some 1940's kind of platform shoes. I'm not describing them right but they do have 2 inch heels and they are red.

kate wondered if she should get a more sensible color, say black. "Hell no," said her mother. Go for Red. It's a neutral color and you're gonna love it.

Advanced Twitter

What you may ask is that? Advanced twitter is just one part of the new course on Social Media that I am taking up at Columbia during April. I haven't been back uptown to the Columbia area since I worked there 100 years ago and it was really nice to be back on campus. The weather was warm and balmy, the campus crawling, rightly, with students strolling across campus carrying their apple computers. My class was full of boomers wanting to know how to tweet. Count me in....

Easter Egg Hunt

I brought in alot of chocolate for kate's Easter basket this year and hid it in the bread basket. then I worred that it would get warm and sprout mold so I moved it into my closet. You know on the left side where all the Christmas presents are usually hidden and pushed the door to the closet shut gently. Task assessed, solution reached and action taken.

However I forgot to factor in the dog. Miss Murray was very erratic this weekend and very aggressive playing very rough with all and sundry. She even executed some death defying leaps over the cocktail table laden with red wine and other drinks to get on and then, just as quickly, off the sofa. Arnie reported seeing some funny silver papers on the floor. Are you there yet? Have I dropped enough clues? So I had a Eureka moment and put together Miss Murray's totally uncharacteristic behavior with silver papers...I zoomed to the closet to check on the chocolate and what did I find? NOTHING. Miss Murray had eaten, without sharing, two solid chocolate bunnies small and large plus a bag of some 50 small chocolate eggs. She left only the white chocolate egg. Miss Murray is finally fine. But as chocolate with this amount of caffeine is poisonous to dogs, we could have had something of a disaster on our hands!

Another Homerun

I can't believe that I'm using more baseball terminology when I find the game tedious. Don't talk to me about the mental qualities of playing and how brilliant Joe DiMaggio was....I just don't get it. But the point of this was that Kate loves her architecture program. You think you've got it nailed and you don't. Or you do. And in this case,Houston, it's a go. Today is the last day and the time for presentations. I'm gonna be there. Another first was that Kate went out for lunch today with another kid from the program...Very exciting.

and yesterday was Alice's last day. I had this idea that we would get her a going away present of a scarf, probably red and purple. But Kate vetoed the idea, claiming that Alice really wanted a fish tank. A fish tank! And lo and behold when I talked with Alice, it turned out that Kate was right and a fish tank really was something that Alice wanted. Kate has a great ability to listen to people.