Tag: My Glamorous Life

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family glamorous

The Valley of Hidden Sorrows

I have this friend. A mountain of unexpected medical debt buried his family at the start of last year. At the same time, the closing of his business stuck him with six figures of personal debt. Liquidating a retirement account and maxing out credit cards bought him short-term breathing room. Mostly, though, it added interest charges and tax penalties to what he already owed. 

A year on, the debts still crush him, and the poor fellow only just manages to keep his family housed, fed, and safe. I should add that he’s a professional who enjoys a great job with a generous salary and terrific benefits. One of the lucky people. Privileged, even. Somebody you’d expect to be quite comfortable. But he wakes in fear each morning.

To all who struggle in these times, be kind to others and gentle with yourself.

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glamorous

satyricon

In the bubble I blew for myself so it would be safe to grow up, satire was a weapon against evil. Of course I was wrong. Satire is how clever people amuse themselves about things over which they have no control. It saves no victim, stops no crime. The few minds it changes were ready to be changed.

The cruel and evil cannot be shamed. They do not read literature, and they cannot laugh at themselves. Those who laugh at the folly of evil men, they punish with extreme and ghastly pleasure.

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family glamorous

A Tale of Two Pools

Two swimming pools hold an almost holy place in my heart:

The indoor pool and gymnasium of the Chatham Center Hotel in Pittsburgh, where our family lived before our house was ready for occupancy. And where the gym manager Mr Kaufman, a mountain of lazily contented flesh who was never without his lighted cigar, unfailingly greeted my brother and me thusly: “Hello, boys. How’s your mother?” And where I taught my younger brother Peter to swim. We would hold our noses and hang upside down, our legs gripping the edge of the pool. When water went up our noses, we would shout “Angela!”, emulating some character on a TV show who had shouted that name, and cracking ourselves up over nothing, as only two close siblings can. After swimming, we would have spaghetti in the Howard Johnson’s that served as the hotel’s restaurant. That world is long gone.

The Big Pool at the Grand Floridian hotel in Disney World, several summers in a row, starting when my daughter Ava was six. The hotel is on the Magic Kingdom’s grounds. Entering the park an hour before general admission began, we’d hit our favorite attractions for an hour or two, while the temperature and humidity were still bearable. It’s a Small World and Pirates of the Caribbean were of course our favorites, but we also enjoyed the singing bears, and even the dreaded hall of presidents. Before lunchtime, our Magic Kingdom needs sated, we’d have returned to the hotel for a long day’s lounging in and around the pool. We made up imaginary and ridiculous Disney movies, describing the trailers to each other. (In “The Dog Who Shit Nickels,” when the suburban neighbor, pointing to a pile of coins, complains to dog owner Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Look what your dog did on my lawn!”, Arnold says, “Keep ze change.”) We splashed, we swam, we paddled. We floated on our backs, gazing at the palm trees and getting giddy over the ducks who roamed the grounds and used the pool as their toilet. My nostalgia for those moments is enormous. They will never come again. For we will never again travel to Florida.

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glamorous

I’m Here

All my life I’ve known I was “creative” and “different.” Only recently have I realized that I’m both neurodivergent and bisexual.

In my youth, as I struggled with drugs, alcoholism, depression, and underemployment, it never crossed my mind that I was neurodivergent—not that the term existed then.

Even after I was diagnosed with an Anxiety Disorder some ten-plus years ago, I didn’t make the neurodivergence connection. It was only as my ex and I began coming to grips with our kid’s autism that I began to recognize many of her autistic qualities in myself and other members of our family.

And it’s only in the past year or two, and only with my daughter’s help, that I’ve come to realize I’m bisexual. 

I’ve known I was attracted to women since age five, when my mom took me into the powder room at B. Altman, where I gazed with open mouth as ladies touched up their lipstick, fluffed their hair, and adjusted how their bodies fit into their dresses. I was dressed in a wee suit with short pants and a bow tie. Two of the ladies picked me up and called me handsome. A lady kissed me. I smelled flowers as she enveloped me in a hug. A deep hunger was born in that moment. (I know. That sentence is gross.) Years later, in college, as I watched the adoration sequence during my first viewing of Fellini’s 8 1/2, I recognized my own experience of awakening.

Yet for all those years of knowing I loved women, I didn’t understand that the love I felt for male friends could also be a romantic attraction. 

How could I not know that? I suppose it’s because the other drive was more dominant—and, let’s face it, was also far more socially acceptable in those benighted days. As a short, nonathletic, curly-haired, unaggressive Jewish male in a world that beat me down for every one of those adjectives, I suppose I wasn’t eager to throw an extra (and even heavier) albatross around my own neck. 

So much so that I could not accept or even recognize that aspect of myself—not even when my unconscious tried to tell me.

I remember writing a short story about a failed connection between two male high school friends. Thinking I was another D.H. Lawrence, and that my hermetically sealed tale was secretly ripe with deep meaning and profound feelings, I shared the story with my peers in the graduate creative writing program where I was hiding to avoid growing up. 

A colleague in the program, who was a far better writer than me, and an out gay man, disdainfully labeled my work “another failed male bonding story.” I thanked him for his honesty and because his ability to use words that way amazed me, but I didn’t understand why he didn’t understand—because it was I who didn’t understand. (Understand?)

And so the decades have passed.

At this point in my life, being single works for me, and, after two marriages, I have enough to get on with, just working and being a dad. So why even share these fragments and evasions? Surely who I find attractive is of interest to absolutely no one.

Except that Fascists in my country are drawing lines, turning back the clock on human rights and human decency, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit silently warming my feet at the hearth of some late-recognized private truth.

If they want to outlaw queerness and Blackness and ovaries and pretty much any identity other than Ward or June Cleaver, then they’re not just a threat to humanity and a wrong turn in the arc of history, they’re my enemy to fight. I’m right here, motherfuckers.

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glamorous

Walking Through Fear

I used to medicate my anxiety by drinking, but that was not good for me, my friends, girlfriends, family, coworkers, liver, or wives, so I stopped.

One way I manage anxiety today is by avoiding or delaying indefinitely the tiny tasks that stress me out—tasks other people do without blinking. Like checking my postal mail. The mail carrier used to think I was away from home, traveling. Nope, just scared to open the mailbox.

Today, I will tackle a series of important tasks I must get done before nightfall. I cannot avoid or postpone them. I’ve already tried bargaining, rationalizing, and pleading with myself, but was unable to find a loophole. What’s gotta be, gotta be.

By the end of this day, I will have done it all.

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family glamorous Health kitteh!

A thousand tiny pieces

Snow White, queen of mystery.
Snow White, queen of mystery.

Snow White pushed a stack of ceramic espresso dishes off of the kitchen counter this morning, to see how many of them would smash into a thousand tiny pieces. The answer was most of them. 

I couldn’t find my broom, so I had to clean the scattered ceramic chips by stooping over a dustpan. Which made me wheeze and gasp for breath. 

So the whole thing turned out great, because I’ll be able to tell my doctor, when I see him on Tuesday for my first annual physical in two years, that my COVID long-haul symptoms have not improved one bit. Which I might otherwise have lied to myself about.

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family glamorous Ice Breakers

What’s your favorite season?

Spring flowers in glorious bloom. Photo by Sergey Shmidt.

As a child, I loved summer—no school! I could stay indoors all day and read! But summer camp, which I dreaded, ended my romance with that season. Even as an adult, no longer forced “for my own good” to do things I hate, the humid misery of August in New York is a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Where were we? New York has two glorious seasons: Spring and Fall. They last only a few days each, it feels like, but that bitter brevity contributes to their sweetness. Spring has a slight edge over Fall in my heart, especially after the twelve months we’ve had.

Photo by Sergey Shmidt on Unsplash

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family glamorous

My Life is a New Yorker Cartoon

“Why are you uncomfortable having a nonbinary cat?”

…my teenage daughter demanded as we sat together on the couch.

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glamorous Health

In which I am vaccinated

Volunteer helps New Yorkers lining up for COVID-19 vaccine.

Got vaccinated against COVID-19 today. Stood in line for just over 90 minutes outside a Lower East Side high school that was being used as an immunization pod. There was an old couple in front of me in line; the man initially thought I was standing too closely behind him and demanded I move back. Fair enough. I spent the remaining 90 minutes keeping my distance from the couple.

After a while I began to worry about the old man. His wife, no youngster herself, said he had just had heart surgery. She wasn’t getting immunized—perhaps she didn’t yet qualify. Mainly she was there to hold his hand and keep him from falling down.

Over the 90-odd minutes, as unobtrusively as possible, I set myself to guarding the old man in case he needed any help his wife couldn’t provide. At the last corner before the high school entrance, there was a little plastic seat. The old man’s old wife asked him to sit and rest a while, and I told them I’d watch their spot in line.

It had rained, but the sun was beginning to come out, and the temperature was warm for January. I did little stretches in place, moved forward occasionally (when the line moved), and let my mind wander.

I had my phone on me but I didn’t look at it for fear of draining the battery—there was an access code on the phone that I needed to present to a gatekeeper to get my shot, and I couldn’t do that if the phone died. Also I kind of dug the boredom. At home, I can look at screens for hours. But outdoors, standing in line, anxious about losing my place or not realizing the line had moved or losing my ID (I have an anxiety disorder and worry about many small, stupid things), I prefered to just be bored for 90 minutes. It was rather restful.

Mural on a Lower East Side Garage.
Kenny Scharf mural on a Lower East Side garage. Spotted across from the high school where I got my jab.

There were many workers helping move the line along, mostly young folks in their late teens and early 20s. Their work day had started at 7:00 AM and would continue until 8:00 PM. Thirteen hours of standing in place. Thirteen hours of answering the same questions. I made a point of learning their names and chatting with any of them who were willing to talk. Catastrophe may bring out the worst in some people, but it was bringing out the best in them.

One of the helpers, an MTA worker, told me he looked forward to standing 13 hours a day after weeks of sitting around at his regular job with nothing to do.

Eventually I made it into the building itself, and then I was getting a jab. Didn’t hurt. Uneventful. I thanked the doctor for his gentleness.

Afterwards I sat in a makeshift waiting room for 15 minutes to be sure I didn’t have an adverse reaction. Then I left, thanking cops, guards, doctors and volunteers as I did so.

Walked around the Lower East Side a few minutes longer and then caught a Lyft home.

Later today I may have soreness or nausea or a headache that could last a couple of days. No big deal. I have to wait 28 days before getting my follow-up dose, and it has to be the same vaccine I got today—the Moderna vaccine, not the Pfizer. (The Pfizer has a waiting period of 21 days.)

When I got home, my daughter was awake and cuddling our big white cat. I went online to register for my second dose. There are no available locations in Manhattan in that time period, so I chose one in Brooklyn, and I’ll go there in February. 

The first dose makes you 50% immune, they had told me. The second dose makes you 75% immune. Nothing makes you 100% immune. We will need to keep masking and maintaining social distancing for a long time to come.

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family glamorous NYC

My Glamorous Life: Sunday Repairs

For about a week, now, my bedroom floor has been torn up due to under-floor flooding created by a malfunctioning window air conditioning unit.

The A/C unit began leaking during the summer months when I lay in bed with COVID-19, and, in my sickness, I initially did not notice the leakage. When I did notice, I was too sick to do anything about it, other than turn off the air conditioner. Summer in New York did not make that sustainable.

Months passed, I began to recover, and repair people began to work in people’s homes again as New York flattened the curve and began carefully easing restrictions. Six weeks ago, I hired an authorized air conditioning repairman to make a house call and check the air conditioning units. (There are three window units in the apartment; one leaked and all three were radically underperforming.)

I thought the fancy repairman had stopped my bedroom unit from leaking, and apparently so did he. On that basis, I authorized a floor repairman to rip up my bedroom floor and replace all the warped floorboards. It took me three weeks to get the floor guy to come here.

He came, he pulled up some of the floorboards, and he immediately stopped working. It was impossible to continue the repairs, he explained, because the under-floor was badly flooded. He asked why I had waited to so long to get him in. I told him I’d been trying to get him to come for three weeks.

So, anyway.

So, anyway, he ripped up more of the floor, then went away and told me to wait a few weeks for the under-floor to dry out.

A week passed. The water under the floorboards didn’t seem to be in any hurry to evaporate.

Then this morning I couldn’t open or close my bedroom door, because  the floor area near the bedroom’s entranceway had suddenly begun to buckle. By pulling with all my might, I was able to open the door, and I will have to leave my bedroom open until my floor is fixed.

Why was the leak spreading, I wondered. And then I noticed that the air conditioning unit had begun leaking again. There was a fresh pool of water on the floor beneath the unit that hadn’t been there last night.

So I called upon Damir, a porter-slash-handyman who works in the building. He’s exceedingly courteous and warm-hearted, happy to take on odd jobs, and remarkably competent at diagnosing and repairing the many things that can go wrong in an apartment.

(Be thankful I’m only boring you with this tale of the flood, and not listing the many other home repairs that have become necessary since around the time the quarantine began.)

Damir elevatored up to my apartment and immediately found the twin causes of the bedroom air conditioner leak. First, there is filthy gunk in the guts of the unit that prevents the water from draining. Second, because of the way it was first installed, the unit is angled forward into the room instead of tipped slightly backward. As a result, all that icy, backed-up water leaks down into my apartment instead of spilling harmlessly out the window and into the alley behind the building.

Over the months I was sick, enough water had quietly leaked into the room for all that cold wetness to find a weakness in the flooring—a point of entry—where the water secretly settled like a doom in the darkness under the floor.

Damir brought up a hand truck to lug the A/C unit down to the building’s basement, where he will hose out the guts of the machine. Then he will reinstall the machine and build a shim under it to tip it backward so future leaks go out the window. It looks like he may get everything finished by tonight.

While Damir was making ready to cart the A/C unit away, he emptied my vacuum cleaner and vacuumed up the bedroom. Meanwhile, I moved all the stored items (boxes, drinks, rocking horse) out of the hall that leads to the bedrooms, so there would be room for Damir to cart the huge air conditioner away. 

Damir and I were both wearing masks, of course, and in my post-COVID weakness, I found myself breathing heavily while I lugged the junk out of the hall.

Remember, several weeks ago, I paid several hundred dollars to an authorized air conditioner repairman who didn’t do any of the work Damir is doing and didn’t even notice the cause of the flooding or recognize that the flooding would continue. Damir, a building porter, would seem to be a better air conditioning repairman than the authorized air conditioning repairman was. 

If the work Damir does today finally stops the A/C from leaking into the apartment, then the next step, after the under-floor dries out, will be for the floor guy to finish pulling up all the floorboards, replacing them with new ones, and buffing and enameling everything to turn those planks into a floor.

The hardwood floors are one of the most beautiful things about this apartment; I hope, some months from now, some semblance of what they used to be will be restored. Although at this point, I’d probably settle for ugly linoleum and the ability to shut and open my bedroom door.

Update: 60 minutes later…

Damir cleaned and reinstalled the bedroom A/C, mopped up a lot of the flood water on my bedroom floor, built a shim to tilt back the window unit after installing it, and checked 60 minutes later to be sure it wasn’t leaking. (It isn’t.)

He also cleaned the filters in the living room unit and Ava’s bedroom. I thought I had cleaned them but I did a poor job. Two words: cat hair. It gets stuck in all the units, causing them to malfunction. Basically, Snow White + my poor home upkeep skills + five months with COVID-19, not really paying attention to what was happening in my apartment, led to all this.

Thank goodness for Damir.

(I tipped him very well; that’s my job.)

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glamorous

A kindness

Dino works six days a week as a porter in my apartment building, cleaning walls and floors, removing trash, distributing recyclables. He’s one of those essential workers who are suddenly on the front lines. We’ve always been friendly.

I’ve been hibernating in my apartment for days, because it’s what we’re all supposed to do, and also because I have a bad cold Coronavirus. Today, when I ventured out of my apartment for 30 seconds to toss a trash bag down the chute, Dino was hard at work decontaminating the hallway. For the first time that I know of, he was wearing a respiratory face mask. I stood about twelve feet from him, smiled and waved, embarrassed to be in sleepwear in the middle of the day but glad to see a friendly pair of eyes.

Dino asked if I had a respiratory mask. I told him no—the stores have been sold out for months—but not to worry about me. He said he had an extra. I was, like, you need it more. He insisted. Won’t you take? For when you go shopping?

Finally I stopped being polite and guilty and class-conscious and embarrassed and allowed him to give me the mask. Finally we stopped being two players in an economic system and were just two souls in New York trying to survive the day and the next few months.

It has been eight hours since Dino’s act of kindness, and I’m still thinking about it, still thinking how I can pay it forward to someone who needs my help.

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glamorous

My Glamorous Life

At 4:00 PM, I went to bed to rest up from my head cold, and promptly fell asleep.

When I awoke, the clock said 7:15. Oh, no!

I banged on my daughter’s door. “You’re going to be late to school!” I shouted.

She cackled with laughter.“It’s 7:15 AT NIGHT,” she explained.

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blogger Blogroll Blogs and Blogging Design Designers glamorous

My Brunch with Jen

Jen Robbins: web designer, vlogger (before that was a thing), and bestselling tech book author.
Jen Robbins: web designer, vlogger (before that was a thing), and bestselling tech book author.

Today my daughter Ava and I had brunch with my old friend Jen Robbins at P.S. Kitchen, a vegan restaurant in the Theater District/Hell’s Kitchen. Jen was present for, and actively participated in, the very beginnings of the creative and blogging web, and her famous book, now in its umpteenth edition, is still the best introduction to web design I know—probably the best that will ever be written.

One of Jen’s early sites, “Cooking With Rock Stars,” consisted of short video interviews she made with the likes of Jack Black, Rufus Wainwright, and others. Her show predated YouTube by five to ten years and podcasts by fifteen. It was way ahead of its time while also being a great reminder of what the web, in its infancy, was like. The rock star interviews are also fun and fascinating and deserve to be seen again.

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glamorous Standup video

Crash Course in Judaism

Transcript

I’m Zeldman, I work on Team 51.

_APPLAUSE_

Yes! We make wonderful WordPress websites for interesting, deserving people and organizations, and *this* is my Crash Course in Judaism. Enjoy.

My mother and father are ethnically Jewish, my father was an atheist, and my mother was Canadian, so we celebrated Christmas.

_LAUGHTER_

We celebrated Christmas ’til I was six, and right before my sixth Christmas, my Nana came to visit. And she looked at the tree, and she looked at all the stuff, and she said, “These boys won’t know they’re Jewish.” So my parents were shamed and changed to Hanukah.

_LAUGHTER_

Now, Hanukah’s cool. Christmas is cool. We won’t get into saying which one’s cooler. We know.

_LAUGHTER_

But either one’s fine for a kid if you just keep going with it. Dropping Christmas at age six, I think that was the start of my Goth years, right there.

_LAUGHTER_

I felt so disappointed, so alienated. And, you know, before I turned six, like, I would go into Kindergarten and my friend would say, “Santa Claus brought me a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher and a Tommy gun and a machine gun and a Japanese Prisoner-of-War camp, what did Santa bring you?”

And I would say “Santa Claus brought me socks and a book.”

Because we weren’t materialists.

And then after age six, they would say, “Santa brought me a neutron bomb and an atomic bomb, and the Great Garloo, a monster that you can control by remote control, and a flame-shooting monster and a set of daggers, what did Santa bring you?”

And I would say, “We’re Jewish.”

_LAUGHTER_

The “fuck you” was implied.

_LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE_

And so … I didn’t get beat up as a Jew until I moved to Pittsburgh, but that was later, and I’m not going to get to that part of the story. But when I was living in New York areas and Connecticut, there were enough Jews that people were sort of laid-back about their hatred of Jews, and they would just be okay with it. They would even be okay with my saying “We’re Jewish,” and there was no retribution from that.

Anyway, I asked my Dad, “What’s God?” and he said:

“Okay, so before science, people thought there were a lot of gods, because they needed a supernatural explanation for everything.

“So if there was a fire, the fire god was angry.

“And if there was a flood, the water god was angry.

“If there was a snowstorm, the snow god was angry.

“And the Jews improved that by saying there’s only ONE God, and he’s *VERY* angry

_LAUGHTER_

“But there isn’t one.”

And then I said, “If there’s no God and we don’t go to Temple, why are we Jews?”

And my Dad said, “Hitler would’ve killed us.”

And that was my satisfaction with that.

Anyway, when I was twelve-and-a-half, my parents came to me, after no Jewish stuff for a long time, and they said, “Jeffrey, would you like to be Bar Mitzvahed?”

And I said, “What’s that?”

And they said, “You make a speech and then you get money.”

_LAUGHTER_

So I said “yes,” and, really, I’ve been doing it ever since. Thank you, Judaism!