My sister and I made an antiwar statement at the president's Christmas celebration -- by showing up baked
In our minds, it was an act of defiance: I’d put a joint in my purse. When my sister gave me the signal, we’d each say we had to go to the bathroom where we’d meet, light up and take a few quick hits off the joint, then go back out to the party.
It was 1971. I was a senior in high school; my sister, several years older, was a secretary and still lived at home. She hadn’t gone to college. Actually, it hadn’t been an option. My father, who himself was forced to drop out of high school to help support his family, didn’t think girls should go to college. Or at least not his girls. I always thought it would have made more sense for him to insist on a good education. He saw what an education could do. He worked as the photo bureau chief for the New York Times in Washington, D.C., where he called among his personal friends some of the country’s most highly educated individuals within the nation’s government and media. That meant U.S. presidents, too.
I would love an invitation to the White House today. But at 17, it wasn’t cool. It was so bourgeois. My sister and I were placard-carrying antiwar demonstrators, and my waist-length hair, long skirts and beads were an expression of my distaste for everything my parents stood for. That their daughters were part of a counterculture opposing the policies of the U.S. government didn’t seem to register on my parents. So when the invitation came for the annual White House Christmas party, my mother issued the order: You’re going to the White House, you’re going to look good, and you’re going to behave. My mother was a former Marine sergeant. You didn’t argue.
My sister and I weren’t the big statement kind of people; ours was a more subtle form of protest. Lighting a joint seemed innocent enough. We also thought it would be pretty cool to smoke a joint before going, too. So, while my mother sat on a stool in the kitchen having a scotch and soda while she waited for my father to change upstairs, my sister and I got high in my third-floor bedroom, blowing the smoke out a dormer window cracked against the December cold.
It’s pretty strange being stoned around your parents, even stranger when you’re stoned around police, security guards, officials of every sort, and a huge crowd of children and adults giddy with excitement and anticipation. And you’re in the White House.
Was I smiling too broadly? Were my eyes glazed? And where was my sister? I found myself wandering through the rooms alone, overwhelmed by the opulence. Actually, my parents and younger brother were nearby, sampling cookies and punch. I was sure I was being followed. Were there drug-sniffing dogs then?
I had to go the bathroom. When I came out of the stall I saw my sister across the bathroom standing by the sink. She put her thumb and forefinger together as if holding a joint and brought it to her lips. Between us were a half-dozen women and children. She smiled. As I pushed past her I told her I didn’t want to, that it was too dangerous, and left before she could pull me back into a stall with her.
But something was happening in the hall. There were quiet murmurs. There he is, I overheard people saying. And when I followed their gaze I saw the president among the crowd. He was making his way through the party, laughing and talking, greeting people by their first names. He seemed comfortable. And happy. We must have been standing near the band because all of a sudden Nixon was sitting at a piano playing and singing Christmas carols. Somehow, not by my own volition, I was in the group nearest him. There I was, stoned, singing with the president. I remember thinking he seemed just like a regular person, that he was just a man. In many ways he reminded me of my father.
I don’t remember anything else about that night. At home, my sister and I probably went directly up to my room on the third floor, spent a couple of hours watching television, and pulled out that joint in my purse. We probably laughed at how messed-up we had been and how it would have been impossible to actually carry out our plan. It didn’t take me long to understand that the act of defiance my sister and I planned had more to do with youthful ignorance than political activism. It took me much longer to grasp that my sister’s interest in all things mind- and mood-altering was an addiction. And finally there is this: As much as I hated the Vietnam war and Watergate and came to revile Richard Nixon, I have to admit I cried when he died. I hated him, but still, I cried. In some ways I felt sorry for him, for whatever had happened in his life that created the demons he carried with him, for surely that must explain — at least in part — who he became. Of all the images of Richard Nixon that flash through my mind — those pictures of him defiant, angry, even crazed-looking — I always come back to him at that Christmas party, sitting at a piano singing Christmas carols.
I can’t find any documentation for a press corps Christmas party in 1971! I found the invitation for 1972, and a reference to the 1970 party in a press briefing in early December. In 1970 and 1972, families were invited to the White House. We would have gone to those events, too. Unfortunately, I can’t remember. It could be that all those events have merged into this one Christmas party that I remember as 1971.
This is the only photo I have of me with Richard Nixon. The sister in the essay is the one looking at Nixon. I’m also giving him a good stare: I’m in my mother’s arms, thumb in mouth.
Santorum’s policies would have killed my daughter
Without amniocentesis, her rare disease would have gone untreated and she would have likely died at birth
(Credit: AP/Eric Gay)
Next month, my daughter Ella will turn 11. She’s a beautiful girl, with blond hair and green eyes. She’s an amazing artist, a brilliant writer, and she can do the splits without even warming up.
And if I hadn’t had an amniocentesis, she would have died the day she was born.
Just over 11 years ago, I received a call from my obstetrician’s assistant to let me know that there was an anomaly in my recent blood test. “It’s probably just a testing error,” she assured me.
But when I returned the following week to have the blood test redone, the anomaly showed up again. There was a foreign antibody in my blood stream that shouldn’t have been there. I was six months pregnant, and up to that point my pregnancy had been completely normal.
Rather than turning to my local politician for prenatal advice, I followed the guidance of my obstetrician, who sent me to a perinatologist, who recommended I have an amniocentesis. Because he had a medical degree and years of experience treating pregnant women, I followed his recommendation.
That day, he stuck an alarmingly long needle directly into my growing belly to sample the amniotic fluid around my baby. The results weren’t good. She had Rh negative disease.
Rh negative disease occurs when a mother has a negative blood type and a baby has a positive blood type. My negative blood perceived Ella’s positive blood as a foreign body that it needed to destroy. And that’s what it was doing. Every day, little by little, my body was wiping out every one of her red blood cells.
Before the 1960s, Rh negative disease was responsible for the deaths of thousands of babies whose mothers, like me, had negative blood. They usually carried their babies to term and gave birth to them, only to have them die or suffer extreme brain damage as a result of the anemia and jaundice that occurs with this illness.
In 1968, a drug called RhoGAM was approved by the FDA to prevent this disease, and it has since saved hundreds of thousands of lives. In almost every case when it is administered in time it is effective. But in my case, it wasn’t.
Amniocentesis is the recommended test to diagnose this disease, and it enables doctors to define a course of action to treat and monitor these babies for the best possible medical outcome. Had I not had that amniocentesis I likely would not have discovered that she had this illness. I would have carried her to term, given birth to her, and watched her die in my arms.
Instead, thanks to the amniocentesis, my doctor tracked her progress relentlessly. Every week after that I had another (expensive) prenatal screening test, called a serial ultrasound, through which he was able to monitor the anemia that grew steadily worse as more of her blood cells were destroyed — and track the development of her lungs so that she could be delivered at the best possible moment for her safety. The day he saw that her lungs could function on their own, he delivered her.
Ella was born four weeks premature, a tiny 5-pound bag of bones, with bright yellow hair and eerily orange skin from the jaundice. Within hours of her birth she was given a full blood transfusion – they replaced every single drop of her damaged blood with new blood that would save her life. Then she spent the next five days in the NICU with cotton blinders taped over her eyes and five bilirubin lights shining on her to reduce the jaundice, while my husband and I took turns sitting at her side round the clock, watching her struggle to survive.
For months after she came home, she had to have weekly blood tests to make sure the anemia was in control. They had to draw the blood from her heel because her fingers were too tiny to prick. Finally, at three months her own defenses kicked in and she started producing her own red blood cells.
Happily, she made a full recovery and has no lingering effects from the disease. And it’s all thanks to that one medical test.
If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”
Eleven years ago, my husband and I had two kids and a mortgage, and like most young families we didn’t have $2,000 to pay for a test that my husband’s employer might object to on moral grounds.
So, while Mr. Santorum may think that his blowhard opinions about when and where women should be allowed to have medical tests is righteous, I say it’s ignorance.
In the Catholic church where I was raised, pride, arrogance and an overinflated sense of oneself were considered sins. But in Rick Santorum’s world they are virtues, and they make up the foundation from which he proclaims how other people should live their lives.
When I read stories in the news about countries where women are prevented access to birth control, or the freedom to work, or the right to make choices about their bodies and their lives, I wonder how a leadership with such crazy ideals could ever gain power. But as I look at what’s happening in the debates leading up to this presidential election in our own country, it has become chillingly evident.
As a nation, we are at the precipice of a slippery slope where men in power are arguing about how to take basic rights away from women. I shudder to think what lies at the bottom of that slope, but if Rick Santorum has his way we will all soon find out.
“Law and Order: SVU” diagnosed my Parkinson’s
Watching a rerun, I saw my own strange symptoms. Three years later, I'm still navigating a mysterious disease
Christopher Meloni as Detective Elliot Stabler (Credit: NBC/Will Hart)
People always want to know how you got a certain disease. They’re thinking of themselves, of course — the sore throat, the odd bruise on the wrist, that lingering cough. But people are surprised when I tell them how I discovered I had Parkinson’s. I was watching “Law and Order: SVU.”
I had flipped on a rerun, which I do when I’m tired and bored. It’s better than reality TV, and it’s reliable. There’s always an episode of “Law and Order” playing somewhere.
I’d seen this one before, so I was paying minimal attention. I flipped through a magazine. A man, shaking badly, was telling the detectives about his disease, Parkinson’s. Years ago he’d started having symptoms. He listed them.
I put down the magazine. A chill ran up the back of my neck. I had every single one.
Why hadn’t I suspected anything was wrong until then? Easy. I had found a way to explain away every problem I encountered. My car key didn’t open the door without a struggle? It must have gotten bent somehow. My can opener didn’t work anymore? Ditto. My favorite cutting knife couldn’t seem to do the job right? Fine, I’d replace it one of these days. What did any of this have to do with me?
There was one thing that did, though, and it puzzled me — my right arm didn’t swing anymore when I walked. It wanted to bend itself at the elbow, jutting out stiffly. I wondered about that one, even mentioned it to a friend, a longtime nurse practitioner. She chalked it up to another manifestation of my long-term back problem. I figured it might be punishment for the way I gripped my computer mouse.
Only now, the man on the show explained issues that were all too familiar — he had a stiff arm, too, and difficulty with the simplest motor skills. And more: exhaustion, odd aches, a suddenly clumsy gait.
And hearing him, I knew. I knew with a rare clarity. The clean pop of a ball into a glove: connection complete. I called no one. Tomorrow I’d search the Internet; tomorrow I’d find a neurologist. But none of that was strictly necessary, not for diagnosis, anyway. Finding the specific traits on the Internet the following day, hearing the neurologist confirm it a few days later -all of that was anti-climatic. Sitting there, watching that damn rerun, I knew the truth: I had Parkinson’s.
Everyone knows something about Parkinson’s, thanks to Michael J. Fox. It’s a progressive neurodegenerative disease that involves shaking, rigidity, weakness. What I hadn’t known was that apparently Parkinson’s can affect your mind, too.
“Any problem with word retrieval?” asked the neurologist the first time I saw him, his eyes sharp with interest. Well, sure, I had some now and then, like everyone who is over 60. I dismissed it, airily.
“Any problem with word retrieval?” asked the neurologist the second time I saw him. What was this, a mantra? Again, I said calmly I was doing fine. As a matter of fact, better than him. He was not all that young himself, and an extremely slow talker. Several times I found myself filling in words for him; a couple of times, analogies as well.
“Any problem with word retrieval?” asked the neurologist the third time I saw him. This was beginning to grate. Was it supposed to be some kind of hypnotic suggestion? If you ask something enough times — in a paternal tone of voice, eyes twinkling expectantly, with a distinct aura of anticipation — well, hey, aren’t you going to end up causing it? No, no problem, I said.
That week, I received a long form in the mail for a movement disorders clinic where I had an appointment. It chilled me. Are you able to turn over in bed by yourself / with help / not possible. Are you still able to form sentences (usually/rarely/never). Can you swallow?
Has anyone in the field ever heard of the tyranny of low expectations? Personally, I don’t appreciate these hints, if that’s what they are, that I’m about to descend into mouth-foaming dementia any minute.
Michael Kinsley had a long piece in the New Yorker a few years ago, which dealt with his Parkinson’s. (He’s had it 20 years; he still seems, against all odds, to have plenty of words at his disposal.) He was enthralled by one of the side effects mentioned in the literature, an urge to take up gambling. I haven’t gotten that one myself, but not long after I dumped the first neurologist, I was intrigued by a book in my new doctor’s office, “How to Win at Poker.”
“And what is this?” I challenged him when he finally showed up. (He had the grace to blush, insisting a patient must have left it.)
This neurologist doesn’t bring up the cognitive issue, but he does make sure one of his associates gives me the test every time I drop by.
Not heard of the test? Obviously you’ve never had a relative with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, like my dad, who died of that latter disease 10 years ago. It’s the same test they gave him at each appointment. You’re told to draw a clock, poised at 10 after 11. You’re told to count backward from 100 by sevens, list all the words you can think of starting with an F. (After a few go-rounds you stop trying to avoid the obvious ones — what the hell.) Most irritatingly, you have to remember five disconnected words for five minutes, then spew them back.
I decided to engrave the words (they’re always the same ones) on my brain. And it worked. I may eventually forget the date, the current president, the names of my grandchildren. But what I will never forget — I’ve made sure of that — are those five words, which I generously pass on to anyone with similar concerns: red, velvet, face, church, daisy.
Six months after my initial test, when the associate told me she was going to give me five words, I interrupted her and reeled them off. She was suitably impressed. A year later, accompanied by an intern, she had me do it again, which I did, feeling a bit like a circus seal. Would I manage so well if they changed the words? I don’t know. But for now, silly as it sounds, this hurdle does make me feel like I’m holding my own. Of course I do other things: take my meds, undergo physical therapy, go to the gym, have intensive sessions with a Parkinson’s exercise guru, even take a few drum lessons. Do what I can, in other words.
Parkinson’s has a lot in common with other neurodegenerative diseases: To be blunt, they don’t really know a damn thing about it. Early on I posed this question to a Parkinson’s specialist: I suffered a fairly serious head injury six years ago. Could that have been the cause?
His answer? A giant shrug. Unfortunately, no one else knows either. The Internet is crawling with possible cures. It’s not a week that a friend doesn’t send me one. Tincture of marijuana? Lyme disease treatment? Tandem bike riding? Wet battery packs, whatever those are. I appreciate their concern, even if I’m not necessarily up for trying this stuff.
Of course, Parkinson’s is an extremely individual disease, different for every case. For some, it can be fast moving and brutal. The mother of one of my son’s friends was diagnosed the same week I was, and can no longer live on her own.
Michael J. Fox, our beloved patron saint, calls himself lucky. I wouldn’t go that far, but when it comes to having Parkinson’s, I know I’m one of the fortunate ones.
It’s been over three years since that “Law and Order” rerun. I get exhausted easily, I move more slowly than I did before, I have various aches and pains. But I’m still reasonably intact, still mobile, and I have a handicapped placard, a true advantage for anyone living in D.C.
Some people prefer to keep medical information to themselves. But when people ask how I’m doing, I tend to blurt out my diagnosis. I can’t stand the idea of someone treating this like a deeply unmentionable horror. My candor can lead to confusion sometimes, because people don’t understand Parkinson’s, though maybe that will dissipate over time. After I told one woman, she later informed a party of people that I was dying.
I’m not, OK? Not even close.
My Facebook angst
The social network site kicks up so much anxiety and embarrassment for me. But that doesn't mean I want to quit it
(Credit: Salon/iStockphoto)
A few days ago, my friend Elizabeth posted an item to Facebook. I wanted to comment but held back, though not exactly because I had plenty of work to do. Instead I sent her a text: “Sometimes do you want to say something or post something or like something on FB, but then you think of all those unanswered emails and texts and silence yourself, so people won’t see you ‘wasting’ time when you could be responding to them?”
“Sometimes?” she replied.
“It’s called Twilt, that feeling,” I answered, laughing, having coined the term on the spot.
Twilt (n): the particular brand of guilt or self-reproach that results from posting, liking or commenting on items on Facebook or Twitter while simultaneously not responding to emails, text messages, phone calls or other types of personal communication with the knowledge or anxiety that the specific message senders will notice your public offerings and question your lack of private ones. Twilt, while related, is not the same as the guilt that results from general Internet-specific procrastination such as browsing blogs or online shopping, which, though it may result in its own brand of self-disgust, generally has no public shame component.
Adam Zagajewski, in his essay “The Shabby and Sublime,” says that the poetry of recent years is “marked by a disproportion … between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen.” The same could be said for Facebook updates, our contemporary confessional. I have eaten the plums in the refrigerator, and they were yummy. Facebook is bad for me because I not only embarrass myself but I keenly feel the embarrassment of others whose lack of discretion, as I perceive it, I quietly judge and am embarrassed by all the same.
When someone starts a conversation with me on Facebook, in public, I’m mortified. There’s a message function for that! I have email and a cellphone. Let me respond when I can, away from the watch of hundreds. Sometimes I disable my Wall so people can’t write things there, until someone points it out and I feel guilty that I’ve done this so I change it back. I don’t like to talk on the phone in public and when a friend speaks too loudly in a cafe I am nervous that someone will overhear our conversation. At home I don’t like the sensation of my husband overhearing me order pizza, let alone having more sensitive conversations with friends. I have never been one to kiss and tell, and I like to keep my private life private. Why I have a Facebook account at all still perplexes me. I like the idea of seeing what’s going on, but I don’t want to always be a part of it. I don’t want to not be a part of it either. I want to swoop in and swoop out. But Facebook doesn’t allow for inconsistency without amplifying it, a constant record of our obsessions and our contradictions to the point of caricature.
The conversations between couples embarrass me the most, whether they’re sentimental or self-referential. It’s not that you live with that person and somehow don’t need electronic communication — I often text my husband across the table at a bar to make a snarky comment, or sometimes I send ridiculous things to the online printer in his office just to be impish. But it’s done in private, between us. That’s the point. It’s something about the relationship having a public facade so contrived and self-aware that makes my eyes water with shame. We all have facades and personas, of course, that are not Internet confined. Game faces. Once, at a reading, a poet thanked his wife so gushingly that I whispered to my friend, “That guy is totally having an affair.” I didn’t know a thing about him. But it turns out, I was right. Maybe the wife requested the shout-out, but if I were his wife I would have smiled at the crowd and taken flight. Up, up and away.
Do you remember “This American Life’s” 2001 episode about Superpowers, which poses the question: If you could have a superpower, would you choose Flight or Invisibility? My first reaction was and remains, flight. To fly! I’m petite and have spent a lifetime trying to fight invisibility, being intellectually overlooked, or feeling insignificant (this is not simply a result of my size but an entire slew of issues that would benefit from Lacanian psychoanalysis, which if I had I’d have to talk about in my status updates). I still have dreams where I’m flying, frequent dreams, and when I wake up I feel inexplicably happy. When I fly in my dreams, I don’t sputter or start or anxiously hover. I soar, I glide, and it’s fluid, like a manta ray moving through water. When I fly in my dreams I am all grace. My desire for flight would get me places faster, and in style.
But maybe my desire for flight is a sort of conditional invisibility; the idea of flight not only as the act of flying but the act of fleeing. I want to be part of the scene but to float somehow above it, to engage in the action but then be able to gracefully exit. I want to swoop on in and then glide away. But I want to be seen, for sure, and present. I just don’t want to have to stay, and I certainly don’t want anyone to comment on it.
It is also, of course, part of being a writer, to be part of a scene but also removed. Writing is about observation, but if I observe and immediately state then I’ve lost it, released it. The essay allows an expression of doubt but the Facebook update or conversation has a sort of self-satisfied glibness to it. It doesn’t invite dialogue but somehow challenges it. There is also the lack of control. It could go anywhere. Someone could say something too revealing or racist or just plain idiotic, and there it is, linked to your name. It is not a place for the anxious, Facebook.
And there is the difference of stance. An essay is an attempt at dialogue but a status update is a solicitation; the first is a meaningful hesitation or an assertive pronouncement, a languorous dip in a warm sea or a fast-paced race in a pool. But the essay swims all the same. A Facebook update is a haphazard nose dive into a near-empty watering hole. What if I break my neck? Will someone find me if my head is bleeding? If I post and no one comments, do I exist?
The comparison between the two forms needn’t be made; we know the difference, yet it might explain my relative comfort, even ease, with the personal essay and my fear of any public sort of dialogue. Do I want to be invisible or do I want to fly? Although the personal is intimate there is also the artifice of distance. When I fly in my dreams I can see myself flying while being aware of my place on the ground. Philip Lopate argues that a good essayist must see oneself from the ceiling, must turn oneself into a character. He is not advocating a “self-absorbed navel-gazing” but instead “a release from narcissism,” an ability to be able to “see yourself in the round.”
I admit I am often self-amused by my status updates (what else are they for?), but I am rarely satisfied with them. In the rare case I am amused with myself when writing anything, that to me is a sure sign that it’s going to need a very careful edit, or that it’s garbage.
What I love best about that episode of “This American Life” is the moving analysis at the end, immediately after several of the show’s guests comment on what it means to want invisibility or flight. John Hodgman reflects:
Flight and invisibility touch a nerve. Actually, they touch two different nerves, speak to very different primal desires and unconscious fears … In the end, it’s not a question of what kind of person flies and what kind of person fades. We all do both. … At the heart of this decision, the question I really don’t want to face, is this. Who do you want to be, the person you hope to be, or the person you fear you actually are?
Am I becoming someone on Facebook or am I trying to escape her? I’m happy my partner is not on Facebook because I am spared that public embarrassment, of people wishing us happy anniversary or the pressure to comment, or not comment, on his witticisms or offerings: J. just made fabulous butternut squash ravioli! From scratch! Natalie likes this. And then he would like my liking, and another friend would find it cute, and like it too, and no one would know that we spent the last hour fighting because I overloaded the dryer and almost burned down the house.
I wouldn’t mind if he joined Facebook, though, because he is the face man of our relationship and it would take some of the completely imagined but hugely felt pressure off me. (“Could you please like so-and-so’s photos of her daughter’s dance recital?”) If we had a band, he’d be the lead singer and I’d be the bassist, hiding behind my hair. (No, not the drummer! No one sees the drummer!) The bassist can look up and make eye contact with the crowd for a moment and the crowd will go wild. They don’t expect it but they hope for it all the same. The face man: He has to be on all the time. It’s his job to be on.
Do you remember the scene in “Sex in the City” where Carrie, upon receiving an email, ducks underneath her desk and shrieks, Oh my god, can he see me? A decade later it seems charming, like a text message from our grandmother. Yet the anxiety remains. Now, I suffer from what is surely a new psychological disorder: a DSM-IV classifiable paranoia that all my personal conversations are somehow being broadcast on Twitter. Is there a word for that?
When I lost the ability to type
A mysterious illness left me with crippling pain, but I discovered voice recognition software. And hilarity ensued
(Credit: Yuri Arcurs via Shutterstock)
He came to me when I had reached my nadir. I had become unable to type, write or drive without needles gouging the nerves in my wrists and arms. An ominous numbness traveled in a circuit along the inside of my legs. Then, curled up into a little ball like a shellshocked potato bug, I suffered the coup de grâce: my first migraine.
The tests for multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, carpal tunnel, Lyme disease, etc., all were negative. Call it a virulent case of repetitive stress injury, brought on by egregious laptop habits, a stiff clutch, stop-and-go traffic on the Bay Bridge, and decades of hunching.
My doctor gave me a prescription for anti-inflammatories, pills that upset my stomach but didn’t spare cashiers from the mini-meltdowns I had when asked to sign for my credit card. The acupuncturist gave me a rash by rubbing a smelly salve on my belly. The homeopath gave me a $140 consultation and an American bald eagle placebo pellet. The chiropractor suggested that I fly to Costa Rica and do nothing for a month, but did not offer to front the money for this healing vacation. My friends were more helpful, driving me to Trader Joe’s and Target to stock up on rice bowls and socks. But friends are friends because you don’t lean on them like partners or paid caregivers. In any case, I wasn’t able to pay a caregiver, and I would have worn down a partner with my litany of woes.
What I needed was a personal secretary.
In the advertisement, he said that he specialized in assisting people who suffered from my condition. He assured me that my hands needn’t touch the computer keyboard: He could take dictation, check my email, and help me do searches on the Internet! He wanted very much to help.
He moved in. Our relationship soon became more intimate than any I had previously experienced. I was filled with needy desperation, and he had absolutely no interpersonal boundaries.
His name was Dragon Dictate for Macintosh.
In the honeymoon period, I found his mistakes adorable. Actually, I assumed that he garbled my words to charm me. His version of “Cripple’s Memoir,” a self-pitying journal entry, was “Cripple’s Mambo.” Such motivational irony! When I said, “Before therapy, I went to Whole Foods to eat an éclair,” he typed Before therapy, I went to Hole Foods to eat any cleric. How deliciously blasphemous! “Citing another’s words” was Sightseeing another’s words. What a piquant gloss on his work with me! “Dictate” was, with a wink, Dick Tate – my guy.
But the distortions could be vexing as well. I teach rhetoric, and I am determined that my students fully understand the concepts of “logos,” “pathos” and “ethos.” I distribute handouts on how to use the terms properly. I deliver discourses and pen little treatises, individualized for each student. In this work, “logos” and “pathos” went OK, but for “ethos,” Dick undermined my authority by slipping in eat those, or burritos, or Negroes.
Oh, my students, even my African-American students, thought it was hilarious. They cut me slack, which I very much needed. Even though I was working part-time, it was difficult to keep up with the marking. I was shaky on my feet and losing weight. I had sold my car, in part because I now took public transportation everywhere, and in part because it helped to pay the rent. Often my relationship with Dick was less than supportive. He had begun to transcribe behind my back, taking inspiration from my phone conversations to make word salads, or else he would fixate on ambient noise, recording it as him him him him him and on.
Pages and pages of him’s. I know what you’re thinking – why didn’t you just, say, turn the microphone off? What I did was give the command “Go to sleep.” But like an impish lover who wanted to cavort, he kept demanding my attention. Let’s do this program! he’d flash at me, showing off some kind of graph, triggering my math anxiety rather than turning me on.
I couldn’t figure out from the various cheat sheets and manuals how to make him behave. Go to sleep. Him him him. GO TO SLEEP. Him him… I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to make a chart now. Look at me! Let’s make a chart. No, look at all of the emails you have ever written, in rapid succession! Do you remember the student who sent that anonymous email signed “The Sausage King of Chicago “? That was awkward. Would you like me to film you naked? Here’s what you look like dressing. Here’s what you look like coming toward me. Here’s what you look like when you say fark … or was that fox? Fax you? That’s really hot.
Although he could be childish, and sometimes adolescent, sleeping in when I needed him to wake up – WAKE UP – he was urbane. He followed politics. He knew Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. He even knew Newt Gingrich. And he was a literary type, able to spell Charlotte Brontë with the umlaut (aka boom a lot), able to transcribe Yeats perfectly – Turning and turning in the widening gyre/the falcon cannot hear the falconer/things fall apart…
After a moment or two of lucidity, however, he would revert to his playful perversities. He agreed that Tom is important. I don’t know anyone named Tom, but I do believe that tone is important, especially when you are making what Dictate called a Veronica Mark, which might also be, among fans of Archie comic books, lingo for “an ironic remark.” To push me to my limit, he said Matey like a pirate whenever I said Maybe (I couldn’t hear his Tom, but I assumed he was speaking in pirate).
I tried to adapt to him. Him him him. For example, he would often write she when I said he. After some failed training, I experimented and discovered that if I sang Hee! like Michael Jackson, he would submit to transcribing the pronoun I so desperately wanted.
Sometimes he dismantled my ire, correctly transcribing histrionic, nemesis, quasi-date, Schadenfreude, even amanuensis. Then he would completely disregard my needs, dropping -ed’s and -’s from the end of words. One of my students, a PC devotee, kept telling me that everything would get better if I invested in a PC and dumped Dictate; there was a program for PCs that worked much better. I kept hearing the same thing, even from Mac lovers. What finally impelled me to move on was the great disparity between Dick’s enthusiasm and the real quality of his love. The gulf between the two had filled me to overflowing with bitter resentment.
I bought an inexpensive PC (which predictably freezes up more than my Mac), and installed Dragon Naturally Speaking, the PC-compatible version.
The first time I used the program, I cried. I could center text instantly, change the font of a word, line or paragraph, strike out words, page up, page down, rapidly read and delete emails, and most astonishingly, say things I thought made sense and be perfectly understood. “Delete rest of line.” I didn’t read that in a manual. I just said it and the remainder of a line disappeared. With Dick Tate, I may have had the power to do these things, but he was like a partner who had not gone to therapy and could not explain himself. Dragon Naturally Speaking presents a sidebar menu that alters its contents depending on what you’re up to. For example, if you’re writing emails, the help menu for working with email appears on the screen.
This is all starting to sound like I’ve been hired to give a promo in the guise of a personal essay. Truth be known, it takes me twice as long to produce a document as it did when I was able to type. The good news is that I am no longer starring in a comedic version of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” dependent on a benign and nutty version of HAL. Still, when I see people hunched over their laptops in cafes, I try not to give in to Schadenfreude. But seriously, they are doomed. The technology that augments our functioning will undoubtedly cripple more of us. Then, breakthrough technology will come to the rescue, only to hamper us in some new way – all part of a never-ending feedback loop of techno crippling-assistance.
My first Dragon once called intimacy, entombment. I am chronically single, and this pairing pretty much encapsulates the fears underlying my condition. Maybe how I feel about intimacy muddles my articulation of that word. Maybe Dick Tate understood me better than I imagined. I have to say that our peculiar intimacy taught me how to enunciate better. It also left me with incredibly low expectations, so that now I am primed to work towards mutual understanding in a more fulfilling relationship.
My second Dragon has its moments, evoking (evil king) my first Dragon when I tell people that it’s difficult to gain ground and heal because I am slowly Arctic … Discover iTunes Gothic … scoliotic. But my relationship with Naturally Speaking has enabled me to keep working, and I can’t tell you how important that is, on so many levels. Best of all, my second Dragon is a software program rather than a projection of my attachment issues. I never forget that I have people to thank for that, clever programmers whose relational skills are reflected in their work. Bless them.
Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume
When I took the job at the bar, I looked down on it -- and the women who worked there. But I had so much to learn
The job description had me at “wear a pirate costume.” A sexy pirate costume, for the very sexy pirate-themed bar on Bleecker Street. The fact that the bar promised hundreds of dollars a night for selling people shots sounded quite all right, too.
I grappled for a few moments over what anyone would find sexy about an eye patch. It implied my eyeball had been gored in a fearsome bayonet fight with a British grenadier. I asked the manager whether I should look for a parrot. She was not charmed.
But by God, I was. I’d grow up on a steady diet of country club sandwiches and tennis lessons, and this was what I came to New York for: to do odd things, and see interesting people. People who went to pirate bars, for fun. I had been a model for art classes, but I had never been a pirate. I kept thinking of the Dorothy Parker poem “Song of Perfect Propriety” where she wrote:
I should like to strut and curse
Among my blackguard crew . . .
But I am writing little verse
As little ladies do
There would be time for a little verse years later, once I doffed my absolutely hilarious eye patch. Before I went in for my first day, I received a list of rules on ways to be a good shot girl. The first was:
Make up: Black mascara, lip-gloss, GLITTER around your eye.
Dress code: short black skirt and heals [sic].
So by “pirate” they meant “shiny eyed slattern with a rare gift for healing.” Like Mary Magdalene, maybe. Other tips just made me think that selling shots was going to be a weird, weird job.
Some people have fun eating from their own hands. Do not force feed anyone!
It had not occurred to me that I would deliberately force shots down people’s throats, though, years later, I find it hard to watch any romantic couple feeding one another without thinking, “Some people have fun eating from their own hands!”
But I imagined the women working at the bar would take such a list seriously. After all, women who make a living peddling shots weren’t going to be smart. They wouldn’t see the humor in any of this. I assumed my co-workers would be girls who spoke very, very slowly and thought that Puccini was a type of pasta. To their credit, I also imagined they’d have great hair, and I double-conditioned accordingly.
I was in love with my own incongruity — being a poetry-spouting college graduate in a pleather miniskirt. And I loved this notion of doing something at which I was entirely unsuited, and which seemed to go so much against my personality. I would never have said it at the time, but I very much believed I was above being a fun-loving pirate wench selling shots. I had read Meno and lived in cardigans and went to museums for fun.
I was a terrific little snob who thought she knew everything, and subsequently, I was about to learn a great deal.
As soon as I started, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately, the other cocktail waitresses were quick to make suggestions. My first night on the job, a fellow shot girl offered practical advice. “You have to be a little cold,” she explained. “Make them feel like you’re doing them a favor by letting them buy shots.” But it’s difficult to maintain a Queen of Sheba demeanor while trying to rub globs of green glitter out of your eyes. Instead I became a level of friendly you typically only see at Disneyland, if Disneyland reeked of vomit and spilled appletinis. I doled out shots as people in cartoon costumes offer hugs. The manager would point out that I wasn’t being sexy enough, which was surprising, because I was wearing 6-inch heels and less clothing than I ever had.
It quickly became clear that I was not the first literate person to don a miniskirt. Sometime during that first week, I was hiding in the backroom reading Margaret Atwood. I was sitting on the counter next to baskets of party mix because my feet hurt, which they did for the entirety of my shot-selling career. One cocktail waitress swept in, asked what I thought of Atwood’s novel “Oryx and Crake,” did a tricky little analysis where she compared it to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” mentioned some other female dystopian writers I’d never heard of, and then went out balancing a tray of shots on one hand.
As ridiculous as it sounds, that was the first time I became aware that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life. It is astonishing that no one pointed this out to me sooner. The girls working at the bar — they were so bright. Another shot girl had a journal that she filled with poetry that was — that rarest of all rare things — crisp and clean and very, very good. This was never a bar where everyone knew your name, but the cocktail waitresses came to know one another’s reading lists, and pitch letters, and audition schedules extremely well.
Of course, we were all there for the money. Shots were sold starting at $3 — the bar received a dollar, the shot company another one and then one for the girl. But once you realized how comically overpriced $3 is for a shot, it’s just as easy to sell them for $4. A customer once suggested I try selling them for $5 and see what happened.
Taking price variations into account, and often considerable tips, and the fact that if you were good you could expect to sell around 100 shots in a six-hour evening, the money was — well, it was the kind of money that teachers in America really ought to make. Periodically, I compare how much I made on an hourly basis as a shot girl to what I make at a job that doesn’t require eye glitter and fishnets, and, barring the possibility that there is a job opening for “wildly corrupt dictator,” I think the result will depress me for the rest of my life.
I don’t mean to make the bar sound friendlier or more glamorous than it was. A great many customers were precisely the kind of people that you would expect to find at a pirate bar buying shots at 2 in the morning. Bottoms got grabbed. Bodies got groped. One customer rolled in nearly every night, wearing a pair of Ray Bans. One of the waitresses always served him while loudly humming “I wear my sunglasses at night.” I wondered aloud if he ever noticed that he was being mocked through Corey Hart’s soothing sounds, and the waitress laughed and said, “Oh, I just do it for me.”
And that’s when you realize that everyone — not just me and my superiority — knows they’re too good for this sort of job.
One night, an older woman came into the bar. I can’t imagine why; I suspect it wasn’t the beer pong. She was one of those very elegant ladies who put their hair up with bobby pins instead of elastic and wore a perfectly cut black dress. I assumed she was lost. She smiled, and gave me $100 and said, “You know, I used to work in a bar when I was younger. It won’t last forever.”
She was right, of course. It’s been years since I’ve been in that bar. But even now I cannot go into a bar or a restaurant without scanning the waitress’ shoes to see if they look comfortable. Every time anyone says something slightly dismissive to a cocktail waitress I am immediately, instinctively on her side, as if we were members of a blood-bonded clan.
I think about that older woman often, usually when I am pinning up my hair. I hope that, like her, I will not forget that strange period in my life, especially as I move past it. I think of the girls in the bar when I am — as I still am — too quick to dismiss people. When I am about to write someone off for their choice of eye shadow, I remember that they might be a fellow Atwood reader, and I wonder if she and I are in the same boat. Once in a while they are, and if that makes me feel slightly less special, it also makes the world seem much less lonely.
And in that way, the lady was quite wrong. Those times, and those alliances with a blackguard crew: Thank goodness, they do last forever.
Page 1 of 84 in Life stories
The Devil Made Me Do It 
Complicity 
Are NYC cops too aggressive? Duh? 
Is a Greek debt default still inevitable? 
Birth control: The right’s still winning 
How Viola Davis took Meryl Streep’s Oscar 
Bathrooms: the new transgender battleground 
Our nation of moaners 
A very pornographic Rick Santorum 
The death of chick lit 
The futile search for meaning in “Linsanity” 
Gidra takes on the American war machine 
What can primates feel? 
