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As a child, I adored listening to my parents' classical music, pretending to be
a hunchbacked fiend slouching around a moonlit graveyard during Saint-Saens'
"Danse Macabre," for example, or an entire Andalucian regiment
marching over North African hills to "Bolero." Then I dropped it entirely
and listened to nothing but rubbish for nearly 30 years. Suddenly it's all I want to hear
again. Yesterday I heard Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" for the first
time, and at one point there's this big, bold, proud, gorgeous theme, and I leapt to my
feet, shook my fist in the air and yelled, "YEAH!" my heart pounding.
I just wonder -- what on earth happened to me all those years, and what's happening to me
now? Late Romantic Dear Late, There is a gigantic marketing machine in America that exists to sell rubbish, rubbish being
easier to produce than quality goods, and you came under the spell of the machine. Big
corporations create and promote rubbish, magazines write about the new craze, it is here, it
is now, it is edgy and awesome and sweeping the country, everyone is talking about it, and
then when sales drop, suddenly everybody is talking about something else. And after a while,
a person wearies of being sold rubbish and then the spell is broken. You got over it, that's
all. You fell out of the machine's clutches and now you're going back to music that bears
repeated listening, that evokes strong feelings that change over time. The difference between
the Spice Girls and Chopin is that the Spice Girls will always be a souvenir of who you were
when you were 8 years old and Chopin is continually new. Invest in a season ticket to see
your local orchestra and enjoy your maturity. Dear Mr. Blue, I am a 41-year-old woman madly in love with my 39-year-old husband of eight
years. We have two beautiful little boys, ages 5 and 1. Rather than
glaze your eyes over by describing my husband's many sterling qualities, I'll cut
right to his one quirk that drives me insane. Chronic tardiness and
procrastination. Not a week goes by in which he's not late to work at least one day; sometimes
more. If he's really late, he'll call the office with one excuse or
another before he goes in. He rationalizes this by saying he works hard
and does a good job, so what's the big deal about being a few minutes late?
Just the same, I worry his boss will get fed up and fire him. If he has an
appointment, he often shows up 15 to 30 minutes late. If he has any
kind of a deadline to meet, he procrastinates until the very last
second, tells fibs to get extensions, then procrastinates on
the extension until the very last second. Forget social occasions; if we
get there before it's over, we're on time. I've tried reasoning with him, telling him that arriving late to appointments screws up the
other person's whole schedule, that he is letting people down who are
counting on him. I also worry about the example this is setting for our
boys. Already our 5-year-old only wants me to pick him up at school because he's
afraid Daddy will be late. My husband and I have gone round and round about this for years. He really
thinks it's no problem. If it's really crucial that he be on time for
something, I find myself nagging him and I hate that. I already have two
little boys and I don't want to treat him like one. Any suggestions? Exasperated Dear Exasperated, It's you I worry about, not your husband. He's obviously got the world
by the tail if he can be so cavalier and keep a job and keep his friends. But obviously it's
driving you nuts. I frankly don't think that retraining is an option here. He has probably
learned how to read people and situations and figure out exactly how much slack he has.
Chronic procrastination and tardiness are complex skills at your husband's level, and so don't
worry about him at work: There's nothing you can do about that. The solution lies with you
learning to deal with your anxiety and learning to live by two clocks, real time and husband
time. The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas, said
Fitzgerald, and this is a mental test. Don't worry about the kids, they've already learned to
make allowances for Daddy. If it's important to you to be on time, arrange for yourself to go
ahead on your own. Do more entertaining at home. Whatever you do, don't continue to harp
on this. Make yourself stop. It's a dreadful, dreadful role, the drone, the nag, the shrew, it
has no good lines, so don't accept it. Take the role of goddess of learning and love: much
more satisfying. Dear Mr. Blue, The federal government conducted a massive study to find out something that
Moses knew thousands of years ago: Children growing up without their
fathers are at a serious disadvantage. One of those disadvantages is being three times more
likely to be fatally abused than children in father-headed families. By encouraging an increase in the number of children living
in fatherless households, you are DIRECTLY responsible for murdering them.
You may claim that you play only one-tenth of 1percent of a role, but
that's no excuse for encouraging murder, is it? Maybe it takes only 1,000
like you to set the fire that destroys our social fabric. Outraged Dear Outraged, I trust that you are writing to me in good conscience, knowing that you are
doing your utmost to protect and provide for fatherless children. Meanwhile, how do you
manage to live in America, going around being outraged at anyone who ever was divorced or
accepted the idea of it? Dear Mr. Blue, I'm a sportswriter from Northern California, now living in a Midwestern city, and my
once happy social life has hit a losing streak. There was the recent divorcée who sent me
dirty e-mails after our
first date and called me "Baby" on our second. There was the lanky
Russian émigré turned redneck. There was the voluptuous bartender who jumped me on our
first date, then blew
me off when I told her I'm not that kind of boy. What's to be done? Move back West? Quit
dating? Gathering Dust Dear Gathering, You are hanging out in the wrong place, maybe in a sports bar with giant-screen TV and free stale popcorn with that yellow napalm topping, and so you have
encountered a covey of aggressively needy women who need to throw themselves at men in
order to distract them from the Bears game. Try a new location, like the Unitarian church.
Not a redneck in the bunch. Unitarian women are sexy but incredibly thoughtful and
sensitive and also passionate about ethics. They won't try to jump you on the first date;
they'll want to know how you feel about economic justice first. They are not voluptuous
because they often fast in protest of something or other, and when not fasting, they eat things
made from tofu and exotic mushrooms. You will need to learn to folk dance and sit through
lectures on American foreign policy by speakers from third world countries, but this is a
small price to pay for happiness. If you can't find Unitarians, try Methodists. They're
Unitarians trying to pass for Christian. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm a writer, just starting out, struggling, having a little success here and there, and I am
plagued by temptations to plagiarize. I come across great stuff and think how easy it would
be to just sort of rearrange it a little and use it in a story of my own. I haven't done this yet,
but I think about it seriously. A friend of mine says that this sort of thing goes on all the
time among writers. What do you say? Green-Eyed Dear Green-Eyed, Your friend is wrong. Writers don't do this all the time. Some writers do
it once or twice and then hate themselves for it and repent in tears and agonize over it for a
few years. Plagiarism is a large dead bird that when it is hung around your neck, nobody
wants to be around you for a while. People who plagiarize are amateurs at heart: They don't
want to write, they want to have written. Yes, there are frivolous accusations, particularly
directed against very wealthy songwriters and authors -- somewhere, someone has a
manuscript in a suitcase that they swear John Grisham gets his plots from -- but the real
thing is hard to conceal. And it's embarrassing. And if it becomes public knowledge, and
eventually you become a big successful author, it will follow you all your life and be
mentioned in the third paragraph of your obituary. Don't do it. If the temptation persists,
stop reading good stuff and stick to trash.
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