Diary of a flight attendant

Home and Away
George Dallah – 07:39 pm PST – Apr 25, 2000 – #38 of 39

Who says the airlines encourage drinking? Certainly the flight attendants don’t. I’d much rather have an unruly sober person on board than an unruly drunkard. Sober people generally don’t try kicking out windows at 35,000 feet, and generally make “jokes” about having bombs and guns in their carry-ons much less frequently than inebriated individuals.
I should state up front that I admit a lot of nervous flyers have a tipple to calm their nerves, and there are those (myself included) that can’t sleep on airplanes no matter how long the flight is…so a drink or two will help us to nod off.
Sure there is alcohol available, but perhaps the airlines are remiss in thinking that all adults are responsible life-forms.
Some airlines state upfront somewhere (inflight magazine) that alcohol as a dehydrating effect (as does caffeinne laced beverages) and that the best thing to drink is water.
I can tell you that a lot of flight attendants would like to see a drink limit for passengers, but then we get into a war with “management” who want to keep the flying masses happy..to a point. Charter flights are the WORST. Scheduled flights are generally smoother with fewer alcohol related problems.

Stupid things that bother you…

Mothers Who Think
Anjali – 11:07 am PST – May 1, 2000 – #4769 of 4875

I apologize for going off topic but have to vent.
Stupid thing that bothers me: fundamentalist bigots and their apologists. You know, where someone repeatedly makes statements about another group of people (or even her own) that are expounded as absolute truths with no possibility for disagreement but doesn’t give any evidence to prove her point other than personal experience. What, you’re omniscient? Gee, and I was so sure the coming of the Messiah would be accompanied by some sort of advertising campaign.
Oh and for all you apologists: “She’s just being provocative”, yes, yes she is. In a Mein Kampf sort of way. Provocative does not necessarily mean intellectual. If it was, then every bar fight would be Socratic discourse. Some of her best friends are black? She’s black? You’re black? Is she best friends with every black on the planet? Is she the only black person on the planet? Are you the only black person on the planet? No? Then it might be a little difficult for her to speak for them all now, dontcha think? Oh, that’s right I forgot, she’s omniscient. She’s just being tongue in cheek? Hey I’ve got no problem with that. Only you might want to tell her, because she doesn’t seem to think so. In fact, she might want to take some lessons in how to give off that “I’m saying this with a glint in my eye” vibe. Little things like tone, body language, mannerisms and emoticons go that extra mile in convincing her audience that, no she’s really not saying that the only good homosexual is a dead homosexual. The “she’s a member of a historically oppressed group X, so she can’t really be a bigot against Y” line? She can be, and she is. The two can be mutually exclusive. Sad but true.
Oh and my favourite “if you’re upset, it’s because you sense that she’s right and you’re not mature enough to/don’t want to deal with the truth”. No, I’m upset because she’s insisting she’s right without proving it. See, if I insist that JFK Jr. didn’t die in a plane crash but is alive and well and living in Winnipeg to everyone I know but don’t back it up with any evidence, I’m annoying at best and unbalanced at worst. Which is she?
I know that anecdotes are observations, and hypotheses are derived from observation and hypotheses can turn out to be true. You feel free to cite all the anecdotes you want. But don’t you call them absolute truths, especially in the face of contradictory anecdotes. I know where’s there’s smoke there’s a good chance there’s fire. I also know it might just be dry ice.
I believe its quite possible that the Jews control the planet and are trying to enslave its other inhabitants, Mexicans are stupider than Taiwanese, and women lack the necessary intelligence to be software engineers. I have no problem with you expounding that theory. But before you get to state it as an absolute truth, I better see some hard evidence that stands up to critical scrutiny (and that critical scrutiny better involve a discussion of correlation vs. causation and had better eliminate other potential explanations for observed phenomena, such as oh, I don’t know how about poverty, systemic discrimination, different environmental factors), not pure anecdotal evidence, not “some of my best friends are ___________ so I know”, and definitely not “I’m older, richer and more experienced/popular/famous than you missy, so I am right”. Fabio is older, richer and more experienced/popular/famous than I am. I’m not going to agree with everything he says either.

Which “Other Side” of the Closet Are You Talking About?

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David Ehrenstein – 08:57 am PST – Apr 26, 2000 – #1 of 457

Women are trained from childhood to get married. That’s fine, save for the fact thatMen are Pigs. Take it from me — I’ve slept with scads of them.
And that brings up another problem. There are men and there are gay men. Men want to have sex with you, but for the most part couldn’t care less about you on any other level. Gay Men don’t want to have sex with you, but think you’re perfectly charming and are willing to spend countless hours listening to your gripes and telling you how fabulous you look in that new ensemble.
So what’s a gal to do?
Deep down, she believes, all men are the same. And while her “Will” may say he doesn’t want her a REAL woman always triumphs.(“In her dreams,” say I.)
As we all know there have been — and continue to be — any number of “New York Marriages.” Consider Cole Porter. Hell — consider Lee Radziwill. And don’t getme started on Maxwell and Juliet. Or Tom and Nicole, for that matter.
The bottom line is Freud’s famous question:”What does a woman want?”
And the answer comes. . . Rupert Everett
Face it ladies. You wanted to marry a gay man. You knew he was gay when you married him — even though he didn’t, or was fighting the truth. So don’t come crying when he dumps you for his weight trainer.
Discuss.

The Worst Meal I Ever Had/My Biggest Cooking Disaster…Lately

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Michelle F. – 03:15 am PST – Apr 26, 2000 – #186 of 198

Time to revive this thread. My brother and our cousin were making nachos in the kitchen one afternoon. The cousin excused himself to use the bathroom. He returned to the kitchen about a minute later, looked at my brother, and suddenly started screaming in agony. He turned and ran back to the bathroom, ripping off his clothes as he went. He jumped into the shower and turned icy cold water on himself to relieve his pain. My startled and confused brother returned to the kitchen to retrace our cousin’s steps, and that’s where he realized that, prior to using the loo, Cousin had been chopping jalapeno peppers using a knife and his bare hands. It was pure pepper juice that had gotten on his, er, lower regions.
Being the kind, sympathetic relatives that we are, we referred to the poor guy as “Jala-penis” for a very long time.

Seder Talk

Mind and Spirit
Daniel Abraham – 07:28 am PST – Apr 18, 2000 – #1 of 14

For the last several years, I have been increasingly fascinated by the Haggadah, for it is less a document telling of the Exodus than a document of the time it was redacted in more or less the form we know it today. That time was after the small-h holocaust of the Bar Kochba rebellion.
The lack of mention of Moses in the traditional text, and the emphasis on redemption by God alone (“God and not an angel…not an intermediary”) is a reaction to the crushing defeat of Bar Kochba, who had been hailed as Moshiach by Akiba and a number of other authorities. The text is trying, in the wake of the defeat and exile which followed the Second Revolt (and the still recent loss of the Temple in the First Revolt), to rally the people and refocus their attention on God, rather than on earthly saviors.
Recall too that after the Bar Kochba revolt Jews were banned from Jerusalem, renamed Aeolia Capitolina, on pain of death. The concluding line of the Seder, “l’shanah ha’baah b’Yerusalayim,” is saying “Next year we will be back in our capital, under its true name.” It is a cry of hope and rebellion from a time of complete despair.
The injunction to speak and discuss Pesach, Matzah and Maror, and the songs like “Echad Mi Yodeah?” are intended to provide a pretext, at least once a year, for the instruction of the young, so that even at a time of social disorganization there would be a means to transmit some basic knowledge.
I would like to see a greater general understanding of the Haggadah in its historical context, for dramatic as the Exodus story is (even without its Cecil B. DeMille overlay), the retelling of it which we turn to every year has a drama of its own, which at the remove of almost 2000 years is too often forgotten or ignored.

AMERICAN PSYCHO: Time For Re-Evaluation?(A risky thread)

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.eea74c1/49">Books
Jazzhermit – 10:27 am PST – Apr 16, 2000 – #50 of 53

I re-read this book (finished it Monday). Saw the movie yesterday afternoon. I’ve registered my thoughts on the movie in its thread in Movies. So I will feel free, here, to speak for the book.
I liked the book. A lot. I think it’s very well written, not at all clumsy or tedious. The litanies of brand names (designers, colognes, restaurants etc.) are meticulously deployed. Everything is seen from Bateman’s viewpoint, therefore if that’s all that he notices about his fellow yuppies, that’s all we will be told about them. I had no problem with that at all.
Similarly I had no problem understanding why Ellis wrote in an often deliberately artless manner throughout the book. For example, Bateman describes no less than four and possibly six different sets of circumstances as “filling me with a nameless dread.” This is not clumsiness on Ellis’s part, but rather a deft illustration of the vacuity of Bateman’s mind. Bateman believes that by deploying a cliched phrase like this his feelings will be made clear, when in fact the very repetitiveness of it (like the repetitiveness which is the continuous motif in the book) only serves to make the phrase, and the emotional state it strives to describe, meaningless. It’s really very funny; the book as a whole is very funny. I laughed out loud a few times reading it on the train, and once a woman sitting next to me looked over to see what I was reading that made me laugh. She turned slightly further away after seeing the book’s cover.
The violent scenes, far from being bright points in an otherwise drab narrative, almost for me slowed the book down. I felt that the detail of them, almost like the report of a pathologist, allowed the satire to come to a crawl when in fact the scenes run by implication, as when Bateman dismisses the two prostitutes without us ever finding out exactly what he did to them, are far more powerful.
I believe the very “tediousness” of the book (and again, I wasn’t bored at all, I was riveted by it) is a stylistic choice on Ellis’s part which serves to virtually goad the reader. Go on, he seems to say; pack it in. Yeah, yeah, it’s boring; put it down. Go on, I dare you. It is only the reader who focuses his or her attention on the book and refuses to take the bait of its potential tedium who will be rewarded by it. This is true also of Glamorama, and in that case I must admit I failed the test. I quit Glamorama after about 145 pages, but I had recognized Ellis’s tactics and quit anyhow.
In Glamorama, the brand names have been bolstered by endless litanies of celebrities’ names, some real and some fictional (i.e. cartoon characters), tossed in a seemingly haphazard way into the narrative, and yes it does become quite brain-numbing after awhile. Which is exactly Ellis’s point, and his way of sticking needles into the reader again.
Example: about 100 pages in, the narrator of Glamorama, male model/club promoter Victor Ward, is at a party and he describes a table at which celebrities are talking. The celebrities are Janeane Garofalo, Steven Spielberg, someone else, and David Koresh. At this point in the narrative literally hundreds of celebrity names have been deployed, almost without repetition, which not only makes a point about the sheer volume of ‘celebrity’ the culture can sustain, but also serves to numb the reader into no longer taking note of which celebrities are mentioned. They’re just celebrity names, tossed about like confetti. So only a careful reader will catch this throwaway sentence, which betrays the entire story as potentially hallucinatory (a possibility which was being explored in more depth when I gave up on the book; Victor was discussing the film crew that was making the movie of the plot’s events, as they happened).
Ellis is a very smart writer, and though I don’t recommend all his books, I do unreservedly recommend Less Than Zero and American Psycho and I plan to revisit Glamorama again in the future.

Elian Gonzalez: Enough is enough!

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?13@@.eea982f/0">Social Issues
Nicole E – 06:51 am PST – Apr 13, 2000 – #1 of 67

Okay, first and foremost let me state my position on this issue. It is my fervent belief that this kid belongs with his father, period. This is, at the end of the day (for me) not about politics, or Castro, or Miami Cubans, or even about the laws of our nation, which have been violated left and right to keep this kid in this country. This is about a father and a son.
That said, this morning on NPR I heard that Janet Reno has ordered the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez to take Elian to an airport “outside of Miami” by 2 p.m. today in order to get on a plane to Washington. The relatives have said they are refusing to do this and that if Elian is going to go to Washington, government officials are going to have to come to their house in Miami and remove Elian by force.
This whole issue has bothered me from the get go, but this latest behavior by the relatives really is the last straw for me. Dozens of our nations laws have been violated, by the relatives and by the government, in order to enable what is for me the kidnapping of this child. These relatives insist they are looking out for Elian’s best interests, but I ask you, is it in the best interest of a child to allow him to go through the traumatic, forcible removal from a home by government people?
The Miami relatives quite frankly turn my stomach. For months they have exploited this six year old kid to make a statement about their political views on Castro. I personally don’t agree with Castro’s politics or his government (although the stupid embargo should be lifted yesterday), but as far as I’m concerned YOU DO NOT STEAL A CHILD FROM HIS FATHER. Period.
If this kid were Haitian or Saudi or Mexican he’d have been on the first boat back.

Washed up after 40?

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.eea983e/2">Writing
Bard Cole – 08:10 am PST – Apr 13, 2000 – #3 of 16

F. Scott Fitzgerald had good reason to believe he was washed up by 39. He was a screwed-up drunk about to keel over dead. The Fitzgeraldian/ Wolfian myth of inborn sensitivity and genius which can’t help but express itself from the earliest age is, in part, a sociopathic self-delusion that left both of those guys dead atvery early ages.
Normal people, unlike tragic geniuses, are quite capable of marshaling enthusiasm, interest and skill for new projects throughout their lives.
Fiction’s just fiction, anyhow… it’s not ballet dancing or reciting odes in Homeric Greek. All you gotta do is tell a story.

The Gifted Vs. The World

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Toni Michael – 12:14 am PST – Apr 6, 2000 – #673 of 683

…I was born with a gift for music that was neither nurtured nor fostered, by my parents, nor my teachers. Even tho it blossomed, its fruit has been small and insignificant.
I wonder how my life would have been different if it had been nurtured and encouraged.
My parents did not make music of their own, or at least not much. They used to sing, a little bit, along with the radio. My father had a couple of “sweet potatoes,” or ocarinas, small hand-held wooden instruments with a mouthpiece for blowing into, and several holes to be covered or opened by the fingers. But he didn’t play them much.
When I was in first grade, I performed in a musical production of “Tom Sawyer,” at a Catholic school I attended. I also sang in the choir of the Catholic church associated with the school.
Later, I sang in the junior choir of a Lutheran church, which my best friend attended, and which I attended occasionally, mostly to perform with the choir.
I wanted music lessons. I loved music. When I was about 8 or 9, my family visited one of my aunts, who was living in a house with two pianos. One of them was an old upright, out on a sun-porch, at the back of the house. I happily spent many hours out there, plunking out tunes on that old piano. I could easily pick out any tune that came into my head. I loved it, and wanted to learn to play the piano.
At about that time, the public school I attended began offering music lessons to students whose parents were willing to commit to them. A music teacher came to our school, and introduced us to the 4 major groups of instruments in orchestral music: strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion.
Individually, the teacher introduced us to the techniques for making basic sounds on a member of each class of instruments. We each tried out a trumpet, a clarinet, a violin, and drumsticks.
If we and our parents were interested, we could take music lessons thru the school. That meant, however, that our parents would have to commit to providing a musical instrument and lessons with a private teacher. The lessons the school provided were group lessons, to teach the students to play as a group, not to teach them to play as individuals. That was up to our parents.
My parents were not interested enough to pay for the instrument and private lessons required.
However, when I was about 12, I took piano lessons, which I loved. We lived across the street from an elderly woman called Madame Stantonne, who taught music lessons on virtually all the instruments of the orchestra. She had been a child prodigy, playing multiple instruments at an early age, and had appeared as a performer in virtually all the capitals of Europe in the early 20th century.
My best friend, DeLoris, who lived across the street from me, right next door to Mme. Stantonne, took violin lessons from her. DeLoris’ mother paid for the lessons by cleaning and housekeeping for the music teacher.
Several other friends and classmates took music lessons from Mme. Stantonne.
I wanted to take piano lessons, and somehow persuaded my parents to pay for them. Since we didn’t have a piano, practicing was a problem. Mme. Stantonne provided two solutions.
In the first place, she lent me a folding cardboard keyboard, which I could take home to use for keyboard practice. It was identical in size to a full piano keyboard, and I could use it to practice the fingering, even tho I couldn’t hear any sound from the exercise.
In the second place, she invited me to come over to her home every afternoon, to practice on her piano. And while I was there, practicing, she heard my mistakes, and corrected me, and came to teach me far more than what she was paid for in formal lessons.
Later, my parents rented a piano, so I could practice at home. I loved it! At last, I had the opportunity to play the instrument I so much loved. I quickly advanced thru months’ worth of lessons of early piano music. Within 13 months, I had learned to play pieces up thru grade 3 of piano music.
Then, my parents bought a new house, and my family moved.
My music lessons ended.
My parents told me that with the expense of the new house, they couldn’t afford to continue my music lessons and piano rental.
I was heart-broken.
I so loved playing the piano. And now I had no piano to play, and no lessons on how to play it.
About the same time, in 7th grade, I took a half-semester class in choral singing. Now, I had loved singing, as a young child, when I performed in Tom Sawyer, and in church choirs. So I was enthusiastic about the class in choral singing. At the end of the class, if we wanted to be included in choir in the 8th grade, we had to audition for the teacher. I wanted to be in the choir, and so I auditioned for it.
However, I was not chosen for the choir in 8th grade.
And so began a long interval of affliction with the idea, “I can’t sing. I have a terrible voice, and I can’t sing.”
And so I seldom sang. In high school, I blossomed as a dramatic actress, and won many awards for performances. But I never appeared in musical shows, because I thought I couldn’t sing.
When I grew up and married and had babies, I didn’t know how to sing to them. I didn’t know any songs to sing to them.
Eventually, when I was feeling most trapped and depressed and unhappy, with a very demanding husband and three small children, on a farm in rural Minnesota, someone gave me a piano. The donor was a friend of my husband, both engineers, who worked together. The friend’s wife wanted to get rid of this old piano, and they were willing to give it away to anyone who’d come and haul it out of their basement rec room.
So my husband and a friend went and hauled it out, into a pickup truck, and brought it to our home on a farm.
The piano was a mess! Built in about 1900, it had been “modernized” in about the 1950s. Its original varnish had been covered with “Zolatone,” a kind of painted finish that was popular in that era, which consisted of a vinyl paint sprayed onto a surface, featuring threads of plastic of a contrasting color.
It was high style, for a while.
So the piano was Zolatoned. Also, its original column legs had been replaced by gilt-painted dowels, placed diagonally from the outside edge of the keyboard to the inside edge of the front of the piano. Above the keyboard and the music stand, mirror tiles had been installed, the kind of mirror tiles that are smoked and marbled with ribbons and flecks of black and gold and silver.
It was a piano fit for a New Orleans whorehouse.
Except it was not only seriously out of tune, it was also unable to play certain keys.
This was a seriously lame piano.
Also, it wouldn’t play several notes, because the hammers were broken.
My husband and I disassembled the piano, and placed the parts on our kitchen table.
The problem with the unplayable keys quickly became apparent.
They were missing the connection that went from the key to the hammer. They needed a replacement part.
As we looked at the inner workings of the piano, we noticed that several of the connections had been replaced by L-shaped scraps of fiberglass panel. My husband looked at these parts and chuckled about the man who’d given us the piano, “He’s a really thrifty man. If he needed a 2-by-4, and he had a pile of sawdust, he’d build one.”
We managed to repair the piano, so that at least it played every note that had a key.
Then I began to seriously train myself to play the piano. We were living on a farm in rural Minnesota (Lake Wobegon, actually). My children were starting school, and I had several hours a day with no demands on my time. I began to relearn how to play the piano.
I didn’t take lessons. But I broke out all my old piano books and worked thru my old lessons. I bought a copy of my favorite piece of piano music in the whole world, “Clair de Lune,” by Debussy, and vowed to learn how to play it.
I began to play several hours daily, along with caring for calves in the barn, and small children in my home, and meals for our family 3 times a day.
Trying to skip ahead many years of pain and nothing productive in musical terms, I eventually came to learn how to play the flute. This led to several years playing in a community orchestra.
And also, I developed a beautiful and soulful singing voice, tho untrained.
How much my life would’ve changed if I’d known I could sing when I reached adolescence is a moot point. But I know it would’ve made an enormous difference in my life.

Questions for the Cook?

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catylaine – 02:52 pm PST – Mar 31, 2000 – #2779 of 2876

I wonder how many middle finger nails have been sacrificed to the kitchen gawds?
My greatest gaff: Growing up in Nola, a prized possesion for serving cocktails were Pat O’Brian highball glasses. You cannot buy them, unlike the foo-foo glasses; you have to steal them in your handbag one at a time. At one time I had a several dozen. About ten years ago I was handwashing the morning after a party, and a chunk of the glass on the rim popped out and I plunged my hand into the glass. Sliced my thumb knuckle to the bone and an inch in, severing a minor artery. So there I am alone, right hand in dishrag over my head, no insurance, hungover, with a stickshift parked in a garage that has to be manually opened. You can imagine trying to dial the phone and finding someone awake on a Sunday morning. Finally I reached my dear friend Melanie, a sexy Mae West that when she laffed, the room gravitated to her like EF Hutton. She arrived in a borrowed Mercedes station wagon, go-cup of champagne in hand, an extra for me, and a spare chilled bottle, and whisked me off to the local charity hospital. Registering with the attendent in the packed waiting room who asked, “Is it bad?” Melanie exposed my hand, now arcing blood, and the nurse said, “Not.” And we sat down to wait. Neighboring chair, bleeding down arm asks me, “You been stabbed? I been.” Oh gawd. Finally Melanie throws a classy fit and gets me taken to a room where another stab victim tells me how bad “he got her back, and you should see her.” Melanie tags one of the security gaurds to stand by the door. The intern arrives, cleans and begins a running stich on my hand. I comment that running stitches are illegal even on dawgs and would he please individually tie the stiches. He must have been in a fine mode, or more likely totally charmed by Miss Melanie, and he complied with almost 50 beautiful knots. I have a delicate scar, almost invisible. I couldn’t bear to go back there so I took the stiches out myself. Needless to say I never washed another of those highballs by hand. I still have two. Time to go to Pat O’s.