“Marked” with Fear

The reactions to Charlotte Cowles’ decision to give scammers $50,000 in the belief she was protecting her income with a CIA agent range from object lesson that could happen to anyone to roiling contempt. More than one pundit has declared Charlotte Cowles ineligible to ever work as a financial journalist again, as if capturing and syntheizing financial advice in readable fashion is an important professional responsibility akin to passing the Series 7.

Several article comments revealed that others have clearly been in the same situation or knew someone who was.(1, 2, 3,4,5,6,7,8, 9, 10,11,12,13), so I don’t understand why everyone is so completely and roundly dismissive of her intelligence, as if only an unsalvageable idiot (or maybe a MAGA voter) would fall for such a ruse. New York magazine readership is, like Charlotte Cowles herself, highly educated and reasonably intelligent, capable of writing in complete sentences without emojis. Thirteen thoughtful responses of “this happened to me or someone I know” just in the comments section suggests that scammers aren’t wasting their time with an unprofitable clientele.

 Some people, like Charlie Cooke above, declare that Cowles’ story is so outrageously implausible that she’s either a complete fool unworthy of her position or simply lying about her experience.   But a simple Google search reveals hundreds of reports of scams just as outrageous, capturing people of all income levels and ages.

Many more cases aren’t reported. Mine, for example. Almost everything in Cowles’ story happened to me four and a half years ago, in late July 2019. I was caught in nearly uninterrupted phone calls for around five hours, pulled out $8000 from my savings and credit cards, and spent it all on Target gift cards in order to read the codes to scammers waiting to spend my money. Even as I gathered funds, I refused to comply with many of the demands the scammers made during those hours, despite dire threats about my imminent arrest. And ultimately I stopped. I refused to hand over the money. I wasn’t saved by a friend or family member (although a timely email did reinforce my resolve).

For that reason, unlike Cooke and the hordes mocking Cowles, I feel qualified to point out that some aspects of her story shocked me. I don’t understand why, if she had $50,000 handy, she wouldn’t just stick it in a safe deposit box to protect it.¹.And what educated person thinks a CIA agent is involved in domestic affairs? 

But distractions aside, her story has many features in common with my own–disturbingly so. I deliberately quit thinking about it (no small task for me) six weeks or so afterwards, so reading her article gave me some unpleasant jolts as those details came zooming back.

Swindling 101: marks are hooked by greed or fear. Cowles and I were both hooked by fear of identity theft.

Cowles:

If I had nothing to do with any of these allegations, how much could they truly affect me? I thought of an old This American Life episode about a woman whose Social Security card was stolen. ..I remembered another story about a man who got stuck on a no-fly list after his personal information was used by a terrorist group. It dawned on me that being connected to major federal offenses, even falsely, could really fuck up my life.

From my  tweet responding to the article on Twitter before I’d read the story:

…but the total fear of all my financial resources being locked down for years, as they threatened, was horrifying and since this was *exactly* what has happened to people whose identity was stolen, it was believable!

In the several weeks I spent obsessing endlessly about my near-miss, I analyzed the event in terms of how my personality affected my vulnerability, as well as my ability to step away. 

An essential attribute for both better and worse is best explained with an example. When my son was about three years old, I suddenly realized he’d been quiet for too long and rushed outside to find him at the top of an 8 foot pile of rotting planks with rusting nails protruding on every side that used to be our back fence. His cousin would have charged up and probably pulled the whole magilla down on his head, but I knew instantly that my boy climbed that dangerous mountain carefully and cautiously. An innate propensity to thoroughly analyze all the pros and cons before, during, and after engaging in insanely ill-advised activities? That, he got from me.

Other vulnerabilities are easier to describe. I was alone when the call came. My housemate and brother knows nothing about the online world but a lot about scams and would have physically taken the phone from me if he’d been nearby.  I was in a car, making it was much easier to convince me to go to the bank than it would if I’d had to get up and find my keys, etc. It had been a bad year, financially. I’d had about $13K in savings in January; it was down to about $3K.².  

On the other hand, I was temperamentally suited for resistance. I have a very low score on the Big Five Agreeable scale. I’m much nicer than I seem on Twitter, but very comfortable making people unhappy. My orneriness is philosophical as well. I can rant for forty five minutes on the enraging mechanics of identity theft. There are companies that make money reporting on my creditworthiness to lenders and when they get fooled it’s my fault?  Tell me my 401K will be locked up for a decade so I should get the money out now? Fuck that. Finally, it turned out to be very helpful that I have extensive experience living and working among a wide variety of recent Asian immigrants.

Specifics of the actual conversations are fuzzy, but I have extremely clear memories of my state of mind, as that’s what I endlessly revisited for a few weeks until putting the incident away and rarely moving it up to conscious memory since.  I know I wrote it all up in an email and I keep everything, but I’m not searching the archives.

***********************************************************

The call came right as I was leaving summer school, which means a little after 1:30.  My father was visiting for the summer and I was using his car while mine was getting fixed. I’d just started the engine when the phone rang. 

How many people have declared Cowles a simpleton simply for answering the call of an unrecognized number? I get the same nuisance calls that T-Mobile now labels  “Scam Likely”. But even today if I get a call from a local area code, my tendency is to flip a mental coin, think about my mood and current activity, and if nothing better is going on, I answer. A good chunk of the time–maybe 30-40%?–it’s a business or individual who has a legitimate reason for calling or that I was actually hoping to hear from. Those are good odds, so I’ve maintained the procedure.

As bad luck would have it,  that day I mentally flipped that coin to “answer”.

Nothing seemed odd at first with one exception: the caller, who I think identified himself as a case manager with the Social Security identity theft department, had a strong south Asian accent. But his name was something like Dave or Sam or Pete.

I spent the 90s working with Indian H1bs, the early aughts tutoring hundreds of south and east Asian kids and talking to their parents, and since 2009 have been teaching hundreds if not thousands of south and east Asian kids and co-working with dozens more adults–almost all of them immigrants. 

East Asians Anglicize their names. South Asians do not. ³

This instantly caught my attention, registering as such an oddity that, before realizing the call’s intent, I’d made a mental note to ask around to see if this was a new thing. Then “Case Manager Pete”  got into the meat of the tale and I was freaked out and on the hook. At some point he transferred me to someone else in SSA with “special projects”, I think but am not sure.

“Special Projects”  dude was ALSO talking with a strong south Asian accent and a name like Dave or Pete or Sam or Charlie. 

One’s an interesting oddity. Two was a warning. I should have hung up, except (and I’d forgotten about this until Cowles’ account reminded me) “Special Projects Sam”‘ told me I was in danger of being arrested because items involved in a massive arrest involving drug and sex trafficking had been purchased with a card using my SSID. The district attorney had issued a subpoena and the police were going to deliver it to me tomorrow but right now they were were following me now to be sure I didn’t try to alert my gang of drug dealers and pimps that the jig was up. 

The only way to convince the cops that I’m not the targeted criminal, “Special Projects Sam” informed me firmly but politely, was to convert all my accounts and credit to cash. This would not only convince the police who are following me RIGHT NOW but also protect my assets against the accounts being frozen the next day. My bank account, all my credit cards. No, don’t give me their numbers, he warned me,  I have them, I know what bank you should be driving to clean out your bank account, you should never give these numbers out over the phone. Sell your mutual fund. Cash out your IRA. 

I said absolutely not. I’m not going to ruin my finances because some dumbfucks in Social Security allowed someone else to use my number. I wasn’t cleaning out the cash advance limits on all my credit cards–I wasn’t even sure how on a couple of them, although I didn’t tell them that. (Had I tried to cash out my 401K and remaining mutual funds my financial adviser for the past 32 years would have told me to hang up on them.)

“Special Projects Sam” said fine, the police will be calling. And immediately, my phone began ringing with the caller id of my local police station–which was not, mind you, the town I was in at that moment. I picked up the phone and for the third time, I heard a clear and heavy south Asian accent identify himself as Officer Dave or Joe or Charles from my town’s police force and explain that fellow officers were tailing me to ensure I didn’t reach out to confederates and warn them to dump the drugs and the women.

If two was a warning, three was an impossibility. The odds against three consecutive recent probably Indian immigrants haveing Anglicized names were ridiculously high. Furthermore, I’ve lived in my hometown for most of the last forty years and never once seen a south Asian cop. The local police force is just 3-4% Asian, most of them Vietnamese or Filipino. As “Officer Dave” (no last name) was assuring me that only actual sex trafficking drug dealers would refuse to cash out retirement and mutual funds, I put the phone on speaker and brought up a Chrome window to find the number of my local police station and if that confirmed, I was going to ask for his full name. 

I had no web service. Just like they told me.

Total brain overload. I was in my employment town, a huge suburb, and I’d never run into a dead zone before but what the hell, they happen. Or did the police have some form of signal blocker and were following me that closely? I said look, I have to go and “Officer Dave”  warned me I was at risk of arrest if I didn’t comply. I’d assumed he hung up, but suddenly over speaker came  “case manager Pete” whose call I thought had ended  (it had, of course, but “Officer Dave” had just transferred me over). As “Pete” kept stressing the importance of collecting all my money, I put the phone on mute, pulled into a strip mall with a Subway, told the girl behind the counter that my phone wasn’t working, could I use her phone for a quick search? 

Call someone for advice? If only. I wanted google. I looked up the local police station phone number. Match. Looked up the number of the original call: a county SSA office. 

I genuinely didn’t think it was possible to alter caller id, so I was stuck  My phone had no signal for the remainder of the incident. I don’t know why. I checked over and over throughout the hours.

I informed “case manager  Pete” I’d clear out my savings and bank credit cards to hold me over while my accounts were frozen, but they could all go fuck themselves, I wasn’t going any further to confirm my innocence. That ended the push for more money. Don’t think I could tell the bank teller what I was doing, “Pete” warned. The cops would question her later to determine if I was trying to warn my team. So I went to a nearby branch of my bank, maxed out the cash advances on my two bank-issued credit cards and pulled out my savings. The bank teller showed no emotion. She probably suspected (and shouldn’t they maybe say something?) but of course, was she suspecting a scam or had she already been warned that I was a suspect? 

Even while complying, as my internet wasn’t working as they promised, as a call came in from my local police station, whole segments of my brain screamed scam. And I got the money anyway. Checked my phone, still no web service. It was now about 4:00. U was to take my money to Target and convert the cash to gift cards.  I can’t remember the details of why, exactly, law enforcement was forcing me to buy Target gift cards to protect my assets; I think Target had an agreement with the federal government to act as a repository for these sorts of funds. I do remember telling them several times this explanation was complete bullshit. I obediently bought $8000 of gift cards anyway. 

Walking into the Target, my situation seemed binary and horrible: Was I spending over four hours making a jackass of myself as a scammer mark or was this really happening despite my doubts and I was protecting some assets from bullshit government interference but was going to have to deal with months if not years of credit hassle and asset freeze? If I walked away, would the entire incident just vanish or would it end with my getting arrested or at the very least suspected of refusing to comply with federal and local government agencies because they were all Indians named Dave or Sam?

And then, in the familiar red decor, a realization dawned: the store had free wifi. One of my best friends is a lawyer. My phone connected to Target’s wifi, which seemed miraculous at this point.  My email, which is around somewhere, said something like “I’m being told I could be arrested under really weird circumstances and that I’m being followed. This can’t be right, right?” Then I spent close to an hour feeding cash into a self-checkout machine⁴. I noticed various people wandering by more than once, almost certainly Target management or security, but because of that ridiculous agreement the scammers described or because who the hell buys $8000 in gift cards? 

Gift cards in hand, I went back to the car.  By now it was probably “Pete” on the phone, but whoever it was asked for the numbers. I said no, the gift cards are fine. My money is safe now.  No, you must give us the numbers. I refused and was transferred to the other guy, probably  “Special Projects Sam” again. Only as I’m writing this out did I recall how brutal the next few minutes were. “Sam” was threatening and cold. Maybe they were wrong to help me. Maybe I was actually a sex trafficker. Maybe he should call the police officers watching me and tell them to arrest me right on the spot. Or I could give them the numbers and security codes for those gift cards.

I scratched off  the covering of a security code. I may have even given them one outside number. But my phone was still on Target’s wifi and  my lawyer friend had responded in an email that, like all the others, I have but don’t want to look at, saying something like “I’m not sure what’s going on, but don’t do anything if a cop’s not in front of you.” 

And in that moment I realized my choices were binary indeed, but much simpler than the ones that had been dancing around in my head: I could agree to give them that money, or I could refuse.

I said, “I can’t do this” and hung up. Went to my recents, selected the “Local Police Station” number of “Officer Dave” and hit call. A woman answered, and she was a cop, not a receptionist. American. Sounded tough. 

“Hi. I’ve been told that the police are following me and that my Social Security id is being used…” 

I got that far and she exploded. “IT’S A SCAM. We would be at your door if we had a subpoena”. Shades of Michael Clayton, a scene I often quote: “The police don’t call.” I thanked her profusely and hung up, sick with relief.

But my phone rang with Sam or Pete and hard as it is to admit I picked up again,  suddenly terrified that all that assurance was false, that one office wasn’t talking to the other. Which is, of course, exactly what the continually loud, angry, threatening “Special Projects Sam” told me, demanding I turn over those security codes. Did he need to have the police call me again? I just spoke to the police, I told him. They told me it was all a scam. Do you think everyone is aware of every case? I could just wait for a call from an informed officer.

Somehow that broke the spell.

“Ah. From ‘Officer Dave’. That reminds me: how come you all have these distinct Indian or Pakistani accents but go by these American names? Since when do Indians call themselves Sam?

Long pause.

“That’s…..incredibly racist.”

I laughed. “Now I know you’re lying.” And hung up,  permanently, blocking the number the next time it rang.

 A cop’s outrage only mostly convinced me, but when a fake Indian fraudster chastised me for racism I was like yeah, fuck no.

***********************************************************************

The coda that made me kick the whole memory out of my brain:

Returning to the Target, I asked to speak to the manager, a thirtyish woman who, sure enough, was one of those I’d seen hovering around while buying gift cards. She was remarkably uninterested. Not sympathetic in the slightest. Took the cards, came back with cash.

I didn’t count it. I was stupid.

Back home, I related my escapade to my brother, who predictably told me all the ways I’d fucked up. My father listened in, confused, but told me I better get the money back into the bank. I was eager to do so, and we drove to the nearest ATM.

I didn’t count the money before putting it in. I was stupid.

When I’d stuffed in all the money, the total was…something less. More than $6000, not $8000. I have the specific missing amount written down somewhere. I don’t want to remember.  Over a thousand dollars was missing.

I think I punched a wall. Definitely kicked my car tire, then realized I was worrying my dad. Returning home, I called the bank 800 number, asked them look at recent deposits. The service rep, a friendly southern woman whose name is still written down in my notes somewhere, gave me all the sympathy the Target manager had not. 

“I see two deposits. One for [some number in the $6000 range], the other for [some number in the 1000+] range.” They added up to $8000.

“But it was only one deposit.”

“Yes but sometimes this happens and there’s a correction.” I’d been standing against a door frame tensely telling her all the details and just slid down to the floor. I’d escaped.

I called the lawyer friend thanking him for the backbone, rehashed the story with dad and brother, spent all night reminding myself that everything was back in place.

Until the next morning, when my account online only registeredthe $6000 plus. The branch told me in person that the accounts aligned, no possibility of error. 

More even than the lack of an internet during those four hours, the disappearance of that thousand plus plagues me. The loss itself wasn’t negligible, but manageable. But how and when in the process had it a disappeared? I’d definitely purchased $8000 in gift cards, so the bank teller hadn’t shorted me. 

I was originally certain the bank had mislaid my money, that it’d been lost in the ATM. But honestly, the bank was pretty great.  When my deposit cleared I called to repay the cash advances but upon learning the story they cancelled the advances and didn’t charge any fees. They gave me the missing funds while reviewing the case and warned me when I’d lost the dispute and gave me notice the money would be removed. Besides, I spent twenty years in tech and worked primarily for financial institutions. What’s the likelihood of the ATM getting the totals wrong? 

Then…it was during the pandemic shutdown, I’m sure…I was waiting for that same ATM to spit out some cash when with no warning, that Target manager flashed in my memory. I don’t remember her face, but I have a clear image of our conversation, where we were standing, the fact that she never looked at me.  I suddenly realized she’d taken all my gift cards and disappeared into the office without counting them first, and then returned with cash that she also didn’t count out. No receipt. 

I’m pretty sure she took it. Don’t get upset, Target people,  if you’re reading this.  I have no proof.  It’s just the bitter ending. I didn’t get away clean.

At the time, though, the service rep telling me about the two deposits a minute apart seemed like the obvious culprit–and mind you, I still have no explanation for why or how the service rep would have invented the story. I reported it as a dispute, mentioning  the time and name of the customer service rep I’d spoken to. A month or six weeks later, the bank rejected my dispute.  I called and asked an agent–begged, really–please, please, review the recording and explain why the service rep saw the two deposits.

“We only record for training purpos…”

“Oh, you asshole prick sons of bitches rot in hell.” I distinctly remember sitting on a bench right outside my classroom, looking out at the garden after disconnecting and reviewing the state of affairs. My house was rented. Car was fixed. My son’s financial emergency was over. Money was coming in.

 I’d told my family, my summer school class the day after it happened, an education reporter I occasionally meet for coffee, my lawyer friend, a couple other pals. I obsessed about the event endlessly when alone driving, before falling asleep. After that last call with the bank, accepting  that a small chunk of the $8000 was gone, I never spoke of that day again and never deliberately pulled it up from the memory bank again until the Cowles story came out and I responded to Megan McArdle’s tweet.

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The next day, I told my students the short version, and one kid said “Oh, that happened to my mom!”

“I sure hope she didn’t get caught up in it like me.”

“Well, she’s undocumented so she knew she didn’t have a Social Security number.”

Fear or greed, it’s how cons hook marks.  It doesn’t seem scary if it’s not your fear.

Other people have told of scams involving the IRS, which wouldn’t yanked my chain. I’d completely forgotten all about the threats about my SSID being linked to drug dealing and sex trafficking, because false accusations didn’t concern me at all. The only threat that registered was their claim that my Social Security number would be frozen the next day and I wouldn’t have access to any money. And before you declare that complete bullshit, what’s up with that Civil Assets Forfeiture Act?

Maybe *this* scam might not trigger your fear. Fine. Maybe you’re completely immune. Good for you. Just…don’t be too sure.

And for those people who read it with a frisson of terror, willing to question their certainty that it couldn’t happen to them? Wise move. Instead of being alert to one specific fraud, focus on behaviors.  This article is an excellent offering of ideas that aren’t specific to any one scam. Print it out, give it to mom and dad, read it yourself. It can’t hurt.

One upside of yanking this out of the memory closet:  I can give myself some credit for killing four to five hours of those bastards’ day with no satisfaction.  Ultimately, I withstood the onslaught and stuck the landing in the phone call, at least.

In the end, the choice is binary: you either give them the money or you don’t.

Don’t.

*********************************************************************

¹I did wonder at first how she got the $50K without triggering financial requirements but her reticence to name the bank, coupled with her family wealth makes me wonder if it was a private bank–or perhaps it was in a safe deposit box and she just doesn’t want to admit it.

²My son, then 31 and out on his own since his mid-20s,  had a genuine financial emergency. My  beloved Accord was betrayed by an exploding radiator and was getting its engine rebuilt for a couple thousand (probably would have chosen otherwise if I’d known a bus driver would murder the car five months later). I’d been covering the mortgage on my rental property since February when my renters had abandoned the house when their involvement in a nationwide story (one you’d recognize) left them without jobs and resources.  I’d had an impossible time refinancing for reasons the bank loan officer simply didn’t understand and had just sold $20K of stock to finance the work needed on the house.

³Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal are native Indian American (as opposed to a Native American Indian, which is Not Said) and born in southern states that held perhaps a couple thousand south Asians at the time of their birth. Haley is using her real name; Jindal is using an “American” one, both of them are consciously downplaying their Indian heritage. I have probably met and significantly interacted with as many if not more Indians and Pakistanis as were in Louisiana in the 70s, literally none of whom are natives, all of whom live in communities that are 30-50% south Asian and 80% Asian. This topic is often discussed in Reddit and Quora, but mainstream opeds about “Asian Americans” abandoning their heritage are always about east or southeast Asians. Here’s an article about Asian students picking American names; note that the south Asians aren’t in fact picking American names.

⁴Reading Cowles’ story got me thinking of the logistics of money delivery. She couldn’t have converted $50K to gift cards The scammers have to execute in a day. So they have to have boots on the ground ready to pick up the cash. Until now I’ve always theought the operations were remote but if they get a big whale (or if they’d convinced me to cash in my 401K) they need local conspirators.  They’ve got a team in place. How would the scammers otherwise keep the “CIA agent” from absconding with all the money?

2023 Thankfulness.

To explain my state of mind this November, I offer this analogy:

I wake up to the sound and smoke of my house in flames, choking off my air as the TVs explode, the curtains fall across my bed and carry the fire closer. I barely escape with my life as everything I’ve ever owned is consumed in the conflagration.

My insurance company puts me in a house that night. It’s…fine. It’s not the home I loved and cared for with all my heart and soul, but basically the same value, same town, same functional description, a better neighborhood really. When people learn I’ve moved, they’re like hey, how do you like the new house? It’s really near that great sushi bar, right? plus the neighborhood has a fantastic homeowners association with  pool and a spa! and it’s all I can do not to turn on them in fury and say what the FUCK are you talking about, bitch? I lost my fucking house! Everything I owned is gone! and instead say yeah, everything’s ok and I’m lucky because, frankly, being alive with a roof over my head is pretty amazing, given the risk I faced.

That’s my life right now. Every minute of every day I grieve what I count as a terrible loss while putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, acting normal, not rending clothes and tearing hair and looking for sympathy, conscious that the outcome could have been catastrophic and wasn’t. Plus, there’s the lawsuit.

While I lost my father completely and lost my mother to dementia since the last time I gave thanks, any honest description of the last three years up to and including the analogous event mentioned above would have to be that they’ve been wonderful and productive. The family is doing well. I have friends that care about me and let me care about them. My students continue to be terrific.

The years were great even though the world was going needlessly bonkers over covid. I said the country was overreacting in March 2020 when most of everyone else was screaming to close the schools. I spent eighteen months living an easy life simply furious at the predictable consequences of a bunch of media jackasses reading the same book about Philadelphia and Saint Louis in the Spanish Flu (and oh, hey, following that policy didn’t work out), but while the lockdowns and optional remote education hurt kids, I can’t say my life was awful. And unlike a lot of other teachers, I see much to celebrate in the nation’s high schools post-pandemic. Not so much to celebrate in the colleges and workplaces that await them, but hey, that’ll change.

A decade ago, I wrote “”I’ve gotten [jobs so far] because I look young for my age, but around the time I’m fifty-five I’m going to look forty-five and then it’s game over.” Well, turns out that clean living and a fortuitous genetic profile has kept me looking pretty close to 45 at 61. Recently, it occurred to me I shouldn’t take this for granted and so let me just say again that looking younger than you are and weighing more than you look is considerably better than looking older and weighing more so I’m thankful.

Speaking of weight, I’m thankful for Mounjaro and the 42 pounds I’ve shed in sixteen months (62 pounds in two years, but the first 20 pounds were pre-drug). I’m paying out of my own pocket–I can afford it, another reason to be thankful–so let’s hope the insurance companies start covering it soon. And anyone who benefited from Pondimin knows to give thanks for continued FDA approval.

I’m thankful for the many options I have looking forward to the next decade. I’m hoping to retire, change states, and still teach some time soon. I could do it as early as next June, or wait a couple years. I have choices and oddly enough the tremendous loss made it easier to decide to move on. Even better, I could decide not to work at all if I wanted to, but I’m thankful I don’t find that option appealing.

I’m thankful that despite the craziness of my “lost home”, I finished my revisionist take on the pandemic school closures. I kept my focus on that and then put off writing or research that wasn’t arson-related. In prior writing gaps, I’ve been researching and writing, just not publishing. Not this time. I haven’t started or updated a single piece in three months. I hope I haven’t lost the habit.

Most of all, I’m thankful for teaching. I’m thankful to be one of those teachers who never gets disillusioned despite all the nonsense, who never stops loving the complex series of performance tasks involved in convincing a bunch of adolescents to knock some brain cells together, gain a sense of achievement and competence and who knows? maybe learn some shit. The job, it’s a joy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Christmas in July

In 1994, I bought a really nice grill. Much bigger than I needed–with a lurking question being did I need one at all, since keeping coals on fire until they ember wasn’t (and isn’t) in my skillset. I was in another state at the time; upon returning back home I moved to an apartment and had no room for it so I gave it to my mom. My stepdad has his own forty-year old Weber, and needed nothing else. So my lovely grill sat neglected for two decades until my brother and I moved back into the family house (not my mom’s). Fortunately, my father was in town that summer. We lugged it home to spend a good week scraping and painting and fixing to restore it to beautiful condition.  We–and by we, I mean my brother, father, nephew, and stepdad–used it for countless family dinners over the past eight years and it has enjoyed a happy, useful life.  Eventually the neglect caught up with it and the bottom fell out.

On the Fourth, my brother and I go out to buy a new grill at Home Depot.

“So here’s the thing,” I said. “I have serious moral qualms about a gas grill.”
“Yes,” Bro nodded.
“I mean, if it’s not charcoal, it’s just….cooking.”
“Exactly.”

I expected more of a diatribe. Look, our family takes food and cooking seriously. I make pumpkin pie with no cans. My brother gets annoyed at the very idea of Chipotle and buys street tacos from little truck stands.  One time we were flying to my dad’s and I was stripping my garden of all the corn to take with us and he objected. The corn won’t be fresh, he said. I observed that dad was unlikely to get corn fresher than six hours and he reluctantly agreed that more than a 30 second delay between picking and steaming wouldn’t be ruinous.  We sneer politely at people who buy Earth Balance. No, Smart Balance. Whatever that fake butter is called. Bro should have launched into a lecture about the need for the carbon in the grill marks or whatever. But he was just wandering around the displays, hesitantly.

“Oh, my god. You want a gas grill.” Guilt was written upon him. “But I’m not wrong, right?”

“No. Gas grills are just…cooking. Well. It’s an open flame, so I suppose that has some value.  But….it’d be nice to get the grill going with less than an hour lead time.”

My failure to master charcoal lighting left me at a serious disadvantage here.

“Well. Maybe if we think of it as just another oven? With Nephew taking cooking seriously, our utility bills are taking a hit.”

Bro cheered up instantly. “Hey, that’s a good idea. I’ll tell him to start cooking outside. Propane is cheap.”

Guilt resolved, we look upon the gas grills purposefully. I suggest that we (I) consider this a throwaway purchase. Who knows how this whole gas thing will work out. So we rule out buying the Cadillac Webers and start looking at the sales. Two five-burner grills, one normally $449, one $529,  are on sale for $299.

“Do these things come in boxes?”
“Yes. They have to be put together.”
“Is it easy?”
“Oh, shit. We need to do this today.”
“It’s almost 1.”
“That’ll be tight.”

Time management being as absent from our genes from as organization, planning and a desire for Chipotle menus, I suggest we buy classic Weber grill as well.

“Both?”
“Well, we need the one for today and then…. hell. Buying two seems crazy.”
“We don’t have to barbecue today.”
“But then what are we here for? Besides, we can give one to Nephew in the unlikely event he ever moves out. I was budgeting $500 for this grill, and we can get these two for under that.”

We decided on the $529 for $299 grill and then look for the boxes, asking an orange apron.

“You do know that the ones inside have to be assembled, right?”

“Yes, we…wait. There are grills here that don’t have to be assembled?”

Home Depot had put a whole bunch of grills for sale outside, purchase assembled. Out the first door, the one marked Entrance but is also an exit, we found multiple instances of two different models.  Miraculously,  the $449 for $299 was one of them. The $529 one wasn’t, but there was a cheaper version in the same brand.

Just then, Bro noticed a taco stand at the far end of Home Depot. Never one to endure indecision for more than 15 minutes, he told me to go figure out what the differences were while he had lunch. I did some research and found him back at the taco stand, past the big sheds for $5000, past the confusingly marked Exit sign that actually works as an entrance.

As I ate the last of Bro’s barbacoa tacos, we agreed that the $449 for $299 was the optimal deal, along with the Weber for today.  Neither of us was particularly happy. This felt more like a duty than a purchase. Still, as I pointed out, a lot of times I make slog buys that turn out great.

We started back the front of Home Depot, past the confusingly marked Exit sign, past the big sheds for $5000, and what do we come upon but more grills!! There were more than two models after all.

So before you think we’re idiots, consider a typical Home Depot storefront.

We came in the entrance just out of picture on the left. The first set of grills were right where they are in this picture. Still going left, there was a huge block of shopping carts–normally right by the entrance. So we thought that was the end of the grills for sale.

But in fact, after the shopping carts, where this picture has tractors, there were more grills. We both walked by them obliviously on our way to the taco stand, which is past the other entrance (the one marked Exit) to the right of this picture. So yeah, we’re idiots.

Seconds after we noticed the grills:

“HOLY SHIT! Look at this!” I looked over at Bro pointing to a grill with a different shape:

typical gas grill

new strange grill

“Why does it have two….holy shit. You’re kidding.”
“It’s BOTH!!!”
“We can have gas AND charcoal! And it’s ASSEMBLED!”

(If you can’t tell, I’m avoiding all brand names. I don’t want your judgment. I do not care if this is the best model. It was fucking Christmas in July.)

And that, readers, is how Bro and I learned about dual fuel grills.

Bro guarded our find while I paid and returned with two guys, both Hispanic long-time first gen, to help load our fabulous find. The grill didn’t entirely fit into the trunk, so Bro secured the trunk with knots and a ratchet strap. Just then a young dude with a huge man-bun parked his Prius, hopped out and came straight to the grills, checking them out with an expert’s eye right by me and the helper guys.

I said “these you can buy assembled–and there’s more on the other side of the shopping carts. And they have plenty unassembled inside.”

He said, “Thanks. But I can’t use gas. I’m opposed.”
“Exactly! It’s cheating! Like, why not just cook?”
” Gas grills really aren’t that different from a gas stove. I don’t want anyone bitching about carcinogenics, either. That’s what makes the flavor.”
“But we just bought this one and it does BOTH!”
“Get the fuck out, really?” (Are dual fuel grills new? I felt better for not knowing about them.) “Damn. I can’t check them out today. I need a long flat grill.”
“Oh, I saw one inside. It was a Weber, too. But I think it was gas. Good luck!”

Man-bun strode off to judge the gas grills and find them wanting just as Bro called me over to show him how to release the ratchet strap and retighten. As we finished, I heard the two Hispanic guys cracking up.

“It’s CHEATING!” “Man, it’s too easy to just turn on, you gotta work for it!”

It wasn’t mockery, but discovery.

The gas vs charcoal preference is a long-running American debate. Gas grillers might think charcoal lovers masochistic Luddites, but they understand the rationale. Not until this moment did I realize there were people in the world genuinely wondering why the fuck anyone would get a charcoal grill if they could afford gas. Like, why the hell did Traegers exist?

And I’d just pierced their cultural bubble. Ten years from now, these two are going to be grilling on their gas barbecues for family dinners and catch each other’s eye and say, in unison, “It’s CHEATING!” and laugh at the memory.

The new grill works great. Dinner was steaks, garlic bread (from scratch, of course) and salad with lettuce and cukes from my garden (tomatoes aren’t in yet). I had finished the pie crusts (from scratch, of course) for the lemon meringue pie but my mom, who has dementia, broke off the crusts and ate them before I could put the filling in. So I bought ice cream.

Happy Fourth.

PS–Can I restore the bottom of my old grill? I’d love to use it as a planter.

Weight Loss and Mounjaro

I’ve been writing a lot more! But then I got blocked on my last pandemic/schools piece, and found myself in the familiar pattern of starting and not finishing other articles–and not starting articles because it will distract me from finishing the ones I have started. So here’s an attempt to write something non-school related that is hopefully quick and interesting, or at least biographical.

I am ridiculously healthy. My few health problems are chronic and lifelong, but I’m a complier in this area, at least. Apnea: diagnosed in 2019 but given my insomnia concluded to be of long standing. Blood pressure: I was clocking 140/95 when I was an 18 year old athlete and it’s remained high at all weight levels (currently 180/115 unmedicated, which it almost never is).  And of course, my allergies, which are always the first culprit I check with any new health issue.

My weight is not considered a health issue. This despite the fact that my weight, for my height,  is shocking. Fifty pounds below my highest weight would still leave me medically obese. 50 pounds lost moves me at most one or two clothing sizes. I can lose 30 pounds without anyone noticing.

My height and weight suggests a person needing two airplane seats, XXXXL clothing, wheezing, and inability to climb three stairs. In fact I’m in normal clothing sizes, hike and walk frequently, can run a mile if you make me, and only wheeze because of my allergies. I’m not bragging. My weight bothers me. A lot. But I’m grateful that my appearance suggests I need to lose 30-40 pounds, not 100.

My weight history was quite consistent until 2016. I have a big appetite that didn’t make me fat until I was 30. From that point on, I’d have to cut back my intake every five years or so because the same amount of calories wasn’t burning off reliably. I’d ignore my weight gain until something forced me to acknowledge it, then diet to successfully lose weight I’d keep off for five years or more. My methods are a recitation of conventional food wisdom because I always went to doctors to lose weight.

1992: start exercising, cut way back on fat. That rule, I kept as a guideline until 2016. Kept off for five years.

1997: Fenphen,  just in time for the fen to be banned. But phentermine by itself kept working until 2008 or so–that is, slow weight gain but no ballooning. Then my doctor told me I couldn’t have phentermine because of my blood pressure, took me off that and put me on hydrochlorothiazide, which I’ve been on ever since (lisinopril and nifedipine added in 2016).  Ending phentermine kicked off a ballooning that I ignored because I was worried that cutting calories wouldn’t work.

2010: I bit the bullet, just cut calories, and lost over 50 pounds in eight months. At that time, I vowed to monitor my weight and not ignore weight problems and over that time did pretty well. I didn’t keep all the weight off, but keeping a scale kept me from ignoring it and I’d cut back and minimize weight gains, even lose a few pounds.

In 2015, I started renting with my brother, which operated on my eating like an invasive species. His leftovers were my undoing: fettucine alfredo, fried chicken, fried fucking porkchops, fresh baguettes, and he keeps peanut butter on hand. That was when I learned that 30+ years of being solely in control of food purchases had created strictures I didn’t even know existed–like don’t buy it and you won’t eat it. It only took me a year to regroup but that year was a 30 pound weight gain and I was back to my all-time high. Wah.

2016 is when the history pattern changed. I cut calories and didn’t lose weight past a given limit. However, two things occurred that year. First, I got much better at watching my weight. I could gain ten pounds from the low limit and then lose them instead of ignoring the problem. Of equal importance, I decided to cut both calories and carbs, which focused me on carbs for the first time since the 70s and the Atkins plan.

If I were given the choice of (a) abandoning meat and cheese for the Fabulous Four white foods (bread, rice, pasta, potatoes) and vegetables  or (b) abandoning the whites for meat, cheese, and veggies, I’d take (a)  in a heartbeat. But the past six years have made clear that option (b) works better. I’ve cut out all the four whites as well as most corn. Exceptions: sushi rice, the occasional corn tortilla, the occasional slice of bread, and snitched fries. I have had one plate of spaghetti in the past six years–my cousin welcomed me into his home with a homemade sauce and I’m not an asshole and oh, my lord, it was so good. I’ve gone from skim milk to whole to cream in my coffee, which is the only milk I use normally. Sugar hasn’t been an issue for decades. I don’t eat candy enough for it to be an issue. Ice cream is a temptation I avoid by not bringing it home. I haven’t wasted calories on non-alcoholic liquid intake for forty years. If it’s not alcohol it’s sugar free.

Since 2016, I’ve been carefully monitoring my weight, eating under 100 grams of carbs and usually around 1500 calories a day. I put a lot of fat back into my diet in exchange for carbs without consequence. For most of that time I walked 2 miles a day, sometimes more. I was far more at ease about what I could eat and what I would see when I stepped on the scale.

But. I should have been losing weight. Every so often, I’d cut my calories and carbs very low just as a test, but no weight loss beyond my set point. And if I varied from that routine even slightly, I’d put on 20 pounds in a month–which I could lose pretty easily by returning to the routine. Totally different from the previous quarter century when I had to turn weight loss into a project to get serious.

2019: I was back at my high and decided to get below the set point I stalled at. Cut down to 1100 calories.  Painfully lost 30 pounds in 8 months, absurdly slow for my usual effort and barely ten pounds lower than my setpoint. The pandemic hit, I continued the same behavior but upped my walking to 4 miles a day. Still slowly put on weight and was back to the same 20 pound set weight range.

Fall 2021: For some reason the thousandth time I heard the GoLo commercial the message sunk in. I’ve never used the product and have no idea what it is, but I’m grateful for that ad. For the first time, I linked my recent troubles with my brother’s diagnosis of Type II diabetes a couple years earlier to my father’s and uncle’s insulin shots to my just a tad out of the green range A1C and glucose levels, despite my low carb intake. I’m not prediabetic  in the slightest. But maybe I was insulin resistant?

My doctor was intrigued with my theory and suggested I try intermittent fasting, giving me three dictates. Eat only from 10 am to 7pm or some similar window. Do some kind of 15 minute aerobic activity to raise my pulse rate. Finally, if I consumed a lot of artificial sweetener, particularly in diet drinks, stop. There’s some suspicion that sweet things trigger the wrong insulin response, even if the sweetness is calorie-free.

The first was easy. I generally eat from 12 to 7:30. The second was not. I exercised 15 minutes close to daily religiously for four months, then (for reasons I’ll mention in a minute) cut back. I still manage it about 3-4 times a week. The last was fucking brutal. I miss diet Coke and Ice sooooo much. I cannot deal with unsweetened coffee, even loaded with heavy cream. So I add in one packet of stevia, my least favorite sugar sub.

Without any other changes I lost 20 pounds in four months, from the high to low of my setpoint. Calorie wise, probably a wash? I used to eat 400-500 calories after dinner, because I’m a night owl, and those are gone. But I never used to eat lunch, which I do all the time now.  Still low carb. I tried going keto but didn’t like it, so kept carbs under 100, usually 50-75 grams.

I still stopped cold at my usual set point. I cut calories down to 1000 for a while and exercised more, to no avail. Barely two pounds in four months. By now, I was pretty convinced that insulin resistance was somehow involved, so I kept to the fasting, although I hate raising my pulse so I cut back a bit on the cardio.

My doctor agreed the halt was weird and sent me to a weight loss endocrinologist. That’s when  I learned there were a number of weight loss drugs on the market. I’d been out of touch for a while.

I’m on Mounjaro. Originally intended for Type 2 diabetes, Mounjaro is, like other diabetes drugs, making the move to the weight loss market. My understanding is that it is not yet approved by the FDA for this purpose, but is on the FDA fast track.

“It’s really expensive and may not be covered by insurance” said the endocrinologist.

“How much?”

“1400.”

“A year?”

“A month. But there’s a coupon.”

“How much?”

“Twenty five dollars.”

“That’s not much of a coupon.”

“Oh, it’s not $25 off.  It’s $25 total.”

Imagine my confused face. That’s not what I’d call a coupon. Still, it’s $25/month with free delivery at convenient hours. My insurance covers around $400 of the cost anyway.

I increased my weekly dosage from 2.5 to 7.5 so far. I’ve lost 12 pounds in 10 weeks, ten pounds below my setpoint, without any other changes.  In fact, since school started I’m actually walking a bit less because I’ve got so much going on.

Side effects: occasional nausea, usually 3 days after taking. Nothing horrible. At this new higher dosage I might be eating a bit less. Hard to tell. My medicated blood pressure seems a lot lower. 115/80 at end of day instead of 135/80.

The endocrinologist is constantly asking me how my behavior changes, am I eating less, and so on, and is skeptical that I’m dropping weight with no other changes. My internist is much more friendly to my theory that this drug is changing my body chemistry in some way. Various reddit threads have testimonials to how the drug has stopped the taker’s binge-eating and hunger pangs. None of that applies to me. I wasn’t a binger, had no food issues, and my appetite hasn’t changed much.

My own theory is that changing my carb intake in 2016 took me off the Type 2 diabetes path, but that the insulin resistance path is unaffected by diet changes? Keep in mind I have only a vague idea what insulin does. Science is still the one subject I don’t teach. In any event, if this continues to work, my doctor agrees with me I’ll probably have to take it permanently.

Moral: none.

Well, I would point out that the sarcastic nasties who say “Losing weight is done by reducing calories” are just being shitty. Even at starvation intake, people process calories differently. On the other hand, a lot of the people who are really obese ate themselves that way. Ultimately, I’m not sure it matters. I think a lot of permanent weight loss will involve drugs. In writing this history, I’m struck by the much longer gap there is between my weight rebound from 1997 to 2008, the other time I was on weight loss drugs.

Here’s hoping I keep losing.

Am I a COVID “Superdodger”? Novid for me.

Time and again I am reminded that either the media class is abnormal or I am. No, don’t enlighten me.

Apparently the media left all decided simultaneously to wonder why some people haven’t gotten covid. The Washington Post wants us to meet the covid super-dodgers which must have been the impetus for this Josh Marshall tweet, asking people who haven’t gotten covid19 to speculate as to why. Or maybe it was this insane nuttiness by an Atlantic writer trying to make sure her fiance doesn’t get covid. Slate asked every Novid they knew to explain why, and the answer was they gave up life as we know it.

I haven’t gotten covid19. Vaxxed, not boosted. I didn’t really want to get vaxxed, but I’m a teacher and I was certain it would become a thing, a moral demand to get vaxxed, and once that happened I’m so stubborn I’d be like oh, fuck you people and never get vaxxed and either be not allowed to teach or go through testing every week. Ick. So I got vaxxed in March 2021 caring not one bit and mildly irritated at myself for giving in. But my reasoning was sound. By summer, I would have been like oh fuck you people and then I would have been forced into covid tests every week.

I travelled everywhere. Took my dad on a fishing trip. Visited my sister several times. Road and air. The only good thing about the 20 months spent teaching remote was that I could do it from anywhere, and I did. While restaurants were legally take-out only, my sushi bar let regulars eat in and I did so weekly, all through the shutdown.

I wore masks when required and at no other time. Cloth only. My school made the KN95 masks available free, handing them out several times. They sat unused on my desk. “Why don’t you use them? They’re better than cloth,” my students would ask.

“Yeah, I don’t want to wear a mask at all and if I understand the experts wearing cloth is the next best thing.”

The first day my district ended the mask mandate, I was afraid I read the calendar wrong. Everyone was still masked. Maybe four teachers and 20 kids weren’t. Some teachers took a vote in their class to determine whether to require masks in their classroom and I nearly lost my shit upon hearing that from my class. At the sight of my fury, two different students took off their masks.

“Oh, don’t do that! I hate masks. You don’t have to! That’s my point. I don’t want people forced to wear masks but forcing you not to is just as wrong.”

“Naw,” said Jacob. “I was just doing it because everyone else did.”

“Me, too!” said Alison, “I hate masks.”

“Ah. OK. So let me be clear. I’m fine with anyone wearing masks, but if you are wearing masks because you’re afraid people will judge you, then man up, puppies.”

Last day of school, a majority of students were still masking, but increasingly kids took their masks off around me. Not sure what that means.

I have never taken a covid19 test. I have allergy attacks that are bad enough I may as well be sick, but I now take allergy meds most of the year to stop outbreaks and so the bronchial disasters are infrequent. While covid doesn’t worry me, I get sore throats so bad that strep is a possibility and that does concern me.  An allergy breakthrough last December gave me a sore throat bad enough to warrant a trip to urgent care for a strep test. They made me sit outside and wait an hour for a covid test before seeing a doctor. Fuck it, I’ll risk strep. It wasn’t strep. It wasn’t covid, either. I just needed to go back on Mucinex.

At school, we get these automated emails warning us if a kid in the school or the class had covid19. The first was just a notification. The second sent out a list of actions we needed to take if we weren’t boosted. I ignored those emails, as did almost every other teacher I talked to. Students stopped calling in sick with a sore throat or sniffles; parents didn’t want to activate the protocols. Girls had cramps, boys had sprained ankles.

I have several classes of 35 kids and they sit in groups. At no point did covid sweep through my classroom, although many cases occurred randomly. Elmore and Leonid were brothers who sat next to each other and lived together. Elmore got covid, Leonid didn’t–not then and, last I checked he, like me, hasn’t had it.

I am not boosted. I will not get boosted for the same reason I don’t get flu shots. Maybe when I’m older and worried about lung function–at some point, with my bronchial history, it might be a good idea.

The official definition of close contact exposure is six feet for 15 minutes. My friend Bart, who left teaching last year, came back for the graduation and slept on my couch. We ate at the sushi bar, had dinner at my house, talked as I cleaned up my classroom, and traveled in the same car during the 36 hours between his arrival and his taking me to the airport for my flight to Florida.

Four hours later, Bart texted me frantically. He’d felt tired and had a sore throat and took a covid19 test which came back positive. He was so sorry!

Who does that? Who feels mildly sick and says oh, take a covid test! Well, Bart does, obviously. He was pretty obsessive about covid throughout, staying housebound for months. Vaxxed and boosted. Still got covid.

Anyway, I was definitely exposed to covid19. Ate at restaurants, went to the beach, went to a movie. Had a great time. No covid.

I never thought my covid virginity was unusual. My brother, who manages an elite grocery store, also hasn’t gotten it–vaxxed, not boosted. His son and daughter who live with us haven’t gotten it. My sister did get a fairly mild case in January–never vaxxed. Her daughter, a nurse, utterly and wholly obsessed about covid prevention, required every attendee at her baby shower to be vaxxed, boosted, and show a negative PCR test.  She’s had it twice. My mom and her husband never had it. Most of the teachers at school never had it–some obsessive protectors, some more like me.

My explanation is my immune system.. Thank my mutt ancestry. Viruses don’t have much hold on me.  Not colds, not flus, not covid. I personally attribute it to the hyperimmune response of allergies, but my brother and sister have much milder allergies and similar health. It’s certainly not my behavior. From February 2020 on I have openly mocked the cautious. It gets you or it doesn’t. I’m okay if it does. But it hasn’t.

Besides, the article already observed that only 60% of the population has gotten covid. 40% doesn’t seem like it’s worthy of superdodger status. Let me know when I’m one of the 1%.

Asymmetrical Executioners

So this is a bit outside my bailiwick, but it’s been on my mind for a while. Besides, I am pseudonymous precisely because I fear the woke world, and was wise enough to do so long before it blossomed into full power. Prescience has to count for something.

One attractive aspect of the new media cancel culture, in which lightweight  crossword puzzle columnists and the most tedious of the people with three names (as John McWhorter refers to various black progressives) demand their betters be fired, is that at least they’re not obliterating ordinary folk any more.

Anyway, whether it be James Bennet or Donald McNeil or any of the other recent absurd terminations, I read responses that are heavy on two questions that don’t really matter, and light on the one that does.

Who the hell do these employees think they are, making demands? Why are they so unreasonable?

This is a boring question. An irrelevant question. A question asked by those who don’t understand how employment works.  Which is why it was odd to hear Rob Long shrug this off in a recent GLOP podcast as Circle of Life cut-throat culture, the younger employees using the threat of bad publicity to cull their seniors from the herd. Odd because Rob Long definitely understands how employment works, so he should be focused on the correct question (see below).

He’s not wrong, of course. Media jobs are hard to come by. If a few complaints can force your manager to fire a worker above you in the food chain, why not?

But that’s not the question.

How can we move out of this cycle? What can we do to raise the next generation to be less horrifyingly fascist?

First question is interesting, but at this point, as indicated by the followup, is focused on the wrong subject. We don’t care about the next generation. They aren’t the problem and so aren’t the question.

Why are the media management folks acquiescing and firing on demand?

Ah. That’s definitely the question.

I was never a big Cheers fan. Carla was mean, Diane was cringy awful, Cliff was fardo personified. The memes were fun, individual moments were classic but I couldn’t usually tell you which episode it was from. For example, for 30 years I’ve remembered the nut job who said “No, I’m the vice president of the Eastern Seaboard! [pause] Now I’m the Eastern Seaboard! [pause] What a view!” but  couldn’t have told you anything else about the episode until I googled it for this piece. I only remember two episodes vividly: the highly ranked “The Heart is a Lonely Snipe Hunter” and the one on point here, “The Executive’s Executioner.”

The storyline: Norm Peterson, high status within Cheers, a chubby loser schlub elsewhere in life, is promoted to “corporate killer”. Research has shown that people feel worse if they are fired by someone they can look up to and admire.  So Norm gets a huge salary boost and fires people all day. Eventually, he realizes he’s lost all his humanity and really is the “killer” he was hired to be. So he decides to quit. He calls his boss to resign, but the minute the boss hears Norm’s voice, he screams and hangs up. Puzzled, Norm tries again, getting his boss’s secretary…who screams and hangs up. That’s all the denouement that matters for my purposes, but go watch the last scene.

For a plot a decade older than Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air, it’s all quite insightful and very funny, particularly the denouement. White collar layoffs were a new thing in the 80s, as America’s corporate titans began worrying about Japan and profitability, to say nothing of the equity compensation that made high stock prices tremendously attractive. Blue collar workers were, at that time, unionized so their mass firings were based on seniority. But middle management, accountants, computer programmers and secretaries had no protection and as someone who lived through that time, I can tell you that the selection process for the chopping block seemed an awful lot like voodoo.

So when Norm’s  manager thought that he, too, had been targeted for extinction, the humor derives from the boss’s entirely credible fear that his superiors had targeted him for the same random execution. No one scoffed and said how silly, why wouldn’t the boss know better? Why wouldn’t they know that Norm wouldn’t be firing them if they hadn’t heard first?

And hey, that’s the same question as the one heading this section. Why would the boss think Norm would be firing him? Why didn’t Dean Bacquet tell his staff to go find another job if they didn’t like the way he was running his newspaper? Better yet, why didn’t he just fire them for their arrogant hubris? It’s not as if he couldn’t find other hypersensitive Ivy League prima donnas.

So why?

This is the question I don’t see many people asking seriously, as opposed to a rhetorical flourish.

Jonathan Chait wrote a whole article assessing the management decision without ever asking why, which was also the topic of Bret Stephens’ spiked column. Ann Coulter wrote a very funny piece without ever mentioning management.  Others provided AP Lang & Comp students excellent examples in synecdoche by referring to “the paper” and its decisions. But no one ever really engages with the question, as opposed to deride NYT management.

Why?

The real answer, the one that links this back to Norm, is mentioned almost casually, as Rod Dreher does: “After a meeting in which Madame Defarge Nikole Hannah-Jones was present, and reportedly threatened Baquet by proposing to undertake her own investigation of what happened on that 2019 field trip”

Threatened.

Threatened?

You need leverage to threaten. What does Hannah-Jones have? Why is Baquet afraid of her and his underlings?

When Norm’s boss shrieked, we laughed. No one’s laughing any more. But that’s the answer. Baquet is afraid. He can’t ever be certain that someone, somewhere, might send Norm to call on him.

Cancellation is an asymmetrical threat. Baquet probably wants to write a book someday. All powerful within the NYT structure, sure, but it’s not entirely unrealistic to think Hannah-Jones could “raise questions” after Baquet retired.  You can see the headlines now. “Journalist wonders why Baquet is getting millions in book deal when he continued to employ racists after their behavior came to light.” (leaving aside the joke of calling the Nikole Hannah-Jones a journalist.)

Who, after all, is going to buy Baquet’s eventual memoir? Or give him a talking head job at MSNBC? Who would those decisionmakers see as the natural Baquet audience, the people who’d be impressed and read reviews of his autobiography or celebrate his appearances on Maddow? If that audience is willing to reject him, given the right people pushing the rght outrage, what objective value does Baquet have to any organization outside the Times looking for pricey talent?

Understand that Baquet only rules one tiny portion of the work universe and his decision becomes obvious. No, he won’t get fired for laughing at the idiots demanding McNeil’s ouster. But he might not get a book deal. Or a TV gig. Or whatever else he wants a few years from now. Because the people who work for him in his NYTimes silo have more influence in another.

The answer to the question is: the bosses are complying because they fear negative blowback in an entirely unanticipated direction, not just now but forever.

Which leads me to the skipped question.

How can we move out of this cycle?

Once it’s clear that the real question is the acquiescent management teams, the solution is clearer, if not simpler. We need more Hyatts and fewer Deltas. Dean Baquet has to start caring about the quality of his paper more than he does his book deal or Davos panels.

That’s a big ask.

On the other hand, Justine Sacco is working at the same company that caved in and fired her. David Shor survived an attempt to end his career.

But is that enough?

Once I had this explanation worked out, back in February, my first thought was well, good. Instead of ordinary folk being random victims of a progressive PR onslaught, the problem has narrowed its focus and victims to elites and their management, the people who have book deals and Davos panels and so on. That’s not good, but a big step up from the Smith cafeteria worker who can’t find a job. These are mostly rich people, or at least rich adjacent. Or at least journalists who talk a lot to rich people.

Now, I’m not so sure. Recently, there’s been a spate of articles about critical race theory infiltrating public schools and lots of reaction pieces hyperventilating about thought control. My own take has traditionally been far less hysterical. Communities have always exercised tremendous influence over public and private school curriculum, unless federal or state law mandates override their preferences (and sometimes not even then). Teachers have near total control over what they teach in their classroom. No one can make me teach critical race theory or woke math. Some teachers have been using critical race theory for decades or more. Others will never use it. In both cases, these decisions are policed by the community preference. That is, after all, how these stories all come to light: a parent gets annoyed, contacts a journalist, a big hooha is made, some kid has recorded incendiary comments on her cellphone or a parent has saved a ridiculous work sheet, the offending party (which is often the principal but sometimes the teacher) is taken to task and put on paid leave and even, on occasion, fired. (Ironically, these efforts are often by woke teachers trying to raise their white students’ consciousness but forgetting they have black students.)

Except.

In the past six months, private schools have been in the news because the staff–non-unionized, often poorly paid, no tenure–is making outrageous demands for a more diverse teaching staff and population and a critical race curriculum, while rich and powerful parents are silent and acquiescent despite privately opposing these idiotic demands.

Why are they silent? Why pay thousands of dollars a year for a bad education? The journalists think the parents are silent because they want their kids to get into elite universities. Maybe. I myself think that loudly resisting critical race theory could prove risky. Parents protesting their private school insanity might think they are acting in a single silo of their lives. Then, suddenly, an angry brainwashed young teacher has contacted an ambitious media twenty-something who transforms the tale of liberal parents upholding educational values into a David and Goliath story of racist white parents objecting to progressive teachers bent on telling the truth about America. Then suddenly parent employers enter into the story, customers email outrage, and Norm calls.

Unlikely? The parents themselves make it clear they fear cancellation. The more interesting question here is who is the “boss” equivalent tolerating the demands? The parents, quietly going along with critical race theory, or the parents’ bosses who’ll get hit with demands to fire any parent who puts up a fight?  It’s both. In all directions.

Even more terrifying is the story out of Virginia, in which public school employees angry at parental recalcitrant to their progressive agenda are trying to hack private Facebook groups opposing their efforts and doxxing the parents. Look. I know it’s received conservative wisdom that public schools indoctrinate children. English and history teachers are indeed quite left of center. But as I keep on saying on Twitter, if we can’t teach them reading, why the hell are you worried we’ll teach them to hate America?  In reality the far more progressive agendas are found in charter schools and privates (see above).

And then I read that public school teachers are seeking out names to feed the media and ruin lives by putting jobs at risk, and my god. That’s simply appalling.

Maybe anyone who has a life to ruin will need to fear asymmetric execution by  waiting, watchful zealots and a helpful, compliant media.

Or maybe not. American social excesses have always been far more pendulum than progression. I am, after all, the person who predicted that cops would eventually take teachers’ place in the hot seat because “acceptable targets change over time”. If nothing else, rest assured that American history shows people don’t take kindly to whackos messing with their schools.

But sometimes “over time” is a long time, so beware. Above all, know this: right at this moment in time, Norm can come calling for all of us.

Figuring Out Podcasts

The path to podcasts, for me, began when I wanted something to occupy my brain while gardening. My brother had a big portable old school radio, and I’d listen to NPR. Back before Trump, on the weekends, NPR would be fairly apolitical, or at least no worse than a typical neighbor in my area.

But then Trump happened, and NPR just got unbearable. Before that point, I’d occasionally listen to bloggingheads interviews while working after school, and it occurred to me that I could just hook up my laptop to some old speakers. That worked so well I ran out of bloggingheads interviews before summer gardening ended.

Before the pandemic, I would sit in Starbucks or other coffee shops and write, but Twitter and other reading attractions were distracting. I suddenly realized that my phone came with a headset and that the headset worked on my laptop. So I plugged them into my laptop and listened to songs on youtube. Usually albums, so I didn’t have to change. No, I don’t have spotify or pandora or even pay youtube. Just whatever I could find: old albums (writing to the Carpenters Greatest Hits is very productive. Don’t @ me),  classical music, anything that would distract me just enough to focus on writing rather than flipping around websites. Somewhere in the last few years I started transferring pictures from phone to laptop via Bluetooth and realized that my rental cars on roadtrips also had Bluetooth which might be useful during the many hours when I was out of radio station range and Sirius had nothing to offer. Believe it or not, I used my laptop in my car to listen to podcasts I’d downloaded for about a year then suddenly, Rich Lowry’s regular reminder “it’s easier for you and better for us” to listen to the podcasts from a service finally sunk in as relevant information.  For the past….six months? year? not sure, I’ve been using Stitcher with inexpensive wireless earphones in rental cars, on walks. My own car was destroyed by a massive bus (sob) and when I get around to buying another it will support my podcast habit. I’m still pretty cheap. Not a big electronics person. And speak to me not of Apple.

Anyway, I’ll share my favorites and occasionals, and if anyone notices a pattern and has other suggestions, let me know.

Top Two:

Mickey Kaus and Bob Wright: These two invented bloggingheads, but then Mickey dropped out because his decision-making process unerringly directs him to choices guaranteeing the least visibility. I was delighted when the two decided to do a regular weekly show to discuss the pandemic. Guys, please don’t give it up. You can tell Mickey is worried that he’s made a choice that might be successful, as he constantly protests a commitment to anything long term. These guys are great. I love the lack of focus, the interruptions, the dispassionate assessment, and their obvious affection for each other.

The Glenn Show: Glenn Loury is a genius, a marvellous interviewer, and a guy who, like Mickey and Bob, should have a much higher visibility in today’s discourse. I’ve written about two episodes before. Eclectic, fearless, and ruthlessly analytical. Always worth listening to, particularly the “black guys at bloggingheads” series with John McWhorter. Other favorites are Amy Wax and Robert Cherry.

After these two clear favorites, it’s categories:

 Weekly or daily roundups

Ricochet Podcast: Rob Long, Peter Robinson, James Lileks. This was one of the first podcasts I began listening to in the garden. It’s very funny, very wry, and a nice mix of geography, political opinions, and personality. Peter Robinson sounds like ChooChoo on Top Cat and boy, does that make me sound old. They’re all interesting, but while Peter Robinson is by trade an interviewer, Rob Long, who began life as a comedy writer, is a pretty thoughtful analyst. Lileks is an op-ed guy.  They alternate between interviews and conversations; I generally prefer the conversations. I wrote about a particular podcast.

NRO’s The Editors: Rich Lowry and Charlie Cooke, with Jim Geraghty and Michael Brendan Dougherty alternating. I actually liked this podcast better when Luke Thompson was a regular, but I’m figuring he was terminated for boldly predicting that Joe Biden was a corpse knocking against the side of the boat.  Never showy or terribly memorable, it still always keeps me interested. I also confess a fondness for Rich Lowry, who would gun Sonny down on the causeway in a minute, because it’s just business. Dude’s a shark.

Commentary: John Podhoretz, Noah Rothman, Abe Greenwald, Christine Rosen. In their recent 500th episode, John Podhoretz mentioned that the Commentary editors moved to a daily podcast when the pandemic began, and that their listening audience tripled. Bingo. I had listened to them occasionally before, but when I walked a couple miles each day to get coffee, Commentary kept me from running out of podcasts.

It’s a very New York City sounding group. Hmm. I would like to be clear I’m not using “New York City” as a proxy for “Jewish”.  I mean that even though one lives in New Jersey and another in DC, the conversation has an extremely New York City sensibility. Like, when they are discussing the riots, they all talk about their neighbors and how they banded together, and I’m like who knows their neighbors?   They all seem to live in apartments. And so on. Maybe people do that in Chicago, too.

Reason Round Table: The libertarian politics are rarely front and center, while deep skepticism for political and media figures is. I like everything except the entertainment recommendations in the last 10 minutes.

GLOP: Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long, John Podhoretz. I used to like this a lot better than I do now. But at its best, it’s a fantastic pop culture show, and Rob Long’s insights into the entertainment industry are excellent (like why Burt Reynolds couldn’t get hired).  They’ve gone down to a show every two weeks; that and Jonah’s occasional Trump rants have dropped it down a notch. Still, I listen faithfully.

London Calling: James Delingpole, Toby Young. I don’t listen to this all the time because the issues just go right by me. But these two are hilarious. They used to do a podcast on Game of Thrones and their ignorance was a treat.  Back in February, Toby Young did a story about an 8 hour trip to the emergency room and a Chinese-loooking man who said he had corona virus, the memory of which still makes me chortle. I need to remember to listen to them more.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Kevin Williamson and Charles Cooke. I can’t stand Williamson. He’s arrogant, hates America, and has very little interesting to say. But for some reason the podcast passes the time adequately, possibly because neither of them live in New York or Washington DC.

Dropped: Left, Right, Center when Bruenig left. The new leftist is horrible. I Tell You What, with Dana Perino and Chris Stirewalt dropped off my list, more for Chris Stirewalt, also way left and really annoying.  I like Bret Baier’s show, but it’s too short.

Never considered: The Bulwark, Beg to Differ, any of a large variety of really smug Never Trump shows.

Interview shows. In general, I choose interview shows for the subject, not the interviewer. But these folks all choose interesting subjects. Note–the best interview show I’ve already mentioned, in the #2 overall slot above.

The Remnant: I gripe about Jonah Goldberg but it’s worth remembering I’ve been listening or reading him for 20 years. He’s a guy who really valued his relationship with his audience, and the Trump rise shattered that relationship, and the audience. He’s never really recovered psychologically from that blow, and he blames Trump and his followers. Fortunately, he had a lot more going on, so all that happens is periodically he breaks into a rant about Trump or his followers or what they say to him and it’s really boring. The rest of the time, he’s still Jonah and keeps interviews moving and fascinating. He tends only to choose people he agrees with, and knows real well, so it sounds like old home week.

The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie: For some reason his stuff doesn’t show up in my feed, and I have to remember to go find him. Very good interviewer, keeps conversations interesting and funny.

Conversations with Bill Kristol: Another Never Trumper I despise who nonetheless puts together a decent interview show, provided you can keep him away from Trump. (In other words, the Mike Murphy spots are unbearable.) Also, his website of all the interviews is unintentionally hilarious: Hi! Are you a white guy expert over 60? Boy, is this the place for you! The Christopher Caldwell talks are excellent, and the interview with John Podhoretz on the movie industry is one I listen to about once a year.

The Dispatch:  Steve Hayes interviews only. Understand, the Dispatch podcast roundtable with Hayes, Sarah Isgur, Jonah Goldberg, and David French is not on my list at all. It’s basically ok until Jonah starts going down the Trump rabbit hole, and horrible whenever French opens his mouth. Disclosure: I loathe French.  And I hate his voice.

However. Steve Hayes does a very nice interview, and Sarah Isgur isn’t bad. So whenever it’s an interview with just them, it’s worth a listen.  The interview with two young conservative Dispatch staffers was so good I almost subscribed, but then David French was an asshole on Twitter, and the impulse evaporated.

Analyst Shows:

I used to like political analysis more than I do now, as most of them have gone way left. Amy Walter is intolerable. Five thirty eight is far too woke for me anymore, although I still have it on my feed.

I still give Josh Kraushaar a listen, depending on his guests. The Sean Trende discussion was fantastic–and speaking of guys who should have podcasts, Sean?  Henry Olsen, one of the few Trump friendly analysts, does a good interview even though his voice grates on me. I also like his ad analysis.

***********************************************************************

Here’s something ironic: Almost every show I listen to has a moment or three, sometimes each week, in which someone takes a dump all over teachers. And if you point that out to them, they say exactly the same thing: We don’t dump on teachers! We dump on teachers’ unions! Please. In the Thomas Sowell interview, Rob Long called schools “sclerotic”.  John Podhoretz routinely says “in those horrible awful teacher union public schools”. Kevin Williamson routinely writes broadsidesagainst the profession. mentioning teachers four times and cops once. They all want to “fire bad teachers”.  Newsflash: if you say teachers unions are responsible for America’s low scores, you’re attacking teachers, not unions. And America doesn’t have low scores, which you’d all know if you knew better.

Whenever I point this out, people think I’m bitching or whining and I’m not. It’s just that my god, conservatives and Republicans and libertarians, get up to speed.  The 90s called and they want their education policy back. Republicans who aren’t directly involved in public school policy have absolutely no idea what’s been happening, and have no idea how to successful promote an education policy that hasn’t already failed miserably.

Just one example: Thomas Sowell wrote a book celebrating Success Academy and charter schools that was just flatly a bunch of bullshit, and was interviewedon Ricochet. Lileks, Long, and Robinson were all gaga with praise and astonishment. None of them mentioned Robert Pondiscio’s book–probably because they have no idea it exists. Not a single conservative in education policy would ever be so idiotic as to brag about Success Academy. They know how SA achieves the numbers. They know it’s all a lie. The only thing they debate about is whether or not the lie can be rationalized or not. But none of this came up. Complexity, something they enjoy in other topics, vanishes entirely when conservatives start talking education.

Notice, too, that there are no education podcasts on my feed. Reformers are too irritating, progressives are too progressives. I do occasionally listen to Nat Malkus, who is at least an honest broker. Conservatives listed above would do well to listen to him, particularly The Shifting Politics of Charter Schooling and Success Academy Charter Schools with Robert Pondiscio.

*****************************************************************************

So I just thought I’d toss this together, in my “write more” phase, and ask for recommendations. Specifically:

• a good left of center podcast that won’t annoy me. I just heard Jesse Singal had one, so will check that out.
• another culture podcast that discusses movies, ideally not just new ones.
• a good comedy podcast. I tried Conan’s, couldn’t get into it. I like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, if that helps.
• Other good shows in the categories above.

Also, is it possible to review shows in Stitcher? I am a very popular reviewer, Yelp assures me.

 

Life During Lockdown

I am living my best life.

I sleep in until 8:00. In the early days of the shutdown, my beloved Starbucks abandoned me. Only two little independent coffee shops were open through March and early April. One is just around the corner and serves cornbeef hash made from scratch. The other is a mile away with a fairly generic menu. So every morning I go on a two mile jaunt for coffee to avoid the thirty pounds I’d gain eating that cornbeef hash every day.  The walk gives me plenty of time to chat with the dozens of others out on the sidewalk, something I rarely have the opportunity to do when commuting every day. The rest of the morning in and around coffee is Twitter, the news, water the garden, maybe make a trip to the hardware or grocery store. Nothing intense, just little tasks. At 10:30 I start my first “office hours” session, working on zoom calls until 2, occasionally scheduling a later session for working students.

I don’t offer “classes” per se. I just assign work, tell students to show up a couple times a week in Zoom sessions, and let them choose when.  Timeshifting isn’t usually an opportunity granted teachers, much less the ability to work from home.  While I love the flexibility of office hours, remote classes narrow the entire act of teaching down to one mode. Explanation has always been my strong suit, but there’s so much more to teaching.  I miss the variety. I miss my job.

Ninety percent of my students were regular participants for the first month, eighty percfent the next, but those numbers will fall. Like most district and union shutdown grading agreements, ours is a spectacularly stupid policy. 1) Grades are credit/no credit only. 2) Students who were passing on the day the schools shut down are guaranteed a credit grade. In short, students with a D or higher in mid-march don’t have to do a thing and the district is legally committed to give them a passing grade.  It’s amazing we have any students at all.  On the other hand, the participation and learning I see my students achieving leaves my original expectations in the dust. The bureaucrats are doing a great deal wrong. My students are doing a great deal right.

After my last zoom call finishes up, once Starbucks finally reopened, I take another  mile and a half trek for an iced espresso. Sometimes the late afternoon is spent in my garden, which is the entire backyard: tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, watermelon, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, basil. Weeds are a problem this year; I’m mulching with my stepdad in a couple days.

I am running an “after school” club activity that I dreamed up to give interested students  some experience planning and managing a donation project. This takes a couple hours of every day, either creating products or buying supplies. Add to that the  few hours a week spent driving around to student homes, delivering materials to assemble various products that we’re donating.  Mondays or Wednesdays I usually head into school just to see the place, talk to my tech guy about various issues, collect any supplies I need.

My favorite restaurant has as much respect for pandemic laws as I do, and allows regulars to dine in. I stop in at least once a week, often bringing a friend or colleague, or maybe my brother.  A few other restaurants are open on the same basis: the barbecue joint up the street, the pho shop I frequent, and the Vietnamese sandwich shop. The liquor store beer bar I love is still open, but Bart left the state to teach while living with his girlfriend, so I don’t go as often as I used to.

Almost every day, I walk to one of three stores for dinner groceries. On Friday and Saturdays, my nephew hangs out with us;  we cook a big dinner and have movie night. I try to keep up on grading while watching TV.

My maid service comes every two weeks. Every six weeks, Lyle the stylist, as he insists on being called, comes by and does hair–mine, my brother’s, anyone else who hears he’s coming. I’m starting up acupuncture pretty soon. As is probably clear,  I follow only those pandemic laws that would put a business or employer in jeopardy if they were caught allowing the behavior. I’m fairly scrupulous at school and extremely cautious in any student interactions. Most of the time, I blissfully abstain from virtuous pandemic theatrics.

My life is great. Like, Tony Tiger grrrrreat. The luxury of time, meaningful occupations both professional and vocational.

Another piece of good fortune: no one in my family is financially at risk. Parents are retired. My sister and her husband are wealthy enough to be semi-retired, although my sister still sells diet products for another five figures a month. My grocery manager brother is busy and respected in the community, regularly working with city managers, nursing home staff, and so on. My other brother spent a couple weeks unemployed but is back at work. My son is in sales, but  the shutdown hit when he was at the top of a cycle and he took unemployment too. He’s enjoyed family time at home with his wife and two kids, feeling very lucky for the opportunity, and just went back to work.  If all that good fortune isn’t cause enough for celebration, my renters are employed.

So my life, which I already found deeply satisfying, has improved in almost every way by being forced to work from home–the only exception being the work itself.

But my easy living barely compensates for the fury. I am aghast at the utter waste and devastation caused by this needless national shutdown. I’m furious at the media which openly advocates for policies rather than trying to inform the public.   Disgusted at governors who caved to the media.  Incoherently, snarlingly hostile to people who see nothing wrong in placing their (or others) peace of mind above the well-being of children and young adults.  I try not to rant about it and in real life, anyway, I succeed. Most of the time.

At least the people in my community share my disdain, whether they say so or not. Surveys say my neighbors support the shutdown laws. Observations say otherwise. The parking lots are full.  Stores are crowded. Lines are long. Apart from rush hour, traffic is pretty heavy. Mask wearing is barely what’s required by law. No one’s huddling in their houses. It’s a deep deep blue region. People will starve before they give Trump the satisfaction of a protest. But random, frequent conversations reveal I’m not alone in my annoyance and anger.

It’s Twitter and the media, the outside world, that flummoxes me with the constant reminder of the mindsets that got us into this mess.  The other day, mild-mannered Damon Linker said, without apparent shame, that schools should be closed as long as need be to ensure that children don’t infect vulnerable adults in their family. When I asked how long he was planning on locking kids down, preventing them from living every day life, he asked angrily who would console his children if they infected him and his wife both of whom are in high-risk categories. Now, I don’t want Damon Linker’s kids to feel guilty, but wouldn’t it be much less catastrophic if he just kept them home? But no, he feels that since many others have the same vulnerability, schools should stay closed. That’s a whole level of entitlement I don’t get. I do not take the thousands of deaths lightly. Neither do the many other people who find this lockdown unnecessary.

I remind myself frequently of my tremendous luck and fruitful, happy life in lockdown, to keep my mood as balanced as possible.

The disconnect between my comfortable circumstances and my anger at the decisions that forced this life upon me can be disconcerting. Were I younger, I’d probably spend all my time fuming and none just enjoying the freedom. But I was self-employed for twenty years, and not a day goes by that I don’t feel a shiver of the economic devastation the pandemic would have brought down on me had it hit  had the pandemic hit during one of my earlier careers.  So I enjoy the sun, the walking, the neighbors, the coffee, the garden, the time spent with students. I try not to obsess about events–now, see, don’t get the wrong idea. I obsess all the time, but mostly about my own life. The world I leave for others to worry about, usually.

Anyway. While reviewing this piece about my terrific lockdown life, I suddenly asked myself if I could do anything to feel even more productive and happy.  And the answer came back instantly:

I could write more.

 

 

Bob, Gwen, and Lines of Best Fit

I have no excuse for this article. Except the new Fosse/Verdon ads are showing up. Also, consider “lines of best fit” a descriptive, not technical, term.

“Hey, Gerardo. Take a look at this.”

Gerardo, my new TA, reluctantly removed his air pods. Like all my graders, he’d been my student for three classes before asking if I could take him in third block, but the rest of my TAs were chatty folks. Gerardo grades with fantastic efficiency, but the rest of the time he’d really rather be somewhere else working on his English essay.

“What the hell…heck is that?”

“Well, this is an image from a famous dance. I took some images from it and started comparing movement lines for fun.”

Gerardo shot me a look. “Fun? You’re so weird.”

“Yeah. But it beats grading. So take a look. What do you notice?”

“You mean, what are the red lines telling me?” Gerardo did look, and think. But shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”

“Who’s taller?”

“What, that’s a trick question? The guy is.”

“Yep. The guy is Bob Fosse, one of the most famous choreographers in history, and Google says he’s 5’8″.  The woman is Gwen Verdon, his wife, and she’s 5’4″.”

“So what does….wait a minute. Gerry looked again. ” You’ve got the other lines at their butts and knees.”

“Yep.”

“And they’re, like, the same.”

“Exactly. So what does that mean?”

“She has to have really long legs. Yeah, I see it now. Look how far below her shoulders are. Her body’s a lot shorter.”

“Good! Try this one.”

Gerardo was interested, now. “Okay, I get this. Her hips are way, way out. His aren’t. But what’s the line for…oh, I see. You have the lines right on their hips, and there’s all this space between her body and the line. But the line goes right through his body. So that means…he can’t push his hip out as far.”

“Nice. Now here’s two at once. What do they have in common?”

Gerardo was hooked, now, leaning into my desk closely. Ideally, my trig students were getting some work done, but we were pretty intent on this.

“Okay, so the top red line on this one is about their height…it’s the same. How is that happening?”

“Good catch.”

“Their knees are lined up, their heads are lined up…wait. Their…what, hips? His is lower!”

“Look at his feet.”

“Oh, wow. He’s got way more give in his feet. So he’s using his feet to push up while his knees are bending down. Oh, you have it circled in the next one. So he’s able to bend down to her height on his toes using only his knees.”

“It’s unusual, because she’s clearly more flexible than he is in the hips, but he’s got very bendy feet. Try this one.”

“Okay, those vertical lines are showing the distance.”

“Yeah. Later on I do slopes to show the difference.”

“What, you’ve got more?”

“You could always grade.”

“No, no. But on this one, I can’t figure out what it means. Her leg is straight up and down. His is all bent forward…oh, I see. He has to bend forward, to do that thing with the shoulder. But she can keep her whole body straight.”

“Neat. Next up.”

“Oh my god. How does she do that with her leg? And she’s almost straight up. She is straight up. He’s kind of tilted just to try and get his leg up nearly as much. Not that I could lift my leg more than an inch.”

Despite his complaints, Gerardo had moved far in to check out the pictures.

“He’s way higher.”

“Yep. Fosse was a jumper.”

“But the other lines show his leg is below his waist. Hers is above…hey, she’s lower than he is in the air, but her leg is higher–not just relatively, but like higher than his. ”

“How about this one?”

“These are getting easy. She’s standing straight up, while he’s having to bend to get the same results. And this one, she’s got the flexible hip thing going, while his is straight.”

“Here I was trying to show that she is turning faster. But I honestly don’t know if that’s a problem, if they’re supposed to time it perfectly, or what. I was just trying to show the turn.”

“Yeah, you can see he’s barely started when she’s halfway around.”

“So he’s having to bend to get the same positions that she can do standing straight up. What part of the body allows that?”

“Hips, definitely. Knees? Good question. Here’s a sequence of three that probably look strange, but it’s like a fake exaggerated run.”

“Jeez, her leg is at 90 degrees, and her body is tilted over. What is she holding herself up with–just her foot?”

“And some pretty impressive legs and abs, I’m thinking.”

“He’s solid on that one, too. But in the next ones, her body is practically an L.  He’s balancing. Like throwing his weight forward to get his leg up. In the last one, he has his leg up as high as hers but tilts over a bit to do it.”

“Well, keep in mind that on relative terms, she outranks him. Gwen Verdon was probably the best dancer ever seen on Broadway, and the rest of the best were trained by her. In her prime, no one was better at that time. Fosse was a groundbreaking choreographer and an excellent dancer, but not in the same league as a performer or star. I know nothing about dancing, so I can’t tell you how the two of them are rated by others, nor do I have any clear idea of who was “better”.

“So this was a long time ago?”

“Yes, Damn Yankees is sixty years old. Try this group of pictures of a sequence of two jumps.”

“He’d have been a damn good basketball player.”

“I know, his vertical jump stats had to be amazing. ”

“You know what else? And you didn’t red line it, so maybe I’m getting good at this. He’s the one who’s straight up. She’s the one bending to balance and get more flight.”

“Whoa. I didn’t catch that. You’re right.”

“Unless maybe the middle picture is just her on the way down?”

“No, I caught the first two on the way up and the last one, after they’d switched sides, at as close to peak as I could. That’s another sign that he’s much more comfortable at jumping than swinging his hips.”

“Well. As it is for most guys.”

“Ha. True.”

“This is obvious. She’s got a straight leg, up and down, and then just a tilt of her body. He’s tilting his body one way to get the hip out, then the other way for the…whatever you call it, the show. Hey, you know, this really is a good use of slopes.”

“Thanks.”

“What the fuck…oh, sorry. What is happening with her leg!”

“I love this one, because it’s related to the reason I became fascinated with this dance.”

“But man, look at it! He’s at his highest point and she’s got a whole additional gear yet!”

“And the funny thing is it makes Fosse look almost clumsy, which he wasn’t. Not many male dancers could do anywhere near as well.”

“How come you got so interested in this dance you’re breaking it down image by image?”

“My interest was first.  I made the images for math class, but much later.   I was watching a documentary once years ago where Gwen was talking about this dance and how Bob Fosse was always yelling at her to jump! because she can’t fly like he does.  I’ve been watching musicals my entire life, but I never really considered comparing dancers. When I was a kid, I always wondered why Cyd Charisse was brought in to dance with Gene Kelly…”

“Who?”

“Remember that movie we watched with Princess Leia’s mom at Christmas?”

“Oh, and then  she died! Yeah, the musical about silent movies. That was good.”

“So you remember how in the big dance number at the end, it wasn’t Princess Leia’s mom?”

“The brunette lady with the legs.”

“Exactly. I used to wonder why they brought her in. But when I grew up, I realized it was because Debbie was a  movie hoofer, while Cyd Charisse rivals Verdon as the best there is. So when I found the dance on Youtube, I analyzed the whole dance and noticed differences that went both ways.”

“You do that with a lot of dances?”

“No. Most famous dances with men and women aren’t doing identical steps–and most of the ones that do exist are tap dances.”

“So you made these pictures?”

“I was having trouble sleeping one night and  watched Cabaret, which he directed. That got me thinking about this dance, and wondering if I could capture their differences in a way a student could analyze.”

“For class?”

“Yeah, maybe. It was just a whim.”

“How does she hold that balance? Even for a second? I mean, he looks good, but normal.”

“Here’s another spin. This time, it goes from a spin into her going on the floor into a goofy tug and him pulling her by the leg. I should say that some of their spins were perfectly synchronized. I was more curious as to what it meant.”

“Ha, I like that little arrow you put! He just jumps like it’s nothing.”

“Wanna see the actual dance?”

“Wait. That’s all the pictures? You mean, there aren’t like, five hundred?”

But Gerardo watched the clip closely, despite the clear implication that I’m a tad, oh, obsessive.

“OK, I get it now. If I’d watched this first, I’d say they were completely identical. But looking through those pictures lets me see the differences.”

“Thanks. Now. You’ve been a really good sport, but can you do me one more favor?”

Gerardo looked warily skeptical. “What?”

“These pictures are from a recreation of that dance from a new show coming out on their lives. I don’t have any red lines drawn, but do you notice anything?”

He snorted. “Yeah, right, like I’m going to see any  differences…wait a minute. Their hips and knees aren’t even. She doesn’t have the long legs.”

“And?”

Gerardo sighed, but complied. Suddenly he leaned forward, and smiled. “Got it. He’s the one dipping his hips! She’s holding them straight.”

I startled him, and the class, by thumping my desk. “I am justified.”

“What?”

“That’s the whole reason I asked you to look through those pictures. Because when the new trailer came out, all I could think was hey, they’ve got it backwards! and I wanted to have someone else know. Thank you, Gerardo. I’ll give you an A.”

“All TAs get an A. Is the guy a better dancer than the lady, or just more flexible?”

“Well, they’re both actors, not dancers. But Sam Rockwell, who’s playing Fosse, has danced in almost all of his movies and you can see he’s really loose-limbed, with hip action. Michelle Williams famously recreated one of Marilyn Monroe’s dances and got nominated for it, but it may or may not be significant that they cut away during a lot of the dips and weaves. Or maybe these few seconds aren’t representative, of course.”

(Note: I didn’t bore Gerardo with this picture, but hey, this is my blog so I’ll bore you. Here’s one example:

Williams, on the right, has to turn her entire body back to kick backwards. Monroe, who had been well-trained to use her body in dancing, can turn her head and neck, kick her leg back–farther, no less– while keeping her body straight.)

I’d like to tell you that Gerardo then asked me dozens of questions about movie lore, but instead he went back to modern music on his air pods. But I felt better for the validation, and got some grading done. While I told the story uninterrupted,I did take some time for student trig questions, pesky though they were.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, “Who’s Got the Pain” is a throwaway number from “Damn Yankees”. For years, it was considered a time-waster and often cut out of TV broadcasts. But dancers and choreographers treat the scene like the Talmud, studying it endlessly. And over time, “Who’s Got the Pain” became known as the only time Fosse and Verdon danced together in a production movie number. Definitely watch the dance all the way through if you’ve made it this far into the read.

 

The Students of My Christmas Present

“What..?”

On time for once, he trudged into the class pulling a small pine tree behind him, a stand in his other hand. His chin was set. His curly hair braided in two plaits instead of flying all around his head added to his air of determination.

“It’s a tree.”

“I see that.”

“I wanna make it a Christmas tree. I want a Christmas tree with lights and decorations. I want to know what it looks like, and see it looking pretty every day.”

“So you’re taking it home?” He rolled his eyes in my direction, and I grinned apologetically. “Just checking. I guess it’s haram?”

“Extremely haram.” Faisal has most of the brains, four times the looks, but far less of the focus and drive of his older brother Abdul, now in his sophomore year of a top 50 university.  Not unknown to the administrators for all the wrong reasons, Faisal nonetheless has held onto a 3.5 GPA and, barring a last semester senior catastrophe, a decent chance at a good college.

And so I acquired a tree.  I showed Faisal how to put the tree in the stand, and we steal some water from a classmate.

“The vendor across the street gave it to me for free! He’s Yemeni, maybe that’s why.”

“No, I’d guess his generosity is due to the trunk bending sharply forward before it goes up.”

“Do you have the..the lights? The things you hang on them?”

“Ornaments.” I looked sideways.  “You are expecting me to decorate?”

Faisal has a charming grin.

The tree was an instant hit with all my students, even sitting in the corner unadorned, as it did for a week. Someone noticed that the tilt kept pulling it over, so we snuck outside and grabbed some painted tiles from the garden to weight the stand down.  Students volunteered from their water bottles to keep the tree hydrated. I took three days and a weekend to bring in lights (one day to find them in my garage, one to pull the box down, one to sit by the door to be forgotten, weekend to put them in my car so I couldn’t forget them), another two days to bring in the ornaments.  Then one day four top students finished a quiz early and I assigned them “light” duty.  I have a huge collection of gorgeous ornaments, some hand-blown glass, others hand  made, some just utterly beautiful, that they all oohed and ahed over. Faisal got to select his favorites.

The vocational cooking teacher teased me for taking nearly a week to complete the tree, but she readily agreed my end product was far superior to the one her student put up in 30 minutes–and I still had it done two weeks before break. Each morning, I turned the lights on to twinkle cheerily throughout the day. Very festive. I have these old plastic window coverings, one with Santa peeking around the corner, one with bells, and on impulse taped them over my door windows, where they hung, unmolested and unbroken, for the better part of two weeks, the kids carefully closing the door without tearing them.

Four of my nine ELD students are either Muslim or Hindu, and they haven’t been here that long. I carefully explained “secular” as opposed to “religious”, reassuring them that the tree was in celebration of the former.  The other half of the class is Catholic, either Guatemalan or Filipino, so were surprised to learn that not everyone celebrated Christmas as a religious event. My math students needed no clarification. Our school is wildly diverse, but that’s never stopped us from openly celebrating Christmas. The kids sell mistletoe messages and Christmas wreaths through December.

I regret not capturing a picture of the tree at school, completely decorated. I’ve learned that it made any number of appearances on Snapchat and Instagram, as my students bragged about their Chrismassy room.

My family of origin has always centered celebration on Christmas Eve. For 45 years, December 24th means cheese, beef, and occasionally chocolate fondue.  When we were kids, we’d then go to bed and have Christmas in the morning. But once we hit our teens and late 20s, we’d just open presents Christmas Eve so we could sleep in. As we grew up and moved out, we turned Christmas Day into family unit, keeping Christmas Eve for fondue with everyone.

My ex and I did Christmas big. We both loved the holiday, both bought each other lots of gifts, bought other family members multiple presents, shopped together and separately.  I love presents. But it wasn’t just the presents. We had a party once, I remember, and always made plans to see friends or do something fun.

We divorced when our son was not quite three. Because of our fondue tradition, my son always had Christmas Eve and morning with me, then went to my ex’s for two or three days. So on Christmas Day, I was alone.

I wasn’t miserable. I still loved the Christmas holiday, even if the 25th was always a bit of a letdown.My son and I would always decorate, get a tree.  We’d drive around looking at lights, go to see It’s A Wonderful Life or Wizard of Oz at the revival theater. But after the divorce, I always felt as if I were watching others experience Christmas, rather than experience it myself. A good chunk of my loss was simply the presents. I’m not materialistic the rest of the year, but by god I like people buying me presents at Christmas. However, the larger sense of loss was due to the realization that while my family of origin is big, my own family unit was just two–and when my son was gone, I didn’t really have a family unit at all. Just me.

The post-divorce change in Christmas was as nothing compared to its utter disappearance after my son finished high school.   Before Faisal dragged that little scrubby pine into my room, I hadn’t put up a tree since 2005. My son would still come to fondue, we’d still have Christmas morning, but without him around during the lead-in, what was the point?

That amputated Christmas threatened to disappear entirely once he moved three states away with his girlfriend and eventual wife. I once had fond notions of visiting for Christmas and opening presents with my grandkids, but my ex and I have spent no small amount of time commiserating with each other about the truth of the maxim “A son is a son till he takes a wife, a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life”. I am truthfully not bitter about this, although I would certainly have it otherwise. My son has a woman he adores, an excellent job he enjoys, two beautiful, loving children , a mortgage, and a marriage certificate (acquired in that order).  I have done my job well. Peace.

My son’s absence forced me to stare down a (hopefully very long) telescope looking towards old age wondering was this it? I’m going to be someone who doesn’t do Christmas? Will I just start peeling away holidays as I have fewer people to celebrate with? I’m still blessed with both parents and family of origin nearby, but the disintegration of my Christmas Day–now getting perilously near why-bother status–made me realize that I had to change my mindset and perhaps my practice as I move towards a time when family will be fewer and farther away.

So for the past few years, I’ve made a point to experience Christmas as a family unit of one. A married couple I’m close to often invites me over for dinner, where I have a wonderful time even though, god help me, she’s a terrible cook. I can dress up a bit, talk to people, drink wine, and mark the year’s passing. Sometimes I’ll go see the holiday film at the revival theater. I often go to a Starbucks, write, talk to people at the store or on the street, seek out a neighbor to chat.

I resumed putting up outdoor lights three years ago, slowly finding uses for the big pile of lights I’d acquired earlier, and then actually buying more. I love Christmas lights so much. And they’re outdoors, so it felt more like contributing to  neighborhood spirit, rather than decorating an empty nest. For three years now, coming home and seeing the house all lit up has been most cheering.

While I expected my new “experience” of Christmas to be limited to outside lights and activities,  Faisal and my students have reminded me of all the happy ornaments locked away in my garage, sitting there unused and unenjoyed. I have treasured the shared cheer of my classroom tree. If I ended my Christmas tree practice because there was no one to share it with, well, then, why not continue to have a tree at school for the season? So I will. When I told my students, they applauded.

I wonder if Julia Ioffe can possibly conceive of a Muslim Palestinian American  begging for a free tree, lugging it into his most familiar teacher’s room, simply because he wants to be a part of one of the best holidays ever created. Would she demand that he, too, see Christmas entirely in terms of Christ? Could she not see it as assimilation of the best sort, appreciation for what American culture has to offer?

I received an additional gift of recognition, one that involves the second best Christmas Carol. The finest is, of course, the Alistair Sim version, which you should run out and see right away, before Christmas season officially ends. But Patrick Stewart’s version holds its own very well.

One scene in particular has always resonated with me, and only recently have I understood why.  I’ll try to show it with pictures, but the difference is easier to see in action. Here’s Ebenezer before his transformation, sitting in front of his fire:

His body language is all crunched up, his face is tense (granted, Marley’s said hello). Here he is after the three ghosts have visited:

‘

He’s alone both times. But in the second, he’s not eating dinner, shoveling it down as a utilitarian act, scrunched and sullen. He’s just sitting, enjoying the fire, with a nice drink. He’s experiencing Christmas, alone and happy.

I wasn’t Scrooge before, or now. I’m just an introvert who is perfectly content to be alone most of the time, but didn’t know how to celebrate Christmas if I wasn’t part of a  big family unit. I faked it–and faked it well–for a long time, but I’m learning how to keep the day in the spirit I’d like.

Faisal’s determined desire for a Christmas tree, and my students’ happy participation in creating one,  had one more surprise in store for me. When school ended for the year, I carefully took off all the ornaments, wrapped them up and put them back in the box. Next was the lights..but I stopped. I’d planned to put the tree in the dumpster but instead wrapped up the cords and carried the whole tree, lights and all, to the front seat of my car. I only felt a little bit silly.

I’m looking at it now, shining brightly in the front window. Maybe next year I’ll have two trees–one for school, one for home.

This year my friends had to delay their Christmas dinner until Thursday. So my brother and I ate standing rib roast, which cooked to rare perfection, and I made lemon meringue pie for dessert.  I’ll be rewarding myself with a hot toddy (Makers Mark) when I finish this.

I always give thanks for my students, past and present, and am grateful I’ve got many more students to enjoy in years to come. But this year, to students present, I thank you all for showing me how to bring back one more piece of my favorite holiday.

Merry Christmas.