there's naked, and there's naked

Until today, I was subscribed to a bootleg music blog. That's a blog where music is discussed and free downloads are provided -- in this case, bootlegged live shows. I subscribe to a lot of these blogs, because mostly they provide out-of-print albums, mainly on vinyl, for download. As someone who bought tons of vinyl in the past, I'm pretty much just replacing what I lost. I PAID for it already -- sometimes more than once, between vinyl, cassette, and CD. Now I'm getting mp3s.

Anyway, this bootleg blog had some very interesting stuff, but the blog owner all of a sudden started putting up pictures of mostly-naked women in-between the music items, rather coyly calling them "deejays." It might not have been so obnoxious if it was just for a few days, or once a week, but a lot of them are turning up daily. On top of that, they're those horrible photoshopped and made up and fake-boobed kind of women. Anyway, I objected and so did other people, and I had an e-mail exchange with this guy, whose basic position was "naked women go with bootlegs, this site is mostly for guys, and I can put what I want on my site." I don't think I would have been so bothered if it wasn't those fake-looking women whom someone has convinced men are attractive and sexy. Fake tits and fake dyed hair are so obvious, not to mention globs of makeup. I mean, eww.

A former friend of mine, a man I was close to, once showed me a couple of magazines from his porn stash. They were magazines from the 70s, which were the years where my friend was very sexually active, and the women in the magazines had long fuzzy hair, natural breasts, very little makeup, and big hairy bushes (it's possible they also sported armpit and leg hair). I liked the fact that his taste was stuck in the 70s, and that he was attracted to relatively normal-looking women. That's a rare find, especially in New York, where every man, no matter how fat/bald/ugly, believes he "deserves" to be with a model-type.

There's a new TV show called "Hot in Cleveland" where three LA women, who are over-the-hill and just average in LA, end up spending a night in Cleveland -- airplane trouble -- and find that they are considered big-time babes. The show is a little sitcom-y, but I love the premise and also the fact that their housekeeper is Betty White, who tends to steal the show.

I've had a similar experience with midwesterners and even in upstate New York and among the hippie-folkies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I am a serious babe once I'm out of an urban area. They don't care about weight or makeup or big fake tits.

I once "met" a guy online and we got very friendly. He was an engineering professor from Kansas, a single father. We talked on the phone a few times, and he was a nice, regular guy, very square and very decent. He sent me a loaf of bread and a nice bunch of biscotti he had baked, as well as a picture of himself. He was pretty handsome, despite the mullet. But he wanted to see a picture of me. (I guess this was before the days of scanners and such...in fact, I did not yet have a home computer so the e-mailing all went on at work.) I was, of course, terrified to send a picture of myself, because he was cute and seemed decently in shape, and I was fat. So I sent the best picture I could find, and his response was, "a face like a china doll!" He thought I was beautiful. (He did come to New York for a conference, and brought his sons, and I spent a lot of time with all of them (as well as some private time with him). I was actually supposed to go out and visit him next, but he decided to put the brakes on, and I got all hurt and pissed off and disappointed, and that was that.)

I was lucky to find a decent man here in the city, but I had to do it with a personal ad. I'd been striking out in person for several years, because of the rampant looks-ism in New York City. At least with an ad, I had some time to talk to men on the phone before meeting face to face, so their first impression of me was not my appearance. I ran an ad that was very specific about who I was and what I wanted. I got twelve responses, talked to six guys on the phone, and met three face to face. Barry was the second one I met, and it was clear before we met that he was the frontrunner. We already liked each other a lot before we met, and it was a bonus that he was good-looking, not a requirement. (I was about 20 pounds lighter than I am now, which is not thin, but I was feeling pretty good about myself, having recently lost 30 pounds.)

I used to have a print of Titian's "Venus and the Lute Player" which I hung in my college dorm. I liked the plump, small-breasted Venus a lot. I would say to myself, "She's built just like me, and she's Venus!" I actually wasn't quite so plump then, at 17, but I thought I was. And Lord, was I flat-chested. Still am. I don't know any other woman who can be fifty or so pounds overweight and still wear an A-cup (though I rarely bother with a bra at all).

I interviewed for a job today, doing sales for the Jewish Yellow Pages. It's mostly a commission job, though if you don't make $1,800 in commissions a month, they make up the difference. Their product is a good product, and their price points and commission rates could spell good money. But the job is 9-7, five days (eek!), although it *is* walking distance from my home. They seem to want me, and I was asked to call back on Tuesday. But when I got home, I had an e-mail from the Office of Faculty Resources at NYU, and they want to interview me! So I'm seeing them on Wednesday.

I left NYU in 1998, and have applied there every time I was between jobs since around 2000. This time, I made a more serious effort and applied for about 6 or 7 jobs over a couple of days. This is the first time since I left that I was called for an interview. Faculty Resources (a new department since I left) is a good match for me, since I did a lot of faculty benefits work at the Law School. I would LOVE to go back to NYU since it's a good location, decent pay, and amazing benefits (which I didn't fully appreciate until I left there). I was the lowest management grade when I left there, but there are really no appropriate jobs for me at that level at this time. But the top three clerical levels have minimum salaries around $43K, $44K, and $46K! (Funny how for-profit Penguin pays so much less than non-profit NYU...) And there's really cheap medical, a lot of paid holidays, a very healthy vacation policy, a casual workplace, and tuition remission (which is how I finished my B.A.). NYU is a really good employer. Unless the supervisor is a total bitch, I think I want that job. Wish me luck.

ecch

I was napping this afternoon, and had a dream about someone really horrible, though in the dream he was quite nice. In the dream, I was cheating on Barry with M., who was very hot and also very sweet.

In real life, M. date-raped me in the early 80s. He was someone I met in college. We had quite a few mutual friends, and I always admired him and wanted to be friends with him, but he was never nice to me. In fact, he was unpleasant to me from the first day we met, which was my first week at college, at an activities fair. He was manning the table from the college radio station, something I really wanted to do. He said that you had to take an exam to be on the air, and the closest place to take the exam was in Syracuse. Having no car, I asked if the station might arrange for a group of people who needed to take the test to go together. He said, "Well, I'm not doing that!" It seemed to me that he was trying to discourage or block new people from coming on; he was certainly not inviting. A few weeks later, I was in the student center, where they piped in music from the station, and someone was playing a song by one of my favorite bands, one so obscure I never imagined I'd hear them on any radio station, even a college one. I decided I had to go to the station (which was in the same building) and shake the hand of whoever had such good taste. It turned out to be a guy named Ron, who was about the sweetest guy in the world and who eventually became my first lover at college ("boyfriend" doesn't exactly describe it, though we were always close). He made the station seem much more available. The first step was to "apprentice" to one of the current DJs, which meant sitting in when he/her did their show, and presumably the DJ would teach the newbie how to run the board and such. Rather stupidly, I chose to apprentice with M., because I loved his taste in music and his show (despite having played my favorite obscure band, Ron's taste was basically the Grateful Dead and space jazz, neither of which were my thing at the time, though I eventually did get to like the Dead). M. was nasty the couple of times I sat in with him, and I did end up apprenticing with Ron.

Once I had a circle of friends from the station, many of whom were friends with M., I reached out to him and he was still unpleasant to me.

Fast forward to 1981 or 82, in Brooklyn. My then-boyfriend and I went to see a band at a club in Brooklyn, and there was M., DJing between band sets. I still admired him for some reason, and still wanted to be friends, so we exchanged phone numbers. He called me once, and soon turned the conversation to sex talk -- I believe he started by asking me if I liked to wear lingerie. I didn't care for this and was faithful to my boyfriend, but somehow we got in touch again during my next single period, and he invited me to visit.

He tried to feed me a lot of liquor (I drank some), and then he went after me. It was forced, in a way that terrified me. He did poppers, too. Afterward, he walked me to a train (I'm not quite sure how or why that happened), and we ran into a very beautiful woman who he told me he dated, emphasizing how beautiful she was and I wasn't.

Fortunately, that was my last encounter with M., almost 30 years ago. Why exactly he popped up in my dream, and why now, is a total mystery. I'm also wondering why he seemed so nice and so sweet in the dream, when the reality was that he was never nice and frequently awful to me over the seven or so years from our first encounter to the last.

I'm thinking now that it might have something to do with V., someone I considered very nice and sweet for a lot of years, but who proved to be selfish and narcissistic, and had a taste for mock-rough sex, though never anything remotely close to what M. did. V. was more of a role-player than a psycho/sociopath. M. was a really sick guy, and maybe still is.

Ron, I invited to my wedding. He's still the "grand old man" at the radio station, or was ten years ago, even though he must be pushing 60. He was older even back then -- he worked for the university, and took a course around once every couple of years, just to keep student status. And he was a maniac about music, had thousands and thousands of records of all types, and made hundreds of numbered mix tapes that he sent to his friends (I received them for years after I moved away). I only every saw him less than sunny once, and it was actually when someone walked in on us when we were in bed together. Well, it wasn't quite "bed" -- he was between apartments for a short time, and slept in the engineering studio at the station. So we were more like "in sleeping bag." And walk-ins were always a possibility. But he did get cranky with the woman who walked in. That was the sole time I saw him in anything like a bad temper. Ron took me to a lot of concerts, loved to smoke dope and eat, and gave great head. Too bad I didn't dream about him.

sorry for the wait

It's been a while since I posted, which I guess is not the best way to develop a readership. Still, everything seems so difficult lately. I was depressed all summer, and went right into those sad short days of winter.

I've been having trouble for several days with my bad tooth, one which has had a low-grade abcess under it for many years, and which was root-canaled about eight years ago. The abcess generally drains itself, and only once about fifteen years ago did I have a problem with it, where it stopped draining and swelled and hurt. Got some antibiotics and a mouth rinse and was fine until now. And any time I've had to take antibiotics for something else, it's helped the abcess. Well, I gotta go see an oral surgeon next month to see if he can dissect the gum and clean the thing out, or if it has to be pulled. (Not the worst thing in the world if it has to be pulled: there's a missing molar on the bottom left and I can get a bridge made.)

We are very lucky to have found a cheap dentist nearly. Our downstairs neighbor recommended him. Dr. Kadaa charges only $650 for a root canal, which is about what you pay at NYU Dental Clinic minus all of the waiting and being treated by a student. Dr. Kadaa rocks.

And though I've been using ibuprofin for the pain, which was been considerable, he offered to write me script for Tylenol and codeine; Barry said yes for me. I didn't want to seem to eager, but the truth is that I love that stuff when I need it.

I heard from an old friend on Facebook, who told me the usual about himself: hometown, profession, number of wives and kids, and added, "And you?" Me? I am one of the greatest underachievers on the face of this earth. I have parlayed a 168 IQ and an expensive education into nothing. I can't drive a car; I don't own property. I had a great two-and-a-half year career in public radio and TV (in an upstate city, not here), and a great two-year career in publishing. Other than that, I had a lot of shit jobs, the cheap ones that paid my way through NYU and the pricier ones in private industry where I learned both about insane bosses and about the ways in which my mental illness makes me a terrible employee.

I'm thinking more and more, lately, about actually writing a novel or memoir, and was encouraged to do so by a former history teacher. My best professors at NYU would probably say the same thing.

I wish -- gotta say it -- that a certain person I worked with in my publishing job, who held a high position in the Transcendental Meditation world, had made good on his offer of free TM training for my husband and me, or even just me. (He wasn't someone from my company, but someone who worked with one of my authors.) I have a feeling it would have done me a lot of good in the past months. I hate how much medication I have to take for things like cholesterol and high blood pressure and diabetes; I hate how much I have to take for my mental health, and it doesn't exactly work right. I'm OK with the medication model for mental health at this point, though I was raised a Freudian and think a lot of Jungian thoughts. But they don't even know exactly how and why the meds work so they're just throwing stuff at us and seeing what sticks. I'd like to see how much of this stuff I'd really need if I meditated twice a day.

Did I mention it was 4 degrees out today when I went to see the cheap dentist? 4 degrees and windy. My husband announced that we were taking a car service. He has been so wonderful to me that I truly can't complain about a thing...except that I'm not sure if I can get any better until he's back to work. I may be too tired to explain this now.

the new rock stars

We were watching an old "American Experience" on disc today, about John Dillinger, and like all historical documentaries -- all of the ones on "American Experience," for sure -- since "The Civil War," it's done Ken Burns-style, which means a lot of period photographs, mournful fiddle music by Jay Unger and/or Matt Glaser, and talking-head experts. About half of the talking heads are generally historians (the others being descendants, friends, experts in certain fields, etc.). Anyway, we're watching the Dillinger one today, and one of the talking heads was an old friend, Claire Potter, who was a grad student when I worked at the History Department at NYU. She's a professor at Wesleyan now, which is where I should have gone (but that's another story). So I dropped her an e-mail, saying, "Isn't it cool that historians are becoming rock stars?" This started me thinking about historian trading cards, and that the first one I would want would be Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Now that reminds me of an interesting bit from my two-year career in publishing. Through one of my authors, I found myself in a room when one of the folks was Justin Theroux, who had just directed his first movie and was talking about how glad he was to get Tom Wilkinson for it. (Good taste. I love Tom Wilkinson.) He was then talking about how he had been on a trading card, when he was one the TV show "Alias." He seemed to find it kind of funny. I told him that I once bought an action figure, from a "Jurassic Park" set, because it was a Jeff Goldblum action hero. He found that funny, too.

My husband's nephew, when he was a young teen, was reeeally into wrestling; he was also being raised in an orthodox home, albeit modern orthodox. (My husband and his brother were not raised orthodox, but his brother married an orthodox woman.) So one birthday, we bought him an action figure of Goldberg, a wrestler whose actual name is Steve Goldberg. Maybe I just think all Jewish action figures are funny.

I did hear, though, that some Hassidic Jews, the ultra-orthodox in the long coats and sidecurls (pais, for those of you who need your daily Yiddish lesson), do have rabbi trading cards. For real.

Back to history -- I worked at the NYU History Department as a secretary, when such things still existed, from around 1983-1985. My friend Evan had told me that if you worked there full-time, you could get nine free credits of tuition each term, which was what he was doing. Evan worked in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, so we were in the same building.

OK, for anyone who is kinda young -- it used to be that people like college professors had someone to type their paperwork for them. If a professor was giving an exam, or wrote out a syllabus, a "secretary" would type it for him or her, and make photocopies. Oh, and the typing would be done on an electric typewriter, generally an IBM Selectric, where you would have to switch out a little golf-ball-sized thingie for a different one to change the font.

A couple of forward-thinking and high-ranking (read: well-paid) professors bought themselves some of them newfangled home computers. The guy who seemed to know best bought himself a Kaypro, so the other few faculty members did, too. I didn't think too much of it, except that now we didn't have to type for those few professors. But then, magically, someone anonymously gave the department a big fistful of money to buy our own copier (at the time, we were sharing with two other floors' worth of departments) and a computer and printer!

You have to understand: unlike the Law School (where I served the greater portion of my NYU time), the History Department didn't exactly have a lot of wealthy alumni. A successful historian is a college professor like Claire, or some kind of researcher or archivist or teacher. A successful NYU lawyer is a Supreme Court Justice or a partner in a huge New York law firm or an elected official. So we had relatively shabby digs, which was perfect for me, because the students were relatively shabby, and I was relatively shabby, and we all got along pretty well. My trademark garment at the time was an oversized camouflage jumpsuit overdyed purple, and I got teased at my going-away party that I wouldn't be able to wear my jumpsuit at the School of Law, implying that it was a snootier, more formal place. (I mean, they actually had their own building!)

So this money to buy the copier and computer and printer was manna from heaven. The copier I remember was a desktop job and we still needed to use the communal machine for big runs. But what I remember, of course, was the computer, *my* first computer, the first one I ever got my hands on. This was one of the best things about working academic for so many years: besides the awesome benefits, I always got my hands on new technology fairly early in the game. Not techie-level early and I never learned to program or write html, but I did get on a personal computer when the operating system was CP/M and the actual computer was sort of like one of those kids' record players that folds up like a little suitcase. It had a tiny little monochrome screen, green on black, and you had to put in one enormous floppy disc to load the program you wanted to run and another enormous floppy disc to access or save your file.

Rather than opting for a dot matrix printer, we got whatever you called the other kind -- like a giant typewriter as loud as a jackhammer, even with the sound shield on. But it looked like real typing.

The thing that I was also thinking today -- the place where I was heading before the many sidetracks -- was that when I worked there, with all of those fantastic faculty and students, I had no interest in history at all. I had some really good history teachers in grade and high school, but the love of history never stuck. But the last ten years or so, I'm *very* interested in it. I have a few books "on deck" that are simply histories of the impact of one commodity: bananas, clay, wood, cotton. There are all kinds of cool subtopics and eras that are fascinating. For instance, I had no idea that Claire was into this stuff -- I actually didn't know her specialty or dissertation topic.

Were any of you lucky and smart enough to major in history? what was your field?

My B.A. (deep breath) is in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Gallatin School at NYU. It was the Gallatin Division when I graduated, and though the program may have changed since I was there, it went like this: you could take courses from any part of the university, as long as your adviser signed off on it. In this way, you could design a program that interested you. But you were also required to do a lot of classics, from a list that included various Shakespeare plays, the Bible, Greek philosophy, Homer...the usual suspects. At the end of all of this, you make up a bibliography which is half from the required classics and half from your other courses, and get yourself ready to talk about this all with your adviser and two other professors for two hours. This is called the "oral exam." I actually passed my orals "with distinction," but there was no way no to be nervous beforehand. I had to be responsible for knowing, I think it was 28 books. And since I did my studies in two stretches -- 1984-86 and 1987-93, more or less -- I hadn't actually read some of those books in a while.

In the earlier stint, I took writing courses, and a couple of interesting lit courses in Gallatin. I particularly remember one that my adviser taught, about autobiographical literature. We read things like Thomas Merton and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. When I went back to school, I took a course in the Religion Department on mythology, and became a raving Jungian, and took a lot of my "great books" courses, in which I wrote mostly Jungian literary analyses. I was a little obsessed.

I did have a great education at NYU, but I wish now I'd given my experience more breadth. Actually, now that I remember it, I had registered for a European history class, and gone a couple of times -- it was good, and hard -- but then Gallatin called me and said they'd miscounted my credits, that I had enough to graduate. So I did drop the class, because the work/school combo for the last two years was really rough. I took a lot of graduate-level courses and wrote long papers. Plus I was still making a lot of AA meetings at that time. Those last two years of college? NO SEX. at least not with other people.

This, and this alone, I think, accounts for the Really Bad Relationship I got into not long after graduating. That hung me up for most of a year.