Next Up: Terrycloth Headband and Perm

Herr Guitar and I were in American Apparel the other day, looking for a sweatshirt. He wasn't buying the unisex concept: "You can't have men's clothes this near a rack of unitards." I pointed out a cool-looking velour sweatshirt I thought would look good on him. "Right," he said. "Who am I'm supposed to be, John McEnroe now?"

Et tu, Slate?

A new study on the long-term effects of child care was released this week and, of course, the media was all over it. Apparently, kids who attend daycare tend to be more disruptive in the fifth and sixth grades. Finally, the Today Show has some proof that daycare is damaging to kids. Lauer could barely hide his glee beneath the solemnity of his "But what about single and lower-income parents who hear this news but may not have an option?" question to the idiot child psychologist next to him who stressed the importance of finding a quality daycare center. I’m sure the Today Show producers were high-fiving each other for this nugget of advice. "Find quality daycare. Who would have thought? It’s so brilliant it just might work." Never mind that most single and lower-income parents are lucky if they can find affordable daycare, regardless of quality.

When I first heard about this study, I laughed it off. First, the study didn't just look at daycare centers, but all types of "early childcare" - including nannies and relatives. Second, I can think of plenty of parents (including one of my own) whose daily presence would do a lot more to damage a child than being in daycare. Sure, there may be some crazies in the daycare system, but kids there have the benefit of spreading out their risk, as opposed to having to sit home with one wacko you can't get away from. I know, I know, you’re going to remind me that all stay-at-home mommies are saints. They are also brilliant and ethereally beautiful and clever enough to manage to make due with one income or, at the very least, to earn an excellent living from their blog (but their main income is not dollars and cents, but their babies’ hugs and kisses). That's a given. But I'm willing to bet there are a few you wouldn't want to hang out with all day, even if you did get to watch endless loops of Judging Amy... I mean, Blue's Clues. Surely there are one or two SAHMs who should not be. There must be at least a handful to be avoided, regardless of their child's potentially bad attitude in sixth grade.

That was my attitude yesterday. Today, I read this Slate article on the subject. It was meant to clear up the confusion, show how the media overreacted in its reporting, help working mommies breathe a sigh of relief.

It made me cry.

Then I took a walk downstairs, and saw a cracked bird's egg with bits of goo and feather sticking out. Thanks, life, for offering such a poetic image to illustrate my failure as a mommy. I half expected to turn around and see the stroller-on-the-stairs scene from Battleship Potemkin. But I only saw a well-dressed woman in her late 30s happily pushing a Bugaboo, at 11:30 on a Friday morning.

Then I cried some more.

By digging deeper into the study the writer, Emily Bazelon, made it more specific to my situation. The effect was more pronounced in kids who had spent more than two years in daycare. Those who had spent less time there did not demonstrate the same bad behavior (great, I’m not planning to make changes anytime soon, so my kid will be one of the unlucky ones). The upside is that these same kids often had better vocabulary skills (unlikely in my situation – I can barely understand what the women who care for my son are saying). Quality is a big factor, so if you have quality daycare, your odds for a normal sixth-grader improve dramatically (not sure what this means to me, as quality is subjective. Put it this way: I don’t send my son to the posh River School downtown, where tuition is double what I currently pay and the wait list is two years long). Lucky Emily, whose kids attended schools with a two-to-one kid/teacher ratio for less than two years, ends the article by describing the withering look a stranger in the supermarket gave her upon hearing that her son attends daycare. I hear you Emily – people are disapproving and cruel to working mothers. Even those who know enough to choose quality daycare.

Conde Last

I am starting to resent Gawker. Primarily because they keep writing about how everyone in journalism is now working at Portfolio (the new Conde Nast money magazine, coming out in April). I'm an ideal staff choice, having worked at Portfolio before, when it was called Worth. And yet, despite sending my resume twice, I'm nowhere close to working there. I even used a friend of a friend's name to personalize the introduction. No bite, no nibble. So if getting hired by Portfolio is so easy anyone can do it. What does not even piquing Portfolio's interest say about me?

Then again, Gawker has gone out on a few snark limbs of late. They criticized MCA for skateboarding at age 42. Then the next day, they made fun of the rash of trapper hats in the city. OK, so one of the Beastie Boys is uncool for continuing to do what he's always done, and the rest of us are uncool for wearing warm hats on one of the coldest days of the year. Exasperated sigh. Are there no real miserable assholes left in New York to make fun of?

Plus, I'm a little disappointed with what I have seen of Portfolio so far. I signed up for a free subscription and got a look at the demo cover. Two prepped-out 11-year-old boys sneering in that Paris Hiltonesque, "look what your dirty money has accomplished" way. We haven't seen enough of this? The last issue of Worth was all snotty offspring and the fiduciaries who love them. Which is why, if anyone knew anything, I'd be running Portfolio by now.

Fine, Portfolio, I don't want you either. I have a new job, and not in a dead medium like print. Sure, I'll probably work for you eventually. But by then you won't be on the rise but on the wane, and you'll give me a title promotion instead of a raise before you miss payroll altogether. I've seen your type before.

The New Old Me

I’m back. Somewhat changed but still the same sunny me.

I did not mean to be away this long, but things have been muy loca. Over the holidays I changed jobs while simultaneously attempting to finish two freelance gigs with the worst pain-in-the-ass-grunt-work to pay ratio in all of mediadom. Herr Guitar was this close to packing up the baby and leaving me for a wife who doesn’t sell her sanity for $1 a word, a wife who understands work/life balance and doesn’t scream at her g-mail and can fit into her pre-pregnancy jeans. But then I met my deadlines and auld acquaintance was forgot and lang-syned, and things calmed down again.

Then I started a new job. I gave up on my plan to be a work at home mom after reasoning that neither Swaddlini nor I could handle watching that much Judging Amy. He enjoys running around someplace other than the living room once in awhile and, honestly, so do I. So I compromised, and left my career- and mind-deadening West Side butter tub and leapt back into the “real world.”

Turns out, the real world got a lot younger while I was away. I guess I should have expected it – my new job involves the Internet, and you know how the kids love that crazy thing – but I feel like a dinosaur. A mommy dinosaur, who doesn’t own an iPod*, who has never sent nor received a text message, who has never owned a Dave Matthews album, and so on.

Oh well. The good thing about being older than everyone in the room is that I’m better. I sucked in my twenties, as much or more than every 20-something sucks, and I would not go back if you paid me. I saw an old acquaintance at a party a few weeks ago and he remarked that I looked and seemed better than ever. I haven’t really hung out with him in about 10 years, and he recalled that an evening spent with me usually ended in my being upset or crying. It's a dead-on description, sure, but it left me feeling so nostalgic for crazy me. Not that I want her back, I just want to know her friends again.

This is similar to the semi-paralyzing nostalgia that gripped me recently upon viewing an After-School Special called, "That's What Friends Are For." I bought these After-School Special DVDs a year or so ago and never found time to watch them. They are pretty stupid, for the most part, but this one episode hit all the right notes. The premise: mother and daughter move to Santa Monica, post-divorce, in 1979. They move into an apartment building, where the young girl befriends the building's weirdo, also a divorce kid. Trouble ensues (involving ritualistic doll destruction in the name of parent reconciliation - sort of like Chucky Meets the Parent Trap, only deadly boring), etc. It was awesome. The apartment building, the weird kid, the look of the film stock - it all worked on me like madelines worked on Proust. I still haven't recovered - I see everything in mellow, slightly grainy light, as if backlit by a sunset or powerful scented candle. All music has become a Bread medley. All fashion a pair of pastel SWAT overalls and a t-shirt with a rainbow across it. All food lick-em-aid and spam sandwiches with mustard. And I have an overwhelming need to go back!

* I now have an iPod. Thanks to my Valentine, HG. xo

Outing Outcry (and, Move Over, James Bond)

Recovering from a terrible bout of bronchitis, I've spent most of my recent waking hours 1.) coughing and 2.) staring at the TV. I've seen a lot of movies, among them the intense recent Bergman, Saraband; the implausible and irritating Derailed, with Jennifer Aniston; and old favorites Living Out Loud and Mr. Jealousy. I've also seen many TV shows, most of which I am too embarrassed to disclose publicly, but one worth mentioning: Frontline's A Hidden Life (I'm not sure if it will be rerun soon, but you can watch it online). The show is about the outing of Jim West, the Republican mayor of Spokane, Washington. He was caught trolling for 18-year-old boys on a site called gay.com in 2005. The Daily Show et al had a good laugh about the hypocrisy, and I probably laughed along. But the Frontline episode examines the story much more deeply.

West was essentially set up by the editors of the main Spokane paper, the Spokesman-Review. Apparently, Spokane is the last place you'd want to be if you are gay (or maybe just the last place in the northern region of the US - I'm sure plenty of places are a lot worse) and in the 1970s, it was also a hotbed of molestation charges and sex scandals in the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts. One case involved a well-known sheriff and scout leader who was accused of regularly molesting young boys, and who committed suicide as a result. The paper never really covered the scandal until 20-plus years after, when a new editor decided it was time to "heal old wounds" (I'm sure the sordid sex angle had nothing to do with this decision).

Reporters reinvestigating the story realized that the accused dead sheriff, David Hahn, was the best friend of fellow sheriff and scout leader, Jim West, who later went on to become the state's senator, and then the mayor of Spokane. West was also known for being an all-around Republican homophobe, sponsoring legislation in the 1980s that would make it illegal for gays to teach school. So had West known what his buddy Hahn had been up to, and was he involved? No one had ever accused him of anything untoward, but the paper pursued it until they and received a tip that West was a regular on gay.com under the name Cobra82 and/or rightbiguy, and that he had engaged in consensual sex with another man.

In an attempt to connect West to pedophilia, the paper set up a sting. They created a 17-year-old persona, MotoBrock, and eventually West did begin chatting with him. But while MotoBrock dropped many hints about arranging a meeting, West generally didn't bite. So they gave MotoBrock a birthday: letting him turn 18. The two continued to chat (West's chat comments - at least many shown on the program - were slightly heart wrenching. They show that he was struggling with his sexuality - he would ask if others were out, and lament that he never could be) and eventually, they had online sex. Then MotoBrock started hinting that he needed a job, and West suggested that he might be able to find him an unpaid internship. That was all the paper needed - well, that and proof that Cobra82 was actually West. They set up a meeting. West showed, MotoBrock didn't. Then they called West to the paper and told them what they were about to print (they have the entire meeting on audio tape, and it's played on the show - talk about dramatic).

In the meantime, one of the writers at the paper gets another scoop: a man who had previously charged Hahn with molestation (and whose parents had several related lawsuits in the 1980s) was now also charging West. This seemed like a perfect lede to the closeted gay/internship-peddling story they already had, so they just ignored the question of why this man had never named nor mentioned West in the past. They ran with all of it. West was destroyed, or at least seemed that way. He cried to the editor that he had struggled with the secret of his sexuality for so long that he was glad it was out, but firmly denied any claims of pedophilia. The town went up in arms, demanding West step down. But he didn't. Weeks later, he held a press conference saying that he was personally humiliated and ashamed, but professionally undeterred. His personal life should have no effect on his job as mayor. Continued public outcry (Frontline even got footage of members of a committee to recall West, and they are as outrageous as any gay basher - e.g. claiming they know West is evil becuase they see it in his eyes) and 189 stories about it in the Spokesman-Review led to a landslide recall. West was destroyed, despite later being found innocent of charges of abuse of office in an FBI investigation. Then he died of cancer within a year.

Frontline interviews West as well as the paper's reporters and editors. The story is absolutely fascinating, as are the questions it invariably asks: Can reporting cross a line in a story like this? Aside from obvious questions of hypocrisy, do public figures have a right to privacy? Politically, I love seeing more and more righteously straight Republicans are being outed - mostly because Americans need to get used to the idea that homosexuality doesn't come in just one flamboyant, theatre producing, here-queer-and-used-to-it variety. But after seeing this program, the notion of such an unwanted public outing also kind of scares me. I also think it's dangerous to so readily link homosexuality to pedophilia. It certainly sells papers and makes Jon Stewart seem even more clever, but it can't be helping the gay community. Anyway, if you can't see the show, take a look at the Web site for more on the story. It's a case that every journalist should study.


Speaking of sexuality...

After thoroughly annoying Herr Guitar (along with many, many strangers at the Daily Show's 10th Anniversary concert at Irving Plaza, don't ask) with my intense and obsessive attraction to the new James Bond, Daniel Craig, I think it's finally spent. I'm OK with this. It was fun while it lasted. Besides, the likelihood of my getting a chance to see the movie before it hits HBO is nil, and by that time I'll be like "Double 0 who?" I'm fickle that way. I just liked having a celebrity crush that my female contemporaries could relate to - whenever I get involved with girl talk regarding hot actors I inevitably make the other girl/s uncomfortable by not seeing the appeal of Brad Pitt (yuck) while espousing my passion for someone like Tim Roth or Bill Clinton or Warren Beatty (oh yeah).

So I was happy to see Salon publish a list of the real Sexiest Men Alive. It's the kind of group that, with a couple of exceptions (Neil Patrick Harris?), a freak like myself can wholeheartedly agree with. I mean, what other list would include atheist Richard Dawkins, actor Alan Rickman and director Noah Baumbach? Note to the women who made the selections: If you're out there, call me for some girl talk.

Move Over, Ursula Andress

Question: How hot is the new James Bond?

Answer: So friggin hot I may just have to watch a James Bond movie.

Hate Debate: JSF vs JF jr.

Who do I hate most?

Is it Jonathan Safran Foer, the lilliputian prince of Park Slope who writes like my evil, talentless identical-twin cousin might write on acid? Oh, I do hate him. I have written before of my hatred of JSF and his lofty book deals and his record-breakingly priced townhouse and his book-throwing prose. (Can't remember if I mentioned that I liked his wife's book - though she also generally annoys me, she can write.)

But there may be someone I hate even more. That someone is Safran Foer's little brother, Joshua Foer. An even smaller human with an even larger advance - $1.2 million! For HIS MEMOIR! He's like 23! And it hasn't been written yet!!! And even the premise supposedly SUX!!!!

But wait... he just sold the rights... the rights to this 23-YEAR-OLD'S-MEMOIR!!!! we're just OPTIONED for a MOVIE!!!

But wait... the movie is tentatively titled MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN!!!

And, he's also in love with CONNOR OBERST!!!!

I'm sorry for all the yelling. But can you blame me? I must declare that I truly hate Joshua (now known as JFjr). But do I hate him more than JSF? For if it were not for JSF, the original Foer, then JFjr be just another weenus from Yale trying to get a job at the Staten Island Advance. But at least JSF had to kiss a lot of ass - and apparently did, writing to other writers from the age of six or something - to get where he is. JFjr only had to say his last name, apparently. Why else... how else could a 23-year-old get $1.2 mil for a memoir that isn't written and that is called Moonwalking with Einstein. It seems ridiculous. Impossible! Implausible! If I made this story up I would be accused of imitating my evil identical twin cousin on acid, only with less believability.

(I also hate Connor Oberst, another minor talent with major hype. But not with the same passion and fire that I hate the Foers. And what's up - are these three all the same guy but sometimes with glasses and sometimes not? I love Seth Cohen as much or more than anyone, but I don't need the persona to extend into my reading and listening materials. I get enough of the character from the show and Teen People.)

Oh... I guess I hate JFjr the most. He wins. For that movie title alone. But things can change. And I'm sure they will get worse. For me. Better for my hate. And for anyone named Foer.

Which reminds me, I changed Swaddlini's name. To Ford Maddox Foer. And he's brilliant! We're shopping around his baby book.