Tuesday, December 20, 2005

The Things You Don't Think About

It comes as no surprise to me that ending a six-year relationship is no picnic. By and large, most of the stuff that sucks the most about it is obvious enough to not bear mentioning. It's more the stuff you don't think about that sticks in the craw -- the logistics, the mundane details of ordinary life, etc. To whit, the little things that suck the most:

1. When signing over the lease to the car, having to say that you sold it to the other person for $1.00, because sales tax is less than gift tax. Or something. I'm still not entirely clear on that one...

2. Actually being given the dollar for the car.

3. Realizing that unless you spend an entire Sunday burning CDs, most of your conjugal music collection will be gone.

4. Spending that Sunday burning CDs.

5. Having to change the lease, the insurance, the emergency contact information, the veterinarian records...

6. Tabulating year-end expenses necessitates a transaction-by-transaction trip down memory lane.

7. Getting sentimental at astoundingly awful songs and television moments. I understand getting a bit weepy at some stuff, but not the finale to My Fair Brady or songs with verses like I know you well/I know your smell/I'd share a lifetime with you. If this is ever you -- Seek. Help. Now.

8. Finding the requisite shirts that were left behind and having to ship them along.

9. Realizing that all the catsitters of days gone by were friends of significant other's -- making you That Person That Has To Cut Her Vacation Short To Come Home and Scoop The Cat's Shit.

10. The contents of the Victoria's Secret drawer look awfully silly now.

11. Explaining the situation to the doorman.

12. Explaining the situation to the cat (see final instructions of item 7).

13. Changing the Pictures section on the website...eventually.

Robyn

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Geek Disco

Just as I did when I took half a day to stand in line for six hours for a U2 concert, I just made excellent use of my vacation time this week. I took two days to go to NYC to attend, of all things, a Moby concert at the Bowery Ballroom. No ordinary concert this, but a concert just for fans.
After careful consideration, it was clear to me that the importance and gravitas of this event warranted my absence from work. But then I was dropped on my head a bit as an infant, so my judgment may be a bit clouded. Meh.

Well anyway, it was a very nice thing for Moby to do. And since his sales in the States are not quite what they used to be, he seems to have the time to do it. They love him in Europe, I understand. Them Swedes never gave up on their electronica, bless 'em. Not that Mssr. Mo is relegated to one genre, but nevermind. Moby and Company played for three hours straight, and afterwards he DJ'd for serveral hundred bouncing, happy geeks in a big ol' bouncing happy geek disco. Good times.

In response to a few queries, yes, there are actual instruments played at a Moby show, and actual singers. While he does use a few backing tracks here and there, most of the stuff that's sampled on the record is recreated live, making for a durned good show. The lady singer is particularly awesome. It is not "some dude on stage pushing buttons on a keyboard." That was a few tours ago, and apparently, Moby read the comment cards and stepped up his game.

The rest if the trip included the usual trips to Rock Center to see the tree and to the Met. New ground was broken with a trip to the UN, which I'm sorry to say I never saw before. I am glad that I went after I started working at Save the World Inc., since I am now, as they say, up on my shit. I even asked smart questions in the Security Council room. Holla. I think I would have been thoroughly confused if I went when I was an Entertainment Weekly-reading college sophomore. Not that reading EW is a mark of poor character. I love a good Hot List as much as the next gal.
VERY IMPORTANT: You CAN find decent parking at a garage in the East Village on 11th Street. $30/day is peanuts in Manhattan. No more parking in Newark and taking the PATH train, where people get stabbed and stuff. Not that anyone would ever do that. Heavens no....

Robyn

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Enter the Squirrel

We played host to a little furry houseguest last week. Not vermin, mind you. We haven't been blessed with that type of visitor yet (knock on simultaed wood). But because I am a sucker on the highest order, I took in a stray cat.

Not permanently. I'm not that daffy. We were just walking along and I saw the kitty sitting outside on the curb by our building one night, eating bread that had fallen out of a trash can. I don't see strays very often in DC, and when I do I may give them a passing hello, and let them be as they normally look like they know what they're doing. But this one was different. He was well-groomed, not terribly skittish, and looked like he was new to the scene. I initially went back to the apartment, but sentimentality got the better of me and Jeffrey and I headed back out with the cat carrier to wrassle us a cat.

He was a bit cautious at first, but eventually he came right to me. We intended to keep him in the bathroom for the night, and then I'd take him into the no-kill shelter where I volunteer the next day. Easy enough, right? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

As it turns out, there is only one person at the shelter responsible for processing the cats that come in, and he either had "car trouble" or "heart trouble." Either way, it wasn't good for him, it wasn't good for me, and it wasn't good for Squirrel, as we had (perhaps fooloshly) dubbed the new arrival. The dude wouldn't be in all week. I had to find other alternatives.

After being turned away from the shelter, we realized we had a problem on our hands. For one thing, Tippy hated his ass. He was keen enough to say hello. He's only about a year old, and is very friendly. She however, is a crazy old bitch, and wanted nothing to do with this young upstart who was invading her turf. So we had to keep the cats separated, which was a pain on the highest order, and made it very clear that we could not continue this way.

But unloading a cat is no easy task -- even with a pretty, friendly, ostensibly clean young animal such as Squirrel -- so named for his skinny gray frame and long bushy tail. It was clear to me that he had been owned before. He was well-groomed and so willing to cuddle. We posted signs around the neighborhood, reported him to the animal shelters, but no owner came forward. I called the euthaniasia shelters to see what his odds would be -- and they weren't good.
Thanksgiving was coming up, and we needed to find him a home right away.

So we went on for a week and a half. Though he was a very nice kitty to have around, as long as Ms. Tippy was the alpha cat, there could be no peace. We knew if someone could just meet him, they would love to have him. Finally, we got one of Jeffrey's co-workers to agree to take him over Thanksgiving and another to express interest. It came down to the wire. but the day before Thanksgiving we found the little bugger a home.

It is a lot quieter without Squirrel around, and I have to admit that he had a much nicer demeanor than Tippy. But deference must be given to the cat that came before, and I'm glad that he has somewhere to go. He was as nice a kitty as could be found on the streets, and I'm glad everything worked out. I swore I would never do such a thing again, but as Cassandra said at work, if presented with the same circumstances, she would bet that I would quickly be proven to be a liar on that front.

Robyn

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Drag Racin'

Normally I have nothing special to do on a Tuesday night. Especially when I have spent the previous month running all over the eastern seaboard, and barely recognize my own apartment. So when I was presented with an invitation to attend a house party to celebrate Dupont Circle's annual drag races, I was a bit ambivalent to attend. But the need to cultivate meaningful social ties got the better of me, and out I went into the drizzly night.

Now, you must understand something about the drag races -- otherwise known as the High Heel Races. You see, the Dupont area has a rather thriving gay population, and just as it is in Greenwich Village, Halloween is a big friggin' deal. So the Tuesday before October 31 is the day when Dupont's most fabulous drag queens take to the streets in 3-inch minimum heels and sprint, or mince, down 17th Street.

Co-worker Seth was intending to run in his second race in a row. Mr. Seth is not himself, a member of DC's illustrious gay population, but he is evidently secure enough in his own masculinity to pretend for an evening. I was under the impression that others at the house party would be bringing their own fabulous attire, so I brought along one of my wigs (yes, I have more than one) and suitably sparkly makeup and a tiny shirt so I, too, could be festive.

Alas, there was not a large contingent of dressed-up revelers when I arrived, but a blue wig is a terrible thing to waste. So I donned it anyhow, and had makeup maven Cassandra go to town with the blue and green eye shadow. She offered her cosmetic services to other partygoers -- including Alex Angert, a young man who I was rather friendly with in the geek clique at high school and unexpectedly showed up as a friend of a friend. Alex, I'm proud to say, accepted a touch of blue glitter after some gentle prodding, but there weren't many takers. Buncha squares, these young DC wonks.

But glory was to be mine, because since I was the only other person decked out and in the spirit of things, Seth, now sporting a pink bobbed wig and a tasteful strapless number, asked me to be his escort to the race. My job was to hold a hot pink umbrella above him while he paraded with the other participants prior to the race, and depending on the level of precipitation, during it as well. A kept girl, if you will. So we pushed through the throng, and joined about 100 other drag queens on the streets.

Some of these gals clearly had prepared very well. There were folks in ball gowns, some in nicely tailored Lady Diana suits, and, inexplicably, a few dressed like a dragged-up Terrell Owens. Others, like ourselves, were rank amateurs. I was not wearing heels, but thought that my pink and purple galoshes were fly enough given the wet weather.

We intended to stroll the length of the race, as we were by no means among the more serious competitors, but this was not to be. Despite our best efforts to stay in the back of the pack, there were a fair amount of angry queens behind us who wanted to race, dammit. One directly behind us was dressed as the Washington Monument. While being pursued by a large phallus may have been exciting to some of our fellow runners, we were rather scared. So sprint we did. Seth ran ahead in his pumps, and I trailed holding the pink umbrella aloft, feeling rather chivalrous.

We by no means won the race. That honor went to a runner dressed as a nun, who hurried out of the rain to claim her prize -- a bar tab at J.R.'s saloon. We were glad to retreat to the warm house and the cold keg just down the block, to celebrate a night well executed.

Robyn

Sunday, October 23, 2005

It was nice to be away for ten days to see family. I caught a cold halfway through the visit, and spent a few weekday afternoons balled up on the couch in my PJs, watching Price is Right with my brother and having Mommy fix me tea, just like in the long long ago. But now it's back to the city known as Washington, where evidently I have a job and an apartment and a cat and a life of sorts.

Aside from the mundane re-entry to work, this week saw me attending two communal events that spoke very dearly to my little heart. Firstly, I attended my final U2 show of the year this week in DC. A DC U2 show, it turns out, is not an event to go unnoticed in the government and nonprofit sector in which I make my living. Although I had procured my tickets months ago, several staff members who work in our Congressional relations department were given free tickets by DATA, the organization founded by Bono. My boss also received tickets, and had to be briefed as to what, exactly, U2 was. Many a Hill staffer and Administration official was given choice seats around or behind the stage, and normally a fan such as myself would be a trifle miffed at this, but not this time. For I was closing out my last show with floor tickets, which were better than any of the freebies given to the Washington elite. Snack on that, Condi.

Through a series of very fortunate events, and a bit of strategizing, I wound up right in front along the edge of the circular stage. So I was able to watch the whole show with an unobstructed, very close view of the proceedings -- which is a rare and fine thing indeed. I hooted and hollered until my throat was raw, and bounced and hopped until my calf muscles decided to up and take an extended holiday from which they've yet to return (come back soon...all is forgiven). One of the great things about this kind of setting is that everyone down there on the floor is so durned nice and friendly. A few of them are even more scholarly than I am...a frightening prospect. It's nice to be among the other yahoos for a bit.

After that, it seemed like the next opportunity to assemble with other sick-minded brethern united in a frivolous cause would be far off. Happily, I was much mistaken. In going through the several piles newspapers that had accumulated in my absence, I discovered a column telling poor, wayward souls hailing from cities other than DC where they could cheer on their favorite football teams. As this week's Eagles game was not to be televised locally, I got myself hence to the Rhino Pump and Brewhouse in Georgetown this afternoon, expecting a modest gathering of Philly expats.

What a sight met my eyes! A sea of green jerseys, a bevy of beer guts, a torrent of expletives -- by golly, I was home! Two whole floors packed of lunatics who cheered and jeered every play, every replay, and every Chunky soup ad. The Eagles were their dependable, excruciating selves, but managed to pull out a victory in the end, sending the crowd into ecstatic fits. It wasn't exactly the place to strike up any deep meaningful conversations, and it may be a bit hectic for me to attend weekly, but it's nice to know it's there. A convention of football fans may be a bit more belligerent that a U2 gathering, but it's a heckuva lot more accessible. Just as silly though, ay, just as silly.

Robyn

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Grampy

The reason I had to condense my visit to New York was that I had to fly to Maine for my grandfather's funeral. Grampy passed away on October 5, after being sick for the better part of this year. He was 89.

We had managed to visit Grampy this summer when we heard that he was declining. We discovered that he wasn't faring well at all physically, and every now and again was prone to some bouts of dementia, but by and large he was still with it. He was cranky about the fact that he could no longer do what he pleased or eat what he wanted, but he knew who we all were and seemed to grasp his situation. In the past few weeks he hasn't been as aware. Like Pop-Pop earlier this year, Grampy passed away at precisely the point when we knew that any kind of "recovery" would only prolong any suffering or indignity.

Also like Pop-Pop, Grampy made for good stories. This was a man who waxed rhapsodic about an apple pie that he had in 1939. When he was 80 years old and 100 pounds overweight, he would jump over the side of his houseboat into the water to work on any engine trouble that might occur. He was incredibly literate, and could recall just about every classic novel he'd ever read. He once was buried alive during a construction project, and was interviewed by the local news after he was freed. The newsperson asked him what he thinking while he awaited rescue, probably anticipating some maudlin soundbite about Grampy's love for his family or his faith. Grampy instead responded, "Well, I was thinking about getting out, you damn fool."

Grampy and Grammy were married to each other for 64 years. I'm lucky in that I was able to know him for so long, and talk with him about books and history and how things were when he was a boy (he often started stories with the phrase, "When I was as big as you..."). I'm not so lucky in that I have lost two grandparents in one year, but I suppose that if you approach 24 years of age with three surviving elderly grandparents, you should consider yourself blessed.

Robyn

Condensed New York

Greetings from Richboro, from where I will attempt to re-cap the past few days in a few posts.
Let's discuss pleasant things first. I went up for a long-scheduled trip to New York this weekend, primarily to see a U2 show. A secondary, but by no means insignificant, reason was that I hadn't been to New York since January. It seems inexcusable, until I consider how damn busy the summer has been with family events and work schedules. It never ceases to amaze me how busy we seem to be despite being fairly boring folks.

Anyway, we arrived in New York City during what is apparently the monsoon season for the northeastern United States. Usually I am not deterred by a little bit of rain. But with the exception of sporting some rather fantastic pink and purple galoshes, I found nothing redeeming about this week's rainstorms. New York got more rainfall in one day than it received in all the time from the beginning of July through September, which is nuts.

We still managed to achieve our most important aims. The show was brilliant. I had seen U2 play at the Meadowlands just after 9/11/2001, and that was great. But I had never seen them play at Madison Square Garden, which I'm told is second only to seeing them play in Dublin. Based on Saturday's concert, I would be inclined to say it was the best gig I'd seen. The audience was incredibly enthusiastic, even up in the nosebleed seats where I was, and nobody onstage seemed the least bit jaded at playing the Garden for the gazillionth time. They seemed to regard it as a bit of a homecoming. If you are so inclined, I very much recommend catching them in NYC proper. Quite a spectacle.

The crowd was leaving the complex in an appropriately jovial mood -- which was quickly quashed by the insane downpour and stinging, cold winds outside. Umbrellas were being launched five stories into the air after being ripped from people's hands by the wind. We briefly considered heading out anyway after warming up in our nearby hotel, but our cozy quarters proved more inviting than the weather outside, and I made the unusual choice of staying in on a Saturday night in NYC.

The next day consisted of us running about and hopping the Subway to all points between Times Square and Washington Square (security threats be damned). We caught up with old friends, visited some shops, enjoyed what will probably be our only lunch at the way-overpriced Second Avenue Deli (home of the $10 fried matzo) and picked up some cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery in the West Village. The night was capped off by a required visit to Rockefeller Center and a dinner at the always fabulous Bamiyan Afghan restaurant. I always get a bit greedy when I visit old favorite restaurants, because I don't know when I'll be back. So Jeffrey and I loaded up on sweet Afghan tea, pumpkin turnovers, beef kabobs, meat dumplings in yogurt sauce, and of course, delicious doogh.

I have learned in the past few visits to target my itineraries on specific areas in the city. Thus, no Met or Central Park this time. Although I never feel like I have enough time in New York, I had more pressing reasons for condensing my visit as much as I could before I had to leave...

Robyn

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Hometown Pride: Dispatch from Rio

From special correspondent Cassandra Kennedy, on location in Brazil:

All is fab here. I managed to get hammered and make tons of friends within 4 hours of arriving. Gotta love it! The corner bar (site of this initial revelry) just happens to be a little hangout for hookers very late at night when (their) business is slow. Sounds dodgy but they are pretty cool.
They have an ``interesting`` outlook on life as you can imagine. So I just had to pop in and relay this little tidbit - I thought you´d get a kick out of it. I was chatting with this hooker (Esmerelda) and 2 guys - all were from the Brazilian countryside and bitching about how violent it is here and how they´re sick of it in Rio. She pulls her shirt down and shows me this scar on her boob and says it was from getting stabbed during a mugging. Oi! I said it´s really violent where I live, too - in some areas. She asked if I knew where Philadelphia was and I said I lived pretty nearby.
Then she freaked out and was telling the guys in Portuguese ``oh my god - you guys would not believe Philadelphia life. It´s the only place worse than Rio. It´s like crazy shootings and super rough. The cops will just shoot you down, too. Wow! Wow!``

And then after that, it was like I had street cred with them. Too funny. None of them have ever been outside of Brazil but they have certainly heard all about Philly. Just thought you should know and be proud:)

I should say that our time here has not been crazy violent or dangerous - more like paradise! Miss you girls...

cK

Editor's note: Clearly, Ms. Kennedy leads a far more interesting existence than most mortals.

Monday, September 5, 2005

New Orleans

It really is frustrating what's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi.

At work, we usually only deal with international crises, because normally the needs of a domestic crisis and one in a developing country are unique. But now many of our member organizations who normally only deal with international issues, especially refugees, are being called upon for their advice, since most domestic aid outfits don't know how to deal with third-world conditions and massive amounts of displaced people.

I'm at a loss as to how it got so bad. The tsunami affected thirteen countries on two continents, displacing people in rural, poverty-stricken areas with no pre-existing infrastructure, and people were able to be fed, administered to, and sheltered. The United States of America can't get people out of a sports arena. I normally cringe when people make comparisons to crises such as Darfur, but the situation in the Superdome and the New Orleans convention center is dishearteningly similar to that taking place in IDP camps in Sudan. After 9/11, so much money was invested in making sure we were prepared for disasters, and it seems like the only thing that was accomplished was was the creation of an even bigger beuraucracy that made us even more poorly equipped to respond to an emergency.

The worst thing for me is that this was not an unforeseen event. The tsunami caught everyone by surprise. 9/11 caught us unawares. But the idea of a monster hurricane devastating New Orleans was something that had been predicted and studied. It's carelessness and petty politics that have made things as bad as they are, and we should be embarrassed. And with donations being offered from the UN and tsunami-stricken Sri Lanka, I think we may need to be a lot more humble in our foreign relations as well.

Robyn

Sunday, August 7, 2005

Monuments in the Moonlight

This evening we did something we've been meaning to do since we moved to DC. We drove down to the national Mall and went for a walk by the monuments at midnight. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. There's plenty of parking around there, so you don't have to worry about traipsing around the mean streets of DC in the dark (not recommended). There's enough people around so you don't have to worry about it being too desolate, but not nearly the teeming masses that swarm about the place in the daytime. Plus, in the summer, it's a lot cooler. It had been in the upper 90s the day that we went, but by the Washington Monument there was a pleasant breeze. We only walked from the Washington Monument to Lincoln and then back through the Vietnam memorial, but that's a deceptively long hike, and we had had enough by the time we got back to the car. Another bonus of going late at night is that all of the ducks and their little baby ducklets can be seen cuddled up together along the edge of the reflecting pool.
Awww....

And I can finally personally attest, as I have been dying to for ages now, that the ring of asphalt surrounding the Washington Monument is just dandy for roller skating.

Robyn

Saturday, July 9, 2005

It's Always Something...

I swear to God Live 8 feels like a lifetime ago.

Here's the good news: I think I'm closer to the conclusion that I'm really really excited about the kind of work that I do. Not Executive Assistant duties, but the whole activism thang. We started this week on such a high. We had worked so hard for so long for this incredible week of events leading up to the G8 meeting in Scotland. Our grassroots and policy people were focused on the concerts and the One Campaign, as well as a whole global movement of awareness-raising events. Our program people were not just tracking their own issues (trade, debt cancellation, disaster relief, all that fun stuff.), but working together to focus our concerns on this one huge event. I was knee-deep in the not very sexy world of logistics and travel arrangements to send people to Edinburgh, but I felt like I was doing my part. Actually going to the concerts and seeing that people were absorbing the message was hugely gratifying to us. We weren't so naive as to believe that some kind of miracle was going to come out of the Summit, but there was no doubt that the collective effort or our organizations and the groups that we worked with had caught the attention of the most powerful people on Earth. We were excited to see what they would do.

So that's why the events on July 7 in London were such a gut punch on so many levels.

I usually don't turn on the news until about 10 minutes before I'm ready to leave in the morning. I'm really not one to break down into tears. That's really not my style. But I was so gutted by what I saw on the television, that I started sobbing into my oatmeal. I seriously considered not going in, but there was work to do. Predictably, the mood at work was very, very glum. Like everyone else, we were all sad for London, which had been having such a glorious week up to that point with the concerts and the G8 and the Olympics. I had been listening to my favorite London radio station all that week, and they were just ecstatic. Now they were completely bewildered and traumatized. Having lived there, and being very well acquainted with the targeted areas, and knowing a thing or two about living in a traumatized city, I was taking it rather hard on that front.

But there was another angle for us at work as well. The focus of the G8 Summit shifted dramatically. When Tony Blair left Gleneagles, we all felt like all our hopes of something being done about global poverty left with him. We had come so far in the past week, and because of the actions of a few petty and thoughtless individuals, another beautiful city that I loved was in tears and all the work that so many people had done all over the world looked to be ruined. We were sad for the Londoners, for the Africans, for the organizers -- we were just devastated.

So we waited. Our people in Scotland were fairly pessimistic. So many people there were based in London, that Edinburgh emptied out quite a bit. The media calls that had been so focused on the Make Poverty History push stopped coming to them. Our staff were sitting in hotels, just waiting for something, anything, to come out of the Summit that they could react to. Then they announced the $50 billion aid package to Africa.

There are two ways you could look at this. On the critical side, $50 billion by 2010 falls way, way short of the targets that these countries had set for themselves five years ago. There is no guarantee or practical plan for actually coming through with the aid, so it could just be a chance for a fantastic headline that will never be realized, which happens quite a bit. Many of the other primary issues that the activists were pushing for, such as increased fair trade, were given lip service at best, ignored at worst.

But then there's the bright side (which, I'm sorry to say, the good people that I work with are usually disinclined to acknowledge. We're not happy if we're not miserable, it seems at times). Global poverty and Africa were given more attention than they ever had been in previous years. The whole world may have gotten distracted on the day of the Summit, but more people know about these issues than they had previously. Like I said to one despondent colleague, we're not as far as we were a week ago, but we're a hell of a lot farther than we were a year ago.

So again, the good news is that I have a passion. The bad news is that because of that, my heart is broken this week. Someone at work said that we would all be a lot less stressed if we just didn't care. But then I don't think life would be half as interesting, and the payoffs, when they come, wouldn't be nearly as sublime.

There's another huge policy meeting at the UN in September, focused on the Millennium Development Goals to end global poverty. Time to get to work...

Robyn

It's Always Something...

I swear to God Live 8 feels like a lifetime ago.

Here's the good news: I think I'm closer to the conclusion that I'm really really excited about the kind of work that I do. Not Executive Assistant duties, but the whole activism thang. We started this week on such a high. We had worked so hard for so long for this incredible week of events leading up to the G8 meeting in Scotland. Our grassroots and policy people were focused on the concerts and the One Campaign, as well as a whole global movement of awareness-raising events. Our program people were not just tracking their own issues (trade, debt cancellation, disaster relief, all that fun stuff.), but working together to focus our concerns on this one huge event. I was knee-deep in the not very sexy world of logistics and travel arrangements to send people to Edinburgh, but I felt like I was doing my part. Actually going to the concerts and seeing that people were absorbing the message was hugely gratifying to us. We weren't so naive as to believe that some kind of miracle was going to come out of the Summit, but there was no doubt that the collective effort or our organizations and the groups that we worked with had caught the attention of the most powerful people on Earth. We were excited to see what they would do.

So that's why the events on July 7 in London were such a gut punch on so many levels.

I usually don't turn on the news until about 10 minutes before I'm ready to leave in the morning. I'm really not one to break down into tears. That's really not my style. But I was so gutted by what I saw on the television, that I started sobbing into my oatmeal. I seriously considered not going in, but there was work to do. Predictably, the mood at work was very, very glum. Like everyone else, we were all sad for London, which had been having such a glorious week up to that point with the concerts and the G8 and the Olympics. I had been listening to my favorite London radio station all that week, and they were just ecstatic. Now they were completely bewildered and traumatized. Having lived there, and being very well acquainted with the targeted areas, and knowing a thing or two about living in a traumatized city, I was taking it rather hard on that front.

But there was another angle for us at work as well. The focus of the G8 Summit shifted dramatically. When Tony Blair left Gleneagles, we all felt like all our hopes of something being done about global poverty left with him. We had come so far in the past week, and because of the actions of a few petty and thoughtless individuals, another beautiful city that I loved was in tears and all the work that so many people had done all over the world looked to be ruined. We were sad for the Londoners, for the Africans, for the organizers -- we were just devastated.

So we waited. Our people in Scotland were fairly pessimistic. So many people there were based in London, that Edinburgh emptied out quite a bit. The media calls that had been so focused on the Make Poverty History push stopped coming to them. Our staff were sitting in hotels, just waiting for something, anything, to come out of the Summit that they could react to. Then they announced the $50 billion aid package to Africa.

There are two ways you could look at this. On the critical side, $50 billion by 2010 falls way, way short of the targets that these countries had set for themselves five years ago. There is no guarantee or practical plan for actually coming through with the aid, so it could just be a chance for a fantastic headline that will never be realized, which happens quite a bit. Many of the other primary issues that the activists were pushing for, such as increased fair trade, were given lip service at best, ignored at worst.

But then there's the bright side (which, I'm sorry to say, the good people that I work with are usually disinclined to acknowledge. We're not happy if we're not miserable, it seems at times). Global poverty and Africa were given more attention than they ever had been in previous years. The whole world may have gotten distracted on the day of the Summit, but more people know about these issues than they had previously. Like I said to one despondent colleague, we're not as far as we were a week ago, but we're a hell of a lot farther than we were a year ago.

So again, the good news is that I have a passion. The bad news is that because of that, my heart is broken this week. Someone at work said that we would all be a lot less stressed if we just didn't care. But then I don't think life would be half as interesting, and the payoffs, when they come, wouldn't be nearly as sublime.

There's another huge policy meeting at the UN in September, focused on the Millennium Development Goals to end global poverty. Time to get to work...

Robyn

Monday, July 4, 2005

Live 8

Going to the Live 8 concert in Philly this weekend really was the natural thing for me to do. I was planning on heading home for the holiday anyway, and since the cause of fighting global poverty is pretty much what we do for a living at Do Gooder Inc., it seemed like something I should be part of. So a few of my pals from work took off early for dear old Filthydelphia. We stayed with friends right in Center City, so we could walk to the Ben Franklin Parkway at 9:30 the next morning to stake out a spot.

Although the concert started at noon, we were by no means the first ones to think of this, as 200,000 people were already there at that hour. Someone in our group who was familiar with the lay of the land had the brilliant idea of walking along the bike path by the Schuylkill, and clambering up the hill so we were right by the Art Museum without having to push our way through the throngs on the Parkway. This way we could work from the stage toward the back, rather than the other way around.

Nonetheless, it was abundantly clear that we were not going to be able to actually see the people on the stage, but we did find a nice area under some trees where we could see at least part of the stage and its two Jumbotrons, and considered ourselves happy. It was a gorgeous day, the crowd was diverse and fairly happy (or at least not completely unpleasant) and although I wasn't particularly keen on many of the groups at the Philly venue, I was sufficiently psyched to shake my posterior to Destiny's Child, Bon Jovi, et al. The performers would play for about 20 minutes, and then we'd sit for thirty minutes watching public service announcements and clips from the London show, so we could see what we were missing. Truth be told, I think I screamed loudest for the Philadelphia Eagles to came on to help announce Toby Keith (no doubt a ploy to appease the decidedly un-country local crowd).

A few of our crew of seven dwindled away as the day went on. One enterprising young man who claimed to not care one bit about the performers finagled his way into the VIP tent, thanks to his connections with the good, kind kids of the good, kind One Campaign. Cassandra and I stuck it out the longest, and at 4pm decided we sufficently represented InterAction, and would go watch Stevie Wonder on the big screen TV in the swanky air-conditioned apartment with the kegerator. It was then that we discovered what most of America had already figured out, which was that the coverage on MTV royally sucked.

All in all I was glad I was a part of it. I think it did what it needed to do, which was educate a large amount of otherwise oblivious people about how bad the situation in Africa really is, and how little it would take for the leaders of the wealthiest nations to make a difference. Best case scenario, a new generation of people gets excited about making a difference and exercises their right to be heard by their elected leaders. Worst case scenario, people went home happy having rocked out with Beyonce. Either way, not a bad day at all.

Robyn

Sunday, June 26, 2005

This Month's Apology

No, I have not been in a post U2-show, blissed-out coma for the past month. That only lasted three weeks.

What I have been is both busy and silly. Busy at work with many things that are not of general interest (isn't it amazing how much we preoccupy ourselves with things that are of very little interest to the world at large? Sad, really, don't you think?). Silly, because I've been logging entries into my laptop and realized that I have no real way of transferring them, as Mr. Laptop has no floppy drive and I didn't think my updates were worth wasting a perfectly good CD on. Actually, now that I finally have made some time for myself, I determined they weren't that good anyway, and decided to start fresh. So the U2 update is the only one to make the cut from the last month. I've posted some groovy pictures from the show under the illustrious "Bono" link in the Pictures section. Any day when a gal can add to her Bono album is a good day.

I suppose I'd be remiss in not noting the dropping of the debt for 18 of the most impovershed nations that was announced a few weeks ago, and will be formalized at the G8 summit next week. It's a big deal at dear old InterAction. There's a lot of rotten , frustrating days in the saving the world racket. The day they announced the debt-dropping was the kind of day that makes a lot of the heartache worthwhile. So it's important to acknowledge that our government and the British government did a really good thing here. I'm sure you've seen and will still see quotes from a lot of organizations saying how it shouldn't end there, and there's more work to do, and that's all correct. But lest the people in those organizations be broadly painted as never being satisfied and always wanting more, it should be noted that everyone who had worked for that announcement was thrilled and relieved that day.

Robyn

Monday, May 23, 2005

Like Coked-Up Kangaroos

Stumbled into work this morning with very little sleep, purple fingernails, and a completely blissed-out attitutde toward life in general. Call it ridiculous, call it shallow -- but spending two hours within spittle distance of Bono will do wonders for one's general outlook on life. Especially if one is a red-headed midget with OCD tendencies exponentially larger than her own little self.

We had general admission tickets to last night's U2 show at the Wachovia Center in Philly.
Possessing such coveted tickets comes with certain obligations -- mainly getting to the venue wicked early to line up with other yahoos in hopes of getting prime standing location. We arrived at 3:00 for a doors open time of 6:00. We were conveniently in direct sunlight the whole time, had to bolt down some Wawa hoagies to sustain ourselves for the rest of the evening, and once inside, had five more hours of standing in a fixed spot to look forward to before the concert would be over. All the while we made friends with the other people who, while all very nice, insisted there was nothing abnormal about this behavior.

While I cannot vouch for the sanity of such an assessment, I will say that we did indeed score a great position three people deep from the right side of the ellipse (if the preceding sentence made no sense to you -- congratulations on having a life. To translate -- we done saw Bono right close, we did). The crowd at that proximity is delightfully wacko. Oh, they're polite, mind you. No slam dancing at a U2 show thankyouverymuch. But there is an extraordinary amount of hopping. After awhile the hopping becomes second nature, and before I knew it I realized I'd spent the bulk of the evening jumping straight up and down like a coked-up kangaroo. Slow songs offer little respite, as we were usually compelled to keep both arms suspended aloft in a manner not entirely unlike some strange Christian evangelist revival. I was strangely okay with this.

I shan't bore you with any more details of the show (though if I knew for certain that we were of like minds, oh how I could bore you with details). When we jumped in the car at 11:30pm to drive back to DC, my legs, arms, voice and head were decidedly on strike. I was stariving, dehydrated, soaked with sweat, and my contacts felt like sandpaper. Physically, I felt miserable. I resolved to do things differently for the next general admission show, for which we have tickets in October.

I will line up even earlier, I will. I will stand even longer, I shall. If arriving at the venue six hours before the band takes the stage only gets you in the third row, then clearly I must step up my game.

Robyn

Monday, May 16, 2005

Kindred Spirits

From the Washington Post
I'll Take Manhattan -- Every Time
By Maura Kelly

I was getting ready to take a two-year sabbatical from New York for an all-expenses-paid master's program -- the only thing that would ever get me to leave Manhattan -- when I rediscovered Joan Didion's book "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." I flipped to the final essay, "Goodbye to All That," written nearly four decades ago, after she'd dumped Manhattan for Los Angeles. "Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before," she complained.
"There were certain parts of the city I had to avoid." Worst of all, she whined, there were no "new faces" in the New York.

Joan Didion, you fool! I thought.

If I were in New York right now, I would listen to all the conversations. I would visit every neighborhood. I wouldn't avoid a single Upper East Side blue-haired society lady, a single toothless street bum, a single street-corner saxophonist. What I wouldn't give for the faces! For a downtown coffee shop scene. Here's what might happen if I went to Doma, my favorite cafe, off Seventh. The Berlin girl with dyed orange hair behind the counter would hand me a Chinese cookie fortune with my change: "To affect the quality of the day is no small achievement." I'd look up from it, eyes wide, delighted; she'd wink and say, "Next?" Smiling, I'd move to a window seat and eavesdrop on a huge, pale, dark-haired man talking to a petite well-coiffed blonde. (An Internet date?) "My family moved here from Russia during the Cold War," he'd say. "Kids called me 'Commie,' thought I had nukes in my lunch box. I was 5. Funny, right? So I became a comedian." A shirtless man would walk by outside with a huge pair of feathered white wings on his back. (An extra from the set of the "Dogma" sequel?)

But no. I'm in a small southwestern Virginia city. Know what I avoid here, Joan Didion? The Valley View Mall, whose very existence has destroyed the vista it boasts of. The Wal-Mart, with the gun department next to the jewelry counter. The omnipresent sports bars, where people in business casual talk about nothing but college football. This town ain't for me because there's no place that gives me the simple hope that I could meet someone here who will change my life. In the Apple, I always knew that, at any moment, I might bump into some bewitching stranger.

Of course, New York could have burned me, like Didion. It could have destroyed me -- almost did. (Anything worthy of being deeply loved should have that power.) I indulged myself with booze and drugs for a long time before finally saying goodbye to all that, after some close calls. Like the time the guy I was flirting with at Jet Lounge bit my cheek so hard that I left with a nasty purple welt. Or those days I woke up next to a stranger. Or the morning someone I couldn't remember had apparently been in my room the night before -- as evidenced by the pile of change and a black lighter he'd left behind on my desk.

But New York also helped me survive -- bringing me comfort in the form of its citizens, appearing like benevolent gods during my darkest moments. As they did when I was walking home from a party late one night -- drunk, alone and broken-hearted. Drifting through a shadowy, lonely part of Hell's Kitchen, I heard two thuggish voices behind me.

I began to think saving on a cab had been a very stupid decision.

"He's gonna go nuts when he sees," one guy said.

"He's not gonna believe what we did," another agreed. "I mean, damn! Look at this thing!"

A gun, I thought as their footsteps got closer.

My heart was thundering in my ears by the time they flanked me. Too petrified to move, I stopped and stared down at my scuffed black boots.

"A lady like you shouldn't be walking by herself,"one said.

"Where you headed?" the other said.

That's when I looked up.

They were holding an arc of variegated balloons over me.

"It's beautiful!" I shouted.

"For our little brother, in a wheelchair," the first one said.

Then, keeping the rainbow force field around me, they escorted me to my door.

There have been so many other strangers in New York who have blessed me, saved me, become friends. Those people, immortalized in my memory, make the city the poem it is. Like the cabbie who gave me a free ride one icy New Year's morning when I had lost my wallet, my friends and my way. The middle-aged businessman who yanked me out of an oncoming car's path, saving my life before disappearing back into the Times Square mob. Or gravel-voiced Willy: He helped me quit smoking by keeping my pack in his register at the Abingdon Square deli and doling out cigarettes to me, one a day. (He died in 2003 of emphysema.) Or Maureen, the old woman in a wheelchair with a face like it was made of cheesecloth -- yet what a new face! -- who called out to roomful of strangers in an ATM center, asking for a volunteer to withdraw money from her account. I obliged; we had breakfast; she told me she moved to New York after she became crippled because it was the easiest place in the world to get around. Or the hipster with a soul patch and Marc Jacobs suit who slid into my booth one night at the M&R Bar and informed me "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone" was playing, so I couldn't leave. Dinner followed; then a romance; now a comradeship that's lasted for five years. And there's the bright-eyed writer I discovered at a Williamsburg art opening in the eleventh hour of my New York tenure; we've been corresponding about the meaning of life since.

Yep, I'd tell Joan Didion, "Too bad you didn't see the people who could help keep you strong -- even if only by watching them smile at you on the subway and letting the corners of your mouth curl up in return. Then you'd never have stopped loving the city."

In a couple of autumns, if you notice what seems like a rough beast slouching towards Manhattan to be born again, look again. It's probably just me, returning.

Robyn

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Educating Mom

Considering her darling, brilliant daughter devotes so much time, attention and ducats to a silly Irish rock band, I thought it would be a nice gesture to take Mom along to the first of, er, several, U2 shows that I am lucky enough to attend this year. So, leaving the menfolk to fend for themselves on the mean streets of South Philly, Mamasita and I proceeded to the Wachovia Center last night to rock.

Props must be given where props are due, for Mom spent the preceeding weeks studying lyrics and assigned albums. She bragged to all her "kids" at the office that her daughter was taking her to a concert. Appropriate excitement levels were attained. I, for my part, was six kinds of stoked as well.

Nosebleed seats, but a decent view. A nice mix of folks in the stands, although we could have done without a pair of flatulent fellows in front of us, but all in all a fine vantage point. We arrived just after the opening act, so we wouldn't have to wait long for the lads to take the stage.

And then lift off.

Those who know me and know of my musical predilictions would be forgiven for discounting any of my personal reviews as biased. But they are very much the bee's knees. The cat's pajamas. I lost my voice and pranced about like a lunatic. Mom occassionally shouted out the random lyrics she knew (very cute) and was as entertained by my antics as those of Mssrs. Bono and Company. After the show, she remarked that he really was an incredible performer. She may not be a full-on convert, but I think she at least gets it now.

And yes, I have made the transition from not wanting to be caught dead with my folks to happily inviting Mom along to rock shows. I might just be a grown-up yet.

Robyn

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Doo Doo Doo (Lookin' Out My Office Window)

A lovely day it was in DC -- a day such as one is very glad to have a big ol' window in one's office. So imagine my consternation when about lunchtime I heard a tremendous roar from two fighter jets streaking across the lovely blue sky. Having seen a lovely day or two marred by aerial malfeasance in my day, such an occurrance piqued my curiosity. I saw the F-16's go off to the north and west towards a hapless little Cessna. I then saw a big ball of light emanate from one of the jets, which then fired something off with a trail of smoke. This did not do much to allay my consternation, and I instructed our public policy director to fire up the old CNN. The jets circled the little plane, with one of them visibly dipping his wings a few times, before they flew out of sight, but still making quite a racket.

By then we all gathered in Nisha's office and eventually learned what everybody else knows by now, but for a few interesting minutes, we wondered whether or not to implement our trusty post-Bad Thing emergency plan. Eventually everyone went back to work, details to be learned on the evening news. Just a friendly reminder to anybody who thought about getting complacent about the state of things these days.

Robyn

Monday, May 9, 2005

Savannah

I just got back from a weekend getaway to lovely Savannah, GA. I had only been there once before, on a very brief and wholly unsatisfying trip to the riverfront where rancid ice cream was purchased and not much of an impression was made.

Granted, the riverfront can be a bit of a zoo, albeit a zoo with wonderful candy shops (no rancid confections to be found) and cafes that have fabulous fried oyster po' boy sandwiches. The real draw of Savannah is beyond the riverfront, where the city is laid out in a series of lovely squares surrounded by gorgeous gothic houses and trees with Spanish moss. Many of the houses are open to the public as museums, including the birthplace of Juliette Gordon Lowe, founder of the Girl Scouts. So you often see a packs of Brownies traveling about the city as well as people in period costume and drunken college kids (open containers are oh so legal there).

It's a bit of a spooky city, and has a lot of ghost-story-oriented tours and histories which seem to drive a substantial amount of the tourist industry there. How much of it is real and how much is hype is unimportant. At the risk of sounding a bit morbid, they have brilliant cemeteries. We went to Bonaventure Cemetary overlooking the river (free tours on the second Sunday of the month!), which is a great park filled with really beautiful statues and an interesting combination of, er, inhabitants: Confederate soldiers, Pulitzer-winning authors, a healthy representation from the (surprisingly) robust Jewish community, Irish Catholics and Oscar-winning lyricists.

Aside from the spooky factor, I was also most taken by the chow. Savannah being a Southern port city, they specialize in fried fare and seafood. One establishment, The Lady and Sons, requires you to put your name in three hours in advance -- but has spectacular fare. We ate ourselves silly on this trip, which is a fine thing indeed.

Robyn

Friday, April 15, 2005

Party Like It's 1999

Once upon a time there was a little idiot who went to New York to seek her fortune. It was a long ago time, when Paris Hilton was merely a luxurious hotel situated minutes from the Eiffel Tower. When September 11 was just...Saturday. And a small nebbishy bald man with horrible teeth and an even more horrible stage name was the great white hope of the future of music. It was September 1999. The little idiot was me. The orthodontically-challenged maestro was Moby, and oh how I loved him. Such strange and lovely music, like nothing I had ever heard before. It was new, it was exciting, and the best part was nobody back in my little suburban enclave had heard of him. Moby was my wonderful, avant-garde, oh-so-hip, New York secret.

Then about three weeks later Moby licensed every damn track on his CD to every commercial, WB teen melodrama and movie that came down the pike and traded quite a bit of his street cred with it. It was hard to be the vanguard of hip when your "art" was being used to sell shit at Nordstrom. The last time I saw Moby, when he was the uber-successful darling of the music scene, the concert hall was populated with somnambulant hipsters looking quite disinterested in the affairs, rather than the amped-up dirty hippie kids (read: fun people) at my first show.

Not easily daunted, I carried the Moby torch for quite awhile, but time, geopolitics, and something resembling maturity drew my attention away. When once I was going to Moby shows every three months or so, I recently discovered that I had not seen him perform in over four years. When he was to appear at the 9:30 Club in DC this month, I decided to buy tickets, but with a healthy share of skepticism. It couldn't possibly be the same. I was no longer the wide-eyed college freshman of yore, but a bitter old woman...an executive assistant. I doubted that I could heed Moby's poetic call to "rock the body, rock the body, uh-huh."

Oh but rock the body uh-huh I did. Alas, Moby is no longer as in vogue as he once was. But the fun people are back. It was like a convention of short geeky chicks with their tall boyfriends jumping about like mental patients. Many a Napoleon Dynamite shirt was to be seen. Everyone -- Moby included -- seemed happy with the proceedings. The critics hated the show, harping on the performer's fall from grace, as it were. The New York Post reviewed his show there with the headline "Moby Commands Geek Nation." I was delighted. I donned the blue eye makeup and waited for a (non-forthcoming) autograph as in days of yore and happily staggered into the office the next morning on too few hours sleep and a club stamp on my hand.

So much for maturity. So much for being on the cutting edge. So what?

Robyn

Thursday, April 7, 2005

Think You're Having a Bad Day?

From the New York Times
With One Stuck in an Elevator, a Search Sweeps Up 3 Others

By MICHAEL WILSON and JENNIFER 8. LEE

While a Chinese-food deliveryman sat in a stuck elevator for more than three days in a Bronx apartment tower, the police searched the building with such fervor that one resident and his two friends were locked up and even questioned over a barbecue stain on one of their shirts that looked like blood, the resident and the police said yesterday.

The deliveryman, Ming Kuang Chen, 35, disappeared on Friday night after delivering three dinners to 40 West Mosholu Parkway. His bicycle was found locked outside the building.

What followed was an intense police search, which included Emergency Service Unit officers breaking down apartment doors in circumstances that required immediate action, Deputy Chief Michael Collins, a police spokesman, said yesterday.

One such circumstance arose on Saturday afternoon on the 34th floor, where all but one apartment had been searched, and no one was home in that unit, Chief Collins said. A neighbor had told the police that she heard screaming earlier in the hallway, so the officers broke the door down, he said.

Troy Smith, 21, arrived home with a friend and was shocked to find officers wearing helmets and flak jackets in his apartment.

"They cuffed me right there," he said. "I walked in, and detectives were guarding my door. The door was kicked in." They took him to a precinct and took his stained shirt, he said.

"I had sauce on my shirt from three days ago. They made me write, 'I'm Troy Smith. You can have my shirt for testing,'" he said, an account confirmed by Chief Collins. "They kept on coming back and saying, 'Where is the Chinese man and what did you do with him?' I said, 'I don't know.' "

And yet, the whole time, a small camera in a rear corner of the elevator car that held Mr. Chen, Car No. 2, relayed live signals to a functioning - albeit small and dim - monitor in the Tracey Towers security office, where security officers are always present and the police were a frequent presence during the search. No one could recall seeing Mr. Chen on the tiny screen.

He was found on Tuesday after he called for help over the elevator car's intercom shortly after 4 a.m. Firefighters lowered the car from where it had been stuck between the third and fourth floor of the 38-story building, and Mr. Chen faced a day of rehydration and reporters asking how he had survived for 81 hours in a 4-foot-by-61/2-foot box.

Mr. Chen has said that he called repeatedly on the intercom over the weekend, even speaking to security personnel on five or six occasions. A spokesman for the building's manager, Don Miller, said the first anyone was aware of him was on Tuesday morning.

New questions over the state of the elevator surveillance arose yesterday. For instance, even after Mr. Chen call for help was heard Monday morning, security personnel looking for him on the monitor could not see him, Mr. Miller said.

The video quality is far from superior, according to a reporter's brief examination of the monitors yesterday. There are three monitors in the security room, two of which are divided into 16 images apiece. One of those images, slightly smaller than a playing card, shows Car No. 2 in a dimly lit feed.

There is a blind spot of one or two feet in the corner under the camera, said Jennifer Givner, a spokeswoman for the city's Buildings Department.

When Mr. Chen sounded the intercom on Tuesday morning, a red light on a control panel indicated he was in Car No. 2, and yet, security personnel could not see him, Mr. Miller said.
Security for the complex is provided by Copstat Security LLC, a company based in the Bronx. A man at the Copstat headquarters who refused to give his name said that the company declined to comment on the events at Tracey Towers.

Whether Mr. Chen was ever visible on a monitor may never be known. While Mr. Miller said the footage was taped, and those tapes had been given to detectives, the police said no such tapes were made because the cameras are not designed to record, only offer live feeds. Tapes from other cameras in the building were given to officers.

Meanwhile, Mr. Smith's weekend went from bad to worse. After about two hours of questions about Mr. Chen's whereabouts, Mr. Smith was arrested on an unrelated disorderly conduct summons, and spent most of the next two days in a holding cell, awaiting processing. His two friends, a man and a woman, were released after five hours of questioning, Chief Collins said. The forensic test for blood on the seized shirt came back negative.

Mr. Smith knows Mr. Chen from his many delivery orders from the restaurant, Happy Dragon. "He's my friend," he said. "He's cool."

As for Mr. Chen, who spoke with reporters after his rescue on Tuesday, he was out of the public eye on Wednesday. He was convalescing at a friend's home, said City Councilman John C. Liu. Mr. Chen is an illegal immigrant, a fact that his family shared with the police and that was publicized during the manhunt.

"Is he worried? Yes. He's very worried. He has a family to support," Councilman Liu said yesterday, criticizing the police for effectively notifying immigration officials of Mr. Chen's illegal status.

Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said the police do not share immigration information of crime victims or witnesses with federal authorities. A spokesman for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement said no contact had been made with Mr. Chen, and said it was unknown whether any would be.

"Anybody who is here illegally shouldn't be surprised if they're arrested by ICE and placed into removal proceedings. That's just common sense," said the spokesman, Marc A. Raimondi. "ICE prioritizes our enforcement efforts to target those who pose the most significant threat to national security and public safety."

But he added, "Being locked in an elevator doesn't give you a free pass to break the law."

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Mort Rubin

I just returned from Miami, where we attended the funeral of my grandfather, who passed away on March 17. Because my grandmother, his first wife, died before I was born, he is the first grandparent that I've had to bury.

In the past 20 years, Pop-Pop had developed emphysema, lost one kidney and had three heart attacks. But he continued a reasonably active lifestyle for a 79-year-old, and had been working for a cruise line greeting passengers. In the middle of February he became very ill. Heart failure followed by bronchitis and pneumonia and a host of other ailments kept him in a hospital for over a month, and required him to be on a respirator for much of that time. Mom and her brother flew in on the weekends to stay with him. Although he could barely talk and, as one doctor put it, "every organ in his body had been insulted," he still managed to give 'em hell at the hospital. Not content with the staff's assertion that a rather uncomfortable feeding tube couldn't be removed in favor of something less intrusive, Pop-Pop ripped out all 18 inches of the tube and laid it on his pillow while everyone else was distracted by the evening news. That won him a couple of days of comfort courtesy of a much sought-after IV tube, but he suffered another setback. Finally, he suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side. The day after he realized that the best-case scenario was to live in a nursing home in a wheelchair, he showed himself out the door, so to speak, and died in his sleep.

I spoke at his funeral, along with most of his other grandchildren. I don't have anything more original to add here than what I said there. He was the kind of guy who called waitresses "hun" and "doll" and drove around in a black and white Cadillac and was fond of dirty jokes. A trip to the dogtrack was as appropriate an outing for the grandkids as bike rides on the Boardwalk. He was a cool cat who at the end knew he was too hip for the room, and left before he had to face any further indignity.

Robyn

Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Putting it All in Perspective

Yes, the Eagles lost the Super Bowl.

They were not annihilated, as many a naysayer thought they would be. It was a close game. That's the good news. The bad news, however, was that it was ::sigh:: a close game.

But it was a fun night, the last three minutes notwithstanding. Wigs were donned, songs were sung, families were drawn together, and it was all captured on videotape for the future
mortification of our progeny. A most disparate group of Shepherds, Bobby's friends and Bobby's friends' families gathered to pay tribute to that great equalizer of Eastern PA and South Jersey -- the Iggles. These are the things we should remember. It was a great season. Think not of the three interceptions, the poor time management, the missed onside kick and the tendency to run the ball up the middle time and time again to no avail as if this time will be different than the last seven can't you please once pass to the outside -- no to our guy NOT THEIR GUY WHY DONOVAN WHY????

But I digress

So Philly's in a funk right now. But now, with the benefit of a few days hindsight, it's not so bad. I even stumbled across a rather timely parable that made me less ashamed of our zeal for the Boids, and the fact that I'm still picking stubborn green nail polish from my cuticles. Hey, we might be okay after all.

SO what does he do when his team loses?

Monday, January 24, 2005

AAAHHHHWOOOOHAHHH!!!

Title of update refers to collective noise made by Philadelphia metropolitan area and its subsidiaries going absolutely batshit last night at around 6pm.

The Eagles are going to the Super Bowl. The core Shepherd clan shall be united on Redwood Drive on February 6, and I shan't go to work the day after. There were tears last night. And fabulous silver and green makeup. And an extremely bemused gay man at a loss as to why a stupid game could inspire such hysterics in the tiny girl in the horrible green wig leaping and screeching around his group house. I left it to token straight roommate Jeffrey to explain, as I was far too busy violating acceptable DC-neighborhood noise levels.

Alas, I had to keep my victory celebrations to a minimum at the office, as my good pal and fellow tiny red-headed football fan Beth is a traumatized Steelers fan. There will be time enough for slapping the front page of the Inquirer on the office door. As one who understands playoff-induced pain, a certain amount of restraint must be exercised. For now.

Fly eagles fly...

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Very Important Events

Not a moment of peace to be had here in snowy Washington for both the best and worst of reasons as of late. Really, I feel like one Very Important Event has transpired after another since Christmas. InterAction was sent into a tizzy of activity for about two solid weeks dealing with the tsunami crisis. Since IA mainly serves other charity organizations, rather than operate as a public funding institution, we usually get about 2 or 3 calls from the public a week. But we distrbuted a list of our members involved with the tsunami to the Associated Press, who gave it to just about every other media outlet, so we had 200-300 calls a week all of a sudden.
Complicating matters was the fact that a colleague was honeymooning in Thailand at the time, and barely escaped the disaster while causing us a lot of worry in the meantime. It was an extraordinary, awful situation which really taxed the abilities of a large sector of people well-versed in calamity on a global scale. I think we're back on track now, but everyone is still caught up in the momentum.

Amid all of this, I managed to leave the burden of saving the world behind and celebrate my 24th birthday. I was taken out to eat no less than three separate times, which was quite nice. I was also whisked off to NYC by Jeffrey for a lovely weekend of perusing old haunts (Met, West Village) and new. Among the new was the relatively new Museum of Sex in the Flatiron District, which was surprisingly educational. Admittedly, there were moments I got the impression that they were stretching a bit for educational context (let's just say I learned more about foot binding than I'll ever want to know in the ancient China exhibit), but not at all a seedy experience. It's no substitute for la Met, but it's quite interesting.

Back in DC, the snow and the inaugeration have put the city in a state of suspended animation. Most businesses (including IA) were closed for the inaugeration -- not so much so people could attend, but because about 100 sqaure blocks were shut down making commutes impossible.
Actually, I know of no one from DC who went. I myself stayed inside and watched the proceedings on TV. It's not that I begrudge the inauguration taking place. It's just that my going to W's second inaugeration would be a bit like me attending the Carolina Panthers NFC Championship victory party last year. Someone's gotta win, and they won fair and square, but some parties just ain't my scene. Besides, it's not like it's a royal funeral or anything. That, as we've learned, is a thing not to be missed.

And the hits keep on coming. Tomorrow the Eagles play their fourth consecutive NFC Championship, which could determine whether Monday morning will be greeted with abject delight or despair. Regardless of the outcome, Monday will be guaranteed to either compound post-victory elation or assuage my horrible melancholy with the announcement of the U2 Vertigo tour, to be followed on Tuesday for a ticket pre-sale for dedicated fan club members. I believe that that's a fine slice of the drama of the human experience for one month.

Robyn

Sunday, January 16, 2005

The Big 2-5

Some hardcore partying went down for the big 2-5 on Friday, friends. Nothing says hardcore like a "dining lounge" called Cloud, where you can be served blue cocktails with marshmallows while sitting on a big fluffy bed. Y'heard? We didn't actually sit on the fluffy bed, 'cuz my crew was too large. So we sat at a table. Drinkin' marshmallow cocktails. That's just how we roll. Then my girls bought me a donut. Word.

But this party didn't stop there. We went to the Big Hunt on Connecticut Avenue, which is fun to go to, because after a few Jack and Cokes, really funny things happen when you try to say that bar's name. I think they did that on purpose when they named that place. Fo' real. Incidentally, it's good to order Jack and Cokes after marshmallow-tinis, because you get to indulge your boozy sweet tooth, and feel like a bad-ass in the same night. Good times.

Got home after midnight, fell asleep on the couch, and woke up with "Flavor of Love" on VH1 and the cat passed out on my tummy. A very successful birthday indeed. Holla.

Monday, January 3, 2005

Not Just Laci

The Washington Post ran a really fascinating article on the prevalence of new or expectant mothers dying violently. Written by Donna St. George, thearticle is a result of a year-long investigation by the Post. At first, the study only focused on Maryland, where they found that homicide was the leading cause of death for pregnant or recently pregnant women (20%). The findings prompted the team to do a more extensive study of 1367 killings since 1990.

Among the more alarming things:
In the DC area alone, three pregnant women were killed in the final seven weeks of 2004.

Three weeks after Laci Peterson disappeared, an 18-year-old woman 80 miles away was shot in the head by her boyfriend as she walked home from the grocery store. Fatherhood, he believed, would get in the way of his music career.

For more than 70% of abused women, pregnancy does nothing to stem the abuse. For 27% of abused women, the abuse actually starts during pregnancy.

51% of the victims in the study were black, 46% white. 12% of the victims were identified as Hispanic, but could be of any race.

42% of the victims had less than a high school education. 36% were high school graduates. 22% had at least some college education.

Most women were killed by the men by whom they were pregnant.

It just gives you something to think about. As horrible as what happened to Laci Peterson was, hers was by no means an isolated case.

The article can be found here