A musing

Occasionally, in a moment of musing about your past, you google a memory. Indeed, this is what must have happened, as I got the most remarkable email today from someone who reached this blog by googling the lyrics to the “United Nations” song that I used to love so much back in my elementary school days at the UN International School.

The reader writes: I googled "United Nations on the march" and found the lyric at your site. As a youngster at a bungalow colony day camp in the Catskils in the 1940s we sang the song. Sadly, I haven't heard it since.

This, then, is the power of the blog. It allows you to get close to people over “blogger dinners.” It allows for friendship to grow exponentially. And, it allows you to talk to someone who, 20 years before your own elementary school days, was belting “Take heart all you nations swept under!” at a camp in the Catskills.

Happy bloggerversary to JFW, the blog that gave me a leg up on this blogging business.

This has happened to me!

I opened the New Yorker this afternoon to the following ad from a credit card company:


(nc: poor Glenna -- she takes the plunge and then gets mocked for it by a credit company!) 

Alongside the photo were these words: It didn’t seem right to us, either. We thought it a little odd that Glenna from Duluth would spend $282 at the Screaming Needle in Hollywood. With Fraud Early Warning, XX can recognize unusual spending and stop it.

Now wait a minute! There is a clear insinuation that a 50 + (okay maybe a bunch of pluses) woman living in Duluth is staid and priggish and that she lacks an irreverent side that would cause her to hop on a plane to LA and get herself a tattoo.

Maybe. I don’t know Glenna. But then, does XX Company? And what else do they know about Glenna? Is there a person who goes through her every receipt and says “Yep, that fits, that’s Glenna!” or “No way would she buy something so gauche, so risqué, that Glenna, she’s no spring chicken now is she? And from Duluth, too.”

I’ve had my card rejected in places and so I know the feeling. I have been warned by operators whom I have frantically called to avoid the embarrassment of being arrested for non-payment, that next time I would be well advised to call ahead, to warn the company of impending odd expenses in weird and out-of-the-way places. It’s for my own protection, after all. What, from myself??

Cost – Benefit Analysis

Last night I attended a blogger dinner: five bloggers (representing Boring, Bed, SirEP and Ocean) sat face to face and talked about the trials and tribulations of life in the big league (of work? academia? blogging? all of the above). Why call it a blogger dinner? Why not just dinner with friends? Because this, like my dinners with Mother In Law and with A, B & F, would not have happened were it not for our blogging. Indeed, in this case, I would never have met the people at all. There is unquestionably a sizable social benefit to this blogging thing.

However, there is also a cost. I have noticed that one side effect of blogger dinners is that people feel terribly anxious about posting something about the event afterwards. It’s as if we have to be especially witty and clever and insightful, we have to stretch ourselves beyond our normal boring selves. In other words, we have to put out a spin that exceeds our capacities.

Well NOT ME! I will not let this become a permanent liability, a cost, a burden, I will lead by example, set the pace, storm ahead with a DUMB POST ABOUT THE BLOGGER DINNER!

Keep that in mind as you read my not especially profound observations about last night:

1. It was one of those interesting situations where you’re sitting there waiting and only one other person shows up. Many minutes pass and still it’s just the two of you. You wonder, have I posted something recently that offends? Did they all get pulled over by a police car and are now talking themselves out of a jail sentence for speeding? What? [ans: the latter.]

2. This was a sober bunch. It’s been a while since I’ve been out with a group of people where the dominant and most popular drink was water. I did not cave in to peer pressure. I stayed with my rule that if it’s a dinner where the entrees cost more than $5.99 per plate then there should be wine.

3. Talk fast or be prepared to move when the waiters start putting up chairs on tables, hinting that you’re overstaying your welcome. It’s Madison: the chairs on tables routine begins at 10. What would this town do without the Barnes & Noble café, which stays open until 11…

4. My devious subtle testing revealed that the bloggers have been reading Ocean. They knew, for instance, that I had misspelled “hardy peasant stock.” [it appears as “hearty” in the blog – something that I affectionately preserve only in part because I don’t retro-edit posts that are more than a day old.] Or, they were good at faking it.

5. The bloggers I met are terrific. They are witty and smart and funny and cool. The lesson: if your blog is good, you’re no dork.

6. A photo. There must be a photo. The Ocean rep took it and so she is missing from the pack. The rest-- here they are, the whole boring, beddy, sirepy bunch of them:

closing down Barnes & Noble