An Education

Caveat: My children are surfing the Internet playing with virtual fish as I write this.

Just finished reading Nick Hornby’s screenplay for “An Education”. As an aspiring playwright, I especially enjoyed the introductory section where Hornby tells the story of making this movie based on Lynn Barber’s autobiographical essay about her affair with a shady older man at the beginning of the 1960s.

Hornby points out the challenge in rewriting a memoir where a woman in her sixties writes about her sixteen year-old self. The point of a memoir is to be as smart as possible about one’s younger self. Meanwhile, “in a screenplay, you have to deny the character that insight otherwise there’s no drama, just a character understanding herself and avoiding mistakes.”

This made me think about episodes in my life that contributed to my “Education,” and the distance between the woman I am today and the naïve girl I was when I graduated from college. As I raise my own children, I wonder how to impart some of this acquired knowledge to them, so they can avoid the painful mistakes I made.

Children Interrupt: “Mommy can I make my bed and fold my pajamas for the rest of the year so I can earn $29 to buy some virtual fish and pearls?

Me: “No, but what you can do is think about ways to get a bunch of children around the world to ask their parents for money to buy things that don’t even exist. That’s a smart person who came up with that idea.”

Situation upon graduating from college
Graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude from Wellesley with honors degree in English literature.

Applicability and use of this degree in finding real world employment (in my particular case): None.

Sales and Trading job in Global Derivatives:
Failed this recruiting interview at a major international bank based on not being able to tell the department head a convincing story about how “street smart” I was. Not knowing what a derivative was probably didn’t help either, especially after lying about how “motivated I was” to get the job/find gainful employment/not go back home and live with my parents. Apparently I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know what a derivative was…

Thereafter, became extremely preoccupied with how to remedy the street smart situation, or more practically, convince other people I had remedied it.

Fundraising consultant/geisha:
Had to rely on family connections to get this job…was fired after 3 months for, among other failings: “talking while stuffing envelopes” and “forgetting the Xerox color-coding scheme for hand-outs.” The ambiance was straight out of the 1960s Mad Men secretarial pool, staffed by young girls from good families biding their time before marriage and housewives bored with the Junior League. Legendary was the Milf who dressed to emphasize her legs and décolletage as she leaned towards male chief executives at the moment of the crucial ask, imploring them to “think of the children.”

Most useful piece of information learned there—“always send hand-written envelopes with real stamps, girls, when you want to look classy and have strangers read your mail.” Whilst your vulgar (or more honest) operator might actually sleep with the client, a society lady, with well-honed skills, plays on your narcissism, vanity and social ambitions to clean you out. Hopefully it’s for a good cause. Least useful piece of information learned there: listening to The Head talk about all the fun things she did with her friend, The Billionaire. “The very rich are very different.”

Even then, I knew: no they’re not. They just don’t give a shit. Lots of very poor people don’t give a shit either and are “very different” too. The middle class, however, are most definitely not “very different” because they’re typically obsessed with what people think of them and studying the mores of their superiors in hopes of moving up the social ladder.

Temp:
After disastrous fund-raising geisha experience, temped as actual replacement secretary for partners at (what was then) Big Six Accounting and Consulting. Was a big hit because I did not talk to my boyfriend on the phone, smack gum or put my feet on the desk. One Managing Partner of Tax was particularly impressed with me because I came up with the brilliant idea of sorting his mail. Also had to listen to him ask me if “my parents could spell” because my name had an “h” in it. Did not feel it was worth my time to explain that my maternal grandparents grew up in France or that other languages and cultures have other ways of spelling things.

What I learned: If I ever wanted to find out the real dirt on what is going on at a company or what certain people are like, I would definitely ask the secretaries.

Mutual Fund Report Writer:
First real job I got was as a writer for a financial company, editing the annual reports for their mutual funds. The department head who hired me was straight out of Mad Men/had been the head of creative for a major SF ad agency at an earlier point in his life. He hired me because I could write, read books, liked to discuss literature and because he had fond memories of dating Wellesley girls when he got his (never-to-be-used) degree at Harvard Law.

Memorable moment in job: telling billion dollar fund manager that Humpty Dumpty was perhaps not the best metaphor for the currently depressed stock that he expected to rebound because “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men never could put Humpty back together again.”

Grateful for: fun colleagues and wonderful second boss, former school teacher and published poet who showed me that women don't have to undermine each other in the workplace, and that you can be an effective boss without being a total hardass.

Realization: Unless you’re J.K Rowling, writing ability and familiarity with children’s stories are relatively low paying skills. On the other hand, managing OPM (other people’s money) is a great paying job, but only a fool would pay me to do that.

JBoss Years

1998: Possibility: Marc would probably have happily built JBoss at Sun Microsystems for a 40% increase in his Pre-Sales Engineer salary and conferral of “Distinguished Engineer” title. Reality: It was impossible to build JBoss at Sun at that time, even more so for a low-level employee with non-established credentials.

Marc meets founders of WebLogic at JavaOne. They ask him if Sun is still the same fucked up company it used to be. He interviews for job at WebLogic, but this goes nowhere because they are bought by BEA and their hiring is frozen.

Our discussion about Marc leaving his job to become an entrepreneur:

“You’re going to leave a secure job with health care and benefits to write free software? If you are going to put all those hours into something, why not something that will enhance our future and pay for the baby’s college education?”

Ultimately, it was quit his job or go to therapy and pay somebody else to listen to how much he hated his job.

Realization: You have to really suck to not be able to find an equivalent, non-fulfilling job a year later if things don’t work out. In that case, you’re no worse off than you were before, but at least you’ve gotten the “coulda, woulda, shoulda” thing out of your system.

1999: Marc leaves to work on JBoss and receives a 300% salary increase for non-JBoss related software consulting in that period. Comment from a friend and former colleague about his desire to work as a software developer: “You’re moving down the food chain.”


2000: “This is not just a bad business plan, this is a horrible business plan:” Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital.

2001: Marc’s first start-up attempting to commercialize JBoss fails. My husband and I, along with our child and dog, move in with my parents. Marc comments to our lawyer at the time: “We’re the original garage company.” Lawyer replies: No you’re not. You’re the original in-law’s garage company.”

I decide to help him until he gets his feet off the ground, but wind up staying because the momentum really picks up.

2002: Twins are born, home office gets small. We look for office space as part of Georgia Tech’s ATDC Incubator program. ATDC’s response: “JBoss is a consulting company. VC’s don’t invest in consulting companies’ ergo a VC will never invest in you, so you’re not a fit for us.” We get outside office space elsewhere.

2004: We’re still not sure we want them, but top VC firms, attracted by JBoss’s user community and growing business, compete to invest in us. No VC would touch us with a 10-foot pole in 2000 when we had an early stage product and a company that was bleeding overhead. If they had, they would have bought us for pennies on the dollar and we ultimately would have gotten very little equity.

We built JBoss on our own because we have no other option and because it’s “fun to blow shit up” and beat down a billion dollar industry, especially if you can figure out how to get people to pay you to do this and make money that is good for you, whilst laughably small for your fat, established competitors.

Lesson learned: “banks only lend to the rich. Them that has ‘gits.”


Education

David Mamet’s definition of street smart (referring to his Hollywood screenwriting work): “the moment when you’ve been seduced and abandoned sufficiently to tire of it.”

Am I more street smart now? Yes, this is because I’m older and I’ve actually been on the metaphorical “street”.

It occurs to me that the only people who are sufficiently sharp to be street smart without painful experiences are the motherfuckers who are always dreaming up ways to screw over other people first, so they’re super savvy at anticipating how other people plan to screw them.

When you are nobody, with no money and no connections and want to break into an established industry and do things differently you can expect to hear two things: “Who the fuck do you think you are. Piss off.”

Interested in being an entrepreneur? Re-read, the children’s story: The Little Red Hen. The only point anybody wants to “help” you is when it’s time to eat the bread.

Painful Learning Experience: The first partnership contract we signed at JBoss paid us on the basis of production sales of the partners’ software with clients of theirs who also ran JBoss. After several months without getting a check, we looked up their sales structure and realized this particular company didn’t sell production licenses; they sold development licenses.

Realization: Otherwise smart people are particularly prone to falling for low-level cons because it never occurs them that people would take advantage of them in such an obvious way. To this day, I still wonder what advantage these people thought they would obtain by pretending to pay us something as opposed to the ill-will they were going to generate when we figured out what they were up to. The irony: we weren’t even expecting money at that point, we were just were happy to be seen with them…

Growing up/getting more savvy: Being excluded from giving talks at JavaOne, realizing Sun had locked down all the conference space in San Francisco that week, realizing that it never occurred/was not feasible for them to lock down the bar across the street and holding our first alternative JBoss One conference at the Thirsty Bear. Handing out flyers for our conference at Moscone center and being treated like unwanted panhandlers/agitators by Sun’s Key 3 Media lackeys.

Realizing that a normal pass to get into JavaOne cost $1000, but press passes are free: Finding sympathetic editors and becoming the “boat people” of J2EE article publishing the three months before the conference—with multiple authors per article.

Possible advice to children? Per Neal Stephenson’s marine-raider and all-round badass Bobby Shaftoe in Cryptonomicon: “Display Adaptability.”

Ability to effectively transmit the benefits of my experiences to children without them actually experiencing any of this for themselves? Unresolved.

Advice My Mother Gave Me

Most useless advice (transmitted from her mother's memories of house parties in the French countryside in the post-war years): "When you stay at other people's houses make sure you scrub out the bathtub, sink and toilet after you have used them. Don't assume the servants are there to do this for you. They will be reporting any negligence in your personal hygiene back to Madame. Oh, and always tip the servants.

Advice I use most frequently: (my mother worked for many years as a chef and restaurant manager): Always angle your knuckles, on the hand that you are holding the food with, away from the knife when you're slicing. Always serve things that you can re-heat at the last minute when you have large numbers of guests.

Advice my mother gave me that I'm still trying to figure out: An object should either be beautiful or useful.

Conversations Between My Boys

Tw1: I do "this"...

Tw2: Oh no you can't, because my tanks have nano protection...

Tw1: But then my guards come and they have a neutralizer for nano-protection and they arrest you...

Tw2: Yes, but then my samurais have a weapon against your box and they free me...

Tw1: Ok, my tanks, the best of the world come, and they kill you...

Tw2: Well, then my planes come and they kill your tanks...

Tw1: That's not fair, you can't do that!

Tw2: Sure I can, and I kill you!...

Tw1: Whatever...

Author's Note: Twin 1 and Twin 2 are 7-yr old boys

The Reluctant Skiier

Skiing, like golf, was not one of those activities that strengthened the marital bond. Nothing like being tricked onto a descent that is beyond one’s ability, concentrating desperately on making it to the next turn, while spouse cheerfully schusses down slope offering annoying advice, or worse still abandoning you to catapult down and land face forward, backside and legs up…like a sprawling cockroach. Might have screamed from top of slope with vocabulary that would shame a fishwife.

Advice from random man in the gondola: “It’s better to look good than be good.”

Children: the three that are old enough to ski or snowboard are all better than me now. They’re not even teenagers and already patronizing. Every dollar spent on ski or snowboard school is well worth it. Can I keep them in those programs until they are 18?

This feeling was compounded by experience riding in lifts with Other People’s Children, especially their surly teenagers. One sixteen year old girl whined: “Mo’om, I can’t believe you got me this grody sunscreen,” before flicking it off in disgust towards her father. My sister and I had couldn’t resist having fun with this one.

“It’s so hard to be your age, isn’t it?”
“Believe me, you don’t want to get to our age with fair skin like that and no sunscreen. Sun damage! All those unsightly wrinkles.”
“Not to mention the cost of laser treatment to get rid of those liver spots.”

Might be a bad mother: on another gondola ride, proudly explained to a woman that my advanced snowboarder daughter is still in classes so she can do things like the terrain park, where she needs more professional instruction. She replies: “Oh, in the local ER where I work, we call that the trauma park.”

Vocabulary: Seriously cannot imagine myself picking up the jargon. Am I the only one who thinks “Got a face shot in Pow!” sounds like manga porn? On the other hand, did find myself learning useful words like “white out”, for skiing in extreme low visibility and “graupel”, for the precipitation that’s somewhere between freezing rain and snow, and generally flays your face.

Skiing powder: Um…vastly overrated for people of my ability. More like sliding over ice patches and into snow drifts. Hubby’s advice: “Just go faster and you’ll glide over it” not particularly easy to apply when you’re already scared out of your mind.

Must be lacking in adrenaline response because don’t feel need for speed. Can’t get image of people who ski better than me and come home from vacation in various casts out of my mind. It’s hard keeping up with four children as it is; can’t imagine what that would be like if I were in need of massive physical rehabilitation.

Ski boots are: an instrument of torture.

Ski equipment is: a pain to keep up with when you have four children--all those face masks, goggles, mittens, helmets, boots, poles, skis. Not to mention complications when child utters most dreaded word in skiing vocabulary: “I need to pee.”

Ski food: $60 to feed family of five on junk food at the top of the mountain, anybody?

Best part of skiing: kids are fully occupied, ditching afternoon skiing (am tired by then anyway) to sip hot chocolate by the fire and read a book or bake Nestle Toll House cookies and watch the classic movie channel!

What is Thanksgiving?

An English woman asked me this simple enough question today. Thanksgiving is the biggest American family holiday. It takes place on the last Thursday of November and is also the biggest air travel date in the US. As a family holiday, it is associated with all the things people usually conjure up when they think of family obligations, and people they only see once a year, with whom they may or may not get on well. My favorite movie about Thanksgiving and the modern American family is Home for the Holidays starring Holly Hunter.

In grade school, American children dress up as Pilgrims and Indians and are taught how the Pilgrims escaped religious persecution in England and gave thanks for their very first successful harvest in the New World, with a celebratory feast to which they invited their new friends, the Indians. Of course some of these escapees of religious persecution didn’t turn out to be the most tolerant people themselves. Then perhaps the Indians weren’t thankful when we later killed them and took their land, but only kill-joys bring that stuff up.

Thanksgiving also comes with various required dishes that many Americans hate, but prepare anyway because otherwise it wouldn’t feel like Thanksgiving—the chief ones are turkey, sweet potatoes, wild rice, cranberries and pumpkin pie. Depending on your individual tastes, the recipes you select, and your cooking ability, these dishes can either be mouth-watering or stomach-churning. In my case, having a Mother Who Could Cook turned me into the worst of both worlds--a judgmental eater, who never bothered to learn any of the basic holiday dishes because there was always somebody there willing and happy to cook them for me and everybody else.

Since I will be away from home and want to cook my own Thanksgiving dinner, my good friend has suggested I go to the Butterball website, which even has a turkey hotline. Whenever, I despair of my country, I am comforted to see this return to our roots and thoughtful marketing, aimed at me, the consumer. The Butterball website dispenses useful information like how long to bake your turkey based on its weight, how big a turkey you should get based on the number of people you are inviting and a recipe selection that caters to the two Americas—those whose lofty and unachievable ideals that lead them to attempt a demi-glace once a year, and those who happily grab the bouillon cube and water; those make their own pie crusts and those who grab the ready-made variety off the freezer shelf at the grocery store. In the US, there’s even a new option for centrists—the roll-out circle of pie crust that you can feel good about pressing into your pan, sometimes it’s even made with real butter.

A family member who once worked in Unilever’s baby foods division described the middle-ground consumer as the Holy Grail of Marketing. I asked her what Unilever thought about women like me who breast-fed for a year and made their own baby food? She said: “We don’t even bother to try and market to people like you. Our ideal consumer is the guilt-ridden mother who is willing to pay more to give her baby healthier off-the-shelf options.” After four children, whom I duly breastfed and made healthy home-made purees for, that woman is me! I’m glad to learn that I matter, that someone cares. Thank you for giving me those choices Butterball!

By the way, it was once brought to my attention in blog comments, some of you are offended by the fact I and other citizens of the US call ourselves Americans. Yes, some of us are aware that we are only one country in the continent of North America. However, if you can’t find any grossly more offensive use of imperialist, Euro-centric, US-centric linguistic manipulation to focus on, shame on you. Please devote your energies to finding and marketing a better alternative, preferably identifying with the struggle of indigenous native peoples…and not a16th century Italian mapmaker.

Book Review: The Hemingses of Monticello

I picked this up as an impulse buy at the book store, and I'm glad I did. Like most Americans, I associated Monticello with Thomas Jefferson. Although I hadn’t read any Jefferson biographies, what I had read about him lead me to admire him as a Great Man of the Enlightenment—humanist, writer, builder of nations, universities, and of course, his own very lovely neoclassical house on a hill—Monticello—Italian for little mountain.

I wasn’t ignorant of the contradictions of the writer of “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” being a slave-owner, who had a long-term relationship and fathered multiple children with one of his slaves. I just didn’t see the interest of commenting on the obvious contradictions or indulging in historical “what if” fantasies. Thankfully, neither does Annette Gordon-Reed.

Her book is not about de-bunking Jefferson. She’s more interested in members of his family, about whom much less is known—the eponymous "Hemingses of Monticello". Gordon-Reed focuses on the Hemings for two convenient reasons: their connection to a well-known American historical figure, the fact that, due to this connection, there is somewhat more documentation about them than their peers in the plantation South.

What did this South look like? Gordon-Reed describes a pre-Revolutionary population of opportunistic frontier pioneers, living off tobacco as a cash crop. The English govt. gave the settlers land based on a head-count system—a certain number of acres for themselves and every other person whose passage they paid to the Colonies. Over time, the primary labor for the plantations evolved from English-born indentured servants to imported, enslaved Africans and their descendants. She explains that the typical Colonial plantation-owner was deeply indebted, usually to English trading firms and speculates that the self-interest in canceling that debt, as well as the Colonists’ desire to further encroach westward into the Indian lands (limited by Britain pre-Revolution) were less lofty ideals that may have accompanied “no taxation without representation.”

The story begins with Elizabeth Hemings, the daughter of an African-born woman and an English ship’s captain. There is some evidence to the effect that Hemings’ father recognized that he had a daughter and may have wanted to free her, but could not because her mother was the property of another man, who refused to sell her. She explains how, the word mulatto, for mixed-race people of African and European descent comes from the word mule, an animal that cannot reproduce itself—that the Colonies had laws against miscegenation but they were only applied to poor whites or situations where the mother was white and the father was black. When plantation-owners like Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, took slave mistresses, like Elizabeth Hemings, and fathered children with them, the law looked the other way.

The growing number of these mixed-race children and the constant fear of slave revolts, caused the colonists to significantly depart from English law. The English tradition would have granted the child the legal status of the father, which would have meant freedom. Instead the Colonies looked to Roman law as inspiration, basing a child’s legal status on that of its mother—thus the children of free fathers and enslaved mothers, would remain enslaved.

The Hemingses were Thomas Jefferson’s family in the literal sense, not just from a paternalistic plantation owner’s view. Many of Elizabeth Hemings’s children were his wife’s half-brothers and half-sisters. When he married Martha Wayles, Elizabeth and her children came with her to Monticello. One of these half-sisters was Sara (called Sally) Hemings, who became Jefferson’s mistress and the father of his children, after his wife’s death. Gordon-Reed explains how the Hemings family’s mixed-race status and blood connections to the Wayles/Jeffersons gave them a privileged status at Monticello—many of them were taught to read and write, they were given better clothes than their enslaved brethren, taught trades, exempted from field labor, given more freedom of movement. Some members of the Hemings family eventually received their freedom, something that would not be an option for the enslaved people of Monticello, outside that family. Gordon-Reed makes the point that house work, while physically less taxing than field labor, was certainly arduous enough and presented the stress of negotiating emotional and physical proximity to the plantation masters. It also cut them off from the more Afro-centric traditions/culture that the fieldworkers were able to maintain.

Gordon-Reed is careful about not generalizing or making assumptions where they cannot be made. She notes that an enslaved woman, like Elizabeth Hemings, could not refuse sex with a white man, whether the children that resulted from these relationships were the product of rape, or whether there existed some emotional attachment with the children’s father depended on individual circumstances, not documented for the historical researcher. She notes that the same was more or less true for white women and their husbands. While these women had a relationship that existed “in law,” they often did not necessarily choose or love these husbands.

One of the more striking facts that I learned about Jefferson is that his wife died from complications resulting from her frequent pregnancies and childbirth. Gordon-Reed points out that while he apparently loved his wife and was inconsolable at her death, he could not have been ignorant of his role in the circumstances causing her death. On her deathbed, Martha Jefferson made her husband promise never to take another wife, a promise Gordon-Reed speculates was likely motivated by her own experience with two stepmothers and the desire to protect her children. Jefferson kept his promise to his wife, and later when seeking another outlet for sexual companionship, looked no farther than with her enslaved half-sister, thus keeping it all in the family, with a woman who did not have a legal status and could never be a step-mother to his children in the eyes of the law.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but it does shine a not-very-comforting light on a not-so-distant era, a world where the children of the plantation owners would be given an enslaved child their own age to be a companion and later servant, a world where the house on the mountain is a symbol for the desire to aesthetically and morally distance oneself from the harsh realities of the plantation economy and the enslaved peoples that make it work; a house that was literally built and run by Jefferson’s own mixed-race family members; a reminder that the leisure to pursue the accomplishments achieved by Thomas Jefferson were underwritten by the enslaved labor of the people who tended to him, to his family, and his plantation. It also gives a face to those enslaved people, and looks at how they carved an identity for themselves, particularly, how a mixed-race family like Hemings both benefited from and paid a price for the different and ambiguous status they occupied within the Peculiar Institution.

She's Still Not Preoccupied with 1985

I first heard this song waiting for carpool pick-up in my Volvo SUV☺ Not very nice to mothers are you Bowling For Soup? In cheesy recent pop, we much prefer Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom (has got it going on)” thank you very much. While I did (and still do) enjoy a lot of 80s music, I was also happy to put that decade behind me—no snakeskin miniskirt, boyfriend, or Duran Duran concerts to wax nostalgic about there.

My memories of the high school in the 80s have a lot more in common with Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep than “The Breakfast Club” or “Sixteen Candles.”

So it is not without irony that I find myself shopping for an 80’s theme party at H&M, where clothes from that decade seem to have made a comeback. They are playing “Blister in the Sun,” a female-vocalist, Euro-pop version that lacks all the angst of the Violent Femmes original. I score a pair of leatherette leggings, fuchsia satin top and black Members Only-style jacket. Paying for these clothes, wearing rather conservative and uninspired “bourge-y” sweater, slacks and Ferragamo handbag, I’m sure the register girl at H&M thinks I’m schizophrenic or have a whole alternative night-life as a street-walker.

After the H&M experience, I feel the need to explain to the 20-something sales-girl at Sephora the objective behind my request for shimmery fuchsia eye shadow: “I’m buying this for an 80s party” meaning “I don’t normally have this bad taste.” The sales girl with the dyed black hair and nose ring (who definitely was not born earlier than 1980) is impressed. “Una fiesta, anos ochenta, que guay!” She explains this to her gay male sales associate with the Clark Kent-style glasses. He’s impressed too. “Una fiesta ochentera! We wish we were going.” Are the 80s suddenly cool again, even for people too young to remember that decade?

Actual items of clothing or accessories worn by Nathalie MF in the 80s

1) Baggy sweater and leg warmers
2) Stirrup pants
3) Jellies shoes
4) Neon socks
5) Shirts with shoulder pads
6) Large hoop ear-rings
8) Stonewashed jeans with zippers at the bottom of the leg. I babysat many hours to save up the $50 for that pair of Guess jeans.
9) Overalls
10) Catholic school-girl plaid skirt, white shirt with Peter Pan collar, knee socks and penny loafers--until my transfer to “The John Knox Institute” which didn’t have a uniform, but did have a strict dress code
11) Lots of Laura Ashley floral skirts and dresses. Embarrassing but true. I spent a lot of time ironing yards of floral fabric to perfect this look.
12) Bermuda shorts and argyle knee socks.
13) Kelly green and electric blue eye-liner
7) Pouf-dress for prom
14) Total write-off year? 8th grade: braces, bad Farrah Fawcett haircut, put on a few pounds, but did not grow taller, had chicken pox the summer before, which was not good for skin, almost failed Algebra…

Then vs. Now

Favorite High School Reunion depiction—30 Rock Episode where Liz Lemon goes back to suburban Philadelphia for her 20th reunion: their private plane gets stranded in the bad weather and Jack accompanies her. She says nobody will believe he’s young enough to be their classmate and he counters: “Rich 50 is like middle-class 37.” She remembers being a nerdy outcast, but they all remember her as being mean, sarcastic and intimidating. She plays spin the bottle and winds up with Jack. They not only don’t kiss, he decides her classmates are right about her.

Sure I was: Nerdy and sarcastic, but most definitely not intimidating.

Happy I grew up then because….no cell phones, messaging or Internet. The stupid things you said and did were confined to throw-away notes or your high school yearbook--not broadcasted, mass-distributed and memorialized in the ether.

Moved on to the 90s for:

Curtis Sittenfeld “Prep” fame-whore/narrow-miss media humiliation

Graduated from college in 1994. Pitched my failure to find a job, combined with large number of interview opportunities to Rolling Stone writer for their “Gen X column—looking for the first job episode.” Used winning lines like “I discussed this with my grandmother and her friends and they said “Honey, we just don’t know what to tell you. When we graduated from college, we joined the Junior League and started playing bridge’;” “I used to write about Personality and Artistic Theory, now look at me, I’m writing about evaporators and batch digesters;” “I picked which college recruiting meetings to attend based on the quality of their buffet spread;” “I failed my interview for a derivatives sales and trading position at a large multi-national bank. I don’t think it mattered so much that I didn’t know what a derivative was…it was the moment I discussed my senior thesis on Samuel Johnson’s theories about being un-able to enjoy/live-in the present because we are constantly fixated on a past or future, which is either far worse or impossibly idealized compared to the ever-vanishing present…where The Head wrote me off as not possessing the driven, goal-oriented Derivatives personality.”

Almost (sort of, not) briefly Infamous

The article never got published and I got three good meals out of this (including one at an upscale restaurant!) on Rolling Stone’s tab.

Will never be representative of my generation because

I actually know most of the lyrics to Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone”…

The Beauty Issue

My husband and his friend both assume that another friend of theirs is quite a hit among the ladies. Apparently high school and college were good times for X. “Can you imagine that they used to call him the 'Devastator'."

The irony is that neither my husband, nor his friend, bothered to ask actual women, including their own wives, what they think of X. The man in question is nice enough looking, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about him. The truth is that all above-average looking people are simple abstractions to me, unless they’ve written, said or done something that particularly piques my interest.

I don’t relate too well to the (outward) absence of obvious flaws in other people—like being too nice or too beautiful. No doubt this stems from an instinct to preserve dignity. One wonders if the unnaturally beautiful or virtuous might be applying their own (higher) standards to us: aka “could use an extra hour of treadmill every day,” or “needs to use more age-defying facial moisturizer” or “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it.”

Even worse, if I suspect that an above-average good-looking person spends a lot of time improving or maintaining their physical appearance. Extreme self-discipline also makes me uncomfortable—seems too much like a self-mortification fetish. I, myself, last tried a diet in 2005—the South B(i)tch ™, which is exactly how carb-deprivation made me feel. Every time I’ve made an effort to diet or exercise more, I’ve lost the same five pounds, which immediately come back--since I haven’t been willing to make a Permanent Lifestyle Change. I do love walking and hiking, for the pleasure of these activities, not because they are connected in my mind with Self-Improvement. The irony is that all these men who spend hours buffing up in the gym would probably get more female attention if they did something like join a cooking class or book club or learn to dance.

On the self-improvement note, I recently received an email inviting me to a book signing by a former high school classmate who has written a book of lists to help people cope with those life-changing events—buying a new house, getting married, having children, getting divorced, dealing with death, and even the impossibly improbable like the World Trade Center Bombing on 9-11. I thought about this. I make lists too. This gives me a convenient sense of accomplishment, while enabling me to further procrastinate from the tedious things I mostly don’t want to do. I put things in neat stacks or star emails in my in-box. My rationale is that if something is important enough, somebody will remind me to do it and it will then pop back to the top of the list, and eventually I’ll take care of it.

Are women less judgmental about physical appearances than men? I thought about men who would not fall into the category of Somebody Whom Other People Consider Exceptionally Attractive that I would find interesting, like Salman Rushdie, for instance. I loved The Enchantress of Florence. What sort of woman, I wonder does a sensitive, deep writer-type like Salman Rushdie find attractive? Wife number four, Padma, model, celebrity chef. She's beautiful and she can cook, what went wrong there? Apparently, she wasn’t supportive enough of his career. What could the source of the “connection” he feels with most recent girlfriend, Pia Glenn be? Oh wait, that didn’t work out either…because he couldn’t get over Padma. He may write like an angel, but he appears to have the emotional maturity of a 16 year-old…

The interesting thing about getting older is that, for most people, it’s a great equalizer. Apparently X has been going to pick up his children at their school, and noticed that the high school girls in their plaid mini-skirts and knee socks still look cute, but they don’t give him a second look. However, he feels that his appearance is quite appreciated by these girls’ mothers. Sorry “Devastator” you’re cougar bait now.