Customer Therapy
For the most part, we roam the aisles of big-box stores alone, hunter-gatherers fending for ourselves. At most, a multitasking cashier on the periphery might holler out an aisle number for us. But have you noticed how in certain places, like phone stores and banks, customer service reps now lavish an inordinate amount of time and attention on each customer? How they lay out every option available, elicit an autobiography on the spot, and dwell lovingly on every possible customizable feature that would suit that person’s “needs” (how I hate the cosseting use of that word for adults — so infantilizing!), lacing the presentation with a simulacrum of personal chat? And that many people — especially women — and always, the person ahead of you — lingers gratefully in the warmth of this exclusive regard, body gathered close into the booth of commercial intimacy, shy shoulders rounded like a child’s receiving praise?
At first I thought this was just Southern manners. Every transaction down here has to be embellished with a little faux-small-town, front-porch gossip, joking, and dissection of the weather. There’s always time for this nostalgic and incongruous ritual. It’s enough to drive a foot-stamping New Yorker nuts (especially since it’s hypocritical — all bets are off when the same people get behind the wheels of their cars. They become killers). But it’s happening in national-brand, franchise places where the reps are given standard training, like the AT&T store where, in a hurry as usual, I wasted twenty minutes waiting behind one of these therapy sessions before finally leaving with nothing accomplished. (I had bought the cheapest, “candy bar” style cell phone, which probably cost $1 to make and $30 to buy, and punishes you with tiny, ugly, illegible graphics and the threat that they will not exchange it for credit if you break down and beg to trade up. But mine really doesn’t work right; half the time the “Select” button scrolls instead of selecting. I was told that I had to ask the manager if they would accept its return even though — the shame! — I may have thrown out the box. The manager, however, was busy crafting every detail of an anorexic-looking woman’s “plan,” with an air of “However long it takes.”)
You could find this complaint of other customers’ narcissism ironic — and narcissistic — given that a big part of my problem is that it’s not my turn. But when it is, I usually try to get the transaction over with quickly. Cordially, but with a minimum of both confession and chit-chat. (Though I’m not above using “My husband is disabled and I can’t leave him alone for long” to get faster service, which is admittedly sickening, though true.)
In what’s been called an “attention economy,” these encounters do mimic the validating and cherishing functions of therapy: having another person’s attention focused solely on you. Balm for one’s loneliness and ever-menacing sense of insignificance is the new soft sell. Like the fetishistic way people build their one-in-six-billion Starbuck’s lattes, the customizing of our bank accounts, cell phone plans, and almost certainly our automobiles (though I’ve never bought a new one, so don’t know) seems designed to console us for, or distract us from, the erosion of real individuality, autonomy, and love.
China’s Empty City for 1 million
That’s not a mistake: The city is built, all of the houses and condos in it are sold, it can accommodate one million people, and not a single person lives there.
(Via Patrick Chovanec)
Chovanec, associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in Beijing, China, visited North Korea in October 2008. He recently began a series of posts, including photos, about that experience.
Chovanec’s blog is sure to become a “must visit” for me.
After the Fire [UPDATED]
A little update, taking my cue from Trooper York’s query in recent comments and then, caught by an echo in his own ear, his posting of the lyrics to the Pete Townshend song of that name:
After the fire the fire still burns,
the heart grows older but never ever learns.
The memories smolder and the soul always yearns,
After the fire the fire still burns.I saw Matt Dillon in black and white
there ain’t no color in memories.
He rode his brother’s Harley across the TV
while I was laughing at Dom DeLuise.
Now I’m cycling all my video tapes,
I’m crying and I’m joking.
I’ve gotta stop drinking, I’ve gotta stop thinking,
I’ve gotta stop smoking.After the fire the fire still burns,
the heart grows older but never ever learns.
The memories smolder and the soul always yearns,
after the fire
The fire still burns, raging through the pain,
blackening the promises, the tears and the rain.
The fire will burn
’til the wind begins to turn
and it all begins again.
After the fireeeee …Yea the fire still burns
(Pete Townshend)
First of all, Troop, I wanted you to know that I sent those lyrics to my favorite former neighbors and they struck home there too. Good medicine, a bitter herb. For healing, don’t turn away from it, go into it.
Good medicine, too, has been the $$ so many of you sent me. I would never have asked for it, and was embarrassed that Randy did, but it has turned out to be the fourth wall that keeps the rain out. The fact that that is one immediate anxiety I don’t have, that I don’t have to worry whether I will overdraw my bank account replacing things like the kitchen trash can and wastebaskets (which I abandoned rather than trying to salvage and wash them, knowing it was wasteful but, you know, I haven’t got time for the slime), has been just night and day.
And having you all to vent to, talk story to, show scary pictures to — priceless.
Where it’s at: the apartment next door is probably going to be ready before November 19. It’s empty and being painted now. The door is left open, and I pushed J in. What’s eerie: it’s exactly like the old one. Same floor plan. The back porch looking out through glass doors at trees is in the same place. All the rooms are in the same places. You walk in and it’s like Groundhog Day.
OK, not exactly the same. There’s a folding door between the laundry room and the kitchen. The front door opens to the left instead of the right, and the foyer light switch is on the right instead of the left. The placement of the main bedroom door is slightly different, making the swath of living-room wall where one of our bookcases used to be somewhat narrower. And the floors are bare wood; no wall-to-wall “crapeting.” But all in all, you feel like you’re in the same place, even though in reality it’s all rotated 90 degrees by the compass. (The back windows face southwest instead of northwest, which should mean more light on winter afternoons.)
My first reaction was to recoil, and to feel confined and suffocated by the sameness, even though it was a good layout for us. If you’ve got to change, then let it be change; fake sameness is creepy, not comforting. I never got attached to the old place and had no yearning to recreate it. The one thing I liked was looking out the back, but now — in concession to more social J — I’ve gotten to like looking out the front, cars and all. There’s more light, and less of a sense of isolation. It’s less of a firetrap, too. No doubt a larger part of my aversion to that layout than I’m consciously feeling is the circumstances under which I departed it. (Someone over here pounded on a door upstairs at 3:30 A.M. a few nights ago, and I was instantly physiologically aghast, although it pretty clearly was an isolated lovers’ or drunks’ quarrel in which someone had locked someone else out.) It’s like returning to the scene of the crime.
But, blah, blah, blah. It will be relatively easy and convenient to move right next door, and we’ll have enough space again, and a chance to start fresh in terms of order. I threw out or abandoned quite a bit of junk in the process of throwing things into boxes to get them out of there, some of which I mildly regret: probably one long-defunct little Mac laptop went down the tubes, buried in piles of saved Sunday New York Times sections I used to buy out of big-city nostalgia but never read. My sadly abused chef’s knife must have been in the sink with the cutting board, because I was on deadline at the time of the fire and because washing dishes after J’s asleep is too clanky. I left the knife-sharpening stone on top of the refrigerator. It was dark in the kitchen, and moldy, and the wreckers were chafing to get started.
What J lost in the fire and the resultant disruption was the last little bit of ability to stand up — with a lot of help — just long enough to have his pants pulled up or the water wheelchair quickly switched under him. If he can’t get it back, that will make going to the swimming pool almost prohibitively difficult (Chris suggests taking the Hoyer lift along to the pool, perish the thought), and that in turn will turn the screw of his decline. He did manage to stand for the strength trainer he works with once a week, so it’s not impossible, but it is Sisyphean. Up is not the direction things are going.
UPDATE: Finally, finally got J to the karate dojo tonight for the first time since the fire. His extreme fatigue plus early dark, cold, and rain had beaten us back, but today a number of factors came together: it’s Saturday, when class is at 5 instead of 6:30, so we didn’t have to leave in the dark; the remnant hurricane finally passed, leaving beautiful weather (as they always do, like giant brooms); and the core karate gang had been here last night for supper, and he wanted to see them again.
Even though all he did was sit and watch the training, the effect was remarkable, He was better tonight than he’s been since the fire. Contact high? Or just human contact?
Ich Bin Ein Berliner
Due to a trick of German grammar — you don’t use the article when you announce your nationality, profession, or other official identification — this bold rhetorical move by President John F. Kennedy was often mischievously translated as “I am a jelly donut!” (Sugar-dusted berliners are to Berlin as hamburgers are to Hamburg and frankfurters to Frankfurt.) OK, he should have said “Ich bin Berliner.” (Except since he wasn’t literally a Berliner, Wikipedia says his usage was correct, and what’s more, Berliners themselves don’t call jelly donuts berliners.)
But the small endearing error, if it even was, didn’t diminish the symbolic power of the June 1963 statement, or the arc it made with President Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” 24 years to the month later. The Berlin Wall went right through our hearts. It divided the very heart of a divided world; it was the metaphorical Iron Curtain made literal. There could have been no more tangible evidence of communism’s breathtaking sense of entitlement to its citizens’ very lives, of the prison it was or the walls and snipers that prison needed.
I saw it on its first birthday, not long after my 16th. August 13, 1962.
My marvelous high school German teacher, W. Gregor Heggen, led a trip to Germany for his students every summer. American teen-agers lived with families in three locations — Paderborn, Herr Heggen’s hometown; West Berlin; and Esslingen, in the south, near Stuttgart — as well as in youth hostels, and we were taken to see marvels of historic architecture and art: Romanesque, Gothic, and Rococo cathedrals, famous altarpieces. When we arrived in Berlin we had just spent a month of total immersion with families in and around then-bucolic Paderborn, and our German had begun to swim. As a city kid I immediately recognized Berlin as a great metropolis — it throbbed with that urban intensity — but a schizoid and feverish one, with a tourniquet cutting off its circulation. The West was a show window of capitalism, pumped almost artificially full of colorful commerce and adventurous architecture. The East — we were led in through Checkpoint Charlie, “Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin!” — was drab and gray and limp. Tall, ugly buildings that looked like file cabinets for storing working parts (I would later see their clones in Romania) alternated with bomb craters and rubble that had never been repaired since World War II. The palate doesn’t lie: a little cart sold ersatz chocolate-coated ice-cream bars that tasted like cardboard. We were given fistfuls of propaganda leaflets about how the evil capitalists were the heirs of the Nazis.
The Wall was the sobering shock of my young life. My letters home (I still have two from Berlin, if I didn’t somehow leave them behind after the fire) had been adolescent prattle; their tone suddenly changed. We got as close as we could to the Brandenburg Gate, where wooden viewing stands peered over the rather low grey barrier into a no-man’s-land of barbed wire coils scanned by snipers. On the first anniversary, we went to a section where whole rows of houses had been conscripted into the barrier, their windows bricked up. Wreaths lay on the sidewalk at the feet of metal crosses marking where people had jumped to their deaths rather than lose their freedom, their families and friends.
Obviously, I had no clue that my own destiny would be all about that barrier, what lay on the far side of it, and the lives and loves severed by it. But it made a stunning and indelible impression.
The sight of the graffiti-infested Wall being dismantled by sledgehammers in a party atmosphere at the end of 1989 was therefore personal to me. I would have liked to have one of those little pieces of it they were selling as souvenirs.
For those of us whose lives were dominated by that divide, the aftermath of its collapse has been bewildering. A world that was starkly black-and-white was shattered into a hologram of little yang-yin droplets. Suddenly good and evil were both everywhere. That was actually a salutary challenge; far worse was the don’t-look-back amnesia that seemed to fall on the world, rendering the whole seventy-year ordeal irrelevant. I wondered how J felt, seeing the bulldozer that rolled over and crushed his entire childhood world suddenly simply vaporize. How could a monolith that had had such vast and terrifying power, that destroyed so many lives, just crumble to dust and blow away?
I am beyond embarrassed, I am mortified that President Obama isn’t attending the 20-year commemoration of the Wall’s destruction. Why?
Gorgeous, Gifted, Funny as Shit, and the Birthday Girl!
Happy birthday Paloma (rising improv/comedy star in Toronto; my niece! brag brag kvell kvell!)!
Not Sussing Seuss?
Dr. Seuss no doubt intended for young people of my generation to side with the Lorax, who speaks for the trees. But clearly the Once-ler was not without his fans, including the young lad who grew up to invent this machine:
Cross-posted at StubbornFacts.us.
H/T: SippicanCottage.
Not a Toy.
In case you thought a ukulele was a just a guitar for little kids.
A Sea-Change
Something rich and strange is happening. It thrills me but I’m afraid to breathe too loudly and blow it away. That’s just my own this-is-too-good-to-be-true, oh-me-of-little-faith superstition; it says nothing about the solidity of the development.
Some of the best (most heartfelt and thoughtful) conservatives are moving a little bit centerward.
I don’t want to exaggerate this or misrepresent it. It doesn’t mean compromising core principles. It seems to mean, among other things, refusing to demonize those who disagree (even those fools who themselves demonize — I can at least foolize them, can’t I??) and looking for ways goodward more effective than shock tactics or absolutist insistence. It means more persuasion and example and less rhetoric. It’s a revulsion from posturing and from being led by the emotions [I mean this in the sense of “led by the nose”] into distraction and righteous deadlock. It’s a willingness to rethink long-held positions, possibly coming to the same conclusions with better grounding. It’s the courage not just to preach to the converted, because that doesn’t change anything. It’s deciding that team sports is an unworthy model for American politics in the footsteps of the Fathers.
It’s not exactly centerward as much as it’s off the predictable grid, out from between two-dimensional poles.
Here’s an example: a conservative who’s patiently and cannily pro-gay marriage. Here’s a glorious example, a trumpet blast from The Anchoress, demonstrating that you can be passionate about being thoughtful and nondogmatic. That’s key, because people making this move may find that they at first lose traffic. Louder and lower exerts a stronger force on attention, which, like water, flows downhill. People will go again and again to have their fears, rages, and preconceptions reliably stimulated and serviced. It’s our human equivalent of a rat pressing a lever. It’s a way of getting off, as predictable and sterile as porn. In fact I’m going to coin a word for the pull of political invective: zornography (from the German Zorn, rage or fury).
What’s good is that millions of people are now mad as hell at most of the political and media class, and this equal-opportunity alarm and disgust is propelling us in a new direction. Perhaps some new words, like Anchoress’s, may be heard, and may fit people’s inchoate feelings like a hand in a glove. A passion for independence gave birth to this country, and is its best hope of rebirth.
From my own tiny point of view, it feels like I moved their way, and now they’re moving my way — that’s so exciting!
Ambiance 