Live on the other side of town

I have just received my bazillionth offer to review a book. Why would I want to when I don’t have time to read the books that are piling up in my bedroom–fortunately I have DWR bookshelves so it’s not a mess. Each time I receive an offer like this I become angrier because I write good stories that have never been in Courting.

I would gladly review a book a blogger wrote, even one that I don’t know well. But without offer of compensation, I will never review a book, for a non-blogger, or do any product placement–and won’t do most product placement for money but for, uh a, book deal.

This offer was from a “marketing expert.” If she is, doesn’t she understand that bloggers have lives, have their own interests, and blog on what they want to, not what they’re asked to? Obviously I’m not looking for content. If I didn’t have things that I wanted to say in a million words or more, I wouldn’t blog

Funny, how I never fit into the right categories except when people would like me to do something for free. Then I somehow fit into every category.

Blogging isn’t fun for me anymore. I have seriously thought, a lot, of giving Courting up because I have much else to do. But then there’s something like tomorrow.

Won’t say what it is. Just be here.

I’m not the most sociable blogger. Frankly I didn’t begin to blog to socialize. I do apologize for not having a more fun blog. I feel badly about that as if blogging has turned into a carnival and everybody has to hawk their stand with something newer, fresher, more fun.

My blog is what it is. You like it or you don’t. And I shouldn’t be apologizing for that.

Just angers me that so many people think I would be delighted to do something for them–and the reward is content. Can not tell you how angry that made me. Content comes easily to me, so easily that I seem to write three posts in one paragraph. Don’t tell me my compensation is content.

That’s like telling me that you will get your reward in your next life.

As I don’t know if I believe in an after life or what form it takes, that’s not an incentive.

The only things that I will do without compensation are my blog, and the cause that the 21 year old girl with a blog has made me realize is of paramount importance, Darfur. See I might not be influenced by marketing experts but 21 year old…yes.

I really can write linear posts, and I see how I could have made the one that follows the above rant, linear, but I’m leaving in the manicure/pedicure appearance stuff because so many people tell me I shouldn’t move to California because it’s shallow. And NY is deep? Think Santa Monica/Venice Beach, Topanga Canyon, and much of West LA has very similar people to New Yorker’s. They just smile more.

On a blogging note, if I leave three comments on somebodies blog and get none in return, I will no longer comment. No nobody is crying over that, but I find that to be rude.

I do have blogging comment issues. I don’t get why so many blogs are centered around them, unless like Sar and the dawg, the blog has substance. I’m jealous of both Sar and Doug for being such great comment hosts. I’m not. I just like to write, and leave the comemnts to the commenters. I am trying to lead a less blogcentric life and am not finding it to be difficult.

People complain when I write about blogging. People complain when I write depressing stuff. People complain…Sometimes I actually used to care. Here’s a link to the post I wrote about my Mom–I will put it on top on Saturday with more. My server had been drinking–and I just realized that some of the sidebars to the “write post” had been closed.

The plane crash happened on the East Side of the Upper East Side. I live on the Upper West Side.

I wrote a guest post for Belle of the Brawl on Friday that discusses my feelings, and asks a question.

Cooper has a fascinating post at Talking Points. It began me thinking, always a dangerous thing. It’s not really about what I’m going to say. I have a friend who has a horrific boss. He places unreasonable demands on her and bad mouthes her. She accepts it because he’s “paying Black man taxes.” Is an attorney who makes around half a mil a year really paying that tax? Or is he using it as an excuse to get away with treating employees badly?

Isn’t there a point where a person has to say “I have made it. Let me not be bitter, but help other people who haven’t made it?” And doesn’t every employer have the responsiblity to treat employees with dignity? My friend happens to be a Hispanic single mother. In his thought process that should win her points, but she is White so he takes more points off

I won’t apologize for getting scared when a plane flies into a building. Somehow I think that in our culture, it’s okay to show feelings, but when it comes to 9/11 people who actually live and lived in Manhattan then are supposed to be stoical, and disbelieve everything.

Two summers ago, the city instituted random subway searches, which I would be for if they certain people weren’t always targeted, and if the subways could ever be secured. They can’t be and it’s foolish to waste money acting out a farce. And 7/7 did happen in London.

To deny that terrorist attacks could happen is simply foolish.
I received a slew of blogger jokes about random subway searches and terrorists. Maybe someday I will find that funny, but I don’t now and can’t really conceive of ever finding humor in that.

We use humor to sublimate and work out our worst fears, but I just can’t find anything funny in the possibility of terrorist attacks. It’s similiar to making fun of the bodies found in concentration camps. Or laughing about the poor Africans being slaughtered in Darfur.

That kind of thinking leads to denial, and revisionist history is a possible outcome. In America we seem to think that history is something that happened yesterday.

I no longer write for political blogs because it’s just not healthy for me. I don’t read them either. I do prefer reading mainstream media, and going to candidate forums. Of course I’m going to vote all Democrat. Even if for some sick reason i loved Jeanine Pirro, her using Bernard Kerik to help her in any manner would make me dislike her. It wasn’t putting a private detective on her husband that I hated, people do that all the time. It was her use of Kerik that made me sick.

Spitzer is a Democrat. He’s the first Democrat I know of who won’t entertain the thought of more taxes. Because in New York City, we’re triple taxed. Somebody has to pay the costs of 9/11, and we continue to do so.

Just read headlines where Bloomberg is ordering more affordable housing to be built in the city. Will believe that when I see it. He won’t intercede in the sale of Stuy Town, and Peter Cooper Village. Said projects like that are better in the boroughs. Lost my grudging respect for him.

If I harp on that, it’s because even the people I know who make what sounds like a small fortune are depressed and think of leaving. They own businesses and their costs keep going up. They are forced to then to raise their prices. Manhattan is too fast becoming an Island of the rich and poor, with much entertainment for tourists who budget in the expense. We live with the expenses every day.

To use an analogy most women and more and more men are familiar with, I think that $50 for a manicure/pedicure is cheap. It’s an essential expense in my life as I’m so bad at doing them myself. If you go around without a proper manicure, it just doesn’t look right.

Whether we want to or not, we do judge people based on appearance.

When people tell me that I shouldn’t move to LA because it’s shallow, vapid, whatever, I just laugh. Because New York is the home of Conde Naste, of PR firms, of modeling agencies, of Broadway, of many appearance based industries.

Yes here on the Upper West Side we can wear jeans and tees, but they have to be the right jeans and tees. It’s leather jacket weather which makes me happy because I have a great one–as I have a wardrobe that consists mostly of black, brown, and various shades of beige and gray with some color thrown in.

I buy clothes in those colors because I have always been a black and gray person, but more because I know that I will look in style next years and five years from now. If I chose from certain designers, that is.

I have been an advocate of the good jacket under the leather jacket, tee or sweater, jeans or good pants or skirts, good shoes, school of dressing most of my adult life because it suits me and I never have to worry about looking in style or being judged as a slob which is one of my worst fears in life. Yes I know that I began by talking about terrorist attacks and veered to clothes.

I read too many mysteries where the detective always goes through files and looks at a person’s clothes, and material objects. It is a good way of describing a victim so that the reader gets to know them. Also shows well on TV and in film.

If I were to be killed today, well, first they would think that I live in a Lycos warehouse, as my living room has two desktops and two printers. Then they would think that I’m disorganized as I have the strangest filing system in the world. There is absolutely no known order to it, to anybody but me.

However they would love my one closet, its drawers and contents. No, don’t think that I’m going to be killed in a terrorist attack today. That PTSD subsided quickly. I did find something that I read by Katie Couric to be insufferable when she was describing her emotions and then talked about how especially tragic it was that Cory Lidle was killed. Then she realized what she was saying and said something about how it would still be tragic if a non-celebrity had died.

That epitomized everything that I hate about our society. We don’t usually find it tragic when people who aren’t well known die in a tragedy unless its The Trade Center victims or a school killing or something like that.

We’re inured to peoples suffering. Some deaths are worthy of our grief, others aren’t. And that does bring me back to my original point. Our society is sick. It was sick to send subway and color coded terrrorist jokes to me, especially after I pointed out that I do live here 24/7, and don’t like them.

Yet I was considered to be the spoil sport and humorless. I haven’t talked about this before because I did go through a long time where I wondered if I had lost my sense of humor and maybe they were right.

It hit me yesterday that is part of what’s wrong with our celebrity worshipping society. We have no boundaries anymore.

I will never believe that the radical right is right in any way, shape, or form. That said I began to understand their horror at how our society conducts ourselves.

They are incredibly misguided, and doing everything totally wrong. Attempting to inflict their religious beliefs on us, and their set of values is wrong.

But it is up to us to substitute real values, and we’re not doing a great job. We just seem to become more and more trashy as a society. We worship at the altar of youth and materialism. If we are political we worship at the alter of voting for Democrats will solve all of our problems.

I had a great congressman, Bill Green, for many years. He was responsible for much social change and for keeping New York’s problems front and center in Congress. When his district was gerrymandered, he lost. Why? He was a Republican. I voted for him on the Good Neighbor ticket as I didn’t want to vote Republican. Had he only been on the Republican line, I would have proudly voted for him.

Back to my original point: I don’t get why being scared of another terrorist attack is considered to be wrong. Isn’t it normal to feel fear when a plane flies into an apartment building?

Or are New Yorkers supposed to set an example and never admit that we feel fear? That can lead to many other problems, but they become “your issues,” and thus everybody else feels superior.

I now have a second rule of life–my first was never let somebody you love die around the time of terrorist attacks, though I know that’s impossible. My second is: if you weren’t in the city that a terrorist attack took place in, you have no right to make fun of anything that happened, because I realized yesterday, you really can’t know.

Except you, Steve, and a number of other people who have tried to put yourselves in our shoes. But these aren’t the people who would make fun of it