The other night over dinner, I told Lynn about a Major Incident that had happened at my workplace that day, about which I’d been completely oblivious until I'd headed to the break room on my floor and saw what looked to be half the Alexandria, Virginia, police department idling in the hallway. This despite the fact that, I’d soon learn, the incident had been extremely loud and had happened, in part, literally just outside my office door.
I bemoaned to Lynn the cruel irony that I’m one of the nosiest people around, but concurrently am pretty much the most oblivious. I delight in office gossip, but usually am one of the last people clued into it. This has only gotten worse in the 10-plus years I’ve been at my current workplace. Our staff is about 180 strong and is spread among three buildings, which means that when gossip finally reaches me—like light from some long-dead star—it may well center on a person I never knew I worked with in the first place.
But this incident the other day involved a person I did know, at least by sight and name. And it apparently involved a lot of shouting that I somehow didn’t hear. I’d been transcribing notes from a tape recorder and had headphones on at the time, but that’s stop-and-start stuff, at fairly low volume. You’d think I’d have heard the string of obscenities, accusations of racism and rambling delusions I’d later learn had prompted other staffers to bolt upright from their desks and, in some cases, to shut their doors. And which had prompted my bosses to call the cops, since history teaches that apparent mental instability and the workplace are not an ideal mix.
Long story short, there’s this woman who works in a cubbyhole office down the hall from me. She reports to a different boss than I, so I frankly don’t know quite what she does. She is so quiet that I couldn’t pick her voice out of an audio lineup. In my work life, she is so low profile as to be virtually nonexistent. But in that, she, of course, also fits the poster description of the “quiet, keeps to him/herself” type who becomes well-known only in infamy. Clearly, calling 9-1-1 in this case was the smart and right thing to do.
Let me just pause here a moment to say that I wish this person well. She apparently was holed up in a conference room, presumably along with law enforcement and possibly mental health people, when I left work that day. She was nowhere to be seen yesterday, I’m off work today, and the weekend starts tomorrow. For her sake, I hope she’ll be back at her desk on Monday—meds administered or readjusted, counseling in place, whatever—and ready to resume gainful employment. I’m in no way passing judgment on her. Everybody freaks out at some point or another. It’s just that some episodes are more chemically linked and flamboyant than others. Presumably she’ll never even know I’ve used her to introduce a blog post about my dimness to workplace goings-on. Yet I sort of feel I should apologize. Especially given the segue I’m about to make.
So. Again, I was complaining to Lynn the other night about how I never know about any juicy stuff that occurs at the workplace until after the fact. That was when she reminded me about the Computer Guy Firing.
This happened many years and a few employers ago, in an age when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and workplaces grouped their electronic resources in dedicated “computer rooms” that had to be kept cold, for reasons that to this day elude this liberal arts major and self-described technological moron. Nowadays, technology is so portable as to be stored on tiny chips in SmartPhones and iPads. But back then it was locked away in chilly edifices reminiscent of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. The contemporary workplace has IT departments and network administrators. Back then there was the lone Computer Guy, tender to and gatekeeper of the big machines.
The computer guy where I worked back in the early 1990s was representative of his species—equal parts mad scientist, 40-year-old virgin, Maytag repairman and Amber Alert suspect. With his bad haircut, narrowed eyes behind unfashionable glasses, three-day stubble, unsettlingly self-amused grin, wrinkled shirt and pants, and scuffed shoes, he looked sort of like what the actors Steve Buscemi and Gary Busey might produce, could they mate. That his office was essentially an isolation booth suited him and the rest of us well. Particularly younger female staff, many of whom he unnerved in the lunchroom with presumed small talk that sounded more like internal monologue, voiced mid-thought. Topics included things like the latest scientific research on bats, or the fact that various common household item easily could be weaponized.
Every once in a while I’d have business in the department adjacent to the computer room. I’d see him in there, behind the glass, adjusting dials or entering figures into a data terminal. I could feel the chill on my side of the door; staff in that department typically wore sweaters. But Computer Guy seemed immune to the cold. In fact, more often than not, his rumpled shirt was short-sleeved.
Since I didn’t see him that often and had no reason or inclination ever to seek him out, the surprise wasn’t that I didn’t know he was gone until weeks after he and my employer had parted ways. What was surprising—and confounding—was that I was among the last to know the spectacular circumstances of his departure.
A co-worker had been telling me about a bad date she’d been on. This had prompted me to cite Computer Guy as a metric of interpersonal disaster. She shuddered and said something along the lines of, “Thank God he’s gone!”
“Gone?” I asked.
“You didn’t know?” she responded incredulously.
That’s when I learned that late one afternoon, at a time of day when everyone else in the department next to the computer room had gone home, a female employee had looked up from her desk to the alarming sight of Computer Guy—in plain sight, with pants unzipped and joystick at full extension—happily and with abandon pleasuring himself. As the story went, he didn’t stop when sighted by his shrieking co-worker. Law enforcement was summoned. Computer Guy now is Howard Stern’s producer.
OK, I made that last part up. Anyway, Computer Guy’s vigorous response to social isolation had been huge news throughout the building. Where had I been? How had I not heard? The person who finally told me couldn’t believe I’d been unaware for so long. Nor could I. As gossip goes, this was the gold standard. Your typical office romances and rumored reprimands were penny-ante stuff compared with a full-frontal Workplace Whack-off.
Where had I been, indeed? Where am I ever? How is it that I always miss everything, from the mundane to the titillating to truly sensational? There are many more instances I could cite here, from over the course of my 30 years in the workplace. Employees long gone, affairs long over, skirmishes long concluded before I ever caught wind of them. I just don’t get it.
At any rate, this tale of mayhem and masturbation likely has succeeded in squandering whatever store of goodwill I built up with last week’s heartwarming post about the senior citizens in my life. So, I guess my work here is done.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Final Jeopardy
I’m thinking of this scene in the movie Annie Hall that takes place in a bookstore. Annie (Diane Keaton) is eyeing a big book of cat photographs, but her new boyfriend Alvy (Woody Allen) encourages her instead to purchase a couple of highbrow treatises on death. The morbid, neurotic New York intellectual explains to his flustered Midwestern date that death is “an important subject.” He further shares his conviction that life is divided into the “horrible” and the “miserable.” Not wanting to seem a lightweight, Annie buys the death books. But her expression says she’d much rather look at cats.
The reason I’m thinking about this scene is that death will be a theme in this post, as indeed it’s been in many of my posts since I started writing this blog last June. I’m hoping it hasn’t seemed obsessive—that it hasn’t made reading this blog feel too one-note, and hasn’t struck my loyal readers (reader?) as unduly depressing. I mean, you might rather, figuratively speaking, look at cats. In fact, I love cats. We have a very sweet girl named Tess, and we just lost a wonderful feline companion named Winnie back in December. Perhaps it’s surprising that I didn’t write about that, since death was involved and all, but it was just too sad. Who’d want to read a post about how much I loved my cat, anyway? I’m conflicted enough as it is about having a blog in the first place—there’s an undeniably self-absorbed and showy “Look at me!” aspect to it—without willfully dragging other people into subjects like my heartfelt but hardly unique grief over a beloved pet. (Not that I didn't do it once. See "Ellie," from last summer.)
But the thing about death and this blog is … well, there actually are two things. One is that the deaths of famous or somehow notable people can serve as jumping-off points for reminiscences and ruminations that hopefully are interesting, or at least quirky enough, to hold reader attention. In that regard, just recently I’ve noted the passings of Jack Lalanne and a Swedish actress who got her start in an infamous porn movie. The other thing about this blog and death is that the Grim Reaper stalks my extracurricular life in ways that place mortality squarely in the forefront of my brain. Which, in turn, is bound to affect this blog’s subject matter.
For more than 10 years now I’ve been a volunteer visitor at Springhouse of Westwood, an assisted living facility that’s part of the Manor Care chain of geriatric health care facilities and is about a 5-minute drive from my house. Most Monday nights over that span, I’ve arrived at about 7 pm to consort with the “night owls”—those few residents, almost always female—who aren’t already in their rooms for the night at that “witching hour” immediately after the dinnertime news. When I’d first approached the then-activities director more than a decade ago and proposed to share some time with the seniors (I should say “older seniors,” as, by AARP’s lights I now am one, too), she essentially asked me to describe my shtick. Did I sing? Play an instrument? Would I be telling stories? I confessed I had no talents—and no big desire, frankly, to be an all-attention-on-me entertainer. This fazed the activities director not one bit. She wasn’t one to look an unpaid gift horse in the mouth.
She had said that Monday evening around 7 or 7:30 would be a good time for me to do my visiting. “What would you be doing if you were home at that time?” she asked. “Watching Jeopardy!,” I answered. “Well, do that, then,” she responded.
And so it’s been that ever since, each time I ride the elevator from the ground level to the second floor of the facility, I read “7:30: Jeopardy with Eric” on the daily activities list that’s taped to the wall. (Staff never think to include the exclamation point, which annoys me as an editor, but to date I’ve let it go.) So, as I’ve already noted, I arrive around 7. I typically spend my first half hour watching Wheel of Fortune with whatever ladies already are seated in the open TV area, and/or visit in their rooms with residents who’ve aged out of communal activities because they’re too blind, deaf, gently demented, or what have you. Then we watch Jeopardy! Mostly I watch, and call out my answers (or, questions, if you prefer), and the ladies watch me. We make small talk amongst us along the way. Then we usually watch the first half of Antiques Roadshow on PBS from 8 to 8:30, or, in season, the first half-hour of Dancing with the Stars on ABC. Then I bid them adieu, telling them I’m hungry and ready for the late dinner Lynn will have waiting for me. For the past several years, the last words I’ve heard before hopping on the elevator are 90-ish Helen telling whoever is in the room, “I can’t believe he waits to eat until this late!” Her tone suggests I’ve just climbed Everest or achieved Olympic gold.
Anyway, I’ve attended a lot of memorial services and funerals over the years, and printed out a lot of obituaries. I’ll always remember my first group of night owls: Imperious Augusta and “Greek Ambassador” Marianthe, who loathed each other; Phyllis, who loved to laugh; and Ruth, a humble but whip-smart Missourian whose daughter was a US Attorney. They’re all dead now. As is Jean, who’d helped Rachel Carson research Silent Spring, the book many credit with kick-starting the environmental movement. And then there was Golde, who was still reading the New Yorker well into her 90s and spoke often of all the fascinating adult ed courses she’s taken in her beloved San Francisco just a few years before moving East. And I’ll always remember charming Richard, the rare man on the assisted-living scene, whose breath suggested his lifelong battle with the bottle perhaps always had been a rather passive fight.
I always tell my Monday-night homies they’re my friends, and they are. Compartmentalized friends, Monday-night friends, but friends nonetheless. I send them Christmas and birthday cards, bring them chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Lynn and I sip middling champagne with them and their middle-aged (or older) kids at occasional celebrations in the downstairs dining room to which family, friends and volunteers are invited. I expect to lose each friend eventually, and I do. But I truly enjoy the time we have together.
Recently I lost Ralph, who’d never once watched Jeopardy! because he didn’t want to leave his wife alone in their third-floor room. Ralph had Parkinson’s disease and was in a wheelchair. Bette had—has—Alzheimer’s. But one of the staff members had told me Ralph could use some company, so I introduced myself upon arrival at 7 one Monday night last summer. He showed me the extensive collection of scrapbooks he’d compiled about his experiences as an escaped POW during World War II. His plane had been shot down in France. He was captured by the Germans, but got loose, and eventually to safety with the help of the French Resistance. He never forgot their bravery and kindness, and devoted the rest of his life to publicizing it through the reunions and events of the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society, which he co-founded in 1964. He was a native of western Pennsylvania, and his death merited an extensive news story/obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I expressed my admiration to him many times. But the sad truth often is that, when you’re dealing with people who are very old, in ill health, and subject to verbal wandering even if they’re still lucid, neither conversation nor understanding are always, shall we say, fluid.
The recent death that hit me unexpectedly hard, though, was that of a woman about whom I knew very little. Joyce was a tall, thin British native (a war bride) who revealed nothing about herself, and whose last name I didn’t even know until after her death. She was very outspoken about certain things, however. One was that life at Springhouse was boring her to death. Another was that I was wasting vast economic potential by watching Jeopardy! with her at an assisted living facility rather than being on that soundstage in Los Angeles with Alex Trebek. I’d shout out a correct response and she’d berate me, “Think of all the money you’re missing!” Every week she’d ask me when I was going to get on the show. Every week I told her I’d tried, but it’s a crapshoot even to get an audition. Every week she all but rolled her eyes at that response, signaling her certainty that with just a little extra effort—which I obviously was unwilling to expend—I could be on that game show set at that very moment, raking in the dough.
The third subject of Joyce’s extremely vocal scorn was the stated value of the items people brought in to the Antiques Roadshow. She’d scoff at how hideous-looking or otherwise useless the presented lamp or vase or piece of jewelry was, then share her incredulity at the appraiser’s estimated auction value of $10,000 or $25,000 for that obvious piece of crap. “Who’s going to pay that?!” Joyce would exclaim. “Sell it, if someone will pay that ridiculous amount!” she’d urge the happily stunned owner of the offending item.
Joyce’s death hit me unusually hard for a couple of reasons, I think. One is that the last time I’d seen her she hadn’t looked even slightly ill. In fact, I still don’t know the cause of death. HIPAA rules and all that. Nobody’ll tell you anything, and I searched in vain online for an obit. The other factor was that TV-watching was my sole context for her. I never visited with her in her room or even knew where it was. I never met any members of her family. While I liked her immensely, she’d been, to me, mainly the Lady Who Couldn’t Believe I Wasn’t a Jeopardy! Contestant.
But then came the recent cold winter Monday nights without her there. A couple of weeks ago, a chipped and particularly ugly Tiffany lamp commanded some hyperbolic appraisal amount on the Roadshow, and I wanted Joyce’s British fury to raise the roof. But I instead was sitting in a room with two old women who were dozing while this outrage played out on the flat-screen TV. Then, this past Monday night, there was the much-hyped men-vs-machine match on Jeopardy! with IBM’s “Watson” casting aside the two human champs as if they themselves were trivial vestiges of an irrelevant age. I had to wonder what Joyce would have made of that?
“That could be you up there, beating that computer!” I could imagine her shouting. Or, “That thing’s not even human, and it got on the show. What’s your excuse?!”
Unlike Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, I’m not morbid, I don’t think. I don’t deem everything in life to be either horrible or miserable, although I do believe the globe’s heading increasingly in that direction. And I’m sure as hell no intellectual. I wouldn’t recognize the book titles Alvy was recommending to Annie anymore than she did. But I will go so far as to agree that death is an important subject. It’s a big part of my life—even apart from my worries about my aging parents and my friends with cancer, not to mention the fact that my own life may well be in its final third now.
Death is certain to maintain a regular presence in this blog. I hope it hasn’t been, and won’t in the future be, a tedious or dispiriting presence. But if you find that to be the case, you can always buy the cat book.
The reason I’m thinking about this scene is that death will be a theme in this post, as indeed it’s been in many of my posts since I started writing this blog last June. I’m hoping it hasn’t seemed obsessive—that it hasn’t made reading this blog feel too one-note, and hasn’t struck my loyal readers (reader?) as unduly depressing. I mean, you might rather, figuratively speaking, look at cats. In fact, I love cats. We have a very sweet girl named Tess, and we just lost a wonderful feline companion named Winnie back in December. Perhaps it’s surprising that I didn’t write about that, since death was involved and all, but it was just too sad. Who’d want to read a post about how much I loved my cat, anyway? I’m conflicted enough as it is about having a blog in the first place—there’s an undeniably self-absorbed and showy “Look at me!” aspect to it—without willfully dragging other people into subjects like my heartfelt but hardly unique grief over a beloved pet. (Not that I didn't do it once. See "Ellie," from last summer.)
But the thing about death and this blog is … well, there actually are two things. One is that the deaths of famous or somehow notable people can serve as jumping-off points for reminiscences and ruminations that hopefully are interesting, or at least quirky enough, to hold reader attention. In that regard, just recently I’ve noted the passings of Jack Lalanne and a Swedish actress who got her start in an infamous porn movie. The other thing about this blog and death is that the Grim Reaper stalks my extracurricular life in ways that place mortality squarely in the forefront of my brain. Which, in turn, is bound to affect this blog’s subject matter.
For more than 10 years now I’ve been a volunteer visitor at Springhouse of Westwood, an assisted living facility that’s part of the Manor Care chain of geriatric health care facilities and is about a 5-minute drive from my house. Most Monday nights over that span, I’ve arrived at about 7 pm to consort with the “night owls”—those few residents, almost always female—who aren’t already in their rooms for the night at that “witching hour” immediately after the dinnertime news. When I’d first approached the then-activities director more than a decade ago and proposed to share some time with the seniors (I should say “older seniors,” as, by AARP’s lights I now am one, too), she essentially asked me to describe my shtick. Did I sing? Play an instrument? Would I be telling stories? I confessed I had no talents—and no big desire, frankly, to be an all-attention-on-me entertainer. This fazed the activities director not one bit. She wasn’t one to look an unpaid gift horse in the mouth.
She had said that Monday evening around 7 or 7:30 would be a good time for me to do my visiting. “What would you be doing if you were home at that time?” she asked. “Watching Jeopardy!,” I answered. “Well, do that, then,” she responded.
And so it’s been that ever since, each time I ride the elevator from the ground level to the second floor of the facility, I read “7:30: Jeopardy with Eric” on the daily activities list that’s taped to the wall. (Staff never think to include the exclamation point, which annoys me as an editor, but to date I’ve let it go.) So, as I’ve already noted, I arrive around 7. I typically spend my first half hour watching Wheel of Fortune with whatever ladies already are seated in the open TV area, and/or visit in their rooms with residents who’ve aged out of communal activities because they’re too blind, deaf, gently demented, or what have you. Then we watch Jeopardy! Mostly I watch, and call out my answers (or, questions, if you prefer), and the ladies watch me. We make small talk amongst us along the way. Then we usually watch the first half of Antiques Roadshow on PBS from 8 to 8:30, or, in season, the first half-hour of Dancing with the Stars on ABC. Then I bid them adieu, telling them I’m hungry and ready for the late dinner Lynn will have waiting for me. For the past several years, the last words I’ve heard before hopping on the elevator are 90-ish Helen telling whoever is in the room, “I can’t believe he waits to eat until this late!” Her tone suggests I’ve just climbed Everest or achieved Olympic gold.
Anyway, I’ve attended a lot of memorial services and funerals over the years, and printed out a lot of obituaries. I’ll always remember my first group of night owls: Imperious Augusta and “Greek Ambassador” Marianthe, who loathed each other; Phyllis, who loved to laugh; and Ruth, a humble but whip-smart Missourian whose daughter was a US Attorney. They’re all dead now. As is Jean, who’d helped Rachel Carson research Silent Spring, the book many credit with kick-starting the environmental movement. And then there was Golde, who was still reading the New Yorker well into her 90s and spoke often of all the fascinating adult ed courses she’s taken in her beloved San Francisco just a few years before moving East. And I’ll always remember charming Richard, the rare man on the assisted-living scene, whose breath suggested his lifelong battle with the bottle perhaps always had been a rather passive fight.
I always tell my Monday-night homies they’re my friends, and they are. Compartmentalized friends, Monday-night friends, but friends nonetheless. I send them Christmas and birthday cards, bring them chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Lynn and I sip middling champagne with them and their middle-aged (or older) kids at occasional celebrations in the downstairs dining room to which family, friends and volunteers are invited. I expect to lose each friend eventually, and I do. But I truly enjoy the time we have together.
Recently I lost Ralph, who’d never once watched Jeopardy! because he didn’t want to leave his wife alone in their third-floor room. Ralph had Parkinson’s disease and was in a wheelchair. Bette had—has—Alzheimer’s. But one of the staff members had told me Ralph could use some company, so I introduced myself upon arrival at 7 one Monday night last summer. He showed me the extensive collection of scrapbooks he’d compiled about his experiences as an escaped POW during World War II. His plane had been shot down in France. He was captured by the Germans, but got loose, and eventually to safety with the help of the French Resistance. He never forgot their bravery and kindness, and devoted the rest of his life to publicizing it through the reunions and events of the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society, which he co-founded in 1964. He was a native of western Pennsylvania, and his death merited an extensive news story/obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I expressed my admiration to him many times. But the sad truth often is that, when you’re dealing with people who are very old, in ill health, and subject to verbal wandering even if they’re still lucid, neither conversation nor understanding are always, shall we say, fluid.
The recent death that hit me unexpectedly hard, though, was that of a woman about whom I knew very little. Joyce was a tall, thin British native (a war bride) who revealed nothing about herself, and whose last name I didn’t even know until after her death. She was very outspoken about certain things, however. One was that life at Springhouse was boring her to death. Another was that I was wasting vast economic potential by watching Jeopardy! with her at an assisted living facility rather than being on that soundstage in Los Angeles with Alex Trebek. I’d shout out a correct response and she’d berate me, “Think of all the money you’re missing!” Every week she’d ask me when I was going to get on the show. Every week I told her I’d tried, but it’s a crapshoot even to get an audition. Every week she all but rolled her eyes at that response, signaling her certainty that with just a little extra effort—which I obviously was unwilling to expend—I could be on that game show set at that very moment, raking in the dough.
The third subject of Joyce’s extremely vocal scorn was the stated value of the items people brought in to the Antiques Roadshow. She’d scoff at how hideous-looking or otherwise useless the presented lamp or vase or piece of jewelry was, then share her incredulity at the appraiser’s estimated auction value of $10,000 or $25,000 for that obvious piece of crap. “Who’s going to pay that?!” Joyce would exclaim. “Sell it, if someone will pay that ridiculous amount!” she’d urge the happily stunned owner of the offending item.
Joyce’s death hit me unusually hard for a couple of reasons, I think. One is that the last time I’d seen her she hadn’t looked even slightly ill. In fact, I still don’t know the cause of death. HIPAA rules and all that. Nobody’ll tell you anything, and I searched in vain online for an obit. The other factor was that TV-watching was my sole context for her. I never visited with her in her room or even knew where it was. I never met any members of her family. While I liked her immensely, she’d been, to me, mainly the Lady Who Couldn’t Believe I Wasn’t a Jeopardy! Contestant.
But then came the recent cold winter Monday nights without her there. A couple of weeks ago, a chipped and particularly ugly Tiffany lamp commanded some hyperbolic appraisal amount on the Roadshow, and I wanted Joyce’s British fury to raise the roof. But I instead was sitting in a room with two old women who were dozing while this outrage played out on the flat-screen TV. Then, this past Monday night, there was the much-hyped men-vs-machine match on Jeopardy! with IBM’s “Watson” casting aside the two human champs as if they themselves were trivial vestiges of an irrelevant age. I had to wonder what Joyce would have made of that?
“That could be you up there, beating that computer!” I could imagine her shouting. Or, “That thing’s not even human, and it got on the show. What’s your excuse?!”
Unlike Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, I’m not morbid, I don’t think. I don’t deem everything in life to be either horrible or miserable, although I do believe the globe’s heading increasingly in that direction. And I’m sure as hell no intellectual. I wouldn’t recognize the book titles Alvy was recommending to Annie anymore than she did. But I will go so far as to agree that death is an important subject. It’s a big part of my life—even apart from my worries about my aging parents and my friends with cancer, not to mention the fact that my own life may well be in its final third now.
Death is certain to maintain a regular presence in this blog. I hope it hasn’t been, and won’t in the future be, a tedious or dispiriting presence. But if you find that to be the case, you can always buy the cat book.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Stockholm Sindrome (Sic)
What I remember most about the Atlas Bookstore, a dusty dumping ground for old paperbacks I frequented when I was in high school, was how every title that wasn’t A Texan Looks at Lyndon seemed to be I Am Curious (Yellow).
The Atlas was a huge storefront space in a low-rent stretch of Walker Avenue in Greensboro, North Carolina. It shared its block with a couple of dive bars and was across the street from a third dive bar and a dingy supermarket. You could find Shakespeare and Dickens at the Atlas, but most patrons, frankly, came for the smut. In fact, the incongruous thing about the place was the absence of window treatments, which streamed the premises with daylight. This not only highlighted every speck of dust and mildewed book jacket, but ill-served the purposes of the almost exclusively male clientele. Walk into the Atlas at any given time and you’d see a smattering of men staring dully into pink-covered books with titles like Horny Housewives and The Postman Always Cums Twice, and teenagers like me listlessly leafing through Steinbecks and Hemingways while stealing glances at racier material.
But then, the Atlas and its environs weren’t anyplace you’d really expect to encounter respectable members of society, so its patrons never seemed to mind being thrust into the spotlight, as it were. But I did. I was so nervous and self-conscious in those days that I’d play the Hemingway game even though nobody gave a crap what I was reading (or pretending to read). That included the cashier, who typically himself was absorbed in a novel pulsating with such action verbs as, well “pulsating.”
The pink-covered books were sequestered in their own section, and thus inaccessible to the easily shamed such as me. Still, that left me the rest of the store. The books were loosely separated by genre, but many were misplaced. And re-shelving was infrequent, to put it charitably. This meant that even within the store’s vaguely homogenous neighborhoods—history books, romance novels, honest-to-God literature—one always could find outliers.
Nine times out of 10, the misfit book seemed to be A Texan Looks at Lyndon. Subtitled “A Study in Illegitimate Power” and written by one J Evetts Haley, it had been a huge bestseller in 1964 but by 12 or 14 years later merely was the biggest cumulative log in the raging fire hazard that was the Atlas Bookstore. In fact, I needed Internet help this week to so much as bring back the author’s name, and I hadn’t known until that moment that the book ever had sold well—let alone that J Evetts Haley, who died in 1995, had run for Texas governor in 1956 on a segregationist platform. All I knew of Haley from my Atlas days was that a million copies of his book for some reason had been lowered by dump truck into a forlorn retail establishment in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad.
Honestly, I don’t think in all my visits to the Atlas I so much as opened A Texan Looks at Lyndon. Although Johnson’s presidency hardly was ancient history in the mid-to-late 1970s, by that time Johnson’s alleged crimes against America had been superseded by Richard Nixon’s very real ones. And Nixon’s offenses had succeeded in accomplishing what Haley couldn’t quite pull off with LBJ—getting a sitting president booted from office. To the extent that I gave Haley’s book any thought at all, it seemed little more than an irrelevant historical artifact. Mostly, it simply was an inexplicably prolific fact of Atlas life. For years afterward, A Texan Looks at Lyndon would be shorthand among my male peers for “omnipresent uselessness.” (It thus would prove an apt descriptor for such 1970s phenomena as Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now campaign and, later, Jimmy Carter’s presidency.)
Anyway, if nine of every 10 books outside the Atlas’s smut section seemed to be J Evetts Haley’s invective against LBJ, the remaining book often turned out to I Am Curious (Yellow). That was the name of Swedish director Vilgot Sjoman’s best-known film. It had been released in 1967—first in Europe and later in the US—and hailed by many critics as daring and groundbreaking.
What, you hadn’t known I’d been a budding cineaste at that age? Maybe it would help if shared a description from Amazon.com. Noting that yellow is a primary color of the Swedish flag, Amazon calls I Am Curious (Yellow) a “radical fusion of film and life” that “tapped into the political, social, and psychosexual condition” of a nation that was “on the eve of worldwide cultural revolution.”
Oh, then there’s this: “The book (or film outline) contains beautiful yet erotic B&W stills from the movie itself.”
I imagine now you fully appreciate my teenage interest in what Amazon describes as “an envelope-pushing event” in cinematic history. Explicit pictures! And lots of them! From a trailblazingly frank movie that I now know prompted an obscenity case in this country that rallied acclaimed novelist, civil libertarian and naked lady aficionado Norman Mailer to its cause.
Not that I’ve ever, to this day, seen the film. But I must say, it was groundbreaking for me, too. That “film outline” that found its way to paperback, and later to the Atlas, definitely opened my eyes to some “radical fusions,” let’s just say. “Erotic”? That wasn’t a word I employed then. But, hot? Yes. Or, as the Swedes say, “Ja.”
Memories of that place and time came streaming back to me—not unlike dust-illuminating sunlight into the old Atlas—earlier this week when I spotted a link to an obituary. “Lena Nyman—Star of I Am Curious Films”, it read. I clicked on the link and found out a lot I hadn’t known about the woman I’d seen nude decades ago but never had met, and the film that had spawned a book, that in turn had inspired my unrequited desire to visit and perhaps relocate to Scandinavia.
Lena Nyman, still craggily attractive in a 2006 photo, had been 66 when she’d passed away on February 4, the New York Times chronicled, having succumbed in Stockholm to “a long illness.” She’d had a distinguished career that had encompassed more than 50 Swedish films and television shows, including Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata in 1978. But she’d always been best known for an early role as “an intensely serious young woman who wanders Stockholm as an amateur reporter, raising questions about mores that seem to her to have calcified Swedish life.” The obituary continued, “She asks people if Sweden really is a classless society and badgers union officials about why the labor movement is so conservative.”
This was, of course, I Am Curious (Yellow) that was being described. I had two thoughts when I read those lines. One was that American porn of that general era had been comparatively shallow—I doubt Marilyn Chambers quizzed any union officials about their commitment to social justice once she got them Behind the Green Door. My other thought was that I could just imagine Lena’s energetic interviewing techniques resulting in incredible, um, access.
I learned that I Am Curious (Yellow) had been made for $160,000 but netted $5 million in its first six months on US screens in 1969, after the hype-stoking publicity of the obscenity case. I read that legendary Times film critic Vincent Canby had pronounced the sex scenes to be “so unaffectedly frank as to be non-pornographic.”
That’s not the way I remember them, Vince. At least as they’d appeared, frozen in black and white, in the pages of a series of battered paperbacks I’d examined over a period of years with my own journalistic intensity.
There’d been a follow-up film, I Am Curious (Blue), in 1968—blue being the other color of the Swedish flag. The Times described it as “almost a reprise.” Thinking about that, I had to admire Lena the reporter’s dogged determination to take even deeper her crusade to free a nation of its sexual shackles. And yes, I kind of wondered if there’d been a Blue book. And, if so, why it couldn’t have found its way to the Atlas and displaced at least a few copies of A Texan Looks at Lyndon?
Anyway, here’s to Lena Nyman. Thanks for the memories, and rest in peace. And here’s to the Atlas, as well. Appropriately enough, after years of befouling paperback books and young minds, it effectively washed its mouth out with soap. It became a laundromat.
The Atlas was a huge storefront space in a low-rent stretch of Walker Avenue in Greensboro, North Carolina. It shared its block with a couple of dive bars and was across the street from a third dive bar and a dingy supermarket. You could find Shakespeare and Dickens at the Atlas, but most patrons, frankly, came for the smut. In fact, the incongruous thing about the place was the absence of window treatments, which streamed the premises with daylight. This not only highlighted every speck of dust and mildewed book jacket, but ill-served the purposes of the almost exclusively male clientele. Walk into the Atlas at any given time and you’d see a smattering of men staring dully into pink-covered books with titles like Horny Housewives and The Postman Always Cums Twice, and teenagers like me listlessly leafing through Steinbecks and Hemingways while stealing glances at racier material.
But then, the Atlas and its environs weren’t anyplace you’d really expect to encounter respectable members of society, so its patrons never seemed to mind being thrust into the spotlight, as it were. But I did. I was so nervous and self-conscious in those days that I’d play the Hemingway game even though nobody gave a crap what I was reading (or pretending to read). That included the cashier, who typically himself was absorbed in a novel pulsating with such action verbs as, well “pulsating.”
The pink-covered books were sequestered in their own section, and thus inaccessible to the easily shamed such as me. Still, that left me the rest of the store. The books were loosely separated by genre, but many were misplaced. And re-shelving was infrequent, to put it charitably. This meant that even within the store’s vaguely homogenous neighborhoods—history books, romance novels, honest-to-God literature—one always could find outliers.
Nine times out of 10, the misfit book seemed to be A Texan Looks at Lyndon. Subtitled “A Study in Illegitimate Power” and written by one J Evetts Haley, it had been a huge bestseller in 1964 but by 12 or 14 years later merely was the biggest cumulative log in the raging fire hazard that was the Atlas Bookstore. In fact, I needed Internet help this week to so much as bring back the author’s name, and I hadn’t known until that moment that the book ever had sold well—let alone that J Evetts Haley, who died in 1995, had run for Texas governor in 1956 on a segregationist platform. All I knew of Haley from my Atlas days was that a million copies of his book for some reason had been lowered by dump truck into a forlorn retail establishment in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad.
Honestly, I don’t think in all my visits to the Atlas I so much as opened A Texan Looks at Lyndon. Although Johnson’s presidency hardly was ancient history in the mid-to-late 1970s, by that time Johnson’s alleged crimes against America had been superseded by Richard Nixon’s very real ones. And Nixon’s offenses had succeeded in accomplishing what Haley couldn’t quite pull off with LBJ—getting a sitting president booted from office. To the extent that I gave Haley’s book any thought at all, it seemed little more than an irrelevant historical artifact. Mostly, it simply was an inexplicably prolific fact of Atlas life. For years afterward, A Texan Looks at Lyndon would be shorthand among my male peers for “omnipresent uselessness.” (It thus would prove an apt descriptor for such 1970s phenomena as Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now campaign and, later, Jimmy Carter’s presidency.)
Anyway, if nine of every 10 books outside the Atlas’s smut section seemed to be J Evetts Haley’s invective against LBJ, the remaining book often turned out to I Am Curious (Yellow). That was the name of Swedish director Vilgot Sjoman’s best-known film. It had been released in 1967—first in Europe and later in the US—and hailed by many critics as daring and groundbreaking.
What, you hadn’t known I’d been a budding cineaste at that age? Maybe it would help if shared a description from Amazon.com. Noting that yellow is a primary color of the Swedish flag, Amazon calls I Am Curious (Yellow) a “radical fusion of film and life” that “tapped into the political, social, and psychosexual condition” of a nation that was “on the eve of worldwide cultural revolution.”
Oh, then there’s this: “The book (or film outline) contains beautiful yet erotic B&W stills from the movie itself.”
I imagine now you fully appreciate my teenage interest in what Amazon describes as “an envelope-pushing event” in cinematic history. Explicit pictures! And lots of them! From a trailblazingly frank movie that I now know prompted an obscenity case in this country that rallied acclaimed novelist, civil libertarian and naked lady aficionado Norman Mailer to its cause.
Not that I’ve ever, to this day, seen the film. But I must say, it was groundbreaking for me, too. That “film outline” that found its way to paperback, and later to the Atlas, definitely opened my eyes to some “radical fusions,” let’s just say. “Erotic”? That wasn’t a word I employed then. But, hot? Yes. Or, as the Swedes say, “Ja.”
Memories of that place and time came streaming back to me—not unlike dust-illuminating sunlight into the old Atlas—earlier this week when I spotted a link to an obituary. “Lena Nyman—Star of I Am Curious Films”, it read. I clicked on the link and found out a lot I hadn’t known about the woman I’d seen nude decades ago but never had met, and the film that had spawned a book, that in turn had inspired my unrequited desire to visit and perhaps relocate to Scandinavia.
Lena Nyman, still craggily attractive in a 2006 photo, had been 66 when she’d passed away on February 4, the New York Times chronicled, having succumbed in Stockholm to “a long illness.” She’d had a distinguished career that had encompassed more than 50 Swedish films and television shows, including Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata in 1978. But she’d always been best known for an early role as “an intensely serious young woman who wanders Stockholm as an amateur reporter, raising questions about mores that seem to her to have calcified Swedish life.” The obituary continued, “She asks people if Sweden really is a classless society and badgers union officials about why the labor movement is so conservative.”
This was, of course, I Am Curious (Yellow) that was being described. I had two thoughts when I read those lines. One was that American porn of that general era had been comparatively shallow—I doubt Marilyn Chambers quizzed any union officials about their commitment to social justice once she got them Behind the Green Door. My other thought was that I could just imagine Lena’s energetic interviewing techniques resulting in incredible, um, access.
I learned that I Am Curious (Yellow) had been made for $160,000 but netted $5 million in its first six months on US screens in 1969, after the hype-stoking publicity of the obscenity case. I read that legendary Times film critic Vincent Canby had pronounced the sex scenes to be “so unaffectedly frank as to be non-pornographic.”
That’s not the way I remember them, Vince. At least as they’d appeared, frozen in black and white, in the pages of a series of battered paperbacks I’d examined over a period of years with my own journalistic intensity.
There’d been a follow-up film, I Am Curious (Blue), in 1968—blue being the other color of the Swedish flag. The Times described it as “almost a reprise.” Thinking about that, I had to admire Lena the reporter’s dogged determination to take even deeper her crusade to free a nation of its sexual shackles. And yes, I kind of wondered if there’d been a Blue book. And, if so, why it couldn’t have found its way to the Atlas and displaced at least a few copies of A Texan Looks at Lyndon?
Anyway, here’s to Lena Nyman. Thanks for the memories, and rest in peace. And here’s to the Atlas, as well. Appropriately enough, after years of befouling paperback books and young minds, it effectively washed its mouth out with soap. It became a laundromat.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
White Lite
It’s one of life’s great ironies that everybody wants to feel he or she is special. Or maybe that’s one of life’s great oxymorons. Or paradoxes. Anyway, that was what I was thinking about as I totaled up my score about an hour ago and found that I’m only a shade over 20% white. Because that made me feel a bit unique, even though all it really meant was that I’m not one particular Caucasian satirist’s perfect cultural stereotype.
For Christmas, my friend Karen gave me the book Stuff White People Like, by Christian Lander, who also created the Web site of the same name. In the book, Lander describes 150 different things—ranging alphabetically from the ACLU to yoga—that are so “white” that were you, the reader, to concede fealty to each and every one, you would be downright albino. There’s a check-off list in the back, in fact, that equates a perfect score of 150 with being “100% white.”
The book’s subtitle is “The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions.” The implication being that the “whiter” one is, the more one thinks him- or herself to be something extra-special, and the more one in truth actually is exactly like millions of other people with the precisely the same tastes and prejudices.
I’d heard of the Web site and knew that both it and the book are meant to be more lark than indictment, more good-natured jab at pretension than serious sociological classification system. Still, my hope from the get-go was that my tastes would prove to be far less white than is my pigmentation.
The description on the back cover, however, didn’t look promising. Defining “The White Stuff,” it began, “They love nothing better than sipping free-trade gourmet coffee, leafing through the Sunday New York Times, and listening to David Sedaris on NPR (ideally all at the same time). Apple products, indie music, food co-ops, and vintage T-shirts make them weak in the knees.” While I’m not an Apple snob and I happily drink 7-Eleven and McDonald’s coffee, those words hit a little too close to home for comfort. I subscribe to and love the Sunday New York Times. I seek out indie music. Lynn and I would shop at the food co-op down the street from us all the time if the staff and patrons weren’t all so sour and unfriendly that we’d rather kill ourselves than spend any amount of time in their company. While I never listen to David Sedaris on NPR, I do buy his books and read him in the New Yorker, and confess to finding him hilarious. And, oh my God, aren’t my two favorite T-shirts machine-faded vintage images of old Pittsburgh Penguins and Pittsburgh Pirates logos?
The copy on the back cover continued: “They believe they’re unique, yet somehow they’re exactly the same—talking about how they ‘get’ Sarah Silverman’s ‘subversive’ comedy and Wes Anderson’s ‘droll’ films. They’re also down with diversity and up on all the best microbrews, breakfast spots, foreign cinema and authentic sushi. They’re organic, ironic and do not own TVs.” As much as I wanted to triumphantly point out to the inanimate object in front of me that living without TV for three days during a recent outage had just about killed me, I was given further pause by the facts that I find Sarah Silverman both hot and funny, that I did kind of like the Wes Anderson-directed Rushmore, and that I’m a fan of microbreweries, organic food and most things ironic. So what if I don’t specifically seek out foreign films and seldom go out for breakfast. Could I, in fact, be afflicted with what Stuff White People Like calls “the unbearable whiteness of being”?
That perusal of the book jacket had occurred in December. It wasn't until this morning, however, before I actually started reading the book’s contents. Sure, the holidays are a busy time, and then there’s the business of settling back into work and everyday life. But I think I also was a bit afraid of what I might discover about myself and the depth of my lameness.
So, earlier today I took a deep breath and started reading, filled with curiosity and trepidation about just how white I might prove to be. The first listed “thing white people like” was coffee—especially at Starbuck’s, the accompanying blurb specified. Damn! I was just there this morning. The second thing was “Religions Their Parents Don’t Belong To.” Well, my parents are staunch Catholics and I’m an agnostic, so, sort of. But what the book was getting at was more how white people tend to wear as badges of honor their alleged appreciation of such faiths and religious offshoots as Buddhism and Kabbalah. That’s not me. I docked myself half a point. The third “white” thing on the list was film festivals. Ha! While I’ve nothing against them, I don’t seek them out—even though the AFI in Silver Spring holds them all the time. Score one for Ries iconoclasm. But all told, items one through 10 were a mixed bag. I do like Barack Obama, for instance, and ethnic restaurants. My score already was 6, with 140 items to go.
Thankfully, however, I never would be that white again. While I had to admit my attraction to Asian girls (number 11), nonprofit organizations (12), veganism/vegetarianism (32) and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (35), I reached the halfway mark with a score of only 20. (Number 75 was “Threatening to Move to Canada,” which I’m abashed to admit I’ve done any number of times—most recently when the shooting in Tucson predictably elicited from American lawmakers fewer calls for gun control than demands for everyone to pack heat.) Among the many white likes I do not have are snowboarding, marijuana, Arrested Development (I found it only intermittently funny—so there!), hating my parents, living by the water, kitchen gadgets, the Prius (we test-drove one and hated it—its fuel efficiency be damned), bicycles (I find cyclists annoying and arrogant; they’re lucky I don’t run them all off the road), Michel Gondry (who?) and study abroad (I never partook, and in fact have only been to three foreign countries in my life).
I found I was on a decreasingly white roll now. I would add only 12 more manifestations of whiteness to my score the rest of the way. Yes, I have bad memories of high school. My humor is nothing if not self-deprecating. Lynn and I loved Portland, Oregon when we vacationed there. I’ve always dug glasses, and The Simpsons still makes me laugh. But, “music piracy”? Not only do I not knowingly own any pirated music, but I’m so technologically primitive (unlike most white people, I might add) that I wouldn’t even know how to pirate anything. Graduate school? Never went, no interest. Noam Chomsky? I’ve heard of him but haven’t a clue what he’s about. Che Guevera? I mock the trendy white suburbanites who wear those T-shirts. Tibet? Same thing, except bumper stickers. Rock climbing? Please! It would strike me as idiotic and dangerous even if I had two hands.
Another way in which I fancy myself far from typically white—or 21st-century American, for that matter—is that I hate the phone and think most forms of social media are self-absorbed and stupid. So, I don’t have a portable device with a calculator on it, or the means to text somebody and ask him or her to calculate my white percentage. Fortunately, the book told me that a score of 30 out of 150 would make me only 20% white. (OK, come to think of it, 30 of 150 is the same as 1 of 5, so, yes, 20%. I get that.) My total score was 32, so, well, I’m at a shade over 20%, as I stated at the outset of this post.
Again, I know this doesn’t mean that I’m one of a kind or anything, as much as I’d like to think of myself as some proud outsider who refuses to yield to convention. To the contrary, I’m conventional in a million different ways, by a million different yardsticks. Still, I’m breathing a sigh of relief at this moment. Because when it comes to whiteness at its most laughable, I clearly could be a whole lot worse.
For Christmas, my friend Karen gave me the book Stuff White People Like, by Christian Lander, who also created the Web site of the same name. In the book, Lander describes 150 different things—ranging alphabetically from the ACLU to yoga—that are so “white” that were you, the reader, to concede fealty to each and every one, you would be downright albino. There’s a check-off list in the back, in fact, that equates a perfect score of 150 with being “100% white.”
The book’s subtitle is “The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions.” The implication being that the “whiter” one is, the more one thinks him- or herself to be something extra-special, and the more one in truth actually is exactly like millions of other people with the precisely the same tastes and prejudices.
I’d heard of the Web site and knew that both it and the book are meant to be more lark than indictment, more good-natured jab at pretension than serious sociological classification system. Still, my hope from the get-go was that my tastes would prove to be far less white than is my pigmentation.
The description on the back cover, however, didn’t look promising. Defining “The White Stuff,” it began, “They love nothing better than sipping free-trade gourmet coffee, leafing through the Sunday New York Times, and listening to David Sedaris on NPR (ideally all at the same time). Apple products, indie music, food co-ops, and vintage T-shirts make them weak in the knees.” While I’m not an Apple snob and I happily drink 7-Eleven and McDonald’s coffee, those words hit a little too close to home for comfort. I subscribe to and love the Sunday New York Times. I seek out indie music. Lynn and I would shop at the food co-op down the street from us all the time if the staff and patrons weren’t all so sour and unfriendly that we’d rather kill ourselves than spend any amount of time in their company. While I never listen to David Sedaris on NPR, I do buy his books and read him in the New Yorker, and confess to finding him hilarious. And, oh my God, aren’t my two favorite T-shirts machine-faded vintage images of old Pittsburgh Penguins and Pittsburgh Pirates logos?
The copy on the back cover continued: “They believe they’re unique, yet somehow they’re exactly the same—talking about how they ‘get’ Sarah Silverman’s ‘subversive’ comedy and Wes Anderson’s ‘droll’ films. They’re also down with diversity and up on all the best microbrews, breakfast spots, foreign cinema and authentic sushi. They’re organic, ironic and do not own TVs.” As much as I wanted to triumphantly point out to the inanimate object in front of me that living without TV for three days during a recent outage had just about killed me, I was given further pause by the facts that I find Sarah Silverman both hot and funny, that I did kind of like the Wes Anderson-directed Rushmore, and that I’m a fan of microbreweries, organic food and most things ironic. So what if I don’t specifically seek out foreign films and seldom go out for breakfast. Could I, in fact, be afflicted with what Stuff White People Like calls “the unbearable whiteness of being”?
That perusal of the book jacket had occurred in December. It wasn't until this morning, however, before I actually started reading the book’s contents. Sure, the holidays are a busy time, and then there’s the business of settling back into work and everyday life. But I think I also was a bit afraid of what I might discover about myself and the depth of my lameness.
So, earlier today I took a deep breath and started reading, filled with curiosity and trepidation about just how white I might prove to be. The first listed “thing white people like” was coffee—especially at Starbuck’s, the accompanying blurb specified. Damn! I was just there this morning. The second thing was “Religions Their Parents Don’t Belong To.” Well, my parents are staunch Catholics and I’m an agnostic, so, sort of. But what the book was getting at was more how white people tend to wear as badges of honor their alleged appreciation of such faiths and religious offshoots as Buddhism and Kabbalah. That’s not me. I docked myself half a point. The third “white” thing on the list was film festivals. Ha! While I’ve nothing against them, I don’t seek them out—even though the AFI in Silver Spring holds them all the time. Score one for Ries iconoclasm. But all told, items one through 10 were a mixed bag. I do like Barack Obama, for instance, and ethnic restaurants. My score already was 6, with 140 items to go.
Thankfully, however, I never would be that white again. While I had to admit my attraction to Asian girls (number 11), nonprofit organizations (12), veganism/vegetarianism (32) and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (35), I reached the halfway mark with a score of only 20. (Number 75 was “Threatening to Move to Canada,” which I’m abashed to admit I’ve done any number of times—most recently when the shooting in Tucson predictably elicited from American lawmakers fewer calls for gun control than demands for everyone to pack heat.) Among the many white likes I do not have are snowboarding, marijuana, Arrested Development (I found it only intermittently funny—so there!), hating my parents, living by the water, kitchen gadgets, the Prius (we test-drove one and hated it—its fuel efficiency be damned), bicycles (I find cyclists annoying and arrogant; they’re lucky I don’t run them all off the road), Michel Gondry (who?) and study abroad (I never partook, and in fact have only been to three foreign countries in my life).
I found I was on a decreasingly white roll now. I would add only 12 more manifestations of whiteness to my score the rest of the way. Yes, I have bad memories of high school. My humor is nothing if not self-deprecating. Lynn and I loved Portland, Oregon when we vacationed there. I’ve always dug glasses, and The Simpsons still makes me laugh. But, “music piracy”? Not only do I not knowingly own any pirated music, but I’m so technologically primitive (unlike most white people, I might add) that I wouldn’t even know how to pirate anything. Graduate school? Never went, no interest. Noam Chomsky? I’ve heard of him but haven’t a clue what he’s about. Che Guevera? I mock the trendy white suburbanites who wear those T-shirts. Tibet? Same thing, except bumper stickers. Rock climbing? Please! It would strike me as idiotic and dangerous even if I had two hands.
Another way in which I fancy myself far from typically white—or 21st-century American, for that matter—is that I hate the phone and think most forms of social media are self-absorbed and stupid. So, I don’t have a portable device with a calculator on it, or the means to text somebody and ask him or her to calculate my white percentage. Fortunately, the book told me that a score of 30 out of 150 would make me only 20% white. (OK, come to think of it, 30 of 150 is the same as 1 of 5, so, yes, 20%. I get that.) My total score was 32, so, well, I’m at a shade over 20%, as I stated at the outset of this post.
Again, I know this doesn’t mean that I’m one of a kind or anything, as much as I’d like to think of myself as some proud outsider who refuses to yield to convention. To the contrary, I’m conventional in a million different ways, by a million different yardsticks. Still, I’m breathing a sigh of relief at this moment. Because when it comes to whiteness at its most laughable, I clearly could be a whole lot worse.
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