-
I just started reading about this guy. Love his work. The last piece here is displayed at the Kreeger Museum in DC. I'd never heard of the Kreeger, but I'd like to see this in person.

-
I've never been a big Alexander McQueen fan, and the Unholiness that was Gwyneth's dress at the Oscars the year after she won did not help:

























But after his suicide this week, I started looking at his work online and found a surprisingly great number of pieces on the like-to-love spectrum. Here's a sampling:







































The piece I like best of all is this number on Drew Barrymore. I LOVE the graphic design and the colors. It's the kind of dress that could be awful if not done right, but for me he gets it just right, making it interesting rather than messy:

-
Another amazing crib from Deb. A must see:

-
Here's the front of our house, right at the curb. The snow plow has piled up the snow to about 8 feet, and it almost looks like an archaeological site, with detritus embedded in different layers:

-
A lot of people have seen the photos of Heidi Montag recently, the wanna-be star known for her multiple plastic surgeries. It's obvious that, before she started the surgeries, she was a good-looking girl: good facial structure, actual planes on her face, someone obviously attractive.

Now her face looks like it's made of bread dough. A generic rounded lump devoid not just of individuality and naturalness but of any sharpness that would give definition to her features. She was already pretty, but she wanted to be "pretty" (I can't write it without the scare quotes) in a certain way---Playboy pretty. And Playboy pretty is defined by these very things: genericism, roundedness, and above all an obvious trace of alteration.

I'm always amazed at women with big boob jobs: they look so, so fake and (to me) unattractive. But maybe that's the very point: Part of the aesthetic is that you can tell that the woman has altered herself. And that alteration---with its implications of insecurity, submission to a narrow male ideal, and sexual prioritizing---is the thing that is attractive to a certain demographic of men. Not the actual looks as much as the evidence that she's put herself under the knife.
-

-

Love this shot of Kristen on the new VF:

-
Poet Lucille Clifton, one-time poet laureate of Maryland, died yesterday. If there's a better expression of how you feel as you grow old than "green tree in a forest of kindling" I don't know what it is.


There is a girl inside


There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a green girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

-

-
I enjoyed this article in the Washington Post about federal versus private employment:


For both government and private-sector workers, grass is greener on other side

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 12, 2010; C01



According to D.C.'s Department of Employment Services, 202,000 of the jobs in Washington were federal government positions as of November 2009. There were 471,000 private-sector positions.

Occasionally, there will be cross-sector pollination, socialization, relationshipation.

At a time when unemployment in the District is at a record high, this intermingling can result in uniquely D.C. conversations:

"He was a level G-I-don't-even-know-what," but definitely something up there, says Alex MacLennan. MacLennan is at happy hour at a 14th Street NW bar, talking with a friend about the government worker he used to date. "And he was on that schedule where he got every other Friday off."

"Well, they have a level of job security we don't have," concedes MacLennan's friend.

"And he was also at the gym at 9 a.m.," says MacLennan, instead of at his desk. Plus, the ex's boss let him leave early once or twice a week.

Pause.

"I never liked him."

The stereotype of the government worker used to fall within one of two categories. He could be the noble office drone, a human widget who bravely battled red tape. Or he could be the cobweb-covered sloth, overindulged compared with his private-sector counterparts, the ones who watch their unused vacation days float away like dreams deferred.

Either way, the most remarkable characteristic of the civil servant was being blandly unremarkable, which is why the Google phrase "movies about federal employees" will turn up exactly zero hits.

But during the dark days of the Great Recession, the sexiest fringe benefit to any job became security. Stodgy is hot. Civil servants = genius! Visits to federal jobs site USAJobs.gov were up 18 percent in 2009 from 2008, according to the Office of Personnel Management, and up 61 percent for those who came to the site more than once. In May 2009, a Gallup poll found that 40 percent of Americans would consider a federal career, compared with 24 percent in 2006. On Facebook groups for federal employees, there are sightings of fed groupies -- wall postings by people who are not employed by the government, but really wish they were.

When private-sector workers socialize with government employees, envy may arise. Couples offer the best view of the phenomenon.

"Those nights when I'd come home at midnight, I'd feel there was a real disparity," says Emily Kirk, who used to work grueling hours at an architecture firm before recently moving to a sustainable-design organization. "It's like he thinks I'm insane. Like I invented a reason to stay in the office until midnight, and I must be really crazy."

Her fiance, Charlie Willson, is willing to concede the enviable schedule and benefits he gets by working at the Government Accountability Office. But there are trade-offs. Quality of life things. Things like, "when they had a party, it was a very nice party," says Willson wistfully about Kirk's previous employer. "One year, it was on the grounds of the Dumbarton mansion, and we had the run of the whole place. For us, [a holiday party] is in the conference room at 2 p.m., and if you want to eat, it's $8.50. We're not going to use taxpayer dollars on our Christmas party."

* * *

Petty comparisons? You bet. Ridiculous? But of course. Couples are good at petty and ridiculous. And if it's true that people covet the specific rather than the abstract, then it's one thing to hear generally about government perks -- President Obama's recent 1.4 percent salary increase for federal workers might be relatively measly, but it probably stung the millions of private-sector employees who have lost their jobs this recession -- and quite another to watch your spouse telework in her pajamas during a week's worth of government snow days, watching Bravo, eating Oreos. Not that you're bitter.

(Inversely, it's also one thing to hear about the private-sector benefits, and quite another to learn that your boyfriend's newly renovated law office will have a sauna and free popcorn, while you're stuck in a concrete block of doom.)

These comparisons have recently trickled up from the kitchen table to Capitol Hill. Newly elected Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) recently made headlines for suggesting that a pay freeze should be put in place for federal employees because of their apparently high salaries, comments that the National Treasury Employees Union met with exasperation.

Numbers, after all, rarely reveal a whole story. Much of that aforementioned salary "disparity" is due to the fact that federal positions tend to be white-collar jobs that require more training and education, and these jobs were being likened to private positions ranging from non-government lawyers to McDonald's cashiers. Federal surveys show that 20 percent of federal workers have a graduate degree, and 51 percent have a bachelor's, compared with 13 percent and 35 percent, respectively, in the private sector.

In job-to-job comparisons of federal vs. non-government employment, some federal jobs -- accountants, historians, information-systems managers -- did have higher salaries, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but many had lower. A government lawyer, for example, makes an average of $124,000, and a private sector lawyer makes $131,000. An editor for the federal government earns an average of $42,000 vs. $51,000 in the private sector; economists earned $101,000 vs. $122,000.

Still, a glancing comparison can lead to irritation. Resentment. Wild generalizations. In a recent poll by Rasmussen Reports, a pitiful 7 percent of respondents believed that government employees work harder than those in the private sector.

"Have you looked into the vacation and sick days they accrue?" says Brian Joseph Lee, a local artist who consorts with federal workers. He lowers his voice conspiratorially: "If you take a few strategically placed sick days" in that holiday-laden stretch between Veterans and Presidents' days, Lee says, "you can manage to not work a full week for three months."

"What's next? Super Bowl Monday?" says Ginger Holden, whose primary friend circle and several assorted exes all worked for the government. "Hey, let's go out today, it's Super Bowl Monday!" She sniffs. "Might as well make that a holiday, too."

Oh, how the government workers have heard this before. Oh, how they try to beat you to the punch, making self-deprecating, apologetic cracks about their compressed schedules, and the occasional 3 p.m. dismissals that President Obama doles out on rare occasion.

But inside, it burns. It burns.

When James Wilson, a supervisory patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, met his wife, he was spending so many hours at the office that he gave her only his work number, figuring that was where she could reach him. "She assumed I was married or had some other relationship going on," Wilson says, "because she didn't believe any government employee could possibly work those long of hours." Wilson made her come to his workplace and watch him, to prove that he wasn't a cheater.

"All of my friends have resentment," says Kyle Bowker, who works for the Department of Transportation and is dating a non-government employee. "But I'm not getting $10,000-a-year bonuses," Bowker says. "My boss can't decide to randomly take my whole office to the movies." The envious simply don't understand what's actually entailed in his job.

Maybe that's the whole issue with these couples, this situation, this city. It's a population of program associates, and program specialists, and program officers, and does anybody understand what anybody does, really? Something with some agency . . . that administers . . . something.

It's easy to burrow into our mazes of cubicles -- public or private -- and assume that the grass is greener in the office building next door.

"Even if I get holidays off, I'm still on the CrackBerry," says Melissa Bosma. She works in international banking and is married to Jason Fincke, a government lawyer. "Just because the U.S. is closed doesn't mean other countries are. Memorial Day, Martin Luther King, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving. " Every single one of them, she's tethered to work.

"But our daughter's preschool takes off the same holidays that I get," Jason says, offering his rebuttal. So, though he might technically have more days off, he spends them doing solo child care and running errands to keep the household operating. They don't entirely count as time off.

Melissa listens thoughtfully to her husband's argument. For a moment, it seems like Jason might have gotten through. Then she gives her response: "Waaah, waaah, waaah."

-

-

-
Rocky sniffed out an injured squirrel who was hiding in the rafters of our deck out back. He was going crazy trying to reach it.

-

It's like the past two days of shoveling never happened.

-

In grad school I had a friend who emigrated from Cuba when she was a girl. She said the first night she arrived in New Jersey it snowed---the first time she had ever seen snow. And she thought it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. Then the next day she woke up, and the cars had been through and the plows and shovels, and she thought it was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen.

-
Good Omens is the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman that I read recently and loved to death. Here's a short bit to give you the flavor. In this scene, the devil Crowley, who has been hanging around Earth since the start and is beginning to like it, tells two other devils what he's been doing to promote the plans of Evil. He doesn't really like these two other devils, who are all old school, tempting priests and corrupting politicians. Crowley feels he's an innovator. His great accomplishment was to tie up all the portable telephones in central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime the other day. His proud announcement is greeted with blank stares:

"What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

"But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them."

-

-
Jay shoveling the driveway:
















Rocky in a trench:




















A cold bird:
















The backyard:
















First blue sky we've seen for days:



-

This is my brother's dog Westifer in the snow yesterday.

-

The snow is falling hard now, in slightly bigger flakes. The woods look pretty already, but not as gorgeous as they will this evening. I've got pizza dough rising on the counter, and have already cleaned out the freezer, refrigerator, and Rocky's basket of toys (which had approximately two dozen shards of rawhides in it). Jay walked Rocky and is now napping.

Things I have to report on today:

1. This is a Mountaineer apple.















I bought it at the grocery because it's local and it doesn't have a shiny peel (I generally don't like the taste of apples that are shiny--yes, I'm talking to you Red Delicious!). The Mountaineer apples are quite funny looking, kind of squat and mishapen, but delicious.

2. I'm reading a new cookbook by Pam Anderson called The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight and Looking Great.

















There have been only two cookbooks that really had a lasting impression on me or changed the way I cooked. The first was Molly Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest,




















which Jay gave me as a housewarming present when I first had my Waverly coworkers over for dinner when I lived with Mary. Molly Katzen was a founder of the vegetarian restaurant Moosewood, and she had a freedom (dips for dinner) and enthusiasm that made me interested in cooking for the first time.

The other cookbook was Pam Anderson's How to Cook without a Book,
















which aims to teach readers how to memorize a few techniques that will free them from the tyranny of reading recipes in order to cook. She's right---the most time-consuming, daunting part of cooking isn't the actual work; it's the recipe-following---having to read step by step, meticulously measure, and worry about having just the right ingredients. She wants you to be able to make dinner with whatever you have on hand. I've only mastered a few techniques so far, but I love using them:

--a creamy vegetables soup (boil a vegetable in chicken stock, puree it, add extras like beans, and stir in some milk or cream)

--an omelet (eggs, cheese, and extras on the stove for a few minutes, then under the broiler)

--searing scallops (sear two minutes each side, remove, swirl pan with liquid till bubbly, stir in a pat of butter to make a sauce)

3. For some reason I've thought a lot about my mom today. I realized that, just like her, I often am found, first thing in the morning, singing some sort of "morning song" around the kitchen. A favorite of hers was "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" and also "All I Want Is a Room Somewhere." One of mine is that Good Morning song from Singin' in the Rain ("Good morning, good morning! It's great to stay up late! . . ."). I thought about her too, today, when I was making the pizza dough. I look back at my childhood and am chagrined at what a troublemaker I was. But I have only good memories of working with mom in the kitchen: sifting flour, rolling out dough, cutting out biscuits. I really learned a lot from her, and I feel super homey and happy when I'm baking even now.















Miss you, Mom.
-

-





















-

It's Been Too Long

-
since we had some doggie cuteness:






















-