If only I had become Mrs. Corey Feldman...

We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture. Magazines like US Weekly, Star, and OK! line the shelves with enticing photographs of famous and beautiful people, with hints that their lives may be even more miserable and complicated than our own. Perez Hilton and the hard-working folks at TMZ work tirelessly to keep us up to date on how truly screwed up the lives of celebrities are. Many people eat this stuff up and escape their own mundane day-to-day lives by immersing themselves in the glamorous and tragic lives of celebrities. I am not one of those people.

Most popular culture celebrity references go right over my head. Unless it's Kanye West on an awards show during a slow news week, I'm pretty oblivious to what's going on in the lives in the rich and famous. The reason I feel it is necessary to explain how removed I am from celebrities is because I'm inclined to do something that feels very out of character. It is one simple gesture, but maybe it could turn into a slippery slope toward obsessive fandom.

I read that Corey Haim's mother is seeking donations to help pay for his funeral expenses. I am usually pretty unaffected by celebrity deaths, but when Corey Haim passed away last week, I felt like a dark cloud was hovering over my childhood. My crush was actually on Corey Feldman, but the two Coreys came as a packaged set back in the 80s and early 90s. Posters of both Coreys lined my walls and I was determined to marry Corey Feldman and one of my classmates was going to marry Corey Haim and we were going to live happily ever after, right next door to one another. We had no doubts that as soon as the Coreys met us, they would realize that all of the beautiful celebrities they dated paled in comparison to the devotion of two Midwestern girls. Unfortunately, we had to find a way to meet them first. That was the biggest hurdle, I think. It never worked out.

It feels really silly, but I may have to make a donation to Corey Haim's memorial fund. It feels silly for a couple of reasons - one of which is that the amount of cash I could afford to donate would not buy much more than a floral arrangement. Also, I have no personal relationship with this person and the idea of giving money to a celebrity just feels... backward.

The request for donations went out on Friday, and since then I have read that they have had some support from the city of Toronto (where the funeral will be held) and a celebrity auction site is rumored to have offered a sizable donation to help pay funeral expenses. Still, something pulls at me to contribute a modest donation to this fund.

I watched the A&E reality TV show The Two Coreys in 2008 (the one reality TV show I actually watched) and I do believe the reports that Haim probably was broke when he died. I hardly recognized him as the fresh-faced kid from The Lost Boys whose photos lined my pre-teen bedroom walls. The show centered on the fractured relationship between Haim and Feldman. They both had conflicting chips on their respective shoulders. Feldman seemed to have his act together a bit better than Haim, although he should never ever ever write and perform another love song for his wife. Under no circumstances should another performance take place like the one I witnessed on that show. It was bad even by reality television standards.

Even still, knowing that my small donation will make little difference, knowing that it may not be as badly needed as originally thought, and knowing that there are many other charitable ways I could part with my money, I think I'm going to make a donation. I never knew him personally, and he never got to marry my friend, but watching his films and obsessing over the Coreys as a kid is a happy memory for me. The subsequent path he took through life toward self-indulgence and self-destruction is sad, and his untimely death is tragic, but my memory of his work and my absurd childhood obsession is a pleasant one. I'm not sure if it's rational, but it makes me feel a little bit better to be one of the many people who let his family and loved ones know that he made a positive impact in our life. Plus, maybe I also feel a little bit of regret. If my friend and I had just tried a little bit harder and been a little more proactive in our plan to marry the Coreys, his life would have been very different. If only he had married a younger, awkward, obsessed, Midwestern fan.

[update: 3/17/10. In case you're wondering, I ended up donating $25 to the Memorial Fund. It's not much, but it's at least one dollar for every Corey poster to ever hang on my walls.]

Au revoir, Winter Olympics!

For the last sixteen days I've been glued to my television set and watching the Winter Olympics. I hate to see them go, but when I saw William Shatner talking about having sex in a canoe, I knew it was really over.

Closing ceremonies aside, there has been plenty of entertainment during this year's Olympics. Every day since they began, I have come home from work, turned on the TV, finished up some work on the computer, and had the Olympics on for the rest of the evening. It's been wonderful! Some events I watched with great excitement (hockey) some I just watched passively (figure skating) and some I watched reluctantly (curling.) But the Olympics and I have been together throughout and I'm really going to miss having a constant competition to watch.

I don't know when I became such a sports fan. I think it was when I moved to Washington, DC. When I lived in Iowa, I was a C-Span junkie and constantly watched that network or the news. I have always been a hockey fanatic, but I think that when I moved to DC and surrounded by C-Span all day at work and living inside the beltway, my attention turned to sports to escape the total immersion in the political climate. I was ready to cancel my cable television until I found out I could add a sports package for $5 a month. I wanted to reach into the phone and hug the representative from the cable company when she signed me up.

Now I have traded watching C-Span in Iowa for watching ESPN, VS and the NHL Network in Washington. I actually blame it on the fact that there is not much entertainment on television anymore. Whatever the reason for my attention toward sporting events, I have really enjoyed the Olympics this year and I am really hoping that I will be able to watch some of the Winter Paralympic Games. The opening ceremonies will begin on March 12th in Vancouver at 9:00 p.m. I have never paid much attention to the Paralympic games, but after watching Murderball a few months ago and currently reading Mark Zupan's biography, I have a new-found interest in the competition. If I can go from being half asleep to jumping out of my bed in excitement at watching Latvia tie up a game against the Czech Republic, I can surely cheer enthusiastically for Team USA in Sledge Hockey.

It's all the spirit of competition, and that's what makes the Olympic games great. The athletes compete so hard and so passionately, and it's inspiring to watch someone compete when it clearly means so much to them. The Paralympic games will be no different. I actually anticipate they will be even more so. It is unfortunate that I've had to go to such great lengths to find out if the events will be televised. It is also unfortunate that when I mention the Paralympics to others, they often get them confused with the Special Olympics. It is a very different type of competition. If you are reading this and you do not know the difference, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the Paralympics do not get much media coverage. Televising the events would do a lot to show the perseverance of people with physical disabilities. One paralympic athlete was named to the Canadian Olympic team although in the end he did not have a chance to compete.

In my quest to find out if I will be able to watch the Paralympics after all, I did find a petition online to protest the decision not to work out a deal with NBC for the Paralympic games. I urge you to learn more about the games, and watch online as I will be doing and cheering once again for Team USA: www.petitiononline.com/USOCTV/petition.html

It's hard out here for a blogger

I've used blogger for a couple of years and I sometimes still feel like a senior citizen with their first computer. ("How do you turn this on? Where is the 'any' key?") I often feel like the equivalent of my dear grandmother when I watched her try to figure out which end of a cellphone she should talk into and which one is for listening. I posted something earlier tonight and I learned that if you save a draft repeatedly before posting, the post date will go back to the date that you started to write it. (Although this is quite easy to change.) I didn't bother to change it because I was quite surprised to learn that I started working on this on january 4th.

If you are wondering why a blog that took three weeks did not end up better constructed or more entertaining, this recent post may give some indication. So, in case you're interested (and I'm not sure that you are) here is what happened...

I started to write and kept running out of time so I pieced it together carefully and added links whenever I had the time. I finally decided to forget about polishing and editing and just post the damn thing on January 16th. It was late at night, I was tired, when I noticed that the spacing between paragraphs was screwy, I intended to copy, paste and edit, I did something that can be better described as cut, cut and cut. The next thing I knew the blog entry was gone and when I tried to retrieve it, all I had left was the title. So, I saved the title, created a new blog whining about how much it sucked that I deleted everything, and went to bed - several hours later than I should have.

Tonight I decided to write and post the blog I had originally intended, and it was nowhere near as well developed as the one I deleted at 4:00 in the morning. I had no idea it had been that long, but my intention was to post it on January 4th and make a snarky comment about how infrequently I have been posting lately. I would love to post every 7 to 10 days, and there's certainly enough randomness in my daily life to be able to come up with subject matter. It's just so hard to find the time to post, work six days a week, spend hours on the phone throwing myself on the mercy of my student loan lenders, worry about paying bills, stay sexy, pay taxes and still find time to eat and sleep. Usually when I blog I have to cut into the "sleep" category. As much as I would love to do more, my goal is to post at least once a month to keep up appearances. The last few months there haven't been many comments and I wonder if the folks who usually read the blog have given up b/c I haven't been writing. Or perhaps they think I've given up on them. It's hard to keep that once a month minimum when you're not even sure if anyone is reading anymore. I do have to give due credit to two people who have commented recently. Thanks to M. Brady for the support on my last comment. Rich K. has also sent me email responses to blog posts. Thanks to both of you for the feedback.

It's approaching that 4:00 a.m. hour again so I should publish this before I go and do something stupid with it. I just wanted to add this entry to let everyone know there is a new entry as of today, but it is dated January 4th. If you've visited the site since January 4th, you didn't miss it. While I technically posted it today, I'm leaving the 1/4 post date because it was the original intended date; and also because - holy cow where did this month go already?!?

In the future I'm going to try and keep up my once a month standard to let everyone know I'm still alive and kicking. And who knows, if I get more feedback that other people are reading, I may throw up a random episode now and then just to keep things interesting.

The saddest thing

is when you don't have time to write the blog you want to write, so you start it four days ago and then finally spend a couple hours finishing it and adding links. Then, after having saved the draft so many times, you finally post it but you forget that blogger always triple spaces the paragraphs when you save drafts. So then you decide to copy & paste to edit and create a new entry but it did not copy. Nor did it paste. So now days and hours of work is gone and another half hour of trying to recover it has also passed. And you have to admit that the sum of your experiences that goes into a blog may not amount to much more than a trivial episode, and maybe even no one would've read it. But taking the time to write it all down and then losing it really really sucks.

December 28, 2009

On December 28, 2009 - one day before Ariana Huffington urged everyone to move their money to a local bank - I was (for the first time ever) appreciating the convenience of my own evil, bailed-out bank.

Prior to this enlightening experience on the 28th, I probably would have looked past the awful George Bailey references and agreed with the advice from Huffington & Co. When I moved to DC in 2008, I reluctantly opened an account with one of the big banks. I would have preferred to keep my money in a local bank (as I did for several years in Iowa) but the big bank was two blocks from my apartment and had branches and ATMs back in Illinois in Iowa. I hate paying those $2.00+ transaction fees, and this way I would have a better chance of avoiding them when I went home to visit family. I support local businesses, but only on a very passive and convenient level. There's a local grocery store near my apartment and I would much rather give them my money than one of the national chains, but it's not practical to spend a couple dollars more for a gallon of milk that's going to expire in two days. I can't afford to put my money where my principles are. But the Huffington Post article is right. If enough people with enough money made a point of changing their habits and moving their money to a local level, it would make a difference. Businesses go bankrupt because of people like me who are just trying to save $2.00 at a time.

It may have been easy a month ago to jump on board with the HuffPo article, but the day it was published, I was still deep in thought and beginning to accept the benefits of our global, technological society. Here's what happened.

At 3:30 p.m. on December 28th, my dad was driving me to Chicago to catch a flight back to DC. We left a little earlier than normal, just in case the underwear bomber succeeded in beefing up airport security to level: overkill. It was about two hours before takeoff, we were twenty minutes from the airport and I received a call from a friend who was in Italy for the holidays. She had gone to visit friends and was flying by herself. I was not expecting to hear from her before we were back in DC. I answered the call and chaos and drama poured out of the receiver. She was frantic. She had left Italy and was stuck in Munich. She couldn't get in touch with her family or her friends in Italy. She was being told she had to leave the airport and stay at a hostel, but she had no credit card other than her debit card connected to her checking account. She was not expecting to pay for a hostel two days before payday so she didn't have enough, but had nowhere to go and no money for the next 13 hours before her flight left. She was stuck in a country where she didn't understand the language and she didn't even seem to know why she was calling me, she was just making her way through her contacts list because she didn't know what else to do.

As the panic spewed from my cell phone, I looked at the clock and then looked over my dad's GPS. I knew that she and I had the same bank, so I picked up the GPS and typed in the name of the bank. There was a branch 7 miles out of the way, but we could still make it there and make the flight. I interrupted her desperation.

Frantic Friend: "I don't even know what to do and there's like one person in this whole airport I can talk to about it and they're telling me I have to leave and I don't know what to do and I hate this place and I'm never going to travel again and this is the worst day of my life and I..."
Me: "Listen. We're a few miles from a bank. Can you send me a text message with your checking account number and my dad and I will go there and put some cash in for you?"
FF: "Huh? [sudden cheerful, hopeful tone] Uhhh, I think I can send a text from here!! I can try!!!"
Me: "Okay, send me the text. We're going to head toward the bank and try to get you some cash right away. Stand by and I'll call you back when we get there."

We hung up, she sent the text with the account number and I ran into a Bank of America branch in a town that I would otherwise never have known existed. It ended up being the easiest bank transaction I have ever made. I filled out a deposit slip and explained the situation to the teller. I asked her when she would be able to access the money with her debit card. The teller said that since it was cash, she would be able to use her card right away. I handed over some cash I had gotten for Christmas that I really wasn't happy carrying around anyway. The teller verified the name on the account, made the deposit, handed me the receipt, and we were out of there within five minutes. I called my friend back.

Me: "Okay, it's done. You should have enough to pay for the hostel and get you home."
FF: "Ohmigodthankyousomuch. Bye!"

So, Dad and I get back on track to Midway airport and I arrive with plenty of time to spare. The rest of the afternoon in the car and in the airport, I could not stop thinking about how simple it all was and how difficult and painful it would have been even just a few years ago. Before cell phones, before GPS, before greedy national banks... who knows how long she would have been stranded or where she would've turned for help. What would have been a huge ordeal a few years ago, can be fixed in this day in about twenty minutes if you have a cell phone and a resourceful friend. It really is quite impressive.

When I finally made it back to DC, I logged onto my friend's facebook to see if she had made any updates about her trip or to see if I could find any information about how things worked out after I had talked to her. She had only posted one update in the previous three days. On December 28th, half an hour after she called me to tell me about how horrible her life was and how her holidays had been ruined, she posted this facebook status update:

I love Munich! The airport is awesome, have a overnight flight, finding a hostel to stay in. :)

There was no mention of the dilemma that had consumed her just minutes before. In fact, there has been no mention of it between us, nor do I think she told anyone what happened to her on that fearful day in Munich. As far as the rest of the world knows, there was nothing but smiley-face emoticons the entire trip.

What a difference $180.00 makes!

Veterans Day, Observed

On Memorial Day this year I wrote about my incredibly moving experience at the Vietnam War Memorial. I like to think that I appreciate America's Veterans and support the troops every day of my life, but this year I have made a conscious decision to spend my day off on Memorial Day and Veterans Day paying my respects and using my day off to observe the holiday as it was intended. Which, as it turns out, has nothing to do with barbeque.

On Tuesday I mentioned to a coworker that my plan was to visit Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day. I didn't necessarily want to go for the wreath-laying ceremony, but I wanted to pay my respects at the final resting place of so many of America's heroes. She was interested in coming with me so we coordinated and met at the Cemetery in the afternoon.

Neither of us have a personal relationship with anyone who has been buried at Arlington. I have only been there once before and for my previous trip I had the honor of going with someone in the Navy who was visiting members of his team who were killed in Iraq. This time I had no one in particular to visit, and the aforementioned Sailor is currently back on another deployment in Iraq. So many friends and loved ones were in my thoughts and in my heart on this day already, I fully expected my trip to Arlington to be an emotional experience. I had no idea that the most moving moment on this day would come from my coworker.

She was especially interested to visit the Cemetery for the first time. She has only been a U.S. Citizen for about a year, but came to the U.S. from Romania twenty years ago. She is an amazing person and she appreciates her U.S. citizenship more than anyone I have ever known. I suppose living under Communist rule will have that effect on a person.

We arrived to Arlington in the afternoon and decided to venture out on our own rather than join a tour. I was concerned that she would want to leave quickly because of the rain, but the weather may as well have been 75 degrees and sunny with how enthusiastic she was to walk the hallowed grounds of the Cemetery. We walked to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and she took a photograph and wiped the tears from her face. After that we set off walking, nowhere in particular, just walking past the numerous grave stones and paying our respects as best we could. The rain came down, the temperature became colder, and through it all, we walked. As the winds came and tried to claim our umbrellas, we held on tight and walked along quietly. Acutely aware that our battle with the elements was no sacrifice at all compared to the experiences of men and women in uniform, their families, and the men and women whose names surrounded us. Walking silently with no one aware of our presence but the fallen heroes long gone, we swelled with respect and awe for the losses our country has suffered.

As we walked along and commented on names, graves and inscriptions, Cristina carried a small American flag and looked for somewhere to direct her symbol of respect and appreciation. As I continued to walk and wrestle the wind for control of my umbrella, she fell behind a bit, and when I turned to look back, she was paused before a grave stone along the path. She knelt down on the wet earth, put her hand on the stone so tenderly, as if she were caressing a member of her own family. She drove the flag into the earth and said, "Thank you, Major Young - for fighting for me." She stood up, dusted herself off, and leaned over and kissed the top of the gravestone before turning to continue down the path.

It was the most beautiful gesture I have ever seen. One woman with no personal ties, sharing an intimate moment at the final resting place of someone who will forever remain anonymous. To everyone who has served or is currently serving in the U.S. Armed Forces - never doubt the effect your sacrifices have made. It has become a catchphrase in popular culture for everyone to "support the troops" but today I saw with my own eyes how deeply this support is felt by someone who still has emotional scars from living with communism and fascism in her own life. Someone who truly appreciates her freedom and her citizenship in ways that I will never understand, but am so privileged that she has shared part of her story, and her Veterans Day, with me.

That's what friends are for

I live in a large apartment building in NW Washington, DC. I am near the Metro and there are shops and restaurants nearby, I have always felt like everything I need is within walking distance. (Everything I want, on the other hand - that may require public transportation or a Zipcar. Depending on how badly I want it.) I have lived there for about a year and a half, but it's just lately that I've gotten to know my neighbors and grown to appreciate and love where I live.

I don't know the exact specifications, but the building is very large and it is mostly one-room studio apartments. There are some other floorplans, but the majority seem to be studio. The rent is expensive for folks like me at an entry-level job, but it's truly the best value for a studio in DC. There is an exercise room downstairs with a sauna and a hot tub. There is a sun deck on the roof, and a party room on the second floor for residents to get together. The party room has a flat screen TV, a comfy couch and chairs, a coffee maker, a lending library, and if tenants leave their drivers license at the front desk, we can have access to the Nintendo Wii. In addition to all of these amenities, the building hosts free coffee and bagels before work once or twice a month, and a couple of times a year they host a wine and cheese party for us in the party room. The building is rather old, and the hallways feel like a hotel or a dormitory, but it is worth every penny I can barely afford to pay to live there.

Even though I'd lived there over a year, it has not been until this summer that I have started to meet other tenants. The building management hosted a party in June, and one of the tenants tried to draw up interest in getting a team together for pub trivia. The pub trivia didn't exactly pan out, but once everyone had exchanged contact information, emails started to abound. There was always an invitation to a happy hour, a kickball league, dinner, game night, going away parties... there was always something going on. It has taken me a while to catch on, but this atmosphere of expensive one-room apartments seems to draw a similar demographic of people. We are all out of school and carving our career path and we're old enough to appreciate living by ourselves. At the same time, we are young enough that we're not at the point where we're ready to buy a house or get married or start a family. It makes sense that we should all come together in this little community of expensive studio apartments.

Yesterday was the birthday of one of the girls in the building. One of the guys in the building had bought her a birthday card and somehow that had a snowball effect and by the evening, we had a card, candy, balloons, cupcakes from Red Velvet, and we invited her and everyone else to get together in the party room to watch The Simpsons Halloween special. This led to the realization that we did not have enough cupcakes.

Brian, Beau and I ended up in Brian's apartment waiting for a call back from the birthday girl. We decided that a box of Ghiradelli brownie mix would save us from running out of birthday cupcakes. After much running around and gathering ingredients, we had mixed up the batter and started to pour it into the 13 x 8 inch pan. The batter barely covered the bottom of the pan. It was apparent that we had a problem and that problem was about 5 inches worth of cake pan.

We laughed at ourselves, then someone else had a box of brownie mix and we mixed that up (to a very different consistency) and poured it into the pan on top of the rest. The absurdity of the different brownie mixes, and people running out to different apartments to grab supplies and back to the brownie batter was absurd. I had a genuine moment of affection and said, "My life has improved so much since I met you guys." Beau looked at me in disbelief, spatula in hand, and said, "Really? This is your moment? You're having that much fun right now?" I reconsidered. Of all the incredibly fun things we've done together, why did I take that opportunity to tell them how much I appreciate them? I tried to explain,

"Yes. Because this moment is identical to what I would be doing had I never met you guys. Except I'd be in my kitchen by myself, feeling like a dumbass for picking the wrong pan and wondering how I was going to eat two dozen brownies all by myself."