i know why the black girl screams: 07.2004

::sigh::

how can someone this cute be such a holy terror sometimes?

every time haiku jumps on the dining room table, scratches me or my furniture, or leaves torn newspaper strewn across my living room floor, i need to take a deep breath and look at this picture.

huzzah!

what was turning out to be a pretty crappy demoralizing day of work/class turned out to be ok.

and how was my day turned around, you ask?

i got my mail key.

see, i somehow lost my mailbox key between sat. and monday. and after talking to my friendly neighborhood post office manager, i was told that i could expect to have me new key delivered tomorrow. so, imagine my excitement when i got home today and saw an envelope with my mail key in it wedged in my door jamb (sp?)! :)

and then, imagine how ecstatic i was when i opened my mailbox and not only had my long awaited credit cards, but also had four count 'em, four of the cds i ordered last week! i also was able to sign up for this amazing deal with cablevision to get cable, internet and unlimited local, regional and long distance phone service all for $90 a month ... so much better than stankin verizon, which charges you an arm and a leg just for regional service... at any rate, i was such a happy camper that i splurged on delivery chinese instead of leftovers. :D

so now, i can tell verizon what cheney told jeffords a week or so ago. i'm so excited.

mondays

my toffee nut latte has worn off.

it's a monday.

i missed some crucial errors during my morning editing session.

can i go back to bed?

ugh.

i had great plans for this evening:

i would cook a magnificent dinner, layout my new template for my blog, watch alias, write about this article i read the other day that has been nagging at my brain and then go to sleep. at 10:30 pm, this is how it has all played out:

1. dinner. after spending more money that i meant to at the grocery store, i made a magnificent mess trying to make spinach stuffed chicken breasts. i didn't make the chicken breast thin enough and didn't chop the stuffing ingredients fine enough, so after "rolling" each breast with dollops of stuffing and haphazardly pinning the chicken breasts closed with toothpicks, they fell apart while i cooked them in the frying pan. on top of that, i had mountains of stuffing (a combo of spinach, ricotta, mushrooms, garlic and shallots) left over. and i had a huge mess to clean up.

2. template. yeah, i'm hella frustrated. it's supposed to be "easy," but all html skills i once had have apparently leaked out of my head in the 6 months that i last used them. i have the vision, but the reality is still not here. and i still have to figure out blogger's tags...

3. alias. stankin abc has not shown any reruns for alias. according to the website:

The next episode of Alias has not yet been scheduled. Please check back later.

boo! hiss! how can they keep a following/build a greater following if they show no reruns?! abc is on my shit list...

4. article. as i write this, i realize i could've done at least this one, since i've spent all this time bitching, but oh well. i'll get to it later.

kitty anxiety

just got home from my day and half excursion in the city. i had fun, but i left the city late this evening so that i could get back to haiku, my kitty.

i just got her a couple of weeks ago, and i felt guilty about leaving her alone for a full day by herself. i left plenty of food for her, a clean litterbox and fresh water, but i still felt so guilty -- what kind of mother leaves their child to their own devices for a day and half just so that they can party and have fun?

so i rushed home, risked being jumped in the bronx at 11 pm on a saturday night or while walking to my car in long island and 1 in the morning, just so that i could make sure my dear, sweet haiku was ok. and, big surprise, she was. very happy to see me, but ok. :)

i'm also pretty psyched b/c i got my first cd from my cd from my cd buying binge on wednesday at half.com and ebay -- a 2-cd set of aretha frankin's greatest hits. i didn't expect to get it so soon, as half.com takes forever and a day, but i forgot that ebay is pretty speedy. i lost my entire cd collection a year ago, and i'm just getting to the point where i can afford to start replacing all my cds. one cd, 100 to go. :)

tomorrow (or later today, rather) is cooking day. i'll possibly be working on my new layout for my blog too, we'll see how the day goes.

welcome.

welcome to my world.

this is my third blog, two which slowly died from waning interest. however, unlike the last two, this one will not center around one specific topic, but on whatever i feel like talking about, b/c it's my space, damnit! :)

stay tuned for more.

my first tree

my tree!

It's Still a Man's World on the Idiot Box

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

December 2, 2004 Thursday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Editorial Desk; Pg. 39

LENGTH: 747 words

HEADLINE: It's Still a Man's World on the Idiot Box

BYLINE: By MAUREEN DOWD.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

BODY:

It's the End of an Era. A momentous change.

Tonight on NBC, one tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes will replace another tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes.

Even Tom Brokaw is a little surprised that he has been succeeded by someone who looks like the love child he and Peter Jennings never had.

''I honestly thought, eight or nine years ago, that when we left,'' Mr. Brokaw said, referring to himself, Peter and Dan Rather, ''that it would be the end of white male anchor time.''

Nah. Those guys are hard to kill off. Indeed, white men are ascendant in Red State America.

As my mom said, discussing her belief that Martha Stewart had been railroaded by jealous men, ''If men could figure out how to have babies, they'd get rid of us altogether.''

The networks don't even give lip service to looking for women and blacks for anchor jobs -- they just put pretty-boy clones in the pipeline.

''I think we're still stuck in a society that looks at white males as authority figures,'' Mr. Brokaw conceded.

Bill Carter, a TV reporter at The Times, agreed: ''Katie Couric may be a much bigger star and even more experienced than Brian Williams. But when the next 9/11 happens, it'll be Brian, not Katie, in the central role. The attitude still seems to be, 'We want a daddy in that chair.'''

And then there's biology. Asked why there couldn't be an anchorette as we enter 2005, Mr. Brokaw, the father of three accomplished daughters and the husband of one strong, cool wife, Meredith, replied: ''You know, honestly, what happens is career interruptus by childbirth and a couple of other things. It's unfair to women that they have to juggle all this stuff, but it plays some role, I think.''

At CBS, the Dan Rather look-alike John Roberts is locked in a battle with the Dan Rather sound-alike Scott Pelley to succeed Dan, and executives are considering four guys -- three of them white -- to replace Craig Kilborn on ''The Late Late Show.''

At NBC, Conan O'Brien is locked in to succeed Jay Leno in 2009, and executives have groomed Brian Williams for a decade to replace Tom Brokaw. I asked Brian in December 1995 if he was a Tom pod person. ''I can deny the existence of a factory in the American Midwest that puts out people like me,'' he said, deadpan, looking at me with those green anchor eyes.

Roger Ailes says he has joked about Mr. Williams having too many shirts, but says he'll ''do better than people think. He has that Tom Brokaw look of somebody every mother wants her daughter to marry.''

Even if I felt like raising a ruckus about Boys Nation, who would care? Feminism lasted for a nanosecond, but the backlash has lasted 30 years.

We are in the era of vamping, self-doubting ''Desperate Housewives,'' not strong, cutting ''Murphy Brown.'' It's the season of prim ''stay in the background'' Laura Bush, not assertive ''two for the price of one'' Hillary. Where would you even lodge a feminist protest these days?

''You ought to call the Lifetime network or, as we say, the 'Men Are No Damn Good Network,' and protest it,'' Mr. Ailes slyly suggested.

I know that women have surpassed men, in many respects, by embracing their femininity and frivolity. Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, who mix news with dish, cooking and fashion in the morning, are the real breadwinners of their news divisions, generating more ratings and revenue than the cookie-cutter men of the night.

Yet, as Mr. Ailes says, ''network anchoring is still Mount Olympus.'' I checked around for feminist outrage, but couldn't find any. Women told me the nightly news was an anachronism, so why shouldn't the anchor be? ''Caring about having a woman in the showcase or figurehead role seems so 80's,'' one said.

Another friend said she devotes the ''one little ounce of feminist annoyance'' she has left for the excess of ''young fluffs'' on cable news -- as opposed to substantial newswomen, like CNN's bespectacled Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr, ''who looks like she could hit those generals with a handbag if they didn't give her answers.''

But my pal admits that she watched Mr. Brokaw partly because he was ''eye candy,'' and declares women at fault in this matter: ''Women like to read books about men and go to movies about men. But men don't like to read books about women or go to movies about women. The only way this is going to change is if women refuse to watch men. And the problem is, women like watching men.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

Glass Ceilings At Altar As Well as Boardroom

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

December 14, 2004 Tuesday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section F; Column 5; Health & Fitness; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 665 words

HEADLINE: Glass Ceilings at Altar As Well as Boardroom

BYLINE: By JOHN SCHWARTZ

BODY:

Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame, psychology researchers at the University of Michigan reported last week.

The study, in which college undergraduates were asked to make hypothetical choices, suggests that men in search of long-term relationships prefer to marry women in subordinate jobs rather than women who are supervisors, said Dr. Stephanie Brown, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and the report's lead author.

Dr. Brown said the findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, could have far-reaching implications. ''These findings provide empirical support for the widespread belief that powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less accomplished women,'' she said.

The researchers asked 120 men and 208 women, all undergraduates, to rate their hypothetical attraction to people they might know from work. The men, for example, were shown pictures and asked, ''Imagine that you have just taken a job and that Jennifer is your immediate supervisor,'' or peer, or assistant. The participants were then asked to rate, on one-to-nine scale, how much they would like to go to a party, date or marry the person.

Women in the study, which was financed in part by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them on the corporate ladder. And men did not show a preference when it came to the possibility of a one-night stand.

But when asked about long-term relationships, the men showed a marked preference for the subordinates as opposed to the bosses.

The findings, which seem to confirm an uncomfortable number of male stereotypes and many mothers' admonitions to their daughters, reflect more than male vanity and insecurity, the researchers argue. Dr. Brown and her co-author, Brian Lewis of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote that ''pressures associated with the threat of paternal uncertainty'' shaped the men's decisions.

In other words, a subordinate woman might be less likely to fool around, and ''female infidelity is a severe reproductive threat to males'' in long-term relationships, the researchers wrote.

In fact, the evolutionary interpretation of human mating behavior is controversial. In an e-mail interview, Dr. Ellen Berscheid, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, took a slight jab at ''these florid psychoevolutionary interpretations of human behavior that wholly ignore the influence of contemporary, mundane social institutional forces."

Relational dominance, she said, could mean different things in a different study -- like one that created hypothetical mates who were richer or poorer than the research subjects. With a money comparison, she said, ''the results may well have been quite different.''

So, Dr. Berscheid wrote, while ''the results may be interesting in terms of assessing probability of workplace romantic relationships'' under some circumstances, ''I think they probably say little about evolution and human behavior.''

In an interview, Dr. Brown acknowledged that the work was likely to stir dispute.

''It bothers people to think about this in terms of evolution that males could be programmed in any way, or have a predisposition to control another person or member of the opposite sex,'' she said. "I think it's something we wouldn't like to say about males; it's something males wouldn't like to say about themselves.''

In fact, she said, ''I lost a lot of collaborators on this piece.''

She conceded that evolutionary causes could not always be teased out of behavior, saying, ''I don't think it's ever possible to really separate out what proportion of a behavior is shaped by evolutionary history and which parts are shaped by our environment or culture.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: December 14, 2004