"Talking" With Your Kids

Today, my 14-year-old and I got new cellphones. He got a Blackberry and I got a phone with a keyboard. We have texted each other since then, which is one of our main methods of communicating these days.

As technology continues to advance, as a father, my main goal has been to keep my kids and I in the most relevant loop, which isn't always an easy or affordable thing to do.

Today's upgrades cost a lot. I just hope I made the right decision? Parents never know.

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Food, Art, and Family

Well, my three young kids have been away three of the past five weeks, but last night they finally got back here for the rest of the summer.

I'm happy. Today, we gathered a few of the cherry tomatoes that are ripening before my eyes all over the backyard, salted them, and ate them either with a single pop or mixed into a salad of lettuces, carrots, cabbages, and some summer potato salad, spiced with fresh green pepper.

Before you eat, if you are Japanese, you thank the food that has given its life so as to sustain you: "Itadakimasu."

After you've eaten, you thank both the food and the people who've served you: "Gochisosama."

Try it the next time you leave a Japanese restaurant, and you will the proprietor very, very happy.



My very young artist is back home and here is one of her latest works, an abstract.

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Occupation Force

Sometime earlier this summer, the Water Department invaded my neighborhood. They never gave us warning, as far as I recall. They just roared in on their heavy machinery early one morning and set up camp.

To work on this team there seem to be several requirements. You have to be very big and have a very loud voice that you use frequently to shout above the roar of the street-destroying equipment.

You also have to be able to convey your utter disdain for those of us whose lives you are disrupting day after day.

You also have to be able to appear to not really be trying very hard to get this project completed.

"What do you expect?" my friend, the UPS driver says, his hand over his mouth the way a baseball player exchanges confidences with his teammate with his glove held in front of his face. "They're from The City."

Maybe he's afraid those Water Department guys can read lips, too.



Since the invasion, they've turned into a true occupation force, expanding their reach day after day. Their "Do Not Park" signs creep up and down both sides of our streets in an imperialistic manner than forces those of us who own cars here to compete like rats for an ever-smaller piece of the curb each night.

They have created huge piles of trash, including toxic materials and their leftover lunches, that lie festering on our corners. (Okay, maybe not their lunches exactly, but the crap our local denizens add to the pile as they shuffle past.)

Why not? It's already so junkie.



So what are these occupiers up to? As near as I can tell, they time their arrival each morning to coincide with the moment when those of us light sleepers are desperately trying to grab that last little slice of repose that just might help us get through the day ahead without falling asleep at our keyboards.

Then they turn on their earth-shattering equipment and proceed to tear up one side of the street. Over the hours, the sound they emit is so horrifying that you begin to feel like you live in a war zone.

They are sound-bombing us to death!

I suppose they are replacing the water pipes, eh? But as soon as they've finished one side of the street, they noisily and messily patch it up, only to move across the street the next day, and do much the same thing over there.

Now, since I've begun observing these workers, it has become clear to me that they are proceeding with their project one small pipe sequence at a time. They hopscotch back and forth every day, once again cracking up concrete in six or eight feet chunks, only to patch it up again in the afternoon.

Wouldn't it has been more efficient to at least do the entire block at one time?

They've been at this at least a month now, I swear, and they appear to be nowhere near completion. The last time their ilk visited our block, my housemate and I ended up with an astronomical water bill after they ruptured a pipe in front of our place but didn't fix it for days.

We shouldn't complain, I suppose. We are a colony here, after all, in the inner city, a collection of poorer folks with little recourse other than to complain to one another.

Except for me. I'm taking this one to the whole world tonight! The world wide web, right?

Come to think of it, I probably would accomplish more by shouting about this into the wind. At least then the cops would be called to haul me off to the loony bin. There, I wouldn't have to endure the sound of jackhammer (削岩機 in Japanese).

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Julia, Julie & Me

I watched this entertaining film (Julia and Julie) about two writers tonight, at the lovely Kabuki Theater, and I identified with both of them in different ways. Julia Child because she was quirky and passionate. Julie Powell because of the math.

The math, you say? Yes. Julie made all 524 recipes in Child's famous cookbook in one year, 365 days. She also blogged about them. That comes out to just under 1.44 recipes/day, and although I have not checked whether she blogged every single time she completed a recipe that year, if she did that would mean 1.44 blogs per day as well.

I don't know how many people reading these words are writers, but that is a tremendous pace for a writer to maintain. Here at Hotweir World Hdqtrs, for example, I have published at the rate of 1.17 posts/day since launching in April 2006.

Doing anything over a long term at a steady basis is quite difficult. Writing is much more difficult than you might imagine. I'm rather proud of myself, from a mathematical perspective, but of course no one will be making a movie about this drivel.

Still, I'd recommend the movie, if only to contemplate the plight of writers, rich or poor, well-known or not, prolific or not.

It does come down to the numbers in the end.

Why We Need a Public Option

Late yesterday, I found myself once again engaged in what apparently must be one of my favorite activities -- hanging on the phone with representatives of health insurance companies (or rather their computerized answering systems) -- because I have been doing it so often ever since I lost my job eight months ago.

This had to have been at least my 50th time trying to get answers from these good folks, who I'm sure joined the health insurance industry to help others in need, like me, for example.

So, if you had to guess, why do you imagine I was devoting yet another two hours of my presumably valuable time to navigating through one of these automated menus over and over: "For providers, click or say 'one.' For billing information, click or say 'two.' For claim forms, click or say 'three.' For website access, click or say 'four?'"

Stay with me and I will answer.

Somewhere, about fifteen minutes and twenty options later, I thought I heard the right option, "If there still is one of you stupid bastards on the line who expect us to actually explain to you why you do not yet have dental coverage even though under the law you qualify but after you lost your job we did not mail you the Cobra form which you needed to have signed during a certain time window because we do not automatically do that unless your employer requests us to do it and it is probably the case that your particular former employer did not request it all we can say, dear sir or ma'am, you are royally fucked."

Not completely satisfied with this option, and apparently having nothing better to do (after all, I'm an unemployed slacker, right?), I did what I always have done, as an investigative reporter.

I called back.

And back. And back.

I learned to navigate the auto-steps to the point I actually landed a human being. When this happened, something amazing also happened. "We know that you and your company have submitted us the second set of forms at least ten times, but we cannot locate the first set of forms anywhere in our system. You have become a sort of test case in our company as we try to figure out, legally, whether you should even have to file the first form since the second form contains all the same, pertinent information."

I thanked this very decent person, who I am quite sure entered the health insurance industry to help people like me.

But, unfortunately, as I write these words, neither he nor any other representative of his company has been able to locate a blank Cobra application form to send to me, so I remain uninsured in this particular area, which is dental.

Oh yeah, I forgot to say why I engaged in this ridiculous waste of my precious time left on earth: I thought I had a dental emergency. It's quite natural. After eight months not knowing whether we are insured, the kids and I have not had any dental exams. It's been part of our frugal, cost-reduction strategy to get through this thing, this recession.

But by yesterday, my mouth was hurting so bad that I was convinced I had a cavity, so I made an appointment with my dentist, and then I decided to call my supposed insurer, once more, hoping for a miracle, i.e., the news that I am indeed covered, as would seem to have to be the case under the law.

The great news is that there was no cavity, after all. What there was instead was "referred pain," caused by grinding, in turn caused by worrying about things like not having dental insurance.

That is the end of this story, for now. But I assure you that I am not done with fighting the company involved.

p.s. Does anyone know a good lawyer willing to take on these insurance industry bastards? The market for my time as a consultant runs around $150-$175/hour, and has since the late '90s, and I figure I've spent 100 hours trying to simply gain what is lawfully mine. I'd like to be reimbursed. More importantly, most people in my position are not investigative reporters. They probably give up easier. I'd like someone to make these creeps pay so others do not suffer as my family has...

Writing's Hungers

In conversations with several writer friends lately, I've been comparing notes about what kind of energy it takes out of them to sit down day after day and write their hearts out -- which as far as I've concerned is the only way to do it.

Every one of them spoke about how tired and hungry this get by the process. It's a little counter-intuitive at first. After all, it's not like we are engaged in heavy physical labor. We can all appreciate why a farmer or a house painter or a moving company worker must be bone tired by the end of the workday.

In contrast, writers sit, stare, think, and key in notes. Note by note, they work to compose. Here a certain word; there a phrase; over there, a sentence that squeaks as painfully as nails on a blackboard; back here, a word puddle as comforting as a bubble bath.

When it is going well, we take a break, make a lunch, and get back at it. When it is going badly, our shoulders and necks begin to hurt. We get all bunched up with pain. Either way, our hunger never slacks. The neurological processes involved must consume a lot of energy.

Food in, words out. That would be on a good day...

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