Kerry Reads The Paper!

Time to read the paper! Time to rant!

Parents Pull The Plug on Williamsburg Trust-Funders: This article fascinates me because from my personal observation of the high cost of East Coast life, and knowing about Genevieve's experience living there and trying to get by and through reading things like Escape Brooklyn. Parental subsidies make a lot of sense as an artificial prop for the marketplace in the city, along with the yearly boom of financial sector bonuses. I'm actually interested in seeing what this all looks like 5-10 years into stagnant growth--will we have a return to 70s-early 80s era New York?

When The Thrill of Blogging Is Gone: I read a few blogs that I think of as being deliberately book deal bait, and it's interesting to see how their authors are building a reputation and how that plays into their writing. As for me, I am surprised I have kept this going as long as I have, that I still enjoy it, and that at least some of my family and friends enjoy it. I don't publicize the blog, so when others happen across it I am always surprised and gratified.

Still Working, But Making Do With Less: Although I agree with a lot of the commentators--get a haircut, put some flip flops on the kids before they get hookworm, vaccinate your animals because you made a commitment when you got pets, you still have a lot of fat in the way you are living--I actually think the real story is in the comments, in what judgmental assholes NYTimes readers are.

The dad saying that childhood was not a time for kids to worry, I found both endearing and infuriating. It was the something The Don thought too, that his daughters should be protected and not exposed to the world, that we would be spoiled by it and lose our innocence. It's sweet and quaint and well-meaning, but it was the reason why my dad and I had a lousy relationship for so long. My natural talent is in worry; it is why I became so interested in the larger world, a compulsive reader, and needed to leave to become myself. I was denied facts, skills and guidance, and when I left home I was unprepared. I'm still quietly furious about it.

I really hate this Cooking With Dexter series due to the fact that a) I'm not interested in children I don't know, b) I'm really not interested in parents bragging about their children, and c) I am so over the foodie lifestyle. (Not so over I won't be seeing Julia & Julia this summer, but having read the original blog (awesome) and the book (lousy) and seen the preview I think they are mostly going with the theme of self-transformation and the challenges of how do you keep yourself interested as an adult rather than FOOD,GLORIOUS FOOD!)

But hey, Peter Wells, guess what? I got a solution for your grocery bill problem. It's called a price book. You make a list of all the stuff your family eats and then you hit your grocery stores and see where it tends to be cheapest and then you (radical notion) buy it there. Quit whining. In the end it doesn't matter a whit what you feed your kids if they know how to eat a balanced diet. Trader Joe's meatballs are not the end of the world, no matter how they offend your sensibilities.

I actually don't fault him for accidently buying a $35 chicken--I think Patrick did the same thing when I was visiting and we went to The Greenmarket. It's probably one particularly tricky chicken vendor. I do fault Wells for not making soup or something more out of it. Can't Dexter do it? Oh wait he's 4. Even if he is the savant his father builds him up to be, that may be asking too much.

So the solution for the upper Midwest might be for all the people who left because they couldn't find jobs to come back and buy summer houses. Oh, that's so practical. It's missing the point of "How do you keep them down on the farm when they've seen gay Paree?"or rather, "How can you lure them back to Flint to sleep with a baseball bat when they've had jobs and lives that didn't require working on a manufacturing line and putting up with this sort of nonsense?" I despair at the sentimentality of it all. It will be incredibly hard to live in Detroit and other towns experiencing once there is no retail in town, and I imagine that buying all your food at a corner gas station will get old pretty quick. No wait, those cheap houses will all be filled with pioneering artists, handymen and sustainable food types. Until squatters burn down the neighborhood. Whoops.