January 2004 Archives

It's always strange when someone from an entire different sphere of your life - the one that does not include Internet - says "I enjoy your personal web site!"

Hi, Tom.

It never gets less strange. There's a certain blindness you adopt when putting things out on the Web - my main philosophy is "put it up, forget about it," but when someone from, say, work, says "Your site is so cute!" I go scrambling around my site to see what's up, what they saw, if I ever said anything bad about them. I reread my archives like a total dork, as if it changed in my sleep. And then there's the doubt: Should I have a blog, am I revealing too much, am I violating someone's confidentiality, is someone going to torture me in 40 years for something I put on the Web when I was 24?

Put it up, forget about it.

I used to have that mentality with my college column. I couldn't read it in the paper until three days after publication - the idea was horrifying. At least then I couldn't do anything about it. If the newspaper existed in a password-protective electronic environment, I wonder if I would have been able to leave things be.

In other news, I had a day off today that turned out to be one of the busiest of my life, because nothing ever happens except when it's your day off. And the reason I took the day - to work on some of my non-work work - was obliterated, so I spent the night doing nothing. A very productive day off.

That, however, is better than last week, when there was a large water main break which spewed mud all over a Staten Island street, and I was covering it. I got really into my assignment, you might say. Really into it. I lost a shoe. I washed out my socks and pants at a nearby veterinary practice. Ah, the glamour of journalism.

The sleep has been scarce and the productivity low and now I'm blogging - oh, that'll help get everything done. Sure.

Tomorrow I'm covering for someone's shift so that I can have Sunday off, because there are christenings and things in my family to which I must attend this weekend. I think christenings should be small, private, immediate family affairs, in the interest of honoring the quiet spirit of Christianity - or just letting me have a day off!

There's a woman that calls the newsroom frequently. We call her Racist Marge. She may have a last name, but she's never given it, probably for fear we will use some part of her tirades as comment in a story, as if we were that insane.

A few months ago I reported a story about a "breakout" of encephalitis in Staten Island. There was, in actuality, no real breakout - just the threat of one, with numbers one patient higher than usual. Well, the next night I had my first interaction with Racist Marge. I had heard stories of her, but had never met her on the phone, and when I said "Newsroom, this is Melis-" and she launched into a forty-minute rant about how there are still illnesses in this country because the "dirty filthy immigrants" sneak them over the border, nay, all the way up to Staten Island, over the Verrazzano, mind you, I knew I had met a truly mad person. It made me feel bad for her, because if she has nothing better to do than call the local newspaper with imagined apocalypse scenarios, home life can't be fun and daisies.

(Not that she's the only slightly off-kilter phone call we get. We are constantly notified that there are UFO's in neighborhoods from SI's top to bottom. One person called me to ask the day and time once - the easiest way to get her off the phone was to give it to her. Another told me that it was my fault that there were so few Italian or black reporters at the Advance, and this 'Dolnick' guy [the name of the reporter who had written an article about racial ferry hiring practices] was one of a string of white Jews who control the paper, and when I told this caller I wondered how he had a profile of our employee's ethnicities, and that I hoped he wasn't going by names because I am Italian and Sam Dolnick is neither caucasian nor Jewish, he hung up.)

Anyway, it's been a while since we heard from ol Marge. So when I read about Bush's sudden desire to throw open the doors of America, I knew we were in for a call. I didn't know I'd be the one to pick up the phone.

"Hello, newsroom, Melissa speaking."

"It's the dirty filthy immigrants! They sneak over our borders and now Bush wants to let them in and it's the end of the Republican party!"

"Hi Marge."

"Can you believe what he's doing, boy oh boy, I'll tell you, where's the psycho with a gun when you need him? We aren't as lucky with Bush as we were with Reagan (pronounced "Reegan.")."

She hung up at this point and I sat with my jaw dropped for some time. Now, I'm no big fan of George Bush, and I would bet my life and then some that if re-election wasn't on the line he couldn't give a siesta about Mexican workers in America, but I'm not about to hit the grassy knoll about it, or wish death on the man. That's up there with my distant relation who swears Bush set up 9/11 for political gain. If I could even in my darkest heart half-believe that, I'd move out of the country.

It is such cruel and unusual punishment for NBC to release The West Wing season one on DVD, with that series finale, at Christmastime, and not start showing season two on Bravo until January 28. It's planned, I tell you. All the people who watched all 22 episodes in record time after the holidays are now on tenterhooks for a freaking syndicated spot. I hate being a pawn in convoluted corporate gambits.

If any of you know the outcome of the season one finale and tell me, I'll kill you. :)

In the mail this week, from a gift certificate given to me by BK and Kirky for my birthday:

The Penguin's Complete Shakespeare
Jane Austen: The Complete Novels
Eragon, that first-time novel from a 20-year-old that's outselling HP right now

From my sister:
The DaVinci Code

DVDs for Christmas and my birthday:
The West Wing, Season 1 (well, it's my father's, but it's the gift that gives to us all, really)
The Two Towers Extended Edition
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5
The Lion King, the collector's edition
Finding Nemo

I simply have no idea where to start.

I take it back. My family and I have taken up the challenge of watching The West Wing's entire first season by the time the first week of 2004 is over. This is the family who has dinner all together approximately once every three weeks - I live home but work at hours opposing those who function in the normal world, my sister lives five minutes away but she might as well live in Canada sometimes, my father gets up at five and is asleep usually by 11 - we are sitting-in-one-place challenged. There is no motivator like the promise of watching The West Wing together. We run to get dinner done, put our tasks on an aligned schedule ("You take the dog out, I'll take out the garbage, you clear the table while you set the VCR and we'll all meet downstairs in five minutes! Go!") and generally act like idiots to steal that hour. This weekend they watched one without me and I was honestly angry about it - my father prefaced the next phone conversation with "Don't be mad!" and told me with a mournful tone in his voice, that they had watched one episode without me but I was working late and they were sorry, they just couldn't hold out. There was retribution - my mother and father fell asleep on the sofa last night so my sister and I watched one more while she dozed. Every man for himself now.