In Praise of the (Dying) Public Option

By Christopher Moore

Public option? Heck, after this year, I don’t believe in a private option.
My personal experience with health care tells me that single-payer is the best way to go. Still. I know that is not going to happen, cause I still read about the news. And since the rest of the nation is not with me on this, I’m willing to pretend that the president’s plan represents significant progress, especially since it has all the right enemies lining up against it.
Indeed, when conservatives ask me whether I want the government running the health care system, I think back on my most recent experience with our fabled private insurance system and I have to say: bring it on.
How could I think otherwise? I spent a healthy chunk of 2009 on the phone with insurance companies, trying to figure out if I am still insured for health or for dental or whether my checks have been received or if the next time the doctor sends over her bill, it might actually be paid.
When running for president last year, then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had a couple of lines about how even insured people worry about whether they are actually covered. That’s so true (like a lot of things that Clinton said during that campaign). There’s absolutely a feeling of uncertainty even among those of us who have insurance.
It becomes a guessing game. For entertainment value, we call the 24-hour hotline and punch a few buttons on the phone to inquire if we are still really covered. Or we ask if a specific procedure is covered. There’s too much built-in drama about the insurance business—and it’s way too much of a business and not enough of a social contract.
For me, the drama has been Cobra-related. Since I managed to do something trendy—get laid off from a print media job—I have learned a lot about Cobra and the not-so-wonderful world of post-work insurance. I’ve also learned that there’s something worse than the insurance companies: the outsourced, big-name human resources departments that serve as a middleman between the insurers and the insured. It gets pretty complicated when one organization tells me I’m insured and another one tells me I’m not. One person says they’ve contacted the insurers, then the insurers report they do not have that data in the computer yet. The strain of it all has brought me to tears on two occasions, three if you count the time I started weeping in my dentist’s office on West End Avenue. I guess we should count that.
I’m hardly the only one who is stressed out. All this misinformation and madness happens with our existing, private system. And I’m supposed to be afraid of government bureaucrats? Well, I’m not.
So bring on government health care. Please. Pronto. Especially since my experience with the government itself, namely New York’s Department of Labor, has been so pleasant. I’m talking about unemployment insurance, not my favorite subject, but one that is handled sensibly online and impressively in person. I’ve been to three panel discussions sponsored by the unemployment division on Varick Street. Each time I’ve come away knowing things I did not know. Each time I’ve been impressed with the professionalism I’ve encountered. Each time I’ve been amazed at how the counselors and speakers there treat people like me, people who are going through some of the worst moments of their lives. Each time I’ve been reminded that government is not them, it’s us. We’re the government.
And I think it’s time we took care of ourselves, especially when it comes to health care.
Yes, I’ve heard the Republican rant about how health care reform is not as important as jobs, jobs, jobs. One of the main terrors of losing a job, though, is losing health care. The two issues are inextricably related. But they shouldn’t be. So let’s divide them and make certain that Americans have health care—whether they have a job or not.

The Quote Didn’t Fly

It’s enough to make one remember fondly to the time when we did not have a Secretary of Homeland Security.
Don’t get me wrong: I like Janet Napolitano. But I woke up this morning to her quote about the crisis in skies, or more specifically our most recent near-miss. “The system worked,” she said—and then she worked overtime to insist she was talking about everything that happened after the incident in question. She told “Today” today that the system “did not work” beforehand. Right. I get what she’s saying, but it all smells a bit too much like the famous “Heck of a job, Brownie.”
The homeland security chief’s luck will turn on whether anybody was paying attention during the last week of the year. Otherwise, the phrase “the system worked” could resonate, because it reminds people of the disconnect between what their government says and what it’s like actually to live in the real world.
Speaking of the real world…I was flying recently and I noticed something: it sucks. Bigtime. Especially for anyone flying out of a New York City airport. There is a feeling of being under siege from start to finish. The security atmosphere costs us something, so much so that each time I stand in that line I think of two people, both fictional: Archie Bunker and Bill Maher. Archie used to suggest arming all the passengers. Maher, doing his newsy HBO shtick, says we should have an airline where people can just take their chances and not have to go through security. I like Maher’s idea…and Archie’s is growing on me.

TV: Sawyer’s Smart Start

I thought Diane Sawyer got off to a good start on Monday night. Then I missed the evening news last night because I was out.
Which is pretty much the story of the evening news.
It’s conventional wisdom, especially among hardworking and busy New Yorkers: nobody is home to watch the news at 6:30 evening news shows. I think in this case conventional wisdom is right. And even in the age of DVR-ing everything, even a newshound like me only rarely would record an evening news show. Cause there’s another one rolling around every few minutes.
So Sawyer’s prize, the evening news anchor slot, is more a ceremonial victory than a tangible one. She may have had more media power had she stayed in place on “Good Morning America.” But Sawyer and I are both old enough—especially this week, since her birthday was yesterday and mine is today—to remember the era when the evening anchor was the face of the network. And he still is. Or, more accurately and more excitingly, she is.
Anyway, Sawyer did a good job. Mostly by being the anti-Katie. I’m not a Couric-basher and think she was unfairly criticized for about a year after she landed at the “CBS Evening News,” but Sawyer seems to have learned the lessons of the Couric debut. Sawyer did not try to reinvent the evening news program, whose audience probably is not up for that anyway. Instead, she dived into the dullness—giving us a surprisingly well-edited newscast that bravely began with a lengthy (by TV standards) health care report. That included a smart series of answers to questions that audience members had sent in. And Sawyer’s news-reading style was even livelier than the news deserved.
I read a mean piece in the Post by Kyle Smith about how Sawyer’s show was full of old news. But I don’t think so. I think the program was professional and almost shockingly smart. Well-paced. I’d give Sawyer high marks, whether anybody is actually watching or not. Maybe somebody will.

Wanted: A More Potent Protest

I don’t know whether New Yorkers have heard yet, but the gays are angry.
Count me among them.
Yesterday’s vote in the New York State Senate on marriage equality did not go our way. So it’s unsurprising to receive an email today about how tonight, December 3, there will be a protest in Union Square. I think that is a legitimate response and it makes sense for a community to come together after a ridiculous rejection of our basic civil rights.
But I cannot help but also think that there are other things to do. Nobody should call himself or herself a homo today—or a friend of gay people—unless he/she has written a note to thank the Senators who stood by our side yesterday. These are days for emails and phone messages and letters—I hear that the old-fashioned letter is still very much a smart way to go—and it would not be a bad time to write a few checks to a few campaigns. (Well, not me. I don't have a damn job.) Also, a few hostile emails, phone messages, letters sent to the bad guys would be nice, too.
As for gathering in Union Square, good enough. Nothing wrong with rallying the base. But I think we need to have some marches in the suburbs and upstate, whether the State Senators who screwed us—and not in a good way—actually live and work and do a lousy job of representing their gay and lesbian constituents.
We could go a bit more global in our perspective, too. This would be an fine time to tell our straight sisters and brothers that we are going to stop going to their goddamn weddings. That we will be passing on Cousin Susie’s engagement party. That maybe, just maybe, we are done looking at and buying from those online gift registries. It’s time at least to consider in a serious way some serious action—methods that might hit back in an economic way. I’m not sure whether that would work or if it would just wind up hurting gay and lesbian people who work for the companies where we would be cutting back. But it’s clear that our present is a little too sweet and not quite as effective as it needs to be. A big brainstorming session is needed.

Out—and With Considerable Class

It’s interesting that Meredith Baxter this morning on the “Today” show announced that she’s a lesbian. Cause with that fantastic haircut of hers, she made me wonder if I might be straight after all
Nah.
But I liked Baxter. I’ve been liking Baxter for a few decades now, stretching back to when she was the mom with all the right answers on “Family Ties.” While I was impressed with the way she conducted herself this morning, getting out in front of the tabloid tale about her sexuality, I also kept thinking: this woman needs a weekly series. She has the kind of likable personality that makes me want to watch her on TV regularly. She’s more than aging gracefully—she’s aging beautifully. Smartly, too.
Baxter and Matt Lauer were both pretty good. They seemed to recognize the ridiculousness of the ritual in which they were engaged. And still they were able to go through it with an endearing awkwardness. He wondered aloud how to ask the question about why she was there. She stressed that she’s a private person who does not like to talk about her personal life. But she was smart enough to realize—and to state aloud—that there are political implications to the announcement of something that can feel so personal. Her remarks resonate all the more at this hour, as the New York State Senate debates whether to grand marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples in New York State.

That Crazy Calendar

Time flies when you are unemployed.
And maybe when you aren’t, too.
I was looking at the calendar last night. It was not pretty. I have been out of full-time work for six months. I hit that milestone on Thanksgiving, of all days. Now I’m lucky to have an increasingly weird array of freelance gigs, all of which I love, and not only because they add structure and meaning to days that would otherwise have too little of either. In terms of actually getting jobs that would pay me a decent wage, well, it’s been a disaster.
The calendar, though, seems not to care much about the details of where I am at versus where I would like to be. The days fly by. I’m a fairly organized sort of person overall (I hope), but remain perplexed each day as to whether I have put the right things on the to-do list. The calendar never answers that question. That crazy calendar just reminds me that time is passing.
Then there are the little notations that I put in the calendar even before 2009 began. Today, for instance, is the seventh anniversary of the arrival of Olga, one of our cats. Happy Anniversary to Olg. This coming weekend will mark what would have been the 10th anniversary of my working where I used to work. Now I almost wish I had not bothered to write that one down. To hell with those people this holiday season (hey, there’s a card you don’t see at Hallmark).
Tomorrow is December. It used to be my favorite month. The biggie holidays are in December, as is my birthday. Then I went through a period when it seemed a bit exhausting. Cause it is. I feel oddly okay about the arrival tomorrow of December, and am looking forward to the holidays more than I usually do.
I cannot for the life of me imagine why. Maybe it’s a recession-era back to basics. Maybe it’s like Jerry Herman’s song said: We need a little Christmas.

Theater: Hating 'Hair'

After I saw the show, a fellow on the 1 line could be heard telling two other people about how much he liked “Hair.” Then, just last Friday, a woman at a lecture I gave told me that she was thinking about going to “Hair” because she was such a fan of the show years ago.
I was not a fan. I am not a fan. I am not going to be a fan.
But I’m a sucker for a free ticket. A few weeks ago, I got a pass on Election Night to the latest version of “Hair,” unveiled last summer at the Delacorte in Central Park and now running on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. I learned something weird about “Hair” that I never expected: I hate it.
Turns out I’m not a counter-culture guy. I’m too young and too old for 1960s nostalgia—unless it’s the political kind. I get the importance of the high-profile political assassinations and the political drama and the Civil Rights struggles and the Kennedy brothers. My dad stood overnight to pay tribute to the body of Sen. Robert Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1968. But my parents never talked much about the psychedelic aspects of the Sixties, both because they were not interested and since they were not participating.
I can see why they skipped it all.
Especially if it is well-represented in “Hair,” a show that annoyed the crap out of me. Sure, I like a little nudity as much as anyone. And if I had made myself more familiar—or far more familiar—with the music, then I would have done better as an audience member. The sixtysomething woman next to me loved those tunes, remember them and bounced along to the sounds—something problematic for me because she was obese and when she moved, I moved.
Nobody warned me that “Hair” is loud and vacuous and has only a wisp of a plot. In what existed of the story, Gavin Creel, cute and cool, played our protagonist. He was okay. I liked him better on New York 1 talking about how he and the other cast members were heading to D.C. earlier this fall to campaign for gay marriage. In the show, though, there’s an assumption that everybody older is uncool…there’s that tiresome left-wing sense that we all are in agreement that War is Bad. Creel’s Claude struggles with whether to obey the law and serve his country in a war he thinks is wrong. But there’s a lack of smarts and subtlety in the debate over the war. In fact, there is no debate. It’s just basically assumed that the Vietnam War is wrong.
I think it was. But I also think the tragic dimensions of what went wrong in the 1960s—and the huge, sometimes joyous movements that helped the nation move right—deserve a far better show. A little sophistication would not kill us, either.

Politics: The ‘Shock’ of a Close Race

When it comes to the results of yesterday’s mayoral election, I’m surprised that people are surprised.
About six months ago, I would predict to anybody who would listen—and nobody really cared, sensibly enough, what I had to say on the matter—that Mayor Michael Bloomberg would lose his re-election bid. Of course back then I did not know he was going to b low through his previous spending records and toss more than $100 million at the race.
Anyway, I was wrong about the result. But not the anger among a large part of the electorate. People like their term limits, by and large, especially in a city where they were combined with a sensible strategy of campaign finance. Even skeptics of term limits would have reason to be somewhat impressed with what they have meant to the New York City Council, where they added some life to a lot of neighborhood council contests in the past few years.
Bloomberg did not just mess with term limits; he did it in what looked like a slow and misleading way. He waited until voters could not have another referendum. And then he coupled the term limits move with record spending. When the richest person in town puts that much of his own money into a contest, some people are going to say it’s unseemly.
So on this post-Election Day, I think the pundits have it right. I think a lot of New Yorkers wanted to send a message to their mayor. The only compelling question left is whether he heard the message. Or cared about it.

A Home Health Care Story Hits Home

A story I wrote about home health care workers is in a special section of the New York Post today. Only took me 41 years to get into a New York City daily newspaper.
But a funny thing happened as I sat down last week to finish that story about home health care: my father started receiving home health care.
“We’ve had a visiting nurse here,” my mom told me on the morning that my story was due. “Listen: those people are better than the hospital.”My parents and grandparents have had enough health care challenges—two open-heart surgeries, successful battles against leukemia and breast cancer among them—for me to have seen some great nursing from an up-close and personal vantage point. But the latest challenge, my 79-year-old father’s fall in front of his building, brought nursing right into my parents’ Riverdale apartment building.
The nurse did so much in about a just over an hour’s time: she filled out the forms (maybe the scariest part for my family and many others), she called the doctor for information, she straightened out the prescriptions (“she knows medicines,” my mother said) and taught my dad how to give himself an injection and she took his blood pressure, measuring the difference between his sitting down and standing up.
Or, as my mom put it when asked what the nurse did: “Everything. Everything.”During a scary time, these are the people who make things a little less scary.

Politics: Third Terms

Sometimes I think we should do Mayor Michael Bloomberg a favor and vote against him.
Third terms tend to be a disaster. I’m old enough to remember the third Ed Koch term. It didn’t go well, maybe less, in retrospect, because of things Koch did than the way New Yorkers began to feel about him. They got tired. After eight years, the romance begins to wear off, politically speaking, and the third and final Koch term—like an awful lot of third terms around the country—began to be more about keeping track of the corruption cases than actual achievements.
With Bloomberg, corruption is not a particularly pressing worry. He hires, by and large, fantastic people. But I worry that he’s going to get grouchier and meaner and that it will matter more. He started out as a relatively amiable chap, even with his passion for private getaways and his disdain for what he saw as dumb questions from the press. Fair enough. But in the last year, his attitude itself became the story on several occasions. Remember the mayor yelling at the handicapped reporter?
This is not, after all, a man who is used to being publicly questioned, much less chastised. You could see that much last week, during the NY 1 mayoral debate. Most of the fun was in seeing Bloomberg’s Democratic challenger, Bill Thompson, say to the mayor’s face the things that so many New Yorkers would like to say. I know there are issues that loom larger than extending term limits, but the mayor's mishandling of that issue embodies the rules-don’t-apply-to-me attitude of the incumbent. Watching Thompson take it to Bloomberg made for great TV.
It does not necessarily follow that Thompson would be a better mayor than Bloomberg. But last week’s debate did remind me that elections can be fun—and are sure as hell necessary.

Carrie Fisher and the Donut Shop, Both in a Matter of Days

My neighbor/pal Jessica got me discounted tickets to two different shows in the past week: “Wishful Drinking” on Sunday and “Superior Donuts” last night. Nothing like a little Broadway to get me feeling autumnal.
Going in, I was pretty sure that the donuts, as conjured up by playwright Tracy Letts, would be my favorite. But having seen the two shows, now I’m not so sure. Because I had forgot to factor in something significant: Carrie Fisher rocks.
I read “Wishful Thinking” as a book, and I learned something interesting: “Wishful Thinking” is not much of a book. It reads like a show script, which did not keeping it from selling well. Still, as I made my way through what sometimes seemed like a forced series of sarcastic asides, I found myself thinking the book would probably be better as a performance piece. It is. It’s an excellent performance piece, with more than a few pertinent points about the danger of keeping secrets and taking the long road to finding mental health. Fisher is such a likable presence, mixing warmth and wit with the aforementioned sarcasm. She becomes a perfect tour guide for her story of the hazards of fame, her bipolar disorder and the time she woke up next to her friend’s dead body. The child of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (and armed with hilarious stories about both of them), Carrie Fisher even begins and ends with a musical interlude. And she’s good enough to leave me with dreams of her doing a nightclub act with her mom.
My favorite moment in the second act was snappy and fantastic. The show’s winding down and then we hear a siren. “Shit, that’s my ride,” Fisher says. My only complaint is that “Wishful Drinking” could be done in 90 minutes without an intermission, but I feel the same way about everything.
“Superior Donuts” tries to do something more ambitious than Fisher does, more communal and less personal. These “Donuts” take the temperature of a culture, while also telling a specific story about a shop uptown in the Windy City. Michael McKeon takes center stage, but almost unwillingly. I’ve never seen anyone underplay as much as he does as the shop owner in the first act of “Superior Donuts.” This turns out to be an unlikely and calm play, at least in that it comes from the author of the electric “August: Osage County.”
There are weaknesses, and they are not pretty. The characters are types more than three-dimensional and believable representations, and there’s a poorly choreographed fight scene that looks exactly like a poorly choreographed fight scene in a play. The acting is so good, though, that sometimes the caricatures come alive. A few powerful moments happen, making this a worthy destination.
It’s funny, too. Indeed “Superior Donuts” has been derided as a sitcom, which is usually a sign that I will love a show. This time around, I loved the sense of community and the set and the play’s predictable but well-played final moments. But this particular sitcom left me a tiny bit hungry for something more substantial, like maybe Carrie Fisher alone on a stage, just chatting about how wacky life can be.

Movies: A Worthwhile Trip to ‘Paris’

In this economy, the closest I’m going to get to Paris is going to “Paris.”So I went to see the new movie starring Juliette Binoche. I used to hate her cause she stole the Academy Award away from Lauren Bacall in 1996. But all is forgiven. I just keep noticing that every time I see Binoche I fall in love with her all over again. That was true even last month, when she appeared on “The View” and kept having to be bleeped for her language. She was the first authentic person ever to appear on “The View”—or at least it felt that way.
In “Paris,” the latest from director Cédric Klapisch, Binoche plays the sister of a young man who needs a heart transplant. She winds up getting a heart transplant of another, more metaphorical variety. I like brother-sister movies, partly because there are so few of them when stacked up against the romantic variety, and partly cause I like my sister. The sibling situation here is dire and beautiful and probably made more compelling because the pretty darn cute Romain Duris plays Binoche’s brother.
This is one of those sprawling Robert Altman-like things, where many story lines run parallel until they bump against one another. I liked most of the plots, but especially the scenes with Binoche and Duris. They felt real. I believed everything they said and did, whether they were sparring or sustaining one another, telling the truth of about the passage of time or lying to kids about Santa Claus. An ambitious movie, but a worthwhile one.
And Binoche is that rare 21st-century film actress, one who can use the muscles in her face to express emotion.

At Teddy Kennedy’s Grave

I went to say goodbye to Sen. Ted Kennedy the other morning.
Last Saturday morning, when it could not quite decide whether or not to rain. My partner and my mom were on their way to the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and I joined them later, in time to see an unlikely and huge crowd of people who have not heard yet about the Death of the Book, a great gathering in America’s backyard. The event was crowded, a bit too much so for my taste, but it was oddly inspiring and refreshingly democratic. I heard the thickly accented voice of Paula Dean (do you ever wonder when her 15 minutes of fame be over?) and a few funny observations about sex and literature from mystery-writing wonder Walter Mosley.
But before that, I walked up the hill at Arlington National Cemetery, a jaunt that does not seem to get easier as I age. And I saw, in amid the clicking cameras, the where the youngest Kennedy brother was laid to rest last month. I am enough of an old-time liberal to wonder what we will do without Kennedy’s voice. Figuratively and literally. He sounded so good and so confident, with just the right earthy eloquence. He used that voice to champion the needs of the poor and civil rights and gay rights and, above all, health care for all Americans. Those of us who agree with him are missing him about now.
I like cemeteries more than the average person. And I like Arlington as much as any place, although the crowds streaming through are not necessarily respectful (the signs aks us to be) or smart. “We have to be out of here by one o’clock,” one man told another in the men’s room at the visitors center. Their next stop: Walmart.
Before that, at Kennedy’s grave, I was thinking again how people at such sites substitute picture-taking for actually experiencing where they are. I tried to do both: take a photo and then take a moment—to notice the fresh grass on the grave and the slope of the hill and the distance between the three famous Kennedy brothers. I thought this visit was just for the youngest brother and that I would not even stop over to see the presidential grave, but of course I changed my mind and went over there.
It’s an oddly comforting place, Arlington National Cemetery, if only because it celebrates the power and value of remembering itself. I looked out at the oh-so-many markers for the non-Kennedys, the thousands of the less famous who rest here. The rain decided to begin a bit. Even or perhaps especially on a gray morning, this is a beautiful and sustaining place.

An Inspiring Thought

This morning I called my 96-year-old former piano teacher to wish her a happy birthday. She was busy working on lessons plans for a class she is going to teach later this week.
You gotta love that.
This is the musical arts equivalent of dying on the job—working until the end. Except that she has not died and she is not necessarily near the end.
In fact, during our chat, she was giving me lessons in positive thinking. I was saying how it would be hard to transition from editing to teaching, especially since so many people from so many fields are turning to education as Step Two on the career path. But my friend told me not to go into something like this thinking, well, something like that…about how hard it would be.
Being 96 and gainfully employed, she may not be right about the odds I’m facing, either in journalism or education. But she is a teacher who still has some life lessons left to give. And I’m listening.

Politics: Anchors Gone Wild

Today’s Primary Day here in New York City.
Which reminds me: news anchors have to work pretty hard to get me to be solidly on the side of politicians. But some recent, bad examples have me wondering about the role of the campaign debate moderator.
Dominic Carter, acting like a cross between a bully and a clown, yelled at the candidates for not providing one-word answers to his questions. Diana Williams said sadly, at the end of a debate between the hopefuls for public advocate, “we’ve learned a little bit about your differences”—and she put the emphasis on “little.”I watched the New York 1 debates (Carter was the anchor) for district attorney and public advocate, then the Eyewitness News offering (Williams) for would-be public advocates. And I was left wondering: when did it become okay for TV reporters to yell at candidates about their answers?
Raising his voice repeatedly, Carter really went after city councilman and possible public advocate Bill de Blasio. Carter said de Blasio, who refused to answer a hypothetical question about endorsing Gov. David Paterson in the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, was the first person ever to refuse to answer one of those patented yes-or-no questions. That should be a badge of honor for de Blasio. For her part, Williams was visibly disturbed that the candidates were not doing a better job of outlining their differences. She wanted a Sunday morning catfight, evidently, and it was not happening.
I think there is a fine line between pressing candidates to answer questions and accepting that the guests on the stage are ultimately responsible for their own words. When reporters start harassing politicians for their answers or the tone of the campaign, the line gets crossed. It did in both of the debates I saw, where Carter and Williams were unwilling to accept their role: to put the questions and issues out there. Beyond that, I think it’s up to the candidates to do pretty much what they will with those questions and issues.
With Carter and Williams (especially Carter, who acts like he thinks he’s some sort of reincarnated Tim Russert), the debate anchors acted as though they were the stars of the show. Ironically, they were whining instead of shining.

Another Trendy Move from Me: I’m Uninsured

I want a public option—today.
I kicked off my day today by learning that I am uninsured. At the moment. My insurance company says I was terminated, even though I was told and I think I even read that this would not happen for several more weeks. I thought there was something called a grace period.
The crack team where I used to work is trying to help me, which I appreciate. But I am left wondering what went wrong. I guess I should have called every day over to ADP Total Source, which handles paychecks and insurance and a range of other workplace-related anxieties. Essentially ADP is the middleman between me and Oxford, which does my health insurance, and Aetna, which does my dental insurance.
I called ADP last week. I was told that my reinstatement application had been sent to Oxford, but that was news to the folks at Oxford this morning. And I do not understand why I needed to be “reinstated” when I should not have been dropped yet.
This would be an appropriate time for me to say: I favor a single-payer system.
Government health care is supposed to scare me? It does not. Maybe that’s because the state government, via the Department of Labor, is doing a fine job by me. They are giving me money to buy food. They are providing me with service online, where I apply for benefits weekly, and with a relatively frustrating phone tree and, as of last week, I got some in-person service.
That’s when I was called to the state’s Department of Labor office on Varick Street. I was surprised to get some decent advice from a good-natured counselor (I was picked at random) and to hear from a pretty witty and reassuring woman who spoke to the group at large. The Labor Department, she candidly admitted, was partly just battling fraud by having us show up. But we got things too: lists of resources, from computer labs to workshops (I signed up for three of them) to lists of Web sites that might be helpful.
Sure, it was painful, especially at first, to sit in a conference room with 40-plus other unemployed people. You could smell the anxiety. And this was a good-looking group, chock full of people who I would hire or buy a car from or expect to see teaching my niece or nephew. Call me an elitist, but the professional look of this diverse crowd only depressed me more. I started to feel badly for everyone I saw. But eventually I found myself feeling at least a little bit better, because of the professional attitude of the Labor people.
So please do not ask me to join in the nationwide berating of government workers. I think they might be up to the task of providing me with health care. Lord knows nobody else is doing it this morning.

After Labor Day, Without a Job—but With a Little Leftover Anger

It’s hard to go back to work without actually having a job.
This is one of those big back-to-work days. It is really the start of the year, a kind of New Year’s Day, especially in New York, where fall is king and brings with it a fresh season of everything from politics to culture. And so it’s only natural on the morning after Labor Day to wake up and be eager to make progress on the job.Instead, I need to make progress on finding a job. Which the New York Times told me yesterday is not actually going to happen. There was a fine front-page feature on the people who are not even included any longer in the rising unemployment stats: the ones who have given up looking for work. I cannot say—after reading the story and after living for three months looking for a job—that I blame them.
I understand the frustration. And I understand the anger, which comes at me sideways. When I was first dumped by the powers that be, I would find myself waking up in the middle of the night and suddenly feeling a surge of anger. I would think about promises made and not kept, like the time that one of my bosses told me that I would have a job as long as he did. Alas, not true.
One smart woman with career advice for me over the summer told me that this is like the loss of a kind of family. Yes, although my actual family turned out to be far more loyal. No shock there. I guess post-Labor Day is a good time, way past time really, to let go of the anger I feel over being let go from a job I thought I did well. Certainly taking the toxic feelings into job interviews would be a bad idea—and I hope I have been able to avoid that particular mistake.
I tell myself to do a few of those learned-in-yoga-class breaths and keep going. I survived the Recession Summer of ’09, with a little help from my friends (a lot, actually) and if nothing else I can promise that if I ever have a job again, well, I’m going to be a lot more sensitive towards the job-seekers I meet along life’s path.

The End of the Line. No, Just the End of the Month. And Summer.

If this is an especially long summer, with an early Memorial Day and a late Labor Day, then how did is pass so speedily?Oh, I guess that’s just the nature of summer itself.
No, it’s not over yet, but it’s hard not to notice that we have only one week until Labor Day, the traditional end of at least the feeling of summer.
There are ways in which I will not miss summer so much. It was an eventful one, and an oddly busy one, but a scary one. Running out of money and all of that. Stress. Finding out who my friends are—and who they are not. At least I can stop feeling like I’m having a lousy summer while other people are out in the Hamptons living it up. Not that it’s the Hamptons that I wanted to go. I was more in the mood for everything from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to something more daring, like London.
Dreams deferred. At least now I have the sense that there may be—please God—a bit more opportunity on the employment front once we get past Labor Day. I thought earlier this month that maybe it would be a good time to make contacts or have coffee, but I was wrong. Nobody was around much to connect with, or at least nobody was admitting to being around in the dog days of August.
Not that it was a summer without big events. One week ago my partner moved into my—now our studio apartment. A big change for a small space. But that’s probably another blog for another day.
As for this day, I have those end-of-the-month anxieties, which are only enhanced when it’s the end of a season too. My to-do list is getting bigger. And some of the things on it are things I did back in late May, when I first joined my fellow unemployed Americans. Now I need to do some of those tasks again, along with a slew of new ones. There’s lots to do, which of course is why I just spent more than two hours watching “Ghosts of Mississippi,” an old Rob Reiner-directed flick, on an HBO channel. Even worse: I started with the misconception that I was watching an earlier and—as I remember it—better film called “Mississippi Burning.” I kept waiting for Gene Hackman to show up in this movie and he never did. Wrong movie.
Back to work and life now. The calendar dictates as much.

Goodbye, Senator of Senators

It does not seem like a day to whine about my professional troubles. Or even my personal ones.
Being a politically interested kid, I learned pretty early that Senator Edward Moore Kennedy was a love-him-or-hate-him kind of guy. My family was pretty pro-Kennedy. At least my immediate family. I remember heading to the Midwest to find that a whole host of family members and friends hated the Kennedys. A whole host of the of the country, actually. Ted Kennedy's name raised a ton of money and attention for conservative causes and candidates, including some who later became his personal friend.
To the end, Kennedy remained someone who inspired deep resentment from his opponents. This was news to my little liberal, Northeastern self. And it bothered me, both as a child and as an adult. I remember that one of the horrible people who fired me earlier this year was incredibly derisive about Kennedy. It was the night when I realized that we probably would not ever be friends. Kennedy was not a bad litmus test.
Kennedy drove conservatives crazy partly because he was so unapologetic about his progressive views—even as I write this, his voice rings out on MSNBC: “I am proud to be a liberal.” Imagine having a president who would say such a thing. And that’s what liberals have done for more than a generation: imagined having a president like that. But we have not and apparently we will not. The incumbent president's passionless defense of health of care reform tells us that much.
My father stood in line to pay tribute to Sen. Robert Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1968. Which has me thinking that I should get my butt to Boston to do the same thing for his brother, but I have an appointment with Time Warner Cable on Friday morning. So, with my misplaced priorities and limited budget, I will probably stay here. At least I will get to keep watching the memorials on TV.
Ted Kennedy belongs mostly now to history, which I suspect will take good care of him.

Passionate About Penney

We have only spent a few minutes together, but already I’m in love.
I’m speaking, of course, of the new J.C. Penney.
Certainly I was familiar with the locale. This is the address where my mom used to drag me as a little kid from New Jersey to Gimbels. Back then, Gimbels and Macys were two-stop shopping; it was unthinkable in my family to visit one without the other. Then Gimbels went out of business in 1986, marking the end of human civilization. In 1989, something even worse happened, when the space was officially converted into something terrible called the Manhattan Mall, an oxymoron come to life. Up until now, the only spot I remember visiting there was the Mrs. Fields Cookies, which I believe is still on the scene, but I have switched from soft cookies to crisp. I’m a New Yorker now.
Last month J.C. Penney added itself to the Herald Square mix, initiating a much-publicized move into Macy’s territory, spending appreciated advertising dollars in our city’s newspapers and even insisting that there would be a hip, New York-appropriate sense of style in the store. Well. I did not really see that in evidence, and did not want to. Throughout my lifetime, J.C. Penney has been a refreshing break from worrying about style.
It’s obvious that the more welcome emphasis here, at least in the first few weeks, is on customer service. I was treated like a human being, so right off I felt disoriented, but in a pleasant way. I’m used to finding items myself, or not finding them, with the result being of no specific concern to store clerks. But in this Penney paradise, people kept saying they wanted to help me. They were almost convincing. One young fellow even pointed out the men’s restroom. It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t a Megan’s Law offender loitering by the men’s room, but rather an employee of the store who was just trying to move the traffic along.
For me, this was a step back in time and place. Time because it’s always 1983 at Penney, isn’t it? Place because my grandmother from Ohio and I spent so many summers traipsing around the J.C. Penney at the Ohio Valley Mall. Trips to Penney were a big part of my at-least annual outings to see her. These were vacation visits, when things had slowed down enough for me to consider whether or not I needed affordable wardrobe additions. We toured Penney—we called it Penneys—and had lunch at Big Boy and life was good and I would trade most of what I have today for another afternoon like that with Grandma.
Granted, usually I hate it when the United States infringes on this city. I have not set foot in the Olive Garden since its invasion. I am not going anywhere near another new tourist trap, the museum that opened where the New York Times used to be. Walmart? No thanks.
This time, though, I’m opening my arms. “Welcome to New York,” I wrote to the fine folks at Penney earlier today, when I went online to fill out my customer survey. I gave high scores. I’m old enough and wise enough to settle for a little Americana. Because this is Grandma’s store, and because there are needed New York twists that keep this from descending completely into the Ohio Valley Mall: the relative lack of obese people, the signs in Spanish and the speedy access to the N and R lines.
Grandma’s dead, but I have my memories and my quickly purchased $17 Levi’s shorts. In the Recession Summer of 2009, I’m taking my consolations where I can find them. And since I’m in job search mode and not taking a vacation, the new J.C. Penney might be as close as I get to visiting America.

COBRA Time

For me, it’s COBRA time. I should be either downstairs at the mailbox, seeing if I’ve got the information on extending my health insurance, or calling the toll-free number that my old employer—you know, the people who laid me off, not my favorite folks on this hot August day—provided me. I will do one or both by the end of the day.
It’s weird to be worrying about health insurance again from a personal perspective. Especially at the exact moment that Americans seem determined to screw up any chance of serious and needed change. Every time I go to a doctor or a dentist I think about how Hillary Clinton was right a decade and a half ago when it comes to health care, at least to the extent that something big needs to be done. I want one of those "Hillary Was Right" buttons, but I guess if she is touring African nations, then she's not obsessed with the past. She's moved on. Lucky her. I'm still one of the people left in the 1990s, wondering and worrying about health care.
Covering the uninsured in the greatest nation in the world should hardly be a matter of such debate. This is a moral imperative. It is also an economic and social one.
The fight is not new, even though the GOP is pretending that it is. I like what Rachel Maddow did on her MSNBC show a few weeks back. She showed Republican stalwarts in Congress complaining about the rush to reform; then she ran clips of President Truman, among others, calling for national health insurance. Hilarious. We’ve been talking about this issue since before the 1948 presidential campaign.
I’m lucky. I have a couple of people in my life who are really looking forward to shelling out the costs of my health insurance. But I’m not that lucky…and I know people without insurance, including a neighbor who had major surgery last week. I heard her story in the lobby last week. It turns out you can hear a lot of interesting stories in the lobby, because there are so many of us without jobs sitting around talking to one another. I think we need to get a reality show up and running.
Anyway, I am following the story about health insurance with new-found passion. I don’t know how we ever got into the business of linking health care with our jobs. And I think that even employed people should be smart enough to realize that such a connection winds up forcing unhappy workers to stay in old jobs for a reason unrelated to whether he or she likes what he is doing. The president is right about health care spending being out of control. I hope he gets something done speedily. In terms of a timeline, this month would be good for me.
But thinking back to President Truman’s passion for the topic and his inability to get the job done, I’m not terribly optimistic about the future of health care reform.

The Futility of the Field

“At least someone still wants to stay in journalism,” said the managing editor for news at a major metropolitan daily newspaper.
I was in his office last month, on what I thought might be a job interview. I was not sure. It was one of those days. I had managed to get into the newsroom, but nobody had explained exactly whether there was a job—and what the position might be. He wound up telling me, in a dejected style that left me confused about how to respond, about two jobs: one of which he thought I was overqualified for (the O-word again) and the other, he said, would be a bad fit. So mostly I was there because someone helpful to me had gotten me access. But I was not sure how to use my access.
I was sure, though, that this guy sounded depressed about journalism. Everyone does. And I had just told him that I wanted to stay in the business.
I still do, but I wonder whether I will. This morning I filed for unemployment benefits, something I never wanted to do but am grateful that I can do. (Thank you, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.) The online process established by New York State makes everything as harmless as possible. Still, I had been hoping to be one of the lucky ones, already in a job by the time that my inadequate severance package (that’s what I got for nine and a half years of my life?) was depleted.
It’s the question at the center of things for almost anyone who is, circa 2009, an unemployed journalist: is it time to get out of the field altogether? I suppose it’s something we have in common with unemployed auto welders…and a lot of other people who wonder about the flailing industry they chose earlier in life.
A teacher friend emailed me over the weekend and said that journalism is dying, except for the very big and very large concerns, and so when she gets back from her getaway I will ask her about education. Whether I might teach. It’s something I have had a taste of, visiting classrooms over the years, and I always wanted to mix teaching with journalism. I am the son of a teacher; I am the brother of a teacher. But I never really wanted to replace journalism with teaching—or anything else.
The managing editor did not sound like he thought I was crazy for wanting to stay in the business. But he did not sound hopeful either.

Actually, No. I Don’t Work Here. Or Anywhere.

I had just had a good session with a former classmate of mine. She works at The New York Times. We sat in the Times cafeteria and talked about my job search and her new beat and a few things in between. This is the kind of talk that helps, even if the results do not come quickly or even necessarily bring tangible results. I feel less alone. And better for having chatted with someone else who has not given up completely on journalism in America.
After our get-together and hearing her ideas and advice, I stood in front of the Times building, a cool and still-newish structure designed by Renzo Piano. People were passing by. One man stopped and approached me and said, “Do you work at The New York Times?”
I said no.
He walked away.
I guess mine was the wrong answer. Come to think of it, I was not happy to be reminded that I do not work at the Times. Or anywhere else. Then again, he looked like maybe he wanted to yell at someone who did work for the Times. So maybe mine was the right answer after all.

Theater Break

Earlier this month I went back in time and wrote for a newspaper in New Jersey where I spent about a half-decade in the 1990s. The paper is the Independent Press, a good local newspaper with five editions (or at least we had five editions during my tenure).
This time around I got to do something I loved back in the 1990s and still do: reviewing a play. The only thing that is more fun is giving a good review to a play that deserves one. That was the case here with the latest production of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. This theatrical troupe is one of the great gifts of our metropolitan area.
Below please find my review. Consider a jaunt to Madison, N.J. It's worth it. Next on the agenda at the Shakespeare Theatre: the oh-so-fabulous Harriett Harris stars in "Noises Off."

http://www.nj.com/independentpress/index.ssf/2009/07/summertime_school_succeeds_mol.html

Before the Interviews

I have two interviews set up for this week: one for a position I want and one for a job I don’t.
If history is any guide, then I will do better when I don’t want the job. I wish this were not true, but somehow I shine best when I do not give a damn. There’s something so freeing about sitting down and chatting with someone who’s offering a position of little or no interest to me. We can just be ourselves. There’s no worrying. There’s so little in the way of mental maneuvering, no time wasted on wondering what I’m forgetting to say weighing if I’m making the right points in the right way. None of it matters because I simply do not want the job.
Now interviewing for the sake of interviewing feels like a waste of time—mine and someone else’s—but I used to like the sport of it. Ten years ago, when I was last actively seeking employment, I found myself loving the interview process. Back then, my big problem was that I might actually get a job offer after one of those what-the-hell job interviews. Someone would call and say, “Hey, you interviewed for that position at NASA and now we are offering you the job.” And I would respond, “Good Lord, whatever made you think that I am interested in the space program?” Then I would remember that I had been down to Houston and chatted amiably with someone and suddenly I had a job offer from exactly the wrong place.OK, I’m kidding. But the essential truth remains: When I care, I get self-conscious and there are too many things I want to mention and I sit there and wonder what I’ve forgotten. I come across…cloudy, I think, or at least less clear about what makes me a good fit for a dream job. I guess it’s no big surprise: it’s scarier when there’s actually something at stake.

The Beggar

The young woman was asking for help, probably money. She was approaching us one by one as we stood after 11 p.m. on the platform at Newark’s Broad Street station. I was between trains, transferring from the one which picked me up in Madison, N.J., a frighteningly quiet town after one lives in the borough of Manhattan for seven years, and I was waiting for the train that would take me, blessedly, to Penn Station. The young woman—how young? I wonder now, but then she seemed mostly to be something between a nuisance and a threat—was holding a teddy bear, which would have been a tactical advantage in dealing with most people. Not me. I thought the teddy bear was a bit much and I was exhausted from traveling out to review a play at the New Jersey Shakespeare Theatre—a fabulous production of “The School for Wives” by Molière—and I did not want to hear the spiel. I could not, at that hour on this day of this month, bear to hear her out. So I called to get my messages. I was basically using the phone as a weapon to disengage. I was faking. She knew that. She was on to me. She approached anyway and started her spiel. “No,” I said. She looked angry. “Someday it could be you,” she said.
A legitimate point. If I did not have a partner who would move in with me at the end of next month to pay my mortgage or parents who would let me borrow a bed, I too could be out on the street. Certainly I could lose a home I love. Part of me wanted to call after her and tell her that actually she was onto something and that we had a few things in common. I lost my job. Does she have one? I am having some serious money problems. She must. I just got on the phone with the student loan company to ask for forbearance—and I’m hoping they will be more responsive to me than I was to the woman on the platform.
But I know that my situation is not as desperate as hers. I have a place to sleep. I do not need to harass strangers at the station. I have a precious few people who would take me in—a handful, really…actually I wonder how many—but a handful can be enough. I am lucky, still, but spend a fair amount of time feeling terrified, fearful of the future.
I did not say anything to the woman. She reminded me of my own little terrors, rational and otherwise. I did not like the way she approached people or even, at that hour and in that place. A moment of candor: I have a certain fondness for the place and an irrational hope, but Newark is still largely a mess, even with the cute mayor and the classy baseball stadium and the arts center full of suburbanites. There's a long way to go and this particular train station is not my favorite hangout. I did not like her mean manner or what I suspected was her use of the teddy bear as a prop.
But I do wonder what will happen to her, and to me, and to the 10 percent of the people in this country who do not have jobs.
Someday it could be you.

The Morning Shower Moves to Late Afternoon

I need to take my morning shower. Cause it’s almost 4 p.m.
It’s been one of the bigger—or at least one of the more odorous—issues associated with my unemployment. It might be a sign of serious depression, I know. But perhaps not. After all, part of the problem is that this morning I got up and just started making job-search calls. Then I went out and got a little exercise and did some errands and came back and watched Republicans say strange things about Judge Sonia Sotomayor and then just sorta forgot about the shower.
It makes sense for me to have this problem, since showering was the first part of putting together a look for my day. And now, given that I’m alone in a room most of the time, I do not need a look for my day. Or at least it feels that way sometimes.
Not that I am really slacking. If anything, I feel as if I have been working harder than ever. I really do not want anyone to be able to say that I am not trying to get work. Or, more likely, it’s more than that, more deeply rooted: it is that I never want to wonder within myself about whether I have tried hard enough.
I’m not sure why I feel so strongly about this. It’s likely that I have more of a Puritan work ethic than I ever knew. I make lists and then actually do what’s on them—for the most part. There are some tasks that are more daunting than others (I am still bothered by calling the credit card companies and the student loan people and have put that off beyond when I should have), but mostly I get the job of seeking a job done. This morning, for instance, I got up and called places I want to work and the people who control those jobs. Nobody calls back, of course, but that’s another matter entirely. I have the satisfaction of having tried. And I will do it again tomorrow and the next day.
All I need to do now, though, is remember to bathe.

Wonder Woman

I met with Wonder Woman eight days ago.
Or my personal variation of Wonder Woman.
She was a career services specialist and she had contacts. She wisely recommended that I think up different sets of goals, ranging from Dream Jobs to the ones that I would do to pay the rent (mortgage in my case). Once I rattled off a couple of the Dream ideas, she would take direct action, making phone calls to people who could get those jobs for me. She left a few good messages. She really helped with my resume, paying more attention to it than I ever did.
Nothing has come of all of this yet, but with some follow-up from me and some luck—I’m a big believer in luck, even when I’m not actually having any—maybe something will. I do know that it was empowering just to be in the room with someone smart and wise and with a few contacts. It felt healthy to get help in a simple, can-do way. Now I’m back to helping myself, but those moments last week left we with a tiny sense of the possible. I need that. Probably everyone does.

The Work of Not Working

I am waiting for the cat to pee.
It turns out—and this is something I really did not know back when I was an employed American—my cat Max does not do a lot of peeing. But he does a lot of sleeping. So this morning and now this afternoon I am watching him sleep. I’m not loving it. Heck, I don’t think even he’s loving it.
This is supposed to be one of the up-sides of being jobless: you have time to take care of errands and household projects. Waiting for Max to urinate would be a combination of the two, I guess, or at least a variation. The vet needs a urine sample from one of my two high-quality felines, so my being home now to collect his urine sample should be ideal. Well, I guess the phrases “urine sample” and “ideal” never go together, but this is a little household task that at least I’m taking care of. (We won’t get into how you get the urine sample.)
At least I have a shot of getting this task done. So many others are hanging over my head: reorganizing the closets (or am I organizing them for the first time? I can’t remember); cleaning out the goo between the tiles on the floor; having the bathtub relined; and throwing away all the stuff that needs to be thrown away. I would think I would further along on all of these things, especially the ones that take little or no money. But even with the gift of time in my schedule, I find myself pretty unable to make progress. I’m consumed with the job thing and really do spend the workdays…working. Even without a job.
In a way, I’m working harder than ever. Cause when I’m here, just me and the cats and my laptop, I work pretty intensely and usually without much interruption—until “The View” comes on. Thank God my wacky gals were back this morning from their vacation. Other than time off for Whoopi and company, working at home has been oddly productive, in the sense that I have finished a lot of emails and job applications and made contact with a fair number of people. I’m disciplined enough to keep—and then keep to—a to-do list.
As anyone who has ever been in an office knows, it’s wacky there. It’s all about whether Sandy and Bobby are dating and whichever jerk has just called to yell at you and left a message and you are left wondering whether you should respond first to the voice-mails or just keep emailing. It’s a mess. A hectic mess where the to-do list is always under assault from other people, especially the ones who can fire you. Working at home is lonelier, but not as lonely as I would have thought. I don’t miss the constant interruptions or the we-did-not-need-this-meeting meetings or even most of the people. I do miss a few of them, though, and I miss the reason for getting up in the morning.
Max just started another nap. Seems to have no need to pee. If this is a metaphor for my current situation, I don’t quite grasp it.

Good Neighbors

The neighbors help. They really do.
They may even be the primary reason that so far I am thinking that New York City is the best place to be unemployed. I think it was lonelier the last time, 10 years ago, back when I was looking for a job in New Jersey. Well, I was looking for a job while living in Jersey…I’m not sure whether it’s accurate to say that I was looking to work in New Jersey.
A decade later, my job search is conducted from a studio apartment in Manhattan. Small space, but maybe I have a bigger support network now. Or at least it feels that way in the better moments, like the other day when a lovely neighbor knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to go to Silver Moon Bakery for a chocolate chip cookie, which she was willing to pay for. There were so many things right about this offer: the neighbor, herself part of the looking-for-work brigade, exactly the kind of person I need to talk to when things are down; the idea of taking a little walk, which is so healthy and gets me out of my rut; the spontaneity of it all; and the not insignificant fact that this woman has the good taste to realize that the chocolate chip cookie at Silver Moon is indeed an answer to many of life’s woes.
It turned out that, real life providing yet another disappointment, the bakery had sold out of the chocolate chip cookies. But my neighbor paid for my iced tea and we sat on a bench on Riverside Drive, right there within spitting distance of the park, and we talked about looking for work and how it can impact on a relationship and how it’s important to try not to drive a partner crazy with all the ups-and-downs, mood-wise. A day or so before, I had sat on another bench along the same stretch with another neighbor, talking about other facets of a job search. I have been working on some of my most serious problems right there on those benches, with smart, funny, quite remarkable women who know a hard time when they see it, but they also seem to know how to keep going. They inspire me. They add so much flavor to my life and to my city, not unlike the chocolate chip cookie at Silver Moon Bakery.

From London, Without Love

Here’s a job I won’t be getting. Mostly because I did not apply before the recent deadline. And maybe because of the punch line offered up in the ad itself.
The job in question, U.S. reporter for The London Times, sounds fantastic. “The successful candidate will be expected to cover a wide variety of news from within the United States, with particular emphasis on politics and business,” according o the posting, which I found earlier this month on the site for Columbia J-school grads. “He or she will have the capacity to write accurate and authoritative rolling news copy and leads, but also possess the imagination to pitch ideas to both the website and the newspaper.” There’s a re-launch of the U.S. blog coming, too, evidently.
Sounds great. And the job is based in Washington, D.C., a city where I went to college and where I would not mind spending some time.
What’s the problem? Well, the ad concludes with this little gem: “Given the breadth of talent within The Times, it is our intention to appoint from within.” Do we give these people points for honesty? Or do we go ahead and wonder aloud why the hell this ad was posted to begin with?
As if it’s not hard enough looking for a job in this economy without a fake-out like this. Thanks for nothing, London Times.

Times Team Talks

Richard Berke, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, last night interviewed Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and Jill Abramson, the managing editor of The New York Times.
That’s a lot of Times.
Thrilled at the idea of seeing three journalists I admire, and all with jobs in this economy, I headed over to The Times Center, the should-be-more-impressive venue in the still-relatively-new New York Times building across from the Port Authority.
Carol Day, also a Timesian, introduced Berke, saying he had “the toughest job in journalism: interviewing his bosses.” Then Berke kept hitting that theme throughout the night. I think he joked about it three times. At first I thought he was kidding; later I thought he was pretty serious, maybe so much so that there should have been another moderator. But Berke was good, displaying a particular interest in the personal work habits and experiences of Keller and Abramson. I thought Berke could have hit harder and earlier on the changing nature of the news business, but that could just be because I’m unemployed and fixated both on the switch to digital and whether anyone will ever make money on it.
These Timespeople take a lot of crap—one of my best pals sent me last week the Keller appearance on “The Daily Show.” He came off like a stuffy Times dude, from what I saw, but I stopped watching. I was not hungry to see the Times being insulted. If I want to see a journalist in trouble, I’ll look in the damn mirror.
In person, Keller is old-school elegant, with intelligent things to say about the Times and the world. He said he was suffering from jet lag, but that only made him more likably laconic. Back from Iran, where he wrote front-page news himself for the first time in 14 years (Berke counted), Keller admitted that one great thing about his most recent overseas trip was that nobody came up to him and asked, “How are you going to monetize the Web?” He was also good when explaining the simple but significant value of sending reporters around the world and around the city to gather information and see things firsthand. He talked about how “we’re there” and also insisted the Times has certain standards, but he was not egotistical about it. “Newspapers are put out by human beings,” he said, “so we don’t do any of this perfectly.”
Abramson and Keller painted themselves as a kind of odd-couple who work well together. Keller to Abramson: “I think you are the designated worrier.” Abramson to us: “I am in my family, too. It’s a terrible double-dose.” She called herself the “Department of Dark Worries” and said she’s the one who really hates when the Times gets scooped.
By evening’s end, I wanted to work for either or both of them. Okay, I’m lying—I have wanted for several years to work there. But I really did think they both handled well the tired criticisms of the Times’ coverage of the Middle East, with Keller refusing to concede a pro-Palestinian slant to the coverage. And they came off, especially when speaking of the recent escape of reporter and ex-hostage David Rohde, as though they understand how to manage a team of human beings. Abramson quoted Keller quoting Mandela: “You lead from behind.”
There were a lot of smart bits and pieces. I could almost believe, by evening’s end, that Keller and company would do what they said they were working on doing when it comes to the sustainability of the Times: “figure this out.”
Good luck with that. Really. In the meantime, I’m sending these people my resume.

Why I Love Marci Alboher

Some meetings go better than others.
And, for better or for worse, right now it’s all about me getting out there and meeting people. Talking. Commiserating, given the state of things. Planning for the future, whether it’s short term (how much exactly is the cable bill each month?) or long term (what was it that I meant to do with the time between when “The View” ends and when I die?).
Had a dinner recently with a pal who is in public relations. Nice gal. Very generous of her to buy me dinner. But she told me more than once during that dinner that my partner and I should really be buying a weekend home. That way we would have space, at least during the weekend. Apparently we can get something nice with some land for less than $150K in Columbia County.
Only problem: I do not happen to give a damn about land. Oh, and one other thing: I have no money. So right at this moment I am wondering about how much it will cost to buy groceries between now and Labor Day.
So pardon me if I skim over the ads for weekend homes.
Jesus.
Some people, especially here in Manhattan, think that what I am going through is some sort of intellectual exercise. That this is all just an opportunity for personal growth. Well, maybe. I certainly hope so. But like the vast majority of people on our planet, I have been working over the past couple of decades not just for personal fulfillment. I was also eager to secure food and shelter.
Sometimes during the past few weeks, I have been by the occasional insensitivity upon which I stumble.
That said, more often than not my meetings are great. Take last Thursday afternoon, even with the rain. I met for coffee last week at the adorable Café Henri on the adorable Bedford Street with Marci Alboher, the queen of the slash. She introduced me to the idea of the slash, as in the punctuation used to indicate that one has more than one career. For instance, I could be an “editor/writer/teacher.” Alboher was ahead of the curve on this. Her book, “One Person/Multiple Careers” (another slash right there in the title!), was published by Warner Books in 2007. She is online with a great career blog called “Working the New Economy” at www.tinyurl.com/.
Alboher gave me tangible advice I can use. Like: 1. When talking to someone who wants to help in a career search, be sure to ask something specific from them. 2. “Let yourself be discouraged.” I thought this was simple and brilliant and have called it back to my brain again and again since Alboher said it. If I could follow this advice, I could save the time I waste fighting with myself over my mood. 3. “Career transition takes time.” Which means that one needs to find a way to pay for the transition period.
That’s one of the things I cherish about Alboher: she is inspiring but realistic. She understands that people have to pay mortgages and rents while they go through life changes.
I recommend her blog.
Oh, and is it okay to mention that she is strikingly beautiful? Every once in a while, during our hour-long chat, I would forget what we were talking about and think to myself: Lord, this woman looks good.

Anne Roiphe on the M5 Bus

Life is weird.
This morning I woke up thinking about Anne Roiphe, the author, most recently, of “Epilogue: A Memoir,” a powerful tale about living in the aftermath of the death of a spouse. I was thinking of sending a note to Roiphe. I had wanted to tell Roiphe two things: first and most importantly, I recently met a stranger on the subway who was reading “Epilogue” and we wound up having a fantastic conversation; second, I got laid off. I tell pretty much everybody about my getting laid off. So does my father. He managed to tell the waiter at Liebman’s Deli in Riverdale.
Anyway, back to Roiphe. I thought about her and then I saw her, about 30 minutes later, on my beloved M5 bus. I was out for my walk when I saw the bus coming. I figured this was the Lord’s way of telling me that I did not need to walk all the way down to the pier below West 72nd Street. I could ride. So I got on. A few blocks later, Roiphe got on.
We chatted about job losses in journalism. I told her about the stranger who liked her book. And when she was getting off, after already having said goodbye, Roiphe turned back and looked at me and said: “Good luck.” Complete with eye contact. I thought that was nice. I had better take my gifts where I can get them.

Free Entertainment

“Obama condoms,” the street salesman shouted at passersby, “get your Obama condoms—for those hard, hard times.”
This played out on Saturday afternoon in Times Square. I found it a refreshing reminder that Times Square is still unmistakably part of New York City. I mean, the Disneyfication only goes so far. They can put “Little Mermaid” on Broadway and remove the cars and have thousands of regular Americans pour into the neighborhood and then place lawn chairs next to the TKTS booth, but this town still has an edge. And thank God for that.
The next day, yesterday, I learned the same lesson all over again. I was walking downtown through Christopher Park, just past the lovely Gay Liberation Monument. I love this little history-making block. The sun was shining. Two guys were walking in front me. One white, one black, both fellows were heavyset (I always like it when I find someone more heavyset than myself) and very, well, regular-looking. Normal New York dudes, but with a nice gay twist. I saw one put his arm around the shoulder of the other. Nice gesture, so I tuned in. Then I heard one was reporting on what he characterized as the “huge” size of his penis to his friend. “I have a nice, f—ing big dick,” the guy says.
This is what we call free entertainment. And without a full-time job for the first time since the Clinton Administration, I find myself appreciating more than ever what is out there on the streets of the city. The last time I was looking this desperately for a job I was living in New Jersey. I think these days a good deal about that time, now that I am back in the same boat. And I wonder if it is better to be unemployed in New Jersey or in New York City.
For now, if only for the sake of the unending show available out there in the streets, I pick the city. Yes, when I feel lonely in New York, that horrible feeling can be extra-horrible because it comes amid all the hustle and bustle and the millions of people who do not give a damn about what happens to me. I get that, but most of the time I do not feel that way. Instead, I appreciate the activity that is out there beyond my apartment door. I feel lucky to be here (until the money runs out) and to be overhearing things and seeing people moving about. Even without a job, I get in my gut an appreciation for the energy of our big and messy town. It still works for me—even if I’m not actually working.

My Printer Vs. Me

I spent much of the day yesterday fighting with my printer.
This was about as rewarding as it sounds.
Actually, I made a little bit of progress. I purchased a cartridge. And once home, I spent some time looking at the printer, which does a hesitant job of printing anything. The thing beeps “paper jam” at me, even though there never actually is a paper jam. It’s lying. Which is jarring.
But at least I am getting to know my printer. I even read a few sentences in the instruction manual (God, being unemployed is boring.) I never really thought before about how the printer can also be used as a fax. Does that mean that if I just put the phone jack in there that the thing will fax something? I think it might. Or do I need to get a dedicated fax line? Cause I am not doing that. I hate faxes. But there’s a certain Vanity Fair writer who told me to fax my resume so he can ignore it. The manual seems to indicate I can really use this as a fax. We shall see.
My home office is in my home, but it’s not much of an office. This never mattered until the ax fell, but now I have learned, speedily and dramatically, that what one needs in a living space changes dramatically when one does not have a work space. I am even getting tired of sitting my fat ass in my glorious red chair, where I have been living since being informed that my career is over.
I have unpacked the boxes and put the crap in the right space—generally speaking. But I need to go through now and throw most everything out. But can I do that when I am feeling poor? Isn’t that toss-it-away instinct a better bet when one has a job? I think so. Right now I would instinctively be afraid to toss out things. Even though it’s still probably not a bad notion.
I promise this: if someone hires me to do a full-time job at a full-time salary (they rarely go together any longer), then I will throw away the things I see right now that should go: the awards I’ve won, the Rolodex from the 1990s exclusively packed with names from New Jersey, the files with story ideas that are not worth pursuing. Probably would not be a bad idea to toss the damn printer, too.

After Saying No

I decided against taking the part-time job. The one that seemed, at least for now, wrong. The one that would have precluded really examining my options.
So now I have time to go on the interviews for the jobs that do not actually exist. Which is weird. Is this an existential riddle or a job hunt?
Accepting the would-be, part-time, underpaid gig felt like selling myself short too soon. That’s one of the things about looking for work in the Post-W Depression: finding the wrong offers along the way. I am constantly measuring my levels of desperation against bad options. Sounds like dating, doesn’t it?
After saying no, I was talking about it with my unemployed neighbor—and by that I meant the unemployed neighbor to my left, not the unemployed neighbor to my right. Sometimes I wonder if anybody in this building has a job any longer. Anyway, when I mentioned the phrase “part-time job I did not take,” my neighbor’s eyes lit up. She had been there. She had recently said no to something, too. Her no went to a much better-paying, full-time assignment, but she knew it was the wrong thing for her.
I envy her certainty. Usually I am incredibly decisive, but now I constantly find myself questioning what the hell to do next. Part of being jobless is weighing how much time to invest in each would-be employer. At exactly this moment, should I be spending my time emailing someone in Fort Lauderdale to convince her that I have Web experience (and that I want to give up Manhattan for the Sunshine State, which I don’t), or should I be sending my clips to a weekly newspaper that is already tossing employees overboard? Or should I be out walking in Riverside Park, since I think fat people do not get hired?
For now, I will keep letting these questions roll around in my mind. Overall, though, I think I owe it to myself to take a month or six weeks (according to my stack of bills, there’s a difference between those two options) and really look for something right. Even in this awful economy. But since I read the newspapers (at least until I stop the subscriptions), I know that there’s not much chance of me actually finding a job. At least in the next month or six weeks. I am out to prove myself wrong. Or at least get out of the existential riddle.

A Door Closes

At midlife, I have finally managed to do something trendy: get fired.
Laid off is the term employed last week, when I became unemployed. Cause it’s not really about my performance. Apparently it’s about the lack of advertising revenue at the upscale magazine where I toiled. It turns out that Katie Couric was not kidding when she reported on all those job losses.
Yup, I had heard about the recession—the one that affects other people. This week it’s different. Now that I’m the one who was canned, I’ve got a pretty good sense of the stories behind the numbers. Certainly you’ve read about those numbers, like the ones reported in the Daily News on May 28. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits is now in its 17th record week in a row.
Since I had read about this happening to other people, I knew some of what to do. I had seen all those “when you get fired” feature stories in the newspapers. So I was ready, right there in the middle of my worst conversation ever, to ask for my severance package in writing. I felt like a champ then, like I had passed a little Life Test, but then later I forgot to pick up the piece of paper. I guess I will forgive myself: my brain has been swirling with worries, like how I was going to pay the mortgage and why I ever went into journalism in the first place.
Maybe I did not do such a hot job of hitting all the right notes, but neither did anybody else. It turns out that what we really need is a few feature stories on what the rest of you should and should not do when I get fired—or when it happens to someone you love, or even just like.
Here are my tips on how the un-fired should respond:
∙ Do not tell me it’s going to be better in the long run. You don’t know that, I don’t know that. Only God knows that—and she’s probably not focusing on my job search, what with so much of her time being spent on the Middle East.
∙ But do say something. The only people I hate this week are the ones who were silent; especially the upper-echelon folks I worked with for a long time (seemed longer than it was). They should have made a phone call or dropped by my office to say something, however inadequate or untruthful. Show some class, people.
∙ Don’t expect me to concentrate. I haven’t been this distracted since my romantic breakup of 2002. This time I got dumped by a media company instead of Mr. Wrong, but the physical shock is the same. I cannot concentrate on anything, which maybe is a good thing. I especially cannot concentrate on your whining about your job, cause I keep thinking how ungrateful you are that you still have one.
My mood goes back and forth. Sometimes I think that everything really will be okay, sometimes not. In a darker moment one night I told my mom that I was probably going to shoot myself. “I don’t really think you should do that,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the answer yet.”
I love my mom and I’m taking her advice, but the “yet” reminds me that these are tough times in a tough town.