The Redstar Perspective

UPDATE (10:55 p.m.): Apparently I’m not the only one quitting. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to resign tomorrow. Wahoo!!! Ok, now I’m done. Read on.

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It’s with some sadness and some relief that I write this post: I will not be blogging anymore at The Redstar Perspective. This has been a difficult decision, and I’m still unsure what it means. I may retire this site entirely, or I may resurrect it at an unknown point in the future. I’m still sorting out the details.

Here’s what led to this decision, somewhat in order of importance:

a) It’s time to write my dissertation. After meeting with two of my advisors recently, it’s clear I can finish this thing in the next 12 to 15 months and GRADUATE!!! Especially since the New Year, but generally speaking, blogging has become my primary activity, and an enormous time suck for me. Yes, my stats are SLOWLY growing, and, according to readers, my writing is improving. But, in addition to feeling like I’m losing my way re: the content of this blog (more on that in a minute), I also feel like I’m investing so much time and energy in this blog and not generating the returns I want to get. It’s not ok with me that my readership grows when I discuss the general election, because that’s not my preferred content focus. The hours I’ve been spending on posts about Obama v. Clinton, etc., is distracting me from really focusing on the writing I need to be doing NOW - that is, on issues of social justice, urban recovery and contentious politics in post-Katrina New Orleans. In other words, my dissertation.

b) I no longer feel comfortable blogging without anonymity in the ’sphere. Given where I’m at in my still-emerging career, I’m not ok with folks’ ability to track down my thoughts and opinions on-line.  I regret not blogging anonymously, and any blogging I do in the future will strive for greater anonymity. For someone with deeply personal intellectual interests, the current context of the Democratic primary and the empassioned and often heated on-line discussions of race, racism, gender, sexism and misogyny, privilege and prejudice have left me feeling that the web is an even less safe space to really grapple with these issues. In our splicing and dicing interpretative world, I know my thoughts and perspectives on the primary, on poverty, on my family, etc. are up for grabs for appropriation and re-interpretation. Nonetheless, I plan to remove some of the content from this site, but will leave the rest up for the history books.
c) The RP has run its course. This blog began in part because of my work in New Orleans, because my buddy Jake urged me to blog rather than send long e-mails to everyone I knew about what I was experiencing in the city beginning in January 2006. With this dissertation, my work in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is coming to a close. This blog has grown from that original reporting, to cover topics of development, poverty, housing, inequality, activism, cities, and politics more broadly, but all of this has been mixed up with odes to my boyfriend, Grey’s Anatomy, and random (hopefully amusing) stories about my childhood and roots. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing a general interest blog that’s a mix of analysis and journaling. I need the latter for my mental health, but I’ll find another outlet. My priority is to examine urban inequality, especially as it impacts low-income women, households, and neighborhoods. This is what I want to be blogging about (and working on in my lifetime), and I know there’s a niche audience who wants more of this. I’ve got all kinds of ideas for blogging, but I need a new and fresh venue. That will come in time.

So there you have it. Just in time for what would have been the second annual RP History Month. I’m still figuring out how to keep my original New Orleans posts and select others on-line and available. I’ll probably make an announcement about that in the future.

If you’d like to stay in touch, please leave a note in comments. That will give me an e-mail address for you (remember, others can’t see it) if/when I launch another blog.

Thanks to all my readers and champions over the last two years, especially NYC Weboy, and other blogging allies such as Professor Zero, DonnaDarko, Pizza Diavola and Pocochina. It’s been fun, instructive, exhausting and mostly my pleasure. I have become a blogger. Look at me.

Until we meet again, I leave you with some highly recommended reading:

Please read this disturbing, enraging and graphic coverage of the brutal rape and assault of a woman and her kids in Dunbar Village in W. Palm Beach, FL, and how you can let the NAACP know where their legal, PR and activist resources really belong.

A pregnant man challenges people’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. And shakes up the healthcare profession. (H/t Echidne.) Meanwhile, pregnancy discrimination complaints from women reach record levels.

A refreshing comments thread that asks bloggers to cool it re: their election coverage. Instead of all the collective hyperventilating, let’s all check out Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action. (H/t Corrente.)

Read Brownfemipower’s WAM conference speech about centering feminist activism around questions of citizenship and the problems this creates for advocating for immigrant women. (How I missed this conference - held at MIT, the irony! - is beyond me.)

Be well, have fun, and stay safe.

After 7+ years of Bush, our economy is in the worst shape since the Depression.  Tent cities are even in the public consciousness.  These developments point to the consistent, callous pattern of government neglect and abdication of responsibility under the Bush Administration, who, along with a GOP-led Congress, put into overdrive the worst trends of three decades of government devolution. 

Take my favorite example of New Orleans, where a flourishing Tent City should come as no surprise to anyone following post-Katrina recovery trends.  One of the worst travesties of the destruction of public housing in New Orleans is the grossly inadequate replacement of subsidized housing units in the proposed mixed-income developments.  Only one proposal - Lafitte - includes one-for-one replacement, in part because one of the development partners, Enterprise Community Partners, knows first hand the success of this model from past public housing renovation in Seattle.

A significant number of developer/do-gooder transplants to New Orleans hail from affluent cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, which tend to have highly competitive, sophisticate and activist affordable housing development sectors.*  They bring these high-capacity models of affordable housing development with them to New Orleans.  Yet, several fundamental problems in New Orleans impede their replication. 

Obviously, all cities have unique socio-political cultures and different demographics.  That New Orleans is a distinctive place in the nation cannot be overstated.  Second, the political economy of New Orleans was weak prior to the storm, and is in tatters now.  Most of the non-profit and civil society actors in the city are trying to fill a serious void left by the financially eviscerated city government.  Third, and most problematically, the massive displacement of the poorest and most vulnerable, the overall whitening of the population, and a corresponding shift to a more conservative, middle-class urban politics, makes alive and well the spirit of Rep. Baker’s (R-Baton Rouge, LA) comment

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

This spirit is driving local and national decision-making behind affordable housing development in post-Katrina New Orleans. 

At the conference I was at in NOLA two weeks ago, in a panel on affordable housing development tenant activists routinely questioned the featured scholars, researchers and developers on the issue of displacement.  It came up over and over again, no matter how strenuously the panelists tried to frame market-based housing solutions as an overall positive for cities and low-income residents.  Cities like Boston et al. are not acting out of any unique urban altruism to retain low-income households, but out of political necessity (votes) and reality (suburban political power and NIMBY-esque zoning + federal funding for cities for low-income populations).  When one of the poorest cities in the country like New Orleans sees a silver lining in Katrina displacing a significant percentage of its neediest tenants all at once - versus the slow trickle generated in other cities in the last twenty years - you can be damn sure the political elites will do everything in their power to keep those folks out. 

They owe a big thanks to the GOP-dominated government we had until 2007, who denied the HUD and Medicaid funds that could have flowed to properly shelter, care for and bring home these families after Katrina.  Actions like this reflect the same spirit behind the massive funding cuts to HUD and HHS Programs and the complete absence of regulation of the housing and homeownership boom that contribute now to rising rates of foreclosures and homelessness nationwide. 

A national pollster at the NOLA conference talked about widespread Katrina fatigue, accompanied by a sense of “we’ve got our own problems now.”  No doubt.  I just hope that as we turn inward to deal with local economic insecurity and crisis, we all remember that post-Katrina New Orleans was never the exception, but the harshest of realities for our country. 

I’ve updated my blogroll, especially the Politics category, but also some overdue additions in my Feminist links.  Check ‘em out.  Introduce yourself.  Make friends.

I’m spending some time with the fam this evening (currently blocking one of my mom’s dogs from the box of Cheez-its beside me as I type), and will be back tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s some links to what I’m reading:

On-line:

Who Represents the Progressive Movement?

Periodically Speaking;

Count WHOSE Vote?;

“White” Like Who?;

and

Generation Gap.

Off-line:

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears;

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao;

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City;

and Justice & the Politics of Difference.

Happy reading.

Weboy here.

It was during the third shampoo - the one before the scalp massage and the Shiatsu in my chair - that I realized I like the pampering of my hair salon. I have given up a great many extravagances - I no longer shop til I drop, or go to the Spa for massages - but my hair is one thing where I just cant skimp.

And too, there’s the moments, like the shampoo, that are just utter indulgences. I usually close my eyes to experience the sensations of having someone else touch my head; it’s not something that happens all that regularly, and because, like many, I carry a lot of stress, it does take a lttle work to let oneself be touched. I completely understand people who say they simply leave their body - I drift into semi-consciousness.

Red is quite simply the only woman I know who came with amazing hair and needs to do little to it - when I first met her we discussed hair coloring, and she decided she couldn’t do it because her natural red might never be the same. And dash-it-all, she’s right: I don’t think I will ever see such golden tresses, especially when they’re kissed by the summer sun. Not only that, but with little effort - and I mean one basic blow-and-go haircut she’s had pretty much in all the time I’ve known her - her hair falls in waves of cascading shoulder length curls that most people get perms to achieve.

Me, not one thing about my hair is natural - I’ve cut it and dyed it and straightened it and braided it and done God knows what else. My current regime is the famous “Asian straight perm,” which I love, and which is utterly time consuming. My hair stylist is a genius, a wizard at cutting straight hair, and a great chemist - the results are long and lustrous, with minimal damage.

And, with a toss of my long mane, that may be that: thanks for having me over. Red should be back online shortly. With a tan, no doubt, and a refreshed spirit. It is, after all, a glamorous life.

… or, the week The Weboy had:

Monday

• Write a little
• Drive to Boston on clear, sunny day.
• Arrive in Boston early evening, enjoy wonderful weather, visit old job
• Go back to house to pack, confront remains of leaving in haste
• Contemplate futility of current plans
• Write a little, go to bed, resolve to pack thoroughly tomorrow

Tuesday

• Feel overwhelmed; write a little
• Attempt to pack
• Realize I haven’t eaten, get food
• Attempt to pack some more; contemplate futility of moving, meaning of life, decide, sadly, to go on
• Visit coworkers, as promised, on warm sunny day; find they are very busy and can’t talk.
• Hang out with really cool Asst Manager and his fiancee and meet their new dog (a very cute small Yorkiepoo)
• Go home, pack some more; make progress, but not enough.
• Attempt to load car, only make it as far as basement; feel tired, call Mom and agree that driving late at night and tired not good
• Prepare to stay the night; get New Hampshire primary results, enjoy Clinton comeback, write a little (more…)

I hear more about the “new” New Orleans these days (sadly, you can believe some of the hype, and not for the right reasons) than any “new” NY, but one need only satisfy one’s Law & Order addiction - as I’m doing as a side project to my PhD - to see how much NYC has changed over the years.  In keeping with the spirit of writing about not too much this week, this post is not a wonkish treatise about urban development and politics.  (I know, I know, you miss my lecturing ways.  Prof. Redstar will be back mid-January, after I shop my screenplay in L.A.  But I digress…)

I’m extemporizing here about my upcoming visit to NYC, which involves four nights of visiting friends in the outer boroughs.  And I’m not talking about the hipsterati in Brooklyn.  Nope, instead, with thirtysomething boyfriend in tow, I will be staying with friends and their families (collectively, three children under the age of five) in the Bronx and Queens.  Saturday night involves a trip downtown for a joint ABD status/birthday dinner with my best girlfriend from college and her husband.  And New Year’s Eve is still shaping up, but the likelihood of me blindly finding my way into a cab between 2 and 4 a.m. is about as high as one of the “lesser-known [presidential] candidates” debating on C-Span right now actually winning the election (someone take the remote away from the M.A.S.). 

Sure, I still have friends who live in Manhattan, and I’m still uncool enough that most of them live uptown (the married ones anyway…and I’ve never been cool enough to have less than a handful of friends living in Brooklyn), but really my NYC reality now is visiting my 22 year old cousin as she fashions her own version of my quarterlife adventures in the city.  Most of these friends are also out of town right now, on vacation with their young families, on mini-breaks with new flames, and just generally living their lives in the ways we know now, which mean that our paths cross less and less frequently, and generally only for special occasions such as reunions, weddings, etc.  My world is shrinking, and shifting. 

This post is not rueful, even if it is nostalgic.  This man of mine has a growing Flickr collection of us posed in front of extended family Christmas trees and dinner tables, at far-flung weddings, and in various leisurely settings.  Apparently, this is now my life.  And I’m wiser, and happier and fatter for it.  But what a kick, commuting from Boston’s own periphery of Brighton to the ‘hoods of Riverdale and Jackson Heights.  Places - mainly the latter - I’d consider living if I ever came back to NY.  A hope I still keep alive, even as I relax behind the wheel of my stepmom’s hand-me-down Pontiac, commuting between Newton and Quincy and Hanover and Connecticut in my own (re)new(ed) life in Red Sox Nation.  Who knew.

I’m off til mid-next week.  If I was more motivated, I’d organize a 2007 “Best of” collection of posts for your enjoyment; I’ve seen that around the web and wish I had done it.  Someone go through my archives for me, will ya?  But feel free to poke around here in my absence.  I can’t promise you’ll want any of the food in the cabinets, but there’s always some booze lying around.  Until I’m back on-line, I wish you all A Very Happy New Year - Be Safe and Have Fun!!

More or less cross-posted at NYC Weboy.

H/t to Outside the Toybox for directing me to this sustainability quiz developed by American Public Media.  It allows me to estimate my consumption footprint compared to the appropriate productive acreage per human on the planet (about 4.5 acres; they explain what “productive acreage” means), and then calculates how many earths are needed if everyone lived like me.  Oh, and I get to design a personal avatar and a neighborhood avatar. 

So how many earths are needed if everyone else lived in a little, one-person apartment and drove a sh*tbox back and forth 5 miles to school and within a 3 mile radius for errands a few times per week?  And went shopping at least once a month and ate mostly dairy, grains and veggies?  9.6.  Welcome to the Redstar Solar System.

Turns out, I can blame the T - that’s right, the public Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority system - for my one-woman path of destruction.  What, you don’t expect me to actually ride that thing regularly, do you?  Sitting here at my PC I rarely shut off, I was flying way under the tree huggers’ radar; I live in a small place, alone, use hardly any electricity or heat comparatively (of course, I don’t pay for heat directly, so that’s probably the culprit there), and recycle A LOT.  3 acres, 1 acre, and 1 acre for my home, power and recycling habits, respectively.  Look at me! I’m a mere spec on the world’s surface.

Then the questions came about public and personal transportation usage.  Miles driven per month, mileage to the gallon, monthly miles ridden by bus or rail, and hours flown yearly, and in what class (why the latter matters I have NO idea).  Well, DAMN if I don’t take up 21 acres with my monthly first class to the Gulf Coast (thanks FF miles) and intermittent T riding ways.  I went from 1.7 earths to 6, just based on public transportation ridership alone.  Together, the MBTA and I will put this planet out of business in no time!!

My eating and shopping habits apparently gobble up 3 more planets, though a major flaw of the quiz is no available stats when I’m asked to compare myself to the average American shopper.  Well, do they mean the folks living in FEMA trailers in the Gulf Coast or the women in Lexus SUV’s in the Chestnut Hill mall parking lot?  Or apparently some combination of the two.  And who knew coffee is the second most traded commodity after oil, and also travels huge distances?   Our caffeine addiction is obviously the lesser known cousin to the American oil addiction.

I’m curious to see how you all fare.  According the comparables they offer at the end, most Americans (Dems, GOP, Green, male, female, etc.), are consuming over 99 planets with their power usage.  But when you break it down by state, and most likely only the public radio listeners/Cambridge-Berkeley-Austin radicals in each, you get much much smaller figures.  Compared to folks in MA, CA, and NY, I’m ravaging 3 to four times the number of planets. 

All without leaving my kitchen table. 

From the M.A.S.’s couch to mine, from Television without Pity to the blogs, to A&E’s Flip this House to VH1 Soul, I’ve barely moved a muscle as I’ve consumed a tremendous range of information this weekend (not to mention about 50,000 calories, thanks to birthday party and hungover consumption of beer, cake, peanuts, chips, hotdogs and Vitamin Water, the latter doing little to counter the effects of the rest). 

I’ve posted a couple belated comments over at Ezra re: communal living and unionization and gender, a brief shout out to Brandeis over securing Anita Hill as a professor, and more rambling about my new cable offerings at NYC Weboy (soon to be a reality, sadly).  But I’ve got Matt Yglesias to thank for introducing me to this fun, fun comparative data site: ZIPSkinny, where you can enter your zip code and see how your neighborhood’s demographic profile compares to those around you.

No surprise - especially to my suburban cousin who informed me Friday night she hates my ‘hood because it’s so “crowded” - to find that Brighton (02135) is the third densest zip among its neighbors, at over 15,000 people per square mile (bordering Brookline and Allston are first and second, respectively).  She’s not the first visitor to comment on how dense it is.  My urban planning pals love it, and the M.A.S. and I also dig the vast sprawl of mostly pre-war, low- and mid-rise apartment buildings all over the neighborhood.  But after NYC, Brighton feels still feels green and relatively uncluttered.  My peep Nikki compared it to Brooklyn, and I’m going with that. 

Compared to our swankier neighbors, which include Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, Chestnut Hill, Watertown and Allston, our only other Top 3 placement is in our poverty rate - third after two Allston zips.  So other than being one of the most crowded and least affluent (third lowest median income too) neighborhoods in western Greater Boston, we’re also more single, more transient, less educated (though this is relative, since over 50% of our residents have at least bachelor’s degree), and yet employed in greater numbers than our urban and suburban counterparts.  Did I mention I love my ‘hood? 

I leave you with a brief demographic history of my zip codes (numbers rounded) after the jump.  Each new neighborhood has been less white, had more households in poverty, and more single people than the last.

(more…)

My dad always believed they bred a different kind of fan down there.

A more-conservative-than-Redstar reader emails to ask why I’m not covering Ahmadinejad’s visit to NYC.  My only guilt over ignoring this story is if by doing so I’m not living up to my legacy as a scholar trained by the American Jewish community (i.e., a Brandeis grad). 

As I wrote to her - and as regular readers can probably gather - foreign relations, foreign policy, and diplomacy are not issues I spend much time on here.  I simply cannot take the macho-heads-of-state-chest-bumping requirement of national politics, particularly as its come to pass under post-9/11 Bush in our so-called “War on Terror.” Indeed, the reason I don’t read the mainstream “progressive” (also, alleged, as far as I’m concerned) blogosphere more often, is because the predominantly male white authors expend an awful lot of hot air on the diplomatic disaster that passes for our foreign policy these days (though I was totally into Yglesias’s post on Olive Garden - who wasn’t, it turns out). 

I tried tonight to read the NYT coverage of Ahmedinejad’s talk at Columbia, but ended up closing the webpage in dismissal.  I remember at Deis when The Justice student newspaper sold ad space to Holocaust deniers, and the backlash that followed.  I just can’t take such charlatans seriously, even though I know that their statements cause very real pain for people.  And though I’m a card carrying member of the intelligentsia, I find obnoxious and smug the empty provocation of a cocooned place like Columbia allowing that guy to come and speak, which does little more than piss people off without providing much legitimate space for productive debate - not least because his sensationalist rhetoric and comparatively weak political power doesn’t give those of us looking to confront the “enemy” much to work with.  (Although, Andrew Sullivan - among others - takes on his denial of persecuting gay Iranians while scoffing at Columbia’s set up.)

Truth be told, if you want to hear me talk about Iran, you’d suffer a conversational mix of its politics from five to ten years ago and my desire to visit it because of its amazing art, history and hot men - all based on my dating an Iranian-American* in NYC on and off for a few months - before I moved into ranting about Bush and our current “mode” of international relations.  To save myself at this bedtime hour the ire that immediately flares up when I think about (or see or hear) Bush, I’ll let Ezra do the talking for me now:

“From [CBS’s Scott] Pelley’s interview with Ahmadinejad:

PELLEY: I asked President Bush what he would say to you if he were sitting in this chair. And he told me, quote, speaking to you, that you’ve made terrible choices for your people. You’ve isolated your nation. You’ve taken a nation of proud and honorable people and made your country the pariah of the world. These are President Bush’s words to you. What’s your reply to the president?

Wow. Pot, meet kettle.”

Now, if we want to talk about keeping alive the history and lessons from the Holocaust, or protecting human rights and preventing hate crimes, I’m your woman.

*Based on these credentials, I’m actually an expert on international and cultural relations.

On my third straight day of shopping (it’s Redstar’s “buy my fall wardrobe” weekend), Weboy and I headed to the new Natick Collection.  “Eh,” is all I really have to say. 

I second Adam at Universal Hub re: the vertigo of standing in the old “Natick Mall” section at the doorstep of the suburban retail nirvana that is the new hall of shops.  Readers above the age of 22, beware the second story, where it’s one Abercrombie or their competitor after another.  I asked Weboy, when did we decide that the upscale wardrobe of today consisted essentially of sweatshirts and flip flops?  (If you do make your way out to Natick, check out Ruehl of Greenwich Village.  It’s as if Disney added a Village facade to Epcot, and let fans of shows like The OC and Gossip Girl decorate it according to what they’ve been told is fancy - that’d be fake fireplaces, college basement-party quality lighting and framed photos of half naked boys leaning against the walls.) 

The first floor feels more mature, definitely more pricey, and not quite at full throttle, given about one-third of the stores still are not open. They also need many more pushcarts to fill the dead space in the middle.  (I wonder if they’ll have the one where my dad can have his face emblazened on mugs for Xmas gifts for my stepmom and me.  You know, to go with the one I already have.)

As someone who lives closest to the Chestnut Hill mall, but about equidistant between Back Bay and Natick, I don’t foresee too much siphoning off from these other retail destinations due to Natick.  (I would be worried if I was the Atrium, which is the most generic of all the neighboring upscale spots, lacking the anchors of Bloomingdale’s, Barney’s, Saks, Louis Boston, etc., and having the most stores that I saw replicated at Natick.)  Boston should still have its international set and folks who prefer to shop downtown, and Chestnut Hill still has Jasmine Sola and Bloomingdale’s for the Newton/Brookline crowds.  Given that our parochialism means few of us like to drive further than 15 minutes to get what we need, I only see the Natick Collection adding to Boston’s fragmented retail market, rather than acting as a consolidator of sorts.  If anything, Natick should be avoided as it will bring together the over-caffeinated, hell-on-wheels rich suburban moms that roam the grounds of Chestnut Hill with the more slow-moving, easily confused, thick suburban crowds.

Ultimately, it’s about the kind of atmosphere in which you want to shop.  For the M.A.S., the perfect atmosphere is my living room with a beer in hand as I deliver packages I picked up for him that day at the outlets.  For me, it’s obviously a more sedate, preferably weekday experience where I can wander in peace and still find some deals.  Space and air matter; Newbury St., most outlets and the pseudo-downtowns of places like Mashpee Commons and the one in Hingham that my cousins love - all these are outdoors and offer varying degrees of “street life” and space.  In contrast, I hate “high-rise” malls like Cambridgeside and Providence Place where the stores are narrowly stacked and closing in around on you and the families and adolescent crowds.  Lighting is also key.  The Chestnut Hill Mall and Copley Place have pleasingly resisted the garish lighting that ultimately leaves the Natick Collection feeling stupifyingly similar to its traditional mall roots (or, as Adam at U. Hub put it, like the duty free section of an airport).   

I’m curious to see how the Natick Collection fares.  It’s not too often you see a Sears and Neiman Marcus sit side-by-side as you search in vain for a parking space between them.  It’s a long walk between JC Penney and Neiman Marcus, where the former has bi-lingual English-Spanish signage* and the latter’s snooty customers nonetheless ask for “Stella McCaHTney.”  I’m well aware of the $$ in the suburbs; visitors to the Natick Collection can browse the adjacent opening-in-2008 Nouvelle condos sales office as they wander from Nordstrom to Neiman’s.  But though I felt momentarily like I was in Soho as I passed the same chains that now consume that neighborhood, I thought I’d feel a lot more like I was in our version of Manhasset.  All I can say is, shame on this Masshole for being disappointed in our failure to measure up to Long Island luxury. 

*I’ve noticed many stores like Sears, JC Penney, and Best Buy now have bi-lingual signage, but at what I think was a Nine West I saw my first bi-lingual hiring sign today.

This just in, via text from my cousin Jane, recent BC grad and NYC transplant:

“Women on the [Upper East Side] with strollers = running of the bulls…”

True ‘dat, Janie, true ‘dat.

When Prof. Zero (you should really read her remarkable blog) posted a favorite cities meme, I thought she put too many parameters around the cities we could nominate.  I was particularly put off by the size requirements, as I’ve come to learn in school how varied cities are in size and scope, not least because the boundaries between cities and suburbs, and urban vs. sub-urban life is rarely as clear as we pretend.  And bigger does not necc. equal more urban.

In response to protests, including mine, she offered up what she called a “self-tagging town meme,” to which I finally responded the other night with a stream-of-consciousness thread of my favorite cities, that included a heavy dose of random memories and specific characteristics that matter to me in cities.

One of the things I love about the M.A.S. is that he and I both look at cities critically and value urban life deeply - mainly, we crave the density, walkability, accessibility and diversity that many cities offer (what is with suburbs and the absolute absence of sidewalks, for instance???).  I believe that if we go through life together, we will be able to live in a variety of places, because I trust our ability to knowledgeably evaluate and recognize if places have the characteristics that we seek at a much deeper level than a schools/taxes/property values equation (though all of that goes into the mix).

Though I hope you’ll read the professor’s posts and my comments, in short, I gave a shout out to:

1) Hartford and economically struggling but ethnically vibrant old NE/MW towns everwhere;

2) Boston, ‘cuz that’s my hood;

3) Krakow, ‘cuz its collegiate, historic and amiable personality - not to mention Krupnik honey liquer - nurtured me through the very dark hours of visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau;

4) New Orleans (though this is more of a love-hate relationship);

and

5) Memphis.

Seattle, Minneapolis, Houston, Bismarck, ND and Vegas (”Adult Disneyland”) got shout outs too.  L.A., London, NYC (public transportation “nirvana”) and Dar are in my big city category.

Cities I could live w/o:

- Chattanooga, though I did find its train-station-sized-airport charming;

- Ft. Worth;

- St. Louis;

- Philly (”somebody else’s Boston”);

- Atlanta.

Of course, there’s no place like home, or my couch, at this moment, for that matter.

What are your favorite cities?  Bonus points for your stories.

According to BostonMaggie’s Levels of Boston Irishness, I’m mint green:

Mint Green: Moved out of the city as a kid. Either has a government job or knows someone who does, especially cops. Likes a pint, but around the age of 30 developed a taste for Jameson’s. MP3 player is full of Dropkick Murphys and The Saw Doctors. Drinks in suburban places with neon shamrocks in the window. Hopes to visit the Auld Sod someday,but is saving for Disney. Might know someone who can get you off jury duty.

I’d venture to say my mint green roots have grown substantially intertwined with the bright blue of Brandeis and the pinstriped New Yorkers I’ve met over the years. This would explain why Zero 7 and Jill Scott crowd out the modern Irish bands in the iPod.  (And let’s not overlook the reddish-yellow tint I’ve picked up from all the foreign spice consumption in my past!). 

As for the drinking, hopefully the Irish bars of Brighton Center will have to suffice. 

Though I’m pretty sure I’m related by degrees to folks who can get you off jury duty.
Via.

Because we’re “wired, well-educated, and obsessed with politics.” Bostonist counters that it’s our Sox obsession crowding out those other chatterbox cities. 

In honor of these latest accolades, some news from around the Hub:

• GOP pres. candidate and former Gov. Mitt Romney apparently owns stock in YES, the Yankees network in New York.  Though there’s no love lost between the former pol and Massholes over his depiction of our lovely state as an “old fling he had, that doesn’t really mean anything,” now, it’s official: he’s dead to us.

• The opening of at least the 5th Dunkin’ Donuts in Brighton (I’ve got to be way too low on this estimate; anyone know the actual #?) dwarfs them all with its giant inflatable coffee cup that’d put any Anheiser-Busch-South-Boston-St. Patrick’s Day-parade inflatable Bud Light can to shame.  Brighton Centered nominates the new DD the “ugliest new business in Brighton.”   

• The latest in Boston’s best kosher food is out;

• Belated news flash for the unwashed public: the state hates you and wants to take away your phat ride, I mean, the T.  Rising resentment over crappy, inadequate trolleys and buses brings new meaning to the term road rage in Boston.  At least we’re all in agreement: the T blows.

Finally,

• BC hates its neighbors.  The feeling’s mutual.

…and I’ll show you my grad school loans. 

While down in MS last week, the mainstream media and blogosphere were carrying on without me about new urban wage trends between women and men.  (The article offers shout outs to many popular NYC urbanists; wahoo “famous” academics!)

If you missed this: the median wages of women ages 21-30 exceed those of men in several large cities in the U.S., incl. Dallas, NYC, and Boston.  Factors in why this is the case incl.:

- the higher number of women graduating from college than men;

- the higher percentage of women in urban areas than men;

- the single, childless status of many of these young women (see here, here and around this blog for more on the motherhood penalty);

- women choosing and building careers earlier than men in response to the lurking biological clock;

- and women’s contemporary freedom to choose their careers and locations vs. subordinating these decisions to their husband’s. 

What’s also remarkable about the stats in this article is how men’s real wages have sharply declined in the last 35 years, while women’s have held or grown (modestly) in the same period.  (The comparative wages in NYC over the three decades also point to the city’s rising affluence overall.)

The full study is here.  Unsurprisingly, it’s not yet cause for those long-anticipated visits to male strip clubs where we can tuck all our newly earned excess wages into their g-strings. 

Turns out that college educated women’s median wages are still only 89% of men’s in NYC, and 82% nationwide.  Also, the jobs cited in NY where men continue to outearn women are both a) feminine-gendered professions (e.g., nurse, teacher, bank teller), and b) within greater reach in terms of education (namely, cost and access) for the general population than many of the professions in which women have surpassed men, such as doctor, architect, economist, and lawyer.  In sum, women are still earning less than men even though they tend to outnumber them dramatically in the sector, and, more importantly, it’s women’s achievement in particular advanced degree programs and career paths that have pushed their median earnings past men.  Indeed, though we’ve been attending college in higher numbers than men since 1980, the wage gap between college-educated women and men has shrunk by only 6% in the last 25 years.  The study also points out the now common trend of rising income inequality according to educational status.

Less than 30% of U.S. workers have a college degree.  If MIT is any indication, and I believe it is, tuition is rising about 5% per year.  While I’m totally jazzed that young women in the city are raking it in, gender and class parity in earnings, opportunity and life chances remains disappointingly bleak and moving in the wrong direction. 

I’d call up my own rock star female friends in NY for a celebratory drink on their behalf, and a strategy session on how to reverse the broader trend towards inequality, but we’re all past 30, they’re moms now, and definitely nursing some battle scars in the on-going fight for gender equity  (Manhattan is the only borough where men’s median earnings are higher than women’s).

When I was growing up, my mom and I lived in a 2 family house, downstairs from my aunt and uncle and, occasionally, my cousins.  My uncle was born in 1954, which is right around when I think I should have born (I’ve long maintained I was born 20 years too late; my penchant for disco is only one of many indicators).  He and I take mutual pleasure in doing a whole lot of nothin’ (pw) whenever we can, and enjoy a much easier affection for one another now than we did when I was a teenager and he was into instructing my boyfriend to take his hat off inside and trying to compel me to shovel the driveway when it snowed. 

Of the many, many hippie record albums my uncle had at home was at least one by the band Ten Years After.  The name flashed back to me last week when my cousin Jane called me to shriek that she was moving to New York City and officially assuming my role as the family urbanista. 

Ten years ago this month, I moved into my first “adult” apartment on the Upper East Side.  Beginning next month, Jane and her entourage (she may call them friends) take hold of a converted 4BR duplex about 10 blocks from there. 

The maturity implied in the use of the word “adult” is contrasted by the vision I have of my then college boyfriend and I driving my stuff into Manhattan from my mom’s house in CT.  In exchange for his help, he got to drive my stepfather’s Mercedes into the city while I chugged down the highway in the U-Haul.  I can still see him zooming past me on the Bruckner towards the tolls and FDR and Manhattan beyond, his seat reclined low and his hat pulled down over his eyes as he flew by.  I remember nagging him to ensure that the U-Haul was locked up tight when we finally parked it for the night on the street two blocks over, only to discover that in failing to double check the Mercedes, we’d left it unlocked overnight.  (Of course, this was mid-way through Guiliani’s “clean up” of the city, and the UES to boot).  My apartment echoed in those first days, barely filled with my pompasan chair and futon, though I still managed to make comfortable the 15 or so of us who celebrated my 22nd birthday there a few nights later.

And now, I e-mail my college girls-turned-moms living in the city and we laugh at our memories of the UES and our twenty-something lives as Jane and her friends gear up for their own. 

Meanwhile, down the street from me now lives a gentleman I like to refer to as “Uncle Neighbor,” perhaps better known to you all as the M.A.S.  That’s right, the M.A.S. has moved to Brighton (the M.A.S. became an uncle right around the time he found the apartment nearby; sometimes I like to add “Dirty” before “Uncle Neighbor,” but that’s probably better left out of the blogosphere.)  Though Brighton enraptures us with its own urban appeal, I noticed tonight how far past my younger, wetter, whirlwind NYC days I now am, as I heard myself calling out to the M.A.S. whether we wanted a salad too when ordering a pizza for pick-up to our little (multi-unit) domestic haven.  Earlier, I’d been disappointed to realize I forgot batteries today at Target and thus couldn’t immediately program the universal remote I bought for his apartment.  (I have time, given his couch doesn’t arrive until Friday.)

Later this week another cherished friend I’ve known for the last 12 years arrives for a visit, husband and toddler in tow.  Though I just saw her in DC, our last real catch up was on the phone when I was last in New Orleans, lamenting my weight gain while shopping for sunscreen.  She gently yet correctly confirmed that yes, it probably was my happy relationship that was making me fat, and we both sighed at the harsh, domesticated reality of aging (of course, she also has the pregnancy to blame!).

Fortunately, I can now live vicariously through Jane, which, no doubt, makes the accompanying twenty-something heartaches and hangovers a lot easier to bear.

Leave it to those clowns - Yankees fans - to run this poll:

Glad to see Boston sucks less than D.C. (as of 6:48 pm, 7/31/07)

What’s up!!  We’re wicked pissa!!!!

Grumblypants.

Grumbly mcCrankypants.

Cranky mcGrumblepants.

Grumbly grumbly.

Grumble.

Grumble.

In high school, I had a lying, cheating deadbeat stalker of a boyfriend (is “deadbeat stalker” an oxymoron?). Other than that, and our very public, very adolescent, screaming fights, we were more or less inseparable for two+ years. One of the few good things about him was his middle child status, which primed him for easily responding to my only-child demands and quick irritability (”get me a tissue”; “i want to watch House of Style” “I don’t feel like it!” etc. etc.). Among the women in my family, this snappishness and short fuse is in abundance, and after that disastrous relationship, it was a long time before I ever felt comfortable enough again with someone to reveal this side of my personality.

Luckily for me, the M.A.S. and I are completely different in our emotional manifestations. Where I am easily outraged and aggravated, he is soothing and chill. Where he is petulant and morose, I am patient and sensible. Just now he visited me here in the computer lab with a smile and a kiss, a wonderful contrast to the whiny blogging I’d just finished moments before. Make today the second in a row where he’s had to make way for my frazzled irritation and temper.

In the course of last evening’s rush hour drive from Brighton to meet my dad and stepmom in Quincy for dinner, the M.A.S. and I were either stuck behind people driving 25 mph, or swerving to almost avoid being hit (3x). I’d hung up from a conference call 10 minutes prior to jumping in the car, and I was completely out of my mind when we arrived at Marina Bay, where I handed the M.A.S. the keys and drank 2 cosmos in no short order. I pictured myself vibrating like the characters in that old Comedy Central cartoon about the shrink (name??), and overall I felt like my cousin T.K. in one my favorite of her exasperated moments.

For those of you who don’t know my rad cousin, she has been going on 40 since she was 10, when she used to have a cup of tea and read the newspaper before school. She’s polished and professional and generous and kind and absolutely in charge, and admittedly, sh*t gets under her skin much less than it used to. Like this time:

It must have been ‘98 or ‘99, when we were both at our first jobs out of college, and hers brought her to NY on business, where I worked and lived. It was a Friday, and we’d planned to commute up to Boston together from the city, stopping over in CT to pick up my mom’s car so I could drive it the rest of the way to Boston (don’t ask me why this was the plan; it’s a classic convoluted strategy of my divorced-parent-life to appropriate their belongings for my own use). At 23, I was in full-throttle-love with NY and my upstart-career-gal life in it, and we were planning to take the Metro North from Grand Central, one of my favorite places in the city in all its classy bustle. For some reason, we agreed to take a ride from Canal Street (my office) uptown from my friend Gladys, a second-generation Chinese-American woman at my firm who is one of the most earnest, unpretentious people I’ve known. She loaded us into her two door car that was stuffed with boxes full of fliers promoting her Asian organization’s 2G’s new play. T.K., at just over 5feet, lucked out with the backseat, jammed in next to the boxes. We proceeded to snake our way uptown in Friday afternoon traffic, Gladys chattering cheerfully all the while.

When we finally arrived at Grand Central and unfolded ourselves from the car, we were immediately overwhelmed and almost run down by the hordes of seasoned commuters streaming about the place. I’m pretty good in crowds on my own, but my dodging and weaving strategy is essentially a solo effort. I was feeling particularly cheerful and at ease that afternoon with T.K.’s company in the city and the promise of a new romance awaiting me in Boston that night, and I was likely sauntering my way towards my train as realistically as possible on a commuter timetable.

Meanwhile, T.K. had about had it 2 minutes into the car where she was packed like a sardine without reprieve from Gladys’s pharmaceutical marketing nattering (our industry) and absent-minded, herky-jerky driving through traffic. Launching T.K. into the dense rush of Grand Central was almost too much for her to bear, and I’m surprised she didn’t melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West from the sheer sensory overload of it all. Instead, she did her best to fold up and disappear and avoid contact with any of the “unwashed public,” as she likes to call her former public transportation comrades. She even held it