Have a Nice Guilt Trip (20 page)

Less isn’t even a good start.

Because of this, I’ve learned I have to be careful with hobbies. Give me even the smallest pleasure, and I can turn it into work, complete with a Things To Overdo List that never gets completely (over)done, which leads to a generalized feeling of guilt.

Guilt is not the purpose of a hobby.

So I hear.

Anyway, I sort of backed into the gardening idea. It started because I was thinking about fencing in my backyard, because I’d like the ability to let the dogs out sometimes, without walking them. I have five dogs and I walk them five times a day, and you can do the math.

Bottom line, it’s a lot of dog walking.

See what I mean, about overdoing things?

To stay on track, the truth is, I don’t really mind walking the dogs, even when people stop me, and say, “Got your hands full!” and “Who’s walking who?” and “Are they all yours?”

To this last question, most times I answer yes, but sometimes I say, “No, I’m just the dog walker. I would never have five dogs. Whoever has five dogs must be crazy. Or menopausal.”

Sometimes I even plead the fifth. (Dog.)

Anyway, so I was thinking if I fenced in my backyard, I could let the dogs out to play and run around, which would be fun for them. But that got me wondering about what kind of fence to get, and since I’m not a big fan of fences, somebody suggested that I get a wire-mesh fence and plant knockout roses on either side of it, so you couldn’t even see the fence.

I never heard of knockout roses, but the idea knocked me out.

So I went online and started looking at photos of knockout roses, then photos of other flowers and gardens, and before you know it, I got the idea of putting in a “cottage” garden.

You don’t need a cottage to have a “cottage” garden.

You could just have a “house.”

Wikipedia gave me the idea that a “cottage” garden is a fancy way of saying an “informal” garden, which I translated as a fancy way of saying, “garden for lazy people.”

Me!

So I started looking for books about cottage gardens, and it took me an hour to choose three, since there are 29,474 books on the subject. The books come in, I sit down to study, and in five pages, I realize that a cottage garden isn’t for lazy people.

In fact, I learn that the only garden for lazy people is no garden.

And I have that already.

But that only makes me want to garden more, because I’m starting to smell New Hobby That I Can Turn Into Guilt.

So I hit the books, take notes, and draw up planting charts. I learn that a cottage garden should have roses, and there are 203,934,847 types of roses to choose from, though only 39,734,727 do well in my planting zone, which narrows it down.

By the way, my planting zone is 6.

It’s my chance to be a six!

I try to decide between bourbon roses, noisette roses, provence roses, and you get the idea, then turn to climbing plants, where I have to choose between European or Japanese honeysuckle.

What, no Italian-American honeysuckle?

Then I move on to hedging plants like viburnum and clematis.

Don’t ask me what these words mean.

I never heard them before either.

But they sound dirty, like every girl should have a viburnum for her clematis.

Ahem.

Also a cottage garden is supposed to have herbs like southernwood, wormwood, catmint, feverfew, lungwort, soapwort, hyssop, and sweet woodruff.

In other words, Harry Potter, in pots.

I get dizzy from the words and colors and the chance to use four years of Latin.

I
knew
it would come in handy!

The more I read, the more excited I get about my soon-to-be cottage garden.

The five dogs watch me, wondering if it comes with a fence.

Of course it does.

But only if they do the pruning.

King Baby

By Lisa

I wished I lived in New York, so I could vote for Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer.

I want them around for a long, long time.

Very long.

Not that size matters.

Theirs, anyway.

I don’t care what they’re running for, just so they win. I want them in the TV news all the time. I need something good to watch, now that the royal baby is all grown-up.

In fact, I think that we need more wieners in Washington. I bet the country would run a lot better if our politicians spent less time in Congress and more time in the bathroom taking pictures of themselves in their underwear.

Got junk?

Consider Anthony Weiner, who was kicked out of Congress for showing his wiener, then he gave interviews to
People
magazine and the
New York Times
saying he was a changed wiener.

Not exactly.

Because even as he was giving the interview, he was sending pictures of his wiener to young girls and calling himself Carlos Danger.

There is so much to admire in this, I don’t know where to begin.

I make up names for a living, and I could never have thought of a name as cool as Carlos Danger. You have to have the imagination of a six-year-old to come up with something like that, and isn’t childlike innocence something we all admire in our elected leaders?

He should win a magic decoder ring!

He could give it to the NSA.

Second, I think too many wieners give up too easy, but not this wiener. Even after he gets fired, it doesn’t stop him, and that’s the kind of persistence that pays off. It’s just like the movie
Rudy,
except that it’s just plain
Rude.

Or
Randy.

To be fair, sometimes Congress does show atypical persistence. For example, it failed to shut down the government over the budget last time, so it’s going to try again.

Yay!

They’re just not trying hard enough.

Try harder, wieners!

Also, Anthony Weiner is excellent at fooling people, like
People
magazine and the
New York Times
.

You have to hand it to the guy.

Well, not that hand.

The other one.

Honestly, do you think you could fool
People
magazine or the
New York Times
about anything?

I couldn’t.

Well, maybe
People
magazine.

At least I can do their crossword puzzle.

But not the
New York Times
.

I couldn’t fool the
New York Times
about anything.

Have you seen me on Halloween? Even when I was little, I couldn’t convince my neighbors that I was a princess or a hobo.

And last year, they all knew it was me.

I should have gone as a wiener.

And to succeed in government, you have to be able to fool people. In fact, to succeed in government, you have to be a world-class fooler of people.

I think both wieners have proven themselves, don’t you?

They fooled everybody, not only magazines and newspapers, but you, me, their wives, their dogs, and their babies.

I bet they could even fool the royal baby.

I admire Eliot Spitzer for all of the same reasons, and then some. You might remember that he was fired because he went to prostitutes, but to me, I think that qualifies him as a great politician.

He’s a job creator, people.

With unemployment at an all-time high, Eliot Spitzer was just doing his part.

Well, not
that
part.

This part.

And he fooled people, at the same time. Isn’t that the type of multitasking we need in our leaders?

I bet Eliot Spitzer could hire a prostitute, take a picture of himself in his underwear, and fool people, all at the same time.

So I say, vote for Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer!

They’re our royal babies.

Politics and Farm-Fresh Eggs

By Francesca

Today I voted for the first time in New York.

I had been reluctant to relinquish my Pennsylvania swing-state-voter status; three things made me register to vote in New York City: Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and my local farmers’ market.

I had never felt more alienated from my adopted city than when I heard people defending Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. With regard to Spitzer, any man who believes he is entitled to purchase a woman’s body for sex cannot possibly respect a woman as an equal. Only objects can be bought, and objects are not equal to humans. I want a representative who is real clear on which one of these I am.

As for Weiner, all of his sexting partners, consensual and nonconsensual, began as female political supporters who reached out to him on the topic of politics. This was not Rielle Hunter going up to John Edwards saying, “You are so hot.” These women reached out to Weiner on the topic of politics, and, after occasionally humoring them, he consistently transitioned the conversation to sex. If I ask my mayor a question or raise an issue at a town-hall meeting, I want to believe he’s actually listening to me, not imagining what I look like naked.

So, my stubborn desire to be viewed as a human being instead of a blow-up doll got me interested in New York politics. What got me to register to vote were volunteers.

Every Saturday morning, I go to the local farmers’ market, and this summer I started noticing a lot of unusually friendly folks mixed in with the power-grannies sniffing the melons and the yoga-dolls buying kale. Who were these smiling strangers?

Politicians.

And their dutiful, overworked volunteers.

If you don’t know one personally, it’s easy to dismiss political volunteers as a nuisance, but I think they’re pretty cool. They care about something enough to stand outside and talk to you about it, so already I like them more than many of my peers.

And when you talk to politicians, you’ll likely get a rehearsed statement in defensively vague language, their real opinions hidden behind a wall of glossy white teeth. But a political volunteer will answer your questions like a human being.

Because he or she still is one.

When I talked to the volunteers, they didn’t blink if I stopped them mid spiel and asked something like, “So what’s wrong with the other guy?”

This is where the good dirt is. I heard all kinds of juicy stories.

Because politics is just gossip on steroids, and the girls’ bathroom is D.C.

Lately, the men’s locker room is Manhattan.

In the course of my farmers’ market debates, I also came to believe that we should all try to be extra nice to political volunteers when we encounter them, because so many others are downright abusive.

I watched an older gentleman go from quietly purchasing pasture-raised, cruelty-free chicken eggs to shouting in the face of a female volunteer, completely unprompted.

I get that we’re all rage-aholics when it comes to discussing politics on TV or online, but let’s bring a little humanity to our face-to-face interactions, hmm? Be at least as humane as we are to the chickens.

So I learned an awful lot about my city and the candidates trying to improve it, and I met some friendly, intelligent people in my dealings with the volunteers.

Plus, they gave treats to my dog.

So I registered to vote in the nick of time. That turned out to be the easy part.

In the past, when I voted in Pennsylvania, I went to my polling location at the nearby elementary school, like all of my neighbors within ten minutes’ driving distance. There, I generally found the same group of people volunteering, and knew most by name. I don’t remember ever waiting in a line.

This is what suburban democracy looks like.

In the city, after chatting a bit with the volunteer who gave me the registration forms, we discovered that we lived on the same street, one block away from each other.

“So where is our polling station?” I asked her.

“You have to look online. It depends on where you live.”

“But … don’t we live in the same place?”

Not same enough. She encouraged me to double-check, and when I did, I found that even though I pass her house every day on my dog walk, she and I do not go to the same polling location.

Ironically, mine was still an elementary school. Although this one had legions of volunteers, a line down the block of voters, and, my favorite: signs outside saying “Vote Here” in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and, I think, Hindi.

This is what urban democracy looks like.

And although I don’t think the Founding Fathers could have ever imagined it, it’s exactly what they meant.

Once inside, I actually felt nervous. The place was crowded, and I didn’t want to be the person who held anyone up. I caught a glimpse behind the curtain as someone exited a booth and saw the voting machines were the old crank kind I had only heard of.

For all of New York City’s modernity, you’d think they’d upgrade their voting machines from the butter-churning era.

Okay, so they might not be
that
old. But I’m just an impatient millennial; if it doesn’t have a touch screen, I don’t know how to use it.

Voting—is there an App for that?

So I stood in line, eavesdropping on the people ahead of me as they inquired about the voting directions, a last-minute cram session.

My tension eased when I saw the volunteer at my booth, an older woman with the eyes and smile of someone much younger.

“The first time I ever voted in New York City, the woman in front of me had voted in the very first election that allowed women the vote,” she said. “We forget, but it really wasn’t that long ago.”

“It’s my first time voting in New York today,” I said quietly.

“It is?” the volunteer cried, her voice booming. “Good for you!”

When it was my turn, she helped show me how the machine worked without my having to ask, and I thanked her for her time. I made my choices, most well-informed decisions, admittedly a few “Woman or Italian” last-minute calls on the more obscure offices, and I pulled the crank to seal the deal with a satisfying
ka-chunk.

Maybe there’s merit to the old machines yet.