November 7, 2007

Manhattan Doll
Volume 1, Issue 3

The Commuting Curmudgeon

There I was on a crowded Madison Avenue bus, reading a book and minding my own business. A woman “of a certain age” got on holding several Bergdorf Goodman shopping bags. She planted herself right in front of me and asked me to give her my seat. I looked up from my book and said, “Lady if you can afford to shop at Bergdorf’s, you can afford to take a cab.”

The Imaginary Workout
Attention gym rats! Talking on your cell phone while sitting on the leg press machine is not working out. You actually have to use the equipment!

And while we’re at the gym, wipe off the equipment after you sweat all over it. I don’t know you well enough to exchange bodily fluids.

Good Reads
I love to read. I enjoy everything from literary fiction to humor, from graphic novels to mysteries--with a lot of self-help/motivational non-fiction in between.

If you want to feed your book habit (definitely one of the healthier ones) and don’t want to spend a gazillion dollars on books you’re only going to read once, check out the Book Cellar at the Webster Branch of the New York Public Library (78^th and York Avenue). It’s one of my favorite places to hang out and spend money for a good cause.

Mass market paperbacks are $1, trade paperbacks are $2, and hardcover books vary in price. And they have a huge selection of wonderful books—fiction, biographies, art, history, self-help, humor, classics, etc. Plus you can donate your used books for a tax write-off. A word of caution, don’t buy back your own books--I’ve done that more then once!

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

"Most cartoon drawing is about distraction: popular masters like Walt Kelly and Al Capp crowded their panels with characters and activity; Pogo and Li'l Abner are dense with what actors call 'business.' Peanuts, full of empty spaces, didn't depend on action or a particular context to attract the reader; it was about people working out the interior problems of their daily lives without ever actually solving them. The absence of a solution was the center of the story.

"The American assumption was that children were happy, and childhood was a golden time; it was adults who had problems with which they wrestled and pains that they sought to smooth. Schulz reversed the natural order of things by showing that a child's pain is more intensely felt than an adult's, a child's defeats the more acutely experienced and remembered. Charlie Brown takes repeated insults from Violet and Patty about the size of his head, which they compare with a beach ball, a globe, a pie tin, the moon, a balloon; and though Charlie Brown may feel sorry for himself, he gets over it fast. But he does not get visibly angry.

‘Would you like to have been Abraham Lincoln?' Patty asks Charlie Brown. 'I doubt it,' he answers. 'I have a hard enough time being just plain Charlie Brown.'

"Children are not supposed to be radically dissatisfied. When they are unhappy, children protest--they wail, they whine, they scream, they cry--then they move on. Schulz gave these children lifelong dissatisfactions, the stuff of which adulthood is made.

"Readers recognized themselves in 'poor, moon- faced, unloved, misunderstood' Charlie Brown--in his dignity in the face of whole seasons of doomed baseball games, his endurance and stoicism in the face of insults. He reminded people, as no other cartoon character had, of what it was to be vulnerable, to be small and alone in the universe, to be human--both little and big at the same time."--David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts, Harper Collins

So True
“Don’t Dwell on Unwinnable Conflicts. Move on. The problems you spend your time and energy on should be both important and improvable. Otherwise, you are better off moving on to things you can change.”

--Source Unknown

“The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882, American Poet