the pieces of my life

Hello, dahlings. How are you all? Jenny was too busy to blog for you–claims to be working on a novel or something; mentioned something about hitting 48,099 words–so she’s asked me, her alter ego, Jennifer, Hah-vahd wife extraordinaire, to step in for her. Really, I think it’s simply inhospitable for her to not take care of her guests, but then Jenny has so much more CWIT training to go. [What was that? Jenny, I don’t care if CWIT training is redundant. Are you going to let me handle the blog today or not?] Anyway, I am delighted to be here to tell you about our wonderfully Hah-vahd-filled weekend. Always a pleasure.

We began the weekend with some fun-filled drinking games at HBS! I say, there’s nothing more bonding then spewing beer everywhere as you pound back a cold one! Such team spirit! Robopounding–a game involving quarters–was deemed too challenging for such a group, so another game was chosen. Section A (Rah, rah Section A!) lined up on one side of a table and Section B (boo!) on the other. Each person was given a plastic cup of beer. The first person at the end of the table had to drink his beer and then flip his cup upside down. Once the cup was flipped properly, the next person could drink. Not an easy feat, I assure you! I know, because I was pressed into service during the first round when they needed more women, and as you, dear reader, know, I am always so happy to help out my dahling husband’s Hah-vahd pals. Of course, Jenny reared her ugly little head and snapped at the well meaning boy who, unknowingly, called her Mrs. Medros. I don’t know why she gets so uptight about that. As if Brown was such a superior name that she just had to keep it. Good heavens. More training, please. The highlight of this event, of course, was a proud moment for myself. My own sweet, dahling husband was the lynchpin of success for the team. As the anchor, he downed his beer gracefully and flipped his cup with ease. Section A chanted, “Tech Rep, Tech Rep,” and lifted Adam to their shoulders. I was able to get a good view of this while Jenny was busy pretending to be there with someone else.

We then had dinner with my friends. I’m sure a civilized lobster dinner at the home of friend would in no way interest you, so I shall merely say it was a lovely event, and Kara is a gracious host.

The end of the evening involved a trip to a lovely night spot, The Middle East, which had me thinking longingly of my days as a drunken New Yorker. I personally tried to recapture my youth by drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Oh, how I wanted to fit in. I enviously watched all the HBSers. They are not just reliving their younger days; these are their younger days. Sigh.

The next morning, my darling husband and I made our way to the HBS tailgate party. Once again Jenny surfaced as she scarfed down whatever food was available–rubbery hamburgers, mayonnaisey potato salad and cold slaw, and a Bud Lite–mumbling something about hair of the dog. As we walked over the game–the BIG game you know: Harvard vs. Yale–I was delighted by the showing of Crimson spirit. Those Hah-vahd kids are just so smart. My particular favorite was a dahling sign some students must have hung that read, “Yale: The World’s Best Safty School.” [But dahling, that is how they spelled it. And it must be correct because these are the world’s best and brightest]. Anyhoos, the game was simply mahvelous, well, that first quarter that I saw. Snuggled up in my big jacket, drinking the free hot chocolate HBS provided (wasn’t that so sweet of them? How many other schools are considerate enough to provide free hot–well, lukewarm–chocolate with their $30,000 tuitions?), it was still quite chilly! So I did the only thing any respectable CWIT would do! I left to buy my dress for Holidazzle, the HBS winter formal. Oh, what joy that was! Nothing I like better than buying clothes. Ah, well, I see it’s almost time to start making my sweetie’s dinner. You know, a good CWIT always has the house clean and an extravagant dinner ready for when her Hah-vahd husband comes home, and it’s never too early in the day to start preparing! Until Jenny lets me write again, ta-ta!

Louder now! C’mon, I can’t hear you! Let’s hear it for Section A! Rah rah Section A!

Last night there was a dinner for Adam’s camp–I mean, HBS–section. For those of you who are blissfully unaware of what a section is, as I was just a few happy months ago, HBS is a mammoth school. They talk a big game about how selective and prestigious they are, but really, there are 900 students in Adam’s class. 900! How selective is that? If I were that selective when I got married, I’d have a harem of husbands by now. But, anyway, 900 students. So what they do is break the class into ten sections. Each section is given an assigned seat in an assigned classroom, and there they stay the entire day. The teachers come to them. (Are you following me? So not only is Hah-vahd “selective,” it is training its students to believe that if they just sit tight, things will come to them. Nothing like teaching an HBS student that the world revolves around him/her. It will make them all excellent bosses.) Adam is in Section A, aka Absolut A (I’m not making this up! This is the name they chose for themselves! Connotes tigers in the business world, doesn’t it?). Section spirit is paramount. Because Section A rocks. Section A rolls. Section can outdrink, outtalk, and outwit anyone! But most importantly, what I learned last night, is that Section A is waaaaaay better than Section B (as will be proven at tomorrow night’s Robopounding competition. Now, I’m not exactly sure what Robopounding is, but I do know it involves copious amounts of beer. Adam will be playing just so I have something to write about on Saturday).

In all fairness to Section A, the evening was a pleasure. A buffet dinner at the Bombay Club, a genuine attempt to make the partners feel included, and a lot of good-natured mockery. I had an extremely enjoyable semi-political discussion with the Libertarian sitting to my left, who was so kind that he didn’t even mock me when after my third glass of wine, I could no longer pronounce “Libertarian.” But, there were a few things that did annoy me to no end:

1. The “Girls of Section A Calendar.” Now, before you get your panties in a wad, let it be known that the images are harmless. Just picture after picture of the women in the class flipping off whomever was taking their picture. Harmless. But what’s with this “girls” crap? The women in that class are all adults as far as I can see, and I don’t hear the males calling themselves the “boys of section A.” C’mon folks. Time magazine may have declared feminism dead, but that doesn’t mean we’ve all gone back to being girls.
   
2. That they speak good. What is so difficult about the English language? All this time I’ve been picking on the CWITs for their tenuous grasp of basic grammar, when really, it’s the Hah-vahd folks who don’t know that “is” is a verb (so cap it damn it, when you use it in a headline!) and fail to understand the distinction between “fewer” and “less.” I elbowed Adam in the middle of a conversation when even he used “less” incorrectly. Of course, that just proves a theory I developed long ago at Amazon: HBS actively sucks away the part of the brain that holds the ability to speak and write correctly. I have yet to meet a single HBS grad who can use the word “literally” properly (how many times did I have to say, “No, actually, your brain is not literally going to explode, although I would pay good money to see that, if you could make it happen”). (And NO, this does not give you leeway to write me with spelling/grammatical errors in this blog. This is my journal that I am kindly allowing you to be privy to, and if I have to take the time to start editing myself, then I’ll never get anything posted, and I’ll get harassing e-mails from people reading, “Why haven’t you written anything? I keep going to your blog, only there’s nothing there,” and then I have to feel guilty, which leads to resentment, which will make me really not like you, so if you have a comment about what I say, post it in the comments. If it’s about how I say it, then friggin’ keep it to yourself!)
   
3. The forced bonding. As I said, the evening was pleasant, but there seems to be a false camaraderie, as if someone early on said, “Ohmygod, we’ve only got two years here so we better cram in all of our friend making and develop some team spirit superfast! Second semester is practically here! [insert smiley faced emoticon here].” Something about all the merriment just didn’t feel natural.
   
4. The waaaah factor. The evening provoked yet another minor temper tantrum on my part on how I refuse–refuse, I tell you!–to become a Hah-vahd wife. Adam, who never wanted me to become a Hah-vahd wife in the first place, took it pretty well. Luckily, this nasty fight shouldn’t rear its loathsome head again until the next HBS event…which is Saturday (okay, I confess, I’m not really going to make Adam Robopound a beer, whatever the hell that is).
   

As I write this, it occurs to me, yet again, that it would have been much smarter had I started an anonymous blog where I could talk about these things with no thought to repercussions. But then again, what the frick do I care? Bring it on Hah-vahd boys and girls!

I must go feed my crankiness with sushi and clean the house, for tomorrow–sheer heaven–we have a maid coming to really clean. (And did anyone just notice what happened there? Yep, that was me, starting to turn into the ultimate Hah-vahd wife: the dreaded CWIT! The proper CWIT always deals with her servants with a kind, yet firm hand. Although a true CWIT wouldn’t go home every night for over two months, close her eyes and say, “I believe in fairies!” as she walks into the bathroom, only to burst into tears when she sees that, once again, no cleaning pixies had come to scrub her bathroom, and then to not bother to scrub said bathroom, knowing that if she waits just one more day, somehow said bathroom would clean itself [who said bathroom?]. Now how was that for a convoluted sentence?)

Hey, check out the porn version of my site. You can try it too.

Diana not only finally has a blog (yeah, Diana!), but she has a very cool secondary blog called Two Seconds with overheard comments. Now why didn’t I think of that?

So it appears even in my Parisian fantasies, I’m low class.

Word count: 37,543.

I need to blog about last night’s HBS Section Dinner, because I told Ivy if she checked today, it would be there (Hi Ivy!). Ivy’s my new best friend because she told me she liked my Web site. I’m easy that way.

But, I need to up my word count, so instead, I’ll leave you with a piece of my getting-closer-to-the-end novel, which may not be your favorite piece, but then, you didn’t grow up with my father (and see, it really isn’t about me, because everyone knows that we don’t celebrate Christmas!). Simon, I hope you appreciate this one (Simon who saved me much grief with his sane advice that went contrary to everyone else’s not-so-wise advice. That made the novel, too. Thanks, Simon):

“Hey, Dad?” Jessica’s weekly phone calls with her father were getting shorter and shorter. She’d taken to calling when she woke up at 6 a.m., as by the time she got home at night, it was too late in Miami to call. “I have a question for you.”

Silence on the other end. “Dad, are you there?”

“I was waiting for your question.”

After all these years she should be used to this, but still it annoyed her. “I need verbal assurances of your continued existence on the other end of the phone.”

“Okay. What, Jessica, is your question?”

“Actually there are two. The first is, how about we skip Christmas this year?”

“Skip Christmas?”

“Yeah. I don’t have time to shop and no time to ship and I certainly don’t have the energy to come home. Let’s just skip Christmas.”

“You love Christmas. And more importantly, your mother loves Christmas. Can’t you make a token effort?”

Jessica sighed deeply and flipped over, putting her feet on the futon, while lying on the floor. “Okay, token effort. Really!”

“Really. Second question.”

“I want to buy and hold. How do I do that?”

“I’m going to assume you mean buy and hold a puppy dog. Because you can’t sanely be referring to anything else. Although I have to ask, if you don’t have time for Christmas, do you really think you’ll have the time necessary to care for a puppy dog.”

“Dad! You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean, because I know I raised a sane and smart daughter, and not one who would spout nonsense, so no, I have no idea what you mean.”

“I. Want. To. Buy. And. Hold. My. Stock. Options.” Jessica used her very patient, very enunciated voice.

“Let’s talk about skipping Christmas again.”

I’m not sure what to say about this one. And I’m not going to make any wisecracks here about my mother being an artist. Don’t you either.

How come I can’t put this on my wishlist? And how will this help the fattening of America? I wonder how much weight it can hold.

I am dreaming of Paris. I am dreaming of a café on the Rue de Quelque Chose (and why did I bother even trying to click on that when Word told me I got the wrong spelling. As if Word was as monoandhalflingual as I am!), where I drink Beaujolais Nouveau and smoke Gauloises (no, Mom, I really don’t smoke anymore, and if you say what you’re actually thinking, then I’m not going to let you read my blog anymore). I’m working on my forty-second novel, but instead of the laborious, miserable task of nanowrimo, words of beauty and wisdom flow from my pen with ease, and surprisingly, my hand never tires and my writing remains legible. My french is fluent (“Plus du vin, s’il vous plait“), and handsome waiters keep my glass full and my ashtray empty. When I am finished writing, I return home to my gorgeous appartement, where the chef has created a six-course dinner of rich buttery cheeses and bread that are actually fat-free (and yes, you can have six different courses all made up of cheese and bread) for me and my darling husband, Adam, who is the CEO of Hachette, which hired him because I refused to allow them to publish my books unless they did so. After dinner, we will sip Dom Perignon on the balcony overlooking the Seine, before heading out to the opera in our [fill in name of fashionable French designer whom I’ve probably never heard of here] gown and tux. Aprés opera, we will have drinks and witty conversation in a small bistro with our dearest friends, Eric Rohmer, Milan Kundera, and Isabelle Adjani, as we listen to a jazz string trio. At the end of the night, we shall return to our gorgeous maison, sneak in to kiss les enfants–whom the au pair has cleaned, fed, and read to–good night, and retreat for a night’s sleep on our 600-thread count sheets.

(A side note, when I went to check on the spelling of Gauloises, I was rudely told by their Web site: “Sorry! Access to our site is not authorized by the legislation in your country.” Even posing as a Brit, I couldn’t get in. The key is to act Dutch. The Dutch are completely legit on the Gauloises Web site. Totally worth the lie, because you can graffiti a subway car there! Didn’t you know? Smoking leads not just to death, but to tagging.)