The minute my husband and I start doing it, I realize it’s a very bad idea.

But that doesn’t mean we stop.  Oh, no.  We just keep on dumping receipts and forms and bank statements all over every surface in our tiny rented living room.  We are participating in an annual drill we both loathe — getting our tax materials together.  Neither of us is what you would call a detail person.  No, siree, we go for the broad brush, the grand sweep, the outsized gesture.  Details and decimal points make us catatonic.

Tax season is traditionally the low point of our marital satisfaction index every year.  If neither of us commits a violent felony against the other at tax time, we call it a raging success.

This year is even more fraught, though, since we have complications because of our temporary tenure in New York.  Not only that — but we are attempting to sort through the annual detritus of our lives during the Super Bowl.  There’s a reason for this: I like the Saints a lot, but I’m sure they won’t win.  Peyton Manning is invincible, I’ve read.  So is the Indianapolis coach, who told one of the sports anchors he is even calmer than he appears; since he has done his work, he said, there won’t be any surprises.  Oh barf.  If there’s anything I hate, it’s that kind of cocky self-assurance.  I prefer people with low self-esteem.  Like me, say.

I have no idea who’s even rooting for the Colts.  I don’t think I even know anybody from Indiana, for God’s sake.  The whole world, as far as I can tell, is rooting for New Orleans.  Why not?  New Orleans has the glamour, the tragedy, the intoxicating accents, the succulent food, the spirit, the music, Confederacy of Dunces, and a quarterback named Drew Brees, who’s from Austin.  The Colts, in contrast, have no bluesy back story, no hilarious novel, no epic natural disasters.  All they have is invincibility and cocky self-assurance — and I know enough about football and life to realize that’s almost always a winning combination.

So, no wonder we’re trying to start our taxes at the same time; it’s going to be a miserable rout, anyway.  Why not go ahead and suffer it full throttle in one hideous night.

We thrash through papers and snap at each other, with the TV blaring in the background.  I get irritated by how good the Colts look and by all the repugnant, sexist beer commercials (to make beer look good, evidently, you have to make women look bad).  My husband says some of the beer commercials make men look like idiots, too, but I don’t buy it.  I announce I am going to boycott Budweiser, even though I never drank it in the first place.  I have principles.  I won’t drink beer brewed by assholes.

Second half comes and our living room looks like a blizzard of white papers — but who cares about that?  We forget our taxes and watch a thrilling game.  For once, the team with soul and spirit and bum luck, steeped in floodwaters and wailing saxophones and the blues, wins.  We see footage of Bourbon Street erupting in joy and for one instant, I could swear my husband and I are surrounded by sheets of dazzling white confetti streaming through the air.  Tomorrow, they’ll be depressing W-4 forms once again, but tonight, they’re practically festive.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about how to pick a quarterback

I recently went back to my old stomping grounds in Dallas to write about the brand new Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University.  See the column here.

I’m convinced we’re all eccentric and guilt-ridden and neurotic about money.  If we have any to spare, we spend it in ways we can barely justify to ourselves.  But how we try to save money, I think, is even stranger.  What do you say no to to economize?

I speak from personal experience, of course.  In the midst of spending several months in one of the most expensive cities in the world, my husband and I are pulling out the stops.  We’ll live more frugally next year, when we’re back in Texas.

But not this year, not now, not in New York.  We go to Broadway shows and we eat out every day, twice a day.  Our apartment has a stove and oven, but who cares?  We’re around some of the most diverse and delicious food in the world and we’re out to sample as much of it as we can.  At the moment, we’re shameless.  But we’ll barbecue in the backyard almost every night, the way we used to, when we go home this summer.

But, having said that, we still have our slithery little notions of economy.  This month, we aren’t buying anything to drink at meals.  Think of all the dough we’re saving, we say, congratulating ourselves and toasting with our glasses of water (tap water, not that bottled crud).  Well done!

That’s not all, though.  Our other little financial secret is that we almost never take taxis.  We walk or take the subway or an occasional cross-town bus.  Over the months, we’ve avoided taxis more and more.  Now, they’ve begun to seem like a ridiculous waste of money.  Forget them.  We’ll economize.

I would pat us on the backs for this, but the truth is, it’s not purely an economic decision.  It’s something more complicated.

Wherever I’ve traveled, I’ve always looked forward to the taxi drivers — talking to them, hearing about their lives, learning what they think about their city, what they recommend.  They see the world in a different way, ferrying all kinds of people and their dilemmas and neuroses from stop to stop.  They overhear conversations.  They know who tips well, who doesn’t.  Day after day, they see their city through a windshield, driving in searing heat waves, ice, pelting rain, you name it.

I especially loved New York taxi drivers — their brashness, knowledge of the teeming area, street-savvy observations.  To me, they were one of the best parts of the trip.

No more.  I hate to go all those were the good old days on you,  but something’s changed and it’s not for the better.  These days, you jump in a New York taxi and an obnoxious video starts spewing forth, unless you turn it off.  Good lord — just what I don’t need when the streets of Manhattan (the most entertaining sights in the world) are flying past me.

But, you can turn off the video, as I said.  The taxi drivers are a different matter.  They’re hunkered down in the front seat, constantly talking on cell phones.  When you ask them a question, it’s often an irritation to them.  It’s enough they’ve opened the back seat of their vehicles to you, the message seems to be.  Now will you just shut up and stop interrupting their phone conversations?  Or their obvious brooding?

You learn not to try to engage them after a while — since most of them don’t seem to want to be engaged.  Which is a shame and is another reason we’ve learned to avoid taxis.  We sit silently in the back seat, watching the back of a stranger’s head.  He could have told us something about himself — where he’s from, whether he has kids, what business is like for him.  Maybe we could have talked a little, too, about what we think about the city.  Or maybe we would have just listened.

It doesn’t seem like much to complain about, but to me, it is.  I miss the exchanges, the warmth, the vital human connections.  The price is too high and the pleasure is gone.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about taking the soap opera over the opera

My boyfriend and I saw the rock musical “Hair” in London in 1972.  Well, “saw” is a bit of an exaggeration.  We were sitting uneasily in the worst seats in the house — wooden bleachers a few miles from the stage.  Occasionally, we could hear a bar or two of music.  When the famous get-naked scene happened, we couldn’t tell.  We had to wait till whispers and rumors of nudity made their way back to us.

Thirty-eight years later, we’re long married and in New York and our seats are far better, even if our vision and hearing aren’t.  This week, we saw — really saw — the revival of “Hair.”  It’s wonderful and exhilarating — full of so much raw talent and exuberance and contagious music you can feel the years and worries slip away from you as you levitate.

But — it’s not just any musical.  It’s the musical of our generation, seething with rebellion, high spirits, great dreams and the looming specter of the Vietnam War.  In 2010, it’s being performed by young people we call kids who were born in the eighties, actors the age of our own grown children.  What do they know of us?

“I wonder if they understand,” my husband said during intermission, “really understand the time we lived in.  How our parents were such a rigid and authoritarian generation — and how we were rebelling against them.”

We sat there talking with minds and perspectives I can only call split.  As parents ourselves, we now understand our own mothers and fathers and the generational pulls so well.  Just think, we said to each other, our parents grew up during the Great Depression and lived through the Second World War, which both our fathers served in.  They were upstanding and frugal, with my own parents struggling mightily to cling to their middle-class status, always fretting about money.  Then, we Baby Boomers came along, coddled (the story goes) and concerned with something beyond pure survival.  In our parents’ view, we did nothing but spit in their faces and scorn their values.

Watching the rest of the musical, I kept wondering about it.  Was “Hair” the story of our generation — or was it simply the story of youth doing what youth always does, rebelling and dreaming outsized dreams, sure they are special and destined for something better than their parents’ staid and boring lives?  Almost 40 years later, how different from our bourgeois parents — whom we lived, dressed and grew hair to shock — are we, really?

Then the music swelled at the end of the performance and a good number of the audience ended up on the stage singing and swaying to “Let the Sun Shine.”  My husband and I stayed in our places, singing and clapping.  Let everybody else take the stage.  We’d already been there and now, it was somebody else’s turn.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about staying on my feet, like it or not

I never got the whole glass half-empty or half-full scenario.  Give me a choice like that and I immediately become literal-minded:  Half-full of what?  It does make a difference, you know.

Anyway, here are the jam-packed events of my morning.  Half-empty, half-full, you tell me.

9:30 a.m.  I am walking along Central Park South.  It’s snowing and the tree branches spike upwards, like yearning fingers, turning white.

(Sounds like a full glass to me, even if I am heading to the doctor.)

9:35 a.m.  An enormous fake rat looms on the sidewalk.  “Welcome to the Helmsley Rat Hotel!” the placard says.  Nearby, two men in hotel uniforms talk heatedly.  “You have got to get rid of that,” one tells the other.

(Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean, who left her billion-dollar kingdom to some lousy mutt!  Oh, baby, my cup runneth over!)

10 a.m.  I meet my new doctor, whom I immediately like, and tell him about two of my health concerns — a small lump, a left hand that isn’t typing as well as it once did.  The latter symptom, I tell him, relates to my great fear of the horrific disease that killed my mother, accelerated Parkinson’s.  She died at 73, having lost all physical and mental functions; at the end, all she could do was moan and scream.  Sometimes, I can still hear her.

(Glass is trembling, spilling its contents.  Emptying out?)

10:50 a.m.  I am examined from head to toe.  Blood pressure, pulse, reflexes, breathing, getting pokes here and there.  I am in admirable shape!  (He didn’t say that, exactly, but it’s my interpretation.)  Lump, slight tremor, are probably nothing.  Even better, I am back to my old height of 5′7″.  Does this mean I’ve grown since I came to New York?

(Glass running pretty damned full.)

11:25 a.m.  Technician takes bodily fluids painlessly.  Tells me I remind her — exactly! — of some movie star whose name she can’t remember.  She puzzles over it.  I keep hoping she’ll say Helen Mirren, but she doesn’t.  “I’ll have to think about it,” she says.  I’ll also take Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton as backups, I think.  But please — not Linda Hunt.

(Glass holding steady.)

11:45 a.m.  Doctor’s assistant, who’s been on the snotty-to-cool side all along, shoves a bill under my nose.

“A thousand nineteen dollars is what you owe this morning,” she sniffs.

Oh, I say, but what about my insurance?

“We don’t take that insurance.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me earlier?  Why did you even take my insurance card?”

“We take everybody’s insurance card.  You have already been informed of this.”

“No,” I say, “I haven’t been informed.  I tend to remember things that are contrary to my financial interests.”

She says yes, I say no, we go back and forth, I repeat my outrage, we are at am impasse, I pay the fucking bill.  She hands the receipt back to me.  “Thank you,” she says.  For one of the first times in my life, I do not say “You’re welcome.”

(I have now telepathically — and in no uncertain terms — informed the assistant what she can do with the goddamned glass, whether empty or full.)

12:05 p.m.  I wander down Madison Avenue in a foul mood, peering into shop windows with objects I can now barely afford to look at.  I pass a jewelry store in the 60s, cordoned off by yellow tape, flanked by police cars.  Minutes later, a cop car with a loud speaker goes up Madison, broadcasting information:  A robbery, a 71-year-old man shot dead, a perpetrator loose, a $2,000 reward.

(Glass?  But whose glass is it, anyway?  Mine?  The 71-year-old man’s?  Doesn’t it always come down to this — the stark comparisons and sheer randomness of life?  I’m $1,019 lighter, I probably won’t find the perpetrator and score the $2K, but hey, I am still alive and whole, walking along a sidewalk slick with melting snow, wondering where I can find a very cheap lunch. The glass, as always, is subject to interpretation.)

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about communing with ghosts

If you like Tolstoy and you think happy families are all alike, you should see the newly released film, The Last Station.  Hell, you should even see it if you think happy families are as different and distinctive as unhappy families.  It’s that good.

Christopher Plummer plays the aging Tolstoy, who was then the most famous and revered writer in the world, considered by many to be a saint.  Some of his most devout followers lived on Russian communes, growing their own food and working for the greater good.  You can already see the problem: Throw a few communes together and start nattering about “the people” and every loafer and charlatan and misfit shows up in leadership positions and then everything goes straight to hell.  (I know this, since I came of age in the 60s and 70s and once lived in a commune for a month.  I think somebody still owes me some rent money.)

Sonya, Tolstoy’s wife of 40-plus years, is played by Helen Mirren.  All these years later, the world has decided her husband is a genius and a saint.  Frankly, I can’t think of anything harder on a marriage.  Who on earth wants to be married to a saint?  If no man is a hero to his valet, you can pretty much assume the same thing about his wife.  After a while, you get sick of hearing how wondrous and perfect he is, which has the effect of making you want to burst all their dippy little balloons by announcing a list of his most egregious faults.  (Or so I imagine.  I am fortunate enough not to be married to a saint.)

Anyway, at this point in their lives, the Tolstoy family is very unhappy in its own way, with communal hangers-on trying to siphon money from his novels’ copyrights to “the people” and change his will.  Sonya takes umbrage about her family’s potential disinheritance — and believe me, this is a woman who takes to umbrage quite well.  She screams, she shoots a pistol, she charms, she seduces, she tries to drown herself.  She would be an utterly ridiculous and unsympathetic character if she weren’t played so brilliantly and vehemently by Mirren.

Christopher Plummer, on the other hand, manages to make the saintly Tolstoy very human, very malleable to his followers, still in love with a wife he can no longer bear to be around.

Put it all together, and you have a wonderful depiction of a once-happy marriage in shreds, an idealistic social movement turning venal and petty, and a time in history where a brilliant author’s life was chronicled by the media as if he were Brad Pitt.  In a season of shallow romantic comedies about people you’d never want to meet, whose bon-bon lives get wrapped up and beribboned in 90 minutes, here’s a movie of complex and outsized characters willing to chew the scenery and burn down the house, since love is worth the madness.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about Confessions of a Book-Club Hater

So, let’s call it what it was: a shitty week.  The bungled and botched Massachusetts Senate election that may derail health care.  The Supreme Court’s letting the corporate hounds loose on elections (the five conservative justices looking quite activist in spite of their protests against judicial activism).  The exoneration of Sharon Keller, the chief judge of the top criminal court in Texas, who was too busy at home to accept a Death Row appeal.  (She’d do everything the same if she had to do it over again, Judge Keller said; I do love it when people learn nothing from their mistakes — especially when that mistake cost a man his life.)

Anyway, bummer week and, on Saturday, we head to the New York Historical Society.  We were really there for the exhibition about John Brown, but it was too crowded, according to my husband, who hasn’t perfected the art of elbowing his way to the front of a crowd the way I have.  So we ended up at the Lincoln and New York exhibit.

After a while, the story of Lincoln’s troubled first term began to strike me as highly familiar.  Elected with high hopes at a grave time in our nation’s history.  War declared.  The war goes badly — not at all the quick-as-a-snap finish the North expected.  Casualties mount.  The economy falters.  Lincoln suspends habeas corpus, institutes an income tax, demands the first draft in the country’s history.  He’s attacked by the abolitionists since he doesn’t immediately free the slaves, denounced by those sick of the war who want to make peace with the South at any cost.

The New York governor’s race in 1862 is billed as a referendum on Lincoln’s presidency — and the Democrat wins.  The war rages on.  Riots in New York break out and blacks are lynched.

“It’s so much more complicated than what we learned in high school,” said my husband, who took American history from a football coach.

So much more complicated.  You look at the attacks on Lincoln, who wasn’t then the paragon or political genius we’ve now agreed on.  He was just another politician to be called cowardly, vacillating, power-hungry, a hayseed from the rough frontier.

Now, a century-and-a-half later, he’s the president we all revere — because we need some heroes, after all.  History didn’t just prove him correct; it came close to deifying him.  I stare at the photos of him, the busts, the statues, trying to understand who he was, the source of his greatness; his drawn, troubled face is unfathomable.  I delay going into the last section because — just like the Zapruder film — I still don’t want the inevitable end to happen.

All of it seems terribly close to our own current circumstances, except far worse.  You look back and what do you learn?  That you know nothing at the time something happens.  That history lessons are too succinct and gloss over too many unsavory details.  That we all want to believe the past was simpler and prettier than it really was.

“Just think,” my husband said cheerfully, getting into a gadfly mood.  “Maybe a hundred years from now, they’ll have an exhibit glorifying George W. Bush for freeing the Arab world.  You never know how things will turn out in history.”

“They’ll add two more spots on Mount Rushmore for him and Cheney,” I said, thinking Over My Dead Body.

Just then, some actors dressed in Union soldier uniforms passed by us.  One of them tipped his hat to me and said, “Hello, ma’am.”

Behind them, a Lincoln figure lumbered along.  Dressed in black, with a stovepipe hat, rangy and angular and tall.  I looked at his gaunt face and, for a minute, I couldn’t even catch my breath.

Truth is, I wanted to run up to him and shake his hand and gush and tell him what a great job he did.  Thank you, I wanted to say, oh thank you.  I guess you had some pretty shitty weeks of your own.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about take this week and shove it

The news from Haiti is heartbreaking.  So, I give money to the Red Cross.  Not enough, of course.  How could it be enough?

The political news from Massachusetts is gut-wrenching.  I walk around with a stomachache.  I try not to think about the feral gloating that is doubtlessly going on at Fox News.

I would commune with nature.  But I’m in New York City — and besides, I’m not much of a nature-communer.  I could be standing right by the Grand Canyon or Big Sur, and my communing would take about five minutes.

I’ve got it!  I will commune with New York culture.

I drag my husband away from his work.  This sounds like an ordeal, but it’s not.  If I ever saw a man who desperately wanted to be dragged away from his work, it’s him today.  He doesn’t even put up a token fight.

We take the B train to Grand Street and — this is what I continue to marvel at in my country-mouse way — we emerge into a different world, the Lower East Side.  After arguing about which direction to go in, we end up at the Tenement Museum.

We take an hour-long tour of a former tenement building lived in by generations of immigrants — Germans, Russians, Italians.  It’s cramped and it’s dark.  But you can see the ancient layers of wallpaper in the tiny living rooms and linoleum in the spartan kitchens.  This is something that always greatly touches me — the human need for beauty.  (It makes me think of the summers our family spent in Taos, where I communed with nature five minutes a day on a regular basis.  But what moved me — even more than the mountains and the dazzling stars at night — were the pottery shards my husband and children found.  They were left by a nomadic people who eked out a rough life hundreds of years ago, but still found the time to decorate their pottery, make it pretty, leave something of themselves behind.)

We heard the stories of the families who lived here briefly, then moved themselves and their children on to better lives and places.  Those stories are wonderful and poignant — stories of the American dream that still surface now and then and make you feel proud.  For them and their descendants, it seemed, the dream worked.

From there, we returned to the Tenement Museum Gift Shop and heard an incredible talk by Elaine Showalter, a renowned literary scholar and author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, and Wendy Martin, an American literature professor at Claremont.  They were funny, they were sharply opinionated about women and literature and the male-dominated literary canon, they seemed to know everything, they were enthralling.  Particularly interesting after our tenement tour were Showalter’s comparisons of women writers in England and America.  England’s were from a far narrower, more educated and affluent social class who had greater leisure time (even the poverty-stricken Brontes, she said, had household help).  In sharp contrast, the American women led harder lives, striving for survival, and came from a variety of social classes and venues.

By then, it was dark and we were hungry.  So we made our way down the street to a wonderful Austrian restaurant, Cafe Katya, where the atmosphere was warm and friendly and the food excellent.

Back to our world on the Upper West Side, where the news continued to be bad and I sometimes wonder if the American dream still holds true.  You can’t escape reality for long, but it’s so rewarding to try.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about taking your kid to work: a cautionary tale

I read some kind of article about how your favorite section of The New York Times tells a lot about you.  Some of the people interviewed in the article talked about how the op-ed page was their favorite; this showed how serious and intellectual they are.  Others — the rebels, the bon vivants — admitted their unhealthy, yet chi-chi addiction to the Styles section.

Nobody ‘fessed up to my own favorite section.  That’s because people like us lurk in the shadows.  Who wants the world to know you’d sideswipe a great-grandmother to get to the Saturday Real Estate Section?  Who wants other people to know you’re so superficial, so covetous, so lacking in gravitas?

Oh, hell, I don’t know.  All I know is, I’m sick and tired of being ashamed of my little addiction, which isn’t hurting anyone else, as far as I can tell.

Saturday morning comes — and if some lowlife hasn’t stolen our newspaper, it’s thick and fat and promising.  I glance at the headlines on the front page, then delve into the bulk of it.

The fact is, you shouldn’t make fun of the Saturday Real Estate Section if you haven’t read it as avidly as I have.  You have no idea how psychologically deep and searching it is.  There’s always an article about someone who’s searching for a great place and almost makes a bad decision.  Maybe he got dazzled by the rococo details — and failed to notice the rodent population.  Maybe she really thought a two-bedroom with five roommates was really going to work out.  Maybe they didn’t take into account that a dimly-lit apartment, however cheap, would render them psychotic in January.

Fortunately — in this venue, at least — they are saved.  They somehow find the perfect apartment that’s only slightly unaffordable.  They learn that, with ingenuity and hard work, they can create a dazzling refuge in what others might term a large walk-in closet that’s as cozy and claustrophobic as a postage stamp.  They realize that a fifth-floor walkup saves the expense of a gym membership.

Yes, but these little human mysteries and morality tales are only the appetizer course.  From there, you can learn about high-rise dwellers who are a little too involved in their neighbors’ lives, their cooking, their coming and going, their most intimate moments.  (Rear Window, it seems, may have been closer to a documentary than you’d suspected.)  You read about how having a big patio with upstairs neighbors may not be as idyllic as you thought it would be when partygoers above you hurl down cigarette stubs that immolate your patio furniture and suicidal cats slip from the 30th floor and crash onto your terrazzo.  You hear about the pain of neighbors who quarrel loudly, then reconcile even more loudly in the bed that’s a few feet below you.

Well, I could go on.  I could tell you how I linger over the color photographs of recently sold condos and coops, how I calculate the dizzying sales prices, how I peer into lives and places that I can see my husband and me fitting into oh-so-seamlessly if we were only billionaires.  But that would cheapen the experience and make me out to be a voyeur of lifestyle pornography.

No, as usual, I prefer a more flattering summary of my little obsession.  I am interested in the human condition.  The best way to understand life in New York is to go vicariously where other people live.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about Why I Hate Casual Fridays

You know the old saying: You can’t begin to understand another person until you’ve spent some time in his shoes.

Today, I’m casting off my usual self — that tired, old liberal whose heart leaks blood and oozes sympathy, the woman who plans to send money to the disaster in Haiti and has never managed to vote her pocketbook in decades of elections.  Enough with her.

Today, I am Pat Robertson.  I am wearing his shoes.  They are Ferragamos.

10:17 AM  I wake up.  I am very tired.  I pray.  God tells me I am exhausted from doing His work and should go back to sleep.  “Thy will be done,” I say and turn over.

11: 44 AM  I wake up again, more refreshed.  As usual, God was right.  I have been dreaming of the earth churning, buildings collapsing, people dead.  Could it be — o, praise the Lord! — Armageddon?  I am ready for it, Lord!  Unfortunately, I am a bit deaf and may have difficulty hearing the wails of the damned.  I pray for God to improve my hearing.

11:46 AM  I turn on Fox News.  I am bitterly disappointed.  It isn’t Armageddon, after all.  It’s just the continuing story of all those worthless sinners in Haiti getting wiped out.  How long will the news media (even Fox!) keep up its endless bleating about this “tragedy”?  Make a note to pray to God to send an earthquake to Cuba next time.

12:01 I see I am in the news once again as I labor selflessly to speak about God’s will and His righteous wrath toward the despicable and loathsome.  It is my cross and my duty; I accept it, Lord — even the calumny.  “Why doesn’t God strike down the rich, the comfortable, the smug, instead?” my persecutors cry in a clammy chorus of self-righteousness.  Oh, ye of little faith!  Don’t you see that God is always testing the best of us — even me?  That is why we have a Negro in the White House.

1:30 PM  I go outside.  It is a beautiful day.  This is because God loves me.

1:31 PM  Unfortunately, I am in New York City, the center of all things heinous, wicked and vile.  You see what I mean?  God is still testing me.  I go to lunch at the Four Seasons.  I am meeting that new Fox commentator, Sarah Palin.  When we get a really good table, I realize I am doubly blessed.

1:32 PM In a loud whisper, Sarah announces she thinks our waiter is a homosexual.  Since there are no homosexuals in Alaska, Sarah says, she used to have trouble recognizing them.  After spending more time in this God-free zone of iniquity, though, she can now spot them in a fast, unerring way: Any man who doesn’t desire her is a sodomite.  She and I bow our heads to pray to God to smite them all, just like the Haitians.

1:33 PM  After we say amen, I mention to Sarah that I desire her.  She winks at me and says she isn’t surprised, since I don’t look like a faggot.  We hold hands and pray again for strength not to sin.

3:02 PM  I walk through Central Park.  I am filled with loathing.  All these idlers sitting in the sun, ignoring the fact God is going to be punishing them for eternity any minute now!  Those shameless, lust-filled couples who can’t wait to get back to their apartments and fornicate!  Those godless toddlers in their prams whose mothers are clearly too busy pursuing their own tawdry, self-aggrandizing careers to bring up their own children, so they have left them in the dark, unseemly hands of their hired help, who are doubtlessly illegal aliens.

3:33 PM  I recover from my tortured half-hour of doubting God’s plan for the world.  My suffering has been so great!  I make a mental note to alert the INS about all the nannies in Central Park.  I will also loudly urge Yale Law School, my troubled alma mater, to stop admitting women into their classes so they will criminally neglect their future children.  Praise Jesus.

4:17 PM  I am still in New York, so God is still testing me.  I recall my wonderful talk with Sarah about God sending a message to New York City on September 11.  If God hadn’t wanted to punish godless liberals, then He would have had the terrorists attack a righteous, God-fearing metropolis like Oklahoma City, Sarah said.  She is such a brilliant, insightful woman!  I pray for her to outlive Katie Couric for a long, long time.

5:03 PM  I arrive back at my hotel.  I am sick of  the iniquity, the atrocity of the secular world, the untrammeled sin!  I turn on Fox news and they’re still talking about Haiti, Haiti, Haiti.  Thousands may be dead, the Fox newspeople say.  They try to look serious, but I know they think it’s as amusing as I do.  I pray, once again, for Armageddon to occur in the waning moments of my lifetime.  (Perhaps Haiti is only a start!)  Then I take a nap, for I am tired.  I sleep the deep, untroubled sleep of the just.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about Elizabeth and John Edwards