Once Again the Swedes Have It - Annika Bengtzon

This picture does not do her justice.

While searching Netflix for something new to watch, we took a chance on Annika Bengtzon: Crime Reporter and were hooked.   This subtitled "series of new Scandinavian crime films based on Liza Marklund's worldwide best-selling novels Nobel's Last Will, Studio Sex, Prime Time, The Red Wolf, Lifetime and A Place in the Sun" takes us into the life of a reporter who is working hard to excel at her job which often runs smack into conflict with her life as a wife and mother.  Even though I think of Sweden as progressive — even in Sweden — women face bias in the workplace and the constant struggle to balance and fulfill the demands of their professional and personal lives.

Though I'm not big on crime/mysteries I really enjoyed following the ins and outs of the stories crafted by Liza Marklund that Annika, played with beautiful vulnerability by Malin Crépin, persistently pushes her way through.  Pursuing lead after lead (often against our better judgment) Annika finds what she's looking for to crack the case and deliver a sensational headline to her paper, Kvällspressen.

Between investigating a shooting at a Nobel committee event, the death of a Swedish family in Spain, or the murder of a popular television host, we see the toll Annika's work takes  on her long-time relationship with the handsome Thomas, the father of their two beautiful children, Kalle and Ellen.   You're rooting for their relationship to succeed but it's complicated by an antagonistic relationship with her soon-to-be mother-in-law — and of course the ever-present ring of her cell phone calling her to another crime scene.

Annika finds camaraderie and comfort from an older female researcher Berit, annoyance from male contemporary Patrik who's intent on busting her chops and showing her up, and pressure from Spiken, the curmudgeon who is head of the newsroom.  When he's about to retire, Annika is offered his job and turns it down — only to suffer the consequences when her annoying male colleague becomes her boss.

In addition to seeing the inside of the newsroom and the society and politics of Sweden, we get an inside look at the life of a young professional woman who walks a tightrope of constant tension between following her instincts and adhering to the paper's preferences, politics,and publisher. At the same time as trying to be a good wife and mother...sound familiar?

We've finished episode six.  I'm sad to say goodbye to Annika Bengtzon: Crime Reporter — but hope you'll enjoy saying hello.

I Need To Talk About Jim

It happened well over a year ago when I sent a form to an invited guest lecturer as part of my old job.  The form was sometimes my first contact with an academic coming to our campus for a two-day visit.  That initial email was the beginning of my job responsibilities shepherding the guest and all their visit entailed.  The form told us everything we needed to know to set up, orchestrate, and pay for Professor she or he, from this institution or that.  The visitor would be involved in multiple events — at minimum, the public lecture and reception, a small invite-only dinner — perhaps a class visit, a lunch with graduate students, breakfast and/or dinner with a local colleague, family member, or friend.  Someone has to take care of these logistics: the travel (some domestic, some international-don't forget about their visa), lodging, local transportation, meals, catered events, publicity, payments. To get all that information it takes a fair amount of back and forth, emails, calls, juggling, shifting, changing to accommodate everyone you can.   You really, really want quick responses because each piece of information hinges on three others. Once you have all that set and documented in an itinerary, you share it with everyone involved.  Doing it well is an art.

Some invitees take the process seriously.  They understand that the goal is both to maximize the visit and ensure one's enjoyment & ease.  Others want to respond in a timely matter but are crazy busy and still others barely respond.  Why they don't respond is for a number of reasons: it's not important enough to interrupt their lives, it's low-priority because it's months away — regardless of their rationale the lack of quick response ends up making it a nightmare for everyone — especially the coordinator. 

I never know these people until they actually arrive and I never spend any time with them.  I don't listen to the talk cause I'm setting up with the caterer and making sure everyone has what they need including late-comers and early-leavers.  During the reception I'm running around and don't have time to mingle.  I'm never invited to the dinner.  I stay after to clean up and lock up.  

The form asks if you have dietary restrictions or preferences.  This invited guest, I shall call him Professor James, was on sabbatical in Key West, but giving a number of talks around the country and he'd been great about responding.  He didn't have constant access to the Internet or a fax but had printed off, filled in his form, and mailed it back.  Under the question about dietary restrictions/preferences he'd written, "NO Onions!"

Well.  Here was a man after my own heart.  One of my very first posts was about my hatred of raw onions.  I was a lifelong no-onions-girl, at least raw ones.  I felt compelled to share this connection.  So when I next emailed I mentioned my surprise, my pseudonym (and wish for privacy at work about my blog) and the link to my post and thus began a four-month back-and-forth conversation.  Here was an academic who actually noticed and was interested in me, lowly me.  

It was surprising.  Professor James dove head in — even called for a 45-minute long chat —  about the onions, writing, our troubled relationships with our fathers, and more.  It was astonishing, unexpected, and made me ecstatically happy. In a short time through a distance, this stranger knew more about me than all the people in my office put together.  I had been working for a long time in an environment that, for the most part, didn't recognize people without PhDs. Though we hadn't yet met — it felt incredible to have someone really "see" me.  I was so grateful. 

That back-and-forth with Jim gave me a shot in the arm — he was an academic and a writer and a published author who was valuing my writing, my thoughts.  We strategized about how to spend some time talking during the visit.  It was a moving target.  He was a really popular guy. Everyone wanted time with him.  The blanks on the itinerary began to fill up, chunks of time were being signed away.  As a last resort we figured I could take him to the airport and that would give us an hour to share thoughts.  I was so looking forward to it.

Then the week before when I sent Professor James' itinerary around, one of our secondaries emailed a request to drive Jim to the airport.  He wanted to spend that time with him.  I felt trumped. I felt robbed.  I felt small.  I deleted myself from the schedule and sank into a depression.  That feeling stayed with me for the rest of the week and through Jim's visit. I found myself avoiding any connection at all.  I was not among the privileged.  Who did I think I was to merit a slot on his agenda?  I blamed Jim.  I felt betrayed and tossed aside.  Later, when Jim commented on the change and said he "was counting" on that time to get together, I didn't know what to think.  I felt embarrassed.

But wait, you're thinking, why didn't I just say arrangements for the ride had already been made?  Why didn't I ask Jim if it was what he preferred?   I didn't because emotions aren't rational and I went to a place where I didn't measure up, where I could perform and orchestrate and coordinate and dazzle and still I wouldn't matter.  It was a place I'd lived since I was in second grade.  It was an old place and I ricocheted into the depths of that despair.  It wasn't Jim's fault at all but at the time I didn't know that.

Once his visit was complete, our connection died off.  I knew he was busy with lectures, finishing his sabbatical, then getting back to his university, starting up with students and classes.  After communicating with frequency (often multiple times a week), the connection, a lifeline was gone.  

Then, after almost a year, Jim sent this email:

Just read "Lost without Normal." One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got was: Write your way through transition.  When normal is lost, THAT is the time to write.  The writing will orient you & help create the new normal.  It's hard but it works.  Thinking of you, JD

Out of nowhere — there he was — sending me a bucketful.  I got filled.  My writer's cup runneth over.

So — as part of "writing my way through" — this is the shameful stuff I've been avoiding.

The Weight of Weight

I weigh more than I should.  Perhaps I always have.  It certainly feels that way.  Last fall I visited with a childhood friend and I was SO happy to see her, be with her, catch up on our lives.  While we were laughing, reminiscing, sharing, it did cross my mind that she'd put on weight, more than was healthy for her (forgive me, M) but, BUT — when I saw the pictures my husband had taken of us — I was floored because I was just as heavy!  REALLY.  The pot thinking the kettle was black.  I look in a mirror every day but I didn't see myself that way, that weight.  Woke me up.

In high school, when everyone else (well, those in my periphery) was 100 or 101, I was 107.  I was on the cheerleading squad, played sports all year long but I was short and I always felt chunky.  Then when they were 110, I was 117 or 121 or 130. As the years went on, high school gone, I kept cooking more, eating more, and "exercising" less.  

Some women never get on a scale.  Others go to weigh themselves once a week at a weight-loss place or a gym or fitness center.  And then there are the women who weigh themselves every day.  There is controversy about this approach.  Just a simple Google search will provide:

How Often Should You Weigh Yourself & When Is The Best Time?

5 Reasons You Can Skip Weighing Yourself

Daily weigh-in key to keeping pounds off 

6 Reasons Why Weighing Yourself is a Bad Idea

Daily Weigh-In May Help Dieters Lose

My friends Susan (in New York) and Kate (in Paris) weigh themselves daily — good, bad or indifferent.  At first, I thought that was complete lunacy but now I see it differently.  I guess it gives them a daily read on where they stand and allows them to adjust their eating accordingly.  That sounds sane to me.

Over the years as milestones came and went, my weight fluctuated, but the last 15 years I've been pretty consistent — not that I was fit.  And I should be.  My friend Michelle (in Chile), SHE is fit.  Unbelievably physically fit — like play Ultimate Frisbee, hike Machu Picchu, scuba-dive in the Galapagos, climb Angel Falls fit — but she's not thin — and that's okay.

To be healthier I do need to lose some weight — but I've given up on thin and that is healthy.  Thin was never going to be me.  I wanted to accept my physical self and not always be judging, judging, judging.  It took decades for me to feel comfortable with how I looked and felt.  But then that photo — sigh.

My friends Carol, Janet, and Linda have stayed as fit and thin as they were four decades ago!  Julie in Ohio looks as she did in college (while the other four of us don't).  My friend Maria (inspired by her friend Susie) grabbed hold of herself, cut out the carbs, started exercising religiously and looks terrific.

My daughter tells me when people are stressed they gravitate to salty foods.  

Here's the sneaky thing about potato chips — they're just so damn light.

The Spirit of Sauna

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One of the things in my new normal has got to be exercise and so far this week I've made it three times.  To be truthful, the first two days I only worked on machines for 20-30 minutes but today I did an hour-long Nia class.  If you don't know Nia, 

"Nia is a sensory-based movement practice that draws from martial arts, dance arts and healing arts. It empowers people of all shapes and sizes by connecting the body, mind, emotions and spirit." 

I only know that it's a very freeing and physical way to get your workout and so count on me to be there Thursday mornings.  The real motivation for the trips to the gym is the reward of being able to enter the sauna and bake, because for me, a visit to the sauna is almost spiritual.

http://blog.hgtv.com/

My first experience with a sauna was in the 70s when this New York power couple I babysat for built one in their home on Fire Island.  Sitting naked in that hot, hot wooden room was liberating. Taking the wooden scoop and splashing a ladleful of water on the hot rocks made the room hiss and the heat rise.  Following the Scandanavian ritual, we'd take a shockingly cold outdoor shower to wash away the sweat and tighten the pores.  It felt like you were new. In the 80s when I went to visit my friend Ann, she had a sauna built in her home (as well as an indoor hot tub), at the top of her solarium. You reached it by climbing a spiral metal staircase — in Chickasha, Oklahoma!   

When you first open the wooden door of a sauna, you get hit by a blast of hot air and then you settle in. I like the upper level where the heat is most intense.  I settle up there — wrapped in my towel enveloped by warmth and dark. The hot dry air encases you and soon makes your skin tingle.  A drop or two of sweat drips down the back of your neck.  If you move, your skin touches the burning cedar surrounding you. I breathe deep and my nostrils feel tinged by the fire of that air.

If I'm alone, basking in the sauna, I close my eyes and talk to my sister.  I feel as if she's there listening — but she doesn't respond.  Still it makes me feel her presence and that comforts me.  In the quiet and the dark, I lose myself in my emotions.  Then the door opens, someone enters, the blast of regular air cools the intensity down, and I've lost the connection to Donna.  The entering sauna-lover doesn't know I'm crying, because after ten minutes you expect rivulets of sweat running from your eyes down the sides of your cheeks.

Twelve minutes and I'm feeling a bit light-headed — I need to hit the shower.  But I'm smiling because it's the third time this week that I got to recharge my battery in the house of sauna.  One of the perks of my new normal.

Lost Without Normal

I guess you can tell — I'm having a hard time writing.  It makes no sense, no sense at all.  Before — when I was working full time — I stuck to my self-imposed routine, twice a week, post on Thursdays and Sundays and I kept to that schedule pretty religiously for over a YEAR.  It meant writing at 10, 11, midnight, 1 in the morning — but I did it.  And I did it with not much angst.  

True, after I wrote something I'd be worried.  Always thinking the writing was flat.  Flat meant lifeless, boring.  But after I posted, I'd see the stats of the pageviews going up and see that there was a small contingent in the United Kingdom reading and even at that late hour, some in the US — probably West Coasters.  In a day or so I'd get an email or a call or sometimes a Comment would be posted and I'd know that someone liked what I wrote and know that the words resonated with someone out there and I could sigh with relief that for that moment the writing wasn't flat or boring or worthless.  

But now that I'm not working full time every day, now that I have the time, now that I don't have the pressure to squeeze the writing in — now is when I'm having a tough time writing.  Tough meaning I can't write.

Maybe it's because the world as I knew it has changed.  

The office I went to every day for almost five years, I'm no longer going to.  The institutional work home I've had for the past 17 years — replete with all its resources, tech support, access to anything and everything just a phone call away — is gone.  Our daughter just moved far away, a couple we've known for almost 40 years moved back to New York, and — and — my sister-in-law passed away in January.  The world as I knew it has changed.

Some things are stable.  My wonderful, supportive, loving, patient, thoughtful, caring  husband is still here with me day in and day out — thank God.  I'm still living in the same home in the same town, with the same terrific friends — thank goodness.  But the rest? The rest is in flux.  No routine, no schedule, no normal.  Now that I have the time to do just about anything I like, need, or want, it's a struggle to get things done.  I'm facing a time when I soon won't be bringing in any regular income.  I need to build my business.  I need to be networking, networking, networking.  And I will.  But it's gonna be a struggle.  

I need to find my new normal.

Honest or Selfish?

To all you readers out there: I know you're reading but it would be really nice if you could become a follower (lower right, below the Labels and the Blog Archive) so I have a sense of who's reading.  You don't have to have a photo or even put your full name — but I'd love to know who is following out there...
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Here's what I think. I think that we hold ourselves back emotionally because we think about the other person and decide (for one good reason or another) we can't tell someone what we really feel because you can't put your needs and your wants and your wishes above someone else's. That's what you tell yourself.  There's always a reason. And when that reason is gone, well, for me there's always another to take its place.  "Oh, she can't because she's got so much on her plate right now."  Or "She can't because she's not able to hear it."  Or, "You need to make allowances for him, he's getting older."  Or, or, or...whatever.  There's always a reason you can't say what you feel. I can't say what I feel.

I don't know — I only know that for me honesty trumps almost everything and yet — I struggle with being honest when it comes to expressing my true feelings when I know they're bound to upset someone else.   I can talk myself out of saying what I want to because I think (sometimes I know) the recipient won't actually hear me.  But should that matter?  Isn't it more important to just share those feelings and see what happens?

I'm trapped by feeling that saying what's in my heart is selfish — and being selfish — that's not allowed.  But some people live their lives putting themselves first and don't see it as selfish. Is it?  Are they?

Births, weddings, deaths — they bring out the best in families and they bring out the worst.

Comfort

Canada by Dan Rhett

Photo by Tabetha J.on yelp

Photo by Jessica P. on yel

Driving north on the way to the funeral (I'm not ready to talk about that yet) we pushed forward until Richmond when we stopped for lunch at a place whose sign offered what we needed — Comfort.  It was one of those high, high tin-ceilinged long narrow buildings that had had a long industrial life and now was taken over by a long wooden bar, blackboard menus, Southern-inspired food, and loads of microbrewery beers. We ordered and then I jumped out of my seat to head for the Visual Artists Studio  a few doors away.  Three rooms chockfull of interesting works by a variety of artists all housed by Anne Hart Chay.  There was jewelry, pottery, paintings, etchings, watercolors, photographs, cards, all sorts of art by in the third room hung a cluster of paintings by Dan Rhett and one, one just jumped out at me.  It was an odd subject matter and at first I thought there was a dog or a child next to seated man in a plaid flannel shirt.  It was haunting in a way, a woman, half-naked, arms outstretched.  What did it mean?  I went back to Comfort to see if my lunch had arrived and then told my husband and daughter that after we ate I wanted their opinion on something I liked. [The squash casserole was yummy, burger and salads were good, skip the fried green tomatoes.]

I stared and stared at this painting I didn't need and shouldn't buy, and wondered why it spoke to me.  Maybe it was the outstretched arms that reminded me of a painted picture of my daughter in grade school.  Maybe it was the blonde hair like Robin's.  Maybe it was the sheer confidence this women showed by baring her chest, facing the man and the creature without a care.  There was something in this odd painting and I knew if I left without it I would regret leaving it behind.  I would miss this painting and I would miss wondering about it.  When my husband insisted, Anne packed the painting to go.  

At the hotel in New York I unwrapped and propped up "Canada" so I could enjoy it during our stay. Seeing it gave me comfort after the wake, after the funeral.  When we got back home there was an email from the artist.  He'd heard I was puzzled by his images and offered this explanation.

A few years back I went to Canada, to Vancouver. One of the big reasons I went was to see the collection of NW Coast art at the University of British Columbia.  After spending some time there my wife and I were looking for a walk, and saw a sign for beach access, and went down these long steps through the jungle down to the beach. The beach there if you haven't seen it is very different than Myrtle or VA Beach which is what I am used to: it is covered with rocks! round ones - anyway - I look out in the water and there is something swimming out there - and I thought it was a dog - and then it disappeared - then came up again. It hadn't dawned on me that it could be a seal - so as I am trying to sort that out a naked man walks by. Which was odd - I start to feel like the other people on the beach are also naked, but they are farther away - so I tell my wife to put away the binoculars - Anyway it turns out we had ended up on Wreck Beach, which later I found out all the locals know about. And there was a sign at the top of the stairs that said something about baby seals - so - That's the story!

Some times — some times I just need to lose myself in art.

Home Economics - Part Two

That night in 1977 as I ate my lunch leftovers of exquisite Chinese food (a very big change from the Chinese we'd been eating in those days) leftovers from the sophisticated Soho restaurant (the beginning of the food revolution in cuisine) I wondered whether I'd lost the big opportunity.  It was a big step up.  It was a jump in pay, in position, in total project management.  I really wanted the job.  I might not have asked for it but now that I'd been courted I wanted the chance to produce a textbook for the first time.  Could I do it?  I supposed but still — it was both scary and exhilarating and now I'd blown it.

I thought it over and tried to think if I'd have done it differently — not taken the food home but every time I came around to the same thing: I just couldn't have allowed that food ("that perfectly good food," as my father would say) to be thrown away. It went against the grain.  No matter how it looked, doing anything else wouldn't be me.  And if they were thinking of hiring me, they needed to know who I was.  Still, not being asked was gong to hurt.

I went in to work subdued. I knew people would be asking me all day.  I got in to my cubicle and buckled down to my IBM Selectric 3 and then, the phone rang.  

It was Mike offering me the job!  I hung up the phone smiling.  I sat with the news a few minutes and then went to whisper to my friends all over the office.   Before long, I thought to call Dick Lidz, the guy who'd recommended me for the job.  I'd been working on a series of twelve career-education paperback books Dick's company was producing for Random House. Adventures in the World of Work was a compilation of job interviews with all the people involved in delivering a product or a service (Who Puts the Plane in the Air?  Who Puts the Blue in the Jeans?). It was gonna be a great set of books and it was going to be my last job at Random House.

"Dick!  Just wanted to thank you.  Butterick offered me the job."

"I know, that's great!"  he replied, "You really WOW-ed them — they had alotta questions and you had the answers. AND — " he lowered his voice and said in a confidential tone, "John and Mike were really happy you could hold your liquor."

"What about Marsha?  She kept pointing out and didn't seem too happy I wasn't a teacher or a home economist."

"Now, shes a stumper.  She wasn't keen on you at all until she came back from your lunch and told Mike, 'She did what a home economist would do.'  Whadaya think that was?"

So. I got the job because I drank three straight Scotches and took the doggy bag from lunch.

Pancetta and all...

When I took that pancetta from the lunch with Marge, I don't know whether I had my father and his depression-mentality thrift in my head, or the more current and pressing fact that having left my job our home economics would be greatly changed. 

But the next day when I was reheating the vegetarian slice of Marge's pizza, I got out that pancetta, sprinkled it on top of the cheese, arugula, and tomatoes and reheated that piece.  As I bit into that delicious leftover, I realized that  — for the most part — being who I am, acting the way I believe, has served me well and if I was going to have any success in his new chapter of my career, maybe — maybe I'd better keep on doing what I do and hope for the best.


  

Home Economics

This half of what I brought home.
I ate the other piece!

My friend Marge treated me to a delicious belated birthday lunch where we shared a handmade pizza of tomatoes, mozzarella, basil pesto, arugula (and prosciutto for me) and a lovely salad of spinach, goat cheese, walnuts (pancetta on the side for me) in balsamic vinaigrette.  We talked, shared sadnesses, laughed (that during lunch she'd wondered why I had a nice little spoon and she didn't and then remembered why!) and given that I'm starting a new venture — she gave great advice. When it was time to go there was a nice piece of pizza (from her half) which she graciously urged me to take.  When I got the take-out container I looked up and said, "I'm going to take this pancetta home.  It'll be great on another salad," and while Marge smiled me on, I thought back to a job interview I went to in I977.

It was a step up the editorial ladder at another company, Butterick Publishing. They were young upstarts to book publishing.  Though they'd started in 1867 they were a pattern company and I was interviewing for a job to supervise the production of their first textbook.  Random House founded in 1925, more than 50 years after Butterick, was the more established giant.

This whole interview thing was new to me.  I'd been happily at Random House for over four years, but things were changing and in some ways falling apart.  The paperback series I was working on and loved (Choices for Tomorrow comparing differing viewpoints on controversial issues of the day: individual's right to privacy vs society's need to know, changing roles of men and women) was cancelled. In GALLEYS. (If you're too young to know what those are, look up "galley proof.") I was heartbroken.  It was such a great series for high schoolers.  One day, without warning the three top management guys (two I loved) were fired at 9 am, out by noon.  Management had changed and I wasn't thrilled with the abrupt implementation of a different direction. So when I was approached, when someone recommended me, I decided to go.

The folks at Butterick had been looking for someone for seven months. They wanted a home economist, who was a teacher, and an editor. I didn't have two out of three. Still they wanted to see me and already it had been a very weird experience. The first interview was with Mike, a guy running the division.  He seemed placidly pleasant but almost a dodo.  The interview was a breeze.  Then Mike called me to come back for lunch and an interview with the guy running the company, John "Scales". I agreed.  A friend called to tip me off that he was a stress interviewer.  

"What's a stress interviewer?" I asked.

"A guy that's gonna try to knock you off your game.  Someone who will want to trip you up."

Well, that disturbed me.  That actually pissed me off. Trying to make you uncomfortable when already you were uncomfortable because it was an interview?  GEEZ. That sounded nasty.  AND none of these guys were the editor I'd be directly reporting to...a woman.  So I went into the interview annoyed and cocky.  They wanted ME.  I didn't go to them for a job — they came to ME. I was gonna show those guys.

Well, it was some interview. Butterick was in a really hip, up-and-coming neighborhood called Soho (remember this was the seventies) I had to take the subway way downtown to Spring and Sixth.  I was brought into the office by the first guy who interviewed me.  I sat down.

"SO," he started out, "instead of me asking you a lot of questions and you asking me a lot of questions, why don't you just tell me about yourself?" he asked as he relaxed back in his rolling chair with a cigarette.

"Where do you want me to begin and how straight do you want it?" I volleyed back.

He sat up, leaned toward the desk, put his cigarette in the ashtray and said with a startled look on his tanned Greenwich, Connecticut tennis-playing face, "Start anywhere you want and as straight as you want, straight from the shoulder."

"I started working in my parents' drycleaners at the age of eight..." and I continued on non-stop for ten minutes until I worked my way up to the present and Random House.

The whole time he kept looking at me, looking at me and staring at me, but not asking anything.  Just listening.  When I stopped finally, Mister Big Shot shot a look at Mike and grabbing his coat announced, "Let's go to lunch."

The restaurant was a dark, clubby, tavern-type place with those dark wooden clunky Captain's chairs and white tablecloths. The waiter approached.

"What would you like to drink?" John asked me.

"Are we drink-drinking or are we having beer and wine?" I deadpanned determined not to let this guy throw me.

"Have anything you like," he instructed and I ordered a Dewar's on the rocks with a twist. [Think Mad Men days in Manhattan.]  Liquor was a part of one's daily diet.  Dewar's was my daytime Scotch. At night, I drank Johnny Walker Red.  That lunch I had three straight Scotches in the span of less than two hours.  The asked questions, I answered.  John did most of the talking.  Mike smiled and stayed silent.  When I left them to take the subway back uptown to Random House, I suddenly felt very light-headed.  The whir of the train, the rush of the people, climbing the steps to emerge into sunlight once again and hike my way over to 50th & Third, quite simply I was plastered.  

The elevator whisked me up to the fifth floor where I stumbled into my cubicle and could not stop giggling.  It was after two and there was no way I was getting any work done.  Everyone could hear me laughing and came over to my cubicle to try and quiet me down long enough to hold out until I could safely leave.  At four, Mike called and said he wanted me to have lunch with the editor I'd be working for: Marsha McCormick. Could I meet her next week?  After I hung up I thought: Did I have the job?  It was an odd way to put it before I'd completed the interview process.  What if this woman didn't like me? Didn't she have a say?

When I met her the next week, Marsha was polite and reserved, conservatively dressed and very civil.  Immediately I knewwe weren't cut from the same cloth.  Still she was trying to engage and be open and I was trying to answer her many,many questions.  We went to a Chinese restaurant that was in a renovated sewing machine factory and it was the beginning of exposed duct work  reconditioned old wooden floors and high, high ceilings. I remember the waiter bringing what used to preface every meal in a Chinese restaurant, the bowl with the fried noodles and duck sauce to dunk them in.  These were really unusual they were cotton-candy-colored pink, blue, yellow, green and white Styrofoam chips these were the only things I had a chance to eat.  I spent so much time talking and responding that before I knew it the lunch was over, Marsha had finished and I hadn't begun.  The waiter approached.

"We're not going to let him throw this away are we?" I asked.

"Whatever you want," Marsha replied, looking at me with a question on her face.

"I'll take this to go" I told the waiter and said to her "I'll have it for dinner." After we'd said our goodbyes, bag-in-hand I headed back uptown, back to the office, back to my cubicle.

Everyone knew I'd been interviewing.  People were covering for me when I had to leave, so once I was back, people crowded into my cubby.  As I was describing Marsha and what she asked, and what I answered, someone looked at the bag on my desk.

"What's that?"

"My lunch."

"Whadaya mean your lunch?" one person asked.

Someone else asked, "You got a doggy bag?" 

"Well, yeah. I never got to eat my lunch, so I asked to take it home."

The crowd erupted. 

                    "You did WHAT?"    "You asked to take the FOOD?"    "Oh my God! I cannot believe you did that!"                  
  "GEEZ, are you CRAZY?"

"What is the problem?" I yelled out to stop their barrage, "we've all DONE IT!  What's the BIG DEAL?"

It got really quiet.

"Not on an interview" someone explained and they all drifted away — back to their own cubicles, heads downcast — convinced I had just blown all chances of getting the job.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

House of Cards

Robin Wright as a steely blond with coldly calculating ambition.  Kevin Spacey as the know-it-all, solidly sophisticated Washington politician who helped elect the incoming President, expected to be made Secretary of State, and just found out he was being passed over.

So opens Netflix's first original series, House of Cards available to subscribers — with all 13 episodes released at once.

Now-stuck-in-Congress Francis Underwood and wife Claire (head of the Clean Water Initiative and about to decapitate half the staff) plot to be a major thorn in the side of the new administration that screwed him.

In addition to this master manipulating power couple, there's Zoe Barnes, a young journalist chomping at the bit to move her editors into the blogosphere and current with the interests of her generation.

Kevin's character speaks to camera and brings a caustic edge that is classic Spacey when he coolly says about his wife Claire:

"I love that woman. I love that woman more than sharks love blood."

From its time-lapse video opening to showing us text messages on screen as caption balloons (à la Charles Schwab ad at left), it feels sharp.    

Frank positions himself to get back on top  — by using protege-turned-Chief of Staff Linda Vasquez, salivating reporter Barnes, fellow congressmen, and others unfortunate enough to be in his path — and his conniving has me intrigued.  

I'm a third through season one. Politics anyone?