5. One inspiration
for the series will be the focus of a separate “miniseries” of beefy entries:
on the placement firm GLG [JCP]
6. Obamacare—Full Adult
Diaper? (“OFAD?” would be my mini-series designation) [RVT]
7. Memories of
freshman year in college: Alan L., a presuming “social arbiter” with a voice
like a mafioso’s [RVT]
8. A tonic for when
you’re ginned: The tale of “Hillary” and the house fire [RVT] [copy not included yet]
9. Patchouli and
B.O.: Entries reflecting on the 1970s
[Edits 1/2/14. Edit 5/28/14.]
5. One inspiration
for the series will be the focus of a separate “miniseries” of beefy entries:
on the placement firm GLG [JCP]
Two things I discovered very recently have somewhat primed
me for the “Dollars & sense” series. One is my clot of files on the
breakdown in 2007 of what I have pseudonymed The Gary Laverne Group, a
placement agency that seemed favored by medical-promotions firms from 2000 to
2006. Its real name, I reveal now (because for
whose benefit should I hide its identity seven years later?), is The Guy Louise Group. (Revealing this
shouldn’t hurt “those who don’t deserve it” because the principal who was left
holding the bag, winding down the company’s operations in 2007, is working
through another employment-related operation that doesn’t make his name too
obvious, as far as I last saw. So I shouldn’t be killing his work prospects.)
I’ve written a blog entry on it, but in finding my
files and, from these, remembering what a shockingly horrible situation it was
to deal with its breakdown, where it was late with four paychecks to me (the
last I received about four months late), and it was late paying numerous other
workers too (probably multiple paychecks to them, and some fellow GLG workers ended
up getting their last money later than I did). I started a formal complaint
with the state Department of Labor, which was just about to ratchet into action
in June 2007 when, on Guy’s coming up with the final checks, I called it off
(as seemed eminently appropriate).
I will want to tell this story more fully than I did in
2012, with some exhibits, to show what a big bear it was. This will not be a
way of pillorying or casting a harsh light into every last corner of the firm;
in fact, one thing I will want to do is to show—as part of showing more broadly
how you can and should be practical in dealing with these issues, not looking
to hold “show trials”—how I worked with
Guy to iron out certain issues, so that he seemed to trust me, or so at
least he would want to “work with me” on the disastrous 2007 money issue, more
than maybe he did others.
(Or rather, other GLG workers, I found, ended up having a
very low opinion of GLG, as if it was incontrovertible sleaze, but I didn’t
really think the same, though I certainly frustrated, vexed, and mystified with
the situation at the time, and in retrospect, the way the firm folded does
raise some stark questions of how much the principals were aware they were, by
late 2006, in a seriously legally dicey situation, and why didn’t they take
other measures to perhaps prevent it?)
My story on GLG will be a separate one or more entries that
will be labeled as outside the “Dollars & sense” series. [Update 5/28/14: See change of plans explained here.]
6. Obamacare—Full Adult
Diaper? (“OFAD?” would be my mini-series designation) [RVT]
I did a few entries in 2012 on the messes I encountered with
certain employers and employer-offered health insurance. Might I follow this up
in 2014? For one thing, I started signing up for insurance on the federal
HealthCare.gov marketplace site (I’m in New Jersey, and we have no state Web
site for this). I could tell about my experience with this (getting to a
certain terminus point on December 12 was a bit of a pain but easier than I
expected; but now I’m waiting on what I thought would be some forms in the
mail, or an e-mail, and nothing has come—for more than two weeks).
But I don’t necessarily want to talk a lot about my own
experience with the health-care marketplace situation, when so many other
people—with stories recounted in the media—have had more interesting stories
than I. But I will play this by ear. I won’t really diligently start following
up on my Obamacare application until early January, and then we’ll see what
kind of nest of weirdness might inspire a blog entry.
7. Memories of
freshman year in college: Alan L., a presuming “social arbiter” with a voice
like a mafioso’s* [RVT]
*Yes,
this subhead has a sort of blog-snarky crudeness to it. The fuller story of
Alan L. will be more nuanced, but it still will reflect a blunt, alien set of behaviors
of his.
[Important fixes to this subsection.]
I think I can get some series mileage out of some stories from my freshman year in college, for reasons I won’t fully divulge yet. Let’s say it (in 1980-81) was a time of cold-environment, bitter-encounters growth for me, and some of the rudest peer behavior I’ve ever seen. There broadly seems to be some controversy about how much there is the phenomenon of the “nightmare freshman-year roommate,” such as I found in Alan L. I mean, certainly some of us have had them, and I certainly did. How edifying to a range of others would be my story of mine? I’ll tell you one thing, I have remembered his hard-ass behaviors ever since—for more than 30 years—and my sense of grievance at them seems to well up whenever I deal with particularly severe career threats/insults.
I think I can get some series mileage out of some stories from my freshman year in college, for reasons I won’t fully divulge yet. Let’s say it (in 1980-81) was a time of cold-environment, bitter-encounters growth for me, and some of the rudest peer behavior I’ve ever seen. There broadly seems to be some controversy about how much there is the phenomenon of the “nightmare freshman-year roommate,” such as I found in Alan L. I mean, certainly some of us have had them, and I certainly did. How edifying to a range of others would be my story of mine? I’ll tell you one thing, I have remembered his hard-ass behaviors ever since—for more than 30 years—and my sense of grievance at them seems to well up whenever I deal with particularly severe career threats/insults.
This story will be very interesting to me on one level—I
seem to have been warming up to it for many months—and it may also give me
cause for pause where I delay getting it out. But here is a nice “teaser”: my
most difficult roommate didn’t just have a strong Long Island/Jewish accent
that made him seem almost like a thug or a punk, hardly eminently promising
material for legal education, much less college education, and he wasn’t only
tremendously self-centered in a way that was decisively remarked on by a later
roommate of mine, who was a “nice” self-centered person, named Eric. But after a long year
Alan and I roomed together, Alan and I agreed, as an elective thing,
to room together for sophomore year, when we found from the college housing
lottery that we couldn’t separately get in to the dorm of our choice (the fuller story makes this situation seem more reasonable and partly a matter of chance). The irony of our
acceding to room together again will be crystal-clear when I show just how we
seemed like we couldn’t stand each other more, in our freshman year together in
GW’s most notorious dorm, Thurston Hall.
One of the amusing things about this area of concern is that
it would really help if I had an audiofile I could share (which I’d made), to
demonstrate Alan’s accent. Instead, in the blog entries, I will spell his words
phonetically when I can, but you really have to have heard the accent in
person. For instance, way back in those days, I had the nickname “Lurch,” from
high school. How this got started was, when I was in about fifth grade, a
classmate named Mike Barone was amused that I knew what the meaning of the word
merchant was, or something like that.
So he started calling me “Merchant.” Later this devolved—as it was shared by
other students, not that I minded—into “Lurchant” and “Lurch.” By high school
it was my nickname among a fairly wide range of classmates.
I almost never hear this name used in recent years, and when
I do, it’s from a high school classmate I almost never see, and the nickname
actually embarrasses me today.
When I got to GW in 1980, somehow it came out—and I wasn’t
embarrassed by it at the time—that my nickname was “Lurch.” So my roomie Alan
L. went along with using it, but the way he pronounced it, with an r that wasn’t simply missing but was
twisted by his tongue into who-knew-what, was like “Luytch.” Try pronouncing
that.
But he didn’t just gamely use this nickname (and heaven
knows he had plenty of other antipathetic behaviors toward me over a dense
year). Once he reported back to his friends when he visited home in Bellmore,
Long Island, that my nickname was “Lurch.” As he told me when he got back to GW—and
he said this as if he was to be taken as reflecting true, “eminently moderate “
values—when he had old his friends this was my nickname, “They wanted to beat the shit out of you!” That was Alan’s
way of showing what True Good Sense was.
Yes, he was a bully—a Jewish bully from the hard-nosed town
of Bellmore, Long Island. You’re starting to get a taste of what this story
about Alan will be like. And in terms of published material, I’ve kept it under
wraps for over 30 years.
8. A tonic for when
you’re ginned: The tale of “Hillary” and the house fire [RVT]
[The copy for this isn’t edited yet, and it involves
sensitive issues, so it pays for me to go slow with it.]
9. Patchouli and B.O.*:
Entries reflecting on the 1970s
*This
isn’t the name of a TV show from the 1970s, though it may sound like one.
I wouldn’t be the first to say that the 1970s were great. In
fact, for me they were depressing. But there is something to be said for today’s
youth, who in no way could have been born then, understanding what that decade
was about. Yes, the clothes were awful (even boys could wear something for
their school class picture that had some purple in it). Yes, the popular music
could be great, and could be awful (disco is known among even young people
today who were born well after the 1970s as a kind of cultural blight, or
cancer: but how bad was it? Was some
disco actually good? Why was it
shaped as it was? And is there, perhaps, no real unitary cultural set of ideals
or effluvia identifiable as “disco,” but instead it is an after-the-fact
concept that loosely applies to a wide range of different cultural artifacts?
Maybe people had an idea of what “disco” was in the 1970s that focused their
revulsion, but maybe the concept today doesn’t apply to its referents so
easily, and it may overlook some important values that we can see as germane to
us).
This occasional series will encompass, among other things,
movie reviews, and the movies at issue either were made in the 1970s and piquantly reflect the
culture from then, or were made later and supposedly ape 1970s style
(whether satirically or for “period piece” purposes). With this latter type of movie, my reviews may look at
this imitative aspect for verisimilitude, or some other comment to make.
By the way, recent social behaviors and economic conditions,
to me, make this time in the U.S. echo the 1970s more than any decade between
now and then. But young people who weren’t alive in the 1970s wouldn’t know
that.
