Takoma Park expatriate Abby
Bardi explores the sins of modern life.
Born and raised in Chicago, Abby has worked as a singing
waitress in Washington, D.C., an English teacher in
Japan and England, a performer on England's country
and western circuit, and, most recently, as a professor
at Prince George's Community College.
Author of the Book
of Fred, (Washington Square Press: Simon & Schuster
2001), she is married with two children and lives in
Ellicott City, Maryland.
January 2010
“Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul.”
— Emily Dickinson
In the zillion years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve probably written about the sin of Hope at least fifty billion times. Why does “the thing with feathers” keep popping up as a Sin of the Month? I guess it’s because I’m one of those people who can’t help looking on the bright side of things, i.e., hoping, no matter how bad things get. Which technically makes me an idiot.
For example, until quite recently, I was pretty good at taking anything President Obama did and putting a positive, hopeful spin on it. Why? Because I liked him. Why did I like him? It wasn’t just the fact that he’s cute. There were people who thought George W. Bush was cute, though I didn’t, and I think it’s safe to say that some of our better presidents were not the least bit attractive (no offense, Mr. Lincoln).
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December 2009
“What does the word ‘socialism’ mean to you?” I asked the man with the sign.
“It’s when the government takes over everything,” he said. “First they take over the banks. Then they take over the car companies. Then they take over your pension. Then they take over your health care. Then they—” By this time he was yelling at me, so in my Teacher Voice, I asked him to pipe down. He immediately lowered his decibel level and said politely that the government was about to take over everything, and it would be just like—I thought he was going to say communism, but maybe it was Italy in the 1930s.
He couldn’t finish his sentence, though, because my friend Al interrupted him. “I guess you don’t like the interstate highway system,” Al said. The man with the sign—which said something about socialism and peeing, but I didn’t actually read it—said that the interstate highway system was a mess, and that bridges everywhere were falling down.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“It’s the government,” the man said.
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November 2009
I was sitting in a department meeting eating a salade Nicoise that a colleague had made for our potluck lunch when I heard a horrible cracking sound coming from inside my mouth. Upon investigating, I discovered that the salade’s olives had contained pits, and that one of my molars had cracked nearly in half when I bit down on one.
I was filled with horror—partly because I was now missing half a tooth, and partly because this had happened before, and I knew exactly how much it was going to cost. Because my dentist is out of network, my dental insurance has in the past paid only 20% of his enormous (but well deserved—he’s a genius) fee for crowns.
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October 2009
When I was in fourth grade, I heard a story about something that happened in a fifth grade class at my school. There was a substitute that day, and when the kids in the class acted up, she lost her temper and started screaming at them. One of the thing she screamed was that they should “go back to Africa.” Most of the kids in my grade school were African-American. It was 1964, and while I was aware of the civil rights movement, my neighborhood—now Obama’s neighborhood—was, famously, “integrated,” and I had never personally witnessed the kind of racism that existed all across America at that time. So this incident has stayed in my mind all these years as one of my first moments of awakening to the existence of societal poisons to which I, as a white child, had largely been immune.
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September 2009
Though we are ashamed to admit it, my daughter Hortense and I have been totally caught up in the recent controversy surrounding ABC’s The Bachelorette. In its umpteenth season, this reality show (sometimes called The Bachelor, for obvious reasons), a gaudy iteration of the overworked dating motif, is so fascinating to us that on a recent car trip to Chicago, we discussed it all the way to Hagerstown until we felt so sorry for her husband, trapped in the back seat, that we changed the subject to something more interesting.
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July 2009
Let’s talk about some good news for once, at least for one person: the recent scandal involving South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and a mysterious Argentine paramour must have been a happy development for that other Republican adulterer, Nevada Senator John Ensign, whose affair with one of his staffers was blasted off the front page (are there still pages?) last month by Sanford’s admission that he had not in fact been hiking on the Appalachian Trail as rumored but had made a quick jaunt down to Argentina, where he had spent several days with his “dear, dear friend,” with whom he had been exchanging emails so steamy that they made Rachel Maddow blush. (Yes, that was all one sentence.)
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June 2009
"There's a deranged gunman on the loose in Connecticut," I said to Hortense. "I know," my daughter said. She was in her apartment in New Haven, writing a term paper.
I had been idly scanning the online news that day when I noticed and item about a crazed assailant gunning down a Wesleyan student. It occured to me to Yahoo-map the distance between Middletown and New Haven, which turned out to be only 27.8 miles. I imagined the gunman fleeing Wesleyan and heading south, ending up somehow on Hortense's street.
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May 2009
I had to laugh when Rachel Maddow pointed out the absurdity of negotiating with pirates. The Somali pirates who had taken an American captain hostage were supposed to have traded him for one of their colleagues, but when the time came to make the swap, the pirates welshed on the deal. “True to their word, the crew let the pirate go,” Maddow said with her trademark arched eyebrow. “But the pirates, they’re pirates! They did not keep their word.”
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 April 2009
"It’s all a giant Ponzi scheme,” Susan said.
We were in Chicago at the annual conference of the AWP, the professional organization of creative writing programs. Susan and I had just met, though like almost everyone else at the conference, it seemed, she had grown up in the same Chicago neighborhood I had.
“Look at all these people.” She gestured at the vast basement room housing the book fair, in which hundreds of writers sat at tables hawking literary journals and other products of the creative writing biz. “The MFA programs turn out students in record numbers, but there are no jobs. What are all these people going to do?”
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March 2009
“Thought this might interest you,” my sister’s email said. It contained a link to a Huffington Post article called “Help! I’m Addicted to Facebook!”
The article lists ten indications that one’s interest in Facebook, the mega-popular social networking site, may have assumed epic proportions. My sister seemed to be not-so-subtly implying that I ought to consider this possibility, so I read the warning signs over carefully but rejected each one: no, I do not update my status twice a day. (For the handful of you not on Facebook, the status update is a haiku-like one-sentence, third-person appraisal of one’s current state that is instantly distributed to one’s “friends” via a “News Feed.”) No, I do not have more than 500 “friends” I have not actually met. (Unlike some Facebook users, I only “friend” people I actually know.) No, I don’t click on someone’s profile more than once a day even if they have not messaged me, and I definitely do not hang around places a person said he or she would be.
Much—I did once drop something off for a friend at the local coffee shop because her Status Update said she would be there.
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February 2009
Every February, I write a short column. Why? Because February is a short month. In fact, let’s save time and call it Feb. I think of Feb as what December would look like if all that holiday bloat were cut out.
Great idea.
Feb gets right down to business, unlike December, which is crammed full of social and culinary digressions. While our annual national commercial orgy can seem obscene on a good day, this past year, with the economy in freefall, it struck me as particularly psychotic. What did those people stampeding in that Long Island Walmart want to buy, and why did they want it? Their behavior was tragically nutty, but weren’t they just a horrific caricature of the rest of us?
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January 2009
As you may recall, when this column began, it was supposed to be about the Seven Deadly Sins. The trouble with that as a concept was that I ran out of real sins fairly quickly and thus was forced to make some up, which I’ve been doing for more than a decade. The world being what it is, this has not been difficult.
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December 2008
At some point during the years she lived in France, my daughter Hortense decided to boycott goods made in China. I’m not sure exactly why—there are many possible reasons an increasing number of people are boycotting China and its goods, ranging from a vague xenophobia to refusal to support the exploitation of its workers. I’m not sure what inspired Hortense’s personal campaign against them—perhaps it was the melamine in their pet food—but I know it’s well reasoned, though I haven’t asked her for fear of receiving a forty-minute lecture on the subject, and naturally, when shopping for her birthday, I tried to comply with her wishes.
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November 2008
By the time you read this, our interminable 2008 presidential election will be over. As I write, there is a bit more than a week to go of the fear- and hate-mongering fiasco that the process has become, and I know I’m not alone in saying that I can’t wait for it to end. As of now, although we are all still being subjected to what resembles an excruciating sporting, or perhaps gladiatorial, event, those of us who support Obama—most of us, as it turns out—have every reason to be optimistic.
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October 2008
In 1969 or so, I did some volunteer work for the defense fund of the Chicago 7, who were at that time known as the Conspiracy 8 (before Bobby Seale was given a separate trial). As you no doubt recall, the 8 were accused of traveling across state lines in a “conspiracy to incite a riot” at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention.
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September 2008
As I write this, August of 2008 is not over yet, but so far it has been chock full of indignant responses to events: to Obama’s vacation in Hawaii; to Russia’s invasion of Georgia; and to the John Edwards scandal. In between nonstop coverage of the Olympics, talking heads everywhere have expressed their horror: Why didn’t Obama go to Myrtle Beach? demanded Cokie Roberts. Bush and Cheney, without a trace of irony, lost no time in condemning Russia’s assault on Georgia’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
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August 2008
Okay, so maybe my hope that Barack Obama would save the world was a bit too, what’s the word? Audacious. Last month I voiced the parenthetical fear that Obama’s lack of opposition to retroactive immunity for spying telecommunications companies might be one of those red flags that arise early in a romance and lead inevitably to heartbreak. Unfortunately, more red flags followed: a lack of opposition to the death penalty, to handguns, and to federal funding for religious organizations; and while I concede that his positions on these things may be “nuanced,” I can’t seem to untangle the delicate strands of his reasoning.
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July 2008
When my husband and I got on a flight to Paris on June 3, I couldn’t believe it was finally happening: after months of planning, my daughter, little Hortense, was getting married to a wonderful man, and we were on our way to the ceremony.
At the same time, while we flew, Barack Obama was—finally—clinching the Democratic nomination. We had been screwed out of a triumphant election night so many times that it seemed a cruel irony to miss out on it, but of course, it was much more important to get to the wedding, which consisted of a series of sparkling events in which the happy couple glowed so brilliantly that everyone around them felt awakened, renewed, and may I say, hopeful. When my husband and I finally had a chance to watch Obama’s exhilarating June 3 speech on Youtube, we could not have been more ecstatic—these tandem moments, the wedding and the nomination, seemed golden in time.
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June 2008
When I was in college in the mid-Seventies, I took a course called “Women in American History” that, as its title suggests, examined American history from the Puritans to what was then the present by focusing on women. Nowadays a course like this might be called “American History,” but back then, the central assumption, even in academia, was that men constituted some kind of default setting from which women were an aberration. History was by definition the history of men, who at that time ran the world.
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May 2008
For the past eight years or so, I have worked very closely with a woman—let’s call her Sheila—who happens to be an ardent Republican. When Sheila’s and my destinies first became intertwined—I won’t bore you with the details of our jobs, and how they intersect—we basically, not to put too fine a point on it, did not get along. We disagreed about nearly everything—policies, procedures, and of course, politics, a subject we tried to stay away from. When Bush, of whom she was at that time inordinately fond, decided to wage war on Iraq, Sheila was all for it, and we had a few tense discussions before we decided it would be best to avoid the subject altogether.
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April 2008
After the strange elections of 2000 and 2004, I didn’t think politics could get any weirder. Although the division of the United States into Red and Blue states was vaguely repellent, at least it made some sense, given the wide range of, for lack of a better word, styles that exist in this country, whose citizenry’s tastes are said to range from Budweiser to Chardonnay, from Ford to Volvo, from Billy Ray Cyrus to Beyonce to Bach to Birdman.
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March 2008
In a recent speech in Texas, Hillary Clinton accused her opponent of being “all hat and no cattle.” The implication in her remarks is that while Barack Obama may have a good personality, it will take more than that to govern a country. This is certainly true: Ronald Reagan was often termed “likeable,” though I could never see why. Al Gore, who was in retrospect obviously the far better candidate than George W. Bush, was often described as “wooden,” whereas Bush was characterized as a guy you’d want to have a beer with. (Of course, it turned out that having a beer was one of the few things that Bush was any good at.)
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February 2008
After spending six weeks in India last fall, my daughter Hortense made a confession to me. “India was a deathtrap,” she said. She then enumerated all the ways in which she could have easily been killed while there: the gas fire in her guest house might have burned the place down; the buses she took up the steep Himalayan roads might have crashed into ravines, as apparently happens frequently; she might have gotten Japanese encephalitis from mosquitoes, or rabies from wild dogs or monkeys, or ended up in the hospital from the dodgy food like everyone else at her guesthouse (as it was, she did spend two days with a high fever from what was probably salmonella).
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January 2008
Usually, no matter how crappy a year we’ve had, we are able to greet the new year with at least some degree of optimism. Sure, things have sucked, but they can only get better, right?
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December 2007
Disneyland
The other day, one of the administrators at the community college where I teach emailed an article she said was “a good read.” I had a look at it: called “Customer Service and Student Respect: A Winning Combination,” by T. Hampton Hopkins, it suggests that colleges, particularly community colleges, should develop a “culture of excellence.” One way to achieve this, Hopkins argues, is by providing students with good “customer service.” He notes that some people (such as myself) are repelled by the idea of regarding students as customers, but brushes past our objections and focuses on the task at hand: “improving service delivery.” How to do this? By thinking of higher education as “a life event staged for students.”
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More from 2007
"Vietnam" October
"Peat" September
"Travel" August
"Warming" July
"Politics AGAIN" June
"Tulips" May
"Fools" April
"America" March
"Winter" February
"Holidays" January
2006
"Dinner" December
"Paranoia" November
"Politics" October
"Houses" September
"Heat" August
"Roving" July
"Recruitment" June
"La Marche" May
"Impeachment" April
"Dancing" March
"Leakage" February
"Gluttony" January
2005
"Backbone" December
"Bollywood" November
"Anger revisited" October
"Glue" September
"Anxiety" August
"Fireworks" July
"Mooo-re" June
"Moooving" May
"Volvos" April
"Freedom of Speech" March
"Left-Wing Zealotry" February
"Money" January
2004
"Elections" December
"Smile" November
"Fear" October
"The Fair" September
"Obedience"
August
"Pillows"
July
"Death"
June
"Paris"
May
"Weddings"
April
"Cleaning"
March
"Teeth"
February
"Spam"
January
2003
"Crabs"
December
"Literature"
November
"Silence"
October
"Security"
September
"Gossip"
August
"Gardening"
July
"Politics
Yet Again" June
"Reality"
May 2003
"The
Media: Liberal Bias" March
"Shortness"
February
"Beans" January |
