Lots of Totally Unrelated Topics

First, from the Metro section of today's NYTimes. It seems that the New York City Administration for Children's Services has hired 60 retired cops to "serve as a bridge to active law enforcement when child welfare and crime overlap."

Okay. Ms. Porsenna, a "child protective specialist" (I thought they were case workers, but then again, janitors are now sanitation specialists or some damn thing), asked one of these gents, a Mr. Flores, to look for the father of the child of one of her families. And Mr. Flores, using his in to the "law enforcement databases," promptly found the gent, who is due in criminal court in September on a trespassing charge.

Now it begins to become - to me, at least - extremely weird out here. Ms. Porsenna has decided, now that this errant father is found, to intercept him at his court date "in hopes of steering him into drug treatment and urging him to attend family court hearings."

Meanwhile (back at the ranch), the one year old daughter of this guy is living with her mother, who is getting help for substance abuse. The mother also has an order of protection against the father. Ms. Porsenna: "So whatever is decided, we still want to involve him."

Whoa. Let's see. The mother is an addict. The father has been trespassing, and has "a history of abusing the mother", to the extent that she has a protection order against him. And Ms. Porsenna, wants to involve this guy in the rearing of his child? Whatever drugs this woman is taking, I would dearly love some of them (well, I sleep badly and I would love to have a mind filled with unicorns and butterflies the way this caseworker does).

ARE THESE PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR FUCKING MINDS? And we want to know why there are all these cases of child abuse and wife abuse. Christ on a crutch. Listen up. Get somebody who will A. drop in once a day to make sure mom is attending her therapy. B. Make sure that the kid is decently fed and clothed and living in some sort of reasonable cleanliness (and we all know that my standard of reasonable cleanliness is possibly the lowest in the world - I just mean, you know, clean kitchen, no obvious moving beasties on the dinner table...basics). And make sure that SOB who fathered the child is kept firmly away from mom and kid.

Sheesh.

I have vented. So there.

So I finally bowed to popular opinion. Every single time I let my (to me) glamorous mane of hair out of its clip, about 47 people (well, mainly Sarah and Caesar) told me I still looked like I was playing head witch Hecate in Macbeth. I gave up. I trotted off to Astor Place this morning (well, all right, about 11:30) and got myself an extremely minimal hair cut. Well. I've got to keep the length, because the bright auburn VERY short crop wasn't precisely what you'd call versatile - and on my level of acting, ain't nobody gonna buy me no expensive wigs. And now I have what I can only describe as a sort of Jennifer Anniston thing - it's the same length it was, but all the straggly bits are gone and when I let it down it actually looks like it was meant to be that way. According to Dee (who, bless her, understood exactly what I wanted), it's "just a tiny bit of layering and clearing off the ends."

However, I decided to fuck with Sarah's head, so I sent her an email, which my child promptly posted on her blog, headed "Oh, for the love of...", and which starts with the immortal line, "My mother is an asshole." You may see it here - http://sarahbooz.blogspot.com/


And lastly, I am full of food. I didn't even cook it (even though, having had my hair cut, I actually went to the grocery store and refilled my icebox). Caesar came over and we ordered Indian food, so I am delightedly full of lamb curry, shrimp korma, meat samosas, garlic nan and rice and chutney. So there.

Burp.

Love, Wendy