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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Lisa Zeidner

The Have-Nots and the Have-Lots

Posted Monday, June 28, 1999, at 11:13 AM ET

Dear John,

I love the bright blue rectangle of the New York Times wrapper. It floats above the grass, inviting as a Hollywood swimming pool. The moment when I first see the paper always gives me an outsized jolt of pleasure--why, I'm not sure, since it's there every morning; maybe I'm just as stupid as my dog, who treats me like a long-lost MIA when I return from the 16-second paper-retrieving expedition.

After that nice moment, the newspaper is all downhill.

I have a book published this very minute, so my first question about a newspaper is "Am I in it?" The whole information highway is one gigantic high-school yearbook. Once I get over being depressed that I am not, yet again, in the paper, I can get on with the business of being depressed.

The bad news comes in two waves. First, the refugees and torture victims, the innocent death-row inmates and homeless and AIDS-afflicted and clitorectomized--the whole numbing parade of the dispossessed. Over good coffee brewed in a Braun (was it Braun or Krups who made the Nazi's fighter planes? For that matter, where was my publisher in 1943?), the liver shivers.

After the have-nots, the have-lots: the legions who are doing better than I am. Those stock market Wunderkinder with their $8,000 wines at lunchtime. The people who Concorde to Paris for the weekend, or get a hankering for dolphin-shaped crystal statuettes, or titanium watches that cost as much as my Accord, or a football franchise.

The relentlessness of commerce oppresses me every morning. All that tinny, chattering thinginess. And there's no escape. I have an 8-year-old. I have to do Halloween. I have to buy Air Jordans, Beanie Babies, Pokémon cards. You--being a mathematician and a sensible person who got the kid-business out of the way at the appropriate time--probably do not know from Pokémon cards.

Should we confess, hereabouts, that we know each other? For a decade, give or take--but mostly as couple-friends. When I talk to your wife, we refer to our husbands as "my John" and "your John." I'll always be grateful to you for not treating me like the village idiot when you came to a dinner party at my house in 1996 and showed me how to retrieve e-mail on my primitive computer--I'd accumulated, what, 349 messages, most warning me that asbestos was being removed from my university office a year before. So you're personally responsible for getting me as addicted to e-mail as I now am. But you and I have never much chatted this way, except to talk about such deeply personal matters as our respective Amazon.com sales ranks.

So this could be interesting, if I can refrain from taking advantage of your wellsprings of knowledge for questions such as: Why is the screen on this new laptop so busy? What are all those little globes and scissors? Can't I just make it blank?

I want a graphics-free world. No icons, no ads, no products. Just a clean Zen slate. Where can you go for that?

Love,
Lisa

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Lisa Zeidner

The Have-Nots and the Have-Lots

Posted Monday, June 28, 1999, at 11:13 AM ET
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John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of six books, most recently Once Upon a Number (click here to buy the book). Lisa Zeidner, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of four novels, most recently Layover (click here to buy the book), and two books of poems.
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