No Major Spoilers Here...Just Another Nanny

Now that finals are over, I have time to return to this blog and the very serious business of...how bad Dexter is this season. But while other reviews and comment feeds are focused on plot developments with the villain and the main characters, I am fascinated and frustrated by a new minor character, Jamie. She is Angel Batista's sister, Dexter's new nanny, and Louis the lab intern's girlfriend. Notice a pattern there, people? Her interactions with other women are few and mostly negative - as when she and Debra fought over Deb's influence on Harrison - and even though she's uttered the phrase "my dissertation" once or twice, no way is that girl in school. I do not say that because she is coded as attractive, young, and happy and therefore we should interpret her as dumb or something but because we never see her near a non-picture book. Yes, when you are a nanny your focus should be on the child, but if you worked the kind of hours Jamie works AND you were getting a PhD, you would bring some of your own work to your job...because the kid naps, and what do you do then? Just prance around waiting for your boss to return...only to ask you to stay and work, oh, I don't know, 5 more unscheduled hours? You would be saying no even if you had no date to go on because you have to study and write and other schooly stuff.

A former nanny myself (and a current student), I realize I'm sensitive to this kind of thing, and in a show like Dexter it probably seems funny to single out this aspect as ridiculous. But c'mon. You don't get to have a female character as incredibly self-sacrificing as Jamie and still present your main character like this (from an interview with Executive Producer Sara Colleton in The Daily Best - emphasis mine):

This season, the producers and writers decided it was time for him to explore faith—and his lack thereof—as he raised his baby boy, Harrison, by himself and wondered what code he should teach him.

No disrespect to actress Aimee Garcia, but Jamie is a prop that gets less official credit for her work on the show than the mannequin hand of the Ice Truck Killer. Nice work, Showtime.

Iowa Imposter

Today I wore my IOWA t-shirt, a gift from a friend who grew up there and knows without being told that the black and gold of my shirt are Hawkeyes' colors. As I neared the hub that is my local post office, an elderly gentleman walking past me said, "Go Iowa!"

"What?" I called back, not sure if I'd heard him correctly.

"I grew up in Nebraska," he explained, "right next to Iowa."

"Nice!" I said, because I like pleasant interactions with fellow pedestrians even when they turn into unsolicited educational moments, and turned back toward the post office.

This conversation was another example of quietly letting someone - usually a stranger, usually during what promises to be only a brief exchange - assume something about you that you know to be incorrect. I was born in North Dakota, grew up in Connecticut, went to college in Illinois, and have lived in Washington for almost 10 years; I've barely even visited Iowa. But I didn't yell this to the man in front of the post office; I let him believe that we were former state-neighbors.

Nannies and babysitters have a lot of these moments, and the challenge is in deciding when to tell that complimentary or chummy mom on the playground that this kid? Not mine. Sometimes it's clear-cut, as when a woman trailing behind me and a toddler-age charge announced, as we all entered the bathroom of a fancy restaurant, "These years go by so fast! Mine are teenagers now."

I smiled and said, "I'm the babysitter," and that was that. But other times it's not so clear what anyone is thinking, and it can feel awkward to halt the flow of a conversation to vocalize a distinction that might change everything - or, conversely, nothing - for the other person.

The best-worst example of this for me was on a playground two years ago. I was hovering near the little girl I nannied for, and a woman said, "I love her haircut."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Her mother did a great job."

"Her mother?" the woman asked, clearly confused. "You're not her mother?"

"No, I'm her nanny," I said, in a tone I hoped sounded cheerful.

"But you're so good with her!" the woman exclaimed.

Well. You can be good to a kid without being his or her parent. And strangers - and even family and friends - don't need to know everything about you. Go Hawkeyes!

The Great Nanny Crop-Out

Babysitting the other night, after the tyke fell asleep I leafed through two celebrity-focused magazines belonging to the mom. Each had a photo that struck me as surprisingly creepy: in one, Heidi Klum, her kids, and another woman are walking down a street. But the woman, who trails the others, has her head neatly covered...by a box of text. In the second, Sarah Jessica Parker is described as walking with her twins. But she holds the hand of only one; the other is holding hands with a woman who walks behind the actress, and while most of the woman's face is obscured by Parker's head, she looks into the camera with her left eye.

The editors' choice to crop out nannies from celebrity photographs - and for many celebrity moms to present their lives as child care-free - has been written about well in other places. What interests me is the pervasive psychology of breezily commenting on the famous person's every move while not acknowledging the visible presence of the woman in the background.

A head eclipsed by words, a lone, staring eye: these would be strange (or comical) editing choices in any publication. But in a celebrity magazine, where all that matters is the famous person, the nanny (or other accidentally photographed staff) is viewed as so inconsequential that hastily or mostly cropping her out is considered good enough. Who's looking at her anyway?

Reliable Transportation = Discrimination?

I have two part time jobs currently, but I still keep my eye out for work. Lately I've been encountering more job descriptions that sound good until I get to the Minimum Requirements section: "must have access to reliable transportation"; "must have access to a reliable vehicle"; or the blunt "must have a car."

I ride the Metro and have ever since I moved to Seattle in 2001. Is it reliable? Well, most of the time it actually is. There are delays, breakdowns, inclement weather, belligerent riders and all the other myriad reasons why it might not get you where you hoped to be when you planned to be there. But any form of transportation will include some degree of uncertainty.

Part of my beef is semantic: If these ads said "must have FAST transportation" instead of "reliable," I would not only be more understanding, I might even be amused. I often have to budget an hour for a bus trip across town - a distance that a car will usually be able to traverse in, oh, 15 to 30 minutes.

But my biggest problem is money-related. Like I said in an earlier post, a lot of people, including me, ride Metro because it's less expensive than driving. Through one of my jobs, I pay just $55 every three months for an Orca card. Collectively, these reliable transportation caveats feel like an additional societal kick in the shin during a recession that's already hurting already vulnerable people. Don't have a job? Can't afford a car? Well too bad!

Do some jobs require cars? Yes. For example, for some of the nanny and babysitting jobs posted in The Daily, the University of Washington's paper, this "must have a car" language makes sense - families who want multiple children to be picked up after school and driven multiple places in the span of two hours, for instance.

But a message to the other families: your kids can ride the bus too.