I have no idea, really, what to write about this week. I suppose I don't need to write anything, but I've been posting on a more or less weekly basis, and I feel compelled for some reason to keep that up.
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It's Friday night. My husband is working. My kids have no plans and are happily hanging out at home. I cook almost every night, so on Friday nights, we order pizza, or I make some kind of frozen non-food. Tonight it was chicken taquitos. I put them in the oven, determined not to touch them myself, but then halfway through my third one, I had to admit: Frozen chicken taquitos are delicious.
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Now it's Saturday morning. I watched news for a little while when I got up. I know that I should wean myself from MSNBC, but I can't look away from the daily Trump outrage onslaught. It's not his policies that bother me so much (although most of them are bad enough); it's the in-your-face contempt for the law, for the opposition, for the citizenry, and for everything and everyone other than Trump and his family and his minions. I'm not surprised, of course. If I give Trump credit for anything, it's for not ever having pretended to be anything that he isn't (other than fit to hold public office, that is.) His supporters worked really hard to get all of us to believe that Donald Trump the swaggering, bullying, ignorant lout was just an act; all we had to do was vote for him and he'd reveal himself as Donald Trump, statesman and patriotic billionaire, willing to sacrifice his own interests, just to serve his beloved country. And just enough people believed that story. And at 12:01 PM on January 20, he was exactly the same Donald Trump that he'd always been, but now as leader of the free (for now) world. And we're stuck with him, maybe for four years, maybe even for eight.
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When I was really young, living on my own in a tiny apartment in West Philadelphia, I used to wash my clothes at the laundromat around the corner. There were signs all over the place--on the washers and dryers, on the machines that dispensed tiny boxes of detergent, on the walls and doors--reminding customers to keep track of their clothes. "Management not responsible for lost articles." "Please collect all items before you leave." "Management not responsible for damaged articles." My friends and I used to call every piece of clothing an item, or an article. "I like that article," you'd say, complimenting a friend on her Benetton sweater; or "I'm broke, but I have to go shopping--I don't have a single item to wear." I remember this at odd times, like when I'm folding laundry. Or like when I watched Kellyanne Conway's QVC appearance. "Go buy Ivanka's articles," I thought, paraphrasing Kellyanne. "It's a wonderful line--I have several items myself." That was apropos of nothing, of course. Except that Kellyanne's probably lying, even about that--she probably doesn't own a single Ivanka article.
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It's Saturday evening now, and we're all home again, watching the Capitals play the Anaheim Ducks. Never mind the absurdity of the existence of ice hockey in Southern California nor the ridiculousness of an NHL team named after a Disney movie. Hockey is awesome, especially Washington Capitals hockey. This is a particularly good time to be a Capitals fan--Alexander Ovechkin's 1,000th career point, Nicklas Backstrom's 500th assist, the NHL's 100th anniversary, and Fatima Al Ali, all in one season. How improbable that a young woman who plays for the United Arab Emirates' women's national team (itself an improbability) would be discovered by retired Capital Peter Bondra, who would learn that Fatima is a Capitals fan and who would then think to himself that it would be awesome to get the Capitals to fly her to Washington to see a game and to meet Alex Ovechkin, her favorite player? And how much more unlikely that he'd actually propose his idea to the team, who would say "sure, why not?" And so Fatima did come to Washington, and she met her favorite players, and she dropped the ceremonial puck at Thursday night's game against the Red Wings, and took a selfie, right there on center ice, with Alex Ovechkin and Hendrik Zetterberg smiling behind her.
Like most Americans, I have mixed feelings about Islam. It's stupid to pretend that the mass shooting in San Bernardino was just another incident of "gun violence;" or that no-go neighborhoods in Paris and Berlin and Brussels are an invention of far-right Islamophobes, and that the citizens of those cities who live in fear of mass shootings or vehicle assaults are cowardly xenophobes. But we have to find a way to defend our own freedom, without denying it to others. We can be the country that firmly refuses to allow fanatics of any faith to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, and we can also invite a devout female Muslim hockey fan to share the ice with the greatest hockey player in the world, smiling and radiant in hijab and a Capitals jersey.
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It's Sunday now, and a post that started on frozen taquitos ended on radical Islam and world peace through hockey, with a few gratuitous shots at the Trump administration, just for fun. I literally cleaned out a cabinet, right in the middle of writing this very paragraph. Adult ADD is no joke. The Capitals won (again) last night, and Fatima Al Ali is probably home in the UAE now, and I have plenty of items to wash and fold, and plenty of things to clean. Stick around; I'll be watching hockey and organizing cabinets until spring.
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