I think it's going to be a long long time

Monday: I'm watching hockey again. OMG! No, that doesn't mean that I'm reconciled to the end of summer. But hockey is back! As Alexander Ovechkin told a reporter, the Capitals are not going to be suck this year. His English is so much better than my Russian.

Tuesday: I made it almost to the end of the day without encountering a single pirate, until I was on my way home. I was sitting at a stoplight, looked to my left, and saw four pirates in an SUV. I was this close. Sigh.

Meanwhile, if I'm Kim Jong Un, right about now I'm thinking "Rocket Man. Rocket Man! Damn straight! I'm ROCKET MAN, motherfuckers!" North Korean state media has probably been ordered to henceforth refer to Kim as "Rocket Man." They've probably already recorded a cover of the song, with Hangul lyrics about Rocket Man's birth at the peak of Mount Paekdu.

Rocket Man. Really. If you're trying to mock and insult someone, then don't call them something so obviously awesome. Rocket Man. Sheesh.

All this science--I don't understand. 

Wednesday: I'm writing a white paper, on a subject that I know woefully little about. So I'm doing research, and talking to experts, and it's coming along, I guess, but very slowly. I hate not knowing what I'm talking--or writing--about.

Actually, the whole day was kind of an exercise in humility. My 7th grader needed help with Algebra, which is another subject about which I know woefully little. I took exactly as much math as I had to, and not one bit more.

I'm pretty good at calculations; it's how to figure out what to calculate that is beyond me. I also can't remember order of operations. I couldn't explain (or apply) the distributive property to save my soul from Hell. I can usually solve for the value of X. I just can't do it in any rational sequence, and I can't explain or write down the process by which I arrive at the answer.  This didn't help my son at all. Algebra is about the journey and not the destination. Showing your work and all that. He's a smart boy, and he figured it out, no thanks to his mother.

Speaking of journeys and destinations, I would love to hear not only why Tom Price needs a private jet to travel around the country, but why he needs to travel around the country at all. What does an HHS Secretary do on the road, anyway? Is he on tour?

Friday: Good work, Mr. President! Focus on the important stuff. Rocket Man will come to his senses; and Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands will fix themselves. Or maybe Tom Price is working on that--THAT'S why he needs private jets! Of course! You just deal with anthem-kneeling NFL players (are any of them even doing that anymore? Is it still 2016?) and build a nice sliding glass patio door between here and Mexico.

I have friends who voted for Trump. Some of them have finally lost faith in him. Others are hanging on. They blame Twitter. "If only he'd stop tweeting," they say, "then he could make progress with his agenda." Eventually, I hope, more people will finally figure out that this is his agenda. Destroying everything good, and exacerbating everything bad, and sowing division and strife, and then sitting back and watching what happens--this is the WHOLE REASON for his existence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The off-the-wall inflammatory tweets, and campaign rally demagoguery: A feature, and not a bug.

Sunday: Enough about politics. I started with hockey, and I'll end it with hockey. We took my son and his friends to a Capitals pre-season game last night. Despite a 4-1 loss to Carolina, it was a good time.  If what I saw on the ice is any indicator, then the Capitals sadly are going to be suck this year, but even Trump can't ruin hockey.

That's not my name

I've written occasionally about my run-ins with wildlife. It's usually deer, with the occasional snake, real or imagined. And squirrels. And spiders. And a few birds here or there. That's usually as far as it goes. I live in the suburbs, after all. 

Last Sunday, I went for a walk on the Matthew Henson Trail. There's a vernal pool on a little side trail that leads back to the street. The county parks department posts signs near vernal pools, urging passersby to avoid disturbing them. As if I'd touch a gigantic puddle of standing water encrusted with green scum. But the green scum isn't the grossest thing about this particular pond. The grossest thing is the frogs. 

No, I'm not afraid of frogs. I'm not especially fond of them, but they don't bother me. Unless, of course, they launch themselves like missiles out of a scummy green pond and right toward my unsuspecting head. Picture frogs being shot out of cannons. Picture yourself at a sporting event, and it starts to rain frogs when you're expecting rolled-up t-shirts. 

Yeah. 

So, I made a mental note to give that little corner of nature the widest berth possible from now on, and I went on my way. And that's all there was to that. 

Until Tuesday. 

Which is when I went for another walk, at about 6:45 or so. It was still pretty much broad daylight at 6:45, but dusk falls earlier now. And dusk means one thing.

BATS.

I'm not afraid of frogs, or spiders, or most of the other creepier wildlife species, but I do not like rodents at all. I know that bats are generally harmless, and that they control the insect population, and blah, blah, blah. They're also flying rodents with fangs, and if I never see one again, it'll be too soon.

Bats are always out at night around here, and normally, they don't bother me, because I don't see them. The sky is dark, the bats are dark and they blend right in, and out of sight is out of mind (usually). But at dusk on Tuesday, the sky was a stunning shade of dark bluish gray, and the outline of the bats (hundreds of them!) was clear and visible against the blue-gray backdrop. They didn't dive-bomb me or anything, but they swirled and circled just a few yards overhead, and I pretty much ran the last few blocks home.

No run-ins with wild animals on Wednesday. Only a mysterious, one-word text message--STASI-- from an unknown number. Why Stasi? Who would text me this? I responded "Sorry, but who is this?"  but whoever it was didn't reply. It was probably a person who doesn't know how to spell Stacy. Or Staci. Or Stacey. None of which are names that I answer to. Or maybe it really was the Stasi. After all, why would they identify themselves?

I'm still in the middle of The Crisis Years, which is taking entirely too long to finish; and I'm heartily sick of the Cold War, normally one of my favorite topics. I wonder what the members of Ex-Comm would have thought about smart phones. Or sonic attacks.  Or projectile frogs, which could probably be weaponized. Or the fact that Castro outlived all of them.

I think I need to get out of my own head for a bit. I think I need to read something else. 

Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it

And just like that, it's all over, and it's all starting again. A week ago, it was still summer. Now I'm up to my neck in fantasy football (no, not me, because ain't nobody got time for that) and back-to-school nights, and fall sports, and weekend fire pits, and it's not so bad. Not summer, but it's OK.

*****
Saturday: Today is my birthday. And it's a beautiful day, but it's definitely a fall day. For lots of people, that's the ideal weather. "Crisp." I spend most of early October restraining the urge to punch people who go around rhapsodizing about the crispness of the weather, and the beauty of the changing leaves, and the pumpkin fucking spice. Yes, it's nice out and the leaves are beautiful (pumpkin, however, is fit for nothing but pie; and pumpkin spice latte is revolting) but fall is just a prelude to winter. And winter is dark and cold and interminably long.

But enough of that. Lots of people in Texas and the Caribbean and Florida would slap me for complaining about cold weather that's coming three months from now, and they'd be right.

*****

We went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum today, which I had never been to, and which I never realized was in the same building with the National Portrait Gallery. I love American art, and art museums in general, and 20th century history, so the place is a veritable gold mine.

The building itself is astonishingly beautiful, too. I wouldn't want to live in the 19th century, but they knew how to build public spaces then. If a building of similar beauty and durability were to be built today, it'd be a Silicon Valley corporate headquarters, or a country club where a PGA tour event would be held every year.

I didn't even know about the American Visionary: JFK's Life and Times exhibit (which ends next week) until we arrived. I'm still reading The Crisis Years, so this was good timing.

Kennedy and Khrushchev met for the first time in 1961. The meeting didn't
go very well, but Jackie seemed to have had a good time.

The National Portrait Gallery has a rotating exhibit of photographs and paintings and sculptures of 20th-century Americans, divided into eras (1900-1920, etc.) 

Gertrude Stein and my younger son. It looks like they're gossiping about Ernest
Hemingway and Ezra Pound. Pound would probably have voted for Trump.

It's Sunday now. I have work to do, though I'm not sure how much I'll actually accomplish, given that half of the neighborhood (the male half) is in my backyard.

Of the many things that send me into a tailspin of panic and anxiety, my least favorites are administrative and bureaucratic processes and proceedings, especially new ones that replace ones that I finally managed to master. For years, the Montgomery County Public Schools used an online grade tracking tool called Edline. After a few years, I had finally reached a  point at which keeping on top of my sons' progress in school was an easy and routine task. And now Edline is gone, replaced by what appears to be a homegrown system, that I'll have to learn all over again. Edline allowed one log-in and password per parent, but the new system issues a new password and log-in for each child, meaning I'll have two accounts, not just one. Why?

And now that I've become almost totally dependent on Google Drive and Google Photos, they're going away, too, to be replaced by something whose name I could easily look up (on Google), but I won't. And my son is a junior, which means that I have to learn how to get a kid into college. Apparently, the process has changed since the 1980s. The Internet and all.

Oh my gosh, I'm the worst. It's a beautiful day, and I don't have a single real problem in the world, and I don't even mind spending the afternoon copy editing. At least I don't have to pay attention to the football game. I mean, I want the Redskins to win and everything, but you'll never convince me that one football game isn't exactly like every other football game, ever. I've seen one; ergo, I've seen them all. I hope that Florida is spared. Meanwhile, HTTR, I guess.

Oh, so I amuse you? So I'm a clown?

I was thinking about stopping this for a while; "this" meaning weekly posting on this blog. Like lots of other things I do, it's become a compulsion-driven source of unnecessary anxiety. But then I think of things and see things, and want to write about them. Maybe I need to just write when I feel like writing. Just like maybe I need to clean the house only when it's dirty.

That last part is crazy talk, of course.

*****
I read something today, which I won't link to. Let's just say that the name "Becky" has two entirely new and unexpected meanings. Clueless, slightly overprivileged white girls are now the bete noire of society, apparently. That's a word that I overuse. "Apparently," that is, not "bete noire." I should use that one more often.  Anyway, I suppose it was our turn. Clueless white girls, that is; not people who overuse "apparently," or even "bete noire."

And that's all I have to say about that, because I can never seem to summon any emotion other than slack-jawed eye-rolling boredom for identity politics in any form. That's the privilege talking, I guess. I get that there are still such things as racism and white privilege. I just don't see how dehumanizing yet another group of people helps to end either of those things.

*****
I'm reading, and have been reading for some time, Michael Beschloss's The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-1963. It's long, and pretty exhaustively detailed, and will probably take me three more weeks to finish, at my current pace, which is slow, because I'm busy.

The book takes lots of side trips, much like that last sentence (and this entire blog, if it comes down to that). I love 20th-century American history, and presidential history (should that be capitalized?) and of course, I love reading about the Soviet Union (not a nice place to visit, and you also wouldn't want to live there), so this is a feature and not a bug. Still, I usually only have a few minutes a day to read (because after all, I do have to write about having only a few minutes a day to read, and that takes time; not to mention that the house isn't going to compulsively clean itself), so it's going to be a while before I can offer a full report. Stay tuned.

Andrei Gromyko, who was the Soviet Foreign Minister during the Kennedy years (and for a long time after), figures prominently in the book, but unlike most of the others (Kennedy, Khrushchev, Dean Rusk, Dean Acheson, Willy Brandt, Konrad Adenauer), his personality doesn't register with the reader. Gromyko was apparently (there it is again) extremely reserved, and is said to have said that he was uninterested in his own personality. He might have been the only real Communist among them. Meanwhile, I can't imagine anything better than to be uninterested in oneself and one's own personality. Something to aspire to.

*****
"Right after I got here, I ordered linguine with marinara, and I got egg noodles with ketchup."

That's the almost-last line of "Goodfellas," which I'm watching on TV.  If you're from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, or Boston (or New Haven or Providence, I guess), and you go anywhere else, food is a big adjustment. Washington, DC is only 3 hours away from Philadelphia, but it's a million culinary miles. When I was pregnant with my first child, I had an overwhelming craving for a tuna hoagie. My husband went out to get me what was supposed to be a tuna hoagie, but which turned out to be Little Friskies on a hot dog bun. I felt Ray Liotta's pain.

It's the day before Labor Day, always one of the saddest times of the year for me. I love summer, and I'm never ready to see it go. I went swimming on Thursday night, and the water was about as cold as I could stand. Then after two days of mid-October chill and rain, it was even colder today. I barely dipped a toe in.  One more day, and then the pool is closed, and the school year starts, and the summer is over, just like that.

*****
Labor Day.

Although my kids love summer as much as I do, they're quite upbeat and enthusiastic about the new school year. Armed with a few new clothes and school supplies, ready to see their friends and to see what their schedules will look like, they're filled with the excitement of newness.  So I'm going to adjust my attitude, right now.  We're already buying pre-season hockey tickets, which means that fall can't be all bad.  It'll be fine, as long as I don't ever have to drink, smell, or even look at a pumpkin spice latte. There are depths to which even a white girl won't sink.