A week in February

I’m reading a book now, and I’m only a few pages in so it’s too early to write about it but I will be writing about it soon. Stay tuned. Watch this space. 

So what should I write about, other than the collapse of America, a topic of which I never tire. But maybe my vast readership would like for me to change the subject. So I will. 

It’s Super Bowl Sunday and I don’t care one little bit about this game, although I do hope Seattle wins, for reasons. It’s extraordinarily cold and bright outside. Sunlight always seems so much brighter on crisp, cold days, especially when it reflects on the snow that fell two weeks ago and that is nowhere close to melting. 

*****

My sons and I went to Barnes and Noble yesterday. I wanted to buy books, but I really can’t justify the purchase of any additional books until I read all the ones I already have. So it’s going to be a while. Instead, I paid for the books that my sons had picked out for themselves because I can and because I like to treat my kids.

*****

We go to the same Super Bowl party every year, and that’s exactly what we did on Sunday. It was lovely - fewer people than usual, and we were quieter than usual, but it was still a good time. It was nice to be out. It was nice to be with people. 

*****

My younger son has always liked the grocery store. He always went shopping with me, while my older son, given the choice, would stay home with my husband or on his own when he got old enough. We both liked the one-on-one time. My son also had (and still has) very specific preferences for breakfast and lunch and snack foods, and accompanying me was the best way to make sure that I stocked up on his favorites. 

Last weekend, he was home overnight. When I announced that I was going shopping and asked if anyone wanted anything, my younger son stood up and said “Can I go?” Can you go? Of course you can! My son is 21 and he doesn’t get home as often as I would like and I will take any chance I can to hang out with him, including a grocery run. Especially a grocery run. 

And that’s really all there is to that story. It was just one of those mundane and ordinary little bits of time that wouldn’t seem memorable from the outside but it was memorable to me. I will remember that grocery store trip and that bookstore visit. 

*****

The temperature is going to claw its way out of the 30s today - maybe even out of the 40s - and the sun is out and I’m watching my favorite fat little squirrel sitting on the fence outside my window. He appears to be grooming himself. Or maybe it’s a she. The squirrel does appear to be up the spout, so I think she’s a she. Anyway, she just finished her morning routine, and she’s on her way. But she’s always welcome to return. My fence is your fence, Squirrelly Hemphill. Take care of yourself. 

*****

On Thursday, we leave for Lexington Park, where we’ll be spending the weekend. The Atlantic East Conference Championship is at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, too far from Silver Spring to drive back and forth between prelims and finals. And it’s a really fun weekend. The Benito Bowl was great, and the Olympics are fine (I’m a Summer Olympics person), but this is the real sports highlight of the year for us. 

*****

Imagine spending 15 weeks walking all day and into the night, carrying all of your belongings, eating one meal per day, sleeping wherever you find room (sometimes outdoors), through highways and trails and city streets and suburban neighborhoods, in all conditions and no matter how much your body might be crying out for rest, you keep going. The Buddhist monks who have been walking for peace for 15 weeks wrapped up their 1,800-mile walk from Texas to Washington, DC. Marymount University, where my son is a student, was one of their last stops. They arrived late on Monday afternoon and spent the night on campus - I’m not sure where, because they barely have enough dorm rooms for the students. Maybe some students volunteered to give up their rooms for the monks. Or maybe they spent the night in the gym. 

My son sent me a video of the peace walk arriving at Marymount’s tiny campus, and I think that not only the entire university, but the entire neighborhood, turned out to welcome the monks.  I wish I could have been there, but I’m glad he got to be there. 

*****

It's Thursday afternoon and I'm in the car on the Capital Beltway (not driving, of course). It's 2 PM, bright and sunny, and we're on our way to do our favorite thing, which is to watch college swimming. The only thing better than a college swim meet is a 4-day multiple session college swimming extravaganza. It's Atlantic East Conference championship weekend. The Super Bowl and Olympics cannot compare. 

This is our third year as Marymount swim parents, and we have a routine now. We're staying at our usual hotel, and we'll have lunch and happy hour with the other team parents at the usual spots, and we'll spend an afternoon at Solomon's Island, and we'll chill in the hotel room in the evening. But mostly we'll sit in the bleachers at the Saint Mary's College of Maryland pool and we'll cheer for the Saints. What could be better?

*****

On a typical Thursday night, I would drive home from work, do some household chores, drop off my work bag, and then go grocery shopping for my old lady. Then I would eat sushi and do laundry and write something and then read or watch TV or both until it's time to go to bed. Last night, I watched my son's 200 medley relay break their own program, conference, and meet records, and his teammates’ 800 free relay also break all their records, and then I sat in a hotel lobby drinking wine and chatting with my favorite team parents. That was a pretty good Thursday night. 

It's Friday morning now. I woke up early and sat quietly in the dark hotel room, reading and drinking hotel room coffee. Waking up in a quiet, dark hotel room and making room coffee and then getting back into bed with a book is such an underrated human experience. It's one of my favorite things about any overnight trip. 

Friday is 200 IM day. 200 IM is not my son's best event, but he'll final, and one of his teammates will probably win. As always, the Marymount parents group shows up and shows out. We have team lanyards (it's a swimming thing) and pom-poms and T-shirts, and we cheer loudly and enthusiastically. The other teams are catching up. The pool at the Michael P. O'Brien Aquatic and Recreation Center was a hub of excitement last night, and that excitement will build throughout the weekend as Marymount and St. Mary's trade leads. No disrespect to the other four teams, but this thing is pretty much a dual meet. 

*****

It's Saturday morning now, and the Marymount boys hold a 16 point lead. In a college championship meet, this is a veritable tie. So it's going to be an interesting day. 

Saturday is 100 breast day. My son is nervous and so am I. He is the defending champion in this event and everyone wants to take down a defending champion. And there are three or four swimmers here who could do it. This race could go any way. 

I know that it's silly for me to be nervous but I am. And all of the swim parents out here saying that they don't really care about their kids' times or placement or if they win or lose or make a relay or not are lying. I say stupid shit like this all the time and when I do, I am lying. 

We all care. But why we care is what varies. A few parents might really feel that their kids' athletic performance reflects on them and so a bad race is something they could or should have done something to prevent. But most of us care because we hate to see our child's disappointment after a bad race. And more than that, we really love seeing their elation after a best time or a flipped race or a win or even a record. That moment of triumph and sheer joy is something to witness. We love to see it. 

*****

And we got to see it last night. Even though it was a silver finish, it might have been the best and most exciting race of my son's career, and it wasn't just me saying that. 

My son's senior teammate, also an excellent breaststroker, has been trying to beat him in the 100 breaststroke for three years, and he finally did it last night. Both boys swam best times and they were neck and neck, trading the razor thin lead throughout the four lengths of the pool. The finish was so close that we had to check the scoreboard to confirm the winner. I'd have loved to see my son win it and swim the 400 medley relay, but I certainly couldn't have asked him to do better or try harder. They left it all in the pool last night. 

It's Sunday now. One more day of championship swimming and then it's over again until next year. My son swims the 200 breast today, and he's not likely to win but he could very well medal. The Marymount boys have a solid lead now, and the girls are behind by only 6 points. Hoping for a two way Saints win tonight. 

*****

I overheard two parents talking - one asked where the other’s wife was, and the man said that she was skipping the meet this year and the first person laughed and said “How is she getting away with that?”

These are two really fine people who happen to have other children who are D1 swimmers. I couldn’t tell if they were being performatively blase or if they’d really rather have been somewhere else. No judgement, but I would not have been anywhere else this weekend. 

It’s Monday morning, and the 2025-2026 swim season is over. The Marymount boys won the meet, with the girls a close second. And my son did medal in the 200 breaststroke - he finished second just behind the conference record-holder, a St. Mary’s junior. My son’s girlfriend told me that the St. Mary’s swimmer’s parents were very nervous during this race, as they should have been. It was very very close until the last 25. 

*****

This is Presidents’ Day. This week’s internet joke is that Presidents’ Day should be cancelled until we have a real President, which is not only a lame joke (even though the principle behind it is quite sound) but an outrage because I am not willing to give up the free gift of a day off. It was a wonderful weekend, but I have some catching up to do - bills to pay, groceries to buy, laundry to do, and a house that isn’t going to compulsively clean itself. The promised book review is coming. I’m sure you’re all agog.   

Burn it all down

This last week, meaning the last days of January through the first days of February, has been quite a week. Quite. A. Week. Day and night, the temperature in the DMV hasn’t risen above 36 or so for about 2 weeks now. I’m acclimated. It was 21 degrees this morning when I went to work, and I breezed in there wearing nothing but a midweight jacket that I didn’t even bother to zip up, and I was fine. 

And the cold is the very least of it. The Epstein files are taking down powerful men all over the world, except here in the US. Yes, a few American men have lost their jobs and their reputations, but I can’t think of a single one who has suffered real consequences. 

OK, one - Ghislaine Maxwell. 

Oh wait - she’s not a man now, is she? 

*****

I’ve always thought that Trump was a Russian asset, and Tulsi Gabbard, too. And now it looks like the Epstein scandal is connected to international intrigue of the very worst sort. And it also looks like the President of the United States is not just one of many evildoers mixed up in this horrendous web of crime - he’s one of the ringleaders. And for me, an American raised smack dab in the middle of the American Century, the granddaughter of men who fought in WWII, the idea of the United States of America controlled by a truly evil cabal of rapists and traitors is too much. 

Years as a government contractor and I have never lost or misplaced or forgotten my PIV (Personal Identity Validation) or CAC (Common Access Card), until Friday. I was scheduled to work from home and when I went to turn on my computer at 7:30, I found that my badge holder had no badge. I panicked immediately but then just started methodically looking for it - in my purse, my work tote, my coat pocket, my car, the pocket of the pants I had worn on Thursday - everywhere it could have been and a few places where it couldn’t. Nothing. And now I’m really panicking, because I can’t work without it, and because it’s easier to replace a driver’s license or a passport than a CAC card. Ain’t nobody got time for that. 

I was just about to call the security office to see if anyone had found and returned my CAC card when I received a text message from my coworker, who had found my CAC card at the front desk. I drove to the base, I met him at the gate, he handed me my CAC card, and I was back home and at my desk by 9. All’s well that ends well, I suppose. 

Except that this little incident was further evidence that my brain is not working, and it hasn’t been for some time. Everything is too much now. Everything is falling through the ever-widening cracks. I’m nothing but cracks now. I’m “crashing out” as the young people say on the internet. 

*****

One of the most fun things this week has been Hillary Clinton out here with “I wish a motherfucker would” energy. I’d like to actually take the day off, make popcorn, and watch that hearing all day long, but I don’t think it’s actually going to happen. James Comer is a trifling and stupid man but he’s not stupid enough not to recognize that he’s no match for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Still, that would be a fun day. 

*****

How fast the White House has gone from “cry more libtards it was just a joke” to “an unknown staffer posted that racist video, which we have now deleted and which we hereby order you to forget about” to “yeah I posted it but I didn’t watch it first and no I won’t apologize.” But despite conflicting stories, one thing is clear (well, two, counting the racism) and that is that someone has a very bad case of Obama Derangement Syndrome

*****

It’s Saturday now and extremely cold but bright and sunny. My son is home for the weekend and I’m going to get out of the house like a normal person. I need to take a little break from my not-at-all fake outrage. A bookstore visit should do it. I’ll be back again on Monday, and I’ll still be furious. 

Dead or Alive

If I’ve learned one thing in the last few years, it’s that picking up a new Zadie Smith essay collection is going to send me down a rabbit hole of knowledge-seeking about artists and writers and musicians whom I have never heard of. That book is also going to cost me some money because when I read Zadie Smith’s essays, I’ll almost always learn about a book that I didn’t know existed but that I must buy and read immediately. 

This time, the essay collection is Dead or Alive, and the book that I must buy is Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black. I thought that I had read all of Hilary Mantel’s novels, and I had resigned myself to the knowledge that there wouldn’t be any more new ones coming because Hilary Mantel died in 2022, may she rest in peace. 

Zadie Smith loves Hilary Mantel just as much as I do because of course she does, because she has flawless taste. She knew Mantel personally and recalls a conversation about the then work-in-progress Wolf Hall, describing Mantel’s animated explanation of her forthcoming book as a performance worthy of any stage. Zadie Smith didn’t read Wolf Hall until Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light had been published, and was just as awestruck as everyone else who read Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Who would ever have thought that Henry VIII’s henchman and consigliere and victim would be the best literary character since Jo March or David Copperfield or Dorothea Brooke? 

Not only Hilary Mantel, but Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Shakespeare, and Dickens all make appearances at some point in these essays. So do Stormzy, Madonna, and Eminem. A Zadie Smith essay collection is a bit of a party. You're lucky to be invited, and you never know who’s going to show up. 

*****

Zadie Smith sometimes writes about her childhood and youth in London. Her father was a white Englishman and her mother a Jamaican immigrant. She writes about what it was like to be a mixed-race child in 1980s and 1990s Britain. She writes with sadness and anger about the erosion of Britain’s social welfare system, which allowed her working-class parents to build a good life and to provide for their children. 

I love all of her personal writing, but she’s best and funniest when she writes about her mess of a teenage self - self-centered, self-important, self-dramatizing, messy and petulant and stubborn but also sensitive, brilliant, and hilarious. She writes about being a teenager like she really remembers what it was like and like she fondly remembers and accepts her teenage self, flaws and all. I was also a mess of a young person, and only began to think kindly about my teenage self when I had teenagers of my own and finally understood that they’re pretty much all self-centered, self-important, self-dramatizing, messy and petulant and stubborn but also sensitive, brilliant, and hilarious in their own way. 

In addition to the writers and artists and musicians I learned more about while reading Dead or Alive, I also learned something new about Zadie Smith, which is that she once fell from an upper floor window, breaking several bones and spending months recovering while also figuring out how to respond to the rumors that her fall was an intentional attention grab or a suicide attempt. The truth is that she was trying to look interesting while smoking a cigarette out the window of her teenage bedroom, and she lost her balance and toppled out of the open window. I never smoked as a teenager, and I never fell out of a window, but I did many many stupid things while trying to look interesting or cool, and sometimes those stupid things had even stupider consequences. Here’s something that Zadie Smith and I have in common with every other person born before 1985 or so - little or no video evidence of our stupidity exists. Thank God we didn’t have access to social media in the 80s, because we did stupid things all day long, and we thought we were hilarious, and we would have documented everything. 

*****

“Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough.” That is Zadie Smith quoting yet another writer, G.K. Chesterton, about whom I have mixed feelings. But here he’s dead right, and so is Zadie Smith, pointing out the unfortunate human tendency to fall for frauds and charlatans and to fail to see the truth even when it’s right in front of them. Zadie Smith can write about art, literature, history, or music from any decade or even any century, but she’s never not relevant to the present moment. Lucky for me, I haven’t read all of her novels yet. I’ll get on that next. 

Without a paddle

It’s Monday January 75th here in the DC suburbs of Maryland. It’s very cold and will remain so for several days - at least a week. I worked at home today because we got a foot or more of snow and ice, and the DMV shuts down in these conditions. OPM ordered maximum telework today and I’d have had to stay home anyway because my rinky dink little street will be among the last to see a plow. 

I didn’t leave the house at all on Sunday, not even for a moment. It snowed almost all day, with some sleet for good measure; and it was freezing, freezing cold. Everyone who is protesting in the streets of Minneapolis is my hero right now, especially Alex Pretti, who tried to help a woman who’d been knocked to the ground by ICE thugs and who ended up dead on the street, shot 10 times. And despite overwhelming video evidence to the contrary, the criminals at the head of DHS and ICE and the Border Patrol claimed and are still claiming two days later that Pretti was brandishing a gun. 

“They lie to us. We know that they’re lying, and they know that we know that they’re lying, and we know that they know that we know that they’re lying. And they keep lying to us and we keep pretending to believe them.” This is paraphrased and an approximate translation from the Russian quote attributed to both Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn and Elena Gorokhova. Soviet cynicism seems particularly relevant now. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now. I was very happy to learn earlier today that Greg Bovino had been unceremoniously yanked out of Minneapolis and shipped off to California to sit behind a desk from which he will not even be able to shit-post for eight hours a day because they cut off his social media access. Considering that most of this administration are nothing more than content creators who think their sole job is to own the libs on the internet, this is a very big demotion indeed, and I’m here for it. I’ll be happier still to see Bovino, Noem, Lewandowski and the rest of them fired in disgrace and left to fend for themselves as Trump washes his hands of them. People who sell their souls to the devil usually learn the hard way, and too late, that they are getting absolutely nothing in return. 

*****

Speaking of shit-posting, I sent something about Minneapolis to the wrong group chat yesterday, and I don’t even care. Anyone who is going to be mad at me for talking about government agents murdering people in the streets can stay mad. Stay mad! 

*****

It’s Wednesday now, and I left the house for real, as in driving down the road, for the first time since Sunday. The driving down the road part took a little time because I made the mistake of turning my wheel too soon at the end of the driveway, where I promptly got stuck in a micro-tundra of snow and ice. My husband had even reminded me to pull all the way out of the driveway before trying to turn my wheel and drive away, but I forgot. So I was stuck. And I was absolutely determined to get unstuck, without any help. So I got out a shovel and I started digging out the snow and chipping away at the ice and I could see the tundra shrinking a bit. I tried again and I was still stuck, but I’d moved a little bit farther back. So I pulled back up and started shoveling and chipping again, and got back in the car again, and bumped my way over the snow and ice and was on my merry way. 

I had texted my boss to let him know that I’d be late. He told me to just go back in the house and telework, and I was tempted, but the car was stuck halfway out into the street so I had to move it anyway. And I also wanted to win. A little ice isn’t going to scare me back into the house.  

*****

It’s so hard to concentrate lately. I’m constantly anxious and distracted at work, and it takes me forever to finish reading a book. I’ll probably fold a load of laundry, clean a few countertops, check my email, and straighten the shoes in the mudroom before I even finish this paragraph. 

Oh, and the government might shut down again. I will not be affected unless it’s a protracted shutdown, but lots of other people will. Three of our four snow shovels broke, and there are no more snow shovels to be had. The Washington Capitals can’t win a game to save their lives. And it is STILL JANUARY. My gosh. 

***** 

There’s supposed to be a general strike tomorrow. I have mixed feelings about this. I believe in strikes, but I also believe that most people in the United States need to keep their jobs and it’s not at all unreasonable to choose your family’s livelihood over activism. But I won’t buy anything tomorrow, and if enough other people don’t buy anything, then maybe the powers that be will get the message. Business leaders are already starting to speak up a little bit - far too late and far too little but better than nothing. Minneapolis got rid of Bovino. Yes, they ended up with Homan in his place, but they still made a difference. They still forced a response. If CEOs and rich people in general start to feel a little bit of economic pain, things could start to change. 

Or maybe not, because it looks like Jeff Bezos is passing along the economic pain resulting from the almost certain failure of the $40 million Melania movie to a few thousand Amazon workers. The billionaire “job creators” giveth and they taketh away - very little of the former, and a lot of the latter.

*****

It never fails. Bruce Springsteen says (or sings) something about injustice and fascism in America, and a bunch of idiots who have obviously never actually listened to a Springsteen song in their lives start crying about rock stars “getting political.” “Streets of Minneapolis” brought them out of the woodwork. The song actually isn’t very good in strict songwriting terms - the lyrics are pretty clunky, and I wish that he had been a little less literal, not least of all because Trump and Noem and Miller do not deserve to have their names mentioned in a Springsteen song, even a song that calls them out as the criminals they are. But it’s still pretty impressive that he wrote, recorded, and released it within two days of Alex Pretti’s murder. I’m glad he’s on the right side of history. 

*****

Catherine O’Hara? Are you fucking kidding me? 

I haven’t been this sad about a celebrity death since Carrie Fisher died. We watched “A Mighty Wind” tonight. This was the first movie in my Catherine O’Hara movie marathon. Or maybe I should just move to Schitt’s Creek. 

Wait. I think I already live there.

*****

It’s Saturday morning now, beautiful and bright and sunshiny and very cold. I’m getting used to it, and it’s a good thing, because the cold is going to continue for at least another week. It’s still quite early and I don’t yet have a plan for the day. I’d like to try to stay away from current events for the next day or so but if the rest of you have to watch this shit show, then so do I. I still think it’s going to get better; rather, I hope that things are going to get better. But not before it gets worse. I’ve heard that the latest Epstein documents are pretty horrifying, which means that we’re due for another violent distraction - maybe an attack on a foreign country or maybe a bloody crackdown on domestic dissent - or maybe both. Anything could happen.  

But anything good could happen, too. It would only take a bare handful of Republicans to force Congress to do its job and stop these criminals. I remain hopeful. The Capitals even won two in a row!! Anything is possible. And January is finally over.