Very secure...

I had to change a password yesterday. It’s a password for a system that I use daily so I’ll remember the new password after a few days of daily log-ins, but I just hate to change a familiar password. It's a disruption. It throws me off my game. 

The system rejected my first attempt to create a new password because it recognized it as an old password. “We’ve seen that password too many times before” the pop-up message read. Who’s “we,” I thought? Who’s seen it too many times? Not me, I tell you what. I’m very happy with that password. I like it just fine. In fact, it’s one of my very favorite passwords, which is why I keep trying to recycle it. Here’s an idea, Mr. Enterprise Solution: Suppose you let me decide when I’m tired of my password? 

The system didn’t like my second attempt either. “Choose something harder to guess.” Harder for whom, genius? If it’s hard for some hacker in the Caucasus to guess then it’s going to be dang-near impossible for me unless I write it down, and if I have learned anything in decades of yearly cybersecurity training, it’s that writing a password down is not a good idea. 

I finally came up with a new password that was acceptable to the very discerning password approving software or whatever it is, and bonus: The new password is hilarious. I cracked myself up with that password. I’m still laughing. I'm going to laugh my silly head off every time I log in now. 

Then I remembered that I had done the very same thing a few years ago in another enterprise system, and I laughed and laughed until the next day when I couldn’t remember the number and special character combination that accompanied my hilariously funny password, and I had to start all over. Determined not to let this happen again, I wrote down a hint for the new password (which is pure comedy gold I assure you). This is what it’s come to. I need a password for my password. It's a great system. Very secure. Very mindful. 

He-Man Woman-Hater's Club

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at Mass minding my own business when the priest, a priest whom I have always liked, decided that “Catholic marriages would be so happy if you women could stop being bitches for five hot minutes” was a good theme for a homily. I am exaggerating, of course, but only slightly. He scolded us, all of the Catholic married women sitting quietly in our pews, for never letting things go, for throwing things in our husbands’ faces that happened years ago. “Maybe he forgot to pay a bill,” he said, by way of example. “Or maybe he forgot a birthday. Or maybe he cheated. Love is forgiving - if he’s doing his best, you should forgive him and move on.” 

Yes, let’s do that shall we? Let’s be more forgiving. And let’s agree that a married man who is having sex with another woman is “doing his best.” Let’s also agree that forgetting a birthday or forgetting to take out the trash are offenses of exactly the same magnitude as infidelity; and that we women, bitches that we are, will react in exactly the same way to all three. And let’s further agree that it is the women, and only the women, who make mistakes in a marriage. The men always do their best and their best should always be good enough. Got it. Thanks, Father. 

*****

I was just about over this routine Sunday morning misogyny, and then my news feeds started to fill up with stories about an NFL kicker named Harrison Butker, who was the commencement speaker at a small Catholic college. 

First of all, I won’t make fun of this guy's name (although my gosh silver platter amirite?) but I will make fun of his smug pious Catholic punchable bearded millennial face. What is it with young traddy men and their glossy beards? Are you emulating Jesus? Because I'm pretty sure that He didn't spend much time grooming and trimming His beard, nor cutting and styling His hair. 

But really, Mr. Butker, that's none of my business. It's your face. You grow whatever you want on it. And that applies to everything else in your life that doesn't hurt anyone else. You want a million kids? Great. Enjoy, and I wish nothing but good health and happiness for as many children as you have. Mrs. Butker wants to stay at home and take care of you and the children, and forgo a paycheck and a career? Good for her. As long as she is happy and the children are well cared for, then I applaud her decision and wish her only the best. I know many brilliant SAHMs. I was one myself for a short while. 

The whole “you do you” thing breaks down for me a bit in your public utterances about what women other than your wife should do, and how people other than yourself should live. Let’s discuss, shall we? 

*****

First, though, a quick digression. Who decided that a person who kicks a ball for a living is qualified to speak at a college commencement? I understand that Mr. Butker is among the very best at this particular job, but it IS a very particular job, with skills that don’t really translate to any other endeavor of life. What is it that conservatives on the Fox News always like to say? “Stick to dribbling?” Let’s adapt that advice for Harrison Butker. Stick to kicking.

And let’s further digress. Who at Benedictine College, an apparently very religious Catholic institution, decided that a representative of the NFL was the best person to speak to Catholic life and morality? Is anyone at Benedictine familiar with the National Football League’s relationship with organized professional gambling? Is the learned administration of that institution aware that domestic violence and scantily clad cheerleaders are the NFL’s main exports vis a vis women? Is there NO ONE ELSE who could come speak to your graduates? 

But fine, let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that the very selection of Harrison Butker was not problematic in and of itself. Let’s assume that it’s perfectly reasonable to invite a guy who kicks a ball for a living (nothing else - no throwing, no catching, no running - just kicking) and who represents a famously greedy and corrupt organization to address the graduates of Benedictine College, a college whose student population is over half female. Would it not then be reasonable to expect Mr. Butker to deliver a simple commencement speech, which is supposed to be about the graduates and their accomplishments and their futures, and not about the speaker and his stupid hot takes on a “woman’s vocation?” 

*****

This is the part that really bothers me most; or rather, it would bother me most if I was in that audience as a graduate or a parent. That speech was disrespectful and downright rude. Instead of allowing these young women five damn seconds to enjoy their accomplishments and their moment in the sun, this MF-er saw his opportunity to record a Newsmax audition tape, and he went all in. Watch the video and you can just see how proud of himself he is, out there owning the libs. “Bouta go viral in five, four, three, two, one...the feminists are going to lose their minds.” Yes the speech was misogynist and homophobic and hateful but it was also predictable, boring, and tiresome. And rude - just plain rude. 

*****

I almost hate to post this now, a week later. This bearded little ball-kicker has dominated the discourse for days, and he’s had just about enough attention, as far as I’m concerned. We are now in the backlash to the backlash stage, with the usual suspects screaming as loudly as they can about this tiny tiny tiny little man’s “First Amendment rights” as though the First Amendment is some guarantee that the world owes you a platform for all of your dumb-ass opinions and as though anyone who disagrees with you and says so is somehow infringing on your freedom. 

And at this point, what else is there to say? OK, just a few more things. First of all, wife and mother is a vocation, but so is husband and father. Why is it that only a husband and father can “fulfill his vocation” while also using his God-given talents and making money and generally contributing to the life of the world, and a wife and mother can’t? 

And one other question for Mr. Butker: Did Mrs. Butker’s life really only begin when she married you? Because I thought it began at conception. 

*****

I’m a Catholic - a faithful, believing, Rosary-praying, Mass-going Catholic. And I know that Jesus loves women. I just wish that Catholic men did, too. 

Fruits and vegetables

I started writing something a few days ago. It's coming together I guess. Today I had an idea for a conclusion and I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget. What was the idea, you ask? Well, I know that it must have had something to do with the words "inverse proportion." I’m sure this made perfect sense to me at the time, but now I really don't know what I was getting at. I don't know what I was thinking. 

That last sentence? An answer to the question: Can you write your autobiography in 7 or fewer words?

I'm only about halfway sure that I will eventually remember what "inverse proportion" was supposed to mean. It's OK, though. I'll think of some way to finish the silly thing. It does bother me that I forget things. A lot. 

Both, really. I forget things a lot and it bothers me a lot. 

*****

The next day, I wrote down the word “banana,” certain that I wouldn’t forget what it meant, and I didn’t. A banana is a concrete thing, after all, not an abstract idea like inverse proportions. A few minutes earlier, I had walked through the lobby of my building today, past the glass case with the scale model of all of the buildings on campus. I really love architectural models, and sometimes I stop to look at this one. Today, as I walked past, I saw that someone had left a banana on top of the glass case. I’m easily amused, and that banana made me laugh right out loud. I mean, a banana, right? Even the word is funny. I don’t think that it was intended to serve as a comedy prop, but I’m telling you, a banana just left where it obviously doesn’t belong is hilarious. I imagine that someone stopped there to dig through their bag, placed the banana on top of the glass case to free up their hands, and then forgot about it. It sat there pretty much all day. It was a perfectly good banana, and no one wanted to throw it away, I guess. 

Later, I had to sit through a required active shooter training video. I’d rather actually face the active shooter than watch that training again. I'm never more restless, more tear-out-my-hair desperate to escape than when I am watching a mandatory training video. Mandatory training videos serve to remind us that Annie Lennox was right: Every single one of us is made to suffer. 

Well of COURSE I don’t want to face a REAL active shooter. Just a little bit of hyperbole, for effect. I really needed to convey just how much I hate mandatory training videos. I hate them a lot. 

*****

It’s Friday now, late afternoon. I’m finished work for the day, though I haven’t logged off yet. I stay connected for a bit at the end of the workday, just in case someone needs me. I’m very dedicated. 

But there’s such a thing as being too dedicated. For example, we’re going to the Nats game today. Not only are we going to the Nats game, but we’re leaving insanely early so that we can arrive insanely early so that we can be among the first 10,000 fans, who receive a bobblehead, which my husband is so insistent that we must obtain at all costs that you would think it was the gosh-darn tesseract. So we’ll arrive about 90 minutes early for a late-season game between the third-worst (Cincinnati Reds) and worst (Washington Nationals) teams in all of Major League Baseball. I mean, I love the Nats, but this is a game that I’d be happy to half-watch and half-ignore in the comfort of my air-conditioned house. Instead, I’ll be hustling through the Glenmont and Fort Totten and Navy Yard Metro stations, trying to catch up with my husband who will break into a full run rather than miss a train and possibly lose his bobblehead to another, more fleet-of-foot fan. It should be fun, really.  He’s buying the drinks. 

*****

It actually was fun. Gollum secured his Precious, which made him very happy and if he’s happy, I’m happy. There was a pre-game concert and as it turned out, we know the band, so that was really fun. Trust me, we are not cool people, but we do have some musician friends, which allows us to occasionally bask in reflected “we’re with the band” coolness. 

We had seats in two separate sections of the stadium, because another bobblehead fanatic friend was unable to attend and asked me to go in her place and get her bobblehead. These people are crazy, I tell you. But the stadium was half-empty and it’s late in a now-meaningless season, so we found seats together in the much better of the two sections, sat down with our drinks, and watched the game. Stadium personnel (who are lovely, by the way) were not checking tickets last night, so people could sit wherever they wanted. Our team has the worst record in the entire league, but there’s an upside to everything, right? 

*****

This wasn’t supposed to be a “that was the week that was” kind of a post, but here we are. It’s Sunday morning now, and I’m probably going to go to Mass, but right now I’m sitting in my backyard listening to cicadas and pondering a tomato. Our tomato plants have underperformed this summer. They’re not achieving their targets. They’re not meeting their metrics. And they don’t give a shit, because they are tomatoes. 

The tomato that I am pondering is ripe enough to pick, I think, but perhaps it would be better to wait a bit. Perhaps it needs just a little bit more time. And it’s not the only one. Today is the last day of summer (yes, I know it’s still August but school starts tomorrow and although it’s maybe not the complete end of summer, it’s the beginning of the end), and I think I would benefit from another day or so. I think I need a little bit more time. I’m going to let that tomato sit for a day or so. The rest of us have to keep to a schedule, but tomatoes are free. I never did remember what “inverse proportion” was supposed to mean, but this thing is over 1,000 words of absolute drivel, and so there’s an inverse proportion for you. The less I have to say, the longer it takes me to say it. 

Burn baby burn

Monday: It's a beautiful day. And almost 20 years to the day after this happened, I was walking across Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville, returning from the badging office in one Federal government building to the Federal government building where I work, when a man drove past me and shouted something too obscene for me to repeat here. Three construction workers, walking away from a food truck where they'd just picked up their lunch, all turned their heads, as shocked as I was.

There was nothing I could do, of course. It was 11:45 on a Monday morning, and he was driving, fast. Later, when I told my husband about it, I couldn't even remember what the car looked like.

One of my government bosses has nicknamed me "Liam Neeson." He says that I'm like Neeson's character in "Taken," because I have a special set of skills, honed over a lifetime. Unfortunately, they're not the kind of skills that make me immune to public harassment and humiliation. But that's fine. I'll just use this little episode to fuel my rage. I'll need it someday.

*****
Speaking of bosses, can we talk about how many I have now? Four. I have four bosses. Fortunately, I like all of them.

But still. Four bosses is a lot.

*****

I didn't think about what happened for the rest of the afternoon. Then I went for a walk after work, with the iPod cranked up to 11. I skipped around, looking for a song that was angry enough to sing along to, and settled on Erasure's "Hallowed Ground," which doesn't really sound like an angry song, at least in terms of melody and instrumentation. But what's angrier than "Who will be the next victim of the criminal dawn?" I sang along, like I do. I can be loud on the street, too. I also sang along to the Pretenders "Talk of the Town:" "Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday. Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday. You'll change..." And maybe I will. Maybe someday, I'll change into a person who can have an upsetting experience, and then just let it go, like it was nothing; like the proverbial water off the back of the proverbial duck. Maybe.

*****
Saturday: It was a bad week, and not just because of the stupid man and his stupid verbal assault. But it got better.  My son had a baseball game today, during which my husband was nearly chucked by the umpire. He never argues with sports officials or coaches. But he did today. Too long a story to make short, but five years from now, we'll refer to the whole episode as the infield fly rule incident, a day that will live in infamy. But that's another story, for another day.

After the game, I was running errands and listening to the radio. It's almost never so bad that singing along with "Disco Inferno" can't make it better. The Capitals just won Game 5 against Pittsburgh, and April is over, finally. Burn that mother down.

Children play in the dark

I haven't gotten around to writing my 2017 book list yet. It won't be as long as the ones from 2016 and 2015. I'm one book into 2018 now, having just finished Joan Didion's The White Album. This was my first for 2018, and my second Joan Didion  and I think that I like her non-fiction better, at least based on this limited selection. She's pretty prolific, so I'll probably read a few more. 

In "On the Morning After the Sixties," one of the last essays in The White Album, Didion writes about college life in the early 1950s, when she studied at Berkeley, and "the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies." I remember reading, a long time ago, something about hand-washing wool sweaters and blocking them on Turkish towels. I think this might have been part of Jacqueline Kennedy's famous Prix de Paris essay, which I cannot find online (Joan Didion was also a Prix de Paris winner); or maybe it was advice from one of the characters in The Group. I didn't know what it meant to "block" a sweater; though I assumed that it meant simply to reshape it so that it dries neatly; and I also didn't know what was special about a Turkish towel versus any other variety. 

The point is that Joan Didion, born in the 1930s and educated in the 1950s, is a member of the last generation of American women who would have known how to block a sweater, and who would have been able to identify a towel as Turkish without looking at the label. 

I was thinking about this as I sat at a table at Chadwick's Restaurant in Audobon, PA, with my husband and sons and my sister and brother-in-law and nephews. It was December 28, a weeknight, still early enough in the holiday week that you can revel in several more days of leisured Christmas coziness, but late enough that you're already thinking about the return to work, and school, and daily routines.  Chadwick's is a nice place, so I found it odd that there wasn't a convenient coat rack to be found, and we had to hang our bulky coats and sweaters and scarves on the backs of our chairs. This would have annoyed Joan Didion, I thought; enough that she might even have written about the sad decline in standards that has made it perfectly acceptable for nice restaurants to offer paper napkins and paper packets of sugar and paper-wrapped straws, and no place to hang your coat. 

*****
The live musician was just starting a break when we arrived, so the restaurant played recorded music. In the Philadelphia suburbs, you can switch stations on your car radio all day long, and never hear anything recorded after 1985 or so, and the recorded music selection at Chadwick's did not vary from local custom. The first track we heard was England Dan and John Ford Coley's Light of the World. 

*****
You know, sometimes I lose the thread on these things. I start with an idea, but I forget details. And sometimes, I remember every detail, but have no idea why they're relevant. I think I had a point when I started this, but I can't remember to save my life what it was. Something about Chicago? But it's too late to abandon it now. I'm too far in. 

*****

Oh, I know why I was thinking about Chicago! It was the band Chicago, and not the city! Because of the Gateway Pharmacy. That's it. 

Yes, I see that I need to back things up a bit. I'll begin (yes, I know--too late) by saying that I'm not particularly nostalgic about most things. Time marches on, and all that. Things change. But like any other almost-old person, there are things about my childhood and youth that I miss. One of those things is old-fashioned neighborhood pharmacies. No, not the kind with the soda fountains, because I'm old, not ancient. I'm talking about the kind of neighborhood pharmacy where you could buy candy and gift items and greeting cards and perfume and I suppose you can buy all of that at Rite-Aid, but it's different.  The Gateway Pharmacy is like the 1978-1983 Tardis stop. And I'm not nostalgic for that particular period of time at all, but drugstores were definitely better then.  I didn't know that they still made Alyssa Ashley Musk, or Vitabath, or Fa, but apparently they do, and the shelves full of vintage toiletries aren't just nostalgia props. I thought about the extent to which so much of the narrative on which I grew up no longer applies, and smelled the Charlie tester, and sang along to Chicago's "Make Me Smile." 

*****
And once again, I don't remember how I was going to finish this now way-off-the-rails post. Joan Didion would probably be horrified at this rambling mess. I'm reading Fire and Fury now, because of course I'm reading Fire and Fury. And although I can't resist "stable genius" jokes (which are never going to get old), I'm actually sorrier for Trump now than I am angry at him, because I believe that he might be well on his way to losing his mind, and it's never funny to see the deterioration of a human person. But I'm plenty angry at the sycophants who are loyal to Trump at the expense of loyalty to right over wrong; and even angrier at the cynical politicians who are willing to use this falling-apart mess of a man as a tool toward their own ends.  The narrative on which I grew up no longer applies; and the narrative on which my children are growing up gets crazier every day.  And love is still the answer, and always was, and always will be. 

Illuminate the main streets and the cinema aisles

Isn't it so much easier and more pleasant to clean your kitchen when you have music to listen to?  I forget this sometimes, but I remembered it tonight, and the nightly dishes and counters routine was much more pleasant as a result.

I skipped around a bit on my husband's old iPod, landing first on The Brothers Johnson's "Strawberry Letter 23", followed by Al Stewart's "Time Passages". Then I found Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha", and listened to it three times.

So many reasons to love "Brimful of Asha". I'm an Indio-Anglophile, if such a thing exists.  Years of working with Indian scientists and software engineers left me with great affection for Indians, who seem to combine razor-sharp wit with kindness like few other cultures can.  Even better than Indian Americans are Indian Brits (or British Indians?)  Because they're BRITISH AND INDIAN.

I like to think that "Brimful of Asha" probably gave at least one record company executive heartburn when he first heard it.  It's a longer-than-five-minutes song about a Bollywood star, and Indian sociopolitics, and life in late-20th-century England, with vaguely Indian melody and instrumentation.  Who would have expected it to be a huge hit? I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it in 1996, and it's held up beautifully.

I'm listening now to Toad the Wet Sprocket's "Nanci".  If only I could bend my words like Uri Geller's spoons.