Re-entry

Just like that, Beach Week is over and with it, summer or so it seems. It’s Monday, my first day back at work (which was just fine after an hour sorting through last week’s emails in conversation view) and it was unseasonably cool; cloudy and gray and slightly breezy with a few drops of rain here and there. I don’t think it got any warmer than 72 degrees today, and that is cool for August in Maryland. 

I write about the weather a lot, don’t I? 

Anyway, school starts in two weeks. That is the end of summer as far as I’m concerned, but the cool temperatures and the October gloom are encroaching on my last weeks of sunshine and warmth, trying to fool me into believing that summer is already gone and that I should just get started with the pumpkin spicing (no) and the Christmas shopping. And I’m not having it. It’s 6:30 and the pool is still open for two hours and the water can’t have gotten that cold overnight (it was just right yesterday) so I’m going to put on a suit and swim laps before I cook dinner. No one here is in any danger of starvation, so dinner can wait. The remains of summer cannot. 

*****

Ha ha ha, that was ridiculous. “The water can’t have gotten that cold overnight,” she says, blithely skipping out the door with her bag and her towel. I should have also brought a space heater and a parka because it was actually freezing. 

Well, let me clarify a bit. The water itself was in fact not that bad. It had gotten a bit colder but it was still quite a nice temperature or would have been had the air temperature not been in the high 60s. Plus, it was rather gray and a bit breezy, and without the sun sparkling on its surface, the pool water appeared dank, which made it feel that much colder. 

My son and his friends were working when I arrived at the pool at 6:45. I was the only swimmer in the place, and my son shook his head when I signed in. “It’s cold, Mom,” he said. “I mean, it’s been colder, but just warning you. It’s pretty cold, especially when you get out.” 

And he was not wrong. Getting into the pool was quite a bit easier than getting out, as a stiff breeze made the already cool air feel downright chilly. It was Baltic, I tell you. Baltic. 

*****

What is it with Wednesdays around here? I am once again writing at work as I await resolution of a technical issue. This time it's everyone, not just me. There's a partial power failure right now where I work, the result of a fix gone wrong. The library is one of the few places where there is both light and WiFi so that's where I am. But it's taking some time for the shared public workstation to set up Windows and sync all of my files and whatever else it has to do. 

30 minutes later and I'm sitting in the courtyard waiting for a call from the help desk. They need to reset my SSO password and they cannot connect to the PW reset application, leading me to the question: What do you do when the help desk cannot help you? And an even bigger question: Who helps the help desk? Who are they supposed to call?

It's 9:30 now; still quite early. I could just go home and work and if this continues for much longer, then that is what I'll do. But we're all in this together and I kind of want to see how it all turns out. Meanwhile I brought a tuna sandwich and some fruit for lunch, so I could just have brunch now rather than waiting for lunch. Tuna salad is good any time of the day. 

Yes it is. 

*****

I’m home now. I worked at five different desks today. I’d connect for a bit and then the connection would drop, and then someone would message me that I could come to room x in building y, and I would be there for a bit and then the whole thing would start over again. I accomplished about three hours’ worth of actual work today, but I  got to hang out with some new people, and I also came up with a really good idea when I was sitting around waiting for my password reset, so it was a pretty productive day altogether. 

*****

It’s Thursday afternoon now, 5:30 PM, and I’m just home from work. I left my phone at home today, not on purpose, of course. But once I was sure that the phone was actually safely on my kitchen counter and not in a ditch somewhere (why would it be in a ditch I wouldn’t go near a ditch to save my soul from Hell) I realized that it’s quite nice to spend a day semi-disconnected. Now I’m catching up on correspondence, and responding to what seems like 50 text messages. It’s not 50. It’s maybe 15. But it’s a lot. Why are these people texting me all day? Am I the only person who works on weekdays? 

*****

My son attends the University of Maryland, which (of course) is now reporting its first case of monkeypox. And there has to be a better name for it, doesn’t there? Monkeypox. Gross. 

I’m not even particularly worried about this; not yet, anyway. It’s Friday, and my mind is blank, and my hands are just moving across this keyboard in an almost-reflexive way. Everything about today, the sunshine and the light and the coming transition from summer to fall, reminds me of 2020. A school year was about to begin and no one knew if or when that would involve entering a school building. The pandemic raged on with no end in sight. The election was around the corner and although I couldn’t wait to see the end of the Trump presidency, I also knew that chaos was going to ensue no matter who won that Godforsaken election. I went to work every morning in my little home office, watching the birds and suburban wildlife outside my window, and wondering if normal life would ever resume. I wondered if anyone even knew what constituted normal life anymore. I still wonder about this. 

*****

But it’s Saturday now, not quite 10 AM, and I’m sitting in my backyard letting my hair dry and listening to the birds, just like I did every morning at the beach, but with different birds. The birds here are quieter. You’d think that inveterate pests and thieves like seagulls would go about their business a little more quietly, draw less attention to themselves, but Avalon’s seagulls are out there and they want you to know it. Hold on to your kids’ sandwiches, they cackle, taunting. Don’t leave those corn chips unattended. Silver Spring birds are politer. You can eat your lunch in my backyard, and your sandwich will remain unmolested. 

But even if a rogue oriole absconds with your lunch, that seems like the worst that could happen right now. Monkeypox and COVID and war and inflation and the constitutional crisis of the day are all out there, but they’re keeping quiet for the moment. With the warm sunshine, birdsong, and clear blue skies, it’s shaping up to be a perfect tail-end-of-summer day. Everything is almost still, except for the trees, barely rustling in the breeze.  

Weather and birds - that is the content that you came here for. 

I can't with this

It’s Friday, May 29 and I’m as angry about politics as I have ever been in my life, if by “politics” I mean the simple ability of politicians and their enablers to tell the difference between right and wrong. The worst thing is that it's entirely possible, even likely, that Donald J. Trump will win another term in November. By "win another term," of course, I mean "do whatever he needs to do up to and including theft, fraud, and murder to hang onto power." Hopefully, the Democrats (who are only marginally better) will take the House and Senate and remove him from office. If using social media to incite gun violence in American cities does not make him unfit for office, then I guess I don't really understand the Constitution.

The Minneapolis police finally arrested the cop who murdered poor George Floyd, who begged for help and cried for his mother, while a merciless thug masquerading as a law enforcement officer held him down, using his knee and the full weight of his body to choke the life out of a man accused of nothing more than passing a bad check. How much pain and terror must a grown man suffer to cry for his mother in front of his tormentors?

By the way, I am actually pro-life. Meaning against abortion, opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances,
opposed to assisted suicide, opposed to refusing refuge to desperate people whose lives are in danger
 and DEFINITELY opposed to mowing people down with machine guns for breaking fucking windows at Target. 

The President who earlier today demanded the death penalty for looters didn’t demand the death penalty for the man who murdered George Floyd. He didn’t call for the death penalty for the Charlottesville white supremacists who murdered Heather Heyer. He didn’t demand swift, deadly justice for the people who murdered Ahmaud Arbery, or Botham Jean, or Atatiana Jefferson, God rest their souls.

My husband is a police officer who had to leave the house in uniform this morning, so not only am I seething with fury at the outrageous oppression that the Black community continues to suffer; I’m also sick with anxiety and fear.

God help us all.

Say crack again

It’s the first full day of Daylight Savings Time, and I’m the only person I know who didn’t complain about the loss of an hour of sleep. It’s not that I don’t miss the sleep, because I do. But I love DST, though it's on borrowed time (get it?) For some reason, there’s a groundswell of anti-DST sentiment. If coronavirus doesn’t get to it, then an act of Congress likely will. But I’ll enjoy the long days for as long as I can.

You know what I won’t enjoy? Spring. You’re a bitch, Spring. Yes, Spring is pretty and shiny and bright, but she is the nastiest skank bitch I’ve ever met. Spring is a fugly slut. I do not trust her.

*****
I have a shitpile of stuff to do, because it’s Spring (Bitch). So I just spent an hour tearing through my to-do list, getting shit done. I checked on my sign-ups, created a new sign-up, responded to emails, wrote some more emails, figured out transportation for this week’s baseball scrimmages, and wrote a job posting for a junior coach for the swim team. I didn’t hyperventilate even one time. Spring and I fight every year, but this time, I’m going to win. I might have to push her in front of a bus, but I’m going to win.

*****
It’s Tuesday now. I went shopping after work, thinking that I’d just get a few groceries. I refuse to yield to coronavirus hysteria, but I thought it might be prudent to stock up a bit. Just in case, you know what I mean?

There are four known cases in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live. And every day, there are more and more pressing calls for the local government to shut down the schools or limit public gatherings or some damn thing. I don’t know what anyone should do except wash their hands and stay home if they’re sick and clean everything in sight. I’m all stocked up on almost everything, just in case we have to self-quarantine, a term that I never used before last week and hope not to have to use again. Meanwhile, I’m planning to go to work tomorrow, because it’s Wednesday and I always go to work on Wednesday. I have to remember to wear pink, or those bitches won’t let me sit with them at lunch.

*****
It’s Wednesday and on Wednesday, we wear pink; and we freeze soup and we stock up on canned goods and frozen pizza. Swept up in the mounting anxiety, I stopped at Aldi for another round of corona-shopping, and I’m ready for a siege.

I did some corona research today, so now I know that the virus that causes COVID-19 is one of several coronaviruses that cause respiratory infections in humans. MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and SARS (Serious Acute Respiratory Syndrome) are other coronaviruses; so called because the spiky protrusions on the round surface of the virus look crown-like. An infinitesimally tiny microscopic particle is causing whole cities to shut down. According to NPR, an 11-year bull market ended today; not because of trade wars or political upheaval here or around the world; but because of a teeny tiny little sphere like a crowned head, like Caesar. Do you remember what Gretchen Wieners said about Caesar? Why should Caesar get to stomp around like a giant, while the rest of us try not to get smushed under his big feet? What's so great about Caesar? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar!

*****
Things I saw today:
A man wearing a t-shirt with the words “Everything is going to be fine” printed in white on black
Water fountains sealed with garbage bags and duct tape
Daffodils
Forsythia

Things I heard today:
All coronavirus, all the time

It’s Thursday, March 12, and you know what? She finally cracked. Gretchen Wieners finally cracked.

Say crack again.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

In just the last 24 hours, all of the major sports have either suspended or delayed their seasons, the NCAA cancelled its conference championships, and the Governor of Maryland ordered schools to close for the next two weeks. And Tom Hanks! Coronavirus got to Tom Hanks, so I guess it’s coming for all of us.

I was in Safeway again this afternoon, collecting the last few self-quarantine essentials. I walked past two women who were hugging and laughing; joking that onlookers would judge them for failing to socially distance. I finished shopping, and got everything I needed. Fortunately I didn’t need disinfectant or hand sanitizer or (why?) toilet paper because those things were all gone. And I feel like I need to write this all down because someday when I’m old, young people will ask me what I remember about March 2020; and I’ll remember those laughing women and golden forsythia and the man with the “Everything is going to be fine” t-shirt. It’s a little crazy right now. Spring is a bitch, and she ramped it up a notch this year. But the t-shirt guy was right.  Everything is going to be fine.

Ninotchka

Early last Sunday morning, I watched a few minutes of “Ninotchka,” one of my favorite movies. I just love Greta Garbo’s performance in this movie. It’s so hard to reconcile Ninotchka with the Garbo of popular myth--the forbidding, unapproachable, unsmiling Swede who famously wanted to be alone. The movie poster for Ninotchka reads “Garbo Laughs!” because it was the first time moviegoers would see Greta Garbo as anything other than serious.

Garbo plays the lead character, Ninotchka Ivanovna Yakushova, an ambitious Soviet bureaucrat and party apparatchik. She is stern and earnestly dedicated, but full of wry cheer. Ninotchka is torn between her genuine commitment to the ideals of the Russian revolution and her honest and clear-eyed realization of its grim reality in practice. The political conflict is real and timely (“Ninotchka” was made in 1939, just as the worst of Stalin's purges were winding down) but it's also a metaphor for Ninotchka's personal conflict, between her desire to succeed in her work and her desire to be a happy woman. Ninotchka is resigned to the demands of life as a rising star of the Russian Communist party but she can't hide her love for life and people and her lively sense of humor, especially from Count Leon, played by Melvyn Douglas. He falls in love with her and she with him. Their only problem is the jealous Duchess Swana. And the vise grip of the party, of course.

Greta Garbo as Ninotchka with Melvyn Douglas as Count Leon.
Was there a more fun couple in any movie, ever?
No, there was not. 

"Ninotchka" is a comedy about the most serious of subjects. It was banned in the USSR and its satellite states, possibly for brilliant dialogue like this:

Buljanoff (the errant party apparatchik whom Ninotchka is sent to Paris to retrieve): How are things in Moscow? 

Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.

Despite her determination to complete her assignment in Paris and return to Moscow, and her uncompromising dedication to the Revolution, Ninotchka falls in love with more than Count Leon. She falls in love with the beauty and joie de vivre of pre-war Paris. “I’m so happy,” she says. “Oh I'm so happy. No one can be so happy without being punished. I will be punished and I should be punished.” Ninotcha’s devotion to the Fatherland and her guilty love for Paris form just one of the movie’s love triangles. The other is between Ninotchka, Count Leon, and Grand Duchess Swana, a White Russian exile in Paris and Ninotchka’s rival for Leon’s affections. Ninotchka and Swana first meet at a Paris nightclub:

Grand Duchess Swana (commenting on Ninotchka’s elegant evening dress): Isn't it amazing? One gets the wrong impression of the new Russia. It must be charming. I'm delighted conditions have improved so. I assume this is what the factory workers wear at their dances?

Ninotchka: Exactly! You see, it would have been very embarrassing for people of my sort to wear low-cut gowns in the old Russia. The lashes of the Cossacks across our backs were not very becoming. And you know how vain women are.

Grand Duchess Swana : Yes. You're quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake when we let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns.

Like everything else in “Ninotchka,” this conversation is about more than one thing. And like almost everything else in the movie, it is both modern and timeless. It’s a perfect verbal sparring match between two beautiful and brilliant women who both want the same man, and the political passive aggression makes it as relevant today as it was in 1939.

Political intrigue and aggression aside, "Ninotchka" ends happily because love wins over all. Given a choice, people prefer beauty and friendship and art and fun and laughter to ideology and dialectics and the vanguard of revolution. It’s 1939 again, and most of us prefer Paris to Moscow. 

One Person in New York

I was listening to "All Things Considered" one day last week, and I heard a story about a snowplow driver in Montana (or Wyoming) who wrote a song about being a snowplow driver. He recorded it on YouTube and (as they say on the Internet), the silly thing went viral. People liked the song so much that they called their local radio station and asked to hear it over the air. The radio station offered to produce a professional recording of the song. Asked what he thought about the song’s success, the man said that people like the idea of an ordinary person with an ordinary job doing something creative or artistic.

Later the same day, I scrolled my news feed and was shocked and saddened to read about Jason Polan’s untimely death at age 37. Jason Polan was an artist. His best-known project was published in part in Every Person in New York, a book of his sketches of New Yorkers (he also had a blog of the same title). Polan drew quick sketches of thousands of people, some of them famous and many of whom didn’t know they were being captured on paper. He aspired to draw literally every person in New York, an impossible goal no matter how long he might have lived, but he finished over 30,000 drawings. Who knows how many he might have done if he had more time?

According to his New York Times obituary, he held informal drawing meet-ups, usually at Taco Bell restaurants. Anyone could show up, and lots of people did, many of them non-artists. They drew pictures of each other, or of their food or the contents of their bags, or whatever else was in front of them. It didn’t matter if they were talented or skilled or not. Something about the idea of carrying around a sketchbook and drawing what you see appealed to Polan’s roving band of part-time would-be art students. Maybe they were ordinary people with ordinary jobs, but they were also artists, because they made art.

Jason Polan wasn’t ordinary at all. His other major project, Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art, was apparently an attempt to get a job at MoMA. MoMA didn’t hire him, which is probably good for the rest of us, though I have to wonder about the competence and vision of museum curators who aren't capable of recognizing and rewarding such obvious genius. Their loss.

I don't write songs (though I do sing quite a lot) and I don't draw much, but I do this. I write about whatever I think about, whatever is interesting, whatever is in front of me. I'm just one of a million other ordinary people who try to spend a few minutes a day making something. Jason Polan was a great artist who saw the beauty and value of ordinary people, not just as subjects but as fellow artists. It's a terrible loss.

Waiting for the hammer to fall

It’s Friday night, the first Friday night in months when I haven’t had anything to do, so I’m sitting on my couch and watching “In the Name of the Father,” a movie that I really can’t believe that I”ve never seen before. Just another night of The Troubles, here in Silver Spring, Maryland in 2019. Catch yourself on.

Did I mention before that I have too many handbags? I think I did. Well I also have too many products. Too many creams and lotions and serums and lotions and stupid too many lipsticks. Stupid. So now I have a project. I’m going to use everything up. I finished one lipstick today, and I’m at the very end of a container of facial cleanser. It’s very satisfying to dispose of the empty containers. It’s like crossing something off a list, and I do love to cross things off a list.

It’s 9 PM now. The movie’s over, and that’s enough for today, because the kitchen isn’t going to compulsively clean itself. It won’t take long. It’s not that dirty.

*****
So now it's Saturday and I'm at Nationals Park, waiting for the Nats game to begin. It's my first Nats game of the season. They're playing the Brewers. Game time in 35 minutes or so.

We're in section 109, just a few rows back from the field, on the shady side of the stadium. They're really good seats. I was a Phillies fan when I was young, and I used to dream about the day when I'd be able to afford seats like these. If this was a Phillies game circa 1984 or so, I'd be sitting in the 400 level of Veterans' Stadium. And we wouldn't be playing the Brewers because in those days (I love being old enough to say or write that without sounding ridiculous) the only inter-league play was during the World Series. But of course, this isn't an inter-league game anyway, because the Brewers are National League now. Time marches resolutely on.

*****
It's nice being here early. It's a bobblehead night and my husband insists that we arrive early on bobblehead nights. They might run out. So we have our Patrick Corbin bobbleheads, our drinks, and plenty of legroom. My 14-year-old son is standing at the rail, watching the pregame warm-up. He said that he wants to use his kid advantage to catch a player's eye and maybe get a ball. He's small for his age. But he's getting taller and he'll be 15 soon. Like most things, the kid advantage does not last forever. One day you're a cute little kid and the next day you're just another punk-ass teenager. The march of time continues.

*****
Sunday afternoon. I think I mentioned once before that when I go to a baseball game, it tends to be an eventful one. Last night was no exception. First of all, it was extraordinarily hot, even in the evening, even on the shady side of the stadium. I think I suffered a little bit of heatstroke, and I’m pretty heat-proof. The players must have really suffered, especially since the game went for 14 innings (we left after 9). The Nats lost 15-14. Not only was it a marathon game, but a fan sitting four rows in front of us got beaned by a foul ball. Rumor has it that his jaw is broken. I can’t find a story about it online because there have been so many foul ball vs. fan incidents at Nats Park this year that this one seems to have fallen off the radar. But it happened. I saw it and heard it.

We listened to more of the game on the way home, and then watched the end on TV, well after midnight. The Nats literally ran out of relief pitchers (and they don’t have that many to begin with). With a temperature of 85 degrees at midnight, it was a war of attrition more than anything else. That might be my last baseball game this year. It’s almost hockey season.

In other news, Operation Use it Up proceeds apace. Do you know how long it takes to use up a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker? Do you have any idea why a middle-aged lady even has a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker? I have two. I don’t know why. I don’t remember acquiring these articles, but there they are and I’m going to use them up if it’s the last thing I do. It might be the last thing I do.

*****
Monday

“What the hell are we fighting for?
Ah, just surrender and it won't hurt at all
You just got time to say your prayers
Yeah, while you're waiting for the hammer to, hammer to fall.”

--Queen, “Hammer to Fall”

It’s 8:45. I just cleaned up dinner. I made pork chops in orange juice, which I haven’t made since 2014. It wasn’t very good. I suppose this is why I haven’t made it for five years. Now I’m watching the end of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I love Queen. God rest Freddie Mercury’s soul.

How did I know that I made pork chops and orange juice in 2014? I’m glad you asked. It’s because I wrote about it, proving (if the entire paragraph about a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker wasn’t proof enough) that there’s no bit of ephemera that’s too trifling for me to document.

I’m about a quarter of the way through Postwar, and it’s instructive. I’m pretty solid on 20th century Europe, so I’m not learning anything new in terms of bare facts. But the blinding-speed cataclysm and upheaval that was Europe from 1914 to 1989 offers useful perspective for those of us who are shocked by how much American political life has changed in just the last three years. It’s helpful and bracingly terrifying to remember that things might well just be getting started; and that a year from now, 2019 might be the good old days.

I’m fun to be around, am I not?

*****
So now it’s Tuesday, one day later; and, this happened. Did I not predict this? Did I not tell you all that something like this was going to happen? Of course, I was thinking that it would happen in the next year or so, not the next 24 hours, but wasn’t that the point? “Blinding speed” was the phrase I used, in fact.

But that’s enough about the march of history. Let’s talk about the half-life of a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker. I’m pretty sure that this one Lipsmacker will take longer to finish than the Conte government was in power. It might outlast NATO and the entire postwar structure of Western Europe. It’s nice to know that some things were made to last. Did I mention that it’s a Starburst-flavored Lipsmacker? Does anyone have any insight whatsoever into why a woman who should be planning for her old age would buy such a thing? What was I thinking? And why do Italian people have all the luck? No heads of government are resigning on this side of the Atlantic, that’s for sure. Non è giusto.

*****
It’s Wednesday now and I haven’t seen or heard news all day. I’m going to assume for purposes of this blog that Western Europe is still standing and that no other world governments have fallen since yesterday.

Today I went with my older son to his college orientation. My younger son’s high school orientation is next week. Work is getting busy again, and the summer is drawing to an end. The last few weeks--quiet mornings, slow-paced workdays, evening swims, movies on the couch with my family, reading in bed--have been almost like a vacation. I wish it could last a little longer, but nothing lasts forever, not even a lip balm, and especially not summer.

Dead Language

I looked back at some old posts, and realized that I seem to write a lot about handbags. I don't know what that's about. I mean, what is there to say, really?

So let's talk about books instead, because you don't get enough of that around here. I just finished Motherfocloir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language, by Darach O'Seaghdha. I got this a long time ago, and forgot about it, but after my trip to Ireland, I was curious about the Irish language movement and remembered that I had this.

Apparently, there are fewer than 100,000 fluent, everyday Irish speakers in the whole of Ireland, north or south, with maybe a few hundred thousand more people around the world who speak or understand the language to varying degrees. It's a compulsory subject for most Irish schoolchildren and has been for some years, so maybe those numbers will grow. Even for the majority who don't speak Irish at all, it's still a fact of daily life in Ireland. Signs in most Irish towns are printed in two languages--Irish and English; and lots of official announcements--on trains, for example--are spoken in both languages, too. So if Irish ends up dying out, it won't be because Ireland didn't try to save it.

*****
Motherfocloir is hard to describe. The word focloir, by the way, means "dictionary" in Irish; and the title is meant to be a clever, attention-grabbing play on another long word beginning with "mother."  Anyway, it's kind of a book about the language, with lots of vocabulary lists and definitions, broken up with commentary and observations about how the language has evolved and how language influences thought and culture. So I suppose it's something of a dictionary, but it's much more of an extended commentary about what language represents to a culture and how it influences the thoughts and ideas of each individual who speaks or writes in that language.

The Irish language is a political issue in Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, taxpayers question the wisdom of spending so much money and effort (signage, compulsory education) on a language that only a handful of people speak. In Northern Ireland, Irish is one of many bones of contention between Unionists (those who want Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom) and Nationalists (those who favor reunification with the southern counties and independence from the U.K., which makes the word "unionist" a little confusing). The 1998 Good Friday Agreement provides for some official support for the Irish language, but the Nationalists want to see more mandated official use of the language, rather than just the "if enough people want to speak and read and write in Irish then I guess we won't try to stop them" approach outlined in the Good Friday Agreement. Of course, this isn't the biggest problem that Northern Ireland has right now, with a messy Brexit becoming more and more likely.

*****
A few weeks after my trip, this article showed up in my newsfeed, and so I read it. The writer explains that the name gaeltacht--the Irish word for the Irish-speaking places in western Ireland--translates roughly as "the Irishness." And that's really how I would describe Motherfocloir, too. It's about the Irish language, but it's more about how the Irish language shapes the Irishness, and about whether or not a distinctive Irish identity would even exist without the language.

Maybe a person who speaks Irish is more Irish than a person who speaks only English. But that's a troublesome idea, especially for an American. My mother-in-law is a U.S. citizen, but after 46 years in the United States, she still hasn't really mastered English. She gets by, and she tries--she has taken classes on and off for years, and she does crossword and word search puzzles to help her to recognize more English words. But even though she can carry on a conversation, she'll never be really fluent in English. I think she feels less American because of that. There's an American frame of reference shaped by idiom and wordplay and jokes that she doesn't get. And I'm sure that she thinks in Korean. But she's American. It says so, right on her passport.

*****
Toward the end of Motherfocloir, O'Seaghdha cites C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as a book that he enjoyed but disagreed with. I suppose lots of people, especially non-Christians, would disagree with The Screwtape Letters, but O'Seaghdha specifically complains about Lewis's "zero-sum take on Christianity and his bitter dismissal of romantic love," a criticism that made absolutely no sense to me. So now I'm re-reading Screwtape, and finding that although O'Seaghdha is dead wrong about Lewis's views on Christianity and romantic love, he's dead right when he writes that "Great writing is never just about one thing..." Motherfocloir, though not great (especially when you're comparing it with Screwtape or anything else that C.S. Lewis wrote) is very good. Mostly because it's not just about one thing.

Transient

When it comes to the physical world, I tend not to notice things. I can drive past the same bench for years, and have no idea what it looks like. (Still.) And it doesn't matter how many times I drive to a place; I can still find a way to get lost. I don't know why this is. Faces stay with me, and I'm very good at matching colors, but geographical landmarks fade into the background and I don't notice them until they change, very dramatically.

Right next door to where I work. a whole building just came down and I barely noticed it. I'm lucky enough to sit by a window; and a few weeks ago, I looked outside and noticed a backhoe moving back and forth, rhythmically gathering piles of debris from one spot on the site where the building once stood, and moving them to another spot. I understand now why 4-year old boys like to watch the action at a construction site. It's very entertaining.

But now a building that's been there for the whole almost year that I worked next door to it (and presumably much longer), is just gone, shoveled away like piles of dirty snow.

I don't really care about the building at all. I have no idea what it contained and I don't even remember what my office view looked like when it was still standing. And I'm not worried about what's going to take its place. Things change.

Last year, I read Maeve Brennan's The Long-Winded Lady. Maeve Brennan moved from place to place when she lived in New York. She lived in hotels and efficiency apartments, and she went out for dinner almost every night, eating at the same restaurants over and over. She never seemed to stay in one apartment or hotel for more than a few months at a time, but she still complained about the pace of change in New York. Every time she looked out a window, or walked around a corner, an old building was coming down, replaced by a high-rise office or apartment building. Brennan herself moved constantly, but she wanted New York to stay the same; that is to say, the same as it was when she found it.

*****

I've never been to Paris, so I've never seen Notre Dame. All of the Americans I know who are mourning its near-destruction are attached to a building that they saw only a handful of times. But I understand. There are lots of places, important and obscure, that I love as much as Parisians love Notre Dame. And they're all temporary--the 800-year-old cathedral, and the 100-year-old beach town, and the neighborhood pool and the who-knows-what-it-was building outside my office window. Nothing man-made is permanent. Nothing.

Fiction and non-fiction

Monday: It's 6:50 AM, and I'm the only person in the house who's awake, but that will change in 20 minutes or so. Meanwhile, it's time to get started on a post for the week.

In "Stranger Than Fiction," Will Ferrell plays an accountant who is also the lead character in a work-in progress novel written by a neurotic novelist played by Emma Thompson. He discovers (I forget how) that he is not only a fictional character, but a doomed one; and he spends the rest of the movie trying to change his fate and convince the author not to kill him off. It's a good movie.

I'm not a novelist, but I write. Some days, I do little else. Sometimes I write about how or why to do things that must be done--a procedure, or a policy, or a weekly email that lets swim team families know what meets and events are happening this week, and what everyone has to do to make sure that those things happen.  Sometimes, I write about things that have already happened--a past performance narrative for a proposal, or a blog post about a new product release, or another email newsletter with highlights of the last month's events and accomplishments.

I realized yesterday, as I wrote a weekly newsletter, that writing about events and plans is almost the same for me as actually making them happen. In fact, it's the only way that I can make something real and concrete.

*****
And now it's Wednesday, and who even knows what I was thinking when I wrote that. It was a bad day.

But Tuesday was a much better day. At 12:30 or so, I was in a meeting at the government site where I work, when a senior Fed interrupted the meeting to announce that the Thai soccer players and their coach had all gotten safely out of the flooded cave where they'd been trapped

That night, my sons were watching "The Martian," a pretty good movie, on TV. I wondered aloud if the movie had already been scheduled to air, or if the network's programmers had made a last-minute decision to show it after the miraculous rescue. My older son asked me what one thing had to do with the other. What does a high-budget movie about an improbable space mission have to do with 12 little boys and one man trapped in a dank, cold, pitch-black underground pit, that could so easily have been their tomb?

A world waiting with bated breath, watching a race against life and death. A no-expenses spared all-hands-on-deck rescue mission. Volunteers willing to endure great physical hardship, even extreme danger, just for the possibility of saving one life, or 13. The heartbreaking sacrifice of a hero who gives up his own life to save others'. And a cinematic happy ending. No matter how awful humanity can be (and we suck sometimes), we will still bear any burden and pay any price (JFK, I think) to save another person's life, whether he's lost in space or trapped in an underground pit. You couldn't write a happier ending. 

Saman Kunan, rest in peace.

GIrl-on-girl crime

Sunday: I have a busy week this week, and will be away next weekend, so I could just not write anything, but I have a more or less continuous once-a-week-at-least streak underway and I feel compelled to maintain it. It's Sunday, and I have to do some actual work for my actual job today, but I thought this morning that if I could choke at least a single paragraph out of myself, then I'll have a start for the week. And then I realized, as I wrote this, that this IS actually a paragraph, which I DID choke out of myself, so I DO have a post started. Mission accomplished!

*****
But really. There's so much to write about, in life and in the world. I could write about a certain hockey team, but apparently, I'm now a sports superstition person. This is why I've been carrying my least-favorite red handbag since the end of April.

Or I could write about media bias and the double standard that so-called conservatives always complain about. This week, they're actually right. I think that Ivanka Trump is a silly, shallow, stupid, and yes, feckless person. I think that her thoughtless little Instagram post featuring her beautiful self holding her beautiful baby was insensitive to the point of cruelty. And I also think that Samantha Bee should be fired.

I'm probably not the most impartial observer here, because I find Samantha Bee even less likable than Ivanka Trump, if that's possible. But that word used to describe a woman is beyond the proverbial pale, and it's even worse when a it's a woman who says it. Like Ms. Norbury said: "You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores." And worse.

*****
To the two girls who flung side-eye at me as I walked and sang along to Cascada's "Evacuate the Dance Floor:"  Keep walking, ladies. Nothing to see here. Worry about yourselves. Maybe go and do something useful, like learning CPR. Because what if that beat actually was killing me? Did you think about that?

*****
Tuesday: I read two stories today, one that made me sad, and one that made me even sadder. And I can't help but think that the two are connected. I'm not sure why.

I don't care much about shoes or jewelry, but I have always loved handbags, and Kate Spade's were exactly suited to my taste when I first started to earn enough money to buy a real, grown-woman handbag. In the mid to late 1990s, before I was married and had children, I owned at least 10 Kate Spade bags and wallets. I still have one tiny evening bag; all of the other original nylon Kate Spades from the late '90s are gone (they were beautiful, but not very durable). Kate Spade once wrote or said something about how in the Midwest, where she was from, a woman chose a handbag because it was pretty and she liked it, not because it was a status symbol or the must-have accessory of the moment. Ironically, her simple nylon black-labeled bags became the must-have accessory of the moment; and I won't pretend that I have never been interested in having the must-have thing, just because it's the must-have thing. But the real reason why I bought Kate Spade handbags was because they were pretty and I liked them.

Sometime in 1998 or 1999, I came home from work one night, so exhausted that I took off my shoes and my coat, and fell asleep on my couch, still in my work clothes. A few days later, I was paging through a magazine (I used to love magazines) and saw a Kate Spade advertisement, in which a young woman, just home from work, was sound asleep on her couch, still in her work clothes, her Kate Spade bag sitting on the floor in front of her couch. The young woman in the advertisement was pretty, of course, but not intimidatingly beautiful. Her apartment was colorful and book-filled and cheerful and just a little shabby. It was as if someone had taken a photo of my life, and then made it a little bit nicer and prettier and more glamorous than it really was. And that made me really happy, just for a minute.

Now I wish just for a moment that I'd been the scrapbooking type of girl who cut ads out of magazines and saves them. I also wish that there was some way for Kate Spade to have known how much her work, and her ideas, and her inspired, down-to-earth but completely original vision meant to me and so many other women. Maybe she didn't know. Or maybe she did, but whatever she was suffering was so awful that she couldn't find solace even in her great success and tremendous accomplishments. I'm so sorry for her family, and I hope that they and she will find peace.

*****
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/. 1-800-273-8255.

The Baby and the Bathwater

It's two months post-Weinstein now, and everyone seems to have came to a sort of simultaneous mass agreement to enforce zero tolerance on sexual harassment or misconduct. All of a sudden, any man (well, ALMOST any man) who has ever behaved or spoken inappropriately has to be punished, severely and possibly permanently. 

Like lots of other #metoo women, I have mixed feelings about this. Weinstein deserves his comeuppance (the word of the moment), and so do lots of other prominent men. With super high-profile people like Weinstein and Matt Lauer, the worst offense is not so much the wildly inappropriate or even illegal sexual behavior; it's the gross abuse of power. In those cases, the public downfall is more than deserved. (And it should have happened to Donald Trump. And it should have happened to Bill Clinton. And it's not too late.)

But there's the baby and there's the bathwater. I would like to drain the dirty bathwater, and then thoroughly scrub the tub, but I don't want to discard the baby. I like the baby. I like a lot of men who might, at some point during their personal or professional lives, have said or done something offensive or stupid. In fact, I love some of those men, and I don't want to see them--my friends, or my brothers, or my cousins, or my colleagues might be among them--cast into outer darkness forever. Should we judge the behavior of twenty or even five years ago by the standard of today? Because if so, then who among us will stand up to scrutiny? 

On the other hand (there's always another hand, isn't there? It's why we have two) I have extremely limited patience with the men who are now crying that they just don't know where the line is anymore. They just don't know how to behave! They don't know what they're allowed to do or say! Because it's not that hard. If you're not intimately involved with a woman, then she does not want you to touch most parts of her body. If you work with women, then they do not want to see naked pictures of you or anyone else, and they don't want to talk about sex, either. Because it's work. See? Pretty easy. 

The larger implications of this whole thing are just beginning to become clear. Or at least one specific thing is clear, and that's that the sex-soaked culture of the last 50 years, in which every aspect of entertainment, art, sports, music, politics, and pretty much every other field of human endeavor is permeated and dominated by sex, will have to change. If we're going to hold men (and women, of course) accountable for maintaining a level of decorum that excludes recreational sexual aggression, then we probably can't shove near-naked bodies in people's faces 24 hours a day anymore. 

On its own, that's a good thing. Even if I wasn't a Catholic, I wouldn't actually want to see sex scenes in every movie. I'm disgusted and bored by crude sexual humor on the radio and on TV. I cringe when I hear the lyrics of some of my children's favorite songs. I'm tired of seeing so-called cheerleaders dressed like pole dancers.* 

But the baby is still in the dirty bathwater, isn't he? Bari Weiss** said something about revolutions taking on a life of their own, quickly swallowing everyone in their path, devouring the guilty, the innocent, and the indifferent bystanders, and it's not unlikely that this revolution will have unintended consequences. Ideally, the culture will shift toward an idea of sexuality that acknowledges and respects human dignity. But if you have been on this blog for more than five minutes, then you know that I never expect the ideal outcome. The worst case scenario is my default option. I even have a tag. 

And what's the worst-case scenario? There are any number, but the one that I can see rising to the top is a new Puritanism that combines the very worst of radical feminist hatred of men and radical religious hatred of women, in a country so divided that you won't be sure which standard prevails from one county to the next. In this scenario, Roy Moore wins in Alabama and ten years later, he's part of the moderate wing of whatever new party replaces the Republican party; the moderate wing being the one that believes that a man should only beat the women he's related to, and that a man shouldn't marry a 14-year-old girl without her father's permission. Meanwhile, in what we now call the blue states, men will be fined or arrested for smiling at women they're not married to, and state-financed abortion up to forty weeks will be a basic civil right. 

Or maybe the whole thing will blow over, and everything will be back to normal, whatever that is, in six months. I don't think so, though. I think that a hard rain is going to fall. I think there's going to be a sea change. I'm praying that it's the right one. 

*****

*That's not so much an attack on NFL cheerleaders as a defense of pole dancers. Why should we consider a stripper a social undesirable; while NFL cheerleaders, who dress and behave in the same manner, are held up as examples of wholesome young womanhood? 

**By the way, I agree with a lot of Ms. Weiss's column, but I've never heard anyone say "Believe all women." There's a huge difference between "Believe women" and "Believe all women," always and everywhere, just because they're women. It's the baby and the bathwater again. Don't throw away the very reasonable "Believe women" because it sounds almost like "Believe ALL women." They are two different things. 

Distraction

I have been following this week's political events more closely than I normally do. And I should have written things down as they occurred to me, because I can't for the life of me remember exactly what I wanted to say about McCain and Bush and Kelly and #metoo and all of the rest of it. I suppose that I'll just write through the weekend on and off, and I'll eventually get to a point. Or maybe I won't. You've been warned. Anyway, it's just been an interesting week, for lots of reasons. All of a sudden, I live in a world in which John McCain and George W. Bush are my heroes.

All day yesterday, I heard and read stories about John Kelly's "defense" of President Trump. And I suppose it was a defense, in the way that you might defend a friend who drunkenly drives onto someone's front lawn and takes out the mailbox and part of the porch, and you say "Hey, he didn't kill anyone!"

So anyway, I've been following the political news cycle this week. I even watched part of Lawrence O'Donnell on Thursday night. And I can't stand Lawrence O'Donnell. And he did exactly what I'd have expected. He extracted the tiniest thread that could tie Kelly's speech to racism and sexism, and he pulled as hard as he could, claiming that "empty barrel," which was really just a garden variety insulting and demeaning and unworthy of a White House Chief of Staff way to describe a Congresswoman, however grandstanding and cynical she is (and she is both), as an explicitly racist and sexist slur. So now we're expected to accept that old-time Ross Perot-style down-home aphorisms like "The empty barrel makes the most noise" are always and everywhere sexist or racist when used by a man to insult a woman, or by a white person to insult a person of color.

Even O'Donnell knows that this isn't true. On the other hand, I agreed with him just a tiny bit when he said that he doesn't remember the world that Kelly recalled, a world in which women were "sacred," because I don't really remember that world either. Kelly and O'Donnell are a little older than I am, but not that much.  And it's also worthwhile to point out that a world in which women are "sacred" excludes the possibility of a White House Chief of Staff insulting a Congresswoman during a press briefing. It also, of course,  excludes the possibility of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.

Apparently, there's video now that backs the Congresswoman's claim that Kelly lied about her remarks at the FBI dedication in Florida. I'm not going to watch it, because I really hate watching videos online. I'm also not going to watch it because 1. It might show that she's telling the truth 2. It might show that he's telling the truth, and 3. It doesn't really matter.  Or it does matter, I suppose, but the larger issue, which is the total domination of political debate by mean-spirited one-up-manship and disingenuous fake outrage and bad faith and flat-out dishonesty on both (all) sides will not change one bit if I force myself to watch the video to figure out the truth of this particular little he-said she-said. It doesn't matter.

(And on the subject of he-said she-said, I guess that we've finally reached critical mass. If the questions are "how long does it take before people will believe women who say that they have suffered sexual harassment or worse?" and "how many women have to accuse a man before people believe that he actually is a sexual predator?" then the answers usually are "years and years" and "a shitload." But I say "critical mass," because the Weinstein scandal might actually change things a little bit. The timing could have been better, of course. A year ago, maybe a #metoo hashtag campaign could have changed the election results.)

So yes, Kelly "defended" Trump. He also pointed out--indirectly, but clearly--that Trump has never sacrificed anything for anyone, has nothing but contempt for women, and isn't smart or sensitive enough to understand well-meaning advice on how to talk to a grieving military widow (Hint: Maybe don't repeat the "he knew what he was getting into" part verbatim, with no additional context).  With friends like that, I suppose Trump doesn't need any (more) enemies.

Masha Gessen suggests (the essay as a whole is a little extreme, as might be expected of a person born in the Soviet Union) that Kelly seems to have little respect for the vast majority of Americans who have never served in the military. One one hand, I understand Kelly's anger.  It's a problem that we have been at war for 16 years now, and most of us live life every day without even thinking about the war(s) or the people who are fighting them, or their families. On the other hand, it's just stupid to suggest that the military is the only place where people sacrifice and serve and even risk their lives for the benefit of others, and John Kelly doesn't seem stupid to me, so I wonder what else he was getting at.

It's almost 6:30 on Sunday night now, and I never did come to the point, because I never figured out what it is. My son went to his high school's homecoming game on Friday night. He and a group of classmates made t-shirts, each with a single letter painted on the front, and they sat together to form "Class of 2019." My son was inordinately pleased to be wearing the "F." In two years, most of them will be freshmen in college, but some of them--maybe even my son--will be in uniform. That has nothing to do with everything that happened last week, except that it does, somehow.  We still don't really know what happened to those four soldiers in Niger, do we?

August 1914

Oh, hello. It's Friday night, so you must be waiting for me to start writing about the ephemera of my daily life. I won't disappoint you. Or maybe I will.  Who knows.

*****

One thing that perhaps I've never mentioned is that I'm obsessed with my Fitbit, and will sometimes go to absurd lengths to get my daily steps in.  And this is why I always walk around when I'm talking on the phone.

You already know where this is going, don't you?

So I wondered, as I paced the house while talking on the phone with my husband, if I was anywhere near 10,000 steps.  I walked, and I talked, and I looked everywhere--in my handbag, in my coat pocket, in my car--for my phone, so that I could check the Fitbit app.  How many steps do I have, I wondered; and more importantly, where on earth is my phone? I knew that I had brought it home, because I had heard it ringing. And then I had answered it, and had a whole conversation. And that's why I couldn't find the phone in my car, or my handbag--because I was holding it in my hand.

Stuff like that?  All the damn time.

*****

It's Saturday now, and a beautiful day. We've had little to complain of this winter, cold-wise, but that has not stopped me from complaining, because I'd prefer for the temperature not to drop below 45 or so, at any time of the year, day or night. Freezing cold and snow in March after a warm and pleasant February seems like an insult, but the world probably deserves to be insulted right about now. And I don't even know what the weather has been like anywhere other than Maryland and the mid-Atlantic states. Everywhere else in the world might have had an entirely normal, seasonal winter, for all I know.

*****

I'm still reading Math Squared. Among the many things that don't make any sense is Hyperbolic Geometry, in which there are triangles whose three angles do not add up to 180 degrees. Except that the so-called triangles are stretched onto a curved surface, which means that they're not really triangles--they're loosely triangular things with curved sides. That's a shape, but it's not a triangle. Euclid's Fifth Axiom still holds, as far as I'm concerned. Too bad that I'm too old for the Fields Medal. Because that's the kind of brilliant mathematical insight that should win me a major award. Age discrimination is all too hideously real.

*****
I've avoided, thus far, writing about what's really important. A 14-year-old girl was raped at my son's high school last week, in a boys' bathroom, smack dab in the middle of the damn school day. Perhaps you have heard about it. It made national news, because the two perpetrators, 17 and 18 years old, were recent immigrants from Central America.  Sean Spicer even mentioned it during the White House daily press briefing on Tuesday, because why waste a crisis? Why miss an opportunity to use someone's unbearable suffering to advance an agenda? Not that the Democrats are any better. But this isn't about politics; not really, anyway.

My son's school is a nice, clean, well-run suburban high school, in a nice neighborhood, with nice, involved, caring parents. So the natural shock and outrage and grief that does (and should) accompany such a horrible event was followed by a week and a half of listserv discussion and Facebook hand-wringing and accusations--against the school administration, against politicians, against conservative anti-immigration activists, against pro-immigration liberals, and against anyone who questions whatever political orthodoxy happens to be correct at the moment.  It's hard to keep up.

(Side note: Our school system is one of the best in the country, but it's also a large bureaucracy, because we're humans and we haven't figured out yet how to run an endeavor  that must serve so many people, rich and poor, of every conceivable ethnic background, from every imaginable variety of family, without quite a bit of bureaucracy. I believe in public school, but you have to accept that it is what it is. If you expect highly trained and professionalized school administrators to respond to parent concerns about anything at all, much less something so awful, in any terms other than carefully prepared statements and tightly organized meetings, then you're barking up the wrong tree.  They can't be what they're not.)

*****
There's way more to this, of course.  The town banded together.  The anger and outrage subsided, replaced by expressions of support for the family, and declarations of unity and togetherness as a school and community.  Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily. I just don't know how supported the poor girl and her family feel by a hashtag campaign and banners and posters and a school-wide wear-your-colors spirit day. This hideous crime has hurt the school and its students, but it's still a crime against only one young girl.  She is the victim, not Rockville High School.  And I wonder: Does she feel empowered by the stream of social media posts tagged #rockvillestrong? Does she see the hand-lettered bedsheet banners, and the giant #rockvillestrong made of plastic cups inserted into the chain link fence, and feel cared for and protected? Does she see the pictures of students clad in orange and black, and know that her fellow students stood up together to defend her? Or does she feel that the worst day of her life has been turned into a block party?

*****
Maybe that's not fair.  Neither is life. I get that all of the social media outpouring and the orange and black spirit wear and the parents declaring how proud they are of our kids and our school and our community are all well-meaning gestures, born of good intentions.  And that reminds me of something; a road somewhere, or something.

*****
That took something of a turn, didn't it? I'm much better at ephemera than politics or social criticism. Who am I to criticize? It's Sunday night now, which feels very different from Friday night.  Some days or weeks change everything and you're never the same again. That happened to me, a long time ago, and now there's a 14-year-old girl who is maybe just now realizing that she'll never be the same again, either.  I know her name, though of course I won't repeat it, not to anyone. I hope she'll be OK. I'll think of her often.

Bravely facing the applause

Lent: 3 days (almost) down.  400 to go. Sigh.

*****

I don't write about pop culture very often. I wrote about the Oscars two years ago, here, and one other time on my old blog--2008, maybe.  Most pop culture bloggers would think it necessary to post an Oscar recap sometime within 24 hours of the actual event, but I just don't roll that way.

I was kind of dreading the telecast; in fact, I almost didn't watch it at all.  Anyone who's been here for five minutes knows how I feel about the 45th President, and I'm also not one of those people who thinks that celebrities shouldn't express political opinions.  I'm just getting so kill-me-now bored with all of Hollywood, and the entire Internet, falling all over themselves to be the biggest of all resisters.  Newsflash: It doesn't take that much courage to stand in front of an auditorium containing the whole entertainment industry, and express your dislike of Donald Trump.  But to my surprise, the stick-it-to-the-man Trump outrage and tedious identity politics were more subdued than usual.  And the show, even without Lady Gaga, was very good.

Highlights:

• Justin Timberlake, in possibly my favorite-ever Oscar opening number.  There's nothing I didn't love about this performance. 
• Jimmy Kimmel, to my great surprise. The Meryl Streep and Matt Damon roasts were hilarious ("Chinese ponytail movie" killed me), and the tour bus visit, though possibly not his idea, was brilliantly executed and so much fun to watch. 
• Sara Bareilles, to my even greater surprise. I'm not a fan of her singing or songwriting, but I loved that performance. In fact, all of the musical performances were very good. 
• Viola Davis!  Finally!  I believe every word that she says on screen, and every look, and every gesture. I'm so happy to see her brilliance recognized. 

Not so highlights:

• Anousheh Ansari reading Asghar Farhadi's statement after the Iranian filmmaker won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for "The Salesman." I hate almost everything that Donald Trump has said and done since January 20, especially the travel ban (both 1.0 and 2.0.) And of course, Mr. Farhadi has every right to say whatever he thinks, either himself or through his representative. But how is it possible that no one in the room recognized the irony of a human rights scolding coming from an Iranian?  Did no one who applauded Ansari's speech consider the welcome that many Hollywood people would receive in the Islamic Republic?  At the risk of sounding xenophobic, I'll just point out that if you're an LGBT person in Iran, uncooperative bakeries and florists are the very least of your worries.  And for women in that country, the term "slut shaming" takes on an entirely new meaning. 
• Denzel?  Kind of a jerk.  He seemed annoyed at the tourists, and would it have been so hard for him to crack a smile at Casey Affleck when Affleck acknowledged him from the stage? I'm not a Casey Affleck fan either, but that was a rather gracious gesture, and Washington didn't give him an inch. Maybe he's just getting crusty with age. 
• I'm glad I don't work at PWC.  Well, I was already glad that I don't work at PWC, but now I'm REALLY glad.  They had one job, as the hashtag goes.  

At some point, I'll comment on the latest Trump scandal. With any luck, he'll have already resigned by the time I get around to it, making yet another post irrelevant.

*****
4 days down, 399 to go. 

I actually love spunk

The 70s were a hopeful and optimistic time to be a little girl. Lots of things were possible. You could do anything--everyone said so. You could be an athlete, like Billie Jean King or Chris Evert. You could be a lawyer, or a politician. You could be a doctor or a businesswoman.  The world was a wide-open place.

I was a vague, bookish little girl, so I didn't have any one particular ambition. I imagined all sorts of things.  In most of my daydreams, though, I was successful, in some glamorous but undefined career. I imagined a life in which I dressed fabulously, drove my own car, and ate grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries (and sipped Coke in a glass, with ice) in restaurants any time I wanted.

I was about 6 years old when "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" first aired (you knew where this was going, didn't you?) My mother and grandmother watched the show faithfully, and I watched with them, sitting cross-legged on the floor and wearing a flower-patterned quilted bathrobe that buttoned all the way down the front.  I didn't get most of the jokes, and I didn't realize at the time that any ground was being broken. I just loved Mary Richards, and I wanted to be like her when I grew up. I wanted to be smart and nice and pretty and funny and independent. I wanted a cute little apartment and a cute little car and an important job with a typewriter and a phone. And I wanted a best friend just like Rhoda.

So much has been written and said about Mary Tyler Moore and the show, especially since Mary's death on Wednesday.  Most of what I've read and heard has focused on her pioneering portrayal of women in the workplace and in the world. This is right and proper, and I'm happy to have seen so many moving tributes to MTM by women journalists and broadcasters, including Andrea Mitchell and Oprah Winfrey. Mary Richards was a pioneer.  And to little girls like me, she was better than any Barbie doll or Disney princess.

*****
So life happens, and most of mine up to now hasn't even vaguely resembled Mary Richards's.  That's OK.  Most of it has been better, despite my periodic bouts with depression. I was unable to sleep one night during one such period in my late 20s, and as I sat on my couch in front of my TV, flipping through the channels and looking for I didn't know what, there it was. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was on TV Land, late 90s small-hours refuge for the depressed and lonely. I watched it, hoping to feel for just a moment as I felt when I was a hopeful and happy 6-year-old.

I fell asleep on the couch that night, probably halfway through a third episode of the overnight MTM marathon that I'd happen to stumble upon, feeling a little better, and not just because I had remembered for a moment what it felt like to be six years old.  It was because the show, to my surprise, was REALLY funny.

Mary Tyler Moore was already famous for her portrayal of Laura Petrie on the very popular "Dick Van Dyke Show," and she could easily have turned her own program into a showcase for herself.  Instead, she found the funniest and most talented actors and actresses--Ed Asner, Ted Knight, Valerie Harper, Betty White, Cloris Leachman--and put the spotlight on them rather than herself, often playing the straight woman to Valerie Harper's wisecracking Rhoda, Ted Knight's buffoonish anchorman, and Betty White's promiscuous Happy Homemaker.  Even the minor characters, especially Rhoda's mother, played by the gifted Nancy Walker, were brilliantly cast.   Yes, the show was culturally significant and the character was groundbreaking, but "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was also one of the greatest TV comedies ever.

*****

Right now feels like less than a hopeful and wide-open time for women. The rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism in countries everywhere from Western Europe to the Philippines has created conditions of intolerable oppression for women and girls.  Meanwhile, privileged women like me; white, middle-class American women who don't want for a thing, have only to contend with the fact that a self-proclaimed uninvited p&%$@-grabber is now the President of the United States.  All of this, though, will pass.  I'm sure of it.  I'm still hopeful and optimistic.  Love is all around.

Commentary and review

I never intended for this to become a book review blog, but I tend to write about what I do, and in the winter, I read.  Well, I also complain about the cold and contrive to find ways to avoid taking my clothes off and/or going outside, but those things don't make for compelling content.  So it's books for now.

*****

Books and current events, actually.  Right now, half a million women, give or take, are marching on Washington, just a few miles away from the couch where I sit with my laptop.  I sympathize with their cause, mostly, but the organizers of the march made clear that they don't want pro-life women anywhere near their protest, so I didn't go.  Just as well.  My son had a swim meet today, so I held a clipboard instead of a sign.  Now I'm back home and about to return to my book: Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede.

Every so often, I'll hear someone mention a book that I've never heard of, and I'll be curious about it.  Then someone else, in a completely different context, will mention the same book, and I'll think about how odd that is, that twice in a day or so, I'm hearing two different people praise the same relatively obscure book.  When I then see or hear a third mention of that same book, I consider critical mass to have been reached, and I immediately buy the book.

*****

Total non sequitur alert: I just watched Sean Spicer's first press room briefing.  That was the type of performance for which the phrase "I can't even" was invented. No words.

*****

OK, maybe a few words.  Was it completely unexpected that the Trump administration's very first concern was not how to reunite this very divided country, nor how to create jobs for the working-class voters who supported the new President, nor how to defeat ISIS or address any of the myriad threats to national security?  Was it any surprise that on their very first full day in the White House, the Trump administration's very first message to the country was a petty, whining little complaint about the media's supposed misrepresentation of the allegedly huge crowds at yesterday's Inaugural events? Does Donald Trump ever do anything other than cry like a big orange baby?

*****
Anyway.  Back to This House of Brede.  It is, appropriately for today, a book about a group of women; specifically, Benedictine nuns in post-war England. The protagonist is a successful Oxford-educated professional woman who at age 40 or so abandons her high position in a government agency and joins the Benedictines as a novice.  Although the action, such as it is, all occurs inside a quiet and isolated religious cloister, it's still page-turningly gripping.  Like all great novels, Brede creates a completely self-contained world like no other, but still completely recognizable.  I recommend it.

*****

Because I like to suffer, and Lent is still months away, I decided to take an online HTML class. It's still too soon.  I graduated in 2014, but I find that I'm still all full up with book learning and can't do with any more just now, so no more HTML class.  I'll just wing it.  That approach usually works really well.

*****

Books, politics, and incompetent coding.  If you were looking for sharply focused thought neatly distilled in spare and concise prose, then you came to the wrong place. Live and learn.

Two peas in a pod

I didn't plan or intend this, but the first three books that I read this year were memoirs written by famous baby boomers (Bruce Springsteen, Ruth Reichl, and Carrie Fisher). I started this post as a comparison/mini review of the three books, but then I saw "Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds" on HBO, and decided to just write about that instead.

*****

I hate most fantasy and sci-fi books and movies.  As a Catholic, for example, I'm supposed to love Tolkien, but I don't.  Not the books, not the movies.  No Hobbits, no Towers, no Lords of the Ring, and ABSOLUTELY NO GOLLUM.  There are, however, two exceptions to my complete and utter disdain for science fiction and fantasy:  C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, and "Star Wars."

I love Star Wars, especially the original movie. And first among the many reasons that I love it is Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia.  I was 11 when I first saw Star Wars, and I felt about Princess Leia the way I felt about Billie Jean King. Like young Billie Jean, Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia was adorable, but not intimidatingly beautiful. Like Billie Jean, Princess Leia could stand up to bullies, fight and win the good fight, and still look impeccable in an all-white ensemble. I loved her.

*****

I read Postcards from the Edge years ago, and when Carrie died, I tried to buy a Kindle edition. Shockingly, no such thing exists. I hope and expect that Amazon is working diligently to remedy that situation. Meanwhile, I bought and read the Kindle edition of Wishful Drinking,  It didn't surprise me that Carrie in her own words comes across as an old-time wise-cracking gum-snapping Hollywood dame.  She was born and raised that way.  What did surprise me was how much she really loved her mother.  Not just out of a sense of duty and not despite whatever her flaws might have been.  Carrie loved Debbie wholeheartedly, and vice versa.  They lived next door to each other, on a property that they called "the compound" (because of course it was called "the compound") and they seemed to never tire of each other's company.  Having read Postcards (and also having seen the movie version), I just assumed that Carrie was bitter and resentful about her mother, which seems to be the stereotypical attitude of old Hollywood children toward their movie star parents. Postcards is a novel, so maybe Carrie thought that the unabashed love and admiration of a daughter for her mother wouldn't have made an interesting conflict for a work of fiction.

"Bright Lights," a reality-style documentary with cameras and interviewers following Carrie and Debbie around, uses lots of the material that Carrie covered in Wishful Drinking, Having just finished reading it, I recognized some passages from the book in some of Carrie's voice-over narration. This is fitting. Carrie was a great writer, and there was no one better suited to write the voice-overs.  Great writer that she was, though, she didn't really capture the day-in and day-out relationship with her mother as well as the movie does.  Carrie and Debbie tease each other, interrupt each other, and break into frequent song and comedy routines that are at once impromptu and highly polished and rehearsed, because they spent 50 years perfecting their mother-daughter act.

My husband actually saw "Bright Lights" first.  He found Carrie and Debbie's "schtick," as he called it, annoying. But I found their banter and silliness charming, and the genuine affection between mother and daughter is touching.  I teared up more than once.

Just as remarkable is the role of Todd Fisher, Carrie's brother, both in the movie and in their lives.  Although I liked watching Carrie and Debbie being themselves and performing together, I can also easily see that the relationship between them was a closed world, unwelcoming to outsiders, and Todd might have felt like an odd man out when he was with the two of them.  If he did, he concealed it well. Debbie's quirks and Carrie's struggles with mental illness and drug addiction are apparent throughout the movie; and Todd's observations about his mother and sister come across as truthful, but kind and compassionate.  The camera often catches him as he watches Carrie and Debbie doing their routine, both onstage and off, and his affection for both of them is obvious and moving.  Debbie raised a generous man.

Carrie and Debbie were also generous with their great personal and professional gifts.  There's a scene in which Carrie appears at a Star Wars fan fest where attendees paid $70 to stand in line and meet Carrie and get her autograph on posters and shirts and other memorabilia.  It's easy to criticize athletes and movie stars who charge for their autographs at such events, but what's most striking about this particular scene is how much of herself Carrie gives to each of the fans--hugs, pictures, and genuine emotional connection, however brief.  The punters got their money's worth.  Debbie, too, was generous with her audiences.  The camera pans the audience at one of her last Las Vegas shows, and every single face shines with love and happiness.  As I told my son, who watched with me, this was Debbie's great gift.  She was a good dancer, singer, and actress, but making people happy was what she did best.

*****

I saw "Rogue One" today, finally, and like last year's "The Force Awakens," it was a fitting continuation of the franchise's great tradition of fearless and beautiful female heroines (don't get me started on Episodes 2 and 3.  As much as I love everything Star Wars, I believe that Episode 2 is one of the worst movies ever made; some other time, I'll tell you why, at considerable length).  Young Princess Leia has the last word in "Rogue One." I'm sad that it's one of the last times that we'll see her on film (she finished filming Episode 8, which will be released later this year), but I'm happy to have seen Princess Leia one more time. Rest in peace, Carrie and Debbie. You'll be missed.

I'll have the usual

Oh my gosh, what has happened to me?  Do you know what I did yesterday?  I bought scented pinecones (scented pinecones!) and a scented grapevine wreath.  And then I went to Michael's and bought a shitload of scrapbooking supplies.

Well, no, I didn't.  Not the scrapbooking stuff, anyway, because come on.  But I did buy the wreath and the pinecones.  Scented.  Orange/clove/cinnamon scented, to be exact. So now I have a bowl full of pinecones on my dining room table, and a rustic pile of tree branches nailed to my kitchen wall.  Bonus irony points: I can't even smell them anymore. What the hell?

*****

I almost never abandon a book once I start to read it, but I made an exception this week.  I started reading another book of ostensibly hilarious life observations by another funny blogger, and I gave up on it almost immediately. I can only take a limited number of jokes about menopause and spandex and the various physical infirmities and indignities of middle-age before I lose my patience.  And that limited number is apparently zero, because I didn't even finish page 2.

I'm reading Ship of Fools instead.  I've read Ship of Fools at least a dozen times, and it holds up very well after 50 or so years (not 50 years of me reading it because that would have made me quite the prodigy, but 50+ years since its publication.)  If you happen to be feeling a little too warmhearted and optimistic about humanity, then just read a few chapters of Ship of Fools; you'll get over it pretty quickly.  Katherine Anne Porter is just like Jane Austen; that is, if Jane Austen had hated everyone and everything.  But oddly enough, a few pages of Ship of Fools puts me in a much better frame of mind, because I don't know anyone as awful as the passengers of the Vera.

*****
If you'd prefer to get your jaundiced view of mankind in a movie theater, rather than a book, then consider seeing The Girl on the Train.  I'd complain about the way the movie portrays women (crazy/desperate/pathetic OR manipulative/sneaky/promiscuous) but the men come off so much worse (controlling/violent/predatory) that it's almost a feminist manifesto on film.   Anyway, it was very entertaining, and because I never (and I mean NEVER) watch or read psychological thrillers, I didn't really see the ending coming, although I suppose it should have been obvious even to an idiot.  Emily Blunt is such a marvelous actress that she makes even a sort of predictable (for smarter people than me) suspense thriller a great movie experience.

*****

So I never buy things like scented pinecones and grapevine wreaths, and I never go to mystery/thriller movies, and I never stop reading a book until I finish it, and I never vote early.  Except in this very unusual and extraordinary November, when I apparently do all of the above.  Who knows what I'll do next.  Maybe I'll join Pinterest.  Maybe I'll go to Disney World every year, and post a "days 'til my next Disney trip" countdown on Facebook.  Maybe I'll run a marathon.  Apparently, anything is possible.

Locker room confidential

Well, that was super fun.

The black, bleak, near-despair mood that dragged me toward the abyss last week is not a new thing for me.  In the past, these episodes were sporadic, and few enough and far-between enough that I could just live with them.  They were like pests, like annoying little mosquitoes that buzzed around every so often.  The bites were unpleasant, but the itching was only temporary.

Last week, however, was a whole 'nother thing.  It was darker and bleaker and lasted much longer than usual, until I thought that I'd fallen into a pit that would become my new home.  And then all of a sudden, it was over, and I'm pretty much myself again.

*****

So enough of that.

I can't vote for him, but now I quote him all the time.  I'm as appalled (though not surprised) as anyone about Donald Trump's now-infamous locker-room bus ride, but "move on (blank) like a bitch" has become my favorite new expression.  If there's a hamper full of dirty clothes, then I'm going to move on that laundry like a bitch.  If it's Monday morning and there's work piled up on my desk...well, you get the idea.  I can go all day.


*****

I just finished reading Domenica Ruta's With or Without You.  I love to read memoirs.  I'm not sure why, but other people's addictions or depression or suffering of any sort are riveting, even glamorous.  I couldn't write a memoir.  First of all, I'd lose interest in the subject no more than three paragraphs in; secondly, I just don't want to share so much of myself.  I like to think that this is because I don't want to hurt anyone, and I suppose that's partly true.  Really, though, I just don't have the nerve.  There are so many things that I just don't want to talk about, ever, and those are exactly the things that would make for interesting literary suffering.  I guess I'll stick to blogging.

*****

So, for example, if I were to write a memoir, I might want to include something that happened when I was ten. At that time, I lived with my family on a narrow one-sided street of brick rowhouses in Philadelphia.  One-sided, because the street was a cross street between two steep hills, and just below our street was a sheer drop to a parking lot on Terrace Street, a block away.  Our side of the street was separated from the drop to the parking lot by a high brick wall that ran almost the length of the other side of the street.  My aunts' and uncles' (yes, more than one aunt and uncle) house was the only house on that side of the street, at the end of the wall. The Polish Falcons (look it up) was at the other end of the brick wall.

One summer evening, I was at the Falcons' end of the street, hitting a tennis ball against the wall.  I was the only child in the neighborhood who liked tennis, and so I often played by myself, just lobbing the ball back and forth against the wall.  When a car would turn onto the street (a rare occurrence), I'd step on to the sidewalk to allow it to pass.  The driver of this particular car said "excuse me, Miss?" and when I turned around, he waved me toward him.  I was ten, and it wouldn't have occurred to me not to obey a grown-up's summons.  "Can you tell me where (a street, I think, but I can't remember.  I also can't remember what color or make the car was.  See?  I'd be terrible at memoir-writing) is?"

The man was naked from the waist down, and he began to masturbate as soon as he noticed my shocked reaction to the first adult penis I'd ever seen.  I looked away, and saw that my parents and my aunts and uncles were outside on the porch (theirs was the only house on the street that had a porch, and most of the neighborhood congregated there on nice summer nights), and all of them were looking down the street to see who I was talking to.  The man noticed them too; he threw the car into reverse and sped away, just as my parents and aunts and uncles started running down the street toward me.

I don't remember anyone asking me exactly what happened.  They all seemed to know.  They hustled me up the street to the house, and a few minutes later, a uniformed police officer was asking me what the man looked like, and what kind of shirt he was wearing, and what did I remember about his car.  No one asked me what he did or said; just as well, as I'd have been far too embarrassed to describe or repeat what I'd seen and heard.  I never saw the man again, and I never heard another word about it.

*****

Or, maybe I'd write about something else, much more frightening, that happened to me when I was 12.  I was walking home from somewhere (the library, maybe) with my sister, who was 11 at the time.  We heard running footsteps behind us, and although I heard running footsteps behind me and in front of me all the time, I was scared this time.  And rightly so, as it turned out.  A young man, or maybe just a teenage boy, grabbed me from behind, thrust his hand between my legs, and roughly fondled me.  "Hey," he whispered, licking my ear.  "Can I fuck you?"

I'd heard that word before, but not used as a verb.  After a minute (probably less), he shoved me away and ran off, almost as fast as he'd grabbed me in the first place. Maybe he hadn't noticed my sister at first, and then all of a sudden realized that he couldn't stop her from running for help while he raped me.  Or maybe he hadn't planned to rape me at all; maybe he just liked to scare little girls.  My sister and I ran home.  I didn't cry, and she didn't ask me if I was OK.  Not because she didn't care, but because neither of us were prepared to accept that what had just happened to me, and what she had just seen and heard, was actually real.  We never told anyone about it, and we have never spoken about it.

*****

Or maybe I'd write about the time when someone actually did rape me.  In the middle of the night.  In my own apartment, where I'd been asleep at 3 in the morning, but then a man whom I'd never seen before was sitting on top of me, and one of his dirty hands was covering my mouth, and the other one was holding a knife that he'd taken out of my kitchen drawer against my throat, and then I wasn't asleep anymore.  This time, I had to tell lots of people what happened, in detail and at considerable length.  The man was arrested two days later.  He confessed, and so I didn't have to testify at a trial.  I went to his sentencing hearing and watched the bailiffs take him away in shackles to serve his 25-year prison sentence.  He has about 6 more years to go.  Time flies.

*****

These things all happened, but long ago.  If I were to tell about them now, how would people react?  Would my timing be considered suspicious?  Would people ask me why I'm coming out of the woodwork now, all of a sudden, after all this time?  Or would these stories only be suspect if the man who exposed himself to a child, or the one who grabbed a young girl and molested her on the street, or the one who violently raped a woman in the middle of the night, were later to become famous?  Would I be a victim still, or just another opportunist, another delusional woman seeking attention at the expense of a powerful man?

*****

I wonder sometimes if the depressive episodes (I wish I could find some memoir-like way to make them evocative or even funny) have anything to do with the sexual assaults.  Who knows?  I think that genetics are just as much to blame.  Meanwhile, I'll still joke about Donald Trump, but I believe every single one of the women who say that he touched them or grabbed them or kissed them when they didn't want to be kissed.  And absent a brilliant write-in idea, I'll probably end up reluctantly voting for Hillary Clinton, but I also believe all of the women who say that Bill Clinton raped them, or molested them, or harassed them.  They don't have to explain why they're telling their stories now, after all this time.  They don't need a reason.  If something happened to you, you can talk about it or not.  You can keep it to yourself if you want to. You can call the cops; or you can write about it in a beautiful, moving, hilarious memoir; or you can tell one friend and make her swear not to tell anyone; or you can call up CNN and get a fucking camera crew in your living room.  You can do any or all of that the next day, or a week later, or 18 years and some odd months later.

*****
It's Sunday night, and the usual post-dinner clean-up awaits.  I'm about to move on that kitchen like a bitch.

Monday Night Football

I met some football players last week.  Real football players, whose names would impress you if you were even a casual fan, especially of the Washington Redskins.  My small company's CEO is a huge fan, and a member of the Redskins Charitable Foundation's board. Knowing that my husband is also a huge fan, he offered me tickets to the annual luncheon.  We ate lunch with Josh Norman (look him up) and my husband took selfies with some of his favorite players.

The players were, surprisingly, rather nice, normal people.  Mr. Norman was a delight, and Kirk Cousins, Ryan Kerrigan, and Chris Baker were also very nice.  I used to think that professional athletes in general, and football players in particular, must all be arrogant, standoffish, and conceited.  The Redskins players, however, were very approachable and friendly.  They chatted with fans, patiently posed for selfies, and signed memorabilia and programs for everyone who asked.

(True story: My 11-year-old son, looking at the program, asked me "Why does it say 'lunch-ee-awn'?" "It's 'luncheon'," I said. "And you need to read more."
"What?" he said scornfully.  "That's not a word."
"It is a word," I said. "And not a 50-cent word, either.  Not an SAT word.  Just a common, frequently used word."
"Oh," he said.  "Hmm.")

*****

A few days ago, Lena Dunham sparked a huge controversy (by "huge controversy" I mean a bunch of people spluttering in outrage on Twitter) when she complained to Amy Schumer that Odell Beckham had ignored her at the Met Gala.  (And I really can't believe that I just wrote that sentence. What is this, Gawker?  Sheesh.) Apparently, Ms. Dunham felt that Mr. Beckham had looked at her, deemed her unattractive, and then dismissed her accordingly.

There's a lot going on here.  Mr. Beckham was, according to the many reports, scrolling through his phone during dinner, which on its own is just simple bad manners.  But Ms. Dunham also claimed that the phone preoccupation was the result of Mr. Beckham's lack of sexual interest in a woman who isn't conventionally attractive. (Note: I think she's rather pretty, but I'm in the minority on this, I suppose.)

If the complaint is actually that this man wasn't attracted to this woman, then that would mean that men who prefer conventionally beautiful women (like most men) are somehow to be faulted for that.  According to SJWs who are all over this case, however, the real issue is that Lena Dunham, being a white woman, feels somehow entitled to sexual attention from black men, no matter who they are.

What if neither interpretation is correct?  What if one particular person, Odell Beckham, just didn't feel like talking to one other particular person, Lena Dunham, at a particular moment?  OR, what if  one particular person, Lena Dunham, misinterpreted polite indifference from another particular person, Odell Beckham (phone-scrolling at the dinner table notwithstanding) as a negative judgement regarding her appearance, because she was feeling unattractive on that particular day?

*****
It's Monday night, and I'm watching the Redskins play the Steelers.   I've actually met some of the players, and now I feel invested.  I'm rooting for Josh Norman, Kirk Cousins, Ryan Kerrigan, and Chris Baker in particular. They wouldn't remember me, of course, but I remember them, and now I can't see them as White Men or Black Men or NFL Players or representatives of any other identity group.  They're people who I met and smiled at and shook hands with and ate lunch with. No two are alike. HTTR.