Commuted Sentences

I am checking to see if this thing is still alive.

2006-12-20T17:36:00.000-05:00

And if you can see this, it is.

We'll see if that information becomes useful.

If I knew the tunes I might join in.

2006-07-25T12:16:00.000-05:00

This morning I learned that the guy across the aisle from me was headed to DC to talk to a lawyer about his uncle's will. His uncle died two months ago, and he's the next of kin, but the lawyer had been unable to find him for a while. The guy's own immediate family has all died (which I thought was really sad given that he couldn't be over 60 - he's lost both sons, his wife, and his two dogs). He is praying that his uncle left him property in DC so he can leave Baltimore, maybe spend his days fixing up a house he can live in. He's nervous that his uncle left him nothing and that he's gotten his hopes up and spent money on train fare for nothing, that he'll come back disappointed.

I learned all this before the train even pulled out of Penn Station. I got on the train four minutes before it pulled out.

After he told me about his dogs, he retreated from the conversation looking pensive. I checked my email, called a friend who was having a bad morning to leave a message that I was thinking about him, and opened my book. I thought about the lady on the train a few months ago who spilled the tale of her husband's infidelity to the guy across from her and how I thought, at the time, that it was sad that she had no one else to talk to... that she was so lonely that she would just tell that extremely intimate story of pain and love and sex and mental illness to a total stranger. I thought about a guy on the Metro last week who told his seatmate about his doctor misdiagnosing him and putting him on the wrong psychiatric drug and how my immediate reaction was a cringing "oh shit, this guy is so lonely and he's making himself so vulnerable to this person he just met." I wondered who the guy across from me today talks to when he's not on the train. I thanked something or other for friends I can reach out to when I'm worried. I reminded myself to be that friend for them, too.

But then I thought about it again, and I don't remember exactly why - I was reading the first chapter of "Unconditional Parenting" at the time, maybe I just have loving human interactions on the brain - and I came away thinking that maybe my initial analysis had more to do with how I have been thinking about love than with these two talkative people on the train. I have been thinking it's a tragedy to have to share worry and fear and loss with strangers... and while I am still thankful that I have friends to share mine with, and I still wish that everyone had friends to share that stuff with, maybe connecting with the person across from the aisle in a brief but intense moment - just saying what's on your mind, honestly, maybe just because the person's got a receptive smile and looked you in the eye and you needed to get it out - maybe that's not tragic at all.

Maybe the guy across the aisle today has a best friend he talks to every day; maybe he's got a lover or a coworker or a next-door neighbor he tells everything to; maybe he just had a whole lot of everything today and needed another person in his life - another friend just for a few minutes. Who knows what the deal is - perhaps he only ever talks to people on trains and that works for him. I think the lesson for me, today, needs to be about me and not about him, you know?

Sometimes spending all of your waking life in DC means needing a reminder that humanity and love and trust don't have to be classified, compartmentalized, and carefully rationed. And that fully exercising your humanity - just... expressing emotion in the moment you're feeling it - doesn't have to be a sign of loneliness or pathology. Maybe it just means you're a person.

Pack up, but don't stray. (Blogging live from Pittsburgh, PA!)

2006-06-17T13:40:00.000-05:00

You knew it was bound to happen, right? As soon as the words "I haven't hated anyone all week" escaped my fingers?

Fucking Mapquest! GOD!

Actually, that's about the extent of it, though. I just can't even muster a good rant right now, even about how Mapquest sucks and caused me to get lost in an unfamiliar city. Because despite having had to stop and ask for directions (which just, no - I hate doing that), I am still freakishly happy. And Pittsburgh is so awesome that it's hard to be in a bad mood, or even a snit, really, here. Plus, completely free wireless in my hotel room, so.

Ruby on fireflies, Thursday night: "That firefly lit up his butt so we could see where we're going. That was nice of him."

My only comfort is the night gone black.

2006-06-16T13:10:00.000-05:00

I've been in an almost alarmingly good mood this week, which explains (and may also be, like a happy spiral of yay, in small part due to) my disappearance from all my usual e-haunts. And apparently I've been telegraphing that in some way to the tourists, perhaps in the lack of passive-aggressive sighing as I try to maneuver around the sidewalk-width packs they're always traveling in, because I haven't left my office for lunch once this week without being asked for directions. And, bizarrely, I have given them with a smile. I don't know what's happening to me. I feel it'd reasonable to look in the mirror tomorrow and find out that I'm plaid, or made of corduroy, or something.

This has all made me hyperaware of Metro's dire signage problem. Twice in the last 24 hours, I've been asked, "Where is the Metro?" while standing literally in front of Metro stations. And because I'm in such a charitable mood, I actually feel bad saying, "Right here!" So I try to do it brightly and cheerily, and without adding even a silent "UM..." on either end. There's only so much good mood to go around. I don't want to take more than my fair share at the expense of the tourists. Scarcity, don't you know.

I haven't hated anyone all week long. I don't know how sustainable this is in terms of keeping a blog. I will try to balance my mental health with your entertainment.

And oh how she prays to find a man to blame for every loveless night she waits.

2006-06-05T17:05:00.000-05:00

I really have to replace my deceased iPod, Hazel. Because when I don't have something in my ears, I have to hear men on the train talk about how they've physically assaulted their 15-year-old daughters for kissing boys and told them "if you want to be a ho, do it on your own time, not when you live here," and "make it hard, but don't make it easy." (It took me a minute, but the putrescent, nauseating, fully horrifying meaning of that did sink in, and then the pesky laws of the state of Maryland kept me from choking the life out of him.)

Sad.

Oh, and there was this other sad-but-for-different-reasons conversation I heard on Friday night. Responding to a casual, "So, are you retired?" from her seatmate, whom she'd just met, the woman across from me said, "Yeah. I got sick. I had a nervous breakdown. [Seatmate: 'Oh.'] My husband cheated on me with another woman, and it just hurt me so much I couldn't even drive. [Seatmate: 'Oh.'] But I divorced him, though. She can have him! [Seatmate: 'Heh!']" She had so clearly been waiting to tell someone, anyone, that story. Because either it hurts so much and so constantly, still, that it's always right there ready to spill out of her on to anyone who gives it an opening, or she's so lonely that she doesn't have anyone to talk to about it. In either case, I kind of hate her ex.

Before Hazel died, though, I only really ever used her to torment myself with equally sad and even more personally heartbreaking lyrics while lamenting my own dramas and losses, so maybe I needn't spend the extra money. I could perhaps just bring a little xylophone on the train and set these tales of tragedy to music.

Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

2006-06-02T10:13:00.000-05:00

My feet are still so raw from the sand at Jensen Beach, which is made entirely of shells. Even my flattest, least fancy shoes are really painful. I think I'm going to wrap my feet in 100 layers of cotton balls. (My brain could use some too - my feet aren't the only parts of me that feel raw this week. I've been having a really exciting and difficult exchange with someone that feels both like excising a wound and like a million pounds of aching lifted off my heart.)

So. A commuting anecdote:

Last night as I was making my way back to my car on the Green Line, I apparently angered a kid (maybe 17-ish?) sitting too far away from me for me to have any idea what I could have done to him. As he was getting off the train he began first muttering and then just outright saying mean shit at me. It was strange... not that people being randomly abusive on the Metro is all that unusual. But normally, when you hear someone shouting random abuse at people, you can count on looking up to see a person who is clearly in some kind of identifiable mental distress, you know? (I'm trying to choose my words carefully here so as not to be offensive, and I'm also only speaking of my personal experiences and not generalizing the entirety of the mentally ill population of DC or anywhere else.) This kid didn't fit the picture I'd conjured upon hearing him shouting (I don't know whether it was at me at that point) earlier in the trip.

Anyway, I decided that whether he appeared unhinged or not, it's certainly not an indication that all is well in one's head to begin harrassing a stranger unprovoked. I've witnessed teenage boys in groups say mean things to lone (usually) girls before, usually after unsuccessfully trying to get their attention by saying sexually aggressive things, but I've never seen a lone teenage boy start yelling at a grown woman before with seemingly no provocation. (Which is not to say that I think girls or women ignoring sexual comments directed at them should be deemed some kind of provocation that would excuse or even explain boys or men amping it up to insults - I further don't think that catcalling anyone is acceptable behavior in the first place.)

As I was trying to decide whether to engage this kid, I thought that he either didn't even think about the possibility that he would anger the other passengers, or he considered that and didn't care what that might mean, and either one of those, to me, was an indication that this was not someone I wanted to engage. Because that seems to me like a pretty obvious consideration and one that should stop a functional person from abusing a stranger in public. So I just kept reading and pretended I didn't even know he was there. But it might have been interesting, if I'd felt more certain that the other passengers would prevent him from choking me or something, to just calmly ask him why he was insulting me. However, given that all of this happened in my favorite city to distrust, I didn't feel assured of that in the slightest.

I was back on the MARC this morning and observed that there is an in crowd developing on the train. I think I will never escape the in crowd or that very tiny sense of "HEY!" I experience about not being in it. Watch me spend all day wondering what's wrong with me that a bunch of women twice my age with near-beehives who probably voted for Ehrlich if not Bush himself don't want me to be part of their clique. I am way well-adjusted.

You're something beautiful, a contradiction.

2006-06-01T14:43:00.000-05:00

I commuted all the way to Florida last week. Observation: MARC is a lot more spacious than an airplane. Another observation: red lights in South Florida are approximately 783% longer than anywhere else on Earth. Seriously. You could completely forget why you were in your car at all in the time it takes a light to change down there.

I have a lot on my mind again today. Putting a whole lot of Burnekos in one spot for a week will generate some thinking. I talked (too briefly) with my uncle Guy about class identity. Later (and today, still) I tried to process my thoughts on the matter from their usual form - something like an ambrosia salad - into bite-sized question nuggets. I think I came up with some good stuff, but then I spent two days at the beach and baked my brain. And also marinated it in the darkest rum I've ever seen. The stuff'll come back to me if it was indeed worth saving.

Ruby took to calling everyone "bucko" instead of "buddy" during our trip. Nothing more to say about that; I think it stands alone as an item of interest.

During my return to work today, our esteemed president spoke to the Chamber of Commerce and went on and fucking on (I was stuck in the traffic created by both his speech and a police chase) about how learning to speak and write English is so important to being successful in the United States. I'm sure I don't need to address the question that is begged here.

Okay, now I've run out of thoughts I'm ready to share but am still writing to avoid driving myself crazy with the ones I'm not ready to share. How 'bout that local sports team?

Questions of science, science and progress, do not speak as loud as my heart.

2006-05-19T22:17:00.000-05:00

This day. It wins. It has bested me. And I knew it had kicked my ass when I found myself on an impromptu walk around my neighborhood in the dark and the freezing, in sparkly clogs, a t-shirt, and a skirt, all in the name of avoiding conflict with a three-year-old.

I think about all kinds of stuff when I walk around, it turns out. Thoughts on a possible destination for my walk gave way to realizations that I've been really bad lately at maintenance of my friendships with people here in Baltimore gave way to a painful, near-desperate wishing to have another chance to repair my friendship with Zach gave way to wondering why Arcadia doesn't have benches anywhere so a person can sit and cry in peace. Coming down Canfield, I heard kids playing and didn't want to become the topic of their conversation after I passed - the crying fat lady in the obviously painful shoes - so I crossed the street so I could pass on the other side, shielded by cars as if that would make me invisible. I'm short, but not that short. I matched cars with houses and wondered how people afford their lives, what they do for a living, and if they are scared like I am about the bottom dropping out. I eyed their trimmed hedges and tried to guess how often they do yard work and whether they write it on a calendar so they can remember to do it and how they learned how to make roses do anything but die. I tried to think of something I know how to do that makes people wonder, "How does she know how to do that?" I lamented secretarydom. I wondered if I got a job at Hopkins if it would put it college on Ruby's radar screen. I tried to remember if I ever really thought I'd get to go to college. A dog barked from behind a fence and scared me, and I cursed myself for feeling afraid. A man stepped out into my path and I was more scared and cursed everything. Another man catcalled me and I cursed feeling flattered. I got cold and went home, and I stood in front of my house and tried to think something profound about it but all I could come up with was that it was too dark and late to stay outside any longer so I had to go back into it. I tried to decide whether that was sad but got distracted by wondering if Joel had brought the mail in.

Democratic School Blog!

2006-05-15T16:32:00.000-05:00

We've created a blog for the purpose of talking about the free-school concept and especially for discussing the creation of a Sudbury Valley modeled school in Baltimore.

http://newamericanschoolhouse.blogspot.com/

Please come join in the discussion! Add it to your blog roll! Tell all your friends, especially those interested in education in the Baltimore area.

2006-04-25T12:14:00.000-05:00

My partner has joined with some other Baltimore parents to form a founding committee to gauge interest in starting a Sudbury-model, democratic school in the Baltimore area.

Leading the charge is our neighbor, Danny Mydlack, who will be debating the merits of the free-school model on a conservative talk show today. Danny made a documentary about the Fairhaven school in Upper Marlboro MD.

Sometime after 3:00 today, Danny will be on with Ron Smith on WBAL, AM 1090. It will also be streamed on the station's website. Please feel free to give a listen and by all means call in with support of alternative education. It seems like Danny's going to need it.

Joel will be doing some more writing, which I will post here, about the free school idea in the future, but we just wanted people to be aware of the radio coverage (Danny is hoping to get on Mark Steiner for more balanced coverage), and also the front page article in the Washington Post published on Monday.

I'm back! (Commuted Sentences: Now with 50% more pondering!)

2006-04-21T11:14:00.000-05:00

My friend Jackie and I went to a conference a few weeks ago called Engendering Justice: Prisons, Activism, and Change. I haven't had enough time/focus to sit down and even think, much less write, about the conference, but one discussion stood out so much that I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

On the second panel, there was a woman named Ije Ude from Sista II Sista, who talked about some of the work her organization is doing in Brooklyn around issues of violence. One of the issues they focus on is reducing the community's reliance on police and the courts to solve their problems, which, if you think about it, is both really wise and really fucking radical. While most people know that much of the violence inflicted upon women of color (and people of color, generally) is by the police themselves, an alternative to interacting with them is not so readily apparent. And when you're talking about issues like rape and domestic violence, it's not as easy as just telling women, "Don't call the cops." (Which is not what SIIS is advocating - their message/plan is not nearly as simple as just not intervening or seeking intervention.)

In her discussion of how her organization and her community are rethinking responses to and solutions for violence, she talked about how abolitionists (prison abolitionists, violence abolitionists, capitalist abolitionists - which, as one of the panelists pointed out, are ultimately all the same folks whether we know it or not) have to do this rethinking and finding new ways of viewing the world all the time. That means thinking about how we think. It means, if we are anti-prison, or anti-death penalty, or anti-punishment, considering whether we have personal exceptions to those beliefs (for instance, did you want to see the cops who shot Amadou Diallo punished, maybe violently? Or, in my case and those of many others, do we wish violence - physical or otherwise - on the men who raped us?). It's all very hard stuff, but I found myself really grateful for the challenge and excited about taking it on.

But I was surprised to find that the aspect of this philosophy-broadening I had the most trouble with was when Ije Ude talked about broadening it all the way into our homes. She's a mama, and she says she is constantly challenging herself to carry her anti-violence/anti-punishment philosophies into her relationship with her child - not just by not imposing punishments, but by not "withholding love" in any way.

Wow.

Now, each panelist only had a few minutes to talk, so she didn't expound on that point, and neither did the few other women who'd made similar assertions in their talks. But something about the phrase "withholding love" hit me so hard. Maybe because she didn't have time to plumb that and give examples, and so I was left to contemplate the different ways the phrase might be applied to my relationship with Ruby.

Joel, being much wiser than I in a lot of ways, suggested months ago that we stop using time-outs as punishment (they were the only form of punishment we'd ever used up to that point), pointing out the inconsistencies between our practices in our home and our philosophies about the world. (And I can answer questions about how that works practically and stuff - because I certainly had a few myself when Joel brought it up - if anyone is curious.) I agreed, and we've been largely successful. But post-conference I've been called to answer whether I'm substituting other, subtler forms of punishment - "withholding love," ouch - for the time-outs, and to figure out what those are and how to stop.

But falling over you is the news of the day.

2006-02-28T08:20:00.000-05:00

Here are some things that are happening here in The Future:

US Group Implants Electronic Tags in Workers

ELECTRONIC TAGS. IN. PEOPLE. IN THEM. INSIDE THEIR BODIES. ELECTRONIC TAGS. I would like it noted that I called this one a few years ago and was accused of tinfoil hattery. I quote Jay-Z: "Whatcha gonna call us now?"

Oh, and:

Venezuelan-Owned Citgo Faces Congressional Inquiry for Offering Discounted Oil to U.S. Poor

Congress is investigating oil companies, you say? That's great! Because I was thinking that it'd be awesome for Congress to look into the fact that Exxon made record profits while we were at war and post-Katrina, weren't you? I'm so glad that Congress is on top of things, doing their job for the little guy, making sure we're not getting screwed ove-- oh.

And the story closest to my heart:

South Dakota Legislature Passes Criminal Ban on Abortion

With no exceptions for rape or incest! Woo! Hey, the silver lining here is that at least we ladies know the location of at least a couple of the men who outright, unabashedly fucking HATE us.

Happy Tuesday, y'all!

Last night I dreamed that I woke up with straps across my chest

2006-02-21T13:10:00.000-05:00

Vernon Evans, who is on death row in Baltimore, has a blog.

I hate the death penalty. So much.

Softing ah Jon*

2006-02-21T00:42:00.000-05:00

Here, courtesy of You Tube, is a clip from The Daily Show's first show after Dick Cheney shot his hunting buddy in the face. Watch it and then send me cookies of gratitude for the link.

*Today's subject line is courtesy of Ruby, circa 2004, and is a bonus gift for my LiveJournal homies.

Some people wait a lifetime.

2006-02-19T10:38:00.000-05:00

I am such a nerd. I just signed up to be notified by email when Kelly Clarkson starts posting to her blog.

Shut up. "Because of You" is genius, y'all. Genius.

Although I often reminisce I can’t believe that I found

2006-02-18T15:31:00.000-05:00

Oh, hi, blog. During my absence, the following things happened:

I took two college courses.

The vice president of the United States shot an elderly man.

I've got stuff to say about both of those items, eventually (read: I am so lazy), but in the meantime, here's Ruby's take on love, in case you're interested: "Love makes you happy and clear, and you hug people, and that's love!"

Heh. I really want to be three years old.

I want to 'lectrify my soul.

2006-01-31T12:46:00.000-05:00

Great moments in Ruby:

Sunday morning, my bedroom; Ruby is demonstrating some princess-y thing to my friend Tara that requires her to spin herself around the canopy on my bed.

Me: Hey, Rubes, don’t do that, okay? The curtain’s already torn where you cut it, and if you spin it like that, it’ll tear more.

Ruby: You can’t tell me that.

Me: Huh?

Ruby (walking over to me somewhat menacingly): You can’t say that to me!

Me: I can’t say what to you?

Ruby: You can’t just say that to me, because it’s mean, and you can’t just say mean things to me.

Me: I wasn’t trying to be mean, Ruby, I was just trying to tell you not to twirl the canopy around like that, because it’s torn from when you cut it, and that will make it worse.

Ruby: But you can’t say mean things to me, you need to say nice things to me.

Me: Okay…

Ruby: Because you can’t just say that to me, because it’s mean.

Me: Okay…

Ruby: You need to tell me something nice, because you can’t just say mean things to me and angry things.

Me: Ruby, I’m not angry. I’m sorry my tone sounded angry; I didn’t intend to sound angry.

Ruby: Yeah, but you can’t just say mean things to me. You need to tell me something nice.

Me: Okay, Rubes, what would you like me to tell you?

Ruby: Something. NICE.

Me: Uh--

Ruby: dramatic sigh Okay. Can you please just go talk to Joel now, because I don’t want to see you anymore.

later that day

Me: Hey, Ruby, do you know that I saw Bethany’s band play last night?

Ruby: Yeah!

Me: Bethany was playing the drums.

Ruby: I play the drums!

Me: Yep, you do.

Ruby: Because I’m rock and roll.

Me: Yeah, you are pretty rock and roll, Rubes.

Ruby: I’m a rock STAR.

Zow z-zow zow, zow z-zow zow.

2006-01-30T13:30:00.000-05:00

One of the problems with being generally grandiose and hyperbolic is that occasionally, I see or hear or experience something that really is brilliant or amazing or sock-rocking, and then no one believes my gushing because I used those words to describe my Cheerios a few hours before.

But please, please take the following to heart.

I went to the Charm City Kitty Club on Saturday night with what has been described as my harem, but which I think was actually my friend Bethany’s harem, since we were all there to see her band, which rocked, as they always do, especially the drummer. (I have been quietly crooning “I hope you think of me when you’re burning in hell” for several hours now, to what I’m sure was the delight of the of my fellow commuters.)

But before Odd Girl Out took the stage, there were many other acts, all entertaining, but two of which were so impressive that I’ve been staring at this blank text field for several minutes and contemplating busting out a thesaurus to supplement my current adjective supply. Since the Creative Alliance has already written a fitting description of Danielle Abrams, and since I don’t want to tax my brain when I have yet to write even one word of the paper I’m to turn in tomorrow, I will plagiarize:

Hot from NYC performances at The Kitchen, WOW Performance Cafe, and Dixon Place Danielle Abrams puts us on the train with her family history from Harlem to the heyday of Coney Island to the makeshift ballrooms in Queens. She is a tattooed butch in hair curlers and a schemata; a Jew from Flushing in search of her black southern grandmother by cell phone; a 200-pound explosion of destabilizing entertainment.

I don’t know what I can add to that but that I want to ride the NYC subway, take a cab, grocery shop, or just sit and drink many cups of coffee or tea, or water, or whatever – enough cups of anything to last many hours – with this woman.

And then there was Charming Hostess, which so defies explanation that I’m going to have to demand that you see them live in March at Busboys and Poets so that when I next write about them, we can all just nod knowingly. And I am sure to write about them again, because I think that at some point during their set on Saturday night, I became a groupie. They were so freaking astonishingly talented and brilliant that my cool-headed and just generally cool friend Rachel was moved to actually speak the words “blew my mind” right to them during the intermission as I bought Jewlia Eisenberg's CD (which I have listened to twice today alone) and tried to talk them into moving to Baltimore. And just in case you think this is my grandiosity speaking, there were several other people mobbing their merch table to tell them about our cheap real estate prices, know what I’m saying? Oh, just go to the show in March so I don’t sound like such a jackass next time we discuss this, okay?

Add to this Cornucopia of Whoa a gorgeous bartender and post-event biscuits at Blue Moon, and what you have is a rock-solid guarantee that I will not be missing future Kitty Clubs.

Do they collide, I ask and you smile.

2006-01-28T15:09:00.000-05:00

I grew up with this kid who, for purposes of this story, I will call Jason (I'll be calling everyone by something other than his or her real name, both to obscure details and to test out my pseudonym-creating skillz). We were in first grade together in a tiny elementary school, and over the next six years, even when we weren't in the same class, we were at the same birthday parties, played together at recess, had G/T* together, and had all the same friends. In the sixth grade, we were all in the same class, and Jason and I got to be actual friends. He was present for my first kiss, in this girl Ann's basement. He kissed my friend Stephanie and I kissed his friend David.

Our friends were high achievers. We all went to intermediate school together and were tracked into classes for the college-bound. Of the entire group (and it was large), all but three of were sure to end up going to college right after high school and staying there. Jason and I were two of the three who wouldn't - by the time we finished eighth grade, it was already clear that was going to be the case. We had both become really... wayward. We were both shutting down a little, shutting people out, and being angry on a level that our 13-year-old friends - the ones with two parents and new shoes and functional homes - couldn't really relate to. We were kind of lost and flailing about by the time high school started. Our friends continued with their college-track lives, and Jason and I were "mainstreamed" after our final grades from intermediate school were received by our new high school. We were as smart as everyone else, no doubt, but each dealing with stuff at home that wasn't conducive to concentration in the classroom. Our elementary school had been small enough that the teachers could know things like who was "gifted" but having a hard time coping because of chaos at home, or who would blossom at a writing camp but had parents with absolutely no money. But our high school had 3500 kids in it, and the administrators didn't have time to know.

The difference, at that time anyway, between "9th Grade G/T English" and "9th Grade English" was this: the latter was the exact same class as "8th Grade G/T English." We had to essentially take all the same classes over again. It was humiliating and frustrating and stupid. I had enough humiliation to deal with outside of school, and so I stopped going. I never asked Jason if that was the reason I always saw him wandering around the shopping center, too, but he was always there when I was, sometimes with a beautiful, brilliant boy named Jerome who should have been at an art academy somewhere instead of getting swallowed up and ignored in a huge school full of rich kids. The three of us spent a lot of time just kind of milling about. We'd wander around town for six hours at a time. We barely talked to each other. We'd walk single file through the woods, silent, Jason in front, Jerome last, so that I'd be in the middle in case there was anyone hanging around waiting to grab a lone girl.

We'd been walking one morning for who knows how long and from/to who knows where when Jason announced that he and Jerome were going to Florida. One of them knew someone there who was going to let them crash for a while. We were 14 years old and it all sounded terribly exciting. I was happy for them. "When are you going?" "Today." "Oh."

Oh.

My other friends had fled me like rats off a sinking ship when my dad left for California and my mom moved my brothers and me into a tiny apartment. I have only in very short spurts since that year felt as lonely as I did then. I was making new "friends," older ones with cars who had parties when their parents were gone and provided me with enough alcohol to forget how angry and lonely and young I was. And even older ones who hung around those parties because there were drunk, lonely little girls there. When Jason said "Today," I lost the last hope of being saved by a connection to something easier, and younger, and freer, and more right. Like he'd just cut the cord between my childhood and an increasingly dangerous and scary adolescence. So utilizing all the logic of an angry, lonely, traumatized 14-year-old girl, I said, "Maybe I should go too." Jason must have been in the same panic I was, because he was suddenly eleven years old again, eyebrows leaping off his head with excitement, his voice squeaky: "YEAH, YOU SHOULD!" Then, embarrassed, he gruffly admonished me that we didn't have all day to fuck around. I needed to get whatever I was bringing right now, because we had to catch a bus. Jerome went home to get his stuff. I asked Jason to come with me to get mine.

We cut through the woods to my apartment where I stuffed my backpack full of the things anyone would need to move out at 14: jeans, t-shirt, yearbook, hairbrush, eyeshadow, teddy bear.

Jerome was supposed to meet us at a specific bus stop so we could go to Union Station and depart for Florida by Greyhound. He didn't show up. We let one bus go past so we could wait for him, and then another. "I guess he bailed," Jason said. But it was okay because Jason knew the guy who was going to let us stay with him, and we didn't need Jerome. The next bus took a really long time for some reason. We sat there in our customary silence. I thought about my little brothers and how worried my mom would be. She'd called the cops at least twice earlier in the school year when I refused to come home from parties or friends' houses, saying I was never coming home because I hated her. I wondered what time she'd realize I was gone and how far we'd be by then. I thought I'd better call her at some point after we got far enough away. I was with a childhood friend. I'd be fine. But I felt pretty sorry for my mom, because she wouldn't believe that.

The bus came into view. "Hey," I said to Jason, "if the Greyhound stops somewhere I need to call my mom, okay? So she doesn't think I'm dead." He frowned. "You can't, she'll call the cops." "Jason, I have to." "Angela, no, she'll make us come back, I'm not coming back." The bus stopped and the doors opened. I started to panic. "Jason, she'll be scared, my little brothers will be scared, I have to call." "Angela, NO, fuck her. No." He climbed the steps. "Come on!" I couldn't move. I shook my head and began crying. "I have to call my mom." The bus driver snapped, "Let's GO!" I couldn't move. "Go ahead without me," I told the driver. Jason's mouth dropped open. The bus pulled away. I headed back into the woods with my stupid backpack full of nonsense, seething and sobbing, angry at Jason and my parents and myself for being such a baby. I wandered around for another hour or so, feeling more and more lonely and dumb. I couldn't go to school or they'd bust me coming in the door. Home was the last place on earth I wanted to see. I decided to go wait at the elementary school for my little brothers to get out and then try to sneak them past the bus monitors so we could all walk the bike paths back home.

It was earlier than I'd thought after all the morning's events. I went inside my old school, nervous about getting nabbed by an administrator but bored as hell and needing very much to be around other human beings. I walked past the front office without anyone noticing. It was good to be the shortest 14-year-old in town - they probably thought I was one of their own students walking back from the bathroom. I walked through the "art gallery." I still had a picture hanging there. So did Jason, and most of our old friends. I stuck my head into my brother's fourth-grade class, the same room where I'd giggled with Stephanie and conspired to get notes over the divider into Jason's classroom next door. My brother's teacher - my old teacher - was happy to see me and pretended to buy my story of the high school getting out early. I led the conversation to Jason but didn't tell her he was en route to Florida. She asked me how he was doing. I let her think we'd had a falling out. "He's fine," I said. "But I don't think I'll be seeing him again." And I haven't. I never heard from or about him again. Jerome got shipped off to military school, or so I heard, and my mom moved us about 30 miles away to another school district, which is the distance of an entire continent when you're 14.

Every six months or so, I wake up startled to find myself in bed, in my house, grown up. I shake off the dream-fog and get reacclimated to my surroundings, blinking away the sound of leaves crunching under my feet, deep-breathing until my heart stops pounding from trying to decide whether to get on the bus. I spend those mornings slightly disoriented and oddly sad, fighting tears as I wander through the chores of starting a day, and asking myself over and over again "How did I get here instead of there? Who am I now, who was I then, and what does this all mean?" This morning, instead, I molded my body to fit into the sleep-form of Joel's and caught my breath by matching it to his. Then I left him sleeping and went in and knelt down next to Ruby to see if she was awake yet. She was. I wrapped a blanket around both of us, and we went out on to the porch and watched the sun come up over Baltimore. She'd never watched a sunrise before. I told her how happy I was to be there to show it to her.

*That's where they pull the "Gifted and Talented" kids out of class for two hours a week to go sit in another classroom and do logic problems and such. Don't even get me started on this or we'll be here all day. I have thoughts upon thoughts about the ways in which this is fucked up for every single person involved.

A simple question makes you look away, your hesitation gives it all away.

2006-01-26T15:58:00.000-05:00

We finally closed on our refinancing. We had to go to Columbia to do so. Columbia is annoying. (I know some nice Columbians, though. Some of whom might pinch me really hard if I don't mention that they're not annoying. You're not annoying, Columbian friends!)

Commuting by car means listening to the radio, and so this morning I was treated to much talk radio coverage of the Hamas victory, which means I got to hear Bush's asshatted response over and over and over again. Let me recap for those of you who got to commute in luxury on the MARC:

"See? SEE? Liberty is spreading! I told you if we attacked Iraq, liberty would spread in the Middle East, and see? Democracy in Palestine! Liberty! It is spreading! Oh. But we're totally not about to deal with that elected government, because they're armed, and you can't have peace with somebody who's got weapons. But yay, liberty! Yeeeeeeehaw!" (The yeeeeeeehaw part was silent.)

Guess the number of times I laughed incredulously during his statement. The person who comes closest without going over will get to spin the big wheel for a chance to win a prize package including a big, big tax cut.*

And to pre-empt any appearances by the NSA or that kid in my fourth-grade class who called me a terrorist-lover for making similar observations about Reagan's guffaw-inducing hypocrisy (probably I didn't use those exact words, though): I do not intend to convey here any support for Hamas or their statements about Israel.

I had chicken parmesan for lunch. It didn't taste suspicious, but right now I'm taking tiny, tiny sips of ginger ale. On second thought, I did listen to talk radio for longer than five minutes today, so maybe I oughta leave the chicken out of this.

*No purchase necessary. Certain restrictions apply. Not available to anyone who actually needs the money, persons living in flood zones or anything referred to as a "ward," students, and/or mothers.

Preacher man wanna save my soul, don't nobody wanna save my life.

2006-01-23T10:19:00.000-05:00

I had to share a very crowded Metro car this morning with seemingly twenty billion creepy anti-choice teenagers and their creepy adult escorts, and listen to their creepy, ill-informed woman hate. For that's what it is, kids, whether you cop to it or not. I know what's up. You want to punish women for having sex outside of the rules. If we make choices about our bodies in that context, you'll take them from us a few months later just to show us who's in charge. I know. It's about control, and it's about anger. That's why the gross old man your parents left in charge of you this morning couldn't contain his head shaking, eye rolling, and shit talking about the feminist buttons on my bag. He hates me. You all do, too, and I get that. It's about fear, and that's kind of pathetic, and I'd probably feel sorry for you if there weren't so much at stake, but the point is: you hate women and I am one. I get it.

I get it. I got it this morning as my face turned red under all the glaring scrutiny, and while I stuffed my hands in my pockets so you wouldn't see them shaking, while I turned up my headphones and tried to quickly come up with the right mantra to calm my nerves. I get it on the Roe anniversary every year. I got it at the March for Women's Lives when men thrust bloody, doctored pictures in the direction of my baby's stroller, screaming, spittle flying out of their mouths, shaking their fists and leaning over the barricades. I got it when I took my friend to the clinic and pressed her ear against my shoulder, wrapping my arm around to cover the other one so she wouldn't have to hear the alleged Catholics on the other side of the fence calling her a whore. I got it when I was threatened with bodily harm at my high school after my own little secret got out.

And I got it when I walked out of a clinic in DC thirteen years ago, tiny, brace-faced, wobbly, and woozy from anesthesia, into an ocean of angry faces and ugly words. I can still feel their rough hands on my arms, the grabbing and shoving, the panic in my mom's voice as she first asked, then demanded that they stop hurting me. One of them screamed "We just want to help her!" while digging fingernails into my forearm. Help me, even. Help me by rushing me and assaulting me and calling me a whore and a murderer five minutes after an invasive surgical procedure. With friends like these, know what I'm sayin'?

So I get it. We don't have to pretend it's about help, or life, or any other good, right, human kind of thing, because we understand each other pretty well. And I get that you're going to come down here at least once a year and terrorize women and remind us how you feel about us, and that I'm going to shake when I see your women-hating signs, and I'll blink back tears and choke down the ugly words you apparently can't keep to yourselves.

But if any of you fuckers ever steps into my personal space again to make nasty comments about my own silent and unobtrusive political expression, you're going to learn a very personal and intimate lesson about the difference between a doped-up sixteen-year-old me and the woman I've become since that day.

And I can't leave this bed, risk forgetting all that's been.

2006-01-11T11:57:00.000-05:00

Did I miss a MARC ALERT email? Mayhaps the one where the MTA encouraged us all to spray stinky substances at each other this week? Two days in a row I've been seated adjacent to women dousing themselves in perfume. I don't mean that they're just wearing lots of it. (Though I find that most MARC commuters are wearing too much of whatever they're wearing - cologne, perfume, whiskey...) These people are actually spraying the shit on themselves inside the train. Because they were running that late, and it was that important.

I don't want to alarm you, but if you're in the habit of spraying perfume on yourself while seated in an enclosed space less than four inches from another person's head, you should get yourself to a doctor right away. Because something is quite wrong with any brain that conceives that plan.

Worse, the person who did it today is none other than My Archnemesis, she of the pantsuits and pinstripes and bizarre, top-volume recountings of conversations in which she berated her coworkers, her boss, her underlings, and her kid's doctor's secretary. Immediately preceding her pollution of the trapped air we were all breathing, she'd arrived at her chosen seat (the very front one) and made a scary, scary angryface when she found the conductor's bag in it. And then? She moved his bag to a different seat. Who does this? And why do I have to have her on my train instead of the people who just get drunk and engage in extreme PDA?

Oh, and I'm officially a college student now, in case anyone's been on pins and needles about that. (You know, the remaining four of you who still read this thing.)

I'm floatin' free on the highway, formulatin' plans

2006-01-05T23:01:00.000-05:00

Holy smokes! I'm so scandalized, y'all. I knew about the drinking, but I must have slept through all the debauchery.

I've clearly been riding in the wrong cars.

I had stories to tell about my last two trips home, but they'd seem quite dreadfully benign in light of that article, so I'll wait.

She's like the wind. Through my trees.

2006-01-03T23:00:00.000-05:00

Someone has to stop this from happening.

Please, I beg of you, someone, anyone! Intervene.

The word today is: job. J. O. B.

2006-01-03T17:18:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd pass along this opportunity for a little blog fame. I'd submit an essay, but I'm clearly quite busy here doing all this nonstop, regular, exciting updating of my blog. Or something.

Oh! And in honor of that subject title, here's a list of other awesome movie quotes for you. Don't say I never gave you anything. You can consider all the pop-ups on that site surprise bonus gifts.

The online portion of my labor studies and "educational planning" (I still don't fully understand what that means, but I think it means "that orientation class that you can't get out of taking") classes started today. Aaaaand I have no password yet for the site where all of this is taking place. A good omen, don't you think?

My foot is smaller today than it was yesterday, and I am glad. Because that means soon I will be able to again wear shoes I don't hate. And also because being unable to walk less than sixty-three miles per hour is a real problem in the Metro system, what with all the antisocial asshats and the pushing and the shoving.

I made a New Year's Resolution (dun dun DUN!) and it's taken on a life of its own - such an interesting life, in fact, that if I were to end up not keeping it myself, it would still be a nifty little accomplishment. But I'm keeping it. If only because Sweetney knows about it, lives down the street, and has an excellent memory. I doubt I'd be able to escape her eye if I tried to "forget" I'd promised to have an affair with myself all year. That's right. You heard me. I'm having an affair. With myself. And at last count, 20 other people were interested in doing the same. Which means there are 20 other people who also know that I've made this resolution, so I'm not going to be able to wander off from it as easily as I've wandered off from such brilliant schemes as: moving to Montana to be a farmer (no, seriously, I had that as a life plan), moving to Hawaii to do god knows what (shout-out to Alex!), taking up knitting (oh, disaster), and becoming a Passionist Lay Missioner (don't ask - but here's a hint: that name implies a lot more scandal than is involved, and you can google it if you don't believe me).

On the eighth day of vacation, my true love gave to me a hand getting up my mom's front steps.

2006-01-01T22:40:00.000-05:00

Three bounced checks. Our mortgage company took our payment out twice for December, causing us to overdraw our account on the subsequent transactions (since they didn't bother telling us they'd done that and the bank didn't bother calling to say "Hey, there's something weird going on here"). When we called the mortgage company to ask when we might expect their check in the amount of our overdraft fees, they said they'd have to research the issue and get back to us in mid-January. Hey, I think I'm going to walk into a store, walk out with some merchandise that's not mine, and then, when I'm apprehended, tell the owners, "I might give that back in a month or so; I need to research the issue, though. Call me in a couple of days." What? What's good for the big, fat, thieving corporate goose, am I right?

Two new crutches. This story would be funnier if it had happened later in the evening on the 31st than it did, since then there might have been alcohol involved. Sadly, the unglamorous truth is that I stepped off a curb and sprained my foot and spent New Year's Eve in an emergency care clinic.

And a missing toddler in a clothing rack. My daughter? Is never going to the mall again. Or at least not until she's too tall to hide in those four-armed clothes rack dealies. It's amazing what your brain can reproduce inside four minutes of searching for your child: entire episodes of America's Most Wanted, that movie about John Walsh's kid, that one time that car full of oh-so-hilarious teenagers tried to scare you by yelling "Get in the car, little girl," when you were eight.... I'm also amazed at how all the reading and writing and talking I've done about how the fear-mongering, lying media distorts our perceptions of reality and gives us an over-inflated sense of danger to take our minds off the things we really ought to fear amounted to exactly nothing when I couldn't find Ruby in that store. The storage area of my brain containing the "stranger kidnappings are grossly exaggerated by the media and exploited and sensationalized for ratings" files was flooded by "OH MY GOD SOME LUNATIC HAS HER AND HE'S HEADING FOR THE PARKING LOT RIGHT NOW OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD." Also, my commitment to atheism isn't nearly as strong as I'd thought, because I surely did bust into some internal praying and bargaining. In fact, I think that's how I came to be sitting here with my foot in a splint. I should have held off on promising Him body parts for just another thirty seconds - I mean, as it turned out, she was only two racks over from where we'd last seen her (smiling evilly like the little imp she is, I might add). I could have just offered to bake The Guy some Cookies.

When I am a man, I will be an astronaut and find Peter Pan.

2005-12-23T13:13:00.000-05:00

For some reason, I have received in the mail the January 2006 issue of Men's Journal. It encourages me on the cover to LIVE THE ADVENTUROUS LIFE and FIND YOUR Paradise. Build a Dream Cabin, it suggests, or Captain Your Own Sailboat for a Week. It promises to tell me about Up-and-Coming Caribbean Hot Spots. What it doesn't tell me is Who Is The Wiseguy Who Sent Me This Subscription.

Day One of my vacation is going smashingly. I'm lying on my couch while the rest of my family is out playing, because every time I move, my entire renal/urinary system goes into an uproar. Faaaaaaaabulous. I'm halfway through another round of treatment antibiotics and start the suppression ones next week. I'm sure this is all terribly fascinating.

I've been thinking and writing about tattoos, my upcoming labor studies course (my books arrived yesterday and I feel like a real student now), and racism and classism in feminist circles. Oh, and urinary tract infections. I've been thinking A LOT about those.

Ow.

There's no lyric depressing enough to accompany this post.

2005-12-22T17:45:00.000-05:00

Texas doctors murder conscious woman of color against family's wishes; Randall Terry, George W. Bush, Senate nowhere to be found.

Culture of life, my ass.

The rungs torn from the ladder, can't reach the tumor, one god one market one truth one consumer

2005-12-22T10:49:00.000-05:00

Here is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' assessment of the economic violence committed by the Senate yesterday.

And here's mine:

This bullshit needs to stop, right now. Put down the free market Kool-Aid and pay attention. We cannot, for our own good or for the good of our neighbors and countrypeople, thrust poor people into further desperation, taking from them to give to the rich. It is wrongheaded and just wrong. It's shortsighted, stupid, morally bankrupt, vile, and disgusting. And if you think that all these poor women and their babies are going to get what they need by turning to the almighty alleged Free Market Amen, you've lost your damn mind. Don't believe me? Try it out for yourself. Let's see how faithful the crackpot ideologically faithful really are: quit your job, give up your health insurance and your savings, have a baby, and go to work for Wal-Mart. What? You shouldn't have any problem with that - the market'll fix you right up, right? Please have full reports on my desk two years from today. I'll have plenty of time to read them, because thanks to the higher interest rates on student loans and BIZARRE new requirements for Pell Grants (your degree has to relate to almighty alleged Homeland Security Amen now), it's pretty much guaranteed I'm not going to be able to afford to finish my labor history degree.

Happy holidays, everybody!

You did me wrong, when I thought we were really down.

2005-12-15T18:49:00.000-05:00

Like Taco Bell's menu, Keith Sweat's lyrics contain only five ingredients, but in a staggering array of combinations.

So (and here's another one for the Curiosity Journal), who writes crossword puzzles? I suspect no one. My hypothesis is that no new crosswords have been written for 30 years; they've just been reprinting the same ones all this time. Two clues from one puzzle in Dell's January 2006* Crossword Special support this hypothesis: "put up (beans)" and "saws." The answers are, respectively, "can," and "adages." Who says "saws" in that context anymore? And who is "put[ting] up beans"? This is stressing me out hardcore.

I fished the crossword book out of my bag to take a break from Anyone You Want Me To Be: A True Story of Sex and Death on the Internet, which I got from the library to take a break from The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. First of all, if crossword puzzles are going to stress me out, where can I turn to get a break from them? Should I just start carrying Goodnight Moon in my bag? Seriously, what is less stressful than a stinking crossword puzzle.

Second, what part of my obviously deranged brain conceived the ingenious plan to de-stress by reading about an internet serial killer? Granted, anything is less apt to ruin my day than tales of modern educational segregation, but no one with as many LJ acquaintances as I've made should fool herself into thinking true stories of e-murderers are going to be light reading.**

Last Christmas, thanks to the smarts and generosity of one Sweetney, I read The Corrections during my few days off from work. This year I've got ten days off, and I'm afraid there is no other work of fiction in the world that I'll ever love like I loved The Corrections. My vacation looms ahead of me, a towering... uh, tower... of booklessness! (See how stressed out I am about this? A towering tower?) Oh, look, I'm stressed out about the profoundly unstressful. Shocking.

*This is also quite suspicious: why do they publish these things three months ahead? I bought the January 2006 book in October. It's because they're shipping them from 1975 and the time machine is calibrated wrong, I'm telling you.

**I can hear it now: "She is so off my friends list." I'm sure you guys aren't serial killers! Don't unfriend!

So give it a rest, toots, don't ya know me.*

2005-12-14T23:54:00.000-05:00

I'm running out of space in my paper journal - five sheets from the end! - and I am embarrassingly proud. I bought it at Safeway almost two years ago. The maiden entry was written from inside a broken-down Saturn on 95 just north of the McHenry Tunnel tolls. I was waiting for a tow truck and had been trying to get to Virginia to a job that was killing me, I think literally. I worked there for about six more months after that day and was, like the poor car, broken down all the time. I couldn't keep up with the journal, and it sat in my bag unopened for a long time. I don't work there anymore, the car went to Habitat for Humanity, and I don't abuse my brain by attempting to drive to work these days. But I resuscitated the journal when I started my current job, breathing new life into it with good moods and a clear head and pretty union stickers.

That has nothing, really, to do with anything I'm going to say, but, as I'm sure certain of my closest associates will attest, I can get stuck like glue on any tiny idea that connects to nothing and goes nowhere, so I thought I'd write it down in an attempt to make some room in my brain for more important things, like, I wonder how zip codes were decided? Boston's start with zero, were they first? How come New York's start with one, but New Jersey's go back to zero? That blows my north-to-south ordering theory. And why did the Northern Virginia 220--'s have to become 201--'s?

Pressing matters, y'all. Pressing matters.

We started a "Curiosity Journal" for Ruby (because I am a GENIUS!), where we write down questions she asks, and where, in theory, we can write the answers after we find them out, and I think I need one of my own. (I say "in theory," because though I am a genius at coming up with weird ideas, I am not so much with the follow-up. I'd guess Joel is doing great work in the Curiosity Journal Division of the Department of Angela's Weird Ideas, though. Maybe I should make that my second question, right after zip codes. "Is Joel following up on my brilliant plans?")

In keeping with the schizophrenic theme of this post, I will now go running off in yet another completely random direction and tell you about the male bonding I was cursed to witness yesterday on the train. Two guys sitting behind me, who had just met, spent the entire trip to DC cementing their new friendship by slagging some poor woman (not there to defend herself) who, from what I gleaned, is shortly going to the mother of Guy One's baby.

Guy One: I can't stand her. My new girl wants to fight her, and I'm like, "Hey, I'm not going to stop you."

Guy Two: *cracks up*

Ew. I don't even want to give them any more Commuted Sentences. You can just fill in the rest using your own imagination and your arsenal of anti-woman words, all of which were used in the discussion. Actually, don't use your imagination that way. Use it thinking up tasty cookie recipes, and then bake me some. What? I deserve them for not telling them both to go stand in front of the train.

Not all the commuting news is bad. There's a Random Christmas Caroler on the red line most days lately. He always sings "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman." He just gets on, sings that song really loud, thanks everyone for listening, and then gets off. And I recently met an, um, interesting harmonica player on the blue line (which I thought was the orange line, leading to all sorts of adventures, story for another time). She would announce the song she was going to play before starting, and though the titles were all different (due to the above-alluded-to adventure, I was on that train for long enough to hear about 15 "different" songs), she played the same song each and every time, and it was awesome to watch the new arrivals to the car realize that's what was going on. I love the Metro sometimes. (Holy smokes, way not enough slandering of DC's good name going on in this entry. I think it's because it looks so pretty in the snow, which has started falling as I've been transcribing this post from my journal. I usually try to add some god-this-city-is-mean seasoning to these entries, but I got nothin'.)

*Das EFX. Aww yeah.

The section of my brain that stores lyrics to use as titles has been destroyed by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

2005-12-13T12:11:00.000-05:00

From the Statement issued by the governor on his denial of clemency for Stanley Tookie Williams:

The dedication of Williams’ book “Life in Prison” casts significant doubt on his personal redemption. This book was published in 1998, several years after Williams’ claimed redemptive experience. Specifically, the book is dedicated to “Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the countless other men, women, and youths who have to endure the hellish oppression of living behind bars.” The mix of individuals on this list is curious. Most have violent pasts and some have been convicted of committing heinous murders, including the killing of law enforcement. But the inclusion of George Jackson on this list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he stills sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems.

Where do I even begin…

Let’s start with the most obvious bit of UTTER RIDICULOUSNESS, which is this: Williams is not reformed because he sees violence as a legitimate means to address societal problems. OH, REALLY? So we are in fact, as the bumper stickers have long suspected, killing people to show that killing is wrong. Violence is not a legitimate means by which to solve societal problems, so let’s kill him!

What?! Okay, even if we can extract ourselves from the bizarre circle of WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT that we’ve just entered into with that logical gem, we’re still faced with the problem of now we’re going to have to lethally inject pretty much everyone in every branch of the federal government, and certainly literally everyone inside the White House. CLEARLY NO ONE BELIEVES THAT WE SHOULD EXECUTE EVERYONE WHO THINKS VIOLENCE IS A SOLUTION TO A SOCIETAL PROBLEM, OR MOST OF US WOULD NOT BE HERE RIGHT NOW, BECAUSE OUR ANCESTORS WOULD HAVE BEEN EXECUTED. SEE ALSO: WAR.

I AM LOSING MY MIND.

Moving right along, then. I confess. I have committed the heinous crime of feeling empathetic toward George Jackson. Please escort me immediately to the nearest death chamber, for I have significantly indicated that I am not reformed. Thank you. You know, George Jackson’s book is in the homes of pretty much every progressive person I’ve ever known. Many of those people are pacifists who staunchly believe that violence is not a solution. Take for example… oh, right, me. I have read Mr. Jackson’s book, I empathize with his plight, I think he shouldn’t have been in jail, and I think he’s a logical choice for the dedication of a book about a wrongfully imprisoned black man in California. I can also be found marching in the street several times a year against the concept of violence as a solution to societal problems. (See also: war.) I know this is going to be a little hard to follow for the dittoheads in the crowd, but people? Are complicated. Issues? Also quite complicated. The world? HAS GRAY AREAS. You can believe one guy is innocent, or redeemed, or shouldn’t be punished for a particular action, or even believe a particular action to be justified, without it speaking for your entire worldview. Some of us like to take each situation as it comes, look at the specifics, and come to a conclusion after actually using our brains instead of making huge sweeping proclamations about people’s goodness or badness and sticking to them no matter what is going on in any particular instance. In fact, some of us even think that life isn’t so simple as to make it possible for us to declare or even know whether people are inherently “bad” or unworthy of life itself. I know, wacky. We’re probably terrorists! Kill us!

If the denial of clemency had said “We don’t believe Williams has truly been redeemed, because he’s been eating the other prisoners,” I’d probably agree that he wasn’t being totally honest about his redemption. I still wouldn’t think it was okay to plot the man’s death, but I would at least feel like alright, these people have a point. Wrong conclusion, but fair point. But how much are you stretching it when you actually think of and then write down, because it's such an important part of your statement that it should be forever immortalized, “Dude’s gotta die tonight because he likes George Jackson.” Way to make my point, Arnold, which is that you don’t have one. It sickens me enough that we premediate the murders of our fellow human beings. But I am stunned into near catatonia that we love doing it SO MUCH that we will reach and stretch and contrive and make complete asses of ourselves to find excuses to do it when we demonstrably KNOW there are no reasons.

George Jackson. Unfuckingbelievable.

2005-12-12T16:45:00.000-05:00

No clemency for Tookie Williams.

I don't know what to say... I'm sad. I'm deeply ashamed of this country right now. And I wish there was anything I could do to stop this execution from happening.

It's for certain, I never thought I'd last.

2005-12-08T17:31:00.000-05:00

First, a to do list:

1. Acquire literally everything on sockdreams dot com;

2. Wear skirts every single day to show off snazzy feet.

Now then: I’ve been thinking (as I do) about pasts and bridges and friends. As I recently told my dad, once every year or so, sometimes more frequently but never less than once per Christmas season, I start to contemplate my lack of a connection to my old self. I agree with what he said in response, which is that my life now, and more specifically my community now is more important than a bridge to my old life.

But.

Have you ever separated from someone, deliberately or otherwise, and wished that you at least still had friends in common so that you could have someone with whom you could share memories? Or have someone who’d understand all the complications of missing someone but knowing it’s okay not to have her in your life? Or talk about how the person is doing now and say, “I always knew he’d turn out okay,” and have someone who’d understand what it means? I often feel like I need someone to be the friend I have in common with the girl I used to be. And I don’t have that, because becoming someone other than her meant, necessarily, cutting ties with her friends.

I would never trade in porch-sitting with Tracey, or marathon silly and/or mutually-irritated email threads with Emily, or planning and dreaming with Joel, for meeting up for dinner with a character from my last life, but every once in a while, I actually spill tears thinking about what it would be like to talk about my life in some kind of actual context. You know? (Unlike meeting up with my current friends, it would have to come with some kind of cosmic/divine guarantee that the evening wouldn’t end with me crying and/or punching someone in the head for being an offensive jackass, but you know.) It might be nice to say, “Here’s what’s up with me now,” and have someone say back, “I know how far you had to travel to get there.”

Maybe it’s only as important as I’m making it. Then again, maybe everything is only that important, right? In any case, my choices are always: do something about it or stop dwelling. And now that I’ve written it down, I’m going to stop dwelling, because it’s all I can do right now. For a lot of reasons.

No, LJers, you aren't experiencing deja vu. I did in fact cover this extensively last year at this time. See? I told you a Christmas can't go by without visions of oldfriendplums dancing in my head.

Talk is cheap and baby time's expensive.

2005-11-30T17:41:00.000-05:00

I think it's the height of hilarity for people who write about politics online to criticize other people who write about politics online for wasting their political breath on the internet instead of in the streets. Especially when you're employing some kind of anti-blog snobbery from inside the confines of a journaling site. I mean...? Did I miss when one of these venues became more politically serious than the other? Are journalers now being called to testify before Congress, but we bloggers are just sad hacks? No, really: ...? We're all doing the same thing - difference is some of us are doing it where it can be seen by anyone, and some of us are keeping it on the relative hush. Some of us are doing both (that'd be me, with my dual e-life). I don't personally care what anyone's doing, actually. I like reading my friends' journals, blogs, what have you, political and non. I don't require that you impress me in any specific ways, y'all.

It should not be presumed that any of us is writing on the internet (or whatever verb you'd like to use there) in place of some other kind of action. One can both write and do other things. Writing on the internet is what I do during the times I can't be in my basement packing books to send to women in prison, or out in the street shouting at the White House. Kind of like what everyone on LJ, Xanga, Myspace, or whateverthefuck is doing. Or kind of like what anyone who's writing anything anywhere is doing. And I know of no one who's able to be out protesting or starting collectives every moment of her life, including the e-snobs who use up their own time (oh, irony) snarking about bloggers. How many blocks can a picket sign be carried in the time it takes to talk a paragraph o'smack about people who write about politics on the internet? You'd better get out there and make up for the lost time, because we're all keeping score, you know. You could have chanted three snappy slogans by now, slacker!

Christ, what a bunch of high school ridiculousness there is online. People seriously can't find enough to be snobs about? Isn't there some too-mainstream-for-thee pop band you could go make fun of?

I intend to write in both my LJ and my blog to my little pontificating heart's content. I'm not going to pretend it's all socially useful, some of it is just talking shit about people on the train, or blubbering about my depression. And sometimes, I get an email from a total stranger saying that I've changed the way they think about something or put words to something they felt but couldn't name. There's no revolution going on in this space, nor in many of the other little personal publishing corners of the internet, and there needn't be. I'm sure we're all perfectly capable of multi-tasking. Witness me keep up a blog, a LiveJournal, and a marriage, all while parenting, running a growing non-profit out of my sad, sad basement, working full-time, and going to school (starting January 3, y'all, FINALLY) - all that while being, as we all know, not your superwoman.

More to the point, however, I bring you Alice Walker:

"Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence." (That one's just because it's amusing to me in this specific moment as I'm feeling much like slapping a monitor upside the head.)

and Alice Walker, again:

"Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful." (And that one because sometimes, creation is action. Or, you know, all the time.)

So, act when and where you can, and create when and where you can, how you can. I mean, bully for you if you're privileged enough to have unlimited protesting time on your hands because you're independently wealthy or something, but if you're not, and you piece together little scraps of creation/amusement/occasional difference-making throughout your otherwise busy days, even better for you. And when we're both off work - be it paid work or parenting work or whatever kind of work it is we do - I'll see you on Pennsylvania Avenue.

We don't need to escalate (wherein I wax political and ask you to refrain from a holy war)*

2005-11-29T12:09:00.000-05:00

Death Row: Does personal reform count?

Yes. It should. Also, no. It shouldn’t. Why no? Because we shouldn’t be killing people in the first place. It shouldn’t be a matter of whose “personal reform” we believe is genuine, whose expression of remorse is more satisfying to witness, whose conversion to which religion is most convincing. None of that should “count” because we shouldn’t kill people. There shouldn’t be a death row. It doesn’t deter, it doesn’t erase, it doesn’t cost less, it doesn’t do any of the things that people who haven’t bothered to look beyond Fox News for information about it think it does. For crying out loud, it’s not even carried out accurately some of the time – and some of the time is FAR too many times for my taste.

What it does do is satisfy a morbid, vengeful bloodthirst that we ought not be indulging. Punishment for punishment’s sake is gross. It’s not the behavior of evolved societies. It certainly shouldn’t be the behavior of societies currently being headed up and represented by buffoons simpering “culture of life” into every camera they can get their ugly mugs in front of. Mercy should be a societal value, not a situation-specific occurrence. (And perhaps if we, as a group, had any to begin with, we'd have to worry a lot less about what to do when someone among us makes an individual decision not to utilize it, because perhaps we'd spend less of our time and dollars punishing people for smaller mistakes and more of both on ensuring lives for everyone, as my father would say, of dignity and grace.)

I have never and will never believe myself to be of such importance that I can judge the worthiness of a fellow person to continue hir life. It’s not mine to say whether Stanley Williams is remorseful enough or contrite enough or sorry enough or religious enough. It’s not for any of us to say.

That said, I, as many other people do, feel an especial outrage about this execution. It will be a travesty among travesties if it is allowed to be carried out. And I’ve no doubt that Arnold Schwarzenegger is exactly the sort of unevolved person who cares more about making a point than about actually being right.

*I have found that arguing about this issue is about the most pointless arguing one can engage in. I'm venting; don't feel like you have to enlighten me or anything. God herself could come down and tell me the death penalty is a-okay, and I'd fart in her general direction.

It doesn't really matter now, and least of all to you.

2005-11-28T16:52:00.000-05:00

I overheard the inanest, most ridiculous DC-related commentary on the Metro on Wednesday afternoon (“People are really nice here” – BWAHAHAHAHA – and something about living in DC meaning one has to arrive at the airport for a domestic flight seven hours before said flight takes off… what?). Not only does the commentary about DC need to be left to those of us who have spent more than five minutes of our lives in this city, but this particular commentary was so distractingly stupid as to make me miss my stop, and so I say to you, Inane College Girl: SHUT UP. People are nice here? Do you know when I relayed that comment to several separate people, they each independently said, "Where'd she come from originally, hell?" The nice people you might have met here are actually from Baltimore. And anyone who arrives at an airport seven hours early for a domestic flight isn’t doing so out of being from DC but out of being a complete and total idiot. Also, you don’t have to shout to be heard on the Metro (note the rest of us are sitting quietly, reflecting upon how much we hate our lives), and it is in fact frowned upon to show any kind of exuberance or enthusiasm thereupon, as you would KNOW if you weren’t so busy making up things to sound knowledgeable about your clearly very new hometown. I bet you stand on the left, too, don’t you? I bet you don’t even know what I’m referring to, do you? So PIPE DOWN!

God! Who on earth is excited on the Metro? The Metro is for hating your fellow man. Learn it, live it, love it. Er, hate it. Whatever. Just be quiet, is what I’m trying to say here. As it stands, even without your shouting and carrying on about all the “nice” “people” in DC, I can’t be trusted to get myself from any point on Earth to any other point on Earth without missing a stop, missing a turn, heading in the wrong direction entirely, veering off the path for reasons unknown even to me, and/or following shiny things until I forget why I left the house in the first place. I don’t need you yammering away about things that cause my brain to switch gears from Just Listen To The Conductor Until You Are Off This Thing to Oh I Am So Writing About Your Silly Ass In My Blog. Because once my brain starts working on a blog post, I will end up in Alexandria on a payphone (and back in DC again, if I’m being totally honest about Wednesday's events) instead of Vienna meeting my mother, and I will HATE YOU FOREVER.

In other news, my doctor informs me that other of my internal organs also cannot be trusted to perform their assigned functions, and that I will now be taking suppressive antibiotics for approximately ever to ward off kidney infections. THANKS, MOUNTAIN DEW. Kids, learn from my mistakes and don’t try the following at home: working every day for four months, 80 hours a week for a community organization that “forgets” to pay you on time (ahem – OR AT ALL); drinking nothing but carbonated, caffeinated liquid death all day every day to stay awake; skipping lunch every single day because your boss is an asshat; and ignoring that burning urination issue/dull pain in your lower back for weeks at a time because you don’t have health insurance. And why don’t we try this at home, boys and girls – uh, I mean, mainly girls? Because we will one evening collapse from the pain and find ourselves in a crowded emergency room crying on our new boyfriend for six hours, and our kidneys will never be the same, and we will have urinary tract infections evermore, or at least for the next four years. That’s why.

In my next life, I would like to have a penis if that can be arranged, thank you. You bepenised creatures have no idea how lucky you are, with your lengthy urethras and your what have you.

Wasn’t it just Thanksgiving? Shouldn’t I be wrapping this up with something holiday-spirited and, uh, thankful, or something? Okay, fine: up there where I said all the nice people are from Baltimore? That is so true, y’all. I spent yesterday with some fine Baltimoreans indeed, and all day was saying to myself, “Wow, s/he is really nice!” People are just uncommonly freaking nice. I moved out of DC two (two? or three? something like that) years ago, and I am still pleasantly surprised every time I attend a party in Baltimore and find myself in the company of not just one or two, but an entire houseful of really nice people I'd like to see again. So thank you, Baltimore, and thank you Joel and Ruby for indulging my Charm City fantasies and taking a chance on a new place with me. It’s a nice city and a nice family to come home to at night.

I'm not your superwoman.

2005-11-18T16:16:00.000-05:00

Or your supermom. In fact, I know better than anyone that I'm far from super as a mom. Really, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing most of the time, y'all. It's probably a really good thing that I've got an inherently bright kid and a brilliant partner. My maternal instincts are for shit.

So I flounder, and I flail about, and I try to think stuff out ahead as much as I can and then end up playing it by ear anyway a lot of the time. I am constantly taken by surprise by my own limitations and boundaries, and I am in a war with myself more than most people know to try to push the boundaries and stretch myself. Having a framework helps a lot; it's like, "I'm an idiot in this situation, what would The Perfect Egalitarian/Anarchosocialist/Feminist Parent Do?" More than I should, I tell The Perfect Egalitarian/Anarchosocialist/Feminist Parent in my head to shut the fuck up and get out of my face. More often as time goes by, I at least try to hear her out. If I can't incorporate all the advice, I try to adapt it as best I can to our situation.

I'm learning.

I bet every parent's got one thing she never fucks up on - a specialty, something about which we can say, "I'm not perfect by anyone's standards, but I am a superstar at making sure we all eat together at dinnertime, or making up really funny stories, or comforting him when he has a bad dream, or making damned sure she never goes without something she needs." My parents had things they were amazing at, and things they were barely scraping by at, and things that I think they'd admit they sucked at really bad.

My Thing, my parenting accomplishment so far, is advocacy, which makes, like, so much sense if you know me. Fighting is kind what I do. I'm a bit of a creative disaster; I'd bet my stories bore Ruby to death. I can't draw a dinosaur or a lion to save my own life. Let's not even revisit the subject of my lyrical abilities. My rampant and unchecked ADD doesn't serve anyone in terms of scheduling family meals and sticking to that or any other routine. I don't think I hear Ruby wake up half the time, whether it's because she's had a bad dream or because it's 7:30 in the morning. Joel is phenomenal at all these things. I am getting better. Ruby might one day be able to say, "My mom would forget all deadlines and appointments unless they were tattooed on her face, but man alive, her stories were outstanding." Probably not. But I hope - in fact, I know - that Ruby, when she's called by new parenthood, or a move away from home, or therapy, or graduation from Harvard Medical School, to reflect upon her life, will say about me, "My mom, for all her faults, fought her ass off for me, even when it hurt. No matter what, she took my side, and she took on the world about it."

I doubt that she will be able to honestly say that I was right every time, or that I always knew how to fight for her. I know that I am clumsy and brash and could stand to sit through a seminar on picking battles. But I will always, always fight them for Ruby. If she can say nothing else good about me, she will be able to say that I always made sure she knew that she was worth fighting for.

I write the songs that make the Joel world sing.

2005-11-04T17:32:00.000-05:00

A big WTF to the person who just called here. It's Friday, ass, lighten up with the cranky attitude.*

So my unpoetic self wrote some lyrics. (No, I'm not going to share them.) I told Joel about it, because I'd written them (albeit months later) in response to his asking me to write some. I think they suck, so I've been reluctant to show them to him, but I finally gave them to him this morning in the car so he could read them after I was far far away. I haven't heard from him since! This is obviously because he's in Virginia having lunch with his mom (and before that was at a friend's house), but I've decided to fret that he's avoiding me because he's horrified at what a sucky lyricist I am, and that the lyrics were so embarrassingly bad that he can't even face me by email.

I mean, they're really stupid and trite. I've heard worse, but anyone can compare hirself to Ruben Studdard and come out on top, know what I'm sayin'? I think songwriters and poets and novelists have a whole section of brain that either I don't have or that is closed for business in my head. I just don't write that way. I can't make up stuff, and I can't paint pretty word pictures. Pretty much I can tell you about my day, talk smack about stupid people, and get pissed off about abortion rights. And really, it works. I see no real need to branch out.

*Man, where's a call from Howard Dean when you need one?

About a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt*

2005-11-01T21:53:00.000-05:00

Due to some nonsense I didn’t quite understand and don’t feel like trying to explain, I am stuck at Union Station until 7:35 tonight. And due to some earlier events I still don’t quite understand and couldn’t explain if I wanted to, I didn’t eat lunch at lunchtime today. I did have a surprisingly tasty Odwalla** bar around 3, but it wasn’t what I’d call lunch. So, stuck and hungry, I turned to Sbarro, specifically the per-pound buffet, some of which I am now wearing on my shirt. This is because my no-knife broccoli-eating method failed. Yes, I do have a Broccoli Method. Shut up, you know you have one too. You ain’t got to lie, Craig, you ain’t got to lie.

What went wrong, you ask. Well, for starters, the fact that my method is completely tacky and mannerless – see also, “no-knife,” above. What I was trying to do, and what I’ve been able to accomplish without incident on several prior occasions, was impale the top – or “tree” if you prefer – parts of the spear with my fork, and then bite the trunk part far enough up that it would separate the tree parts from each other, and then I could remove them from my fork as two individual pieces of broccoli. I’m sure any fool can guess what I did wrong. It was such a careless, avoidable error: I bit too close to the bottom. I know! I know. Stupid. And then, of course, I had one large treetop and not enough trunk left to start over. I suppose right then would have been a good time to walk over and get a knife to cut the cursed thing into manageable bites, but I soldiered on – some might say valiantly – attempting to use my front teeth for the job, and the treetop fell right apart, tumbling off my fork and bouncing off the container. And now I have broccoli juice and olive oil right down all the inches of shirt most likely to be stared at by all the cretins in this station. Who cares what they think, anyway? Clearly, I do. I mean, they might be bosom-leering cretins, but now I am a tacky, mannerless broccoli juice-wearer. No one wants that as her legacy.

*You’re going to have to wait until my post of November 2, which is when I always start my yearly Joel Retrospective, for the first half of this title to make any sense. I was going to start it early this year, just to be able to use that lyric perfectly, and then I remembered this is my blog and I don’t have to make sense if I don’t want to.

**Heh. That’s the second mention of Odwalla in my blog this week. I am not being paid for this product placement; they just had a gang of stuff on sale at Safeway on Monday.

It's 7 a.m., and I've already said "because I said so" three times.*

2005-11-01T10:14:00.000-05:00

Okay, I confess! Whatever it is, I did it! I hate time changes. Especially the fall one, because it takes me no time at all to get adjusted to the new hours, but it takes Ruby what feels like all goddamned winter. And I'm sitting here trying to think up even one thing I'd like less than to be up at 6 a.m. with a demanding, whiny toddler, and I've got nothin'. Bamboo shoots under the nails, hot sauce up my nose, hanging upside down over boiling oil, I've thought of all these things. No one's ever come up with better torture than a three-year-old who refuses to go back to sleep or to even stop asking for things for two seconds at a time. They should put toddlers in police interrogation rooms. Nobody can withstand this.

Which is why they're so cute... Because Mother Nature knew she'd better do something to keep adults from losing our minds. And if you'd like some visual evidence of The Cute, head on over to Sweetney's place for pictures of Ruby and Mina in their Halloween finery.

Some beverages that taste like cold ass. Coca Cola Zero and Odwalla's new super protein latte thing. There is no difference between Coke Zero and Diet Coke, and "Zero"'s continued presence on the shelves indicates that people haven't figured this out yet. People are really stupid. And that Odwalla thing, yeesh, what the hell is in that?

Fire FIGHTER, Baltimore, fire FIGHTER. If you clicked that link up there like I told you to, you know that Ruby was a firefighter for Halloween. Fire FIGHTER. With a staggering ONE exception, every single person who verbally noted her costume (which was basically everyone we encountered) called her a fireMAN, referred to her as "he" or "him," or said she was a boy. If Sweetney or I said "she" or "her," they'd say, "Oh, excuse me, fire GIRL." (Fire girl? You thought she was portraying an adult back when you called her a fire MAN, and now she's a fire GIRL? Kinda telling that you went right from MAN to GIRL while skipping over WOMAN.) Won't you all join me here in the 2000s, now that they're half over? How about firefighter?

*Back when I was just a wee, naive lass (four years ago), I had a list of things I was never going to say to my future child/ren. That was one of them. Oh, how far we've come. In addition to the fact that I now apparently recite that list without irony three times an hour, "child/ren" became "CHILD, JUST ONE CHILD, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO MORE." How many days 'til she gets her driver's license?

Rosa.

2005-10-25T02:52:00.000-05:00

I hadn't thought much about Rosa Parks, specifically, beyond what I'd been told in my public school history classes (taught by white men, using textbooks penned by white men), until I had a conversation with Joel a few years ago. We were watching something on TV about how DC public schools were celebrating the anniverary of the Brown decision, and we were both getting really frustrated about the patronization and superficial teaching of "history" we were witnessing in the documented classrooms. Eventually, our sniping at the teachers on the screen broadened to a more general discussion of the treatment of the history of Black people in mainstream education and media, and Joel pointed out that the way that Rosa Parks's story is told does her a real disservice. I had read shortly before that conversation (possibly in Lies My Teacher Told Me - get it, read it, love it) the unabridged version of her tale, the one where she was not just a tired woman who reached the end of her tolerance one day, but a woman who'd devoted her life to the fight for justice. But I hadn't really sat with the longer story and thought about what it means that we all grow up hearing the edited version until Joel brought her up. For all those years it never occurred to me what was taken from Rosa Parks when she was made a saint of history.

And so today, while we're all reflecting on her life and her impact, I thought I'd pay tribute by posting a link to an examination of that disparity between her truth and the myth, and by saying goodbye not to Rosa the saint, but to Rosa the organizer, Rosa the worker, Rosa the woman, and Rosa the human, who had human fears and human shortcomings and human faults, and who overcame those and the all of the external oppressive, brutal opposing forces, not through magic but through struggle.

[S]he sang as if [s]he knew me

2005-10-25T02:30:00.000-05:00

I’m reading The Chelsea Whistle right now, a book that really deserves and may actually get its own real entry here when I’m finished.

I’m pretty careful to always have something to read on the train. Yesterday, as I was getting ready for work, I noted that I was approaching the end of Consuming Kids, so I packed The Chelsea Whistle into my bag so that I wouldn’t have any lapse in books. (This is because when I have a book lapse, I spend precious dollars on tripe like People and Us, both of which I hate and read anyway.) I finished the first book by the time the train pulled out of Penn Station (I was closer to the end than I’d thought – that Appendix is long) and started The Chelsea Whistle, which I was halfway through before I got home last night, because it’s that good. It’s so good, in fact, that I broke my own rule about not reading my train books at home and took it out and read a few pages while Ruby and Joel were finishing dinner (which I’d also finished quickly because it was that good).

So this morning, thinking that it was entirely possible that I’d finish The Chelsea Whistle before the end of my trip home, I spent a few minutes looking through the books spilling out of the shelves in our bedroom, stacked up on the floor and the nightstand, trying to find something I hadn’t read yet. Joel’s mom sent me a generous Amazon shipment for my birthday a few months ago, and I was sure I hadn’t torn completely through it yet, and I was right. I hadn’t yet started Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Colored People. So I packed that in my bag and headed off. When I got on the train, I reached into my bag for The Chelsea Whistle and pulled out Consuming Kids instead. Dang. I’d forgotten to put it back last night (this is one of three reasons I don’t read my train books at home*). And I’d forgotten to take Consuming Kids out of my bag in the first place, and then forgotten that I’d forgotten, so it never occurred to me to verify what was in the bag this morning when I walked out instead of just doing a head count of the books. So I went ahead and started Colored People, which is excellent and also deserves its own entry here, and now I’m not going to be able to decide tomorrow whose memoir I want to finish first.

Books seem to present themselves to me right when they should. (I am an atheist. But if I were going to believe in a deity, she’d be someone who sent books into my life at the precise appropriate time. She’d be more a superhero than a deity, I guess, because I wouldn't endow her with any other importance like needing me to devote my life to serving her egomaniacal ass or any such nonsense.) I am sorting through all kinds of stuff right now related to gender and sexuality and having been a girl child. Right at this moment in my life is when I most need Michelle Tea, and here she is. My friend Emily actually gave me the book for my birthday, but I had already queued** up several books from Joel’s mom in a particular order. Then we had some Ruby issues that needed addressing, and so I read Consuming Kids first. And reading that stirred up a whole mess of thinkin’ about my life as a girl – as just any girl and as the specific girl that I was. And some of that stuff has been hard to revisit – hard meaning painful and hard meaning laborious.

I’ll probably deal with the painful aspect elsewhere, but just to touch on the laborious part: sometimes I feel slightly crazy even thinking about gender. I’m finding that not a lot of people share my understanding of what it means and how it shapes our lives, especially those of us raised as girls. I get discouraged almost immediately when I contemplate speaking my thoughts aloud (a fact which itself relates to gender). I know most people aren’t going to understand, and that many of them won’t even believe me. So right when the noise was loudest in my head, after finishing Consuming Kids, I went to the stack of unread books on my floor and there was Michelle Tea’s story, waiting to reassure me that I didn’t invent all of this shit in my own head, that I’m not crazy, that other girls thought what I thought and feared what I feared and lived what I lived. I don’t know what I did to deserve all this literary synergy. I’m excited about getting further into Henry Louis Gates’s story and discovering why it entered my life when it did as opposed to any other time.

*The others are: I concentrate a lot better on the train and don't want to "waste" pages at home where I don't concentrate at all, on anything, basically; and I have been reading some brain-consuming shit lately, and I try not to have my brain consumed right before I go to sleep.

**Why the hell are there so many u's in this word?!

If you could see me now...

2005-10-21T19:03:00.000-05:00

I witnessed the most ridiculous cell-phone related nonsense I've ever seen on Wednesday night while waiting for Joel and Ruby to pick me up from the train station. A woman came out of the station, looked around for a few seconds, and then pulled her cell phone out of her bag. As she crossed the driveway, she asked the person on the other end, "Where are you?" Apparently, the other person said, "At the station," because she started explaining where she was and saying, "Can you see me? I can see you, there you are! Can you see me yet? I'm over here, no, no, yes! Right there! Okay, I'm walking toward you. Stop there. Okay, I'm about to walk out in front of your car."

I'm about to walk out in front of your car.

She was about to walk out in front of his car, they were looking right at each other, and she felt it was necessary to tell him, by PHONE, that she was about to walk out in front of his car. Either she needs to smash her cell phone into a thousand bits and enter some kind of recovery program for cellholics (or should I say cellholes? Yes, I should), or he really needed her to tell him that, in which case he REALLY doesn't need to be driving around on public streets.

Good night, my people.

2005-10-18T20:47:00.000-05:00

It’s the usual cast of characters tonight – Stinky Cologne Guy, Nakey, Shouty, and a few people who haven’t been mentioned here yet but deserve a little recognition:

Chelsea. This person is notable for two reasons: 1) She’s about 50 years old and is sporting an honest-to-god Chelsea; and 2) no matter how early I get on the train, she’s already on it, and I’ve never seen her walking up ahead of me on the platform. These facts combine to create one somewhat embarrassing other fact: I am slightly afraid of this woman.

Bob. Also notable for both her hair-to-age ratio and her boarding procedures. She has my haircut and is easily 30 years my senior. (This is not as intriguing as if she were sporting a buzzed head with bangs, but interesting for reasons I’ll cover later.) Every night, she walks past the first available, or rear, entrance to the quiet car, and enters through the very front of the car, only to proceed to a seat several rows back. This has, on a few occasions, caused our paths to cross in the aisle (since, like everyone else, I board from the back and proceed toward the front), which has in turn caused her to make put-upon faces at me and me to want to ask her, “What’s up with your OCD entry-point decisions?”

Laptop. Here’s another one who somehow manages to already be on the train by the time everyone else gets on. Not only is he already on board and seated with his belongings stowed away in the overhead rack, but he’s already fully engrossed in laptopery. This is puzzling for the obvious reason: how the hell did he get on, seated, and settled in so quickly? Does he just ride back and forth all day? It’s also confusing, for me anyway, because you can’t get on the internet from inside this train (I’ve tried), and so what is the point of lugging a laptop around?* Work? What is that about? Who are these people who voluntarily do work outside of work? It’s baffling.

Back to that hair thing. I’ve noticed that – for most people – there’s a point at which we stop keeping up with hair trends and just pick a hairstyle and stay with it. I’m getting there myself. I make small adjustments, but the general idea hasn’t changed in quite a while. A friend whose hairstyle is similar to mine and is only a few years older has recently told me that she’s also settling down with her bob. My hypothesis on this issue is that right around 30, we marry our hair. So you can tell what was in style at any given point by looking at the heads of people over 30. I’ve been riding the train with the aforementioned Bob long enough to know that she is actively maintaining her relationships with this one haircut. She’s married to it – or, as Ruby would say egalitarianly, they are married wiff each other. If I’m right about Bob’s age and that 30 is the average age of marriage to one’s hair, I am currently sporting a hairstyle that was hip the year I was born. (This may further mean that my parents were out of style that year, according to certain recently rediscovered family photos.)

Back to the people on the train. We’ve been joined this evening by a most unexpected and I daresay unwelcome fellow passenger: Announcementron. For no reason I can figure out, station stop announcements are suddenly being made by an exceedingly creepy pre-recorded voice. Maybe she got fired from 411, and MARC is like her uncle or something. Whatever. Nepotism or no, I don’t like her.

Some other things I’d better go ahead and address while I’m here, infrequent as my blog appearances are lately:

1. I’ve found a fashion trend I actually like. Folks, please take as long as you need with the button-downs-and-argyle-sweater-vests thing, because it is certainly not bothering me. And by all means, work the geeky glasses, too, if they move you. Mmm-HMM.

2. If you all don’t read Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and Consuming Kids, I’m going to start posting oversized images that will make your screen go all horizontal-scrolly. Don’t test me. I have big pics and I’m not afraid to use them. I’m looking at you, LJ RSS-ers. Read them or your friends list gets it.

3. Some people’s vividest (yeah, vividest, that’s right) happy life memories are of vacations to exotic places, thrill-seeking activities, or proud accomplishments. Mine are nearly all of laughing my face off, usually in a thoroughly mundane location like “my old Ford Festiva” or “the basement,” over some bizarre, obscure inside joke shared with my brothers. This says mostly embarrassing things about me, but very nice things about my relationship with my brothers. It also makes for a lot of guess-you-had-to-be-theres. (For instance: two shakes of a rat’s ass. HAHAHAHA! Oh. Uh. Guess you had to be there.) I mention this because Joel, in a demonstration of how wisely I choose my lifemates, actually referenced the above-cited example last night, and he hadn’t even been there for the birth of the joke! This reminded me of two things: a) non-Burnekos who find these things amusing are rare and precious gifts, and I was lucky enough to marry one; and b) I REALLY miss my little brothers and want us all to live in the same town again. Okay, house, but even I think like a reasonable, realistic adult now and again.

*There is one other acceptable answer to this question, and it’s: to watch TV shows on DVD. But that’s not what Laptop’s doing, I checked. Incidentally, it’s also not what the dumbass in front of me last Friday morning was doing with his laptop. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Mr. I-Watch-Porn-on-the-Train-Where-My-Mom-Can’t-Catch-Me.

I think you're the same as me, we see things they'll never see.

2005-10-14T12:54:00.000-05:00

Joel, who is going to kill me for honoring him with an Oasis quote, is another year older and cuter today.

Because we met around his birthday four years ago, it has been a sort of bookmark for me. Every year, I think back to the fall we spent working together as organizers in DC, driving around in my car, talking about changing the world, and falling in love. We've yet to overthrow any governments together or bring about our hotly-contested anarchosocialist utopia. But we have created some very magical things together, like Ruby, and in small ways are daily changing at least our world.

It has been anything but easy most of the time. I told Joel, four Decembers ago after we learned of the impending Ruby, that in all but the most literal way, I'd been born when we fell in love. He wrote: "Giving birth is such an interesting concept. I hope that we can give birth to new and exciting things in our life together always. Giving birth takes work. It takes sacrifice and stress. But once it happens it is always beautiful." I don't know if he knew at the time how prophetic that was. We have indeed created breathtaking beauty out of what has sometimes felt like excrutiating stress.

I don't know much about Joel's birth, how much sacrifice or stress was involved (his mom is pretty stoic and/or good-natured on most matters). I do know I am thankful for the resulting beautiful people I now share my life with.

Ah, ah, ah, aaaaaoooooh*

2005-10-07T02:52:00.000-05:00

Alright, who do I need to give a stern talking-to (er, to?) about this weather? Did one of you bemoan the lack of rain? Get over here and bring me some dry clothes! (I walked an eighth of a block to the ATM an hour ago, WITH an umbrella, and my sleeves and pant legs are STILL soaked. I'm freezing and on my second cup of hot chocolate to try and thaw out.)

I'd have thought this weather would push me over the edge, morose as I've been feeling all week. I'm actually in a better mood today. I might even get motivated to transcribe the backlog of stuff in my paper journal.

Ruby wrote her name last night, on a paper tablecloth at Rocky Run. Apparently it wasn't the first time, but it was the first time I'd seen it. If we hadn't been in public, I'd have followed up on my impulse to fall directly on the floor and yell "HOLY SMOKES!" I know we can all write our names and stuff, and it's not like she composed a symphony at the dinner table, but you know, I'm her mom. It's exciting to me, alright?

As some of you have heard, I'm thinking of holding an anti-Wal-Mart candy sale on October 30th (see here). I'm not sure exactly how this works, and the website is slightly less than helpful about logistics and stuff - like, how does one determine where to have the sale? I'm guessing Wal-Mart probably won't let one go too long on their actual property.

God, I think this entry really drives home the identification of this space as one of those "me, me, me" blogs.

*I'm sure it was obvious, but just in case you didn't get it: that's Shannon Hoon ad-libbing out of "No Rain." But you totally already knew that.

Get up, get get get down.

2005-10-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

Baby beluga in the deepbluesea
Swim so wiiiiild, swim so free
Heaven aboooove and the sea be-low
Just a lilwhitewhale ondago

Baaaaaaby beluuuuga, oh baaaaaby beluuuga
Isda water warm, is your mama home wifyoooooooou so haaaaaaapy

Hey, if I have to have the Ruby version of this song on a neverending loop on my head, then you do, too. And I must say, if you have to have Baby Beluga stuck in your head, the Ruby version's the best one to have.

I'm severely sleep deficient right now; I had two or three nights in a row of going to bed way too late, and on the nights that have followed, I'm getting enough hours of sleep, but not all together, and none of it is restful sleep. I'm having dreams ranging from mildly weird (my dad being a closet Republican) to starkly terrifying (my being laid off), and I just never get into a deep sleep. Then the sleeplessness makes me anxious, and the anxiety makes me have weird dreams and I don't sleep. Remaining alert and ungrouchy is getting harder every day, and this morning the tearfulness started. On the train, no less. Over Jeff Chang's description of the implosion of Public Enemy. I am not making this up.

I hate these cycles. You'd think humans would have evolved into something more functional by this point in history.

Speaking of sleep (and mild weirdness), as I was walking to the gate at Penn Station this morning, some guy looked me up and down and said, "What you doin' with your sleepclothes on, girl?" I'm wearing black pinstriped pants, a pink tank top, a black cardigan, and a security badge/elevator pass for my building, and was carrying a messenger bag and a Mountain Dew. So... ? I really want to peer into that guy's windows at bedtime - what? It's in the name of anthropological research!

Oh, and looping back to Ruby, she's all into conjunctions right now. We spent all morning coming up with sentences containing the word "but." The one I remember of hers: "I want my mommy, but(!) she's at work." And yet I cried over Griff's inability to get along with Flav. Have I no heart?!

Although I'm so tired, my mind is set on you.

2005-10-03T09:28:00.000-05:00

I too have noticed the dearth of Sentences; I've been under the weather (way under it for a couple of days, in fact) and haven't had much to say but "ow" and "ugh" and "blech." I thought I'd be better by now - I felt alright yesterday - but woke up this morning feeling worse. So, ow, ugh, blech, and I'll be back soon.

Roo.

2005-09-29T19:56:00.001-05:00

One night when I was 17, I went into a pet store in Bailey’s Crossroads with my then-boyfriend, who was looking for fish for his aquarium. Near the front of the door was a cage full of very small, striped kittens. I watched them climb over each other to get to their just-filled food dish. As they each settled into a dining space, I saw that one gray, unstriped kitten had been pushed completely out in the struggle. It was even smaller than the rest, and looked up and made a tiny, frustrated, high-pitched meow in my direction, as if to say, “Can you please talk to my crazy siblings about letting me get some grub up in here?” I knew I was asking to get grounded for the what remained of my childhood (I had not even a month before been explicitly told “no kittens”), but I also knew there was no way I was leaving him there after that exchange.

I asked the man at the counter how old the kittens were. He didn’t know, but guessed a few weeks. They’d been born in a nearby alley, and someone had brought them and their mom in. They weren’t exactly for sale, but he said he’d let me take the little one if I bought a carrier and some food from the store. I brought him home late that night. My stepgrandmother, known disliker of cats, cooed and baby-talked him for hours. My mom came into the kitchen while we were admiring him and said, “Oh. My. God.” She looked at me as if I’d completely lost my mind. But then she picked the kitten up and looked at his jutting ribs, visible tailbones, and comical ears, and she forgot all about having told me that any cat-adopting would result in my not seeing daylight for seven more months, and just asked me what we should call him. I had no idea until a week later, when someone mentioned how much his legs and ears looked like a kangaroo’s. I named him Roo.

Roo spent his days hiding in a vent in the basement. At night he slept by my head – or on it, batting at my eyelashes – until he was confident enough to risk encountering our overly-friendly golden retriever in the dark. After their first nighttime rendezvous, it took him no time at all to make the dog understand that he would be in charge now. And once that was established, we got to see Roo’s personality: class clown. He tried out new and exciting walks (the grizzly bear, on his back feet with his arms stretched out, lumbering toward his target; or the crab, which looked just like it sounds), climbed trees he had absolutely no idea how to un-climb, tricked us, by wailing mournfully, into racing into the basement to rescue him so he could tackle our feet. This last, like his head-sleeping, was largely reserved for me and my mom. He never really did get around to trusting the men in the house enough to play with them interactively, and his relationship with my stepgrandmother indicated that he understood that he was the only cat she tolerated. He seemed to tease her about her distrust of his species. But he also watched soaps with her in the afternoons.

We lost my stepgrandmother, moved as a unit, moved separately – especially me, I moved in and out of the house seemingly with the seasons in my late teens and early twenties – went through a family split, and moved some more. Roo has taken all this in stride. Eventually, after my mom half-jokingly threatened to sue me for custody, I gave up on the idea of having Roo move with me for what I knew would be my final move out of my family home four years ago. It had become clear that year (a particularly move-y year for me) that Roo was really his grandmother’s child. He’d stopped sleeping in my bed and seemed a little peeved that I would even suggest such a thing on the nights when I was home instead of crashed at a friend’s or at my boyfriend’s. He was right, of course, and really, my mom has needed him the last several years. He’s seen her through some hard stuff, faithfully by her side through breakups and the loss of our beloved golden retriever (whom we always dorkily referred to as Roo’s uncle). When I’ve visited since moving out that last time, he’s treated me very much like a visitor, and one who brings a noisy toddler along at that. He’s become an old man, albeit one with as amusing a personality as he’s always had, set in his ways and resentful of intrusions.

My mom took him to a vet today, after his usual doctor said that there was nothing to be done about the tumors that have appeared all over his skin the last few months. She wanted a second opinion. The new vet repeated the first vet’s diagnosis, and added that Roo is dying. He offered to put him to sleep. My mom’s not ready to let him go, and no one else is either. And he's still eating, purring, and sleeping by my mom's head. He's not quite ready to let us go, either. My mom and my brother and sister-in-law are going to keep him comfortable with pain meds and their presence until it would be cruel to hang on to him, and then we’ll say goodbye. But I’m going to start now so that I don’t have to handle all the hurt at one time.

I have often silently and, I'm ashamed to say, snarkily, wondered about people's attachments to their pets, and the grief I've witnessed at their losses - after all, we lose people all the time, and shouldn't that be more upsetting? Maybe it should. I don't know, and it doesn't matter. I had a better friend in Roo than I did in most of the people I knew before I was 25. It's going to sting like hell to walk into my mom's house and not find him there.

2005-09-29T02:27:00.000-05:00

I have a lot of stuff I should be writing about, but I'm like mainlining psuedoephedrine to get rid of the crap in my sinuses, and it's not exactly conducive to depth. So I'll just tell you about a conversation I had with Ruby last night:

Ruby: Let's build a seesaw!
Angela: Okay. What are we going to use to build it?
Ruby: We could get some logs.
Angela: Where are we going to get those?
Ruby: The log store!
Angela: I think the log store is closed; it's pretty late.
Ruby: Hmm. *taps chin with finger*
Angela: How about we chop down a tree?
Ruby: Okay! But we need some sharp teeth.
Angela: Sharp teeth?
Ruby: Like a beaver.
Angela: Oh. Do you know any beavers who could help us?
Ruby: No. We hafta get some sharp teeth.
Angela: Where are we going to get those?
Ruby: The teeth store!

Heh. Awesome. Oh, and here's a tidbit from later, after we'd chopped down the "tree" and built and played for a while on the seesaw. She went back to the "forest" for more logs, and when she came out, she said, "I went to the forest, but there were no trees. Just newspapers." She is the jam.

Track each trickle back to its source.

2005-09-23T14:16:00.001-05:00

It should really not be this complicated to arrange, by email, a meeting place and time for tomorrow. However, the intersection of the internet, the Metro system, and my family is best described as a collision. Or a vortex. Or something.

Does anyone remember the April 2000 anti-IMF actions in DC? Let me tell you how we planned for that one: a day or two before, Albert and I, while playing the Sims, decided to go. As in one of us said, "We should go to DC for this protest." And the other said, "Cool." And then we ended up at our dad's house the night right before, discussing IMF stuff and how to prepare ourselves for arrest*, and the conversation went so long that we decided just to stay up all night. I think we played some more Sims when we got home. It was still dark when we decided to just set out. Then we got in the car and drove east out of Virginia until we could hear chanting, and we parked. We wandered over to some people sitting in the middle of an intersection, and we sat. That's how we planned. None of this responsible, adult-like roundtable-email-discussion-involving-ninety-seven-different-parties nonsense. Just, "let's go," drive, park, protest. We put all of our planning energy into strategic wardrobe decisions and decisions regarding whom to call if we found ourselves in Ye Olde Clink.

By the way, I still, all these years and memories later, count April 16, 2000 among the best days of my life. It was really amazing, personally, politically, and familially. (I don't know if that last one's a word, but what I'm trying to say is, "It was a really uniquely awesome experience to share with my little brother.") It was pivotal for me - my first real radical political action. Our lives and the political climate have changed immensely and alarmingly (respectively, of course) since then. But I learned, in the first moments of the sunrise that day, arms linked with my brother in the chilly spring-morning air, with chants of democracy and taking back our streets echoing from all over downtown, what I wanted for my life and for the world. Who I am today - as a person, as a writer, as a parent, as a partner - can be traced back to a few places, and that intersection is one of them.

And because the CityPaper will pour Haterade on my blog if I dare use it to talk about just me, let's say that I wrote about that to illustrate the point that you can have a transformative life experience just a few short hours from now if you just get in your car, drive to DC, and park when you hear democracy in action. See? It's not all about me. I'm organizing here. Take that, CP blogsnobs!

*That conversation led to my very first WinterMittens article. WM is no more, as you probably know, but I saved the article, and I'm going to repost it later so that you too can know how to get your protest on.

Another game of putting things aside, as if we'll come back to them sometime.

2005-09-22T02:45:00.000-05:00

I'm thoroughly disappointed in my own lack of momentum, which disappointment is keeping me from voicing my growing disappointment with the momentum of everyone else in the world, because I don't like to be a hypocrite in such a public space. I save that for my in-car venting.

In my own defense, though, this week has included one late-night emergency room visit*, two missed trains, three more rumored disaffiliations, and a partridge in a pear tree.

But. I'm protesting on Saturday and will be joined by both of my parents and my lovely sister-in-law, who is not in Chicago anymore because American Idol is run by morons. Oh well. Your loss is my gain, suckas.

If anyone wants to march with the recently-formed Burnekos, Et Al., Against The War, Et Al. (BEAATWEA, pronounced Bee-ah-twee-uh), hit me up at grrangela7 at yahoo dot com for the DC meetup info or to ride with me from Baltimore.

In other news that doesn't suck, Joel and Ruby and I went to the rally at Hopkins on Tuesday night, and the Gold Star Families (those who have lost relatives in Iraq) were extremely inspiring. And extremely heartbreaking. I can't conceive of doing anything but lying in a dark room waiting for death if I lost my kid to the whims of some rich guy, but these parents are changing their own lives and the world in response to their pain. It's incredible.

I was handed a flyer in the lobby about a national day of action on November 2, and I think that I will coordinate my own (still VERY seminal) efforts to coincide with those. Which is kind of what its organizers have in mind. So let's start talking, Baltimoreans, about meeting to talk. Talking about talking. This describes my former organizing career pretty well. (I hope to be more successful now that I don't have to contend with organizing for pay within a weird hierarchical structure, but that's a blog entry for another time, and by "another time," I actually mean, "I'm never going to get around to writing about that, so don't hold your breath.")

I started to get pulled off the path this week by my usual tendency to "realize" that it's time to completely reinvent myself. I have this "realization" every couple of years. This time, I had an actual realization to counter the quote-realization-unquote: while it is true that this is not the life I was supposed to have, that isn't true because of my day-to-day circumstances. It's true because this isn't the life anyone is supposed to have. And so the next time thoughts creep in of relocating, or taking up soybean farming, or shaving my head, or converting back to Catholicism so I can go be cloistered somewhere, I will do what I'm doing now and recommit to focusing on changing it for everyone.

And for those of you who skipped that last paragraph full of angsty navelgazing, the recaplet (<----in case you hadn't already guessed my TWoP fandom): LET'S DO THIS. When and where do people want to get together to start planning our Mobtown-style revolution?

*Did you know that a pulled chest wall muscle feels just like a massive-and-certainly-fatal heart attack?

PEACE RALLY TOMORROW NIGHT IN BALTIMORE

2005-09-19T14:01:00.000-05:00

Strong Voices for Peace are Touring the Country
Join them Tuesday, September 20th in Baltimore

Tuesday , September 20th, 8:00 pm.
Peace rally at Shriver Hall, Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD

You're invited to an important event in Baltimore.

TrueMajority members have been very generous in supporting the work of Cindy Sheehan, Celeste Zappala, Melanie House, and other mothers and wives of fallen soldiers as they speak out boldly for peace in Iraq. Now those voices, along with veterans who know the true cost of this war and military families who are paying that price, are touring the country. They're knitting together a nationwide movement, and they'll be in your area Tuesday, September 20th.

On Tuesday, September 20th at 8:00 pm., these veterans and families will tell their stories at an evening peace rally at Shriver Hall (34th and Charles streets) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

Join these members of Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Gold Star Families for Peace and Veterans For Peace in speaking out for bringing our troops home. Cindy Sheehan, whose vigil outside President Bush's vacation ranch inspired the tour and re-invigorated the peace movement, will be there too.

Come and join in. Together, we ARE the peace movement.

Matt Holland
Online Organizer

We Need Your Help! Please share this email and the web site www.bringthemhomenowtour.org to people you are in touch with. Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this. Tell-a-friend!

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for TrueMajority.

Thanks!

We got to get up right now, turn the system upside down, we're s'posed to be fed up by now...

2005-09-12T14:23:00.000-05:00

First of all, if you haven't read White Like Me by Tim Wise, I command you to get it and read it right now. (Powell's doesn't have it in stock, I know, so you can get it from that other e-bookstore if you must, or your local independent bookstore - ahem, Atomic - or the library. I don't care how you get it, just get it if you can. And I will paraphrase Oleta Adams all day in here if I want, and you will like it.)

With that out of the way, according to AP-Ipsos and CNN Bush's approval rating has dropped below 40% for the first time. This is a good time to ask Congressional Democrats, "What in the name of all things sacred are you doing, you fools?" The country's pissed at this guy like never before, and with clear, compelling reason, namely: he lost New Orleans! You're telling me career politicians can't craft a message out of this? They're either complicit or incompetent, y'all, and either way, they need a fire lit up under their asses. Protesting in front of the White House has its merits (and it felt good, too, and you should have been there) - people need to see visual evidence that there are plenty of us who are angry at the president, and communing with other angry people is galvanizing. Organizers know you need a clear target, and the president is an obvious one, I'd say.

But who has Bush's ear? Who's had it since long before he was in office? To whom does he owe his attention? MoveOn or Halliburton? Left-leaning critics of his budget priorities or Conservative supporters of the war in Iraq? Me or my grandfather? Goodness and rightness or Satan? You get my point. Now, I'm not naive. I don't think the Democrats in Congress (with a couple of exceptions) give much more of a damn about me, MoveOn, or not burning in hell for all eternity than do the Republicans. However, if anyone's bread is buttered over here in the Camp of Actually Caring About Our Fellow Humans, it's the Democrats'. (I know that it's also buttered by corporations, but corporations can't vote, and it's about time we remembered that and reminded these lazy asses we keep giving 25% of our paychecks to.)

So while protesting in front of the White House is symbolically important, there are other ears that need shouted into, and they are attached to the heads of people who, to whatever degree, need progressives if they want to keep their jobs. And keeping their jobs is really about the only goal of all of these people, I'm convinced, which is why we haven't heard any real outrage from the Democrats. They're scared. They don't want to piss people off and get fired. We need to tell them that if they stand up for what's right, we will stand with them. The 60% of us who disapprove of Bush need to make that disapproval mean something by supporting an alternative. If you disapprove of this presidency, tell your Democratic representatives that you will back them with your vote and your voice when they call for impeachment hearings.

We also need to tell them that if they don't stand up for what's right, they're on their own.

I'm no vote abstainer. My poor harangued partner can tell you that nothing chaps my ass like people who never vote and call that an action of some sort. It's an inaction, and inaction is the path to... well, more inaction. But I'm starting to warm up to protest voting, and I'm telling the world right now: Democrats on the 2006 ballot are not getting my vote if they don't show me the outrage. I will vote Green, Socialist, Independent, or even Republican, but I'm not voting for any Democrats who don't do the job of Democrats. If what they need to snap out of it is to see their jobs lost for another four years and the country brought to the brim of its outrage and despair cup, things are bad enough now that I'm willing to give it to them.

But we first need to try our hardest to turn it around right now. It's not going to be easy, and it's not going to get done by complacent, rich politicians who want to keep their cushy jobs. We've let them forget for a long time who works for whom around here, and getting them back into the business of working for us is going to mean some work on our parts. We're going to have to push, really hard, against their inclination toward not working and against big campaign donors who want them to forget that corporations can't vote.

What does this mean? What is the work? I can't be sure. I'm not a politican, or a historian, or a professional organizer. I think I can speak on what isn't enough, though, just as a citizen and an observer. Merely taking yourself to the polls on a designated morning in November clearly isn't getting things done. Merely writing letters to your representatives doesn't seem to be working, either. I highly encourage voting and writing to Congresspeople, but if that combination alone created change, we wouldn't be in this mess right now.

Like I said, I can't be sure, but I think it's this: We need to get the attention of the Democrats by going to where they are. Everyone immediately thought of marching at the White House, but it didn't seem to occur to anybody to march at the office of a Democrat who's acting afraid to speak up. I know that's not the most comfortable thought - I love my Democratic senators and I kinda cringe at the thought of shaming them. So let's not shout "Shame" at them. Let's go to where they are and just ask them to stand with us. Let's say, "We trust you to do the right thing here and want to know what you need from us in order to get it done." Of course, that doesn't boil down to placard-size as easily as "Shame on Bush," but I bet we can figure something out.

And in the long term... We're going to have to talk to each other, not just in the choir-preachy way that we all talk to each other now, commiserating (though that's good and necessary too). We're going to have to talk to people who are inclined to vote for guys like Bush, much as it pains me. Not the obscenely wealthy white guys who vote for Bush because obviously they'd vote for Bush, but those folks who vote for him and make you go, "Huh?" because it doesn't make any sense. My grandfather, who's been working class all his life and needs Social Security to not disappear if he wants to continue having food to eat but who also thinks that damned liberals want to give the terrorists a hug. My old best friend who thinks that being married to someone in the military means she has to support neocons, not making the connection between neocons, Halliburton, and no flak jackets because the media goes to great lengths to obscure those connections. My grandmother, who fears for my little brothers in a climate that seems to be leading inevitably to a draft as we spread our troops thin, but who thinks Bush is a nice guy and a good Christian, because she watches Fox News. None of these people are voting in their own interests. We need to figure out what is happening to make them vote against themselves and how to fix it - how to talk to people so that they'll listen.

It's all going to suck, and it would be a lot less sucky to use that energy playing Frisbee or watching Room Raiders, I know. I KNOW. No one wants to talk about politics with my granparents less than I do (well, maybe Chutnee wants it a little less). And if I didn't feel like I have responsibilities to the world, believe me, Room Raiders marathon, totally. My own personal life could probably withstand, probably even with little change or discomfort, another four years of the Bush dynasty (certainly not eight, but four). I'm no longer poised to slip right through the cracks. But that kind of "I'm personally fine, so what's the problem?" attitude is precisely how it came to be that people starved and drowned and a great American city was destroyed. We need to care, and we need to make our friends care, and right now we need to make those who represent us care. They've shown that merely being shown what's happening doesn't suffice. They care about anything to the extent that public opinion polls tell them they should. They care about what we tell them to care about. So tell them to care about the people who died or lost everything in New Orleans. Tell them to care about the work of protecting and providing for people who don't have the means to protect and provide for themselves. Tell them that we will help them build the safety net and help them keep their jobs, as long as they're doing those jobs.

In the coming days, I'm going to tackle the first thing first and talk to other local progressives about what an action targeted at one of our own Democrats should look like and how to get it done. (That means that if you live near me and I think you're progressive, I'm going to bother the hell out of you to get involved. Please consider it a compliment.) And when we figure it out, I'm going to write about it and bother the rest of you to do the same. And since I know very little about organizing a protest from scratch, I am right now going to ask you for your suggestions. Go!

No, I'm not really thinking about much else, actually.

2005-09-09T18:13:00.000-05:00

Keith Olbermann on the conservative response to Bush's non-response. (Bonus: read Olbermann's own response in the second post down, titled "The 'city' of Louisiana.")

I have to hope that this all means something - the outrage from the usually-unoutraged, the extra outrage from the usually-outraged, the increased scrutiny from the media... I grab these little chunks of hope each day, just looking for enough to get over. I'm just chasing hope around all day every day, like I'm facing imminent hope withdrawal. And I so am.

From MoveOn.org

2005-09-07T15:40:00.000-05:00

Dear MoveOn member in the D.C. area:
Tomorrow four MoveOn members who were evacuated from New Orleans will travel to Washington, DC to deliver a petition to President Bush demanding he stop blaming the victims of Hurricane Katrina, including state and local officials, for the poor rescue and relief effort and focus on helping them.

You're invited to join them at a peaceful protest and picket outside the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue at 1:00 PM tomorrow, Thursday. Together we'll send the message that the White House blame-shifting is shameful and raise awareness about public anger over the Bush administration failures.

Here are the details.

What: Protest outside the White House to help Hurricane Victims

When: 1:00 PM, Thursday, September 8th

Where: Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House.
(Metro: Red Line: Farragut North. Blue-Orange Line: Farragut West or McPherson Square)

Signs will be provided. (Signs will say, "Shame" and "Help Hurricane Victims")

It is important as Congress returns and the Bush administration tries to cover over their failures last week that a surge in public concern forces the Bush administration to take care of Hurricane victims.

Please show up and demonstrate your support.

Thanks for all you do.

–Tom Matzzie
MoveOn.org Political Action

My family v. privatization and racism

2005-09-04T01:03:00.000-05:00

After we impeach these criminals in the White House, I vote that we immediately swear in my dad and my brother. (Plus me and my other brother, plus our mom, my husband, my kid, and Kanye West.)

Dear Media and Everyone Else in the World

2005-09-02T11:06:00.000-05:00

Don’t talk to me about the horrors of looting. I don’t want to have that conversation. Don’t stand in the elevator and tell me about people stealing DVD players with that scandalized look on your face. Don’t show it to me on the news. Don’t take up column space with it in the paper. Don’t subject me to it on LiveJournal. Just don’t. Your outrage over the looting will find no kindred outrage at my desk or in my living room. I know what you’re trying to do, and I’ve seen the Wizard of Oz. Don’t try your man-behind-the-curtain tricks on me. My attention won’t be diverted by Shiny Green Wizards or Scary Black Men. The only discussion I want to have is the one where someone explains why. Why did funding get cut for reinforcing those levees? Why is the National Guard presence so small? Why aren’t people being airlifted to shelter and food? Why has the Superdome been so understaffed and unsecured that people – including children – have been raped inside, where they were supposed to be safe?

I already know where the money and helicopters and troops are, and now I want to hear someone tell me why. Not the justifications that every sentient being already knows aren’t true. I want the real reason, and I want to hear it from the people who made and implemented the decisions. And after that, I want to talk about what is going to be done, now and down the road, in the way of immediate relief and long-term prevention. And then I want to talk about how these people got control of the country and the world, and what we’re going to do to change that. And then we can talk about the looters – not gossip about your offended sensibilities, but talk about poverty and neglect and desperation; about wage slavery and corporate feudalism and the exporting of middle-class manufacturing jobs; about the calculated dismantling of worker protections and health care safety nets and the public education system; about “tough on crime” politicians financed by private prison CEOs; about racism and classism. At no point, ever, and especially not as people are facing death every minute, do I want to stand on dry land in my dry clothes, safe, housed, fed, employed and insured, and entertain my or anyone else’s smug, self-righteous, privileged judgment of people whose lives are and have been completely under the control of people who don’t care whether they drown and starve. Until you’re ready to have that conversation, keep your bullshit to yourself and let me focus on the man behind the curtain who had and still has it in his power to provide what is really needed.

2005-09-01T18:26:00.000-05:00

David Corn on Katrina and Dubya

I really don't know what to say right now other than to encourage people to send money to the Red Cross and America's Second Harvest, and any other organizations doing disaster relief, and to encourage people to then press their representatives to get their legislative and funding priorities in order.

Taking a break from me, me, me:

2005-08-29T14:22:00.000-05:00

My heart is with the gulf shore today and all those who are unable to leave, including the prisoners who are, according to one Louisiana official, exempt from the evacuation order and being kept "where they belong" thanks to generators. If I believed in prayer, I'd pray for whoever's in charge of these things to put some mercy and humanity in the hearts of those in charge of the prisons, that they might move the prisoners to where they really belong, which is out of danger. Other officials have said, following that quote, that there are procedures by which prisoners can be moved to secure locations. Let's hope the locations are actually secure and that those procedures will actually be implemented.

Come hear our beats play, and bust our DJ.

2005-08-29T13:37:00.000-05:00

I finished Yes Yes Y’all this morning on the Metro, just as I arrived at my final stop. The whole book is immensely quotable and SO informative and important, but my very favorite quote came right at the end and is from Grand Wizard Theodore (whose name, incidentally, has always perplexed me):

I am hip-hop. My every day life is hip-hop: what I do, what I say, the way I dress, the kind of music I listen to, seeing the graffiti on the walls all the time…it’s like my everyday life. It’s in my blood. If you was to cut my veins, a bunch of music notes and records would just start pouring right out, ya know? It’s just my life.

Awesome.

One thing I wish they'd expanded on was the role of women in the early years. I'm sure this was glossed over in part because there were fewer women DJs, MCs, etc., than men, and in part because a book can only be so long, but the only woman they spoke to was Sha-Rock, and I know (because she mentioned them) that there were several other prominent women in the scene. I have a couple of books about women in hip-hop on my wish list, and I'm hoping they explore the role of women in the late 70s Bronx scene in more depth, because I'm really curious now.

I actually remembered this time to bring my next literary conquest with me so I wouldn’t get stuck bookless, and so tonight I will start You Have Stept Out of Your Place: A History of Women and Religion in America (Powell's doesn't have this yet). I’m all about some history right now for some reason. Where was all this enthusiasm when I was being graded on this stuff? Oh, that’s right, it was hiding in the books I’m reading now, not willing to waste itself on the drivel and dishonesty that passes for history in public school texts. I swear, I really would assign Yes Yes Y’all to a history class. Someone should.

Due to rapid-fire schedule changes involving a large family dinner (Saturday at five! No, Sunday at five! No, Sunday at four!), I ended up spending the entire weekend in Northern Virginia, something I would never do unless my family (of origin) all lived there. Northern Virginia is dreadful (actually, most of Virginia is dreadful), but my mom’s living room is delightful, especially when it is populated by my brothers, their ladies, two boxes full of old pictures, and a large boxer. I have the best family ever. I don’t like them so much that I’ll ever move back to VA (no offense, family, it’s just that I don’t like anyone that much), but I like them enough that they should all move to Baltimore.

In important family news, it is still hilarious to go to dinner with my grandparents; my lovely cousin Marie has an equally lovely boyfriend who didn’t run screaming from said dinner and is therefore a very nice, very brave guy; my honorary stepmom believes she knows where the last remaining photos from my childhood are; and my beautiful and tremendously talented sister-in-law (who is also one of my best friends, because I am that lucky) is trying out for American Idol next weekend in Memphis, and you are all to commence good-luck dancing for her immediately. Not that she’ll need it, because she’s amazing, and if she doesn’t get picked I will be totally confused. Of course, if she does get picked, it will mean I’ll have to actually watch a whole season of American Idol, Paula Abdul and all, but I’m not holding this against my sister-in-law. (It'll be a good excuse to have gatherings with alcohol.) I will, however, hold it very much against a certain regional transit authority if the trains don’t run on time at least on the evenings when the show is on. That means no making me stand around a station while you change the status from On Time to 5 Minutes Late to 10 Minutes Late to 15 Minutes Late, like you did this morning, you heartless bastards. Ahem.

Looking in the crowd your face is everywhere.*

2005-08-26T14:46:00.000-05:00

It’s been a good week in public transportation. Uh, except for my train losing power last night in a tunnel for half an hour. That was not good. But otherwise, good. Pablo resurfaced and had me preview a new mix he’s making, which he promised me a copy of if I will stop walking so fast through Metro Center so he can catch up to me. He also offered to tile my bathroom at a discount and hook me up with a friend of his who does other contracting work. If I never have another good thing happen to me on the train again, I will still be glad for all the time I’ve put in if it means I can get my house issues straightened out by nice people who won’t do all of the clichéd shady-contractor shit that our prior contractor did to us.

Last night, I had a very nice conversation on the Red Line with a lady who liked the tattoo on my back. I know many of my friends don’t particularly like being peppered with questions about their tattoos, but I kind of enjoy these encounters. I think I’ll miss them when it’s cold out and my back is covered up. I’m pretty shy, for being whom no one would ever describe as shy. I mean, I won’t start a conversation with a stranger. I’m not all that likely to start a conversation with an acquaintance, either. I’m kind of socially awkward. But I also really like meeting people. So it’s nice to be a walking conversation piece, at least in warm weather. (In cold weather, I look dreadfully boring and unapproachable.)

This morning, I had two very nice exchanges with people who wanted to know about the book I’m reading (having finished Purchasing Power, I’m back to Yes Yes Y’all). The first was on the MARC – a guy who was standing next to my seat asked, after reading over my shoulder for a second (I usually hate that), what I was reading. I flipped the book over to show him the cover (because that was quicker than it usually takes me to formulate a response when approached – like I said, awkward), and he gave me a thumbs up sign. Heh. It was perfect for me, because it bought me some extra time without actual words being exchanged. I finally got it together to tell him I was really loving the book and was kind of sad that the train was pulling into Union Station because I’d have to put it down for six hours or so. He gave me a flyer for a show on Labor Day weekend. I might take some inspiration from Danny Wallace and go.

Then I had another shoulder reader on the Metro who wanted to know the name of the book. He asked if I thought he could get it at a regular bookstore. We talked that over for a few minutes, discussed my enjoyment of the book, and when we got off the train, he said he was going to go look for it right then. I’m like a guerilla book critic or something, you guys. How can I expand my work in this area? Should I get a uniform?

It really should be far more normal to speak with strangers. I’m happy that I feel exhilarated about it, but it really shouldn’t be this exhilarating. I used to talk to strangers every day, for a living, and while the organization for which I was a community organizer was a crapheap to beat all crapheaps, I was never as thoughtful and alive at the end of a workday as when I was walking around talking to people about their lives all day long. Reading about Elizabeth Chin’s first days of fieldwork in Newhallville for Purchasing Power made me acutely miss that feeling. I’m not going back to any kind of field organizing EVER again (unless and until an organizing organization is born that treats its workers like human beings and isn’t chock full o’hypocrites, but I’m not holding my breath). But I miss the constant connecting. I think I can probably shed my awkwardness and remember how to start conversations, or at least keep them going without sounding like a jackass, if I just get back in practice. This might sound completely off the wall, but I’m thinking about… not sitting in the Quiet Car tonight. I know, I know. Madness. I might rethink this when the mania wears off. Damned weather is making me loopy, with the temperatures out of Hell range and all.

Oh, let’s talk about books and mania some more for a second. I’m happy to announce that WPLI has a new home in my basement, which is only about 25 paces away from its old home in my foyer but about which I am very proud because it required some serious basement-stuff-sorting. I’m so proud, in fact, that I’ve been reading about drywall and waterproofing and hydraulic cement and all kinds of shit that used to bore me into a coma but is now making me feel all tingly inside. I think I’m going to tackle some serious project-doing this fall. Watch for posts including 50% extra cursing.

*This subject line only connects to this post by way of my scenic-route train of thought, and I'm not about to try to write that all out.

A small smattering.

2005-08-24T16:55:00.000-05:00

Gettin’ naked with the creepy pizza guy. One night last week, we ordered pizza. (Okay, and wings.) In the span of 30 minutes, I forgot we’d ordered pizza and commenced taking off every stitch of my clothing and wandering around the house (yes, I do this pretty regularly). Obviously, as I walked into the foyer to leisurely contemplate the available pajama-type items in my closety thing (I’m so articulate today – it’s called a WARDROBE), which is located directly in front of the window next to the front door, the pizza arrived. I somehow managed not to hear the car pull up, the door shut, or the footsteps on my porch, and only became aware of the pizza guy’s presence when he rang the doorbell. I dashed into my bedroom and heard nothing but the blood rushing to my face for the next few minutes, but Joel filled me in later on the following exchange between him and Pizza Guy:

Pizza Guy, looking at the pink poster in the foyer that says “STOP THE WAR ON WOMEN”: So you’re a women’s rights [something or other]?

Joel: Yeah.

Pizza Guy: So what would you do if I hit a woman?

Joel: Um. Why would you want to do that?

My understanding is that the conversation ended there with the exchange of the pizza for the signed charge slip, but the point here is: Of all the pizza guys I’ve ever encountered, the one I’ve viscerally hated, albeit in retrospect, is the one who’s seen me completely naked. I think this is unfair.

Get behind me, Stinky Cologne Man. I’m such a boring, predictable One of Those People now that the conductor on my return trip doesn’t even look at my ticket anymore, because I’m always in the same seat and he knows I have a monthly pass. I sit in the same seat every single night. I have a regular seat. How embarrassing. More embarrassing was my realizing last night, upon finding someone else in my seat, that I was mad that someone else was in my seat. Get a grip on yourself, myself! I got stuck sitting in front of Stinky Cologne Man’s seat, which he was unfortunately occupying. Try as I might, I cannot think of a polite way to tell him his cologne makes me want to puke. That’s not an exaggeration or a figure of speech – his cologne literally makes me want to run to the bathroom and vomit. It causes a headache that spreads from my temples down into my neck, and I feel nauseous. I feel sorry for his coworkers. I hope he lives alone or with someone who doesn’t have a nose.

Oh, and she doesn’t get her own heading, but Annoying Lady was gone long enough for me to get hopeful, and now she’s back. But this morning, she had no one to talk to so she just violently folded and refolded her newspaper while clearing her throat a lot. I can’t think of a polite way to tell her she’s abrasive, loud, and irritating. I feel sorry for myself. I hope my organization relocates to my backyard so I don’t have to ride the train with her anymore. Actually, that would interfere with my plans to turn my backyard into a gigantic moonbounce, so I just hope that Annoying Lady gets a new job closer to home.

I have no cute heading for this paragraph. Shopping for Ruby’s birthday was horrifying. The gender- and race- based segregation of toys at major toy retailers is horrifying. The price of toys is horrifying. The availability of non-offensive books at large retailers is horrifying.

Shopping online is an option for us, and next year, I think it’s all going to get done that way, but this made me wonder, what of people for whom that is not an option? Which led me to many other questions, which all led me to: consumerism fucking sucks, especially for kids. Which led me to read “Purchasing Power.” You should too, because it’s really thought-provoking. And if you know of some, you should recommend me some other books about consumerism as it relates to age, race, gender, and class. Or combinations of those things. I feel like this is something I haven’t thought about enough or in enough depth, despite having strong opinions about it. Heh. That’s probably true of many of the things about which I’ve formed strong opinions. I always find that quality (you know, forming opinions without thinking about the issue) so endearing in other people.

ETA: You can get Purchasing Power at Powell's, which is union, and you should, because it's a good book and because you want to support union labor, yes? Yes. Or you can be extra subversive and check it out from the library, or from my house.

2005-08-22T17:54:00.000-05:00

Imagine that your adult child calls you on the phone and tells you that today, and every other weekday for the past several months, she has walked into her office and been loudly taunted, tripped, and publicly degraded and slandered by her coworkers. They don’t like her because her clothes aren’t expensive enough, and they ostracize her because she’s not stylish and doesn’t have as much money as they do. A few of the other women have started calling her a slut, making up stories about her and the men in the office. She comes home from work every night and cries for hours. She’s beginning to believe the things they say about her. She feels fat and ugly and stupid. It’s escalating now into shoving and threats of further physical violence, and she is afraid to go back. Do you:

a) Tell her she’s just got to keep dealing with it, because no matter what, she has to go back to work at that job for the next several years;
b) Tell her she should complain to her boss and then, if that doesn’t bring an end to the harassment, find a new job; or
c) Tell her it’s her fault for dressing so unfashionably and she should go out and buy new clothes.

If you chose b), congratulations, you are a human being. If you chose b) and thought “I’d even offer to help her look for another job or help her write a letter to her boss,” congratulations, you are me. If you chose a) or c), please skip directly to some other blog, because you are mean and cruel, and a bit of an ass as well, and I don’t like you.

This exercise was prompted not by any harassment at my job or any incompetence on the part of my own parents but by an episode of some atrocity called “How Do I Look” that I inexplicably sat through voluntarily yesterday. The episode did not feature an adult woman and her mother, but a young teenager and her mother. However, it highlighted for me the sheer idiocy of the attitudes most people have about school and how counterintuitive and counterproductive they are. This poor kid had begged her mother to take her out of school because the other kids were being threatening and abusive toward her. Her mother’s response to that was to make the kid keep going to that school and then, as she was preparing to enter high school the following year, take her on a makeover show where she harshly criticized the girl’s clothing (most of which the girl was making herself because she’s creative and interested in fashion design, like, way to encourage your kid’s healthy self-expression, you dolt – you should be praising everything you can think of that she’s not expressing her grief at being bullied the way I expressed mine). She even allied herself with some snotbag who wouldn’t let her kid hang out with the bullied girl because her boots are too aggressive looking. Why on earth would you take up with someone who was prejudging your kid and talking shit about her?

In the name of what, I ask? Please tell me what parent wants hir daughter to be a woman who will keep returning to the same abusive situation, day after day, reacting to the abuse by making futile and painful changes to her own appearance, her own language, her own personality? Can someone explain to me how this is in line with any universal parenting goal? Never mind, don’t answer that. It isn’t in line with any goal of parenting. And yet, it’s astonishingly prevalent. People tell their kids all the time that they have to go to school, a specific school, even when they’re being harassed and hurt there. Why? To prepare them for what? A world where the government assigns you to a job based on where you live and then you have to go work there every day or go to jail? Did I miss a memo? I realize that we have to impart a little realism. I’m a working-class mama – a secretary – and I don’t have a whole world of professional options. I do want Ruby to understand that that’s our reality* (at least for right now), and that sometimes, you have to go through some unpleasantness in your life because That’s Just How It Goes. I don’t want my kid to harbor illusions of being able to just wander away from any situation that makes her the slightest bit uncomfortable. But we’re not talking about necessity and slight discomfort. We’re talking about arbitrary (or maybe gerrymandered) geographical boundaries and abuse. Do people give any thought to what they’re saying to their kids? You don’t have to say the words “I’m doing this so that you’ll learn how to take abuse quietly” for a kid to hear the message. And it’s bad enough for a kid to take abuse quietly. It’s awholenother ball of wax for a kid to also believe their parent(s) wanted hir to be abused and shut up about it.

This isn’t anti-school, or anti-public-school, or anti-traditional-concepts-of-school. I don’t yet know exactly how we’re going to approach Ruby’s formal education, but I recognize that a lot of kids do very well in and even need the kind of formal education offered at traditional schools, public or private. I also even believe that some public schools are good places. I’ve never been to one of those public schools, but I know people who have. (Actually, my elementary school was exceptionally good, but I’ve been thinking more about middle and high schools in writing this, and all of the ones I attended were horrific.) I guess it’s part of what I’ve talked about before – the careless, thoughtless way we accept our circumstances for ourselves and on behalf of our children, with no critical analysis. Some guy in a suit somewhere says that education is compulsory. Unless you have an unusual amount of disposable income, you have to send your kid to a specific place that was chosen by someone who isn’t you or your kid. So we all send our kids out to the bus stop on the first September morning after their fifth birthday, and that’s it for a lot of parents. We just do it because it’s what we’re supposed to do. And your kid goes because it’s what s/he’s supposed to do, and when it’s unbearable, s/he has to go anyway, for no other reason than “supposed to.” What is that?

It’s not really fair for me to lay all, or even most, of the blame on the individual parents. Changing schools, or homeschooling, or unschooling don’t occur to a lot of people because the “supposed to” factor is so high and the pressure so strong from outside forces – the government, the community, our own families of origin, etc. Others think of those options and then literally can’t implement them because they’re class disadvantaged and “The System” operates to keep poor people’s kids poor by sending them to substandard schools and making sure their parents can’t send them elsewhere or stay home and educate them themselves. (Someone’s got to work in the service economy, right? How else are the children of the rich going to continue being rich? Surely they’re not going to bus tables in the cafés at their own hotels?)

But there are some parents who are just straight up being fucking lazy, and that was the case with the woman on that god-awful show. It was clearly a matter of not wanting to be the right kind of parent for the kid she got. What she got was a creative, quirky, kind of weird kid, who responded to being bullied (for being weird) by dressing in a manner that threatens the status quo sensibilities of her friends’ parents. She did weird things with her eyeliner and Beadazzled her green jacket with little silver studs. She wore combat boots. You know, as I mentioned up there somewhere, I can right off the top of my head imagine 500 worse ways for a 13-year-old girl to deal with being ostracized and alienated. I did 498 of them myself, and when this mom said “I’m worried that you’re going to attract the wrong kind of attention,” I thought, “Lady, you’d better get out on your front porch and personally welcome the attention she’s getting dressed like she is, and pray every night she doesn’t start dressing the way I did and getting that attention instead.” And by the way, what kind of message is it to girls that they’re responsible for dressing in a way that will keep them from getting the wrong attention? What kind of victim-blaming, problem-avoiding, not-solving-a-damn-thing stupidity is that? Isn’t it a better idea to teach certain other groups of people not to pay inappropriate attention to little girls no matter what they have on? (I don’t think I’d let Ruby out of her room dressed the way I did at 15, but at some point, don’t we need to stop focusing our attention on how people are dressing and address the monsters who target people based on how they’re dressed?)

Before I get too far afield of my point, let me just make it already: there’s nothing so magical and wonderful about the arbitrarily-assigned school your kid goes to that makes it worth hir being taunted and mocked and made to feel bad about hirself and hurt, emotionally or otherwise. It doesn’t serve anything – in hir life now or in the life you want for hir as an adult – for you to make hir keep going back, day after day, to be tormented. There’s no lesson in that at all but the ones you should never want hir to learn: that s/he doesn’t deserve better, that you aren’t hir ally, that s/he can’t walk away when s/he’s being hurt, and that s/he can’t trust hir own intuition about a bad situation. The rest of the world stands ready and willing to tell our kids – especially our daughters – all of these things. If there is one place on Earth that they should hear otherwise, it’s in the safety of their own homes. If we aren’t providing safe places for our kids to be who they are and be comfortable with it, who is it that we think will? That’s the job description. And parenting really is the one job you can’t leave.

*(And the larger reason I want my kid to know those things isn’t actually because I want her to think she’s got to stick it out forever in whatever crap situation she finds herself in – it’s because I want her to know that the world is fucked up and unfair and that not everyone has the same choices, and that who gets what choices is based on bullshit like race and gender and class. I want her to know that because she needs to understand it’s going to be a little harder for her than it is for white kids or rich kids or boy kids and that the reasons for that have nothing to do with her own worth but with things that were set in place well before she got here. And I want her to know that because I want her to want to change it.)

Oh, also:

2005-08-22T15:03:00.000-05:00

Just an administrative note: I'm going to be posting back-dated stuff again later today from my paper journal, so those of you reading via feed will get a bunch of posts all at once.

Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper is a massive let-down.*

2005-08-12T13:02:00.000-05:00

I am right now actively courting a heart attack by eating the most delightfully unhealthy breakfast ever. Because some days (or, for some of us, three days a week), you need a grease fix. And sometimes you need to wash down your grease with Mountain Dew.

That annoying lady from the other day is apparently going to ride my train every day now. She used to just show up once or twice a week, usually making clear to anyone unfortunate or inexperienced enough to make eye contact with her that she was only on the MARC because she’d missed the Amtrak. (I always wanted to thrust my hand in the air frantically and shout, “Ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me, I know the answer to this one! You can afford to spend $32 a day to get to work because you’re so fabulously well-paid! Right? Right?”) But she’s been on every day this week. This morning she got on just as we were about to leave the station. Imagine my glee at her making it before they shut the doors. She proceeded to pull out her cell phone and scream into it for 30 minutes, first at what I assumed to be her child’s other parent, and then at her child’s doctor’s office, making sure to be even louder when mentioning that her child is getting ready to leave for college in Europe. She kept saying “Europe” without ever once mentioning the actual country. I hate that. But I’m pretty excited, because none of her usual seatmates were on the train this morning, which means that Monday morning, she’s going to tell the story of how she gave a piece of her mind to her ex and the receptionist, and I’ll get to hear these tirades all over again, like a rerun. An embellished, embarrassing rerun with extra Europe for freshness.

I really have to stop writing about this woman. I’m making her into my commuting nemesis or something. I wonder if I hate her because she reminds me of me**; isn’t that what They say?

This Mountain Dew isn’t making a dent in my grog. Too much carousing last night. And by carousing I mean sitting on Sweetney’s deck nursing a drink and talking. This is how we Lauraville mamas carouse. Whew! I’m tuckered. I’d hate to think what might happen to us if we tried to move our chatting and drinking to a bar. I might be typing this with my forehead.

Someone came to meet with a coworker, and he said “over to” where I’d have said “over at,” as in, “We were over to the building across the street earlier.” I love that. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “Did you just say ‘over to’? Awesome.”

Wow. Boring. With that, this entry has officially gone on too long.

*That has nothing to do with anything at all, but I had to put it somewhere, because it's true.

**I mean, a much taller, angrier, louder, wealthier me, with much longer hair and more pantsuits.

I'm so rumbly in my tumbly.

2005-08-11T20:47:00.000-05:00

I know this will be a tremendous shock for anyone reading this: we’re delayed again. But this time, there’s a twist! I thought it would be a good idea to have knockwurst (I don’t even know what knockwurst is, really) and sauerkraut for lunch today. From a pay-by-the-pound buffet. Followed by an iced mint mocha latte ramalamaccino or something before I got on the train. My digestive tract is not amused. We haven’t even left the station yet. This is going to be a long night.

Okay, I know I said I was going to say something nice about someone tonight, but so far all I’ve got for observations is the guy who got on the train and unbuttoned his shirt to the waist (and no, he’s not wearing and undershirt, and no, I have nothing nice to say about him or his torso), and the group of 100 teenagers back inside the station who kept shouting, “Woop, woop!” in the key of E-over-high-please-shut-the-hell-up, because they are here on vacation from their homes in 1994. (Because, you see, it was a very high-pitched 1994 "woop woop" instead of a preceded-by-eep-eep 2005 "woop woop." Oh, never mind.)

So I know this violates the spirit if not the letter of my promise to be nice, but I’ve chosen as my someone about whom to say something nice a man who is not on this train or even in this country: Danny Wallace, author of Yes Man, a book I'm not going to go track down an Amazon link for, you lazy, lazy bastards. The idea was that I’d talk about someone who made my commute happy, like Pablo. And since Pablo’s not here and I’m not about to swap magazines and CD’s with Nakey over there, Danny Wallace will have to do. Plus, he really did happy-up the first three days of my commuting week with that book. You really should read it. Or don’t, but don’t come crying to me when your commute sucks.

More from the hearts and flowers department.

2005-08-10T11:17:00.000-05:00

The woman across from me is quite probably the most annoying person in all of Maryland. I cringe every time I see her on this train. She has made the acquaintance of a few other riders, and she always corners someone for a soliloquy on how important/impressive/wealthy/successful she is. (Uh, lady, you’re on a MARC train like the rest of us, okay?) She also likes to brag at long, long, l---o---n---g length about the snotty, rude, pretentious shit she says to her coworkers.

So today’s dissertation is on her professionalism. I know this because she’s said the word “professionalism” at least once per minute since we boarded. She’s been talking at her seatmate for 20 minutes straight, without interruption, about how someone at her job wanted her to do some shit, and she didn’t want to, so she sent him what she thinks is the most impressive email ever. She apparently memorized the email, because she just spouted off the whole thing, which was full of misused big words and repeated use of phrases like “compromise my professionalism” and “compromise my professional values” and “compromise my professional ethics.” I think she’s making the whole thing up, actually, and that she’s passing of what she wishes she’d said as what she actually said, but if she did really send that email, the recipient probably laughed uproariously and forwarded it to everyone. I would have.

Oh, now we’re on to her pay raise. Goody. And we’re only in Halethorpe. Not even halfway done. Of all the fucking days not to have headphones. You should really all be here to see the look on the face of the poor soul she’s lecturing to.

SIGH! I was just putting this notebook away when she said, “I can smell a shakedown.” I don’t even want to know. Also, she just said “professionalism” three times in one sentence. I wonder if the conductor would have any issue with my just sticking my head out the emergency window until we get to Union Station.

I swear I'm going to try to find something nice to say about somebody on tonight's trip home

Get back muhfugga you don't know me like that.

2005-08-09T20:50:00.000-05:00

Why, yes, that was me shouting "Go fuck yourself" in front of Gate A this evening. You see, I have this pesky habit of being troubled when large men shove me and shout at me in an attempt to get me to move faster than the people in front of me are moving. Peskier still is my tendency to politely but firmly explain basic physics and common courtesy to these sociopaths. And, peskiest of all, I have a bizarre aversion to being called gendered slurs - by men who have just shoved me - when I dare to express displeasure with being shouted at and having my body touched violently and/or without the toucher having troubled himself with the - pesky - matter of obtaining my consent before touching it. It seems to me that people who engage in such threatening, antisocial, sexist behavior should go fuck themselves, and so I suggested as much to the motherfucker who engaged in it with me this evening. And since he was both several feet away from when he got up the ovaries to call me a name and possessed of a demonstrated inability to respond like a human being when spoken to quietly and politely, it seemed only reasonable to shout the suggestion at him. My apologies if you were standing nearby and were offended, but I must confess that the expression on his face when I retorted, "GO FUCK YOURSELF," made it worthwhile.

Holy smokes - as I was finishing up that last sentences, some maniac thoroughly flipped out on the beleaguered security guard because the train is late. Because that's totally his fault, as he is obviously driving the train right now and not sitting here in this hot room with the rest of us. I mean, she lost it. She was bright red and screaming, and spit was flying out of her face, and she used the word "disgusting" several times to describe the delay. Everyone sitting around me cracked up, because really, "disgusting"? And really, how is that helpful?*

I hate DC. I had a few nice minutes there after we laughed at the spitting lady, as we all snarked about the utter nonhelpfulness of her tirade, but I hate DC. Being on a train right now with everyone around me jabbering into their cell phones isn't doing anything toward making me feel less hateful, either. I'm now in the ~~Entitlement Class~~ Business Class Car on an Amtrak train. Amtrak agreed to let some of us on their superspecial train, which was pretty generous of them, you know, in light of it having been their fault that we got delayed.)

*The author does realize that readers may find it a bit unseemly for her to call Spitting Lady a maniac after herself shouting "Go fuck yourself" in a train station, but the author wishes to clarify that a) she rather likes being unseemly, and b) the security guard hadn't shoved or degraded Spitting Lady before she began repeatedly screaming "disgusting" at him. If this doesn't suffice as a clarification, the author has a suggestion for you.

**The spell check function on this thing SUCKS.

I had this whole snarky thing about my fellow commuters I was going to post today, but first this:

2005-08-04T19:31:00.000-05:00

Last night, my train got stuck behind a broken-down one. The conductor came over the loudspeaker and said he didn't know how long we'd be stopped. The guy across the aisle hadn't heard the whole announcement and asked me for a recap. After I told him, he came over and asked me if I had anything he could read, since we were going to be sitting there indefinitely. I fished some embarrassing glossy tabloid out of the recesses of my bag (after first offering him "A People's History of the United States" - he was hopeful we wouldn't be there quite that long), we discussed my tattoo for a few minutes (he said it was "really amazing"), I thanked him and he thanked me, and he went back to his seat. Several minutes later we were moving, only to get stuck again at Seabrook, where we learned we'd be picking up the people from the disabled train. Guy Across The Aisle and I exchanged a glance - you know, the glance of "Oh for the love of god." People poured into the car until there wasn't an inch of available space anywhere. I got crowded into my window seat, with my bag on my lap, my book on my bag, and my iPod and my drink on my book. When I looked over to observe all the people standing in the aisle (so I could watch if they all fell like dominos when we started moving again - they didn't), Guy Across The Aisle smiled at me as if to say "Yeah, that does suck." For some reason the entire train evacuated in Odenton, and I was able to lay my things back out in their usual order on the seats next to me. As I was doing that, Guy Across The Aisle grinned at me: "Whew." I read for the rest of the trip, and as we were approaching Penn Station, he was writing something and I got up to make my way to the door. Guy Across The Aisle said "Hey," and handed me my trashy magazine, and as I was thanking him, he said, "Oh, this too," and just as I was preparing my "Actually, though I'm flattered you'd like me to call you, I'm quite happily married" speech, he handed me a CD, on which he'd written "Pablo" at the top and "Rock en Español" at the bottom. He blushed and I stammered over a thank you, which didn't come out nearly as sincere as it felt. I really wish I'd just gone ahead and said, "This is the nicest moment of my whole day, and I wish that everyone else who was in this hot, sticky, frustrating situation tonight could have had this kind of brief connection, and thank you for keeping me sane and even happy this whole trip."

Seriously? I've had decade-long "friendships" with people who cared less about how I was feeling and were less attuned to my discomfort. Which probably says as much about my judgment in picking friends as it does about Pablo's humanity, but the point is that it's a rare thing for me to experience true kindness from strangers, and I'm glad that I did, and it reminded me to be more aware of other people as I'm going along.

(If anyone knows Pablo, tell him thanks again from me.)

MARC-ass busters.

2005-08-02T20:44:00.000-05:00

People are too fucking stupid to be believed. Is commuting this complicated? Apparently it is. So for the edification of anyone reading who needs it, I’d like to share a list of common fucking idiotic things commuters do. In this installment: MARC commuters. I’ll try to follow this up with an exciting Metro sequel Try not to fall right off the edge of your seat.

1. Talking in the Quiet Car. (I know I’ve covered this extensively, but unfortunately, MARC hasn’t yet made my blog a prerequisite for purchasing tickets.) The “Quiet” in “Quiet Car” refers to the expected behavior of the passengers in it, as in “be quiet.” Perhaps some of you thought it meant that the car itself doesn’t break into song or contain any giant-headed mechanical animals like Chuck-E-Cheese. (FYI, these things are in fact also true of the Quiet Car.)

2. Assuming that once you’ve boarded, boarding is complete. This ASSumption manifests itself in a couple of ways:

a. Snotting at the conductor about the train not having left yet. I kid you not: there’s a guy on my train who does this obnoxious shit at least once a week. I want to punch him in the forehead, but he’s nearly always drunk and definitely always as old as my grandfather, so he’d probably fall down and break something if I did that.

b. Standing in the aisle as traffic backs up. This is, in my experience, always perpetrated by men, who pretend they can’t see me and the 400 people behind me tring to get past them as they fold, unfold, refold, dry clean, press, and sew new buttons on their goddamn suit jackets. Dude, sit the fuck down. I’ll eat your fucking suit jacket.

3. Trampling to death the de-training passengers. Every night, there’s a salivating mob gathered at Gate A at Union station for the 6:35 departing train. They can smell the train as it approaches, and they bumrush the exit doors, storming up the platform bearing their teeth and swinging spiky metal balls on chains and shit. God help you if you’re getting off that train. They will crush you to death for the title of First Seated Rabid Odentonian (or Halethorpian – either way, I refuse to believe these people are from my beloved, gentle Baltimore). This behavior is the most curious one I’ve observed, because it doesn’t matter at all what time the train pulls in; whether they have three minutes to board or 23 minutes, they are determined to maim someone in the process.

4. Not following universally accepted traffic customs. Okay, you’re driving on a multi-late road. The exits are all on the right. There are no exits on the left. Where do you think you should be if you’re going to be exiting soon, or if you just want to go at the pace of someone who’s going to be exiting soon? (If you said anything other than “on the right,” please turn in your driver’s license and sell your car immediately, or I will eat them both.) Can anyone explain why walking in heavy foot traffic should be any different? If the train is on the right, traffic is slower on the right – closest to the train – because people are slowing and stopping to get on. If you must walk at the speed of my old Ford Festiva, can’t you do it where all the other pokeys are walking? Why are you way over on the left where the fast walkers are, making us risk life and limb to pass you by walking along the ledge overlooking the empty track on our left? Move! (Yes, I am this easily irritated – don’t ever get me started on the behavior of mall shoppers.) I realize that we’re all trying to be careful, faced as we are with the additional hazard of the bodies left in the wake of that frothy-mouthed mob, but please, pick up the pace or move over.

5. Talking in the Quiet Car. If you just said, “Uh, that was number one,” you’re right, but there are, right now as I am writing this, two guys across from me, both with HILARIOUSLY bad hipster hairdos, talking so incessantly that I fully expect them both to deflate into two-dimensional cartoon characters with HILARIOUSLY bad hairdos from failing to take a breath at any point in the last 25 minutes. The conductor even told them about their chatty selves (this never happens), and they were apologetic, but they seem truly incapable of stopping. And because I’m on a long streak of not being That Girl (you know, That Girl Who Needs You to Know That She Knows the Rules, You Noob), I’m not going to tell them how stupid their hair is – I mean, that this is the Quiet Car, but I am going to write about it here in case they ever wander into my corner of the e-world (or find my notebook after I drop it while being arrested for gnawing the buttons off some guy’s suit jacket). Mmm, passive aggression. It’s what’s for dinner, or some such.

This & that.

2005-07-27T13:05:00.000-05:00

More on D.C. fashion. Everyone is wearing straw hats. I will not be adopting this custom. In other fashion news, last Christmas I got a J. Crew gift card from a relative who doesn't pay much attention to how I dress (or who does pay attention and wishes I'd stop that). I forgot about it until this past weekend, when I was on a marathon phone call with my mother in law and started pacing around the house looking for something with which to busy my hands (our wireless router doesn't work when the phone is in use, and when I'm stressed out like I was this weekend, I require multiple forms of stimulation). I found a bag I haven't used in a while and started rooting through it and found the gift card, and then I ordered a bunch of stuff from the end of summer sale on their website. In anticipation of an extremely shitty week (and OH, it has been one), I had the stuff shipped to my office so it would be like getting presents. It just arrived, and my little consumer heart is bursting with joy. However, I have no idea how I'm going to carry all this shit home.

Duh. I have completely forgotten what else I was going to say here. That sharp turn I made into my e-shopping experience up there was not part of my original plan for this post, and now I can't remember the "that" that was supposed to go with my "this."

[S]he's the one they call Dr. Feelgood.

2005-07-26T23:31:00.000-05:00

A minute ago I was hugging Joel, who had just announced that he was depressed because he's "not good at anything." (Let it never be said we have nothing in common.) Electra - I mean, Ruby - told us to stop hugging. I explained that I was hugging Daddy because he was sad. She asked him why, and he said, "Because I'm not good at anything." I said, "Daddy thinks he's not good at anything, but he's good at lots of stuff." She said, "You're good at lots of stuff, Daddy," and, abandoning her carpentry project (she'd minutes before declared that her room was her workshop and that she was going to fix her chalkboard), announced, "I'll make you feel better; I'm a doctor!" She left the room and returned with a picnic basket, saying "This is my doctor bag. Now, sit down here. Now breathe."

Joel had to cut the exam short for a bathroom break, and Dr. Ruby didn't think this was a good idea. "But you'll be cranky if you go to the bathroom." Random. I laughed, which she felt showed a disregard for the seriousness of the matter, so she said, "Stop laughing or I'm going to drain the pool." (The "pool" is a pink blanket she spread out on the living room floor earlier this evening.)

Now she's planning a picnic. The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are in her doctor bag. But first she has to "fix [her chalkboard] for a while." Quoth she: "I don't know why it's broken. I need to get my workshop bag. Where is my workshop bag? Somebody took my best workshop bag!"

I'm not sure whether Joel feels better, but I'm pretty amused.

Said I loved you but I lied.

2005-07-25T05:10:00.000-05:00

(Yeah, I used Michael Bolton for my subject line. When you're as fucking cool as I am, you can get away with shit like that.)

So last week, or the week before, I was all impressed with Ken Livingstone for saying this. Because I tire so of people talking about radical Islamic terrorism without mentioning the West's propping up of radical Islam when it suits our needs, and it was nice to hear someone put his political ass on the line to say what so many of us are thinking.

And then, today, I read this:

However, London's Mayor Ken Livingstone said police had done "what they believed necessary to protect the lives of the public". He added: "This tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility."

in regard to the killing, by police, of a man for being brown in a heavy coat. And so today I say, "Shut up, Ken Livingstone."

Will be taking longer breaks than usual from posting here for a bit due to stuff going on at work.

Deja vu all over again.

2005-07-22T02:29:00.000-05:00

Wasn't I just talking about this?

DCist on Metro bag searches.

My take? They're not searching my bag. Period.

When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse.

2005-07-20T11:21:00.000-05:00

Looking out the window a few minutes ago at West Baltimore station, I saw something – two, maybe three small objects that appeared to jumping up and down behind a propped-up screen door next to the tracks. I couldn’t look at it from the right angle or something, so I couldn’t make a complete picture emerge and figure out what I was seeing before the train pulled away.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but because I’m groggy and inartful after a night spent trying to sleep through convention-related panic, I will just aim for “clumsy segue” and see where I land.

While I was pregnant with Ruby, I decided that I didn’t want to be pregnant ever again. When she was an infant, I decided that I didn’t ever want another infant. By the time she was a year old, it had become not just a personal but a political issue. I was denied sterilization services by three doctors, and I was angry at them and at the people in my life who questioned my decision. These people were equating my womanhood with motherhood – they were taking something from me, and while I couldn’t quite name it, I knew they weren’t getting it. It was radicalizing, and that radicalization energized me – placed me, awarely, in the world as a woman for the first time. It made me clear on this point: My womanhood is not to be defined by the standards of a male-dominated culture, and my femininity is not tied to my ability or willingness to birth babies.

This is why I chose permanent, surgical sterilization for myself over an IUD or Joel’s getting a vasectomy. It’s a line in the sand. It dares you to step across. It leaves you no room to question my decision not to have any more babies. It challenges you to rethink your assumptions about me as a woman, and about women, generally. It says that these things are true: I don’t want to harbor life in my womb. I’m not meant to suckle and nurture infants. My partner might change his mind and want another baby someday, and I’m not going to incubate it for him. My daughter might wish for a sibling, but I’m not obligated to make one for her. My fallopian tubes are destroyed, and I cannot and will not do that which is assumed to separate me from men. All of these things are true, and I am still a woman.

It was in that spirit that I happily announced my plans to anyone within earshot and planned to throw an after party. And then, the day after the surgery, I had an unexpected realization. (No, not that I want to bear more children.) I realized that the challenge I threw down to the rest of the world – to answer the question of “Who is Angela, as a woman?” without use of the word “womb” – was one I hadn't accepted myself. I can’t answer that question. I’m halfway there: I know what I’m not, and that’s a walking womb. But even I am using the definitions I so despise, albeit negatively.

This decision was about me, for the first time in my entire life, having complete control over my sexuality and reproductive health. It was about my becoming a woman, and I knew that. What I need now to answer is: what kind of woman? If not the thing I didn’t want, then what? It’s funny and sort of sad that three weeks out from my 29th birthday, I’m really asking myself this question for the first time. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Not just as a person, but as a woman? Who is the woman you want to be?

And I think I see her sometimes – when I write, when I stay up all night talking about feminism and friendship over pizza, when I laugh hysterically with my mom or Ruby, when I press my cheek tightly to Joel’s in the dark – but I haven’t yet turned my head to the right angle and focused long enough to make a whole picture emerge.

Please operator see what you can do, I dialed the right number but I still couldn't get through.

2005-07-19T13:45:00.000-05:00

I am so indescribably tired of talking to people on the phone whose job it is (or who think it’s their job) to make sure that they answer no questions, give out no information, and make sure that I speak to no one who can help me. I deal with this at work all the time. I’ll call somewhere with the simplest of questions, and before I can even say what I need, I’m put on hold, transferred, put on hold again, transferred again, and dumped into the voicemail of someone who doesn’t check hir messages, ever, and may not even work there. It seems like “What’s your fax number?” should be a question anyone in an office can answer, you know?

And okay. It’s not often an emergency, and I’m sure that the office workers I call are often extremely busy. Perhaps in a number of cases, they really don’t have time to answer my question. Fine. I’ve already decided that in my next life, I’m going to avoid becoming a secretary at all costs to myself and others, so taking into account my age, the state of Social Security, the political trajectory of the United States, the economy, and the number of Bushes who are now or ever will be eligible for political office, I will only have to put up with speaking daily to put-upon, testy office workers for another 62 years.

But even I, in my infinite patience and perspective, must draw the line somewhere, and I’m going to tell you where that is. Hospitals. Specifically, I draw it right around the Johns Hopkins Outpatient Surgery Center. Here is what I expect – nay, demand – from people who have recently operated on my body: If I call the number you have provided to report on things you have advised me to call to report, like, say, excruciating pain in a part of my body that shouldn’t be in any pain at all, having not been operated on, someone should answer the phone associated with that number and be ready and willing, if not outright excited, to find someone who can explain to me what is going on and what I need to do to make it stop. I do not expect to be told by three different people to “call [my] regular doctor.” Given that the sheet of paper your hospital provided says to call your hospital if I can’t reach my “regular doctor,” it should be assumed by the fact that I’m on the other end of your telephone that I couldn’t reach my “regular doctor.” Don’t you have “regular doctors” there at the hospital? Isn’t a hospital a reasonable place to assume will contain doctors?

It’s pretty alarming to be in the kind of intense pain I was in over this past weekend. It would have been alarming even if it were pain in a part of my body that had been operated on, but since it was in my jaw and eyes, and to my knowledge I didn’t have face surgery, it was extra alarming. When a person calls a hospital that has just released her following surgery, and she is in an obvious state of alarm, indicating that she is in inexplicable and unmanageable pain, it seems really counterintuitive to make her go through three levels of phone security guards, all of whom have been trained to make callers go away without getting what they need. It’s a fucking hospital. The entire goddamn purpose of the place is to make people better. I’ve no doubt that they get their share of callers who are nuts, or who are looking for pain meds to sell on the street, or who have Munchausen’s or something, and you know what? So be it. That’s probably just something you’re going to have to deal with. If once a week, or once a day, a doctor ends up on the phone with someone who’s full of shit, then…okay. It’ll have to be okay. Hire some doctors who can deal with it. To my thinking, that’s a far better scenario than the one where a woman calls crying and panicking because she’s in horrible pain and can’t make it go away, and you put her on hold fifteen times and subject her to phone-answerers who are increasingly insistent that she call someplace other than there. If you’ve got to put up with a little extra aggravation in your workday so that someone can get a quick response to an urgent problem, I think that’s fair.

That said, I am now sterile (which is what I went there for; don’t be alarmed) and though my left temple continues to throb and I hence continue to be completely unable to sleep at night, and though I have aged thirty years in five days, I am at least assured of not having any more temple-throbbing sleepless nights or premature aging related to babies and/or toddlers who are not Ruby. Assuming that these after-effects dissipate any time in the next three years, I will consider this a success.

Fix-ation.

2005-07-14T12:42:00.000-05:00

Four more hours!! I'm excited, and I'm also so fucking hungry that I might eat this computer before this entry is finished. (I'm not allowed to eat anything.)

Actually, in all seriousness, I'm so hungry that I don't really think I can finish this entry, because if I were to write down what I'm thinking about right now, it would just be descriptions of things I wish I were eating.

So instead, I give you some wonderful journalistic tidbits from Fox "News" anchors:

Hume's "first thought" on hearing of London attacks: It's "time to buy" futures"

Fox's Gibson on "golden opportunity" missed: If France had been selected for 2012 Olympics, terrorists would "blow up Paris, and who cares?"

Fox's Gibson: Rove deserves "a medal ... Because Valerie Plame should have been outed by somebody"

Media Matters for America is my official Favorite Site of July 14.

Name this post!

2005-07-13T13:14:00.000-05:00

Why am I always situated near the stupidest teenager on any given Metro car? This morning, there was a group of kids (well, sort of kids – they were probably 16 and 17) on the train, chaperoned by two adults wearing t-shirts with the name of an organization I couldn’t make out. One of the kids spent the time we shared that car (which was probably about six minutes but felt like the entire morning) telling the others about his recent trip to the beach, where he apparently spent several days saying really mean things to girls after striking up conversations with them and making them believe he was interested in them. He also devoted a significant portion of this account to a description of his trip to Hooters. I devoted a significant portion of his account to not turning around and telling him how proud I’m sure we all were of his charming behavior, and that by the way he should fuck off.

Have I written here about how much I don’t miss being a teenage girl? Because I don’t.

In trying to tune out his bullshit (no small task, as those of you familiar with my brain’s filtering system know), I stared at one of the 5000000000000000000 advertisements on the wall of the car. This one was for Time magazine. It was a black and white photo of Prince Horseface and Whatshername getting married (not old Whatshername, new Whatshername). Imposed on the photo was Time’s logo three times in its usual red – a tiny logo atop a larger logo atop a huge logo. Tiered, like a wedding cake, get it? Huh, huh? Cle-ver. Next to the Cake of What Has Become of Journalism?! was a message: “Find out why.” Find out why what? Find out why they got married? Find out why she wore that boxy sack of a dress? Find out why I’m supposed to give a flying frog’s ass about this? Find out why you’re devoting any space to this whatsoever when 40 people a day are dying in Iraq, we’re losing all of our rights here at home, and the President’s Henchman in Chief/Secretary of Treason is still at large? Really, what is it that I should drop $3.95 to find out? You should just go on ahead and tell me, because I’m not giving you my money until you start giving me some legitimate news. I can read about the lives and loves of the soulless and self-important for free by hitting the “Random” button on LiveJournal. In fact, by reading my friends page on LiveJournal on a weekday morning, I can get more actual world news than in three issues of Time combined.

I got to meet yet another e-friend last night, and she too was lovely and smart and funny. My e-friends never disappoint. I am e-fortunate. Our conversation reminded me that I must find time and words to write about my vastly differing "hometowns." (And this time, I'm not talking about DC and Baltimore. I'm going to get in the way back machine for this one. You know, if I actually get around to writing it.)

You know you've got to have 'em, you know you've got to be strong.*

2005-07-12T16:20:00.000-05:00

My ongoing love/hate relationship with this here internet. Having given the URL for this blog to my parents, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to write about everything here. (Sorry, parents, if you're reading; you know how it is.) So I keep a protected journal elsewhere, accessible to a very small group of people. I still haven't quite figured out what sort of relationship I want to have with that site. Sometimes I just go ahead and pour myself all over the page there, but I never feel 100% comfortable afterward. I often end up feeling overexposed, then going back and filtering things down to an even smaller group of people, or making them inaccessible to anyone but me. The sense of (pseudo) intimacy is what draws me to that venue and then is exactly what freaks me out about it. It's so incestuous. I'm constantly worried about who's going to take what which way; who's friends with whom; blah blah blah blahbitty blah. I know: high school. So anyway. I'm constantly re-evaluating whether and how I want to use that space. I haven't found the right fit yet.

Speaking of right fits... Do you think they (They) have come up with all the shapes of underwear they're going to come up with? Because I thought I was settled on a particular shape, but now I don't think I am. It seems like this is an area of my life in which improvements could be made, but I'm not sure exactly what they are. I know that thongs are right out of the question for me anymore - at some point in the last three years I became incredibly touch sensitive, and so while I used to not notice at all that there was a piece of fabric in my ass, I now can't stop noticing it. I hate panty lines, so briefs won't do. That leaves me, currently, with boy-cuts. I thought I'd found an underwear home in boy-cuts - they're flattering, no panty lines, no swatch of cloth in my butt... but they do their own riding up thing on me that's almost as unpleasant. They start off around my hips and land around my waist for some reason, necessitating my constant checking to see if they're viewable by the entire staff of my department. And they tend to kind of drift back and forth from one side to the other in a certain location. (Uh, didn't I say my parents read this thing? Sorry, parents.) Perhaps I'll invent a new underwear shape and become a Captain of Industry.

Karl Rove. I know I've already mentioned this to some of you, but it's just impossible today to stop having a nervous breakdown about the fact that we impeached a guy for lying about getting a blowjob, okay? This White House has covered up a far worse lie. Well, okay, so this White House has covered up so many hideous lies that its nose should be stretched out across the park and poking me in the ribs right now. Which really only bolsters my conclusion: IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS, PLEASE. And some jail time for Karl might be nice, too. For me, that is, not for him.

T (for Tubal Ligation!) minus 48 hours. Among many other things over which I am losing it, I am really jittery about the possibility of general anesthesia, which I've never had, but which I've heard could cause me to die. I know it's a small risk, but I'm not a thrill seeker. (My mom and I have recently discussed the fact that there's just no love and admiration for tranquility seekers in this world. Why isn't anyone impressed by my quest for a nice hot bath?) Also, I really fucking hate vomiting, and the risk of that happening is far higher. I had twilight anesthesia once (for an ABORTION - gasp! Cue the anonymous comments!) and it made me vomit up vital organs. I'm so nervous. On the other hand, no more hormonal birth control, which I swear is the major cause of my anxiety and general malcontendedness.

Ruby. (Because I know no one can ever get enough of parents' rambling about the oh-so-cute things our kids say.) Last night she exclaimed, at random, "Shit! What is going on here?" This morning, after reminding me that she'll be three in August, she asked me when August is. I told her that it's next month, and that her birthday is in about five weeks. Her reply? "Damn!" Later, on the way to the train station, she asked Joel and me whether we remembered when she and "Stella" got married. She tried to refresh our memories by saying, "Yeah, there were lollipops there, and Stella got married to me!" They really do grow up so fast, don't they?

*Subject line is apropos of absolutely nothing, but I have that fucking horrible song in my head, and you will by god share my burden.

Oh Bronson, Up Yours

2005-07-11T13:05:00.000-05:00

I had an all-sugar breakfast this morning: cheese danish, Mountain Dew, Us Weekly. Dear Everyone in Hollywood, please, eat a sandwich. Thanks.

In other sugary news, I watched about ten minutes of the new Surreal Life last night, and I think it’s over between me and that show. Record this, because it’ll be the only time I ever publicly confess to agreeing with Janice Dickinson: Bronson Pinchot is a disgusting, horrible man. I was really grossed out at the way everyone but Janice reacted to his repeatedly touching her after she’d told him to stop. ‘Round here, we call that sexual assault. In the Surreal Life clown house, they called it Janice being a drama queen. Fuck that. Blowing off, on national television, the real panic and anger of a woman who is being groped against her will is exactly the sort of thing that leads men to think that they can do that and women to think we have to tolerate it. Perhaps Janice Dickinson is, generally, a drama queen. That doesn’t strip her of her right to her own body or her own reactions to it being touched without her consent. She shouldn’t have to keep silent about being assaulted. And for the rest of the people in that house to spend all of their energy on addressing her reaction and not his behavior? Deplorable. There’s no way I’m going to watch a whole season of has-been celebrities re-enact my adolescence on VH1.

Deep breath. Moving on. I’m trying to arrange catering for a conference in Chicago. I have the names of two union caterers who have casual, lunch-y menus. I called them both on Friday; the guy at the first place faxed me a menu, made some suggestions, gave me his name, and offered to make substitutions and replacements if the menu didn’t meet our needs. The guy at the second place, when I explained why I was calling, said, “What’s your fax number?” I gave it to him, and he said, “Okay,” hung up on me, and never faxed me a menu. By the end of the day, I was pretty sure I was going to use the first place, but I wanted to first make sure there isn’t a huge price difference. (I can tolerate a fair bit of discourtesy if the discount is steep enough.) So this morning, I called the second guy again and said, “I called Friday, and someone was going to fax me a catering menu, but it never arrived.” After sighing dramatically, he said, “Give me the number again.” I started to give him the fax number, and he cut me off after the area code, snapping, “‘202’? What kind of area code is that?” I said, “It’s DC’s area code.” And he replied, “DC? This is Chicago.” I said, “Right. And as I told you on Friday, I am calling from DC about an event that is taking place in Chicago.” Him, as though talking to a complete idiot: “Oookay then.” I had no idea my catering needs would engender such hostility in Chicago’s restaurant community. On Friday, I thought maybe that guy was having a really bad day or that he had customers waiting there to speak with him and was in a hurry, or something. But this morning, I realized he’s just a big jerk who hates me.

Or maybe he hates DC? It’s not unheard of.

In MARC’s ongoing quest to drive me mad, they have switched up the conductor team on my morning train. Unacceptable. This is far worse than the personnel changes on the evening train. I have a specific conductor on the morning train with whom I have a specific exchange every morning. Sometimes we add a little variety by talking about iPods, but for the most part, we stick to our routine. I don’t wish to start a new relationship with one of these conductors. Why didn’t anyone ask me?!

Joel assigned me to write song lyrics today. I’m supposed to put them in my blog. I wonder if songs about small talk with train conductors hold any commercial appeal. Maybe I could write a song about how Bronson Pinchot is a pig. I could call it “Bronson Pinchot Is A Pig.” I’m a fucking musical genius, no?*

*But seriously, you have to admit that my subject line made you giggle.

And because I want to end the day on a note that won't give me nightmares...

2005-07-07T23:45:00.000-05:00

I bring you this from tonight's ride home:

Ruby: Mommy, what's a doctor?
Me: [long-winded explanation of different types of doctors, ending with vets]
Ruby: Aminals [not a typo] have doctors too? When they don't feel good?
Me: Yep.
Ruby: But. Mommy. Jraffs [not a typo] don't fit at the doctor!

I wish I were almost three.

'Cause if they make us all panic, they can start martial law.

2005-07-07T22:35:00.000-05:00

The problems that lead to people blowing up trains, or blowing themselves up inside trains, are not solved by making everyone show nine forms of ID and go through checkpoints to get on a damn commuter train to go home in the evening. They are not solved by putting machine-gun-wearing men and their dogs on subways. And I don't for a skinny minute believe that any "homeland security experts" believe that they are solved that way.

I am so angry today. And I don't feel any safer having spent my commute being terrorized and fear-mongered at than I did 24 hours ago, or 12 hours ago.

Is there an end to the bullshit we will tolerate being told is in the name of safety? What about national ID cards? What about checkpoints on the streets? I thought there was an end to my own personal tolerance, and I'd have thought that the Patriot Act was right on past that line. And it was. But what have I done about it? Being made to ride in a train with a person carrying a loaded machine gun is well past my personal boundaries, but what can I do? We've all been complacent for so long that they can unleash any Fresh Hell on us now without fear of reprisal. It takes us so long to figure out what's going on and what we can do, that we're already well fucked by the time we muster a response. There are people reading this right now who still don't get that our civil liberties are being eroded before our very eyes; they're mad at me for writing this commie shit. (I would ask that those people save me the trouble of deleting their comments by not making them.)

I feel right apocalyptic today, and not because I believe The Terrorists are going to get me, but because I believe I'm going to - out of paralysis, apathy, and lack of help - give up all the "Freedom (tm)" Bush wants us to believe they hate so much. Because it's just so much easier to just show the ID and get on the train, ignore the dog, ignore the guns, get home, don't make a scene, what's the big deal, right? If only I could figure out what precise combination of antidepressants, reality television, and McSalads makes the dread and the guilt go away.

You've been struck by a smooth criminal.

2005-06-30T02:13:00.000-05:00

Oh no! Television Without Pity isn’t recapping 7th Heaven anymore! OH. NO. How else am I supposed to laugh at that show? I’m not going to watch it myself, that’s for sure. Damn it!

Holy smokes. I thought I was going to go to Metro Jail this morning. I swiped my SmartTrip card at Union Station, and the little screen told me to see a station manager. When I was finally able, seven and a half months later, to locate someone I thought was a managerial type, she took my card, went into the booth, and came back really angry - she looked at me as if I'd offended her so deeply that I was going directly to hell. She hissed at me that I had never “exited the system” the last time I used the card. I started to tell her that anyone could see, by observing my position at that moment OUTSIDE “the system,” that I had in fact exited it, but she decided it was better to stick her hand in my face and shout “WAIT” than to listen to me like the paying system user and adult I am. I said, “Are you serious with that?” and she cut me off again, accusing me of walking through the turnstile thingamabob last night without swiping my card. She said (as smugly as anyone who thinks she’s just caught someone in an act of criminal wrongdoing), “I’m going to take the exit fare off your card before you can go back through.” And before I could say, “You’re doing no such thing, you snotty assface, because I did swipe that card, and I’ll take your arm off if I have to,” she ran over to the exit side of the nearest turnstile and swiped my card. She handed it back to me with a snappy “Here,” and I snatched it out of her hand and walked away without either thanking her or telling her to fuck herself, having realized that I was now going to be late for work.

I freaking hate being late for work. I’ve been here at least fifteen minutes early almost every day, so when I show up several minutes late, it feels even later. And it probably seems later to my coworkers, too. Plus, I’m scheduled to be in several hours late tomorrow, and it’s giving me huge anxiety that that will now make two lates in a row. (I am aware that this could all be remedied by my learning that people aren’t paying nearly as much attention to me as my narcissistic ass thinks they are.)

By the time I got to work, I had calmed down just in time to get pissed off all over again. I mean...what the hell? How are you going to put your hand in my face? And furthermore, does it make any sense that I’d call attention to my theft of Metro services by tracking down a station manager? Does it make any sense that I’d spend THOUSANDS of dollars a year on fucking Metro and then, at random, sneak through to save $1.35 when there was money on the damn card? But more important, how are you going to put your hand in my face? UGH! Do you ever feel like just completely snapping and scaring the fuck out of somebody with the sheer craziness of what you say to threaten them? Because I had quite a few creative concepts I wanted to run past her, like, “Lady, do you want to find out if you fit through one of those Farecard slots?” But then I remembered I’m from Baltimore now, and cramming someone into a Farecard slot is just so DC.

One last thing, on the topic of DC: tote bags. Remember I said that DC didn’t have a uniform? No style? There it is, folks, right there. Tote bags. With the names and dates of conferences on them. That is DC's style. I can’t believe it took me this long to process this information. I've been looking at those things since 1976. They'll probably outlast us all. Yeesh. Well, hey, it beats flipped-up collars.

Jack and Jill's shopping list has grown.

2005-06-29T22:06:00.000-05:00

Ruby, on the way home tonight: Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of [dramatic pause] iiice creeeam? [laughing at own joke, just like her mom] Nooooo. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of [beat] BUGS?! [cracking up]

Okay, also? Just now, she drew several sets of barbells on her etch-a-sketch dealy, announcing that one set was for her, one for Daddy, one for me, one for Michellene, and one for Kelly. She remembers and draws presents for my e-friends!

My kid is fucking rad.

And now, as if to drive that point home, she has caused me to look up the answer to the following question: Do male cats have nipples?*

No really, my kid? She is rad.

*Yes.

The Countdown(s) begins( )

2005-06-29T19:55:00.000-05:00

My organization's convention is rapidly approaching, and it's going to be a hell of a throwdown. The potential outcomes are such that I can actually feel my heart rate increase when it's discussed. I got downright woozy thinking about it today, and so I resolved not to, but I may as well work it over in my head and get braced for impact. Un.pleasant.

However. There are things to look forward to in July, like...

Fifteen days to infertility!!! God DAMN it, I'm excited.

So, how does a person celebrate sterilization, exactly? Should I have a party? Demand to be taken out for drinks? Will there be presents?! And should I put up a tree that they can be put under? We could decorate it with condoms and strings of birth control pills that I'll NEVER NEED AGAIN!

Oh shit. I think I'm seriously thinking about doing that last thing, y'all. Who's in?

More immediately-upcoming events have me all atwitter as well. My good e-friend Kelly (in fact, she is one of my longest-standing e-friends, from back when I was just "[old LJ name]" and not "evil man-hating, castrating, babykilling internet-community-free-speech-ruining, pc-fascist feminazi [old LJ name]") is coming to Baltimore! IN 48 HOURS! I like Kelly more than I like a solid half (way more some days) of the people I know in real life. The fact that I will soon be sitting on Tracey's deck getting drunk with my favorite wimmins (okay, mens too), e- and otherwise, is giving me some serious warm fuzzies.

Notes to self (and anyone else wanting to read about feminism)

2005-06-29T15:58:00.000-05:00

I am reading...

I want to read...

I am glad to have found...

(That second item is also a note to anyone who might be at a library, say, tomorrow for, say, story time, and who might want to check that out for me. Oh, and who might live with me.)

Speaking of reading, I've started another Dorothy Allison book in defiance of the voice in my head screaming "DON'T YOU REMEMBER HOW YOU FELT AFTER 'BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA'?! STEP AWAY FROM THE LITERARY SERATONIN-BLOCKER."

I get sick when I'm around, I can't stand to be around

2005-06-28T22:04:00.000-05:00

I was going to take a shot every time this gross motherfucker tried to link 9/11 to Iraq and get royally trashed, but then I realized we don't have any liquor. So instead, I aimed my remote at his face and turned on Blow Out, where I think I might actually be more likely to hear truth about American foreign policy. At the very least, I will find the smirking and lying appealing instead of soul-chillingly mortifying.

Man I promise, she's so self-conscious.

2005-06-27T14:04:00.000-05:00

I had one of those weekends that I’m convinced only happens to me – the kind that makes me think that while I haven’t exactly angered god, I’ve apparently irritated hir. Having finally gotten an appointment at what I’ll call Blissfully Inexpensive Baltimore Salon (henceforth, “BIBS”), I arrived there early Saturday morning uncaffeinated and with unwashed hair. I was excited about the idea of walking out of there with clean hair that I didn’t even wash myself and certain that I’d be there for a short enough period of time that I’d be able to grab post-haircut coffee before my caffeine crankies even set in.

Half an hour after my scheduled appointment time, and after I’d watched four people with later appointment times get called back and shampooed (in fact, I watched two of them leave freshly coiffed), the receptionist timidly approached me to announce that due to some cat-related emergency, my stylist had left, and due to the receptionist’s having apparently forgotten I was there that whole time, she had called all of the stylist’s later appointments to cancel before coming over to talk with me. I don’t hold this against her, for that is exactly the kind of thing I do all the time at work, and I always later think, “What a bizarre order to do those things in; what was I thinking?” She looked very much like she was having that very thought. She was also nice enough to squeeze me in later in the morning, probably because I looked like I was going to cry on her desk if she didn’t.

There is something uniquely sad about walking out of a hair salon with dirty, uncut hair. I swear I heard someone say, “Aww,” as I was shuffling out, slumped shoulders announcing my dejection to all of Charles Village. I must still have looked like that kid whose lollipop fell in the sandbox when I got home, because Joel gave me the kind of hug you give someone when you feel really sorry for her.

High points of Saturday included my getting a really good haircut from the person I now want to see every time I go to “BIBS” (could it be? Could I have found The One? Will I soon be able to say “my stylist” about her?) and seeing three very awesome bands at Rock & Romp (where I also bought an extremely cute t-shirt from an extremely cute girl). Unfortunately, these high points were followed by a tragic evening in which I MISSED THE FUCKING SLEATER KINNEY SHOW.

You know those menstrual cramps that fuck with your entire body? The ones where your uterus contracts so hard that it causes some kind of lower-abdominal earthquake, and contractions happen in concentric circles in all the organs around your uterus, until you actually think your right eyeball might be contracting, just a little? But you can’t focus on that because your immediate concern is how fast you can get to a bathroom before the intestinal contractions reach the point of no return? Yeah, those. So I don’t know if I was having that problem or if I got food poisoning from the room service we’d ordered in the HOTEL ROOM WE’D BOOKED FOR THE NIGHT BECAUSE OF THE SHOW WE DIDN’T END UP SEEING. I do know that I was fine when got on the Metro, but then we had to turn around because we’d left the tickets in the hotel room, and by the time we were a block from the hotel, I thought I was going to need to be carried the rest of the way. My insides felt like they were being twisted into a pretzel. We’d been in the room ten minutes when the real excitement started.

There is something uniquely sad about having to call the front desk of a schmancy hotel that you can’t really afford in the first place to ask them to send someone up to plunge your toilet. It’s even sadder when they don’t show up, but your digestive system continues its rebellion anyway. Yeah.

Joel skipped the show to lie next to me in bed while I made futile attempts at finding a comfortable position, cried at five-minute intervals, and watched horrible TV. I think I’ll keep him. Oh! At some point over the weekend, we realized that Sunday was our wedding anniversary. So, uh, here’s to that Wednesday afternoon when we got married right quick in some lady’s living room while wearing a t-shirt (him) and a maternity sundress (me). Cheers!

Yesterday was better - maybe god was busy meting out punishments to the people who displease him by making sad attempts at emulating hip-hop artists' clothing quirks (psst: that was FORESHADOWING). We drank beer with tourists at that big bar on Thames Street that I can’t at all remember the name of. They have really good pretzel sticks. Okay, I’ve officially run out of anything interesting to say about that. We hung out on a bench for a little while afterward, and I learned what a tugboat looks like and that Joel is the only person from whom “You walk like a penguin” sounds like a compliment.

Before I go, there’s something I observed this weekend that needs to be discussed: polo shirts with flipped-up collars. The following people should continue doing that: Kanye West. If you didn’t see your name on that list, stop it. Stop it right now. I am telling you that if you are not Kanye West and you are walking around with a flipped-up collar on your polo shirt, you look like a jackass and people are laughing at you. If you pair that fashion atrocity with prep-school khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a little tennis-playing ponytail, they’re laughing harder. Knock it off.

2005-06-23T19:12:00.000-05:00

Quite without looking, I stumbled upon this today, in the my-karma-must-be-good way that Jon Stewart dedicated his show last night to reassuring me and Ms. Sweetney that we weren't alone (ha, I sound like a nutbar, I swear that part was a joke - laugh!). Anyway, I'm posting this for those of you who know who you are, and for everyone else too. And I'm hanging it up over my desk for me, because seriously? I need it. A lot.

Affirmation by Assata Shakur

I believe in living. I believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine
in windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs.
And I believe that seeds grow into sprouts,
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.

I believe in life.
And I have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path.
I have seen the destruction of the daylight,
and seen the bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted.

I have seen the kind become the blind
and the blind become the bind
in one easy lesson.
I have walked on cut glass.
I have eaten crow and blunder bread
and breathed the stench of indifference.

I have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if I know anything at all,
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.

I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.

And I believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home
to port.

Get Out Your Summer Reading Lists and an Editing Pen

2005-06-23T02:52:00.000-05:00

...so you can bump this to the top spot. This one's shorter than my last recommendation, so you can do it on your lunch break. Go read this from the inimitable Sweetney. You need to. Yes, you. Go.

2005-06-21T16:11:00.000-05:00

On the ride back from Tara’s Cupcake Party Sunday night, I was carting in my lap a bag containing cartons of drunken noodle and fish cake from the Father’s Day Thai-Carryout And Ice Cream Cake Extravaganza earlier in the evening. Joel asked me, as we pulled into a gas station, if I could hand him some fish cake. Ruby, visions of cupcakes and ice cream cake still dancing in her head, said, “Can I have some fish cake, too?” I passed her a small piece, and she said, “Danks! I love fish cake!” Several seconds passed, and she announced, “Wait a minute! This is fish!” I said, “I thought that was implied in ‘fish cake.’” Cara, catching on just a second before I did to where Ruby’s head had been, said, “Cruelest. Joke. Ever.” We laughed as Ruby rolled the fish cake between her hands and then made a final, resigned announcement: “It’s just fish, though,” and handed it back to me.

Ha! I think my favorite part was the “Wait a minute!” She said that again yesterday on the way to the train station (where she thinks I work no matter how much I try to explain). We passed that painted crab (one of the millions) in front of the school administration building, and she said, “Look at that crab! Mommy, what’s a crab?” I was groggy, sore-throated, and incoherent, so other than pointing out the window and saying, “That’s a crab,” I had nothing. I referred her to Joel, who told her that a crab is a kind of crustacean that lives in the sea. “Ohhhh,” she said knowingly, and resumed looking out the window. As we were approaching the next intersection a minute later, she said, “Wait a minute! What’s a crustacean!”

It occurs to me that when Ruby isn’t speaking in strange igloo-related word salad, she totally talks like an old person. In addition to her increasingly frequent “waitaminutes,” she loves to compliment people, and she loves to do it like this: “Hey, nice dress you have there.” I was just thinking about that and wondering, “Where’d she get that?” I mean, “nice dress you have there”? Is this a thing that two-year-olds say?

Speaking of nice dresses, mine is so cute I don’t know what to do with myself. I should be outside swirling around or something.

2005-06-21T13:14:00.000-05:00

News flash, and I do mean flash: In case you weren’t downstairs at Union Station Metro around 10 this morning when the red line came through, bringing with it winds of about 83 miles per hour, I am wearing white undies under the looser-than-I-thought skirt of my sundress.

As predicted, I finished Without A Net yesterday. The last few essays were as good as the others. Read it. And then pass it on. I’ve got to figure out what to read next, fast. This morning’s hastily selected glossy tabloids (listen, the newsstand at Penn offers very little in the way of literature) are making me shallow. Stay tuned for details.

And here they are! Current anxiety: Sleater-Kinney show Saturday night, nothing to wear. I am not apparently too embarrassed to tell the world that this is my chief concern after “will I have time to get my hair cut before the show?” Those are, quite seriously, the things closest to the front of my mind today. Where to buy a cute t-shirt between now and Saturday, and how to make sure I effectively communicate what I want done to my hair. I’m a regular one-woman revolution.

2005-06-20T04:39:00.000-05:00

I started Without a Net last week and am in the final stretch now – I expect I’ll finish it on the Metro leg of tonight’s commute. It’s astonishing – revelatory not so much in content (although I suspect it may be for a lot of its readers) as in voice. I’ve read a lot of books about poverty and about the experiences of working class families, and they have all been written (as Michelle Tea covers in the intro to this book) by upper middle class authors. Jonathan Kozol and Alex Kotlowitz in particular both worked very hard to get the words of their subjects on paper, but the narratives were still lacking…narrators. I love Kozol and Kotlowitz as writers, but you’re either a working class woman or you aren’t one, you know? They heavily quote the mothers and workers whose lives they write about, but I realized in reading Eileen Myles talk about powdered milk and her preference for margarine (they couldn’t afford butter, now it’s not bland enough for her) that affluent writers know what’s important for the story they’re hoping to tell, but they just don’t necessarily (or just don’t, period) know what’s important to the story of a life. Eileen Myles’s essay was slightly humorous – she didn’t mean to make me cry with the margarine, but she did. Because that truth would never have come out in a story written by someone else. If you don’t prefer margarine, you wouldn’t know to ask whether she does. If she said it to you in passing, you wouldn’t know what questions to ask afterward. You might not even hear that part.

I prefer margarine, too. Surely there are more action-worthy items in the book and in all the books that caused Michelle Tea to pull this anthology together, but for me, it is magical to see my truth in black in white – margarine, that tiny little thread no one bothered to note before, is notable for the fact that it wasn’t before. This is to say nothing of the other threads I’m seeing for the first time in print but have always known held together the story of my life: siblings as siblings-in-arms, poor girls as insta-sluts, reclamation of femininity, teeth. I bet a few of you saw this list and went, “Yes, YES, YES! Oh my god, teeth, yes!” Those moments are important – I will always need to hear it’s not just me, I’m not the only one who feels unable to ever get completely clean and smelling good, I’m not the only one who’s embarrassed by her love of processed food, I’m not the only one who never completely understood why she was so Other. When Eileen mentioned that bland-ass margarine, I could have jumped right into the book for a group hug. I’d like to tuck the book under my pillow and feel like I have sisters there who will stand ready to remind me “Girl, I know, me too,” when I choke up after being asked where I got my degree (I didn't), or rage after some snot makes a crack about people feeding their kids boxed macaroni and cheese (I do), or when my anxiety over my overgrown hair reaches fever pitch and I just know no one’s going to get why I don’t just slap a headband in it, call it intentionally messy, and get on with my life (I can't).

Michelle Tea is to be thanked and hugged and asked to put out sequels. Even as a woman who grew up working class, I didn’t realize how infrequently our voices are heard in these discussions. Or what goes missing when we are silenced and spoken for.

Okay....

2005-06-18T12:02:00.000-05:00

Ruby, just now, at random: "Can you say 'Setta'? Setta is a kind of lady that's a kitty. My house is purple, but it's white though. You wanna come? I'm gonna get some different songs to listen to so you can come, okay? So you have to come into my igloo and listen to a song. You have to go in the igloo."

I guess I'll be in the igloo if anyone needs me.

I ain't nothin' but tired.

2005-06-16T16:23:00.000-05:00

So I just wrote this whole long thing about it being bullshit that the government intervenes when a matter really is personal (marriage, medical decisions) and then doesn't intervene when a matter is both of grand-scale societal concern and immediately harmful to people (you know, gotta stay out of the way of The Almighty Market a/k/a campaign donors). And then I deleted all of it, quite on purpose, because, well, I'm tired. I'm like...so incredibly tired. I'm tired, and I have some kind of throat thing getting ready to happen because my immune system has been completely defeated by exhaustion, and I'm tired. And it really invited argument, and I don't have any in me.

So instead of reading my rantings against American corporatism and busybodyism, you should go visit Sonicage for some political booty-shaking.

At night I can't sleep, I toss and turn*

2005-06-16T09:57:00.000-05:00

I just saw that the feed for this thing is fetching stuff out of order. Annoying.

My headache is not only not gone, it is worse. Also annoying.

All last night I had the same kind of weird, looped, slightly-awake dreams that I had last week after taking Excedrin PM - except I didn't take anything at all last night, despite my headache, because I was afraid of that very thing happening. Power of suggestion, or psychosis? You decide. In any case, I slept exactly not at all and now I'm exhausted and cranky. Which is awesome, because Ruby's being a huge pain in the ass. Work is generally a good respite from obnoxious toddlers, but the train is full of obnoxious toddlers and worse, they're all at least 5'8" and carrying cell phones. Looking forward to it. At least they don't melt down into a squealing fit when they see an ant. Or maybe they do. That would be pretty funny. But it's really rather unfunny when Ruby does it. It's goddamned irritating is what it is.

This is definitely a headache of calling-in-sick proportions, but when staying at home means listening to Ruby scream to bring the house down and refuse to eat breakfast because she saw a freaking microscopic ant crawl across the floor under her chair? Yeah, no thanks.

Someone send me a million dollars and Supernanny. Do it!

*God damn, homie.

Wal-Mart CEO: Not everyone should love Wal-Mart

2005-06-15T17:23:00.000-05:00

An email I just received, which very nearly amused me, because this shit is so outrageous:

Dear Angela,

Last week, Wal-Mart’s CEO Lee Scott said, "Not everyone is going to love us, and not everyone should." Why shouldn’t people love you Mr. Scott? Maybe it’s because Wal-Mart has no respect for people, for communities, or for what it means to be American.

Just look at a few stories from this week.

Yesterday, the St. Petersburg Times revealed Wal-Mart fired Molly Beavers in December of 2003 for not smiling enough. It turns out that Ms. Beaver's face is partially paralyzed from surgery related to her condition as an achondroplastic dwarf. Ms. Beavers filed a complaint under the Americans with Disabilities Act against Sam's Club and parent company Wal-Mart.

If that wasn't bad enough, today's Charleston Gazette reports that Wal-Mart is now requiring workers to be available for practically "any shift, any day they're asked, even if they've built up years of seniority and can't arrange child care." One worker said, "I've put up with a few things, but this has got to be the worst thing I've seen them do."

To keep up with all of the breaking news on Wal-Mart and for up-to-the-minute commentary please visit the WakeUpWalMart.com blog:

http://blog.WakeUpWalMart.com

We started WakeUpWalMart.com because there is only one force powerful enough to change the largest corporation in the world - the American people. We are Wal-Mart's consumers and it is time for Wal-Mart to wake up and start doing what is right for its employees, our families, and our country.

Since we launched we now have over 53,000 supporters who have joined America's campaign to change Wal-Mart. Your call for Wal-Mart to change is now being echoed by community leaders and elected officials all across the country.

Yesterday, Steve Westly, the state comptroller of California, urged Wal-Mart to create a committee of independent directors to review regulatory and legal controls at Wal-Mart following the allegations that Wal-Mart's vice chairman may have had an illegal anti-union slush fund. In addition, Westly pointed out Wal-Mart was just fined $188,000 because Wal-Mart "willfully and consciously disregarded its obligations as a California employer" when it refused to reinstate a female employee after her maternity leave.

On WakeUpWalMart.com's blog you can comment on these stories and discuss them with others.

http://blog.WakeUpWalMart.com

Please be sure to pass this link around to your friends and family and ask them to come visit our blog to discuss the latest Wal-Mart related stories and issues.

Thanks for all you do,

Paul Blank
WakeUpWalMart.com

P.S. If you haven't already signed up to co-sponsor Fair Share for Health Care legislation in your state, please do so now:

http://www.wakeupwalmart.com/feature/health-legislative.html

I don't know about all this "We are Wal-Mart's consumers," since I am most certainly not a consumer of their worker-mistreating asses and have not been for some time, but otherwise, yay Wake Up Wal-Mart. I'm glad people are starting to have this conversation on a broader scale.

2005-06-13T14:22:00.000-05:00

I wasn't sure I was going to say anything else here about Alli, but her writing is so important, and I feel like we all have to work to make sure that her words continue to reach as many eyes and ears as possible. And I realize that as someone whose life was changed by but not daily connected to Alli, the best thing I can do in tribute is to let her speak for herself. This piece in particular had a huge impact on me and so many others:

When I Was Garbage by Allison Crews.

It's a shame that those of you reading this for the first time won't have the chance to meet this amazing, inspiring person. She was such a fighter, and such an immediate and strong ally to everyone lucky enough to come into her world. The loss of her voice and her light is an immeasurable one to the activist, feminist, and teen mama communities, and especially to her family and everyone who loved her. My heart is with you all.