Same As It Ever Was

I'm a little depressed. So pass me the Kleenex and shut up.

2012-02-18T21:38:00.001-05:00

Back around the turn of this century, I was VERY depressed. Enough to verbalize some suicidal-type feelings. Enough to want to stay in bed most of the day and not make the effort. Things got better after awhile, but all together, it had me down for about 4 years. Since that time, I can spot the signs better. Recognizing it goes a long way toward helping it pass faster. Right now, on a scale from 10 (everything's fine, couldn't be better) down to 0 (Slough of Despond), I'm probably around a 5-1/2.

Anyone who's ever been depressed can relate how frustrating it is to talk to the non-professionals in our lives about it -- especially those who have never experienced depression, or claim to have never experienced it. Though why someone would deliberately lie about such a thing is a mystery to me.

These (probably) well-meaning but clueless types will almost always try to cross-examine you as to why you're depressed or what the depression is "about." Not only is it often impossible to pinpoint a root cause, it's annoying because even if the depressed person does have the ability to identify a cause, it still makes no difference whatsoever in helping lift the depression.

In this way, depression can be like a cold. How often do we really know what brought the cold on? We can search our memories for every person we've come into contact with, who could have transmitted the virus to us. We can determine that lousy nutrition, immune deficiency, or going out in the cold weather without adequate clothing, brought it on. Great. But after you whittle it down and say Ah-ha!, what are you left with? A big box of tissues, maybe a day off from work, hot tea and maybe a little somethin' from the pharmacy. Or the liquor cabinet. And time, if you're lucky. Time to catch up on your sleep and ride it out until the virus gets bored with your room decor and moves on to the next victim.

Does anyone ever say, "Well, okay, now you know that little kid with the runny nose in the grocery store is where you got it from. Feel better now? No? Well, why the hell not? Suck it up and get back to work -- other people have problems much more serious than yours!"

Nobody says that to a person with a cold. But just dare to mention that you're depressed and here come the questions.
"Was it something I said?"
"Was it something I did?"
"Is it because your _____ died?"
"Trouble at work?"
"Is there something from your childhood that's bothering you?"
"Are you angry at somebody?"
"Is it your subconscious??"
"Is it the weather?"

And the "remedies":
"Go out and get some exercise."
"Make some new friends."
"Go sky-diving."
"Think of all the good things in your life."
"Put on some dance music."
[insert inane religious advice here]
"Smile!"
"Volunteer at a soup kitchen."

So -- if KNOWING where your cold probably came from doesn't do anything to alleviate it, why on earth would anyone expect that figuring out what made you depressed (which only happens in very rare cases) play any role in making you stop being depressed? If you want to help someone who's depressed, you can LISTEN to them, if they feel like talking. And them not wanting to talk is NOT an invitation for you to start jabbering at them for hours on random subjects because their silence makes you uncomfortable. Another thing you can do is address concrete issues (as opposed to their state of mind, which you and they actually know very little about). Depression makes people feel indecisive and overwhelmed. It can leave them awash in piles of unfinished chores, which makes them feel even worse. You can offer to do a couple of things for them -- wash some dishes, maybe, or run an errand. Something to cut down on the number of things they know they need to do but can't seem to. And the key word here is offer. If they don't accept your offer of help, you're fine telling them that you care about them and that they don't have to cope with it all alone. Unless you really know this person, know their entire history and what kind of risks they face, simple trite remedies don't do any good. But above all, confusing a "diagnosis" with a "cure" really doesn't work, for depression or colds or a lot of other things.

End of rant.

For those who have wondered about the Wally situation, he should be out of the hoosegow and taking all the usual steps toward a fresh start this coming summer. This may or may not be complicated by a recent health crisis involving his father, Doug, who faces cancer surgery in early March. No prognosis will be available until the surgeon does her thing. Everything else is, well, same as it ever was.

Our Encroaching Food Desert

2012-01-14T09:05:00.001-05:00

Earlier this week, we learned that the grocery store we frequent will soon close. The same is true for other locations of the same chain in our area.

This store is not "sexy." It doesn't have a cafe or a pharmacy or a sushi chef. On the other hand, it doesn't have a police guard, bulletproof cash register windows or display shelves made of cardboard boxes. It's just your average utilitarian grocery store. The kind you probably shopped at when you were a kid. A supermarket...but just barely.

We like it because the prices are exactly right. The nearest competitor prides itself on its "sales," but otherwise, their prices are at least 5% higher than this one, across the board.

For some background, I pay most of the bills for our household, but Carl takes care of electric, water, and groceries. We've reached a state of detente with regard to our widely differing diets: He gives me $20 a week to stock up on my semi-healthy frozen entrees and other items for lunch. On Sunday, the last day of his work week, he takes the bus from work to our grocery store, shops, and then calls me to pick him up. Then we go home and spend an hour or so putting food away and conversing about how much things cost and/or how much we saved. It's an arrangement that's worked well for a couple of years now.

Put your money where your mouth was

2012-01-08T19:48:00.000-05:00

I shall be brief!

A friend of mine posted today on a popular social networking site about restaurant servers and their view of Sunday customers.

That view is uniformly negative.

Why?

Because when they see a crowd of well-dressed people coming in, they surmise that this group has come from their house of worship. After being run ragged by these people, who are for some reason typically fussier, pickier and more demanding than the average customer, the server can often look forward to a very measly tip -- or worse, no tip at all, or worst, a religious tract or fake money with a scripture verse on the other side.

And no, I am not making that up.

Apparently, some people think it's much more important to leave money in the offering plate than next to the dinner plate.

As any server will tell you: If you can't afford to tip, eat at home.

Servers make as little as $2.13 per hour. Plenty of countries around the world don't even have a policy of tipping -- they pay servers a reasonable living wage. But here in the good ol' Free-market States of America, it doesn't work that way. Tips are used as a means of encouraging good service. Servers, however, are at the mercy of numerous factors in the course of their workday, such as incompetent kitchen staff and customers who don't know what they want, among many other things. The server may take the order perfectly, interact with the customer impeccably and deliver the food swiftly, and still take the brunt of the customer's dissatisfaction if something goes wrong.

Cooks are paid on a completely different scale and bussers usually get a percentage of whatever the servers make.

This is not "easy money."

Everyone should have to wait tables at least once in their lives.

This has been a Public Service Announcement on behalf of your restaurant staff.

Oh, what the hell.

2012-01-03T06:26:00.001-05:00

This is not the way I prefer to blog.

I prefer to construct careful, orderly, logical posts on an intriguing subject, sprinkled with wit, following a neat sequence, decorated with eye-catching pictures, and wrap it up (just like they taught us in elementary school) with a solid conclusion that will keep 'em coming back for more.

But...

If I keep trying to blog that way, the result will be what you've seen lately.

A big pile of nothin'.

That stretches on for months.

[cue a scream from Miss Thistlebottom: Look at all those sentence fragments!!!!!!!! Gaaaaaah!!!]

Shut up, lady. Can't you see I'm trying to write?

So, here I am, prefatory to jumping in the shower to start my first workday of 2012.

My son will be home some time in the fall (more about that later)
My good friend Matt from church died yesterday after a long struggle with Type I diabetes and kidney failure. He was only 54 and a light has truly gone out with his passing.
My cousin Pat came to visit over the New Year's weekend. It was a fantastic time. We went up to Lookout Mountain and took lots of "pitchers."
Our friends came over for New Year's Eve. We celebrated the holiday and their 35th anniversary with snacks and bubbly.
My cat is in heat again. She wanders around the house crying out for some dude named "Harry." The nogoodnik still hasn't turned up.

It's going to be a good year, and I'm going to post more. Just like this, if that's what it takes.

Happy New Year to all.

Sharing an Infographic

2011-12-17T08:24:00.000-05:00

There's a lot more to this than will show in this space, so check out the link:
http://www.militaryeducation.org/military-equipment/

From: MilitaryEducation.org

All manner of good news

2011-11-18T19:17:00.002-05:00

It really was a good week overall (for purposes of journal-keeping, my week starts on Saturday).

Got 3 postcards from Wally today. Apparently all but one of mine got through to him. I figured out that the people in the mailroom must be "trusties." Some are sticklers for rules (or maybe they just get bored and like to play head games with inmates' families) and others will be happy to let it slide. Whatever the reason, he and I are back on track with communications.

There may be a way to send him $ without paying exorbitant fees. He's been getting postcards from many other people as well, so he doesn't feel too isolated.

Undelivered Messages, Ineffective Inoculation

2011-11-06T14:04:00.001-05:00

In accordance with the jail's regulations, I snail-mailed Wally several postcards with messages of varying importance. I started sending them out on October 17th. They started coming back to me this past Friday, November 4. Why? Not for lack of a return address -- I'm glad I put one of those on each card; otherwise, I'd never have known they were rejected.

Why were they rejected? Because the return address I included was on a pre-printed label (with a heart). "NO LABELS" said the, um, label that the jail-snail-mail guardian affixed to the card. So I can expect the other half-dozen or so cards to make their way back to me as well. Fortunately, there is now a public defender in the mix. We have spoken and exchanged emails. He seems like he knows his stuff and has demonstrated a willingness to convey urgent messages that can't wait for postcards. But, because mail is likely to be a vital morale-booster, I've started cranking them out again, without labels this time. Oh, and blue or black ink only... [eyeroll].

I've had several conversations about Wally's situation with friends and family members. One of the family members is Carl's sister Melanie. Melanie is the religious one in the family. She was quite supportive over the phone, having been through something similar with a nephew. Inevitably, though, she had to ask me "the question." "Is Wally saved? Does he have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?"

Me, the Reader October 23, 2011

2011-10-23T09:38:00.003-04:00

Google Reader is a great way to keep up with any website that has an RSS feed. Kind of a one-stop shop, it's an alternative to surfing around, trying to remember what your favorites are, or digging around in your Bookmarks. I find it convenient to visit Reader right after checking Gmail, since the link to Reader is at the top of the page.

Many of the bloggers I follow on Reader offer a daily, weekly, or otherwise occasional listing of sites they've been following, which offers opportunities to add still more sites to my growing list.

So, today, I thought I'd return the favor -- a series begun a few months back.

My Reader is divided into categories, with one called "Culture." Most of these are stand-alone webzines and blogs. I have another group called "Magazines," but those are web versions of magazines that one might previously have subscribed to in print.

A few of the blogs listed to the right of what you're reading now are included in my Reader feed to ensure that I don't miss anything. One of those included in "Culture" is PZ Myers' Pharyngula. An appropriate placement for one of the heroes of the "culture wars."

Politifact is another. When this column in the St. Petersburg Times began tracking the status of President Obama's promises, I was in the habit of clipping and saving them in a folder. But in keeping with my resolve to avoid such cluttery behavior, I found the column in Reader and began accessing it that way. Much better.

Roger Ebert's Journal (also listed here in the blogroll) is next. As a side note, has anyone noticed how many great examples we have today of individuals who are in the grip of a devastating illness, and yet keep going in spite of it? From Ebert to Hitchens to Hawking to the late, great Ann Landers to Michael J. Fox and beyond,(what the hell, I'll even throw poor old Zsa Zsa into the mix), we have no shortage of examples of grit and determination to inspire us. Perhaps it's the relentlessly intrusive nature of the media, who won't let someone retire to their sickroom in peace, but more likely this phenomenon has the opposite effect. Celebrities who are gravely ill but still able to go online have the reassurance of knowing, for real, how many millions of people are out there pulling for them -- and how many non-celebrities share the affliction without all the publicity. We really do live in an interdependent "web" of existence, with fewer and fewer occasions to feel alone when we don't want to be.

Ebert is a social critic as well as a film critic. His medical struggles have given him a large helping of fearlessness as well as clarity of voice -- ironic, considering how that "voice" is now produced by technology, after nature failed.

Salon.com appears to have changed its feed structure as of October 1st. I had a subscription to the Life section, which included the advice columnist Cary Tennis, but that exact feed seems no longer to exist. I now subscribe to Cary's column separately (he's filed elsewhere in my Reader), and have resubscribed to Salon for its eclectic mix of stories.

SimpliFried is a spinoff from Unclutterer.com. I've come to rely more and more upon web-based sources for recipes and cooking tips, despite my love of cookbooks. Yummly is one; this is yet another.

Slate is another site where I came for the advice columns (Dear Prudence and Friend or Foe) and stayed for all the rest. It's a Washington Post offshoot.

The Daily Beast is an online fraternal twin of Newsweek, which used to be owned by the Washington Post. Are you following all this so far?

The Skeptic Detective is another science blog with lots of entertaining and informative geekery.

Wowowow is "Women on the web" and includes contributions from Mary Wells Lawrence, Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen, Margo Howard, Lily Tomlin,Whoopi Goldberg, Jane Wagner, Joan Ganz Cooney, Cynthia McFadden and "Miss Manners," Judith Martin. Came for the advice column and forgot to leave.

Those are my "culture" recommendations from Google Reader. Next: Feminism.

Back on the hamster wheel

2011-10-21T06:16:00.001-04:00

Far be it from me to post something cryptic and then fail to follow up...

The Trip Into the Unknown (shall we abbreviate that as TITU? Hey, why not?) went relatively well. It was the most involved traveling I've done since 1999 or so, and that was before I started spending half my waking hours on the web. I credit the Internet with giving me many under-acknowledged resources for making the week go smoothly. Even a touch of adult ADHD can throw a lot of complications into such an undertaking, so my pet message forums and blogs went a long way toward helping me think things through, plan, and watch out for potential snags.

Worst moments were transitory logistical problems with the car rental, which my hero brother-in-law helped to alleviate, and absent-mindedly leaving my hardworking windbreaker behind -- in the rental car.

Beyond that, the "bad moments" were due to their own nature, and they involved taking hours to locate Wally at his various venues (jail and courthouses). The corrections system goes out of its way to make life difficult for family and friends of inmates. I don't know why this needs to be -- other than the unopposed profitability of such schemes. Crime does pay, but not in the way you might think.

But I did get to see my son -- for one hour out of a 5-day trip. Communications are a challenge. The collect calls from the jail are far beyond affordable for me, so right now we're limited to postcards from me to him, and possibly letters from him to me. He won't be in there forever, but realistically, he may "graduate" to a more secure facility before all this is over. He's saying all the right things, remorse-wise, but I also think he's still unaware of the internal factors that have led up to his current situation.

To be fair, most of the people I encountered on this trip were helpful, and then some. Things could certainly have been worse.

Like many of life's chapters, this one is about waiting for events to play out. Guess I'll go make some popcorn...

Bags Packed, Ready to Go

2011-10-08T22:39:00.000-04:00

Good news: My child is not very good at being a criminal.
Bad news: This results in his being incarcerated.

And so, I'm heading out of state on Monday to visit him and see what can be done to make things better. The city he's in is one I have not previously visited, but it's pretty in the travel photos. And events have conspired to make this affordable.

Horoscope for the coming week says:

Intense emotions bubble to the surface while you probe deeply psychological issues, particularly in close relationships. You are a miner for truth, refusing to gloss over situations for appearance’s sake. And by Thursday, you’re wont to say a lot on the subject of others’ honesty, or lack thereof. Be prepared for (what you consider) overreactions to your frank assessments, which can sting. Though you are forgiving, some can’t bear the notion of disappointing you. So it might suit you better to remain silent, Sphynxlike, letting them squirm in any beds of lies they’ve made.

Making good use of time

2011-09-17T17:39:00.000-04:00

Pushed myself out of the house this morning to attend a journaling workshop at a local nature preserve. We were a small group. It was a laid-back, relaxing hour and a half. We were invited to write our impressions and share, so here's mine.

Trail Notes

Moss-flattened mud and a creek of lampshade green

The tree frogs are out in daylight, unafraid.

Daddy Longlegs pauses to rebuke us, then prudently hastens on his way.

"God's Walking Stick" holds up the sky

And keeps the world steady

At least for today.

What Kind of Nerd Am I?

2011-09-04T08:31:00.002-04:00

This kind:

History / Lit Geek

...and probably "general pop culture" too, because the title of this post was inspired by:

...which features the standard "What Kind of Fool Am I?"

Welcome to Vol-E's Kitchen!

2011-08-27T20:52:00.000-04:00

There's something about a cookbook...

Twelve years ago, approximately, I had a much bigger library of cookbooks, including Julia Child, The New York Times Cookbook, and a series from the 1960s called Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, Salads, Meats, Vegetables and Casseroles. In the first of our pointless, ill-advised interstate moves, we discovered that all of our stuff wouldn't fit into the moving truck, so we left some items behind. One of them was the cookbook library and the bookcase where it was kept.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. In some primal way, I have gotten caught up in the fantasy that having a cookbook both enhances my culinary ability, and, even more magically, causes prepared food to appear on a plate in front of me. Obviously, it does neither. I used to feel that way about aprons that came from wineries and kitchen-supply stores: They would identify me as a Serious Cook.

I am nothing of the kind, though I am apparently much more of a "foodie" than I ever realized before limited funds curtailed most of my culinary adventures.

Reunited and it feels so good.

2011-08-20T08:59:00.002-04:00

For the last couple of weeks I've been moving some of the posts from my old blog onto this one, in anticipation of eventually shutting the old one down altogether. It's given me a chance to look back on some things that were going on in 2008 and 2009, and to take note of what's changed and what hasn't.

Oldie, 7/24/10: More Orderly, Less Hoarderly

2011-08-15T20:23:00.001-04:00

I absolutely love shows like Hoarders, Hoarding: Buried Alive and Clean House. Not sure why, since I don't have bulging closets, narrow aisles of stuff throughout my house, or even a cluttered car. I guess what intrigues me is the mindset that gets someone locked into that type of behavior. My father had a bit of that tendency. He got it into his head, in his early 60s, to start trying to recycle aluminum cans. But since he worked full-time during the week and drank full-time on the weekends, he didn't have a lot of time for separating them from the rest of the trash. And it is quite telling that no one came up with a better plan...like installing a "Recycle" bin for cans only, or having my mother or me take on the task of sorting out the cans. The result was a growing pile of plastic garbage bags in the garage, which were eventually discovered by field mice.

Oldie, 5/27/10: My Summer of Death and Religious Craziness

2011-08-15T20:18:00.002-04:00

It was the third of September.
A day I’ll always remember, yes I will.
‘Cause that was the day that my daddy died.

-Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, “Poppa Was a Rolling Stone”

~
My father could hardly have been described as a rolling stone, but he did happen to pass away on September 3rd. He was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer the year before, but kept it a secret until he couldn’t anymore, in the spring of 1991. If it had been up to him, he would have died alone, with no fanfare. He was signed up for Meals on Wheels and Visiting Nurse services, and those kind people were the ones who found him helpless on the floor and called to let me know, over his strong objections. While his oncologist predicted his death by early summer (and with good reason -- by the time I learned the truth, he weighed about 70 pounds and could be transferred from couch to bed by two slightly built women using a sheet as a sling), he hung on for another three and a half months. He endured the indignity of having strangers in his house, his living room turned into a sickroom, and most of his personal autonomy taken away. None of this could be helped -- he was too fragile to move to my home or even to a Hospice facility, and the heavy pain medications made it impossible for him to manage his finances or make decisions for himself. He and I didn’t get along spectacularly well by that point, so it was awkward on both sides for me to be taking over the checkbook. But there was nobody else. Mom had died the year before, and I was the only child.

It was an extremely stressful time. Religion didn’t help things at all.

Oldie, 5/14/10: The Oil Companies Can Go Bleep Themselves

2011-08-15T20:12:00.006-04:00

Anybody ancient enough to remember the old show from the 1970s, Barney Miller? It starred Hal Linden as a police captain in Manhattan. Steve Landesberg, Max Gail and Ron Glass were among the ensemble cast, and beyond the first season, the stage set was confined to the precinct room along with its barred holding cell.

Along with The Odd Couple, another classic series that ran (also on ABC) during roughly the same time period, Barney Miller’s draw was its dry comedic approach to New York and its denizens. The writing was almost impossibly crisp -- making Seinfeld’s plots and dialogue look downright clunky by comparison -- with an air of authority to it.

I remember one episode, and would really love to hear from someone who can corroborate, because I know it’s not my imagination. I’ve searched archives numerous times but come up with nothing. So far.

Oldie, 4/14/10: Surveys and Dream-Teasers

2011-08-15T20:09:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the looong absence -- just nothing worth writing about. However, two worthy topics sprang to mind today: Surveys and dreams.

I take a lot of online surveys, purely out of greed. Periodically, I'll get a surge of ambition and sign myself up for anything and everything that promises an incentive. I've been doing this for somewhere between 5 and 8 years and have done reasonably well with it. If I spent more time and took more risks, there might be even more to brag about.

Harris Interactive is one of my all-time favorites. They let you tell them how often you want to be "invited" to take a survey. The shortest interval is every 3 days, which I've signed up for, but usually it's more like every 10 days. So when Harris shows up in my inbox, there's no rolling of the eyes or "not this again." Their surveys are well-constructed; they're not too long or too short.

Oldie, 3/29/10: 54? She was a baby!

2011-08-15T20:05:00.000-04:00

Excuse the long absence. Nothing to write about. Until this morning.

So...how do y'all feel when you hear of the death of a classmate or other contemporary?

My first such experience was at age 18. A young man that I'd dated in senior year of high school became a homicide victim shortly after the beginning of his freshman year of college. That one shook me on so many levels.

First, there was the obvious: The whole "forever" aspect of death. GT and I had broken up the day we graduated from high school, and in the intervening months, I weighed whether or not I wanted to try and re-establish contact. Our breakup had been the result of teenage immaturity and that old classic, "communication issues." I always felt there was unfinished business, and his death brought home the fact that there would never be a chance to test that out.

The loss also made me obsess over the question of whether something like that could happen to me. I didn't worry about someone murdering me, but just dying in general. What would people say about me -- would I have died without anyone truly knowing "the real me?" Talk about being voiceless! I had accumulated an impressive stack of diaries and journals by age 18, and it alarmed me when my parents, remarking on GT's passing, expressed the opinion that any such writings he may have left should be destroyed. My silent thought: Would they have said the same about Shakespeare? Dickens? I wanted people to read what I'd written (notice the past tense -- 33 years later I'm not sure that would have been the greatest idea...). I just wanted to be known...understood. It bothered me when people talked about GT and painted such a superficial picture of him (nice guy, good student, friend to all, blah-blah-blah). I didn't want that for myself -- didn't want to be just another nice dead person. I'd have much preferred to have people speak the truth about me after I was gone, even if it sparked controversy.

This experience made me realize that it can take a very long time to recover from a loss, even if the deceased isn't someone you were close to at the time.

Oldie, 1/10/10: The Hour of Toad

2011-08-15T20:02:00.004-04:00

Although my parents encouraged me heartily as a reader, and their efforts bore abundant fruit, their personal choices in which literature to send my way were not, as I've discovered, typical of a child of my age and gender. They leaned heavily toward more contemporary material, such as a Little Golden Book called Make Way for the Throughway. My mom also couldn't resist anything having to do with kittens.

If traditional fairy tales or bible stories found their way into the house, they were probably brought in by Dad. His work took him to various gathering places in the Bronx and upper Manhattan; now and then someone would pass him a volume, which ended up in my hands. Mom tended to turn her nose up at those. Probably because they came from Dad, which made them instantly suspect.

What also didn't make the cut was the type of literature you will normally visualize in the hands of a soft-focus Thomas Kinkade-rendered little girl in a crinoline dress, seated by the fire.

Oldie, 09/09/09: Of TV and Comedy, Pratfalls and Walnuts

2011-08-15T19:55:00.001-04:00

[Edited to add, months later: Apparently I'm the only person on the planet who didn't know what "jumping the shark" means -- I could have trimmed this post considerably by simply using that phrase. Live & learn, I guess.]

My husband Carl watches reruns of Family Matters in the mornings. The sound effects are unmistakable -- the dulcet tones of Urkel and the audience members with their high-pitched "Woooooooooo!" every time two cast members kiss or even make reference to the topic of sex (in this case, the key word was "lipstick." Whatever...).

Hearing those sounds this morning gave rise to a lot of random thoughts about comedy and TV.

Oldie, 7/25/09: Breaking Through Silences

2011-08-14T20:37:00.000-04:00

I'm cursed with a long memory that allows me to revisit unpleasant moments from long ago and get upset about them all over again.

The encounters that are most likely to come back and haunt me are those in which I have allowed myself to be rendered mute. That would seem almost counter-intuitive. Certainly, there are plenty of episodes in which I shot my mouth off and caused problems for myself, but even in those cases, my words kept the conversation moving toward a resolution, for better or for worse.

It's the times where I said nothing and walked away because I couldn't sort it out in my head fast enough that leave me with that indelible aftertaste of frustration. What lingers is that feeling, if only I could have gotten the words out and made the other person understand me, it would have had a better outcome.

Oldie, 7/19/09: The other victims of the right-wing hate machine

2011-08-14T20:35:00.003-04:00

This report from the Southern Poverty Law Center was the last thing I read before going to bed late last night, and it popped out at me first thing this morning.

One excerpt in particular struck me:

April 4, 2009
Three Pittsburgh police officers — Paul Sciullo III, Stephen Mayhle and Eric Kelly — are fatally shot and a fourth, Timothy McManaway, is wounded after responding to a domestic dispute at the home of Richard Andrew Poplawski, who had posted his racist and anti-Semitic views on white supremacist websites. In one post, Poplawski talks about wanting a white supremacist tattoo. He also reportedly tells a friend that America is controlled by a cabal of Jews, that U.S. troops may soon be directed against American citizens, and that he fears a ban on guns was coming. Poplawski later allegedly tells investigators that he fired extra bullets into the bodies of two of the officers "just to make sure they were dead" and says he "thought I got that one, too" when told that the fourth officer survived. More law enforcement officers are killed during the incident than in any other single act of violence by a domestic political extremist since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Oldie, 7/11/09: Swim Caps: A Short Story

2011-08-14T20:34:00.000-04:00

In the bland little suburb where I grew up, the planners had seen fit to install Olympic-sized swimming pools every 20 blocks or so. As in many such places, they also saw fit to compose a broadsheet's worth of rules for proper conduct. None of them made any sense. One was "No suntan lotions or oils in the water." In today's sunscreen-obsessed culture, that one certainly wouldn't go over very well; I doubt it did even back in the mid-1960s. The lifeguards could be shits when they wanted to be, but most of the time, as long as they had other lifeguards to flirt with, they didn't much care what you did once you got past the Gatekeeper, who checked to see that your pool tag was current and listed in the master database, and that you had an actual swimsuit on (she made you strip off your outer clothing so she could check). She, too, was a shit, but she had no one to flirt with, you see.

One of the rules everyone remembers was (and I am quoting accurately here): "All females must wear swim caps while in the water."

That was fine, up until about 1969 or so. Then, of course, the entire world turned upside down and "our boys" started growing their hair long, like "those hippies."

Immediately, a controversy ensued. If girls (even with very short hair) had to wear swim caps in the water, then long-haired guys should have to, as well. The purpose of the rule, after all, was to prevent long strands of hair from clogging the filters.

I'm sure the Pillars of the Community would have really preferred simply to ban those dope-smokin' war-protestin' hippieboys from even entering the pool enclosure, but that was not to be. In the spirit of fairness, the rule was amended to read "All persons with hair over 3" in length must wear a swim cap while in the water."

I heard tell of one young man who chose to comply with this rule, but he disappeared the next day and was never seen again.

By 1975 or so, there was no longer any swim cap rule at our local pools.

And the persons rejoiced.

Oldie, 7/10/09: Dad

2011-08-14T20:31:00.001-04:00

I can't possibly be the only one who engages in light fantasizing while listening to the NPR interview show Fresh Air.
Drew Barrymore was on today (a rerun from April) and I found myself silently responding to some of Terry Gross's questions as though they were directed at me.

I think the best thing about Terry's interview style is the open-endedness of her questions. She invites the interviewee to ramble wherever their mind wishes to go, and that results in some thought-provoking answers.

In the course of my own mental wanderings, I sometimes answer a question and discover some interesting new things about myself.

Today, I found myself describing my father, and how my upbringing was influenced by his worldview.