as if time doesn't pass

I'm re-posting this from a very good friend's storytelling on Facebook. The reason I'm doing so - and choosing it from amongst all his great stories - is because you realize, oftentimes while writing a post about a trip and/or kin - that even with goddamned cameras in our beloved phones we never take pictures. I'm horrible, truly. In the grand scheme of things a picture is fine within even a Snapchat realm - something only seen for a few seconds, but something that tells a nice story. And something that lets everyone say, "Oh, there they are." I think this story might be enough to straighten us all out..

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After work last night, Diana attended a visitation for a colleague's husband, who, by all accounts, was a wonderful person and taken far too early, as so many seem to have been over the past few years. When she got home, she seemed subdued.

"You okay?"
"Yes. It was kind of sad and happy at the same time."
"How so?"
"Well, during the visitation they ran a montage of pictures of them on a screen. They were smiling and just looked so happy together. You can tell they really loved each other."
"Yeah."
"And then I got to thinking..."
(Oh, crap.)
"...You don't ever smile in our pictures."
"Sometimes I do."
"Rarely... and only after I nag you to do it. And even then, it's only a half-smile. And now I'm worried that I'll be standing there at your visitation, with all these frowny pictures of you scrolling on a screen in the background, and everyone will think you were miserable with me."

Now, after 31 years of marriage, I have learned that normally when Diana unburdens herself or brings some problem to my attention, she is not necessarily looking for a solution. Usually, she just wants to sound the problem out. My job is to nod and reassure her, but not try to fix it (because then I get irritated when she doesn't take my perfectly good advice). But her eyes were getting all teary, and I could tell, in this one instance, she was looking for a solution.

"Darling, I promise that will never, ever happen to you."
"Because you're going to start smiling in our pictures?"
"No, because I plan on outliving you by at least three years."

Well, that made her cry and laugh at the same time, which is better than just crying.

"Do you promise?"
"I promise."
"Wait a second..."
(Oh, crap).
"... If it's my visitation and people don't see your smile in our pictures, how will they know we were in love and happy together?"
"Because they'll see YOUR smile... and they'll know."

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Oh, there they are....

zooming by

 It's been quite a bit longer than I expected to be away. I imagined a normal day or two before once again typing away. Life intervenes, doesn't it?

I'm sure I should probably go on at length, but I won't; not right now. My father passed away about two weeks ago so I haven't been much in the mood to write about the little things in life. I spent last weekend in Dallas with his wife, Caroline, and the largest gathering of the clan that I've attending in many a decade. There were tears, but there were an equal number of laughs and stories - a celebration as much as mourning. I'll leave the rest of my wandering thoughts for another time.

My youngest got her first college acceptance letter - with a chunk of scholarship money attached - in the mail today. It was a nice package from Goucher College and it sort of makes me feel like my work here is done (it's not, not by a long shot!). Regardless of how the other applications turn out, I'd be very happy for her to continue her education at a very small college nearby. She and visited back in November and I really like the academics, campus, and people. I think it's grown on her a bit since then so we'll probably make a return visit in the next month to have one more look about the place.

Bad news. Good news.

The easiest way back in, isn't it?

life

I sat in the car in our driveway on the Hilltop listening to the final Terry Gross interview with Maurice Sendak. I remember how powerful it was. I remember I might have had lots of dust fly into my eyes. It’s something special – his entire life was something special. You’ve been warned. A discussion has come up at the Dish, and continues.

hope and situations

As I was babbling about hope, situations, and how we might react a few weeks ago, I couldn't bend the words to my will - that's my problem A week after the shootings I offer you a parallel ideal posted by TNC at The Atlantic. In his words at the bottom of the post he answers a lot of what was calling me, and these two in particular stand out:

"But I would not insist that I was the same person armed, with the power to take a life, that I was without it."

and,

"These are compacts I have made with myself and with my family. There are other compact we make with our country and society. I tend to think those compacts work best when we do not flatter ourselves, when we are fully aware of the animal in us."

The first statement rings so true for me - I cannot insist that I would or would not behave a certain way in a different situation. I do believe that if you are holding a gun in your hand that you aren't the same person you are without it. I don't even think it's a debate, and it follows my general rule, no doubt heisted from somewhere else, that if you pull out a gun you better be ready to use it. For any person to assume that they know what will happen tomorrow, next week, or next year in their life is fooling themselves. Proof of that, in the current situation is that Ms. Lanza never imagined what her son was capable of doing. She had guns in her house legally. She never expected her son to kill her then drive five miles and mow down 26 innocents. When you remove the anchor we all have, the one that allows us to imagine that we are the perfect ones, it's much easier to see the problems that exist. When you put that gun in your hand, when you release that anchor, you are a different person: one probably for the worse, one for the better.

As for the compact it's the same thing, and tied to same instinct that we are so often wrong about - we aren't necessarily who we think we are and my day-to-day life is so different than the pact I have with society. Any assumptions I have about how my life is to be led should always be measured in tandem with the compact of which I am a party.

i can't make anything of this...

I confess

I’m reading a story about the Central Park Five and their overturned convictions from the 1989 rape in Central Park. I remember vividly the entire story about kids out “wilding” in the parks and streets in NYC. I didn’t know that all five were exonerated and released in 2002; my immediate excuse might be that I was living in England but that’s probably lame.

What this has got my mind working on is the intersection of “the times” and “techniques” modes. For criminal proceedings the easiest events to look at are the exonerations driven by the passage of time, exonerations combined with advanced scientific techniques like DNA testing. What we want to believe is that wrongful convictions are simply a poor application of a mathematical formula: The reason that a conviction was wrong was because the techniques we had at the time weren’t advanced enough to convict or not. But that never seems to be the case – when people are exonerated through DNA testing what is exposed in the underbelly is always horrible or biased police work. I never read about someone being released who was convicted through efficient, unbiased, or unprejudiced police work. Maybe a murderer is released and we hear a backstory about how at the time of conviction the preponderance of evidence, or whatever legal term fits here, showed that the suspect was the murderer. No false confessions and no violations of rights and no crappy witnesses. No guesswork or assumptions that led to a failure to disclose evidence or the like. Is this because it’s nearly impossible to mistakenly convict without some of law enforcement insider trading?  Are we as humans preconditioned to convict based on bias? Or, does our system’s “beyond a reasonable doubt” ideal force our hand? There must be convictions are would stand up to any test of technique or time, right?

In a lot of human endeavors we can agree that “the times” we the basic underpinning of human behavior – times when no technique would ever trump or sway the truth. Nearly all civil rights issues wear this anchor: It was the times we lived in; we didn’t know or believe that X was equal to us. We eventually outgrow that and move forward, but we recognize somehow that there was a contribution from time and place within our granting of civil rights. We can understand it. With police/court work the techniques reveal the truth, not the passage the time.

Right. I’m stopping. My head is spinning. I haven’t even fully addressed the ins-and-out of The Life of Pi.

Lemon was taken to the doctor/parole board this morning at 7a and even though he was wishy washy on releasing her, she will roam free this evening. All hail...

let it live

I’ll be short and sweet.

I was at the Birchmere on Friday for Justin Townes Earle and Tristen – after walking the Delray neighborhood for dinner and wine. It was solo date; it happens. Yes, I said wine. I did manage a pitcher of Shiner for the show.

My view on opening acts is well known, perhaps unfair, perhaps not. I have discovered two of my favorite bands via the opening act protocol: The Tarbox Ramblers (opening for Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men), and Erin McKeown (opening for the Be Good Tanyas).  In the grand scheme it’s a small percentage of success, but credit where credit is due.

Tristen ranks right up there on my list. I was a bit tentative at first, like some of her songs, but she brought me around quickly. Apropos of the last paragraph, she reminds me of a combination of Erin McKeown and Martha Berner. It’s not a perfect analogy, but close. The thing about her live songs is that she never leaves you hanging when you don’t want to be hanging. I’m a well-documented pop whore, and there are endless performances and songs that never get to the top of the hill; they sort of dick around the plateau and get stuck at altitude. Tristen can start out a slow motor, like my favorite song, Inaction, and suddenly deliver the goods while she ramps up to the peak in a very cool combination of orchestra, pop, and (sometime) growling.  That song process and performance style is a recurring theme for her and the band and it was enticing. I grabbed her CD, Charlatans at the Garden Gate, between sets and it’s been well worth the price through a weekend of cooking and music.

Justin Townes Earle more than met my expectations. I first saw him with his dad and aunt in London in 2001 at the Beyond Nashville Festival. I’m pretty sure that when he came out at 19 he did about four songs before surrendering the stage to Stacey, and eventually, Steve. They all came back and did a few songs together at the end – and I’m almost sure he did this song which is still one of my all-time favorites, and ended up on the Just An American Boy CD a few years later. I know, a long story. Eleven years, an EP, and four full-length CDs have passed and his talent is in full bloom. His newest CD, Nothing's Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now, is as good as it gets. At 10 songs and just over 30 minutes it’s short, tight, and sweet; his roll through almost every song from it, combined with the rest of his catalog, during his 100 minute set was a thing of beauty. The highlight? His acoustic blast through Lightin’ Hopkins’ I Been Burning Bad Gasoline.  I won’t ever claim to know what from what, but I’ve seen hundreds of shows in my life and I have little doubt the JTE is one of the best guitar players ever. Jesus.  His four-piece band was perfect, his storytelling was engaging, his singing is solid gold, and he had the crowd full of musical joy. Hearing him roll through all the songs I love so much was a treat. If you ain’t on the JTE bandwagon, you're missing one of the great artists rolling around America. Get to it.

Here’s a great recording from a live show in 2010:

And because I can; unless I’m mistaken that’s Bryn Davies playing bass. Man, I love her – saw her playing with Patty Griffin a few years ago:

a deed, indeed

I’m going to be more positive. I think my blog can often whine.

We’ve done the deed and purchased a house. Contact is accepted, a bunch of paperwork is being done, money is changing hands. The American economy is strong.

It’s a two-level place with seven (yes, seven) bedrooms as currently configured. Corey is going to rip out the walls downstairs that create three bedrooms, and we’ll turn that level into a large, open living room and big dining room. The upstairs will keep four bedrooms with a full bath and master bath to follow. We got a very good price on a place this size while staying in the same school district for the kids – a primary goal. The commutes for us won’t change, time or distance, but the boys will have a longer bus ride to school. X did a load of the work on this, and I played the role of agreeable co-dependent. We’re very happy to have our own place with no limits on what we can do to it over the next few years – the longer view being 7-8 more years in this area. I can’t imagine what the gardens will look like in three or four years. The picture above is the backyard. The front of the house picture at the Web site isn’t the best so I’ll hold off on more photos until we get in and sorted.

I’m allegedly heading back to school in January to finish up the degree. I have three more classes – they weren’t offered at night this quarter so I was out of luck – and should be done in late March. From there, I still have one year of GI Bill benefits so I may move to community college and take some courses of interest to me. Or, as X asks, “why don’t you get certified as a massage therapist?” I think I see where she might be going on this one. Food. Massages. Maybe I can go to housekeeping college.

All the kids are home and healthy. The cats are fine. We’re doing great.

The move will be a very sudden evacuation between Christmas Day and New Year’s. We should close on the 23rd of December with nine days to sort out the place. Based on the just-completed military operations call from CINC-house, I’m responsible for victuals three-times-per-day from the 23rd to the 29th while they rip out walls and carpet (new, ugly white…anyone need 1000 sq. ft of carpet?), patch the wood floor, sand and re-varnish. 30th and 31st will be actual moving from The Hilltop. This has all been dubbed Christine’s Happy Holiday Moving Blast. We’ll keep a solid audio, video, and photographic blog of the festivities. I may have to set-up a field kitchen in that back shed.

Love to all.

t

a tin cup for all these nickels

When did a cup of Starbucks coffee become that standard measure against magazine subscriptions, NPR membership drives, and any other contributable financial matters? Why doesn’t the NPR semi-annual membership campaign say things like, “For a $120 donation, and that’s only $10 per month, Beverly, the same as what you might spend on a dime bag,” instead of continually harping on the cost of a Starbucks? Listen, I don’t drink Starbucks often and, quite frankly, their coffee isn’t great, but I don’t think that they should be singled out in the $5 spending realm. How about you don’t buy the NYTimes on Sunday ($6), or that Happy Meal for the kid ($4-$6), or drive 20 fewer miles in your Hummer H3?

H has an assignment for his science class – and something that will also be a project of sorts for the school’s science fair. There are something like 46 pages of rules (nothing illegal, no fires, no using animals, etc.), but there is also some bullshit requirement that the student can’t repeat any other experiment or project…..THAT’S EVER BEEN DONE. Ever. Anywhere. If the moronic science teacher can Google up your suggested thesis, and find any indication that Newton, Einstein, or Darwin have attempted what you’ve put forth, think again. Anything. Ever. Really? They are expecting 15 year-olds to come up with something completely new to the scientific world; something never pondered or subject to experiment? On the basis of the Fairfax County School procedures I think the Wright Brothers would have failed class because someone else had already ‘tried to fly’. Remember that guy with his wings, wax, and the approach to the Sun? Yeah, him. “Sorry, Orville and Wilbur, you fail the class because you tried something that had already been done. Granted, you did actually fly so I’ll give you an F+.”

what what

I haven't been here for awhile. I pop in to get back on track and there's some racy picture of Katy Perry and her tits. Strange.

Okay, quick-and-dirty update, not in chronological or order of importance:

We got 60-day notice to move. We are looking to buy. Deadline: October 15th.

I have a new job. Very nice, challenging. Cutting into my blogging.

School is going well-ish, but getting bored. Have an instructor who's horrid.

Looks like I may take a pastry/baking weekend gig at a good restaurant in Arlington.
Finally saw Kasey Chambers in concert last month.

L and I saw Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving in Uncle Vanya at Kennedy Center last night.

L went to Victoria for about a month, but is home now: had fun.

Boys are in Wisconsin, back later next week.

Life, for all its shit, is good.

I actually love everyone.

herding cats

The end is near; or, the crazy has set in.

Over the last few months, Pumpkin has taken to only drinking running water at the bathroom sink. We’re not sure what drove him this direction, but he only seems to want running water and has banished the bowl, well, aside from his strange habit of drinking stagnant water from plant base dishes. The problem in the heat of summer and I want to make sure he’s drinking enough and he can’t/won’t drink unless it’s from the faucet; he’s out of luck during the day. After listening to an episode of the Animal House on NPR, I learned that cats suffer kidney problems most often and hydration is very important – not only water, but with food. In order to remedy my concerns – and his peccadilloes – I’ve bought them wet food for evening meals and….a moving water drinking dish. The problem now is that both cats are bugging out: Lemon doesn’t want to get near it, Pumpkin will dabble nearby. And, it makes some noise while moving the water so neither is too sure about that event. So, we have the moving water dish AND the old, standard water dish nearby. These are top drawer cats.

This is my life:

L. is working on her registration for school next year and the course offerings are so cool. I’ll post a selection of her courses once they are finalized. As with us all, her junior year will be the hardest. We’ve gotten her into a year-long Honors English/Literature class, she’s going to move into French for two years (from German), and some serious History and World Studies courses are on tap.

I’m digging around from a ride to NYC at the end of the summer; L wants to head up for a weekend and wander Manhattan. I was thinking of the Acela Express, but it’s much more expensive than I thought, and certainly more than flying JetBlue into JFK. We could take the regular Amtrak (I really want to train up) and make the schedule work out fine. The next step will be sorting out a place to stay: I’m contemplating both the Pod Hotel and the military hotel in Manhattan.

Two weeks until vacation. Keep count with me.

we are the ones we've been waiting for

Time is time.
Our time is here
We asked for this and we have it.
meep meep
Peace.

let me ask you this...

I've been wanting to do a blog entry using only this online program and I think this is as close as I'll come. If you haven't been keeping up, and don't know about the Message to Garcia, then this will be wholly unfunny. I'm calling this my anti-Garcia:

chop chop

Here’s a timely piece on culinary school (I start tomorrow night). What’s difficult to gauge, using my own hopes, is how hard it must be to pay for an education of any sort knowing that your job opportunities are limited, financially. As pointed out, there are loads of careers where you can just as easily work your way up through skill and practice but oftentimes that might entail starting even lower on the pay scale and spending years trying to get in the door. Of course, the paper doesn’t necessarily get you in any door, either, and that was made pretty clear at my orientation last week.

The massive difference for me is that I’m taking this on as a combination of my interests and a good dose of hope for down the road. I’m not paying anything for the time I’ll be spending learning the basic skills (which I don’t actually have right now) and my living expenses are covered as I continue to work in my career field. If I decide to give the food world a go in three years' time I won’t owe anyone anything, I’ll have my retirement pay and health insurance, and I can probably take a few steps without being overwhelmed. Those that are attending the full-time day program (I’ll be full-time nights) are going to be those who aren’t working and taking loans in order to pay for school and living expenses over the next three years. Coming out of a degree program with $60K in debt and falling into a world that pays you $25K per year is demented. When you break it down, what should be the norm – something like 12-15 months and <$10K in cost – would make much more sense. My friend, Todd, went to accelerated nursing school for 15 months and it ran about $25K – to be a nurse and to save lives. And here we’re talking about food and cooking? Hmm.

Regardless, my voyage begins and I’ve got a much more relaxed road ahead of me than most students – aside from not being home to cook three nights a week. If it goes pear shaped? The world will keep turning and I’ll still have money sitting around for other education, if I choose.

That's that. L. arrive tomorrow evening.

believe

Former Solicitor General Ted Olson has written a truly important piece on gay marriage rights in America. (Olson has joined David Boies, his nemesis in Bush v. Gore, in a federal lawsuit to overturn California’s Proposition 8 as unconstitutional.) Fortunately for me, he covers everything I wanted to say about gay marriage but didn’t possess the clear, legal, and logical opinion headmeat to write. You can read it here. (I’ve claimed my stake from an entry by Andrew Sullivan.)

One thing I want to add, and something that Olson addresses in the piece, is the idea we have that somehow progressed ages from other types of discrimination. I’ve given this idea a test run on X and some friends and I think it’s is important to understand. When you look back to Brown v. Board (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967) and really take the time to just process those dates – 1954 and 1967 – you’re more likely to believe that it took way too long to overcome segregation and discrimination; yet it's not been long enough to be fully destroyed. I use my parents as a measuring stick of time – not opinion – when I sort this out in my head. My father would have been a rising college junior when the United States finally decided that ‘separate but equal’ was unconstitutional. My father. Not my grandfather or some distant ancestor from the 19th century: my father. At a university, studying, planning a family (me included) when we decided as a country that segregation was illegal. It stuns me to think of what it would be like to be a 20 year-old man and living in a time when a country finally decided that blacks and whites must be allowed to attend the same schools. If you contemplate the amount of time that black Americans have had to grow and succeed in our country it's the smallest of eras: my father’s working life. Period. Yet, we somehow expect that we’ve solved all the racial issues of our country in a blink of the eye. As for Loving, I was two years old when the Court decided that blacks and whites could not be prohibited from marrying. Suddenly, we aren’t even digging back to some generation of my family that came before. It happened in my lifetime and I’m all of (nearly) 45.

What does it mean, to me? It means that when I look at the gay marriage issue and consider transporting myself back to when my father was 20, and putting myself in that time and place – knowing what we as a country now know, it would be truly embarrassing to live through the debate of integration. And if I can look forward in my life to when I’m 65, I’ll be embarrassed for the current me to have lived through a period where basic civil rights were ignored by so much of my country.

That's all I've got...

T

step 1 step 2 step 3...

I’ve turned in all my paperwork to the Art Institute and now have a few weeks of waiting to see if all works out. Between them settling on my acceptance and getting the GI Bill stuff in order, it’ll take a bit of time; updates when available.

I remember way back in the early summer with the President said he was putting $12 billion toward community colleges. The Eleven looked at each other and did a little high-fiving since we both have CC experience and loved it; as did everyone we know that attended a CC. For some reason community colleges became the weaker option in the drive for secondary education back in the 70s or 80s. All the rankings of top colleges and universities, the money expended by families, and the growing financial input toward public and private universities seemed to confer a death knell on community colleges. From what I’ve seen, loads of community colleges seemed to recover and thrive at some point in the mid-90s. I’m guessing the resurgence was a counter-balance to all the factors above: state universities began to actively tie curricula to the regional CCs, the cost of spending two years at a CC and then transferring to a four-year program made much more sense, and the cache of major universities (especially when you consider the cost) probably waned a bit after the go-go 80s. Not only that, a four-year degree isn’t actually a requirement for what many people would like to do in life, at least not at first. Sarah sorted that out at ASU two years ago and moved back to CC to complete a vet tech degree, go to work, and then move to a four-year program if she chooses. Unfortunately, not a lot of kids (myself included) sort things out that quickly and it turns into wasteful spending, lost years, and some mediocre careers. Paul Krugman has an op-ed in the Times today that presents a lot of hard questions about our education system, its financial situation, and its future. I don’t want to sound too much like an old, cranky man but what the public schools are teaching, even in a well-regarded system like we live in here in Virginia, isn’t very impressive. They send homework out with the kids, stuff that is grades behind where the kids are academically, that gives the appearance of learning but it’s really just box checking for the school. In fact, I think what we are seeing at schools, at least here, is an academic year of holding serve followed by three weeks of drilling the kids for the standardized tests at the end of the year. I’ve ranted enough about education in other entries; I’ll just let it all hang for now.

Between my application process for the Art Institute, and reading Krugman’s piece, I’m again bewildered (surprised? finally remembered?) by just how much of your life you’ll always have to answered for. My life, for all its ups-and-downs, has been charmed; the complaints I may have all fall from the parts of my life over which I had total control but chose to half-step or ignore. The Art Institute, as with all secondary schools, wants your academic transcripts, and since they do quite a bit of trade and community college training they also want your high school transcript. I don’t even remember high school but my grades were good and aside from it being printed on parchment, I have no concerns. My college transcript is another story. Rolling that piece of junk into the light of day is embarrassing. When I was 18, 19, and 20 years old it just didn’t seem too important; I wasn’t interested in the pitched battle to make millions on Wall St. (it was 1983, after all and I was just about to vote for Reagen) so I justified not doing well by thinking that, in the end, I’d somehow sort things out. Hey, I had a girlfriend and someone else was paying for school…no worries. Well, thing did get sorted and turned out well but it was twenty years in the military that steadied things, not me. It was almost a lark that I joined in the first place but I ended up with a career, lots of benefits, and a good life. Now, yesterday, the fact that I’m telling the story of my 2 ½ years of poor college performance, which could easily have been stellar if I had made even an inch of effort, over a quarter-century later is a tough lesson in taking care of your business at every point in your life. Nothing disappears – you DO have permanent record – and you better know that you’ll never walk away and truly start over. While I was driving home from the admissions office and thinking about all of this it wasn’t so much under the guise of being a straight-A student, saving the world, being a saint, or anything along those lines. What it was, and what really grated on me, was that you can’t finish your life as you may choose when you’re 14 or 15 years old, but you can make that future significantly more difficult. If you take on any sense of responsibility and move through your youth as a B student then you’ll be fine; you won’t be explaining away how a B+/A- student in high school ended up with a 1.98 GPA after two years of college. It all seems so obvious, doesn’t it? I’m pretty sure that, as a community, we miss those chances to pass along this symmetry; we figure it will sort itself out in the end. Well, it may, as in my case; or it may not.

I think I need to give Laurel a call.

That was rambling. I’ve got nothing else….

Oh wait, I do. Here’s something brilliant to start your weekend.

t

a bit foggy

Being that I’m not philosophical enough to ever get all my thoughts properly aligned, nor my writing ability up to scratch, I’ll direct you to Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece at the Atlantic. It’s a bit long – and I’m passing that along as a warning to you, not an critique of the piece – but so perfectly encapsulates for me not only the problem of “-isms” but also the massive divide I see between conservatives and progressives. And to some extent, it ties into how we frame our positions on other important issues; using extreme examples to justify whether we are or aren’t doing something wrong. The most obvious scenario where I see this happening is the ‘ticking time bomb’ line of defense when we talk of torture. I think it’s brilliantly written. What’s always on my mind when talking about social issues is my belief that things aren’t the way they appear because there’s so much still behind the curtain, stuff we don’t see and therefore don’t take into account. We think we have full awareness of everything around us yet we don’t even try to see details that aren't overtly displayed. I have pages of my memory that are filled with why something like disparate impact makes perfect sense. Volumes of thoughts from the ride home that have been penned about how disingenuous it is to see the phrase “reverse discrimination” used in an serious discussion. It always sounds like two kids fighting on a playground. The big kid is always punching the little kid in the face – every recess, every day, all year long. The little kid decides that enough is enough and he buys a catcher’s mask to wear every single recess; sure, he’ll look pretty funny and the damn thing isn’t comfortable but it seems the best option. As they head out the first day for some morning games the big kid hangs out around the corner of the exit and, as usual, punches the kid in the face. Fortunately, the mask takes the brunt of the strike and breaks three of the kid’s fingers. Now, is there any sympathy for the big kid? Should the thug be going to the teacher and claiming the little kid broke his fingers? I’m just saying…

I think I’ll just relax tonight and quit getting wound up. Maybe I can squeeze another entry out of Laurel. She told me the other night that she “doesn’t like deadlines”. We’ll see about that.

Love to all.

t

P.S. If you are Mad Men follower there’s some sort of unintended second-season spoiler over the first few paragraphs of the Atlantic article. If you’ve seen that season on TV, no worries; if you’re waiting for the DVDs to show up…well, I’ve been spoiled.

slow simmer until done

The other night while I was making the pizza dough – and no doubt humming to myself - I suddenly came to the opinion that cooking shows, primarily the 24-hour Food Network, are part of a larger problem; it seems a food problem cloaked in a TV problem. I don’t have anything against cookery shows, at the base level, because I learned a load from quite a few of them (Lidia on PBS, the older Bobby Flay shows, the early BBC Jamie Oliver shows), but I’m starting to believe that cooking has become something closer to a hobby than an actual live requirement. Think about all the other hobby-ish stuff on TV: flipping houses, antique collecting, makeovers, home improvement, and gardening. That’s not an all-inclusive list but it does reflect a load of activities that seem to fall under sideshows to actual daily life. All of them are great activities but they aren’t required in order to survive. With entire networks devoted to home-and-garden, cooking, motorcycle building, and new wardrobes, I think we’ve begun to see all of them as accessories to life as opposed to actual life. What logically comes to my mind is that we’ve moved from cooking as a part of our daily life and decided that it’s much like gardening, knitting, or redoing a bedroom; it’s nice enough but it can wait. Not only can it wait – like the bathroom redo – it can be fulfilled by someone or something else be that a restaurant, a microwave, or a bag of chips. If you untangle that mess and pull yourself back towards the idea that buying quality food and cooking it at home is an actual function of everyday life then you’ll be in a better place. I don’t buy into the idea that eating out, or eating crap food, is either easier or more cost effective in either man hours or money. Cooking at home certainly consumes a piece of your day when you do the shopping and putter about the kitchen but it’s not an inordinate chore that is somehow beyond most people. I know it’s no a fully-formed idea as written here but it makes sense to me. The other issue I think I could fold into my idea of “food isn’t that hard” would be the American workday timeline. I happen to think that eating breakfast at 7am so you can be to work at 8 or 9am throws off our entire cycle. If we awoke a bit later and had our workdays run more like 10 or 11 am to 7pm then we could change our dinner planning – which is the bane of the eating process – to something more like 9pm and then hit the sack closer to 11pm or midnight. The forced eating process that squeezes everything in between 7am and 6pm is problematic, at least as I see it. I think that I can make the point better by imagining a TV network that was full of shows that showed nothing but housecleaning techniques and tips; within that idea, people would stop cleaning their houses because it would’ve become a hobby. Here’s some enlightening news about fast food:

on a lighter note

After The Eleven put a wrap on our civil rights discussion (Ricci) and my query as to whether or she felt Roger Federer’s 15 Grand Slam titles or Tiger Woods’ 14 Major Championships was more impressive (she went with Tiger), we finally settled into bed about midnight. At which point there was some story from her youth that included the following phrases: Fra Angelico Blue, a “pigment enthusiast”, “started her own religion”, and Ruthie. That was enough to send me to sleep with a chuckle but I was also then lucky enough for her to speak of “scrapping dead chickens off the road”, as if that were a normal pursuit in every child’s upbringing.