Holy cow, is tomorrow Friday already?
Indeed it is.
This has been a weird week all around. I was given an urgent project earlier in the week and told, right as I finished, “wait, we don’t need it until May”. Sigh.
Bioshock Infinite came out on Tuesday and I have my copy! Sitting over there on the couch! Because I gave up new vidya games for Lent! Sigh. I am surprised by how much I’m looking forward to Easter Sunday. The problem with Easter, however, is that it doesn’t *REALLY* start until Sunrise. Christmas you can get away with saying it starts at Midnight. Not Easter, though. No religion.
All of the little inbetweens of the weekend will involve chores, laundry, and maybe a little tipple on Friday night.
So… what’s on your docket?
Homework. And making you run all the errands so I can do more homework.
Midterm season, sigh.
Moving!
We have to be out by Monday. A new brief list of grievances. But… it’ll all be over Monday.
Then… the unpacking!
Forge your will in the fires of your ancestors.
Isn’t this the wrong holiday for that kind of thing?
Vacation starts at 5pm. That will also leave me with 53 hours this week. A personal record for my time with my employer. Next week will be filled with rest, TV, video games and a few miscellaneous appointments I have been putting off.
Walking Dead finale on Sunday and Game of Thrones. I also have the entire most recent season of Star Wars Clone Wars on the DVR. And the entire season of Blue Bloods. Going to do some serious binge viewing.
Crap – completely forgot to mention basketball. Let’s go Cards!
Go Ducks!
Johanna – I will fight you.
My birds is bigger than your birds.
LOL. I’ve got two of your birds in my freezer right now. Mmmmm…..dinner.
Speaking of birds, the Jayhawks loss has ruined my brackets.
Last year I filled out my bracket with my Cards losing to UK in the Final Four, which is exactly what happened and I felt terrible about it. This year I wrote them in winning the whole thing before I did anything else. Hoping I got it right this time. They’ve looked good so far but Duke is going to be tough.
My vacation starts at 4 pm, but I’m pretty sure that you will be on vacation shortly before I will due to time zones, Mike.
This weekend will be focused on doing egg hunts and other giant bunny related activities with Junior. And on Monday I drive to California to visit family with a three year old in the backseat. Wish me luck.
Today is my birthday and we are taking a family trip to the Toledo Museum of Art. A great little local jewel that is free!
Happy Birthday!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you!
Happy happy happy happy happy
Happy birthday!
Thanks Zic and Maribou, it was a terrific day.
Today is a half day at work. Most people took the full day off, so it is oddly quiet.
This afternoon. MOMA with a friend and the hope of seeing Tilda Swinton in a glass box.
Tomorrow, breaking Passover with dad and brother at a beer festival.
Sunday, Flying back to SF filled with half-melancholy and half-sentimental thoughts that happen whenever I leave New York for SF. After 4.5 years on the West Coast I feel like I am between cities. Still a New Yorker and I still feel like this city is home but there have been lots of changes in the last four and a half years to my old neighborhoods and haunts and this leaves me feeling melancholic. I try to return to New York (need a job first) in fits and stats but there is also a distinct feeling of “You Can’t Go Home, Again”
I’m going to be a very sentimental and melancholy old man.
Change is inevitable but knowing this does not prevent change from being less shocking.
It’s not so bad, being sentimental and melancholy and old. All big cities are really just collections of neighbourhoods. I’ve been back to Old Town Chicago many times after my business partner died. I eat breakfast at Nookies on Wells, walk down by the Buddhist temple, walk over Lake Shore Drive to the beach, remember my children playing in the sand, flying kites, the sand in the car.
Cities are full of ghosts.
At turns, I can twist my mind and see myself in the third person, seen from high above. Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” I might extend that just a bit, “I remember, therefore I am.” I see other people with children playing on the beach, the beautiful skaters as they cruise along the walkways. Two boys throwing a ball back and forth. A group of Hispanic picnickers in folding chairs, an man reading Giles Goat Boy on a park bench. Lovers hand in hand. The panfish in the lagoon, clearing their nesting areas.
Thus it was then. Thus it is now. If others now occupy those roles, yet others will replace them in their turn. The faces change, the roles remain the same. You have lost nothing. Nothing and no-one is truly dead until they’re forgotten. It is a often great comfort to me to become that Third Person, an observer in my own life for that which is loved never really dies. It is preserved within us. If cities are filled with ghosts, they are the ghosts of those we loved. And while those roles are filled, they love us, too.
This seems appropriate: Guided by Voices (the name alone evokes the ghosts of those that have gone before us, shaping our paths in ways we don’t always see but often sense) singing about an indeterminate everyday in their hometown.
The year may be known, but the decade is uncertain:
http://youtu.be/1C6AhgMYiRg
Immer wieder, ob wir der Liebe Landschaft auch kennen
und den kleinen Kirchhof mit seinen klagenden Namen
und die furchtbar verschweigende Schlucht, in welcher die anderen
enden: immer wieder gehn wir zu zweien hinaus
unter die alten Bäume, lagern uns immer wieder
zwischen die Blumen, gegenüber dem Himmel.
Always and again, however familiar the landscape of love might be
with its little churchyard and its lamentable names,
and the grim silent abyss into which the others
have fallen: always and again the we two walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down ever and again
between the flowers, heaven overhead.
-Rilke
Even now
I know that I have savoured the hot taste of life
Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light
Black Marigolds,
From the Sanskrit of Chauras
(Chaura-panchasika, 1st Century,
As quoted in Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
Oh sure guys, make me look like even more of a Philistine.
Well at least I inspired some poetry.
I’ve always liked this line:
“I am haunted by waters”-Norman MacClean
The boy wants to play minor league so we will be playing catch&bat a few hours this weekend. I spotted a 10″x10″ bare patch in the garden, a good place for a few beans. Sweet peas are still producing and make a good snack.
Tomatoes are a couple weeks out from producing. Ironically a volunteer Roma is the first to make fruit. Didn’t plant Romas this year and doubled up on the cherries. The mustard and lambsquarters are coming on strong. The chickens will eat the lambsquarter but they absolutely relish the mustard leaves.
The sand and bits of charcoal mixed in the soil last fall is allowing a better moisture distribution at the root zone and helps to prevent the clays from hardpanning. The leaves of the Fig have restored in full and add a little 3′ high canopy to the east. For a small tree it has produced considerable fruit.
Had to top the dill last weekend, it was over waist high and the winds were about to push it over. Most of the blooms were removed, but a few remained closer to the ground. Yellow jacket wasps love the dill blooms, I strange coop I would have never thought of.
The native plantains have hoisted their little spires, and the dyer’s chamomile have bloomed in force. The red birds are passing through on their seasonal flights.
I plan to enjoy all this with reckless abandon until my eyes hurt from the sun.
Tomorrow, my brother’s wedding!
Much cake will be consumed.
Hooray! Best wishes to your brother and his soon-to-be spouse.
I remember, not too many years ago, jokes about SS couples, “Yeah, which ones the wife?”
And then I read Andrew Sullivan call his spouse, “My husband.”
In this world of English, full of crazy gendered pronoun problems and gendered words, that gave me so much joy. So simple. So elegant. So clear. My husband. Soon, two couples who I count as my closest of friends will be wives. I’m not really sure why this obvious application of existing English to the new-found wonder of marriage equality thrills me, but it does. Our words can sometimes work for us in kind ways.
And tonight, that makes me enormously happy.
Thank you.
🙂 Soon after we got married, I started calling Jay my spouse most of the time, because I was tired of the genderedness I felt being pushed on me all the time by the words “wife” and “husband” (and by the specific assumptions that more often than not underlie that genderedness, in a place like Colorado Springs). Despite this, I also love describing couples I care about as two husbands or two wives.
To your brother and his soon-to-be husband, mazel tov!
After we were married, I made it a point to refer to K by her name rather than as “my wife” because it felt too possessive and stuff, but then I’d always have to stop and answer the inevitable “who is K?” question. I’ve since settled for the slightly-awkward-but-it-makes-me-feel-better “K, my wife.”
I believe strongly in self-identification… if two married or partnered men want to call each other husbands, that is what I will call them. If they don’t want to be called husbands, I won’t. For me, it is as simple as that. Provided you can make a legitimate claim to the title*, I will call you that.
At one point, I entertained the notion of referring to Zazzy as “my partner”, as a way of being slightly provocative and making a point about titles and marriage rights and the like. With people who did not know me, it led to many assumptions about my sexuality (“He’s a man… with a partner. He must be gay, right?”) And while I have often been mistaken for gay and generally do not take offense to it**, it became overly cumbersome to have to explain to people what I meant.
And now reflecting on that, I realize I’m simply acknowledging that it was inconvenient and frustrating to sacrifice my privilege. Crap.
*I genuinely won’t cast aspersions on someone’s self-identification, but if I were to come to know that someone was identifying as “black” and yet had zero ancestral or cultural connections to people of the African diaspora, I’d probably be uncomfortable calling them such. But if a biracial person of mixed European and African ancestry wants to identify as white, I’m cool with that. If they want to identify as black, that’s cool, too. If they are Tiger Woods and want to go with Cablinasian , more power to ya.
** I only took offense if people were indulging in offensive stereotypes. And the offense was not because they thought I was gay, but because they thought X about gay people and, because I exhibited X, it must mean I’m gay because all gay men are X. For instance, if I admit to liking “You’ve Got Mail” a bit too much and you genuinely conclude from that I must be gay, I would object and insist that many gay men have far better taste in movies than such drivel.
The concept of privilege is frequently a useful one.
But it does sometimes end up confusing two separate concepts. Sometimes a privilege is inherently oppressive: the privilege is the ability of the privileged party to oppress the disprivileged party. Other times a privilege is something that everyone would have in a just world, and the oppression is that disprivileged people are denied it. It’s still important to be aware that you have the second kind of privilege. But I don’t think taking advantage of it is morally blameworthy.
Fnord,
That is a great and important distinction to make. Too often, when talking about “dismantling privilege”, the assumption is that the goal is to bring the privileged group down. I mean, it’s right there in the word “dismantling”. And this is often the goal, but not always. Many other times, the goal is too simply extend that privilege to everyone such that it ceases to be a privilege because it is enjoyed by all.
But regardless of which form of privilege it is, I think it is important to know when it exists, because it means that some corrective action is required, be it destroying the privilege or extending it.
And I do think there is value in attempting to rid one’s self of privilege, even if it is that second kind that isn’t morally blameworthy. Sort of a, “I won’t indulge this privilege until everyone can.” You can rarely do that 100%, but you can make efforts to, which not only shows support to the oppressed group but is a more effective means of communicating the issue to the privileged group, because they see one of their own doing it.
Think about the bus boycotts. Riding the bus was not a privilege that should have been eliminated, but one that should have been expanded. Yet a great number of whites participated nonetheless.
But really, I said what I said there because I hadn’t realized until that moment that privilege was part of the issue there. Hence the, “Oh crap,” moment.
‘I remember, not too many years ago, jokes about SS couples, “Yeah, which ones the wife?”’
Maybe I am being too Jewish but I always raise an eyebrow or two when people use SS as an acronym for anything but well you know….
I thought about that as I was writing the comment; I decided to go ahead anyway. Abbreviations can mean many things. If I’d used ‘SS’ as an acronym for Social Security, would it have drawn attention?
Eventually, we’ll get to just couple. And that will be a good thing.
it’s even more uncomfortable trying to describe white nationalist same sex couples.
dhex, the retired American white-nationalist, same-sex couple couple converges to hissing sibilance and acronym redundancy.
especially if they were also work for the Treasury Department on the Presidential Protective Detail
and are squirrels
Glyph, I’m sure you’ve heard about the snail who got a new sports car, had an “SS” painted on it for “Super Snail.” Pulled up at a red light, and then when it turned green, stomped on it and sped through.
Old lady on the sidewalk said, “Look at that S car go.”
/ducks thrown tomatoes
I have mentioned this before, but written wordplay sometimes escapes me when I am reading. I have to say it out loud and literally hear it, to get it.
This was one of those times. (The Pretenders live album Isle of View was one that escaped me for YEARS. It wasn’t until I loaned it to a friend and in the process named the album title out loud that I smacked myself in the forehead).
Me too. I was considering saying something like “The husband is the obergruppenführer.”
Was the obergruppenführer’s badge of office a pink triangle with two esses in it?
Deutschland is happy … and gay!
Zic,
I generally say Social Security, Secret Service, etc. No abbreviations for those.
New Dealer, I respect and understand, and I really hope you’ll forgive me if I’ve given offense.
From this day forward, it’s just couples, and marriage equality.
Thank you, language has the power to hurt, which goes back to my original joy at the word ‘husband.’
It was a beautiful wedding. A room full of very old people, mostly conservatives, had tears on their faces; they all realized that these two people who have loved each other and cared for each other so faithfully for a quarter century deserved to be family, and that they were partaking of not just the birth of a legal family, but of the healing of an old, old wrong in the world.
I’m at the National Wargames Convention, playing Warmachine.