August 1914

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

*****

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

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

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

Stuff like that?  All the damn time.

*****

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current events

This has become a Friday night routine. I tentatively approach a thing that resembles an idea for a post, and then I circle it for a while, poking it with a stick, to see if it tries to bite me or anything. And then I just write about whatever nonsense pops into my head. Like a week in review.  Yes, that's it!  Week in review! Why didn't I think of that before?

*****

Monday: Sadly, Amy Krouse Rosenthal died on Monday, after a long illness. I wrote about her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life on my 2016 book list. I had no idea that she was sick (or that she had written children's books) until the New York Times published her "You May Want to Marry My Husband" essay on March 3.  She was a great writer and, obviously and more importantly, a great person.
Monday night: A tense evening as the heavily hyped forecast of snow appeared for a while to have been mistaken (or a hoax). The snow finally began to fall, prompting an early snow day call from the school district--the first one this winter. All-out Lord of the Flies rebellion: Narrowly averted. 

Tuesday: Snow day. 

Tuesday night: You know, Rachel, I turned off a hockey game to watch that, nearly sparking an another potential uprising. These are revolutionary times at my house. I'm not sure that "Donald Trump paid some taxes in 2005" was quite the truth-to-power Watergate-level scoop that we all hoped for.  PS--I think Trump leaked the return himself. 

Wednesday: I don't even remember.  It was four days ago! Oh wait, I remember.  I worked from home on Tuesday.  Snow and whatnot. So I sent myself some files, because my work computer is huge and unwieldy, and no matter how many times I readjust my hands on the keyboard, I can't type on the thing.  I worked like a madwoman all day.  Then, on Wednesday morning, I got to my desk and realized that I didn't have the computer that I had used on Tuesday, and that I had forgotten to email the file back to myself. Kind of a problem, because it was kind of an important thing with kind of a hard, immovable, drop-dead, not one minute late deadline.  Something of a dilemma.

All's well that ends well. My husband was on the late shift this week, and being home, he was able to email the file to me.  Then, I stopped at the grocery store on the way home, only to realize that I'd left my wallet at home, too. At least I hadn't actually shopped yet. Because I'd have been SO MAD.

Thursday:  A long work day, but I didn't mind.  The Friday deadline still looming, I stayed at my desk until 6:30, and then came home and worked until a little after 10.

Friday: Deadline met.

Saturday: I hate to shop, as I mentioned here.  The benefit of working full-time is that I can afford to shop; the disadvantage, of course, is that I don't have time to shop.  Or rather, I do have time, but my time is limited, and shopping is my very least favorite way to spend it.  So I buy clothes online. And then I wear them, and hate them, and end up with a pile of nearly new stuff that languishes in my closet, while I tear my hair out every morning because I have nothing to wear.

But wait.  We're not talking about every morning.  We're talking about today. I went shopping, in a real store, where I tried some things on, and even bought a few items. Or articles.  We'll see what happens. That was the least fun thing that I did all week.  Note that this was a week that included floor mopping, snow shoveling, tax paying, and insomnia, so do the proverbial math.

*****
It's still Saturday, a few hours later.  Do you know what's happening right now? My son, who is 15  years and 9 months old today, is watching the Maryland Motor Vehicles Administration's how to get your driver's license video. No matter what time it is, it's always later than you think. Or later than I think, anyway.

And speaking of math? 100 Concepts is veering off the rails into pure ridiculousness .  Now I'm supposed to believe that there's such a thing as a three-dimensional one-sided shape. Fiction, I tell you.

Early in the evening, we went to our favorite neighborhood Mexican restaurant, with this boy and his mother (my sister-in-law) and his baby sister, who slept through the entire meal. The hostess was the senior co-captain of my son's high school swim team, and as high school kids often do when they see each other in non-school settings, they pretended that they didn't know each other.  Perhaps my son, who had ridden with my sister-in-law so that he could help with the children, was embarrassed to be seen carrying a sleeping infant in a forty-pound carrier.  Perhaps the girl, who is normally rather stylish, was embarrassed to be seen in her work uniform of khaki pants and a polo shirt.

I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore. Because it would be awkward to be the teenage mother of two teenage boys.

*****
It's Sunday morning now. I'm the only person awake, and I'm watching "Stranger than Fiction," a movie that I really love. I might like Will Ferrell even better in dramatic roles than in comedies. His "Stranger than Fiction's" character's favorite is work, not smiling. And Emma Thompson, Queen Latifah, and Maggie Gyllenhaal (sp?) are great as they always are.  It's good to be up early.

Did you not get the work/smiling reference?  Then go and watch "Elf," right away.

After Mass, I'll be attending a Lularoe home boutique show with some friends. No good will come of this, I promise you. With money in my pocket and the encouragement of well-meaning but misguided friends (both of whom are teachers, which means that actual toddler clothing is acceptable work attire for them), I'll end up with a pile of stretchy polka-dotted sack dresses, peacock-feather printed leggings, and a floppy hat.  With the right pair of Birkenstocks, I can show up at my job as a technical writer at a federal government contractor looking like a jewelry vendor at Lollapalooza, circa 1994.

Maybe I should leave my wallet at home.

I look ridiculous? You're wearing
cupcake-patterned
 leggings. Dumb ass. 

Later, I'm making chicken for dinner, using a video recipe recommended by another friend. The recipe involves a chicken and a Bundt pan, and like every other Internet chicken recipe, it suggests an insanely optimistic cooking time. (Hey!  That was exactly a year ago!) A food writer who believes that a whole chicken stuffed into a Bundt pan and surrounded by lemons and vegetables can go into a 425 degree oven and then come out ready to eat just 55 minutes later has obviously never cooked a chicken, but the friend who recommended the recipe is usually a dependable source of household and cooking advice. Only one way to find out.  Maybe I'll post a cooking diary next week. Don't say you weren't warned.

How do you take down a dictator?

I just finished reading, and looking at, Jason Polan's Every Person in New York, with foreword by Kristen Wiig. She writes that Polan finds and captures the "spark" in ordinary people.  That's why I love this book and these drawings so much. It's why I love to look at people and how they push their hair back and dig in their pockets or their bags for their keys or their phones and laugh at their kids and prop their sunglasses on their heads and all of the other little and ordinary things that people do.  No two are ever alike.

*****

12YO: Is Lent almost over?

No, sadly, Lent is nowhere near almost over. But now, in an entirely predictable development, the long mild winter actually IS almost over, only to be replaced by a freezing cold early spring. As my 15YO says, What in the actual hell? We're expecting our first real snow of the season, on March bloody 14th. At Mass this morning, the priest reminded us that God has a sense of humor.  I don't think He's very funny just about now.

*****

I'm taking a break from the Cazalets to read a math-for-idiots gift book called Math Squared: 100 Concepts You Should Know.  I'd have made the subtitle 100 Concepts THAT You Should Know, but that's just me. I like the relative pronoun.

Home office and workshop of Ralph Baer, inventor
of "the Brown Box," very early home video game
system.  That's a Simon game on the bottom shelf. 

I have written before about my lack of aptitude for abstract concepts, including such ridiculous things as imaginary numbers (I read that chapter twice--still don't get it.)  I distinguish math from math, in that calculations are fairly simple for me, once I understand the concept behind them. It's the concept that eludes me. I suppose that this is connected in some way to my fearsome lack of aptitude for spatial relations and my hideously bad sense of direction.  But gaping knowledge holes bother me, and I try to fill them whenever I can, as best I can. And again, it's Lent--math is nothing if not penitential.

*****
Just in case, after my failure to grasp the idea of imaginary numbers, I needed another reason to feel inferior, I went (finally) to see "Hidden Figures." I feel insulted, as a graduate of public schools and a state university, that I had never heard of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan before this movie was released. The movie itself is wonderful--every performance is true and human, and the story and script and pacing are tremendous.  And now I know the difference between a parabolic and an elliptical orbit. That's information that might come in handy one day. Imaginary numbers, however, are still beyond me.  Frankly, I think some joker at MIT made them up.

*****
My sister-in-law and my three-year-old nephew were at my house when we arrived home from the movie. He's a very active little boy. He makes me fight him. Fists up, or sword lifted, or Nerf gun aimed, he yells "AUNT CLAIRE. LET'S FIGHT."

I mean, it's fine for now. My size advantage is significant, and his hand-eye coordination isn't fully mature, so I remain undefeated. I worry about the future, though. He's going to get older, and grow.  I'm going to get older, and shrink. It won't be long before I'll no longer be able to take him down with  physical strength and agility alone, and I'll have to resort to cunning and treachery. Fortunately, I'm not afraid to fight dirty. Scruples are for suckers.

*****

So three weeks later, I still hate my hair.  But I've learned the hard way (which is the way that I learn most things) that the solution to a bad haircut--particularly a too-short bad haircut--is not another haircut. So I wait.

Julia Child's kitchen, recreated at the Smithsonian's Museum
of American history. I like the paintings hanging right on
the cabinets.  Note the odd placement of the trash can.

*****
Speaking of ordinary life (see first paragraph. No, I don't blame you if you forgot already. This post has taken rather a circuitous route to its conclusion), enjoy these pictures of ordinary life lived by extraordinary people.  Julia Child's kitchen is very appealing to me. I love the color of the cabinets, and the pegboard walls are both pretty in themselves and very useful. What I like best is the imperfection and lack of concern for magazine layout aesthetic.  The trashcan is molded plastic (though maybe she'd have had stainless steel if it had been widely available) and the clock above the sink, which you cannot see in this shot, is shockingly ugly--white with birchwood trim. Very 1984.  Likewise Ralph Baer's home office, above.  I would love to own the green toolboxes with the tiny drawers, and it's clear that he arranged his personal items and mementos in a way that was visually pleasing to himself.  Some of those mementos are hideous, though, and the chair on which he sat is repaired with silver duct tape. People lived in these spaces.  They pushed their hair back and laughed at their friends or their children (Julia Child, famously, didn't have children; Ralph Baer did, I guess, because there are Father's Day cards propped on his shelves.)  Maybe every so often, they thought that they'd like a fancier space; or that they should paint, or organize, or buy a nicer trashcan or a new chair.  But most of the time, they were busy living and working and being themselves, and they didn't have time to worry about what their houses looked like. That's a good way to be.

*****

In my own dojo!

This title makes no sense, does it? I was sick in bed on Friday night, watching "Mean Girls," and I thought I'd use that line as a title, and then let the rest worry about itself.  But I'm going to leave it there. There might be need some day to take down a dictator, and it doesn't hurt to start thinking about it.  Meanwhile, I'm nothing if not oppressed, living under the regime of a three-year-old madman who makes me fight to the death in my own home.   As Bertie Wooster said, sometimes you need to let dictators know where they get off. Pugnacious toddlers: Beware. Sleep with one eye open.

Bravely facing the applause

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

*****

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

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

Highlights:

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

Not so highlights:

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

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

*****
4 days down, 399 to go.