I was thinking about stopping this for a while; "this" meaning weekly posting on this blog. Like lots of other things I do, it's become a compulsion-driven source of unnecessary anxiety. But then I think of things and see things, and want to write about them. Maybe I need to just write when I feel like writing. Just like maybe I need to clean the house only when it's dirty.
That last part is crazy talk, of course.
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I read something today, which I won't link to. Let's just say that the name "Becky" has two entirely new and unexpected meanings. Clueless, slightly overprivileged white girls are now the bete noire of society, apparently. That's a word that I overuse. "Apparently," that is, not "bete noire." I should use that one more often. Anyway, I suppose it was our turn. Clueless white girls, that is; not people who overuse "apparently," or even "bete noire."
And that's all I have to say about that, because I can never seem to summon any emotion other than slack-jawed eye-rolling boredom for identity politics in any form. That's the privilege talking, I guess. I get that there are still such things as racism and white privilege. I just don't see how dehumanizing yet another group of people helps to end either of those things.
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I'm reading, and have been reading for some time, Michael Beschloss's The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-1963. It's long, and pretty exhaustively detailed, and will probably take me three more weeks to finish, at my current pace, which is slow, because I'm busy.
The book takes lots of side trips, much like that last sentence (and this entire blog, if it comes down to that). I love 20th-century American history, and presidential history (should that be capitalized?) and of course, I love reading about the Soviet Union (not a nice place to visit, and you also wouldn't want to live there), so this is a feature and not a bug. Still, I usually only have a few minutes a day to read (because after all, I do have to write about having only a few minutes a day to read, and that takes time; not to mention that the house isn't going to compulsively clean itself), so it's going to be a while before I can offer a full report. Stay tuned.
Andrei Gromyko, who was the Soviet Foreign Minister during the Kennedy years (and for a long time after), figures prominently in the book, but unlike most of the others (Kennedy, Khrushchev, Dean Rusk, Dean Acheson, Willy Brandt, Konrad Adenauer), his personality doesn't register with the reader. Gromyko was apparently (there it is again) extremely reserved, and is said to have said that he was uninterested in his own personality. He might have been the only real Communist among them. Meanwhile, I can't imagine anything better than to be uninterested in oneself and one's own personality. Something to aspire to.
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"Right after I got here, I ordered linguine with marinara, and I got egg noodles with ketchup."
That's the almost-last line of "Goodfellas," which I'm watching on TV. If you're from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, or Boston (or New Haven or Providence, I guess), and you go anywhere else, food is a big adjustment. Washington, DC is only 3 hours away from Philadelphia, but it's a million culinary miles. When I was pregnant with my first child, I had an overwhelming craving for a tuna hoagie. My husband went out to get me what was supposed to be a tuna hoagie, but which turned out to be Little Friskies on a hot dog bun. I felt Ray Liotta's pain.
It's the day before Labor Day, always one of the saddest times of the year for me. I love summer, and I'm never ready to see it go. I went swimming on Thursday night, and the water was about as cold as I could stand. Then after two days of mid-October chill and rain, it was even colder today. I barely dipped a toe in. One more day, and then the pool is closed, and the school year starts, and the summer is over, just like that.
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Labor Day.
Although my kids love summer as much as I do, they're quite upbeat and enthusiastic about the new school year. Armed with a few new clothes and school supplies, ready to see their friends and to see what their schedules will look like, they're filled with the excitement of newness. So I'm going to adjust my attitude, right now. We're already buying pre-season hockey tickets, which means that fall can't be all bad. It'll be fine, as long as I don't ever have to drink, smell, or even look at a pumpkin spice latte. There are depths to which even a white girl won't sink.
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