Auto-didact

I finished the Evita book, and learned more than I needed to know about the Perons and the whole sorry history of 20th century South American dictatorships. After Evita died, Argentina's political climate shifted so abruptly that exile for Juan Peron alone wasn't enough. Evita's body was also exiled, hidden in a graveyard in Italy under a false name, where it remained for nearly 20 years. Eva and Juan Peron were both objectively terrible people, and yet they inspired fanatical devotion among millions of followers. It was an instructive read.

*****

Anyway, I'm working my way through the Excel course, and it's also very instructive. I'm learning a lot. For example, did you know that you can turn an Excel rectangle into a square, or an oval into a circle? I don't know why you can't just start with a square or a circle. That's a question for Bill Gates.

I am a person who writes and thinks in mostly words.  I look at a graph or a map or a diagram, and I have to methodically work my way through it before I can actually understand it. A quick glance at a picture doesn't help me to grasp an idea, unless I think backward step by step, relating each color or shape to the information that it represents.

I realize that this is just the opposite of what is supposed to happen and that many people find it very easy to absorb information when it's presented in a visual format. They're the same people who never get lost, and who can always cut the right-size sheet of wrapping paper just by looking at the gift they need to wrap. They're the people who always say that a picture is worth a thousand words. And maybe it is. But I like a thousand words.

But now that I'm learning more about how to use Excel, I'm seeing that a particular type of visual display can actually change the way you understand something, You'd think I'd have known this already, but I didn't. A histogram or a tree map or a pareto chart or a pie chart or a column and line chart all illuminate data in different ways. I thought that one chart vs. another was a stylistic choice--flats or high heels; a dress or a skirt and sweater. But it's more than that. It's more like the difference between wearing shoes and not wearing shoes-- you'll understand your feet differently shod or barefoot.

*****
With Evita and the crazy Peronistas out of my hair (and good riddance), I needed something new to read. So I'm reading Nora Ephron's Wallflower at the Orgy. It reminds me of what I thought my life was going to be when I was young.

The first essay is about the first generation of what were once called "foodies," and it made me remember a line from "When Harry Met Sally," when Carrie Fisher tells Bruno Kirby "Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s;" and of course the reason that I remembered that line was that Nora Ephron wrote it.

Before this, I'd never read Nora Ephron's work. It's tempting to compare her with Joan Didion, and there are definitely parallels. But when you read Nora Ephron, you feel that she was fully immersed in and engaged with the world that she's writing about, the world of well-educated and attractive and stylish young people in New York City in the 1970s. She can claim to be a wallflower, just blending into the background, but there's nothing distant or disengaged about her writing.

Didion, on the other hand, remained at a cool and impenetrable distance and even though she was also fully immersed in a very rarefied and stylish world, she seemed removed from it somehow. But she is mercilessly honest about herself in her writing. I haven't read enough of Nora Ephron to know if she's as brave, but I'm looking forward to a visit to New York and Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s, when people believed that a regime like Peron's was a relic of another time and another place and could never happen here.  It should be instructive.

Reality and dreams

I saw an article online, which I now can't find, no matter how I search. It doesn't matter. The article was about a phone that's supposed to help you avoid smartphone-induced distraction and stress. More specifically, it's a phone that offers only a few apps, so you can remain in touch with family and friends, and avoid the constant intrusion of social media and the Internet. Of course, it's an adjunct to your real phone, and it works only when connected to the mother ship. So for just $400 or so, in addition to the $600 or so that you already paid for your smartphone, you can have a phone that keeps you away from your phone.

My favorite-ever phone was a Samsung slider phone with a perfect little QWERTY keyboard. It was small and neat, and a pretty red color. Like most messaging phones of that time (around 2009, so smartphones were around, but messaging phones were still widely used) it had an alarm clock and calculator and messaging and calling, and a low-resolution camera. You could even play games with it; not that I ever did, but I could have if I'd wanted to. No navigation, though; and no email, and no Google. So I don't know if I could go back. But it's nice to think about. It's nice to think about being out with friends and having a spirited and good-natured argument about which actor was in that one movie, or what year it was that some team ended a long drought to win a championship, without someone settling the question with a pocket full of Google.

*****
I worked from home on Friday. I had promised to review an SOP for a coworker, and while I was on a conference call, she texted me to ask me if I'd gotten a chance to look at it. I noticed the text, but I didn't respond right away because I was taking notes during the call. Or at least I thought that I hadn't responded. Because on Saturday, I was going to text her about something altogether different, when I noticed, to my horror, that I had actually responded to her request on Friday. "Nope." That was it. Not "Sorry, I forgot about it but I'll do it now." Not "Sorry, I won't have time today but I'll have it back to you first thing on Monday." Just "Nope."

I'm using third-party keyboard and messaging apps, which normally work pretty well. But the messaging app suggests responses that don't even resemble any words that I would ever write to anyone, ever. My normal workaround is to just ignore the suggestions and write my own texts, complete with fully spelled-out words and complete, correctly punctuated sentences. But now I have to make sure that I don't inadvertently hit send on an auto-response and make myself look like a jerk. 

*****
Later that weekend, I had a dream. I was in Taiwan with some coworkers, including the one to whom my phone was so rude. Yes, Taiwan. A third coworker was, for some reason not known to me, holding on to some valuables for us. We walked down the corridor of our hotel to ask our third coworker for our things, and then we noticed that we were on an airplane. The plane began to taxi, and it was too late for us to get off. "Where is this plane going?" I asked my coworker.

"Shanghai," she said, barely looking up from her Chinese-language newspaper.

"We don't want to go to Shanghai!" the first coworker and I exclaimed. But it was too late. The plane had already taken off.

It was a strangely realistic dream, the kind from which you awaken slightly panicked and disoriented, with your brain straddling reality and the dream world. Even as I thought about what to make for lunch that day, I also worried about what the Chinese authorities would do with me when I arrived in Shanghai with no travel documents. It wasn't until halfway through my coffee that I realized that I had dreamed about actually being Shanghaied.

*****
I changed high schools after my freshman year. At the time, it seemed like a big deal. Now, 35 years later, I sometimes forget that I went to the first high school. One of my old neighborhood friends invited me to a Facebook group for my old school's upcoming reunion, and although I have no plans to attend, it was nice that people remembered me.

When you look at the Facebook profiles of old friends and acquaintances, you compare. You see their lives (such as people represent their lives on social media), and you wonder how yours measures up. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you're not one of those people who looks in the mirror because you literally don't know what you look like. Maybe you don't worry at all about what other people think about you. Maybe you're pretty clear on the difference between your friends' and neighbors' social media images and their real selves. Maybe you don't wake up expecting to spend the rest of your life in a Chinese prison. Maybe you don't worry that your phone will go rogue and be insufferably snotty on your behalf.

*****
It's the end of the day and I am worried about the world. I'm worried about displaced and homeless people who can't find welcome anywhere in the world. I'm worried about pipe bombs. I'm worried about systematic devaluation of human life.

Mother Teresa said that if you want to change the world, go home and love your family. It's the end of the day, and I'm going to make some banana chocolate chip muffins that won't solve any crises or end any wars or cure any of my ever-growing number of neuroses and fears. They'll just be a nice breakfast treat for teenage boys on a cold morning. Love is the only thing that has ever changed anything and the only thing that ever will.

Don't cry for me Argentina

Monday: Did I promise more book notes this week? I think I did, I think I did. I remember writing something about abandoning Edna St. Vincent Millay and Nancy Mitford after one page. And then the FAFSA intruded.

I realize that people file the FAFSA, and the 1040A, and passport applications, and all kinds of other bureaucratic forms and applications all the time. I just hate it more than most people.

Anyway, back to the books. I just read The Clancys of Queens, a memoir by Tara Clancy. I liked it a lot, and not just because I have some things (but not all) in common with the author. Like me, she grew up urban working class Catholic; and like me, she had an unorthodox family situation, in a time and place when most families were of the traditional variety.

The similarities end there, but I felt a sense of kinship with her, and I like her writing. I like her voice. Rough around the edges, a little boastful, but sensitive and thoughtful and genuine. A nice break from the early USSR.

*****
Now I'm reading Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Peron. 

Yeah, I know. Just when I get out, they pull me back in (in as in early to mid 20th century). But at least it's not Europe or the Soviet Union. I'm just a few chapters in, but it's very good so far, and I'm learning a lot. I know absolutely nothing about Argentina under Peron, except the part where Madonna sings from a balcony, and it's starting to occur to me that that might not have actually happened.

*****
In other news, I submitted the FAFSA and I didn't punch anyone (that you know of).

*****
Thursday: Heart-attack stressful day at work today; the kind of stress that seems not to affect other people in the slightest but that leaves me a hyperventilating, panicking mess. But I think I held it together well enough that observers wouldn't have suspected that my chest was about to explode. It's 7 PM now, and my heart and respiratory rates are back to normal.

When I get stressed out, I get scatterbrained and foggy, and maintaining my compulsive housecleaning routine helps me to settle my brain and organize my thoughts. But scatterbrained and compulsive, terrible traits individually, are even worse combined.

Let's say you were a normal person, who just likes to vacuum on alternate days because she likes a clean house. And it's Thursday, and you can't remember if you vacuumed on Wednesday or not. Do you:

A. Look around and say to yourself "Well, it looks pretty clean around here, and so I could just let it go until tomorrow regardless?" OR

B. Vacuum, because you can't remember if you vacuumed yesterday or not; and if you didn't vacuum yesterday, then you HAVE TO VACUUM TODAY.

For our hypothetical normal person, the person for whom cleaning is an activity prompted by the presence of dirt, the answer would be A. For me, of course, the answer is B. So I have to vacuum. And I'm pretty sure that I also just dusted the same room twice. Pretty sure, but not 100% sure; this is why I had to dust it (again) just to be 100% sure.

Are you thinking to yourself that it must be exhausting to be me?

OMG, you're so right.

*****
Friday: Much better today; the crazy is under control and I accomplished quite a bit today, performing each necessary task once and only once. I'm still reading about Evita, and although I sometimes envy women like her, who never waste a moment with anxiety and confusion and panic and indecision, I can also take comfort in knowing that at least I'm not a Nazi sympathizer. So that's something. Adios until next week.

Hand me a fork

It's Friday night and the FAFSA is making me want to walk right into the ocean. God help me. God help us all. 

*****

Let's talk about books instead. So after I finished Lina and Serge, I visited the opposite end of the political spectrum, with The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss. Actually, I have no idea what Auchincloss’s politics were (though I’m pretty sure that he was on the not a Communist sympathizer like so many writers of the early to mid 20th century). But he came from and wrote about the very rarified and inbred society of 19th and 20th century New York City aristocracy, as far from revolutionary Russia as you can get.

I liked the stories, and I’d read more of Auchincloss. Almost every one of his characters is a New York lawyer, as was Auchincloss himself; and most of the stories are set in the 20th century, though he also set a couple of them during the mid 19th century. Those stories were almost as believable and effective as the contemporary (to Auchincloss) stories because he had a thorough understanding of the inner life of people such as his characters, and of human nature in general. I don’t think that his focus on a narrow stratum of society limits the artistic merit of his work; I think that he just recognized that a writer can’t write about everyone and everything. That made him a good writer, not a bad one.

Segueing from plutocracy into anarchy, I read To the Barricades, the Alix Kates Shulman biography of Emma Goldman. It was OK. I’m not an admirer of Emma Goldman (nor of Ms. Shulman) but she saw through Soviet Communism far sooner than most early 20th century radicals. Aside from the hagiographic tone of the book and the frank admiration of Goldman’s total commitment to politics at the expense of everything else, I completely reject Shulman’s premise that anarchy has been misunderstood and poorly executed and that true anarchy is the means to a just society. Humans have an innate need for leadership, and many (maybe even most) people need a structured and organized society, with recognizable authority. And defending the weak against the strong would seem to be impossible under anarchy. Though I have to admit that if I lived as a poor person in early 20th century America (or even in early 21st century America), I’d be hard-pressed to see the value of the state, which does an absolutely shitty job of defending the weak or reining in the strong. But just because no government can ever be truly just (because we live in a fallen world), it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t try.

After Emma, I started on Savage Beauty, the Nancy Mitford biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's totally coincidental that I chose another biography of a famous woman written by a different famous woman. Of course, Emma Goldman was much more famous than her biographer, but Nancy Mitford was probably just as famous as Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anyway, I stopped after one page. I'm sure it's interesting, and I'll return to it eventually. But after Emma Goldman and Louis Auchincloss and the Prokofievs, I've had enough of the 20th century for now. We are hurtling toward a replay of the years 1929 through 1944, and I don't need to read the handbook.

*****

Speaking of handbooks. Hey FAFSA: What the fuck does this mean? 

How much did your Parent 1 (father/mother/stepparent) earn from working (wages, salaries, tips, etc.) in 2017? This amount is your Parent 1 (father's/mother's/stepparent's) portion of IRS Form 1040-lines 7+12+18 and Box 14 [Code A] of IRS Schedule K-1 (Form 1065).

Does that seem to you like a straightforward question? Well riddle me this: Why, first of all, do you need to see our two individual wage incomes when we filed jointly? And WHY do you ask for the EXACT SAME THING for Parent 2? Same lines: 7+12+18. There are only ONE OF EACH of lines 7+12+18 on the 1040, and WE ONLY FILED ONE. Again: Married, Filing Jointly. What. In the ACTUAL HELL. If I had a fork, I'd stick it in my fucking eye.

Son of a bitch. 

*****

So that's me, filling out forms. That's the real reason why I lie awake worrying about a return to Soviet-style totalitarianism. It's not because of the gulag or the interrogation cells. It's because I imagine that every task in life would be prefaced by a 47-page-long web form that demands administrative details from 11 years ago, secured by two-factor authentication, and designed to time out every time your session is inactive for over 7 minutes and I just can't.

*****
It's Sunday now. I just read this over, and it reads as a little crusty.

I'll adjust your gross income!

I think that a break from the early 20th century and a break from the FAFSA would seem to be in order. Additional book reviews and procedural notes to follow. Be afraid.

Carry on

As a child, I used to feel ever so sorry for my mother and her friends and my aunts and my grandmother, all of whom carried handbags that they called "pocketbooks." My mother's pocketbook was a shoulder bag, but older women  still carried satchel-style bags that they carried by their short little handles, or hung on their forearms. Like all children, I hated to carry anything, and I thought that having to carry a thing full of other things, every day, even on the weekend, would be an intolerable burden on my life.

I gave this considerable thought, in fact. I planned to get around the pocketbook thing the same way men seemed to: with pockets. If every single article of clothing I ever bought and wore had pockets, then I'd never need a pocketbook. One pocket for my money, one pocket for the keys that were the one thing that I envied adults, and maybe one more pocket for random small items. I was also certain that I would never ever wear makeup; and I didn't see any reason why I wouldn't continue to wear a ponytail every single day, which would obviate the need to carry a comb, and so voila! Problem solved.

*****

So last week, I finally finished reading Lina and Serge. I learned a lot about artists and musicians in the early Soviet Union. For example, I learned that Serge Prokofiev was a jerk. I also learned that in the most dire of circumstances, a woman needs a handbag more than almost anything else. Lina was a musician, too; a singer, though not a very successful one. When she was shipped off to the gulag, she carried some sheet music with her. During her eight-year-long imprisonment, she managed to piece together a tote bag and to embroider it with her own designs, all using whatever scraps of fabric or thread she could scrounge up. Of all of the things that she could have used her limited energy and resources toward, she chose a handbag. And of all of the things that might have survived her trip to and from the gulag, and then her later travels around the Soviet Union and abroad, the tote bag survived. No recordings of her singing are known to exist, but the tote bag remained with her until she died and was preserved by one of her sons for years afterward.

*****

I'm not a fan of the NFL. I think that football is boring, and not just boring compared to a real sport like hockey, but super-long meeting with a monotone presenter kill-me-now BORING. I think that NFL cheerleading degrades women (not that anyone cares about that). I think that NFL owners are either greedy cowards or cowardly greedy people (noun for greedy person--anyone?) for failing to stand up to our ridiculous President on the anthem-kneeling why-is-this-even-an-issue issue. But my biggest objection to the NFL and all its works and pomps is the clear handbag rule, about which I haven't decided yet which is more astonishing:

• That the NFL has the nerve to demand that women expose the contents of their handbags not just to security screening (a necessary evil, I suppose) but to public scrutiny.  Not even scrutiny, because to scrutinize is to examine carefully, and you don't have to look that carefully to see through a damn plastic bag. 
• OR that so many women still attend games, carrying their clear plastic NFL-branded handbags, paying for the privilege of being insulted by the National Football League.

Men and women are different. I'm perfectly fine with according men their privileges (no, not THAT kind of privilege), as long as women can have theirs. My privileges are few but treasured: I park my car in the garage, and not in the driveway. I'm not responsible for pest control. And my handbag is sacred.

*****

The Kate Spade bag arrived, and I've been carrying it for a few weeks now. And because I couldn't get it out of my mind, I also bought the little Coach bag. The Kate Spade is a little nicer, and it's a light color, so I don't carry it when it rains. And it rains all the time. So it's not quite true to say that I've been carrying it for a few weeks; more like I've carried it two or three times during the last few weeks. But they're both beautiful and practical bags that accommodate everything I need for any day not spent in Siberia or Kolyma.

Never say never; that's what I always say. Or almost always, because I guess you should never say always either. My ten-year-old self would never have believed me if I'd gone back 40 years to tell her that when she grew up, she'd not only carry a handbag every day, but that handbags would be among her favorite things. I still wish I had more pockets, but I'll always have a pocketbook.

Let it snow

It's the last week of summer, at least for all practical purposes. I know that summer doesn't officially end in a meteorological sense until later in September, but when the pool closes and kids are back in school, then summer is over as far as I'm concerned. And I hate when summer is over. 

But I still have a week, so it's not over yet. There's a week left to swim, and to eat dinner at 9:30 PM, and to sleep a little later in the morning because I don't have to wake teenagers up. And summer reading--there's a week left of that, too. I read all the time, all year round, but I do tend to read more than usual in the summer. 

I finally finished Entering Ephesus. I hated the ending almost as much as I hated the ending of Atonement, for which I believe Ian McEwan still owes me an apology, so I'm happy to have it out of my hair. Now I'm reading Lina and Serge, a biography of Lina Prokofiev. Lina was married to Serge Prokofiev, the great Russian composer. Like so many other Russians of the early 20th century, she ran afoul of the Soviet police state and spent years in the gulag. So this one is right up my alley, obviously. 

Last night, I recommended that a friend read A Gentleman in Moscow, which another friend had recommended to me. Lina Prokofiev's story made me think of the Count, thought the books are completely different. A Gentleman is a novel, and the reader comes to know the protagonist very well. I'm only a few chapters into Lina's story, but it's already clear that I won't get to know her as well as I got to know the Count.  Coincidentally, both of these characters, one historical and one fictional, passed through the Metropol Hotel. Lina had a chance meeting there that would later lead to her imprisonment, while the Count's entire story takes place there. The Count's story ends happily. I hope that Lina's does, too. 

*****

The word "narrative" is an interesting one, isn't it? In the strictly literal sense, it just means story. And I love stories, true or fictional.  But like so many other words, "narrative" has more than one meaning, not to mention lots of icky political overtones. Just to be helpful, because I'm nothing if not helpful, I'm going to try to explain how to use this word, and how not to use it. 

Let's say that you're Kelli Ward, and you say something idiotic and indefensible. And reporters report what you said. Here's a helpful hint, Kelli Ward--the suffix "er" is often appended to the end of a verb, like "report," which then becomes a noun that describes the occupation of the person who performs the activity described by that verb. It's a lot to take in, I know. Long story short, reporters report. That's their job. 

When that reporter reports (again--that's her job!) on the terrible and inexcusable and whiny and sniveling thing that you said, that reporter is NOT "creating a narrative." She's reporting a story. Even when you say something stupid and ridiculous--ESPECIALLY when you say something stupid and ridiculous--it's newsworthy when you are running for Senate. So instead of being a crybaby little snowflake* bitch and whining about "the media" and "the left," you could (crazy, I know!) just APOLOGIZE and move the hell on.  By the way, saying that you're sorry that other people "might have misconstrued" your remarks isn't REALLY apologizing, but it's a step in the right direction. 

I hope that was helpful. And I wish you well in life, Dr. Ward, but I also sincerely hope that you lose today.

*****

Summer and winter, and politics and literature, and truth and fiction. That's a lot in one blog post! Until next week...

*****

*Another word note. I hate the word "snowflake" to describe anything other than the cold white product of December storm clouds. But it's worth pointing out that it's not only over-sensitive college students who might need a "safe space." 

Nerd rage

Grammar/Punctuation Derangement Syndrome: Characterized by flaming hot fury and acts of violence that include pen-throwing, foot-stomping, and keyboard abuse; sometimes accompanied by NSFW verbal outbursts, this disorder may be triggered by any of the following:

• Inability to distinguish between "e.g." and "i.e." OR (and especially) the misguided belief that these Latin abbreviations are synonymous and may therefore be used interchangeably. 
• Liberal use of both "e.g." and  "i.e." without the (necessary) comma to follow. 
• Note that "liberal use" means at least three times per page, throughout the entire length of a 174-page proposal. God help me. God help us all. 
• Use of the semi-colon to separate single-word list items (OH GOD THE HUMANITY).
• Use of the phrase "flush out" in reference to anything other than a toilet or a sewer system. 

So that was Monday. And now it's Tuesday. I slowed way down on my way home from the pool, to accommodate two (not one, but two) squirrels who were either blind or just not smart enough to get out of the way of an oncoming Subaru. I wondered for a moment if squirrels as a species might not have benefited if I'd hit one or both of them (NOT ON PURPOSE) because these two were obviously not the best contributors to the squirrel gene pool. But then I realized that as humans, we're probably better off if the squirrels don't become too intelligent. My family in particular doesn't need any more rodents that can outsmart us.

*****

Do you see what happens to me when I don't get out enough? I mean, really.

*****

I don't look at blog analytics very often, but I did look yesterday, and found an unusual one-day spike in visitor numbers. Interestingly, many of them are from Russia. So добро пожаловать. That means "welcome," if I take Google's word for it. I suppose I should actually learn some Russian, given that it will eventually be the primary language of the United States. Meanwhile, I hope that my poor grammar doesn't upset any Russian trolls. I know how that feels.

Artificial intelligence

In terms of my particular work, there's nothing worse than those days when you're chained to the laptop all day long, as the minutes tick by and the deadline fast approaches. But there's nothing better than when you finally get to the last page, and you do your final spell check, and update your table of contents, and ship the thing off, knowing that it's as good as it can possibly be. Even when that happens at 10:10 on Sunday night, it's still a happy moment of euphoria that will carry you through to the next mad deadline crunch, which you can only hope will happen on a weekday.

*****

So that was Sunday; and now it's Monday, and I'm now the proud owner of this:

Yes, I'm listening to everything you say,
but you have nothing to hide, right? 

I had to replace my phone recently, and I got a Google Pixel 2. Unbeknownst to me at the time (any excuse to say or write "unbeknownst"), Verizon was offering a free Google Home Mini with any Pixel purchase, and it arrived in today's mail.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's a fun new thing in a pretty box! It was free! And we'll have so much fun talking to it and telling it to play music and look up random facts and tell us when the puck drops. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it will become (if it isn't already) a surveillance device that will report on my every thought and conversation. I've read 1984, and this is how it starts.

I actually thought about just leaving it in the box. I could donate it somewhere, I thought; or we could just sell it on eBay. But curiosity got the better of me, so I opened it, just to see what it looked like when I plugged it in.

It's a very cute little device, and when you plug it in, four tiny lights flash the now-familiar Google colors (red, blue, yellow, green). It's cheerful and fun to look at; it's like Christmas in June. But after I set it up, I didn't know what to do with it. My son started testing it on state capitals, and then I threw it some multiplication questions. When I was 9 or 10, I dreamed of something very similar to this--a machine or a robot that knew everything and that could offer the sum total of human knowledge, just for the asking. State capitals, multiplication tables, and the weather, all in a a little round package.

*****
Last year, I had to write a white paper about data lakes. I don't know very much about databases, relational or non-relational, but that didn't stop me from writing all about them. One of the things that I learned while researching this topic is that when you build a data lake, you don't need a use case for the data you're collecting. You can just gather any and all data, throw it in your data lake, and then figure out later how to use it, and why. That's kind of terrifying, isn't it? With the right kind of data repository as the backend, your Google Home device, or your Alexa, or your Apple Home, could just collect data on every question you ask it, now and forever, store that data indefinitely, and then eventually figure out how to use it, presumably against you.

*****
I don't know very much about algorithms, but I do know that algorithms control how search results are compiled and returned. The day after I received the Google Home device was primary day in Maryland, and I wasn't sure where my polling place was (it changed recently), so  I asked Google, and it suggested that I should visit the Board of Elections, in Virginia. Based on the weather forecasts, it knows that I live in Maryland, so there was reassuring proof that it doesn't know everything. It does, however, know that the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup, because everyone in my house has asked it "Who won the Stanley Cup?" at least ten times.

*****
It's Friday now, day 5 of sharing my household with an AI-enabled speaker that actually speaks. I like asking it to tell me jokes; and of course, the daily reminder that "the Stanley Cup was won by the Washington Capitals" (passive voice; another algorithm quirk, I'm sure) will never get old. But I'm keeping it at an arm's length for now. As helpful as it might be to get a quick Spanish-to-English translation (or the reverse) or to get the weather forecast without looking for my phone, I'm still not convinced that it's not spying on us and reporting my every idea to our Google overlords. By the time I finally unplug it, it might be too late.

Washed and clean

Tuesday: I intended to start writing yesterday morning, and then the morning got away from me. Yesterday was the first no-school day, so our morning routine has changed a bit, and I thought that I had more time than I actually did. It's always later than you think. Well, it's always later than I think, anyway.

So now it's 7:15 (AM). Cloudy, with silvery pale sunlight and dense humidity, and it feels like a morning at the beach. I’m keeping track of the time this morning. I’m on top of things.

And now it’s 9:15 PM. Today was a back-to-back meeting day. I'd planned to go outside and take a short walk between meetings, but a sudden heavy rainstorm derailed my plans. And then within ten minutes, the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, giving way to intense, mad-dog-and-Englishmen noonday sun and the smell of ozone as the pavement dried. The air was dense; so humid that it was just short of condensation back into rain. The grass and trees and shrubs were jungle-green and dewy. You know how sometimes a garden or a lawn goes from lush and verdant to sloppy and overgrown, all in the space of minutes? The whole world looked like those few minutes. I walked in the sun as the rain dried. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in the office, and then the rain started again.

The rain stopped, again, and I finished work, came home, made dinner, and went swimming. The pool water has been warming gradually, from icy to chilly to tolerable to just right. All of this is to say that it feels like summer, finally.

***** 

I use spell-check, but only as a fail-safe for typos. My eyes aren’t what they used to be—when I was younger, no typo had a chance against me. I’ve noticed something with Word’s spell-check feature. When you spell-check a document, and spell-check doesn’t find any errors (this still happens fairly often—I’m pretty good), the pop-up reads “Spelling and grammar check is complete—You’re good to go!” Not only confirmation that the spell-check has done its job, but a congratulatory exclamation point. But when you run spell-check and ignore any of Word’s grammar or spelling recommendations, the pop-up reads “Spelling and grammar check is complete.” Full stop. It comes across as a little bitter,  a little truculent. No “good to go,” no exclamation point…it’s as if Word is washing its hands of you.

***** 

It's Wednesday now. I'm at a Wednesday night swim meet, with no job. Not as in unemployment, just no swim meet job. This is very rare for me; very rare indeed. Rumbling thunder cut the meet short, and there was a mad scramble to clean up the pool as quickly as possible before the rain started. A friend and I, both of us long-veteran swim parents, were walking toward the parking lot to stow our handbags so that we could come back to help clean up, and we saw the meet manager walking toward us.

“Let’s say ‘Good night, Lois—see you Saturday’ and keep walking, just to see what she says,” I said to my friend.

“Awesome,” she said. We executed perfectly, and then cackled like idiots when she fell for it. Then we all cleaned up together, and I thought about how lucky I was that I got to go home over an hour earlier than I expected; and even luckier to clean up a swim meet with these people, who I love and whose children I love; all during my beloved summer.

***** 

So as I mentioned once before, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And as I also mentioned that last time, I won't really compare the President to a stopped clock, because he's not right anywhere near twice a day. But he did the right thing today, so he deserves credit. It doesn’t matter that he did the right thing for the wrong reasons; it only matters that it was the right thing. Hopefully, most of the children will soon be reunited with their parents.

RAICES

No, but if you hum a few bars, I can try to play along

Wednesday, June 6: I was just going to write a sentence, which I'm not going to write, because you shouldn't put certain things in writing until they actually happen.

*****
Remember how I was singing along with "Evacuate the Dance Floor?" And then remember how that song was stuck in my head for a damn week afterward? No?

Well let me tell you all about it. I sang along to that song one too many times, and then it was stuck in my head for a damn week. And if that was the end of that story, then there'd be nothing else to say. But that is not, as it happens, the end of that story.

I'm extremely susceptible to the curse of the earworm; and sadly for me, the songs that get permanently lodged in my brain are not always songs that I like. "Evacuate the Dance Floor" and "Just Dance" and "Badlands"? Fine. "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Where do Broken Hearts Go?" and "We are Never (Ever Ever) Getting Back Together"? Not so much.

In fact, just hearing one or two bars of a bad song at the wrong time are an almost-certain predictor of an earworm that will last at least 24 hours, and often as long as a week. It's like the aura that some migraine sufferers experience. It's like that vaguely feverish malaise that within hours morphs into full-blown flu. By the time you recognize the symptoms, it's probably too late.

*****

Sunday, June 10: So now It’s a rainy and unseasonably cool Sunday afternoon, and I’m just a few miles north of Baltimore, driving southward on I-95 after an overnight trip to Philadelphia. As always, I feel duty-bound to point out that I’m not actually driving the car that’s conveying me home. And I’m not online, either. I could write on my phone, but I’ve never learned how to type fast on a smartphone. On a real keyboard, though, I can type like lightning. I can barely see my fingers--that's how fast they're moving.

I’m beginning to resign myself to the likelihood of a cool and rainy summer. My swimming friends and I have been steeling ourselves to the icy water, because we’re determined to swim and if we wait until the water warms up, we won’t get to swim until July. I’m learning to like the cold water, though I’d take warm over cold any day. But once you get used to it...

*****

Friday, June 15. You might have read or heard somewhere that the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup (this, of course, is the thing that I couldn't put in writing). My friends and family in Philadelphia, even the die-hard Flyers fans, all congratulated me last weekend, as if I’d scored the game-winning goal. The last time I lived in a championship city was 1980 (Phillies, World Series), and I'd forgotten how much fun it was to be part of a joyous collective celebration. And I'm really happy for Alexander Ovechkin, the world's greatest hockey player. I know that he's a Putin supporter, but how can you not love this face?

*****
Speaking of my favorite Russians, I finally finished with the Count. I haven't read any reviews of A Gentleman in Moscow, and I wonder if any critics commented on the relative lack of suffering in the book. After all, it's set in Russia, beginning in the 1920s all the way through the mid 1950s--Suffering Central. Without giving too much away, the main character, Count Alexander Rostov, was in 1922 placed under permanent house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel and remained there for over 30 years, eventually becoming the headwaiter of the Boyarsky, the hotel's renowned restaurant. Early in the novel, he is removed from his luxurious, expansive suite, and sent to a tiny room on an upper floor. He has an unpleasant encounter with a Bolsehvik aristocrat-hater.  Soviet-style bureaucracy encroaches on his beloved Boyarsky, even its famous wine cellar.

But no one starves, and no one ends up in a filthy cell in Sukhanova. A few major characters disappear, though, lost to the gulag; and the reader always feels the Stalinist menace hovering over the Metropol and threatening all of its occupants, including the Count and his adopted daughter. I might write more about him next week. Once again, Stalinism and all of its totalitarian relatives seem particularly relevant right now.

*****
Stalinist menace or not, the weather has finally turned and it feels like actual summer again. The Count wasn't beaten or starved or sent to Kolyma, but he was held indoors for 30 years, never stepping outside, even during the summer. And right now, on the southern border of the most fortunate country in the history of the world, there are hundreds of children, separated from their parents, and held indoors in prison-like conditions for most of the day.

I have no idea why some people, or some countries, or some times in history are marked for suffering. I'll probably never know why, at least not in this life. All I can do is to not forget the people who suffer, and try to think about them and pray for them when the sun is shining on the pool water in just the right way and all is well in my particular part of the world at this particular moment. 

Dum-Dums and Bolsheviks

My husband, as my sons and almost-5-year-old nephew settle down to watch "Guardians of the Galaxy 2": Be careful with this movie. It might not be appropriate for him.

Almost 5-year-old nephew, loudly, about five minutes in: Showtime, A-Holes!

Me: Too late.

Next time I have to run a meeting for the government client (oh my God, the meetings and the PowerPoint presentations), I think that will be my introduction. In fact, "Showtime, A-Holes" might be my first PowerPoint slide.

*****

I work in a pretty large office building that sits on the edge of the Twinbrook neighborhood in Rockville, Maryland. Twinbrook was built just after World War II, as the flood of returning soldiers gave rise to a housing shortage, which was mitigated by construction of what used to be called "tract houses." The streets are named for World War II sites and battles and military figures: Ardennes Avenue, Marshall Avenue, Farragut Avenue, Halsey Road, Midway Avenue.

Most of the houses in Twinbrook are small; 3-bedroom saltbox-style houses on 1/4-acre plots. After 60-plus years, the neighborhood, filled with mature-growth trees and shrubs and flower gardens (some better-tended than others) is a riot of growth during a rainy spring.

The residential part of Twinbrook gives way very suddenly and abruptly to a burgeoning business district surrounding the Twinbrook Metro stop. For people who don't live in Rockville, I suppose it's just the opposite--the place where they work turns very suddenly into a mid-century residential neighborhood filled with the kind of homes that some journalists would condescendingly describe as "modest." I don't live in Twinbrook, but I live just 15 minutes away in a neighborhood not unlike it. So for me, it's the former--it's as if I'm out for my usual walk and I turn the corner and there's a 10-story office building two doors away from a neighbor's house.

Oddly enough, the business district doesn't appear to encroach upon the neighborhood, nor the reverse. A residential neighborhood is very peaceful during the middle of a weekday, and I like to walk for a few minutes at lunchtime, both for exercise and to gather my energy for the afternoon. Just a few steps away from the building, the street feels completely suburban and residential, so much so that more than once, I've turned around to return to the office and feared for a moment that I walked too far to get back in time for an afternoon meeting. It's the trees--the curtain of green completely blocks the view beyond a few steps, making it impossible to see the rest of the neighborhood beyond the block where you're standing. It's like you can't see the forest for the trees; or more accurately, you can't see the trees for the lack of forest.

*****
All of that? Apropos of nothing. Description for its own sake.

*****
Me to coworker: There's a big basket of candy in the kitchen.
Coworker: I saw it, but it's just a big pile of Dum-Dums.
Me: There's a lot of good stuff in there, too. You just have to dig past the Dum-Dums.

And is that not a metaphor for life itself?

*****
I'm reading A Gentleman in Moscow, as my friend recommended. She didn't steer me wrong. I'm only about 20% in, and I'm all agog. It's like reading a Wes Anderson movie: A quirky Russian nobleman befriends a sassy 9-year-old Ukrainian girl, and the two of them explore every corner of the huge Moscow hotel where the nobleman is under lifetime house arrest. It's all fun and games now, of course, but I'm afraid to keep reading. No good ever comes of a Russian nobleman once the Bolsheviks get hold of him.

It's Saturday morning now. I watched some of the royal wedding, though not live. In 1981, I watched the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana live, but I was a teenager and it was summer. Full-time working mothers don't wake up at 4:30 on Saturdays unless we have to. Anyway, it was lovely, and the gospel choir singing "Stand by Me" made me proud to be American. If pressed, I couldn't come up with a single reasonable practical justification for the existence of the royal family. But not everything is meant to serve a practical purpose.  If the Bolsheviks had understood that, then a lot of suffering could have been avoided. But as Isabelle Sallafranque tells Princess Luba Couranoff in another of my favorite novels, there had to be a revolution.

Packed and ready

When I was little, I was sure that the ground beneath my feet was 100% constant and permanent. Not in a figurative sense, of course. Quite the opposite, in fact. Figuratively, I was always sure that the world was about to end. Some things never change. But in the topological sense, I believed that any surface that was covered with asphalt or concrete (I lived in the city, so most of the outdoors as I knew it was covered with one or the other) was firm and solid, right down to the core of the earth. How could it have been otherwise?

I don't really remember how or when I came to the realization that the manmade ground on which I walked was anything but stable. But I thought about it today, as I left work. The government building where I work has a three-level parking garage beneath it. Thankfully, I don't have to park there--my company buys inexpensive monthly parking passes from the little community church across the street, where we can park our cars outdoors, as God intended. The building also has a small parking deck, supposedly for visitors only, but usually filled with employees' and contractors' cars, despite the threatening "we'll tow your car, we're really serious, not kidding at all" signs that are posted everywhere. As you walk across the parking deck, you can clearly feel and hear the hollow cavern underneath.

I have to assume that the parking deck is constructed properly, and that it's able to sustain the weight of several dozen cars in addition to the weight of the many people who walk across it every day. It feels and sounds as if the asphalt-coated concrete is only a few inches thick, and that the whole thing could cave in, at any moment.

That's a metaphor for something, but I don't know what. Pick something. It's DIY day.

Oh, and good morning, good afternoon, and good night Pittsburgh.

*****
I have wanted a backpack for a long time. I love handbags and purses in general, but I've secretly longed for a colorful but practical and sturdy backpack. But I didn't buy one, because I thought that a middle-aged lady would look silly carrying a backpack to her job as a technical writer for a government contractor. I suppose it shouldn't matter if other people thought I looked silly, but it does matter. Now, however, backpacks appear to be all the rage, and not just among college students and tech nerds and would-be iconoclasts who are determined to show how little they care about fashion. Some of the most stylish people I know are now carrying backpacks to work.

This trend couldn't come at a better time. When I worked at our company headquarters, I usually left my giant 40-pound laptop on my desk. I used Google Drive to sync everything (and don't get me started on why why WHY they replaced my beloved Google Drive with FileStream) and so when I needed to work at home, I could just use my own computer, and everything would just magically sync. Oh, the wonders of the cloud.

Now, however, I have a GFE (Government-furnished equipment) laptop that I have to carry back and forth every day. It's actually a much nicer laptop than my company-issued laptop (well, it's much smaller and lighter, which to me means that it's nicer) but it's still more than I want to carry back and forth in my tote bag, which also has to accommodate my lunch, my phone, my wallet, my little cosmetic pouch, my power cord, my notebooks, and my water bottle.

I guess I could carry less stuff.

Get outta here. That's crazy talk.

So although all of this stuff is very hard to fit into my work bag, it fits with tons of room to spare in this lovely and cheerful backpack. In fact, I can carry even more stuff if I want to! Who knows if I'll need an extra pair of shoes, or a change of clothes, or maybe some gardening tools--and if I do, I can carry it all. Go ahead and laugh, but when it all hits the fan and you need some water or a band-aid or some kleenex or a granola bar, you'll want to be with the person carrying the giant backpack.

Yes, I know: Dora the Explorer called, looking for
her backpack. Bitch is going to have to buy a new one. 

*****
I haven't posted about books in a while. My friend Megan, whose judgement I trust, recommended A Gentleman in Moscow, so I'm going to read that soon. Early-revolution Russia--all fun, all the time. I can't wait. Meanwhile, I just finished Plum Sykes' Bergdorf Blondes, a silly novel which
A. Took me forever to read because I couldn't stand more than a few pages at a time, and
B. I had already read, a long time ago, and didn't remember until I was halfway through it.

In a shocking and unpredictable plot twist (spoiler alert), the young squire whom the protagonist's social-climbing mother had been pushing her to marry and the hot young movie director whom she's secretly dating are--THE SAME PERSON. So there you are--listen to your mother, because she has your best interests at heart. Happy Mother's Day.

Tired mountains and rally towels

It's week 4 or so on the government project, and I'm starting to understand the project and the organization. And I'm neck-deep in level setting and boots hitting the ground. As I wrote once before, business jargon isn't necessarily bad in and of itself. Sometimes, a business slang term colorfully and concisely expresses an idea not expressed in any other word or phrase.

When I first started at the government site, I was a little overwhelmed. There was a lot to take in. In one of many meetings during the first week, our government boss asked how we liked "drinking from the firehose." I have since heard lots of other people use the expression "firehose mode," so I guess she didn't coin the phrase, but I thought that it was a good, apt description of a person trying to take in a very large quantity of information in a very short time.

"Tiger team," on the other hand, is ridiculous. What can a team of tigers do for you other than protect their young and prey on large mammals? I'm pretty sure they don't have any other skills, though I wouldn't tell one that to its face. Pigs and dolphins are smarter. I can easily see why you'd want to avoid standing up a pig team, given that recruitment would be difficult, but everyone would want to join a dolphin team. OR--you could just use regular words, and call it a special projects team.

Or an A team! Because everyone loves it when a plan comes together.

*****
Ignore what I said last week. I totally want the Capitals to win the Stanley Cup.

Obviously, I'm delighted that they beat Columbus in the first round, but of course, now they have to try to get past Pittsburgh again, and if Thursday night's third period shit show was any indication, then the climb is Mount Everest-style uphill.

Meanwhile, I have an official complaint to lodge with Mr. Leonsis and the Capitals organization. We attended Game 1 of the Columbus series, and although that series turned out happily, the first game ended badly, with an overtime loss, notwithstanding an early game 2-goal lead. We had hoped, when we bought the not-at-all-cheap tickets, that the traditional Game 1 giveaway would be something good, like maybe a bobblehead, or a rally towel. Instead, we got light sticks. And when you picture that in your mind, don't think about a decent, self-respecting miniature flashlight kind of thing. Picture instead a styrofoam tube wrapped in cellophane (and there's two archaic words in one sentence). Because it was a styrofoam tube wrapped in cellophane, which Boeing unwisely allowed its logo to be imprinted upon.

Insult added to injury--the Penguins gave away t-shirts at their first-round Game 1. T-shirts, for Penguins fans! Those bitches have Stanley Cups out the proverbial yinyang and they get t-shirts!

Light sticks. Hmph. You can't cry into a light stick. Round 2 continues.

*****

This is my family in 2014, at the Pyongyang Platform at Dorasan Station. Dorasan Station is the northern terminus of a railway line that used to run the entire length of the Korean peninsula. It's less than a kilometer from the Demarcation Line at the Demilitarized Zone. The sign in the upper right corner reads: "When the Trans-Korea Railway (TKR), the Trans-Siberia Railway (TSR), and the Trans-China Railway (TCR) are connected in the future, Dorasan Station promises to emerge as the starting point of the Transcontinental Railroad." As my husband explained it to me, after he visited in 2008, the South Korean government maintains the station, though it's no longer operational, so that it's ready to transport passengers between Panmunjom and Pyongyang when the two Koreas reunite.

At the time, nothing seemed less likely than reunification. Now, I guess anything is possible. Maybe Trump deserves some credit (and now my hands hurt, from typing those words). Or maybe it's a case of Tired Mountain Syndrome.  Whatever. If one or the other or a combination of those two things represent the first step toward collapse of the worst regime on earth, then it's good news. I can't imagine how beautiful and energetic South Korea will be able to absorb and integrate the undereducated and impoverished North Korean people, but that's a problem for later. Hope springs eternal, for Korea, and Capitals fans during Round 2 against Pittsburgh, and for the rest of the whole world.

Birdwatching

It's Tuesday. Last night, I was watching the Capitals vs. Winnipeg with my sons, and I left the room just in time to miss the world's greatest hockey player's 600th lifetime goal. Disappointing, but I got to watch the replay, and it was almost as good as seeing it live.

As I watched the game, I was imagining, for some reason, a character who becomes a hockey fan late in life. After choosing his favorite team, he realizes that he also needs a least-favorite team, a hockey nemesis, as it were. This character is not based on me, of course, because I have the moral clarity to know that the only hockey nemesis that anyone ever needs is present in the form of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the most evil franchise in the worldwide history of professional sports. My character, lacking such moral clarity, chooses the Winnipeg Jets as his nemesis.

"Why Winnipeg?" his family and friends ask him. "What did Manitoba ever do to you?" He doesn't deign to justify his choice or explain his reasoning. He just glares at the TV as his team plays Winnipeg. "Fucking Winnipeg," he snarls, every time the Jets score. That eventually becomes his catchphrase: "Fucking Winnipeg."

*****
Who knows where that came from. Anyway, it's still Tuesday. Speaking of fans, I'm not a particular fan of Rex Tillerson, but he did call Donald Trump a fucking moron on a hot mic, and for that, he'll always have a place in my heart. Godspeed, Rex Tillerson.

*****
After I finished Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I read Havana, which is so far my least-favorite Joan Didion non-fiction. In some ways, it reads like a period piece, with its very Reagan-era preoccupation with Latin American revolutionary politics. Like lots of other literary intellectuals of the 20th century, Didion seems to have had a blind spot about Communism. I mean, I'm sure she's right about totalitarian ideological rigidity among the Cuban exile population in Miami in the 80s, but she doesn't say much about the conditions in Cuba that gave rise to their extremism. Like many other writers who wrote about Latin America in the 80s, she (rightly) condemns Somoza, but gives Castro a pass.

I couldn't decide what to read after Havana. I have a pretty large backlog on my Kindle, but nothing was calling out to me, so I decided to re-read The Thinking Reed, one of Rebecca West's best, and that's already a pretty high bar.  It's just as good as I remembered.  The book takes place in France in the years between the two world wars. One of the principal characters is an immensely wealthy French industrialist who, despite enormous success and power, completely lacks the inclination to abuse or take advantage of the poor or powerless. "Though his ties were with the strong and not with the weak, he would not have had a sparrow fall, anywhere in the world." I have noticed that not every rich and powerful person is like that.

The best part is that it's been so long since I've read it that I really don't remember how it ends. So I'm torn between wanting to rush through it to find out (again) what happens, and wanting to slow down a bit, so that it won't be over too soon.

*****
Thursday: Have you ever cleaned behind your refrigerator? If not, then I don't recommend it. Leave it alone. Nothing to see. The less said, the better.

It had been a long time since our kitchen had been painted, and so I talked my husband into doing it. The paint looks beautiful, but the kitchen is now in a horrifying state of disarray that makes me wonder, just for a minute, if the dingy walls maybe weren't so bad. I don't like disorder. And I have to pretty much leave it as it is for now, because he has to finish the job tomorrow. Horrifying. I'm hyperventilating just thinking about it.

*****
It's Saturday morning now. The kitchen is back in order, and you could eat off the floor behind the refrigerator. Well, you could, but I don't recommend it. I mean it's clean, but it's not perfect. It's still a floor. So don't eat off it. I'll give you a plate.

*****
And now it's Sunday, and I have just a few pages left of The Thinking Reed.  When it's over, the weekend will be over. More importantly, I'll need to find something else to read.  Too bad that Comey's book won't be out until next month. I continue to be torn between actually feeling sorry for Trump's unfortunate staff, enduing threats, insults, and firings via Twitter; and wondering what they expected when they chose to serve a bullying, vindictive, mean-spirited, draft-dodging, pants-on-fire lying coward.  By the time the Comey book is released, there will probably be at least two or three more firings. My money is on McMaster and Sessions, but it could be anyone, I suppose.

Putin just won re-election by a landslide; and somewhere, a sparrow is probably falling. If it's a Russian sparrow, the richest and most powerful man in that country is claiming innocence and feigning outrage that anyone could accuse him of shooting down a sparrow, even as he continues to hold the gun. If it's an American sparrow, it has been subjected to weeks of poking with sticks, as its eventual killer decides if it would be more fun to shoot it out of a tree, or to just set a cat loose on it. I'm losing the thread on this metaphor, so I'll end this episode of sparrows here. Until next week...

The Baby and the Bathwater

It's two months post-Weinstein now, and everyone seems to have came to a sort of simultaneous mass agreement to enforce zero tolerance on sexual harassment or misconduct. All of a sudden, any man (well, ALMOST any man) who has ever behaved or spoken inappropriately has to be punished, severely and possibly permanently. 

Like lots of other #metoo women, I have mixed feelings about this. Weinstein deserves his comeuppance (the word of the moment), and so do lots of other prominent men. With super high-profile people like Weinstein and Matt Lauer, the worst offense is not so much the wildly inappropriate or even illegal sexual behavior; it's the gross abuse of power. In those cases, the public downfall is more than deserved. (And it should have happened to Donald Trump. And it should have happened to Bill Clinton. And it's not too late.)

But there's the baby and there's the bathwater. I would like to drain the dirty bathwater, and then thoroughly scrub the tub, but I don't want to discard the baby. I like the baby. I like a lot of men who might, at some point during their personal or professional lives, have said or done something offensive or stupid. In fact, I love some of those men, and I don't want to see them--my friends, or my brothers, or my cousins, or my colleagues might be among them--cast into outer darkness forever. Should we judge the behavior of twenty or even five years ago by the standard of today? Because if so, then who among us will stand up to scrutiny? 

On the other hand (there's always another hand, isn't there? It's why we have two) I have extremely limited patience with the men who are now crying that they just don't know where the line is anymore. They just don't know how to behave! They don't know what they're allowed to do or say! Because it's not that hard. If you're not intimately involved with a woman, then she does not want you to touch most parts of her body. If you work with women, then they do not want to see naked pictures of you or anyone else, and they don't want to talk about sex, either. Because it's work. See? Pretty easy. 

The larger implications of this whole thing are just beginning to become clear. Or at least one specific thing is clear, and that's that the sex-soaked culture of the last 50 years, in which every aspect of entertainment, art, sports, music, politics, and pretty much every other field of human endeavor is permeated and dominated by sex, will have to change. If we're going to hold men (and women, of course) accountable for maintaining a level of decorum that excludes recreational sexual aggression, then we probably can't shove near-naked bodies in people's faces 24 hours a day anymore. 

On its own, that's a good thing. Even if I wasn't a Catholic, I wouldn't actually want to see sex scenes in every movie. I'm disgusted and bored by crude sexual humor on the radio and on TV. I cringe when I hear the lyrics of some of my children's favorite songs. I'm tired of seeing so-called cheerleaders dressed like pole dancers.* 

But the baby is still in the dirty bathwater, isn't he? Bari Weiss** said something about revolutions taking on a life of their own, quickly swallowing everyone in their path, devouring the guilty, the innocent, and the indifferent bystanders, and it's not unlikely that this revolution will have unintended consequences. Ideally, the culture will shift toward an idea of sexuality that acknowledges and respects human dignity. But if you have been on this blog for more than five minutes, then you know that I never expect the ideal outcome. The worst case scenario is my default option. I even have a tag. 

And what's the worst-case scenario? There are any number, but the one that I can see rising to the top is a new Puritanism that combines the very worst of radical feminist hatred of men and radical religious hatred of women, in a country so divided that you won't be sure which standard prevails from one county to the next. In this scenario, Roy Moore wins in Alabama and ten years later, he's part of the moderate wing of whatever new party replaces the Republican party; the moderate wing being the one that believes that a man should only beat the women he's related to, and that a man shouldn't marry a 14-year-old girl without her father's permission. Meanwhile, in what we now call the blue states, men will be fined or arrested for smiling at women they're not married to, and state-financed abortion up to forty weeks will be a basic civil right. 

Or maybe the whole thing will blow over, and everything will be back to normal, whatever that is, in six months. I don't think so, though. I think that a hard rain is going to fall. I think there's going to be a sea change. I'm praying that it's the right one. 

*****

*That's not so much an attack on NFL cheerleaders as a defense of pole dancers. Why should we consider a stripper a social undesirable; while NFL cheerleaders, who dress and behave in the same manner, are held up as examples of wholesome young womanhood? 

**By the way, I agree with a lot of Ms. Weiss's column, but I've never heard anyone say "Believe all women." There's a huge difference between "Believe women" and "Believe all women," always and everywhere, just because they're women. It's the baby and the bathwater again. Don't throw away the very reasonable "Believe women" because it sounds almost like "Believe ALL women." They are two different things. 

That's not my name

I've written occasionally about my run-ins with wildlife. It's usually deer, with the occasional snake, real or imagined. And squirrels. And spiders. And a few birds here or there. That's usually as far as it goes. I live in the suburbs, after all. 

Last Sunday, I went for a walk on the Matthew Henson Trail. There's a vernal pool on a little side trail that leads back to the street. The county parks department posts signs near vernal pools, urging passersby to avoid disturbing them. As if I'd touch a gigantic puddle of standing water encrusted with green scum. But the green scum isn't the grossest thing about this particular pond. The grossest thing is the frogs. 

No, I'm not afraid of frogs. I'm not especially fond of them, but they don't bother me. Unless, of course, they launch themselves like missiles out of a scummy green pond and right toward my unsuspecting head. Picture frogs being shot out of cannons. Picture yourself at a sporting event, and it starts to rain frogs when you're expecting rolled-up t-shirts. 

Yeah. 

So, I made a mental note to give that little corner of nature the widest berth possible from now on, and I went on my way. And that's all there was to that. 

Until Tuesday. 

Which is when I went for another walk, at about 6:45 or so. It was still pretty much broad daylight at 6:45, but dusk falls earlier now. And dusk means one thing.

BATS.

I'm not afraid of frogs, or spiders, or most of the other creepier wildlife species, but I do not like rodents at all. I know that bats are generally harmless, and that they control the insect population, and blah, blah, blah. They're also flying rodents with fangs, and if I never see one again, it'll be too soon.

Bats are always out at night around here, and normally, they don't bother me, because I don't see them. The sky is dark, the bats are dark and they blend right in, and out of sight is out of mind (usually). But at dusk on Tuesday, the sky was a stunning shade of dark bluish gray, and the outline of the bats (hundreds of them!) was clear and visible against the blue-gray backdrop. They didn't dive-bomb me or anything, but they swirled and circled just a few yards overhead, and I pretty much ran the last few blocks home.

No run-ins with wild animals on Wednesday. Only a mysterious, one-word text message--STASI-- from an unknown number. Why Stasi? Who would text me this? I responded "Sorry, but who is this?"  but whoever it was didn't reply. It was probably a person who doesn't know how to spell Stacy. Or Staci. Or Stacey. None of which are names that I answer to. Or maybe it really was the Stasi. After all, why would they identify themselves?

I'm still in the middle of The Crisis Years, which is taking entirely too long to finish; and I'm heartily sick of the Cold War, normally one of my favorite topics. I wonder what the members of Ex-Comm would have thought about smart phones. Or sonic attacks.  Or projectile frogs, which could probably be weaponized. Or the fact that Castro outlived all of them.

I think I need to get out of my own head for a bit. I think I need to read something else. 

Oh, so I amuse you? So I'm a clown?

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.

*****
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.

*****
"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.

Tied up with string

You know what I love? The word "actually," when little kids say it. Sometime around age 3 3/4 to 4 1/4, little kids tend to start prefacing their explanations with "actually." This is funny enough on its own, but it's even better when they pronounce it "ackchully."

*****
You know what I don't love? The nightly thunderstorms this week, which are seriously affecting my swimming schedule.

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I feel like I should try to dress better. I mean, I try to look neat and appropriate for the occasion, but that's as far as it goes. But then I see someone who has taken extra care with their appearance, and they* look so nice, that I think that I should make the extra effort and take the extra time to make a better impression.

As with everything, it comes down to time. I have all the time in the world to pound out utter drivel on this blog, but not enough time, apparently, to take a few extra minutes to find some jewelry or an accessory, or something that would make me look more stylish and pulled-together.

And there's money, too. Clothes and shoes and accessories cost money, and I find that I'm willing to spend money on almost anything else. Like my 20-year-old couch, for example. It's a very comfortable, hardwood-frame couch that will probably outlast humankind, only the cushions and slipcover need to be replaced. So that's where my clothing budget for the next few months will be spent. The couch will be better dressed than me. On the other hand, it will have to wear the same outfit, every day, likely for the rest of its life.

*I have revised my position on use of the singular "they," which I hereby deem acceptable.

*****
I'm not sure how robust my annual reading list will be this year. I'm quite a bit behind last year's pace, and I don't see myself catching up any time soon. I just finished Beryl Bainbridge's A Quiet Life. It's apparently based loosely on her own life in postwar Britain. The story is told from the point of view of the older brother of a wild teenage girl who is having a secret affair with a German POW. The boy's family is miserably unhappy, and although the book is beautifully written, and short, it still took me ten days to slog through it. Well, I'm also reading another book at the same time, but a short novel is usually a faster read for me. I had never read Beryl Bainbridge before, and probably won't read any more of her work. Too depressing. She is almost as misanthropic as Evelyn Waugh, and not nearly as funny.

*****
And why am I even worried about maintaining last year's reading pace anyway? I'm not that competitive,  but I am goal-oriented. And I'm competitive sometimes, too. Swimming again, for example. I'm not very fast at all, but I can go all day. Just the opposite of running, for which I have near-zero endurance (and I'm also a slow runner, so maybe "just the opposite" isn't quite right. Maybe "somewhat the opposite" would be somewhat more accurate). I was swimming laps one night last week, and a neighborhood man, who is older than me, but fit--I see him running all the time--started to swim laps in the lane next to me. He had to stop to rest after every length of the pool, and he complimented my endurance. I modestly dismissed his praise; after all, as I explained, I'm a truly terrible runner who can barely cover a block without stopping to rest. But I was secretly pleased that I was better than someone--anyone--at something athletic.

The man got out of the pool after 5 or 6 laps, and I kept going. Another older person, a Russian lady who reminds me of Raisa Gorbachev, took his place. She and her husband, whose names I don't know, are frequent swimmers. We say hello and smile at one another, but I've never really spoken to them. Her endurance is better than the running man's, but I'm faster than she is. A lot faster. So even though she's at least 10 years my senior, I can't help but enjoy beating her pace and swimming past her, and turning before she's even 5 meters from the wall.  It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Eat my bubbles, Mrs. Gorbachev.

*****
As usual, I have no idea how I ended up getting from there to here. I started by writing about some of my favorite things, and "actually" was first on my list. Then I got distracted.

But this post is kind of about some of my favorite things. Like swimming. And books. And grammar. And trash talking about old people. OK, not the last  one. But the other three, for sure. Books, swimming, and grammar really are some of my favorite things, actually.

I'm a ray of sunshine

It's 10 PM Friday, and I'm watching "The Hunger Games" with my son. We have one more summer swim meet tomorrow morning, and then the season is officially over. I'm guess I'm relieved, but I'll miss it.

I was so busy at work today that I didn't even hear about Priebus until I was driving home. We have a President now who has made Sean Spicer, Jeff Sessions, and Reince Priebus all look like sympathetic characters. For a while, I actually felt sorry for Spicer. And now, all of a sudden, Republican lawmakers are having Profiles in Courage moments, warning Trump (via Twitter, of course) not to try to fire Sessions.

It all begs just one question: What did you bitches expect? Did you all think that Trump was going to treat you better than he treated Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and everyone else he bullied and humiliated throughout the campaign? Did you think he was going to be nice to you, just because you're on his side? I give Scaramucci three months.  I got your communications, right here.

*****
I'm still reading A Kim Jong-Il Production. Sang Shin-Ok spent several years in a North Korean prison as punishment for his second escape attempt, and it was just as brutal as  you'd expect a North Korean prison to be. Because I'm the most fun person in the world, I sometimes imagine my favorite places--the pool, for example; or Avalon, New Jersey, turned into giant battlefields or prison camps. Not, obviously, because that's what I want to happen, but because I'm afraid that it could.  Because it has.

We saw "Dunkirk" last night. Brilliant, but not what I expected. Maybe I've been married to a Korean for too long, because all of the young, handsome Englishmen looked the same to me. I liked the three interwoven stories, and Mark Rylance is great as the captain of the tiny Moonstone. But I keep returning to the opening scene, of a soldier running through the almost-too-picturesque streets of Dunkirk. He runs past the seaside hotel and onto the sun-drenched beach, where he finds queues of stranded soldiers, thousands of them, trapped with no food or water and awaiting uncertain rescue amid bombs and machine gun fire raining down from German fighter planes.

All of these places, all of the killing fields and mass graves and secret prisons and re-education camps, all started as something else. They all started as just places, where people lived or vacationed or just drove past every day without much thought, only to see them turn into hell on earth. Good prevailed over evil at Dunkirk, as it will in the end. But evil never stops trying.

The Ryan Lochte rule

I had something that I wanted to say about The Zelmenyaners, but I can't remember what it was. I can confirm, however, that it's the funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning that I have ever read. I'm reading it in English, of course, so maybe it's even funnier in the original. Anyway, I'm halfway through it.  I used to read books at a much faster rate, but a person can only read so many pages in 10 to 15 minutes a day.

The Zelmenyaners is nothing like The Cazalet Chronicles, and of course, I didn't expect it to be. I don't feel like I know the Zelmenyaners like I knew the Cazalets. Elizabeth Jane Howard was writing about her own family, so there's an intimate, knowing quality that makes the reader feel very well acquainted with the characters. After a few days with the Zelmenyaners, I still don't know one Zelmenyaner from the other. But The Zelmenyaners has a poetic and whimsical quality that's rather lovely, even in translation. There's a character who is described as refusing to come out of the house, having been insulted as a child (this is a paraphrase, because Kindle won't let me search the passage). I find this charming, and very truthful.  Most days, of course, I'm not inclined to refuse to leave the house because of remembered childhood insults. But I do remember.

I probably won't re-read The Zelmenyaners. But I'm glad that I read it once.

*****

It's 7:30 PM on Saturday. I went to the pool today, and chatted with friends, and read for a bit, and then I tried to swim. I really love to swim, and I don't mind chilly water. I do, however, object to iceberg-plowing-into-the-Titanic freezing cold, and I didn't get any farther in than my ankles. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe not.

*****
Summer swim season just started. This is our 11th year of summer swim team, so we are seasoned swim team parents. I just renewed my refereeing certification. Apparently, there's a relatively new thing called the Ryan Lochte Rule, which I learned about on Thursday night.

And now begins weeks of Friday night pasta parties, and Saturday morning meets, and writing weekly email updates, and standing on the deck with a clipboard and then being amazed at the end of July when it's all over again. I love summer.

*****
That was going to be all, because I just didn't know what else to write about, even though I've been writing in my head all day. I'm extremely prolific, in my imagination. It's about 10:45 now. I picked up my son from work at 8 and heard about the London attack on the radio, and I've been avoiding the TV until now.

I'm so tired of these cowardly barbarians, trying to drag the rest of us back into the stone age by brute force. Social media will probably be awash in the Union Jack by tomorrow, and my Trump supporter friends and family will say "See? Now do you understand?" as if my failure to vote for a corrupt and ignorant vulgarian is somehow to blame for this most recent of many outrages. And Trump was super-tough on terrorism when he visited Saudi Arabia, right? King Salman is probably still trying to wash the lip prints off his rear end.

And when it happens here again, which it will, we won't really know if it's real or staged. And it won't matter, for our purposes, because either way, the boom will be lowered. Martial law will be declared, and habeas corpus will be suspended, and the press will be restricted or silenced altogether, and lots of people will thank the administration for keeping us all safe.

OK, that took a turn. It's probably time to turn off MSNBC.

*****

It's Sunday morning now. It's beautiful and sunny and warm, and this little boy and his baby sister are coming over to go swimming later. The barbarians might be at the gate, but they're not coming in, at least not today. I have a swim team newsletter to write.

*****
I did finally go swimming today. It was freezing when I got in, but then I got used to it, and it was still unbearable.