Odds 'n' Ends

I have a loaner laptop.  Huzzah! I may get around to actually posting things I've written over the past two weeks as I have been away.

This weekend was "Psychotics in Media" weekend:  on Friday night the Rocket Scientist and I saw Black Swan and on Saturday the Resident Shrink and I saw Next to to Normal.  Nothing like watching crazy people on stage and screen to reaffirm one's basic belief that the world is in fact insane.  Watching the latter with a psychologist was amusing, however.  She says they got the psychiatry basically right.

I have a backlog of posts about several different things which I really should put up here before they become too out of date.  On the other hand, right this evening I am feeling brain dead.

The past three weeks has seen quite a number of really misogynistic proposed bills at the state and federal level.  It's quite disturbing.  It makes me feel relieved, sadly enough, that I do not have daughters.  I would not want to be a young woman now, and it would be very upsetting to think of what a child of mine would be faced with.  This does not mean that I do not fight as hard as I can against the terrible misogyny that seems to be rearing its terrible head right now, simply that it is not quite as immediate.  I recognize that this is a privilege that other mothers do not have.  My job is to raise up young men who are as appalled as I am about what is going on, and who are as determined to fight as I am.  I think I can do this.

I turn fifty in two months.  I am trying not to feel old, and also trying not to lie to people about my age. Both of them are proving difficult.  I have decided against having a tattoo, for medical-related reasons, so am at a loss to know what to do to mark this momentous occasion.  Going to a dive bar and getting really, really drunk, as attractive as it sounds, is not particularly noteworthy.  On the other hand, maybe the solution is simply to ignore it.  Age is just a number, right?

I am rereading one of my favorite "popcorn"* books:  Letters of the Twentieth Century: America 1900-2000.  It is by turns infuriating (the letters sent to Jackie Robinson after he crossed the color line), intriguing (Ayn Rand's letter to Frank Lloyd Wright -- sorry, libertarians, but she was a loon), amusing (Groucho Marx's letter to Warner Brothers when they attempted to stop him from naming one of this movies A Night in Casablanca, or my favorite, a series of exchanges between an ad executive at Ford and the poet Marianne Moore regarding the naming of a new car, or Clyde Barrow's letter to Henry Ford telling him what a great car he made) and moving (an Oklahoma woman's account of life in the Dust Bowl, a Vietnam soldier's letter to a friend regarding the killing of a nine-year-old child).  The human spirit is an amazing thing.

Goodnight all.  It's good to be back, more or less.


*Popcorn books are books that are collections of items that you can read bits and pieces of.