One thing that has come about from working is that I am once again reminded of how it is possible for people to have completely divergent political views and still get along.  Tonight, I discovered that one of my favorite coworkers, a very sweet and funny man, is a ... conservative. 

He was saying how he could not believe this country elected Bill Clinton over George Bush, Sr. I did not say anything because I have a firm rule about not discussing politics in the workplace -- I like my coworkers, and would hope they like me, and really want to keep it that way.  In my world, discussing politics (or law, for that matter) is not something to be casually bantered about while reviewing census binders. 

It is a blood sport.*   I tend to be passionate about my views -- read the political posts in this blog and that becomes evident -- and a lot of people find that passion off-putting, especially when they disagree with me.  (I do, however, try to be respectful of those on the other side.)

The end result is a narrowing of my views.  I am most likely to talk politics with people I know will agree with me. 

I do not think this is a good thing.  I am far less able to learn from people who think like I do.  But on the other hand, public discourse has gotten to be so polarized, so vitriolic, and I am by nature a conflict-adverse person. 

Who knows? There might be a great deal that my conservative coworker (whom I still think of as a lovely human being, even though I think he was dead wrong about the elder Bush) might agree on, and there may be ways in which talking with him could change or refine my views on things.

I wish I knew how to get past this.



*  The 2008 primary season was grim, my husband being a Clinton supporter and me for Obama. 

Conversations ...

Middle Son, putting away groceries:  "There's no room!"
Me:  "Fridge Tetris.  Learn it."
MS:  "I don't want to learn it.  It's a boring game with no bonuses."

Unseen Strength

My husband will turn fifty next week. To celebrate, last weekend he went skydiving. I have no plans to ever follow suit.

On my fiftieth, I'm getting a tattoo.

A butterfly, between my shoulder blades. Something I will always know is there, but not visible when I am wearing work clothes. Not that I believe in totem animals, but if I did have one, it would be a butterfly.

Butterflies appear fragile and delicate. They seem weak. This is misleading. They are far stronger than they appear. Monarchs, for example, migrate thousands of miles each year between their summer and winter homes.

I am stronger than I would seem. I am stronger than I allow myself to express, to think, to feel.

I need to remember this. Maybe the butterfly on my back will help.

Hmmm...

Since I have started writing again, I seem to be stuck in writing about myself. While the unexamined life is not worth living, perhaps there is such a thing as too much introspection. Besides, that's what I have a Live Journal for.

I mean, I do not think I've written more than two non-me posts this year.

However, it is likely to continue for some time. I think I want to get the hang of writing again before I wade into political/social waters.

Although there are a couple of posts percolating...

Such as the things that the Supreme Court did right last term. (Including, suprisingly enough, at least to me, the gun control case from Chicago.) And what I think about the people in Utah who circulated that list of alleged illegal immigrants (although anyone even remotely familiar with my politics can probably guess what that one's likely to be like).

But in the meantime, I guess it really is all about me. Hope it's not too boring.

Today's mantra...

Be Here Now. Be present in the moment, and do not fear about the future. Do not ruminate about the past. Find what is good in your life and concentrate on that.

I have had a bad afternoon, and a sad one, even though the morning was quite charming. I have been reciting the Serenity Prayer, and it's not working.

I wish I could freeze time. I wish...

Oh, hell.

One can intellectually understand that change is inevitable, even necessary, without being able to embrace it emotionally.

I have written about the job. I am still employed. However, as I said in that post, the job is temporary. People are leaving. I am sad about that.

Several friends have or are going to shortly relocate out of the area. I am sad about that.

I am feeling ill, and will be unable to go to a dinner I was looking forward to. I am sad about that.

The physical pain I suffer from seems like it will never go away. I am sad about that.

It is summer, and I am sad about that.*

I need to remind myself of the things that I am grateful for, the ways in which my life is so much better than 90% of the people on the planet.** It's a hard slog.

In the end, it comes down to: good coffee, and good people to share it with. The Pacific Ocean. Hummingbirds. Jane Austen. Really fresh corn on the cob. Rick's Rather Rich (or Marianne's) Ice Cream. Shakespeare in Love and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Terry Pratchett. Great Big Sea. Alfred Hitchcock. iTunes. The job, and the people I work with, while it lasts.

The color blue. Autumn afternoons. Art. Music.

Writing.

It may not be a long list, but it's a start.

* People with Seasonal Affective Disorder are negatively impacted by having too little light. I (and a couple of other people I know) are negatively impacted by too *much* light. Summers are rough.

** Well, there are the very obvious facts that I have a roof over my head, food to eat and shoes and clothes to wear, and I do not fear soldiers with guns knocking on my door in the middle of the night. I need to remember and be grateful for those.

Things I have learned at work

1. Good coworkers are more important than interesting work. At least in the short term. Especially coworkers who have good senses of humor.

2. I really can go several weeks without swearing. Other than an occasional "goddammit," I have been very good about not saying anything that will get me written up.

3. I cannot go several weeks without at least occasionally turning sarcastic.

4. I get cranky in noisy situations. One of the reason I have been very aggressive about snagging computer work when it's available is that I can sit quietly and work without having to feel that I need to join in the conversations around me. One of the nice side benefits is that I have been pretty proficient in the program we use, which means right now I have work. Which is nice.

5. The federal government can be completely shortsighted about the realities of workers, especially outside the Eastern time zone. Which is reflected in a computer system that shuts down at midnight EDT. My LCO is on the West Coast. So the computer shuts down at 9:00pm. Pooh.

6. I am extremely competitive. I keep finding myself repeating the Olympic motto: Citius Altius Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

7. Most importantly, I really like working.

Lastly?  A piece of knowledge that will stay with me a lifetime:  I really know how to spell "questionnaire" correctly.

Hunting of the snark

I am naturally a rather snarky person. ("Nooooo," you say. "We're shocked, shocked! to find this out.")

I am really working on this. It is, however, a measure of how comfortable I feel with a person or situation -- or how hopeless I assess it or them to be.

As I have been feeling more comfortable at work (and as the time draws near for the Job to end, *sob*) my snark level has increased. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Because, really, people do not like being the target of snarky or sarcastic comments. Or most people, anyway. Tuesday, my annoyance at a particular coworker boiled over, and I said something I immediately regretted. He took it as a sign of affection. Definitely a mixed blessing.

I also was snarky to my supervisor (or one of my supervisors) on Wednesday. I later apologized, saying "I wish I could say this was out of character, but I'd be lying." The supervisor in question seemed amused rather than offended (at least as far as I could tell), but I as I get further along, I can see that I am testing my luck.

And again, I like my coworkers. I do not want to be cruel or sarcastic, but things just ... slip out.

I'm working on this.* I'll let you know how I do.

*along with that swearing thing. In fact, now that I think of it, the less I can swear in a situation, the more I am likely to be sarcastic and somewhat nasty.

Two more things about me....

For an icebreaker at the "Hurrah! NRFU is done" party, a co-worker distributed questionnaires for us to fill out with interesting tidbits about ourselves. Most of what I filled out is found in my previous two posts on this subject, but a couple were not. So, for completeness sake, as an add on to a previous post....

22. I have a geographical feature named after me. Pat's Cove is a small and remote glacial inlet on Devon Island, Nunavit, Canada. My husband, who was the first to find a path over there and lead a traverse there, named it after me. He has since told me that names are not immutable, and that over time can be forgotten if not used or referenced, but for now, it's mine, so to speak. Pity it is in such an inconvenient location, otherwise I'd like to visit sometime.

23. Long-time readers of this blog know this, but I have had work featured on the cover of a nationally distributed magazine. Okay, so it was a back cover ad for Fire Mountain Gems, but still... for a beader, getting your work in the FMG ad on the cover of Beadwork magazine is really hot stuff.

So, maybe I'm not as boring as I think I am.

Well, he finally did it.

Echidna boy broke one of our rules for his continued use of the computer. Fortunately, not the one involving the FBI.

He downloaded Blender, an open source 3D graphics software package. He was teaching himself 3D graphic design. All well and good.

He did a few small pictures. We should have known something was going on because he started to complain that the machine was getting slow.

He then decided to do a larger -- screen-saver sized -- picture. And ended up overwriting the entire hard drive, including the operating system. He may also have overheated the CPU, we don't know yet. And he cannot find the proper OS X release to reboot the system. Apparently, a trip to the Apple Store is in order.

I am terribly conflicted. On the one hand, he fried the computer. This a serious inconvenience. (Not for me, I write on my laptop anyway, but for his brothers.)

On the other hand ... he was trying something new, and creative. He was showing initiative. He was being curious. All of these are things I am extremely proud of him for. (I've actually told him this.)

On the first hand, he still trashed the computer. We have a large, sleek paperweight on our counter. This is a very bad thing. (I have also told him this, and that he'd better not do it again.)

So, as I said... conflicted. When people said parenting teenagers was hard, I never expected this.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call and may not be denied

John Masefield, "Sea Fever"


Sometimes, there is a story which hits so close to home that following it simply hurts, and there is a temptation to go around with fingers in your ears saying "la la la, I can't hear you."

The BP oil spill fiasco is one such story for me.

I have spent more years of my life in Northern California than anywhere else. But for all of those twenty-two years, I have never been a Californian.

I am a Floridian. A Western Floridian at that.

The Gulf of Mexico was my first ocean. It is a great starter ocean, with manageable waves and warm waters ripe for swimming. Not wild and exciting, like the cold and forbidding Pacific, my current ocean. It nonetheless beckons, promising adventure in its own way, and the gateway to the exotic Caribbean. It has its own dangers, mainly in the form of hurricanes that come sweeping through in the summer months.

It was on the beaches of the Gulf that I first learned about shuffling your feet to avoid stingrays. Where I first saw the breathtaking majesty of a thunderstorm at sea. Where I first walked along the tide-line looking for scallop shells and whelks. My first exposure to sand. (I was in my teens before I learned that not all beaches have sands the color and consistency of cane sugar.) Where I saw my first gulls, my first pelicans, my first cormorants.

The thought of all of that being drenched in black, sticky crude oil almost makes me weep.

Have you ever seen a bird covered in oil? I have. Many, many years ago my brother brought home a bird that had been fouled in a small spill in Tampa Bay. The volunteers were cleaning the oil off the birds and then keeping track of them until they could be released. The bird lasted less than 24 hours, a victim not of the oil on its feathers (which had mostly been cleaned off) but poisoned by the oil it had ingested. It was a terrible way to die.

Even though veterinary medicine has come a long way since then, the toll on wildlife will be enormous. Not to mention the beaches despoiled.

I could go on a rant about how this represents the failure of the free market to create and maintain adequate environmental safeguards because they are far too focused on the bottom line, or how the dismantling or refusal to create meaningful governmental regulation of the oil industry led to this mess.

To tell the truth, I am too heartsick. I have seen the satellite images of the spread of the slick, and it makes me want to cry. While there is some hope that the beaches I grew up in near St. Petersburg may be spared, almost certainly the beaches along the Northwest coast, in places like Destin, will not.

I know for a lot of people the fate of animals matters less than people. That issues such as the Proposition 8 case now winding its way through the course are far more involving and immediate. I get that, I really do: it matters very much to me, too.

But this... I feel like I may lose the best part of what was in very many ways a difficult youth and adolescence. Those beaches go, and a part of me will, too.

Yesterday was a freaking bear.*

A person I was looking forward to having coffee with flaked. I did spend the time blogging and talking on IM, though, so it was not a complete loss. No, the trouble began fifteen minutes after I got to work.

I was in the most pain I've been in at work yet. I contemplated going home. I tried my best to keep a smile on my face and do a good job of pretending. (It helped that I had had a good night's sleep beforehand. Today, on only a few hours of sleep broken by pain, might be quite a bit more difficult.) I didn't want pity, and I did not want anyone -- such as a supervisor -- suggesting I would be better off if I went home. Because I would have. And thus far, after over two months, I have only let my disability get the better of me once (when I got sick enough from the meds that I was throwing up -- I ended up going home for three hours until I felt better). I was certainly not going to start now.

Work helps amazingly. It keeps my mind occupied, and makes me feel competent in spite of my disability. Yesterday, pain not withstanding, I kicked ass. I was one of if not the most productive production clerks in the office. (We were filling binders that will be sent out to the field over the next few days. At the end of the day I was in a virtual dead heat with another clerk for most binders assembled.) And by the end of four hours, the pain had abated somewhat so that I was able to complete the day without too much trouble.

I can't take the fibromyalgia drugs now on the market. They interact with other drugs I have to take, and have side effects that would be difficult for me to deal with. I can take pain meds -- except for ibuprofen, which my doctor has taken me off of out of conern for my stomach. Pity, because ibuprofen is the drug that works most effectively (even better, in many situations, than Vicoden, although that is better if I want to sleep).

If I go home, if I give into the pain, then I become an invalid. I've done that, and the hit to my self-esteem is in some ways worse than the pain. It certainly does not make me feel better.

Have I ever mentioned exactly how much I hate this disease?




*See? I really am trying to work on the swearing thing.

Nobody's going to die....

I was planning this morning to blog about the BP oil spill, and my reaction to it.

But you know what? It is a lovely day here in Northern California (albeit with a promise of serious heat later) and blogging about something that causes me such pain on a personal level would be a waste of a perfectly good mood that I seem to have woken up with.

So... fluff. Or maybe not, depending upon how seriously you take your television.


My current favorite show is, bar none, Criminal Minds. In spite of the occasionally graphic violence, it has a humanistic view of people that fits very well with my own. There are few monsters, and even many of the UNSUBs (the "unknown subjects," i.e. serial killers) are shown to be human, albeit damaged and very dangerous humans. The death of prostitutes, junkies and homeless people is treated as being as worthy of the same consideration as that of blond teenagers. The main characters are human, themselves occasionally capable of horrendous acts, which the writers do not excuse even as they show how people can be driven to do them.

And it has strong, strong women characters. It routinely passes the Bechdel Test.* (And yes, I am extremely unhappy at the network decision to jettison one of those strong women characters and reduce the screen time of the other.) The women are treated as being equivalent to their male counterparts.

Except the technical analyst Penelope Garcia. She is head and shoulders above the other characters, and is probably the main reason I keep watching the show.**

Garcia is probably the first character I have ever seen on television that caused me to say -- "Wait, I know her!"*** Not someone exactly like her, of course, but she is an amalgamation of a number of women I know in technical fields: uber-competent, unique, and utterly secure in their own abilities. Unafraid women, for whom a major annoyance is the failure of those around them to take them seriously.

Every time I see Garcia on CM, I think of my friend, the fabulous Sarah Huffman.

Sarah is not exactly like Garcia -- they dress differently, for one thing. But I can see in Garcia some of the attitude I came to love about Sarah.

I first really got to know Sarah on a trip to Spain. She was a sysadmin for a NASA project which my husband was running, having been hired as a last minute replacement two days before she left for Madrid. With nothing but the most general knowledge of the project. She was hired based on an interview done via Internet while she was on a Greenpeace ship off the shore of Alaska. She was able to conduct said interview by virtue of swiping wireless from various fishing villages with the help of an antenna made from, if I recall correctly, coat hangers. [Edited to add: Sarah has corrected me on this. She did in fact use an actual antenna -- hanging off a broomstick.]

When we got to Spain, chaos ensued. The scientist responsible for seeing that all the equipment got to Spain had decided, against all advice to the contrary, to go with the government shipping office rather than FedEx. With the probably foreseeable result (at least by most people) that said computer and telecommunications equipment was sitting gathering dust in California rather than in the offices of the Spanish branch of the European Space Agency in Madrid. There was panic. The project looked doomed! doomed I tell you!

And then Sarah entered the picture. She figuratively bitch-slapped people into the next week, handing out what would become a mantra for that trip for everyone: "Nobody's going to die, Nobody's going to jail." (I think we should have had t-shirts made.)

Sarah later explained to me that that philosophy had come about from working with Greenpeace, where people dying -- or certainly going to jail -- was an actual possibility. That people went out on actions with the name and number of the local legal representative written in Sharpie marker on their forearms, so that they would have someone to call when they were arrested.

After injecting a sense of reason into the proceedings, Sarah then proceeded to save their collective asses. Trips to the Corte Inglese (a large shopping center type place) and the local Ikea (yes, they have Ikeas in Spain -- except for the language spoken, they are identical to any Ikea I have been to in the States) resulted in enough equipment for her to cobble together an impromptu communications system that allowed the project to head to the field. (The government equipment later arrived, and was integrated, but it was Sarah's system that saved the day.)

The end result was that a many-hundred thousand dollar NASA project was saved from complete collapse. And there was much rejoicing.

This is a woman who is capable of cobbling together computer systems, replacing sparkplugs on malfunctioning ATVs and cooking a mean salmon with blueberry sauce. Who once went to the Canadian Arctic as a joint sysadmin and cook (not your usual combination of job responsibilities).

Sarah has moved to Arizona now, and I miss her. I am very bad at keeping in touch with people. But I think of her every Wednesday evening, when I watch Criminal Minds, and see one of her fictional counterparts shining on the screen.

It's not the same, but it's something.


*The Bechdel test requires that there be at least two women, who have a conversation, which does not revolve around a love interest. CM passes this in spades.

**Although the high proportion of handsome men does not hurt: Thomas Gibson, Shemar More and Matthew Gray Gubler are eye candy, and Joe Mantegna's voice has a tendency to make me go a little weak at the knees.

*** I have yet to see a character in either television or film that reminds me of me, unless you want to count Princess Fiona (after dark) from Shrek. Which is not exactly acccurate either, because I do not have .... red hair.

Twenty [More] Statements about me. Plus one.

I've done this before, but what the heck, I'm bored.

More things you should know about me (or not, as the case may be):

1. I don't eat fish. My father fished a great deal when I was growing up -- both as a hobby and a way to feed a household of seven -- and I got spoiled: I only ate fish that had been frozen within an hour of being caught, or fresh fish that was less than half a day old. I do like fish chowder, and clam chowder, and I adore shrimp, crawfish, crab and lobster.

2. I like to read or recite poetry aloud, although I have not been called upon to do this in public since I was in high school.

3. I used to read in church. I was very, very good at it. So good at it that at one point when I was lector coordinator I would hold workshops on how to read in church.

4. I love to travel. The number of countries I have visited now stands at either fifteen or sixteen, depending upon whether you classify Scotland as a separate country. (In my last list I forgot to include the Bahamas, which I visited on my honeymoon.) I have visited forty-four of the fifty states (everything but the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wisconsin, and oddly enough, Arkansas). [ETA: Alaska! How could I forget Alaska! Although I have now gone to Hawaii.] I have also visited the U.S. Virgin Islands. Yes, I count myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to travel this much.

5. I have a cookbook signed by Alton Brown. ("Pat, don't run with kitchen shears! Alton".) At the time I went to the book signing, I had no clue who Alton Brown was (I was simply keeping a friend company) but I have since become a big fan. AB is even cuter in person than he is on tv.

6. Red beans and rice is a comfort food for me, and it grieves me that no one else in my household will eat it. Three of them are vegetarians, and proper red beans and rice is not vegetarian (seeing how it contains both bacon and andouille sausage).

7. I have trouble remembering whether my anniversary falls on July 2 or July 3, but I can recall with ease which scientific term first appeared in a work by James Joyce, and which child's toy was created by the son of a famous architect.*

8. I hate Scotch. Passionately. Various attempts to get me to drink it have generally met with failure (with the exception of some Highland single malt I drank at the bottler's). When I drink, which is rarely these days, I drink wine or mixed drinks (I like rum-based drinks best of all).

9. In law school, my best grades were in Criminal Procedure, Advanced Criminal Procedure, Appellate Advocacy, and Evidence. Which is, of course, why I went into ... land use and real property law.

10. A man who would go on to run for vice-president (albeit on a third-party ticket) once gave me a photocopied booklet of short stories by J.D. Salinger. Matt Gonzalez is a very sweet guy.

11. I have a soft spot in my heart for Marines. I am the daughter and niece of Marines who served honorably in the Pacific during World War II, and I have never met a Marine I didn't like. My dad used to sing the Marine Hymn as a lullaby.

12. My very favorite t-shirt was a gift a few years ago and reads "Certifiable Mad Genius. I have a Death Ray and know how to use it. Better living through merciless experimentation." Unfortunately, it seems to have disappeared around the house. My favorite t-shirt that I don't own (yet) is from ThinkGeek.com, and says "You read my t-shirt. That's enough social interaction for one day."

13. My kids are messy and disorganized. They inherited this. Sadly, from their mother. Unfortunately, they did not also inherit my clear handwriting -- theirs is almost illegible.

14. I have been known to swear like a sailor, although I have been really working on this lately. Mainly because swearing a lot in my workplace can get you written up.

15. It says something about the crowd I used to run with, but for one ten-year period (1995 - 2005) I attended more ordinations than weddings.

16. Until I was forty, I pretty much dressed only in black, and shades of green and blue. At some point after that, I ended up owning six pink shirts, as well as several in shades of magenta, peach and salmon. I seem to look better in brighter colors. As the song goes, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

17. I firmly believe that life is too short to eat bad ice cream.**

18. I once typeset an entire press ready publication in Word. In 1990, when it was much more difficult to do so. (I was the managing editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal at the time.)

19. I have had one professional singing lesson. For one of my birthdays, I was given a voice lesson with Elissa Weiss, a gifted professional musician and wonderful singing teacher (and good friend) in New York, who taught me to sing "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" and suggested that I get more lessons when I get back home to California. I never followed up (sorry, Elissa). I regret this sometimes.

20. I have a fondness for underdogs and losers, which explains my devotion to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Democratic Party. (Sorry, I could not resist that last one.)

21. I'm much nicer in person than I am on the Internet, although I have still been told that I intimidate people. This confuses me no end.

Anything else you want to know?

* The answers, in case you are even slightly interested, are quark (which first appeared in the pages of Finnegan's Wake, where Murray Gell-Mann saw it, although he had previously decided on the sound that the word should have, based on the sound ducks make), and Lincoln Logs, which were created by John Lloyd Wright and based on the foundation supports created by his father Frank for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. See, don't you feel smarter already?

**Bad chocolate, on the other hand, is occasionally a necessity.

The way to a girl's heart...

Is through bad puns.*

As a public service, we here at WWF would like to pass along the most recent bits of (ahem) humor that we have run across....

First as, seen in a Criminal Minds fanfiction** at Live Journal:

A cop pulled over Werner Heisenberg. The cop walked up to the driver's window and said "Sir, do you have any idea of how fast you were going?" "No," replied Heisenberg, "but I know where I am...."


Secondly, a conversation between me and a coworker, R., yesterday morning:

R: "So why do they want us to write the CLD*** number in pen, not pencil? That makes no sense."

Me: "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die...."

R: "Yeah."

Me: "Of course, that worked out so well for the Charge of the Light Brigade...."

R: "Yep, that was a real Turkey shoot."

Me: *groan*

R: "A lot of war crimea were committed there."

Me: "Stop! Please! Or I'll be laughing too hard to work!"

(R did stop, which was fortunate from a productivity standpoint, even if it was much less amusing.)


We will, of course, be passing along any other stellar examples of the punster's art as we come across them.



*Or chocolate, of course.

**Don't ask. Seriously. I have gotten to reading slash on the CM fan community on LJ. Why, I cannot fathom.

***Crew Leader District. R and I are census clerks. Again, don't ask. It's all pretty boring.

Who Am I?

I have been rereading this blog lately, from the beginning. And I keep running smack dab against an overwhelming question:

Who is this woman?

I have changed so much in the past two years that in many ways the woman I was seems a stranger, light-years away from the me that lately has been feeling so old, so empty, so ....

Me.

I am no longer involved in my church. The story behind that is a long, painful, and odd one, which I do not have the fortitude the discuss here. I am still devastated by that loss, even as I recognize that most of the culpability lies with me. Perhaps as a result of this, I have been undergoing a profound crisis of faith: in spite of the fact that deep down, I do believe there is a God, I have trouble believing that He gives a damn about what has happened or what will happen to me.

My children are rapidly becoming adults. The Not-So-Little Drummer Boy (who now no longer plays the drums, sadly) is nearly twenty, and will be entering his sophomore year in college this fall. I am afraid for him: this is a dangerous time of life. At the same time, I have to stand back and let him fall on his own, if for no other reason than he has to learn how to pick himself up again without my help.

My middle child, a wrestler no longer, will be a junior in high school. He continues to struggle with his Asperger's, although he is getting much better. He has shown an interesting love of entertaining, and organizing social events for his friends. He is an extrovert -- something I marvel at all the time. (Being an introvert of the first order, I have a great deal of trouble understanding extroverts, even though my husband and two of my children fit that description.)

Echidna Boy (who still does love echidnas) is turning out to be ... an interesting kid. He starts high school in the fall. On his Facebook, he has friends who are girls at high schools in different cities who are two to three years older than him. He had a crush on a young woman, and wrote her a sonnet. An actual honest-to-God sonnet, with the proper rhyme scheme and everything, and which included phrases such as "thou art brighter than starlight's face in june" (okay, so capitalization and spelling are not his forte) and "for one tender kiss, a mountain I would wring." I did not even know what a sonnet was at thirteen. Did I mention that he has red curls and is really cute? Personally, I think we should just ship him to a monastery NOW and save all of us a world of trouble. He likes to watch documentaries, discuss politics and physics, and has read all the way through Goedel, Escher, Bach, which is more than than I can say.

He is also trying to learn to be a computer programmer. Our rules are simple: don't do anything that will screw up the operating system so that we'll have to reload or that will result in permanent damage or loss of data, and don't do anything that will result in the FBI showing up at our door with a search and/or arrest warrant. He rolls his eyes at that last one, but I know my kid: he will go after anything because, in the words of Sir Edmund Hillary, it is there.

To see them grow up creates such conflicting emotions that I don't know what to do. I am pleased with the people they are becoming, yet a large part of my raison d'etre for the past twenty years is deserting me. If you identify yourself primarily as a mother, finding out who you are beyond that is a frustrating and bewildering task.

I am in pain a great deal of the time. Fibromyalgia is not my friend, although it is my constant companion. I have not yet hit a point where I cannot work, and work helps keep me from fixating on how much everything hurts. I cannot hide the pain from my face, however, with the result that last Saturday, two different supervisors asked me if I was okay. "I've worked through worse," was my answer, which satisfied one of them, although she did remind me that I could take however many breaks I needed provided I accounted for them on my timesheet.

The other gently replied "But we don't want you to have to," when I mentioned that I had worked through worse pain. "Do you need to go home?" "If I go home, I'll just ruminate." "Okay, then! Pull up a comfortable chair!" (That comfortable chair is often his chair, which I swipe whenever I can, because it hurts less than any of the others in the office.)

I am currently temporarily employed by the federal government as a census clerk. I love the people at my job, although the work is often not, how shall I put it, the most engaging endeavor I could be involved in. Pulling in a paycheck, even if it is a relatively modest one, helps as well, as does the realization that, yes, I am capable of working full time outside the home,* something which has not happened for eighteen years before this summer.

I used to write better than this, I think. A lot of that had to do with simple experience: I wrote a great deal more in 2006 and 2007. Practice may or may not make perfect, but it sure does help one improve.

Yet, looking through those old blog posts, some things still resonate: my politics are about the same, even if I have been overcome by "outrage fatigue" over the past few years. (Do not get me started on the current Republicans, or the Tea-Party people, or the ways in which the Democratic Party has failed to make real change.) My belief, too, that we need to recognize the humanity of those on the other side -- even when they are acting like unmitigated horses' asses -- and make some attempt to try and understand them remains intact. My pro-choice and anti-death penalty** beliefs are, if anything, more deeply held.

My hatred of torture, by whatever name you call it, and my fury at those who espouse it, stand unabated.

Art matters.*** Poetry matters. Music matters.

And I am still here.

That matters, too.


*Yes, stay at home mothers do a lot of work, too. My blog is not the place to engage in the mommy wars.

** Some of the law in that link is outdated, but the general point is not.

** Not too long ago, I found a list of the top ten art museums in the world. I have been to seven of them. This makes me irrationally happy. I might have a chance to pick up another -- the Vatican museums in Rome -- this fall, and I am trying to figure out a way to go to Florence to see the Uffizi. And I will get back to London some day to see the Tate Modern. (I had a brief visit to the older Tate, to see the pre-Raphealites.) As I said, art matters.

To everything there is a season, and
a time to every purpose under heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

The last two Enumerator Questionnaires rolled into the office today. NRFU (Non-Response Follow Up) is done.

It is bittersweet.

Sweet, because this was what we were working towards. All those days reviewing hundreds upon hundreds of EQs. All the evenings when I left late because I was frantically entering information into the Census databases before the system went down at nine o'clock (my nominal ending time).

Tonight I left on time. I felt... odd.

Bitter, for me, because it threw into sharp relief the transitory nature of this work. It will be done before too long. I will say goodbye to the good people whose company I have come to enjoy so much over these past two months. Work which has been fulfilling will be over.

This job has been a godsend. It has let me hear adult voices other than my own; voices full of warmth, humor and intelligence. It has given me common purpose with others.

It has let me be part of something larger than myself; something that matters. A job which I originally took on because I desperately needed the money became so much more than that.

I have been useful. I have been competent. Through all the many months of unemployment, I had forgotten how satisfying that feels. It soothed a craving in my soul I didn't even really know I had.

And now...

Once this is over, it is back to the depressing round of resume after resume being sent out, usually with no evidence that human eyes have ever seen them. Of emptiness. Of loneliness.

I am determined to enjoy the next few weeks. If I have to lose this so soon, I will at least have gotten every ounce of benefit it has to offer. And then, its season done, it will become only a memory of a time in my life full of purpose and companionship.

I'm going to miss it.

The wisdom of Yoda .... yeah, right.

My youngest son graduated from middle school last week. It made me feel old, and odd, to think that from here on out, I will never be the mother of small children. On the back page of their graduation booklet, they included the famous quote from Yoda: "Try not. Do or do not. There is no try."

Other than the bizarre fact that they are looking to a fictional character for guidance ..... What the hell sort of advice is that to give to anyone, let alone thirteen-year-olds?

Just think of the message. No race should ever be run unless it can be completed. No project or experiment should be undertaken without certainty of success. Trying is for losers.

Wrong. Trying -- and failing -- is how we learn things. We gain insight into ourselves, and we learn skills to help us do better next time. At the very least, we learn that perhaps we shouldn't have tried that in the first place, which, if we stop to figure out why, can be enlightening indeed. More often, we learn what it is to strive, to work towards a goal, and that value lies in the journey, not merely in the destination.

Much better is Samuel Beckett's take on these things: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Best of all is Robert Browning: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be inclyded within this Union, according to their respective numbers.... The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. Article 1, Section 2, United States Constitution.

It's census time! Or actually, it's past census time -- the actual deadline for filing the forms was, perhaps unfortunately, April 1.

Then it was time for the long hard slog as enumerators -- the people charged with going door to door and tracking down households that didn't return their questionnaire -- were out in the field.

This matters to me because, as of April 26, I have been a temporary employee of the Census Bureau. I'm a fed. Yay. Unfortunately, my job is almost up. It's been, well, sort of fun.

I am not an enumerator, which is just fine with me: they have to face dogs, and people yelling at them, and the occasional firearm (not in our area, thank God). I'm a clerk, just one of the small army of clerks and other office workers who support their effort in the field: preparing binders, affixing labels to questionnaires, double-checking -- triple-checking -- to make sure that every household who did not return their form gets counted.

It's not rocket science. It's not even remotely glamorous.

There are, however, compensations. I work with and for good people (Hi Mike, Karen and Beth, in the extremely remote chance you are reading this! And Roger and Roger and Karen and Tom and Kristi and... well, everybody else!) And, deep down, I do feel significant.

What I am doing matters. The Census matters. It will affect the life of the country in very real ways. And I am a part of that. A small and probably insignificant part of that (I do recognize that I am fungible), but a part of that nonetheless.

In it's way it's as important as the voting work I used to do. Or more so. Voting changes things. The Census makes voting accurate and fair -- or at least as fair as it can be in this messy thing we call democracy.

So if an enumerator comes to your door, or if they or a Quality Control person calls you on the phone, please be nice to them. They're only fulfilling the Constitution's requirements.

It's your patriotic duty.

Hi, I'm Pat. Will you hire me?

It's downright depressing.

I am 48, with a J.D. and a lot of life skills under my belt, with a recent work history with a former supervisor who is willing to praise me to the skies at a workplace where (I have been told) I am still much missed, and for all intents and purposes I am an entry level employee.

You see, I was at my last job less than three years. And it was a part time job, at that. Before that? A homemaker for twelve years.

Volunteer work? Doesn't count -- not paid. Legal work and law school? Doesn't count, too long ago. Anything before law school? Forget it.

I can write. I can oversee projects. I can coordinate. I can problem solve and troubleshoot. I am a big-picture person. My people skills, according to an art instructor who called to see under what conditions I would return to work at PAL if she could get them to pay me, are "phenomenal." I can get along with just about anyone -- my customer service abilities are kick ass. (I'm not that good of a sales person, though.)

At my last employer, I developed a reputation for calm under fire. (Oddly enough, I often totally fail to bring this quality to my personal life.) I was the one who talked to the difficult instructors, the difficult students. And you know what? I didn't mind doing so. People who would be routinely abusive towards other staff would back off with me.

Oh, and I can data-mine, and I know Word and a limited amount of Excel, and am taking classes in April in Power Point and Access.

I would be an asset to your organization.

Problem is, I am an entry level employee at a time when there have been mass layoffs in my area. Employers are asking for people with two to five times my level of experience -- and getting them -- because they can. Add to this my necessity for a flexible schedule, and I am going to have a damn hard time finding a full-time job, or even a part-time job that pays what I need it to.

I am having a difficult time figuring out even what I should be looking for. I have not seen a lot of jobs in the public/private sector that correspond to my former non-profit job. I did an online job assessment, and some of the answers came back: counselor, clergy, and librarian. In other words, occupations which would take yet more schooling, for which I don't have the time or money. Or, in the case of "Clergy," no calling and possibly not the temperament. The only one that seemed slightly reachable was "First Line Supervisor of Maintenance Personnel."

So I am at a crossroads. I need a job, sooner rather than later, and it is almost certain I will end up with something less than my abilities can contribute. Hopefully I will end up with an employer who will give me an opportunity to grow the job to fit who I am.

Anyone who knows me for any length of time knows that I am irretrievably opposed to capital punishment. Nonetheless, some people just deserve to be taken out and shot: the doctor who published the study linking autism and the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine has been reported to have falsified data to get the results.

I am the mother of a high functioning autistic teenager. Although my son is now doing quite well, it has been a long, hard slog to get to where we are. I understand the frustration and the desire to find an answer -- any answer -- to "why did this happen?"

The MMR study was pernicious. Aside from creating unnecessary guilt in parents and unwarranted anger towards the pharmaceutical industry, its claims led thousands of parents to refuse to have their children vaccinated, on the grounds that they were risking a disease which was presented as almost worse than death.*

There is a reason vaccines were developed against these diseases. To dismiss them as "childhood diseases" ignores the fact that they can kill. When they strike adults, they can cause sterility, or in pregnant women, birth defects. (One of the questions I plan to ask my sons' fiancees when they get engaged is "Have you been vaccinated against rubella? If not, why the hell not?") And it's not just the MMR -- there are parents who refuse to allow their children to have any vaccines.* I have heard some argument about the chickenpox vaccine, and am less dogmatic about that one, but the MMR? And the Diptheria Pertussis Tetanus vaccine? Every child should have those.

Fortunately, we eradicated smallpox -- and polio in the Western world, although it still occurs in Africa and parts of Asia -- before the anti-vaccination hysteria took hold.

There are people who cannot be vaccinated due to honest to God allergic reactions to the vaccine or the ingredients they are made from. But when most people have been vaccinated (i.e., above 95%), the society as a whole becomes immune, protecting even those few individuals who cannot be immunized otherwise.

Vaccination is not merely to protect the individual, it is a civic responsibility; to shirk it is not just poor parenting, it is a failure of proper citizenship.



*And do not get me started on the people who claim that they can "cure" autism, like Jenny McCarthy. Just don't.

Do you like it?

New Administration, new look.

So this week, in his first week in office, President Obama* signed an executive order stating that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay was to be closed in a year. There were immediate protests.

A few, from the very far left, complained that a year was a long time . Well, duh. Due process, which is what is needed here, takes time. You can't simply dismantle something as large as Gitmo, and arrange for the proper disposition of the detainees.

Some of these people are dangerous. Very dangerous. They need to be treated as such.
Some of these people are not dangerous. They need to be treated as such.

Figuring out which is which will take time and the operation of law, the same as it would for any criminal.

The other protest comes from the right, and can be best summed up by the Fox News Headline : "Do you want terrorists in your backyard?"

Funny thing, that. We already have terrorists in our backyard. Remember Eric Rudolph, guilty of abortion clinic bombings and the centennial park bombings? And then there are the Oklahoma City conspirators. We had Timothy McVeigh up until we executed him. Terry Nichols is serving life. Mike Fortier, who testified against McViegh and Nichols at trial for the Oklahoma City bombings, got only twelve years in prison. We have the Unibomber, Ted Kaszinki, and the terrorists behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

We have serial killers. We have mass murderers. We have serial rapists. Somehow we are able to accommodate all these very violent criminals in our system, and keep the rest of us safe.

That's what maximum security prisons are for.

In any case, the purpose of Gitmo was so that suspects could be rounded up and kept under lock and key without due process of law, without the benefits of either the Geneva Conventions or habeas corpus. The Bush Administrati0on fought tooth and nail to delay actually letting any of the detainees have their day in court. Not that they didn't have enablers: the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2006 stripped detainees of some of their most basic rights. (The Military Commissions Act was struck down by a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court in June, 2008.)

Consider the case of Mohammed El Gharani, who was 14 years old when he was captured in Pakistan some seven years ago. He has been at Guantanamo since then. The U.S. government, according to the findings of U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, had relied mainly upon statements from two other Guantanamo prisoners in determining that El Gharani was an enemy combatant. These statements, the judge found, were inconsistent, unverified, and not backed up by any other evidence. In short, the sort of thing that would have been tossed out of court had the young man been tried in the U.S. seven years ago when he was first brought in to Gitmo. Judge Leon ordered his release and for the government to the make all arrangements forthwith.

Seven years. Seven years based on unverified reports by other prisoners already in the hands of people who have admitted to using "enhanced interrogation techniques." I do have a concern that this young man is dangerous -- that we have radicalized him by his detention and treatment. That does not mean that we can continue to ignore our ideals, just that we may have increased risk to ourselves.

And then there is the case of the Chinese Uighurs. The Uighurs are a religious minority in China. They cannot be sent back there because they would be persecuted. The Justice Department doesn't want them sent to the United States. so they sit in detention at Gitmo, in limbo. The government claims that they would be a danger to the United States because they have had military weapons training.

So have many members of white supremacist groups. And, as my husband said, "we made the mess, we need to clean it up." And how can we ask other countries to take detainees if we won't ourselves?

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama said:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.



*Hee hee. The joy of saying that has not worn off yet.

I don't know about you, but one of the things I am looking forward to with the new administration is the capacity to feel outrage over my government again.

For years, the Bush administration committed atrocity after atrocity. There was torture, there was the wiretapping without warrant of members of the public and the military, there was the blatant stifling of science in the name of political and religious agendas, there was the outing of a career CIA operative for political revenge, there was the politicization of the Justice Department and other parts of the administration which should never have been politicized, and I could go on. The Supreme Court had its share of bad decisions -- the Ledbetter decision chief among them -- and Congress, too, disappointed mightily, most notably in its refusal to hold people accountable.

After a while, it began to be too much. Another outrage against conscience, law, or common sense on the part of the President, the Court, or the Congress, elicited an emotional response of "Yeah, it happened again. So what else is new?" Burned out and jaded, I suffered from "outrage fatigue." When you expect absolutely the worst from your government, nothing it does can come as a surprise or a shock.

But this is a new day, to use a hackneyed phrase. I have hope and expectations for and from my new president, and from the new Congress. (I view the Supreme Court as a lost cause, at least for now.) I have standards they need to meet.

They are going to fail in some of them. In some cases it will be a difference of opinion, in some cases because I think they are just plain wrong, and in some cases dangerously wrong. Indeed, there are already one or two areas where I see the Administration heading off in what I think is the wrong direction. (Afghanistan? Really? And in a rather more trivial matter, we could discuss Rick Warren. Or not.)

Over the next four to eight years, I fully expect to be outraged by some of the decisions made by my government. It is an institution made by man, with all that that entails. The men and women who inhabit its branches will fall short, although hopefully from error rather from corruption.

But I have hope that they will not fail so much of the time. This, more than anything, makes the possibility of outrage so much more palatable than its certainty.

Here we come a caroling....

Last Saturday I attended a caroling party, and I discovered an unpleasant truth about myself.

I am turning into a Puritan, at least where Christmas is concerned.

The Puritans, you may recall, prohibited Christmas celebrations as being ungodly. I wouldn’t go that far, but clearly something has to be done.

To get back to the caroling party. We sang all the Christmas carols people remembered liking that were in the songbook. We sang a few non-religious songs (“We Wish You A Merry Christmas,”“The 12 Days of Christmas,” “Deck the Halls” and “Wassailing Wassailing”) But most of the songs we sang were Christmas hymns, beautiful and lyrical and deeply meaningful.

Except we left out “the depressing verses.” You know, the verses that dealt with sin and redemption or sacrifice or the need for salvation. The ones with actual theological content.

I knew very few people at the party. None of them well enough to ask, “why are you singing Christian hymns if you find the basis for Christianity so inherently distasteful and depressing?”

Christmas is not about babies in mangers. Babies are cute, sweet, nonthreatening. Christmas is also not (just) about goodwill towards all people – who could argue with goodwill?

Christmas is about God made manifest on earth in the form of a human being – an unsettling thought – who will sacrifice himself for the sins of all the earth. The enormity is difficult to grasp. (The resurrection? Beggars the imagination.)

That manger stands in the shadow thrown by the cross, from light reflected from the empty tomb. Christmas’s light is thrown out against that shadow.

Without the cross, all you have are babies in mangers. How pretty. How… meaningless.

Don’t get me wrong, I think generalized holiday cheer is great – as long as it is generalized holiday cheer. And I give and get gifts like many other people. But subjecting everyone – regardless of faith – to “Merry Christmas”? Just plain wrong, regardless of what Bill O’Reilly says.* I say, let's have more "holiday parties," because all of us need to do something at the end of the year to cheer up, not so many "Christmas Parties." Because no one should be subject to proselytizing when all you want is to have a good time. Unless you also want to have a hanukkah party (or eight!) for your Jewish friends, and a Solstice celebration for your pagan friends....


Season’s Greetings to you all.



*and before anyone brings it up, I do not think that the Great Commission in Matthew ("go forth and make disciples of all nations") requires you to cudgel people into saying "Merry Christmas," even if they or the person they're speaking to are not Christian.

Writing Exercise #1

[Note: This is the first of several attempts to make myself write whether I feel like it or not. It's pretty rough going. Feel free to skip.]

During the late campaign, Sarah Palin showed herself to be a thoroughly undistinguished individual, unfit to be just a heartbeat -- or a stroke, or a reoccurance of cancer -- away from the presidency. However, I though the Katie Couric interview in which she was unable to state what she read most illuminative.

Not because of what she read, but because she refused to answer the question at all, instead giving a generic non-answer answer.

I am not Sarah Palin. I am more than willing to answer what I read. It's not at all pretty.

I read the morning San Jose Mercury News, most mornings. I glance at the online edition of the St. Petersburg Times, the best newspaper in America. I, I am abashed to say, devour Entertainment Weekly the day it arrives at our house. I read the good parts (i.e., European politics, science, arts) of the Economist when my husband buys it when he flies places. (Is it just me, or has the Economist gotten much much more conservative in the part five years? Or have I gotten more liberal?) In doctor's offices I read Smithsonian, Time, or People, depending upon what is available and what sort of mood I am in. At the dentist's office I read Sports Illustrated, because she is the only office that has an SI subscription. (When I was growing up my father had an ironclad rule: I was never allowed to read SI before he was. Never. I have tried to instill the same ethic regarding the EW in my household and it has failed -- someone is always going off with it. I suspect my eldest son.)

Books? What are they? Every once in a while I will read another one of the Anne Perry Thomas Pitt mysteries, although I am pretty much done with them now. I re-read Pride and Prejudice every so often, because one must, if no other reason than to appreciate the expanded role of Colin Firth in the A&E miniseries. It also has one of the best opening lines in all literature.

And Connie Willis. In discussions of Science Fiction I almost always say "The only sf writer I read is Connie Willis.

I also read nonfiction "list books." These are not books with a thesis and a coherent argument, but collections of disjointed facts centered around one subject. I have a ton of those, and I love reading them. I adore dictionaries and histories of the world.

The vast amount of reading I do is online. Blogs, blogs, and more blogs. LiveJournal. Now Twitter. Not that I comment -- except irregularly at Making Light -- but just that I vicariously tap into other people's lives, either on a perrsonal level (LJ and Twitter) or intellectually (everything else).

I keep trying to think if this means I have too little time on my hand or too much, and it constantly amazes me the people who both seem to engage a great deal online *and read* a lot of books (excepting those for whom it is a profession. That I show a certain lack of intellectual rigor.

Methinks I need to work on this.

If for no other reason than it will make it easier to find something to write about.

Decisions, Decisions...

To work on my beaded Christmas/wedding presents...
Or do my necessary resume distribution for the day...
Or blow off both of those and go see Milk at the Castro Theatre with friends.

I need a Magic 8 Ball.

Reclaiming myself

I am going to engage in that most hackneyed cliche of bloggers: complaining how hard it is to find something to write about.

I pride myself on being a good writer. Good communication skills are part of my self-identification. Yet I have fallen out of the habit of actually engaging in any writing.

Part of it is time. When I was working, my tie was spent working and beading. Beading has an outside chance of being a money source, at least to the point of supporting my beading habit. Writing does not.

I have read that one should write three pages long-handed every morning. I can't do that. My fibromyalgia makes it hard to write more than a paragraph without experiencing considerable pain. I have no such problem when typing. But unfortunately when I type I spend a lot of time self-editing.

So the answer is a to write some every day here. The quality will be rough, and I may not have as many cites as I usually do -- they take time -- but maybe I can relearn the skills which are such a part of who I am.

Picture!

In response to my last post, Barbara requested pictures of Elvis. Attempts to scan the ad were unsuccessful, due to my lack of ability with the equipment I had at hand, but I do have a picture snagged off the web from the Fire Mountain website. (By the way, the same tree is also in the Fire Mountain Comprehensive Jewelry Maker's catalog on page 249.)

Elvis is made from copper wire and malachite beads and 6/0 transparent green seed beads. The ornaments are made from a variety of beads. The snowmen are Swarovski faux pearls.

Elvis was a finalist in the 2007 Fire Mountain Beading Contest. I think they used him for the ad rather than the Christmas tree which did better in the judging simply because it showcased a wider range of their products. In any case, it's cool: I think of it as the equivalent of having a short story published.

Good News

I realize that, because this blog has been nearly comatose, nobody is reading much anymore, but just in case you are ....

One of my beading pieces, officially named "Lilliputian Christmas Tree" but unofficially called "Elvis," is featured in a full-page, back-cover ad for Fire Mountain Gems and Beads in the December 2008/January 2009 issue of Beadwork Magazine.

Full-page. Back-cover. In a slick, nationally-distributed magazine. Hot damn.

Bad News

I realize that I had let this blog go dormant, primarily because I was working.

I have been laid off.

What this means for the future of this blog remains to be seen.

It has been way too long since I have posted here. But I had to break radio silence simply to point out out that I have been a Tampa Bay Rays fan since before they stepped on the ever verdant Astroturf of Tropicana Field, and that the past week makes up for an awful lot of conversations which went like this:

"The X are doing really well this season," other baseball fan.
"I'm a [Devil] Rays fan myself," me.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!, or, if they are gentle souls, "Oh, I'm so sorry".

Ten years. Ten years of always being the miserable losing team -- not cute, not lovable, just bad. We weren't even the '62 Mets, who at least were amusing in an Ed Wood so-bad-it's-funny sort of way.

And this. Better than any of our dreams had a right to be. And with the strong possibility of getting better still. I just wish my Dad, who passed away the year before the franchise was awarded but who always wanted to see a MLB franchise in St. Pete, could see it. Not bad for a team representing not a state, not a city, but a body of water.


GO RAYS!



[Edited to add: This was from the year they reached the World Series, but lost to the Phillies.]

Two MIllion, Six Hundred Thirty Thousand, Eight Hundred and Eighty Minutes

As Keith Olbermann would say, today marks the 1827 day since the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

1827 days. 365 days x 5 + 2 leap days = five years.

How do you measure the years?

In inches of newspaper columns about the war?
In number of times the photograph of George W. Bush, standing so faux-heroically on the deck of the carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln (the irony of that location reduces me to simple incoherence), has been displayed by an uncritical or pandering press?
In in number of chances Congress has had to do something -- cut off funding, and if that did not work, then at least try to impeach the man -- that they have failed to act upon?
In number of politicians that have said, in an error of critical thinking skills so profound it must make one despair of the American educational system, "We fight them over there so that we do not have to fight them over here?"

In terrorists created by our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq?

In lives. Always in lives.

4063 Americans dead. 29,000 wounded. God knows how many others with psychic damage as yet unrevealed.

That's just Americans. A 2006 study published in the British medical Journal the Lancet estimated the "excess deaths" from all causes during the war (violence from all sources (not just inflicted by American military), increased illness due to collapsed infrastructure leading to lack of sanitation. etc.) to be over 600, 000. Even the Iraq Body Count Project, which records only media cross-checked deaths due to violence, had reached over 90,000 as of April 30, 2008.

Families torn apart. Families living in fear. Both here and there.

We have lost other things as well: our innocence, our security, our way as a country. Sometimes, looking back five years, it seems like a surreal dream. We are fighting a war in which young men and women are dying and having their lives destroyed and we sit and argue over what a presidential candidate's pastor said. Or whether another one was telling the truth about something completely inconsequential that happened years ago in Bosnia.

Why the hell are we not talking about THIS? Why is not every news broadcast ending with casualty counts? Would it make us too uncomfortable? Damnit, we need to be made uncomfortable. And not just on anniversaries, every day. We need to be constantly reminded what this war is costing us in human lives and suffering.

Maybe then people in high places will get serious about ending this.

There have been five anniversaries; that there be no sixth before we leave Iraq might be too much to ask for, but there sure as hell better be no seventh.

Jeremiah Wright was Barack Obama's pastor. Hillary Clinton -- and others -- have said that Obama should have left his church after Wright made his controversial statements.

Okay.

But a pastor is not the church. He may run the services and have the most visible role and (in the worldly sense) be the most powerful man in the congregation, but he is not the community.

The community is...

The old ladies who have the prayer group who are always requesting God's help for everybody, whether they ask for it or not. The youth minister who makes sure that a bunch of unruly adolescents have a group to run with that won't lead them into trouble. The men who helped landscape the yard for the woman whose husband was dying of cancer. The mothers who organize the church nursery. The Sunday school teachers. The women who make sure that there are refreshments after the service.

It is the man struggling with addiction; the woman with mental illness. It is the family dealing with death and disability. It is those who found community after a long time wandering in the wilderness; it is those who are descended from generations of clergy and church leaders.

The church is people. At its best, the church is connection. It is the chance to experience God in other people.

How could he walk away from that?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Aside from the double standard -- what about all of the conservative politicians over the years who have embraced right-wing religious figures that condemned the United States for its perceived moral failings in language no less strong than that of Pastor Wright? -- Hillary Clinton and many others have stated that they would have just "walked out."

All of which makes me wonder -- what sort of church, if any, do these people attend? Is church a spectacle? Something they consume, like entertainment? Or a community, of which they are a part? Walking out on a show is one thing. Walking out on the community quite another.

I know, because I have done both.

I am a progressive who has spent a great many years in churches more conservative than myself. I was raised Roman Catholic, and was rebaptized (I refuse to say "born-again") as a Southern Baptist in the early 80s. In that time, I sat through many a sermon equating birth control (let alone abortion) with murder, and homosexuality as a grave sin, and (in the SBC) detailing why a woman is subordinate to a man. I gritted my teeth and stayed in my seat, because it mattered to me to be part of the body of Christ gathered in that place. So I stayed, even though my heart and conscience told me the church leaders were wrong.

And I was not alone: there are people in the Roman Catholic church who strive to change it to be more welcoming and more inclusive of all people. It was hard for me; I can only imagine how hard it must be for my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. I had no calling to the priesthood, but other women I know did, and had to leave the faith into which they were born to follow that call.

The first time I walked out of a church, it was the Roman Catholic church in which I had grown up. On third Sunday in January, the priest gave his usual anti-abortion sermon. And it was a doozy.

Abortion was murder, he said. Women who had abortions were the vilest evil human beings on the face of the earth, for which there could be no forgiveness.

I sat frozen. I was home on winter break from college, my senior year. I knew that a friend of mine had had an abortion. I was saddened by her decision, even though I knew why she had made the decision she had made, and felt deep in my heart that she had acted out of fear and uncertainty. She was not the devil incarnate; she was a frightened woman in her early twenties.

I left. And as I left, I knew I was leaving for good, and it was hard. My mother was there, and a lot of the people I had grown up with in the church. I was walking out on the community of faith that had nurtured me from a child, and it hurt.

The second time I walked out on a sermon... was a very different experience. My husband and I were shopping for a church, and were in a large SBC church which I found uncomfortable from the beginning. And that was before the Tim LaHaye gave his guest sermon.

Yes, that Tim LaHaye. It was before the Left Behind books, with their atrocious writing and even worse theology, when he and his wife Beverly were the hottest shots around on the evangelical lecture circuit.

I expected the "abortion is murder" and the "women be subservient to your husband" exhortations. This was the Southern Baptist Convention, after all. But then LaHaye stated that women who placed their children in child care were selfish and evil and destroyers of society. What? I had had enough. I was sitting about two-thirds back in the sanctuary, in the middle of the row. I got up and left, as noticeably as I could, and my only regret was that I had not been able to get a seat closer to the front. I never looked back.

I had not been a part of a community, had never fit in at that church. I was a consumer, not a participant. Leaving meant nothing at all to me.

The third time I left a church service, I did so quietly, from the back, crying in anger and frustration, during a sermon given by a man I consider a friend at a church which was not merely a community but a home. It was hard, but necessary.

But this time, I did not leave the community. I went in the next week and talked to the priest about what he had said, and what I felt.* In the end, I did not change his mind, nor he mine, but we recognized that disagreement need not mean abandonment. Much like Barack Obama does when he talks about not abandoning the pastor who taught him the love of Christ, even though that pastor has made statements he vehemently disagrees with.

Because that's what being part of a faith community means.



* On at least one other occasion I argued with this pastor while he was giving his sermon. I didn't really intend to, I just couldn't help myself. He was actually amused. I would not suggest trying this with most clergy, however.

Sibling Rivalry...

Now the Manning boys have matching rings. How sweet.

Gold and Darkness

Today, January 31, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of America's entry into space. On January 31, 1958, the aptly named Explorer I took to the skies from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, headed to earth orbit where, besides being a "Anything you can do we can do better!" response to the Soviets, it amassed evidence of the Van Allen radiation belts.

Happy Anniversary.

It is an anniversary that falls amid other, more sobering, dates. January 27 marked 41 years since Apollo 1 caught fire on the pad at Kennedy Space Center, killing Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. January 28 was 22 years since Challenger exploded a minute after liftoff, killing Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair Gregory B. Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. As of tomorrow, February 1, it will have been five years (already?) since that horrible morning in 2003 when Columbia, the first and best of them, disintegrated on reentry over East Texas, killing Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon.

I suppose one could pontificate pompously on the price of exploration, and how great discoveries often require great sacrifice. It would be true, and crass, and trite.

I make no pretense to being a disinterested observer. My mortgage is paid for by programs which hopefully will someday send humans to Mars. I have lived with a man for twenty-five years who has space exploration as part of his psyche; a NASA lifer who just got his 20-year pin. A man for whom the question has never been "Should we go into space?"but "How do we get there?" And space fever is contagious.

I do not have an answer to the question "Is it worth it?" To state that a loss of any life makes the costs too high , in what is essentially still a complicated enterprise fraught with endless opportunities for disaster, is as wrong as saying that the death of brave men and women -- who knew that they were involved in a possibly catastrophic endeavor -- do not matter. I do think that exploration is part of who we are, for good or ill: we can no more as a people renounce our desires to boldly go where no man has gone before than we can renounce our passions for sunlight and moonlight. To explore is to learn, to know -- curiosity is a basic human drive.

So we do what we have always done: mourn the sad anniversaries and rejoice in the successes. They become entwined, one around the other, the past and the present and the future.

And through it all, we still reach for the stars.

The other reason I've not been around as much is my new time sink: beading.

Including things I've made for myself and those made for others (all my female relations got jewelry this Christmas), I've made probably a couple of dozen (mostly wire-wrap) bracelets (takes an hour), two or three necklaces (ditto), a fair number of pairs of earrings (which don't take that much time individually but it adds up -- and I've lost a shameful number of them), and spent time just playing around. All of which takes up time formerly spent blogging.

And then there is Elvis. And the baby Elvises.

Elvis is a Christmas tree made of malachite and copper wire, with ornaments. It takes an hour and a half just to string the "popcorn and cranberry" garland made of Ornela seed beads. Not to mention the little snowmen made of Swarovksi faux pearls. He stands 15 inches tall; the baby Elvises -- three smaller trees made for family and friends -- stand between six and nine inches tall. All of them were time and labor intensive. (At least by my standards -- I don't have the attention span to, say, knit sweaters.)

Elvis (so named for a LJ post about him which began "Elvis has left the building...") is my first effort at serious designing. He was a finalist (alas, not anything more) in the 2007-2008 Fire Mountain Gems Beading Contest. (Fortunately, Fire Mountain is on the West Coast -- I drove the piece to Oregon, since I saw no way to actually ship it. The smaller trees -- which did not have a base -- were taken East for Christmas on the plane, not shipped.) He also convinced me to keep my day job: I could never to hope to sell them for enough to compensate for the time spent making them. So now I just make them for closest people, blood and chosen.

Art Wars

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away…

Oops. Wrong opening.

Once upon a time, er, in Palo Alto, California, there was an arts non-profit organization. It was, although flawed, a good and exciting place. It had potential. It was going places. (Metaphorically speaking, although there was a certain possibility of physical expansion as well.)

Except …

Then it wasn’t. There were (unfounded) allegations of bad faith, backhanded deals and outright fraud. Good and honorable people were slandered, their work belittled. A coterie of people undertook to make what once was a wonderful place to work a battlefield.

So we quit. That’s right, WE. Most of the board of directors (leaving a few for a transition period) and the ENTIRE junior staff (all five of us, including the weekend receptionist) resigned on January 9. It was enough to make the pages of the Palo Alto Daily News (which had provided ongoing – albeit incomplete and biased – coverage of the controversy). Because, let’s face it, a wholesale staff resignation says something about an organization. And not anything really good, either.

The Executive Director, a.k.a., the boss I would walk over hot coals for, did not leave. I can say that I am not the only one who is worried about her.

As for me, two emergency rooms visits in one week with disorientation and heart palpitations, followed by overnight admissions to determine that I had had neither a heart attack nor a stroke, made me consider that just possibly this was not a good situation for me to be in. That, and developing stress-related hypertension.

Several of us have talked about how “someone should write a book about all of this.” So someone should – and from the staff viewpoint – but although the truth is a defense in libel actions I don’t have the extraneous cash just lying around to fork out for attorneys. To tell the truth, I am a tad nervous about this post, although I have tried to make it as milquetoast as possible and with nothing that is not verifiable from already published sources.

I still mourn, a bit: I had a job doing work I enjoyed for a boss I adored with coworkers I very much liked and respected. How many times do you hit that trifecta?

But as rough as the past three months have been, I would not have traded this experience for the world. It has given me a confidence that I previous lacked. I had been out of the paid workforce for a long time – and I now know that I can survive, even thrive there. (Before things headed south starting in late September but really going to hell in a hand-basket in late November, I was doing quite well, thank you.)

I learned that I have skills people value: I write well. I am not afraid of computers. (I became the office registration/membership sysadmin by virtue of saying “I can figure out how to do that,” rather than “No, I don’t know how to do that.”) I have a sense of humor. I have the capacity to be civil to almost anyone under trying circumstances – I almost never raised my voice at a customer, member or instructor (and God knows, some of them deserved it), even though I occasionally had to walk away without speaking. Once, when I was wondering aloud why I got so much less crap thrown my way than younger staff members (I was the oldest weekday staffer by probably fifteen years, other than the ED), an instructor told me that it was that I exuded an “air of competence.” (Either that, or word got around about that law business. I was asked about it a couple of times. Although I don’t refer to myself as a lawyer, and certainly don’t use it to intimidate people, in this case I’m not going to quibble.)

I’m flexible. I am willing to do what needs being done – the words “that’s not in my job description’ were never uttered to refuse a task, although they were sometimes used to point out that I needed to be allowed more time to work on my primary goals. My boss referred to me as the office “Utility Infielder.” It’s a title I held with pride: I wanted it on my business cards. (My actual title was “Education and Development Coordinator,” which is much more boring.)

But I also learned what stresses me out: people. Those interactions I mentioned above? Hypertension city. Even routine interpersonal interactions were, by the end of the day, exhausting. I like my coworkers a great deal, and I was fine dealing with them, but the general public, or the membership, or even the instructors? Tough. I dreaded just calling instructors. (With two or three exceptions.) At the end of the day, I would go home and just want to hide. My family hated this: I was so peopled-out from work I could barely stand to be around them, as much as I love them.

I am an introvert of the first order. People often don’t see this, because I can be a chatty and friendly introvert, but I am an introvert nonetheless. And I can force myself to do customer service, and do it well, but over time it takes a toll. (I have decided not to pursue a job that at least two people have recommended to me precisely because it would require a high level of interpersonal interaction, even though I know I could do a very good job.)

So this has been a learning experience. And I have come through it bloodied but unbowed. My blood pressure is a bit lower, which pleases my doctor. (Dr. W: “What did we say you should do for the blood pressure, other than quitting your job?”) My sense of humor is intact. I have had no lasting ill effects. My major concern is that a prospective employer will see that my last job was of a short duration (under nine months) and be scared off. All they would have to do is talk to my references, though, and it would be clear that it wasn’t my work that was at issue. (Do you think it would be tacky to attach the PA Daily News article announcing the board and staff resignations to my resume? Yeah, probably.)

I’ll still be around the organization a little bit: one of the instructors (one of those who wears a white hat, metaphorically) talked me into taking a watercolor class. Although taking classes was a benefit accorded to employees, I was always too frazzled to actually take advantage of it while I was there: it was always “next quarter, I’ll get around to taking….” watercolor, or printmaking, or stone carving, but I never did. I am tremendously excited: I expect I will be rather mediocre, but that’s okay. It’s going to be fun, anyway.

And there is a possibility I may do contract work for the organization in the future (I have a skill and experience set they need), but the circumstances will be very different. They need me. Hopefully, they are smart enough to realize this. If not, oh well. It's their loss.

And now I have at least some time to write, so you may be seeing more of me in this space. After all, there’s so much to write about…. The upcoming Olympics in China, why I hope the Giants win the Super Bowl, the funniest things my kids say, squirrels and popcorn machines, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.

Oh, and yeah, isn’t there some sort of political thing going on, as well?

No matter. I'm still here.