My own post for today, on fear of Muslims and religious tolerance and the election of public figures, did not come together in time.  Just as well.  I'd rather have it in good shape and my thoughts as clear as I can before I post it.

However, I would like to post a few links.

The first, to Terry Karney's post for today, "Today, call me a Muslim ."

The second, to a post made about three weeks ago by Fred Clark over at Slacktivist, "Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated."

 And finally, for everyone of all religious persuasions, "God Angrily Clarifies Don't Kill Rule."

Movie Quotes

I actually have two substantive political posts in process.  I am too brain-dead to work on them right now, so I decided to write fluff.

Tonight, on FaceBook (I have been spending a lot of time on FB lately, so sue me)  I found occasion to write some of my favorite movie lines.  Here are twenty of my favorites, in no particular order (they're from memory, so if I don't get them exactly right feel free to correct me in comments).  The starred ones are ones I have actually used in conversation, more or less:

1.  "Are you crying? There's no crying in baseball!"* A League of Their Own  (I've used this at actual Little League baseball practices.)
2.  "Aristotle was not Belgian.  The London Underground is not a political movement.  And the central tenet of Buddhism is not "every man for himself."  A Fish Called Wanda
3. Also, from the same movie: "I've worn dresses with higher IQs than you!"
4.  "Houston, we have a problem."* Apollo 13 (Okay, as the wife of a NASA lifer, what do you expect?  I say this to my kids.)
5. "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."* Cool Hand Luke (Again, a favorite to say to my kids.)
6.  "I coulda been a contender."* On the Waterfront (Let's not discuss Jeopardy!, shall we?)
7.  "...So do all who live in such times ... All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
8. "It's 106 miles to Chicago.  We have a full tank of gas, a half pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."* The Blues Brothers (There was this trip where we drove across the Midwest.  I must have repeated this quote across all of Illinois, usually followed by a giggle.  My family was not amused.)
9.  "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."* The Wizard of Oz. (See above comment.)
10. "So what? Noah was a drunk.  Look at what he accomplished."  (Dogma, the best movie about religion ever made.  There was also a hysterical opening screen about platypi, but I can't remember the exact wording.)
11. "Badges? "We don't need no stinkin' badges!"* Treasure of the Sierra Madre (usually used with something substituting for the word "Badges")
12.  "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..."* Finding Nemo (Usually repeated to myself as a mantra.)
13. "I didn't recognize you without the handcuffs." Rent
14. "It will work itself out." "But how?" "I don't know, it's a mystery."* Shakespeare in Love
15. "It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage."* Raiders of the Lost Ark
16. "I love you!" "I know."* The Empire Strikes Back (Quite frankly, after that exchange, Han deserved to be frozen in carbonite.)
17. "I am shocked! shocked! to find gambling going on here!" (Casablanca.  In fact Casablanca is a gold mine for great quotes.)
18. "We'll always have Paris. We didn't have, we, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.... But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that." (also from Casablanca)
19. "Look, it's Ethel Barrymore!" (Singing in the Rain.)
20. "Look, Princess, let's get one thing straight - the only person I take orders from is me." "It's a wonder you're still alive." (Star Wars)

And one I hope my kids never say again: "There can be only one Highlander!" (Okay, so we were in Scotland, but still.  On the other hand, I think they were getting back at me for the Blues Brothers quote the year before.)

My favorite movie quote exchange came at the Apple store.  The "genius" and I were trying to get an operating system problem resolved, and the laptop was simply not cooperating.  I softly said, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," and, without missing a beat, the Apple guy came back, "I can't do that, Dave."

What are your favorite quotes?

Because I'm bored, but too brain-dead to do anything useful

I almost never cross-post from my LJ to here*, but you know what? It's 1 a.m. and I am very much awake.  (Note to self:  Coke has caffeine, stupid.  Drinking it at 11 p.m. and expecting to get to sleep anytime soon? Not wise.)

So, about my LJ...  I have a quiz there.  Some time ago I made a cd mix called "Pat's Soundtrack."  The quiz is composed of odd lines from the songs, to see if people can identify them.  Just in case you're up at 1 a.m. too, and as bored as I was.  Or in case you're just interested.  Or like proving to yourself how musically savvy you are.



*I sometimes cross-post in the other direction.

Rats.

I have been trying to comment to blog posts here, and the stupid Blogger won't let me.  Pooh.  Other people have complained about this in the help fprum but I have yet to see a satisfactory answer.

Who you gonna call?

I may be going to hell for linking to this.....

My one hope in life is that whatever God there may be has a sense of humor, or I am totally screwed.

The wonders of Photoshop

(Sound not necessary, video absolutely)

Small Graces.

I allowed myself a day to mope. Not to grieve: I suspect that will be a much longer process.

I did what I often do when my heart is troubled: I drove.  I drove one of my usual haunts in time of despair or self-doubt -- Highway 1 from Half Moon Bay south to Santa Cruz.  (The section from Half Moon Bay to San Francisco is far too developed for it to be soothing to my soul.)  I drove it the complete length and then, in an unusual move for me, drove it back (instead of going over the hill on Highway 17).  (I suspect that was because I did not have time to fulfill my real wish, to drive to Monterey and south over Big Sur. ) I am a creature of the sea:  the sound of the waves and the smell of the spray heals me in a way that few other things do. I stopped several times along the way (including a lengthy stop at Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz) just to ... be.

And as I drove, I listened (and sang along with, loudly) my current mix tapes, which are entitled "Comfort Food 1" and "Comfort Food 2."*  They contain music which, for various reasons means a lot to me.

And as I drove, it occurred to me: for someone who is having such struggles with faith, with the notion of a loving and merciful God, I sure do have a lot of religious music** in my iTunes library.

There are traditional hymns:  "Simple Gifts" and "Amazing Grace" sung by Judy Collins; "River of Babylon" by Sublime; "Down to the River to Pray" by Alison Krauss; and my very favorite, the Cat Stevens version of "Morning Has Broken." (I am still seeking for versions I like of "Thou Art My Vision" and "Seek Ye First".)   There are songs which are "secular" which nonetheless use explicitly Christian language and imagery: "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister, or "Travelin' Thru" by Dolly Parton.***  There are songs which include very strong spiritual elements: "Prince of Darkness" by the Indigo Girls or "Asking Us To Dance" by Kathy Mattea. Not to mention the entire soundtrack to "Godspell," and a couple of songs from "Jesus Christ Superstar."  And these are just examples.

Maybe I have them because I am seeking... something I once had but lost.

I have been looking for God for a long time now.  It occurred to me on that empty, lonely stretch of Highway 1 today that maybe I am looking in the wrong places.

I keep waiting for the epiphanies, the miracles (usually involving someone else, which is never a good thing).  I am waiting for the tongue of fire in the upper room, the bolt of lightning on the road to Damascus.

But maybe what I need to understand is God in the small graces, in the still small voice.  The grace of the faces of my children, and the voices of my friends.  Of the realization that there are people out there who love me and who will actually care what happens in my life -- and whose lives I care about, too.  That there are people who respect me for who I am, not ignore me because of what I am not.

Of the sea and the birds and the sky at sunset.  Of golden poppies in the spring and crepe myrtle in the summer and glorious leaves in the fall.  Of autumn and winter nights that close around me like a comfortable blanket.

Of the world around me.  Of creation.

Maybe those aren't such small graces, after all.


* If you are at all interested, the playlists can be found here.
** There is no "Contemporary Christian" music there, for the simple reason that I have yet to find any at all that I like.
 *** I am uncertain how to classify "Hallelujah," written by Leonard Cohen and sung by Rufus Wainwright.  Yes, Cohen used a lot of Biblical imagery, but it seems to me for another purpose entirely.

When is a child an adult?

We have certain standards for when children become adults in this country.  We believe youngsters incapable of making the commitment to marry (or have consensual sex) without parental consent, in most states until sixteen, in others eighteen. We state that young people are too irresponsible to vote (or smoke) until they are eighteen.  We hold that they are too reckless to drink (except for active duty military) or, in most cases, enter into contracts, until they are twenty-one. (And most rental car companies will not rent to people under 25.)

On the other hand, we hold them perfectly capable of being adults, of understanding the world around them, when it comes to violent crime.  In that case, in some states, they become adults at the age of.... twelve.

In 2001, twelve-year old Christopher Pittman took a double-barreled shotgun and killed both his grandparents, set fire to the house, took the family dog and SUV, and fled.  The facts are not in doubt:  Pittman has admitted to them in court.  Prosecutors tried him as an adult.

A jury took less than a day to convict him of the double-homicide.  Because he was tried as an adult, not a juvenile, the judge had no ability to take his age into account when sentencing: he received thirty years with no possibility of parole. 

This for a child -- and what other word is there for a twelve-year old ? -- with a troubled past, who had been on anti-depressants (including recently started Zoloft), and who had been twice abandoned by his mother, who claimed that his grandfather had beat him with a belt.  Who had been on Paxil, an antidepressant no longer prescribed for people under the age of 18.

The state held him in juvenile detention for three years before trying him.  It is noteworthy that the jury was faced not with a twelve year old, but a with a fifteen year-old.  Someone who looked, in other words, much more like the adult he was accused of being.

The Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal.  That thirty-year sentence, with no possibility of parole, stood. 

[Note: in the lengthy time I have spent thinking about this case -- I started writing this post in June -- Pittman received post-conviction relief from the circuit court on July 27.  The circuit court did so based on the failure of his attorneys to seek a plea bargain.  The state can appeal, however, and I would be very surprised if they did not do so.]

This summer, the Court, in what should be an obvious result (but with SCOTUS, that which should be obvious sometimes is ignored), held that life-imprisonment without possibility of parole for juveniles for non-homicide crimes is unconstitutional.

Interestingly, or perhaps maddeningly, the Court merely now states that juveniles must be offered a chance to show parole boards that they have matured enough to not be a danger to society.

And when will that be? Ten years? Twenty? Thirty?  And what will this once child be like at that point?  Arguably, a long prison term may make a once-child-now-adult more dangerous to society, not less.

Yes, there are children who will grow up to be serious menaces.  Perhaps trying older juvenile repeat offenders as adults is not such a bad idea.* But children -- and I refuse to consider a twelve-year old, or thirteen year-old** anything other than a child -- deserve help, and a chance.  To do otherwise is to throw them away.

Or we might as well declare them adults for all activities.  Because if one is capable of landing in jail for such a possible length of years, what's a little drinking compared to that?

*While the Supreme Court dismissed another case involving a thirteen-year-old for procedural issues, the case it did decide involved a sixteen-year-old. Someone much closer to being an adult.

**The facts in the Sullivan case are atrocious: a thirteen-year old was convicted of rape on "voice identification" by a witness that had been blindfolded before the crime, and more importantly, the testimony of two older co-defendants who identified Joe Sullivan as the assailant, and who received juvenile sentences.  (That brings up the issues of using co-defendant testimony, but that's a rant for another day.)  DNA evidence, which was available, was not introduced at trial, and has since been destroyed. His attorney filed a brief on appeal stating that there were no issues. The attorney has since been disbarred. 

The gift was ours to borrow*...

The job ended Friday.  My efforts in support of representational democracy are done.

I knew it was temporary when I took the job.  I just never expected to find it so meaningful.  Or to have such wonderful coworkers.

I never expected to care so much when it ended.

I knew the end was coming -- I had been told a week ago.   I was not alone in going -- the office is paring down to a skeleton crew in preparation for closing.  Of the crew in field ops, three clerks other than myself were let go.  There was similar attrition in the other departments.  Even before then, I knew it would not be long: all field operations had finished a week ago.  I was pleased that, just as with NRFU,  I got  to enter the last EQs for NRFU Res, the last operation, closing it out.

On Friday, we had a pizza party for lunch, followed by a lovely session in which the LCOM (Local Census Office Manager) spoke to us about how well we had done and all we had accomplished.  He insisted that everyone speak. When I spoke I said that I had no regrets, other than it had not lasted longer. I reminded him that he had told us the first day that we would be working with people who were all vastly overqualified for the jobs they were doing, and to enjoy them.  He was right.

I stayed for much longer than I expected, much longer than I had any right to expect.  I ended up being the most junior clerk in field ops, and possibly the most junior clerk  in the office.  It was an honor.

One of the wonderful things about staying was that I got to know my bosses better.  Especially my grandboss, a warm man with a wicked sense of humor.  And I got to know the few clerks that remained, especially those who tended to work in other parts of the office.

Friday, I said the things to people that I felt I needed to say.  To one boss, who left on Wednesday for a trip, and to whom I said goodbye early, I told what a wonderful and supportive influence she had been.  I told my other bosses how much I had enjoyed working with them, and thanked the boss with whom I worked most closely for his support through some of the difficulties I faced.  I told the LCOM that I firmly believe that the tone of any organization starts from the top, and thanked him for fostering such a wonderful work environment.  I told the supervisor in QA how much I had enjoyed his silliness over the months. I told AL, a fellow clerk, how he had always been the clerk I aspired to be.

Walking away was hard.  I find myself wondering things, from the serious -- how will shipping the field binders back go with so few people -- to the silly -- what's going to happen to the field ops rubber band ball?  (It had started out when one of the crew leaders had returned her rubber bands in a ball the size of a baseball, and we had just added to it over the following few days.  When I left it was almost the size of a miniature watermelon.)

It is rare that you can be part of something that matters so much with such great people.  As I said, I have no regrets.

How often can you say that about anything in life?




*A line from What I Did For Love, from A Chorus Line.  I had it stuck in my head the entire week.

Congratulations...

To  my LGTB friends --  may you have the chance to marry  before the opponents of same-sex marriage can get a higher court to agree with them.  I have yet to read the District Court's opinion, so I can't talk about specifics, but I am very happy at the outcome.  (I understand there are some interesting standing issues -- and I find standing a very engaging topic -- but again, have not read the opinion, or cursorily glanced at news reports of the legal manueverings following it.)

More Conversation...

Echidna Boy:  So, Mom, what do you think the weaknesses of the Census databases are?
Me:  a) I don't know, and b) if I did, I certainly would not tell you.

In the subsequent conversation, I learned, among other enlightening things,* that his Computer Media teacher had decided that he was one of the four kids in the class most likely to hack the school computer, and put special controls on them.  Echidna Boy, of course, told this with a great deal of pride.

We are soooo doomed.


*His big goal for the year was to be put on the media team that handled the live announcements over the closed circuit television, and Rickroll the school.  His teacher, who really is nobody's fool, refused to let him anywhere near the media team.

Laughing hard, I am.

wcg at Live Journal pointed me to the wonder that is  #wookieleaks.

My favorites, other than the ones listed in the article?

"Plans to drain Degoba swamps to build planet sized WalMart meets resistance from green party. " (@jjd241)


and


"austerity measures announced on Dagobah system, Yoda's pension to be reduced by half, forced to give up costly elocution lessons" (@Poscillio)

My very favorite, as mentioned in the Atlantic article, is:  "Protocol droid fluent in 6 mil languages discharged for violating DADT." (@daudig)
 

Assessing my social media

I have ...

(in order of adoption)
a Live Journal (actually, I have four LJs, in one of which I never wrote anything and two of which are moribund)
a Blogger blog (this one)
a Twitter account*
a Face Book page
a Dreamwidth account (mainly to have an archive of the first six years of my LJ)
a Linked-In account**

I read LJ to keep up with my friends there.  I occasionally post things of a more personal nature there, because I can friends-lock potentially embarrassing or sensitive material.  (I have posts there about work, for example, that should never see the light of day.***)

Lately, I write here.  I do not know why -- I get less feedback and there is less sense that anyone is reading than either with LJ or certainly FaceBook, but I just seem to like the interface or the type of writing I do here (which is similar in many ways to the public posts I did in the first couple of years of my LJ).

Most of my friends are on FaceBook.  FaceBook's policies make me nervous, and the interface makes me twitchy, and I keep getting friends requests from people I either barely know (or in one case) actively detest.  But if I want to keep up with people, I need to look at their FBs.

Sigh.  It was so much less complicated back in 2002 when I started all this social media stuff.


*Twitter I mainly got in case I was in a collapsing building and needed to notify the world.  You think I'm joking, but I'm not. (I was working in unreinforced masonry building at the time.)  The simple truth is that I am too verbose to be able to say anything much in 140 characters.

**because networking is the way to get things accomplished, right? Too bad I suck so badly at it.


***No, there is absolutely no Title 13 material posted there, or anywhere else by me.  If you don't know what this means, don't worry about it.

Enquiring minds want to know....

If someone has simply mentioned FaceBook in passing, not telling where or what name their FaceBook account is under, is okay to try and search them out anyway?  Or is it simply too stalkerish?

This in no way applies to children.  They're fair game, no matter how old they get.

Perspective

Tonight, Echidna Boy and I were playing (what else?) MarioKart.   "I'll tell you what, I'll choose the exact same Kart as you, so we'll be identical."

"Oh, so you can say 'we were exactly alike and I still pwned you?'," I responded.

"Mom, no one says 'pwned' anymore.  It's back to 'owned.'  'Pwned' is so, so 2006 -- a dark, bleak time for the Internet."

Alrighty, then.  Good to know.  This from a kid who was born a couple years after I first went on the Web.

Odds and Ends

The mood, she is good today.  I am on an even keel. Pain is relatively low.  Hurrah.  My current assignment is not to wait for the other shoe to drop, but enjoy the moment.

I have given the kids an actual writing assignment, on the grounds that they need to be doing something other than playing MarioKart online, or watching Futurama on Netflix.  Their assignment is to write two essays: one about what they want to do on our vacation, and a rather more important one of what they hope to get out of the coming school year.  Middle Son, predictably, asked if he could do a simple list rather than an essay, where Echidna Boy already has his outlined.

There is good news in my life: the job I love will continue for a short while longer.  In telling me I was allowed to stay a bit longer, my grand-boss told me I do "fantastic work."  Very ego-gratifying.  The good thing was that I had already come to the conclusion that I do very good work, so that his words were a confirmation rather than a surprise.

I think the reason I do so well at this -- and other jobs I have held -- is attitude.  I fight to get interesting assignments.  When I hit a roadblock, instead of saying to my supervisors "this is a problem, take care of it" (although I have to do that a lot, too), I also say "this is a problem, teach me how to take care of it myself."  So the result is twofold: I tend to get more interesting work and my work tends to get noticed.

I need to contact the boss-whom-I-would-walk over hot coals for and tell her.  She will be pleased for me, but not the least surprised.  When I told her that I had to discontinue the volunteer work I was doing at the non-profit she works for because I had a paying gig with the Census Bureau, her reply was "They're lucky to have you."  There's  nothing like having people whose opinion you respect tell you you are capable to boost your confidence.

Oh, and someone passed my resume along to a non-profit and told me last night that they love it, and are simply worried that I will have another job before the end of August when they are planning to hire. I am very excited about this.  This does not mean I will have a job soon; but it does mean that I will be considered for a job.  This is wonderful.  I have no doubt that me being employed currently has helped.

Although I tend to be annoyed at the constantly boring weather (no summer thunderstorms!) in Northern California, the sky does tend to get an amazing color of cornflower blue.  Wow.

Rocket Scientist gets back from the Arctic in a few days.  A good thing: they have had minimal communications this year, so he has been out of touch.

This afternoon, I have had good coffee and good conversation, two of the things on my list of "Things I am grateful for."  Maybe I'll take the kids to Rick's for ice cream, and make it a trifecta.

On the other hand, I already have commented on the blue sky.  So that covers "the color blue."  And I am writing. Maybe tomorrow I will go to the ocean.  If I do, I will have made a good start on covering the whole list; other things will come up.

Just this very second, I am happy.

I don't feel like discussing context, at least not yet, but I wanted to post the following, if for no other reason than to look at it in moments of self-doubt:

Damn, I'm good.

Ah, an xkcd comic absolutely relevant to this blog.

To other people, I am the human equivalent of sensible shoes.  Comfortable, supportive, almost invisible.  I've never been anything else, really.  Maybe sensible shoes getting really worn around the edges and falling apart, now.  I've come to terms with this fact, for the most part.

But for just once in my life....

I really, really wish I could be someone's black velvet stilettos with diamonds in the heels.

Today at work was not bad.  Well, not for me, at any rate.

Yes, a situation which had cropped up a day or so ago went completely pear-shaped.  That was okay with me because a) the screwup was not my responsibility and  b) it meant that Yay! I had work to do all day.  I hit 4:00 -- one hour before time to leave -- and went "Whoa! It's 4 already?"  Okay, so it sucked, but I am really trying to look at the bright side of life. (*cue Eric Idle whistling*)

And I reached a milestone: I discussed politics with TL.

TL is a nice young man.  I like him a lot.  He is, however, far more conservative than I am. (But then again, so are a great many people.)  The first formulation of my "Do not discuss politics at work" ended with the phrase "....with TL."

Today, however, we got to talking, and I discovered.... there were things we agreed on (such as how for-profit health insurers are bad for people, for instance).  And even on things where we disagreed, we talked politely and civilly.  And he made me reconsider one of my positions on a recent controversial court case.

So, I am feeling rather good about my decision to actually engage.  Life is more interesting this way.

Note to kid

Dear Echidna Boy:

You learned a valuable lesson tonight, to wit:  it is extremely inadvisable to take a picture of a young woman playing Twister when she has her butt up in the air.  She is likely to react badly.  And, unlike in olden days, she is quite likely to smack you.

And so will your mother, when she hears about it.  I'm so totally on her side in this.

Love, Mom

My secret weapon...

Echidna Boy is a night owl.  Getting him to go to bed before 1 a.m. is very difficult, especially that we don't currently have the threat of school looming.  (He comes by it naturally: my first week of work I worked 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m., and loved it.)

Tonight, he went to bed at 10:30.  Why?

I don't know with any certainty, but I am pretty confident that it was because I was insisting on watching the six-part PBS series Broadway: The American Musical in the living room and persisted in singing along with the soundtrack.  He left halfway through the hour on Rogers & Hammerstein.

Show tunes: effective against teenage boys.*  Hee hee.


*Of course, it could also have been my singing.

Just a normal family viewing television...

We were watching the Dr. Who episode about Vincent Van Gogh.  After grousing about the fictional museum curator anointing Vincent "the greatest artist that ever lived,"*  I seriously geeked out over the cinematography of the scene where the Doctor wakes Vincent up.

"No, really, guys!  This is seriously cool! They've shot it to mirror the painting! Don't you see? That's not  normal perspective! The angles are all wrong for it to be normal!  Just like Vincent painted it!"

Middle Son replied -- for his brother as well as himself -- "Mom, that is why we cannot watch anything with you.  Seriously.  It's only a television show, for crying out loud."

Well, excuuuuse me. I thought it was cool.

*I'm not arguing that Vincent was not among the greatest artists of all time, but I'll see your Vincent and raise you a Leonardo and a Vermeer.  Quite honestly, there is no such thing as "the greatest artist of all time."  Art is not something subject to review by the Guinness people.

Well, that's a relief, sort of.

South Florida catches a break.

From the St. Petersburg Times:

The powerful Gulf of Mexico loop current, which seemed primed three months ago to thrust oil to the Florida Keys and beyond, suddenly changed course and helped protect much of Florida's cherished shorelines.

Now, with BP capping the leak, a growing number of scientists think the loop current will help spare South Florida and the east coast from large amounts of BP oil.
....

 "Things look excellent," said Frank Muller-Karger, a biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida. "They have not looked better in the last two months."

Pollution from the Deepwater Horizon site has blanketed Pensacola and parts of Louisiana and Alabama. Texas saw tar balls.

So far, most of Florida has caught a break.

Tampa Bay and the west coast have been spared because they are separated from the spill by the shallow, 150-mile-wide West Florida continental shelf. It would probably take days of tropical storm-force winds to push oil to the shoreline.

The Keys, which were supposed to get oil weeks ago, have seen nothing from the BP spill, researchers say. It's the same story along Florida's east coast.

Good news, except for the poor people in the Panhandle, Alabama and Louisiana. Here's hoping the hurricane season continues to be quiet, although the most storm activity tends to be in August and September.

Okay, I'm sorry... One more post

True story:

I was on Jeopardy!  I was one of the probably well over a hundred people who were cannon fodder for Ken Jennings' runup to $2 million.  (Ken, by the way, is a lovely human being, and very funny to boot.)

At any rate, by the time Final Jeopardy rolled around, I was toast.  In the break between taping Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy, I commented to Ken that all those hours my kids had me playing MarioKart to speed up my reflexes hadn't worked.  His response?  "MarioKart?  I love MarioKart.  I nearly failed a couple of classes in college because I spent all my time playing MarioKart!"

So the moral of the story is: Keep playing, kids.  You never know when those MarioKart skills will come in handy.

From xkcd.com

Just one more...

Okay, so by this time you are perfectly fed up with me posting.  (Seven posts in one day? Geez, girl, get a life!)  And you're probably fed up with xkcd as well -- although that would be a shame because it is so darn funny.

But I saw this one, and I had to put it here.  It is geeky, geeky, geeky (although not nearly as geeky as the one about Paul Erdos -- sorry, I have't figured out diacritical marks yet) and I love it.  It reminds me of an advanced logic course I took at MIT more years ago than I care to remember (and I'm certainly not telling you).

I am seriously displeased

For technical reasons, I have had to delete one of my all time favorite quotes from my sidebar.  This will likely be the case until I can figure how to eliminate said technical glitch.

The quote?

"An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it."  Don Marquis.

I firmly believe this to be true.

I have taken it very easy today.  Pain levels are the lowest they've been in a very long time.  I have done nothing but hang out, blog (a lot!) about inconsequential things, and nap.  Even the discovery that Google Reader contains posts I thought better of and deleted from my actual blog did not faze me.  Much. (Note to self:  posting at 2:00 am after several of the Elephant Bar's wonderful pina coladas is a mistake, because the Internet is forever.)

Tomorrow I have to actually get things done, but I do not think that will be a problem.

Right now, I have my beautiful Penwiper (see photo) lying on my side, purring and poking holes in my relatively new peach colored shirt with the ruffle around the neck.  I don't even care, much, about the holes -- at least not until I need the shirt to  wear somewhere, such as work.  The boys are on their own for dinner.

Things are what they are.  Life needs to be taken on its own terms, not mine.

Right this very instant, that's okay.

I have added a new quote to my "Words to Live By" sidebar: "

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Reinhold Niebuhr

(Niebuhr is best remembered by most non-theologians as the composer of the Serenity Prayer.)

Another classic xkcd cartoon....

Another I love (too big to be embedded here) is about tvtropes.org

Still another is about dreams (warning: warning, strong language).

Randall Munroe is a  genius.

Okay, so this is sort of cheating...*

I would just like to note that, as of this post, I will have posted just as many times in 2010 as I did in 2009 and 2008 combined.  I think this is a very good thing, and hopefully will continue.  I mean *I* like it, which is what matters here, right? 


*It's cheating, because I really sort of made this post so I could say that I had posted so much.

What all that Census data is good for

 

I just love  xkcd.com

(larger version at link) 

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.