Mother's Lost Weekend Pt. II -- Ensenada

NOTE: I'll get the pictures up tonight, honest.

Day Two – Ensenada. Despite every effort to sleep-in Saturday morning, my eyes opened at 6 a.m. and refused to close again. This was not supposed to happen! I was supposed to be lazy and not open my eyes before 11! Bertie Wooster would not approve of this behavior. The tea wasn’t even scheduled to arrive until 7! But this did mean that I got to watch from my stateroom window as we pulled into Ensenada. The first thing I immediately noticed was the lack of sun in Sunny Mexico. June Gloom does not respect international borders and pesters Baja California as much as Alta California. Baja California, for anyone who might be geographically challenged, is a long (like 1,000 miles long) strip of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez, perfect conditions for the same shore-hugging clouds that visit us in the north each June. A huge Mexican flag flying in port told us we were a foreign country, otherwise the coast could have been San Diego or Santa Barbara. After tea and toast and watching sea lions frolick in the harbor for a while, the child and I dressed and when in search of...I kid you not, gentle readers...breakfast!

For breakfast, we visited one of the formal dining rooms, having opted for the casual dining room for dinner the previous evening. The difficult thing to get used on a cruise is the wealth of choices. Meals are included in your ticket, and the staff is prepared to bring whatever you want and as much as want. Smoked salmon! Eggs Benedict! Omelettes! Pastries! The head spins at the array of foods. No wonder I forego breakfast at home! I don’t keep smoked salmon in stock and I lack the time for Eggs Benedict. This has shown me the error of my ways. Breakfast isn’t inherently evil, it has been warped and twisted by our wage-slave society from its natural place as a regular meal into this abbreviated, rushed, often over-processed, pseudo-meal; a meal with an asterisk next to its name. I resolve to work on reforming my relationship with breakfast, but that’s another blog for another day.

Our shore excursion, based on my assumption about sleeping in, wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon. This gave us time for a nicely leisurely game of mini-golf up at the very top of the ship. Again, travel proved enlightening because the ship had absolutely no problem with the notion of mixing mini-golf with a Bloody Mary. In fact, the bartenders seemed to encourage it. Nothing improves the game of golf like a Bloody Mary, and I was sure Bertie Wooster would approve. I was sure Jeeves himself would approve. We were making progress after the rocky start. Perhaps I couldn’t sleep-in until noon anymore, but I can certainly amble around a pretend golf course with a drink in my hand!

Ensenada is just 76 miles from the US border. It is a port city that caters to tourists, probably best known for two things, both bars – Papas & Beer and Hussong’s. However, Baja is also known for its big annual off-road race and is becoming better known for it’s branch of Fox Studios – which was one of the first things we noticed as we surveyed Mexico from Lido Deck earlier that morning, a strangely familiar, somewhat piratical sailing vessel docked very nearby. Later that afternoon our guide was able to confirm for us that it was none other than Capt. Jack Sparrow’s Black Pearl, and had been used for filming of “Pirates of the Carribean III.” But Ensenada had a little more history than that, as our charming and fast-speaking tour guide Belen shared with us.

Ensenada was a quiet little village until an American named Jack Dempsey, very famous pugilist, opened a casino there, the Riviera Pacifico Casino and Hotel (there are rumors it was truly owned by Al Capone, but we were told Dempsey). What remains of the building is wonderful. One can imagine Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo seated at a ringside table beneath the brightly painted ceiling and stunning chandlers. Of course, gambling is no longer legal in Ensensada (I’m sure the cruise ships don’t want the competition). The building is now a cultural center where the locals have their weddings and Quinceañeras (one of which was being prepped for during our visit). Outside of the cultural center was a select assortment of vendors specializing in traditional Mexican arts and crafts, leather work, silver, ironwood, beadwork and so forth. Long story short: child saw opal pendant, vendor saw me coming, I never spent $80 so fast. Our next stop was the Santo Tomas winery, where they had displays of old-fashioned wine-making accoutrements, and explained their wine-making and bottling processes. Apparently, Mexican wines have a good reputation outside of the United States, where the Napa Valley vintners aren’t going to let wines come in from across the border. All of this was proof that there is more to Baja than Tijuana, two large bars and an off-road race. Well, sort of.

Our last stop was along the major shopping district, very near those two large bars. Here, the lovely picture our tour guide painted for us of an Ensenada that wasn’t Tijuana didn’t quite ring true. The street beggars, the children rushing up with trinkets and hands out, are an all too familiar sight to anyone who’s visited TJ. But at least, to Belen’s credit, it’s not nearly as bad in Ensenada and there are signs for a middle class and economic progress if you look for them. But on to happier thoughts than the poverty that makes so many risk crossing the border without documentation…

Here in Southern California, where Mexican and American culture has been so blended, diluted, and then reconfigured, there is, I think, a general impression that Mexican culture begins and ends with things as mariachi, folklorico, and margaritas, but of course that isn’t true, and the first shop we visited proved that quickly. The child was immediately intrigued by the alebrijes, fanciful creatures, part real and part myth, carved from wood and hand-painted in delicate patterns with bright colors. She also liked the somewhat scary, but often humorous skeleton creations for Dia De Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead celebration. In the end, for her they were just a touch too scary, and so she opted for the alebrijes. And I was so absorbed in the painted ceramics that, in the end, I couldn’t decide which to purchase and left empty-handed! The ceramic plates were nothing less than amazing. The majolicas with the intricate talavera designs, story plates, vibrant flower and animal patterns…again, too many choices! I came home confident that technology would save me, but alas! Bazar Casa Ramirez has no website. After the quality and craftsmanship on display at Bazar Casa Ramirez nothing else measured up, so we had ice cream, rested our feet and boarded the bus back to the ship.

After a nap, we changed for dinner, foregoing the “formal” night in our assigned dining room, we opted, again, for the casual atmosphere of the buffet, world of overwhelming choice and every bit as good as what was being served downstairs. One of my best memories of the cruise is seeing my picky, finicky child eat and eat and eat! She stuck to her usual routine of eating about five times a day, but small meals rather than three large meals; a bit of ice cream, some strawberries, a spoonful of melon betwixt and between breakfast, lunch, and dinner give her a steady supply of energy for walking, sight-seeing and talking, talking, talking! But this night it didn’t give her quite enough energy. The plan had been for her to attend the kids’ slumber-party to give mom a chance to drop $20 on slot machines, but about 20 minutes before the 10 p.m. start time, she confessed her immediate need for sleep. The last two days had finally taken their toll, but the best was yet to come, and those slot machines didn’t really need my $20

A little Fairy(Ell) reminded me...

That I wanted to talk about Jay Rosen's piece at HuffPo, but it was just a busy week, I wasn't able to get to it. Also, I left Pt. II of the Cruise Blog at the office on Friday, so this will keep you all entertained over the weekend -- and thinking, I hope.

Many thanks to Time Goes By for being more astute and on their toes this week than Mother was.

Mother's Lost Weekend -- Pt. I

Day One – There had been a plan. It was a good plan. The child would go to school until about noon, then I would pick her up and we’d be off. That would give me time to pack, take care of the cat, and lock everything up, and keep her occupied in the morning, since the ship wasn’t scheduled to sail until 5:30 in the evening. However, the child begged and pleaded, so I relented and let her stay home from school. This meant every 15, then 10, then 5 minutes there would be a request to leave for the port. It’s the at-home version of “Are we there yet?” Still, we were both excited and who could blame us? Our first cruise! So, at noon we left for lunch and the drive down to Long Beach.

Now Long Beach sets your cruise expectations very high, for sitting in the Port of Long Beach is the grand dowager of cruise ships: The Queen Mary, in all her Art Deco splendor. Just looking at the QM reminds me of when travel wasn’t about getting from Point A to Point B for the least money in the quickest time. There was a time when travel was exciting, glamorous, and the journey as meaningful as the destination. The QM, long-past her time of being seaworthy is a hotel now, but you can visit her and see pictures of movie stars, millionaires, and Winston Churchill aboard back in her glory days, and dream about what it must have been like. Would our ship, Paradise, possibly live up to such expectations? Or would it be the Southwest Airlines version of a cruise, a floating cattle car with all the personality of a Motel 6?

Before we’d find out the answer we had to get on board, in the usual post-9/11 fashion…long lines and a security guard ransacking your luggage to make sure the two bottles of water you had packed for your day wandering through Ensenada, were really just water bottles contain just water. The good news was we got to keep our shoes on. But after security, a quick check of our American citizenship, and arrangements for our Sail-And-Sign Card (a combination boarding pass & credit card) we were a quick escalator ride from the gangway, crossing the pier our gleaming white floating hotel and home for the next few days.

Dear Readers, Paradise delivered from her first moments. Boarding, we found ourselves in the central atrium – apparently Deco splendor is the optimal cruise ship décor, and the designers and builders of Paradise, built in 1998, understood this and saw no reason to depart from proven success. A bar surrounds a platform topped by a white grand piano offering classical music while people sorted out which direction to their stateroom. And, if I might take a little credit it here, as well as thank those who had offered their suggestions and recommendations, Mother picked out an ideal stateroom, ocean view, toward the back but still very much midship, and not far from this atrium. The child was immediately pleased. And so, very soon, we were unpacked and situated in our stateroom, and ready to have an explore of the place. We wandered up and Aft first arriving quickly at the pool on Lido Deck, which almost immediately gained the nickname “The Drunk Tank,” because of the large number of happily inebriated people who seemed to live there. Here, I was able to acquaint myself with “The Fun Ship Special” the bon voyage drink of the day – rum, vodka, apricot brandy, and just enough fruit punch to make it all go down smoothly, served in a tall, curvaceous glass with a spear of tropical fruit and a little paper umbrella. After a stroll around Lido Deck, we dropped down one to Promenade Deck, with an assortment of casinos, bars, lounges, and Café Ile de France, the ship’s version of Starbucks. This place became part of the daily routine for us, usually for an after-dinner mocha and some chocolate-covered strawberries or a slice of cake. Wandering the Promenade Deck was one of the child’s favorite activities, not because she’s partial to gambling, and not only for the confections, but because here was people-watching central in luxurious surroundings with an ocean view. Speaking of which, it was soon time to cast off.

Now, this is the post-9-11 world, so all those romantic images of people tossing confetti and serpentines off the side of the ship showering it down on throngs of well-wishers waving from the pier – forget all that. Doesn’t happen. Well-wishers have to be left behind before you enter security and get nowhere near the ship. Such are the sacrifices we make to create the illusion that we are safe. However, from our vantage point back on Lido Deck Aft, we could see the churning water indicating the ships engines were engaged, watch as we slowly moved away from the pier and, like that breathless moment on an airplane (the one the airlines have not yet found a way to charge you for or deprive you of) when the engines whine, gravity pushes you back in your seat, you hold you breath and wait for that moment when the wheels of the landing gear break free of terra firma and you realize your flying, here is the moment when you have broken your bond to dry land and are floating off into the vastness of the Pacific. It’s a brief moment, but there’s a freedom to it that always gives me a thrill that I am happy to now be sharing with my daughter. Travel isn’t about Point A to Point B; it’s about breaking free and creating your own journey. So Long Beach receded into the distance and anything became possible.

Blogging the Book: Al Gore’s "The Assault on Reason," Pt. II

Well, I reached the end and, no surprise here, Al thinks the Internet will set us free. I was also relieved to find that he did include extensive notes in the back of the book, but because he didn’t footnote as he went along, a reader would have exercise real patience and tenacity to source everything. Footnotes, Al, footnotes.

Over all, Al was preaching to the choir about the abuses of power by the Bush Administration. I don’t suppose too many conservatives would be willing to read a book by Al Gore regardless, but a bit more mea culpa about the flaws of the Clinton Administration might have widened the audience more. Still, Al does a darn good and convincing job of explaining that uncomfortable feeling that something’s gone wrong with our democracy. It’s a book that should be reaching a broad audience, especially among those who believe that whether they vote or who they vote for doesn’t matter because Washington will continue to ignore them. However, it’s exactly on that point that Al is weakest.

While he addresses how the disconnect between the will of the people and the actions of the government leads to detachment and disinterest, I wanted to see more about how to combat that, more about how to bring the disillusioned back to the conversation. It isn’t enough to say the Internet is out there; go forth and use it. To bring about real change, to bring vibrancy back to our democracy in America and work to repair our damaged reputation in the international community, we need to reach that 50% of the public that isn’t even registered to vote and the 50% of registered voters who regularly don’t vote. Democracy does not thrive when elections are determined by a vote that is absent 75% of the eligible voting population. A strategy to engage that 75% is as important to the marketplace of ideas as continued access to a neutral and unfettered Internet. When we have 75% of the people voting and participating, then we’ll have regained our democracy.

Someone inferred recently that, because the stock market is up and unemployment is down, we shouldn’t be concerned that our President believes he is beyond the rule of law; that provided the US is still an economic powerhouse, we should turn a deaf ear to our global neighbors concerned about the hubris and arrogance of our foreign policy; and that because we live in a post-9/11 world, we cannot expect to protect the same rights and freedoms that have been the hallmarks of our country for more than 200 years. I would argue that we need to ensure the strength of our democracy when we are fat, so that it will survive when we are thin; that it is difficult to business with countries alienated by misguided policy; and that our Constitution is not worth the parchment it was written on if we can only safeguard individual liberties in times of peace and security.

“These are the times that try men's souls… Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

-- Thomas Paine

Why I Won't Vote for Democrats, Pt. II

Few men or women elected in our history—whether executive or legislative, state or national—have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:
Get us out of Iraq.
Yet after six months of preparation and execution—half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:
The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president—if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history—who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;
The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.

So says Keith Olberman of MSNBC. Please read his entire commentary about the Democrat's lack of testicular fortitude. The only thing I don't understand is why Mr. Olberman is surprised by this. Ditto Jon Stewart at The Daily Show http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=87456&ml_collection=&ml_gateway=&ml_gateway_id=&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show&ml_origin_url=%2Fshows%2Fthe_daily_show%2Fvideos%2Fmost_recent%2Findex.jhtml&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true and Stephen Colbert at The Colbert Report http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_colbert_report/index.jhtml and Taylor Marsh at The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/taylor-marsh/bloody-tuesday-on-capitol_b_49182.html.

The Democrats continue to allow Bush to frame the dialogue. They continue to use his language and imagery. They continue to underestimate the public's disgust with "do-nothing" politicians. The people sent them to Washington to do one thing: end this war. They shouldn't be allowed to ask men and women to fight the battle "over there" if they don't have the courage to fight in the corridors of the Capital.

UPDATE: Add Harry Shearer to the shocked and outraged punditocracy of the left. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/the-congressional-democra_b_49201.html

Blogging the Book - Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason" Pt. I

Oh, Al, you disappoint me so! Having read the first half of "The Assault on Reason" and your concerns about media ownership being consolidated and how the marketplace of ideas has suffered accordingly, paired with your deliciously detailed, yet unfortunately unfoot-noted, accounting of the sins of the Bush Administration. Yet, conveniently, you skip how the Clinton Administration, for which you served as Vice President, passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing for that very same consolidation of media ownership you now say is such a bad idea. In fact, you have said very little (so far) about any Democratic flaws or faults.

On the other hand, Mr. Gore, you've got a lot to say about how the marketplace of ideas is suffering because of the one-sided, high gloss, high spin approach to discourse, and I see already where you are going. Television is, for now, the medium of politics. It is not interactive, it's easily manipulated, and it's very expensive. The internet, on the other hand, is very interactive, much more accessible, and, like the printing press, is based on literacy not pretty pictures. I see you already building the case for a hi-tech restoration of the democracy on which this country was founded. However, I look forward to reading how you think it can be any less manipulated than television.

For the rest of us, of course, the question remains "Will Al Gore Run?" and is there anything in "The Assault on Reason" that can be read like teas leaves to answer that question. Sorry, all you Draft Gore guys and gals. One hundred and forty-five pages in and this does not sound like a man running for president. It does read, however, like a man who is trying from the outside to shape the dialogue of the 2008 campaign. It does read like a man very much connected to the process of presidential elections. If he weren't so soft on the Dems, one could imagine Mr. Gore talking third parties (I'm only half-way through, he might yet). There is, out there in cyberland, already the Unity '08 group, with it's proposal to have an internet-based convention. Their gimmick, whoever is selected as their nominee must agree to a running-mate from an opposing party. Hmmm.....Gore/Bloomberg '08?

To be continued...

On Another Year Passing

In a few days I'll once again be having a birthday (didn't I just have one?), so this weekend I was marking the event with my annual trip to the five-and-dime to see what they have to offer to stave off the never-ending signs of old age. This has become a tradition in the last few years. All year long, when I sit at the receptionist's desk to cover the phones while she goes to lunch, I read the "women's" magazines she keeps there. The ones telling 20-year-olds that they need two tons of special products to maintain "youthful-looking" skin. Right. They're 20. They have youthful-looking skin until that start dumping that crap on it. But us ladies on the wrong side of 40? We really should start looking at surgical enhancements or life may not be worth living much longer.

So after a year of absorbing the helpful hints brought to me by Maybelline, L'Oreal, Max Factor, and the like, I look in the mirror at the wrong side of 40 and wonder if there isn't something I can do. Hair color, but that goes without saying, I've been a bottle blonde since the 80s. A bath scrubber with a micro-abrasion attachment to peel away the dead skin, and a facial mask to moisturize and smooth out my "rough, uneven skin" (that still breaks out regularly -- wrinkles and zits: life is unfair). Of course, I have no faith in these things, but every year about this time, as I notice the popping joints pop louder in the morning and the backache takes a little longer to work itself out after getting out of bed and I'm covering more gray than brunette and I can't read the paper before 8:30 because even with glasses I can't see, I figure I owe it to myself to try something to make the years less noticeable. Come May 24th, I won't care again for another year. On May 24th, I'll still be me, same as May 22nd. I still won't be able to see, my ankles will still pop in the morning, and all the rest, but I'll have to get the child up for school and get myself off to the office and...really, it won't matter at all.


But this weekend, like so many pre-birthday weekends before, I'll take stock of all the signs of age that weren't there a year ago: How I can never find my sunglasses, how my hands are begining to resemble my grandmother's, what clothes I now look ridiculous wearing, how I can ride the train unmolested and flirtation-free. The rest of the year, these things won't matter. I don't know why they matter now.


As for the facial mask, except for a little redness, my face looks the same as it did an hour ago, worn out and a little crinkly at the edges. In 25 minutes, I'll be blonde again, for another six weeks at least. My "micro-abrasing" shower-scrubber hasn't erased a line, eased the pain in my back or stop my joints popping in the morning. Onions still give me unforgiving gas and indigestion, my hips are still be too big and too saggy, and I don't even want to think about my boobs. But life will go on, creaking and sagging, puffing and drooping.

And my daughter will continue to grow more beautiful every day. My to-be-read list will continue to grow, I'll keep discovering new music, new paintings, new parts of the world to visit. On Saturday, my daughter will take me on a picnic in the park (shhhh! It's a surprise, I'm not supposed to know), the sun's "harmful UV rays" will have another go at my skin, and I won't care a bit because I'll be too busy living life with my beautiful little girl to notice. And next week, we are off for our very first cruise (*insert mini-lecture on how people shouldn't wait until their 40s for their first trip on a ship), where there will be "damaging" sun and salt air and fun and grand adventure and I'll eat too much, but I won't care because I'll be too busy living life with my beautiful little girl to notice. So the summer will go, and fall and winter until that weekend before the next 23rd of May gets me wondering how I got so much older in just one year. And I'll look in the "women's" magazines and see promises of youthful skin, firmer breasts, instant weight loss and the rest, make a trip to the five-and-dime, make my annual concession to old-age, then get back to living life with my beautiful daughter. But who knows? Maybe next year the "women's" magazines will surprise me. Instead of telling me I'm fat, wrinkled, old and unattractive, they'll tell me to get out in those harmful UV rays, let my graying hair down, and go live life with my beautiful little girl.

*Mini-lecture on how people shouldn't wait until their 40s for their first trip on a ship (or plane bound for Paris or train to Istanbul or anything else): Lesson learned the hard and really stupid way is to make up your mind you're going, give it the same priority to give all the rest of your bills, surf the web of a killer deal, and go. The hardest part: making up your mind you're going. So what are you waiting for? GO!

One step further or just another drop in the sea?

Last month Mother wrote a post about an article from The Guardian called “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps”. The idea that America should somehow become a fascist regime seems far-fetched, but as the article goes through the steps it becomes clear that it’s in fact very realistic. I’m not an American, so this will be an outsiders perspective. I’m not fond of America either, but I’ll try to keep that out of this as best I can.

One of the steps is about establishing the notion that dissent equals treason. This is dealt with in a documentary Mother linked to earlier where they show exactly what this notion can lead to, and today we are still fighting in Iraq with no end in sight. The reasons given for the war was brought to people so convincingly that there are people today who still believe them, despite those who presented them have back-tracked.

Michael Moore has recently made a movie where he looks into the American health care system. As part of the movie he traveled to Cuba, to see if it was possible to get better treatment there. According to this article, Michael Moore is now being investigated by the US treasury department for unlicensed travel to Cuba and according to Harvey Weinstein, the man behind the company behind the movie; the treasury wants to impound the negative. This can of course be viewed as an act of dissent, and Weinstein argues that there is a political agenda behind the investigation. Weinstein is of course biased, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be some truth to it. Weinstein has hired a lawyer and is not trying to get to the source of the investigation to see who pressed for it. Now you might argue that this can’t be seen as a true step since it’s being fought, but not everybody is like “Team Moore”, not everybody would fight back or be able too. Get enough of these cases; even if only some are successful there will still be a message sent that the US don’t tolerate dissent within.

So how might Moore’s new movie be viewed as something promoting dissent? Like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, the new movie challenges the view that the US is the greatest at everything; a view I’ve encountered from many Americans on many different Internet fora. What is even worse in this case is that Moore is comparing the US to Cuba, the enemy in the backyard. It seems that even the two previous movies spawned a lot of hate towards Moore, but this is the first that has these kinds of consequences. Clearly something has changed since Fahrenheit 9/11 and I’ll leave it to wiser people to tell what. In essence Moore challenges one of the core things that seem to unite a lot of America; patriotism. If the average American comes to believe that their system isn’t the best, then they might want to change something; and change, it seems, isn’t something politicians in power want.

It’s also possible to look at this as another step towards fascism, the one the article calls “Targeting Key Individuals, and this is pretty straightforward, if someone doesn’t get in line, punish them. Moore is no doubt an outspoken individual against some things in America, and he makes no effort to hide his bias. He takes things to extremes to get his point across and lose some people in doing so, and gain others. He wants people to look at things beyond abortion, gay marriage, Idol and the like. But a thinking population can be dangerous thing to the people in power. They might have to take responsibility for their actions.

Why does someone who’s never been to America care what goes on there? Because it’s the most powerful nation in the world. What happens there effect everyone and should America become a dictatorship, then the world has a new problem on their hands. It won’t happen overnight but even if it’s not the intent of the people in power, then the first steps have already been taken and someday someone who is willing will come into power, and that’ll be it for the land of the free and home of the brave.

The Devil is Always in the Details

Thursday, May 10th was a whirlwind day on the political frontlines in the
War on the Middle Class, as a handful of senior congressional Democrats and the
White House - cheered on by K Street lobbyists - joined forces today to announce
a “deal” on a package of trade agreements that could impact millions of American workers and potentially calls into question the entire election mandate of 2006 (I say potentially because the full details are still being concealed by both Democrats
and the White House). You’ll notice the irony of the deal with just a glance at
the front of the New York Times business section (screen captured above) - the deal was agreed to (though its details have still not been made public) on the very same day the U.S. government reported another widening of America’s job-destroying trade deficit.

Because so much has transpired in the last 6 hours, I’m going to summarize it here chronologically in bullet points to make it easier to digest.
I’ve been covering it live all day, but figured for brevity it would be best to put it in one place. For context, remember that, as Public Citizen has documented and as business publications like Forbes Magazine has confirmed, Democrats won their congressional majority in 2006 thanks to scores of challenger candidates specifically running against lobbyist-written trade policy. This 2006 lesson is particularly important to Democrats who, in the early 1990s experienced their own President campaign for office opposing unfair trade deals, then ram NAFTA through Congress “over the dead bodies” of workers, then watch the Democratic majority get decimated in the following election. I want to stress, we still don’t know the details of the deal, but we do have some critically important information to analyze.

This is one of those long, complicated, you have to be paying attention issues which Americans usually tune out in favor of "American Idol." The important facts here:

• No actual legislative language has been forthcoming on this series of trade agreements.
• The media is trumpeting it as a great thing for our country and the partner countries involved, without having seen anything more than summaries.
• Lobbyists claim they are getting assurances that any requirements about environmental concerns or the rights of workers in other
  countries will be essentially unenforceable.
• The Administration and a handful of Democrats are doing
  everything in their power to push this deal through with the least amount of scrutiny possible.
• This is all after the American public swept a slate of new representation into Washington who vowed to put an end to lobbyist-written legislation, reduce the influence of lobbyists, clean-up the culture of corruption, and put an end to "business as usual."

Al Gore May be the Most Dangerous Man in America

...Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of
us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply
diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The
persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even
in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems
to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has
happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone
wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a
prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern
themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best
evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American
democracy. This premise is now under assault.

This is from Al Gore's new book "Assault on Reason." I can't wait to read it. It sounds like someone is finally connecting the dots. The excerpt, along with a profile on Al and how he is not running for President, can be found at: www.time.com

On Love

Love (part 1)

- the question we seek an answer for.

In general we grow up with a family, showing us affection and love, trying to teach us the world is held together by the inter-human connections and relations. Now this is from the point of view, where the family teaching us these values, have had years of experience and time. Time to think through the experiences of the past, the interactions with people and the emotions connected. Both our own and the effect we have on the people in our close vicinity.

The parents have a tendency to neglect the difficulties of love, the consequences of the choices that are made along the way. They do not want us to grow up thinking love is an impossibility beforehand. Even if they end up not being able to maintain the appearance themselves, they still tell us the same story. Perhaps in the hope of giving us the chance to live out the dream and succeeding where they failed.

Then we get older, and start to find our own in this world. We try the first teenage-crush, we get burned for the first time. We make our own conclusions and form our own view of the world of love. In the process, we grow up. The experiences we make in the early years, form the view of how we see the world. Even if we do not acknowledge the fact, we still judge people by how they act, based on what we feel.

In the same way, we make choices based on our feelings. These are bound to our emotions, even if we try to distance ourselves from them, and pretend to make judgments and choices based on what we see and hear. We pretend to be objective, but a complete distance is not possible. Deceiving ourselves however, is.

Love (part 2)

- Habit vs. Love vs. Security

No matter what we have been through regarding relationships, one-sided or two-sided emotions, every relationship we have will start out with strong emotions. These may be based on physical attraction, friendship or, to some extent, both.

Regardless the starting point of the relationship, for it to be long lasting (this on a relative scale) both friendship, trust, physical attraction and mental attraction must be present. These factors grow in the relationship and are the basis, when the initial attraction fades. In the beginning the flaws of the other are ignored and later these are to be seen as charms and speciallities of the individual. We come to love each other.

In time, two people get to know one another, and if trust and honesty is present they become each others trustee. But what about doubt? At some point, be that after 6 years or 6 months, doubt will appear. This may be nothing, but as we are dealing with humans and their emotions it all comes down to how the handling is done. Doubt comes in many forms; insecurity regarding yourself, insecurity regarding your partner, fears about the future, loss of freedom, jealousy (substantiated or not) or maybe just the change in individuals over time. The only way to deal with doubt is in coorporation with you partner. If the relationship is truly based on trust and friendship, this will solve the issues if love is still there. If the love between the two has dissipated over time, the friendship will still have a chance.

The biggest issue comes if people stop asking themselves; "Why am I here, do I still love?".

Do the two people in a relationship notice the change from "decisive choice" to "habit"? Given enough time each relationship develops its own habits and routines, based on the interactions of the people involved. This also enables the relationship to change away from each choosing to be with the other, but making it more "the easy thing" to do. This is not something that is noticed, but merely a thing happening over time. It may not be a bad thing, as all individuals function better with a certain set of routines, but in these the love may fade into the shadows. It is important to question one self about the feelings that are the basis of the relationship, and whether or not they are there or if they have changed for better or worse.

The aspect of security is a large part of relationships. This, in itself, is not bad, as people feel more secure based on having the trust and support from their partner. But given enough time it becomes the main basis for the two persons involved. Then it poses a threat to the individual, as there is no longer substantial belief in one self to be alone. One side of the relationship may be in doubt as to the basis of the two, but lacking belief in one self makes the choice to end it and move on even harder.

In this there is also the responsibility to the people close, be that the partner or possible children. The choice to leave a relationship or to stay in one, has an impact on others, no matter which way the decision goes. If no children are in the picture, then the decision should be personal and thereby favor ones own happiness. If children are present, then the welfare of these should be considered also, but to what degree? Are the children better off having a set of parents living together but not enjoying it, or the other way around?

Only the two people in a given relationship can make the decisions, and they need to have the courage to do so. But it also takes two people to have a relationship, whereas it only takes one to end it. The important lesson is to have the courage to make a reality-check once in a while. And let the other one know the outcome – a “good” one will help the relationship grow, a “bad” one will help the individuals grow.

On Art: An Introduction

This piece is the introduction to a series of essays on art. I started writing a single commentary and realized there was far too much ground to cover, that I would have to break it down into smaller segments. In subsequent essays, I’ll attempt to address the questions raised here as well as some other thoughts that have come up over time. I want to publicly acknowledge “me, your god” for his invaluable assistance and inspiration. Thank you "me." You are one of kind.

Before what was left of her mind was gone, my grandmother, suffering from Alzheimer’s and a lifetime of too much drinking, went through a phase of compulsively writing. She’d write the same notes to herself, over and over again. She’d forget she’d written one the moment it was completed and so she would begin again. She’d scribble on every scrap of paper she could find, these reminders to herself that made no difference because her brain was no longer capable of remembering. But the act of writing gave her some comfort. I think there was something reassuring in the words forming on the paper. I think it was proof of her own existence, of being alive from one moment to the next. I live with the fear that one day my brain will remember what gene pool spawned it and begin its steady and inevitable decline until I can no longer write.

Maybe that’s all art is: proof to ourselves of our own existence. Frida Kahlo painted more than 100 self-portraits. Anais Nin kept two sets of diaries, the way some accountants keep two sets of books, keeping her best writing locked away for fear of discovery, but compelled to write just the same. In “Quiet Days in Clichy” Henry Miller writes about “Carl” but everyone seems to know “Carl” was Henry. Not every artist is intent on self-replication, but putting pen to paper or paint to canvas or creating sound waves from an instrument that carry out into the world tells someone we exist, even it is just us. At its most basic, art is the action of creating, unblurred by commerce, by higher purpose, by even the perception of audience.

But from the time the first men where drawing on the walls of a cave on the left bank of a swamp that became Paris (trust me, it had to be Paris), and another caveman came along and decided there was something about Caveman A’s drawing that Caveman B’s lacked, there has been art and Art. A select handful of critics, gallery owners, curators, and other artists usually make the call. That would seem a considerable power to be wielded by so few, if that power really matters. It does, or at least it should. That it may no longer be the case troubles me.

My daughter is upset about the paucity of art offerings at her school. I tried to explain to her that, yes, there is too little art and too little music being taught in schools these days, brought on by this hysteria over increasing test scores at all costs. She says to me, “What’s wrong with them?!? Don’t they want to see the next Picasso? The next Monet?” She was passionate. To her, this defies all logic and straddles the border between crazy and travesty of justice. I wonder how alone she is in this passion. Do parents care so long as test scores go up? Maybe they are willing to forego that next Picasso if it means higher SAT scores for their kids. Dan Brown sits on the bestsellers lists for months on end. Does the world need another James Joyce if people are content with the ill-spun yarns of a hack who makes them feel intellectual without having to put any work on it?

And what happens -- what society do we build -- if these things no longer matter? Is there a price to be paid? Are we already paying it? I think it means something that those cavemen were drawing on the walls way back when; it says something about humanity and maybe we are losing that. What do we become if we lose the urge to create, to seek out others’ perceptions of the world, to shout at the universe that we exist?

The day came when my grandmother stopped scribbling her notes. She lost her battle with that clinging fog inside her mind. The veil closed over her thoughts, over her memories, over her identity. It took a painfully long time from that day until the day her physical form could no longer function and so stopped and breathed its last. But the truth is that everything that was my grandmother died the day she stopped writing. Everything she was, everything that made her uniquely human, no longer existed. I think about the genetic time bomb that is very likely ticking inside my head and I write. Je me crée donc suis.



Woman with a Guitar by Pablo Picasso, 1913, from the Norton Simon Museum of Art website: www.nortonsimon.org

A blogalicous update

A few things going on that I thought I should acknowledge and/or announce:

First, welcome to White Smurf and (eventually, I’m sure) Ritalin Kid. There’s an awful lot of testosterone in the room now, so any time one of you ladies wants to help balance things out, let me know. Meanwhile gentlemen, get posting!

Second, while I haven’t been posting too much original stuff the past week, I have been hard at work. The results will start making their way here soon. I ask for everyone’s patience in the short-term. I will try to at least keep doing short posts on stuff I come across on the web, just so everyone knows I haven’t fallen off the cyber earth. Feel free to discuss and offer opinions.

Finally, the good folks at Blogger are offering some updates that will allow for further customization of TCK the Blog. This is wonderful news because I’ve never been happy with this layout, color scheme, font or anything else. I utilized it because it was the least of all evils at the time. The downside is we may lose some of our set-up in the short-term while I transfer everything to a new template and finish tweaking it. I think this will make everything more readable and I’m hoping it will give us more options. This fun and games will probably occur over the weekend. Fellow bloggers, if you have ideas or input on this, let me know.

The Toughest Job You'll Never be Prepared for

I’ve been up half the night and my mind is 22 miles northeast of my present physical location. I’m not sure I’m all here. This is a story of parents, which means it is an imperfect story about imperfect people whose purpose in life may at first appear to be to make as many mistakes as possible in 18 years. I’m writing this because I recently overheard a conversation between an estranged parent and adult child that was heartbreaking. The occasion was the revelation that said adult child is pregnant. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to discover what an imperfect person she is. The sad part is, by the time she discovers this, it might be too late for her to tell her father that perhaps, just maybe, she was a bit harsh in her judgment.

None of us should be allowed to be parents, and yet most of us are. There are no more harsher critics of our parenting than our own parents and our own children. I was surfing through some children’s health websites today and so many questions pertained to new parents having different opinions from the new grandparents: when to potty-train, when to wean, whether to allow a pacifier, the child’s too fat, too thin, to aggressive, doesn’t stand up for himself… right up until, about age 13 when suddenly the questions became “why won’t my mom let me get my tongue pierced, date, become a vegetarian..”

In some ways I suppose I was lucky in that my parents had both passed on before I had my child. I had enough doubts in my head. I certainly didn’t need my father’s second-guessing as well. It doesn’t change the fact that parenting is a losing proposition. Someone is always going to think you’ve done something wrong, even if you have a perfectly healthy child in every respect, there’ll be someone to tell you he should have started walking sooner, was weaned too soon, and heaven forbid if you didn’t breastfeed! I have this awful feeling that all those Mother Superiors (not the Catholic kind, the other kind) are planning to buy Gitmo from Bush and his friends once they are done with it. It will still be a gulag, but it will be there exclusively for women who don’t breastfeed their children. Trust me formula moms, they’ll be coming for you next.

So once your own parents have told you what a bad parent you are, and society has chimed in about what a bad parent you are -- and pity anyone whose child is less than perfect, because all of society knows, deep down, medical research, mapping of the human genome, heredity be damned, any flaw in your child from a strawberry birthmark on the cheek to an extra toe to anything in between is the fault of the parent, especially, the Mom – little junior or Suzy gets old enough to tell you what a bad job you are doing and how you are ruining the best years of his/her life.

But louder than any of those voices is that voice in your head that keeps you up at night…what did I do? What mistake did I make today and how bad was it? When did I do too much and when did I not do enough? That cup of coffee I had when I was six months pregnant, how damaging was that and when is it going to come back to haunt me? Am I helping my child build self-esteem or am I spoiling her? Should junior be playing with Rainbow Fairy Barbie or should I take that away and give him a pro-wrestling “action figure” instead?

And then, no matter how careful you are, no matter how many books you’ve read, no matter what expert advice you’ve listened to, something goes wrong. Maybe it’s choking on a coco puff or falling off a swing or tripping over a sprinkler. Maybe it’s a signal you missed that said, silently but clearly, “Mom, we need to talk” or “things aren’t going so well at school.” And you realize you’ve made a mistake. You weren’t watching. You weren’t attentive enough. You lost patience. You failed to anticipate. You got careless. You didn’t think. There’s no worse feeling in the world. Then you have to measure the magnitude of your blunder and figure out what damage control can be done. After you’ve patch things up as best you can, you do it all again until the next time you make a mistake, and there always seems to be a next time. That any of us make it to adulthood is a credit to the survivability of our species. That we then manage to raise another generation is nothing short of incredible. Some blunders you never fully recover from, some turn into opportunities in the most unexpected ways, the best ones are the ones you get to look back and laugh at a few years later.

I’ve stayed up half the night with contemporaries telling the tales of all the unmitigated errors our parents made in raising us. Now, some of my contemporaries are hearing from their own children how badly they botched the job. We all fail. The best of us attempt to inflict the least amount of damage possible. But how would the most perfect parent prepare a child for the knocks and bumps of the real world if they always did and said the right thing?

With all that in mind, I propose the following thought experiment. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, forgive your parents just one thing today. And while you are at, forgive yourself for one as well.

For the next person that tells me about "The Liberal Media"

WALTER PINCUS: We used to do at the Post something called truth squading. --President would make a speech. We used to do it with Ronald Reagan the first five or six months because he would make so many-- factual errors, particularly in his press conference. PRESIDENT REAGAN: (3/6/1981) From 10 thousand to 60 thousand dollars a yearÂ…

WALTER PINCUS: And after-- two or three weeks of it-- the public at large, would say, "Why don't you leave the man alone? He's trying to be honest. He makes mistakes. So what?" and we stopped doing it.

BILL MOYERS: You stopped being the truth squad.

WALTER PINCUS: We stopped truth squading every sort of press conference, or truth squading. And we left it then-- to the democrats. In other words, it's up to the democrats to catch people, not us.

BILL MOYERS: So if the democrats challenged-- a statement from the president, you could-- quote both sides.

WALTER PINCUS: We then quote-- both sides. Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Now, that's called objectivity by many standards isn't it?

WALTER PINCUS: Well, that's-- objectivity if you think there are only two sides. and if you're not interested in-- the facts. And the facts are separate from, you know, what one side says about the other.

I'm still reading the transcript of this, but it talks about an issue near and dear to the heart of a former journalist

More light reading...

As it turns out, our many Web 2.0 revolutionaries have been so thoroughly seized with the successes of strong collaboration that they are resistant to recognizing some hard truths. As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers. With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life's work to know stuff. This, I maintain, is not a positive development; but it is also not a necessary one. We can imagine a Web 2.0 with experts. We can imagine an Internet that is still egalitarian, but which is more open and welcoming to specialists. The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but—unlike the old order—gives the general public a place at the table as well.

This is hot off the press from Edge.org. Yes, it's long, but in the ongoing discussions about what we believe vs. what we know vs. what we think we know, I think it brings some food for thought to the table.

Atheism causes Anorexia???

Again, the link to the full article is in the title.

Girls Inc. just published the results of its depressing, nationwide survey called "The Supergirl Dilemma," which reveals that girls' obsession with thinness has gotten significantly worse in the past six years. Despite the efforts of the Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty – well-intentioned, though undeniably market-driven – and Love Your Body Day events sweeping every school from San Francisco to Syracuse, 90 percent of teenage girls think they are overweight today, compared with 24 percent in 1995, according to a recent ELLEgirl survey.

So what gives? Is it our celebrity-obsessed, extreme makeover culture? Is it the newest version of the age-old story of dysfunctional family relationships? Is it peer pressure – mean girls critiquing one another's every lunchtime indiscretion? Is it the $30 billion a year diet industry?

It is, in truth, all of the above. But there is also another profoundly important – yet little noticed – dynamic at work in the anxious, achievement-oriented lives of America's perfect girls: They have a sometimes deadly, often destructive, lack of faith.

So many perfect girls were raised entirely without organized religion, and the majority of the rest of us – I reluctantly admit to my own membership in the perfect girl club – experienced "spirituality" only in the form of mandatory holiday services with a big-haired grandmother or unconscionably elaborate and expensive bat mitvah parties, where everything but the Torah is emphasized.

As a nontheist that could stand to lose a few pounds, I'm pretty sure I disagree.

How others see US

The link thing in the title will take you to the full article.

It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

This is from an article in today's Guardian. Agree? Disagree? This is how a lot of countries perceive the US right now. If they are wrong, how do we change the perception?

On Nothing or The Long-Awaited New Age Blog

My mother died when I was four. That is the most fundamental fact of my being. Everything about who I am and what I am goes back to that moment 40 years ago when a drunk driver ended my mother’s life. Sure, I’m a big girl now and that happened a long time ago, but that doesn’t change the fact that it shaped the 40 years that followed it. Without that one event, I don’t get an abusive stepmother, I don’t have to live with an alcoholic grandmother, and I don’t have to essentially raise myself beginning at about 9 years old. Lots of things don’t happen, happen differently, or even if they happen the same way, I have a mother to help me through them. I didn’t know what that meant until I became a mom myself. I felt the hole in my life, but I never saw the magnitude. It’s what I imagine it would be to live on earth your whole life and then finally see it from space. People can claim I’m being disrespectful for saying some of the things I’m going to say here, but whatever you believe, whatever you think I’m disrespecting, using your same assumption of its reality, it disrespected me first, 40 years ago.

I explain all this, not to venture in the “Dear Diary” territory of soggy blogging, but to allow you, dear reader, to understand when I say that when it comes to looking for answers, to trying to figure out how things work, what the meaning to it all is, I guess I have as much vested interest as anyone. I have looked for the answers, in religion, mysticism, fatalism, nihilism, cynicism, dogma, karma, palm readers, tea leaves, and Elvis on black velvet. A lot of people give up on the religion they were raised on. I guess it’s kinda uncool, having Dad’s religion, a lot like driving Dad’s Oldsmobile to the prom or something. If you are a certain age, maybe you gave up on “Western” religion and sought answers in the mystic east, which, if you think about it is almost as condescending as thinking that only Western religion has the answers. I explored a lot, looking for something that could answer the fundamental fact of my being. Something that made sense, something that could say, “This is why a 4-year-old child loses a mother and goes on to having the life I’ve led.” If the big G god was working in “mysterious ways” I wanted an explanation. I spent quite of few years being really pissed off at the Big Sky Daddy because I couldn’t think of an explanation that qualified as good enough.

Enter the New Agers and their promises of ancient wisdom, untapped potential, cosmic harmony, and all the rest. Just like with religion, I was ready to believe anything that could answer me, could explain my pain, and the pain of others, because it wasn’t just about me now. How do some people get everything by being greedy, corrupt, even criminal, while kind, fair, just people are starving, dying in civil wars, languishing in poverty? Why does the Big Sky Daddy give some people miracles, let other score touch downs, but I couldn’t keep my mother? New Age belief said there were no coincidences, everything had a purpose, and everything sought balance. And best of all, the New Age said we could affect the balance in our lives, we could change it, improve it. So, I meditated, I paid attention to the coincidences in my life, I wrote things down on paper, I embraced my inner child, I healed and purified, it was practically a full-time job. The universe would take care of everything; the whole great interconnected universe was there to do for me what the Big Sky Daddy did for everybody else.

Did it work? No.

So there came a time, what we like to call a bump in the road, or a rough patch, one of those times when everything that can go wrong does and then some. Big things and little things, some that probably didn’t matter as much as I thought they did and some that to this day cause me pain. I tried everything. I prayed to the Sky Daddy, I journaled, I meditated, I took pills, I sent my thought energy out into the cosmos – something was going to make the pain stop, right? No. There, at the edge of the abyss, I realized I was waiting for something to help me that didn’t really exist. At the very brink of madness was the sudden clarity that said none of this is real. It was all created by people just as scared as I was. These were their answers to fear and pain, but they were all inventions. It’s all magical thinking. It’s all based on a desire to not be alone. It’s all based on what we want things to be and not on what they are. I stopped looking into the void seeking an answer and finally saw the void itself.

That’s what there was. Void. Nothing.

Believing in Nothing may not sound, on the surface, like such a terrific system. And it isn’t that I reject all belief without considering it. It’s funny, but I miss believing in something. But every time belief presents itself, or I find belief sneaking into my thinking, I look at it, I look in the mirror and say it out loud, I compare it what I know about life. I look at it and think about it, and I wonder if it fits the truism I tell my daughter when she gets scared of the dark at night: “There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the daylight.” The minute I sniff that there’s something supernatural to process, something that wouldn’t be there in the light of day, I retire its number and move on. But Nothing, to date, has proven 100% effective as a belief system. It’s got a better batting percentage than prayer, positive thinking, tea leaves, and Elvis on black velvet. Nothing is never wrong. It’s amazing. And there’s a kind of comfort in the reliability of Nothing, not nearly so alluring as the great interconnectedness where there are no coincidences, but a basic inner beauty. It’s so consistent and in keeping with what we know about the universe, most of space being made up of empty space and all.

In science, an equation, a theory, must account for all variables, or it is flawed. I’m not saying we should worship at the alter of science, but I think a belief system should be held to some standard of accountability. Nothing has accounted for every variable I have encountered. It’s still a theory, but it’s a good theory. Nothing says my mother died for no very good reason other than there was a drunk driver on the road that night; that these things happen. They are unfair and unjust, but we pick up and move on because there’s Nothing else we can do. And best of all there’s nothing in Nothing that points fingers. In Nothing, bad things happen because they happen, not as punishment, not as a failure to measure up. And there’s Nothing to keep each of us from trying our best to change things, to be good, fair, and just people, from falling down and getting back up again, from failing or succeeding, from being amazed at being alive, or gazing in wonder at what life offers. That’s the magic of Nothing.

Dead Man Walking, "What am I supposed to do now?"

Yes, I know, I said I was doing the New Age next, but this popped into my head. -- Mother.

Ian Hunter does a wonderful song called "Dead Man Walking," the lyrics of which can be found at: http://www.hunter-mott.com/lyrics/rant.html#DeadManWalkin
It's a brutal, honest look at being a certain age. It's a great wallow song if you feel like wallowing and has some lovely piano bits.

I bring this up, because I have been reading of late of people who find themselves lolling the doldrums, maybe because of age, maybe because of natural temperament. I read their words and I hear "Dead Man Walking" in my head.

If I could speak to them though, I wouldn't quote lyrics at them. I would remind them first of all they have and shouldn't take for granted. You have a job, think of those that don't, who worry about how to keep the lights on and feed their kids. You have a home, think of those that don't and will be sleeping on the sidewalks tonight. You have food and health and the your nation, however divided, isn't being destroyed by civil war. There are many who can't say that. I'm sure they know those things, but being reminded never hurts.

Given all that, humans are basically selfish creatures, so even being "comfortable" when others lack basics, they are still apt to look at their lot and find it lacking. I have, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that, so a reminder of all that is good is good, but it isn't enough.

Want to get rid of your over-abundance of possessions? Don't go on e-bay, call a charity. Got too much time staring you in the face? Volunteer teaching people to read or teach English to immigrants. Join a Guide dog training program and bring an animal into your life that, if you both work hard enough, will become the eyes or ears of someone who needs them. Volunteer to answer phones at a crisis hotline. Go to a convalescent hospital and offer to be a companion to someone who has no one else in their life. Your life will have meaning and you will be helping others. You will also have less time to wonder whether or not your life has the degree of happiness that our Western consumer-based culture promises you will have if you just buy the right products, pills, and services.

Still not enough? Then look at all the things you have not tried. Here's a partial list of things I have not tried. You can borrow it if you like: Canning preserves; yoga; quitting smoking again; reading Don Quixote; watching the AFI Top 100 films of all time; travelling to about 100,000 places I want to see in my lifetime; cleaning behind the refrigerator (ok, I have done that, but not in this millennium); trading my practical car for a roadster before giving up my car and relying on public transport; volunteering to work on a political campaign; finding just the right version of that cool-whip and jello pie I loved as a kid; learning to play chess well; meeting in person all my friends from the internet; writing a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That should be enough to get anyone started and everyone, if they think about it, has their own list. If you truly have no list, you poor unfortunate soul, you best start making one.

And finally, quit waiting for "the right time" to start living your life. So often I have heard people say they will get on with their life goals when the time is right, when they have the money, when the kids get in school or out of school or out of the house, when they meet the right man, woman, or llama, when the stars are aligned just right and guarantee the success of their endeavor. THERE IS NO RIGHT TIME! Keep waiting and you'll be laying on your death-bed wondering what you did with all those years you spent waiting.

Friendship

No matter how bad a situation appears at times, I'm always amazed at how some friendships can remain, and how others can fall apart.

Add into that the complexity of the written word, and the anonimity of the internet, and the potential for a relationship to disolve is multiplied exponentially.

So when I have troubles with a specific person I expect the worst, skeptic that I am, and I'm always delighted when my fears are proved unfounded.

Mother, you define "friend" for me. We butt heads. I piss you off. You frustrate me. I fuck up. You accept me for what I am. We never hold grudges. We accept our differences. We communicate. We always seem to move on, and move past our differences. The road is bumpy sometimes, but there's always a road there somewhere.

In the end, we remain friends. It takes work, and sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes it hurts. But damn, the end result is always worth it. There's always something to learn. About yourself as well as others.

I've been lucky to have met a handful of people like that over the internet.

I just wish more people could examine their issues and troubles, and agree to accept differences while enjoying the act of communication and friendship as we have.

There are some really special people out there. I feel fortunate that through nothing other than luck, I've met a few remarkable people.

Listen

Monday the 23-year-old Cho Seung-hui shot and killed 33 people, including him. The news had barely hit the air before people started to talk about stricter gun laws. Being from a country where it’s not legal to own a gun, I’m all for gun control, but would stricter gun laws have helped Seung-hui? It would probably have helped the 32 others, but there would still have been one victim too many. I know the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” saying. It’s true, but as Eddie Izzard says “I’m sure the gun helps.”

Today I read that the police are looking into a theory that Seung-hui was copying scenes from the movie Oldboy. He might have been, but does it matter? At worst the movie could have given him some for of inspiration to how he wanted to it, but it didn’t but the supply him with the motivation to do it. And the motivation is all that matters. What makes a 23-year-old shoot that many people and then kill himself? How can anyone get to a point where life seems so hopeless and find so much hate towards everything? It’s not gun laws; it’s not movies, music or games. But people would like to believe it is, perhaps because those areas are easier to fix. Perhaps because we then know that we don’t have to blame our self. It’s easy to say after this, that Seung-hui was disturbed; Seung-hui was in pain. There where signs, people where worried about him. But no one had the ability to do anything.

I saw the clip that was released and I can’t get anywhere near the core of what he is saying. Comparing himself to Jesus and saying this could have been avoided. Saying they forced him. I’m sure all this made sense to him. I see that tape as his surrender. He realized that he had lost some battle that was going on in his head, and the killings were his last stand. I don’t know what he was fighting; I don’t understand the war he lost. I’m sure there are people who fight the same battle every day; I’m sure there are people losing the same battle every day. Seung-hui just made the battle visual, how many others die in silence? Now people would like to silence Seung-hui too, but I think he should be heard. He chose a terrible way to deliver his message, and I don’t think it should be condoned, but with so high a cost for a message, can we then truly allow our self to not listen? We owe it to the 32 killed and Seung-hui to listen and to try and understand. We need to look the horror in the eyes and understand. We need to ask Seung-hui the questions in death that we forgot to ask in life.

What will we learn from this? Nothing. People don’t want to learn, they want to live their sheltered life. They want to believe this guy was a psycho, he was evil. They want to believe he was everything but what he truly was; depressed, alone and a victim. A victim of a world than celebrate murders as long as they are performed by soldiers in other countries; A world where one half is dying of starvation and the other half of obesity; A world where you can walk among 26 000 people on the same campus and not find a single person who reaches out and touch your life in a positive way. When we meet each other we ask how we are doing, but we don’t really want to know. It’s a world of egos. If it’s not about me, why care. Why is it not okay to go over to a stranger and hug that person and say “it’s going to be alright” or “can I help you”? It might seem stupid, but who knows what it might mean to someone else, to be shown that there are people in this world who care. I know we are far away from a day where people will think like that, so I’ll leave it at three words:

Watch and listen.

The Partial Sabbatical of a Tree-Hugger

Remember back in the 80s, Shirley MacLaine and her New Age memoirs? I confess, I read “Out on a Limb.” I tried, Shirley -- really I did -- I tried to believe. Be that as it may (yeah, there’s a blog there, but not today’s), I liked the saying behind the title, “To get to the fruit of the tree, you have to go out on a limb.” I feel like I’ve been out on a limb for a long time. Hell, I know I’m different. I’ve been standing out like a sore thumb since I was head and shoulders taller than everyone else in my kindergarten class, and the only one whose mother had died. I’ve been a freak since that night my mother died. That’s 40 years of freak-hood. My version of life isn’t like most people. I have issues with trusting women. I have issues with American men. Let’s face it, I have issues.

But the other thing I have is, if I might be immodest for a moment, a way with words. Having a way with words, makes you sort of a commodity in cyberspace. If you can put words together, people want you to put words together for them, fill their web-pages, fill their blogs, fill their forums. Your words make them look good, and they aren’t the ones out on the limb. You are. You, me, and Shirley MacLaine. Now there are three of us out on this limb and Shirley and I aren’t as thin as we used to be.

Now, there’s the safe way to do this: make up cutesy names and talk about fluffy bunnies and sporks. It’s funny and clever, if a bit juvenile, and there’s zero risk involved. Or you can put yourself out there, be honest, talk about what matters to you, knowing you are a minority voice, knowing it stamps "freak" on your forehead in great big day-glo letters (mine are pink). How long can you stay out on the limb, even having me and Shirley MacLaine to give you some cover, before you start wondering who’s really benefiting?

One day you start thinking, “What the hell am I doing? I’m sitting out here on this limb with an Oscar-winning actress and a neurotic blonde with a way with words and it seems like the only fruit I’m getting is what’s being chucked at me by some guys on motorcycles.”

Well, what did you expect? Even though people stopped roasting cats for entertainment years ago, there’s still a large number that enjoy making fun of freaks. Look at the fun I’ve had writing this at the expense of Shirley MacLaine? Honestly, I thought she was fantastic in “Some Came Running” and “Sweet Charity,” and her book, while nothing I can give credence to, was pretty well-written. So while I poke a little fun at Ms. MacLaine, it is with affection and respect for her talent. I also have had some fun at my own expense, which I do frequently. If I laugh first you can only laugh with me and not at me.

So who benefits from this circus act? People looking for others to laugh at so they can feel superior, they get a good show. All those cyber proprietors who would have nothing but empty space if you weren’t filling their sites up with bits, bytes, pixels, and what-have-you, they get ownership and possession of your well-crafted words from now until the day of the great server crash that sends your handiwork to electronic oblivion. And you, you get eternity out on that limb with me and Shirley trying to rub the day-glo marker off your forehead and wondering what you were ever thinking that made you climb up here in the first place.

Well, I think it’s time I asked Shirley to move to one side for a couple of minutes because I think I’m gonna climb down for awhile. I’m going to take my way with words and put it in my journal where it belongs. I might lose something in the translation, but I think I’ve earned a rest. And after a rest, maybe I'll just climb up on this low branch here. There still might be people waiting to lob produce in my direction, but the climb down is shorter and there's a little more cover. I won’t be any less of a freak, but I’ll smell less fruity and maybe I’ll finally get this pink marker off my forehead.

Monogamy, an essay in three parts

Part I -- How It Started

If you plan on reading Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" be warned that a small spoiler is contained below.

In the middle of Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" there is a love story. World War I has exploded across Europe at long last and our young lovers are fleeing across the countryside seek a safe haven.

Pretty standard fare...except this is Pynchon who never does anything standard. Our young lovers are Yashmeen, a European heroine with a head for numbers; Reef, rugged American adventurer from a very colorful Colorado family, and Cyprian, the Brit who has mooned after Yashmeen since college days despite the fact they were both, for most of their lives, confirmed homosexuals. It does change things, doesn't it? Except...it doesn't. Sure, at first Cyp is there more as an audience and Reef, he's sure he's far too macho to ever be gay, except, by the time Cyprian leaves the other two, it's very plain that all three love each other very much.

While I have mixed feelings about "Against the Day," I really enjoyed their story and, to no one's surprise, it got me thinking. When did we decide that love was a two-way street; that it needs to be confined to two people and two people only? Yash, Reef, and Cyp get away with it because the world's gone to war and no one is really paying any attention to them. They also get away with it because they are fictional characters in the book of a very liberated author who will let them. Still, Cyprian, realizing the world won't let their relationship survive the war, stays behind in a monastery so the two people he loves most can continue to be together.

Ok, I hear you, gentle reader, saying how could anyone so hard-bitten and cynical even have been interested in a love story? Is there really something that softens Mother's heart? Whether it's a combination of primary and secondary sexual traits that attract someone and makes them want to procreate and continue the species, or whether it's the compatibility of life scripts between people so that each individual finds and bonds with people they perceive as meeting their pyschological needs, let's acknowledge that we are attracted to some people more than others, that we emotionally bond with other people, that we find other people physically attractive, and when all of that comes together and is mutually held, we call it love and it is a good thing. Is it limited to couples only? Is that a blessing or a curse? Is not the companionship of more than one person better than the companionship of only one person? If romance between two people is good, would not romance between three be even better?

In my very unscientific sampling of my THH guinea pigs, I mean research group, it appears that most people, regardless of their other beliefs, have some need or desire for monogamy, here meaning a single relationship between two people. Even the resident anarchist leans towards monogamy. Two people. One life-time commitment. Exclusivity. But we didn't start out that way. Like most mammals, we started out a much less discriminating species.

Part II -- A Brief History of Monogamy

Back in the early days of humankind, groups divided themselves into men and women and pair off collectively, meaning all the men were one half of the couple and all the women were the other half. But then, we got civilized. One of the first things we did as civilized beings was to decide that property needed to be passed down to our progeny. For that to happen, we had be certain of who our progeny were. Thus, the male-dominated relationship wherein women could be killed for infidelity was established. Men had to have some degree of certitude that they were passing on their property, title, wealth, etc, to actual, real, blood descendants, and the way to do that was lock up and repress the women. So, we all got civilized and each man got to marry and bind his women to him, which eventually became just one woman. And thus all the wealth did stay in the family and life was good -- for men and their first-born sons anyway.

And what were women told? Women were told about true love. They were told fairy tales about how if they became submissive slaves, cheerfully doing all the household drudge-work, their prince would come and carry them off because he had a castle that needed a good cleaning by a cheerful submissive…or something like that, sometimes I get a little fuzzy on my fairy tale details. They were told good, virtuous, lady-like women put up with their men folk so they could experience the rewards of child-bearing, and that their men, deep down, loved them. If their man beat them, it was out of love. If they fooled around, well, it was probably something you as an ignorant woman did, so you better do better next time. What you didn’t do is get out and get yourself another man. Only brazen hussies and wicked, fallen women did things like that. Nor were you able get out and get by with no man at all. Good women did what they did for “love,” but it also kept them from becoming paupers, because they had no means of self-support. Remember, all that wealth, property and so forth was being passed down to male heirs. So good women did what they were allowed to do. They met a man, they got married, and then they had kids.

And that is where monogamy came from. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?

Part III – The Wow Finish

But wait! ‘Cause here’s where it gets interesting! In the post-WWII era, suddenly corporations discovered what valuable assets women are. Women are able to earn their own money, they can hire their own cheerful submissives to do the drudge-work, and have their own property, wealth, etc. to pass on to the progeny, and they know which kids are theirs because child-birth isn’t something you forget easily. What happens? In the words of Tammy Wynette, “Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes fin-al to-day…” Half of all marriages famously end in divorce. People wait longer to get married. Fewer people get married.

We’ve been conditioned to still want, based on my unscientific sampling, one person to love us and choose us above all others. Yet, the reality for a lot of us isn’t a single life-time marriage, but serial monogamy, consecutive true loves, mates for every age and stage of adult life. How great of a leap is it, then, from consecutive relationships to concurrent ones, and if we can accept concurrent relationships, how far is it from there to shared relationships? Personally, I think it’s damn near impossible to find one person to love who loves you back. Finding two people to love you and to love each other: It seems like such a long shot. Thinking back among the world’s great lovers there are Neal and Caroline Cassady and Jack Kerouac; Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Mrs. Miller. Then there are all those so-called adult films that aren’t really very adult at all, and that 80-year-old man and his three young bouncy blondes on late-night cable. Doesn’t sound like a very promising group. But when you are going against a society that insists on pairing people up two-by-two, you are bound to run into difficulties. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe it could happen, but it would take an evolution of society far beyond what we’ve reached today.

Concurrent relationships would require less sense of ownership of another person than anything we’ve had since our cave-dwelling ancestors. Don’t we still make remarks about “sinking her claws” into a man or “slipping a ring on her finger before she gets away”? They would require a re-shaping of our mythology about true love, something else the unscientific sampling was fond of. To maintain our belief in true love, we will tell ourselves that only our mate is attractive to us and only our mate meets our emotional needs. Until that relationship falls apart and we go looking for another. And we will ignore the possibility that if we can love consecutively, we also are capable of loving concurrently, that there’s more than one true love out there, there may be a lot more true loves out there.

To get all the way to a shared relationship, we also would have to reshape the idea that there are straight people and gay people, and accept that there is straightness and gayness in all people, including ourselves. It has taken years to get some people even to accept that there are gay people and they have a right to exist, and there are still those clinging to the notion that there is something “evil” about homosexuality. So, yes, I think society will keep embracing monogamy, though I think it will become even more of an ideal and even less of a reality, and we will beat ourselves up about our failure to find it. Three will be kept in the domain of certain adult films, half-crazed literary figures, and the characters they create. Society will continue to enforce an antiquated system of ensuring that the only seed that finds its way to a womb is planted by the rightful owner and we will call it true love.

Eating with Chopsticks (left-handed)

The child, being mine, is as comfortable with chopsticks as she is with a fork. We go out for various Asian foods regularly and she’s offended if the serving staff brings her a fork, assuming she’s too young or too Caucasian to handle sticks. She learned from me and I learned so long ago I can’t remember when I learned. I said this to a friend of mine who then issued a challenge: next time I was having fried rice try using my non-dominant hand. It’s a good exercise and a good allegory.

Doing anything left-handed if you are a right-handed person, forces you to not rely on reflex, memory, or habit. You have to think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You have to pay attention to the choices and decisions you’re making. You end up, not only with a lap full of food, but with a new or improved perspective of something that was so automatic you had stopped thinking about it.

Too often, life is about getting to that level of comfort that allows us not to think. We get there and suppose we’ve arrived. We equate mastering one set of skills done one way with mastery of all. We get into ruts, routines, quagmires of boredom, both mental and physical. Let those ruts get deep enough and we can start missing what’s around us. Breaking away, taking a second look, following a different path keeps the view fresh and the mind sharp.

Here are a couple of examples:

I live in the suburbs and usually commute to my job in downtown Los Angeles on the train. From the sidewalk, downtown LA is like a small town. The buildings don’t require street addresses, they are known as Library Tower or Wells Fargo or Arco Plaza, and they can all be recognized but their sculptures or entrance ways. At sidewalk level everything is cozy and small, but every so often I have to drive into work and the whole landscape changes. Two-way sidewalks turn into one-way streets, and suddenly everything looks so big, one huge wall of concrete and glass adjacent to another. Looking out the windshield my little village becomes unrecognizable. I have to look for street signs instead of landmarks because a newsstand or a fountain disappears at 30 mph. It’s a reminder that where I work really is the second largest city in the country.

I’m a life-long liberal. I’ve always thought of liberals as the good guys. Or I did. One day, while surfing through the usual assortment of What Hath George Wrought, I see an article on one of the left-wing blogs about Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The author claims she is aghast that Romney is not putting for position papers on the hearing of Warren Jeffs of the Fundamental Latter Day Saints, a very small, fringe religious group that was alleged to be engaging in forced arranged multiple marriages between older men and underaged girls. The hearing was to determine if there was enough evidence to charge Jeffs. She wasn’t asking Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton to jump in with opinions about something that hadn’t gone to trial, hadn’t resulted in a conviction, but Romney, she insisted, needed to take a stand. Why? Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget how the left railed against people who thought John Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith would affect his ability to fairly govern the country. Forget how the left has fought to keep religion out of politics and out of government. Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget even that it has been more than 100 years since the Latter Day Saints Church renounced polygamy and that the Latter Day Saints Church as nothing, zip, zero, zilch, nada to do with Jeffs and his group, because Romney is a Mormon. I read her tirade and it was my turn to be aghast. I don’t want Romney to be President for a lot of reasons, but being Mormon is not one of them, anymore than Obama’s race or Clinton’s gender are reasons they should not be president. Liberals don’t generate this kind of guilt by implied association. And yet, there it was, in pixel and bits on the computer screen, a liberal behaving badly. Worse than badly: unconscionably. Being Left is not the same as being right. Lesson learned.

Maybe I’d starve if I tried to eat every day with chopsticks left-handed, but looking at what we know we believe, what we believe we think, and what we think we know, can nurture us in ways we never imagined.