last train to snarksville

I'm going to be very confused when in another two weeks I have no reason to jaunt off to our nation's capital. My biggest lesson learned in all of this was that a 2-hour flight with a video iPod and homemade chocolate chip cookies is a better proposition than 11 hours in a car with just about anything.

The last four days were a circus of four children under the age of four, 8 dogs (32 paws!), six cousins, five cousin spouses, and one pregnant lady. That side of the family is a bit older and much bigger (in so many ways) than my side, and while whirling around in their cloud is a nice reality check, it's good to be home, where my values, choices, and personality aren't in such stark relief.

there are as many elephants as there are rooms

I'm heading back to Warshington this weekend, off to a baby shower. Lots and lots of typing here, describing where I've been for the last week.

with a little luck, we can work it out

I have a confession to make. And not like one of those Augustine-ish confessions, one of these "I have normal human drives, desires, and faults" sorts of things, for one because it's 2007 and for another, I am not Catholic. I am so not Catholic that I'm not even entirely sure how the Pope feels about Jesus. Other has explained that Jesus is indeed big with Catholics, but from my rather disinterested perch outside the whole religious culture, the Pope seems to get more air time with the Catholics than Jesus himself does. Baptists, Methodists, they're crazy about Jesus, but the Catholics, meh. Of course, I vaguely remember from history classes that the whole Protestant vs. Catholic thing is a relatively recent development having to do with whether one should/needs a direct relationship with God or a mediated one, so the Christians who were all pissed off when Jesus got crucified must have been the precusors to today's Catholic, right? And that would also make sense with the whole mediation thing, because the Pope would be the guy to go to to get to Jesus. I recently learned that the same sort of schism occurred in Buddhism. Huh.

But hey, none of that has anything to do with the fact that I like lite rock.

O. There, I said it. Lite rock, with the light spelled wrong. I love it. There was some sort of coup at the pharmacy, I think having to do with switching over to cds of Christmas carols, but since December, the no no-repeat-workday country station is gone. And I'm surprised at the extent to which this change is improving my quality of life. Roberta Flack and Maxi Priest just take me back to a time where my astonishing beauty made people walk into things and where I actually wanted to work 12-hour days for $5 an hour before taxes even though my boss never let me. I know every single word to what must be three or four hundred songs that all sound the same. And I can barely summon a list of more than five songs that I heard last Saturday, even though I could (and kind of did, ach, confession number two!) sing along with every last one. It's almost like being hypnotized.

So, yeah, whatever. I suspect some of you have a lightening-bolt-guitar-shaped skeleton or two in your own closet as well. Mine happens to be duets with ridiculous lyrical allusions to sex and videos shot through gauze.

go ahead, blame title IX

Yesterday I asked Other if he wanted a cake, and he requested "some kind of chocolate death explosion." And let me tell you: I went in with confidence, but outdid even my greatest expectations. Unless the good folks at Duncan Hines aren't being straight with us (the word "special" appears nowhere on the box - I checked when I came down) adding chocolate in enough different states can improve cake to the point where you shouldn't operate heavy machinery up to 10 hours after consumption.

bonediggin

This is food!



This is - I can only imagine - a graveyard for cartoon and videogame characters.



Go ahead. Try to argue that if Kirby's dead, he's not buried here. I'll wait.

This is not the White House.



This is a squirrel who lives on the lawn of the White House. He likes nuts.


Being the idiot that I am, I'd left my camera set on 1, which is the setting I use for blog-intended pictures. 5 is what I take pictures on that I actually want to print. I had the camera set on 1 for the whole wedding ceremony thing, which I realized after the ceremony, so I changed it to 5 for the pictures of the squirrel on the White House lawn and the tofu.

---
On a sad note (as opposed to all the pointless notes above), take a moment and give a thought to Eden. She has turned off her comments, I would imagine because she does not want four hundred of us to say oh god, I am so sorry. Even still, though - oh god, we are so sorry, Eden.

ich bin HOME, gad, finally

There are unique weddings and non-unique weddings, and the unique ones are usually more fun and very far away. So we are back, after 25 hours in the car over three days, and I'm trying to remember precisely what it is that I do at my job as well as wrap my head around the fact that I am supposed to be there tomorrow. In the morning.

Tomorrow: a photo tour of Washington, D.C.

celetellephellular device malfunction

Hey, woo, dreamhost is green!

Also, first I was going to write about this, then just now I started to write about how I wasn't going to write about this, but now, looking at it, I think I am going to write about this. By which I mean, this.

Glenn Greenwald is fast becoming my hero. He was posting over at Salon's War Room many months ago, and I remember thinking Who the hell is this guy, Where did this guy come from, How did he get to be so awesome, and I wonder if he would come have some coffee with me. Now he's got his own blog, and he averages one thoughtful, beautifully logical, extensively quoting, substantial post a day, with an average of about one update as well.

In the midst of an excellent post about how Harvey Mansfield, in his clear intellectual prose, lays out precisely what's so frightening about the neocons and their Leader, comes this quote (with Greenwald speaking about and then quoting Mansfield):

He has a career-long obsession with the glories of tyrannical power as embodied by Machiavelli's Prince, which is his model for how America ought to be governed. And last year, he wrote a book called Manliness in which "he urges men, and especially women, to understand and accept manliness" -- which means that "women are the weaker sex," "women's bodies are made to attract and to please men" and "now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite." Publisher's Weekly called it a "juvenile screed."

And, urf. That is the sound of my brain being socked in the gut.

Did you ever get one of those dinosaur gumballs out of a machine at the mall when you were a kid and put the whole thing in your mouth, and find, once it's in there, that you had no leverage of any kind to be able to actually chew it? And then you could feel all that excess saliva start to pool at the corners of your mouth and wanted to lick it away, but there was the dinosaur gumball?

That's kind of what that statement does to my brain.

"Now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite."

Urf.

Okay. So what you do at this point is take the gigantic gumball out of your mouth and try to break it up. It's slimy, it's gross, but it's better than the alternatives.

I mean, okay, first: yes, this is patently ridiculous. Now that we've agreed that you're smart, you should be able to take the truth that you're stupid. Now that we've agreed that I'm faithful, you should be able to handle hearing that I've slept around for the last 32 years. Now that you're beautiful, you should be able to accept being told that you aren't, quite.

Interesting, I think, how my first two parodies added the speaker "I," when he just says "now that women are equal." Which I guess means "now that we've pretended to agree that women are equal." Which means "I've never believed that women are equal, even though I've tolerated patiently and pleasantly the suggestion that they are since, like, the '70s."

I don't think I need to go over the points that women aren't, on average, as strong as men, muscle-wise, but maybe women's bodies are good enough at harboring and expelling new members of the species that we're still around. Which requires physical strength in a different but pretty important way than men's ability to bench press stuff.

The thing that really just gets me about this is that I know people who think like this. I know people who think that feminists claim that women are just as physically strong as men, even though they're not and we all just have to pretend to agree. It's just so simplistic and frustrating.

It's hard to believe that this guy is going around, not only writing and publishing this stuff, but thinking it. And Greenwald's point that it's great that he's doing so, because it makes clear the pure and true idiocy of the neocons, also pretty much applies to what he's doing for the sexists.

while the cat's away, the mice will FORTIFY

We're heading off to a rather short-notice wedding next weekend, which necessitated a rousing game of "Do I Own Anything at All that Looks Nice Enough to Wear to A Wedding?" which is also known as "Just How Fat Have I Gotten?" We're actually doing okay on something to wear on the bottom, but two possible contenders for tops are nowhere to be found. And other things that have worked okay as tops before are too far into the t-shirt camp to be acceptable. And are skirts okay for pretty formal weddings, or are we in dress range?

Classes have just ended, and I seem to have eked out an A- with a 90.something. Lots of time recently has been put towards that, so I haven't much else to say.

Except for this retelling of a PBS documentary about dogs that was on recently:

At first we thought the domestication of woves and their evolution into dogs happened thusly:

HUMAN: Hey there, tame wolf puppy. Do this and that.
TAME WOLF PUPPY: Okay.

[Time passes}

HUMAN: Hey there, dog. Do this and that.
DOG: Okay! [wags]

but now we think it was more like this:
TAME-ISH WOLF: Hey, human dude. Mind if I eat your trash here?
HUMAN: Fuck do I care?
TAME-ISH WOLF: Cool.

[Time passes]

TAME-ISH WOLF: Hey, I was just eating your trash over here, and I was wondering if you might like to snuggle.
HUMAN: Uh... well, no, not really. That's okay.
TAME-ISH WOLF: Oh, alright. Yeah, that's fine. It's cool. It's just been getting kinda cold at night, and I was just thinking maybe... but no, whatever. It's cool.
HUMAN: Well, yeah. It is kinda cold.
TAME-ISH WOLF: Heh, yeah.
HUMAN: So, I don't know, maybe...
TAME-ISH WOLF: [wags]
HUMAN: Yeah, what the hell.
TAME-ISH WOLF: Cool, man.

[Time passes]

PROTO-DOG: So, hey, I was thinking. Maybe I could spend most of my time inside.
HUMAN: I don't know, proto-dog. I mean, you pee on all my stuff.
PROTO-DOG: Holy shit, that bothers you? I can totally stop that.
HUMAN: Yeah? Well, okay. Can you stop chewing on your ass, too?
PROTO-DOG: Well, but it itches.
HUMAN: It's annoying.
PROTO-DOG: Having an itchy ass is annoying too.
HUMAN: Do you want to live in the house or not?
PROTO-DOG: Yeah, okay, I'll try to stop chewing my ass. But I can't make any promises.
HUMAN: Okay. Want to eat the Cheerios that Ug-Rug threw on the floor?
PROTO-DOG: Yes. Yes, I do.