It’s George H.W. Bush’s fault. During the 1988 Presidential Debates, then-Vice President Bush sneered at his opponent, Gov. Mike Dukakis, for being a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Bush claimed that the ACLU was out to make child pornography legal as well as make it legal for children to see X-rated movies. Both of those claims were, at best, distortions of actual ACLU goals (the ACLU has long opposed a rating system used in the U.S. because the system is secretive, favors large studios over independent ones, and sometimes serves as a form of de facto censorship, for example), but it almost certainly shored up support from Republican-leaning voters. But the other thing that happened was that, in the days after the debate, tens of thousands of people called the ACLU and asked what it took to become a card-carrying member.
And then they donated and joined.
I wish I could say I was one of them. I didn’t become a member for a few more months. I was in the process of transitioning from college to working full time, and my wife was still a full-time university student (yes, I used to be married to a member of the opposite sex; it’s a long story). And in 1988 you couldn’t just google the ACLU and in a few clicks sign up. It was after the election, and after I got a better job, so it was sometime in the spring of 1989 that we signed up as members.
I’ve been a proud member ever since.
When school districts try to discriminate against queer students, it’s the ACLU that sends lawyers to sue the school and get kids their rights. When peaceful protesters are arrested, it’s the ACLU that sends in lawyers to get the protestors out of jail, to defend against the bogus charges, and sue the appropriate government officials to try to prevent future violations. When high school students are unconstitutionally strip searched by school officials, it’s the ACLU that sues the school district. When states enact unconstitutional voter suppression laws, it’s the ACLU that sues and often gets the measures overturned. When federal authorities tried to hide documents about torture progams, it was the ACLU that sued to get the documents brought to light so that citizens and legislators could demand changes. When states fail to provide required medical and mental health treatments to people in state custody, it’s the ACLI that sues to get people the basic care they are guaranteed under the law. And as everyone saw this weekend, when a narcissistic megalomaniac issues an unconstitutional executive order resulting in people being illegally detained or deported, it’s the ACLU that goes to court for stays to try to halt the illegal actions, and send lawyers to try to meet with detainees to help them.
I could go on and on.
If you believe in liberty; if you believe the Constitution guarantees that everyone is equal before the law; if you believe that everyone deserves legal representation and the full protection of the law; then the ACLU deserves your support.
Oh, and if you’d like one of those spiffy blue pocket Constitutions to keep on your person in case you need to assert your rights (or just correct a douche bro who doesn’t understand what the Constitution actually says), the ACLU sells them in very affordable 10-packs. Because you want to pass out extras to your friends and loved ones. And if, like me, you have a lot of freedom-loving friends who are also bibliophiles, you might want to pick up some Bill of Rights bookmarks. Not to mention stickers and other things.
*Achoo*Now, you might be thinking, “Why are you bringing up hay fever in January? You live above the 47th parallel in the northern hemisphere! It’s winter!”
And that is precisely why I’m writing about hay fever and why I hate it: I suffer from moderate to severe hay fever, specifically exhibiting an allergic reaction to every pollen, spore, and mold in existence. Seriously, when an allergist once tested me to see which pollens I was reacting to, it was all of them they tested for. Because I live in Seattle, which is far enough north to experience winter, but moderated by the proximity of the Pacific Ocean, under the best circumstances my hay fever season lasts for 10 months out of the year. Usually some early flowering plants start pollinating in mid-February, and then it’s flowers and trees and grasses taking turns until October, when all of that starts to die down–just in time for the ferns to start sporing. And in the Pacific Northwest we have a lot of native ferns around. Then, sometime in November, mushrooms and toadstools start popping up all over, and the air fills with fungal spores.
If I’m lucky, we’ll have a good solid freeze before December is over. I’ll stop taking my prescription allergy medication when we get some freezing temps and see if the symptoms flare up. If not, I’m usually good until the next February.
The last few years, we never got a solid enough freezing period. I would try skipping my meds for a day or two, but then I’d have a horrific attack of hay fever (red swollen itchy eyes, sinus congestion, headaches, et cetera) and go back on the meds until the next freeze. But it never let up.
This year we got several extremely cold spells, and earlier than usual. Overnight lows not just below freezing, but well more than 10 degrees below freezing, and daytime highs that didn’t exceed freezing. I stopped taking my allergy meds in early December, and no hay fever symptoms came. So I thanked my lucky stars and hoped I wouldn’t have to start again until February.
Then our most recent string of colder-than-normal temps ended rather dramatically. In less than 48 hours we went from overnight lows in the teens (farenheit) and daytime highs right at freezing at best, to a daytime high in the 50s, and overnight lows also above freezing. And during that 40-some hours? Almost non-stop rain. A veritable deluge.
Winter is normally very rainy here, of course, and I was happy the rain had returned. But a few days later, I woke up with itchy eyes, congestion, and a nasty sinus headache. When I stumbled to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, my eyes were red and swollen. I started taking my hay fever medicine again, and as usual, the worst of the symptoms were alleviated. But I’ve been at the low level, semi-congested and so forth stage that I feel during high pollen season when I’m on the meds.
A few days later, my husband mentioned that he had red swollen eyes and such a burning in his sinuses, that he thought there might have been a chemical spill at work. But no one else had the symptoms, no one could smell anything, and they couldn’t find anything. He doesn’t get hay fever nearly as badly as I do, but he keeps some over-the-counter hay fever meds around because on high pollen days in the spring and summer he does get it. So he took a pill, and a couple hours later his symptoms were also helped.
I’m assuming that the sudden jump of temperatures up to a bit warmer than usual for winter, after a lot of colder than usual days, plus all that rain after a long dry spell has tricked a bunch of plants into thinking its spring.
So, I’m back to being stuffed up, sniffly, and very occasionally sneezing. In January. Could you pass the Kleenex, please?
Quote from Martin Luther King Jr, Letter From Birmingham City Jail, 1963 (click to embiggen)I always feel a little nervous posting anything on Martin Luther King Jr Day, as I don’t want to co-opt another marginalized community’s hero, day, or message. Especially after seeing several people of color on my various social media feeds caution against talking rather than listening. But during his life, King said more than once that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and I believe we have entered a very dark time in our nation’s history where all of us who believe in equality for everyone need to stand together. So while I may be a white guy, as a queer person I have some experience with oppression and believe that I have a responsibility to use whatever gifts, privilege, and platform I have to promote justice.
A lot of people, not just the moderates that Dr. King talked about in that quote from Letter From Birmingham City Jail, rationalize and deny the existence of bigotry by making appeals to certain fallacies. Academically, we often state those myths as five fallacies:
Individualistic Fallacy: racism/homophobia/antisemiticism/etc is perceived as being only interpersonal, ignoring the systemic structural realities (such as underfunded schools)
Legalistic Fallacy: the belief that abolishing racist/homophobic/religious laws automatically ends the bigotry.
Tokenistic Fallacy: the inference that the presence of members of the marginalized class in influential positions in society proves that all bigotry has ended.
Ahistoric Fallacy: the belief that the denial of basic rights in the past has no lasting effect on subsequent generations (“but slavery is over!”).
Fixed Fallacy: assumes there is one and only one kind of discrimination, not recognizing new forms that emerge in context of societal and legal changes.
There’s an academic paper that explains all of this: WHAT IS RACIAL DOMINATION?, by Matthew Desmond & Mustafa Emirbayer of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, if you want to get into it. It’s rather long and involved, but if you open the PDF at the link and search for Five Fallacies you can jump right to their discussion of the fallacies. The paper is focused on racism, but the fallacies apply to all kinds of bigotry.
All of those fallacies contribute to that preference for an absence of tension rather than a passion for justice that Dr. King talked about. It’s the classic “Can’t You Get Past it/Live and Let Live Fallacy.” Or maybe another name could be the “Respectful Disagreement Fallacy.” It’s the belief that as long as a person isn’t physically attacking you right this moment, and is framing their critiques in polite-sounding language, than it can’t possibly be racist/homophobic/antisemitic/misogynist/etc.
So the bigot talks in dog whistles (coded language that doesn’t sound overtly like bigotry to people who don’t know the code), claims to respect or even feel love for the community targeted by their language, and if we point out that they are being racist or misogynist or antisemetic or homophobic, we’re the ones causing a problem. And people who think of themselves as moderate or enlightened turn on us. They don’t just look the other way from the bigotry and bigoted policies that the community is enduring, they actually enable it.
Which means they’re part of the problem. They’re not being neutral. They’re not seeing things from both sides. They’re not being nuanced. They’re oppressing other people.
I wish there was a simple solution. I wish I had some words of wisdom. Instead, I’m just stuck with this regrettable conclusion, having to try to educate people who don’t think they’re being an enemy.
“Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed in the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice: who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
— Martin Luther King Jr, Letter From Birmingham City Jail (1963)
I just want to stay under the covers.The only reason I even saw the doctor today was because I already had a follow-up appointment for another matter scheduled. If that appointment hadn’t been on the schedule, I would have just muddled through another day. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should tell things in order. I’ll try not to let it turn into a “what I had for breakfast” post.
I’m fine here, thanks. CatsAnimals.com“There are two kinds of people in the world…” is a setup for a number of jokes. One of the conceits behind that particular setup is that there exist certain almost unbridgeable gaps between people: those who like mayonnaise and those who don’t, for instance. Some years ago I realized that one of those vast chasms of that divided humans are those who are morning people, and then the non-freaks. And I learned this the first time I mentioned just what a wonderful feeling of joy it is to wake up in the morning, roll over to squint at the alarm clock, and see that it’s going to be at least ten more minutes before the alarm goes off.
It really is almost a transcendent joy—that moment when you know that you can safely roll back over and go back to sleep. Even those mornings when I wake up, look at the time, shuffle to the bathroom, then hurry back to the bed to collapse back in it and fall asleep for just eight or nine more minutes is so profoundly delightful as to leave me grinning an hour later.
Years ago, as I alluded to above, I happened to mention my enjoyment of such moments during a conversation with a friend, and her reaction was less than accepting. She could not understand why in the world I would roll over and go back to sleep. “If you get up, you have more time to get ready. You could have a fun, leisurely start to the morning instead of rushing around in a panic.” I pointed out that when I get out of bed when the alarm goes off, I don’t rush around in a panic. Going back to sleep until the alarm sounds is not the same thing as oversleeping. The bliss I was describing is that moment of knowing that I’ve still go time to sleep.
She also expressed a lot of skepticism about whether I actually slept during those few minutes. “You’re just laying there awake with your eyes closed! What’s the point?”
I knew, then, that the chasm between morning people and non-morning people is truly vast, and possibly insurmountable.
She was by no means the last person I found myself in this argument with. And it is an argument. She wasn’t just perplexed at the difference in our perception, she got more than a bit irritated. It really seemed to anger her that I would want to sleep for a bit longer, that I would go back to sleep for as little as a few minutes, that I would enjoy it, and that I would describe it as a wonderful thing. I think she felt that I ought to be ashamed of myself for not leaping out of bed the moment I realized that I had woken up before the alarm went off.
Since finding myself in this particular discrepancy of viewpoint on a number of occasions over the years with various people, I’ve developed my own definition of a true morning person which includes that intense belief that a proper response to waking up early is to embrace the wakefulness and leap into action.
When I say that I fall back to sleep for a few minutes, I mean it. I don’t always fall all the way back to sleep, of course. Sometimes I do lay there with my eyes closed, just enjoying the feel of the blankets. Other mornings I sort of doze, drifting along the edge of wakefulness, not really asleep, but definitely not awake either. But many mornings I do fall back into sleep. I’ve looked at the clock, saw that I had less than four minutes before the alarm goes off, and then fell back into sleep deeply enough that I started dreaming again before the alarm sounds.
Now, not everyone who doesn’t feel as I do about enjoying every last second of my allotted sleep time is a morning person. I’ve met plenty of people who don’t get that same thrill of satisfaction from falling back into bed for a bit longer in the morning who also don’t insist that the only normal or natural reaction to waking up a few minutes before the alarm goes off is to jump up and get an early start on the day.
So I know that there aren’t merely two kinds of people in the world on this particular topic. As with most things, people fall on a spectrum, and we probably all slide up and down that spectrum over time. While there is some science out there about chronotypes (a technical term for classifying people based on their natural circadian rhythm), it’s a mixed bag. A lot of the articles one finds talking about the “science” of morning people vs night owls are simply citing surveys, which isn’t very rigorous. Most of the more scientifically rigorous information is actually from studies of people with insomnia and sleep apnea and the like, which yields a lot of information that may be useful for treating sleep disorders, but doesn’t actually tell us much about healthy sleep patterns. All we can reliably infer from the science we do have is that people do have natural sleep patterns that vary from person to person.
It’s just as natural to be a night owl as not. And it isn’t productive to try to talk someone into being the other sort of person.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not claiming that I’m physically incapable of getting up early. Some mornings I wake up before the alarm goes off, and I decide to get up rather than roll over and get a little more sleep. Some mornings I sleep like a log right up until the alarm goes off. And yes, some mornings I hit the snooze alarm a time or two (snooze alarms are another source of bewilderment to a True Morning Person).
I like sleep. Even more, I like it when I get enough sleep that I feel rested and ready to work in the morning. As part of my taking-care-of-myself routine for some years, I keep track of bed times and make efforts to keep my sleep schedule from getting too far out of whack on weekends or on vacations. And part of that routine is letting myself enjoy, from time to time, those moments of voluntary sleep before the alarm.
In December 1991 Ray and I were spending our first Christmas living in our own place. It was a tiny studio apartment whose windows overlooked an alley behind a bar. I was in the middle of getting divorced. Ray had had a recent significant job change that was complicated by the involvement of one of his exes. So we were both broke and most of our personal property was at least temporarily in someone else’s custody.
His mom or his sister had given us a small artificial Christmas tree that had been boxed up in a garage for some time. Ray came up with a few old strings of Christmas lights somewhere. We had bought a single box of very cheap glass ball ornaments in multiple colors, and a similarly cheap tinsel star tree-topper with a cluster of lights. So we had the small tree perched on a chest of drawers. It’s the kind of first Christmas stories lots of couples tell. One of the things I really liked about that silly star treetopper is that it looked exactly like one my parents had bought when I was a baby, and had been my childhood treetopper until sometime in grade school when they replaced it with an angel.
One weekend a couple weeks before Christmas, we helped one of Ray’s friends, Miss Lee. She was an older woman that Ray had met when he had worked as a nursing aide a few years before. She had only recently moved from a nursing kind of facility to a sort of assisted living apartment. It was the first time in years that she had had more than a single room of her own, and she had recently gotten a bunch of her things that had been in storage at a relative’s house, including a box of Christmas ornaments. She had been told she could have a tree and that the maintenance staff would take care of disposing of cut trees after the holiday. So she needed someone with a car to take her to buy a tree, and then help her set it up.
Miss Lee lived in the south end of Seattle, not far from one location of the former Seattle institution known as Chubby and Tubby. Chubby and Tubby started as an army surplus store run out of a tin shed in the Rainier Valley neighborhood of Seattle by two friends after they came home from serving in WWII. They moved to a bigger location in Rainier Valley in the mid-50s, then opened at least two other stores (the one in north Seattle being the one I shopped at most often), before the owners passed away, then eventually their heirs sold the locations and closed down the stores in 2003. Chubby and Tubby was a strange store that’s really hard to describe. They sold blue jeans and tennis shoes and fishing poles and tools and gardening things and… well, just a whole lot of weird stuff. Always cheap.
And every December, each Chubby and Tubby store offered Christmas trees for sale, cheaper than you could find them anywhere else. In the 80s and 90s the price was alway $5 a tree, no matter what size. I’ve talked to people who remembered during the 70s when Chubby and Tubby trees were only $3. The owners sold the trees at a loss. They said they wanted to make sure that people who couldn’t afford a Christmas tree could have one. The trees were usually Douglas Firs, and they were… well, they were never very symmetrical. They were never as scraggly as the proverbial Charlie Brown Christmas tree, but they were always unique. I had purchased at least a couple of Chubby and Tubby trees in the years before this particular December. We hadn’t bought one ourselves that year in part because I didn’t think we’d be able to dispose of it easily afterward. Also, the loaned artificial tree was even cheaper.
Anyway, Miss Lee wanted a Chubby and Tubby tree, in part because she had fond memories of getting trees from Chubby and Tubby when she was younger, but also because you can’t beat the price. Before we’d gone to the store, we had untangled her strings of very old lights and determined that at least one of them was probably a fire hazard and shouldn’t be used. So she also hoped to find a cheap string of lights or two at Chubby and Tubby as well.
It was less than two weeks until Christmas, and Chubby and Tubby was absolutely packed. It took Miss Lee a while to pick out her tree, mostly because she wanted one small enough to fit in the spot she’d chosen in her living room. And then there were strings of lights and ornaments to look at. There was one particular string of Christmas lights that Ray was very taken with. A string of a couple dozen lights with plastic teddy bears wearing Santa hats. It was at Chubby and Tubby, so it was cheap, but even cheap was out of our own budget at the time. Miss Lee wanted something simpler, with multicolored lights for her own tree. She offered to buy Ray the string of Teddy Bears, but he told her very firmly no.
At each check-out line they had a bucket of odd little brass keys. There was a contest. Every customer could pick a key out of the bucket, and then try the key on this Treasure Chest at the front of the store. If the key opened the chest, you’d get a gift certificate good for certain items in the store. Miss Lee told Ray to pick a key and give it a try. The key he picked unlocked the chest. Ray asked her what she wanted to use the gift certificate for, and Miss Lee said, “It yours.”
My late husband won this string of teddy bear Santa Christmas lights 25 years ago.And yes, the string of Teddy Bear lights was one of the things he could redeem the gift certificate for. So we took home the string of teddy bear lights.
We got the tree back to her place, got it set up, helped her put her lights on the tree and hang her ornaments. She told us little stories about each ornament as she unwrapped them. It was a fun day.
When we got home that night, Ray hung up the teddy bear lights in the window over our bed. That silly string of teddy bear lights hung either in windows or on our tree every Christmas for the rest of Ray’s life. Ray died mid-November of 1997, not quite six years after that first Christmas living together.
For Christmas 1997 I barely did any decorating. Ray had only been dead a few weeks at the time we would normally start pulling decorations from the basement. I knew if I started unpacking our ornaments and such I’d break down sobbing and I wasn’t sure I would stop. I barely felt brave enough to open the storage closet in the basement to pull out one of the smaller artificial trees that I knew I could get to without opening other boxes. I decorated using some ornaments and a string of lights Ray had purchased on sale somewhere a week or so before he died, thus they were already upstairs and they didn’t have a history of Christmases with him.
In 1998, as I unpacked boxes of ornaments, I broke down crying several times. Ray had loved Christmas so much, and so many of the ornaments evoked memories of when he had found that particular decoration and showed it to me in the store. Or times he had fussed with where to hang it to best show it off, et cetera.
Yes, one of the times I broke down was when I pulled the teddy bear santa lights from one of the boxes. I hung them in the bedroom window that year. The next several years I put the teddy bear lights up. At least once on the tree, but usually in one of the windows. The last few years I’ve gotten them out and looked at them, debating whether I should put them up. They’re more than 20 years old. At some point old electronics, even something as simple as strings of mini lights, break down and/or become fire hazards. So I would plug them in, look them over, and some years I’d decide to put them back in the box. But most years I have still hung them up.
Our building, which was the last home Ray lived in and has been my home for a bit over 20 years, has been sold and the new owners want to do major renovations. They’ve given us advance notice that everyone’s going to be evicted sometime before 2017 year is over. So this was my last Christmas in the place that was Ray’s last home. I’ve been… moodier than usual this holiday.
I put the teddy bear lights in the kitchen window. Every evening they turned on and shown their silly light until the wee hours of the morning. I checked them frequently, but they never showed signs of problems.
But when I took them down out of the window, I noticed that several stretches of the wire are stiffer than other sections. The plastic doesn’t actually crack when you bend it in those locations, but clearly 20-some years of use is taking its toll.
While we were packing things and taking the tree down, I was looking at all of our decorations with a critical eye. If we have to move, it would be silly to move old ornaments and lights we know we’re never going to use again. I now have a couple of big boxes of old light strings and the like to recycle, and a big pile of other decorations that I think are in good enough shape to donate, if I can find a place that will take them.
And those teddy bear lights (or at least the string itself) shouldn’t be used again. No one wants the lights to start a fire some December in the future. So its time to says good-bye to Ray’s teddy bear lights. 25 Christmases later, they’ve earned a rest.
New Year’s Resolutions are a fraught topic. There is no shortage of posts and articles out there telling you not to make resolutions. Some say to set goals instead. Others talk about how no one ever succeeds at resolutions, so you shouldn’t set them. Others insist that getting out of the mindset of setting resolutions will somehow miraculously make you into the kind of person you want to be, and so on. Then, of course, there are the pedantic jerks who insist it’s all meaningless because the calendar is an arbitrary thing, anyway.
And while I get a good laugh out of the memes declaring that being technically correct is the best kind of correct, I’m also fully aware that one can be technically correct while being completely wrong. It doesn’t matter that it’s arbitrary if you find meaning in it. As Zen Master Unmon asked the monk, “The world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robes at the sound of a bell?”
A few years back a friend shared her decision to take a lesson she’d learned from training pets and apply it to herself. She identified specific habits she wanted to change, and made her resolution to replace each with a better habit. Since then, that’s how I’ve been setting my annual goals. And for a couple years I also pledged to write monthly reports on this blog of how I was doing. The first year I made very solid progress on two of my four goals, while doing only so-so at the other two. So I set similar goals, one designed to further improve on the two which I had done well with, two slightly different ones to keep attacking the bad habits I had failed to change, and a fourth new goal. Once again, I made good progress on two of the goals, and not so much on the other two. Then last year, for a variety of reasons, I decided not to post my new goals publicly, and not to post the monthly reports.
I’m not going to do a recap of how the 2016 goals went, other than to say that not posting monthly reports led to a much worse success rate last year. I did keep track of my lack of progress, but I have to admit one reason why was each new month I would have the thought that I should make a post about how I was doing on my goals, and then I would remember the reasons I had decided not to do it this last year. I also have to confess that the insurgence of white nationalism and other forms of bigotry that were encouraged by the election did a lot to both distract me from the goals, and contributed to a lot of backsliding.
I have set some goals for the year. I’m going to post them here. I plan to post a monthly progress report. Some parts of this year’s goals are kind of continuations of some of the previous goals, but I’ve trying to change the focus to see if that might help. Each goal has some initial tasks I’m assigning myself to try to foster new habits.
My goals for 2017:
Don’t get mad, get busy. It has always been the case that I find it easier to rant and get outraged about injustices and the like in the world than to actually do something about them. It’s going to be really tempting to share links to outrageous news stories, or memes about the outrageous people, and so on during the next four years. Which isn’t going to fix anything. I don’t want to backslide any further from the progress I made with my Reduce the Outrage goal and its sequels, either. My tasks are: write about about things I love, including artwork and writing created by some of the fabulous people I follow; listen to music and audiobooks more and podcasts less; spend at least half of my lunch break writing; set specific monthly writing/editing goals in each check-in; write at least one blog post a month about organizations we can donate to that are fighting the good fight.
Reduce, pack, and prioritize. We now officially know that we have to find a new place to live this year. We have some parameters on the timing, though there is still some uncertainty on that front. Last year we did some clearing out of things we don’t use any more. We need to do that more aggressively for the next couple of months. The initial goal is to go through the book cases and filing cabinets and clear out unneeded stuff.
Take care of us. Not that I don’t do this, but we both have a tendency to let things slip. My initial tasks are related to some specific medical things that aren’t urgent, but need to be dealt with. I am going to remain vague on the details of this one.
Submit and publish. I’ve been in an unending iterative loop of proofing/editing one novel for an embarrassingly long time. I only submitted stories for three calls for submissions last year (and collected three rejections). I need to submit more. I haven’t been able to figure out a reasonable number of submissions to set as a goal, particularly with how much time and energy is likely to be sucked up with the move. So initial task is to organize how I’m going to find calls for submission and set reasonable targets for the novel revision/finalization.
Finally, my specific tasks for January are:
While packing away Christmas stuff, reduce the number of RoughTote™ containers full of old ornaments, et al, by at least two.
Figure out Writers’ Night schedule.
Write at least four blog posts about things I like.
Make a list of places that post calls for submissions.
Finish the current stage of the copy edit pass. There is a list of unfinished tasks with specific piles of pages of prioritized notes.
Finish going through the bookcases in the computer room, and get through at least one filing cabinet.
Stand up. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for your friends. Stand up for your neighbors. Stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves.
When you get knocked down, stand up. The old aphorism is it doesn’t matter how many times we fall, as long as we get back up and keep striving after. And it’s true. But the thing we don’t always remember is, no one said you have to do it alone. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to ask for a hand when you’ve fallen. And when someone has fallen and needs a hand-up, don’t be afraid to reach out and help them. When we help someone else stand up, we’re helping ourselves.
Stand together. Stand beside your friends, neighbors, and the people who feel alone. Stand together against the cynicism and greed and hate which we all have to face from time to time. Stand together. Lean on each other if you have to, but the most important thing is to stand up together. We’re stronger together.
Because when the forces of bigotry, fear, greed, and ignorance gather together and try to overwhelm us with hopelessness and despair, our only defense is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and say, “We will not be divided. We will not retreat. We will not give in. This is where we make our stand. Together.”
A couple of days ago I saw a comment on Tumblr (but haven’t been able to find it again so I can credit the person who made it), espousing the theory that in a future season of Doctor Who, there would be an episode where it is revealed that 2016 was a sentient year that fed off of destroyed hopes. Which seems like a good way to sum up most people’s feelings about how this year has gone.
Okay, so I understand that a year is a completely arbitrary thing. Humans who use the Gregorian calendar refer to the 366 days which are just ending as a year, but not even everyone on the planet agrees to when years begin, end, or how long they are. It’s the 31st of December 2016 for me, but for people observing the Hebrew Calendar (which varies in length from 353 to 355 days plus some years have and extra month) it’s the 2nd of Tevet AM 5777, and the end of the year is still months away. And people who still follow the Revised Julian Calendar (members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, for instance) it’s the 19th of December 2016–they’re still looking forward to Christmas! And Chinese New Year isn’t tomorrow, it’s still four weeks away.
But humans organize the world and their lives by categorizing things. We give meaning to our experiences by creating narratives. So we categorize one collection of days as this year or last year or next year. And w assign some meaning to our lives during a particular collection of days as a good year or a bad year or some other simplification. And for a lot of us, a horror movie is the narrative that most sums up 2016:
Yesterday I mentioned specifically the election, and the sorts of laws Republicans are planning the pass now that they have someone who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about other people (let alone democracy) weilding the veto pen, and others have focused on the famous people who have died, the rise of hate-motivated crime, various refugee crises, political problems around the world, and new scary diseases. But there’s a lot more to it than that. From four deaths in our family this year, to changes in work situations and living arrangements, to family members explicitly telling me why they want to take some of my civil rights away (and getting angry at me when I take it personally)… it’s been a pretty unhappy year personally.
I am under no delusions that somehow the arbitrary turning of a calendar page is going to bring a better tomorrow. Or that somehow when that balls drops and I kiss my husband and we wish each other a Happy New Year that any of the unpleasantness we’ve been dealing with is going to end.
But I can still take a bit of solace is saying “Fuck you, 2016!” Because sometimes venting anger is all we can do.
Happy Christmas! Shabbat shalom! Blessed Yul! Happy Hogswatch! Joyous Kwanza! Festive Festivus! Feliz Navidad! God Jul! Mele Kalikimaka me ka Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou! Beannachtaí na Nollag! Buon Natale! Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus un laimīgu Jauno gadu! Felix Dies Nativitatus!
It’s George H.W. Bush’s fault. During the 1988 Presidential Debates, then-Vice President Bush sneered at his opponent, Gov. Mike Dukakis, for being a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Bush claimed that the ACLU was out to make child pornography legal as well as make it legal for children to see X-rated movies. Both of those claims were, at best, distortions of actual ACLU goals (the ACLU has long opposed a rating system used in the U.S. because the system is secretive, favors large studios over independent ones, and sometimes serves as a form of de facto censorship, for example), but it almost certainly shored up support from Republican-leaning voters. But the other thing that happened was that, in the days after the debate, tens of thousands of people called the ACLU and asked what it took to become a card-carrying member.
Oh, and if you’d like one of those spiffy blue pocket Constitutions to keep on your person in case you need to assert your rights (or just correct a douche bro who doesn’t understand what the Constitution actually says), the ACLU sells them in very affordable 10-packs. Because you want to pass out extras to your friends and loved ones. And if, like me, you have a lot of freedom-loving friends who are also bibliophiles, you might want to pick up some Bill of Rights bookmarks. Not to mention stickers and other things.
Font Folly 