Category Archives: life

What men do…

society, , ,

I was on my third date with Glenn when I made some comment about something in the news being particularly disturbing for gay guys like us.

“Hey, man, I’m not gay,” Glenn said, with a grin and a chuckle.

I was dumbstruck for a moment. This was our third date, and me being (at the time) a very recently out guy, and it being the nineties, we had had sex with each other more than once by this point. His night job was bouncer at a gay bar, where he was a well-known flirt. (That wasn’t where we met, btw; he had seen me sitting in a coffee shop reading a book, and had chatted me up in part because he didn’t recognize me as a regular from the bar and he had a thing for “brainy shy guys.”)

Then I realized what he must have meant, and I said something like, “Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were bi. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

All signs of a sense of humor left his face. “I’m not bi, either,” he growled. “I’m straight.”

I apologized, and then asked him to explain, since we had had sex several times, and there isn’t any part of my hairy body that anyone in their right mind would describe as feminine. I did not add that he had a rather large number of stereotypical gay mannerisms and speech patterns, so no stranger who met him would have described him as straight-acting.

He explained. There was one certain sex act he didn’t do, because only gay guys did that. He did all sorts of things with men, including a few acts whose crude names are common insults thrown at non-gender-conforming men. But this one thing he did not do. So even though he had sex with men, specifically had sex with gay men, he wasn’t gay.

That was another part of his self-definition: he didn’t have sex with men that fit his description of “straight,” he only had sex with men who met his definition of gay. Not obviously effeminate men (in fact, having met a couple of exs, and being friends with a guy who he dated after me, I know he had a particular thing for hairy chested guys with beards), but men who did the thing he wouldn’t do.

I tried to circle back to the bisexual topic, and he dismissed that because he didn’t like having sex with women. He had dated a few girls in high school, and had had sex with two of them on an on-going basis. But he hadn’t enjoyed it. He did it, he said, because it was expected. He tried, when things started getting serious, to convince them he was a good Christian boy who didn’t want to pressure them, because of course being good girls they wanted to wait. But they didn’t want to wait, and he was afraid they might start rumors that he was gay, so he had sex with them.

He knew he wouldn’t enjoy it—just as he hadn’t really enjoyed dating the girls—because he’d been having sex with other guys his age as early as junior high.

“So, you don’t like dating or having sex with women, the only people you’ve had sex with or dated since high school have been men—a lot of men—and the only people you enjoy having sex with are men,” I summed up, “But you’re not gay?”

“No, I’m not, obviously,” he replied, “I’m a man. I do what men do.”

“So what you’re saying is,” I replied slowly, “that I’m not a man?”

The conversation just went downhill from there. Need I mention that it was also our last date?

I was reminded of this conversation by the comments a couple weeks ago by a particularly slimy television preacher in which he told a woman whose husband was cheating that it was her fault. “Men wander,” he said, “that’s what men do.” And then he told her it was her job to make the home and herself so appealing that her husband would rather not wander.

“What men do” is used as an excuse for everything from denying husbands equal child custody in divorce proceedings to excusing infidelities, verbal bullying, and violence. Its inverse, “things men don’t do” is the rationalization for bullying boys and young men who fail to act manly enough, as well as bashing gays or suspected gays of all ages.

It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.

It’s not that men wander—people wander. You can quote studies that say men report more sexual partners than women, and that more men admit to infidelity on confidential surveys than women. But you’re ignoring more recent studies, where respondents were hooked up to what they were told were lie detectors, which show that there is almost no gap at all between the number of men and women who admit to cheating on a spouse or significant other. The numbers of partners reported are more equal, as well.

Monogamy isn’t natural, that’s just a fact. That doesn’t mean that people can’t strive for it and achieve it, it just means that it’s hard work. Perhaps if more people understood that, instead of believing the myth that if you really love someone you will never be tempted to wander, a lot of relationships would be healthier and happier.

Some extremely masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with men. Some not terribly masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with women.

One of the men with the most masculine personality I ever knew is someone I met when he was a woman, a few years before identifying as transgender and entering into transition.

A straight friend I’ve known for more than twenty years exhibits a lot of stereotypical conservative masculine personality traits—but he’s not afraid to sit with his five-year-old daughter and play with her dolls when she asks. And he’ll tell strangers when he takes said daughter to My Little Pony conferences that it’s for her, but that only explains the third day of last summer’s convention, not the two days before while he was there by himself.

What men do… is whatever a man does. If it would be wrong when someone other than a man does it, then it’s just as wrong when it’s a man doing it. And, if it is all right when a man does it, than there’s nothing wrong when anyone doing it.

Because we’re all people.

Starting your day right

life, , ,

A few weeks ago I found myself trying to explain to a good friend precisely why it is I forget to eat breakfast on weekends, and more specifically, why “You just need to get into the habit” isn’t helpful to hear. While I agree that it’s never too late to learn knew things, it’s important to recognize that when one has failed for decades to undo a bad habit, it is going to take more than a pep talk to change it.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not still trying. It’s not the only habit I fight with. When I was in my 30s, for instance, was when I first realized that I was no longer capable of staying up to all hours a few nights every week and still put in a full, productive work week. I had to get out of the habit of staying up really late and sleeping in on weekends. And as I started doing a better job of getting up on weekends only a little later than weekdays, I found Mondays no longer felt like such a drudge and disaster.

It’s not easy. I’m not a morning person, and that isn’t just a preference. If given a chance, my natural body clock switches to almost a nocturnal schedule. Some of us are wired that way. So pursuing a career involving a more or less traditional office job is a constant fight.

After my late hubby went through his first round of chemotherapy, he had a very hard time sleeping more than a couple of hours at a time. One of the things we tried was melatonin, which is a natural hormone involved in regulating the sleep cycle. Melatonin tablets are very useful for people who work rotating shifts, or otherwise can’t sleep at the same time each day. It didn’t really help Ray.

Since I’d done a lot of research on it before Ray tried it, it occurred to me that I could use it when my sleep schedule got out of whack. Since it’s the same hormone that causes drowsiness naturally, taking the tablets don’t “dope you up” like other kinds of sleeping pills. Though research indicates we can’t build up much of a tolerance for it (it’s a hormone, after all), there is some concern that over-using might cause your body to produce less of it naturally. The upshot is that it’s advised only to use it the first night or two when you need to change your schedule.

So I tried it one Sunday evening, taking it about an hour before I needed to be asleep to get ready for work, and I laid down with a book. I conked out about a half hour later, and as the cliché says, slept like a baby.

I woke up the next morning about a half hour before my alarm went off, feeling better that I ever remembered having felt on a Monday morning. And the weird thing was, without taking any more pills, I reliably started getting drowsy for the next three or four days right about the time I’d taken the pill on Sunday. My personal natural cycle of not feeling drowsy until well after midnight did start to assert itself after a number of days, but for most of the week, it was great.

So, I decided that I should make it a regular thing to take one tablet every Sunday. And it works great.

When I remember to do it.

The problem is, if I don’t pay close attention to the time on a Sunday evening, it’s easy to miss the time. If you take it later, that defeats the purpose, because you’re setting the sleep cycle wrong.

I first tried it 18 years ago. I go through phases where I get good at remembering to do it, week after week, and it’s easy to get up and get into work on time without doing a lot of rushing, or feeling discombobulated at the beginning of the week.

But then I’ll miss a Sunday. And then I miss another, and pretty soon months have gone by without me remembering.

No amount of setting computer reminders or giving myself pep talks will work. Because no matter how determined I may be when I set the reminder to go do it as soon as the reminder happens, if by chance I’m in the middle of writing something that I’ve been trying to finish for a long time, or working on some other thing, I’ll think, “Yes, I’ll do that in just a minute…” and the next thing I know, it’s 45 minutes later.

But man, when I do remember, those Mondays are awesome!

All in the (video) family

life, ,

My dad didn’t like All in the Family. I think he and Archie had way too much in common, and seeing his own opinions laughed at rubbed him the wrong way. So we only watched it occasionally in the first season, or so. Usually when Dad wasn’t around.

I had mixed feelings about the show overall, and about some of the characters. Except, of course, Edith. As portrayed by Jean Stapleton, Edith Bunker was the sweet, ditzy, long-suffering wife of the unapologetic racist, conservative, and working class Archie. Edith was adorable. She was the favorite aunt everyone wished they had in their family.

By the time my folks divorced, All in the Family had been the highest rated network show for a few seasons, and the network had started broadcasting reruns of early seasons on weekday afternoons (it didn’t enter syndication for a few more years). I was able to see a lot more of the show, sometimes watching episodes with my grandmother, who loved Edith as much as I did.

Although the show was a licensed Americanization of the British series, Til Death Do Us Part, Stapleton played Edith much more naive and happy than the character from the British series. I’ve heard some people disparage the show in comparison to the British original, referring to Edith as an example of “typical American dumbing-down.”

They may be right about the show over all, but they’re wrong about Edith. Edith was ditzy, naïve, gullible, and clearly not a rocket scientist, but she wasn’t stupid. Ms Stapleton played her as warm, loving, and trusting. She was gullible because she saw the best in people, assuming that they were trustworthy until shown otherwise.

This was probably best demonstrated in an episode that a lot of people hate, “Edith’s 50th Birthday,” in which Edith is taken captive in her own home, and nearly raped in front of the audience. Edith eventually fights off the attack with a flaming birthday cake (seriously, and it wasn’t in a funny way). All the ways Edith tried to talk her attacker out of it, how she reacted to his threats, his gun, and finally, as the the birthday cake in the oven burns and fills the house with smoke, convincing the rapist to let her pull the cake from the oven, which allows her the smash the thing into his face and chase him out.

I saw the actor who played the rapist, David Dukes, on a talk show some years later, where he described the episode. The show was filmed before a live studio audience, at the time, and he said that the audience was clearly shocked when his character took Edith hostage, but they were still thinking that, since the show was a comedy, things were going to turn to slapstick at any moment. There was a point, when he had Edith up against a piece of furniture and he was pulling some of his clothes off, that the audience realized that this was serious. “There was a collective gasp,” he said, “which immediately changed into a growling. And I thought they might storm the stage and try to kill me.”

The birthday cake smoke appeared at that point, and moments later the audience was cheering very wildly as Edith scalded his face. He said he hadn’t really understood that Edith Bunker was “everyone’s favorite aunt” in the collective imagination before that moment.

And the problem was, he said, that because they filmed before a live audience, they also recorded every episode twice, each time in front of a different audience. “So, after genuinely fearing for my life, I had to turn around and do it again.”

He said he still occasionally received hate mail, “some of it with rather serious-sounding threats” years afterward.

After portraying “everyone’s favorite aunt” for over 200 episodes spanning nine seasons of All in the Family and one season of the spin-off, Archie Bunker’s Place, winning three Emmys and two Golden Globes, Stapleton thought Edith’s potential had been reached, and felt there was no story left to tell of her. When Stapleton asked Norman Lear, the creator and producer of the series, to kill Edith off, Lear was noticeably upset. Stapleton is said to have said, “Norm, she’s just a fictional character.” Lear responded, it is said with a tear in his eye, “No, she’s not.”

Before playing Edith, Stapleton played numerous roles in Broadway musicals and plays, appeared in several movies, and play dozens of guest starring roles in television. She continued to appear on TV and in movies for years afterward. But for many of us, she will always be Edith, the person we all wished we knew.

After news of Jean Stapleton’s death at the age of 90 on Friday, I noticed a sudden spike of traffic on this blog, all going to a post from last August called, “Maybe it was the heavy syrup?” I was referencing an episode of the series. I suspect people were looking for a clip. So, here’s one from the episode in question, “Edith’s Accident”:

You’ll feel different when…

life, love, people, ,

When I was in my late teens, I once got into a peculiar argument with a slightly older friend. I had made a comment to the effect that I could never see myself being happy living in a city. It had taken me a few years to get used to living in a town that was big enough to require more than one high school, after spending most of my life living in very small towns.

He was attending college in a nearby city at the time. He said he had felt the same way just a few years before. “You haven’t actually lived in a city,” he pointed out. “You’ll feel differently after you do.”

At least, that’s what I heard. It is quite possible that he actually said, “You may feel differently,” but I heard the firm assertion that he knew exactly how I would feel, and it activated my obstinate streak. I pointed out that I had been visiting a couple of cities fairly regularly, and I had a pretty good idea what they were like. Except I probably said it a bit meaner. I know I made a lot of disparaging observations about cities during the course of it.

A year or so later, I was attending college in a city. By the time I finished college, I had some good job prospects, and I had become quite enamored with several aspects of city life. So I stayed. And the longer I stayed, the more I liked living here. When I visit my mom in the town where I went to high school, I find I feel a lot differently about several aspects of living there which I used to think of as advantages.

My friend was right, and I was wrong.

Another time another friend and I had gotten into a discussion about my dismal love life. Most of the time there had been no love life at all. The few exceptions had failed spectacularly, though each in a different way. I trusted this friend more than I had ever trusted anyone, so I told him that I suspected I was bisexual, and I thought that perhaps that might be playing into my difficulties.

He immediately asserted that 1) I could not possibly be bi, and 2) once I stop doubting myself I would find the perfect girl for me. He argued his point with such emphatic certainty, that I doubted my own feelings and experiences.

Of course, I wasn’t being entirely honest. I didn’t merely suspect that I was not heterosexual. I had quite incontrovertible evidence. My friend was also operating under the same societal brainwashing that was responsible for the megaton of internalized homophobia I was carrying around at the time.

Eventually, I worked through that baggage (though it got more than a bit messy) and came to understand that my friend was wrong. I had only been half-right in understanding myself and my future, but the half I was wrong about was part and parcel of the parts he was wrong about.

Of course, one could argue that my friend was partially correct. Because eventually I did find the right person for me—a guy who made me so happy, who I couldn’t imagine living without, and who made me brave enough to stop living the lie of being closeted.

Our fairytale ending didn’t last as long as I hoped—Ray died a bit over six years after we moved in together. I had to figure out how to have a life that no longer had him in it. I have since been lucky enough to fall in love with another wonderful man, who has stuck with me for 15 years, so far, and even said “I do” when we finally could do so, legally, a few months ago.

The two friends who were adamantly convinced that I would feel differently one day were correct that my perspective changed, but their certainty about the way my perspective would change was at best guess work. It was also a bit of projection. Like people who insist that another person saying they don’t want to have kids “will feel different when you have your own,” they’re unable to conceive of anyone being happy and fulfilled living differently than themselves.

Just like I was when arguing with my first friend that I’d never be happy in the city.

Because we all do it. At one time or another everyone has either offered advice along that line. Or we’ve complained to a mutual friend, wondering why the person doesn’t see the obvious solution and do things this way. We may be right that there’s a better way, but it isn’t our life. No matter how smart or sympathetic we think we are, we don’t know what it’s like to be them.

The boy who knew too much

society, , , , , ,

Yesterday, a bunch of people linked to this article about Daniel Dobson, the son of a prominent fundamentalist preacher, talking about being a gay Christian. One of the places that linked to it also linked to this blog post by Ryan Barnhart, which sort of goes off on a tangent. But I understand why, because Dobson’s interview sent me on an even more meandering trip down memory lane.

During high school, I joined an interdenominational evangelical teen touring choir. I’d been raised in evangelical churches in several much smaller towns. Moving halfway across the continent to a bigger town had me feeling more adrift and out of place than before, so an organized religious musical activity was a welcome refuge.

I’d also spent my middle school years discovering beyond a doubt that I wasn’t straight, while experiencing entirely new levels of bullying. I was desperate to get rid of those feelings, so being confronted with a way to do “god’s work” seemed like the solution to all of my problems. Here were a bunch of people more or less my age who had a common background and a holy purpose—plus it combined aspects of music, theatre, sound, and light production…

Continue reading The boy who knew too much →

Memorial

historical trivia, , ,

Grandma often called it by the older name, “Decoration Day.” Each spring, as May approached, Grandma would start making phone calls to distant friends and relatives, making sure that flowers would be placed on the graves of relatives in that area. She would also make plans for the graves of relatives that were within a reasonable drive of her home. During the days in the week before Memorial Day she would visit each of those graves and place flowers. If the particular relative in question had also been a war veteran, she would place a small U.S. flag along with the flowers.

The pastors in the Southern Baptist churches we attended might give a sermon on the last Sunday in May about the importance of turning grief into rejoicing because someone has been “taken home to be with the Lord.” There would be some mention of people who died in military service (often as part of one of the prayers, asking god to comfort the families of the fallen soldiers, airman, marines, and sailors), but it was seldom the primary focus of the sermon.

For most of my childhood, I understood that Memorial Day was a time for families to visit the graves of loved ones. It was about remembering anyone who had died. The fact that many people used the day to specifically remember and honor those who had died in battle seemed to be a subset of the larger goal of celebrating the lives of all your loved ones who had died.

Most of my grade school career occurred before the passage of the federal Uniform Monday Holiday Act, so Memorial Day landed on whatever day of the week May 30 was, and I don’t think we were usually let out of school to observe it. When the Monday Holiday Act went into effect, I remember a lot of grumbling from various adults in my life. One particular rant stood out: an older man at the church potluck in May started complaining about “Yankees taking a good, pro-family holiday and turning it into a pro-federalist celebration of war!” He was shushed by his wife before he got too far along.

I didn’t meet my first Radical Memorialist until High School. Someone made a comment about the big barbecue their parents were planning for the weekend, and another of my classmates went ballistic. Memorial Day was not supposed to be about parties and celebrations! It was a serious day to remember people “who gave the ultimate sacrifice to keep this country free!” Anyone who didn’t do that was ignorant and shallow at best, selfish and unpatriotic at worst.

I genuinely was stunned. This being in the Stone Age (before the advent of the internet), I had to look up Memorial Day in an Encyclopedia. And that’s when I first learned how the original Memorial Day had been observed in 1866 intended to honor “those fallen in battle defending their nation during the recent rebellion.” A decidedly northern perspective.

Before that time, many southern states had a tradition of a Decoration Sunday that sometimes happened in April, in other places in May, where the aim had been to put flowers on the graves of family members. Families would frequently have a picnic lunch in the graveyard or cemetery, telling stories and celebrating the lives of their dearly departed. These often turned into family reunions, because family members living far away would try to get home for Decoration Sunday.

Which is why for many years a few southern states didn’t recognize a state holiday of Memorial Day. Several of those that did recognize Memorial Day still also had a separate Confederate Memorial Day or Confederate Decoration Day, because even today in those places Memorial Day is seen by many as “pro-Union.”

Of course, the historical reality is more complicated than that original encyclopedia article I read. While the Civil War was still raging, groups of people, mostly women, in both the north and the south organized days to decorate graves of soldiers from both sides. There was a recognition of the common humanity of all the soldiers. Some people coordinated it with the existing Decoration Days, others did not.

When I saw certain people going off on rants this weekend, angry that there are people who don’t spend the entire three day weekend on the sober, solemn, and somber business of mourning fallen veterans, I felt conflicting emotions. Of course we should be grateful to the memories of the men and women who have died in battle, fighting in our name in various wars and conflicts around the world. Of course we should comfort grieving widows and widowers. We, as a nation, should take care of children bereft of a parent because of a war fought in our name. Of course we should do all of those things.

But being a jerk to people who don’t choose to do it precisely the same way and at precisely the same time as you? That isn’t something I can support.

Memorial Day in my family was always a day to honor the memories of people such as my great-grandparents: people I knew and loved and who are no longer with us. It was a time to call my maternal grandmother to hear about everyone she had contacted while arranging the flowers, to get news from distant relatives (many of whom I barely remembered). For the last several years I haven’t been able to do that part. Grandma died on the Friday before Memorial Day, 2007. She was putting flowers on the grave of one of my great-aunts. My step-grandfather was getting ready to take a picture, when Grandma looked up, said she didn’t feel good, and then she fell over, suffering a massive aneurism.

We realized the next Memorial Day that none of us knew how to contact everyone that Grandma always got hold of to make sure flowers were placed on the graves of my great-grandparents, or Great-great-Aunt Pearl, or several others of the more distant relatives. My aunt located a few. One of my cousins tracked down a few others. and all of us spend some time on this weekend thinking about Grandma, and all the ways she kept everyone connected.

I’ve spent other time this weekend thus far thinking of many people I have had the privilege of knowing and loving who are no longer with us. My two grandfathers and eight great-uncles who served in WWII among them. Rather than lament their loss, I think about the good things they did, and about the fun times we had together. Memorializing someone should be about celebrating their life. Not just weeping.

And it certainly shouldn’t be about scolding people who have the temerity to wish you a happy holiday weekend.

Why Seattleites don’t use umbrellas

life, ,

I’ve been asked the question many times: as rainy as Seattle is, why don’t any of you have umbrellas? The answer is surprisingly logical, but it takes awhile to explain.

First, despite the reputation, Seattle isn’t as rainy as you think. Manhattan gets more precipitation per year than Seattle, for example. Now, it’s true that within an hour’s drive of Seattle are rain forests that get far more rain than that, but because of mountain ranges to the east and west, plus the the enormous heat sink that is the Puget Sound (an arm of the Pacific Ocean) on one side, and the slightly less enormous heat sink of Lake Washington on the other side, we have weird weather patterns that pushes a lot of the moisture into a convergence zone north of us.

One reason the people who visit or move here from other places think it rains more than it does is because we have many, many, many days of overcast with cool temps and a damp feeling in the air—but not rain. It feels like rain, or at least as if it must have just been raining minutes ago and you just missed it. So they think of some days as rainy when there wasn’t any actual rain.

When we do have rain, all that geography I mentioned means it might be drizzling in one neighborhood, but dry as a bone only a few blocks away.

The rain itself often comes as such a light drizzle that it feels more like a heavy fog or mist than rain. On days like that, it doesn’t matter whether you have an umbrella. If you’re walking, you get damper and damper and damper just from colliding with those micro droplets that seem to hang suspended, rather than fall.

We have a variant of that, where the rain is coming down as perceptible drops, but each seems to be accompanied by a host of the micro droplets. So it feels like you’re immersed. One of my friends describes it as, “It’s like there’s no difference between the air and the river or lake or whichever body of water is nearest.”

On those very rare occasions where the rain is very heavy, it’s almost always horizontal, because it is almost always accompanied by a strong wind. Again, a regular umbrella is useless against that (and is likely to be more of a bother, as the wind keeps trying to yank it away).

While we’re on the subject of wind, we have lots of places where the wind is constant. My office is a few hundred feet from the water front, and the first two miles of my walk home from work is similarly very close to the water. There is a constant airflow either toward the water or away from it in that zone. Because it is constant, it often doesn’t feel like a breeze. It seems to be almost nothing. You notice it most on either very warm days or cold ones. Because if the breeze is coming off the water, it’s always cold. So when the weather is uncomfortably warm, the side of you body facing the water feels noticeably cooler than the other side. If the overall weather is cold, that same breeze makes one side of your body feel as if it has already frozen, and the other side is significantly less frigid.

I’ve watched people try to walk with umbrellas in that part of town a lot. I assume most of them are tourists, as there are a lot of tourist places in the neighborhood. Even though it doesn’t feel like much of a breeze, people are fighting with the umbrellas at every corner. That airflow is sneaky that way. While you’re walking along beside a building, you feel a slight tug on the umbrella, but it’s easy to hang onto. Suddenly, as you get to the intersection, the pressure starts ramping up. Again, it doesn’t feel like an actual wind in your face, yet the umbrella is suddenly yanking and swooping and surging like a living thing trying to escape you.

In between the extremes I described above, we have rain that is a bit more like what people from other parts of the world think of as rain, and on those rare days an umbrella can be helpful—for the three to five minutes it actually is raining at the spot you happen to be at. So, for three to five minutes, ten or eleven days out of the entire year, an umbrella can be useful.

I’m not a native Seattleite. So when I first moved here, I owned an umbrella—for a while I owned a few of those compact collapsing umbrellas, plus one traditional big umbrella. I tried different strategies, such as keeping one at the office, one at home, and one in the car, so I would always have one handy. Or I carried a compact one around in my backpack. The problem remained that either I didn’t happen to have it near me when it would have been useful, or I’d have problems because of the wind, or by the time I dug it out and deployed it, the rain had either stopped, or shifted to the misty drizzle.

Most of the year one needs to have at least a light jacket handy, because it can go from sunny and pleasant to overcast and cold multiple times a day. Similarly, you need to have some sunglasses nearby, because those sun breaks can be quite blinding. You will use sunglasses hundreds, maybe thousands of times a year. But an umbrella will only be useful, at the very most, a dozen times a year.

And that’s why most Seattleites don’t use umbrellas—but almost all of us have spare pairs of sunglasses stashed around.

Tiny living…

life,

For several years my late husband, Ray, and I lived in studio apartment that was just a bit larger than 200 square feet. It had a real, if teeny, bathroom, and there was a kitchenette in one corner. Things were tightly crammed in, but we managed. For a couple years after that, we lived in a place a bit more than twice as big, which was a less cramped—but still tiny enough that it was an uncomfortable chore to have more than one or two friends visit.

Truth be told, we weren’t really living in such a tiny place. We only got by thanks to a rented storage unit down the road where most of my gigantic collection of books sat in boxes. We also kept seasonal clothes there, swapping out part of our wardrobe a couple times a year.

When we moved to a larger, two-bedroom apartment, it was like moving into a castle. There was so much room! Even after we bought a dozen big bookcases and unpacked all my books. Now, 17 years later, I’m in the same place and I suspect some folks who have visited our place would refer to it as a small apartment.

Shortly after we moved into this place, another couple moved into a small studio in the same complex. It’s a little bit bigger than the studio (in another neighborhood) we had lived in. Whereas we had had a storage place down the road, their spill over was vehicles. When they first moved in they had three vehicles: a classic Volkswagon Beetle, a big panel van with a rack of conduit and stuff on top, and a small pickup (a beat-up red Toyota, as I recall). And they parked all three on the street because their unit didn’t have an off-street parking space.

This was a problem for us as our unit also didn’t have an off-street parking space, and we owned one car. Not one car each, one between us. Which I sometimes feel guilty about as I don’t drive very often. But it’s still fewer cars than people. Not to mention the difficulty friends had finding parking when they come to visit.

A few months later, the couple with three vehicles already acquired a new truck. Not just any truck, this was on of those pickups with four doors, so it’s much longer than the van. They didn’t trade-in any of the vehicles they already had on the new truck. So they were two people, living in the city, with four vehicles.

The one time I engaged in conversation about the vehicles, I tried to ease into it by talking about the classic VW, since I knew a few people who drove hybrids that had been built in old VW chassis. I didn’t say what I had been thinking: why are you guys taking up all the parking space on the street? I just asked whether the VW was all original equipment, or if it was some kine of re-furb.

In answer, I got a bit of a lecture about how environmentally friendly driving a small car like the VW to work every day was, and how keeping the old van running for the contracting business the hubby did was more responsible than buying a new van every few years, and while the VW was perfect for her to get back and forth to work and such, her husband was just too big to fit comfortably in it, so they of course had to have a vehicle they could both fit in for running errands and such. (I learned later than another neighbor had recently bluntly confronted them about the number of vehicles they owned.)

I understood all of that. But first, that had nothing to do with them deciding to buy a gas-guzzling behemoth in addition to the others, especially when they were parking all of their vehicles on public property. I would probably have still been annoyed at the giant truck often being in my way, even if they had gotten rid of the older pickup, but this was a big step beyond.

She also talked about how cheaper it was for them to rent an apartment in the city close to where she worked than where they had lived before, where there had been more parking. I stopped myself from suggesting that the point of living close to work is usually to eliminate the need for a dedicated commuting vehicle (I live much further from my work than she did at the time, and I take the bus and walk, for instance).

The kicker was they had stopped driving the smaller truck. When someone reported it abandoned and it was ticketed, they moved it to a different spot on the street and put a For Sale sign in the window. And then, they bought a motor cycle. Not a little, economical scooter, a ginormous, rattle windows in houses a mile away motorcycle.

By that point, a bunch of neighbors were tired of the whole mess. Multiple people started calling to report the pickup that never moved. Since the newer truck tended to get left in the same spot for many days at a time, a few people called that in, too. After getting several abandoned vehicle tickets, they finally took the small truck somewhere to sell it, and began making plans to move to “a friendlier neighborhood.”

They had it backwards. The rest of us weren’t the unfriendly neighbors.

Yes, parking on the street in our neighborhood is open to the public. And our particular block has a number of small apartment buildings with inadequate off-street parking. If the households living in every individual “living unit” on the street had only one car each, there would have to be some cars parked on the street all the time. This was a decision made by builders, and sanctioned by the city when it granted building permits. There was an assumption that either some people wouldn’t have cars, or that some of us would park on the street.

It is getting easier and easier to get by without a car in the city. And I know, being a car owner myself, I am living somewhat in a glass house if I complain about this couple.

But the point I’m meandering to is that a lot of choices that we make about how we live have consequences on other people’s lives. Yes, they had a legal right to buy what cars they wanted. But parking that many on the public right of way isn’t really fair use. Parking isn’t the only impact that people have an a neighborhood, by any means.

So I have misgivings about some of the practices some owners in several neighborhoods are undertaking, finding loopholes in the current regulations to subdivide existing apartments into smaller and smaller units in the name of “affordable housing.” Yes, if someone wants to live in a place that size, they may do so, but the mere presence of many more people in a given neighborhood is going to infringe on the lives of other people in that same neighborhood.

Asking to have my misgivings addressed isn’t being a bad neighbor. It isn’t being classist. It isn’t being a “not in my backyard.” It’s one citizen saying, “You haven’t answered all my questions, yet.”

Mundanity and a slice of key lime pie

life, ,

The pollen count as been up, and up, and up, and down, then up, then, not-quite-so up (but not enough of a drop to count as down), and so on for the last few weeks. So most days I have fairly bad hay fever. Couple that with some big deadlines at work, and my productivity on home projects, including my own writing, has not been great.

It doesn’t help that we’re getting into heavy movie season, with Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness taking up a bit of my time and a lot of my mental space.

Friday before last started like a typical work-from-home day. I got up, took some sinus medication because of the hay fever, logged into the work network, dealt with some emails, then downloaded some files to work, before taking a break to drive my husband to work. I do that on work-from-home days so that I can pick him up at the end of the day and we can go directly out to dinner afterward, rather than waiting for him to ride his bike home and so on.

By mid-afternoon I was feeling really tired and my throat was starting to hurt. Throat symptoms are not typical for my hay fever, so I was beginning to worry. Then my hubby walked in the door, saying he’d left work because he was sick–sinus headache, sore throat, itchy eyes, and a fever. He went straight to bed.

I kept working until the end of my work day, but I was getting a bit groggy. Some point in there I took my temperature and confirmed I was running a low-grade fever. Finally, I logged out, went upstairs, and collapsed into bed. I woke up an hour or so later and asked Michael what he wanted for dinner. Neither of us felt like cooking. What I was craving was burgers and pie. As soon as I mentioned pie, Michael admitted that sounded good. But neither of us knew anywhere that delivered pie. So I drove to the store, picked up juice and things for easy meals for the next couple of days, and a banana cream pie. Then I got drive-through burgers.

I had to take another nap after dinner. Then we slept in both Saturday & Sunday, both of us taking frequent naps. Originally we had been planning to go out to see Iron Man 3 on Friday night, so when on Sunday afternoon we realized we both felt a bit better, were both feeling a little stir crazy, and there was a showing at the theatre within walking distance in about 35 minutes, we went. We stopped at one of our favorite restaurants on the walk back afterwards for dinner, then came home. I took another nap before waking up to serve us each a slice of pie.

So we had pie several nights in a row. It made being sick seem a little less icky.

For various reasons I needed to go into work earlier than usual three days the following week. One of those days I wound up driving in, which I almost never do, because it was the only way to make sure I arrived when I needed to. The drive in took less time walking to the bus, riding the bus, then walking to the office. But the drive home, as it has every time I’ve driven to this office, took more than three times as long as the drive in.

Friday night we saw the new Star Trek movie. I want to see it on the big screen again. Probably several more times. Yes, I liked it that much.

When I was picking up groceries Saturday in preparation for friends coming over for the monthly writer’s meeting, when I went looking for desserts I found myself picking both a coconut cream pie and a key lime pie. Just because pie sounded good, and one friend who usually attends really like coconut cream, while another friend who attends less frequently really like key lime. I like both (even though all this pie isn’t really on my diet). So while I was a bit disappointed that the key lime-liking friend didn’t attend this month, it was kinda nice to have all that leftover pie in the fridge Sunday.

Because it’s always nice to have pie.

Is it worth the outrage, part 2

historical trivia, ,

Saturday was the 43rd anniversary of Kent State Massacre, when members of the Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds into a crowd of student protestors, killing four and wounding nine others.

May 4 for some years now has been recognized in some circles as Star Wars Day, because of the silly pun, “May the fourth be with you.”

On Saturday the hashtag #StarWarsDay was trending much higher than #RememberKentState and other variants on Twitter. Some people were upset about this. They were so upset, that by midday all sorts of people were posting apologies, some of them rather abject, for desecrating the memory of the four students killed at Kent State.

I was flabbergasted. So I took to twitter myself and posted the following:

How dare you people talk about either Star Wars or Kent State while totally ignoring the assassination of Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson! Not to mention the deaths of the Haymarket Square Riot. Or those twenty sailors killed on HMS Sheffield! (In other words, can we please tone down the outrage? Please?)

If you aren’t familiar, HMS Sheffield was a British warship involved in the Falklands War, which was struck by missiles fired by the Argentineans on May 4, 1983. The initial strike disabled several ship systems, including fire suppression systems. The excess rocket fuel in each missile ignited, and the ship’s diesel stores burned for days after the crew had been evacuated. The ship sank while it was being towed in for repairs. And as I mentioned above, 20 members of the crew died in service to their country.

The Haymarket Square Riot broke out near the end of a long labor demonstration in Chicago on May 4, 1886, when police marched in on demonstrators, someone threw a bomb, the police started shooting indiscriminately. Seven police officers were killed (almost all by bullets fired by other policemen, by the way), four demonstrators were killed, well over a hundred people were wounded by either gunfire or shrapnel from the bomb. The demonstration itself had been called to support an ongoing strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which had escalated to the point on May 3 of police and Pinkerton guards firing into the crowd of striking workers, killing two, and wounding many more. Eight anarchists were later arrested and convicted of throwing the bomb, though everyone agrees now that none of them actually threw the bomb, and only one of them was probably involved in the making of bombs. Reaction to the incident kicked off a renewed series of police repression of labor activists and anarchists that many historians refer to as the first Red Scare. While May Day parades and demonstrations by labor had been occurring for a few years before this occurred, this event is often credited as solidifying the significance of May Day as a Worker’s Rights commemoration.

Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson was a Swedish nobleman who led a rebellion against the King of the Kalmar Union, an event which eventually led to Sweden becoming a kingdom of its own. Englebrektsson was assassinated on May 4, 1436 by a rival. Englebrektsson is considered a national hero of Sweden because his actions gave peasants a voice in government for the first time, creating a Riksdag (a deliberative assembly or parliament) structured so that peasants and laborers would have a number of representatives equal to the number of nobles. The Riksdag continued in the form Engelbrektsson instigated for nearly 400 years.

Some will argue that it is unfair for me to compare the assassination of a Swedish rebel leader from the 15th Century with a massacre of peace demonstrators in modern times. One seems lost in the mists of time, while Kent State is a current event, right?

Except Kent State isn’t a current event. It occurred 43 years ago. I personally think that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a much more relevant (and shameful) example of the abuse of power by the U.S. government than Kent State, yet when was the last time #GuantanamoBay was trending at all on Twitter?

And let’s be brutally honest here. Less than half of the Americans living today were even alive when Kent State happened. The median age of people living in the U.S. is 37 years old. That means more than half of the people alive today in the U.S. were born at some time after Kent State. Yes, it was a tragedy. Yes, we should remember instances where our own government has used its power to harm citizens rather than to protect them. But it is ludicrous to demand people treat its anniversary as a day so sacrosanct that no non-serious topics can be discussed.

Not only that, “May the fourth be with you” is a pun that is understandable by the vast majority of the English speaking world, whereas Kent State was an American tragedy. If you quizzed an Englishman less than middle aged living about Kent State, they’re likely to think you’re talking about something happening in the county of Kent in Southeast England, rather than a Vietnam Era event at an American University.

Two friends who saw my posting on Twitter spoke up to agree. By very odd coincidence, both of them are children of sets of parents who both were students at Kent State when the Kent State Massacre occurred. Yes, both parents of both of these unrelated friends were there. Each of them expressed surprise that anyone thought you couldn’t keep both meanings of May 4 in the same mind at the same time.

I get outraged about things all the time. Outrage over something like a troops firing on unarmed civilians is certainly justified. Outrage over people sharing a completely unrelated joke on the forty-third anniversary of merely one such event which is hardly the worst that this government has ever perpetrated?

That’s just silly!