Category Archives: life

Not the cool one

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I love The Big Bang Theory. I didn’t expect to. In fact, when I read about the show before it first aired, I was convinced that not only would it be horrible, but that it would obviously be a collection of low-brow humor built around making fun of nerds.

And since I’m a nerd, freak, and a geek from way back, I just didn’t see the point.

Then a pair of friends—both nerds—told me how funny it was. As one said, “Yes, the humor is at the expense of the nerds, but it’s things that are true about nerds. Not only do I know people exactly like them, many times I’ve been the people just like them.”

As I watched it, I’ve had one realization over and over. Every time I start thinking that while I am nerdy, of the four central characters, I’m more like Leonard (the least socially awkward one), Sheldon (the über-est nerd) will do something that is exactly like me. Or I will say something that I realize would be totally in character for Sheldon to say.

For instance, today a friend made a comment on Twitter about President’s Day, and before I knew what I was doing, I had replied to point out that the official Federal holiday is called “Washington’s Birthday Observance.” President’s Day is a completely unofficial name adopted mostly by advertising people. Explaining that to someone is something I could easily see Sheldon doing on the show. Having dipped my toes into Sheldon-land, I might as well leap on in.

I’m old enough that I remember when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed by Congress (it was signed into law during the summer of 1968—between my first and second grades—though it didn’t go into effect until January of ’71). I have quite distinct memories of teachers explaining, after the law was passed, how Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday would no longer be observed as separate holidays, but that a Monday between them would be the new holiday.

Except not one fact in that sentence was true.

Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, has never been observed as a Federal holiday. Some states at various times have observed it, but as far as I have been able to tell, none of the states I lived in as a child was one of them. I could digress for a bit about how there are no national holidays, and why states are free to ignore federal holidays, and why a Lincoln’s birthday is controversial in some states, but let’s leave that for another day.

Washington’s Birthday, February 22, was observed as a holiday only in the District of Columbia beginning in 1879. It wasn’t until 1885 that an act of Congress declared it a holiday to be observed at all federal agencies and offices throughout the states and territories.

In the 1950s some citizens started lobbying to have March 4, the original Inauguration Day, declared a federal Presidents’ Day holiday to honor the office of the presidency. A bill to name both Lincoln’s Birthday and this March 4 Presidents’ Day as federal holidays in addition to the existing Washington’s Birthday got stalled in Congress in part because some felt that three federal holidays in such close proximity was too much.

By the time the Uniform Monday Holiday bill was introduced, the first draft did specify that the third Monday in February would be observed as Washington and Lincoln Day, but that draft never got out of committee. The bill that was actually passed named the third Monday in February Washington’s Birthday Observance. Lincoln’s Birthday wasn’t included or mentioned.

A couple of states do officially observe a Presidents’ Day, but neither does so in February. Massachusetts recognizes May 29 (John F. Kennedy’s birthday) as Presidents’ Day in honor of the four men from Massachusetts who have served as president thus far: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Calvin Coolidge, and JFK. New Mexico observes a Presidents’ Day to honor all who have served as President, but the holiday is designated as the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Most of the rest of the states recognize the third Monday in February as Washington’s Birthday. In Virginia the official name is George Washington Day. In Alabama, the official name is Washington and Jefferson Day, in honor of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In Arkansas the official name is George Washington and Daisy Gatson Bates Day, to honor both Washington and Daisy Bates, a civil rights activist.

Currently, only three states officially recognize Lincoln’s Birthday as a holiday: Illinois, Connecticut, and Missouri. All three observe it on the 12th, no matter what day of the week that date falls on.

So the next time someone calls it Presidents’ Day, you’re prepared to set them straight.

Because neither Sheldon nor I can be everywhere.

Names, names, names

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In the last two weeks I’ve gotten into at least three conversations with friends and acquaintances about names. Then a long-distance friend explained his names in response to a writing prompt, and I figured the universe was trying to tell me something.

I’ve had a bunch of different names, some given names, some nicknames, some family variants of names, and then there’s an interesting twist on the legal names. Probably best to start at the beginning.

Continue reading Names, names, names →

Things out of our control

life

I was lucky enough, growing up, to have a bunch of wonderful grandparents. Both sets of grandparents, all four of my great-grandmothers, and two of my great-grandfathers were still alive when I was born. All four great-grandmothers lived until I was at least in my teens (one lived until I was in my 30s).

Part of the luck was simply having them. I didn’t realize that until sometime during grade school, as I learned that very few of my classmates knew any of their great-grandparents. I remember one particular friend in sixth grade who practically accused me of lying when I told him about seeing one set of great-grandparents at Christmas, and two other great-grandmothers a few weeks earlier at Thanksgiving. Not only had all of his great-grandparents died before he was born, but at least a couple of his grandparents had, as well.

My parents married quite young, and theirs had before them. Consequently, one of my great-grandfathers didn’t reach retirement age until I was in kindergarten.

And they were quite a collection of characters. One great-grandfather had been a horse wrangler (actual job title), moonshine runner, and repairman. One grandfather had repaired tanks during WWII, the other had repaired bombers. One great-grandmother spent many years working as a waitress. Another, when she was 70, rescued a horse from her son’s ranch when it was going to be put down because it was “untameable.” Within a year, it would come running when she whistled, and if it misbehaved, would stand obediently and let her spank it with her cane (and afterward he sulked around her looking like a dog with its tail between its legs until she told him he was forgiven). One grandmother was a nurse. One was a City Treasurer.

I learned different things from each of them—skills I still use today. I can see bits of each one’s personality in myself.

And until tonight, I didn’t have to use the past tense for all of them.

My Grandma B. died earlier this evening. She was the last of my grandparents still alive.

In many ways the loss is more abstract than personal. I haven’t seen her in person in decades, as she lived in a remote town that literally is not on the way to anywhere. For various reasons—some mine, some theirs—I haven’t been close to most of the relatives on that side of the family for a long time. Because of the dementia, it’s been a few years since Grandma and I had a phone conversation where I was certain she knew who I was. So, for me, she’s been gone for some time.

I don’t feel as if I deserve condolences. Not like my aunt who has been living with and caring for her, and has now lost her mother. Or any of the other relatives who live nearby and watched her decline up close. So I feel almost like an emotional carpetbagger just writing this.

We can’t control death. We can postpone it a bit. We can certainly hasten it. But that is merely an illusion of control. We can’t change the past, and the future is slippery at best. The only thing we have control over is now. How we live, now. How we treat our neighbors, friends, and family, now.

Choose carefully.

New shoes

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I was walking home from work, dealing with rain, a cold wind in my face, and the usual craziness of crossing intersections, and something felt wrong with my left foot. Not painful wrong, just off. Unfortunately, it was almost another mile before I could stop somewhere that had a place I could sit down sort of out of the elements but still have some light.

I took off the shoe (one of those boots that are sort of a hybrid between high top athletic shoes and full-fledged work boots) and checked my foot, the insole and so on. Nothing seemed obviously wrong, so I put the shoe back on, making extra effort to re-tie both shoes extra snug, and finished the walk home. Once there when I pulled off the shoes in better light, I cold see the spot on the outer left side where the upper was separated from the sole. “Guess I need a new pair of shoes,” I said. As I set the shoes aside, I found a hole on the other shoe’s upper, at a different location, but around on the side where it hadn’t been easy to see. “Okay, seriously overdue for new shoes.”

The next morning while I was getting ready for work, I grabbed my pair of low-top tennies, which I normally never wear to the office except sometimes on a casual day. As I was tying the shoe, I realised that the spot on the middle on one top that was a brighter white than the beige of the rest of the shoe was actually a hole letting my sock show through.

When I mentioned this to my husband, he mentioned that both his main work shoes and his backup pair were in a similar state. Which is why we wound up driving to a big sporting goods store Friday night before going out to dinner.

And now we both have new shoes. Which means we both have new-shoe soreness. I even got a blister, yesterday! Joy! At least until I break them in (or they break me in, depending on how you see that debate).

This is the first time in a while that I replaced both my main pair of work shoes and my “casual” shoes at the same time. When I replace only one pair, I can at least give my feet a break every couple of days by wearing an already broken-in pair. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown the others away so soon, eh?

Except we know that when I don’t throw out old shoes right away, they never get thrown out. And soon a major chunk of the closet has been taken over by old shoes. That’s not good.

It is a bit disturbing how much we can ignore. Yes, the wearing out of shoes is a gradual process, so on one hand it shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t notice how decripit a shoe is getting until something big fails, but then I look around at other the pile of “books to read next” or “things to sort through” that have gotten larger than I realize and I wonder how could I not notice?

I think I need to block out a few weekends to do some de-junking before we turn into an episode of Hoarders…

Acclimated

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“Bring your coat; it’s cold out!”

I was reminded recently of the last time I visited Arizona. It was 1982. I was attending college1 in southwest Washington. My mom, who had remarried a couple years before, was living in Phoenix with my stepdad and the older of my sisters2.

My sister was getting married3 on Christmas Eve, so I came to visit for Christmas break to attend the wedding and have Christmas with Mom.

Every time we left the house, Mom would urge me to bring my coat. And everywhere I went, I wound up carrying my coat draped over one arm. I regretted not packing several pairs of shorts. The temperature, as I recall, never dropped below the low 60s (Farenheit)4. My Mom and Step-dad weren’t the only people wearing coats at the restaurants, movie theaters, and so on. I was sweating, but surrounded by an entire city of people practically shivering from the “cold.”

December in Phoenix, at least that year, was like June in Seattle.

On the other hand, I start complaining about the heat when the temperature gets up into the high 70s—and whining by the upper 80s—which makes friends who live in Phoenix (and Texas, southern California, Florida, et cetera) laugh5. Since for only two or three weeks in August or July does Seattle temperatures get into what most people would classify as summer-ish, my tolerance for heat is nearly non-existent.

Mom’s acclimation to Phoenix winter was particularly amusing to me, because during my childhood we lived in much, much colder places. During my junior high years, for instance, one of my morning chores during winter months was to carry an extension cord out to the driveway and plug-in the engine block heater for Mom’s car. It was actually two heaters: one built into the oil pan, the other into the coolant system. It warmed up the engine block enough to make the car start easily in the cold. On those mornings where the thermometer out on our front porch showed the temperature was colder that -10°F (-23°C), I had to string the second extension cord out to plug in the engine block heater for Dad’s pickup.

It got cold enough to justify the second extension cord at least a couple dozen times each winter.

Some years ago when on Christmas Eve I called my grandmother who still lives in that small Colorado town, she told me it hadn’t been a terribly cold Christmas thus far. “We only got to 25-below6 once or twice this week!”7

And one of my cousins who was there chimed in that the windchill factor was only “minus fifteen.”

Mom lived in that part of the country for a good 18 years, yet only a year or so in Phoenix was all it took for her to start thinking that what I considered early summer weather required a coat. Not a jacket, but a coat!

People are adaptable. We get used to the environment we’re in (physical, emotional, or cultural), adjusting our comfort levels without concious thought. Adaptability is a good thing. It doesn’t hurt, every now and then, to try to step outside yourself and look at what you’ve learned to accept as normal. In the abstract, are those really good things? Is this really where you want to be? Are you really who you want to be?

Similarly, are the people you disagree with just looking at things from a different perspective? Just because I think it’s madness to wear a coat when the temperature is in the upper 60s doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Not in the way they would be if they were huddled under an umbrella complaining about getting wet when the sun is shining and the precipitation is zero.

It’s important to distinguish between the way a person reacts to facts and the facts themselves.

1. During the long stretch of attending part-time, while living with my grandparents and working several jobs.

2. Our younger half-sister was living with my dad and stepmother back in Utah.

3. Which is a story so convoluted that if I used it in the plot of a novel, critics would universally pan the book as being totally unbelievable.

4. I have been known to be out and about wearing shorts when the temperature is 50°F (10°C)—and sometimes colder.

5. Of course, the last time I was in Texas in the summer, I noticed how many people spent those hot, muggy months inside their homes air-conditioned down to the lower 70s, riding in air-conditioned cars to sit in restaurants or churches air-conditioned down to the upper 60s, so I’m not sure they have as much to laugh about as they think.

6. That’s -25°F, or -30°C.

7. Just today my half-sister, who lives nearby, commented that the high temperature this week had been 6°, or -14°C.

Just in (unseasonal) time

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I realized this weekend that the wall calendar is soon to go the way of the phone book.

In previous years, while I was out Christmas shopping, I was constantly coming across racks of wall calendars for the following year. There would be scores of different calendar designs at some places. And most years I would see one that leapt off the shelf at me, “Oh, I have to give this one to Michael!”

Some years we each gave the other multiple wall calendars. Which was fine. We need them in multiple locations in the house. At a minimum, one upstairs and one down. And I have always had one at work. At work I also always have a year-at-glance style calendar. While the latter technically makes the former redundant, I use them for slightly different ways of thinking.

Plus, I like having some interesting art or a photograph to look at that changes every now and then.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still wall calendars for sale in stores. But this year I noticed that the displays were far smaller and less varied. It’s always been the case that the variety of cute kitten or puppy calendars outnumbered everything else, combined. And lame landscape photo collections came in a close third.

But this year, those were the only ones I ever found!

So I didn’t buy any before Christmas. And when I realized that the only 2013 wall calendar either of us had was the Brony calendar several of our friends did art for, I went looking specifically for a good downstairs calendar for the house and one for my cube at work.

It’s not just that there wasn’t ones that appealed to me–a lot of places that I could previously count on to be selling slightly discounted calendars for a couple months after New Years didn’t have any calendars in stock at all.

I did see a couple at the FedEx store, of all places, that would have been acceptable. I probably should have grabbed them, but that would have meant getting in the checkout line after we’d finished our shipping business, and we were on a schedule.

And it’s also true that I far more often consult the calendar app on my phone (which automatically synchronizes with my calendar app on my laptop), so I don’t really need a hard copy calendar hanging on the wall. It is slightly convenient having the hard copy, but it has more to do with habit than need.

I don’t think that demand is going down nearly as fast as the practical obsolescence of the phone book. I suspect the lack of selection in brick and mortar stores is as much to do with online shopping as more and more of us using calendar apps. The wall calendars that physical stores will carry are going to fall into the categories of things that people will buy on impulse or out of desperation because they don’t know what else to buy Aunt Martha.

It only took me two minutes online to find a couple of calendars I liked and order them. So I’m contributing to that part of the process.

Not that it’s a bad thing. I just need to learn some new habits.

And we all know how easy and fun that always is, right?

Right?

My New Year’s Wish

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The changing of the year from one calendar to the next is often a time to set goals. I may do that more concretely before the week is out, but first I want to make a New Year’s wish. This wish is for everyone, especially me:

Remember to be a lantern, not just a mirror. If your life is filled with light, share it. But even if it is not, never forget that we always have the power to lighten someone’s life, at least a little bit, and sometimes that little bit is more significant than we can imagine.

Gold rings (ba-dum-bum-bum)

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About a week after we eloped a friend said, “I’m going to ask you a question that may seem weird, but I’m asking because so many people asked me the same question after I got married: do you feel different?”

My answer was, “Actually, yes, I do. It’s a little weird. Great, but weird.”

There are several reasons I didn’t expect to feel different. Michael and I have been together for nearly fifteen years, living together for 14½ of them. We already know each other’s quirks, bad habits, good habits, who is most likely to misplace his keys/wallet/watch/phone (me), or who is most likely to not check to see if his keys are in his pocket until he’s out of the house but know exactly where they are inside the house (Michael). We’ve registered as domestic partners, first with the city, and then when the state offered it, the state. We even had a small party with friends the first time. We’ve been through medical emergencies together. We’ve bought two cars together. We’ve been calling each other (and thinking of each other as) “husband” for many years.

When voters in our state approved the referendum three years ago affirming the legislature’s vote that extended all the state-given rights and responsibilities of marriage to domestic partnerships (but not to call it marriage), one of the changes was that the process of dissolving a partnership became the same as getting a divorce. When we received the official notice from the state that we had a certain number of days to dissolve the partnership under the old (much quicker and simpler) process before the new law went into effect, I remember we had a few moments of joking that if either of us wanted out, this was our last chance. It was a sobering thought, and one which I don’t think most couples entering into marriage think about as much as they ought.

So while I think the latest vote that got rid of domestic partnerships and extended marriage to same-sex couples was important, I didn’t expect to feel different. Having been through so much with Michael already—having covered all that emotional ground together—I figured the actual being married part would feel like the same old same old. I knew I would get emotional during the actual ceremony. I cry at tearful scenes in movies that I’ve seen millions of times, for goodness sake. Of course I was going to tear up a bit.

Okay, so I didn’t just cry a little bit. I cried while reading news stories of couples who had been together for many decades getting their licenses. I cried seeing the pictures and watching the videos of crowds of people congratulating strangers. I cried when they took our picture after we picked up our license. I cried when relatives and friends sent their congratulations. And I cried at our elopement. I cried a lot.

And I still get teary-eyed. While I was tidying the house on the afternoon of Christmas Eve it struck me that this is our first Christmas as a married couple. And I teared up and had to go give Michael a hug.

I know part of that is because it is new. I know another part of it is because I’ve had to fight for legal equality my whole life, and it’s still just a bit of a shock that a majority of voters in my state agreed this institution should be open to gay people, too. Related, over the last few decades I have become painfully familiar with just how many legal rights and responsibilities are utterly unavailable to couples who don’t have the flimsy piece of paper from the state saying you’re married.

A few years ago I read an editorial about how important marriage is to society. In building her argument, the author pointed to several gay rights web sites that had lists of legal rights available only through marriage and heart-wrenching stories of long-term partners being kept out of hospitals or funerals by bigoted relatives as the best source of information about how deeply entrenched the concept of marriage is in many of our customs and laws. “No one understands the value of a social or legal institution more than the people who are not allowed in,” she said.

Which brings me to the people who feel such a burning desire to keep the institution an exclusive club that only allows people of whom they approve. People don’t raise millions of dollars, compose disingenuous television commercials, and pass laws to exclude people from a mere piece of paper. They don’t amend state constitutions, try to oust judges, or fire teachers to prevent the mere public acknowledgement of the “true commitment that happened in private.” To do that sort of thing you must believe that this institution is something more important than a simple piece of paper or public declaration.

So one shouldn’t be surprised if one does feel something once you’ve managed to join that very institution.

I’ve been failing to complete this posting for several days because I can’t quite put into words the difference that I’m feeling. Searching the web, I see that in other blogs and articles it’s split about 50-50 between people who insist that nothing feels different, and those who admit that it does feel different, but they can’t quite explain what it is.

One thing I know it isn’t: the ceremony was not the culmination of our relationship. It isn’t a pinnacle. It was a high point, but it isn’t the highest we will ever reach together.

It was a wonderful and very moving day. It was and is fabulous to feel the genuine excitement from our friends. The love and support and well wishes that we’ve received have been palpable and have made me grateful to have so many wonderful people in our life. It’s the beginning of a new phase in our journey through life together. Not radically different on a day-to-day basis, but very subtly different.

I can’t fully describe all the ways I feel different. And I certainly don’t claim that the way I feel is the same way any other married person ought to feel. But I do know that I feel very, very, very lucky to have this wonderful man as my husband.

And maybe that’s all that matters.

Goose eggs!

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This time of year I often find myself saying, “You don’t have to get me anything. No, seriously.” And I mean it.

One reason I mean it is because I already have too much stuff. I’m a packrat, son of packrats, grandson of packrats, great-grandson of packrats, and things accumulate around me. I hang on to extra adaptor cables, chargers, old gadgets that have been replaced with newer models because someone might need that someday. I collect books, certain kinds of toys, pens, earrings, paper products, movies, music, and other things because I like them. Or because they have some kind of sentimental value.

And my husband has similar tendencies.

So, on one level, I literally don’t need more stuff.

On the other hand, who doesn’t like getting gifts? Particularly if it’s something really wonderful? A couple of friends found an old book I didn’t know existed, written by an author I love, illustrated by an artist I like, featuring a character both my husband and I have enjoyed reading about, and with a hilarious title which was perfectly innocent when the book was written in the 1930s, but now sounds like a sensational expose of some secret gay life of the character in question.

It was a perfect gift for us. And I was truly ecstatic when I opened it.

Several years ago, when my mom was trying to come to grips with the problems inherent in her packrat tendencies, asked me to refrain from buying her things that would just sit around taking up space. “If it isn’t something I can use up or that you know I need, please don’t.”

It has proven a valuable guideline, which I have been trying to apply to everyone I shop for at Christmas time. And I really enjoy getting that kind of present from others. For instance, another friend gave me some really comfortable, extra warm socks in my favorite color. They’re perfect for cold winter evenings when I need to keep my toes warm. And yeah, they’ll wear out eventually, but the whole point is to use them, including use them up.

Another friends got us a custom engraved photo frame with the date of our elopement. We were blessed to have several friends take some really great pictures of the event, and yes, I want to display a few of them. One of aforementioned friends gave us framed printouts of some of the best of the pictures he took. More great gifts.

I know that I have ignored others telling me that I don’t need to get them something. I’m not trying to be difficult, and I certainly don’t want them to feel obligated to reciprocate. I do it because I want to give them something. Sometimes it’s because I saw something in a store or at a craft fair or in a dealer’s den and I thought, “Oh! So-and-so simply must have that!” And sometimes it just means I was thinking of them.

And I recognize that the same thing is happening with the people who give me things when I say they don’t need to.

It’s a dilemma with no easy solution.

Well, actually, the solution is quite easy: now that I’ve typed it. Instead of telling people they don’t need to get me anything, I should just stick to a heart-felt “Thank you!”

Milking it (Not just for eight maids)

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When I was a teenager, the local community college upgraded the lights for its baseball field. After the first night game, a relatively well-to-do widow who lived next to the field called to complain that the lights kept her awake. They were so bright, her curtains couldn’t keep the light out.

So a school official met with her. At her request, he came back during a game and let her show him how much of her house was impacted by the lights. The school brought in some experts to look things over.

Fairly quickly, the school offered to pay to install new windows and blinds, and to investigate whether trees could be planted on school property to shade her house, or whether a tall barrier would work better. She responded with a letter from her lawyer, explaining that the only acceptable solution was the complete and permanent removal of the lights. The letter also asserted that the additional heat from the lights made the house unbearable as summer came on.

The college countered with an offer of more remediation steps, including paying for a central cooling system. She answered by filing a lawsuit against the school and several state agencies.

Thus began a back and forth of offers and rejections. Various state officials became involved. More accomodations were offered. She countered by adding the names of specific officials to the lawsuit, and recruiting various cranks (who would all be part of the Teabagger movement if they were around today) to stage protests, storm board of trustees meetings, and so on.

When the school offered to buy her house for a specific percentage above assessed value and to pay to move her to her new home, her lawyer suggested she take it. She fired the lawyer and hired a new one, and filed more motions to the court. The state attorney general’s office recommended, with all the time and money already sunk into an attempt to get a settlement, that they not risk the expense of all the suits going to trial. They recommended the school moved to condemn her property for the construction of new facilities (they had been buying up property nearby and building new buildings, already).

The process for condemning land when needed for essential services (which, thanks to the original framers of the state constitution, includes education) is much quicker than any lawsuit. The appeals process is more limited, and the standards for filing a suit to stop condemnation are much higher than that to file an ordinary suit.

By the time I was a student at the college, and Editor of the student paper, the final appeal of the condemnation was in the works. She suddenly changed her tune. Those same cranks who had mobbed meetings and staged protests, insisting that none of the offers the school had made were an acceptable solution, now demanded that the school stop the condemnation process, buy her the new blinds, and plant a line of trees to shade her property from the field lights.

Though the drama seemed to be nearly over, I thought it might be worth a story or two. One of the other student reporters was very keen to interview the widow, so I assigned the story to him. A couple days before deadline, he told me the interview had been awkward, but he would have the story in.

The threatening phone calls started before I’d even seen the story, and long before we printed anything. I’d been a student journalist in high school before coming to college, and I’d gotten threats and harassment before. But they had been mostly from other students. This was, I think, the first time that nearly all the threatening phone calls, messages, and notes had been coming from adults outside the school. And some were very vicious, though, to be fair, none were death threats; we usually only got those in relationship to abortion and art show reviews—yes, art show reviews!

I attended the board of trustees meeting where the last opportunity for the school to back out of the condemnation proceeding took place. Dozens of people showed up to speak on the widow’s behalf. But she wasn’t there. She had never attended any of the meetings. She wasn’t incapable of leaving her house. She had hosted several strategy dinners at a restaurant just outside of town to arrange that crowd at the meeting, for instance.

Every single person who spoke on her behalf mentioned again, and again, how she was such a helpless little old lady. And they repeated the appeal for the school to do the very things they had offered to do many times before starting condemnation procedures.

One of the reasons I believe she never showed up at any public meeting was because in person she didn’t come across as a helpless old lady. The student reporter who had interviewed her said that at first she was very sweet and charming, but he must have said the wrong thing at one point, because she became hostile—not in a screaming or insulting way, he said. Her eyes went from twinkly to glaring like a predator. She made several veiled threats indicating she might be able to cause him some trouble if his story didn’t treat her fairly.

Difficult to play the helpless victim when you’re threatening people, particularly in that cold, quiet, and calculating manner.

Even if I hadn’t know that, the personality type was clear by her legal findings. Every compromise that was offered simply spawned more threats, until finally the bluff is called, and suddenly she was all for compromise. It’s classic bully behavior.

Just like Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle, who spent the summer and fall issuing statements that the passage of the Marriage Equality Referendum on the ballot would force his priests and churches to perform same-sex marriages, and urging all religious people to oppose it for that reason. And now that it has passed, he’s issued a set of instructions to the churches in his archdiocese, quoting the portion of the same law that explicitly exempts churches and ministers from performing same.

Classic bully behavior.