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The Socks I’m Not Sizing

February 23, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, games & puzzles, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, music, school, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Socks I’m Not Sizing

Department Of Spoiler Alerts

* Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
* Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
* We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
* Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
* Here’s looking at you, kid.

After seeing Poor Things last weekend, I have a nominee to add to the list of the American Film Institute’s best/classic movie quotes:

“I must go punch that baby.”

 

Dude, please, let her go punch that baby.

 

And on the subject of movies, have y’all seen the nominees for the 2024 Best Picture Oscar?  One of the best lists in years, moiself  thinks.  I’ve seen eight of the ten films that are nominated…

֍  American Fiction

֍   Anatomy Of A Fall

֍   Barbie

֍   The Holdovers

֍   Killers Of The Flower Moon

֍   Maestro

֍   Oppenheimer

֍   Past Lives

֍   Poor Things

֍   The Zone Of Interest

My favorite fellow movie lover, daughter Belle, was eager to know what I thought of Poor Things, which she’d highly recommended.  Here’s part of our text-versation early Sunday afternoon, as MH and I exited the theater after having seen  Poor Things.

Moiself:
I must go punch that baby!

Belle:
I laughed out loud in the theater when she said that line.

Moiself:
So did we – for several minutes.

Belle:
I was wondering if I should warn you guys about the gratuitous amount of sex scenes. But hey, you’re adults too (haha).

Moiself:
They were mostly just funny.

Belle:
I agree, the whorehouse scenes were practically comical.

Moiself:
I like the fromage joke she told.  That’s something I would do.
I mean telling a joke about cheese, not working in a whorehouse.
Now I don’t know what to root for, for Best Picture…the strongest category the Oscars have had in years, I believe.

Belle:
Yes!
I decided to catch up on Oscar noms today. I finished watching Anatomy (of a Fall) maybe 30 minutes ago, and I’m gonna watch The Holdovers later this afternoon.

Moiself:
I’ve been wanting to watch Anatomy but can’t find a time when MH will agree to it because he thinks it’ll be depressing…just like he can’t find a time for me to watch Killers of the Flower Moon, because more depressing than the subject matter to me is 3 ½ plus hours of watching Leonardo DeCaprio’s pumpkin face.
The Holdovers is really good.
Here’s another nominee that has something to do with Nazis/WWII. I don’t know if I’ll get around to that; there’s been so much done on the subject – done well, of course but still…. Do you know which one I’m talking about?    [1]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Thanks (Mick & Keith) For The Memory

Dateline: last Saturday, 7:45am-ish, driving with MH to meet son K for breakfast.  MH was playing music via his music app’s we-think-you’ll-like-these-songs-because-you-listened-to-these-other-songs  playlist via his car radio.   [2]  The iconic rhythmic intro to  Honky Tonk Women rambles through his car’s speakers, providing me with a flashback to one of the few times in my life when my mother said or did something quite uncharacteristic of her.

Dateline: one late Spring evening when I was in high school.   [3]   For some reason I have the living room all to moiself.   Our house’s only decent stereo/radio console is in the living room, and I have the radio on and the volume up, to distract my brain from a boring homework assignment I’ve been putting off.

As whatever station I’ve tuned to begins playing The Rolling Stone’s Honkey Tonk Women, I hear the hallway door open, and my mother enters the living room.  She cocks her head to one side as she listens to the song, and begins to snap her fingers to HTW’s instantly-recognizable-to-anyone-under-30 syncopation  (hats off to TRS’s stickman extraordinaire, the late great Charlie Watts). 

 

 

 

She then declares that HTW would be a great song “…to do a striptease to.  You know, like Gypsy Rose Lee?”  She begins swaying her hips from side to side, and mimes removing a glove from her left hand, finger by finger, and gestures for me to join her in her…uh…dance.    “C’mon, Rob, try it.”   [4]

 

 

 

*   *   *

 

Lies, lies.  More of the same, as in a potpourri of mostly apolitical blurbs.  After a week’s worth of not-particularly-surprising-but-nonetheless-depressing news from around the world, moiself  feels like taking the blog equivalent of a spa day.

*   *   *

Department Of Oh, That Poor Kid

Dateline: Tuesday morning 7:58 AM.  Nearing the end of my morning constitutional,   [5]  moiself  is walking up a neighborhood street, headed toward home.  Approaching me is a girl riding a bicycle.  [6]  I assume she, like other kids I’ve seen on this street at this time of the day, is headed for the local middle school, which is two blocks behind me.  She has curly, shoulder-length, dark brown hair, thick black rimmed eyeglasses and is wearing khaki pants and a red/blue patterned sweater.  And she is grinning from ear to ear. 

 

I don’t know how important this message is; my pause is to insert background info:

I vary my morning walks, but most of my routes take me around/near the two schools in my neighborhood (one elementary, one middle school) and several street corners which serve as a stop for the high school busses.  If I’m out walking and make eye contact with a person passing by it has been my lifelong habit to briefly greet that person, no matter their age.  But in the past few years, I’ve stopped extending a quick good day if the passersby are of student age.  This is because 99.5% of the time the Young People Of Today ® never return the greeting, and/or seemed annoyed or embarrassed or even alarmed that an adult is recognizing that they are a fellow traveler in this world.  I figure they mostly fail to see me in the first place:  they don’t make eye contact; they’re all looking down at their cellphones (the rare one or two who are not screen-mesmerized are still walking with their heads down).  Someone over age 30?  I’m not on their radar.

BTW, this saying-hi-to-strangers was a custom of mine that one of my college boyfriends found bemusing at first, then alarming, when he realized it was a thing-that-I-do.  We were planning a trip to the East Coast for the summer after my graduation, and he’d spent some time exploring The Big Apple with friends when he was in high school.  “Please don’t to this when we’re in New York,” he advised me, and told me scary incidents he and his friends had experienced, illustrating how making eye contact with or even acknowledging the presence of strangers was an invitation to get mugged.

 

 

Big Smiling Girl’s bike is a beach style contraption with balloon tires; when she is about 50 feet away from me, she stops her attempts to ride it with her hands off the handlebars (the bike was wobbling, quite a bit.)   When she’s about 30 feet in front of me she looks directly at me and chirps an enthusiastic, “Good morning!” I return the greeting; as she pedals past me she adds, “How are you doing?” I turn around and reply, “I’m doing well, thanks, and I hope you are, too.”

It was a sweet moment for me, even as I vacillated between stifling both my laughter and my “Oh dear…” reaction.  The latter is due to the idea that if junior high is anything like I remember it (and my sources tell me it is, if not worse), this girl, by acknowledging and even initiating an exchange with an adult who is not related to her….oy vey.  Why am I so cynical about her likely social standing among her peers?

*   *   *

Department Of Yet Another Appeal To The NY Times

Gentle Editor of The New York Times game section:

When I open your app on my phone first thing in the morning, and see the game you have chosen to be “on top” (as in, the first game that the app user sees   [7]  ), please refrain from greeting me, under the play button of the game which you currently have as the top choice (Spelling Bee), with the phrase/warning/admonition/challenge (what is it, BTW?),

You missed yesterday’s game.

Moiself  missed nothing.  I used to play Spelling Bee, but it’s been over a year since I have, after for the too many-eth time I became irritated by the narrowness of the game’s word curation choice – a petty complaint to you, perhaps, but one that to me is a matter of honor.  I’m not coming back.

I greatly enjoy your new word game, Connections, and also Wordle, the mini crossword, and Letter Boxed, as I have written here previously  (no need to thank me for the free publicity).  Just stop the nagging, OK?

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [8]

 

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

Moiself  hates it when someone whose job it is to help you can’t or won’t admit that they just don’t know something (or that they are wrong):

Dateline:  Monday, 11:30 am shopping at a local sporting goods store for a pair of socks for MH’s half birthday.   [9]    I’m looking for a certain brand of wool socks.  Flipping through the store’s sock selection hanging on the wall by the hiking boots department, I notice that there seems to be no pattern to either the size or brand or color organization of the socks.  I keep thinking I’ve found the pair I’m looking for, then see the sizing info on the price tag, which reads, Womens.

A salesperson standing about twenty feet to my left, who has been organizing a sales rack in the adjacent (camping supplies) department, calls out to me, “Are you finding what you’re looking for, ma’am?”  I thank him, say that I’ve found the socks, and am now trying “…to find the right size for my husband – men’s sizing.  I found one in large, but it’s a women’s large, which is as two sizes smaller than a men’s large, and my husband has big feet.”

“All of our socks use unisex sizing,” he responds.

 

And all of our socks use they/them pronouns.

 

Hmmm.  *Some* of the socks are clearly labeled unisex, with a small chart detailing unisex sizing range, but others are not. “Well…noooo,”  I reply, shaking the socks I am holding in my hand.  “I need a men’s large; this is a women’s large.”

“Our socks *all* use unisex sizing,” he insists.

I find the pair I’m looking for, and mutter, “Tell that to them,” pointing to three hanging rows of socks clearly marked Womens, as I head to the store’s checkout counter.

 

…and some of your socks speak French.

 

*   *   *

May the world be filled with junior high nerds who freely greet adults;
May you always find the right-sized (and linguistically appropriate) socks;
May you curate your own list of classic movie lines;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] I think that’s Zone of Interest, which, as of this writing, I still have not seen.

[2] That must be moiself’s  record for most vias in a run-on sentence.

[3] Don’t ask what year; I can’t recall, and that detail would neither add to nor detract from the story.

[4] Rob was what my mother called me, until her fourth and last child, my brother Robert (younger than me by 9 ½ years), decided that that nickname was rightfully his. 

[5] When I’m feeling particularly jaunty I use words like “constitutional” instead of walk.

[6] Safety-conscious pedestrian that I am, I am walking on the left side of the street, facing oncoming traffic.  She is riding with traffic, thus, headed toward moiself.

[7] This varies – which game is featured first – although it seems to have been several weeks if not months that Spelling Bee is first.

[8] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. 

No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[9] Our family – MH, son K and daughter Belle and I – celebrate our respective birthdays, and half birthdays, thanks to MH (unknowingly) starting the tradition when he and I were dating. 

The Acclaimed Grammy Performance I’m Not Watching

February 16, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), current events, foodie, freethought/humanism, health & wellness, Holidays, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, music, politics, reproductive rights, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Acclaimed Grammy Performance I’m Not Watching

Department of Holiday Gifts

Dateline: February 13, 4 pm-ish.  Moiself  suddenly remembers what the next day will be, and that I’ve neither a gift nor a card for MH – damn!  What do you get the man who has everything?  Besides, of course, a good dose of antibiotics.   [1]

 

 

I decided instead to go for the practical, but heartfelt.  MH’s father worked for General Mills, and there is a certain cereal which MH not only loves but is the only commercial cereal MH will eat. 

 

 

*   *   *

The Fast Car I’m Not Driving

“Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs pulled out all the stops with a performance of four-time Grammy winner and 13-time nominee Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car at the 2024 Grammys.”
( Grammy Awards site )

Regarding Chapman’s performance at the Grammys, I’m sure all that or most, of “the stops” were pulled out during her performance of her masterpiece song, although I didn’t see this year’s Grammy awards telecast.  Moiself  will probably wait for a bit before finding a video of the Chapman-Combs cover of Fast Car, due to the emotions that Chapman’s staggeringly evocative song stirs up in me.

When that song first came out, I found it both memorizing and depressing. Memorizing as in it was – and still is, IMO –  one of the prime examples as how a song can be the most perfect short story.  The depressing part was how, whenever that song came on the radio, I thought to moiself,  “Ah, it’s the Planned Parenthood song.”

 

 

…in another life it sometimes seemed, I worked in women’s reproductive health care, with jobs in different Planned Parenthood clinics bracketing 5+ years in a private OB/GYN practice.  As stressful and challenging as the job could be, I mostly enjoyed my stints working at Planned Parenthood, and considered it an honor to have been able to serve their clientele.

Chapman’s song, with its skillfully sparse instrumentation and haunting narrative, reminded me of many patients I encountered at PP:  well-meaning if emotionally immature women and girls, scrapping by in poverty, hoping desperately for something more in their lives besides what they have, which is getting involved with the wrong man and being dragged down with him….

At least the protagonist in Chapman’s song finally realizes what she has to do, and tells her once beloved partner – whom she now sees as the ultimately and utterly useless baggage he has become –  to “take your fast car and keep on driving.”  All these years later, the song takes me back, and I wonder about certain patients:  What happened to her?  Whatever became of those women, and girls who grew into women?

And still, after all these years, when I hear Fast Car I ache for the protagonist’s naive humanity, for her wanting something more than a life of caretaking, first for her drunk, ill and incompetent father, and then for the family her incompetent partner saddles her with…

That break/catch in Chapman’s voice, with the lyric, “I’d always hoped for better…”   Slays me, still.  Every time.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Don’t Know

Is there an age after which a person should not be able to run for public office?

Moiself  doesn’t know.

Our country’s constitution has a minimum age requirement for federal office,   [2]   but no maximum.  According to the Pew Research Center, most Americans favor maximum age limits for federal elected officials and Supreme Court justices.  I have been among the plethora of Americans on all sides of the political divide who have been grumbling about the age of the two major party likely candidates for president. 

Then, after a recent conversation with a neighbor whom I’ve admired for years – a conversation wherein he revealed his age to me – I felt the surprising sting of my own ageism.

After our wide-ranging discussion I was thinking about what an asset he is, not only to his family and friends and neighborhood, but the community at large, the co-workers he served with….  And this kind, compassionate, intelligent, clear-eyed person, even at this late stage in life, felt called to enter public service, making use of his years of experience and a variety of fields, what would be the point in denying that?

I don’t know.

Then I started thinking about my other/older friends and family, colleagues and neighbors, whose exact ages I sometimes don’t know,  [3]   whose intellectual acuity is heightened by their years of experience and shows no signs of abating, and whom I’ve seen outwitting and out-reasoning people decades younger than themselves.  And yep, I’ve had/seen aging friends and family members whose decision-making facilities and memories translate into shouldn’t leave the house without an escort or intellectual guardian of some kind – but I’ve also seen that in far too many people under the age of forty.

 

 

Should there be some kind of a means test, as in cognitive function, to run for public office after say, age 70?  But why that age – why not 57, or 75?  And who will be the ones to design and test for and then implement such limits?

I don’t know.

I do know that the current presidential candidates’ ages, along with the average of a US Senator being 64   [4]    (!!)  are adding more fuel to the fire in the minds of many young voters.  Unfortunately, the fires being fueled are those of dissuasion, and not activism.   It is further proof to many young people that the country is run by and for the old (mainly white and mainly men), who know little and care less about the world that these younger voters have inherited and are navigating.

 

I do want the opportunity to vote for Dolly Parton (age 78).  For something.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Looking For A Good Article On Identity And Cultural Appropriation,
And …”Its Relationship To Concepts Of Authority And Ownership”?

 

 

If your answer is well duh yes, then Mexican-American, gender queer writer and artist John Paul Brammer has writen the story for y’all.   How’s this for a teaser:

“The rise of social media has profoundly impacted cultural identity. Optimistically, it has served as an equalizer of sorts, allowing historically marginalized voices a platform to be heard. But it has also cultivated an ecosystem where there’s incentive to gate-keep, where identity is its own form of capital. In an influencer age crowded with voices, it’s shrewd to find a lane and to thin the herd in terms of who gets to talk about certain topics.

Over the last decade or so, ethnic identity, at least among the internet literati, has been governed by a certain essentialism that holds that culture is biologically ordained by blood. It is a solemn, sacred, fragile affair that must be protected with utmost care by those qualified to handle it, by individuals appointed to this role by virtue of their birth….

The concept of cultural appropriation has been a handy tool to such ends, serving as a broad category of crime that covers everything from genuine grievances, such as the pilfering of Black American musical trends by an industry that consistently neglects and disrespects them, and truly absurd claims about who is ‘allowed’ to ‘make sushi.’….

I’m not trying to make a blanket dismissal of people’s concerns over how their cultures are handled by those unfamiliar with the nuances. But a problem I do have with ‘cultural appropriation’ as a concept is how it flattens everything down to a simple narrative of theft and is more of an end to a conversation than a springboard for one….

Culture is messy, and in an increasingly globalized world, dictating how and where it spreads is incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible….”

(  excerpts from “De Los: In defense of Vietnam’s love of pachucos,”
by JP Brammer, LA Times, 1-22-24 , emphases mine )

 

 

I didn’t know that “who is allowed to make sushi” is a thing.  Which is good, ’cause moiself  enjoys making sushi (or what passes as my version of it).  But I’ve no worries in the matter, as I’m sure if the Cultural Appropriation Police ® ever raided my kitchen while I was making sushi they would leave soon thereafter, smug in their assessment that my pathetic, non-Japanese, gaijin attempts at “cold rice dressed with vinegar, formed into any of various shapes, and garnished especially with bits of raw seafood or vegetables”    [5]    is no threat to anyone’s cultural authenticity.

Moiself  highly recommends this informative and entertaining article, especially to find out the hitherto unknown (well, to moiself ) cultural exchange between Vietnam and pachuco culture, and also between Yugoslavia and Mexico in a style called Yu-Mex.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I love it when I feel a part of the totality of the human experience while surrounded by strangers, as when at 5:10pm on 2/13/2024 I found moiself  standing in one of three very long checkout lines at The Dollar Tree.  Although the lines were very long they were moving quickly because, as I saw (glancing at each person in line, ahead of/behind/beside me, to confirm my suspicious), each person in line had at most two items, one of which was the distinctive red-enveloped greeting card. “You too?” I asked knowingly of the elderly gent in front of me.   He smiled conspiratorially and whispered to me, in heavily-accented but understandable English,

“I almost forget what tomorrow is.”

 

 

*   *   *

May you always hope – and more importantly, work – for better;
May you find a way to enjoy the last minute greeting card shopping;
May you never have to defend your right to make sushi;    [7]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] I actually said that once, to a patient in the medical practice where I worked, when she wondered aloud about what to get for her husband for his upcoming birthday, as he had few hobbies and “…we want for nothing – what do you get the man who has everything?”  “Penicillin?”  I suggested.  She stared blankly at moiself. 

[2] Minimum age of 35 for President, 30 for the Senate, 25 for serving in the House.  No minimum or maximum specified for Supreme Court justices.

[3] Except for a certain range (“He’s in his mid-70s, I think….”  “No way – she can’t be 82?!?!” )

[4]  Yep, an *average* of 64.  Even more shocking to me, over two thirds of them – 34 out of the 50 – are aged 70 or older.

[5] Sushi, noun, as defined by Merriam- Webster dictionary.

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[7] Unless, of course, your sushi really sucks.

The Possible Hazards I’m Not Avoiding

January 12, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, community, current events, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, hiking, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, Recreation, school, The Write Stuff (literary life), Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Possible Hazards I’m Not Avoiding

Department Of Imagine My Surprise

It’s been a while since I received any income from my writing; thus, when I received the yearly royalty statement from the publishing company that publishes the play I’ve written, moiself  was expecting the usual statement showing me the royalty I am owed.  Brief explanation for the folks who are how-publishing-works–impaired:   [1]    depending on the contract, publishing houses/companies, particularly those specializing in plays for off-off-off-off Broadway (as in, for schools, church groups, community theaters), may keep payments in escrow and may not issue a royalty check until the royalties earned are above a certain amount (usually a very, very, small amount).

I’ve had a piddling royalty rollover with that publishing company for years, since the last time someone bought the script for my play.  On December 28 my yearly statement informed me that a check for the June – December 2023 reporting period would be issued, and I received it in early January.  So, although I have writing income to report for 2023, the amount…well, I’m sure if there were actual humans involved in reading my e-filing tax returns, the response I might receive when said reader(s) come across lines 1-9 on my 1040  form might be akin to

 

*   *   *

Department Of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

After not having been to the coast for several weeks,  [2]  MH and I returned to see several “No Access” signs, posted at places which seemed to us to be bafflingly random.

I checked out some local news (social media) groups to find out more about the signs.  Amidst all of the  Seriously?/you’ve got to be kidding posts, someone noted

“(the signs) might have something to do with the lawsuit in Newport…
 Municipalities/counties/state had an injury lawsuit exemption for recreational trails. Someone was hurt on a bridge, sued and won on appeal. The closures are happening in other places as well.”

 

 

Now, this first no access sign we saw was on nothing we’d previously considered to be a trail; rather, it was by a path, at the end of a street about four blocks from our house, which leads ~ 50 feet through dune grass to the beach.

That FB poster is (was?) correct, moiself  thought: there’s a state law declaring that people who hike or bike or walk their dogs along the beach or prance through the forest or otherwise engage in recreational activities (“recreate”) do so at their own risk…I think? I found the statute:

ORS 105.682

Liabilities of owner of land used by public for recreational purposes….

(1) Except as provided by subsection (2) of this section, and subject to the provisions of ORS 105.688 (Applicability of immunities from liability for owner of land), an owner of land is not liable in contract or tort for any personal injury, death or property damage that arises out of the use of the land for recreational purposes,….

when the owner of land either directly or indirectly permits any person to use the land for recreational purposes,…. The limitation on liability provided by this section applies if the principal purpose for entry upon the land is for recreational purposes…

and is not affected if the injury, death or damage occurs while the person entering land is engaging in activities other than the use of the land for recreational purposes….

(2) This section does not limit the liability of an owner of land for intentional injury or damage to a person coming onto land for recreational purposes….

( excerpts; my emphases;  Oregon public statutes )

Another local news group commentor wrote,

“The change came about after someone in Newport got hurt on a city-maintained bridge that was on the WAY to the recreational area and sued.  This has had a huge ripple effect up and down the Coast (and probably throughout the state). Tillamook County closed two access roads to Oceanside, and at next week’s City Council meeting in Rockaway Beach, one of the key agenda items is whether to close all beach access….”

We looked for more information about this lawsuit and its effects in several news outlets.  Here’s the scoop as per the city newsletter, Manzanita Today (1-8-24):

Manzanita Avoids Most Beach Access And Other Trail Closures After Court Decision

“A 2022 decision by the Oregon Court of Appeals and affirmed by the state’s Supreme Court, has forced some coastal cities to close all beach access trails….
The consequences of the court case will likely lead to a legislative fix in the upcoming short session of the Oregon Legislature, but many coastal residents
and visitors may wonder how things got this far.
Here are the facts of the case.
Nicole Fields  [3]  regularly walked her dogs on Agate Beach in Newport and used a city-maintained access trail to reach the beach. One day, as Ms. Fields returned from the beach with her dogs and a friend, she slipped on a bridge and seriously injured her leg. She sued Newport for damages. Newport tried to assert ‘recreational immunity’ under an Oregon law intended to encourage landowners to allow recreational use of their land. Ms. Fields argued that walking on the beach access trail to engage in recreational walking on the beach was not itself recreational. She was just crossing the city’s property to start or finish her recreational activity of walking on the beach. The court decided that a trial court must, in effect, determine what Ms. Fields intended while walking on the trail. Was that part of her recreational activity or did she intend merely to use the trail to get back and forth to the beach?
Thus, whether the City of Newport (and its insurer, CIS Oregon) ultimately prevailed, they would still incur the substantial expense of a jury trial. CIS provides liability insurance to many cities and counties, including Manzanita and Tillamook County. Because of that potential liability, CIS has recommended closure of all improved trails used to access any recreational area….”

 

 

WTF, if only.

“The consequences of the court case will likely lead to a legislative fix in the upcoming short session of the Oregon Legislature.”  Yes, of course.  Unfortunately, human nature being what it is…

 

“It’s your fault I tripped over my own feet!”

 

… that won’t prevent someone from suing when they fall-down-go-boom.  Moiself  understands the no-access signs from a liability point of view (one such lawsuit could wipe out funds for coastal towns and villages).  Still, signs – and apparently, existing laws – mean nothing if someone is determined to sue others for their life choices and/or the random accidents that we are all at risk, from the moment we rise out of bed until we return to said bed at the end of the day.

That dog walker could have slipped on her own rain-slicked driveway, tripped over her shoelaces or down her own front porch stairs, or gotten tangled up in her dog’s leash…..  But, whatever caused her fall, she did it on the pedestrian bridge, and then got around the law by claiming that she was not *yet* recreating, but using the bridge as a passageway to get to where she was *going* to recreate…

 

 

Artful, isn’t it?  Congratulations to her scum-sucking ambulance chasing lawyer attorney for the legal and cognitive gymnastics on that one!

The city newsletter article went on to note that Manzanita’s Public Works Director attempted to limit the number of trail closures by inspecting and rating the condition of every trail within city limits.  He made a chart of city trails, which he ranked in five numerical categories:

1. Poor (many hazards noted);
2. fair (some hazards noted);
3. average (few hazards noted);
4. good (no hazards noted);
5. excellent (no hazards noted)

MH and I were familiar with them all, and know that many of the “trails” on this list are just beach access points and undeveloped road crossings, rather than actual hiking trails.  The chart showed “…the trails that will be closed and signed to warn users to walk at their own risk because of “possible hazards.”

MH beat me to the suggestion:

“Let’s find the most ‘dangerous’ trails and walk on all of them!”

And so we did. We girded our loins and, at our own risk, did all seven trails on the #1 and #2 (Poor and Fair) lists.  Barely escaped with our lives, lemme tell ya.

Possible hazards.

It’s a world of danger out there.  Some people should just never leave their house.

 

Be sure to have your lawyer’s number on speed dial the next time you leave your abode – something like this might be hiding behind the city trash can by the bridge on the way to the trail to the beach….

 

*   *   *

Department Of Things We Probably Will Not See Changed In The New Year,
But It Would Be Nice To Try, If Only To Please Miss Manners

(  excerpts from “Miss Manners: What topic most grinds Miss Manners’ gears? Self-philanthropy.”  Oregonlive.com  1-1-24  )

DEAR MISS MANNERS: You must receive a lot of the same, or similar, questions. I’m just wondering: What are the most-asked ones?

GENTLE READER: Well, they are not, as may be supposed, about which fork to use. That is a question posed only by people wanting to declare that manners are trivial. Such people tend to be consistent in not having any….

There is also a topic that always shocks Miss Manners but has become increasing prevalent: blatant greed.

People have gotten shameless about demanding money from family, friends and strangers alike. Even the ubiquitous gift registry, with its transparent whitewash, is giving way to the outright demand for money. Any occasion will do –  birth, death and anything in between –  as an excuse for begging.

It seems to Miss Manners that there are enough serious causes that need addressing before solvent people are justified in engaging in self-philanthropy.”   [4]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Past Regrets Which Live In The Present

Moiself, after hearing a podcast in which a gay person spoke about not being out in high school due to a fear of being teased and/or bullied, had the following memory flash.

Dateline:

That would be my senior year in high school.  I can’t remember which pep squad member asked me to participate in a short skit the cheerleaders were planning for an end-of-year, Senior class only, school assembly.  I do remember being recruited with the we-need-someone-who’s-not-afraid-to-be-ridiculous-and-that’s-YOU enticement.  I was told that, along with the cheerleaders, the cast of the skit would be three students:  moiself; the school’s best drama student (male), and another male student.  There would be no rehearsal, but we could get out of class early to prepare and thus, since the assembly itself took up one class period, we could skip two classes – sign me up, I said.

We three students were given “costume” guidelines and the skit scenario/outline.  [5]  Within the scenario we could ad lib the rest (we had no dialogue).

Brief skit summary:  The curtain rose to reveal the auditorium stage, empty but for a bench at center stage, upon which sat a Dorky Boy.  Dorky Boy (the drama student) was tall and skinny, clad in highwater pants, a short sleeved, plaid shirt and bow tie, wore thick horn-rimmed eyeglasses and clutched a lunch box to his stomach.  A provocatively sleazily dressed girl (that’s moiself’s  cue) entered from stage right.

 

My costume was a slit-up-the-side cancan skirt and fishnet stockings, tight fitting sleeveless top (comically stuffed brassiere), too much makeup…similar to this on the classy scale.

 

Sleazy girl strutted across the stage, past the DB.  She turned back and begins to flirt with DB, but he was embarrassed/appalled and tried to ignore her.  She sat down on the bench, he scooted away from her, she scooted toward him…after a few seconds when it looked as if she might end up chasing him around the bench, a Sexy Stoner Surfer Dude®  swaggers in from stage left. SSS Dude had shoulder length, sun-streaked blond-red hair, wore mirror sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, a puka shell necklace, low-slung cutoff shorts which reveal his toned abs, and flip-flop sandals   [6]    SSSD did his own laidback stage strut toward the occupants of the bench.  Sleazy Girl immediately turned her attentions toward the SSSD who, after giving her the once-over, exchanged looks with DB, and the two boys linked arms and pranced off stage.  Sleazy Girl was flabbergasted, and flounced off stage in an indignant huff while the cheerleaders broke into a chorus of…I can’t remember the exact words, but the cheer ended with something like,

“gimme a Q and a U and a E-E-R,
Q-U-E-E-R is what you are.”

 

 

Really.

Yep.  Of course, that was then and this is now.  Still, doesn’t that count, as even a relatively mild case, of high school homophobia, no matter how unintentional (“it’s just supposed to be funny”)?  I knew of at least four teachers at our school, and several students, who were gay (and not out, in the case of the teachers, of course), and later would know of other students I went to school with who were gay but who were not out at the time (even to themselves, in some cases).  But I never thought of how they might react: I never considered that they might think the skit in any way was about targeting or even referring to them.  Here’s how clueless about Such Things®  I was, back then:  I thought the joke was on the character *I* was playing!  As in, she considered herself to be hot stuff, but the cool surfer dude found her so repulsively skanky he’d rather run off with the nerd.

Back to the future: I would like to ask one of those students what they thought of the skit.   [7]   Were they aware of their own sexual orientation at the time, and if so, did the skit make them uncomfortable, or hurt their feelings?  Perhaps they don’t even remember it (it was three minutes out of four years of school), and if so, will it be *my* bringing it up that causes the discomfort?  I have rarely recalled that skit in the decades since high school (I’ve rarely had reasons to do so); still, every ten years or so something sparks that memory, along with my regret for participating in something “comedic” that essentially amounted to punching down.

I don’t know who was responsible for the skit – was it a sketch the cheerleaders had been taught at cheer camp, or did they hear about it from another school’s pep squad?  The head cheerleader was a girl I’d known since junior high, although not well – I knew “of” her more than I knew her (we hung with different academic and friend groups).  We became better acquainted two+ decades after high school, and I was delighted to discover that she is one of the most life-positive, human rights-affirming, feminist, pro-woman, pro-people people I know – a person who would now renounce that skit (if she’d even remember it). Yet another example of how anyone can get caught up in the moment, in a “joke” that might not be so funny….   [8]

 

 

While such an organization was unimaginable when I was in high school, I did a search on the subject and, yee haw!, there is a GSA club in the Santa Ana school district (although, this is not their logo, and the club is now the QSA ).

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [9]

“Religion tries to give us maps of sexuality that are no better than
 a 2,000-year-old map of my hometown.”

( Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality )

 

 

*   *   *

May you make it a goal to avoid self-philanthropy;
May you update both the physical and emotional maps of your hometown;
May you accept the fact that life is composed of possible hazards;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Which is most anyone with an EQ greater than their inseam.

[2] due to finishing up with The Kitchen Remo That Ate Our Brains®

[3] The person suing was not mentioned in all of the reports I read, but it is part of the public record now, and I must confess that a part of me wants her to be shamed for this.  I’m sorry she injured her leg; I’m sorry for any person who inures themselves in any way, but sorry does not equal, “someone else’s fault/someone else pays.”

[4] My vote for term of the year…the year is young, I realize.

[5] To call it a plot would be too ambitious.

[6] The student they recruited for that role basically played himself.  No wardrobe changes for him; he even had the puka shells.

[7] I’m thinking of privately messaging him, and asking for his feedback, which I will include in next week’s post, anonymously and if I have his permission.

[8] Sorry; no footnote here.

[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. 

No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Ransom Notes I’m Not Sharing

January 5, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), current events, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion) Comments Off on The Ransom Notes I’m Not Sharing

Department Of The Partridge Of The Week

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself  is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard.   [1]

Can you identify this season’s final guest Partridge?   [2]

 

 

 

*   *   *

Moiself  likes to start off the new year by sharing the most profound sentiments ever sung.  [3] – they transcend space and time; these words go beyond words, what can I say?

Na, na, na, na na na na
Na na na na
Hey Jude

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Preparing For The Inevitable

Dateline January 1, 7:45 AM-ish.  I go through the same ordeal very year:  Maybe, if I say nothing, he’ll forget….

But noooooo.

This year, we made it to 8:32 am before MH abruptly looked up from his crossword puzzle, put down his pen and exclaimed, “Do you know what day it is?!?!”  He scurried toward the very large cardboard box by the back door – the box that was on its way to the recycling bin; the box that, from my seat at the breakfast table, oh-so-conveniently blocked my view of our television.  “Here,” he said, “I’ll move this, so you can see….”

My head slumped to my chest.  My ordinarily kind, sensible, sane, dedicated life partner – who otherwise never watches morning television – had just realized the date, and informed me of That Which I Knew All Too Well: “It’s Time for The Rose Parade!”

I don’t know if it’s the Pasadena connection  [4]  or what, which explains MH’s interest in the parade.  As for the or what, I’m just not a parade person and MH knows this (which, of course, increases his delight in turning on TRP’s broadcast).

So: for the next however many interminable hours, The Rose Parade was on in the background as I did other NY day things and was vaguely cognizant of the TV being on in the background.  When I occasionally glanced at the screen (often at the behest of MH – “Look at that marching band’s dancing drum majors!”) moiself  had to admit that the parade afforded the rest of the country a beautiful view of a certain slice of SoCal: it was a morning of gorgeous, crystal-clear blue skies (amidst a timely in the series storms hitting and forecast to hit the region).  Still, the whole idea of watching a parade….  You sit there, whether in person or in front of the TV, and other people and massively adorned platforms built on trucks (i.e., the parade floats”) just…pass by?  Someone please explain this to me, she said rhetorically (because people have tried, and it has still never made sense).

The parade’s floats’ raisons d’etre were divided amongst local publicity, charity promotions, or other “causes” – perhaps the most publicized was Ft. Lauderdale’s attempt to lure the tourists back to their city   [5] with their not-so-subtle,  we’re-not-THAT-Florida  theme.  Meanwhile, the ever-present droning of the parade announcers’ float descriptions provided an almost surreal background (each float’s sponsors and representations apparently had to be described in 30 seconds or less). 

“…represents The Hopi tribe’s butterfly dance…
Now we have The Core Kidney Foundation’s tribute to renal health….
Next up, Fort Lauderdale reminds us Everyone Under The Sun is welcome in their fair city….
the whimsical UPS Store entry shows The Beat of Achievement…
The bees on this float remind parade fans that you can BE the solution to…”

 

“Florida sucks, but look, these folks like the gays *and* the manatees – let’s go spend our money in Ft. Lauderdale!”

 

*   *   *

Department Of Nice Timing

Moiself  appreciated the fact that one of my best memories of 2023 came from the very end of the year, on the day when MH, Belle, K and & I played a new (to us) game that Santa Robyn left under the tree for us.  In Ransom Notes, the self-described “ridiculous word magnet game,” a player reads a prompt from a card, and everyone (including the prompt card reader) has to craft answers to the prompt using their limited pool of ~ 75 words (a mélange of pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions) each player has drawn from a pool of word magnets.  Players read their answers aloud; a Judge for the round is randomly chosen, and Judge decides whose entry is funniest/best, and that person wins the round. Everyone replenishes their word magnets, plays another round, and whoever wins five rounds wins the game.

A sample of the prompts:

* Tell someone you’ve clogged their toilet at a party
* Write a letter informing someone why they were not accepted into college
* Summarize Greek mythology
* Write a theme song for a TV show about loneliness
* Get someone who’s been in a coma since 2014 up to speed
* Explain to a store employee why you must be accompanied by your monkey

 

 

We were doing fine, enjoying the game, MH was in the lead with four wins…and then came what was to be the last round.  The prompt read:

* Whisper something seductive to your date during a movie.

The four of us were all groaning as we crafted our responses, everyone muttering about what they were being *forced* to make with their limited word resources   (MH and I in were having the most trouble keeping upright).   [6]  K read his answer, Belle read hers, both were good for some giggles.  After three attempts I was able to choke out my own answer, prefacing it with, “This is *not* your mother talking!” as my offspring roared with shock and delight to hear their mother’s…well… (there’d no other way to describe it ) soft porn creation.

“I can’t read this.” MH buried his head in his hands, and held out his answer to me.  “What, yours is worse than mine?” I said, when I was able to catch my breath.  Turns out, yep.  After four tries I was able to wheeze out 80% of MH’s answer before I dissolved into a breathless mess, sobbing with gut-twisting laughter. Looking around the table I saw my entire family doing the same – all four of us with tears of  Did-MH-and-Robyn-really-say-that ?!?!  laughter streaming down our respective faces.

Too much fun; when was the last time that happened?  And don’t y’all wish you knew what MH and I had written?   [7]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of An Open Plea To All The Merchants…

Whose products moiself  has purchased, intentionally or otherwise (translation:  our 30+ year old dryer broke down for the last time), over the holiday season:

Stop asking me to tell you “about my purchases.”  Do you just ship your products randomly  to people?  Of course not.  I bought it; paid for it; received it – you know all of this, and you don’t need to know anything else.  If it’s crappy, I’ll let you know.  Ditto if it’s the best damn humidifier on the planet.

 

Actually, she’ll be even happier with the name of a good divorce attorney, once she realizes the only thing that sucks more than the vacuum is her husband’s idea of a romantic Christmas gift.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Why We Can’t All Just Get Along

Dateline: last Friday (12/29/23).  A clue in NY Times daily crossword was, “Word on a common bumper sticker.”  I snorted when I filled in the answer, “Coexist.” MH, hearing my derisive reaction, commented, “I’ve seen that bumper sticker a lot.”

So has moiself; so have all of us. And I’ve never really liked it.

 

 

I’ve seen it accompanied by icons representing a variety of the world’s religions; in rainbow form, with the flags of different nations….

Moiself  imagines that it purports to be a suggestion or call to action, when it’s just a passive statement of a fact.  Whether or not you are actively seeking a world where everyone gets along, the fact is that all of us coexist with other beings, be they those of our own species or the flora/fauna around us   [8] .

C’mon, people,

 

 

Coexist.  As a suggestion, or even a call to action, it’s about as motivating to moiself  as such bland but equally important prompts as

* Hydrate
* Eat
* Floss
* Breathe

Increasingly I see the coexist bumper sticker accompanied by its differently-abled cousin:

 

 

Excusez-moiself?  (translation for the French-impaired:  WTF !?!?)

Believe in it?  Why?

Tolerance exists; believing in something doesn’t do anything to increase the amount of the something.  How about *work* for tolerance…or something better.  Moiself  don’t know about y’all, but the idea of being tolerated doesn’t exactly flip my roller coaster.  But, sometimes that is all you can get, and if acceptance is lacking, then toleration will have to do.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Date Mistakes I’m Not Making

Many years ago, I noticed moiself  got into a pattern after the change to the new year: I always got “it”– the new year – correct.  Whether writing checks or dating letters or doing whatever other activities required a date entry, I would never mess up the new year…until I’d have a relapse, several months down the line (April or May), and I’d write the previous year on, say, the electric bill.  For some reason, the petty corner of my mind which keeps track of such things noted that I haven’t done that in at least three years.  The reason why?  It’s not due to some new cognitive improvement/memory technique or anything else I’m practicing; rather, it’s likely due to the somewhat pedestrian fact that moiself  does so many logistical things digitally now.  Translation: I write very, very, very, few checks; thus, the opportunity for mis-dating something has dropped precipitously.  Not exactly the most interesting factoid, but still…

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Best New Definition I’ve Heard So Far This Year

OK, so the year is young.  Still….

What are pickles?
Pickles are just cucumbers sitting in their own piss.

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department of Employee Of The Month

It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself.  Again. The need for which I wrote about here.   [9] 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [10]

 

 

*   *   *

May you coexist with tolerance but live with love;
May you try to get that definition of pickles out of your mind;
May you remember, when times get tough:
Na, na, na, na na na na,
Na na na, Hey Jude;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] Specifically, in our pear tree.

[2] Season as I arbitrarily declare it to be:  Partridge-in-our-pear-tree season runs to after Thanksgiving through the 12 Days of Christmas.

[3] Yes, we – as in, all of humanity – voted on this years ago, don’t you remember?  Or did you forget your absentee ballot?

[4] He’s a Caltech alum and thus spent four years in Pasadena.

[5] Along with many other tourist-dependent Florida towns and attractions, Ft. L has taken a hit, what with boycotts from both organizations and individual tourists due to Gov. Santos’  aggressive attacks on LGBTQ and reproductive rights.   In 2023 18 conferences pulled bookings from Broward county (home to Ft. Lauderdale) in response the state’s conservative stances (the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, e.g.) on human rights issues.

[6] Yes, we were all sober!  And it was only 11:30 in the morning.

[7] I briefly considered taking a picture of our respective answers, then realized, NO WAY am I documenting this future blackmail material: “Ya wanna see what my mom‘s/dad’s/idea of a romantic suggestion is?”

[8] And inside of us.  Do some research on your gut microbiome, and be impressed (or cringe).

[9] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg.  Until I did.

One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens.  No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.

[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Santa Claus Story I’m Not Dissing

December 22, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), nature, Oregon, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Santa Claus Story I’m Not Dissing

Department Of The Partridge Of The Week

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself   is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard.   [1]

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

 

*   *

Department Of  Somehow I Managed Not To Post This To The Store’s Site…

But I’m sharing it with y’all.

Background info:  my adopted village   [2]  of Manzanita (Oregon) has several nicknames, including, Muttzanita.   [3]  It’s a dog-friendly town to say the least, and in the 30 years moiself  has been hanging around the coast I’ve seen the best and worst of dog owners.  I am happy to report that *most* of the dog owners – well, the locals, as in, the ones who actually live at the coast – are good at picking up after their dogs (even though, the, uh, “remnants” of their dog’s solid business still remain, and the liquids blend in…eventually).  Still, there’s a reason (besides the rusty hooks, jagged crab pot wires and other fishing detritus that periodically come ashore with the tide) that, although I walk on the beach every day when I’m at the coast, I don’t do so barefooted.

Dateline: earlier this week. A store at Manzanita, one which I love and where I’ve frequently shopped, posted an ad on their social media page for a new holiday product they are offering for sale:

Stocking stuffer alert!🫧🌊🩵
Our magical Sand & Sea Scrub Bars are blended with sand from Manzanita Beach!

My first thought:  For anyone familiar with – as in, paying attention to –  what gets deposited onto the sands of Manzanita beach, this is not an enticement.   Do the buyers realize that means they will be scrubbing their skin with puppy piss-drenched sand?   [4]

 

Just adding the “magic” ingredient to the sand and sea scrub bars!

 

*   *   *

Department Of Yes Virginia, You’re Correct About Santa, But If You Know What’s Good For You You’ll Keep Your Mouth Shut
Sub-Department of Two Santa Stories

I don’t know how old I was when I figured it out, but I can never remember a time when I thought about Santa and “believed” – that is, when I thought about the story of Santa Claus and thought it was true/Santa was real, rather than knowing that he was a character in a story and that my parents actually supplied “Santa’s” gifts under the tree and in our Christmas stockings.  I also cannot remember ever discussing this with my parents, or my siblings, when I was a child.  Moiself  *does* remember the common knowledge about such things:  kids believed in Santa Claus; adults didn’t.  After noting the difference between the respective Christmas presents received by kids and their parents, I thought it in my best interest to keep my mouth shut.

 

 

Look at what kids who “believed in Santa” (even the ones just pretending to believe) found under their Christmas trees:  A miniature, pedal-propelled 1956 Chevy-styled sedan; Barbies and GI Joes; roller skates and skateboards and pogo sticks; Nancy Drew books and Animals of the World almanacs; Lincoln Log sets and Mousetrap games; Tonka trucks and plush stuffed animals.  And what did the adults, the A-Santa-ists, get?  Sockx and neckties; aftershave lotion and talcum powder; stationery and appliances.

I figured out early on that the idea was to go along with the story for as long as possible….which is somewhat related to the reasons why I stayed in religion (read: was not out about my non-belief) for so long.   You get better “presents” when you go along with the pretense.

Then, viola! you’re a grownup with a forehead-smacking moment of realization:  the Santa Claus story is one of the most useful tools ever for freethinkers, in showing how otherwise seemingly kind and intelligent people can agree to promote a lie, even after you ask them a direct question and emphatically request a truthful answer, for what they believe is the greater good (“Oh, honey, of course there is a Santa Claus!”).

“It’s hard to even consider the possibility that Santa isn’t real. Everyone seems to believe he is. As a kid, I heard his name in songs and stories and saw him in movies with very high production values. My mom and dad seemed to believe, batted down my doubts, told me he wanted me to be good and that he always knew if I wasn’t. And what wonderful gifts I received! Except when they were crappy, which I always figured was my fault somehow. All in all, despite the multiple incredible improbabilities involved in believing he was real, I believed – until the day I decided I cared enough about the truth to ask serious questions, at which point the whole façade fell to pieces. Fortunately the good things I had credited him with kept coming, but now I knew they came from the people around me, whom I could now properly thank.

Now go back and read that paragraph again, changing the ninth word from Santa to God.

Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one….“

 

 

…as our son began to exhibit the incipient inklings of Kringledoubt, it occurred to me that something powerful was going on. I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind….

This is the moment, at the threshold of the question, that the natural inquiry of a child can be primed or choked off. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.

The ‘Yes, Virginia’ crowd will heap implausible nonsense on the poor child, dismissing her doubts with invocations of magic or mystery or the willful suspension of physical law. Only slightly less problematic is the second choice, the debunker who simply informs the child that, yes, Santa is a big fat fraud….

I for one chose door number three.

‘Some people believe the sleigh is magic,’ I said. ‘Does that sound right to you?’  Initially, boy howdy, did it ever. He wanted to believe, and so was willing to swallow any explanation, no matter how implausible or how tentatively offered. ‘Some people say it isn’t literally a single night,’ I once said, naughtily priming the pump for later inquiries….

I avoided both lying outright and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine, in the snowy parking lot of the Target store, to the sound of a Salvation Army bellringer, he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.’ He smiled at me. ‘Am I right?’

I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.  ‘So,’ I asked, ‘how do you feel about that?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.’

By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists -– and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.

( excerpt from “Santa, The Ultimate Dry Run,”
Parenting Beyond Belief, Dale McGowan;  my emphases )

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Second Santa-related Story

The second Santa-related story comes from a book moiself  has previously/recent blogged about, We Of Little Faith: Why I stopped pretending to believe (and maybe you should too), by Kate Cohen.  BTW, Cohen is not out to convert religious believers; rather, her book aims to support and persuade those who are religion-free to be open about *their* beliefs (and about their mere presence, in this religious rhetoric-saturated world).

In the book’s epilogue the author tells of an encounter she and Lena, the author’s then three-year-old daughter, had in a grocery store checkout line.  It was a few days after Christmas; Lena and her mom were standing behind a father who had his two preschoolers in his cart. The father turned to speak with Lena.

” ‘Did Santa bring you something good this year?’ he asked.

As you know, I grew up Jewish in a small town in Virginia.  And, as you know, I’m fond of Christmas.  When someone wishes me a ‘Merry Christmas’ I typically respond with a hearty, ‘And a Merry Christmas to you.’  but this felt different.  Asking a random child about Santa Claus in Albany, New York, where Yom Kippur is a public school holiday, struck me as a bit careless.

Indeed, my daughter looked confused, even troubled.  I was straining to think of a polite way to tell the guy he was a jerk when Lena did it for me.

Solemnly, she said, ‘Santa Claus is just pretend.’  He looked stricken and came closer, glancing back at his two little cart riders. ‘Don’t tell my kids, okay,’ he said to Lena.  ‘They still think he’s real.’  Lena nodded, accepting the burden of discretion.

I was so proud of her for speaking up, and then so sad that she was immediately asked to keep quiet.  To be a nice girl, she was expected to hold her tongue.  She was expected to hide the truth as she knew it and respect a lie that others had constructed.  A pleasant, harmless lie, you might say.  But a lie, nonetheless. “

( excerpt from Kate Cohen’s, We Of Little Faith:
Why I stopped pretending to believe (and maybe you should too), my emphases )

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [5]

 

*   *   *

May you never feel compelled to respect even “pleasant and harmless” lies:
May you enjoy the beach (and watch your step);
May you have the happiest of whatever you celebrate;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

 

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Specifically, in our pear tree.

[2] Why is it called a village, and not a town?  I’m not sure who is the demographics Boss re such things.

[3] The name of the annual “dog festival” held in the late summer in Manzanita.

[4] Or worse.

[5] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Sack I’m Not Peeking Into

December 15, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, community, current events, extended family, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Oregon, politics, school, science , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Sack I’m Not Peeking Into

Department Of The Partridge Of The Week

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself  is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard.   [1]

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Someone Who Obviously Did Not Reread What She’d
Posted After She Posted It

Background: There’s FB group wherein residents of our fair city post jobs offers, services sought, items for sale, etc.  Dateline:  Monday, 8 am-ish.  MH is scanning the afore-mentioned FB group, and reads me one particular post:

“Hi! I am looking for a professional mobile pet groomer.
I have two small dogs and all they need is nail trim/grind
and their anal gland expressed…. “

That’s *all*?  How did the poster possibly attain even quasi-sentient adulthood without realizing that the phrase, “All they need” – signaling a minimizing of the need which is to follow – is never, ever, appropriately associated with anything to do with anal gland expressions ?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Sounds Like A Holiday Themed Porno, If You Ask Moiself

And you did ask, didn’t you?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Petty But Important Grudges To Hold

Why I play the New York Times word game, Letterboxed, but refused to play their game Spelling Bee anymore:

Because when given the right letters in the right places, Letterboxed will let me enter a legitimate if touchy word, e.g., shat, where as Spelling Bee, despite providing the right letters to spell the name of a beautiful African wild cat, would not let me enter the word caracal, because this totally legitimate, not-at-all-controversial-nor-carrying-scatological undertones, is not on the game editor’s “curated list.”    [2]

 

“Curate *this*, NY Times.”

 

*   *   *

Department Of A High School Student Had To Sue Her School District To Do What?

That would be, she had to sue her school district to be able to have a table outside of her school’s cafeteria, with literature available on milk alternatives and plant-based milk options. That’s what Eagle Rock High School senior Marielle Williamson wanted to do.  She’d researched the negative impacts the dairy industry has on both the environment and animal welfare, and wanted her fellow students to know that there are milk alternatives.   

“… But administrators said she could only do so
if she promoted dairy milk as well…. 

(Despite the fact that the school is already promoting dairy products, with “…school hallways covered in ‘Got Milk?’ posters.”)

‘It was kind of like, Wow, this is serious,’ (Williamson) said.
‘The hold the dairy industry has over schools is so strong that I can’t even promote soy milk at my school.’

In May, Williamson, along with the advocacy group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a federal lawsuit against her school administrators and the Los Angeles Unified School District, alleging that her 1st Amendment rights were violated when school officials barred her from sharing material about plant-based milk options without also including information on dairy milk.  The suit also named the U.S. Department of Agriculture….

(editorial comment: The suit was settled by the school – yay!)

The USDA, which did not join the settlement, has filed a motion to dismiss the case, Press said (Deborah Press, general counsel for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine), but Williamson and the committee intend to pursue it and challenge federal statutes that, in part, require schools in the National School Lunch Program to serve cow’s milk during meals as a condition to receive federal funding….

‘LAUSD wasn’t the problem here; they were doing their best to comply with these dogmatic federal rules,’ Press said….

In order to receive a dairy milk substitute, a student is required to provide a note from a doctor or parent citing a medical or dietary need to restrict the student’s choice of milk.

The federal policy also states that schools in the program ‘shall not directly or indirectly restrict the sale or marketing of fluid milk products by the school’ at any time while on school premises or at school events. “

( excerpts, my emphases, from Got milk alternatives? Former student wins settlement from L.A. district over criticism of dairy products,
LA Times, 11-24-23 )

 

“WTF ?”

 

Yeah, WTF.  And, wow.  Who did the dairy industry screw pay off to get that statute into federal law in the first place (a statute I’m guessing few people were aware of, until the lawsuit)?

After the lawsuit was settled, Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for LAUSD, released a statement saying that, “Our Food Services Program follows USDA guidelines, and we continue to support our students with nutritious meals and healthy alternatives for those who have specific dietary requests and requirements.”

Scientists and nutritionists – at least those not employed/paid off by the dairy industry – have long known that “nutritious meals and healthy alternatives” do not need, and probably should not include, dairy products. And, as the article mentioned, “Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latino Americans are among those most likely to suffer from lactose intolerance, which can result in digestive issues including bloating, diarrhea and gas after consuming milk products.”

 


Got diarrhea milk?

 

Oh, and here’s the ethnic makeup of LAUSD students: 74% Hispanic/Latino, 7.3% Black, 5.7% Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, 0.1% American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.2% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 10% White.   Yep, nine out of ten LAUSD students are likely to have, to some degree, lactose intolerance or sensitivity. 

Just wondering:  why are we the only mammals who continue to consume milk products after we are weaned, and then, not even products (cheese/milk/cream) made using the milk of our own species?  And yes, this question is coming from someone who thinks Tillamook Pepper Jack cheese is as habit-forming as crack cocaine….   [3]

 

Well, Martha, actually not, but it sure is addictive.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Well Of Course A Middle Child Would Find This Interesting

Moiself  has long had an interest the theories of birth order and sibling relationships as tools to understand the complexities of family bonds.  My interest in this area of family dynamics was heightened when I recently came across a link to an article from The Atlantic on birth order and gender expectations:

“…a contingent of oldest sisters have described the stress of feeling accountable for their family’s happiness, the pressure to succeed, and the impression that they aren’t being cared for in the way they care for others. People have even coined a term for this, ‘eldest-daughter syndrome,’ which speaks to a real social phenomenon, according to Yang Hu, a professor of global sociology. In many cultures, oldest siblings as well as daughters of all ages tend to face high expectations from family members—so people playing both parts are especially likely to take on a large share of household responsibilities, and might deal with more stress as a result. ⁠⁠

The caregiving tendency isn’t an inevitable quality of eldest daughters; rather…it tends to be imposed by family members who are part of a society that presumes that eldest daughters should act a certain way. Birth order does not impact your personality, but it can impact how your family views you. Eldest kids aren’t necessarily more responsible than their siblings; instead, they tend to be given more responsibilities because they are older. Expectations are also influenced by gender. Daughters in particular can be seen as ‘kin keepers,’ performing invisible labor that keeps a family together. ⁠⁠

( excerpts, my emphases, from “The Plight of the Eldest Daughter:
Women are expected to be nurturers.
Firstborns are expected to be exemplars. Being both is exhausting.”
By Sarah Sloat, The Atlantic )

The complexities inherent in birth order theories have always intrigued moiself.  There are sooooooo many variables – the number and gender of the children; the spacing between their births, a child whose mental and/or physical health issues drain monetary, emotional and time resources from the other children, the family’s financial situation….[4] –  too many variables for the theories to be subject to any kind of testing that will hold scientific water, so to speak.

 

  

“Older children are ____.  Only children are _____.  Middle children are ____.“

These generalizations seem to touch some observational keystones, amongst both psychology professionals and us layfolk.  But there are also a bajillion exceptions to the attempts at classification, such as this example: [5]

You are not your parent’s oldest child; you are the fourth of their six children.  But there was such a large gap between their first four the second two offspring (you and your baby sister are the,“Ooops I guess it wasn’t menopause after all!” babies) that your older sisters and brothers were out of the house before you had anything resembling a sibling relationship with them:  throughout your life, they’ve been more like aunts/uncles/distant cousins.  Thus, *experientially,* instead of being a middle or younger/est child, you are the oldest child in a family of two children.

Fitting with everything I’ve read on the subject, The Atlantic article says the research shows that birth order does not confirm personality traits, but it *does* affect how people view you, and treat you, and what their expectations are of you.  And it is fairly well-established that how people treat us impacts how we view and treat ourselves.

 

 

My father was from a family of six children, and he’d told me how his parents’ relations with his siblings influenced how he wanted to raise his own children.   [6]   Several decades ago, when I first started reading articles about how parents respond to different children, I was fascinated by the studies, and they got me to consider my own family experiences.  On more than one visit to my parents’ house I tried to have a conversation with my father about it – get his opinion, basically.  But he would have none of it.

My father was a person with many fine qualities; however, introspection wasn’t one of them, and he wasn’t well-educated.  Despite my attempted explanations to the contrary, I think he took my wanting discuss the subject – of birth order/different expectations; parents’ relationships to different children –  as my wanting an answer to a question that had never occurred to me to ask.  He seemed to think I was implying that he (and our mother) loved certain of their children “more” than others.  No matter how I phrased my questions/observations, he would respond with variations of, “We love you all the same.”

“Your love was never in question,” I tried to assure him.  Finally, in good-natured exasperation (but exasperation nonetheless), I sighed, “You’re not listening….”   [7]   But it was a lost cause.

Years later, after observing friends and family members have and raise their children, and then after MH and I had our own two offspring, I have come to this opinion:

If you truly believe you “love your children all the same,”
then you don’t really love them – or see them – for who they are.

 

 

You can’t love your children *all the same* because your children are not *all the same.*  They need different things from you at different times.

One Of My Siblings (OOMS) has a good life now but had a very difficult time for many years, due in part/IMO to the fact that our parents loved us “all the same.”  Translation:  they parented us all the same, even though we were four different kids and OOMS had different challenges than the other three.  But because the rest of their kids didn’t have those challenges, my parents just didn’t see (or didn’t want to see) the struggles OOMS was going through.  Not to cast blame; they, along with 99% of their peers,   [8]  were simply ignorant re behavioral and mental health issues.  OOMS needed more guidance, more attention, a firmer hand, so to speak.  OOMS wasn’t as self-starting, self-regulating, and motivated and organized as the other three; OOMS was flailing, in many ways.  But this idea of theirs, that they “loved us the same,” led them to assume that OOMS would, eventually, turn out the same.

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [9]

“It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists
and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.”

( Ernestine Louise Rose, (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 1892)
a…”suffragist, abolitionist, and freethinker who has been called the ‘first Jewish feminist.’ )

 

 

*   *   *

May you not try to love everybody “all the same”;
May you steer clear of curated word lists;
May you never need a note from your parent to choose oat milk, FFS;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Specifically, in our pear tree.

[2] I know because I emailed the editor after this had happened to me, and he replied.

[3] Not that moiself  is familiar with crack cocaine, or any kind of highly addictive anesthetic (except for that prescribed me for wisdom teeth extraction all those many years ago), but hey, I like, read things….

[4] “Oldests” and “Onlys” get more of their parents’ time and resources (both are finite qualities, and must be divvied up with the arrival of more children) – this one observation is a fact (one of the few in birth order hypotheses), not a theory. The parents may be financially struggling with the first child, and then get established in their careers and be more economically secure as the years go by…OR, if they have “too many” children (as in more than they can support and/or they get laid off from work….), the financial circumstances can go in the opposite direction…. Just one of the variables to the “rules” of what Oldest and Only get.

[5] From more than one family I’ve known.

[6] That is, he vowed to do things “differently.”

[7] That was a common theme, for conversations with my parents which involved subject matter deeper than the weather or what the kids are doing in school.  If there was any issue that might make them the tiniest bit uncomfortable – and those issues could be difficult to impossible to anticipate – they would reframe what I had said/asked into a question they felt comfortable answering (even if *they* were the ones who’d brought up the uncomfortable issue in the first place!)…or they’d just change the subject.

[8] 99% of any and all of us, at that time.

[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Dead Man I’m Not Praising

December 1, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, freethought/humanism, friends, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, politics, school, The Write Stuff (literary life), Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , Comments Off on The Dead Man I’m Not Praising

Department Of The Partridge Of The Week

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself  is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard.   [1]

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Dissing Remembering The Dead

Dateline:  11-21-23.  Longtime friend and college apartment-mate SB posted a link (on social media) to an obituary:  HG, a fiction writer and one of our college’s part-time professors, had died at age 99.

SB’s post sent me on the express train to memory-ville, and I commented with the first thought that came to mind when I read the news:

“Didn’t know he was still alive.”

But I’d edited moiself’s  reaction, which was, in its entirety:

“Didn’t know he was still alive…
I’d assumed he’d died decades ago,
crushed under the massive weight of his own self-regard.”

If I’d read HG’s obituary (I didn’t), I’m sure I’d have run across the compliments from those who liked HG and/or his work.  Still, I doubt that any of the praise and adoration typically cast upon the departed would have equaled or exceeded HG’s own high opinion of himself.

I’d not taken a class from HG, but two of my college apartment mates (SB, and GG) did, during Winter quarter of SB’s and my sophomore year.  During that quarter moiself  heard their stories of HG’s class.  Then, one oh-so-memorable night, I met HG when he came to dinner at our apartment, after which I thanked the gods and my lucky stars – none of which I believed in   [2]   ­– that I was not in his class.

Y’all may be thinking, Wait a minute: a professor came to his student’s apartment, for dinner – for any reason?  How did that happen?

 

 

Yep, he did.  And there’s a wee bit o’ backstory to the how did that happen  part.

 

 

Fall quarter of my sophomore year I took a beginning Creative Writing class.  During the last weeks of class its professor, FT, encouraged me to sign up for another CW course, this one taught by HG:  You have to apply for this class, by submitting a sample of your writing – check with the English department but really, any of your stories that you submitted in my class will get you in.    HG’s class was considered the next step up for those interested in writing fiction, FT told me, and he thought that that was the class for me (It’s obvious you’re no beginner).  I thanked FT for his compliment and encouragement, but told him that although his CW class satisfied a requirement and had fit into my schedule – not that I didn’t enjoy every moment! – I didn’t have room in my schedule for another class that either wasn’t required for my major or didn’t satisfy another degree requirement.

But you will have room for it – this class will be taught in the evening, FT countered.  He asked me about my major.  When I told FT that I was pre-law,   [3]   he affably ribbed me (You’re a writer, not a lawyer).   During the next couple of weeks FT kept asking me if I’d signed up for HG’s class.  I knew his persistence in the matter was in fact a compliment, but I didn’t like revealing my financial situation to those whose business it wasn’t.  The fourth or fifth time FT asked me if I needed a suggestion as to which story to submit for HG’s class application, I told him the truth.  It wasn’t just the class time I had to juggle; I was working to put myself through school.  My days were busy with classes and with my two jobs: my official job at the library, at which I worked both day and evening shifts, and my “unofficial” (read: under the table) job, typing term and research papers for other students   [4]  .  And I needed time for my own homework and papers and a sanity-preserving social life….

My teacher’s persistence hit a nerve.  I loved writing fiction, and he knew it – what better excuse to take the time to do so than to have a class where it was required?  A day or two before the deadline I went to the English department, filled out the very brief application for HG’s class, and gave The Secretary In Charge Of Such Things my sample story.  The secretary told me that HG would read the applicants’ stories by a certain date, and that I should check back on that day for the return of my story and the enrollment decision.

 

My interest in writing was as strong as my dislike of my own typos, as demonstrated in my high school’s journalism class office.

 

I had not asked FT which of my stories he thought I should use.  I decided to submit the one both FT and my CW classmates had voted as “the best,” in a class contest organized by FT.  Years later I would look back upon that contest win (which I found somewhat flattering and mostly embarrassing) as my introduction to that most ubiquitous and vile literary publishing practice: contests, for any and everything, on any and every subject (even on the personal and/or demographic characteristic of the writer), so that you – along with any and every writer, it seems – can, eventually, declare yourself to be “an award winning writer.”   [5]

Once again, I digress.

Two of my apartment mates, SB and GG, also applied to HG’s class.  I assumed that the majority of the applicants would be the Serious Writer® wannabes: pale young men in black turtlenecks who would be submitting their imitative, Cheever/Roth/Updike-styled novel excerpts in which their descriptions of suburban angst, vacant sexual encounters, and hipster misogyny would be mistaken for edgy, clear-eyed commentary on contemporary American mores.  I decided to go for something different.  Figuring HG would like a reprieve from all the derivative, Great American Novel aspirational prose, I submitted something shorter, and humorous (the story which had won my class’s contest).

When I returned to the English department on the appointed day the secretary flipped through the stack of students’ stories on her desk, handed me my mine, and said that I had not been chosen for the class.  I quickly flipped through the pages; my story was unmarked.  “Did HG give a note – any feedback, about why he didn’t like my story?” I asked.  “No,” she said, “it’s not that he didn’t like it.  He didn’t read it.”

“He didn’t even *read* it?” I sputtered.  The secretary’s eyes radiated equal parts pity and frustration as she pointed to several other stories in the pile, stories whose paper clips were stretched much further apart than the one holding my manuscript pages together.  “He didn’t read those stories, either.  All of these” – she gestured at the manuscript in my hand, then at the bulging tomes on her desk – “violated the guidelines.”  She reached into a manilla folder on her desk from which she withdrew the guidelines for HG’s class’s story submissions.  She placed the paper in front of me and tapped her index finger over the second line of the guidelines, as if trying to gain the attention of a third grader with ADHD.  I saw that the guidelines, which I’d not bothered to check, were that stories had to be between 1500 and 4000 words.    [6]   My story, as per the word count listed in the upper right corner of the title page, was 200 words short.

 

 

Part of me was embarrassed that I had been so careless and cavalier; part of me was relieved that I wouldn’t have to do even more time/schedule juggling. Another part of me was soon to become amused beyond expectation, when SB and GG both made it into HG’s class and began relating their experiences therein.     

After the first meeting of HG’s class, when SB shared her rundown of her classmates, it turned out I was right about the guys in black turtlenecks.  By week two of HG’s class, I’d noticed something else about the attire of another of HG’s students – a something else which both amused and confused me, as it was GG’s…outfits.

As GG left that evening for HG’s class I stopped moiself  from asking if she was skipping class and going to a party instead.  Week three, there it was again.  If this had been happening in modern times the present, I would’ve been surreptitiously taking pictures of her with my cell phone and having a petty giggle about it later with my boyfriend.  Instead, by weeks three and four I made sure to invite “witnesses” – select male friends who also knew GG –  over to our apartment, 30 minutes or so before GG left for class.  Their observations confirmed that it wasn’t just my imagination:  no matter what GG had been wearing during the day, she, uh, pimped her ride, as those wacky kids of today say.  Translation: she upscaled her clothing and makeup for HG’s class.

 

 

I tried to come up with a defense for GG to counter my friends’ snickered theories – which were all variations on the theme that either HG was flirting with/hitting on GG and she was responding to his attentions, or that *she* was the one soliciting her professor’s attention.    [7]   Maybe it’s…subconscious?  But soft-fuzzy, form-fitting sweaters, perfectly coiffed hair, makeup and *lipstick* (this was the late 70s; students didn’t dress up for anything, certainly not for class, and although GG had always spent a lot of time on her hair, there was no other class for which she wore *lipstick*)?  Such frills do not unintentionally adorn a person.  Subconscious?

 

Nice try. 

When SB would leave for HG’s class she’d look like her normal self (attractive, casually attired, jeans-and-tee student), while GG looked as if she were going to an audition for a glamour camp counselor.  And the more stories SB and GG told about HG’s class, the more I squirmed to consider that my witness-friends’ observations might be spot on.

The winter quarter rolled on; then one weekend GG announced that professor HG would be coming to our apartment for dinner later that week.  She would make dinner, and she wanted all four of us (SB, moiself, and our fourth apartment mate, LM) to be there.  Ummm…okay…?  GG was obviously eager to host HG; I tried to be supportive, and feigned enthusiasm even as I wondered why, after full day’s work  (or maybe not; I didn’t know HG’s schedule), a grown-ass professor would want to spend time (and have to eat an amateurishly cooked dinner) with four undergraduates….  Ah, yes.  Make that, four twenty-year-old *female* undergraduates.

 

 

Moiself’s  curiosity was stoked; I no longer needed to feign interest in meeting SB’s and GG’s professor.  Assuming my cultural anthropologist mode throughout the before/during/after dinner banter, I spent the evening taking mental notes more than I participated in the conversation.  [8]    Oh, did I mistakenly type, conversation?  It was more of a presentation, just short of a lecture, from HG.  HG was obviously used to and expectant of female adoration.  He evidently and thoroughly enjoyed holding court, attempting to impart his…what was he attempting to impart?  Yeah, okay, he’s been to so many Esalen Institute and other Big Sur retreats he’s lost count, but how indiscreet can he be to think that we are interested in his opinion of Joan Baez’s sexual preferences?  Every story he told practically megaphoned,

Can you believe how cool I am, who I’ve rubbed shoulders
(and other body parts) with; what I have seen and done…
and here I am, in *your* apartment, you lucky lasses !

HG was SB’s and GG’s teacher.  What did he teach that night?  Although I found HG’s demeanor and anecdotes jaw-droppingly pretentious at the time, my recollection of them did serve me, eventually.  Many years later I modeled a character in one of my stories after HG: “Patrick Glasson,” a professor of creative writing.  The story’s protagonist, Colleen Kiernan, a student in Glasson’s Advanced Fiction Seminar, incurs Glasson’s thinly disguised wrath by challenging his critiques, not being deferential to him, and mostly by being different from the rest of the graduate students in his class, the “pretty young things and scowling young men” who either worshipped Glasson or feared him.  In this excerpt, Colleen approaches Glasson at the end of the class to discuss one of her stories.

…. Glasson tossed Colleen’s manuscript on top of his desk. “What is this?”

Colleen Kiernan fingered the hollow between her collarbones. “The title is on the first page.”

The professor snorted. “So it is.”

Pretty young things and scowling young men gathered their papers and book packs. Colleen’s Seminar in Advanced Fiction comrades scuttled off to their three o’clock classes, pretending not to notice that, once again, their guru and his apostate were at his desk, at odds.

“It’s unfinished, obviously. You said initial drafts were acceptable if…”

“I should have chosen a smaller facility.  A class of thirteen hardly fills this cavernous hall, which might explain the echo. I hear myself reiterating our group’s paradigm — our mantra, if you will.  If you want to be ordinary, write ordinary.”  Professor Glasson exhaled lustily. “No academic preparation is needed for mainstream publication. There are a plethora of How to Write A Damn Fine Novel tutorials.  Check the trade magazines.”

“Check the trades.”  Colleen feigned writing a memo to herself.  “Almost forgot that one.” She set her briefcase on Glasson’s desk, and caught the glint in his bleary eyes. He made no attempt to mask his disdain for the tatty brown canvas attaché Colleen favored over the jewel-toned, Gore Tex shoulder bags that were the totes of choice for pretty young things.

“As I was saying, you said drafts were…”

“This is no class for the conventional. What I have been saying, what they are saying…” Glasson tapped his hirsute finger on the stack of books atop his desk, “is as profound as it is simple. Tell the stories that need telling.” Glasson steepled his fingertips in front of his nose. “If you’d been paying attention you’d have picked up at least the concept of narrative nuance. Post-Joycean streams of interior monologue do not a nuance make.”

Narrative nuance? Hard to discern these past weeks, over the thunderous crash of names dropping from lofty, literary heights. The adventures of Patrick Glasson, erstwhile Swingin’ Sixties Author and B-list celebrity. How many names fell from the Big Sur retreat, where our hero encountered a celebrated folk singer from yon times, and discovered that the angelic soprano was a lesbian predator who pursued pretty young things with banshee-like ferocity?…. We mustn’t forget our hero’s dialogue with the bards frequenting a Bay Area pub notorious for its clientele of IRA sympathizers, said pub having been named for an exploit of his, recorded in his first novel, in which he, his third wife, and a gaggle of second generation Beats revitalized San Francisco’s waning sex-for-poetry scene.

Reverent gazes, front and center. Imagine the thrill of being Him, back then.

 

 

Cutting to the chase:  moiself  found HG to be the most pompous, preening, gossipy, arrogant, name-dropping lech I’d ever met.  He was blatantly “after” GG; his practiced air of seduction gave me the impression that he’d pursued other females in his CW classes and would continue to do so.  The charm and panache he oozed seemed habitual; thus, he even (if ever-so-briefly) focused his powers of seduction on LM and moiself   [9]    after he caught LM shooting me a sympathetic eye roll when I failed to sufficiently mute my WTF  snort at the end of one of HG’s I-did-this-really-cool-thing/know-these-really-cool-people stories.  And by trying to win LM and I over, HG revealed his cards:  he was one of *those* kind of men.  Those Kind Of Men generally view and deal with womenfolk in one of three ways.  There are women they want to fuck, women they don’t want to fuck, and women who remind them of their (or other people’s) mothers.  HG wasn’t sexually interested in LM or moiself ; still, we were females, and had presented him with a challenge by indicating that we were in not in awe of his mere presence nor dazzled by his attentions.

What better way to secure the attentions of Pretty Young Things® who have an honest interest in creative writing than by telling them that he, a Published Author ® , thought that they had potential as a writer?  HG essentially broadcasted that modus operandi.  My feminist sensibilities were both annoyed and embarrassed by GG’s evident hero-worship…and a part of my heart ached for her.  GG had asked me to read several of the stories she’d written for HG’s class assignments.  I honestly liked the majority of what she showed me, even as I cringed on her behalf to imagine what HG was saying to her – how, in so many words and/or gestures and body language, he was giving her the impression that it was getting into her prose, and not into her pants, which interested him the most.

 

 

I hadn’t thought of that HG story in some time.  Today we have more information regarding gender exploitation and what in people’s backgrounds and circumstances makes them vulnerable to abuse (or to being the abuser).  I wish I’d had a more nuanced understanding of the situation, other than what went through my mind at the time, when I was concurrently concerned for and judgmental of a friend (“HG is a lecherous douchebag; why doesn’t GG see it?!”).

The MeToo movement brought the HG story to mind, and had me briefly wondering: if HG were still alive, would he be subject to scrutiny and outing from former students?  Or maybe…whether or not HG offered grades/privileges for sexual attention, maybe he was just a run of the mill/par for the course, approaching middle-age, narcissistic skirt-chaser, unaware of and/or unconcerned with the power imbalance dynamics and ethical violations inherent in pursuing his female students?

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [10]

 

( Taslima Nasrin, Bangladeshi author, physician, civil rights and freethought and  feminist activist, living in exile since 1994,
after receiving repeated death threats from Islamists and Al Qaeda-linked extremists. )

 

*   *   *

May you be able to speak your mind sans death threats;
May you have no heroes to worship;
May you always remember to check the *#!?%#* guidelines (geesh!);
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] Specifically, in our pear tree.

[2] Although it would be years until I was “out” as being religion-free, I was always openly “lucky star” free.

[3] Specifically, a Criminal Justice major.

[4] Looking back, I should have charged so much more for typing the papers for those students whose handwriting was practically illegible (surprisingly, they were mostly engineering majors, not pre-med).

[5] I lampooned the phenomena in one of the few non-fiction pieces I’ve published, the essay, “You Can Be (Or Already Are) An Award-Winning Writer!”  One editor to whom I submitted the essay said he liked it very much and wanted to publish it, but was overruled by his fellow journal editors, and because of that he felt he should warn me that “this will be impossible to publish — everyone (as in, literary journals and magazines) has a contest !!!  and they do not have a sense of humor about that…or themselves….”  Despite his warning I kept submitting the piece, and it was published twice, once heavily edited to remove much of the contest-related snark, and the second time in its original form.

[6] Or the range may have been 1200 – 4500… I can’t remember the exact numbers, only that in my rush to be concise and clever I’d forgotten to check the guidelines.

[7] One of them “asked around,” he told me, and had heard that HG had a reputation for…that.

[8] Yes, it can and has happened.

[9] Although not for a second did I think he would have been interested in us.

[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Country I’m Not Escaping To

November 17, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, community, current events, exercise & fitness, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Isms (religion), politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Country I’m Not Escaping To

Department Of Given The Headline, Is This Warning Necessary?

Los Angeles Times headline 11-7-23

“Four current and former L.A. Sheriff’s Department employees
died by suicide in a 24-hour span.
warning: This story includes discussion of suicide.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of An Odd Thing That Makes Me Feel Lonely

That would be the show Escape To The Country, a BBC daytime TV show (recommended to moiself  by a friend), wherein current city dwellers search for their dream homes in rural UK areas.    [1]   The ETTC would-be buyers give their budget, desired rural locale, and other what-we-want parameters to a real estate agent, who then shows them three properties for sale.

My afternoon exercise sessions often include working out to a DVD, and a few weeks ago I began watching ETTC during my cooldown/stretching sessions.  Although I found ETTC quite interesting at first (it was fun to imagine traveling to those areas), watching those potential home-in-the-country buyers gradually made me feel…lonely, in a way that was initially hard for me to recognize, much less describe.

 

 

Methinks I have identified the sources of what my mind interpreted as loneliness:

(1) The ETTC buyers are mostly older, often retirees, and are living in a city.  They’re moving to “the country,” where they don’t know anyone and will have few nearby neighbors.   [2]    Aren’t they going to be friendless, at least for a while?

(2)  What an adventure that would be, moving to the English/Welsh/Scottish/Northern Ireland countryside (even for those people who are already in Great Britain)!  But the show makes me wonder…has my and MH’s time for such adventures passed?

(3) Even if for some reason MH and I wanted/found a way to relocate to another country (whether permanently or temporarily), we’d be leaving behind family and friends.  Given our life circumstances (read:  “at our age”), would we make new friends, or would we be the proverbial fish   [3]  out of water?   What makes a friend is the willingness and availability to *be* one.  After a certain time, most people already have their friends, and do not have a surplus of time and energy to devote to making new ones.   [4]

 

 

Well, not quite so long.  This story is from sixteen years ago, when I was at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s annual conference, in Madison, WI.  On the day the conference ended, while riding the hotel shuttle to the airport moiself  struck up a conversation with an elderly couple who sat across from me on the shuttle’s bench seats. We chatted about the convention highlights, what a great city Madison was, etc.  Noticing their British accents, I offered that I lived in Oregon, and asked where they were from. They said they’d lived in Connecticut for 15 years but, “as you might guess,” were from England. When I said, Do you mind if I ask why you moved?  they exchanged knowing glances, and the wife said, “This conversation.”

They chuckled at my bemusement, and the husband went on to clarify:  Both of them were native Brits who’d lived in England all their lives,   [5]  and they’d never had a conversation like this – a warm exchange with a stranger – in their home country.  It simply didn’t happen.  While they considered themselves to be kind and friendly folk, they found Brits in general (“Yes, we realize *we* are also British”) to be rather…cold; distant; hard to get to know.   Traveling outside of England confirmed their opinions, and they decided to retire elsewhere.  Within six months of moving to Connecticut they felt they had more close friends and neighbors than they did in 60 years of living in England.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of The Problems With Identity Politics

Beware the harmful consequences of good intentions.

 

 

Yeah; beware that ides-thing, as well.

But my beware  is related to a series of decades-old, poignant conversations with a family member about good intentions gone wild, conversations which sprang to mind when I came across an article by academic and writer Freddie deBoer.  I will address those conversations in a future post; on to the article, which is thought-provoking enough for moiself  to devote way too much a modicum of blog bandwidth to the article’s observations and assertions (and I hope my excerpts prompt you to peruse it in its entirety).    [6]

deBoer, a self-described “Marxist of an old school variety,” writes on politics and culture.  His specific interests include media commentary and “critiques of progressive pathologies from the left”: in the case of this article, identity politics activists who advocate for a “community” which in fact does not exist, and who might presume include him in their community, whether or not he wanted to be.  [7]

In deBoer’s intro to his article (excerpted below; my emphases), he notes that although he’s written about certain elements of the disability rights and the disability studies movements (the former a “catchall term frequently used by activists,” the latter an academic field), these complicated subjects are worthy of book-length analysis.  deBoer intends his article to be a “primer,” and warns that ...the people who are responsible for this stuff have good intentions; indeed, that’s part of what makes it all so frustrating and at times tragic. 

 

 

” ‘Disability rights’ rhetoric implies a community of the disabled that does not exist.

A common problem with identity politics is that those who practice it often imply unanimity within broad groups that doesn’t exist (…I refer to the common implication that all Black Americans supported defunding the police in 2020 [despite] polling demonstrating that no such thing was true.)

There are sometimes commonalities that are shared by a large percentage of a given group, but ‘people with disabilities’ is an unusually broad and varied group even compared to others. This is true because all kinds of people can be afflicted with all kinds of disorders, making it unthinkable that we’d ever see (for example) rigid attachment to a given political party among the disabled. More, the experience of disability is dramatically different depending on a given ailment – you can refer to people with psoriasis and with anxiety and with ALS all as ‘people with disabilities,’ but that’s a meaningless exercise…

…(also) many people with disabilities reject being defined that way, which has inherent political and social consequences. All of this diversity undermines any faith we might have in seeing those with disabilities as a coherent political group. Disability activists are forever purporting to speak for all people with disabilities even as many such people completely reject the activist agenda. There is no organizing committee for people who are sick. This has particular consequences given the next point.

Normalizing disability inevitably centers the most normal and sidelines the most severely afflicted. When you insist that there’s nothing wrong with people with disabilities, you are inherently (if usually unwittingly) pushing people who obviously have something wrong with them out of the conversation.…

… autism self-advocacy partisans are so insistent that having autism is not in any sense negative that they have to sideline those whose autism is clearly negative, as it is with profoundly autistic people who are nonverbal or self-harming or unable to control their bathroom function or similar. Such people are an uncomfortable reminder of what autism specifically and disability generally can do, so they are marginalized by those who prefer to maintain a false positivity. …. Anyone who can’t express themselves in a conventional way, whether thanks to cerebral palsy or autism or schizophrenia or any other condition, finds themselves written out of the debate….”

 

 

deBoer notes a disturbing trend of disability/identity rights activists: proclaiming that there is nothing wrong with having a disability and therefore nothing needs to be fixed – that what the disabled suffer most from is a stigma placed upon them by society.

“Once disability becomes identity, treating disability as something bad becomes forbidden. Contemporary disability mores are deeply influenced by the social model of disability, which holds that disabilities themselves are not inherently or intrinsically bad but rather that society has not set itself up in such a way as to accommodate those with disabilities.
It’s certainly true that we should do far more to make the world more accessible, but I don’t think that attitude is productive. I’m perfectly happy to say that being sighted is better than being blind regardless of how society sets itself up, and for the record there are many people with disabilities who find it insulting and callous to be told that there’s nothing wrong with them. Either way, insisting that you simply are your disability sacrifices your autonomy and right to self-define on the altar of an identity that you didn’t choose….

Stigma is nobody’s biggest problem….

A deeply mentally ill person who lives under a bridge has a lot of very real problems, and stigma is not one of them.

… Almost no one who suffers from a serious disability is going to name stigma as the highest hurdle they face. Access to healthcare, housing, and food, achieving basic financial stability, grappling with hopelessness and depression, finding community and love…. All of these things come first. But because of the incentives of identity politics, stigma reigns as the object of fixation…..

( excerpts from “What’s the Problem with Disability Studies and the ‘Disability Rights’ Movement?  Self-appointed spokespeople don’t own disability issues.”
Freddie Deboer, Nov 6, 2023;  my emphases )

 

“If only there was no stigma attached to my disability, I could get into this building, no problem.”

*   *   *

Department Of I Hate To Even Type “Literally,” But Literally,
Chills Ran Up My Spine When I Read This WaPo article

Because in the article was the essence of a recurring dream I had in childhood – a dream that could become reality, according to the article?  Moiself  wrote about this dream in my post of 12-13-2019:

“A major unpleasant memory from my childhood (early 1970’s So Cal) was dealing with smog alerts.  Activities were curtailed; recess and PE classes cancelled….  Flash forward to the present, and whenever we have had ‘low quality’ air alerts – as when the smoke from recent year’s wildfires drifted south or north to the Portland metro area – my watery eyes and that distinctive ‘catch’ I feel in my chest/bronchial tubes takes me back to those wretched smog alert days.

 

And the yoga teacher says, “Remember to breathe deeply…oh, never mind.”

 

In the late 1960s through the early 1980s California’s enactment of innovative, first-in-the-nation, vehicle emission control strategies and standards actually worked, and although the state’s population continued to rise its air quality improved…for a few decades, at least.  [8]   But while politicians and scientists joined forces to cobble together stop-gap measures, a schoolgirl dreamed of a fantastical invention which would solve the problem forever.

During an interval of several months when I was 11 or 12 years old, I had dreams wherein I invented colossal fan/vacuum type devices which, when placed in strategic locations across the state, sucked in air and ran the air through a series of filters, which strained out the polluting particulate matter and compacted the pollutants into bricks, particle boards, and other (non-toxic) building materials. Not only would our air be clean, this invention also protected trees and forests, as the need for lumber was greatly curtailed.

Yep, it seemed realistic to me at the time. The decades passed, and the Scientist/Engineer Who Saved The World…well, it very obviously didn’t turn out to be moiself….”

 

Yeah, okay…but smoky bands of filthy air encircle the globe, and my imagination in all its glory isn’t fixing that….

 

Here is a teaser for the WaPo article which prompted my digression:

“For decades, scientists have tried to figure out ways to reverse climate change by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere…. Companies, researchers and the U.S. government have spent billions of dollars on the research and development of these approaches and yet they remain too expensive to make a substantial dent in carbon emissions.

Now, a start-up says it has discovered a deceptively simple way to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it for thousands of years. It involves making bricks out of smushed pieces of plants. And it could be a game changer for the growing industry working to pull carbon from the air.”

( excerpts from “The Lego-like way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere,”
The Washington Post, 11-13-23 )

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [9]

 

 

*   *   *

May you carefully consider your participation in identity politics;
May you risk engaging amiable strangers in conversation;
May you eschew   [10]   using redundant content warnings;

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland

[2] Most of the buyers specify wanting a good deal of acreage, for their fantasy of having horses and/or livestock, ample space for gardens, etc.

[3] Pacific Northwest Chinook salmon, most likely.

[4] Nor the motivation to do so, if you are satisfied (and busy) with your current friendship group.

[5] Or at least until 15 years ago.

[6] Which is a writerly way of saying, “read the whole damn thing.”

[7] According to some disability rights activists, DeBoer is part of the disability rights community due to his bipolar disorder.

[8] So Cal air  pollution is rising again.  Rising numbers of people and vehicles outnumber good intentions and inventions. Waaaah.

[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[10] I once tried to come up with a joke about a Spaniard describing how he eats a French delicacy:  ” I eschew the escargot.”  Yup; still working on it.

The Engine I’m Not Revving

November 10, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, freethought/humanism, general ruminations, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, politics, radio & podcasts, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , Comments Off on The Engine I’m Not Revving

Department Of WTF?
Sub-Department Of What Could That Possibly Mean?
Sub-Sub Department Of This Is What I Get For Scrolling Through Roku Channel Offerings Late At Night…

…and discover this title of a…show?  Series?  Satire/hallucination?

“Kelsey Grammer’s Historic Battles for America.”

Moiself  is quite certain that neither my high school nor my university history textbooks contained any information on this Frasier actor’s battle contributions.

 

*   *   *

Department Of I’m In The Process Of Reading This Book
(And Perhaps You Should Be, Too)

“… when I think about the world, there’s no god in or above it. It’s that simple. Ask yourself: Do I think there’s a supernatural being in charge of the universe? If you answer ‘no,’ you’re an atheist. That’s it⁠—you’re done. No suing, signing, marching, debating, or tweeting required. You don’t have to do anything with that information. But if you do choose to share it, you may find you know far more atheists than you thought.”    [1]

 

 

A few years back I was asked by an acquaintance (with whom I was not personally close but who knew me well enough to assume I could answer their question) to recommend books for someone (else?   [2] ) who was “…genuinely interested in understanding a family member who had rejected religion.”  Moiself  made some crack about how actually asking the religion-free person sincere questions might be less expensive and time-consuming….

Looking back, I’m not sure which book(s) I recommended, I only recall that several came to mind.  If I were asked the same question today, the book I’m currently recently  [3]  would probably be at the top of the list.  This book is aimed more toward encouraging those who are religion-free to be open about that fact; still, I think religious believers could benefit from its perspective as to what their atheist/Freethinker/Bright/humanist friends and neighbors and kin and coworkers deal with.  Also, this book might help religious believers to realize that they know a hella more atheists than they think they do, because most of us, for a variety of reasons, are not out of that “nominally religious” closet.

 

 

“…should you say you’re an atheist even if you believe in ‘god’ as the power of nature or something like that?

Yes. It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in god metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that god is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell.

In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their god’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in ‘god’ when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your ‘god is love’ only lends validity and power to their ‘god hates gays.’)

So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?

If you answer ‘no,’ you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done….”

 

 

“It shouldn’t be hard to say you don’t believe in god. It shouldn’t be shocking or shameful. I know that I’m moral and respectful and friendly. And the more I say to people that I’m an atheist — me, the mom who taught the kindergarten class about baking with yeast and brought the killer cupcakes to the bake sale — the more people will stop assuming that being an atheist means being … a serial killer.

And then? The more I say I’m an atheist, the more other people will feel comfortable calling themselves atheists. And the stigma will gradually dissolve.

Can you imagine? If we all knew how many of us there are?

It would give everyone permission to be honest with their kids and their friends, to grapple with big questions without having to hold on to beliefs they never embraced.

And it would take away permission, too. Permission to pass laws (or grant exemptions to laws) based on the presumed desires of a fictional creation.  Permission to be cruel to fellow human beings based on Bible verses.  Permission to eschew political action in favor of ‘thoughts and prayers.’

I understand that, to many people, this might sound difficult or risky….

But for everyone else who doesn’t believe in god and hasn’t said so? Consider that your honesty will allow others to be honest, and that your reticence encourages others to keep quiet. Consider that the longer everyone keeps quiet, the longer religion has political and cultural license to hurt people. Consider that the United States — to survive as a secular democracy — needs you now more than ever.

And the next time you find yourself tempted to pretend that you believe in god? Tell the truth instead.”

(excerpts from “American doesn’t need more god.  It needs more atheists”
by Kate Cohen, author of We Of Little Faith: Why I stopped pretending to believe (and maybe you should too),
The Washington Post, opinions essay, 10-3-23, my emphases )

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Oh, wait, except that it’s more of the same….

Department Of “god Is Love” And Other Horseshit Wimpy Analogies

Moiself  didn’t intend for this book to dominate the post, but have you ever read something and thought to yourself, How did this author get inside my head?  Although Cohen grew up in a religion-in-name-and-culture-only family, and I in a practicing Christian (Lutheran) family, I found many similarities to our experiences and mindsets.  I was a little less…hesitant than she seems to have been, when I realized it was time to come out of the religion-free closet, but like her, I was in that closet for many, many years, and for many of the same reasons.  [4]

A difference between Cohen and moiself  is that when asked to label or describe my worldview [5]   I don’t often call moiself  an atheist.  I will happily accept the label if given it, as I view it as an invitation for education.  [6]   Nevertheless, Cohen’s experiences are similar to mine, thus I quote them here (and thus I hope to entice you to buy her book and compare experiences and perspectives yourself).

 

 

“When I mustered the courage to call myself an atheist, I was often gently invited to recant. ‘Now are you an atheist or an agnostic?’ they might say. (Now are you a lesbian or have you just not met the right boy?)

Obviously, they wanted to give me, a person who seems nice, a nicer word. ‘Atheist’ evokes a sneering cynic who thinks believers (and possibly love and puppies too) are beneath him (yes, him). That’s the stereotype….
An agnostic, on the other hand, is just a regular person humble enough to admit what she doesn’t know. She’s not sure there is a god, but she’s not sure there isn’t. Either way is fine! Believers with even a tiny bit of doubt can relate to the agnostic, which is why they sometimes helpfully offer me that label. They want me to be someone they can understand. They want me to be someone they can like. Maybe they even want me to be someone who can like them….

So why don’t I call myself an agnostic? Because I see absolutely no reason to think there might be a god. None. I don’t see some evidence for and some against. I see no evidence for and plenty against.
To be clear: I really don’t think much about whether god exists. I enjoy those British-accented books that sharply articulate every possible argument against god’s existence. I’m grateful they did the work, grateful that all that complex reasoning sits on my shelf like an intellectual battery pack. But I don’t really need them.

My atheism derives naturally from a few simple observations.

1. The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard obviously just made that shit up. Extrapolate.

2. Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge of everything and that we somehow continue to live after we die. But (2a) wanting doesn’t make it so.

3. The holy books that underpin some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.

4. The existence of child rape (and other unfathomable cruelties).
As for the argument that god isn’t an actual being capable of or interested in preventing (4) but instead is a sort of cosmic life force / sense of oneness / mystical transcendence, well…then we’re not really talking about theism anymore. If you’re not using the term ‘god” to mean a deity ‘with the capacity to design, to choose, to create,’ a being actively engaged in human affairs, and instead using it ‘as a way of describing Nature itself,’ then you’re falling into the trap that Daniel Dennett calls ‘belief in belief in god.’ He argues in Breaking the Spell   [7]   that we name ‘a throng of deanthropomorphized, intellectualized concepts’ the same thing that believers call their Supreme Being merely so we can say, ‘we all believe in god.

That’s how ingrained it is in us that we’re supposed to believe in ‘god.’ We know the god of the Bible doesn’t make sense, so we give the title to something else. We should stop doing that. As long as a large number of people literally believe that (a) god is looking down from heaven, judging our actions, preferring that women wear dresses or what have you, it’s just misleading to claim that you believe in god metaphorically. Let’s call love ‘love’ and not confuse the issue.

That’s it⁠—why I call myself an atheist….To me, it’s clear there is no god. Or rather, it’s clear that god is made up: of course god exists, as the most powerful, most fascinating, most cited fictional character ever created.”

( excerpts from Kate Cohen’s “We of Little Faith (Why I Stopped Pretending To Believe And Maybe You Should Too), from the chapter dealing with why she doesn’t call herself an agnostic.   my emphases…and some style changes.   [8]  )

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Gender, Inclusivity, Exclusivity…Whatever Floats Your Boat

Dateline: last week, searching YouTube TV for viewing options. Here was a summary, which someone got paid to compose, for “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” as streamed through the TNT network ( my emphasis):

“Men (Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite)
confront dinosaurs on a Costa Rican island.”

 

“Don’t you confront me, you *man,* you!”

 

*   *   *

Department Of Do You Ever Wonder, What If…?

Dateline: last week, circa 8 am, morning walk, just after having crossed a busy street on my way toward a nearby park. Behind me I hear the distinctive sound of a souped-up car, its driver revving the engine in an attempt to – what, serenade everyone within a mile radius with his pathetic attempt at covering his inadequacies manliness substitute?   [9]  Of all the emotions I expected to feel when I heard that cacophony, moiself  was surprised by the one that enveloped me: gratitude.

I was grateful for something over which I had no control:  what if I’d been born into a different family, time and/or place?  Nature and nurture, they work together, and the jury is deadlocked on when it comes to what is the primary influence shaping Who We Are.  So, Car Revving Dude: besides being a ridiculous waste of money, I consider “souping-up” an auto and engine-revving and other such displays to be ignorant and wasteful.

Now, back to my gratitude, involving both the nature and nurture categories: What if I had been raised in a family and/or neighborhood where that kind of display was considered admirable, and something to strive for ? Even if no one in my family practiced that kind of behavior, what if I was raised, as a female, to consider whatever-makes-a-guy-want-to-do-those-kind-of-things to be attractive – even essential – qualities in a mate?

Sometimes, I just feel lucky. Take it away, Mary Chapin Carpenter.

 

 

*   *   *

 Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [10]

” We won’t know the truth until we tell the truth.”
( Kate Cohen )

 

 

*   *   *

May you never confront dinosaurs without a posse of men;
May you be grateful for not being an engine-revving kind of guy;
May you consider “telling the truth instead” the next time you have an opportunity to hide an essential part of your identity;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] From Kate Cohen’s We of Little Faith: Why I stopped pretending to believe (and maybe you should too)

[2] They never said, “for me,” although I think it might have been.  As in the, “Doctor, I have a question for a friend, who has this rash….”

[3] Which I purchased after reading an excerpt from it in a newspaper’s opinion piece, written by the book’s author.

[4] e.g.,  not wanting to be discounted or experience discrimination; concern over how my children would be viewed and treated….)

[5] or my, ick, “spiritual beliefs,” by someone who doesn’t know any better than to use that term with moiself.

[6] Short version: as in, how to not define me in terms of someone else, who is a theist.  Calling me an a-theist, as in, not-a-theist, only gives you the most basic clue as to what I do *not* believe, as opposed to what I do believe…so I use the terms Bright, Freethinker, Humanist, etc.

[7] Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon.  Another good book you should read; I read it in my (former) church’s book group.

[8] I do not capitalize the word god (although Cohen does), as it is not a proper noun.  In other words, even if you believe in (a) god, its name is not, God.

[9] I’m confident of the pronoun even though the car was behind me and I couldn’t see the driver.  A needlessly revving car?  It’s always a he.

[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org.

The World Series I’m Not Watching

November 3, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, sports, travel, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The World Series I’m Not Watching

What would ushering in the holiday season be without The Dropkick Murphys?

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Halloween Highlights

Dateline: Tuesday eve, 8 pm ish.  I hadn’t been in the mood for trick or treaters, for mostly logistical reasons,  [1]  and MH did most of the doorbell-answering/treat-dispensing duties.  Then, when I did take a turn, a lone trick or treater made my evening.

He wore a really cool/handmade dinosaur-ish costume, appeared to be about ten years old, and was delighted when I guessed that he was Godzilla.  After he took his candy he thanked me, lingered on the porch for a moment, then, his eyes sparkling at me through his costume’s eye slits, asked, “Can I give you a high-five?”

My heart soared like a hawk.

But wait – there’s more.  Today is…can you guess?

 

 ( On November 3, 1954 director Ishirō Honda and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya’s vision for movie monsters changed cinema forever as Godzilla opened in theaters. On November 3, 2023, we join our fellow fans and proud partners in recognizing the indomitable 69-year influence of the King of the Monsters with the biggest Godzilla Day yet.”  From Everything You Need To Know To Celebrate Godzilla Day )

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Wouldn’t Have Believed It If I’d Seen It With My Own Eyes…

Except that I did see it.

There it was, in my mailbox.  The new (to moiself ) Signals gift catalog.

 

 

Gifts that inform, enlighten and entertain?

I had trouble with the catalog’s name as preceded by the description of their gifts.  Then,  my Devious Little Mind ® went to work:

Ah…Signals as in, virtue signaling?

Alas, my DLM worked for naught, for when moiself  skimmed through the catalog I found saw no mention of how these gifts are ethically sourced, etc.

The Signals  title apparently also does not – cannot, IMO – refer to how the gift recipients will think you’re so cool for selecting presents for them from this catalog.  Moiself  saw nothing outstanding in that department, nothing different from the five bajillion gift catalogs which’ll clog mailboxes around the country in the next couple of months. 

 

 

So, neither coolness nor virtue is being signaled by buying any of this catalog’s jumble merchandise, unless you mistakenly think that giving a *you’re an amazing woman* mug to a friend/relative/neighbor/coworker is somehow informing, entertaining, enlightening, rather than what it actually is: an opportunity for them to practice their Present Face. ®

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Lions…And Sirens And Dudes, Oh My

“So now we’ll have a world series between a couple of 2nd place also-rans that nobody outside of Dallas and Arizona will care about.
I predict record setting low ratings. Happy MLB?”
(Comment from a FB friend, after the Game 7 of the Philadelphia-Arizona National League Championship Series )

Was it only a year ago, when moiself  was excited about having the opportunity to attend a MLB playoff game?  Apparently, as per these excerpts from my post of 10-21-22:

Early last week daughter Belle messaged me, wondering if she should get a ticket to Game 4 of the Seattle Mariners-Houston Astros American League Division series playoff game.  The division playoffs are a best-of-five series; Belle’s company, Schilling Cider, is a Mariners sponsor, and was guaranteed a certain number of tickets to purchase for playoff game 4.  Belle checked to see how many tickets her company would be allotted, and found out there would be enough so that she could get one for moiself  as well…and would I be interested?

It warmed the cockles of my heart, to hear that Belle was interested in going. How Belle’s grandparents would have liked that, I told her.

Chet and Marion Parnell were longtime baseball fans.  They once told me they’d always wanted to go to a playoff game but never had the opportunity. I grew up going to LA Dodgers and Anaheim Angels games, then in the 80s I lost – or rather deliberately misplaced – my interest in the sport.  I don’t remember the exact year; it was when there was yet another player/management strike.  Free agents had become the thing; it seems like you didn’t know the players anymore (“Wait…he was a Dodger and now he’s a Yankee?”), there was no team loyalty or team identity on either side of the management/players…it used to be you could follow the career of a player, having come up through the farm system….

Then came the latest the player/manager/owner strike.  I remembered thinking,

“Hmmm, which group of multi-millionaires do I feel sorry for?”

And that was that.

I became a fair weather fan – one who would watch The Big Games ®,  particularly if there’s a team I had an interest in (rooting for California or West Coast teams, and against CHEATERS like the Houston Astros…or just arrogant asshats like the Yankees).

As it turned out, there was no playoff game for Belle and I to attend. While I was stuck on the train (a presidential visit and the usual, non-unusual-for-Portland shenanigans, including some dude who was “laying across the tracks,” delayed the train’s departure for *hours*) after we finally got moving, the Mariners lost the longest 1-0 playoff game in MLB history.   [2]

 

 

As I’d mentioned in that year-old post, the lack of any team loyalty/permanence re their player roster was a factor in limiting my interest in baseball, along with the gradual and interminable lengthening of the games.  But this year, with a new pitch clock and other rules changes, my *potential* interest perked up a wee bit…until the playoffs.  It used to be the Boys of Summer became the Men of October, and now, what with the various divisions and wild card series and league series championships, the World Series won’t be finished until November.  Who set this up – Oprah?  “You get into a playoff series!  And you!  Every team gets into a playoff series!”

 

 

My tends-to-be-sensible husband was befuddled by the endless playoffs, and voiced his opinion on the matter:  After such a long season, there will likely be one team in each league with the best record, and why don’t those two teams play each other in the World Series?  Okay, maybe you need at least one playoff series, so the top two teams in each league – never mind which division they are in – face each other, then the winners go to the series.  Isn’t a team’s record over the *ONE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO* game season more indicative of talent than the random/bad luck any team might have during a five or seven game series?

Oh, honey, you’re so cute when you’re trying to make something make sense.  Sports and rationality…they just don’t mix, silly boy.  Moiself  gently reminded MH about the enormous amount of $$$ from broadcasting revenues and merchandising, etc., to be made from playoff games.

 

 

 Once again, I digress.

After I read my friend’s FB comment, here was my response to him:

“My daughter and I were discussing (texting- text cussing?) this last night. I echoed your sentiment, and she replied,
‘Everyone not in the southwest should just refuse to watch the World Series. Make it have the lowest viewership numbers in decades.
We will cyberbully them into submission.
It’s kindergarten tactics – like we’re convincing all the other kids in class not to go to their birthday party.’ “

What I didn’t share with him was the content of Belle’s and my textcussion during the latter innings of the Phillies – Diamondbacks game,  during which Belle and moiself  traded some important observations about baseball…uh…strategy.  Her closing comment had me giggling so loud MH had to ask what was going on:

Moiself  (circa inning 5):
Alex Bohm of the Philadelphia Phillies is adorable.
I bet Yeti     [3]   would love to snuggle in his hair

Another cute Philly just knocked in the go ahead run.
The Phillies definitely have the most interesting hair. So, they got that.

 

Any questions?

Belle:
I haven’t been watching, had to run some errands after work and now I’m cooking dinner.
Is the game over?

Moiself:
No, still on…now sixth inning…now I think Arizona’s leading 3 to 2.

Belle:
Me and L___ at work came up with a theory about baseball: players will always fall into one of two categories.
(1) Ridiculously handsome, essentially a male siren
(2) “Yeah that’s just a dude.”
I’ve never seen the theory proved wrong yet.

 

Bryson Stott was also workin’ it in the siren category.

 

Moiself:
There could be a third category…arguably, it could be a subcategory of the second one: the chunky uncle, who could be wearing a MAGA hat, instead of a baseball hat.

Belle:
That’s still 2 main categories though!

Moiself:
I think you and L___ need to submit that categorization to major league baseball. They can work it into the rules somehow.

Belle:
A new stat.  They mention which category every player is in, in the commentary.

Moiself:
When he’s at bat, along with his average.

Belle:
“And coming up to bat is Dan Smith, career 321 hitter, falls into the siren category as well!
Do you think his looks will distract the pitcher?”

 

I think Belle’s grandparents would have been proud.

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of A Modest Proposal  [4]

Dateline; last Friday. The link for my yoga streaming class never came through, so moiself  did an online class instead, the link to which I discovered a couple of years ago.  It’s a fun, covers-most-of-the-bases, 60m vinyasa class, it’s become one of my favorites. Except for this one part where the teacher tells her students, after an intense series of postures, that “It’s OK to smile; it’s not that serious.”

Now, the teacher was joking to her class, which included both men and women.  But it reminded me of a recent outing where I heard someone else (a man) advising some woman to smile.  Yep, we’re almost to 2024, and many dudes still haven’t read the memo.

 

 

But if this holiday season is like all the others before it, ’twill not only be men who will be the transgressors in this matter.   Here come the requests for family and extended family group photos, and say cheese and hold still and we’ll have to do this again- Uncle Aeneus had his eyes closed…”

This can be annoying for everyone (and particularly for scophphobes  such as moiself ).  And there’s always the adolescent who just really isn’t in the mood to smile, as everyone turns to look at them with their you’re-ruining-it-for-everyone-else glares….while the tween wonders aloud why people can’t just have their normal face on display for a photo.

And so, my modest proposal for keeping the peace during the holidays  (my pipe dream is to extend this year-round):

How about if we all agree, no matter the circumstances, to stop telling other people
what *we* think they should do with *their* faces?

 

Okay, everybody stop smiling and someone call Child Protective Services.

 

*   *   *

Department of Employee Of The Month

 

 

It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself.   Again. The need for which I wrote about here.   [5] 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [6]

“I’ve been told by professional drug users that if I did the drugs, I would like the Dead. It seems like the most effective PSA against drugs could just play some Dead jams and say, ‘If you do drugs, you will like this kind of music.’ What other deterrent would one need?”

( Penn Jillette, from Every Day is an Atheist Holiday! )

 

Non-stoned concertgoers appreciate a Grateful Dead reunion jam.

 

*   *   *

May your gift-giving inform, enlighten and entertain your giftees;
May you be in charge of your own face during photo shoots;
May you never pass up the opportunity to high-five Godzilla;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Doing some major house remodeling which means our usual spaces are compromised and we’d be running up and down the stairs to answer the doorbell.

[2] 18 innings, 1-0.  Sounded to me like a soccer score.

[3] Belle’s Bengal cat.

[4] Kudos to the English literature majors who get the Jonathan Swift rip off reference.

[5] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg.  Until I did.

One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens.  No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

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