“There’s a wonderful Japanese term, for which there isn’t a precise English translation. The term is Mono No Aware ( mo no no a- war -ey ) loosely means, a sensitivity to ephemera; the bittersweet feeling of seeing things change. Mono no awareis a wistful awareness of the transitory nature of existence. Since everything we see all around us will one day be gone, we must appreciate every millisecond. According to this idea, cherry blossoms are not only beautiful despite only blossoming for two weeks once a year, they are beautiful *because* they only blossom for two weeks once a year.
When you notice yourself fearing or resisting change, perhaps you can remember the concept of mono no aware, and find harmony with the impermanent nature of all things. As Jack Kornfield [1] said, ‘Like a sandcastle, all is temporary. Build it; tend it; enjoy it. And when the time comes, let it go.’ ” ( from Daily Calm morning meditation, 7-22-26 )
* * *
Department Of Apropos Of Nothing…
…or at least the nothing that now seems so important, or at least, memorable. Recently, both a book I was reading and a podcast I was listening to, on the subject of the history of the radical undergrounds [2] in the 1970s-1980s, mentioned an incident in Chicago where the boxer Muhammed Ali ( “the most recognizable man in the world” ) joined in on an action to disrupt the eviction of a poor Black family living in a Chicago tenement. I didn’t know about that incident; while I admired his acting on behalf of that family, hearing about it got me to thinking of the impressions I carried of Ali, and still do, to this day.
My parents were not very interested in boxing. Moiself actively opposed and was confused by its very existence: why were select men given money and medals for doing something that, if they did it in the streets instead of in a sporting arena, they’d be arrested ? [3] I refused to watch any boxing matches as a matter of principle, but when it came to the Ali-Frazier competitions I – like the entire country, it seemed – was well aware of the pre-matches hype and the post-matches analysis.
When it came to that classic rivalry – the three Frazier-Ali matches known as The Fight of The Century (1971) and the rematches Super Fight II (1974) and the Thrilla in Manila – my parents, like most Whites of that era (so it was assumed), supported Joe Frazier. Joe Frazier was shy, respectful, softspoken, and humble; those traits of his were ridiculed by Ali and his supporters as being more palatable to White people whom, they sneered, saw Frazier as a Good Negro®.
I admired Ali for how he stood up for himself and was willing to go to jail for his principles. I’d never heard of a Black man talking back to White people like Ali did. It wasn’t so much that Ali talked back, it was that he unapologetically stood up for himself. I lovedthat. And I hate hate hated the way Ali talked about, and to, Joe Frazier.
Joe Frazier supported Ali ( both publicly and financially ) after Ali refused induction into the US Army and was subsequently stripped of his title, banned from boxing, and threatened with jail. Frazier even lobbied the boxing powers that were ( and President Nixon! ) for Ali’s being able to return to the sport. Here is what Frazier got in return: Ali boasted about how “pretty” he himself was, and contrasted his own handsome visage [4] with the features of Frazier, called Frazier “ignorant” and “dumb” and “ugly,” and actually compared Frazier to a gorilla.
Those astoundingly racist epithets would’ve been called out as being just that if they had been uttered by a White person instead of being brashly spewed by the self-proclaimed [5] “Greatest.” You could try to excuse Ali’s taunting by saying it was part of the boxing culture’s pre-match hype; but Frazier didn’t, and never forgave Ali for the taunting and bullying he (and his family) endured from Ali supporters.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) was the celebrated agnostic orator of the 19th century, sparking what became known as The Golden Age Of Freethought. A Civil War officer, abolitionist, civil rights and women’s rights advocate, author, and skilled orater, Ingersoll’s lectures attracted thousands, and he was the person most responsible for the flowering of Freethought in the USA.
Although I knew *of* Ingersoll I did not encounter Ingersoll’s vow until after my own coming out as religion-free. Moiself got goosebumps, the first time I read this essay of his, to think of how the experiences of a someone of over 100 years ago so paralleled those of my own. It’s as if he was emptying my thoughts onto his pages.
The *news,* was not what Ingersoll realized he was convinced of ( e.g., the natural, not supernatural, origins of our world; the fact that religions are mythologies ) but rather of his ability – his*need,* his obligation, even – to express this openly.
When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myths – there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free –
* free to think, to express my thoughts; * free to live to my own ideal; * free to live for myself and those I loved; * free to use all my faculties, all my senses; * free to spread imagination’s wings; * free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope; * free to judge and determine for myself; * free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books
that savages have produced,
and all the barbarous legends of the past; * free from popes and priests; * free from all the “called” and ‘set apart;’ * free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies; * free from the fear of eternal pain; * free from the winged monsters of the night; * free from devils, ghosts, and gods; for the first time, I was free.
There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought – no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings – no chains for my limbs – no lashes for my back – no fires for my flesh – no master’s frown or threat – no following another’s steps – no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.
And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain – for the freedom of labor and thought – to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains – to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs – to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn – to those by fire consumed – to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.”
* * *
May you remember, or soon discover, the first time you realized that you are free; May you know the wistful joy of appreciating ephemera; May you feel free to spread imagination’s wings; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Jack Kornfield is a Jewish-American writer and teacher of the Vipassana style of Theravada Buddhism. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, and has been teaching mindfulness meditation since 1974.
[2] The Weather Underground, The Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army.
[4] Which, as more than one White and Black pundit pointed out, was the result of having some European ancestry in his lineage – specifically, an Irish ancestor from County Clare.
[5] “To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.” “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” Muhammed Ali In His Own Words.
[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
Dateline: Circa 7:45 am; taking my morning constitutional. In a neighborhood where I sometimes walk, I pass a house that is heavily trashed accessorized: its front yard décor includes a multitude of plastic multicolored flowers, garden gnomes, smiling animals, faux garden implements stapled to the house’s siding, etc.
A sign on the front door of the house reads, “This is my happyplace.” My first thought as moiself reads the sign:
The Very Nice Exterminator Man (VNEM) tried unsuccessfully to stifle his laugh when, as he followed me on the pathway around the side of the house to the place where the squirrels were using our trees to access our roof, he told moiself that the traps he was going to set were kill traps, and I blurted out an enthusiastic, GOOD!
“Wow, it’s a squirrel howitzer,” I said, when I saw the first trap.
“Your attitude,” VNEM chuckled – then quickly added, when I turned around to see if he thought I was A Terrible Person ® , “I like it. It’s, uh…very different…when I’m in Portland.” He explained that when he’s setting up traps in optimal places ( for where the squirrels are accessing the house ), his Portland clients often ask him – whisper to him, he said – if he can “hide them (the traps) so the neighbors don’t see.”
I correctly surmised that was because they don’t want their neighbors to know about the kill traps. “Let me guess,” I replied. “Portlanders fear their neighbors’ judgement because they, like their neighbors, are misinformed. They think it’s somehow better or more humane to trap the squirrels and ‘relocate/transplant them,’ when they in fact know nothing about squirrels, including that
* squirrels are highly territorial; thus, depending on how far away they are transplanted, they will find their way back to your property and continue to be a problem/do the damage for which you wanted them gone in the first place, or
* they will be beaten and harassed by other squirrels into whose territory they have been released, [1] not given a moment’s peace to establish their own territory, much less forage, and they’ll starve to death;
* the majority of Oregon’s squirrels are *not* native, but are introduced species which, through being larger and more aggressive and via spreading new diseases, have taken over the native squirrel population…”
“You *do* know a lot about squirrels,” VNEM said, as I finished my Why It’s Okay To Hate Squirrelsharangue explanation.
“Enough to loathe them,” I said. “Look; I love animals; my diet is 99% plant-based; I escort spiders from our house (even bought a special device that traps, rather than squishes them)…and I detest squirrels.”
Ater one week with the traps up: the body count is two traps, two dead squirrels. [2]
The following is not a picture of a dead squirrel. The Picture That Does Exist But That I’m Not Showing You [3] is of a squirrel tail trailing out of one of the bazookas, the tail waving in the slight breeze, like a flag of surrender…. [4]
She’d never want us trapped in a sloth bazooka, but then, we’d never chew on her house or electric wires and cause hundreds of dollars worth of damage….
* * *
Department Of Traditional Foods Whose Existence I Acknowledge…
…but will not touch with a ten-foot pole. Or narwhal tusk. Or whatever is available to push the hákarl as far away from moiself as possible. The idea that you can call such a thing “food” is, IMO, an insult to all which is considered edible.
You’ll be safe with me, lady. Let’s order the tuna casserole instead.
Y’all may have heard of hákarl, the infamous Icelandic “delicacy.” If not, videos of people chunder-spewing immediately after having tried it are just an internet search away.
Ahem. Written by the person who, attracted by the title, purchased, Does Anyone Actually Eat This?Nanna Rögnvaldsdóttir, Iceland’s “best known food writer,” wrote this slim ( 73 pages ) but mildly intimidating book about 16 peculiar Icelandic delicacies. Besides the better known hákarl – Greenland shark meat that is fermented (read: putrified) in a way to remove the copious amounts of uric acid (read: piss) in the shark’s flesh so that you may eat it and not vomit blood (a common reaction to piss-shark-flesh eating) – curious culinary minds might want to read about other Icelandic delicacies, including
* Svið (a sheep’s head, halved and singed, then boiled with the brain removed;
* Súrsaðir hrútspungar (sour ram’s testicles) – yep, just that: sheep’s testicles, boiled, pressed into blocks and preserved in fermented whey. Some Icelanders consider it rude to call the dish by its name; thus, several euphemisms are used to refer to it, including millifótakonfekt( “between-the-legs candy” );
*Hverabrauð, a hot sprin- baked, dense, pumpernickel-rye bread, which at first sounds rather tame until you get to the details: “the bread…has a reputation for causing flatulence and is sometimes nicknamed, þrumari, aka, “thunder bread.”
Dude, a chase of thunder bread will absorb the urine/blood vomit aftertaste.
* * *
Department Of The Idealism Is Nice, But Your Age/Gender/Privilege Is Showing
Datelimne: earlier this week; listening to Clear + Vivid podcast, of 6-30-26. Host Alan Alda’s guest is American journalist, editor and biographer Walter Isaacson. The episode: Walter Isaacson: Are These Truths Still Self-Evident? From the episode’s description:
On the eve of our nation’s 250th, Walter Isaacson takes a deep dive into the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. It’s what he calls “the greatest sentence ever written.”
After discussing the history of the declaration and the interpretation and implementation of that so-called “greatest sentence, [5] Alda and Isaacson discuss the current fragmentation of our nation and the fact that we seem to have lost our ability to compromise, which is what led to the crafting of Declaration, and later, key elements of the U.S. Constitution.
( Excerpts; my emphases ):
Alda: Now, what about the big question…how can we accomplish the return to this great sentence…and make it no longer merely aspirational or largely aspirational, but make it truly happen? What kind of things need to be done…can be done?
Isaacson: …Among them is look for ways where we can have shared national service, whether it be being part of civic life in your town or teach for America….
We should form the type of civic organizations that, when you and I grew up …you’d go into town, there’d be the Kiwanis Club, and the Rotary Club, and the bowling League, and the Elks and the Moose.
We all had whatever our religions, whatever our ideologies, we all rubbed elbows together. And so I think in our daily lives, we can say, how do we do it at a local level? We can’t do this at a national level now….
My reaction: Gawd, does he (Isaacson) ever sound old/white/male/upper class!
The community and social institutions Isaacson lists – it’s not a bad thing, IMO, that they’ve faded away and/or drastically lost their impact. In their heyday they exerted great influence in the business and social lives of their cities, and membership in them and other “fraternal” organizations were steppingstones for business and political success. But, the we all rubbed elbows togetherideal – what orifice did Isaacson pull that out of?
“My orafices are none of your beeswax, sweetie.”
Those institutions, whether community/civic or fraternal, were *not* welcoming and inclusive. They required an invitation and/or sponsorship from current members for your membership application to be considered. If you were white and male (and had an “in”), you had a chance.
Many a story I’ve read about those organizations’ resistance to change. In particular I remember a community newspaper article about the blowback faced by an Oregon Coast man, a longtime member of his local fraternal organization (Elks, maybe?), who lobbied his fellow members to allow women to join the organization. He pointed out that his wife and other wives of members already did the lion’s share ( maybe it was the Lions Club!? ) of the work when it came to organizing, setting up (and – surprises! – cleaning up after ) the group’s yearly fundraisers and other events, and that they and other women in the community had expressed interest in joining…. But, no. His fellow Elks/Lions were content to keep the ladies in auxiliary status. Women were capable of doing the work, but heaven forbid they get the recognition (and status and influence) of membership.
Two personal examples: Over a decade ago I congratulated an acquaintance of mine when I saw an announcement in the local paper about how she’d joined the local branch of a nationwide service organization (ala Kiwanis Club). She was one of three businesswomen who’d been invited to “integrate” the previously all male [6] club, which had gained a reputation among newer-to-the-area, younger and nonwhite/nonmale city residents as stodgy, elitist and out of touch. Two years later I saw her at a city event, and told her I’d once again [7] intended to support her in the group’s annual fundraising sales, but that I didn’t find her name on the group’s roster. She rolled her eyes in disgust and told me she’d resigned from the group, as she was tired of banging her head again the proverbial wall. “All those old men are going to have to die[8] before anything will change,” she huffed. [9]
Another friend of mine started her own business in her small Oregon town, and as her success grew she joined her local Chamber of Commerce. Her C of C experiences…
* being either ignored and or patronized by old time (read: white male) COC members
* her ideas dismissed/discounted by her male colleagues one minute, then ten minutes later appropriated by another COC member, who presented them as his own
…spurred her to rally other women business owners in her town to form the ____ (name of town) Women’s Business Association.
So yeah, definitely encourage people to get off of social media and find other outlets for personal connection. But before advocating a return to those old organizations, a remaking of them is in order.
And, BTW, what’s so bad about having bees that don’t wax?
* * *
Department Of A Documentary I’ll Have To Get Back To
A friend recently sent me a link, along with this message:
I don’t know if you’ll like this, but this week’s independent lens is about a woman dealing with her father who is the last creationist in their family. I appreciated her struggle.
The episode he linked me to was released earlier this week by the PBS documentary series, Independent Lens. Its title and description: Flood, directed by Katy Scoggin: A filmmaker revisits her evangelical roots to find connection with her estranged father.
I thanked him and wrote that I’d watch it later. I did, then sent this reply:
Oh… Holy crap. Figuratively and literally.
I love the Independent Lens documentary series, but I could only get about 20 minutes into this particular documentary before I had to stop watching it. I know there had to be a setup of the filmmaker’s conservative evangelical background in order to establish the estrangement between the filmmaker, who left those beliefs behind, and her father, who still holds them, but still…ICK.
If I never again, no matter the context or pretext, have to hear grownass adults serious singing/discussing about being “washed clean by the blood,” then I will have lived a happy life and can possibly withstand even global warming.
Listening to children reciting the gibberish of theology provokes a physical reaction in me. It actually twists my stomach, to hear children spewing things they’ve had to memorize but have no idea what they’re talking about. [10] Particularly retch-worthy was the scene at the filmmaker’s father’s dinner table, when one of his cherubic blonde granddaughters (maybe four or five years old?), chirps, “I know all vowels: A E I O U!” Then, smiling, she recites in a sing-song voice the first four letters of the alphabet, which she has been taught to link with bible verses:
“A – All have sinned and gada fada baba… ( it’s hard to make out many of the words, as she lisps and runs the words together [11] )…the glory of god
B – Believe in the lord jesus christ and thou shalt shall be saved
C – Children obey your parents in the lord for this is right
D – Depart from evil and do good….”
It’s child abuse; it’s emotional and intellectual child abuse. And I can’t watch that, any more than I can stand by and watch someone beat a child and not intervene.
* * *
Department Of Damn, It’s Inevitable, But They Rip A Piece Of Your Heart Out When They Go
May your bees continue to wax; May you remember to never eat a slice of thunder bread before yoga class; May your sweet tooth steer clear of between-the-legs candy ; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] I have seen some epic squirrel territorial battles in a nearby park which I regularly walk through/around – battles that have drawn blood between the combatants (and which unnerved me, years ago, when I didn’t know much about squirrels) and which would make MMA combatants envious.
[2] Upon completing his inspection the VNEM thought one or at most two squirrels were accessing our roof, trying to chew their way into our attics. Which was somewhat better than the last invasion, which included an entire squirrel family.
[3] But which I sent to select friends/family, who almost certainly wouldn’t rat me out to PETA.
[4] I did send the picture to the exterminator (when he asked if we knew if either of the traps had been sprung), with the caption, “My heart soars like a hawk.”
[6] And mostly all White, despite the city’s growing Hispanic population.
[7] I had donated to the group’s yearly fundraiser only because she was in it.
[8] A lot of them did…but then their nepo-stodgy sons “inherited” their memberships, so change as continues to be slow.
[9] And she even had an “in” – she was the former mayor’s daughter-in-law.
[10] And I have a similar aversion to kids reciting loyalty oaths, such as the Pledge of Allegiance, in schools. I stopped saying the pledge when I was in the fifth grade.
[11] It’s likely the Christian tenet, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god…” from Romans 3:23
[12] I was so NOT able to even type that last week.
[13] “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
Department Of Snarky Thoughts While Looking At The Rear License Plate
Of The Car Ahead Of Me At The Traffic Light.
“Isn’t that sweet – one of the license plates Jesus made while
he was doing 5-10 at the Federal Penitentiary for money laundering….”
* * *
Department Of Gummie Bears, Schmummie Bears – Have You Tried…
Dateline: 9:20 am Wednesday; message from daughter Belle. In her work as QA manager for a hard cider company, Belle is privy to the FDA’s product recall list. She sent a copy of the latest list, with this intro:
“The FDA email recall list is the gift that just keeps on giving!”
* * *
Department Of I’m Not Sure What, Exactly, Prompted This Memory Number 3,2781 In A Never-Ending Series Sub- Department Of Lost In Translation
I’m thinking what brought this to mind was a podcast moiself recently listened to, wherein the various stories presented had to do with the protagonists having to make do in unexpected circumstances.
Dateline: a midweek afternoon; the mid-1980s, Planned Parenthood clinic in Santa Ana, CA, where I worked as an Options Counselor/Clinic Aide. At that time perhaps 30% of PP clients were bilingual or Spanish-only speaking, and there were always at least two bilingual clinic and office staff scheduled. On that fateful day, we were short staffed in the clinic, with only one clinician (a Nurse Practitioner, “Serena,” who spoke only English) and two clinic aides – moiself, and Anna, who was bilingual.
I was halfway through my afternoon Clinic Aide shift. Brief clinic logistics: both new and returning patients checked in at the reception desk. “Renee,” the clinic’s receptionist, either pulled the existing chart or created a chart for a new patient, then placed the charts in order of appointment time/patient arrival in a chart holder which was affixed to the door between the reception area and the clinic waiting room. I was surprised when the door between the reception office and the clinic opened, and Renee, holding a chart in her hand, personally escorted a new patient back to the clinic. This was unusual.
What was also unusual was the new patient herself. She looked to be in her late 30s (most of our patients ranged in age from late teens to early 30s), and was dressed to the nines: immaculately coiffed, glistening black hair; a string of fresh water pearls around her neck; a tastefully expensive diamond ring on her left hand [1]; a tailored linen suit… She had a bearing of Old Money ® about her, and looked as if she were headed for a corporate cocktail reception and not a women’s health clinic.
Renee pulled me aside and said that the patient, “Señora Rica,” spoke no English – Renee had learned what she was about to tell me from the PP accounting secretary (“Dina”), who was bilingual and whom Renee had grabbed to translate when Señora Rica [2] came to the reception desk. Señora Rica: age 36, in good health; no allergies; not taking any medications; has two children who are back at home with her husband; currently using an IUD for contraception; lives in Guadalajara; has been visiting relatives in Santa Ana for the past two weeks; began having heavy heavy vaginal bleeding two hours ago; she was not in pain; it was not time for her menstrual cycle. This PP was the closest medical facility Señora Rica’s family knew of; Señora Rica insisted on driving herself to the clinic, sans accompaniment. [3]
I wondered aloud why la Señora had not been referred to an ER, but dropped that concern when I saw that I’d made the already twitterpated Renee even more hyper. The other clinic aide, Anna, had just left for her lunch break – this was before cell phones; there was no way to reach her. So: we have two non-bilinguals – moiself, and NP Serena – in the clinic for the next hour. I told Renee that I’d get la Señora set up for an exam and that Renee needed to get that bilingual accounting secretary back to the clinic, pronto, to interpret.
Moiself just happened to have started studying “clinical” Spanish – and by just I mean, like, two days prior. I’d taken Spanish in high school and had learned next to nothing useful ( ¡Qué sorpresa! ). And although by my junior year my high school’s student body was majority Hispanic-surnamed, the words and phrases I’d picked up from my friends were, how you say, hardly genteel and not at all respectful (nor Castilian grammarly-correct). Still, with my minimal skills I was able to escort Señora Rica to an exam room, where, after apologizing for my abysmal Spanish, I asked her to disrobe from the waist down, put on a drape, and take a seat on the exam table. I told her that I would be right back with the clinician, along with someone who spoke better Spanish than moiself.
I exited the exam room just as Renee and the Very-Nervous-Looking accounting secretary, Dina, and the NP, Serena, arrived outside the exam room door. Fortunately, there were no other patients in the clinic waiting room. I quickly got my comrades up to speed…which was way below the speed limit, as I didn’t know much. NP Serena gave a sneak preview to Dina re what Serena and I would be asking the patient, via Dina’s translation. Serena asked Dina to first please introduce the three of us; we’d need to know at what point the patient was in her reproductive cycle, whether or not she might be pregnant, and she should be informed that the clinician would be performing a pelvic exam which should reveal the status of Señora Rica’s IUD…. And could Renee wait outside the exam room for a minute, until we all got settled?
A little more than a minute after the three of us entered the exam room and maybe forty seconds after Dina had begun talking with the patient, I noticed that Dina’s lips were turning blue, and that her eyes – which had focused on the blood that seeped through La Señora’s paper gown and off the edge of the chux pad[4] under the exam table’s paper – started to roll up in her head. “She’s going,” I hissed to Serena. I managed to catch Dina before her legs’ muscle tone had morphed into al dente spaghetti. As quickly and discretely as I could, I scooted/dragged Dina out of the exam room and to clinic waiting area. I helped Dina to the floor, propped her legs up on a chair and put a seat cushion under her head. I told Dina to breath slowly and deeply, and told a flabbergasted Renee to please keep watch over Dina. [5]
I returned to the exam room. The patient was supine on the exam table while Serena performed a pelvic exam on her. La Señora seemed nonplussed by the near-swooning-drama; whatever is the opposite of nonplussed, that was moiself. I was plussed as hell, but was determined not to let any of that be seem by the patient (or Serena ). I did my best – my comments and questions bracketed with lo siento; lo siento mucho [6] – to convey what Serena needed to do to and know about La Señora.
The exam revealed that La Señora had most likely expelled her IUD, but the patient had no idea when…perhaps when she was in Guadalajara? Or during her shower yesterday morning? “I need to know if there’s a possibility she could be pregnant,” Serena told me. “We can try a pregnancy test after the exam, but the bleeding – which seems to have stopped; well, it still it might interfere with the results – the tests we have here might not be accurate.”
With the help of the calendar on the exam room wall, I was falteringly able to determine La Señora’s LMP. [7] Now, Serena told me, I needed to ask La Señora when was the last time she’d had intercourse. Oh, this is gonna be fun (not). I gulped, and tried my best to comply:
“Ah…Señora, lo siento, pero…
¿Cuándo es la ultima vez…momentito, por favor.”
I realized my high school/crude Spanish was going to fail me in this situation. I whispered to Serena that I did not know the technical Spanish term for sexual intercourse and that I did not want to offend the patient – Serena interrupted me and said that this was need-to-know info, and that I should just do my best.
My best. Muchas gracias, Serena. You want me to ask this very gentle, very patient, very gracious woman when was the last time she and her husband fucked?!?!?
I girded my proverbial language loins, and, as one does when all else fails, employed the universal language of gestures.
“Lo siento mucho, pero, ¿Cuándo es la ultima vez que…usted y el esposo…”
I could feel my cheeks flushing as I made the OK sign with my left hand and jabbed my left right finger back and forth through it.
La Señora’s eyes widened with comprehension. She smiled, chuckled softly, kindly reassured me ( “No hay problema, señiorita” ), pointed her finger toward the calendar, and gave me a date.
By the end of the exam the patient’s bleeding had stopped. She said she felt fine; her vital signs were all normal; we referred her to an Urgent Care clinic for a pregnancy test and followup exam.
Later that afternoon, as Serena was doing her charting and I was getting ready to go home, Serena complimented me on keeping a cool head and on my “ability to pivot.”
“Is that what I did? Thanks, Serena. No, really – thank you, thank you very much,” moiself responded, followed by, “You realize Renee and Dina are never going to speak to me again? And I am never speaking Spanish with a patient, never, ever, never….” [8]
May you be entertained in traffic by other people’s license plates; May you have the appropriate vocabulary at the appropriate time; May you have fun going bowling instead; [10]
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Or so Renee (the clinician who saw her) – who always noticed such things about patients – told me later ( “Did you see that rock on her finger?!? White gold band, round center pink diamond with two rows of diamond insets…” )
[3] And she parked at the curb right in front of the clinic, leaving her cream-colored Merecedes in the no parking loading/unloading only zone.
[4] For general/every day exams, clinics use exam table paper, which makes that distinctive, crinkling sound when you sit on it. When a patient is in labor or during clinical/exam situations involving the possibility of any kind of heavy fluid expulsion, an absorbent underpad, aka “chux” pad, will be placed under the exam table paper, where the patient will be sitting.
[5] “She might throw up; deal with it as best you can; I’m sorry but I’ve got to get back in there….” I can’t remember all I blurted to Renee but I’m sure she found my instructions…lacking.
[8] The very next day I broke that “promise,” and would continue to break it in the following years I worked in the women’s reproductive health care field.
[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] Which, rumor has it, can be made even more fun with a dose of Boner Bears.
Because moiself be doing a rerun. Similar to the monthly Blast From The Past® feature, [1] this is a blog segment I ran across while looking for something else. Specifically, one from ten years ago last month, found while I was lamenting this year’s lack of April Fool’s Day pranks:
Department Of Fun With Student Drivers
Dateline: Tuesday, early a.m., out for my morning walk, waiting to cross a street. As I watched the cross traffic’s stoplight and saw the green-changing-to-yellow light – the pedestrian’s rewarding indicator that it will soon be your turn to cross the street – I noticed a white sedan slowing down much more deliberately than is usual yet still not managing to come to a complete stop until the car’s front bumper was just a tad into the crosswalk.
My light changed to green, I began to cross the street, and saw the telltale red and yellow logo for a local driving academy on the car’s driver’s door. A student driver?
Excellent.
I looked inside the car: the student in the driver’s seat sat ramrod straight, an expression of nervous anticipation drenching her face. Her white-knuckled hands gripped the steering wheel and her gaze was fixed ahead. Her instructor was looking down at a clipboard he held; neither of them seemed aware of my approaching presence.
My instinctive reaction was to throw myself onto the hood of the car and scare the living pee-pee out of both of them.
How I managed to restrain myself, I’ll never know.
But, I did. Okay?
Had I gone through with my whimsical notion, ‘twould have made a good – dare I say, even legendary? – April Fool’s Day prank.
You gotta love a day that is devoted to honoring and encouraging practical jokes, hoaxes, and pranks both well- and feebly-played.
The origins of April Fools Day’s are not completely agreed upon by historians, and have been variously attributed. What is agreed upon is that many cultures, going back to the ancient Romans and Egyptians, have set aside days for celebrating jokes and pranksters. Perhaps, as some people have speculated, there’s just something about the day’s timing – the fading of winter and the blooming of spring, which lends itself to the observance of light-hearted frivolity.
I can recall only a few of the pranks I’ve played on friends, family and co-workers over the years. The memories are silly but fond, and include:
* Sneaking a package of Hydrox cookies [2] from the family snack drawer and replacing all the cream fillings in the second row of cookies with toothpaste.
* Showing two positive pregnancy test dipsticks to a newbie Planned Parenthood co-worker and telling her I was pregnant with twins.
* Adding just a couple of drops of blue food coloring to the carton of nonfat milk in my parent’s refrigerator.
* Calling my father at his office and convincing him (if only temporarily) that someone had bought a raffle ticket in his name for the local animal shelter’s fundraising event, he’d won the raffle, and could he please let the shelter know when he was coming to claim his prize: an English Mastiff and a week’s supply – a 100 lb. bag of kibble – of the dog’s food. [3]
“I don’t get it. Why would that be funny?”
* Swapping my and my siblings’ framed high school graduation pictures, which hung in my parent’s hallway, with pictures of the members of Led Zeppelin.
* Replacing the hard-boiled egg in my sister’s school lunch bag with a raw egg.
* Cutting my finger, smearing my blood on the scissors in co-worker Roger’s cubicle, leaving a note on my computer saying I had been threatened by Roger and feared for my life, then faking my own death and leaving town.
Oops, that’s right – I never got around to implementing the last one.
As pleasurable as it is to pull off an epic prank, it can be equally fun, IMHO, to have a great prank played on your own self. I hope y’all have a Happy April Fools’ Day…and I hope that I do not regret having made that previous declaration. ( excerpts; 4-1-2016;The Instinct I’m Not Obeying)
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* * *
Department Of Seeing Yourself Through Other Eyes…Or, Not?
Dateline: Monday morning; scrolling through the previous night’s Nehalem BBQ posts. The BBQ is an online bulletin board of sorts. As per its mission statement:
The BBQ is a free public service provided to the citizens of the Oregon North Coast. It is dedicated to the promotion of community building by establishing a website forum whereon citizens may announce important matters and events, offer goods and services, express needs and provide information of general interest. [4]
Moiself clicks on the post that catches my eye – the one titled, North Coast Pinball Updates May 2026. North Coast Pinball is arguably my favorite beach business. I always spend a couple of hours there at least once a week. [5] I adore the owner’s community spirit, his generous, welcoming personality, his freethinking/humanist, feminist politics…and has NCP really been open for five years? Here is how the post begins:
“Fun fact: we’ve been doing this thing for five years now. Sold 562 used pinballs and 1272 stickers. Rebuilt more flippers than I quite know how to count. Gave away *so* many mystery tokens. Maybe you’ve seen our chess set in the corner; guess how many pieces have gone missing in five years?
None! Well, there was that knight who wandered off one day but it came back before I noticed it was gone. [6] Y’all are the best. Thanks for making NCP NCP.
Oh! Also in those five years I wrote a book about the place, which should be out later this month. You can learn more about that at www.mysterytoken.pub.”
I assume the post was written by NCP’s owner, with whom I am on a friendly/first name basis (moiself also assumes (1) he is writing the book; (2) trhe book will be self-published).
Wondering how/if he will write about those of us who might be considered regulars of NCP, I follow that link, which leads to this teaser/excerpt: (my emphases):
Can You Feel It?
stories from North Coast Pinball
“…another day, you may write in your journal that three people, who did not know each other a month ago, who live in three different towns, and who met each other playing pinball in your place, are now out on a hike together. Your journal will reflect a feeling that the purpose of your life has been fulfilled.”
“…five years later you’ll write a weird little book. A book that’s not so much about pinball as it is about how it feels at North Coast Pinball in Nehalem, Oregon….
“A book about what it’s like for the five-year-old peering through the window as you prepare to open. What it’s like for your ten-year-old regular, back once again to improve on his high score. What it’s like for the sullen teenager, dragged against their will on an obligatory family trip….
What it’s like for the sixty-something beach bum who comes in weekly for $20 in tokens, plays each game exactly once, and leaves her leftovers in the community donation jar….
“Holy crap, that’s me,” I blurt out, first to moiself, then to MH. I read the underlined section of the post to him, then wonder how the book’s author can accurately write a *nonfiction* book about “what it’s like” for the five-year-old, or the sullen teenager, or the beach bum, without interviewing said characters. [7]
My reaction surprises moiself. That (underlined) pretty much describes what I do when I’m there. I am sixty-something; I do frequent NCP weekly (when in town); I do get $20 in tokens; I do play the games once…but sometimes twice (and not all of them – I avoid the easy ones/the one-token-per-game ones…and when I win a free game I don’t play it again – I like to leave the free game available for a kid to discover); I do make sure to not use up all my tokens so that I may leave the leftoversin the community donation jar.
“But,” I confess to MH, “I don’t know how I feel about being described as a ‘beach bum.’ ” ( Although I realize that my ubiquitous attire – yoga pants and t- shirts and OR rain/sun hat – are casual to the max and could tilt perceptions of moiself toward the latter category.)
MH points out to me that the description could fit many people at the coast. [8] Nice try, honey. I’m not a vain person (what would be the point?). [9] Still…. Beach bum is one of those phrases that could mean colorful character to some people, or one-step-above-a-grungy/homeless person-and/or-those-men-in-their-eighties-with-their-pants-hiked-up-to-their-nipples-who-patrol-the-beach-with-metal-detectors to other folks. [10]
Beach bum. Okay; it’s two words. Until I have evidence otherwise I’ll take the description to be one that is meant with fondness. And although I’ll maintain my smugness re self-published books, I will buy a copy when it comes out.
My high score in one of my fave pinball machines, which I rented from NCP and got to have in our home (terrorizing/entertaining the neighbors) for three months a couple of years ago.
May you have unending patience with apprentice drivers; May you be entertained by how you might be described by others; May your you enjoy religion-free casseroles; and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Wherein yours truly posts a segment from a blog of the second Friday of years ago….which I just did last week. Lazy ass writer that I am.
[2] Anyone else remember the precursor (and competitor) to Oreos?
[3] My sisters making muffled barking sounds to approximate background animal shelter noise was a great help in pulling off this prank.
[4] To post on this BBQ you must be a subscriber or non-subscriber who operates a business on, lives on or has a second home on the Oregon North Coast.
[5] …when I’m at the coast. That time has been rare since my November foot surgery and now since MH and I cannot easily get to Manzanita unless we can arrange the complicated care for our elderly, kidney-disease stricken cat…
[6] Okay…there is some missing info here. How did you know it was gone, if you didn’t notice it was gone, and then it was back and so it wasn’t gone?
[8] Perhaps…but how many of them play pinball at the NCP place and in the manner described?
[9] (that would be an exercise in futility – in vain?)
[11] “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
Department Of Reasons For That Take A Deep Breath Truism
“The way we breathe has a direct and immediate impact on the state of our mind, emotions, and nervous system. When we’re agitated or anxious, our breath is often quick and shallow. When we’re calm, and grounded, it tends to be long and deep. So, it’s helpful to remember that we can deliberately alter our breath when we want to soften stress or anxiety.…
we can always call on this tool, lengthening our inhales and exhales, in order to regulate our stress response, and gain a sense of calm.” ( Calmmeditation, app, “Breath in Three Acts,” 4-6-26 )
* * *
Department Of Powerful People Have The Privilege Of Ignorance Sub-Department Of Reasons To Use The Calming Breath Tools
“It is an old truism that knowledge is power. The inverse — that power is often ignorance — is rarely discussed.
The powerful swathe themselves in obliviousness in order to avoid the pain of others and their own relationship to that pain. There’s a large category of acts hidden from people with standing: the more you are, the less you know….” ( excerpt, Rebecca Solnit, “Nobody Knows,” Harpers Magazine )
A few days ago, when moiself ran across Rebecca Solnit‘s above cited article, I was reminded of SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor’s recent and right-on critique of her colleagues’ obliviousness to the realities in daily lives of non-one-percenters such as themselves.
( excerpts, my emphases/additions, “Supreme Court’s Sotomayor slams colleague Kavanaugh for ICE ruling,” USAToday, 4-9-26 ):
Sotomayor spoke about the court’s divided decision in September 2025 that allowed the Trump administration to resume indiscriminate immigration-related stops….
Over the objections of the court’s three liberal justices, including Sotomayor’s, the court blocked a lower court ruling that said federal agents need to have reasonable suspicion that the person they’re questioning is in the country illegally…. [1]
‘I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,’ Sotomayor said, referencing Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion…. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.’
Sotomayor added, ‘Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,’ she said of those detained. ‘And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper.’ ….
In his opinion for the court, Kavanaugh liedblew smoke out of his prep school Ivy League ass made up crap about something he knows nothing about said that legal residents’ encounters with immigration agents are ‘typically brief,’ and impacted individuals ‘promptly go free.’
* * *
Department Of New Great Term From A Book I Might Read
*Might read,* as in, Get in line with the 158 books ahead of you on my list. But, as is often the case with my reading list, the lastest, newest/shiny entry kicks the others to the rear. Sigh. There’s no fighting evolution.
Oh yes the term: safetyism. Before I even read the definition I suspected what it was;…moiself knew it was a name for something I’d previously had no name for – a phenomenon that both alarmed and infuriated me when I saw it creeping into my children’s college experiences. [2]
The Coddling of the … reviewer admitted being skeptical about a book whose title could have heralded a tirade from middle-aged professors about how “today’s students are too soft and whiny.” Instead, the reviewer noted, the book’s authors point out the disturbing data of what is happening on college campuses: the rise of trigger warnings, safe spaces, disinvited speakers, student protests shutting down debate – linked with the dramatic and documented rise in anxiety and depression among young people. The book does not blame young people for these particular problems; rather, it lays responsibility on the bad ideas that youth are being taught by well-meaning adults.
“…despite their theoretical benefits, protected educational experiences [safe spaces] often fail to instill the most important attributes of a liberal education: critical thinking, persuasive argumentation, close reading, and cultural understanding. Indeed, students’ desire for safe spaces can limit their ability to traverse the real world—where strong disagreements and challenging experiences are part of life…. I know my campus is not a protective bubble that can shield students from reality. Rather, it’s a microcosm of the real world—and I’m not doing my job as an educator if I perpetuate the illusion of safety at the expense of challenging students’ ideas and beliefs.
As a Black man who teaches Shakespeare at a predominantly white institution, I realized years ago that the classroom can never be a safe space. When I teach Othello, a tragedy replete with anti-Black racism and misogyny, am I safe from silent criticisms that I’m an assimilated Black person with a ‘white voice’ teaching a white author? If there is only one Black female student in the class, is she safe? Rather than asking a non-Black colleague to teach the play for me, I lean into discomfort and use it to my pedagogical advantage. I carefully address whatever arises from the class’s collective exposure to the text and its racist moments, because that is my job as a professor.
In my classroom, I eschew safe space rhetoric—such as the truism that all opinions are equally valid—in favor of a pedagogical practice I call ‘productive discomfort.’ This practice leans into difficult discourses on a variety of contentious topics and fearlessly engages students’ personal backgrounds, identities, and experiences. It uses the learning process to expand the boundaries of students’ comfort zones by challenging their existing assumptions and biases.”
“Education should disrupt the status quo and promote critical thinking.”
Yet again, I digress.
What follows are excerpts from the The Coddling of the American Mind review, with my emphases. I have not yet read the book; thus, my emphases of the reviewer’s statements mark *my* concerns – ones I’ve amassed over the past decade, from my offsprings’ experiences as well as from my own readings and observations. One example: although content/trigger warnings and attempts to establish colleges as safe spaceswhere students are promised refuge from being “offended” may feel like a kindness in the moment, IMO these policies impinge on free speech, suppress open discussion of complex issues, throttle academic and intellectual diversity, and ultimately (and perhaps most importantly) hinder young people in building resilience.
“Lukianoff and Haidt [the books’ two authors] are not conservatives….both lean left politically. That matters, because this book is not a right-wing attack on campus culture. It’s a liberal critique of things that have gone wrong inside liberal spaces….
The central argument is simple: three bad ideas have spread through American universities (and increasingly through K-12 schools, workplaces, and families). These ideas sound good on the surface. But they are toxic. They make students more anxious, more depressed, and less prepared for adult life.
The three bad ideas are:
‘What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.’ This is the opposite of the old saying. It teaches that discomfort, emotional pain, and offense are dangerous. So, we must protect people from them. The problem is that avoidance makes anxiety worse, not better. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), one of the most evidence-based treatments for anxiety, teaches the exact opposite: you have to face your fears to overcome them.
‘Always trust your feelings.’ This sounds empowering. But your feelings are not always reliable guides to reality. Anxiety tells you there’s a threat when there isn’t. Anger can be based on a misinterpretation. If you always trust your feelings without questioning them, you become a prisoner of your own emotional reactions.
‘Life is a battle between good people and evil people.’ This is the us-versus-them mindset. It divides the world into oppressors and victims. It leaves no room for nuance, context, or good-faith disagreement. And it makes every conflict into a moral crusade where compromise is betrayal….
Here are four things the reviewer learned from the book ( again, excerpts from the review, my emphases ):
“1. Safetyismis not the same as safety.
The authors coin the term “safetyism” to describe a culture where emotional safety is treated as more important than intellectual freedom. Actual safety protects you from physical harm. Safetyismprotects you from ideas that might make you uncomfortable. The problem is that you can’t learn in a discomfort-free environment. Learning requires challenge.
2. The rise in anxiety and depression is real and alarming. [5]
3. Antifragility is a real thing.
The book borrows Nassim Taleb’s concept of ‘antifragile’ things [6] that get stronger when they’re stressed (e.g. bones, muscles, immune systems) Minds can be antifragile too. But only if they’re exposed to manageable challenges. Protecting kids from every stressor makes them fragile, not safe.
4. You can be compassionate and still allow discomfort.
One of the book’s most important distinctions. Compassion does not mean removing every obstacle. Sometimes compassion means letting someone struggle, fail, and figure it out.
The book ends with a line that has stuck with me: ‘Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.’
That’s it. That’s the whole argument. We have been so focused on smoothing the road, removing every bump, every uncomfortable idea, every moment of potential distress, that we forgot to prepare the child. And now we have a generation that is more anxious, more depressed, and less resilient than any in recent memory.”
May you remember that discomfort is the point of learning; May you call out mind-coddling when you see it; May you always have room for nuance, context, and good-faith disagreement; …and may the hijinks ensue.
[2] I don’t know if it went as far back as high school – I don’t recall K or Belle mentioning “safe spaces” or “trigger/content warnings” then – but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was already there.
[3] I copied/wrote down portions, so it must have been online…Facebook? One of my many newspaper online subscriptions? ACVATTWAFNB (All Cat Videos All The Time With A Few News Breaks)?
[5] Most of us have heard about the skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression; the book presents data linking this to social media, the decline of free play, and the rise of safetyism.
[6] Nassim Taleb is a Lebanese-American author, professor, mathematician. His book cited here is Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,
[7] “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
Department Of But First, Set Aside The Skepticism For: More Proof That Everything Circles Around
Dateline: Tuesday 4:29p, reading a blurb in The Weekmagazine’s “guide to what’s worth watching.” I come upon a blurb that makes me shriek with joy, and search my blog history for the story I know is there. Here, from 10-27-17 ( The Studio I’m Not Touring ), is an excerpt of my relating a Parnell family story to my family
Remember the story I’ve told you, when I was in grade school, and one night at the dinner table my dad was teasing my mom about her name….
For the benefit of those not related to me or who haven’t heard the story, [1] a wee bit o’ background info: my mother’s birth surname was Hole. [2] Yes, Hole. I sometimes teased her, about why her own mother didn’t keep her surname Moran but instead was willing to take on her husband’s…unique…family name: It really must have been love, or desperation….
Yeah, so, the story. At the family dinner table, occupied as per usual by my parents and their four children (on this particular night oh-so-many years ago, my older sister, younger sister and I were all in grade school, and our brother was an infant):
After my father’s customary So, tell me about your day? query, we dove into yet another round of thematic banter. Our family dinner table dialogues tended to focus on one subject, which was never (or rarely) intentional or pre-planned, but rather tangential from something which had happened to one of the Parnell siblings [3] at school. On that evening, I shared a story about a kid who had been teased on the playground about his name: the combination of his first name and last name made for some tease-worthy rhyme schemes. [4]
Marion Parnell said she felt sorry for the poor boy. Growing up with her particular last name, she knew exactly how he felt:
“My father was always telling my sisters and I how, in Norway, Hole was a respectable, upper class, landowners’ name. I lost track of how many times he told us we should be proud of our name. He just couldn’t understand how it was for us, because in America, it was just HOLE. Oh, I heard it all the time, the jokes: ‘Look, here comes Marion Hole, hole-in-the-ground…don’t fall into a hole!’ “
(I had also lost count of how many times I’d heard about Hole-is-a-proud-Norwegian-name assurances, and had come to think that our maternal grandfather had made that up to make our mother feel better. I’d never heard of anyone, of anyethnic background, with that name.)
Still with me? You deserve The Order of the Pretty Purple Toe ® award.
My mother took little comfort from me telling her that her peers had been pretty lame in the joke department: ” ‘Marion Hole-in-the-ground’? I can think of a lot worse things to do with a name like…”
Chester Parnell jumped in, to save me from embarrassing my mother. Or so I thought.
“Well, Robbie Doll, you know what your mom’s middle name is?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “Alberta?”
“That’s right,” Chet nodded enthusiastically. “But you know, she was so beautiful, I never had any second thoughts about marrying an A. Hole.”
This produced shrieks of delight from the three Parnell daughters – first from me (my shriek decibel count was boosted by my pride in being the first one to “get it”), followed a few seconds later by my older sister, and then by my younger sister, who probably didn’t get the reference but knew something hilarious must have been said by the way her older sisters and father were reacting.
Mom had that tense/amused, try-to-be-a-good-sport look on her face. Dad gazed across the table at her with impish affection – I knew something even better was coming up.
Chester B. Parnell: “Tell them about your cousin.”
Marion A. Hole Parnell (baring her teeth): “I don’t want to tell them about my cousin.”
Chet: “Tell them about your cousin. What was his name?”
Marion: (muttering) “His name was Harry.”
Chet: “And it wasn’t a nickname – his real name wasn’t Harold? And he didn’t have a middle name – just a first and last name?”
Marion: “That’s right.”
Mom, of course, knew where this was heading. She tried to act as if she were miffed, but I could see the corners of her mouth beginning to twitch.
Chet: “And so his name was…?”
Marion (deep breath): “Harry Hole.”
Professional stand-up comics would kill to get an audience response akin to that which erupted that evening, in the smallest of venues, the Parnell kitchen dining nook.
* * *
Back to the present; specifically, Tuesday, when moiself comes across the blurb in The Week magazine and shrieks aloud, My mom’s cousin!!
* * *
Department Of Post Easter Reflections
It’s the week after the weekend of the most holy Christian festival that ironically [5] has the most un-Christian name. What we call Easter, as with most Christian holidays, consists in large part of the ancient rites and myths of paganism and other spiritualities which were incorporated into the Christian myths (see this Longest Blog Footnote So Far ® for details, should that float your boat. [6] )
Three years ago, around this time of year, this was included in my blog:
Department Of Uh, Since You’ve Asked, That Would Be, “No”
Last Sunday a FBF (Facebook Friend) began her post thusly:
Happy Easter, everyone! Can I share what it means to me?
FBF went on to – surprise! – offer her testimony for Jesus, without waiting for an answer to her question.
Moiself remembered that post on Monday, when I saw a different post on social media – a post which, if I had a different relationship with that FBF, I would forward to her, and possibly even ask for her reaction/opinion.
For my Christian readers, family and friends – and yessirreeebobsurprise! I do have them – I assume they call themselves Christian because they go to a Christian church and/or believe they have committed to “follow Jesus.”
Having been raised in that background, it has always – and especially around this time of year – been a source of forehead-bonking wonder to moiself that there seems to be little understanding by Christians that their Jesus is never quoted in their scriptures as saying, “Oh, yeah, along with the teachings and good deed admonitions I’m leaving y’all with, here’s the most important thing: please remember to start a new religion, and name it after me.”
Former Christian evangelical divinity student Jim Palmer’s new ministry seems to be to “minister” to former literalists such as himself ( from Palmer’s writings moiself has seen so far, I gather Palmer would still claim to follow [some] words/example of Jesus, but not Christianity). For the sake of relative brevity, moiself will assume that most Christians accept their Biblical scriptures as reliable. [7] It is to those Christians that I’d like to direct to one of Palmer’s writings, which contain some abundant food for thought (an entire life’s rations, I’d say) about how Christianity ≠ Jesus ≠ Christianity:
It still surprises people who haven’t looked closely that Jesus and Christianity are not the same thing. Not even close. Jesus was not a Christian. He didn’t start Christianity. He didn’t write a creed, build an institution, or outline a belief system that would later dominate empires. You can’t blame Christian nationalism on Jesus. You can’t even cleanly blame Christianity on him. What exists today under his name is something that formed after him, around him, and in many ways, in spite of him.
What we call Christianity is largely shaped by the Apostle Paul and later by the political machinery of the early church. Most of the New Testament isn’t Jesus talking, it’s Paul interpreting. Then you have centuries of councils, debates, and power plays where theology gets hammered into place by people trying to stabilize a movement that was never meant to be stabilized. Read the creeds. They are packed with metaphysical claims about Jesus, yet strangely quiet about the actual things he taught. It’s a lot of doctrine, very little Jesus.
Then Constantine shows up and everything shifts. After the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Christianity goes from a grassroots, disruptive movement to a state-sanctioned tool. Legalized, institutionalized, and eventually weaponized. What began as something subversive becomes something that props up empires. By the time you get to Nicaea, Jesus is being defined in ways that would likely leave him scratching his head. The question isn’t just who Jesus was. It’s who needed him to be what they said he was.
Christianity didn’t just elevate Jesus. It insulated people from him. Turning him into God conveniently removes the pressure of actually following him. If he’s divine in a way you can never be, then you don’t have to wrestle with his humanity or your own. You can worship instead of embody. You can believe instead of live. It’s a brilliant move if your goal is control. Not so great if your goal is transformation.
Strip away the layers of theology, politics, and institutional spin, and you find something far more dangerous than what Christianity preserved. Jesus wasn’t executed for starting a religion. He was executed for disrupting one. He challenged the alliance between religious authority and political power, and he did it without holding any official position himself. That’s what made him dangerous. He didn’t oppose the system by building a rival system. He made the existing one look unnecessary.
The Romans didn’t crucify nobodies. Jesus mattered. Not because he held power, but because he exposed it. His message stirred hope, and hope is not harmless. Hope destabilizes systems that rely on resignation. It wakes people up. It makes them harder to control. Jesus told people to stop outsourcing their authority, to stop deferring to religious gatekeepers, and to trust what was alive and true within themselves. That’s not religion. That’s a direct threat to anyone who benefits from people staying dependent.
Every time Jesus spoke, he was pulling another block out of the structure holding everything in place. He didn’t need an army. He didn’t need a platform. His clarity did the damage. He revealed that the system people thought they needed wasn’t necessary in the way they had been told. And once people start to see that, the whole thing begins to wobble.
What’s ironic is that the religion built in his name ended up doing the opposite of what he did. It rebuilt the very structures he exposed. It reintroduced authority, hierarchy, and dependency, then stamped his name on it for legitimacy. And now, two thousand years later, Jesus is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Talked about endlessly, but rarely recognized.
Jesus might be the most famous missing person in history. Not because he disappeared, but because the institution built around him made sure you wouldn’t find him.
Dateline: January 2025. A new year; a new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month). My thought at the time: Perhaps moiself will like this enough that it will turn out to be a regular blog feature. So far it has, but time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.
This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?![8] friend gave me, all those years ago, [9] as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life. Thus, journal/diary-resistant moiself would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.
Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago April to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )
“I HAVE AN EASTER challenge for Christians. My challenge is simply this: tell me what happened on Easter. I am not asking for proof. My straightforward request is merely that Christians tell me exactly what happened on the day that their most important doctrine was born.
Believers should eagerly take up this challenge, since without the resurrection, there is no Christianity. Paul wrote, ‘And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain…. ‘ (I Corinthians 15:14-15)
The conditions of the challenge are simple and reasonable. In each of the four Gospels, begin at Easter morning and read to the end of the book: Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20-21. Also read Acts 1:3-12 and Paul’s tiny version of the story in I Corinthians 15:3-8. These 165 verses can be read in a few moments. Then, without omitting a single detail from these separate accounts, write a simple, chronological narrative of the events between the resurrection and the ascension: what happened first, second, and so on; who said what, when; and where these things happened….”
Protestants and Catholics seem to have no trouble applying healthy skepticism to the miracles of Islam, or to the ‘historical’ visit between Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni. Why should Christians treat their own outrageous claims any differently?…
[Thomas] Paine points out that everything in the bible is hearsay. For example, the message at the tomb (if it happened at all) took this path, at minimum, before it got to our eyes: God, angel(s), Mary, disciples, Gospel writers, copyists, translators. (The Gospels are all anonymous and we have no original versions.)
But first things first: Christians, either tell me exactly what happened on Easter Sunday, or let’s leave the Jesus myth buried next to Eastre (Ishtar, Astarte), the pagan Goddess of Spring after whom your holiday was named.
Then, like now, you’d think somebody at the time would have noticed zombies walking around….
* * *
May you enjoy the rites of spring, no matter what natural processes and/or mythical beings you attribute them to; May you apply a healthy skepticism to all supernatural claims; May you always notice when zombies are walking around; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] The latter group would not include anyone within a twenty mile radius of my dining table.
[2] Which is why, once my feminist worldview began to develop, I told her it was completely understandable that she never even considering retaining her birth name upon marriage
[3] Which translates into, usually moiself. Things were always happening to moiself.
[4] And although I remember with vivid clarity the conversation that ensued from me sharing that story about the kid being teased re his name, to this day I cannot recall what the kid’s name was – something along the lines of Bart Katz, which of course got turned into Barfing Cats or Fart Cats or the like.
[6] When early Christian missionaries encountered the tribes of the north, they attempted to convert them to Christianity and, of course, alter their existing religious observations. They did so in a clandestine manner, as suggested by church authorities and finally “officialized” in 601 A.D., when Pope Gregory I issued an edict to his missionaries regarding the customs of peoples they wanted to convert. Rather than banish native customs and beliefs, the pope had his missionaries incorporate them (e.g., if people worshipped a tree, rather than cut it down, Greg I advised missionaries to consecrate the tree to Christ).
Early Christians holy day observances coincided with celebrations that already existed. And as with almost all “Christian” holidays, Easter was originally a festival of another religion, and derives from a variety of pagan celebrations. It made sense to Christians to alter the festival itself, to make it a Christian celebration. Still, every Easter, many Christian parents are put in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to the kiddies why the torture, execution, and supposed resurrection of Jesus is celebrated with colored eggs and cute widdle bunnies. Uncomfortable, in that most adult Christians have only a vague clue about the connection. Some grant that Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover celebration. However, seeing as how Yahweh didn’t send a plague of egg-hiding rabbits into Egypt, the link seems rather feeble.
The name of the holiday, “Easter,” is the name of a pagan goddess, and was identified as the source of the holiday’s name by “The Venerable Bede” (672-735 CE), a Christian theologian (in his book De Ratione Temporum.) The name “Easter” has many variations (Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Ester, Eastra, Eastur, Austron, etc.) but all of these come from the same Roman deity, the goddess of the dawn, named “Eos” or “Easter.”
[7] The refutations of that assumption, along with the problems which come from assuming such veracity and/or the reliability of scriptural sources, are just a google search away.
[8] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.
[10] For those not familiar with churchy stuff, this is the traditional Paschal greeting.
[11] “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
Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something.
And everyone feels better after looking at a picture of a baby sloth wearing pjs.
* * *
Department Of The Theory Of Let Them
I’m not sure if this can – or should – apply to politics in the wider sense; e.g., when it comes to the depredations of The Mandarin Turd Führer and company, we don’t just want to let them. But in one’s personal dealings, I have found this to be helpful.
* * *
Department Of Dude Doesn’t Waste Time Getting Down To Brass Tacks [1]
Sub-Department Of Things I Learned From The Older [2] Man Who
Approached Me As I Was Waiting For The Door To Zumba Class To Open
Dateline: Monday; circa 10:55 am. An affable, petite, elderly man, [3] whose appearance and accent indicated he came from a culture different from mine, approached me and wished me a good morning. He looked familiar; I’d seen him in class at least once. Thus, after I returned his greeting, I passed on the information a staff member had given me when I first entered the Rec Center: the Zumba class was going to start a few minutes late, as another group was using the facility.
He nodded, said he’d just come from another Zumba class at Hidden Creek (another Hillsboro Parks & Rec facility), and asked if I was married.
The casual ease with which he spoke his question – which I found to be both a straightforward query and a non-sequitur, given the circumstances – took me by surprise…but not in a threatening way.
“Yes,” I said, “I am married.”
He looked at my left hand, his eyes widening and sparkling with mischievous disbelief when he beheld the modest band on my ring finger (MH and I currently choose to wear plain but colorful silicon bands, which, I have been told, “…don’t look like *real* wedding rings” ).
“You are married?” he asked again. I laughed, repeated my marital status affirmation, and decided to return the straightforward-ness: “I take it you are not married, and are looking to meet someone?”
He seemed pleased by my supposition. Yes, he enthused, he is looking to meet a woman for dating! He reached into his jacket pocket, retrieved a piece of paper that had his name and phone number on it, and asked me if I would be so kind to take down the information and pass it along to any women I know who might also be looking for companionship.
Moiself was feeling generous, and said that I would. As I reached for my phone to take a picture of the paper, I asked if he was using his family for matchmaking ( a common practice in his culture ). He said he’d decided notto go that route. I asked him what he sought in a date, and what should I tell prospective dating partners about him? He told me…
* He is 78 years old, a retired chemical engineer originally from ____ (another country);
* He was married for 43 years, has been widowed several years;
* He frequently visits his daughter, who lives nearby;
* He doesn’t ask his daughter to “fix him up” because she isn’t happy about him wanting to date;
* He has looked at online dating apps but is not impressed by them (and he doesn’t do social media);
* The age of the woman doesn’t matter to him;
* He offers companionship, kindness, and affection, and seeks the same;
* He has found that there are two things which people think are important to control in their life: their diet and their religion. But he wants people to know that he doesn’t care “about any of that;”
* “Everyone” at the Hillsboro Recreation centers knows him (he said that after an employee passed by and greeted him by name), because he is so friendly;
* He is open to meeting a woman from any background, *but* notfrom ____ (his home country). This is for several reasons, including the “fact” (as he put it) that after they (women from his culture) are widowed, they don’t look to date or remarry; rather, they join their children’s families and spend their time looking after their grandchildren.
I guess I won’t be passing his number on to June.
He asked me to stress that he is monogamous (“Not like many other men who,” he said, “flip around” [4] ), and that he goes to exercise classes and takes care of himself, “even though with age…” he glanced down, patted his protruding belly, and chuckled. He then complimented me – “And you obviously take care of yourself” – and touched my upper arm, very lightly and quickly squeezing my bicep. It was a gesture I might have found insulting and/or icky from someone else, but from him, it was almost…sweet? Is that ageist, or patronizing of me?
I found him wistfully charming; not creepy or threatening, and there was an air of both optimism and loneliness about him. As the Zumba classroom door opened I said something positive about networking ( “Well, that’s how you do it – let others know you’re looking” ) and wished him well in his search. We shook hands and he bid me farewell. It turned out he was not going to class. It also turned out (surprise! As in, not) “He does that to every woman,” I heard from another female class member, after she asked about the bemused look on my face and I told her about my gentleman solicitor.
* * *
Department Of Sometimes I Feel Like Moiself Should Wear A Black Arm Band For My Country
Context: recently messaging a friend from high school, who has lived now for decades overseas, about The State Of Things In My (and formerly, his) Country ® . My friend’s past experiences include being in the US military and working in health care with mentally ill – life experiences which, along with being bicultural and multilingual and an expat ( a stranger in a strange land which he has now made his own) – give him a keen and unique perspective on what he sees going on in his native land. His pithy articulation shredded my heart.
“Do I miss my homeland? No, not really, but I do mourn for it.”
* * *
Department Of What’s The Best Advice You’ve Ever Received
While listening to the rebroadcast of the No Stupid Questions podcast, What’s The Best Advice You’ve Ever Received[5]moiself didn’t immediately come up with my alternative (as in, Ah, yes, and the best advice I ever received was….” Instead, I was intrigued by how many possible answers there might be to that question, perhaps as many different pieces of advice as there are advice givers, and seekers.
Podcast host Angela Duckworth: “The first thing that leaps to mind is I was about 19 or 20 years old. There was a professor named Kay Merseth, who I’m still in touch with. And I remember being unhappy and going to Kay for advice. I can’t exactly remember whether it was another romantic breakup…or more that I was struggling with a career decision. Like: should I go into education, which I really wanted to do, but my dad wouldn’t speak to me after that, or should I become a doctor like he does want me to.
And I remember she said this: ‘Angela, it sounds to me like you really want to make the right decision, the best decision.’ And I nodded. And she said, ‘But life’s not like that. Life is a story. And your job is not to tell the ‘right’ story or even the best story. It’s just to tell a story that you can be proud of.’ And I went away from that day thinking, ‘What the hell did Kay mean? This is too deep for me.’
But I have actually used that advice when I talk to undergraduates in my own course. Now they’re the 19 or 20-year-old, and I’m the professor. And I do think the reason why Kay gave that advice to me — and why I pass it along — is that I think I was a little bit paralyzed by, like, ‘What’s the absolutely correct or best decision?’ And we can’t know. I mean, life is just mostly uncertainty. All we can do is act in a way where we can use the intuition we have. There are many, many paths in life, and who knows how this is going to turn out? But am I doing something that — at the end of the story, will I look back and say, ‘I’m proud of that?’
“No myths need to be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No person god needs to be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need to be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.”
May you discern when or when not to just Let Them; May we do more than wear a black armband for our country; May your life be the best advice someone else has ever received; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Whence that phrase, which means getting down to the basics or serious business? And can the tacks-one-is-getting-down-to be of an alloy other than brass? Getting down to pewter? Bronze? Sterling silver?
[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
The only reason I’m not casting my vote for the 2026 Best Picture Oscar is because moiself is not a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences…either that, or the Academy misplaced my ballot. Not that it would matter, because I’d do a write-in; that is, I’d vote for a movie that didn’t win last year, because it was egregiously mistakenly not on the ballot: 2024’s TheLife of Chuck.
If you hold as truth, as I do, the idea that we all contain multitudes, [1] then all of the movies which existentially and ultimately mean more than diddly-squat [2] can be contained in The Life of Chuck.
* * *
Department Of Helpful Reminders
Tomorrow is Pi Day. Do you have your recipes ready? Seeing as how it’s AEDD [3] month, y’all can guess what my entrée will feature.
“I think she means us!”
* * *
Department Of Tomorrow Is Pi Day And Today…
…is a significant day for my circle of loved ones. Moiself wasn’t going to mention the significance until I made a…perceptive typo, if there is such a thing. [4]
Background info: every Friday I write and send two letters ( yep, “snail,” in the mail), one to each of my offspring. I begin each letter with either a haiku or limerick, rotating every week. This week is a haiku week. The two letters I sent today began by noting the birthday of someone dear to us, who was taken from us way, way, way too soon. [5]
A Haiku For SEH A wise life guide is
to “Love ’em while you got ’em.”
And she was so loved….
I can’t write about anything else today, which is SEH’s birthday. She would have turned 35 today. She’d have had finished her residency; I like to imagine her working…in one of her several specialties: family medicine; wilderness medicine; reproductive medicine? She loved the outdoors so much, and was concerned about this country’s eroding reproductive rights and access to medical care in underserved communities…. I like to think she might have stayed in Utah to provide women’s health care there, or in other more restrictive states. She shone bright in her brief but significant life, and her fabsence is keenly felt.
Yikes, did you see what I just did typed? I decided to let the typo stand; certainly her absence is keenly felt, but IMO she also had a keen fab sense.
“Sarah Elizabeth” English tea rose
* * *
Department Of I Guess I’ll Never Know The Answer
If I Never Ask The Question
Dateline: Sunday, ~1p.m., returning from lunch with MH. As MH steers our car into our driveway an oldiebegins playing on the car radio. I recognize Jimmy Soul’s bouncy 1962 hit, If You Want To Be Happy. The song begins with its chorus:
“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life/ Never make a pretty woman your wife/ So for my personal point of view: Get an ugly girl to marry you…“
The song goes on to extol the virtues of marrying an unattractive woman. The singer proclaims that, among other plusses, an ugly woman won’t ever leave you ( as per the stereotype, she’ll be grateful for any attention she receives, ’cause no one else would want her ). Oh, and she’ll be a great cook.
Har de har har!
The first time I heard that song ( Junior high? It was already an oldie) moiself was appalled. When I expressed my distaste for the lyrics, a guy friend accused me of being a Women’s Libber With No Sense Of Humor® ( “Oh c’mon, it’s an old song; a light-hearted joke of the times… “ ).
Skip to decades later, to the day when daughter Belle came home from high school in a grumpy mood. She told me about a boy who’d been sent home to get a change of clothing because he’d shown up to school wearing a t-shirt with a slogan on it that another boy objected to as being racist. What gave Belle the grumpies was that the previous week, when she and another girl had gone to the administration to complain about a couple of troglodytes male students who harassed female students and wore t-shirts with misogynistic slogans (e.g., with a drawing of a boy ordering a girl to “Shut up and make me a sandwich”[6] ), they were told by said administrative spineless lackies personnel that what those boys were doing wasn’t “illegal” and that there was nothing the school could ( read: would ) do about that.
I sadly confirmed to my daughter what experience was already teaching her. Yep, you are not imagining things: there’s a hierarchy of political and cultural concern with discriminatory isms and ists. Something deemed as racist is seen as worse than something deemed as sexist. It’s not (or shouldn’t be) a contest; still, isms/istsare often pitted against one another, as many a Black feminist has attested.
“As a black woman I’ve been told that…I’m supposed to be black first and stand in solidarity with black men. Focus on the impact of racism, specifically on racism that negatively impacts black men. Stop bringing up sexism so much.”[7]
If the student at Belle’s school had worn a short with a drawing of a white boy ordering a black boy to Shut Up And Go Pick Me Some Cotton, he’d be sent home/ordered to change his shirt and possibly even suspended. But wearing a shirt with a slogan meant to put a female in/remind her of “her place” – somehow, that was acceptable, or at least tolerable.
On the rare occasions when I hear that Jimmy Soul song – which still receives airplay on Oldies stations – I think of what moiself has long wanted to ask someone who whistles along to the up-tempo ditty: What if, instead of referencing a sexist stereotype of the early 60s, the If You Want To Be Happysong contained a 1962-ish, “light-hearted” reference to racism? Would the song have even gotten airplay, then or now? If it got airplay today, would its dodgy lyrics be excused as a relic of the times? Ala….
“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, Never make a light-skinned woman your wife, So for my personal point of view, Get a colored girl to marry you…”
* * *
Department Of A Blast From The Past
Dateline: January 2025. A new year; a new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month). My thought at the time: Perhaps moiself will like this enough that it will turn out to be a regular blog feature. So far it has, but time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.
This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?![8] friend gave me, all those years ago, [9] as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life. Thus, journal/diary-resistant moiself would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.
Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago March to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHATwas I thinking!?!? )
Here is an excerpt from my blog of 3-14-14 ( The Book I’m Not Stealing ) – two excerpts, actually, both of them book-related:
“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.” ― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away….
Okay, it was 1971. American anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman wrote and published Steal This Book. As intrigued as I was at the time – by the “counter culture” and social activism of the late 60-s–mid 70’s in general and by Hoffman’s cheeky chutzpah in particular – I declined to pilfer Hoffman’s prose. Stealing anything was not something I was inclined to do. I also did not buy his book because how in good conscience could I lawfully purchase a book that was, essentially if puckishly, advising me not to do so?
Thirty-three years later I find myself wondering: who, if anyone, bought that book?
Belle leaned against the doorway to my office, respectfully but insistently reminding me that I’d agreed to donate copies of two of my books (my short fiction collection This Here and Now and my juvenile novel, The Mighty Quinn) to her friend A’s senior project…and…uh… A needs those books, now. Up in the attic, searching for a box to put the books in, I remembered I had copies of another book of mine – “mine” in the sense that my writing was in it, even if my name wasn’t on the cover – to donate.
Feminist Parenting: Struggles, Triumphs and Comic Interludes (The Crossing Press, 1994) – has it really been twenty years since its publication? My contribution to the anthology was an essay [11] wherein I juxtaposed the naming of my soon-to-be firstborn, K, with how I chose names for my fictional characters. I was honored to have my contribution included along with a variety of essays, stories, and poems – selections from literary luminaries like Robin Morgan and Anna Quindlen, [12] and literary ordinaries like…well, like me.
The publisher-arranged publicity for the book consisted of readings by the anthology’s contributing writers, held at select locations throughout the country. There were enough contributors from the Pacific Northwest to do a reading in Oregon, which took place one stormy January evening in Eugene, at the erstwhile vanguard of independent feminist bookstores, Mother Kali’s. [13]
May Mother Kali recommend some light reading-perhaps a political satire or a wacky historical romance?
MH, sitting in the in audience with our son K on his lap, later noted that I was the only one of the speakers F-parenting in what (used to be) the normative child producing/rearing relationship: I was a woman married to a man with whom I was raising our child. There were four of the anthology’s contributors present: One lesbian mom, two divorced/single moms, and moiself -mom.
May you find a way to use diddly-squat in conversation today; May you know what it feels like to be the least normative in a crowd; May you remember to love ’em while you got ’em; …and may the hijinks ensue.
[6] The phrase has various attributed origins ( including a 1995 SNL skit ); whether it is aimed at feminists in particular or women in general, it plays off the sexist idea that it’s a woman’s place to be in the kitchen serving her husband or boyfriend.
[12] I particularly enjoyed Quindlen’s essay, “What About the Boys?”
[13] I know, I know. The bookstore was named in the 70’s, okay?
[14] “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
AEDD. No, it’s not some type of learning disability…you could think of it as a culinary learning (or experimentation) opportunity.
It stands for Asparagus Every Damn Day ® . To honor both the impending arrival of Spring and my love for asparagus, I challenge moiself to cook and/or eat asparagus, in some form, every damn day of March. Last year I had some favorites creations; mostly, I defaulted to what’s-easy-but-I-still-love-it (e.g., oven roasted lemon garlic asparagus spears, creamy [1] asparagus and green pea soup….).
Gird your proverbial loins and let the wild rumpus begin.
* * *
Department Of My Favorite Blast From The Past
Were I asked by Someone to come up with an example of carefree bliss, I would show that Someone this picture.
Moiself, son K and daughter Belle (and Mt. Neahkahnie in the background), on Manzanita beach, circa…two decades ago. Picture taken by MH, existential protection provided by Mt. Neahkahnie.
Dateline: last Friday; driving to the Oregon coast, listening to one of my science podcasts. At the end of the podcast there is an advertisement from one of the podcast’s sponsors. The ad is for…some kind of service having to do with manicures. Repeated at least three times during the ad is the service’s enticement/slogan, something about how “…we all deserve to have perfect nails.”
And I find moiself thinking, do these people understand the target audience of this podcast? And how can the proverbial we all – or just moiself– deserveanything having to do with our fingernails? And is it deserveas in, how we all deserve basic human rights and to be treated with dignity (and not harassed about our less-than-perfect nails)? And what, exactly, constitutes perfect nails? And is there a committee, a governing board, which establishes and oversees such a standard of perfection?
And the sheer inanity of this ad is provoking way too many, And and and andquestions – which made me want to (should moiself be offered a free sample of the product) take whatever was being advertised and heave it off the rim of the Grand Canyon. [3]
Important Note To The Advertising Industry, whether large scale Commercial/Industrial And/Or Small Business Owners: Struck as I was by the astounding vacuousness of the ad’s tag line, I can’t tell you what service it was for. Which is the ultimate failure of an advertisement, the very purpose of which is to get you to want (or at least remember the name of) the product.
I’m assuming these were not the top choice of the Fingernail Perfection Police.
Relax; it’s a story about Porch Proselytizing®. There will not be pamphlets left on your front doorstep. [4]
The prompt for this story is…moiself saw an article online having to do with someone complaining about having to shoo Porch Preachers away from their front door.
The above is the sign I made and had laminated 10+ years ago, a larger version of which is on our front porch below our doorbell. The sign, in my estimate, keeps ~98% of solicitors away. Before I did the rewording I had another sign up, a cartoon illustrating how we do not want solicitors, but – surprise ! –there was always a Someone who thought it didn’t apply to him. When moiself answered the doorbell, realized who the stranger was on my porch/what he was up to, and pointed toward our no soliciting sign, that Someone would say, “Oh, I’m not *selling* anything. I have good news that’s free…”
Even before the signage, religious solicitors – Mormon “Elders” [5] in particular – left skid marks getting away from my porch, after I’d engaged them and they realized What Kind Of Uppity Woman They Were Dealing With ®.
What used to surprise moiself, about the solicitors I personally encountered as well as those I’d known over the years who’d engaged in such activities, was their seeming befuddlement re overwhelmingly receiving less-than-hospitable reactions from those whom they sought to evangelize. I had to wonder: from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Mormons to Evangelicals, in their witnessing training, was there not even a smidgen of attention paid to the basic human psychology behind someone not in *your* group being presented with *your* group’s message, with no request from themfor yourthoughts and/or opinions?
Was there no mention of the reality that it is highly likely that what you are indoctrinated trained to think of as informative/friendly/useful information, will be seen by others as presumptuous? And that’s because it *is* presumptuous. A friendly demeanor and/or beatific smile on your face does not dilute the ultimate cluelessness and arrogance of your mission: you are approaching a stranger, unsolicited by her, knowing nothing about her save for the (likely [6] ) fact that she does not share your spiritual worldview, which therefore in your worldview means her worldview is deficient…and you think you can (and even should) enlighten her!
I bet she can’t wait to hear the good news from white boys wearing even whiter shirts!
I remember seeing and hearing my mother deal with the Mormon “Elders” ( nine out of ten of the proselytizers we got were Mormon ) who would, every couple of months or so, ring the doorbell of our Santa Ana home. First off, no one who knew our family came to our front door (when I was a young child I didn’t even know if our front door “worked,” or if it was just for show). We all entered and left the house, along with our friends and neighbors, via our side door or backyard door. Thus, when there was a ring/knock at the front door we knew it was from a stranger; i.e., someone who didn’t know us. This Someone, experience taught us, most likely wanted to sell us something, and would ask to speak to “the adult of the house,” so I and my siblings would call for our mother to answer the front door. But I liked to lurk in the background, to…watch.
My mother would never confront the Porch Preachers, despite my advice that she should tell them the truth ( that you think they’re whack-doodles ) and not waste anymore of your or their time. But Mom came of age in the 1950s, meaning she was raised to be a Nice Woman®. She would listen to their opening spiel, then give her standard, gentle-but-firm, “No thank you; we have our own religion,” response, and wish them a nice day while she gently shut the door.
There was one exception (that I know of) to my mother’s unperturbable niceness with solicitors. This happened during a weekday, the summer before I entered eighth grade. A pair of Elders knocked on our front door. I heard the customary/brief exchange between my mother and the elders, then noticed it was going on longer than usual at the front porch. I was surprised to hear the rising pitch of a young male voice, followed by my mother sputtering, “Blasphemy!” before slamming the door.
After commending her display of backbone, I asked what they had said to her. Instead of simply accepting her brushoff, that pair of snot-nosed albinos [7] didn’t do what they should have done at that point – thank her for her time, apologize for disturbing her, and get the fuck off her property. [8] Instead, one of them challenged her. Yes, you may have your own religion, the cadaverously pale, just-past-post-adolescent pompous primnose [9] preached to a woman twice his age, but only *our* faith has the “true revealed truth“ (I can’t remember the verbatim exchange, but I remember that phrase, and how I’d guffawed at the redundancy).
“Yes, God is beyond our understanding…but let me tell you about him….”
* * *
Department Of And Now For Something (Not So) Completely Different
( excerpt a scene from the movie The Big Kahuna. Three industrial lubricant salesmen, Larry, Phil, and the evangelical Christian Bob, are at a convention in Wichita. In this incisive scene, Phil is speaking to Bob, emphases mine.)
“You preaching Jesus is no different than Larry, or anybody else, preaching lubricants. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling Jesus or Buddha, or civil rights, or how to make money in real estate with no money down. That doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a marketing rep.
If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids, find out what his dreams are — just to find out — for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation, to steer it, it’s not a conversation anymore — it’s a pitch — and you’re not a human being. You’re a marketing rep.”
Or perhaps you prefer the wisdom of *this*Big Kahuna (on the far right) from the world of Gidget surfer-movies.
* * *
May we all have our own favorite example of bliss; May you never give a thought to the quality of anyone’s fingernails; May you enjoy all that damn asparagus; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Yet, without cream. Yep, it’s those dastardly plant-based cooking tricks….
[3] Please do not take this as any form of encouragement to litter in our beautiful national parks.
[4] At least, not metaphorically, from moiself. Who knows what happens in *your* neighborhood?
[5] I just love that title, once reserved for revered people of great age and wisdom in the community, now doled out by the LDS to pimply-faced boys who get the respected title simply by being a male age 18 and up, while a kick ass, grown-ass woman like moiself who is twice their age could never be an Elder in their world.
[6] It’s more than a likely fact, if you are a Mormon missionary. Mormon missionaries are given a list in the neighborhoods they canvas; they don’t waste time showing up at the houses of other Mormons. They know whether or you are not Mormon, because they are given that info by the local Mormon church. Unlike other brands of Christianity, if you are Mormon you do not go to whatever LDS church you like, you go to a certain church – “chapel” – that has a specific geographical area assigned as “their area.” If you live in that geographical area, you are supposed to go to services at that chapel, and your address is noted.
[7] You’ve never seen how white the white boys can be until Mormon missionaries come to your doorstep. I used to think they were selectively bred for their lack of melanin.
[8] I probably don’t need to explain that that was *my* 12-year-old-smartass’s interpretation of their responsibilities as uninvited solicitors, and not my mother’s thoughts.
[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
Department Of Now That The Winter Olympics Are Over I Can Get Back To
Considering Issues Of Profound Ethical And Existential Importance®
Host David Marchese: “What do you think we should *do* with the increasing awareness that more animals might be conscious than we previously thought? ….we *know* human beings are conscious and we exploit the hell out of other humans all the time.”
Guest Michael Pollan: “…there’s this whole conversation…that if A.I. is conscious, then we’re going to have to give it moral consideration. Well, really: have we given moral consideration to one another? Have we given moral consideration to the chickens and the cattle that we eat? The answer is no. It doesn’t automatically follow. So, we’re going to have to sort out the ethics.”
Michael Pollan: “Maybe it’s around the ability to suffer. Maybe that’s where you draw the line…but it’s not as easy as: Ital you’re conscious, therefore you have all these rights…. Who we grant personhood to is a very subjective human decision. We give it to corporations, oddly enough, which are not conscious, but there are all sorts of creatures we don’t give it to. I don’t think we’re entirely rational or consistent in our granting of moral consideration.” ( excerpt from journalist and professor Michael Pollan’s interview with David Marchese,
“Michael Pollan says humanity is about to undergo a revolutionary change,” 2-7-26, NY Times podcast The Interview )
So yeah, there’s that. Or….
I could search the incredible volume of available videos online and perhaps find an entire channel devoted to showing a continuous loop of All Races Won By Norwegian XC Skiing Æsir-god Johannes Høsflot Klæbo® .
You know what you need to do.
* * *
Department Of Five Words You Don’t Hear Me (Or Anyone) Saying Very Often…Or At All
“This Norwegian salad dressing rocks!”
Holy Hel [2] and Herring Heritage – it seems moiself is producing a (unintended) Norski theme blog. [3]
Dateline: last week. I finally got around to making this salad dressing, from the innovative mind of Norwegian chef Andreas Viestad. I’d been intending to do so for some time; now, I want this dressing on every lettuce-based salad I eat, for the rest of my life.
Viestad, who also hosts the PBS show New Scandinavian Cooking, pissed off impressed the European gastronomic world by when his cookbook on Norwegian food was selected the “Best Foreign Cookbook in the World” and also was awarded Special Prize Of The Jury at the 2008-2009 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
Norwegian Salad Dressing (moiself’s adaptation of Andreas Viestad’s recipe; serves 2-3)
Viestad’s recipe uses juice from the lettuce offcuts to make a dressing with an intense lettuce flavor. Use your best lettuce for the salad, and the dressing (which will be an intriguing dark green color).
2 to 3 small heads of your favorite/most flavorful lettuce – one small head of radicchio or other bitter salad green [4] – 1 t Dijon mustard – neutral oil (I use avocado) – splash of lemon juice or any vinegar (optional) – ground black pepper; and a pinch of fresh or dried dill – sea salt to serve
(1) Rinse and tear the greens into bite-sized pieces; dry them in a salad spinner. Set aside the “cutoffs” (inner stems, core, and outer leaves) of the greens. (2) Juice cutoffs in a juicer; strain juice ( you want ~ ¼ c ). [5] (3) Add juice to a jar along an equal amount of oil as juice (or less, as moiselfprefers) the Dijon, the spices, and lemon juice/vinegar; shake well to combine. Mix dressing into the salad leaves, serve w/sea salt sprinkled atop greens.
Many people who eat salad don’t tend to care about (or even notice) the flavor of the lettuce – it’s all about the dressing. [6] Viestad came up with a dressing that uses the bits and pieces of the lettuce that we tend to throw away but where the lettuce flavor is concentrated – almost more lettuce-flavored than the lettuce itself – which is why the greens you use should be your favorites. Y’all foodies may be thinking, Why would you *trust* any salad recipe from a Norwegian? Growing lettuce in the high north might sound like a bad idea, but as one Norski “salad farmer” explained to Andreas, [7] the far northern farms of Norway have good soil, good water, good light, and the cold night temperatures help the salad greens to grow “strong, crispy, and tasty.”
The only reason our household now has a juicer is because moiself wanted to properly make this dressing [1] . I *love love love* this dressing; please try it out, and I must emphasize again that you should do so using the best, flavorful lettuce you can find. On that subject, I hope I don’t have to remind anyone that storebought [8] iceberg “lettuce” is anything other than nasty and flavorless. My favorite description of iceberg lettuce came from an anonymous post on a food-related bulletin board, from a former restaurant worker: “…with the experience I got being an employee I can tell you that iceberg lettuce tastes as poor as my life’s decisions….at the end of the day it’s just water with a cell structure.”
In moiself’s opinion, it was the preponderance of iceberg lettuce in the Titanic’s food storage holds that actually sank the ship (there was a miscommunication when the first mate radioed for help…and the rest is history).
* * *
Department Of Every Senior Person Should Be Taking This Class- Dang, That Means Me As Well…
Moiself is having a hard time identifying with that label, as, according to the various demographics (depending on which ones you consult), you enter senior territory at age 55, or not until 60, or 65, or 70, or 75…. I recently took a Zumba class labeled for that (“senior”) demographic. And now I’m thinking that every person, regardless of age, should also be doing so, if only to provide reason/excuse to get up and shake it instead of sitting on your ass all day commune with your fellow human beings.
I was trying to think of some activity something to stretch or even test my foot recovery. [9] At my most recent postop check (two weeks ago) I asked my doctor if a Zumba class might be good; I’d been searching for something other than what I do at home (neighborhood walking; elliptical and treadmill workouts; yoga; weights and core routines) to give my foot some new challenges. He asked if I’ve done any Zumba before my surgery. No; but I used to do a lot of Jane Fonda workout tapes back in 1990s.
I did the tapes, but not the spandex.
I told the doc that the classes were held at the local community/senior center, so it’s unlikely they’d include ski jump landing preps or ice-skating quadruple jumps or extreme…whatever. Thus, I told him, unless he said no, I was planning on checking out the Zumba class. After briefly examining my foot he gave me his thumbs up– “Feel free to resume normal activities but don’t push till it hurts/do anything stupid.”
So: moiself had my first class on Monday. [10] What can I say? I found it to be so delightful and stimulating that it’s probably banned in countries that frown on people of any age (read: females) moving in ways that distinguish them from infrastructure.
“Now, move to the music…can you even hear the music?”
And by moiself thinking that everyone should take the classes, I don’t mean only the specific brand of class called, Zumba – I’m referring to any exercise class incorporating movement/choreography/what might be called dancing.
Most of us have heard and/or read about how dancing is “good for us;” and most of us don’t have the time or inclination to take formal dance classes, often because we think that you must have a dance partner to do so. And the latter is not the case in a dance fitness class.
Research on multiple levels of study (involving brain health, psychological and social well-being ) suggests that dance-based workouts help protect against the cognitive decline that can happen as people age. From what I’ve read, learning dance/choreography workouts (I’m going to invent the acronym DCW [11] ) reduces stress by boosting your mood through the release of endorphins, providing an outlet for emotional expression, and, when it’s done in a class with other participants, [12] creates and strengthens social connections and a sense of belonging. DCW require focus as you listen to the beat, follow steps, and feel the rhythm – DCW require you to be mindful, as in, putting your mind in the present moment, or more colloquially, paying attention to what you are doing.
So, DCW aren’t just good for your mood – they’re also also great for your brain and your physical coordination. DW enhance cognitive functions, such as memory and spatial awareness and concentration…and yeah, all that’s fantastic, but it’s also just plain fun.
This move is not done in Zumba; still, I challenge you to be in a bad mood when you’re imitating a dog about to pee on a fire hydrant.
Oh yes, the class itself: the instructor (who was a sub for the usual class teacher) was excellent – both chill and enthusiastic. Also, it turns out she has a really great name (even though she spells it wrong [13] ). After the first two dance sections, in the five or so seconds of pause before the instructor queued up the next music, moiself inadvertently blurted out, “Oh, this isfun!” Apparently, in-class out-bursts are not the norm, as the teacher immediately assured the rest of the class, “She’s new.”[14]
( Emma Goldman was Russian-born, radical anarchist activist and lecturer who opposed capitalism and fascism and promoted equality for women, workers’ rights, and free education during the Progressive Era. )
* * *
May your lettuce (or your life) be more than just water with a cell structure; May you find make room for both Issues Of Profound Ethical And Existential Importance® *and* Norwegian sports videos; May your revolution (and exercise) always encourage dancing; …and may the hijinks ensue.
[2] In the Norse pantheon, Hel is the god (female – let’s do away with this “ess” notation, as if the male gender is the default and the female is the decorative afterthought) of death and the netherworld. Just in case you’re thinking of getting on her good side, Hel’s favorite offerings are tea, chocolate, dried meats, preserved flowers, mead, and raw honey.
[4] Soak radicchio or other bitter greens in ice water (helps tame the bitterness) for at least 15m while you prepare the rest of the recipe, or scroll online for cat videos .
[5] You could also use a heavy duty/high speed blender, like I did the first few times, but this takes some time and it doesn’t work as well, IMO.
[6] Except for MH, who, much to many people’s bewilderment, has always preferred his green salads sans dressing ( he thinks that dressings are or can be a cover for less-than-tasty-greens/other salad ingredients.
[14] Her explanation was probably not necessary, as, from what I could see, all I got was enthusiastic smiles, and no Debbie-Downer Stop Having Fun looks from the other participants.
[15] “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
Active, reliable, sarcastic, affectionate, bipedal, cynical optimist, writer, freethinker, parent, spouse and friend, I am generous with my handy supply of ADA-approved spearmint gum and sometimes refrain from humming in public.
