The Blog I'm Not Writing

Department of Holiday Gifts

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

 

 

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

 

 

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The Fast Car I’m Not Driving

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Department Of I Don’t Know

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

Moiself  doesn’t know.

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

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

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

I don’t know.

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

 

 

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

I don’t know.

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

 

 

 

 

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

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

“I almost forget what tomorrow is.”

 

 

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

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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