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 The Life 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.
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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!”
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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
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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 oldie begins 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/ists are 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 Happy song 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…”
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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, WHAT was 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?
* * *
( second excerpt [10] )
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.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]
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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.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] As per the movie’s “I contain multitudes” reference, from the Walt Whitman poem, “Song of Myself“.
[2] Sorry to get with all the graduate-level philosophy concepts.
[3] Asparagus Every Damn Day, as noted in the previous week’s blog.
[4] And now, I think there is.
[5] She was murdered, seven years ago. I wrote about it here: “The Life I’m Not Mourning” and here: The Speculation I’m Not Endorsing; and here: The Reality I’m Not Denying.
[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.
[7] ( [Why] Do you think Black Men aren’t trusting of Feminists or on-board with Feminism as a movement? Reddit.com/r/AskFeminists )
[8] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.
[9] Was it really over twelve years ago?
[10] I wasn’t (consistently) using the Department Of format then)
[11] “What’s in a Name? Ask My Pal, Barry.”
[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
