Five Useful Things

Five useful things I have done since becoming officially unemployed:

1. Raked all the leaves into the corner of the yard. Too lazy to actually bag them up, mind you, but at least they're as far away from the patio as they can be so they won't blow back up there and make a mess.

2. Shredded an entire box of old credit card mailings, receipts, etc. so nobody can steal my identity.

3. Checked out Michael Jackson's Off The Wall CD from the library and put it on my iPod.

4. Learned how to Wii bowl with Lumpyhead's parents and the former captain of the Dreher High School bowling team.

5. Went to see Frost/Nixon at the Kennedy Center with some last-minute discount tickets. Loved it!! Must see!

Unemployment Day 1: Fantasy vs. Reality

Unemployment Day 1: Fantasy

6am-8am: wake, dress, eat, blog, e-mail, catch up on RSS feeds
8am-10am: walk dogs, unload dishwasher, plan cooking, list errands for the afternoon

Unemployment Day 1: Reality

9:59am: This has been Morning Edition on National Public Radio...
10:07am: Welcome to The Diane Rehm Show...

18,000,000

NYT: "For many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters she was Everywoman, called on to prove her toughness without wholly abandoning her softness, asked in the end to yield once more to an ambitious, impatient man. Come Tuesday, will these supporters be haunted anew by what might have been? And will they be haunted more by an Obama victory or an Obama defeat?"

Right now I have to say that the answers are yes, and victory. Watching the live coverage of parties at Howard make me think how much I would rather be seeing parties at Wellesley and Smith.

(On the other hand, at least I don't have to listen to any bullshit about how proud we should be to see a woman elected vice-president, as if we should be satisfied to break the glass ceiling by walking two steps behind a man.)

Look, I know she ran a bad campaign. I'm not stupid. I wish she hadn't been so fucking certain from the very beginning, and I wish she had been humble enough to think past Feb. 5th. And I'm not saying the nation is going to crumble without her. I don't drink Candidate Kool-Aid. I don't like it in any flavor.

My mother spent her youth and young adulthood being pigeonholed into a system where she was expected to date lots of boys but never have "too much fun", go to college just long enough to get married, then drop out and start having babies. Oh, and make sure those babies are bathed and on their best behavior at the supper table when dad gets home from work to collect his evening martini.

She bucked the system and stayed to graduate, only to enter a work world where she was welcome to be a secretary, a nurse or a teacher. For the next 20-odd years of her life, while she wasn't working admin jobs bored out of her skull with her talents being ignored, she was figuring out what she could do to create a society where her daughter would have more freedom of opportunity than she did. She refused to teach me to iron because she said if I knew how to, I'd end up doing it for some man for the rest of my life. (My dad started sending his shirts out in the mid-1980s…)

I like to think of myself as young for my age, what with the YouTube and the Facebook and all that, but I'm old enough to have internalized a lot of strong messages from her and from her peers about the front lines of bra-burning and consciousness-raising and never receiving equal pay IF you could even get the job to begin with. Joan and Peggy on Mad Men? My mother and her friends lived that shit. The idea that she went through that and her daughter could cast a vote for a woman president … fucking amazing. I don't exaggerate when I tell you that it makes me cry thinking about it.

So yeah, Obama won. The job went to a man. What a shock.

And he's probably going to raise my taxes and redistribute some of my wealth and do some other things that I don't want him to do. On the other hand, he's probably not going to drag us into any more pointless foreign wars or pack the Supreme Court with old men who want the legal right to control my body, and he might make a tiny bit of progress in convincing the rest of the world that Americans aren't ignorant, narrow-minded crackers. So on balance I'll take him.

But I wrote in Hillary, and it felt good.

Worship Happiness

I LOVE this!



Thanks to AmFam for broadening my musical horizons!

Chicken Parm 2.0

The sandwich wasn't half bad, but it was worth the entire price, including the tip, just to read this message.

(Except I think "heat-retaining" should be hyphenated.)

The Blessing of the Animals

GOOFUS: This dog wandered away while being blessed, because something more interesting was happening over there. (Last year he tried to drink from the bowl of blessing water ...)


GALLANT: This dog sat quietly while being blessed. Good dog!

The Eastern Media Elite

Shit, y'all, I'm a terrible blogger! I'm not even going to trot out any tired, old excuses for it.

But maybe this funny video will make up for it.