No News. Absolutely None at All.

For my mother's friend Claire, a picture of the neighbor's sexy, sexy cat.

Dear Vista,

Although we have not been together a long time, I feel I need to be honest and tell you our relationship is in trouble. I have been patient and faithful thus far, but it has been hard. I know you will not be surprised to hear me repeat that I have nothing but fond feelings for your predecessor, XP, and remember quite happily the years we shared together. As you are well aware, we did not end the relationship voluntarily, quickly, or easily; our bonds were severed due to the death of the perishable body he inhabited, and we both tried as long as we could to stay together despite ever-increasing odds.

I admit I was lonely by the time I met you. In the last weeks of XP's life I could only be with him one or two hours at a time; in his last days, our precious time together narrowed to minutes. His congenitally poor ventilation system weakened and whined until he could no longer even feebly cough out the cat hair, the incense dust, the errant biscotti crumbs and minute Egyptian-glass debris -- the cruel, cruel insults of this too-material world of which he never wished to be a part yet heroically tried to surmount.



I didn't expect a replacement, Vista. There is no room in my heart for another XP, let alone Win 95. We all have our great romances, our soulmates, and I did not demand that you be one of them. Still, I am not the sort who looks for 'NSA' relationships. I had hoped at least you would treat me with respect, that you would honor my very meager requests of you. Have I loaded you with unwieldy programs, failed to conscientiously monitor CPU usage, clogged Startup with needless tasks, or been other than extremely cautious and considerate in every possible way?

No, I have not. And I don't ignore you and certainly don't ask more of you than you should be able and willing to give. Moreover, I support you in your personal growth and well-being: I actively encourage your agility and physical fitness by running every manner of scan on your behalf every day. I have you inoculated six ways to Tuesday -- and I don't even do any questionable things for which that should be necessary. I just do it because I value you and want you to stick around. And yet you behave as though I am taking you for granted, you passive-aggressive, self-righteous, opaque, whorish, game-playing varlet!

So let me say this to you now, Vista: XP was a Mensch. He did what he had to do and he never complained. He was sufficiently confident in himself such that this confidence was readily extended to others. XP never whiningly asked me if I was absolutely SURE I wanted to open a program or change settings; he knew that I was a big girl and trusted my decisions. XP didn't have to use Apple widgets or garish 3-D to win my affections. He didn't have to advertise his 'snipping tool' to let me know it was there. He was understated; he knew I was smart enough to feel around and find it if I needed it, just as I would with his registry once we were intimate enough. He earned my loyalty not by trickery and flash, but by participating fully in the relationship and always keeping up his end of the bargain.

Vista, I'm sorry it has to end this way, but I have given you more than enough chances. Day after day you abandon me yet again just when I need you most, and recoil back into yourself, as distant as though we had never met. I know I was rash, I know I was bereft and lonely and I turned unthinkingly to the first OS I saw. But, Vista, it's been months and you still don't want me to touch your registry keys. You continue to try to keep me out of everything. There is no Us, and the way you are, I don't think there ever will be. Maybe it's my fault and not yours; maybe you were never expecting to be in a relationship in which something was expected of you, in which you would have to be 'on' so much of the time, where you would really have to be part of a team and not be able just to shut down and be alone whenever you felt like it.

I just know I feel misled. Dirty. Used. Yes, I had heard some things about you, but maybe I thought you would be different with me -- after all, I ask so little compared to other people. Maybe I thought I could change you -- but unlike 95, 98, or XP, you refuse to change and grow. You are like a bitter and stubborn, yet somehow unnervingly cocky, old man, Vista, and I wish I had never come to know you.

Angrily,
Me

Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with him.

Perhaps I should have then, according to Cicero, at any rate, shared today's heavily feta-ed spinach and pasta dish with the people I bought my last car with. The problem is (other than the fact that the feta was eaten today and the car was bought a few months ago) (actually it was eaten, and this post mostly written, more than a month ago, before the, ahem, issues)-- if there is a problem, and I'm not sure that there is -- that I honestly do believe everything people say.

There are two qualifiers: I endeavor not to put myself in circumstances clearly mitigating against an atmosphere of trust, and I am more than capable of rescinding the trust once it is clear it is no longer warranted. For example, to satisfy the first condition, I don't go to car dealers. The second should be obvious: I wouldn't buy the Brooklyn Bridge twice. Even from an old lady. With flowers in her chignon.

The people I bought my newest car from were very nice, though. They lived on a houseboat and I liked their rug. They had some friendly cats, and they told me their names. They also lived close to me, which I admit probably earns them at least a lower branch on the trust tree a priori, in terms of (obviously logically untenable) ingroup/outgroup status. They showed me the new car they were replacing my new one with, and the trade made sense and adduced to their argument - and thus my faith in them.

I asked what was wrong with it, and they said nothing other than the lock on the passenger side needing to be disengaged from the inside. For me, this is not a problem, as any passenger I might have would be far more likely to want to be escaping from the car, rather than attempting to break in to savor my questionable navigational powers. When we took a test drive, the brakes seemed weak, and I overcame my concern over seeming rude with Valid Arguments (to myself) about Reasonable Questions (to them) and therefore asked about this. In retrospect, I less asked than provided my interlocutor an answer proactively by suggesting that it was perhaps simply the contrast of having to stop such a big heavy car as this versus merely imagining a stop in my tiny hatchback and having it come true. I could push my other car to most destinations and not lose much time. It is very small.

He agreed with my suggestion and responded that, yes, that was probably it, and they had had the brakes serviced recently. It was a matter of becoming accustomed to them, which I would, as he had.

I still haven't, though. I still try to leave eight car lengths between me and the car in front. In inclement conditions, which, it being January, are frequent, I try to double that when possible. And today, at the garage, my oil change mechanic confirmed my initial impression that there might be something wrong with them. What, he suggested, was largely wrong was that there weren't any. Stopping being one of the three things I most look for in a car, I am forced to get them fixed.

I do feel sad, though. Not just that the seller patently lied, but also that I was truly that dumb, or imperceptive. However, in my defense, there were no odd noises. The car is nearly silent, most particularly when compared to the other one, which is made of paper. Additionally, the last oil changer (at a chain oil-changing place), failed to notice anything, despite their 1200-point Vehicle Inspection. (He did, of course, notice all manner of irrelevant things he'd be happy to replace, after which overhaul I would have spent enough money to have bought a third car and a Vespa.)

I loathe putting money into cars, however. I don't mind tires and oil changes. Spark plugs make sense, too, as does keeping one's muffler from dragging on the ground. But there is a limit, and all I want is a little (or large) box that starts and goes and stops. And has a heater. Alright, a good heater, with a good fan, the sort that heats up as though there were no water in the radiator and stays there, on high, bringing me bliss and fueling my thermal fantasies from September to May.

I don't mind spending money on a pretty vase, or furniture for the neighbor's cat, or flowers, or wine, or taxis. Imagine life without taxis available when just what you need is precisely a taxi and nothing more: it's a horrid thought. In any language. And it doesn't matter what they cost, because what you need is a taxi -- and here one is! How amazing! Always a blessing.

But I suffer from what amounts to an eternally-inchoate (thank God, because were it ever worked out it would be yet more ludicrous than it already is) conspiracy-sort-of theory regarding certain products and services. One, obviously, is car service and car parts. I don't believe all car service at a garage should be priced at the same rate: some jobs are easy, and some require fine troubleshooting. Turning a couple lug nuts is one thing, but often mechanics must utilize their brains and not just their brawn, resorting to analogies, logic, tricky diagnoses, comparison of all the options - and sometimes mustering a good bedside manner, too, which is not at all necessary when you simply have to relate We topped off the coolant, or The coolant looks fine. I can hold my own hand through that.

This distemper also extends to the purchase of certain products that we have allowed to become necessities. I in no way mean to say I am exempt from this enslavement, but merely that each time I acknowledge it I am more piqued. I live alone, and not in a family of seven; therefore I only seldom need to buy any of these, and I suspect this lack of frequency has prevented me from becoming inured to the injustice.

In this list are garbage bags and lightbulbs. They cost practically nothing, and in the first case I very rarely have need of them, and in the second they last far longer than anything of that price should be expected to. Yet in both cases I am resentful not only that I need them, but that there is nothing else that can be reasonably substituted. I could in theory use bedsheets if I had an unusual quantity of garbage -- but I don't have any old ones nor can I imagine doing so if I did. And candles and television sets have attributes in common with lamps -- but one can't read by the light of a television, and reconfiguring an entire home for candlelight would certainly require a level and amount of effort I could much more sanely and enjoyably direct elsewhere.

The most galling purchases, however, I always note as TP on my list and always end up buying all together, as I can never remember, once I get there, what my discreet notation system was meant to convey this time. I find purchasing any of the three difficult and embarrassing, as each is a stark and irrefutable admission of frailty, and of impending death. Each screams at the clerk and the moribund mortals behind me, in its gaudy or discreet packaging, that however glorious the undying soul may be, for this brief flicker in its eternal existence we are stuck haplessly inside these markedly inglorious fleshbags, urinating, defecating, menstruating, and accumulating gingiva as we variously await, bemoan, or battle the inevitable. And in the meantime, we buy as many products as we can to conceal and combat the true nature of our bodies and of life itself.

None of this would be as excruciating as it is, I suppose, if I were an average grocery-store customer, if my cart were piled high with all manner of distracting items. Food can divert the attention; the reader of my cart could focus on the pleasures of the flesh rather than its inevitable decay as he took note of the artisan breads and local cheeses and pounds of finocchiona and bresaola. But it's no use for me keeping large quantities of food on hand, and I hate bread. Therefore, there is never a cart piled high. There is never, frankly, need for a cart at all. I can always get by with a little basket, and when I muster the courage once again to parade my weakness before my peers, the terseness of the message renders it quite easily read to even the most pressed for time.

I do try to throw a few ringers in: wine, flowers, licorice... Of course, a basket of toilet paper, tampons, toothpaste, wine, flowers, and licorice looks rather egregiously like someone who is not succeeding magnificently in coming to terms with death and its precursors. 'Denial' these days is a far graver sin, we are told, than anything John Calvin or Billy Sunday warned us about. So perhaps directness is preferable. Or at least au courant.

However, as comfortable as I genuinely am with some of my atoms eventually ending up in potting soil, I suspect it is the intentionality that can be read from my purchases that most disturbs me. In other words, I presume that my fellows at the supermarket have come to the conclusion, via analogy to their own lamentable position, that my body engages in all manner of bodily functions just as theirs do, and that mine, like theirs, will one day cease to do any of them, and that I, like them, am in the meantime doing what I can to make the consequences of these functions less unpleasant for others and myself. What I don't enjoy is the declarative aspect of the purchase: it is though I am assertively announcing my intent to evacuate my bowels and rid myself of some spare endometrial bits. I am sharing with strangers information I'd rather keep private, if we can assume that the overwhelming majority of toilet-paper purchases are practical and not based on some kind of wild whim after having heard of this invention and its potential uses in home decorating or weaving or somesuch. I cringe every time I have to carry a pack of SuperQuilty around a store knowing that I have thereby given permission and incentive for everyone who sees me to picture me using it for its intended, sole, horrific purpose.

Call Me!

I had to go cold-turkey on my cell-phone addiction briefly, which means I was, in fact, completely incommunicado telephonically, as I haven't had a landline since the Great War and I've never bothered with VOIP. The reason? A cell phone serves all my needs: I can use it at home just as easily as in the car!

And normally my 'system' serves me well. I have a one-million-minutes-per-month plan, and I have five 'friends' whom I can call at any time without using any of those minutes. Gone are the months with surprise overage charges of two or three hundred dollars. Plus, I have been with T-Mobile since the days when we had to strap our forty-five-pound 'car phones' to the roofs of our Datsuns anytime we wanted to carry a passenger, or freight larger than an evening bag, so every time I talk with them I receive shocked and somewhat disgusted but nonetheless effusive thanks for my unwavering loyalty.


This gratitude has come in handy, as I tend to go through a number of phones per year and have then to change my plan each time to suit the features of the model I haven't lost or broken yet. I also have to call a lot to figure out how to use the features or software on the phone I'm just becoming acquainted with. (As well as the regular 'Please send me a new phone as soon as you can no the cheapest one no I don't care what it has yes I need a phone not a camera no I'll buy one I like later when I'm not at work crying into an office phone and deactivate the old one ASAP it's on a flight to Bangkok and I have no phone!!!! Help me pleeease!' calls.)

Now, as you can well imagine, unless I am at work, where I can comfortably cry, slaver, cajole and whine into the multi-line, my refusal to have a landline or VOIP has its unpleasant consequences each and every time I lose, destroy, or have stolen another cell phone. This last time was especially egregious, it being winter and me being about 90 pounds and the few pay phones remaining in this very wireless city not being enclosed in metal and glass as in Ye Olde Days when people used them for purposes other than setting up drug deals. It was wet, it was windy, it was cold, and I was small. Eventually quite grouchy, as well, as each time I attempted to set up my prepaid, stopgap account (which it turns out was unnecessary anyway) it seemed either I had forgotten yet another bit of crucial information, or the customer service person I reached was not privy to a different but equally crucial bit of crucial information at his end.

Much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth ensued, interrupted by bouts of shivering and clattering teeth and trips home to sit in front of the heater, after which a restorative and healing sleep was inevitable, swift, and full. The following day I spoke to a better-informed representative at great length who informed me the whole prepaid scheme was unnecessary and yes, contrary to what I had been previously told, he could indeed use an old SIM card to restart my account on a different phone.

Now I have that account on that different phone, and perhaps the Blackberry will come back to me, along with all the Terribly Important Information locked inside itself and its SIM card. For the future, though, I now have the delightful comfort of knowing that although the prepaid phone costs about sixty dollars a minute to use, it is nonetheless a phone, with a number and account and working 'send' button which I can use in two months from the comfort and privacy of my own home to order a new phone when I lose or destroy the current one.

In the meantime, call me: I don't have your phone number...

Apologies to the Monkeys

Let me be clear: I don't hate monkeys! I realize now that between the descriptions of my personal struggle to write this blog unfettered and my disparaging remarks about the candidates' lack of individuation I may have come across as a unforgivable speciesist, or a raging crypto-neo-Darwinian! Far from it. I love the little monkeys! All of Primata are my friends; from their scent glands to their tapetums to their strangely-modified digits and the sacculated stomachs of cercopithecoids they, and their wondrous adaptations, give beauty to my days and sweet dreams to my nights. I just don't want an Alouatta in the White House, or a Daubentonid as an editor, pointing that crazy 'finger' at the screen or in my eye (-aye)...

...like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling space and heaven

'Other states indicate themselves in their deputies, but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors; - but always most in the common people. Their manners, speech, dress, friendships; - the freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the picturesque looseness of their carriage, their deathless attachment to freedom, their aversion to everything indecorous or soft or mean, the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one State by the citizens of all other States, the fierceness of their roused resentment, their curiosity and welcome of novelty, their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy, their susceptibility to a slight, the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors, the fluency of their speech, their delight in music (the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul), their good temper and open-handedness, the terrible significance of their elections, the President's taking off his hat to them, not they to him, - these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.' --Walt Whitman

I am seeing less and less unrhymed poetry in this terribly significant election as it continues. I admit that for a while I was almost excited; it felt not unlike a sporting event, albeit with rather grave stakes: so many strong candidates, shoo-ins Giuliani and Clinton toppled or well-matched by underdogs, a seeming unusually rich diversity of candidates, all in the midst of two wars, a nascent recession, raging global anti-American sentiment, a tormented and much-reviled administration, and the mortgage crisis and falling housing prices simultaneous with soaring fuel and heating costs.

Not to be glum, but the fact is I don't think anyone is up to the task. Not the candidates we have, nor anyone else. However, the enormity and variety of these and other problems at least serve to illustrate the scope and difficulty of the challenges awaiting the next sworn defender of the Constitution, while the risible pettiness of so many campaigns thus far demonstrate how little suited to the task are the candidates, the two viable political parties, and the campaign system.

To begin with, apart from Ron Paul and John Edwards (and may God bless both of them and grant us a future in which we will have more Candidates with Individual Platforms), and bracketing John McCain for the moment, the nature of the system, or process, has ensured that our selection at this stage of the campaign consists of candidates trying to prove that they are the most Republican of the Republicans, or the most Democrat of the Democrats, as those terms have come to be understood in recent years. Not only does this result in exhausting recitations of party platitudes, but we are also subjected to brain-numbing internecine schoolyard taunts as candidates for this insanely demanding position attempt to persuade us not that they are agile of mind and able to rise to new challenges with brave, fresh ideas or established, proven strategies (knowledge of which gleaned from long immersion in world and American history and political science) -- but that whatever fresh hell emerges during their tenure they will not be blinded by global or domestic realities and instead reliably make decisions based on what most conforms to current Party ideology, and damn the torpedoes.

Kim Jong-Il would be proud.

This does not solely result in a lack of choice (who are these candidates? what do they really stand for? what would they say were they allowed to be candidates, rather than merely apparatchiks? alright, fine, I guess I'll vote for the one with better hair), but as well an acculturation to it, a (tragic, really) resigned sense of This is how it is, then, I suppose...

And therefore we just live with it, and sooner or later we won't know any better. We listen to the Democrats one by one say universal health care is nice, and we let each Republican in turn assert that his respect for life is greater than that of all his fellows. And neither getting inner-city children liver transplants nor preventing suburban pregnancies from terminating has anything to do with the other 9,000 components of the job.

And this is a job, after all (megalomania and messiah complexes notwithstanding), and one that, moreover, involves a great deal more than thumping a pulpit. One that, indeed, will necessarily involve a great deal of ratiocination, negotiation, argumentation, and diplomacy. That we have a Constitution as well as separation of powers and a great big elected legislative branch means that this country cannot be run by the Old Testament, or Sharia, or the Klingon code. Some acknowledgment of this fact, a nod here and there to the (political?) realities of politics and governance, not to mention the nature of a republican state, would go a long way toward lessening the resemblance of most candidates to lip-synching monkeys.


But this stultifying sameness, this need for all serious contenders to prove themselves the most rigid Party Man, stifles true debate. The sole perceptible difference between Clinton and Obama at this point appears to be that Clinton is a white woman and Obama is a black man. Under ideal circumstances, that would be a less than convincing pitch in either case. Sadly, however, because it is all that we have, that means we get to base our Democratic-candidate analysis and decision upon which hairstyle we would prefer to look at for four to eight years. Clinton's has more room for variety, and not merely in terms of cut but potentially color, as well, so that is well to bear in mind. As for the Republicans struggling to convince us that the one time they casually dropped the the word 'choice' in 1972 they were really referring to the embarras de richesse at Baskin-Robbins, the one-upsmanship is equally otiose.

Two results come to mind: one is that due to all the ludicrous ideological sniping and personal insults we are confronted with a constructed antagonism between all same-party candidates until the end of the Primaries, at which point two of these hitherto (radically, as we were told incessantly) incompatible individuals will alter their rhetoric entirely and embrace each other as long-lost clan brothers, devoted adherents to the same glorious cause momentarily blinded by other concerns now forgotten.

The second nausea-inducing consequence of this doctrinaire, blindly party-centric approach to promulgating and maintaining a 'platform' is the apotheosis of rigidity. Any candidate who has reconsidered, moderated, or changed a position is lambasted - regardless of issue or consequence - as alternately traitorous (to the Party) or (the lesser charge) weak-willed, a 'flip-flopper,' insufficiently prophetic or, more accurately, too willing to take changing circumstances into account. In other words, circumstance, fact, geopolitical knowledge, the Constitution, wisdom, and the long- and short-term good of the country should not determine policy: Party doctrine must.

To my mind, however, the ability to consider new facts and developments is an asset; what comes of utilizing this skill can be good or bad, but of itself and independent of consequence it is a virtue and a blessing. Certainly changing course radically is not always the best option, but neither is sticking to a course of action or a mode of thought when it is patently not working. What does work is being able to choose among various options, and that possibility is predicated on being able to think, consider, analyze -- something apparatchiks are not paid to do. I used to believe in Santa Claus, and I used to wear footed pyjamas. I long ago changed my position on both, and I have never since awakened of a morning filled with regret or self-loathing over being weak willed, reckless, or capricious from having altered my stance. In the best of all possible worlds, political candidates and elected officials would be granted similar permission to evaluate, assimilate, contemplate, and apply new information as they see fit --and be adjudged on the consequences of their decisions rather than being pilloried for the audacity of daring to think.

Ess, Bench, Sei a Mensch!

And while we are on the subject of stupidity, I would like to expatiate a bit on one of my long-held peeves: use of the content-free, yet so perniciously, routinely, and vacuously turned-to word 'classy.'

Now, I hear you rustling in your chair, getting ready to object, 'It can't be content-free, since I know what it means!' And I see your point (somewhat): there is a meaning, to some extent. My problem is that that meaning is now predicated on air, which is a bad thing to predicate most things on, unless those things are respiration, or flying.

I say now because things have changed a great deal in the past few centuries. These days it's harder to find a daimyo, serf, lady-in-waiting, knight errant or invigorating pas d'armes than it is a suburban mother of three driving a sensible mid-size sedan. First it was that whole business with Gutenberg, then Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau, Kant. The Church, King, and God got disentangled, and Man with his Declaration of Rights stepped into the vacuum. Then came Marx, Lincoln, child labor laws, compulsory education, corporations, self-made men, literate freedmen and chimney sweeps.

(And et cetera.)
Add in the First World War, department stores, film, dance halls, television, and ascendant America, and what remains in the 'developed world' is demotic American culture writ large. Class distinction is a monetary distinction only, no longer rightly carrying with it connotations of difference in education, refinement, or taste in amusements. Popular culture, now the prevailing cultural expression, filters 'up' from the masses or out from the advertising industry and routinely influences 'high' art. Meanwhile, in countries where there still exist aristocracies, their scions grow up listening to the same rap and rock as do most other teenagers worldwide.

In the U.S., having taken the Enlightenment seriously, or at least the parts of it we felt applied to men of European ancestry, we wanted no truck with hereditary title, and sought instead to create a sort of meritocracy and a culture of opportunity. A poor man could through industry become rich, and some did. And then they realized that they weren't acting as they imagined rich people to. They hadn't the training. They hadn't acquired any acquired tastes. They didn't know a cantata from a canticle, couldn't tell Burne-Jones from Botticelli. So rich boys were sent away to learn Latin and Greek and history and politics as their European (economic) counterparts did, while rich girls learned ladylike arts and comportment at finishing school, the better to resemble people with money who had a family history of being people with money.

But it is all quite different now. We still have a robust tradition of philanthropy amongst the very wealthy in this country, and of that we should be proud. But with regard to 'class' being a reliable predictor of erudition, conduct, diction, taste, or 'classiness,' I need only point to George W. Bush and Paris Hilton as two notable examples among many with regard to which that is patently not true. Examples pertaining to either of these two admittedly egregious cases are too numerous to mention, obviously, but I think Bush's question to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso in 2001, 'Do you have blacks, too?' (drawn from a conversation they were having about difficult race relations in the two countries, according to Cardoso), is just as good as any I might pick, as it is nicely multilayered in its resignation to (optimistic reading), or embrace of (more realistic version), ignorance, insularity, ineptitude, and indelicacy.

And perhaps that is where the problem lies. On the one hand, there is nothing to aspire to. On the other, the major cognitive divide in society is between youth and age. Both categories are fluid and subjective, but since 'youth' is widely believed to be a 'state of mind' rather than chronological fact, it can be learned, attained, much in the manner of adulthood in days past. The youthful demotic is now normative. Being young is what the old aspire to.

Fame is what matters, and it is viewed as simply Popularity on a much larger scale. Bush is the Homecoming King because he is in the White House; Ms. Hilton the Queen because her images, flattering or otherwise, are everywhere. He enacts variously the role of the sitcom buffoon, the warrior-hero, the rodeo cowboy, and the child king eternally under the tutelage of this or that éminence grise.

He is under no obligation to behave with the 'dignity befitting his position,' as his position is Star. He is the Captain of the Football Team; what he does or says is cool, or, more alarmingly, correct, by virtue of his having done or said it. His imprimatur is sufficient. The same with Ms. Hilton or other celebrities, or by virtue of the fact that a particular item is sold at a particular store. There is no global warming because George Bush says it is a fiction; I must buy these shoes (or a cheap knockoff of the style) because Saks says they are desirable. I must listen to Phish, or go to Burning Man, because (at 40, or 50, or 60) the kids I think look 'coolest' (or is it more comprehensible, and more as I envision my youthful self?) do...

In any of these three cases, I think the root problem is the same: immaturity, a symptom of which is the inability to think for oneself. This willful ceding of all higher-level though to the monarch and to Madison Avenue, which would have scandalized the thinkers of the last few centuries had they been forced to witness it, is routine for us now. Second nature. Nearly ineluctable. This tendency is evidenced in our pandemic of not voting as well as in our voting, as noted previously, for people we fancy we would 'like' were we to encounter them in a social situation. It is also apparent in our decisions about where we live, why, and what criteria we routinely turn to when meeting others.

But more on that then. Time for bed and books and sweet dreams,

so whatever it was I was going to say about Lautréamont with regard to all this, and whatever Grand Pronouncements I was hoping to get to about stupidity, cupidity, faux anything, the unconquerable vacuity of the newly rich and poorly educated, and the few (very few) defensible occasions on which one might wear a tweed jacket (I know, I knooooow, and it hurts me far worse than it does you, but some people simply don't listen to their clothing consciences!) will simply have to wait.

I'll Take Sanity -- and Make It a Double.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed the hiatus as much as I have. I will no doubt get around to what I consider Grave Issues soon enough, but for today I have only the following lament, regarding the presidential primaries thus far:

It is, as is frequently the case, that people are idiots. Women vote for Clinton, African-Americans vote for Obama, people who like Chuck Norris support Huckabee, fundamentalists are scared of Romney because he's not their type of fundamentalist, and people under sixty are scared of McCain due to his age.

All of it boggles my admittedly weak mind: it has never occurred to me that the paramount considerations in my deliberations about candidates' suitability for the job should center around selecting the person who looked most like me, wore the same sort of undergarments as me, observed the same rites, or had a similar background. I for one don't care in the slightest if the winner is someone with whom I fancy I would enjoy riveting conversation over a glass of wine (or, in the case of Huckabee and Romney, over root-beer floats at the ice-cream parlor). (And, of course, in the case of John Edwards, pin-shaped bottles of domestic beer at the bowling alley on Rock-n-Bowl Nite.)

After all, this isn't an election for Student Body President. It is, or at least should be, a quite serious decision. We have seen the sorts of things that can go wrong. And yet, for the position of Commander-in-Chief of the sole (for now) remaining superpower, Baptists are voting for the Baptist, Mormons are voting for the Mormon, and people with wombs are voting for the Mom in the group. The job is so much larger than Roe v. Wade, creationism, or immigration; it has an enormous international, and diplomatic (well, ideally) component, as well, for but one example, and yet it seems the bulk of the populace is treating it with approximately the same level of deliberation, soberness, maturity and dispassion as would be required in deciding which of the Village People is their favorite, or whether Angelina Jolie or Gwen Stefani is hotter.

I realize the field will be narrowed later, but if it is narrowed by these sorts of emotional, juvenile, fatuous decisions, we will deserve whatever we get -- and that four years could be even longer than the last eight.

I hear, yet say not much, but think the more.

Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. 3, IV, 1

I was going to get my nails done today, but problematically I took a nap that lasted until 22:30. That also precluded following through on any evening plans. Not that I'm saying I had any. Also not to mention sabotaging any hope of a regular bedtime or waking. Not that I'm divulging what those normally are, or even that I am so rigid as to adhere to a pattern.

I was going to steam the rugs, too. Not that I wish to indicate that I have access to water.

Although I feel a tremendous sense of liberation as to what I can or cannot say now, and while I still hope the point of writing a Personal Weblog in the first place is not having to worry about whether or not one sounds snarky, the fact remains that there will always now be a chill in the air as I imagine someone scrutinizing every post for Signs.

Which of course there aren't. And I sometimes start things and finish them later, and only then try to decide whether they should be dated as 'then' or 'now.' Although I admit that the Blackwater entry was something I encountered that same day I posted it.

No, this won't do. I really don't want this to become a blog concerned solely with the antics of the neighbor's cat and Internet snippets I find amusing or tragic. Or an extended apologia for my belief that there truly is something in between, that I do believe in a middle -- in fact a big, hearty one like the Average American Middle, and that, further, it is in that middle that I imagine most things to reside.

It's just that the middle isn't that entertaining.

For example, today I did not get stuck in any particularly egregious traffic. I missed it, in other words, both coming and going. I was moderately pleased by McCain's moderate success and what it might or might not portend, and likewise mildly bemused by Clinton's lack of the foregone-conclusion landslide. I had the intent to steam some clothes, but was slightly saddened that I had left the water in the steamer too long and came to the mildly disheartening realization that, while agitation with white vinegar inside the chamber helped a bit, a proper cleaning would require the purchase and application of a baby-bottle-sort-of brush, the undertaking of which I with the vaguest sense of resignation felt better left to another day.

I likewise awoke from my tranquil yet perhaps excessive nap with a middling discomfort surrounding the realization that tomorrow I will possibly have a marginally puffy face. This minor regret as regards the conjectured effects of my temporary intemperance in matters of adhering to strict diurnality was offset by the realization that I could simply hold bags of frozen spinach up to one eye with my arm-thigh while using the other eye to assist the fingers of one hand in painting those of the other. If the need to atone for my indolence should arise (understanding that the odds of such an arising are nearly nil), I could strap, if I wished, the bag of spinach over alternating eyes with an aromatherapeuticized silk scarf while steaming the carpets, thus rendering any discussion or internal dialogue as to the effects of my negligible profligacy on either the productivity or cosmetic arenas nil.

In addition, I was suffused by low-grade joy when the neighbor's cat came to call, as well as by his choosing to lay on my stomach. He has not, as of this writing, yet done anything to cause either consternation or ecstatic exuberance, nor has he engaged in any overtly comical 'antics.' He was a bit miffed about the weather, but did not tremble, jump on things, or make unsettling sounds, so pathos, too, is out.

I ate a mostly nutritious dinner but did not go overboard. That is to say, it was at the same time high-fat as well as accompanied by yogurt and the vegetable-seaweed condiment/nutritional powder. It was tasty, but not excessively so. And I ate a shellfish-shaped Belgian chocolate after. I did feel the merest tinge of regret that I neither had on hand a bottle of the sort of wine one would not regret popping open for just one and leaving largely undrunk, nor had sufficient motivation to go to a store and procure just such a mediocre and moderately-priced selection. I then effaced that tinge when I realized that even one glass would likely enhance rather than diminish the sleep-disturbing effects of the long nap, which realization conduced to a subtle relief commingled with a vague joy. When, later, the appropriate dose for my weight of melatonin succeeded in creating the appropriate measure of somnolence at a reasonable hour, I was pleased, but not to an extent that would have adversely affected my newfound sleepiness.

In addition, somewhere in there I bathed, and styled my hair. I did not take an extravagant Bubble Bath, or fill the tub with milk or rose petals, but I did change the blade on my razor, resulting in a closer shave than my last. As I did not use a lot of Products in the styling of the hair, it felt and looked silkier than at other times, but not, it not being four feet long, frighteningly glossy, just moderately, somewhat attractively so. And I chose a black sweater set for the day's sweater set, not out of melancholia, mind you, but because it is a bit thicker, softer, and cozier than some of the others.

See? That won't do. Who cares? I certainly don't; I can't imagine you do, either. But that is the reality of most people's days; most are fairly good, which means fairly prosaic, which means fairly unwritable. I you want something to write about daily life, you must either realistically portray, or exaggerate, or invent some kind of Challenge or Crisis for the hero to encounter and struggle against and sometimes surmount. And Proust, were he here, would no doubt be able elegantly to make my lily-of-the-valley soap evocative of much, much more than cleanliness and nice packaging, and tie it in handily and subtlely with the tiny cheap lily-of-the-valley perfume sets I used to insist, as a child, that I be given when we encountered them in 'gift shops' on family 'road trips' -- but I'm no Proust, and it genuinely felt and smelled simply like a bar of soap to me. There was very little Evocation going on in the bath, very little recherche, very little thought of any sort, frankly, other than 'which leg shall I start with this time?' A question, by the way, which I answered the same way I always do, with 'the same one I always do.'

Hardly worth the paper it's written on.

(Update 06.12.08: Still not, dear.)

My Heel Broke in a Traffic Jam en Route to the DMV -- so I Killed Myself.

Sorry, children, about the long pause. I tried a couple times, but it was difficult to think of utterly content-free things to write. (I do realize I come close, very close, at times, but it is a talent that cannot be fully harnessed; it comes when it wills.) And that wouldn't have been the solution, anyway: people who wish to can read volumes from the selection of a semicolon over a period. It doesn't mean they are correct in doing so; nor, however, does this latter truth dissuade them from undertaking the exercise for their own reasons. Despite my silence in this venue, however, I remain very much alive, not to mention sentient and ambulatory. And having rather a good time of it over the holidays, circumscribed culinary choices notwithstanding.

'Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.' Much Ado, II, 1

That has nothing to do with it, though, actually. This does:

A former boyfriend succeeded in making me partially insane and fully uncomfortable by noting, taking to heart, and doing some long-range, possibly trigonometric, extrapolating from, aspects of this blog that in an ideal world would escape every reader's attention. I then wrote the Reader's Guide in hopes of making my intentions for this encyclopedic rant clear as an unmuddied lake.

But allow me to backtrack.

Since the demise of this relationship, I have had little (very little) contact with this person. He writes the occasional ingratiating, or condescending, or cloyingly/disturbingly reminiscent email, and I respond politely yet tersely. I answer his questions (that's the polite bit), but I answer them in as brief a manner as possible (so as not to engage him further). I strive to be ladylike, in other words, whilst neither providing details, meeting his nostalgia with some of my (depleted, frankly) own in return, nor asking him any questions. The letters end with 'Hope you are well,' which I should think would be read as something quite distinct from 'Tell me all about your work,' or 'Who are you dating?' or 'What's new with you?'

But the State of Things being what it is.

Politeness, it seems, can, in its rarity, be mistaken for Friendliness or, perhaps, as it seems in this case, a Desperate Plea for Help. A cri du coeur the nature of which I am still at a loss to discern. Had I wished for reengagement with this party I assuredly would have supplemented his proffered reminiscences with a few breathless sighs of 'Ah, yes, those were indeed the salad days' of my own and some rose-hued specifics to make my argument. But I would not likely have answered his (misty, watercolored) Memories with silence.

But One Cannot Wear Kid Gloves in the Ring.

And although my amateur pugilist days are well behind me, a friend convinced me that however little I was saying I was clearly saying it wrong, even if 'saying it wrong' meant I was merely saying it politely. And that this drain on my psyche was draining my blog, and that that was wrong.

And while I agree, I thought I had sounded rather more austere than previously in my last return email. On the other hand, I still couldn't think of things to write, other than merely reprinting the Gettysburg Address or the Creation Story a few times -- things of my own, that is, into which nothing at all could be read that wasn't solely of a cheery and uplifting nature. Nothing, in other words, to indicate that we live in a world in which we sometimes stub our toes, eat mediocre food, get stuck in traffic, wake up too late, wake up too early -- or kill our cousins, or kill our brothers, now that I come to reconsider my arbitrary choices above.

Moreover, I couldn't even figure out when I was supposed to 'publish' these cheery entries, as a recent missive from this individual indicated that he was paying close heed to the (again, arbitrary, but no matter) timestamp and reckoning from it the course of my days. (And not in the most flattering of lights, I assure you, but more of the sort of thing about which scores of country singers have had much to say through the decades. Except for the latenight online Scrabble dig, which, to my knowledge, has yet to feature in the lyrics even of Dwight Yoakum, literate, postmodern, and good with words though he may be.)

'Certainly a woman's thought runs before her actions.' As You Like It, IV, 1

So I thought about it a bit but remained stuck. I would like this blog to be a way to keep in touch with people, to entertain them a bit, and to be a place where I can, if I wish, vent my spleen. I like puppydogs and minigoats. Tremendously, in fact, and puffy clouds, and saltwater taffy, and veiled chameleons, and broderie anglaise, and maribou slippers, and birdsong in the summer in a field under the sun amongst frolicking animals and wildflowers by a waterfall, too. I like painting my nails, and going to the ballet, and eating Drumsticks, and making perfumes. But I also get stuck in traffic, I also get lost in parking garages, I abhor going to the DMV, I put off the Post Office and UPS for as many months as I can, and I sometimes sit around reading and writing by myself and letting my nail polish dry. And why any of it, or the writing of it, or the patent exaggeration of my angst surrounding it should cause someone to pity me eludes me.

So I thought about it a bit more, but just a bit, because short on the heels of the above conversation came the New Year's Wishes missive. And I couldn't take it. Relative to the others it was, frankly, innocuous, save for a rhetorical device I can't be bothered to go into here. But it was enough, if due only to the cumulative effect of the whole series and of my frustrated, impuissant, polite and indirect efforts to discourage further contact.

Thus was I impolite in my response. And thus one hopes was he disabused of the misguided impression that we are, owing to the persistence of the aforementioned watercolored memories, Friends. It's a shame, though, that it had to come to that; except maybe for Kant, reading is only as hard as you make it.

Yes she said yes I will yes. Or maybe not. It's so hard to tell after forty years.

This is just simply the best photo taken of me ever. Amazing. Back in 1962 when it was taken I wasn't sure, but now I am. So let the half befuddlement, half disgust, and half barely-able-to-control-my-inappropriate-pleasure 'smile' portend the Happiest of Happy Holidays to you and anyone even sideways concerned with your business interests.

And by the way, my mother ABHORS this photo, says it looks nothing like me, and insists that I take it down in the interests of decency. I love that it looks as though I have a football player's neck, and I love that it is impossible to tell whether I am about to crack up laughing, slap someone, or finally announce the One True Grand Unified Theory. (In all likelihood, I was probably just thinking really hard trying to understand a knock-knock joke.) I also enjoy that between the collar, hair, jewelry, makeup, and expression, I accidentally look like a 1960s Wellesley grad faced with the proposition of either eating 'Easy Cheese' squeezed on tinned 'Vienna Sausages' or dying of hunger.

And on the subject of great wit, What is Santa Claus' favorite style of pizza? --Deep and crisp and even!

A Reader's Guide to the Personal Weblog

Since people appear to be reading this, as well as writing to me about what they read, the following are intended to be helpful tips to prevent those people from having difficulty with making either heads or tails - or heads along with tails, if that is their preference - of the contents.

I'd Have to Use Even More Liner. (And driving would be yet more difficult.)

Firstly, take it all with a hearty helping of coarse-grain Himalayan Pink. I have never once, for example, taken an oyster knife, grapefruit spoon, or hydraulic corkscrew to my (gorgeous, seagreen) eyeballs over the sight of Dockers at dinner, despite what might seem to be (glaring and repeated) indications to the contrary.

I'm Not Reuters.

Secondly, the foregoing derives from the fact that this blog is neither a news wire nor a diary. It is not true, in other words, nor does it purport to be. There is truth in it, surely, but that truth, where one can find it, is snuggled up tight with with all kinds of tricks, like exaggeration, sleazy argumentation, grasping at straws to make a point, and lazy recourse to such creatures as litotes, anaphora, paranomasia, syllepsis, paraleipsis, and their wicked, wicked chums, to lend, at times, the sense that I truly do accord the selection of the evening's shoes the same weight as I do truly weighty things. --Or to make things sound more pleasant, or less pleasant, or funnier, than they really are.

I'm Lying.

Thirdly, the same foregoing can be interpreted to mean that some of the details are factually inaccurate. I might say 'Dockers,' for instance, when in fact I was at no point anything like close enough to read the tag inside the pants of the individual in question. In that case, I am extrapolating from: 'chinos of some sort' plus probability, as I learned a few years ago in Harper's Index that about 80 percent of American men own Dockers. Thus, they are indeed likely to be Dockers -- but, again, they might not be. And if it is the case that there was an initial 'd' in the vicinity looking lost and hapless and unbecomingly unadorned, I might say 'Dockers,' anyway, even if the benighted boob under scrutiny was -- as unmistakably as he was inexcusably -- wearing corduroy. The ratio might be close to the following: 15 percent true, 80 percent fic-trutional, and 5 percent abandonedly, recklessly, from-the-gut brutally honest.

Why, Just the Other Day I Ate a Whole Half Rosemary-Roasted Brandywine.

Fourthly, if not all admissions are entirely accurate, so, too, must one be wary of reading too much into omissions. We might take bathing and eating as two obvious examples: I do both so frequently that one could almost consider them 'daily activities,' and yet there is scant mention of either. I have neither the time nor the inclination to make this a minute-by-minute accounting of the day's every activity. I would like to keep work, for example, out of it almost entirely, confining it, if I can manage, to the occasional snarky and quite general aside. Dating, for its part, is poked at only when it can be used to serve as a convenient portal into disquisitions on some of my more general Concerns with Our Decaying Society, or 'make a point' in some way I misguidedly think might be amusing, or open the way for a large-scale rant on a marginally related topic for which I lacked a segue. The blog also features a great many lacunae -- including around dating -- the (non-?) existence of which gaps being attributable in part to a sense of decency and concern for others. I am more than happy, in other words, to prate on at obscene, contrived length about the recurring failures of my structurally-unsound would-be 'hairstyles' and my inability to give a one-word answer to such questions as 'Do you like tomatoes?' while I would hope that I am possessed of sufficient restraint not to catalogue the conversational and sartorial failings of anyone misguided enough to go on a date, or enter into a relationship, with me. This latter is of course true only of the present: my gay exhusband is still gay, and my other exhusband is still welcome to help me find pants whenever he's in town, and anyone base enough to have offended the sensibilities of the Only Perfect Girlfriend in the Free World (TM) may likewise find mention (if little quarter) herein.

I Left My Heart in Ouagadougou.

Which, having covered factuality, intent, scope, omissions, and timbre, leads us to Sixthly, which is the timestamp. And sometimes the date, too, if I, let's say, neglected finishing my birthday greetings to M. Saussure until the day after, in which case I can retroactively date it appropriately and thus save face with the dead. Neither, then, is an entirely accurate gauge of my doings. Six o'clock is six o'clock in Vanuatu, or Yerevan, or the Marianas Trench. Whichever one I had it set to then. Or a different one, as that list above was arbitrary. For the sake of clarity: I am not certain that I have ever set it to any one of those three. Just as geographically savvy alcoholics can always reassure themselves with the fact that the sun's always past the yardarm somewhere and start the day thus with a G & T rather than regret and misgiving, so, too, is it the case that it is frequently oh-six-hundred-hours somewhere -- just not always precisely where I am. Sometimes, frankly, the thing's all written, and I just want to look over it once before work, or upon returning home, which would mean I had 'really' written it before, even though I am pushing send now.

My spectre around me night and day

Like a wild beast guards my way...

Dost thou not in pride and scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn,
And with jealousies and fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

There are various reasons I don't own a cat. One is that my bed does not have a roof.

To a cat, however, it looks like it has a roof, because it looks like it has sides, due to its having curtains where sides would be on the sort of thing that has them. Consequently, when the neighbor's cat comes over, he (or she: I have no idea), being a cat, frequently wants to get onto the nonexistent roof, and to accomplish this jumps from the low chest, to the tall lingerie chest, up the curtains, and then, using the tops of the curtains and his claws, inches his way - precariously and flattened out because there is about an inch of clearance - to the far end, from which he still believes, until he gets there, that he can leap to the top of the armoire.

Since he in fact cannot, he instead just sits there, discomfited and increasingly petulant, until I put on a padded suit, goaltender's mask and gloves and reach to get him down.



A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime. -Mark Twain

Blackwater Found Stealing Old Ladies' False Teeth

Blackwater killed the New York Times' puppy dog in Baghdad.

Have You Seen This Inner Child?

I blame it on the Beats. That is unsurprising if you know me, as I blame most of everything on the Beats, from unpremeditated 'poems' of testosterone-ridden admiration hastily scribbled on cardboard bar coasters, to white men in dreadlocks, to women in public in sweatpants, to shorts on adults, sneakers as shoes, Dockers as dining attire, sexagenarian playboys, and restaurant place settings without knives. I blame blogs on the Beats, for heavens' sake: they are evidence of the now pandemic delusion that everyone, anyone, can write -- and therefore, what's more, should. But at least we are not getting paid for our self-indulgent drivel. And it is not being forced upon anyone, as is sadly the case with barroom panegyrics and their unwitting subject/victim, as well as the sight and sound of long-haired middle-aged men in sportscars blaring Korn or Dave Matthews or some indefensible 1980s girl band from their convertibles.

Yet I digress. While all those symptoms and disorders share a common etiology, and while I could digress far more in innumerable concentric circles about all of it until I bored even myself, what they also have in common is what I wish to lament here: a renunciation of the Civility clause in our social contract, the subsection that stresses that your rights end where mine begin. Now, only an adult can understand that concept; an infant doesn't even know that he stops at any point, and a child has great difficulty seeing beyond his immediate desires and their quick satisfaction --much like the Beats, and their latter-day progeny unswerving in their resolve to 'let it all hang out,' 'chill,' 'listen to their inner children,' and 'find themselves.'

I for one have yet to wonder where, or who, I am. (At least in the sense they intend, and for other, more practical, senses I have GPS, and the invaluable Google Maps on the Blackberry, not to mention the nice officers who pull me over and ask if I know where I am going, which is something, even with the above, that I sometimes cannot answer affirmatively.) It used to be common wisdom that if one had questions about this, the answers were predictably to be found in a youth hostel in India or Western Europe at the age of 18 or 21. Those failing to encounter an integrated self by that time, and to choose an appropriate superego congruent with this self, were quite rightly deemed insane and offered antipsychotics at government clinics.

Now, of course, it's quite different. One can realize at 70 that there is a gaping hole where instead a Whole should be, of personality, tastes, goals, desires, values, and dreams. A void where for years all those components of a self, of a Gestalt, were ignorantly presumed to have been resident. And nobody gets medicated, or lobotomized, or ridiculed. Divorced, perhaps, but then marriage or 'heavy' relationships are just one more instance of the hand of the Man keeping a free spirit down. A free spirit who could instead be occupying himself with penning boozy free-form verses with a Sharpie over several months' worth of Chimay stains on paperboard about my felid eyes and porcelain cheeks and sangria lips of oranges and sunshine and the endless day and hair black as rainwashed Dougfir in the misty gloom of the blackblack forest gloom. Or something.

No, I encounter myself every day, whether I want to or not. I'm the only reason I have ten red suit jackets. I'm the only excuse for buying aspirin by the case and for putting ice cream into the refrigerator. I can look to no one else for a rationale for the absurd bed, or the driftwood arrangement by the bathtub, or the highly idiosyncratic wine selection, or the dying houseplants. It's down to me and me only that there are bottles of unfinished perfume around, miles of sari cloth, hairstyling products in the wine cabinet, and socks in the tinned-goods-organizer in the kitchen. It's me with the tailor on speed dial and the phobia of hairdressers, and me with the books under the covers on the passenger side of the bed. Everywhere I turn, ever since I had a sense that there was in fact a me to speak of, I haven't been able to get rid of her. Even when I look in the mirror, it is chilling how deep a resemblance my reflection has always borne to me, and me alone.

So I don't get it. How does one wake up, in the midst of being an adult and decades after crashing triumphantly past Piaget's goal line, to find that that the hole one so recently discovered is a hole with a shape that can only be filled with Burning Man, or rabbit hunting, or arena rock shows, or casual sex, or over-the-road trucking? Genuinely, it strains my mind. Additionally, what makes it all the more grievous is that the vast majority of such cases do not 'realize' they have 'always wanted' to join the seminary, or start an NGO; instead, their epiphanies as regards this previously missing 'self' tend to focus on the need to tend to the needs of that neglected self, not to others. This in its turn leads to a convenient discursive loop, as the neglected self, being neglected, is always presumed to be in some child state, if not the dread Inner Child itself, thus excusing all manner of base and self-indulgent, if not overtly puerile, pursuits.

Which is where the Beats and the Social Contract come in, if only out of convenience rather than painstaking logic, since I am becoming quite cranky with thinking of all this, and have a long week ahead in which I will have to muster my usual charming self repeatedly. The painstaking logic can come later, if I feel like the taking of pain might for some reason be pleasant at that point. For now, the Beats and their popular lionization, quite simply, are handy scapegoats for the existence of the near-ubiquitous reverence for the supposed virtues and, indeed, necessity (for the 'self,' of course) of a perverted, solipsistic, jejune freedom over the adult responsibility necessarily implied in acknowledging the worth of others around one, one's fellows in society. Acknowledging that we are a part of a group, and that the group consists of other individuals with their own desires and needs, perforce constrains behavior. If one can manage to accept that it's improper to murder members of this brotherhood, I fail to see it as a great cognitive leap to acknowledge as well that respecting them in other ways is in order.

And etiquette is nothing but respect and consideration for others. It is not about proving to (or lording over) others that one knows the proper utensils to use for jellied consommé or oysters or bacon; it is instead at base an attempt to create and foster an environment of mutual respect. In other words, I respect you by not sonically resembling in any way a giddy aye-aye with an egret's egg as I eat my consommé, and by not air-guitaring 'Stairway to Heaven' as you pray with your congregation and by not ruining the coming week for you by blasting inane 'dance music' out the opened windows of my Porsche or forcing you to witness the horror of my deformed toenails and crusty heels in 'flipflops' or a topographical map of my cellulite through mangy sweats because I was, yes, rude, that is the word, and so is immature and so is tiresome and so is inexcusable after the age of three and in my rudeness wore Inside Clothes outside because my Inner Child wanted to.

Perhaps at this point we are too far gone in our stoned and Xanaxed and liposucted solipsism for one to expect that we might credit our peers with having existences, wills, and souls of their own. But if we are intent on becoming children ourselves, it is not unreasonable to suggest that we put into our service that much-vaunted 'childlike imagination' we thus have again at our disposal and, for the purposes of sustaining an at least marginally livable world, pretend that they do and accordingly put behind us the stringy grey ponytails, the shorts when not on the water or holiday, the adolescent pop music, the sweat pants and track suits outside the gym, and, in the name of all that is holy, unsolicited spontaneous 'poetry' of any stripe.

We'll Frolic and Play, the Eskimo Way

It's not as though I don't have Christmas cheer, as the previous post may have seemed to imply. I have scads of it, as evidenced by the Christmas dioramas in the accompanying photos. One is inside, and features some kind of dwarf fir, I think (I made notes at the time - and thank you Flower World - but I don't remember where I put them), and the trio outside may be firs, as well, but, again, I no longer recall.

At any rate, two of the boxes outside are green and one is red. That equals Christmas, as does the shape of the trees, and the fact that they are some kind of conifer. Inside, as you can clearly see, there is red, green, and gold in the diorama next to the planter, in the form of vintage, modern, and Saudi perfume bottles. What is less obvious is the exuberant holiday cheer stuck into the planter itself, consisting of a sparkly apple, two sparkly little balls, a tiny drum, and simulated, sparkly conifer and ivy branches.

Moreover, my bedroom itself is red, red, red and gold. My living room is green and red and gold. Or at least celadon and sage and raspberry and gold. So I am living Christmas all the time. I even have Balthazar in Spanish, yet none of the rest of the (less-Christmassy-titled) Quartet in any language right now. Add in the photo of St. Joseph with the infant Jesus, and it's almost oppressively Yule in here. All I need is a karaoke machine and some nutmeg, and the opportunity to catch the neighbor's cat unaware and stick some stuffed reindeer antlers on him, and then no one, no one, will again question my holiday cheer.

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

It seems I had misremembered Christmas. It's not surprising, really. I did so well with my sombre Yom Kippur wishes for my more Hebraically-minded friends that I was bound to mess something up.

Anyway, Christmas is always a bit of a conundrum for me. There are so many options, and all are slightly discomfiting. When I had roommates, or lived at boarding school, Christmas was always a time to savor a brief bit of solitude and quiet. I remember at college in Southern California, KPFK would play a reading of The Alexandria Quartet all day and all night for days over Christmas. If I were staying in the dorm over vacation, I could sit alone in my dorm room for hours at a time and listen. I could stay up all night and listen -- and who cared? it was Christmas break!

Now, however, I usually fulfill my RDA of quiet, solitude, and contemplation without needing a state-imposed religious holiday to do so. This leaves me in a bit of a bind when I do find myself confronted with one. Most things are closed -- not just (all but eleven, according to Open Table) restaurants and supermarkets, but gas stations, convenience stores, tire stores, nurseries, book stores...almost everything. Probably even Wal-Mart, too. Well, maybe only in largely Christian markets.

Thus normally the activity choices outside of churchgoing are fairly circumscribed: some kind of Christmassy thing at someone's Christmassy house, or Chinese food and a foreign film with the Jewish population of whatever city I'm living in, since Larry Durrell can no longer be relied upon for succor. In the first case, not only is there no species of traditional North American or British holiday food that I enjoy (although I love getting the good charms in a pudding!), I also dislike feeling trapped in someone's house as people get drunker and stupider and the dread board games are resorted to one after the other in an attempt, presumably, to stave off the Holiday Melancholia from which the revelers would otherwise be suffering. If I should find myself overtaken with suicidal impulses and existential angst, God help me if I for one second believe Boggle to be the cure.

The problem with Christmas dinner for the single person who is not overwhelmingly inclined to celebrate Jesus' birth with drunkenness or ironic renderings of 80s metal ballads is that Jews and Chinese seem to be the only religious or ethnic minorities who want things to proceed with as much semblance of normalcy as possible amidst all the gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And since, outside of Florida and big Eastern cities, the Jewish community in North America tend to leave the restauranteuring to other groups, while non-Chinese non-Christians in the business gladly leap upon their one opportunity a year to take a day off, that leaves the Christmas trinity of Hunan, Mandarin, and Szechuan, with the odd offering of late-night dim sum (not available in all areas). There are also, of course, 24-hour/365-days places and nicer hotel restaurants open on Christmas, if your Yuletide tastes run toward chicken-fried steak with eggs or eating amidst lonely, stranded business travelers and recent divorcés who haven't yet found the courage to cook for just one.

I hadn't misremembered that. It is hard to forget the limited culinary offerings when the same thing happens every year and I get sufficiently frustrated, once more, around 8PM so as to relent and find myself again numbly picking at a plank of ghastly tinned ham over a Monopoly board, with people potty on boozy curdled cream with nutmeg scum to the accompaniment of a whiskey-fueled rendition of My Way streaming from the den-turned-karaoke-studio.

This year, however, I had an alternative. My Australian friend was going to be in Denver on Christmas Eve prior to flying out for skiing on Christmas Day. The snow would lend a festive yet nonsectarian air, and the crack addicts outside the window would serve as handy stand-ins for more traditional holiday revelers. And since I'd already be in a hotel, it would make sense to eat in it. Or I could just have some nuts and Toblerone from the minibar. In either case, not a single incongruous eggroll would need pass my lips.

That is the part I misremembered. I had about 80 to 1 on it being Christmas Eve/Christmas with a hedge of 2 to 1 on New Year's Eve/New Year's. I lost out on both, because it was squarely in the middle, the 27th, which doesn't help me at all, since by then I could be eating Hakka or Lebanese again if I wanted to. My only wish is that, whatever transpires, however many rounds of cribbage or Pictionary and however many murdered Rat Pack songs and show tunes I have to sit through, however many people cry, or break up, or end up in the ER, and no matter how many bowls of punch are gone through, there be no Tofurkey at any time, anywhere. That would kill my Christmas cheer completely, and quite possibly permanently.