Watch this. It will make you feel better.
September 08, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
How many hours of lost productivity is Sarah Palin responsible for? Admit it: whether you’re gloating or loathing, you’re getting precious else done.
I’m not going to let her take up another nanosecond of my neurons after this, but three bits to share:
* Normally I hate when people send me off to some video somewhere online, but this is an exception. Joe Biden ripping the Republicans a new one. The man is goddamned pissed off. Totally refreshing, especially if you feel like you’ve been living in an alternate universe these past weeks. Seriously, give yourself a two-minute present and watch it.
* Love this conservative talk show host in Boston. When he criticized Caribou Barbie’s parenting skills on air, his listeners trashed his inbox with haterade, as loyal Republican attack dogs feel they must. But the guy goes back through his old emails and finds the very same people who are now defending Bristol Palin unto death called the Gloucester girls bitches and ho’s. Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites.
* Judith Warner, in the Times, The Mirrored Ceiling, nails the real problem:
“One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can ‘relate’ to.”
Seriously. Why does the president have to be someone you feel comfortable having a beer with? You can’t find your own friends and leave him/her alone to run the fecking country? Try Craig’s List.
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Sarah Palin: Yeah, I’m Going There
August 31, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
UPDATE: And the New York Times weighs in on the same topic. Only with, like, more reporting and analysis and stuff like that.
Normally I don’t wade into political waters, especially when so vastly many other writer/bloggers are already peeing in that pool, but as the writer of the definitive (cough cough) pre-convention examination of the fate of the Soccer Mom, I feel obligated to weigh in now that Soccer Mom is suddenly back in the news full-force, in the body of one Sarah Palin.
(And hey, everyone, she’s from one of *my* states! Add in Obama’s Hawaii and Kansas connections and only poor North Dakota is being left out of The 50th State’s Election 08 Special Coverage.)
Others have summed up way better than I can just how many ways Plain is a joke candidate (my two faves so far: Gail Collins’ McCain’s Baked Alaska in the NYTimes, and handy summary of her sins from MoveOn), but here’s what I’ll add to the discussion: What about the kids?
I know I’m being a bad, bad feminist for even bringing this up, for letting these traitorous thoughts so much as cross my brain pan. We’ve all been trained to not judge one another, to respect every working or SAH mother’s choices no matter how crazy they might appear, to never never never wonder if any single human can still be a good parent while fill-in-the-blank—scaling Mt. Everest, CEO-ing a corporation, running for Veep, whatever.
But I’m going to go there. Reading her bio, her kids were the No. 1 thing that crossed my mind. FIVE kids, including a Downs infant, and a husband that works on the North Slope oil fields, so it’s not like he’s a SAH dad with the apron and the kids’ schedules all computerized on his Blackberry.
Sorry, but how is this going work again? Massachusetts has already been down this road, with a young, underexperienced Republican governor mom-of-young-children. It was a disaster, and it was over in very short order.
It’s none of my business what kind of a mother she is, or what kind of a parent her husband is, that’s not why I would vote or not vote for anyone. But I know firsthand, as do all working mothers, what it’s like to bring only half your head to the game after a night of puking kids, or emo kids, or homeworked-out kids, [UPDATE: or pregnant kids] or whatever domestic disaster you’ve spent your physical and emotional capital putting to right.
It’s one thing to take your eye off the ball if you’re writing computer journalism or running a small biz that sells sustainable something-or-other or middle-managing in some vast corporation. The world will not screech to a halt thanks to your fuzzy thinking. But I’d like my vice-president to bring her A game to the table each and every day of her term, especially with a boss who’s entering the Dangerously Decrepit territory. And I just don’t see that happening with five kids in Palin’s picture, not with all the nannies in the universe.
Plus she’s anti-polar bear. No. Just no.
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Thirty-six months to go!
August 21, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages
Today’s my birfdee. Whee. I have to confess, I’m not the happiest camper these days, not about anything in my tiny overprivileged life. But! That’s okay, ‘cause I’m 47 now, and if there’s one thing a 47-year-old knows, it’s not to be afraid of the downs. Just another piece of the puzzle.
Do you think three years from today I’ll be writing, Wow I made it, I did it after all?
Update 1: Spent at least part of the day in a car with four tween/teen boys singing a Chumbawamba song at the top of their lungs. If this doesn’t improve your mood, nothing will. Only because you come to realize that every moment of your life spent not listening to Chumbawamba is a good moment.
Update 2: Someone in my extended family with a lot more problems than I have gave me for my bday a dish towel that says “Celebrate each day” on it. I am genuinely always happy to get dish towels ‘cause, owing to our ban on paper towels, we use a lot of towels in a given week. I thought, awwwww, that was nice, and tossed it in the wash.
But yesterday when I was folding that load, it came over me: OMG she read my blog and she’s using this towel to tell me to STFU! I feel so…chastened.
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Ordinary
August 11, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
Today I woke up early (6:30) to rain. More rain. I made coffee, fetched the paper off the driveway still in my sleep shirt (the top to a fancy pair of Books Brothers PJs that I bought T but that he never wore) so I could see if it was ever going to stop raining. It wasn’t.
I worked for awhile, said goodbye to T when he came down, tried unsuccessfully to walk the dog (don’t ask), showered, kept working. Greeted first W and, hours later, C as they staggered out of bed. Allowed them to do what they would on a rainy unscheduled momma’s-gotta-work Monday.
At noon we all drove the 1.5 miles to the nice campus with the woodland paths, finally walked P, drove back along the same road. There were five or six orange cones on the right-hand (southbound) side of the street that weren’t there when we first passed and a ordinary-looking sedan pulled fully up onto the sidewalk (there is no shoulder there) because I remember thinking, Dude, way to be parked on the sidewalk.
Came home, made the boys a lousy bowl of ramen noodles for lunch because I hadn’t shopped in a week but had a 1 o’clock conference call, took it, talked to S (more work, but fun work), finally shut down the computer, took the boys to GameStop (ugh) and food shopping (more ugh), came home, unpacked food, threw in a load of laundry, re-checked email, re-walked the dog, started dinner early because C’s GF was coming and ordinary people are not used to eating as late as we do. I stared at the onions and peppers cooking in the pan and thought, who fucking cares about onions and peppers in a pan.
That’s because this whole live-long day, this whole stupid wasted idle rainy August day of our lives, another mom very like me—someone who lives close enough that she could hear me if I opened my door and screamed as if my first-born child had been killed—all today she dealt with exactly that. Her first-born child was killed, this very same day, at the very same orange-cone spot we drove past not once but twice thinking not of her boy but of our dog, dinner, work, bills, what was on the iPod (what was on the iPod was a odd, fun-but-no-fun Killer’s song that I can now a) not get out of my head and b) never disassociate with today or her son).
I imagine, but I do not in any way know, that the mundane details of Swellville life must strike you in such a moment as both unspeakably absurd and unbearably dear. I imagine this boy’s mother would gouge out parts of her body to be able to be bored over onions, to be worried about walking her dog, to be replying to email and putting grapes in a cart and moving wet things from the washer to the dryer like the competent stay-at-home mom she was. I imagine she will never again do any of those things, for that matter never again draw breath, in exactly the same way, but that she would give her eyeteeth to have the ordinary crap-ass Monday we just had. Whatever happens to what’s left of this family, it will never again be ordinary, not any second of it.
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Doesn’t fish. Isn’t a cat.
August 02, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
A couple of years ago I was walking Pip on a really dank and gray November morning. We crossed the culvert at the end of our street where a little stream trickles into the mighty Swellville river (that’s a joke—the river flows so slowly it’s legally in danger of losing its status as a moving body of water) when we were suddenly face-to-face with this, this thing—it was long and sleek and furry and throwing off the most awful karma.
It was very clear that this animal had mayhem in its heart. Seriously, the hair on the back of my head stood on end, and all for a creature that prolly weighed 8 lbs. The dog, an animal not known for her discretion, or her silence, was struck dumb. The three of us stared at one another for an instant before it slunk away and Pip and I hurried off to shutter our windows and mutter curses as we threw burnt offerings into the fire.
Turned out it was what they call around here a fisher cat, though, as the article I later read in AMC Outdoors pointed out, they a) don’t fish and b) aren’t cats. They do rip up the bellies of cats and small dogs and other various little mammals they can get ahold of. Lovely. They’re the littlest members of the weasel family, a group of mammals that are pretty hard to love when you’re looking at them nose-to-nose.
The biggest member is the wolverine. I have to be really frank here. Until we went to Alaska, I wasn’t 100% absolutely positively sure the wolverine was a real animal, like a real animal that still lives in the wild in this century, as opposed to something that died out in the Pleistocene era and only lived on only in the hearts of Hugh Jackman fans.
The day in Alaska that we went on our bear safari, we had lunch in a wilderness lodge in the Lake Clark National Preserve that had a stuffed wolverine that W and I could not stop staring at. I wish so much we had taken a picture (… but oh yeah! That was the day we had no camera at all! Duh.) Well, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with this pic.
They’re fascinating and terrifying to look at, and, apparently, still plenty wild in Alaska. They’re bigger than you think they’re going to be—like the size (and heft) of a hassock. They have really powerful forearms and claws. If they were people, they’d be those muscle-bound weight-lifters who are really big on top and teeny-tiny on the bottom. Also, they have a really scary teeth-and-jaws thing going. You can definitely picture them ripping things. Ew.
The lodge owner told us wolverines have been known to scare a bear off its kill. Also, according to that know-it-all Wikipedia, wolverines have killed moose before, which are obviously many, many, many times bigger, but not to worry—they’re only attacking weak moose in the winter when they’re most vulnerable. Phew.
They have no known natural predators—except two, the same two that pretty much any other wild animal has these days. 1) Humans encroaching on their habitat (wolverines are, surprise surprise, not sharers, and each one needs a pretty big chunk of land to do his hunting in) and 2) the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Bush administration (note they are not classified here as humans), which decided pretty much around the exact same time that we were learning about wolverines in Alaska that they don’t need any protection, even though there are only 500 or so (or, some say, considerably less) in all of Idaho and Wyoming and Montana.
You can read the Times’s op-ed on it here.
In the meantime, leave me to my fantasy: how fun would it be to introduce one of these fellers to the office-bound political puppets who’re making all these life and death decisions about this or that endangered species? Go get ‘em, wolvie, I’ve got your back.
Way back.