All posts for the month June, 2010

Right now, heaven’s right here.

Lately, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have, on occasion, complained.

Grumbled. Belly-ached. Moaned and groaned, fussed and freted, sniveled, whimpered, whined, and yes, repined. I have my reasons.

But not tonight. Not right now. Not with the smell of wood smoke in my hair.

This evening I finally put together my birthday-present-three-months-early fire bowl that I got on sale for $50 at Target (given what my birthday present was last year, I would say the decision to jump the gun was a wise one). This evening, I finally opened up the wee bundle of wood that I picked up at the hardware store, and twisted up some newspaper, and, eventually lighting more matches than I have hairs on my head (I’m fairly certain), managed to build my first fire (ever). This evening, I sat around a small bonfire in my own backyard, under an azure sky, my children funny, my husband charming, and watched the flames and saw how the wind caught the smoke and occasional ash and spun them up and away as the fire chattered and spread, quieted and gathered, my backyard the only place on earth, the only place I might possibly want to be. The children went in, the husband stayed, we chatted of this and that, the World Cup, high school, nicer patio furniture. The sky darkened, the husband put the girl to bed, the fireflies emerged, and I didn’t move, other than to stir my fire, in my fire bowl, in my backyard, ultimately driven in only by the need to put the other child to bed, and the summer-evening chill in my limbs.

My whole house smells of bonfire now — we’ll have to learn to close those back windows, I think — and I do wonder if the neighbors turned on their air-conditioning on this cool night expressly to avoid a similar fate. I may not love the smell on my pillow come morning.

But right now? I’m good.

 

PS: Please don’t mind the dancing/bike-washing in this clip (…). It’s the only embeddable source I’ve found for the song, which is among my most beloved!

by emilylhauser on June 30, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Gratitude, Mental Rambling, Music

Posted by emilylhauser on June 30, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/right-now-heavens-right-here/

Housekeeping brief.

Having been introduced to Eat the Damn Cake (and blogger Kate Fridkis) by Jezebel, I’ve decided I’m in love and have added her to my Smart People blog roll.

Also, and on a strikingly unrelated note, I just deleted a comment that was awaiting moderation, in spite of its even tone and the writer’s calm approach to telling me how wrong I was on Gaza and the blockade. Why? You ask, not unreasonably, and I’ll tell you: Because two paragraphs in, the would-be commenter began to evenly and calmly advocate the ethnic cleansing of all Arabs from Israel. I think I’m pretty safe in saying that advocating ethnic cleansing — of anyone, really, anywhere — violates Rule #1 for commenting on this site:

Rule #1: Be a person.

I rather thought that went without saying but apparently, I was mistaken. Good to know.

by emilylhauser on June 29, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Housekeeping

Posted by emilylhauser on June 29, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/housekeeping-brief/

Your diet, yourself.

So on Sunday, I’m at the grocery store. There’s a short line. I’m glancing about in boredom, willing my eyes to float past the gossip headlines — so my eyes settle on the other magazines. Bright and shiny things, they are, after all, and they draw the eyes — thonk! — straight to them.

I note a pattern. I start to count.

One, two, three, four… holy crow, five! No, six. Wait! Seven – and there’s eight! Eight magazines geared toward women with cover lines about weight loss.

Nine, if you count bon appetit‘s “Low Fat Cooking Secrets.”

Oprah, on the other hand, Oprah is classy. She doesn’t offer me diet tips. She presents me with a “Special Report”: “Your Relationship with Food.”

Frankly, my favorite — even to the exclusion of the (I’m certain) very Special Report — was the magazine that told me that I could “Walk off Weight” (that’s at least about increasing movement, right? That’s a good thing, right?) and then added, in a slightly smaller font: “PLUS: Get Your Diet Back on Track.”

Because, you see, it’s presumed that I am, in fact, on a diet. I’m a woman, right? It’s presumed that I’m on a diet, and that said diet is likely “off-track.” It’s presumed that I’m on a diet, it’s off-track, and I want to put it to rights. That diet of mine, boy oh boy, I can’t stick to it, but I sure wish I could!

There’s a level at which I’m not even angry about these things anymore. We’re struggling with a psychosis, a body dysmorphia of national proportions, and the truth is that we’re not even really struggling — we kind of gave up before the fight even began.

And so I will say it, loud and bold: “Dieting” is not a way of life! “Weight loss” is not an essential female concern! Our “relationship with food” should be, dare I say it, one of enjoyment! Or none at all — because it’s fuel!

But no. This is not the approach we take. We take a term that is (at the very least) fuzzy in definition — “thin” — and turn it into a totem: God and stick, item of worship and tool for punishment.

If you aren’t thin, you not only must be, you must want to be — and we will tell you what thin is. We will tell you what is enough, or too much, for you, with little or no input from you. Because more than any real God — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindi, Flying Spaghetti Monster — this is what Americans worship. More than money, heaven knows — because if you’re rich but fat? You’re really just fat. (If, of course, you’re a woman). This is our shared narrative. This is perhaps the one thing all Americans — Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Anarchists, Independents, the quick and the lame — can get behind: If you have lady parts, you need to be “thin.”

So I fume and I fuss within the confines of my head, and then, in a clear case of the internet reading my mind, I run across the following on Jezebel: I Used To Be a Skinny Person.

I used to be really, really thin. People were always telling me I was so thin. Like a compliment. And I brushed it off and even pretended to be a little offended, because “thin” shouldn’t mean “pretty.”

Now I’m less thin. And I’m betting I’ll keep getting less and less thin. That’s the way these things seem to work. And suddenly I start to wonder what happens when “thin” means “pretty” and you’re no longer thin. What do people say, then? You know what’s scary? They say, “You look so thin in that.”

…

My inclination when I gained weight was to feel pretty good about it. I’d been too thin after not remembering to eat through much of grad school, and I had just met my fiancé, and I was happy. We were eating together constantly, out of joy. He clearly thought I was gorgeous, my breasts were not quite as non-existent as before, life was good.

I was obviously oblivious. I hadn’t learned a really, really important lesson. Which is the following:

It is NEVER ok to gain weight.

Emphasis, the author’s.

She does offer up one universally acknowledged exception: It is NEVER ok to gain weight, Kate Fridkis writes, unless you’re “recovering from a disease” — but having never been a skinny person, I can attest to the fact that, in fact, even that’s not so. When I had major surgery for a potentially life-threatening condition that landed me in the hospital for a week and spat me back out pale, wan, and hungry — I was getting complimented right, left and center. “Have you lost weight? You look great!”

As I’ve said in this space before, I don’t think we even really know how to talk about these things (anymore? Did we ever? I don’t know). I’ve said that we can’t even use the word “normal” with any degree of confidence. I know, intellectually, that there is some point at which health, good sense, and attractiveness meet, but I can’t even begin to talk about it seriously — every word is too fraught, and too many lives are daily ruined or diminished in this battle. I don’t want to risk adding to the destruction, even inadvertantly.

But here’s what I do know: I am not the only one who knows how to read. My daughter — along with all the other little girls who pass through American grocery stores — also does.

And I reclaim my anger when I begin to think of what these words may be doing to her.

8/16/11 update: Please also read this, about new studies showing that “fat” and “healthy” are not – hey, surprise! – necessarily mutually exclusive terms.

by emilylhauser on June 29, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Body, Personal/Political

Posted by emilylhauser on June 29, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/your-diet-yourself/

Mistakes were made.

Well! Turns out this blog is a year old! I’m a bit stunned really, as blogging was once a thing I was fairly certain I would never do. Well, you know the old adage: Never say fairly certain never.

I’ve been pleased to discover that I’m mostly capable of sticking to a schedule of daily posting, and I’ve been very pleased to watch my readership grow as the year has gone by (there was even a thrilling spike during the flotilla fracas, which was really cool, in a weird, surrealistic way). And I have really enjoyed the writing. It’s a good thing, writing.

What I’ve been less than pleased about has been the things I got really wrong. The mistakes. The misreadings. The “I know this is going to happen nao” followed by a not so much. If you rifle through my archives, you’ll discover that I generally endeavor to correct mistakes or offer updates as I go along, but that’s harder to do when the mistake was such a big error in judgment that you can only see it in retrospect…. So, in honor of my first anniversary, I address errors of this nature, and present to you the first installment of:

Mistakes Were Made

Ahem.

  1. Well, first of all, I have clearly not figured out how to lift pictures off the internet in a way that is always legal, or ethical, or actually functional. Because pictures occasionally just disappear. Terribly sorry about that! Nothing like saying “Just look at this, will you?” and — naught. (For instance, here – the sign in question is that bright red British one, circa WWII, that reads “Keep Calm and Carry On.” But it’s just plain — poof! — disappeared).
  2. “I do not Tweet.” Not technically a mistake, as I didn’t at the time, but at the time, I also knew I never would. BWA-haha-haha-haha!
  3. “I really, really want a netbook and can’t afford one – wahhhh!” Literally the first time I actually used a netbook — literally within seconds — I realized how miserable I would have been with one. Tiny keyboard! Tiny, tiny keyboard! Big, mannish hands — and a tiny, tiny keyboard! Phew. Bullet – dodged.
  4. “Iran’s history is about to change because of this one really significant death! Keep you eyes and ears peeled!” As happens with me on occasion, the post-election uprising in Iran moved me so deeply that I forgot to separate my hopes from the facts. My hopes were informed by the facts, but not by all of them (such as, for instance, the profound power of the Revolutionary Guard). Yeah, so, though I told my children (tearily) to pay attention to the pictures of hundreds of thousands — millions? — of people in the streets, that they were seeing history and would remember these days — I was wrong. Sadly, unfortunately, tragically, wrong.
  5. “OMeffingG, Israel is going to launch another war in Gaza!!” It certainly seemed that way for a few days, and I take some comfort in the fact that I wasn’t the only one who thought so, but yeah. I was a little too certain of my reasoning — a little too certain, really, of my fatalism. Given a choice between assuming the worst of the Israeli government, and thinking “hey, maybe it’s not quite as bad as I feared!” I tend to err on the side of the former (which is probably not much wiser than erring on the side of the latter).
  6. “I have the feeling that the arrival of the Rachel Corrie, and the Israeli reaction to it, and the world’s reaction to Israel’s reaction to it, is going to prove very significant.” Yeah, not so much. See above comment re: Iran and my occasional confusion of “hope” with “fact.”
  7. I am forever linking in my Israel/Palestine posts to background material (“Israel/Palestine: The basics” , “Israel/Palestine peace advocacy – places to start” and “Israel/Palestine – a reading list” ) — and somehow fucking it up. I occasionally sweep through and correct the broken links, but then a week later I discover another one. Or two. Very, very annoying. Again: Terribly sorry!

Ah, being wrong. What fun! One is, it turns out, very small indeed.

The view of Earth from Mars, photographed by Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, March 8, 2004. Photo courtesy of NASA Flickr.

******************

Update: Intrepid commenter dmf links below to an interview with Kathryn Schultz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error — fascinating, fascinating stuff! Well worth the listen, and I am off to order the book. Money quote, from a discussion of science and how science moves forward: “Being wrong is actually an engine of the advancement of knowledge.”

by emilylhauser on June 27, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Huh!, Mistakes Were Made

Posted by emilylhauser on June 27, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/mistakes-were-made/

Gilad Shalit and 6,300 Palestinians.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the capture of Gilad Shalit. Shalit was serving at an Israeli military post on the border with Gaza when he and his unit were attacked by Palestinian militants. Two other Israeli soldiers were killed; Shalit was taken into Gaza.

This event came a day after Israeli forces went into the homes of two suspected Hamas members in Gaza and kidnapped them, taking them to jail in Israel. According to Israeli human rights group B’tselem, working from figures provided by the Israeli government, Israel currently holds more than 6,300 Palestinians in its civilian and military detention systems. Also according to B’tselem, and other Israeli human rights organizations, Palestinian prisoners are “routinely tortured” in Israeli jails.

I join B’tselem in calling for Gilad Shalit’s immediate release. In a statement they released yesterday, B’tselem rightfully says:

Shalit is considered a hostage due to the circumstances of his abduction and the manner in which he is being held. International humanitarian law absolutely forbids the taking and holding of a person by force for the purpose of pressuring the adversary to comply with certain demands, while threatening to harm the person if the demands are not met. The taking of hostages is considered a war crime, for which all those involved bear personal criminal liability.

I wept when Shalit was taken, as I wept over the loss of the young soldiers he served with, Lt. Hanan Barak and Staff-Sgt. Pavel Slutzker. These are my people, and as I read the stories of these young men’s lives, I felt I knew them. I cannot imagine the torment their families have lived through in the past 1,460 days.

But I would call on Israel to recognize that the political prisoners its holds are just that. I would call on Israel and my fellow Israelis to think of the families on the other side of the fences and walls. I would call on Israel, and my fellow Israelis, and the world at large to remember all of the many, many God-awful mistakes that Israel has made (including a series of military attacks in which hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians were killed) in trying to force Hamas to free Shalit — to absolutely no avail.

There are two sides here, and much as I mourn my own people’s losses and pray for Shalit’s safe return home, I cannot forget the suffering that my people, in turn, have caused.

The only way to end the madness is to end it. The only way to end the madness is to build a just peace.

************************

In December, it looked as if a deal might have been struck to swap Shalit for nearly 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. I wrote about it at the time, but as we all know, nothing came of those negotiations. I want to quote some of the facts and figures from that post here; to read the whole thing, click here.

I have compiled a short, and certainly incomplete, timeline outlining the things Israel has done since June 25, 2006 in retaliation for the capture of its soldier, in retaliation for subsequent Hamas retaliations to Israeli attacks, and/or in the name of bringing Shalit home without negotiation:

  1. June 28, 2006 – Israel launches an assault on Gaza, dubbed “Operation Summer Rains” and said to be aimed at freeing Shalit. Great damage is done to Gaza’s infrastructure in the first days, including the destruction of several bridges and the Strip’s single power plant, leaving much of Gaza without electricity or running water.
  2. June 28, 2006 – Israeli jets fly a sortie over the home of Syrian President Bashir Assad, an act of saber-rattling directed at the government Israel accuses of being one of the main sponsors of Palestinian militant organizations. The IDF simultaneously “[raises] its alert level on the northern border, mainly for fear that Hizbullah or other groups will attempt to take advantage of the situation and cause an escalation.”
  3. June 29, 2006 – The IDF kidnaps 64 Palestinian legislators and officials from inside Gaza, including eight government ministers.
  4. October 10, 2006 – The UN reports that a total of 256 Palestinians have been killed since June 28, of whom 60 are children. 848 have been injured. Some 355 acres of agricultural land have been destroyed, and 3,000 commercial fishermen have lost their incomes because the Israeli navy will not allow them access to fishing grounds off the Gaza coast. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed and 31 Israelis injured. In response to the operation, Hamas has fired 465 Qassam rockets into Israel.
  5. November 1, 2006 – Israel launches “Operation Autumn Clouds,” focusing its attack on the Beit Hanoun neighborhood which frequently serves as a base for rocket fire into Israel. Over the course of eight days, the UN reports that at least 82 Palestinians are killed and 260 injured, and HaAretz concludes that “the IDF wreaked havoc and terror in Beit Hanoun and left behind hundreds of wounded, as well as destroyed houses, uprooted orchards and a water system that was brought to a standstill. But despite all this, the declared aim of the operation was not achieved and the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel continues.”
  6. November 14, 2006 – The UN expresses its “shock at the horror of Israeli targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians in Beit Hanoun while they were asleep and other civilians fleeing earlier Israeli bombardment.”
  7. February 27, 2007 – Israel launches Operation Warm Winter; between Feb 27 and March 4, Israeli forces kill 120 Palestinians, including 34 children, and 269 Palestinians are wounded. In the course of hostilities, 224 rockets and 49 mortars are fired into Israel; one Israeli is killed and 14 injured.
  8. December 27, 2008 – Israel launches Operation Cast Lead, now more commonly known as the Gaza War. In the first day, at least 225 Palestinians are killed and 700 wounded; B’tselem reports that in the course of the war, which lasts until January 18, 2009, Israeli forces killed 1,387 Palestinians, of whom 773 did not take part in the hostilities and 119 were under the age of 11. Three Israeli civilians were killed by Qassam rocket fire, six Israeli soldiers were killed in combat, and four were killed in a friendly fire incident. In July, the United Nations Development Program reported that it would likely take the Palestinians a year to clear the half a million tons of rubble created by Israeli bombardment and bulldozing in the course of the war. It’s widely presumed (and suggested by official Israeli statements) that the continued captivity of Gilad Shalit is at least one of the reasons for the launch of the war.

************************

Earlier:

Israel/Palestine: the basics.

Israel/Palestine peace advocacy – places to start.

Israel/Palestine – a reading list.

by emilylhauser on June 25, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Israel/Palestine

Posted by emilylhauser on June 25, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/gilad-shalit-and-6300-palestinians/

Buzz kill.

Lately the husband and I find ourselves sharing deeply personal cultural artifacts with the boy and the girl.

The girl and I are working our way through the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books, having not long ago completed the Little House series, and even more recently, the Winnie the Pooh books. In each case, it’s been a joy and privilege to share these pieces of my heart and soul, and in each case, I’ve been stunned by the quality of the work. Of course, it was always quality, but one hears things differently when one is an adult — one gets to see, I suppose, just how genius is The Man/Woman Behind The Curtain.

And the boy has been getting the full wallop of the Lord of the Rings movies. Given their length and complete unsuitability for his younger sister, we’ve had to wait for just the right circumstances, and, this summer, on Thursday afternoons/evenings (c’mon – they’re really, really long! We’re talking extended versions, here!) — the circumstance is right. So last Thursday it was Fellowship of the Ring, today it was The Two Towers, and next Thursday: Return of the King. Huzzah! He’s loving them, we’re loving him loving them — and I am reminded, with nearly every frame, just how brilliant the work is.

Here’s the thing though: Not everything that carries a place in one’s heart is of equal value. Not everything that we might want to share is worthy of it. By this, of course, I mean: John Denver.

My first-ever concert was a John Denver show, and I very distinctly recall being blown away. I went, exactly the age my son is now, all: too-cool-for-school, all: hoping the family friends who’d given me the ticket wouldn’t embarrass me — then going home and writing in my diary that it had been (if memory serves): FAAAAAAAAAR OUT!!! Or something along those lines. There are John Denver songs that I haven’t heard in 30 years, probably, that I could sing along with, word for word, even now.

So imagine my “oooh Pookie I love you sooo much!” moment when I learned, some 18 years ago, that the man I’d fallen in love with, the man who was to become the husband, had also been into John Denver in his youth. Though Israeli-born and -bred, he and his family spent a crucial nine months living outside of DC, where he and his brother got hold of an 8-track player (yes, really) and a vewy, vewy small selection of 8-track tapes, one of which was John Denver’s Greatest Hits. Which they played over and over and over. Oh joy! Oh rapture! We were meant to be together!

Well, meant to be together we were, but neither one of us has been much of a country-folk fan since the days of our youth, and so until very recently, the only John Denver that crossed our doorway was in memory form. Until this week. Until Tuesday.

The husband, in an act of fatherly love, bought John Denver’s Greatest Hits for the boy. This follows on the successful heels of Tea for the Tillerman (Cat Stevens, before he was Yusuf Islam) and Simon and Garfunkle’s Greatest Hits, and even Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony Hearts and Bones, which, while somewhat less successful with the boy, was at least a reminder of the genius that is Paul Simon, even if the boy is not yet (at nearly-11 years old) fully appreciative.

And then: Tuesday. John Denver. Tuesday, and John Denver, and the all-too-human reminder (which, full disclosure: I’m not sure is shared by the husband) that one’s taste is, just occasionally, execrable.

I mean: Ew!

It started off all sunshine and rainbows (or should I say: poems, prayers, and promises) with me singing along, even tearing up a little at “Follow Me” — as I explained to my family (not a soul of whom was alive in the United States during the 1970s and thus none of whom could have known), “Follow Me” was played at every single wedding ever conducted during that decade. It was, for a time, the very soundtrack of true love.

And then, God help me, my ears started to really listen. I started to really hear the lyrics, first of all (“Follow me, where I go, and who I know. Make it part of you, to be a part of meeeeeeeee”), and then the orchestration, and then the heavy-handed, awkward phrasing (some of those lines are delivered so slowly that they fall in different time zones, I swear to God), and then, oh Lord, it was back to the lyrics (“I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky. Friends around the campfire, and everybody’s hi-IGHHHH! Rocky Mountain high, Colorado” –  oy, and etc, and you get the picture).

Wow.

Well, his voice is still beautiful. And I know that those songs meant the world to many, many people — and not just easily impressed pre-teens. I find myself wondering, in an anthropological fashion, about what it was like to be an adult of the era and hear a man singing with great joy and enthusiasm about getting, and being, high (hi-IGHHHH!). I mean, sweet baby Moses, the sunshine makes him high, the mountains make him high, and then everybody gets high again, around the campfire!

Was it revelatory? Freeing? A hint that the brotherhood of man was just around the corner and all would soon be groovy and far-out and loving and, you know, hi-IGHHHH?

Or did it sound fucking stupid back then too?

I’ll likely never know (unless one of my slightly older-than-me readers wants to chime in!). But man oh man, what a lesson in humility. Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Maud Hart Lovelace and Peter Jackson/JRR Tolkien all get to stay in the pantheon — but John Denver?

Dude. Out. On a jet plane, or whatever mode of transportation you may choose — don’t let the pantheon’s door hit you on the way out.

by emilylhauser on June 24, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Entertainment, Mental Rambling, Music

Posted by emilylhauser on June 24, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/buzz-kill/

Good stuff: Sports page.

And if I may, just briefly, if I could have a moment, just, you know:

U!S!A! U!S!A! U!S!A!

That is all.

(I don’t expect WordPress to allow this picture to stay for long, but enjoy it while you can. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! Wasn’t it fucking amazing? Fucking amazing. Whew!)

by emilylhauser on June 23, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Good Stuff

Posted by emilylhauser on June 23, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/good-stuff-sports-page/

Housekeeping: RL blog roll.

A very long time ago,  I said that I would create a dedicated blog roll for people who happen to know me in — as it is sometimes called — meat world.

I have two small blog rolls for the folks from Balloon Juice and Jezebel/The Basement (and if you know me from any of these places and would like to be on the blog roll but aren’t, please let me know!), and a much longer one for the folks from Ta-Nehisi Coate’s site (because for a few days, a handful of us were a little obsessed with creating a TNC Web-Ring, so a lot of names and sites came out of the woodwork) — but apparently, if you actually know me? Like, have broken bread with me, and/or held my hand, and/or sweated out a project with me? NO BLOG ROLL FOR YOU. As I mentioned last night, this may be because I am a lousy friend.

BUT NO LONGER.

Behold, to the right: a blog roll for The Lovely Folks Who Know Me IRL! As with the other blog rolls, hovering over the text of the link will provide you with a brief description of the site. So far it’s a pretty short list – but I’m sure it will be added to in the fullness of time.

Oh, and PS: I’ve also added Ill Doctrine, Jay Smooth’s video blog, to my Smart People roll, a) because he’s awesome and b) because you need to know how awesome he is. He was tweeting yesterday about maybe putting up a new video, but that hasn’t happened yet — fingers ever crossed!

by emilylhauser on June 23, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Housekeeping

Posted by emilylhauser on June 23, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/housekeeping-rl-blog-roll/

Ma, the well’s run dry!

Been a couplea days — I let myself slide yesterday, what with two posts (well – a post and a half) on Sunday, but dude. This is technically meant to be a five-days-a-week affair, is it not?

The problem is that there is nothing that I want — much — to write about. I owe my RL friends a dedicated blog roll, but don’t feel like cutting and pasting and Add New Linking and whatnot. Probably because I’m a lousy friend.

And I appear to have entirely abandoned the MLK blogging — but not really. I was just so incredibly psyched about Strength to Love when I started, and then I hit this chapter that made me go all meh — and, yeah. I often get hung up on meh in my life. I’ll get back to it. Probably sooner rather than later.

And I just finished this terrific book by I Hate to Cook Book author Peg Bracken, a book that the nearly-11 year old boy picked up off a give-away table the other day and said “here Mom, I think you’d like this, it’s by the I Hate to Cook Book author” — A Window Over the Sink: A Mostly Affectionate Memoir — and I loved it and feel this inchoate sense that I’d like to write about it… but the sense is inchoate and hasn’t yet formed much in the way of words.

And I did this focus group thingie today (yes, this is what your friendly neighborhood vastly under-employed writer does to make extra scratch these days) and it emerged that every single person around the table owned at least as many televisions as there were people living in their houses — if not more. And I own one. For four people. And it’s a 20-inch deal. And other than to go: Really? You own SEVEN televisions? I don’t know quite what else to say about that. That I’m horrified? I’m a wee bit horrified. But that’s hardly a post, is it. “I’m horrified” — like: What the hell else is new?

And of course there is: The blockade of Gaza. The endless torrent of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The McChrystal interview in Rolling Stone (and the fact that apparently, the Taliban are loving the American civilian-military tension). The poor, benighted Uzbeks. There is, in short, no shortage of disturbing, distressing, and/or horrifying news out there about which I am sure to have an opinion.

But I just don’t want to write about any of it.

We had hotdogs for dinner on our front porch tonight, and later, when the fireflies came out, I reminded the nearly-11 year old that fireflies always remind me of being pregnant with him. In between, I read from Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill to the nearly-7 year old girl. At a time when I feel entirely at loose ends, they tether me and bind me, to the earth and to them, and I could write again about the depth of my love for and my gratitude to them — but really, that sort of thing is best held in reserve and only hauled out on occasion, right? Plus, their “nearly”s will soon be fact, with the girl’s birthday in a month and the boy’s three weeks thereafter — I’d best save my powder for those eventualities.

And so, for tonight: I got nuthin’. I hope to have somethin’ tomorrow.

by emilylhauser on June 22, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Mental Rambling

Posted by emilylhauser on June 22, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/ma-the-wells-run-dry/

Update – Holla Back Chicago!

Dude, I’m so lame! I didn’t realize — probably because it didn’t dawn on me to look — that there’s a Hollaback Chicago! Here I am, sitting in the environs of the Windy City, and a commenter even says “I need a Chicago Holla Back” — and lo! There is one!

So, now you know, too.

And, for good measure, here’s Stop Street Harassment, which has a global reach (and, not incidentally, Stop Street Harassment is the reason I know about Hollaback Chicago, because they very kindly linked to my earlier post).

by emilylhauser on June 20, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Body, Personal/Political, Social Justice

Posted by emilylhauser on June 20, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/update-holla-back-chicago/

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