just this

JH

A birdie told me what you're going through. I'm so sorry to hear about it. I don't have really great words to say except the oft-repeated 'stay strong and hang in there'. We'll be thinking about you.

A balanced collection

Perusing Amazon.com this morning to verify some bibliodata (yeah, I could use WorldCat, but Amazon is more fun). And I spy this title:

Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments

... and it's by once-upon-a-time Clinton hack Dick "Wow did my parents name me right" Morris.

So if you put this in a room with the new Scott McClellan "Oops did I tell you I had my fingers crossed while serving as Bush's Press Secretary" book, you have a finely balanced collection. Jeesh.

So I woke up this morning and decided....

1) That if Hillary Clinton thinks it's okay to declare victory and claim better electability based on other peoples' racism, she's immoral and has no business being a public servant. The better course of action is to step back, address the social ill of racism while she's in a position to do so, and stop exploiting it for personal gain.

2) Cory Doctorow's new novel, Little Brother, is Young Adult because it's hamfisted. I'm also surprised and peeved at him for portraying a librarian as someone who is okay with the government gathering massive amounts of private data on citizens and mining it in the name of national security. We like data and its possibilities.... but we love our - and our patrons' - privacy. Wanna watch a librarian foam at the mouth? Mention the PATRIOT Act as it relates to libraries. (And for the millionth time, Laura Bush doesn't count.)

Meet Saffron!

She came home with us on Friday from the Humane Society, and has already settled in quite well. TJ is, well, okay. A little miffed, but not too mad to cuddle with me.

And she's too girly to call Rickroll.

PMR: Madonna, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland: "4 Minutes"

AKA The Cougar Themesong. Hear those trumpets? Yep, it's the Apocalypse.

What the world needs now...

Is an LOL Cats Steampunk Pirate Band.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Can I Has Steam Mateys. Singing delightful shantys such as "Does You Have a Flavor (tick tock)" and "Oh Hai and Ahoy I Upgraded Your Timex".

So wrong, but feels so right

How wrong is it that I want to adopt a ginger tabby and name it Rickroll?

Never gonna give you up....

Another messed up dream

A couple of nights ago I had another broken instrument dream. In this one, I was at a spiritual retreat and participants were encouraged to bring their musical instruments. During a break between sessions, a facilitator started messing around with my sarangi, saying that he had one too. He didn't ask my permission, and he broke my bow. The hair became floppy and useless. I was observing from that strange dream 'I can see what's going on but can't intervene' perspective. Then when we got back into session, he asked me to play as if nothing was wrong.

The facilitator was not someone I knew, and the setting wasn't familiar. I'm just wondering what these dreams mean, if anything. They get me quite upset by the time I wake up, and leave me unsettled for a few days.

PMR: She & Him (or, erm, Her)

Zooey Deschanel, please give Mandy Moore her day job back.
Mandy Moore, please give Zooey Deschanel her day job back.

Thanks, ladies!

Seventeen Years

Fulfilling a promise made years ago to my sarangi teacher in Pune, I finally got to see Aruna Narayan last weekend!

A ha ha ha!

Really messed up dream

One of those dreams with a whole bunch of rolling random things. Somewhere, a mini fig tree was involved. In another part, I got a job as an extra in some movie and somehow spent time with one of its stars, Kal Penn. I was playing a tamboura, and he snapped its neck off. It was a rented tamboura, and I was going to be on the hook for six hundred dollars for it, so I decoupaged the receipt to my fingernail so I could show him that it was not a trifling amount.

And yes, I woke up thinking, I get to have a dream about Kal Penn, but that's it? He breaks my tamboura? Sigh.

a URL that I should register

WowAmIReallySickOfSteamPunk.com

Also, I looked at Remy Nicole on YouTube and feel slightly guilty about the PMR below. It's like beating up a girl scout.

Pithy Music Review: Remi Nicole, "Rock & Roll"

This might have been okay waaay back when it was a demo. It has since been overproduced into being the worst thing on the radio. Cringeworthy.

Isms intersecting

The article that this entry's title links to was something I found on Feministing, a blog I read on a daily basis. It was tucked into a weekend roundup of links.

The author describes a situation in which a neighboring airline passenger crossed her boundaries. In the process, she swore at him, which further aggravated the man. In her writing she constructs the incident, including the reactions of the flight attendants she called for assistance, through the lenses of racial and gender biases.

Here's my problem with her argument: she swore at the guy before he 'assaulted' her. I'm using quotes because she chose not to press charges. She then becomes irate with the flight attendants, who tell her she has the option to press charges but it would require her getting off the flight. The flight attendants repeat the fact that she swore at the man. The writer seems to have no consciousness of the fact that her swearing could be construed as verbal assault. Doesn't excuse the male passenger - he had, after she swore at him, grabbed her arm and threatened to slap her - but as he had already left the row before the flight attendants came, and she was not willing to go forward with pressing charges, the flight attendants have no further obligations than to get the plane ready for flight. This includes getting her to calm down and let them do the rest of their jobs. When the flight gets underway, the writer is in tears, and then she gets upset that the flight attendant comes back to check on her. Because that's maternalistic. She's also quite sure that the entire incident happened the way it did because she's Asian American, and not slender.

So... we have a writer, who won't accept responsibility for her words in causing a situation to escalate, and who you cannot possibly approach in any way if you're white because she's going to find fault with your mindset. You're either with her, or against her. Oooookay.

To me, feminism includes believing that your actions and words have consequences. She chose to swear at someone who was approaching antagonistic behavior, and it sent him further down that path. Saying her words had nothing to do with the outcome is like saying that what a woman says shouldn't matter. Which, had she decided to press charges, wouldn't do her so well in court, would it?

I read the story two days ago and it's still stuck in my craw.

In a much less agonizing story, I had a slightly odd intersection-of-race-and-gender incident of my own yesterday. I was grocery shopping, with both kids in tow, and stopped at the fish counter to get some salmon. It's a local grocery chain, not quite Whole Foods, full of hipster types that also fill my neighborhood. I'm mainly paying attention to my own kids and getting the errands done, when a black man comes by and - I wish I could describe this better - kinda waves his arms at me and then tells me he's just picking on me because I'm a white woman and it was "a white woman thing". Um.... I don't know what body language I was using before this happened, beyond putting the wrapped salmon into my cart. I'm far from being the only white woman in the store. He might be the only, if not one of the very few black men in there. He also happened to be a bit flamboyant. It wasn't antagonistic, but it was just weird. I was thrown for a loop. Mainly because there wasn't a darn thing I could do in equal response that wouldn't automatically label me as a racist or a homophobe. Later, as I was putting my items on a conveyer for checkout, he was came up to the front looking for a checkout line. My line was short, but it looked like he was trying to avoid it. I signaled him over and said I was harmless, really. He said something about 'just messing with me because I had a good smile.' I still don't quite get it - maybe he thought I was someone he knew, and then halfway through realized I wasn't, so his gesture fell flat, or maybe I looked 'safe' to play with because I was toting my two biracial kids with me. I can't do much more than chalk it up to Portland randomness at this point.

Pithy music review: Velella Velella

Velella Velella: Wheeee! Wheeee! (Not all PMRs are gonna be snark.)

Check 'em here. PDXers, go see 'em at Holocene on 2/28.

Pithy music review: Girlfriend in a Coma

If this wasn't by the Smiths, it would have been laughed off the planet.

"I have been in villages in rural Gujurat! I have been a patient in a hospital in rural Gujurat!"

In planning our trip to Kerala this coming November, my husband has been sweating the details of our itinerary. Which town, which hotel, how many days, how to transport from A to B, etc.

And what he keeps asking me is, am I sure I want to visit his family's rural village?

This is bugging me - not the question of whether or not to go; I definitely want to go and would consider the trip incomplete without going. But my husband, who hasn't been in India since he was 3, seems convinced that village life would take me outside of my comfort zone, even though I have been in rural villages before. I'm also wondering if the fact that his repeated asking bugs me so much indicates that (a) he's reluctant but feels duty-bound to go, and would like an out or (b) I am experiencing "I am soooo into diversity! Lemme show you!" whiteyism.

So I keep telling him, I want to go, I am part of his family and would feel awful if we didn't go. Maybe by the time we're on our way there, he'll believe me.

John McCain wants me to break the law

I am getting several calls a day from John McCain, asking for my vote in Virginia's primary.

These calls are coming to my Oregon home phone number. When we moved, we had the "this number is no longer in service, please call this number...." message direct people to my still-Virginia cell phone number, so we don't know how the McCain folks got our home number. We're also perturbed by the fact that these calls come from "blocked number" or "no data" IDs.

In any event, I can't legally vote in VA's primary, and something - like say, a 503 area code - should have clued McCain's databankers to this fact. But maybe he's that desperate that he's willing to take a chance on the possibility that I am not registered in Oregon yet (which, of course, I am).