February 2012
“A lesser person would fall under the intense scrutiny I am facing, but...”
– Josh Powell, textbook narcissist, days before taking a hatchet to his sons’ necks.
Which of these scenarios is more likely?
Yesterday, I had a perfectly civil and cheerful telephone conversation with my mother.
I have, in one night, developed not only an effective AIDS vaccine but also one that guards against attacks by Zombie Republicans
Long-lost identities of slaves uncovered in old... →
Moving stuff. (Avoid comments section if you don’t wish to go blind with rage.) (Unless all the racist comments I flagged earlier have indeed been removed and there isn’t a fresh batch since added.)
NYT: Depression Defies Rush to Find Evolutionary... →
Bummer.
In an adjacent story, The New York Times also reported “Irony is Dead.”
HALP! The kids have seized the remote and are...
This explains the loud squealing I heard at the time (I was, wisely it seems, hiding in the bedroom).
thunderdolt:
I was forced to watch Darren Criss do a MJ crotch grab & eeheehee!
However, I can’t help but point out the irony that the two major rival glee groups sing I’m Bad to each other. No chains? No ginourmous sunglasses? Not a single bandana, adorning a head, wrist, or ankle?!
“No, we are not anti-white… But we don’t have time for the white man. The...”
– Malcolm X, in recently recovered speech from 1961, digitized and to be aired next week.
Brown student uncovers lost Malcolm X speech – USATODAY.com
Netflix's suggested categories, based on past...
Has this been done, meme-wise? (I tend not to register that memes are occurring until they’re quite stale and overdone, so if that is the case here, I apologize.)
Anyway, my top suggested categories:
“Visually-striking Crime Movies”
“Emotional Political Movies”
“Understated TV Mysteries”
“Drug Movies”
“Gay & Lesbian...
The number of books in this house on the laws of...
crammed into already impossibly tiny and awkward spaces (what would be the mathematical expression for rooms in which one can scarcely squeeze a fart sideways due to precariously stacked tomes?) suggests that, while I would like (very much!) to acquire an understanding of how physics works, I do not have that knowledge yet.
HEY, I KNOW! I’ll find some books about how people who hoard books...
I would not be surprised to learn
there are those who have committed suicide rather than get to the quagmire-y bottoms of their respective tax problems, despite actually being owed several thousands of dollars from both federal and state entities going back to, say, 1991.
Unrelated: Someone please figure out my motherfucking taxes LOL/jk, just kill me.
Notes toward a mercifully brief definition of PTSD
: In which one feels, for years at a time, one is always 5 minutes (give or take, depending on triggers at hand) from losing everything, with overlays numbness and hyper-awareness: competing permutations of fog.
Password as mantra or, a short tour of my brain «... →
Zoe, the woman who wrote the above-linked post (daughter of the late Don Finkel, one of my first - not to mention best - teachers at Evergreen) is whip-smart in her own right. Her modest, spare, occasionally updated blog is one of few I manage, these daze, to keep up with, and I suspect she has a brilliant future ahead.
(Shorter V.: ‘Hey! This was an enjoyable post.’)
January 2012
“Geary, the official Republican candidate, refused to abandon his campaign,...”
– Matthew Geary found dead in apparent suicide | Richmond Times-Dispatch
Normally I’m glad to see local Republicans going at each other, but this row got especially brutal, and today, a man is dead, leaving behind a shattered family, and so many talking heads mouthing inevitable mantras of...
“I began this book in the spring of 1987 in the belief that America was passing...”
– Haynes Johnson, in epilogue to Sleepwalking Through History, America In The Reagan Years.
[Excruciating personal subtext: My mother’s mother was the campaign manager for her county during Oliver North’s Senate run. Yes really.]
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I love you, Richmond
But you continue to not be either Portland or Seattle or anywhere between, and I am not sure how much longer I can handle that.
Our youngest is determined* to teach our hounds to...
__
* One might even say she is “doggedly” determined.†
† I am sorry.‡
‡ Now I’m just being a dick.
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Did you buy your new Lamb of God album,...
Inevitable albeit belated reblog on behalf of our homies. (Sweet bonuses: My husband’s name in the liner notes; hearing him squeal with happiness on playing one of the tracks and saying “I remember when this was just a little riff!’ - Because he spent countless evenings over at Mark’s while all this was in development.)
thunderdolt:
“But it’s available online for free.”...
I AM HUNGRY [edit: and also a tad demanding]
Also: To the one of you who is married to me and is more likely to read this on his goddamn phone in the next room than pop his head back here to see if I was still hoping to hold him to that hours-ago promise of dinner: I love you, now please feed me.
(An ode to bean soup) Still My Commode Gently...
It is not only our commode which weeps; we all weep when my husband makes bean soup (although the soup is, itself, delicious, in spite of its consequences that inevitably follow).
thunderdolt:
I look at the wall see the roll there that’s cringing, while my commode gently weeps. I leave the bathroom and the fan is still blowing, still my commode gently weeps.
Decades after the fact, I realize Chrissie Hynde...
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“Should we feel weird about the computers and phones we use, all the clothes that...”
– Ira Glass, citing and quoting Paul Krugman, This American Life (Ep. 454: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory).
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The teenager wants to volunteer with a peace...
Whatever happened to peace begins at home?
I have no doubt (having met one of the organizers - himself a survivor of genocidal campaigns in neighboring Burundi) that it’s a good and trustworthy project,
But - see - if it’s ‘peace studies’ she’s interested in, she could simply stay here and try to get along with her sister. This - in addition to being loads cheaper...
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My 11 year old is saying something about a Jersey...
and I must have passed out because I can’t remember anything between the Jersey Shore thing and now, when she’s talking about girls in the locker room and their various methods of bra stuffing and WHO IS THIS KID AND WHERE DID SHE PUT MY BABY GIRL?
The Kindness Swear Jar →
No way I’m going to stop cussing like a sailor, but this is pretty fuckin’ cool: donations benefit the Richmond Organization for Sexual Minority Youth (ROSMY).
"Shorty Ray," the Gospel Chicken House beagle... →
Web meanderings being where they are, I have no explanation for how I ended up on the website for a local ministry, “The Gospel Chicken House Express.” (Yes it is really called that.) Then I ended up reading this story of Shorty Ray, the ministry’s resident beagle, who could
…howl any part, bass, tenor and any in between. It didn’t matter if he was invited to the stage...
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Thank you, autocorrect
for offering “pornography” as an alternative to my correctly spelled colporrhaphy, because that correspondence concerning “surgery to repair the anterior or posterior vaginal wall” WASN’T AWKWARD ENOUGH.
“A day after they took control of all of Richmond, Virginia Republicans began to...”
– Va. Republicans assert themselves - The Washington Post
“Took control of all of Richmond” = THIS STATE IS SO FUCKED.
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So, I finally started physical therapy.
Hardest thing thus far: Realizing the extent to which I had been using dissociation as a means to block out pain.
That is: I’m not actually in more pain than before I started (it might even be less), but I’m 3,000 times more aware of the pain (and 7,000 times more hyperbolic).
So it’s great, and it’s awful. ‘Great,’ at least, is gaining ground on...
“‘Moderate levels of exposure to marijuana don’t seem to have any...”
– Pot smoking not so harmful to the lungs, study finds
Asthmatics with severe fibromyalgia rejoice! (I hear.)
After yet another mother-daughter discussion about...
me (dreamily): Tina Fey is a national treasure.
teenager: I want to meet her. No-- I want to hug her.
me: Maybe meet her first.
Twitter as parenting tool: When the now-almost-12...
What I said: “Brush your teeth and prepare for bed.” What she did: Coated various items in the bathroom with Vaseline. Close enough, right?
— Victoria Marinelli (@vmarinelli) November 9, 2009
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Randonesia: Blabbering mouths, the rotting corpse... →
Two things:
If you thought the person (known variously as “Randy,” “D. Randall Blythe,” and “D.,” among other monikers) responsible for the Cookie Monster vocals on a series of recordings in a hardcore metal genre couldn’t also have a great deal of serious thoughts in his noggin, you were wrong, as the 7000+word below-linked post indicates. (Also, see...
Conversation fragment I wasn't sure, in my sleepy...
Him: No, no - I don't mind making the coffee. But first, does Tumblr know you're a hasbian?
Me: Thanks. And yes, of course they know. [*rubs eyes*] Wait-wwwhat?
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Nation & World | Rape redefined for FBI to include... →
1. Yay, but also
2. How in the hell was this not already policy?
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I miss my mother's cornbread.
There, I said it.