Let's see...if Flanny were a person: my little cold, ruthless, calculating baby. Well, I probably would steer clear of her.
Now, as for Sippy...I think she'd still be nice to cuddle.
My husband has a theory that anytime a church has the word Unity or Unitarian in its name it will be a magnet for lesbians. I don't completely buy into this theory, but I accept its underlying premise that churches of the Unity/Unitarian bent are more likely to welcome people who would otherwise be shunned by more mainstream churches. For instance, at the Church of the Valet, where I worked, there was much heated debate over whether we would allow the gay couples in the church to be photographed as couples in the church's photo directory. No one seemed to object to the people who chose to be photographed with their dogs, but for some folks I guess two happy gay men in beautifully tailored Easter suits was just too much. I don't imagine you get that debate at your average Uni church.
For me, though, the thing that sets Uni churches apart from mainstream churches is their unabashed embrace of all things fruity, marginal, and New Age. Oh, sure, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, they all accept that an Invisible Cloud Being Who Shall Not Be Named spoke to a tribe of Hebrew nomads and rescued them from Egypt through miraculous means, and told them not to eat shellfish or meat and milk or look on their fathers' nakedness or have congress with a woman during her monthlies, and demanded that they sacrifice animals, and in some cases their children, and wanted every man to have his foreskin cut off, and generally sent the Hebrews rampaging, raping and pillaging across the countryside to establish themselve as the Chosen People. And sure, Pentecostals, Nazarenes, Quakers, and Christian Scientists believe that the Invisible Cloud Being Who Shall Not Be Named sent his son--who was also him--to earth to preach peace and heal people. In this case, it sounds like the acorn fell pretty far from the tree. (Could we abbreviate Invisible Cloud Being Who Shall Not Be Named to ICBWSNBN? Or would that sound too much like a frozen yogurt shop?)
But in none of those churches will you find Chakra Bear:
In short, no matter what the lesbian head count is, you can usually count on a Uni church to offer children a lesson in something from the fringe that is more wholesome than mainstream Christianity.
As I mentioned before, I like tea parties. I like hosting them and I like going to them. My niece's birthday tea party was quite nice. We all dressed up, wore hats, and had some very nice, polite tea table conversation. (When the tea served asked if today was her birthday, my six-year old niece said, "No. My birthday is in five days, not including today." She's precise.) The food was quite traditional--chilled soup, cucumber sandwiches, a spinach tart, a scone with clotted cream, lemon curd and strawberry jam, followed by some little cakes. Delish. The tea was not traditional, as the tea house only served Republic of Tea instead of something old-school like Twinings.
After the tea party, though.... I don't know why I expected anything different. After the tea party, my mother said, "It was nice enough, but I could host a better tea party with better food." Then she began to detail all the ways in which she would have improved upon the tea. Yup, that's pretty much the outcome of every experience in my mother's life. She may have enjoyed it, but she could have done better. Now, you all know how crazy competent she is, and often she's right when she claims that she could do this or that home repair project better than anyone else.
That said, after she had her knee surgery, she complained. In short, she thought she could have operated on her knee more successfully than her surgeon. It's nice that she's so confident in her skills, but I wish we were sometimes allowed to enjoy something without being forced to concede that Mom can do it better.
Like a big, lumbering critter, too stupid to run away, I've been tagged again, this time by Secret Heart, and this time I'm supposed to tell ten things about myself. Yeesh. Are there even ten things about me to know? Pardon me while I rummage around in this gunny sack.
1. I am terrified of cockroaches. There was a roach in my office this morning and I begged an elderly professor of Slavic Languages to kill it. I actually screamed when I saw it, because it almost ran across the top of my foot. Me, a rational, educated, modern woman--I screamed in fear over a cockroach. I didn't scream the first time someone pointed a gun at me.
2. If I had been born a boy, my mother planned to name me Peter, after my great-great-grandfather, Peter Depp. (Who built and operated the first electric chair at Ft. Leavenworth Penitentiary.) As it were, I was named after a college, while my older sisters were named after popular soap opera characters at the time.
3. When I was a child, all of my nightmares involved monsters, and specifically, the adults in my life turning into or turning out to be monsters. Now that I'm an adult, all of my nightmares are about home ownership--buying, selling, insuring, repairing.
4. I was once woken from a sound sleep by the smell of a fart. I came awake in a cold panic, thinking "Oh, God, the gas main has ruptured. A sink hole opened under our house and broke the sewer line. What the hell should I--" [sniff, sniff] "Aaaauggh!" The culprit, my husband, slept peacefully through it, but was so proud of himself when I told him the next morning. (I guess that's cheating, as this is actually something about my husband instead of me.)
5. Surprise Vox Hunt attack!
I believe that in the search for freedom, peaceful resistance and violent struggle both have their places. As much as I believe Ghandi's pacifism changed the world and freed India from colonial oppression, I believe that John Brown struck a powerful spark that caused the downfall of slavery in America. The difficulty is in knowing when to choose peace and when to choose violence.
6. I once applied for a job as a topless waitress. The "interview" went like this: the club manager told me to take off my shirt and bra and serve a tray of drinks to a table of soldiers. I did. He said, "You can start Thursday. $8 an hour, cash, plus tips." (At the time minimum wage was $3.25--thanks, Reagan. My mother preferred to pay me to take a vacation that summer.)
7. I'm an evangelical Mac user. I never miss an opportunity to talk about how fabo my Mac is, or to try to convince someone to switch to a Mac. I have been using a Mac since 1987, when I was using an Apple IIe in my college computer lab.
8. It disgusts me when people refuse to accept that the stupidly-dead are responsible for their own stupid deaths. The father of a Cardinals relief pitcher is suing a whole bunch of people, because he can't accept that his son is dead because of his son's stupidity. The pitcher got drunk and crashed into a disabled vehicle and tow truck, but his father is blaming the bartender who served him, the manager of the restaurant where he was served, as well as the driver of the stalled vehicle and the tow truck driver who had come to tow the stalled vehicle. Somebody ought to sue him for having raised a child that stupid.
9. I hate talking on the phone. As far as I'm concerned, e-mail is the greatest invention since the printing press and penicillin. (And what's with everybody going gaga over sliced bread? "The greatest thing since sliced bread"? Like that was so amazing?)
10. I love tea parties. In college, I used to throw tea parties for my fellow grad students, which made me a bit eccentric, but still people came. I served tea, of course, with a variety of biscuits and gateau. Typically I also served a "dare" food item--the sort of thing that only bravest people tried, like adzuki bean cakes or octopus crackers. This weekend, my mother, older sisters, and I are taking my niece out for high tea for her 5th birthday. It's a first, as she is the daughter of my stepsister, and usually my sisters and I aren't allowed to take the kid anywhere by ourselves. Ah, family.
So, have a good weekend, and I'll see you back here next week.
As always, I'm not going to tag people by name, but if you haven't been tagged, and you want to play along, then consider yourself tagged. You're it.
Every year, a mallard duck comes to the courtyard of the school where my sister teaches. The duck lays her eggs and raises them in the courtyard, where the school oblingingly provides her with a small swimming pool, a nesting box, some food, and relative peace and quiet.
I have been working since 8:00 am today. If this keeps up, I will have put in an 8-hour day! That is outrageous--I did not take this job to spend my days working. Damn it!! I need some down time. I spent all morning pushing paperwork to get summer GTA's and lecturers paid. As if that weren't bad enough, I then went down to their offices and discovered that most of them have made no effort to get ready for the impending doom move.
Here in a mere two weeks, the GTA's will all be moving out of their scary, dark, dank basement offices into dark, abysmal offices on the second floor with the rest of the department. For weeks I've been nagging them about getting everything packed. Everything. Today, I go into offices and find desk drawers full of crap, filing cabinets full of files, piles of books all over the place. Now I'll have to go through every office and make sure things are ready to go. Shiftless little fuckers. Maybe their payroll paperwork won't get turned in on time. The good news: I've now found a system to decide who ends up in the tiny, cell-like office right next to the elevators. Ha-ah. Should have cleaned out your desks.
Plus I'm still wasting way too much time on the phone trying to order a piece of audio-visual equipment. Still, no one will return my calls. My last message went like this: "This is Redzilla, from the University. This is my 5th phone call this week. I really need to receive a written quote as soon as possible. If I don't get it by noon on Friday, I'm going to assume you don't want my $2,000 and call someone else." Jerk. I swear, if he were here, I would stab him in the jugular with a ballpoint pen.
I am in a dangerous mood.
Dear Customer Service/Sales People,
Contrary to what you may have heard, I don't really enjoy going on rampages. I'd rather not destroy your peace of mind and the shreds of your self-esteem that you're hanging on to, but I will.
It's simple: as of today, there are 21 business days left in the university's fiscal year. I have about $6,000 to spend. I want to spend it on products you sell, but I can't do that unless you fucking call me back about the software I want to order. Or e-mail me the quote for that very expensive portable LCD projector you promised you would send on Monday. Or fax me the order confirmation for those 14 office chairs I ordered last week.
I don't demand that you like your job. I don't ask that you do it with a smile. You don't even have to ask me how my day is, or wish me a good one. You just have to pretend that you have any interest in earning my money. Pretend that you care whether the company you work for stays afloat. For those of you who are actually lucky enough to have mandatory contracts with state agencies, would it be asking too much that you do the bare minimum of work that your contract says you will?
Again, I don't require anything special, just please, get your worthless asses in gear, before I have to start making destructive and hateful phone calls.
Go fuck yourself, but first, send me the quote I asked for. Okay?
~Redzilla
What is it, my people, that no one seems to want to make money anymore? Plumbers who don't want to fix toilets, salesman who don't want to sell you anything? Have we all gotten that lazy and self-satisfied? This is not the Midwestern work ethic I was promised.
I love free stuff, espesh when it's as cool as this. Right now, you can get free mini picture business cards from a company called Moo Cards, who have just joined vox. All you have to do is add them to your neighborhood and then you can go and get 10 free photo cards from your photos on Vox. Free! (But just for the first 1,000 peeps.)
For more info, go here.
Imagine:
You live in a country, where a certain citizens are being rounded up and taken away. You don't know exactly what happens to these people once the police arrest them, but there are a lot of rumors about their fate, none of them very nice. Every day more and more are arrested. Luckily for you, you are not a member of this persecuted group. You suspect that your neighbors belong to this group, and one afternoon, your suspicions are confirmed when the intelligence police arrive to arrest them.
Although you can hear the police breaking things and the woman next door crying, you step into the hallway and then, on a wave of fear, into your neighbors' apartment. The husband and wife are there with the police around them, and in one corner, nearly unnoticed, you see their little girl. Soon, the police are going to arrest the family, take them away. What will happen after that, you're not sure, but it can't be good.
Can you save them without endangering yourself? How? You have only a moment to choose, a moment to decide, a moment to act. Quickly, what do you do?
Yvonne Collomb, not a Jewess, in no danger herself until that moment, simply stepped into her neighbors' apartment and said, "What is my child doing here?" She took the little girl by the hand and led her back to her own apartment, where she hid her for several weeks, before sending her to a safehouse for Jewish children.
It's always a good idea to be ready, to have some idea what you're capable of and what you're prepared to do.
(For more accounts of people who were saved by another person's willingness to step into the breech to save a child, click on Yvonne Collomb's name and read the comments other BBC readers have added about their own experiences.)
I am a writer.
I know we've been over it before, what with my writer's manifesto and all, but it's nice to say it again, if only to remind myself.
For you, my people, I thought I'd offer a little more than a rehash of my manifesto. I though I'd just offer you what I've written so far today. It's for the novel I'm currently working on, called Lie, Lay, Lain.
As Olivia reached for the front door, the house went from warm and familiar to cramped and hostile. White. In that instant, the house practically screamed, “White people live here!” Of course, all the family photos were of white people, but even the furniture, the quality of light, the smell of piney candles, the ridiculous decorated Easter tree, all seemed so hopelessly, categorically Caucasian. It could only have been worse if it had been December and her mother had been playing White Christmas.
Before she could even speak to Rindell, her father came—all right, fair enough—waddled into the foyer, panting a little from the effort. Oliva swallowed hard and said, “Daddy, this is Rindell James.” In a moment of cowardice, she muffled his name on purpose, making it as near to Randall as she dared. Whitening it.
Her father clasped Rindell’s hand, saying, “Jim Holly. Welcome.”
“Thank you,” Rindell said. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”
Seeing her father’s
raised eyebrow, Olivia checked the handshake, to see if her father was giving
Rindell “the grip.” Could black people
be white-knuckled? She wished she could
thump herself for being so stupid. It
wasn’t as though Rindell was literally black, and it was clear that Olivia’s
father was giving him a crushing handshake.
I'm enjoying the scene, because Olivia has only recently met Rindell in a low-light situation. On their first date, the result of misunderstandings, lies, and guilt, she realizes he's a very light-complected black man. Too late, she has already agreed to invite him to her parents' house for Sunday dinner. So in this moment, she's coming to terms with the fact that she's accidentally started dating someone her father is unlikely to approve of, and maybe even more frightening for her, someone she feels is culturally unlike her. For me, the interest in that moment, is personal. I grew up in a very white town. My 8th grade English teacher, her husband, a local mechanic, his wife, and their son were the only black people in town. It wasn't until I went away to college that I met other black people, and then my junior year, my roommate was black. (He was a half-back on the university football team from Atlanta.) I wasn't even dating him and my family was very weird about it in ways I wasn't prepared for. (Because in a small town where there were almost no black people, prejudice wasn't very visible.) I'm always curious about how other people first encounter diversity, especially on a personal level. The people of another race that you become personally involved with, instead of just seeing at the grocery store--how do you process that experience?
