Conversation overheard in next cubicle, moments ago:
Speaker A: "Can you imagine him in jail? How would he even handle that? He'd be like somebody's trophy wife."
Speaker B: "Nah, I think they'd be, like, in awe of him. Because they're like, from the 80s, y'know?"
....
....
Speaker B, thoughtfully: "He hasn't aged well, in the last ten years."
...where I write about how I haven't been writing.
Phew, I'm glad that's over.
Coming soon --- as in a few hours, as soon as I get home and fire up the Dell --- Antonio Bandares' penis,* Ghetto Etymology, and more. Not that much more, but more.
*Maybe that'll get me some google hits, huh? Huuunh? Come to me, internet perverts! Let me amuuuuuuse you!
Puzzle Pirates is killing me. But the sloop's on order. I hope she's a pretty color.
These words will make sense to so few people. But I think I'm okay with that.
The other day I had a personal record, Worst Song-Stuck-In-Your-Head Playlist:
Theme song from Bosum Buddies
2Live Crew, "Me So Horny" (just the chorus)
"I Don't Know How to Love Him," from Jesus Christ Superstar
That last one I had to learn in 8th grade chorus. They carefully de-emphasized the fact that Mary Magdalene didn't know how to love Jesus because she was all about the Uhhnn! Double Up! Uhhn! Uhhn! and He was all about the God. And the foot washing.
I just noticed the thematic link between the 2nd and 3rd tracks. Way to go, brain! My subconscious is churning out subtext like so many widgets.
Today is much better; today I've had me some Marvin. "What's Goin' On," to be specific.
It occurs to me that it might be amusing to chart such permutations in my mental Muzak; 'stead of a smily face, I can have my own little Freudian mood ring, off in my sidebar.
The sidebar needs fattening, anyway; you feel a little disappointed when it trails off after the second post down. Sidebars are comforting; they travel with you as you plunge further back into the archive of whatever blog you're reading, functioning as a potential escape hatch for when the site you're reading gets boring. And as a careful display of intellectual knick-knacks which reassure the vistor of the proprieter's good taste in friends and admireds. So, for the sake off good impressions, I really feel I ought to lengthen mine. Especially since I can't find a way to make the damn thing not poke itself 20 pixels deep into the banner when rendered in Mozilla. (All this desperate fluffing does remind me a little of the young married woman despairing over the arrangement of the mantelpiece in Dorothy Parker's "Too Bad." Go, read it, just so you understand this parenthetical. You can thank me later, because Dorothy Parker's just that good.)
So, in goes Marvin, tucked under the email, and who know what's to follow him tomorrow. Hopefully something mildly confusing and amusing. Or if not, maybe I can inflict my irritations on the rest of the internet. Quick, hum the Theme Song from Mission Impossible. Or Batman.
Psst. Are any of you my willing slaves yet? Has nothing the Simpsons taught me been true?
Reading Dear Raed again today ... Raed himself posts there now, he's a little scattered, but brilliant....my favorite bit was when he compared the U.N. to a rodeo clown, and he's right in so many ways...hop over the fence when the cowboy gets thrown and distract the bull, and as soon as you have his attention, run, run, run away....the world's most thankless job, all the danger, none of the glory, and never really vanquishing your foe.
But what really grabbed my attention was this post:
"But unexpectedly, the thing that made most of the hair on my head stand .. like some one being shocked by the so-called electricity, was when I heard the news about France and Belgium taking these ultra-stupid-shallow-decisions of veil / hijab !!! what the hell!!
"I mean .. I find myself forced to criticize my secular tribe!! What the hell are you doing there??? This is not supposed to be OUR part of the game
I lived in Saudi Arabia for four years, in a small city in the south called Abha. And there .. the medieval-stupid-shallow-corrupted-government used to send religious men called “mtawwe” to insure all women will cover their bodies and look like black tents, I remember my mother – the sophisticated feminist engineer – putting that black thing on her, covering her head and face, to the point that no one can tell in which direction was she standing, these are the people whom WE (me and my secular cousins) must teach how to live and understand life...."
This is the thing that occupies so much of my mental real estate lately: What do the words My People mean? Can they ever not mean?
This is the thesis of globalization, the idea those who are awed by it think it proves, that the world gets smaller and your reach gets longer, so long that you are, in the end, untethered to all that used to shape, and sometimes crush, a person's dreams --- the circumstances of family, class, place, sex. Now, it seems, all that matters is what you like, for that proves what you are like. You can live your whole life in some Thornton Wilderville outside Omaha, and spend your leisure cybering a fellow transexual Buffy fan from Nairobi.
And yet. And yet there is still something to those words, my people. Something that makes a kid like Raed, who snarls with contempt at the memory of his Mom in a chadoor, to boil up at the idea of the French and the Belgians banning the hijab. And it's in those words, in their meaning, in what we mean when we say them.
I'm American, and I care more when Americans die. People I don't know, will never know. I care more when annoymous Americans die far away from being blown up than when the same number and kind of people die in a house fire five miles from me. Maybe this is mere self-preservation; perhpas I am merely, really, concerned with how such things affect my chance of being blown up, should I choose to go far away. Perhaps. But I don't think so; I think it's more than that. My people.
My people. It means what I am; the qualities I share and that shape me, and that I cannot disavow. The parts of my identity I can't lose. Not even if I hang out in chat rooms at midnight, pretending to be somebody else.
This is what I want to go to Ireland for, to test the limits of that phrase, my people, to find out what it really means....
But I really need to quit talking about myself, even though that's aginst the blog rules.
P.S. I'm not really a Buffy fan, by the way. Nor a transexual. Sheer hyperbole. Hi Mom!
On a scrap of napkin from a cafe in the Sixteenth, four years old at this point,
....I sometimes wonder if it is not the ambition of every woman in Paris to become one of those grand old women, walking along with their head held high and their umbrella low, and the day's captured treasure rolling gently along behind them in a silver hand cart glistening with rain. They are magisterial --- it is their city, the rest of us live in it. It is the ghosts of their lovers who walk the streets, whose pale cold shoulders brush past us, invisible, and make us shiver with romance. Only they can see them now, those old woman...
Now I can throw out the napkin.
So I got this blog a couple months ago, becuase I wanted to get into the habit of writing everyday, and coming up with inane natterings to please and amuse the random web-surfer seemed like a good way to do it.
Hmmm. You know, when you put it like that....
I slacked, I admit, in the run up to the holidays. Attempting to get back on track in late December, I discovered that my hosting company made an eensy-weensy change to thier server. Which deleted the database containing my Movable Type username. And so I couldn't log in, and as they brusquely informed me, would have to re-install Movable Type.
Which I tried to do. Deleting the password that allows me to transfer and manipulate the files on the website at all, in the process. Oopsie.
They fixed that right quick --- I think it was, what, three days? I finished the re-installation the following weekend. Then we had two weeks of back and forth missed phone calls and unanswered emails, considering the topic: "Does it not work anymore because I'm having a problem with my MySQL database, or does it not work anymore because I don't have a MySQL database?"
Last night I finally figured out a workaround. So, I'm back.
See above.