Perks of Working at an NGO: Penguin Baseball, or, the Joy of a Fowl Ball

The chair of our board sent this to me yesterday. My best is 319.8 feet. Hers is 293.5.

For $1800 a month, they can't complain too loudly about the penguin honks coming out of my office.

You click once on the yeti for the "pitch" and again for the swing.

I Heart the Alien Tort Claims Act

I read about this in the paper some time ago, but didn't realize the case had been settled until picking up a friend's lefty newsletter at Easter dinner yesterday.

US Corporate Pirates can be brought to some kind of justice, even under a Bush administration.

This Is What You Get

I remember when I thought I was a punk. Well, for my part of rural dairy-farming Jefferson County, I was. I was 14. We didn't even have sidewalks, let alone skater punk culture. I would powder my face white, put on eyeliner, and wear a long black cashmere thrifted coat that blew in the wind and didn't close at all. For Christmas I pinned bells into the hem. They never suspected it was me jingling. Well, I was reading some punk magazine. Actually, it might have been Creem. I don't know if that is punk. But I had a subscription to that and a few other things that I thought were punk. My favorite band was U2, which never was very punk. Not even pre-Boy.

So somebody had an ad in the back of this magazine where if you sent him a dollar he'd send you a doughnut seed. Why didn't I think of this myself, I now wonder. I sent my dollar with the requested SASE, and after a few weeks I got my own handwriting on an envelope in the mailbox. Excited, I opened it, and a crumbled Cheerio powdered out into my hand. Then there was a note making fun of my handwriting, from my anonymous doughnut farmer. I remember being so lonely and attention-starved that I thought this was funny and wished I could correspond with him. Maybe he could be my boyfriend.

So, this is life, right? You know what you're getting into, sort of, and it looks exciting, so you ask the universe-- surprise me! Then in your SASE-- the handwriting reminding you that you yourself are entirely responsible for this-- you find a pale shadow of what you had imagined for yourself. And there are no doughnut trees. There will never be doughnut trees.

And it's entirely up to you if you laugh, or delude yourself into thinking that this is the universe being kind, or delude yourself into thinking this is the universe being cruel. But ultimately it's a trick you play on yourself, right? You get yourself into trouble reading the backs of magazines, so you let your subscriptions run out, and then you still find yourself ordering the equivalent of doughnut seeds on Craigslist 15 years later. You're not punk, you never were punk, and you are not much smarter than you were when you were 14, falling in love with gay boys and weeping over the gravestones of people who died in 1872 named Sophronia and Ezekiel.

But somehow I find that comforting. Today, anyway. I'm glad I still ask people to mail me doughnut seeds.

We all turn out right in the end, right? Like this phenomenally demutated plant, we can untangle the ways the world trains us not to lean directly into the sun, and grow ourselves right. I can be my own doughnut tree.

I Hurt Myself Laughing

The Feline Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics

The injuries from laughing at the Face Down Food Kersplat nearly brought about an untimely demise.

Who Knew Such Hippy Misfits Worked at the Department of State?

Yes, he juggled oranges on stage, and put it in his DOS online bio. Now my coworker, distinctly NOT a hippy, is about to call him. They put his phone number on the website, that's their fault.

I Heart Zora

I don't know what is more renewing than a Zora Neale Hurston Story. I got reminded of this watching the TV production of Their Eyes Were Watching God last night. The morals to her stories just feed the soul, they do.

You can see the picture that I saw on a poster in a grade school classroom that fascinated me so much I starting researching her and reading her books on this Florida Hall of Fame site. I love that shit-eating grin. Alas, the Hurston Museum site -- linked there -- doesn't function very well.

I was and remain amazed that I never crossed paths with her until randomly being captivated by a classroom poster, years after leaving Vassar with an English degree. I found that she had many of my same passions, and was also what some might call a witch. I think you can read "Their Eyes" as a lesson in how every woman needs to be accountable to herself for her own happiness. The deliberate, informed nature of all of the heroine's choices -- to take risks for her own joy -- is what makes it a witchy for me.

Let me direct your attention to a past blog entry related to Zora-- from the week I was celebrating Undead Americans.

A Freed Hostage Nearly Dies Under US Fire

I was going to write today about the delight of having a friend recently "come out" as some kind of non-heterosexual, and the interesting conversations we've been having. I was also going to write about brewing some tea that I bought in 1989 in Moscow, and maybe even tell the story of how the USSR came on to my radar when I was a wee teen. But THIS disgrace has emptied my mind of other, more pleasant subjects.

Was the driver afraid we were trying to re-kidnap her? Did he panic? Did we really warn them? Boggles the mind.