Whence I Came: My Grandma the Jailbird

Being home in North Nosebleed for a few days always resurrects the ghosts. This time I was collecting my grandmother's ghost stories and recording them for posterity. She is 87 or something godawful close to 90 and her mind is still razor sharp, so there's lots of cool gossip about ghosts to harvest. One of her best is the story of a date gone awry. I'm lining up people to read at a "bad date" themed performance, and I'm realizing my horrible dates have nothing compared to my grandparents' bad date that ended up on the front of the Chicago Tribune and across the country in the radio news headlines, a date that generated hate mail. A quintessential bad date.

My first date was at the age of 12, and I showed up in my finest clothes only to be asked to help with the neighbor's haying. My date and I were out in the afternoon heat hauling in the hay bales. My second boyfriend, me still at the age of 12, didn't really have dating on his mind and so I remember repelling his advances more than any one of our few, bad dates. My third boyfriend was the first in a long series of long distance romances that didn't require as much effort, which worked for me, since I'd figured out before even the first bad date that I was actually a lesbian. Dating women or women-identity-based-creatures didn't start for me until I was 19, far past my prime in the world of North Nosebleed. Now I'm an old maid at 31, enjoying a cup of decaf earl grey, some good wool to knit, and NPR far more than I probably should. Meanwhile, in 1930's Brooklyn, my grandma was being made an old maid at the age of 15.

My great-grandpa Adolph (so named in the same year as the other Adolf-- they were age-mates) had great plans for his two daughters. He wanted to see their names in lights. He was born to poor farmers in Sweden, an illegitimate child to a class-conscious mother, who ran away to the US with the first guy who'd marry her, to try and start the climb to the social top rung. He wanted no man to touch his daughters and put them in the bad position his mother escaped. So he made them pile their hair up in long braids pinned to their heads like some 19th century cameo. The style then was short hair, and cutting her hair was the first thing my grandma did when she escaped Adolph and went to Chicago Theological Seminary (his alma mater, and the furthest away he'd let his daughter go). He also taught them how to box. His youngest, my great-aunt-Mona, beat up-- rather badly-- a teacher for holding her after class... when she was in the fifth grade. My grandma takes a very dim view of boxing, but I like that Adolph taught them to defend themselves-- it feeds my fantasy that I come from some bastard line of Xena Warrior Princesses.

So, when grandpa passed her a note in her Religious Drama class asking her out to coffee, grandma was ready for action. She says she was a Swede who couldn't turn down a free cup of coffee, but I bet she was just aching to make her father jealous. Off they went to two semesters of coffee and strawberry shakes, during which time grandpa made sure his date was aware that he was from a penniless line of Michigan farmers. We had no less than three bankruptcies on that side of the family during the Great Depression. Just the ticket to piss off her papa, she threw herself into the romance and even spent the winter holidays at his family's farmhouse. To give grandpa some credit, he was a handsome devil, the son of another handsome devil. Great-grandpa Frank has a headshot from his youth that looks like a movie star-- dark and brooding and wind-tousled. Grandpa had even more gravity about his dark good looks.

Little did these lovebirds knew what was in store for them the night they went to see Dumbo. It was February 1942. Dumbo had hit the theatres just days before bombs hit Pearl Harbor, three months before. After the news reel, the theatre played a war bonds ad. The ad was a cartoon in which the war bond you could purchase flew into a racist charicature of a Japanese fighter pilot, whose blood then dripped down the screen and became the field of red in the stars and stripes of the US flag. The national anthem rose up in the background of the war bonds spiel, and some people in the theatre stood up and removed their hats. My grandparents, who had a dear friend at seminary who was Japanese, did not stand at this gory display. An off-duty police officer sitting behind them tapped my grandpa on the shoulder, and told them they should stand. They refused and told him why. He arrested them, and sent them to the paddy wagon without escorting them-- leaving them waiting at the jail to be charged while he finished watching Dumbo.

They were later charged with disorderly conduct.

Tomorrow... the story of my grandma's hard time in jail.

World Bank Supports Community Art Project

Albeit indirectly.

Peepers, Stars, and Cow Crap

The land of my birth. I am leaving tomorrow morning to go back to the SF Bay Area to complete whatever next challenges I've chosen for myself. But returning to this place I call North Nosebleed for a few days reminds me that there is achievement in just leaving here. And, if I can find it, still more genius in finding a way to come back, if only in reweaving my life to include this. My father and I went for a walk to remedy the food coma from Mother's Day's all you can eat carbo-riffic buffet, and in the 20 minutes we were out, only one car passed. The stars were so multitudinous we didn't even carry flashlights, and found the neighbor's garage floodlight blinding. The dark swampy fields of May were washed in a thick eau d' cow shit-- the annual beshitting of the fields where the dairy industry would get its hay in July. The new generation of baby frogs we call "peepers" were in full swing. Each song would last about 15 seconds. I have-- for the plane ride home-- numerous MP3's that I recorded from different points around the swamp on our land. Two were leading the peepage, and uncounted quieter thousands of voices kept a gentle pulsing chime going under the solos and duets. When the lead singers paused, it seemed like the stars themselves were providing the undercurrent of shimmering sound.

This makes me happy.

I have a couple of guys working with me on a project whose names are Bob and Doug. It doesn't help that they are both a little slow on the uptake and one is Canadian.

Walking down memory lane via Google, I discovered this factoid about the SCTV puerile purveyors of the federally mandated "Canadian content" that was Bob and Ted's Great White North (from a site devoted to beer):


Canada's fastest supercomputer, used to simulate the collisions of galaxies and the movement of supermassive black holes, is named "McKenzie," after the nefarious brothers. It cost $900,000 to build, which, at the current exchange rate, equals roughly 40,900 Molson beers, sold wholesale.

You can read "important Bob and Doug episodes" here.

A Chance of Inspiration with a Steady Downpour of Frustration by Nightfall

Rest in peace, Marla Ruzicka. My coworker M. remembered you fondly-- he organized your first trip to Cuba, when you were 17. Your friends at Global Exchange are gathering today to share memories about you. I don't think I ever met you, but I very well might have-- and that is something I can be proud of: we ran in circles not that far afield from eachother. Although, reading about you, I must say your field looks like it was always a helluva lot more dangerous than mine. But I was a early-teen visitor of nonprofit offices and collector of pamphlets and subscriber to The Nation and The Economist and Greenpeace and Amnesty International-- but I couldn't get started as fast as hard as you did, since I was living in North Nosebleed, and you were in Northern California. You will be remembered among the bright young stars that fell on my watch:

Terry Freitas who died helping the U'wa defend themselves against big oil while volunteering for Project Underground, where I was also then a volunteer; and

Rachel Corrie, another SF Bay Area leftie -- she died when she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer; and

...the not-yet-gone:

Lori Berenson - who was a roommates with a dear friend of mine when she was in college. I imagine her decorating her jail cell in Peru and thinking about her dorm room at MIT... how far she has gone to stick to her beliefs.

Tonight: more inspiration from the Goldman Awards! Where (as per usual) my organization "knows" some of the awardees.

My Unitarian Jihad Name Is

The Gatling Gun of Courteous Debate.

Anyone surprised?

Lovin' Those Gmail Ads

I have a rendezvous with a web design person -- who I've never met in person-- about a project, and he wrote me the following magic eight words:

You can’t miss me. I have green hair.

And here are the headlines of the links-- based on those eight words-- that Gmail helpfully provided in the margin:

• Remi Cuticle Virgin Hair


• No more Chlorine Buildup


• METROPOLITAN DIGEST
  
  Kansas City Star - 15 hours ago
  A baby was left at Truman Medical Center on Tuesday afternoon, and ...


• Police seek info after body found
  
  Townsville Bulletin - Apr 12, 2005
  The body of the woman, in her early 40s was found at 1.30pm at Rowes ...

Everything is Turgid

I am sorry, but I find this sentence hard to forgive, even in a book with brilliant moments and an interesting premise, and especially as the opening line of a chapter.

She used her thumbs to pull the lace panties from her waist, allowing her engorged genitalia the teasing satisfaction of the humid summer updrafts, which brought with them the smells of burdock, birch, burning rubber, and beef broth, and would now pass on her particular animal scent to northward noses, like a message transmitted through a line of schoolchildren in a childish game, so that the final one to smell might lift his head and say, Borsht?

I'm sure other people found Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" to be a work of unprecedented genius, but I'm here to tell you, it can only be appreciated if you can ignore that his Sasha speaks some horribly fake Ringlish (or Ruslish, however you like), and his non-Sasha narrator spews out some real stomach churners, like that one above.

As I bounce gleefully into the new Eoin Colfer, The Artemis Fowl Files, with my favorite juvie-lit heroine Captain Holly Short!

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.

In Honor of Presidents' Day, I'm Going to Interview my Cat About the Word Lesbian

A women's studies professor friend has asked me to think about the usefulness - or lack thereof - of the word Lesbian.

I can't think of a way to make this more interesting than by putting some socratic questions to my cat, Dasha. She is a stripey tabby girlcat with more than enough brains to figure this one out.

S.S.: So, Dasha, why does sexual orientation need labeling?

D: (Sitting on the computer monitor, facing me) This spot is nice and warm, and might put me to sleep. I hope you don't mind. Now, as Allah says, we have names so that we might better know eachother. If people feel like they need a label so you'll know something important about them (like gender, sexual orientation, or style of stripes), then more power to them. A true tabby has circular stripes on her flanks, which you'll note that I have. If I want people to know this about myself, I call myself a tabby. If I don't, then I call myself "gray" or "tiger."

S.S.: The US anti-oppression movement of the turn of the milennium encompasses a broad range of young people's issues, which go far beyond sexual orientation. If labels are for knowing eachother, and people find other ways to self-identify besides sexual orientation more important (like single/ not-single, poor/ not-poor, punk/ geek/ nerd, unconventional/ within-the-system, Marxist/ Anarchist/ Communist), why do the activists of the 60's feel betrayed by the way "lesbian" has fallen into disuse? Isn't it just a matter of empowering people where they feel disempowered, and not about defending one term from obscurity?

D: (Turning to listen better to the sound of someone dumping their trash in the alley outside my apartment) If I had a catnip mouse for every time someone asked me that. We sort ourselves every day, but often do it without examining the history of the terms we use to do the self-sorting. Or, sometimes, even examining our own personal histories -- and if the ways we self-sort are really accurate. I, for one, consider myself intelligent, but I could allow that my lack of an opposable thumb
and therefore ability to type or hold a pencil and therefore score highly on any standardized tests makes me NOT "intelligent" but maybe rather an "intellectual." I like "intellectual" better, now that I think of it, since it takes power away from those people who measure things like IQ, and height, incessantly.

Anyway. Intellectuals stare squinty-eyed out at the universe and decide their place in it. So do activists. Naturally, young women who love women turning to another word for self-identification is threatening to people for whom the old label "lesbian" still has positive charge. But the people for whom it still has charge-- not all 60's activists, mind you, but international activists who find its clarity of meaning, translatability, and sexy Greek roots appealing-- need to do a better job at dissecting the power of the word and sharing their findings with the young women who eschew it. Without that understanding, women are going to continue to use niche terms like "polybiflexible" or "queer grrrl" - which might serve to best identify them to themselves, but does it really help the people who they want to know them to (in fact) KNOW them? What about that sexy Greek exchange student?

They need to learn the skills of self-reflection to know who they are (first) and also the meanings of the terms they use in a larger context than, say, their campus or girl-clique. "Lesbian" has that broad accessiblity, offers a big umbrella under which sexually-different women have always found some quarter (if only to use the word to thwart interested gentlemen). Buddha says gender is an illusion and sexual desire is an attachment that obscures truth, anyway. Did I answer the questions? I'm a little distracted by the alley pigeons. No, wait, that's just a reflection.

S.S.: Sure, sure, close enough. Young women need tools of analysis more than dictation of what terms are best and most powerful. But "lesbian" does something that those "niche terms" don't do-- it thingafies gender and sexuality in one fell swoop, without allowing for that gray zone that we now can explore with a wealth of new terminology, new theories, new spheres of education dealing with sexuality and gender-- spheres that-- by the way-- are getting farther and farther apart the more we advance into their subdermal meanings. Isn't it too specific? Too rigid to empower young women who are just coming out? Who don't want to call themselves something that-- also by the way-- sounds like a kind of disease, or a person from a middle-eastern country?


D: After this answer I really have to sleep. This computer monitor is just HEAVENLY. You are NEVER getting a flat screen, not on my watch. So, with "Women's Studies" turning into "Gender Studies" and "Lesbian Studies" turning into "Alternative Sexualities" the historically-stigmatized words that invoke society's second-class people--women/ women-loving-women-- are becoming re-marginalized, and might again become used as diagnostic-- not social empowerment-- terms. Aren't young lesbians-- however they call themselves, if they are persecuted under law in some countries it won't be for queer-grrlism, but lesbianism-- losing out on a "safe space" where they could DO that analysis and-- hopefully-- from there learn what other factors marginalize people, especially single women, poor women, sex-workers, etc.? Doesn't "lesbian" still have the force to clear out that safe space for dialogue? Its historical weight doesn't go away with fashion, or with the fear of its stigma (whether that of the right or the left)-- making it invisible makes the history less visible. If anything, keeping "Lesbian Studies" but having the whole first month of study be discussing the historical and present -- national US and international-- usage of the word "lesbian" is in order. MORE focus on the word, not the deletion of the word. In the less-public (than a university catalogue) class room you can choose to abandon the word, but young women who refuse to take a class because it's not "Queer Grrrl Studies" don't have the patience to learn history anyway.

S.S.: Isn't that a little flip? A little ageist?

D: I'm going on six years old what do you want me to say? Run along my little pretties, call yourselves whatever you want? Everyone will just figure out that you're lesbians eventually? Unless of course you change gender and all become straight men?

S.S.: Now you are getting transphobic. You take your nap, I'll get back to you later.

To be continued...

To Brighten Your Friday: The Charming Somerville Gates

As much as I would like to highlight the Poopatorium Gates photo from the Somerville Gates, just for the fact that I think it features a hand-crafted litter box made of - I think - ash or cherry wood, my coworker and I have to say that the Tub Gates photo is our favorite.

For people stumbling upon this from outside the information highway or from inside a cave, The Gates (by Ikea, as Jon Stewart put it) is what those clever Somerville people are alluding to.

What Fun, this Gannongate

Amoral queer sex-workin' capitalist Dem-attacker quits the White House Press Corps amid a brouhaha; John Aravosis' Ameriblog comments--

And they can't even handle a bronze breast on a statue.

Here is the Feb. 10 CNN article, which plays up "Gannon's" resignation from the conservative Talon, and sadly skips the porn website angle. Never mind that, The Washington Post goes where CNN fears to tread. Yeah, Post, you just had to drop in a Deep Throat allusion, didn't you.

The Fishes Really Are Lke The Traffics

I'm finding myself in the "Shark Tale" Pixaresque scene of street traffic as schools of fish swimming by... Today I spent the afternoon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (being a guide to a local visiting-from-Russia former-prisoner-of-conscience environmental celebrity, Grigoriy Pasko) and got into my head all these images of fish swimming in neatly-kept schools crisscrossing and whatnot, which bled all into the long drive thither and back, and then walking on the street tonight in San Francisco... After an evening of whale-related informational discussion and drinking beer with some shark and whale and manatees specialists, Market Street traffic starting looking verrry fishy to me... those sunfish are almost the size of a VW, you know.

You'll be happy to know the Great White girlshark in their outer bay aquarium is still kicking it there at the top of the indoor water-column. Hasn't eaten anyone (important) yet.

When Even the Economists Say We're Becoming a Police State
... maybe it's really time to worry.


"Commodity economies are typically not a pretty sight."