Katie: I love you

Katie, after almost ten years of refusing to see me, yes, it would be hard to reconnect. But worth it. I love you.  You love me.  Yes, it will be hard. Come back.  You can give me contact info in the comments on my blog.  Kiss kiss.  Life can be hard. You suck it up and get over it and then life is happy again.  Come back.

geek but not in a good way

I sometimes fantasize that I would like to be a tech geek, and when I say 'tech geek' I mean someone that knows about software coding, like maybe a software engineer or someone would could be involved in creating very cool online games, not so much the visual coding but the strategy coding, which, for all I know, might be the same kind of thinking.

But I have to settle for feeling like a savant when I do something like I did today:  I set up my Airport Express wifi connection in my apartment. And then, in the same time frame in which I was tinkering with the wifi toy, I got another delivery from apple:  a new battery for the laptop.

Basically, you plug in the wifi gizmo, pop in the CD with the software, hit install, then continue continue continue until the wifi is turned on in your laptop. For the battery, you open the laptop, pop out the old, slide in the new, walk around the corner to FedEx to send the old one back so apple doesn't gouge me $129. My old battery under warranty but they will charge me if I don't turn it around fast enough. Technically I had ten days from the day it shipped but the turnaround mailer said I had one day so I got all obsessive compulsive and I had to march down to FedEx asap (as soon as possible). I kinda hate it when I get obsessive like that about a very teeny tiny unimportant thing. If I had waited a few hours, or a few days Apple would not have cheated me. But, whew, it's over. I sent it back.

I bought a refurbished laptop. I wonder what happened to my machine before it came to live with me. The battery never worked right. The big buzz with macbook pro lithium batteries was six to eight hours of battery life but I never got more than an hour or so. It didn't matter much cause I haven't been traveling and I always take my plug. But it matters. It was defective. I called about the battery once, when the machine was new, and the service guy cajoled me into giving it time. As if the battery would what, fix itself?  I get it time. I gave it a year and a half and lately the battery life was, no kidding, about ten minutes. Unacceptable, even in a 1.5 year old battery.

So I talked to apple a few times. A guy told me how to recalibrate the battery. Basically, you charge it to the max, then you let it go to sleep on its own once you unplug the power cord and then you let it sleep at least five hours. In other words, I had recalibrated that frakking battery daily for months cause I charge it daily, snuff it out daily, and then let it recharge overnight. But the guy promised me that if I did it one more time and the battery still didn't work, I'd get a new one. So I obeyed him. Then I called, using the work order reference number Apple gave me, and the new guy starts analyzing the problem all over. The new guy didn't even bother to check the old work order. The new guy had me turning the machine off and on, holding down many buttons, opening and shutting. Pissing me off.  He even made me repeate my home phone. I said "If you have the work order from the last time I spent an hour on the phone with an apple service tech, why do you need to ask for my phone number again?  It has not changed since two days ago?" And I said "The last guy said if the recalibration didn't work, apple would send me a new battery. How long do I have to play with you to get you to do what the last guy promised?  Do we have to do all the same stuff again first?" And then amazingly, tech guy #2 said "Okay, I'll send you a battery." And he did.

This battery has always been hinky. I hope the new one works. But if it doesn't, then it is the machine.

This machine must have had some initial malfunction, something to cause it to be refurbished. I have already gotten a new motherboard, which is like a whole new computer, right? And then the dvd/cd drive had to be replaced. It would not play music.  So maybe something is wrong with the on-off-power something. So far, the new battery acting strange. When I first plugged it in, my computer indicated it would take 1.17 hours to recharge it. Now, two hours later, the computer indicates it will take 1.25 hours to fully recharge. What is wrong with that picture?

Anyway. I feel like a tech smartie just cause I hooked up the airport express and popped in the new battery.  Woo-whee, look at me. Geek grandma. I should be a grandma. I covered that the other day.

I should be a grandma

In a way, me being a mother was all about being a grandma.  I was born to be a grandma.  I bring many qualifications to the table, of course, but I think I would make a super stellar long-distance grandma. I totally rock the whole concept of gift boxes.

If I had a grandbaby right now, for example, I would be sending the Rosemary Wells boxed-set of stories called "Voyage to the Bunny Planet".  This was originally a set of three tiny books about bunnies, which came in a box. It has since been published as one book, with three stories, but the tiny box with three tiny books is best. Clearly, Wells is riffing off the Peter Rabbit stories, which also have a history of being published in teeny, tiny books with beautiful illustrations. Bunnies are adorable.  The Peter Rabbit tales do other adorable animals, like Jemima Puddleduck. And cats are involved.  But bunnies are probably the cutest of cute animals. And bunnies are all about Easter, although sure, chicks are also cute.

Bunnies. Spring time cometh. Easter is next month. It is time to be reading about bunnies to children you love.

But I aint got any babies or bunnies, no anywhere there. Come to think of it, this would be a perfectly good time to get into Winnie the Pooh. A.A. Milne did a couple books of children's poems that rocked my childhood. One of Milne's kid poetry books was "When We Were Very Young" and the other one "Now We Are Six".  Both books are awesome. At the end of one of those books, the kid in the poem wants a rabbit but there weren't rabbits anywhere. So, moping, he goes for a walk to the end of the town and there are rabbits everywhere.

Blah blah blah.

Rosemary Wells does a contemporary spin.  Her bunnies are just as adorable as Beatrix Potter's rabbits but the stories are more contemporary.  Potter started out, I think, as a nature illustrator.  Wells is also a gifted illustrator but her stories have more lightness for me.

And when you have a dumpling toddler you love sitting on your lap and you read First Tomato, life is perfect.  And you might as well talk to the plumpling about growing tomatoes and talk about the garden. It is time to be planting tomatoes, at least where I live. Where I raised my dumpling, it is too soon to plant tomatoes but not too soon to begin imagining the garden for the year.

There are many fun aspects to growing tomatoes. What is the most important?  Hard to choose, but in this moment, I wish I had a toddler on my lap. I would talk to him about the magic of planting a microscopic seed (maybe explain that word:  it is so much fun to explain everything to a smart child), put it under the top of the ground, cover it, water it. And then ask the child to imagine what the seed will do. Does it get wet?  How does the seed respond to the wet, to the soil, the dark? Does the seed feel itself changing? What would change first?

At some point, we know, a tomato seed responds to its environment. It changes. How do such changes begin? What happens first? And then what happens next?  How does a seed grow? How does a seed change from being a seed to being a tiny plant, to rising up in the soil into the sun? Does the plant long to feel the sunlight, is that what makes it grow out of the dirt? How does the urge to feel sunlight get put in the seed?  Magic?  Love? Spirit? Think about it honey, for this is the story of life.

These are the kinds of things I would natter about to any grandbabies on my lap.

I am not lonely for grown ups. I am lonely for children.  I have a lot to tell some lucky kids.  Kids would be lucky to know me.  And if we found ourselves talking tomatoes early enough in the day, we might go out and buy some and make something with tomatoes.  I am thinking I'd like to make tomato soup from scratch and have grilled cheese sandwiches. What would we have to buy? The child (or children) and I would work this out.

What a great day that would be.

An old friend just visited. She has two granddaughters, age two and four.  I am not exactly jealous.  I am glad my friend has those girls in her life.  Where am I going to get a grandbaby?  I'd even take a boy.

leftovers

I had some leftover spinach paneer, some yummily creamy spinach with yellow lentils, from a takeout order.  And I had some not-bad frozen falafel from Trader Joe's.  Neither was enough for dinner but together, wow.  I just had one of the most satisfying leftover dinners of my life.  Was I unusually hungry? Is my body signaling to me that she craves more vegies?  I placed it all in one large shallow bowl, positioned falafel patties all around the spinach goop and lightly zapped. Then I mashed the falafel. Yeah, boring blog post but oh my gosh this was tasty. The spinach thing was very spicy. The falafel was a little dry and more texture than flavor. Mush them together and you had a frakking great casserole-y thing. Upper Midwest Lutheran potluck with Indian and Middle East seasoning.

I want more but it's all gone and it is two a.m.  I do have some frozen spinach stuff, also TJ, but I'm not hungry.

I am boring but, trust me, this was a very tasty meal.  I want more right now.

Chuck-the-fuck

I have a brother that I reference as Chuck-the-fuck. Chuck was (and, I am sure, still is) a bully when we were kids. The oldest child of what eventually became six siblings (with two preemie babies that did not survive infancy so those little girls never experienced Chuck's bullying), my parents seemed to feel helpless to do anything about Chuck. Boys will be boys.

I have four brothers. I was the second kid after Chuck-the-fuck. I didn't start calling him Chuck-the-fuck back in my childhood.  I don't think I ever said the word fuck out loud until I had left home and even then, never at home. Good Catholic girls don't use profanity and I was a good one.  Except for profanity, I still score as a good Catholic girl, in the sense that I actually follow all the rules. Well, I don't go to church or confession, those are still mortal sins, I guess. Never mind. If I edited myself, I'd delete this paragraph because I have digressed. This essay is about Chuck-the-fuck.

In our grammar school, an 8th grade rite of passage required every 8th grader to give a speech about the person they most admired in history. I graduated the 8th grade in 1967. Chuck in 1966.  I suppose it was a sign of the times, pre-feminist consciousness in my life, because it never occurred to me to choose a woman. I can remember reflecting on what seemed, at the time, to be a portentous, meaningful choice. Which figure in history would I pick?! I never considered that there were any meaningful female history figures. That's sad, eh? And later, at my all girls' high school from 1967 to 1971, I don't remember any introductions from the nuns to the possibility that women had ever done anything important. The contemporary female issues that roiled our school was the new birth control pill, which the nuns seemed determined to keep all of us Catholic girls from using. Ever. We also debated the Vietnam War. I confess, with chagrin, that I happily advocated for the war. I remember talking, in my history class debate my sophomore year, about how we had some kind of commitment to support the French in Vietnam, so we had to fight there. I never gave a thought to the slaughter. I only analyzed the war in terms of the treaties my history book presented.  I don't remember doing any other research, other than Encyclopedia Britannica. And EB talked about our treaty with the French.

When my kid was in high school and had to write papers, I took her to the library. Gosh, I worked in a library all through high school. I knew how to do research. I always loved libraries. But I have always had a black and white tendency to do things in rigid form.  If my teacher had assigned us to do research at the library, I would have, but that was not assigned. I don't remember being encouraged, ever, to think independently. As a black and white thinker, I needed someone to tell me to be flexible. Maybe?  Maybe I am manufacturing retroactive justification for what I readily concede was my considerable naivete in my teen years.  I also acknowledge that I went to a mediocre high school.  I don't think my school expected its graduates to go to college. I know that most of my friends only saw college as something to do until they married. None of my closest friends expected to finish college.  My best friend and I had a bet, as we graduated, about who would drop out first. I can honestly report that I bet twenty bucks that I would graduate in four years and would not consider marriage until beyond college. My best friend bet against herself, at least I thought she did. She bet that she would drop out after one year, having landed her man. She and I lost touch.  I don't know if she graduated.  I remember her declared major, that she chose as soon as she got on campus. She announced that she was majoring in something related to fashion design.  I don't remember how I might have responded to her announcement to her but I remember being appalled. First, she had never voiced any interest in fashion or design in four years of being best friends in high school. Where did she come up with that? I asked her that, I think. She said her advisor had asked her to talk about what she liked to do and then the advisor had suggested fashion design as a major and that sounded right to her.  I hope I didn't say to her, but maybe I did, maybe this is why we lost touch with one another, but I remember being shocked.  I was at a liberal arts college, looking forward to studying art, philosophy, literature, culture and history.  I gave no thought whatsoever to tying my studies to a job. Such an approached offended something in my beliefs about a college education. What was she going to do with a year of fashion design? Remember, she expected to drop out of college after no more than two years to marry and have babies.  I have dreamt about this friend countless times.  I have a recurring dream about her. In this dream, I learn that her parents were secretly very wealthy and she never had to earn money and that was why she didn't care about finishing college.  In this dream, she leads a mysteriously prosperous life, traveling a lot, free of all financial cares. Over and over, she and I, in these dreams, try to reconnect but we never do.

Gosh. I digress.

So. When my brother Chuck-the-fuck was in the 8th grade, he chose Adolf Hitler as the man he most admired in history. I found out about this because one of my girlfriends who lived next door was in the 8th grade. Ellen. I was buddies with both Ellen and her sister Nancy who was my age. Ellen told her mother about Chuck's speech choice when I was in their kitchen.  I was instantly mortified, but tried to hide my uneasiness. I mentioned it to my folks, but if they ever discussed it with my brother, I never heard about it. Which means they probably didn't because Chuck would have punished me for interfering in his life. So I concluded that my folks ignored that choice. And Chuck gave that speech.

Chuck was that he admired Hitler because Hitler favored the Aryan race and our Celtic ancestry made us Aryan.  Chuck's teacher must have known, in advance, that Chuck was going to talk about Hitler. This was not long after WWII.  We, obviously, didn't have any Jews in our Catholic grammar school. But we had lots of refugees from Eastern Europe in our neighborhood, like Poles. Lots of Poles and immigrants from Slavic countries. Not many of them came to our school.  I assumed, at the time, that the waves of immigrants that moved into our neighborhood weren't Catholic, because even poor kids could go to our school. This was in a heydey of Catholic schools in Chicago. Our school was stuffed to the fills with post-war baby boomers.  Every grade had three classes and each class had, no kidding, fifty or sixty kids.  Virtually all the kids in our neighborhood that were Catholic, even the poorest ones living in then-quite-rare single mother households, divorce being very rare, esp. for Catholics in the fifties and even the early sixties, went to Catholic school.  Only one family on our block, and nearly every house on the block had kids, went to public school. That mom was a widow with 10 kids.  They were very poor, that family, but that's not why they didn't go to Catholic school. The reason they didn't go to Catholic school was much, much odder than poverty:  they weren't Catholic! They were the only non-Catholics I personally knew in my grammar school era.  Now I am wondering if the Polish kids on nearby blocks might have been Jewish?  I don't know anything about Polish history emigrating to America. I have a vague understanding that Hitler slaughtered a lot of Jews in Poland. Or did he just slaughter Poles in general?  I don't know.

I don't remember hearing anti-semitism in my household growing up.  I heard plenty of casual racist talk about blacks. Gosh, in those days, most white people referred to blacks as niggers and it was not really seen, in my white world, as a racist way to refer to African Americans. That was the vocabulary.  But in my household, my mother forbid us to say nigger and she constantly complained when my dad used the word.  My dad was an average civil-service (equivalent, in Chicago, to being a good union man) precinct captain whose livelihood was dependent on the Chicago political machine: dad delivered Democratic votes on election days and dad got his kids pleasant summer jobs at public libraries and dad got maximum promotions in his civil service career. He also had to pass exams to advance but once you made the list, your connects greatly influenced the jobs you scored. There were good locations for his work and bad ones. Dad got the good gigs.  A very long battle with my parents revolved around dad's civil service politicking. Dad's connects were only good in certain strata of the city.  My dad deliberately failed some civil service exams to avoid a promotion because there were no jobs at the higher grade where he already worked. My dad loved where he already worked. That first place was filled with guys from his old neighborhood, like his home town. If he got promoted, he would have to move to a facility with all unfamiliar co-workers, including more black civil engineers. My dad was a civil engineer for Chicago. He had the same job, I think, that Michelle Obama's dad had with the city, actually.  I actually bet that my dad new her dad, because when mom won this fight and dad passed the test and got promoted, I am pretty sure he was transferred to the same plant where Obama's dad worked.  Gosh, the things I remember. If I were to tell this stuff to my sister, who was born the week I graduated from the 8th grade, she would say "How come you remember all this family history and I don't?"  Um gee, maybe cause you weren't born for some of it. We actually moved away from that parish the year my sister was born.  My dad resisted that move, too. He loved our old neighborhood.  But my mom prevailed. And then we all found out, part of mom's motivation had been to engineer her escape from the marriage.  She knew she wanted out. She anticipated only taking the three youngest lids with her into her new life. She bought a house that she thought would be easier for her to take care of when she got it in the divorce. Our old house was a gigantic barn, with a rental apartment.

I am way off course.  I was writing about Chuck the fuck.

Chuck worshipped Hitler. And I don't think he was faking to be outlandish, although at the time, I remember trying to convince myself that he had chosen Hitler just to be obnoxious.  I didn't know much about Hitler. My Catholic grammar school and high school never discussed the Holocaust. Ever.  I got lots of Holocaust at college.  My undergraduate program had a much-touted Freshman Humanities requirement:  all freshman took these classes and studied the same books, heard the same lectures and then met in small groups for discussion and paper writing. And the Holocaust was a big part of that. We watched the films showing what American soldiers found when they got to the death camps, seeing endless mounds of human skeletons, seeing the ovens, seeing the endless hovels that housed endless streams of innocently slaughtered humans just because they were Jewish.

My dad fought in WWII. My parents both followed the course of the war along with the rest of America.  They had to have known that Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews.  How could they let Chuck give a speech about Hitler as the man he most admired in history?  I guess in 1966 Catholic world, there was not much empathy for genocide. And, of course, the Catholic Church enabled Hitler in some meaningful ways that the church long refused to acknowledge.  Maybe my parents were blind and clueless.

But Chuck wasn't.

Later, after my parents divorced, Chuck lived at his college campus during the school year but with my dad in the summers, as I did.  In those long summers (long living with Chuck), he would pace up and down the length of our house talking manically about Hitler, the superiority of the Aryan race, the superiority of Chuck's ethnic background. I never really listened to him so I can't explain his position but Chuck seemed to take much comfort in endlessly assuring the rest of us that, according to Hitler, we would have been considered Aryan and safe from genocide. And this proved, in Chuck's rationale, that we were superior. Because, he said, people just didn't understand what Hitler was trying to do. He didn't want to erase Jews. He just wanted to ensure the human future by only allowing superior people to live in the future. It was basic jungle law. Survival of the fittest.

Then, as Chuck moved through law school, and I moved through law school and I went home to Chicago less and less and less, mostly to avoid him, he married and moved his wife into dad's house. And he still would pace up and down the house, talking endlessly and subjecting everyone in the house to his rants. It was crazy behavior. Manic. Definitely manic. 

I tried to get my dad to forbid Chuck from unloading his ranting on the rest of us. Couldn't dad make Chuck stay in his room when he felt a need to rant?  Dad did allow me the privacy of my bedroom but he couldn't stop Chuck from pacing and ranting.

A California winter storm

I lived on the 6th, top floor of a building with downtown, a block from BART. I was aware of the lightning for a long time before the downpour. And the downpour quickly turned into hail. I could hear it pounding on the roof, down the sides of my building and into our courtyard. My windows, in a new (2 years old) building, rumbled from the wind.
It was actually pleasantly thrilling to experience nature in such high energy form. But I lived in the Upper Midwest (Minneapolis) most of my life, in a three story Victorian. My first floor was a rental unit and I became accustomed to living ‘up’ in my two-story home. I had a two-story atrium with windows all the way to the top, plus many skylights on the roof. All the windows were privacy windows, position so my near neighbors could not see into my home, nor I into theirs so I never covered the windows and I loved the feeling of being perched ‘up’ in the rain, snow, sun, shadow, and wind.
In the summer and fall, the house was densely shaded by the 110+ year old elm tree, which, alas, was declared dead by the city since I sold that home. That grand elm tree shaded three,three-story homes. It would feel like living in a bald spot to me now.
But with the elm tree wrapped over and around my windows, with or without leaves, depending on the time of year, I loved every minute I spent in that house during rain, snow, winds, and hail. I felt like I lived in that tree.
Up on the third story was another, completely different experience because up there, was was above much of the tree and my views of the weather were completely differently.
Ever since, I have longed to recreate a more direct experience of the weather than I got in my first California home. My first place in CA was in a second-story condo, nested around a very nicely landscaped courtyard but the only view was the top of shrubbery. I know there are some tall stately oaks in CA but there weren’t any tall trees in this mid-century-built complex. I was, as I said, a very nicely landscape space but there was little to see.
Now, perched in the sky, with views of the Berkeley hills peeking in my view, and endless sky, I don’t get the cosy feeling I used to get under my dear old elm tree. How I loved that tree. I am so glad I didn’t live there any longer when the city decided the tree had to come down. As it is, I mourn it but if I still lived there under the bald, unshaded sun, without the comfort of that cooling and embracing shade — I used to feel so embraced by that tree! — . . my weather/sky experience atop downtown Berkeley is different but I have come to love my view. When I moved in here, I resolved to love the view, for I expect to live here a long, long time.
When I awaken each morning, I try to calculate the time based on the sundial outside my window. This ‘sundial’ is simply the rounded tower of the other side of my building. Based on where the shadows fall on the wall, I can accurately tell the time. So I awaken, glance at the sundial and then check the clock to see if I am right. After two years, I have learned to adjust to the changing seasons, as the sun rises at different times and at different angles and I am right about the time each day. I have come to love my view, love what I learn about the changing sky conditions. Sometimes the fog dips down below the top of my building, even to the point where it covers my window. I love that. Mostly, it clear and sunny with overcast sky often, of course, but mostly it is always bright. And monotonous.
So last night, the light show was a thrill. I stopped what I was doing and just watched the sky for a long while. When the downpour began, it was another thrill. And then, by the time the hail was pounding down, all the high energy was happy excitement for me.
Wow. I live on the earth. Nature touches me, even in my very urban world.
This experience was very satisfying.
It was not so satisfying this morning when I trudged over to the farmers market in the cold rain. I have this one pair of shoes that I slip on most often to run neighborhood errands. I don’t understand why this one pair of shoes, a pair of ‘earth shoes’, as it happens, seem to catch the rainfall as I walk. It seems like my socks become wet after walking just one half a block. Slip-ons, I don’t quite understand where the rain falls so it is able to roll inside the shoe. But it does. I know other shoes I own keep my feet dry but I forget and seem to have on the wrong shoes every time it rains. I can’t stand it when my feet get wet because then they get cold.
So my trip to the farmers market became a shivered rush. I did my regular rounds, purchasing the same things I tend to buy each week, chatting with my regular vendors, which was much easier to do today because there were not many customers during the rain.
I felt assaulted, trudging through downtown, sloshing in the rain, the wind actually blowing back my Marmot hood, which is a rainjacket designed for windy and rain. I stopped at one point and secured the hood as snugly as possible, zipped everything as tightly as possible, pulled the rainhood so the visor left me almost blind as I walked and still the strong winds blew that hood back. It was a pain. I was cold. My feet felt like wet, icy chunks of chill. But, still and all, it was great. I was cold, icy, wet and alive alive alive.
All in all, a fine winter storm.

my brudha da judge

I have a brother who was a judge for almost thirty years. He retired recently. Knowing my brudda, his pension must have vested. Or else he did something that the local political machine would not forgive. He retired. Someone else was appointed and his replacement quickly moved up. My brother never advanced. He was a magistrate. His job was always part time.  He settled for that part time gig. It was with the county. It had great benefits. His pension vested with lifetime health care after a certain point.  Most people who take the job want to become a full district court judge, full time, not a low level 'magistrate'. If someone settles for part time magistrate, they also maintain a private practice. Not my brother. He rented a law office for one year but he never got any business. He is plenty smart. He could do good legal work, I bet.  But my brother is neurotic, shy and crazy. He cringed at the thought of needing customers.  He was born to a public sector job mentality.  His wife also worked for the public sector. She worked for one agency of government for twenty years, until her first pension vested and then she switched over.  He always intended to get full time work, maybe move up as a judge to full time or into a law firm. But he never did.  My brudha da judge is a Nazi fuck loonie.

Oh, and my brother the judge used to worship Rush Limbaugh.  I haven't talked to this brother in fifteen or more years. More, I think.  But back when I did still run into him once awhile, which was basically when I visited our mother, he liked to rant on and on with his beliefs about politics. He is one of the puzzling middle class voters who vote for the Karl Rove political agenda that has used abortion, gay marriage and eliminating big governent to incite middle class voters to vote against their own wellbeing. Back when I still talked to my brother once in a great while, he still believed that sooner or later he would rise into a higher economic bracket and benefit from the lower-our-taxes mentality.  This brother had lots of theories about the superiority of the white race, esp. Aryans.

In the 8th grade in our grammar school, every student had to give a speech about a historical figure they admired. I gave mine about Abraham Lincoln. This was before I was infected with any feminist thought.  My brother, in the 8th grade a year ahead of me, talked about Adolf Hitler. I am not making that up. It caused a bit of a scandal in our little world but my folks never seemed to notice.  My folks never noticed anything this brother did, like when he beat me up.  Once, when I was in the 5th grade and this brother in the 6th, my class had left the school before his. I waited for his class to exit to walk home with a girlfriend in his class. Brother bounded out the school door, seeming to gather power as he rushed up to me and then he smashed my left eye with his right fist and kept on going.  I had a seriously black eye from it. But when my brother told my parents that he had accidentally run into me because I had been standing in his path, they believed him. He was not punished.  I was blamed for standing in the wrong spot because I should have known by then what he was like. That's how my parents handled him. And this brother did not just beat on me. He beat on all us kids. And my folks let him. The nuns warned my folks not to waste money on Catholic h.s. for this brother cause he was destined to drop out and land in prison. So the nuns were wrong. He did become a judge.

It's funny how even losers can become judges. It seems that

Tizzielish

Tizzie Lish was the name of a character in an old radio drama.  In, I think, the forties.

I was born in the fifties. My mom called me Tizzielish as an affectionate pet name. I loved having a special name. Until I was thirteen, I only had brothers and my pet name was too feminine for boys.

Then my sister Margaret was born when I was thirteen.  My mom started out calling her Tizzielish. I objected, in my awkward, gangly, teenage self.  My mom capitulated a bit. She shifted to calling my sister Ms. Lish, but I objected to that. I told my mom it was just plain wrong.

My mom liked to ignore me.  It seemed to empower her to defy me. And it seemed to me that the more reasonable my requests were, the more connected my requests to mom were about my own self care, the more she liked to defy me. It seemed to me, and it still does, that my mom liked to put me down, that it made her feeling better about herself to look down at her daughter.

I guess I kinda hate my mom.

She persisted in calling my sister Ms. Lish, but only infrequently. It never really caught on as the kid's nickname.  And my sister didn't like being Ms. Lish. She wanted to be first in mom's heart and she wanted, I think, to be Tizzie Lish. But she wasn't.  I was.

Sibling rivalry.

on wisconsin: be strong, fight the coup d'etat

Robert Reich says, at robertreich.org, what I'm thinking:

"If most citizens of Wisconsin are now convinced that Walker and his cohorts are extremists willing to go to any lengths for their big-business patrons (including the billionaire Koch brothers), those citizens will recall enough Republican senators to right this wrong.

But it’s critically important at this stage that Walker’s opponents maintain the self-discipline they have shown until this critical point. Walker would like nothing better than disorder to break out in Madison. Like the leader of any coup d’etat, he wants to show the public his strong-arm methods are made necessary by adversaries whose behavior can be characterized on the media as even more extreme.

Be measured. Stay cool. Know that we are a nation of laws, and those laws will prevail. The People’s Party is growing across America — and the actions of Scott Walker and his Republican colleagues are giving it even greater momentum. So are the actions of congressional Republicans who are using the threat of a government shutdown to strong-arm their way in Washington.

The American public may be divided over many things but we stand united behind our democratic process and the rule of law. And we reject coups in whatever form they occur."

The People's Party

The Repugnant Republicans in WI just gave up on the rule of law and went rogue, passing laws without complying with little legal niceties such as legal procedure. They just passed a law without giving legal notice of heretofore legally required public hearings on new legislation. And Scott Fitzgerald, the knuckleheaded leader of the WI Repubican Senators (his brother heads the state house of reps and their father just got annoited head of the WI State patrol by the governor . . . cosy family politics!!)  . Scottie says he talks to lawyers who said the state senate could disregard state law this time.


So then, the boys can call their father, head of the state patrol, and, what, legally force the whole state to do what Scotti wants?  Sounds like things are getting a little testy in Wi and the Republican governor and head of the Republican House and Senate are behaving like toddlers who need their naps. I totally understand that they are frustrated with the senate democrats who decamped to IL to prevent a quorum but, geez, that doesn't give Scottie the right to do whatever he wants.

Outrageous.

anyway, Robert Reich just posted the idea of an alternative to the Tea Party:  The People's Party.  I like it. Here's a link

http://robertreich.org/post/3752615196

water in Jane Austen's time

How did clean drinking water arrive in the various kinds of households Jane Austen wrote about?  We see rich people's homes in her novels and economically stressed but still middle class homes such as parsonages with a few servants. We get glimpses of poor tenant farmers and even fewer glimpses of the lives of servants of Austen's main characters. I think it fair to conclude that Austen was not much interested in classism except how class status affected her single female characters and their pursuit of husbands. I'm not criticizing her. She wrote about what she was inspired to write about.  It's just that I have learned what little I know about what day-to-day human life

water in Jane Austen's time

I have relied on literature to inform me about human culture.  I am not a history buff but I have read quite a lot of ficiton, set in all kinds of eras.  But novels don't usually tell the reader about societal infrastructure.

Does Charles Dickens discuss how the London of his day dealt with human piss and feces? How London got drinking water to its inhabitants?

And how come I have never wondered about such things.

Now I am wondering. When Marianne falls in love with Willoughby, she and her family are newly coping with their severely reduced financial circumstances. The father died and a half brother from an early marriage has inherited, leaving three daughters and a widow almost penniless. A rich, kind relative rents them a cottage for a nominal amount and they settle into severely reduced circumstances. Austen tells us about some of their domestic struggles. Once Willoughby gives Marianne a horse which she thoughtlessly accepts without considering that they have no barn to keep the horse and the family cannot afford to feed it, much less hire a groomsmen. And we read about the mother, who was rich all her life and never had to worry about frugality before, wanting to do things she can't afford. And we read about their gratitude when the kindly relative sends over baskets of food, a leg of an animal.

And there was no electricity.

I don't think Austen wrote much about the physical surroundings. When  her young women socialized in their endless pursuit of a husband who could support them, they are always gathering for dinners, dances, balls and parties.  Did humans of Austen's time go to balls in January, when it gets dark in late afternoon, that were lit only by candlelight? In my mind's eye, as I have read Jane Austen's work, the ball scenes and the evenings of ladies and gentlemen talking to one another after dinner are lit like such a scene would be lit in 2011. But when Elizabeth Bennet verbally jousted with Mr. Darcy, before she realized she was in love with him, if they were in a drawing room with a piano, a half dozen sofas, lots of single chairs, lots of little side tables to put down tea cups and room for roving servants and maybe a fire in the fireplace, the room must have been a little dark.

I don't think Austen has any of her characters excuse themselves to pee.

I'm just wondering:  how would Austen's stories be different if Austen had described the lighting for her readers?  I'd like to read what Austen had to say about how differently a young beauty might be seen at 10 p.m. in a large salon in a rich person's mansion versus 10 p.m. in the tiny sitting room of the parsonage.  Surely rich people had more candles and oil lamps? Surely lighting made a difference. 

And then we come to water.  I am aware, vaguely, that clear, clean water that I have always taken for granted was not univerally available to all humans in history.  In the Masterpiece Theater series Upstairs Downstairs, set in London in a time before cars and, at least in the beginning, predating electricity in houses, was water for the rich Upstairs crowd clean and clear? How did it get to people?  Was the servant class able to partake of the same water as the rich people?  Where did the water come from, how did it get distributed in a city and then in a house?  I know that humans, mostly servants, carried water within houses, but how did clean drinking water get to rich people's houses in Dicken's London?

I assume rich people used chamber pots to pee and poop and then servants emptied the chamber pots. Did the London of Upstairs Downstairs have a raw sewage system before there was such a thing as indoor plumbing?

I just watched Downton Abbey, a great new Masterpiece series set in England just before the beginning of WWI.  Downtown Abbey gets a phone installed during the first season of the show and one of the characters mentions how accepting electricity makes her feel like she is living in an H.G. Wells novel, which was a funny, well-written line, wasn't it?  I never would have expected the dowager Duchess who says the H.G.  Wells line to have ever read something like H.G. Wells. In fact, I wonder if the writers made a mistake with that very clever line. This particular character can be very fuddy-duddy, seeming to cling to tradition at all costs. There was a time when some in that upper class would have looked down upon ladies reading H. G. Wells.

I'd like to heat the dowager duchess character say something about drinking water. I guess houses had water pumps? and houses that didn't have water pumps hauled water.


thinking.