Je me souviens

Bonjour! It's Sunday morning, and I'm writing from beautiful Montreal, my home for the next week. We drove here from the Washington D.C. suburbs. It's a long, but pleasant drive, via my beloved New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, and then through the Catskills and Adirondacks. Yes, I know that "beloved" is not an adjective that is usually used to describe the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike, but I love New Jersey, including its highways, and especially its mandated-by-law full-service gas stations.

*****
We crossed the border at about 6:30 PM last night, and because we weren't paying close attention to the (few and all but invisible) signs, we ended up, completely by mistake, in the NEXUS line. My husband (who was driving--I had taken the first driving shift) realized his mistake a split-second after it was too late to correct it.

"Uh-oh," he said, as an angry-looking Canadian border guard approached the car. My husband started to explain/apologize, when the border guard asked "Sir, can I ask you a question? What would make you think that you can jump the line in front of all of these cars, when this lane is clearly (not at all clearly BTW) marked 'NEXUS only'?"

The question having been asked, my husband attempted to answer it, only to be interrupted by the border guard, who held up his hand, saying "Wait, let me finish. You see a traffic jam at the border, and you decide that you should just blow past all of these people, hoping that breaking the rules will save you 15 minutes?"

"I apologize," my husband said sheepishly. "It was an honest mistake. I really didn't notice the sign."

"REALLY?" the border guard demanded. "What did you think that all these people were waiting for?"

I chimed in, as I do sometimes. "Again, we apologize. We have been driving for 13 hours and weren't paying as close attention as we should have."

The hand went up again. "Ma'am, there are people who crossed this border today who drove from Florida, 20 hours or more, and they got in the right line." I didn't argue. I hadn't seen a single U.S. license plate in the line of cars waiting to enter Canada, but maybe I had missed the earlier caravan of alert Floridians.

My husband tried again to apologize, and the border guard held up his hand once more. "Do you have any guns in the car?" he demanded. He asked for our passports, and after giving them the most cursory of glances, explained that in the future, we should remember that the NEXUS line is reserved for immigration cases. "It's not rocket science," he pointed out helpfully, therefore disabusing me permanently of the notion that Canadians are naturally witty. Having visited Toronto a few years ago, and having attended many NHL games, I already knew that they're not any nicer than Americans. After accepting another finger-wagging and scolding from a second border guard, we were waved through and just like that, we were in another country.

"Well," my husband said.

"I know, right?" I said.

"I mean, if 'it's not rocket science, sir' is the worst abuse I have to endure, then I can live with it. We probably saved 45 minutes, don't you think?"

Easily. EASILY.

*****
It could only have gone up from there, and it did. Montreal is lovely, and its people are delightful, proving that it's not hard to be kind to strangers, even if their French pronunciation leaves a great deal to be desired. Ce n'est pas sorcier.

*****
Last week, I finished reading Lynn Freed's Leaving Home: Blah Blah Blah. It's a memoir, and so it is of course filled with the author's memories, including her recollections of vague childhood envy of families who vacationed in what she called "caravans," or "trailers" as we say in the U.S. I thought for a moment that this was another reminiscence of a thing that used to be done, that is no longer done; and then I drove through upstate New York on a Saturday in August, and realized that at least half of Quebec vacations this way. We saw dozens (no exaggeration!) of cars bearing the "Je Me Souviens" Quebec license plate, towing vacation caravans on their way back to Montreal and Quebec City and Sherbrooke and Drummond. Years from now, a French-Canadian memoirist will lament her family's unconventional city vacations, wishing that just once, she'd had the chance to tow a caravan from Quebec to the Jersey Shore like all of her friends.

*****
Who knows what my 17-year-old son will do when he can't have poutine with every meal. During his first college visits, we explained the Freshman 15, cautioning him not to overindulge in dining hall all-you-can-eat pizza and soft-serve ice cream when he goes away to school. The Freshman 15 could easily give way to the Montreal 20 if we stayed here for too long. I don't get the appeal, but my son loves it.

*****

Last night, our crazy Arlo security system (another story, for another day) alerted my husband of a visitor at hour house. A person was knocking on our door at 1 AM. He knocked, peered in through the kitchen window, knocked again, and then disappeared. Apparently, our house was not burglarized, but it's a little disconcerting to know that something or someone might be threatening your home when you're too far away to do anything about it. Being me, I naturally had a panic attack that grew into a full-blown existential crisis. Bonne vacances! Eventually, I did go back to sleep, and woke up this morning feeling much better.

Henri Matisse, Portrait au Visage Rose et Bleu, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Last night, I was the blue part; this morning, I was rose. 

It's Monday evening. Time to swim. More on Montreal later this week.

Artificial intelligence

In terms of my particular work, there's nothing worse than those days when you're chained to the laptop all day long, as the minutes tick by and the deadline fast approaches. But there's nothing better than when you finally get to the last page, and you do your final spell check, and update your table of contents, and ship the thing off, knowing that it's as good as it can possibly be. Even when that happens at 10:10 on Sunday night, it's still a happy moment of euphoria that will carry you through to the next mad deadline crunch, which you can only hope will happen on a weekday.

*****

So that was Sunday; and now it's Monday, and I'm now the proud owner of this:

Yes, I'm listening to everything you say,
but you have nothing to hide, right? 

I had to replace my phone recently, and I got a Google Pixel 2. Unbeknownst to me at the time (any excuse to say or write "unbeknownst"), Verizon was offering a free Google Home Mini with any Pixel purchase, and it arrived in today's mail.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's a fun new thing in a pretty box! It was free! And we'll have so much fun talking to it and telling it to play music and look up random facts and tell us when the puck drops. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it will become (if it isn't already) a surveillance device that will report on my every thought and conversation. I've read 1984, and this is how it starts.

I actually thought about just leaving it in the box. I could donate it somewhere, I thought; or we could just sell it on eBay. But curiosity got the better of me, so I opened it, just to see what it looked like when I plugged it in.

It's a very cute little device, and when you plug it in, four tiny lights flash the now-familiar Google colors (red, blue, yellow, green). It's cheerful and fun to look at; it's like Christmas in June. But after I set it up, I didn't know what to do with it. My son started testing it on state capitals, and then I threw it some multiplication questions. When I was 9 or 10, I dreamed of something very similar to this--a machine or a robot that knew everything and that could offer the sum total of human knowledge, just for the asking. State capitals, multiplication tables, and the weather, all in a a little round package.

*****
Last year, I had to write a white paper about data lakes. I don't know very much about databases, relational or non-relational, but that didn't stop me from writing all about them. One of the things that I learned while researching this topic is that when you build a data lake, you don't need a use case for the data you're collecting. You can just gather any and all data, throw it in your data lake, and then figure out later how to use it, and why. That's kind of terrifying, isn't it? With the right kind of data repository as the backend, your Google Home device, or your Alexa, or your Apple Home, could just collect data on every question you ask it, now and forever, store that data indefinitely, and then eventually figure out how to use it, presumably against you.

*****
I don't know very much about algorithms, but I do know that algorithms control how search results are compiled and returned. The day after I received the Google Home device was primary day in Maryland, and I wasn't sure where my polling place was (it changed recently), so  I asked Google, and it suggested that I should visit the Board of Elections, in Virginia. Based on the weather forecasts, it knows that I live in Maryland, so there was reassuring proof that it doesn't know everything. It does, however, know that the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup, because everyone in my house has asked it "Who won the Stanley Cup?" at least ten times.

*****
It's Friday now, day 5 of sharing my household with an AI-enabled speaker that actually speaks. I like asking it to tell me jokes; and of course, the daily reminder that "the Stanley Cup was won by the Washington Capitals" (passive voice; another algorithm quirk, I'm sure) will never get old. But I'm keeping it at an arm's length for now. As helpful as it might be to get a quick Spanish-to-English translation (or the reverse) or to get the weather forecast without looking for my phone, I'm still not convinced that it's not spying on us and reporting my every idea to our Google overlords. By the time I finally unplug it, it might be too late.

The Baby and the Bathwater

It's two months post-Weinstein now, and everyone seems to have came to a sort of simultaneous mass agreement to enforce zero tolerance on sexual harassment or misconduct. All of a sudden, any man (well, ALMOST any man) who has ever behaved or spoken inappropriately has to be punished, severely and possibly permanently. 

Like lots of other #metoo women, I have mixed feelings about this. Weinstein deserves his comeuppance (the word of the moment), and so do lots of other prominent men. With super high-profile people like Weinstein and Matt Lauer, the worst offense is not so much the wildly inappropriate or even illegal sexual behavior; it's the gross abuse of power. In those cases, the public downfall is more than deserved. (And it should have happened to Donald Trump. And it should have happened to Bill Clinton. And it's not too late.)

But there's the baby and there's the bathwater. I would like to drain the dirty bathwater, and then thoroughly scrub the tub, but I don't want to discard the baby. I like the baby. I like a lot of men who might, at some point during their personal or professional lives, have said or done something offensive or stupid. In fact, I love some of those men, and I don't want to see them--my friends, or my brothers, or my cousins, or my colleagues might be among them--cast into outer darkness forever. Should we judge the behavior of twenty or even five years ago by the standard of today? Because if so, then who among us will stand up to scrutiny? 

On the other hand (there's always another hand, isn't there? It's why we have two) I have extremely limited patience with the men who are now crying that they just don't know where the line is anymore. They just don't know how to behave! They don't know what they're allowed to do or say! Because it's not that hard. If you're not intimately involved with a woman, then she does not want you to touch most parts of her body. If you work with women, then they do not want to see naked pictures of you or anyone else, and they don't want to talk about sex, either. Because it's work. See? Pretty easy. 

The larger implications of this whole thing are just beginning to become clear. Or at least one specific thing is clear, and that's that the sex-soaked culture of the last 50 years, in which every aspect of entertainment, art, sports, music, politics, and pretty much every other field of human endeavor is permeated and dominated by sex, will have to change. If we're going to hold men (and women, of course) accountable for maintaining a level of decorum that excludes recreational sexual aggression, then we probably can't shove near-naked bodies in people's faces 24 hours a day anymore. 

On its own, that's a good thing. Even if I wasn't a Catholic, I wouldn't actually want to see sex scenes in every movie. I'm disgusted and bored by crude sexual humor on the radio and on TV. I cringe when I hear the lyrics of some of my children's favorite songs. I'm tired of seeing so-called cheerleaders dressed like pole dancers.* 

But the baby is still in the dirty bathwater, isn't he? Bari Weiss** said something about revolutions taking on a life of their own, quickly swallowing everyone in their path, devouring the guilty, the innocent, and the indifferent bystanders, and it's not unlikely that this revolution will have unintended consequences. Ideally, the culture will shift toward an idea of sexuality that acknowledges and respects human dignity. But if you have been on this blog for more than five minutes, then you know that I never expect the ideal outcome. The worst case scenario is my default option. I even have a tag. 

And what's the worst-case scenario? There are any number, but the one that I can see rising to the top is a new Puritanism that combines the very worst of radical feminist hatred of men and radical religious hatred of women, in a country so divided that you won't be sure which standard prevails from one county to the next. In this scenario, Roy Moore wins in Alabama and ten years later, he's part of the moderate wing of whatever new party replaces the Republican party; the moderate wing being the one that believes that a man should only beat the women he's related to, and that a man shouldn't marry a 14-year-old girl without her father's permission. Meanwhile, in what we now call the blue states, men will be fined or arrested for smiling at women they're not married to, and state-financed abortion up to forty weeks will be a basic civil right. 

Or maybe the whole thing will blow over, and everything will be back to normal, whatever that is, in six months. I don't think so, though. I think that a hard rain is going to fall. I think there's going to be a sea change. I'm praying that it's the right one. 

*****

*That's not so much an attack on NFL cheerleaders as a defense of pole dancers. Why should we consider a stripper a social undesirable; while NFL cheerleaders, who dress and behave in the same manner, are held up as examples of wholesome young womanhood? 

**By the way, I agree with a lot of Ms. Weiss's column, but I've never heard anyone say "Believe all women." There's a huge difference between "Believe women" and "Believe all women," always and everywhere, just because they're women. It's the baby and the bathwater again. Don't throw away the very reasonable "Believe women" because it sounds almost like "Believe ALL women." They are two different things. 

I'm a ray of sunshine

It's 10 PM Friday, and I'm watching "The Hunger Games" with my son. We have one more summer swim meet tomorrow morning, and then the season is officially over. I'm guess I'm relieved, but I'll miss it.

I was so busy at work today that I didn't even hear about Priebus until I was driving home. We have a President now who has made Sean Spicer, Jeff Sessions, and Reince Priebus all look like sympathetic characters. For a while, I actually felt sorry for Spicer. And now, all of a sudden, Republican lawmakers are having Profiles in Courage moments, warning Trump (via Twitter, of course) not to try to fire Sessions.

It all begs just one question: What did you bitches expect? Did you all think that Trump was going to treat you better than he treated Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and everyone else he bullied and humiliated throughout the campaign? Did you think he was going to be nice to you, just because you're on his side? I give Scaramucci three months.  I got your communications, right here.

*****
I'm still reading A Kim Jong-Il Production. Sang Shin-Ok spent several years in a North Korean prison as punishment for his second escape attempt, and it was just as brutal as  you'd expect a North Korean prison to be. Because I'm the most fun person in the world, I sometimes imagine my favorite places--the pool, for example; or Avalon, New Jersey, turned into giant battlefields or prison camps. Not, obviously, because that's what I want to happen, but because I'm afraid that it could.  Because it has.

We saw "Dunkirk" last night. Brilliant, but not what I expected. Maybe I've been married to a Korean for too long, because all of the young, handsome Englishmen looked the same to me. I liked the three interwoven stories, and Mark Rylance is great as the captain of the tiny Moonstone. But I keep returning to the opening scene, of a soldier running through the almost-too-picturesque streets of Dunkirk. He runs past the seaside hotel and onto the sun-drenched beach, where he finds queues of stranded soldiers, thousands of them, trapped with no food or water and awaiting uncertain rescue amid bombs and machine gun fire raining down from German fighter planes.

All of these places, all of the killing fields and mass graves and secret prisons and re-education camps, all started as something else. They all started as just places, where people lived or vacationed or just drove past every day without much thought, only to see them turn into hell on earth. Good prevailed over evil at Dunkirk, as it will in the end. But evil never stops trying.

The Ryan Lochte rule

I had something that I wanted to say about The Zelmenyaners, but I can't remember what it was. I can confirm, however, that it's the funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning that I have ever read. I'm reading it in English, of course, so maybe it's even funnier in the original. Anyway, I'm halfway through it.  I used to read books at a much faster rate, but a person can only read so many pages in 10 to 15 minutes a day.

The Zelmenyaners is nothing like The Cazalet Chronicles, and of course, I didn't expect it to be. I don't feel like I know the Zelmenyaners like I knew the Cazalets. Elizabeth Jane Howard was writing about her own family, so there's an intimate, knowing quality that makes the reader feel very well acquainted with the characters. After a few days with the Zelmenyaners, I still don't know one Zelmenyaner from the other. But The Zelmenyaners has a poetic and whimsical quality that's rather lovely, even in translation. There's a character who is described as refusing to come out of the house, having been insulted as a child (this is a paraphrase, because Kindle won't let me search the passage). I find this charming, and very truthful.  Most days, of course, I'm not inclined to refuse to leave the house because of remembered childhood insults. But I do remember.

I probably won't re-read The Zelmenyaners. But I'm glad that I read it once.

*****

It's 7:30 PM on Saturday. I went to the pool today, and chatted with friends, and read for a bit, and then I tried to swim. I really love to swim, and I don't mind chilly water. I do, however, object to iceberg-plowing-into-the-Titanic freezing cold, and I didn't get any farther in than my ankles. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe not.

*****
Summer swim season just started. This is our 11th year of summer swim team, so we are seasoned swim team parents. I just renewed my refereeing certification. Apparently, there's a relatively new thing called the Ryan Lochte Rule, which I learned about on Thursday night.

And now begins weeks of Friday night pasta parties, and Saturday morning meets, and writing weekly email updates, and standing on the deck with a clipboard and then being amazed at the end of July when it's all over again. I love summer.

*****
That was going to be all, because I just didn't know what else to write about, even though I've been writing in my head all day. I'm extremely prolific, in my imagination. It's about 10:45 now. I picked up my son from work at 8 and heard about the London attack on the radio, and I've been avoiding the TV until now.

I'm so tired of these cowardly barbarians, trying to drag the rest of us back into the stone age by brute force. Social media will probably be awash in the Union Jack by tomorrow, and my Trump supporter friends and family will say "See? Now do you understand?" as if my failure to vote for a corrupt and ignorant vulgarian is somehow to blame for this most recent of many outrages. And Trump was super-tough on terrorism when he visited Saudi Arabia, right? King Salman is probably still trying to wash the lip prints off his rear end.

And when it happens here again, which it will, we won't really know if it's real or staged. And it won't matter, for our purposes, because either way, the boom will be lowered. Martial law will be declared, and habeas corpus will be suspended, and the press will be restricted or silenced altogether, and lots of people will thank the administration for keeping us all safe.

OK, that took a turn. It's probably time to turn off MSNBC.

*****

It's Sunday morning now. It's beautiful and sunny and warm, and this little boy and his baby sister are coming over to go swimming later. The barbarians might be at the gate, but they're not coming in, at least not today. I have a swim team newsletter to write.

*****
I did finally go swimming today. It was freezing when I got in, but then I got used to it, and it was still unbearable.

Help desk

It always starts with just one little thing, right? You notice a tiny bit of dirt on the floor, and then six hours later, all of your furniture is on the front lawn, because you had to pull up the carpet to vacuum underneath.

No? So that's just me?

Well, anyway, the furniture's not really on the front lawn, because I'm sitting on it. But the point is that I started doing just one thing, and then ended up down a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time rabbit hole of what could possibly go wrong. It's figurative furniture, on an imaginary lawn. The less said, the better. Nothing to see here.  Move along.

*****
I learned a bunch of new things today, including some of-the-moment Maryland teenage slang that I won't bother to define here, because what is this, Urban Dictionary? We had hoped to see Barry Trotz win his 700th game as an NHL coach, but what we saw instead was a sad beatdown of my beloved Capitals by the Nashville Predators, of all teams. And why is there hockey in Nashville, anyway?  I'm not worried; they're still the best team in the NHL.

Nashville? Whatever.

*****

I'm now on the second volume of The Cazalet Chronicles. At the end of the first book, the extended Cazalet family and all of its servants and connections were breathing a sigh of relief as Neville Chamberlain returned home from Germany, having made a dishonorable agreement with Hitler that forestalled war, which had seemed inevitable. As we all know now (and as most of the Cazalets knew even then), the reprieve was only temporary.  As the first book opens, the reprieve has ended and the family is readying for another terrible war, barely 20 years after the last one, which was supposed to end all wars.

My computer has been behaving strangely.  I cleaned the disk (I don't really know what that means, but I did it) and ran a virus scan, and now everything is fine, but I'm afraid that this too is a temporary reprieve.

*****

Yes, I know exactly how bad that sounded.  That's the point.

Late last week, I went to check my to-do list, and I realized that I just didn't care very much about any of the various tasks and chores that I had assigned to myself. More than that, though--I didn't even care about the list itself. I had actually already done two of the things, and hadn't even bothered to cross them off.  What is wrong with me, I thought.  But I knew what was wrong. The fog had descended again.

Sadness isn't the worst part of the periodic depressive episodes that plague me.  The lethargy and lack of interest in regular normal things is worse.  And worse still is the inward focus and self-absorption that make it quite normal to compare a potential hard drive crash to a world war that killed 50 million people. Thankfully, this episode is coming to an end almost as quickly as it began. Which means that I have some catching up to do. I haven't crossed off a single thing this week.

Peace in our time

I like to finish what I start.  Sometimes it takes longer than one might expect; over 25 years, for example, to finish my bachelor's degree (Summa cum Laude, of course, but still--25 years!)  If I start reading a book, I will usually force myself to finish it, no matter what.

Or rather, I used to force myself to finish it.  In the last six months, I've abandoned four books.  A combination of too-busyness and age have made me hyper-conscious of how relatively little time I have in the world; how relatively little time any of us have, in fact.  I have a lot to do, not just in a day, but forever.  A lot that I need to do before I die.

*****

Well. That took an unexpected turn, didn't it?  Maybe I need to turn off MSNBC for five minutes.  Back to the books.

Walker Percy, of all people,  wrote a satirical self-help book called Lost in the Cosmos, which was published in 1983. I'd never heard of it, and I thought that Walker Percy had died years before 1983, but Lost in the Cosmos ended up on my bookshelf one way or another, and I started to read it.  Maybe my sense of humor is lacking, because despite tons of reviews that describe this book as hilariously funny in a sly tongue-in-cheek way, I just didn't get it.  And I find also (age-related again, probably) that I just don't have any patience with casual sexism, even taking historical context into account. So I bailed on Walker Percy, right in the middle of chapter 2.

That meant that I had to find something else to read.  I started on Christina Stead's House of All Nations, which is the kind of book that I usually love, but I put it down about 10 pages in.  Maybe I'll try to read it again, but not now.  I'm not really sure why I didn't want to finish it in the first place. It's a period novel set in pre-WWII Europe.  What's not to love?  Too French, maybe, in the way that a novel about the French written by an Australian (or any other non-French author) would be. So much jaded upper-class infidelity and intrigue; so much sophisticated elegance and glamour, and all in the first chapter. I couldn't keep up that pace for 300 or more pages.

House of All Nations is set in Paris in the late 1930s, and the late 1930s is an historical period of particular interest to me, especially now.  Two years or so ago, I was sure that the world order that most of us Americans and Europeans have taken for granted for the last 70 years or so was soon to collapse.  I wrote about this here, and here, and here. In fact, I've been preoccupied with political upheaval and the breakdown of civilization for pretty much my whole life, from age 10 or so on. I'm a lot of fun to hang out with.

Part of this is just because I'm a recreational worrier. The worst case scenario is usually the default option for me.  But now, I feel that I have a real, actual reason to worry, based on just looking at and listening to the world. Until very recently, I didn't talk much about the end of the world as we know it (or once knew it, because it's probably already too late), even with my friends. I was sure that they'd think I was crazy. Now, though, I'm right in the mainstream.   It's 1999.  Everyone is waiting for everything to hit the fan.

*****
But again, back to the original problem: What to read?  I didn't want to finish House of All Nations, but I did want want to return to the mid 1930s, and not just because I wanted a how-to manual for history that's about to repeat itself.  A few weeks ago, I bought a Kindle edition of The Cazalet Chronicles, so I started on that, and now I'm pretty sure that I'm going to accomplish nothing until I read all thousand-plus pages.  SO good.  I have no idea how it's possible that I had never heard of either the books (it's a series) or Elizabeth Jane Howard, the author, but for the next few days, I'll be all agog as the Cazelets and all of their servants breeze through 1937 and 1938 without a care in the world, only to be thrown headlong into the cataclysm of 1939.

I almost feel sorry for them, long-dead imaginary people that they are. They have no idea what's coming.

Fireflies

I said that I'd write something this week, so here I am.  It's a so-much-to-do week, the kind that I can only manage with the aid of a list. And I know that the only way that I'll write anything is to make writing a to-do list item, that I can cross off my list with great satisfaction.  So there's the list, and here I am.

The fireflies are back. I walked through my neighborhood tonight, just a short time before twilight.  The sun had gone almost all the way down, and so it was hot, but not blazing hot without the sun overhead.  The air was heavy and close and humid, and there wasn't so much as a slight breeze.  I could hear everything; cars and lawnmowers and crickets and children shouting about fireflies.  We called them lightning bugs where I grew up, but here, they are fireflies.  The fireflies had disappeared for some time, or so I thought.  For 15 years, give or take, I didn't see any fireflies, nor did I hear a word about them.  Then suddenly, 10 years or so ago, they were back.  Had they really disappeared, or did I just not notice them until I had a five-year-old boy?  The five-year-old boy is 15 now, worried about his upcoming lifeguard's exam, and asking when he can get his learner's permit.  He probably won't notice a firefly again until he has his own five-year-old boy.

*****
So today was even hotter and more densely humid than yesterday.  After an interminably long evening swim meet, I made an ill-advised decision to allow a sleepover tonight.  Who knows what I was thinking.

No, really.  That was a question.  Who knows what I was thinking? Anyone? Anyone?

Fortunately, the sleepover includes only this boy, who is such a frequent guest that he might as well live here.  No special guest accommodations or preparations are necessary.  The boys are now cozily parked on the L-shaped sectional couch, which is covered with sheets and stacked with as many pillows and blankets as they can fit while still leaving room for their 11-year-old bodies.  Multiple swims today have left them tired enough to thwart their plans to stay up late to watch Batman vs. Superman.  I'm pretty sure that they'll be asleep no more than an hour into the movie.

*****

The boys fell asleep, as expected, about an hour into the movie, but then my son woke me up at 2:30, complaining that he couldn't sleep.  When I got up with him to see if it was too hot or cold or if any other adjustments to the sleeping arrangements would help, I found that the porch light shines so brightly in the family room that it was all but daylight in there.  A person with reasonably sharp vision could easily have read a book.  With the light out, he fell asleep again in no time. I left for work this morning as a sleeping pile of boys were just beginning to stir.  School is out, but morning swim practice is on.

*****

I'm married to a police officer, so it's been a difficult week.  Awakened by light, literal or figurative, I often wish that I could just go back to sleep.  Friends and others, well-meaning or otherwise, ask me how my husband is, what he's thinking, what I'm thinking.  What do I say? Black lives matter? Blue lives matter? All lives matter, during a week when it feels as if life itself is disposable, isn't valued, doesn't matter?  I don't know.  I just know that it's summer, and for only a short time.  Swim meets, and sleepovers, and fireflies, and movie-watching on the couch--who knows how much longer it will all last?

Current events

I work from home.  When my husband is at work and my kids are at school, the house is sometimes too quiet, so I keep the TV on, on low volume, because the background noise is helpful.  I'm usually tuned to MSNBC, alternating occasionally with the local all-news channel.

Even though I don't actually watch most of the time (I usually sit with my back to the TV), the talk still enters my brain, which means that I know more about politics right now than I necessarily want to.  I was shocked last week when my husband, commenting on the New Hampshire primary results, asked me who John Kasich was.   He's an intelligent and reasonably well-informed person, but he'd never heard of John Kasich; didn't even know that he was running.  

Right now, MSNBC and every other news network are covering the death of Antonin Scalia and the emerging fight over whether or not the President should appoint a replacement and whether or not the Senate will allow a nomination to come to a vote.  Anyone who wonders why most Americans now hate both parties needs only to watch five minutes' worth of Scalia coverage.  The poor guy's body probably isn't even cold yet, and the politicking is fully underway. 

I'm on both sides of this issue.  As a pro-life person, I don't necessarily want to see another Obama appointee to the Supreme Court; however, I also don't think that the Supreme Court is actually that important.  The misbegotten idea of abortion as some sort of human right took hold over a period of 50 years or so.  People who still believe that abortion is anything except a horror for women and for humanity aren't going to change their minds because of a court decision or a political fiat.   

On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that President Obama, who has almost a year more to serve, should appoint Scalia's replacement. It is also manifestly and transparently obvious that if the current lame-duck President were a Republican and not a Democrat, then Cruz, Kasich, Rubio and the rest of them would be vigorously defending that President's right to appoint the next Justice, and would be asserting his Constitutional responsibility to do so with dispatch.  And, in that very same hypothetical case, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the rest of THAT gang would be expressing fake outrage over the supposed power grab of a sitting President making a judicial appointment and would similarly threaten to delay, filibuster, or otherwise stymie the process.

I don't remember exactly when the term "litmus test" began to be used in discussions of judicial appointees' views on abortion.  Sometime in the 1980s, I think.  I also don't recall having heard of a litmus test applied to any judicial nominee's views on eminent domain, say, or Fifth Amendment rights, or interstate commerce, or even gun rights.  Only for abortion, it seems, are both sides, but especially the pro-choice side, so determined to try to guess the potential candidates' views to be sure that they'll vote the right way.  On the pro-choice side, I think, it's because there's no other way to sustain the whole monstrous lie--that abortion is about women's rights, or that a fetus is anything other than a human being--than to prop it up with phony "settled law," ideally by appointing young judges who are likely to sit on the bench for the next 20 years or so.  Then keep sharpening the "choice" and "war on women" rhetoric during that 20 years, and hopefully, you'll fool just enough people that the next generation will produce politicians who will do what's necessary to sustain the lie for the next 20 years or so after that. 

Right now, on social media, smug pro-choicers are circulating a meme that reads something like "Justice Scalia expressed a wish to be cremated; however, women will need to meet first to decide if that's what's really best for his body." Hilarious!  Gotcha!  I really NAILED those idiot pro-lifers this time; they can't argue with that!  Except for this: Justice Scalia is already dead, and abortion, of course involves two bodies, not just one, both of which are alive, at least until Planned Parenthood gets hold of them.  Right-wing social media friends are just as bad; they're flooding Facebook with rumors that Scalia was murdered by nefarious pro-choicers and gay rights activists.  Sleep with one eye open, Justices Thomas, Alito, and Roberts, because I suppose you're all next. 

And that leads right back to what's wrong with politics right now.  Nothing can be solved with politics, because politics is about nothing but politics, and no one on either side actually cares about truth.  The people in power care only about holding onto power, and the fight is about only the fight.  The politicians all know this and they have known it for some time.  Unfortunately for them, people are beginning to catch on.  Unfortunately for all of us, the people who are catching on are in reaction mode; nothing else can explain the rise of Donald Trump.  Maybe it will take two years, or maybe five, but it's entirely likely that sometime in the not-all-that-distant future, the debate over Supreme Court appointments and filibusters will seem quaintly nostalgic, because the Constitution and the United States as we know them now won't even exist.   Or maybe I just need to get out more. 

Recipes for the gulag

As the person responsible for preparing and serving 95% of the food that my family consumes, I'm sometimes overwhelmed by the immediacy and relentlessness of the chore.  These people want to eat EVERY SINGLE DAY, several times per day.  It's exhausting.

If you ask most people who cook because they have to, and not because they want to, they will probably tell you that the actual cooking process is not so bad (and in fact, it can be rather pleasant at times.)  What's hard is the figuring out part: planning meals, securing ingredients, working planned menus and mealtimes around various schedule demands.  If someone showed up at my house every day and told me what to cook and when to cook it, and then handed me a bag filled with the necessary meal components, then I'd happily do the rest, even the cleaning-up part.  This hasn't happened yet, but hope springs eternal.  Someday...

My ever-sunny disposition and my persistently optimistic outlook don't stop me from being preoccupied (often) with plague, violent upheaval, complete social and political breakdown, and famine.  Especially famine.  At any given time in history, in some place in the world, people starve because there's no food, anywhere, and no hope of getting any.  Never mind unexpected deliveries of neatly packaged groceries with handy instructions; there's not so much as a slice of moldy bread or a wormy apple to be found, and people just literally die from hunger.

20th-century famines, so often manmade, are a particular preoccupation, as are the excesses of the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin (see previous paragraph re: sunny disposition/optimistic outlook.) When I'm not grieving for the purge victims, I'm worrying about the ones who starved during the Ukraine famine,  or the siege of Leningrad, or fill-in-the-blank Soviet hellhole.  Apparently, cannibalism was not uncommon in the Ukraine in 1933; meanwhile, in Leningrad during the siege, the rat problem was pretty well in hand.

It's dinner time again.  Thoughts of famine are a sure (though temporary) way to silence the internal complaint monologue about the fact that it's dinner time again.  It's helpful to imagine that you're cooking for the rat-hunting victims of the Leningrad siege, or for the unfortunate kulaks of Ukraine.  Sometimes, I imagine them sitting down to a meal with us, and marveling at the feast before them (This appears to work best when the meal involves potatoes, or bacon.  Not so much for salad or grilled salmon.)  I don't feel like cooking, because I never feel like cooking, but I feel like eating, and I feel lucky that thoughts of eating aren't limited to the abstract.  Bon appetit.

Wild Kingdom

(A short post while I wait for an answer to a work-related question, without which I can't proceed.)

I saw two things today; A dead deer, covered with flies; and a snake.  The snake was alive.  I'm only slightly more fond of deer than I am of snakes, so I didn't really mourn the former, but had the choice been mine, the deer would be frolicking around Rock Creek Park right now, and the snake would be deceased.

Actually, I'm not particularly fond of any animal in the wild.  I was raised in the city, and 16 years in the suburbs have not made me accustomed to everyday encounters with wild animals.  I don't count squirrels, of course, which are more urban than mass transit, but I still can't get used to the sight of foxes on my front lawn at 6 in the morning, and the deer around here are have become overly comfortable with humans.  When I first moved into this house, ten years ago, I'd walk my then-little children around the neighborhood; one walking beside me and the other in his stroller.  The deer were still timid then, and they'd turn tail and run as soon as we got within 20 feet or so.  Although I have no empirical evidence to this effect, I feel sure that they have become bolder with each passing year.  They stand their ground now as I pass, and more than once I've seen an aggressive expression on a deer's face.  Within a year, I'll be backing away from them with my head down; in five years, I'll probably be running.

"Running," of course, should be read as "walking pretty darn fast."  If you ever see me actually running, you'd better run too.  Don't ask questions, don't turn around to see what's going on, just run.  Save yourself.  There might be another snake coming after me, or the deer might finally have turned predator.  It's only a matter of time.

Or maybe not...

Would the first 1,000 words of 50 different novels work just as well as one 50,000-word novel? By the way, all of the words would be dialogue.

Drosophila

What's the life span of a fruit fly again?  A day? 4 days?  Anyway, it's short.  I feel like I should remember this in better detail after months of study for the CLEP exam but everything I ever learned about biology escaped my sieve-like skull the moment I walked out of the testing center.

I could look it up, couldn't I? But I won't.  The point is that they were in my kitchen, just a handful of them, buzzing around some slightly overripe bananas that I moved to the refrigerator, depriving them of what I hope was their sole major food source.  I talked to them about their certain impending death (not likely from starvation; my kitchen is clean but it's not perfect.)  How long does life feel to something that small that lives for such a short time?  Assuming that it's aware of its life at all, do the minutes feel like days?   "You'll be dead by tomorrow anyway; Friday at the latest," I told the little gang's leader as I announced my decision to spare their lives. 

Curiosity and the desire not to look foolish (almost always too late in my case) drove me to look it up anyway.  Turns out that they can live for a month or more.   The stays of execution may have been too hasty.  No one knows the day or hour, right?  The little bastards could outlive me. 

That's not all that needs examining

Weeks (no, months) of filling my head with phosphate groups and Punnett squares and all sorts of other things that really don't belong there, and the CLEP exam has been cancelled because of the (stupid and stinky) weather forecast.  I'm rescheduled for March 6, which means three more weeks of waking up in the middle of the night screaming "The homozygous recessive expresses the trait!  36 molecules of ATP!"

If I were actually capable of learning Biology, this wouldn't be such an extinction-level event for me.  I'd just enjoy the snow day tomorrow and plan for an unpleasant morning on March 6...no worse than root canal (which isn't that bad, by the way). Sadly for me, though, I have no aptitude for science whatsoever.  I'm good at passing tests, and so my efforts have been focused on memorizing just enough to get me through the exam. I have absolutely no hope of retaining any of this unless I continue to beat it into my cement-like skull every day.

Onward.  The Protists survived their demotion from Kingdom status, so I'll live through this.  Meanwhile, maybe male fruit flies will eventually learn sexual responsibility and then we won't need to worry about how many of their 112 offspring are heterozygous for red eyes.

Free Advice

Before researching treatment and surgery options for the cataracts that you're certain you have, maybe take out your contact lenses and clean them.