Whoa

I was trying to find the classic Eschaton post wherein Atrios coins the "Preznit giv me turkee" phrase to link to for my previous post. My Google search took me to the 2003 Koufax awards for best lefty blog, where Atrios' post won for most humorous post. And there, to my surprise and amusement, I found my own comment quoted in the award text:

Commenter Mike remarked that Atrios’ post “was better than a New Yorker cartoon.” That is high praise indeed, in my estimation. Silencia noted that the post “quickly entered the lexicon of my household, and still elicits giggles every time it is spoken, always in a plaintive, childish voice.” Yes, our media often speaks in a plaintive, childish voice and Atrios’ post captured that voice perfectly. Congratulations, Atrios.

Silencia! That was the name I used for awhile, and I remember making that comment. Mr. Thel still occasionally pulls out his munchkin voice to mumble, "Preznit giv me turkee?" or "I kep my mouf shut." How crazy to find that quote, almost two years after I emailed and forgot it.

Preznit Giv Us Turkee

Internet, I am, at this very moment, baking a pumpkin pie. This pumpkin pie is no ordinary pie. Multiply this pie by the square of its radius and all you will have is a full belly area the size of Rhode Island. I was going to say Texas, but it isn't that big.

It's the first pumpkin pie I've ever baked, in fact. I even made the crust from scratch. I'd express my pride, but since the baking of the pie is still in progress, and the true test of its mystical properties will not come until sometime tomorrow evening, I will refrain. Anyway, I cheated on the crust by not going so far as to make the kind that requires the carefull rolling.

Mr. Thel and I are staying in Seattle for Thanksgiving this year. We spent Veteran's Day weekend with family in exchange for staying home and relaxing this weekend. Veteran's Day just happened to fall on the first Friday after we bought a new car! Well, not a brand new car, but a year-old car with barely 14,000 miles on it is new enough for me. Since its mileage was so nice and low, we quickly drove it to Oregon to click up another thousand miles on it. That way the car knows right from the start exactly the kind of hard work it's in for during our term of ownership. Although, as long as I'm anthropomorphizing the car, it probably took one terrified look at the old yet-to-be-sold car in our driveway and had a good idea how much we travel by car.

But not this weekend, thank all the gods. I have no love for Thanksgiving travel, and I'm delighted to just have a four-day weekend without the large travel brackets surrounding it. I get the impression that people doubt the sincerity of my pleasure to have a nice quiet Thanksgiving weekend, just me and Mr. Thel; a couple of friends from work sort of made sad faces when I burbled about how the two of us are just going to have some traditional Thanksgiving food and spend the weekend being lazy, and invited us to come spend tomorrow with at their respective family events. Um, thanks? --but no.

Thanksgiving isn't a holiday I have any great love for, anyway. At least since leaving home nine years ago, [--oh my god, I've been on my own for nine years already? Like, a third of my life? Holy shamoly....] bad things have tended to happen to me around this holiday. In 1996 I was in a minor car accident while carpooling down the freeway. In 1997 I was diagnosed with cancer the day before Thanksgiving; it's hard to top that when trying to find a real holiday buzzkill. Two Thanksgivings in a row found me going through relationship breakups. After that I started dreading the whole damn month of November. Although nothing awful has happened for the last couple of years, I still find myself wanting to hibernate through the month.

This year, though, I'm optimistic. Perhaps the curse of November has been broken. I have a pie in the oven, and tomorrow for the first time I'll be preparing a Thanksgiving dinner of my own. (Mr. Thel is in charge of the turkey, however. My kitchen skills skew more toward the baking side of things, not so much the meat side.) Turkey, stuffing, potatoes, green bean casserole (OF COURSE), and le pie, which is now cooling and to which I am going to give a tentative, pre-tasting thumbs up. It isn't burned, or runny, so it looks promising.

May tomorrow bring you a stomach full of good food (and unburnt pies), a house full of exactly as much activity with family and friends as you desire, and a heart full of joy.

What do you mean, high-strung?

Or, It's So Funny Because It's True

[Mr. Thel walks into a room containing several of his co-workers.]

Co-worker #1: Hey man, your ears must be burning.
Mr. Thel: Oh yeah? What's going on?
Co-worker #2: We were just talking about you.
Mr. Thel: What about?
Co-worker #1 [with mock-solemnity]: We have arrived at a conclusion.
Mr. Thel: And?
Co-worker #3: Well, we have decided...You need to start smoking pot.

Autumnally Yours

I never can quite decide whether I love October or hate it. We're still having these crisp sunny days, but they sprout from chilly mornings that make getting out of bed so very unappealing. I feel like I'm steeling myself, "girding my loins" for the long grey months ahead, the interminable string of soggy mornings waiting for the bus and the equally dreary afternoons of blowing my nose and clutching a cup of tea in my office to warm my clammy fingers.

On the other hand, October does mean hot cups of tea in my office, and busting out the fun hats and scarves, and snuggling in under the down comforter. So it's a mixed bag.

It makes me pensive. I've been thinking about reconciliation a lot lately. As you know Bob, I've spent a few years trying to distance myself from the religion in which I was raised. Like a lot of people, when I found that I couldn't and didn't believe in it anymore I felt all grouchy and bitter about the whole thing. I thought I could just wash my hands of it all, but it wouldn't all come off. Damn sticky stuff, the religion you're raised with.

In the process of re-evaluating my religious beliefs, I was also revising my political opinions--because nothing's as fun as simultaneously breaking down all of your lifelong assumptions about God and government! Wow, I wonder why those first few years after graduation were so unhappy and tumultuous... Anyway, as I became more aware of issues of social justice I heard a mention of an intriguing church. The description I heard was intriguing enough to make me Google it, and the snippets I found about Keystone United Church of Christ added just enough to my curiosity to make me visit.

After much procrastinating, finally one Sunday almost two years ago we walked through Keystone's doors. Four or five people sat chatting in a cozy lobby area between the entrance and the sanctuary, and they immediately welcomed us in and got us each a cup of coffee. I was surprised by the small size of the congregation after all I'd heard and read about the good work of this group, but it was a pleasant surprise.

I was in for a pleasant shock as soon as the service started, too. The song leader, a woman near my age who simply stood and led us in song with a gorgeous voice and flute playing, opened the music time by noting that one of the hymns we would be singing contained gender-exclusive language. "Instead of singing, 'God will bring his people peace,' we're going to change it to be more inclusive and sing, 'God will bring God's people peace,'" she said.

I can see the way some of my old Christian friends would roll their eyes at that, but I was delighted. That was exactly the kind of thinking that had helped ostracize me from the faith of my childhood: once I stopped thinking of God as a cosmic-sized man, and started pondering the feminine aspects of God, it didn't seem like I could possibly be referring to the same God I'd grown up with. The Christian friends who were alarmed by any mention of a feminine aspect of God only confirmed my sense that I wasn't "thinking like a Christian" anymore. So to hell with it, I thought. I felt pretty sure there was Something here, Something you might call God, Something that grounds and contains and surrounds and sustains the entire span of existence; but apparently if I didn't think that Something was limited to one set of people's impressions of it (or him or her), I couldn't be a Christian.

That was perfectly fine with me, though it did make me inordinately resentful of Christianity--right up until the moment Melissa stood up and asked us to sing a hymn to God and deliberately refrain from gendering God therein. And from then on, every Sunday I heard Rich Gamble speak I thought, "Well, I can call myself a Christian if that's what it's all about." When they started organizing last year's Festival of Hope, two days of a craft market / rummage sale that tries to raise $10,000 every fall, every single penny of which is donated to organizations that are fighting poverty around the world, I thought, "Sure, I can call myself a Christian if that's what it's concerned with."

But obviously I've still been thoroughly ambivalent about the whole thing. I have so much baggage with that word, that book, that set of beliefs. Blah.

So when I heard they were starting a six-week group to study one of Marcus Borg's books, The Heart of Christianity, I signed up. I am intensely interested to hear what this group of people has to say about what the heart of Christianity is for them. If it doesn't rely on literalism and fear, what does it rely on? If it doesn't make claims about its own exclusive hold on the truth, what claims does it make?

Wow, this post is incoherent. We met together for the first time last night, and I will have more to say about it. Of course Marcus Borg says it all better and more succinctly in his book, but you know...I'll still hash it all out on my own.

And that's what October is doing to me this year.

Serenity (no spoilers)

Ahhh, Serenity...

I didn't get lucky enough to go to one of the advance screenings they had during the summer (did they even have more than one in the Seattle area?), but I *did* get lucky enough to see it on opening night in the theater! I half-expected it to be sold out, but I went online on Thursday and got tickets to last night's 7:00 showing. We got to the theater just after 6:00 and there were already about twenty people clumped up in the lobby waiting for the doors to open. They let us into the theater about 6:20 where we sat and enjoyed the enthusiasm of all our fellow moviegoers, whose excitement was overflowing and contagious. (On my way out to the lobby to use the restroom, I passed a couple of guys just heading into the theater; one of them turned to his friend, his eyes aglow, and couldn't restrain his quiet "Eeeeeeee!" of delight.

I really enjoyed the movie. And it was so much fun to watch it in that theater, with a bunch of people who already loved the characters from watching Firefly, and all laughed and gasped and applauded together intermittently.

Everybody go see it. I *really* want to see another movie in that 'verse, with that bunch of characters, so go make it a hit. If I can, I'm going to see it again this weekend or this week, to absorb all the details I'm sure I missed last night--the pace of the dialogue was just as rapid as anything else Joss Whedon's ever done, and I didn't have time to watch the background very closely.

I've been looking forward to seeing it all summer, so three cheers for a Serenity that didn't disappoint.

Word

This is what we're all thinking, of course, what Tom Tomorrow says:

If you live in a major American city, you better pray there's never a terrorist attack of this magnitude. Because this is the best these fuckers can do with several day's notice before the disaster hits and 90% of the city having had time to evacuate beforehand. So unless the terrorists are kind enough to give advance notice, you are well and truly fucked.

The fourth anniversary of 9/11 is next Sunday. My vacation starts on the tenth. Why yes, we will be heading for the hills during that time.

Of course it's silly to fixate on one date over any other, so we're quietly restocking our first aid kits and making sure we have "jump kits" ready to go. What's a jump kit? That's the bag you keep right next to your door so in an emergency it's there, all you have to do is grab it on your way out. Since shortly after my encounter with the elderly woman who had broken her ankle last year, I've kept a small kit in the bag I carry with me on my bus commute. Another kit in the back of the car. Another kit at home. I know it may seem over the top, but you know what? I can't predict where I'm going to be when something goes wrong. Might as well be as well-prepared as possible, no matter where I am when something happens. Jim Macdonald knows what he's talking about; check out his list and assemble what you can. The best time to prepare is now.

"Sniper"

See, here, the nihilistic kid makes a point I incoherently stammered about yesterday:

Sniping actually takes a fair amount of skill; some schmuck in a white shirt on a street corner firing a whatever and missing everything is, at best, engaging in an ambush, not sniping. That Washington DC area "sniper" from a couple years ago was equally misnamed.

The main thrust of his post is to note that reports of "insurrection" in New Orleans may be greatly exaggerated. Do read it, my three readers: I command thee.

Battered Nation

There's a certain hollow feeling you get when you're trying to earn someone's approval, a faintly desperate determination to claw your way back into their good graces. It's like this: you can't figure out what you did to make Dad so furious, but you know if you just try hard enough you can ease his temper. You're so certain that if you're really really super good, if you can be on your very best behavior, you can through sheer effort make him happy with you.

So you creep quietly down the hallway and clean up your room. You share your Barbies with your little brother without whining. (If you're really desperate, maybe you even get out your crayons and write a cheerful little "I love you Daddy" card in a last-ditch effort to earn a smile.) You play nicely all evening, and help set the table for dinner, and then you start to wash down a too-hot bite of chili with a swallow of milk and Dad abruptly snarls at you, "Goddamn it, don't be such a pig! Finish chewing before you take a drink."

And that's the moment the bottom drops out of your belly in despair, that moment when you realize that you tried as hard as you could but you couldn't be good enough, and you believe with all your heart that it's your own fault. If only, you think. If only I could be a little bit better, he wouldn't hate me.

From there it's a quick trip to thinking, I hate myself. I am a bad kid. I will never be able to be good enough. And from there it quickly makes sense to say, "Fuck it." If you're bad you get punished; if you're good you get punished anyway. Why bother with the extra effort to be good?

That's the memory that swept through me when I saw this quote:

"The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians."

I don't know what to tell you, but that broke my heart right there. Oh, you poor huddled people. Senators and governors and the director of FEMA himself are ready to blame you, to say that if only you weren't so stupid none of this would have happened. So you line up and clean up and try to convince them you're good enough to be rescued, good enough to live--and when the messages keep coming, maybe you think, "Well, the hell with trying to impress them, then."

Oh, you wonderful people, this is not your fault. Powerful people are having their criminal level of negligence and exposed and questioned, and they want to blame someone else for their ineptitude. But if I have learned anything I have learned this: the name for a person with more power and influence than you, charged with protecting you, who rages and belittles you when you need their help, is abuser. There's no other word for it but abusive, whether they're a dad with a drinking problem or a politician with an accountability problem.

They've diverted the money that was supposed to protect us, and they viciously attack us when we ever-so-meekly dare to point that out. I just wish I knew where the battered nations' shelter could be found, or how to take out a restraining order against them.

What. The. Fuck.

It's been four days since Katrina blew through New Orleans, and there STILL haven't been any food and water drops to PRE-ARRANGED SHELTERS? What the ever-loving FUCK, people? Seriously, okay, obviously you can't just drive in and deliver a tray of sandwiches, but there are news helicopters flying around at the very least. Can we not manage to do some kind of fucking food drop from those helicopters, even if we can't manage to get the government to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to coordinate it? Oh, hey, I see on CNN that they did finally manage to drop a few MRE's today. Jesus.

You know the death toll estimates the governor of Louisiana has given, that deaths may reach into the thousands? Hundreds more are going to die that DIDN'T HAVE TO. Obviously the hurricane, the flooding, the people trapped in their houses--that's one thing. But leaving tens of thousands of people in squalor for a week or so will sure make that death toll skyrocket as the medically fragile perish, as diseases flare up, as violence spreads.

Meanwhile the asshole conservative fringe is already springing into gear to sneer about those darn refugees waiting for a handout from the government, questioning whether the government really ought to provide any aid at all to people who surely must only have stayed because they were stupid. You know, this dude has the final word on that bullshit:

Where do you live, that's so free from natural disasters you can pat yourself on the back for your excellent judgment? The Pacific Northwest? Volcanoes and rain! The Midwest? Tornadoes, blizzards, thunderstorms! The Gulf Coast? Hurricanes! The South/West? Droughts! Major cities? Blackouts! Bangladesh? Typhoons! Malaysia? Tsunami! Japan? Godzilla!

Look, if you get caught in a natural disaster, it's your own damn fault for one primary reason-- having been born somewhere on the surface of this fucking planet. Circumstance is chasing us all down, slowly but surely. There's an expiration date stamped on all of us. Empathy, sympathy, and respect all stem from recognition of this. And there's nothing cheaper, nothing less considerate, nothing more full of witless sound and fury, than sitting in comfort and safety and taunting the drowned, the displaced, the diseased, the lost, and the destitute for not being the Awesome Hurricane Warrior you would have been in their place.

Hey, you know what else, by the way? On behalf of Mr. Thel? The word "sniper" doesn't apply to just anyone firing a weapon. "Sniper" is a very specific term for a very particular situation, and any fool firing like an asshole on an aid helicopter doesn't qualify as a sniper. Jesus.

"Looting"

We break our exhausted silence for this public service announcement:

When you see clean, coiffed national "news" anchors contorting their makeup-heavy faces into expressions of horror and disgust at all "those looters" in areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, pause a moment before you let them get your gut all churned up into self-righteous anger at those bad bad looters.

Pause and think about it for a split second.

From Boing Boing:

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number -- 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources -- meaning, the political will -- weren't there to get them out.

White per capita income in Orleans parish, 2000 census: $31,971. Black per capita: $11,332. Median *household* income in B.W. Cooper (Calliope) Housing Projects, 2000: $13,263.

From Making Light:

First, I believe it was St. Thomas Aquinas who said that if a man’s family is going hungry, it’s no sin for him to steal a loaf of bread.

Second, anything salvageable the kid finds in a grocery store is something that won’t have to be cleaned up later. Besides, where’s the store where he can make legitimate purchases?

Third, yes, I absolutely agree that looting has to be suppressed. Some people will loot any time they think they can get away with it. Others will loot if they see those first people getting away with it. It’s a behavior that’s guaranteed to snowball (which is why I still say we were at fault for allowing the large-scale looting of Iraq to get started and perpetuate itself, right after the first wave of the invasion). Civil order is important.

Fourth, I have yet to hear one mention, one murmur of a hurricane evacuation plan, that didn’t consist of “everybody gets in their cars and drives somewhere else.” This, in a city which was guaranteed to sooner or later need evacuating, and which had something on the order of 100,000 citizens who didn’t drive cars.

New Orleans kept its light rail system during that period when other cities were going over to an all-highway system. It has streetcars. It’s a walkable city. That’s a mercy to the poor: you can live a poor but decent life, get to your job, do your shopping, without having to support a car. Until, of course, the day comes when any prudent person would get out of town.

I heard the city officials, before the storm hit, explaining that the Superdome would be a shelter for people with medical problems, people with special needs, who weren’t prepared to evacuate the city. Malarkey. It was, as they knew all along, the first last and only refuge for tens of thousands of New Orleans citizens who had no way to leave the city.

Not all of them are in the Superdome, or the other refugee centers; but no matter where they are, the majority of New Orleans’ beleaguered and flooded-out residents who’ve remained are the city’s poor.

That’s not looting. That’s plain old survival.

Really, read all the comments at Making Light, too. I know I keep sending you over there to read what other people have to say, but hey--when smart people have already made the points I was fumbling at inside my brain, why not save some time listening to me stammer and just see what they've said already?

**EDITED TO ADD: Somebody else who gets it.