maeve66 | Recent Entries

Dani has been posting almost nothing but Zionist dreck on Facebook for a year and a half. It is more and more painful to read. We had two huge fights about Gaza last year, both prefaced by me being unwilling to debate it scholastically with gem. I had HUGE PTSD flashbacks to fights with Andrew Hoerner, similarly bullying and avid to "change my mind" on something I told him I had no intention of changing my mind about (in that case, the need for an end to capitalism) via endless citation of sources blah blah blah.

I told Dani I refused to do that debate with gem, because gem's approach was exactly the same, piling on the minutiae of gem's "research" online.

But I finally caved and wrote a response to gem's last Zionist pile of steaming manure. Here it is.

* * * * * * *

I appreciate what [redacted] wrote, and I enjoyed the measured grace with which she demolished that troll. Just now, I was also very glad to read [redacted]’s contributions.

I cannot say the same for what you wrote, and have been writing, Dani. I have avoided commenting for months now, because it is so painful to see you absolutely not engage with either nuance or context, but solely raise antisemitic attacks (which of course are horrible and vile) and rail against Hamas (which of course is not an organization I support), and solely amplify the very few “Palestinian voices” (about four or five people, whom you cite over and over) which you believe are legitimate representatives of the hundreds of thousands of Gazans displaced, traumatized, and dehumanized in this war. They don’t seem legitimate to me, and I have a lot of life experience with judging political writing and political positions. Hamza Howidy has a very, very small Google footprint for an actual community leader. And you never cite or pay attention to people like Bisan, the Palestinian woman journalist whose videos over the past sixteen months have often started with “I’m still alive”. Not that I am terribly au courant with social media, but she has more than 4 million followers.

The current underestimate of Palestinians dead is around 49,000, and the British medical journal Lancet (hardly a wild eyed leftist organ) suggests that the toll, over and above the doubtless thousands buried in the rubble that Israel has created of Gaza, would have been nearer 186,000 LAST JULY (from the Lancet, July 2024: “In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.” You never, never acknowledge this pain.

You have also viciously slandered the student anti-war movement, accepting every claim about what pro-Hamas positions they hold, asserting your interpretation of what “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means, informing me that Jewish Voice for Peace is some kind of a scam, run by non-Jews. I urge you to look at what Sacramento JVP has been doing for the past year and almost a half. They’ve had amazing events and book groups. If you want to read reputable sources that are not your internet go-tos, I recommend Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine.

None of this stuff is easy. My cousins and aunt are Jews, and are in pain about this war, and talking about it together is not easy. We did, a little bit, on the weekend of my father’s memorial. But I personally know activists who participated in different student encampments last year – encampments which were brutally taken down, harassed, and punished by cowed university administrations (the University of Wisconsin and Columbia’s Hind Hall) (speaking of tragedies you have never, noted, the vile targeting and murder of a whole family, with one five year old, Hind Rajab, left crying over a phone until she died too, while the Green Crescent ambulance trying to get to that car was ALSO destroyed by Israeli tank fire) and violently attacked by, yes, Zionists and diaspora Israelis (since you like that term) at the University of California at Los Angeles. You say derisively “It's been so frustrating to see posts with complete disinformation get thousands of notes. Or to watch so many encampments demand things that have zero effect on Gaza. End the school's contract with Hillel? Stop all foreign exchange programs with, and speakers or visiting scholars or research work with, any school in Israel?
If even some of that energy had been going into fundraising for people in Gaza, or demanding that Egypt stop war profiteering by charging $5k-$12k per person to cross the border, it seems like it would have gone such a long way.”

PLENTY of people have been fundraising for people in Gaza. I don’t know how much money I (and my nieces, and my sister and my brother-in-law and my stepmother) have donated to Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. BDS is supposed to have an effect on ISRAEL, not on the rubble left by Israeli bombings in Gaza. And what have US citizens to do with Egyptian policy? Our government is sending weapons to Israel to prosecute this war. That’s where our tax dollars are going, from Biden to Trump.

That’s the other thing about nuance and context. I was a part of my university’s anti-Apartheid/divestment movement, in 1985. The parallels hold. Parallels with other anti-colonialist struggles also hold, and you know what? The tactics of those people struggling against colonialism, against being dispossessed of their land, their rights, and their lives? Sometimes they were brutal and tragic. Native Americans, Algerians, Irish nationalists in the six counties, uMkhonte we sizwe (the armed wing of the ANC)... every accusation you hurl at Hamas, or the PFLP, was hurled at those groups. Plenty of people, Ronald Reagan, for one, were furious about the anti-apartheid movement’s call for boycotts and divestment, including cultural boycotts, claiming that “constructive engagement” was what was needed. But international sanctions and boycotts took down Ian Smith’s white Rhodesian government, and helped free Nelson Mandela.

When I read your posts these days, I feel like Alice in Wonderland being dragged painfully and bloodily through the shards of a broken looking glass, where almost every sentence is only true backwards.

* * * * * * *

Dani's response? Privately, to tell me I have no room to tell gem I disagree with gem because I have two friends who are TERFS, in Britain. Does gem think I haven't told THEM I disagree with them? Publicly, on FB, to ignore any substantive point and once again plow into internet research gem has done, which tabs gem currently has open, etc.

I don’t have a whole lot of really early memories. It’s a question I pose once a year to my middle school students – “what is a strong very early memory you have – and if you have family photos of it, it might not be your memory, but your family’s”. But many of my early memories are of my father.

Possibly the first strong memory I have is when I was three or four. We lived on West Main Street in Madison, Wisconsin, and the first floor flat was tiny – a living room, a kitchen, and one bedroom and a bathroom. I slept in an iron-barred crib, separated from my parents’ bed by a green and white India print improvised curtain.

I think this may be a memory of something I did more than once. I remember that after I learned to climb over the bars down to the floor, on nights that friends and fellow activists were over, I would sneak out of my crib and go stand quietly in the entry to the living room, concealed, mostly, by another India print curtain, and I would eavesdrop on the grownups and especially on my daddy and his passionate positions on the anti Vietnam War movement, on tactics and ways to build the antiwar movement. Eventually I would be caught, claim I needed a glass of water, and be returned to my crib.

My father frequently said that he was never wrong. I both waged an endless battle to find something he WAS wrong about, and implicitly believed it. He was never wrong, about anything. I built the highest, most polished, most ostentatious pedestal ever and placed him on it – to the point that even he finally tried to tell me to cool it, once I was a freshman in college. But I don’t think I recognized until my early thirties that no one at all, ever, should be on a pedestal, and that every single human being has feet of clay. So I know that he was not ALWAYS right… but he was still right an awful lot of the time, from his phenomenal memory for facts of all kinds to his instincts for politics, tactics, and strategy.

Children often become not what they are told to be, but what they see modeled for them. PQ never TOLD me I should be a socialist, stand up for unions and ordinary working people, look at how the world could be made fair and equal for all, regardless of difference. But he lived that life, and my sister and I absorbed it.

I remember that on the nights that my mother worked late, my father would make up a bedtime story before tucking me in. In 1970 those stories featured heroes like Che Guevara, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a leader of the Nationalist struggle for Civil Rights in the North of Ireland, and Tony Benn, a radical, maybe revolutionary leader in the British Labour Party. I was very surprised, once I was in my 20s, in Britain, to find that Benn was not a long-haired radical militant, but a white-haired Labour MP. He even went to the trouble of researching Russian revolutionary history to try to find (or invent) a Russian princess who sided with the Bolsheviks. I have no idea if this person was real, or not.

Possibly he was thinking of a real woman from the Russian upper class who was a revolutionary in the ‘teens, Inessa Armand. He named our black cat Inessa, anyway. My dad loved cats, and he always gave them interesting names – Inessa, for the revolutionary woman who had an affair with Lenin; Clio, for the Muse of History, Philo for Philo Judson, one of the founders of Evanston, Illinois, who laid out the streets and served as a Census Enumerator. Judson, also for Philo Judson. Three Burmese cats he bought as a gift for a friend were returned because Lee Steinberg’s parrot was scared of them. So the Burmese went on a second plane flight and he took two of them and gave my mom the other – He named one Exley after one of his favorite authors, Frederick Exley, one Frida after Frida Kahlo, and one Malcolm, after Malcolm X. His last little female Siamese was actually named by Mary – Jerusha, the wife of Philip Maxwell, one of the early notables in Lake Geneva. But PQ, having a very strong sense of aesthetics, enthusiastically endorsed the name

I also remember less political moments, like Sunday mornings in Madison when I was five or six years old and my dad would put me up on the back of his old black bicycle (no child seat – I would just carefully stick my legs out, and clutch his belt) and cycle off to look for a Sunday paper and occasionally go out to Sunday breakfast in a cafe on Williamson Street… not the Willy Bear Cafe – that opened later. Then he’d cycle back to Dickinson Street, a Sunday ritual observed. I remember one time, he bought a coconut and brought it home. He got Rachel and me to inspect it, feel it, smell it, thump it, shake it and hear the sloshing. Then he took a literal machete, whacked it open on the kitchen floor, gave us pieces of coconut, and finished his performance by telling us to look at his bicep and squeeze it, noting that it was the same size as the coconut.

Not long after that, he got laid off and blacklisted from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and while he was applying all over the place for jobs, he also got day work at the labor hall as a construction worker. He’d been trained by his uncle (and used as forced labor) as a kid, but if he was lucky enough to be chosen to work that day, he would be doing the unskilled heavy labor. Every night when he came home, I would unlace his work boots, tug them off and put them away, hang up his yellow hard hat, and then get a beer and popcorn for him while he sat, exhausted, in his black vinyl armchair, watching the evening news.

I remember him talking about how much he wanted to follow where the Rand McNally maps showed the highways going when he was a little kid in Lake Geneva, but how he never traveled further away than Chicago and Milwaukee, for baseball games, until he was in high school and went on his senior trip. He was determined that my sister and I would learn about the United States and about other places in the world through travel (I mean, as much as he could afford). We went on long car vacations every August from when I was a toddler until my parents’ split. By 1978, we had traveled to 38 states and most of the Canadian provinces, and one of the two remaining French territories in Canadian waters, St. Pierre. Otherwise, he introduced us to the idea of other cultures by having us go out to eat almost every Friday night to a different cheap storefront restaurant in Chicago, each time a different cuisine. Yes, Chinese and Italian and Mexican and Greek, but also German and Polish, El Salvadoran and Puerto Rican, Korean and Vietnamese, Japanese and Thai, Cambodian and Irish, Portuguese and Persian, Lebanese and Pakistani and Indian.

My dad had a mania for getting us to memorize facts like the fifty states and their capitals, quizzing me relentlessly. He would ask both of us random fact questions all the time – making us into excellent takers and passers of standardized tests. And almost every Christmas gift he gave me was educational – a globe, an enormous illustrated dictionary, a one volume children’s encyclopedia which I was still using sometimes in middle school. He crowned this when I was a sophomore in college, leaving for England to do my Junior Year Abroad – I went two months before the October start of the school year, and just before my departure, he gave me a six week Eurail pass, which I used to travel, by myself, to Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Gdansk in Poland, Paris again, Parma and Venice, in Italy, Paris again, Oviedo in Spain, Lisboa in Portugal, and finally back to England.

My dad thought his daughters were the most brilliant, the most beautiful, the most political, the most everything. He was overwhelmingly proud of us – and later, of his granddaughters, also the most brilliant, the most beautiful, the most political, the most everything.

One of my dad’s friends in Mexico, Peter Gellert, quoted the playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht to describe PQ’s life:

“In Praise of the Fighters”
There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all of their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.”

I would add one more Brecht poem, illustrating the attitude to history which PQ passed on to his daughters and granddaughters:

“Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.”

When Patrick Quinn said that he believed the wave of genealogy sparked by Alex Haley’s Roots offered the bricks and mortar of a new social history, he was also echoing his belief in the strength, worth, and future of working people:

“Nothing’s too good for the working class”

The trip to Lake Geneva was really, really difficult, from getting off the Amtrak in Naperville, where the conductors did not put down the ramp because they were in a hurry (although they were actually way ahead of schedule). I have absolutely no sense of balance between, say, three inches and a foot or more. And it was terrifying to try holding on to the train and setting one foot out for the yellow metal stool. And I nearly fell (which would have been a disaster I cannot even contemplate) and I did wrench my knee, and I was crying and cursing. And then we had to Uber to a rental car place, which did not have a single fucking car my travelscoot could fit in (though it fits in my Honda Fit perfectly, without needing to be broken down). And they were all a foot off the ground, so getting INTO the car was almost as bad as gettin off of the train.

Once we were in Lake Geneva, things were better, though there were too many people to divide one's attention between, by which I really mean my stepmother's family. I am glad they were there to support her. But it was hard to balance than with my sister, my nieces, my brother-in-law, and my aunt, our two cousins, and Pete's wife and two kids, who don't know Mary's family at all. And Mary's family is nice... but nothing like mine. More money. Mennonites. A little bossy towards Mary and a little condescending towards us. The sister of Mary's I feel the closest to couldn't come because of her own health.

The service was really good, to the extent that I was able to stay there and not just zone out into tears. 200 people, and the revolutionary marxists let it all hang out and offered memories that left the local Lake Genevans at the very least nonplussed.

My dad's friend, mentee (SO MANY people who thought of his as a mentor in their lives...) co-worker at the Northwestern University Archives and eventual successor there gave the eulogy and it was really wonderful. He is one of the kindest most decent people I've ever known, and also terribly funny. The two of them were like a double act at Northwestern.

Kevin told about how he met my dad when he was an undergraduate researching for a paper, and when he signed in to the Archives users' book, PQ looked at it and said "Kevin B. Leonard?" Kevin BARRY Leonard? Your folks are Irish nationalists?" No one had ever instantly deduced that. They got on like a house on fire after that, but Kevin did make some assumptions of his own, and he asked my dad "where he went to Mass"? PQ growled and went into a rant about the medieval superstition of the Catholic Church, and Kevin noted to himself that that was not a subject to pursue.

My sister, me, my brother-in-law, and my nieces all spoke, and then so, so many other people, who told stories of how PQ had influenced them in their lives. He would have liked being celebrated like that. Comrades I had not seen in person for twenty or thirty years. He would undoubtedly have corrected some people's stories.

I love him so much. I miss him so much.

And then, the last day in Lake Geneva I started to feel sick -- it was 12 below, and I had chills all night. My sister asked if I was all right to get on the plane (there was no way we were taking the Amtrak back) and I knew she was pretty desperate to get home.

I had chills on the plane, too, though part of it might also have been low blood sugar. And near the end of the flight, I started coughing a little.

I bet you can see where this is going.

The first thing I did today was take a Covid test. After nearly five years of avoiding it, I have Covid-19. Kaiser jumped right on the Paxlovid. I had to call in to work for tomorrow and Friday and probably Monday and Tuesday, god knows what. And text and email all the parents. And text and email all my fellow teachers. And sleep and have a fever and cough and cough and snot and feel like my brain is swiss cheese, when it was ALREADY fucking trash from grief.

I wanted chicken soup so badly, but had none in the pantry. How is that possible? Anyway, I ordered a caldo -- Tlalpeño, without the verduras... just chicken and spicy broth and avocado and rice.

I've eaten maybe a cup and I think that is it.

I am going to post what I said about my dad and me in my next entry, and then maybe watch a couple of short easy shows on my iPad in bed.

I got the call this afternoon. My stepmother had called my sister immediately after calling 911, and then the paramedics and police arrived before she could call me. So my nieces called me. And they all came over. I mean, my sister, my nieces, and my brother-in-law.

My sister and brother-in-law were literally just out there in Lake Geneva. They got back on New Year's Eve.

I think I wrote in here about how my stepmother's sister texted me several months ago terrifying me with concern about how I would manage without my dad -- not knowing that my stepmother had not told either my sister or me yet about his need for a heart valve operation.*

But my stepmom downplayed it, telling us he wasn't going to drop dead. Apparently -- she said on the phone a while ago, the doctor had actually said the heart valve operation would make him feel better, but probably NOT prolong his life.

I've been crying pretty steady for a few hours now, with gasping breaks to talk with my sister and nieces et al.

It hurts so much.

I want him to have a huge political memorial, sometime this summer. I was angry that my uncle's memorial soft-pedaled his Workers' World politics. I am damned if my dad's will not celebrate his lifetime of revolutionary marxism, of internationalism and engagement with the Fourth International and Ernest Mandel.

We have to do an obituary for the local LG newspaper in which he had a weekly history column.

He was 82. He was not enjoying the contraction of his life -- he should not have been driving, but still was. He couldn't travel internationally any more, and walking was increasingly difficult. He fell, yesterday, apparently, and my stepmother wasn't strong enough to pull him up, so he waited a while on the carpeted floor and was finally able to pull himself up using his armchair. This morning, he didn't feel like he could do the daily drive to the Piggly Wiggly for coffee and so Mary could get her paper copy of the New York Times. So he went back to bed, and Mary drove to the Pig. When she got back, she thought he was napping. He has been napping a LOT in the last few months. When she went to wake him up, he was dead. Which is exactly what happened with me and my mom. She went to take a nap; I went to wake her up; she was dead. She was still warm, which was shocking and led to me shouting at her to wake up, over and over until the neighbors came. He was cold, according to Mary.

I will have to write about him. I want to write about him. But not now.

*This is what Mary's sister (whom I love) texted me last July: "Thinking of you. I suspect you are worried about PQ. I had a good talk with Mary yesterday and hate to think of all of you losing him.😘"

Both

mistersmearcase and

microbie did this, and even though I never do it and think my life is too dull to do it, I decided to check it by trying.

1. What did you do in 2024 that you'd never done before?

God. Did I do ANYTHING I've never done before? I mean, at least it isn't like two years ago when I did cancer, which I'd 'never done before'. Um. I kind of think not? If something occurs to me, I'll circle back. Oh, ha -- SUCCEEDED IN NOT BEING PURGED from a book/study group. Two, in fact! Take that, you bastard Maoist women in Chicago in the late 90s! One on Palestine and one on (anti)fascism. They were both good. The (anti)fascist one was actually put on by Solidarity, which is the socialist group I still pay dues to (in addition to DSA, but I am not active in either... it had been ages since I interacted with Soli folks, and I helped found that group when I was 18, in 1984. I was the only "youth" in the group.) It was really nice to see old comrades. And the discussions and readings were fucking great. I should maybe actually post the readings list.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I never make resolutions, and I will not make any formal ones this year. I DO have a To Do list of shit I have disgracefully neglected for literally years, but that is very depressing.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

No -- but Lucie, the wife of one of my best friends, Adam, is due in about eleven days -- in fucking Kazakhstan! They already have a toddler named Sebouh Marx Hefty (I should redact that, but I think I am going to make this private-to-me only anyway). Adam lived in Saudi Arabia for... jesus... eight years? and has now moved to another similar academic position in Astana, Kazakhstan.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No. Though I always freak out and cry at the deaths of friends' pets, and that happened at least three times this year.

5. What countries did you visit?

None

6. What would you like to have in 2025 that you lacked in 2024?

Better health, based on me taking better preventative care of myself?

7. What date from 2024 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Ugh November 5th, where we all stupidly hoped against hope down to the wire. UGH. Even though, like many friends, I despise Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Hmm. Maybe recommitting to learning more Hindi via Duolingo? I'm also doing Irish (fuck their spelling, though)

9. What was your biggest failure?

Health. Ignoring Devlin's paws, thinking it was arthritis that was making her limp. Luckily, that grievous error ended well and she is fine and entirely recovered and will not have claw problems again now that I have discovered a mobile pet groomer/vet tech.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

I think I won't know until after the mammogram. I still have not had Covid, fingers crossed.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I indulge myself with lots and lots of ebooks from Amazon... I have an upcoming thought of a big expenditure (which will gratify my sister) -- getting my carpeting replaced.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

"The people who work to help those in Gaza and to show the rest of us what's really going on." Yes. What

microbie said... including Owen Jones, whose passion and anger and integrity are deeply appreciated. I am not enough of a social media consumer to know all of the people in Gaza who are documenting this insanity.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Here I agree with

microbie also, but will add on a personal note... a friend of twenty years' standing who converted to Judaism a few years ago from an adulthood so far of hippie paganism and CHOSE UNREMITTING ZIONISM as their Jewish identity and politics. It has been an excruciating year with them, and I think it is the end of the friendship. They are a person who absolutely loves to correct people on the internet, and dive deep into Reddit and other cesspits and when they turned that focus on me, wanting me to argue and debate with them, it was horrific. They cherrypick ridiculous statistics and data (and always have, in whatever internet obsession they are currently fielding) and feel like they are Experts on Israel and Palestine based on their friendship with a staffer for the ADL (a childhood friend) and pretty obvious CIA and Mossad "Palestinian" sources.

14. Where did most of your money go?

See aforementioned Amazon ebook comment.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

I was actually pretty excited to do the Soli book/readings group with my older niece, via Zoom.

16. What was the worst thing you bought in 2024?

Hm. I can't think of anything ridiculous or regrettable. Some books were stupider than others.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

I. Happier or sadder? sadder

II. Thinner or fatter? I think fatter

III. Richer or poorer? About the same, I guess, except that the mortgage amount ticks down excruciatingly slowly, and the savings account ticks up equally excruciatingly slowly.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

mustered up the will to try walking with a fucking LIGHT walker, up and down my hallway

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

ordered food using apps

20. How did you spend Christmas?

Christmas Eve here at my place, with my sister, brother-in-law, and nieces -- we watched Kneecap (which I'd already seen with my sister) and then It's a Wonderful Life which I persist in viewing as a late document of American fellow-traveler Pop Front culture (it's really almost ten years too late for that, but whatever). Christmas Day -- ten hours of it! Unheard of for me!) at my sister's, opening presents and hanging out. I got my sister to start Slow Horses which is an enjoyable Brit spy series.

21. "What was the best live show/concert/event you attended? (Formerly "Did you fall in love in 2024?" a.k.a. the El DeBarge question)"

I can't answer either of these questions interestingly. I don't think I give a damn about falling in love (I've always been at least agnostic on it, and I think I am a worse person when I am involved in it)... and it's been a LONG TIME since I saw any music live. I guess going to a movie theater to see Kneecap was unusual for me, and I enjoyed that.

22. How many one-night stands? (need to think of an alternative question)

lol

23. What was your favorite TV program?

You know, I'd like to enjoy Abbott Elementary, but it makes me anxious, possibly partly because it is quite realistic, and partly because I just do not like long series anymore. I think it's good, and funny, and I like Quinta Brunson a lot... but. In terms of series that are streamable, oh, so many! My nieces just got me into Never Have I Ever, which R the Elder CLAIMED they were hate-watching, but admitted that "it goes down easy"... it's is pretty perfectly calibrated to entertain all three of us with its high school Indian-American heroine based partly on Mindy Kaling and all the self-reinforcing Netflix pop culture references you can imagine. Also, Slow Horses as mentioned. Also finished Derry Girls, finally. Also Bodkin and... was Deadloch this year? Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Warrior. Shogun (the new one, which I was reluctant about because I loved Toshiro Mifune in the 80s miniseries and have read Clavell's books approximately a bazillion times... but now I am kind of excited to see what they do as they go off book but continue the Tokugawa Shogunate story). Anyway, a lot of streamed stuff.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

I'm getting there with the friend-turned-Zionist, which is super sad.

25. What was the best book you read in 2024?

Nonfiction: The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, I think.

Fiction: The Marvelous Mirza Girls by Sheba Karim -- YAF about an Indian Muslim mother and daughter who go back to India to live for a year in Delhi. Kind of an Indian Me Too moment, also.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Seriously I am enjoying Kneecap, though I liked their music before this year.

27. What did you want and get?

books, more political discussions even if via Zoom, a continuing sense of enjoyment at the alternative school/program where I am in my third year of working

28. What did you want but didn't get?

Hm. Maybe Bernie Sanders running again instead of just accepting Biden and then Harris.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

I enjoyed Bullet Train very much too! And I watched it this year. Otherwise, I've already babbled about Kneecap... Irish language hip hop and Irish nationalist politics in the North of Ireland in the present day, linked to the real history, but also seeing a way forward with cross community youth who understand the class based similarities? I dunno, it was just great.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 58. I don't actually remember what we did. I am going to say it is likely that my sister et al brought me Irish soda bread and we hung out.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Less pusillanimous Democrats

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2024?

Have I already said this? The day I started at this program IN PERSON (I'd worked the first year from home, teaching via Zoom, and I was very nervous about coming back) I wore what I really wanted to wear every day to our back to school staff meeting -- a teeshirt, a cardigan, and patterned pajama pants and crocs. And I girded my metaphorical loins and directly asked the administrator/boss guy if what I was wearing was "professional enough" and he looked surprised and said yes, of course. So that is what I wear EVERY DAY. I have a lot of different patterned pajama bottoms and a lot of different cardigans.

33. What kept you sane?

My nieces, my cat Devlin, my sister, books, absorbing shows, politics, Bollywood music, Duolingo

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Yeah, I don't really do that

35. What political issue stirred you the most?

Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and fuck Israel.

36. Who did you miss?

I miss my friend Alistair, in Britain. I miss Adam, now in Kazakhstan. I miss getting to hang out with Meghan, in Missouri, though we talk on the phone. I miss my mother, still. I miss my grandmother, too -- so many things I would ask her if I could.

37. Who was the best new person you met?

I enjoy the new social worker at my school/program

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2024:

Jesus. I am really bad at something like that. I feel like I do not successfully learn life lessons. I just continue fucking up in the same areas of my life.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

No

40. Post a picture of something(one) that made you happy this year.

I fucking hate DW for making image hosting so near impossible

41. Did you wrong or hurt somebody in 2024?

I think the possibly former friend would feel I did, but I also feel that about them.

42. Is there some new place you are planning to visit in 2025?

not sure -- I'd maybe like to drive East to Chicago this coming summer. My older niece and I have talked about it.

43. Where would you have wanted to go and did not in 2024?

Eh, traveling is insanely difficult for me, so that's a hard one.

44. Did you learn any new life skills in 2024?

I learned how to make really good Habitant soup -- that's yellow split peas with savory and ham shank. I need a ham shank because I want to make that tomorrow if possible.

45. Any new food or drink preferences developed in 2024?

Not really -- tea addict forever

46. What is your greatest fear for 2025?

ugh... that neglecting preventative care will haunt me

47. Did you follow any sports events in 2024?

Since the NFL closed the loophole where I could listen to Packers games on internet radio, no.

48. Which social media occupied most of your time in 2024?

I dipped my toe in at BlueSky but just like Twitter in former days, I cannot stand it. I have absolutely nothing to say. I like Tumblr a little better, though I also have little to say there.

49. Is there somebody you feel particularly grateful to this year?

I am grateful to my nieces and to my sister and brother-in-law for many things, but recently for participation in the aforementioned political study groups.

50. Name a hope you have for 2025.

It feels very difficult to have a hope for 2025.

Current Music: "Khwaja Mere Khwaja" from Jodhaa Akbar

Such a nice day. Devlin seems all better. R. and R. came over to make applesauce cake with Grandma's mother's recipe (tweaked, I am convinced from one in the Kansas City Star, or a magazine of the time... with added cocoa) and also a mince pie; we chatted, watched some short videos, ate cheese and crackers, drank masala chai, and put my presents under the tree for literally a hot second, so I could take a photo. Then they packed them in a box to take over to Damuth.

We looked up Frederick Demuth, Karl Marx's illegitimate son with Helene Demuth, the Marx's housekeeper.

Around 5:30 PM, RQ and T. came over. RQ made a delicious peasant winter dinner of fried cabbage-onions-and-butter, roasted potatoes, and fried kielbasa sausages. I was unconvinced because of the kielbasa, but in fact fried, it was delicious.

I have a lot of dishes to do, but I don't mind dishes.

We watched Kneecap (which RQ and I had already seen, as I wrote about a couple of months ago), and then after dinner, we watched It's a Wonderful Life, which was the first time RQ ever watched it all the way through, and the first time T. ever watched it at all.

I'm due over there tomorrow morning for presents and bagels and lox and cream cheese at 10 AM, so I cannot stay up that much longer.

Current Music: "Tannenbaum" the Vince Guaraldi Trio

I wrapped all my presents this afternoon. R. and R. are coming over this evening, maybe in an hour or so, to decorate the tree. I bought a new garland this year (well, three six-foot strings) that made me think of Bollywood a little. And some more lights. We'll see.

I like what I've gotten for people... mostly.

My dad -- a globe paperweight made of American rocks and crystals -- the map is good, mostly, considering that it's 3 inches in diameter. But the larger groups of islands are basically small white rectangles, which looks like they're being censored. Indonesia, Madagascar, the entire Caribbean.

My stepmother -- a purple peony cotton sateen yukata, XL (hope that is not too large)

My sister -- garnet earrings and a garnet necklace. I never, ever feel like I get RQ something she actually wants, and I foresee this will be more of the same, and also suspect that she might already have at least one set of garnet earrings, possibly from me years ago... I also got her a 500 piece puzzle of international stamps. Oh -- and an enameled ball point pen (one for RQ, RFM, and RQM)

My brother-in-law -- I think this is really cool, but it is ALMOST UNMANAGEABLY HEAVY. It's a world historical atlas with maps and infographics for EVERYTHING. I opened to the lead up to the Reconquista, which is synchronicity since this year's Illuminated Manuscript model was about that very thing, a letter from Leonor to her mother Eleanor of Aquitaine.

My older niece R. -- 1) a Mondrian artist's mannequin* (and the enameled pen); 2) a Topadorn ceramic travel mug for tea (or whatever; 3) 2 boxes of Wagh Bakri masala chai tea bags.

My younger niece R. (who turns 21 on Christmas Day) -- 1) two books -- James, by Percival Everett, and Libertie, by Kaitlyn Greenidge (and the enameled pen); 2) a Topadorn ceramic travel mug for tea (Rosie's is blue fish grafitti on a white background; Ruby's is similar coloring but old sailing ships, in a nod to The Terror); 3) 2 boxes of Wagh Bakri masala chai tea bags.

And (thanks Ruby, for reminding me that this would be a good gift) for Rosie's birthday, a donation to the PCRF in the amount of $50.

*It's just one of those twelve inch wooden artist's mannequins, but it's painted to look like a work by Piet Mondrian.

Current Music: "Sister Winter" Sufjan Stevens

I am trying to collect all the examples of AI that I use without minding it at all, AI which is useful to me and doesn't set all of my teacher alarms off, because boy, do I get shirty about AI and student writing, or AI and its generation of "art" or "fiction", etc.

1. I am quite fond of being able to search for information on the internet, though the little stuck-at-the-top Google announcement of their AI version of my search results pretty much annoys me and I do not use it without checking more.

2. I find Google Translate extremely useful in a pinch, to check my own guess at a Spanish translation, to use with languages I absolutely do not know (which involves some blind trust, obviously) -- Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin, Latin... obviously those are not the only languages I do not know. I worded that poorly. But Google Translate has gotten a lot better in the past few years.

3. I find Ancestry.com's scraping of uploaded information very helpful in terms of what my dad calls genie research.

4. I am sort of hit or miss, mostly miss about predictive typing. I don't make many typos on my own, or misspell much, and autocorrect mostly enrages me and does not get it correct, whatever it is. Also, if AI is so great at that, why does it not correct the typo "on" to "in" or vice versa; you'd think it could manage that.

5. Map/Direction apps are... useful... though I will say they give me much the same feeling as a calculator, which I still avoid for fear of losing what little knowledge of basic calculation I have -- same with the ability to use a map and retain directions in my head. But map/direction apps are so convenient, sigh.

6. Speech recognition and Speech-to-text apps for my students who have various forms of dysgraphia... those are very useful.

7. Again I am less sure about grammar and spelling fixes... I mean, they mostly work, but I do feel like ... well, first, my students are too lazy even to make use of them, but if they DID, I fear they would not actually learn from them, just lazily accept corrections. What do other people think about this?

8. welp, that might be it. If others have examples that are useful and not predatory and/or dystopian, I would be interested to hear them.

(Some teachers here thing ChatGPT might be a fine thing that students would 'learn from'; some also think that it's not exactly ChatGPT is useful tool in some formats that, for instance, allow you to input text and then choose a register in which to spit it out: snobbish academese, for example, or sarcastic, or some other historical period. I have not checked these out yet... they don't flick me on the raw like straight up "write me a five paragraph theme on X journal topic)

Current Music: "Holy, Holy, Holy" Sufjan Stevens

but I love streaming services way too much. I should learn to torrent, but I am a) a wuss, and b) slightly technophobic wrt downloading stuff when it is punishable by... I dunno, fines and jail? I mean, probably not. I'm just chicken.

That said, I am contributing to the coffers of far too many streaming services. I refuse to list them. For right now, I will just say some things I have very much enjoyed watching, of late, and things I intend to watch, soon.

Kneecap -- brilliant, I loved it, I think I wrote about it here at some point. It doesn't actually belong in this entry, though, because I saw it with my sister in an actual movie theater.

Bodkin, which, apart from being out of the stable of Michelle-and-Barack-Obama's post presidential production company (that is SO WEIRD) (also, his attempt to be another David Attenborough with "Our Oceans" or whatever it is called, also on Netflix is just... no. His voice was okay for a presidential address. It is not suited to the majesty of narrating nature)... anyway, though, I enjoyed this mash-up of Only Murders in the Building, and Deadloch which could have been titled Only Murders in the Quaint Irish Village

Slow Horses -- hat tip to

sabotabby (hope that works right) -- I just finished season 1 of this Brit spy series about fuckups in a dead end has beens offshoot of M15. Loved it. Will start S2 pronto, even if it is (as is reputed) not quite as good?

Blitz I am a sucker for WWII homefront stories and movies, so I ignored all the highfaluting damned-with-faint-praise three out of five star reviews by e.g., the Guardian. So it wasn't an art film, sue Steve McQueen. Something I think was worth the price of admission (a bit of a silly thing to say, since I watched it with a free week long membership in Apple TV + or whatever it is) was that it did not deliberately cast race blind, as some shows and movies have (I'm looking at you Bridgerton though that show had a kind of half-assed alter-historical nonsensical rationale... and also, I don't MIND race blind casting at all...) but this was better because it was HISTORICALLY ACCURATE... if you'd looked at a census of 1931 or 1941 London, these were the people you would have seen, probably in exactly the proportions McQueen shows -- Indian families, Black Britons from the Empire, whether the Caribbean or Africa, etc. And yet, because actual films made in the 1940s by Ealing Studios or whatever, as well as more recent movies set in the 1940s ignore that history, seeing Indians and Black Britons (and mixed race Brits) in this movie is jarring and feels fucking refreshing. Also, I loved the kid and the Nigerian Air Raid Warden, and I liked Saoirse Ronan FINE -- fuck the Guardian's "pencil sketch of a role".

Obviously this is the film I just finished, since it's the one I have written the most about.

Next up (I mean, probably not TODAY, but soon):

Say Nothing -- series about the Price sisters, Brendan "The Dark" Hughes, and the murder of Jean McConville. My ex from Belfast has his critiques (mostly of the soft-pedalling of Brit handlers of Jean McConville, who was a tout and who had been caught with transmitting equipment and warned once, but then was pressured into starting up again by the Brits, even though her cover had been blown). Note: L. was not a Provie himself, but in what were called something like "the intellectual Republicans", e.g. a group then called People's Democracy.

Raanjhanna -- Bollywood recommended by co-worker, a Sikh Punjabi woman who is insanely gorgeous and has a full back tattoo that is amazing.

I Never Cry a Polish/Irish film about a young Polish woman who travels to Ireland to retrieve her father's body after an industrial accident.

when it finally starts, the next season of Strange New Worlds

ditto, the next season of Deadloch.

Also... Xmas movies. It's a Wonderful Life; A Christmas Carol (the Patrick Stewart version and maybe the Henry Winkler one); Spirited (don't judge me!); MAYBE Elf; and MAYBE Klaus.

ETA: Oh! And "A Huey Freeman Christmas" -- a Boondocks Xmas special! (Maybe the Charlie Brown Christmas Special too...)

Current Music: "Barcarola" Sufjan Stevens

→ Comment with "Questions, please!"
→ I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
→ Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
→ Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

The following questions are from Microbie (I do not remember how to do that click-on username html tag):

1. Describe a student you still remember many years later. (Not a question, but I am curious.)

I have a lot of students I remember from years and years ago. Some from literally 1998 to 2005, when I taught middle school in West Oakland; some from 2005-2012 when I taught at my first middle school in my current district, and some from 2012-2021 at my second middle school in the district, and into and through the Pandemic.

So. From Lowell Middle School in West Oakland... I had an eighth grader maybe my third year there? Maybe my fourth. He was a cool cat. His family was stable working class, which was rare in West Oakland. He was Black, which was almost de rigueur in West Oakland. Over my seven years at that school I had two white students, and a small minority of Asian students (mostly Vietnamese and Lao) and Mexican and Central American. At least 85% or more were African-American.

This student was pretty strong academically, but mostly motivated by basketball and track. He had a hilarious but dry sense of humor. He was very tall, had very dark skin, and an infectious smile. One day during a very stupid school spirit "Opposite Day", I wore a hoodie and chewed gum ostenatiously all day, and he found that endlessly funny and started calling me by my first name. I should have shut that shit down, but I did not. He called me by my first name most of the time for the rest of the year, though no other students picked up on it. I went to one of his basketball games in the Spring, and found myself sitting next to his father, by chance. In the final minutes of the game he came over to the bleachers and told me he was going to dunk in my honor. And he did. I let students friend me on FB once they are out of HS, figuring if they remember by then, well, no harm. He is friended to me, and he became an artist in West Oakland, though I don't know whether he does it for a living.

I could write in this much detail about at least fifteen other students, too...

2. Do you have a bucket list? If so, what's left to do?

I do not have a bucket list. Somehow I do not like the idea.

3. Have you ever been in a book club?

Hahahahahahaha. Yes. I tried being in a book club right after I stopped being resident in grad school -- I moved back home to finish my research and write my diss (never happened; I am still ABD, because I finished my written and oral exams in bravura style, but then just stalled out on crafting my unwieldy PhD thesis). It was a socialist women's book group, made up of several comrades from my own group, and some from another tradition (Maoists, if you must know). And the Maoist women purged me after either one or two meetings, because I treated it like a seminar, I think. They literally wanted me to do a crit/self crit and I refused. Two of them (this is true) were twin lawyers who did a lot of National Lawyers Guild defenses. I was gutted by this experience, and had a lot of resentment because not all of my own comrades stood up for me. They let me leave the group rather than protest forcefully. I've only THIS YEAR tried another book group -- two, in fact -- and I am enjoying them.

4. What's the worst subject/event/book you've had to teach?

Without a doubt it was sixth grade math. Thank fuck it wasn't eighth grade math. It was a punishment assignment, sixth grade math/science core, though I didn't mind the science AS MUCH. I still minded it. I hate the "multiple subject" teaching credential that I have, according to which, technically, I am qualified to teach fucking ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. Which I am in no wise actually qualified to do. Anyway, I was lucky we had a very strong math department at that school, and that as a sixth grade math-science team, we all met together and planned each week's lessons in complete lock step. The main teacher was willing to just hand me lesson plans and warm-ups and let me be a week behind, but I refused. I wanted to contribute if I could. But I hated it anyway.

5. Do you ever think about a road not taken?

Occasionally I think about either sticking with archaeology as an undergrad (at the end of the intro course, all of the grad students came in and gave us a series of speeches about how there were no jobs and they were all graduating into unemployment or at the best, following a bulldozer and pleading for potsherds ground up by the thing's metal teeth) OR sticking with French political translation and interpretation. But there are a lot of things I love about teaching -- particularly lesson planning (and doing the projects along with the students) -- and I am fully glad I moved out here and could be a part of my nieces' lives.

Current Music: "Happy Christmas (War is Over) Angélique Kidjo

Note: I give this as a journal topic every year, often around Thanksgiving, but not only. The idea (I tell my students) is to be as specific and exhaustive as possible.

1. I love Celtic interlace. I learned how to make a couple of patterns WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY. The image above is one.

2. I love lesson planning, especially for Social Studies projects involving art. Currently, my 7th grade students are immersed in writing an original letter in the persona of Eleanor of Aquitaine (or one of about 17 people she actually knew and in some cases actually wrote to, though in much briefer form) to Eleanor of Aquitaine or one of those 17 people *... which they will then turn into an illuminated manuscript on parchment paper. This is the Medieval 1% study focus. For peasants, the 99%, we turn to Karen Cushman's excellent YA novel The Midwife's Apprentice, which (I had an insight years ago) maps pretty directly on to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, so I teach that, too and sometimes have them write an essay proving that.

3. I love Devlin, my cat, who is glorious and snuggly and endlessly open for petting, including on the belly, and who sleeps next to my head until I pull the cover up and turn onto my side. Then she flounces off, but when I wake up, she is already back, asleep by my head.

4. I love learning languages -- to date, French, Spanish, Hindi (in progress on Duolingo), Irish (ditto)... eventually I hope, Arabic and maybe Farsi. Korean also seems cool. I am intimidated by Chinese.

5. I love stained glass. I have a small imitation Tiffany lamp I got my mom as a housewarming gift, um, 35 years ago? Which I inherited back from her once she moved out here. The background screens on my phone are both photos of stained glass from Winchester House, where that whacked out widow of the manufacturer of Colt revolvers lived.

6. By the same token, more or less, I love colored lights and have a string of them up all year round. And I go crazy on them when decorating my Xmas tree.

7. I love revolutionary politics and Marxist theory, and I am super glad to be in two different Zoom reading groups, one around Palestine (and also reaction to the election, sigh) and the other around the history of and resistance to fascism.

8. I love most things Indian except Hindutva -- food, language, pop culture, visual art.

9. I love Quebec and Montreal even though I haven't been there since I was a teenager. But it is an enduring love.

10. I love soups -- my mom's cabbage bean soup (but swapping cannellini beans for red kidney beans, and ground turkey for ground beef, and adding a cumin bagheer); split pea soup with ham; habitant soup with pork shank; lamb barley stew; a really good soup my older niece just made with cannellini beans and chard and lemon and parmesan; black beans and onions and cumin and cotija cheese and crema (not really a soup); masoor dal with cumin (ALMOST a soup); chicken soup with carrots and onions and rosemary and peas...

11. I love Irish (and generally Celtic) music and I love folk music, having been raised on it, and I miss singing with my mom so, so, so much.

12. I love reading -- genre fiction, from young adult fiction, to historical fiction to historical mystery series, to sci fi, to Regency Romances, to chick lit, to some fantasy, and also theory and history and biographies. I do not love self-help books, though my mom owned a bazillion of them and had a shelf devoted to them which she called the Richard E. Miller Memorial shelf -- her father who offed himself when she was twenty-two or so. Okay, that's not so germane to Things I Love, but.

13. I love the fact that at my alterna-school program I can go to work every day in a comfortable tee-shirt, a cardigan, and one of the innumerable pairs of pajama pants I own. And crocs. I literally checked with my administrator about this on the day I started back to work in person after two and a half years of remote teaching (I had an extra year of it).

14. I love that I am lucky enough to have actual painted art by various relatives up on my walls -- a not-very-good oil painting by my mom's brother Peter, of his mandolin; a watercolor of NYC, probably Greenwich Village, by my great-aunt's husband Don Silks, two oil paintings by another great-aunt's husband, Claude Owens -- very surreal dream pictures. Also a 1972 screen printed red and black poster in my mother's handwriting and some no-nonsense sans serif font advertising her speaking on "Women and Revolution", for the Young Socialist Alliance and the Women's Coalition for International Women's Day (which my sister and I grew up thinking was a regular holiday, celebrated by lots of people).

15. Speaking of things on my walls, I also love that I have the actual diploma (it is ENORMOUS -- about 2' by 3') that my great-great grandfather's cousin Jennie Quinn received in 1888 from Lake Geneva High School. She went on to Wisconsin's Normal School (teaching college, in Milwaukee) and then spent her entire working life as a teacher in Milwaukee, until the 1940s. I have traced her various 'homes' -- which were basically rooms in someone's apartment in the neighborhood near the school she taught at the whole time... sometimes she'd stay in one place for a few years, and often there was at least one other female teacher lodging there as well. But she came home to Lake Geneva every summer, no doubt partly to save money.

16. I love the smells of rosemary and lavender and citrus.

17. I love Irish breakfast tea with half-n-half, which would probably horrify all my friends in Britain. The half-n-half, I mean. It could be even MORE extreme, honestly. Once I was in Sevilla with my best friend, and we were wandering around town, coinciding with people's morning commute. We shouldered our way into a crowded cafe and I tried to order "té con leche". The barista looked at me like I was insane, and then steamed milk to past boiling and poured it over a tea bag. My god it was delicious.

18. I love my nieces so much that it would be endless to write about it. I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area not because the idea of California compelled me, but because my sister had, and I knew she'd reproduce out here. And that decision is justified every day by the mere existence of R & R.

19. I love doodling. I use Zentangle with students, but I've been doodling basically like that since long before I ever learned about that method. But it's very good for de-escalating the fear that a lot of kids have about their 'inability' to do art.

20. I love Prismacolor colored pencils.

21. I love journalling, and have been doing it since I was nine years old.

22. I am somewhat surprised that I love having carpet under my feet in this apartment.

23. I love Wisconsin -- Madison, Lake Geneva, Green Lake, Wild Rose, Milwaukee. I love much of the Midwest, in fact, and it super pisses me off when people dismiss a whole swathe of states. To be fair, though, I question the need for Nebraska and Oklahoma. But slagging off Ohio? Wtf.

24. I love my parents, all three of them -- my father, who is getting so old and creaky and needs teeth pulled and a heart valve replaced, my stepmother who is extremely wonderful, and my mother, whom I miss every single day.

25. I love scented candles -- cranberry, pine, bayberry, any citrus.

*Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, King Louis VII of France, King Henry II of England, Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess Marie of Shaftesbury, Petronilla (her younger sister, whom some sources say was dead and others say may have accompanied her into captivity), Archbishop Thomas à Becket of Canterbury, Sir William Marshall, Marie, Alix, Young Henry, Richard, Matilda, Geoffrey, Young Eleanor, Joanna, John... the letter has to be written in the year of 1175, so Thomas à Becket is actually not SUPPOSED to be involved, but one kid broke my rules for the assignment years ago and wrote a letter as Becket pleading for compromise... and had the letter splattered with ink-blood!

Current Music: "Danny Boy" Black 47

I am going to be grumpy in this entry. This grumpiness is the result of the New York Times, though not for the normal reasons (crappy snotty biased articles, equally condescending op eds, most of them, etc) -- it is the result of Wirecutter. I do not enjoy Wirecutter, unless I am looking up one thing, though it's a rarity. The last time I looked some consumer product up on Wirecutter, it was... I think a pot. A saucepan? I don't even know the terminology well enough. I wanted a good pot to cook rice in. Anyway.

What was sending me berserk today is really the greater hatred I have for Black Friday. I have always hated Black Friday. I have never ever bought anything on Black Friday -- it's my personal Don't Shop day. My family never did either, let me say... not out of disdain or a critique of capitalism or whatever, just because we did not in general buy the kinds of things that were big ticket items.* We got new clothes twice a year at K-Mart, once at the beginning of summer, and once before school started. Each of our series of used avocado green Chevys were inherited from my father's uncle. Christmas seemed very wonderful and expansive and extravagant to my sister and me, but looking back it was more a question of enjoyable quantity than anything that cost a lot. I am still perpetually astonished at the prices of gifts people I know routinely give each other for birthdays and Christmas. The wrapping paper is often the most enjoyable part of it all for me -- I mean, I like GIVING presents, and wrapping them. Of fancy items of consumption we had... a dishwasher, which remained an amazement to me. A washer and dryer in the basement for both flats in our building. A tv (it is still bizarre to me, the idea of having more than one -- lots of my students' families have one in almost every room). An okay Pioneer stereo. Otherwise our apartment was a space full of refinished used furniture, india prints flung over anything you could sit on, endless shelves of books, house plants, political posters, photos my mom had taken, guitars and a mandolin and a dulcimer and recorders (and yet I cannot play any of those things... I could once play the recorder and do some duets with my mom). I guess my mom was kind of 70s hippie-ish as well as a socialist. I remember we both really enjoyed Apartment Living which basically was a magazine that showed how to do interior design knockoffs on the cheap, in 70s style -- lots of macramé and rich colors and use of large coffee cans covered in découpage or whatever, and thrifting.

Anyway, that's the way I like objects. What makes my guts churn is "door busters" and every electronic thing in the world being hyped at deafening levels -- I looked through Wirecutter this morning, god knows why, and saw not one single thing I could ever imagine wanting. Ring cameras. Various iterations of Alexas. Technical cookware I could not even understand. Electronic toys for toddlers that are basically screens but prerecorded or something? Or not? I don't know, I couldn't even understand it but it made me want to be a crotchetty old Luddite who insists on wooden toys and fabric books and art supplies.

It was strange -- the visceral dislike of everything on that list (even the Apple products, and I am an owner of a MacBook Pro, an iPad, and an iPhone) was slightly similar to BUT NOT AS ENJOYABLE AS that yearly snarky take-down of the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. Which is kind of what I feel like the NYT is ... it is just as condescendingly bougie but tries to disguise that with its staid paper-of-recordness.

Okay, I feel slightly purged now, whew. I think I am going to do a book-end entry on Things that I Love (or am grateful for, same diff).

*Let me interject here that I am NOT someone who thinks that socialists should be abstemious for some stupid moral high ground reason. Friends in grad school would always try that shit on me, and it's nonsense. Also, my dad raised me with a couple of jingles that guided him: 1) I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus, sitting on the dashboard of the car; 2) The working class can kiss my ass; I've got the boss's job at last (you can see he was a premature aficionado of today's ironic wokeness), and -- crucially -- 3) Nothing's too good for the working class.

Current Music: "Boy from Tamlaghtduff" Christy Moore

I mean. I expected it. But that doesn't stop my stomach from revolting, my head from spinning, my shoulders from tightening up like there's a crank steadily grinding away, my eyes from tearing up, my throat from seizing up.

Fuck the Democratic Party for being so EMPTY and SPINELESS and for refusing the only policies that could have beaten Trump, which were a principled withdrawal from support of fucking genocide in Palestine and Gaza (and war on Lebanon) and economic populism to strengthen the working class (which IS African-Americans, and Latinx, and immigrants, and women). Bernie's program (not Bernie Bros, though they would have flocked to it) could have beaten Trump. But the Democrats will never bite the hand of the capitalist system that feeds them, and believe that cheap semi-woke social and political THEATER can motivate enough of their base, along with "joy" and "hope". Their only progressive policy was defending and restoring abortion rights, and too many white (racist) women voted for Trump.

The sickening New York Times has an article titled "Resist or Retreat? Democrats are Torn About Whether to Keep Fighting", which claims in their endlessly snide and insinuating style that "Many Democrats who became activists during the first Trump administration are questioning if they can summon the strength to do it all over again". I hate that fucking paper so much. They are just as disinforming as openly right-wing media except they cloak it in lofty declarations of principle and manipulative weasel words.

I came home from a fifth day of excruciating, brutal heat, to find that the elevator was not working.

What the FUCK. After calling the HOA, which was unpleasant all the way around, since they close at 4:30 and it was 5:03, and I had to hit "0" to be connected to the emergency after hours company... and that guy acted like my situation was unimportant and finally told me he'd call the manager (what manager? where? contact info? All I know now is that her name is Melody, and she was already primed to be a stone bitch) consulting with RQ (and Ruby) I put my 'scoot back in the Fit and drove to the front and parked on Saratoga, luckily in front of the upper gate.

Getting the travelscoot out and over the curb, and settled so it wouldn't career downhill was extremely tricky. Getting myself over the curb, and then onto the 'scoot without tangling my legs and falling either in the cambered street or on the uneven pavement -- sloping precipitously downhill -- was extremely scary. I nearly fell, twice. Getting the gate open and holding it open while I maneuvered the 'scoot over the lip of the uneven sloping pavement to the bridge was also extremely difficult. The bridge was okay.

But I have to reverse all of this tomorrow, most likely. Melody says it will not happen in the next hour, or perhaps even before tomorrow, and further says that “well, ma’am, elevators break, and we have no control over that. If they need to order parts we have no control over how long repairs take, either.”

I tried it a few years ago, I think with Hindi and just for comparison's sake, French -- which I had damn well better still be close to fluent in. And it kind of sucked. The sentences were ridiculous.

I started again a couple of weeks ago -- I am doubling up on Hindi and Irish (which I tried to start years and years and years ago... like, in my 20s, but found the tapes and books "Teach Yourself Irish" completely impossible... Kneecap revived my interest!), and I feel like I somehow subconsciously made some sort of progress with Hindi despite not doing anything but listening to Bollywood music and watching Bollywood movies (and not as many of those as in the past...). It's very heartening not to have to mess around with identifying Devanagari characters, but to be able to sight-pronounce almost everything I see, even if I am kind of slow at unwinding the meaning of sentences I hear. I think their n + i model is much better now. Eventually I want to add in Arabic (probably ought to do it sooner than later, god...) and Farsi. I can fantasize about Korean, too. Anyway, I am enjoying the hell out of it, and despite doing both at once, it is not confusing me.

The spelling in Irish is insane; the accents and the ridiculous combinations of vowels, and the nonsensical pronunciation of some consonant combinations and clusters... a far cry from the different rationalities of, say, Spanish and Hindi. Spanish is a WYSIWYG language, I swear -- 26 letters and they all make one fucking sound each, damn it. (Especially the vowels... no batshit dipthongs, no seven-or-eight-ways-to-say-OUGH. The only confusion for native spellers seems to be h and j sometimes, and double ll, h, and y, sometimes.

And Hindi... Hindi has a lot of confusing Ds and Ts and Rs and Ns, but apart from that, it is the most conscious and designed transcription from oral to written language I've ever looked at: their abugida (not quite a straight alphabet, but a syllabary where an "ah" sound is built into each consonant when it is by itself... there's a lot more than that, but I am going on memory here) is transcribed IN THE ORDER IN WHICH EACH SOUND IS PRODUCED IN YOUR THROAT, MOUTH, and LIPS, from back to front. That's the alphabetical order in, say, a dictionary, too, except that all words with initial vowels (also in mouth order) are in a separate section of the dictionary from those words that begin with consonants.

God, I find linguistics fascinating. If Northwestern had had minors, I would have had a linguistics minor to go with my French Studies major.

Ruby's machinations on my behalf (and her worry for my social and political isolation) has resulted in Tim calling to see if I want to join his weekly Sunday evening Zoom on, well, maybe mostly on Palestine. They started by reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi, which I have started and need to finish. But they've done other stuff since then -- the very good interview of Khalidi by Tariq Ali in Jacobin, etc.

I will strive very hard not to be an asshole and take up too much air time.

He said if I had any reading ideas, to throw them into the ring... two things that occurred to me, though neither are at all new. They're quite old by now, in fact. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, which I gather informed Khalidi... I read it in grad school -- it's a historical and theoretical exploration of nationalism, and I think would be useful, counterposed to, say, Marx. And Lenin, who grappled with it in practical terms. Also -- and I have never read it, though I should -- Orientalism by Edward Said. I am also thinking about Palestine and Marxism, but it might be super fucking heavy, so maybe not.

I am really grateful to Tim for being open to it... I mean, he asked me when they had just started the Khalidi book.

But Ruby's right: I need somewhere to focus my anger and rage and despair about capitalism and imperialism and Zionism. I am so angry at the impunity with which Israel murders fucking ANYONE, ANYHOW, ALL THE TIME. Blowing up pagers and walkie-talkies in a coordinated attack that also of course killed many innocent children and women. Bombing four apartment buildings to dust to get to one Hezbollah leader. Continuing to flatten Gaza and kill children there, while pivoting to send not only settlers but tank bulldozers in to Gazafy the West Bank. Tank bulldozers. I remember when I first heard about the tactic of destroying the family homes of accused Palestinian "militants". WTAF -- there could be no clearer metric of colonialism. Israel has more than matched the European wholesale annexation and clearing of Native Americans. You don't want a people to question your right to occupy their land? Make them homeless. Make them refugees. Literally destroy their homes. And face absolutely no consequences for doing so.

She wants me to do phone banking for "Uncommitted" -- I don't know about that. I don't want to tell people especially in swing states NOT to vote for the fucking wretched, spineless, Zionist-enabling Democrats... in the face of Trump/Vance. God, it's hard to believe that this is where I am on fucking electoralism. I never thought I'd vote for a Democrat ever in my life, but now I've done it twice and will do it again. Ugh. I am pretty sure I voted for ... god, did I? For Hillary Clinton? Eep. I know I fucking did for asshole Biden. Maybe I did not, since California was (and is) a safe state and the Electoral College makes the popular vote meaningless, in 2016. But Trump broke me, by 2020. I don't know. Maybe I will phonebank. Physically I cannot manage demonstrations. But I need to do something besides donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and promote it on my FB feed.

Okay, in other news, I finally made a Safeway order for early this evening. I am sitting here in the recliner -- okay, RECLINING HERE, in the recliner, listening to my entire iTunes/Music list of 10,000 songs on shuffle, editing it down as I go. Ludacris, followed by Sahana (a Bengali woman, Sahana Bajpaie singing, I think), followed by "Louise" by Human League.

Those are all three great songs. I like that kind of mix-and-(not)-matching, though most people I know do not.

Current Music: "Get Back" Ludacris

Working with one of my eighth grade students, Samaa is so fun, no matter what I am teaching her. She is avid to learn, and even though her skills are not the highest (iReady diagnostic pegged her reading at the third grade level, for two reasons, I think: 1) she's an English Learner, and 2) she has little exposure to text and avoids reading ... and doesn't go to the library, or read the books I've given her... she prefers videos -- K-dramas, C-dramas, and now T (Thai)-dramas -- and iReady pegged her math skills at the first grade level, some of which may also be due to ELL issues) she WANTS to learn and is not bored by things.

Today we were continuing with back to basics grammar (I have jettisoned those stupid grammar drill sheets I used as a crutch last year) -- we'd reviewed Parts of Speech, but now I am connecting those to building blocks of sentences. I want Samaa to be able to identify each part of speech in a sentence, so that when I tell her to build a sentence using at least two nouns, a pronoun, an adjective, a past tense verb, a conjunction and a preposition, she'll be able to do it. After color coding the PoS (shades of Montessori instruction, though I don't really know much about that and should look it up), I gave her three topics and said she should write one sentence, any sentence, about each. (Topics, two of which she suggested because she did not want to do two of the ones I had come up with -- the election, and Gaza*: fruit; next weekend; and K-dramas). All three of her sentences were perfectly grammatical utterances (with one misplaced word, because of ELL). Then she painstakingly, bit by bit, underlined each part of speech in the associated color, with help. Then I asked her to figure out which two PoS EVERY sentence MUST have. She guessed an article first (I think because they are so ubiquitous) but then corrected herself to a verb and a noun. So we made up a ton of two word sentences with nouns (people, animals, and things) and pronouns, and a verb. Finally, I showed her the most basic first step of sentence diagramming. She was able to correctly figure out where to divide each of her three earlier sentences.

* My sister likes to eat a lot of apples. -- divided between sister and likes

* Next weekend I'm going with my mom, shopping. -- divided (with help because of the contraction) between I and am going

* My friend told me about a new K-drama and I am going to watch it. -- divided between friend and told

Because I was late (boo -- I had to waste time this morning using my final [more than a year past expiry] Covid test because I have a wretched sore throat, which was RQ's first symptom a couple of weeks ago when she got it) this took up all of our time and we had to plan how she could do one hour of math iReady at home and use one of the Thursday hours on Social Studies instead, with me.

I fucking love small group or one-on-one instruction. It's where I began with teaching, at Evanston Township High School's STAE -- Steps Towards Academic Excellence program, which is what finally pushed me to become a teacher instead of a professor.

*She has written plenty about Gaza, in horror and anger and sorrow. Almost every one of her weekly Current Events assignments is on an article on Gaza.

ETA: Two hours later -- Samaa and her mother just stopped by with a Yemeni feast for my lunch -- something like Greek pastitsio with cinnamon and ground beef or lamb and macaroni; some roast chicken; saffron rice and a yogurt sauce for eating it with, and a salad. I was not expecting that.

I have my iTunes (oh, Apple Music, WHATthefuckEVER) on songs, shuffle. Shuffling 9,189 songs (apparently 27 days of music, if I wanted to play them once through without stopping). I haven't done this for a long time, but I am enjoying it. Things that have come up in the past half hour: a song from Hamilton, a Turkish singer (possibly Selda; I didn't see the song title/artist), Blue Scholars, the Coup, June Tabor, Prince (which is where I started, on which more in a bit), the Cure... upcoming: Dolly Parton, Woody Guthrie (whom I love, politically but can only bear musically one song at a very isolated time), Fairport Convention, and Mary Wells' "My Guy", no doubt from one of the Motown mix CDs a high school ex sent me several years ago. Like, more than fifteen years ago?

I listen to music on my computer all the time, or frequently, anyway. Often I choose something specific to listen to -- recently Kneecap, for example. but this morning I was reading a New York Times article about the Ezra Edelman (he's the guy who made the amazing OJ Simpson eight hour documentary O. J.: Made in America, which I watched when it came out with my sister, nieces, and brother-in-law) documentary-in-the-making-and-apparently-suppressing on Prince. It is a fascinating article, and I really wish the fucking dismantled estate would not prevent its release by Netflix.

The article itself led me to watching a linked Prince video -- one of his masterful guitar solo with a bunch of 'guitar greats' (all older white guys) on George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". He's incredible and a fucking genius, but also terribly flawed. The estate and one of its controllers, a music industry lawyer, doesn't want it released (according to the article) because it/they are afraid it will lower the monetary worth of Prince's estate.

I was aware of and liked Prince music in the mid 80s -- and I remember seeing an earlier album cover in a record store in the much earlier 80s and being kind of blown away by the sexiness of it. But I wasn't a knowledgeable fan or anything. I wasn't sure what to make of "America", for example. We had Purple Rain at my house, but I think it might have been my sister's album. We didn't own a ton of records, really. Our first albums were both Motown, Stevie Wonder. A friend of the family had given me the amazing double album Songs in the Key of Life when he was visiting from Montreal. Then he realized RQ felt left out so he went out and got her an album of Stevie Wonder's younger Motown hits. I think those were our first records. I know my second and third records were these later Beatles compilations, "The Red Album" and "The Blue Album".

When Prince and David Bowie died relatively closely together -- Bowie in January 2016 and Prince in April of that same year -- there was a landslide rush of people buying their music in celebration and mourning. I didn't buy much Bowie, though the gender-bending of both Bowie and Prince moved me. I already owned a ton of Prince, more because an ex (a relatively recent ex, at that point) had introduced me to a lot of his stuff that I hadn't been familiar with before.*

Anyway, I recall reading another super long article about late Prince (not 'the late Prince', but Prince later in his career, during his Jehovah's Witness period, which confused me -- that period, uh, which extended to the end of his life, not the article. Another filmmaker wanted to make something about Prince, though he was still alive at the time. God, I am rewatching that Kevin Smith talk about it right now, so it was a video, not an article. It's a weird rewatch, after the NYT article about Ezra Edelman's project. The audience is almost entirely white. It seems like a very Reddit-feel (not that I know much about Reddit, for sure). Smith is milking the comedy of Prince being religious and a megalomaniac who wants a documentary about whatever album he was releasing in 2001. Anyway, apparently Edelman interviewed Kevin Smith along with seventy other people who knew Prince, and also had access to the Smith footage of that Paisley Park event from "the Vault".

Man, this entry is a dissection of a fucking rabbit hole, isn't it?

I guess, overall, the NYT article makes me think about artists and how you weigh their life and their work, which I have always been ambivalent about. I mean, I grew up on 19th century kids' classics, from Treasure Island to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin to Frances Hodgson Burnett and L. M. Montgomery and more. I think Polanski's Macbeth is an amazing movie. But I find it hard to re-read any of J. K. Rowling's Potter books, and god knows I wouldn't read anything else by her -- I mean everything else by her is as far as I can tell absolute shit, and the Potter books are more mediocre every time I think about them. More of an amazing publishing phenomenon that swept young adult fiction for a few years. Diana Wynne Jones is a billion times better.

I don't have any neat way to tie this rambling rabbit hole up in a bow. Sigh.

*Let me explain something here: I do stream music, mostly on YouTube, but I don't really use Spotify or Pandora. I want to have the actual bits and bytes on my hard drive -- so I am hardly a vinyl purist or anything. But I also cannot stand not to give the artist money for their work. I go to fucking Bandcamp to buy tracks by unfamous artists like the anti-cop dude who created "The Bonk Song", No$hu. Kind of ironically, that "I want to buy the music I want" thing doesn't apply so much to Prince, because that ex spent hours and hours and hours in Augusta, Georgia one week at his sister's, ripping the CDs of his he thought I would like onto my hard drive. There were a few things that did not last the test of time, like some fucking seventeen minute song about a car crash, which I cannot find ANY trace of (including on the internet... it's not "Warm Leatherette" which I am also squeamish about) and like a lot of 1930s blues that were extremely graphically sexual, or the horrific Shaggs, eh. But the Googoosh music, the Selda music, Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, tons of 70s Bollywood, the 90s shoegaze music... there is a great deal I have to thank him for.

Current Music: "Glory Days" by Pulp

1 What was the first piece of furniture you bought?
The first one I remember (though since I was twelve, I didn't pay for it, so possibly it doesn't count) was an old wooden desk with a thin band of decorative inlay around the long, fairly narrow rectangular top. It had one long central drawer and narrow wooden legs with a lot of space, and was somehow very satisfying as a desk.

2 What proportion of your meals do you cook?
Almost none of them. Sandwiches, frozen food from Trader Joe's, literally sardines on rice cakes, soup from a can. This summer my niece Ruby introduced me to ochazuke, which involves no cooking (except you can microwave quick rice in a pouch for it) and is satisfying and delicious. I used to love cooking (and I still do it once in a while, particularly in the winter with various tweaked soup recipes). But I loathe cooking dinner after work.

3 Foaming hand soap or normal hand soap?
Um. Non-foaming liquid soap? Mrs. Meyer's, to be specific. Basil, or Verbena, or Geranium.

4 Favorite chore?
I actually kind of like to wash the dishes and do laundry. With both of those chores, the satisfaction is quickly obtained when order is restored, and conversely, loads of dishes in a sink gross me out, as do loads of undone laundry in laundry baskets.

5 Least favorite chore?
Cleaning floors, whether that is mopping or vacuuming.

6 Most precious thing one of your pets has destroyed?
The worst any of my cats have ever done has been to scratch furniture, and honestly I don't care much.

7 Any groceries you've been getting into lately?
Trader Joe's lightly smoked canned salmon, for the aforementioned ochazuke (recipe: one packet of insta-rice, microwaved for 90 seconds; one can of said salmon, with some but not all of the oil/liquid discarded, mixed into the hot rice. Soy sauce, not too much. Genmaicha tea poured over it, and some furikake.)

8 What cleaning product do you swear by?
I like scotch pads, the green ones. And the non-scratch blue sponges.

9 What's your emotional support craft?
Drawing, if that counts.

10 Youtube, cable TV, or streaming?
Streaming, from many services. And I guess YouTube.

11 What's something you saved up for and then regretted buying?
I am not sure I regret anything expensive I've ever saved for and bought.

12 How many cups can you see from where you're sitting?
I'm in the living room, so none

13 Which filter are you most likely to go "eh, it's probably fine" when you find out you need to change it?
I think I am only aware of two filters in my apartment. I think I have changed both within the past year.

14 How often do you take baths?
I got my bath turned into a walk in shower, so never.

15 Do you go down each aisle when you grocery shop, or only the ones you know you need stuff from?
Mostly my groceries are delivered. If I shop at a grocery, I usually know it and definitely do not go down every aisle.

16 Where do you go when you need to get out of the house but it's raining?
Is that a thing? It is pleasant to be inside and be aware of rain outside. I just wished it rained more and more strongly in the Bay Area.

17 What's a movie you saw recently that you liked?
I wrote about Kneecap, which I REALLY enjoyed.

18 Pro or anti tchotchkes?
To quote Microbie: 'I like tchotchkes.' I will admit that I think I have as many beloved tchotchkes as I want. I don't like to acquire them, much.

19 What's your go-to tape?
It is hilarious to me that this is a question that generates so many different (or any) answers. Mine is that strong see-through packaging tape, which I used to use so much as a teacher, mostly 'fake laminating' stuff, that I had an Amazon subscription. That stopped with the Pandemic. But I still have a lot of excess rolls of it around.

20 What's in your freezer right now?
Making chicken stock is on my list (as a byproduct of the really delicious chicken and rice soup I made this summer) but right now, all that is in my freezer are Trader Joe's frozen tamales, frozen peas, a baggie or two of ice, and little plastic freezy inserts for my lunchbag.

21 Last concert you attended?
God. I don't remember the last live concert I went to. Possibly Neil Young with Lucinda Williams opening? Or Green Day? Or a huge bill of women singer-songwriters at the Fillmore. All of those are more than ten years ago.

22 Favorite grocery store?
Either the Piedmont Grocery Store, which is a little boutique bourgie grocery store in Oakland that has excellent cheese and imported stuff and a great deli and meat counter OR Trader Joe's. They're also not down with unions, which sucks.

23 Paper bags, plastic bags, or reusable bags?
Springheel Jack's answer to this was interesting. I HAVE reusable bags, but since my groceries are mostly delivered, I also have a lot of single-use plastic bags.

24 Do you get your government mandated 8 hours every night?
No, not by a long chalk.

25 Favorite old person activity?
Napping, I guess.

26 Would you rather sit on the porch drinking sweet tea or sit by the lake drinking beers?
I'm with Microbie on this. Neither. Sweet tea is nauseating. I've been super into both herbal and different varieties of black iced tea this past summer, though. But I'm fine with drinking it at home.

27 Do you prefer Boardgame Night, Build-Your-Own-Pizza Night, or Movie Night with your friends?
Uh. I watch some movies and more shows or Tiktoks with my nieces. The notion of a ______ Night is a little weird to me.

28 Be honest, do you like all of the pictures of their babies that your friends send you?
I have a possibly statistically odd number of friends who have not reproduced, so honestly I don't get many. Not even remotely in FB updates.

29 Go-to holiday card format?
I like real cards, but... I'll save the rest of the answer.

30 How many pairs of scissors do you own?
I think... four? Or five, including my scissors that are only for cloth.

31 Do you still own your first car?
No, but I loved it the best of all four cars I have owned since age 25. It was a 1983 Subaru wagon, that dark red color.

32 How do you take your morning coffee/tea?
Irish breakfast tea with half 'n half, no sugar.

33 What's something you collect?
I buy enough books from Amazon (on top of the 700 or so actual books in my shelves) that they must count as a collection?

34 What's your commute like?
I drive about four miles to work, no highways, and it takes maybe twelve minutes.

35 Aisle at the grocery store you never bother walking down?
baby stuff/non-food items

36 Do you keep a daily journal or agenda?
I do, though that doesn't mean I write in it every day. But I started at age 9 and am now on volume... 73, I think?

37 Do you still listen to the same music you listened to in high school?
Yes, plus.

38 What's the last filter you changed?
"what's with all of the filter questions?" -- seriously, boringest topic ever.

39 What little treat do you always get when you run errands?
Sometimes, particularly if I am with my nieces, we stop at a drive-thru Starbucks.

40 Grocery list or no grocery list?
List.

41 What's the oldest thing you own?
I also have a fossil I found in Canada when I was ten. I think besides that, I have the actual (HUGE -- it is about 20 inches by 32 inches, maybe?) High School Diploma of my great-great aunt Jennie, from 1886 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She was one of the first girls to graduate from the high school, and she became a teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin starting around 1888 or so, until she retired around 1947. She never married, and she lived as a boarder in different apartment buildings near the single school she worked at that whole time, spending her summers back in Lake Geneva with her sister, Martha.

42 What's an unjustifiably expensive appliance that you really want?
I don't really care about appliances. I guess a better refrigerator would be nice, but I cannot imagine going to the trouble or expense of getting one.

43 Favorite book you've read recently?
I read The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson a couple of weeks ago. It's a kind of journalist's historical take on the Great Migration viewed as a much longer movement. I thought it was quite good. She did years of oral history interviews and whittled them down to three representative people. The Chicago woman (from Mississippi; immigrated in the 40s) and the New York man (Florida; immigrated in the 1930s ... lots of cultural links with Zora Neale Hurston) were my favorites... but there was a smaller story of a guy who was vaguely linked to the third main person (from Monroe, Louisiana, to Los Angeles, CA, in the 1950s)... The minor person was a Black comedian and actor from Monroe, Louisiana (part of what makes this interesting to me is that Monroe is in Caldwell Parish, and very near where my research was focused, for my history MA) -- who is mostly known for turning his Vaudeville shtick into an ongoing sidekick [the chauffeur] in the Charlie Chan movies. I went and watched one on YouTube, and his "indefinite language" patter bit WAS actually funny. I am going to read her book Caste next.

44 Honest feelings on Settlers of Catan?
I barely know what it is. I think I confuse it with that weird sex cult. Gor?

45 What's something you wish you had more time for?
Cooking, seeing friends who are so fucking far away, learning Hindi... And the rest of my deferred answer about Xmas or holiday cards (including birthday cards) -- I wish I had more time I could spend on making those by hand. I used to do it A LOT, and it has felt like a bit of a defeat not to hand-draw such cards... I think my mom drummed it into me that hand-made was better, and my sister drummed it into her daughters, too.

46 What kind of stuff do you keep on the door of your refrigerator?
Magnets holding niece art from long ago and various tweaked recipes.

47 Lamps or overhead lighting?
My apartment was built in the early 1980s, but it still does not have a single overhead light (except in the bathrooms) so lamps.

48 If you could build your home from scratch, what outrageous feature would you want to build into it?
Oooh, both Springheel Jack's and Microbie's answers to this question were interesting. Me... huh. Well, honestly I'd like a private long pool with salt water instead of chlorine, for water walking. With steps down into it, and a deep end.

49 Do you bring a bag with you everywhere you go?
Hm. I mean, I have a very capacious shoulder bag, but I don't always have a separate bag with me.

50 Pro or anti throw pillows?
I don't really care. I have a couple, but I myself don't really sit on the futon/couch, so they don't impact me at all.

51 How many blankets do you keep in your living room?
One queen size dark red fleece blanket, and one extra queen size paisley comforter. I never, ever turn the heat on, so if people hang out in the evening, or sleep over (nieces) they are very necessary.

52 Did your relationship with your parents get better when you stopped living with them?
It was pretty good while living with them and then also once I moved out as a grownup. I mean, I moved home as an adult when I was ending up not finishing my PhD, and even though that had its frustrations, it was still good.

53 What's worse, the DMV or the Social Security Office?
No experience of Social Security offices; I HEAR the California DMV has gotten better. I will have to find out for myself within the coming year because my license is going to expire and I need to convert it into "Real ID".

54 Do you decorate your house for holidays? Which ones?
I love my Xmas tree, and I usually have a wreath made of little jinglebells, red and silver, on the door.

55 Favorite high-effort meal that you make?
Anytime I cook Indian, which hasn't been too often of late.

56 Favorite low-effort meal that you make?
Ochazuke as mentioned before.

57 Do you tend to bring an appetizer, entree, dessert, or drinks to a potluck?
Ooh, yeah -- mine is masoor dal with a cumin bagheer, and rice pullao with mushrooms and garam masala.

58 What kind of bag do you use for your bag full of bags?
"what's with the bag questions?" to quote Microbie.

59 If you died and your ghost was stuck in the outfit you're wearing right now for the rest of time, would you be happy with it?
Sure. I don't really give much of a shit about clothing, but I like this particular color combination, and it's comfortable, which is how I assess clothing.

60 Do you have an opinion on your local weather reporter?
I haven't watched TV news for... it might be decades at this point.

61 Do you have a favorite brunch spot?
Nope. I used to. I used to live literally next door to a neighborhood institution called Mama's Royal Cafe, which has been around in that incarnation since the '70s. It's changed hands, but the menu is the same -- it has really, really good omelets and scrambled eggs, including trout or catfish, sometimes. Really good bacon and sourdough toast. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. Damn. I haven't been there in probably five years, since I moved down here. It's not cheap, though.

62 Where are you on the minimalism-maximalism kinsey scale?
The first time I ran into this phrase I had no idea what it meant, unless it was literally asking about sexuality. If it's talking about decor, I dunno... a 6 or 7 towards the maximalism end? Wall of bookshelves, lots of art on the walls, a wall of old photographs, a storage cabinet, the top of which has tchotchkes on it (two dripped lead sculptures by my mom from the early 1960s, a glass head, an Egyptian cat statue, a varnished wooden music box in the shape of a grand piano I made in woodshop class in middle school, some wooden candlesticks, and a stereoscope from about 1902 along with twenty or so stereoscope cards...)

63 Opinion on Bath and Body Works?
When I lived in Brighton, I liked the Body Shop. Never cared for Bath & Body Works.

64 Last time you visited a farmer's market?
I used to go to the Oakland one by Lake Merritt all the time; it's REALLY nice. But the local ones down in this working class suburb are... just very basic and held in an ugly parking lot.

65 Anything you're procrastinating on right now?
Nope

66 Do you get your taxes in as soon as possible, at the last minute, or late?
Probably during the last week before they're due.

67 Do you keep any stuffed animals on your bed?
Nope. I never really liked them.

68 Are your garbage bags scented or unscented?
Unscented, good god.

69 What are you looking forward to next week?
I'll be starting with my students (we had work this week but not students yet) all of whom SO FAR are kids I had last year.

Current Music: "Joe McConnell" by The Wild Colonial Boys

My sister pushed me into going to an actual movie theater today* to see the Irish film (North of Ireland, in fact) Kneecap, the semi-fictionalized story of how the pretty fucking republican hip hop band got started. The actual band members were the stars of the movie, plus Michael Fassbinder as the possibly apocryphal Provie father who fakes his own death (thus abandoning his family) to escape the Brits.

I have liked what I'd heard of Kneecap's music -- and Liam's nephew, I forget his name -- was in one of their music videos, which took place at a party.

But the film spent more time on the Gaeltacht, or Irish speaking, community in West Belfast, a stubbornly persistant political movement to get Irish recognized legally and supported. And Kneecap is part of that, because their rap is mostly in Irish. And fucking catchy. I told Rosie I thought she should definitely see the movie, and she mostly demurred because she thinks wypipo shouldn't try to rap. Which I get. But ... though arguably Eminem is exploitative in the same way Elvis was... his rap is good. Most white rap is not. But Kneecap's is, very much so. Anarchic and hedonistic and political, all at once.

Notes: shows I want to continue and finish:

1. S3 ~~Only Murders in the Building~~ -- finished 8/6

2. A Discovery of Witches

3. True Detective: Night Country

4. My Lady Jane (frippery recommended by Veronica Stein while we were texting today)

5. Warrior (maybe)

Shows finished: remake of Shogun and The West Wing rewatch and Brooklyn Nine-Nine

* We were going to go to Union Landing in Union City, because I am curious about their theaters, which show a lot of Hindi and Telegu films... but ended up for scheduling reasons, having to go to Bay Street, which was arduous and fucking annoying, because once we'd parked and struggled with the parking payment machine, it turned out that the only elevator was broken, so RQ had to haul my scoot while I stood grimly on the escalator... and then the second escalator up to the actual movie theater was also broken! We almost shitcanned the whole project then... but after some food and drink my sister went to get the car and pick me up and drive ... as it turned out, ALL THE FUCK OVER THE PLACE eventually to Parking Garage B, to find a practically hidden floor with "temporary ADA parking spaces" and a metal ramp I worried my battery wouldn't be able to deal with, but it did, brave little 'scoot. And then the handicapped bathroom was out of order, too. All garbage.

Current Music: "HOOD" Kneecap

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maeve66

March 2025

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O Brave New World...

...that has such unblushing blogging in it

Recent Entries

Well, I maybe blew up my 22 year friendship with Dani.

My daddy

Yeah, how was this bound to end.

My father is dead.

I'm going to try this, though I never do it and my answers are always dull

Christmas Eve

Xmas xmas xmas

No reason for this usericon; I just love it

I hate TV...

Memery

Things I Love (and am grateful for)

Things that Revolt Me

Son of a bitch

God, the heat and then shit just gets worse.

I feel like Duolingo has improved...

A collection of things...

Teaching and tutoring

I'm listening a little more randomly to my music, thus the MQ icon

Springheel Jack and Microbie meme-ing

Kneecap was brilliant!