... by Isabel Wilkerson.

I thought I'd read this before, but I think I bought it and then mentally collapsed it into the collection of all the primary sources, historical monographs, and fiction I HAVE read on the topic -- Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Hortense Powdermaker, W. E. B. DuBois, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, the papers of the Louisiana Central Lumber Company.

Anyway, I'm reading it now, and it is as excellent as I thought it would be. I want to read Caste, too. And then watch Ava DuVernay's Origin.

One thing it makes me remember is the anomaly of my grandmother's poetry notebook I found after her death, hand-typed in the early 1930s when she was in the only year she had of community college (at least I think it was one year? I know she didn't actually finish... add it to the dozens of questions I wish I had asked her and will never be able to ask her now).

She had typed copies of the poems she particularly liked, to which I assume she was exposed in Kansas City, Kansas around 1933 or so. The icon for this entry is a photo of her in KCK sometime close to then.

The poems were an eclectic mix, but the ones that caught and held my attention were the ones from the Harlem Renaissance, STILL UNDERWAY. How did a young white woman encounter and love these poems? Who was the professor at whichever junior college this was? I don't even know which college she went to for a year or two before marrying her high school boyfriend Dick Miller.

Countee Cullen -- there were at least two of his. Langston Hughes, too. Arna Bontemps.

It's another bit of evidence that complicates the expectations of history of race, and for that matter, gender. My grandmother's future sister-in-law was a lesbian (known to her family), living with her partner in Kansas City, by the late 1930s. Was my grandmother aware of Countee Cullen's or Langston Hughes' rumored (more than rumored in Cullen's case) sexuality? On the other hand, that same future sister-in-law, my great-aunt Billie Miller (actual name Willanore, a combination of her grandmother's and grandfather's names) was herself a horrific racist. Her family was in fact the first exposure I had to racist white people in my life, when I met her sister and more, her sister's husband, in Springfield, Missouri when I was four. Aunt Pat gave me my first Barbie, in fact, during that visit. I named the doll Malibu, which was the style of Barbie she was. Such a tangled weird tapestry.

This is my text to my brother-in-law this afternoon, and a link to Sean O'Brien's (President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters) speech to the RNC.

- - - - - - - -

"Have you watched it? [Redacted] commented that this one speech tipped the balance for him to think that Trump will be elected. Fuck."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDnocISOKc

Some comrade on the Soli list said it’s the speech the Dems won’t let Bernie make. Plus, of course, a HEFTY dose of American nationalism and patriotism. It’s so weird. There are so many echoes of what you could imagine a right wing labor populist/fascist saying. But at the same time, the Trump faithful, as someone pointed out, were hella lukewarm because they can’t applaud anti-corporate shit… these aren’t the actual poorer Trump base, at the convention. But working people beyond the base? Fucking hell. He avoided any immigrant bashing. I wish you’d watch it."

- - - - - - - -

There are a lot of white working people I grew up with that I can imagine gravitating towards that, in Wisconsin, who were anti-Trump and anti-Walker, but... He fucking applauded Josh Hawley for walking two picket lines in Missouri and 'changing his mind on Right to Work' (I fucking doubt it).

I just tried calling Alistair -- it's 10:16 PM there now, eight hours ahead. Or, I guess since the world goes by Greenwich Mean Time, we're eight hours behind. Whatever, there was no answer. I will try tomorrow between 10 AM and noon, my time. It's very frustrating that I can no longer just text or email him, sigh. I mean. A lot more frustrating for HIM, miracle man that he is.

I want to add my (tempered) jubilation to his, and also to see if he'd like me to figure out how to make digital files of me reading two books for him -- Hall Greenland's The Well-Dressed Revolutionary: The Odyssey of Michel Pablo in the Age of Uprisings, and a collection of essays by Michael Löwy, Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark. Actually, I guess I could also offer the more instantly relevant The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi.

Back to the British election -- I said on FB last night, Yes, Keir Starmer sucks, but at least a) Jeremy Corbyn won back his own seat in Islington North, as an Independent, and b) Jacob Rees Mogg LOST his seat, which is apparently right up the road from Penny (one of Liam's exes... one thing you have to say for Liam; his taste in partners is uniformly good, which, yes, is a shout out partly to me).

Oh. Stupid Dreamwidth will probably make this impossible, but if it doesn't, here are two brilliant bits by the Brit comedian Tom Walker, "Jonathan Pie", whose persona is a left biased journalist going off on Brit, Australian, and New Zealand (?) politics 'before' or 'after' doing a supposedly straight bit of journalistic commentary. He's hilarious, but his two from yesterday and today are really wonderful.

https://fb.watch/t87Oxd0hfI/

and

https://youtu.be/ghr2M8mh8MA?si=Cfi6LcA9KODfLkg-

Yeah, I don't think those URLs are going to do anything like show a thumbnail. The second one, particularly, is his take on Keir Starmer, "50 Shades of Beige" -- a candidate who promises nothing, but a party which, if it does not start to undo Tory ferocity and fix some of its evisceration of the NHS and social services, will open the door to fucking Nigel Farage's Reform Party in five years. YIKERS.

Owen Jones is more upbeat, seeing huge growth for the Greens -- from one seat (Brighton, long a Green stronghold) to 4, and SECOND in 47 constituencies, often with 20 to 30%, which never happens here!

We're globally poised on a knife edge, here, between right populist reaction and anemic political liberalism based on rapacious neoliberalism. The Left probably doesn't even deserve to be capitalized (despite the brief blip in hopes raised by the Bernie effect on the Democratic Socialists of America... which is now, according to Tim, being further gutted by internal sectarian fights foisted on it by ultraleft assholes...)

Oh, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA -- No$hu (my favorite artist who also did "The Bonk Song" about CalPoly's student protesters bashing a riot-helmeted cop with an empty office water jug) put up a "commissioned song", which he has titled "Comrade with Benefits". Oh, my god.

Here's "the Bonk Song" and also "Comrade with Benefits"

The Bonk song

https://youtu.be/r-Z41xCFE2U?si=g0pWxGhUdZ16iMgP

Comrades with Benefits

https://youtu.be/6ENv6ZO__PM?si=IoEhu9_CBm0D4CeQ

Wow, a link post. Haven't done that in years.

I did not get, at first, why there were no ANSWERS to these generally mostly interesting questions. It's because you are supposed to ask Sabotabby (or have someone ask YOU, if you repost it) any of the questions you are particularly curious about. That might prolong people's interaction with it, I guess?

I have been posting SO MUCH, recently, but only for my own eyes. It's been a great relief to type a journal, honestly, and to know that no one else is seeing it. Today, however, Facebook prompted a Memory (and for some reason in the past couple of weeks or so, I have been clicking on that) and it turned out to be a "15 Book Meme" from 2009, which I wheedled my mother into doing, and that was fucking touching, honestly. She -- before her dementia took greater hold -- followed the instructions (don't think too hard; 15 books which have stayed with you) to produce this list:

15 Books from MQ

1. Perdido Street Station, China Miéville
2. Socialism On Trial, Albert Goldman
3. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
4. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
6. Lad, A Dog, Albert Payson Terhune
7. In the Pond, Ha Jin
8. Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
9. Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
10. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
11. The Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky
12. American Notes, Charles Dickens
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
14. The Censors, Luisa Valenzuela
15. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

That list made me look for my own, because most likely I did the meme first and then pressured her to do it. But I have the WORST time searching fucking Facebook, and did not find anything. Which led me to the second of the rabbitholes I went down today. (The first, by the way, was ... god, how did this happen? Oh, another FB post, this one from a friend-of-a-friend philosophy professor in Canada who is a very cool woman raised Buddhist and anarchist... she posted a quote from Stuart Hall (whose work I enjoy) about preferring people's young or middle periods, e.g. The Eighteenth Brumaire to Capital, Vol. 2, or Althusser's For Marx to his Reading Marx... which led me to Althusser's extremely disturbing Wikipedia entry. Not that I didn't know he'd murdered his wife, just that I didn't know much about her, or his personal life. In a way, too, it re-awoke all my loathing of French intellectual life. I was interested in some Althusser in my 20s partly because he was a pied-noir marxist, like Camus. But what I texted my older niece about this was: "Also, reading it all [the Althusser Wiki entry] just makes me loathe the French intellectual world more. It’s shitty, no doubt, to smear a whole raft of thinkers with a national character, but UGH. I think I far prefer German (well, before fascism), Italian, Spanish, and even some English theorists and writers...The only exceptions I might make are Voltaire, Hugo, a lot of poets, Foucault, the whole of the Jeunesses Communistes Revolutionaires — opposition youth group in the PCF which broke away to become Trotskyists and join the Fourth International just before Mai 68 — and de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus... Oh, and Paul Nizan. He goes with de Beauvoir, etc.")

If you are wondering, yes, that is the length at which I generally text.

Yeah, so that long tangent was my first rabbithole. The second was looking at old LJ entries from 2009, fifteen years ago. God, I'd forgotten that I used to write several times a month, at length, and people would comment. And that was already during the Decline of LJ! I didn't find the book meme. It is probably buried in the search-resistant bowels of Meta.

Here is the meme Sabotabby posted. If anyone reads this and is curious about any of the questions, I will do my best to oblige with answers... but in a week or so, I might just answer the questions for my own satisfaction.

- - - - - - -


1 What was the first piece of furniture you bought?
2 What proportion of your meals do you cook?
3 Foaming hand soap or normal hand soap?
4 Favorite chore?
5 Least favorite chore?
6 Most precious thing one of your pets has destroyed?
7 Any groceries you've been getting into lately?
8 What cleaning product do you swear by?
9 What's your emotional support craft?
10 Youtube, cable TV, or streaming?
11 What's something you saved up for and then regretted buying?
12 How many cups can you see from where you're sitting?
13 Which filter are you most likely to go "eh, it's probably fine" when you find out you need to change it?
14 How often do you take baths?
15 Do you go down each aisle when you grocery shop, or only the ones you know you need stuff from?
16 Where do you go when you need to get out of the house but it's raining?
17 What's a movie you saw recently that you liked?
18 Pro or anti tchotchkes?
19 What's your go-to tape?
20 What's in your freezer right now?
21 Last concert you attended?
22 Favorite grocery store?
23 Paper bags, plastic bags, or reusable bags?
24 Do you get your government mandated 8 hours every night?
25 Favorite old person activity?
26 Would you rather sit on the porch drinking sweet tea or sit by the lake drinking beers?
27 Do you prefer Boardgame Night, Build-Your-Own-Pizza Night, or Movie Night with your friends?
28 Be honest, do you like all of the pictures of their babies that your friends send you?
29 Go-to holiday card format?
30 How many pairs of scissors do you own?
31 Do you still own your first car?
32 How do you take your morning coffee/tea?
33 What's something you collect?
34 What's your commute like?
35 Aisle at the grocery store you never bother walking down?
36 Do you keep a daily journal or agenda?
37 Do you still listen to the same music you listened to in high school?
38 What's the last filter you changed?
39 What little treat do you always get when you run errands?
40 Grocery list or no grocery list?
41 What's the oldest thing you own?
42 What's an unjustifiably expensive appliance that you really want?
43 Favorite book you've read recently?
44 Honest feelings on Settlers of Catan?
45 What's something you wish you had more time for?
46 What kind of stuff do you keep on the door of your refrigerator?
47 Lamps or overhead lighting?
48 If you could build your home from scratch, what outrageous feature would you want to build into it?
49 Do you bring a bag with you everywhere you go?
50 Pro or anti throw pillows?
51 How many blankets do you keep in your living room?
52 Did your relationship with your parents get better when you stopped living with them?
53 What's worse, the DMV or the Social Security Office?
54 Do you decorate your house for holidays? Which ones?
55 Favorite high-effort meal that you make?
56 Favorite low-effort meal that you make?
57 Do you tend to bring an appetizer, entree, dessert, or drinks to a potluck?
58 What kind of bag do you use for your bag full of bags?
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?
60 Do you have an opinion on your local weather reporter?
61 Do you have a favorite brunch spot?
62 Where are you on the minimalism-maximalism kinsey scale?
63 Opinion on Bath and Body Works?
64 Last time you visited a farmer's market?
65 Anything you're procrastinating on right now?
66 Do you get your taxes in as soon as possible, at the last minute, or late?
67 Do you keep any stuffed animals on your bed?
68 Are your garbage bags scented or unscented?
69 What are you looking forward to next week?

It's been more than five years -- my mom died June 25th, 2018, eleven weeks after moving in with me to my new place, a condo that is beautiful but in a town that is not Oakland, and is much more boring.

I am missing her a lot right now -- and my sister just told me today that she's been missing her a lot, too. We were never a family that made videos, really, but our cousin found a short video my mom recorded on her new iPod Nano in 2009, at Christmas, when she (and my cousins and aunt and uncle) were in Chicago, in her apartment, and we were all out here. My cousin Sara aimed the nano around at everyone and in twenty or so seconds people basically just said "Hi! Merry Christmas!" ... but there is almost no footage of my mom moving and speaking, and my sister texted me to tell me it made her cry. Me, too.

I miss her as she was before she got dementia, kind of obviously -- so many parts of her personality were flattened by that, and altered into strangeness. There was one period near the end when she would just switch into bad Spanish in the middle of her sentences. She'd ALWAYS been trying to learn better Spanish -- she did a trip to Mexico and stayed with a (Mormon) Mexican family and went to classes. The main thing I think she got from that was an excellent way with chilaquiles. She took classes at adult schools. But it didn't really stick. And then, in the last year, there was this just weird outpouring of more or less Spanglish mixed in with other parts of what she was saying. Very basic. Not incorrect -- I mean, it wasn't gobbledygook or anything. But choppy and very, very odd.

My mom and I got along really, really well, like 85% of the time. Maybe even 90% of the time. We had a lot in common, in terms of things we liked to do -- sing, cook, draw, read, be political... She taught me to love folk music, especially Child ballads and 1970s singer songwriters like Bryan Bowers, Tom Paxton, Holly Near, and 40s, 50s, 60s singers like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Joan Baez...

She was always absolutely and emotionally on the side of the oppressed, and I remember walking downtown with her along Judson Avenue and her pointing at different huge Victorian houses saying "That could be a summer camp... that one would make a good communal art studio..." Her emotions informed her politics, and she would be so angry and in pain right now over Gaza. All of my friends from middle school on were envious of my mom, because she was always both tolerant and supportive. Everyone liked spending time at my house, because of her. And so many people moved in to live with us, because she was open and willing to fill up any nook and cranny. Comrades visited from around the world, and then comrades in need lived in our basement apartment, and later also in our refinished attic bedrooms. A friend of my sister's who was estranged from his family after coming out moved in with us, in high school. My college roommate moved home to those attic bedrooms with me, sophomore year.

I'm not going to say she was perfect or that our relationship was absolute bliss. There was that ten to fifteen percent of the time where we could grate on each other or have fights. And she wasn't of the same temperament as my dad and me -- we blow up and then it's over, very quickly. With her, there was a slow burn and then a sharp angry explosion, and then possibly a long slow recovery to status quo ante. She was very judgy about me and how I used money, for example, thinking I spent money wastefully. Fair enough, when I didn't have a job. But once I did, I was a little done with THAT. And she had this weird thing where she sort of made it clear that whatever successes I had, she chalked down to my luck. I got mad about that. I mean, I think I have been lucky in some things. But I also am good at some things and got jobs, and prizes, and so on as a result of being good at those things. And she was an absolutely terrible driver and very, very forgetful. She seemed to lose her wallet about once a month -- though, back in the 70s and 80s, it was more than once mailed back to her, empty.

She had a great speaking, singing, and reading voice, and always wished that she had found a project where she could get recorded reading books aloud for the blind, or something. I loved having her read aloud to my sister and me when we were little. And I LOVED her singing and playing guitar. She would sing us lullabies that were kind of questionable, especially two versions of the Child ballad about the two sisters who loved the same guy, and how the older, less favored sister murdered the younger one by letting her drown, and was suitably punished for the crime. There are so many versions of this, but the two she sang were "The Lord of the North Country" and "O Binoorie". She also sang "The Great Silkie". I wish I could have been in the audience in one of the folk clubs she played in in Madison, before I was born.

I don't know if putting a link in here will work, since putting a photo is IS WAY TOO FUCKING DIFFICULT. But I'll try, and see if it works. If it does work, I might have posted it five years ago, but whatever. It literally makes me cry every time. We don't have much video, my family, but we do tend to have a lot of photos. And my dead half-sister had these tapes of my mom practicing, which she sent me when I told her I had no recordings of my mom singing. So I digitized about five songs, and this is one from a Christy Moore album called "Unfinished Revolution", about women in revolutionary struggles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9EJDY-f0As

Hope it loads.

1. What was the last thing you put off doing?

probably also laundry, though with the washer and dryer in the kitchen, it is not a chore that is a drag, at all. I love the ease of it, now.

2. Do you eat your dinner at a dining table, coffee table or off your lap?

I generally eat at my desk. My dining table is... just not very fun when I am on my own, and quite small if I am not.

3. Do you prefer holidays where you relax or actually do things?

Holidays are for relaxing, yeah... I AM a Christmas nut, despite being a full on atheist, so relaxing does involve Xmas music, a tree, wrapping presents, egg nog, and this year, Xmas cards.

4. Have you ever attended a black tie formal event?

No.

5. Can you snap your fingers?

yes, but kind of half-assedly. Other people get much better clicks than I do.

6. Have you ever broken a window?

I've been in the vicinity of a window breaking, when my uncle and father were fighting over Solidarnosc around 1978. But I, myself, have not broken a window. I have, however, shattered a glass door. I was picking my little sister up from afterschool daycare at 5 PM, which was at our elementary school. I was probably resentful that I had to go get her anyway, but once I was there, no one came when I knocked on the big double glass doors. And no one came. And no one came. I figured my puny fist was not making enough noise, so I decided to use my heel -- I turned around and kicked the door, trying to make a louder noise. And it shattered. My principal, Mr. Cherry, and for some reason a Catholic priest THEN came to the door, aghast at what the priest, at least, assumed was delinquent behavior or something. He grabbed my ear and dragged me to the Office. Mr. Cherry did not say anything. It was quite painful! I'm sure they called my parents. I don't remember if they then had to come down, tired after work, to get us both. Anyway, by the next Monday, the door had been repaired, and there was a doorbell installed.

7. Have you ever finished reading an entire book in a day?

It's more like, when have I NOT finished (at least one) book in a day. Not super long ones like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but plenty. I can easily finish two books in a day -- but I do read once I go to bed, as well as at lunch, after school, etc.

8. Do you know how to play pool?

I've played a couple of times, but I suck. On the other hand, kind of like bowling, I don't care at all that I suck.

9. If you had to be trapped in a TV show what would it be?

Hm. This is hard, for some reason. I felt in some ways like I LIVED in the Brit show The Young Ones for several weeks in Britain in 1984. Squats, lots of lentils, shouty politics, hippies, badge-bearing Trotskyists... You know, I wouldn't mind living on whichever version of the Enterprise it is in the latest (prequel) Star Trek show -- "ST: Strange New Worlds." Transporters (even if they're in the early days, there), congenial people to work with, space exploration and no pesky problems with the speed of light, SUPPOSEDLY a post-capitalist society on Earth.

10. Do you dream often?

If I get good sleep I do dream, sometimes REALLY ANNOYING ANXIETY DREAMS about teaching, one way or another, or even mindless anxiety dreams where I am trying (and utterly failing) to complete some extremely frustrating task AGAIN AND AGAIN which, when closely examined (as I am waking up) turns out to be compeletely nonsensical. I dream non-anxiety dreams too, sometimes, but I don't usually remember them in detail, boo. Sometimes. My father claims never to dream. I didn't think that was possible?

11. What is something that's bothering you right now?

I know I have more than a year ahead of me on this shit, but the prospect of the 2024 Election cycle bothers me so fucking much. I cannot bear the thought of Trump getting back in, and Biden just seems to be imploding and getting all kinds of shitty bad policies and luck, from caving to Trump's fucking border wall to now digging in behind Netanyahu's triumphant "wartime" truce with pro-democracy Israelis, in this morning's dreadful news of Palestine.

12. What was the last sporting event you attended?

God... I have no idea. Maybe a KU-MU football game? Which would be, oh, more than 27 years ago. Oh. Or it was the flag football game I went to the year before the Pandemic, when my middle school had a girl on the team. That was fun.

13. Do you enjoy staying at hotels?

I've never stayed at a fancy hotel. I've stayed at whatever motel I ran into on cross country drives, mostly pretty janky. Wait, I take that back -- when I was twelve or thirteen, on the Divorce Vacation (so called because the "D" word was first used in the wretched, horrible fights that erupted pretty much daily as we drove west through Canada), my dad had phlebitis so we couldn't camp in provincial parks or Rest Areas as was our normal wont... we stayed at a couple of the huge masonry RR hotels at first, in Winnipeg and Saskatchewan, and then in fleabag motels as we went further, ending in a literal hotel/whorehouse in Ketchikan, Alaska. So those 19th c. RR hotels are the fanciest I've been in, but I have to say I don't much remember them. Those were the first times I'd EVER been in a hotel. I have liked staying in cheap bed and breakfasts, in England.

14. What was in the last package you got?

I am so ashamed to admit this (also it is supposed to arrive today, so it's not REALLY the last package I received... that would have been, what? Probably some sort of school supplies, including a new blank journal for me for the first time in four years) but yesterday was so brutally hot as today will be also that I caved and bought an ice maker. A countertop ice maker. Instead of the rice maker my sister thinks I should buy. This was on sale and I don't have room in my freezer for ice and I never remember to make it. So we'll see how stupid and impulsive this purchase is.

15. Who is/was your favorite animated character?

Eh, animation. Now, CARTOON character... I love Mo and her pals from Dykes to Watch Out For.

16. If you could move out of your home country permanently, would you?

I used to say yes to this automatically, and fantasize about moving to Canada, to Quebec. Now I still imagine moving to Britain, where many of my friends are, but it seems so impossible that I don't think about it as much.

17. Do you play the lottery?

No

18. Do you shut off the water while you brush your teeth?

Yes

19. What was the last good news you received?

Hm. That all of my students were finally rostered into the online curriculum we are using (well, I'm only using it for Math and Science) this year because the lags and tech issues were super fucking annoying and... I hate to admit this, but I added myself to all of their classes and... this program's pedagogy is ... actually really good? It's called (stupid fucking name, but aren't they all) Edgenuity. I like Sal Khan and his Academy, but this is... it's just much, much, much better, with video lessons carefully chunked, warm-ups that are actually good, summaries, vocab pauses, an internal e-notes function, self-pacing measured against how much material remains to complete, retakes on quizzes... it's just surprisingly good. And it means I do not have to fucking lesson plan and try pathetically to teach math and science.

20. Are there any projects or goals you’ve recently abandoned?

I made an effort to find someone to teach me guitar during the Pandemic, but it never panned out and I think it is an effort abandoned, now.

21. What are your top five books?

I hate this kind of question, but here are the first five that OCCUR to me, because I love literally thousands

The German Ideology, by Karl Marx
Another Shore, by Nancy Bond
Not a Swan, by Michelle Magorian
Possession, by A. S. Byatt
Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery

22. Would you ever sky dive?

No

23. If you could "install" three complete languages in your brain what would you choose?

I like the process of learning languages, despite the ease of Google Translator when you're in a bind. If I could, though, I would "install" Hindi, Arabic, and I guess Mandarin. If I could have a fourth, Korean.

24. What holiday is your birthday closest to?

Mine... I guess Memorial Day? Kind of dull.

25. Do you use a wall calendar?

Not really. I use my phones iCal, or I use -- EXTENSIVELY -- a weekly one-sheet per week planner that a student got me, from the Dollar Store. It's the perfect size for all my lesson plans and has room for last minute additions and notes to self. I love it. You tear off the week and stick it in a folder (if you're an archival daughter of an archival father) on Friday, since it's a work-week calendar, for me. I put notes in Saturday and Sunday and "Notes". Okay, that's more detail than expected.

26. First foreign vacation?

Mexico should count, Microbie! My first was Canada, as part of the annual August car vacations (before the Divorce Vacation). Even more foreign was my dad's cool surprise of us taking a ferry from Newfoundland to the French outremer island of St. Pierre.

27. Do you watch any anime?

No. A lot of my students love it fiercely. I watched a little with my nieces when they were in high school -- a show called Black Butler which was surreal, and another I forget the title of about an elite high school club where one student was a girl pretending to be a boy? A poor girl at this super rich elite school? I dunno. Ah. I looked it up: Ouran High School Host Club. It was... weird. Boring to me, as are most video game apps.

28. Do you prefer to keep a clean workspace or are you somewhat messy?

I am meticulously neat and organized at work. I am mostly neat at home, never letting anything look too messy. But, you know, I'll throw a cardigan on the couch and leave it there until I require it again. Several times in a week. My surfaces aren't pristine. In my own bedroom, clean clothes stay (folded or sometimes even unfolded) in the laundry baskets and never get into the dresser. Etc.

29. What portion of your day is typically spent outdoors?

Um, the portion between my apartment's front door and my car's door? And my car's door and the library where my office is at DICE? And, given California school construction of the 1950s, any time I leave the library to go to another part of the buildings.

30. Did you get an allowance as a child?

Hahaha, money management. I think I started at a dollar a week and by high school might have been at $10/week? But I don't actually remember. I know that babysitting earnings outstripped it by middle school, even though I only earned $2.50/hr. I know that the child support my dad paid my mom was about $167/mo each for me and my sister, and that in college, my mom gave us it directly, each month.

"This set of questions is pretty bad." -- quoth Microbie. Correct as she usually is!

12. Have you ever taken a photograph with a celebrity?

I don't think so. But I was VERY impressed with Villagecharm's photo with BILLY BRAGG!

13. What is your favorite thing to do in your spare time?

Sleep and or read. Though today (9/2) I ended up on an unplanned Zoom meet-up with two of my best friends from grad school and we babbled and also played with Ancestry.com for about two hours -- one friend had just joined it.

14. Where in your house do you spend the most time in?

"The living room." Me, too. Although it's kind of open plan, so it's living room/dining area and the kitchen is visible over a little raised counter.

15. What is the last meal you cooked?

Cooked, cooked? As opposed to microwaved or pulled together out of the fridge? It's not a frequent occurrence any more. Oh! I made clam linguine (just canned clams, not that fancy) with a friend a couple of weeks ago. It was good. We ordered wine to put in the sauce and to drink while I cooked, and it was fun. I almost never drink wine, but we got silly BEFORE hand, reading all the "notes" of each pretty cheap white variety. I think we got... some brand called Cupcake? A sauvignon, I think. Delicious.

16. What's the fanciest food you've ever ordered at a restaurant?

Huh. Fanciest? I guess fanciest -- not a one off, but an often-at-Christmas when my father and stepmother visit -- is German food at Speisekammer's restaurant in Alameda. Delicious classics like sauerbraten and spaetzle. Duck. REALLY GOOD BEER.

17. Do you enjoy camping?

No. I didn't mind it when I was a kid, though "camping" might be a bit of a misnomer. More than once it was my folks in a pup tent and my sister and I stretched out on the car seats.

18. What kind of popcorn is your favorite?

I swear I remember these questions and maybe even answering these questions, but I don't see it when I look at my DW. I like plain popcorn, or I like serious caramel and peanuts corn, like Cracker Jack but not burnt tasting and with bigger more generous kernels.

19. What is your preferred way to learn a new skill?

Being directly taught, if it is something like guitar (which I somewhat aspire to). Trying things out on my own if it is some other kind of skill.

20. What’s your favorite horror movie?

I don't like horror over all, but sometimes there are horror movies that I think are very good -- Get Out, Nope, some Korean ones. Let the Right One In (Swedish version only).

21. What is the last new thing you discovered that was really good?

Hmmm. I mean, there's "new" and there's "new to me" which might not be at all NEW. Okay, this Australian comedy parody murder mystery series, Deadloch, which was BRILLIANT. I cannot wait for Season 2. Hilarious, but still a mystery, with zigs and zags and gender up the wazoo. I am embarrassed that I was not entirely sure that Tasmania (where the show is set) was part of Australia. I thought it might be independent or even part of New Zealand. Nope. I mean, it's an island, and I knew THAT. But still.

1. Where would you like to retire to?

It's hard to imagine retiring without National Health Care, so that either means my answer is one of the many excellent countries that have it, or right here in the Bay Area, grimly cobbling things together, working part time until I keel over.

2. Do you play online multiplayer games?

"no" quoth Microbie, and me.

3. What is the longest you have ever slept?

Easily 15 hours, maybe more? But with bathroom wakenings, sigh.

4. Who was the last person you called?

I called my sister yesterday, and my friend Dani the day before, and my stepmother (and father) a few days ago.

5. What was the last amusement park ride you went on?

It's been a billion years, but my two favorites are the Tilt-a-Whirl and a big Ferris wheel.

6. What is your favorite brand of pens?

Ha, I DO have a favorite, and in fact, a) don't write with anything else (my father is the same, though his choice is different than mine), and b) DO NOT UNDERSTAND why my favorite was not the pen chosen by the NYT "Wirecutter" product reviewing team. The only pen I will use is a black Pilot G-2 gel pen 07. It flows perfectly; it is neither too wide nor too narrow; it requires no pressure.

7. What is the biggest waste of energy in your life right now?

By next Wednesday, it will once again be work, this time I suspect worse than ever as I try to navigate the shoals and reefs of "independent study" teaching. Ugh.

8. Do you set an alarm to wake up?

Yes, but I am virtually always awake right before it goes off. My cat WOULD wake me up, but she is too lazy and only wakes me when she wants food.

9. What was the longest train ride you've been on?

I'm not sure which was longer: NYC to Chicago, or Stockholm to Parma (Paris might have been a stopover; I cannot remember). I like long train rides.

10. What's the silliest thing you've believed, that turned out to be untrue?

I am not sure I can come up with anything for this. My father was relentless in making me question any comfortable assumptions. One of his favorite things to chide me with was "Don't believe everything you read." He gave me a very thick kids' encyclopedia when I was four or five, as well as a giant dictionary. On the other hand, when I was four or so, and he was stuck with the bedtime story routine because my mom worked late once a week at the Madison Public Library, he listened to my pleas for a WORTHWHILE princess and amended his usual bedtime tales of Che Guevara, Bernadette Devlin, or Tony Benn (no, I am not kidding, and was I surprised later to find out that Tony Benn was not a young revolutionary in the 1960s/70s) after researching to find a Russian princess who went over to the Bolsheviks. Sadly, I no longer remember the name. God, I suppose he could have made it up, though that would be unlike him.

11. Last movie watched?

Not in a theater, mind you... but the most recent movie I watched was Shrek with a friend who had NEVER seen it, which was strange. Movie before that... (am I trying to come up with something that is not quite as bizarre as that? Probably) I watched Bullet Train not long ago, and enjoyed that quite a lot.

12. What have you learned today?

I learned about molokhia, which is a green herb/plant used mostly in Middle Eastern cooking, but also in North Chinese cooking.

13. Do you prefer to be around introverted or extroverted people?

That's a weird choice. I tend to like both, and I am not really sure it breaks down all that accurately.

14. What simple pleasures did you enjoy this week?

Simple pleasures... okay. I enjoyed the simple pleasure of using Meyer's Hand Soap -- I bought a five pack of different smelling ones a few months ago, and boy, the geranium is amazing! I also like their lemon verbena and their basil one. I have two more to discover, when these three run out. I think lavender (how can you lose?) and... gosh, I have no idea what the fifth scent was... ahh, having looked it up: I got a SIX pack, and the remaining scents to be tried are lavender, honeysuckle, and rosemary. I love the scent of rosemary, so that's good. In fact, one of my promises to myself when I moved from Chicago to California was that I would have either a garden with rosemary and lavender, or at least giant pots. And I do, on my balcony. Any other simple pleasures? Uh, reading is always a simple pleasure. Oooh -- I got a pedicure with my sister on Wednesday, and that was a simple pleasure (and cheaper than she thought it would be at our favorite place... she thought the prices had doubled, but in fact it cost less than I remember. She claims that for once we were not upsold.) It's been literal years since I was there.

15. Have you ever been somewhere where you didn’t speak the local language?

Most places I've traveled where the people didn't speak English either spoke French or Portuguese or Spanish or Italian, all of which I can manage (I mean, not really Italian, but if you squint sideways with it using your ears, it's SORT of like a mash-up of Spanish and French, so...) and the places where people spoke German and Swedish (that is, Germany and Sweden), most people also spoke English. The one exception was Poland. No English, nothing to help me out -- although this was in 1986, and it was still all basically Stalinist there (I was in Gdansk, a ferry ride away from Stockholm) (to see the Lenin Shipyards, birthplace of Solidarnosc, mainly, and also to lift the tattered remnants of the storied Iron Curtain)... so there were literally troops of Russian Komsomol scouts running around the streets (side by side with smaller determined troops of nuns, not running) and I was able to make out the following Russian words: "da", "nyet", "krasny", "iskra", "pravda", and "oktyabr". Okay, that's a lie. I did hear yes, no, and truth. The rest are just commie words I know how to say.

16. How often do you go grocery shopping?

Never! Ha ha, j/k. I essentially only shop online via Instacart, because I cannot carry anything while using my travelscoot. I online shop probably once a week-ish.

17. If you could go back and witness any historical event what would it be?

The first thing that came to mind was the Paris Commune, 1871. Anything else? Oooh, the Seneca Falls Convention. Those would be my top two.

18. Do you have any home exercise equipment?

I may have some handweights buried in my closet.

19. Have you ever seen a shooting star?

no, though I would love to see the Perseid shower...

20. What's the next DIY project you are going to do or want to do?

Um, none. That is not the sort of project to which I aspire. I am currently doing a 'project' if you can call it that, of re-recording the Federal Manuscript Census database I made for my (never completed) dissertation -- the 1870 (just a sampling) but all of the 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920 of Caldwell Parish, Louisiana. This is just silly -- I don't think I have any intention of finishing writing my dissertation (I'm thirty years behind the secondary literature for one thing)... but when I was doing the listing of Black families in Evanston, Illinois from the MS Census of 1900 (for the mystery I may eventually start/continue... I wrote a chapter of it right before moving out here) I got re-fascinated by the amazing details of the manuscript Census, so...

21. Do you find it easy to make friends now?

No. I do think a lot of this is that it's really only easy to make friends if you are in a target rich environment, like high school, college, or grad school.

22. Have you ever studied abroad?

Yes, but I was crazy lucky because my dad had the faculty/staff discount at Northwestern, and NU's deal with the various universities they exchanged with was that the exchanging student (me) paid NU's fees... and for me, those fees were $1200/year. For living in Britain! Crazy! The French department was disgusted with me, and called me at midnight on the closing day of applications for their Sorbonne program. I was a French major, and they were PISSED that I only applied to the University of Sussex exchange. But my best friend lived just outside of Brighton and this was my chance to go live near a bunch of Brit revolutionary socialists, so fuck Paris. Was my thought.