…just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.
Your brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat.
Bob Dylan, Brand New Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat
Just a few things I’ve tried to balance in my head the last coupla days….
Like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.
by the way… Bob Dylan has some of the most nonsensical lyrics in music. And yet, when I hear them I actually think I might know what they mean. Must be because we were lovers in many past lives and we know each other so well. O for cripessake, allow me my harmless little fantasies, please.
*Every day Starbucks stores all over the country remove the morning pastries, wrap them up and donate them to local food shelters. Baked goods or stem cells: the options are the same, to throw them away, or put them to good use where they can help people who need them.
George W. Bush: Take a freakin’ lesson.
*A few weeks ago I watched the All-Star Baseball Game. I might have missed something, but was the Roberto Clemente Award actually given to, uh…Roberto Clemente??
I’m not lazy. I’ve done web searches. I’ve checked mlb.com, the NY Times. I've asked men at Starbucks and cannot find the answer anywhere. If Clemente was posthumously awarded the humanitarian prize named for him, does that mean there is NO ONE playing Major League Baseball today who is deserving of it? And isn’t it a little like awarding the Nobel Prize to Alfred Nobel? The Edgar Prize to Edgar Allen Poe?
*The other day I was doing a short introduction to feminist theory in my class and presented the feminist observation that for most of recorded history society has been organized as patriarchal. A young man raised his hand and said, "Well, there have been societies led by women." First, I pointed out the distinctions between matrilineal, matrifocal, and matriarchal and then said, "And those are the exceptions aren't they? There's a reason why we call examples like that exceptions. If this entire room represented the history of the social and political organization of the human race and we wanted to allow for a representation of societies that were matriarchal that space would take up this much room on the wall [and I took my chalk and drew a tiny little dot] and the rest of the wall, would represent patriarchy."
Sometimes you don’t need a whole picture to paint a thousand words.
Sometimes all you need is a chalk mark on a cinder block on a sea green wall.
*Tuesday evening I had dinner with a friend. We ate at a restaurant that advertises $5 martinis during Happy Hour. I ordered a Dirty Martini (straight up, extra olives please) and when it was time to pay for the drink the waitress told me it was $8. I mentioned the Happy Hour special and she told me that martinis are $5 only if you drink them at the bar. What? It costs THREE dollars for you to walk the damn martini from the bar to the table? Tell you what, I’ll carry my own dinner from the kitchen to the table and you can knock four bucks off my bill.
*The next time a straight person tries to convince you that homosexual orientation is a choice, ask them to wake up tomorrow morning and “become gay.”
*I wonder what would happen if a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, erected barricades around its cities, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC or Charleston, SC and did not allow its citizens to enter them. But they did so, they said, with all good intention; the U.S. government is unjust they said, in need of reform. It has a corrupt leadership. I wonder what the response from Americans would be. Surely there would be those who, most affected by this government’s small tyrannies would welcome the change; who might hope that this new regime would bring an end to their poverty or suffering. But there would be others who would fight the occupation to their last breath. And we would not call them insurgents. We would call them patriots.
Sometimes the other person’s shoes are very uncomfortable indeed.
*This past Sunday as I spoke to my 88 year-old mother, she was voicing a small complaint when suddenly she stopped and gleefully and child-like she exclaimed, “Oh! Louise! I have to tell you!”
And she proceeded to tell me that a few weeks ago during a wind storm, a cactus plant, which has not had flowers in the nine years she has owned it, was perched on a table on her outside porch and fell to the floor. The pot broke; the cactus lost some sections of leaf. She walked to the store, bought a new pot and transplanted the cactus. Last week there appeared on the cactus at least twenty pink blooms with many more buds emerging.
Sometimes when we fall down, we come up better!
(But this doesn’t mean it’s the reason we fell down to begin with. There’s a difference between a consequence and a reason…. Ok, here I go again).
*I worked with a woman at Starbucks a few months ago who had a particularly bumbling morning. She kept dropping things and spilling things. At one point she exclaimed, "I'm having such a bad day! God must be mad at me." God, save me from a god who gets mad at me and determines that my punishment should consist of my spilling Mocha Frappuccino all over the floor.
*And why is it that when something bad happens to us, it's all our fault, but when something good happens to us it's a gift from God?
Look, either He [sic] gets the credit and the blame or neither.
*I watched three seagulls play in the sky yesterday. They flew in a spiraling pattern, one taking the lead and then another. It was a leisurely gliding on the currents not a frenzied, frantic flight. They circled and circled in constant synchronicity. And as they circled and spiraled they also advanced in height and distance. I watched them in this dance until they were out of sight. I wonder, why didn’t they just fly in a straight line towards wherever it was they were heading? But no, the spiraldance went on and on. Now if anyone reading this is a biologist or knows the scientific reason or cause for their pattern, please don’t write to me or comment below. My query was a rhetorical one. I don’t want an answer. Do not suspend my belief or destroy my wishful illusion. I want to believe that they were playing; this little trinity in which I took so much delight…
*On the first day of class, I sometimes offer my students a few questions to share that are hopefully non-threatening. They don’t have to stick their academic necks out to comment on a reading or the course content, but hopefully they will hear the sound of their voice in my classroom and it won’t seem such a frightening thing later. One of the questions I sometimes ask is, “If you could live inside someone’s mind for 24 hours, whose would it be?”
A student once wrote, “Professor Doire’s…but only for an hour.”
Some of us, Lester, just don’t have a choice.
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