I Want This Dress In Deep Rich Bottle Green

The lovely Christy  has blessed me mixedly with an award:

I now must reveal five addictions and make five other people do the same. If I'd received this award in the 80s, I'd have been honor bound to begin with my addiction to black shoes, but I am thankfully in recovery from that one. I'm more of a "propensity" type than an addiction type, but I have come up with 5 things suitable for general consumption. So, here goes.

My name is Kelly, and I’m addicted to

1. My Laptop  More precisely, I'm addicted to googling people and things that don’t do wonders for my self-esteem and compulsively checking blog comments, FB updates, and emails.

2. The Pacific Northwest  I am meant to live there. I dream of Oregon and the San Juan Islands daily, and would love to retire to a craftsman cottage in either spot and grow lots of peonies.

3. Very Nice Hotels  I’ve had insomnia issues for years, and I always sleep well in a cold, dark, quiet room on a good bed with tons of pillows. I also like to take my laptop to the bar and people watching in conjunction with addiction #1.

4. My Goofy Dog, Kaiser  He’s a pain in the ass, my husband is allergic to him, and I have to do all the work. But those eyes! And all that love!

5. Procrastination  But I will make significant progress on this one tomorrow, believe it or not, I promise!

I honor the following bloggers: Do You Realize?, What I Saw Today,  Redmolly Picayune-Democrat, Cheerio Road, and The Savvy Navigator

Book Plugs

Hey....they're better than hair plugs, right?

I have a few quick moments before the off-to-school drama takes off, so I thought I'd offer the love to a couple of wonderful books.

First, Momma Zen. The subtitle, Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood, may scare off men. It should not. Anyone, with or without children, will benefit from the gentle lessons in mindfulness and peace this book provides. The author, Karen Maezen Miller, is a Buddhist priest, but thinking humans of any faith (or none at all) will find grace here.

And now we turn to a sadder place. The most poignant literary place I've been in thirty, maybe forty years...at least so far. Why so far? Because I can not make it past the first seven or so chapters without starting over or flipping back for selected bits. This fact, in and of itself, is astounding. After all those years of careful close reading in college and grad school, I now take my books at a quick clip. But Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is new country. I've been put off for two years by the back cover copy, which suggested a "look at me" extravaganza of mixed media and stunt writing; nothing could be farther from the truth. Some reviewers have compared him to Vonnegut but, so far, I find that comparison facile, at best.

Fall is not here yet, but those of you lucky enough to live where the air is crisping now have two excellent reasons to curl up in front of the fire.

Sadness and Rage

I feel sadness for a young woman, alone in a spotlight in Alaska, who made a mistake many young women make. My sadness is increased exponentially by the cultural policies of the state in which she was raised, policies shared by my home state, policies which deprive young men and women of the information they need to protect themselves from disease and pregnancy.

Oh surely, you say, she knew how not to get pregnant. Perhaps. Even likely. But I grew up in a home where such things were not discussed, not for religious or political reasons but for generational ones. I am forever grateful for the good sex education I received. Along with memorizing the symptoms of primary, secondary and tertiary syphilis, I had to learn all the then-available methods of contraception and their efficacy.  And then I took a test. And that test was averaged in to my seventh grade health mark on my report card. Yes, in Texas.

But the rage? That is directed directly at her mother.  Yes, I know that children act independently of their parents' wishes and expectations. I certainly did. But I detect more than a whiff of disingenuousness. 

I know I just took a vow of political silence.  So I will let the beautifully eloquent words of  Karen Maezen Miller speak for me. I quote today's post from her blog, Cheerio Road, in its entirety and with her permission:

Seeing the soft bigotry of low expectations

With apologies to those who expected more or less of me.

There was once a supremely arrogant and idiotic man who mouthed this line of someone else's melodic prose – "the soft bigotry of low expectations" – to decry the educational imprisonment of the underprivileged. Nevermind that by his every action he condemned these underprivileged to further generations of poverty, invisibility, exploitation and pain.

Now I see what those words mean.

When you blithely send your firstborn to war and call it foreign relations.
When you leave your three-day-old at home and call it working motherhood.
When you don a dimestore tiara and call it a star.
When you adamantly oppose sex education in public schools and silence comment on your daughter's teenage pregnancy by calling it a private matter.
When you cynically manipulate the future of the world and call it a game.
When you ignore the rules of reason, experience, wisdom, truth, legitimacy, decency and public trust and call it a gamechanger.

I see what it means.

Call me a bigot. But do not expect me to take any more or make any less of this.

Thank you, Karen, for your wise and passionate words. 

And, to that young woman in Alaska: I wish you well.