I swear to sweet baby Jeebus: this morning, I found a bag of masa flour selling on EBay for $9.98 – used.
In other news: today, we will acquire banana leaves or I shall have to reconsider my opinion of my zip code. Reconsidering is thinking. That’s hard work, my pet.
Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? There are certain, mathematical ways to apprehend the harmony one hears in the chorus: it’s perfect. It’s the vaulted ceiling of related guys what sing together. But that has nothing to do with the goosebumps you feel when the Neville Brothers sing the word free.
Are you?
Call me crazy, but I’ve always thought Caravaggio’s Judith didn’t want to get her hands dirty.
Let’s review:
Yehudit (Judith) was a widow living in the city of Bethulia. The Assyrian King, Nabuchodonosor, sent his general Holofernes to punish the city. Holofernes went and cut off the water supply and laid siege to the city.
The city’s elders were about to give up when Yehudit told them she had a plan. She went in her nicest clothes and jewelry to the camp of Holofernes. The general was taken with her beauty and invited her to a feast. Holofernes drank a lot of wine and got drunk.
Yehudit went back to his tent and, when they were alone, and Holofernes was passed out from the alcohol, she took his sword and cut off his head.
With the death of Holofernes, his army was in disarray and the Jews were able to mount an offensive and defeat the Assyrian army. The account of this story is in the book of Yehudit, which is part of the apocrypha and, while it was originally written in Hebrew, only the Greek version survived to be translated.
All my life, men have given me knives. Perhaps I was the only one who didn’t know why.
These are the words, just a few words. I’d count them like daisy petals: He loves me. He loves me not. It always comes out even, though. Somehow, I find it in my heart to be surprised every time. Once I said to a man packing his bags to go, “You love you the most.” Without blinking, he said, “Of course.”
And that took away my breath.
In another life, I could sing the lives of the saints. In another life, after the ashes scattered in the wind, only the stories mattered. We don’t listen to stories anymore. Stories interfere with the words we tell each other. We say words like protection and safety, when what we mean is keep your distance and love is infection.
Artemesia Gentileschi understood Judith, because Artemesia was raped and painted with every enraged fiber of her being. This painting, Judith And the Maid Servant With the Head of Holofernes, captures the fear of being trapped so viscerally that one might not at first notice the maid servant stuffing the bloody head into a bag. Judith is afraid but not ashamed.
In a dining room cabinet with a glass door sits a pile of pen knives. One, given to me by a woman who loved me but could not stay, is a tiny mermaid keychain. It is the kind of treasure one might easily overlook.
I am not trapped on the wrong side of any line. It does not make me brave to say so.
Let us be perfectly clear: the people we hear talking about healthcare reform are the people who will neither benefit from it, nor will they suffer. The voices we hear and the writers we read will lose nothing. They are almost uniformly wealthy, and nothing will touch them. Then, there’s everyone else; there’s us. We can talk to one another, but no one will hear us. Our words interfere with the stories.
One by one, we must cross into the enemy’s tents and test our courage. Each of us must draw the knife. Each of us must find her own reason not to live in fear anymore. I myself will listen past the words to the stories, and I will not back down.
I am not afraid and I will stand my ground.
What, then, is this ground?
What is it?
In another life, I could sing the lives of the saints. In another life, only the stories matter. In my story, reproductive freedom is a concern of the distant past, but that’s not the end of me.
This law that limits the bodily autonomy of poor and middle class women – a fair-sized number of the people this law is supposed to help – will be enacted, if not word for word. It’s going to kill women you and I don’t know, but those women are real. Their stories matter, if not in the tangle of words.
I am sharpening my knives.
This evening, I looked around to see what an abortion costs. No one offered me anesthesia when I had mine, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that it cost extra. Trust an old woman: pay it. From now on, I will never be without what it costs to prevent words from interfering with the stories of women around me. Make no mistake: this is not a conversation we should have to have, but we will. Because time has run out. Because words have come between us. Because I am sharpening all my knives.
Over the weekend, which seems like weeks ago, Darla came from Canada via my sister Daria’s house in Flemington. Pete had a cold. Darla had a cold. Topaz had a cold. I was putt-putting along until I stopped, fell over sideways and burbled a lot. I spent most of Sunday and Monday in bed and on the couch, and I’m not leaving the house any time soon. For one thing, I am the western world’s leading source of fresh, flowing snot. I like to think I contribute to society in exciting, unexpected ways.
Huff Po nonsense…pointless crap…nonsense…celebrity gossip – what’s all this, then? Sez Arianna:
The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks – JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo – all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.
Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.
Meanwhile, America’s Main Street community banks – the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of – are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.
We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform – including “too big to fail” legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don’t we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse – what if we used it to make the system better?
Imagine my surprise when I found useful advice on the Blogosphere’s leading source for medical quackery and Hollywood divorce tweets! But enough about me, what’s Arianna got to say about you?
The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it’s meant to be. It’s neither Left nor Right – it’s populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It’s time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don’t have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks – and unlike the big banks they don’t provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.
Got that? Don’t be a-skeert! If you’ve been reading PIC during 2009, you may remember I skipped community banks, passed Go and went directly to the credit union:
The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) is the federal agency that charters and supervises federal credit unions. They also insure savings in federal and most state-chartered credit unions across the country through the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund (NCUSIF), a federal fund backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.
Sort of makes you want to get all common-bondy with someone, eh? Thing is you might already be. I didn’t know this, but here in New Jersey, there are literally hundreds of credit unions. The unnamed university has a credit union for faculty and staff, but not everyone knows there’s another for students and alumni, and if you’re an immediate family member of faculty or staff, you can join too. The one I belong to used to serve as the rusty vault into which I stuffed money. It was hard to get to and with limited hours, even small, regular deposits added up – mostly for Miss Sasha’s tuition, but I’ve stopped having nightmares about writing those checks and the credit union’s services are online now. Anyway, credit unions have branched out into home and car loans, CDs and other thingies. The credit union gave me a loan for my braces. Straight teeth, yay! I paid it back in record time and improved my credit rating, also yay! Bonus: a credit union can also connect its members to better insurance policies.
The big banks, generally, are too big. Many are insolvent and many more are unstable. There’s no incentive for them to do anything but exploit their customers to the bitter end. You may not have to suck on that. What if you could move your finances to an institution that wasn’t trying to fuck you over?
I moved almost everything to the credit union but I still have a checking account for reasons that may no longer be valid. It may be possible to establish electronic billpay, but it is not yet possible to buy savings bonds through the credit union. If I can find a way around that mulberry bush, my checking account will be history; so I am not asking you to consider making a leap while I cling to the ledge. No. I’m pretty sure there’s a soft spot where we can all land.
Nonny Mouse tells us a story:
Our politicians, just about all of them from every country, are like children playing on a beach while the tide goes out and fish flop on the sea bed, ignoring the signs of a coming tsunami, too busy squabbling over toys and kicking sand in each other’s eyes. Our current technology is shackled to oil interests, with alternative energy and its technology insufficiently advanced to make much of a difference. According to the figures whizzing by ever so quickly on an excellent website, Worldometer, we’ve consumed nearly 170,000,000 MWh of energy today alone, 156,700,000 of which is from non-renewable sources. We’ve got 15,676 days left until oil runs out completely.
That’s slightly less than 43 years. That’s all – 43 years, and we’ll have sucked those wells dry as a witch’s… bones. My grandmother was born in 1910, she saw the car replace horse-drawn wagons, and by the time she died, she’d witnessed the birth of the internet and a man walking on the moon. A child born this year, 2010, a mere hundred years later, could possibly see that happen in reverse… should we survive that long. By 2030, energy, water and food shortages will be heading toward a ‘perfect storm’, with major upheavals, destabilization and riots worldwide as food prices will rise to become unaffordable to the majority, starvation increases and millions of refugees flee climate ravaged regions.
Two nights ago, my sister Daria, raised by the same tree-hugging hippies and scientists I was, argued with our stepmommy Darla that we “have to listen to both sides on climate change.” When I heard that last night, I blew up. Life is really fucking short. Life is getting shorter every minute we patiently listen to tales like Jesus rode dinosaurs to make us beholden to British Petroleum. We owe no one patience with this bullshit, because what happens next is a really old story.
[The King] said, “What does a person deserve who drags another out of bed and throws him in the water?” “The wretch deserves nothing better,” answered the old woman, “than to be taken and put in a barrel stuck full of nails, and rolled down hill into the water.” “Then,” said the King, “Thou hast pronounced thine own sentence;” and he ordered such a barrel to be brought, and the old woman to be put into it with her daughter, and then the top was hammered on, and the barrel rolled down hill until it went into the river.
Every day, we are pronouncing our sentence. Every. Day.
Darla, Dad’s third wife, is on her way over to our house. She has a cold, which is not alarming since Pete has one, too. Pete’s baking a loaf of whole wheat bread, heavy on onion and molasses. We’ve spent our New Year’s Day tidying up the house, lounging around and doting on Drusy, Sweetpea and poor Topaz, who is also stuffy and sneezing.
Borscht is simmering on the stove. Soon, we will ladle fragrant soup into bowls and top the soup with fresh homemade yogurt. Hopefully, your year will be peaceful and prosperous.
In 2009, I struggled with questions for which I’m still awaiting answers. Life is very complicated – unless it isn’t. As for the new year: I am hopeful that while our national discourse has taken a turn for the disastrously stupid and craven, in our own lives, we can think the smart thoughts and make the smart moves. For us – for you – here is what I wish –
In 2010 – and not a decade too soon – I want a political talk show host to finally turn to William Kristol and slowly, deliberately ask this important question:
“Bill, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
But our host can’t stop there.
“Bill, what the fuck is wrong with you? You’ve been saying the exact same things about different brown people around the globe since the first time we had the misfortune of hearing your name. You are always wrong. You hate yourself and every living being. You stink of death and misery and I can smell you from here. For the sake of your favorite sky god, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Balm, like the laughter of little children, it is!
In 2010 – and not a decade too soon – I want a political talk show host to finally turn to Thomas Friedman and slowly, deliberately ask this important question:
“Tom, what is the matter with you?”
But our host can’t stop there.
“Tom, what’s the matter with you? To call you stupid is to insult stupid people everywhere and to call those things you think ideas is to dignify suggestions to lick frozen flagposts. You have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the world, the damage you’re doing or the political use to which you’ve been put. If you had any decency you’d put out a Times supplement in which you hand wrote apologies to every literate man, woman and child in the world, drew pictures for the rest and never wrote another word. There’s no excuse for your continuing to inflict yourself on a world desperate for adult interaction. What is the matter with you?”
Brings a tear to the eye, I know!
In 2010 – and not a decade too soon – I want a political talk show host to finally turn to Jonah Goldberg and slowly, deliberately ask this important question:
“Jonah, what in vomitrocious tarnation is your frigging problem?”
But our host can’t stop there. No. Our host is on a roll.
“Jonah, what in vomitrocious tarnation is your frigging problem? Your ancestors roll over in their graves every time you touch a keyboard. Actual fascists wink when you leave the room. You’re overdressed in pajamas and underdressed in a tux. No matter what your mom told you you are not a smart person. You just aren’t. You’re stupid and dangerous, and what is your frigging problem?”
Much like this magical moment –
– when for just an instant the truth was spoken, America heard it and laughed, laughter has the power to free us from the spell of tiresome, murderous trolls. I hope in 2010, many more heroes will slay evil with simple truths, delivered fearlessly. I wish this for you – for us – not just because it would be a pleasure and a delight to watch the venal meet justice on at least an Auntie Mame scale, if not on the Brothers Grimms’, but because we need it now. We stand at the crossroads of history. Let us hope the messenger comes armed with both a punchline and a broadsword.
Last week, Topaz seemed to be running a fever, so we trundled off to the vet’s office, where the vet was very patient with 6.5 pounds of seething, hissing and shivering pussycat. I don’t want to get into humiliating specifics, but let’s just say that if the six and a half foot vet is intent on taking the temperature of the tiny angry kitty, LET THEM FIGHT IT OUT. Got that mental picture? Got it? Awesome.
In the evenings now, Topaz has taken to curling up on a velveteen pillow while I type a stirring missive or work on the family store’s website. Sometimes she stands on the keyboard and insists I admire her beauty, and how could I not? Though she will on occasion go so far as to nod off on my lap, Topaz is no lap cat. She is in her heart a panther, lounging in a tree, watching, always watching.
This is a picture of a sudden ensmartening. Yes, I made up word. Shut up!
Siobhan and I had lunch like lunching ladies, and Siobhan was squawking about dumb stuff it doesn’t take much thinking to see through. Naturally, I squawked a harmony part.
Siobhan: That’s like my favorite cooking instruction Remove from heat. No one follows that!
Tata: Omigod, so a few months ago, I was listening to a woman in my office talk about making yogurt and how the way she does it sounds like a lot less work than I put into it, when suddenly I realized that not only should I shut off the heat and remove the pot from the burner, but if I remove the milk from the pot, the temperature will drop sharply.
Siobhan slapped her forehead.
Tata: I KNOW!
If I had a plastic bowl, I’d feel even smarter.
Poor Impulse Control 