Die Another Day, by Madonna

Done! Donedonedonedonedone!

Whee!

We went to the mall tonight because it’s supposed to be 20 matriarch-fornicating degrees tomorrow morning and frostbitten thigh-chub is not a prospect to which I look forward, so I had to get me some sex-ay spandex, which Grandma Texas got me, together with a snazzy running shirt and vest, as a totally-not-a-surprise Christmas present. I might still be last, BUT! I will look the part of a runner, right down to my Wonderwoman bracelet/key holder.
Behold my snazziness:

And for no good reasn other than that it amuses me, here is Moe looking persecuted:

OK. Done now. Off to read World War Z. That should be a good motivator, I would imagine, for the somewhat faster than usual running.

Working for the Man, by PJ Harvey

bruce Springsteen is known for not having opening acts. Legend has it that this practice stems from his own (thankless) time in the opening slot and his reluctance to inflict this apparent torture on others.

In truth, I’ve often wondered whether headliners aren’t the wee-est, tiniest bit sadistic in their choices, because rarely does an opening band elicit much more than a polite handclap or two even from me. PJ Harvey was an exception — girlfriend opened for U2 in 2001, and while (of course) she didn’t show them up (NO ONE can do that, don’t even try, foolish mortal!), she certainly brought an arena full of indifferent-at-best U2 fans to heel. With her swagger that out-Mick-ed The Jagger and a voice that turned Robert Plant’s unholy swoops into madwoman cackles, the woman had charisma to burn. When she launched into the a cappella end of Rid Of Me — screaming:
Lick my legs I’m on fire
Lick my legs of desire
Lick my legs I’m on fire — you could see the frat boys arrested in their tracks, beer halfway to their lips, wondering what the hell was WRONG with this chick.

I have had a hetero-girl-crush on PJ ever since, and unreservedly recommend her if you are looking for chick-rock that is not twee and folky.

***

WHY DID NONE OF YOU TELL ME THERE WAS NEW KILLERS MATERIAL OUT?!?!?!?!

I have missed two whole weeks of listening to this stuff! Gah! I know, it’s just outtakes, but they are (so far) quite lovely, lovely stuff. The Joy Division cover (Shadowplay) is delicious, and Tranquilize! Hey! It’s Lou Reed! Cool!

***

True or false:
These three people are related:

***

Grandma Texas and I are going to be racing on Saturday in Hipster-City-to-the-North-of-Us. Wanna come run with us? It’s been interesting to be doing the same sport as my mom. She runs races to kick @ss and take names, while I pretty much do it for the schwag and the ambiance (free hot chocolate at this one! Wooh!). She keeps forgetting and offering me tips for successful @ss-kicking, while my objective is still pretty much: “Don’t trip!

Death of a Train, by Daniel Lanois

1. Grandma Texas is here! All week! Details of hijinks to follow!

2. Barney is playing fetch with me — he brings me his mousie, drops it at my feet, waits expectantly, and when I toss it, scurries a wild Scooby-run-scramble after it, smacks it around a bit, then brings it back to me. It’s completely adorable, and also nice because he hasn’t played this game in a while. I worry about Barney because his temperament has proven to be a less-than-ideal match with a toddler (he’s gotten a little twitchy), but things seem to be settling down, if behavior like this is any indication.

3. Creepy, and yet not: I had a dream last night that I died. I’d somehow been taken hostage, and the situation deteriorated to the point where one of the women holding me captive shot me in the head. The last thing I did was take her hand and say, “I love you; tell my daughter I love her.”

I woke up right then. I’ve been turning this over in my mind all day because as disturbing as it sounds, it was an astonishingly comforting dream. I am not that surprised that my last thought was for Eliza — whatever else my shortcomings as a parent, the one thing I want her to know above all else is that she is loved. It WAS surprising that I was able to say it peacefully and calmly and with great faith that Eliza would somehow hear this message and know its truth.

What was really eye-opening was that when I took my executioner’s hand and told her I loved her, I knew that I meant it. I forgave her completely for what she did and I could feel nothing but love for her as a fellow human being. I wasn’t afraid at all. It felt like a moment of enlightenment.

Let’s Dance, by David Bowie

Put on your Christmas boots and dance the blues?

We were looking at the Christmas stuff this evening, Eliza and I, and when she saw the Christmas stockings, she said, “Want to put on DESE boots!” Then she looked at them and decided, “You don’t WIKE dese boots!”

***

I always listen to NPR’s Talk of the Nation driving home from work. Yesterday’s topic was the rich, today’s was sexual misconduct among teachers in the schools.

I had a phone conversation with a former co-worker yesterday — her son and his family are considering moving to my city and she wanted to talk to someone who lives here. One of the things that always comes up when people have this conversation is schools. Ours are troubled, no question about it. Test scores are poor, drop-out rates could stand to be lower, etc.

At the risk of sounding totally nuts, I just can’t get that worked up about it. I think a child who is reasonably intelligent and whose family places a priority on academic striving (to the best of one’s ability, of course) and supports the child in that, will be fine. I have anecdotal evidence of to support my thoughts in this from a friend whose daughter went through the school system and found her educational needs well-met, not to mention the stickers from selective colleges that adorn our neighbors’ cars.

Besides, my parents strove to put me and my sister in the best school systems possible, and I had plenty of mediocre-to-awful experiences with teachers.

There was my sixth grade English/reading teacher, who didn’t like me and manipulated my grade. I put forth exactly the same effort in fifth and seventh grade, and somehow I consistently “earned” two letter grades lower in sixth? Yeah. He poisoned reading and writing for me.

In seventh grade, I was relentlessly (often sexually) harassed by two of my classmates. Butt-pinching, tripping in the hall, name-calling, etc. These dumbclucks, to be precise:

Guess who lefting me twisting in the wind? Oh yeah, the AMAZING school system I attended, IN SPITE of my going, at one point, to the PRINCIPAL to beg for help. I still remember my science teacher pairing me with the mangy short one as a lab partner and how everyone in the room got very, very quiet after he read off that particular name pairing. ALL the students knew, but the renowned faculty? C-to-the-L-to-the-UELESS!

Let’s see, then there was the teacher who was really into hugging. Girls. 8-year-old ones. There was the high school teacher rumored to have married a student after having an affair with her. The college professor whose class was so boring my friend T and I used to count the “Ums” and “Ers” and average them out over the class period to see if he would beat the previous per-minute record.

Those were the bad. Now for the good. My seventh grade teacher was the antidote to the poison of the previous year and I credit her with giving me the courage start thinking, very early on, about writing for a living. My junior year history teacher made his subject come alive with inventive projects. We worked crazy-hard in his class and none of us minded. My college advisor was one of the coolest women I have ever met. I let myself get intimidated by her but that was my own baggage, and I wish I hadn’t because I would have loved to count her among my friends. I have several friends who teach at a local Jewish day school and if we were in any way Jewish I would put my kid there in a second, because I know that these women are fantastic. I’ve also seen many instructors in action with teenage and adult learners in my city and I know that they are tremendously dedicated and capable of drawing out the most reluctant student.

I take a fatalistic view of things: You can put your student in the best school money can buy and still have a lousy teacher who fouls the waters for your kid. Or you can get lucky and get the opposite in the worst school system you can find. Part of me feels a responsibility, too, to put my money where my mouth is when I talk my big game about supporting my city. The school system does need improving, because there are a lot of students whose situations are dire, in ways that are not caused by the schools but that nonetheless affect the schools, AND which the schools need to be better equipped to counteract. The system needs people with our kind of resources (time, enfranchisement, etc.) to commit to it. How’s it going to get better if the well-off keep yanking their kids and their money out?

We haven’t finished this discussion, and I need to investigate more, because if it’s hopeless, I’m not going to sacrifice Eliza’s future for the sake of a political point — home schooling, private school, school choice, charter school are not off the table. But I’m just not convinced — by a long stretch — that it will come to any of those.

Desenchantee, by Mylene Farmer

I was so sure I pontificated on the War on Christmas last year, and yet, multiple searches turned up nothing. I must’ve had a rare moment of discretion, a quality I find I have less of than I once thought (Hi, A&J, sorry about that whole miming-the-doctor-pulling-the-baby-out-complete-with-graphically-detailed-narration thing the other night. Please don’t reconsider procreation on my account!).

Between this appallingly callous mention of Santa in a catalog and the general tenor of the holiday media coverage this weekend, I feel a little rantiness coming on. I am, on peut dire, un peu desenchantee avec le holiday season.

1. I (sort of) agree with the conservative punditry about the ridiculousness of the stripping specific Christian references out of our holiday observances, from decorations to well wishes.

Where I disagree with them, quite strongly, is in why this is a bad idea.

We* live in a culture that espouses separation of church and state, but we’re not kidding anyone. The 10 Commandments figure quite strongly in our sense of right and wrong, which means we are firmly in the Abrahamic tradition. And the founding fathers may have been deists, but theirs was a Christian deism, and significant chunks of this country’s early non-Native American population were people were motivated in large part by a desire to practice the kind of Christianity THEY wanted. Christianity (and to a lesser extent Judaism, given the Old-Testament origins of the Commandments) is woven into the fabric of our society. We’re like fish in water — it’s so omnipresent we can’t even see it half the time.

We do everyone who is not of this tradition a disservice with our tokenism. I think tossing off a Happy Hanukkah or Eid ul-Adha or Bodhi Day and patting ourselves on the back because “Hey, we remembered the name of those other people’s holiday!” is pretty insulting. I don’t know squat about Eid ul-Adha, and only a little about Bodhi Day but I have it on good authority that Hanukkah and Christmas are NOT equivalent in terms of religious significance, and I am pretty sure that falling in December (sometimes) is the only thing these days have in the way of commonality. We have smooshed and crammed and punched and kicked Hanukkah into some semblance of equivalence because it is convenient for us to have a thing to say that makes us sound enlightened.

I think it would show a heck of a lot more in the way of multiculturalism and ecumenical thinking to find out what holidays DO matter, and to acknowledge those. I know it’s impossible to be fully informed about every single holiday in every single denomination of every single religion, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect that of people. The challenge is to recognize that saying Happy Holidays to someone in December doesn’t exactly let you off the hook.

2. That said, I am, perhaps predictably, none too thrilled with our modes of observance r.e. Christmas either. Did anyone else find the breathless coverage about percentage points up or down in sales a little off-putting? I was distressed to hear the holiday reduced, over the course of the weekend, to a horse race. I’m not the first to say it, but let me add my voice to the clamor: Is this REALLY what our observance of the birth of our most important spiritual and cultural figure has come down to? (And yes, I know, Jesus wasn’t really born then, the holiday’s timing is actually an appropriation of Saturnalia, etc.)

Don’t get me wrong, I like to get presents, but I listened to a radio program today about how even the richest people in the world never feel like they have enough, and it popped me right between the eyes, because one of the speakers made the point that by the standards of the rest of the world, even we in the middle class are impossibly rich. I have a lovely family, everyone is in reasonably good health, we don’t have to worry too hard about money. The one thing I would like is to not lose sight of that so often. Gratitude — if someone could show me how to keep that foremost in my mind, that would be the best gift. That, and another night’s drive around the park with my girl exulting over the light display.

____

ETA because I realized upon reread this morning that this sounds accusatory: *When I use “We,” here, I mean our collective society, not we-the-readers-of-this-blog per se. I also don’t mean that specific people intend insult, but rather that taken collectively, this practice dismisses the true meaning of these other religions and their holidays.