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Wednesday, February 26, 2003 ( 2/26/2003 08:47:00 PM ) DN Get Real, Pen Pal, I Hope It's Love, My Man, My Baby, Cutie Pie. (Necco) (It's quote week. Also, eat up leftover conversation hearts week.) Katie's creation: You're mine, my man. # Tuesday, February 25, 2003 ( 2/25/2003 11:39:00 AM ) DN Although it reinforces Appalachian stereotypes (being factual, though selective), there's an interesting collection of files at the Library of Congress's American Memory web site. The documentary project is called Tending the Commons. There's hundreds of files there so I've barely begun to look & listen to them. # ( 2/25/2003 10:55:00 AM ) DN Week of PMS ended & I came back to life as of yesterday. I've been reading - - because the bad weather just won't stop - - and thinking about spring. I am spending evenings aboard the Worcester, a poorly built ship of the line. I find I really need a sailor nearby since I usually feel like Hyde, the lieutenant who can't remember starboard from larboard & crashed the Ariel into the rocks. Tom might be rated able in his grasp of seaman terms, but I hate to keep asking & seem like a landsman. Katie turned 6 Saturday and wore a pair of shoe skates around from Friday all the way through Sunday evening. # Friday, February 21, 2003 ( 2/21/2003 12:50:00 PM ) DN Local Scandal Big Surprise Not. Two large development projects nearly went down the tubes in a single week here in our town, where we can ill afford it. I have reviewed the faxes & photocopies of the Kinetic Park/Uptowner Inns mess, courtesy of huntingtonnews.net. Hate to be cynical (not really), but I think Mr. Midkiff might be trying to prevent any hotel from being built at the site. Didn't he say Huntington wouldn't support another hotel & it would put his Holiday Inn out of business? So now we have three lawsuits pending over it. The Pullman Square project was briefly endangered, too. But apparently HURA members came to their senses in time. # Tuesday, February 18, 2003 ( 2/18/2003 07:51:00 PM ) DN Appalachian Reverse Snobs? I said earlier that Lee Smith wrote that "Appalachia" was a label she didn't recognize as a child. Now I read the same quote in John O'Brien's so-far excellent book, "At Home in the Heart of Appalachia" (sorry, no useless Amazon links here; go look it up yourself!). All right, who said this? This is an apocryphal claim. Nobody said it, not in so many words. Everybody knows what the Appalachians are (a mountain range, idjits!). They mean, I suppose, that they didn't know they were "different," or the bunion--or maybe the cold sore! (ugly, embarrassing, and perversely fascinating)-- of America, until the 1960s, when the media turned on them. If they think that it came from the WPA photographs, as someone said in a recent AP article about Appy stereotypes, they are WRONG. I have a very fine book of those photographs, and damn me if the Okies and the Texans and the Alabamians and the Virginians and the Missourians and the Pennsylvanians all didn't have that same weary/poor/hungry/desperate/wrinkled/careworn look in the Depression. I spent a few years in California in the 80s and I believe I saw more than a few country folk there, too. Especially in Bakersfield and everyplace else in the Valley. # ( 2/18/2003 02:33:00 PM ) DN I'm back & no, I haven't been writing Mrs. Dalloway (I know, I'm the wuss). I've been away from my computer for two days!! Wanted to comment on the anti-war demonstrations and Senator Byrd's speech to the Senate but that's yesterday's news now. While half the country is buried in snow, we've been getting rain and only rain. The Ohio crested at 38' or thereabouts Monday evening. Flood stage here in Huntington is 50'. We're safe, thanks to our floodwall. I moved my office to a new room in our building yesterday and just now, at 2:30, have gotten the modem, router, network settings, etc., all working again. # Friday, February 14, 2003 ( 2/14/2003 12:33:00 PM ) DN Here's a funny thing. I was leaving work yesterday & my partner was giving the brush off to some salesperson on the telephone. She was being given a number to call, if she changed her mind, etc., and she was pretending to write it down, making big fake writing motions without even a pen in her hand. I immediately knew what was going on, because I do this, too. But if you think about it, you have to wonder why we do it? The person on the telephone doesn't know whether you're writing it down or not. Hell, they don't even care whether you are. They give it to you fast so they can beat you to the hang-up. There's a zero percent chance of ever using that number, so we must be pretending to ourselves, just for that few seconds, that we're doing what they ask. Or maybe there's a fear that they might quiz you--ask you to repeat it back to them--and then you can pretend that you can't quite read that imaginary handwriting. # Thursday, February 13, 2003 ( 2/13/2003 03:12:00 PM ) DN Abortion Is the Most Common Surgical Procedure in America? I wonder. Too lazy to research this for more than 30 minutes, and I can't find exactly what I need. The CDC tables on ambulatory surgery rates seem to show that cataract surgery is more common. Certainly abortion numbers are high. However, I suspect that this "fact" is an anti-abortion "fact." Here's some rough "facts" from the CDC's surveillance report on abortion (don't ask me why that word's in there). About ninety percent of abortions are performed on the youngest & oldest women in the US (reproductively speaking): those under 20 and those over 40. Nearly 80% are performed on unmarried women. And about 90% are performed at under 12 weeks. Seems like we have a teen sex problem that could be better addressed thru sex ed. The other thing that steams me is the whole partial birth thing. There were a few hundred abortions (around 300, I think) performed in the US last year at 32+ weeks. I'll bet at least 2/3 of those were in extreme cases, situations you wouldn't wish on any woman you've ever known, leaving possibly 100 abortions done for selfish, stupid reasons. For this we need federal legislation? More than 100 people are killed each year by all sorts of stupid things. Let's get federal legislation to ban handguns in homes with children. # Tuesday, February 11, 2003 ( 2/11/2003 07:49:00 PM ) DN What value is there in the unmodified (screwed up) personality? Even if we're modified, we're not automatons or stepfords, so why not modify? The view from the street will always be that modifying is good. Because it feels, well, good. # ( 2/11/2003 03:42:00 PM ) DN State of the City I missed our fine mayor's state of the city address last night. Accidentally. If it had been me speaking, I could have done it in a word. "Uncle!" # ( 2/11/2003 07:25:00 AM ) DN Last night I got to some good stuff in the book For Common Things, by Jedediah Purdy. He says "every decision in law and politics is a decision about what we will become." This statement is so self-evident it's scary. Of course it's true, but we often act as though it is not. His entire book is an argument for more engagement, more responsibility in the world we live in, and for less irony, detachment, and indifference. Yes. How can one argue with that? I have come to the conclusion--late--that we have here in WV no culture of enforcement. So, our decisions in law and politics are perhaps only a wish about what we will become. Why are we not following through? Our problems are endemic. If there truly is an Appalachian fatalism--if this personality trait is not limited to the coalfields where residents have good cause for fatalistic thinking, having had little control over their own lands and economy for a hundred years--where did it come from? It must be organic, seeded from this specific place and these conditions, but not from these people, who originally came to do what other frontier people were doing in Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. What makes West Virginia a failed place? I believe it was the writer Lee Smith who said that as a child, she didn't know she was from Appalachia, that terrible place of poverty. Appalachia was an other world, not hers. Is there any reason to think that the future won't be as ruinous as the past has been? A German firm just bought our water company. Coal companies are leaving us surrounded with eroding plains of rubble. The relatively few taxpayers here help to pay for worker's compensation funds that are left short by evasions of mining companies. It seems as if every arm of government and law is on the side of the corporations, not the citizens. Stay tuned. # Sunday, February 09, 2003 ( 2/09/2003 04:11:00 PM ) DN 4:00 pm. The weekend has been spent. Except for the movie "Amelie," which we're still watching. Dinners have been cooked, family members from out of town have gone home. Birthday parties have been attended. I got at least one extra hour of sleep! Nothing fell apart. I imagine I hear the football game on TV in the next room and smell the green beans cooking in the kitchen. Sunday afternoons are the same, no matter what one has done with the rest of the weekend. That empty, final hour when work and play are both over always comes. Sometimes it feels good, like today. # Thursday, February 06, 2003 ( 2/06/2003 02:00:00 PM ) DN The other day I was haranguing my students about exercising their right to vote and I almost confessed that I didn't vote the first time I was eligible, when Carter was running (2nd time). It occurred to me just in time that I probably sounded to them just as someone describing the Kennedy/Nixon race would sound to me. Aaargh. # ( 2/06/2003 08:49:00 AM ) DN I am Mom with the Cast Iron Stomach. I got to thinking about sick cats (RIP Jasper) & Virginia Woolf, who complained in a letter once that the business of life (she was buying and taking delivery on a new bed) could ruin days and days of creative work. Between Saturday and Monday, we had, here in the homestead, a clog in the kitchen sink that had to be opened a few feet from the main drain to let out a stew of 2 week old strangely fibrous chicken parts and Liquid Plumber; a disposer jam from a largish brass screw; a toilet clog that flooded the bathroom; a really largish bursting sebaceous cyst on the guinea pig, which we helped drain and doctor; an entire four-pack of defective light bulbs misleading us into electrical investigations of the bathroom wiring; and a child with a stomach virus. All this involved lots of the wrong tools, plenty of first aid supplies, hand dishwashing and at least 2 ½ extra loads of laundry (above the usual Sunday five). Woolf didn’t even have a day job or kids. What a wuss. How did I feel after all this? I felt a sense of accomplishment. I may not have created something, but I kept things from falling apart, as everyone knows they have a tendency to do (see above). Yesterday the kids' after school teacher laughed and laughed because my two tend to go around perpetually trailing school papers, important notes, library books, hats, gloves, coats, sweaters, backpacks, art projects, and everything else they own. I usually spend fifteen frantic minutes in the morning finding all that stuff for them, so I agreed with her. They didn't get it from me, I said. But maybe they did. Perhaps we do have more than normal amounts of chaos. And maybe it comes from me. I don't think so, though. # Saturday, February 01, 2003 ( 2/01/2003 09:37:00 AM ) DN Expendable Cats & Boy Scouts Cats are expendable. Don’t read any further, cat lovers. I once had a cat, a lovely, smart, half-Siamese, who lived with us for nearly 10 years. He was touchy to the point of neurosis, secretive, indifferent, yet clean, quiet, and tolerant of human folly. However. He was also very ill for nearly three years before he died, and it was a great relief to me when he went. In retrospect, we might have had him put down and saved us all a lot of pain. I cleaned up so, so many grotesque leavings over his last years. I cannot comment on it. This is not how family cats met their end in my childhood. We had many cats and when they died, they were simply gone. My father, no cat lover, may have disposed of them, and I mean that in the most sinister way possible. I don’t know. They disappeared. We remembered the last one fondly and got another. At dinner with the kids, we were discussing dogs and what kind we might want. I was careful to keep the discussion hypothetical. I could not bear a barker, or a frantic, nervous dog. Nothing you might step on. I didn’t want any breed known for its aggression. Nothing that bit. I didn’t want an oversized, excessively hairy dog. Nothing that shed. I didn’t want a stupid dog. I didn’t want a pure bred, unstable sort. I also didn’t want a mongrel with several breeds' bad qualities. Said I, “I’d want a dog that was loyal, trustworthy, kind, and clean. Honest, brave, and friendly.” Said my husband, “You don’t want a dog. You want a Boy Scout.” “Yes,” I said. Doesn’t everybody? # |
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