Stuff that makes me cringe

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Yeah, nothing like having your iTunes shuffle up Patty Griffin's Wiggley Fingers while your boss is in your office...

States I've Visited

I shamelessly ripped this off from my newly-rediscovered friend Mark.



create your own personalized map of the USA

A riddle

Because I don't get a lot of time to blog, I have to strike while the iron is hot. So yeah, we have two posts in one day, after a three-week absence.

What do you get when you mix a good girlfriend in town for a wedding, 2 bottles of decent champagne, the realization, at 11 pm, that your grey hair has become too noticeable to ignore, and an all-night drug store?


Yep. It came out purple.

I had to color it two more times, with highlighting assistance from the almost-seven-year-old, to get it so I could go to the aforementioned wedding without pretending I was the clown hired to entertain the kids during the reception...

Grrl Power

I think I've been pretty clear with everyone here and in meatspace that I have a true disdain for war and warmongers. But I do genuinely understand the need to have a military strong enough to protect us (I'm not naive enough to imagine that the lion and the lamb are going to lay down together any time soon) and I realize that we need to show the American public what we're spending all that money on.

I am also a closet motorhead chick. Sorry. I get it from my father.

As a result, I get a real charge out of going to the Cleveland Air Show. I love the big jets. I love the rumble in my chest when the afterburners come on. I think the Harrier jet may be the most impressive freakin' thing on Earth. And I just love all those incredibly proud, polite young men who are there to guide overweight mommies from the suburbs through tours of C-130 transports and Chinook helicopters.

But this year, I was accompanied for the first time by my almost seven-year-old and her classmate from school. And for the first time, I was struck by something else. Not all those guides were young men. More and more of them are young women. And not that stereotypical butch soldier we sometimes see depicted in movies. These are young, pretty, feminine women. They are physically fit, to be certain. But they also are well spoken, soft spoken, and carry an air of remarkable confidence and competence. They wear make-up. And they're not just playing support roles. I was flabbergasted, after a truly impressive faux helicopter battle that featured six wicked-looking Army copters, to see a woman step out of one of the cockpits. Her name was Patty. She had red hair and wore yellow and black-patterned nail polish.

I made my daughter and her friend go up and ask her to sign their T-shirts. I don't know about you, but I haven't met many female helicopter pilots in my life. She was gracious, gathered all those little girls around her (I sense there were several other mothers in the crowd who were as struck as I was) and she looked them all in their eager faces, saying "If you want to fly, don't you dare let anyone tell you that you can't do it. Go back to school, study math, take good care of your bodies. I'll see you in flight school, ladies."

I had two other pilots (both men, one in the military and one on a commercial plane) tell my daughter the same thing, as she climbed into the pilot seats of their aircraft. "You can be a pilot. Girls are smart and capable and better at doing two or three things at once than any boy. Don't let them fool you."

I don't think I would ever like to see my daughter in the military, even knowing that the chances she'd ever be in combat are slim. I have too much distrust for our government to trust them with my baby's life. But I like this message of empowerment for our daughters. It's a step in the right direction.

Conflagrations and Loin Cloths

So I’m off the soap box for a few days, because I’m just too freakin tired to think.

What a weekend.

We cleaned out our garage on Saturday. Now, this may be a trivial activity in the eyes of many, but you have you understand two things:

1) My husband is a pack rat extra-ordinaire
2) Said husband hates to clean.

The end result of these two things is that our garage had about 4 years of crap in it. His M.O. is to take whatever is in his car, put it in a cardboard box, and shove it in the garage. If it doesn't fit in a box, just shove it in there anyway. Do this once or twice a month for 4 years. You get the picture.

It was frightening beyond one’s wildest nightmares.

But we cleaned it out. Took 9 hours. Two bon fires in the back yard. Many sore muscles. And we have a pile of crap to be thrown out in the driveway now that is the size of my car.

Now here’s the kicker: My car still won’t fit in the garage, near as I can tell. I’m not sure how that happened.

Anyway, at least I can open it without being embarrassed that the neighbors will see. And I have a sense of accomplishment that is close to that which I feel after I spend 8 or 9 hours on my garden.

Sunday was a better day.

We went to see The Lion King onstage.

If you haven’t seen this, stop right now, call your local Ticketmaster, find out when it’s coming to town and book yourself tickets.

I’m serious. Go on. I’ll wait.

This was, bar none, the best touring show I’ve ever seen. Ever. And it comes damn close to the best stage production I’ve ever seen ANYwhere. And you have to realize I’ve seen Cats at the Wintergarden and Les Mis in London.

It was that good.


The costumes! The staging! The wonderful casting of an enormous South African woman as Rafiki. The performance of the Elton John/Tim Rice music (as well as an African-themed score by Lebo M, Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin and Hans Zimmer) by a live orchestra. Birds flying over the audience! Incredibly gorgeous men dancing in loin clothes. People who are dressed as GRASS, and who seem essential to the production. Depth of character that you just can’t get in a cartoon. Honestly, I was in tears more than once from sheer awe.

Go see it. Tell them I sent you. You won't regret it.

Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose

Today is Wednesday. Halleluiah.


I work at one of the largest, wealthiest research hospitals in the United States. As I drive on campus each morning, I can see beautifully-manicured lawns, expensive cars, massive construction on building projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I see banners proclaiming US News rankings and advertising the new 4-star restaurant they’ve opened in the hotel across the street from my office. Everything about it speaks of success and money.

What I see in the ten minutes before I reach campus is a different story. The campus is situated in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Each morning, I see prostitutes in skin tight shorts and wobbly heels, wending their exhausted – or stoned - way home from a night of work in some other part of the city. I see drug deals made with a pat on the back and a hand slipped into a coat pocket. I see teenaged girls dragging weary toddlers to the convenience store – there are no true groceries in these parts of town. I see gangs of young boys in white t-shirts and baggy pants, who should be in school but aren’t. I see street people sleeping off the aftermath of last night’s struggle with personal demons. I see middle-aged men, sitting in doorways, staring at nothing, hoping for nothing. They'll still be there on my way home in the evening.

I also see churches, perhaps a dozen or more in the 20 blocks between the freeway and my parking lot. They proclaim messages from their front signs:

All are welcome here
Tithe if you love Jesus; anyone can honk
CH__CH. What’s missing?
Tent revival August 24-28. Seek your salvation here.

They also proclaim the following:

Free hot meals
Food and Shelter for the Body and Soul
Grocery distribution on Wednesdays

The last sign hangs on the church parking lot across the street from my parking lot. Each Wednesday morning, a truck pulls up from the local food bank and distributes meager bags of groceries to the local residents. The crowd forms early and throngs well into the lunch hour. Even if I couldn’t see the crowd, I would know they were there by the singing. As they patiently wait in line for stale Thomas’ English muffins, surplus granola bars, fruit roll-ups and brown-paper bags of rice, they sing hymns of thanks. Young, old, mothers with babes in arms, homeless men in outfits that are uniformly grey-brown from months of street dust, the strung-out, the insane. They sing thanks and praise under the leadership of the church pastor, as thousands of well-dressed employees hurry from their cars to their offices a mere 90 feet away.

On one side of the street, the haves; on the other, the have nots.

I find myself wondering how our country – how any country – can hope to achieve peace and democracy abroad when it so clearly has not put forth the effort to give its own people equity in society.

How do we set our own house to rights?

Stay tuned, all three of you who read this blog. I have some ideas. And I’d like to hear yours.

Marketing 101

Conversation with my 6-year-old:

Watching TV and the ad for the Simpsons Movie comes on.

Marge looks at Homer: "I thought he was Spider Pig"

Homer: "Now he's Harry Plopper"

**Camera pans to a pig wearing a pair of round black glasses with unruly hair and a zig-zag scar on his head.**

***

Daughter: Mom! They made that pig look like Harry Potter! Aren't the Harry Potter people going to take them to court???

Me (choosing not to discuss parody as a protected form of speech at this moment): I'm sure they got permission from the Harry Potter people.

Daughter: Permission to make a pig look like Harry Potter? That had to be expensive.

Might be cheaper to go to court.


(pause)


Me: That's my girl

Of the People, By the People, For the People...so long as you don't plan on actually SEEING any of it...

So as I alluded to in an earlier post, I had an opportunity to meet the president about a week and a half ago. He was in town to discuss healthcare issues and for a short time, regenerative medicine was on his agenda. Given that it’s my bailiwick, I was on.

Under normal circumstances, the opportunity to meet a sitting president of the United States would have left me (and I suspect, most other normal people) in a state of excited anticipation. I, however, found myself dreading this meeting, as I would be in the unenviable position of needing to spend time discussing the urgent need to fund research to help treat wounded warfighters who were wounded only because of his misguided excuse for a foreign policy…well, you get the picture.

So the good news is that I dropped off the “talkie” part of the schedule. I did get to be in the peanut gallery watching him watch one of my colleagues do miraculous stuff with electrodes that can cure Parkinson’s patients. (I’ll write about that some time if I get a chance – it’s wicked cool) I was close enough that with a bit of creative effort, I could have pulled off the aforementioned gratuitous left hook to the solar plexus, however, and I do wish to exercise full marks for having resisted that temptation.

As it always the case when I see presidents in person, I was struck by how small Dubya is. I mean, he’s like, 5’10 or something like that, and certainly not “short”. I actually have no strong opinions about how tall or broad-shouldered a man should be or anything. It’s just…well…there’s a part of me that I think still has this image that the leader of the free world should be physically capable of fending off an attack from the Mongol Horde. I mean, when I met Clinton, he was like 6’2, and coulda swung a hand and a half sword if push came to shove. Course, he would have had to put down his Big Mac to do it…but I digress.

Actually that whole height think was a digression…let’s move on to the real point of this discussion.


If your idea of a Presidential motorcade harkens back to those photos of Kennedy in the convertible, with the adoring crowds lining the street and cheering as he went by, you’d be awfully surprised at the reality that is today’s presidential transport. Even 10 years ago, when I saw Clinton, you could still stand on the street when the closed, darkened limo went by, and people did, in large numbers.

When the president comes to town these days, you might as well expect that there are aliens invading the premises and you should run for your life. They close the street to traffic, of course, but it goes so much farther than that.

No one may stand on the sidewalks when the motorcade goes by. You cannot stand in a window facing the street where the limousine will be going by. If the president will be exiting the vehicle on your street, you must close all curtains and blinds. In essence, from the president’s perspective, it must appear he’s governing a complete ghost country, populated only by men in black suits with radios in their ears.

No wonder he’s out of touch!! He never sees anyone!

This country used to be known for having the most accessible leadership in the free world. That is definitely a thing of the past. When the president’s motorcade rolled in, it could just as easily been populated by Idi Amin. Complete with the armed guards, the three identical jet-black limousines, and the men in suits who ensure that no one sees the president in person.

How very sad. And how very illustrative, in my opinion.

Stuff that makes my heart stop

OK, so I still have to fill in the blanks on my last entry, but in the meantime...

I'm doing dishes and I hear my daughter sort of humming a song as she's coloring.


DO-DO-DoDoDoDo-Do-DeeDOOOO

DO-DO-DoDoDoDo-Do-DeeDooooo

I smile.

Until I realise that she's humming the "Enzyte" jingle.


I'm giving away the television tomorrow.

Blog Neglect

If this blog were a houseplant, it'd be wilted by now.

I'm not cut out for this sort of commitment, I think.

Anyway it's been a whirlwind week or so, punctuated by my having developed a renewed disdain for commercial air travel. It says something that last week's trip was among my worst travel experiences ever, when you consider that over the years I have:

1) Been detained by the DEA on suspicion of drug trafficking, because I had samples of agarose in my carry-on
2) Had one of New York's Finest pull a service revolver on my taxi driver, as I cringed in the back seat, wondering if the phrase "Ballistic Nylon" meant my luggage would stop a bullet.
3) Had a fellow passenger die of a heart attack while circling Chicago.

But here are some additional highlights for you to ponder while I think about how to tell the rest of the story...

-- My daughter got her training wheels off Sunday and can ride her "big girl bike" without assistance now

-- I have had breakfast with 2 senators in a week.

-- I fully resisted the urge to punch the president in the nads last week, even though I had the opportunity to do so. Please give me full points for etiquette.

-- I'm now an expert on Nitrogen Generators.

More later, gentle readers. I'm late for another meeting.