Succinct

Last night I heard the most succinct, eloquent summary of the gay marriage issue on one of my favorite shows, The PBS Newshour. The guest, a woman, said that the problem is a result of the fact that the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to take any decisive action, which leaves the states scrambling. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton penned the madness into law with the marriage defense copout. What that legislation mandated is simple: the federal government will not make any decisions on the gender composition of a legal marriage because it doesn’t want to interfere with legislation made at the state level. Furthermore, the states don’t have to agree with one another, or defer to one another; therefore, a marriage that’s legal in New Mexico is not necessarily so in Maine. Instead, we can wage war on a regular basis, state by state. We can pit friends and neighbors and co-workers against one another each and every election season, and we can spend millions and millions and millions of dollars doing so. I was so thrilled to her the guest on last night’s show sum it up so clearly. So thrilled, in fact, that I almost lost sight of the fact that the subject was not gay marriage but the latest immigration fascism from the state of Arizona.

The border

I guess election season really is right around the corner, since the immigration drum is being beaten so hard I can barely hear myself think. I’m not very well versed in the issue, but I’ve never let that stop me from mouthing off and I see no point in starting now:

• Were the American Indians the first people here, or were there others before them whose history has been erased? If they were the first ones here, they should have the final word on who stays and who goes.

• Isn’t Mexico beautiful? The food is good and cheap, and the people, they’re so nice.

• My people came to this country from Ireland, and did not receive what I’d call a warm welcome.

• It should be illegal to live in Arizona unless you work for the park service. There’s almost no water so they’re sucking several other Western states dry. When do I get to vote on whether or not they receive federal aid? I don’t think they should. In fact, I think they should be arrested for water crimes.

• Clearly, Mexicans created the drug problem in the U.S.

• If you’re a homo, know this: we’re on sabbatical this time because the anti-gay account has been overdrawn by the political strategists. We’ll be on the ballot again, soon enough.

• If people come up from Mexico and they don’t do all the proper paperwork, how do they get jobs? And where?

• Teaching children in the U.S. two languages – English and Spanish – would make our country smarter. That’s because learning a new language – regardless of the language – requires using a part of your brain not used otherwise.

• Really, what’s wrong with detaining people – even if it’s just pulling them over on the highway – because of what they look like? I look gay, so I think it’s perfectly understandable that parents get nervous when I’m around their children, because we all know gay folks are child molesters.

• I’ve read in the history books that large parts of what is now the Southwestern part of the U.S. was Mexico not that long ago.

• I think all of us – regardless of the groups to which we belong – should know what it feels like to be on a ballot, to be voted on by your friends, neighbors, co-workers. There’s nothing quite like it.

• If all the minorities refused to be pitted against one another for the sake of short-term gain that usually turns out to be fake anyhow, man, I only have two words for what that would be like: game over.

Testify

I will not deny that I thought it was thoroughly entertaining to watch the Wall Street criminals forced to appear before Congress and explain how they were earning millions while the rest of the country lost jobs, homes and health insurance. It was good television. Go get ‘em, Barney Frank! Kick some serious ass, Chuck Schumer! These impeccably dressed frat boys had robbed us blind, I recall thinking, and now they’re on the hot seat.

Except that they’re not. The news channels are abuzz this morning with lots of talk about the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who is testifying today. Will his testimony be reconciliatory, or will he come in fighting? My guess is that Goldman Sachs is as sinister as the rest of them, with its terrifying connections to all sorts of governmental entities, including the White House. So today the CEO will take his seat and there will be a lot of indignation thrown at him and we’ll all have a good time watching the news this evening. And then tomorrow, back to business as usual.

So if I were advising the CEO, here’s what I’d suggest: Seat yourself and thank everyone for the invitation. Then, beginning with Alabama, go through each state in alphabetical order and announce the amount of contributions each member of Congress has accepted from Goldman Sachs. Once you’ve reached Wyoming, shift to the White House. Then, invite questions and comments.

That would be my advice if I were asked, which, of course, I was not.

A good book

Well, I did it: Last week I finished Anna Karenina. This book and I go way back, so my sense of accomplishment is probably a bit out of proportion. This book was assigned reading for a course I took in 1987, 110 years after its completion. Why, I wondered, is any book 800 pages long? And what, I wondered at the same time, could a dead Russian guy from the 1800s possibly have to say about anything that matters?

A lot.

So here, from someone who left college more than two decades ago, are a few not especially original comments about the novel itself. There are many weighty, worldly themes woven in and out and across and above and beneath the actual story. And the weaving is done in a way that I, as a confirmed language slut, find breathtakingly beautiful. But Anna Karenina’s secret sauce, if you will, is this: the fucking is endless. The characters in that storyscape are not at all shy about getting into one another’s pants. The way it’s described takes a little getting used to – Vronsky, for example, is often described in terms of “his urgency,” and “flushed” is not an uncommon description of Kitty. But, just like today, when the sex is forced to fit into the narrative confines of conversations both internal and external, pandemonium is not far behind.

And that, for the most part, is what I like about this book: at more than 130 years old, update the names a bit – almost everyone in the book is named, to one extent or another, Alexander or Ivan in three or four variations each – replace the incessant exchanging of hand-written notes with e-mail, replace the servants, and there are lots of them, with administrative assistants and convenience store clerks and other groups we like to degrade as a matter of course, swap out Countess Lydia Ivanovna and swap in Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison and the novel could easily serve as a template for the nightly news. That amazes me.

So that’s what I was left with, basically: we have not changed at all. We perhaps haven’t regressed, but if Tolstoy’s text is any barometer, we haven’t moved forward either. When it comes to horsing around, the women in the novel are held to a very different set of standards than the men, which makes me wonder, as I have for years, why everyone doesn’t just get it over with and become gay. In a way that’s eerily familiar, the characters who populate the novel are on the verge of financial ruin – some closer than others – but the party continues, and these people, trust me, are lavish. In fact, it isn’t until page 669 of my copy that anyone even mentions that her cash supply is dwindling. And once it is mentioned, it’s quickly forgotten because there are parties and dinners to plan and host – kind of like our mortgage blindness, I think, our love of SUVs as the world’s oil supply declines, our institutionalized hatred of public transportation, which inspires us to continue building highways in spite of the doom that’s sure to follow. But here’s my favorite, from page 324: “Levin was struck especially by one little detail. The old peasant used the thinning of the rye as fodder for the horses. Many a time when Levin had seen this valuable food wasted he had wanted to have it gathered up, but had found this impossible. On this peasant’s fields this was being done, and he could not find words enough to praise this fodder.” I was shocked to read that, because I’d come to believe that “green” farming practices – or even “green” gardening practices – were invented right here in Portland, Oregon just a few years ago.

Two movies

This week I watched two very interesting movies. The first, which I saw at the neighborhood theater with two of my favorite neighbors, is a smoky little love story called A Single Man. The second, which I was mesmerized by on Wednesday evening, is Away from Her.

I’ve confessed before and I’ll confess again: a film critic I am not. Ignoring that very basic fact, here’s what I have to say.

The movies I saw this week had a lot in common. They were both based on written works, one by Christopher Isherwood, the other on a short story by Alice Munro. They were both filmed beautifully, I think. A Single Man is set in early 1960s Los Angeles, porn of sorts for the mid-century devotees. Away from Her takes place, and was shot, I presume (I couldn’t read the credits due to contrast problems) in the early 2000s in Canada. It was bright, cold and stark, not only visually but thematically as well. They’re both relationship stories: the central relationship in one film happens to be two men, one dead, one alive and – do the math – single; the other, a married hetero couple, half of which is in the early stages of decline.

And then, in both movies, other people show up. That’s where the two movies part ways, one meandering gently along, the other anything – and everything – but.

I think both movies were well worth the time and thought they required. My initial response to A Single Man was that it wasn’t very good, but it was one of those movies that came to me throughout the following day in unexpected ways, and so I altered my opinion accordingly. Plus, Julianne Moore was in it, so if 100 points are perfect, there’s 50 of them right there. I don’t read reviews of movies until after I’ve seen them, so I’m not going to spoil it for anyone who may see A Single Man, but here’s a hint: If you see it, try to guess what profession the director was in before he made this movie. I haven’t read any reviews of Away from Her. I’d like to read the short story first, because I’ve never quite understood Alice Munro, so maybe experiencing her work in reverse – from the screen to the page – will lead to a breakthrough. One thing about the movie, though, is this: I ordered it through Netflix. The strange thing about Netflix for me is that I add movies to my list and then, by the time they arrive in the mail, I’ve generally forgotten why I picked it. And, almost without exception, that is fine with me.

Stranded on Earth

The timing couldn’t have been scripted better: today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, and the news is still obsessed with the airplanes sitting on the ground at airports around the world, where they have been forced to yield to the aftermath of what blasted out of the surface of our most adolescent continent, Iceland. For some reason I really enjoy the stranded traveler stories. A couple of years ago, when several inches of snow – relatively speaking – shut Portland down, the people interviewed at the airport and the train station amazed me. How dare my travel plans be interrupted by snow? It’s the holidays! One particularly obnoxious woman from Salem, who had been stuck at Union Station for two days, announced she was never going to come to Portland to see the symphony again. It’s really interesting when travel problem stories have a trans-Atlantic angle. I’ve spent time in Europe, and in my opinion they’re as flawed as the rest of us, but they are almost without exception far more dignified on camera when their flights are cancelled. The people from the U.S., of course, whine and bitch and moan and talk about how “frustrated” they are. And, in keeping with the formula for these stories, one woman burst into tears while showing the reporter a picture of her two children, whom she hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks because she and her husband were stuck in France. It’s really difficult for all of them, she sobbed. Poor things. And finally, now that the safety issue seems resolved, it’s on to the money angle. How much is this costing? How long will it take to recover? Who is to blame? All of which makes me wonder, what are we going to do when we run out of gas, when we have to ration things like oxygen and water? Now that will be truly frustrating. Happy Earth Day!

Blood numbers

The weekend got off to a very good start around here when the current issue of Mother Jones landed in the mailbox on Friday morning. I’m not normally into math stories, but the one I read this Saturday morning is an exception. So here, from the cover story, are some numbers: in 1965, the year before I was born, there were 3.3 billion people in the world. By 1983, the year before I graduated high school, that number was 4.7 billion. And by 2009, the year after I quit drinking, there were 6.8 billion of us.

I really try to resist reciting chunks of other people’s text, but I do love a good paragraph. Like this one, compliments of Mother Jones:

The United Nations projects that world population will stabilize at 9.1 billion in 2050. This prediction assumes a decline from the current average global fertility rate of 2.56 children per woman to 2.02 children per woman in the years between 2045 and 2050. But should mothers average half a child more in 2045, the world population will peak at 10.5 billion five years later. Half a child less, and it stabilizes at 8 billion. The difference in those projections—2.5 billion—is the total number of people alive on Earth in 1950.

Sort of takes your breath away, doesn’t it? At best – assuming that the fewer mouths to feed, the better, which is in fact my assumption – we’re going to add at least 5.5 billion people over the course of one brief century. How, I wondered on Saturday morning, is that possible?

Then it occurred to me that it happened in families like mine, times many millions more. My parents were married six years after there were 2.5 billion of us; in 2050, the last of their six offspring will turn 80. It happened like this: My father had one sister and one brother. My mother had one sister. In little more than half a century, those five individuals – my blood aunts and uncles and my parents – put 21 additional people into the system. And most of us have added two or more on top of that.

Move it, I'm in a hurry

I was in a really fantastic mood on Tuesday. I’d had a horrible day, relatively speaking, with incompetent clients and some strange computer issues. But I had dinner plans, so I shut the office down early, took a shower, shaved, got dressed and thanked my lucky stars that the clients I have are incompetent: if they had even a fraction of a clue, I wouldn’t have a job. So I got on the bus and went downtown. I have a few birthdays coming up, and I’m out of stamps. I refuse to send personal mail with stamps from my grocery supply: U.S. flags, the bald eagle, the Liberty Bell. That’s just trashy. There’s a post office downtown on Sixth, about a block in from Burnside. It’s not listed in any of the directories, but I noticed it from the bus one day, and I’ve become a huge fan. They have a good inventory, and the guys who work the counter appreciate the value of decent stamps. Then I went to Powell’s and bought the next big book I plan to read, which is happening sooner than I’d hoped. I’m actually slowing down my reading of Anna Karenina because I’d rather it not end – it’s that good, in my opinion.

Then I went to a neighborhood called The Pearl – a pretentious few square miles full of the worst sorts of people, in my opinion, people who build enormous condo towers that they call “green,” people whose millions hijacked a neighborhood they wouldn’t have set foot in 15 years ago, people who bitch about the noise made by the mail trucks and the trains and the parking garage cleaners, all the while congratulating themselves for being “urban.” It is sort of fun to walk around there, though, and since I had time to kill before meeting my friend for dinner, I did some walking. I didn’t make it very far, because I found this cavernous place so crammed with stuff that it took a while just to look. In addition to an entire wall of kimonos and massive oak chests and candle gear that recalled the Spanish Inquisition, I found a pretty good card selection. One of the strangest things about Portland, in addition to the low-grade stamp selection, is the card situation. In a city so precious, it’s shocking how hard good cards are to come by. I found some, and I bought some.

I do believe in following the crossing signals. I stood on the corner of one of the major north-south streets through the Pearl and when the signal changed to “WALK” I did just that. A woman in a pale blue Prius waited with her right-turn signal on as I crossed. The guy driving the car behind her – a Mazda, or a Honda or VW perhaps, black – honked his horn. Then he honked again. I walked across the intersection. More honking. I stood on the corner and the woman in the Prius stayed put. Maybe she’s screwing with him, I thought happily, and took a nice drag from my cigarette. I turned to see that there were two more people crossing the street. The woman inched forward. I caught her eye and waved and mouthed “thank you,” to her. She nodded and smiled. The guy honked again. I caught his eye and gestured toward the two people crossing. With one hand he pointed at his watch and then honked again. The light turned yellow, the last of the two people crossing the intersection reached the sidewalk, the Prius took its turn and the honking man pulled up to the intersection, where he was stopped by a light that had just turned red. I’m not sure if he was about to have a heart attack, or if the mother of his unborn baby was about to deliver, or if his own mother was on her deathbed, or if he was late for a meeting, or if he just thought his schedule was more important than people crossing the street – not sprinting, but not slow poking either. The two other street crossers and I set out into the intersection to walk in front of him, and I was in such a good mood, so happy about any number of little things, that I took another deep drag off my ciggie and then flicked what was left of it at his windshield, adding my quite advanced flick skills to the already long list of what made Tuesday a very enjoyable day.

The weirdest lust triangle of them all: Elizabeth, Jon and me

In a completely inappropriate, self-aggrandizing way, I had a very proud moment last night when I heard the news that one of my favorite public people has been added to the short list of those being considered for a nomination to the supreme court. I had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course, but the first time I saw Elizabeth Warren interviewed was a bit of a lusty moment for me. Here, I thought, as I listened to her and Bill Moyers trash pretty much everyone with any financial power, is someone who actually says something. And she takes good care with the word when she says it. I suppose you could call her dowdy. You could call her plainspoken. You could call her lots of things. I have two words to describe her: Thank God. But I would have never in a billion years imagined her being nominated for anything, especially the supreme court. She makes too much sense. Anyhow, I was reading the news stories on the internets this morning and I found something astonishing: Jon Stewart has a crush on Elizabeth Warren. In fact, he said that even though he knew her husband was just beyond the reach of the camera when he was interviewing her, he still wanted to make out with her. So even more unlikely than the notion of Elizabeth Warren being nominated to the highest court in the land is this: Jon Stewart and I have something in common.

Black and white

I’ve truly enjoyed watching Michael Steele’s fall from grace. Apparently, breathtaking handsomeness is not enough to protect the Republican party’s half-assed answer to Barack Obama from the ridicule he so richly deserves. I don’t care what he knew or didn’t know about the strippers or the redecorating budget or the corporate jets. I know there are all sorts of arguments and statistics that could be thrown around about this, but to me, listening to Michael Steele speak about the wonders of what we call conservative is way too close to listening to gay people advocate on behalf of Focus on the Family. As far as I’m concerned it’s a joke – a horrifying one but still, in my opinion, a joke.

On Sunday morning I watched the CBS weekly features program, which included a segment on Michael Steele. Even the conservative commentator – Ben someone or another – called for Steele’s removal. On a side note, even though it requires a bit of mind bending, I kind of like this Ben character: the weekend before, he did a piece calling for conservatives to stop taking cheap shots at “the government,” which, he pointed out, includes everyone in the country. Why the Democrats can’t express that very simple concept is beyond me.

At any rate, on Sunday night I watched a documentary about the election of Barack Obama, called “By the People.” Although my guess is that the Obama people would consider the film a score for their team, I found the movie disturbing in more than a few ways. First, the volunteers. Young, mostly white, enthusiastic in a way I’d almost forgotten – and after eight years of W., who really could blame them? But the mesmerized, nearly catatonic way they listened and spoke was chilling. Perhaps it was staged, but the volunteers who were interviewed could barely utter a word without crying about the greatness of Obama and his mission. There were close-ups of the college students during conference calls, their faces focused on the speaker phone with such mindless awe and wonder that it seemed to me they were expecting God to come on the line, if not emerge, as if by magic, from the phone. I’m not sure if I was in a certain mood when I watched. Perhaps I was subconsciously thinking about genocides or something. But I wondered, as I watched and listened, how much – or how little – would it take to realign the intentions of the thousands of campaign volunteers toward something truly destructive? Yes, I thought with dread, we can.

Anyhow, the weirdest part of the movie is how white it was, which somehow brought me back to Michael Steele. Obama’s our first black president, but if you watch this movie closely please let me know if it doesn’t remind you of a present-day version of the plantation. My own family has more color in it than his campaign team did. White men everywhere. White men advising, strategizing, barking orders on cell phones, making proclamations left and right, white guys obsessing like toddlers over the numbers, white men sucking up to white man reporters on planes and buses and trains full of white people. White men like David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs – seriously, is Robert Gibbs the best Obama can do for a press secretary? – walking along with their hands pressed into their pockets, heads thoughtfully bowed in deference to the weighty topics they’re tackling. White guys like the press secretary for the Iowa campaign, shameless in his sycophancy. White guys like the officious speechwriter, whose comment about the victory speech was, I thought, the most telling. Leaning back proudly in his chair on election night, the whiz kid broke it down as follows: “Hillary, you’re great. McCain … blah blah blah. You know, hope, change.” Although it scares me to type the following words, because I’m afraid my computer will blow up, hearing Obama’s speechwriter say that sounded to me an awful lot like, well, Sarah Palin.

A very emotional moment

For me, it all goes back to Marcia Brady. When I finally poured the last of the beer down the drain and made a commitment to start participating a bit more, I replaced the booze with the news. At that time, the actress who played Marcia was on a publicity tour to promote her new book, which, of course, painted a very dark picture about the doings on the set of the Brady Bunch. How, I remember one therapist asking, on camera, how on earth could this be? At first, I naively thought she was asking how this story could be such a big deal. I was wrong. She was asking how the cast of such a wholesome show could turn out to be a bunch of horny party animals. She did not refer to the author of the book by her name, which is Maureen, but by her show name, Marcia. The problem, I realized, was that Marcia Brady was not living up to our image of her, and we were sorely disappointed. We apparently thought the Brady Bunch was a reality series, or a documentary.

Are we really that stupid? I wondered. Why yes, of course we are.

Tiger Woods has a new commercial out, a close-up of his characterless face with the voice of his dead father saying something, I believe, about ‘how you really feel.’ In addition to hitting a new low in poor taste, the commercial isn’t really what it appears to be: the dead father’s voice, apparently, is from a video made of his dead father talking not to Tiger but to Tiger’s mother. And we’re supposed to get misty eyed over this? I couldn’t stop laughing, personally, but that’s me.

In the strangest shift I’ve ever experienced, I actually found myself respecting Tiger Woods after watching that commercial and then listening to the sports drones grunt about it. And here is why: I don’t believe Tiger Woods ever came out and said, explicitly, look at me, I’m a family man, I love my wife and I love our children and I am a family man, family man, I’m a family man. That’s because he didn’t have to, and that’s because we did it for him. I think all Tiger Woods did was to go along with it, and with that kind of cash on the table, who can blame him? Even though there are millions of dollars in invoices, all the marketing team did was assault us with time-tested images of the hero-athlete with an attractive woman and a couple of kids, and we are so there it’s horrifying to me. There’s no need to be explicit about it: we’re so addicted to this mythology that we’re more than happy to fill in the blanks, not only with our brains, or what’s left of them, but with our money as well.

So I was amused this morning to hear the news that Tiger Woods didn’t win the tournament over the weekend. Robin Roberts, who can always be counted on to dumb it down (kind of like Tiger Woods), was practically bouncing in her seat as she proclaimed that “Tiger” isn’t the biggest news coming out of the tournament. Then she said, “It’s a family story.” That’s because the guy who won is married to a woman who is fighting breast cancer. His mother is also fighting – or recently fought – cancer. So he hugged his wife and they embraced after he won the tournament. He’s married, and his wife is fighting breast cancer, and he’s playing for her because he loves her so very, very much, and it’s not the money, really, it’s her. He’s a family guy with values we can all appreciate and maybe shed a tear or two over, because it’s all so sweet. And maybe it really is, but I don’t know that, nor do you, nor do the sports people or the people who for some reason think it’s fun to watch people swing golf clubs. We’re far more interested in the image until, of course, the image crumbles, and then we somehow feel betrayed. Almost as scary as kneejerk patriotism, we prefer to simply turn the controls over to people like Robin Roberts, who during the prolonged shot of the victory embrace, just couldn’t help herself from saying, on our behalf, “It was a very emotional moment.”

Quiet please: the rich are sleeping

Lately I’ve been snottier than usual about the suburbs. I’ve been reading too much about how we’re about to run out of gas, and about how we have blindly designed an astonishing portion of our lives around the belief that there’s an endless supply at the pumps. Yet we continue to build and build some more. Sometimes we even build green!

So I’ve been somewhat amazed recently at the amount of coverage the local media showers on the people in the towns of Beaverton, Tigard, Tualitan and Wilsonville, though mainly the people of Tualitan, who have been whining and pouting about the choo-choo train. I think Beaverton may be a different story, but I will vouch for this: in the towns of Tigard, Tualitan and Wilsonville, the term public transportation means picking up more than one child from the private school in the SUV. For four years, I worked in an office park in that godawful stretch of banality, which could be reached more efficiently by bicycle than by bus. Even though I live in what is considered to be the United States’ most well-planned city – and I tend to agree – the company I worked for managed to set up shop in a place that took two hours to reach by bus. They don’t like public transportation out there. Hell, they don’t even like sidewalks out there.

Not long ago, we shelled out $160 million to develop the Westside Express Service, a TriMet (that’s the BiState of Portland, for the Saint Louisans) train that goes through these communities at rush hour, carrying people to and from the transit center in Beaverton, which in turn connects to the rest of the bus and train system. Since the train began running a little over a year ago, the people who live near the tracks have been whining more regularly than the train schedule about the blowing of the whistle, which is a federal requirement at points where the tracks cross the road. I think that sort of behavior is to be expected of people who think it’s their birthright to consume as much as they need in order to live in places accessible only by freeways, places where the main geographic feature is the parking lot, people who think, evidently, that living in the city is beneath them. I live in the city, and there’s noise all day long: people coming and going, the freeways nearby, the airport, the endless screaming sirens on Burnside, Glisan and 82nd. Where’s my news conference! To be fair, though, the people who bought million-dollar condos in the Pearl a few years ago pitched a royal fit because the mail trucks going to and from the post office – which has been there for many, many years – are too noisy. At least in the Pearl, unlike Tualitan and Beaverton, they don’t take over an obscene amount of square footage, and they have buses and streetcars.

But what’s surprising is how much air time they get. Not nearly as surprising, though, as the bit that came on the news on Wednesday night: somehow, an exception has been made, and the whistles won’t be at such a high decibal in Beaverton. Which makes me wonder, of course, how long it will be before some driver paying no attention to the task at hand manages to get smashed while crossing the tracks. It’ll be interesting to see who gets blamed for that.

Making it work

After a lot of shoddy diagnostic work, I finally upgraded my operating system last month. After a couple of tries – or auditions, as I’ve come to think of them – I found what I think is a pretty good computer repair shop, which happens to be within walking distance of my house. The people are nice, they return phone calls and respond to e-mail and the rates are reasonable. So I got the new operating system installed. Although there’s absolutely nothing original about it, I am sort of proud of my prediction: having a new operating system resolved the original problem, which was that starting the system was taking longer by the day, but it created new ones.

Yesterday afternoon, I was on a conference call with a group of clients. One of the women was attempting to do the call through her mobile phone, which was also receiving e-mail (it didn’t work, of course). Before I realized what was happening we were not talking about story ideas but the operating system. And once it came up, it was the focus of the meeting for more than half an hour. Two other people on the call had upgraded around the same time that I did, and – are you ready for this? – we’re all having the same problems. So they shared their troubles with me, and I shared mine with them, and at one point I was able to walk one of the women through the steps required to disable a certain feature within the operating system that generates blank e-mail messages in its attempt to reconcile various parts of the inbox. In what I suppose is the technology age’s version of bartering, one of the people on the call then walked me through the steps required to direct meeting requests to certain calendars within the inbox (I have five calendars at the moment, because the company that created the operating system apparently believes that I need them).

At any rate, my point is not to talk about the operating system. My point is, when did it become just sort of business as usual for things to not work they way they’re supposed to? I think the appropriate way to deal with a product that doesn’t work correctly is to take it back. But yesterday, without even thinking about it, we all put our work on hold and focused instead on the nuances of the operating system. Which made me wonder, in the early days of things like television and radio, did people get together to discuss the finer points of tuning in to specific channels and stations? Maybe they did: I wasn’t there at the time, so I cannot say for sure. But I cannot imagine my grandparents tolerating that sort of crappy craftsmanship. And besides, according to the marketing department, when it comes to operating systems, we’re hardly in the early days.

Easter temptation

On the morning of Easter Sunday, the world presented me with a golden opportunity to destroy someone’s life. I powered up the computer, which I normally do not do on Sundays, because I needed to send people an agenda for a meeting on Monday night. In my e-mail I noticed that there were a few messages from Facebook. I had made a comment about someone’s status update on Friday afternoon, and whenever someone else – anyone else – comments on the same status update, the comment is automatically forwarded to my e-mail. As long as the computer was up and running, I decided to just go ahead and open Facebook and have a look. I am ‘friends’ with a few anti-religious posters, and I wanted to see if there was anything juicy. It was Easter morning, after all.

And that’s when I saw this: Lois (not her real name) became a fan of Pastor Rick Warren

It is amazing to me how I react to things like this. How could anyone I know on any level become a fan of one of the world’s most legitimized homo haters and, at the same time, consider me a friend, if only on Facebook? My initial reaction is an intense blend of pain and horror, and it’s so consistent year after year that I’m tempted to call it reassuring. But Lois thinking it's okay to declare her admiration for someone who thinks gays are a lower life form than others is only the beginning.

Lois and I met in the early 1990s when we were both working for a research department at a very large, very prestigious university in a state that prides itself on its liberal politics. Lois and I became friendly. She met my boyfriend. I met her husband, and her dogs. We exchanged recipes and gossip. There was all sorts of intrigue in that office – I’ve yet to work in one where there’s not – and we stayed on top of all of it, including uncovering, in the days before Google, the fact that the guy who administered the grant funding was a convicted embezzler.

One of the strange things about Lois was that she’d been married to her husband for many years, but, according to her, the two of them never had sex. I’m not sure if this next bit of information is a cause or an effect of the husband situation, but Lois did not go without: she had sex with other men. She had a Ph.D. in education, and had been chosen to travel around the country to make site visits and write up evaluation reports, which I did for her, on the progress of federal grant programs. I helped her pick which site visits she was going to make, which were chosen in order for her to be in the same town at the same time as Willard (not his real name), another evaluator, who was also married. Willard’s wife, Vivian (not her real name) was dying of cancer in a hospice. I apologize for sounding like a Republican (although I’d be in good company if I were to sign on to Rick Warren’s fan page, which has more than 55,000 members) but these shenanigans were financed by the U.S. taxpayers. Eventually, the guy whose wife was dying of cancer grew tired of hotel encounters with Lois and called it off. Lois got furious and threw a few floppy discs – remember those? – at the wall, and stomped out of her job at the university.

And moved two time zones away, where her husband rented her an apartment. It was a comfortable, tidy little place for Lois to live and “sort things out” and “recover from the breakdown.” She lived in the apartment for three and half years, and she shared it, of course, with yet another married man, but he too eventually grew tired, and who could blame him, of having to disappear every couple of months or so when Lois’ husband came to town for a visit. When, with a bit of persuasion from the legal system, the live-in returned to his wife Lois had another breakdown and moved back home to her husband, where she’s been living ever since, working on her quilting and her knitting and becoming a fan of a guy who helped bring the phrase “one man, one woman” into the nation’s vocabulary as he attempted, successfully, to ensure that people like Lois can enjoy all the privileges of marriage while people like me cannot.

So my question is this: what should I do? I think it would be fun to post a response to her public declaration of support for Rick Warren that would go like this: Hey Lois, how’s Willard? Did his wife die? Are you guys back together again? I think it would be fun to expose her hypocrisy, right in front of her husband, her mother, her neighbors, her fellow church goers, anyone and everyone who’s part of her Facebook page and may entertain even the slightest notion that Lois is in any way honorable in her marriage, or her career for that matter. I think it would be fun to ruin her. But a big part of my attempt to become a better person is that I am trying to honestly examine my motives, and the only motive I can think of thus far for responding to her very stupid move in the way it deserves is my desire to be mean to her on a personal level. How dare she support – if only in the fakest of ways – someone who wants to legislate me into second-class citizenship? And that, of course, is where I keep getting stuck. I’d like to wreck her marriage, and I’d enjoy poisoning any professional credibility she has left, but not because I think it would do any good, or that anyone, including me, would learn anything, but because I actually think it would be fun, which worries me almost more than her brazen arrogance.

The perversion files

In a way I feel guilty for trashing the Catholics, this being the holiest of weeks and all, but I cannot help myself.

First, though, nostalgia. Easter Sunday, when I was growing up, was a lot of fun. Usually we went to my aunt’s house, which entailed an encounter with most of my father’s family. When I was younger I didn’t care for that side of the family. I much preferred my mother’s people. But the older I get the more stark the reversal. My mother’s relations were kind of haughty, kind of taken with themselves. My father’s family, on the other hand, was so unapologetically fucked up that I have come to admire them almost unconditionally. One of his aunts, who reminds me very much of one of my brothers, was so outrageously audacious that people simply let her have her way. That was easier then arguing with her, because really, where would you even start? Unfortunately, the result of that approach was that this woman owned everything, and it wasn’t until she nearly killed herself in a fire and lost her mind and came to live with us at the age of 90 that anyone ever told her no. Also unfortunate is the fact that the person who did that was my mother. Then there was Jack and Marie: they would show up for Easter breakfast, Jack’s big black car gliding up the driveway as if they were part of a procession. Jack was one of my father’s cousins, and Marie had been at one time married to someone’s uncle, some guy with only one leg whose name nobody can ever recall. They went on trips together, tours, as Jack called them, to places like Hawaii and California. “San Francisco!” Jack slurred once. “Now that’s my kind of town!” My aunt, my father’s sister, and her family would switch rooms around at least once a year, so that what was considered the living room the year before would, by Easter morning, have been designated as the new dining room. When we were really little my cousins and I would take turns sliding down the laundry chute, which started in the upstairs bathroom and wound up in the downstairs one, which did not have a door. Once, my oldest cousin, who had epilepsy, had a seizure while taking a bath upstairs, flooding the room as well as the chute, and after that we didn’t play in it anymore. That cousin is now a big deal in Vermont accounting circles. My aunt used to yell at her husband “Go to your room Dick!” at some point during the gathering. One of my cousins is mentally retarded because she had spinal meningitis as a baby, and when her temperature went up she called a priest and then called my mother, who told her she really needed to call a doctor. One Easter, after breakfast, one of my cousins – who is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen – pierced her ears with a needle that had been dipped in rubbing alcohol. I held the ice behind her earlobes.

Fortunately, even though that branch of the family is hopelessly Catholic, there were never any priests at the table, or lurking in the bathroom, or out back behind the collapsing garage. I’d be lying if I said I am not enjoying watching the latest unraveling of what I consider the greatest show on earth. I don’t care what the pope knew, or when, or what he did or did not do. I don’t care about the church official in New York who has called the latest series of revelations “petty gossip of dominant opinion.” I don’t care about the case, in Oregon of all places, that was covered on the news this week and referenced “the perversion files,” a term that is really way too good to leave alone, a term that would be an excellent title for a Broadway musical: The Perversion Files. What I do care about is that there are millions of people around the world who continue to surrender their brains – and their money – to this tax-exempt drag show. Especially this week – the holiest of them all, which makes me wonder why this, instead of Christmas, isn’t the grand slam of holiday seasons – when the news went round the world that in the U.S., the Catholic church has created a program to help people recognize early warning signs of child sexual abuse. That’s almost as magical as dead people rising up out of the dirt.