Trending Now: Racism

An alert came up on my Facebook page about a rally to be held in downtown Portland tomorrow evening. It is being called Say NO to Racism, and supposedly if you show up there and hold a lit candle you will somehow display to all the others assembled there that you are against racism. Personally I am against racism and while I am in favor of lit candles, I am against attending rallies where I might get maced in the face (happened once, not fun) or run down by a madman (or madwoman or madthey) driving a van, so I will not be there.

Hattie McDaniel, Best Supporting Actress 1939

Instead I will stay home and be against racism in my kitchen while I cook dinner for myself and my husband, and later maybe take in a movie. But you can be damn sure it won't be Gone With the Wind, which is now being pulled from theaters nationwide because of its alleged "racial insensitivity." The 1939 film, beloved by thousands, maybe millions, for decades, and which earned the first Oscar ever awarded to a black actress (see photo), is now, all of a sudden, considered racist.

Racism is quite popular these days. It's everywhere, in places you never even suspected. Actually, anti-racism is even more popular. Either way, I would say the entire state of Maine is racist, being the whitest state in America, so simply by living here, my racism is implied. Throw in the white skin covering my entire body and I totally suck. In fact, I should light a candle and hold a vigil for myself and pray I don't burn in Hell for eternity just for staying white all these years. (If it's any help, I have never seen Gone With the Wind.)

LOL

Although I have long suspected it, I finally got 100% definitive proof earlier today that my adult son does not read my texts, he simply responds with non-committal words like "Cool!" and "Thanks!" so I will go away and leave him alone. This realization is both depressing and freeing, the former because I gave birth to him and it was a long, hard labor with no drugs and I deserve better, and the latter because now I can say anything I want without fear of reprisal. (Ditto this blog.)

Comfort Food at 30,000 Feet

Ever since my first commercial jet flight (at age 22) made an emergency landing in a fallow cornfield outside of Frederick, Maryland and necessitated my exiting the aircraft (along with all the other screaming passengers) via an inflated rubber chute, I have been what you might call "a nervous flyer." However, despite that unhappy experience I have flown literally countless times, up, down and across the country and over the pond, although I am never happy about it and always assume a dire outcome. So I was cheered when I spied an article with the headline, "Airline creates 'mood food' snack box to help calm nervous passengers."

I learned that under the tutelage of an esteemed Oxford University professor, Monarch Airlines has recently begun serving a mood-food snack box specifically designed to calm jittery passengers. Here's what they get: First, a dish of echinacea and licorice ice-cream to help reduce symptoms of coughs and colds. (Yum?) Next comes some lavender/green-tea flavored rice cakes to aid relaxation and counteract jet lag, washed down with herbal teas to avoid bloating. (Yuk.) Finally, sort of like a dessert, there's a umami seaweed biscuit and a caramelized bar covered in umami mushroom and tomato powder. (Barf.)

Despite my wide vocabulary and love of sushi, still I had to look up the meaning of umami, which turns out to have nothing at all to do with raw fish. Instead, it refers to a category of taste in food other than sweet, sour, salt, and bitter, corresponding to the flavor of glutamates, especially monosodium glutamate. (Yikes.) Okay, so I guess won't be booking any flights on Monarch.

Instead I'll stick with the usual suspects and continue to rely on my very own mood foods, which include one 5 mg. Lorazepam swallowed just before entering security and a Bloody Mary immediately upon boarding, followed by a stream of blatantly unhealthy snacks. These include but are not limited to a package of Chuckles, countless bags of those mini-chocolate-chip cookies and flavored popcorn and Sun Chips -- I love those -- that the flight attendants hand out, a black coffee and perhaps a bottle of water, and if it's a long flight to Europe, another Lorazepam and maybe a glass of red wine to wash it down, but only if there's turbulence. Otherwise, tomato juice. (No ice.)

That usually does the trick.

It's Hard Being Human

After picking up my friend at the airport, we stopped for lunch on the way home. On the drive I heard all about her trip, asking more and more questions to get the whole picture. Once at the restaurant, having ordered and while waiting for our food to arrive, I told her about my own recent brief excursion to New York, even though she had not asked about it or about anything at all, in fact. Nevertheless I soldiered on until, sensing a subtle lack of interest on her part, I ended by declaring the few days my husband and I had spent visiting our friends as "a great time."

I said that because A, it actually was a great time and B, it's what you say, unless of course you had contracted food poisoning or encountered a destructive tornado or someone in your group had died. You just say "I had a great time," and leave it at that. But my friend, in all sincerity, asked, "What does that mean? How do you even have a great time with people?" Her question alerted me to the realization that she and I had never had what could be called "a great time" together, and possibly she never had a great time with anyone, and maybe that's why she asked.

Coming up with an answer wasn't easy. More and more these days, spending time with people you actually enjoy is a rare and almost indescribable pleasure. You know it when you see it, but in our oh-so-politically correct culture, when even a casual friendship places harsh demands on the participants, it's not that often. Now you've got to feel the same about politics, race, religion, climate change, food additives, free speech and gender issues, and God forbid, if you don't see a neo-Nazi hiding around every corner then you must be one too!

Say the wrong thing and suddenly there's tension in the air. The slightest hint of a difference of opinion can turn a smoldering ember into a huge, all-consuming firestorm of hurt feelings and misunderstandings. It's literally exhausting, making me suddenly comprehend that true friendship is exhilarating, and that makes all the difference.

Redefining Friendship

One of the few tangible perks of aging is that you finally stop tolerating other people's bullshit. Here at the start of my eighth decade in my current human form, I have honed my standards to a fine edge, concluding there is little reason to pretend admiration for someone you secretly dislike simply for the sake of harmony. Besides, it's not fair to them.

What triggered this musing is a recently resurfaced memory of my closest friend from my early thirties until my mid-fifties. At the time I found her funny, irreverent, refreshing and entertaining, but now I look back in horror at her often blatantly disgraceful behavior. This included a two-year affair with the husband of another close friend of mine that I was forced to silently condone, making me a willing accomplice and thus feel personally ashamed through osmosis. Also, she consistently kept an open bottle of red wine in the fridge (bad enough in itself) for six months and would actually serve it to her guests, and reused the same strip of dental floss for a whole week, discarding it every Sunday. Her lame defense for both was, "Money doesn't grow on trees," yet she came up with enough of it for a facelift, so go figure. I finally pulled the plug after more than twenty years of biting my tongue and have never regretted it.

Lately I am much quicker to pull the plug. Almost as soon as I find myself thinking only negative thoughts about someone, that's it. Unlike in my youth when my home was a revolving door for reprobates, miscreants and delinquents of every stripe, these days sluts, liars, addicts and the just plain unprincipled need not apply. The downside is that I spend a lot of time alone, but the upside is knowing that the friendships I do maintain are with people I strongly value and deeply respect.

Art Appreciation with Allahu Akbar

Once again someone did something terrible while yelling "Allahu Akbar!" Apparently a certain type of individual, and to avoid being accused of racial profiling I will just call that person a total whacko nut job, believes that even if they do a bad thing while yelling "God is Great" in Arabic, everything is cool and they will be rewarded. This time it was someone who attacked London police officers outside of Buckingham Palace with a 4-foot long sword.

This got me wondering: If someone shouted the phrase while doing something good, would it net positive results? I may try that the next time I show one of my paintings in an exhibition -- just stand there and call out the phrase and see if the painting sells. Of course that would be quite tiring, standing around all day, and what about bathroom breaks? Far easier would be to simply include the phrase in the title of my paintings and think happy thoughts. Here are a few examples:

"Only the Akbar Allahu Can Make a Cow (and a Forest)"

"Flower Arranging With Allahu Akbar"

"In the Akbar Garden of Allahu"

"Allahu Akbar Hanging Out at Home"

"One of Allahu's Akbarest Virgins"

Squawking Over Squaws

A Lakota squaw.

It's been almost 18 years since an IBM computer bested world chess champion Garry Kasparov at the game, making lots of people think that computers are so damn smart. In fact, according to Wikipedia, "chess programs running on commercial hardware - more recently including mobile phones - have been able to defeat even the strongest human players." This makes some people predict that computers will soon outsmart humans and start running things.

 

Well guess what: Many computers are morons. I know that's considered a bad word these days, but only when referring to a human being. I think it's okay to call computers morons because A, they are after all machines and B, they are moronic. And here's why. 

 

Recently playing Words With Friends, an online game I personally am addicted to, I could make the word SQUAW for 68 points, putting me well ahead of my opponent. But a message popped up saying "Squaw is not a valid word on Words With Friends." WTF, I thought. Why not? Oh right, because Nancy Pelosi wouldn't approve, somehow it might make an Indian, oops I mean Native American, feel bad, even though the definition of "squaw" is not insulting to anyone in any way. According to Urban Dictionary: "The word comes from the Massachusetts Algonquian tribe and means: female, young woman. The word squaw is not related to the Mohawk word ojiskwa which does mean vagina. There is absolutely no derogatory meaning in the word "squaw."

 

Nevertheless, the supposedly super-brainy computer running Words With Friends declared the word unacceptable, so I grudgingly made a different one for a lot less points. Afterwards I checked the game's feature that is called Hindsight, which shows you what word you could have played instead for the most points, if only you were as smart as the computer. In this particular case, it was SQUAW.

 

See what I mean? 

A Refreshing Surpise

This afternoon I went to an art opening at a small, local museum. The artist's daughter, an attractive woman about 45 years old, was in attendance. We struck up a conversation and I asked if she had inherited any of her mother's creativity. She replied, "I guess you could say that. I'm a dancer." When I asked if she danced professionally, she said that it was a tough way to make a living and so she performed only in amateur and community productions. "Dancing is my passion," she explained with a shrug, "but it doesn't pay."

By then my curiosity was piqued, so I asked what it was she did for a living. Leaning towards me and lowering her voice almost to a whisper, making me think maybe she was a high-priced escort or perhaps a stripper, she replied, "I'm an internist."

I was shocked, and doubtful at the same time. After all, has anyone ever met a physician who didn't advertise that fact? Later on her mother confirmed that indeed her daughter was a doctor, confiding, "She tells everyone she's a dancer first. It's who she really is."

Look Out Below!

Tourists have always seemed to like the Washington Monument. What did they know?

My nephew, smart and passionate in these matters, informed me just last night that 750 statues all around America that have ties to the Confederacy must come down, stating, "Taking them down is all about the present and the future. It's about the message given to black children today and every day they remain." So in light of the following information on Wikipedia, it looks like the Washington Monument will have to go, and possibly Washington's Mount Vernon Estate, a popular tourist attraction, slave quarters and all:

"When George Washington was eleven years old, he inherited ten slaves; by the time of his death, 317 slaves lived at Mount Vernon, including 123 owned by Washington, 40 leased from a neighbor, and an additional 153 "dower" slaves." While these dower slaves were designated for Martha's use during her lifetime, they were part of the estate of her first husband and the Washingtons could not sell them. As on other plantations during that era, Washington's slaves worked from dawn until dusk unless injured or ill; they could be whipped for running away or for other infractions.
 
Visitors recorded varying impressions of slave life at Mount Vernon: one visitor in 1798 wrote that Washington treated his slaves "with more severity" than his neighbors, while another around the same time stated that "Washington treated his slaves far more humanely than did his fellow citizens of Virginia."

Nobody seemed upset (by the Monument) when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there.

Removing Statues and Brain Cells

Once upon a time I had this friend . . .
We really hit it off. We'd meet for lunch almost every week on her day off. Sometimes it would be every few weeks when our lives got busy. We always enjoyed one another immensely, exchanging books back and forth and generally gabbing for hours about literature, our kids, diet and exercise, and sometimes a teeny bit of politics. Then along came Trump.

Please understand: I am no Trump-lover, but instead of jumping on the CNN or MSNBC or FOX bandwagon, disparaging or praising the president no matter what he says or does, I prefer to hear  both sides of any issue and judge for myself. I have made that point repeatedly in this blog and I have also made it in person, apparently to no avail. One day at lunch, my always cheerful friend seemed downright grim after I said something that could be construed as my not loving Hillary Clinton and also not wishing Trump would die a horrible and painful death, which is how she felt and had made quite clear over the months of our shared Pad Thai noodles and Caesar salads since the election. That day we parted without our usual hug.

Vintage political button, circa 1980s

Since then there have been no texts. No, "Let's have lunch!" I ran into her a few weeks ago and asked, half-joking, "Are we breaking up? " She replied, "No, of course not, the kids are around, it's summer, I've been busy." Then it hit me: I'm breaking up with her. She actually likes Nancy Pelosi (how could she?) but I never considered dumping her for that. Still, she couldn't handle my independent thinking, and I was tired of hiding my true feelings just to maintain a friendship that didn't allow for differences of opinion.

Beside my husband, my very best friend in the world is an unapologetic, unswerving chronic Democrat. But he's also smart and has taught me a lot about the world, so he gets a pass. Another one is my brother-in-law, who is generally open to learning how the "other side" might feel even if it's not how he feels. He too gets a pass. Other than those two, I'm done with lemming-like Democrats who mouth what's expected without any thinking to back it up, and who now believe that the removal of inanimate stone and bronze sculptures shaped like people who lived and died hundreds of years ago can also remove the ugliest truths of our history.

The rabid left can take down every last Confederate statue in the country and it still won't eradicate slavery from our past or racism from our present. I guess what's coming next is mass lobotomies for the populace: "Step right up, ladies and gentleman, and have all that nasty history wiped out in one fell swoop! It's fast, it's easy, and you'll feel so much better afterwards!"

Enough Already

Today's Wall Street Journal. Suitable for framing?  According to statistics, 151,600 people die each day.

That comes out to 6,316 deaths per hour.

Got it?

So enough already with the 1 person who was hit by a car when a crazy person drove into a crowd of people on the street.

She was not a saint.

She was a regular person.

You wanna talk about people who died? Let's talk about my friend Noreen Welle who I miss every day.  She died of Multiple Myeloma in 2006 at the age of 57.   She was a loving wife and mother of two young girls.

I knew her for 20 years and I have no idea what her favorite color was.

News of her death was not on the front page of every newspaper.

It should have been.