Wedding Bell Blues

I'm having a hard time understanding the Gay Marriage Issue... what the hell are people so afraid of? When I read the other day that Kerry and Edwards are on record as being against gay marriage (but think it's a state right, not a federal one, as if that makes a fucking difference), I found myself wanting to vote Nader all of a sudden. I can imagine people disapproving, I can understand people wondering why gays want to get married, but I don't get why people are against it.



I was mulling this over yesterday afternoon, trying to understand the mindset of those opposed; I tried to think of how, even in worst-case scenarios, gay people getting married threatens the institution of marriage, and how it can possibly harm the government and people of the United States.



For example, I can see that if gay marrieds get tax breaks for being married, then it would cost the federal and local governments a certain amount of revenue; partner benefits will cost employers a certain amount, also; and then I can see waves and waves of gay immigrants getting greencards by fraudulently marrying same-sex spouses instead of fraudulently marrying opposite-sex spouses as they do now. But look at it realistically: there aren't that many of us. Nobody except gays have ever believed that 10% rule-of-thumb put forward by Dr. Kinsey (hell, even I don't believe in the Kinsey Scale anymore), and then among gays only a percentage would find someone they wanted to marry, so just how many people do they think will be taking advantage of this right?



It seems to me that if people are married in their own hearts and in the eyes of their families and their churches, what right does the Government have to say that they are not married? I understand that if the government allowed anyone to be married who said they were married, it would open the door for polygamy and other strange practices from crackpot religions. But what harm would that do?



The problem I see is that the government does not actually have a right to be involved in any way with marriage, but it is involved... so once you realize that any legal objection to gay marriage is in contravention of the First Amendment (and it is... if marriage is "sacred," as so many are claiming, then the First Amendment disallows government involvement in marriage), then the next logical step is to throw out all marriage laws on the same grounds. There is no reason based in law that Mormons shouldn't have as many wives as they can manage to support; there is no reason based in law why a spouse should have any natural rights to inherited property if a person dies intestate; there is no reason based in law why a married couple should have a different tax status than anybody else; there is no reason based in law why businesses should supply benefits to employees' spouses.



The fact is, the traditional institution of marriage as a legal entity has, over the last century, become moribund and irrelevant due to technology and cultural shifts; the government's involvement in the religious ritual of marriage has always been un-Constitutional, but now the culture of the nation has completely lost sight of the traditional purpose of marriage as a legal arrangement. And I think that is the reason people are against gay marriage: it shows the straight people that they're just fucking around and that what they believe is in many ways false... it shows that the legal recognition of a religious rite on which they base much of their social and financial status is un-Constitutional, and that knowledge threatens what they have.



I've heard that the purpose for marriage being limited to a man and a woman is to create a family in which biological offspring are produced, and so since two men or two women cannot produce biological offspring between them, there is no real reason for them to get married. But if you follow that argument to its logical conclusion, nobody should be able to get married if they are not willing and able to biologically produce offspring. So post-menopausal women should not be allowed to marry, people who have had recorded vasectomies and tubal ligations should not be allowed to marry, and people who are otherwise demonstrably sterile should not be allowed to marry. Following that argument to its end also throws out the legality of adoption, the ability of a single parent to keep his or her children, and a lot of other things as well... for if you are limiting the rationale of marriage to biological childbearing, you exclude considerably more than gay people from the paradigm.



But this is all very complicated. The fact is that there is no real reason, it's just that it makes people uncomfortable... it's a new idea, and the Great Unwashed haven't had time to get used to it. I personally think it was a mistake to start immediately in on the gay marriage thing in the current political climate; it would have been better to wait a little longer for the dust to settle from the whole sodomy-law thing. Because as far as I can tell, the biggest problem people have with gay marriage is the same problem they had with the sodomy laws... not to mention the Jim Crow laws: a phenomenon my coworker just now explained to me as "The Ick Factor"... it seems kind of yucky on the surface, in perception, and so it shouldn't be allowed.



It was The Ick Factor that forced my grandparents to go all the way to Washington state to get married in 1945 because my grandfather was of Chinese descent while my Grandmother is largely Anglo-Saxon (California had miscegenation laws on its books until 1957), and people thought interracial marriages were against God's will, biologically unsound, and simply looked funny; it was The Ick Factor that led people to actually believe that African-Americans should use different facilities because they weren't as "clean" as Anglo-Americans, as if the black of the skin would smudge surfaces and carry germs. It is The Ick Factor that makes a ludicrous controversy of something as benign as breast-feeding (I know I find it disturbing, but I am mammophobic).



And it was The Ick Factor that inspired people to deny basic human rights to sexual minorities (as well as racial and cultural minorities) for the bulk of our nation's history... when you would mention gay rights to people, they would immediately think of anal penetration and get all fidgety about it, as if anal penetration was the only thing gay people did differently from straight people, as if it were our sole defining characteristic. This is based solely in wilful (and therefore shameful) ignorance.



The final thing is this: the US Constitution was put into place to prevent Mob Rule (which is the natural conclusion of "majority rule" when there is no understanding), to prevent foreign and interest-group control of government (hence no State religion or foreign-born presidents), and to ensure the most rights for the most people... ideally all rights to all people. Passing a constitutional amendment that is inherently un-Constitutional and contrary to the spirit of idealism in which the Constitution was drafted is a serious waste of time... it's the same thing as Prohibition, which sought not to grant rights but to take rights away, and a Gay Marriage Ban Amendment will have to be negated by yet another Amendment for exactly the same reason. Constitutional Amendments are to ensure further rights, not to limit them.



One person's rights end where the next person's rights begin; there is a lot of gray area in between those two people, but if granting a right to one person does not take away a right from someone else, there is no reason to deny that right. Any activity that does not take the right to life, property, or physical and emotional safety from another person is not criminal and should not be made illegal. Granting gays and lesbians and transexuals and whomever the right to legally marry will not take away anybody else's rights, and so there is no reason to not grant those rights. It's that simple.



Any questions?

Back to the Front

After a whole week of sleeping late every morning, I was worried about getting to work on time today; that's always the hardest part of returning from vacation, getting back into the timetable routine. But for some reason, I accidentally set my clock forward an hour while I was setting my alarm back an hour (I decided to start getting up at eight instead of nine). I don't know how this was done, the buttons for the alarm and for the regular time are on opposite sides of the clock. But I was already awake and drinking coffee and reading my morning blogs before I discovered the time difference, so it gave me an extra hour to sit down and start chatting with you, and to have more coffee, and to enjoy a little more peace and quiet before going back into the fray at the office.



I spent so much time this last week lying in bed, sleeping and reading and watching videos, that my lower back is starting to ache and I'm getting little spasms in my ankles... that's a sure sign that I've enjoyed my time off. I've also got three books open and am reading them in turn, another good sign (I always did this when I was in college, so I choose to interpret it as a sign of intellectual stimulation... though it could easily be a sign that I can't concentrate on anything in particular after a week of mental dissipation).



However, I am disappointed that I didn't get much done in the way of writing, nor in the way of research, nor even in the way of housecleaning (though I did rather more of it than usual), during my week off. I've been working on that last bit of Worst Luck, rewriting a part of "Chapter One Part Three" and continuing on from the rewritten paragraphs, but it's been slow going. I never did get over to the City to check out their courtrooms, and will not have a free weekday to do so anytime soon, and may end up having to rely on video reference (I've seen San Francisco courtrooms on the news many times) and non-definite descriptions of rooms and procedures that will not show up my ignorance. And though I have washed dishes and wiped counters and loaded the dishwasher I don't know how many times, I never reached the bottom of the hand-washing stacks and the kitchen is an even bigger mess today than it was this time last week... and I didn't even think about my bedroom or my drag-room or any of the other messes in my life. All very disappointing.



But I am rested, and we shall see if that rest has prepared me for an increase of activity... or whether it has instead spoiled me for it. The whole concept of work is alien to my nature, and I get used to vacation all too quickly, mightily resenting the return to schedule and effort.



Actually, now that I think of it, I believe I should start getting into the effort now, take advantage of my serendipitous extra hour and go load the dishwasher again, and maybe water the lawn, before I go into the office. I'll post now but finish this once I'm there, or else after I get home (if it's as madly busy as I fear it will be after my week's absence).



In the meantime, try this interesting quiz, which I discovered via Paul:

Category IV - The Musketeer

You have a small, highly edited social group, and you like it that way.

What Type of Social Entity are You?

brought to you by Quizilla.



?

2:45 p.m.: Okay, so it's official: returning to work after a week's vacation sucks. I feel like I've been sitting in this chair and working for eight or nine hours straight, but I've only been here for four and a half hours. There wasn't an awful lot of extra work to wade through, my boss was here all last week checking messages and all, so there wasn't a big backlog. But I am suffering terribly from the overwhelming desire to go lay down and dip back into Gaudy Night or Wasted or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, or perhaps to watch a movie, or maybe just take a nap. But I can't L!



Still, I have been productive, I've achieved everything I wanted to do today, and that always feels good. And there are people here I can talk to... people who hear every word I say, and who don't interrupt to ask what the words I've just used mean (it's bad enough having to define such potentially advanced words as 'irrelevant' to the Small Children, but when an adult and college graduate like Caroline stops me in the middle of a sentence and makes me explain the meaning of 'prudent' and how it differs in connotation and denotation from 'wise'... and then have to explain 'connotation' and 'denotation'... well, it's just too much).



So I guess I am glad to be back at work, for the most part, despite the strong desire to be horizontal: it's intellectually stimulating and is probably better for my soul than lying in bed all day. But it would be nice to have a sofa or something here in the office where one could lie down during one's little breaks. Maybe that's something we can do in our new office (whenever we find it and move into it).



Well, I'm going to close up now and get back to work. I got in nice and early due to the Clock Mystery, so I can leave nice and early, and there are a couple of things I ought to do before I go. I hope you're having a super lovely day!

En Vacances II: Je Reste Chez Moi

Well, here we are in day four of my vacation, and I feel ever so relaxed... despite the presence of Small Children in the house. I'm getting all sorts of sleep, and am spending loads of quality time in bed with books and movies, and it's simply Heaven on Earth.



On the downside, of course, I am not getting much of anything done... even the things I wanted to do during my vacation. I tried doing some fiction-writing yesterday, but I hardly got started before I was interrupted by an overwhelming desire to lay down again and watch some more early episodes of Brideshead Revisited (I can only watch the first five episodes, the halcyon days at Oxford and Brideshead; the later episodes depress me); while languishing there, Grandmother asked me to take her and the Small Children to Beverly's to find some handicrafts that will keep the children busy during their visit; and since I was already planning to go with my Daddy to the movies in the evening, that shot the remainder of the day.



And then today I had planned to go out to San Francisco to do some visual and atmospheric research at the municipal courthouse and around Polk Street, two settings in my story with which I am not as familiar as I ought to be if I'm going to write about them; but I woke up at eleven, which kind of shoots a big hole in my plan... by the time I get dressed and schlepp over to the City, the municipal courthouse will just be closing. So I'll try and get up early to do that tomorrow, and spend today writing and washing dishes instead.



The kitchen is a fright... though I've been able to keep up with the day-to-day dishes, which go in the dishwasher, I haven't touched any of the cookwear (knives, pans, wooden utensils) which have to be washed by hand. There's a big Tupperware bowl and some baking sheets that I know for a fact have been there since the Fourth of July. I rinsed them, they don't stink or anything, but they have to be scrubbed and hot-water-washed and all that jazz.



That's something that has always irked me about dishwashers: the only things you can put in them are the things that are easy to wash by hand, like plates and glasses and forks... but the things that are hard to wash, you can't put in there. What kind of sense does that make?



But then, a lot of the non-sense of dishwashing stems not from the limitations of the dishwasher and the special needs of the cookwear, but rather with the Grandmother's bizarre superstitions and prejudices about dishwashers. She feels you have to rinse the dishes so thoroughly before putting them in the dishwasher that you can't tell by looking at them whether they've been washed or not... so thoroughly that, if you'd had some soapy water on the dish instead of just clear water, you would have washed it already.



I point out to her that my experience has always been that just scraping the larger chunks of food off the plate or the fork is quite enough, but she doesn't believe me. She claims that sometimes the food doesn't come off, and then you have to wash it again and the heat-dryer seals the food onto the dish and makes it harder to get off. "So turn off the heat-dryer," I reply, but she'll have none of that, because then the dishes don't get quite dry enough. They do, eventually, as all things do eventually dry out once you cease to apply water... it's in the physics of the thing, but she simply doesn't believe it.



She further believes you can't put wooden utensils or knives or pots or pans into the dishwasher because the heat-drying cracks the wood and the handles; so turn off the heat-dryer? No, then they wouldn't get dry. So instead, it's better for them to lie around dirty for weeks on end (oftentimes in standing water which destroys the handles more surely than the heat-drying) instead of putting them in the dishwasher.



Well, it's all very medieval, but I guess it's better than hand-washing everything. But the more involved I get in housework, the more I discover that Grandmother's methods don't make any sense. For one thing, we have way too many pots and pans in this house: I advocate having just one of each kind of pot or pan, so you have to wash what you want immediately after using it, or immediately before using it, instead of letting them stack up all over the place; but Grandmother will use one skillet for bacon and another skillet for eggs and another skillet for gravy, one after the other, transferring the same bacon grease from one to the next, instead of doing it all in one; and then she has to use one particular cast-iron skillet if she's making the eggs over-medium and a different Teflon one if she's going to scramble them. As a result, we actually have at least nine different skillets; and at the moment all of them are dirty and stacked up at one end of the sink.



I have come to believe that the only way around this irrational method is to take over the entire housekeeping myself, from cooking to cleaning to laundry to gardening. My only other choice is to do it her way, with her. I haven't quite decided which road I am going to take in the coming years: I know how deeply resistant Grandmother is to change, and I respect that resistance because I share it; but when something's not working, it has to be changed.



One of the things that Grandmother and I argue about is how to affect change in the way we do things. For example, I once discussed with her methods by which we could keep the dining-room table tidy: I recommended, for one, that Grandmother stop clipping coupons and saving the parts of the newspaper that advertise sales; she doesn't ever use the coupons, and buying things just because they're on sale is a wasteful practice that ends up costing her more than it saves (buying a $5 object you ordinarily would not buy in order to save 50¢ on it means that you just wasted $4.50). Her answer was that she should use the coupons instead of not using them... which not only doesn't solve the problem but doesn't even address the point under discussion, that the dining-room table is a mess. Whether or not we use the coupons or take advantage of the sales has absolutely no effect whatsoever on how messy the table is with all these bits of colored paper floating around all over the place.



On the same token, I advised that she not cut out gardening and cooking advice columns from the newspaper, since she doesn't have the ability to carry out the advice anymore; again her answer is "I should be able to"... which simply doesn't address the fact that with her age and weight and arthritis she simply can't, and whether she should or not is entirely moot — and furthermore that even if she did follow the newspaper's advice, that doesn't prevent the bits of paper from littering the dining-table. Most aggravating.



One thing I have done in the last few weeks, starting when Grandmother was practically bed-bound and continuing now that she can get around a bit, is taking over the production of dinner. It occurred to me lately that, cost-wise, it is not much more expensive to eat prepared food all the time than it is to try to prepare fresh food all the time... prepared food comes in these convenient table-for-two portions, and fresh food always comes in great bulk that tends to get wasted. Bags of pre-mixed salad cost about the same as the various heads of lettuce you'd have to buy, and you use the whole bag, so there's less waste. We've usually eaten frozen vegetables instead of fresh, so why not have frozen entrees as well? They taste better than anything we could make, and though they have more preservatives and salt than fresh food, they have considerably less fat and other crap in them than what Grandmother cooks.



But dinner is only one comparatively small facet of the housekeeping routines (though my method cuts down considerably on the use of non-dishwasher cookwear), and leaves the kitchen and bathroom (which I really ought to clean more often for mere hygiene's sake), the wildly untidy dining table, the wildly untidy other parts of the house, and the entire hateful expanses of the garden to deal with.



Perhaps the answer is to hire a service. We have a gardening service to mow the grass and trim the plants, but they come twice a month and don't do the watering and don't tend the plants that Grandmother in her infinite farmgirl fantasies keeps planting (she always tries to grow tomatoes, and encourages the apple and peach trees to bear; repeated failures, tiny thick-skinned flavorless fruit, and the unbelievable expense of limb-trimming and plant-buying never dim her zeal). Similarly, a cleaning service would come in to mop and vacuum and dust, but could do nothing about the untidiness of Grandmother's end of the dining table, her corner of the living-room, and her bedroom (they would not be allowed in my rooms).



But it would still be something, a move in the right direction, dealing at least with the hygienic issues of dust and toilet-bowls and kitchen grease and what-have-you. I would certainly be willing to chip in for such a service, if not pay for it myself. But then, I'd have to resolve some of my more pressing financial issues first.



I can't quite believe I just spent all this time and energy writing about housework... if I had spent it doing the housework, I wouldn't have much of anything to write about.

@

So anyway... the movie I saw with Daddy last night was Fahrenheit 911. It was a powerful experience, moving and affecting. It didn't change my views so much as it reinforced them; and though I know Michael Moore has an agenda and an axe to grind, and that many of the scenes portrayed in this film were melodramatic or unnecessarily sentimental, it was good to see all of the solid factual research that also went into it. Daddy liked it, too (and wonders if the soundtrack is available), though he got a little choked up at the end when that woman was talking about losing her son in Iraq; with his grandson (my nephew) possibly on his way over there, his life in extreme danger, the episode had a great deal of resonance.



My problem with this film, and films like it, is that it preaches to the choir. Nobody in that theatre had his mind changed by what he saw... those who believe otherwise from Michael Moore and Daddy and I (like the Grandmother) will not see this film. The nature of our media-driven society is that there is too much information out there at any given time; one has to pick and choose what one sees, and it is natural to choose to see and hear that with which one already agrees.



That is the secret of the success of Fox News: it convinces the ignorant, the uninformed, and the simply stupid people of this nation that they are in fact quite learned, informed, and intelligent... they present their information in tiny dramatic pieces that even the meanest intellect can grasp and remember... and having convinced them of this fictional intelligence, can tell them anything else they like, no matter how fantastic and irrational.



It is the same trick the Republicans are currently using, aligning themselves with the recidivist tendencies of the Great Unwashed: "Scared of all this progressive social change? Pissed off that you can't beat up broads or niggers or fags or even your own chilluns anymore? Terrified that you might possibly be wrong in your beliefs and traditions? Well," (says the Republican Party via the Turner-and-Murdock-strangled right-wing media), "you're right to feel that way! You may not have much book-larnin' but you have good folksy common sense: so support this other moron we put in office, who can't remember his lines and mispronounces common words, because he's just as smart as you are." And having been convinced of this, the newly-enfranchised sheep will obligingly look the other way while you rape the resources of the nation and line your and your friends' pockets with billions and billions of public dollars.



So now I'm talking about politics... somehow I felt on surer ground when I was talking about dishwashers.

@

Well, anyway, I had better get along with the rest of my day. I have those dishes to wash, and now I have been drafted into helping Caroline enter some stupid contest where she might get to meet Duran Duran. Like I have nothing better to do than help her find a cream-colored necktie and take pictures of her dressed as Simon LeBon in the Rio video. The things I do for my friends.

En Vacances

I don't really have anything to say, in fact I need to leave in about ten minutes to go meet my sponsor for lunch and a good long talk, but I didn't want to leave the last post at the top any longer. I'm not angry anymore, in fact I don't like to stay angry for more than a couple of days, no matter what... anger is such a wasteful emotion. Instead of being mad at Kellie, I can take that energy and devote it to entertaining her children.



Yesterday was the first day of my official one-week-off-from-work Vacation, and I rather enjoyed it: I spent almost the entire day in bed watching videos (Chicago, Down With Love, and To Wong Foo...), reading a book (Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House), and eating (bacon and eggs served by a small cousin in bed, a bowl of lime jello, a bunch of grapes, and a handful of Brach's candy... not mentioning the food I ate outside of bed).



I would have blogged then, but I stayed off the internet as much as I could stand, as yesterday was also Grandmother's birthday (she's 86 now), and the phone-calls were coming in from all over. And though I'd like to write a little more and read a little more, I have to jet off to Solano Avenue for my lunch date... oh, I think I'm going to be late... must dash!



Toodles!

So Mad I Could Spit

I'm so angry right now — not jumping-up-and-down pissed off, but deeply and quietly angry — that I don't quite know how to deal with it. And the worse part is that this anger requires a confrontation; I can't just get over it and forget about it, as I usually do when I'm angry... this time I have to do something about it.



Regular readers will remember my kvetching about the Two Small Children that plagued our lives earlier in the summer; these are my cousin Kellie's children, Jessie and Alex, and it seems that these two are about to descend upon us again for the next two weeks. Why? For the second week, because Kellie is going on vacation to San Diego with her friends, and the first week because Kellie did not sign up the children for the Y day camp for that week... I still don't know why she didn't do it, but I will find that out later.



Regular readers will also remember that The Grandmother has just spent three weeks in bed with a bum knee and a cold, followed by this last week of being able to hobble around somewhat (but not much). And this is what is mostly angering me: when Grandmother asked Kellie to make other arrangements for the children next week, so that she'd have more time to recover from her disability, Kellie nagged and pressured her into taking them for the whole two weeks instead of the one week she'd already agreed to. I was in the kitchen and listening to Grandmother's end of the conversation, and it took every ounce of good manners I possess to keep from launching across the kitchen, snatching the phone out of Grandmother's hand, and giving Kellie a piece of my mind right then and there.



In the end, Kellie said she'd try and find a baby-sitter for the week; but when she called Grandmother this morning she said she'd only been able to find a sitter for Alex, not for Jessie. Grandmother, quite predictably (and since I wasn't there), said that she'd take them both for the week, in that case, since there was no point in taking one of them for one week and then having to drive down to San Jose next week to get the other one (the other part of this story was that if Grandmother didn't take both children back with her from her own birthday party this afternoon, that we'd have to go to San Jose next week to pick up the children... Kellie can manage to go to San Diego with her friends, but she can't come to Oakland to drop off her children).



So this situation, where Grandmother is being pressured into taking care of two children, at a time when she can barely take care of herself, is angering enough. But this is just one more episode in a long-running series of Kellie abusing Grandmother's hospitality in this manner. I think she doesn't try very hard to find sitters for her children because she knows Grandmother will do it , with overnights, for weeks at a time, and for free... not only does Kellie contribute nothing for the upkeep of her children, she doesn't even cough up for a nice thank-you gift. She claims poverty as her reason, but she still has money to go on vacation to San Diego and to go out with her friends. She claims that her car can't drive more than ten miles at a time without breaking down (which I don't believe for a minute), and she claims that she can't find a babysitter in the middle of summer (another difficult-to-believe fairy-tale).



I find it extremely difficult to not resent Kellie's abuse of Grandmother; but if Grandmother is willing to allow this abuse, that's her problem and not mine. However, since Grandmother can barely take care of herself nowadays, that means that I am the one taking care of the children... and in many cases taking care of Grandmother and the children. And nobody asked if this was OK with me.



And another thing: Kellie isn't doing her children any good, foisting them off on relatives for prolonged periods like this. Last time the children were here, they became so deeply neurotic at the end of their visit that Jessie was eating surreptitiously all day and wetting the bed every night, and Alex fashioned a surrogate mother doll out of a two-liter soda-bottle and written-on paper-towels held on with rubber bands, which he slept with every night and carried around with him all day. All so that Kellie could run around like a single-girl and enjoy a childless lifestyle... sure she'll say she missed them, and maybe she did: but let's not forget that, although she called the children every day on the phone, she did not come visit them on her days off (because of her half-assed car, ostensibly, but I think otherwise).



Having been raised by a largely disinterested mother, myself, I find myself resenting Kellie on her children's behalf. She's no more fit to raise children than a parakeet... from what I can see, she completely ignores them most of the time. I have never seen her play with her children, or include them in a conversation, or focus solely on them for more time than it takes to scold them for whatever mischief they were doing to get her attention. I'm not around her when she's alone with them, obviously, but what I do see burns my ass.



And finally, the thing that's really grilling my ass is that I don't get to go away for vacation this year... I don't have the money, for one thing, but more importantly I can't leave Grandmother alone right now; instead, I get to help Grandmother take care of Kellie's children so she can go on vacation, and I don't even get a say in it. I have next week off from work, and while I certainly intend to make time to visit friends and to do some research for my book, I am going to be at home with children, not gallivanting off to San Diego with friends. That pisses me off like you wouldn't believe.



What I'm left with, though, is that I have to confront Kellie about this without creating so much conflict around us that it colors our family life; this will be made difficult by the fact that Kellie is a drama-queen of the first water. I have to weigh every word out of my mouth, and keep a lot of things to myself, because while you can say all sorts of things to people with whom you no longer intend to consort, with a family member you have to live with them after the confrontation... and that rather draws one's claws as far as what can be said. So I have to focus my remarks on Grandmother's inability to take care of children any longer, and try to convince Kellie that this is no longer a resource she can use.



Well, I was going to go on about this at some more length, but I have to get dressed now and take Grandmother to her birthday party in San Ramon. Wish me luck in my dealings with my cousin; I'll keep you updated on the outcome. I hope your day is lovely!

People Are Talking

I'm not much of one for current events... I almost never watch the news, unless I happen to wander into the same room as the Grandmother and something catches my eye, and I don't read any part of the newspaper except the comics and advice columns, and I wouldn't be caught dead reading a newsmagazine. I don't even have headlines on my Yahoo! Frontpage. I read the articles on Queer Day almost daily, but I really only skim the newsy bits in search of the entertaining bits.



But information filters in, nevertheless... in fact, I feel that I can gauge the importance of any event or phenomenon by how many people are talking about it in my little newsless world — how many bloggers write about it, how many of my friends or family mention it in conversation, and how much of it spills over onto the fluff channels on my television.



So, according to this principle, here is What is Going On in the World Today:



The Democratic National Convention: I haven't watched it, of course, and have no intention of watching it. I don't even understand what it's all about. Why bother having a convention if there's no debate, no voting, no candidates? (yes, I know there are other candidates, Kucinich and Sharpton and all them, but they really don't matter) I do understand the unified front, the engineered unanimity needed to combat the right-leaning tone still rampant in the nation: the Democratic Party needs to show as much confidence in Kerry & Edwards as the GOP shows in Dumb & Evil.



However, I find that I still harbor a certain distaste for the Democratic Party, its seeming inability to stand for anything, its craven snivelling after swing votes, its rather lame platform of "we're not Bush." But I will vote Democrat in the coming election. (most likely absentee so I don't have to worry about rigged voting machines — though, really, didn't we learn in the last presidential "election" that paper votes are just as easy to rig as electronic ones?) I'll vote Kerry for no other reason than because I hate Bush with a seething, burning, glittering hatred. I just wish I could like Kerry as much as I hate Bush, I wish Kerry hadn't been in the vaguely sinister and patently elitist Skull & Bones at Yale two years before Dubya was, I wish Kerry's wife weren't a rich foreigner (I like rich forgeigners, but I know how most Americans feel about them), I wish that I could believe in any of it. That would make the whole thing a lot easier.



Interestingly enough, the Grandmother (who is still registered as Democrat but hasn't voted Democrat since Jimmy Carter) has been watching the Convention in its entirety; when I came into her room yestere'en to discuss dinner, I got an eyeful of Teresa Heinz Kerry in a red suit that did absolutely nothing for her (did she think the patriotic red would distract from her foreign accent? Perhaps she should have worn blue instead, or at least had some white around the neckline to combat the sallowness that particularly virulent red brought out in her skin), nattering on about something or other. I didn't care for her rather heavy-sounding rhetoric, but then I didn't stick around long enough to find out what she was talking about. During dinner, though, Grandmother expounded a bit on Mrs. Heinz Kerry's speech:



"She's supposed to be very smart," Grandmother sniffed, "she speaks five languages or something, but her speech was very dull. Some people just aren't good at speaking, no matter how smart they're supposed to be. She seems to think that the most important thing for America is Women's Rights. I can't think of any rights women don't have, so maybe I missed something."



Translation: "She's a contemptible and unwomanly smart-ass." If Grandmother had been an adult in 1920 (but she was only 2), she would probably have been against the passage of the 19th Amendment. I think that deep down inside, Grandmother doesn't believe that women should have any rights other than those granted by their fathers or husbands... she buys into the partriarchy paradigm wholeheartedly. She therefore has the most extraordinary contempt for feminists and women who are "supposed to be smart."



Still, when I read some articles and transcripts of Mrs. Heinz Kerry's speech, I see that Grandmother had got hold of the wrong end of the stick: it wasn't women's rights that were being discussed, it was women's voices. I'm not sure, though, what Mrs. Heinz Kerry means by "women's voices"... because if she were listening to the voices of many women I know (like Grandmother), she'd be listening to a regurgitation of patriarchal Rush-Limbaugh-and-Bill-O'Reilley-influenced hooey; the rest of the women I know say pretty much the same things as the men I know. It seems to me that there's no real difference between a woman's and a man's way of looking at things... there is only the difference between ignorance and intelligence — and let's face it, Womankind has some monumental dummies in its ranks: Ann Coulter is a woman, too, you know; so're The Two Mrs. Bushes, Condoleeza and Laura ... not all women's voices are voices of wisdom.



Britney Spears: And speaking of unwise women... I don't know why she's been popping up in my world so much lately, but there she is. For one, Toby posted some really funny pictures in which it appears Britney is going down on her fiance on a balcony (don't celebrities know better than to go out on balconies? Did they learn nothing from Brad Pitt?), and then I keep seeing paparazzi pix of her in fashion and entertainment magazines walking around with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, and then Caroline and I caught parts of her Miami concert on MTV and really enjoyed it (I can't find a link that doesn't cascade pop-ups all over the place, so you'll just have to take my word for it).



I like Britney, she's so pretty and has the most delightul voice and manner, but I wish she was being discussed because her show is great or her music is fun, not because she keeps getting married to people, is publically dieting on Red Bull and cigarettes, and is generally presenting a most shocking role-model to her legions of teeny-bopper fans. I don't know where these celebrities get the idea that they don't have a responsibility to act as role-models for their young fans, particularly when they purposely courted those young fans in the first place... if Britney were marketed to adults and was of little interest to a huge Tween-girl fanbase, it wouldn't matter so much what she did... but she's not, so it does.



Still, though she isn't a great singing talent, and I don't think she does anything about her own music, she is one hell of a performer (you'll never find a drag-queen faulting a performer for not doing her own singing)... the stagecraft of the concert was gorgeous, although I do have a bone to pick with the camera editing: when there's a hot guy in tiny tighty-whiteys grinding away into a mattress during a song about masturbation, you do not pan out to the audience at that moment. Bastard! Still, the presentation of "Oops I Did It Again" as a swing number was totally neat, and her sex-kitten-lingerie costumes were to die. I loved the dancing, the dancers (that blond boy, and the one with the mohawk, woof), the lights, the colors, the complete disposability of the music in favor of the choreography and stage-design... style over substance is one of my favorite flavors!



Jessica Simpson: And speaking of Pop Princesses, the enviably beautiful Mrs. Lachey has been popping up in conversations a lot lately... most notably when my co-worker BB asked me who she is (her stepdaughter mentioned the name, and BB was dismayed to find herself so out-of-the-loop, so I had to explain). Then Graham Norton did a riff on her alleged intelligence ("her mother claims that Jessica has an IQ of 160... but I think she meant 160 jelly-beans"... and I have to point out that an IQ score of 160 is supergenius, less than one in a hundred million people will score that high); and then she was featured in a tasty layout in this month's Vanity Fair.



I don't watch Newlyweds all that often, but when I do catch part of an episode, I enjoy it immensely, especially if Jessica is letting loose one of her patented Dumb Blonde Moments; I often find myself debating whether or not she is anywhere near as stupid as she seems... the much-publicized question about whether tuna was a bird or a fish was pretty believable, and Nick seemed just as baffled as the rest of us; but I once watched her struggling with a washing-machine, where she apparently couldn't figure out how to turn it on or which of the bottles in the cupboard was the detergent... yet she knew to put the fabric softener in the little ball. Fabric softener is pretty advanced laundry-magic, and the instructions for turning the machine on are printed in big white letters under the lid. It was all very suspicious, but at the same time amusing (style over substance, again).



The War: Actually, people aren't really talking about the War that much anymore. I suppose we've gotten bored with it. But it's on my mind, nevertheless: you see, my nephew Matthew flew this morning to North Carolina for Army boot camp, and is probably at this minute getting his head shaved or being yelled at by a drill-sergeant; though it's not certain that he'll be sent to Iraq upon graduating in October (if he has the Manners Luck, which sent my father to Germany instead of Vietnam during his Army tour from 1964-68, he might not be), the current survival rate of US troops these days is a little too shaky for my comfort.



Being a pacifist, I of course am not fully on-board with Matthew's decision to enter the Army as a career, and as his uncle I am worried sick about him going into the Army in the middle of a particularly life-wasting war. But I support his decisions, and even understand them fairly well, so I just sucked up my disapproval and fear and gave him a hearty hug and told him to have fun and not get shot. These are not the words of profound avuncular wisdom I would have liked to bestow, but it's the best I could do. I forgot to caution him to not get blown up or run over, either, but I assume he'll know not to do those anyway... he's a pretty smart kid, tested in the 99th percentile on his placement exams, and is going to be trained for Army Intelligence... I try to think of the lives he'll save with proper intelligence instead of his chances of getting killed.



The problem with a war like this one is that there's no way of knowing when it's over. I mean, even if when we get Bush out of office, the war is still going to be there, and it will not be easy to disengage from Iraq now that we've been planted down there for the last year or so. A precipitate retreat of US armed forces will leave behind a situation much worse than what prevailed before we came in search of those mythological WMDs. We remember (don't we) what happened when US troops pulled out of Vietnam without so much as wiping their cocks off on the sheets first... it was very messy.

@

So that's what's been travelling across my brain-pan today. All terribly, terribly interesting, I know. I'll let you stew on all of that, while I get back to my work. I need to write some more meeting minutes, and a realtor is stopping by to discuss new office space for us... I am hoping he's as cute as he sounded over the phone, but people so seldom are. Here's hoping your day is full of cute guys (or gals, as you prefer), and don't take any wooden nickels.

The Endless Huh? of French Films

It seems that every time I see a French film, I find myself wondering, at the end, what the hell just happened. This is not a language problem, because I have not always had this same sense of bewilderment after an Italian or Spanish or German film, and I speak more French than I do Italian or Spanish or German... it's something about the French, they like to fuck with your mind and leave you wondering.



Last night I watched The Swimming Pool... and I still don't know what the ending was all about. It all made perfect sense right up to the end, and then pow... complete confusion. With a handful of oddly juxtaposed images and one piece of unexpected information, the well-laid (if slightly bizarre) plot was completely unraveled, leaving an open question of whether or not any of the preceding had actually happened (in the world of the film), or if only parts had happened, or if it had all happened, or what. After all that perfectly understandable and interesting plot, it was just mean to tack on that ending and pull the whole movie apart like that. Mean!



I don't know why, in that case, I keep watching French films. They so often do this to me, leave me wondering at the end. I get so angry at having the conceptual rug pulled out from under me at the last minute that I usually swear to never watch another French film as long as I live... but then time passes and I forget and somebody tells me about this great movie, and they don't tell me it's French, and I rent it (or more likely buy it for $4.99, which is cheaper than renting because I always forget to return rentals and have to pay late fees), and the rug gets pulled again and I get all pissed off again. It's an ugly circle.



But now, as I look at the website I just linked above, two other French films I've seen that made very little sense — 8 Women, which I really did like (Deneuve and Ardant, what's not to like?), was fabulously surreal but at least had a cogent plot; and Sitcom, which was also generally sensible, though certainly bizarre, but which ended in a way so unexpected and nonsensical that I had to watch the movie again in hopes that there was some explanation I'd missed (there was not, but the scene with Stéphane Rideau tittie-fucking the governess was well worth the second run-through, even if it was a prosthetic) — are by the same director, François Ouzon.



On the other hand, the rest of the French films that left me speechless with baffled fury at the end were not by François Ouzon... the almost unbearably freaky The City of Lost Children (practically gave me nightmares, especially Ron Perlman speaking French) and Wild Reeds (charming, but completely pointless and more than a little confusing) come immediately to mind, and then there was The Adventures of Felix (again charming and pointless though somewhat more cogent) and Artemisia (one shot of a hot naked man was not worth all the shots of an ugly naked man that followed, and it turned the life of an amazing and groundbreaking artist into a tedious codependent affair).



Let's not forget the historical things that I was forced to watch in college, like The Return of Martin Guerre (Gerard Depardieu should be banned) or Indochine (even the divine Catherine Deneuve couldn't make that turkey fly, though I do have the movie poster, and it's hot) — dare I mention that horrible short film that I suppose every child of my generation was forced to watch in elementary school, The Red Balloon? (the very memory makes me cringe and weep).



I suppose you could blame the insipidity and irrationality of La Cage Aux Folles II & III on the fact that they were sequels, but the original wasn't all that hot, either (though it was interesting that Mike Nichols practically remade it frame by frame for The Birdcage, but one must note that he also managed to inject a few drips of rationale into the script while he was at it). And let's not talk about the legions of French films that I wouldn't watch if you put a gun to my head, like Amelie or Babette's Feast (actually, I did see part of that one, but I got bored and wandered away).



On the other hand, there are a lot of French films that haven't left me in a state of baffled fury at the end... the excellent Brotherhood of the Wolf, for one, and Ridicule for another, each with well-made plots and fully explained, entirely understandable actions and motives. What about the wonderful Ma Vie en Rose? And I have to admit, there are piles upon piles of French films I haven't seen and know very little about; conversely, there are also piles and piles of films from America, Britain, and Asia that I have seen and which left me even more baffled and enraged than The Red Balloon could.



I seem to have simply fallen into the poor mental habit of hating the French... it's so trendy these days. And of the movies I've cited above, most weren't as bad as my confused emotions at the time made me think... as I look over the list, there were some entertaining (if baffling) moments involved in many of those films.



The thing is, though, that I had been an uneducated francophile practically from birth, automatically assuming that the French were culturally and intellectually superior to Americans, that their films and their clothes and their food and their art were better than everyone else's; but then when I actually started seeing French films (and studying French art and eating French food), I found that they aren't superior, they're just different. Like English-language directors, French filmmakers are in many cases complete poseurs — or even worse, are simple morons who have been deified by poseur Americans who think that, if it's completely incomprehensible and unaccessible, it must be brilliant. And when we find that our gods have feet of clay, we tend to become angrier than we were at the people whom we didn't think were gods... it's easier to forget about a stupid American film because you weren't expecting as much as you were from the stupid French film.



Well anyway... this is all very interesting, I'm sure. If any of my readers have seen The Swimming Pool, and actually understood it, please let me know. Actually, any insights into French cinema would be appreciated. In the meantime, I am going to go watch some fully-expected-to-be-stupid American television.



Á bientôt!