black belt

Five years ago I set myself the goal of earning a black belt in a martial art. I set this goal because my friend Jared, drunk on whisky one night, pointed out with uncanny perception and searing honesty, that I have no self-esteem. He told me that he hears me talk about all these things I’ve done, and that I talk about them as though I know other people think they’re really cool, and as though I think I ought to think they’re really cool, but that it’s obvious that I don’t actually believe any of it.

Which is true. I don’t. As a matter of fact, I devalue every achievement I’ve ever achieved. I swam butterfly at State in high school, but I didn’t place. I took half the prizes in the Deep South Young Writers’ Contest, but the other contestants were lame. I had a 3.7 GPA, but all I did was not skip classes. I got a masters degree, but at a university overseas that didn’t require me to take the GRE. I suck. I suck for thinking like this.

So the very point of this new goal, which I set upon returning to the US from New Zealand and setting up camp in Boston, shortly after my weekend visit with Jared, was that I would not be able to devalue the achievement of a black belt. Right? This should be a tangible goal.

And this was what I answered Sunday at the black belt test, in a sort of rambling, round-about way, when one of the senior ranking black belts asked me what getting my black belt would mean to me. The question was asked after the test, and I was feeling remarkably confident, having done far better than I had anticipated. In fact, I felt proud. A sensation I’m not very accustomed to. As I answered the question, I felt as though I had achieved my goal just as I had set it, no shifting bars, and no slippage this time.

So it’s ironic that tonight Mr. Hwang managed to raise the bar on my goal after I thought I’d achieved it. He told me that although I may have tested well, and earned my black belt, that I am not as good as I was a year ago when I was testing for red belt. And that that’s the reason he didn’t want me to test yet.

I’m sorry I disappointed you, I said, with eyes on my feet, feeling the corners of my mouth twitch.

No, you didn’t disappoint me, he said. You did fine. It’s just that the standards of the school have been decreasing over the years.

What a fucking bummer it was to hear that.

Because it’s not about the belt, and it’s not about how high my wheel kick is, or how much power and snap is in my form. It’s not about the taekwondo. Or the standards of the school, for that matter. It’s about what it represents. In my own head.

So it seams that taking – and passing – that black belt test wasn’t the achievement of my goal after all. Whether I let that comment ruin it for me is.

Results not yet in.

Poppy Sid

Poppy Sid died last night. My grandmother doesn’t know, and we all agree it’s best not to tell her. She has alzheimer’s – doesn’t know today from yesterday from 30 years ago – and she’s drugged to the hilt to manage the mood swings that inevitabily arise from sitting around in a nursing home all day bored and confused. Old age in this civilized society of ours is so fucked up.

But she lived a good life, and so did Poppy Sid.

Poppy wasn’t my “real” grandfather, but as a kid it didn’t much seem to matter. He and my grandmother were married just after I was born, and even though he had two granddaughters and a grandson of his own, he was my Poppy, who called me “Kiddo” and gave me money for my birthday and made sure that I always found the hidden motzah on Passover. He was a New York Jew, wise-guy know-it-all. As a kid, whenever I saw All In the Family on TV, I thought Archie Bunker was the same person as my Poppy Sid. The adult meaning of the show went right over my head, but the gruff-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside character struck me as familiar.

Poppy Sid was color blind, but always a snazzy dresser, said my grandmother, who obviously had a thing for tall men in plaid golf pants and pink sport jackets. He picked out shirts with epaulets for my father that he would never wear, along with “Rolexes” from China. On weekends he and his other in-the-know pals would troll the flea markets for deals. He once gave my dad a digital watch that played Happy Birthday and Christmas carols and other random melodies we couldn’t identify.

Poppy Sid liked his brisket well-done. Burnt really. Which was good, because my grandmother liked to overcook things. He introduced me to bagels. And motzah ball soup.

Poppy had a heart-attack once when I was visiting my grandmother. I think I was 8. He had to be taken to the hospital. Waiting in the hospital waiting room reminded me of the Madeline book in which Madeline is taken to the hospital when her appendix bursts. Poppy was okay, but my grandmother was shaken, and said something about not wanting to outlive another husband, which stuck in my brain until I was older and was able to understand what she must have been feeling. She doesn’t know it, but she has now outlived her second husband.

Poppy’s heart was a source of constant worry for my Nana. He wasn’t supposed to eat shrimp or other foods high in cholestorol. On the bathroom mirror there was a note that said “Sid – remember to take your pills – I love you – Claire,” written in my grandmother’s upward sloping handwriting. The note was still taped there the last time I visited the apartment, when we were taking away all of my grandmother’s belongings, just before Sid joined Nana in the nursing home.

As an adult I began to understand the distinction between a blood relation and what Sid was. Although he treated me as a granddaughter, I was really Nana’s granddaughter, and Missy, Stephi and Henry were his. More importantly, he was not my mother’s father, and their relationship was awkward. He was different in every way from my mother’s father, Joe, who apparently was a depressed, hen-pecked man who disappointed my grandmother by not turning out to be the successful businessman her father had been. Their marriage had been unhappy, my mother said, and my grandmother would have divorced Joe had he not been diagonsed with a brain tumor and died 6 months later. Sid, on the other hand, made her happy. In his brash, brazen New York Jew kind of way. He was a tall, handsom man, who knew everything, or so he’d have you think, and he made my grandmother laugh, right up to the end, even amidst the disorientation of alzheimers.

We visited just last month. For my grandmother’s birthday. But really I was more concerned about Sid. Unlike my grandmother, Sid’s mind was still very lucid, and he was painfully aware of his body’s decline. “I’m falling apart” he said saddly, as he struggled to stand from his chair. His hair had changed – turned into a sort of grey fuzz at the back of his head, what was left of it. And his grin had become just a little more skelatal – his teeth somehow too big for his thinning lips. But the fact that the grin was still there at all was something at least. Poppy Sid was still perfectly recognizable.

We wheeled him into my grandmother’s room so he could brighten her day. He said he needed to go to the bathroom, so we started to look around for an attendant, but he said he’d be fine on his own. Dennis tried to help him, but Sid shooed him away, always a prideful man. A moment later we heard a crash, and Sid was cursing, belowing “help me, goddammit somebody help me!” We ran into the bathroom and found him on the floor, head caught under the sink, pants down around his knees, his pinky finger broken, bent at an odd angle and bleeding. I didn’t know whether to try to help him up, or to avert my eyes to preserve his dignity. So I ran for a nurse. Nurse and aids cleaned him up, tsked him for attempting to use the toilet alone, and took him to the hospital. On the way out he asked my father to fix his watch – the strap had broken during his fall.

The next morning he was back at the nursing home, his finger fixed with 20 stitches and a little grogy from his cocktail of painkillers. He knew what he wanted to say, but his mouth wouldn’t work properly to get the words out, and his voice sounded funny. Which distressed him. “Listen to my voice,” he said. “This isn’t my voice.” We found my grandmother sitting in the dining room eating breakfast for a change, and wheeled Poppy in to see her. He looked dapper in his red shorts and striped polo shirt, but grumbled about how long they made him wait at the hospital the night before, the quality of care, the fact that nobody knows anything anymore and other petty annoyances that we couldn’t make out. Pretty much back to normal.

Then he brightened a bit and asked “so what are you driving these days?” Such a “Sid” thing to say. We talked about cars for a while. He approved of both Volkswagens and Saabs. My dad gave him back his repaired watch. And then we had to say goodbye to catch our planes.

“Be good, kiddo” he said as I kissed him goodbye.

I guess I couldn’t really ask for a better farewell. I’ll miss Poppy Sid. I don’t think anyone will ever call me “kiddo” again.

little orange cat

Saturday night. We’re back in Burlington. Driving down Route 7, headed to meet Merry Moses for coffee and music in Middlebury. Passing through road construction, the traffic slows, as one car after another veers to the left, going around something in the road. In the headlights, a ball of orange and white fur. A little animal was just hit. A little cat. Poor little cat…my heart in my throat. But as we drive by, I see her head lift. I bolt from the car. Heather, the rescuer of little furry animals. The cat whisperer.

I crouch over the frightened little creature. Her eyes are wide and staring, pupils dilated, and I know she’s probably beyond saving. Her little mouth opens and shuts in soundless meows. Her paws reach out, trying and trying to get up.

Have you ever seen a life prepare to leave a living body? I haven’t. It’s tragic beyond words. And beautiful, in a way. A sacred moment. But so, so sad. All the needless death in the world, you might think a cat in the road would go unnoticed. And often it does. But a life is a life is a life. And a wasted life is tragic. A soldier in Iraq, a kitten hit by a car… it isn’t predation or the natural order; it’s just stupid and sad.

Another car stops. And another. And suddenly a community has formed around the little animal. Dennis is on the cell phone trying to find a vet. I stroke the little cat. She’s going to die, someone says. Can someone take her to a vet? One woman lives an hour from here. The other has a car full of kids. We will, I say. She’s in shock, says one of the women, cover her up, she could die of shock. I take off my jacket and put it over her. A velvet shroud.

Briefly, the silent cries become more frequent, and I can’t help but notice the sharp, healthy little kitty teeth and white-pink gums. The pale gums mean shock, and that the end is near. Someone puts down newspaper, a piece of cardboard, an Ann Taylor bag, so we can pick her up and transport her to the vet. The little cat winces as we move her onto the makeshift gurney. Her paws have stopped reaching. It’s too late, one woman says. No, no there’s still a heartbeat says the other. Are you sure? Yes, there’s a heartbeat. I keep petting her, trying to keep the life from flowing out. I look up to see a police car pulling over. He’s sympathetic, just wants the humans out of the road. But when I look back down, a tiny red trickle of blood is seeping from her soft, pink nose. She’s gone, I say. And my eyes fill with tears. She’s gone.

We four hover over her for a moment more, as the police officer stands watch. I had an orange cat that got hit by a car when I was a little girl, I say. So did I, said one of the women. Somewhere there’s a little girl who’s looking for her cat. A very sad little girl.

Dennis and I carry the cat over to the grass, place her beneath a fir tree. The two women go back to their cars. We continue on to the Coffeehouse to meet Merry Moses and listen to Australian folk music.

We see a good show, Ian Campbell Smith, the so-called “Billy Bragg of Australia”…though Dennis is probably the only one in the audience who knows who Billy Bragg is. We tell Merry about the cat. And she is appropriately sad. And then the conversation turns to other things. Like a book Merry bought for Dennis, called “Marley, the Worst Dog In the World.” Marley is Dennis’ cat. Who has a reputation that precedes her. We have a good laugh. And attempt to go elsewhere for a beer, but give up after finding the Inn is closed. Our heart isn’t in it anyway. We’re emotionally drained after our little roadside experience. We turn around and head back to Burlington.

I tell Dennis about a series of dreams I’ve been having, in which I’m trying to save little dying animals. A piglet that looks up at me knowingly and swallows, fearful but resigned to its death on the butcher block, as I cradle it helplessly in my arms. A tiny squirrel run over by a car before I can rescue it from the road. In each dream I sense that I am somehow responsible for the suffering, despite my efforts to nurture and console. And now this little cat presents herself as the actualization of these strange dreams. Why? What does it mean?

I insist we stop when we get to the place in the road where the construction begins. I get out of the car and approach the fir tree, hoping that somehow she would have gotten up and walked away between then and now. But there she is, stiffer than we left her, and damp with dew. I pluck a branch from the fir tree and a couple hardy yellow flowers and place them in the crook of the little cat’s neck. So that whomever finds her will know that someone was there when she died, I tell Dennis. And then burst into tears. I am eight years old again, crying over my dead orange tabby cat. Dennis calls the animal shelter and leaves a message in case anyone is looking for a little orange cat.

Back at the B&B I take a bath and climb into bed. Dennis holds me tight in his arms as I continue to whimper, a heart full of ache, the little cat representing all the pent up loss my soul can hold. Loss of life and loss of love, loss of all that is precious and out of my control, gone forever, all that is unappreciated until it’s too late. I sniffle and blow my nose and feel grateful for the strong arms that hold me. And for the two healthy cats waiting for us to return home. And for the fact that we both still have humanity enough to be touched by the passing of life, however small.

We should give the cat a name, Dennis says. Because in the end she was ours.

Little Orange Cat.

Little OC it is, says Den.

Goodbye, Little Orange Cat. We knew you only briefly, but you gave four strangers pause, and when you left, we had four stories to tell.

what grown-ups do

A couple weeks ago Dennis and I went home to Lafayette for my old friend Clem’s wedding. We flew into New Orleans to save money and my parents dutifully drove down to pick us up. I insisted we go into the Quarter for lunch at The Gumbo Shop. We all ordered gumbo and salad and white wine. And, as I held my breath and tried to act nonchalant, Dennis picked up his glass and made a toast “to the engagement ring on Heather’s left hand.”

Really? Are you serious? Really? my father kept saying. And when I went to the bathroom, Dennis later told me, my mother wouldn’t stop hugging him.

I state this all matter-of-factly because the engagement itself actually occurred 6 months ago, on my birthday, after a blizzard, over avocado smoothies and bubble tea at the only restaurant open in Cambridge. I hadn’t told my parents until just a couple weeks ago because I wanted to tell them in person. They’d waited this long, I figured, it wouldn’t hurt them to wait a little longer. Everyone I mentioned this to thought I was nuts, but, whatever. Plus, for quite a while now they’ve really, really wanted to hear that I’m settling down and getting married…and I’m a stubborn and ornery child. I don’t like to do what other people want me to do.

And also, because I hate the giddiness and shrieks that ensue when I tell people, which we’ve been doing in a completely random and nonsensical fashion. For example, we’ve been telling people for the past 6 months that Sean Cole will be marrying us, only to finally tell Sean last weekend when we bumped into him at Peet’s. We aren’t really big on the whole announcement thing. So formal.

To be honest, I’m not really sure what I think of marriage. And this isn’t news to Dennis…we’re kind of of like minds on the matter. Which I guess is why we work together. Dennis says he used to associate marriage with death. Myself, I associate it with something grown-ups do, not people like us. And more than that, I see relationships as fluid, not something that can be defined by law and society. But it’s a rites of passage, and there’s nothing wrong with a good party.

And to my father’s point, there is something to be said for making that commitment. Like now I can say to Dennis that if he really hates being back in Boston, in a few years time if he wants to move to a new city I’ll go with him. And the whole notion of children starts to seem a little less abstract. Not much, but a little.

However, my terror of the suburbs has only increased. It’s as though being single into my 30s was to be my one last defiant streak of rebellion and now it’s gone. And our little counter-culture rebellion is doubly at risk because now we too are on the real estate investment bandwagon. Not so much because I really want to be a homeowner, but because I want a cool bathroom with a clawfoot tub. And I want a piece of Cambridge to call my own before we get completely priced out for good.

We saw a great 2-family property right in Central Square last week – Dennis’ friend Orrin dropped him a note from LA to let us know his cousin is selling his house and to offer us first dibs – we went by after work Thursday and then had dinner at River Gods right around the corner and fantasized about how cool it would be to live there and for River Gods to be our neighborhood bar …and then I tossed and turned the whole night, spreadsheets and mortgage calculators floating through my dreams, crunching impossible numbers we could never afford.

Have I mentioned being an adult sucks?

And Friday I came home from work and Dennis mentioned he’d picked up a real estate guide and to take a look it’s on the coffee table and how about Stoneham it’s a lot cheaper and isn’t so far outside of Boston… and I burst into tears.

I WILL NOT MOVE TO THE SUBURBS!! (for if I do, the SUV-driving, bad hair-wearing, 30-pound-weight-gaining, latte-sipping soccer mom alter ego will surely chase me down and kill me!)

We have this friend, Mitch. He’s an old acquaintance of Den’s from years back when he was working at a bar on Huntington Ave. We crossed paths with him a few months ago at the Philosophy Café and have since woven him into our eclectic social network. Mitch is brilliant and interesting and extremely odd and we enjoy his company because he provokes and challenges us with esoteric questions and references to volumes of books we’ll never have time to read. Yesterday over coffee Mitch asked me what it’s like to be a genius. I love this question because (a) I’m so clearly not a genius and (b) it vindicates me of my dirty little secret that back in high school I got lower SAT scores than almost anybody I know. Around here (meaning the intellectually elitist “what school did you go to” northeast) people think I’m smart because I wrinkle up my forehead a lot and don’t talk much — generally because I don’t know what to say. Everywhere else they just think I’m weird.

But I do rather like the genius angle. It’s a very lofty notion. And it lends itself nicely to this pet fantasy that I harbor at times – such as when I’m playing at being an adult, which, as I’ve mentioned really sucks – that I’m destined to be, among other things, a brilliant investor.

Friday night, in my discouraged stubborn child I-will-NOT-move-to-the-suburbs pouting funk, I sat on the floor in front of our bedroom bookshelf and looked for a book I hadn’t read yet. There are a lot actually, because now the bookshelves contain all of Dennis’ books, in addition to all the books I buy and then forget to read. We have a lot of environmental books that Dennis acquired from working at Living On Earth, and we have a lot of travel books acquired from Savvy Traveler and a lot of money and investing books from Marketplace. (Now you know – where normal employees get stock options, National Public Radio employees get left over books.) I pulled one of the investing books off the bottom shelf and adopted it for the weekend.

For no other reason than because the author describes himself as a “stewer” with an almost limitless capacity for brooding and pondering and dwelling and hemming and hawing, re-examining and reconsidering and revisiting and just generally being as neurotic as me, I arrived at the conclusion, Aha! You see I am determined to be a brilliant investor, and here’s my plan…! And I then proceded to phone my father to tell him about my plans to invest the money he’d surely see fit to loan me to buy a house in Cambridge with a clawfoot tub.

And guess what? I’m really not a genius or a brilliant investor, I’m just a simpering little girl and I really, really, really hate this stupid grown-up thing. (Nope, my father didn’t see much sense in my vision, and we’re back to the old wait-and-see game.)

But hey, I’m getting married next year, and it’ll be a good party. What comes next is anybody’s guess.

used to be

Today was the first nice weekend in nearly two months. Beth came to visit following a conference in Portland. It’s been a while – I’d thought by moving to the northeast I’d see my friend all the time – tickets are cheap between DC and Boston – but it’s been over a year since I saw her last.

While I was at work yesterday she went to the yarn store in Harvard Square and bought me two pairs of knitting needles and a ball of purple mountain goat yarn. She said it was a belated, belated birthday present. I cooked chicken cacciatore and we drank wine and talked about things like her friend in DC who [sincerely] believes “we are what we buy,” and the frightening cost of real estate, and her upcoming wedding, and the new Coach bag she just bought, and the disarray of her friend Brie’s love-life, and her fiancé’s experiences year-two on the police force and then, somewhat drunkenly, she taught me to knit.

“Knit One, Purl Two,” Den contributed, quoting the Tweety Bird granny. We spent the evening curled up on the couch with wine and yarn and cats, Beth knitting a scarf for Lorin’s mother, me knitting a line, ripping it out, knitting two, starting over. “Knitting could be an analogy for the way one lives their life,” I observed, observing also that if I had a time machine I would probably spend my life going back in time to rip out and knit again entire years of imperfections. If I ever make it through an entire scarf, perhaps I will learn a little self-tolerance.

Today, at Beth’s request, we made a special trip to Christina’s Spice Shop, which I don’t visit nearly often enough considering it’s just a few doors down from 1369. I’m dying to find a recipe that calls for sumac, just because I know where I can buy it. Or Hawaiian pink sea salt, or juniper berries or huge bags of peppermint.

And I also took her to my favorite paper store where she happily browsed pretty velum stationary for hand-made wedding invitations. And I bought myself a new pen. And a card for Clem and his soon-to-be bride Brooke. The actual wedding cards were all sappy, so instead I bought him one that read:

“One of the hardest things to realize,” she said “is that our ‘someday’ is right now.” The trust that others place in you is your grace.

A nice weekend – I certainly don’t get enough female companionship anymore. Friendships just don’t grow like they did in my teens and twenties. But so exhausting. My energy reserves seem to get depleted so quickly these days. And extended social interaction drains me where it used to replenish

Used to be, wherever I happened to be living, I always had a confidante. Someone to whom I could pour out my soul, weep out my heart, without fear of judgment or disdain. Used to be I would talk freely, like a wind come from my soul, share and over-share unabashedly, unselfconsciously. Talked myself inside-out without ever pausing to think, “am I talking about myself too much?” Never did I politely – politely false – ask: “And what about you?” because I was in the moment back then, always and every moment, and I talked from the heart, talked what I felt in a great big gush, fully expecting my companion to also be in the moment, so that when a thought struck them they would pull the conversation back like bedcovers and ramble on equally self-centeredly about their own feelings and hopes and dreams and fears…to which I would listen attentively and then interrupt again when a new thought struck me …And so it would go, back and forth like racquet sport, and I would feel bonded, connected. Cathartic.

No more. Somewhere along the way my spirit of self-revelation got stifled. My soul sits like a lump in the back of my throat that I can’t swallow and can’t spit out. At some point during the awkward, precarious, sensitive years of my twenties I began to hear a certain refrain that I deemed unflattering: Heather talks about herself a lot. I don’t do that anymore, thank you very much.

Being an adult sucks. I don’t like being self-conscious of how I appear to others, or painfully aware of when others talk about themselves too much. I don’t like polite conversations that consist of questions about one’s new job/new house/new baby. I don’t like living adult realities. My own misgivings about my career or buying a house or investing or having kids or whatever are all quite real, but they lack the rawness and authenticity of those ethereal inside-out existential feelings I lived and breathed age sixteen to twenty-six.

All day I’ve been wanting to write with my new AG Spalding & Bros pen. It’s pretty and silver and has a satisfying heft. But I don’t write anymore. Used to be I kept journals – took them with me everywhere. I would sit in the sun on the library steps scribbling pages and pages of passion and angst. Used to be I wrote long letters on onion-skin airmail stationary in mocha brown ink with my special fountain pen. No more.

So tonight, after dropping Beth off at the airport, as Den napped on the couch, I sat outside eating an apple, reflecting on the remains of this first beautiful Saturday in over two months, and in the looming dusk I took out my new pen and my Moleskine pocket journal (which has only the first ten or so pages filled, mostly with lists and doodles and names of books I should read), and I began to write. And as pages filled up with my messy scrawl, I began to feel better.

A few spittles of rain splatter down onto my pages, leaving round runny spots in my prose. The kids next door shriek and giggle in their yard. The sky darkens to gray. In a minute I’ll go in and boil water for pasta. Heat up the left-over cacciatore that’s waiting in my big yellow pot. Eat a light supper. Do laundry. Go to a movie at the Kendall. Hope that tomorrow will be another beautiful day. Try to swallow down that lump of soul stuck in my throat.

jingle bell rock

Den just went out and got a new iPod for his Christmas music. 2,000 songs, 20 gigs. Nothing but. Yes, it’s nearly June. Den wants to know, does this make him a Geek? Or a Nerd? Or both?

spring

Today it was Spring. I drove to work with my sunroof open. I wore shoes without socks. I watched Spring unfold outside my window, stuck inside, hoping it would still be spring when the workday ended.

Today I got an editor at a big “chick book” interested in a high-end digital SLR camera. No small feat, I was on cloud 9 for an hour and a half. I then proceeded to call every single daily on the planet with non-newsworthy content for my other client, and got…zilch. Naturally. Today I loved my job and hated my job.

I drove home into a dusky sunset with my windows open and my heater on. Please let it be Spring through the weekend…

going nuclear

Today I did my political duty and spammed my friends with a plea to call their senators. I should add, I virtually never do this. I’m about as jaded and apathetic as they come. But last week I finally got off my apathetic ass and Den and I ventured out to a MoveOn.org house party. Admittedly my motivation was social more than political – I would never sign up to hand out flyers or knock on strangers’ doors, but I liked the sound of a house party. Plus, as I explained when I introduced myself and stated my purpose, I pitch consumerism for a living…I have to do something to redeem myself!

So anyway, the issue that I just spammed my friends about is this: our persistent ideologue pain-in-the-fucking-ass excuse for a president has just resubmitted 20 judicial nominees that the senate blocked last term. These kids have resumes 10 feet long filled with pandering to powerful special interests and good-deed-doing for extreme right-wing ideologues at the expense of ordinary Americans. The Dems are uniting to try to block them again, but this time they’re in the minority, albeit only just.

So how much do you know about how our government works? Myself, I don’t know much because my high school Civics and Free Enterprise class happened to be 6th hour and I always fell asleep with my head on my desk (causing ol’ Doc Laneau to rap a yard stick across my desk nearly every day, which had the effect of causing everyone in the class to jump except me… but that’s another story). Anyway, what I learned from my MoveOn party, that I didn’t learn from my high school Civics class, is that our system is designed such that, in order to avoid situations where a very slim majority (as we now have) might try to ram through extreme legislation or judges, the minority is given the right to filibuster to block nominations (and laws) that it feels are too extreme, thereby forcing compromise. Also known as the system of Checks And Balances (which I do vaguely remember from that boring Civics textbook of yore). Now, for what it’s worth, the filibuster tactic has been used almost exclusively by the conservative right over the past 100 years or so, and as a result we do not have such social niceties as universal health care and we do continue to have such debacles as an electorate system, which is to say, the filibuster has historically been a huge pain in the ass for the Democrats. But what comes around sometimes tends to go around, and now the conservative majority is finding itself on the other side of the filibustering game.

Oh, but no, the Reds, they don’t like this game so much now. Kind of a headache. Gums up the system. And in THESE TIMES OF TERRORISM yaddayaddayaddda. Nope, can’t have that. So Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is threatening to use a legal loophole to abolish the right to filibuster a Presidential judicial nomination. This tactic is sufficiently drastic as to be affectionately known as the “nuclear option.” If Frist uses the nuclear option, this would mean that Dumbass, I mean Bush, would be able to appoint whomever he damnwell chooses to lifetime judicial positions with as little as a 1 vote majority (which, by trick of our asinine electoral process, could be as little as 17% of the popular vote).

There are likely to be 2-4 vacancies on the Supreme Court in the next four years. The freaks of the extreme right are demanding that Frist pull the nuclear trigger now to clear a path through the Senate for a series of nominees in the mold of our favorite drinking buddies Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas (who happen to also be the most aggressive right-wing ideologues on the Court). This would have the potential to overturn more than 100 Supreme Court precedents affecting civil rights, civil liberties, environmental protections, privacy and reproductive rights, separation of church and state, workers’ rights, etcetcetc. A Scalia-Thomas majority could also go so far as to reinterpret the Commerce Clause, the Spending Clause and the 14th Amendment, to dismantle the bipartisan social justice achievements of the past seven decades and to eliminate the entire constitutional basis for future progressive initiatives.

Wanna know who’s up for vote? Well, there’s a William Myers III, who has in fact never been a judge, but does have top notch cred from his career as a lobbyist for the cattle and mining industry, and who has written that all habitat conservation laws are unconstitutional because they interfere with potential profit. Then there’s Terrence Boyle, who was once a legal aide to that kind and gentle soul Jesse Helms. Unlike Myers, Boyle has been a judge, however his rulings have been overturned a whopping 120 times by the conservative 4th District Court of Appeals. Some might think this is due to gross errors in judgment or simple incompetence, but we think he’s just misunderstood. So we’ll give him a pity vote for being such a loser. And then we’ve got the infamous William Pryor Jr., who during his term as Attorney General of Alabama took money from Phillip Morris and, naturally, since corporate money isn’t given out for free, fought against the anti-tobacco lawsuit. Pryor calls Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and has consistently argued against the federal protections for the civil rights of minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled.

So. If you didn’t get spammed by me today, do a good deed and give your Senator’s intern a call and tell him or her to log your opposition against use of the nuclear option and encourage your senator to support judges that aren’t assholes or fucking morons.

winter blues & the philosophy café

[Okay Annie, I’ll update my blog.]

Yes, it’s been a while. It’s been winter and I’ve been down,  kinda. I’ve always liked winter, but lately it just seems to go on a little too long. November, December, January – those are the good winter months. Christmas with my family and Den’s was good (no major bickering broke out between my mom and I this year). We got a blizzard for my birthday (my landlord cursed my name – literally – as he shoveled two feet of snow out of the driveway), and I finally felt justified to go out and buy a pair of Sorel boots for clomping around in the snow. February we went skiing with friends in Maine and rented a chalet in New Hampshire where we cooked dinner, drank wine, watched a bad movie and played dominos and some weird bean game. But March…March seems to get me every year. Two, three…or was it <em>four?</em>…more dumpings of snow just sucks when you’re living in the city. The neighbors get surly, leaving lawn furniture and trashcans weighted with bricks in their “claimed” parking spots; cars get encrusted with salt; you run out of wiper fluid half-way to work… Past February I just can’t find it in myself to enjoy winter anymore.

So I’ve been grumpy lately. The world outside my window looks ugly and grey. I resume my mutterings about moving to a new city (which, really, I have no business doing after dragging Den back from warm, sunny Los Angeles), and today even began two new diatribes about how much I hate above-ground power lines and my latest plan to move to Canada since the US is clearly heading in the direction of right-wing facism and consumer glut. But really it’s just the weather, as Den pointed out this morning as I sulked on the couch.

And the remedy is to get out of the house and fill one’s brain with things external to oneself, with the hope that there will be that much less room to fill with sulking and concocting extreme plots to dismantle the stability of one’s life.

A couple weeks ago we went to The Philosophy Café, which is a monthly open-to-the-public gathering at McIntyre & Moore booksellers in Davis Square. This was just the medicine my flailing spirit needed – a good esoteric debate for me to sink my sharp little teeth into. The topic was “Who Counts Morally?” and the mission was to determine whether there is a line between the rights of humans and animals, and if so where and how is it drawn, asking: if humans have rights, why? and what distinguishes them from animals? The discourse fluttered around notions of religion and soul, capacity to reason, ability to relate, ability to create. But these explanations seemed flabby to me, full of holes and question-begging. At every pause in the discussion my hand shot up like the too-eager kid in fourth grade…but for some reason the moderator just kept looking past me.

This was a topic that’s been circling in my head for years. At the end of high school I became a vegetarian, because of something I’d seen on 20/20 about the unsanitary procedures at meat-packing plants, topped off when, just a couple days later, I found a hairball in my hamburger and my mother swore she hadn’t dropped it on the floor. Then in college I read an essay in which the central argument amounted to, “if you can’t kill your own pig – experiencing both the life and the taking-of-life of the animal – then you have no business eating meat. This became the force behind my argument for being vegetarian, which I sustained for eight years, until I started getting monthly headaches that laid me out flat. In New Zealand I began eating meat again and the headaches disappeared. And in New Zealand I could argue that the animals were at least treated humanely — and not shot full of growth hormones and antibiotics — but now back home in the US I can’t, and yet I still eat meat.

So. Where does that leave me? A hypocrite in my own mind.

I will not be placated with the argument that “animals were put on earth to serve humans” or that “humans have souls and animals don’t” – both of which I think are assinine – in fact, this is the very reason that I rejected Christianity at the tender age of eight. (You better believe my cat’s going to heaven! Because if I have a soul my cat damn well does too!) But I never could believe in heaven, and although I will always insist that my little familiars have every bit as much spirituality as I do, I’m not at all sure that I actually believe I have a soul. I’d like to believe I have something more than the body I live in – as does my cat, as did that creature that once was a cow that reluctantly parted with its flesh for me to eat for lunch – but I can’t be sure, so as far as I’m concerned it’s all just wishful thinking, and the best I can do is respect life, for that may be all there is.

And because the food chain is inherent to existence, and nature was not designed with the principle of live and let live, I cannot apply the logic that all living creatures are sacred, thus making it is as wrong and cruel to kill a fish as a cow as a human fetus as an 18-year-old boy as a 31-year-old woman as a 93-year-old coma patient as a mosquito.

So instead I argue – and argued when finally an hour and a half later the moderator gave me a chance to speak – that there is no inherent morality. We have no inherent rights. The notion of rights is inextricably tied to religion. In actuality you can only have “the right to” what cannot be taken away – and life is not one of those things. The notion of rights is a luxury of self-actualization, created by us, through our language and our self-reflection.

What we do have, I argue, is a will, or desire, such as the will to live or the desire not to suffer. But to ensure that this desire is respected, the burden must be on the “doer.” As rational, reasonable, empathetic creatures we have a responsibility to be kind to the best of our ability, and to do unto others as we would have done unto us. And I would argue that this extends to animals, and that we have a responsibility (which we are failing to uphold) to not cause animals to suffer, just as we have a responsibility not to cause our fellow humans to suffer.

Having had so much time to percolate in my head, this little argument of mine had the effect of turning the nicely moderated discussion on its head. The discourse got a little unruly towards the end…which made it a whole lot more interesting.

After the discussion wrapped up, a Globe reporter that was doing a story on the Philosophy Café came over to where Den and I were sitting and took down our names. The story ran today and I even got my own pull-quote

going home again

Last weekend was Den’s birthday. We drove up to Vermont to visit his friend Merry in Middlebury, but spent most of the weekend in Burlington. I can’t believe it’s been 7 years since I’ve been back to Burlington! Den humored me as I scampered up and down Church Street in the cold, making detours on Cherry, Bank, College and Main Street, revisiting all my favorite haunts from my college days. Had to get sweet potato fries and an apple crumble with Ben & Jerry’s and cheddar cheese at the Vermont Pub and Brewery. Gone was my favorite Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, but the Vermont Smoked Porter wasn’t a bad substitute. Paid a visit to Speeder & Earl’s for a Clockwork Orange (espresso and hot chocolate with orange peel and almond Torani syrup). Visited Old Gold – the best vintage shop EVER, where I got my Schott leather jacket that my parents spent years trying to get rid of (unsuccessfully). Had Dim Sum at my beloved Five Spice Café, where Den watched with glee as the waitstaff sang Happy Birthday to the wrong table (we set them straight in time to rescue our cake). Then we returned to Five Spice again for dinner because I couldn’t leave Burlington without having their Pad Thai and Jerry’s special red snapper, which is now tilapia because snapper is being over-fished, but which is still every bit as good as I remember.

Stopped in at Ecco because it had been Beth’s favorite dress shop back before we moved to London. She had fallen in love with a white silk dress that she nearly bought with the justification that she could get married in it someday. Now, some 5 boyfriends later, she is getting married and I couldn’t resist peeking in to see whether, against all odds, the dress might still be there. Of course it wasn’t. I also have an Ecco dress with a story, a slinky black evening gown that Jay had bought for me as part of a surprise graduation present to wear to Phantom of the Opera in New York, not quite realizing in his provincial Vermont way that nobody really wears evening gowns to see Broadway shows. Wandered into Pier 1 – one of the very, very few remaining privately owned franchise stores (most are corporate owned now) – where I worked my last few months in Burlington, in addition to waiting tables, trying to save enough money to make my way to London in some semblance of style (all that money was gone within 2 weeks of London). Frank, the owner, greeted us but, not surprisingly, didn’t remember me.

Acquainted Den with Pure Pop, to see whether Burlington would pass muster in his eyes, measured by the quality of its indy record store. It did. Whiled away an hour in Bennington Potters, where Merry became determined to buy a banged up antique couch that wasn’t for sale.

Den bought Merry a book from The Crow, where I learned the fate of Chassman & Bem – a locally owned bookstore that had been a fixture on Church Street – like so many other small quaint and quirky bookstores, they were driven out by the behemoth, packed up and left as soon as they heard Border’s was coming to townz. Goddam Borders! I swear I’ll never buy a book at Borders again.

The Origanum health food store is gone from Main Street, replaced by a new Onion River Co-op. But the new co-op is fabulous so we don’t have any hard feelings there (plus Den found a bottle of blueberry wine, which is huge in satisfying Den’s unquenchable craving for blueberries). Vermont Pasta Company, the first restaurant I ate at in Burlington when my parents drove me up for college, is also gone, replaced by something called SmokeJack’s. And Sweet Tomatoes has strangely become Three Tomatoes.

In addition to the despised Borders, an Old Navy moved in (to where Woolworth’s used to be) along with the usual mall suspects of JCrew, Pottery Barn, etc. And of course there’s a Starbucks now. But Muddy Waters is still thriving on Main Street – all that a perfect coffeehouse should be, with it’s rustic décor, comfy chairs and couches, shelves of books for the borrowing, and even a few beers on tap – and of course we spent more than a couple hours there contentedly lounging with our newspapers and coffee. And Sweetwaters is still there, and Nectar’s – of course – and The Daily Planet, and Ken’s Pizza, and the Church Street Tavern and Leunigs (where I promised Den blueberry pancakes, but they weren’t serving breakfast when we went in, so we had pancakes and omelets and hot chocolate at the iconic Henry’s Diner instead).

We didn’t have time for dinner at Trattoria Delia, which had been my favorite restaurant whenever my parents came to visit, since as a student I couldn’t otherwise afford it. I’ll have to return with my parents sometime, so my mom can have her favorite Pond-Fed Swordfish. There’s a story behind that. My mother, who with every year becomes more of a pain-in-the-ass to take to restaurants, couldn’t find a single thing she wanted to eat on this incredible Italian menu, what with her worries about dioxin and fat and pesticides and hormones and mercury. The mercury was at the top of her most vocal concerns that particular evening, because she really wanted the fish, but… and so, without even so much as cracking a smile, the waitress reassured her that there was no need to worry about mercury in the fish because this particular variety was pond-fed swordfish. At which my mother instantly brightened and said, “wonderful! I’ll have the swordfish,” happily oblivious as my father and I snickered and cajoled. Seldom do we go to a restaurant as a family that the pond-fed swordfish incident isn’t brought up.

The whole time I’ve been in Boston I’ve ached to get back to Burlington, but somehow the opportunity just never presented itself. And I fretted over how they always say “you can never go home again” – I don’t know anyone in Burlington anymore (even Jay has moved away, and I long ago lost contact with him anyway), nor am I even the same person I was when I last lived there. And I guess it’s true that you can’t go home again, in that I could never return to that place in time, that old Heather still in school, still naïve of all the experiences and travels and heartaches that I’ve come to embody these last 7, 10, 12 years. But there’s something so exquisitely comforting about returning to a place that once was home, and that has been long cherished as a memory, to find that you can suddenly reach out and touch it. In all the places I’ve lived, only two cities have ever really felt like home – in that way that you can leave a place and return and feel welcomed back: Burlington and Edinburgh. I haven’t been back to Edinburgh either, and it haunts me with memories so poignant it seems I could just step back into them. I’ll never be able to live in Edinburgh again, and I think that’s what prevents me from visiting – the fear that I might love it too much, because I desperately didn’t want to leave that city when my year came to an end. But I could live in Burlington again. Maybe not now – for career reasons – but someday. This is a city that speaks to my soul in a way that Boston, even Cambridge, just never has.