Eagles

(Note to the children in the audience. This blog post uses a word derived most likely from a Swedish word meaning to strike or push. If this is a problem for your interwebz censors, stop reading.)

I am pretentious as hell. (I don't know if you noticed with my last post on gerunds.) I walk around using phrases like "spring term" and "to wit" because I read the Chronicles of Narnia too many times as a child and apparently think I'm an upper-crust British lass.

That said, there are brief (but all-too-frequent) moments when I grow perversely, irrationally irate and full of patriotic fervor. These are the moments when some very nice person full of personhood and valuable values walks down the street (or, say, the terminal in the Honolulu Airport), minding his/her/zer own business, imbued with different cultural norms than those with which I was raised. As a result, this person walks down the left side of the street. My immediate reaction, particularly upon encountering this person face-to-face at all-too-little distance, is to mentally shout, "THIS IS AMURRICA, GARDANGIT!"

BALD EAGLE!

AMERICAN CULTURAL HEGEMONY!

For the love of all that is holy, walk down the right -- both right-hand and correct -- side of whatever throughway you are traveling.

Then I calm down and realize that this is foolish. After all, these persons are simply locomoting to someplace just as important as I, and why should my cultural spacial norms prevail? CUZ THIS IS 'MURRICA! Okay, whoo, I calmed down.

Enough to wonder: Do you suppose that the eagle is embarrassed with that name?

 "The correct term is not bald. It's receding hairline. Asshole."

On that same subject, the eagle is also probably pretty pissed about being exploited in every advertising item sent out by the Tea Party EVER ( "I AM THE TEA PARTY." ).

"HEY your people want to cut environmental funding - which has kept me alive - ENTIRELY. So fuck you, you patriotic fucks. I don't even LIKE tea."

Fun with Gerunds!

Welcome to an interactive (kind of) grammar lesson.

A gerund is a verb, ending in -ing, used as a noun.

For example,

"Playing the clarinet is fun." Playing is the noun in that sentence.

"I enjoy eating peanut butter." Eating is the primary object noun in that sentence.

"Mouth-breathing and close talking are obnoxious." Mouth-breathing and talking are the nouns in that sentence.

Therefore, when you modify the sentence with the person doing it, you have to use the possessive, as in,
 "His playing the clarinet is fun for him!" or
"My eating peanut butter makes me very happy," or
"Your mouth-breathing and close talking make me
want to both hold your lips closed and
run away with equal fervency."

Most people, however, string their nouns together willy nilly.

"You mouth breathing is annoying." ALL KINDS OF NOUNS
"Him playing the violin is loud." WHAT THE HELL IS HIM PLAYING? What sort of playing is "him"? I hope it's nice, since it's so loud.

So when someone very kindly says, "I appreciate you noticing," that's like saying, "I like you essay," or "You late arrival is annoying."

You might say to me, "Thank you, Katherine. I appreciate you teaching me about gerunds."

And here I would imagine the little stick with the apple on the end that all my elementary school teachers had for some reason, and I would imagine whacking you with it.

You appreciate MY teaching you about gerunds.

The teaching is mine.

Twit Face

Today's front page revelation from D.C.'s preeminent political newspaper, Politico, is that lobbyists are not down with being up on their social media. The article suggests that it's strange for this center of national power to have so little presence on the world's most popular form of media, the constant barage of updates from Facebook and Twitter. As the author puts it,

About half of the year's top-grossing lobby shops have no discernible presence on either Facebook or Twitter, the nation's two most popular social-media sites, a POLITICO analysis* indicates. Most of the rest have two- or three-figure followings that would embarrass a not-particularly-popular ninth-grader. 

It isn't surprising, given the audience for Politico (I picked up mine at my friendly local Starbucks, nestled comfortably between K Street and the IMF, whilst ordering a Dirty Hipster) that the artcile focused on the loss to public relations specialists of a potential power source at the public square that is the interwebz. What is surprising is that message's provenance in Dave Levinthal, a former Communications Director at the Center for Responsive Politics, which claims its mission as "to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry and a more transparent and responsive government."

The fact lobbyists don't yet understand the Twitterz while elected officials have begun to is a positive sign that there is an area of public life untouched by the enormous quantities of money spent shaping public policy. However, it also means that the Facebook-friendless lobbyists are still doing their work behind closed doors, in the computer-free smoke-filled back rooms of yore. That is the true concern: not the impact that Farragut North is failing to make 140 characters at a time on an iPhone-glued electorate, but the impact they continue to make outside the scrutiny of a public that, to its credit, is a greater fan of the President than of Katy Perry.

So pursue your right to e-rage, or better yet, engage in a reasoned, populist discourse, and Tweet Dave.

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* I understand "POLITICO analysis" to mean "an intern counted." I do, however, want to credit Dave and his copy editor for their excellent hyphen usage.

We Reuned.

There is nothing to make one feel tan and svelte like spending a weekend at the Mall of America, where my maternal family celebrated a reunion.  However, I learned there an important lesson about weight on log flumes.  My brother-in-law went with my nephew, and said I would get just a splash, "Like when you spill water on yourself."  (Yes, this happens more often than I am comfortable admitting.)  However, when my brother-in-law, my sister, my nephew, and I went on the log flume together, we got SOAKED.  Well, let me clarify: I got soaked.  If my sister and brother-in-law got a Methodist baptism, my nephew and I got the full on, Disciples of Christ, believer's dunking.  In the name of the Creator, the Christ, and the Holy SPIRIT of consumerism.  Fortunately, we were in a mall.  So I squished over to Old Navy and bought myself a dry outfit; I'd been wanting a pair of goucho pants anyway.

Lovegood

It is weird that people are dressing up to go see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.  There is, in fact, something definitively creepy about being in one’s mid-twenties and putting on a schoolgirl costume to go see a children’s movie.  However, there is a story behind that utter strangeness for every one of those weirdos.

I have sharply colored memories of my mother handing me the first Harry Potter book as I was finishing sixth grade, just after I turned twelve.  During middle school, that universally awful period through which we all apparently must suffer to become functioning adults,  I followed a bereft tween as he fought against bullying peers and a bullying teacher and the bullying world and found himself able to meet the challenge with a flick of the wand, and found myself with him.  Two days later, when I had devoured the first book, my mother brought home the second, picked up on another lunch hour run to Barnes and Noble, a boon to a child in the shadows of an accomplished, beautiful social butterfly of a sister graduating from high school.  She handed it over with a warning that she would not be buying me a thirty dollar book every week for the rest of the summer.

No matter – by the time I scorched through that second book, and then read them both again, I was ready the following year to buy the third book with my own money on the day it came out.  The books came out more or less once a year, and so as Harry aged, as his emotional maturity grew and his way of understanding the world, its beauty and its evils, became more complex, so did I grow with him.

There are tens of millions of kids – nerds and cool kids alike – who have found a piece of themselves in this series, and at least thousands of us who lived along with Harry, starting at age 11 and coming out at the end, somehow as adults.  Those of us who were born 24 years ago grew up with Harry, and we are coming of age with him.  So I will walk to the theater this evening with my fellow nerds, those of us who could not join the throngs of teenagers at last night’s midnight showing because we had to be at work at 8 this morning.  I will don my Hogwarts uniform (Without telling him why, I asked my housemate if he had a stripey tie I could borrow.  Without blinking, he asked, "What House are you representing?"), to relish the whimsy of being young and alive but also to be representative of a million iconoclasts.  We are not a generation that insists on living in a fantasy, refusing to acknowledge the real world; we are the generation that formed a social justice movement using the inspiration of fantasy to fight real-world evil.  We are not failing to grow up; we have just been waiting for our hero to grow up with us.

An Anti-Sorkin Polemic

Most women, given the opportunity, will blame their misguided notions of romance on the Disney movies, which taught them to look for a prince they would know from their dreams and his white horse.  They may too lay fault with those winsome leading ladies with surnames that sound like men's first names (Roberts or Ryan) or means of inducing impotence (Bullock or Witherspoon).  These women showed us a world in which beautiful men with two first names are unassuming and principled purveyors of the written word.


These romps through fantasy and folly are not my downfall, however.  The devious, dastardly screenwriter responsible for my epically unrealistic expectations of the dating scene is none other than Aaron Sorkin.  Not only does he play to my secret desire to cause political scandal and shake up American politics with my romantic endeavors, he lures me in with rapid-fire, vocabulary-intense dialogue that makes me think what I'm watching is deeply thoughtful and high-minded.  Philosophical even.


But Aaron pulls the same tricks as the Nora Ephrons of the world, on an even grander scale.  She made you want a witty New Yorker who just needed the love of a good woman?  He made me want a man who would risk his journalistic and political career because he found my insults to his character and competence endearing.  A man who would send me absurd tokens of his love at work.  A man who would come to see the brilliance of my well-justified political opinion and stand up for me and for love before a rapt American populace to defend truth, honor, justice, and reduced fossil fuel emissions.  He's humble and eager to please in bed and controls the 82nd Airborne (though he is loathe to use violence).


If you've got five minutes, watch this speech, and tell me you don't want to get in his presidential pants.





And keep a look out for that man for me.  I'm right here in DC, and my six home states and many favorite foods and flowers make me very convenient to woo.  Just send over some gerber daisies with that nice Marine regiment you've got and it's a date.

Civil Rights

I work in an office that ensures the fulfillment of people's civil rights.  I work with a lot of people who have been victims of discrimination because of their skin color or disability or accent.

I also spend a lot of time participating in conversations punctuated with, "It's okay, I can say that.  I work for civil rights."

This was one such conversation:

Colleague:  "I don't think I'd want a guide dog.  Or any non-human guide really.  I mean, I love my cat, but I don't want her to lead me to WalMart."

In my head:

As our conversation meandered onto other topics, we got to talking about compost worms.  (Yes, I am a hippie, and I compost in my backyard.)  I was extolling the virtues of worms and their ability to divide and  reproduce to a sustainable level in proportion to the food available.  Sharing my wonder, she cried, "Maybe worms should be the guides!"

In case you can't tell, that's a guide worm.

The conversation continued away from this topic, thankfully, to a discussion of minority communities.  In a final moment of truly fine political correctness, she ejaculated, "I just don't get some communities.  Like, for example..."  With a furtive glance to see if anyone was listening, she stage-whispered, "Deaf people!"

I'm not really sure what her point was going to be, as I dissolved into paroxysms of laughter at her great care to make sure that the deaf weren't listening to her comment.

Uniform Reporting

Our nation's capital does not publish statistics on sexual assaults committed inside the District.

I came across this fact while trying to provide some context for the women around the country who are participating in this year's V-Day campaign to end violence against women.  Hundreds of women are practicing their moans and mustering the dignity required to perform about hair and clitorises and genocide, and there are places in the Vagina Monologues script to insert local and current statistics about rape and sexual assault.  It was my hope to try and find estimates of total sexual assault survivors in the District of Columbia and to note the number of sexual assaults counted by DC police.

The national agency that provides crime statistics, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics uses a widely accepted definition of sexual assault that includes forced sex and other kinds of unwanted sexual contact, which they then parse down into legal subcategories.  DC's Metro Police Department, however, uses the FBI's Universal Crime Reporting guidelines, which only include "forcible rape,"  or "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will."

This "forcible rape" definition is the one some members of Congress want to use in defining how federal tax dollars can be spent on abortions.  My first question on hearing this proposal was, "What the hell is rape if it's not forcible?"  The answer to that question is a definition that excludes date rape, statutory rape, alcohol-related rape, sexual assault against men, and incest in which the woman was not beaten.  Leaving aside the abortion and federal funding debates for a moment (though if you have not seen it, you should watch the Daily Show's fantastic commentary on the proposal), how is this 1930s definition of rape (the one used verbatim in To Kill a Mockingbird) useful in preventing sexual violence?

On an empowering note, there are ways you can help stop sexual assault and violence against women.  Attend your local production of the Vagina Monologues.  If you're in our nation's beautiful (non-sex-crime-reporting) capital, come out to see V-Day DC's production, in which I will be a cast member.  Volunteer at your local rape crisis center or an international agency that works on women's issues.  And talk to your children/nieces/nephews/students/friends about consent, so that sexual assault survivors will be fewer and more likely to report the crimes against them.

(And for an interesting article about talking to kids that I couldn't tie into this post, check out Jim Wallis's blog.)