Comma Dot Comma

Yesterday I re-inaugurated my tradition of solo picnic lunches.  There is a wide-branched pine tree on a grassy hillside near my work, just out of view of sidewalks and the road, and I unfold beneath it the giant sarong I won at a raffle one time.  It has tassles and maybe 17 different colors, so I don’t wear it around much. I mostly just recline upon it beneath the shady tree. Last summer there was a guy who practiced his sax solos in a nearby gazebo, but he was in absentia this time so the breeze was the only thing floating in my direction.  I ate some pasta salad, cut up a fresh farmer’s market tomato and salted and peppered it and promptly consumed it, dabbing my mouth afterwards with a cloth napkin.  Once you’ve used a good cloth napkin it’s hard to put up with harsh bleached paper napkins.  I drank my ice water and leaned back with my book for a few minutes, then drifted into dreamland for 20 minutes or so.  Long live the full-hour lunch.

Shannon G.

Ages 5-8. She lived a few houses away, and she had long black curly hair and a birthmark by her eye. We walked to kindergarten together, down the block and through a stand of pine trees, but somehow we could never make it on time. Once we showed up an hour late, having been distracted by the aliens and princes and flowers and spies and butterflies in those pines. My mom called us her “little space cadets.”

Amy I.

Ages 10-14. Amy and I only lived in the same town for a few years, but after sixth grade we relied on weekend visits to get us through the long middle school years. She remained faithful even after I punched and kicked her in the field trip line one time. Lucky for me she was too surprised to fight back, tall blond athelete that she was. I found her on the playground and apologized. Once we ate all the meat off of a plate of chicken wings and put the gnawed bones back in the refrigerator.

Gloria W.

Ages 15-16. I moved to a new town in 9th grade and Gloria found me. She could secure all of her shiny dark hair in a bun with just a pencil. At lunch we would walk nonchalantly around the basketball court where the cute boys played. We wrote each other elaborate notes in school, using various colors of pen, but she would never tell me her grades. When she got her driver’s license, she’d drive me places, and I’d have to crouch down below eye-level in case her mom should happen to go by.

Lydia A.

Ages 18-19. Lydia lived across the hall from me in the dorm my freshman year of college. We combined our funds to get giant packages of licorice and cereal at Costco and wandered in and out of each other’s rooms at will. We went to the dining hall together, discovered email together (1993!), and joined campus clubs together. Once when we were playing truth or dare Lydia put on coveralls and rapped on the R.A.’s door. “Maintenance!” she said. She climbed up on a chair in his room and unscrewed the cover of the central air vent, said thanks, and left, carrying it under her arm. A champion moment!

“I believe in the holiness of the human person and of humanity as a phenomenon. I believe our failings, which are very great and very grave– after all, we have brought ourselves to the point of possible self-annihilation– are a cosmic mystery, a Luciferian disaster, the fall of the brightest angel. That is to say, at best and at worst we are within the field of sacred meaning, holy. I believe holiness is a given of our being that, essentially, we cannot add to or diminish, whose character and reality are fully known only to God and are fully valued only by him.”

–Marilynne Robinson, in “Onward, Christian Liberals,” The American Scholar, v 75 n 2.

Take a 5 pound mound of raw hamburger, 80 to 90 percent lean, and set it on a tray covered with waxed paper then cheese cloth.  Pat the hamburger into the shape of a daisy and store the tray in a cool, dry place such as a closet (It is necessary to avoid overstimulating the hamburger).

Once a day, open the door of the closet and throw in handfuls of chopped fresh cilantro, cats eye marbles, ketchup, and eyelet lace.  If, after throwing in one handful of each, you hear the daisy say thank you, double the amount and sing as you throw it.  If you hear nothing, verbally abuse the daisy and slam the door behind you.  Eventually, the daisy may sing the low part of “Roll With It” while you sing the high part.

Do not, under any circumstances, let the daisy out of the closet.  Drizzle it with vinagrette. Decide if it is amenable to tortillas.  If so, you’re 90 percent of the way to Schubble Roll-ups.  Congratulations.

So medieval! (Pics courtesy of Dr. G’s sister, Marie)

It’s good to have two kinds of friends: first, the kind that  understands your history and perspective and helps you stay true to your core values; second, the kind that challenges you to go beyond your comfort zone with new experiences and ways of thinking. (I guess if you find both in one person, you should get married to him/her.)

My fabulous friend Deborah falls mainly in the second category, and over the past few years I’ve learned that when she’s got something in the works, it’s going to be exciting. On Wednesday she invited me to be her date for an awards ceremony and soiree down in DC. Her fascinating book, The Riddle of Gender, was up for an award from the Lambda Literary Foundation, which supports LGBT literature. She offered me the chance to hobnob with celebrities, to don a lovely cocktail dress and partake of a buffet and an open bar. I said yes immediately!

Now, the folks I run with tend to be pretty mainstream in terms of gender and sexuality, and I was sort of looking forward to being the odd one out at this shindig. It was fun to imagine how confusing a pair Deborah and I might make– people commonly assumed, while she was writing her science/history/creative nonfiction book about gender, that she herself must be transgender, when in fact she is quite unequivocally a heterosexual woman. In this context, the simplest explanation– two platonic women friends– was likely to be among the last that anyone would hit upon.

I also wondered how uncomfortable I would be. Lambda is primarily an activist organization, and I find that whenever I am among a group of people united by ideology or mission, the people in the group tend to assume that I share their views, or else I wouldn’t be there. This can sometimes make conversation difficult. My views on the intersection of sexuality, gender, society, and religion are both poorly formed and complicated, so I decided I would go primarily as an observer, to root for Deborah and take many many pictures of her in her gorgeous gossamer-light dress with beaded bodice and her matching pointy silver shoes with tiny flowers.

We got there a bit late. There were not enough folding chairs. There was much hoity-toity speechifying. There was much beseeching about raffle tickets, finally followed by the giving of the awards, and the book titles and jackets (projected as a powerpoint presentation) proved to be the most interesting part of the whole thing. Alas, Riddle of Gender did not win, and afterwards we hung out for awhile by the food, chatting with a fellow (non-winning) finalist and his girlfriend. I started to feel better once I got into the food and drink. The open bar didn’t skimp on quality of the wine and I saw some impressive liquor bottles there as well. The caterers brought out tray after tray of chocolate-dipped strawberries and chewy brownies dusted in cocoa powder. There were about seven kinds of dips and tapanades for one’s bread, vegetables, fruits, and meat skewers. I indulged in much scarfing, and also in the observation that Deborah and I were perhaps the best-dressed people there (I wore a basic black cocktail dress but I had a fancy shawl thing with it). After a suitable interval we resolved to go be the best-dressed people somewhere else, too.

We decided to catch part of the Liars show at the Black Cat, and stood there glittering with our high heels and bottled water and tiny purses, right among the billows of cigarette smoke and too-small vintage T-Shirts. The band had a Jesusy-looking lead singer with a guitar, one main drummer, and a second guy who mostly did additional drums, but also ventured into sound loops and backup vocals. They relied quite a bit on interesting noises and wailing. It was entrancing, in a way, but the trance wore off after five or six songs and I was getting dizzy from the smoke and it was time to go.

Here is the list of some of the topics Deborah and I managed to discuss on our busy evening out:

• attracting crazies
• driving with confidence
• why trans-men end up with such awesome girlfriends
• Dundalk
• Israel-Palestine conflict
• death and the afterlife
• burial at sea
• eating fruit from a tree growing over a grave
• political power-grabbing
• what part of the body we wouldn’t mind getting cut off
• plastic surgery
• fashion
• the role of religion in the public sphere
• do-gooderism
• attracting crazies
• men as providers
• spiritual health
• Jesus vs Paul
• gender roles
• opportunities to look and act like a princess
• New York City
• Phoenix
• Lawrence Fishburne vs Bill Murray
• Buying vs Renting
• Having enough money

It was fun.

First off, “very cognitive!” is not an appropriate use of the adjective cognitive.   Second, my name is not Jane.  Third, and most importantly, no one sees your comments except me.  So even if you send 76 comments one night and 187 the next, no one will be able to buy your illegal prescription drugs.  Let me explain how this works:

10:01  Check email– oops! 187 comments to moderate!

10:02 Login to Wordpress and scroll down through comments

10:02 and 15 seconds: click “mark all for deletion” followed by “moderate comments.”
See?  It’s not even hard!  And if by chance you find a way around the built-in spam protection, I will just spend five minutes adding a free yet fancy anti-spam plugin and you will be back to square one.

Finally, and this will definitely be of interest to you, my comments moderator tells me where you are and what computer you are using, so don’t think that an email address such as “mike@gmail.com” is disguising your identity.  Lucky for you I am a fairly benign blogger.

There was only one route to walk to and from school, which took all the fun out of walking. On one side of the street was a tall cliff, netted to catch falling rock. On the other side of the street the houses and alleys were fenced in with razor wire. To live there you had to have a special remote control for the razor-wire gate and a regular one for the garage door. The town had planned it that way to prevent predators from gaining access to the children. Chelsea, a student at the school, liked it when base jumpers dropped from the cliff into the school yard; she helped them fold their parachutes. The base jumpers carefully calculated their stunts to moments when no one was looking out the school windows, but Chelsea was an attentive student and she noticed when chute shadows dimmed the classroom. She resolved one day, while on the long straight boring walk home, to only marry a man who shared her views on both clapping and clapboard houses. This vow caused her trouble as an adult because most men couldn’t recognize a clapboard house* if it clapped its boards in their faces, let alone develop unorothodox opinions about it. Chelsea wished she had had the foresight to resolve something more related to folding things, or to beverages.

*This is a clapboard: