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September 26th, 2008
11:56 am - workin' on the clampdown
Yes, I realize that the quote/title above is entirely inappropriate and Joe Strummer is spinning in his grave, et cetera.
Anyway. A series of unrelated events over the past week led me to realize how uncomfortable I am right now with the assorted ways I have of disseminating information. Right now, although there is gas in my car, my father-in-law is home, and the holders of my money seem relatively solvent, I am feeling a rather severe control deficit. This feeling of loss of control is why I still don't feel comfortable getting on planes, why I feel a twinge of guilt at my irresponsibility for spending $10 on lunch, and why stuff that would not have registered on my radar five years ago bothers me now. And while I cannot heal Henry, save Washington Mutual, or get through the semester any faster, I can at least increase control of who is listening when I go off on some random and potentially unflattering (or worse, confidence-betraying) tangent.
So: next Friday this journal is going away. Not "going to friends-locked." Away, period, full stop. I think that will mean that my comments on other people's entries stay but other people's comments on my entries go away. I have tried to back up/export as best I can, but I'm giving the one-week warning so that if there was a conversation you want to make sure gets preserved, you can. The Facebook account is not going away but a lot of the groups and such are being pared back.
Let me make one thing clear: I am not making some Grand Moral Statement that LJ=Bad!. I am also not swearing that I won't pop up again at some point, or that I won't change my mind and just let the journal sit dormant for a while. I don't think LJ is bad. It's been very, very good for keeping up with people from whom I might not hear very often. I'm just thinking it's not that helpful for me right at the moment.
Current Mood:  worried
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September 19th, 2008
10:56 am - Marie Harbour, nee Scrimpshire, 1925-2008
I believe my cousin Adam wrote the obituary. The photograph is probably from the early 1980s.
Her journey was longer than it should have been, frankly. She was enjoying life less and less the year before my uncle David died, and once he went -- some fiftysomething years after the doctors initially predicted he would -- she didn't have anything to fight for anymore. In the last year she was apparently not able to talk much; and she was not a quiet woman by nature. If anyone is better off on the other side, she is.
So I am not crying much and I am still going to be partying this weekend.
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September 15th, 2008
10:20 pm - a confession
I've read the Economist summary, the Times summary, the Times blog, a blog linked to by the Times blog, and the WSJ, and I still cannot coherently explain why Lehman Brothers is going down with "Nearer My God to Thee" blaring. The hot, hot husband and I discussed it at dinner, and when we got to CDOs, we more or less gave up and contented ourselves with imagining the conversation between Lehman and my laconic brother-in-law as Secretary of the Treasury.
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September 13th, 2008
03:13 pm - Twitter will break your heart
...if you're following the feeds coming out of Galveston.
I hope all your Galveston/Houston/Port Arthur/SE TX coast/LA friends are safe and well and not dealing with more than a lack of power (which right now is pain in the ass enough). If you don't know, try the Red Cross's "Report Myself Safe and Well" page.
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September 11th, 2008
05:22 pm - seven years ago today
...we tried to give blood at the Citicorp Center at Lexington and 59th, and then at Lenox Hill Hospital (where I was born) further up the East Side. We didn't make progress in either place, because there were lines.
I am awfully glad that the rate of attacks seems to have slowed.
I am still not sure if I can give blood, by the way. The Red Cross is most unhelpful on Eligibility If You Were Previously Pumped Full of an HIV Vaccine That Didn't Pan Out. Those of y'all who can, reportedly Georgia is running a bit low on blood as well as water.
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September 8th, 2008
10:45 pm - things are grave, but
there is room for frivolousness.
As in: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) rwdrake is shaking his head as usual about These Kids Today and their Terrible, Terrible Music. And yes, I ought to listen to Nellie McKay and Kool Keith and get Erykah Badu's new album and go up to bchan at AWA* and get her to sign my stomach or something. And certainly not think I am suddenly The Bomb for knowing that the lead singer of Rilo Kiley was previously the girl in The Wizard, as seen in the theater by a then-Fred-Savage-crushing-on me.
But: I really do like "Lollipop." No, I do. It seems like the absolute perfect song for 3 am Interstate driving. It's like Dirty Vegas is all, "We missed you too, honey, but you're in Atlanta, for Pete's sake. You really ought to listen to hip-hop that did not originate from your future fourth husband Andre Benjamin and his on-again off-again partner."
* = my and Mike's presence at AWA, as with pretty much everything for the immediate forseeable short-term, is contingent on the graver stuff, which I do not feel like talking about in this post.
Current Music: she even wear her hair down her back like mine
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September 5th, 2008
10:16 am - for my NY friends: missing person alert
Copied from Tomato Nation::
Hannah Emily Upp, 23, has been missing since Friday, August 29, from her residence in the vicinity of Hamilton Terrace, Harlem. Hannah is a New York City Public School teacher; she teaches middle school Spanish at Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change, at W. 135th and 7th Ave. A recent graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Class of 2007, majoring in Spanish and Comparative Literature, she is a New York City Teaching Fellow, working on her Master's degree at Pace University and teaching full time. She completed her first year of teaching 2007-08, and was about to start her second year of teaching when she went missing.
Anyone with any information is asked to contact Detective Perez, 30th Precinct Detective Squad, at 212-690-8842, or 212-690-8843.
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August 28th, 2008
11:07 pm - instant speech reaction
A for rhetorical flourish -- I was nearly tearing up at the end. Also A for the part about his grandmother and the applause, which should serve as a nice balance to the accusations of him throwing her under the bus in the spring.
B- for not saying anything about ending the drug war (I may have missed it, and it's not entirely fair to expect such a thing anyway). (Edited to add: decafdyke reminded me this is not an issue Obama should be bringing up. Grade changed to B- for not saying much about civil liberties.)
C- for policy prescriptions. I don't see us fixing health care, saving Social Security, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil while still coming in under budget by using the Dave approach to federal accounting. More seriously, just as the Kerry/Edwards promises to the airlines annoyed the crap out of me four years ago, I cringed at the line about supporting Detroit. I want a Chevy Volt as much as the next person (especially since the Honda Fit-brid will not be sold in the US), but it's hard -- or should be hard -- railing on corporations for 95% of your speech and spend the other 5% promising money to Detroit and farmers.
F for the line, "I don't know of anyone who benefits when an employer undercuts a worker's pay by hiring an illegal immigrant." But I'm the only person who's going to be bothered by that one.
It was too rally-the-party-faithful for my taste. But I can understand that if you stood in line for multiple hours to hear the man, you wouldn't want him to take the throw-out-the-losing-bathwater-and-hope-to-keep-the-baby approach that David Cameron has taken with the Tories.
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August 4th, 2008
10:51 pm - on the Olympics
My feeling is, either call it a thin shiny veneer on a big ol' cesspool and write it out of your life, or admit that you love the sports silliness so much that you must confess to choking up upon seeing this video, despite not having watched it live at the time, and despite its bringing the realization that people complain about the commercialism and the bombing because they are too polite to say, "WTF with the Khaki Shorts Olympics?". No matter where the Games end up, it still results in governments spending too much money (or in the Atlanta case, corporations spending too much money) to inconvenience the living fuck out of their residents for the sake of a big empty show.
But declaring that this Olympics is beyond the pale because China is the host is oversimplifying things, is my feeling. If it were the CCP on one side and the Parade of Mostly More Democratic and Less Inclined to Censor Local Media Nations on the other, then it would be this simple. The problem is that such a matchup leaves out the 1.4 billion and counting people who will be watching with varying degrees of national pride. It may be possible to boycott the Olympics, or mount a general criticism of China, and not arouse a feeling of defensiveness in many of said 1.4 billion, but I'm not sure how. Hell, I'm still defensive about our Olympics, and the worst we did was ship the homeless to Tennessee for a while and put up more Coke signs than is usual.
It should be noted at this point that Wei Jingsheng feels differently, and Wei Jingsheng is one of the people I admire most in the world. China Labor Bulletin (founded by another hero, Han Dongfang) is not so hot on the Olympics either. So if I watch the opening ceremonies live Friday morning, as I have already asked a (Chinese) classmate about doing, I am not on particularly good moral ground.
What I am having trouble with are the thousands of Chinese -- thousands being not much among 1.4 billion, but thousands nonetheless -- who, for the first time in the 60-year history of Communist China, can pretty much ignore the dead hand of the state. Firewalls? They know how to get around them. Hukou permits? A minor annoyance. One-child policy? Ignored, if you pay the right bribes. Censorship? A professor at Peking University (or Beida, if you prefer) can tell the New York Times, "I think a consciousness of political rights has increased more than anything," without apparent fear of losing his position. Fair? No. A vast leap from where China was 30 years ago? Yes. And these are (I continue to hypothesize) the people in the best position to make some headway in the internal dialogue about rights and politics in a successful (as opposed to a "humiliated") China, and quite likely also the people most likely to bristle at Westerners trying to dictate the external dialogue. So I suppose I'm saying, in the name of self-justification, that I suspect boycotting the Olympics is more likely to provoke defensiveness than actual internal change.
To put it another way, from the New Yorker piece:
Like many of his peers, Tang couldn’t figure out why foreigners were so agitated about Tibet—an impoverished backwater, as he saw it, that China had tried for decades to civilize. Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America’s treatment of the Cherokee.
Touché.
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August 3rd, 2008
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