Memories, sort of

 

This photo was taken April 2, 2018. Nifty flora, obviously things were blooming in Arizona. Only question I now have is where did I decide this particular agave needed to be immortalized. Is it from the Boyce Thompson Arboretum over towards Phoenix, were we in Tucson at the Sonora Desert Museum, or was it someplace else, like Saguaro National Park? And if I can't remember where we were at the time, why did I bother saving the photo? 

The arboretum, incidentally, was lovely. We were there in the spring so maybe that is where I took the photo. It's a place I'd probably go to on a regular basis if we lived a whole lot closer. As it is, given our general dislike of everything within spitting distance of Phoenix and our total lack of desire to be snowbirds in the desert, we'll probably never visit it again.  

I have been going through hard copies of photos, pitching the ones that I figure would be meaningless to anyone other than myself. Basically saving my heirs some time and trash bags. So should I be doing the same with digital? Is anyone ever going to look at them for any reason? Probably not, so maybe they can just sit there quietly in electronic limbo indefinitely. 

A trip down Nostalgia Lane

Saw this cartoon and had instant flashbacks to academia. Every graduate seminar, every conference, had presentations where the speakers were shuffling their transparencies on to and off the overhead projector faster than a card shark dealing out hands of poker. The one that probably set the record for number of slides used was a civil engineering grad student at a Michigan Tech Sigma Xi interdisciplinary symposium. The dude gave a 5-minute summary of his research in to how quickly fecal coli form bacteria broke down in sunlight using data collected observing sewage flow from Syracuse into Lake Onondaga. I know his slides were on and off the projector a lot faster than the shit traveled across the lake. His dexterity in handling his foot-high stack of slides made such an impression that it's been well over 30 years and I still recall the talk, which is more than I can say about my own contribution to the event.   

Gullibility, naivete, or flat out stupid?

Ol' Buzzard has a post up musing on humans and how gullible we can be. This isn't exactly a news flash -- look at what gullible people managed to put in the White House -- but it did remind me again of a conversation I overheard on a public bus years ago.

Back when I was finishing up my dissertation, during my last semester on campus at VaTech, I was totally dependent on public transportation. I took the bus to campus, I took the bus home. The studio apartment I had was out at the very end of the bus line, which meant morning or evening there were never many people on it that far from campus.

So one morning I get on the bus. As usual I'm the only passenger. Another person gets on at the next stop, but the bus is still basically empty. The second passenger sits right behind the driver and strikes up a conversation. He's all enthused about something he had seen on television the night before. I can't help but hear -- the dude is loud, he's enthusiastic.

Turns out he'd watched an episode of "The X Files." He's super excited about it. And then it hits me. It becomes clear that he thought that what he saw was real. He did not realize David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were actors; he believed they were real FBI agents. It was on television, ergo, it had to be fact.

At the time I was amused. Today, not so much. I realize now that what I saw was the equivalent of "if it's on the Internet, it has to be true."

Anyone else want to bet that if that dude voted in 2016, it was for Trump?

Whatever happened to Jim and Margie?

My mind works in odd ways. I was wandering through the living room (all 8 square feet of it) yesterday while the S.O. was playing with the Amazon Fire Stick. We've had it for awhile now, but he keeps discovering new applications and updating old ones. He's managed to find quite a few viewing options through the Fire Stick, including many that let us watch stuff in real time instead of having to wait to stream it. If we want a news fix, for example, we can watch "The National" on CBC.

In any case, he had just installed something new and was cruising through the various offerings when he hit Penthouse HD. Being male and not dead, he had to click on the icon. Naturally, the first thing that popped up, so to speak, was porn. And not subtle porn -- we're talking porn so explicit there was no doubt whatsoever as to what we were seeing on the screen. Porn in High Def.

So what's the first thing I think? "Holy wah, isn't that some sort of workplace safety violation?" The setting was a garage floor, the naked dude was supine on a creeper (as in the device mechanics use to slide under vehicles, not as in the slimy dudes who slither up to women at inappropriate times), there was a car not far away. The dude is on a creeper! That implies the car is up on jack stands. Isn't it some sort of OSHA issue to have two naked people doing the nasty only a couple feet away from a vehicle that isn't solidly on the ground?

Second thought was, I bet that chick is serious about yoga. She was remarkably. . . limber.

And then I found myself wondering if the crab louse (Pthirus pubis) has made it on to the endangered species list yet. There were news stories circulating a year or two ago about how Western societies' obsession with removing body hair in general and pubic hair in particular was threatening the existence of the crab louse. Its preferred habitat, its specific ecological niche, was vanishing. What had begun as a few women worrying about their bikini lines had evolved into wholesale deforestation. The crab louse is an obligate sanguivore -- the only thing it can eat is blood -- that co-evolved with humans. It dines on blood and resides on body hair, preferably the hair found in the groin. Shave or wax the groin and you've just done the equivalent of clear cutting a forest and wiping out an ecosystem. Pity the ever shrinking populations of crab lice, done in not by the famous Blue Ointment (I wonder how how many people who used it knew it was basically a mixture of mercury and lard?) but by aesthetics. For sure no crab lice were going to colonize the couple on the creeper. They were both so thoroughly waxed that if there hadn't been obvious genitalia they would have looked as plastic as Ken and Barbie.

It is odd how a procedure once viewed as torture -- waxing an area that is remarkably sensitive to pain -- managed to morph into a routine trip to the salon that many people, both men and women, take for granted. Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away (Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1960s) my circle of friends included Jim and Margie. Jim was quite the young raconteur. He told remarkably amusing stories about the high jinks and mishaps of various acquaintances. This being Wisconsin at a time when 18 was the legal drinking age for beer, many of his stories involved pranks pulled on dudes who lacked the ability to stay conscious longer than their friends. A favorite prank, it developed, was The Torture of the Scarlet Scrotum.

I think the reader knows where this story is going. If some poor sap passed out at a kegger at the frat house, he wasn't likely to wake up a few hours later to discover a penis drawn on his forehead in permanent marker. No. What happened was that if he didn't wake up when his "friends" removed his pants or when they began dripping hot wax on to his junk, for sure he came to with a scream when they ripped that wax off. Hence, The Torture of the Scarlet Scrotum.

On the positive side, at least he didn't have to worry about dying from alcohol poisoning or choking in his own vomit.

As for the endangered crab lice, I also wonder if parasitologists are trying to maintain populations of them for research purposes. If they do, how do they maintain them? I have read of other researchers who deal with sanguivores who allow themselves to be dined on -- it's not an uncommon practice for scientists who work with leeches, bedbugs, and even vampire bats to offer an arm to their lab critters -- but it would take real scientific dedication to introduce crabs to one's crotch.

My first quilt

To the best of my recollection, this is the first quilt I ever made. It was the early '70s, no one I knew was doing actual quilting, i.e., piecing traditional patterns like Burgoyne Surrounded or Dresden Plate. The Lutheran ladies "quilted" for World Relief, but what they did involved using large pieces of material, squares or strips that were sewn together quickly and then tied as comforters, even though everyone called them quilts. I bought a McCall's magazine with traditional (or close to traditional) quilt patterns in it and proceeded to teach myself, more or less, how to quilt. The pattern for my first quilt was, I think, called Night and Noon; 45 years ago the color contrasts for the smaller pieces were a lot more vivid than they are now. When I look at it now, of course, I can see the gazillion mistakes I made, the weird puckering with the border, the mismatched points, and various other problems. On the other hand. . .

I gave the quilt to my mother, and it's spent most of the past four decades on her bed. I guess somewhere along the line I should have given her a couple more so she could rotate them so this one wouldn't have gotten so thoroughly worn out, but for some reason I never did. I did knit her several afghans, but that's not quite the same thing.

Not surprisingly,  the quilt has gotten more than a tad faded. It's also worn threadbare in places. One particular fabric seems to have been particularly prone to sun bleaching and dry rot. It was bright red in a bandanna paisley pattern back in 1972; now it's threadbare and so faded it's hard to believe it was once red. It's a lot more faded in real life than it looks like in the photo. I took the quilt when my sister and I cleaned out our mother's apartment. I'll be spending the next several days patching the torn pieces and doing repairs as best I can. The batting has gotten flattened to the point of virtual nonexistence over the past 40+ years but there isn't much I can do about that with just a week or two to work in. We're going back up to Grand Junction later this month, and I'll bring the repaired quilt with me. If we're all lucky, my mother will get a few more years use out of it.

Whining white guys

Or, why everyone hates Jeff Gordon. I don't watch much NASCAR -- I tend to vanish when the S.O. decides to waste an afternoon watching cars go in circles -- but it didn't take me much time to figure out that I despised Jeff Gordon. Why? Because every time something went wrong on the track,it was someone else's fault. Gordon was the epitome of the whining white guy, although in recent years Jimmy Johnson's done a fine job of replacing Gordon as the king of that category.

Yesterday I referred to Jim Webb appealing to aggrieved white males, the guys who seem to think life would be just fine if we could just return to those halcyon days when women and minorities knew their place. For those whining white guys, whenever something doesn't go right or they don't get exactly what they want, it's always the fault of affirmative action or quota systems or those damn illegals stealing jobs. They're seemingly incapable of recognizing that you don't always get what you want or think you deserve. No matter how good you think you are, there are going to be times when  the other job candidates really are better qualified than you, your test scores are too low, or you lose out on stuff for no reason whatsoever other than sheer bad luck, like your application falls behind a desk or gets lost in the mail.

Thinking about whining white guys after reading Webb's book triggered a memory of one of my fellow grad students. He was in his final year, i.e., he was making final revisions to his dissertation and job hunting. He applied for a position at a major university, a Midwestern school that was the equivalent of Virginia Tech. He was totally convinced they were going to hire him because the posting seemed like a perfect match for his research interests.

I can't recall if he made it to the interview stage, but I do remember the ranting he did when he found out they'd hired -- omigod, the horror! -- a woman. He did a lot of pissing and moaning with his cronies about how affirmative action and political correctness were driving hiring committees to select applicants who had no apparent qualifications other than a vagina. What were the actual facts? Academia being a small world, it didn't take long for the rest of us to learn who had beaten out our colleague for the job.

The whining white guy in our program was ABD (his dissertation wasn't done yet), had zero publications, had done almost no presentations at professional meetings and had minimal teaching experience. The "unqualified" woman had her Ph.D. in hand (and it was from a more prestigious program than ours), multiple published peer-reviewed journal articles, and a book in press. She'd been out there building her c.v. and networking since her first day of grad school; the whining white guy had done what would have been normal behavior a couple decades before but didn't exactly make him competitive in the 1990s.

The fellow did manage to find work eventually, although it wasn't at the research university of his dreams. It would be nice to believe that sooner or later he grew up and recognized he'd simply lost out to a better qualified applicant, but I doubt it. He's probably still whining to his friends that he wouldn't have been stuck at Podunk U. if it hadn't been for affirmative action screwing him over. Once a whiner, always a whiner.

Memories

1968 Cadillac Coupe de Ville

Saw this photo on another blog this morning, and was swept away in a wave of nostalgia. We never owned a '68. We had a '67 purchased definitely used from a dealer on Highway 99 in unincorporated Snohomish County, Washington. The car had moss growing in the back window. We didn't care -- everything on that side of the Cascades had moss growing on it or in it if it sat still for more than 15 minutes. The key things were the price (cheap enough that we could pay cash for it) and the fact it ran. Our Dodge station wagon was going through oil so fast we were starting to consider buying the stuff in 55-gallon drums. Buying a new used car seemed like a cheaper option than hauling home endless cases of generic motor oil from Fred Meyer.

I loved that Caddy. It was huge, probably got mileage that would make a person blanch today, but I didn't care. It was the ultimate road car. The thing was such a tank I used to joke about keeping a Honda in the trunk as a spare, but it still felt like it was just floating down the highway. It was probably the most comfortable riding car we've ever owned. We managed to hang on to that car through three moves (Panorama City, Tucson, and Reno), but had to make a choice between it and the S.O.'s Barracuda for the move back east -- and the Barracuda won.

The Help, a review, sort of

I finally got around to reading The Help this week. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past three years, the book is a best selling novel that describes the lives of African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s. The movie version came out last year; it received several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. I didn't see the movie or read the book before we left Atlanta -- my name hadn't reached the top of the waiting list at the library.

Turned out the book was worth reading. The quality of the writing is decent, especially for a first novel, and the story line overall holds a person's interest. It didn't contain any major surprises -- I knew that life in the segregated South was a bizarre sea of contradictions, with whites paying blacks to cook, clean, take care of kids, and nurse the elderly but at the same time insisting that blacks and whites couldn't possibly drink out from the same water fountain or use the same toilets. There's some major cognitive dissonance going on when you don't want your maid pissing in the same porcelain as you, but at the same time you're eating food prepared by the maid, sleeping on sheets she washed, and living in a house she's cleaned. The servant is too dirty and/or crawling with germs to use your toilet, but you're willing to eat the soup she's cooked?

In any case, all those contradictions have been well-documented many times and from multiple perspectives, both as fiction and as autobiography (e.g., Coming of Age in Mississippi). We all also know that Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s was full of bigots, and that it was a particularly perilous time and place for anyone black who gave any appearance of supporting the civil rights movement. The Help didn't break any new ground, although there was some hoopla over the audacity of a white author daring to write in the voice of a black maid. That controversy, such as it was, struck me as flatout stupid. If writers could only write from their personal perspective, that would mean male authors couldn't have female characters in novels, young authors couldn't have anyone elderly, black authors couldn't include white characters, and you could never set a novel in a time period other than the one in which you were currently living . . . the whole point of writing fiction is being able to imagine how the world looks from a perspective other than your own.

Anyway, The Help did resonate with me. I found myself remembering my summer in Chicago as exploited labor a mother's helper many years ago. The summer of the year I graduated from high school I responded to a Help Wanted ad in the local newspaper -- Chicago families tended to advertise for  live-in help in newspapers in the western Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin; middle class urbanites apparently still viewed the northwoods as being full of potential Scandihoovian maids fresh off the boat and ripe for working for shit wages -- and was hired by a family that I'll call, for convenience's sake, the Kaplans. The deal was, if I recall correctly, $25 a week plus room and board, with Sunday morning and one weekday off.

Working for the Kaplans was an education. I went into the experience fairly naive and emerged as a nascent Marxist. It wasn't that I'd never had a job before. I'd been working since I was 12, mostly stoop labor in the summer picking strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and cucumbers but with some other odd jobs tossed in. However, the Kaplans were my first experience with an employer who seemed to confuse employees with indentured servants. They didn't go quite so far as building a separate water closet for me in the carport like one of the families in The Help does for their maid, but they came close. (Mrs. Kaplan made it pretty clear my blue collar white ass had better not ever go anywhere near the plumbing in the master bedroom.)

The Kaplans lived in a renovated brownstone in a neighborhood north of the Loop that had been posh in about 1890, had hit the skids for awhile, and was on its way back up. If I had to categorize the family politically and socio-economically, I'd say they were upper middle class liberals. Mr. Kaplan made a comfortable income working at a white collar occupation, Mrs. Kaplan got to be a stay-at-home mom (except she never was at home), and they had the requisite 2.5 kids (a boy and a girl from Mrs. Kaplan's first marriage, and a toddler from the current relationship), and they paid lip service to progressive causes like civil rights and school integration. The family was technically Jewish but thoroughly secularized -- they didn't even have a mezuzah by the door. For sure, they never went to temple and the Sabbath was a day like any other. 


As the summer progressed, I felt sorrier and sorrier for the two older kids. The toddler had it the best -- she spent her days with me. We walked to the park, we hung out with the other mother's helpers and their charges, we played with the puppy (the family had recently gotten a standard poodle), and in general the kid got to be a kid. As for the older kids, it may have been summer vacation for everyone else, but not for them. Their mother had their lives scheduled down to the nanosecond: summer school, guitar lessons, piano lessons, tennis lessons, swimming lessons, you name it. They got to rush from lesson to lesson, and come home for their evening meal of Spaghetti-Os, and then get hustled off to bed. The kids lived on a diet of Franco-American and Chef Boyardee; the poodle got chopped sirloin. When the kids weren't being hustled from lesson to lesson, they were listening to their mother's little lectures guaranteed to put them in therapy by adolescence. The son was stupid, the older daughter was unattractive. One of Mrs. Kaplan's favorite lectures to her daughter involved the crying need for rhinoplasty to "fix that Jewish nose" as soon as she was old enough. What type of mother tells a 10-year-old she needs a nose job while simultaneously instilling shame about her ethnic and religious heritage? Then again, Mrs. Kaplan's goal in life seemed to be to turn herself into a shiksa, complete with bleached blonde hair. She'd already bought herself a perfect Hollywood starlet nose.


It didn't take me long to figure out I'd been snookered. The other mother's helpers and nannies enlightened me pretty quickly to the fact I was working for a lower wage than average. The Kaplans had given me a day off that didn't synchronize with the traditional maid's day off -- no doubt a small attempt at preventing me from hanging out with other maids and finding out just how much more money and/or better working conditions I'd enjoy elsewhere. Maybe they didn't realize just how much time there is for schmoozing while sitting around watching toddlers play in a sandbox. Turned out my employers had a reputation in the neighborhood. The maids who were permanent, year-round help told me the Kaplans had a nifty habit of hiring a live-in housekeeper/nanny to work September through May for about four times what the teenage summer help got paid and then firing that person as soon as they had someone like me lined up for the summer months. 

So, in retrospect, what's the take-away, the bottom line? I guess what it comes down to is that, everything else being equal, some people are always going to be assholes. In a way, I was a lot luckier than the maids in The Help. When you're a person of color, you can never be sure if you're being treated like shit because the boss is a bigot or if you're being treated like shit because the boss is an asshat who treats everyone that way.  In my case, it was pretty clear the Kaplans were just jerks who'd try to take advantage of anyone unfortunate enough to end up working for them. Back in the 1960s, they went trolling for naive farm girls to exploit; no doubt now they're paying an undocumented immigrant with a marginal grasp of English to walk the dog.