Random thoughts.

Posted on September 10, 2025 by Pat Greene

I was trapped in my room for over a week with Covid. I’ve read some, binge-watched a bunch of different shows, just generally done nothing. So thoughts that have crossed my mind….

Everyone seems to want the administration to release the Epstein files. I don’t.The administration has had those files for what? Seven months? God only knows how they’ve manipulated them. Donald Trump won’t be in them, but his political enemies will be. They can’t be trusted, and simply risk potentially smearing the names of innocent people.

I would express an opinion on California’s Prop 50, which would authorize a new redistricting plan (created in response to Texas’s redistricting to create more Republican districts and disrupt the House of Representatives), but I am going to be working this election, so I think I’ll leave my opinions to myself. I have been wondering if the Penzey’s pins (one says “Kind” and the other says “Embrace Hope”) I have on my purse constitute political speech; Penzey’s has been an outspoken critic of the Republican Party. I may take them off my purse anyway.

I have binged a lot of British shows — “The Great British Baking Show” (remarkable for how the contestants support each other, and Paul Hollywood’s intense blue glare), “Fake or Fortune” (finding out whether art pieces are really what they purport to be), a bunch of shows about the British monarchy, and several revolving around the question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays (I have turned into an Oxfordian, for those who care about such things), and a lot of “QI.” The whole premise around QI is to have a panel of celebrities (mostly comedians, but sometimes people from other professions as well) asked questions, the answer to which is not what anyone really expects. (Usually the questions are “gotchas”: the answer arises from a particular fact which is narrow in scope. Although sometimes the answers are of the variety “what everybody knows is wrong.”) The scoring is opaque bordering on arbitrary: points are awarded for correct answers, subtracted for wrong ones (although points are awarded for *clever* wrong answers) with one or more (frequently all) the panelists ending with negative points. Think a demented version of “Celebrity Jeopardy!.”

British panel shows (“QI,” “Would I Lie to You,” “Eight Out of Ten Cats” (best name for a show *ever*), “Insert Name Here”) may just be my new obsession. For someone seeking escape from the Trumpster fire which is America today, they are as comforting as a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. I would really love to move to England, except for their recent horrific record with regard to trans rights. As the mother of an adult trans child, I would never want to live somewhere my kid would feel uncomfortable visiting.

As to the aforementioned Trumpster fire: I weep for my country. I am grateful I live in a blue state, but it increasingly looks like that won’t be enough protection. Given that my husband works for the federal government, we are sadly very aware of the ways things are going pear-shaped.

My psychiatrist has given me an assignment to find one thing a day to be grateful for. Today’s gratitude is that in my neck of the woods it has been really a moderate summer, not too hot. And Josh Groban.

I hope things are well with you.

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Sigh.

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Pat Greene

Last Friday, I developed significant weakness on the right side of my body. It was obvious from the fact the my smile was completely lopsided, among other things. It was so bad that when the Rocket Scientist saw me he immediately turned off the paella he was making (paella, yum) and got his keys and said “Let’s go.” (In retrospect, we would have done better to call an ambulance.)

We got to the E.R., which was totally slammed. It was full enough that they were not allowing anyone to accompany patients. At this point, I was in a wheelchair because I was having trouble walking straight. I went through triage, explaining my symptoms as best I could (I was having trouble speaking), was given standard neurologic tests (smiling, squeezing hands, touch sensitivity), all of which showed a pronounced weakness on one side of my body, and was then sent to the waiting room. FOR THREE AND A HALF HOURS.

When I finally did get back to a room, the Rocket Scientist was allowed to come back. He explained my symptoms, including that I was enunciating very clearly to be understood. The doctor checked me over, ran the same neurologic tests (with the same results), immediately called a “stroke code,” and notified the neurologist on call. Within minutes, I was whisked off to a CT scanner. I was examined by the neurologist when we got there.

The CT came back clear. I was diagnosed as having a “complex migraine,” which made sense since I have a history of migraine (usually controlled by Emgality). I was given Tylenol and Reglan and sent home.

Here’s the thing: according to all the PSAs, minutes matter when someone is having a stroke. As the doctor herself commented, I was exhibiting the signs that they tell people to watch for, including a lopsided smile and trouble walking. So why didn’t the nurses and doctor who were doing triage call a stroke code themselves?

I am a very large woman. I have been to the ER three times previously this year (each time with asthma exacerbations). And, most significantly I believe, I have a history of mental illness. (They would have known immediately about the mental illness since they had access to my medical record and looking at the records of someone who has a history of psychiatric hospitalizations requires an extra step in my medical center’s computer system.)

I was, I believe, not taken seriously. This is not the first time I have been to the ER and been treated this way. (I was seen immediately for the asthma, probably because my blood oxygen was in the 80s.) People with mental illnesses are assumed to be unreliable narrators when it comes to their own bodies. We’re attention seekers, they think. We fake symptoms, don’t you know? (I once came into an ER in severe pain from what was later diagnosed as a shoulder injury, only to have a doctor act as though I was simply there drug seeking. I was told to go home and take Tylenol, in spite of the fact that I had tried that — and I TOLD them so — and it had done nothing.) I take someone in to advocate for me, and they often get treated more respectfully than I do.

I wish I believed otherwise, but stigma is a real thing, even among medical professionals.

[I am still having some symptoms today, in spite of taking migraine meds, but they’re lessened.]

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Posted on May 9, 2025 by Pat Greene

Every week — day, sometimes — something new comes out from the Trump administration that makes me feel sick to my stomach. Today’s item makes me feel more afraid than I have yet this year.

According to Stephen Miller, the administration is seriously looking at suspending habeas corpus.

Oh.My.God.

For those of you not up on your Constitutional history, the writ of habeas corpus is what allows someone to challenge their detention at the hands of the state. It’s a vital piece of the process that is due when a person is deprived of their liberty. And according to Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

It has been suspended several times in U.S. History: during the Civil War, in the Philippines in 1905 during an insurrection, and in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor. George Bush tried to suspend habeas corpus for those declared to be “enemy combatants” following 9/11, but the Supreme Court struck his efforts down.

Nothing like that exists here. There is no invasion. There is no insurrection — other than that pardoned by the President himself.

There are only migrants. Migrants who are the current bogeyman of the right. He wants to strip them of their ability to challenge their deportation. And what of citizens caught up in all of this? What if his henchmen at ICE decide that some poor Latino is in the country illegally because they don’t have their papers on them?

After all, they deported a four-year old American citizen who was a cancer patient without her medicine. If they are that callous, who says that anyone in America who looks like they were born somewhere else is safe, regardless of what their circumstances are?

This administration claims to be made up of Christians. I think they’re going to have a lot to answer for if they ever stand before the throne of God.

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The barbarians are inside the gates.

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Pat Greene

American culture is in grave danger. Worse yet, its knowledge of its history, its very understanding of what America is and has been, is under attack.

It started with Donald Trump taking over the Kennedy Center, firing most its board and replacing the members with cronies. A previously bipartisan institution is now almost exclusively Republican. Trump lackeys accused the Center of being “woke and … broke.” The president is now the director.

There has been fallout: musician Ben Folds resigned as artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra. Issa Rae, Rhiannon Giddend, and the musical Hamilton have all canceled shows.

The takeover seems to have been over the three drag shows the Center put on last year. Three out of 2,000. Apparently, giving representation to trans people at the nation’s preeminent cultural showcase was unacceptable.

Defining what is “acceptable” art is an early move for authoritarians. The Nazis didn’t just burn books, which are published by the hundreds and can often be smuggled out of the country. Books, as expressions of ideas, are hard to kill. No, the Nazis also burned paintings, singular and irreplaceable. Many lost masterpieces by modern artists, such as Klee, Picasso, and Dali. Even the often anodyne Impressionists were condemned by authorities as “degenerate.”

The history of a nation’s art is a history of its soul. And museums are the holder of that history, both in its art and in the physical reminders of the past. This is as true for America as anywhere else, possibly more so. The pictures and stories of the experiences of Blacks keep the unforgiving facts of slavery and Jim Crow front and center in ways that many whites feel uncomfortable about.

That is one of the functions of the National Museum of African-American Culture and History. Filled with stories of the pain, it also contains stories of hope and courage. It records not only the horrible history of Blacks in America but also responses to it.

It has the following the first page of its website:

Our mission is to capture and share the unvarnished truth of African American history and culture. We connect stories, scholarship, art, and artifacts from the past and present to illuminate the contributions, struggles, and triumphs that have shaped our nation. We forge new and compelling avenues for audiences to experience the arc of living history.

Trump hates that. He has taken direct aim at the NMAACH, and all the Smithsonian museums. In an Executive Order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” he has given J.D. Vance instructions to  Vice President JD Vance to review all properties, programs and presentations in the Smithsonian to prohibit programs that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”

His goal is to whitewash history — literally. He wants to sanitize all the bad parts of our past. He wants to pretend that all the horrors faced by Blacks during the life of our country — and by extensions the sometimes heroic responses to those horrors, as well as the accomplishments of people in the face of unrelenting racism — never happened. He wants to enshrine white supremacy by eliminating the story of Black experience.

Other Smithsonian museums will be affected as well, of course, to a lesser extent. The only museum likely to be left alone is the Natural History museum. (The Museum of the American Indian will face similar issues to the NMAACH, probably.) If they can only change their exhibits some, and keep other artifacts previously on display out of the public eye but still in their collections, they can be okay. But it’s impossible for me to see how the NMAACH will not be totally destroyed.

I have been to the National Museum of African American Culture and History. It was a deeply moving and inspiring experience. It makes me physically ill to think what Vance — and Trump — are going to do to it.

God help us.

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Coping.

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Pat Greene

It’s tough out here right now. I’ve been working on a list of ways to cope with the current insanity. I’m posting it here so I can find it easily. Here goes:

What to do:

Stop avoiding the news. Ignoring the situation will not make it any better. Sadly, object permanence means that things don’t just go away because we’re not looking at them.

Don’t wallow – that just leads to paralysis. Find good news sources and stick to them. (Sadly the Washington Post no longer fits that description, what with Jeff Bezos interfering with editorial decisions and what not. The NYT may not be reliable, though admittedly I am only keeping my NYT subscription for the games and the Arts section.) Set limits to how much time you spend reading news.

Confront the fact that there are limits to what you can do by yourself. The things in motion are bigger than you.

Confront the fact that changing things back will be slow – it takes a lot longer for a rock to be pushed uphill than it does for that same rock to roll down.

As the pin I have in my coat (and on my knapsack) says, “Embrace Hope.” (Thank you, Penzey’s Spices!) Despair clouds the mind and makes any action seem like walking through chest high mud.

Find out what you can do: Find the contact info for your representatives at the federal and state levels. Know who your county commissioners and city council members are. Know who sits on the local school board and county board of education. (While Trump and Musk are disproving the old adage that all politics are local, much of it still is.) There are a lot of things we can do to keep our localities good places to live. Call and write your elected officials frequently so they know that at least some of their constituents are paying attention.

Escape is good, and necessary, in small doses, but don’t spend all your time in 1920s Britain with Hercule Poirot, and other similarly enticing times and locations. That goes for both the television and the books. Especially don’t get so engrossed in a book that you stay up until 3 a.m. and trash your sleep schedule.

Recognize how you are privileged. In my case, in addition to the obvious (I’m a white, cis, woman), I have a secure roof over my head, the breadwinner in our household has been with the agency enough years to make them secure from being RIFfed (RIF=Reduction In Force, aka layoffs)(if the administration starts forcing retirements, he might be in danger, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it). Inflation will make life harder, but not desperate. 

If you are a praying person, pray.

Find sources of joy, even if they are little ones. Try to find happiness in the everyday.

Get your (physical) house in order: do whatever you can do to make the area around you cheerier. (Unfortunately, the one thing I would want to do – put out flowers – is not possible because the cats eat them. Most flowers are toxic to cats, and even roses, which are not toxic, can still upset their stomachs. The last time we put roses on the table, an hour later you could see teeth marks on the leaves and a few of the petals.)

Build bridges, and find community, online and IRL. Contact friends that you may have lost touch with. If you have drifted away from your faith community, find another. (It’s easy for me to say that; I’m a lapsed Episcopalian and before that a former Roman Catholic. Episcopalians (at least the ones I know) tend to have the same outlook as the Reverend Marian Budde of Washington’s National Cathedral.)

Call your mom, or your dad, or your siblings, or your kids. (Assuming that there are not reasons you are out of touch with them other than simply having a busy life. Obviously, if you cut off contact with them because they were toxic to you, that’s a different story.)

Take care of yourself. In my case, that means eating more healthy meals, and exercising to the extent I can (right now I am recovering from a wrenched back and the last vestiges of problems from a cracked ankle). Develop a regular sleep schedule.

Remember the Zen Buddhist proverb: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” For “enlightenment” substitute “political stability and a safeguarded democracy.” Do what you need to do.

If things get to be too much, get granular: what do you have to do the next day? The next hour? The next minute? What is the next right thing?

And most of all…

Breathe.

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Hug a federal employee.

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Pat Greene

[It is 1,444 days until the end of the second Trump presidency.]

[Note: full disclosure — I’m the wife (and dependent) of a federal worker.]

I knew things would get bad. I never expected they would get this bad, this fast.

Having a spoiled brat billionaire and a cadre of nearly teen young men taking over the U.S. Treasury was not on my bingo card. Nor was the shuttering of an agency created by Congress to provide help to people around the world.

It seems to be the time for sniping at federal workers. One senator stated that there were going to be savings by getting rid of people “some of who haven’t been to work in years.” (Note: just because they haven’t been “to work” doesn’t mean that they haven’t been working. There is such a thing as remote working. Not to mention that during the worst of the pandemic, they were prohibited from going in to work.)

You know the old saying, “good enough for government work.” To me, that means that whatever it is was done to exacting standards by people who care deeply about their mission, and who could be making a lot more money if they chose to work in the private sector but who believe strongly in public service.

The “buyout” letter sent to workers by Trump was both insulting and threatening. And the vague threats that have followed have not been much better. Besides, this is being extended by a man who has a history of stiffing contractors (Trump) and a man who didn’t honor his commitments to employees who left, in circumstances much like that the federal workers face now (Musk). Why should anybody trust them?

A special shoutout to USAID workers: my heart goes out to you and the people you serve. You don’t deserve what’s happening to you.

So if you know a federal employee, let them know you appreciate them and that you have their back. It’s the least we can do.

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Posted on January 29, 2025 by Pat Greene

[It is 1,452 days until the end of the second Trump presidency.]

This video by Heather Cox Richardson is extremely important (if a little lengthy). She sketches out where we are and the nature of the constitutional crisis we are currently in.

Highly recommended. Scary.

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Silly games.

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Pat Greene

[It is 1,455 days until the end of the second Trump presidency.]

I have a new strange obsession: British “game shows.”

The ones I love are not really game shows, but more akin to CBS’s After Midnight. The competition aspect is less important than giving the panelists — usually made up of comedians — a chance to riff on the subjects of the questions.

There is QI, Would I Lie to You, and — the best television title EVER — 8 Out Of 10 Cats. (That last one is about statistics and polls. It’s quite amusing.) My favorite is QI, which involves asking questions where the general knowledge of the answer is usually, technically, wrong. The scoring is incomprehensible (panelists lose points for wrong answers, except that they get points for amusing answers, even if wrong), with the final scores often being negative. My favorite panelist is the recurring panelist Alan Davies.

I have been watching them on Tube and YouTube, which means I have not been watching recent episodes, but old ones. It’s enough to make me consider buying a subscription to BritBox.

If you get a chance, check them out.

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When heroes fall.

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Pat Greene

[It is 1,457 days until the end of the second Trump presidency.]

I can remember the first time that I fell in love with Neil Gaiman. In 2007, when I was going to London for the first time, the Not-So-Little Drummer boy said “You have to read Neverwhere.” He gave me his copy for the plane.

I can also remember what sentence drove me from “Wow, this is great” to “I think I’m in love”: the protagonist is given a concoction to drink that is described as tasting “of peppermint and cold winter mornings.” Something about that description conjured up an image in my mind — I could almost taste it.

Neverwhere was not actually the first Gaiman novel that I had read. I had previously read American Gods, which I liked but which had not grabbed me in the way that Neverwhere had. It seemed too remote, and I had trouble empathizing with the protagonist.

There were other Gaimans: I read a collection of short stories that included “Snow, Glass, Apples,” which was a telling of the story of Snow White from the perspective of the queen. It’s phenomenal. There was also Good Omens, but I always think of that as a Terry Pratchett novel.

And Stardust. I never read the graphic novel, but I loved the movie. It’s one of my favorites. And I loved Gaiman’s telling of Norse myths; listening to the audiobook of him reading it was delightful.

I have Stardust on DVR. I have been meaning to reread American Gods, but hadn’t gotten around to it. I’m not sure I can now.

All of which is to day that the revelations that Gaiman has been a sexual predator have shocked and saddened me to no end. Art which meant so much to me has been tainted.

I know, I know. A lot of people say you should separate the artist from the art. I can’t do that, at least not with artists that were alive during my lifetime. I don’t think I can read Gaiman’s work without thinking, at the back of my mind, of women he preyed upon. I will find myself looking for evidence, for indications of who he really is, the same way that revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s sexual abuse of minors has made it impossible for me to read The Mists of Avalon, or her Darkover novels without taking what she wrote as proof she is a monster. (For example, in The Mists of Avalon, there is a child rape which is not condemned but described as inevitable.)

It’s hard when people whose work you admire show themselves not merely to be human, but to be terrible humans. J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans statements make it impossible for me to reread the Harry Potter books, even though I own all of them, so rereading them would not make any money for her.

Are there artists who were awful humans whose art I can respect, or even love? I don’t know. Learning more about Paul Gaugin, for example, made me see his paintings of young Tahitian women in a different light. On the other hand, I love Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, even though he was not a particularly sterling person.

So I will grieve the wonderful works that I have lost. And remind myself once again of the dangers of putting people on pedestals.

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Countdown.

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Pat Greene

It is 1,458 days until the end of the second Trump presidency.

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Down the rabbit hole.

Posted on January 11, 2025 by Pat Greene

As I have talked about in this blog before, I have bipolar disorder. There have been times when I suffered from delusions. Sometimes, my relationship with reality has been an uneasy one.

I often use the analogy of a snow and ice-covered riverbank. Reality is the ground I stand on. Next to the river is the ice, and there comes a point where it becomes difficult to tell where the ice of reality ends and the river of delusion begins. It’s a scary place, where I have trouble telling what is really happening.

I am standing at that river’s edge, and for once it’s not because of anything I did. I’m terrified.

The president-elect has announced that he will impose tariffs on Denmark unless it sells Greenland to the US. He has not ruled out using military force to obtain the Panama Canal. He has unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Lately, each time I think that I have imagined something Donald Trump has done — or at the very least the news comes from the Onion — I check reputable media outlets to find that, yep, he really did or said whatever it was that I struggle to believe.

Massive tariffs on Mexico and Canada seem reasonable (if ill-advised) in comparison.

It’s going to be a very long four years for people like me. However, given what he has said so far, it will not surprise me if he attempts to hang on to the Presidency past that time. I have rarely prayed for someone to die as fervently as I pray for Trump’s demise. I think it’s the only way out of this nightmare.

God help us all.

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Posted on June 4, 2024 by Pat Greene

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. Desmond Tutu

Summer sucks.

Summer has sucked for me as long as I can remember. Part of it is that there is no school, and little structure. But even when I was working, summer sucked.

I have been diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder, except that the season that triggers me is summer, not winter. Most of the times I have been hospitalized have been between May and August. On the other hand, I love winter — December is my favorite month. I hate July.

Today was not bad; it was overcast. Normally in summer, especially where I live, the sun falls down like concrete blocks. Sunlight has weight, sunlight overwhelms me. I can feel the sunlight scrape along my skin like sandpaper. And not only outside: I live in an Eichler, a mid-century modern home with floor to ceiling windows in the living room. I have taken to wearing sunglasses in the house on sunny days.

This summer threatens to be worse than usual. The sheer insanity of our public life threatens to break my brain. And keeping hold of what matters has become harder than ever.

I have described my concept of reality before: reality is the snowy bank of an ice covered river. The edge of reality, where the ice juts out over the water, is very very scary. The stranger things are, the more “unreal” things seem, the closer I am to the edge. And the harder it becomes to ascertain what is real. The ice gets pretty thin.

This is true in spades today. I can understand Donald Trump claiming his trial was rigged, that the verdict against him was a miscarriage of justice; doesn’t every convicted criminal do likewise? At least many of them. It’s all those other people, like Mike Johnson, speaking out and claiming that a jury that was picked from a pool of everyday people in New York was a tool of a Democratic cabal intent on destroying an innocent man, that upset my understanding of what is factual, what I can rely on.

It’s not that I believe what Johnson and others are saying, it’s simply so unbelievable that he and others who have sworn to protect this country from enemies “foreign and domestic” would be willing to so undermine the rule of law. I should be used to this sort of thing after the last four years, but I’m not. At least, not in the summer.

For me, I need to remember hope. I need to let go of the fear and instability that have gripped me, and work on just… being sane.

It’s hard to write about this. I have talked before about my mental illness but I don’t talk about my experience of it, generally. I’m afraid y’all will stop talking to me. I have had people in my life who have dropped me when I hit a crisis point. On the other hand, if you can’t cope with my bipolar, you can’t cope with me. Gonna miss you.

As far as hope goes, I need to heed the good bishop’s advice, and remember, that sanity exists in the middle of all this craziness. (Although I have to admit the light/dark metaphor doesn’t really work for me. Dark is beautiful, and gentle; light can be harsh and blinding.)

I can hold on until October, and December is only six months away.

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Music of my life.

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Pat Greene

[Note: I have not been writing in a long time, and I am out of practice. This is a long and rambling post, just to let you know. You have been warned.]

My brother-in-law recently tagged me on Facebook in a meme that asks people to post a picture of an album that had influenced their tastes in music — no discussion, no explanation, just a picture of the cover. I couldn’t do this.

What good is just seeing the album cover without knowing how or why the music affected you? And isn’t “taste in music” just a little narrow? I want to know how the music affected your life, not just your tastes. Does the record remind you of the elder sibling who would play it when they were getting ready for a big test? Was the album “your record” with your boyfriend, and when you broke up you played it endlessly to try and soothe yourself? (I’m looking at you, Kathy B., my next-door neighbor in the dorm my sophomore year in college. You’re the reason I hated Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon until I was in my late forties and the Not-So-Little-Drummer Boy convinced me to listen to it all the way through. I still can’t stand the part with all the alarm clocks, having had to hear that through the walls at midnight when I was seriously ill with bronchitis.)

So, here are thirty albums that have changed my tastes in music, or simply changed my life:

To go with the most recent one, the soundtrack to Hamilton. Hamilton convinced me that rap was music. True story: when I went to see the show, I found myself in a conversation with the late middle-aged white woman next to me about…. Kendrick Lamar. I no longer listen to much rap music, but I’m a lot less snobbish about it.

The others, in not quite chronological order:

The first two Warner Reprise Loss Leader albums. My siblings used to play them, and introduced me to musicians from Frank Zappa to Randy Newman. Some of the songs on them (especially Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”) have become my favorites.

The soundtracks to My Fair Lady (the Broadway cast album) and The Sound of Music (the movie soundtrack). My father loved musicals, and these were his two favorites. He passed that love down to me.

Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album (aka The Beatles), Abbey Road, Let It Be. Because… the Beatles. Having elder siblings, the Beatles formed a large part of the soundtrack to my childhood. I love them in spite of that fact. (Although “Revolution No. 9” on the White Album gave me nightmares and made me shudder inwardly whenever I heard airport loudspeaker announcements for years.) There were other albums my siblings played a lot (Surrealistic Pillow by the Jefferson Airplane comes to mind) but the Beatles’ albums were the most influential.

Woodstock. My first exposure to Joan Baez, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Santana. (I have the film on DVR and watch it occasionally, skipping past the non-performance portions. I’m no longer interested in seeing what was in fact a massive clusterfuck and an environmental disaster.)

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Simon & Garfunkel. I love S & G — another love sparked by my siblings.

John Denver’s Greatest Hits — the first album I bought with my own money. It inspired me to get round glasses. Even though I wouldn’t have called it country at the time, I have come to think of Denver as one of the best of the late seventies/early eighties country writers.

Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. I am not a big jazz fan, but “Take Five” is on my “five pieces of music I would take to a desert island” list. (So is Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” but I do not have a particular version of that in mind.)

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, Jimmy Buffet. When I was in high school, the seniors got to choose what they wanted painted in the locker area. We picked the last line of the title track (“If we weren’t all crazy, we would go insane”). What can I say? We lived in Florida in the late seventies. Jimmy Buffet was a beloved figure.

Speaking of Jimmy Buffet, Volcano and Coconut Telegraph got me through a dismal, drama-filled snowy last semester at Wellesley. I still smile when I hear “Boat Drinks.” (“I gotta go where it’s WARM!!!!!” perfectly expressed how I felt after four winters in Massachusetts.)

The Stranger, my introduction to Billy Joel. (I need to thank my sister for this.) I went on to buy 52nd Street and even more significant to me, Glass Houses. The latter album has one of my anthems on it (“You May Be Right”).

Indigo Girls, Indigo Girls. The Rocket Scientist and I saw them at Emory University on a night where they opened for a series of Sam Shepard one-act plays, with maybe fifty people in the audience. Our friend from New York stated that “they were totally derivative” and “would never amount to anything.” Um, no. When, a few years later he was challenged on this, he said the duo’s success simply demonstrated the appalling taste of the American public. Some people just can’t admit when they’re wrong.

Graceland, Paul Simon. As much as I love it, this album will forever be etched in the memory of a stupid three day trip across country when the Rocket Scientist and I first moved to California. We got into a fight somewhere in Arizona and stopped talking to each other. The tape went through three complete spins, and we were too mad to break down and ask if the other person wanted to change the tape. It was only when it hit its fourth pass through that one of us (I think it was me) changed the tape.

Greatest Hits, Randy Travis. My moot court partner in law school insisted on playing this for me, and got me to admit that maybe, just maybe, I could like country music.

Lonesome Standard Time by Kathy Mattea and Come On, Come On by Mary Chapin Carpenter. I got hooked on women-centered country in part because of these two albums.

Two mix tapes given to me, one by a close friend that had “Number Six Driver” from Eddie From Ohio, and “Tobacco Island” by Flogging Molly, and the other by the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy who believed, rightly, that I needed to expand what I listened to, and gave me a mix CD which included Foo Fighters, Lenny Kravitz, and Sublime. Mix CDs give me warm fuzzies; someone thought enough of me to share what they loved.

So that’s thirty… there are so many more, of course. My music is not as varied as it should be — heavy metal is not represented in my iTunes, save “Enter Sandman” by Metallica (with the SF Symphony), and I know very little popular music past, say, 2010. And, aside from Hamilton, very little rap. And a lot of Broadway, possibly more than any other single genre. And tons of holiday music. (One of the reasons December is my favorite month.) And a little comedy from George Carlin, Monty Python, and, of course, Weird Al.

I’m not sure what any of this says about me.

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Thanksgiving.

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Pat Greene

It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving. I used to do these posts on Thanksgiving, but I was otherwise occupied.

50 Things I am thankful for, in somewhat random order:

  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • December
  • Christmas music
  • Christmas lights
  • Trivia work
  • Bar Trivia on Monday nights
  • My friends at bar trivia
  • The Washington Post
  • The New York Times
  • That Joe Biden is president
  • That the Democrats control the Senate
  • That Railfan passed the first section of the CSET (California Subject Exams for Teachers)
  • That the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy has a job he is doing well in
  • That both Railfan and the NSLDB are local so I get to see them at least occasionally (Railfan more than occasionally)
  • That The Red-Headed Menace is in a lab that they like in graduate school, even if they do get stressed
  • My daughter-in-law (the NSLDB’s wife)
  • That my daughter-in-law was able to get her green card (she’s Korean) relatively easily
  • RHM’s fiance/ee
  • Casa de Fruta
  • The Voice
  • Rachel Maddow
  • My MacBook Air
  • Coke Classic (although I guess they call it just Coke now)
  • Homemade cranberry sauce
  • The movie Encanto
  • Barbie
  • Oppenheimer
  • Good books
  • “Connections” (it’s a NYT game)
  • Crepe myrtle trees
  • Occasional rain
  • That fire season was relatively quiet this year
  • That hurricane season is over
  • Sunsets
  • Ginko trees in the fall
  • My doctors
  • Medical insurance
  • Covid Vaccines
  • That I got to see Yosemite Falls at full flood
  • The National Gallery of Art
  • The National Museum of African-American History and Culture
  • Maryland blue crabs
  • The cornflower blue sky of Northern California in winter (except when it’s raining, of course)
  • The color blue
  • The color purple
  • That I have a roof over my head
  • My family
  • My friends, online and IRL
  • Music and art
  • Being alive

Here’s hoping you had a lovely Thanksgiving, and wishing you a happy holiday season, whatever you celebrate (Hanukkah, Yule, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or simply December).

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Why I have not been writing

Posted on July 12, 2023 by Pat Greene

I have not been writing in this consistently for several years now. First, the posts slowed to a trickle, now they are drops. Why the change?

Many of my early posts were about my children. They are all grown now, with their own lives. Only one lives at home; one lives a continent away. So no more cute posts about Little League or band camp or even college. I miss those days: they gave me endless things to think (and write) about. My life was more interesting then.

I posted about politics and democracy a lot. Our republic and its (dis)contents filled me with purpose, and writing about them gave me an outlet for my appreciation, or, more usually, my rage. I also occasionally did some good with what I wrote, such as the election where I collected the voting requirements (registration and absentee ballot deadlines, e.g.) for all fifty states in one place. I did that for a couple of elections before I found a national site that did the same thing. Next to nobody reads this thing, but I received several thank yous from people across the country.

Rage, and apprehension (what we are now we have been becoming for a long time), but not hate. Never hate. I disliked and feared George W. Bush and what he could do to our country, but I never hated the man personally, or wished him ill. The same for his father (who I actually respected), the same for Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump and his minions have changed all that.

I hate Donald Trump. I hate much of the GOP leadership — much of the GOP itself. As a political party, they don’t play fair (they haven’t really for forty years but it’s gotten much worse in the last ten) — just look at the Supreme Court: when faced with an opening a year before Obama left office, Mitch McConnell refused to let the nomination of Merrick Garland to replace Scalia even be heard. “Wait until after the election,” he bleated. Yet he was willing to rush through Amy Coney Barrett with only weeks to spare until Trump left office. The hypocrisy and naked lust for power and willingness to ignore and abuse Constitutional norms (with the Garland case, not necessarily Barrett) takes my breath away — or would, if it had not been so in line with other actions.

I hate Mitch McConnell. I despise and detest with a burning passion the Freedom Caucus, who are so wedded to some twisted idea of political purity and pursuit of power that they demanded that Kevin McCarthy put forth no legislation that would be signed on by any Democrat. I hate Kevin McCarthy. I hate that I feel compelled to keep saying “no relation” after I utter Marjorie Taylor Greene’s name.

I hate the MAGA people. I hate the insurrectionists. I hate those who have decided that they want a dictator; democracy and decency be damned. (Note: I am not talking about those who voted for Trump because they honestly thought he aligned more closely with their values than Joe Biden. I don’t hate those people; I think they’re misguided, but I don’t hate them. I am talking about the people who parrot the Big Lie, who view Trump as akin to Jesus. THOSE are the people I hate.)

I hate the white supremacists and the anti-Semites. I hate the people who threaten the lives of people I care about.

I hate the transphobes and the culture warriors bent on destroying the lives of people they think are unnatural or even evil because those people don’t align with some fundamentalist religious viewpoint of how people should be. I hate the zealots trying to keep kids — even in high school! — from reading about someone who has a different sexual orientation or a gender identity they don’t approve of, even at the risk of increasing bullying of those who are different. Or who obsess over who uses which bathroom. Or who outlaw gender-affirming care for minors, forcing parents to make the agonizing choice between pulling up stakes and moving to another state or forcing their trans kids to forego needed medical care.

I hate hate HATE Ron De Santis. Not only is he one of those people who want to destroy the well-being of trans people, he has made my home state, MY state, a place where my nonbinary kid and my trans friends are unwilling or outright afraid to visit.

I can’t watch Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis on television. My blood pressure goes up just hearing the sound of their voices. Thank heavens for closed captioning, although reading what they say is bad enough.

And when I say hate, I mean HATE. I want these people dead, preferably in the most painful way possible. I would never commit murder, but I’m not sure I would care much if someone else did.

Except then they’d be martyrs, just like Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot by the Secret Service as she tried to lead a violent mob into a chamber where they were trying to evacuate Congressmen. The last thing we need is something else for these rabid dogs to rally around.

No, better that they die a natural death, even if that is somehow less satisfying than if they were shot by someone whose life they threatened. I keep having fantasies that Donald Trump won’t be shot but will be struck by lightning while he’s out golfing.

Another thing I hate? I hate feeling hate. It feels… unhinged. Out of proportion. There are degrees, of course: I hate the transphobes and the white supremacists and insurrectionists far more than I do Mitch McConnell. But I do still feel hatred towards McConnell. In any case, I turn into someone I don’t recognize, or like.

I keep trying to turn hate into some other emotion: outrage, or pity. But I can’t pity people destroying the country I love, and I am beyond outrage. Outrage includes an element of surprise, and nothing these people do anymore surprises me.

And I realize I am just playing into their hands. They want to be hated, they want to be feared, by people like me. That’s called “owning the libs.” My hate mirrors their own.

And hate is paralyzing. I don’t write about politics because I find it frustrating and enraging. But I need to. I need to start reengaging with the the mess this country is in. I need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. I need to be an activist.

And writing is the first step for me. I write, and then I try to do something about what I write. For example, I wrote about elections, and then I got jobs revolving around elections — first as a phone banker for a labor organization, then as an elections worker. I have been thinking for a while now that I would like to be part of Katie Porter’s campaign for Senate. (I heart Katie Porter. Sorry, Adam Schiff.) Maybe writing about why I find Katie Porter such an attractive candidate would give me the motivation to call her campaign office and see what I can do. Or maybe I will call the League of Women voters, and volunteer, although the state where I live has a good track record of promoting voting and protecting voting rights. If I could do something about the states that have passed voter suppression laws, I would be more useful.

Writing of any kind is good for my brain. A close relative was just diagnosed with dementia, and that terrifies me. The thought of losing my faculties makes me break out in a cold sweat. I can’t promise that I would not die rather than live with dementia.

Writing is good for my mental health. Writing this post has let me express things I have been feeling for a long time. Even if I never touch on the subject of politics ever again, even if all I do is write about the three cats that live in my house, I will still feel more connected to the world. Identifying what to write about has been difficult; writing will force me to engage more with what’s going on, both personally and with the world at large. The discipline of looking for something to write and sitting down and actually writing would be good for me.

So we shall see.

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