The Wild Winds of Fortune

I will be getting a new laptop soon, probably within the next week.  I will hopefully be posting more then.

******

The laptop is courtesy of the insurance company of the elderly man who ran into me in February.  They offered me (in addition to paying all my medicals bills) $1000, basically as a “We’re so sorry you’re hurt, please don’t sue us” gesture.  I resisted the temptation to tell them to talk to my counsel, since I had absolutely no intention of suing anyone, provided they paid my medical bills.  Suing people is a pain in the backside, and I had had no real “pain and suffering” (which is what this is compensation for) except for a mighty uncomfortable three hours in the Stanford ER and several days stoned out of my gourd on Vicodin. I didn’t tell the insurance company that, of course, but simply took the grand.  I think if I had pushed I might have gotten two, but that seemed unethical to me.  Contrast this with my insurance company, who is being aggressive with the people who I hit in March (it’s been a bad year for cars in my household), even though it was the same sort of injury (soft tissue damage, whiplash).

The litigious nature of American society is also why I have certificate for three days stay at a resort hotel in Hawaii, as another “We’re so sorry you fell getting off the poorly designed tram, we’re very glad you weren’t seriously hurt, please don’t sue us” plea. 

******

The Apple Store in Palo Alto California employs some seriously pretty geek-boys, such as the one today who explained to me the difference between flash or solid state memory and traditional hard drives.  Cute, enthusiastic, and didn’t condescend to me when it became clear that I was a reasonably intelligent person — actually, not even before then.  And he did not even steer me towards the most expensive option!  (Well, he did suggest I consider a Macbook Pro, when I told him I keep computers until they die, since it had the most recent Intel processors, but I had already decided to do that anyway.) I realize that in some sense this is objectifying this lad, so I lose some feminist street cred here.  Oh, well.

*******

Quote of the week comes from the Red-Headed Menace.  After reading about a third of Romeo and Juliet (you could tell he was reading it, too, because he yells at the characters in books the way other people yell at characters in television shows — in this case, “Romeo, you wuss.  What is this about Rosaline?  Get over her, man!), he came into the kitchen and asked “Mom, I realize this is purely hypothetical, but do you think a romance between me and Juliet would work out?”

No, son.  It wouldn’t.  Her family would definitely disapprove.  On top of that, she’s a fictional character.  From the sixteenth century. Who had a boyfriend/husband. Who committed suicide. So I think you’re pretty much out of luck on this one. Things not going too well with the crush object, are they?

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In the toy store today, while buying a butterfly net for Railfan for his Bio project, I noticed that there are two new versions of  Trivial Pursuit out.  The Trivial Pursuit Master Edition seems to be nothing more than a standard game with a timer added.  I can just swipe the timer from the game of Pictionary gathering dust in the hall closet and save myself $45.

Trivial Pursuit — Bet You Know It!, however, seems to involve betting on who will get what right.  Hehehehe.  I see the possibility for an entire new income stream. Of course, I’d mainly be winning stuff off of the people in my household, so in the end it wouldn’t matter, but still….

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I have discovered that the Rocket Scientist has his own IMDb page, due to having appeared as “himself” in two episodes of the documentary series, Mars Rising.  (He does not, alas, have his own Wikipedia page.)  Also, by virtue of Mars Rising having been narrated by William Shatner, he has a Bacon number of three, and an Erdos-Bacon number of 6, the same as Natalie Portman.  I’m not sure what to make of all this, other than to find it terribly amusing. [Edited to add:  The Rocket Scientist says that James Cameron was also onscreen in Mars Rising, so he has two different routes to get his Bacon number of three.  He also says that when he was introduced to Cameron, he had no idea who he was, since he had not seen Titanic and it was before Avatar.  *facepalm*  To say that popular culture is not his forte would be an understatement.]

I have thus far resisted the temptation to create an entirely bogus biography of him.  It’s taken a lot of willpower, but I am being good.

******

A friend introduced me to Straight No Chaser.  Oh. My. God.  I think I may have a new obsession in the making.  I especially love their version of Tainted Love, and am thinking of trying to find a version to use as a ringtone on my phone. 

Of course, I do love having the Superchicken Theme as my default ringtone. I have come a long way since I had Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major as my ring tone mainly so as to not bother other people.  Maybe, having turned fifty, I just don’t care anymore.  The Superchicken theme is so much in keeping with my personality, anyway.  Really.

******

When I was considering law schools, I made the mistake of visiting Stanford on a day almost exactly like this one.  The sky was this amazingly intense cornflower blue, it was neither too hot nor too cold, and the hills were still green  and lush.  I fell in love.  Who knows, had I visited during a heat wave in August, when all the hills have turned brown, I might have ended up in DC.  Or Austin.

This is not to say that Stanford was not very very good to and for me, and I still have a great deal of fondness for both the place and the people associated with it.  It’s just that I need to remember and treasure days like today, because all too soon everything will dry up.

It is also an object lesson in doing your homework.  Had I actually checked it out, I would have found out that the the area around Stanford has an average annual rainfall of roughly 18 inches a year, as opposed to over 50 for the Tampa Bay area (where I grew up), or Atlanta (where I moved from).  There are (sob) NO summer thunderstorms.  Oops.  What can I say?  I was young and stupid(er).

It all worked out in the end, though.  I do wonder, sometimes, what I would have been like had I gone to Georgetown, UT, or even Berkeley.

******

Mother’s Day is Sunday.  I suppose that it would mark me as a bad mother to say that I really would like to go out drinking.  I think that I should emulate the example of my mother.

My mom loves Disney World.  My father hated it, primarily because his knees had gotten bad enough that walking around/standing were uncomfortable for him, and he would have had to be completely immobile before he would consent to something like a scooter.  (True story about my Dad: I showed him the book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche when it came out.  Dad growled “Real men eat whatever they damn well please.”  He paused, then asked, “What’s a quiche?”) So Mom only got to Disney World when the grandkids were in town.

After my dad died, one of the first things Mom did, after her first initial mourning period, was buy a season pass to Disney World.  “I love him, but he’s gone, and I want to go to Disney World.  I’m too old to worry about what people will think.”

You go, Mom.  I never said this when I was growing up, what I have decided you’re the person I want to be when I grow old.

I hope you got my phone message last week.  If not, then here’s wishing you (again) a belated Happy 84th Birthday.  You’ll outlive us all, I expect.  At least I hope so.  I’m going to miss you when you go.

And a Very Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.  And to all the other mothers I know out there, regardless of age, race, creed, sexual orientation, or birth/adoption status: you guys rock.

Here’s hoping the people around you tell you so.

Me: I’m losing my mind.
Rocket Scientist: Where was it the last time you saw it?

I am, in the popular argot, a cheap drunk.  A Really. Cheap. Drunk.

At Wellesley, every year the juniors put on a show.  My freshman year, the Junior Show included the line “It takes more than two drinks to change a Wellesley woman’s mind.”

Not in my case.  All it takes is two drinks.  Unless…

One of those drinks is the “Corpse Reviver ” at the British Banker’s Club in Menlo Park, California. In that case, it only takes one.

I was at the BBC this evening meeting a friend of my housemate, the Resident Shrink. I was planning to order at the most two drinks.  The time before this, when I had gone out drinking, I had had two rum and cokes and had barely noticed them.  (Which could be why I lost the game of Trivial Pursuit that evening (lack of enough alcohol) but that’s another story…)  So I figured I would be okay, right?

I ordered the Corpse Reviver because it looked interesting and had absinthe in it.  How can you resist a drink with absinthe in it?

I drank it down.  It was easy to drink, tasting faintly like lemon and licorice.  (I know that sounds like an awful combination, but work with me here.)  It was decent, but on the second round I ordered my standard Mai Tai.

I had taken barely a sip of Mai Tai when I knew I was in serious trouble.  As in, “I am slurring my words and I have only had one drink” trouble. I excused myself and headed to the bathroom, staggering a bit and definitely holding onto the rail on the way up the stairs.

But then, I had this Mai Tai.  What to do? I did what anyone half drunk would do.  I finished that one, too.  At this point, I was having trouble walking, period, let alone up or down the stairs.

The Rocket Scientist and the Resident Shrink showed up.  Fortunately, the restaurant where we were having dinner was within easy walking distance, and the Rocket Scientist held my arm the whole way.  I refused sangria, even though the sangria at Iberia Restaurant in Menlo Park is very good.  I settled for a coke.

I managed to make it through dinner. At the end, I succumbed to temptation and had a glass of sangria because, hey it was there and we needed to finish off the pitcher and the Rocket Scientist couldn’t have any more because somebody had to drive us home and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.

I have been assured that I was in fact charming and not at all embarrassing, which is good.  I am sitting here dreading what I will feel like in the morning.  All of which means…

Next time, avoid ordering any drinks with really scary names.

I visited my neurologist yesterday.  I have to be evaluated every six months for migraines and to make sure that my tremors are benign and that I do not in fact have Parkinson’s.  They have been determined to be “essential tremors.”

I asked my neurologist “What does that mean, ‘essential’?”  He answered, “It means that essentially we have no idea what causes them.”

Nothing like having doctors with a sense of humor.

Quote of the day, from the Red Headed Menace. who is vegetarian: “the velociraptors should eat me, I’m grain-fed. I taste better.”*


Yes, we were discussing what to do in case of velociraptor attack.  That’s just the sort of family we are. Next up, how to prepare for the coming zombie apocalypse.


My kids are already thinking along those lines: last Christmas, the Red-Headed Menace asked for a laser. For his birthday this year, Railfan asked for a girlfriend and C-4, both of which are helpful in warding off brain-eating monsters.**


*He then remarked that “Actually, the velociraptors should eat vegans.  They’re practically grass-fed.”
**We had to sadly explain that the girlfriend was something he needed to take of himself, and as it would be illegal for us to own C-4 ourselves, buying it for him was pretty much a moot point.  Besides, we figured he would just use it to blow up his brother.

Believe it or not, I was a member of the Environmental Law Society at Stanford.  (More than that, I was managing editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal.*)

I was, in many ways, an odd duck to end up in the basement offices of ELS.  I had little interest in saving the wilderness or endangered species.  My dedication for natural resources law was, to say the least, not remotely awe-inspiring. Not that I am not glad that there are people who are devoted to those, mind you — I think that is very worthwhile, nay vital.  It’s just not my thing.

I was passionate (and stilll am, all these many years later, although my environmental interests have broadened, pretty much due to my involvement with ELS) about historic and architectural preservation.**  I was living and working in Atlanta in the early eighties, a time when, according to the papers,  there were arguments about saving Margaret Mitchell’s house*** which centered primarily on whether the house was sound enough structurally to be worth saving, but where many people thought it would be okay to run the Jimmy Carter Presidential Parkway through the Sweet Auburn neighborhood, which was crucial in the struggle for civil rights.  Or where an architecturally important building could be demolished to make way for a MARTA station, although they were careful to save the facade statues, isolated and removed from their original setting for the enjoyment of riders.

So what’s so different about the the desire to protect nature and the desire to protect historic sites? In many cases, the tactics are similar, and in some cases the ends coincide (in the case of Native American sites that are also environmentally sensitive, for example).  I think the underlying question is one of emphasis.

Historic preservation is about people.  Saving places that tie people to their past, to  their sense of who they are, as individuals and as a culture or society, is paramount.****  It is about not forgetting, the good or the bad.  It is about remembering the heritage which we justly take pride in, and the past which we would rather forget but which is dangerous for us to do so.

Environmentalism, in the larger sense, is not necessarily about people.  For many environmentalists it is, but I also know environmentalists who view humans as a blight upon the planet, who tend to be disdainful or dimissive of those who stand in their way.  One friend — and she was a friend, in spite of our differences — once described herself unapologetically as an “environmental Nazi.”  She had no problem with whatever regulatory and legal tactics were necessary to protect resources, wilderness and wildlife.  People were in many ways an impediment, and dangerous to the earth.

It comes down, to me, a question of “Why save the planet?”  .

One can say that the planet needs to be saved for its own sake.  That wilderness and resources and endangered species provide their own justification, and need none from us.

But for me, we need to save the planet because there are people living on it. Yes, you need to save the whole planet — not just the parts where there are people living — because it is a complex system and it is impossible to say what will matter in the future.  And far too many environmental decisions made by individuals, governments and societies are disastrous for people in both the short term and in the long run.

I also believe that people need wilderness, need the idea of wilderness.   We have to have whales, regardless of any practical use they may have, because we are creatures with a capacity for wonder and curiosity, and we require objects for that wonder.  If you doubt the need for whales, go on a whale-watching trip with a group of elementary school kids to see just how vital they are.

All of this influences how you see the struggle, and what problems you become interested in.  Given the choice, I would  much rather focus on the short-sighted repeal of the Williamson Act, and what this means for municipalities and farmers, than on saving the Amazon rainforest.  Again, it’s not that I do not view this as important, but that I can only retain focus on a limited set of problems at one time.  Water resource issues, and the tension between agricultural use and municipal use, interest me more than the problems with traffic congestion (and its attendant air-quality concerns) in Yosemite. The former is much more central to how people live their lives on a daily basis.

The lead singer of Great Big Sea, Alan Doyle, once caustically commented on celebrities who went out to the ice to protest the baby seal hunt.  Where were they the rest of the year, he asked, when people were trying to feed their families and get by without having to leave where they have lived for generations?  Whatever you think of the seal fur trade, he has a very good point. Telling people that they are evil for killing fur seals, or for logging in endangered species (such as spotted owl) habitat, may well get the response “Screw you, I need to feed my kids.”

All of which means you have to enlist individuals in the fight.  Give people living in the rainforest incentive to save it themselves (which has happened in a lot of areas) and you will be more effective than imposing outside regulation.  Giving farmers financial incentives to conserve through water marketing is going to work better in the long run than imposing quotas on water use. Outside regulation is only needed to keep the all-too-powerful forces of the (alleged) free-market system from overpowering people acting in the best interests of themselves and their families. Or where the problems — such as air and water pollution — are larger than can be addressed locally.  Or where what is threatened is one of those areas we need for the health of the people living on the planet even though no people currently live there.  (E.g., the Everglades) .

This is a change for me from twenty years ago when I was in law school. I no longer see regulation (as very important as that may be) as always the best way to solve environmental problems.  Outside regulation is a fragile reed:  that which is given under an environmentally sensitive administration can be taken away by one who is held captive by industrial interests. 

And maybe I have come to have more understanding of, and sympathy for, people who really are just trying to get by. Because they live on this planet, too.

*One of the more thankless things I have ever done.  That I got through the year without strangling anyone — including myself — never ceases to amaze me.  One contributor in particular… never mind.  I’m pretty sure I did not do a good — or even an adequate — job.  I like to think of it as a clear example of the Peter Principle in operation.

**The difference between the two (although they are sometimes used interchangeably) is that a building can be historically important and completely nondescript:  the elementary schools at the heart of Brown v. Board of Education, are historically important, but pretty unimpressive to look at.  On the other hand, both Fallingwater and the Robie House, residential structures from two different points in Frank Lloyd Wright’s career, are aesthetically pleasing and architecturally important, but aside from that have very little historic significance. 

***Don’t get me started on Gone With the Wind.  Any book which glorifies the slave-holding culture of the antebellum South is a very bad thing in my estimation.

****Saving not-so-historic places, because people have attachments to them, matters too. See my rant about Kelo v. City of  New London.

As a result of Jan finally having completely bit the dust, I have no access to my music.  Damn.

So I have been listening to a lot of Pandora, especially on the Droid.  The Mazda’s sound system has likewise gone the way of the dodo, so it is a convenient way to listen to music while driving (absolutely necessary for me).

I keep hearing new music I love, and music I used to listen to that I forgot how much I love.  One of my channels is “Mary Chapin Carpenter Radio”,  so I find myself listening to a lot of women songwriters in country and folk genres.

So far I have found one song I love love love that I had never heard before: “Let the Wind Chase You,” by Trisha Yearwood, which led me via YouTube to Sally Barris’s original.*  And I have rediscovered a song I adored when I went through my country music phase about eight years ago: the cover of Nanci Griffith’s “Outbound Plane” by Suzy Bogguss.**

It’s wonderful.  I can hardly wait until I get Jan’s replacement (probably a month or so down the road, tentatively named either Eduoard (Manet), Claude (Monet), Chuck (Close) or Marc (Chagall)) so I can buy them for my iTunes.

*The best song I have ever heard for people suffering from unrequited love.  Even better than Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”  Not that I have any experience with this.  Not, not at all.


**Yes, I know.  Griffith’s voice is rawer, and a lot of people like that, in the same way that a lot of people (myself included) prefer John Hiatt’s version of “Drive South” over of Bogguss’s.  But I just love Suzy’s voice.

I turned fifty yesterday.

That number feels odd.  Unlike forty, where I relished the idea that I did not have to worry about whether people liked me or not anymore, fifty is disturbing.  I am not sure what its significance is, other than people seem to feel that it is significant.

The Red Headed Menace tells me that my life is half over; he seems to believe I will live to be a hundred.  Lovely child.

I know better.  Part of the reason fifty feels so unsettling is that, without being overly melodramatic, there were times when it was a question as to whether I would live to see forty.  It’s a full decade past that, and I’m not sure what to do with myself.

There is the “WTF have I done with my life?”, usual for birthdays and New Year’s Eve. And the answer is, as always, elusive.  I have made my peace, I think, with the fact that I am not going to be anyone whose name the world at large will ever hear.  I am not going to change the world:  the best that I will be able to do is to enable others to do so.  Since I believe firmly that no one does anything on their own, that we are all connected, I recognize that in itself to be an important task.  Still, given the tools that I was blessed to have, in education and ability, it feels like I have wasted far more opportunities than any one person should have the right to.

There is a different sadness this year.  For various reasons in my personal life, I have become acutely aware of all the people that I have lost track of.  I think of them often; I wonder where they are and how they are doing.  And I wonder if I will find the strength to find them and apologize for ever having let them go.

Maybe that’s the task for my next half-century.

As a parent, one of my raisons d’etre is to embarrass and discomfit my teenage children.  Talking about sex does not work — they’re modern kids, and are more or less comfortable with those sorts of discussions, as long as the conversations are serious and restrained.*

However, I have discovered a secret weapon….

It makes Railfan sing loudly “I can’t hear you lalalalala” and the Red Headed Menace flee the room.  What is this gem?

Tom Lehrer’s “Masochism Tango.”

Hehehehe.  Guess what is going to the top of my iTunes playlists?

*Actually, they tend to initiate discussions — and questions — about sex.  I think they are trying to discomfit me. I usually tell them to ask their father.

Unions have been much in the news lately.  The efforts of conservatives in places such as Wisconsin to dismantle worker protections — and the support with which those efforts are met — are another example of the very short historical memories of far too many people in this country.

Unions are responsible for protections which are ingrained so deeply into law and society we take them for granted:  child labor laws, workplace safety requirements, the very concepts of a forty hour work week and overtime and vacation and sick pay.  All of those are union victories which benefit everyone, not merely those who pay union dues.

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.  Terry Karney has a nice piece of writing on the fire, and more importantly, on the conditions which existed for workers in that factory.  It is sad and chilling reading.

Well worth a look.

Edited to add:  This post at Jason Cochran’s blog is a must, too.  He says what I’ve been thinking.

Last night I saw one of my very favorite bands in the world, Great Big Sea*, in concert in Petaluma  It was amazing.

Great Big Sea’s music, when listened to on CD is… okay.  Their renditions of traditional Newfoundland and Gaelic songs are the best perhaps; their original modern pieces range from good (“Ordinary Day,” “Straight to Hell”) to overly sentimental and sugary (“Walk on the Moon,” “Boston to St. John’s”). (Interestingly, some of their best songs are contemporary songs written to sound like traditional ballads: “England” and “Safe Upon the Shore” being the two best examples I can think of.)  Their covers of “When I’m Up I Can’t Get Down” (originally by Oysterband) and R.E.M.’s “End of the World” are wonderful.

GBS in concert is another kettle of cod entirely.

A GBS concert is an excuse for a party: the audience is usually like a bunch of Parrotheads who are better behaved and far less drunk.  The band interacts with the audience. People sing along.  There is dancing in the aisles – if there are aisles – or in front of the stage — if there is space for it — or, failing everything else, in people’s seats.  It would not be a GBS concert if people were not enthusiastically bobbing up and down for most of the show.

The unexpected can happen.  Last night, for instance, Alan Doyle jokingly launched into the first few bars of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”  It might have ended there, except people in the audience started singing along.  Shrugging and laughing, the band went on playing the song while the audience sang.  It was great.  It was nearly as much fun as the audience sing along — led by Doyle — of “Bohemian Rhapsody” at their San Francisco concert two years ago.

The Mystic Theater in Petaluma was a great venue to see these guys.  In Canada, they sell out arenas.  In California, they play in clubs no bigger than your average multiplex theater.  No joke — the theater where I saw “Mars Needs Moms” was bigger than this place.  So you are never far from the stage, even when you sit in the back.  And with a large empty area in front of the stage (perfect for the aforementioned dancing), you didn’t even need to settle for staying in the back.

Their music improves so much in concert.  Songs that might be treacly on disc are infused with a needed energy and edge. (“Yankee Sailor” being the most significant example last night.) Songs which are fun on the stereo (“Hit the Ground and Run”**) become frenetic and even more fun.  And there are songs that just do not work unless you have an audience involved with them: “Helmethead” (my favorite song to see them perform live) and the wonderfully over the top “The Night that Paddy Murphy Died.”

I know Alan Doyle fans: he’s the cute, articulate clown.  Sean McCann is his straight man, and pretty amusing in his own right.  Me?  I am totally, unabashedly, a drooling Bob Hallet fangirl.  The man makes playing an accordion look sexy.  Really.  And last night he played (in addition to the accordion), mandolin, recorder, harmonica, tin whistle, banjo, guitar, and most wonderfully, violin.  I adore multi-taskers.

It was a wonderful concert.  I only wish I could go to Carmel to see them on St. Patrick’s Day.  Now that is going to be a good time.

And – to end the night?  As part of their encore, they played the one song I’ve always loved that I have never heard them do live:  “End of the World” (with thirty seconds of Beethoven’s Ninth sandwiched in the middle — don’t ask, it just worked).

I can die happy now.


*My fondness for GBS is the best argument I can think of in favor of music file sharing.  I first heard them on a mix tape sent by a friend.  Since then I have bought three CDs (other people in my household have bought another two) as well as ten individual tracks off of iTunes.  I have seen them in concert seven times.  It seem to me that whatever income they lost by my friend sharing that music with me they made many times over.


**”Hit the Ground and Run” is an Appalachian bluegrass number written by a Canadian (Alan Doyle) and an Australian (actor Russell Crowe). For some reason I find this terribly amusing.

I have a new external hard drive.  Jan is sort of back, but flaky, so I have been backing things up externally.  The external hard drive I had was named Francisco (after Goya, natch). It was a good drive…

Up until I kicked his cord and knocked him off the table onto the floor while he was copying something.  Oops.

Back to the drawing board — having lost some data, I still have my long-term important documents. (As well as the problem of what to do about my music library, half of which requires authorization by iTunes, but the version of iTunes I can run on Jan is old enough you can’t actually access the Music Store, and every time I try to authorize something, I get an error message.  Out of 1976 pieces of music, I can access all of 748.  Damn you, Apple.)

So, let me introduce you to Henri (as in Toulouse-Latrec).  He is a 500 GB iOmega Ego portable drive, with a rubber cover that hopefully will help protect him.  According to the salesman at Fry’s, these guys are pretty sturdy.  The Rocket Scientist confirmed this by stating that this is the portable drive he uses in the field sometimes.*

So maybe Henri is in fact Pat-proof.  I sure hope so.  I’m tired of having to recopy whole disk drives.

* I didn’t take any chances, though, given my recent lack of luck with anything computer related, and bought the extended warranty, which normally I wouldn’t.