I’ve been writing a lot about families lately (and by lately, I mean the last few years). The pieces I keep returning to again and again are much more interested in familial relationships than in romantic ones. In rereading these pieces, I’ve found that I frequently use personality mirroring to show their relationships. For instance, despite working to differentiate herself from her mother, the main character in my thesis has consistent traits that come from her mother.

I don’t know whether this is real or not. Probably both real and not real, depending on the situation. But assuming for a moment that it is true that families have certain shared traits (be they genetic or otherwise), I have come up with a list of reasons why I might, then, be adopted.

1. My dad is building an airplane. Not a model airplane. A real fly-through-the-sky airplane. He’s been working on it for a few years and it should be finished sometime in July. I once tried to build a cheap DVD case. There were approximately four steps. I got bored with reading the directions and, consequently, screwed up.

2. My mom doesn’t mind cooking so long as someone tells her what it is she should be making. She hates having (or being invited) to select the dinner menu. I prefer baking, from scratch (no bread machine here!), and one of the best parts of the process is, for me, deciding what to make. Read more »

Top 5 reasons this is one of my favorite speeches of all time:

1) The way he says “decade.”

2) LBJ’s delayed clapping. He acts as if setting a pen aside is an arduous task.

3) It pushed the Gemini and Apollo programs into full, fevered, frenzied, action.

4) His brazen attitude in talking about something so far fetched. It was September 1962, which gave the country a less-than-eight-year-window to get to the moon. It was only May ’61 when the US got their first human into space, Alan Shepard. And even then he was only in orbit for 15mins before splashing back down.
Bold, Mr. President. Bold.

5) His word choice.
For a speech that would be heard everywhere, for a speech that would go down in history, and for a speech that defined America’s fortitude, JFK decided to say “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.” (00:20)
Do the other things? Really? Couldn’t find a way to narrow that down, Jack?
If one of my ENGL 201 students handed me this speech I would circle that phrase and write, Vague.
I always imagine someone saying their wedding vows in the same fashion: “I love you for your strength, your beauty, and your other things.”

I could talk about this speech and this era until the end of this decade, but I’m busy this week. Life is happening. So excuse me while I go and do the other things.

Your Momma’s so dull, she thought hair dressers had a cut and paste job.

Your Momma’s so out of shape, she runs out of room evens when she sets.

Your Momma’s so dirty, her writing has to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.

Your Momma’s so cheap, she plagiarizes from Project Gutenberg.

Your Momma’s so simple, she always asks if it’s copy edit, copy-edit, or copyedit.

Your Momma’s so repetitive, she dittos quotation marks.

Your Momma’s so old school, she thinks the Chicago Manual of Style is the Marshall Field’s catalogue.

the GOP presidential hopeful was apparently something of a bully in high school.

steve almond wrote a thoughtful response to this news on the rumpus.

according to a politico poll, most americans who were aware of this news—two of three—said this didn’t change their view of romney.  but maybe many americans thought he was an asshole even before this came out.

Read more »

Are you mindful of the other driver?

Between home and work, those huge digital matrix signs loom over the interstate, the ones intended to keep you abreast of traffic situations. But, except during snowstorms, there are no real traffic situations between home and work. It’s not that kind of town. So, instead, the signs display helpful messages and driving tips. Usually somewhere between self-righteously bossy (“Texting and Driving Don’t Mix”) and winkingly practical (“DUI Patrols Tonight”), lately the DOT has turned more philosophical. The other day, all over the state, the signs asked, “Are You Mindful of the Other Driver?”

It is the word “mindful” that seems out of place in square letters above the interstate. I am used to the DOT being concerned about my driving habits and even about the more physiological aspects of my mental state (who doesn’t like rest stops with free coffee?), but this seems to enter another kind of territory, a territory that is normally the domain of poets and pastors (and—on a side note—of Dinty W. Moore’s new book). I’m not used to hearing about such existential stuff from the lower levels of state bureaucracy. Not that I mind. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they might have more to say than “Merge Left in 1500 Feet.”

But that “mindful” and the abstract “other.” The word choice suggests authorship in a venue that is normally dominated by anonymity. This is not, I think, language that could be produced by machine or by government committee. This language was created, composed. So, reading it, driving beneath this message, I imagine the DOT copywriter in his cubicle, the perfunctory fabric walls, the smell of canned air. Read more »

A Brave New Book

I can understand why some Germans would like it if the rest of the world’s fascination with Hitler, the Holocaust, and the rise of the Nazis would dissipate. One German woman told me the Germans find talk of all of this “boring.” I was supposed to be helping her with her English so I probably should have helped her determine if boring was the word she really meant. Another German woman told me that what happened in WWII wasn’t the fault of her generation and she wishes people could stop talking about it.

At the same time, some people are engaging with and adding to our knowledge of this particular part of history impressively. One such project is a book written by a German historian called, Mein Großvater im Krieg 1939-1945: Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich (My Grandfather in the War: 1939-1945: Memory and Facts Compared). In the book, Moritz Pfeiffer, who is a historian, interviews his grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht infantry. Read more »

Yesterday, the soccer team I coach lost eight to one. It might have been nine to one; to be honest, I stopped keeping count at six. It was a tough game, and my team looked off from warmups. I don’t really know why. I don’t think I’m a fantastic coach. Not bad, just not awesome.

The team I coach is fifth grade girls. Most of them are eleven now, but a few are still ten. We have one sixth grader. Our league has tryouts, but we cut only two girls this year. It’s really a rec league. I work hard to make sure the girls get equal playing time, and while I usually let them play the positions they like, I make them try out new ones as well.

We were in first place and undefeated before our game today. My girls may be ten, but they aren’t stupid. They know that the score matters, no matter how much I sometimes wish it didn’t. They were ashamed and sad, and each goal made it worse. After the game, after we shook hands, the other team made a tunnel for my girls to run through, and they chanted B-R-A-V-O bravo! at them. My girls couldn’t meet their eyes. They were embarrassed. Not just because they lost, but because the other team pretended like it didn’t matter, when they all knew it did. If it didn’t, the other coach wouldn’t have screamed at the ref when one of my girls got too free with her elbows (and we got scored on anyway). If it didn’t matter, he wouldn’t have kept his star player in for all but five minutes of the hour-long game. Read more »

“The mint leaves, fresh and tender, should be pressed against a coin-silver goblet with the back of a silver spoon. Only bruise the leaves gently and then remove them from the goblet. Half fill with cracked ice. Mellow bourbon, aged in oaken barrels, is poured from the jigger and allowed to slide slowly through the cracked ice.

“In another receptacle, granulated sugar is slowly mixed into chilled limestone water to make a silvery mixture as smooth as some rare Egyptian oil, then poured on top of the ice. While beads of moisture gather on the burnished exterior of the silver goblet, garnish the brim of the goblet with the choicest sprigs of mint.”
-from Henry Clay’s diary

May your Derby weekend be decadent and depraved.

I may well have just changed my gender.  I have taken the scissors to my hair—eight dollar Goody scissors meant specifically for the purpose, not the orange-handled office kind—and now the trash can is full of dirty blonde curls.  And the sink.  And the floor.  I’ll be feeling the scratchy shards of it on my shoulders for days.

It started with just the bangs, but people with curly hair haven’t pulled off bangs since the ’80s.  Then a few chunks came out of the sides: once you start cutting your hair, you can’t just stop.  You have to keep snipping and snipping, trying to find that hairstyle that you imagined when you first began.  You have to find the sculpture within the marble, the bob within the mass of curls.  You cut one bit just a little too short and then have to trim the rest to match, eroding your mountain of hair until there’s practically nothing left.  You start out methodical—measuring the strands against each other, trying to work in sections—and then you get artistic.  You chop and hack.  You feel instead of thinking.  You’re not just cutting off your hair; you’re setting yourself free. Read more »

I love Twitter. If you have spoken with me and I somehow didn’t talk about video games, I may have dropped an excited/incomprehensible explanation of Twitter and how much I like it on you, and for that, I thank you for humoring me. It’s difficult to explain how to use Twitter. Using Twitter is like telling a joke at a party. The difference is that with Twitter, you can see if your audience really liked your joke, and weren’t just being polite, and, even better, you can see if they liked it enough to tell all their friends about it. In the barren wasteland of Internet-speak, these everyday actions are called “Faving” and “retweeting” respectively, but they are very much like the human behaviors they resemble. And because you can see how many people faved or retweeted you, it encourages people to say funny or insightful or strange things (or sometimes all three at once), like a no-stakes poetry contest that lasts all day and never ends. Read more »