Kung Fu Monkey on chickenhawks

Kung Fu Monkey has the best post on the rhetoric of the war and chickenhawks that I have read in a month of Sundays.

By the broadest, most easily agreed-upon standards our side of the covenant with the troops is not being upheld. We are culpable, we are responsible, were are in fact guilty if we do not rectify this situation. And the only way to rectify this situation, in our form of government, is to go chew the shit out of the guys whose job it is to execute our will.

The problem is, these yahoos have managed an ugly trick. They have turned criticism of the policies of Bastards in Suits into criticism of The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. This, of course, is completely wrong, as one can easily tell the difference between the Bastards in Suits and The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. One group is in Suits, and Not Getting Shot At, while another is in Uniform, and Getting Shot At. Please, try to grasp this. Not the same.

There is a flip side. Some people confuse supporting the Bastards in Suits for supporting The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. This is, again, ridiculous. If the history of modern warfare has taught us anything, it's that the Bastards in Suits spend an awful lot of time working the kinks out of plans involving The People in Uniform dying unpleasantly. They often screw that up. When they do screw up, it is incumbent upon Bastards in Suits to suffer criticism and fix the situation, as by comparison The People in Uniform are suffering shattered skulls, missing limbs and death. Which is, on my scale, exponentially more traumatic than criticism.

While you're there, you should also read his post on the Crazification Factor, which is the best explanation I've heard yet for what is happening to this country.

KFM also matches reader donations to a given charity each month - this month he's blogging for Fisher House, a nonprofit dedicated to helping military families.

Life is good

Perhaps the universe could tell that I was feeling frazzled and and the end of my rope. Maybe the universe reads this blog? Or maybe I just look that pathetic, though I hope not. In any case, wonderful things have been happening to me lately.

I automatically wore my seatbelt "wrong" Saturday morning again - the habits of a lifetime - and got stopped by another cop, who let me off with a warning after a little baby-related chit-chat. Amazing!

The woman in front of me at the Starbucks drive-through later that morning paid for my cakie and a cuppa, perhaps in sympathy for the infant howling she could hear emanating from my car from several yards away. She was already gone by the time the man at the window told me she'd paid for me, and I didn't even get to smile at her in thanks; whoever you are, mysterious benefactress, be assured that I will pass on the random-act-of-kindness karma tenfold.

The Squid slept through the night on Sunday night, God bless his wee heart. It was an anomaly, but considering that he was following up his two worst nights ever, and that my partner is out of town, it was received with great joy.

My good friend I. came to visit me this week, about which I was beside myself with happiness. It was a glorious three days of tasty food and excellent conversation and squidwrangling and walks and general goodness. I wish we lived closer together; my eyes got all leaky when I had to drop her off at the airport and I miss her already. Wah.

I am headed to my college reunion, avec bebe, in a little more than a week. It will stretch my resources, both personal and financial, to do it - but I already have plans to see many wonderful people whom I don't see nearly often enough, and that will make the ensuing exhaustion worth it.

And Himself comes home in two and a half days, and the baby is asleep now. Life is good.

Driving, rebellion, and law enforcement (all much less exciting than it sounds...)

Yesterday was day three of the latest bout of mastitis, and while I was feeling a bit better with the antibiotics, young Squid was not in a good mood, and by five p.m. I had been peed on, screamed at, and spit up on (being shit on had to wait until eight-thirty, but we managed the bodily-fluids hat trick, too, at which point I cried a little). Himself was getting ready to leave today for a week-long business trip, and I was feeling woefully underprepared for the first week of solo parenting. We had talked about a nice dinner together, but by six p.m. all I wanted was a babysitter, a babysitter, a babysitter, and 24 hours alone in a quiet hotel room, none of which were on offer.

So we ordered out from our favorite pub in town and Himself took the baby while I went to pick up the food. God, it felt great to get out. I mean, I get out of the house avec bebe several times every day for errands and walks, but this was the first time in over two weeks I had been neither sleeping nor caring for the baby, and it felt...like I could breathe. I mean, I love the Squid, let there be no doubt, but before he came along I spent the majority of each day by myself, and the transition has been a very difficult one.

So I rolled down the windows and geared up the iPod and blasted the Throwing Muses and Bikini Kill all the way to the pub and back. I felt ridiculous, but it felt good. I mean, those bands are not for thirty-something suburban moms with earnest bumper stickers, are they? When I saw those groups play, my life had a lot more to do with the sex, the drugs, and the rock-n-roll than the onesies, the mortgage, and the meeting planning. But I found it very satisfying, somehow. It felt like yet another part of my adolescent rebellion against the person I've become, which is fairly pathetic but ongoing.

Even more pathetic, however, is when the already ridiculous "rebellion" is reduced to playing girly punk music too loud in my Toyota Camry while I go to pick up the takeout. I can't even get wasted and stay out all night. No, I go get the burgers, and come home and change the diaper...and get shit on. Ah, adulthood. In better news, Squid slept almost eight hours last night, which is more exciting than I can possibly express to you.

I feel like I have become boring even to myself. In the past, even if my life wasn't interesting to tell about, it was still pretty interesting to live. Lately less so. I'm not unhappy, I'm just...tired, and in lock-step with the eat-burp-bounce-nap-pee cycle of a 2.5-month-old. This all has to do with another post, about the conflict between caretaking and wonder, that I've been working on for a while, but that will have to be another day.

Instead, I want to share with you that breastfeeding spared me a traffic ticket today. The cop stopped me on the way from dropping Himself at the airport to tell me I was wearing my seatbelt wrong, that is, under the left arm and breast rather than over the shoulder. I explained to him with an artfully embarrassed laugh (like I have ever been embarrassed talking about my tits, HA!) that I am breastfeeding (he peered in the backseat to verify Squid's existence) and have mastitis, so it hurts to wear it over, which was a wee lie - it doesn't really hurt. He let me go "in support of motherhood".

I did not explain to him that I've been wearing my seatbelt wrong all my life, because I hate having things touch my throat (I don't wear turtlenecks either) and I feel like I'm choking if I drive with it the "right" way. I also carefully failed to mention that this is the second time I've been stopped (and let off!) for this violation. But the third time's the charm - guess I'd better start driving the "nagging feeling of strangulation" way from here on out. Argh. But hey, a perk to motherhood other than, you know, a baby! Rock on.

Internetworking

According to MySpace, everyone I went to high school with is straight. How statistically improbable is that? I just found it interesting that even those people who listed themselves as married or partnered and not interested in dating still felt the need to proclaim their heterosexuality rather than leave it as "no answer". Then again, I listed my orientation...but that has more to do with my own feelings about what it means to be able to "pass," which is a whole 'nother blog post.

MySpace is weird. It's like Friendster meets Livejournal, only with a busier layout than your average Geocities page. The searching functions are fairly advanced, but ultimately, it's just another web networking tool. I can't exist in that many places online at once. I'd go crazy. I already have this blog and another couple of special interest communities where I'm active, plus remnants of me floating about from other message boards and communities long gone. Interesting to poke about the MySpace profiles, though; it's also interesting to contemplate how many people have no online identity at all. You can't mirror your real life networks online; neither can you know everyone in person that you know online. It's a Venn issue.

Anyhow, speaking of online networking tools, I think I'm going to try to migrate this blog back to LiveJournal. I miss varying privacy levels for entries. I miss logically-organized past-entry navigation. I miss threaded commenting. And they've recently instituted tagging, which Blogger does not offer, and I really want that - it would allow me to categorize entries by whether they're about politics, or the baby, or family, or any of the other things I blog about here. It would be so great to click a tag and be able to find all the entries with poems in them, for example. The switch will mean that non-LiveJournal users have to sign comments with their names (it designates people without an account as "anonymous," which is part of the reason I stopped using it), but I think it's worth it.

The migration probably won't happen for a few eons, given how much free time I've got lately, but when it does I'll let everyone know so you can change RSS feeds and all that other good stuff. You'll still be able to read it off this page - you won't have to go to the LiveJournal site - it will just be a slightly different (and better) engine running it.

Mothers' Day

Mothers' Day was first proclaimed by social activist Julia Ward Howe in 1870. She conceived of the holiday as a day on which mothers would give back to their communities, working for social justice and other causes larger than themselves and their families. The current Hallmark celebrations of the day came later, and the original purpose slipped slowly out of cultural memory. But once, this day was not for breakfast in bed and rose-tinted cards, but for tree-planting, organizing, marching, and writing letters to one's representatives.

So this morning, I think I'll hang out with my Mom and take my Grammy some pastries and flowers, because I do love and appreciate them. And tonight, I think I'll make a few donations to causes I care about. And write Barbara Boxer that thank-you note I've been procrastinating on, because she's a great representative, and I never have to call her, because she's always already on my side. And I'll join MoveOn.org's Moms Rising campaign.

I think the holiday can (and should) be both a celebration of our own mothers and a celebration of the power mothers have to change the world for the better. Celebrate with me?

Mother's Day Proclamation

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

— Julia Ward Howe

Primero de Mayo: Dia Sin Un Imigrante

Well, I wrote about how I wouldn't go, and then I hung around the house and felt crappy for about five minutes, and then the Squid woke up. So I thought, fuck this, I don't care if I'm late, I can't not be part of this. This is history. This is regular people mobilizing to change the world for the better. I'm going to skip this for a nap? I think not. So I packed up a few clean diapers and the Squid's frontpack and we went to San Jose; the march (a four-mile stretch) had been underway for an hour and a half by the time we got there, so I parked about two miles from the end point, loaded a sleeping Squid into the frontpack, and walked up to the main street. I needn't have worried about it being over; this is what I saw as I got there:



The demonstration stretched the full four miles - one woman told me that at 6:30 (the ostensible "end time" of the march) people were still leaving the origination point. I have never seen so many people all in one place, except maybe at Gay Pride in San Francisco, and even then, it's a parade, not a march, so they clear the street for floats and groups of organized marchers, not this steady stream of regular folks. Almost everyone was Latino, and I heard very little English - we could have easily been south of the border, a sudden reversal, an oasis of (mostly) Mexico in the middle of downtown San Jose. There were a few bands, and a dance troupe, and I'm sure some other organized groups, but mainly it was just a stream of families (children everywhere) and friends and couples, dressed in white shirts and waving American and Mexican flags.



I'm not a big fan of the American flag. I love my country, but the flag's been used too many times by heavy-handed right-wing politicians to stand for everything I can't stand for in this country. But it was heartwarming to see it today. One of the small rag-tag marching bands struck up "Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue" at one point along our route and everyone cheered. I've never actually felt patriotic about a patriotic song (unless, you know, Woody Guthrie, okay) until that moment, but there was something very special about it.



The signs were great - not cheeky, like so many of the "fun" signs you see at political rallies, but very heartfelt. "We Do Jobs You Won't." "Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote." "What Would You Do To Feed Your Family?" "You Immigrated Too." I saw a little girl on her father's shoulders wearing a t-shirt that said, "My Parents Pay Taxes." I walked along and couldn't stop smiling. People smiled back and asked after the baby, and with my usual pathetic inability to generate ease with strangers, I answered them, and we smiled at each other, and walked on. One woman thanked me profusely for coming, which made me feel strange - like being thanked for doing less than you know you should. I told her I was very happy to be there, which was true, but made me sound like a guest on a talk show.



Never at any point was the street less than completely full of people in all directions, a sea of white-shirted humanity as far as I could see. I'm a bit cynical about marches, having participated in way too many that were pointless and self-congratulatory over the years, but this felt different. The Squid and I marched maybe 20 blocks and turned around when the sun started going down, but I was so glad we'd gone. If he ever asks me, when he gets older, what I did on the first of May, 2006, when all this amazing stuff was happening, I won't have to tell him I was taking a nap.

Confessions of a lipservice liberal

I made up my mind to go to the San Jose march, because there are marches everywhere today, and nobody I know could come with us anyway, so our plans were flexible. But then the Squid's grandma and great uncle came by this afternoon instead of tomorrow, and they were here until three and the Squid ate and fussed for another hour plus after that, and he's just fallen asleep. I could load him into his carseat and go now, but the march is half over and would be done by the time we could get there, and and the rush hour traffic is godawful around here.

Or I could nap.

So much for dedication to the cause.