Month: July 2009

by

I am in Love

There are some just dog things, such as the way they trot in front of you with their ears back, going the way you go, that I just adore in this puppy of mine.  I love how wherever I go in the house she follows me.  My dog Autumn did that.  It was one of the hardest things to lose when she died.  Even as I write this, Ava is lying at my feet.  There are also some unique to Ava things I love about her.  She sits on my feet.  If I am in a place and standing and talking or sitting and talking to someone else, she perches on my foot.  She will do this when I am saying goodbye to Dan or Milla as they leave the house to go do something and I am staying home.  Ava sits there on my foot, I am staying here with her, she seems to say, you go have fun.  We will be here when you get back. Then as I move into the house to do whatever, she follows me.

Years and years ago, I may not have even been out of my teens, I read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.  I don’t remember much of it at all.  I read it because it was a bestseller.  I don’t even recall its premise.  But I remember one thing vividly.  He argues that humans can never really love a dog, or any other animal, because to love as he defines it requires reciprocation in kind.  My feelings in response are unchanged:  I wholeheartedly disagree.  There are different kinds of love.  There are loves that are equally reciprocal, usually with the person we choose as a mate, but also with certain friends or even family members.  But by his definition, I could not truly love an infant or a small child or someone who does not love me back in the same way and with the same articulation.  What a limiting view of human capacity.  I absolutely love my dog, as I have loved other dogs before her. It does not matter that her adoration of me is different.  It is there.  It does not simply vanish because we come from different places.Can I Kiss You

Ava moved from the floor beneath my feet to the corner of the bed.  She likes to sit on the corner and look at us sitting here at the desk or look out the window.  She hovers with her paws over the edge of the bed frame, her head rested on them, looking at me.

She makes distinct faces, this dog.  The most common is what we call her happy face, her mouth slightly open, tongue out, eyes bright, often one ear cocked.  She’ll turn her head slightly as if to ask Do you want to play? In these moments I stop what I’m doing and play with her.

In the morning, when she wakes up, she has the most incredible bed head.  Her eyes are all sleepy, her hairs all akimbo.  She’ll crawl to the top of the bed, as if the effort is more than she can bear, then sigh and relax as we snuggle and pet her.  Later, wild dog comes out, chasing bears and fozzies, rattling them mightily from side to side until they are dead.  Sometimes she brings them to us and requests that we throw them.  We do, because watching her little sheep butt run away to get them is one of life’s greatest joys.  She does not like these stuffed creatures to have eyes.  Within a half an hour of getting a new stuffed toy she removes its eyes.  Perhaps she does not want it to see her remove all its innards piece by piece.  More likely she loves that the pieces are hard and fun to chew.

After she has a bath she runs through the house like she’s on fire, ears back, bolting from room to room. What is that, dogs running after baths?  I understand their desire to rub themselves dry on the floor, but the running around after, I wonder why they do that.  Almost every dog I have ever owned has gone running after getting a bath.  However, none of them have run like Ava does.  The others have all just gone for their run to dive into their rubs.  This one just runs like a bat out of hell from room to room, then comes and stares at me with the happy face, tongue lolling out, eyes bright. Then off she goes again to make another round.  It’s hilarious.

Ava isn’t thrilled with having baths.  She is actually one of the more obnoxious dogs I have had to bathe.  It’s a good thing she is small and easy to hold down because she really hates it and tries to escape.  Yet she is intrigued by the bathtub, or rather, people showering or bathing.  When Milla takes a shower, it is a guarantee that Ava will be in there standing on the edge of the tub, peeking around the shower curtain, her little sheep butt wagging its little tail.  When any of us bathe, she comes and stands and looks in.  Maybe she is curious why we would want to do something so hideously awful.  Or maybe she just wants our company.

As I have mentioned, she loves to snuggle.  She is thrilled at her ability to jump on the bed.  She could not always do it by herself, but she grew and figured it out and seems to take great pleasure in it.  And jumping off. I can jump on the bed!  I can jump off the bed!  See?  I launch myself many feet past the bed!  Aren’t I skilled? Anyway, she will jump on the bed if I am lying there and come and lie across my neck and sigh.  She’s my little doggie stole.  She’ll snuggle there a while and get kisses from me, and strokes and rubs.  She knows I do not like her to kiss me.  She does not even try anymore.  Dan lets her kiss him.  I think it’s gross.  But she knows he doesn’t mind so she licks him all over.  The only time she licks me is when I get out of the shower.  She will come in and lick the water off of my feet  until I dry them.

This dog makes me happy.  That’s the simple fact of it.  She came along when I was very sad.  There were so many reasons, many of them huge, for my sadness.  One of them was grief over the loss of my house and the loss of the dogs who lived with me there.  I would have dreams about them, dreams they were still alive or still lived with me.  Vivid dreams.  Then this little dog came to live with us and I suddenly felt the desire to laugh again.  I laugh every day living with her.  She’s a happy, wonderful little spirit.  Frankly, I’m completely smitten.  I am in love.

by

Racism is Alive and Well in America

The following article is taken from The New York Times and can be located here.

Think Again
by Stanley Fish

Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again

I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.

The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.

The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)

Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.

He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.

by

Spam

I have to wonder, do the originators of the spam selling Penis Enlargement Pills and Best Orgasm Jelly Ever actually ever sell any of their crap?  Seriously.  What is their incentive in continuing to send these ads to our junk mail folders?  Is it cost effective to pay to send the ads and hope one moron in a million will actually click and buy?  I just don’t get it.

by

Who are the Real “Activists”?

I absolutely agree with the premise of this article, that if we are going to define a judge’s decisions as activist, it should be based on the numbers of times the judge went against the laws designed by congress and signed into law by the president.  It certainly should not be based on the holdings in certain cases.  Most people on both sides of the fence have no idea what goes into a judicial decision and make the assumption that a judge is activist just because they don’t like the result in a case without really having any idea what the core issue was or how the ruling was reached.  They just pick the party they like and if that party doesn’t win, call the result activism.  This article argues from a more coherent, critical thinking perspective.

The link to this article can be found here.

July 6, 2005
So Who Are the Activists?
By PAUL GEWIRTZ and CHAD GOLDER

Correction Appended

New Haven

WHEN Democrats or Republicans seek to criticize judges or judicial nominees, they often resort to the same language. They say that the judge is “activist.” But the word “activist” is rarely defined. Often it simply means that the judge makes decisions with which the critic disagrees.

In order to move beyond this labeling game, we’ve identified one reasonably objective and quantifiable measure of a judge’s activism, and we’ve used it to assess the records of the justices on the current Supreme Court.

Here is the question we asked: How often has each justice voted to strike down a law passed by Congress?

Declaring an act of Congress unconstitutional is the boldest thing a judge can do. That’s because Congress, as an elected legislative body representing the entire nation, makes decisions that can be presumed to possess a high degree of democratic legitimacy. In an 1867 decision, the Supreme Court itself described striking down Congressional legislation as an act “of great delicacy, and only to be performed where the repugnancy is clear.” Until 1991, the court struck down an average of about one Congressional statute every two years. Between 1791 and 1858, only two such invalidations occurred.

Of course, calling Congressional legislation into question is not necessarily a bad thing. If a law is unconstitutional, the court has a responsibility to strike it down. But a marked pattern of invalidating Congressional laws certainly seems like one reasonable definition of judicial activism.

Since the Supreme Court assumed its current composition in 1994, by our count it has upheld or struck down 64 Congressional provisions. That legislation has concerned Social Security, church and state, and campaign finance, among many other issues. We examined the court’s decisions in these cases and looked at how each justice voted, regardless of whether he or she concurred with the majority or dissented.

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more “liberal” – Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens – vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled “conservative” vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

To say that a justice is activist under this definition is not itself negative. Because striking down Congressional legislation is sometimes justified, some activism is necessary and proper. We can decide whether a particular degree of activism is appropriate only by assessing the merits of a judge’s particular decisions and the judge’s underlying constitutional views, which may inspire more or fewer invalidations.

Our data no doubt reflects such differences among the justices’ constitutional views. But it even more clearly illustrates the varying degrees to which justices would actually intervene in the democratic work of Congress. And in so doing, the data probably demonstrates differences in temperament regarding intervention or restraint.

These differences in the degree of intervention and in temperament tell us far more about “judicial activism” than we commonly understand from the term’s use as a mere epithet. As the discussion of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement begins, we hope that debates about “activist judges” will include indicators like these.

Correction

Because of an editing error, this article misstated the date the court started. Its first official business began in 1790, not 1791.

Paul Gewirtz is a professor at Yale Law School. Chad Golder graduated from Yale Law School in May.

by

Pregnancy Insomnia

It does not matter when I go to bed, I wake up at 6:43 a.m. every day, usually to pee, then cannot go back to sleep.  By the time my body might consider going back to sleep, it has to pee again.  Pregnancy is so fun.  There is also often the problem of a numb hip or arm.  My middle is so much heavier than I’m used to, it seems to cut off circulation.  I noticed a reflection of myself yesterday while waiting in a line.  I look funny.  I have skinny legs and skinny arms and then this watermelon in the middle.

I am carrying differently than I did with Milla, but this does not surprise me.  Milla obliterated the flat and tiny stomach muscles I had enjoyed my entire life up to that point.  I think she also shifted my guts around.  This baby also seems to like to hang out up in my ribs more than Milla ever did.  My sister complained about her babies (she has 4!!) bruising her ribs.  I had no context.  Milla liked to lie on my pelvis.  That hurt.  I think wherever baby hangs out inside us eventually hurts.  Anyway, this baby moves all over, but she does hang out near my ribs and it is quite uncomfortable.  I push and shove and rub and move her back down.  Lately she has been lower in my pelvis (in fact she’s wiggling there now), but it’s getting closer to birth time.  In fact yesterday was 2 months to due date exactly, so there isn’t a lot of time left.

I do believe I have the sweetest child in the world.  As I sit here I see the little pile of jewelry she made me last night while I was working away on the computer.  She and I were talking yesterday about some girls she met in our building.  They told her they could not imagine having no television (we do not have one).  I reiterated to Milla that I think it’s better not having one, that I never even notice not having one.  The jewelry-making provides an example why.  When we are home in the evenings, or even during the day, Milla finds things to do with herself.  She knits.  She crochets.  She draws and draws and draws.  She makes me jewelry.  When she grows up, I will have all these mementos of a childhood spent doing things rather than staring at the idiot box.  That’s a good enough reason for me not to have one.

Baby One is growing up.

Baby One is growing up.

Baby Two sucks her thumb.

Baby Two sucks her thumb.

by

Mini Rant Against Retailers

Headline on Yahoo! today:  Retailers Report Weak June Sales.

Well, duh.  Has anyone been to retail stores lately?  Especially clothing stores?  It’s like retailers think we are all rolling in dough or something.  And even if we were rolling in dough, the prices on shitty crap made in China are obscene, especially at stores that like to capitalize on brand names.  Most of the stuff is piteously and poorly made, but it has a label in it, so the store charges a small fortune.  T-shirts that are so thin they are see-through.  Clothes have seams where the threads are already coming out before the clothes have even been sold.  Then the retailers want $50 or $60 for them.  And it isn’t just clothes.  Bottles of plain lotion are $15.  Razor blades–razor blades! those little pieces of metal that cost about .20 cents–are 20 bucks a pack, just so people can have four in a row.  Cereal is $6 a box, when the cost to make cereal is lower than it has ever been. It’s insane.

Here’s a clue stores:  Want to sell more stuff?  Lower prices to an affordable and reasonable level.  Forty bucks for a t-shirt is too much, especially a crappy, see-through t-shirt.  Seventy bucks for pants is ridiculous, especially since you can’t seem to vary your sizes so that people can buy things that fit.  $100 or more for a purse is stupid, especially since, in my experience, the straps or buckles break within a couple of months.  Marking things as “on sale” with a higher MSRP is for fools.  You may have been able to sell your crap for ridiculous prices a couple of years ago, but times have changed (and people were probably buying all your crap on credit then anyway.  Now the bills are due and the job is gone and there isn’t anything left to spend with.).

A special note to Goodwill:  Your stuff is USED.  Trying to sell a suitcase with a hole in it for forty bucks is never going to make you a penny. I can go buy a NEW one for that price, without the hole!  Used clothes for $10 or $15 is too much.  And an old, ratty, smelly couch for $150 is TOO MUCH!  Your racks are FILLED with crap you will never sell because, guess what?  Your prices are too high for used junk.  There was a bunch of flack a couple of years ago about your CEO making too much money.  Stop charging too much and giving the money you do make to the CEO.  Start helping the people you put on your trucks and in your ads in your pitiful attempts to look like d0-gooders and actually charge prices these people could afford.

by

Pregnancy Brain

I heard someone say or I read somewhere that “pregnant women are stupid.” I have to agree. Having gone from a person with so many thoughts running through my head I had to start a blog to deal with them all so I could focus on the other stuff I wanted to write, to someone who can barely compose a coherent sentence, let alone an entire blog piece, all in the span of just under 8 months, I have to agree.

The end of the first trimester and beginning of the second were the worst.  I look back at my blog posts from that time.  The number of posts start to dwindle.  The topics become more inane.  In fact I wrote about the fact that my brain seemed not to be functioning as it had previously.   And I just wrote about the concern, but there seemed to be no real pressing urge to change it.  I was sitting there muddled in a fog.

Gradually over the last few weeks I have started feeling somewhat clearer, but by brain in no way compares to how it was when I was not pregnant.  My energy levels certainly don’t.  I have always been the sort of person who has a list of 20 things to do and gets all of them done with time left over.  Now?  Now it’s a feat if I remember, oh yeah, I have that appointment today, and manage to dress and get to it on time.  Then that’s it.  I’m done for the day.  I also used to clean the house once a week.  Now it seems it takes seeing pink around the drain in the tub to remind me to clean mildew, or the dog chewing up a roll of toilet paper to force me to drag out the vacuum cleaner.  About the only thing I’ve remained regular on in the housecleaning department is keeping the kitchen clean.  Of course, our kitchen is so tiny, if it isn’t kept clean it’s a disaster within 2 days so the “mildew ring” shows up sooner, so to speak.

Words also used to flit off my tongue.  I had a thought and a response to everything.  Often these thoughts had some intelligence behind them, and I would analyze and think around all the angles.  Not anymore.  Now I don’t even have the thoughts, let alone intelligent ones.

I have some great writing projects I’m working on.  They are like cars with broken batteries.  I give them a jump.  I get them going for a bit.  Then they stop again and languish, waiting for AAA to come and jump them again.  Only AAA takes its own sweet time.  I took months completing and revising a short story I’m pretty pleased with.  I was at the query phase, ready to send letters to the magazines I had chosen.  Incidentally, choosing the magazines took weeks.  Then I started to write the query letter, but it didn’t roll off the fingers as such letters had in the past.  I had to write something saying what the story was about.  Stuck, I stopped for the day, then took a trip to Portland, and I still haven’t finished.  It’s on the list.

The list.  I’ve started making these because I forget things.  I was never much of a list maker in my personal life.  As an attorney, I had lists.  I had calendars.  I am extremely organized.  But I never had to in my personal life.  Now I do.  If I don’t make a list, even the stories and non-fiction pieces I’m working on are forgotten.

I realize pregnancy has hijacked my brain.  I realize at some point the thoughts will return.  However, I also realize that soon there will be a little baby to take my attention and getting these things done will be a practicality nightmare.  This realization is somewhat overwhelming.  Will it be years before I get my brain back?  Will the stories I have been working on be dated by then?  I feel the urge to complete these projects, but can’t seem to get them done.  However, I have stopped just lying in bed in the morning when I can’t sleep after I had to get up for the tenth time to pee.  I have started coming here and writing a little bit now and then.  So maybe there is hope.  I guess it will be obvious by the number of posts I make here.  Or not.

by

Poop Breath Monster

Gads, I love my puppy.  I know this is a silly thing to write about, but she is just such a dear, sweet, delightful little dog, and I adore her so much that I had to say so.  She is so cute.  She is small and white, with a happy grin. Her little butt looks like a sheep butt.  Her ears go up or down.  When she wakes in the morning, she actually has bed head.  She is a good dog.  The best.  The kind of dog people dream about.  She’s no Marley.  She only chews the toys that are hers.  She sits and stays and behaves well.  She doesn’t like to be told no, so when she does something requiring a no, she looks so sad, then doesn’t do it again.4-13-09d

Except for one thing.

She eats poop. Yes, she does.  Not on a regular basis, but when it happens, it’s horrible.  She’s a snuggly creature.  If I’m lying on the bed, she’ll jump up and come over and lie across my neck (she is quite small, only 8 pounds).  This is wonderful, except when she turns her head and I get a whiff of poop breath.  Then the gag reflex kicks in and it’s chaos getting her off me and trying not to vomit.  I happen to be 8 months pregnant.  Smells are stronger for a pregnant woman.  Having the smell of shit right under my nose is like taking a dose of ipecac and receiving the expected and immediate response.  Having the smell of shit on my puppy honey’s face is worse than the simple smell of shit. There is the thought of her eating the poop that adds to the gag reflex.  I have to spend the next several minutes rubbing my lavender pillow all over my face and thinking about flowers and clouds and pretty things, anything to get the idea of my puppy eating shit out of my head.  Not fun.  No, not at all.

I bought some pills to give her to help her stop the coprophagia, but ever since I bought them about a month ago, she hasn’t been doing it so the pills have languished on the shelf.  In fact, I’m not even sure exactly where I put them.  Maybe by her dog food? Maybe in the bathroom?  Maybe in the linen closet?  I don’t know.  Somewhere around here.  Before I bought them, she ate her poop about once every week.  Then I bought the pills, did not give them to her, and she stopped.  I almost forgot about them.  Then last night I was all snuggled in my bed and puppy came in for some loving–the little, poop-breath monster.  I gagged and screeched, Dan and Milla came running (they had been watching a movie together and my yelps interrupted them), and semi-chaos ensued as the puppy was rounded up, the lavender pillow tossed in my face, and efforts were made to locate the offending turds, if any remained.  Puppy’s face had to be washed and I spent 15 minutes thinking those pretty, non-poop thoughts.  Good times.

Like I said, I love my puppy.  If I can get her to stop eating poop, she’ll be perfect.

by

Bombing the Moon

Ever since I heard about NASA’s intention to bomb the moon (see the story here), thoughts and reactions to the news have been flittering in and out of my head.  There are so many, I have had difficulty articulating what one definitive thing bothers me the most about it.  Yet conclusively, my overall sense is that it is WRONG. s_full-moon

Cost:  Why is it we spend billions on crap like this, chasing water on the moon, when we can’t (or won’t) spend the same amount here to conserve water?  Senseless stupidity.  I won’t even get into the waste of money when unemployment numbers are higher than ever and we are in two wars…

No Choice:  NASA does what it wants.  We might vote in a mostly new Congress every two years, but we have such little control over how they spend our money, ultimately, what difference does it make?  Legislators on both sides of the aisle are unwilling to underfund NASA.  I’ve heard all the arguments about how NASA research benefits us all, and I’m sure there are aspects of their research that do, but this is just silly.  There might be the claim they are looking for water, but it’s really a bunch of grown kids who think it’s cool to go bomb the moon and there isn’t a damn thing any of us can do about it.  If they really wanted to conserve water, just as much would be spent on the very real climate and water problems we are experiencing right here on earth.  Plus, as silly as it sounds, the moon belongs to all of us, collectively.  What right do a few have to go and harm that which isn’t theirs?  They don’t.

The Unknown:  Scientists can conduct all the earth bound tests they want to.  The simple fact is there is no way of knowing what ramifications this will have on the moon and the earth.  These planets are inextricably linked.  The earth and moon are connected gravitationally and energetically.  Messing with these forces could alter our tidal patterns, weather patterns, and who knows what else.  It’s just foolishness.  And dangerous.

I don’t know.  If enough people feel about this as I do, then perhaps we could turn public opinion against it enough to get the government to stop it.  My inclination is though, that a bunch of idiots who like movies by Michael Bay would think it’s “AWESOME” and think that naysayers like myself are just a bunch of fuddy duddies.  American ignorance is so prevalent on so much else, I would not be surprised.  On most issues, I consider myself very forward thinking.  I’m willing to try most things.  But not this.  Bombing the moon isn’t only silly, it is scary and wrong.