The Pogues, Fairytale of New York
The Pretenders, 2000 Miles
Jonathan Coulton, Chiron Beta Prime
Ben Folds Five, Brick
Sufjan Stevens, That Was The Worst Christmas Ever (or, indeed, anything by Sufjan Stevens. Come, beautiful young man, sit by me and sing me your songs of emo. I will listen all year.)
Spent the morning in meetings in conference rooms with huge glass walls that looked out on the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges, Coit Tower, Alcatraz and Angel Islands. Hard to concentrate. San Francisco is gobsmackingly beautiful.
Choosing new glasses isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. Where are the frames that say all three of “unreformed Mission hipster-nerd”, “corporate bitch” and “PTA mom, but in a Sandra Tsing Loh way, not a Sarah Palin way”?
From Prada and Kate Spade, as it turns out.
My former arch-nemesis having retired the field, I have decided that my new arch-nemeses – plural – are Time and Space. Many factors influenced this choice, including but not limited to: my father-in-law’s illness; my own parents’ advancing age, not to mention that of my appalling but much-loved cat; the cost of flights from San Francisco to Sydney; and weirdly enough, the 20th high school reunion that, like the tenth, I didn’t attend.
I will say I have a cool cohort. Last time around, mainstream media produced Romy and Michelle’s and Grosse Pointe Blank to coincide with my first decade outta school. This time it’s Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. She approached the event with the same nerdy trepidation I feel. High school was awful! Everyone was mean to me! Why would I want to go back? What Liz discovers is that her wicked comebacks scarred all her enemies for life. At this point I was falling off the sofa, laughing so hard there were tears in my eyes. For me, that would be something of a dream come true.
I have nothing but goodwill for all of the people who just friended me on Facebook in the wake of the Forest High School’s 20th, and several of whom I can almost recall. One, Steve Mackay – quite possibly the curly-haired Christian boy I pretended to have a crush on, to conceal the fact that my sexy dreams were all about girls – put it best when he asked: “What are you doing in America? You missed an awesome reunion!”
It’s not an easy question to answer. As a kid with no money for a plane ticket, how I loathed Germaine Greer and Clive James and their casual assumption of expat superiority. As a twenty-something grad student and then geek migrant, how casually I assumed expat superiority myself. Turns out it makes no difference whether you stay or go.
In superficial ways, sure – you leave one set of people behind, make new friends where you arrive. But I think about how my life and Jeremy’s would have turned out if we’d stayed – look at the friends in Sydney we are most like, and how things turned out for them – and I am forced to conclude it is a wash. Our Australianness asserted itself here, just as our not-Australianness would have asserted itself there. Wherever I go, there I am. Serves me right.
As it is, I miss my mum. I love San Francisco. I wish I could hang out more with my friends in London. I’m still trying to get lead remediation finished on the house. I have a frantic couple of weeks of work left before the end of the year. Claire finished her first piano book and started on her second. Julia got the memo about turning three, and has become a tiny, adorable banshee. Jeremy is as delicious as ever.
As for you, space-time continuum: you are On Notice.
Harvey answers the phone and it’s some gay kid from Minnesota. The kid is thinking of killing himself. Harvey’s distracted but tries to focus: “No, no, don’t do that. Get on a bus. Go to the nearest big city. Go to Minneapolis or New York or LA. It doesn’t matter what anyone says. You’re not sick. You’re not wrong. God doesn’t hate you.”
It’s true what they’re saying: Sean Penn is incredible. I’m a Milk completist and I had to concentrate, hard, to see that it was Penn in the role, so absolutely does he disappear into Milk. It’s Gus Van Sant’s masterpiece, the film he was born to make. It’s painful, of course, and some parts of it were very hard to watch: Prop 6 so neatly prefiguring Prop 8, but without the wrenching end; the murderer walking through the City Hall where my dear friends married last month. The candlelit march down Market.
But it was at “Get on the bus” that I started crying. GLBT history doesn’t matter only to GLBT people. It matters to all the fellow travellers, to anyone who likes opera or books better than football or stock car racing, to anyone who even just doesn’t want people like us dead. Weird kids, misfits, outsiders. “Get on the bus”; where would I be now, if no one had said it to me? “Get to the nearest big city. You’re not wrong. God doesn’t hate you.”
I dreamed I had him back. He was strong and young and happy, his coat shining orange, his mane long and tangled, his expression intelligent and wry. I can still feel the hot sun on his neck, and smell his unforgettable scent, mixed with the eucalyptus flowers.
This time I had enough money, and he wasn’t going to die of cancer, and everything was going to be okay.
Boston, then New York, then San Francisco briefly, then Las Vegas, and now back in my darling San Francisco again. So tired I can’t write or think or parse Spanish or make connections or keep more than two things in short term memory. Claire has a tummy bug and a fever. She is asleep with her hot feet in my lap. It’s so good to be home that the very thought of it brings tears to my eyes.
In the small hours after the acceptance speech, I was reading – very anxiously – the Conservative blogosphere. I do this occasionally to get out of my echo chamber. Liz does it in a much more disciplined and organized way, and while I’d like to emulate that, mostly it upsets me too much. Anyway I followed a link to this one guy’s blog and now I can’t find it again and don’t want to wade back through all those comments, but –
His point was that he was extremely sad about the result, and cynical about an Obama administration, but grateful about and awed by the peaceful transfer of power. I remembered that that was my only real shred of comfort in the wake of the Democratic losses in 2000 and 2004. What a grown-up thing! Bitter partisans accepting the other side’s triumph!
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this is democracy. We liberals want to be all yay! Vindicated! Take that Dubya and whatever, but Obama’s victory is only partly that, and partly a manifestation of this nation’s innate desire to change things up every eight to twelve years. That honest grief I felt for Gore and Kerry? I know McCain’s supporters feel that way now. I can see it in their faces. I can remember every pang of sorrow. I wish them only peace. It’s why Obama urges no high-fives, no triumphalism. It’s the United States.
This is the price of democracy: that committed, political people will, half the time, have their hearts smashed to bits. Every few years we open executive power up for debate, and sometimes the other guys win, and then we mourn and rage and say it’s gonna be the end of the world. But the alternative is to have the same guy in power for ever and ever and that is MUCH, much worse.
This is democracy! It’s a chance for the disenfranchised to take the mike. And in four or eight or twelve years? We’re gonna have to give it back. That’s the deal. It’s this or a dictatorship.
It’s easy to say it right now, with my guy having just won, so remind me of this next time us liberals are out in the cold: I say it is worth it. I will endure the grief of loss ten times over before I will deny anyone else the right to vote for their candidate ahead of mine.
Abe Lincoln (who totally supported my guy) put it like this:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.
And Ze Frank is saying it with Tubes.
My centrist Christian tax-cutting guy beat the other centrist Christian tax-cutting guy. Euphoria! Hippies dancing in the streets wrapped in the American flag. Yet California voted against love.
And yet and yet: there will be a black man in the Oval Office. A president for his supporters and for the people who didn’t vote for him; a president from my America, for the world; a 21st Century president for the Long Now and the Big Here.
I’ll miss compulsively-reloading Nate Silver, whose outstanding wonkery covered itself in glory. I’ll miss Fake Sarah Palin. I’m not under any illusions; the country and the planet are in a big-ass mess with no easy way out. But I will never forget last night or this morning. I feel honoured to have witnessed this.
Completely failed to Nanowrimo yesterday or today; a bit distracted deciding the election the way I fly every plane I passenge in – KEEPING IT ALOFT BY PURE FORCE OF WILL.
Lucky MT lets me back-date ’em…
Am in possession of one (1) husband. He seems intact. He’s all epiphany-licious and wants to Seize The Day. I’m all After the election, buster.
A cat is inveigling itself onto my lap.
The extra hour just made a long day longer.
I decided to do Nanowrimo for the first time in a few years. My novel is called “The New International Version”, and it takes the form of two LiveJournals. Masochists and the more indulgent of my friends can follow them here:
It’s been a while since I blogged about The Girls And Their Awesome, which is odd and lame of me, because Their Awesome is Very.
Julia is experimenting with language. “I missed Daddy,” she said the other night, in an emo moment, clearly meaning the present tense. It’s a direct search-and-replace from what I always say when I see her after work: “Julia! I missed you!” Other idioms of hers are translations from the Spanish. “I want much milk!” she says. “Mucher and mucher!” Jeremy pointed out that this was a literal rendition of “mas” and “mucho.”
My relationship with Claire is a little stormy at the moment, Claire’s experiments being in the area of defiance. “No!” said Julia to me last night during one heated exchange: “no shout at my sister!” She’s right, of course. She’s also extremely well-mannered. If I photically sneeze, she and I will volley: “Bless you.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.” “I love you.” “I love you too, mommy.”
Ah, Claire, my volatile, stubborn, brilliant, fabulous rock star. She and I butt heads continually. I would take a bullet for her in a heartbeat and I believe she’d make an excellent president, but does she have to be SO IMMATURE? The other night she went into full meltdown because I had given her ice cream in a blue bowl, AT HER REQUEST, and ignored her followup request to disregard the earlier request, take the orange bowl away from Julia and give it to her, Claire. She went to bed without ice cream, rather than back down! I HAVE NEVER WITNESSED SUCH SELF-DEFEATING FOOLISHNESS except, of course, obviously, my own.
Did I mention brilliant? May I brag? No? I will anyway. She had a catch-up piano lesson one Friday, in which she learned a new melody; by her regular lesson on Sunday, 36 hours later, she was playing the duet with Renee. She lazily corrects my awful Spanish and instructs me in Important Facts. (Actually Julia has picked up this habit as well: last night I made the obviously unfounded claim that we live on planet Earth. Julia pointed out that we live in our house, while planet Earth is in space, and can only be reached by going UP UP UP UP.)
God, they crack me up. Claire picked up Arthur and the Comet Crisis at the library. There’s a passage in it in which a computer notes that the comet will destroy the earth, and adds: “Have a nice day!” Claire thought this was beyond hilarious, and has been reading it to anyone who will stand still long enough to hear it. She has inherited my bleak sense of humour and taste for apocalyptic science fiction! Good times, good times.
When the alarm goes off before sunrise every morning, groan, they jump into the big bed with me and the cat and I hug them as tight as I can, looking down at their dear heads, one strawberry-blonde bob, one puff of white silk. My daughters, my daughters, my daughters; I never dreamed I could possibly love anyone so much. Mucher and mucher.
That’s because me and others like me are atheists and agnostics. You, revered figment of my Socratic dialogue, may want a Messiah, but I don’t want a Messiah. I don’t like Messiahs. I don’t like Chosen Ones, Those Who Were Foretold, prophecies, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, Boys Who Lived or magical swords or rings. That shit’s undemocratic, yo.
I and others like me don’t want to be saved. We’re busy trying to bootstrap our way to grace. Keep your spiritual venture capital with its onerous term sheet attached! We’re not signing anything! That’s why we’re atheists and agnostics.
Obama’s Christlike to the extent that both he and Jesus were (gasp!) community organizers. Faith moves mountains, but only if you bring a shovel. Other than that, Senator My Boyfriend is just an intelligent and competent good-government liberal. He won’t walk on water, but he just might do something to address the titanic mess bequeathed to the next President by the current administration, to wit: unwinnable wars on two fronts, a massive deficit and a catastrophic global financial crisis, all traceable directly to the recklessness and bankrupt ideology of Bush and his cronies. (Blame any of this on the Democratic Congress of ’06 and I swear I will spit in your eye, bipartisanship be damned.)
preoccupations
