8:26 PM


La luna nueva celebrated her six-month birthday on Saturday. The poor baby has to go in for her operation this Friday. She's so small still, it's hard to believe she can procreate.

I'm totally jealous--the baby likes to sleep on Catherine's pillow, not mine. Why not mine? Doesn't she love me? Why not?

It might have something to do with the fact that I keep calling her "demon spawn," I don't know.

Unable to fight her way out of a paper bag.




Sneak attack on Jack.



8:21 PM


My teeth hurt.
9:34 AM

Sunday, February 23, 2003







4:54 PM


Okay. I've learned my lesson. No more burning the candle at both ends. No more 1/2-eaten meals in the car between destinations, no more staying up too late, no more going out when I should stay in. This is apparently what it feels like to be an adult.
4:51 PM

Friday, February 21, 2003
Neither one of us slept well last night. Over dinner, I started making a list of things we shouldn't discuss right before going to bed, but after the fifth or sixth item, I changed it into a list of things we shouldn't discuss whilst we're trying to eat.

The big three points for yesterday:

1. I opened up my e-mail to discover a "funny" e-mail that my coach had sent to everyone on the team. It has already been established that I need to develop a sense of humor, but even with months of tutoring from a comedy coach, I will never find something like this e-mail funny. It was full of bigoted, racist, and homophobic statements, like:

"I believe that if you are selling me a Big Mac, try to do it in English."

"I believe that it doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes two parents, a married man and woman."

"I think if you are too stupid to know how a ballot works, I don't want you deciding who should be running the most powerful nation in the world for the next four years."

And so on. How am I supposed to react to this? I do a pretty good job of keeping my opinions to myself. I delete all the Christian, pray-for-the-world e-mails he sends. But this seems a bit too much for me to take. I have to spend a lot of time with this guy, but this makes me really uncomfortable. Do I ignore it? Confront him? What?

2. D. and I have been friends since junior high, and this is the first time we've had a political conflict. He sent me a copy of the letter he sent Barbara Boxer, in which he accused her of being "reactionary" because she believes that the UN needs more time to work its inspections properly. He suggests that her statement in support of the UN "is nothing but a weak appeal to the politics of the moment." To summarize his letter, he argues that we need to support military operations in Iraq to save face, we would lose the respect of our allies if we didn't follow through with our threats.

What I want to know is: is he willing to fly to Iraq himself and hold a gun to some civilian's head and pull the trigger, just so he won't look like a wimp? This is really distressing, because he's totally brilliant--a genius--and here we are, at odds with each other over the issue of war. Ordinarily, I would say, "Hey, he's the smart one, he must be right," but this time, I'm not going to do that. And I'm not very happy about it.

3. Catherine's dad is going off the deep end. Apparently, when Liz got off the plane, having rushed from Modesto to Portland to see her mom in the hospital, the first thing Earl said was not "glad you could come" or "your mom is doing fine" but "I've decided your mom is a lesbian, and so is every other woman in her family, including you." There is no gay blood on his side of the family, he says, only on her mom's side.

Well, we've noticed he's been harping on the lesbian thing a LOT lately, but to hit Liz with this convuluted theory while Dot is in the hospital just seems a bit much. Liz called last night and asked Catherine, "Do you know your father thinks I'm a lesbian? And he makes it sound like it's a bad thing?" So, it was a long weekend for Liz, taking care of her mom and trying to ignore Earl's whacko theories.

She really called because she wants us to pay attention when we go out to visit in March and see if Earl really is declining mentally. I'd say already, yes, he is. I can hear it when I listen to Catherine talk on the phone, their conversations sound completely different than they did a year ago. So, the plan (as laid out while we were trying to fall asleep last night) is to try and get Dot-Mom alone at some point and see what she thinks of the whole situation. I suppose it doesn't matter in the end, though, because what are we going to do about it from Indiana?

But we're not talking about these points, or about war, or about terrorism, or about night club fires, or about my family, or about money because it's too close to bedtime.
6:55 PM


So, yesterday afternoon, Catherine had a chance to go hear Aaron McGruder. I'm really surprised that kid hasn't been arrested for sedition. The campus paper had a pretty even-handed article; the city paper hated him. Everyone agreed he was a radical. He's even more radical now than he was six months ago, if that's possible. He and Bill Breeden apparently had a discussion in which Rev. Breeden advocated peaceful protest a la MLKJr., and McGruder disagreed, saying that the era in which non-violent protest could accomplish something is over. And at this point, he's flat out accusing the Republican party of murdering Wellstone. It's not that I don't think the Bush administration is above taking people out if necessary; I just think the Republicans are too arrogant to see one Senator as a threat to their position.

I guess I'm really surprised that no one wearing a black suit and sunglasses has shown up at McGruder's door and said, "You know, Mr. McGruder, when you stand up in public and say non-violent protest doesn't work, and it's time for an armed revolution, the government gets very nervous."

I can't decided if he's brave or stupid. Probably a little of both.
11:26 AM


"In support of its claim that future drilling in the 1002 will affect only a small area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the oil industry promises more precise mapping of deposits, horizontal drilling from smaller pads up to four miles away, and other new technology that it claims will reduce the size of its "footprint" on the tundra. The oil companies claim the damage might also be offset by limiting exploration to the winter months and using ice roads instead of digging gravel. But even if all this should work, to drill a new oil field efficiently would still require an estimated 280 miles of new roads and hundreds of miles of new pipelines. Realistic predictions of economically recoverable oil in the 1002, based on U.S. Geological Survey studies in 1998, work out to about 3.2 billion barrels (assuming a price of $20 a barrel), or less than a six-month supply for America's wasteful fossil fuel economy, which consumes 25 percent of the world's oil production while possessing only 3 percent of its known reserves. Drilling in the 1002 is no quick fix, for even if drilling is approved, most energy companies estimate that no oil would be ready for consumption for at least a decade. The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that if manufacturers increased the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks by just three miles per gallon, we would save more than a million barrels of oil a day—five times what the refuge could possibly supply—thus reducing the dread dependence on foreign oil far faster than the proposed drilling in our last great expanse of pristine land."
--Peter Matthiessen, "Footprints in the Last Wild Place," Outside Magazine (February 2003): 81.



10:46 AM


Mixed signals.

And I'm bitter about the whole thing.
9:44 AM

Thursday, February 20, 2003
Whoo-hoo! I was just channel surfing and ground to a stop at MTV. My favorite Sushirobo song, Rat or Mole, was playing in the background of some Real World drama scene. David has hit the big time!

Order your Sushirobo T-shirt, only ten bucks!
8:25 PM


Travis
Fran
print proj. manual, drawings
run BC Framer tutorial

3:32 PM


I didn't quite make my escape fast enough.

Packing up my papers before leaving class, one of my students raised her hand. She had been handing around little scraps of paper with a URL on them: defendamerica.mil.

Student: Susan, would you like to support our military?
Susan: (suddenly very busy with her papers) Nope.
Student: You don't support our military?
Susan: Nope.
Student: Why not? Aren't you proud of them?
Susan: Well...although I'm not a conscientious objector, I am a pacifist, so no, I'm not.
Student: Oh. Well, have a nice weekend.

This ranks right up there with my class closing conversation on Tuesday, when one of my students asked my age, said, "Wow, you're *old*," then asked me if I'm married.
11:16 AM


Immediately after September 11th, Americans started running around, chicken no head style, raving about "a new Pearl Harbor." At the time, Howard Zinn dimissed the comparison, stating in the Bay Guardian that "it's a poor comparison. Pearl Harbor was part of a world war, and this action is the work of a small group of fanatical militants who don't represent a nation." However, he continued on with his thought, proposing that "one of the advantages for the establishment of comparing it to Pearl Harbor is that after Pearl Harbor we could strike back against a nation, Japan. By comparing it to Pearl Harbor we can find a nation to strike against, in this case probably Afghanistan. The comparison with Pearl Harbor is intended to get the country ready to accept war."*

Okay, so he got the country wrong, Afghanistan was just a temporary diversion, buying the Bush administration time to pull together a plan for an assault on Iraq, but other than that, I'd say Mr. Zinn has it quite right.

As indicated by a paper written by Henry Burke Wend (published by the Heinrich Boll Foundation), there are a few compelling parallels to be made between September 11th and Pearl Harbor.** Most of them have been discussed to death in the popular media--the alleged intelligence failures on the part of the U.S. gov't in both cases, for instance. What interests me most about Mr. Wende's article, however, is his discussion of the solidifying of American racial biases after both attacks. Previous to Pearl Harbor,


American leaders simply did not think that Japanese were capable of such an attack....Americans believed that the Japanese were physiologically incapable of flying planes, attributing the exploits of the infamous Mitsubishi Zero fighter to the fact that they had been designed and flown by Germans (neither of which was true).***


After Pearl Harbor, however, the Japanese were "culturally transformed in the public mind overnight from hapless subhumans, to superhuman monsters bent on destroying human civilization."****

It doesn't take a mastermind to spot the same trend after September 11th. Arabs and Arab-Americans, once depicted in movies as rather stupid, bumbling terrorists, suddenly are sneaky fast and wily. This isn't exactly a news flash, it's been going on for the past year and several months.

The new part, the part I hope Howard Zinn takes on in his next book, is the slippage between Osama bin Laden and Sadaam Hussein in the American mind. Certainly the media have decided that the two men are the same person: Witness Bill O'Reilly's attack on Jeremy Glick's anti-war stance.***** Although the conversation was ostensibly about Afghanistan, the real point of contention was a peace petition (Not in Our Name "statement of conscience") that Mr. Glick signed. O'Reilly maintains that Glick's refusal to support a war--against Afghanistan, originally, but now against Iraq as well--is disrespectful to his father's memory, as if his father's death had anything whatsoever to do with weapons inspections in Iraq. Americans seem absolutely unable to distinguish a terrorist attack from the political leadership of a sovereign nation.

My question is this: How much of an intelligence failure was there on September 11th, if any? My real fear is that there was no failure, that the Bush administration knew exactly what was going to happen, when it was going to happen. I suspect that the U.S. gov't knew it was going to happen, enabled it to happen, knowing that they could move from Afghanistan to Iraq with little challenge from the U.S. population. So, it really is like Pearl Harbor, an attack that could have been avoided, had not our gov't needed an excuse to join (or start) a war.

What I would like is for someone to present me with *incontrovertible* evidence that the U.S. gov't was not involved in September 11th, that they didn't deliberately let it happen in order to orchestrate an attack on Iraq. I actually don't think Bush is smart enough to think up this possibility on his own, but it wouldn't surprise me if he had help.

------------------------------------------------------------
* http://www.mediaworkshop.org/september11/article4.html
** Henry Burke Wend, Pearl Harbor and the 11th of September: Some Historical Parallels, Heinrich Boll Foundation. Heinrich Boll was well known for his work for global human rights until his death in 1985. See the Heinrich Boll Foundation's webpage for a short biography and other Foundation publications. See particularly the dossier on the Iraq conflict for international analysis and opinion on the current situation.
*** Wend, p. 2.
**** Ibid.
***** For a transcript of O'Reilly's chastisement of Glick, see http://www.left-turn.org/feature/archive/glick-oreilly.html.
8:35 AM

Wednesday, February 19, 2003
I swear to god my brother is up to something illegal, smuggling drugs across the border or running guns or something. After months of not being able to get in touch with him, my parents finally decided they would contact the sheriff's office and ask them to do a well person search. Before doing that, though, they called the most recent phone number they had for him (his girlfriend's) one last time, and left a message telling him what they were going to do. This is the gazillionth message my parents have left at this phone number; they've e-mailed him, they've called him, they've written him letters, no response. Not a word when my dad had a heart attack, not a word when he went back in the hospital, not a word on mother's day, father's day, or any day in between.

However, not more than three minutes after they left a message saying they were going to resort to well person search, my brother calls my parents back to say he's alive. But he won't tell them where he's living, he won't give them a current address (just send mail to his [ex?] girlfriend's house), he won't give them a current phone number (keep using the one for his girlfriend), and he won't tell them anything about his job, except for the fact he works for the same company (but what company? No one knows). I find it highly suspicious that two dozen phone calls pleading with him to call home before his father dies produce no response, but one phone call mentioning the sheriff, and suddenly he rediscovers the long lost skill of dialing a phone number.

Amazingly, my sister had a fairly astute observation about both of my brothers after this episode: "You know, Mom, the whole problem is, Tim follows the wrong person, and Carl doesn't follow the right person." And she's exactly right. I fully expect to hear that one brother has turned out to be a serial killer, while the other one is busy arming a militia with assault rifles in the southwest desert somewhere.
7:35 PM


I think if Bush and his evil little cohort want war, that's what we'll get, no matter what I say or do. Don't get me wrong, I am very much cheered by the fact that my friends are out protesting, I really am. But I think we're all lying to ourselves if we believe what we say is going to make any difference whatsoever. At this point, I think all protest is good for is making ourselves feel a little better by surrounding ourselves w/like-minded people and comforting ourselves by listening to other people argue points with which we already agree. It's not going to change Bush's mind, it's not going to make Colin Powell less of a toady. It's just going to let us recognize the faces and names of the people in our community with whom we'll be able to hold a civil conversation after the U.S. takes the next step toward re-colonizing the Middle East.
6:04 PM


My, but I hate teaching. I wonder how many of my college profs went home after giving a lecture with the feeling that holding a pneumatic nailer against their temples and pulling the trigger would be a good idea.

5:32 PM

Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Community is (at the very least):

• Getting your coffee for free on Friday morning and Tuesday morning just because the guys behind the counter recognize you as a regular customer;
  
• Having two different students in your class say, "Hey, I think I know someone on your team," and have it turn out to be true;
  
• Being able to walk from shop to shop on your lunch hour without missing a beat of your favorite song, because every store has the same local radio station tuned in;
  
• Calling a local pizza chain and hearing a guy in the background say, "Yeah, that's their new number, I know what they want," and have that be the case.
  

Snow tubes.



The wind kicked up night before last and played games with the snow. All the open fields around here were filled with tubes of snow, w/a major diameter of about a foot, a minor diameter of 4 inches or snow. If you get down on your stomach, you can look through them like a telescope. Really, pretty cool.

The opening for Catherine's show at the Monroe County Historical Museum went really, really well yesterday. It's sort of fun to follow around your celebrity wife while everyone heaps praises upon her shoulders. This is the 2nd opening this month (well, the 3rd, but the 2nd for shows she's curated). The big opening is Feb. 14 for the "Feminine Persuasions" show. But we have an opening on the 8th for...hm...some show. There are so many, I can't keep track. We have two things next week to do, but I can't remember what they are. I know Catherine has to do something with Gloria Steinem one night, in addition to that. Between my hockey and her career, we never know exactly where we're going to be. She carries around her work calendar, and I carry around my hockey calendar, and whenever anyone asks if we can go to dinner, we have to stop and compare schedules before saying, "No, you'll have to check back in April."