I am a child of the 80's

Which is why I feel I must share that this was the first cassette I ever bought with my allowance:


I also started this blog because I tell stories over an over again like someone 30 years my senior - if I write them down, maybe I will stop telling them. So here are two you may or may not have heard.

One
After buying said cassette, I had it in my walkman (yes, kids, a walkman) that I would listen to while on the swings - Graceland was my other choice for this activity.

One night my dad stole borrowed my walkman to go for a run. Ten minutes later he came running through the door and said to anyone that would hear him:

What is this shit!?!

Evidently, he was not expecting Vincent Price to narrate his night-time run through the neighborhood.

Granted, this was maybe four or five years after Thriller had been released, but while we owned the record, I don't think my dad ever listened to it and we didn't have MTV (I wouldn't see the full length video until I was in high school). It would also not be the last time he asked that about my musical taste.

I am going to guess that the reason I decided to buy Thriller, years after it was released, is because this next story is indicative of just how ingrained the King of Pop was into many a young psyche.

Two
In kindergarten we were paired with 6th graders who were supposed to act as our "mentors." Mine was a boy - not at all weird and awkward, right?

They were also our "secret" santas during our holiday party. I don't have any memories about my mentor other than a vague uncomfortableness around a boy that seemed infinitely older than me, except for what he gave me. I opened a small white box and inside was a sparkly, gleaming, totally rad and wonderful, tiny, white glove pin.

Mind you, we did not have MTV. I don't remember watching Michael Jackson on TV, ever, but I certainly remember Captain EO. I put the lid back on the box and sat on it for the rest of the party. I knew the minute I set it down it would be gone forever. I also never wore it for fear of losing such an amazing present. Lord knows where it is now.

The Austin Chronicals: A Brief Reminder

Ridding the house of cockroaches was not where my exciting adventures in the entomology of Austin ended. When you live in a eighty year old house in a hot and humid place, it is a good day when you can recognize what it is you are killing, scooting past on the porch, or (sometimes) scooping up and making it the neighbors problem.

Is that fuzzy caterpillar on the porch poisonous? Not sure, run away.

Should I leave the porch light on so I can see to put my key in the lock, or leave it off so I'm not accosted by June bugs before I can get in the door? Leave it off.

What the hell just crawled through the tiny gap in a closed window and is now on my pillow? Don't know, but kill it now before it bites you in your sleep.

However, not once did I see one of these:


That, was discovered by a friend's dog while she made dinner inches away from it. Evidently, the Texas version isn't poisonous, but they also come in pairs...

Buffy vs. Twilight

What was that? You don't think I'm really that much of a nerd because I like buying school supplies? Ha, ha! Have I forgotten to tell you about my love of all things vampire? It's true. I blame it on a pubescence that coincided with the paperback release of Interview with the Vampire. Oh, and because Joss Whedon is awesome.

To prove my point, I sneakily watched part of this video at work, and then made my husband watch it with me again last night, just so I could see it on his shiny macbook without buffering interruptions:



I admit it. I love Twilight. Yes, yes, it has some problems which I'll get in to later (that post is a doozy) but VAMPIRES! Four books of 600+ pages of VAMPIRES! Okay, okay, the movie wasn't so great. None of them were really pretty enough to be vampires, and the grey/blue wash made me feel cold the whole time I watched it.

Which is why this video so freaking fantastic, because while I have a soft spot for Bella, my heart (and feminist principles) belong to Buffy. Though, I have to agree with Amanda at The Sexist, Buffy did make some questionable choices in dudes.

Urban Umbrella Etiquette

New rule: since the majority of the population seems to have no idea of how much space they take up in the universe, let alone how a giant piece of nylon and wire increases their circumference, and that said piece of nylon and wire is most likely directly a my eye level, everyone must get one of these:



Of course, getting one would still require being aware of how much space you take up in the universe.

Snips, Snails, Sugar and Spice

Seriously?


As Eric Stoller notes, this is a perfect set up for a study of the socialization of gender. Boys draw fire engines! Girls draw ballerinas!

The inanity in this exercise is even more clear because I'm going to guess that the publisher decided to make the "boy's" red and the "girl's" blue to de-emphasize the ridiculous stereotypes being employed. However, all it does is underscore those ridiculous stereotypes. Blue did not always equal boys and pink did not always equal girls. In fact it used to be just the opposite:

When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split.

Pseudo science can try as they might, but these are not "natural" tendancies. They are taught from day one.

The Austin Chronicles: Duck and Cover

I'm a drought baby.

That makes is sound like I was born during the dustbowl, but really it just means I was born in California. California is always in a drought - or, at least has been since I was born. I've never seen a full reservoir. I thought those stair-stepped lines of earth around all "lakes" in California were normal.


It wasn't until El Nino came that I saw an honest-to-goodness downpour. At twelve I sat in the back yard with my mom, sister and a few family friends as the moms tried to talk down the kids under ten who were sure it was the end of the world.

Only that wasn't really a downpour, at least not what people in the rest of the country would call a downpour. It was really just enough rain to actually use an umbrella, with some thunder and lightning to send the cats under the bed.

I didn't see a real thunderstorm until I spent a summer in Washington, DC. As I was sitting in my dorm room, laying on top of the air conditioner, wondering if I would ever stop sweating, the sky started to turn a funny shade of green. My parents had lived in Michigan for a bit until they couldn't handle not being able to barbecue all year long, so my mom had told me about when the sky turns green. It meant run to the basement. To the south....south-something corner.

But, I was in the third day of living on fourth floor of a dorm. I could barely find the bathroom, let alone the south-something corner of the basement. So I called my mom.

Mom: Hello.

Me (barely concealed panic): The sky is turning green.

Mom: Oh, well what are the clouds doing?

Me: I don't know, I'm in a building surrounded by buildings and the fullest, lushest trees I've ever seen, I can't see the sky!

Mom: Turn on the television. Is there a read ticker on the bottom of the screen?

Me: No.

Mom: Oh, okay.

Me: Oh my god. Its started raining...no its pouring...I can barely see outside the window!

Mom: Oh, yeah. That's weather.

Me: Oh, my god! Lightening just struck the tree!

Mom: Hang up the phone.

Me: Why?!?!

Mom: Because there's lightning. It can go through the phone.

This was during the Clinton administration, when we still had land lines, kids. And, yes, it's true.

Me: What?!?! Oh crap.

So I hung up the phone. And I watched the rain pour down. Then it dawned on me. This was the mid-Atlantic. Rain didn't mean cold, it was still warm outside. I ran next door and was officially given the title of The Crazy Californian.

I knocked on the door of the girls from North Carolina and Texas. And screamed: "Who wants to go jump in puddles!" And we did. Or I did, and the rest looked at me like I was, well, The Crazy Californian.

So, when I moved to Texas in August, I figured I knew what I was in for. I had spent a summer in DC so I knew about humidity and thunderstorms and hot nights and feeling like you'd been slathered in grease for three months.

Yeah...nope.

That cute little clapboard house built in 1922 had survived 80 years of Texas weather, but the first night I spent alone in the house I wasn't so sure.

I was awoken by a horror movie thunderclap shaking the windows and lightning flashing through the curtains. I shot out out of bed and into the living room. I was sure the world was coming to an end. The living room had nine windows all of which were shaking as the thunder and lightening continued and the rain whipped branches against the house.

I turned on the television. And there it was. The red ticker.

TORNADO WARNING: TRAVIS, HAYS and WILLIAMSON COUNTIES UNTIL 3:00AM.

We did not have a basement and I still didn't know what south-something corner to go to. And besides, all those windows weren't going to do much to help. So, I decided that the best plan of action would simply be to continue to watch the news until 3 am. The ticker was going, but the weather wasn't breaking through the one o'clock infomercials, so it couldn't be that bad, right? And if they did break through, they would tell me what to do, right?

At 2:57 the warning was cut off. I peeked out the front door to make sure Armageddon had not hit (it hadn't). And went to bed.

The next day I woke up to Grace the landlady knocking on the door. Evidently the storm had been mentionable enough to take a branch or two off the trees in the yard and she was overseeing the handyman.

Grace: Quite the storm!

Me: Oh my gosh! Yes! I thought I was just being a baby since I'm from California. There was a tornado warning and everything, I didn't know what to do!

Grace: Oh, honey. That is what the bathroom's for. We put that in when that one touched down downtown.

Me: - - -

Grace: Yeah, that's why its got no windows. You go in there and get in the tub with your mattress over your head. Those pipes should hold up.

Me: - - -

Grace patted me on the shoulder and went back to overseeing the handyman, as I stood there. That was why the shower had no windows? Because somehow I'd transplanted myself to tornado country?

I went back in the house and tried to figure out how I would be able to fit my mattress into the bathroom. Then I called my mom.

Me: THEY HAVE TORNADOES HERE!!!

Mom: Yeah, the rest of the country has weather.

Me: I like earthquakes better.

No Change

In undergrad I took "math for English majors," AKA: Logic. In that class we learned about fallacies and poor logical reasoning. Sadly, I have a feeling that this speech will be used as an example of very bad logic in classrooms for years to come:



In other words, the Obama Administration will let people who have been held in Guantanamo for years without trial go, so long as you can prove that they were innocent in the first place. For others that you can find guilty, they will be transferred to other facilities that (hopefully) are within US judicial and geographical borders. But, for those people that you cannot prove are guilty, they will remain in "prolonged detention."

The Obama Administration will "not avoid a legitimate legal framework," because they will create their own legal framework. And that framework will be in the context of a "legal regime."

This is scary. It simultaneously dismantles habeas corpus and the most basic tenet of the United States judicial system that we were all taught, "innocent until proven guilty," which means the burden of proof is not on the defendant - something particularly important when that defendant has no access to legal counsel.

But for me, this is especially scary because, as Rachel Maddow says, it is a beautiful speech full of platitudes about democracy and held in a venue that not only represents democracy, but holds the documents upon which American democracy is founded.

But, beautiful elocution means nothing if the content of the speech is despicable.