Buried Bottles

The French have come up with a kind of pay-it-forward scavenger hunt I have to think a number of people I know would think is the best in history.  I can't help but think of watching a bunch of conspiracy theorists digging up equally shiny bottles with significantly less interesting things in them.  Even I would prefer the beer.

Cable Television

Since getting cable again for the first time in about 15 years, less than two years ago, I've made a running joke about being grateful for my Roku box ... but, the fact is, cable seems to have a special place in the dumbification of our society.  The internet and broadcast are hardly great examples, and reality TV crosses boundaries - but cable generates some of the most shockingly stupid programming it is quite literally terrifying.  In this case, we have two documentaries about mermaids being real.  Why does that matter?  Read the link.

It's not just science, but our society and communities themselves under fire.  For every Housewife (and there are SIX of those series), there's an unmarried person babbling about "connections" and "this journey" under the pretense that game shows can end in "lurve."  And it's not just content; the sponsors have turned me into a middle-aged suburbanite who can't poop without resenting Jamie Lee Curtis and the massive conspiracy to get my obsessed with my own eliminations, losing weight, and an industry of food products designed to promise weight loss (because that is the only worthy goal for a woman) and simultaneously designed to hew precisely to exactly the poor diet issues which have brought my country in the space of half a generation to ownership of the fattest and most risk-ridden bodies in the whole of history.

There is a shrillness in the politics, in the morality, in the gender roles, in the rather overwhelming presence of alcohol in places it will create the most televise-able drama, which goes beyond the anti-science foolery of Animal Planet, Bravo, History, and what have you.  It goes into our PEOPLE, and that is sickening.  When I tell people I earned every minute of my age, I'm simultaneously blessing it.  With age, I've come to a more critical view of the world (even than I trouble to express in this largely non-critical/analytical blog), but a very real gratitude for the fact that I missed out on the rampant opportunities to whore my very "life" out for money in order to entertain and confirm the self-superiority of millions of Cheeto-snarfing strangers.  Because I certainly would have wanted to.  Impossible not to be concerned about the psychological fates of not only those who do it, but the susceptibility of those who consume this from early ages.

But the central problem is the willful ignorance cable so successfully fosters.  Believing in mermaids, but disbelieving climate change.  Taking talking heads of no credible expertise at face value, especially when they are popularly and entertainingly barking mean things about proven science, economics, what have you.  "Fairy tale" gender roles, self-defeating politics, incendiary anger directed not at oppressors, but at those who are different.  Bread.  Circus.

The older I get the more I realize I don't even know how to question our society properly or to any effect.  And the more I see that needs to not only be questioned - but changed.

Just Because It's Beautiful

... and it has a Penny dog in it.

Image:  Wikimedia
William Holman Hunt

Look Again: at Jane Seymour

In the strange proportions of the marriages of Henry VIII (Aragon's duration being by far the longest, though in the telling she tends to be dismissed in a hurry in order to get to the blood and sex; and then three wives in quick succession during his final seven years), Jane Seymour's less then two year reign beside the king is often simplified as the quiet after the storm, when a milk-faced cypher meekly made history first by being the greatest love in the life of a man later immortalized as a bloody tyrant, and then by bearing his madly-desired son.  Jane herself has been immortalized for her submissiveness - bound to obey and serve - and for being the one bright flame for a king hurtling viciously through darkness.

But what might Jane have really been - behind the legend ... and if she had survived ... ?

"Because I Couldn't Help Her Then"

Given My Mood ... Is This Too "On the Nose" ... ?

Because, in fact, I was loving this when I saw it.

He looks rather young.
Who is he ... ?
Image:  undyingfaces.com

Once More Unto the Dragon, Still Wielding My Trusty Butterknife

I haven't liked to post about it, but will keep this short and less-painful.  In this past week, Carole Blake has finally sent me my rejection (I didn't expect otherwise, but hormones still make it deflating), and James River Writers' letter came, 'congratulations, you didn't win this.'  Again, hardly a shock (JRW has never much featured my kind of fiction; it took like six years to even get a first page read, between all the Southern fiction and writers writing writerly-ly about being writers), but again, not feeling good about it.  I think the latter bugged me mainly for its patent expectation I'd rewrite.

Taking advice does not come hard for me in my work.  The problem is - I'm out of readers.  The two I want to trust most have full lives, and writing of their own - and taking on a 130k word manuscript of someone else's is too much a demand on their time.  Mr. X, who's always been one of my best readers, abdicated the position some time ago because he somewhat unnecessarily recoiled in a moment when I explained the market inadvisability of preserving some passages he happened to like.

It is what it is, but it was thus I spent six months of before my last real go at revisions flailing and not knowing where to stab that butterknife at the dragon which was the MSS.  I finally tackled it, essentially alone, and felt I'd done a lot of good with it.

Not surprisingly, even to *my* vanity:  clearly I haven't done enough good.  Not that JRW is the last word in a genre they don't prefer, obviously - but even dipping back into it myself, I know I can do better. Must do.

And it is completely exhausting.  Not exasperating.  But I want Mr. X back, or to have the capacity to trust. It's not lost on me that you can find readers online, but the one way I am "precious" about my writing is in that making a reader of a stranger is almost giddily horrifying to me.  It's not the sharing of my work - it's the trusting to the competence of someone I don't know to know how to follow the path to where I want to go.  The idea is nearly offensive in its alienness to my way of working.

Though to be sure I never was a joiner - and went on to become a First Chapter member of JRW - and actually a founder of the SBC ... still, for me, reaching out for help to someone anonymous to me is beyond my capability.

And so I read (again) and so I see, cold now, the words I once could not see for the forest, or whatever it is the kids say these days.  And so I wield my trusty butterknife.

And stare into the cold eyes of the dragon again.

Notes From a Commentary

As a topper to yesterday's movie experience, it seemed only reasonable to combine my plans to spend time on research today with a bit more Trek - indeed, a bit more Khan.  Wrath was the obvious choice, of course.  But, since I wanted not to be concentrating on the film too much, I opted to listen to it in the background, as it were, with director's commentary playing.

My mistake, of course, was to turn on Mike Okuda's text track as well.  (Have I geeked out and mentioned lately that Mike Okuda follows me on Twitter?  How awesome is THAT???)  Here are some thoughts from his contributions ...

• I love that Roddenberry had the "no smoking allowed on the bridge" sign removed because he hoped smoking would not survive into the future.
• Okuda observes the then-state-of-the-art CG and states, the more advanced a computer, the faster they seem to become obsolete.  Has to make production design pretty challenging!
• Wait, we didn't establish the Klingon neutral zone until 1982??  Amazing.
• "One can't help but wonder how wise it is to use live explosives  as part of a training exercise."  Hee!  (One might also wonder why the crew of the Federation's flagship is acting as part of this exercise ...)

He's too good to waste - so I had to turn his feature off in order to get through more research.  But still - there's this:

Pets

I was just saying to my brother, Penelope looks less puppy-ish since her head isn't quite so bubble-round.
She still photographs puppy-ish, obviously.

I get this a lot.
Aww.

This is not about to be an affectionate moment ...

Gossamer has the most vivid little snot-green eyes.
My handsome little kit-kit.

Napping with his tongue sticking out.

As snuggly as they get.

Star Trek: Into Awesomeness

Finally saw Into Darkness yesterday.  As deep as Trek is in my DNA, it was a very satisfying flick, even better than the 2009 feature (and that one I got to see with Mr. X).

Abrams made a lot of noise in 2009, that he was giving Trek a Star Wars treatment; and I can admit, it was a good adventure.  In subsequent watchings, though, I found it felt more SW and less Trek to me, which (and I'm ducking as I type this, because one of my favorite readers here happens to be a Wars fan) begins to be distancing, somewhat.  ID, though, feels ALL Trek - and that makes it a bit of a deeper a story, and all the better for me as a fan.

I did have a couple of "huh" moments and a couple of nerd (*) moments, of course.  The ship underwater bit (it can't be a spoiler if they put it on a poster) - it was cool and all that, but they did do that in Avengers, so I found it a little less whizzbang for just having seen it during our last Blockbuster summer season.  No harm/no foul, though, but rather a lot of production money for a repeat.  I also laughed in the wrong way when they ripped off the Godfather trilogy, because I was laughing - "really? going to do a scene from a Godfather movie, and we pick PART THREE? seriously?" - but hey, they did it well so it was fine.

My nerdier moments were, "aww - they just mentioned the Mudd incident last month!" and (MICRO SPOILER) "oooh, so we're admitting to Section 31 just that easily, are we?" and, finally - "they're spelling Q'onos THAT way???"  Hee.

I can admit to realizing, as I watched, just how much Trek really does mean to me, in those couple of moments I wanted to kill my moviegoing companions for giggling and joking during moments I was sitting there welling up at scenes custom made for me as a lifelong fan.  I can also admit giving a wee smackdown to one of them, all of nineteen years old, saying he knew more about Trek than I because he's read the Reddit and "all" the novels (at that age, to read "all" the Trek fiction out there would have had to take 70% of your life, kid).  "It's just not the same experience as to have had this stuff in your DNA for forty years, though."  He agreed to this pretty readily.  Hee again.

ST 2009 I loved and still do, but I can see 2013 meaning a lot more to me over the long run.  As a popcorn flick it is par excellence on its own terms, but as a fan flick it is amazingly well done.  Its use of existing canon is wonderfully finely balanced, and its deviations are a very nice set of inversions.

There's much talk of how pretty the cast are, but they've come into incarnations now whose maturity and oneness with the original cast are breathtaking.  Zoe(umlaut) Saldana is a fine actor and (it sounds stupid) but I'm so proud of her; stepping into Nichelle Nichols' boots has got to be a hell of a job, and she is doing it unbelievably well, while still bringing some new feelings to the role.  Bravo.  Pine has begun to eerily resemble Shatner, and I actually mean that as a compliment.  Though his upper lip is still distractingly pouty.  Heh.  And Karl Urban continues to bend my brain by sustaining a teeny tiny crush on Bones, of all characters.  Heh again.

One standout was Simon Pegg, a brilliant casting choice, who has been aged to look a lot more like classic Scotty (though the rest of them, mature as they are in the roles now, don't look actually older) - and, indeed, much harried now that he's fully in the role (... and out of it ...).  The sole quibble I had with the fantastic choices they made in using Scotty is that they had him kill someone right on the heels of a moral stance so firm it shaped the entire film.  I almost felt Jimmy Doohan there in his opening scenes, and hated to see Scotty used even to kill one minion.  You don't use Jimmy like that.  He may be the most LOVED of all the characters.  You give him a moral stance, you give him harrowing frustrations.  You don't use him to kill a guy.

Finally, Cumberbatch.  I wanted him for Christmas the first time I saw Sherlock, but that's the pretty cast for you.  (EVERYONE is gorgeous in this movie, from Bruce Greenwood to the little girl in a coma who never even opens her exquisite eyes onscreen.)  Blown up to the bigscreen, he's great in his role, but I was distracted by the weird fact that his mouth resembles and ex boyfriend of mine, who himself very strongly resembles Mr. X, but who in turn bears no resemblance to Cumberbatch to complete that dizzying personal circle of psychological issues.  (Say it with me:  erm/hee ... ?)  You can't go wrong with a Brit for a villain, of course, particularly one as nicely complex as this one - and the eventual ruthlessness is perfectly realized, following some displays of almost clinical civility.  This guy makes Hannibal look like an absolute wreck, and of course it's immaculately, wonderfully terrifying.

All the relationships are just CINCHED in this movie.  And that is the thing that means most in Star Trek, any iteration.  It's enough to make a fangirl cry, and EVEN want to see it (in theaters!) again, and wish I had a hellacious sound system on my TV for when I get it at home, so the movie need never be diminished nor compromised.



So - yeah - liked it.


(*Nerd moment - I meant to note when I first wrote this post, my brother and I analyzed my level of ST geek cred, and I seem to settle, not at geek, but at nerd status.  I'm more than a mere bystander, if only by dint of a generation (plus) absorbing the Trekverse by osmosis ... and yet, I stand not quite in the pantheon of fully *geeked* fans.  I know far too much - and care enough about the minutiae - to assert a certain status for myself.  But I fall short of fully fledged Trekker/Trekkie-dom.  I don't even passionately care about the choice between Trekker/Trekkie ...)

"Bloodline"

It's funny, the places you can run into wisdom.  I've thought for a while now, but continued to avoid, posting about exactly what my religion (as opposed to my faith) really means to me.  At times, it seems like it could be important; but mostly, I know that my heart is my vanity.

A couple of days ago, I fired up "Bloodline" on Netflix, and finally finished watching it just now.  This documentary is the breathless following, over a couple of years, of an investigation into the Merovingian Heresy.  It could be funny, I could play a game of (pardon the offensive terminology, yet it is exactly the right phrase) "bait the 'tards" - making fun of the whacko conspiracy nerds (as one could play the same way with so many docs - about Trekkers, about ferret lovers, what have you) - but I chose to put it in my queue just because the heresy, named for the very dynasty Clovis I founded, is one which, while maddening, is also of at least a passing interest to me.  I have a hard time abiding Dan Brown and this sort of thing (Foucault's Pendulum, which I allowed myself to read twice, with a decade or more between attempts, I have confirmed as a nuisance read), but anyone who knows me or reads here regularly won't be surprised to know this is exactly the sort of car wreck I succumb to rubbernecking.

So we started off this post with mention of wisdom.

I don't find wisdom in the games people play, performing edge-of-your-seat-AWFUL "archaeology" while following TV-series-Batman-level-silly/convoluted clue games and digging up bright shiny bottles they've caked with mud and swear are generations-old buried treasures.  I don't find wisdom in missing the point that, in debunking something passionately, you actually accept its premises in order to deconstruct them.  If you really don't believe a mythology, it isn't particularly necessary, for most people, to spend time and energy (and, in the name of making a documentary, one assumes many many thousands and thousands of dollarse/euros) obsessing about it.

The wisdom I found in "Bloodline" crops up near its end.  With ten minutes left in its nearly two hour run, we come to an interview with the Right Rev. John Shelby Spong, DD, retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.  The documentary introduces him as controversial, and, though I must state that even as a relatively newly minted Episcopalian, I know nothing about him - I can believe he's controversial.  Like many in this Church I was drawn to for its compassion, Spong sees change, and perhaps even the abandonment of certain traditions, as growth.  I want to quote him at a little length here:

I think that traditional Christianity, that institutional form of Christianity, is probably dying.  And I'm not sure that letting it die wouldn't be a good thing to happen, because I think When you look at the manifestations of traditional Christianity, they're not very life-giving.  We blessed slavery with the Christian scriptures.  We blessed anti-Semitism with the Christian scriptures.  We stood by and watched Hitler destroy six million Jews, and then we were negative about women, and then we were negative about gay people, and we've been negative about left-handed people and we've been negative about mentally ill people and we've been negative about divorced people.  The Church has victimized a great number of people in this world; now how does that square with the portrait of Jesus drawn by the Fouth Gospel, that says the purpose of Jesus is that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly?  Is the way we treat gay people giving them life?  Is the way we have treated women giving them life?  ... and so the traditional way in which we have told the Jesus story I think is inaccurate, and I think it will die.  But I don't think the Jesus story will die, and I don't think the power of a G-d presence in human life will die.

As a rule, I write this blog to the standard that anything here could be read by my coworkers, my boss, my government, my nieces - my mother.  This post is not one she'd have a happy time reading.  It's also possible that, apart from being described as "controversial" by a conspiracy documentarian to whom he agreed to give an interview, the Bishop holds views or has done things I might find anathema.  For some reason, I prefer not to start worrying about that with facile research; because in many ways what he says resonates with me.

At bottom, the very concept of divinity is beyond the ability of the magnificent, and yet wee and paltry human brain to actually comprehend.  Those of us who believe in it choose mythologies to cope with it, to guide us, to grapple with *everything* we encounter which is beyond our wee and paltry brains (spirits and hearts).  Some believe those mythologies very deeply indeed.  Some believe an "essence" of these roadmaps to faith. Me, I give up on the particulars, rejoice in the spiritual leader I have been fortunate to find,  and bless what wisdom can be gleaned, without (as above) trying to peer too closely at its provenance.  Staring into the sun is bad for the eyes, and doesn't look interesting enough to justify doing it.  Take the light, live in it, hope it shines on a good path, and try to stay on *some* track, for the most part.

Or explore, be brave, bless the light and still proceed at night as well.  If that means concerning yourself with conspiracies, go with G-d  as they say and try not to hurt anyone including yourself.

It's an interesting watch, in some ways.  But could have been edited down significantly and still have said everything it does.  Watch it, or don't.  This is just the story of what I accidentally seem to have gotten from stumbling on this in my own path.


Edited 07/29/13 to add this - turns out the hoax is admitted.  Hardly a pearl-clutching revelation, but does make taunting the fakers less fun.

Long Days

8:40 p.m. and I just came in from mowing the grass.  Yep, 2013 is going by in a HURRY - and the days are seriously long!

Reading and Telling

Even as long as I’ve been working to make this blog a presentable platform for myself as a writer and lover of history and archaeology, it is still hard for me to discuss reading publicly (even as little comment as this blog gets; I still know you’re out there *reading*).  I can air out my draft writing without a second thought (I need to get BACK to that project) and I do remember to bring up topics, process, and interesting little inroads of research or storytelling from time to time – but discussing that thing so deeply intimate to me still comes only reluctantly (I’ve even eliminated using the “here’s what I’m reading/watching/etc.” widget in the sidebar; does anyone read those things anyway?).

At the moment, though, I’m reading one of those pieces of popular lit which is itself so ostentatiously intimate in tone it distances me enough to be reading as a mechanical exercise more than an immersive, never mind emotional, one.  It’s “The Red Tent” – in which the Telling is so much more of the work than any Showing that, though it’s clearly intended as a whispering, urgent, immediate confessional, I’m set apart from it completely.  It’s not bad writing (though I know some who argue with its presentation of actual behavior in its period), but for me such intentional intimacy invariably produces the opposite of its desired effect.  Storytelling can’t be done without some Telling, of course.  But when it’s all Telling, it must be impeccably well done for it to envelop me.  As easily as I'm willing to give it, my WSD, it still doesn’t come stock just because I picked up a book.

Similarly ancient, similarly feminine in POV, similarly speculative and researched – “Lavinia” trumps “Tent”, for me, in its ability to take me in.  Ursula LeGuin, in writing it, wasn’t working to be literary, nor to write The Latest Bestseller – but urgently telling a story she felt from deep within.  Of course, Diamant must have done the same, must have borne “Tent” from the same motivation – but the result works a different spell.  LeGuin was so inspired she spent years teaching herself Greek and read The Aeneid in its original language before she could or would write her own work.  Lavinia came from a practical drive as much as it did from fanciful or emotional needs, and its discipline produces a work all the more ineffable.  Where “Tent” tells us of memories, relationships, emotions, and points of view … “Lavinia” is a poem.

I’m not much a reader nor a writer of verse, and epics turn me off sight unseen if I am honest.  So it is perhaps necessary to note that I mean poem as a rhapsodic descriptor.  “Lavinia” tells, yes – but, in telling, it creates, and there is no questioning it.  “Tent” leaves me room for “but, but, but” while I am reading.  “Lavinia” held me so beyond my own will it’s one of the few books I own with barely any marginalia scribbled in its edges.  For those who know what an inveterate commentator I am with my books (some of my novels have layered years of copy editing, cooing, snarking, or questioning laid down over different readings and bearing different reactions) – “silence” from me, in my reading, is perhaps the clearest signal of a novel’s success.

If I am so enthralled I’m rendered speechless - reactionless - by a novel as I read it, it must be of immensely potent power.


One of the things I found distancing about "Tent" was its insistence upon changing the very basis of the story.  Instead of laboring seven years for Rachel, only to be given Leah - then laboring seven more to finally win her, Jacob marries both sisters within months, the basis of the deception and Leah's role are utterly changed, and no powerfully compelling reason for this seems to explain these liberties.  I have said myself that historical fiction depends as much upon its fiction as its history (or accepted mythology), but alterations to fundamental plot points accepted for literally millennia now beg some fairly hefty storytelling questions it does not do to leave unanswered.  The result is that this fundamental story becomes nothing but a prelude to whatever enflames Diamant's imagination "more" than ... you know, the story she takes as her own text.  It feels like Short Attention Span Theater - and there is no reason for it.

Since Dinah is, like Lavinia, scarcely on the stage of the traditional tellings, why turn toward the text if only to ransack it pointlessly?  If you want to tell the story of Dinah, why waste the time on telling the biblical tale and changing it so?  Yes, it's important to the character at hand.  But few would have needed instruction, and providing revision is somewhat irksome.  I don't nitpick out of religiosity, but the *literary* presence of this story is so indelible changing it is inexplicable.  Dogma be damned, if you are inspired by a source, respect it - you're not the only one.

Basically - if the idea is to bring into the light a familiar detail of a time-honored piece of the culture and history of so many societies even today, why point your light onto distortions before pointing it on her?

Also somewhat irritating is the character of Laban.  No joy of a fellow, to be sure, the character who deceives his nephew and son-in-law to chisel fourteen years of labor out of him, his shabby greed *still* comes across as shallow in characterization and so repellant as to distract me, at least.  When I read "women's fiction" (which itself I find such a reductive genre), incest comes off always as a tool to vilify a character not given enough room to grow, not as the traumatizing violation of (usually the main) character it would be if treated more organically.  Laban's diddling of his daughters seems little more than shorthand for "he's a bad guy" - as cheap a piece of characterization as the verb diddling is for such a profoundly dysfunctional, selfish, evil behavior.

In fact, a number of the characters are hateful in “The Red Tent.”  This again seems to be characteristic of “women’s”/feminist fiction, and even as a feminist I find it a turnoff.  Perhaps particularly because I am one, and don’t feel the need to “shore up” my convictions by demonizing anyone.  It's easy to depend on villains, but characters are compelling.  When the first thing you know about a novel is the good guys and the bad guys, you're cheated out of learning something which can be one of the most interesting things about reading.

I'm not a great one for axioms - "write what you know" is outright foolish - "show, don't tell" is good, but can limit innovative storytelling.  Some things have to be told.

Some authors know how to tell.  Diamant is good.  LeGuin is peerless.

The British Are Going! The British Are Going!

The History Girls have an excellent post by Leslie Wilson, on the latest wolf cry in the land – we often hear of the “death of” (insert a much-treasured whatsis here – rock and roll, Star Wars, a given nation-state, good manners, any –ism you like).  Indeed, I get guilty of this sort of thing myself, but lack the energy for much sustained shrillness about most matters.

Here we have the death of Brisish-ness (as evidenced by a theoretical and statistically unsound minoritizing of white people Coming Soon to an Island Near You, and the advent of “human rights” – some sort of alien concept brought on by too much affiliation with the Continent, that).

Britain and the British (… or England and the English? even the decryers can’t say, apparently!):  “dying” at least since 1066 …

A “sadly popular narrative” indeed.

Building Houses ...

... in the thirteenth century ...

Photos of People Reading

Sometimes, a cruise through The Passion of Former Days is just what the doctor ordered.  These are fantastic, and as always a nice variety.

LIFE Archives @Time Inc.

I Lied, Of Course ...

... that last bit in that last post was NOT last ...

But this needed an embed, and that post was already carrying a bit much weight.  Plus, this vid deserves a solo staging area.

So - here we go, and don't miss the History Blog link where a *lot* of these gems can be found:

Archaeology Articles at the History Blog

Yes, it's definitely become my new addiction.  On their front page right now, there's nothing not worth reading, from things reminding me of that fountain story, but involving an ancient statue from a ritual ball court in Mexico and a piece about, instead of excavating in road fill, the razing of a site to create it - harrowing reading, actually - to yet another dig in Britain ... but this time by a little kid!

There aren't even words (appropriate from a privileged white woman 150 years or more out of date) to blithely, bloggily contextualize the story about the slave cabin the Smithsonian is preserving and moving in Virginia.

Then there is the medieval adventure story of the pope on the run - was he murdered?  Read and find out ... maybe - and take a look at the late/abdicated pontiff's new and improved death mask along the way.

And last but not least:  dolphin "bomb-sniffing" archaeologists.

So long, y'all - and no thanks for all the fish!

Caring and Coming With the Territory

One of the things in life I dread most is the extent to which I am a burden on my mom.  Financially, I don’t have an exceptionally bad record, and in my actions I don’t tend to justify some of her more fevered imaginings (mom was still having the occasional nightmare about me showing up on her doorstep pregnant, like some sort of wayward teen reality TV star, even past my age 40), but sometimes life is stressful, and we share the stress with those we love either through action, complaint, or simply because caring about someone means worrying sometimes, even sometimes when worry doesn’t help.

One of those parts of my life I keep offstage, I have successfully been able to distract myself from.  Still, life does flare up, and when it does that even a dried up old biddy aunt can’t keep the experience entirely personal.  So mom’s been worrying about me, and it breaks my heart.

Try as I might, I’m mom’s daughter, and nobody can be someone’s child without their care turning into concern – and worry – from time to time.  I worry about her, too, fair is fair.  That’s family – we scold each other out of fear for wellbeing, and we protect each other even from things those we’re “protecting” want no protection from.  In this case, mom wants to protect me from something I dearly wish I could protect HER from – wish I could not “be” this problem in the first place.  I suppose that wish goes as much against logic as all our wishes for our loved ones seem to.

It’s a blessing my mom loves me.  I only wish it were an easier blessing on her.

Don't They, Um - AUDIT ... ?

I work for an entity pretty serious about its expenditures and internal audits, so when a coworker sent me this yesterday, I was something like morbidly fascinated.  Not least because:  the IRS, for goodness sake????

From personal experience, I’m aware of the extent of oversight on EVERY expenditure we make, and so the extent of this woman’s profligacy is astonishing.  Where I work, we can’t even make certain types of purchases from otherwise approved vendors (it is acceptable to purchase training books from Big Online Retailer We All Know, but if we buy electronics there because they’re not on our supply-catalogue contract, there is an inquiry).  If we buy a lamp or a cheap wall clock without going through a facilities procurement process, there are consequences.

It all makes for a lot of PROCESS (and, heaven help us, “PROSSA-seez” when there’s more than one), but we don’t see a lot of admins buying jammies, makeup, and candy/sno-cone makers.  Holy Hell – and over $8500, yet.  If I bought a $5 lunch at our own café and accidentally used the wrong card, I’d get a ton of bricks on my head and feel it was only justified.  I owe the entire public the responsibility of good stewardship with this responsibility, and I take it very seriously.  The idea of buying ANYTHING for myself goes right beyond inconceivable into immediate self-punishment.  And so I share in the public pillorying of this Haughty and Naughty mascara-wearing horse’s hole, because:  SERIOUSLY, woman.  Chocolate.  Fountain.  And bankruptcy.

There is a saying at my place of employment:  “You don’t get rich working here.”  I have a saying of my own:  “We don’t get poor either.”

And we HAVE JOBS.  That, too, is a responsibility – and, these days, in this economy – you’d better believe there are HONEST people eager to have the ones idiots such as Yetunde Oseni treats so cavalierly.