Area 51 Disease

I just don't quite get the whole ufo thing, I must admit. If you google "ufo" you get well over 3 million hits.

Of course, I'm just adding to that already massive google weight.
I'm okay with that, though.

There are about 321,000 image hits alone. I waded through several pages of pictures. They ranged from pictures of clouds and helicopters and snowboarders and airplane lights, to fuzzy or grainy photos than made me think, "hmm!"

All the conspiracy theory stuff about ufos and the government seems less mysterious, though. The idea of possibly-threatening but perhaps benign beings, with mysterious and incomprehensible powers--and the government aids and abets--seems a very valid fear, on some level.

It's so much easier to spin an elaborate UFO metaphor to provide a mythology to explain our own feelings of powerlessness. It puts a false face on that which we fear and despise, so we don't actually have to confront the reality, directly.

Karl Rove might really, truly, be a hostile alien though.

Just sayin'.

Latoyia Figueroa

Just picking up what a bunch of other bloggers have already done.

Her name is Latoyia Figueroa. She's missing. She's five months pregnant. She has a seven year old daughter at home, whom I'd imagine is very frightened and confused.

The All Spin Zone is collecting donations toward a reward. As of a little while ago, the reward was up to about $7,ooo. Please help, if you can.


In the meantime, you might browse around a bit. Turns out NOW claims murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women. This is discussed a bit more, here.

Another study has murder as second only to car accidents, in terms of injury-related deaths. It also observes that pregnant black women are more than three times as likely to be murdered than pregnant white women. Either way, it makes getting pregnant look pretty fucking grim.

Things look pretty awful for Latoyia Figueroa. But her family hasn't given up hope, and neither should we. At the very least, we should track down the person or persons responsible for her disappearance.

Now. I'm admittedly a white, upper-middle-class, well-educated lesbian. It's highly unlikely that I'll ever be murdered by some lumbering, no-neck, neanderthal-wanna-be; certainly--god forbid--not because I'm carrying his child and he senses some sort of threat to his tiny reality.

And that is, of course, a gross caricature of the kind of man who does this sort of thing. Certainly, as a lesbian, I've encountered appalling misogyny from what seemed--on the surface--to be unlikely sources.

This is just wrong on so many levels, it leaves me speechless.

If you've seen Latoyia Figueroa- please call Philadelphia Police at 215-686-3183.



You can help. Over at Daily Kos, there's an open invitation for bloggers to get on board, and help get the word out: "if you have a blog, whether you have 1 visitor per day or 1 million, please consider blogging about Latoyia. Visibility does make a difference."

Sexy Writers

No, it isn't an oxymoron. Just bear with me, and I'll explain.

A few different things started me thinking this direction: Nicholas, over at Return to Sender, worries a bit about whether he's too obsessive and frank in discussing his penis, wet dreams and so on (hey, he's like 20, it's normal.) Then there was the whole thing about bitchy women, and why they're so hot. Also thinking about smart people in general, and how much I like them.

So then I started thinking about writers I like to read, and why. It isn't about the people, either--it's about the words and how they're strung together.

I arrived at the conclusion that some writers are just, well, sexy--at least in the way they handle language. Those are the writers I read again and again. The novels for which I wait anxiously, for months. The blogs I've bookmarked not just at home, but on the laptop, too.

This can't be that weird, right?

Just for clarification--I don't care what these people look like, what they smell like, whether or not they're complete pills, in real life. That doesn't matter. I don't know these people, and I never will. I don't even want to, to tell you the truth.

Ah--but I know their various and yummy ways with words.

It isn't about subject matter, either. I'm not talking about writers of erotica--although that's certainly just fine, as well. A sexy writer can make anything seem interesting and tasty. It's style and vocabulary, combined with sumptuous patterns of thought and articulation.

I can't be the only voracious reader who feels this way, right?

These aren't the only writers I read and enjoy, either. Something about their prose, though, goes straight to the pleasure centers in my brain. I know it sounds odd to sexualize that, but it's the closest I can come to expressing precisely what reading can be like, for me.

Some writers just leave me with my toes curled, squirmy and warm, and breathing a bit quickly--God bless 'em. Some prose just does it for me.

Who writes like that, for you?

Cerebrally Hot

So I've recently discovered Bitch. Ph.D. and a couple of days ago, she was talking about Nice Guys and Bitchy Women. (Go and read it, if you'd like. Read the comments, too--I'll wait.)

Just in case you don't want to navigate over there--although I highly recommend you do--here's a synopsis.

She sorts "Bitchy Women" into possible categories:

1. There are surely women who are genuinely mean people; and often these women are bitchiest to other women, but tend to play up to men, because on some level being a "bitch" is all about power. . . .

2. Women who are abusive. Nothing much to say about this; women who treat their partners and / or kids like crap suck, just the same as men like that.

3. Strong women, as we all know, all get called "bitch" sooner or later. That's the spirit in which I named the blog; and sure enough, there've been a few comments here and there. . .

4. Women who are bitchy in private relationships. . . .women who are sometimes described as "high strung" or "high maintenance" or, as Mr. B. calls me, "stressmonkeys." Up to a point, I think these women are good partners for solid, self-confident guys; we have a clear sense of boundaries, we're direct; we're not conflict-averse; we don't mess about on the borders of hinting that something's wrong--we'll come pretty straight out and let you know. But I'll admit that sometimes those skills get misapplied. . .

She also suggests that perhaps Bitch #4 has some weird corollary relationship to Bitch #3, then she observes, "I think that a certain level of personal "bitchiness" is fine, and I suspect a lot of men are attracted to strong, assertive, ambitious women, which is of course the simple answer to the "why do men like bitchy women" question. But I wonder about the men who live with those of us who are (4). What's the attraction? I admit: I don't think I could do it."

*Whew* Okay. I've caught you up on what I was thinking about, and the conversation I've been following. I thought about replying there, then chose not to, since the conversation had become rather stultifyingly hetero, then increasingly combative, then began to degenerate into a discussion about whether or not Angelina Jolie is sexy (yes, but in a not-altogether-comfortable sort of way,) and why.

She says later, in the comments section: "I also wonder, come to think of it, how these archetypes play out in same-sex relationships, or whether there are different archetypes altogether."

The answer to that is, of course, "it depends" and "yes."

That is, I know same-sex couples both male and female who seem to avoid the nice partner/bitchy partner dynamic--but I've never quite managed the trick of it.

I didn't want to cut-n-paste the entire post, so I've omitted Dr. Bitch's nice-guy classifications. They're insightful and funny. Really, you should go and read the post. If you had Firefox, instead of the cursed IE, you could even open it in another tab and zap back and forth for reference.

And cuz this is my own blog, I'm not particularly inclined to explain why I classify myself as a nice-guy type. You'll have to just take my word for it. I'd love to be a bitch. I really would. I just can't ever pull it off. The closest I've come is when a dear friend described me as "mostly feral" and I'm not even certain what that precisely meant. I took it as a compliment. My friend who made the observation is very much a bitch, by the way. In the good sense of the word.

(I'm terribly tempted here to launch into a monologue about the urgent need to expand the lexicon: "Bitch" has been neatly appropriated by strong women to mean a combination of sexy/strong/wonderful/and-if-that-scares-you-we-don't-give-a-fuck. I applaud that appropriation, and suggest that those who need a gender-specific pejorative should go looking for another word to use. I'm resisting mightily. Feel free to admire my fortitude.)

What were we talking about? Oh yes. Nice dyke/bitchy dyke partnering arrangements, and what's the attraction.

*disclaimer: the following is mostly irreverent observation, thrown together out of my personal experience. It may well have no bearing on any one else's reality whatsoever. I'm okay with that.

So here's the thing. Dr. B's Bitch #3 and #4 are mostly the same woman, although there are some exceptions. She's strong, sure, intelligent and articulate in her public and professional life--but there's a cost for that. She's often strong, sure, intelligent, and articulate in her private life, as well--but sometimes she's a bit...err...neurotic.

Okay. You know what?

Occasionally, she's just plain bugfuck nutso.

Even that's sort of sexy, in a not-exactly-healthy-or-comfortable way. The "stress-monkey" side-effect is friggin' adorable as long as you can maintain a healthy detachment. Because it's still about knowing precisely what she wants, and how she wants it. Even though she's perhaps the only person in the world who can understand the logic. It spells the difference between Athena and Boadicea. Athena is, frankly, a bit boring. Boadicea is, well, a total hottie.

This is a phenomenon I've long associated with education. More recently, I've realized it's just about intelligence in general. Or rather, a combination of intelligence and a talent for appropriate introspection. So it's something I often see in well-educated women, but not exclusively.

It's a kind of sexy that's got little to do with pheremones, and so when it's combined with good pheremones, it's completely and overwhelmingly irresistable.

Shoes

So I'm watching the NBC Nightly News last night. Actually, I wasn't really watching--sort of listening with one ear, while I scraped old paint off of cupboard fronts. I couldn't help but overhear several minutes of discussion about four members of a women's lacrosse team who wore flip flops to the White House. Apparently, this act was sufficiently scandalous that it ignited controversy sufficient to overshadow any other issues of the day, because it got a lot of coverage.

Essentially, it seems the current White House prefers a higher level of decorum and...er...formality.

A bit later, still scraping, I hear on the local news about a big friggin' tunnel dug under the Canadian border. "Oh great," I think, "We have to take our shoes off in line at the airport--which I'm supposed to believe makes me safer--and meanwhile, someone's run a private underground superhighway from BC to Washington state."

I would have been fine, if I'd stopped thinking right there.

Instead, though, it occurs to me that if taking our shoes off in the security line at the airport isn't really about Homeland Security (booga, booga) then what the hell is it about?

Then I start thinking about what it was like to stand in that line for almost an hour. True, I don't take my shoes off--nor do my fellow travelers--until we reach the metal detectors and conveyer belts. At that point, though, there's this enormous mob of unhappy, stressed people handing over their shoes and belts to total strangers: Strangers in uniforms, unsmiling, officious, and abrupt.

That sets off a chain of images in my mind.

I think we need to be damned careful what we let ourselves become accustomed to. We're being conditioned to accept being treated like cattle--all in the name of security and freedom.

Cowboy Heroes

I have a confession: In spite of an education practically designed to engender contempt towards and automatic dismissal of any book you can find on a supermarket spin-rack, I love pulp fiction.

The stuff people in used bookstores buy by the grocery-bag full? I'm fascinated by that stuff.

I think many of those writers are/were on to something. They've tapped into a jugular vein of popular imagination, fantasy gender-roles, and cultural iconography.

This is by no means a secret sort of obsession. I wrote my master's thesis about Pet Sematary much to the committee's bemusement and...er...horror. (But they approved it with no rewrites, after my defense. The guy who wrote about literary allusions in Vanity Fair can't say as much.)

So that's how I came to be reading my way through a box full of Louis L'Amour westerns. My dad picked them up at a local garage sale, during a recent visit. Now, it isn't that I'd never read any of these books; in fact, when I was still tutoring reading-challenged kids, these slender little paperbacks were a big favorite with a lot of the boys.

Somehow, though, I'd come away with the impression that these books are more-or-less the same story. I'd developed a kind of patronizing, dismissive roll-of-the-eyes attitude about them.

Shame on me.

Okay, I'm not going to try to sell you on the idea that Louis L'Amour's books are great literature, somehow-overlooked.

Let's face it, though--the Cowboy has definitely become an archetype of American culture. He pops up all over the place, from John Wayne to Han Solo to Serenity to--god help us all--GW. Louis L'Amour certainly didn't invent the American cowboy archetype, though he cashed in on it, with enthusiasm.

"I wanna be a cowboy...

Riding on the range,
I've got my hat - on
I've got my boots - dusty..."

The books are very clear-cut in the world view they put forward, with regards to strength of character, self-discipline, morality, ethics, and just how-stuff-oughtta-be in general. The characters live by a code, unwritten and largely unspoken--yet somehow understood and accepted by everyone.

They aren't terribly written, either. In fact, L'Amour had moments of real beauty, especially in terms of describing landscape with which he obviously felt a powerful connection.

Okay, yeah--he head-hops all over the place. It's a bit jarring to be reading a first-person novel, then jump to a third person scene, revealing the innermost thoughts of another character far away. Sort of a mostly first-person, but sometimes-omniscient-for-the-sake-of-convenience approach.

Now, to a degree, almost all of 'em could be read as sort of one-note Gary Stu stories. To give credit where it's due, however, I think he honestly tried to broaden the one-dimensional caricature of cowboy-gunslinger. Admittedly, his heroes tend to be much more thoughtful--and much better-read--than the typical card-board cut-out cowboy. There are even some notable attempts at real characterization, with varying degrees of success.

He gives his reader multiple hints that we are to understand the hero riding across the western landscape as a knight of the prairie, through oft-repeated allusions to Lochinvar and Ivanhoe.

OH! young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none.
He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love and so dauntless in war,	5
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

His version of romantic love, too, seems closely informed by the courtly-love, chivalric-code versions--the hero and the love interest have a sort of unspoken attraction, from which springs a barely-discussed understanding of one another...they can even travel across hostile territory in each other's company, with nothing awkward or unseemly happening.

" Where is my John Wayne
Where is my Prairie Son
Where is my happy ending
Where have all the cowboys gone

Where is my Marlboro man
Where is his shiny gun
Where is my lonely ranger
Where have all the cowboys gone ..."

Except the lonely, far-travelling gunslinger--as good with his fists as he is quick with his gun--provides what can be a disastrous real-life paradigm for "how to be." It's a model that has been glorified and imitated to incredible extremes.

This guy just never has any doubts. He intuitively knows what's right and wrong, and he sets about imposing and enforcing what he knows to be right, with gun and fists.



Sound familiar?

If only the cowboys currently in office were as well-read and introspective, as concerned with liberty and justice, as dedicated to the ideals of equality, as a L'Amour hero.

Smart People

I love hanging out with smart people. The smarter, the better.

Oh--it's humbling, for sure. In fact, nothing quite stings like hearing someone articulate off-the-cuff, with seeming ease, something you've been long been struggling to frame and verbalize.

But it's good, too. It keeps things in perspective.
It also saves me a lot of mental work.

Funny people tend to be smart. I mean funny in the says-clever-and-amusing-things kind of way, not funny in the oh-my-god-what-a-bonehead, GW kind of way. Perhaps that's part of why it's so much fun to just hang out in the background and listen to smart people talk.

Oh, I suppose you could make a case that it's intellectual voyeurism. I'm okay with that, actually. I can certainly think of worse perversions.

(These observations are leading up to my point, in spite of how it may seem otherwise.)

I like blogs, because I like to listen to smart people. Reading the blogs of smart people is polite, non-intrusive, and convenient. There isn't that awkward moment where you're hanging about listening, even though you aren't actually included in the conversation, and trying to pretend you aren't listening...

Thank god for smart people and their blogs. They've saved me from having to cope with my own social ineptitude.

If I notice I'm late for something, I don't have to make any apologies and try to unobtrusively exit a conversation. I can just close the screen. It'll still be there when I come back.

It's all sort of a huge party, where you circulate and eavesdrop on or even chat briefly with total strangers. Some of them are fascinating people, and you look forward to your next encounter. Some are simply dreadful, and you fidget while looking desperately for an avenue of escape.

Reading someone's blog on a regular basis is like the un-relationship relationship.

If someone usually witty and interesting is having an off day, I can just navigate away. I don't have to find polite ways of saying, "oh Christ you're boring today..." Thus, I don't have to burn any bridges, and when said person returns to their witty and stimulating self I can pick right up as if they'd never had a bad day.

And if your eyes are glazing over about now, that's okay. I completely understand. I never need to know.

I'll try to be wittier next time.

Paranoid and political rant--I'll understand if you skip this one.

A bit of googling and too much evening news has recently led me to an uncomfortable conclusion. What if this administration actually perceives most Americans as the enemy? It would explain a great deal of what I hear in the news, stuff that otherwise actually seems completely baffling and inexplicable.

First though, some observations from a paper purportedly neither opposed to nor in support of the American military operation in Iraq, written by Harvey K. Ullman and James P. Wade:

Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance

Given this reality that our military dominance can and will extend for some considerable time to come, provided we are prepared to use it, why then is a re-examination of American defense posture and doctrine important? The answers to this question involve (1) the changing nature of the domestic and international environments; (2) the complex nature of resolving inter and intra-state conflict that falls outside conventional war, including peacekeeping, and countering terrorism, crime, and the use of weapons of mass destruction; (3) resource constraints; (4) defense infrastructure and technical industrial bases raised on a large, continuous infusion of funding now facing a future of austerity; and (5) the vast uncertainties of the so-called social, economic, and information revolutions that could check or counter many of the nation's assumptions as well as public support currently underwriting defense.

Lets just think about that for a moment, shall we?
"(1) the changing nature of the domestic and international environments"
mmm-hmm. The changing nature of the domestic environment? The environment here at home, that is.

"(2) the complex nature of resolving inter and intra-state conflict that falls outside conventional war, including peacekeeping, and countering terrorism, crime, and the use of weapons of mass destruction"
Crime? See, this starts to sound odd, to me, especially when so closely coupled with the aforementioned domestic environment.

"(3) resource constraints"Well, that's a bit vague.
Which resources precisely, d'you suppose?
The US military abroad certainly faces resource constraints. And so do our domestic police forces. Also, with a huge chunk of our National Guard serving in Afghanistan and Iraq--our domestic resources for national disasters and local emergencies are rather depleted.

(4) defense infrastructure and technical industrial bases raised on a large, continuous infusion of funding now facing a future of austerity
Austerity? Poor Halliburton. My god. I had no idea. (This actually has little to do with my point, but I couldn't stop the sarcasm from just bubbling out.)

(5) the vast uncertainties of the so-called social, economic, and information revolutions that could check or counter many of the nation's assumptions as well as public support currently underwriting defense.
Hmm. Again, back to concern with public perception and support. Wait, though, because it gets even more interesting. The authors go on to invoke Vietnam era political struggles.

It is clear that these so-called grey areas involving non-traditional Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and law enforcement tasks are growing and pose difficult problems and challenges to American military forces, especially when and where the use of force may be inappropriate or simply may not work. The expansion of the role of UN forces to nation-building in Somalia and its subsequent failure comes to mind as an example of this danger. It is also arguable that the formidable nature and huge technological lead of American military capability could induce an adversary to move to a strategy that attempted to circumvent all this fighting power through other clever or agile means. The Vietnam War is a grim reminder of the political nature of conflict and how our power was once outflanked. Training, morale, and readiness to fight are perishable commodities requiring both a generous expenditure of resources and careful nurturing.

WTF? I realize the authors are theoretically talking about a specific situation, perhaps within a frame of reference already understood by the intended audience. This paragraph starts to set off my subtext alarms, though.

I'm troubled by the implicit acceptance of military-as-law-enforcement.

Beyond that, I'm appalled by the notion of shock and awe as a law-enforcement tactic. It rather suggests to me that we perhaps should brace ourselves for our very own Kristallnacht.

Thus, the greatest constraints today to retaining the most dominant military force in the world, paradoxically, may be in overcoming the inertia of this success. We may be our own worst enemy.

"We may be our own worst enemy."

I suspect that sentence actually provides a key clue about the thinking of the current administration.

Moving right along, we get finally to the definition I wanted, that led me to the site in the first place:

Rapid Dominance, if realized as defined in this paper, would advance the military revolution to new levels and possibly new dimensions. Rapid Dominance extends across the entire "threat, strategy, force structure, budget, infrastructure" formula with broad implications for how we provide for the future common defense. Organization and management of defense and defense resources should not be excluded from this examination although, in this paper, they are not discussed in detail.

The aim of Rapid Dominance is to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fit or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe. Clearly, the traditional military aim of destroying, defeating, or neutralizing the adversary's military capability is a fundamental and necessary component of Rapid Dominance. Our intent, however, is to field a range of capabilities to induce sufficient Shock and Awe to render the adversary impotent. This means that physical and psychological effects must be obtained.

Rapid Dominance would therefore provide the ability to control, on an immediate basis, the entire region of operational interest and the environment, broadly defined, in and around that area of interest. Beyond achieving decisive force and dominant battlefield awareness, we envisage Rapid Dominance producing a capability that can more effectively and efficiently achieve the stated political or military objectives underwriting the use of force by rendering the adversary completely impotent.

Now--if I think of that stated objective not in terms of some faceless, overseas, foreign military enemy; then it means one thing.

But put that definition in the context of the domestic situation specifically mentioned several times at the beginning of the paper. It starts to sound rather chilling.

I'm going to sidestep now, with no elegant segue, into a Human Rights Watch statement about the torture of U.S. prisoners:

Each day brings more information about the appalling abuses inflicted upon men and women held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. U.S. forces have used interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep—in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort, and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while incarcerated.

Now, let's consider just who is really shocked and surprised by all this. I'll give you a hint: it isn't the combatants. We've all seen the accounts of Iraqis and others, essentially saying that after the US invaded Afghanistan, it was widely accepted that the American military was going to beat and abuse prisoners. Prisoners expect to be humiliated, to have dogs set on them, according to more than one report coming out of the Middle East.

It's the rest of the world that's stunned and outraged: the citizens of our ally countries, and our own citizens.

Now, if we revisit the concept of rapid domination, coupled with demoralization:

"...we envisage Rapid Dominance producing a capability that can more effectively and efficiently achieve the stated political or military objectives underwriting the use of force by rendering the adversary completely impotent."

I think the torture scandals currently occupying so much of the news are carefully engineered not so much to obtain information from enemy combatants, nor even to deter would-be terrorists and combatants on foreign soil. I think this is "Shock and Awe" at home, to establish rapid dominance over the American people, and to intimidate our long-term allies.

I think we are supposed to start thinking about torture as a legitimate tool of law enforcement.

For really the first time in my life, I fear my government.

Yet More Kisses

Still thinking about kisses. A friend pointed out "Kiss Me" (Sixpence None the Richer) which was one of the songs I had in mind when I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. The song sets up all the singer's expectations about the environment--"you will wear those shoes, and I will wear that dress." Which makes me smile bemusedly about the incredible weight we can give to the simplest things.

Frank said of his first for-serious kiss: My mother was waiting in the car to drive me home. She must have talked. I probably responded. But a goodly portion of me was still on Laurie's back porch. I think maybe part of me still is.

I think part of us always stays with that first kiss--the kiss that makes you leave behind forever that schoolyard-cooties view of kissing. It marks a sea-change in the way we perceive the world and others. For me, that moment didn't happen until the first time I kissed another girl.

Ray, I'm blowing you a big friendly smooch right now.

Mommie4A said: Anyway - about the kiss you describe - I just watched Spanglish last night. Wasn't that thrilled with it but it's got a lot of pregnant with kisses moment. Those were my favorite moments in the movie. And Paz Vega -wow.

I really, really wanted to love Spanglish, and just couldn't. The pregnant-with-kisses moments were far better than the actual finally-realized kiss. Perhaps that was the whole point. The thing is, I just don't believe that's always true.

And an anonymous poster wrote: Kisses
You've reminded me of things I'd forgotten. Will I be able to make it go back to sleep now that you've awakened it? It's been such a long time gone.....

Which brought to mind a poem I read years ago.
Currently, these lines are running around and around in my brain:

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
...

From Richard Hugo's Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

We use kisses as memory-markers for the passage of time--our first kiss to our last good kiss.

So you see, .:J.r.A.:, it's all in the history, and how you remember. Kisses that surprise you are, perhaps, even better than the kisses you anticipate and hold your breath, hoping for.

And stop kissing people you don't really want to kiss.

Poor crippled and ugly little WIP

Heh. I wanted you to be so perfect. Instead, you're a twisted and misshapen little thing. Gimping along, dragging your damaged and malformed little self along as best you can. Oddly, you're all dressed up in your Sunday-best words, which only emphasizes your inadequate and slow moving story.

Dunno if I should try to fix you, or send you to the shredder to spare any innocent bystanders from accidentally reading you.

"Kiss me..."

I heard a Bonnie Raitt song, yesterday. I've heard it before, but this time the phrase "...and you haven't even kissed me, yet" stuck in my mind.

Something about the word "yet"...So very loaded, such implications of inevitability.

Just because I'm an etymology weirdo, there is this:

kiss (v.)
O.E. cyssan "to kiss," from P.Gmc. *kussijanan (cf. O.S. kussian, O.N. kyssa, O.Fris. kessa, Ger. küssen), from *kuss-, probably ultimately imitative of the sound. The O.E. noun was coss, which became M.E. cuss, but this yielded to kiss, from the verb.
For vowel evolution, see bury. There appears to be no common I.E. root word for "kiss," though suggestions of a common ku- sound may be found in the Gmc. root and Gk. kynein "to kiss," Hittite kuwash-anzi "they kiss," Skt. cumbati "he kisses."

Kissing seems such a weird thing to do; and the emotions a kiss evokes, all out of proportion to the mechanics of the behavior, itself. We write songs about it, we fantasize about that first kiss, we hang all kinds of expectations and conditions and idealizations around the very idea of that kiss.

I'm not talking about the other kinds of kisses: the frosting-smeared toddler kiss; the papery, little-old-lady, grandmother kiss; the soothing kiss your mother planted on your forehead when you were small, and didn't feel well. Not the kiss from your long-time lover, partner, and friend. Although those are all lovely kisses, too.

I have it on good authority that the generation just after mine indulges in make-out sessions as sort of a recreational pastime. I'm not even talking about those kisses. Although I think that's great. And I'm sort of jealous. And I think the behavior signals a fairly radical cultural change--but that's an entry for another day.

It's a kiss related to the cathartic movie-kiss, when it finally happens; when you've known throughout the whole movie that it would happen, it should happen, these people need to just kiss, for chrissakes, and all those plot complications will magically resolve so nicely...

It's also related to the off-limits kiss: The kiss from that married-or-otherwise-unavailable-friend, the one you're crazy about, but haven't let yourself wonder about kissing. The kiss that you never anticipated, because you couldn't imagine where or how it would ever happen, but then it's New Year's Eve, and you zoom in for the quick, friendly smooch, and suddenly the paradigm shifts--drops out from beneath your feet--and the kiss is over, and you're staring at each other, and someone's spouse is pissed...

I'm talking about that kiss--the kiss in your mind, when you're starting to think about what it might be like to kiss someone specific. Someone you've never kissed before. Someone who hasn't kissed you, yet.

That kiss, when you wonder about someone you know, when you imagine their lips and tongue, and you wonder if they're any good at kissing, anyway.

That kiss we write songs about. The kiss we remember, years later.

I was talking to a friend about the whole kissing thing, this morning. I said that I thought the kiss in your mind was much more powerful than the actuality. She asked me who the hell can hold out that long? "If I sense it's coming, I just go for it," she said.

She also observed that's why the first few seconds before the first kiss are so sexy.

That "kiss me" instant...

Awesome Chicken Tacos with mango/roasted corn salsa

You'll need to invite some friends over. This makes rather a lot. Delegate the margarita-making to someone with whom you don't mind sharing counter-space.

Salsa:
a couple, three, ears of fresh sweet corn
two or three fresh limes
a fistful of fresh cilantro
a couple or three ripe mangos
at least one fresh jalepeno pepper
a couple of fresh anaheim chile peppers
a medium red onion
a couple of small ripe tomatoes
a couple of cloves of fresh garlic
sea salt

In a big black skillet, or a wok, or whatever you have handy, roast the kernels of corn you've managed to save from falling all over the floor while you were slicing them off the ears. Send someone out for more ears of corn, if needed.

Just heat your pan with a little good olive oil. Before the oil starts smoking, toss in the corn. You want to roast it fairly hot, so it just begins to carmelize, but the kernels are still crisp. Have a margarita while you're working. Have two. Roasting corn while everyone else is out on the deck is hot and thankless work.

Take the corn up and let it cool, while you chop all the other stuff--you want it all chopped fairly fine, but not teeny-tiny. Holding back the cilantro, sea salt, and limes--chop up all the mangos, peppers, onions and tomatoes and put 'em in your biggest bowl. Add the corn. Then juice the limes and add the juice a bit at a time, until the mix starts to take on a salsa-ish texture. Add the cilantro according to taste. I like quite a lot. Sprinkle the whole thing with a bit of salt to bring out the flavors, then clear off the top shelf in your fridge until the bowl fits. Cover it with plastic or something. Have another margarita, if you want one.

Chicken:
fresh boneless, skinless chicken breasts, sliced across the grain into strips about 1/2" wide
1/2 cup of decent tequila
2-3 limes
2-3 cloves fresh garlic

toss the strips into a big bowl with three or four shots of good tequila, the juice from two or three limes, and a couple of cloves of finely chopped garlic, marinate for an hour or two.

Pour off the marinade and toss the chicken into the big black skillet, or wok, or whatever you cooked the corn in. (You've cleverly cleaned it up so that the chicken doesn't stick like crazy.) Cook it fairly hot, with a little more olive oil, so that it browns nicely. Salt as needed.

Set that off on the back of the stove, while you grill some nice corn tortillas. You want to cook them just a bit past "hot" but stop well short of "crispy". I like 'em just a little toughened, so they don't fall apart when you fill them.

Have another margarita.

Grate a bunch of Monterey-Jack cheese.

Serve with either plain yogurt (for the low-cal, low-fat contingent) or sour cream. Either tastes pretty good. Chicken, salsa, cheese, sour cream, in the grilled corn tortillas. Have more margaritas, as needed.

You'll probably have enough salsa left over to go on top of omelettes in the morning, too.

Musing on Heroes and Warriors

On the Warrior Ethos, From the Army National Guard Recruitment page:

"In the face of a rapidly changing theater of operations, General Schoomaker, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, has personally called for a return to this most fundamental of creeds. The modern Guard, active now on battlefields around the world must be prepared for battle at all times. There is no such place as “behind the lines” any more. Our enemy will strike at us whenever and wherever they can. And we must be, we will be prepared to meet them and destroy them. And we will accomplish this mission by adhering to the Warrior Ethos:

I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade."

Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith received the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously, April 4th, 2005. The accounts that I've read of his heroism and sacrifice clearly describe this man as both a hero and a warrior. You don't have to agree with the motives behind the Iraq War and you don't have to like the ideology that keeps America in the conflict in order to feel a surge of admiration and respect for a man who voluntarily laysdown his own life to protect the lives of his comrades.

Then I found myself thinking about heroes, warriors, and how we value them.

I spent some time perusing the Congressional Medal of Honor page, and the stories of the recipients of the medal. It was an education for a would-be writer of fiction.

There is a certain kind of valor, a level of heroism remarkable in its purity, that seems to transcend ordinary human nature. Perhaps that is why the more cynical souls among us seek to diminish the weight of such acts. I suppose it would be more fashionable, at least among my most radical pc friends, if I were to write and think about Sgt. Smith's medal as a story told by the government at a time when this war badly needs some positive publicity.

I refuse to do that. I can't bring myself to diminish Sgt. Smith's valor that way.

I do want to think about it in terms of stories, though. I want to think about this act in terms of the stuff of heroism. This story is all the more poignant because of the accompanying pictures of the sergeant and his surviving loved ones--the human face. And I wonder if we need to recognize the face of the hero, to love him. If, in knowing and accepting his all-to-human failings, we recognize all the more the power of his transformation.

Our most revered medals aren't awarded for killing the most enemy combatants, like some real-life video-game--God save us all, if our culture ever comes to that.

I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.

This ethos seems to me to be about selflessness, about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. An effective fictitious hero/warrior must be recognizeably human--and still must embody selflessness.

The tension of the struggle between those two states of being is where the story lives.

Passings

I'm struck by the quiet dignity accompanied by international vigils surrounding the Pope in his last hours. In comparison, the lunatic hysteria surrounding poor--purportedly Catholic--Terry Schiavo seems even more ghastly.

Godspeed to them both.

Pushing the edges

I got some really good advice, years ago. A Hemingway scholar I used to know told me, "write hard. Then, when you rewrite, write even harder. Make the words as true and powerful as you possibly can." That's actually a more or less fictionalized paraphrase--but it captures the essential gist.

Now, this is easier said than done, of course.

It seems a fine line: manipulate your reader, without letting on--because as soon as the reader feels manipulated, you've blown it; write in a manner both true and unflinching, without sacrificing tension and subtleties.

Oh, and write about something that lots of people care about--or if you're really good, make them care about something they didn't realize was so important. Find something that sets up that odd, aching, harmonic overtone inside the reader--without letting your words or your story slip away into cliches.

While we're at it, stand on one leg on the tip of a chimney in a high wind and recite The Odyssey backwards while knitting a sweater.

Just kidding. Mostly.

*note: I like this template quite a lot, but the white letters on the dark blue field have to go. I'll be mucking about with it for the next few days, and since I really don't know what I'm doing, the whole thing might well vanish completely. If that happens, my apologies in advance. I also rather like the courier font--but I'm afraid it isn't the easiest thing to read on the screen. So I expect I'll be experimenting with that, as well.

Humility

Whenever I feel the need for a reality-check about my relative importance, I just come here and look at my google ranking.

It helps me remember not to take myself too very seriously.

Tonight...

Tonight, I would like to be some incredibly interesting and complicated character in a noir film...or perhaps a little indie foreign picture. Someone with chiselled and compelling features, smoking at a little table in a tiny bar, someplace exotic and dangerous.

I would smoke, french-inhaling and letting the smoke curl from my lips into wisps over the table. If I could figure out a way to do so without looking ridiculous, I would blow smoke-rings.

I would drink something terribly potent and tasty and romantic. When the time came, I would slip my trenchcoat around my shoulders and step out onto the street, into the night and the fog, to keep my prearranged assignation--despite the danger and uncertainty.

I wonder who I need to talk to to arrange my very own, extremely cool soundtrack.

I'm allergic to the alder trees blooming their little hearts out, here. The antihistamines are obviously making me a bit strange.

Thoughts about the WIP

I've linked this back to the livejournal that I'm using as a sort of brainstorming place for what I want to work on next. I don't actually plan to be cross-posting like this, often.

Lately I've been thinking about Henry II and the murder of Thomas a Becket.

...The monks were solemnly chanting vespers to Almighty God, as he entered the sacred temple of Christ, shortly to become an evening sacrifice. The servants of Satan pursued having neither respect as Christians to his holy order, nor to the
sacred place, or season; but attacking the dignified prelate as he stood in prayer before the holy altar, even during the festival of Christmas, these truly nefarious Christians most inhumanly murdered him. Having done the deed, and retiring as if triumphant, they departed with unhallowed joy. Recollecting, however, that perhaps the transaction might displease the person in whose behalf they had been so zealous, they retired to the northern parts of England, waiting until they could fully discover the disposition of their monarch towards them.
Source: The Church Historians of England. Vol. IV - Part II. Translated by Joseph Stevenson. London: Seeley’s, 1856; pp. 465-7; 478-81; 493-5.

A terrible thing to love a king, and find yourself set against him. Even worse to be the king, though. The seeds of tragedy lie within human fallibility.

Divine King of England: A Study in Anthropology, by Margaret Murray, supposedly suggests the murder of Becket was actually a ritual substitute sacrifice, a Sacred-King sacrifice. Katherine Kurtz played with this idea in Lammas Night, sort of an alternate-WWII-history fantasy.

The problem IS that Murray and many of her ideas have been co-opted by more marginal new-age sites and proponents. I'm unsure as to the quality of her actual scholarship. I have a lot of work to do, there. I can't find an actual copy of her book, Divine King--which might at least help me distinguish what has been sensationalized and taken out of context. I'm off to the library as soon as I have a free day--because I just don't trust the internet for reliable sourcing.

Meanwhile, I'm completely infatuated with the picture of Becket, murdered at vespers, monks chanting, candles lit... during the Christmas season. I'm not alone in my interest, of course. There is also the French play, Becket.


Henry, legend has it, walked barefoot to Canterbury as penance. Becket and Henry, by all accounts, had been closer than brothers, at least at an earlier point in their lives and relationship. Henry was apologizing to Becket, or to the Church? Probably both, life and history being complex and fraught with rich nuances of relationship and politics. And he didn't actually cover as much ground barefoot as he might have.

Still.

The idea of the murder as a voluntary laying-down-of-life for the king--his close friend and almost brother--as a surrogate sacrifice...hmm.

Gawd, what a story, though. No matter HOW it really played out, once upon a time. You just KNOW the real story is infinitely more complex than history can really tell us.

Very bad news.

GENEVA
(CNN) -- Doctors reported for the first time Wednesday the ominous spread of a strain of the AIDS virus that is resistant to protease inhibitors, the medicines
that have revolutionized care of the disease.

I also heard on an NPR sidebar that there is apparently a drug-resistant strain that converts to full-blown AIDS much faster than the old-style HIV.

God. What if we just spent a third of the money we spend invading other countries on microscopic killers, instead?

This could be a very bad thing for the already floundering health-care system.

A Passing...

"As of 11:12AM Friday, February 11th, 2005, Jack Lawrence Chalker has now passed away and is now in a greater place. We thank all that have kept Jack in his thoughts and prayers." --from JackChalker.com

Midnight at the Well of Souls was one of the first sff books I remember reading.

Godspeed, Mr. Chalker.