Book of the Night Club

I always thought California was supposed to sink into the sea

Not New Orleans.

It’s just so strange, watching the news and trying to imagine what it would be like to lose everything material that you have. In thinking about it, I suppose it wouldn’t really matter, as long as those I loved were okay. In a bizarre way, sometimes I think it might be a refreshing way to start over.

But the thing is, where to start in New Orleans? From what I understand, New Orleans has pretty much effectively vanished, swallowed by the water from the broken levees. They city is being abandoned, and nobody can really say when anyone will be able to return. All that history, gone forever. Because it will never be the same again, it will never really be New Orleans. Much of the French Quarter escaped flooding, it’s true, but the real New Orleans was more than that.

If you lose your house, you can rebuild. But what if you lose your city? I can only imagine the sheer number of people who not only lost their homes, but possibly their entire livelihood, as a result of this disaster. I try to think of what people have lost when I hear about the rampant looting, but I still seethe when I see or read about it.

I know someone online who had to leave some of her pets behind because there wasn’t room enough for all of them in her car. She has no idea how they are or if they’re still alive. A friend of my mother’s took her son down to Tulane for his freshman year of college. As they prepared to move him into the dorms on Saturday, he was told they were being evacuated to Mississippi until Katrina passed. He went to Houston instead to ride out the storm, and I don’t know what he did after that.

I’ve never been to New Orleans, although I’d always planned to go. I loved the whole gothic mystery that enveloped it, and reveled in reading about the lingering spirits of old New Orleans and listening to Cajun music. But I never went; I talked about it, but nothing more. My husband, who isn’t particularly well traveled in the U.S., wanted to go, too, but we always put it off.

“It’s not like it’s going anywhere,” we’d tell ourselves.

Guess we were wrong.

Midwest Tragedy

I've had a number of people asking me if I'd had a chance to read this article yet. The answer is yes, I have. And I know it takes place in Nebraska, where I grew up, and Kansas, where I briefly attended college.

What I can't answer is which part of this terribly tragic story saddened me more. There's the fact that Kansas allows marriage at the age of 12, then there's the poor little girl can't see more of a future for herself than being married and a mother at 14. She has no interest in college, and thinks that being a nurse requires nothing more than a high school diploma.

The parents, as they always seem to be in these situations, either were not or chose not to be in touch enough with their children to know what was going on right under their noses. And then there is the emotionally immature, learning disabled "husband", who didn't have the judgment to see how imprudent this type of relationship was and remove himself from it. Someone had to be the adult, but sadly it appears that nobody was interested in filling the role.

The prison question is a hard one for me. When I worked with pregnant and parenting teenagers, many of their children were fathered by men who were in their 20's while the girls were still in their teens. In one case, the girl was 14 and the man was 22. The sad, twisted thing about it was that often Social Services would (often the custodial "parent") would refuse to press charges against the men because the only source of emotional support the poor girls had were the families of their abusers. I don't know one of these men who treated these girls well; often they seemed to collect lonely, unloved teenagers and had at least two children whose mothers did not have their driver's license. These men should have been arrested, but they walked; the one thing I can say about this child/man is that at least he's still there. And he does seem to be trying to do right by his family, although I have a feeling that the grandparents are carrying more of the burden than was disclosed.

Eventually, I think these kids will tire of playing house and divorce. Hopefully all of the children involved (and I'm including the parents in this, because they are children, too) will escape relatively undamaged.

when clarification goes wrong

Before he finally just apologized and shut up, Pat Robertson tried to clarify the remarks he made on Monday by saying that he was misinterpreted. Because, you see, kidnapping is also a way of "taking" someone "out". And that was really more the direction he was going in, not outright murder.

If it wasn't so mortifying, it would be laughable. And somehow it is, just a bit, in a deeply twisted way.

Thou shalt not…how does it go again?

Okay, I always said that Pat Robertson was a whack job. And now the whole world knows I'm right! I love global validation.

On his 700 Club show yesterday Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition and one-time-presidential candidate, pretty much encouraged the U.S. to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Love it!

His reason: Chavez is purportedly trying to make Venezuela "the launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism". I'm still looking for supporting documentation on that.

Sometimes I'll admit that I just want to bitch slap some of the world leaders, but you just don't go around cheerfully advocating murder on national television. Especially if you have connections as close to the White House as ol' Pat does. And if your power within your little Republican world seems a bit tenuous, it is not the time to begin advocating murder.

The best part, though, was watching the White House try and run interference. They send out Rumsfeld, who makes powerful statements such as, " "Certainly it's against the law. Our department doesn't do that type of thing,". Girl, please! Do NOT get me started on covert operations, not as long as Denial still isn't a river in Egypt.

This San Jose Mercury News article has some other great Robertson pearls of wisdom to share. These just illustrate my belief that overall fundamentalists in general are just frightened, ignorant people.

I hope that this turns the tide a little away from the fundamentalist streak surging through the country right now, but somehow I doubt it. However, it just may cost Pat some invitations to lead prayer breakfasts at the White House.

Okay, I was all stressed because I couldn't find my favorite photo of Rrrrr, but now I have. It was taken when we lived in San Francisco, and features him wandering up the stairs to our apartment from the backyard. What a big, grey monster of a cat he was. And such attitude! Don't even get me started...

The Rrrrr Cat, 199?-2005

Today we put my oldest cat, Maxim, down. We actually called him Rrrrr, because he liked the sound of the rolling R's. I've had him since 1992, so he even predates the husband.

He found me at a Midwestern humane society on Halloween, 1992. I wanted a kitten to warm up my lonely apartment, so since Halloween is my favorite holiday I thought it would be a lucky day to begin my search. As I walked up and down the rows of cute kittens a tortie caught my eye. I reached up to put my fingers on the cage to call her to me, when the largest grey paw I'd ever seen came down on top of my hand. It was attached to the single largest grey cat I'd ever seen, with eyes that told me that I'd been chosen.

They thought he was feral, but still decided to give him a chance by putting him out for adoption just that day. He'd been abused; they knew that by the terror he showed when people came too close too fast and his fear of people wearing boots. But they saw something, I guess in his eyes that told him he deserved a chance. So they gave him one, and he picked me.

He was a large grey Maine Coon cat, somewhere between 3-5years old. He had a veritable boatload of emotional issues, so we matched. In time, he began to mellow and trust, and so did I.

It's been hard watching him go downhill the last year or so, stricken with a brain tumor and had to take Phenobarbital, which made him act stoned and unsure. But the decision we made to take him to the vet was the right one, and now he's in a happier place, free from pain.

I love you, Rrrrr. Thanks for taking care of me and letting me take care of you. I miss you.

With a capital P...

So now we officially can't live in Denver. First they do the whole deeply ignorant and tragically misguided Pit Bull Genocide, and now I come to find out that their libraries are apparently run by idiots.

See, it seems that these anti-immigration freaks have decided that, in order to try and stop people from being bi-lingual, they want to get any books in a language other than English from library shelves. The best way to do this, they seem to have decided, is to use a Music Man offence. You've seen the Music Man, right? Basically, a con man tries to push his personal agenda by taking advantage of some townspeople's ignorance about a new pool table in their town. The pool table, he tells them, is a harbinger of evil, and no good will come of it. This "organization" went into the libraries and looked around, then picked the one thing they knew would push people's buttons; pornography. Then they blew it out of proportion and ran with it.

Some of the Spanish-language collection contains graphic novels. Some of the graphic novels, which contain adult content and are not shelved in the children's section, contain foul language and nudity. Since these people assume that children are left alone in the library with no parental guidance (which may be sadly quite true), they have decided that poor, misguided white children are being force fed pornography without even having the benefit to be able to put it in context because it's in SPANISH! They had a big tantrum about how tax dollars were being spent on Hispanic pornography, and sadly the media ate it up. The libraries even pulled the novels, and are now concerned that other collections will come under fire. Because you see, the organization in question doesn't care about the other graphic novels (ever read Sin City?), only the Spanish ones. If that does not already shoot their credibility all to hell, I don't know what does.

I'd link to articles that have appeared in the Denver Post and to the radio station where the allegations were originally aired, but sadly they seem to have completely misunderstood the real issues at hand and appear to be coming down on the side of the extremists.

This is, no doubt, partly in reaction to a discussion by the Denver Public Library system about making some of their branches primarily Spanish language. I'm not sure what I think of that, but I certainly don't think that it's completely wrong if that's who your population serves.

What really makes me sad is that, for a long time, I really loved the Denver area. My grandparents and family friends lived in Colorado, and I spent a lot of time there growing up. I had considered moving there as recently as last year, when the husband and I began looking for a place to relocate once I finish Grad School. But things change as you get older; ice cream no matter tastes as good as it once did, and Denver reveals itself to be a deeply reactionary metropolitan city full of unreasonable fears.

Crap; and the mountains are so pretty, too.

Today I cried

The point of my last entry, and it did have one, was that sometimes I want to cry but can't. Because crying makes one feel better. There are things that make me cry, like Rent, that I look forward to experiencing. And yes, I do feel all the more the freak because I don't have normal emotions.

Today we went to the funeral of a woman we knew casually, the mother of one of the women we work with at FOA. She was 96, had all of her faculties, and didn't suffer. You can't really want a lot more than that.

I don't do well at funerals as a general rule. The grief of the family and loved ones impacts me deeply, and I inevitably begin to cry. Often it's for the dead, like today. It makes me sad that someone who was so loved and needed had to die. But sometimes it's for other people I've lost, like Eric, or people I will lose, like my family.

I am not close to my family at all, and that makes me very sad. My husband tells me that I'm nothing like my family, which in his mind explains everything. But that still does not stop my wanting to be accepted by them. Because my family has never "gotten" me, they don't really value me, and that makes me feel like a total fraud when people do like me. I keep thinking that eventually they'll see what my family sees, the difference, the alien, and turn away. This keeps me on my toes, and most people at arm's length.

I am very lucky because I have a husband who adores me and seems blind to my obvious freakishness :). Even though we don't get to have children, meaning I'll never really have the family I want, he is everything to me. When we're at a funeral, I think about losing him and I just break down. Or I think about when I'll lose my own parents who, despite raising me since I was three months old, don't really know me at all. And it's hard to be okay with that.

Seasons of Love

Am I the only one who sometimes anxiously anticipates the opportunity to cry? Maybe it has to do with the Prozac; I take so much that sometimes even when I feel sad, I can’t get sad enough to really get it out and get over it quickly. Does this make any sense? I get this overall feeling of undefined sadness; I want to just cry and “cleanse” it, but I can’t. Strange, but true. Welcome to me.

For the last few months I’ve been quietly obsessed by the forthcoming film version of Rent. I love Rent, and have been hooked since the first time I saw it. There’s something about it that resonates with me, that sense of being outside and looking for love and acceptance and somehow feeling unworthy. It’s so powerful on stage, and I wasn’t sure if they could pull off a screen version. Then again, I didn’t think Lord of the Rings trilogy would translate well to film, and look at how wrong I was.

I’ve been watching the cast’s progress on the Rent web site for a while now, and I think they might have done it. The fact that many of the original cast members star in it helps enormously, (including the amazing Idina Menzel, who I could watch for hours) and I find that from what I’ve seen of Tracie Thoms, I like her better than the original Joanne. They seem to all have a great chemistry, and the smallness of the cast makes it more like a stage musical than an actual film.

I have been watching the trailer for a while now, at least once a day. This is largely due to the fact that it is wrapped up in one of my favorite Rent tunes, Seasons of Love. Which is now available on iTunes. YAY! Now I can burn it onto a CD and drive around with my obsession like the freak that I am.

Currently, there are only 130,548.38 minutes until Rent appears onscreen. And baby, I’m counting every one.

Another reason to love ebay

The best part is that he's called Steve,

Peter Jennings, R.I.P.

Sad to hear he died today, he was one of the nicest men I've ever met. He came to the bookstore once for a reading and we got into a good conversation about books and the world.

He was not a particularly educated man by the accepted standards, but it was the way he educated himself through reading and experience that I admired. You can't really do that anymore.

When he was looking around the store he found a book published by a publishing company he'd invested in, and was interested in whether it was selling well and why people might buy it. It pleased him that people might be as interested in the world as he was.

I'll miss him.

Poor Rick!

Dear Senator Santorum,

Today I was listening to an NPR interview with you, and I was devestated to hear of your plight. It seems that you find it a very rough row to hoe being a "person of faith" in this culture and to be public about it. Lambchop, I weep for you. It must be so achingly difficult to be a white college-educated male professional politician in this culture. My heart breaks with how much trouble you have ramming your cryptofascist religiously-motivated political agenda down people's throats. (Don't think I didn't see what you tried to do with the "No Child Left Behind" Act, either, okay? You're not that sly and I'm not that stupid.) Cry me a freakin' river.

Here's a thought, Rick: if everyone who is even a single angstrom to the sociopolitical left of the current Pope seems to be criticizing your stance on a whole lot of issues, maybe it's not because you're a Christian and maybe it isn't because you believe in God. Maybe, just maybe, it's because you're a jackass.

Look around and you might notice that there are a wide variety of people out there in the world who are "people of faith" and who work in various public arenas from the perspective of their faith who are not receiving, or have not received, for some reason, the same kinds of criticism.

Try for a few minutes to see if you can figure out what the difference is between you and them, Rick. And if you can't figure it out, ask Jimmy Carter, 'cause believe me, mon ami, he knows.

Points to ponder,

Kath