Trans/plant/portation

I have a shortish bucket list of places to visit in my lifetime, because I’ve read about different corners of the globe and I’ve always had a hankering for seeing them up close. Patagonia. Paris. Senegal. Lebanon. Hawaii. The trick is, getting there takes some doing. I imagine that for millennia, most people stayed pretty much where they started, with some nomadic peoples making long treks, or some specific folks earning a reputation for exploration and such. Perhaps there’s a wisdom in nesting, because with all of our technological prowess and transportation advancement, venturing from Point A to Point B is still a total pain in the keister.

Ever since we moved to Walla Walla, one of our quieter gripes has been that it takes 2-3 flights and 12 hours or more to get to the East Coast, usually at an expense of $500+ per traveler. At some point Susanne and I toyed with the idea of going to Hawaii instead of making multiple trips home for the holidays. Once we assessed that the prices really were similar, coming here shifted from a tongue-in-cheek thought experiment to a plan. And because we’ve struggled with getting in and out of Eastern Washington so many times now, seeing a three-legged airplane journey didn’t feel like a big deal. What price to pay for paradise, we asked ourselves.

Turns out, a 6-hour flight is no small feat for a toddler. The entire ride, we listened to wailing like I’ve never heard come out of any human being, much less a small child. Thank goodness it wasn’t Emile having the extended purple scream. Sure, he fussed, asking for “down,” and saying “all done” with the jaunt just 20 minutes after takeoff. But he held it together for the most part. Getting to the big island, Emile notched his 12th, 13th, and 14th flights in his new existence. A couple of bouts with turbulence notwithstanding, Hawaii Airlines gave us a smooth ride and a strange meal box. But hey, they have a meal box. It was a step up from the pretzel bag from Delta, and 10 light years better from the three sips of flat cold soda that they serve on United. (I think we all know I will never again breathe a friendly word about United Airlines.) Read More…

I remember the 1990s well–ATMs were a novelty, all the cool kids had neon-colored pagers, and Friday nights were spent playing an X-Files drinking game.* 1992, the year I graduated college, was an election year, and there were all kinds of debates within and about the queer community, some of which made the mainstream news–also known as “the evening news.” Which was watched on television, not on the Internet.

These debates included:

• Whether bisexuals should be included in the umbrella of “queer”
• Whether we should try to reclaim the term, “queer”
• Whether gays should be able to marry
• Whether queer civil rights should be about liberation or assimilation
• How best to advocate for more/better access to health care (mostly in light of the AIDS crisis)
• Whether lesbians should date bisexuals, and what that would mean about their lesbianism
• Whether gay men occupied too much of the priority list at the top of LGB civil rights
• Whether butch/femme or androgyny should be the preferred goal for lesbians

Twenty-one years later, we haven’t moved far from these debates, if at all.  Read More…

1. Pageants still exist for people over the age of 8.

2. When singing a rendition of … well, anything, it definitely leaves an impression if your last note sung is flat. Just not a good impression.

3. When giving an answer to an important question of our contemporary culture, flash a smile at the end to show you’re still a lighthearted gal.

4. Ernst & Young considers questions about Boo Boo Honey and gun violence “of similar complexity.” Ernst & Young should not be allowed to evaluate anything anymore.

5. “Medical marijuana” and “recreational use” are not the same thing. Unless one is in Iowa.

6. Never name your child Mariah Carey. That’s just cruel.

7. Nobody looks credible with a tiara on their head. Except maybe the Queen of England.

8. Reality television has really fallen on hard times if Miss America contestants recommend we all take reality television “with a grain of salt.”

9. When in doubt, break into a vigorous tap dance.

10. Miss America is much more bearable when Donald Trump is nowhere to be found.

UPDATE: Okay, two more items —

11. It is mean to taunt pageant contestants with doughnuts.

12. There’s always an opportunity to tout Sketchers shoes.

The West Wing rushed in at the end of the 2oth Century when we were all worried about Y2K and our brand-new Internet crashing down around our ears. Helmed by Martin Sheen, Aaron Sorkin’s vision of the capitol city gave us a non-sexist image of a Democratic president, quick-witted and principled to the hilt, someone who would never receive, much less request, oral sex in the Oval Office from an intern. The biggest argument inside the Beltway was whether Ken Starr needed to spend $20 million of the taxpayers’ money to investigate the commander-in-chief’s sex life. We may not have thought of it as a simpler time, and it wasn’t all that long ago, but well, in retrospect popular culture was somewhat less complicated.

This is not a series that didn’t manage to hit the point of poor performance, often called “jumping the shark.” It did become somewhat preposterous, with a pretend coup of a pretend nation that could not possibly compare to the destruction of our national mental stability brought about by 9/11.

But many of us watched anyway, for the rapid fire dialogue, for Rob Lowe (until he left, of course), for the rich relationships among the senior advisers to the president (C.J.! Toby! Lyman!), and the ways in which smart people in Washington were portrayed. Intrigue on the domestic front was especially believable, First Family kidnappings aside. Audiences were willing to go along with a few half-baked story ideas because so much else about the series rang true. And when Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda ran for the highest office in the land, viewership rebounded. Read More…

2013 is here and already people are waving their fists at the sky in frustration. Mitch McConnell of the US Senate is angry his congressional colleagues want to take up gun control debates on the floor. Murmurs from DC point to anger over the nominations of Chuck Hagel to head the Department of Defense and of John Kerry to lead State. Shooting victims from Aurora, Colorado, bemoan the possible trial of the Man Who Would be Joker, and the Hell’s Angels rode en masse to Connecticut to obstruct the Westboro Baptist Church from protesting at the Newtown victims’ funerals. If any of us had any hope that the end of the election could bring down the vitriol a notch or two, we had another thing coming. Glenn Beck may be relegated to the superhighway, but Ann Coulter continues to get attention for saying this jackass thing or that, and the Tea Party continues its clamp down on legislative productivity.

Therefore, I propose a few things for the sane among us to get through these trying times: Read More…