Lysistrata's Daughter

My husband loves Christmas. By which he means that he loves the hymns and services of Christmas, both East and West. He loves to have an Advent wreath and sing the O Antiphons of the Roman rite. You know? Christ-mass. The lovely churchy parts of Christmas. The hymns we love because we only get to sing them once a year. I love all that, too. What I hate about Christmas is something quite different, and it was on full display today. It started this morning, with NPR hinting darkly that people who do not spend every penny they can afford on Christmas presents, and a few more after that, were nothing more than economic jihadists, determined to sell the country into financial ruin. As if the brainiacs of Wall Street hadn't done that for us already. And I'm so sorry that I'm not willing to spoil my child rotten and fill up my little house with kitchen gadgets we'll never use in order to save an economy already being killed much more effectively than I ever could with...

BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Rom-coms 'spoil your love life' : "They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner." Ha! I always thought romantic comedies were pernicious crap.

Usually, when I think of A, I have a jumbled impression of his wildly convoluted stories about building houses and killing bad guys, tantrums over going to bed, elaborate coffee table altars and painstaking Lego constructions. Occasionally, though, I am struck by A as, simply, himself. The first instance I remember is when I realized he no longer had the baby smell, that soft aroma of milk and soap, but instead, smelled sweaty and dirty, because he was no longer a baby but a little boy. He must have been around two at the time. A year ago, when he was three, I was holding his hand after he had fallen asleep, and I felt the calluses that had grown as a result of his hard playing. It was a shock to discover that he no longer had the soft, fleshy hands of a baby, but the vaguely hard, dry hands of a man. Tonight I checked on A after he was asleep. He was rolled up in his comforter, and as cute and vulnerable as he looked, I also felt that I saw a glimmer of the man he would become...

Today is A's name day, and he got a new pirate hide-out thingy. The old pirates and the new pirates are getting acquainted and will probably be planning some expeditions to find treasure in the near future.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | The age of 'celebrity terrorism' : "Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie." I promise this won't turn into a round-up of political stuff I find interesting, but this really was a totally novel and convincing, to me, at least, analysis of modern terrorism.

I've stopped looking at Facebook recently, and I hardly ever watch YouTube videos anymore. The reason? I can't stand to watch the total disintegration of American political discourse. On Facebook, friends of all political stripes post snarky status messages taking potshots at one side or the other. They also post propaganda-style YouTube videos and fear-mongering articles, which cite few checkable sources. I can't take it any longer. I can't stand to watch the most outrageous propaganda masquerading as serious political comment. I can't stand to watch the artificial division of the country into 'us' and 'them'. I can't stand to watch as people I love, throughout the political spectrum, are painted as ill-intentioned, hateful people. Politics is not a parody of fundamentalist religion, in which we must choose between good and evil or face an eternity of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore wet t-shirt contests. Politics are contingent, ambiguous an...

I've been recommending this talk to everyone I know lately. It is one of the most revolutionary and healing things I've heard in a very, very long time. The thesis is: you are not your thoughts, meaning that stream of chatter that goes on in your head all the time, quite independent of what you're doing. I think the Buddhists call this the 'monkey mind'. The talk is about an hour long. It's absolutely worth it to take the time to listen to it carefully.

Heard in our house as those of voting age attempted to watch the veep debate, "I'm throwing these people out. Turn them off. I want to watch Thomas. I'm voting for Arack Obama and Muh-Cain."

A couple of nights ago, I finished Father Joe: the Man who Saved my Soul by Tony Hendra. I was almost sad to be finished, because the storytelling was so wonderful. It's about Tony Hendra, who played Ian Faith, the manager in Spinal Tap, and his relationship with a Benedictine priest, who counsels him, but more importantly loves him and is his friend throughout his tumultuous life. As a young teenager, Hendra experiences a crisis and is introduced to Dom Joseph Warrilow, usually known as Fr. Joe. Fr. Joe is supposed to "straighten Tony out," but instead of lowering the boom, he responds to the deeply confused young man with love and understanding and helps Tony to see the other people in the crisis in that way as well. This is the pattern of Hendra's relationship with Fr. Joe. Expecting to find judgment when he loses his faith at university and knocks up his girlfriend, Fr. Joe instead counsels him about being unselfish toward his wife, to embrace his vocation a...

Tonight we went to the little Serbian mission in Irvine, because a myrrh-streaming icon was going to be there, and Y was asked to help sing the service. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical about this icon at first. I think doubt and skepticism are my default reactions. I wish belief came more naturally to me, but I find myself always, always questioning. We picked A up from school, then fought traffic on the 110 and 405 for over an hour. We got to the church with about 15 minutes to spare, only to find that the icon (and its driver) were stuck in the traffic from which we had just extricated ourselves and would be about 30 minutes late. A played in the grass outside the church, which is in an office park, while we waited. At last the icon arrived, and the service started. The church itself is about the size of a largish living room, and it was packed with people. A and I stood near the front. The icon was actually quite small, a mounted print of the Iveron-Montreal icon o...

A Chuck E. Cheese "crew member" comes crackling over the loudspeaker to announce to the room of wired children and their beleaguered parents, "Will guest number 74 please report to the beverage station? Your hot, delicious order is ready. Once again, will guest number 74 please report to the beverage station? Your hot, delicious order is ready. Thank you, and have a magical evening." Y and I looked at each other and at the marginally edible pizza in front of us and wondered if we had missed the hot and delicious moment. Of course, it's terrible marketing to request that someone appear to retrieve their order because it's as good as it's going to get and if you don't get a move on, it'll go soggy. Said "crew member" was later observed at the beverage bar, filling a cup with Coke and muttering, "I'm going to pretend it's vodka." Yes, exactly.

This evening as we were driving, a piping voice announced from the back seat, "My grandson lived in America. He moved to Los Angeles from California."