Yes, he is wearing a sweater.

The other day I took the dogs for a walk in the Parc Regional de la Nature at Papineau and Gouin. Pepe’s stamina is not so good these days, so I tucked a baby carrier in a bag just in case. And I did end up using it, posing great, if imaginary, social difficulties. Sometimes I could completely hide him inside the carrier and I could imagine that other people assumed it was a baby. But mostly his head stuck out. Besides, pretending your dog is a baby is even creepier than just treating it like one. 

I knew that rushing up to people and explaining that YES I Let Him Walk, But He’s Thirteen With Kidney Disease And He Gets Tired, OK? was not the right thing to do. And staring people down with an I Dare You To Say Something expression was not fun for anyone either. So mostly I avoided people’s gaze, which is interesting because when I am not carrying a chihuahua in a baby carrier I’m not aware that I look people in the eye that much.

One possibility would be that I just stop taking him on these walks, and just let him walk up and down the street in front of the house. That would be the sensible thing, right?

Another would be to get a BAT CARRIER to perplex, amaze and amuse.

Found on stuffonmymutt.com. Thanks, Leanne!

Mark bought two tickets to Sigur Ros, one of his favourite bands. He keeps insisting that I like them because the lead singer is a woman, but I find them dreary and dissonant and generally difficult to listen to. The lead singer doesn’t even sound like a woman, but like a man singing falsetto. They aren’t bad, I don’t hate them, but in general I would rather be listening to Macy Gray.

Finding someone to go with turned out to be surprisingly difficult. He asked me again to go with him, so I said that he could tell his single-parent friends that I would babysit - but that yes, if that didn’t work, I would go.

It didn’t work. So tonight I prepared by drinking half a beer, taking acetominophen and ibuprofen, and buying earplugs. I sallied into the night to do my best at enjoying an outdoor concert with my beloved.

It was quite nice, really. This old biddy had a good time. The music was somewhere between Bjork and whalesong, and the lead singer is a man singing falsetto. 

I spent an evening with a friend who’s been struggling. She was depressed and very lucid.

I think I really like depressed people. Not so depressed that they just lie there pretending to be dead and wishing that pretending would make it so - those ones I just want to kick. But depressed enough that we can have interesting conversations about bad things without having to invent a happy ending for everything. Depressed enough that we can comfort one another without feeling patronising or patronised.

I had two dreams just before I woke up this morning.

The first was about eggplant parmesan. I decided it should have béchamel sauce in it, and that the egg yolk in the sauce would give it a rich yummy colour.* What to do with the remaining egg white became a problem generating some anxiety.

The second dream was about my Uncle Kevin. He was explaining to us that he hadn’t travelled as much as he would have liked, and that it was time for a change. He would quit his job at the Cleveland Clinic and practice overseas. He would join the army and go to Kandahar!

At which point my Uncle Kevin ripped off all his clothes and started boogying backwards down a busy street, naked, on roller-blades, joyfully singing Kandahar! to the tune of the Village People’s YMCA. This was an unexpected development, but deeply moving.

The first dream was easy to decode. My mother and I made an eggplant casserole for Easter dinner today and I was mentally rehearsing it.

The second dream was also easy. I recently finished reading a book in the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency series set in Botswana.** Our heroine spends a certain amount of time in each book looking forward to retirement in a village with her husband, where they will putter and enjoy their memories. I realised that the life I lead, in which my dreams, challenges and ambitions do not rise above the level of preparing a vegetable casserole and making good use of leftover egg whites, is not going to supply me with many interesting memories to get me through old age. It hadn’t really occurred to me before that I would need to lay down memories for future use, assuming that I would just keep busy. In fact, people slow down as they age and have the time to review memories. Which they do, as they rest in between being busy.

I don’t know if Kandahar is where I need to be, but I think I need to learn to roller-blade.

*No, real-world béchamel sauce does not contain eggs. Only in dreams.
**Nostalgic and sentimental, but I like nostalgic and sentimental. Totally stuffwhitepeoplelike.com which makes sense, because I am totally white people.

A friend submits the following challenge:

Foglia, dans sa dernière chronique, a proposé un jeu :

“ON JOUE ? - Pour finir, une idée piquée dans un journal en Alabama, je ne sais plus lequel, anyway c’est un jeu. On a demandé un jour à Hemingway d’écrire une nouvelle en six mots ; pas n’importe quoi, une vraie nouvelle qui raconte vraiment une histoire. Hemingway a écrit ceci : À vendre : souliers de bébé jamais utilisés (en anglais ça fait six mots).

Sur ce modèle, le journal – peut-être The Atlanta Journal – a demandé à ses lecteurs de raconter leur vie en six mots. Le journal a reçu plus de 15 000 réponses. Deux exemples au hasard : Found true love, married someone else. Moins intense : Wasn’t born a redhead ; fixed that.

J’ai essayé évidemment. J’ai visé de ne pas être trop sérieux, mais quand même, d’être le plus près possible d’un vrai résumé de ma vie. Ça donne ceci : Euh, quelqu’un aurait-il un tournevis ?

Vous, votre vie en six mots (pas sept), ça donnerait quoi ?”

Moi, ça donne ceci : Né handicapé, pour limiter les dégâts.

Et vous ?

Luc

Ok, my six-word life summary is: “Well, at least I didn’t breed.” (I had some others, but they were too self-deprecating to publish.)

And yours? It’s harder than it seems. Give it a try!

*** *** ***
Addendum March 23: If you submit something for the Six Words challenge I’ll bake you a cake next time I see you! If you submit something not self-deprecating, I’ll bake you a cake as a reward and encouragement. It’s a harder thing to come up with and you deserve the recognition. (If it is self-deprecating, then I guess you need cheering up.)

Alston has invited his readers to do the ‘privilege’ meme. It was designed as an exercise for students at the University of Indiana. Students line up together and for each Yes answer they take a step forward. At the end of the exercise, some students have taken quite a few steps. This represents the head start in getting to college that they had over the students who stay close to the original line. Discussion, anger and rationalisation ensue.

An interesting aspect of the exercise is that it’s for college students, so doesn’t include getting to college as a step. (I would hope that the discussion includes those who will never be in that room.)

I am hugely privileged. I knew that: the results of this exercise are no surprise to me. I would have used different criteria in the exercise myself, and my criteria would show me to be even more privileged.

My eye-opening experiences in college were with respect to entitlement. Despite my enormous privilege, I wasn’t prepared for the sense of many of my classmates that the world belonged to them. People who assumed that the position of CEO was theirs - not by right exactly. They’d still have to demonstrate to the board that the position was theirs. But it was what people like them did.

Utz I could deal with: “I know I have more money than most people, so I’m careful. When I go out with someone who doesn’t have money, I take maybe $250 in cash with me. That reminds me that I have limits. If I brought my credit card, I might end up offending my friend by doing something like buying a motorcycle on impulse. If I only have cash, I have to think before I spend.” (This was in 1981, so substitute $578 in today’s currency.) See, Utz had money but he didn’t think the world was his by right. He was always worrying about his place in it. (Well, actually I couldn’t really deal with Utz. I didn’t judge him, but left him to his anxieties and self-doubt. The problems of having too much money were not ones I could relate to or cared to contemplate.)

But this other woman whose name I have erased from my memory? “Don’t worry about Jimmy. Look, he only wants a union in the kitchen because he’d be paid more. But he’s not paid more because he doesn’t deserve more. That’s how it works.” Um, no.

Jimmy ran the dish belt in the kitchen where I worked. He quit school at eight to work in the cotton fields of Georgia when his father got sick. I could relate to him: I had friends whose parents had done the same thing. And Jimmy was an educator, like my family. He used his position on the dishbelt to educate the children of privilege about what it meant to be black and working class in America. I was grateful. He died of a heart attack before retiring.

There were other, unironic, expressions of entitlement. “I always prefer a little blood on the bedsheets.” “I like it so much when women wear hats and gloves.” The hats and gloves comment from one southern man meeting another and happily identifying common cultural touchpoints. But no recognition of what a society where women wear hats and gloves means.

I only lasted a year in that school, but I’m glad I went.

*** *** ***
This is the exercise:

Take a step / Set to bold…

• If your father went to college before you started.
• If your father finished college before you started.
• If your mother went to college before you started.
• If your mother finished college before you started.
• If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
• If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
• If you had a computer at home when you were growing up.
• If you had your own computer at home when you were growing up.
• If you had more than 50 books at home when you were growing up.
• If you had more than 500 books at home when you were growing up.
• If you were read children’s books by a parent when you were growing up.
• If you ever had lessons of any kind as a child or a teen.
• If you had more than two kinds of lessons as a child or a teen.
• If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively.
• If you had a credit card with your name on it before college.
• If you had or will have less than $5000 in student loans when you graduate.
• If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate.
• If you went to a private high school.
• If you went to summer camp.
• If you had a private tutor.
• (US students only) If you have been to Europe more than once as a child or teen.
• (International question) If you have been to the US more than once as a child or teen.
• If your family vacations involved staying at hotels rather than KOA or at relatives homes.
• If all of your clothing has been new.
• If your parents gave you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.
• If there was original art in your house as a child or teen.
• If you had a phone in your room.
• If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen.
• If you had your own room as a child or teen.
• If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course.
• If you had your own cell phone in High School.
• If you had your own TV as a child or teen.
• If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College.
• If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline.
• If you ever went on a cruise with your family.
• If your parents took you to museums and art galleries as a child or teen.
• If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

So. My modifications would be to remove the step associated with having your own television (this is about getting a head start on going to university, and having a tv in your room is more likely to be a disadvantage). And to add a step for having people who work in your home, like a housekeeper or gardener. For not working more than ten hours a week. A really big step was omitted, and I don’t know why in this context: If you have no children.

Also omitted were questions related to access for people with physical disabilities. If you can walk up stairs. If you can pick up a book. If you were hospitalised or institutionalised for less than a cumulative total of two weeks as a child or teen.

Related: If money was never an object to getting health care. If you were never required to nurse a chronically ill family member.

An assumption in the exercise is that you were raised by your parents. I know it’s cumbersome to read out ‘parent or parents, and/or a relative or guardian you were living with’ but if the purpose is to make privilege visible… let’s do it.

If you felt safe at home as a child and teen. If somebody told you that you were smart. If nobody told you that you were stupid.

What steps would you add? Which do you think do not belong?