Second: Twenty-five years or so ago, in an argument with my father about feminism, I said something like, “A black man will be president of the US before a white woman will.” His answer: “If you think that, then you don’t understand anything about racism in the US.”

It’s good that he was wrong. Some things can change.

Most or all the remaining fossil fuel underneath the earth is going to end up as C02 in the atmosphere. The question is when: are we going to move it all from the earth to the air in the next 50 years? Or 200? But we are going to move it. So what’s the fuss?

No, we can’t compensate for fossil fuels in the air by replanting the forests we’ve cut down. The carbon that was in the forests is now in the air. If we replanted all the forests we cut down, they would suck up all the CO2 released by cutting down the original forests. The fossil CO2 would still be out there.

Besides, we can’t significantly replant the forests. Not without reducing the human population to below a million (and keeping it there). The land the forests used to occupy is needed for human habitation and agriculture.

It’s too late anyway. Does anyone remember when the Kyoto accord was signed? And how we were all so disappointed because it was too little, too late, and anyone who thought that Kyoto targets were meaningful had missed the point? Well. We’ve missed our Kyoto targets. And if they were too little, too late, then we are up shit creek, aren’t we.

I know it’s not polite to say, because having children is what people do and for most parents is the most (difficult but) satisfying part of their lives, but I honestly don’t know what people think they are accomplishing when they reproduce.

Good point. He’s a prosthetic baby.

prosthesis. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prosthesis (accessed: October 15, 2008).

1. a device, either external or implanted, that substitutes for or supplements a missing or defective part of the body.

For instance, those cool racer feet for someone who’s had their feet amputated, or saline implants for someone who’s had a mastectomy. It’s fairly obvious why someone without feet would want artificial replacements: even if they don’t look or feel like feet, you can still walk and run, which is the important part. Replacing a breast with an implant is a little less clear, because the implant carries risks, making it harder to detect any recurrence of cancer; it doesn’t look or feel like a breast; and the practical uses of an implant are subtle. I’ve thought about it though, and if I had a unilateral mastectomy I think I’d have an implant. Clothes would fit better, but also the weight on my body would be balanced and I would be less susceptible to the backaches that women with a single large breast get.

Anyway. Back to Pepe. I always wanted a large family, and I like babies. I never had the circumstances I wanted to start a family, so never did. I was always certain of my decision, but I missed the kids and babies I didn’t have. Sort of an itchy, uncomfortable feeling that had me looking for something I knew I didn’t want.

Then I got dogs. They aren’t kids or babies, but they occupy the itchy kids-and-baby spot so I can settle down and concentrate on my life instead of my itch. Kind of like a saline implant isn’t a breast, but it holds the clothes in place and allows one to head out and do the groceries without worrying about the alignment of one’s spine.

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!

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. 

Staying in a hotel has its advantages. I stripped the bed and dumped everything in the hallway; washed up in the bathroom and put the soiled towels out in the hallway; called Housekeeping to pick up the soiled linens; and moved into the other bed. Cool. It happened again in the middle of the night, but then I didn’t have a clean bed to move in to. I wrapped myself in a complimentary bathrobe and spread a towel on the bare mattress. That’s when I started feeling sorry for my future self, imagining myself living alone and poor in an HLM with a laundromat in the basement, wondering how long it would take me before I stopped changing the sheets when I was sick. 

Then I realised I hadn’t been paying attention to all the television ads I’d been watching. Of course. When I am that sick, in that situation, I will just wear diapers. 

The next morning I didn’t try to eat right away, but took a taxi to work and set my things up in my usual conference room. Then I walked to a drugstore and bought myself a package of Depends and changed into them before getting breakfast at the company cafeteria. They are surprisingly comfortable, which is good to know. I kept a couple of changes in my purse for the flight back to Montreal that afternoon, but I didn’t need them. The bug seemed to have run its course. And all day I was thinking of the Active Woman in the Depends ads, who can leave her home to lead a Busy Life. And I thought how liberating the availability of a disposable consumer product can be.

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.

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.

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.)

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?