Black and Sun

going nuclear

Today I did my political duty and spammed my friends with a plea to call their senators. I should add, I virtually never do this. I'm about as jaded and apathetic as they come. But last week I finally got off my apathetic ass and Den and I ventured out to a MoveOn.org house party. Admittedly my motivation was social more than political - I would never sign up to hand out flyers or knock on strangers' doors, but I liked the sound of a house party. Plus, as I explained when I introduced myself and stated my purpose, I pitch consumerism for a living...I have to do something to redeem myself!

So anyway, the issue that I just spammed my friends about is this: our persistent ideologue pain-in-the-fucking-ass excuse for a president has just resubmitted 20 judicial nominees that the senate blocked last term. These kids have resumes 10 feet long filled with pandering to powerful special interests and good-deed-doing for extreme right-wing ideologues at the expense of ordinary Americans. The Dems are uniting to try to block them again, but this time they're in the minority, albeit only just.

So how much do you know about how our government works? Myself, I don't know much because my high school Civics and Free Enterprise class happened to be 6th hour and I always fell asleep with my head on my desk (causing ol' Doc Laneau to rap a yard stick across my desk nearly every day, which had the effect of causing everyone in the class to jump except me... but that's another story). Anyway, what I learned from my MoveOn party, that I didn't learn from my high school Civics class, is that our system is designed such that, in order to avoid situations where a very slim majority (as we now have) might try to ram through extreme legislation or judges, the minority is given the right to filibuster to block nominations (and laws) that it feels are too extreme, thereby forcing compromise. Also known as the system of Checks And Balances (which I do vaguely remember from that boring Civics textbook of yore). Now, for what it's worth, the filibuster tactic has been used almost exclusively by the conservative right over the past 100 years or so, and as a result we do not have such social niceties as universal health care and we do continue to have such debacles as an electorate system, which is to say, the filibuster has historically been a huge pain in the ass for the Democrats. But what comes around sometimes tends to go around, and now the conservative majority is finding itself on the other side of the filibustering game.

Oh, but no, the Reds, they don't like this game so much now. Kind of a headache. Gums up the system. And in THESE TIMES OF TERRORISM yaddayaddayaddda. Nope, can't have that. So Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is threatening to use a legal loophole to abolish the right to filibuster a Presidential judicial nomination. This tactic is sufficiently drastic as to be affectionately known as the "nuclear option." If Frist uses the nuclear option, this would mean that Dumbass, I mean Bush, would be able to appoint whomever he damnwell chooses to lifetime judicial positions with as little as a 1 vote majority (which, by trick of our asinine electoral process, could be as little as 17% of the popular vote).

There are likely to be 2-4 vacancies on the Supreme Court in the next four years. The freaks of the extreme right are demanding that Frist pull the nuclear trigger now to clear a path through the Senate for a series of nominees in the mold of our favorite drinking buddies Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas (who happen to also be the most aggressive right-wing ideologues on the Court). This would have the potential to overturn more than 100 Supreme Court precedents affecting civil rights, civil liberties, environmental protections, privacy and reproductive rights, separation of church and state, workers' rights, etcetcetc. A Scalia-Thomas majority could also go so far as to reinterpret the Commerce Clause, the Spending Clause and the 14th Amendment, to dismantle the bipartisan social justice achievements of the past seven decades and to eliminate the entire constitutional basis for future progressive initiatives.

Wanna know who's up for vote? Well, there's a William Myers III, who has in fact never been a judge, but does have top notch cred from his career as a lobbyist for the cattle and mining industry, and who has written that all habitat conservation laws are unconstitutional because they interfere with potential profit. Then there's Terrence Boyle, who was once a legal aide to that kind and gentle soul Jesse Helms. Unlike Myers, Boyle has been a judge, however his rulings have been overturned a whopping 120 times by the conservative 4th District Court of Appeals. Some might think this is due to gross errors in judgment or simple incompetence, but we think he's just misunderstood. So we'll give him a pity vote for being such a loser. And then we've got the infamous William Pryor Jr., who during his term as Attorney General of Alabama took money from Phillip Morris and, naturally, since corporate money isn't given out for free, fought against the anti-tobacco lawsuit. Pryor calls Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history" and has consistently argued against the federal protections for the civil rights of minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled.

So. If you didn't get spammed by me today, do a good deed and give your Senator's intern a call and tell him or her to log your opposition against use of the nuclear option and encourage your senator to support judges that aren't assholes or fucking morons.

going home again

Last weekend was Den’s birthday. We drove up to Vermont to visit his friend Merry in Middlebury, but spent most of the weekend in Burlington. I can’t believe it’s been 7 years since I’ve been back to Burlington! Den humored me as I scampered up and down Church Street in the cold, making detours on Cherry, Bank, College and Main Street, revisiting all my favorite haunts from my college days. Had to get sweet potato fries and an apple crumble with Ben & Jerry’s and cheddar cheese at the Vermont Pub and Brewery. Gone was my favorite Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, but the Vermont Smoked Porter wasn’t a bad substitute. Paid a visit to Speeder & Earl’s for a Clockwork Orange (espresso and hot chocolate with orange peel and almond Torani syrup). Visited Old Gold – the best vintage shop EVER, where I got my Schott leather jacket that my parents spent years trying to get rid of (unsuccessfully). Had Dim Sum at my beloved Five Spice Café, where Den watched with glee as the waitstaff sang Happy Birthday to the wrong table (we set them straight in time to rescue our cake). Then we returned to Five Spice again for dinner because I couldn’t leave Burlington without having their Pad Thai and Jerry’s special red snapper, which is now tilapia because snapper is being over-fished, but which is still every bit as good as I remember.

Stopped in at Ecco because it had been Beth’s favorite dress shop back before we moved to London. She had fallen in love with a white silk dress that she nearly bought with the justification that she could get married in it someday. Now, some 5 boyfriends later, she is getting married and I couldn’t resist peeking in to see whether, against all odds, the dress might still be there. Of course it wasn’t. I also have an Ecco dress with a story, a slinky black evening gown that Jay had bought for me as part of a surprise graduation present to wear to Phantom of the Opera in New York, not quite realizing in his provincial Vermont way that nobody really wears evening gowns to see Broadway shows. Wandered into Pier 1 – one of the very, very few remaining privately owned franchise stores (most are corporate owned now) – where I worked my last few months in Burlington, in addition to waiting tables, trying to save enough money to make my way to London in some semblance of style (all that money was gone within 2 weeks of London). Frank, the owner, greeted us but, not surprisingly, didn’t remember me.

Acquainted Den with Pure Pop, to see whether Burlington would pass muster in his eyes, measured by the quality of its indy record store. It did. Whiled away an hour in Bennington Potters, where Merry became determined to buy a banged up antique couch that wasn’t for sale.

Den bought Merry a book from The Crow, where I learned the fate of Chassman & Bem – a locally owned bookstore that had been a fixture on Church Street – like so many other small quaint and quirky bookstores, they were driven out by the behemoth, packed up and left as soon as they heard Border’s was coming to town. Goddam Borders! I swear I’ll never buy a book at Borders again.

The Origanum health food store is gone from Main Street, replaced by a new Onion River Co-op. But the new co-op is fabulous so we don't have any hard feelings there (plus Den found a bottle of blueberry wine, which is huge in satisfying Den's unquenchable craving for blueberries). Vermont Pasta Company, the first restaurant I ate at in Burlington when my parents drove me up for college, is also gone, replaced by something called SmokeJack’s. And Sweet Tomatoes has strangely become Three Tomatoes.

In addition to the despised Borders, an Old Navy moved in (to where Woolworth’s used to be) along with the usual mall suspects of JCrew, Pottery Barn, etc. And of course there’s a Starbucks now. But Muddy Waters is still thriving on Main Street – all that a perfect coffeehouse should be, with it’s rustic décor, comfy chairs and couches, shelves of books for the borrowing, and even a few beers on tap – and of course we spent more than a couple hours there contentedly lounging with our newspapers and coffee. And Sweetwaters is still there, and Nectar’s – of course – and The Daily Planet, and Ken's Pizza, and the Church Street Tavern and Leunigs (where I promised Den blueberry pancakes, but they weren’t serving breakfast when we went in, so we had pancakes and omelets and hot chocolate at the iconic Henry’s Diner instead).

We didn’t have time for dinner at Trattoria Delia, which had been my favorite restaurant whenever my parents came to visit, since as a student I couldn’t otherwise afford it. I’ll have to return with my parents sometime, so my mom can have her favorite Pond-Fed Swordfish. There’s a story behind that. My mother, who with every year becomes more of a pain-in-the-ass to take to restaurants, couldn’t find a single thing she wanted to eat on this incredible Italian menu, what with her worries about dioxin and fat and pesticides and hormones and mercury. The mercury was at the top of her most vocal concerns that particular evening, because she really wanted the fish, but… and so, without even so much as cracking a smile, the waitress reassured her that there was no need to worry about mercury in the fish because this particular variety was pond-fed swordfish. At which my mother instantly brightened and said, "wonderful! I’ll have the swordfish," happily oblivious as my father and I snickered and cajoled. Seldom do we go to a restaurant as a family that the pond-fed swordfish incident isn't brought up. 

The whole time I’ve been in Boston I’ve ached to get back to Burlington, but somehow the opportunity just never presented itself. And I fretted over how they always say “you can never go home again” – I don’t know anyone in Burlington anymore (even Jay has moved away, and I long ago lost contact with him anyway), nor am I even the same person I was when I last lived there. And I guess it’s true that you can’t go home again, in that I could never return to that place in time, that old Heather still in school, still naïve of all the experiences and travels and heartaches that I've come to embody these last 7, 10, 12 years. But there’s something so exquisitely comforting about returning to a place that once was home, and that has been long cherished as a memory, to find that you can suddenly reach out and touch it. In all the places I’ve lived, only two cities have ever really felt like home – in that way that you can leave a place and return and feel welcomed back: Burlington and Edinburgh. I haven’t been back to Edinburgh either, and it haunts me with memories so poignant it seems I could just step back into them. I’ll never be able to live in Edinburgh again, and I think that’s what prevents me from visiting – the fear that I might love it too much, because I desperately didn’t want to leave that city when my year came to an end. But I could live in Burlington again. Maybe not now – for career reasons – but someday. This is a city that speaks to my soul in a way that Boston, even Cambridge, just never has.

christmas eve morning

It's been a while since I've written anything... I've finally found a job that keeps me busy enough to turn off [most of] the noise in my head. And so, less time to reflect. And less time to whine. But here I am, 7am on Christmas Eve morning, curled up in my chair, laptop on lap, because I can't sleep-in for some reason, reflecting on reflecting, and my week, and the last couple months, and what's been going on in my world that I can write about.

I'm a lot happier these days. The new job is fun and I really like the pace of agency life. I like that projects that would've taken two weeks and half a dozen iterations of edits in corporate, I can now get done in an hour. I feel so much more productive at the end of each day. And the things I complain about now are really pretty trivial. I like that every day is something different. In November we attended a party for the Red Sox that the client co-sponsored -- which was kind of ironic, seeing as I'm the one person in the state of Massachusetts least interested in meeting a Red Sock -- but there was a certain amount of novelty value. Got to hang with the drummer from Aerosmith. And Dennis got to interview "Miss Massachusetts" for an NPR story. In January I'll be going to CES in Vegas -- a city I could've happily lived my  life without ever visiting -- but it sounds like it'll be a lot of fun. I can't say that what I do for a living is especially meaningful, and I'm certainly not saving lives or making the world a better place, but I like that I at least don't have to spend my days in meetings anymore.

I remind myself on a daily basis just how bad it was at my old company so I don't become too complacent with my new reality. It was bad. So so bad. Worse than I'll probably ever know, my friend Beth tells me. And the worst of it was that after a while I began to think it was me. And then I began to think it was universal, that all companies are like Dilbert cartoons. And when I could muster up that sputtering spark of hope, I would dream of what it would feel like to be out of there, and to look back on those days and think smugly about just how fucked up that company was. Which I get to do now. Thank god.

My taekwondo is suffereing a bit for it though. I work late a lot and don't get to classes as frequently as I used to. I try to make it to at least three classes a week, but even that doesn't always happen anymore. I'm a red belt now, which means I should actually be training harder if I ever want to test for black belt. This is something that's been bothering me a lot, because black belt was a goal I set for myself when I moved to Boston four years ago. And I have to achieve it. But I'm not really in any hurry and I don't especially mind if it takes another two years. It used to be, back when I first moved to Boston and was looking for work and didn't know what the hell I was doing with  my life, that taekwondo was the haven that kept me sane. Used to be I didn't know what to do with myself if I didn't go to taekwondo every night. So I guess it's a good thing in its way that I'm down to just three nights a week.

It's now 7:34 Christmas Eve morning. The house is very quiet. Dennis is still in bed. My pie crust is sitting in a ball on the kitchen counter waiting to be rolled out and baked. In a little while I'll go out and retrieve my parents from their B&B. Then Dennis promised to take my dad up to the Car Talk studio in Harvard Square, and maybe to Ray's garage in hopes of meeting one of "the guys." Then we'll pick up a bottle of Jamieson's for Peter and wrap the last of our presents and head up to Portland for Christmas.