My boss at my previous job went on a three month maternity leave, putting me in charge of the office for the duration and leaving me with a full packet of information about anything that could potentially come up in her absence. Included in that packet was her home phone number, "just in case". I may have called her once, perhaps not at all.
My ( Read more... )

My mother moved in with my younger sister and her husband about 10 months ago, when her divorce from my father and the sale of their house were finalized.
My sister gave birth to my niece five months ago.
And now she has a new profile picture on Facebook: Her glasses look exactly like my mother's, as does her hairstyle. The picture was taken in LA ( ( Read more... )

As methods of self-care, there are worse ones than listening to lots of Replacements songs. The short-term psychological effects are comparable to drinking a lot of gin-based cocktails. No one has yet found any correlation, however, between exposure to Paul Westerberg's voice and liver disease.

Spent a night in the ER over the weekend due to a mysterious instance of severe abdominal pain. ([spouse] has Crohn's disease, so I have a good behavioral template for the concept "severe abdominal pain," Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations be damned.)
The pain went away in full not long after my discharge, so I've been working full days all ( Read more... )

I wish all those relatives of mine who've changed their Facebook userpics had been so enlightened 20 years ago when they were calling me "faggy."
(And this, folks, is why my LJ is still active. And pseudonymous.)

As of today, my parents are officially divorced. So I explained to [daughter] why she would not be seeing her pappou again. In the course of the ensuing conversation, [spouse] reminded me that my mother is giving away her cat.
Even though I'm fiercely allergic to cats, I think I'll miss that cat more than I'll miss my father.

"Fantasy. Lunacy."
"All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."

The above is from Cloud Atlas, published in 2004. In 2011, weeks before the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, I said almost exactly the same thing in a meeting in New York about ongoing events in the Arab world, thinking I was being terribly witty. It ( Read more... )

This meme (remember those?) seems to be an expansion, perhaps inadvertent, on the late, great wouldprefernot2's classic "What Are You Reading?" posts. I picked it up from pantryslut:
"To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?"

My responses:
Currently ( Read more... )

Judging from what I'm seeing on Facebook and Twitter (again, I admit, a limited sample):

• Conservatives don't trust black or brown people, or the mentally ill (since these fall under the rubric of supposedly easily identifiable "bad guys"), or teachers presumably, since they don't seem to be good enough "guys"--heck, most of them aren't even guys.
• ( Read more... )

I have to draft a report to a foundation about a termed, named professorship that they endowed at the Wasps' Nest. The newest recipient of this honor, for a four-year term, is a kind of Donna Haraway manqué. Unfortunately, for the first year of the appointment she was away on family leave, and so to describe her scholarship I have little more to go ( Read more... )