Penny Wiseacre

Scooping up the dust in the space of the selah

While it is alive
Until Death touches it
While it and I lap one Air
Dwell in one Blood
Under one Sacrament
Show me Division can split or pare—

Love is like Life—merely longer
Love is like Death, during the Grave
Love is the Fellow of the Resurrection
Scooping up the Dust and chanting "Live"!

-- Emily Dickenson

Basic bitches just can't win

I dragged myself into the pool on Friday morning, and while I was in there, I was thinking about two pieces I ran across this week: "The Basic Bitch: Who Is She?" and "How basic are you?"

I was mostly thinking that the worst crime the so-called Basic Bitch commits is being unabashedly girly. She likes Pinterest, and pumpkin spice lattes, and the Barre Method, and scented candles. The Basic Bitch has mainstream pop culture taste: romantic movies, The Bachelor, Taylor Swift, Coachella. She wears the Tiffany return-to-sender bracelet and calls herself a "daddy's girl" and reacts to trends; she doesn't create them.

There is nothing wrong with any of this.

I am sick unto death of how quick we are to immediately denigrate girly things as somehow inferior. When that Goldiblox commercial ran, the thing I found the most off-putting about it was not the intellectual property foofarah, but the implication that pink, girly toys are somehow inferior.

True, there's no need to shove girls into a pink, princess-shaped pigeonhole, and I'm no fan of how Lego's gotten all gendered in recent years. But I don't think the answer is to reject commercial, girly culture wholesale. Why not? Because plenty of awesome children like wearing sparkly dresses to soccer practice, or they decide to be Queen Elsa In Space, and the last thing those girls -- or boys --  need to is internalize the message that their love of sparkly, feminine aesthetics marks them as culturally inferior.

This is, of course, the flip side to the cool girl phenomenon. The cool girl, as elegantly described by Gillian Flynn and elaborated upon by Anne Helen Peterson, is cool precisely because she appears to embrace the entertainment tastes and preferences of the men around her ... without appropriating any of the social privilege the men enjoy. The cool girl is like a flattering mirror that makes men feel better about how they choose to spend their time.

By contrast, the basic bitch lives in a pink, floral-scented bubble where the language, values and power are all defined and reinforced by women. There are no cool-girl analogues for men who want to embrace the basic bitch world.

I don't get the appeal of the things basic bitches are alleged to like. But the thing is, I think it's even more despicable how easy it is to look at any flavor of feminimity and  turn it into a pejorative.

Lurid fantasies about what a sick day might look like

I knew there might be trouble last week. As I boarded the plane, I noticed that the row in front of mine was occupied by a child wrapped in blankets, flushed yet shivering, and coughing up a storm. Next to her was a man who looked as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Although I felt bad for the child, I felt worse for everyone else on the plane, since we were all trapped with Patient Zero and sucking in recirculated, virus-laden air for six hours.

And now I am on day five of the cough that won't go away. I've run through my supply of codeine-laden syrup from the last time I had a cough worthy of a rock opera about the refusal to shoulder the eminently unsurprising consequences of dumb decisions. I'm at the point where my head hurts every time I cough, and I had better be developing a six pack from the constant abdominal engagement, and I sound like Kathleen Turner.

Here is what is not helping this persistent, tiring malady: This is the week where our daughter has decided that sleep is for suckers.

I am so tired and so run-down at this point, I have begun imagining what a sick day might be like. An entire day where all I have to do is nap. No day job, no housework, no preschool wrangling, just ... a clean bed (that I didn't have to make after doing a few loads of linens), a hot cup of tea (that doesn't get cold because something comes up that has to be addressed RIGHT THEN), a lengthy snooze (that I can sink into without fretting about missing preschool pick-up or ferry pick-up), a clean and quiet house, a to-do list that is either empty or complete.

But the fantasies aren't going to help me finish the work I have due tonight. They're not going to get my tomatoes into the raised bed tomorow morning before work, or the load of clean clothes folded. So I'm going to beg your pardon, but I need to wrap this up and cough my way through tonight's to-do list. Make a bed for me, would you?

In which Ralph Fiennes and I tell you how to read a book

Before cracking the spine of Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's classic How to Read a Book, I had considered myself a good reader because I was naturally speedy, yet capable of retaining and synthetizing nearly all of what I had read. After reading Adler & Van Doren, I sat around thinking, "Entire new vistas of ignorance have stretched out before me! How smart I am to know that!"

If you have not yet read How to Read, pro tip: See the movie Quiz Show before you read, so the experience of reading the book can be gilded by the golden luster of Ralph Fiennes at the apex of his attractiveness. That will make passages like "Both inspectional and analytical reading can be considered as anticipations or preparations for syntopical reading" seem a lot more beguiling.(At left: "I've got your anticipation for syntopical reading right here." [swoon])For those of you who don't really see a need to heed the advice "Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally, be maintaine throughout" -- and why should you? -- let me break down why this book is worth wrestling with: Because it teaches you how to cheat like a pro.

Ut prosim -- that we may serve

Tomorrow marks the seventh anniversary of what has come to be known as the Virginia Tech Massacre. It is still surreal to me to have my alma mater linked so casually to the word "massacre."

At left is a picture of Burruss Hall. It anchors one side of the oblong Drill Field at the heart of campus. When I was there, the offices that made the university run were there too -- bursars, financial aid, admissions.

There's also a huge auditorium, so the hall used to host rock concerts and other events. I saw Stephen Jay Gould speak on the horrors of state-sanctioned eugenics. I covered a debate between Paul Tsongas and John Sununu. I saw Denis Leary, Kurt Vonnegut, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale ... if you want to listen to lots of smart, ambitious, creative and driven people speak, become a student reporter and get assigned to cover these events. I did it, and that's how I accidentally ended up with a liberal arts education and a science degree.

How you gonna get 'em back in the condo once they've been to the McMansion?

Back in 2001, Phil and I sat in the quiet courtyard of a boutique hotel on the edge of Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood. We had just spent a few days tooling around Seattle without a car -- which meant that we pretty much went where we could walk or bus -- and we had a great time.

"Let's never choose the life where we have to drive everywhere," Phil suggested, and something felt so right about that idea, we've never wavered from it. This is why we have spent our married lives living in small, pricey places. But we always think, At least we're not spending it all driving around.

A tale of two yard sales

THE FIRST SALE: A sun-baked corner lot, with four or six hulking old pieces of furniture out there plus the usual assortment of yard sale-y crap: old fitness props, the saddest holiday decorations, cookbooks promoting diets that have since been found to be profoundly lethal.

I had driven by the sale on my way home from church, and somewhere between executing a right turn and keeping up with my child's chatter about how she felt she ought to celebrate her half-birthday, I noticed a marble-topped dresser.

I go out walking after midnight

It was Phil's night to put the daughter to bed, and to expedite the process, I left the house and took a 55-minute long walk.

Beans, beans, the magical fruit/ let us burn all the bean witches at the stake

So have I told you how I've rounded the corner on this food-tracking madness and begun tracking what I eat using three separate apps? Let's take a brief tour into insanity here:

Ask not for whom the chicken clucks; she clucks for thee

If you are going to read books about how awesome urban farming is (Spring Warren's The Quarter Acre Farm) or how wonderful it is to live off what you raise (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral), then I think you should skip the next sixteen "How I, an urbane lady who loves Sephora, came to grow my own food/teach inner-city children what kohlrabi was/find intense life lessons in agriculture while keeping all my upper-middle-class cultural capital and privilege so I could sell a memoir" recommendations Amazon will give you, and skip straight to Josh Kilmer-Purcell's The Bucolic Plague.

Here is the book in a nutshell: Josh and his husband Brent buy a farm in upstate New York. Then they spend their lives doing one of three things:

1. Working grinding, high-paying jobs in Manhattan so as to afford the farm and its attendant mansion.

2. Taking trains between Manhattan and Albany.

3. Working 18-hour days at the farm. On their weekends. Before doing #2 in order to do #1.

It all sounds hellish and pretty much is, until in the final chapters of the book, personal growth is had, the reader is reminded how handy it is to have friends in high places in the New York media world, and the boys keep the farm.

(You may or may not also recall that later, the guys finally get to release Kilmer-Purcell from his 1-2-3 grind by dint of going on the Amazing Race and using the stealth strategy, "We only need to come in first once." The prize money paid off the mortgage on 1802 Beekman and now they're empire-building. If I give in to the temptation to buy some of their goat-milk caramel, I'll do a full taste test.)