A Birthday at the Supper Club

We didn’t celebrate Easter today. We’ll save that for another time, perhaps in a couple of weeks. Holidays happen when you have time for them, and today we had something else to celebrate.

Tomorrow is Grandma’s 80th birthday, after all.

I was not involved in the planning for this, which is for the best since a) planning events is not really my strong suit and if you want an event to go well you should probably consider giving me a meaningless project to distract me and keep me out of your way, such as designing a new ballroom or something like that, and b) there were a lot of moving pieces to keep track of, given the number of family members we wanted to come to this and the even larger number of constraints on their lives that would prevent that. It was a lot of juggling, in other words, but in the end we had a good-sized group, if a smaller one than originally planned, and we made a lovely time of it.

Kim and I set out from Our Little Town, picked up Lauren – only a day removed from 25 hours of travel across eight time zones and fully recovered from whatever jet lag she might have had, which is how you know she is Not Middle Aged – and headed on up to what has become our go-to place for these kinds of celebrations. It’s a Genuine Wisconsin Supper Club – the kind that has prime rib on the menu and artificial bacon bits in a bucket at the salad bar so you know it’s going to be good. We got there a little bit early to set up some decorations and get things ready. I’m not really sure what the inflatable throwing stars were supposed to symbolize but they were festive and set a nice tone.

Eventually the guest of honor appeared and, slightly later due to some confusion about the start time for this event (see above, re: moving pieces) everyone had gathered around the table and we shared a good meal and a lot of conversation and you can’t ask for a better evening than that, I think.

We brought our own cakes, which the Supper Club was happy to let us do – they even provided forks and a cake knife for us, which was nice of them. I ended up giving slices to the waitresses because they were working on Easter and we had, frankly, a terrifying amount of cake, and they seemed happy to be included. It was good cake.

It is a grand thing to celebrate with people you love.

Happy birthday, Grandma!

News and Updates

1. In the past seven days it has been 27F (-3C) and 84F (29C) here. We’ve had sunny days and severe thunderstorms. We had three separate tornado warnings in a two-hour span one night (none of which came close to our house, but the sky was notably yellow). It’s been a time.

2. The rusting silver pickup that has been parked across the street from our driveway for most the past two months (with the brief exception of the blizzard a couple of weeks ago, when everything had to be moved off the street) has finally gone away. On the one hand, it’s a legal parking spot on a public street so there really wasn’t anything we could do about it. On the other hand, it’s nice to be able to back out of the driveway without trying to thread that particular needle anymore.

3. I spent most of today driving, mainly to pick up Lauren at O’Hare from her trip to visit Shai in South Africa and deposit her back in her apartment up by Main Campus University. In this era of uncertainty it was nice that all of her flights went well – the main holdup in Chicago was actually baggage claim rather than security so that was good. She had a lovely time in South Africa and got to see some of the country with Shai while she was visiting. They bopped around Cape Town, where Shai’s family lives. They saw Bafana Bafana in action. They went out to South Africa’s wine country for a few days. They went to one of the townships, which is not something most visitors do – on the plus side Lauren got to help one of the market vendors butcher a chicken, something she has now done on three different continents, but on the down side our bank looked at some of the purchases she made in that market and thought, “that can’t be right” and put a hold on her card until she could explain things, which was complicated by the fact that they don’t use WhatsApp but eventually it got resolved. So it was a good trip and now she is back in Wisconsin to tell us stories.

4. Also, a quick shoutout to the Ethiopian Airlines ground crew in Addis Ababa, who not only got Lauren from her arriving flight from Chicago to her connecting flight to Cape Town in the 15 minutes they had between the first one landing to the second one taking off (a process that involved a bus across the tarmac directly from one plane to the other and a quick climb up the stairs into the back of the plane while they were loading the food) but also managed to get her luggage on board as well.

5. I spent a good chunk of the past week trying to clear my advisees who are graduating this semester, which is a much more complicated process than it used to be because back in the day I would just look at their transcript, compare it with the degree requirements, and write a note on a spreadsheet to say that everything checked out, but these days there is a Computer Program that in theory is supposed to automate much of this task but which in practice required me to spend several days trying to figure out how to explain to the Computer Program that the neat little boxes it divides everything into do not correspond in any meaningful way to the actual lived experiences of flesh-and-blood students. I am not sure this constitutes progress.

6. This is a general problem with This Modern Age, in my experience. We spend so much time, energy, and money trying to automate human judgment which could make those calls quicker, easier, and more cheaply. I do not think This Modern Age was built with me in mind.

7. I visited the Tax Prep Person at the end of last month and let them get on with all of that, a discovery that I made the year after my mom died and let me tell you it was just lovely to have someone else handle that. And they found me a refund I wasn’t expecting so it worked out. This year I’m still waiting for a couple of documents and I’m not likely to get anything back but it should get done. I have to admit, I don’t think the regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves has done anything in the last fifteen months to merit me paying them any taxes, but so it goes.

8. I read recently that the reason Americans hate paying taxes while Europeans don’t seem to mind it nearly as much is that Europeans generally get services in return for their taxes while Americans mostly get bombs and oligarchs. I can’t say I disagree.

9. Here we are only seven games from the end of the season and the Philadelphia Flyers are tied for the last playoff spot, which is worlds better than I thought they’d be. They only have about a 25% chance of making it in, according to the sports knobs, but they’re still in the hunt and one takes one’s victories where you find them.

10. Wisconsin has a set of elections this week, and I’ve been working on which candidates I wish to vote for (and, in this day and age, which ones I wish to vote against). Go out and vote, people! If your vote didn’t matter there wouldn’t be so many Republican legislators trying to stop you from casting it.

No Kings

All this past week the same vapid essay has been showing up repeatedly in my social media feeds, put there by an assortment of people most of whom likely had only the best of intentions.

“I’m not going to go to the No Kings protest,” it said. “And neither should you.”

Huh. Didn’t realize I needed permission from some internet stranger to go about my day but there you have it. Consider me notified.

If you haven’t read the piece, I’ll spare you the trouble. The author claims, no doubt sincerely, to have attended several of the No Kings protests only to discover that in the wake of this experience the world had not magically been altered. There were no rainbows and unicorns, the bad guys still existed and held power, and the thought – the very idea – of doing this again without the immediate resolution of those issues seemed dystopian, futile, and just intolerable. They have given up on these protests and would very much like you to do so as well. Instead they have an agenda that they insist you follow that will indeed produce the rainbows and unicorns that the No Kings protest so far have not! So spare yourself the wasted energy, dear reader, and obey your worldly correspondent.

Yeah, no.

Such maunderings are what you get from people who don’t understand the long game and who don’t really understand the point of the protests at all, and the defeatism embodied in that essay is exactly what is necessary for those in power to continue unimpeded.

Tyrants depend on mass submission. There are more of us than there are of them, and the mere fact that this is demonstrated – that masses of people are willing to get out and let people know that they oppose this tyranny – is an important thing in itself. Not everyone is in a position to protest, and the No King rallies serve the useful function of reminding those people that they are not alone. That others agree with them. That this is in fact a popular movement and they should not despair. Even if that is all this accomplishes right now, that in itself is a worthwhile achievement because opposition dies in isolation. We are here. We will not go away. And when the current protest ends and nothing seems to have changed, there will be another one.

Because nothing is going to change overnight. There will be no big reveal after which the rainbows and unicorns will be brought out of the wings to take center stage. This is a war of attrition, of incremental victories and hopeless stands that can only be validated in retrospect. It is worth shouting into the wind just to be heard, because that sets the stage for the next round and the one after that and the one after that and even a brick wall will wear away to nothing in time.

Opposition movements focused on short-term victories tend not to survive.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that in Shakespeare’s King Lear there is a very minor character – unnamed, with less than a dozen lines – who sees the blinding of Gloucester and draws his sword against those who perpetrated this deed because even if he does not understand the larger machinations of the plot he sees what is in front of him and will not stand for it. He does not succeed in stopping it or even punishing the guilty and he is murdered almost immediately, but Lewis said of him that “if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.” This is what Ken Taylor describes as defiant resignation – acting despite the understanding that it won’t change anything, simply to demonstrate your unhappiness with the world as it stands and your belief that it should change. That in itself is a worthwhile thing, perhaps not immediately but later.

And sometimes you have to do these things just because they need to be done, whether anything larger comes out of them at all, because it’s what you have to do for yourself.

A.J. Muste protested against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, holding a candle in front of the White House, often alone. Do you think you’re going to change the policies of the US by doing this, he was asked. “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country,” he said. “I do this so the country won’t change me.”

You need to be able to say to yourself and to those who come later that you were not silent in the face of evil. That you spoke up. That you did not let it pass. That you joined with others or stood alone but either way you were not silenced.

Kim and I went to the No Kings protest today here in Our Little Town. I have no idea how many other people where there – I am notoriously terrible at estimating crowd sizes. Several hundred at least. Kim thinks it might have been as many as a thousand. A good-sized crowd on a cold and blustery day, at any rate.

We carried our signs and raised our voices, and there were speakers and singers and most of the cars driving by honked in approval and we went away knowing that we had not been silent and that there were a lot of people here in Our Little Town who agree with us – unlike previous protests, there were no counter-protesters that I saw, which is perhaps a sign that even the hardcore MAGA folks are starting to question things.

As of this writing there are still no rainbows and unicorns, and my country is still ruled by a child rapist desperate to cover up his sex crimes with war crimes, surrounded by a corrupt and spineless mob of cosplaying white supremacist toadies inflicting their shortcomings on an unwilling world.

So we will return for the next protest, and the next, until either they come to an end or we do.

And if that bothers the essayist, well, I can live with that.

A Decade On

Ten years is a long time in the span of a human life.

It isn’t on a historical scale, but then people don’t live on historical scales. They live lives tightly bound by time, three score and ten if they’re lucky, more if they’re even luckier. The great achievement of the twentieth century wasn’t expanding the human lifetime – it was creating a world where more people hit that mark than ever before. This was always a fragile achievement, easily undone by the usual forces that drag our species down into darkness, but it was an achievement nonetheless.

But even so, it always comes to an end.

It’s been a decade now since my dad died. It feels like yesterday. It feels like a hundred years ago.

The world is a different place than it was. His grandchildren are grown now, all but one a college graduate and that last one rapidly approaching that mark. My mom has since passed away. There’s been a pandemic, an insurrection, and enough political stupidity to keep us in conversation for the next decade even if nothing else happened at all.  The Eagles won the Super Bowl twice, something that he’d have enjoyed seeing. I sometimes wonder what he would have made of this world now.

I suspect he would have had some very definite opinions about it.

I do not claim to know what happens to us after we die, but if there is more to this than what we see I hope he is doing well and I hope he knows he is not forgotten.

News and Updates

1. It’s Spring Break Month here in Baja Canada, which is what happens when you have four people in an academic family who have absolutely zero overlap in their Spring Break weeks so there is about that much chance of us doing anything together. I don’t get much of a spring break, to be honest, since the two campuses I work for do that at different times so I get two half-breaks which isn’t all that helpful. Kim’s on her break right now, except that she’s in a far-off city at a conference, from which she will have to do work for Home Campus anyway because that’s just how that goes and that’s not much of a break either. Oliver’s break was a couple of weeks ago but he had so much to do, being a first-year graduate student, that the only thing that was different for him was that he didn’t actually have to go to classes. Lauren is visiting Shai right now and that genuinely is a break so I’m glad that one of us got to have one. There will be stories later, no doubt.

2. Kim and I were hoping to continue our streak of Traveling Abroad this year but we looked at the current state of both international politics and prices (both of which are now … what’s the jargon term that economists use in these situations? … oh, right … “thoroughly fucked”) and decided that perhaps staying closer to home this year would be a good idea. So we’ve got a smaller thing planned and perhaps some others will be added at some point. As problems go this is a fairly high-class one to have, but still. It is one more black mark to be added to the account of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves.

3. Watching the slow-motion suicide of a Great Power from the inside has been a grotesque way to spend time, really. The illegal and blisteringly incompetent war of aggression against Iran, the unfathomably cruel strangulation of Cuba that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is waging that nobody in this country seems to be aware of, the slow-drip of Epstein Files revelations confirming ever more conclusively that the Only President This Country Has is a child rapist surrounded by people who don’t consider that a deal-breaker and are happily willing to violate the law to protect him and cover up his crimes, the open and ongoing financial corruption that makes the Gilded Age look pristine, the continuing rampage of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s unaccountable army of thugs through American streets, the tanking of both the American and the global economies, the destruction of NATO – seriously, it never ends with this crew of cannibals. I very much look forward to clear, unambiguous, and brutally blunt justice being served, and while I have already had to wait far longer than I had hoped for it I will not be deterred from believing that this nation will at some point see that justice served cold and hard. 

4. On Monday we had a blizzard. Today it was 75F (24C). Living in Wisconsin can be strange.

5. One of the ways I have been trying to distract myself from current events has been to get back into genealogy, a deep rabbit hole into which news and events rarely penetrate. After not being able to find my paternal grandmother and her family in the indexed versions of the recently released 1950 Census, I decided to put my research skills to some use and go to the actual documents to see for myself. And it seems that she managed to duck the entire census. I found the sheet where their house should be, and it is not there. On the one hand, this is entirely in character for my grandmother and I have to admire the commitment to the bit. That whole family was like that. I located her parents – my great-grandparents – who were still living at the ancestral family home in West Philly at the time, and both of them reported their ages as being at least a decade younger than they actually were (if the ages they gave were accurate neither one of them would have hit their teens when my grandmother was born and I know for a fact that was not the case). So I’m not surprised that she’s not there. On the other hand, it is disappointing as I had hoped that document could help clear up the ongoing mystery of my grandmother’s marital status in 1950. We press on.

6. I spent a good portion of the last couple of months doing Committee Work down at Home Campus, and on Thursday night this particular committee’s task ended successfully so now I can put down my keyboard and retire from those duties with the sense of a job well done. Three cheers to my fellow committee members and all those who made it happen. One takes one’s victories where they arise.

7. Sometime in November Kim and I got replacement credit cards. I don’t know why this happened, since we’d just gotten replacement cards in June because my previous card was probably sitting in a landfill in Florence somewhere. The first replacement cards were working fine so it was a bit of a mystery, particularly as the relevant numbers remained unchanged. I actually called the credit card company to ask about it and they said, “Yes, those are legit, go ahead and validate them.” And that would have been the end of it except that every time I pull out this latest card I am reminded once again that this card is made of depleted uranium and grief. It is the heaviest card I have ever owned – easily twice the weight of any other card in my wallet – and I have no idea why this is so. Sometimes I just randomly hand it to people to see what their reaction is and it never ceases to amaze them. It is a mystery.

8. It is March Madness season, the only time of the year when basketball of any description makes any noticeable impact on my life, and I have dutifully filled out my bracket. My designated champion lost their first game and pretty much every team I actually thought would be interesting is gone as well, though I did somehow manage to call one entire region correctly in the first round based purely on vibes, so I’ve got that going for me. I am the only person in the family who filled out a bracket and yet I suspect I have still managed to lose this year’s contest anyway.

9. I really hate the fact that the internet killed the phone book and then got so enshittified that you can’t actually find a business anymore. We need a Large Household Project to be done by someone else, and half the results I get by searching online are either a) not in that actual line of business, b) not anywhere in the time zone despite my specifying the actual town I was trying to search, and/or c) so long gone and forgotten that their phone number has been reassigned. This does not strike me as progress.

10. I finally got new headlights on my car. After 20 years the plastic housings had gotten so opaque that they really didn’t illuminate anything anymore, and it is nice to be able to see where I’m going when driving in the dark again. It’s the little things.

Blow Ye Winds, Blow

Apparently our trip up north was very well timed, since we made it home on dry roads with only a minor blip in traffic near Madison. There’s always traffic around Madison. It was an easy drive.

This would not have been the case had we tried it today. Likely would not be the case tomorrow either.

Most of Wisconsin is shut down right now, and when Wisconsin shuts down because of a winter storm you know it’s bad. When they close the bars then shit has definitely gotten real.

The state Department of Transportation has this nice service where if you go to their website you can see a map of travel conditions. The entire northern half of the state is outlined in black and listed as “Stay the hell off the roads you simpletons! Your 4-wheel-drive Compensator will not help you!  We’re not sending people to rescue you! Maybe Tuesday we’ll send out retrieval parties! Morons.” I’m sure if they thought they could get away with it there would be skull-and-crossbones graphics as well, and possibly little hand emojis flipping you off for even thinking about driving, but they’re doing what they can to get the message across.

The interstate highway that we took to drive home on Friday was shut down in both directions at 11am today. The traffic camera images all looked like closeups of sheep.

Down here in Wisconsin’s banana belt it has rained incessantly since about mid-morning and you have to appreciate the fact that you don’t have to shovel rain. The winds are fierce, the ground is saturated, and the main storm has started to sag southward so our potential overnight snowfall has been raised from one to four inches (2.5-10cm) to eight to twelve inches (20-30cm). This will be on top of all the rain, which will have frozen into sheets of ice at some inconvenient point in order to provide just THAT MUCH MORE EXCITEMENT for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is not looking good for leaving the house is what I’m getting at here. All of the local school districts have already announced that they’re closed. As for Home Campus, we usually wait to make that call. Instructors can cancel their own classes without too much bother and staff can make the choice to stay home on their own, but to close the entire campus officially triggers a wave of bureaucracy that the people in charge try to avoid if at all possible. So we’ll see.

I don’t have any classes or student appointments tomorrow, but I do have to be part of two different candidate interviews for positions where we’re hiring and I’m not sure how much of that is actually going to happen. Perhaps there will be Zoom. I’m not the one making the decisions, so I’m sure I will be told at some point.

At the moment I’m just sitting in my little office, surrounded by books, listening to the rain lash against the windows. I got the grocery shopping done yesterday and none of today’s plans involved putting on shoes. There’s corned beef simmering on the stove, since Tuesday is St. Patrick’s Day and nobody has time to simmer corned beef on a workday. It smells good.

So we will hunker down and be glad for our snug oasis in the middle of the storm.

A Wild Trip Up North

I actually like the Minnesota Wild. They’re a good team, they have a snazzy logo, and Minnesota feels like it should have a professional ice hockey team in a way that Florida and Texas really shouldn’t. Plus at this point in American history I confess I have a deep fondness for anything connected to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, as they have been at the forefront of resistance to the current tyranny and should be supported by all patriotic Americans for this. So I do like the Wild.

Just not as much as the Flyers.

A while ago Kim and I discovered that my hometown Philadelphia Flyers would be traveling to St. Paul for a game in March and we agreed that this would be a fun thing to go see. For me that probably would have been the end of it but Kim is a planner and actually makes things happen, and surprisingly quickly we had tickets and a hotel reservation.

And then we realized that by midwestern standards St. Paul is not all that far from the campus where I teach my remote class, so perhaps we could head there the following morning so I could teach it in person for the first time since I started doing this course in 2012. It would be nice to see the students, for one thing, and it would also be good to see all the people up there who make this class work – any remote class is a group effort, after all. Plus the Campus Director up there is a friend of ours and an old chemistry colleague of Kim’s from a previous institutional structure, so there was a lot to recommend this visit.

We therefore had Plans.

We drove up to St. Paul on Thursday – a relatively uneventful ride for the first part, though once we got past Eau Claire the snow closed in and the High Wind Warning became a genuine thing. It wasn’t much snow, to be honest – just enough that no windshield wiper setting was quite right – but the winds were fierce and remained so through much of the next day.

The Saint Paul Hotel is a much nicer place than I’m used to staying. It’s one of those big old-fashioned places with lobbies that were designed to convey more than simply utilitarian processing, and as someone used to staying in hotels that have numbers in their name it was a bit of a shift, though a pleasant one. They also have valet parking, which meant we just pulled up, handed the keys to a dapper man in black tails and a top hat who did, in fact, work for the hotel (we checked), and then didn’t have to think about it again until the next morning. This worked out very well since the arena where the game would be played was just a three-block walk away.

It was raining when we walked over, which was actually kind of nice. Rain melts ICE, after all, and we were not confronted by any jackbooted government thugs while we were in St. Paul. They haven’t left the city, despite the news reports – they’ve just decided that publicly executing American citizens was bad PR so they’re not as overt as they were a couple of months ago. Still no justice for the dead, of course, but one lives in hope and fury.

We got to the arena fairly early, bought one of the souvenir programs (“Only $5! Benefits youth hockey!” – how could we say no to that?) and found dinner at the first big concession stand that we came to. The arena has a row of Standing Room Only spaces just behind of the last row in the first tier of seats and these come with a little counter that you can lean on and was also absolutely perfect for resting trays of Buffalo Chicken Fries and cups of house cider upon, and we enjoyed a tasty if nutritionally void dinner.

From there we wandered counterclockwise around the concourse until we got to our designated spots on the Standing Room Only section further up the ice. For those who actually watch hockey, we were about level with the face-off dots on the Wild’s end of the ice, across from the team benches. We were a bit worried about the very tall people in front of us who did not sit down during the entire extended warm-up skate, but they did once the game started and we had a great view of the game during regulation time. It turned out that they were most of the neighborhood where Alex Bump grew up and they were here to cheer for him in his first professional trip to St. Paul as a hockey player, even if he was playing for the Flyers. They dutifully wore Flyers gear with his number on it, despite confessing to be Wild fans in general, and you have to appreciate that kind of support. I chatted a bit with the guys standing next to us at our counter, one of whom was also a university instructor so we had that in common.

There were a lot of Flyers fans in attendance, to judge from the jerseys and sweatshirts, and everyone seemed happy to be there. I like going to sporting events where everyone is clued into the fact that it’s a game and you’re there to have a good time. Three cheers to the Wild fans for being good about that.

It turned out to be a very entertaining game, even from a neutral perspective. The Flyers went up 1-0 toward the end of the first period, found themselves down 2-1 after the second period, and then tied it on a short-handed goal in the third.

The game went to overtime, which the NHL now does as a 3-on-3 five-minute sudden death period, and everyone stood up at that point so we couldn’t see anything. Fortunately there were two seats open a couple of rows down by that point, so Kim and I went there and stood by them, so we did get to see the end of the game. When overtime didn’t solve anything they went to a shootout, which the Flyers won 1-0, and it was a good night for the orange and black.

Every single goal of the game was scored on our end of the ice.

We walked back to the hotel, collapsed into heaps on the various chairs, and spent a lovely time not doing much of anything at all before calling it a night.

The next morning we got up way too early, retrieved the minivan from the top-hatted man (who was either still there or had somehow returned before we woke up), and headed off toward Far Away Campus. We made it there with plenty of time to spare despite a) the High Wind Warning still being a thing, which is an experience in a tall vehicle on a high bridge, let me tell you, b) somehow managing to get behind every sightseer in northern Wisconsin, which in mid-March is not that many people so this was something of an achievement, and at least one turkey delivery truck, and c) stopping for breakfast at one of the several million Kwik-Trip gas stations that permeate Wisconsin like pubs in Britain. IYKYK.

Kim found a table just outside the classroom so she could get some work done and I wandered into the room and met Simon, the guy who sets up all the Zoom stuff for the class, and we got things ready. My students filtered in – according to Abbey, the Campus Director, they were happy that I was coming up to see them, and we had a good time together. It was a pretty full house for being the Friday before their spring break, and there was even a former student from last year who sat in for a while. We covered WWII, one of the gateway drugs of history and always a popular subject despite the casualty figures. And then I wandered around the trying to catch up to other folks who I’ve worked with, eventually finding Sue and Angela but missing Sonya and Troy. It was good to see them!

I also bought a campus sweatshirt so I can actually represent when I’m teaching. I have a lot of Home Campus gear, but this is my first for this campus.

After that we went to lunch with Abbey at a very good Mexican restaurant, where we hung out for a pleasingly long while and had good food in the process. One of my students showed up with his parents and it was nice to meet them.

All in all, a good day.

The drive back was uneventful as you always hope they will be, and eventually we came home and were confronted by a deeply annoyed cat who was, nevertheless, not too proud to sit on my lap for a while.