Learning the Streets

Tabitha has started taking Drivers Ed classes.

I know.

This is one of those Parental Moments where you think to yourself, “Wait, how did she get that old?”  And then immediately afterward you think to yourself, “Wait, how did *I* get that old?”  Because they’re related questions.  I don’t feel all that different from how I felt when I was thirty-five – I’m slightly rounder and rather balder but otherwise not much has changed.  But she has changed a great deal, and therefore I must have too.

Time.  It’s a harsh mistress.

So far, it has to be said, the classes don’t seem to be impressing her much.  She missed last night’s class due to the continuing Fall Crud that seems to have laid her low this month, and Tuesday was the only other class so far. 

Kim picked her up after that first class was over and asked, “How was it?”

“It exudes smoke and despair,” Tabitha replied.

“And spiders.”

So there’s an uphill climb, shall we say.

I think Drivers Ed is just like that.  Certainly my own experience in with that subject did not leave me particularly inspired or educated.  It did save my parents a great deal on auto insurance, as I recall, so it was certainly worth a few Saturday mornings in a basement classroom that way.

There were a lot of us in that room.  Some people were there for the first time.  Others, including at least one friend of mine, were there because they had already managed to screw up their legal status to drive and had to recertify themselves.  The class started at some horrifically early hour, when 16-year-olds were pretty much comatose, and went all morning.  We sat at these long tables in horizontal lines and tried to stay awake for the presentations.

My instructor was probably not drunk at that hour, though he had the shambling presence of someone who probably wished he were.  And confronted with a couple dozen bored teenagers for exactly as long as we were confronted with him, I suppose I can’t really blame the man.  To keep himself entertained he would pretend he was Bill Cosby, back when that was still a respectable thing to be.  He would stand up in front of the room and introduce the various videos that they mandate you show in Drivers Ed classes and which have not changed since the 1950s (“DEATH ON THE HIGHWAY!  How One Moment of Carelessness Slaughtered an Entire Town!”  In Technicolor!) and then go on long tangents about them, usually involving sound effects and flailing motions with his arms.

Eventually there would be a break.

We’d go outside and troop, en masse, across the busy four-lane road to the little shopping plaza and buy snacks and drinks to keep us afloat until lunchtime, when we could all go home.

To this day, film footage of traffic accidents makes me think of Welch’s Strawberry soda.

The class also came with on-street practice sessions, where a portly man in a tan Dodge Omni would take us out individually on the streets of suburban Philadelphia.  He had a hard life, that man.  Those streets were narrow and twisty, until we got to the Schuylkill Expressway, whereupon they became wide and filled with maniacs.  I guess the thinking was that if we could survive that, we could drive anywhere.  It seems to have been true – I have successfully driven in more places than I ever thought I would, so who am I to judge?

Eventually they declared me Wise in the ways of automobiles and their safe care and handling, and let me loose. 

Now the wheel comes full circle.

Following the Thread of the Evidence

In one of my earliest memories, I am staring at two spools of thread.

I don’t know how old I was – maybe three, maybe younger.  We were living in the twin house we’d moved into when I was a year and a half old, so no younger than that. 

I was downstairs, in the living room.  I recall that room having olive green carpets as befit a room in the late 1960s, and that they didn’t go from wall to wall.  There was space between them and the walls where I could run my Matchbox cars without having to push them so hard.  Or maybe that’s a later recollection.  It’s hard to say.  Things get so jumbled up with the passage of time.

It was probably a weekend, since I was up and my parents were still asleep.  Although I don’t remember my dad being part of this, now that I think of it.  I always assumed he was there, but perhaps not.  I do remember my mother being there in the house with me.  This was before she went back into the workforce, when my brother and I were a bit older, so perhaps it was a weekday after all.

It was early in the morning, at any rate.  The sun was up, but at that point I was well into my brief morning-person phase.  We had a small black-and-white television that I had learned to turn on by myself, and I’d often wander down before anyone else was up and watch cartoons.  The Pink Panther was my favorite, even though I had to take the idea that he was pink on faith.  I saw no reason to doubt it. 

I think my mom was glad that I’d learned the tv on my own, as that would keep me busy while she slept for a bit longer.  When I became a parent I understood the wisdom of that much more clearly.  At the time I thought I was getting away with something.

So there I was, in the living room, with two spools of thread.

One of those spools had red thread – a deep, vibrant cherry red.  That was my favorite color at the time.

The other had thread of a turquoise blue, rich and saturated, not one of those pale turquoises that had been popular earlier in the decade.

I remember deciding that I liked that blue better than the red.

This seemed a momentous thing at the time, something that required careful deliberation and thought, changing your favorite color like that.  Favorite colors had seemed permanent, immutable, inherent parts of life up until that time. 

But there it was – the red was not as appealing as the turquoise.  There was no doubt about it.  The evidence was there, and the received truth would just have to change to accommodate it.

I went up to my parents’ room, where my mother was sleeping, and woke her up to deliver this grave news.  To her credit, she simply said that this was fine by her and went back to sleep.

It’s still my favorite color.

And the lesson that received wisdom must fall before new evidence has stayed with me ever since.

That’s a lot of weight to hang by such a pretty blue thread.

News and Updates

1. So we’ve had yet another mass slaughter of the innocent in the United States this week, which differentiates this week from any other week in the United States not one iota.  And, as predicted, an army of the stupid, the ammosexuals and the reality-challenged has come out swinging with their insistence that the solution to the problem of too many high-powered weapons in the hands of too many people like them is to put even more high-powered weapons into the hands of people just like them.  I wouldn’t mind it if they were the only ones who died – there would be a certain justice in that, really – but the fact is that they represent a clear and present danger to the rest of us and really ought to be treated accordingly.

2. But who am I kidding?  My side lost.  Gun control died in the United States the day we decided that the slaughter of the innocent was an acceptable price to pay for the free availability of firearms, and I see no mark on the wall that says, “When the pile of bodies reaches this high things will change.”  Watch your back, my fellow Americans.

3. The hole in Kim’s office ceiling has now been fixed.  It no longer rains plaster down onto her desk, which is a good thing.  This did mean getting a new toilet in the upstairs bathroom and marveling over the installation job done on the old one by the previous owners of the house. 

4. I feel kind of bad for my Ancient World History class, since it’s the fifth class I teach in the day and ends nearly ten hours after my first class begins, and by that point I’m pretty fried.  At least they’re nice students.

5. It’s finally fall, which means that it is cool enough for tea and cider donuts.  Life is good.

6. Commuting an hour and a half each way to campus has its interesting moments.  Yesterday some idiot stopped dead in the fast lane for no apparent reason.  I can now scratch “laying rubber on the interstate” off my bucket list.  Nobody so much as dinged a fender, but it made the day far more interesting than it needed to be.

7. People who think that putting scare quotes around the word “historian” is a clever way to insult me and deal with arguments they can’t refute are just the most adorable little things.

8. Once again we’re on the Identify Theft carousel because other people cannot be trusted with our information.  This makes four times in the last decade, none of which can be attributed to carelessness on our part.  It does make you question the merit of a totally linked-up world.

9. This is the last week for the roosters, since we need to merge our hen flocks and roosters are like the Highlander in that there can only be one.  Although we’re going to try two, since Rosie is basically an overgrown pigeon and might not get too huffy with the new one coming in.  It will be a shame to see the rest of the roosters go, though – they’re beautiful birds. 

10. It only took a week for Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) to resume his fanatic assault on the State of Wisconsin.  That was the one nice thing about him being on the presidential campaign trail – it kept him out of our hair.  His latest scheme is to gut the civil service laws that have kept Wisconsin government relatively honest and open for the last century and reinstate Gilded Age patronage.  Can’t say I’m surprised by it, but the sheer arrogant stupidity of it does give one pause.

11. The Republican Party is doomed.  At least that is the impression I got from listening to the unmedicated ramblings of a nationally-syndicated right-wing radio host the other night, anyway.  I spent half an hour while driving home listening to this guy “blasting conservative fire!’ – which, boiled down to its essentials, was a breathless and nearly uninterrupted rant on the unmitigated evil of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Rand Paul, the GOP Establishment, and pretty much anyone on the right who has ever said a negative word about Ted Cruz in particular or the Tea Party in general.  He did give a shout-out to “the Marxist Left” running the White House (yes, that’s a direct quote, and I almost drove off the road laughing at that point), but mostly he was angry at the GOP.  When people that unhinged are a) your base, b) angry at you, c) given air time to spread their opinions, and d) popular enough to be nationally syndicated, you’ve got problems that are more serious than anything the Democrats can give you.

12. Naturally I am reading a 3-volume collection of linked post-apocalyptic short stories during this parlous time.  It makes the days interesting.

Of Popes and Politics

It’s been fascinating watching the right-wingers lose their collective mind over a Pope who follows the teachings of Christ more than the polemics of Ayn Rand.

Be good stewards of God’s creation.  Care for “the least of these,” the poor, the outcast, the downtrodden.  Seek justice.  Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.  It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

You’d think a group that clothes itself in religious rhetoric – that claims sole ownership over the term “Christian,” in fact, much to the amusement of the rest of us – would recognize these and abide by them.  That they would welcome spiritual guidance from the leader of the world’s largest church, from the leader of the church where so many of their foot soldiers go on Sundays.  That they would recognize the spiritual power of a man who has spent his life in the service of his faith – the same faith that they claim to have – and who has been elevated by the votes of the elders of that faith into its most prominent and powerful office, an office which, by its own decree, renders the occupant infallible when speaking ex cathedra.  A man who lives that faith every day, far more thoroughly than they do.

You’d be wrong, of course. 

The religious right has nothing to do with actual faith.  It is a deeply cynical manipulation of the symbols of faith in order to achieve political power, and it has been extremely successful in the US since it emerged in its modern form in the late 1970s.

And if you understand how it emerged, you also understand why this particular Pope is such a threat to the right-wing and their carefully-constructed political machine.

The modern American right wing is a strange and jury-rigged creation.  It has at its core a set of different, not entirely compatible constituencies whose interests all managed to line up together in the decade or so following the 1968 collapse of the left in America.

First and most importantly, you have the politicians of the right, conservative leaders who – like any politicians – sought to gain and hold power.  They had been out of power since 1933, when it became clear that the supply-side economics that they favored and which served the interests of the wealthy and powerful so well were simply inadequate to the needs of a demand-side economy.  The problem for them is that they had nothing really to offer the American people to get them on their side.  The majority of Americans were, objectively, better off economically under the progressive economic policies adopted by the US in the wake of the Great Depression – a fact recognized even by many conservatives, who incorporated them into their own platforms by the 1950s and simply argued for different focus and extent.  Read through Dwight Eisenhower’s election year platforms and see. 

The right-wing revolt of the 1960s brought a new group of conservatives to power in the Republican Party, and they worked diligently to switch the focus of American politics from economic issues (surefire losers for their cause) to social issues (on which they could win).  You see this with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, for example, and the backlash against the social protest movements of the 1960s.  While the resistance to the Civil Rights Movement was the most obvious and open social issue on the right, it would be the resistance to the Feminist Movement that would eventually bring them the most success.

Because those conservatives needed foot soldiers.  And that brings us to the second main constituency – Protestant Evangelicals, many of whom held deeply traditional or even reactionary views on social issues.

These Evangelicals had largely disappeared from American politics after the Scopes trial of 1925.  They hadn’t given up on changing the United States to suit their views, but they generally sought to do so outside of the political sphere.  As I have written before, this changes in the 1970s when they emerge back onto the political stage as actors.  The question was, of course, whether they would jump to the left – the leading Evangelical politician of the 1970s being Jimmy Carter, after all – or to the right.  And for reasons that I’ve discussed here, they jump right.

But those two groups were not enough to turn the modern right wing into the juggernaut it is today.  To do that, they needed the Catholics.  That's the third group.

The late 1970s is where the abortion issue first becomes a concern to conservatives and Evangelicals.  Because prior to that it wasn’t.  Evangelical leaders in the 1960s had hewed to what we would call a pro-choice line today – a view that is fairly easy to support using the Bible, actually – and the Roe v. Wade decision removing state restrictions on a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion had been hailed by those leaders as both a religious and political victory. 

But the Catholic church had long held a consistent anti-abortion line, condemning it as sinful and supporting political efforts to bar the practice.  This fit fairly well with the socially conservative views of the church hierarchy at the time, views that were in many ways not that far removed from those of the Evangelical leaders on other issues – particularly on issues relating to women’s rights in general.

The animosity between Protestant and Catholic leaders had long roots, however.  Anti-Catholic hysteria goes back all the way to the founding of the American colonies – the Puritan John Winthrop, one of the founders of Massachusetts in the 1630s considered the Catholic church to be the anti-Christ.  And anti-Catholic violence would emerge again and again over the course of the 19th century – the riots of the 1830s and 1840s, and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s being perhaps the best known examples.  Much of the Nativism directed at the New Immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was specifically because they were Catholic.  Uniting those two groups would not be easy.

Abortion was the key.

If right-wing political leaders could sway the Evangelical churches to adopt an anti-abortion position, they could join those two interest groups into a powerful and influential voting bloc that would bring those leaders to power.  And that, more or less, is what happened.  This alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics remains the bedrock of the modern right, the source of much of its electoral strength and the machine that allows conservative politicians to enact their economic plans.

And now the Pope is openly criticizing their economics.

He has decried the kind of unfettered libertarian capitalism that is at the heart of the right-wing economic vision.  He has called for economic justice.  He has called for resources to be put toward the care of the environment.  He has spoken in defense of the poor, the outsiders, and the refugees.  He’s basically recognized the incompatibility of so much of the right-wing economic and social platform with the teachings of Christ.

He’s still anti-abortion.  But that’s not enough anymore.

What this Pope is doing, in effect, is opening a wedge between Catholics and the American right.  American Catholics now find that they have the religious freedom to abandon the right and still call themselves good Catholics.  The alliance with Protestant Evangelicals which has been the foundation of the modern American right for nearly half a century may not survive that.

This terrifies the GOP.

And you can see it in the hysterical assaults they are making on the Pope while he is here in the US. 

They’ve called him a false Christian.  They’ve questioned his understanding of the Bible.  They’ve called him a Communist.  They’ve boycotted his speeches and angrily declared him to be a liberal, which to those of us who actually are liberal is rather comical.

They’re scared.

If Pope Francis ends up decoupling the alliance between Catholics and Evangelicals that has been so critical to the success of the right wing since the 1970s, the right wing will collapse.

It’s been a fascinating thing to watch unfold, and more than a little sad.

Ding, Dong, the Campaign is Dead

We went out and celebrated.

When the news came down the internet that Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) was bowing out of the presidential race, it really wasn’t a surprise.  He’d been polling at 0% all week, after all, and even if the margin of error was about 2% on those polls, that still means that mathematically he could also have been at -2%.  I’m not sure what that translates to in real terms – perhaps that 2% of the GOP base would rather vote for Bernie Sanders than this guy.  But it was clear that he was on his last legs.

I worried anyway.  People like that, people with no principles beyond what they are paid by their puppetmasters to have, people whose careers have been defined by soulless ambition and ruthless immorality, people like that have a way of hanging on, of surprising the mass of decent humanity with their powers of recuperation.  And given the money that the Koch Brothers had paid for him, I expected them to make more of an effort to save their investment.

But rumors began to fly yesterday about staff layoffs.  And today when I got back from picking up Lauren from school, several of my friends had tagged me with articles announcing Governor Sock Puppet’s withdrawal from a race he should never have been anywhere near to begin with.

I can’t say I’m overjoyed so much as I am relieved.

Scott Walker is gone from the national stage, for the moment at least, but the sickness that he represents in the body politic remains.  He is the poster child for venal ambition, for the petty vengeance of the cowardly on better men and women than they, and for the right-wing extremism that is rotting the foundations of the republic.  It’s still out there. 

Seriously – one right-wing extremist today (a Patrice Lewis of the World Net Daily, and no I’m not going to link to that collection of half-witted radical fantasies – go find them yourselves if you truly want to abuse your intelligence) went on record calling for the US government to be overthrown by the military and then divided into Conservative America and Progressive America, since there is no other way for right-wingers to get what they want.  They fundamentally despise democracy.  They have no respect for the Constitution.  They hate everything this country stands for, and they have the gall – the unmitigated horror-show arrogance – to call themselves patriots and criticize everyone else as not real Americans.

Why this woman isn’t being prosecuted for subversion right now is an interesting legal question.

In a just world, such people would have been confined to padded cells and kept away from anything sharper than a banana years ago.  But no – they’re out there, cluttering up the nation’s airwaves, running for office, and reducing the average intelligence of the nation simply by continuing to breathe.

That’s what conservatives are reduced to these days.  Caricatures and insanity. 

I feel bad for genuine thinking conservatives.  I know a few of them.  They’re good people, even if we disagree on many things.  Nobody represents them anymore.  I tell them, “welcome to my world.”  Nobody’s represented me for a while either.

I’m glad that the nation will be spared the unanaesthetized brain removal surgery that would have been a Walker administration.  The man was by far the most dangerous candidate running as far as the long-term survival of the republic was concerned, up to and including The Donald, and anything that that keeps him out of the Oval Office – even as a tourist – is by definition a good thing.

On the other hand, this is a guy whose entire career has been defined by overweening ambition and ruthless petty vengeance against those who have crossed him, and I fear for Wisconsin.  He’s back, he’s angry, and like any sociopath he has no conception that any of his ills were his fault.  He’s already on record blaming others for his fall.  We will pay for the wisdom of the American people in rejecting him, no doubt. 

America, as you celebrate your Walker-free future, remember us back here in Wisconsin.  We took the bullet for you.

Actually, I don’t really expect him to finish out his term of office.  He’s still got three years remaining in office and nothing to do other than exact retribution and really, how long will that take?  He’s already gutted the state.  There’s not much left.  I’m assuming the GOP will kick him upstairs to corporate HQ and settle him in with a nice little hot-air factory of his very own on Fox.  He can brag about facing down all those nasty, nasty protesters there, and the gullible will believe him and send him money. 

Although I was one of those nasty protesters, as were my daughters, and a politer group of people I have never been in – I’ve been in rowdier grocery lines.  There were people walking around with plastic bags collecting trash.  There were singers.  There were children.  It wasn’t exactly a riot.  Also, now that I think about it, I never saw Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) the whole time I was there.  He spent his time hiding in the tunnels under the Capitol, scurrying in and out like a rat.

A legend in his own mind, that one.

But his future lashing out is still to come, so tonight we cancelled our dinner plans and went out to celebrate our governor’s fall from the national stage with food and drink.

You grab what good there is in the world, and run with it.

New Who Now

We finally got to see the new season premiere of Doctor Who tonight.

Two and a half years ago, I’d never seen an episode.  Now I’m an addict.  As addictions go, it’s not so bad.  There are all kinds of support groups, though unlike AA they are more focused on helping people like me further our addictions than actually get over them.  There are t-shirts, mugs, and other paraphernalia so you can identify your compatriots.  There are even conventions for likeminded souls to gather and share, and someday I’ll probably get to one. 

But mostly there are the shows, which are fun to watch and occasionally even thought-provoking. 

It took us months to get through the backlog of the New Who episodes on Netflix, but it was nice to have them there, waiting for us, anytime we were ready for them.  And then we finished them.  But that was okay!  Because the 50th Anniversary special came right up, and then the Christmas episode that year. 

And then there was a wait.  A very long wait, which ended with Series 8 and a brand new Doctor.

And then there was another wait.

Fortunately, we have lives so we didn’t just sit around staring at a blank television screen, tempting as that may have been when the GOP debates were on.  There were other shows to watch!  Other things to do! 

Naturally, when tickets went on sale for a 3D version of the last two episodes of Series 8, strung together to make a movie, we jumped on them the way any good junkie would when presented with a fix.

We went down to the next city south of us Wednesday night to see it.  There weren’t nearly as many people there as I thought there’d be, which is perhaps not surprising in hindsight for a 2-hour show at 7:30 on a school night, but the ones who showed up were mostly wearing Who gear and were friendly.  One nice young woman named Courtney – wearing a bright red fez – struck up a conversation with me and Tabitha while we were getting our tickets, and eventually she and her boyfriend ended up sitting with us.  This sort of thing rarely happens at Terminator movies.

The 3D part didn’t add much, honestly, even if it did make the credits more fun.  But we enjoyed seeing the shows again and catching a few things that we had missed the first time around, and there were a couple of throw-ins for the fans that they tacked on at the end.  It was a good night out.

Saturday was the actual season premiere, but we were all busy that night.  Tabitha had to work, and the rest of us were at a family event at my in-laws’ house.  Fortunately we live in the age of the DVR, so this was not a problem.

We ordered pizza.  We shoveled off some space in front of the television – Kim’s office is undergoing some repairs, so everything in it is currently in the living room.  We dimmed the lights.  The show began.

I rather like Peter Capaldi’s version of the Doctor, and his writers are much better (or, if they’re the same people, they’re doing a much better job) than the ones Matt Smith got saddled with.  I’m still not sold on Clara, whose character has yet to solidify nearly three years in, but Missy is turning out to be one of the more entertaining features of the recent shows.

The Doctor is still a madman in a box, who goes wherever there seems to be trouble and tries to help out as best he can.  That’s a hero I can get next to.

No, I Will Not Repost Your Meme

If you spend time on social media – especially Facebook, where old people like myself hang out now that the kids have all moved on to other, trendier, less obvious places where they can be kids and not have to worry about being monitored by all the old people (vide supra) – you know that things come in cycles.

For a while everyone was posting videos of people lip-syncing to popular songs.  There was a phase where every third post was a petition.  And way back in the Jurassic age of social media (2009) there were these things called Notes that people would post, answering questions and asking those who were tagged or interested to answer the same ones – little ice-breaker exercises for a digital medium.

I kind of miss the Notes.  They were a product of a more innocent time.

This tells you how fast the eons flicker in and out on social media.

The Notes have never come back and since Facebook has become the faceless behemoth that it is these days I don’t expect that they ever will.  Nobody has seen or heard from Carly Rae Jepsen in years.  Someone should call her, maybe.  You still see petitions, but they’re pretty easy to ignore since mostly they serve to announce to the world how fine the petitioner’s moral weave is.  Once you have said to yourself, “That person who put this on their social media account is a moral example to this poor benighted world and I hope there are more people like that out there, because there certainly isn’t one sitting in my seat,” you have accomplished the poster’s mission and you’re pretty much done.  Signing is entirely optional.

I don’t mind the fundraising things, oddly enough – the posts that say, “We’re doing a strange and taxing physical thing in order to raise money for this worthwhile cause!” and the like.  There are a lot of good causes out there.  Good luck with them.  Sometimes I even contribute.

And, in general, I like memes.  They're interesting.  They're funny.  Facebook is where the jokes went once email became a chore.

But not all memes are created equal.  Some of them are really irritating.

One of the more pernicious things that went out for a while but is unfortunately now making a comeback is the “Repost This Or You’re An Asshole” meme, and frankly I’m a little sick of it.

Yes, I have a hard-working dad.

Yes, I love my kids.  And my wife.  And my extended family all the way out to cousins (which is as far as my family goes, though Italian families do tend to define "cousin" rather broadly).  And my pets, most days.

Yes, I am happy with my personal religious views.  I regard them as my own business, however, and as the other (more entertaining) meme goes, I find religion rather analogous to a penis in that it is perfectly fine to have and it is lovely for you if you are proud of yours but waving it about in public is annoying, attempting to shove it down my throat will get you forcibly removed from my presence, and you are advised not to point it at my children if you want to see the sun go down.

Yes, I think your occupation is a worthwhile one, unless you’re a telemarketer, in which case you should probably find a new field.

Yes, I have very good friends who I don’t get to see or talk to nearly enough.  We’re still very good friends even so.

Yes, this.  Yes that.  Yes the other.

No, I will not repost your meme. 

It's nothing personal.  Don't infer anything from it. 

Even more exasperating is the current tsunami of Facebook status updates that talk about how the poster really needs to start culling people from their friends list and would I please put one word – just one word! – about how we met in the comments and then repost this whole mess as my status update so they can respond, because otherwise …

Well, I’m not really sure otherwise.

Presumably I will be unfriended, a clumsy but somehow needed verb these days. 

Or perhaps my eternal soul will be cast into the pit of hell, there to spend its time with all the rest of the sinners who have ignored the petitions and other such things that come down the pike.  I’ll be in good company, at least.  The sinners are much more fun.

No, I’m not going to do that either.

If you’re on my friends list at all, it’s because I like you.  It’s because I value spending time with you, either in person or online or both.  It’s because I find you interesting and worthwhile.  I find my world to be a better place with you in it.  I know very well how I met you – I am a historian, after all, and remembering things is what I do for a living – and I expect you do too.  And if I skip that little bit of nonsense on your wall, well, again, nothing personal.

My status updates are my own, and if not responding to these memes leads you to set me adrift then I suppose I didn’t mean all that much to you in the first place and I should apologize for my earlier misconceptions about you.

I am probably making too much of this.  But then it is my blog, and that’s what blogs are for, really. 

Maybe I should find a good song to lip-sync to.