the blue option

I used to keep a closet full of different clothes. Well, different shirts. I never had many pants because it is so hard to find pants that fit me and my long legs. I have very long legs!

What I had many of were nice, solid-colored polo shirts and t-shirts with beautiful designs on them. Then I realized that a t-shirt with a beautiful design on it did not necessarily make a beautiful t-shirt. At least as worn by me. I needed a collar on my shirt to look good. So I would only feel comfortable wearing the polo shirts. But I would still wear the t-shirts too, because I didn’t want them to go to waste. Or more precisely, I didn’t want to waste my precious polo shirts on just any regular day. I had to save up the polo shirts for special days.

Eventually, my t-shirts all wore out and I was finally left with just polo shirts. Then I noticed myself saving up the blue polo shirts for special days, and resigning myself to wearing the green or red ones on just normal days. When I finally allowed myself to wear a blue polo shirt, I would wear it for as many consecutive days as possible, so that I could get the most out of it before having to return to the other-colored shirts. A blue-shirt day was a special day, and I wanted more of them.

My friend who knows these things says that retail interior design companies always prepare at least two proposals for their clients: the design they think would be best for the workplace, and a “blue option,” which is the same design but all in blue. They do this because they know that if it is a man who is making the purchasing decision, he will always pick the “blue option.” Maybe that is what I am doing. Or maybe I am just picking a shirt that will go well with my eyes. I have very blue eyes!

Anyway, I decided to cut out the middleman and stock my closet with only blue shirts. I went around town scouring TJ Maxx and Ross and Old Navy and Target for cheap, fitted blue polo shirts. I found a bunch of nice ones at Target, which I snapped up. Then I found cheaper ones at Ross to fill more hangers. And then they held a sale at Old Navy, where I was able to fill out my closet very nicely indeed. If I found enough blue polo shirts at different places around town, I would almost never have to go to the laundromat again, yet I would not have to stretch any one polo shirt more than one day.

But guess what. I do. Because some blue polo shirts are just better than others.

33 most compelling reasons why we need a woman to replace judge souter in SCOTUS

1. oranges, when cut in half, sometime dribble abundant sweet-sticky orange-colored juice
2. those are good oranges
3. i hardly ever eat oranges
4. if i eat an orange i generally cut it in half, suck the juice and eat the pulp of one half, then do the same with the other half
5. this is a messy way of eating an orange which i nonetheless find satisfying
6. i have to wash my face afterward
7. i don’t remember the last time i ate an orange in segments
8. i like orange juice, especially from a carton
9. apples and oranges are both fruits and, contrary to common lore, compare perfectly well
10. i ate an apple yesterday; that was kind of rare, but not as rare as eating an orange
11. talking about apples makes me want to eat an apple; i think i’ll eat strawberries instead
12. off the top of my head, i can think of only two books with “orange” in the title, both having to do with female homosexuality
13. apples are either mentioned or alluded to in both titles
14. what’s with that?
15. when i was young my grandmother fed me orange segments
16. that’s a nice memory
17. in southern california i saw once tens of thousands of orange trees spread out in a valley
18. i thought it would be a stretch to call that an orange grove
19. i may have seen orange trees in florida but i haven’t recognized them
20. because of the citrus canker, many were destroyed
21. the most recent outbreak of citrus canker in florida was in 1995
22. i have no idea if it’s over, in spite of the fact that i live in florida
23. our relation to food, as to most objects, large and small, is entirely rootless
24. this makes me moderately-to-not sad
25. i imagine it must be nice to relate to food as a live thing, for instance by having a vegetable garden
26. i can’t see myself having a vegetable garden
27. i like processed food, like donuts
28. chain-store donuts must be the single most object-like food, the most remote from the natural roots of the food chain
29. even more than candy bars
30. don’t argue with me on that
31. i could totally eat a glazed donut right this second, or any other second of my waking life
32. my waking life would be vastly enlarged if i had glazed donuts at my disposal whenever i want them
33. i would hardly ever sleep

jonie v.’s secret confessions part I

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there are people i cannot stand

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imnotproudofit

politics as usual

Sometimes I get to wondering about the issue of politics. And not identity politics, but real politics. Politics of class struggle and workers’ rights — the things that documentaries are made of! Events causing other events, with people throwing their support thither and yon based on the outcomes of those events and based on speeches people give about those events. I get to thinking, then, about how important it is to organize if we want to effect change.

Let’s say, for example, that I work on an assembly line, manufacturing — I don’t know: paper. I work in a paper mill, OK?  Most days, my concerns center around the quality of the paper we are putting out, and how I can cut the corners off the paper in an exactly symmetrical way. Or maybe I work in another part of the paper mill, the distribution center. There we are most worried about how we can ship our paper to the space station in a timely fashion, and how to stabilize the eight-sided paper inside the boxes. Should we use rectangular boxes, hoping that the four main sides of the paper will hold it in place inside the box? Or should we use eight-sided boxes? Seems like the eight-sided boxes waste a lot of space.

I have a lot to think about at the paper mill. And it doesn’t help that everyone is so suspicious and on-edge these days, what with the occupation and all. My biggest worry used to be whether the management had put spies in our midst to inform them about union organizing. But now I have to worry about cylons, too? Which of my trusted paper-packers, which of my factory foremen are sleeper agents? It is too much to bear sometimes.

how far we’ve come

this morning the pony and i went to a bakery to eat pastries. we try to get together and eat sugar-based products as often as we can, to keep it real.

when the pony asked for a red velvet cupcake, the bakery’s owner, who is some variety of european to judge by her accent, said she had two velvet cupcakes. the pony said, “i’ll have one.” the owner said, “two?” the pony replied, “one.” the owner rejoined, “two?” patiently and politely, the pony said, “one.”

this reminded me of when i was a young ‘un and did the grocery every day for the whole family. it was around the end of the 19th century and we did daily grocery shopping. it took a sizeable chunk of the day because there were many shops to visit: the bread and egg shop, the meat shop, the cheese shop, the veggie shop, the newspaper shop, the tobacconist shop, etc. you did it all on foot. that was just the way it worked. i didn’t particularly like it. by the end the bags were heavy and i was tired. (it was also cold and snowy, and we had wooden shoes and threadbare hoseries: but that’s for another post).

the worst was the cheese place. the cheese guy would always give me as least 50% more cheese or cold cuts than i asked for. if i asked for 1 hg, he’d give me 1.5 hg. if i asked for 2 hg, he’d give me 3. it was very painful for me, because i didn’t know how to stop him. when i joined the line i’d rehearse what to say to him: “and i mean 1 hg!” or, “did you get that i said just 1 hg?” but it never did any good. it only made me feel anxious and defeated.

while i was in line i checked if he did the same to the other people, older, maturer women, grown-up women, but i don’t remember it now. what i know is that no-one said any of the things i did. maybe the women accepted the extra stuff, or maybe they asked for 2/3 of what they really wanted and ended up satisfied. i would never have done this myself because i hadn’t yet learned The Practical Approach to Life and was practicing instead The True and Just Approach to Life. let me tell you before you read any further: the True and Just Approach to Life must be practiced very seldom and for a very, very good reason. if you are in any doubt whatsoever, go for the Practical Approach to Life with a clear and light conscience.

when i asked for cold cuts i’d keep a keen eye on the scales and shout “enough!” the moment the scales reached the amount i wanted. the cheese man would continue unfazedly to pile slices till he added another 50%. my fury knew no bounds.

when i think of it now, i wonder why i didn’t just hand him back the rolled package, tell him to take 1/3 off. at the time, it seemed unthinkable. the package was wrapped and sealed, the price scribbled on. it was over. i had lost my round.

here is something i’m proud of, though. one day, when she was still doing the grocery shopping herself, my grandmother came home furious because the fish monger had sold her fish other than the one she had requested. seeing my grandmother so upset gave me the courage i later failed to find for myself. i went out into the street as i was (no coat) and marched to the fish monger. there was a fair crowd at his truck. i elbowed my way to the front and said with a big and indignant voice, “you cheated my grandmother! shame on you, cheating on an elderly woman! i want all these people to know that you are a grandmother cheater. shame on you!”

everyone was very quiet. the fish monger was very quiet. i turned on my heels and marched back home. it was a fine moment.

this morning, when the baker pretended not to understand that the pony had asked for only one cup cake, i felt bad for her. this is america, i wanted to say. this is america.

verba volant

when i was little i used the dictionary all the time. it was very frustrating because the definition would always contains words i didn’t understand. i’d go and look those words up, but their definitions, too, would contain words i didn’t understand. i would look those up, only to be stuck in a hellish cycle of endless deferral. it was exhausting and i could never reconstruct what the original word meant. i don’t think i bothered asking my mom or grandmother. my grandmother was always home so i suppose it would have been easy to ask her, but for some reason i didn’t.

when i came to the US i didn’t buy an english-italian dictionary. by that time i had realized that dictionaries were useless. it was much easier to ignore the words i didn’t know and get the general meaning from the context.

now that my english is all right, when there is a word whose meaning i don’t know i ask simsby. if he’s not around i ask li’l pony. if neither is around i don’t ask anyone. i figure sooner or later i’ll figure it out.

there is a site that will send you an email with a new word every day. it’s called A.Word.A.Day. someone gift-subscribed me to it. i knew the first two words i received so i felt rather pleased with myself and even smug. since then i haven’t known one single word. until three days ago, i’d look at the word carefully, read the definition, and look at the usage. i’d tell myself that i’d try to find a way to use the word that very day. but the occasion never came up and by the following day i had forgotten the word entirely. three days ago i stopped opening the emails.

i do remember, however, snake eyes, because that seemed a really important word (well, two words). snake eyes is when you get two ones on a pair of dice. since this is the lowest possible outcome (i had to think a second on that, on account of not being very good at math, but of course it’s true), snake eyes also means bad luck. i hope i’m remembering this right. these words stuck with me because i like gambling, as a concept. for instance, i really, really like movies about gambling. i think i would like novels about gambling if i could understand them.

i never gamble in person unless my mom is in town. when my mom is in town we go to the casino on the miccosukee reservation and gamble away $10 each. we stay at the slots until we finish the $10. the last time we went it was touch and go for a bit because the casino had replaced the usual slots with new ones and for the life of us we couldn’t understand how the new ones worked. finally we asked a slot attendant and she told us. the explanation was very difficult and i didn’t understand it (my mother didn’t even bother following). the young attendant had to think a little to figure out what the easiest machine in the house was, then walked us to it and told us its very basics. she told us not to touch this or that button because it would make things too difficult for us. we managed to play for a long time with our $10. we felt cool and also a little smug, though there was no reason for the smugness whatsoever.

very absorbent

Someone I know is getting ready to teach sex ed to 5th-graders, and is wondering what kind of questions to prepare for. I am trying to remember what I wanted to know as a 5th grader. It seemed weird to me at the time that they would segregate the boys from the girls for sex ed. I was scared to be with all the boys and only the boys because I knew I was different from them and I thought that would be more apparent with no girls around. When it was over all the girls came back to class looking somber and important as if the weight of the world had just been put on them. That was my idea of it.

I already knew certain things about girls, before this class. The year before, in fourth grade, my friend Lucia told me, à propos of nothing, not to bother her because she was in a bad mood. I had learned by then that this meant you were supposed to ask “why are you in a bad mood.” So she took out a sheet of paper and a pencil, and started drawing a circle, dragging the pencil lead around and around and around and around, obsessively, for a really long time until she had a huge black circle on the paper. That’s how I learned what a period was.

It was later, in seventh grade, that the health teacher gave us a lesson on the male anatomy, the vas deferens, the urethra, nocturnal emissions, why some boys like to do their own laundry, etc. She let us ask her questions anonymously. So we all put our timid anonymous questions into a hat. I remember the teacher fishing out one question that went something like this: “Wouldn’t it be fair to say that nocturnal emissions are kind of like a boy’s period?” It’s not that bad of a question, is it. It sticks with me because I remember thinking that there must be some boy in my class who was jealous of all the fuss over menstruation. This Q&A session came after a particularly moving demonstration, involving a large glass of water, of how tampons work.

My next chance to take a class like this was at my all-boys Catholic high school, senior year. You learned Church teachings on who you could and couldn’t marry. The big controversial one was no cousins. (This was the 80s.) I learned this from friends who took the class. I opted out.

i heart miami part I

my friend M asked me for my favorite miami memories and i realized i don’t have a single good memory of anything: my brain discards good memories, annihilates them like laser annihilates hair follicles. my only memories are bad memories: my mind hoards them fiercely and tenaciously. this is a fact. if you find it grim, just think how much i like it.

so here is the beginning of a series on good miami things (things are not as meticulously screened by the mind as memories are, and sometimes fly under the radar screen of the positivity-annihilating laser beam, a horribly mixed metaphor if i ever saw one).

1. the beach. man, the beach. miami beach, with its colorful lifeguard cabins, the sun, the white sand, the perfect and imperfect bodies, the boardwalk, the cruising, the leaving alone, the being who you want to be, the cold beer, the packed-dirt track, the in-line skaters, the bicycles, the jewish retirees, the non jewish retirees, the burnt-to-a-crisp tourists, the dog walkers. (honorable mention: key biscayne, to which i only went once and which i loved).
2. the sun. man, the sun. the miami sun. you haven’t seen sun if you haven’t seen the miami sun. miami’s sun gives california a run for its money, and that is saying something. thing is, you won’t ever actually see the miami sun. you’ll spend all of your time squinting your way through it, blinded and dazed and hot and on the verge of sunstroke. miami’s sun is sun that kills.
3. the gays. man, the gays. the gays of miami beach, a place where being gay is not only okay but de rigueur. the gays of miami beach give you a glimpse of a world in which heterosexuality is “the other way.” they make you want to grab the hand of your boy/girlfriend and give it a long squeeze, then walk back to the car and go home, because even in miami beach some things cannot be done publicly, thank jehosaphat.
4. scotty’s landing, where you can count on black & tan every day and cheesy live music just about every weekend, and where the staff is exceedingly forgiving. i smoked my last cigarette at scott’s landing, or at least that’s what i like to think.
5. u of m. okay, i’m not joking. it’s a beautiful campus, and, more often than not, you’ll run into someone you’ll be surprised to be really happy to see. and they’ll be happy to see you. they’ll be in a hurry to get to class or to a meeting and so will you, but you’ll smile really broadly and sincerely to each other and wonder, if briefly, why you are not making more of an effort to hang out. also the books, available for free at the library, late fees always waived if charged at all.
6. coral gables and coconut grove. man, the green. and the crazy architecture. and the sweet illusion of luxury and money. jaguars parked nonchalantly in driveways. hedges hiding lexusues and lamborghinis. not a soul on the sidewalks because there is no sidewalk. the chirping of birds. the barking of dogs. the otherwise silence.
7. the biltmore, where you and friends once got drunk on $7 ¼ bottle pellegrino water and it was worth every penny.
8. the downtown public library. i should have put it first because i love it so much. all the three times i went there i spent my entire stay wondering why i didn’t go more often. then had to run to the toilet, because gorgeous libraries act like powerful laxatives on me. oh, the books, the mixture of people, the solicitude of public librarians, their go@&amn helpfulness. absolutely wonderful. (honorable mention: the whole government center, where the library is located).
9. the airport. one of the most dysfunctional airports in my meager international experience, but who can forget the slices of sbarro pizza gobbled down in a hurry between runs to the bathroom (airports = libraries in this respect) and bouts of hysterical tears? or the pastellitos devoured serially at the über-crowded international terminal, teeming with people and boredom and anxiety and, occasionally, the heartbreaking joy of a long-deferred reunion?
10. versailles. don’t get me started on versailles. i fucking love the place. man, do i love the place. on the day that castro almost died – the first of his multiple almost-deaths – i went over and chatted up the people. i knew it was risky but who am i to draw back from risks? i sat at the café and partook of the enthusiasm. i won’t celebrate castro’s death (he’s done nothing to me, plus i wouldn’t celebrate anyone’s death), but the cubans sure know how to have fun.
11. the lesbians i met while canvassing for kerry. okay, this is less of a thing and more of a memory, but those lesbians, man, i really thought i had finally cracked the miami lesbian scene. the day kerry was defeated i never heard from them again. i thought we were friends but apparently they didn’t feel the same way. i really dug their houses, though, and the cool lesbian party we crashed.
12. M, T, jules… okay, i’m getting sentimental. i’ll skip this point.
13. denny’s. i have always loved denny’s, and i cannot say that i don’t have absolutely lovely memories of denny’s dinners taken during long car trips (i can think of one on the way to the grand canyon and another with my sister between l.a. and san fran, just after i got my fucking doctorate). but denny’s in miami has acquired a whole new dimension, a semi-hagiographical status. once, very early in my miami life, i drove alone on a night on which i was too bummed to sleep and stopped at a denny’s near homestead for a cup of joe because that seemed the right thing to do. when i got my first (and current) digital camera, i stopped at denny’s and took a million fabulous pictures. later, when M and T joined me in denny’s fellowship, denny’s pictures became a staple of the miami visual canon, but that was the first time. two words: grand fucking slam.
14. milkshakes. i cannot deny that milkshakes had a place of significance in my los angeles life, but miami has made them larger than life in j.v.’s imaginary. milkshakes are food for the individual soul and food for the soul of relationships. milkshakes are to be fought over lovingly and sometimes snarkily. milkshakes allow friends to come to grips with differences. milkshakes provide endless food for conversation. milkshakes nourish, bitches.

rules of war

this is serious, bitches, so if you can’t take it go elsewhere.

jonie v. , who now likes to refer to herself in the third person because of the nefarious influence of facebook, has given lots and lots of thought to the facts of a) so-called suicide bombers and b) shooters on a shooting spree that ends with the shooter’s suicide. and this is what jonie v. has concluded: that it’s all fucked. the rules of war and warriorship, which jonie v. finds an inherently male enterprise and (therefore implicitly) despises but has to reckon with nonetheless, are based on the principle that no one wants to get hurt.  since no one wants to get hurt, you can pressure your so-called enemies to do things they don’t want to do by threatening to hurt them or, even better, actually hurting them. once they are hurt enough, thus the theory goes, they’ll realize that they don’t like being hurt and will do whatever you want them to do, providing it’s not too unreasonable (the rules of war take care of this, too).

well, it doesn’t seem to work like this anymore. nowadays “warriors” do their warring by getting hurt. meaning, they hurt themselves (and others alongside). now some people, namely those people who go by the old rules of war, call these self-hurting warriors cowardly. i never got this. what’s cowardly in choosing to die to forward a cause? isn’t this the very definition of heroism? and you see that, in fact, those who are on the side of the self-hurting warriors (if such self-hurting warriors have anyone on their side at all) consider and proclaim them heroes.

this totally fucks up the concept of heroism and cowardice, because people no longer agree on their definitions, and we all know that when concepts are not agreed on it’s fucked up. another concept people no longer agree on is martyrdom and since i have always been pretty impressed by martyrdom, being catholic and all, i find this pretty fucked, too.

so here i am, trying to clarify things for everyone, in a handy fit-in-your-pocket easy-to-consult list:

• war sucks
• all violence against others sucks, but organized and self-righteous violence clad in nationalistic hymns and flags sucks even more, in fact, it sucks so much it basically sucks itself
• instruments of violence suck

and here is another short and easy to consult list that should guide us in understanding acts of self-huring warriorship:

• self-hurting warriorship is not worse than self-protecting warriorship in any respect whatsover
• it’s not better either
• self-hurting warriors are not heroes or martyrs, they are just fucked
• unself-hurting warriors are also fucked, if not individually, because the whole enterprise is fucked and they necessarily partake of this fuckedness

jonie v. would like to close this short and, she hopes, enlightening essay with an appeal to international cooperation and international basic decency, which, as the readers of this blog know, is not too difficult to attain if one actually gives it a try.

thank you.

chchchchchchchange!

dear readers,

as you will certainly have noticed, a great deal of change has come to a very nonny mouse. at first we, the editors, were wary of bringing such dramatic change to a publication that, we say with humility, has done so well and done so (much) good for so many years for so many people: it’s the old if “it ain’t broke,” right? but then, well, to put it simply, an air of change swept the country, nay, the entire world, and what could we do but follow it, nay, embrace it? what indeed?

here is then the new and improved mouse. we realize it will take you some time to get accustomed to the new features, the new outlook, in other words, the radical newness of it all. but you have bowled us over with your faithfulness, love, creativity, and sheer smarts over and over and over through the years, and we know we’d be condescending to you if we doubted for a second that you’ll embark on this adventure with less enthusiasm than that with which we invite you on it.

as mouse editors, we are of course in the simultaneously uncomfortable and privileged position of making decisions without consulting and referending our readership. uncomfortable because, as the bard said, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown; privileged because we have never seen our role as editors as anything other than: service.

it is to this service that i want to return, then, at the end of this letter. service is the word we live by, the spirit that sustains us, the beverage that quenches our thirst, the sleep that soothes us at night. service. readers, all we do here is for you.

please accept this radically changed, we trust improved, but very much same and very much your nonny mouse with the same joy and humility with which we offer it to you.

sincerely,

jonie v.