Category: Uncategorized

Summertime is here.

Check out my new story, “Kite Nites,” published at Spillwords!

Thanks Spillwords!

This is probably still current as my #1 favorite song. There’s just something about it.

But, I could roll on down the shore all day long on the NJ turnpike, then the Parkway, windows down, smell of salt air, hot breeze, and this song on a constant loop.

Roland shared this:

I mean that track has just got a life of its own. It’s crazy, I mean, it was always popular, but then… I did an interview with Reuters or something like that, a while back, with this lady who went on Spotify and worked out that there are about 140 cover versions of that song; I mean, from Don Henley to Patti Smith, to Weezer, to Lorde, obviously. It’s crazy, it’s one of those songs, isn’t it? [ ] There’s something intrinsic to it, you know, it’s just, it’s got a magic quality and so damn bloody simple.

A magic quality and so bloody simple. Like we wish life was.

Happy Spring….

First of all, I already know it’s a long song. Go cry to your mama. I love it, and I want it even longer. I could float down the Mississippi on this and never care a wit about the world.

Go Neil go, just don’t stop so soon Man.

Sadly I have seen many people, including my next-door neighbor who is also our local nightly newscaster, praising Rush as if he were a saint.

Fuck Rush. May Satan enjoy his new toy. I hope he uses him as a dildo.

What?

Yes. Fuck Rush. I will never ever ever support people who are racist, sexist, bigots, and against same-sex marriage, a woman’s right to choose, immigration reform, Black Lives Matter, and all the usual crap that goes with those beliefs. My neighbor, former sportscaster turned nightly news guy, also cannot stand to see things like the cartoon mascot of the Cleveland Indians change. This is why I am nervous living where I live.

And here is a photo of one of the sexiest men alive after my sexy husband:

What makes John McCrea so sexy aside from his rhymes? His absolute stalwart refusal to accept or ignore injustice. Long may you run, John. Thank you for all your posts. Keep sticking it to the unwoke white guys, and their wives.

First of all if you haven’t seen Eagle Vs Shark, you need to.

Secondly, the soundtrack is amazing.

I highlight today one song that is so great, and so short, and should be like a half an hour long at least.

It’s an 80s celebration everybody.

Have a great week!

80s Celebration: The Reduction Agents

It’s your first birthday without you. It’s our first Bill-Birthday without you.

You’re so cute.

You’re so funny.

I remember how you could eat any number of Thanksgiving dinners one right after the other and still keep your 29″ waist jeans.

I remember the cut-offs you always swam in that had too many holes to be respectable.

I remember when you visited me in Los Angles and we sang “narcissistic” songs all night long. “I love me, for sentimental reasons. I hope I do believe me; I’ve given me my my my my my; given me my heart because I mmmmmmm- me, and I alone was meant for me…..”

We laughed so hard we almost peed.

I wish Mom had given in and moved to Los Angeles and you had come too, and we had bought that property in Venice with the three houses on one lot. I feel like we could have lived happily ever after there. But, no one was ever ready to compromise for the other. That’s how we are. We love each other, and we love our freedom. And we can’t seem to give one up for the other.

I miss you.

I hope you’re somewhere and not nowhere even though nowhere is where I am sure we all go someday.

I hope you’re happy.

It won’t be your birthday without you.

It won’t be Thanksgiving without you. And who knew, when you were sick and missed last year, that you wouldn’t be here for cake and pie this year? We didn’t expect 2020, and really who did?

I’m thankful you were my big bother of all the big brothers I could have had. I think you were the best.

Except you left.

Too early.

Too quickly.

I miss you.

Everyday.

I don’t really think of myself as a person with heroes, but, I guess I have a few, and RBG would be one of them.

If you click on the photo above, you’ll end up over at National Public Radio (NPR) which is the only place you should end up, IMHO (in my humble opinion) simply because reporter Nina Totenberg has been so complete and so kind in her coverage of all the justices as long as I can remember. No other news source has covered the SCOTUS more thoroughly, and more fairly than Nina and NPR. (And this is me, doing exactly like I tell my students not to do, talking about Nina, as if we were buds. And it is exactly something Nina never does.)

There are so many outsized and amazing things about RBG. She survived in a women-hating world (law) at a very young age. She argued 6 times before an all-male SCOTUS herself. She was married for 50 or so years to the genuine love of her life. She went to work, and back to work, over and over, from her 20s to her 80, during real challenges in her husband’s health, her own health, and other family issues, when lesser people would have given in. One thing that everyone is remarking on, she was friends with Justice Scalia, a name I can barely type without anger rising in my gullet. This is something few in politics can even imagine today, being friends with their ideological opposite. She was beyond extraordinary.

Well, if you’re going to pick a hero for yourself, Pearce, might as well pick a super-hero.

Women in the USA owe her so much, and many don’t even realize it.

“Ginsburg is the rare supreme court justice whose most significant work was done before she joined the court. She changed the course of American law not as a supreme court justice, but as a lawyer, the founder and general counsel of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. Ginsburg began the project in 1972, the same year she joined the faculty of Columbia Law as a professor; by 1974, the project had participated in nearly 300 gender discrimination cases nationwide. Ginsburg personally argued six gender discrimination cases before the then all-male supreme court, winning five. She built on her victories one by one, establishing precedents that made future victories easier to win.

First was Reed v Reed (1971), a monumental victory that struck down an Idaho law favoring men over women in estate battles. That case extended the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment to women, barring laws that discriminated by sex. Ginsburg followed this case with victories in Frontiero v Richardson (1973), barring gender discrimination in compensation of military members, and Weinberger v Wiesenfeld (1975), striking down gender discrimination in state benefits. Her tactics were savvy; she framed gender discrimination in ways that made the practice seem unreasonable even to hardened misogynists. In Craig v Boren, she successfully convinced the court that state laws that distinguished on the basis of sex needed to be subjected to at least what was called “intermediate” scrutiny; she won the decision not by arguing for women to have equal freedom to men, but equal obligations. In Weinberger, she managed to get a discriminatory practice deemed illegal largely by virtue of finding a rare case in which the victim of sex discrimination was a man.

These victories, coming down between the years 1971 and 1976, forced laws to change nationwide. It is impossible to overstate their impact. One moment, much of family, tax, and financial law was made of statutes that codified men as breadwinners and beneficiaries, women as dependents. Within just five years, all these laws were declared unconstitutional. At the time the supreme court first ruled in Ginsburg’s favor, in Reed v Reed in 1971, many banks still would not issue women credit cards. By the end of it, her work had helped to usher in a feminist revolution that has changed the face of American families and expanded the possibilities for American women’s lives.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/ruth-bader-ginsburg-death-legacy-supreme-court)

And, I have to tell you, it is this lack of understanding of what women haven’t had that has often caused me to be frustrated with or disheartened by the young women I teach. I was an adjunct at the University of Delaware I cannot easily count how many young women told me that men, like Bernie (big Bernie fans there among the ladies) would be better presidents than women because men are just better at it. And, when I was teaching at Santa Ana College, a large number of the young women I taught there would say how men should make more money than their wives, and the women should take their husbands’ lasts names, because when women make more money or keep their last names, men feel badly, and they feel not manly, and women have to help with that.

I remember when I was a college student myself, and living in a neighborhood at University of Penn (though not attending… too expensive for my family to even consider), in an apartment surrounded apartments occupied by white male students, how harassed I was for my Mondale/Ferraro poster. I faced a verbal confrontation almost daily, and had my apartment windows broken, because the guys at Penn were losing their minds over the mere possibility that a woman might become VEEP.

Of course, Mondale and Ferraro were running against Reagan/Bush. And those were dark times for women. Nancy Reagan certainly popularized a shut-up and stand-by-your man ethos. Women, at least many white women, believed her. The movement lost momentum, and women who had once marched must not have told their daughters in any meaningful way about what they hadn’t had before. Of course, that is an assumption, but, I have been teaching incoming freshman at colleges and universities since 1991, in urban and suburban and rural settings, and women do not seem to see a problem with their situations when it comes to gender equality, and that is a huge loss.

And that is why we need a SCOTUS that looks to the future, that sees the needs for society that society cannot see for itself, and which was a major problem with RGB’s friend, Scalia. He felt The Constitution was a dead document. And it is, in so much as it was written to be complete to the best of the imaginations of the men who wrote it at the time. However, the fact that they immediately attached a Bill of Rights to it shows them setting a precedent for revision.

RGB was able to see that women needed their own rights cemented into law, so that they would never be in question again.

I am very afraid of being emotionally wounded in the coming weeks and months, as people attack RGB from both the left and the right. From the left they will say she should have stepped down when Obama was in office, as if her career was not her own, as if she still had not earned the right, as a women, to fully own her own career. And from the right they will say any horrible thing they can think of to smear a woman who earned every single accomplishment in her life with blood sweat and tears, unlike our despicable POTUS who has only ever broken a sweat after eating fast food, or while paying for sex.

RGB was a very very successful woman. She was a very very intelligent and educated woman. She was a beloved friend, mother, wife, grandmother. She was a beloved Justice. She was a champion of the underserved and under-heard.

She was my hero.

And I feel the world has lost a bit of its magic now that she is gone.

(Sophie and her bells & Mouse)

The third and final gift we got from The Jefferson School (TJS) is the music teacher from the charter school we did not get admitted to.

I am not gonna mention the teacher by name; I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, but I cannot ignore what a great gift this teacher has been to our lives.

During the school year the teacher started teaching Sophie the xylophone, also known as mallets or bells. When we went on quarantine, the teacher skipped right over into Zoom like a life-long Zoom user. It was seamless.

We still thought (remember the lied to part from post # 1 on this topic) that Sophie was getting into the charter school, so we asked the teacher, now on Zoom, to also give Sophie piano lessons, as our local piano teacher quit about a year ago. The answer was yes.

When I tearfully told the teacher that Sophie had not gotten into the charter school, the teacher was also tearful, and agreed to keep teaching her… forever.

She has two lessons a week with this sweet and talented teacher and she has flourished. Her playing is wonderful. We cannot thank this teacher enough!

And so,

when everyone is screaming that they want their kids back in school no matter what,

and when people make arbitrary decisions about who gets into which school and who doesn’t,

it is a failure to treat the students or their teachers as human beings, with feelings and attachments and needs of their own.

I hope that, if the charter school goes back to business live and in person, Sophie’s teacher will be safe. I hope this teacher means as much to that school as our teacher certainly does to us.

 

This is Mouse.

As you can see quite easily he is debonair, civically-minded, and a sucker for cookies.

Mouse has been in our house about 11 years now, and his personality has evolved as he’s grown up. Once syrupy sweet (and a bit boring, if I’m honest, dear Mouse, with a voice to match) he has grown-up a bit and in the nicest way. His voice is still a high-pitched, for he is a very tiny fellow, but it has a certain mellowness to it that is so nice. And, being more grown-up, he doesn’t pull any punches with us anymore. If, say, we forget to include him in the cookie dispersal, or he is left behind on the sofa instead of snuggled into bed, he will often say to us, “You bastards! I’ll cut you!” I know it sounds a bit violent, but it’s just Mouse. We know he’s just kidding. And given his petite stature, we can understand that he may wish to make himself as difficult as possible to ignore. I mean, no one wants to miss out on peanut butter cookies, or snuggling under the covers. Mouse demands not to be ignored, and in a world were the little things are often bulldozed over, we are so glad that Mouse makes us pay attention.

The second gift we got from The Jefferson School (TJS) would be Atty, the class pet.

Soon after our daughter transitioned from the 5th grade class to the 4th grade class at TJS, I went in for parent-teacher conferences, which was my first time in the 4th grade classroom.

There, in the corner on the floor, was a fetching young lady named Atticus Finch, or Atty, for short.

Atty is a most beautiful and possibly 2-3 year old guinea pig, the (former) class pet.

For me, it was love at first site.

I immediately offered to take her with us over Christmas break, and etc., and the teacher was happy to have us do it, as her dog did not tolerate Atty coming home with her.

So, Atty stayed with us over Christmas, making our Christmas so much sweeter, and I could hardly bear to return her when school began again.

And then…

Coronavirus.

The school asked us if we could keep her during the shut down. Of course, we could.

But what began as, I expected, a few weeks, turned into the entire second half of school. We felt, as a family, that Atty was now a part of our family, and we hoped we would not have to return her.

Finally, a few days before TJS closed. the school told us the happy news that we could keep her.

Our family joke is that I say we have three GPs, and I call them by these names:

Pigness (Atty)

Baby Pigness (Sugar)

and Favorite Pigness (Sophie).

During our time with Atty, Sophie and I have done a lot of research on Guinea pigs. We learned that they are NOT from Guinea. They are from Peru where they live their lives as pets, food, and shamanic healers. They are important and revered, just like Atty (though we will never eat Atty, I do feel that she has provided me with some shamanic healing).

We learned they need vitamin C in everything, so they don’t get scurvy. Though they might like to play pirate, they do not want to be one and die from scurvy! (Or walk the plank!)

We also learned from Sophie, the mole on the inside, that, while in the classroom, Atty was often forced to ride in Lego cars, and the like, by the boys, and generally handled roughly. That she had been donated by a school family who thought better of owning her, and that she was, of course, given away a second time, to us.

There should not be any such thing as class pets, IMHO.

Animals have feelings and fears and loves, and to subject them to long weekends (or even closed weeks, or days with no heat during snow events) is cruel. To buy and commit to an animal and then throw it away, is cruel. To keep an animal as school pet but not take care of its dietary needs, or to allow children to be rough and self-serving with it, is cruel.

Since Atty has come to us one other thing we have learned is that Guinea pigs are very social pack animals, and so we rescued another one, this time from the pet store as our local shelter had none, and Atty is no longer lonely. She shares her home with Sugar. Sugar came to us with a severely infected eye, and it took quite some time, and quarantining from Atty, to get her healthy. And they both now get vitamin C supplements in their treats and water. And there is always hay, so Atty never has to worry about a long weekend with not enough hay and deadly GI stasis. And she never has to worry that she will be alone or cold or hungry or given away ever again.

Atty and Sugar are victims of the pet trade, and we cannot stop the pet trade, but we can insure that two little ladies are living their best lives from now on.