Pimpgnosis

For instance:

What might one say to the woman who chose not to place her child, for adoption, with you?

Is there anything to be said, really?

I am failing at the effort to come up with things.  Not even polite things, just things.

Like: “How did you find that book you bought, when we still thought we had something in common, namely your then-unborn child?”

“Did you really like my marmalade?  Or were just flattering me?”

“Who convinced you to keep the kid?  Your pastor?  Your dad?  The baby’s father?”

These are not things I need to know.  Nor even, in the last analysis, are they things about which I will, or did, ever care very much.

What about this: what might one say if one were ever introduced to the child one did not adopt?

More specifically, what might one say to a child whose recovering mother decided, quite specifically, to keep him?

Not that I am saying I could have given a better life for such a child.  I cannot make such a judgment, much less such a statement.  I cannot, having seen the 2nd-floor cold-water flat walkup in a dying industrial northeast town in which that child will be raised, and ever think to compare it with the 3000 s.f. single-family home in a rising western city, with attendant vacation properties in Tahoe and the Cascades, not to mention 120 acres of vineyards on spec to be planted in pinot noir and eiswein, in which I live and plan to raise my child(ren).

No.  I cannot, and will not make such a comparison.

Nor is it profitable to imagine the kind of conversation one might have with such a person.

What word exists to supply the precise nature of the relationship between oneself and such a potential child?

It’s a funny thing, right?  We create words to describe relationships that involve claims (legal or social) to property and income, whether present or future indicative.

We have no words that describe relationships in the past subjunctive (the child I might have adopted, had his mother seen fit to give him up).

We have no words to describe even the charitable instinct that might arise from such a subjunctive relationship.

Just as have no words to describe the relationship between me and my half-brother’s half-sister.  Who shot herself this weekend.

Yeah.

There are things I absofuckinglutely do not need to think about at the moment.

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I just received a review on an article I submitted.  I can’t give too many details, but I will say this:

a.) If you cite yourself three times in your review of my article, you are a whore.

b.) If you cite yourself three times in your review of my article, and that citation is for the same article every time, and that article is 20 years old, you are a tired, old whore.

c.) If you manage to have the second reviewer say exactly the same things you did, only cite your textbook instead of your 20 year old article, you are a tired, old whore who’s looking for a threesome.

d.) If your suggestions are, with one possible exception, entirely dedicated toward changing the question I asked and requiring that I do something completely different from what I actually did, then you are a tired old whore who’s looking for a threesome with someone of a different orientation.

Or, to put it more simply: take your review and shove it up your ass, bitchez.

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It turns out that “Killer Joe” is just a bit much for me.

Oh well. Maybe this is what it means to be on the downslope headed toward 40.

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What well-known Protestant hymn begins Metropolitan?

What sorta-well-known dance turn begins Strictly Ballroom?

Extra credit: what well-known Protestant hymn ends Last Days of Disco?

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Which is worse*?

Reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s daily coverage of Nadia Lockyer’s meltdown?**  Or

Reading the Gray Lady’s daily coverage of the George Zimmerman trial?

Actually, the answer is “none of the above,” since the Washington Post has decided to showcase a whole roll of soft-core porn.

*By “worse” I mean “likely to give you a social disease,” or, which amounts to the same, “likely to result in spending significant amounts of time in Purgatory.”

**Full disclosure: I am related to someone who might, or might not, have worked for Mr. Lockyer.

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Daniel Santorum could be my doppleganger.

No, really. Check it out

It’s like looking at a younger, more constipated, Republican mini-me.

*shudder*

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That San Jose has absofuckinglutely fuck-all to do in downtown.

And so I am driven to the extreme of either (a) coding data, or (b) flirting with straight women, of a Saturday evening.

In case you were wondering, I chose option (a): coding data.

I am not, after all, a sadist.

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When straight women flirt with me.

At the happy hour, of a conference.

When I’m wearing my wedding ring.

In front of others.

I mean, it’s kind of obvious, right?  Right?

This is, as it turns out, enough to get me to turn beet red.  Or at least as red as a gingham check shirt.  Which one member of the (ahem) audience was so kind as to point out.

Is it being 37?  Or being reasonably well put-together?  Or the wedding ring?

I seriously do not understand this.  Nor, for the record, do I enjoy being pulled into games the stakes of which I sincerely believe are quite a bit higher than I am prepared to meet.

Just….sayin’.

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I was in the check-out stand of my local grocery store the other evening, when I ran into the coach of the football team of my high school.

Ponder that statement for a moment.  That is not something that everyone could say.  Not people that went to Bedford-Stuyvesant.  Not people that went to Collegiate.  And not, I would submit, people that went to Lowell.  But, as it happens, people that went to my particular high school.

Da Coach, as we shall call him, looked as one would expect, 20 years on from coaching the single most spectacularly unscuccessful team in district history.

Puffy.

Perhaps even a smidge over-weight.

Clutching a mid-range bottle of red wine.  Of indifferent label.

For which we he paid, not with a Benjamin, but with a Grant.

Blue-tooled.

Question: which of the preceding five statements qualifies as excessively bitchy?

Just curious.

Anywho.  After approximately 5 minutes of conversation spent establishing that we had essentially nothing in common except certain mutual acquaintances who fail to maintain their blogs (and so I cannot include hotlinks!), my former student government advisor let fly — in the checkout line of a large grocery store in a not-ignorable neighborhood of a not-large town — that the current mayor of our fair city is “a wierdo,”  ”an asshole,” and most specifically “a pedophile.”

In public.

Out loud.

In the check-out line of the Safeway on Alhambra in East Sac, Mr. Coach-man called Mr. Mayor-man a pedophile.

If one’s former employees are willing to use such language, what are we to expect from one’s political enemies?

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I had a very…revealing conversation with a colleague today.

It involved a discussion of the word “manipulation.”

As in, what “manipulating the data” may or may not — or rather, should or should not — mean, in a research project.

More specifically, it involved a discussion of the meeting at which Grima Wormtongue apparently told certain persons that is was their job to manipulate the data, because research was about finding data to support conclusions already known to be true.

Yeah.

Just….yeah.

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