Obsidian Wings

Why I am where I am

by liberal japonicus

This is not the post I've been working on, but Michael Cain's comment in the last post sets me off on a train of thought. Might not have been the one he was on, but anyway. Below the break cause there is a video down there.

Any excuse for a party?

by JanieM

Recent topic of conversation: various generations of my family and their love of Lego. My sister said my niece had had “pink Lego” as a child, and that her (my niece’s) five-year-old son plays with them now, among many other Lego sets that he owns.

The mention of “pink” for girls led me to observe that when my own kids were born, I was bemused (okay, dismayed) to realize that the world, or at least US popular culture, had not moved an inch in a direction I would have considered forward, and was still obsessed with pink baby clothes for girls and blue for boys.

The fact that large swaths of US popular culture have, yet another generation later, moved not only not forward, but quite a bit backward, is signaled by the fact even the death toll from explosions at gender reveal parties hasn’t convinced people that gender reveal parties are the most idiotic idea since square wheels.

Actually, it’s even worse than I thought when I set out to write this frivolity. I had remembered reading about a death from shrapnel at a gender reveal party fairly recently, but Newsweek says there have been four deaths at these shindigs just this year.

The New World

by JanieM

In all kinds of ways, this year hasn’t been as hard for me as it has been for a lot of people. Unlike more than three million people worldwide, including almost 600,000 Americans, I’m still alive. I never got COVID-19. No one close to me got it either – everyone I know has been very, very careful, even the ones who have had to be out in the world more or less as usual.

I’m retired, so I didn’t lose my job. My son has done most of my grocery shopping, for which I’m profoundly grateful. I’m an introvert bordering on hermitdom at the best of times, so the isolation hasn’t been as hard on me as it has been for people who thrive on socializing.

Starting late last March, I made sure to get in the car and take a drive out into the countryside every week or so. I watched spring turn into summer, summer into fall into winter, and here we are again: it’s spring, and we’re in the middle of another wave of COVID infections. In a few days it will be a year since my mom died, and we still haven’t been able to gather to mourn and remember her together.