Love and pain

Today’s pandemic-elections earworm is removed from “these challenging times” and harkens back to the eternal pain of…love. 

“Plaisir d’amour” is an 18^th-Century song by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. I’ve loved it since I first heard Nana Mouskouri sing it back in the last century. The refrain is often translated as “the pleasure of love lasts but a night; the pain of love lasts a lifetime.” But “chagrin” is not exactly pain—it’s regret, it’s humiliation, it’s wish-you-were-dead.

One of the weirdest instances I’ve ever seen for its performance was a scene in the “The Breaking Point” episode of Band of Brothers. Easy Company of the 101^st Airborne is taking respite during the Battle of the Bulge in a convent orphanage in Foy, Belgium, and one of the nuns is leading the girls’ choir in singing it. The likelihood that a convent choir of young girls would sing about the humiliation of romantic love to a few score female-starved GIs is as close to zero as dammit, but they made a nice background sound.

Anyway, here I’m giving you Cecelia Bartoli singing it.

 

ETTD

Lordy, that shitshow on Tuesday was just beyond the beyond. I am so very glad I did not watch it; just getting clips on Twitter yesterday was painful. 

A colleague of mine did watch it, and my heart goes out to him. “I knew it would be bad,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

And there you have this entire administration and its Repug enablers.

 

 

Respite

On the morning after the first presidential debate of this lunatic-year election, I’m not even going there. I’m giving you pix of beautiful nature.

 

 

Bureaucratic polka

Welp, I was hoping that by the time you read this, I’d be street legal, but that Virginia DMV has up its butt is truly wide and deep. Seems that it’s not enough that the name on my California driver’s license and my passport and my Social Security Card should match; the name on my utility bills have to match as well. 

So here’s my yesterday:

Drive a bazillion miles to Shirlington (including paying frickin’ tolls), get in front of a DMV employee and be told that if I want to go home, find some other utility bills that match within an hour, they’ll graciously condescend to allow me back into their appointment-only facility.

(I looked at her and said, “You want me to get Comcast to change my name in their bill in an hour?” All my bills, my mortgage, everything is under the name I’ve been using—and paying taxes under in seven states—for bleedin’ ever.)

Drive a bazillion miles home, realize that I left my tote bag at the counter. My tote bag with my mobile phone. And a book on (wait for it) mindfulness.

Drive a bazilion miles back, get the bag, drive a bazillion miles home and hop on a standup call where I learn that every single time ENG “fix” a problem with the product, they break something else.

Scour the Virginia DMV site for next available appointments and discover that the earliest out there are late December. Across seven or eight DMV locations, which I had to search separately.

(TBF, tho, the DMV both rang me and emailed me to tell me they’d found my bag. Of course, there’s no number for any DMV office where you can ring them. Just that one never-answered number in Richmond.)

So, I’ve got nearly three more months of having to look over my shoulder every time I go two miles over the speed limit. And I have go to the county election place next week to register to vote. That was my whole rationale for getting the license here at all. I am not going through this election without voting.

 

Gratitude Monday: Everyday special

Shortly after I moved to the environs of The District They Call Columbia for the first time (sheesh—more than 25 years ago!), my friend Suzi in the Research Triangle area sent me four cut-crystal glasses. She described going into Belk—one of the snootier department stores in the South, and picking out the stemware, referring to them as wine glasses.

The sales woman (whom I can well picture as having carefully-arranged greying hair, a tailored suit and tasteful jewelry) admonished her.

 No, deah, these ah watah goblets.”

Suzi—originally from New Jersey, and preferring beer to wine—replied, “No, [Bas Bleu] really likes her wine.”

The woman sniffed, but a sale’s a sale.

They’re absolutely gorgeous, and for a long time I was reluctant to use them except for special occasions. Only no occasion was ever special enough. So I’ve finally pulled them off the high shelf and have been using them for everyday.

Turns out they make the ordinary occasion special. And I’m grateful for that.