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.

 

 

In for nasty weather

I still have not figured out why Cadet Bonespurs’ campaign team has chosen to bracket his super-spreader Nazi rallies with two songs you’d think they’d want to steer clear of. Do his goobers not understand the subtext of The Village People’s “YMCA” or John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son”?

Actually—it’s not even subtext. “It’s fun to stay at the YMCA” against a driving beat? “I ain’t no Senator’s son”? I mean, we’re practically at the sock puppet level.

Well, I’m not giving either of those to you for my Friday earworm today. Instead, we’ll have Fogerty’s “Bad Moon Rising”. Because it certainly feels like that.

Convenience food

Oh, dear—Trader Joe’s has bake-yourself croissants. You pull one out of the freezer, let it proof overnight and bake in the morning.

Start/finish:

Just before baking (it puffs up a little more in the oven): 

They come in chocolate and almond (currently, the People’s Republic store is out of the latter). They also have mini-croissants, which you pop straight into the oven from the freezer. 

They’re actually very, very good.

With my new freezer, I can really stock up.

Oh, dear.

 

 

White goods

 I’m not sure it’s the pandemic, but…

Yeah, it’s the pandemic. Starting in May, what with all the baking I’ve been doing, along with what a pain grocery shopping has become, I started looking for a real freezer to replace the 3 cubic foot one I’ve been using for the past two years.

Turns out that all of America was also looking for freezers, and there were none to be had. (Remember—factories shut down?) Finally, after two months of calling a local appliance shop every couple of weeks, I ordered a 17 cubic foot upright, paid my money and got put on The List.

It came in two weeks ago, and last Friday it was finally delivered.

 

(Back around April, I was chatting with a friend about all the baking I was doing, and how I had no place to put it all. She made me promise to call her before I bought a chest freezer. Well, in fairness, this is not a chest freezer, so when I sent her these pix she called me a survivalist. Whatevs.)

It’s excessive, I know, but I feel so much more secure now that I have frozen Lebensraum. This week I’m going to Costco to stock up on butter, crab cakes and pot pies. I’m also getting electricians in to split my single kitchen circuit into two. I’ve already blown the one a couple of times (microwave, mini-freezer, toaster oven, refrigerator, wine fridge all drawing juice when I turned on the George Foreman Grill; didn’t even have the dishwasher running), and I do not fancy the prospect of 17 cubic feet of crab cakes and butter going bad.

What can I say: 2020, man.

 

 

 

Wanted?

 The very instant I saw “You wanted this” on this envelope, I knew I didn’t.

 

I was right.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Righteous one

It is somewhat difficult today to haul up gratitude, given not only the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, but also the probability that the Kleptocrat and his Repugnant senatorial lackeys will jam through the confirmation of some Kavanagh-level troglodyte ideologue to replace her. 

I mean—I have no words to express my sadness, fear and rage.

So what I’ll focus on Ginsburg’s grace and courage, her meticulous arguments as an attorney and her sharp questioning of lawyers as a Justice. Her 27 years on the Court were preceded by an impressive career as an advocate against gender discrimination. So many people—women and men alike—owe her a debt of gratitude for the work she did for decades. She personified the term “public service”.

As far as I’m concerned, she is indeed a Tzadik, and her memory is a blessing.