Incomplete story

Thirty-five years ago, Roe v. Wade went the way of "yes, you can."

Thirty-three years and 183 days ago, I was born.

Then some other things happened, and things are never as clear
as you think they are.

The items

These are the lovely genuine (I posit) chemicals that have been behind glass in their little glass phials and such at The Kansas City Museum since the family no one can recall (plaques, unlike plaque, don't stick with me) donated the 1900s soda fountain/drug store to adorn the basement of the Long's Corinthian Hall.

Currently, though in no order I'm making myself privy to, collections staff are removing, cataloging and storing all the stuff that made up exhibits there. A friend showed me a shot of the boxed minstrel puppet, quiet for now and detached from the "press here" that kept him a' janglin' all these years, and I would like to know if he has access to the cyanide, bromine salts, cocaine and other poisons that I find so charming in antique form.

Obviously, it's because I want good photos and catalogs of what they are! The drugstore museum in Liberty's town square has similar items, which are lit better, but that's not the point.

No matter how late

Even when I decide to miss a ride with earlier-than-nine-working spouse and don't get my chilblained face to the office until 9:45, I am still first.

It's about 25ºF, but yesterday, the Walt Bodine Show had on two men who had recently run a marathon in Antarctica, where the headwinds are 35 mph and a temperature I never want to experience.

My 10 block "trek" over patchy ice and still-fluffy snow is nothing special.

Another person showed up…but they do not work here (in that sense)…another, but they are meeting someone who does work here who has not arrived…and then a staff person. The other should be here soon, apparently.

Ah, Friday.

I'm leaving at 3 p.m. anyhow.

You know that we work on weekends, right? And after hours?

Yes, we do.

School is still more fun

Job life has settled into being the normal mode, and so going to class yesterday made me sick to my stomach. I got over being nervous, and I feel I was the only person who laughed at the professor's joke about having 283 e-mails to answer when she had returned from a delightful tech-free fortnight over the holiday break.

Am I wrong to feel more as a peer than a student? I acknowledge she is my mentor, for that's the reason I'm paying $900, but the joy of taking notes in a classroom as opposed to city council conference room or last night's crowded Mutual Musicians Foundation space is quite apparent.

School is still more fun that working, even though it's its own kind of job. Parents were right, school is better than work. I don't like, though, being all lined up closely with other people in desks; I long for the gallery-style rooms of the medical or law school, the wide tables curving around the wired space; there are cord portals and Internet connections through the laminate.

Anyway, I'm an inveterate note-taker anyhow, and it was a skill I developed at my earliest academic stage. It's probably why my shoulders prefer to hunch and that I have to constantly remind myself to sit up properly.

Writing everything down is the only way I can stay awake or pay attention. I wish for a digital recorder sometimes, but then one has to repeat the whole experience to transcribe…although, I suppose there is good software to do this automatically by now. Of course, the advantage is that while listening, I could form judgments more quickly or ponder macro themes. It's always quite useful to be able to stare into the eyes of the speaker and to note the tell-tale non-verbal cues of dishonesty.

This is why I am not in the science part of any college of arts and sciences. I probably should be getting a business degree, but I think that in the next 50 years, both an M.B.A. and an M.A. in art history will be equally obsolete.

I spent $138 on two books, and I am too afraid to fight for free parking, so I spent the equivalent of the KCP&L bill on a parking pass as well. Maybe it will make me go to their gym again? I'm sure I want to be surrounded by people whose bodies are a decade younger.

Damned if you do:

China has taken a series of measures such as cutting export tax rebates and tightening investment criteria to cool an economy that expanded 11.5 percent in the first nine months of 2007 compared with a year earlier.

Damned if you don't:

Upcoming reports are expected to show the [U.S.] economy grew at a feeble pace of just 1.5 percent or less in the final three months of last year and will be weak in the first part of 2008. Consumers, whose spending is indispensable to a healthy economy, are expected to have tightened their belts.

Identity crisis

Oh no. Now I'm a nut.

You Are a "Don't Tread On Me" Libertarian

You distrust the government, are fiercely independent, and don't belong in either party. Religion and politics should never mix, in your opinion... and you feel opressed by both. You don't want the government to cramp your self made style. Or anyone else's for that matter. You're proud to say that you're pro-choice on absolutely everything!

What's Your Political Persuasion?

O.K., so, I may be the closest thing to anarchist a nice girl without punk tendency can, but mostly my neck hurts, my first such injury in memory, the immobilizing result of having slept five hours on a two-cushion couch Tuesday night. I am too old to sleep on a couch for five hours with my vertebrae compressed. I'm too young to sleep only five hours and be satisfied, too.

Here I am wasting cheerspace and earning oldness points by rattling off illness and injury. Pain and suffering are what give variety to the otherwise comfortable process of being alive, after all. It sometimes is useful to share details with others, so that they know what to expect, for example, or what particular aches or signals to pay attention to, cancer-finding facts leading to earlier diagnosis and higher recovery statistics; however, for the most part, it's a slobbery indulgence to spend society time on base survival chat.

The report of snow in the desert city of Baghdad was sweet.

Inspired by a co-worker who expressed the dinner expedient of Gate's barbecue, we got A. Bryant's ribs ourselves, after a short excursion to Historic Northeast. Protein (another example of the fallacy of the "'i' before 'e' except after 'c'" rule) is good for those of us with damaged soft tissue.

I'm saying "A. Bryant's" because they put the ribs in a box. I miss the unpretentious and quite adequate brown waxed paper! Sure, the Wonder Bread was a bit less squished up, but the cardboard and big plastic bag were totally unnecessary; I had only been there a short time ago, on one of my last trips in my Camry, so I guess they went ahead and "lemme lemme upgrade" for 2008.

The 196,500 car is still in front of our house, naked of its license plates, because the tow company working it in for Vehicles for Charity was lame and didn't come out in the rain yesterday, I'll presume.

For the beneficiary, I chose KKFI, of course, because I'm a big, fat "Don't tread on me Libertarian," don't you know.

Sunday

Trash piles on Troost

Corinthian Hall on Gladstone Boulevard
It's fun to have a vehicle again from which to photograph my favorite things. And, The Kansas City Museum building is busy, but the yard and the other parts of the site are still quite open; go darken their doorstep with your own shadow today.

Why whine

Or, let's question vino.

Somehow (blame Yahoo News), I got swept into reading about The Master Cleanse fasting program. If doctors can't even agree on how the intestines work, how would we ever know if it's a good idea or not to eat food A, food B, etc.? How do we know that the gunk coming out is ages-old mucus and not just some weird form of dead red blood cells looking funky without their usual fiberbulk moving them out of the body?

I think the inclusion of Pottenger's cats is specious, since, duh, cats were designed to eat raw meat in the first place. Don't confound species! Perhaps homo sapiens shouldn't be cooking anything either, but on a day like today, when fingers are purple and toes are white, noses red and inner thoughts grey, the fact of apple and cashew do not warm.

How can raw foods people never eat wine and cheese?

Last year

I wonder if the windows did not do in another avian. This may prove to be as bad as the IBM building on Grand. It was disturbing to see this perfectly-folded pigeon on one of the backyard's concrete slabs just a few days after we had moved in. I was showing the place to a curious friend who once told me houses could consume one.
I had to bury the bird, of course, and took a ton of photos of the process, all of which got caught up into the slide show my extended family saw on pre-pre-Christmas eve. I'm just never prepared for such things.
This is not the expected Happy New Year, but see how well the foot color corresponds to that of the breast-feathers.

This is not a joke!

You are the 1xxth visitor!

Believe it or not (and I know you must), there are e-mail recipients who will take "today" or "yesterday" at face/current value, despite no actual dateline.

I hate spam.  It's a shame the word for e-junk mail is identical (but Scrabble-allowed) to that of a canned WWII hamish product that occupies a fond place in my pre- and in-adolescence.

My brother, an architect and employed more financially-gainfully than I, once made stamped jewelry of Spam cans.  Laura Beemer makes money all over the country making jewelry out of pop lids.

Yes, such is the dross, to use a word from a writer I've just encountered and whose work I find difficult for its inspecificity and poor rhetoric*, though I enjoy art or functionals made of reused materials.  We are so wasteful.

2008, year of the waste.  Of the waist?  Of the oasis?  The aphids?  The AFIS?  The A-list is all I ask for (or, for the G.N.'s, all for which I ask, which sounds stupid).  I want good writers, plain and simple.  No one wants to read B.S.

*You'll allow me the use of a non-word such as inspecificity, won't you, as my recently-retired best-professor of English once said, "you have to know the rules to break them."  I wish I had learned more languages than English as a child.  Sigh.  We have so much capacity and then it gets sucked up into the biology of latency that is synonymous with aging, and we end up spending New Year's Eve playing Wii for hours on end (and eating too much; ugh, why do all holidays make us gain weight?  It is, my guess, that holidays used to represent ritually-enforced indulgent eating, when we used to walk or hoe or hunt all day; now, they are not necessary, as dentists so completely have become.)

This is my usual hour for being awake.  I wonder what it truly suits me for.  (I wonder for what it truly suits me, bleh!)

Then, when I'm supposed to be working:  [guess].

It's like being an insect or even a domesticated pet.  You have these desires and personal rhythms and you fly about and hope to avoid chance encounters with chemicals of death or you shed indoors and meow plaintively and without reasons even the highest primates can discern.

And yet you have to keep playing along with the dominant social group.  They seem to like commuting and being engaged in others' business from sunrise until after sunset, five-sevenths of the time.