My First 100 Days in Office

The white boy with the funny name has been back in Philadelphia for 100 days. That would be me, in the Blue House with my own round-table office at my new address in Pennsylvania.


I would rate my performance so far an A-, taking into account that I had inherited some of the world's largest problems, including my father's property a continent away, my step-father's 7-year-old laptop that was on its last legs, my mother's concern for my financial security and health care, and an uncanny ability to dream in broken Danish every single night since the inauguration. Last night, for example, I dreamt that H&M was out of the socks and t-shirts I was looking for, but instead I found a Danish phrase book for €24 that I could hardly afford but bought anyway.



Hope and hard work are what's stimulating my economy for now: I clean house (for a friend); I balance the books (for a dance company); I cut hair (illegally); I make wedding invitations (to save the institution of heterosexual marriage); and I'm reinvesting my real estate in order to clear my accumlulated deficit (including a new MacBook) and provide myself with practical educational opportunities.


[goldensilhouette.etsy.com]

I've drawn up an ambitious budget -- my own blueprint for the future: it includes investing in health care, education, transportation infracstructure (new lights for my bike!), alternative energy, and dinner. It also includes hamstering incandescent light bulbs before they become outlawed and replaced by those awful blue-spectrum, mercury-filled, unsightly hoax invented by the lighting industry. There might also be a puppy on the horizon, somewhere.


[I'm partial to Wheatens, hypoallergenic and all]

When my days in my home-office get especially rough, Michele stops by for a snack and a chat about Battlestar Galactica or the Rachel Maddow Show. That is, Michele, the dancer. We sometimes take ballet together, too, or spend some time on the Rittenhouse lawn.



Currently, I am meeting with heads of the family on a state visit to Europe and the Middle East, specifically to celebrate two parental round birthdays and to make peace with the people of Israel. All the while, I am reflecting on our tumultuous times, and will say with confidence: It ain't over.


[John McCain is a cylon]

Susan Boyle's Sacrifice

It seems that within minutes, the world got to know this face. The BBC claims YouTube videos featuring Susan Boyle, the quintessential Ugly Duckling du jour performing a musical number on Britain's Got Talent, have reached 50 million views. Facebook was and still is abuzz with commentary, most of it in the category of "I weep every time I see this video."

Here's a link, in case you've been hiding in a bomb shelter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nox2DRCAKxk&feature=bz303

Granted, the deeply archetypal stories of the frog turning into the prince and the ugly duckling growing up to become a beautiful swan are compelling. Don't judge the book by it's cover, or whatever. Something about no matter how mediocre, ostracized, unpopular, unsophisticated, or different-looking you are, there might be a pearl lurking in the oyster, a diamond in the rough.

I did not weep, cry, gasp, or feel tingles down my spine when I saw Susan Boyle sing. Rather, I became afraid for her, sacrificing her beauty so that we can redeem our collective insecurities about our own hyper-mediated body image and expectations of success. Within 5 minutes, we have placed onto this unsuspecting woman the burden of having to carry our collective guilt about doubting her in the first place, while constructing her starry-eyed success story for her, from beginning to end. We will make her win, make her famous, turn her life upside down, suck the life out of her spirit, use her up, and spit her out -- just so we can feel self-righteous and say "Look, I totally respect and believe in this ugly person. She's, like, such an inspiration to me. She's truly following her dream!"

Except that she's following someone else's dream of success. Except that we'll only feel inspired if we can simultaneously preserve her position of power -- down there, on a pedestal. We will like her as long as we know we're younger and/or more beautiful and/or more sophisticated and/or more all-knowing -- and as long as we have the power to cast our vote on her destiny, quite literally on this television competition.

Would we love Susan Boyle if she wasn't so awkward and backward-looking? Nope. Which is evidence enough that we are not actually considering her full humanity, that she's facing the real danger of having her self-esteem built up for her by her hysterical and complex-ladden audience only to find that she's being carried off on a hot air balloon slowly drifting into oblivion.

May you, Miss Boyle, harness the true power of transformation that is carefully concealed in this experience. I wish nothing less for you. (Hint: Your audience won't give it to you, other than in the form of bait.)

East Coast Bloom

If you live in the northern hemisphere, you may have noticed that spring is in full gear (at least I hope it is where you are, even in Canada and Finland). I have demonstrated my fascination with buds on this blog before. But now we're on to blossoms. Jerusalem might have blossoming date trees, olive trees, almond trees, and various and sundry other palms. Here on the Mid-Atlantic East Coast, the cherry blossoms have just passed their prime, as well as the magnolias, here shown in full bloom last week in Philadelphia:



This is not me smelling the popping buds, but they do smell really good. And here the vaginal close-up:





Tulips are now in bloom in Washington, where patches of neat rows of them grace city parks and suburban gardens. Out in the Virginia suburbs I also found this tree in bloom today (dogwood?)...



Ever so slowly, these colorful blossoms are being replaced by the juicy, fresh green of spring leaves, each tree, it seems, at its own pace as we head into the lush months of summer...

Goats On Ponies!

My friend Jonathan is a teacher. Last year, he got the coolest teaching job ever (at least to write home about): He teaches circus performers' kids in a one-room school house, all ages, all subjects. He has a room on the circus train, on which he has been traveling across the continent, becoming part of the Ringling circus family and getting to know the train yards of our country all too well.

And that is how I got hooked up with tickets to the show today. I took my aunt for a special birthday treat. I had two favorite parts:

1. Seven motorcyclists in this 5-meter sphere, going around at crazy speeds -- heartstopping.


2. Three goats riding their own ponies. Nothing can compare.


3. And of course, the elephants. Classic.



Thank you, Jonathan!

Doggie Park Sociologist

During my recent stint as a dogsitter, I made the following observations in the doggie park:



a) When dogs of all sizes, colors, temperaments, and levels of drool production congregate -- often 15+ at doggie park rush hour -- I can't stop laughing at who's humping whom, who's actually running after the slobbery tennis ball (human or animal), how it is possible that the pitbull slobbers all over the prissiest puggle-owner's coat, ... Dogs are just funny together.

And b) the social interactions between dog owners, some -- like me -- awkwardly standing by the sidelines laughing at the four-leggeds, others engaging in small talk that inevitably starts with "Oh, how old is your dog?" -- is ground zero for rich empirical study. There's the constant sizing up of each other's dog training skills -- how many minus points do i get when my little shitsu leaves a pawmark on the labradoodle's lady-owner's freshly washes jeans because he's so excited to see her? And the gauging of the precise moment of when it is obligatory to start a conversation with another dog-owner, once the dogs have been smelling each other's bits and butts for a while. Do you make eye contact with the human or just stare at their dog while you're starting this conversation? Do you tell the owners of large dogs that keeping them in the city is cruelty to animals, or do you just let it slide?

I guess, I opt to simply look around at the budding trees, like these magnolias that just popped:



Plants are so much less complicated.

Meine Führer

Together for the first time, each represents his and her people well: He, calmly passionate, rhetorically charismatic, necessarily humble, casually multiracial, able to get away with giving the Queen of England an iPod; She, spectacularly plain, secularly conservative, unmysteriously opaque, defiantly relaxed, able to hold her own in a world of bullies.

So American -- So German.

Here's to bridging the Great Cultural Divide, meine Führer!