Here We Go Again

I thought we were past this, but it's raised it's giant head of stupidity again. I was asked "Why do all the new buildings look like mosques?"
Well, there is actually a good answer to that, and it's "Because y'all have mosques on the brain!" You go for decades without seeing a mosque, suddenly parts of the world where these buildings are prevalent are relentlessly in the news, and when you drive down the street, you see something new that doesn't look like a box with a storefront so you immediately connect it with these other "foreign" objects.
Here's a quiz for y'all. Mosque or Not-Mosque?

1.
2.

3.4.

5.

Answers are below. How'd you do?

Gobsmacked

The group was gobsmacked. They had been working on the project for two weeks and it was almost finished. And Farhad had asked to be moved to another group.
"Why?" asked Bev, because she was always the one who had no governor on her mouth and said the first thing that came into her head - the things that other people wanted to say but couldn't.
Farhad raised his head but did not look any of them in the eye. He looked to his side, as if someone was there to give him support. "My father says I cannot be in this group."
Eve became very still. Her eyes searched Farhad, but he wasn't looking at her either.
"But why, why does he say that?" Bev slogged on, crashing all social barriers as she went.
Farhad looked pained. He looked as if he were barely keeping his face from crumbling. His wide brown eyes became even wider and his forehead seemed to be performing some minimalist gymnastics feat.
"Why this group but not another?" Bev continued, and Tony shook his head at her. She glared back at him. "I want to know. I bet everyone wants to know." She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest. "But I'm the only one with the nerve to ask. Why, Farhad?" And she was about to go on when Eve made a hesitant noise that was more a gasp than a throat-clearing.
"It's me, Bev."
All eyes immediately went to her. Eve's arms hung like wooden forks. She didn't dare move for fear she would start shaking. With everyone's eyes elsewhere, Farhad relaxed too soon. The group's eyes shot straight back to him like spectators in a tennis match. Now he looked hunted.
"You ... you mean you two - " Tony began.
"No!" Farhad said, too emphatically. He grimaced and tried his adult voice again. "No, no, it's not like that - "
"We're not - " Eve interrupted.
Net ball.
The group began to breathe. Then Caleb stuttered, "Because she's J-jewish?"
Farhad could not answer him.
"That's just - that's ... silly," said Tiff.
"You don't understand," Farhad began, wanting to defend his father even though he was angry with him. "He is my father. I respect his decisions even if - "
"They're stupid?" Bev added, again with no governor on her mouth.
"No, even if I do not agree. It is called respect."
Tiff shook her head, "Farhad, that's medieval!"
"No, it's not," said Caleb. Then he blushed when they all looked at him. "There's lots I'd like to do but my parents won't let me. They do it for my own good," he added, echoing something he had heard many times.
"Like what?" Bev's inquiring mind never stopped.
"This isn't what group projects are about," groused Tiff. "We're supposed to learn to work together. If it's not sex," and here Farhad looked shellshocked, "I don't see the problem."
Another polite, if strangled cough, came from Eve. "I do." She flapped her wooden arms aimlessly. "My parents ... my parents told me to find another group, too." Farhad's head jerked up.
"What did you tell them?" Tony blurted out.
Eve wriggled a bit under the stares. "I lied." Plucking up some courage she continued. "I told them I was in Anna's group now."
"Great," said Bev, grasping the positive, "problem solved. Farhad, just tell your dad you switched groups and stick with us."
But Tiff was still working on the previous thread. "Let me get this straight - Your parents wanted you out of this group, why? Because of Farhad? Because he's Iranian?"
Eve glared at her. "My uncle is in Iraq, remember." Then she caved. "But, yes. That was it. Farhad's Iranian, he's a Moslem. They say he - " and she stopped. She couldn't bring herself to express it.
"I can't, Bev," Farhad said, breaking the silence. "I have to do what my father tells me to do. I'm not like you. The truth isn't something that's ... " he gestured with his hands trying to find the word, "that's elastic." It came easier now. "I respect my father because he is my father. I also respect you, and I respect Eve. Most importantly, I respect myself."
Eve's face attempted a smile. "So do I. I was angry with my parents and my first thoughts were to defy them. What they wanted me to do wasn't right. Farhad isn't - Farhad is a good student and he brings a lot to this project. We had a chance of getting a really good grade on this." She blushed. "Not that it's all about grades. It was just wrong to label him. And they wouldn't listen to me." She sniffed and started rolling her eyes around. Tears were forming. "It would have been embarrassing to ask Mr. Lynch to move me to another group. I couldn't explain it, I couldn't tell him why." She fixed her eyes on Farhad. "What did you say? What did you tell Lynch?"
Farhad lowered his eyes. "I said that for personal reasons I wanted to be moved to another group."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing. He just looked at me for a long while and then said yes."
Tiff huffed. "He knows."
Caleb agreed. "You bet he knows," said Tony.
Eve nodded. She sniffed again. "Farhad, I'm - "
"It's okay," he said quickly. "I too am sorry. I liked this group. Maybe not at first," he admitted. "But if things were different ..." And he walked away.
Tony shook his head. "He's just ... " but he had no words.
Tiff repeated her "Just medieval, man!" She turned to Eve. "You did the right thing."
"Did I?" Eve said.
Caleb sighed. "Maybe the right thing but the wrong way."
Tiff looked at Caleb in a sidelong way. "What about you, Caleb? How did your parents feel about you being in the same project as Farhad?"
Caleb started at the question and looked at the others. They knew he had lobbied long and hard to go to public school after being homeschooled most of his life. "Yes, well, about that," he began and then faltered.
"Yes?" prompted Tiff.
"Actually, I didn't tell them."

"I'm a Prat and I'm Proud"

There is a person (for lack of a better term) running for Congress in my area who is proud of having invented a new term of abuse and puts it on his campaign mailers as one of his achievements. That this term, when critically dissected, has no intrinsic pejorative connotations, or any more than say, the words "bunny" (so cute!) and "jungle" (connoting luxuriant growth) do when separate, is immaterial. Most people are not familiar with Hedonism and, if they look it up quickly, will equate it with debauchery. Besides, it sounds like "heathenism"! So they will see the terms "secular" (omigosh, that sounds like "sexual"!) and "hedonism" together and picture scandalous orgies, people with no morals (because many seem to believe you can't be moral without a belief in some god) revelling in lascivious wassails instead of living with an ethical code based on rationality ... and revelling in lascivious wassails.
As a Secular Humanist (because there are Humanists who also follow the religion of their choice), I am insulted by this. I don't think that this represents my lifestyle (based on my personal Hippocratic Oath of "First, Do No Harm.") and it hurts my feelings to have my way of life mislabeled and ridiculed in this fashion. My first inclination is to, of course, turn the other cheek. I dunno, heard that somewhere. Recently, though, I have learned that stigmatizing people (say, by giving them an epithet not of their own choosing) is the easiest method of creating solidarity within a group.
This person wants to improve the cohesiveness of his target group by creating a sense of disgust in that group for another group. Now, I know that too many crazy people try to demonize behavior like that by linking it to Nazi Germany, but that is precisely how the Nazis manipulated people. There are more positive ways to rally your troops, but the easiest way is this way: create a scapegoat. Blame them for all the problems. I'm not saying this is the eventual intent of this person. I'm not saying he pictures a Final Solution for all non-Christians. He just wants to get elected. I'm sure he thinks that when he is elected, he will be working for all of his constituents to improve their lives and that his god is behind him 1000%. He means no one any harm, he just thinks he invented something clever.
Let me put this question to him: if that clever epithet was a new one to describe African Americans, Native Americans, North Koreans, Jews, Muslims, investment bankers, or welfare recipients, would he have put it on his campaign literature? "This country is under threat from 'Kimchi Jong-Illers' - a term I invented." Not that he would have to worry about that voter segment in this population, but how would that look?
While it is now too late to take it back, I appeal to this person's profession of Christianity (which is all over his campaign mailer) and his better judgment to drop this name-calling of a segment of his constituency. It is beneath him. And, while it might be efficacious, it's denigrating and hateful and has made him look like a prat.

Now I Lay Me Down

My sister used to enjoy making fun of how prudish I was. My nieces and their children look on me as some prim and proper creature who likes to turn film canisters into rockets but is otherwise dull. If I swear, my friends burst into fits of giggles. Avatars have given up hitting on me in Second Life (not that I'm complaining). How did I get here?

But is there anything wrong with being prudish at 13? Is it possible that their mother's stream of scorchingly blue vocabulary just made my limited use of "Aw, shit!" seem like no swearing at all to my nieces? Do I really swear that infrequently? I don't have a problem with swearing. Just today my husband and I were imagining David Sedaris's brother Paul as a spokesman for some product or another and both of us went through a conjugation of "mother-fuck" worthy of Carlos Fuentes. We chuckled at ourselves, not out of any kind of embarrassment or shock, but just at the juxtaposition of Paul (a person we don't know at all but seem to think we do) and, say, Aunt Ruby's Peanuts.

Okay, my first year of college, I have to admit that I consciously taught myself to say "Shit!" by repeating it over and over in the car on my way to class. And my sister's language did used to make me cringe. When she was dying, and her husband was playing the stereo too loud (or perhaps just the wrong music - she'd taken an unreasonable dislike to Leon Redbone years before), she raised her head up enough to tell me to go "Tell him to fucking turn that shit off!" I think my version of it was something in a hushed voice to the effect of, "She respectfully requests you turn the music down."

And I really do say, "Oh, sugar!" - but because I think it's funny.

I look back now and wonder why I should be the anomaly when I hardly recall our parents swearing. I could get into deep doo-doo for saying someone "crapped out," if my dad hadn't pointed out that it was a perfectly respectable gambling term. When I was eight or nine I clearly remember my mother starting to say "damn" and trying to turn it into "darn" and coming out with strange dipthong that sounded like "Darren." Sewing could even make her hurl out a very unusual "Hot damn!" which was worse, she informed me, than a regular "damn." I don't recall my dad swearing or even raising his voice. During their worst arguments, no matter how shrill my mother got, he remained calm and reasonable, and, boy! did that piss her off! The most I ever heard him say to her was, "Now, Ruth ..." Something like that would send her spinning out of control and lead to her calling him a "Buster" as in, "Look here, Buster! If you think ..."

So, as a young person, I had to resort to being whiny. I had no good vocabulary! I would stretch my sister's ordinarily monosyllabic name into three or four syllables and run it through my sinus passages. And she would call me names. She called me "The Modest Maiden." "You take that back! Mo-o-ommmmm!" I was also some kind of "virgin" as well, but I don't remember the adjective. This was because I liked to have the door closed when I was on the toilet. Silly me. What was that all about? To keep her from coming in, I started locking the bathroom door. It seemed as if she was always wanting to brush her hair when I was in the bathroom. Couldn't she keep a comb in her room? What was that dresser and mirror for? Geyahhhhd, Ayeeeunnn! It turns out she was just part cat. I can't go to the bathroom without a cat being upset if the door is closed.

Is this reaction so unusual? Am I the only person in the world who closes the bathroom door? I was in my family. I was also the only one who didn't scamper naked through the house. When we moved to the beach, we would shower off the salt and sand before entering the house after a swim. My dad would actually totally strip outside. At least my mom shed her suit in the laundry room. I often wondered how the neighbors felt about some seventy-year-old retiree rinsing his less-than beefcake form in the side yard. No one ever said anything to me.

How did I get this way?

The first year we went away for the summer vacation (always the same last two weeks is July like all IBMers and their vendors) without my sister, she went crazy. She had a week-long party. The nosy neighbor next door pumped her for information about it; she was sure there was an orgy going on. There was definitely a great deal of drinking, but that wasn't so unusual because drinking went on all the time in my family. My sister's friends came over and spent the night - and another night, and another and another ... We had three bedrooms in the house and they were all occupied. My sister told me that one of her friend's period started on my bed and that was the least of it.

Later on I went into my room and looked at my twin bed. It creeped me out that it had led a more interesting life than I had. I felt it had betrayed me somehow. How could I sleep on it again? My sister had thought it was a big joke: people having sex on her little sister's bed. I was disturbed, but not at her, which was the weird thing. I was upset with the bed. It didn't last long, though. You can only stay up watch television so long. Eventually, you have to go to bed.

I spent most of my life living down my sister's behavior. She wasn't a scholar, so I had to do well at school. This was something that was easier to achieve when she finally moved out of the house. She never did what she was told, so I was quick to obey. Her language made stevedores cringe; I spoke four languages (three of them badly). She had wild, unprotected sex, had children outside of marriage, died from cervical cancer; I couldn't get a date or even probably wanted one. She did the right thing and finally got married, had two children, and stayed home to be the perfect mom; I ran off to New York City to break into acting.

Now that our parents are gone, I don't have to live a contrary life, but I have done so for so long, I don't know what sort of life I would have wanted. There are things I don't attempt because she was good at them: pottery, mothering, training horses, pies. Okay, I do make pies, but they will never be as good as hers. I had a boyfriend (such a juvenile term!) who was so fascinated by one of her pies that he pried off the pastry layer by layer. "If you don't want that, I'll eat it," I told him. No way, he wasn't giving up that pie. He'd never seen anything like it. No one ever will.

I don't say these things about my sister to be mean. This is my last chance to contrast myself with her. From now on, I will be treading in virgin (so to speak) territory. I am taking the path she never took, going through the menopause she never achieved, getting old without her to forge the path for me. And really, the only thing I can think of to say is, "Oh, shhhhhugar!"

At Last!

Someone must be mellowing in their Old Age. No longer can This Certain Person complain about the Season's Greetings cards I send out. I feel that now, and only now, Peace on Earth is within our grasp. And why is this? What is this magic, is it the Ineffable? Is it Easter?

No, of course not, it's My Birthday and I will thank everyone in the world to set aside their stupid, petty prejudices and join hands for a big lovefest in my name, amen.

Don't make me send you a card!