Regarding Aunt Mary: she was the most loving person the world has ever known, despite going through some extremely difficult things, and her spirit will be an inspiration and example to me forever. Also, she was 95 (beat that!). I drove to central PA and back (10 hours) yesterday for the funeral, but the scenery was lovely and I sang songs the entire drive. I got to see estranged second cousins and stop at WaWa. Here are some photos, also in no particular order.

sent from a device

seven years and one falafel

You come around the corner from out of a time machine. A few hairs on your beard have gone white but otherwise the only thing that has changed is the presidency and my teeth. Also you are wearing new glasses. Perhaps you don’t remember the time you put me in a headlock and I instinctively punched you in the face, my fist backwards, the way you’d taught me. Pieces of glass fell in triangles at our feet. I notice them now between the concrete and futility between us. I was so proud of my strength back then. I still am.

Ebertfest 2013 Dance Along from Ebertfest on Vimeo.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with MIT campus police, but they are an amazing group of people. Many are former secret service officers. They’re kind to students, understanding (and very lenient) about crazy technological/chemical/dangerous physical pranks/hacks by students, and work very hard to ensure the protection of the entire MIT community. To hear one of them has been killed right outside Stata (with his own gun) is chilling, especially in the face of our idiotic Senate’s ruling on, as a former student put it, “an extremely tame bill” imposing minimal measures for gun control. The MIT officer was killed with his own gun, grabbed by guy he was investigating, on this sidewalk outside Stata:

I took this in Jan ’12, just before moving to Germany.

All this has made for a very scary week. And yet it’s my responsibility, I feel, to keep my thoughts up – not merely to think generic “good thoughts” but to seriously pray about the situation, this very aggressive suggestion that bad things happen, bad people happen, and that is more powerful than anything good. It’s not true. That which is good is real and lasting. It’s where life comes from and what life is. You can’t kill it. Which is why the community has and continues to come together to help one another and look past these horrible events, and they will continue to do so – and THAT is real and lasting and powerful.

I wish I was at MIT now more than ever. I just feel like I SHOULD be there; I should support everyone at the Institute at this time…but I thank the students and staff and professors I know there for keeping me informed tonight, and for staying safe themselves. I hope this generation of MIT students goes on to tackle the endemic cultural problems of this era (gun culture, greed culture, “self” culture), which are societal as much as they are political.

And tonight, let’s send some love to the people who’ve been lost this week (including the MIT campus officer), and the Boston and MIT community.

The Dublin Galway train last Friday. These are your people Bon :-)

The New Political Map
Found this via a contact on Facebook. At first I thought it was sarcastic, then realized it wasn’t. Totally gets to this generation of technocrats (myself included? Or not?) and the subculture(s) that have built up around them. Manuel Castells would have something to say about it, which is a reminder to myself and others to read his latest books.

Sourced from http://howtosavetheworld.ca

Quartz
Quartz is “a digitally native news outlet, born in 2012, for business people in the new global economy.” I like it. A lot. You should sign up for their daily news brief.

Most of the time, the bros don’t overwhelm the environment. They work out next to overweight gay dudes, old Greek men, and svelte young women who probably work in mid-level marketing positions downtown. These bros lift weights and grunt, which is fine. It’s when they start spouting expletives that I get perturbed.

Tonight, a perfectly normal, almost non-bro type guy was lifting heavy weights when he started swearing. First it was the f-word, then it was bitch, then it was f’ing bitch. I looked over at him, his tendons strained, his anger peaked and misdirected, and I felt…how shall I say…wary. Because aggressive men who have no problem screaming ‘f’ing bitch’ at inanimate objects in public aren’t the type of human beings I feel comfortable around. I think there should be rules against this type of behaviour, and I think New York Sports Clubs should enforce these rules. The overt ‘bros’ in this case were actually quiet and behaved, expressing themselves exclusively in grunts; it was the average-looking guy who acted threatening.

On my walk home, two similarly normal-looking dudes pulled up on bicycles, waiting near me for the light to change. They were talking about someone, using normal words. Then one of them said, ‘I’m gonna kill that bitch.’ The other laughed. Now, I’ve never been overly sensitive about the B-word (in college, my best friend and I constantly called each other ‘bitches’ in the plural, referencing hip hop culture to which we had largely been exposed in childhood but were not a part of), but my ex didn’t like it at all and his sensitivity did rub off on me a little. It is, after all, a derogatory term for women, no better or worse than any other derogatory term, and like all the others, its existence in our canon should no longer be accepted. Our country has a long way to go before enacting legislation that supports and protects women (not to mention countless other populations), but it’s insidious that dialogue like this has seeped into our culture to the extent that we no longer notice. That we withhold complaining is even worse; somehow it seems uncouth to tell someone he (or she!) shouldn’t talk like that in public, because it’s derogatory and insulting. And because it makes them sound ignorant, hateful and stupid.

Like anything, hatred is insidious. It sneaks into the mainstream, masquerading as slang, as a joke, or appropriated from (in some cases) various subcultures. We start to use the words, thinking they are just words. They seem funny, we don’t mean it in an insulting way. We see celebrities doing the same thing. We hear it in the workplace. We know respectable people who talk like that, too. It’s ok.

But here’s the thing: it isn’t. Stop talking like that. Stop saying ‘bitch.’ Stop saying ‘fucking bitch.’ Stop allowing the undercurrent of (ok, I’m gonna say it) the patriarchy – or any other dominant cultural force – dictate how you talk or behave or what you believe. I need to put this into practice myself, and I hope others do the same.