merielle

People I like said two really nice things about me today! 

 Ohmigod. OHMIGOD. Y'all, this is my sister-in-law holding my niece, Anya, who is about six months old and wearing a fucking epic pink bunny suit. Note that she is already developing comic timing! She's all, "I'm gonna nom on this fake carrot ANY SECOND NOW. Ready for my close-up, dad!" 

I totally kermitflailed the first time I saw this. That is some industrial-strength cuteness. 

- I did not expect to like Vienna so much, but I really did. Apparently I watched too many movies about WWII as a child (this may sound like I'm kidding, but I'm not - my father made us watch a zillion of 'em), so I have this deep-seated, irrational resentment of Germany and Austria. I realize that it's been 60 goddamn years. I realize that there are people from both countries who fought against the Nazis with their last breaths. I realize that I would not want people to judge me by, say, George W. Bush or Rand Paul. And I realize that Hungary's politics are currently WAY scarier than either Germany's or Austria's. I get all this. I realize that it's irrational and that I should grow the hell up and approach Vienna on its own terms. So I did.

And it turns out that ending up in Vienna was a great thing for us, because we both really dug it. It's a beautiful city with a delightfully cranky and effective history of socialism (you go, Red Vienna!), excellent coffee and associated ridiculous coffee beverages, fabulous music and art all over the damn place, wonderful architecture, leafy boulevards... So much to recommend it.

- I wish Google would fuck off and stop "helping" by noticing that I'm online in Austria and Hungary and thus switching its default language to German. FUCK OFF. People travel! Stop helping me!

- Cool, rainy weather feels like heaven after a miserably, punishingly hot, dry Texas summer. Y'all, I wore A SWEATER. Because I was COLD. It was kind of awesome.

- Many men in Vienna and Budapest wear too goddamn much cologne. Dial it down if you're going to take crowded public transportation, people!

- Viennese folk are very, very good at creepy things. I imagine it's a good city to be Goth in. The natural history museum is fabulous in ways that demonstrate this clearly - lots of creepy little tableaux about. There's also a charmingly mordant sense of humor on display - like the butterfly sitting cheekily on the nose of a taxidermied caiman (which is like a wee alligator).

- I stood in front of the Venus of Willendorf and realized how small she is, but how beautifully detailed. Humans could make art with such care and grace 25,000 years ago! Cool.

- I do okay with basic courtesies and stuff in German, but holy craptacular, Hungarian is HARD. I've just had the hardest time wrapping my head around the pronunciation.

- Poor Hungary has pretty much had the shit kicked out of it forever. Part of this is just bad geographical luck - like Poland, it stands between western European powers and Asian ones, and it gets ground like grain between them. But Hungarian leaders also just seem to choose tragically badly, to end up on the wrong side of history.

- Today we went to Terror House (museum and memorial to those killed by the Nazi occupation and then the Soviet occupation) and the Great Synagogue (second largest in the world, very beautiful, with memorials outside to the Hungarian Jews who died in WWII). The seemingly endless list of names and catalogue of those killed during the occupations covers a staggering amount of wall space at Terror House. The tree of life memorial outside the synagogue, with the name of a Jew who was killed engraved on each leaf, is beautiful and gut-wrenchingly sad. As often happens to me in Europe, I feel like I've spent all day tripping over bones. I'm glad I saw these things. They are heartbreaking, horrifying, and important, especially for people from the US who have not experienced war or occupation on their own soil. It's too easy for us to forget that when we talk about sending troops somewhere, this is what we ultimately mean: homes, bridges, roads, schools, lives, and families destroyed. It's too easy to forget what a country looks like when people are bullied into policing their neighbors and themselves, when the panopticon leaves us hating and fearing any difference or deviation. I left nauseated, tearful, and more committed than ever to fighting my own country's fascist tendencies.

But can I tell y'all something wonderful I learned today? Outside the Great Synagogue, there's also a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who literally, personally saved thousands of Jews. He issued protective passports, as many as his office could churn out, which were totally illegal but which allowed hundreds of people, maybe more, to escape. He organized a group of over 300 folks to help out and raise money to rent buildings (32 in all!!) and he declared those spaces Swedish territory - where he and his allies housed 10,000 people who otherwise would have been tortured and/or killed. Ten. THOUSAND. People.

One of the people Wallenberg saved was Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), who died in 2008, but who was a tireless champion of human rights, co-founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a fierce progressive (on almost every issue - unsurprisingly, he was more than a bit hawkish on Middle East issues), and a particularly strong environmentalist. Lantos fought in the Hungarian resistance and was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the US Congress. He was not unproblematic, but damn, dude got himself arrested for civil disobedience protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy over Darfur issues when he was 78 years old. I have no doubt that he was treated much more gently by DC cops as a sitting member of Congress than he ever was when detained in his youth, but still. That's pretty hardcore for a man pushing 80 years of age. His grandson, Tomicah Tillemann, is now a speechwriter for Hillary Clinton. His grandaughter, Charity Tilleman-Dick, is an opera singer. And that's just some of the ripple effect from one of the thousands of people Raoul Wallenberg saved.

So that's today's powerful reminder that one person who chooses to be brave and kind can change the world in unimaginably beautiful ways that will echo through time long after xie is gone. Blessings on you, Raoul Wallenberg.

[Partner and I discussing shirts. For the last week or so we have been watching the Harry Potter movies to prepare for the upcoming final installment in the series.]

Partner: I find I like the darker colors lately. Dark like Harry Potter's soul.
Me: Sure. You're thematic.
Him: Right.
Me: Dark like George RR Martin's world.
Him: Yes. When you play the game of shirts, you win, or you... have an ill-fitting shirt.
Me: Which is not death, but is often itchy and uncomfortable.
Him: Yes. A Song of Itch and Attire.

<3 <3 <3

BFF's youngest daughter: "I want to know how to whistle."
BFF: [explains to make a circle with your mouth and blow, have to experiment to find the right shape]
Daughter: "NO! I mean whistle with your fingers and your mouth."
BFF: "I don't know how to whistle with my fingers."
Daughter: "NO! Not just with your fingers. With your fingers and your mouth!"
BFF: "I know what you mean. I just don't know how to do that."
[This part gets repeated a couple of times]
Daughter, exasperated: "But you're a GROWNUP. And GROWNUPS know EVERYTHING about whistling!"

Ooookay.

BFF goes on to explain that, like kiddos, grownups know many things and can do some things well but not others. Daughter is unimpressed.

These are nothing resembling complete; they're just things that struck me, so I wrote them down.

From the Feminist Intersectionality panel:
- Ian Hagemann: "Ally" is not an identity you get to keep all the time. You not even have a say in whether you get it.
- Ian on how to be an ally but not speak for others: You can start with an I statement - "I have a different opinion" or "Please don't use that language around me." Or step up and make space - "I'd like to hear what (x) has to say about that" - and then step back.
- Isabel - No outgroup is a monolith. [My reaction to this: one of the concepts I recall most vividly from my social psych courses is outgroup homogeneity bias. So probably this is something we all have to work very, very hard to remember. :( ]
- Betsy - Disability accommodation != accommodation for wheelchairs. If you ask Jesse the K, who's in a chair, and Betsy, who has arthritis, about what they need, you'll get really different answers.

From the Feminist Coalition-building panel:
- Culturally relevant approaches matter. Seriously. All the time. If you ask an Inuit child, "If I have 3 apples and you have 4, how many apples are there," that child will probably not answer, "7." Community values about sharing mean that zie is probably going to say something like, "We can all have some apples." Interesting!
- How to have productive disagreement - Acknowledge that disagreement/discord is inevitable; re-acknowledge basic commonalities; start with agreement/set boundaries on what we won't argue about; commit to having a moderator
- Debbie Notkin - Often what makes us angry is feeling like the other side has all the power and we have no power to speak.
- Argue in the present, not the past.

From the Self-Reflective Revolutionary Panel:
- "Buddha, you are acting out your shit right now." Heh! Read: no one is exempt from the possibility that zie's being an asshole.
- If you get calm, the level of calmness in the universe has gone up.
- Ian - Revolution is a state change which could not have been predicted beforehand - not a logical extension, but a new thing.

From the Slacktivism panel
- Online activism != slacktivism. Online stuff can be impactful and real, and for some folks, it's all they can do. So be wary of judging.
- Offline activism can be sucky and unhelpful, too!

I wrote down many, many things that Ian Hagemann and Debbie Notkin said. Wow, they are smart and I am so grateful to be able to learn from them. I'm SUPER excited that Ms. Notkin is one of the guests of honor for next year, and I'm eagerly anticipating her GoH speech.

Awesome things about my last day and a half:

- I am in New Orleans with my honeybunch to continue celebrating our anniversary and because holy crap we needed a break

- We got a nice deal at the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans, a super-schmancy and very conveniently located hotel which, it turns out, offers outstandingly warm, friendly, and competent service. They are taking excellent care of us.

- I surprised him with champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries on arrival :)

- One thing for which I am deeply grateful after two straight years of WTF stratospheric stress level is our financial well-being. Money does not buy happiness, but it damn sure greases wheels. We're taking this really decadent trip without worrying about what anything costs, and that is a tremendous privilege.

- OMFG New Orleans French bread is fucking amazing

- Said bread is excellent with tasty shrimp and okra gumbo

- Said bread makes the best goddamn bread pudding I have ever eaten

- We listened to jazz and drank expensive but perfect drinks at our hotel lounge. The boy had a hurricane, I had a Pimm's cup. Ahhh, fruity booze and boozy fruit.

- The boy had never had eggs Benedict until he had them for breakfast from room service this morning (!!!), after which he said, "So basically, an egg McMuffin is a hideous desecration of this dish." I couldn't really argue.

- The aforementioned bread makes fucking amazing French toast

- The aforementioned hotel is six pleasant blocks of walking from Jackson Square

- There was - I'm completely fucking serious - a guy in Jackson Square dressed up like Prowl, the Transformer police car. And he could actually transform and roll around on four wheels. That guy fucking rocks.

- There were many mediocre and some amazing artists displaying their wares in the square. We bought a painting of a silhouette of a jazz combo, done on recycled slate, from the artist himself. I love handing the money to the person who made the object.

- There is a charming toy store nearby. I bought some NOLA-themed children's books for the kiddos in my life.

- We took a half-hour mule cart tour of the French Quarter with Charlie, the tour guide, and Sugar Daddy, the mule. We saw a bunch of stuff and heard some fun stories about pirates and movies and voodoo queens and other NOLA-y things.

( more decadence behind the cut )