"It's all about BIG WAVES, Wendy."

Surfing, I've been told, is a way of life. A religion. I'm not sure why I've been told that, because I've also been told that 99% of all women can't understand.

Well, the church of tides and barrels has lost a cardinal.

Here's to an American hero.

Gonna keep on tryin'
'Til I reach the highest ground

If we're talking about muscle definition -- or lack thereof -- I have oh-so-much room for improvement. Alas, it's not just the physical aspect of my being I have yet to perfect. Try as I might to be a good person, I have a hard time growing past my impatient, intolerant streak.

I need to be more like Miss Jane Bennet, who is "honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others," who takes the good of everybody's character and makes it still better, and says nothing of the bad. I need to be a whole lot less like Mr. Darcy, whose "good opinion once lost is lost forever."

Yesterday
I thought my life had gone astray
Now I know that it will be okay

Fortunately Damien Jurado's John in the Morning theme song* is not being corrupted on a daily basis. I'm so happy that my life can return to normal now.

*Listen by time. Enter Thurs, May 26, 2005 6 AM for the sweet song that I love and Wed, May 25, 2005 6 AM for the horrifying remix.

Well, life is a funny thing

Sometimes I wonder whether events in my life are staged and I'm just the main character on some reality TV show like that one with Jim Carrey. For the most part, those times are when I'm having a hard time finding a place to park. In Seattle, it would take me so long to find parking sometimes that I would start to cry. Inevitably, those times I cried, I'd park a mile away, and get home to find a parking spot right in front of my building.

I've realized that it wasn't the parking gods -- it was the gods of irony. They're mocking me. I finally confessed to my dirty little secret of loving the John in the Morning theme song just to have it CHANGED on me less than twenty-four hours later. This morning I had my coffee and my peanut butter & jelly sandwich. I was tuned into kexp.org and I was just waiting. And for what? Damien Jurado's sweet theme song? Nope. Damien Jurado's new digitally enhanced song.

My whole morning was just about ruined and I wasted a lot of time thinking that I was like Rainman -- can't live with a change in routine.

In other news...
I have two -- count 'em TWO -- reasons to go to Ballard when I get back to Seattle. I'll go to Oaxaca for a delicious meal, of course, and on the way I'll go to Archie McPhee's to get me some o' these.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A giant nuclear furnace

If you have five minutes to watch Cuke Skywalker save Princess Lettuce Organic, you may want to pretend they're keeping the 'science' in science fiction and didn't actually express undue concern for genetic modification and irradiation. We'll pretend they took undergrad genetics, organic chemistry, and have a modicum of understanding about just what it is that giant glowing orb does for us with all its radiation.

May the farm be with you.

In the morning when I wake up yawning

So, there's a perpetual myth that it's always raining in Seattle. It's not like I don't know where it comes from -- the Peninsula to the west is home to the only old-growth, temperate rainforest in the world, and Seattle is the Emerald City because it's so very green. But the thing is it doesn't actually rain that much. What it does is mist. And sometimes drizzle. And yes, it's very gray.

Today, here in northern Virginia, I woke up to a Seattle morning -- gray and drizzly. It's actually raining now, but earlier there was a perfect Seattle mist. So, I'm drinking coffee and listening to fellow Spovegan John in the Morning, and I've decided it's the right time to confess to something that I've kept bottled up inside for months now.

I like John Richards' morning mix. I do. I may not advocate that the best way to fight the supposed great homogenization of unregulated radio is to simply incorporate John's playlist into all the other radio programming in town. (Yes, as counterintuitive as that may be for the average person, there are Seattleites who actually say things like that out loud and expect to be found insightful.) But what I do advocate is that you log onto kexp.org some weekday morning at 6:00 am Pacific Time (or "tune in" to the archives) and listen to the first thirty seconds of John's show.

You see, this is my confession: my very favorite song for going on five months is the John in the Morning theme song by Damien Jurado.

I just want you to know who I am

What happens when you introduce your artist friends whose medium is artisan-grown produce to your artist friend whose medium is oil on canvas?

This!

Gotta get the operator
Make a telephone call

Yes, I've seen it, and I'm waiting to comment further until I've seen it again.

But what I will comment on is my recent calls to 411. If you live in the United States, then I strongly suggest you pick up your cell phone (or 'self phone' as my Czech and Chinese friends have spelled it) and dial now.

You'll hear the usual "4-1-1 info. Say a city and state," followed by "or for Star Wars, Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, please say 'theater times'..."

Damn, Jedi!

You wear black clothes say you're poetic

So, he thinks "shareholders are the great evil of this modern world," does he?

Perhaps the verb 'think' isn't quite appropriate when employed in the first person by Gwyneth Paltrow's husband. Thinking, after all, usually leads to understanding.

So are people who think that dispersed ownership is an okay thing supposed to boycott the contract-breaking "deadlines mean nothing to us" Coldplay? I mean, it's okay if we are, because if I actually wanted to listen to a bunch of whiny Brit pop, there are certainly plenty of other options to choose from. Of course, then I couldn't sing along with all those sorority girls out there.

I bet Ben Affleck never looked so good.

Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi
Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi

It's amazing what people manage to do in their spare time. If you're scared that George Lucas and his Star Wars mythology have mas influencia con sus ijos que tu tienes, you should go here.

From those who like good wine
We salute you!

Congratulations IJ!

And thank you for helping make wine more accessible and affordable in markets across the United States. Perhaps now I can stop paying $18 in Virginia for $7 wine from Washington or California.

For those of you who heard the NPR story this morning, you wouldn't know it from listening, but yesterday's Supreme Court victory for vintners everywhere was brought to you by the Institute for Justice.


P.S. Of course Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion!

God only
God only
God only knows

This editorial on liberal fundamentalism could have been written yesterday, but it wasn't.


Esther tried in vain to pacify the mob

This news story aired last week, but I'm only just getting around to blogging about it.

It seems the good people of Nebraska voted to ban -- with an amendment to the state constitution -- same-sex marriage. Okay, let them vote.

The ban was challenged, and the Federal District Court ruled that the state ban was unconstitutional, violating the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Okay, if there's no equal protection under the law, then the people of Nebraska screwed up, and their action should be reversed.

And now some of the people of Nebraska are slinging around that oh-so-popular "activist judge" epithet.

Now, I do think there are activist judges, but I think it's relatively -- to drastically understate it -- important to remember that our Judiciary Branch and the Constitution exist for a reason. I think it has something to do with protecting individuals from the rule of the mob, but it's kind of hard to recall with all the shouting in the streets.

The mob -- in case there's a literate person who's not yet noticed this -- is less than spectacularly intelligent and knowledgeable. I mean, I know it's really cool and popular to shout 'this is what democracy looks like' and to pretend that we're supposed to be a democracy, but it's also wrong. We're not a democracy. The constitution and the electoral college are part of a framework that was very intentionally designed to protect the individual -- the minority -- from the tyranny of the majority, to protect us from democracy.

I have a lot more to say about gay marriage, something to contribute based on a conversation I had last month, and a letter to the editor last year, but I'm too tired. We'll have to continue this discussion at a later date.

A kiss on the hand may be quite continental
But lyrics are a girl's best friend

When we were in Miami eating one of our many Cuban meals, Justine and I made a new friend, who wrote a song about how we were the only smart girls in South Beach. It was cute and clever and funny.

Gentlemen, if you're not prepared to get together with your friends and record your own version of a Guns 'n' Roses song for your girl (yes, a boy and his friends actually recorded "Patience" just for me and it made me love them all), then you should go to unstaged.com and have Gary write and record a song on your behalf.

Bohemian Homesick Blues

I just made myself crazy homesick for Prague.

I never thought it would happen, but I miss Prague. I'm always missing some of my Czech friends, but tonight I actually miss Prague. A couple girlfriends are headed there in a couple weeks for a visit so I just spent an hour trying to clearly describe where to go, what to do, what to eat, what to drink, and how to get everywhere. I had forgotten how completely and utterly confounding the old town is to navigate until I tried to explain to someone, without the aid of a map, how to get from point A to point B.

There are two Prague moments that tugged on my heartstrings at the time and I'm sure will continue to do so forever. One was very shortly after September 11, 2001. It'd been a very weird time to not be home in America and it was sort of hard for me to process my emotions so I was in a shallow funk for a couple weeks. One night, my cute boys that I knew from the mountains called me to join them at a bar whose name I've somehow totally forgotten. I went, of course -- it's hard to resist the call of a dozen cute snowboarders, though I did manage to do so for two solid years at K2 -- and I had fun.

At the end of our night, a few of us were walking through Old Town to get to the tram stop on Revolucni to take us home. For whatever reason -- the stars aligned, or there was something in the air -- we were completely and totally giddy. It was nearly impossible to walk because we were laughing so hard. Yes, we'd been drinking but not that much. The boys were saying that they loved Prague and could never imagine leaving such a beautiful city. Not wanting to spoil the moment, I simply enjoyed their enthusiasm. No, I'm teasing. Prague is beautiful, and I do love it in many ways.

That night in my dreams, I was reliving our walk through the cobblestoned maze that is Staré město. And in my dreams, we were laughing and loving the city. And in my dreams, though I was still with Michal and Radek and some other boy I'd just met, and though I was walking through Prague, suddenly the Golden Gate bridge stretched out before me and I was looking up at the Transamerica Tower and then the sky got all rosy and Mount Rainier appeared in the sky behind the cityscape. I woke up in the morning and realized it was time to start thinking about going home.

A year later, I was headed home. I woke up one morning to my phone ringing at like 7 a.m. on a Saturday. I saw that it was Radek calling.

W: "No, dobré ráno. To už jsi vzhuru, jo?" (Good morning. You're already awake?)

R: "Vendulkooooo."

W: "Aha, tak jseš ještě vzhuru." (Aha, so you're still awake.)

R: "Vendulkoooo, nesmíš jet do Ameriky. Jsi náše. Jsi češka." (You can't go back to America. You're ours. You're a Czech girl.)

W: "Rádku, ty už to dobře víš, jsem sto pro američanka. Pořad budu váše američanka, ale budu váše američanka v Americe." (You know this already, I'm an all-American girl. I'll always be your American girl, but I'll be your American girl at home in America.)

R: "Ale čeští kluci tě maji rádi. Ty se libíš nám všem." (But Czech boys like you. We all like you.)

W: Laughter

R: "A ty máš ráda češké kluky, ne? Nemůžeš nám odjet." (And you like Czech boys, don't you? You can't leave us.)


Well, I did leave them, and now I miss them. Very much. Fortunately, I know I'll wake up in the morning and be glad I'm on American soil.

Around the rocks the rugged rascal ran

It sounds like the folks at NPR (National Public Radio) need to invest some of my tax dollars in a diction coach.

This morning one of the hosts of Morning Edition said that Title IX "bans sex discrimination in sports." What?!!! They're dropping syllables like Galileo dropped the orange! And confusing consonants.

Title IX doesn't BAN sex discrimination. Title IX MANDATES sex discrimination.

I know that this is heretical coming from the daughter of a woman who coached college athletics programs for women before Title IX was enacted, and goes to all the Title IX anniversary galas and reunions, but I contend that Title IX is not merely discriminatory, it is also punitive.

I've probably blogged about this before, but it obviously bears repeating: if boys want to participate in sports, boys should be allowed to participate in sports, whether or not an equal number of girls want to participate in an equal number of sports. Why should boys not be allowed to wrestle, play baseball, and play volleyball at the college level, just because very few girls want to compete in gymnastics, field hockey, and lacrosse at the college level?

It's ridiculous, discriminatory, punitive, damaging to sports in general, and MANDATED by the federal fricking government.

Can't get use to losing you

It's really hard to find clarity after a couple years of uncertainty.

I've said it before and I'm afraid I'll probably say it again, but I was ready to leave Prague and tell Honza "goodbye" and I didn't. I got suckered into a long-distance relationship. What a dummy.

I'm absolutely certain that I was a smart little kid. I'm not entirely sure what happened. Maybe it was too much hippie crack at Dead shows.

Como lo hace

Just in case I haven't yet been pegged as a whacko libertarian blogger, I thought I'd post about our new plan to go to Venezuela to lend our efforts to the folks who want to oust Chavez.

We've begun assembling our team:

Wheeler makes contact and develops our strategy

Davis teaches us how to survive in the jungle and poison Hugo's bodyguards (not lethally).

DeVany whips us into coup-staging shape.

Give me five (five)
Give me five (gimme, gimme)
Give me one, two, three, four
But if you love me more
Give me five

My favorite Sesame Street skit e-ver was the one where Gordon, Luis, Bob, and I don't remember who else were all dressed up in white tails dancing like the Temptations.

I din't know how to blog it, but next time you see me, I'll be happy to demonstrate it -- song and dance and all.

In any case, it would be appropriate for today, this fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the millennium.