Advent Calendar: fixins

Advent Calendar:

Dec 9
Those little crackers with the sugar flowers on them for Christmas. (Florecitas?) Those large tins of Sultanas (knock-off brand of Saltines) that we would manage to consume briskly. (Soaking them in coffee for breakfast) I have a memory of two of those tins out in the PR countryside. Some elderly family lady (probably a Soto), gaunt, in one of those little cotton dresses using those tins, one to wash clothes and the other to cook pig swill.

Advent Calendar: parenting

Advent Calendar:

Dec 7
I never realized it until I became one that a lot of parental teaching moments are done clandestinely and sometimes even without our even meaning to do them. You'll ask your kids what something means or ask them to look something up even though you know the answer, maybe let them make a mistake so that they can figure something out or whatever. If you had asked me who I was most like when I was a kid it would have been my real dad. That's because anyone who saw me would say I was his spitting image. I was dark like he was and my mom had the fair Mendez look. But it's only recently that I've come to see how much I look like my mom, especially around the eyes and how much of her and my step-father's ways I've subsumed. All those years of watching my mom toil away at constructing dresses and making things translated into my love of the arts. From the old man, I got his love of gadgets and his meticulous ways. From both of them a sense of moral indignation if I am right or something stands to me corrected. And, I guess that is our greatest legacy - the things we give to our kids and that our parents left with us - that we are set out on our paths and with a little guidance, sometimes from beyond, they guide our way.

Advent Calendar: family get-togethers

Advent Calendar:

Dec 8
The Alvarez family moved to Irvington when it was the boon docks. It was sylvan and suburban and was the family's first sojourn into real Middle Class life. This trickled down for the rest of of since we were all so tightly knit. We'd have raucous parties and spent just about every weekend "in the country". The house had a basement that was a party room and Tio would always have the latest toy, like a full-sized pin ball machine or a pool table, etc. One year we recreated the Christmas Nativity. Because I was the youngest - and over my strenuous protest - I played Melchoir, the black Magi. Al has the video of it somewhere. It shows Mary (Lydia) dragging the baby Jesus down the stair by his heels.

Advent Calendar: religion

Advent Calendar:

Dec 6
Because you think of Puerto Rico as a Latin country, it surprises a lot of my friends to find out that my mother and her siblings (as well as my step-father and real father) were protestants. Mami wasn't "spiritual". Even if it was just her way of playing along with her cultural background, she professed a belief in all sorts of spiritista nonsense. Her core belief was an abundant confidence in some sort of ethereal goodness and her sence of righteouness. And it was always grounded in the practical. I remember her telling the nuns, "You educate them and their souls are yours." That's how we became Catholics. Our mother sold our souls to the Sisters of Charity. When Sundays rolled around, conflicting with some family junket, she'd meet my protests that I had to go to mass or suffer damnation with the solution: go to confession on Friday. "But what if I die before then?" "Do you think God is really going to punish you for that?", she'd say. "Besides, tell him I made you. Now get in the car." It worked for me.

Advent Calendar: Santeria

Advent Calendar:

Dec 5
Dec 5: When I was a little boy I found coins all over the apartment where we were visiting. "Go put them back," Mami told me almost hush-toned. She was being gentle with me and uncharacteristically reverential. My mother was an amalgam of old and new worlds, especially where religion was concerned and she didn't brook much metaphysical nonsense but she was always, somehow, all about the supernatural. "Those are for good luck," she told me. It seems this was some sort of spiritista stuff and she knew all about it.

Advent Calendar: babies

Advent Calendar:

Dec 4
In the same vein, a pregnancy was always big and exciting news. The Tias were all harpees, in both a good and bad sense, and they were all about a new baby. New babies and weddings, those were the major celebratory events around which our family revolved and each Tia had a special calling. My mother's was sewing and party logistics. For weddings she made everything from the dresses down to the little organza bags of white almonds that they stuck in the plastic swans. But a baby was their own little secret girl doings. They would have had by now their wedding shower. Bawdy little events. By the time of the baby's impending arrival the Mendez coven would be in full conspiratorial swing. One of the things leading up to it would be finding out the sex of the child. The PR version of the ultrasound usually happened as a parlor game at a baby shower but also happened spontaneously, usually a Tia instigating it. The baby's mami would come into the room and pick a seat. Every cushion had a fork or a knife hidden in it. Depending on where she sat, that was the baby's sex.

Advent Calendar: culture

Advent Calendar:

Dec 3
When my mom was a little girl in PR they would peel an orange, trying to keep it one continuous strand, throwing it over their shoulder and seeing what the initial of their future husband was going to be.

Advent Calendar: mom

Advent Calendar:

Dec 2
As a kid I could always get a rise out of my mom. I would make a weird or contorted face and she'd almost automatically make one of those "Your Mom May Really Be Jewish" comments. She'd get all flustered and excited, maybe even slap me. "Stop. Your face will freeze and you'll look like that the rest of your life."

Advent Calendar: matriarchy

Advent Calendar:

Dec 1
A few years ago Lydia and I put together a family page. Some of the things that we said were, well, "unvarnished". In true Mendez fashion Tia Celina was outraged that we had said our grandfather was, well, "not a saint". She was on the warpath and took it out on Lydia, who implored me to change it. In typical Mendez fashion I responded that I was not and that she could kiss my ass. However, after a few days, (also very typically Mendez male-like) and because it was my beloved Tia, I caved in. I changed it.

NOING

NOING

Religiosity is not high up on my menu. I prefer to think of myself as indifferent about the weighty concept of the holy. And even “indifferent” doesn’t really describe it. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. I’m driven by the same fears of mortality, the tinyness of me and the sense of my vulnerability. Call it, maybe, exasperation or weakness. I guess at the end of the day I’m just left with the idea that the existence, or rather the question of the existence of God, is something futile, that it’s way above my head to prove or worry about and that putting a label on one’s disbelief is just the flip side of hubris, the other sect, the truly faithful, of The Knowing.


When I hear someone describe themselves as an agnostic or atheist (and they may mean something completely different when they use that term) I think about reincarnation. And not really incarnation per se but a quote I read a long time ago. As support for the idea of reincarnation the writer said that it was just as amazing to be born the first time as it is to be born again. It was a tour de force statement for me, rational/faithful jujitsu. I appreciated the cleverness and the depth of what was seemingly such a terse statement. And I was even more profoundly influenced by it when I witnessed the birth of my first son and could appreciate its implications in full.


That statement and the way that it cut through my insistence on just facially denying the idea of a god has always stuck with me. Comfort in any certainty is delusional. It’s dishonest to continue to deny the existence of some other power and, yet, constantly confront the contradictions that are all around us. I may be “science” guy or “rational” guy, but I can’t get my head around the enormity of reality, the illusory concreteness of science and the spongyness of real things, like the paradox of the beginning of infinity or the physical frontier of the universe.


That’s when I come back to that statement about reincarnation and the core of it’s message, that the miraculous doesn’t lose it’s edge because it happens frequently or because you can explain it on some visceral level. Life is still wondrous. I might question the existence of some higher power, but I might be wrong. The Me didn’t get here in a vacuum. I’ve flirted with ideas holy and red. And, maybe, that’s what we’re all doing. We’re a giant organism still trying to get it together. So, I claw from the entrails of most teachings what are, at base, their proscriptions of conduct (sins), trying to emulate what I think they seek to address, the character flaws and the selfishness of an individual to act at the expense of others. Believer or not, I try to do right and that’s all any of us can strive to do. If there is a God, She will love me for it.

Main Page

This 99% stuff is pretty interesting, so I've been posting on Facebook what I think are the more interesting positions and arguments, witness this below:
IS THAT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT?
Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?
Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week? Do you think you can? Because, let me tell you, kid, that’s not going to be as easy when you’re 50 as it was when you were 20.
(DAILY KOS)
But, because I felt guilty about posting more than my "fair share" of these items last night on FB, I've restarted my blog. This will mean some much-needed FB economy and less limitations on me about what I feel I can say.

Alexander M. Martin: Alexander M. Martin on Dominic Lieven’s ‘Russia Against Napoleon’ - Book Review - Truthdig

THE ROAD FROM MOSCOW
Western understandings of the Second World War validated the template inherited from accounts, such as Tolstoy's War and Peace of Napoleon’s downfall in Russia - both Napoleon and Hitler had the hubris to attempt to conquer all of Europe, but they were defeated by the freedom loving peoples of the West and the snowstorms in the East. Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon makes the two central arguments that the real reason Napoleon lost was that the Bear's was better, this superiority related to retrograde features of Russian society and politics.
(TRUTHDIG)

How Sarah Palin Has Become a Singular National Industry -- New York Magazine

ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK
Sarah Palin is already president of right-wing America, a position that pays well.Over the past year, Palin has amassed a $12 million fortune. Her memoir has so far sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Palin is planning a second book with HarperCollins. This January, she signed a three-year contributor deal with Fox News worth $1 million a year. In March, Palin sold her cable show to TLC for a reported $1 million per episode, of which Palin is said to take in about $250,000 for each of the eight installments.
(NEW YORK MAGAZINE, suggested by MEDIA BISTRO)

Joe Cutbirth: Phelps' son says "God Hates Fags" church could turn violent

WHY DOES GOD HATE WEST VIRGINIA?
The hateful Westboro church cult spent this weekend in West Virginia taunting the families of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. They complained they didn't get adequate police protection during a picket at the state Capitol, where they carried signs that read: "Thank God for Dead Miners," "God Hates Your Tears" and "God Hates West Virginia."
(HUFFINGTON POST, suggested by Joel Sogol)

Shades of blue and gray

SHADES OF BLUE AND GRAY
Years ago, as a founder and board member of WHIL, I made a tour of other public radio stations on behalf of the CPB. I spent a few days in Cambridge and was shocked at the blind arrogance directed towards me as a "Southerner". Now, mind you, my hair was kinkier and longer than Jimi Hendrix's, my attire and politics were vintage Fugs and Allen Ginsberg, my heritage Puerto Rican. Yet, here I was listening to the stupidest comments in the world from the supposedly smartest people on the planet, who apparently couldn't see me for who I was. So, while I don't necessarily (completely) agree with him, I love this very articulate writer's response to The Atlantic ARTICLE. I especially like his comments about "the instinctive, knee-jerk hatred of the white southerner that is exhibited by most of the lefty elite media. It's pathological really. It's a similar, but much more intense form of the loathing displayed towards the white working class, and for similar reasons. You guys are the ones that hear dog whistles, not us."