Skip to main content

Wednesday Morning, 11am (-ish)

I am taking a little bit of a slow morning today. I had two presentations yesterday, and I feel like I've been running on full burners the past days preparing for them. So today, I'm sitting anti-socially at the Temescal Cafe on Telegraph Ave., knitting and listening to Jim Powell and Bob Uecker calling the Braves vs. the Brewers via the computer-internet. It's turning into a beautiful day outside, but I am very happy at the moment to be sittin' and knittin' and rootin' (and a little tootin', but don't tell the other patrons).
I can't listen to baseball games without thinking about my family, whether it's Brewers' games as a kid with Mom and Dad and Aunt Julie, or talking about the Indians with Cousins Andy and Marty, or watching the Twinkies with Grandma Karlson... The very definition of bittersweet. Sometimes California feels very very far away, and listening to the familiar voice of Bob Uecker, describing a perfect spring day at the Park, just emphasizes that distance.
Ben Sheets is pitching a pretty good game--9 K's in five innings, so far--and the Brewers are providing some run support, which is a refreshing change from, oh, ever. The only detraction from this seemingly idyllic setup is that the internet radio feed cuts out every 25 minutes or so, and I have to reload the player. Also, the audio cuts out whenever Bob or Jim isn't speaking, so there're these jarring silences in between bits of commentary instead of the ambient noise of the ballpark. Two distractions. I gotta say, it could be a lot worse.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I remember listening to the Brewers in Rhinelander when we were up there cottaging...at Camp Stinky..that and the herbal tea lake swimming experience. Nothing like voices in a familiar rhythm to bring back other voices in other familiar rhythms and so starts the cascade of memory. I'm glad you can connect to Wisconsin through the mysterious internets - bandwidth issues aside. And I had to get my 92 year old mother to call me on my cell phone so I could practice answering it... I usually just use it for outgoing calls, but today I needed to make sure Aunt Kathy could reach me and I didn't really know how to answer it. So I called Mom who called me back and in my confusion, I hung up on her. Oh, my ring tone is the Flight of the Valkyries. Love, Mom
8:27 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Three Good Things for Thursday, March 7th

No time to waste, let's hit those Three Good Things: 1. "Fifteen bucks for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge, Edge, EDGE!" An impossibly red, impossibly cute 1997 Suzuki X-90. It looks like a real-life Barbie car, a mini two-seater pickup, minus the bed and with a little spoiler on the back. Also it has a T-top. In college some buddies and I drove up to Cleveland one weekend to see the monster truck rally at the Gund Arena. Were we genuinely interested in it? Was it an act of willful irony? We were the last gasp of Generation X, so there is truly no way to know. What I remember most aside from the noise and fumes was that the promotion ran a contest in between "acts" where local schmoes could try their personal vehicles on the motocross track they'd constructed on the arena floor, with the fastest time taking home a cash prize.  One of the first contestants roared out of the gate in a huge, very obviously brand new, very obviously expensively
Post a Comment
Read more

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household
Post a Comment
Read more

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to
13 comments
Read more