All posts filed under: Social Commentary

The world would be simpler if everyone just lived my way.

Aggressive decency.

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Most days I tell myself, today feels good. Birds chirp during morning dog walks. Hankie Smalls the Corgi and Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog – innocent and protected – are untroubled by politics, economics, or impending societal collapse. They are cheerful and hopeful every single morning. Interesting adventures in the confounding universe await. They smile at me and expect love back. So I smile and feel good, breathing deeply in the cold, hydrocarbon scented city air. Then comes the newspaper. The morning news on the car radio. The news synopsis emails. The Facebook feeds. From them I learn who died and how. Who was assaulted, harassed, or disempowered. Who has had their legal rights, access to medicine, or control over their own bodies stripped from them in the night as our political leaders sneak sly, lobby-fueled, religion-fired legislation into the system. The senators must be tiring of my letters. Ugh. I grit my teeth and work through it, distracting myself with the minutiae of academic program management and research. Time is passing and …

Independence Day.

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Thanks to the bold minds and brave signers of the Declaration of Independence, and their willingness to see it through we are here now:  equal, free of abuses, repeated injuries,  and usurpations from Government, free of a Government which refuses to pass laws, free from the obstruction of justice, free of taxation without representation…er. Ok. Well. Thanks to the bold minds and etc. etc. were here now: basking in a glorious summer day of picnics and simply joys. The people of the WideEyedHousehold came of age in one of the New Jersey shore towns, working to serve the holidays of one hundred thousand city-folk. Now, we wallow in the quietude and privacy of a day of independence, without obligation. Sweet Tibbit the Useless-Little-Black dog waits patiently for more raspberries to ripen on the thicket in back yard. She already harvested all within reach using her front nibble teeth, stretching her neck, balancing her dainty toes on the edges of the raised beds to reach more. Hamish watches, pretty sure this is Not Allowed but not sure …

Voting feet.

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So…the WideEyedHousehold had to leave our archery league. Not because of my broken wrist: the little bones in there are cemented back together after several months. I get an exciting zing every time I release the bow string, adds to the thrill of the moment. And, not because the Spouse’s reconstructed clavicles feel like marbles rolling around in his shoulders – although apparently they do. Lesson: don’t fall down when riding a bike. Twice. We’ll still probably stick arrows in the archery butt in the dining room. Maybe. We’ll see. The thing is, we had a choice to make. A family-level ethics choice. The choice centered on the issue of tolerance. The WideEyedHousehold runs on tolerance. People have their own ways and it is not my business to re-educate the Spouse when he makes the bed wrong (I do not like it when the sheet pattern is in the wrong direction) and it is not his to help me be a crumb-less eater in his car (he can’t help but watch, fretful and worried, when I have …

Not cold in the library.

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I don’t get out much and when I am out and about my interactions with Other People are confusing. Confusing for me because these days I’m not super great at tracking communications unrelated to my work. Confusing for them because I am entirely unpredictable in my responses. For me the Other People seem like a radio station fritzing in and out. I respond to the portions I comprehend. Recipe for weirdness. But. Sometimes my difficulties are surpassed. The WideEyedSpouse and I were at the Central Library downtown on New Year’s Eve (Friends, this is how I ring in the New Year. With books.) The Central Library is a tricksy place filled with lunching corporate workers, homeless people in from the cold, retired people, people on long bus layovers, and kids. I keep my eyes to myself and my hand on my wallet – always good business in any city or university library. I waited for about three-fifths of my lifetime for the person ahead of me to do the self check out. He kept getting …

Revolution Style | Look Your Best During NSA Interrogation!

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Our government has failed us and it is time to oust the dysfunctional ruling body and call for a revolution, but we don’t want to be caught in the wrong outfit when the NSA comes for us, do we girls?! Make sure you have on pieces that leave you comfortable and put together after days in an unmarked NSA detention cell! You’ll look fresh and fashionable in “who’s this criminal?” NSA instagrams and you’ll be ready for your CNN interview as soon as you’re released! The Dress – An unstructured, lined silk with ¾ sleeves and a fanciful pattern in a darker palette won’t bind up, won’t show blood stains after you’ve been slapped around, and silk is tough! A quality silk can take rough wooden benches, handwashing in toilet bowls, and won’t rumple past a certain “I’ve been up all night” élan!  The ¾ length sleeves will keep you warm during cold phases of environmental torment and can be pushed up when the heat is on! Be sure to find one with a charming …

Budget Sequestration Made Me Eat Cheap Peanut Butter.

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The WideEyedHousehold must make decisions about financial sequestering by prioritizing categories of expenditure. Just as our Senate is divided in debates about preferential priorities, so we are. Just as our nation must make difficult choices, so we must. “Compromise” in the WideEyedHousehold results in unpalatable solutions, as it does in our nation. As you may know, I dreamed of an exotic winter break far from snowy Buffalo. Last week during spring break, we ate lunch at the Ikea just outside of Toronto for our international vacation. The basic parameters of an exotic, international locale with regional cuisine were met. They were met stupendously if the rumors about horsemeat in the Ikea meatballs are true. How intrepid of us to eat the little meat balls all unknowing, even with an unconcerned panache. As you may know, the WideEyedSpouse likes beer. I like to eat. He feels that beer sort of is food. I feel that food is food. The Spouse prefers good beer. I prefer organic, limited ingredient, small batch peanut butter. Our preferential priorities battled …

Debating Obedience and Disempowerment with Dogs

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“Miss Tibbit,” I addressed her hindquarters as she strained away from me with all the power in her small frame. “Miss Tibbit,” I repeated and shortened her leash during a brief lull in the pulling. Her head snapped when she hit the end of her lead sooner than expected. She gave me a dark look that clearly said, What do think you’re doing? I reeled her in and asked her to sit by my foot. She refused. Flatly. “Miss Tibbit, do you know what obedience means?” She glanced at me from the corner of her dark eye. No. She was not being truthful. She watched a squirrel in the tree above us. She heaved at the leash in dog rampant, front paws flailing toward a submissive Golden Retriever across the street. Over her shoulder between choking gasps and yips she said, But I do know what disempowerment means! I gasped. The audacity. Disempowerment indeed! I asked Hamish to join us. He was illicitly rolling in a moldering worm and finished up before coming over. He, …

Dental hygiene at what cost?

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The husband contributes a guest essay while the WideEyed…Wife travels for work. I am the husband of the beautiful and talented author of the wideeyedfunk blog you are slowly falling in love with one week at a time.  I am your guest author this week as the wifey is off doing her big-brained, intellectual work in another one of the 50 States. When I am not absent mindedly looking for the ketchup or awesomely rewiring our light fixtures in a drunken stupor I am allowed to go outside and play with the public at large. You can see some stuff out there if you open your eyes and look around. Sometimes you see good things and sometimes you see things you wished you hadn’t, but there is always something. Here’s an example of the latter: This past weekend I was sitting in the car waiting for the spouse to come out of a store.  I was passing the time with my iPhone watching a movie on Netflix and marveling, as I often do, at the wonders of modern …

Dear Other Drivers, You Don’t Own the Road. Sincerely, Me.

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You don’t own the road.  I know it is so hard to believe and so profoundly, deeply unfair, but you don’t own the length of road between where you are now and where you want to be. I don’t mean where you want to be in 1.2 seconds because, ok, you might arguably have rights to that space. I am saying you don’t own the whole path from A to B. You also don’t own all of the lanes when you are going around a curve that actually requires you to steer. You don’t own the entire street, even for the few moments you are stopped in the middle of it to send off a quick text. Therefore, you don’t need to have fits when someone else, namely Me, goes around you, merges into a lane you have claimed, makes a turn several hundred feet in front of you, takes an exit you were thinking of using, or stops for a red light that you intended to run. Because you don’t own the road, it …

Why Can’t My Husband Find the Ketchup?

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Men and women see the world differently. This isn’t my opinion; it’s a strongly supported scientific hypothesis. Men and women perceive space and the items in it differently. I wrote an article about it. I think about it all the time for my work. But for some reason I never applied my ivory tower notions to my household.  Why does my husband have to lean into the refrigerator hunting the ketchup? It’s been on the same door shelf position in all 11 of our households over the years. It isn’t rocket science. The man memorizes the URLs of hundreds of routers and switches and techie stuff for his work. But he can’t reliably find the ketchup.  It just isn’t his fault. Evolutionary psychology tells us that men learn large territories and routes through them, while women learn smaller areas in greater detail. Back in the day, men were hunting the big game over days of effort. Women were taking care of every other detail of life, including feeding themselves and their families using their detailed …