Lip Service confirms I should have been a Lesbian

More than a bit enamored by the BBC's 2010-11 series Lip Service, I awake thinking of my bed companion as one of the characters. I even call her Frankie and ask, "Fancy a shag?"

Ruta Gedmintas as Frankie Alan and Laura Fraser as Cat MacKenzie

Lip Service is about a group of thirtysomething high-pheromone lipstick lesbians (i.e., not butch) in Glasgow. Can't get enough of those Scottish accents!

Don't get me wrong: I am an Argentine-American of the heterosexual male persuasion. Still, being a woman with another woman? Intriguing at the very least.

Of course, as with most of my species I'm erotically drawn to the visuals of two naked women rubbing against each other. Think of all that excess of naked breasts nipple to nipple. Is that hot or what?

But it goes beyond that. I like women. I really like women.

Women tell me that one of my winning traits is that, unlike most men, I really listen to them. Yes, my eyes glaze over when the subject turns to fashion and kittens and babies (seen one, seen 'em all). But I share a generalized aversion to sports, love of literature and chick flicks. I can speak about feelings and inner thoughts for hours.

Moreover, penises are overestimated. They have to become engorged and elevated, they have to find the correct orifice (in some cases this can be problematic). And don't get me started about testicles!

Besides, men have to engage in oneupmanship in the marketplace, play sports, go to war and like it. Women get to have feelings, express them and the hell with anything else.

Most of all, when women break up, they mope and cry, then they move to another city, repaint their homes and become brain surgeons lickety split, surrounded by kindred-soul women and the occasional handsome guy. A guy breaks up and he can't find his underwear and socks.

So I could totally get into being a woman.

OK, scratch out menstruation and childbirth, with a thick felt-tip pen until not even the thought is visible. Scratch bitchy competition to be pretty and gain men's attention. Scratch saying "I'm sorry" for everything that is entirely not my fault.

Add to those minor adjustments the possibility of encountering love with someone aesthetically pleasing, usually well-groomed, who can cook, is always looking out for me. Not to mention gentle, soft, caring.

I'm in. Frankie and Cat forever!

Back to the retrofuture

The word "retrofuture" perfectly captures one's thinking about a number of "new" things after one has been around the historical block a few times. It was brought to my attention by Argentine graphic artist Germán Ponce, who was captivated by a "new" design of a Renault that stylizes one from the 1960s.

Of course, retrofuture involves, first, a sense of déjà vu.

Take, for example, the Cloud, that wired or wireless repository of data and, increasingly, programs in a location far, far away. The tendency toward subscription software and data in the Cloud coupled with the electronic tablet reminds me of nothing so much as the mainframe and the dumb terminal.

Is it good? Is it bad? Retrofuture involves some ill foreboding.

Who can deny that Libertarian Rand Paul, with his proclaimed love of the business owner's freedom to choose who will be served, wants to take us back to 1963 and the "white" and "colored" lunch facilities? Or that the Bush family wants to take us back to the political economy of 1915 ... or 1815?

Yet the retrofuture is not all evil.

Think of the commodious, quiet, nonpolluting streetcar of yesteryear. When they first electrified the streetcars, which originally were pulled by horses, the vehicles were said to travel at 15 km/h, a speed that is said to have prompted my horse-and-buggy era maternal grandmother to have exclaimed, "They'll kill themselves!"

The street car was killed in many countries by a greedy combination of auto and petroleum industries and plutocratic demagogues of the 1930s, 40s and 50s (see "General Motors streetcar conspiracy").

Now it's coming back in many U.S. cities. The streetcar will save the Earth!

Germán is a youngish man who is fond of now "classic" designs of my boyhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that he does not realize quite how much of everything new is actually is something I have seen before. I say so with a bit of envy and that curmudgeonly sentiment that "youth is wasted on the young."

But some of it was wonderful and some of the wonders are coming back. So I join my artistic friend in celebrating the retrofuture, a place in which some good ideas from the past come back and the bad ones are again rejected.

Thank you, my friend, for an eminently useful word.

Bye, bye, Microsoft, you've XPired

Today Windows XP ceases to be supported (meaning that Microsoft will not correct any more of the mistakes in their shoddy ware), so I am saying goodbye Windows, hello Linux.

This has gone in stages. At first I thought I would go to 7. I am a great believer in "distressed" software technology. To me this means software that someone else has forced Microsoft to bring up to the standard it should have been in the first place.


I decided to keep a locked up, un-networked XP for those projects that started with a particular Windows application. But the more I look at this, the fewer items there are to preserve.

Most of the ordinary software runs great in Linux (and for free!!!):

• Firefox, Chromium (no need to sell your soul to Google using Chrome), Opera and even Safari surf fine under the penguin.
• Open Office or Libre Office are in many ways better than Microsoft Office and they are compatible with WordPerfect (which I prefer to Word).
• GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) will do everything any other graphics programs will do and there are media players and editorsthat do cartwheels on the overpriced Windows wares.

Some specialized software is hard to replicate because the bastards (yes, Intuit, I mean you) refuse to allow people to export their own data from programs for which they paid good money. Imagine buying a car that would not let you empty the trunk unless it was to the trunk of a car made by the same manufacturer!

That's why I think that in about a year from now, I won't even using my museum piece XP.

So give it a try. I'm using Linux Ubuntu, which is very friendly and comes in a huge bunch of flavors.

What helps depression most is to help someone else

Just that.

So a House is not a Home, what now ... ?

Stardate 64935.8

Am clearing out my place so it can be renovated. I was persuaded to post something I thought trite and self-referential on this matter by Carol of Carol's Vault, a fantastic blog site on freeware and open source software (plus occasional excursions to other regions of the mind). Blame her. But, heck, this is a web log, right?

Now that my home is virtually empty I realize that the old trope "a house is not a home" is true. I've lived 30 years there. Now I'm finally getting rid of the museum of a family that no longer exists, which has surrounded me for a about a decade, I realize that the real charm of the place lay in those absent people.

Two boys jumping on a trampoline (yes, a trampoline!) in the middle of a living room.

A Mom pasting a verse from Proverbs on the back of the cubpoard door.

Two boys reading, or playing or working (ha!) on their laptops, next to each other on a sofa, without speaking.

A Dad spending a reading vacation on the balcony, devouring neo-Father Brown detective novels set in Detroit.

One boy building a fort in the living room (the trampoline gone); another in their bedroom. playing "music" capable of drowning out street-repair drills.

And on and on and on ...

Now only the Dad lives here. It's not so spectacular a place without posters and books and bunk beds and religious images and all that gone. Still, he's committed to moving out in a pine box. Where else could he live?

What did Papa Heinz feel when he turned 59?

When my father turned 57, two years before he died, I composed a poem although there was no reason, other than my own inexperienced youth, to suppose his death was anywhere near. I laughed when people said "he died so young" two years later, yet surely he had no idea.

I said for years that I would welcome going at the same age. As I got closer, however, my tune began to change: I like being alive, warts and all.

Upon turning 59 today, I have already thought and rethought this. When I turn 60, next year, I'll heave a sigh of relief. Then keel over. Just kidding! (Or perhaps the joke will be on me.)

It would be worthwhile to know when one will die. A friend was diagnosed with a terminal disease, given a few years and spent all his savings before dragging on in poverty for a decade longer than predicted.

Doctors know nothing! My plan is to stay away from the medical money extraction machine as long as possible, to age in place to avoid feeding tubes and the like, and generally to go gently into that night. The plans of mice men men, right?

Still, if I die this year, say six months from now to match the exact life span of my father, I can't say I'll go with much too much fight. Barring some unforeseen development, of which life is admittedly chock full, I have done just about all I'm going to do and I'm plum out of new ideas.

Oh, last thing: I called my father Papa Heinz drawing on the fabled 57 varieties of ketchup in an old slogan. Thank your stars I speared you the poem.

Closing a museum of a life that no longer exists

All the shelves are empty, as are the kitchen cupboards. I realize I've taken on something monumental. In short, I'm transforming the museum of a life that no longer exists into my own abode.

Redo the kitchen, floors, paint. The place is not for sale, but the process is almost as I were moving.

I tried emptying a desk on my own and a 30 minute job turned into three hours.

Did I really need that software game for DOS? Remember the day my son and a friend "played" a baseball game that was on the radio ... ? The computer version, set to play itself, came out pretty close to the real game being played by real human beings out in the stadium.

Then there's the anxiety about getting rid of furniture that is way past its prime. And the comic strip she left taped inside a cupboard door.

When all this comes at me I have to go lie down. Breathe deeply.

In the end, I gave in and hired someone to pack. I'm getting someone to take the old furniture away. I'm getting someone to store the boxes for the month or so work will be in progress.

As a result, I have only what I had at hand when the packing took place. Where is ...? I don't know. I had too many things, anyway.

This brings to mind Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone, young man who in 1204 publicly disavowed his wealthy father, returning his money but also his clothes, down to his underwear, and walked off naked out of his native town of Assisi to start a new life.

I imagine that first day walking naked amid the brambles in the valley outside the town. Given that I am blogging, I am far from naked, light years away from that. I am getting a glimpse of the loss, but not the new life of Francis' marriage to Lady Poverty.

In any case, I am a much older and insecure 21st century agnostic. I am not sure there is a transcendent point to any of this travail.

Goodbye, Uptown Cathay

Incredible! After so many years I don't know where to write or call Peter, the man I have known as the proprietor of the Uptown Cathay since 1991.

Uptown Cathay Restaurant, Connecticut Avenue, Washington, D.C.

I'd like to tell him that I will miss him and his food.  For years, it seems, this cozy little neighborhood place was where I went with my younger son every Saturday around lunch time.

We had a prandial ritual that the waitress, Grace, knew by heart: pan-fried pork rolls and a half-Peking duck. Enough to feed an entire Chinese family. She didn't know, of course, about our rip-roaring game of 20 Questions.

You know the game: I think of someone famous and you have 20 chances to ask me for clues to the identity of this person. You can only ask questions that can be answered "yes" or "no." Female? American? 20th century? (It was the 20th century, then.)

We began playing traditional 20 Questions, although I gave my son a handicap appropriate for his age (6? 7?). When it was time for him to guess, I once chose the educator after whom his school was named. Later came the grand figures of history; of course, never Hitler or Napoleon, because they were too easy.

Later still, came Reverse 20 Questions, in which the guesser would ask directly "Are you thinking of Napoleon?" If you were, he'd have to continue guessing. The object was for the guesser to ask a name you weren't thinking of, so you had to keep thinking of new historical figures every second.

Then came Anything Goes 20 Questions, a variant of the traditional game in which you didn't have to think of a person: it could be a thing or an idea. I was finally defeated with my son's thinking of "nothingness." He was then about 11 and about to graduate from going anywhere with his father, even if it was just half a block from home.

Of course, the restaurant evolved, just like our game.

The enclosed open-air table area on the sidewalk (lower left, by the date imprint), wasn't there originally. Nor did the menu include Japanese sushi, nor Thai food (added after the Thai Room, once across the street, closed its doors). Before the Cathay, there'd been a deli that was never quite to my taste -- or wallet.

In later years, after my family moved away and I remained. I kept going to the Cathay because I knew the menu by heart. When I didn't know what to order, Grace, who has just had her second child, could pretty much guess something I'd like. One could call that Food 20 Questions, except that the idea would be lost in translation.

Once, Peter gave me a formal Chinese dress shirt similar to one of his that I had admired. It was an Asian version of the guayabera. The one he gave me was too tight around the abdomen. I still have it, always hoping to slim into it next year.

Finally, there came on June 19 the occasion of a friendly postmortem of reading by Sam Munson from his new novel "November Criminals" across the street -- at the bookstore that is (sigh!) on the block to be sold.

That night, I had longtime friends with me, along with my younger son. I had had lunch there and Peter had told me his troubles. This was why I'd brought my entourage after the reading; I was set on spending my way into saving the place.

Peter's wife came over and remarked that she had seen me earlier, so I told her of my "plan." She hugged me.

Next Saturday, the place was shut.

The Will to Be Blond

In a discussion of whether we have free will — we don't —I suddenly became fascinated with the imaginary possibility that we could decide our physical beings, pretty much the way we can design an avatar.

I would give myself my overall body as it was when I was somewhere between 17 to 23: thinner, more limber, more easily renewed of energy and vitality.

Then, what if I had the ability to change coloring? I could literally make my skin green with envy or red with anger, look a reflective albino pale if I was crossing a street at night or greenish if I was trying to surprise someone (for something like a birthday, at a picnic.

The color toggle could apply also to hair and eyes. I could be blond or redheaded and have those blue-green-gray irises that change with the mood.

To improve on the present body, I'd make myself permanently and invincibly immune to the common cold and STDs.

And, hey, while I'm playing, maybe I could design some “template” appearances that I could change in and out of, like a suit.

Just imagine what you could do ...

The Zone

It's often the small things that make a difference.

Giggling through an otherwise boring transaction in which the bank staff just can't spell your name (three times). Gliding through traffic after a satisfying workday. Finding the perfect parking spot even thought it's 8pm. You feel you have the karma and nothing can touch you.

Sure, having karma is itself a contradiction in terms. Karma just is, like grace. No one owns it.

Like The Zone. Capitalized. Mysterious. Undefinable. Without clear borders. It's a strangely satisfying state of mind that comes from nothing (no drugs, sex or rock and roll), probably doesn't last too long, but what a high when it's there!

Vacation Lag

People used to laugh at me when I told them I'd spent my vacation, a week in July, reading detective novels in my balcony. But I used to laugh at them when they came back weary from Thailand and points beyond.

The problem with active vacations (hadn't had one in four or five years) and international travel vacations (not taken for at least a decade) is that you end up needing a vacation to recover from the vacation.

Then everything back home feels a little weird.

If you go to the southern hemisphere, as I did, you get a short period of summer, then return to the frigid north. Last weekend I went from 90 degrees Fahrenheit going into the airport at my departure point to 26 degrees F coming out at the other end. That's a 64-degree difference!

This is all to suggest that the wisdom of staying home is ever more evident.

In a minimalist lifestyle, one would read in the balcony for a few days off in summer. Go for trips on tour buses through one's own city. Go to bed when one is tired on Dec. 31st and wake up at one's usual day-off wakeup time on Jan. 1 -- which I have actually done a number of times.

One would sell one's car and walk more. One would buy more produce and cook more. One might get rid of one's cell phone (I still don't know how to answer mine, anyway).

Ommmmmmmmmmmmm ....

The Last Time

A longtime cyberfriend announced that today she would be walking out of a classroom for the last time. She's retiring from work as a university professor. The first thought to strike me is how rare it is that we get to know that we are doing something for the last time.

There are probably hundreds, perhaps thousands, of important activities that we ceased doing without our noticing that it was the last time.

The last kiss received from or given to a certain lover, relative, friend. The last time you fed at your mother's breast, if you did at all. While most people remember the date of their last cigarette or bottle of booze, I'd doubt they recall the actual puff or sip that was their last.

Then there are those events that you may have anticipated without knowing. I distinctly remember wondering, for no reason, whether I was seeing my father for the last time on the last moment I saw him, hale and hearty, walking to his car. At the time I regarded my thoughts as oddly morbid and told no one. Several days later he was unexpectedly dead.

Yet I don't think I can recall the last lucid conversation I had with my mother. It's all very random, as folks say these days.

Think of the many lasts still ahead. When will you last go out to the movies or drive your car? Or breathe your last breath?

Do we need to be aware and know? Or is there some hidden beauty in the way parts of life simply slip away?

Himym's "Aunt Robin"

With the second new season episode of himym (google it!) coming up tonight, all bets are off Robin Sherbatsky being the second m, except ...

... if "future" Ted at some point begins a story by telling his kids, "You know how we always call Mom 'Aunt Robin,' let me tell you how that got started ...?"

The Shivers

Ever since my late teens I experienced for many years a psychosomatic phenomenon I dubbed "the shivers," for lack of a better term. An unbidden unpleasant memory would pop and I'd shiver to shake it off.

The memories were not necessarily the stuff of novels and melodrama. Most of them were tiny, tiny embarrassing moments.

It was the sort of thing that, had it referred to wrongdoing, people brought up in Catholicism might have called "scrupulosity," in the old traditional language: an obsessive concern with one's personal sins, including "sinful" acts or thoughts usually considered minor or trivial.

A few typical ones of mine:

• As a teenager my mind used to drift during the Gloria at the point when the congregation says "Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father." While my mouth said the words, my brain would rebel and say to me "son of a bitch." It bothered me. The thought was sacrilegious.
• Another one that haunted me for years was when I finally earned my Second Class badge in the scouts. I was a Tenderfoot, in some countries Third Class, for the longest time of anyone in my scout troop and, who knows, maybe in the history of scouting. At the ceremony I was given the prized neckerchief and clasp. Being awkward and perhaps unprepared, I didn know what to do with the clasp and kept it in my hand as I attempted to shake hands with the dignitaries present at the podium. I still remember the look of disgust on the face of Father Jean, the stern French-born pastor, as I attempted to shake hands with the clasp awkwardly between our hands, almost like one of those practical joke joy buzzers.
• Then there are the innumerable times at which I have given answers to superiors that have left me looking either stupid, or plain uninteresting or simply unimaginative. Three seconds outside their door the brilliant response would flood into my brain. Too late. Years of too-lates, I suspect, kept me from becoming James Reston.

OK, so I beat myself up a tad too much. I know. I hated the shivers. I taught those who knew about them to ignore them and let them pass; eventually I learned to hide them.

Several years ago, the shivers finally went away. Well, not exactly. I reasoned them away.

I relaxed and told myself that the moments were not that shameful, or if they were, no one was going to arrest me for them; in fact, no one knew about them but me. I bet Father Jean would not have known what I was talking about if I shared my recollection the scout ceremony.

The point is I haven had them for years.

Then, yesterday at lunch, I found myself running through one after another after another, almost like an uncontainable multiple orgasm of shame, embarrassment and regret.

Socrates to the Rescue

I made a huge mistake at work, involving a misunderstanding of economic research. I've been covering this for decades now and I still make beginner's mistakes. All I know is that I know nothing. Thank you, Socrates.

I feel I should stop blogging about grand things like the economy and foreign policy. No one cares, anyway, and who am I to say anything?

So instead I'll crawl back into my personal philosphical corner. No one cares about that, either, but I can at least clarify things to myself. I don't talk out loud; I write.

Whither Marriage

The Edwards affair once again brings social notions of marriage and its obligations to the fore, all of which leave me uncomfortable and intellectually unsatisfied. People mean different, disparate and often contradictory notions while using the same word.

Ask the average man or woman on the street about marriage and you'll get answers such as "a sacrament," "a commitment," and "a contract." What do these mean?

I still have the actual illustrated Baltimore Catechism no. 1 from way back when the dinosaurs roamed, which Sister Catherine Agnes used to teach us in second grade that "Matrimony is the sacrament by which a man and woman bind themselves for life in lawful marriage."

Sister also used one of her classic and mildly scary illustrative stories -- which I later learned had not been her own invention, but part and parcel of a U.S. catechetical teaching method devised in the 1930s -- to drive home the point. Here's how I remember it:

There was once a little girl who was very sick. Her family and the parish and everyone prayed and prayed and prayed so she would not die. She lived. Years later, she died in a car crash. She had been married three times and went straight to hell. Better that she had died when she was young and pure.

Save your gasps for the comment box.

One need not have been a child in a pre-Vatican II American Catholic school to agree that, traditionally in the West, marriage has meant that a man and a woman publicly committed to mutual and exclusive sexual congress, with childbearing and rearing in mind, along with a series of social and economic obligations that flowed from parenthood, for as long as both would live.

Social mores have amended that commitment in almost every respect. A man and woman? To have sex? Exclusively? To have children? To rear children properly? For life? No, no, no, perhaps (say some economic studies), and ha-ha!

Perhaps that's because marriage is a contract.

Traditionally, again, in marriage a propertyless woman was conveyed to a man for the purpose of bearing an heir and keeping house, in exchange for economic benefit. In the Cinderella scenario, the aspiring, talented, voluptuous woman provided sexual, childbearing and house-managing services to the handsome, well-heeled man, a prince of a fellow.

Some view marriage, then, as the sole surviving universally legal and respectable form of prostitution. In exchange for unnecessary, ephemeral promises in ceremonies whose luster barely survive the very day they take place, a man gets sex and a woman gets money -- even though in contemporary society, marriage is utterly unnecessary for either.

I mean, if it is a contract: who is selling and buying what, why and how do the terms make sense?

If not, why then, marriage?

Cliché Criticisms Cripple Themselves

Discussing the role of the United States in World War II with a cyberfriend, I found myself sighing with the exasperation of one who could make her case ten times better, yet would never choose her terms. This happens whenever someone ventures into an area in which I feel comfortable about facts my interlocutor treats much like a bull amid eminently breakable china.

Say a European spouts clichés about the USA. "You Americans are, how do you say ... [insert cliché here]."

Or how about your gringo out of central casting who spouts something like "Well, [Latin American country here] is so backward because those people just don't know how to [insert Ugly American truism here]."

Then there's the bloody Prod who repeats some 500-year-old false canard such as "the Jesuits [add heinous act here]."

Critics often think that my reaction means they've touched a nerve. They decide that I am "emotional" (goodness, let's not spill emotion on the clean carpet, shall we?) in much the same way there-thererer men dismiss women who get legitimately annoyed.

My problem is not always that I disagree.

Americans have customs and habits of mind that may seem quaint or unusual to Europeans or even Canadians. Latin American countries are socioeconomically behind the United States by almost any conceivable measure. And even one Catholic joke has it that not even the Holy Spirit knows what the Jesuits are up to.

Nor is it that my feelings of attachment to the country of my birth, the region in which my ancestors lived or the the religion in which I was brought up (to which I no longer assent) prevent me from accepting their blemishes, scars or even fatal flaws.

Actually, the problem is that most Europeans have no effing idea of the depth of criticism to which I am capable of subjecting America. Nor do average Americans know enough to understand my exasperation with Latin American societies. Nor, finally, does the average Protestant even begin to plumb the faultlines I see in Catholicism.

To the contrary, pseudo-savants such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, the recent author of an essay on the United States, which was expanded into a book, are exasperating for the little they understand. They richly deserve every kick in the pants they get precisely because they provide the best rationale for the Republicans' idiotic renaming of French fries as "freedom fries."

That's the problem. But how does one convey this to those who feel they already know the truth and even know what I am thinking? Moreover, I am not exactly incapable of provoking a similar reaction.

Sometimes, men and women are the worst discussants in the world. I wish I could talk to my dog -- if I only had one.

Killer Pretzel Strikes Again

Remember the January 2002 "killer pretzel" that left George W. Bush bruised after he choked on a pretzel and fainted? This goes against every political bone in my body, but I now have reason to think that maybe he told the truth for a change.

True personal experience this week: I was at my desk, racing to get work done, unable to go to lunch. I got up at about 3 or 4 pm and grabbed some pretzel sticks and a Diet Coke.

Sat down, popped one in and took a sip. Somehow, either the pretzel went down the wrong way or the Coke flooded my throat or ... I don't know. Next thing I knew I propelled myself out of my chair noisily attempting to breathe.

Like Bush said, "I hit the deck." I fell, throwing a paper basket out of the way and even shoving a bookcase against the wall so hard that the phone jack was twisted in such a way that the phone became inoperable.

I'm not sure what happened then. I blacked out. I came to in pain, lying on the chair mat and attempting to catch my breath. I could not speak, just make signals that I needed a moment.

I felt myself sweat profusely. It was a cold, panicked sweat. Slowly breath returned to me and from shallow gasps I went to deeper, more moderate breathing.

Then I noticed I had hit my left leg badly. My big toe was swollen and, upon inspection later, at home, it was bruised -- just like Bush's face.

CNN called it a "vasovagal syncope" at the time. I'd come across that term once before, when someone I know had a horrible, humiliating loss of bodily function. According to the Wikipedia, a syncope is

a sudden, and generally momentary, loss of consciousness, or blacking out caused by the Central Ischaemic Response, because of a lack of sufficient blood and oxygen in the brain. The first symptoms a person feels before fainting are dizziness; a dimming of vision, or brownout; tinnitus; and feeling hot. Moments later, the person's vision turns black, and he or she drops to the floor (or slumps if seated in a chair). If the person is unable to slump from the position to a near horizontal position, he or she risks dying of the Suspension trauma effect.

This approximates in many ways my own experience, and possibly Bush's.

Uncannily, Bush was almost exactly my age in 2002, when he had his episode. Perhaps it's a middle-aged-man thing. The killer pretzel attacked me, too.

On Compromising

By the time you get to middle age the life you have is very different from the life you planned -- unless you're the odd geek who started Microsoft or the poverty-inspired boy from a town called Hope who wanted to be in JFK's shoes one day. Is the answer to dream doable dreams? To work harder? To accept fate?

These questions will one day dog you, too, younger readers. Trust me on this. My favorite description of life is "life is what happens when you had other plans." (Anyone know this phrase's author?)

The answer depends in part on your philosophical system. The ancient Greeks subscribed to the invincibility of Fate.

On the other hand, core Judaism, Christianity and Shi'ite Islam all teach that we have free will, that the deity may well know the future, or rather be outside time, but that nothing is preordained. That is, unless you area Calvinist, one of a small band within the Lubavitcher school of Hasidism or a Sunni Muslim.

By the time we become adults, most of us subscribe to some middle road. We have some power to alter the course of our lives, we think, but there are limits.

Some limits are givens: we are born rich or poor, male or female, a perceived member of the majority in our society or of a minority; our genes, science tell us, carry many predispositions. What little science I know and what experience I have tend to tell me that my individuality amounts to little more than a certain mix of chemicals that one day we will know how to completely control and manage.

Still I persist in thinking that by sheer willpower I can achieve a few things. Years ago, when I first learned the game, I spent weeks losing at backgammon consistently until I went to the library, borrowed a book about the game and evened my odds.

Why can't I do the same when it comes to becoming president of the United States, winning the Nobel Peace Prize or enticing Penélope Cruz to my lair? Where's the how-to book for dreams?

Even if I know that I will never be president nor be invited to the prize ceremony by the Swedish Academy nor spend a night with Penélope ... what would I really feel if I embarked on a campaign to achieve any of these things and actually succeeded?

Does John Updike wake up every morning thinking "Gee, how wonderful, I'm John Updike"? Or does he get depressed from time to time that he is not, say, Gustave Flaubert or Albert Schweitzer or Neil Armstrong?

I'm probably not the first to muse on why we conceive of dreams. They're archetypally human. Heaven and salvation, wealth and power and sexual satisfaction, the admiration of others and the feeling of conquest over oneself -- these are some of the things to which many of us aspire.

The story was once told to me of a saint who, upon applying to enter a monastery was asked what job he would like. He said "abbot." He was placed as porter and later laughed that if he had said anything less he wouldn't have been admitted at all.

The paradox seems to be that attaining goals by sheer effort is illusory or happenstance and probably impossible. It's not true that the poor are lazy; most work more than the rich and at harder, more grueling jobs. Yet we would not be human if we didn't aspire to a reality beyond our present one.

So what do we do once we know that the big dreams won't come true? Three things.

• We realize how unrealistic it was to believe that by our own single-minded, individual efforts we could succeed. Most success involves help from others and sheer luck. (Balzac put it another way: all wealth come from a crime, he said.)
  
• We gratefully accept the wisdom that falling short imparts.
• We adjust our dreams to things that still stretch us but are no longer obviously unattainable.

I have more or less attained the presidency in my little world. I still am continually looking for the opportunity to build my own little Lambaréné, realizing that the real prize comes not from the Swedish Academy, but from the smiles of those you manage, by chance, to influence for the better.

Finally, I'm not sure that Penélope and I would actually get along or have much of a passionate night, but I'm daring to hope that, as Daniel Berrigan once wrote, there is "love, love in the end."

Children or Dogs?

Perhaps it is the bruising cold that sharpens the critical faculty, but I see around me a depressing lack of discriminating judgment in distinctions that aren't so fine or difficult to make. Let me offer two instances.

Case #1 -- Surgery for Pets

It seems the past few weeks have been the time for pets to get expensive surgery that society does not feel fit to grant to the 40 million Americans (many of them children) who simply cannot get any kind of preventive health care because they are uninsured.

One person is spending $1,400 on a cat's operation. Fellow-blogger Julie has had a dog diagnosed with cancer undergo surgery. Ever heard of putting an animal out of its misery with a shotgun? (Truth in advertising: I have never even touched a shotgun. But you get the idea.)

When I raised the question of a hierarchy of values -- among them, people before pets -- in a comment in Julie's blog, mommyblogger Dharmamama weighed in with an out-of-context biblical quote to propose that no one is facing a choice between pets and children. (This amid an ocean of there-theres and poor-yous.)

Julie, for her part, threatened to censor me. Never mind that child homelessness has not quite been eradicated driving distance from her cancer-operated dog. To Julie's credit, the next day she aptly called the dog-cancer post a "pity party."

We all feel our hangnails are worse than a famine in India. But they're not in fact, in truth and in reality.

Case #2 "He Crossed the Line"

Heard from a blonde, white capped pedestrian commuter on her cell phone: "Brian, he f*cking crossed the line."

A man other than the patient Brian, whom she "f*cking" did not know well at all, had apparently invited this pretty, well-dressed but potty-mouthed cell-phone-toting young woman to a "f*cking" strip club. Then, some prodigious (and presumably expensive) amount of "f*cking" drinking had taken place. All ending up at his or her "f*cking" place in the middle of the "f*cking" night, where alcoholic intoxication lowered inhibitions to the point that clothes were discarded amid "f*cking" amorous activities (which, one imagines, were headed toward f*cking). Finally, some "f*cking" Maginot Line was crossed.

And all downtown, or at least everyone within the radius of a city block, heard about it.

The cognitive dissonance in this conversation begins with the understanding that in 2008 everyone knows that yelling into cell phones does not improve communication, any more than loud, slow diction and adding an "o" at the end of every word translates English into Italian. Certainly, yelling out one's angst at a line "crossed" when one is crossing so many socially accepted lines concerning public comportment is internally self-contradicting.

As is almost everything else in this overheard conversation. What delicate sensibility belongs to a young woman who has to f*cking cuss every other word? Where's the common sense in going with a little-known man anywhere, let alone a strip club and a private residence where intimate behavior may ensue?

If one can be held legally liable for driving drunk, can't one be held at least morally responsible for drinking to the point that one disregards the normal inhibitions about placing oneself in a situation of nudity with a stranger?

None of this suggests that the male stranger was therefore authorized to treat the unnamed bodily territory in question the way Germany twice treated Belgium in the 20th century. However, it does suggest that the frontier crossing was a folie à deux, as in the number of people it takes to tango.

So, what's more important: children or dogs, morning-after rescuing of self-respect or circumspect civility the evening before leading to a better morning after? Some people seem not to know the difference.