When I Will Look the Other Way as You Knock the Shit Out of Your Kid in Public

So, I’m up the hill at the little grocery store which is packed with people coming home from work and there, in the meat aisle, is a woman pushing a cart. A boy of about nine or ten is standing in the basket of the cart, reaching up to try to touch the signs  that hang from the ceiling.

She tells him to stop. He petulantly says no. She says she is not kidding and that he could get hurt.

And then he swung his leg up and kicked her in the face. Not hard, but he kicked her in the face. And we all turned to look. And he just smiled at her like “What are you going to do about it?” and her face didn’t change at all, but she just kept pushing the cart.

And I thought, should I do something? If so, what? And then I thanked everything I could think of that I didn’t have a kid like that.

On the Bright Side, Democrats Write Inspiring Things Like This

You cannot have our hours of labor without also respecting our opinions and input and giving us the respect deserving of any other voter in this state.  I believe I speak for not only the younger generation, but party members of all ages, in saying that what ALL democrats need right now are leaders, not lectures.

Cody Goodman to Chip Forrester. I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I have to say, it’s kind of refreshing to see cards actually out on the table, finally, at long last. We, as Democrats, have needed that for a long time.

Oh, New Contacts, Why Aren’t You Here Yet?

I’m not even going to complain about yet another day with a headache, except to say that this one starts at my eye, runs across my face to my ear, and then down behind it into my shoulder. And it makes me feel almost drunk, in a bad way.

Did I tell you about the most exciting thing? So, you know, I got glass doors for my fireplace for Christmas, which necessitated buying a new grate that would fit behind the doors and the Butcher picked up a tea pot that goes on the fire.

Yes, on the fire.

It’s supposed to help humidify the air, but, of course, you can use it for tea.

Ever since I saw Paula Deen cooking in cast iron in her fireplace, I have longed to cook in mine.

I feel like this is the first step.

No, I don’t know why cooking in the living room in the fireplace is so much more awesome than cooking in the kitchen, but it is. If I ever build my own house, I’m going to have a fireplace in the kitchen. I guess that’s what I’ll use the money from the movie rights for.

Ha ha ha.

I have not forgotten, Universe!

Unless You are an Adulterer, You are Not an Adulterer

I have a bunch of blogs in my RSS reader left over from the Nashville is Talking days and slowly, obviously very slowly, I’ve been weeding out the ones I don’t care to read any more. Normally, these are sports blogs.

But yesterday, I read a post by a woman in which she was talking about being an adulterer and I read the whole thing only to realize it was, basically, a rehash of the family fight we’d had on Sunday. My mom is like this–not an adulterer, though she might claim she was or was as bad as one. But this idea that, because their god sees all sin as the same–a sin is a sin–finding yourself briefly lusting after, say, Beyonce is the sin of adultery, same as cheating on your wife with her best friend, even though one is something you enjoy the idea of briefly and then get back to your day and the other one can tear your family apart.

But my mom has these weird moments, too, where you’ll be talking to her about some asshole you both know, who has just been arrested for beating his wife, say, and my mom will say “Well, I shouldn’t talk, I have my bad qualities, too.” Really, Mom? You have some bad qualities heretofore completely hidden of equal evilness to beating your spouse?

You know what I mean? It sounds delusional. This woman whose blog I stopped reading has not hurt her husband even in the same neighborhood of bad by lusting in her heart as she would by wrapping herself around another man’s penis after promising her husband she would be true to him. Not only are those not even in the same ballpark, they’re hardly the same game, like the difference between playing catch with a toddler and being the catcher in a major league baseball game.

My mom isn’t a spouse-abuser.

Now, let me be clear–I get this at some level from a spiritual perspective. And, in my heart, I don’t care if you think all have sinned and fallen short in the privacy of your own home. Or hell, in public.

But it seems to me sometimes to be borrowing trouble, to believe of yourself that you are as bad and hurt people as bad as people who are actually hurting people, and it seems to me that it starts to fuck with a person morally. After all, if you commit adultery against your husband by having lustful thoughts about Bob Dole and your husband laughs and you pray about it and he forgives you, if you truly believe that is adultery and those are as bad as the consequences are? Does it make you reckless about pushing it a little further?

I don’t know.

The main thing about it is that it scares the shit out of me for my mom, which is why I can’t bear the daily exposure to someone else also thinking along those lines. I worry sick that my mom does not say “Oh, this person is a bad person who I should stay away from.” Too many times I’ve seen her set aside her own discomfort, because who is she to judge, since she, too, is a sinner?

I wish there were some way of saying to her “Can’t you believe that all sins are equally bad AND believe that all behavior is not equally bad?”