Respect?

Being in DC, there's always a great sense of entitlement surrounding everything you do. You always expect and demand more, and you feel disappointed when what's "due" to you isn't awarded to you. You start out low on the totem pole, and you gradually inch your way up. But you become competitive, or maybe defensive, or maybe just entitled to the perch you've clawed you way to. And when someone leapfrogs you, or starts from a position higher than you, or just pushes you aside, you become resentful. You become angry. You become bitter. And then you become resigned. Because that's how things work in this city, your office, your relationships. You've "earned" something, yet only until the next best thing comes along.

You can read between the lines, and some of this is just venting. You always claim in this town to be ego-less, and a big part of me does not care at all. But a part always feels like you have earned something, something resembling respect. And yet...

No matter what your status in life, I think, you feel this way. There's always another step in the ladder to climb, and that ladder seems unending, no matter how high you climb. And another ladder always goes up next to you, and there it is. And sometimes your efforts bear fruit and sometimes you slip a few notches down. And you aren't sure if your footing is as sound the next time.

So it all comes back to respect, after a long journey's climb. And that to me is crucial. Because without respect, there is no trust nor confidence. So it gnaws you down. You need to come to terms with it or not. Respect.

H Street Festival

I have no idea if there really was 100,000 in attendance at the H Street Festival this year, but I've got to say, it was crowded even on a less than sunny day. Who knows how many more would have turned out if the weather had been 80 degrees and sunny. But the ten blocks were full, vendors were plentiful, good food, great restaurants, great music. Justin Trawick was a great folksy find. It's really a fantastic neighborhood. I was glad I could buy some local neighborhood art courtesy of Cherry Blossom Creative. It was about time H Street made the neighborhood maps, alongside the Noma print I also purchased.

I am already looking forward to next year's neighborhood fest.

Sweet Valley High Syndrome

I came across this piece through a link from a link. It's about how the idealized, model-ific Wakefield twins ruined her conception of high school-hood. I'm the same age as the author, though of course, no older sister for me. I also had a weakness for the serialized book series, i.e. the Little House books. So yeah, more to relate to.

My high school, obviously, was nothing like Sweet Valley High. And I was not a beautiful size six, blond hair, blue eyed goddess who might have been a model. I didn't have boys chasing after me, and I didn't have a niche of friends in high school. Though with my impending 20th reunion coming up, and after having seen Julie this summer, high school and what could have been, should have been is a conception that stays with me. And everything it might have been that was not, and thankfully, was not.

Someday

Maybe someday I will return to this piece, as I struggle to juggle/balance family and profession. If I am only so lucky...

It’s the tacit denial of the tragedy of the human condition that I’ve come to resent in the contemporary literature about “balancing” career and family. This literature is full of demands for Justice and Equality, its authors motivated by ideas of social perfection: to finally place a sufficient number of women in the ranks of management and government and to effect true gender equality in the workplace as a whole. Engaged on a quest to change the world, they write with a fervor generated by a political ideal and employ the language of political advocacy, as if the divided desires of our souls can be unified by Reform and Revolution. There is a solution for everything, they imply; we just haven’t found it yet.

But this simply isn’t so. I know from personal experience that this conflict in the soul does not go away, no matter how pleasant and accommodating our colleagues may be, or how flexible our schedules. We are limited, embodied creatures. These limits mean that we cannot do everything to its fullest extent at once, and certain things we may not be able to do at all. The tragic aspect of this is that both excellence and nurture are real, vital goods and that the full pursuit of one often, and perhaps inevitably, forecloses fully pursuing the other.

H Street Festival

Oh, how I wish my hometown could have street festivals like this one. I can't wait for the H Street Festival. Hopefully, the weather is good.

Navy Yard Shooting

The headlines are dominated by today's shooting at the Navy Yard, with at least a dozen victims. It doesn't matter if this is terrorism or a random workplace shooting or a cold, calculated rampage. It's horrible, and it hits too close (two miles away) from home. God watch and bless the victims and their families and friends.

Twelve Years

One wonders how 9/11 would have been experienced had smart phones proliferated twelve years ago. That is one indication of how this world has changed; we all have camera phones, we all have smartphones, we all have cell phones. More videos of that moment the planes hits and the buildings collapsed and thousands died. More video of the smoke plumes out of the Pentagon, the city streets filling with commuters spiraling in every direction, trapped in the city as public transportation shut down.  One wonders if cellular networks would have just shut down, and we would have been relegated to hovering in front of televisions, just like we were anyway, twelve years ago today.

I will never forget that morning.Though today seems like an ordinary morning, with talk of football and sweltering temperatures. It's not perfect and sunny and beautiful, a late summer day, like that day, twelve years ago. We face new challenges and risks in this country, and we face terrors and unknowns that we will confront, forced or not.

If you do forget, though, you can see for yourself.

God bless America, and God save the souls of those who perished that day. And may God comfort all of those who still mourn the loss of a loved one, family and friend, colleague and neighbor. We all were touched by loss that day, but some have an enduring void in their life.  Time may help heal all wounds, but the scars remain.

Syria September 10

Peggy Noonan, as she so often does, makes sense of the lack of strategery that President Obama is exhibiting with respect to Syria. About President Obama's address tonight:

All this, if it is roughly correct, is going to make the president’s speech tonight quite remarkable. It will be a White House address in which a president argues for an endeavor he is abandoning. It will be a president appealing for public support for an action he intends not to take.

We’ve never had a presidential speech like that!
...

Then get ready for the spin job of all spin jobs. It’s already begun: the White House is beginning to repeat that a diplomatic solution only came because the president threatened force. That is going to be followed by something that will grate on Republicans, conservatives, and foreign-policy journalists and professionals. But many Democrats will find it sweet, and some in the political press will go for it, if for no other reason than it’s a new story line.

Twelve years after 9/11, one year after Benghazi, and five years into a presidency, we may have the most inept foreign policy, well, since Jimmy Carter. They know nothing. They have learned nothing.

Back to School

With college kids all over DC, and my little nephew becoming a big kindergartener, my mind has wandered to thinking about school. It's now been two full decades since my last "first day" as a high school student. Twenty years sometimes seems like a year and sometimes it seems like decades. It's weird. It is now half of a lifetime ago, and I can't get over that I'm 37 and J and others are just starting their journeys. It is sad, a bit. I imagine what it would be like to have a little boy starting kindergarten, shopping for the backpack and feeling so bittersweet as he got on a school bus and headed off onto a new adventure. I would wonder how his day without me would go, and I would hope that he would make friends and he would like his teacher. And I hope he'd be smart, and he could read and write better than the other kids. And he would come home all excited to see me to tell me about his day, and how I'd be breathlessly awaiting his little stories about his day. It is so bitter, so sweet to anticipate. And so sad, because I don't know if that will happen. At M&N's party on Sunday, I felt so distant not having a baby to talk about, to hold and watch and to share my own stories. It makes me so lonely at times.

Maybe someday that will be me, and I will appreciate it so very much. But for now, all I can do is look forward to hearing the stories and wistfully hope that it will be me someday.

75%

I'm officially 75% of my way through my 30s. I'm officially in my late 30s, no wiggle room.

One nephew turned 4, another started kindergarten. And it's meterological Fall (despite the 80 degree temps), which means that the Fall equinox is coming up soon. And next week marks 12 years since that day in September, which really cannot be that long ago.

This year already feels over, like a loss, treading water, a stalemate. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I was hoping for more and it hasn't appeared. And it's the same tired old, same old same old.

Well, I will continue to hold out hope for the next 25%. Which isn't really just quarter time. Hopefully the start of something bigger.