Amy Welborn has moved away from the Midwest and I feel a bit poorer for it. “Many hands make light work” they say, and I liked that she was up here adding her hands to holding back the line against the winter foe. (I’m likely under the mistaken impression that winter doesn’t really exist in Birmingham; Steven Riddle mentioned that in Orlando area he wore no jacket the first winter there, but then a jacket the second winter, and now wears a winter coat. It’s all relative, except when it’s not.) I attribute to the Deep South the sort of romanticism that many a Northerner does. Greater gentility, a slower, more satisfying way of life, pretty women, hot toddies, and warm hospitality. Or pretty toddies and hot women? I get corn-fused.
I was a bit disturbed by how much more difficult Thursday’s bingo than bingo’s past, particularly because I only worked only part of the evening, as Kim will testify as I was subbing for her until 7:30, give or take. I think a big part of it is that all the novelty of bingo has been completely stripped. In the beginning, the first year or two, everything was so new that it offered an adrenalin rush. I recall with nostalgia the quiet non-smoker’s room to which I would repair in order to breathe air with oxygen.
Since I am by nature private, the public thing was a big step out. The bingo players had been built up by fellow bingo volunteers as tigers without cages such that you had to be tough skinned to survive, and yet I did.
Bingo held a sort of anti-glamour and after the glow of fatigue and camarderie with other bingo workers I would come home, feeling sort of holy from the effort and would write inspired. Oddly(?), I’m closer to my bingo co-workers than my corporate co-workers.
But now I have nothing to write about bingo. I think it’s a writing vein that has been tapped, although I never expected it would be worth writing about and so that was all bonus. There were all sorts of eccentric people, people I would never normally see in my daily life. But eventually, alas, it is a fact of human nature that a church bingo hall would become something less than…say…Broadway.
Bingo is a genre that, like spam poetry, seems to have been spent. I’ll miss it!
I’m still thrown back by the big financial bailout. Or more to the point, by the reaction against it. There's an unlikely coalition of populists whose view of economics is, in my opinion, lacking, and uber-principled conservatives. Including Ham o' Bone and my stepson. It’s amazing how out-of-step I am with “Main Street” as well as with my fellow hardcore conservatives. It seems as though issues are clarifying the Catlick conservative community. I feel a bit chagrined to notice I don’t take the “purer” stand on either not voting for McCain because of his support of ESCR or against the bailout. It’s likely thin gruel to know that I wouldn’t have voted for Giulliani or if McCain had nominated a pro-choicer. Coulda, woulda, yeah.
One thing is for sure: to the extent the financial crisis has global consequences America owes the world an apology for this FUBAR.
Watched the first Office episode. It was okay, but not as magical as it used to be.
Wednesday was water aerobics, which I shorten to “aerobics” when mentioning in mixed company so as to preserve my heterosexuality. (Or some absymally small fraction of coolness.) Our instructor was absent this week. Last week I felt proud to have asked her a question she’d never heard before. I’d said, “why exercise our stomach muscles when anything you exercise gets bigger, and my stomach is big enough already thank-you-very-much?”. She explained that our stomach muscles are not our biceps or quads. Their maximum size is so small as to not significantly alter belly size.
Well, they say there’s no such thing as a dumb question, don’t they?
She was absent because she’d lost her voice, presumably from her day job as a roller derby gal. Well, now, that’s different.
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