I met with the painter at new!house, watered plants there, watered plants at present!house,did shopping, watched a Tracy/Hepburn film I'd never seen all of called "Without Love", dyed hair, went to dinner and movies with friend, and am now going to walk the dog and go to bed.

Tomorrow, buy bougainvilla for new!house as surprise for DH, plant it, clean present!house, do laundry, take dog to dog park and welcome DH back from road trip.

I went for a lovely long run in the hills on a new route, got a pedicure and a fish taco and some gelato, looked at some rescue dogs, did some writing. Now I am watching an illegal ahem of a movie starring Matt Damon, and cursing the new hand-held camera technique.

Also laughing at the way there are heads in front of the screen and the sound of people coughing. It's very funny.

Didn't leave the house until almost 5:00 PM today. Then we went out to dinner to celebrate K finishing grad school. We picked Lori up at the airport and left Noah with her. My mom arrives tomorrow (MEEP) so I should be cleaning. But instead, I'm going to pajamafy myself and go to bed.

Have you ever read Kate Braverman, Robin? I always think of her fiction when I see bougainvilla.

Good day, Consuela! Fish tacos are yum, running is good.

Emmett won another trophy today playing in a Berkely Rec baseball game. He had three doubles and closed the game for the win. We actually had TV crews there, but they were there for the other team who were formed as a response to a lot of gang shootings in their neighborhood in Oakland.

So they were the feel good story and we went and ruined it.

Oh, I have read about them, Hecubus. Because my friends see urban blight on the internets and think of me. Which is either sick or quite touching...I haven't decided.

Is it just me, or does this article have an undercurrent of "Wimmens shouldn't be allowed to have male friends once they belong to their boyfriend"?

While I'd agree that there's trouble ahead if someone grows close to an opposite-sex friend and starts covering that closeness up, my view is not that a good girlfriend should honor a general blanket request to do away with any male friends since her boyfriend should come first, but rather that she should dump the jealous and controlling boyfriend that makes such a request.

No, not just you. But then, someone did break it off with me because I wasn't possessive of him, so maybe I'm not normal.

On the one hand, that article is saying something similar to the problem with the Second Life guy-- he was using his intimacy points with someone not his wife. But this paragraph kind of sums up what's wrong with the Yahoo article:

Your mate may believe that opposite-sex friendships are harmless because his or her friend is married. But that's just dead wrong! Many friendships outside of marriage start as "just friends" and grow closer and more intimate. Because these friendships are so fresh, interesting and compelling, it's not long before the two people involved start to think they are more compatible than their own life partners. It's a small step from that realization to the development of a full-blown affair, and the destruction of a marriage.

Which is saying that all close friendships must become romances, which in itself is kind of ridiculous. But maybe someone who has experienced this can comment.

Oh, I have read about them, Hecubus. Because my friends see urban blight on the internets and think of me. Which is either sick or quite touching...I haven't decided.

It's kind of weird because the team Emmett played for also had a bunch of black kids, but he was basically one of the White Kid Ringers. He was recruited by this coach (who is black) and Emmett likes the coach, and they were training with wooden bats (cool!) and paddle gloves (basically they were playing games with special training baseball mitts that force you to use good technique because they don't have a pocket to catch the ball). So it was fun and interesting for Emmett, and he was getting a high level of coaching. (The coach had been a minor league ball player.)

So it was basically just low-key fun baseball, barely a notch above a pickup game and suddenly they're in the championships and we've got a couple players (Emmett and Matthew) from the District champions putting them over the top.

It was all legal and fair, but it was sort of not. I don't think our team would've won without the contributions of Emmett and Matthew (who pitched four innings of shut out baseball). It was a relatively close game, 7-4, but it wound up being this weird nexus of race and class and competition and baseball and pushing the edge of what's fair.

Frankly, it was one of those situations where it was really about class but that picture is always complicated by race in America. Emmett's a good ballplayer, but that's partly because he's played SO many more games on his tournament team than the average little leaguer. (We played 30 games in 45 days at one point. A normal season is 18 games.) And tournament teams are mostly an upper middle class activity because they require a fair amount of money and a huge commitment of time and energy from the parents.

Here's the story of the team we beat.

There was a big local response to the first article.

A really good article on race, class and Little League

Book porn: [link]

Books turned into work of art.