~jobma for ita.

not sure why my mom arriving has led to me being an anxiety attack on legs. Maybe because I know mac has someone here that he feels safe with and has no other place to be. Maybe because it means the move in 16 days is really really real. Maybe because with someone else looking at it all I can see is all that is NOT done at my place. GAH!

The Protestant governing elite must also bear its own share of responsibility for slavery and racial discrimination. Yet, after the ideals of meritocratic inclusion gained a foothold, progress was remarkably steady and smooth.

You see, it's because the white Protestant elite were the cause of the vast majority of systemic discrimination in this country that they should also get credit for ending it! I mean, things are all perfectly equal now, right? We've got a black President and two chicks on the Supreme Court! Progress COMPLETE.

Ha HA! I can totally get USAir miles for my Lufthansa flights! Good job keeping all of my boarding passes, which I need to mail them.

Well, who else has the wisdom and leadership to stop oppressing all those people who weren't fit to govern themselves anyway?

In the words of a straight male WASP college classmate of mine, possibly in a class called Ethnicity, but definitely in some pinko commie Liberal Arts class: "It was my people who made this country great!" He almost got killed right on the spot.

ION, I found a caterpillar in the caldo verde tonight that I'd made with the remaining CSA greens for this week. I love that our farmer doesn't spray anything on his crops, but OTOH, pesticides do tend to get rid of, um, pests.

(And I'm sure it was a perfectly non-poisonous and edible caterpillar and was probably an indication that these greens were grown in a healthy sustainable environment blah blah bugs-are-good-for-the-earth-cakes. But I still did not want to eat it.)

I'm still trying to figure out what that part at the end about Ralph Lauren means. The clothes that are mostly associated with the Ivy League are mostly designed by Jewish designers, and therefore ... what?

The author of that op-ed has a somewhat "interesting" history with Judaism. He went to the Maimonedes School in Brookline, outside Boston, which is a Modern Orthodox school that puts a lot of emphasis on the interaction between traditional Jewish law and modern life. (One of my cousins went there from kindergarten through middle school.) Anyway, he went to his high school reunion with his non-Jewish fiancee. When a photo of this reunion was published in the school bulletin, he and his fiancee were not in it. (There seems to be some dispute about exactly how much of the picture was cropped out.) He took this and made it into a 10-page article in the NY Times Magazine about how Modern Orthodoxy can't really survive in the modern world.

The clothes that are mostly associated with the Ivy League are mostly designed by Jewish designers, and therefore ... what?

It's not racism if you like their race. Or, you know, if you like having members of that minority ethnicity make your clothes.