I just turned the Olympics on. This runs to 11:30pm, I didn't expect it to go so late. ...I'm old, huh?

Well, the alternative is talking heads screaming about politics, and a rerun of Graham Norton.

Graham Norton it is then.

Windsparrow or aurelia, either of you want to do another tweet thing? this involves being tagged in a tweet with 2 lines of a poem, then retweeting that out and adding 2 more lines (we could provide you the lines) and tagging someone else.

msbelle, I missed this last night, but will gladly tweet anything else you want. Let me know here or at cynthia[no space]mclennan AT gmail dot com (or link me to your relevant tweet; glad to help).

...

Interesting discussion on stay at home parents vs working mothers. My own mum stayed at home 'til I was about 10. Dad was a self-employed carpenter. Mom went back to work to get us health insurance, because we had been priced out as individual subscribers, which is why I always laugh when known conservative culture warriors (who don't think women should work outside the home) are against "Obama Care." Had *we* had Obama Care, mum could have stayed at home.

Scott & I married in '94. To get married in the church, we had to partake in pre-marital counseling with the pastor. One of the nicest surprises of that experience (for both of us) is that we both preferred that I would stay at home with prospective children, before they were in public school, were that financially possible.

That said, I never bought into the mommy wars. I loathed stay-at-home moms who thought they were superior to mothers who worked for pay outside the home. By the same token, I hated employed mothers who looked down upon stay-at-home mothers.

I have always felt that way about various marriage and family issues, including "submission." Marriage is hard enough. If a couple finds itself in a groove (egalitarian or otherwise) and it works for them and produces a loving home, leave it be, judgers.

On a larger scale, I don't want women to be subjugated to men, but I don't have that sort of marriage, and neither did my parents or either set of grand-parents (and from what I gather, neither did my maternal great-grandparents, so it's not what I think of as marriage).

That said, I think the media has, in both cases, exaggerated the animus between mothers of different ilks, because I never experienced much of it, face to face. My day-to-day has always involved regular people just trying to make it through 'til bedtime.

My Mom worked as a secretary in the 50s until she had me and then stayed home until I was in 1st grade and one of our cats got sick. Because money was tight, she decided to wait another day before taking Tiger to the vet. He died that night. And Mom went back to get her teaching certificate so she should work and still have summers off with me and my sister. I don't recall Dad complaining about it, FWIW. This would have been about 1964.

I've got British Bake Off from YouTube on in the background. I'm always amazed at the amount of alcohol they put in things--and themselves.

So apparently there's a Pokémon gym in my company's parking garage, but it's "owned" by Team Valor. Does that mean the other team isn't allowed to use it?

It may be owned, but here gyms turn over from team to team with shockingly great regularity. Like it's not uncommon for some gyms to turn over within in an hour or less.

Are there going to nerdgangs having dance battles in the parking garage as they fight for access to Pokémon?

Yes. If it's a high status or convenient gym to hold. The one at my school is in a locked part of campus. You can't really reach it from classrooms, but you can't access it unless you are in the gates on the campus itself. This gym turns over far less -- I held it for 20+ hours since it's summer and there aren't people on campus.

Evolution in politics reminds me of two things. The first is that it reminds me, in lots of ways, of the Personality Myth episode of Invisibilia which looked at research that indicates that personalities change over a lifetime (usually for the "better") based on experience. [link] If that happens, then it seems totally reasonable that the beliefs we hold also change based on experience Why not? Why should one's political beliefs not evolve in all sorts of ways. It's not flip flopping or inconsistency. It's experience.

The difficulty, of course, is when someone's beliefs shift away from our own as opposed to towards them. Then we view it scathingly. Or we question how "real" their shift is. For example, Diana Ravitch was a key voice in creating the current state of ed systems, with frequent testing and the privatizing of public schools via charters. She know is one of it's most vocal and ardent critics. I feel myself being very eye rolly about her change in position, but she's a well respected voice of dissent now. Or George Will leaving the GOP is causing not sympathy but schadenfreude. It's weird and interesting to consider our responses to other people's changes.

Oh yea. And of course it's Saturday AM, I have a long day and I'm all, "I'M AWAKE."

I'm so post-market sweaty, Pumpkin is licking my shins. It's not so much hot as it is muggy. Shower, likely cool, then shopping.

Plei (quite a few posts ago)

It's funny, but a lot of your stated positions are very Hillary! (Outside of the war thing, where I believe she gets painted as a lot more hawkish than she actually is, given that even her support of the resolution that got us into the mess was worded very strongly in favor of the whole "only as a last resort should diplomatic solutions fail us") Who also gets painted as a centrist!

No, Hillary is a super hawk. Even on the Iraq thing, it took her a long time to say that the vote was a mistake and an even longer time to say that the war was a mistake. Her time as SecOfState provides other examples. For example, Obama was torn over the idea of pushing out Gaddafi in Libya. Hillary pushed hard for the hawkish position. When Gaddaifi was caught and killed, she quipped "we came, we saw, he died.". In her book, Hillary also essentially admits to pushing hard as SecOfState to make sure that the coup in Houduras stuck, with the pro-coup politicans pushing democratic forces out. Again, she boasts in her autobiography of this as a great accomplishment.

Incidentally Hillary is not just against single payer as a matter of pragmatism. She has explicitly said she thinks it is too anti-competitive, and too expensive. For her, being anti-single payer is a policy position. Hillary beats Trump of course. But on foreign policy and economics she still is a lesser evil, not a positive good. On social issues she has taken good positions up to a point. But it strikes me as hard to be truly feminist or truly anti-racist if you can't strongly oppose the economic inequality that devastates women and people of color.

Timelies all!

When I went to pick up the little guy at daycare, he was wheezing and having a bit of difficulty breathing. I took him to a nearby emergency room, where Gary joined us and we spent all night getting him checked out. He has some sort of virus that affects his breathing. He spent the night in the hospital. (Gary stayed with him.) They put him on oxygen and an IV. Now he's off of both, and breathing better.

The joys of parenthood, huh?

Oh, yikes, Sheryl. I'm glad it turned out okay.