"When you walk in by yourself, the look on the host or hostess’s face changes. It is sometimes a look of panic..."

"... like ‘What are we going to do with this person?’ Or sometimes it is a look of sympathy. I am just so tired of being treated like a second-class citizen."

Said Rajika Shah, "a lawyer in Los Angeles," who "is often led to the worst table in the dining room, neglected by her server, and then rushed out at the end of the meal," quoted in "Why Is Dining Alone So Difficult? With solo reservations on the rise but many restaurants still restricting tables to two or more, solitary Americans often feel left out or stigmatized" (NYT).

The assumption that people need to be coupled or grouped goes beyond restaurants, said Bella DePaulo... author of the 2023 book “Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life.”... Dr. DePaulo also pointed to a recent, highly circulated article in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” which links practices like solo dining to reclusion and loneliness....

“People who are lonely are going to stay home,” she said. “They are not going to go out to a restaurant. People who go out on their own are confident.... We are a nation that really romanticizes romantic coupling and marriage, .and stigmatizing people who are single or do things alone is part of that”....

Here's a picture of me 17 years ago with my fisheye-exaggerated hand on a Bella DePaulo book, "Singled Out":

Obviously, I'm not alone. I've got Obama! I mean, I've got my tablemate, my photographer, and he was audaciously hoping, while I was preparing to do a Bloggingheads with Bella. And that Bloggingheads turned out to be momentous. It played a role in connecting me to Meade, as I described a bit later in a post called "Flashback '08: The Audacity Althousity of Hope."

So I'm always happy to see Bella DePaulo's name come up in an article, even though the important matter of living well while single isn't my personal concern anymore. I still care about it! And you don't have to be single to find yourself in situations where you need to or would like to eat alone in a restaurant and you waste part of your mind on the possibly disapproving expression on a restaurant employee's face and the way the other diners might be thinking, oh, that poor woman, no one loves her.

At least Obama loves us!

Today's the big day.

Trump inauguration

Let me take your temperature:

How are you feeling?

Wary

I'm in despair

Happy and hopeful

Ravenous for the revenge that begins today

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?... A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long."

"You know what I’m talking about. It’s the contagious power of hope. The anticipation, the energy, the exhilaration of once again being on the cusp of a brighter day. The chance to vanquish the demons of fear, division and hate that have consumed us and continue pursuing the unfinished promise of this great nation, the dream that our parents and grandparents fought and died and sacrificed for. America, hope is making a comeback. Yeah. But, to be honest, I am realizing that, until recently, I have mourned the dimming of that hope. And maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings, that deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future.... For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black..... Doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better..... We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us..... Let us work like our lives depend on it, and let us keep moving our country forward and go higher, yes, always higher than we’ve ever gone before...."

Said Michelle Obama — I've edited it down — at the Democratic National Convention last night.

Watch the whole thing for yourself and form your own opinion:

How many times did she say "hope"? I counted: 7.

How many times did she say "Biden"? I counted: 0.  

She said "Kamala"17 times. And, by the way, she said "Harris" only 5 times, and each time, it was the full name "Kamala Harris." I think she (and her speechwriters) are showing us the preferred locution — say either the full name or the first name. "Kamala" is distinctive in a way that "Harris" is not. Ask the person on the street, "What do you think of Harris?" and I bet most people will express puzzlement: Who's Harris?

Replete with cheeseheads and "Jump Around"...

Wisconsin weighed in at the convention:

I don't know why Governor Tony Evers had such trouble getting the words out, but what does it matter? The votes were cast, and the votes were not real anyway.

Nice to see Ben Wikler by his side.

As for the convention in general, no, I did not watch. Maybe I'll take a look at the Obamas speeches on YouTube... or just look at the transcripts... count how many times they said "hope" or something.

ADDED: I scrolled right to Wisconsin and felt good about hearing "Jump Around," but I see that all the states got their popular song. Here's a full list. Because they went in alphabetical order, Alabama was first, and the song is a song that used to make lefties cringe: "Sweet Home Alabama."

"Adopting joy as a political shield has also allowed Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz to throw some bare-knuckled punches at Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio."

"Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, has targeted Mr. Trump for his many legal problems — 'I know Donald Trump’s type,' she now likes to say, to uproarious applause and chants of 'Lock him up' that she only recently began to discourage. Mr. Walz has castigated Mr. Trump for 'servicing himself' instead of helping others, and made an off-color reference to a debunked rumor about Mr. Vance and furniture. Both Democrats do it with a smile, and the crowd eats it up.... Of course, Ms. Harris’s joyful-warrior approach has so far not been substantive from a policy perspective...."

Writes Katie Rogers in "Harris Used to Worry About Laughing. Now Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign. Democrats are smiling again, and so is a vice president who once weighed the political risks of cheerfulness. The high spirits are also providing air cover for scathing attacks on Republicans" (NYT).

But maybe get-happy is policy enough: "In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted the song 'Happy Days Are Here Again' to offer a promise of a bright future to Americans stricken by the Great Depression.... In a time of war and economic recession, Barack Obama’s likeness was plastered on a poster [with] the message... 'Hope.'"

I thought it might be satire — Trump's request that the RNC not make him, right now, its "presumptive nominee."

But it's real... and Trump was for it before he was against it. CNN:

When Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 — "It felt then as if we were embracing modernity and inclusion, moving away from the image of John Wayne’s America."

"How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one? Of course, every time there’s a movement, there’s a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened.... Trump has played on that resentment.... Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. I’m puzzled about why his devoted fans don’t mind his mean streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, brazenly make fun of disabilities in a way that had never been done in politics — President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries from being tortured, a Times reporter’s disability — and loyal Trump fans laugh. He calls Haley 'Birdbrain.'... Obama’s triumph in Iowa was about having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity...."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her column this week, "Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman" (NYT).

To repeat the question: "How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?" Does Dowd really believe it's all Trump's fault? Couldn't Obama himself have used his presidency more effectively and built American optimism? He promised hope, but why didn't he deliver more of it? Why did we end the Obama years with so much division and strife? Dowd puts no responsibility on Obama. It's all about the reactionaries — the countermovement that automatically follows any movement. It happens "every time." Dowd chooses to portray the American people as a machine, behaving mechanically — and perversely. And yet somehow it is Trump who is devoted to "tearing down faith in humanity." 

"Trump’s victory is by no means assured...."

"But the past few years of Trump, Trump, Trump have taught me, if nothing else, that hoping for the best is not necessarily a winning strategy. With American democracy on the line, I’m taking the only defensible position toward the New Year: full-scale dread. I plan to pull up the covers and hide under my pillow as long as possible come January. It’s going to be a long twelve months."

Writes Susan B. Glasser, in "The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump/The story of 2023 wasn’t the search for another Republican leader—but the Party’s embrace of the one it already has" (The New Yorker).

Dread as the alternative to hope.

How could dread be a "winning strategy"?

Are Democrats arriving at the belief that Trump is inevitable? What strange power that man has!

"The Taliban says that women’s lives have improved under its two-year rule."

"Supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada issued a ban on forced marriages shortly after taking power, and he vowed in a recent audio message that he wants women to live 'comfortable' lives. But many women tell a different story. A 29-year-old participating in an art workshop for girls and young women in Kabul said she is afraid of the moments when her fellow students say they are starting to feel better. 'These days, it actually just means they have given up hoping for a better life,' said the woman, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals."

From "As Afghan schools remain closed for girls, mental health crisis builds" (WaPo).

Is it a different story or is it the same story? What is a "comfortable life"? Is it not accepting the reality where you find yourself and feeling good about whatever it is you happen to have? Is hope comfortable?

"The four children found alive after surviving for 40 days in a Colombian jungle were told by their mother to leave the site of a plane crash and seek help..."

"... their father said. According to the oldest child, their mother lived for about four days after surviving the impact of the crash that left the group stranded in the wilderness.... Fidencio Valencia, an uncle, told reporters... that the siblings initially sustained themselves on cassava flour known as fariña, which was being transported aboard the aircraft.... 'When the plane crashed, they took out a fariña, and with that, they survived.... After the fariña ran out, they began to eat seeds.'... [R]escuer Henry Guerrero said the children also found one of 100 emergency supply kits scattered by the military — as well as wild fruits and plants in the jungle."

From "Mother told kids to leave Colombia plane crash site for help, family says" (WaPo).

Here's a tweet from Colombia’s military showing a drawing from the 2 oldest children. We're told: "This drawing represents the hope of an entire country":

"He looked forward, he said, to a better diet in prison, with more vegetables and fewer carbs. Life in prison will allow him..."

"... to correspond with his friends, perhaps including a pen pal whom he said he wanted to marry. He’ll have recreation time, be able to play sports and maybe even watch his favorite teams compete on TV. Opponents of capital punishment often claim that life in prison is worse than death.... Instead of putting him out of his misery, they insist, keep him alive so he’ll really suffer. Three decades of documenting daily life on death rows and inside maximum security prisons.... have taught me.... the most vicious criminals often have the best jobs, best hustles and easiest lives.... Mr. Cruz’s hopes, expectations and dreams for his own future remain realistic...."

Writes lawprof Robert Blecker, author of "The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst of the Worst," in "If Not the Parkland Shooter, Who Is the Death Penalty For?" (NYT).

"Loss or change of sense of smell or taste can lead to 'severe distress'... people... often feel 'isolated' when dismissed by clinicians."

"Daily activities such as smelling coffee and testing the flavour of food can become 'disgusting and emotionally distressing'.... [A]n estimated 5.6% of patients have smell dysfunction for at least six months and 4.4% have altered taste.... [W]hile most patients are expected to recover their sense of smell or taste within the first three months, 'a major group of patients might develop long-lasting dysfunction that requires timely identification, personalised treatment and long-term follow-up.'"

 
From "Covid study finds millions have long-term smell or taste problems/Researchers say about 5% of infected adults may develop long-lasting changes to sense of smell or taste" (The Guardian).

What is the "personalised treatment and long-term follow-up"? I've had a loss of the sense of smell for over a decade, and from what I understand, there is no treatment. I'd love for there to be more research to develop treatments, but if you don't have anything to help me, I don't want health-care money — and my own time — wasted on monitoring me.

The article refers to "the devastating effect that loss of smell and taste can have on quality of life and wellbeing." Don't overdramatize! It's as bad as it is but no worse. My life isn't devastated. How do you expect people with worse disabilities to keep their spirits up? 

ADDED: By chance, the very next thing I read, also in The Guardian, was "I gave up hope of a cure for my chronic condition. And it’s made me happier than ever before/For 30 years, I tried to ‘fight’ it. In the end, I found relief in embracing my identity as a person with a disability" by Keith Kahn-Harris: 

"I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years. It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades..."

"... and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it 'work.'... It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it!.. I was too permeable.... So, like a lot of people, I started to dose the news. I cut out TV news altogether, because that’s just common sense, and I waited until late afternoon to read other news.... I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong.... Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in 'The Social Dilemma,' when all those tech executives admitted that they didn’t let their kids use the products they had created."

Writes Amanda Ripley, in "I’m a journalist who stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or our product?" (WaPo).

She decides that news needs to be rebuilt around human needs. It needs to give people: 1. hope, 2. a sense of agency, and 3. dignity. 

"To bring a child into this world has always been an act of hope," writes Ezra Klein...

... in "Don’t Let Climate Change Stop You From Having Kids" (NYT).

The ignorance and lack of empathy is simply astounding. Always? "Always" refers to all of human history, replete with slavery, rape, the subordination of women, and the lack of perfect birth control and the freedom to use it. You didn't need hope! What drivel is this?

I know, women's emancipation is not Klein's focus. He just forgot about it. Outrageously! He's saying — presumably unwittingly — that when women have been raped and impregnated and continued in their pregnancy to the point of childbirth, they were TAKING ACTION — not merely experiencing an ordeal — and — what's more — it was an ACT OF HOPE. Always!!! 

"Canada’s supreme court has ruled that life sentences without the chance of parole are both 'cruel' and unconstitutional..."

"The court unanimously determined on Friday that sentencing killers to lengthy prison terms with little hope of freedom risked bringing the “administration of justice into disrepute.'... Acknowledging the heinous crimes of those serving multiple life sentences, Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote that the ruling 'must not be seen as devaluing the life' of innocent victims. 'This appeal is not about the value of each human life, but rather about the limits on the state’s power to punish offenders, which, in a society founded on the rule of law, must be exercised in a manner consistent with the Constitution.'"

The Guardian reports.

"The inclusion of a transgender personality for kids and adult doll collectors alike is groundbreaking. This is bigger than even Laverne Cox herself. This would ripple down many generations to come."

Said Tinu Naija, "a New York-based Barbie enthusiast [who] ordered the Cox doll," quoted in "Laverne Cox is first trans woman to have Barbie doll modeled after her" (WaPo). 

Cox herself said: "I hope all the kids who are feeling stigmatized when their health care is being jeopardized, whose ability to play sports [is curtailed], I hope they can see this Barbie and feel a sense of hope and possibility."

ADDED: I had an additional thing I was going to say. Then I checked out the comments over there and saw the top comment is pretty close to what I'd self-censored : "I thought Ken was the first transgender Barbie doll. Look in his pants."

Ha ha. I got the original Ken doll when it came out, and I was quite interested to see what was in his pants. It was 1961. I was 10. Should Mattel have dangled that in front of me?

They named the woman-focused sports bar Sports Bra.

I'm reading "A bar of their own: Portland’s Sports Bra will only show women’s sports/Jenny Nguyen’s sports bar, opening in April, has already received praise from women’s sports fans around the world" (WaPo). 

From the comments at WaPo:

1. "Men have become discontented and snarly. Women still possess hope. So women's sports and sports fans are still fun. I'd like Netflix or Britbox to feature women's sports leagues. Is that an idea? Why not sports on streaming sites?"

2. "There isn't the demand to warrant that. The reality is that the vast bulk of women's sports don't have a very high level of interest or make any money.... Mark my words, six months from now the headline will read 'bar that only had women's sports on tv closes.'" 

3. "Okay, whateverdoodle, oh Dearth of Hope comment-maker."

"Ladies, if a man invites you to his place — and it's just the 2 of you — for a beverage... he has asked you if you'd like to fuck, and you said, yes, probably..."

"You have told that man, I'd absolutely be interested in fucking you — pretty much tonight.... If you send the message I pretty much am up to fuck, and the guy leans in to kiss you, he may be operating on bad information. Our system doesn't put him off the hook. The man is still required to respond to the signals as soon as they are clarified.... I suppose there could be such a thing as a 24-year-old who can be in a meeting with a Senator and is still too dumb to know what an invitation to come up to his place really means.... The Senator didn't read the signals wrong. The Senator read the signals exactly as they were sent. They were the wrong signals. I think it was very generous of the Senator to say he read the signals wrong. He didn't read anything wrong. The signals were crystal clear. They were sent wrong." 

Scott Adams takes a strong position on the Huma Abedin accusation against an unnamed Senator.

 

1. I initially resisted taking this story to heart because Abedin did not come out strongly on the side of women but is continuing a pattern of protecting Democratic Party men, as I showed you here, yesterday.

2. I have personally lived my entire life, going back to adolescence, with the understanding that Scott Adams is putting very starkly, that one's actions are understood that way. In fact, I followed a personal credo: Don't give him any ideas. I'm sure I missed out on some lovely experiences because I was so cautious, and this was a caution that went way beyond avoiding sexual assault. I didn't want the other person to feel hurt or embarrassed. 

3. So I agree with part of what Scott Adams is saying, that by accepting the Senator's invitation, she gave him hope, and she ought to know that her action inspired hope.

4. But hope goes on only in his head (and the rest of his nervous system). He probably also had hope as soon as he saw her, as soon as she was friendly to him. He got ideas. Fine! The question is what can he do with that hope? 

5. Since I spent a lifetime operating under the credo Don't give him any ideas, I'm not in a great position to parody Scott's advice to ladies with a statement that begins, "Gentlemen, if a woman accepts your invitation," but there is one thing I'm sure of, so let me try.

6. Gentlemen, if a woman accepts your invitation into your place for a drink, you may be one step closer to fucking but you are also one step closer to humiliation and far worse things, and you'd better know what you are doing and not just plop down next her and kiss her, pushing your tongue into her mouth, pressing her back on the sofa.

7. Notice Adams's language: "the guy leans in to kiss you." That's like kissing in a romcom, where the man gradually and gently moves his lips closer to hers and observes her response, so that there's lots of nonverbal communication. That's not what happened (as far as we know from Abedin's description). The Senator suddenly advanced to French kissing (and whatever that "pressing" was). 

8. I would tend to think that Abedin had a lot of self-esteem and — rightly! — believed she could offer a man a wonderful relationship and intended to give this man a chance to enter into the highly valuable sphere that is her life. Let's keep talking about what actions mean. His action meant: You're not an important person in my life. 

"Franzen’s position is a common one among liberal intellectuals: He concedes the threat to free speech norms on the left is real, but..."

".... insists it is too insignificant to merit criticism....  Franzen’s position, a common one on the left, implicitly concedes that there could be a point at which the problem grows to a level that it does merit criticism... Franzen takes the clarifying step of making that level explicit: when 'people start being sent off to Lubyanka' — the headquarters of the Soviet secret police — 'for having said the wrong thing to the wrong person.' I would suggest that, once we have gotten to, or anywhere near, the point at which stray comments result in abduction, torture and execution, it will be a bit late to speak out. Yet that is apparently the point at which Franzen is willing to start complaining publicly... Franzen’s mind seems to have particular difficulty calibrating and ordering multiple problems; the same befuddlement once inspired him to argue that environmentalists should focus on saving birds because mitigating climate change is hopeless."

From "What Jonathan Franzen and the Left Get Wrong About Free Speech/Don’t wait for an emergency to criticize dangerous ideas by your allies" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

Franzen refused to sign a letter. I'm not going to accept Chait's characterization of why he refused, because I can see that Chait is misinterpreting the Lubyanka statement, which I'd read as hyperbole. People who say "It's not the end of the world" don't mean it's not worth worrying about if it's not the actual end of the world. 

And I suspect Franzen doesn't like signing his name to other people's writing. He seems to prefer to craft his own very particular statements. I've read a couple books of his essays, including one where he takes on the critics of his remarks about birds and climate change, and I don't think he would appreciate Chait's paraphrase — befuddlementization — of those remarks. 

I won't purport to paraphrase it myself, but here's what Franzen wrote in The New Yorker in 2019, "What If We Stopped Pretending?/The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it." It begins:

"In the last few months, six promising connections with men under 30 — all of them well-educated and seemingly polite — degenerated quickly..."

"... (before meetings that never took place), first into references to sex, then to requests for information on what I 'like,' and then to an unstoppable slew of messages about what they’d like to do to me, what they’d like me to do to them, the current status of their body parts, and then incessant voicenotes, body-part pictures and requests for pictures of me. It is inane, tiring and completely pointless. Sexting has taken the place of sex. This may be because sex itself has become such a vexed operation, even for 24-year-olds...." 

 From "Why are young men so scared of sex?/Sexting has taken the place of sex" (Spectator).

I don't get "unstoppable slew." Why not block anyone who is boring you? All I can think of is: hope.