As February came to a close I was set to begin blogging up a storm with some squalls like I had in February. It was not to be. It began on a Sunday and I’ve been keeping to family on weekends. Then on Monday I was hit with what felt like a stomach bug. Couldn’t eat, thought cookie tossing made sense but couldn’t bring myself to do it and just sat binge watching the very satisfying end of the salacious “Orange is the New Black.” Salacious is a loaded word. There is a lot of lesbos in it but its done so casually that it ends up being in your face. The sex scenes would have gotten the adolescent me all heated up. Today they just sort of made me sit up in wide eyed astonishment and then in their frequency inured me. It had much the same affect as reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog daily for ten years. Women’s breasts were to Orange what casual even wincing explanations about the details of gay life were to Sullivan. A salutary effect in both cases was moving past titillation to a more grown up attitude about facts of life. I’m still in many ways a Puritan in mind. It reminds me of a line in a George C Scott Movie I watched 35 years ago, Hardcore. A puritanical father learns his daughter has been lured into a sordid life and goes on a quest to rescue her after she is too humiliated to let herself be found. A young prostitute he encounters in his search tells him that Sex is similar for both of them. Because of the miracle that is the Internet it only took me ten minutes to find it:
“We’re just alike. You think sex is so unimportant you don’t do it. I think sex is so unimportant I don’t care who I do it with.”
Orange is the New Black is rollicking but its not for puritans. It reminds me, as so many things do of Mathew 10:16, “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
By the way the link above is to “Bible Hub” a condordance which in this case has over twenty different versions of Mathew 10-16. I’m not good at remembering scriptural references so I just plug wise as serpents into my search and I find it immediately. Since Google emerged the concordances had grown exponentially more vast. Reading down this verse you find the different Bibles calling the serpents wise, cunning, prudent among other words and the doves innocent, harmless and dimwitted. Sorry, that last word is a lie. No Bible employs “dimwitted” but just maybe Jesus had something like that in mind when he diplomatically cloaked his listener’s ignorance with a child like aura.
Well, that was quite the birdwalk.
Yesterday, I did manage to improve upon Monday’s lethargy. I gathered up my Mother’s records to take into our tax preparer, Worked on Probate, Took our Chevy into the shop, shoveled the walk after our first snow since my birthday last December and continued moving stuff out of our attic so that it can be remodeled into an office starting next week.
But my most serious job was preparing testimony for a Senate hearing in St. Paul later this week. I’ll be reworking it shortly and sending it in to the Senate staff who is organizing testimony. More on that later.
Other than that a truck load of intentions is still awaiting my attention. That means blog posts. But here’s another birdwalk. Yesterday as I cleaned out my attic I found a Demographic study from 2003, my last year on the Duluth School Board. I grabbed it to peek at because we are having a special meeting the last week of March to discuss a more recent demographic study. I’m not sure if its the one we voted to spend a small pile of money on but it sure is necessary.
Anyhoo, only one thing stuck out to me in the 2003 study prepared for the School District (perhaps at no charge) by the Duluth City Planning Department. The only significant area in our school district that has seen continued expansion of housing and new residents is in the townships. It was averaging over 3% growth at in 2003 while other parts of the District were flat or losing housing and population. That issue was very much on my mind when I began criticizing the Red Plan’s brutal division of Duluth into East and West with its implications for segregation rearing its ugly head again. I felt that keeping Central would have made more sense. We could have bused kids between Central and Denfeld easily because we were already doing this with the Secondary Technical Center and its vocational oriented classes.
This would have put that growing township population closer to Central and returned Eastern students to Central the first “eastern” school in the City. As a byproduct it would have made the city’s recent de facto segregation less of a factor.
Ah, but that’s me being an “I told you so” again. Not helpful. I just hope our little March meeting on demographics is.
