Yes where do you start?

I saw this post on Twitter the other day:

And I really wanted to reply, agreeing. What is so distinctively "feminine" about "innocence"? How does "innocence" differ from ignorance? And so on.

 

I didn't say anything. I don't have a Twitter account in the name "Hosea" and I decided at the last minute not to create a trail on this kind of topic under my real name. But oh heavens, did I want to!

Fortunately when I sought out the original post she was replying to, lots of other people were already chiming in. I think one of my favorite questions was, "If a woman loses a certain amount of femininity every time she fucks a man, does she gain it back again if she fucks a woman? Does that mean that, for instance, an M-F-F triangle is neutral on this score? Can you let me know by Friday?"

 

There were others in a similar vein. It was fun to read.

  

Hair, part 3: Vogue speaks

A few weeks ago I found the following article, linked from something else on the Internet: https://www.vogue.com/article/julia-roberts-underarm-armpit-hair-notting-hill-premiere-1999-busy-tonight-interview.

So I read it. And gosh, here I always thought Julia Roberts was just incredibly overrated. But now I'm going to have to think more favorably about her, I guess. She's got the right idea on this topic, at any rate.

And I appreciated the gallery of 16 beautiful women that accompanied the article. Maybe the world isn't quite as crazy as I have sometimes thought.

I'm glad.
  

Go public again?

Should I take this blog public again?

I started to think about it because I've started (in a slow and dilatory way) to try to put my affairs in order. Not that I particularly expect to die soon (God forbid!) but I don't want to leave things a disorderly mess if something happens unexpectedly. 

So I need to write a current will (since my last one dates from before my separation from Wife and is explicitly invalidated by that), and some other things. I've written a letter to my boys telling them where to find the paperwork on my insurance, and so on. All the usual stuff. 

But what do I do with this blog? 

Right now it is locked up so only a dozen people can read it, and I'm pretty confident none of them is reading it any more. (If I'm wrong and you are reading this, please comment to let me know!) There's a lot of data here, and I don't really want it lost forever, or buried under a rock, or deleted in a routine purge of the Blogspot server. While I want to preserve my privacy in the short run, I am conceited enough that I want to preserve my writings in the long run.

On the other hand, if I write the detailed access information and password into that letter for the boys, ... well, right now all that is just in my filing cabinet. It's not in a safe deposit box or anything like that. So in principle either boy could find it, discover the blog, and edit or delete it at any time. I sure don't want that either!

Why did I go private? Because I was worried that Wife would find the blog and use it against me in the separation. But that reason has expired because the separation agreement is now signed and filed. There is no further advantage for her to get.

What else? Well I admit to some pretty discreditable behavior here. I wouldn't want my boys to read it until after I die, and I wouldn't especially want Marie or Debbie to find it. Could they?

It seems highly unlikely to me that the boys would ever find it unless I gave them explicit directions. The only way I can imagine Marie or Debbie finding it is if either one ever googled a line of poetry I wrote for her and the search results led her here. Is that likely? No, but I suppose it is imaginable. 

I think what I want is this:

- to take the blog public again

- to prevent (by magic) any old girlfriend from ever finding it

- to put the actual editing information (URL and password) into a document that the boys cannot see until I die, like something kept for them at a bank.

I can imagine how to do the first and third. I have no idea how to do the second. Maybe I need to think a little longer.

I hope the whole project doesn't turn out to be urgent. Let me know your thoughts.

Sent from my iPhone

"When you became such a hippie...."

Early in this holiday season the boys were at my place (I mean Son 1 and Son 2) and one of them referred to the period of time when I moved out of the house as "that time when you started becoming such a hippie." The other said, "I think Dad was only a hippie for a little while and now he is slowly clawing his way back." (I don't remember which was which.)

Several days later I asked them, "What does hippie mean to you, at least in this context?" After all I haven't started wearing love beads or smoking pot (although now that I think about it there was that concert I took them to a few years ago).

They came up with several points:

• My shift to more-vegetarian cooking (though I'm hardly religious about it) 

• My meditation (which I'm still doing, usually just once a week at Sangha)

• "Caring about other people" (I suspect refers to my volunteer work, which I still -- four years later -- do once a week like clockwork except when I am out of town)

• And my neck beard. (Some time after I wrote this post -- in which I admitted to still trimming the edges of my beard -- I decided that for the sake of consistency I really ought to stop shaving altogether. I keep my beard short, but I do not use a razor anywhere. And ever since that day, my boys have given me a bad time about letting the hair on my neck grow.

• They never mentioned the concert.

I asked them about the neck beard, because they have picked on it so often. Specifically I said it is simply not true that only disreputable guys let their neck hairs grow. I instanced a guy at Durmstrang (Son 2's old high school) who keeps a neatly-trimmed beard that covers his neck as well.

Son 2's answer was, "Let's think about this. One of these people lives on a ranch and frequently has to do hard, grimy physical labor fixing things. The other one has a white-collar job in an office. Which one looks right wearing a neck beard?"

OK, maybe he has a point, though I didn't concede it at the time. Gosh, I wonder if this has anything to do with the changes in my job situation? (See, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here.) Actually probably not, but I suppose it might affect my ability to get a new job if my current one peters out. Maybe I should take that possibility seriously instead of just hiding my head in the sand.

Anyway, that's why my boys think I'm a hippie.