Why The Heart?

Jane Seymour's "Open Hearts" line.

I am really not a fan of the heart.

Here is the problem with the human heart, and its use as a symbol around this time every year: it has everything to do with life, but almost nothing to do with love. The organ in charge of love is the same one that manages the children, the mortgage, and the checkbook: the brain.

Human beings are a species of the highest order. Love, as we play it out among our lovers, friends, and families, is a very complex and delicate thing. So why do we consign it to that poor southern organ? The dumb one, the one that beats and beats, and clogs, and finally breaks?

We don’t even draw it correctly. Look at this:

Where’s the ascending aorta in that?

It’s Not Them, It’s Me

I listened to President Barack Obama’s speech in Tucson last night — after reading it online.  I’ll admit it:  I cried.

Naturally.  The words he used last night hit all of my cognitive reward centers:  humility, empathy, listening, love, family, children, partner, future, better, community, hope.

Hope.  Barack Obama always did have me at hope.  I elected this man because I knew he would be the Dad In Chief:  the leader who is also a father, one who continues to aspire to the hopes and dreams of his own (and indeed all) children.

I loved the President’s speech.  I wanted to celebrate it.  So I went to Wordle, and made an image of the most frequently used words in the full text of the speech.

This is lovely enough, but it is not what I remember.  Where is empathy?  Humility?  Why isn’t hope bigger?

Get Up.

I have cared about politics since I was in grade school.  I was so excited to vote for the first time, as a college freshman (in 1984!  Such a big year!  Okay, it wasn’t), it didn’t matter that I had to cast my vote for Walter Mondale.  I told myself I was really voting for Gerry, his running mate; that seemed to make it better.  There was an hour or so between the time I cast my vote and the moment it was crushed in the Reagan landslide; but for that hour, I felt great. 

Geraldine Ferraro was the name of that running mate:  the woman who would have been Vice President.  Decades before the big ol’ fake from Alaska showed up, Gerry was the real (and quite modest) deal.  Because of her, I did not consider my first vote wasted.  I thought it was cool to be involved, at last.

You can say it.  I know.  I’m an antique.

Current college student Jessica Glicker was not eligible to vote in 2008, but she went ahead and campaigned for John McCain anyway.  (Loves an underdog, that Jessica!)  Two years later, the once-plucky voice for the veteran Senator is going to sit this one out, according to George Washington University’s GW Hatchet. 

“Basically, I just haven’t got my absentee ballot figured out,” she says.  I guess absentee ballots are, like, hard? 

The Night of Tarnished Gold

Ladies and gentles, Emmy Night has arrived.  Cocktail up:

Where Von Schramm will park his man business and wait, tonight.

I will not be live-blogging, or probably even watching, the event.  For live-blogging, go to your one true source for all things Mad Men, the Basket of Kisses.  (I said I’m not watching; not that I do not have an agenda.)

Even in the best years I don’t watch the Emmys.  And this is not the best year:  I have jury duty next week, and a new job as well.  (For which I already have homework.)  So, needless to say, I will be cooking.

And after 10 p.m., I have a standing appointment with circa-1965 Manhattan.  As you damn well know.

But all of this aside, I have Hopes:

• I hope that this is the last year that Vincent (Pete “Christ-on-a-cracker!” Campbell) Kartheiser gets left off the list of nominees.
• I hope the Academy of Television Arts and Flyswatters is seating Jon Hamm that close to the stage for something more than the obvious decorative purpose.
• … And it better not be for the one scene he played, wearing hooks for hands, in 30 Rock this year.
• I hope that Christina Hendricks wins her category.  (There, I said it; she is not even the favorite from the show on the supporting-actress short list.)
• I hope that, should Julianna Margulies win (as I expect), she says something wonderful about January Jones.
• I hope, against every legitimate hope in the world, that January Jones wins.
• Finally, I hope a chandelier or something falls near the Lost people, so that their fans and I can argue for years about whether it was rigged.

Best of luck to the best damn bunch of TV-watchers in the world:  scripted television fans.  You.  Thank you for taking arms against a sea of troubles (and by “troubles”, I mean:  White-House-party-crashing, debt-addled anorexics; equally debt-addled table-flippers; and young men who are very unkind to young women).  By opposing, I — perhaps you? — seek to end them.

Go bravely, my friends, into that gold night.  Hydrate, take breaks, don’t throw your drinks at the screen, and remember … there’s always Twitter.

(Agenda-free live-blogging:  start with The Fug Girls.)

I Hope, I Hope

My niece Abby is three years old.  Last week I was staying with her, her parents, and her newborn brother at their home in North Carolina.

I have taken to calling this little ball of blond activity and opinion “my sweetpea,” which she currently does not like.  She’ll correct me every time.

“I not you sweetpea,” she’ll say, chubby hands on her nonexistent hips. “I Snow White.”

She is sure she is Snow White.  She loves that Disney movie, with its rigid gender roles, implausible plot and annoying songs.  She’ll sing those songs — “Someday My Prince Will Come,” a big favorite — while wandering the house with her stuffed doggie.

I’ve taken to mashing them up.  “Someday my niece will come,” I’ll sing back at her.

“No!  That not how it goes,” she says, pointing a perfect little finger at me.

“… And I’ll read her stories at night …”

“It goes this way!  ‘Someday my pince will come …’ “

“ … And I’ll get to turn on her night light …”