Yo ho ho! It was Talk Like a Pirate Day recently and I completely missed it, having to spend half of the designated day on a train to the City of Brotherly Love and back, which unsurprisingly did not feel piratical, brotherly, or lovely.

Since then, I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading and my working and my sleeping and Pop Tart acquisition. They don’t sell Pop Tarts at the Whole Foods, which is a crime, frankly. There is a whole food in each and every crazy goodâ„¢ silver packet of sugary goodness; it’s just not organic so the ecofood warriors are all bent. They have organic “toaster pastries”, which lack the frosting (as if!) and are made with real fruit. Real fruit! Can you believe it?

While I work out how to sue them for shelf space on behalf of Kellogg’s, I wanted to mark down for all posterity (or until the end of Web 2.0) some links. First up, there is the Salary Search at Indeed.com [via Lifehacker]. The average salary of a pirate in Washington, DC, is $55,000; the average salary of a cat is $58,000. Clearly, I am in the wrong line of work.

I should have been a magician ($39,000). Or beter yet, the girl who gets sawn (sawed? ewn?) in half! Instead, I must be content to be enamored with them, especially when they look like Christian Bale or Hugh Jackman in The Prestige or if they read like Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil or Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Allow me to show you the full shelves of Organic Toaster Pastries at Whole Foods. And now, *poof* those shelves are empty… and awaiting fresh s’mores Pop Tarty goodness! Thank you, thank you!

I liked the old Pope better. This one has a touch of the crusader about him, and it bodes ill for for, say, all of that PEACE business the Vatican keeps trying to push.

While the rest of the world mourns Steve “Crikey!” Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, I’m holding silent vigil for one of two rare albino pygmy marmosets. They were born at the Froso Zoo in Sweden two weeks ago and one has already gone to the big rain forest in the sky. Best of luck to the remaining baby!

Pygmy Marmosets (Callithrix (Cebuella) pymaea) are the world’s smallest true monkeys. They are native to the Amazon rain forest and grow to be no bigger than 5 inches long and about 7 ounces.

 

 

In almost 7 years of living in Seattle, I met the mayor (Greg Nickels) once, by accident. It was an almost forgettable encounter, except that the whole thing was so weird and awkward since I didn’t recognize who he was. I’ve met Rudy Giuliani too, which was entirely memorable as he managed to look me in the eye while shaking my hand and saying my name with no obvious glance to my nametag. Very impressive party trick.

I can now confidently say that I’ve met the next mayor of Washington, DC. I can say that because I have met all of the mayoral candidates for Washington, DC. Some of them twice. The conversation goes like this:

Me: late for the Metro, trying to avoid eye contact with the newspaper pushers and strange crowd of over-dressed people with flyers in their hands, not getting to the escalator without talking to…

Mayoral Candidate: “Hi. Good morning. How are you? (shakes my hand) I’m Michael Brown/Linda Cropp/Adrian Fenty/Marie Johns/Vincent Orange and I’m running for mayor. Do you have a minute?”

Me: “Not a DC voter.”

Mayoral Candidate: turns to the person behind me. “Hi. Good morning. How are you? (shakes their hand) I’m Michael Brown/Linda Cropp/Adrian Fenty/Marie Johns/Vincent Orange and I’m running for mayor. Do you have a minute?”

It is hot in DC. Hot hot. Legs sticking together, hair damp at the neck, underarms perpetually off-scented kind of hot. And, as if there was a memo that went out recently to the suit-wearing men in the District or perhaps a collective decision made at the weekly meetings in steam rooms and squash courts across the city, they all began wearing khaki suits at once last week.

The suits, I don’t mind them so much. They are basic, boring Brooks Brothers/Jos. A Banks/Men’s Wearhouse “summer suits”. They do not do much for the men, because (everyone knows) khaki makes your ass look big as Black Rock Desert. The men wearing the suits weren’t in any shape to be noted for their physique in the first place, anyway. The more heinous crime, though, is that they wear them with baseball caps. Not trucker hats–I’ve not yet seen one foam & mesh promotional advertisement for Bert’s Fish & Tackle. Proper canvas baseball caps for the team of their choice.

And now I am perplexed. Is this some sort of GQ fashion thing I don’t know about? Is there some sort of citywide activity challenging men to combine khaki and sportsmanship? I don’t know. I assume they are trying to recapture a carefree, jaunty, youthful look that they never really had. Or perhaps just trying to hide that growing bald spot from the vicious summer sun.

I was very grateful to see one former presidential candidate John Kerry, looking tall and tan and more salt than salt & pepper, in his khaki suit without the baseball cap. He was headed to the travel section at the Barnes & Noble, preparing to evade the next fashion memo, no doubt.

There is much swimming around in my head. I have been overloading on information lately… all kinds of information… and now I am trying to make sense of it. “Why this? Why now?” It is like a giant puzzle for which there are no correct pieces and I fear making the Hill Country of Texas look like the Matterhorn.
Lately there have been some challenging things happening to the people around me, the people whose blogs I read, countries far away some of whose citizens I am friends with. It is interesting to see how people rise to the occasion of a challenge. This reminds me of some of the better writing in “The West Wing”:

“…every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that that capacity may well be limitless”

These people have been inspiring in so many ways that I thought I ought to write them down before I forget:

• One friend has been having a hard time lately, what with June being Smiting Month and all. Someone even stole the birthday present I sent her! She is handling all of the traumas and challenges, though, with the same positive attitude and sense of scale that I have always loved about her.
• Another friend took a job in academia, after a long stint at the UN, only to find out that the school was in fairly dire straits. She proved her commitment by sticking out her contract, but then stood up for her needs by telling the dean she wouldn’t be staying given the enormous additional workload she’d been asked to do for no extra money. She’s also the bravest person I know, heading off to live in various recently warring states.
• Ariel’s husband was injured in a terrible bicycle accident. Rather than dwell on the scariness, which indeed looks quite scary, she’s all about being grateful that he wasn’t hurt worse.
• One of our former interns is Lebanese and was working for the UNDP in Jordan when the recent violence came up. His family is still in Lebanon, including his wonderfully talented mother, who is an internationally-acclaimed furniture designer. Khalil is working hard now on a global outreach program to spread the word about ending the violence in Lebanon.
• Everyone reads Dooce and I’m not one bit surprised to see her facing cancerous cells with a giant dose of humor.

I am lucky to be exposed to these people on a regular basis, to find the hope and the humor and the passion and the grace to deal with all of the challenges, big and little, that get tossed our way. Life, that little glow in each person that persists beyond all else, shines through in interesting ways when we are pressed by our circumstances.

you are waiting.