Talking Heads

Two lunches out this week.  It's too much happiness.

 

Tuesday I had lunch with my friend Ruth.  We always go to a Chinese restaurant, but our usual place has closed and is being turned into a taqueira, so this was our second week at Hunan, which used to be the classiest Chinese place in town.   (Now it has left its classy location and...well...let's say it's not up to old standards.  Our old place had a buffet; this place has a set price lunch plate, heavy on the carbs.  This week I chose lemon chicken.

It looks good.  And the chow mein was tasty, but the crab rangoons (those won-ton like thingies) were dry as a bone and had the consistency of cardboard.  As for the chicken, it tasted "old" to me and I only ate one piece of it.  I brought the whole lunch home for Walt, who thought it tasted ok.

It's fun to meet with Ruth, because she's a theater person and we always talk theater and books, this week no exception.  She doesn't get to as many shows as I go to, so she always lives vicariously through my reports of whatever show I have seen. And she told me about a book she had found at Logos that talked about various kinds of psychiatric diseases and how they were treated in various films.  

Then on Thursday, it was my monthly lunch with my long-time friend Kathy M.  We always meet at the Olive Garden in Sacramento.

We always order the same thing--the soup and salad combo; she has minestrone and I have zuppa de toscana, and we share the salad and the bread sticks.

Kathy and I don't communicate between lunches.  No e-mails, telephone calls or smoke signals.  We just meet for lunch.  We've known each other since the La Leche League days, when we were both nursing our babies and teaching other mothers how to breastfeed their babies. 

Our lunches almost always start with what outrageous political thing has happened, what outrageous thing some politician has said, and our fear that Obaa won't be re-elected (in 2008 we were hoping he would be elected!), and the latest news in the fight for marriage equality (Kathy's son has to live in another country because his partner is not a U.S. citizen and though they have been together for more than 10 years, he can't get permanent residency in this country....a problem which, incidentally, legal same sex marriage in California won't fix.  It can only be fixed at the federal level.

But today there were other things to discuss, like Romney's ridiculous and downright dangerous response in the wake of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Libya, using a tragedy as an opportunity for a political attack against the president.

The amazing thing about the backlash to that ridiculous statement was that other than Ann Coulter, most of the far right reporters condemned it as well. "Romney looked weak today," Peggy Noonan said. "At one point, he had a certain slight grimace on his face when he was taking tough questions from the reporters, and I thought, 'He looks like Richard Nixon.'"

Joe Scarborough was "absolutely flabbergasted" by Romney's response.

Even Bill O'Reilly admitted that "I'm not sure the Governor was correct" in his response.

The Washington Post called it "a discredit to his campaign" and the Los Angeles Times said it was an "outrageous exercise in opportunism." The Boston Globe labeled it "offensive on many other levels" beyond the timing of his remarks. 

Bill Clinton said that Romney is the kind of guy who shoots first and takes aim afterwards.

There are lots of things about a Romney administration that terrify me.  It would be the end of decades of work by gay Americans and women and old people.  Gays can forget ever getting equality in my lifetime if Romney is elected.   Women will lose the right to choose and if he leaves Social Security alone for people my age, my children certainly will never be able to take advantage of it.

But the thing that scares me more than anything else is a man who acts so quickly before having all the facts at hand being given the power to start a nuclear war....and don't think that isn't a very real possibility.

It's great having Kathy to talk about this stuff with, someone who shares my ideas, philosophy, and fears.  Walt doesn't really like to talk politics, but I do get my "fix" with my monthly lunches with Kathy.