Nom de Plume

Think the visual’s great? Try the story.

And he’ s dispensing advice…

My betrothed, a most wicked man, betrayed me near as bad as Tereus did Procne. His woman of choice commited, though, that villainy which women do best, and tempted him away. Presently it is not legal, where I live, to have either of them killed for this treachery — what shall I do to avenge the wrong they both have done to me, and to my virtue? Their joy at my grief does pain me so.

Cor Fracta Est

Ma Cher Coeur Brisee

Thoughe y love a goode revenge tragedie as much as the nexte guye, y muste counsel yow to a bettre path. Yow sholde maken pece and kepe faithe, not wyth thyne betrothede nor wyth this womanlie Diomede, but rathir with yowrselfe. For vengence aperteneth and longeth al oonly to juges. Remembre yow that pacience is a greet vertu of perfeccioun, and remembre that ther are tymes ordained unto al thynges by the first moevere — of the ookes, and of the hard stones, and of man and womman seen we also, in youthe as well as age, alle shal be dumped , a kyng as shall a page – som dumped on dates, som dumped by telephone, some dumped in compaignie, som dumped allone – ther helpeth noght, al goth that ilke weye.

And thus, take two pintes of hagen dasz dulce de leche, a ful seson of buffie the vampyre slayre, and calle me in the morninge.

Le Vostre G

link via Boing Boing

This is something, by the way, that I tell her on a regular basis and she says, “Well, at least you inherited it legitimately.”

So. My mother is going to Iraq. I’m still not precisely sure what she’s doing, but it has something to do with leading a team out in the field to help put democracy in place.

Personally, I think she just likes the idea of flying in there wearing a flak jacket. Wayne, on the other hand, is beside himself. The last I heard from him was an e-mail in which he mentioned her appearing on an al-Jazeera feed not once, or even twice, but three times. Okay, it was a pretty long e-mail.

It’s not that I’m not worried. When she called to tell me my father had died — I remember this vividly — I was in the grocery store, and I knew what she was going to tell me, so I sat down at the blood pressure machine. People were walking by with their shopping carts, prosaic lists in hand. I said, “Well, it’s just us now.” And it was — still is. She’s an only child; I’m an only child. Sure, I have Steve and she has Wayne, but in terms of blood relatives, there are distant cousins … really, she and I are it. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I would be devastated should something happen.

But as she likes to point out, danger is a relative term. We take our lives in our hands every single day just by getting into a car. Getting on her horses to ride can be dangerous, especially with a replaced hip. Flying somewhere is dangerous. (She also felt the need to point out that me running around in USA 57, the LandRover I drove in Freetown, after curfew with stoned 16-year old soldiers with AK47s manning the roadblocks was dangerous. I prefer not to remind myself of how stupid I was at 18.)

And here’s the thing: she’s so happy about going and doing some good that it’s hard not to be happy for her. We have made plans to meet in Jordan for her next R&R and she has just bought an iPod for the extremely spartan living conditions.

It was actually pretty cute; she called me to ask how to turn up the volume.