April 12th, 2005

Happiness is finding a three week old to-do list and realizing that not only have I completed all the mundane tasks on it, such as “fold clothes” and “order cartridge” but I have also completed “blog – putting toys away unprompted” even though I didn’t remember doing it.

I was thinking yesterday about how it is said that smell is the strongest sense memory, that it can take you back to places and moments like none of the other senses. I was thinking about this because yesterday, with the window opened, I heard the sound of tires splashing along wet pavement. It’s a very particular sound and no matter how often I hear it, it always takes me back to my childhood and to Buenos Aires. I was somewhat surprised, in fact, on looking out the window to see that it was not Peugeots, Citroens and the ubiquituous black and yellow taxis making that familiar sound.

Speaking of Argentina, today I’m hearing all sorts of polio stories because it’s the fifty year anniversary of Salk’s vaccine. I am the only American I know of my age who was vaccinated for polio, due to the historical oddity of a polio scare during the mid or possibly late seventies where I was growing up. My mom says that she doesn’t remember anyone actually getting it, just that there was a scare, and so the police would set up roadblocks and if you couldn’t produce proof of vaccination for your children, they gave it to them on the spot. It was the Sabin, so it wasn’t the big long needle most people who got it in the fifties remember. The whole situation seems to me, in retrospect, to be a very philip k dick/government intrusive/scary military dictatorship sort of thing to have lived through, but as with most of my memories of the time I do not recall thinking it anything but normal. I remember commercials on TV, PSA’s I suppose, about the importance of the Sabin vaccine. I have mixed feelings about the whole experience because on the one hand forcing vaccinations on people seems an untenable violation of individual will but on the other hand dealing with a public health problem in a sustained and systematic way like that is very likely to eliminate it. There’s probably a story in that somewhere.

Someone has made an offer on our house in Jackson which we have accepted. That doesn’t make it sold yet, and a lot of things can happen between now and the end of May when we expect to close, but hopefully this will all work out, and we won’t have the worry of an empty house in a faraway city that we’re making payments on but not really using any longer.

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for : the tally of your votes for what I should blog about. All ballots were counted. International observers were present. You can check my math. Free and fair elections here at Anarkey’s Among Mad People. Just because we’re crazy doesn’t mean we can’t be fair, right?

1. Scanned Gems from the Vaults – 3 votes
2. Internal Images of the Self (in two parts) – 2 votes
3. Random Thoughts on Parenting (with links and anecdotes) – 4 votes
4. Stuff I’ve Noticed about Missouri – 5 votes
5. On Being Unemployed – 5 votes
6. Why I am Uncomfortable Drawing Attention to my Religiosity – 6 votes
7. The Stages of Grief, and Why I Think I Might Be Broken – 6 votes
8. Question of Fat – 3 votes
9. Political Identity and Shifting Measures (or, what’s with the astrology question popping up at politicalcompass.org?) – 4 votes
10. Extolling the Virtues of Sophia (yet again) – 3 votes
11. Something Other than the Aforementioned Subjects (be specific as to what) – 2 votes for me going into more detail about Spanish lessons at Montessori school

So it looks like you people want me to be uncomfortable and emotionally honest. Tired of the book reviews, are you? That’s alright, it’s pretty much what I signed on for, as you know. I’m thrilled that so many of you expressed preferences. Thank you for your help. I’ll be writing a couple of posts in the next two weeks on the six vote topics (Religion and Grief) and then proceed from there. Because they’re tied, I’ll get to choose what goes first. Hah.

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