mallorys_camera | Pissy, Pissy, Pissy

I continue in my pissy mood. Combination of lingering illness and cabin fever – when temps don’t break 20 degrees, I have very little incentive to want to leave the house.

The lightbox Max gave me for Christmas will get plenty of workout today.

Logjam on the To Do list is dissolving, though through no effort on my part. The creaky rattle of the conveyor belt. Time. Moving forward.

The number of people who are reacting to the Charlie Hebdo slaughters with some thinly veiled variant of, Hey, they had it coming! is just appalling to me. I suppose this is because I’m a writer, and at several points throughout my career, I’ve gotten people pissed off enough at me so that they’ve threatened retributions ranging from acts of physical violence to the loss of my job.

I get it, too, that Islam, as such, is merely a cover for the forces that have been unleashed in the Middle East and elsewhere. That what we’re really looking at it is an economic tsunami of sorts, the shudder and shift of a social gigantic system that’s reacting to globalization with a massive surge toward socioeconomic homeostasis.

In my long-ago high school civics classes, there was always one day a year when the teacher would dole out several strands of seaweed and a cup of boiled brown rice, and tell us, If resources were equitably distributed, this is what we’d all be eating. Once a day.

I don’t like seaweed or brown rice. Hence, I’ve always been cognizant that I’m very, very fortunate to have been born an American so that I have access to far more than my fair share of the world’s resources.

I doubt that these inequities will continue much longer, at least on a nation-by-nation basis. The coming split will be between a tribe of ultra-wealthy pan-nationalists and the 99 percenters with no passive income who can’t figure out a way to get out of that grid. Even as the shopping malls that cater to the middle class continue to go bust (leaving eerie abandoned complexes all along the super-highways), so do the retail establishments that sell toys for the ultra-rich flourish.

This transition will take plus or minus fifty years. I won’t live to see it in my lifetime. My kids certainly will.

In cheerier news, I met up with Summer yesterday, the charming young Mandarin woman whom I will begin tutoring in English next week.

“Summer,” of course, is not her real name. She chose it because it was easier for Americans to pronounce than her real name. Her husband chose “Spring.”

She understands English reasonably well – or, at least, I think she does.

So my emphasis will be on encouraging her to converse more freely, tweaking her pronunciation – Phonics! – and possibly helping her with reading. She has an advanced degree of some sort in China – I’m not sure what in – and it would be nice to help her to a similar level of proficiency in the States so she’s not trapped in a scut job.