Since I began weaving in earnest, I’ve been rewatching television online, shows I’ve already seen, or tried to see, when they first aired. Monk. Psych.

Just now, it’s Grey’s Anatomy.

But I’m not really all that interested in these shows or even in telling about the weaving I am getting done, though that will surely be part of my post today. I’m interested to see what else…

I watch shows I know because I am paying more attention to my hands and colors than to the screen. Watching something with subtitles is too hard, which is not to say I have not tried. I have always done two things at once. We used to have next-door neighbors who came over every evening to watch television with us because they didn’t have cable. We don’t have cable anymore either, but no one complains if I flip pages as my neighbor would.

I need two things at once. When I weave these days, I use two stick shuttles and alternate the two weft colors. When I watch Netflix, I work on taxes or write in my daily record book, plan the next days meals, or… weave.

The other day we saw an eagle on the sand. This is rare except in late summer when the local nesting pair are training their youngsters. Then the parents and offspring will land on the sand and the parents teach the kids how to take off from the flat. This is only dangerous when humans try to intervene. (Dangerous for the humans.) Two days ago, there she was, standing at the surfline.

It wasn’t until I got home, uploaded the images from my camera, and zoomed in that I realized why the eagle was on the sand.

I can’t say whether that seal is alive in this photo. Small as it appears, it’s too heavy for the eagle to lift, and the local eagles generally eat only what’s already dead or close to it. This is the time of year they are nesting, so it might be that seal looks like essential food. Maybe it became eagle food. I really cannot say.

Here’s what I do know for sure: If I am very sentimental about wild things eating one another, I have no business eating meat. If I cannot bear the thought of an animal being hurt, I do not want to know how my hamburger or bacon or fried chicken lived and died.

Who knew that’s where I was going this morning? I didn’t.

I meant to complain about trivial mistakes in Grey’s Anatomy, which is set in Seattle, and that is why I loved the show at the beginning. And Cristina Yang, my favorite character. I knew all the episodes in the early years. By Season 8, I had missed episodes. Only the beginnings of episodes from Season 9 were familiar because I kept falling asleep during late shows during those years, and I was always up early. I am watching Season 11 just now and know none of it. In the episode I was watching a moment ago, a stay-at-home-mother drives off a bridge, her behavior erratic enough that even her husband acknowledges it when he comes to the hospital to find his injured wife and children (he calls them “my children” not “our children”). I wanted some recognition of the problem with that “my children” line in an episode that otherwise deals sensitively with the overwhelming patronizing approach most people use toward women, their skills, needs, and crises.

Mostly I am irritated every time the characters, from the very first episode, refer to “ferry boats.” Maybe newcomers to Puget Sound think that body of water is the “ocean” crossed by “ferry boats.” We called that mass of salt water “The Sound” and the Washington State Ferries (WSDOT) boats were “ferries,” as in: “We took the ferry across the sound.” This from people born and raised in the PNW.

Puget Sound ( / ˈpjuːdʒɪt /) is a sound of the Pacific Northwest, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and part of the Salish Sea. 

—Wikipedia

They get other things wrong in the series, of course. There is no building in Seattle where lobbing a ball off the roof would not potentially kill someone on the street below. The view from the Grey house sometimes seems to be looking northwest from southwest of the CD and other times looking south from Queen Anne Hill. Sometimes the hospital is right next door to the Space Needle or the Science Center of the old Century 21 (1962) fairgrounds and other times across the street from the Public Market. Sometimes the latter is seen through a window and other times it’s a framed photograph. (The actual building used as the hospital front is a mall in southern California.) I forgive all that.

Here’s the real issue that I am wrestling with just now: gender. If the LGBTQ movement has taught us anything, it should be that gender identity, gender-defined character, and gender-assigned roles are on some sort of sliding scale. This should be obvious, but somehow we still struggle. Yes, according to Grey’s Anatomy, women can be awful and killers too, but the actual fact is that more 90% of murders are committed by men. They are more likely to be the victims, too. But when women are murdered, it’s usually by a romantic partner—a boyfriend or husband or former boyfriend or husband.

Men kill the women they are supposed to love because they see possession as the role of the woman. They are the ones who are supposed to be possessing.

The other evening a comedian poked fun at a successful, talented, powerful woman. She rolled her eyes at a bad joke. That spoke and it should have been enough. Her husband laughed at first. That said something too. And then he had to be the actor, the one acting. The slap was not about her, it was always about himself. 

It is a paradox, to my mind, that all my life I have been told how different men and women are, how women are more emotional. And yet…

If you cry like a baby, claim you love beer and whine that all the confirmation questioning is so, so unfair, they put you on the Court. If you are a man.

If you are a woman and someone is tearing you a new one, you are just supposed to lie back and enjoy it? Yes, elected men still say such things.

I’m inclined to think we do a poor job raising our boys.

A couple of months ago, presidential hopeful Andrew Yang wrote about his concern that boys are falling behind, that they do less well in school, are more likely to drop out, more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and autism. I can only say that boys have underperformed in more than a century of records that make clear that boys get into more trouble, learn less in school, and drop out more often than girls. This was true in 1910, and people have fussed about it off and on ever since. 

Some researchers contend that boys are more often diagnosed not because there are more boys than girls with what these issues, but because we socialize girls to behave “properly” and exercise more self-control. We tolerate misbehavior and acting out in boys more than in girls. Even now.

Yet, somehow boys end up making a lot more money even in traditionally female-dominated occupations. In fact, income increases in jobs once men become the majority employed in those jobs. Men still earn more than women, control more, are over-represented in most corporate board rooms.  

So yes, the schoolboys are in trouble, but they seem to have been managing anyway. Perhaps, as an educator and a woman, you can understand why I feel concern for the boys, but also a small nugget of personal resentment on behalf of girls.

So. Pet peeves. Current events. I will be finishing the “Sugar” warp today, the second for March—what was meant to be the April warp—and I have been working on our taxes. I still cannot understand where the program I used last year got one of its figures, and I will try not to worry overmuch about that. Some of our required forms never arrived—what the heck? But we are muddling along. I have what I need.

In the mean time, our community is changing. Thirty-two treed acres are for sale nearby (177 platted lots) and an entire development is being cleared even closer. All our immediate neighbors are not only not living here, but renting their houses by the night. So there’s that. I remember when this was still a quiet place. I remember trees coming right down to the shore, how every single time we came to visit my grandparents, we missed the turn because the highway showed only a wall of spruce. I remember when the swamp north of us was just that, east was my grandfather’s workshop, and south was a tiny cabin painted barn red. I remember when “The Cabin” up the street was less than 400 square feet instead of three stories. Mrs. Christie and Irene. My grandfather and Genevieve. We moved here because we wanted our children to have what we had most enjoyed in our childhoods—freedom to roam, forest, mud, and distance from home.

We were the youngsters in 1979, the only homeowners locally under the age of 65. Now, we are the longest-time residents. When I wonder about events from past years, there is no one to ask, because we are the oldest in our families and old ones living here.

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