I mean, Beaker and Miss Piggy make the song.
Category: Life
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ODDS and ENDS: It’s Cold, Life with an Oxford Shirt, and Yellow Cake
(Tin Roof! Rusted!)
It’s winter now. That was fast. Seems like last week, it was still Autumn around here. And I don’t just mean because it was Thanksgiving back on last Thursday. No, there were still colored leaves on trees. Then, this morning, it was 21 out, and all the leaves were gone. Just bare trees, and cold winds.
My mother used to always buy me blue Oxford Cloth Button Down shirts growing up. I hated the shirt style. It seemed too formal for a kid to wear, and if you did have one on and went to school, the other kids would make fun of you – call you a nerd. Though I always had one in my closet, just in case when I need to wear a tie. When I was in college, and hated doing laundry, I started wearing the Oxford shirts again, and on some level, it felt comfortable this time around. I am sure it had everything to do with no one calling me a nerd. I kept Oxfords in the rotation when I started working professionally, as they looked smart with a tie, but also not too formal, like I wasn’t trying to dress up. Now, it’s what I want to be in all the time. Not sure what that says about me.
Sometimes I just want a box-mix yellow cake with chocolate icing for desert. I know that yellow cake doesn’t really have a unique flavor – I think it’s vanilla, right? But right now, I really want to have that lite, spongy sheet pan of a cake. And the icing as well. That cream cheese icing with coco powder. Nothing special, or ground breaking, just solid great tasting icing that isn’t too sweet, and with a slight hint of biter chocolate. That cake feels like the best comfort food I could have right now. Maybe ice cream would be more comforting, but it’s too cold for that. No, I want right out of the over yellow cake.
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Short Story Review: “Safety” by Joan Silber
(The short story “Safety” by Joan Silber appeared in the December 8th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Chris W. Kim
You know, every “time” is a “historic time” but some are more historic than others. I will agree that we are in the middle of one of those historic times, and if I am lucky enough to have grandkids, then I imagine they will ask me “WTF was everyone thinking, grandpa?” The good news is that over the past three or four months, I have started to see works of art in different media start to tackle the events of deportation, disappearing, and what effect these policies will have on America. I am going to throw Joan Silber’s “Safety” in with all of these works, though uneven, I applaud what this story attempted.
Overly Simplified Synopsis: Two girls become friends growing up in New York, one Muslim the other Jewish, and both decedents of people who immigrated to the US to escape dictators. They go their separate ways in life and reconnect in New York, where the Muslim friend now has a child and a partner who is a comedian. When the comedian is on his way home from a gig, he is disappeared by the Administration.
There is an ease to this story, and a simple directness to the writing. What it does well is create a picture of the modern melting pot that America is – people of different backgrounds are still coming here, and their children are still connecting with people that are different from them, and finding a commonality in our shared humanity. Silber does well in creating a context for the Muslim family regarding escaping the Nazis, being forced to migrate by Stalin to Uzbekistan, and the trauma of family separation.
Yet, through it all, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this story was pulling its punches. There is a huge amount of drama here that is being sieved through a philosophical existential filter, but it never seems to amount to an emotional climax. For example, think of how these families lives’ have been influenced by authoritarians – from being pushed out of home nations, to being pushed together in America – and how these families have made new lives for themselves. And when a new Authoritarian pressure is applied, the characters seem more resigned, as if ordained to this fate, rather than free to exist.
Ultimately, I appreciated this story, and Silber, for taking a swing at an issue that needs to be swung at. “Safety” uncomfortably reminds us that history does repeat itself. That immigration, deportation, and citizenship (both in its legal and the social definition) needs to be discussed and debated again, so we can finally find a way to break this awful cycle.
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Earworm Wednesday: They Don’t Sample Like They Used To
And before anyone tells me, yes, I know why they don’t sample like they used to.
Anyway, I used The Sounds of Science as an example for my kid to explain and understand what sampling used to be like, being that she knows both of The Beatles songs used in it.
But what gets wedged and stuck in my head is the Pato Banton sample saying “I do not sniff the coke, I only smoke the sinsemilla.” Yeah, that line plays over and over and over…
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Back at It (Unedited)
Thanksgiving Vacation ended this morning, and everyone in the family was back at it. The wife was at work, the kid went to school, and I returned to stay-at-home-Dad-ing… To put it mildly, no one was happy about it. Not that we hate work, school, or chores… it’s just never fun to go back to the grind when you have been off for so long. And we did have a long break.
The kid took it the worst. She really didn’t want to go to school, but she didn’t take it out on us this morning. No, she did all her complaining last night. And I would say that she had a point on using the “night before” as the staging ground for her anger. She is getting used to the “Sunday Night Blues” as my mother would call it – That feeling of dread on Sunday night before you have to go back to work on Monday. I would be nice to tell her that that feeling goes away, but it never really does. You kind’a are stuck with it.
But, now we are in the next leg of the season – the count down to Christmas. Decorations and a tree are going up in the apartment, and hopefully, that excitement of the Season will camp in our living room soon.
As of right now, I think I would prefer a nap.
