Sunday night, as is our annual tradition, Juliette and I watched the Academy Awards. There were a number of moments that caught my attention for being nice or interesting, heartwarming or funny or cringe-worthy. Sandra Bullock’s acceptance speech, for example, which was simultaneously heartfelt and funny. Or Gabourey Sidibe’s tears after being introduced by Oprah. Or Jeff Bridges finally winning. The one that I’ve been thinking about the most over the past couple of days, though, was Kathryn Bigelow’s win of Best Director. It turns out that Bigelow was the first woman to win that award, something that was pointed out a lot leading up to the ceremony, and even several times during it. What I can't stop wondering, though, is just how important her win is.

Before I go any further I should say that I'm sure that it was well-deserved. Although I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, I have only heard excellent things about it. Literally every person I've heard speak about it, whether a friend or a reviewer, has said it was a great movie. And I also thought that Bigelow's acceptance speech was nice. True, she may have made some small political statement, but she presented herself with respect and humility, and what seemed to be genuine gratitude.

It was actually the speech itself that really got me to thinking, because I couldn't help comparing it to Halle Berry's acceptance speech when she won for Monster's Ball. That speech really rubbed me the wrong way, and it's stayed in my mind over the years. The part I always come back to is this:

This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.

Now, to be sure, it is important that a woman of color finally won Best Actress, just as it's important that a woman won Best Director. But I just can't help but feel that neither is quite the same as, for example, Hattie McDaniel's Best Supporting Actress win in 1939. I don't even really think it's the same as Dorothy Dandridge's nomination for Best Actress in 1954.

Don't mistake me as saying that Berry's and Bigelow's wins don't matter, and especially don't mistake me as saying that we're past racism and sexism these days. Race and gender inequalities are real and serious problems. They are problems that, while we certainly have made gains on them over the past 50 years, we are not through with. I doubt we'll be through with them in my lifetime. Sometimes I doubt we ever will be. So, yes, it is important that a black woman can be Best Actress and that a woman can be Best Director. It's something that we should be proud of, that we live and participate in a society where things like that can happen.

Why, then, am I so set on Berry being different from McDaniel or Dandridge? The main thing is that I'm not sure that Berry's win really did open any doors. How much more of a chance does an unknown young woman of color have at becoming a Hollywood star now than she did before 2002? And now that Bigelow has won Best Director, does that really mean that women will have an easier time becoming movie directors?

Even before Halle Berry won her Oscar, I don't think it can really be said that minorities are underrepresented in acting. Just off the top of my head I can think of a number of well-respected black actors and actresses: Angela Bassett, Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Sidney Poitier, to name a few. And while it does seem that more directors are men than women, I don't know that I think that's due to some sort of institutional bias against women as directors. In fact, one of the earliest directors of a narrative film was a woman (Alice Guy-Blaché), and women have been making hugely successful films since at least the 80's (Big, directed by Penny Marshall, made over $100 million in 1988).

I can't help feeling that what I'm saying is going to bother people, but I really don't mean to denigrate Halle Berry or Kathryn Bigelow or their accomplishments. (And, to be fair, Bigelow doesn't seem to be trying to make her award into something more than that.) And I know that there's a natural tendency to make a big deal out of firsts. I just can't help feeling that Kathryn Bigelow's and Halle Berry's awards don't mean much more than that they did a good job in their work.

What do you think?

Dear Substitute Spin Instructor,

We need to have a little talk, OK? Look, I know it's your job to tell me what to do, how much gear to add, when to stand, when to sit, when to speed up, when to slow down. That's fine. I know that you're supposed to push me, to get results out of me. What you're doing, though? That's not it.

OK, so you want to throw a heavy hill climb at me? No problem. You want to keep me at a level 9 for 3 minutes? Sure. You want to pull a little bait and switch at the end of the 3 minutes and tell me to keep at it for another whole minute? OK, I can go with that. Tell me to push it? OK. And when I'm straining and I have sweat stinging my eyes and I'm panting so hard that I can't even make myself slow my breathing down, you can even shout "Are you having a good time!?" at that ridiculous moment. But, seriously? When I don't answer, don't give me that "I can't hear you!" crap. That does not inspire me. It just makes me angry.

OK, so maybe I'm stubborn enough that when you say things like "Hey if I don't hear you, I'm not letting you down!" I'm more likely to set my jaw and grimly press on rather than give you the satisfaction of hearing my voice. (As if speaking were even an option for me at that point.) Yeah, I guess that's a form of motivation. If I'm thinking to myself "I would rather puke and pass out than answer you" because of something you said, then I guess you are getting me to work. Except that ultimately what you're motivating me to do is figure out what your class schedule is so that I can avoid you completely from now on.

Oh, and another thing. If you know that you're going to be a hard ass later on, own up to it from the get-go. Don't start off the class like some kind of yoga teacher with all that "listen to your body, don't push yourself further than you can go" stuff if you know that you're going to shout "Dont you dare touch that dial!" at people when they actually do decide that they can't keep up.

Lead instead of pushing. Don't make threats. Don't be a jerk. It might work for Jillian on the Biggest Loser, but you're not dangling a big pile of money in front of me. Is all that clear?

I can't hear you!

I joined a new gym a few weeks ago. I'm enjoying it so far and am excited to lose weight and improve my cardiovascular health, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about underwear.

I normally wear boxers and have been doing so for quite some time now. However, it became apparent shortly after I started going to a morning spin class that I was going to need something more supportive in the undergarment department. I won't go into all the gory details--suffice it to say that bike seats can be uncomfortable. So, last week I found myself at Target shopping for briefs for the first time in over a decade.

Now, I know that necklines and hems and what have you have a tendency to move around, but I wouldn't have guessed that this sort of thing would happen with briefs. As it turns out, I would have guessed incorrectly, since what I found immediately after putting on a pair of my new tighty-whiteys is that the waistband actually came up over my navel. Now, I admit that it's been a while since I've had any intimate experience with this kind of underwear, but I don't recall my underpants extending two inches above the top of my jeans when I was back in high school. I bought some boxer briefs in the hope that they might be a little better, but they actually went up even higher.

It seems to me quite strange to wear my underwear so high, but if I put the waistband where I think is comfortable, the support is lost. It leads me to wonder whether perhaps the boxer mentality--you might call it "freedom-loving"--has become so pervasive that underwear manufacturers have started making briefs that cater to that desire. But that just makes no sense because if briefs aren't supportive then what's the point of wearing them in the first place? Aside from which, I would think that the people that find briefs unappealing to look at would be even more put off by saggy briefs.

For myself, I don't appear to have many options. I could roll the top down but that just looks dumb. Or I suppose I could try to find a pair that's cut shorter, but I have the sneaking suspicion that that road leads to bikini briefs and I'm not sure that I'm ready to go there. So I guess I'm stuck with some really high-waisted underwear for the time-being.

And just in case you were going to ask: no, there will be no pictures. Whether that's a relief or a disappointment is your own business.

There's a little dent in my forehead just about the size of the corner of a 5/8" wrench. And, as it happens, I have a 5/8" wrench in my toolkit.  This would probably be a more interesting story if the two were unrelated, but unfortunately you get to read a relatively mundane story of frustration.

Let me back up a bit. This morning I was going about my usual morning business--feeding Jason, emptying the dishwasher, and so on. I had just given his high chair tray a quick rinse and when I went to shut off the faucet, the handle came off in my hand. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just pop over to Home Depot on my lunch break and pick up a new fixture." After all, how hard could it be? A couple of turns of a wrench, take the old one off, throw the new one on, and voila.

You can see where this is going already, can't you?

First off, I ended up having to go to three different stores to find a faucet I liked, which took almost two hours. And even then, I couldn't find anything exactly right so I ended up buying three with the intention of returning two of them. At that point I was annoyed, but relieved that it was mostly over. Which it wasn't, but I didn't know that at the time.

See, the boxes that the fixtures came each had a list of the required tools--a short list, all of which I owned. (It would have to be a short list for that to be true, but that's another story.) For some reason, though, I wasn't bargaining on it being quite so cramped under the sink. Nor was I expecting the retaining nut to be rusted tight. I struggled with different wrenches and drivers and levers for almost an hour, pulling with my fingertips, scraping my knuckles, and, of course, cursing. I cursed at great length and with a great number of obscenities. I was like the dad from A Christmas Story--and when that occurred to me I very nearly called that nut a "mundane noodle," just to complete the effect.

I kept at it for a good ten minutes after I dropped the wrench on my face before I gave up. When I came out, Juliette gasped "You're bleeding!" Sure enough, when I went into the bathroom to look in the mirror, there was a line of blood running across my forehead. It was a pretty small wound, though, once I got it cleaned up. Just a little dent now.  I still can't believe I dropped a wrench on my face, though. It was like I was in a cartoon or something.

Tomorrow I'm headed back to the Home Depot to see if I can find a metal driver to get that nut loose. (The driver included in the box was plastic and no match for that rust.) Maybe I'll manage to drop a hammer on my face in the afternoon.

I won.

You know, in case you were interested.

On the drive back from Sonoma county this past weekend--Juliette and I went to a friend's wedding--I noticed a bunch of roadside signs on I-5. The whole stretch of road between the East Bay and the Grapevine is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to anything that will attract your attention, so the odd signs really stand out. A bunch of them are little micro-political tracts, which gets extra interesting when you see a series of them on two sides of an issue. It's kind of like watching an old married couple engaging in a very passive-aggressive argument. The sign that really sparked my curiosity, though, was just south of the Highway 46 junction, and it proclaimed "Tom McLeod slept here."

I had no idea who this Tom McLeod was, but I figured there must be some story there so I had Juliette jot down a quick note so I could remember to look it up when I got home. As it turns out, this is one area where the Internet is unfortunately inadequate to the task--Googling the phrase just turns up a handful of blogs pondering the same question as me: "Who is Tom McLeod and why should I care that he slept there?"

It seems like anyone going to the trouble of putting up a sign for such an event must be showing a certain sense of pride. I mean, as far as I know, nobody goes around at the motels I've stopped at and put up a sign about my visit. And we're not even talking about the man's birthplace, or the site of his most famous accomplishment. No, this is just a place he slept once. So my first guess was that Mr. McLeod must have been some old celebrity, possibly an early Western film star like Gene Autry or Tom Mix. Of course, it would have had to have been someone a little less famous--a second-string star, if you will--as I've clearly heard of those men but am quite clueless about Mr. McLeod. Which sort of makes the sign pathetic, even a little tragic. Here's a place whose only claim to fame, what they've decided to proudly display to the world, is that some B-lister that we've all long since forgotten once decided that he couldn't make it all the way to San Francisco or Los Angeles that day and tucked in there instead.

Of course, if there were some famous Tom McLeod like that, that's surely a person that some site somewhere would have taken note of. As far as I can tell, that's not the case here. Oh, I turned up a few names, but a Texas museum curator and a New Zealand composer don't seem quite the types to inspire such a monument.

My best guess right now is this guy, the CEO of McLeod Software, which makes and distributes trucking logistics software. I-5 is, as most Californians know, one of the major trucking arteries in the state, so it's possible that the man behind these truckers' dispatching software is a big name in those circles. Maybe he's the Bill Gates of truckers, I don't know. Except, I don't know that Bill would rate a sign if he stayed in some motel out in the middle of nowhere, so either I just don't understand celebrity in the San Joaquin Valley, or this isn't the guy.

I'm left with a mystery. So, if anyone out there knows which Tom McLeod slept there, please do get in touch and let me know.

This past Sunday I finally made it in to get my car washed, which was long overdue. I have this tendency to put off going to the car wash since it seems so lazy to pay someone to wash my car, but this is what we're advised to do in this drought. And, really, who am I kidding? I am that lazy.

Anyway, as often happens when I get my car washed, Juliette and I were sorely tempted by the donut shop that's in the same building, and we both caved and bought some completely unnecessary sweets. We then had to take turns distracting Jason so we could eat our donuts in peace. When it was my turn to distract him, I walked him around and sang Rose Royce's "Car Wash" to him.

The first thing that occurred to me, singing that song, was that I don't really know many of the words. The second was that it's kind of weird that someone felt he had to write a song about a car wash, of all things. I later found out that it was written as the theme song for a blaxploitation movie of the same name, but that strikes me as even weirder. I mean, were car washes some kind of cultural touchstone back in the seventies? Was working at a car wash some kind of common rite of passage for young black people? And why did that song get so popular, anyway? Certainly, it's much more well known than the movie. What gives?

These are the things that keep me up at night, folks.

You've probably heard the song "Under the Boardwalk," by The Drifters, right? (If not, I imagine you must be pretty comfortable under that rock, though how you got Internet access there is a mystery to me.) There's a line in the original version that goes like so:

(Under the boardwalk) Out of the sun,
(Under the boardwalk) We'll be having some fun.
(Under the boardwalk) People walking above.
(Under the boardwalk) We'll be making love
Under the boardwalk, boardwalk.

I was thinking about it this afternoon, and I don't think I'd like to make love under a boardwalk. It's probably really gross down there, all covered with discarded bottles and cans, hot dog wrappers, cigarette butts, and ABC gum. Not to mention seagull poop. Add in the potential for getting arrested on charges of lewd behavior and I think I'll stick to someplace a little more conventional for my lovemaking.

Last night when NBC announced that Obama had won the election, I found myself getting pretty choked up.  In some ways, my reaction reflected my feelings about the man, and the way that he's gotten me to care about and respect the ideal of the Presidency in a way that I haven't since I was a small child.  And that's no small thing--I, like most of the adults I know, have been very jaded about the entire political process for almost as long as I can remember.  Still, I think the bigger part had to do with Jason, and what this election will mean to him.

I looked down at my son, asleep in his mother's arms, and realized that, as far as he will remember, a black man will always have been elected President of the United States.  And it struck me how different a world he will live in than I have lived in, how different his views will be from mine because of the different basic assumptions of life he'll have.  When I was small, I did believe that I could grow up to be anything, even President.  But as I grew up, I came to see that in many ways and for many people, the promise of America is an empty promise, that there are limits to what we may accomplish that have nothing to do with the limits of our ability.

I thought to myself about the way that Jason will grow up thinking about his country and his world, and realized that he has more of a chance than I had to hold onto that optimism.  And that's a truly beautiful thing.  And, beyond optimism, he really is coming into a world that has more opportunity in it than the one I was born into.

Later, I watched John McCain's concession speech, and while I thought it was a moving and earnest speech, I did think he made one mistake.  "This is an historic election," he said, "and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight."  On the contrary, Senator--this election is one in which we can and should all take pride.

Why is it that I only write about the bad stuff? I guess that's not really accurate. Looking back over the archives I only see a few negative ones. It kind of feels that way right now, though. I mean, I didn't write about it when we bought our house five months ago or when we brought our puppy home four weeks ago. I haven't written anything in over six months. And what finally gets me to start again is the email I got from my mom yesterday, telling me that another one of her cats died over the weekend.

When I saw the subject line--"We are down to one cat..."--I figured that this time it was the oldest one, Leon, the one who I found as a kitten in our back yard when I was a kid, the one I had grown up with and who was now crotchety and arthritic and going blind and senile. But no, it was Bill, a stray that my parents took in while I was in college.

Because I was already moved out when Bill came on the scene I never really got to know him all that well. He was sweet-natured and had a very cute face. My mom says that he always got along well with the other neighborhood cats; which was unusual in our house because the other cats were always either extremely timid or ferociously territorial. Once, a friend of my stepdad's brought his two-year-old daughter over and she was quite taken with him. She couldn't pronounce "kitty cat," though, and it instead came out as "diggy dat." From then on he had the nickname "Diggy."

Last year, not too long after my parents moved to Virginia, Bill was hit by a car. One of his hind legs was shattered and he had to have steel rod installed in his leg. When we came to visit last spring he was still recovering; the incision from his surgery hadn't healed completely and from time to time the tip of the rod would poke through. He limped a lot, but he seemed in good spirits even though my mom says he never completely got better.

This past weekend Bill's kidneys began to fail. The vet said that there wasn't anything they could do for a cat of his age--he was 12 or 13 by then--and on Sunday my parents decided to put him down. They were pretty upset about it, especially my stepdad. Meanwhile, their remaining cat, who is 16 years old now, has been looking like he's had one foot in the grave for a while now, but he still eats like a horse and even catches the occasional bird or squirrel. Hopefully, Leon will last at least long enough for me to see him when we go visit my parents this summer. Up until just recently he was the pet that I most thought of as my own and I have a lot of good memories of that cat.

I was sad for my parents but not being very attached to Bill myself, I didn't feel much personal loss. What really struck me was that someday my puppy is going to get old and die. I've got 10 years, maybe 15 if I'm lucky, but it'll happen and that thought does make me sad. When I stop and think about it, it's kind of weird that I've become so attached to Cooper in so short a time. A month ago I'd never ever set eyes on him, and I was even a little resistant to the idea of getting a dog. Now I find that I think about him all the time and I really love the time I spend with him, whether it's taking him for walks or playing in the yard or just having him sit with me while I watch TV. It's a really weird phenomenon, that a person could feel such a strong bond with a creature, but I do.

In the absence of a real conclusion for this entry, I'll just end with a cute picture: