I think “fair” might not have been the word weather.com was looking for to describe the sunshine yesterday. Perhaps… “pointless.” I live exactly one mile from a very large body of water, so the above wind chill is not really a hypothetical. This is how I handled it:

A. SmartWool long underwear (first layer, legs).

B. Wool tights (second layer, legs).

C. Real clothes (third layer, all over). My office tends to be pretty hot, so I have to be careful not to go overboard: just a shirt, sweater, and jeans.

D. Polypropylene sock liners (first layer, feet).

E. Knee-high SmartWool socks (second layer, feet. Third layer, not shown here, is a pair of waterproof, fleece-lined boots).

F. SmartWool gloves (first layer, hands), hand-knitted wrist warmers (second layer, hands), thick wooly glittens (third layer, hands).

G. Hand-knitted scarf worn under coat (I).

H. Hand-knitted hat worn under coat (I).

I. Coat, which LL Bean has “comfort rated” at 0˚ F.

J. One-foot by six-foot double layered boiled wool scarf, wrapped twice around my neck and pulled up to my eyes, as seen here.

K. Hood, worn over hat (H).

But, good news! It might warm up to freezing this week!

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current book: Home by Marilynne Robinson and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

current music: Just my running mix, which got me through a “character-building” six-mile run in the snow and wind yesterday.

current socks: Mismatched SmartWools. They are both red snowflake patterns, though.

I’m blogging about this with some trepidation—I haven’t asked the sender’s permission to reprint any of her comments here, and I’m not comfortable going into very much detail. But the incident is really bothering me, and I can’t seem to let go of it, which is why I’m handing part of it off to you. Sorry about that.

The email showed a photograph of the White House Rose Garden with a watermelon patch photoshopped in. The ‘joke,’ is, of course, that a black man will soon move into the White House, and watermelon has a derogatory connotation when connected to black people. Except that this isn’t a joke at all.

I’m not sure where you draw the line between off-color humor and outright racism.  And I certainly find some politically incorrect humor worthy of a good laugh—you can’t avoid offending everybody all the time. But wherever that line is, this photo is pretty far on the other side of it. A few emails exchanged between the sender and myself only made me angrier—the implication was that I was overreacting to a ’silly joke’ and that I shouldn’t let it upset me. The sender and I are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, so perhaps she thought that my bleeding heart was too sensitive, or that I was offended that Obama was made the butt of a joke. But I don’t think so.

I’m about the whitest white girl ever. I fit into almost every other majority: white, straight, raised in a Christian faith. I’ve lived almost entirely in big cities with relatively large minority populations. When I was kid growing up in Dallas and Indianapolis, I went to school, church, soccer practice, and ballet class with white kids and non-white kids. Which is to say that I have been, perhaps more than I realized, incredibly sheltered from racism. I know it exists, that it’s not just a toxic memory from the 1960s and earlier. Friends have even shared personal stories. But I’ve certainly never experienced it, never really witnessed it first-hand.

Perhaps it’s strange, then, that I had such a strong reaction to this photo. Although I tried not to, I almost certainly offended the sender with my reply, in which I pointed out that it did upset me, and that it should upset both of us. Our nation has an ugly history in slavery and Jim Crow laws. We don’t need to repeat that, especially for the benefit of—of what? A cheap laugh? I don’t know what pleasure people get from racism, or why people choose to propagate it. I don’t understand the close encounter I had with racism, and I can’t imagine how a black person would have felt seeing that photoshopped image. Maybe because I’ve gone 30 years without intimate knowledge of racism that seeing it exposed so close to me is so shocking, so hard to understand. Maybe because I’ve always been able to look at racism academically, removed from its emotional force.

Condoleezza Rice made some extraordinary remarks on November 5 of this year. She said, “But one of the great things about representing this country is it continues to surprise; it continues to renew itself; it continues to beat all odds and expectations… As an African American, I am especially proud because this is a country that’s been through a long journey in terms of overcoming wounds and making race not the factor in our lives. That work is not done, but yesterday was obviously an extraordinary step forward.”

I guess that whatever our color or experience, we’re all still part of that long journey, falling backward, plodding forward.

• my management company has not returned any of my three phone calls about the “fix-it” list. On this list includes the fact that I have no mail key (and I’m expecting the security deposit from my last apartment) and a faucet that drips hot water at an alarming rate.
• apparently I have the worst management company ever. Note to apartment-hunters: poke around online first. Don’t let this happen to you.
• I just got my vaccinations for my upcoming Panama trip. Do you know how much vaccinations cost? Do you know you could just buy an iPhone instead? I did not. And iPhones don’t make your arm sore.
• I have to give my cat an enema tonight. We’re both really looking forward to it.