"No, the [Chick-fil-A] CEO did not jump out of the hidey-hole slide, point at me... and yell 'You're one of the gays!' as I had imagined."

Writes Carolyn O'Laughlin, the Director of Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College, in The Wall Street Journal (which I'm reading because a reader emailed asking what the author's point is, whether her position as Director of  Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College is relevant to that point, and why The Wall Street Journal is publishing this sort of thing).

O'Laughlin is a member of a 4-person family consisting of 2 adult women and 2 male children, and they're on a road trip where they want to stop at the restaurant with a play area, and it happens to be a Chick-fil-A, which she put on her "list of places to avoid" when its CEO "went on record indicating his support for only families that meet the 'biblical definition of the family unit.'"

But O'Laughlin has a moderate approach to using her spending power to nudge businesses. She wanted to favor J.C. Penney, for using Ellen DeGeneres and "families like ours" in their advertising, but there was a pothole in the parking lot, so she went somewhere else, and she'd like to reward Starbucks, but it's overpriced, so she snubs it.

Noting that life is "complicated" and you've got to see the "nuance" and be "practical," she goes to the Chick-fil-A, buys the food, but hates the atmosphere — not because it's anti-gay, but it's noisy and chaotic (because of the very play area that made her overcome her political aversion to the place).

"Let's get out of here." I say to my boys.... Standing outside, my wife and I look around with road-trip decision paralysis. A kind Chick-fil-A employee comes toward us with four trays. "Y'all could sit on these if you'd like," she says. We smile, thank her, and set up a picnic on the grassy island between the parking lots of Chick-fil-A and Burger King. We're having it our way.

So what's the point? It seems to me that the point is that life is complicated, and we make individual choices to suit our own needs and tastes, some of which include politics and morality, and part of what we get to choose is how hardcore we want to be about where we go and what we buy. Also, the lower-down employees of a company are individuals with their own lives, making their own choices, just like you, and it's good for everyone to remember that.

This not the point of the article, but just something I'd like to add: Picnicking at ground level in a parking lot is not a good idea. Not only is it unfair to the business that has provided tables and chairs and wants to project an image of tidiness, but it's not a clean place to eat. Grassy does not equal clean. Grass doesn't magically repel the filth from the cars, and it attracts dog poop, human sputum, and dog and human pee.

"8 Things Your Lawn Is Trying to Tell You."

Headline (in Popular Mechanics.

That feels like a challenge to write your own list, so here's mine:

1. "Get off me."

2. "I'm sick of this 'Get off my lawn business.' I am not your lawn. I belong to me."

3. "Why don't you go back in the house, sit down at your computer, and write a 1000-page novel called 'The Lawn' — some Stephen King type thing about a lawn that's trying to tell some guy something, gets a mind of its own, and all hell breaks loose."

4. "Alternate title: 'Mown.' Get it? Moan. I love puns. It feels so good to get mown."

5. "Grrrrr. Ass."

6. "I am the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

7. "The only reason men are alive is to take care of me."

8. "Fascist!"

At the Pathway Café...

... tread gently.

"Does how to cook bacon count as my personal life?"

"If you say yes, then 1 of 11 posts today is about my 'personal life.' If not, then 0 of 11. Going back before today, I counted 47 posts before I got to one that could arguably be considered about my personal life, and it was only a photograph of our backyard garden with the TT parked next to it."

That's me, responding to Pete, who has the impression that other lawprofs blog mainly about law and occasionally put something in about their personal lives, whereas "the reverse is true" for me.

I'm posting to say that Pete's wrong, but I'm pleased by that wrongness. I like that this feels personal. But the notion that you're seeing my personal life... where does that illusion come from? I hope you're getting pleasure too... from this faux voyeurism.

And here's the garden + TT, in this morning's light-and-shadow.



Data mine that, peepers!

At the Double Arc Café...

... you can talk about anything you want, but this is a photo I took this morning from an upstairs window after Meade commented on the perfect parking place for the TT, which is to say, replicating the arc that he made to mark the transition from lawn to garden.

At the Treillage Café...



... I was going to say get out of the grid, but you have to stay on the grid to jabber in The Treillage Café. Meade taught me the word treillage. I was going to say "trellis," but treillage sounds a little exotic. I did a Google image search on the word to make sure I wasn't getting it wrong, and the first couple things that came up made me worry for a moment that I'd stumbled into the name of some subdivision of bondage fetishism. The next step in my research was the Oxford English Dictionary (to which I cannot link). Meadhouse dialogue:

ALTHOUSE: Trellage is not even in the Oxford English Dictionary.

MEADE: French!

Trellis, however, is. My favorite historical OED quotes for trellis:

1861   Bp. S. Wilberforce Let. in Life (1881) II. xiii. 454   The earthly love becomes the trellice, up which the heavenly love creeps.
1894   H. Drummond Lowell Lect. Ascent Man 193   Language formed the trellis on which Mind climbed upward.

What metaphorical trellis — treillage — is supporting your upward aspirations? (The shadow the trellis makes on the grass — the focus of this photograph — is a also metaphor, though I don't have quotes for that easily at hand.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel said: "OED may have it with an 'i' before the first l.'" Ah! You are right. Meade only said the word, so I take responsibility for misspelling. I've corrected the spelling in the post, except at the spot where I'm not finding it in the OED. In fact, treillage is in the OED:

1712   J. Addison Spectator No. 477. ¶1   There are as many kinds of Gardening as of Poetry:..Contrivers of Bowers and Grotto's, Treillages and Cascades, are Romance Writers.

Green stuff... a kick in the head... U R Dead... hypochondria on U.S. 93 South...

Let's take a break from our mundane cares to check out — as we often do on this blog — who's been calling the police in Montana:

An irate motorist on Helena Flats Road reported a big sprayer truck spraying green stuff all over and was adamant the [activity] be stopped. It was eventually discovered the truck was only spraying grass seeds and mulch.

A Martin City man was knocked unconscious when his daughter kicked him in the head. When he came to, she was kicking him in the face. He refused medical treatment....

An astute Elk Trail woman in Whitefish suspected her ex after finding “U R Dead” scratched into the hood of her vehicle....

A hypochondriac on U.S. 93 South asked a passerby to call 911 after he stepped on a thermometer, claiming he now had mercury poisoning. The passerby reported the man smelled like alcohol and was hard to understand, and all the passerby could see was wrong with the man was that he was dizzy.

Springtime!

At the Morning Garden Café...

... there's new light.

Purchase of the day.

From the March 25, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Tanaka TCG22EASSLP 21.1cc 2-Stroke Gas Powered Straight Shaft Grass Trimmer Brush Cutter (CARB Compliant)

... purchased — anonymously to us and at no additional cost to the buyer — through the Althouse Amazon portal: now with 40% more room for easy entry/egress and still 100% CARB compliant.