My grandmother, SallyGrams, is such a proponent of getting married and
procreating, sometimes I think she's an undercover operative for the
Christian right.
SallyGrams is aggressive, SallyGrams is straight-forward and SallyGrams is not scared of me in the slightest.
When I called her in October and she asked me if I had any good news to tell her and I informed her that I'd been promoted at work she said, "Enough with promotion. Get married!"
I'd find it highly annoying, I think, if she wasn't so small, so brown, so in her 80s and so on the other side of the planet. The woman can wear anyone down, evidenced by what can only be described as a mayday from Lester in India yesterday where he ever so cooly, ever so subtly, ever so loudly on an international call asked me how the "dating scene" was at the behest of his mother-in-law.
But after I read the Bush interview end-of-year issue of People magazine, I thought to myself -- and not for the first time this year -- "At least I'm not Condi."
On the subject of a female president and Condoleezza Rice fitting the bill, our First Lady agreed she'd be a "really good candidate" only Condi's not interested because "she is single, her parents are no longer living, she's an only child. You need a very supportive family and supportive friends to have this job."
My grandmother takes my single status down in the privacy of my family and that's bad enough; if she took me down on a magazine with Brangelina on the covers and promises of brand new pictures of their beautiful, trendy, interracial, global family inside, it would be something else entirely.
For the first time, I felt for Condi. We look at her and think, "But she's single..." in unfortunate tones and pitying clucks, but we'd never look at a 52-year-old woman who dropped out of a PhD program to have kids and pityingly think to ourselves, "Oh...but she's not Secretary of State..."
After a hit like that, all I could think was that maybe Condi might enjoy a trip to Bombay post-Bush presidency. Sure, my SallyGrams asks a lot of questions but she draws the line at public humiliation and, as an employee of the Federal Government, I feel like Condi, well-versed in the art of answering hard questions without actually answering them, might be one of the few people on the planet who could go head-to-head with SallyGrams and come out on top.
SallyGrams is aggressive, SallyGrams is straight-forward and SallyGrams is not scared of me in the slightest.
When I called her in October and she asked me if I had any good news to tell her and I informed her that I'd been promoted at work she said, "Enough with promotion. Get married!"
I'd find it highly annoying, I think, if she wasn't so small, so brown, so in her 80s and so on the other side of the planet. The woman can wear anyone down, evidenced by what can only be described as a mayday from Lester in India yesterday where he ever so cooly, ever so subtly, ever so loudly on an international call asked me how the "dating scene" was at the behest of his mother-in-law.
But after I read the Bush interview end-of-year issue of People magazine, I thought to myself -- and not for the first time this year -- "At least I'm not Condi."
On the subject of a female president and Condoleezza Rice fitting the bill, our First Lady agreed she'd be a "really good candidate" only Condi's not interested because "she is single, her parents are no longer living, she's an only child. You need a very supportive family and supportive friends to have this job."
My grandmother takes my single status down in the privacy of my family and that's bad enough; if she took me down on a magazine with Brangelina on the covers and promises of brand new pictures of their beautiful, trendy, interracial, global family inside, it would be something else entirely.
For the first time, I felt for Condi. We look at her and think, "But she's single..." in unfortunate tones and pitying clucks, but we'd never look at a 52-year-old woman who dropped out of a PhD program to have kids and pityingly think to ourselves, "Oh...but she's not Secretary of State..."
After a hit like that, all I could think was that maybe Condi might enjoy a trip to Bombay post-Bush presidency. Sure, my SallyGrams asks a lot of questions but she draws the line at public humiliation and, as an employee of the Federal Government, I feel like Condi, well-versed in the art of answering hard questions without actually answering them, might be one of the few people on the planet who could go head-to-head with SallyGrams and come out on top.
