This week is my first full week at work. It’s also the week after my last cycle of chemotherapy before radiation treatment (I also get more chemotherapy after radiation – it’s called “sandwich therapy”). My mother flew out yesterday to help me, from the other side of the country. Mom’s been a great support through all of this; having taught at a medical school, she helps me understand all the medical aspects. I’ve been sure to get her copies of my ultrasounds, my pathology report, and my blood tests. Now, though, she’s doing a different Mom task: sorting my clothes. Today I came home to find all my clothes sorted by type. Well, not all of my clothes, but the ones that Joel has managed to dig up and wash. There they were, the piles of underwear, sweaters, office shirts, dressy shirts, dresses, and T-shirts.

4 dresses. (Joel tells me he’ll have a couple more for me tomorrow.)

More than 33 T-shirts.

Since I have now reached the day when I finally fully recover my appetite after chemotherapy, I did follow the spirit of Elissa Ashwood’s blog today by eating a serving of chocolate cake.

Now for today in Greek politics: If you were to range the Greek parties that made it into Parliament from right to left, they might go: Golden Dawn, the Independent Greeks, ND, PASOK, the Democratic Left, SYRIZA, KKE. And, as the parties gear up for the almost certain second round of elections, probably to come in June, the bitterest feuds seem to be between parties next to each other on this spectrum. In particular, SYRIZA and the Democratic Left, which days ago were talking about forming a government together, are now deeply at odds.

In theory, SYRIZA and the Democratic Left want the same thing: to reject the austerity measures and stay in the EU and the euro zone. (The Independent Greeks also support this course.) The KKE stands alone in wanting to leave the euro zone. ND and PASOK have already committed themselves to austerity measures to keep Greece in the euro zone and getting EU/IMF loans, and, given that Golden Dawn wants to put landmines on the border to keep immigrants out, I tend to consider its economic positions moot.

In practice, the Democratic Left has always been more moderate in its opposition to austerity measures than SYRIZA, so, when invited by Papoulias to join a unity government with ND and PASOK,

PASOK, New Democracy and Democratic Left agreed last week on a government that would last until 2014 and be committed to keeping the country in the euro region and renegotiating bailout conditions from the International Monetary Fund and European Union to boost growth. SYRIZA’s Tsipras turned down the approach on May 11 as the first opinion polls since the elections showed he was gaining in support.

Democratic Left has said that SYRIZA, the second-biggest party, must be part of its proposed unity government, or give it tacit support at least, if the government is to succeed in its task. The position has been adopted by PASOK and New Democracy.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras says hell no, he won’t join this unity government; he would be betraying the people who voted for him if he signed onto tolerating the austerity measures any longer. In particular, SYRIZA is on record as resisting both Merkel’s version of structural reforms

We are calling for
Well-paid, well-regulated and insured employment.
Immediate reconstitution of the minimum wage and of real wages within three years.
Immediate reconstitution of collective labor agreements.
Instigation of powerful control mechanisms that will protect employment.
Systematic confrontation of lay-offs and labour relations deregulation.

and cuts that affect education, health care, and social welfare.

Mathematically, ND, PASOK, and the Democratic Left can form a government by themselves, so SYRIZA says go ahead without us if you want, but don’t expect our complicity. In response, the Democratic Left now says that if Greece goes to a second round of elections (in which SYRIZA is expected to gain more votes), it may not cooperate with SYRIZA in forming a government. Since SYRIZA isn’t likely to gain enough votes in a second round to have a clear majority, and since the KKE refuses to join a coalition with anyone, the Democratic Left presumably hopes in this way to pressure SYRIZA to join the proposed unity government.

Speaking on Real FM radio station, Kouvelis, criticized second-placed SYRIZA chief Alexis Tsipras for failing to agree to the formation of a unity government with first-placed New Democracy and third-placed PASOK, in which Democratic Left also said it would participate, arguing that SYRIZA’s absence from such a coalition government would render it too weak to have any real decision-making power.

Meanwhile, the Independent Greeks are said to refuse to join a government with ND. I gather that Golden Dawn is uninterested in forming a coalition with anyone, but then, I gather that feeling is mutual, and no one wants to form a coalition with Golden Dawn.

Here is a post on the situation from a Greek blogger sympathetic with SYRIZA.

At the oncologist’s office, we got good news and bad news. The good news was from the oncologist. The bad news was from a neighbor who telephoned Joel while we were in the office. So, this is how the appointment went, roughly:

Oncologist: You’re looking good. Your CA-125 is down to 7, which is well within normal range. After the radiation, you’ll have three more chemotherapy cycles, and then you’ll be done.

Lynn: What about the twelve consolidation chemotherapy cycles?

Oncologist: Those are optional. We’ll determine later whether you get those.

(At this point, Joel was thinking, “Great! Lynn may not have to go through chemotherapy all that long.” I was thinking, “Great! I only have to worry for three more cycles about whether I can tolerate this without my blood counts going too low or the neuropathy getting too bad. If I get the consolidation cycles and my white blood cells plummet or my hands go numb, I can bail, and because they’re optional and I’ll still be disease free.”)

Joel’s cell phone: Ring, ring.

Joel: What? How did he get out? We closed the window. What? He jumped from the second story? How badly hurt is he?

It turns out that Drake, our Boston Terrier, for reasons known only to himself, decided, once we left, to break out of the house, not through the window that leads onto the porch (that one, indeed, we had carefully closed), but through the window that jumps two stories down onto the parking lot. He must have run through that window, for he left a big tear in the screen. Somehow he survived this leap.

Joel decided he was too distraught to drive, and gave me the wheel. Then we drove back, with Joel anxiously trying to hurry me along (“You could have made that yellow light”), while I, following my standard reaction to any anxiety within the car, focused extra hard on trying to drive safely and take as few risks as possible. Eventually we made it home, to find that the neighbor who called us wasn’t answering her phone (she, apparently, was trying to call Joel and finding him not answering). After wandering around for a while looking for her, knowing only her first name, a neighbor whom we’d gotten to help us called to us that the neighbor with the dog had arrived on our doorstep. We collected Drake, who by this time was definitely not winning any praise (but was, improbably, walking around as if he’d done nothing remotely as hazardous as jumping from a second story window). Joel and I took Drake to the vet to be checked out, I took Joel home to go back to the vet in his truck, and I drove to the Beyond the Farm event.

Stanford Beyond the Farm is a whole bunch of events, actually, all scheduled for today. It’s a global day of service, where Stanford alumni in all kinds of places arrange charitable events of one kind or another, and then recruit people to join these events through the Stanford alumni web site (and Stanford alumni social media groups – I’d heard of this particular event through LinkedIn). This particular event was organized by Stanford Professional Women of Orange County. As the woman organizing the event told the story, it turned out that one of the women leading Stanford Professional Women of Orange County is also a two time breast cancer survivor who helped start Breast Cancer Solutions, a non-profit organization that helps breast cancer patients in Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino (California) Counties, providing both direct assistance and referrals.

Since being diagnosed with cancer, I’ve learned of various volunteer efforts related to cancer. The chemotherapy lounge has hats, knitted or crocheted by somebody or other, for cancer patients. There are, I gather, wig lending services. I’ve grown my hair in the past for Locks of Love (which makes wigs for pediatric cancer patients from donated hair), and I’ve met another woman who donated hair for a different organization that does something similar. Particularly of interest to me were the American Cancer Society program that gets volunteers to drive cancer patients to appointments and Cleaning for a Reason, an organization that gets professional maid service companies to donate house cleaning (four monthly cleanings to a couple of women at a time) to women with cancer.

Breast Cancer Solutions’ focus is women with cancer who are also short on money, whether because cancer prevents them from working or because they were unemployed when they got cancer. Medical covers their medical expenses, but there’s still the matter of food, shelter, and other financial and emotional assistance. Breast Cancer Solutions partners with other organizations to assist these women.

Because of the stunt of the dog who thought he was a bird, I was fifteen minutes late for the Beyond the Farm event, and the clubhouse was already full, with several tables of women, a few children, and eventually one man. There were Stanford alumni and mothers of Stanford alumni, of various ages and occupations. Our tasks were making fleece blankets and assembling bags of items. The fleece blanket assembly involved putting two sections of fleece, of complimentary colors, together, cutting the edges to make ties, and then tying them together (the tying went faster than the cutting). The bags had pillows, packets for hot drinks (cocoa, cider, soup, tea), beaded bracelets, toothbrushes, bookmarks, and lotion. (Lotion, I’ll note, comes in especially handy if you’re going through chemotherapy, because it dries your skin. At my last chemotherapy session, some women came through as part of a massage therapy training, massaged our feet with lotion, and advised us on what to use to keep our skin from drying out too much.) The pillows had been made by a Girl Scout troop, and the bead bracelets and bookmarks by a couple of women from Stanford Professional Women of Orange County. And so, amid the pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness and the cutting of fabric, I chatted with the other women at my table about IT jobs held and one woman’s doctor daughter, who would be serving the Air Force for eight years in return for their funding her education.

I got home to find the dog OK, just needing an anti-inflammatory for his sore joints. The vet, Joel said, was calling him Superdog. He’d better not get any further ideas from that nickname, though. As it is, just as I thought we were done with remodeling, we need to get custom interior louver shutters on two windows, so that we can open the windows for a breeze without fearing another leap by the dog.

But I suppose I can be grateful that, rather than being a cancer patient who needs financial assistance to stay housed, I’m a cancer patient who can buy custom interior louver shutters without going into debt. Just not too many more expenses, please.

If you want to donate to women whose cancer experience involves being rather more financially strapped, here’s the Breast Cancer Solutions web site again. And there are, of course, other worthy cancer charities. Feel free to recommend your favorite one in the comments.

The parties that made the 3% cut to get into the Greek parliament in the May 6th election, in order of popularity, were ND, SYRIZA, PASOK, the Independent Greeks, the KKE (Communists), Golden Dawn, and the Democratic Left. ND and PASOK have traditionally been Greece’s dominant parties, with ND the center-left party and PASOK the center-right party. As recently as the last election, they had 79% of the vote between them. This election, they had a third of the vote, with about a fifth of the vote going to a variety of parties too small even to make the cut for Parliament. I don’t think there’s been a Greek election where the vote was this scattered since 1950. While ND was technically the winner, the collapse of ND and PASOK from their former leading role, and SYRIZA’s rise from a fifth place party generally described as on the far left to second place makes SYRIZA the relative winner, so the big stories of this election have been how such a radical party reached second place, and how such a creepy right wing party as Golden Dawn got into Parliament at all.

Let me begin with the neo-fascist Golden Dawn, the scariest party of the lot (and the one party that none of the others is willing to include in a coalition government). In 2009, Golden Dawn got less than 1% of the total vote. In 2012, they got nearly 7%. What gives? Whose votes are they getting? And why?

A Kathimerini Profile of parties running in May 6 Greek elections, written before the election, describes Golden Dawn thus:

Brief history: Party leader Nikos Michaloliakos had been active in far-right politics for a number of years before Chrysi Avgi was officially recognized as a party in 1993. He met with leaders of the 1967-74 military junta while serving a jail sentence for illegal possession of explosives and has said he was “proud” to serve in the same jail wing as the imprisoned colonels. The party expresses open admiration for the 1936-41 dictatorship led by Ioannis Metaxas and associates itself closely with Nazi ideology and imagery….

Main campaign points: Chrysi Avgi is opposed to the EU-IMF loan deal but does not favor an exit from the eurozone at this point. Its main focus has been on calling for the expulsion of all illegal immigrants from Greece. It wants land mines placed on the Greek-Turkish border to stop illegal immigrants entering the country. Michaloliakos told NET TV that he believes second-generation immigrants born in Greece should be allowed to live in Greece but not have the right to vote or stand for office. Michaloliakos says that once his party is in Parliament it will create private security firms to patrol working-class Athens neighborhoods and medical centers to provide treatment to the poor. Chrysi Avgi calls for the cancellation of Greece’s bailouts and erasing of any debt accumulated since 1974 that is deemed “illegal and odious.”

Campaign slogan: So we can rid the land of filth….

The Miami Herald writes

On Sunday, Golden Dawn won enough votes to earn seats in the Parliament, and now Greeks – and the estimates 1 million foreign immigrants here – are bracing to see how the party, with its swastika-like logo and the black-shirted toughs who come to its rallies, will try to commandeer the debate….

The issue that put the party into Parliament was illegal immigration, a topic that major parties had largely refused to touch until the eve of Sunday’s elections, when Samaras denounced illegal immigrants as “tyrants.” But Golden Dawn, whose advertisements also featured the burning of American and Israeli flas, has many even more controversial positions, such as its call for unifying Greece with Cyprus, a move tried by the Greek military regime in 1974 that led to the Turkish invasion of the island. Cyprus has remained divided ever since.

While Golden Dawn is the only party sporting a swastika-like logo, proposing landmines to stop illegal immigrants, and proposing to make a play for Cyprus, it’s not the only party on the right appealing to resentment of illegal immigration. Greece’s position at the southeastern edge of the borderless European Schengen area, its extensive coastlines, and its easily crossable borders have made it a magnet for increasing immigration at the same time that its collapsing economy have made Greeks more resentful of such immigrants. The same Kathimerini article party profile article that I quoted on Golden Dawn says of of LAOS, the party that prior to the election held the fourth most seats in Parliament,

The party wants the mass repatriation of illegal immigrants in a bid to curb crime and unemployment, and has called for a change in the law to allow victims to shoot robbers.

Golden Dawn appears to have gotten into Parliament at LAOS’ expense, as LAOS failed this time to get enough votes to get into Parliament at all. I suspect this shift in support from LAOS to Golden Dawn may be at least partly due to the fact that LAOS got brought into the technocrat unity government of Papademos (even if with only one Cabinet post), and therefore is tainted, along with ND and PASOK, with its tie to the austerity measures to which that government had to agree to get the latest loan tranche from the EU and IMF. Still, Golden Dawn has a larger fraction of the vote than LAOS had in 2009, with even further right and uglier platform.

Greeks have reacted with horror to the rise of Golden Dawn, and the Facebook group “We say NO to Golden Dawn” has over 19000 likes as I write this post. Two Reuters reporters have trouble finding people who will admit to having voted for Golden Dawn.

A 63-year-old taxi driver, who gave his name only as Leonidas out of fear of reprisals, said he voted for the party because his colleagues had been attacked by immigrants.

“But now I realize they (Golden Dawn) are just thugs. I wouldn’t vote for them next time,” he said….

But in rundown Athens neighborhoods, the party has managed to build a Robin Hood image among some.

Its members – often muscular young men with shaved heads and tight t-shirts – escorted elderly women to the bank and delivered bags of food to poor families struggling to get by during the country’s harshest economic crisis in decades.

Analysts said obscurity had helped the party’s cause in a country that resisted Nazi occupation in World War II and was later ruled by a military junta….

Sophia Ignatidou, writing at the Guardian, warns her fellow Greeks against Golden Dawn.

The reason tens of thousands of Greeks stand behind this propaganda is the sweet talk that comes with it: eradication of debt for low income workers and the unemployed, implementation of an independent audit committee for Greece’s debt, and bringing corrupt but faceless politicians and people of power to account….

Whatever you call Michaloliakos’s party, Greeks shouldn’t let their despair drive them into supporting Golden Dawn in the 6 May elections. For this will not be the dawn of a new era but a step towards the end of democracy.

Yannis Palaiologos, writing at The New Republic, sets out to meet the voters of Greece’s extremist parties.

Taking the election results at face value is a frightening prospect. After all, nearly all the far-left and far-right parties have argued for policies that would almost certainly force Greece to abandon the euro, a move that would, in turn, have drastic effects on Greece’s economic life, as well as its relations with the rest of Europe. (In the case of Golden Dawn’s rabidly xenophobic platform, the consequences would be considerably more harrowing than that.) But there’s also reason to doubt that this is really what the Greek public wants: In poll after poll, the majority of Greeks have expressed their desire to remain members of the euro zone.

Over the course of the campaign, I talked with Greek supporters of these extremist parties to see if these political claims could be reconciled. What I found under the surface of the slogans was a more complicated—but not much more reassuring—reality….

If Golden Dawn is the most disturbing of the rising parties, SYRIZA may be the one to watch. The crowds celebrating SYRIZA’s rise in Syntagma Square after the election resuls came in echoed the crowds celebrating Hollande’s victory at the Bastille, and Louis Klarevas, writing at Foreign Policy magazine, suggested that “Suddenly, the fate of the global economy may rest on an obscure leftist party and its young, charismatic leader.”

SYRIZA was formed of a coalition of left wing groups, some with roots in communist movements, with significant participation from Synaspismos, a split from the KKE (Greek Communist Party). Of all the Greek parties, it has been the one most closely tied with, and which profited most from, the “Indignants” movement that took over Syntagma Square last year. Kathimerini describes SYRIZA’s platform as follows

Main campaign points: Tsipras, who hopes he can lead SYRIZA to third place in the elections, has said he would accept support from the right-wing Independent Greeks if there were a possibility of forming a left-wing government that would oppose the terms of the new bailout. Although fuzzy on the question of keeping the euro, SYRIZA supports Greece’s membership of the European Union, but opposes the belt-tightening measures mandated by the memorandum. It proposes sustainable economic policies, it rejects the EU’s reformed Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), it envisages the regeneration of workers’ cooperatives, and rejects the deregulation of maritime transport. SYRIZA is in favor of abolishing the Dublin II treaty, legalizing all immigrant workers and speeding up the asylum process. The party advocates a change in the voting system and is in favor of a simple proportional representation, which would give all parties seats in Parliament based directly on their share of the vote.

(That last point would remove the current rule that the front running party gets bonus delegates added to its share.)

If SYRIZA gains strength from its ties to popular protest against the hated austerity measures, its weak point appears to be the fragmented nature of the Greek left. When ND gave up hope (after only six hours) of forming a government and passed the mandate to SYRIZA, Tsipras set out to form a coalition based on five points

The immediate cancellation of all impending measures that will impoverish Greeks further, such as cuts to pensions and salaries.

* The immediate cancellation of all impending measures that undermine fundamental workers’ rights, such as the abolition of collective labor agreements.

* The immediate abolition of a law granting MPs immunity from prosecution, reform of the electoral law and a general overhaul of the political system.

* An investigation into Greek banks, and the immediate publication of the audit performed on the Greek banking sector by BlackRock.

* The setting up of an international auditing committee to investigate the causes of Greece’s public deficit, with a moratorium on all debt servicing until the findings of the audit are published.

I expected, of course, that he’d run into trouble here with ND and PASOK, since both parties have signed agreements with the EU that are at odds with certain of these five points. What I didn’t realize (and perhaps should have if I’d managed to pay closer attention to Greek politics) was that the KKE would bail on him, too. The KKE and SYRIZA in fact differ in their views of how to respond to the Greek economic crisis. SYRIZA wants to reject burdensome austerity measures and still stay in the euro zone (though getting Berlin and Brussels to accept his five point plan would be quite a feat), while the KKE wants to leave the euro zone altogether. Still, it would seem to me, from a distance, that joining a coalition with SYRIZA would go further toward supporting the KKE’s goals than letting talks collapse and hoping for better from a new election. It’s not as if the KKE has never participated in a coalition government; they did once join in a coalition government with ND to replace PASOK, in the wake of a corruption scandal. At this time, though, they’re refusing to join anyone’s coalition. In fact, they appear to have been less willing to work with SYRIZA than were the Independent Greeks, though ostensibly SYRIZA and the Independent Greeks are on opposite ends of the political spectrum and the KKE and SYRIZA on neighboring places.

The Democratic Left seems to be taking the opposite tack, and is happy to talk about joining anyone’s coalition, apparently welcoming its potential kingmaker role. Since the Democratic Left’s position is to be anti-austerity and pro-euro, but in a more moderate way than SYRIZA, they were willing to be brought into a SYRIZA government (yesterday Twitter was all abuzz for a while with hope that the Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis might save Tsipras’ attempt at a coalition government by coming on board as Prime Minister), but are now willing to negotiate to join a government with PASOK if given hope that Greece can gradually move away from the memorandum.

Quite rightly, no one at all is willing to work with Golden Dawn.

What could we have expected if Tsipras had been able to bring a coalition together? Louis Klarevas, at Foreign Policy magazine, was hopeful, seeing the prospect of a SYRIZA government as much less alarming than new elections.

That said, there’s no reason to panic just yet. Even if SYRIZA earns the mandate and manages to somehow seize the reins of power, the changes in Greek policy will hardly be “radical,” as the Coalition of the Radical Left’s name misleadingly implies. The party’s young, charismatic leader, Alexis Tsipras, has made it clear that he has no intentions of withdrawing Greece from the eurozone, let alone the European Union. Instead, we should expect a more nuanced approach to economic revitalization, which would likely include an aggressive renegotiation of the bailout terms currently in place between Greece and the “troika” composed of the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF, as well as a demand for more public investment in lieu of loans.

Forbes, in contrast, predicted that SYRIZA’s rise raised the possibility of a Greek exit from the euro zone as early as this summer.

Can SYRIZA be brought into the unity government now sought by PASOK? On what terms? Can a coalition be formed without it? Or are we headed toward another round of elections? We have just a couple of days to find out.

But if there’s one thing both results have in common, it’s that voters in both France and Greece have rejected the EU’s push toward austerity. Paul Krugman writes

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.

Indeed, coming in the wake of the fall a couple of weeks ago of the government of the Netherlands, one of the EU’s most pro-austerity countries, when Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) refused austerity measures that would bring the budget deficit in line with EU rules and the news that Spain, amidst the deepest cuts in three decades, has seen its unemployment rate leap to 24.4%, the rejection of austerity both by the EU’s shakiest economy and by the country that supplied half of “Merkozy,” the election results from France and Greece raise the question of whether the agreement to restrain spending, which EU nations reached several months ago, can possibly hold enough voter support to be sustained. But what will the practical results be, as Hollande wins one of the most difficult jobs in the world, and no one really wins in Greece?

It’s the economy stupid: Here in the US, Biden has campaigned for Obama with the remark, “Thanks to President Obama, bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” Given that General Motors is alive, and that our economy, however slowly, is recovering, this may yet prove a winning slogan. But I’m not sure, if the US economy were experiencing the same freefall that parts of Europe are seeing now, that even bin Laden’s death would save Obama. Certainly, the success of Sarkozy’s ventures in Libya and Côte d’Ivoire did not bring him the boost in popularity he hoped for.

Hope and change, the French version: The Associated Press reports Hollande’s victory speech thus:

“Austerity can no longer be inevitable!” Hollande declared in his victory speech after a surprising campaign that saw him transform from an unremarkable figure to an increasingly statesmanlike one. He will take office no later than May 16.

Speaking to exuberant crowds, Hollande portrayed himself as a vehicle for change across Europe.

“In all the capitals … there are people who, thanks to us, are hoping, are looking to us, and want to finish with austerity,” he told supporters early Monday at Paris’ Place de la Bastille. “You are a movement lifting up everywhere in Europe, and perhaps the world.”

“Yessssssssss !!!!” was the Facebook status message of my college housemate who now lives in Paris.

EU austerity rethink: Prior to the French election, BBC reported

But Mr Hollande is quite clear in his intentions: “I will renegotiate the treaty. Mrs Merkel knows that. And if the French people give me their backing, my first trip will be to confirm to her that the French people have voted for a different kind of Europe.”

The words “a different kind of Europe” will not go down well in Berlin. What they imply in undiplomatic language is that German leadership has failed and that it is up to the French to steer Europe in a different direction.

Francois Hollande may have an ally in Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank. In the impenetrable language so often loved by central bankers he said that austerity was “starting to reverberate its contractionary effects”. In other words, spending cuts and higher taxes are starting to shrink the real economies.

Mr Hollande is committed to balancing the French budget by 2017. He is not intending to renegotiate the fiscal pact itself. After all it would be difficult for the Irish to vote on it at the end of May if it was being re-written. What he wants is for a growth pact to form part of a wider package. Mario Draghi has also backed that.

For the Germans there is a red line: growth cannot be boosted by increasing borrowing….

Now that Hollande has won, Berlin predicts that a compromise will be found. But how far is Merkel willing to bend?

PASOK and ND in freefall: Meanwhile, in Greece, PASOK was the big loser, dropping from 40% of the vote in 2009 to 13.4% now.

“This is a message of change, a message to Europe that a peaceful revolution has begun,” said Alexis Tsipras, who heads Syriza, a coalition of radical left and green groups that took 16.6% of the vote – the second largest share. “German chancellor Angela Merkel has to know that the politics of austerity have suffered a humiliating defeat.”

No Greek party has come anywhere near a majority, so the question becomes how a viable coalition government can be formed. Under Greek law, ND, as the party with the largest number of votes, has three days to attempt to form a government, after which Syriza, which came in second, gets a shot, followed by PASOK. ND and PASOK are both on record as supporting the austerity measures, however reluctantly, but will ND be willing to tie itself to PASOK’s unpopularity. Syriza wants to reject the austerity measures, but stay in the EU. Even the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn has managed to win a place in Parliament (but God forbid it gets into any sort of coalition government). Kathimerini, before the election, predicted that ND would overcome its reluctance and form a coalition with PASOK, and that

In looking for a third coalition partner, the only viable candidates seem to be the Democratic Left (DIMAR), Democratic Alliance (DISY) or the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS). There remains doubt over whether the last two will get into Parliament. In each case, the compromises that will have to be made to get a third party on board will have to be weighed against the extra seats that it could bring. The liberal DISY, led by former Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, appears the most pliable of the three parties. LAOS and DIMAR may ask for concessions with regard to the austerity measures.

More on the varied Greek parties from which a coalition might be formed can be found here.

Meanwhile, here in Orange County, a place of far fewer and smaller demonstrations than LA, I saw no sign of May Day activity. My own time this week has been spent preparing to return home and preparing to return to work. On Monday, I stopped by the office, let them know that I’m expecting to return to work next week (but only for a couple of days of the week, since it’s also a chemotherapy week, and chemotherapy wipes me out for a few days), and what accomodations I’ll need. Then I exchanged email with my doctor, since my workplace wants his explicit OK before I can go back. Yesterday I got his email confirming that I can return. Today I battled the overwhelmed EDD phone system to try to reach a human being and find out how I’m supposed to notify them that I’m going back to work. (This involved repeatedly calling the EDD number, pressing 0 to get to a representative, and reaching a recording that tells me the maximum number of callers waiting for a representative has been reached. Eventually, on the fourth try, I got through to the on hold queue, and eventually from there to a representative.) I have also gone back to my 6am cell phone alarm this week, to prepare for next week, when I’ll have to wake up to go to work. No more sleeping in till 7:30am. This means I have to get used to going to bed by 9pm, since, even in the more energetic part of the cycle, chemotherapy seems to sap enough energy that I can’t get by on 8 hours of sleep. Otherwise, I feel relatively normal (if much less supplied with hair) during the latter part of the chemotherapy cycle.

Using a small inheritance that I got from my mother-in-law after she died a few months ago of brain cancer, we have remodeled the condo so that it can more readily be kept clean while I go through chemotherapy. Clean is desirable, on the off chance that chemotherapy knocks out my white blood cells, though when counted after the first chemotherapy cycle they continued to thrive. And little work is desirable, since I surely don’t have lots of energy for housework, and don’t expect to have such energy for a year and a half or so (the length of time that I’m supposed to be getting one form of treatment or other). For that matter, I had no energy for housework during the several months when the not yet diagnosed cancer was sapping my energy, so there was even more than the usual mess to clean. So the wall-to-wall carpet, not too helpful in a pet owning household, has been replaced with laminate, the mildewed bathroom wallpaper (who thought it was a good idea to put wallpaper in a bathroom?) removed and replaced with paint, and the condo thoroughly cleaned by a maid, whom we have also hired to do regular cleanings. Today I will return home, with at least enough stuff that I can sleep there again, and ferry more of my things back there from the friend’s house where I have been staying over the next few days. Vast quantities of things still remain in the garage, some of which must be restored to the condo and others gotten rid of, so that the car can return to the garage. This will take weeks.

Besides making the arrangements for returning to work, this is what I have gotten done this week: Hung out in the condo while the painter was working, so that I could pay him when he finished. Read a few chapters of Innocents Abroad while I did so. Drove to the flooring place and paid them after they finished the job. Helped Joel put felt pads on the feet of furniture, so that our furniture won’t scratch the new laminate floor. Picked up whatever small items Joel needed at Home Depot. Set up the computers and network. Disentangled things associated with the TV and its DVD player from other miscellaneous wiring. Paid bills. Mailed a couple of postcards to family. Walked the dog many times.

Today closet storage people are supposed to show up and give an estimate for how much they’ll charge to build storage into our closets. Sometime within the next few days someone will be in to fix the garbage disposal. Eventually I hope to both have a suitably remodeled condo and a garage where I can actually keep my car. In the meantime, tonight I will rejoin Joel, the dog, and the cat, and Monday I go back to work.

To celebrate the return of semi-normality, Joel and I went to dinner at Souplantation last night, and had a not so normal night out. As we were emerging from Souplantation after dinner, we heard a loud crash, turned, and saw two cars spinning. Joel called 911 while I ran to find out if the drivers were OK. One of them was carried off in a stretcher (he had complained of pain in his neck), and both Joel and I got interviewed by police, though neither of us witnessed the beginning of the accident (two other bystanders saw more than we did).

It was only after it was all over, and I got back home, that I remembered that everyone present at the accident scene, drivers, witnesses, and police, had seen in me a woman in a headscarf with no visible hair, and wondered, how do strangers see me now when I wear the scarf? Do they see me as the cancer patient that I am, or as a Muslim woman, or just as someone who likes to wear bandanas?

@xeni There’s a big difference between identifying/extracting whatever positivity you can from a shit deal; and a gift.

@xeni girlfriend’s mom recently diagnosed with cancer, her coworker told her to accept god’s gift. GF’s mom is an atheist. She LOL’d

@xeni @tbias Of course! Every Xmas I lay out all my presents, slice them up with scalpels, then blast them with radiation.

To be clear, @Xeni said someone told her cancer was a gift & I said “If true, it comes in one hell of a shitty wrapping job.” #FuckCancer

@xeni a gift is something you want to share with others. Cancer is not that thing.

Hey, way to sell people on God’s love, fellow Christians! Whichever of you are going around telling people with cancer that they should accept it as God’s gift, cut it the hell out! You’re comforting yourselves, not your friends or acquaintances.

There’s an analogy that people sometimes use, when trying to answer the “Why so much pain?” question about God. Imagine a beautiful tapestry, but you’re looking at the wrong side of it, so all you can see is the ugly knots. You don’t know that those knots are what was needed to make that tapestry to begin with. Now, maybe that analogy works for you, and maybe it doesn’t. I’m betting it would leave GF’s mom, the atheist, cold. But take it as given, for the moment.

If you wanted to learn gratitude, would you do it by looking at the reverse of that tapestry, at the ugliest knot you could find, and telling yourself that you should be oh so grateful for that knot? No, you’d turn your eyes toward the tapestry, and remind yourself that, however ugly the knot was, the tapestry was still there.

Tell someone to accept cancer as a gift from God, and you’re telling her to stare at that ugly knot and be thankful for it.

I’m not thankful for cancer. But I’ll tell you what I am thankful for.

• I’m thankful that I’ve had this life at all, with all the joy that came with it.
• I’m thankful for my family and friends, who have been incredibly supportive as I went through surgery and started chemotherapy.
• I’m thankful that I live in a time when treatment has come as far as it has. I’m thankful for my surgery, and for my chemotherapy, and for the radiation to come.
• I’m thankful to live in a time of new, improved antinausea drugs, so I don’t have to go through the killer nausea that earlier chemotherapy patients did. I love my Aloxi and my Zofran.
• I’m thankful for my job, to which I hope to return soon, and for my insurance.
• I’m thankful that my current odds are in favor of surviving, rather than dying. 51 is younger than I’d like to die. Twice that age would be more like it . And if I don’t get that, I’ll gladly take at least 20 more years.
• I’m thankful for books and music and walks outside.

To me, at this point, those are sufficient things to be thankful for.

UPDATE: Xeni says it wasn’t a Christian who said this to her. I guess I jumped the gun, assuming (since I live in a mostly Christian country) that religious admonitions would be coming from Christians. All the rest of what I said here stands.

Vanessa describes Millwood as a working class town. I’d have said middle class, but that may be a matter of semantics (don’t we all see ourselves as middle class in this country?). Compared to Chappaqua, Millwood was definitely the lower income hamlet. Though my own father rose through the ranks at IBM to the point where, by the end of my childhood, no one would have described him as working class, I expect we landed in Millwood rather than Chappaqua, when I was ten months old, because Millwood nicely combined being part of the really good Chappaqua school district with not having as pricy housing. At any rate, the rich kids at school were generally the Chappaqua kids. When a Law and Order episode takes a jaunt to Westchester, and the show lets you know you’re heading toward wealth, it will be a town near Millwood, and not Millwood itself, that the cops must visit. I’ve said, in blogging about Mad Men, that I grew up in the world of Don Draper, but Don Draper himself of course lives in a neighboring town, not mine. Some parents did, like Don Draper, commute to New York City to work (my mother, when she eventually went back to school and then to work, commuted first to Columbia University and then to Mt. Sinai Medical School), but many (perhaps, as Vanessa says, most) worked locally, with the mothers mostly at home (though Vanessa’s parents, of course, both worked as teachers). My own father worked at an IBM Research Center that was, though not in Millwood, in a part of Yorktown Heights so close that we could walk to it (and sometimes did, for the IBM grounds included a small playground area for employees’ children). It may have been (as I remember someone suggesting when Paul Krugman described his similarly free suburban childhood) that ubiquity of at home mothers who all knew each other that allowed the unlocked doors, free roaming kids, and non-helicopter parenting that we all grew up with in those days in Millwood, but I expect some of it was also the effect of living in such a small town, whether your mother worked outside the home or not.

Vanessa remembers Elmer’s, the five and dime store where she bought candy (but doesn’t mention Rocky’s, the Millwood deli that now has its own Youtube channel, which I remember as the other local store of interest, besides the supermarket). The three siblings closest to my age and I (four of us were within three years of each other in age) used to walk down to Elmer’s often for candy, and, even more interesting to me, comic books. I would read the comic books on their stand until I got the warning, “This is not a library,” letting me know that I had better buy something or go. Near Elmer’s was a liquor store, which burned down during my childhood; my sisters and brother and I (the four of us closest in age) all walked there with our sketch books to sketch the wreckage. Also near Elmer’s was the building that housed the volunteer fire department, as well as my Brownies troop.

Like Vanessa, I took ballet, a class for which I seemed well suited, since my feet naturally pointed out in the proper ballet pose (a relief after gym class admonishments to try to run with my feet pointed straight forward). I was also flexible, and could walk easily on the tips of my toes. But that was the extent of my accomplishments; unlike Vanessa, I abandoned dance early. I preferred (with my brothers and sisters, especially the three closest in age) to take long walks in the woods, when I wasn’t curled up somewhere with a book, or making up stories about glass and china animals.

Other places where Vanessa’s memories match mine: Her family being one of only two black families in town, the preppie clothes and the girls with long, straight blonde hair. In another post, I once described Millwood and Chappaqua as something like Woody Allen’s Jew meets WASP world, with a few more Italians. When I was young, we were the only Greek-Americans I knew, and so I tended to identify ethnically with the Jewish kids, who could tell me of immigrant grandparents rather like my own immigrant father. Later, two other Greek-American families settled right near mine, making my little hill the Astoria of Millwood (I also met a couple of other Greek-American kids in high school). Because I compared myself with the WASP kids, I spent my young years under the illusion that I was actually dark complexioned. I’m not. Even by white people standards, I’m medium in complexion rather than dark. Anyway, definitely a small town where you could name all the black kids.

Here’s how my memories compare with Vanessa’s on other matters.

The schools: Westorchard, the elementary school that Vanessa describes as progressive, was newly built when Vanessa went there. My sister in Vanessa’s grade was part of the first set of kids to go there, and I was one of the last set in our neighborhood not to go. Instead, my elementary school years were all spent at Roaring Brook. The whole Chappaqua school district was known for good schools; we were often told that our school district and Scarsdale’s were the best in Westchester county. (When my sister and I got our National Merit scholarships, we were brought together with that year’s bumper crop of National Merit scholars, to talk to the local paper: we were more evidence of what a special public school Horace Greeley was.) Within those schools, though, Westorchard differed from Roaring Brook: It was the cool, new, progressive school, built to suit new, flexible educational principles.

For junior high school and high school, I went to the same schools as Vanessa: Robert E. Bell School and Horace Greeley High School. I wasn’t in the theater crown in high school. In the clique naming system that my high school friends used, I was what was called “a brain.” This meant that I hung around with other girls who carried hefty AP history textbooks (and in my case AP calculus as well); one couple I knew sealed their dating relationship with the exchange of Palmer, the textbook for the AP European History class. I did have one friend in the theater crowd, Marcia. She lived in the Shingle House, from which the road I lived on took its name, a house that had been built back around the time of the Revolutionary War. I doubt Vanessa and Marcia had much to do with each other, though, since Marcia was two years older than me, while Vanessa was two years younger.

I do, though, remember Phil Stewart, Vanessa’s theater teacher at Greeley. I might have taken one class with him (I don’t remember for sure), and I definitely remember the day I auditioned for Godspell, with Phil Stewart evaluating my audition. Marcia had tried to allay my stage fright by showing me how to act the role of a horny tree, but it was in vain. I fell apart in the audition, and thus ended my musical career.

Greeley did send rather more of its graduates than I’d expected (not being in the theater crowd myself) off to Broadway, TV, or Hollywood. Vanessa names four of the more notable ones from her time, two of whom I remember. At Greeley, sometimes one of us students would get to teach a class about something we knew particularly well, either at the annual student organized seminar day event, or by special arrangement with a teacher. I taught a German class about Nietsche one day, and Matt Arkin once spoke to a class of mine about acting. I didn’t know, at the time, that his father was a well known actor. He’s since gone on to an acting career himself. But the one I remember most is Joe Berlinger, who was responsible for my playground nickname, and whom I later knew in high school because we both took German. (I’ve since connected with him on LinkedIn – if any old Greeley friends of his want to find him again, you can find him there.) A couple of other people I knew went on to be working actors; there was John, the boy I remember liking best in grade school, something of a class clown then, who later played Pharaoh in a high school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and who I hear has gone on to Broadway, and there’s Bill, with whom I’ve reconnected on Facebook (where Christine made it her business to reconnect as many of us as she could), and who posts statuses there about the plays he’s in.

The abortion: My Alexandria co-blogger, Wired Sisters, has said that a large fraction of her high school class got pregnant in high school. I knew of no babies, exactly zero, born to girls in my graduating class. There was one girl a grade or so before me, whom I remember as riding the same school bus as Vanessa and me, another Millwood kid, of whom I heard rumors. She vanished from school at one point, and at first I assumed she’d moved (since she had picked on me when I was young, she was the last girl I’d miss). But later I heard stories from my friends that she’d actually gotten pregnant, and, because she was Catholic, it was said, she had gone off somewhere to have the baby. I heard a similar story about another girl at Fox Lane. Other than that, no teenager anywhere in my vicinity seemed to have ever gotten pregnant (though one of my friends had a pregnancy scare).

Looking back, I’ve always figured that meant that at least some of my classmates must have gotten abortions. It stands to reason. The statistics I’d heard, when I was in high school, had about half of my generation still virginal at graduation. I was in that half. Number one, my mother had told me she didn’t want me having sex in high school (and gave me what I considered good reasons), and number two, I was way too shy to have the opportunity. In fact, when we all reconnected on Facebook, my former classmates voted me “Most Shy” (evidently my shyness was my most memorable trait). I even suspect that more than half of my friends may have remained virgins till graduation, since my friends tended to be in the nerd set. But some of the people I knew at Greeley were, after all, having sex, and it was hardly likely that everyone’s birth control always worked. So it doesn’t surprise me that Vanessa got an abortion. There must have been others.

Madeleine Davis at Jezebel describes Vanessa as “an unapologetic badass” for the way she talks about her abortion when promoting her book. In the book, well, she talks about a mix of feelings at the time – fear, sadness, guilt as a Catholic girl doing this – but does affirm her right to choose not to become a mother when only sixteen; she has always been, and remains, pro-choice. So, nuanced but ultimately unapologetic.

The pictures: I was, of course, on the West Coast by the time the pictures came out. I remember being angry with the pageant on Vanessa’s behalf (Millwood people should stick together – and it really was unfair to dump her six weeks from the end of her reign over that), and I did hear news of the little hometown demonstration of support for her (but not about the “Vanessa is a lesbian” graffiti by the local grocery store). But what I can speak to is the part where she says:

People will say, “You’re an intelligent woman; how could you think nude pictures wouldn’t come out if you became famous? Especially if you became Miss America?”

Well, guess what? I never imagined I’d be any type of beauty queen, that’s for sure – let alone Miss America!

I don’t know, having grown up white, what it was like to be Vanessa back in the 60s and 70s, and not dream that you’re ever be any type of beauty queen because all the beauty queen images you saw were white (which is what the rest of that chapter is about). But I do know that of course no one expected Vanessa to be famous, because none of us, in Millwood, expected any Millwood kid to grow up to be famous. Why would we? When we reconnected on Facebook, someone from the local summer acting group that some of the teenagers were in posted a photo, and there was Vanessa, off in the back row. Consider her talented enough to make it to Broadway in some role? Sure. See her as a future star? If anyone had that premonition, we’d have saved better photos of her. And, neither expecting to be famous, nor having the kind of Internet we have now, where even ordinary people can have their careers ruined by racy photos, who would expect nude photos of yourself to be nationally famous years later? You might think, as Vanessa says she did at the time, before ignoring the caution, of what your mother would think, but not about what would be on the evening news.

And of course the photos do last indefinitely, even after she’s long since shown her detractors by proving to be the most talented former Miss America ever, someone who’d have made it as an actress beauty queen or no, scandal or no. A couple of years ago, during lunch break at work, I thought to do an image search on Vanessa Williams on Google, to see if there were any new photos of her latest project. Oops! This is one celebrity whose Google image search results will never quite be worksafe.

But I can remember, when I was about the age Vanessa was when those photos were taken, the guy who stopped me on White Plaza at Stanford, and assured me that I could be a model. And the warning bell that made me blow him off was not any worry about what kind of photos he’d take, or where they’d turn up, but the fact that he wanted me to get in a car alone with him (my thought was, if you have a real modeling job, it should come with a business card that leads to an office with people other than you also in it). And I can remember, at around the same age, going to the Gay Freedom Day parade in San Francisco with friends, and considering, for a few minutes, whether I should go to the “Take Your Photo in Bondage” booth. Wouldn’t it be fun to do that and post it on the Synergy kitchen wall, I think I said to one of my friends, and someone may have suggested I go for it, but in the end I didn’t. But it didn’t seem, at the time, a big deal.

Nude photos? I had friends who posed nude for art classes. I’d auditioned for Equus, where I might have gotten a part that would have required me to appear nude. I was free; nudity could be artistic. I’m pretty sure, if I’d been in Vanessa’s shoes, that I wouldn’t have done the Gregg photos (I’d have bailed when I found out the modeling wasn’t at an actual office), but the Tom photos? For the boss for whom she’d been doing normal modeling work for a while, and getting paid to apply make up to other models, and whom she considered a friend, and who assured her the photos would be artistic? Yes, I might have done that at nineteen. And if I didn’t, I’m sure other people I knew, and not just Vanessa, would have. And those were the photos that came out in Penthouse and got her booted as Miss America.

I just don’t think it was something an ordinary college student, who never expected to be famous, would have seen as career ruining. You’d think about your parents faces, and either heed whatever warnings they’d given you or rebel, but you’d never imagine that your photos would be news to the larger world.

As for the rest of the book, where she comes back from those photos and launches her career, well, at that point she moved beyond my sphere, and I have nothing to add. Except, go Vanessa! You showed them.

It was also an occasion for the various cousins to see how I was faring with chemotherapy. This, though, always happened in a knot of people other than the one including Aunt Pat and Aunt Muriel; in my family, once you get to be around a hundred, people stop telling you bad news, so neither Aunt Pat nor Aunt Muriel has been informed of my cancer. For this reason, I made sure to get my hair cut before the party, the better to fit my dwindling hair under my new wig. Aunt Muriel, who has macular degeneration and can barely see, noticed no change, but Aunt Pat’s eyes were still keen enough to see that I somehow looked different, and she first questioned Dick (who replied “she looks the same to me”) and then me (I told her “it’s my hair color,” which is true – the wig is a slightly reddish brown that’s not quite my normal brown, though I did have a touch of red highlights when I was younger).

For a present, I had brought three chapters of the novel in progress, and Joel used his smart phone to play her a birthday song on Youtube. There were balloons, which we gave after the party to one of the youngest cousins. After the usual meal selection from the retirement home, we had cake and ice cream. Here is a picture of Aunt Pat blowing out her candles.

Diane Randall blogs about the gathering of 1000 Quakers speaking 42 languages, the diversity of worship, and how Friends live their faith in action.

Benjamin Lloyd writes about his experience at the conference in Kenya.

From Margaret Fraser’s blog about the conference: Esther Mombo starts us off.

An Ekklesia article about the conference.

The official World Conference of Friends 2012 web site, with pictures, videos, and a study guide.

Other links, unrelated tot he FWCC conference:

The Pangea Blog has a series of posts onChristian reexamination of the doctrine of hell.

Via my sister, A Surprising Risk for Toddlers on Playground Slides (trying to protect your child by sliding down with the child in your lap may make your child less safe).

Bint Alshamsa begs you not to vote for Romney.

Paleoconservative blogger Daniel Larison thinks that We Can Know Something About What Romney’s Foreign Policy Will Look Like

Rod Dreher on Marx at the Ballpark

Eve Tushnet reviews a book by Mary Eberstadt on the sexual revolution. They are, naturally, on the same side: Catholics who defend Church teaching on sexuality (unlike the large number of US Catholics who reject said teaching). The review, though, is a mix of praise and critique:

The biggest flaws in Eberstadt’s book are a lack of focus and a total absence of economic realities. I’m no Marxist, but economic pressures do affect our culture of unmarriage, and our sexual dysfunctions widen the class divide; neither of these causal arrows gets discussed in Adam and Eve. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” Everybody, apparently.

That said, the book makes a few strong contributions. Eberstadt spends a lot of time discussing the damage done by pornography….

(The part of this that interests me particularly is the bit about the intersection between economic pressures and marriage.)

Audacia Ray, who would not agree in the least with Eve Tushnet or Mary Eberstadt about pornography, also has a critique of her own side of the debate: Why the Sex Positive Movement is Bad for Sex Workers’ Rights. Given my last link, I want to be clear here that Audacia Ray still winds up sex positive, and pro-legalization; she just wants to nuance her earlier position:

But for sex positivity to be a useful framework, one that encourages the pursuit of social justice, it must also engage with the ugly pieces of sexuality, and not in a simplistically reactive way.

Four Myths About Black Marriage

Malaria Resurgence Directly Linked to Funding Cuts

Ghana Confronts Challenges of Biometric Voter Registration