I recently discovered Advertising for Love, a blog that’s been posting personal ads from the 19th century. Some of it’s just fun, but I was struck by this post showing some women in desperate straits. It shows why women in 19th century New York would marry: for financial support. An unmarried woman in the city without a family had nothing.

I’ve been reading Beyond Heaving Bosoms, the Smart Bitches guide to romance novels, and in the chapter on heroines, they discuss a problem with historical heroines: in romances written today about bygone eras, women are usually empowered to a point, and they always marry for love, which is nice and all but undermines the basic fact that women in the 19th century married because they had to in order to survive in many cases. Plenty of women did marry for money. These women didn’t have other options. The advertisements highlight that.

Speaking of romance novels, I think this ad sounds like the potential beginning of one. Two people spend almost a week together, then the woman doesn’t show up for their second scheduled rendezvous. What happened? Did she move on to greener pastures? Was she already married? Was she actually a prostitute? Was she struck ill or killed in a carriage accident? The possibilities are endless, no?

I’m not usually one to get maudlin at celebrity deaths, but somehow I still managed to spend 3 hours last night watching Michael Jackson retrospectives on TV.

Songs have a way of imprinting themselves on your memory, or being associated with specific memories. Billy Joel’s “Time to Remember” was my prom song and so is indelibly linked to a ballroom at the Sheraton Crossroads, for example. This is the case with a lot of Michael Jackson’s catalog, me being a child of the 80s and 90s.

I was a toddler when Thriller came out, so that’s one of those things I came to appreciate more as an older person, although those songs were all classics by the time I was old enough to have taste in music. Bad is more familiar, although maybe because the kids at one of our babysitters’ houses would watch MTV in the afternoons, and we loved Weird Al, so I knew all the words to “Fat.” “Man in the Mirror” was a favorite slow jam for a while at the roller rink where all my friends had their birthday parties. Before Michael Jackson was weird, he was completely awesome. It’s easy to look back now and judge his affectations, like his penchant for wearing sparkly quasi-military jackets or just one glove, and say, “Oh, he was always weird,” but, no, we all thought he was the coolest in 1989.

Even later, everything he released got a lot of attention. I was in high school when HIStory came out. “Scream” was the most expensive music video ever made and was duly hyped, and my friends and I were mildly obsessed with it. We were probably bigger Janet than Michael fans at that point (remember how good the Janet. album was?) but that space-agey video was pretty wild. I remember us all going to the mall—because that’s what you did if you were a teenager in New Jersey—to buy the cassette single of the song.

I’ve never been much able to stomach Michael Jackson gossip and fall from grace. I think it’s amazing that his music transcends all that, that we as a culture have separated Michael Jackson music from Michael Jackson the man. No doubt he leaves behind an impressive legacy. So far, most of the tributes I’ve seen have been overwhelmingly positive, which I think is how it should be in the immediate wake of his death. So let’s uh, “Remember the Time” for now.

Do you have any Michael Jackson song memories?

I heard someone say the other day that, when we elected Obama, a Democrat, we did it because we wanted to be governed by Democrats. Some of us wanted a government made up of appointees who were all for women’s rights (including the right to choose), marriage equality, universal health care, the end to torture, and the whole shebang. So why does Obama keep adhering to some misguided sense of bipartisanship. Bipartisanship? That’s not what we want. All those lovely things you promised in the campaign? Progressive leadership, change, that’s what we want.