I typed this whole post in last night. But it was after midnight, and I accidentally lost the whole thing.
Those of us who started blogging more than five years ago still remember those blog-golden days, when we not only posted every day — as bloggrandaddy Dave Weinberger suggested — writing ourselves into existence; we also read each other’s blogs and left voluminous and numerous comments, fueling continuous debates about everything from gender bias to blogging ethics.
Last night I grew nostalgic for those blogolden days, for the community I no longer seem to have, for the lack of any comments/discussions in my posts, for the necessity to blog late at night when I don’t have to worry about taking care of my soon-to-be 91 years old mom. (Her birthday is in a couple of weeks.)
This recent post at BlogSisters only made my nostalgia worse, reminding me of what’s been lost as we early birds aged — or should I say “evolved” — as bloggers.
I check the BlogSister’s roster to see who’s really still blogging from the bunch. Rox Populi seems to be the most recent one who’s opted out of a personal blog for other venues. Zeeahtronic and Esta Jarrett seem to be MIA.
My biggest sadness rests in the fact that I don’t get comments anymore. That means this site is no longer a conversation; it’s just an ego trip. And that’s not enough reason to keep it going, especially if I’m just writing about things that only interest me.
So, I sit here wondering if it’s time to move on, move out. Maybe I just don’t have much to say anymore, my life being so confined.
Of course, I could write about that ordinary man I saw crossing the street in front of my car carrying a witch’s broom. He had just walked out of the “Awareness Shop: Esoteric Consultation” place in front of which I had to stop to let him cross. An ordinary man — slightly balding, dressed in jeans and a windbreaker — carrying a witch’s broom. I wondered if he might have bought it as a surprise for a friend who wanted one. Or maybe he was planning to do a ritual cleansing of his own. Or maybe it was a symbolic gift for someone — a metaphorical message that meant “get on your broom and ride out of my life.”
I guess I could have written about that.

…Ivins’ use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.


“She was just like a force of nature,” Sargent said. “She was just always on and sharp and witty and funny and was one of a kind.”

Molly Ivins is gone.
She liked to walk around barefoot when she worked at the NY Times.
She was the first one to call Dubya “Shrub.”
I wish I had even a fraction of her talent and her courage.

The above from Harper’s Weekly. Also, the below:

And this from The Week.

I wonder if Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson would like to emigrate to America, become a citizen, and run for president here. (Heh. We know she’d never get elected!)

It’s no surprise that while visiting in Massachusetts, I went to the shopping mall with my daughter and grandson. He had taken some money out of his piggy bank to buy himself a toy. And, of course, I had planned to subsidize some additional treat.
As we three strolled down the main mallway, we were accosted by a jovial gentleman with a microphone followed by a quiet guy with a news station videocamera. At first, I wasn’t going to stop and be interviewed, but when my daughter heard that the interviewer was looking for a family of three generations, she opted to talk to him. And so I agreed to join in.
“You’ve heard of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, haven’t you,” he asked and then proceeded to explain that he was interviewing people about how much they buy into that concept. And he was wondering how that changed over the generations.
I went first, explaining that, because my parents had been upwardly mobile and my mother very conscious of what she had in comparison to others, I rebelled against the stress of that lifestyle, opting to go into education — which really doesn’t pay that well. I think I said that I started out as a teacher because I wanted to contribute something to the world. While there was some truth to everything that cam e out of my mouth in that spur-of-the-moment monologue, the rest of the truths are even more relevent. But I never got a chance to get into all of that. So, instead, I sounded like a poster mom for “family values.” If you read this blog, you know that I’m a far cry from that.
My daughter’s brief statements also reflected only part of her truths. She said that she left the workforce to stay home and raise her son; that it was hard living on one income, but she felt it was worth it. All of that is true.
What neither of has had a chance to say, however, was that we were never interested in “keeping up with the Joneses” because we began our adult lives being more interested in following our dreams than making a lot of money — her dream being acting and mine being writing. Ultimately, as it turned out, we chose lives that center around the people we love. I guess we are just not competitive enough to have gotten sucked into that “keeping up” rat race.
Relative to all of that, I recently read an article in The Week stating:

A growing number of new mothers are quitting their jobs to devote their full-time attention to their children. Is the traditional family making a comeback?

The article also includes these statements:

A growing number of companies are offering to let moms telecommute or work flexible hours to avoid losing them altogether. If employers had done this earlier, they might have avoided their current jam, says Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings. Most mothers would prefer to keep working, she said, but are “pushed out by workplace inflexibility, the lack of supports, and a workplace bias against mothers.” In a recent survey, 86 percent of women said obstacles such as inflexible hours were key reasons behind their decisions to leave.

and

“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing,” said Yale historian Cynthia Russett. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”

As a single mother, I had no choice but to work. My daughter has a choice, and I have a feeling that her experiences growing up under my roof contributed a great deal to her making the one she has. And I think she made the right one.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Massachusetts for GRANDSON.
The American Idol of the next generatilon.

There is something cathartically liberating about having a few drinks with friends and dancing into the wee hours to energizing, rhythmic music.
There is something uplifting about being a part of a group celebration, a joyful ritual.
From here, about a new book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy:

Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich believes she has identified a gaping hole in the lives of most contemporary Westerners. The human instinct for communal celebration, she says, is as deeply seeded as our sex drive, but modern civilization has bullied our Dionysian impulses to the sidelines. Yes, she admits, pop concerts and big-league sporting events still offer modern Americans the occasional opportunity to paint their faces and scream themselves hoarse. But, back before recorded history, communities frequently convened to dance and carry on for days at a time.

A major theme of her argument is that religious and political authorities have always been threatened when commoners gather for free-form revels, said Mark Coleman in the Los Angeles Times. Her history of “collective joy” is thus also a history of escalating suppression.

Yup. Not much going on to stimulate feelings of joy these days.
While on the subject of books, Tamara at Mining Nuggets takes a look at Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts of Being a Woman, quoting several of Ephron’s lines wondering about giving up the little things that bring us joy (eating “bad” carbs, especially really good crusty bread; spending money on things that make you feel good, etc.) when life is much too short anyway.
Ephron’s book reminds me of Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses, which I read ages ago with great attention and appreciation.
Nope. Not enough joy. And that’s why I pig out on PiMs cookies — the best of carbs and the worst of carbs.

I looked out the door this morning to see my car totally covered in ice and surrounded by driveway as slick as a skating rink.
I was in Albany, having stayed overnight with one of my women friends. My five long-time friends and I had gotten together on Saturday and expected to head out for brunch today. Uh. Uh.
Years ago, I broke my ankle badly slipping on a patch of black ice. Needless to say, we missed brunch.
Instead, after I eventually and carefully slid out and started the car while my hostess chipped away the layer on my windows, I hit the yarn sales. I’d been thinking that I’d better start using a lighter weight yarn for my projects, since we don’t seem to be needing heavy sweaters much around here these days. (Knitting is the one thing I can easily do while sitting for hours in front of the television with my mother. She is scared to be alone.)
I listened to NPR on the foggy, rainy drive back down the Thruway. (Driving outside the interference of the mountains is the only time I can get NPR on the radio.)
Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion were on, and he did a great bit about Nancy Pelosi bringing a blindfolded Dumbya to a defunct but well-equipped “men’s club” In San Francisco, where he was told he was being kept safe in a bunker, and from where he could continue to plan out his Iraq strategy. He minions were also brought there, all being wined and dined and treated royally while they were kept out of Pelosi’s way. Of course, Keillor and company delivered it all brilliantly, cleverly, and irreverently.
Keillor also published a wonderfully irreverent article in the Baltimore Sun entitled “Time for the Father to Chat With the Son, “ which includes the following:

Meanwhile, in Washington, memoranda are set out on long, polished tables, men in crisp white shirts sit at meetings and discuss how to rationalize a war that was conceived by a handful of men in arrogant ignorance and that has descended over the past four years into sheer madness.

Military men know there is no military solution here, and the State Department knows that the policy was driven by domestic politics, but who is going to tell the Current Occupant? He is still talking about victory, or undefeat. The word “surge” keeps cropping up, as if we were fighting the war with electricity and not human beings.

Rational analysis is not the way to approach this administration. Bob Woodward found that out. The President Bush who burst into sobs after winning re-election when his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., said, “You’ve given your dad a great gift,” is so far from the President Bush of the photo-ops as to invite closer inspection, and for that you don’t want David Broder, you need a good novelist.

Here we have a slacker son of a powerful patrician father who resolves unconscious Oedipal issues through inappropriate acting-out in foreign countries. Hello? All the king’s task forces can gather together the shards of the policy, number them, arrange them, but it never made sense when it was whole and so it makes even less sense now.

American boys in armored jackets and night scopes patrolling the streets of Baghdad are not going to pacify this country, any more than they will convert it to Methodism. They are there to die so that a man in the White House doesn’t have to admit that he, George W. Bush, the decider, the one in the cowboy boots, made grievous mistakes. He approved a series of steps that he himself had not the experience or acumen or simple curiosity to question and that had been dumbed down for his benefit, and then he doggedly stuck by them until his approval ratings sank into the swamp.

He was the Great Denier of 2006, waving the flag, questioning the patriotism of anyone who dared oppose him, until he took a thumpin’ and now, we are told, he is re-examining the whole matter. Except he’s not. To admit that he did wrong is to admit that he is not the man his daddy is, the one who fought in a war.

Hey, we’ve all had issues with our dads. But do we need this many people to die so that one dude can look like a leader?

Keillor also wrote a letter to the Editor of the Sun last week about banning smoking in Baltimore. He cited the following stats, which only go to support what I was ranting about here. He said:

One wonders if our legislators are aware that secondhand smoke is the third-leading cause of preventable deaths in Maryland, claiming the lives of 1,000 people every year.

Or that the economic costs of exposure to secondhand smoke in Maryland are nearly $600 million per year.

If leaders are serious about improving health and saving lives in Maryland, they will make limiting exposure to secondhand smoke a priority.

Moreover, while statewide legislation is the goal, smoke-free initiatives present a great opportunity for local officials to show leadership even if state officials will not.

Baltimore loses more than 150 people to secondhand smoke every year.

Well, my car defrosted rather nicely on the not-so-nice drive home through the rain as the sheets of ice flew off its top and sides. Ooops.

I confess that I didn’t listen to Dumbya speech yesterday. It’s always so very hard to find those few fragments of wheat among all that chaff. It’s so much less aggravating to wait until FactCheck comes out with its assessment. Which they just did.
This is their summary, but you should hop over and read the whole thing:

President Bush’s sobering address to the nation laid out his plan to rescue Iraq by sending in more troops at a time when polls show the American people want just the opposite. Is his approach a significant change of course? Will it work? We leave that to others to chew over. What we can say is that he was right on the facts he cited, although there were some notable omissions. While he highlighted the planned distribution of oil revenues to the Iraqi people and a new commitment of reconstruction funds by the Iraqi government, he didn’t say a word about how the U.S. or Iraq would deal with rampant corruption that threatens to undermine both.

I think it’s worth repeating here FactCheck’s take on the “corruption” angle:

After you live in a place for while, you wind up driving around the territory by rote. Your subconscious remembers certain place markers so that otherwise generic stretches of country road remain familiar. You know that you are on the road home because you have passed a certain stand of birch or split rail farm fence or huge ancient maple tree centered in an acre of weeds.
There is a downhill stretch of country road I drive on the way back from town. I know where I am because the high craggy side of the mountain rises suddenly in my vision. It marks my place on the road home.
Several days ago, as I started down that hill, I suddenly felt lost. The road seemed unfamiliar. It took me a few seconds to realize that the mountain was not there. Instead, the gray sky edged my view from horizon to horizon.
I was aware of parts of my brain darting about trying to decide if this were some other downhill stretch and I had lost track of where I was driving.
No mountain. No crags. Not even hint of evergreen or speck of granite. Just miles of gray sky. The thought came to me that, in another time, I might think that dark forces had magically removed the mountain; that I would need to do some sort of ritual to bring it back.
As I drove closer to where the mountain should be and made the turn into the road that follows the mountain’s base, I still couldn’t see it. It was gone from sight. Like magic.
As I drove up the driveway, I turned to look again from another perspective. Nope. Nothing. Just impenetrable gray sky.
The next day the sun came out and the mountain was back.
See, my ritual worked.