Here are some of the headlines Netscape's boasting right now:
Seized Ship's Explosive Cargo Equal to 'A-bomb'
10 Secrets Restaurants Don't Want You to Know
How to Find Time to Exercise
U.S.: Recent Attack May Have Hit Saddam, Sons
Woman Delivers Conjoined Twin Girls - and a Boy
Comedian Adam Sandler Ties the Knot [and from the looks of the little dinky photo, she's human!]

I found myself turning to their idiotic daily Poll with outright *relief*: Which artist wears the most outrageous hairstyles? Their poll always irritates me. They *never* include the answer: None of these, you moron. But today, anyway, I was relieved to contemplate the tresses of Kelly Osbourne, Pink, Christina Aguilera, Cyndi Lauper, and Bjork. You know I don't really care, but at least while I'm thinking about that, I don't have to think about...those other creeps.

Last Friday while I was waiting for Josh to pick me up after work, three women passed by on the sidewalk. They're regulars. I often see them at that time and place.

They're all what you would call "huge" women, no doubt clinically obese. Their attire is modest and middle-class, casual, not "office." slacks and blouses, jeans and tee shirts. One is blonde, another has short hair about my color before I started coloring it -- mouse-brown. I don't recall the third's coloring. I'll observe more carfeully next time I see them.

I'm a product of my society (as though that were an excuse) -- until Friday their chief -- their only attribute in my mind was their size.

But Friday one of them had a little jar of soap and a bubble ring, and was blowing bubbles as they walked along chatting and laughing. The light breeze was at their backs, so the bubbles streamed forward a little with the force of her breath, then swung to the street side as they matched the wind. I couldn't help but smile -- that's what bubbles are for, they make you smile.

And then, a full 30 seconds after the women had passed out of my view, the air between the buildings on either side of the street was filled with bubbles! The ones she'd gifted on the previous block were just going by my point of view from inside my building's foyer.

They glimmered in the sun, danced and curlicued in the micro-breeze eddies, and then they, too, were out of my range of sight.

I sat transfixed by the little magic, and then I recalled that these ladies are always smiling when I see them, always engaged in lively conversation.

How our prejudices blind us to the vibrant truth.

In grad school I was a Teaching Assistant, which meant that I supervised the Biology 102 lab a couple hours a week, and that I led a Discussion Group (DG) 3 days a week. The PhD profs would give the students their lectures 2 or 3 days a week, the students then had a lab and a DG on the topic.

I worked very hard preparing my DG materials. I'd go over the topic's more difficult concepts, then we'd do Q & A. I tested them at regular intervals and kept a grade book on their scores.

Most of the students then were the "normal" 19-to-21-year-olds. The course was for non-majors. So I'd look out on this roomful of bored or sleeping students and know that this was all the biology they'd probably ever get. I felt a great obligation to teach them as much as I could. Most of them seemed to feel a great obligation to resist learning.

One semester I had a 50-something "displaced homemaker" in one of my groups. I felt immediate empathy for her. The first day of class she arrived in a bright-colored double-knit pantsuit, nylons and low pumps, and her gray hair was coifed and sprayed into spun-sugar rigidity. She was nervous and timid, and she blanched at some of the students' language--but she was my best student.

I had been where she was, a brand-new college student older than "the norm." I knew intimately her fear of appearing stupid, her doubts about her ability to succeed in college, and the middle-aged semi-fear of "these young people," even though I'd only been 25 when I started college.

I'd also taken the friend of a friend, literally by her shaking hand, and walked her into the Admission Officer's office (he happened to be a neighbor of mine, but by then, my junior year, I wasn't afraid of Admin anyway), and sat with her while she asked him how to apply, whether there were grants, loans, or scholarships she could try for, and whether he thought she could make it through college. (Does an Admissions officer ever say No to that question?) She was a home-salon hairdresser, a single mom, and she wanted more, for herself and for her kids. Her voice vibrated with fear, and though it steadied during the conversation, she never lost her fear, and she still hadn't applied for college when I graduated and left that town.

Years later I saw the movie "Educating Rita." The single shot that still sears my memory is when Rita went to that ivy-covered Administration Building to apply for admission. She stood at the bottom of those stone steps, took a deep breath, patted her lacquered spun-sugar hair (she was a hairdresser too, a lower-class Briton with a savagely chauvinistic husband, and parents who simply couldn't understand her yearning for education), and started up the steps. The lines of her body were tense and crooked with the weight of her entire life pressing down on her--everyone she knew telling her in words, action and attitude that "her sort" didn't go to college.

They shot the climb, brilliantly, from behind Rita, and it was Julie Walters' genius that her whole body, her whole being, told you what a heart-breaking act of courage she was performing. I cried at that scene, for joy and pride in Rita's bravery.

Anyway, my 50-something student's semester resembled Rita's remarkable journey. The first sign was when she started actually discussing biology in our discussion group. Sometimes she even disagreed out loud with the other students.

Then she showed up one morning with a new 'do: short, combed, and left to riffle freely in the air.

By the end of the semester, she was wearing jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers to class.

The strain had relaxed out of her face, and she laughed and teased along with the other students. Of course she got an A, that was never a question. And this former "displaced homemaker" had stepped whole-heartedly into the stream of life.

I felt honored to have witnessed the metamorphosis.

Terry B. deMille

I had a lot of little cowboy and Indian and horse toys when I was a pre-teen. Each one was different. There were some cowboys and Indians that were permanently bow-legged so you could snap them onto a horse. They'd stand on their own but they stood with their legs spraddled in a wide inverted U. I didn't care, I played with them as though they were normal.

I also ignored scale. I had a plastic Palomino about 10" tall at the ears. He was at least 25 times the size of the other toys, but he was part of the cast anyway. He stood stolidly on all four hooves, legs straight, looking straight ahead. To make him trot, I'd pogo him up and down in short hops. For a gallop I'd rock him, back hooves to front, back to front, along the floor or sofa or coffee table.

The furniture -- mostly in the living room -- was my cliffs and mountains surrounding the canyon of the floor. Little Indians hid behind the tops of the sofa cushions, lying in wait for the unsuspecting settlers (or bandits, or cattlemen) to come trundling into the canyon.

The good guy was a spraddle-legged cowboy with his right arm extended forward holding a six-shooter, and he always rode the white trotting pony. There was another identical pony, except he was brown, and the Indian chief always rode him. I don't think I did a lot of battle scenes -- often the cowboys and Indians were all mixed up together in the good guys' and bad guys' camps. I spent many hours Saturday mornings playing with this assortment.

When I got a small package of Army green G.I.'s, they were just folded into the mix. Sometimes I played G.I.'s and Japs (I was born 5 years after the end of WWII), and then the Western figures got assigned new roles.

Then I got a Barbie doll (TM) and she fit pretty well on the Palomino -- I ignored that her legs stuck straight out in front of her as she perched on the saddle.

Many hours. I wish I could remember some of my scenarios, but they just "passed through" me, as Goldberg says, just flowed through my child's imagination and were forgotten, like water in a stream.

I wonder where all those toys are now. Probably in a landfill. Or maybe -- and I hope this -- they got sent to Goodwill and other children got to play with them. I like that idea. By now they might be in some 1960's buff's collection. That'd be great -- they'd be ready for retirement by now.

But I bet they'd like to be on display together, maybe in a basement rec room, watching their owner's busy life. Maybe someday a grandchild will come along and say, "Grandpa, can I play with those?"

I hope he says Yes.

As a writing exercise, I want to write about some time in my life when I felt most out of place. When I started writing that sentence I thought I'd not be able to think of one, but before the sentence was done a memory popped up.

It was a birthday party given by the parents of one of my junior high classmates, I'll label her D.F. She was beautiful in a Sophia Loren-ish way (if you like that sort of thing), and her parents were rich. They hosted all of us in D's homeroom class, plus some of her friends not in our homeroom. Maybe fifty 13-year-old kids.

I don't remember exactly where it was. It may have been in the Peony Park ballroom (I don't think so), or the Blackstone Hotel (maybe), or the downtown Brandeis if it had a banquet room. Wherever it was, it was lush.

The tables bore china, crystal, and more silverware than I'd ever seen in my life. I had no idea what to do with all that silverware. I don't remember who sat on either side of me but I don't think they were friends of mine (that would have been K.R., who was doing fine on the other side of the room).

So I felt very graceless and crude from Minute One. My hair stuck out funny, my clothes didn't feel right. Most of the other girls were stylish and expensive dressers. They all knew how to put on makeup--many of them already wore bras! They never emitting raucous barks of laughter, or bit their nails. They knew what to do with that extra silverware.

We were served sandwiches cut into four triangles and held together with toothpicks topped by colorful cellophane curlicues: red, blue, green, yellow. The bread was stuffed with about 20 layers of meats, cheeses, lettuce and condiments, so the triangles stood up about 5 inches high. I had a terrible time eating those adroitly -- in fact, I didn't. I managed one triangle, and the second deconstructed itself all over my plate and the surrounding (snow-white, of course) linen tablecloth. I left the rest untouched and yearned for dessert.

I vaguely remember sparklers, and a fabulous cake, so we must have had cake. I also remember a uniformed waitress bringing around a silver tray with a collection of chocolates, each one its own little marvel of sculpture. I wanted to take several, some to eat at home, but I at least knew better than that. I took ONE.

The afternoon dragged on, with everyone but me seeming to have a good time (there were, God help us, games). I was so miserable and self-conscious that I wanted to die. Probably others felt similarly, but I was too self-absorbed to notice. That was probably a good thing. I'm sure all I would have been able to do for small talk was make snide comments about the fanciness and how much this all was costing.

At long last, it was over. The Daddies rolled their cars up to the door and mine appeared and I threw myself into the passenger seat and he drove his little social butterfly home, hallelujah. I changed immediately into play clothes and shot outdoors looking for my fort-building, apple-grenade-throwing best buddy. It had rained that morning. There were gutter dams to build, mud to grind into our jeans.

I've learned a lot since then, most importantly what to do with all that extra silverware.

You bundle it up and jam it head-down into that extra crystal water glass.

(OK, OK, my public is clamoring for continuation of this blog. Well, it's a quiet, refined clamor. Well all right dammit, it was just one person. So I'm easy. Sue me.)

Reading the Obits

I've started doing something I never thought I'd do: reading the obituaries. It started after my father-in-law died last fall. Soon after, I saw that the father of a grade-school friend had died; I went to the Visitation that night and saw CT and her sister, whom I worked with in the late 1980's, and got another bonus: the sister had also worked with a guy who was in grad school with me, and he was there, too. I hadn't seen him in *years*.

Then a couple of months later, I saw that the mother of one of my best friends in high school had passed away. I'd lost track of KE and no amount of googling had unearthed her. Now at this sad occasion I would be out of town and couldn't even attend the Visitation. I called the funeral home and gave them my phone number to pass on to my friend. (It was a long obit; KE has twelve brothers and sisters! Unusual in the Protestant denomination we'd belonged to.) The next weekend KE called me from her home on the East Coast. We caught up on all the happenings in our lives over the past 25 years, and now we email each other a couple of times a month. She hasn't changed a bit; just the sight of her name in my emailbox brings a smile to my face.

A two-minute nightly scan of the Deaths page over a couple of months, and two heart-warming re-contacts. The behavioral scientists call this "intermittent rewarding," and it's one of the most powerful conditioning tools known. (It's especially effective in fostering and maintaining gambling addiction.)

So now I read the obits almost daily. I look at the last names first to see if any ring a bell. I think I've seen the parents of a couple of grade-school-mates but we weren't close enough for me to try to contact them.

Then I look at ages. I'm amazed at how many people die in their 40's and 50's! And I have that sneaking feeling that oldsters before me have admitted to: "I'm older than that! I beat her!"

Aha. So it's the Grim Reaper I'm playing hide & seek with here. That's probably why I finally started sorting through the old photos, and reading my old journals, too: totting up, as the Beatles said. I'm at that time in my life when I'm looking back, seeing what I've been through, what I've accomplished, and where I've failed. What's changed about me and what hasn't.

While I'm resolutely forward-looking (nine inch nails vs. the Beatles; Bright Eyes vs. John Denver), this process is necessary, I think, to keep me grounded--or maybe it's to give me a firm springboard for whatever the next step is.

I feel like I have gained some wisdom and that's a direct product of all my fuck-ups. Reading my journals, I realize that there are some areas about me that are still the same, and shouldn't be. In other aspects I've made huge strides--sometimes because of a lot of work, blood, sweat and tears; other times I have no idea how I got from There to Here. There are regrettable gaps in my journals, and even more numerous and gaping ones in my memory.

I don't feel the scorn my younger self expected to feel at the Now Me for reading the obits (which could serve as a nick-name for this whole process). I feel pretty content right-now-this-minute, and that this is right for me now.

And...I'm a little pleased that I have that compassion for myself. That above most other things is very hard-won indeed.

Unless something extraordinary happens, I won't be posting here any more. I just don't have the time or the inspiration. You may find this message for months to come, because Blogger.com doesn't give us a way to cancel our Blogspots. They just leave them hanging out here until they decide to move them to archives, and after that--they don't say how long--they dump them off their servers.

So, don't come back! All you'll see is this message! Visit my web site (it's not updated *much* more often than this blog) if you want to see what I'm up to.

Terry

I'm considering dropping this blog. I so seldom have time to enter anything, and it's only going to get worse as we get more into the wetlands growing season (now through September). I don't know that anyone's reading it anyway.

Just in case someone is, and someone *else* has dribbled coffee down their fronts at this early hour of the workday, I'll supply a Handy Hint from Terry: First, try to do this while the coffee is still damp. Go into the restroom of your choice, wad up several dry paper towels. Stuff them under your shirt, or pants leg, or wherever the coffee stains are. Take another 2 or 3 paper towels and run them under the tap, get them a little wet. Daub the coffee spots. The underlying science here is "capillary action," that tendency of water to follow very tiny tunnels--if you've ever had a nurse hold a spaghetti-thin tube to a drop of blood on your finger and watched the blood rise up the tube all on its own, you've seen capillary action. Anyway, it's also a matter of diffusion--molecules tend to move from an area of greater concentration (the wet paper towels) to an adjacent area of lower concentration (the dry paper towels) until equilibrium is reached, or until you are satisfied that the darn spot is gone and remove the diffusion system (the paper towels on both sides of the fabric). Capillary action and diffusion will (this is my theory) drag the coffee stain with the water, out of the fabric and into the underlying dry paper towels. For dry stains (like you only noticed you'd dribbled *after* the meeting with clients), you may have to use a two-step process. Put a drop of liquid soap (like, out the bathroom's hand-washing soap dispenser) on the wet paper towel and dab the soapy solution into the stain; throw away both under- and over-sets of paper towels and repeat without soap to rinse the soap (mostly) out.

Be forwarned: You'll have a big blob of water on your shirt until it dries, so don't do this unless you can hide out in your cubicle for awhile.

Boy, if I keep rewarding readers like this, soon there won't be *room* for all the hits this blog will get.

It's obviously been a long time since I posted an entry here. If anyone is coming around to read this, I'm sorry about the paucity of entries. I don't know how often I'll be able to post; if you're really interested but get tired (as don't we all?) of coming around here and finding nothing new, you could email me and I'll send you a little note when something new goes up.

Wondering what you can do to help our troops in the Mideast (and elsewhere)? Check this great web site: http://booksfor troops.com

I've got some books, a box, and an address, now I'll be getting some filler (toothpaste, gum, whatever) and my first box will go off Monday!

And if you think this contradicts the previous posting, you're not a very careful thinker.

If Flush LImberger gets his say, I by God get to sound off on my opinion about this war, too.

I'm divided. Well, not really. It'll be great getting rid of that slimy sociopathic dictator. I just wish we could do it *before* we got rid of Saddam. [ba-DUM-boom]

No, seriously, folks, I'm relieved that we're not getting the shock'n'awe that all the news heads are so disappointed not to see. It's a GIANT relief that we're not just pulverising every single object within the city limits of Baghdad. Or however you spell it (patience; I'm on post-operative meds). The fewer civilian casualities the happier I'll be. But I have this nagging feeling that the war opened *this* way instead of with shock'n'awe because the generals just said, "To hell with that; we can achieve the same end *this* way without 100s of 1,000s of dead."

Even if this war is over tomorrow, we'll still be left mopping up not only Iraq but our own newly ragged, filthy reputation amongst our traditional allies--not to mention the love & joy we'll be getting from Muslims and Arabs all over the world. Way to diplome, Dubya. Not that you care.

I think Lileks (www.lileks.com) has a great idea: attach Palestine autonomy to the autonomy of women in Saudi Arabia. Can't have one without the other. It'd be darned interesting to watch what happened after *that* one got signed, wouldn't it? [sigh] That's one of the things I can agree with Lileks about; otherwise I fear we're on different pages, though not different sides.

But I am sure getting tired of hearing that disagreeing with the Occupant of the White House makes me un-American. How ignorant is THAT? And on the other hand, it's heartening to see that several rallies have been held here in Omaha that were publicized as NOT pro- or anti-war, but PRO-OUR GUYS OVER THERE. *That's* something I can get behind, too, and it's encouraging that people from all points of view are not letting Dubya Et Al sucker them into the All-or-Nothing straw man B.S.

But it's sad because the people of this nation deserve so much better than they've got in the White House.

Blow it out yer barracks bag, Lush! [Oops, forgot--you don't have one, do you? You didn't serve in the military.]

SCAM ALERT!!

If you use Paypal, you'd better get educated about the latest email/spam/scam going around. Complete details are at the site linked below; Speculations (www.speculations.com) editor Kent Brewster details what to look for when you receive a notice like this in your email.

Anatomy of a Really Convincing PayPal Scam by Kent Brewster. Spread the word, this is *very* helpful info!

I dated a man for a year and a half during my junior and senior years in collge. (I'll call him Jake.) I loved him with all my heart. He loved, me, too. He worked all over the middle of the USA doing construction for a prefab house-building company. This is how much he loved me: On Friday nights, after 60 or 80 hours of working, instead of riding with his crew-mates all the way back to his hometown forty miles up the road from where I lived, he'd have them drop him off on the highway two miles from my house in town. He'd walk all that way lugging his week's laundry in his duffle bag, along with his lunchpail and sometimes even a small gift for me or my son. He'd arrive at our door exhausted, sweaty, grimy, but with a big grin on his face. On Monday morning, I'd drive him out to the highway with a bagful of clean clothes and a pailful of sandwiches and fruit, and drop him off for the crew to pick up for the week.

I would have married him in a heartbeat, but he was chronically insecure about money, and was saving it as fast as he could, and I was a poverty-level single parent college student. I didn't want to get married before I'd got my degree, anyway. Finally, his financial insecurity led him to leave the state, to move halfway across the country to work for a friend of his who was launching a big-deal new food-processing equipment company. This was the death knell for our relationship, because he was not a long-distance communicator, and I was insecure about love. I'd go for weeks without hearing from him, meanwhile sending him letters, tapes and cards daily. When I'd finally break down and call him, he was always amazed that it had been so long since he'd written or called me. I went through hell. The "friend" was turning out to be, as I wish I'd seen before, a lying sociopathic asshole, and was using and abusing Jake. But you couldn't tell Jake that; after a lifetime of grinding poverty and exhausting manual labor, he couldn't give up the hope that this was his ship coming in at last. Finally, when eight weeks went by and I heard nothing from him, I called him up and more or less gave him an ultimatum: a call a week, or a letter, or I'm finished. I can't stand this. When he equivocated, I told him finis.

Then I went through a year and a half of more hell, the hell of having dumped someone I truly loved. But I would not tolerate playing second fiddle to his friend/employer's nefarious tune. Jake called me once, about a year after I'd graduated from college and moved back to my hometown. Just making sure I was all right, he said. It was a short conversation.

A few years later, I met the man who is now my husband. I'd recovered from the college-years trauma. We started a life together, and I was madly in love with him. We had ups and downs, but since I'm still married to him now 18 years later, I guess we've done well, and though the colors of our love have changed, they are just as vivid now as ever. Anyway, when we'd been married about 3 - 4 years, I got a phone call from my best friend from those same college years. She knew what I went through after Jake left, and after I'd broken up with him. She was calling to say he had called her wanting to get in touch with me if I wanted to. She said "He's got MS. I could hardly understand him on the phone. He gave me his phone number to give you so it would be up to you to call or not, but if you're going to, my advice is: Do it soon."

To this day, writing those words sends a heavy heat of shock and horror through me, and my eyes fill up with tears. Then, it was even worse. Guilt, pain, horror, despair, all filled my body for days. Of course I told my husband what was going on, after the girlfriend called. He expressed sincere sympathy, and the subject was dropped. I went around in a fog, trying to hide the depth and intensity of my emotions from my husband. After all, this was a *past* lover, someone I'd recovered from before I met my husband, and my loyalty was by right and moral, owed to my husband. Besides, I didn't want to hurt his feelings by showing how devastated I was over the bad news about another man. It took me several days to decide to call Jake.

My girlfriend was right. I could hardly understand him on the phone, but with patience and caring we got through the conversation. He apologized for having left me adrift all those years before. I told him I'd long ago forgiven him for that and hoped he'd forgiven me for breaking up with him; he said he never blamed me. He'd left his "friend's" employ, having finally figured out he was getting screwed, and gone to work for the Post Office. He'd worked for them for a few years when he was diagnosed with MS, and apparently the disease progressed rapidly after that. He said his church and his P.O. co-workers had been a great support system, and his elderly mother, now widowed, had moved out there to take care of him. When we hung up, I believe it was in a spirit of mutual love and concern.

After that, my pre-occupation deepened. I have too good an imagination; hearing his voice had summoned up memories of his physical presence: his walk, his touch, his smell, his body. Knowing what MS was doing to him tortured me. But still I couldn't say anything to my husband, especially not these sensual memories. And the thought that I could have been married to Jake, and might have had to *be there now* going through it with him, tortured me more: a big part of me was hideously relieved that I didn't have to do it. Imagination was bad enough. I wrote to him about once a month, cheerful little note cards with short reports of current events in my life and expressions of warm regard. His mother would write back thanking me and saying how they cheered Jake up.

After a couple of months of this I took the whole thing to my AA meeting. It all poured out, all of it, along with about a gallon of tears. When I finished I looked up and my friends' faces were full of concern and a few were crying. One of the newer guys leaned forward and said, "Man, you must be one wonderful person. Nobody I ever dated would ever have wanted to talk to me under those circumstances." My jaw dropped; I didn't feel very wonderful, I felt like a piece of shit. One by one all my group spoke, as they always did. Even those who didn't address my situation, had something profound and moving to say. It helped. One of them said, "I think your husband would be more understanding than you think." I couldn't believe that; I feared losing him more than losing my life, and it seemed just too risky. I'd try to work through this grief myself, and not bother him with it.

A few days later we went out to eat at one of those "blue-hair cafeteria" places. Jake had been with me all day, and by the time we sat down I was near tears, but fighting them desperately. This makes me smile now, but I really thought I'd kept a pretty good poker face. But as I unwrapped my silverware, my husband leaned across the table and said, "I don't know why, when a love affair ends, we think that's the end of love."

No one has ever said anything kinder or more loving to me.

About six months later Jake's mom responded to a letter with the inevitable: Jake had died in his sleep. He rests, of course, in a treasured place in my memory.


The human heart knows no boundaries.

It occurs to me that I do some rather odd things, sometimes. I wonder if I'm the only one, or whether they're really very normal for a human being.

This first occurred to me the other night when I was reading Stephen Jay Gould's Eight Little Piggies. I got to the end of one particularly lyrical and elegantly logical essay, and mourned his death anew. There I am, a middle-aged, highly educated woman alone in bed, hugging a *book*. "Whot?!" I thought, "Whyever am I hugging this inanimate object? What possible good does it do me? Isn't this strange?" And I think I thought a few more miscellaneous things about the way a middle-aged woman's mind starts working. And I turned over and went to sleep.

Then I was cleaning out my Yahoo email box, and I found several really old, outdated messages from someone I only hear from occasionally, but whom I really really like in a cyber-pals sort of way. They were months old. "Why on earth did I keep these?" I asked myself. (Yes, I talk to myself a lot, but that's not middle-age, I've always done that.)

The contents of the messages were trivial. Then it came to me: they're mementos. I like the person very much, and kept the emails because she sent them. I also keep greeting cards, but eventually they are tossed, in my periodic fits of cleaning ruthlessness. These emails are the electronic equivalent of treasured greeting cards. But they're not cards, not even e-cards. They're really just a certain assemblage of electronic nits residing on a hard drive on the Yahoo server somewhere in cyber-land. They're not even in my *house*! But the person who caused them to be organized in that precise order, and uploaded to that server, is special to me, so I don't erase these equally-electronic nits giving me access to them through my e-mailbox, and they cause that particular pattern of light-and-dark to beam out of my computer monitor to be seen by my eyes and perceived and interpreted by my brain as a message from her. Could anything be less warm and fuzzy? Good grief! I think this is downright WEIRD.

But I bet I'm not the only one. So what's being co-opted here? Are we being trained to think like computers? Or are we appropriating the detritus of Cyberville and -- loaves-and-fishes-like -- turning them into paper letters and greeting cards in our minds? To comfort ourselves in the absence or loss of our friends and loved ones.

At least Eight Little Piggies is a *physical* object. And it's a hell of a lot cuddlier than an electron.

It occurred to me this morning that I’ve been a writer all my life. I started a journal as a young adult, and I started college intending to get a double major in biology and journalism. I took journalism classes, and in junior college I served as editor of the school paper for one semester. But it goes back much farther than that.

When I was 5 I think I wrote my first story. It was maybe four lines long, an illustrated work. It concerned a little girl getting a birthday present and discovering it was the same toy as someone else had already given her. “Oh well!” she said laughing. I think the gist was, if one is good, two is better. I showed it to my parents, who reproached me for this evidence of greed.

Later on, in grade school, I found science fiction. I read a lot of Andre Norton, Robert A. Heinlein, and a bunch of others I don’t remember. I’d spin elaborate tales in my head and start to write them down, but my small hands tired quickly of the effort, and I lacked the patience to finish them. I remember standing frustrated in the middle of my room one summer day and wishing, mentally creating, as it were, a marvelous machine into which I could speak, and it would do the hard job of writing my words down. I imagined that this machine wouldn’t be invented until far, far in the distant future that my favorite books told about, and grieved that I wouldn’t be around to see it. I said I was a writer back then, not a good prognosticator.

I had a lot of dolls and stuffed animals, and I’d cast them in my adventures and adopt different voices and many, many scary predicaments--and some happy endings. When I had playmates I’d try to do the same with them. No wonder I got chided for being bossy more than once.

In junior high, in the grip of Beatle fever, I penned a long Beatles story, and Lindsay Bloom, one of my Beatle-loving girlfriends typed it for me. It ran 40+ pages, single-spaced. Lindsay went on to the role of the secretary in Stacy Keach’s Mickey Spillane TV series, and I’ve heard she married one of the actors in The Dukes of Hazzard. I wonder what ever became of that manuscript. Probably ash-canned 30 years ago…or else Lindsay’s holding onto it until I become a world-famous author. Yeah, that’s probably it.

Wow, five days since I made an entry here. Well, it's not because I haven't thought about it. But every time, I'd slough it off with "I don't have anything to say. Why junk up the internet even more with my own useless drivel when there's plenty already?" But between that first thought of "...blog..." and "Why junk up...?" things were going on in my decision-making machinery. I knew that, I just whizzed on past it. Don't worry this isn't going to be a heavy soul-searching. [Whew! I can hear you say.]

Lately it seems like my mental space has been crowded with too much, and it's all my own doing. I've got a little party I'm hosting tomorrow [Eek! Tomorrow!] and the carpet cleaner came twice this past week, so we had all the dining room stuff stuffed into the kitchen, and hubby's been down with a miserable cold so I've been doing all the cooking and of course I had to ram my toes into the cedar plank bookshelves that were stashed *directly* in the footpath into the kitchen and I think I've got a broken toe,

gasp,

and while I was waiting for the carpet cleaner Thursday, and hubby was waiting, miserably, for his cold to lighten up, my new notebook computer arrived so *there's* a couple of hours wasted oohing and ahhing and poking and scowling at the User's manual and it snowed 8" last Saturday so every morning I've had either snow and ice, or heavy frost--latterly *mud* since it's now 50 degrees to clean off my car before heading out for work at 5 a.m.--

gasp gasp!

and I've started a family web site that various members of my family have been clamoring for for several years but no one's showing up to look at it, and I've started sorting through the bushel basket of photos going back to the 1940's (before I was born) and that has been an emotional adventure let me tell you...and I've been maintaining my momentum with the return to my writing after two long dry years of blockage, so I've been thinking a lot about writing, and about *what* I'm writing, and the morning writing exercise has dredged up some stuff I suppose I need to deal with since it pains and bugs me every time I think about it...and I'm behind with the laundry and the kitchen's a mess--

Ye gods. I'm back in the squirrel-cage ferris wheel. This has got to stop! No good can come of it.

So, you see, I really *don't* have anything to say here--that's worth saying. Except I don't need to let my mind be cluttered with such a cacophony of crap. It's high time I made time in my life daily to just Be Quiet.

Let's see, where's my PDA...yup, I've got a free quarter-hour between 2 and 2:15. A.M.

I just laughed myself sick at Jim Lilek's column "Back Fence" in the Minneapolis Tribune (URL at end of this entery; I want you to read *mine* first) about life in the basement during a Chemical Or Biological Weapons Red Alert.

I often disagree with Mr. Lileks on politics but there's no one better--funnier, truer--on home relations (that means FAMILY, silly! Didn't you notice there was no "land" grafted onto "home"?). When he's funny, I end up with my gut hurting from laughing so hard. When he's touching, I weep, and think about his words for the rest of the day. For the many days when he's neither, he's just recording what his life was like today, it's a touchstone for my day. And I love his dog, Jasper.

It takes a real knack to turn everyday life details into something interesting or funny or moving enough to read every day. I mean, I have *my* everyay life going on, too, how dumb would it be to try to "live" a *second* life if all the guy gave you was his daily To Do List?

I can write to everyday details--sometimes. Mostly my imagination fails. I drive 120 miles round trip to work every day. That's the same stretch of I-80 day in, day out. Virtually the only thing that changes (aside from the seasons) is which section of the Interstate is Department of Roads tearing up today?

OK, OK, I know; each minute each inch of that highway is different than a) the inch to either side of it, b) different than it was the minute before, and c) different than it will be in the next minute.

Fine. You go gaze regardfully at that stretch of I-80 with the perspective of a Hindu god. I have to get back to Omaha to visit my mom in the nursing home.

A visit which Lileks could probably turn into a hysterical knee-slapper and a heartstring-tugger. Too bad for you, I can't.

Oh, here's that Lileks column link.

And just for good measure, here's his personal web site. Don't MISS the Gallery of Regrettable Food! The Bleat.

I drive every morning 60 miles through the dark cold. Stars watch me from far away glowing blue-white to show their indifference--but they still watch even though they've long ago moved away from where they first trained their bright beams upon the earth.

Cold night air. Through my life I've been out in the cold dark air many times, and how could such an experience not leave its traces in me?

One late night in frigid northern Iowa in the 1970's I went out into our big front yard. We had a foot of virgin snow out there and where the cold moonlight brushed the snow crystals, millions of tiny stars answered their older mightier brethren. Is this the only answer Earth offers to the haughty gaze of those vast fireballs?

Humans have invented artificial lighting and now our planet is a sphere wrapped in a network of glow. We have embraced our lights as though by keeping the dark at bay we can vanquish that distant hauteur. But the stars continue their stately glide through space, their light speeding for millions of years to strike our ephemeral retinas as though that was the reason those particular photons began their journey long before humanity's ancestors had even developed notochords.

So I drank up the stars and the moon, and the millions of reflected beams from the snow; saw the blue waves of snowdrifts spread across our quarter-acre front yard; saw the darkness between the stars and blanketing the countryside between farmyard lights as not black but the blue so deep it's almost infinite.

I inhaled the night air and felt it freeze the moisture in my nostrils as a sharp, dry, pinch. I thought of myself out there under the mysterious universe as no less a mystery, only so small and brief, it was unimaginable.

Nothing stirred. No bird called, no cow lowed. Even the highway two miles away lay silent, respecting the weight of all those billions of years and all those rays of cold starlight.

You are nothing, the stars thought. Compared to our majestic eons you are less than a breath, a blink.

Ah, I said, but I'm looking back at you.

[This is a very long blog today, and I apologize for that. But I dedicate it to my friend Gregory Koster, and to all librarians everywhere. You're my heroes!]

When I lived in the old farmhouse outside Rutland, Iowa, I became well-acquainted with the librarians in Humboldt, the nearest town large enough to have a library. They were unfailingly patient, diligent, encouraging, good-humored and amazingly knowledgeable.

I researched Anthony Zerbe’s theatrical career there after becoming intrigued with his work on “Harry O.” I discovered the series of books called “The Year’s Best Plays.” I’d look Zerbe up in the Guide to Periodical Literature and go hunt down the references--usually those annual “best of” books, but sometimes a magazine reference. Doing this I was teaching myself library resource skills I would later use heavily in grad school. I also found every play Zerbe was in, and read those, too.

I learned that my sympathies in “Othello” were with the bad guy, Iago. This was partly because that was Zerbe’s role in the play, but mostly because it seems to me that Iago’s the only character without his head up his ass. He’s the only one smart enough to know what’s going on--well to be fair, that’s because he’s instigating most of it--and it seemed like none of the others were aware enough to even feed themselves, let alone cotton onto the outrageously transparent machinations of Iago.

It was the early 1970’s, so environmental issues were in the air. I subscribed to Jacques Cousteau’s 20-volume series on life in the oceans. I had an organic garden, and subscribed to Organic Gardener & Farmer, and applied a lot of their ideas to my own garden. I found, somehow, the book The Organic Gardener by Catherine Osgood Foster, and that *really* turned me on.

All the reading I did, and poring over the pictures, opened up more questions: What is a “cation” that Foster writes about in her description of soil as a living community? I pronounced it “casshun” until I got into chemistry class in college because I didn’t know about ions and how that was the important part of the word.

I stared for hours at the jewel-like fish schools in Cousteau’s books, and the clown fish nestled in its sea anemone protector. How do these masses of fishes know to turn the same direction all at once? How did an anemone know that this was its clown fish and not some interloper?

I read a library book titled The Abyss and thrilled to its first chapter’s description of all the poop and dead microorganisms and creatures’ body parts as a stately, constant rain of nutrients down onto the inhabitants of the sea floor in their eternal night.

One book would prompt dozens of other questions, and send me back to the library. I discovered Inter Library Loan when I’d read every book on biology that Humboldt’s library had.

And still the questions came, springing up out of the pages. I felt insecure about what I was learning, afraid there were some basic things I didn’t know. My thoughts turned to college. There, I thought, my learning would be structured by textbooks and lab experiments and by teachers who really knew it all. I could go forward knowing there were no gaps in my understanding.

My concept of college was built on Dorothy Sayers’ descriptions of Oxford in her Lord Peter Wimsey series; by my one disastrous semester at Dana College--and my rich and highly enjoyable though challenging course in French there under Dr. Sarah Penick; and by a single comment made by one of the college-age senior counselors at Circle R Bible Camp, where I worked the summer after my sophomore year as a junior counselor. “It’s really hard,” she said. “I had no idea how hard it would be.”

I began hungering for that grueling, difficult challenge. I thought all colleges were like Oxford--full of brainy students working around the clock just to keep up, and demanding, if inspiring, professors.

When I at last started at Iowa Central Community College, with a schedule of English, Algebra, Biology, and Chemistry, it was with a wind of terror and excitement at my back. I threw myself into it with all I had. I was almost disappointed when I got all A’s that first semester. How can this be? I’ve never been a straight-A student in my life! This wasn’t that hard!

Of course by the time I graduated from ICCC, my expectations of college and its denizens had altered to a realistic view. Few places were like Oxford--probably Oxford wasn’t quite like my Oxford fantasy had been. But at least I was on my way.

What led my interest, back in that isolated farmhouse, to biology, the subject I’d hated in high school?

Just being there, I guess. Observing the plants (I still remember that the very first plant I keyed out on my own was a spiderwort in the road ditch) and animals (from an abandoned quarry I collected strings of toad eggs and put them into that ditch in front of our house, and couple of weeks later when I went out to the mailbox, there were dozens of pencil-eraser-sized toadlets hopping all over the place) and nature itself (we saw magnificent, eerie aurora borealis almost every winter in that northern-Iowa location).

And I’d been raised with a love of reading. A passion for reading. The library became my lifeline, my connection to a larger world, much larger and deeper than even TV could supply. The farmstead, my family, the local social relationships (community theatre, the saddle club) were not enough. I had a hungry mind, a vivid imagination, and voracious curiosity. The library fed it all, and gave me a step up into the world I wanted to know. I wonder now what those librarians thought of me. Crazy woman? Maybe. I wish they could know how they helped transform my life.

This is how pitiful our computer system at work is: I use a database that was written by our IT guru 12 years ago to store my data on the state's mainframe computer.

Two weeks ago one of the IT people came through while I was out of town and updated my computer and some of its programs. When I got back, I discovered that now, instead of the 1/4-screen, light-gray eye-ruining screen I'd been stuck with for several years, I can now mazimize the data entry screen, it has a black background with big blue, red, green or white letters, AND -- this is the REALLY BIG THING: it now, after these long, 12 years of toil, actually has a Macro capability! This means that all those "clients" for whom I have to enter data multi-times throughout the year and often, in one day? I can just use a macro and fill in all the repetitive data. ("I know, dummy--that's what Macros are for!" -- Well, WHO KNEW??? Certainly not our IT people!)

Isn't it pitiful, in 2003, to be so delighted with a database program that has a Macro facility???

On the other hand, there's something to be said for being so happy with such a small thing that most other people doing this kind of work take for granted. Easily pleased, that's the ticket! Expect nothing (and you learn to do that, working for state government, believe me) and anything, any crumb of novelty or convenience (which in itself is a novelty), reduces you to tears of gratitude.

The only thing I can imagine is that they're fixing to take the whole program away soon, when I'm just getting used to this wonderful "new" feature, and make me keep records in cuneiform on clay tablets.