AN ADDENDUM
As regards my last post: or…hrm…I could just be completely addicted and in denial about it. bwahahahaa! Blindingly Bright and Bouncy Birthday Wishes to geniealisa!
20
May
2006
Category: general
19
May
2006
BY CHANCE MET, BY CHOICE FRIENDS
My friend Marilyn over at California Fever, wrote a very insightful post today about why people blog, how blogging affects the people who do it, and how the blogosphere has changed in the past few years, both for the better and for the worse. I found myself nodding along with her assessments, for the most part. There seems to be a lot of reflection going on out there among my virtual friends these days and many of us have experienced the cyclical ups and downs of online writing, online journaling, online blogging, or whatever the hell you want to call...
18
May
2006
POETRY THURSDAY
First, I listened, twining hair about my hand, perhaps sucking on my thumb, my legs stuck out straight in front of me, my head resting in the crook of my mother’s arm. Then I pored over the pictures, turning pages slowly, matching up images on each leaf with the images the words raised in my mind. There, Georgie Porgie with the weeping girls running from him, and there a cow jumping over the moon. I learned the ways of rhyme and tone, I sang them back with a singsong voice, repeating them until they were a part of me. The...
16
May
2006
FREEZING FEET AND BLOOMING BRAIN
It is 8 degrees Celsius (46F) out right now. Do you know how cold that is for the 3rd week in May? Colder than a witch’s Springy tit, that’s what. I just checked the 2-week forecast and it’s all BLOW and COLD and GREY and SUCK. There are no numbers anywhere in sight above the middle 50s except for the ones that give percentage chances of precipitation. Those? Are in the 90s. Overnight, it seems we have gone from spring to fall. Summer, we hardly knew ye! I just went out and watered the garden and the trees, fully expecting...
15
May
2006
IN OUR EMBERS IS SOMETHING THAT DOTH LIVE
A child’s toothbrush, a pair of sunglasses snatched off the hall table, and the pajamas they were wearing. That’s what our neighbors saved from their burning house. I think of all their history, their shared memories, the scrapbooks, the photo albums, their daughter’s crayoned scribbles melted to the charred husk of the refrigerator. It’s all just stuff, isn’t it? But it’s YOUR stuff. If it went up in flame and ashes, do you think you would feel freed? That you were winnowed and lightweight and had a free hand to start over; a clean slate? Or would you perpetually be...
14
May
2006
KEEPING HOUSE
Did you play House when you were a child? I did. I don’t remember it as well as playing School, though. THAT was fun. Gathering pencils and papers and rulers and making little exercise pages for my sister and brother to do, and throwing chalk at them when they misbehaved (not really, the chalk part, I mean). My sister and I had Dawn dolls and Barbies, and while we played with them, even the bendable Barbie whose leg had been chewed halfway up by Thumper, Sarah’s black and white rabbit, so that the bendy white plastic part stuck out from...
13
May
2006
OMGWTFPINESOL
What is wrong with this picture? Anders and the kids left this morning for overnight scout camp. It is sunny, blue-skied and breezy out. I can hear birds singing from all directions because all the windows are open. Loud and cheerful music is playing on my stereo. I am inside: deep spring cleaning. *** I shall stop soon and go for a walk. I may also, at some point, feel the urge to make a bullet-point list of my cleaning accomplishments here because that way I increase the chances of getting some applause for a job well-done, which I will...
11
May
2006
POETRY THURSDAY
A great many of my favorite authors are also poets, and if they’re not poets, then they’re as wordsmithy AS poets, and often they use snippets and quotations and poetry in their books, to head chapters or reference or set a mood. This one is in the endpiece of Sheri S. Tepper’s Sideshow. She’s a favorite because her books are NEVER predictable. I like predictability in my real life (to a certain extent, and even to a CERTAIN extent, if you know what I mean) but I don’t like it in my reading.* Anyway, this poem struck me like a...
11
May
2006
PUTTING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE
Every time I feel down, like things aren’t going my way, like people aren’t commenting on my journal (like no one wants to hear what I have to say), when I’m snappy and grumpy and everyone is causing problems and my relationships are rocky and my children are driving me nuts, that’s when the Universe invariably gets out her big cluestick and whaps me on the back of the head with it. It’s been like that lately. Feeling off-kilter, feeling a bit down and not sure why. On edge. Stage fright this far in advance of my a capella solo...
08
May
2006
ANYWHERE IS WALKING DISTANCE IF YOU’VE GOT THE TIME*
A brisk perambulation at sundown, of an evening, a fine and flowering evening, in Flyinge. The sun was a huge orange ball o’fire aglow in the west. Between it and me the tall trees of the crow party loomed, a giant’s spiky picket fence. I could see all the crow’s nests, way up high. As I walked down the snail trail, the air cooled off and the crows became agitated at my presence even with their secure distance up in the treetops. RAWK! they all screamed, and they flapped and fleaped** from nest to branch and back again. The white...