Bill O'Reilly's Victory Dance

This morning Bill O'Reilly is celebrating his influence-- specifically,
VIllanova University's decision to remove a plaque in memory of Mine An Ener, a former history professor at the university who confessed to killing her baby daughter and then committed suicide. Ener seems to have exhibited symptoms of psychosis, postpartum or not.

This is a terribly sad story; all children should be protected from danger,
and Ener's daughter deserved to live, no matter what affected her mother's
mental health. But O'Reilly's self-congratulations are in poor taste. A
story like this is not appropriate fodder for his stick-it-to-ya
attitude. If he were truly concerned with what is a right and proper
response to the tragedy, his own response to the university's decision
would not have looked so much like an arrogant victory dance.

I tried to email Mr. O'Reilly to offer this feedback, and discovered that
since I don't pay for premium access to his website, he doesn't want to
hear my opinion. I can't say I'm surprised.

New Laptop, Email blogging

I've ordered a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop, after seeing the one ordered for
a collegue. I've become a compulsive checker of my Dell order status, only
to be stuck in "boxing" for more than 24 hours. If I worked for Dell, I'd
find a way to stretch out the time an order is reported in "testing" instead.

Also, I can now apparently email my blog. Why does this happen _after_ I
buy a laptop?

Not a new idea, but...

NPR's Morning Edition reported this morning that a group of Catholic-school parents have objected to the enrollment of a pair of twins, because their parents are gay. The group is concerned that the children will be used as "pawns" to obtain greater acceptance from the Church for homosexuality. Never mind that they are children, or that they aren't necessarily gay themselves-- (why do those people so easily forget that there are innocent children involved in these stupid power struggles? How do they convince themselves it's ok to reject children on the grounds of these trumped-up "concerns?") I grumped around my bedroom about it, but didn't have time to write anything before work.

Then I read Laura Miller's article on Salon:Books about Witch Hunts in early Europe and America. Yes, I know that linking these two stories is a huge cliché. But the article cites local records of trials from the Witch craze on both continents, in which there is evidence to support the idea that the accusations weren't driven by weird happenings, or even by a Church trying to eradicate pagan practices or to subjugate women. The new scholarly work Miller cites illuminates a different motivation: The discomfort created among the neighbors when someone refuses to conform, and the need to blame.

I don't know any of the parents from that California school. But I've been around enough PTA meetings to know how easily "Can you imagine having to put one of Them on a committee?" becomes "This is a plot to undermine our values!"

Clichés happen for a reason, after all.

Exciting new Project...

I have started a new project that really excites me: a new blog, called Media Watch on Disability. It's basically my own activism campaign aimed at raising awareness among media professionals of positive language and story "angles" when writing about people with disabilities. I'm being so professional about it, too-- I wrote a press release, which I'll be sending out to anybody I can think of over the next few weeks. So far I'm just doing email, but I might do a paper mailing that's more targeted, later. I feel so "official!"

I just got an email from the library, and Neil Peart's new book, Ghost Rider is waiting for me via Inter-Library Loan request. ILL has got to be one of the greatest inventions since, well, the library. Wait, it's Friday, isn't it? Shoot! I wish they stayed open long enough for me to get there after work. The book was nominated for the biography category of the Great Literary Award

The book chronicles both a physical journey and a psychological one; the author responded to a series of family tragedies with a motorcycle trip across North America. (I guess there are as many ways to grieve as there are people who need to.)

Peart is also the drummer of Canadian progressive rock band Rush

Also on my plate this week:

Fear of Flying ~ Erica Jong This is a classic of the feminist sexual revolution, but aside from its value as cultural ommentary, it's a warm, wise, canny novel. I'll post a blurb later, but one thing I noticed was Jong's Isadora physically objectifying men in her very own, microscope-viewfinder kind of way. It's a device, of course. But it's well-used and I caught her at it, which delighted me endlessly.

Thunder and Lightening ~ Natalie Goldberg This book found its way onto my desk this week, just as I was beginning to contemplate starting a novel (and hyperventillating.) I first read Goldberg when I was about seventeen, when a friend recommended Writing Down the Bones. Goldberg was both alien (a Jewish New Yorker, Living in Taos, who practices Zen) and famlliar (Went to college at U of M, swooned over english poetry, seemed afraid of people, wanted desperately to be a writer, marked the passage of time by chocolate) She gave me the idea that maybe I was OK, that I just hadn't arrived yet. I've read that book and her others again and again, relishing the ways we are different and the ways we're alike, taking her triumphs as rocket boosts to get me moving toward my own goals. With Thunder and Lightening she's giving me clues to the process and experience of not just writing, but writing 'something.' This is gotta-have-it stuff for me, and I think, anybody who wants to write.

I'm working on a new story this week, plus working a lot of hours at Hilgraeve. It's all very exciting, but little time spent noodling around in the library or on the web makes me a dull blogger.Thanks for your patience-- noodling will recommence later this week.

Yahoo!!

The article is up now, at "Telling the Truth". What a weird feeling! I've never found my name anywhere like that, and I honestly wasn't expecting it to be that thrilling on "just a website." (with all due respect to Long Story Short. It's just my critical psychology talking) Yay go me!

Okay so I checked already, and my article isn't up yet. I can't wait! I hope everybody procrastinates long enough that it's there when they check. (I wish I had.)

M. Night Shyamalan is my age, and he's made at least four movies.

Now I know I'm kind of a procrastinator, but did they put this guy on that huge budget for The Sixth Sense before he was legal to buy beer? I guess I'm more over the hill than I thought.

Md. Woman Crowned Ms. Wheelchair America
Associated Press Online - Top News
August 1, 2004Juliette Rizzo of Maryland was crowned Ms. Wheelchair America 2005 on Saturday, beating out contestants from 24 other states and the nation's capital for the right to represent...was crowned Ms. Wheelchair America 2005 on Saturday,... "

Don't Block MY vote

Local elections are today-- we have a senior citizens' Service millage and a library millage on our ballot. I'll be going over to cast my vote today, but I dread it-- the very sweet volunteers in my small town always make a loud production of finding me a private place to complete my ballot, because we don't have a wheelchair-accessible voting machine. I will grit my teeth and abide it, because I refuse to let frustration and embarrassment disenfranchise me. But looking over Don'tBlockMyVote.org and learning about the Help America Vote Act has me thinking I could be Changing it instead....

Wardrobe adventures

Lots of shopping this weekend-- My clothes had gone completely ragged, so I took the opportunity of a good check at work to buy some new things. I found a lot of jeans and bottoms, but I only found a couple of tops I really liked, which ended up with me wearing an ancient sweater shell and jacket with new pants today.

The most difficult purchase of all, though, was cologne. I'm completely enamored of fragrance lately, and would have been perfectly happy with Shalimar or Givenchy Organza. But it turns out that M. is very picky about perfume and didn't like any of at least ten old and new scents I tried on for him, everything from the aforementioned Shalimar, which I love, to Deci Dela by Nina Ricci, which I didn't care for either, even if it does have hazelnut in the base. The one perfume that we both loved was L'Instant by Guerlain, but the department store price was worse than the attitude of Elder Beerman's counter girl.

The happy ending is that I used DealTime to find it at a much more realistic price, even with shipping. It isn't here yet, but I can't wait!

The Forest House

I finished Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Forest House last night. It's the first time I've read her, and the book is engrossing. Her rich characterizations make me understand why so many fantasy writers are fans and emulators. I enjoyed it and am waiting impatiently for The Mists of Avalon via InterLibrary Loan.  Still, some things about it disappointed me.

1.) I didn't buy Arganos' inability to tell Eilan and Deida apart all their lives. He's was Deida's father.  It felt like a "God in the box" trick.  I bought it when Deida was mistakenly chosen for the Forest House by Lhiannon, since she didn't know either of them well at that point. 

2.) If the whole of Eilan's "work" for the Goddess was in giving birth to Gawen and founding the house of priestesses on the Isle of Apples, why didn't she send Gawen with Caillean? I know she loved him and wanted him with her, but Bradley makes the point that his safety is the Druids' power over her-- she would surely have ended the threat and the leverage when Caillen left.

3.) IMHO, it felt like a book without an ending. Despite the logical points that can be made about the survival of Gawen, the second House of priestesses, etc-- it took half a day's digestion for me to concede that she'd actually ended it, rather than just stopping.    This would be OK for a writer known to pick up the next book with practically the next breath of the same character, i.e. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. But my understanding is that Bradley's novels are commonly as much as a generation apart.

In spite of all that, don't let my nitpicks keep you from reading Marion Zimmer Bradley-- She is gifted worldbuilder and storyteller. If you read The Forest House, and can make cases against my complaints, I'd love to hear them!

 

July Gatherings

This Month's Gatherings

BOOKS
Fiction:
Great expectations / Charles Dickens
The pillow boy of the Lady Onogo /Allison Fell
A shadow on summer / Christy Brown
The art of mending : a novel / Elizabeth Berg
'Ware hawk / Andre Norton.
The forest house / Marion Zimmer Bradley

Non-fiction:
How to See : Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made / George Nelson
Collage discovery workshop / Claire Hellmut
The South Beach diet cookbook / Dr. Arthur Agatson

MUSIC
Van Halen II / Van Halen
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones / The Monkees
90125 / Yes

Yahoo!

I did actually manage to write something, and get it published!

It's an article based on my post from last year, about my sister-in-law and my daughter and trying to get straight what I believe about tough stuff (In the finished article, birth control) so I can actually present an organized opinion and/or policy.

It will appear in the online writing journal Long Story Short beginning August 7.

Yippee!!

um... your panic is showing.

Sorry... I told some people I know about this blog in late August, and haven't written anything since. Stupid psychology trick #1.

This is my toe in the water... (its impossible to drown in a teacup, silly.) We'll see who wins: me, or my toddler-minded ego.

Rules to Live By 

Loud Equals Right

If you challenge something I say, you can probably expect me to yell. I first equated “loud” with “right” when I was about ten years old. I was with riding with my Dad in the car, discussing what we’d seen on our trip to a marine animal park the summer before.

"Dolphins don't have teeth," said my Dad, "they have kind of a beak."

"Nuh Uh! They do so have teeth," I said from the back seat of the car. "I read it in a book somewhere. They’re not fish, they’re mammals like us. They breathe air." I gave a little nod, then. I could see the page from the book in my head.

Dad got a little louder. "I know they breathe air. I’m not stupid," he said, looking quickly at me in the rear-view mirror. "But I’ve seen them, and they don’t have teeth. They just grab a fish with their jaws and swallow—"

"You’re wrong!" I said, louder yet this time and leaning toward him.

There was a pause then. I watched the neighbors' yards go by, waiting to feel the car turn and stop under the droopy willow next to the garage. My dad drove past our house! He sucked in a big breath, red in the face, and I figured I had gone too far.

"Listen to you!" he finally bellowed. "What book did you see it in?"

I looked down, my face hot. "I don’t remember, Dad." I wondered if he knew the house was back there.

"Hah!" he said, "you don’t know."

"Yes I do!" I yelled, even louder than him. "I don’t know what book it was but it was a picture of a dolphin smiling and there was a little circle at the edge of the dolphin’s mouth. The little circle was connected to a bigger circle over to the side and the bigger circle had a close up in it with a bunch of LITTLE POINTY TEETH!" I yelled that last part so loud that the seat in front of me had spit dots on it.

Yelling at my dad usually meant he would yell at me a lot more. I didn’t care. I was right!

"Well," said my dad after a minute, "I guess I’m not really sure they don’t have teeth." He pulled into a driveway and backed out, going home. He didn't say anything else. I was stunned. He wasn’t mad anymore. I didn’t get grounded or anything. I won.

I really did know dolphins had teeth, but I won because I was loud. So, I end up wanting to yell whenever somebody challenges my ideas. Thirty-Something me knows this is silly. But ten-year-old me sneaks onto the controls once in a while, and boy, when that happens, look out!

My sister-in-law belongs to the local peace group. She met other members of the group while she was protesting the recent war in Iraq, and is an active participant. She called yesterday to give me a heads-up on what's going on with them. At a recent gathering, nearly everyone expressed support for abortion on demand. "Its so funny," she said, "All these people who are against killing can be pro-abortion." Later she said, "Sometimes they make good points." I could tell it bothered her a little.

We ended up discussing the difficulties she has, being both Catholic and Liberal. I wear different political labels than she and her friends do, but during our talk I realized that regardless of labels, being politically and socially aware means there is no list somewhere of all the "right" things to believe. We are confronted with an issue, and we each make up our minds about it. What I think is probably hardest is confronting the same issue over and over again as we get older and learn more. My sister-in-law is struggling with women's rights to abortion, and I've been struggling with the issue of contraception.

I made up my mind to side with the Catholic Church against artificial contraception several years ago, based on an understanding of what I believe marriage is designed to be: a union between two people who submit themselves to God. I believe that God is the Creator, and that a Christian couple is most correct when he gets to decide the size of their family. But that's where it stops being simple. When two people are having sex and they are not a married, Christian couple, they aren't leaving their reproductive decisions to God. Someone needs to make the decisions. Despite my convictions about artificial contraception, I can tell you from experience that the same rules don't easily apply to every situation.

Over fifteen years ago, as a high-school senior, I entered my first sexual relationship. I believed it was the wrong thing to do, but did it anyway. I didn't use artificial contraception, though: at some point, my boyfriend asked if he should "get something." My mother belatedly tried to get me on the pill. I would not hear it. I got embarrassed, told myself "It doesn't matter because I'm never going to do it again." Of course, I did. And of course, I got pregnant. I grew up; I learned to made practical decisions for myself for my daughter's sake. I know what it costs to become a mom at eighteen.

My talented, beautiful, and now teenaged daughter is _going places_. I want her to wait until she's married to have sex. I'd like to teach her what I believe about artificial contraception. However, I do not want her to get pregnant and then grow up! Thinking about that, I catch myself coming up with desperate schemes to gain control of the situation. But the truth is, I am unlikely to be nearby, let alone in control, when she faces an opportunity to have sex. What she does then is her choice. So, when we talk about chastity, I tell her what I want for her and why. I also tell her that whether I like her decision or not, I am on her side: if she does have sex before she is married, she needs to use protection and birth control-- and she can come to me to get it.

There's no simplifying this one. I have to live with making two choices on this issue, because my first responsibility is not to my principles, but to my family.

This weekend has been feature-heavy, light on content

I was reading about BlogSnob in Biz Stone's Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content and it got me started on a whole campaign of feature upgrades. I think I got it out of my system now.