On Sunday, an old friend e-mailed me a link to a Facebook group I couldn’t resist delving into. Not joining, you understand, but logging into my barest-of-bones Facebook account so I could peruse the details of the group and ensuing discussion. The group is peopled with, well people, most of whom I haven’t heard from or thought of in 15-20 years, but all of whom I share the experience of being raised up in a certain fundamentalist evangelical church. I couldn’t help but be curious, enough so that I read through every post on every thread in a single sitting.
The threads included serious theological debates, wandering and wistful ”remember when?” recollections and some intense discussion of improprieties and abuse. I was struck, quite honestly, with the civility of the discussion, despite the range of opinions and views. Maybe it IS some small credit to that upbringing. We DID sing Kumbaua every now and then.
Anyway, this is my basic explanation for How I Got Suckered Into Facebook, though there is, as of yet, no explanation for the childish delight I have taken in it. I shall attempt to return to my senses as soon as humanly possible.
For the second time in a month, someone stopped me in a parking lot and asked me if I wanted to sell my car. And ok, it is dirty. Dusty really, but VERY dusty. Still there is nothing else about me or my car which (in my mind) indicates a desire to sell said vehicle. Sadly, this is not the first time my car has been this dirty, but never before have I been approached with that kind of out of the blue question, so what the hell is going on?
give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / so I can sigh eternally
On Wednesday nights, Ashlieanna goes to her support group. She doesn’t see it as some cathartic process, but more lof a social event, a weekly night out, bitchfest over coffee and bummed cigarettes. The official meeting is over at 9:30, but often they don’t actually wind up until after 11:00. It is a small group, though larger than I would have expected to find in this conservative a city. I found them within a week of Ash’s revelation, but it took another couple of weeks to convince her to try the group out.
I accompanied her that first night, and watched the women (all of them, on that first night, my age or older) sweep her up into their midst as some glorious and darling child, precocious yes, but unconditionally accepted nonetheless. After that first week, I confined my involvement in Ash’s group activities to the Drop Off, the Pick Up and a tentative lunch-date kind of friendship with the group’s facilitator, a woman as naturally bent by librarianesque tendancies as myself.
that i have tennis elbow but don’t play tennis? Probably not. At least the hives are gone. and that weird lump behind my left ear disappeared too. Now though Mr. J. has a spot on his back, which he tenderly refers to as “My Cancer”. He’s the son of a hypochondriac, I should explain, and I am the daughter of a woman who sailed through of her nurse’s training, until the hands-on test for sponge-bathing freaked her right out of her field. She maintains a library of well-illustrated medical books, my mother does, and when an illness strikes, we pour over them in a flurry of self-diagnosis. Ashlieanna, as the third generation of this familial habit, is the worst. She saunters into doctors’ offices with a laundry list of ailments, possile courses of treatment and preferred medications. Her distrust of the medical community is unmatched and she challenges their expertise in the way only a sixteen-year-old can.
But back to the elbow. I think its because Mr. J. and I switched sides on the bed last week so he could fall asleep watching Star Trek without my pillows always getting in the way. And overall, the switch is fine, though it took the dogs a couple of nights to get used to it, but I’ve slept with my left arm stretched out beneath my head for all these years, and now, my wussy right arm is getting all the added pressure. Its the kind of thing you don’t mention to your doctor, fearing that quick comeback of ”well if it hurts when you do that, maybe you shouldn’t do that”.
After thirty some-odd years of sleeping with an arm beneath my head, ‘not doing that’ is highly unlikely, and after three months of obscuring Mr. J.’s view of Captain Kirk, and finally giving in much to the joy of my mate, it is equally unlikely that I will demand my previous position in the bed any time soon. So damn it, I WILL do that and I WILL suffer from tennis elbow until my right arm toughens up. And that, I suppose, is that.
* Mad Men
*Rachel Maddow
*True Blood
*The Daily Show/ The Colbert Show
*The Shield
*Original Star Trek reruns
*Meet The Press
*Californication
Just thought I’d get that out of the way. I will admit that after a good nine months of trying to convince my mother to at least view the 2008 Presidential race in a post-partisan manner, you know, based on the facts alone, I am irritated to have the whole discussion swept out from beneath us with the revitalization of the culture wars by way of the blatently cynical addition of a lipsticked dog-whistle to the Republican ticket. I honestly enjoyed the conversation and the challenge of it. In an instant, and with a dangerously rash decision, John McCain rendered all rational political discussion between my mother and I off limits. For that reason alone, I’d vote against him.
I called my mother this afternoon and thanked her for not agreeing to run for Vice President without warning me, back when I was an unwed pregnant teenager.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”
— Kierkegaard