Shelley’s tracking and I’m trying to figure out if I figured out the magic of it all. Did you get pinged, Shelley?

I’ve discovered some bloggers whom I’ve added to my roll because they are just such damned interesting people: Lorraine O’Connor (one of the older/wiser ones), eclectic Aussie Allan Moult, Mike Zellers (spacemonk), and Tom Bolton. I was particular impressed by Tom’s piece that picked up the thread on gender started by Frank Paynter. So, check ’em all out.

I’ve been reading so much online about the current American travesties that I can’t remember where I saw a list of criteria that are indicators of the imminent fall of an empire. If I remember correctly, my country is exhibiting all of them.
On top of that we have ravaging fires in drought-ridden parts of this country, heavy rains and flooding in areas already known to be sodden, horrific tales of pedophiliac priests rising out of the religious dark, and an increasing number of news stories of parents breaking apart their kids’ bodies and spirits.
My son ruminates online about his painful alienation from his country of birth, and we all wait to see if something awful will happen on the day on which we celebrate the ideal that America was supposed to strive toward.
No wonder we’re all depressed. There is hardly anything that is in our control anymore. It makes me wonder about what exactly IS still in our control.
Maybe all we have is all we really can expect to have as humans on this planet: the challenges of daily survival; of creating ways to connect with and love each other; of working toward and celebrating small successes because the large ones will always be out of our control; of learning how to share our successes with each other so that we can all hope beyond the daily.
Perhaps we humans have gotten too arrogant. We assume that we can control — each other, the elements, the whims of the universe. The truth is, it seems to me, that the only thing that we each have control over is our own Self. And nowhere in our upbringings or educations are we taught to understand that and how to accomplish that with love, compassion, joy, and meaningful connection.
Maybe those of us who survive what comes next will be those of us who can hunker down, live small, stay connected with similar souls, wait for it all to blow over. If it doesn’t blow us all up before we make it through.

Since I post about b!X so often, some might think that I have only one offspring with a presence on the web. Not so. My daughter — aka ‘cwyln’ –(on the verge of popping out my grandson any day now) has a website here promoting her novel, which was supposed to be published by a small press that now claims to have been so badly affected by 9/11 that it has pretty much folded. So, does anyone know of an agent and/or publisher that might like to take on this one?
Not my actual offspring, but dearly loved and much appreciated, is my son-in-law — aka ‘schmev’ — who is an amazing illustrator with stuff on his website here. He has written and illustrated the most beautiful children’s book about Esmeralda the honey bee, and that’s looking for a publisher as well. Both sites are in my Familylinks.
I’ve posted about these two before, specifically about their wedding five years ago, which sported statues of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia on their wedding cake (instead of the traditional bride and groom) and featured a life-sized Yoda cardboard figure presiding over the whole event.
We are quite a family, doncha think?

Sometimes things kinda settle into the back of your brain and you have no idea where they came from. Well, one of b!X (former?) friends gives that one true one credit for the ‘heh’ that I — and she — often use. Heh.

I hate patriarchy. But I like men who are not patriarchs. That makes sense, doesn’t it?
I’m a feminist but I like being both female and feminine. That makes sense to me too, although I occasionally run into people — mostly of my generation — who find that confusing.
I think about these things today because Frank Paynter left me a compliment to my “femininity” under the photo I left on my old blog site. And believe, me, I am complimented. At my age, I’ll take all those kinds of compliments I can get.
I remember my former boss (female, two years older than I) having a conversation about how different our attitudes are about accepting compliments from our male colleagues (i.e. “nice dress” or “hey, you got your hair cut; it looks great…”) as we get older. Of course, our whole unit was relaxed and collegial, so we were as apt to compliment the guys’ new ties or new hair cuts as well. But I know that in my younger, more radically feminist days, I was very sensitive to anything that smacked of condescension or trivialization — that I interpreted as detracting from my professionalism. Heh. How times have changed.
And they’ve changed not just for me as I move out of my prime (but, hey, there’s still a dance it the ol’ dame yet, don’t forget). I get to know younger women like Halley and Jeneane and Shelley and Denise and Andrea and Anita (and lots of my other Blog Sisters) and see strong, sexy, confident, professional, savvy women who blend being feminine and feminist with ease and humor. As I still sometimes struggle to walk my fine line between feminine and feminist, I recognize that’s it’s a line drawn by the times and the situations that shaped my definition of who I am. (Just another example of why I was born too early.)
I also recognize that, in creating a blog-identity as a “crone,” I conjured up an image of myself that’s true only in spirit.
So, thanks, Frank. You made my day. Hell, you made my whole week!

This from b!X’s site (who got the whole thing from here.) And if this just ain’t the Supremist irony!
“How much do you actually know about where the Pledge came from?
A Christian socialist who turned his back on religion. That’s the guy whose handiwork politicians of both parties and religious right leaders rushed to defend this past week.
Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister in upstate New York who sermonized against the materialism of the Gilded Age and who resigned from his church after businessmen cut off funding because of his socialist activities and lectures, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Now his words, composed for a magazine-sponsored school program celebrating the quadricentennial of Columbus Day, are treated as a sacred writ.
Originally, he was going to place the word ‘equality’ in there with I ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ but realized he’d get resoundingly berated, since most people didn’t at the time believe that blacks or women should be equal to white men.”
If you don’t check b!X’s site every day, you’re missing the best way to keep up with the ongoing sagas of our country’s most current embarrassing ironies.

All of this blogging about the “pledge” and b!X’s post about the time he refused to say it in high school reminds me of my checkered pledge past.
When I was a young student, we were a nation “indivisible” and not “under God.” No problem there for me. By the time I was a teacher and had to stand up with my class to say the pledge, the “God” thing had been inserted; no one ever noticed that, while my lips were moving, I wasn’t saying anything. Then came the Viet Nam war, and I was an Assistant 4-H Leader of a group of a half-dozen girls that included my daughter. I was protesting the war and refused to say the pledge. I’m probably the only 4-H leader that ever got fired for political insubordination. Heh.

Got this off Aussie Alan Moult’s page. He got if off SatireWire. And it did make me laugh.
Exclusive: Band of roving Chief Executives spotted miles from Mexican border.
El Paso, Texas (SatireWire.com)

(I posted this on Blog Sisters, but if it’s good enough for there, it’s good enough for here):
Halley Suitt’s candid and candied comments to probing interviewer Frank Paynter prove that she’s anything but.
Paynter’s latest interview of the blog’s most fascinating women (heh — that’s my arrogant editorial sidebar, so don’t attribute that to Frank) is a portrait of Halley that reveals her complex, creative, productive human mind, her wittingly raunchy female soul, and her attitude toward body that — well, go and enjoy the view yourself. Move over ol’ Madonna and Britney. We’ve got our own Madonna of the Blog.