I’ve watched eight movies in the past four days, including Matrix Revolutions (I actually went to the movies by myself on Thanksgiving eve) and Bowling for Columbine, which I rented. Watching those two movies within 24 hours of each other was enough to push me over the funk edge.
So I just kept watching movies. I had nothing better to do anyway. And, since I’m a good multi-tasker, I could watch TV and still work on some boa-scarves and other stuff that I’m going to sell at a craft fair in my building this weekend.
When I was kid (that’s before TV) I escaped via radio, fantasy books, and creating cool clothes on paper. And I spent most of my time escaping, since I was house-bound a lot with asthma and had to take care of myself.
It seems that I’m heading back to where I started, only now its TV and DVD, fantasy books, and creating cool clothes out of yarn. It’s a good thing that I’ve had some memorable adventures in between, because I’d be pretty pissed at finding myself pretty much back where I started. And back with my mother, to boot.
Actually, the truth is, I could get out and do things. But what exactly is it that I would do at my age? What new things can I take up? I started learning to tap dance but my herniated disc acted up and that was that. I have so little input that I can’t seem to generate the output that transforms itself into what was once pretty good poetry.
Most of my life right now is one big volunteer effort, so I sure don’t want to volunteer anywhere else. I’ve lost touch with what I like to do for fun. I haven’t made any new (other-than-blogger) friends in three years now. And that’s very unlike me.
I guess maybe I’m feeling the same as Tom Shugart, but for different reasons. (Actually, I can’t seem to get onto Tom’s site because of some kind of cookies that his haloscan comment function is trying to get my computer to accept and it won’t. I know that it has something to do with my security settings, but I don’t want to degrade them and I don’t have trouble with anyone else site. Anyone have any suggestions?)
So I read. A lot. Just started Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum as I read through the Discworld series. I just finished Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, which I spent most of Thanksgiving Day finishing.
Escape. Fantasy.
Tonight, there’s Alias and Criminal Intent (I dig Vincent D’Onofrio) — which I have to tape bacause it’s on at the same time as Alias, and The Practice (ditto James Spader).
Escape.
Is that all there is left for me, I keep thinking?
I’ve got to get out and visit my grandson and take him his Christmas presents, which, of course, I went overboard buying. (I just love Amazon.com’s free shipping.)
I miss having a reason to feel in a holiday mood. I need to make some new friends. I need to hug my grandson and my daughter and my angel of a son-in-law.
I need a reason not to escape.

They’re shifting, dissolving, resolving, evolving — those strings — the ones that join loose pieces, and the ones that ground us, keep us from drifting into various netherworlds, the ones that tie bloodlines together. So much shifting these days.
I was one of those who noticed that Tom Shugart had become missing in action. But now he’s back. At least for now.
Can you imagine? He’s tired of being retired! Wants to get back into the old grind. Except that today’s grinding machine is not the one he left behind. He let go of the string and can’t seem to catch hold of it again.
There was a point in my life at which I looked forward to retirement. I was tired of all of the strings I was expected to keep weaving together every day. They were not my strings. I looked forward to playing with strings of my own choosing.
Several organizations in which I had been involved had asked me to serve on their boards. And then there was the ballroom dancing. I once considered teaching it after I retired. I thought of all the time I would have to create wearable art, to get involved in that community, do all the craft shows that abound this time of year.
Uh uh. Parenting a parent hasn’t left much time to do all of that. Neither has my aging spine left much opportunity. But I still don’t miss going to work.
One of my best friends who retired several months ago is so busy traveling and lunching and socializing that she can’t imagine how she had a life before she retired.
I’ve found that men I know seem to have a harder time adjusting to retirement than women. Is it because we women tend to have lots of other things that we like to do and work actually got in the way of our doing them? Is it that we have hobbies and interests that we can’t wait to pursue when we finally have the time?
On the other hand, the husband of a friend of mine retired when he was fifty from a job he didn’t really like in order to spend his time building furniture — on his own time, in his own workshop, using his own designs. His wife liked her job and so she continued to work.
Back to the first hand, one of my cousins, who retired from college teaching and whose pension was more than he made teaching, says he’s going to accept an offer to go back and teach. Go figure.
As more and more jobs dissolve, as careers disappear, more and more retirement-age people are going to find themselves (sooner than they expected) facing several decades that they will have to fill with something.
I’ve always believed that kids need to learn more than just the traditional school subjects. They need to learn to be curious, to explore, to develop creative interests beyond those that prepare them to earn a living. It seems to me that, given what life in the future will look like, it’s all the more important to give students those learning experiences, to give them a chance to experiment with lots of brightly colored, multi-stranded strings, to begin imagining what kind of vibrant life they might one day weave for themselves.
In the meanwhile, Tom, if you’re getting bored and miss having all that stress, I’ll trade lives with you for a while. You won’t have much time to miss the challenges of the consulting business.

It’s been a year and a half (that’s when I stopped ballroom dancing and dudeing up with the frilly fun clothes that go along with it) since I wore pantihose, but I struggled into a pair yesterday as I readied myself for my cousin’s daughter’s wedding. I finally twisted far enough to get them on, but not after hearing a few crunches and cracks in my back. Not a good sound for someone who’s got a major problem with a disc in her lumbar spine. As it turned out, no harm seemed to have been done, but I have promised myself that from now on, no more pantihose.
And then my cousin’s daughter and now husband promised each other, in front of friends and family, all the things that people promise each other when they’re in happily love and looking toward a future together.
It was a traditional Catholic wedding ceremony that included a reading from the Book of Genesis about how the Judeo-Christian God created man, realized that the poor guy was lonesome, and then formed woman out of the guy’s rib. Yeecchh!!
I wanted to stand up and yell, “Hey, haven’t you heard of Lilith? Don’t you know the power of myth to make real history happen? No, No! That’s not the story that needs to be told. You got it wrong. You got it all wrong!!”
But, of course, I didn’t. I just squirmed in my seat and hoped for the best.
And the reception was the best! Tribal, even.
I have to hand it to my cousin’s daughter and her mate. It was their celebration and their way to celebrate. The DJ revved up everyone (except those of my mother’s generation) with rhythms driven by blood-pounding drums. And the tribe gathered around the newlyweds, who writhed and wound around each other as well as others in the gathering circle as the bride’s white gown sparkled through the web of strobing limbs. They danced in groups, alone, and in pairs — men with women, women with women, men with men. The beat went on, and on, and on. The circle ebbed and flowed and whooped and danced. The air throbbed with promise.
And my cousins and I crowned our you’d-never-know-it-graying-heads with glow-in-the-dark circlets and became, for those moments, our younger, vital, music-infused selves. Luckily, I must have sent my sciatic nerve into shock because it never felt a thing.
After the reception, some of my cousins went back to one of their homes to continue partying. I had to drive back upstate. The party was over for me. At least this one was.
But I’m promising myself that I will find more chances to party. And I’m promising myself that I will do it without the back-breaking risk of wriggling into those claustraphobic pantihose.

I’m a day late, but yesterday I was driving downstate to and attending a wedding. And before that I was getting ready to drive downstate and attend a wedding.
I remember that crisp sunny day in November — I was taking my almost year-old daughter out for a walk and got half way up the hill when a neighbor stuck her head out her door and yelled that the president had been shot. “President of what?” I asked, never even considering that it could be “The President.”
I turned around and went back home and spent the rest of the day in front of the television set. I don’t even think it was a color tv back then. This was the second time that the immediacy of television broacasting hit home for me.* I was watching real-time history unfold on a little screen in the corner of my living room. I didn’t have to be there to be there. Reality TV: what a concept!
I remember when JFK was running for president and I was a college student but too young to vote. But a friend of mine wasn’t too young, and I talked him into letting me drive him back to his home town to cast his ballot. (I was too young too vote, but not too young to have a car and a license and a readiness for adventure.)
Yesterday, that friend had this to share:
I still miss jfk. That was driven home to me this day.
I had no intention back then of voting for him. Politics was not in my frame of reference. I was not long out of the army, I was not long back in college at a new school. I was busy studying and playing. But a college friend insisted I had to vote, even drove me from Albany down to Dobbs Ferry and back that election day so I could cast a ballot. But I did it only as a favor. Then after the election, I listened to the Inaugural speech, and for the first time ever and since, a politician touched me. He awoke in me a sense of hope and purpose, convinced me it was my responsibility to reach out to those in need, to speak out against injustice, to try to make a difference. That was his magic, he could do that. His basic drive was to reach out to the world, to try to join hands to make the world and lives everywhere better. “Preemptive war” was not part of his vocabulary or manner. The Peace Corps was, the moon mission was. We were part of the human race, not a country needing to prevail.
When he was shot and killed, I was not long a teacher (in part my reaching out to make a difference)…. And throughout that long, emotionally crushing weekend, as with many others, something drained out of me: this was change we had not anticipated, were not prepared for. Hope and promise were dying. Somehow, we knew things would never again be the same for us. Forces we hadn’t dreamed of took it all away. And we were right. Things never have been the same. It has been a long downhill slide since that weekend. No one could ever measure up to him as an inspiration, as someone who was clearly human (complete with human weaknesses) but who could evoke a sense of meaning — not so much as an American, but as a human being. That was his massiveness: he appealed to our humanity. Tell me another political leader who’s done so since. You can’t because there has been, is, no other.
*The first time was in 1962, when I stood outside the bookstore in graduate school and watched John Glenn turn all of those science fictions stories I constantly devoured into awesome reality.

From here:
LONDON (AP) – A woman scaled a gate at Buckingham Palace on Monday, unfurling an upside-down American flag in protest, while Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic delivered an 85,000-signature petition asking Prime Minister Tony Blair to call off U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to Britain this week…..
…..Officers cordoned off the area and after about two hours the woman climbed down. She was arrested on charges including aggravated trespass. Police did not release the woman’s name, but media reports identified her as Lindis Percy, 61, a veteran protester.

For years, until the paper it was typed on began to yellow and crumble, I had a quote from Alan Watts prominently displayed on my refrigerator. It said something about learning to use the system so that it doesn’t use you. Following that advice is what make me successful in a job where its bureaucratic governmental system was famous for regularly chewing up independent thinkers and spitting them out to look for less stressful ways to support themselves.
As I continue to mull over how to use this system that’s called “blogging” so that I’m not being used BY IT, I can’t help noticing all the ads on tv for the Victoria Secret’s fashion show that’s coming up in a few days, and I stop to read a piece about the show and model Tyra Banks that’s in my local TV listings.
Now, I don’t have anything against astoundingly gorgeous women. I wish I were one myself. I don’t have anything against wearing make-up and sexy clothes. I’ve been known to painstakingly apply them myself on myself.
I do hate the message about what’s important about being female that ads like Victoria’s Secret’s spread so enticingly. But that’s not what I’m writing about here.
This is about being smart about using a system that you’re in so that it doesn’t use you. And Tyra Banks seems to be doing that, not only doing well what she does and enjoying it, but using her initial success in that system to move up in the system. She formed her own modelling agency, actively produced “America’s Next Top Model” (which I actually watched a few times) and apparently produced the upcoming VS television fashion show. In her interview, she says
They thought that all was just going to come in, do my on-camera stuff, and just leave and take the producing credit. But I was there right through the budgeting and the lighting and the editing.
Even the music cues you hear on the show ere eeither approved or changed by me. If I say I want the girls to wear clown noses, everybody will look at me like I’m crazy, but they’ll do it.
Now maybe that’s just PR hype by her publicist, but it provides an example to younger females that smart and ambitious women, who also happen to be beautiful, can intelligently use the system in which they become famous to their ongoing professional advantage. And they it’s OK to have fun doing what you make money doing.
On the other hand (or maybe not), according to my favorite local Sunday newspaper columnist Diane Cameron, Vogue magazine has provided the front money, along with cosmetic manufacturing companies, to open a beauty school in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Cameron writes:
Does that seem a paradox? The burka comes off, but mascara, liner and lipstick replace it? It’s certainly a mixed blessing to have won the freedom to participate in the dominant culture’s pressure toward high standards of attractiveness and grooming. This seems a situation where women exchange one kind of social oppression for another. One woman’s constraint may be another’s liberation.
She also says:
There is another facet, though, to this beauty school endeavor. The beauty business is, after all, a business, and this program will teach work skills. Vogue’s Kabul salon project is a form of economic development. Beauty salons are a good option, because they can be started at home and they have needed flexibility for women who are supporting families.
But, as Cameron says at the end of her piece:
…we have to always remember the unspoken credo of the beauty industry: Make up, make over and make money.
That’s the delimma women face in trying to be successful in a world where the values — for beauty and sensuality; for financial success, for professional success, and even for personal success — are set and maintained largely by males (not all males, but certainly lots of them) and those females who have bought into that set of values. We have two choices: we can fight the system and refuse to “buy” into what really is a system based on valuing the superficial or we can use that system and, in the process, add substance and deeper human values. I’m not saying that one way works better than the other. I’t can work either way.
I’m not saying that Banks is doing that necessarily. But she could. And I don’t think that the Kabul beauty school will be doing that. But it could. It would mean creatively taking an existing skewed sexist system and transforming it, from within, to better the position that women are in within that system — to expand the choices that women have over how to live their lives, to affirm that we can enjoy enhancing our “femaleness” externally while still demonstating (and insisting on being treated respectfully for) our fundamental professional and intellectual strengths. One choice doesn’t have to preclude the other.
That’s what feminism has always been about for me — my choice to be externally female (make-up, stylish clothes and all) and still be acknowledged, respected, and rewarded for my fundamental knowledge, experience, accomplishments, and intellegence. And not just as a professional, but as a mother, grandmother, caregiver, and poet. (Heh. And also as a bitch, witch, harridan, and hag.)
Thanks, Shelley, for stirring up my ashes and getting my fire going again. I ain’t giving up on this, and I sure hope that you don’t.

I wasn’t going to post tonight; I was just going to tool around and see what some of my old blog buddies are up to. I take a long overdue look across vast oceans and see that Mike Golby is moving his blogabode, and Andrea James is folding up one of her tents and taking up major residence elsewhere.
Something stirring, shifting. I thought it was just me, but it’s not just me. Shelley’s moving and she’s got half the wayward bloggers I know moving in with her and becoming Wayward Bloggers. They’re changing servers, taking on new faces and focuses. Frank Paynter’s moving in with Shelley. I read s somewhere that Ray Sweatman is too.
I head over to Lorraine O’Connor’s place to check out if she’s on the move again. She’s moved around so many times that I got tired of changing her link on my blogroll. The ol’ girl (she’s even OLDER than I am) is still there, but she’s going through some kind of malaise as well. I’m telling you, it’s the strings. We’re all strung out together here, and, for the moment, we’re vibrating a little out of sync.
OK, everyone, repeat after me: Ohm. Oooohhhhhhmmmm. Let’s get that Unified Field a little more fine tuned. Get those spheres harmonizing.
I have a lot of work ahead of me updating my blogroll after everyone gets settled in. It’s way out of date anyway, and I ‘ve got a list of female-founded spots I’ve got to get around to including. Burningbird’s rant got me fired up about that one.
Meanwhile, for my own information, I’ve been Googling to find out more about audio hallucinations. I found this incredibly relevant article, which started me wondering about just how many “problems” that are diagnosed as psychological really have their bases in physiological anomalies — everything from outrageous hormone levels to atrophied ear drums or such. We are, after all, mostly fragile flesh. Well, actually mostly water, but you know what I mean.
Meanwhile, I get no answer at Tom Shugart’s. Oh oh. Is that a broken string? Or have I been out of tune for so long that I missed his move?
I’m feeling a little left out, since I’m not moving off b!X’s server and that means I won’t be one of the way cool Wayward Blogger group. Maybe they’ll let me be an honorary member.

It seems to be that, every so often, I find myself looking around at my life and realizing that I’ve arrived at somewhere I really don’t want to be. I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised, since, after all, I tend not to set goals or target destinations for myself. I’ve always just gone where life takes me, and I make the best of where I am until something prompts me to take stock and seek change.
Over the years, I’ve changed jobs, hobbies, social circles, and personal relationships. I’ve changed hair color, hair styles, and living arrangements. But there’s always something that precipitates the change, some disturbance in the field, some lurch of lobe. And then my snake-mind begins the shedding of old skin.
It’s happening now, prompted by a series of emails about blogging launched into my space by bloggers I know and respect. It’s not what they said that’s propelling me toward change. It’s what I found myself saying. (*see below)
I don’t fit here, where I am, right now, in the corner of the blogworld where I wound up, after sailing in on b!X

My aunt’s wake over the weekend was noisy, and not the least of the noise came from the back of the funeral chapel, where my cousins and I sat in a circle, comparing the status of our various kids, ailments, and retirement plans. I’m a little envious of several of my cousins. One of them wasn’t even there because she and her husband were on a cruise to Bermuda. Another (along with her recently-retired husband) is building a house on an island off the coast of Florida, where they both will be spending lots of time when she retires. (I can barely manage to take a week off in the summer and go to Maine. But the good news is that they said I’d always be welcome to come and stay with them any time I want — when I’m free to do that, of course.)
For all of the things that my cousins and I DON’T have in common (I gladly moved away from our home town and associated values when I was 17 and continue to only go back for weddings and funerals; they all still live within easy driving distance of each other), our overlapping childhood memories seem to be enough to keep us feeling connected. Something about blood. And shared histories. And they make me laugh. (I guess that, unlike me, they inherited the genes that make their brains produce lots of serotonin. I