As of last week, I have been blogging for six years. There weren’t that many of us when I started, and making friends with those few fellow bloggers was exciting. There was a stimulating feeling of camaraderie and an open sharing of who we really were. I made, perhaps, a dozen blogger friends, and I still feel connected to most of them.
Now there’s Facebook, which is the “social network” to which many of my original blogger friends belong, and so I can keep up with them all using that application as a portal. I play Scrabulous with some of them, and interact with them (virtually) more than I do with any of my friends in the real world. Of course, that’s the isolated nature of my life as a caregiver.
One of the bloggers I know has more than 300 Facebook “friends.” Umm. I can’t imagine even having that many casual acquaintances.
I guess I have no need for friends on paper (metaphorically, of course, in this virtual world). I like to actually interact with my friends, and I only have so much time and energy to do so.
So I try to keep my “social network” friends at a minimum
But now I’m in a new network , a network of “third-age women, ” one of “…women growing old with joy and zest, wit and wisdom.” And I am confronted with the challenge of how to participate in that network authentically. It’s a chance for some new virtual friends with whom I share, if nothing else, the experiences of age.
But how many friends do I need? And, more importantly, how many friends do I have the time and energy to get to know.
I haven’t figured that out yet.

don’t anybody try to tell
me what a noble
thing I’m doing all day
the mindless whine —
please please please
where can I go where can I go
hands grabbing, patting, folding
I dream of monkeys
I’m going, gone inside nothing
left in me but anger
and ashes
nothing left of flow
of fire
don’t tell me it’s not
her, it’s the disease
it’s her still
demanding
my very soul.

It was bizarre walking into the gerontologist’s office with my mother a week or so ago and coming face to face with a man (the doctor) who looked just like a former colleague. Same eyes, narrow and slanted. Same mouth, with fleshy pieces at the lips’ edges. Even the voice was the same — a cultured New York City kind of sound.
And then the next week, taking my mom to an orthopedic surgeon and confronting a doctor who was the spitting image of the actor, Tom Amandes. It was like meeting Dr. Abbott of Everwood in person.
Many years ago, a woman accosted me in JC Penney’s, insisting that I was “Helen Kaminski.” I kept telling her I wasn’t, until she finally walked away muttering, “Well, you look just like her.”
It makes me wonder if someday science will enable us to trace our genetic heritage far enough back in time so that we can discover the ancient tribe where those genes began to be shared. Surely that’s why some people have practically the same physical features. They must be products of the same original dominant gene pool.
They say we each have a twin. A “doppelganger.”
I wonder what the odds are of any of us running into ours on the street.

One of the reasons I enjoy my long rides north out of town is that I can get NPR on my radio, WAMC out of Albany. (The mountains block the reception at the homestead.) On the way back from my daughter’s after Thanksgiving, I had a chance to hear an interview with Norman Mailer when he was at Hunter College last January.
I was able to find this blog post, which not only displays a photo of Mailer from last May, but offers some of Mailer’s best lines from his Hunter College interview. Unfortunately, the post doesn’t include his comments about death.
Mailer died on November 11.
From what I remember about what I heard him say in the taped interview, Mailer hinted at believing that we all come back, that there is some kind of reincarnation that happens. He told this story (and I’m paraphrasing.)

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily Time’s guest writer every Monday.
POOR GUY
Dear G.W., Prez of US of A,
You must be feeling really bad about the way these veterans are acting towards you and your administration. Saying nasty things and all, after all you’ve done for them, too. Ungrateful don’t quite cover it, does it? Closer to being treasoners is maybe more like it, like that old pro, Chaney, says, no?
I mean, look at how you tried to help’em, making their lives better and all when most of them didn’t have a pot to pee in before and nothing that would let’em throw back their shoulders and be proud about what they were doing for once in their lives. Here you go and start 2 wars for them and get them signed up to go to Iraq and that other place (which I’m not writing the name of cuz the guys here in the bar — many of’em vets — bet you can’t spell the name of the other place and are gonna get Meet the Press or something to challenge you to spell it, so I don’t wanna make it seem like I give you the spelling or anything. You’ll show’em. Just remember there’s a “H” after the “G” just like in the word “right” like in your politics.).
Anyways, so you give them the chance to risk life and limb for the good old USA and to be seen as heroes (all the things you never had the good luck to do or be back in the ‘Nam days), and what’s their reaction? Well, ingrates they are, they bitch and moan that they ain’t getting enough care from the VA for their missing arms or legs or both or that PTSD, whatever that is, maybe some Islamo-fascist code. Instead of holding up their stumps proudly and saluting you with them, all they do is whine, “They ain’t helping us enough.”
And then there’s that bunch that got big sign-up bonuses, some as much as 25-30 grand. Then they go and get hurt or killed over there in the war and can’t serve no more after only 2-3 weeks in action. And they or their families have the nerve to bitch and moan when you ask’em to give back the bonuses cuz they didn’t complete the contractual agreement they made. It’s probably enough to make you puke up your breakfast in the nice warm White House dining room with Laura and your dog.
Maybe what you oughta do, Mr. Prez, is toss all them ungrateful whiners down into Guantanamo and let’em rot there as traitors to you and your country which has done nothing but give them 2 good wars to fight in, like I said. I mean, what more could anybody ask of you? That’s a helluva legacy you’ll leave behind when you say, “Mission accomplished,” for the last time in ’09.
In the meantime, you just hang in there, Mr. B., and keep your wars cooking so as to keep ALL of us safe from terror. Except them damned veterans, of course. Looks like nothing could satisfy them.
Sincerely yours,
Jonathan Swift-boot

It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and they sit on the floor of his sunny bedroom and build Lego towers. He’s got parents who play with him. I don’t remember my parents ever doing that with me.
He helps them set the Thanksgiving table for the nine people who will gather for the family dinner. He wants to add something of his own at each place setting. What a great idea, they tell him.

I don’t think I would have been allowed.
He’s a lucky kid.
Now, I’m sitting here blogging while my mother is sleeping. I dressed her, fed her, cut and filed her fingernails, and that was about all she could take.
Her nails are dry and brittle, and they crumble when I cut them. She sleeps a lot. Eats little. She’s always stroking something — my arm, her knee. She needs to touch. Keep in touch. She’s afraid. We all know what she’s afraid of.
This is not play. This is not fun.
I try to make her smile. I try.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily Time’s guest writer every Monday.
MAYBE THE REAL NEWS
Dysfunction isn’t limited to our government. The news media — tv, radio, and print alike — share the ailment in spades. In large measure, it’s become a matter of news entities trying to match or exceed the popularity of supermarket tabloids with their sole goal of rampant sensationalism. Fiction passed off as news.
Radio and local t.v. news is practically non-existent, consisting mostly of one-sentence sound bites promising fuller, more amazing coverage later on sometime. In showmanlike segments they then give us longer bits of weather and sports info. All of it’s wrapped in extended numbers and lengths of commercials and self-promotion telling us how great they are at what they do. Meaning mostly nothing. About that, we can’t argue.
Major national t.v. news entities, both broadcast and cable, do a better job but not by a whole lot. Much of the time, they ride their particular hobby horses. MSNBC, for example, has become deeply enamored of crime stories and features of prison life. CNN moves between hopscotching the world for variety and a maddening, eternal focus on illegal immigration. CBS is hopelessly focused on Katie Couric. But at least the majors make serious noises about real news.
Still, there’s the attention by all the majors to stories and/or slants that border on the unbelievable. This past week, for example, nearly every news organization covered a story out of our drought-stricken southeastern states. Residents there gathered to offer prayers asking for rain, an event dutifully covered as real news. In the next day or two, rainy weather (some severe and damaging) did indeed arrive. Well, the news jumped all over it, relating it to the prayer sessions as if were indeed a matter of cause and effect (as those who prayed proclaimed). If it were truly cause and effect, then we’ve stumbled on the solution to humankind’s problems, all of them. Prez Dumbya can lead the nation in mass prayer sessions asking for peace in the world, for all the best for everyone — Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and every other religion. And within days, paradise would be achieved (except for atheists and agnostics for whom prayer to an Almighty likely wouldn’t work). And all of it would be covered by the news media with a straight face.
Then there’s some of the print news, like the New York Post which typifies what’s wrong with ALL of our news media. It has a daily gossip column called “Page Six” which except by occasional accident is never on page 6. And on Sundays, it’s a separately-printed, glossy page, full-scale magazine.
You see, for the news folks, reality is not so much what actually IS in the world but what they choose to CALL reality and hence news. The truth is left to fend for itself.
This is Walter Cronkite signing off. Truly. Honest.
Direct from The Horse’s Mouth news organization. (Or maybe the other end of the horse.)

From here:

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily Time’s guest writer every Monday.
WRITE AND WRONG
WRITE:
The Writers Guild of America is on strike, trying to get a fair share of the huge profits companies and producers make off materials like dvd’s and the newly-tapped internet downloading. You see, film and tv companies and their big-shot producers are notoriously greedy and egocentric. They believe they’re the heart of the entertainment industry cuz they front the bucks. Their importance in the process can’t be denied, but they, like many of us, forget that without the writer providing the words, there is nothing. Well…except so-called “reality” shows. In scripted creative endeavors, however, “in the beginning was the word.” (John, I.1)
But writers more often than not get shoved somewhere at the back of the line. Take a look at the opening credits of a movie or tv drama or sitcom or late night show. You’ll see much attention to a host of studio bigs and companies and actors but only a momentary glimpse of who the writers are.
So a strike is a welcome event with the secondary benefit of driving home a very basic point: without writers, there are no words (meaning scripts).
Without words, the big shots have no shows or films. No matter how much money they have.
And that’s right. Write?
WRONG:
Then there is our government. Loosely speaking.
Like Dick Cheney who identified Hugo Chavez as the leader of Peru , not the Venezuela he actually runs. How’s that for pure (but unsurprising) stupidity out of our second in command?
Like G.W. Bush who threatens Congress that if they don’t approve his Attorney General, he’ll leave the post vacant. Like it wasn’t so with Gonzalez in there.
Like Congress which gutlessly folds and gives him what he wants.
Like Prez hopeful, the Senator Hypocrita Clinton who screws up in a recent debate then complains they ganged up on her and lets her campaign claim it was a guys against the girl thing. Yeah, go down that road. That’d qualify you for Prez. And then this week in Iowa, after a supposedly impromptu Q. and A. session, it was discovered that at least one question/questioner was a plant by her campaign. So…how’s she then any different from the current administration?
And the supposed question of waterboarding as torture so ponderously puzzling our elected and appointed pundits. What’s to ask? Wanna know if it is or isn’t, or wanna flat-out insist it isn’t? Then first you must undergo the process and then come back and tell us with a straight face it isn’t. (That especially means you, Senators Feinstein and Schumer and new A.G. Mukasey. No sense adding Dumbya and Darth to the list since they’d lie about having undergone it.)
This government — the Founding Fathers would love to see it in action. Right?
WRONG! They’d have a collective heart attack upon learning how the WORDS they WROTE have been perverted. Or maybe they’d go on strike and start a new country.