“Iraq, the Musical,” compliments of freeway blogger.

This afternoon, a friend called my from Myrtle Beach, where she goes several times a year for fun on the links (golf, that is). Yes, she’s one of my retired cronies of whom I am supremely envious. During our chat she asked me if I had seen a segment on CSPAN with Barbara O’Reilly of mahablog.com and had I heard of her. I didn’t and I hadn’t, so, of course, tonight as I finally left my mom sleeping and got online, I went to maha. From which I followed the link (no relation to golf) to Maureen Dowd’s article in True Blue Liberal, from which I linked to TBL’s home page ,from which I linked to this graphic and painfully funny illustration of the “New Christian Science Textbook.” Alll that was after I linked to the video of maha’s O’Reilly on CSPAN.
By now it’s after midnight, and so finally, while mom is finally sleeping (with her favorite shoes tucked under her pillow so no one will steal them) I’d better let the rest of the links go.
That is, after I stop over at BlogSisters and leave a comment on this post about Congresswoman Heather Wilson, who is someone I would never have on my pro list, given her terrible and terrifying voting record.

This video clip is hilarious. Pump up your volume!
Bush on Comedy Central.

They weren’t pretty — not by the standards of our American culture today. And what they held up for us to see in the mirror of truth wasn’t pretty either.
Betty Friedan, the feminist icon of my times, died yesterday at the age of 85. This is my favorite Friedan quote, given in an interview with LIfe magazine in 1963:
Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men.” It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.
Sojourner Truth, much of whose life was lived not too far from where I am now, is featured in my local newspaper today. The piece ends with the following:
‘Ain’t I A Woman?’
Sojourner Truth gave this speech in 1851 at a women’s convention in Akron, Ohio.
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
“Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?
“I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?
“I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
I look around me for the Betty Friedans and Sojourner Truths of this generation, yet all I see are Hillary Clintons.
_______________________
It is not that I don’t try to look attractive myself. After all, I did just blow a bunch of money on getting a hair cut and highlighting.
Double Vision — © Elaine Frankonis
I choose the cosmic and the common,
refusing to sever half my soul.
I choose to grow in all directions:
to bear with thorns as well as fruit;
to glory in the ground
and desire the sky;
to stretch roots across acres
and reach for bedrock;
to stand firm in my space
yet assume the varying shapes of the seasons.
I eschew the single-minded vision.
I am all
Eye.
_________________
Every day my mother tells me that I look pretty (even if I’m in my sweats and my hair looks like a fright wig). To her, the important thing is to look pretty, and she believes that it’s my first priority as well. I have long since recognized that my mother never looks beyond the packaging. Which is why she’s never seen the truth of who I am. Denial is her faith of choice.
__________________
speaking of beauty:
from the frontispiece of ANOTHER BEAUTY (prose, 2000)
& in the collection TREMOR: Selected Poems –
by Adam Zagajewski, tr. Clare Cavanagh
ANOTHER BEAUTY
We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversation bides its time
in others’ poems.

I’m watching the tango dancers at milongas in Buenos Aires and I’m literally drooling. Just before my mother’s sudden shift into major dependency, I was really getting into the tango — for all of the reasons why all those others love that dance.
I think about all of my former dance cronies back in Albany who are probably taping the show because they’re out dancing. Thursday night was always a good dance night. I wonder if my ol’ dance partner is still out there, devotedly taking lessons, dancing every chance he gets.
I google around to see if there are any places near here to take some lessons and brush up — meet new people. There’s one — a little more than a half hour away in Newburgh. The only daytime private lessons are on Sunday. I could do that — make Sunday afternoon, twice a month, my time to dance.
I’ve sent the studio an email to see what the possibilities are.
If I don’t do something soon to get both my body and mind back in shape, I’m going to irretrievably lose them both.
My mother, who wants me just about glued to her side all of the time, keeps asking when she and i can go out dancing. I’m sure that she’ll think that she should go with me to the lessons, should I sign up for some. She thinks we’re best friends. Oh man, is she ever delusional about that!
I’ve got to get away. Get away. Get away.
Dance away. Dance away. Dance away.

On 20/20 tonight, a program about mothers and daughters. I couldn’t identify with most of it, except for the older Jewish mother and her daughter. I could learn from that daughter, who counters her mother’s criticisms with humor. Why can’t I just make a joke out of the controlling things that my mother still tries to lay on me??
OK. So that program wasn’t really all about me. But an ebook I downloaded from my library does resonate a lot more with me, especially since the adult main character finds herself stuck back at her parents’ house because her mother has alzheimer’s and her father is dying of colon cancer. What she says about her mother is about mine too, and this quote did make me smile because it’s so true.:
Wherever she went she left behind a trail of soggy tissues.
Oh, man, do I know that trail. They fall off her lap, out of her sleeves, from between her bony fingers. They overflow from the pockets of everything she wears. I’m always bending down to pick up those soggy tissues. And that’s all both very real a very apt metaphor for just about how it goes around here these days..
I bought myself a refurbished iRiver multi-media player that they don’t make anymore to which I downloaded two audio books to listen to as I try to fall asleep each night. I got if off ebay for a pretty reasonable price; it will probably take me the rest of my life to learn how to use all of its features. But all I care about now is using it for my ebooks and NPR podcasts. Next, I’ll teach myself how to download photos of my grandson. Maybe even a little video of him. Good exercise for the brain.
It’s supposed to be a nice day coming up. In the 50s. I’ll haul my mother out of bed by noon and we’ll get in the car and go somewhere. Maybe we’ll get lost — although I’m not sure I can get any more lost than I am.
It’s all about me.

First, some fact-facing from the contemporary woman I most admire, Molly Ivins:
President Bush says it’s a great idea and he’s proud of the secret spy program? Attorney General Gonzales explains breaking the law is no problem? Dick Cheney says accept spying, or Osama bin Laden will get you?
Or might we actually have gotten far enough to point out that the series of high-profile security events is in fact part of a propaganda campaign by our own government?
A Molly Ivins column a day keeps defeatism at bay.
Meanwhile in the little picture, “Snow, snow,” she says as she wanders around her bedroom.
“Yup, ma,” you say. “There’s lots of snow outside.”
She shakes her head and waves her hands, frustrated that you can’t understand her. “Snow, snow,” she repeats. Then she puts her hands to her face.
“Ah,” you say. “NOSE! You want a tissue to wipe your nose, right?”
Right.
More and more often she sounds like a schizophrenic. She knows what she wants to say, but her brain reverses letters, skips to another track, leaves her frustrated and frightened. It’s worse when her pain is worse. The pain makes her cry.
Such are the facts, here, as you put your arms around her and hug her and she kisses your neck. “You’re my mom,” she says. “I love you.”

I continue to get relevant comments on posts I made a while ago. Sometimes those comments behoove me to go back and re-read that post. This is one of them well worth re-reading.
As education specialists of every ilk scramble to respond intelligently to the recently publicity about how girls are now doing a lot better than boys in school and what to do about it, I can’t help repeating what I said in my previous post: “Everything we are is in our brain.”
BUT that doesn’t mean — even if gender IS in the brain — that all of our personality traits, including learning styles, are gender based.
Like many boys, some girls are tomboys and learn better when they can move around and not have to sit still. Some boys, like many girls, get totally involved in process and are not, by nature, assertive.
It seems to me that education first has to address the kinds of intelligences that children can have, and no two children will have the same balance among those intelligences. In dealing with each child as an individual, issues of gender=based tendencies become irrelevant — or they would become irrelevant if that’s the way education was conducted. Each child would be enouraged, motivated, and rewarded for honing skills in all the various intelligences. What would eventually happen in terms of learning “styles” and gender, I’d bet, is that we’d wind up with a bell curve, with some girls all he way on one end, a whole bunch of girls and boys rising from each end toward the middle, and some boys on the other end.
And, maybe someday the advice given by a character that I quoted in that old post will resonate respectfully with both genders:
“What I have done is be a woman, with all my feminine qualities intact, in a world that was run completely by men. And you know something? They appreciated it. They didn’t exactly move over and make room for me –I had to carve out my own space among them, but that was nothing different than any of them had had to do. That’s something some women don’t seem to understand. Nobody is accepted right away. Everyone has to prove themselves. The world will never make room for you– you have to make it yourself. You have to make your own place, and stick to it. And there’s nothing weak whatever about those same feminine qualities, Haley. That’s what I want you to recognize. They are not a liability. They are a strength.”
I wonder what the male equivalent of that kind of statement would be.

Nah, not mine.
I’m thinking about my 3 1/2 year old grandson who’s having chronic digestive problems. Poor kid. They’re testing him to see what’s going on.
On the other hand, his brain is full of that good fire. My daughter tells me this story:
He doesn’t just absorb and retain things, he makes connections and builds bridges in his head — there’s a line in the Polar Express at the end, “The thing about trains is, it doesn’t matter where they are going. What matters is deciding to climb on board.”
Last night we were playing trucks in his room and he suddenly said, “The thing about trucks is, it doesn’t matter where they are going.” After I got over my shock, I said, “what does matter?” He smiled and said, “Climbing over me to the other seat and getting in.”
Everything we are is in our brains, it seems. As I watch my mother’s brain slowly, slowly shut down, I am even more aware of that.
On 20/20 last night, Norah Vincent shared her experience pretending to be a man while she researched her book “Self-made Man: One woman’s journey into manhood and back.” During her interview, she makes the point that “gender is in the brain.”
Our brains, ourselves.