I could have entitled this post “relatives and friends” but that’s not as catchy. And I do love metaphors.
As I get older, relatives seem to become more important. I’m not sure why, since I still feel closest to those friends who continue to breathe inspiration, warmth, and support into my life. And that includes blogger friends . And, of course, my long-time women’s group (who I don’t get to see much of any more).
Today, the mail brought some photos of a batch of my cousins (I have a slew of cousins), some of whom have moved to Florida and some of whom often visit those who have moved to Florida. The photos show them tanned and smiling, even my younger cousin whose hair is growing back after an intense bout with major breast cancer. She looks perkier than ever, with her growing-back hair short and curly. “Come down and visit us in Paradise,” they tell me. Ah, if only I could.
I’ve never felt I had much in common with my cousins besides blood and the shared memories of our young years growing up together. My life went in a different direction from theirs. But whenever we get together, I laugh so hard I have to run to the bathroom. I don’t always make it. They know how to enjoy themselves. They know how to relax. And it’s all contagious. As we get older and become the “elders” in our clan, we find ourselves coming full circle.
We live too far apart to get together these days, but we have begun to email more, reminding me of the thickness of the blood that binds us.
LIving as I isolated as I do, I seem to have forgotton how to make friends, even blogging friends, and that’s something I have to put more effort into. Instead of complaining that I don’t feel connected any more, I need to reach out and make or keep connections to friends.
And so I thank those of my readers who left comments on this post.
Maria at Alembic is someone whose blog I used to read all the time. Her writing is lyrical and personal and compelling. It’s my fault that I’ve lost touch with her, and I’ve already begun to renew the connection.
Rebecca, of Pocahontas County Fare, is a blogger I hadn’t heard of until now, when I linked over to her site. She blogs about poetry, knitting, her cat, the land where she lives, fiber arts — so many of the things I also blog about. Why hadn’t I discovered her before this? She obviously discovered me!!! I’m certainly going to get to know her in the days to come..
Elayne Riggs is a blogger I’ve read on and off since I started. (She introduced herself as Elayne with a “Y”; that’s how I still think of her.) She works hard and blogs hard and spends a lot of time reading the blogs of others. Another friend whose creative air I need to breathe more of.
Full circle, back to “blood,” I’m waiting to see if b!X (my son), who designed and hosts my weblog, can switch my comment feature from Typekey to Halo Scan — thus making it easier for readers to leave comments and for me to filter out comment spam. Maybe the conversations can start again.
I’m feeling a little more optimistic today about both blogging and breathing.

Both Hillary and Nancy are playing the “mommy” card.
Accroding to here, excerpted:

I know that a lot of people don’t like Hillary because she’s such a political animal. But her “mamisma” gives her a balance the guys don’t have.
Harriet Rubin is the author of The Mona Lisa Strategem: The Art of Women, Age, and Power.
Now, there’s a book I’d like to own.

I typed this whole post in last night. But it was after midnight, and I accidentally lost the whole thing.
Those of us who started blogging more than five years ago still remember those blog-golden days, when we not only posted every day — as bloggrandaddy Dave Weinberger suggested — writing ourselves into existence; we also read each other’s blogs and left voluminous and numerous comments, fueling continuous debates about everything from gender bias to blogging ethics.
Last night I grew nostalgic for those blogolden days, for the community I no longer seem to have, for the lack of any comments/discussions in my posts, for the necessity to blog late at night when I don’t have to worry about taking care of my soon-to-be 91 years old mom. (Her birthday is in a couple of weeks.)
This recent post at BlogSisters only made my nostalgia worse, reminding me of what’s been lost as we early birds aged — or should I say “evolved” — as bloggers.
I check the BlogSister’s roster to see who’s really still blogging from the bunch. Rox Populi seems to be the most recent one who’s opted out of a personal blog for other venues. Zeeahtronic and Esta Jarrett seem to be MIA.
My biggest sadness rests in the fact that I don’t get comments anymore. That means this site is no longer a conversation; it’s just an ego trip. And that’s not enough reason to keep it going, especially if I’m just writing about things that only interest me.
So, I sit here wondering if it’s time to move on, move out. Maybe I just don’t have much to say anymore, my life being so confined.
Of course, I could write about that ordinary man I saw crossing the street in front of my car carrying a witch’s broom. He had just walked out of the “Awareness Shop: Esoteric Consultation” place in front of which I had to stop to let him cross. An ordinary man — slightly balding, dressed in jeans and a windbreaker — carrying a witch’s broom. I wondered if he might have bought it as a surprise for a friend who wanted one. Or maybe he was planning to do a ritual cleansing of his own. Or maybe it was a symbolic gift for someone — a metaphorical message that meant “get on your broom and ride out of my life.”
I guess I could have written about that.

…Ivins’ use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.


“She was just like a force of nature,” Sargent said. “She was just always on and sharp and witty and funny and was one of a kind.”

Molly Ivins is gone.
She liked to walk around barefoot when she worked at the NY Times.
She was the first one to call Dubya “Shrub.”
I wish I had even a fraction of her talent and her courage.

The above from Harper’s Weekly. Also, the below:

And this from The Week.

I wonder if Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson would like to emigrate to America, become a citizen, and run for president here. (Heh. We know she’d never get elected!)

It’s no surprise that while visiting in Massachusetts, I went to the shopping mall with my daughter and grandson. He had taken some money out of his piggy bank to buy himself a toy. And, of course, I had planned to subsidize some additional treat.
As we three strolled down the main mallway, we were accosted by a jovial gentleman with a microphone followed by a quiet guy with a news station videocamera. At first, I wasn’t going to stop and be interviewed, but when my daughter heard that the interviewer was looking for a family of three generations, she opted to talk to him. And so I agreed to join in.
“You’ve heard of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, haven’t you,” he asked and then proceeded to explain that he was interviewing people about how much they buy into that concept. And he was wondering how that changed over the generations.
I went first, explaining that, because my parents had been upwardly mobile and my mother very conscious of what she had in comparison to others, I rebelled against the stress of that lifestyle, opting to go into education — which really doesn’t pay that well. I think I said that I started out as a teacher because I wanted to contribute something to the world. While there was some truth to everything that cam e out of my mouth in that spur-of-the-moment monologue, the rest of the truths are even more relevent. But I never got a chance to get into all of that. So, instead, I sounded like a poster mom for “family values.” If you read this blog, you know that I’m a far cry from that.
My daughter’s brief statements also reflected only part of her truths. She said that she left the workforce to stay home and raise her son; that it was hard living on one income, but she felt it was worth it. All of that is true.
What neither of has had a chance to say, however, was that we were never interested in “keeping up with the Joneses” because we began our adult lives being more interested in following our dreams than making a lot of money — her dream being acting and mine being writing. Ultimately, as it turned out, we chose lives that center around the people we love. I guess we are just not competitive enough to have gotten sucked into that “keeping up” rat race.
Relative to all of that, I recently read an article in The Week stating:

A growing number of new mothers are quitting their jobs to devote their full-time attention to their children. Is the traditional family making a comeback?

The article also includes these statements:

A growing number of companies are offering to let moms telecommute or work flexible hours to avoid losing them altogether. If employers had done this earlier, they might have avoided their current jam, says Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings. Most mothers would prefer to keep working, she said, but are “pushed out by workplace inflexibility, the lack of supports, and a workplace bias against mothers.” In a recent survey, 86 percent of women said obstacles such as inflexible hours were key reasons behind their decisions to leave.

and

“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing,” said Yale historian Cynthia Russett. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”

As a single mother, I had no choice but to work. My daughter has a choice, and I have a feeling that her experiences growing up under my roof contributed a great deal to her making the one she has. And I think she made the right one.

She doesn’t like peas. She used to be willing to eat them as long as they weren’t from a can (the smell, you know). Now I have to pick the peas out of the soups I made and froze or she won’t eat the soups. And I have to strain all of the herbs and spices out of the broth. She doesn’t like little specks in food. Thinks they’re bugs.
The number on her triglycerides would make a great number for a credit report.
Planning meals is becoming a real challenge — not just for her, but also for trying to get my addiction to carbs under control.
I do have one dish, the recipe for which I posted a while ago, that’s made up of only healthy ingredients and doesn’t need seasonings, not even salt.
I’ve experimented with variations on that recipe, which is really the basis for “bigos,” the traditional Polish Hunter’s Stew, which requires many additional ingredients, mostly meat.
My version starts out strictly vegetarian, and it tastes even better if you sautee cut up portabello mushrooms and add them when you add the onions. (See above link to recipe.)
Sometimes I roast a pork tenderloin (hardly any fat) and cut up the cooked pork and add it to the soup. Actually, if you keep the liquid at a minumum, it’s a stew. If you add more stock, it’s more like a soup.
I also discovered that it’s better to rinse the sauerkraut before you add it to the pot, especially if you don’t like it too sour — and also to reduce the amount of salt you’ll ingest.
Sauerkraut, by the way, has all kinds of health benefits. It’s best to buy it at a health food store, so Dr. Andrew Weil explains.
My quick and easy soup freezes and reheats well. And it doesn’t contain any peas.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Massachusetts for GRANDSON.
The American Idol of the next generatilon.

There is something cathartically liberating about having a few drinks with friends and dancing into the wee hours to energizing, rhythmic music.
There is something uplifting about being a part of a group celebration, a joyful ritual.
From here, about a new book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy:

Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich believes she has identified a gaping hole in the lives of most contemporary Westerners. The human instinct for communal celebration, she says, is as deeply seeded as our sex drive, but modern civilization has bullied our Dionysian impulses to the sidelines. Yes, she admits, pop concerts and big-league sporting events still offer modern Americans the occasional opportunity to paint their faces and scream themselves hoarse. But, back before recorded history, communities frequently convened to dance and carry on for days at a time.

A major theme of her argument is that religious and political authorities have always been threatened when commoners gather for free-form revels, said Mark Coleman in the Los Angeles Times. Her history of “collective joy” is thus also a history of escalating suppression.

Yup. Not much going on to stimulate feelings of joy these days.
While on the subject of books, Tamara at Mining Nuggets takes a look at Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts of Being a Woman, quoting several of Ephron’s lines wondering about giving up the little things that bring us joy (eating “bad” carbs, especially really good crusty bread; spending money on things that make you feel good, etc.) when life is much too short anyway.
Ephron’s book reminds me of Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses, which I read ages ago with great attention and appreciation.
Nope. Not enough joy. And that’s why I pig out on PiMs cookies — the best of carbs and the worst of carbs.

JOY!