The Big Buildup to BlogHer'08

Tomorrow is July 1st--Holy Shit! just seventeen days to get ready for the big event. Some of us are going on extreme diets and some of us are having our hair cut, colored and what-evered. The boys are moaning about the dumb luck of Mommybloggers and a dozen or so contests have sprouted all over the blogosphere. The air, she is palpable, as is the excitement. What shall I wear? Who will talk to me? What if no one does? What if I end up sitting in a corner all weekend like a crumpled ball of Kleenex. There is no way that the event could ever match the anticipation, but every year we hope it will. Is this the eternal hopefulness of the damned? (And what does that mean? It just slipped out).

This year I have high hopes for BlogHer'08. Mostly because I am working hard to have no hopes at all. No expectations. Not for me. Expectations, as Pip could tell you, are a trap. I will not be going out the day before I leave to get a Really Cool Haircut that was a REALLY BAD MISTAKE, requiring that I have it immediately amended at Supercuts. I will not be staying by myself, because, damn, that's lonely, even if I don't have an extra bed for all my schwag. I will not try and make of my blogs anything, anything at all. They are what they are and--are you ready for this incredible insight?--they will be what they will be without any grandiose efforts from me. My goal this year is simple: to have fun.

Yes, indeedy. After the year I've just had, I think fun has to be at the top of the agenda. And laughing. Lots of LOLing. And maybe a serious conversation or two. And meeting people I know on-line but not in person. And people I don't know on-line. And just hanging out. And laughing--did I mention that?

Is The Food Channel Dumbing Down?

I think so. I just watched the latest episode of The Next Food Channel Network Star (or whatever it's called). Between the episode itself and the commercials, it seems clear that The Food Channel is looking to appeal to the common mom cook without much time (or talent?) in the kitchen. I don't mean to be snobby, but when I watch a cooking program, it's to be taken to a higher level in the kitchen. Rachel Ray doesn't cut it with me. Bobby Flay--eh, he's cute, albeit somewhat damp looking, but he doesn't inspire me to new culinary heights. Thinking about it, the only Food Channel programs I really enjoy are the ones with professional chefs doing high concept cooking. The other stuff--the easy, peasy in the kitchen stuff--nah, I can do that myself without the laugh track.

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Why Orange?

Morning Pages, the Canine Version

Molly and I have just gotten back from our Morning Walk. This is the doggie version of Morning Pages, and her daily output may be more meaningful than mine. Molly likes some dogs, is disinterested in others, and some she seems to be extremely wary of. Generally the strong, silent ones; the little yappers she figures she can bat out of the park. Every once in a while, though, she seems to be struck from afar with the beauty, the very charisma of another canine on another leash who is some distance away. This morning it was a dog who looked like this:

Molly was stopped in her tracks--and I, not knowing that, continued to walk until our full sixteen feet of leash had played out. I had been deep in thought (cogitating, as it were), so I didn't realize what was happened until the leash jerked me to a halt. Then I saw the dog and then I looked at my dog, and what I saw was: I am in love.

Even now, she is dreaming of him.

It's 11:46 p.m.

...which gives me about fourteen minutes to fulfill my Blog 365 responsibilities. There--consider them fulfilled.

The Hard Part of Deciding...

...is not making the decision, or even setting out the options. The hard part of deciding is being able to wait until the time to make the decision is right.

Witnessing for the Lord

I am such a sucker for these people. Because I'm nice and my mother raised me right and when someone comes to my door, I may not let them in, but I at least give them the courtesy of listening to their spiel. But they're not satisfied with my courtesy; they want nothing less than my soul. When they find out that it's a Jewish soul, oh my my my, do their evangelizing hearts beat faster. They whip out their Bibles and start quoting Isaiah to me and take me point by point through this verse and that to prove that the Prophesy is true, and I could be saved if only I'd listen. And read the literature which they left me the last time (which I threw out, but not without some guilt that I was tossing someone's Word of God). I stand in my doorway and nod and smile and give the same mindless comments I'd trucked out in high school when a date would start talking about his car.

The irony of that does not escape me, that I'm still putting on a happy face so a male should not know how pitifully boring I found him. But it is my choice; I could cut them off at the pass (which is what my mother would have done, without a second thought). I don't because they care so much. I find that kind of intense good will a rare quality in today's world; therefore, in the spirit of tikkun olam (to heal the world), I listen.

MidLifeBloggers: a new post is up

Adventures in MidLife: You're Going Out Looking Like That?

Ta Dum.....

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Climbing That Ladder to a Satisfying MidLife

The Wayward Wind

PhatMommy has writer's block. Me two...or rather, too. All of the wonderful things, the pithiest of my normally pithy comments, have gone the way of the wind...and it's a restless wind, that's born to wander......

Ahem--in today's mail I got a Xeroxed notice from the Family Life Center. At first, I thought it was one of the many varieties of Christian churches that have come to minister to Elk Grove's needs. But no, t'was an Employment Opportunity, two of them actually. The first was for a "mature couple" willing to minister in a "highly respected residential treatment program" for adolescents in "the beautiful countryside of Petaluma." Indeed, Petaluma is quite lovely, and since the job came with "Housing in a beautifully furnished country home including utilities, food and household expenses," I was enticed. Alas, I am not part of a couple, so that job could not be mine. But wait, wait, on the other side of the marigold sheet was another Employment Opportunity, and this one was for a mature, caring MFT Intern. Doesn't that just sound like me. I'm mature. I'm caring. I'm definitely an MFT Intern.

I got quite excited--was the universe offering me something new? I've been of a mind to move to the Bay Area and, hey, I think Petaluma qualifies. Or near enough. Plus this position offered the same beautifully furnished country home and a "competitive salary." In return, I would provide a "nurturing, stable home environment for four male students." Yes, I would, because I was mature and caring AND an MFT-Intern AND I like boys (I actually prefer them to girls, who I find to be rather MEAN). My imagination took of like a tumbleweed along the Texarkana border.

Yes, yes, I would apply for this job. I'm good with kids. Particularly wayward male kids. I would move to Petaluma and and and---.

I'd have to get up early, wouldn't I? And probably prepare three meals a day. And would I be keeping that beautifully furnished country home tidy? Oh no no no, that is so not me.

For I'm a wayward wind.....

Now I'm Up--Now I'm Not

It amazes me how quickly my sense of self can teeter off the board. Today was a good day. I got MidLifeBloggers accepted for BlogHer Ads and I wrote a Belated Intro to the site to post on BlogHer.

Maybe the teetering started when I couldn't download the second part of the BlogHer Ads app. Maybe it got a little worse when I couldn't get the intro uploaded without some strange code attached to it, despite trying twice, and so I deleted it, twice. Frustrating, yes, but ultimately fixable.

Then I read Dooce and her friend Carol's twin posts about the diet they're doing together, and I thought I want to go on that diet too. But I immediately realized that it wasn't the diet I envied, but their friendship. It's been a while since I've had that kind of closeness with another woman where you can absolutely trust that she wants what is good for you--and cares enough to say so.

The coup de grace happened when I sat down to dinner. I had a plate full of food, chicken arriabiata and basil pasta and fresh green beans that I was enjoying, I thought, when suddenly my perspective changed. It was as if I had an out-of-body experience, and I looked down and I saw myself as I was, sitting alone, working my silent way through the chicken and green beans. The thought flashed through my mind: is it worse to always be sitting alone, eating alone these nutritious meals. Or would I feel less pathetic if I was eating on the fly, just grabbing whatever, like I did when I was in my twenties?

That's a rhetorical question, by the way; no need to answer with encouraging words about respecting oneself and caring for one's body. I know all that. Hell, you don't get to this stage of midlife without having internalized a whole heap of magazine articles and books about How To Live Successfully Alone. I'm really just registering that instant of altered perspective and then only to say how it was as if the lights went out.

I know what my problem is, and I know how to solve it. It just takes time, but patience has never been my strong suit.

I'm a D-list Blogger with a Dilemna

...and I need to know what you think. Every once in a while I get sent something to review, a book or a film usually. I don't pretend to think it's because I have such salient wit. I know I'm just a D-list blogger and I've gotten on the rolls of some similarly-situated PR people who are hoping for that Viral Thingie to happen for their client. My problem is this: D-list PR people tend to get D-list writers for clients. That means that the works that I am sent are not so much without merit as flawed, in some cases fatally so.

Now if you know anything about me, it's that I have a rather skewed view at times. And I like to laugh. And I tend to see juxtapositions that other people don't, until I point them out. Add all that up, pour it into a flawed novel or film and you get me ripping off a series of cogent comments that are pretty darn funny. And while I'd love to write them in a review post because they are often just too, too good to go unsaid, I don't. Because I know that at the other end of that book or film is a writer. A writer who has pinned a lot of hopes and plans and ambition on the particular work. In short, someone like me.

Maybe that's why those who can do and those who can't write about it. It's not too hard to be upfront honest when you have no stake in the races yourself.

But the horns of my dilemna are these: am I faithful to my integrity as a reader or am I faithful to my loyalty to other writers? In the past, I've managed to walk a narrow path. I squelched my better bon mots, focused on what was good about the work, and alluded to some of the Problems with the text. But now I'm reading a review copy where I'm falling off the path. The intention of the writer was with merit; the realization was without. My choices, then, are:

1. Lose the book. Forget I got it. Pretend to myself that it was lost in the mail.
2. Write the truth, even though it hurts me to think of the writer reading it.
3. Do one of those la-di-dah reviews where you basically just summarize the plot.

The problem with the first is that it's a lie and believe it or not, I do have issues with lying. The problem with the second is that I end up feeling really, really bad. The problem with the third is that I sneer at critics who through ignorance or laziness end up copping out with a summary.

What would you do? What do you do?

New post up at MidLifeBloggers.

Death and Insomnia

If I only included Orgasm, I could have titled this Les Petit Morts (and forgive me if I'm off on the gender of my French...you say la, I say le...whatever).

I've been slow on the uptake and off on the posting since this weekend. First, there was Tim Russert dying on Friday. Then a local man was killed by a sheriff's deputy when he wouldn't stop beating his kid to death. The kid was a baby. The local man was his father. He took the baby out of his carseat (this was a responsible parent!) and just stomped him to death on a country road. One man who was unsuccessful in trying to stop him said that his eyes were empty and you could see all the way to the back of his head. And Monday, on my way to the gym, just around the corner from my house, I passed a blanket-covered body oozing blood. Just his paws were showing. The German shepherd from down the street. The kids in the car that was, to judge by the skid marks, going too fast when it hit him looked chastened. His owner was inconsolable. And now I have to avoid that corner.

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Is it any wonder that I have a hard time falling asleep? And that I'm groggier than hell now, and probably making little sense?

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Announcing: Three New Features

Happy Father's Day!

I'm reposting an entry from several years ago when I blogged on Live Journal. I've written some about my father before, and when I do, I almost always end up in tears and being incredibly mushy (or as he would have said with an eyebrow raised, Tender). So I guess I never venture too far into what I feel about loving him and missing him because, well, because I'm afraid I might never get out. The last paragraph of this, the last sentences--that says it all. I'm sharing it with you today because I can't with him.

The World Cup--and Harold darling...

It's a draw--1::1, USA and Italy. {Sound of cheers}!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm sure a computer saavy person could actually give you a link to that sound, but it ain't me.

I can't believe I actually watched the game. I didn't intend to. I turned the TV on to just hang out for a while, and there the game was. And I never moved throughout. I'm amazed at myself.

I've never been a sports fan particularly. My father, from whom I would have gotten the bug, wasn't a a sports fan either. He was a star fullback, first for Cornell, and then for one of the early league teams, the Long Island Bulldogs--or maybe it was the BlueBells. He played in the days when the helmets were leather caps and the only padding they had was Kotex. He considered contemporary players, with their complicated underlay of plastic and metal, to be (his word) sissies. So I never learned to love games by sitting on his knee. I learned to love reading by sitting on his knee. And arguing any topic at any time whatsoever....

...it's a funny thing about this blog. I started out to write about watching the soccer and how I couldn't believe how absorbed I was in it and how it took me back to that time long ago and far away, when I loved a footballer in England and spent many a Saturday watching him play...

...but then my thoughts took a right hand turn to my father--and I suddenly realized that tomorrow is Father's Day.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. You would love all the new stuff computers can do. You would cheer my blog on and write Anonymous comments and maybe you'd have your own blog. I miss you. I miss your mind and your wit. And I miss the way you loved me. And liked me. Especially that.

Tim Russert: Some thoughts

I wasn't going to watch NBC's special "Remembering Tim Russert." It seemed like too much, another time when the news goes into entertainment mode, hyping a sad occasion into a three-ring orgy produced to wring tears and ratings.

I heard the news where I hear most news these days, on-line, from Twitter posts actually. I watched CNNs pathetically maudlin coverage this afternoon while I rode the bike at the gym and then turned to NBC, figuring they would do something more dignified, something that didn't smack of having to fill the 24 hour news cycle. But NBC was showing Tiger Woods playing golf. I tuned in later to NBC's Evening News, assuming they would give Russert the kind of dignified, two-minute send off that they have done for other collegues who have died. Instead, the entire half hour program was devoted to talking heads, one journalist or politician after another after another, each with a minute or so with some memory of Tim Russert. Nothing else happened in the world today, according the NBC News. No fires in California or floods in the MidWest. There were no demonstrations in Pakistan and although the Nightly News originated tonight in the Middle East, nothing of note happened there either. Tim Russert died today, and that was, it seemed, all the news fit to broadcast. So I wasn't going to watch another hour from NBC. What for? What more could be said? And, more important I thought, why was NBC doing this?

But I did watch it, and from it I got some, not answers so much as elaborations on my questions. I'm putting them out here because I want to know what you think. To answer the last first, I think that NBC did it because the individual journalists involved were so full of grief and shock that they were collectively taking us, the viewing public, by the collar and saying, "Look, this is who this man was. You didn't know him like we did and we cannot let him go without you seeing his full measure."


In that, for me, they succeeded. I liked Tim Russert when I thought about him, which wasn't often and rarely on Meet the Press. I hated that he was so sure--and so right--about the Democratic nomination. I was annoyed by that gleam in his eye when he was doing political analysis. I saw it as a knowing smirk. Now I think that it was simply his enthusiasm for his subject, for politics, that created that gleam. But I didn't know him, or really care about him, and mostly what shocked me was how young he was. Now, however, after watching an hours worth of clips and interviews and lots of tape of Tim himself, now his death feels personal. Now I really will miss him, and in some ways that makes me mad at NBC, because to feel little is so much easier than to actually mourn.

I don't have a clever conclusion to this post. Mostly I'm wondering--what do you think?

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Lawsy mercy where are my glasses? or why aren't my arms longer...

It may not help your vision, but it will make you laugh...MidLifeBloggers.com

How I Keep My House Clean, byJane

Simple answer: I don't particularly. I am not one of those women who is deeply houseproud (much to the chagrin of a former SO of mine who thought this was a sure sign of my degredation). I was not raised by a mother who fostered family cleaning events, such as my friend G, whose entire family devoted Saturday mornings to cleaning the house. Typically, my mother devoted some portion of her budget to paying a cleaning woman to devote one day to cleaning our house. I don't know what the going rate was but I do know that it included carfare and lunch. I didn't pay much attention, I must confess. Consequently, not only did I never really learn the how-tos of cleaning, I didn't learn how to manage those who cleaned for you. That, added to the fact that my sense of justice and fair play is such that I cannot ask someone to do for me what I won't do for myself, means that on the odd occasions when I have had a cleaning woman, I have generally hovered tying her shoelaces and make sure she was sufficiently hydrated.

This comes to mind today because I have just spent as little time possible getting ready for a meeting at my house. I have shut all the doors to every room except the guest bathroom. I have Swiffled, in a manner of speaking, the visible parts of the floor. I have cleaned off all tables, etc. by transferring the Stuff on them to my desk--and closing the office door.

I am ready for company, in a manner of speaking, and I dare anyone to judge me. Please don't.

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Sex and The City: Does It Work at Midlife?