Snickers Needs to Satisfy My Curiosity

I admit, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a full sized Snickers. Usually, the Butcher will bring home a bag of the miniature ones and then we’ll fight about who ate them all. But today I had a full-sized Snickers and I must ask, are Snickers smaller than they used to be? Like circumference-wise? I swear this thing was like the size of a Twix.

Is It a Rule that All Cat Rescues Must End in Blood?

People, it’s barely even seven o’clock in the morning and I have already had a cat dangling from my bare boob by one claw. Not that there’s an acceptable hour of the day to find a cat’s whole body dangling from a claw in your bare chest, but at least, in the evening, after a few drinks, if you look down and find a cat embedded in your chest, you can just assume you fell in with some animal-loving inverted-suspenders. Or that you are merely a means to an end for cats who enjoy suspension.

But first thing in the morning? When you’re standing in on the garage steps in nothing but your nightie?

I now see why firemen wear their whole uniforms when they rescue cats.

Anyway, there’s not much to tell.  I was driving home last night, as I am wont to do, cruising from 5 Points over to Dickerson, across Trinity and up White’s Creek Pike, just me and the dark, interrupted occasionally by the lights from the signs of clumps of businesses, listening to Left Lane Cruiser, which is a band I should say more about, but won’t, just feeling like it was the kind of night where you hope to run into old women with cigarette creases at their bright red lips and men with oil deep in the folds of their hands.

I did not run into those folks, but I also couldn’t get my car in the garage, which apparently meant that the cat could not get down from the storage area above where the car goes. Normally, he just leaps from there, onto the roof of the car, and right down my windshield into the house. But this morning, he could not do that, because my car was still mostly in the driveway, at a strange angle with only the front right headlight actually in the garage.

So, I told him he would have to go onto the ledge over the outside door and then onto the outside door itself, where he would be close enough for me to grab and lift him down. Since this is the same cat that will go and fetch the dog when I need him to when it suits him, he understood the gist of what I was imparting.

However, since this is an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, once all paws were off the door, one paw was on my chest and almost instantly, that claw was sunk into my boob. And I, having a brain also the size of a walnut, immediately panicked and, people I am not even making this up, let go of the cat.

Yes, so for an incredibly stupid second, the whole weight of the cat was hanging from one claw embedded in my right boob.

It was sheer instinct.

Luckily, some even deeper, less stupid instinct grabbed back hold of the cat and lifted him up so that his claw could get loose from my flesh.

“Damn it,” I said, though it startled me, because I hadn’t realized I was going to say anything out loud at all, “I knew that was going to happen.”

But, of course, I did not.

In Which I Say Something Nice about Ghost Adventures

If you don’t watch it, Ghost Adventures is a show in which three giant douches (I used to think it was two giant douches and a poor put-upon sweetheart, but I was wrong) go around and, after a flurry of “Dude”s and “Bro”s, get locked into supposedly haunted sites in which they yell at ghosts and behave rather douchily towards each other.

Last week, they were investigating an abandoned home for the developmentally disabled. And, as they usually do, they interviewed various people about what it was like–the tv reporter who had discovered deplorable conditions inside the home, the people who were sent in to run it and help close it down after said deplorable conditions were discovered, and a woman who lived at the home.

It could have been a disaster–a giant douche interviewing a woman with conditions giant douches are normally uncomfortable with.

But instead, she was treated just the same as everyone else who was interviewed and she spoke about her (non-paranormal) experiences and explained why she behaved how she did when she was in the home and how it was in response to the deplorable conditions.

And then the douche was off to the next interview.

It was really nice to see her treated just like everyone else interviewed on the show–as someone who would, of course, have important information to impart.

It shouldn’t be a big deal. But it really stood out because you so rarely see it on TV.

It also made me wonder if one of the reasons I like these kinds of shows is not for the ghost stories, but for the chance to hear real people talk about their real stories (no matter what those stories are).

I don’t know.

Whew, I am in Over My Head

How it’s set up here at work, there’s a main IT department that gives advice to the people with IT duties in each department.  This is pretty hilarious because I am our office’s IT person.

What’s hilarious about this, you might ask?

Yesterday, I “solved” a co-worker’s computer problem by installing Vista.

I keep asking the main IT folks if I can’t relinquish my IT status, but the answer is always no.  Apparently, once you’re in, you’re in for life, regardless of how little you actually know.

Sam Coleman Owes Some of Us an Apology

Holy cow! I came across this story while doing the Morning Roundup over at Pith, about how Councilmember Sam Coleman wants Nashville to allow guns in our more rural parks because they might be dangerous.

And I really can’t decide which is worse–that at a time when the Parks budget is being gone over with a fine-tooth comb and when people’s jobs are on the chopping block, some Councilmember is going around naming which parks he thinks are so unsafe that you need a gun to go to them? If the Bell’s Bend Park gets closed in order to save money because it’s so “rural” and “isolated” and “dangerous,” because of Coleman’s slander, I’m going to be pissed.

Or the insinuation that the rural people in Davidson County are such a bunch of evil rednecks that we hide in our parks and just wait for naive, unarmed city folks to come into our parks and then it’s just all Deliverance all the time. I mean, who else does he think are going to sit around rural, isolated parks just hoping that someone might come by?

It’s just so fucking insulting, to insinuate that people need to arm themselves against us, because we’re so damn dangerous.

And I also don’t want to open up a  whole other can of worms, but it’s not like they frisk you at the entrance to the parks. The point of having our rural parks gun-free is not so that they are actually gun-free, but so that people who aren’t used to rural noises, including animals that get very close to you in the brush or the sound of gun-fire echoing off the hills more close to you than you might expect, don’t feel like their first reaction should be to reach for their guns and start shooting.

Yes, that’s right, you urban Barney Fifes. We are just as afraid of you as you are of us.

The Orange Cat Doesn’t Believe in Walking the Dog

So, I’m coming back from walking the dog and who is sitting at the edge of the AT&T lot, hollering away, but the orange cat. Whew and we got the stink-eye.  And then he herded us back to the house. From the outside, it certainly must have looked like I was walking the dog and cat, but trust me, the cat was walking us.

I was talking with the Professor about this a little bit yesterday–not about the strangeness of our cats, but about walking, and about navigating healthcare professionals who are so focused on weight. I mean, in my own case, I have to wonder where the balance between one’s mental health and one’s physical health is? Because if I have to weigh myself every day and carefully measure what I eat and know my numbers the way some guys know sports stats, I can tell you from experience that I will be in a very bad mental place, especially if it results in what it usually results in for me, where I am hungry and miserable and still fat, and still, according to well-meaning family members, never going to get a man to marry me, and still, according to doctors, lying or not trying hard enough.

So, I’m trying to figure out how to negotiate a way to emphasize health sort of uncoupled from weight.  And I’ve been wondering about what kinds of guidelines we would use?  Would you say that a person should be able to lift 10 pounds ten times or twenty or whatever?  Do ten pull-ups (in the interest of full disclosure, I have never done a pull-up in my whole life. I’m not sure my arms actually work that way)?  Walk three miles in an hour?

I mean, you start to see why weight becomes a stand-in for health.  Even if it’s completely implausible that every woman who is 5′7″ should weigh 130 pounds, that’s a lot easier than collecting charts and data about what someone with arms that long or legs that long or these breathing issues or those could possibly do.

But it seems to me that there should be some guide, even if it’s only keep your heart rate above x but below y for z number of minutes a day, that is not so intensely focused on women’s bodies and on women’s bodies as belonging to everyone who can see them and not just to the woman herself.

I just don’t know what it is.

But I feel like a guide like that “heart rate x for z minutes” is something I could work towards without feeling like a failure as a human being. So, I’d like to keep my doctors focused on that.

But damn, I’m fighting this urge to just go along with whatever the endocrinologist says in the moment, bitching about it, and then ignoring it because I hate it, rather than standing up for myself and being clear about where we need to put the focus, because I don’t want to be seen as somehow non-compliant.

But I also don’t want to think about food that much. I know a lot of women who think about food all the time and, I love you guys, but I’m kind of horrified at the thought of that. I think about food at the grocery store and at mealtimes and otherwise? It doesn’t really cross my mind. I’m not a big snacker, even less so now that I’m on the metformin and my blood sugar is more even throughout the afternoon.

But the ways that women can know how many calories are in a thing and how many grams of fat and how much this and how much that and can hold in their minds what they’ve had to eat for the past week or longer? If you can do it, more power to you, but nothing about that interests me.

And having to live my life that way?

I just won’t do it.

So, maybe I am noncompliant after all.

Oh god, you know, it’s only Monday. The appointment is four days away and I am already this worked up over it.

I swear.

Two Things I Have My Eye On

Ugh, I forgot to take my pill yesterday morning. Seriously, of all the things that wig me out about being medicated for the rest of my life, the ease with which it becomes such a part of your routine that it can just so easily slip your mind scares the shit out of me. I need a low level of anxiety reminding me to check and check again to make sure I’ve done it, but I don’t have that. Luckily in this case it was just the Pill, but I forgot to take the metformin the day before the Butcher’s birthday and I spent that whole day feeling like I was fixing to die.

Anyway, I think GoldnI is doing some of the best blogging on Cooper of anyone in the country right now.

And it doesn’t look like Tom Wood’s story about soldiers being exposed to dangerous toxins by KBR and Halliburton is behind the paywall yet, so read it and weep while you have the chance.

In Which I Try to Guess Why the TNDP Won’t Aid Adrienne Pakis-Gillon

LeftWingCracker has a post about Pakis-Gillon, which you can read and be persuaded by, or not. I’m still a little suspicious that there are people in the party who would love to foist her off on the bloggers so that, if she loses, they can have their proof that the bloggers aren’t that powerful.

I refuse to play that game not only because it’s unfair to the bloggers, but because it’s patently unfair to Pakis-Gillon. (Though, I should say, I have also heard this exact same scenario theorized, except that Pakis-Gillon is supposedly being foisted off onto progressives and, if progressives can’t put her in office, then it proves that progressives aren’t that powerful and the powers that be can safely ignore them.) This kind of setting up tests and not telling people and then holding people responsible when they fail them is like a disfunctional marriage, not the kind of relationship that’s healthy among a candidate, her potential supporters, and the party the first two ostensibly belong to. Well, nor is it healthy in disfunctional marriages, but we’re focusing on the political.

LWC says:

Considering that A) EVERY Senate and House seat is critical in preventing a complete GOP takeover of the General Assembly, which will lead to Democrats losing up to three seats in Congress from Tennessee and B) we have a chance to end Brian Kelsey’s political career before he damages anything else, why the hell has the TNDP essentially told Adrienne that they aren’t going to help her?

THESE are the races that make differences in how each party is viewed. If the GOP can’t hold on to this seat, their presumed hegemony is NOT going to happen. Now, understand, I don’t want the TNDP to send troops (not after the House 62 debacle), but I DO want them to send money.

And it occurs to me that possibly this is why the TNDP isn’t giving more support to Pakis-Gillon: they spent all their resources on the adorable baby clones that were supposed to strike fear in the hearts of voters who… um… hate babies or something.  I’m still not sure.

They probably have like 200,000 post cards with those adorable clone babies on them. If only we could find a way for them to repurpose these hypothetical postcards in support of Pakis-Gillon… But we’d have to remind the TNDP that babies are uniformly adorable, so we should not try to frighten voters with cute babies.

Could we white-out everything on the postcards except the babies and just write on there, “Why does Brian Kelsey hate triplets?” or “If Brian Kelsey had his way, all babies would be kept in Pirex pie pans for easy baking. Vote for Adrienne Pakis-Gillon and vote against Republicans who want us to eat babies.” or “Vote for Adrienne Pakis-Gillon and she will outlaw all tasteless political ads involving adorable babies like these.”?

I don’t know, people.  I’m just brainstorming here.

Edited to add: My favorite part about the adorable baby negative ad is the “Pro-Life leaders are against Marsh’s radical cloning plan.” which kind of implies that there are some less radical cloning plans pro-life leaders might be in favor of, or even that a radical cloning plan proposed by anyone other than Marsh might be okay.  I mean, seriously, that’s just hilarious.

For the Midwesterners, For the LOLZ

At the end of a post about Casimir Pulaski getting posthumous citizenship, John Arivosis adds:

Note from John: Pulaski is a well-known street in Chicago. I never knew the history. Fascinating.

For you non-Midwesterners, this is funny for this reasons: While Pulaski is indeed a well-known street in Chicago, that’s not actually why most Chicagoans, nay, most Illinoisans would have heard of Pulaski. That would be, oh, THE STATEWIDE HOLIDAY IN HIS HONOR. Shoot, back in my day, you got that fucker off of school.

(On a side note, Illinois has a Pulaski day because it has the city with the second largest Polish population in the world after Warsaw, and they like their war heroes.  Ha, no, actually, I’m not sure what’s going on here.  Pulaski day was made into law in 1977, a year after Daley died. There had been great animosity between the governor, Daniel Walker, and Daley. I’d be curious to know if this was some left-over Chicago powerplay–”We will inflict our heroes on the whole state and Walker will just have to take it.” or if this came very early in Thompson’s run, in which case it might have been a signal from Springfield to Chicago that hostilities were lessening. I don’t know. But with all things having to do with Illinois politics, you can bet the answer is far from what it appears to be on the surface.)

But, Fat, Fatty Fat Fat…

Today, Nicholas Krisoff is writing about BPA, a synthetic estrogen that’s in almost everything. The chemical companies have a study that says it’s safe. A great many studies not conducted by the chemical companies link it to everything from diabetes to malformed genitals to obesity.

On average, apparently, we consume six pounds of this stuff, because it leaks into you through the plastic containers you use, the lining put on cans of green beans, and it’s put into foods we eat.

I bring this up because of the State Democrats’ flirting with a war on childhood obesity. If children cannot avoid consuming a chemical that makes them fat, all your haranguing and hand-wringing and personal-responsibility-ing won’t mean squat.

Are you, State Democrats, working to craft legislation that would get this crap out of kids’ systems?

Or are you going to continue to play “Blame the Fat Kid” while we’re being poisoned?

Beautiful Early November

Bell’s Bend Park is in Need of Help

So, the dog and I just got back from Bell’s Bend Park. We normally go on Sundays but we were both in the mood for it today. The walk was great. The park was beautiful. All the things that want to prick you with their long prickly prickers can no longer hide it behind their leaves so you can give them the stink eye all you want and they just have to know you know they’re out to get you.

Now, of course I’ve been following Mike Byrd’s coverage of the park situation, so I knew that there had been some ridiculous overages in the Parks department, because it was oh, so important to have golf all winter long.

But until today, I didn’t get that the people who would be let go as a result of this fiasco were not the idiots who let this happen, but people like the awesome guy who came out after we’d completed our walk to check on us and ask us how things went. He’s in charge of the park programing and he would get laid off, and his boss would have to cover Bell’s Bend and Beaman Park, which would basically give her enough time to be a glorified janitor at both places.

This really sucks, and not just because Bell’s Bend Park is my favorite park in the system.

It sucks because it’s unfair to ordinary people.  It’s unfair to the ordinary people who work for the parks, who couldn’t control or have any say in whether things were properly reported to Metro, but it’s also unfair to those of us ordinary people who enjoy the parks.  Because the golfers got to golf all winter, we don’t get to have enough staff?

And seriously, at what point do the big wigs fall on their swords and lay themselves off rather than always looking for the people lower down who can be cut?

Anyway, call or write your council members.

Unless you don’t live here. In that case, call or write our council members, because your council members will think you’re bonkers if you contact them complaining about us.

An Updatey Update

For those of you following along at home, I have a very rough draft of my book proposal done, because the Professor said she was going to look at it this weekend and I had to have something to show her.

I have looked at thousands of book proposals in my life (granted, not for fiction) and I just want to say, “Damn, those puppies are hard to write.”  You want to come across as yourself and as someone who would be easy to work with and as someone who kind of knows what the fuck they’re doing.

That’s a hard balance to strike.

Also, I don’t know of anyone who could blurb my book.  Stephen King, if you’re lurking here, now would be the time to ‘fess up.

Did I Tell You About the Hiestand House?

I don’t think I did. I think I just put up pictures. Anyway, we drove about an hour farther than I thought we should have.  Looking at a map, I’m convinced that going up to Bowling Green and cutting across on the future I-66, even if you can go 70 miles an hour the whole way, took longer than if we had cut up through Glasgow.  But whew, it took forever to get over to Campbellsville.

The house itself sits on a slight hill overlooking the road into town.  It’s got a sewer treatment plant to one side and a hotel behind it, but I was amazed at how much land it still sits on, considering that it seems to be pretty prime real estate and the house had been in really bad shape at one point.  If it were Nashville, that puppy would have been torn down to make room for a parking lot.

But I have to give it up for the people who did the historic preservation of that house.  Dang, it’s amazing.

The house is so cute, all gray stones and blue trim and wooden shingles that have weathered to gray and started to cover with moss. The kitchen is right up close to the house, a little square box coming off the back corner of the house.  The Hiestands used the back door primarily, but the house is set up with a room on either side of a hallway, with the hallway leading to both the front and back door.  There’s a very steep staircase in the hallway that leads up to the second floor which is also divided into three spaces.

Our tour guide was really intrigued with the fact that the house had “closets,” which were just two very large cabinets, one on either side of the fireplace in the living room.  What I was more intrigued by is that the dining room appeared to have the same set-up–two floor to ceiling cabinets, one on either side of the fire place–but they were NOT cabinets at all. The one on the left opened up to a very steep staircase up to the master bedroom on the second floor and the one on the right opened up into a little vestibule that took you to a side door to the house which then, when you immediately turned right, led you right to the kitchen.

The amount of brilliance this is cannot be overstated.  Imagine that it’s winter and you’re trying to heat a house with only three fire places (the children’s bedroom didn’t have a fireplace). Every time you opened the back door, you were letting cold air right into the center of the house.  This way, women could come in from the kitchen into a little space that was very warm (since it was right up against a huge fireplace) and then open the door into the dining room.  So, opening the outside side door really only fully affects this little space.

I don’t know who came up with that design but it was brilliant.

I wish we’d gotten pictures of that.

Anyway, I’m definitely going to try to take my folks up there, even though Bart and I are positive that this is not our ancestor, but our ancestor’s brother.

Especially because I know my dad is going to love the story about how our ancestor’s niece single-handedly defeated the Confederates. It’s not much of a story.  They saw the strategic value in a large house made of stone sitting on the top of a hill overlooking the main road into town, a house filled with women who might cook for them. A house that would be easy to defend, say, even by one woman with a rifle.

And so it was.

To the sadness of the Confederates.

Looking at the Big Picture

I’m going to look at this for a while, just to recharge my soul.

The Thing that Really Bugs Me about the School System

I’m not saying the accusations of trying to resegregate the school system don’t bug me. Obviously, they do. But at a level, I can almost appreciate it. You don’t want your kids to have to deal with some situation.  It may be fucked up. It may be evil, but it’s about putting what you think are the best interests of your child first.

But look at this:

“He believed it was not so much about race, but it was about socioeconomics,” Maynard said of Schulz. “He believed that it wasn’t about getting black kids out of Hillwood and Hillsboro, but rather it was about getting out kids who are poor who do not share the same values of parents who live in the area around Hillsboro and Hillwood.”

How is this not worse? Now it’s not even about the kids who actually attend schools but making sure some parents don’t have to come into contact with parents who don’t share their same values?

If this is the truth?

I wish we could get a list of parents who felt this way–that they should be able to pressure the school system to move children to other schools so that they wouldn’t have to associate with those childrens’ parents–so that we could avoid associating with those assholes.

Good god.

All I Have To Say

All I have to say about yesterday’s incident is this–the burden of these wars falls unequally. A very small group of men and women return again and again to do something the vast majority of families in this country have kept their sons and daughters out of the way of.

People willing to risk their lives for us, especially over and over again, deserve to have their lives watched out for as well as we can by the rest of us and we have not done that well as a country, ever.

As more of the story comes out and we discover whether this man was motivated by religious or political beliefs or reacting to the stress of being sent back to war or racial discrimination or whatever reasons we come up with for this terrible tragedy, we owed it to our service people to ferret him out long before this.

Moving him around so that he was someone else’s problem just doesn’t cut it.

Obviously.

We owed his victims more than that.

Oh, Tennessee

The first book about Tennessee politics I’d like to will into existence is, of course, a history of the Memphis Fords, with a whole narrative arc about the minor tragedy of Harold Ford Jr. not having a snazzy hat.

But after that, I swear, someone needs to write a book about Mike Turner. I vote for Jeff Woods.  Read this article and tell me you don’t get a vision of what the book would be like–all genial ambition and well-earned bluster and constant self-foot-shooting.

And then, tell me you don’t want to find a way to sit down with Jerry Maynard, give him a couple of beers, and hear this story again off the record.

“He was trying to make us feel more comfortable and saying that, growing up, he had black friends and black people came to his house for dinner, and basically he was letting us know he was comfortable with us,” Maynard said.

“And did that make you feel comfortable?” civil rights attorney Larry Woods asked Maynard.

“I know Mike,” Maynard testified. “I’ve known Mike for a while. So I gave him a pass. I wasn’t offended because I know Mike.”

“When you say you know Mike, what do you mean?”

“Mike’s a good old boy,” Maynard replied.

The thing is that you know this whole thing just sounds like Turner.  If he didn’t say this, folks sure know him well enough to come up with something that sounds plausible.

The thing I’m still confused about, though, is why Turner inserted himself into this situation to begin with.

Edited to add: This is the context. That’s the threat that kept Turner’s childhood idyllic. That’s the ghost that haunts this lawsuit. (h/t S-town Mike on Twitter.)

Fowler, Revisited

I’m sorry, I got to telling folks about this at lunch and it just tickled me so much.  I mean, I spent my morning doing work and thinking about how nicely Coble phrases things, how delicious I find her writing. And all indications are that Fowler gets to spend his morning thinking of shocking sexual combinations in order to titillate his readers.

It’s enough to make a girl want to become a conservative. My morning if I am me? La, la, la, doing some work. La, la, la, thinking about Coble thinking about writing.

My morning as imagined by Fowler?  La, la, la, undermining the sanctity of marriage.  La, la, la, imagining how delicious I find Coble.  Plotting to ensnare her and her husband into a gay, polygamous, um, super secret, children scandalizing, union with rotating partners we invite in by lottery. Oops, looks like Sam Holloway and his wife are our first official lottery winners. They’ll have to bring three other women, a goat, and some BBQ. And their own pillows.

That is one million times more entertaining than how I actually spend my days.

Shorter David Fowler

We have to discriminate against gay people now or we won’t be able to discriminate against other people in the future!!!!!!!

I have two thoughts. 1. Why doesn’t David Fowler support the efforts of people to bring back true Biblical marriage? Does David Fowler think he knows better than God how to organize a family? 2. Conservatives always have much better imaginations than I do.  I have always thought of polygamy as a person taking multiple spouses who just sleep with that person. I had never considered the “every night is an orgy of blind passions in which all combinations of body parts come together in writhing ecstasy–man with woman, woman with woman, man with man, woman with man with woman with man, etc.”, but now, as I try to imagine what Fowler sees in polygamy that resembles gay marriage?

Whew, that’s a little much for a girl to bring to mind so soon to lunch.  I think I’m blushing.

Random Thursday Things

1. I now have a new theory about what happened to all my pumpkins. And possibly what my neighbors are constantly shooting at.

2. One of the things I like best about the internet is when you see people you know create something that kind of blows your mind. This picture of Malia is amazing. If I were an artist, I would paint it.

3.  There’s always a sex tape. This is, I believe, the most fundamental disconnect between liberals of my ilk and conservatives of a certain ilk. To me, the fact that Prejean has a sex tape just goes to show that we all do stuff that other people think is wrong (like, being gay) and, as long as no one is hurt, maybe we should all just let each other go about doing things that others think is wrong without trying to fuck over the perceived wrong-doers. To them, this incident shows that everyone does things that are wrong and that’s why it’s important to not let any more wrong-doing get a foothold in our society.

Still, I think it’s hilarious that this sanctimonious asshat got caught.

A Book, The Book

I have to tell you that every time I sit down to write a post about the prospect of turning the ghost stories into a manuscript that could then be submitted to publishers who will then write me notes laughing in my face and telling me how stupid I am and how I have no talent and how, perhaps, I should just return to whatever it was I did before I became literate, I about want to throw up.

I did force myself to consider publishers last night. I think it’d be most appropriate for a small, regional publisher, someone who doesn’t mind if their primary market is people in Nashville and who does books that aren’t run of the mill.  And I tried to think about what I want to do before I submit it. I’d like to make sure I have it “Bobbie’s Dairy Dip” and not Bobby’s.  I really think I want to write a different story for 28.  I think “Hickory Hollow Mall” is just too damn close to “Laura” in terms of themes.

I’m trying to decide about art, which I think it does need–if I want to ask the Butcher to do some drawings, if I want to see if I can sucker Chris Wage into doing some photographs, or what.

And I’m trying to think about how to order them.  Online, they’re either one at a time or you can skip around on the map, so order isn’t as important.  But do I move “The Devil Lives on Lewis Street” farther back?  It’s a hard act to follow.  But if “The Cat that Says Ma Ma” doesn’t come after it, doesn’t it lose some of its punch? So, then, I wonder, should it come forward?

And when I think about finessing things, I feel excited about it again, like maybe it could be the nice little weird thing someone would want to read. After all, the stories almost got me on NPR.

But when I start thinking about trying to find a publisher… ugh.

Reassure me, internet, or kick my butt, or something. Get me over this hump.

Decitement? Expression? Oh, Wait, Expression is Already a Word

Well, Maine.

I’m bummed on the one hand.

But on the other hand, I can’t believe that that many people came out in support of gay marriage.  Even ten years ago, would you have thought that would be possible?

Can you feel like we lost and are winning at the same time?

Because that’s how I feel.

Depressed and excited.

Strange, Very Strange

I’ve been wondering about the “conversion” of the former Planned Parenthood director. Not just for the reasons Amanda Marcotte outlines, though I think she’s right about all the reasons this whole thing sounds so sketchy.

But when someone threatens repeatedly to kill you and then you “mysteriously” start working with them, it’s hard for a person to not wonder whether you’re working with them out of duress.

I wonder if anyone has checked with Abby Johnson to make sure she’s not a very public hostage.

Maybe I’m being too generous, but I’d still like to know that someone has checked to make sure that she’s okay.

News Laundering

I wrote a post about it over at Pith.