So Far

There’s so much to write about; too much, really, for someone with the
attention span of a caffeinated kitten. Trying to keep up with the
international, national, and
entertainment news this week is harder than playing pinball on my new 3G S
iPhone. In other words, not that hard, akshully, but it tends to suck you
in and keep you from doing anything productive as a blogger.

And yet I actually have pretty compelling personal reasons for blogging,
which have totally gotten pushed out of the way by circumstances  – I have
a rotten memory and I lose the
detail all too quickly of things that happen in my fairly dull life. I’ve
been a lazy blogger for too long, and now that I have this incredible tool
in my hands, I can now work on full-blown blog essays during the daytime,
copy and paste them in an email to myself on break (work constraints on
using Internet, including Gmail, during work time). And then I can pick up
the mail, paste it into a blog post, and wa-la, a post.

Yes, very boring. And yet at home in the evenings, when it’s completely
easy to blog on my desktop or laptop machine, am I blogging my experiences
of the day? No, I’m playing solitaire, watching TV, playing
with the cat, hanging out on Second Life.

It seems that during the day when Deep Thoughts occur to me, while I’m
waiting for calls, I don’t retain them for later blogging. This crappy
memory of mine has been the frequent source of amusement for my friends
and family, but it’s
no joke to me; I can’t remember huge swathes of my own life unless my
memory is jogged in conversation or by ephemeral experiences like music,
scent, or chance encounters.

I never blogged most of my trips in the last few years, and now all I have
to go on are the pictures I took. And I didn’t take nearly enough pictures
on my last few trips (England
2008, Hawaii 2009, Seattle-San Francisco 2009) to make up a narrative. I
still have a ton of photos to upload to Flickr from all three trips. I’d
like to try to rectify that.

I have a ton of print photographs, both old family ones and old pictures I
took before the digital age, that I’d like to scan and preserve. And blog.

I still have a shoebox full of Mom and Pop’s love letters, which I’d like
to catalogue and read and see if there’s anything that could be blogged
that’s not too personal. There’s a
lot of interesting detail about how hard they had to work to make the
extra time to see each other (they lived in different towns during their
courtship).

Riley is always a source of amusement, hairballs, and stuff to clean up;
there’s always something interesting going on with him. He’s shortly to
become the next YouTubes star (not really) now that I have video
capability with the new phone. I’d have to figure out how to add aption
cards and music, I guess. That could be fun.

I do have opinions about world, national, and local news and events, but
by the time I get around to blogging them, it’s all over and I’m just
regurgitating other people’s more interesting thoughts. Dammit, I has
interesting thoughts too! I does!

As for recent events, we had a nice visit with the extended family last
weekend, as we went down by David’s folks for Father’s Day at a
restaurant I’ve blogged about before, Petey’s II. David’s dad likes it
because it has huge portions (he calls it Petey Two’s) for relatively low
prices, but we hate it now because the food is always overcooked, bland,
slow in coming, and you’re totally stuffed by then because they bring t
appetizer plates, slaw, relish trays, and mac salad while the kitchen is
busy leaving the food to dry out under the broiler and heat lamps. Ugh.
Anyway, it was a nice dinner because the entire family was there, cluding
our College Boy nephew and his older sister, who lives five hours away
below the Sweet Tea Curtain.

It was a wonderful surprise seeing her, although we expected him… it’s a
long story. But we were happy to see her and my in-laws were also
overjoyed that for the first time in more than a year, the entire family
was together – all three adult sons, their wives, and all four of the
grandkids. I can’t really go into a lot of detail on the nieces and
nephews because of privacy concerns, but I think it’s safe to say that
we’re closest to the one that lives farthest away, and make time every few
months to go down and visit her, shop, and just hang out and be family.
She seems to like these visits, and also she calls all of us frequently
(sometimes more than once a week) to stay in touch. The other kids are on
Facebook and I occasionally see what they’ve updated… that’s about it.
The youngest niece is a cypher to me and I really worked to come up with
conversational topics over dinner as she was directly across from me.
Fortunately, her older sister (who will be a junior in high school next
fall) was there to help her cope. It’s kind of… a strange situation and
can’t be chalked up to simple pre-adolescent shyness. Anyway, the Father’s
Day celebration was a success, as Dad got yet another in a series of dumb
hats that say “Best Father/Grandpa/Geezer Ever!” After we finished dinner
and got back to their place, they showed off some new furniture that was
duly ooohed and aaaahed over. And then Dad put on his favorite hat, which
he got when he turned 65. It’s one of those “Slow Moving Senior” hats with
a bicycle horn and a blinky light. Unfortunately, the blinky is stuck!
Battery must be dead. It would be great if I could find a supply of those
little clip-on bike lights to give him. It was a nice evening, and then we
said goodbye to everyone. Our oldest niece dragged out her suitcase, as
she was staying over with her grandparents prior to returning home – this
worked out as a nice treat for them that she was able to come for a visit,
as they live farthest to the south and thus have the shortest drive to the
town she lives in. So her grandma, who revels in retirement and a flexible
schedule, drove her to a halfway point Monday to catch a ride with someone
else in her household. She got safe and sound and called that night to
tell us how much fun she’d had. So it was a great weekend all around.

So this week I’ve stilll been engrossed in the international news from
Iran, and then all the bombshells last week and even yesterday and the day
before hit. Twitter has been interesting, so has Facebook and Second Life.

Then there’s all the other news:

Sanford who? Don’t cry for his Argentinian girlfriend..  go away, then
cry, emo gov.

Farrah Fawcett: that iconic poster everyone always mentions really was
everywhere – every male dorm on campus in the mid-late Seventies had at
least 5 copies of it on each floor. It was readily available at the nearby
drugstore/everything store near campus – guys bought it and maybe the one
of Magnum’s Ferrari to decorate their bare dorm walls. Girls like me went
for the arty Art Nouveau-ish Mucha posters, not realizing the connection
with smoking and “drug culture” on the one that featured Job “cigarette”
papers. However, we all tried to have Farrah’s hair. In my freshman dorm,
there were a couple of blondes who spent HOURS trying to get their hair to
look just like hers. It seemed to involve big blow-dryers, round brushes,
spray bottles of water and dilute hair gel, and TIME. Having “Farrah Hair”
was considered a major plus, fashion-wise. I didn’t, as my hair then was a
lot shorter and wouldn’t hold a curl unless I used a curling iron (OW!) or
twisted rags. I was always slightly envious of the girls that had Farrah
Hair, though. Guys paid more attention to them, especially if they were
the kind of guy who had a Farrah poster on the wall of his dorm room.
There were even a couple of girls who goofed around a little with
skateboards, only because Farrah’s character used one in the opening
credits of “Charley’s Angels” for the one season she was on.

Michael Jackson. Seriously, WTF? Whut Tha F$ck? I loved the Jackson 5 in
the Sixties – I thought they were electrifying and Michael was amazing. I
was never the kind of girl that bought teen-idol crap although one of my
co-workers is pretty upset and is going to bring in some memorabilia she’s
saved since childhood this week, maybe. Well, meh. I did really like
Michael’s music (what I heard of it on white-bread radio) on the Off the
Wall album, a lot. I respected him for breaking free from his family’s
control – especially from his father’s control. When Thriller broke, and
the video came out, he just exploded all over the world. I admit that I
watched MTV every chance I got and I loved watching that damn video, and
the others that came later. I still remember even lesser songs like
“Smooth Criminal” because the dancing (and the nostalgia factor, with Fred
Astaire) was a hook for me. However, I was never into his music enough to
buy it, mostly because I didn’t own even a cassette player during most of
that time, let one a decent stereo system. When Michael started to get
weird – the glove, the cosmetics, the odd changes in his appearance, and
then especially when he turned deathly pale, I lost interest. The music
was powerful, but never as good as the early stuff – and then when I’d
occasionally see the cover art on the Off the Wall album, there was always
a moment of shock for me, because he’d changed so much. That photo on the
cover was taken when he was still natural looking, and seemed to be a
sexy, talented young man who’d liberated himself from limiting influences.
After he changed, with the rumors of some kind of skin disease and then
plastic surgeries and then the bizarre tabloid life he led, I lost
interest, but felt sad for the amazing kid I remembered that seemed to
have disappeared. And living in Utah as I had, I knew perfectly well that
The Osmonds were considered the acceptable boy-band alternative to those
Young Black Men and their incredibly talented younger brother. The Osmonds
countered with those Nice Clean-Cut White Men, with their teen idol
younger brother Donny (and later, the pudgy Jimmy was brought in to be the
idol for the youngest fans. Their moves always seemed so uncool next to
the Jacksons’ but we didn’t see much of them in Utah. As for Michael, I’ve
been pondering how fame ruins the most talented people, and wondering if
there was a moment when Michael might have been saved from his own demons.
It seemed that he was never really the same after the injuries he suffered
on the Pepsi commercial where his scalp was burned, and then also he broke
a leg falling off a stage, but I don’t recall people saying he couldn’t
dance the same after he recovered. I just wish he hadn’t messed with his
appearance so much. Also, there’s evidence on YouTube that Michael could
produce a much deeper voice when he chose, and that the breathy child-like
whisper was part of his adopted persona. So sad, and yet it’s hard to say
whether Michael ever really matured into manhood. That word doesn’t seem
to relate to him  in a comfortable way.

And the celebrities keep dying!?! What IS this? The joke going around was
that after the Rule of Three was achieved (Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett,
Michael Jackson), Billy Mays threw one in for free. But wait! There’s
more! Actress Gale Storm also died, as did rocker Sky Saxon, Indian
classical musician Ali Akbar Khan, and then a week or more ago, David
Carradine. Celebrity mortality is definitely trending with a bullet. And
no, that wasn’t meant to be funny, as Neda Agha-Soltan became a celebrity
simply by being shot and dying on camera. Poor Neda! I wept for her and
her family more than for any of these so-called celebrated people.

On developments closer to home, I’ve been feeling more and more
uncomfortably out of shape. It’s time to get serious again about my
health, too, as I’m now officially Middle-Aged. I went to the ladyparts
doc yesterday for the first time in years and got the full prodding and
poking routine (although not the squeeze play, that has to be set up
during some upcoming vacation time). All seems to be well, the new doc was
very gentle and rather bizarrely cheerful as he chatted to me about travel
plans whilst doing that uncomfortable netherbits exam.

Fun Fact: Contraceptive manufacturers give out free fleece booties for the
metal stirrups on a gyno-exam table, with their logo and web information
embroidered and everything! In bright colors! So your feet stay warm while
your ladyparts are free and easy in the breezy! WHEEE!

Yes, it was distracting that the little stirrup-booties were different
colors, it was like the exam table got itself dressed in the dark or
something.

So, then, it appears likely that some changes I’ve noticed recently are
right on schedule, dead average, right in the median range. I can expect
total inconsistency for at least a year, hooray. And then I will
officially be a crone. La la la!