Finished Updating my Archives


I have now officially moved all my posts from both Blogger and .Mac to this site. It has been somewhat interesting to look back at where I was a year or more ago, but not something I would want to do too often. In the past I have always destroyed journals of my daily life at some point. The ones I kept through high school and college were toast by the time I was on my own and teaching in Des Moines. The stuff from my early twenties to my early thirties (about 15 spiral notebooks) were purged when I bought my first house and moved from the apartments. I just don’t think that kind of thing is good to keep around. Of course as my husband points out there is no such thing as “delete” once you publish something on the web which is why I am grateful I didn’t have anything like this blog back in the days of my youthful stupidity. Men seem to be totally okay with having been “young, dumb and full of cum”, but I don’t know too many middle-aged women who are as serene about their teens and twenties. Perhaps those are the rough years for women and men don’t experience a similar thing until the hit middle-age? Just a thought.

Anyway the archives are as complete as I can make them and as categorized as I care to make them. I was a teacher, not a librarian.

Grief Groups and the Four Seasons


We had hospice last week. Katy loves to go and see the other kids and do the activities. She has improved a lot since she started going to the children’s grief group. For Rob and I though the parents’ version hasn’t had the same effect. Rob finds that it simply digs up things that he has put to rest (no pun intended and naturally he knows that you can never truly put grief behind you yet it does become something that isn’t constantly in your face all the time too), and I find that I am a bit annoyed with the way the group functions. There is a trained grief counselor there but lately she has been working with training sessions for volunteers and so we are left with a hospice volunteer to lead the group. She is an older woman who reads prompts to us from handouts and speaks in platitudes. 

So this last week, she had a video for us to watch. As a former teacher the moment I am told I have to watch a video, I immediately suspect the worst and I am seldom disappointed. This particular one was circa 1989 and was little better than a slide show. It was a narrator talking us through the four seasons with lovely flora photos and inspirational sayings from famous people who have lost loved ones. The four seasons thing was enough to set my teeth on grind because I heard more than I cared to about the importance of living through widowhood for four seasons before one could do anything from sell the house to go out for coffee with someone of the opposite sex, and frankly, I find the idea to be some of the worst nonsense ever, but I am digressing. The video was supposed to set up talking points and to that end our facilitator planned to pause the tape after each season.

The first season was fall. After viewing it, we were asked to comment. I had already decided to not comment. I know, from years and years of faculty meetings and inservices, that the fastest way to kill a crappy exercise is to sit and say nothing. A good teacher (or facilitator) can deal with this but there aren’t that many people who are good at either of the aforementioned and usually they cave fairly quickly. My dearest husband though works for a large multi-national corporation and his training says “When something is bullshit – speak up.” And so he did. He said he felt that the video would have been useful to him in the first month or so but that now it merely dredged up things that didn’t need to be reviewed. We watched the rest of the video without stopping and then we moved on to other topics. 

I love my husband. 

What would Tyler Durden do, indeed?


I have a link to a celeb gossip site listed here called What Would Tyler Durden Do? (WWTDD). I found it. Read it and had a giggle or two at the expense of some of the shallower gene pool members of the Hollywood ilk, showed it to Rob and then moved on. Rob has no interest in celebrities and less in their tabloid exploits, but he does have a wicked sense of humor and eventually began following the site. Last weekend, he stumbled across a rant written by yet another blogger (god, we are like locusts) about the misuse of Tyler Durden as the symbol of something as vacuous and completely evil as celebrity gossip. I read the rant. It is mainly quotes from the movie (based on the better book by Chuck Palahniuk) with a few original thoughts thrown in. And it’s right on the money. Tyler Durden was the anti-consumerist. He would not only have disapproved of his name christening such a site but likely would have found the idea of blogging and the blogosphere as yet another way the system subtly enslaves us. Instead of being out in the world, living and interacting, we are here – writing about it. Reading about it. Surfing past it. Dipping in the occasional big toe via comments and then catching the next wave for sites known and yet to be discovered. Tyler would have scoffed at the idea that anything of true value could be found on the Internet and that Internet communities were a fallacy. There is no community in space. MySpace. Facebook. Undestinations where unpeople don’t gather and therefore can’t become friends. Tyler is a bit of an extremist, but the point of the rant was well-stated.