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Stepping Out on My Blog


So when I wasn’t here, I was here and there and there.

First piece I am lamenting my ability to hold the line with the daughter on proper school footwear. As I wrote this for the mommy blog, it reminded me of a middle school friend whose mother made her wear winter boots until May every year.

While the rest of us were splashing about in the April showers in our Adidas (the height of cool in 1977) runners and track jackets, she was shod in grandma boots with the zipper up the front and a mid-calf ringed with fake furry fabric that pilled and her winter jacket from Sears.

“Was she scarred for life?” Rob asked as I related the woeful tale of my old buddy.

“Well,” I said, “the last I heard of her she was a teacher at a community college somewhere in Florida and working on her third husband.”

True. By the time we were thirty, she’d run through two husbands and her potential third was about eight years younger than we were. I don’t know for sure  he was a student, but the evidence was damning.

However, in case you missed Rob’s point – I didn’t – the boots were not the likely cause. She had the misfortune of being the catalyst behind her parents marriage, and her mother felt that her great potential had been cut down before it could bloom by my friend’s untimely arrival. Seriously. Even though we were all very young, it was evident to us that she was flogging her daughter with her thwarted ambitions rather than asking herself why she simply hadn’t used a more reliable method of birth control – like abstinence perhaps? Jae was the family go-to in a Cinderella way while her younger brother, an obnoxious cry baby, was the second coming.

“You are going to cave on the shoes,” Rob told me.

“I told her only as treat,” I conceded.

“You totally caved,” he confirmed.

I have not. Dee only gets to wear the flip flops on the last day of school, which is still months off.

The other posts are about racism in Mississippi schools (hardly worthy of a stop the presses but reprehensible never the less) and bribing kids (in some instances it works beautifully).

Also ran cross this awesome link on Jezebel* that led to a blog post by Paulina Porizkova – the former super model – on the shame not allowing women to age is. Excellent read.

Forgive my lazy blogging. Allergies are kicking me hard.

* A must click. There is a current pic of Paulina that leaves me in awe.

Blogging: the anti-Yoga


Blogging feels heavy lately*.

The unspoken expectation of snark, controversy and condescension permeates blogs and the act of blogging. The genre matters not. What gets read is hot button topics, snide commentary and kabob point humor.

It’s not that I can’t do any of this. It just makes me feel like a karma polluter.

My gig at Care2 is case in point. Posts that aren’t tinder worthy of the forest fire kind don’t get read. If a blogger’s posts don’t garner hits they won’t prosper – bonus wise or in the eyes of their editors.

I am double-whammied at Care2 because I believe that the current trend in education reform is even more revolutionary than Obama’s piddlin’ health care bill. I think it should be covered more extensively.

Readers don’t care. They want edu-fluff. They want to be outraged by preschoolers forced to cut their hair (the kid in question had hair longer than Dee’s and the parents weren’t pulling it back – because he was a boy and hair ties are “girly”) or by kids being punished for writing on school property or equally local “who really cares in the larger scheme of things” TMZ stuff.

I write about issues. I don’t want comments to devolve into flaming based on personal issues – which happens there a lot. How can behaving badly in the comment box further a cause? Really.

But even here or at 50 Something, I feel a premium is being placed on my ability to write cute and clever and that substance is of lesser value.

A little cute is going a long ways with me these days. Even my Facebook status updates make me feel unworthy of the ability to string words together because they are so … typical … of what we do in the ‘sphere.

The medium has(d) so much potential for good, but the traces being left are so banal. Banality being the deepest root of what is deemed “evil”, am I a positive or a negative?

I have to give a workshop this weekend about the Internet as a tool for writers. I don’t know what to tell them. Everyone sells, and what they are selling is mostly meaningless and for the purpose of acquiring … what?  Just acquiring it appears.

I have work to do. Later.

*I wrote this to put up this morning, but changed my mind until I finished reading chapter two of the Sutras this afternoon. Ahhh, Patanjali.  I am not in turmoil, but I feel a change of direction/motivation/inspiration that is difficult to express. Perhaps it is time to do something. Or perhaps I am doing it? Or maybe it is catching up with me or I with it. I am still quite a base person as evidenced by my glee over this, but I find that I hesitate to share things like this and isn’t that the nature of social media and the web?