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The Bloggess Vs. Captain Kirk: The Tribble with Tweeting


The Bloggess is the web persona of a Texas blogger named Jenny Lawson. Her posts run the gamut of oddball humor which her readers respond to in kind via comments. Everyone’s tongue planted firmly in cheek, The Bloggess is the kind of naughty, gross and irreverent humor we engage in as teens and young adults and sometimes, it’s fun to lose the adult outer layer and revel in that again.

Jenny has parlayed her Bloggessing into a popular Twitter feed, a gig as an advice columnist and various other kinds of web fame. Good for her. She doesn’t take herself too seriously – also good for her – but others do. Others who don’t seem to get the joke, or maybe they don’t appreciate being the joke.

Recently Willam Shatner found his Twitter feed was the repeated tagline on a Bloggess  stream of consciousness ramble for which she is well-known. The Shat, who has a gazillion followers* – though not as many as Ashton Kutcher  – did not appreciate the attention. Maybe it was the hookers? Regardless, he blocked The Bloggess. Which only gave her more material because the best way to cut a comic off is not handing them more ways to goon you.

The followers of The Bloggess, which number thousands more than mine but still less than Ashton Kutcher’s, being game and having too much time on their hands took to the hashtags and what was just a little joke at Mr. Shatner’s expense exploded on the twitsphere into an “on-going incident”.

Social media is interesting. Right now, Americans are in real danger of having Obama’s health care “reforms’ neutered into being a moot point and what inspires people to arms on the Internet is a “feud” between an Internet humorist and an aging celebrity.

Wow. Life in the lower 48 must be worse than the news up here makes it look, and they make it look bad.

 

*Unsurprisingly Shatner is on Twitter simply to self-promote because he follows only 9 people and one of those 9 is himself.

Remarriage: What Do The Kids Think?


There is a fascinating dialogue over at ye olde widda board right now dealing with remarriage and children. What’s fascinating is not the fact that the dissenters are invariably not remarried at present (or even interested in anything remotely heading in that direction like say, dating), but there are two camps of thought that butt heads regularly for the entertainment, more than the enlightenment, of others.

Camp Dissent believes that remarriage cannot take place without the full and unreserved blessings of one’s children – regardless of their age or agendas. This camp goes so far as to believe that any parent who doesn’t co-parent with their own kids shouldn’t have become parents at all. A child’s “happiness” is the measure of one’s parenting skills. Things like being smart, well-mannered and progressing towards full status independent adulthood are of lesser merit than a child who is pleased with life and his/her parents role in it. There is also a sub-set of this group that believe remarriage in general reeks of personal desperation and grief denial and that suffering – sometimes loudly – is the true mark of a good widowed person.

Camp Hitched is actually divided in their stance. Both believe that parents should be the ultimate decision makers in a family, but some believe that children’s discomfort with recoupling should be given full credence until they turn 18 – a magical watershed moment – while others believe that blending is a process that time, love and elbow grease can handle.

Like most charged discussions, this one quickly devolved into a dogpile on a single poster. Not that I feel much sympathy for the victim because she is someone who confines herself these days to posts on remarriage and never misses an opportunity to call out remarried widows as desperate settlers who don’t love their children, probably didn’t have good first marriages – hence their remarrying, and are just a divorce away from enlightenment, but the original topic of the thread – the tendency of extended family and friends to expect widows to stand still in time until they are ready to let go – got lost.

The one thing about marrying again I have discovered is that it highlights the disparities in the grief time-lines of all parties. Spouses and parents grieve daily. How can we not? Children are blessed with the gift of grieving in spurts – like they grow – but they are still in touch more often than extended family and friends who only have to confront loss occasionally. Family gatherings are excellent examples of occasional grief. Weddings, holidays and reunions highlight the absent sibling or auntie/uncle/grandparent who is little remembered on a daily basis because of distance and the tendency we all have to be caught up in the life we are living.

I have mentioned before that Rob’s in-laws have been wonderful. Though I hear about the difficulties they had and still sometimes have with his remarrying just short of the first year of Shelley’s death, they have been kind and welcoming to Dee and I. Shelley’s auntie, as an example, invited us to Christmas dinner that first year, and we have a standing offer of lodging whenever we are up towards Grande Prairie  or out Vancouver way from a couple of Shelley’s cousins. They have never let their grief get in the way of Rob’s journey or imposed their opinions about what he should or should not be doing in terms of the course he took.

Our kids have gone through various stages where our remarriage is concerned. The older girls expressed concern at the “haste” with which we moved from dating to engaged to married”, but they never acted out. They voiced their feelings to their Dad only and they listened respectfully to his answers and he in turn reassured them about their concerns. In the end, they were the generous and wonderful young women I have only ever known them to be. They trusted their Dad, which goes to show that laying a good foundation with your children as they are growing up is really that important.

Dee never had a father in the active sense, and she was very young when Rob came into her life. She took to him immediately but theirs is still a relationship in progress and we’ve had tense times as they’ve adjusted, as I have gotten used to co-parenting – something I never had the opportunity to do with Will.

How do I feel about needing my children’s permission to make decisions about my life? I don’t need permission. I’m an adult. An adult weighs the options, looks at possible and probable outcomes and does the deciding based on what is best long-term for all. That’s how my parents did it. That’s how, I believe, all grown-ups do things.

The kids are alright in our family because the adults are adults who think and consider and act as a unit. A family is not a democracy. It is the out-growth of a marriage.

Another Sunday at the Movies


With Dee safely pawned off at her bff’s house Saturday for an overnight (I will miss that about summer. We’ve had a Dee-free weekend just about every other and at the price of hosting bff on the opposite weekends which is still a definite win-win in terms of child occupying), Rob and I spent the day pondering the “movie” side of dinner and a movie date night. 

Rob wants to see the new Tarantino flick but it doesn’t open until next weekend and so I googled the offerings and did a bit of review reading and came up fairly empty. It’s not that bad reviews put me off. I don’t pay much attention to what a critic thinks. I read reviews to get a feel for the story-line and to find links to trailers. The bottom line is always this:

Is a story interesting enough to justify the time spent elbowing with the masses?

Most of the time, the answer is “no” because unless a movie is a must see – like the recent Star Trek for example – we aren’t in any hurry. The majority of films are out on dvd within four to six months and our public library does a wonderful job of keeping current on titles. Trekking to the theatre to queue up with teenagers and young adults who have little concept of personal space or tmi conversations, which they carry on at deafening levels that make me glad when I run across groups of young people who text each other even when shoulder to shoulder, just isn’t an experience I need and I know Rob has little patience with humanity anyway, so why? 

Movies can be savored from the comfyness of the sofa, snuggled with husband, pillows and under blankets. The living room is a lot closer to the true amenities of life and what it lacks in screen size is more than made up for by a clean bathroom and a kitchen with a wider – healthier – variety of snack options.

After ruling out the theatre and taking in dinner at the local Chinese option, Rob and I decided to splurge and rent dvd’s. Our selection for last evening was the Nick Cage flick, Knowing. The trailer blaring from a tv screen in the store lured us into it. Trailers are deceptive but nothing else was really screaming out “pick me” and it had an intriguing premise.

A time capsule buried fifty years earlier is unearthed and reveals a sheet of paper covered in numbers that turns out to be the date, location and death totals for nearly every major disaster between 1959 and 2009. And there are just three dates left. Cue the spooky music.

Unfortunately many things work against such a promising start.

  • Nick Cage is a one facial expression actor.
  • The film can’t decide if it wants to be a horror, action or alien encounter movie.
  • It veers wildly back and forth between actual science and Rapture inspired religious mumbo-jumbo.
  • And did I mention that Nick Cage really sucks the air out of every scene?

Of course widowhood reared its head. Cage’s character is a widower who drinks himself to sleep every night while staring morosely at the unopened birthday gift his wife died before having the chance to give him the year before, and there is cgi galore. The end is part Michael Bay/part Spielberg AI. And there are two adorable children. Something for everyone and therein lay the problem. No focus. Story drifted and then would scream off in an almost opposite direction.

I hate it when good story ideas are treated so badly. Some people should not be allowed to make movies.