So we watched another widow movie entitled Smart People with Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, that girl from Juno and Thomas Haden Church. I really don’t know why I like widowed people movies so much – the comedy ones in particular. Perhaps it is because I equate my experience as a dramedy rather than a Lifetime Movie for Women. I had as many up and really surreal and satirical moments as I did sad grief-drenched ones. Read Full Article
Monday MEME
Except I was never cool. I was so uncool that as a teacher I took to telling my students that I was above cool. That’s how distant a relationship I have had with being cool.
I found this list over at Mad Hatter ages ago and thought it might be worth a meme.
In the 1970’s
I listened to Casey Kasem’s Top Forty Countdown every Sunday afternoon without fail.
I wore “husky” sized pants from J.C. Penney’s.
I played with Barbies and married them off to my brother’s G.I. Joe’s.
I rode the Schwinn banana seat bike I got for my 7th birthday until I was in junior high and my knees hit the handle bars. I loved that bike to the point I had to be pried from it.
I stuffed envelopes for Jimmy Carter during the 1976 election campaign.
I walked everywhere I didn’t ride my bike, so the oil embargo thing didn’t affect me much that I can remember.
I was too fat to wear a halter top.
I was too young to go to disco’s.
I read Rich Man, Poor Man because I wasn’t allowed to watch the mini-series, which was probably a lot less racy.
When I could finally drive, my car was a 1972 Dodge Dart.
In the 1980’s
I graduated from high school and then university.
I never voted for Ronald Regan.
I thought Madonna was a slut.
I cut the neckline out of my sweat shirts and chopped off the sleeves even though I never saw FlashDance or even liked the soundtrack.
I loathed aerobics.
I watched Dallas but not Dynasty.
I was a Santa Barbara fan after I gave up on General Hospital.
I watched Luke and Laura get married but not Charles and Diana.
I drove a 1976 Plymouth and then a 1986 Ford Tempo.
I moved away from home and never really looked back.
In the 1990’s
I survived the Midwest Flood of ’93. Two weeks without running water.
I traveled for the first time in my life to NYC and Washington D.C.
I bought my first house.
I wrote my first novel.
I met and married my first husband.
I ran, lifted weights, kick-boxed, earned a black-belt in Tae Kwon Do and coached girls’ basketball.
In the 2000’s
I became a mother and then a step-mother.
I lost my husband to a progressive illness.
I met and married my second husband.
I emigrated to Canada.
I retired from teaching.
I became a writer.
I got published for the first time.
I wrote another novel.
I took up Yoga.
I quit watching television.
I took up blogging and befriended a world of virtual people.
I drove a Chevy Malibu and then an Avalanche and Equinox.
I am still not cool.
What about you?
I blog, therefore I cannot work in the Obama White House. I also Facebook and have been a member of numerous on line communities from soap opera fan site and widow support groups to parenting sites where I discussed all manner of reproduction minutia that would make the skin literally crawl off anyone assigned the task of checking out my cyber-trail.
In addition to outing one’s own behavior, good, bad and pornographic on the great WWW, a person coveting a position on the President-elect’s second coming team will also have to cough up the goods on his/her spouse and all their grown children (no word on the age at which they will be considered grown but as any parent can attest, children can be an embarrassment at nearly any point in their lives).
I have blogged so extensively about my life for the last decade I can be certain that I will 1) never get a job with Obama and 2) possibly just never be viably employed again given the work world’s obsessive need to know what I do on my off hours.
I guess I can see the Obama people’s point. Their guy is going to have a tough time as it is. He doesn’t need to worry about what his “people” have been up to on the ‘net. And while I don’t believe it is fair play to dig up blog posts or comments from years ago to try and tarnish a person’s reputation, because this implies we are all set in stone and incapable of growth or change, I can understand an employer’s side of things. Blogging and other social networking is like the tattoo your mom or dad told you not to get because you would regret it someday. But they were old and uncool and you knew better, didn’t you? So now, Lola or Chad is history you can barely recall – because of the amount of alcohol you were consuming back then – but the tat you got in their honor is still there, faded and starting to visibly sag. If only you had listened to your unhip parents.
The same can be said, of course, for that post you wrote about having sex with that guy you didn’t really want to have sex with or the time you twittered about the pub crawl – while you were mid crawl – and provided photos to boot. Or maybe those pictures are on your MySpace or Facebook page, tagged for all to correctly identify you.
And let’s not forget the mommy bloggers out there who are ruining their children’s futures with every stroke of the keypad.
A full confession for Team Obama includes among other things: all websites, every alias and a recap of every time you flamed someone or went off on a Keith Olbermann rant. Flaming alone would get my resume circularly filed. Soap opera sites are dog eat dog, people.
My worst peccadillo was replying to a post on the widow board about whiny people. The author felt indifferent to the point of being cold to non-widoweds problems and resented having to listen to them because they were trivial. I replied that this didn’t bother me as much as widowed who did the same thing (whined about little things) because the non-widowed didn’t have a sense of perspective (actually people who have experienced great tragedy in general have this sense of what is really important – well most do). I was chastised off the board while being reminded that only the widowed are allowed to elevate mole hills to mountains – so there. Probably my least shiny moment. One day I might let that go. But not today.
So what’s in your Internet Closet? Publish porn much? Frequent Yahoo chat rooms just to pick ideological fights? Have an alias persona on Facebook? The President-elect would like to know, so he can disqualify you.
anniegirl1138 