The Most Beautiful Insect of All Sting sang (really ungrammatically), “If you love somebody, set them free.” I guess my son really loved his pet praying mantis, because a week or so ago, he came to me and said he had decided to set her free. I agreed it was time. Friends had found her [...]
Entries from November 2008
November 22, 2008
Gay Marriage 101
Teach Your Children Well When Prop 8 was passed this November in California, my kids were stunned. They knew about the proposition, but they assumed it would easily be voted down–after all, why would anyone have a problem with two people in love wanting to get married? It didn’t make sense to them. I couldn’t explain [...]
November 19, 2008
Miserable Is the Enemy of Kind
Behavior 101 For some reason, when I couldn’t sleep last night (as opposed to when I couldn’t sleep every other night this week), I started thinking about whether or not I’m a kind person. I want to be. Which maybe sounds obvious but isn’t. I know plenty of people who would choose “successful, respected, powerful, [...]
November 16, 2008
Our Beauty is Their Sadness
The Southern California fires It smells like smoke everywhere you go right now. We can’t keep our windows open because the air outside is so much worse than the air inside. I’m used to the natural air conditioning of living close to the ocean: just throw the windows wide open in the morning and keep [...]
November 12, 2008
Being Thankful . . . That November’s Almost Over
A Thanksgiving tradition We have a family tradition at Thanksgiving. One holiday, a long time ago, I handed everyone a different colored Sharpie and told our family and guests to write down whatever they were thankful for at that moment, right on the white tablecloth we were using. The younger kids, who couldn’t write yet, dictated to the [...]
November 11, 2008
Knitting Animatedly
I love to knit. I don’t do it as much as I’d like to because . . . well, four kids, two dogs, one cat–the yarn has a way of getting all tangled up when I’m not looking. Still, when the stars align and I have some time to lie in bed and watch TV, it feels [...]
November 9, 2008
The Art of Blogging
New blog design By “art of blogging,” I mean literally that–I changed the artwork and the design. It was really tough, creative, exhilerating work. No, actually, I just clicked through a bunch of different themes on wordpress and picked this one. I really loved the artwork on the old design–the “girl in green” who looked [...]
November 7, 2008
Ruminations on a Half-Chewed Snickers Wrapper
There’s a Shakespeare quote that goes something along the lines of “like a dog to his vomit, the fool returns to his folly” (I could look up the exact wording and it would take me precisely ten seconds on Google, but I’m tired of how easy it is to be right and am taking a [...]
November 5, 2008
I’m a Loser
I did it again: I forgot to write something on the calendar and scheduled something else and ended up scrambling today, trying desperately to reconcile the fact that I was committed to two equally important things at exactly the same time and there was no graceful way to solve it–and that it was one hundred [...]
November 2, 2008
Proof that One Man’s Happiness is Another’s Despair
So I walked into the bedroom where the cat and dog were sleeping on the bed together and, as I entered, the big yellow dog started wagging his tail with happiness at seeing me, only because he was lying on the bed it was more of a “thwap-thwap-thwap” and the poor cat who was lying [...]
