Clutch Cargo

This is easy for me, since I'm not in Boston where it hit fifteen below today. I'm craving a cold cold day with dry snow on the ground and a huge pot of thick coffee just waiting to be drunk with cold cream, and no one to answer to but the absent writers of the New York Times.

How come right after I publish, it never seems to appear in the "recently published" window?

And can't someone find something interesting besides the Fox Searchlight blog? For god's sake, is Blogger just another PR shill like every other site and publication? Stop the celebrity/Hollywood ass-kissing madness!

It's hard enough feeling lost and stranded inside my own life and head, but with this blog, now I'm stranded in cyberspace, too. No one reads me. Well, I check in periodically and reread me, but I'm not sure that counts. Now, if I keep writing anyway, is that developing the creative habit? And if, against all my better judgment, I crave having someone read the inconsequential spurtings of my conscious and occasionally unconscious mind--what does that mean? If my whole obstacle to doing much of anything has been fear of having the results judged by outsiders, what does craving that judgment indicate? Am I changing, or simply vain? After all, as the wise Malena on "Average Joe" says, (and I paraphrase here) "Vanity is bad." Good thing she didn't go for the pretty boy...

It's both embarassing and reassuring when the woman who is paid an inordinate amount to analyze your psyche reads your mind, twice in one 50 minute hour, one instance astute, the other completely trivial. First, she nails me for "making a list" of all the character flaws I possess that I feel I can directly attribute to my mother. Not only that, she already knows that it's growing longer by the day. Then she knows before I ask that I want the statement for last month, so I can submit it to my ever-dwindling insurance program to recoup some of her (exorbitant) fee. Does this mean that I am not only passing the buck, but am also absurdly predictable? Maybe that's my mother's fault, too...

my two year old is spreading two chenille blankets, one green, one red and gold, into a mat on the floor in front of the giant television--prone being the preferred position for watching "A Bug's Life" for the tenth time in as many days. This is what you do when you're a two year old with the flu and a strep infection and two exhausted parents who have lost the will to fight.

BTW, the two year old in question titled this post. In case you were wondering.

There's nothing like a truly awful Thanksgiving to remind you just how shallow you are, just how unable you are to be thankful for the things that are working and wonder-full in your life--NOT the sick husband, sick child, dirty house, cancelled Thanksgiving feast, meal delivered on wheels by friends, now congealing (the meal, not the friends) on the kitchen counter. If I were writing for some crappy mass market Parade magazine-esque rag, I would find some lesson of hope in the fact that in spite of just how self pitying I am feeling today, I actually have come to a higher realization about my privileged place in the universe of mankind....nope. Just pissed. I love Thanksgiving, and this one sucked. But not as badly as the one my senior year of college, where I was stuck in dank New Haven (where, as one wise man quipped, it is always winter, and never Christmas) dining at the most expensive restaurant in town with a boy who doted on me and who I despised as a result. I slept with him, and may well have dumped him the next day. Merry Christmas-shopping season, sucker. It's nice to realize that my "better self" hasn't gotten any better with the passage of all this time.

One mommy to another, commenting on the headline PEDOPHILE EXPRIEST STRANGLED IN BOSTON :

"How would you like your life's accomplishments reduced to the headline 'PEDOPHILE EXPRIEST STRANGLED IN BOSTON'"?

Well, gee, not very much, actually.

Not. And I quote, from the Governator--apparent:

'The public doesn't care about figures. What the people want to hear is are you willing to make the changes. Are you tough enough to go in there and provide leadership. That's what this is about'...

Riiiiight....