Happy Halloween!

This entire post is stolen blatantly, word for word, from today's Wonkette. Thanks, Wonkette, for making my Halloween witchilicious!

Lil’ Sarah Palin Wants Welfare Handouts 

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Family Circus

Dolly’s sadistic parents have dressed her as America’s most-hated angry dingbat, so the neighbors will feed her poison. 

Here's What I'm Talking About

The kind of thing that's worrying me these days...



and another:



Hat tip to The Huffington Post.

Tragedy and Travesty

Of course, you've all seen the CNN and Weather Channel footage of Hurricane Ike.  And the coverage of the horrendous train accident in Los Angeles. 

My heart goes out to all those who suffer, and my gratitude is immense that my friends in Houston are safe, even if their homes sustained damage. 

On a micro scale, things aren't much better. One friend has been forced to hospitalize a child, just to make certain that insurance will "kick in" for the residential treatment the child needs. Two other families, both connected with the school system in different districts around the state, have insurance that is so worthless that their health is being compromised.  

And, in the face all this national pain, those who wish to be our leaders continue to smile and lie - so very certain of their position, facts be damned.

I see Sarah Palin, and I am reminded of Reagan - a plastic face with no relation to reality. My biggest fear is that the press and the public will continue to present more and ever more evidence of her unsuitability for any public office, but that none of the evidence will matter. Reagan, once called the "Teflon President," will appear - in retrospect - to have been covered with Velcro instead.

What can we do?  

Tonight I want to throw up my hands. 

But tomorrow I will try to remember that all I can do is live where I live in a way that demonstrates my beliefs. I can walk slowly, think clearly, and speak carefully. 

And I can try to find hope.

North of Achilles' Heel, Somewhere in Tendonville

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned somewhere in this blog that approaching fifty makes me feel like an American car with 100,001 miles on it; things are starting to go just a wee bit wrong, becoming marginally less reliable, slightly less predictable.

The most disturbing of these changes rests somewhere deep within my metabolism. While it's been decades since I willingly displayed my stomach on a beach, I've always been able to knock off  some pounds with exercise when I wanted to. And even when I didn't want to exercise formally, I've stayed pretty active.  

Appearances can be so very deceiving, and if you saw me walking down the street you might think I was the queen of lazy (especially if you couldn't see my legs). I love the look on a new doc's face when, expecting to deliver a standard lecture on cholesterol and blood sugar and the error of my ways, she sees my lab results and then, just to be sure, double checks my blood pressure.  "Still 108/60?" I inquire. "Yep," she admits. Another good one? When a massage therapist, expecting to plunge his or her hands into peanut butter or jelly, encounters instead the muscles in my legs. "So what do you do to work out?" I hear, kind of, as I drift off to a half-sleep.

But my body? She's a traitorous bitch. My new best friend, menopause, apparently has 15 surly cousins....the pounds that have snuck in since March. Yes, you heard me, SINCE MARCH. They're stealthy, well-distributed, not really enough to move me up a size, just enough to make me feel cumbersome and lumpy. 

The summer in Texas may be a contributing factor. I missed the walking and hiking and biking availble in Oregon. About all the outdoor exercise I'm willing to do around here from June until mid-September is uncork a bottle of wine. 

I am fiercely anti-scale, so I only met these slatternly additions today at my doctor's office. Why was I there?  The title says it all.

I am pissed, royally pissed, at those pounds.  I refuse to believe that I cannot sweat them off. I will not take estrogen to make it easier.  I will do it the old fashioned way, and I will even give up cheese.  So I joined the YMCA near Small Child's school. And I did not start slowly. Nope, not me.  I visualized every one of those pounds as a frumpy Sarah Palin in elastic-waist pants (this made easier by the fact that the only cable news show available in the room was FOX) and went after them like an Alaskan shooting wolves from a plane. After ten days, nothing had changed.

Except my left ankle.

I was going to ignore it.  After all, I thought, what could I have possibly done to injure it? I'm no athlete. I wasn't even running. Maybe the double cardio sessions were a bit much, but given the circumstances that was probably what it was going to take to see results so I might as well suck it up. I settled with a couple of days off. After the second one, things weren't any better. Just the opposite.

So, Wednesday night, I casually mentioned the pain in the back of my ankle to The Man.  He didn't look up from his book (Who does when his wife complains about something? And I should probably mention that he is an ex-jock from the "tape an aspirin to it" school of athletic training), but muttered, "Is it swollen?" I said I couldn't tell and asked him to take a look.

His reply?

"That looks nasty. You need to see Our Doctor tomorrow."

That's when I actually looked at the Achilles tendon areas of both ankles and noticed that the left one had an obvious bulge. I rolled my eyes, said I'd think about it, and tugged on a compression sleeve the next morning. No improvement whatsoever.

So today I gave in.

Diagnosis: tendonitis. Pretty bad (I think that's a technical term). The good news is that it isn't partially ruptured...yet. I'm banned from the treadmill and consigned to the bike, which Our Doctor adores but which I despise with every fiber of my being. I begged for the eliptical and she relented as long as it didn't get any worse. I get to bop about town in lace-up shoes (fashionista!) with a gooshy heel cup. I left with a month's worth of Celebrex samples. If it doesn't improve with TLC, I'm off for an MRI and PT.

So, for all of you with odometers in the lower ranges...enjoy your young, reliable bodies while you can.

And don't forget to stretch.

Sadness and Rage

I feel sadness for a young woman, alone in a spotlight in Alaska, who made a mistake many young women make. My sadness is increased exponentially by the cultural policies of the state in which she was raised, policies shared by my home state, policies which deprive young men and women of the information they need to protect themselves from disease and pregnancy.

Oh surely, you say, she knew how not to get pregnant. Perhaps. Even likely. But I grew up in a home where such things were not discussed, not for religious or political reasons but for generational ones. I am forever grateful for the good sex education I received. Along with memorizing the symptoms of primary, secondary and tertiary syphilis, I had to learn all the then-available methods of contraception and their efficacy.  And then I took a test. And that test was averaged in to my seventh grade health mark on my report card. Yes, in Texas.

But the rage? That is directed directly at her mother.  Yes, I know that children act independently of their parents' wishes and expectations. I certainly did. But I detect more than a whiff of disingenuousness. 

I know I just took a vow of political silence.  So I will let the beautifully eloquent words of  Karen Maezen Miller speak for me. I quote today's post from her blog, Cheerio Road, in its entirety and with her permission:

Seeing the soft bigotry of low expectations

With apologies to those who expected more or less of me.

There was once a supremely arrogant and idiotic man who mouthed this line of someone else's melodic prose – "the soft bigotry of low expectations" – to decry the educational imprisonment of the underprivileged. Nevermind that by his every action he condemned these underprivileged to further generations of poverty, invisibility, exploitation and pain.

Now I see what those words mean.

When you blithely send your firstborn to war and call it foreign relations.
When you leave your three-day-old at home and call it working motherhood.
When you don a dimestore tiara and call it a star.
When you adamantly oppose sex education in public schools and silence comment on your daughter's teenage pregnancy by calling it a private matter.
When you cynically manipulate the future of the world and call it a game.
When you ignore the rules of reason, experience, wisdom, truth, legitimacy, decency and public trust and call it a gamechanger.

I see what it means.

Call me a bigot. But do not expect me to take any more or make any less of this.

Thank you, Karen, for your wise and passionate words. 

And, to that young woman in Alaska: I wish you well.