2 of my 3 kids were in college last semester (Humbly Ann graduated!).

Both of them got straight As.

Babies, you done your Mama proud!

NARAL is inviting bloggers to Blog for Choice on January 22nd. If you are pro-choice please go to their site and sign up.

If you are anti-choice don’t bother posting a comment letting me know that – I’ll just delete it. It’s my blog and I get to do what I want with it.

Won’t you drop me a line???

ps – I’m playing with my template – it will be a while before I get it right. Please stand by…..

Alhtough I do run and I am going to be training for the SF marathon starting in about March, this is not a runner’s blog. Today it especially became not a runner’s blog because I got a new bike yesterday and I am in love with it. I went for a 2 hour ride today and it was most enjoyable. The sun made a rare appearance and I live in an area with great trails and the bike is smooth and light and easy to ride. I am also really enjoying swimming lately so that’s 2 reasons I won’t be writing about running very often.

I’m not sure what will happen when it comes time to run again but run I shall because I already paid my charter member registration fee (a mere $75!) and I’m in, baby. I am soooo in. Thanks today and every day to all of you real runners because I take a lot of inspiration from your blogs. Especially Jeanne because I have a long distance, internet based girl crush on her. I hope her Mom is doing better.

Alhtough I do run and I am going to be training for the SF marathon starting in about March, this is not a runner’s blog. Today it especially became not a runner’s blog because I got a new bike yesterday and I am in love with it. I went for a 2 hour ride today and it was most enjoyable. The sun made a rare appearance and I live in an area with great trails and the bike is smooth and light and easy to ride. I am also really enjoying swimming lately so that’s 2 reasons I won’t be writing about running very often.

I’m not sure what will happen when it comes time to run again but run I shall because I already paid my charter member registration fee (a mere $75!) and I’m in, baby. I am soooo in. Thanks today and every day to all of you real runners because I take a lot of inspiration from your blogs. Especially Jeanne because I have a long distance, internet based girl crush on her. I hope her Mom is doing better.

I’d like to welcome my new tenant, Mystickal Incense who does not sell Peppermints but who does sell incense, soap and candles and who writes great posts. She is also hosting a snake naming contest so trot on over and toss your favorite names in the ring! Just click the link over there —->

I was just reading Jo’s anniversary post over at Leery Polyp and decided to see how many months of blogging I have under my belt. It seems I have been at this for a year. I had no idea. I don’t remember why I did it although I think I documented my motives at one point. A whole year and I have garnered a readership of about 3 people. Don’t get me wrong, ladies. I love you with all of my cyber heart and soul and thank you for hanging in there with me. That would be Jessica, Jeanne, and Tama with a couple other drive bys now and again (most notably panthergirl and C-8). I also have my sweet daughter, Humbly Ann as a fairly consistent reader and it’s possible that her little sister Pookie stops by now and then. Now that I mention it I’m in very good company!

I’d say I’m going to resolve in 2006 to be more interesting and work harder to increase my readership but I’d be lying. I do this for my own amusement. The blogosphere has gotten huge and I’ve never been one to try to grab attention in a crowd. I’m not about to start now but I will keep writing because what else am I going to do with all of those crazy thoughts that rattle around in my head? I hope that from time to time I give you a laugh or a sense of kinship. Hang in there and I’ll try to make it worth your while.

Daphne Merkin’s piece in the NYT on New Year’s Day entitled “Our Vaginas, Ourselves” is uproariously funny in a skin crawling way.

These are cruel times for vaginas. Lately, as if I don’t have enough to worry about, with the deadline on various unkept 2005 resolutions fast upon me, I have begun obsessing about various aspects of my genital appearance.

She goes on to expose and lampoon (poon- get it?) all the various cooter taming procedures that are becoming so popular – Brazilian wax (oh no – there’s hair down there! remove! remove!), labial sculpting, vaginal tightening and the truly incomprehensible hymen reattachment (because that brand of searing pain just once is not enough – we need more!).

Okay, I confess that I do shave my bikini line and I might even do a little trimming but come at my yoni with a bowl of hot wax and I’ll gouge your eyes out.

All I can say is the very day that someone decides saggy, hairy testicles are a problem in need of hot wax and a knife is the day esthetology will be outlawed across the board. Fight back ladies – set your cooters free!

I finally had an occasion to use the strikeout tag – I had to update my profile from 50 to 51.

Having a birthday 4 days after Christmas can be a total drag. No one wants to deal with yet another party, more presents, more food and sweets. I have but one photo of a birthday party from when I was a kid. In college no one was around at my birthday since my Mom had moved away from my hometown and the college town I lived in emptied out. When I was married it got a little better because at least my husband and my kids would recognize the date. My Mom was always good about getting me a present but still no party. My ex threw a surprise party when I turned 30. By the time I was 40 I had been divorced for a while so I threw my own party – it was great! Last year we had harmonic convergence in my family where my kids turned 16, 18, and 21 and I turned 50 within the same calendar year so we had another big old party. Again – it was great.

Me being passed down the pike at my 40th birthday party

This year my bookgroup friends met me at Peets for coffee. Some brought cards and presents but mostly it was just the recognition and support that warmed my heart. I think this is just about one of the most special birthdays I’ve ever had. My little Pookie got me some pants and a shirt that are very nice, my son is borrowing my car to get me something, Humbly Anne called from the mid-west where she has been spending the holidays and I am having dinner with my ex’s mother and her oldest daughter who shares my birthday. This will be the first time in the 25 years we’ve known each other that we celebrated together.

When I was in my early 30s a friend gave me a card that said, “Never older, always better”. It seems she was right.

I first heard the word ‘meme’ way back in the 80s when I was a Wellpern. A Wellpern was (and possibly still is) a person who interacts on The Well . In those days you had to dial directly into the Well’s modem bank (at about 300 baud) and use their crazy, proprietary system called picospan. It was this primitive but effective ASCII text based BBS system.

The Well was young and hip and was the home of the hard core cyberati having been founded by Stuart Brandt and Larry Brilliant of Whole Earth Catalog fame. Howard Rheingold posted frequently. Jon Carroll, one of my two favorite columnists for the San Francisco Chronicle was also a frequent participant. There was a futurist from SRI named Tom Mandel who was the focus of a running joke about his genitals, his penis allegedly being just about the right size for a termite or something like that. . There was a collective running joke about plutonium butt plugs – who had one, how it was being used, who got it next – that sort of thing. I could have participated in forums about the environment or gardening or parenting but I went for the off-beat ones like ‘Weird’ and ‘UnClear’.

The thing about The Well was that the people who ‘hung out’ there were intellectuals – they were smart and funny and hip and cultured. I was married to a knee-jerk, conservative, red neck, anti-intellectual and my relationship with The Well was my version of having an affair to relieve the ennui of my marriage. Like all affairs this one was doomed for discovery and was destined to destroy the relationship it violated.

When we moved from Oakland to the Suburbs, access to The Well got really expensive. I had to use metered minutes of phone time as well as paying the monthly fee and I had to keep it all secret from my husband. We had 3 or 4 phone lines at the time so I guess I used one of the business lines to pull off this virtual slight of hand. My office was this little hidey hole, illegal add-on off the back of our garage (accessible from within the house) and I would go down there to ‘work’ and to log into The Well and trade witty repartee with the cool kids. I will never forget my first post. I broke out into a sweat as soon as I submitted it and when I next logged in and saw that there was a response I blushed and I panted and my fingers trembled as I started reading it. Of course I had said something totally dorky and was thoroughly rebuked for it and so I retreated for a while, wrapped in the comfortable mantle of my low self esteem.

I kept at it, though. I got smarter and regained some confidence and I posted more frequently Occasionally I got a cyber-laugh in response. I was enraptured with my new found paradise and had an epiphany that the world really was still populated with smart fun people who cared about books and politics and social issues and who used their brains and that I didn’t have to live in the low oxygen cocoon I had somehow spun for myself. The phone bills mounted up and up, frequently exceeding $50 a month which was a fair chunk of change to hide at the time. Still, this was my secret love, the strong comfortable hands that gently touched my body and soul and I had no intentions of giving it up. If I heard my husband approaching the office I would quickly hit some arcane sequence of keys that would swap the green screen from one application to the next (this was a pre-Windows situation).

One of the things I bumped into on The Well was someone who studied and followed memes. At that time a meme was not a funny internet game that you used to pass around personal aspects of your life that you give up to the collective conscience. It was a concept so deeply intellectual and so laden with cultural gravitas that it was discussed only by the most intellectual, most cyber literate people in the world (note The Well’s intro to see what I mean). So what if it was really just the crap Faith Popcorn made a living ‘predicting’ . Memes are also just common expressions that get passed around and how that happens is pretty interesting but not that interesting. I decided I didn’t really like the meme people and wandered back to the more comfortable stomping grounds where people joshed around about termite sized genitals and plutonium butt plugs.

One evening I was so deep in the thick of the Secret Life of a Suburban Wife that I almost didn’t hear the husband approach. As he opened the door I finally managed to hit the magic affair hiding key sequence. He stood there in the doorway looking concerned and asked me, ‘What are you doing?”. “Oh nothing”, I replied. “Just answering some messages from US Leasing”. “Oh really?”, he asked crossing his arms and frowning, “And what do plutonium butt plugs have to do with the leasing business?”

I don’t even remember what happened after that. I vaguely recall having a moderate out of body experience as I realized it was all over – I was busted. I stammered out some explanation of how that butt plug thing wasn’t part of the work messages, that I had this sort of funny on-line community thing, etc. etc…. but after that it was never the same.

I didn’t give it up right away. I kept participating albeit less frequently. In the early 90s The Well was sold to an Entrepreneur named Bruce Katz who had the audacity to provide Internet access to the sacred grounds upon which the original Wellperns trod. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. How could he let the common folk in to sully up the white sand beaches of their collective intellect?

Tom Mandel, sadly enough, died of lung cancer and as far as I could tell Howard Reingold got too busy globe trotting and evangelizing technology to hang out in the halls anymore . I got an Internet account but not with The Well. Alas, my affair was over and it was time to move on to the rest of the World Wide Web.

The Well did me good, though. It reminded me that it was okay to be a thinking person and to care about things beyond cleaning the kitchen and putting the diapers out on the porch so the service could pick them up. Ultimately I started asking for more from my marriage and like me, my husband found an outlet to escape a marriage burdened wtih features not to his liking. Of course that comes as no surprise because as the old meme goes – what goes around comes around.