I got an email from The GAP this morning touting their new wide leg pants. I have wide legs so this was of great interest to me. I opened the mail and clicked on the link and got this description:

“ultra low fit khakis are a must for Spring.

sits ultra low on the waist
hits below the navel
fits straight through the hip”

thereby confirming that I am not in the target demographic for the GAP (and that capital letters are apparently out of fashion).

The good news is that every single picture of these pants shows no abdomen – none! I looked at the shirts currently in vogue and they are all loooong.

I find this heartening. Someone in the fashion business has finally decided that young women don’t really need to walk around looking like hookers ready to turn a quick trick.

Go GAP!

I got an email from The GAP this morning touting their new wide leg pants. I have wide legs so this was of great interest to me. I opened the mail and clicked on the link and got this description:

“ultra low fit khakis are a must for Spring.

sits ultra low on the waist
hits below the navel
fits straight through the hip”

thereby confirming that I am not in the target demographic for the GAP (and that capital letters are apparently out of fashion).

The good news is that every single picture of these pants shows no abdomen – none! I looked at the shirts currently in vogue and they are all loooong.

I find this heartening. Someone in the fashion business has finally decided that young women don’t really need to walk around looking like hookers ready to turn a quick trick.

Go GAP!

I’ve been playing the ‘wannabe’ writer game for a long time. When I was in high school I had some notion to go to journalism school but I ended up studying physiology instead. I took exactly one humanities course in my three and half years in school. Then I ended up becoming a computer programmer which was about as far from writing as you can get. After moving up the career chain and ultimately becoming a manager and losing my technical chops I finally started taking a writing course or two. I loved it but I didn’t really do the work what with the full time job and the little kids and no husband and all. My most recent foray in the world of writing was to try NanoWriMo in 2003. I wrote 36,000 words in a month since I was laid off and had lots of time on my hands. I have yet to go back and read those words, fearing they are the worst drek produced in this area since God was a baby.

Now we have blogs, the great literary/journalistic frontier. Anybody can have a blog – it’s free! What keeps me from writing now is an utter lack of confidence. I’m no getupgrrl and I’m no Heather Armstrong and Lord knows I’m no Ayelet Waldman, the pro amongst us. Until I met her today I used to put off writing by hearing her voice in my head saying, “Kids, don’t try this at home!” and just like that! – I was off the hook. When I went into my mewling ‘I wish I were a writer’ routine what she actually said was, “Just write 1 page a day, just 300 words. At the end of the year you’ll have a novel.” Curses! Nothing like transmogrifying the devil on my left shoulder into the angel on my right. So do be an angel, dear and don’t nag me, – okay?

(307 words!)

ps – she is NOT fat.

Blogroll Me!

I live in a suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area. I moved here from Oakland when my oldest kid was soon to start kindergarten. I couldn’t bear the thought of finding my way through the Oakland public school system and with the impending arrival of my 3rd kid we needed a bigger house so we defected to what I know refer to as Chichiville,

Out here inthe ‘burbs the houses are expensive, people drive high end cars and we have excellent public schools – schools that maintain their excellence at least in part by a high level of parental involvement and financial generosity. The trend over the last 5 or so years has been to establish an “education fund” that collects more money from every family at the beginning of the year than most American families spend on vacation. The money is then used to fund various programs. Raising half a million dollars for a district of 5 or 6 schools is not uncommon. For some, being the Ed fund treasurer means never having to take a second mortgage to fund the H2 or kitchen remodel you are lusting after.

Two cases showed up in the local paper just this week. Two separate Moms managing 2 separate funds have been charged. One of them stole $80,000 and the other stole $50,000. With all the stealth and cunning of a Navy Seal operation they simply wrote checks from the funds to themselves or deposited the checks made out to the funds into their own checking accounts – I’ve heard both stories.

Only one woman has been fully charged and named. A quick Google search shows that in addition to being treasurer of her local Education Fund, she was ‘Cheer Director’ of the local pee wee football league I wonder if she took odds on the games? I can see her on the sidelines now, screaming to little Johnny – “Run honey, run! FASTER!!! Mommy needs a new Thermador!”

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Jet Li was vactioning on the Maldives when the big waves hit. He managed to grab his child and his maid and scramble for higher ground. His family survived. An article on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB.com) say this:

“Martial arts superstar Jet Li has spoken of his terror, running from the Indian Ocean tidal wave last month. The Hero actor was holidaying in the Maldives with his family, when the tsunami hit the coast line and caused widespread death and destruction to the surrounding countries. At a celebrity fundraiser concert in Hong Kong on Friday, Li told the audience, “The waves came really quickly and formed swirls. I carried my daughters and pulled my maid and ran. I’d only walked three steps when I realized that the water had already come up to my waist. When I looked back, everything I saw minutes ago was gone. Everything was surrounded by the ocean. The houses collapsed. I continued to run but the water was already up to my mouth.” Li and his family managed to find lifejackets in their hotel as they waited for a second round of bigger waves to hit the island. Li has donated $158,000 to the tsunami relief fund and marks the tragic event as a defining moment in his life. He adds, “Some things I dared not do in the past, I am ready to do them now”
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And that’s how it goes when we are confronted with our own mortality. It doesn’t matter who you are or how exciting or fulfilling your life is; when you are faced with death what you see are the holes in your life – the unfinished projects, the unexpressed intentions, the dangling relationships and the experiences that take place only in your head.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans felt that way after 9/11. Some of them changed their lives dramatically and some just thought about changing their lives and motored on. I did a little of each. Writing is one of those things I’m alway ‘going’ to do. Thanks to the wonder of the internet and blogging technology I finally have a place where I can write a hundred or so words and feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I blog therefore I am? I keyed that phrase into my trusty Google search bar and it returned 7180 results. For my next death defying act I think I’ll try to be original.

All in all I had a pretty good year if you don’t count the part about my Mom dying and then me losing my job. The Mom dying part was hard and I will probably write about it in detail some day. I actually sat next to my mother and held her hand while died and no amount of reading about how that would go could have prepared me for how it really did go. I’d like to thank Mitch Albom for his sappy little book about dying that actually made the process much easier for me to endure. The idea that my Mom might meet people from her past and be able to reconcile some of the many and enormous hurts in her life was very comforting even if it was completely contrived. When you come right down to it, everything we think about dying is mostly contrived except for the part about white light and peace. Enough people have had near death experiences to confirm that one.

I ‘lost’ my job much the way I might ‘lose’ someone at a party who is a little too focused on self aggrandizement or on my boobs (ha ha – that’s a little joke as my boobs are not worth focusing on). I did not like that job. The company was fine and a lot of the people were fine but I didn’t fit in and I never felt comfortable and although I liked my boss as a person I really disliked him as a manager. So I left.

I then spent 4 lovely months doing this and that including working as a volunteer at 826 Valencia, an activity that fills me with nearly as much joy as I get from my children. I work one afternoon a week at the tutoring center helping young children with their homework and I put in some time out at various high schools and at Everette Jr. High helping with writing projects. I just love it and one of these days I’ll have time to indulge myself with teaching and tutoring as a full time endeavor.

For now I have a contract and will be returning to work. I’m hoping to be able to do some work with 826 still but we’ll see how it goes. In my line of work the hours tend to be really long. I also just turned 50 and I’m adjusting to that idea. I’m supposed to run a marathon in May and do a mini-triathlon in July or August which is a self aggrandizing way of saying that I’m in great health and damned glad of it.

Happy New Year to all! May 2005 bring us a big fat impeachment followed by a regime change to people with enough sense to terminate this miserable war. A girl can dream, right?

Is blog a verb? I think it probably is now… it is, it is!

Have you noticed how just about any word that gets used a lot shows up in a dictionary? Have you noticed how many dictionaries there are? For those of us who used to think that words and grammar were sacred I have but one thing to say – get a fucking life! In the 21st Century it is open season on words. Words are ours to own, manipulate and use as desired. If you don’t understand a word just do your best to figure it out from context. For example, my kid told me that we got ‘major props’ on the food at a party I threw. Wow, major props! Rock on and WTF? Turns out I’m just a dork and I didn’t know that ‘major props’ means ‘compliments of the highest order’. But who wants to use an antiquated term like that and sound like an old lady with a face that looks like she must have a stick up her ass? Not me!

Getting back to the point at hand, there are zillions of blogs in the blogsphere. The good ones are topical – I finally figured that out after reading many, many blogs, some of which were informative and captivating and many which were boooorrrriiiiinngggg. The topics about which people blog are endless. Knitting, travel, being a parent, not being able to be a parent (some of my personal favorites), being homosexual, beer, and there is always politics. There are awards for blogs, many awards. For example there is the Diarist Award and the BOB award, The Best of British Blogging and The Asia Weblog Awards, The Australian Blog Awards, and The WizBang Awards (apparently limited to 2003), to name but a few. Some blogs carry massive amounts of advertising which gets us back to the original point. Why work when you can just blog all day? There must be a way to make a living off of a blog. I’ve got to figure this out or I will have to keep working and that’s just no good – no good at all. Maybe I just need to mount a bunch of advertisments and make up an award. Think it will work?