Slices of My Life

2011-11-14T19:42:00.001-08:00

(Reprinted from my Facebook note from 4 March 2009)

I love this Navajo prayer. Years ago, I used to chant it while I walked for exercise. It turned my fitness walk into a meditation walk. I think I should start doing it again. There are variations on it, but I particularly like this version.

********************************************

In Beauty may you walk.
All day long may you walk.
Through the returning seasons may you walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may you walk.
With grasshoppers about your feet may you walk.
With dew about your feet may you walk.

With Beauty may you walk.
With Beauty before you, may you walk.
With Beauty behind you, may you walk.
With Beauty above you, may you walk.
With Beauty below you, may you walk.
With Beauty all around you, may you walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,
lively, may you walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,
living again, may you walk.
It is finished in Beauty.
It is finished in Beauty

Mitchum is the author of six novels, one collection of poetry, one collection of biographical essays, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Ruby Beach in Washington State

Another Lego Refugee Washes Ashore

2011-10-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

While I've been doing time, er, sorry, while I've been spending time in Florida with my friends and family here, an intriguing thing has happened. An 8' tall Lego man washed ashore on Siesta Key (Sarasota, FL). While that in itself is a pretty funny sight to behold, what has piqued my interest is the enigmatic message on his chest. "No real than you are." There is too much of the editor in me not to fill in the word that was left out. Should it not read, "No (more) real than you are?" That in itself is quite a statement, given that said Lego man is made of fiberglass. Although a brand new Legoland theme park has just opened up nearby in Winter Haven, on the grounds of the former Cypress Gardens, the park claims that it had nothing to do with the big Lego float. While it would be a great publicity stunt, I suspect they're telling the truth. If they'd been responsible, I think that it wouldn't have a typo on it, and they'd take responsibility for it and claim the object for the park. Why not?

Just because they aren't behind the stunt doesn't mean it isn't one. This is not the first of its kind. So far, I've found videos of two other nearly identical figures that have washed ashore. One in 2007 at Zandvoort in Holland and one that washed ashore in the UK at Brighton Beach. That was in 2008. Given that a new park just opened up in Florida a mere ten days before the arrival of the giant Lego man, I had to wonder if the appearance of the other figures coincided with other park openings, but upon further investigation, I discovered that the appearance of giant Lego men didn't start 2007. The park in the UK opened in 1996 and their big guy didn't appear until 2008. While I do think it's a publicity stunt, I don't think the Lego folks are behind it. According to an article in Sarasota, Florida's Herald-Tribune, an artist in the Netherlands, one Ego Leonard (name on the back of the giant Lego dudes), is responsible. They emailed the guy at his website and got a response in first person from Mr. Lego himself. The email reads:

"I am glad I crossed over. Although it was a hell of a swimm," the email said. "Nice weather here and friendly people. I think I am gonna stay here for a while. A local sheriff escorted me to my new home."

Apparently it takes this fellow two ems to "swimm" around the world. That is one hell of a swimm after all.

What I want to know is, how many more Lego men will show up? The one that landed in Holland had the number 9 on his back. I haven't been able to find the number on the UK man, but since the Florida one had the number 8, I suspect there are more to come unless the great white sharks out there are giving themselves indigestion by biting into these fiberglass babies. Blech!

If you want to learn more about Lego Man, a.k.a., Ego Leonard, he has his own website (of course he does!). http://www.egoleonard.nl And a Facebook page: V=http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001127118502&sk=wall He's also tweeting apparently. https://twitter.com/#!/egoleonard I just signed up to follow his plastic tweets. To read more about the first (known) Lego Man washing ashore, I refer you to: http://www.marketingvox.com/giant-lego-man-washes-ashore-in-holland-032233/ More about the Florida incident can be found at: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20111025/WIRE/111029721/-1/new?p=1&tc=pg and more about the UK one can be found in many places, but here's one link to get you started: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702121.stm

Happy Lego-ing. Thank you, Ego Leonard, for an interesting topic to occupy our idle hands/minds while you promote your art. Very effective marketing trick and nice pun off the Greek word for I (ego), as in I, Leonard, and the word Lego, which makes for an interesting subject for art as well as a statement about the plastic state of the world in general. Well done!

Videos of the Lego Finds:
Holland in 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=i5ezlcanXaY
UK in 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su9MtRJ-3cY&feature=related
USA (Florida) in 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB8ay2DojAA&feature=share

Beth Mitchum is the author of six novels, one collection of poetry, one collection of biographical essays, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Finding Balance in a Sea of Raging Hormones

2011-08-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've heard a lot of women complaining about psychotic mood swings arising from perimenopause. I hope you don't take ten years to figure it out like I did. I lost a lot of valuable time and jeopardized relationships by taking too long to figure out how to return to sanity and hormonal balance. I’m using a homeopathic menopause remedy made by Hylands to smooth out the bumps in my emotional path. I plan to continue to use it until I am long past menstruation.

http://www.hylands.com/products/menopause.php

If these don't work for you, I implore you to try something else that is natural before you resort to hormone replacement therapy (HRT). In some cases, HRT might be the only thing that works, but at least make sure you get bio-identical hormones, if you go this route. Some of the stuff out there is made from horse urine. Yes, you heard me right. One of the names it goes by is Premarin. Not only is this a form of cruelty to horses, but ew! Who wants to ingest horse urine?

http://antiagingguide.com/prempro_horseurine.htm

Homeopathy is a safe, alternative way of approaching wellness. It's been around a very long time. It's not always fast acting, but it does work for a lot of people. I take the menopause remedy every night (3 tablets) before I go to bed and any time I start feeling sad, depressed, weepy, bitchy, etc. I usually need them only once a day, but if I need them more, I know I can take more b/c they operate on infinitesimal dosages. I also use their insomnia remedy for the perimenopausal sleeplessness. I’m sleeping much better. Now if I can only convince my kitz that I need to sleep more than six hours at a time, I’ll be set. For you younger ladies, this same company has a menstrual remedy (PMS) as well.

http://www.hylands.com/products/pms.php

Women's wisdom about women's needs used to be passed down from generation to generation, with wise woman healers helping women through difficult patches. We got disconnected from this chain of wisdom and are out there being tossed about on the stormy seas of our hormones. I've been taking the menopause remedy for about six months or so, and I'm back to the more gentle, easy-going woman I used to be. If I start feeling too weepy, I take an extra dose of the stuff and maybe some of the Calms Forte formula too until it subsides. The Calms stuff (various formulas of this) usually works really fast on me and has none of the side effects of Zanax or the other things being pushed onto women in times of anxiety.

http://www.hylands.com/products/calms.php

Part of our midlife anxiety arises from the stress in our lives, but most of it is hormonal and needs to be eased back into balance rather than controlled by drugs. You need to control the mood swings in order to deal with the real sources of the anxieties. You may need to make lifestyle changes. You may need the spotlight to focus on the areas of your life that are out of balance. You may need to establish some boundaries or leave relationships, but more than anything, you need to be the one making the decisions about your life. Don't let the medical authorities take over for you. Empower yourself to make whatever decision you need to make by becoming informed. Menopause is not a disease any more than menstruation or pregnancy. Sometimes they get too complicated and you need medical people to intervene. But most of the time, all we need are food, herbs, and gentle alternative remedies (homeopathy, aromatherapy, massage, sound healing, flower essences, etc.) to return our bodies to a more balanced state.

Using synthetic hormones to treat normal and natural hormonal changes is like dropping a boulder on the other side of the scale to balance the weight. You might feel as though you need something that drastic to make the craziness stop, but you really don't, if perimenopause is the only underlying cause. Start experimenting with gentle, natural remedies as soon as you can to ease yourself back to balance. I’ve been studying women’s health for a couple of decades, so I’m very accustomed to taking charge of my health issues, but by all means, please consult a naturopath, if you’re unaccustomed to taking charge of your own health and don’t trust your research capabilities and resources. Once you find what works, keep doing it until you bid these crazy swings goodbye. Just bear in mind that you might need to treat yourself for a decade or more, which is another reason going the natural route is a better idea. Ten or more years on synthetic hormone replacement can cause other serious health issues.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/38211-side-effects-synthetic-hormones/

If you decide to use HRT to treat the symptoms of menopause, please insist on bio-identical hormones over horse urine. I don’t understand why any woman would knowingly choose to ingest horse urine. The problem is that they are not being informed about what they are taking, so you have to inform yourself. Don’t take my word for anything either. I’m not an expert on your body. No one knows you better than you. Not even your doctor. Your doctor is taught about pathology and not necessarily about wellness. There is a huge chasm between studying how to treat illnesses and studying how to prevent them by creating a lifestyle of wellness.

http://www.get-healthy-enjoy-life.com/synthetic-hormones.html

Don’t be like a lamb led to slaughter when you go to the doctor. There’s a good chance that your doctor is being influenced by the powerful pharmaceutical companies out there, who are looking only to make a profit. Sure, it’s easy just to pop a magic pill to calm the storm, but what sort of perfect storm are you setting yourself up for later down the line when the side effects all come together to create a true illness?

Menopause is not an illness, even though it sometimes feels like mental illness. I know I was feeling pretty insane by my 51st year. I was weepy and needy at times and angry and enraged at others. Mostly I was quietly depressed with episodes of sudden anxiety that had absolutely no basis in what was occurring in my life at the time. These bouts started slowly and infrequently around the age of forty and increased with age. None of these emotions felt like me, and yet I knew it was coming from inside my body for the most part. I was also opening up psychically at the same time. Increasingly I started picking up on other people’s energy. From what I’d read years ago about the crone stage of life, I knew this was part of perimenopause too, becoming increasingly empathetic towards others. I learned to shield myself when other people’s energy started impacting me too much, and I learned how to discern which emotions were mine and which were coming from someone else. I also figured out that the erratic mood swings were because of being perimenopausal, but I still didn’t know what to do about it. Finally when the crazies got too out of hand, I went online looking for natural answers. I found what works for me, and it was a combination of homeopathy and herbs, along with aromatherapy, massage, and trying to maintain a more peaceful, simpler lifestyle.

After all is said and done, you may still need something you can get only from your medical doctor, but don't acquiesce to radical medical treatment without doing the research and exploring gentle, alternative methods first. They’re usually much less expensive, but because they aren’t generally fast acting magic pills, you need to take charge before the next crazy episode. Start talking to other women in this age range and the ones who have gone before you. We have a wealth of knowledge and wisdom collectively. What works for me might not work for you and vice versa, but if we keep talking to one another, perhaps we’ll all find something natural and gentle that works. Then when our daughters and granddaughters reach this time of life, we’ll have more knowledge to help them through this as well.

The more connected women are to each other, the more solutions we can find together. If we remain in isolation, we are targets for those who want to tell us what our bodies need. They know medicine, but we know us. If you have a medical condition, then by all means seek medical help. Menopause is part of life...like giving birth, having periods, and letting go of loved ones when it's their time to leave. None of these things should fall under the auspices of medical treatment unless other issues arise in conjunction with them. There are plenty of women out there who have researched these things and some of them have done so with medical degrees to guide them. Dr Christiane Northrup is one of them.

http://www.drnorthrup.com/

Be aware that the pharmaceutical industry is the driving force behind much of what doctors are prescribing. I hope you've read enough to see how much harm indiscriminate use of any drug can cause. Or indiscriminate use of herbs too for that matter. Drugs originally came from herbs. They are strong medicine and not to be taken lightly either. The point is to be informed and talk to other women. If we remain isolation in our frustration and embarrassment about feeling so out of control of our emotions, then we are vulnerable to doctors and pharmaceutical companies who want to take over our health care. No one should ever take over our health care unless we are entirely incapable of handling it. If that is the case, then I'm pretty sure you're not reading this blog.

Beth Mitchum is the author of six novels, one collection of poetry, one collection of biographical essays, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Gearing Up for What's Next

2011-08-15T23:10:00.000-07:00

Since I don’t know where to start this blog, I might as well jump into the middle. That’s where I am in my life anyway-- midlife. At least as long as I live to be 102, which is unlikely. Truth be known, I’ve been having midlife crises for quite a while now, for at least a decade, I guess. This is partly because I’m perimenopausal and partly because of the strange times we’re living in these days, though they’re not really as hard as some make out. It's not like it was in the Great Depression when there were people who had to go to work on empty stomachs because there was nothing to eat, no money, not enough work, and no unemployment checks coming in weekly. People really should read a little more history to keep things in perspective. Even given these “troubled times,” a phrased overused a lot in the past couple of years, most of us still live like royalty in America in comparison to Third World countries and even mere decades ago. Most American households have multiple televisions and computers, among other things. I don’t watch much television when I live by myself, and I even have a nice one now. Of course that is because my best friend was visiting me while I lived in the Puget Sound area and she wanted to be able to watch sports during her visit. I owned a cheap 19-inch color television, but since her vision is less than stellar she bought me a 32-inch HD television with an LCD display. I've enjoyed watching DVDs on it and the Weather Channel of course. I even break down and watch a show now and then.

I’m a writer by trade, so my royal wealth is revealed mainly in the number of laptop computers I own. Yes, multiples, because of their tendency to develop weirdnesses after a few years. Since I have to be connected to the internet a lot to keep my various businesses operating, I buy a new laptop if my main one starts behaving badly. I usually keep at least one backup just in case something untoward happens to my main one. I recently acquired an extra, older laptop that had been retired by my friend who doesn’t wear them out the way I do. I think she replaced this one because it didn’t have a keypad, which is okay with me, since I’m used to not having one anyway. I use numbers a lot less than I use letters. She, on the other hand, is a high school math teacher. Thus the need for the keypad. Getting her old one brought my total collection to four. I just passed one on to my nephew, otherwise I’d have five, which is a bit excessive even for my tastes. But I digress.

I want to keep a journal on what I am about to do and how I am proceeding on my life’s path as it unfolds before me. I know that I’m on the right path, but I really need some guidance at the moment and a forum for untangling the threads of thought that are currently winding their way along my synapses. I need to process, I guess, and the best way for me to process things has always been to journal my thoughts. So let me bring you up to speed. If you’ve been following my blogs you’ll know basically how I got to this place in time. If not, you might want to back up a bit, but you really should read my first collection of autobiographal essays, Slices of My Life: So Far. That will make my life seem a little more sensible to some of you. Maybe.

I’m 51, and I’m living in my best friend’s house in Florida. This is not where I thought I’d be at this age and stage of life, but it is, however, where I am at the moment. While I’m glad to be able to spend more time with my buddy after twenty-five years away from this part of the world, I miss my chosen home, which is the Puget Sound region. It’s located in the Pacific Northwest part of the United States. I also miss having my own life. For various reasons, I needed to come back here for a time. The reasons for this return to my childhood home are nearing completion, and I’m itching now to move onto whatever is next or to go back home to the Seattle area. Only I don’t want to go home the way I got here. I had a harrowing trip getting here that was hard on me and my three cats. In fact, the oldest of my cats died about three days after we arrived. That was no fun, but fortunately my cats reincarnate and come back to me, so he’s back now, and we are even closer than we were before, possibly because of all we went through getting here. I’d really like to go back in a small RV, so they and I can roam about the country in greater comfort and at a gentler pace. Apparently the size and kind of RV I’m interested in is called a Class C motor home. Whatever. It’s not too big and it’s not too small for one person and three cats. As in the children’s fairy tale, it’s “just right” for this Goldilocks (NOT) and her three teddy bears (cats).

While the trip here was difficult, it did have moments of beauty. However, I’d like the journey back to be simply beautiful and a great time of connecting with lots of friends and family along the way, and I’d like it to prepare me for the next stage of my life. I’ve had over a year’s worth of trying to recover from all that happened to me during the packing and moving last year. I need things to be easier now. I’m not in as good a shape as I was before I started packing last year, but I do have considerably less stuff. I’d already been paring down over the years because of all the moving I’ve done in my life. I have continued to pare down since I got here. Now I find myself paring down even more. Again.

I’d like to be able to fit most of my belongings in and on the motor home, my bicycle being the one thing for sure that would have to ride on the outside. I sold my sixteen-year-old car a few months ago after owning it for fifteen years. I love that car, but it was time to let it go so I found her a good home. Now I need to find a good home for myself and my cats. We’re just fine where we are, except that it isn’t our home, and this isn’t the part of the world where I fit. I grew up in Central Florida, but for my entire life, I didn’t feel as though I belonged here. I still don’t. I knew I had to be here for a time, but that time is running out now, and I need to know what I need to do in order to be ready for the next step. I also need to manifest whatever I’m going to need to move me to the next place.

So I continue paring down and now I’m looking for an RV so I can join the millions of other Americans in the world who ride off into the sunset to enjoy the retired life. Only I’m not retired. Indeed, I’m in one of the few professions where retirement is not only unnecessary, but it’s also unlikely. Most writers pretty much die writing. While I have a number of years to go and lots of things to see and say yet, I will no doubt stop writing only because my heart has stopped beating. I’d be very happy just to drift off to sleep some day and never wake up. I know pretty much when that will happen. If you've been reading my blogs, you might already know that I am of a spiritual bent. If truth be known, I am psychic and work closely with angels, so I know that death is nothing to fear.

When a spiritual teacher told me several years ago that I could just ask when my time would be up, I did. It wasn’t as long as I thought, but I’m happy with all that is left of it. It’s enough time to do what I need to do before I close my eyes for the last time, as long as I stay on my path. That’s what I’m doing here now. Staying on my path. It’s not necessarily what other people think I should be doing or want me to be doing, but I stopped worrying about what other people think I long time ago. That's what makes me a good lesbian. In order to come out to myself and the world, I had to quit caring about what other people think about me and my life choices.

In the immortal words of one of the greatest childen’s writers of all time:

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” --Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a., “Dr Seuss“)

So here I go, preparing for the next step into the seeming void that will become more solid the closer my foot comes to making it.

I’m reminded once again of the Taoist teaching. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. “ -- Lao-Tzu

Beth Mitchum is the author of six novels, one collection of poetry, one collection of biographical essays, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Trained to Deceive

2011-07-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

There's something I have to confess. It may shock you. It may make you want to turn your back on me. Or maybe, just maybe, you'll understand and be able to identify with me. Here's the confession. I have spent a good portion of my life being dishonest with myself and sometimes other people too, either consciously or unconsciously. I won't blame my society for this, but if I'm going to continue to move my life towards the state of being an open book to others and myself, then I have to speak out about the world that helped shape me into the person I am today. The truth is that I was heavily influenced by society to deceive not only myself but others as well.

You see, one of the things I learned early on from society is that being gay isn't okay. If you are my age or older, then you're probably nodding your head as you read this. If you are much younger or grew up in a state or country that is more progressive in their laws and their thinking, then you may not be able to relate to this at all. Thankfully in the twenty-first century, the laws are changing as the ranks of the accepting grow and the ranks of the homophobes die off. The younger generations growing up simply have no reason to deny the LGBT community equal marriage and all other civil rights. It isn’t part of their ideological heritage for the most part. Even many older people with sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren who are living their lives openly as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, now have a face to put on that old “queer” label. They love these people and want them to be happy. It makes no sense to them to deny us equal rights either.

However, growing up in the 60s and 70s, I learned (first at school and later at church) that being gay isn't okay. So I hid the truth about my gay-ness not only from other people, but also from myself. How did I do this? Indeed, how does any gay person hide it from him or herself? And yet we do. I certainly had plenty of evidence of my gay-ness. I started having sexual fantasies about women when I was in junior high school. I remember the first woman I fantasized about and what school year it was, although I don't remember the fantasy exactly. She was one of my teachers, married and very definitely not gay, at least as far as I knew. I mean, really, we don't always know about others. How can we when we are so good about denying the truth about our own lives?

Oddly enough, during ninth or tenth grade, I double-dated with this teacher and her husband. Her husband's younger brother was visiting, and they asked me to go out with him and them on a double date, which I must say was a little strange to me. I had fun with them all, but I felt like a fish out of water, perhaps because while the guy was nice, I was definitely not attracted to him. I suspect, had I been honest with myself at the time, I would have had to admit that I was way more attracted to my female teacher than to her teenage brother-in-law. It's hard to admit something like that as a teenager. Those years are so much about exploring your sexuality and your worldview in general.

The internal conflict didn't always go unnoticed either. One of my peers, who was apparently either more perceptive than the others, or at least less inclined to filter her thoughts, blurted out one day in geometry class than she couldn't really think of me as either male or female. Wow! There ya go. She figured it out before I did. This was after the lesbian fantasies, mind you, but I had certainly not gotten as far in my thinking as she did with that one statement. It gave me pause, I have to admit, but I didn't disagree with her. I simply looked at her and said, "Okay." Then I thought about it later and still couldn't disagree with her. I mean, I knew that I was female. There was no ambiguity there. I had been a tomboy growing up and very athletic, but I was still female inside and out. What I wasn't, was a heterosexual female, and that I suspect was the energy she sensed around me. I filed that thought away and went on my merry way, fantasizing about my female teachers. I think by this time, I'd stopped fantasizing about male teachers, although there had been a couple in junior high who had been fantasy worthy.

What did happen after that point is that I got engaged between my sophomore and junior years in high school. I was fifteen going on thirty that summer apparently. Needless to say, my mother choked on that, but she didn't freak out. She simply suggested that we wait until I graduated from high school. Had she gone totally berserk, it might have solidified the thing in my mind, but she didn't. In her outwardly cool way, she tried to accept it for what she thought it was--hormones. In a way it was and in a way it wasn't. I really liked, maybe even loved the guy. He was really nice and a great friend. But I must say that he didn't rock my world, even though together we did manage to rock my mother's world. Sorry, Mom. Thank you for letting me work through that one on my own. I suspect in some way I was trying to prove to myself that I wasn't a lesbian. I thought I was doing what women were supposed to do, i.e., grow up and get married to a nice fellow. Only as was my wont, I was trying to skip the whole growing up part. I had always been ahead of the curve, but this was one area where I really needed to slow down and take my time, time I desperately needed to figure out that I really wasn’t like the other girls.

When you realize just how different your worldview is from the majority of teenagers around you, it can be quite daunting. While other teens are thinking about the opposite sex, you find that you are thinking about the same sex. It can be quite a profound wake-up call, or it can be a more subtle awakening, bit by bit, to a different point of view and life experience. I was acting like my peers on the outside, but I was a different person on the inside. I was rather timid about letting anyone know about the inside me, so I dealt with it by denying my true feelings. This leads, I think, to a breakdown of a cohesive sense of self. If you can't be honest with yourself, how can you help but become somewhat dishonest with others. Even if you want to be honest and open with the world, you have already figured out by listening to your peers that being "queer" is anything but normal, and when you're a teenager, you generally want to be normal. You want to fit in with the crowd.

I used to hang out with different groups in high school, but I never completely fit into any single clique. That's part of what made me so independent and capable of standing on my own, so it's not necessarily a bad thing. I do wish though that I could have done that in a way that was more open. Instead, I hid parts of myself I thought were too different and searched for some way to move through the world that fit my experience. My way of moving through the world turned out to be that of being my own person, set apart by virtue of my different-ness, but also somewhat split in my thinking. I had to dichotomize my world into my outer me and my inner me.

To a degree I still do this, even though it's no longer necessary because I'm a lesbian who is very out of the closet now. But I didn't reach this level of openness overnight. I don't think any of us do. The process of coming out takes time, and sometimes we sacrifice important bits of ourselves, including significant relationships, while we are in process. How can we not sacrifice bits of our own integrity when we feel such a strong need to hide who we are? We are in fact being trained by our cultures and our laws to deceive ourselves, our friends, our families, our teachers, our students, our employers, law enforcement officials, the military, our neighbors, our landlords, virtually everyone, including the stranger on the street who might be lurking outside the gay bar just waiting for the opportunity to assault us. The more restrictive the laws and culture, the more deeply ingrained are the levels of deception. How can this not impact who we are and how we move through the world? How can it not train us to deceive?

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

An Iconic Year for the Pusillanimous Logophile

2011-03-14T21:19:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that Americans are wearing out a particular word this year? Maybe it didn't start this year. Maybe I simply started noticing it this year when really it has been an underground movement that finally surfaced enough that I noticed. Whatever the case, starting at the beginning of 2011, my best friend and I started noticing that everyone on television and lots more in print were throwing the word iconic around like it was absolutely indispensable to the English language. Suddenly it's being used in reference to hockey jerseys, movies, rock stars, and everything else that is in the spotlight. It seems that nothing is worthy of our attention unless it is iconic.

I have noticed in the past that when I learned a new word that I suddenly started reading and hearing it everywhere I turn. Only in this case, it is not at all a new word in my vocabulary. Perhaps it is someone else's new word that is suddenly everywhere, and my buddy and I are just caught in the crossfire. Whatever it is, it has gone beyond coincidence; it has gone beyond quirky. Now it is downright annoying.

Everyone in the English-speaking world, hear me! Please stop wearing out this word. By it's very definition, for something to be iconic, it has to be something or someone that represents whatever group or thing to which it is being compared or to which it belongs. This word cannot possibly be appropriate to everyone and everything in the whole world, or its meaning becomes diluted.

I suspect that this sudden extreme usage of this word can be attributed to the speed at which information is being transmitted around the globe via television, the internet, and cell phones. That's great. I have no problem with that, but could we just switch out the catch word once a week at least? I get dictionary words delivered to my email every day. Let's use some of those. They are perfectly good words and they are languishing in the word pool, while iconic is being bandied about like a beach ball on a hot day. The word has become even more cliche than the word cliche, if that is at all possible. I'd like to see writers and public speakers come up with some new words before that one gets completely stretched out of shape and has to be chucked into the charity bin. Today's word is pusillanimous. I'm tossing that one onto the court. Now let's play ball. Unless you are too pusillanimous to try.

In the three days after I posted this blog, I heard the word iconic on television four more times. It was applied to a recipe (an "iconic dish"), Mt. Fuji (the "iconic volcano"), the new Jeep ("iconic beauty"), and last but not least, a Coca-cola bottle (the "iconic bottle"). I'll give them the iconic bottle for coke, but not the rest of them.

My Facebook post on March 19th. <OMG! Now there is an "iconic Native American Indian head" on a gold coin. *bangs head against the wall*> I can see this one too, but most of these descriptions are too lame for words. Particularly overused words.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Forget St. Louis; Meet Me in Paducah

2010-10-14T20:35:00.001-07:00

Once I made it through St. Louis with no further mishaps, I got on another interstate and started making my way southward. I cruised into and out of Iowa in a half hour, clipping off the tiniest corner of it before heading into Illinois. That was a slightly longer sojourn but not by much. As I approached Paducah, Kentucky, I decided to see about meeting up for dinner with my aunt and two cousins on my father’s side, so I gave my mom a call and set her to work on calling my aunt to see what we could work out.

After much phone calling and a lot of conferring via cell phones, we figured out how to rendezvous. I found a safe and shady spot on the side of a tall hotel where I could park my truck with the cats in it and leave them for a little while. It was a comfortable enough temperature and was only going to get cooler, so they were fine for the hour or so I spent with my family, laughing and reminiscing about the summers I used to spend in Kentucky with my granny.

My granny was the most amazing woman, but I’ll just introduce her to you now and save most of the stories about her for later, and I do have a lot of them. She was the reason I was able to connect with my aunt and cousins when I was in junior high. Up until that point not only did I not know this part of my family, but I hadn’t even heard of them that I could recall. My parents had separated when I was six months old, and I met my father’s parents only once that I can recall and that was when I was in early grade school. The only thing I really remember from that visit was the sound the wooden floor of their house made when you walked across it. I felt like I was in a western movie walking down one of those wooden sidewalks wearing cowboy boots. I grew up in a house with terrazzo floors and had never encountered wooden floors before so this was a strange new phenomenon.

During eighth grade I finally met my granny for real. After my grandfather passed away, she made my father drive her down to Florida so she could visit her grandchildren in Florida, whom she hadn’t seen in seven years. My granny and I rode in the back of my dad’s camper to Walt Disney World, while my sister and father rode in the cab. By the time we were halfway there, my granny and I had laughed so much we’d been in tears. That set the tone for our relationship from that point forward. She invited me to spend a couple of weeks in Kentucky at her house the following summer. That two-week visit lasted two and a half months. I fell in love with my father’s side of the family and continued visiting my granny for as long and as often as I could.

It was during that very first summer when I’d met my Aunt Jean and her two children. They were such wonderful people, and I’ve had so much fun with them over the years. Even though we have never lived near each other, we have managed to meet up with each other every so often. I hadn’t met up with them, however, since my granny died in 2001, and we had all come together again for the funeral and family gathering afterwards. Since I was routing myself to go right through Paducah where they all lived, it was too good an opportunity to let slip away if they were available for a visit. As it turns out, they were all three available, so we met up and had a wonderful reunion. After having such a difficult time during the first half of the trip, it was so nice to be able to sit with people I know and love and laugh myself silly sharing memories of the past.

I can’t speak for them, but it was quite a nice healing time for me, and I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised to find out somewhere down the line that Granny had orchestrated this gathering from the other side. I can just see her now, hands over her belly, eyes closed, laughing hard and long. I also wouldn’t be surprised if she had been there with us, though at the time I was so out of it from the stress and strain of that trip that I didn’t sense her. I’ve sensed her spirit presence many times, and the most significant time was at her funeral.

There had been an empty chair to my right, and my sister and my friend Jan had been sitting to my left. When they started playing the first song, I felt her spirit standing right in front of the empty chair to my right. I felt so much joy radiating from her being that I couldn’t be sad that she had been released from the restraints of her broken-down body. I couldn’t be sad when I knew that she was now filled with so much joy. It was amazing, and I’ll never forget it. In that moment in time I lost all fear concerning death. Having sensed her spirit after she’d left her body I had felt that “joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

I know she would have been glad that we’d gotten part of the family together again for a spontaneous reunion. It was a good reminder that no matter how much we may lose, or who we may lose, we will never lose the love that binds us all together.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Blowing Off Steam

2010-10-14T19:44:00.000-07:00

I’m happy to report that the last two days of my cross-country trip were extremely easy when compared to all the other days of the trip. Without any of the impediments of the first five days, I made really good time. Yes, there were sections of highway where there were slowdowns because of road construction. One of the things I noticed on this trip is that when you are out west in Nowheresville, they may close an entire lane of traffic on the interstate, but they don’t bother to lower the speed limit or not much anyway. Sometimes I had to follow a queue through a construction zone for miles on end, but we were all barreling along at 65 or 70 mph, even me and all the bigger trucks out there. Plus I never saw anyone hitting their brake lights. Oddly enough there were no mishaps through all that, and yet once you got farther east they made you slow down to 40 mph, even in places where there was no more traffic than there had been out west and no construction workers in sight. I find this intriguing and am still puzzling over it.

Once I was not being blown or sprayed off the road, I found Nebraska to be downright pretty. The day before when they were hosing down my windshield and blasting me off the road with high winds, I hadn’t had the opportunity to notice how pleasant the scenery was. Silly me not noticing something like that. I guess I was simply too preoccupied with getting my cats and myself out of there alive. Go figure.

I had a most pleasant and boring fifth day of travel and stopped in Columbia, Missouri for the night. I decided to tackle St. Louis early in the day. I felt a little trepidation as I neared this metropolis, having a history of mishaps and travel delays there, whether I was in a car, truck, or airplane. So I slathered on an extra layer of angelic protection and proceeded with caution. I was using the air conditioner only periodically still. After one time when I’d turned it off and started up an incline while driving through the middle of St. Louis, I noticed smoke coming out the air conditioning vents. While I’ve seen that phenomenon before, I wasn’t entirely sure that it was only condensation from the air conditioning that had just been switched off again after a long period of running it.

This was, after all, the St. Louis where I’d had to stop and get the air conditioning fixed on the Ryder truck I was driving out to Seattle from Asheville because it had broken down and I’d been sweltering all afternoon in a hot truck. The same St. Louis where we’d stopped at an Olive Garden for dinner and a waitress had dumped an entire glass of iced tea onto my chest and lap. Much to her surprise, I looked up at her horrified expression and said ever so calmly, “Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone has done to me all day.” Boy, was she shocked. But it was the truth. I’d been freaking hot all day, and after being doused with a big old glass of iced tea, I felt considerably cooler. Soaked through to the skin perhaps, but cooler. Then after dinner we’d gone back to get the repaired truck, but as we made our way around the city trying to find a place to stay, our vehicles got separated and we had no idea where the other vehicle was. The car lights we’d been following turned out not to be our friend’s van after all.

This was in 1993, before the days of everyone and his brother having a cell phone. After a futile attempt to relocate the other vehicle, we stopped the truck, and my partner at that time called the police to report our whereabouts and to check to see if our other party had done the same thing. The driver of the other vehicle, who had my partner’s children with her, was my lifetime best friend, Jan, who is quite likely to surface again in other stories, particularly now that I’m back in Florida, and staying with her for the time being.

We had gotten separated briefly in Louisville (maybe the connection here is Louis!) where we’d had to circle the city twice until we caught up with each other. We decided then that if we got separated again, we should simply stop and call the police to report our positions. So we were delighted though not surprised to learn that she had already called the police to report her whereabouts. They gave us the phone number of where she was. She’d stopped at a hotel and booked a room because the little girl had gotten stressed out when she’d gotten separated from her mother. She ended up hurling out the window (though not totally out the window), and was very upset.

Once everyone involved had gotten to talk to everyone else, we decided to stay where we were since it was late and wait until daybreak when it would be easier to locate each other. Next morning we met up at my friend’s hotel and resumed our journey. Other than the brief separation in Louisville, the St. Louis fiasco was the only truly difficult thing that happened on that trip, so you can imagine that I didn’t have fond memories of that city. Then in later years when I had gotten stranded overnight at the St. Louis airport on a flight from Orlando to Seattle, my distrust of St. Louis had deepened. Either on that flight or another one, the St. Louis airport lost our luggage on the way home, which is why I never check all my luggage. I carry on a backpack with a complete change of clothing. Just in case.

From a driving standpoint, St. Louis is a bit of a logistical nightmare. It is called the “Gateway to the West,” but really it’s more like the gateway to disaster. Multiple interstates converge there and trying to puzzle out how to get from where you are to where you want to be can take some time and concentration, something you have very little of if you are driving and trying to navigate all at the same time. God help you if you reach St. Louis at rush hour.

I had stopped the night before not too far west of St. Louis so I could avoid that unpleasantness. It was still early in the day when I started approaching the big city of scary interchanges with only my cats to help me navigate. Before I got too close, my sweetheart called my cell phone from England while as I was driving on a new bypass that I must say was a sound improvement over the way things used to be. I had memorized the route the night before because I knew what I’d be facing when I reach this city and former bane of my existence. So I talked as long as I could and was about to say that I needed to hang up because I had to focus on the road when the phone suddenly went dead. I didn’t know what had happened at the time, but it couldn’t have happened at a better moment because I needed to concentrate on making it through St. Louis without mishap. I think that may have been the angel protection working. They were saying to me, “I know you want to talk to her, but you really need to pay attention right now.” So they cut us off without warning. Okay then. I stuck the phone back in my pocket and paid close attention.

Now that you know where I was coming from in regards to this city, you’ll understand why the next scenario caused me some consternation. As I started through the heart of St. Louis I noticed smoke coming out of the vents on the dashboard. Not one to underestimate the power of St. Louis to cause hiccups in my travel plans, particularly on a trip that had already proven to be a bit of a nightmare, as soon as I could I pulled into a gas station where I’d be able to turn truck and car around easily and dug out the phone number for the truck rental place.

The guy who answered the phone was puzzled but suggested that since the radiator wasn’t overheating, I should drive on and call him back if anything else happened. Ahem. I stifled the urge to ponder what else could happen because I simply didn’t want to find out. I hung up thinking that had been a pretty unproductive phone call. However, I drove on and figured out that it was only steam blowing out because of the condensation that had built up from running the air conditioner. I noticed that it did that only when I turned off the air just before going uphill, which is something I’d taken to doing for the purpose of conserving gasoline, though why it had chosen St. Louis to exhibit the whole blowing off steam routine for the very first time was a puzzle. I think if it had started doing it anywhere except St. Louis, I would have simply watched it and figured it out without having to make a panicky call to the service people, but I wasn’t about to take any chances. I was in St. Louis after all.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Trial by Wind and Rain

2010-10-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Athough the next major event that happened shouldn’t have been a surprise, it was. I had been lulled into a false sense of complacency the day before when I had gotten to drive all morning without anything else happening to impede my progress. We’d gotten the rest of the way through Wyoming and deep into Nebraska, another state that felt very long because I was driving from one end to the other. We'd had a good night of rest and were ready for another day. The kitties cooperated a little more. Anjolie did much better because we’d stayed in a place that was obviously designed for kitties who like to find hiding places. There simply were no places for her to hide so she was easy enough for me to capture and load into the truck. Once we were all loaded, we headed on our way. It was a comfortable temperature and while I probably ran the air conditioner part of the day, I didn’t need it much of the day. In fact it was rather cloudy and it looked for a long time like there was some sort of stormy weather system ahead.

It had only just begun to rain a little bit when I noticed an eighteen-wheeler starting to pass me going up a slight incline. When he had just barely passed me, we both were hit by a huge blast of wind that sent both of our trucks onto the right shoulder of the road. The truck very nearly hit me when this happened. Had the blast come a couple of seconds earlier, it would have driven the tractor-trailer into the cab of my truck on the side where I was sitting. We both struggled to bring our rigs back under control, once the wind blast was over. Quite honestly I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to get my vehicle under control first. My relief at getting safely back onto the road quickly dissipated when I looked up to find that the truck driver in front of me was trying to keep his rig from jack-knifing. Given that he’d just barely gotten in front of me when we both got blown off the road, you can imagine how close I was behind him still. I tried to slow down right away but that was no easy task given what I was driving.

Before I even had time to say a prayer, he suddenly got it under control. It was so fast that I don’t know how he did it. I think we both had angels giving us a hand because it was apparently not his time or my time to go. I was very aware of how close I’d just come to being the filling of a truck sandwich. It probably would have been quick but unexpected to be sure. Why should I have such a sudden urgency to get to Florida only to end up another highway fatality? I knew that wasn’t in the cards, so I focused my attention on the road in front of me. The rain was picking up, and the truck was moving on down the highway in front of me.

The winds kept gusting, and the rain came down like a fire engine’s hose was being directed at my windshield. I couldn’t see to drive safely yet there was nowhere to go that would be any safer, given that no one else would be able to see either. After at least a half hour of blinding rain and heavy gusts of wind, I finally spied a rest area ahead and pulled into the area where the trucks were parked. There was only one space left, so I slid into it and waited for the rains to slow down enough for me to head to restrooms.

Once inside the facility, I ran into another woman who was as perplexed about the weather as I had been. An hour or more earlier, when I had seen the weather system miles ahead of me, I had phoned my mother and asked her and Amy, my niece, to find out what on earth was going on in Nebraska. They both assured me that the forecast was only for thunderstorms, yet this was anything but your basic thunderstorm. I have lived through hurricanes in Florida and wind and ice storms in North Carolina and Washington, and the kind of blast I’d been hit by was the stuff of weather disasters. Finally I heard from the weather station video at the rest area that they were calling for high winds in Nebraska. Uh huh. I was pretty sure that we had already noticed that part. What I wanted to know was if there had been any tornados spotted in this crazy weather system, but no one seemed to have any answers. I called my mother again, and still the Weather Channel was not reporting anything amiss. Not until hours after it had started did any news trickle into the weather stations. Okay then. I was obviously on my own.

If no one knew we were in the midst of a hugely destructive storm, how could I get any clues about where I should head other than where I was already? A few hours back, I had approached the exit to another interstate that would have taken me south to the next interstate that would have taken me east again. I had a nudge to take the southerly route, given the storm I could see in the distance, and I guess I should have listened to the nudge, but that was after I’d already called home to find out what kind of weather was ahead of me. With no indication of severe weather being reported ahead of me, I had to conclude that it looked worse than it actually was.

Once again in my life, I had encountered the message to trust what I see myself in nature and to heed my intuitive nudges over listening to the weather reports. Those folks can’t be everywhere at the same time, and apparently they mostly report weather. Predicting weather is not all that easy. When I had gotten snowed in for two weeks around Christmas of 2008, I would have been a lot worse off if I hadn’t listened to the nudges to stock up on food supplies for myself and my cats. The forecasters weren’t calling for multiple storms coming in back to back for a week or more. They were just calling for one snow storm.

By the time it was over, no one could have told you exactly how many storms in a row had rolled over us. They sort of all merged into one massive rolling storm that lasted for a week or more, instead of multiple little systems, each one delivering its own sleigh full of snow, ice, wind, and more snow. Fortunately I didn’t lose my electricity that whole time, and I never ran completely out of food supplies even though I had felt a little silly at the time stocking up as though there weren’t going to be any stores open for the next week. The stores were there all right. I just couldn’t get to them easily any more and neither could anyone else because for the first few days, the snow plows we did have on hand couldn’t keep up with the demand. Even the big city of Seattle came to an abrupt halt for a week.

The key to surviving strange and unpredictable weather occurrences lies in listening to that inner urging to do something different from your normal routine. The urging will either be suddenly strong or it will be a constant nagging, depending on how much time you have to act on the intuitive nudge. Had I gone the other way, I may have missed out on the worst of that weather system. At the time, the nudge was less urgent but presented as an option. Although I didn’t take it, my life didn’t depend on it that time, but when the nudges are particularly urgent, your life may very well depend on it. While it may not turn out to be a life-threatening event, it might be a less stressful option. I think I probably would have hit rain anyway, but perhaps it would have been less intense, and I could have skipped the close encounter with the semi. There’s a lot to be said about avoiding stressful driving conditions, which is why I got off the road early that day to avoid catching up to the terrible storm I’d let pass over me during my break at the rest area.

Once it had cleared, and I’d gotten back on the road, I discovered that the ominous black wall of scary weather wasn’t moving very fast. I was on the phone with my mother for a while giving her my location and where I thought I might have to stop for the evening. It was early yet, but I was barely staying behind that storm, and the last thing I wanted to do was to run into it again after dark.

She and my niece figured out a good place for me to stop for the night where they accepted kitties and had internet access, so I called it a day at dinner time. I ate a real meal that evening while my cats sat in a much cooler truck with the windows cracked. I had to confess that the scary weather system had made it much cooler than it had been even after the first cooling that had accompanied the hailstorm in Wyoming.

That night after we were unloaded, we all had a much better night’s sleep. I was very grateful for my family’s help at finding cat-friendly accommodations, and I was grateful to be alive. Although I had been calm enough during the wind storm, the battering rain had really been tough to deal with because of not being able to see anything beyond my steering wheel. I was glad to be able to relax earlier in the day. The cats were in heaven because they were allowed to romp around the room again after a much shorter day of being cooped up in the cab of the truck.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Getting Down to the Wire

2010-10-13T08:00:00.001-07:00

Now you’d think that the blown tire on the side of a Wyoming interstate and hours and hours of waiting to be rescued would be enough. Add to all that the time spent waiting for two new tires to be put on my car, and you’d think as I did that it was about time for things to start going my way for a change. But no, it seems not.

Tony, the fellow who had replaced my tires and helped me put my car back on the dolly where it belonged and plugged in all the cords to make the electrical system work, noticed that the wheel of car dolly was less than stable. One of the holes where the bolts attached the wheel to the vehicle was hollowed nearly all the way so you could have lifted the tire off over the lug nut if that had been the only one on the dolly. Fortunately it wasn’t but it still looked none too safe, considering that the bolt next to it had no lug nut at all. Ah, now that looked like an easy fix. I asked him if he had a lug nut he could put on it. One loose bolt was one thing but two loose bolts was definitely tempting fate, and given the trip so far, I wasn’t interested in doing that. Tony did indeed have a few spare lug nuts lying around the shop so he tried a couple of them and found one that had a tight fit. That solved that problem for now. I was almost ready to get back on the road. They just needed for finalize the bill, and I could get my car keys and hit the road again.

I noticed that the sun had shifted and that the cab was no longer completely in the shade so I hopped back in the truck, cranked it up, and turned the air on again to cool down the cab so the cats would be okay while I went back inside. I followed Tony back into the store to run my credit card. When I returned I realized with a touch of horror that I’d locked both truck keys in the truck with the cats. While Dustin was a most helpful cat, he had never overcome that lack of opposable thumbs handicap. Not that he hadn’t tried, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to help me out here.

I’d been in the habit of keeping one of the truck keys on my car keys and one with the truck key ring so I could lock the cats in the car with the engine running and air conditioning cooling them while I made pit stops of one type or the other. I always took the car keys with me so I could activate the car alarm and lock the doors on it when I left the vehicles unattended. After all, the car was full of my belongings. I couldn’t leave the car alarm engaged while driving because all the jarring from travel would have set off the alarm multiple times a day. So I had a system already by this point in the trip. Only in removing my car keys for the tire folks meant separating truck key from car keys. In hindsight, I realize that was a bad idea, but hindsight is always based on the very experience you were trying not to have and did anyway.

So, yes, I had gotten back out of the truck, and somehow locked both keys inside. One was in the ignition so the cats would have air conditioning while I went back inside, and the other was wherever I’d stowed it in the cab when I had detached it from my car keys. Okay then, now what? I walked back inside and approached Tony, my angel of the day. He came out with a can-do attitude and a wire hanger and went to work trying to pop the handle up. Only it didn’t work despite the fact that I had so cleverly left the windows cracked and the air conditioning running. My absent-mindedness was working for me and against me at the same time.

After several unsuccessful attempts, it dawned on Tony that the truck was a Ford and therefore the handles pulled inward rather than upward. So he went back inside and brought out only a few less than a bazillion wire hangers and painstakingly twisted them together one at a time until he had a long, fairly inflexible wire contraption that could stretch across the width of the cab from window to window. He inserted his high tech wire gizmo and instructed me to catch his contraption on the other side with a single wire hanger, which I could lower onto the door handle. I did as he directed, he gave a quick yank on his side, and voila! The truck was unlocked again. Yay, Tony!

Thank goodness his day was coming to an end and the service area had been quiet except for me and my seemingly never-ending series of conundrums. He was in no way taking attention away from anyone else while he focused on solving problem after problem for me. He was definitely my earth angel that day, and I told him so. I’d met a lot of friendly and helpful folks that day in Wyoming, but Tony was by far the most helpful and resourceful of them all. Turns out that he used to be an engineer at some big company in Oklahoma but for whatever reason was now working in the automotive department of Walmart in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Their loss and Walmart’s gain is all I can say, though the man’s talents are not being fully utilized.

Now that it was dinner time, it was time to push on down the road. It had taken six hours to solve the problem of the flat tire in Wyoming. Ahem. How ridiculous. But still it was time to move on. I called my mother again and inquired if she minded if I just stopped in Wyoming and unpacked my bags. I’d already had enough, and I was nowhere close to getting to the end of the trek through Wyoming. I still had miles to go before I could sleep. Several hundred to be more exact. She did object, so I pushed onward. I drove for I don’t know how many more hours and finally stopped near Laramie or Cheyenne, I think.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Trial by Tire

2010-10-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

It was a perfectly normal day when it started out. Well, no, it wasn’t, but I was trying to make it feel like a perfectly normal day of perfectly normal and boring driving. It was boring for a while. After the brief hailstorm and wonderful cool down, thanks to the angels, I hit the road again sans air conditioning, smiling and happy to be with my kitties and happy to be sucking up less gas in the truck.

I rode on for miles and miles up and down long stretches of highway all morning, thankful for the boring nature of it all. I was completely perplexed when out of the blue a tattooed Harley rider and his equal tattooed female companion pulled up beside me and started gesticulating wildly to roll down my window. Once I did, they yelled and gestured that the tire on my car was in the process of blowing out. Wide-eyed I thanked them, slowed down quickly, and pulled off the road as far as I could on the rather narrow concrete shoulder. After I waited for the light traffic to clear, I hopped out of the truck to survey the damage and was startled to find that not only had the tire blown to hell and back again, and I was nearly down to the rim on that wheel, but the loose flaps of rubber had battered that rear panel, chipping paint down to primer and beyond. The trim piece had also been knocked loose and was dragging on the ground. All this destruction and I never heard or felt a thing. Not once did the truck even hiccup with all that wild activity going on back there. If it hadn’t been for the helpful Harley riders, I probably would have gotten down to metal and sparks on that wheel before I noticed it. As it was, I was perilously close to that point.

While I know how to change a tire, I was concerned about several things. First of all, my back was still trashed so I didn’t know how much strength at the moment I had for torquing the crow bar to loosen the lug nuts. Second, I was only a couple of feet away from the highway traffic out in the middle of Wyoming. While that meant not very heavy traffic, it also meant that people were driving 70-90 mph. Ahem. You might remember the blog in Slices of My Life: So Far, where I mentioned my attempts on one cross-country road trip where I’d tried to see how my little Honda Civic handled at speeds approaching 100 mph while passing boringly through this state. I was in no mood to become road kill and leave my sweet orphaned kitties sitting in a truck cab in the middle of nowhere. Third, I wasn’t sure the jack would hold the car steady when it was on an incline attached to a dolly that was suspending the front tires off the ground.

So instead of doing what I normally do, which would be to get to work at solving the problem manually, I did what most sane people do when they’re in a fix on the side of the road. I called 911. I got back in the truck cab, dialed the emergency number, and tried to explain to the dispatcher where exactly in Wyoming I was located. I knew what town I’d just passed and what town was coming up, but that left a pretty good stretch of road for them to scour. They went to work on the problem and we hung up.

Then I called my mother. When she answered the phone, I said those magical words that no mother wants to hear. “Now I don’t want to alarm you but…” Of course you know she went into an immediate adrenaline rush. I told her what was going on and assured her that everything would be all right. I felt perfectly calm about the whole ordeal and did for most of that ridiculous day. While I was still talking to her, the highway patrol called me, so I quickly hung up to take their call. Since they couldn’t figure out exactly where I was, the patrolman asked me if I was comfortable with getting out of the vehicle and waving at passing motorists. I affirmed that I was cool with that, and I was, particularly because the angels had been cool with me and had already turned the heat down on the entire state of Wyoming. So I jumped out and did my distressed motorist dance routine on the side of the road.

I’m so not one for theatrics, and I was feeling utterly calm, so I had to wonder if I was at all projecting any sort of damsel in distress persona. I was pretty sure I wasn’t and probably appeared more like a calm, cool driver who suddenly felt the urge to do a few jumping jacks on the side of the road to restore circulation from all that sitting. Whatever the case, a van pulled up behind me and came to a stop. That in itself was perplexing, given that I was standing on the shoulder well in front of the truck to lessen the chance of someone veering into the lane and creaming the crazy lady doing jumping jacks on the side of the road.

A middle-aged man and woman got out of the truck and asked me if I was all right. They told me that they’d seen the blowout from across the highway and had gotten off at the next exit to backtrack up to my position to offer help. Well, God bless their pea-picking souls (spoken with my best down home country folk accent), the Good Samaritans had arrived! The woman actually had a friend who worked on the police force in that county. She called her friend and gave her mile marker info and asked her to call the Wyoming Highway Patrol with that message.

Hurray! I had been found at last. Or at least my co-ordinants had been more closely determined. The couple offered to change my tire for me, but I declined since it meant exposing them to the highway traffic and the other factors that made me think that this was not a normal flat tire situation. I didn’t want anyone to be harmed in the changing of my tire, so I thanked them profusely and after a few more minutes of chit-chat, they continued on their journey, no doubt with a warm glow in their hearts. They certainly should have a warm glow since they probably had cut down considerably the amount of time it would take before the highway patrol arrived. Bless the Good Samaritans wherever they are. May the angels in charge of weather adjust the outdoor thermostat for them on any day of their choosing.

While I was standing there talking to my Good Samaritans, a burly FedEx truck driver had been walking down the hill from where he had finally managed to stop his freakishly large triple trailer load when he saw me waving at him from the side of the highway. In my distressed motorist routine, I had focused my efforts on truckers because they knew the highway better than anyone, they had CBs, and they knew to check for minor details like mile markers when there was a distressed motorist practicing cheerleading skills on the shoulder of the road. We had a brief discussion amongst all of us and ascertained that I should be rescued soon by the knights in white Crown Victorias.

I had to chuckle at the incredibly nice FedEx trucker because he laughed and said, “You see how long it took me to stop that rig. Makes you wonder why people think they can cut us off on the highway and expect us to be able to stop quickly.” I had to agree with him because the rig I was pulling, while not all that heavy and certainly not very long, took a noticeably long time to stop. When I had moved to Washington in 1993, I had driven a very loaded down 27-foot moving truck from Asheville, North Carolina to Seattle. It had taken a stupidly long time to stop that heavy truck, so I knew well what he was talking about and marveled that he had stopped at all. I thanked him enthusiastically too and assured him that all would be well soon, now that the troopers were heading my way.

Before this trip, I had already had a healthy respect for truck drivers. I’ve spent a lot of time on the road over the decades, and I always do my best to give them plenty of room to drive those big rigs of theirs. Because of the size of the combination of vehicles I was driving, I had to use the trucker parking lots so I could always be sure that I could pull through since backing up was such a nightmare. I know my truck looked like a toy compared to theirs, but I felt a comradery with them anyway because I was seeing the road through their eyes again after fifteen years of driving only the small Honda Civic I was now towing.

After I bid all my lovely helpers a fond farewell, I climbed back up into the truck to check on my sweet felines, who were slumbering as though sitting on the side of the road in a broken-done rig was nothing to break stride for, much less interrupt a perfectly good catnap in a comfortably cool truck. I called my mother again and found out that she’d talked to my insurance agent as I had asked and had determined that I did have emergency roadside service through them. I thought this was true, but I’d never had reason to use it. Then I went back to waiting for the Crown Victoria to appear in my side mirror.

It took a while, but said Crown Vic, bearing a decidedly young highway patrolman, pulled up behind me. I got out and greeted him. He asked me for my drivers license, so I produced that while he took down my information and did a routine check on me, no doubt to make sure I wasn’t a fugitive from the law who’d had the bad luck of having a flat tire on their towed car in B.F.E., Wyoming. I retrieved my license after he’d determined that I was relatively harmless, and we chatted about the safety issues of changing a flat tire on the side of the road when it was attached to a dolly and only two feet away from the speedway. We chatted about a lot of things actually. I was beginning to learn that people in Wyoming are very friendly and like to talk.

I told the officer that my insurance company would pay for towing or emergency roadside service, so he called the local emergency roadside service fellow while I cleared out the back end of my car. It was loaded down with emergency preparedness gear. I’d lived in Western Washington long enough to know that you never know when an earthquake or winter storm or some other unforeseen cataclysmic event might strike, so it was best to be prepared for all occasions. I’d had several occasions to use that gear for non-cataclysmic events, so I left it in the hatchback year around. Once the gear was out of the back end of the car, I extracted the car jack, crow bar kit, and ridiculously tiny donut tire.

The trooper surveyed the tire-changing tools with a skeptical expression. He agreed that changing the tire out here was not a good idea, so we chatted a while longer until we ran out of things to say, and he decided that he really should get back to catching bad guys or something. So he drove off again while I awaited the tow truck by myself. I went back to the relative safety of the cab to wait some more.

When the emergency guy arrived, he took one look at the tire-changing gear and said, “Yeah, no problem. I’ll just change the tire for you here. You don’t need a tow.” He’d positioned his big tow truck so you have to move over a little bit away from the shoulder so you wouldn’t hit the truck. That accorded him a slightly improved margin of safety, although he remarked when one driver got too close for comfort that while he liked his truck, he didn’t mind if the careless driver bought him a new one. Without the relative safety of the truck he might have been the one getting hit. At any rate, he finished the job in short order, and I gave him my credit card information so he could run the card when he got back. Then he told me where there was a place at the next exit where I could get a new tire. He even followed me there to make sure I made it. I was glad that he did because the little donut tire was going flat by the time I got there. It had to be aired up again by the people who put two new tires on the back end of my car because the other tire also had dry rot, which was what had caused the first one to blow.

I knew the tires were old but I’d checked them before I left and they still had a lot of tread left on them. It’s true that I hadn’t driven much in the two years since Waldenbooks in Seattle had closed. That’s where I’d been working last when I’d had a significant commute. With the loss of that job, my driving time decreased hugely so my car had spent a good deal of time in the garage simply sitting there looking pretty. I suspect they were right about the dry rot.

When I pulled up to the service area, I was instructed to circle around back. I was told that I would have to unhitch the car so they could pull it into the garage for repair. Yippee! The very thing I had not wanted to do. I had to unhitch the car, drive it down off the dolly, and then hitch it up again when they were done. You can imagine the sardonic smile on my face.

After much fiddling and racking my brain to remember everything Lindsay had showed me at the truck rental place when we’d hitched up, I finally figured it out. I had been, you may recall, completely wiped out and on the verge of heat exhaustion at the time. So I asked the angels for help with this nonsense and somehow managed to do it right. I backed the car down and pulled it carefully around to the car bay. The fellows took it from there while I checked on my kitties to make sure they were okay. It still was not too warm out so I cracked both of the windows and left them in the truck under the shade of the building while I went inside the store to talk tires with the gal at the counter.

In the process of ordering tires, I had to give my zip code so I gave them the one for my mother’s house in Winter Park, Florida. The woman looked at me incredulously and asked if that was Winter Park. Startled that this woman in Wyoming knew about Winter Park, I confirmed her suspicions, thus beginning a reunion of two women who were roughly the same age and had grown up within a couple miles of each other and whose mothers still lived in the same community. Go figure. We hadn’t gone to the same high school because of the zoning lines, but she knew about my school and I knew about hers. It was one of those moments when you are slapped in the face with the reality of how few degrees of separation there are between most of us.

I was puzzled as to how she’d ended up in Wyoming of all places, but then again, I’d wound up in the Seattle area, so there you go. While I’m pretty certain that there is a secret worm hole between Seattle and Orlando, I have yet to discover its exact location. Somehow the two cities end up connected in so many ways that they could be sister cities. Believe me, if I ever find that worm hole, I’ll be set. Then I’d be able to pop back and forth between my original home town and my chosen home town.

At any rate, this woman had found a very friendly place to live. The weather in Wyoming must be about as antithetical to the weather in Winter Park as you can possible get south of the North Pole, but I couldn’t argue with how nice the folks were in Wyoming. You definitely got the feeling that these people had your back. Unless of course you were Matthew Shepard and gay. Then, I suppose, all bets were off. However I will say that the community where he lived was completely shocked by that tragedy, so perhaps the young men responsible for Matthew’s murder were not at all representative of the culture as a whole.

The Wyoming state legislature certainly sprang to life immediately afterwards trying to pass a hate crimes law. While it was a long time coming, the federal law based on the original Matthew Shepard Act was finally passed after President Obama came into office. The two perpetrators of that hideous murder, for a time, had been incarcerated at the state penitentiary in Rawlins, Wyoming, just east of the place where I got two new tires put on my car after breaking down on the side of the road. Talk about your degrees of separation. That was fewer degrees of separation than there had been on that blown tire.

Peace to you and your family, Matthew.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

What the Hail?

2010-10-13T07:57:00.001-07:00

I don’t want anyone to get the impression that my trip was one disaster after another. It was very stressful at times, and it was very boring at times. But it was also funny at times. It was the overall effect of exhaustion from moving and packing, a re-injured back, extreme heat, and trying to get my cats into a gentle routine that made the first part of the journey so incredibly difficult. Our lives together heretofore had been pretty blissful as far as the two younger cats were concerned. Dustin had certainly gone through a number of difficult moments with me in the fifteen years plus we lived together, but the younger kids were most likely under the impression that the scariest thing about our lives together was that a baby came to stay for the day several times a week. Or that their much older sister had gotten sick suddenly and died rather unexpectedly the Christmas before.

On the plus side of the trip, I had gotten to go back to Cannon Beach and take some wonderful photographs, which in my book is a simple but wonderful pleasure. That it followed an hour-long battle trying to get Anjolie in the car in no way dampened my enthusiasm at being able to spend fifteen minutes or so at a pull-out, taking in the beauty that is so evident along the Oregon coast. That I got great photos from that shoot was priceless to me. That it was really chilly during that time was positively sublime. I haven’t felt that cool and contented with the weather since then, but no matter. The point is that the trip had its moments of fun and splendor as well as all the other stuff that happened.

So what does any of this have to do with hail? I’m getting to that. Suffice it to say that by the fourth day on the road that I was already fed up with the heat. I had entered Wyoming soon after that day of the trip began. I rejoiced in having left Oregon behind finally but I wasn’t particularly looking forward to having to drive all the way across Wyoming. There are moments of beauty along Interstate 80, but mostly it is a place of rolling sage brush. While I think the sage brush is pretty, it does get old after awhile and the only real break in the never-ending tumbleweeds are the watering holes scattered randomly along the road until you get near Laramie and Cheyenne where things get more picturesque.

As it approached mid-day, I could feel the temperature rising again. I pulled into a rest stop in Nowheresville, Wyoming. I locked the kitties in the cab with the engine running and the a/c blasting and went to use the facilities. I texted my sweetheart while I peed, using my multi-tasking skills to the max, and after washing up in the sink, I started to head back out to the truck.

Before I’d pulled into the rest area, I’d asked the angels to cool it down at least ten degrees. I suggested helpfully that maybe they could lasso a few dozen clouds and lash them to my truck cab so we could ride along in the shade. Having made this trip a few times before, I was painfully aware that for at least a thousand miles of this trip, there is absolutely no shade anywhere. I knew I was burning buckets full of gas every day I had to spend running the truck air conditioning nonstop, but the alternative was unthinkable. Even if I didn’t end up with a heat stroke, or at the very least, heat exhaustion, it was definitely not safe for my cats to sit in the cab while I went in for even a quick break at a rest area.

Imagine my surprise when I came out of the restroom to find that it had not only suddenly and inexplicably clouded up, but it was also starting to hail pea-sized hail. I stood there with a couple of other women under the eaves and chuckled to myself. I had not considered frozen precipitation as a way to cool the air outside, but the angels had apparently. That tickled me no end, so I shrugged off the light pelting of the hailstones and trotted back out to the truck. Once inside, the hail let up, and I drove off still laughing at the cosmic joke. I have to state for the record that from that moment on, I never felt hot again for the remainder of the journey. I still had to run the air conditioning half the time, but even when the events of that afternoon began to play out, I didn’t have need of the air conditioning much of the remaining days of the trip.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Not So Silent Night

2010-10-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

The third day of driving was much more uneventful, and trust me when I say that you want a cross-country trip to be uneventful. This was not meant to be a long, drawn-out trek across America, although it turned out to be. Other than my jaunt down to Cannon Beach, which despite the difficulties with Anjolie and getting the truck in a bit of a jam had been very much worth it to reconnect and say goodbye by means of a photo shoot. I meant to travel as quickly and as directly as I could across America. I was towing my car and traveling with three cats. This was not a situation I was evenly slightly interesting in prolonging any more than necessary.

I finally drove out of Oregon, across the broad part of Idaho, and down into Utah. Late that night, I found a nice hotel in Trementon, Utah, but they didn’t accept cats as guests either, so I had to leave my sweet babies in the cab for a second night in a row. Don’t you know that those cats were now convinced that not only had I stuffed them in carriers and driven away from our home in paradise, but now I was going to force them to live in the cab of a truck for the rest of their lives? Oh my gawd! If I hadn’t been so tired from pushing on that day to make up some of the lost time, I would have driven onward, but I couldn’t get going and it was already cooler so I knew they’d be okay if not exactly happy about the whole cab camping trip that would have sent them to a therapist if they had been humans.

Fortunately felines are way more resilient so they scrambled out of their hiding places when I laid out the evening’s fare before them. I cleared their litter box again, freshened up their water, and did that best I could to make their accommodations as tidy and comfortable as possible given the close quarters of the truck cab. I cracked the windows again, hauled my luggage across the sand pit of a truck parking lot, and retired to my room on the third floor. I was delighted that the room overlooked the parking area, so I could actually check on the truck at least without going out in the middle of the night this time. I did this exactly once and then passed out on the bed after a delicious shower.

The next morning I forced myself to leave the lovely and comfortable hotel room I’d found last night. After a free full breakfast, I stumbled back out to the truck to find paw prints of a canine kind on the passenger side of the cab along with a smaller set of prints, which looked distinctly like raccoon prints. Ahem. So a dog had treed a raccoon on top of my truck? I guess that should be trucked the raccoon but that sounds like it gave the raccoon a ride, something more on the friendly side of life. Okay then. Needless to say I wasn’t the least bit surprise to find the cab of the truck in a disastrous state, no doubt from the chaos that had ensued with the arrival of a barking dog and the scrambling raccoon. Three felines stared accusingly at me. Even Dustin looked as though he’d lost a bit of faith in me. I apologized profusely while they dined on breakfast and got lots of cuddles and soothing noises from their truly remorseful mother. I vowed then that for the remainder of the trip, my cats were coming inside with me if I had to sneak them in one by one. I’d smuggled a cat into a hotel room before inside a pillow case along with the pillow. I’d do it again if I had to, or I’d stay in the truck with them in a campground.

Fortunately after hearing the tale of the dog prints on the side of the truck cab, my niece and my mother figured out how to get online and scout ahead for cat-friendly hotels. It took a little planning and regrouping when I began making better and better time, but each night for the remainder of the trip they were able to find not only cat-friendly places for me to stay but also ones with AARP discounts and sometimes free pet stays and free breakfast for me. I hadn’t been eating real meals more than once a day on the whole trip, so being able to start out with a decent breakfast at least was nice.

Being able to keep my kitties in the room with me was wonderful. We were able to hone our routine pretty well for the rest of the trip. I had only one more night when I had a problem getting Anjolie to come out of her hiding place. I guess after three days and two nights in the cab, she had resigned herself to living in the small space behind the passenger seat. When it was time to get everyone inside, she refused to budge, so once again I got the boys inside first so I could focus every drop of energy and patience on my terrified little princess.

I finally had to lean the truck seat the two inches forward that it allowed me, reach down behind the seat, grab Anjolie by the scruff on the neck, and lift her to the platform next to the seat. Then I held her there until I could shift my position and stuff her into a carrier. She was none too happy about it, but once she got into the room and realized that she could run around again, she was absolutely ecstatic. She and her brothers feasted on their dinner, slurped water like camels on a drinking binge, and ricocheted across the room like ping pong balls. I was never so happy to see such enthusiastic chaos in all my life. The best thing was that they’d stuck me in the “pet wing” of the hotel apparently and it was empty, so they could make all the noise they wanted, and they did until they wore themselves out finally. I thought that with this turn of events we had finally reached a turning point in our journey, but the next day’s adventures let me know that no, we’d only been allowed one day of respite.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Could This Be Hell?

2010-10-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

I have made mysterious allusions to the grueling nature of the trip I made with my three cats from the Seattle area, where I lived for seventeen years, back to the Central Florida area where I grew up. Okay, so where I was raised. That I actually ever grew up is still a matter of some debate so we’ll leave that for the time being to the critics of this world. I make no claims to be anything more than a kid romping through the world while pretending to be an adult.

In the best of conditions, driving 3500 miles in a moving truck with a cab full of felines, while towing your car, is not an ideal situation. Should you ever find yourself in that position, I recommend that you take whatever measures necessary to get yourself and your cats out of that position. Immediately. It simply isn’t worth it, and it wasn’t because the cats were a problem. My cats were wonderful. Well, all except Anjolie who ranged from being terrified to distraught enough to wet herself to nearly comatose. While I did my best to keep them cool and allow them constant access to food, water, and a mini litter box, she simply withdrew into herself and refused to help me out with that whole saving her life routine.

One of the early days on the trip, I had to keep wetting my finger and putting droplets of water on the tip of her nose so she’d licked it off. After a few minutes of this, she finally realized that she was really thirsty, so she got out of her carrier and drank a little bit of water. That was one of the good days. On the worst day, she hid behind the passenger seat of the truck and didn’t come out all day. By the end of that day’s journey, she was so lethargic from dehydration, I had to reach behind the truck seat (no easy feat since it didn’t fold forward) and lift her out by the scruff of her neck onto the platform I’d constructed between the truck seats. From there I stuffed her unceremoniously into the cat carrier and took her inside the hotel room. Once she got in there and realized that she was free once again to run around, she ate and drank with her brothers, and came to life again.

For the first couple days of the trip, it was stupidly hot. I realize that it was summer, but it hadn’t been hot all year in the Pacific Northwest to that point, so for it to get blazingly hot on my last day of packing and the first two days of my trip was nothing short of maddening. Lest you think I’m being a wimp, a friend of mine who still lives there gave me the startling statistic that in an average year, there are only about 74 days a year when the temperature reaches at least 70 degrees in Seattle. That’s not a typo. It really does not get hot that often there, which is why I lived there for seventeen years. I am not a fan of hot weather. I’ve never pretended to be. It took moving away from Florida to make me realize that I wasn’t really a cranky, lethargic bitch. I’d just been hot for the first twenty-five years of my life.

All of you women who have gone through or are going through your perimenopausal years, please envision having hot flashes for the better part of twenty-five years in a row. Yes, there were a handful of cool or cold days thrown in there. Those of course were days when I was actually able to accomplish something, no doubt. Otherwise, I generally had to stay up late, waiting until the worse of the heat had dissipated, in order to have energy to do anything at all.

I recall clearly having to crank up the air conditioning in my house just so I could run the vacuum cleaner and do a little dusting. Then after a cool shower and a cool down period, I could turn it down again. Forget mowing the yard. I did it when I had to but I would wait until just before it rained or as late in the evening as possible. Even that didn’t help me completely. During my last summer in Florida I got heat exhaustion and was extremely sick for a couple of days. Since that time, I’ve done everything in my power not to get overheated. In spite of that, I’ve had several recurrences of heat exhaustion. If you’ve ever had the displeasure of having heat exhaustion, then you’ll understand my need to avoid it at all costs. If you haven’t, then you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to go through it. Ever.

I have no doubt that I was well on my way to another bout of heat exhaustion by the time I crawled into the truck, cranked up the air conditioning to refrigerator settings, and rolled out of Kitsap County. That the air conditioning saved me, I have no doubt. I can’t imagine having heat exhaustion on top of everything else I’d just endured.

So here it was, just after the 4th of July weekend, and it turned suddenly deadly hot. It went from highs in the sixties to nearly a hundred degrees. What my friend told me after this summer was over and along with that their best chance of seeing any more days where the temperature reached seventy degrees, was that this year had been anything but average. Apparently there have been only 54 days in 2010 when the temperature has reached at least 70 degrees. 54 days out of less than 300 days to this point in the year. At the time I was trying to pack the truck and car, I don’t think we’d had more that a handful of days that had reached 70, never mind 80 or 90. So for it to nearly reach 100 on my last day was nothing short of insanity and an odds-breaking phenomenon. May I say that I didn’t take kindly to this odds-breaking phenomenon? It was insane, and I was glad only to crawl into the air-cooled truck and drive as though my life depended on it. Probably because at that point, it really did.

Of course I didn’t get very far. The late start I’d gotten out of Kitsap County landed me in Tacoma at rush hour, during which there’d been an accident that had snarled traffic. It took me over two hours to get through Tacoma from my departure point in Silverdale. That was more than twice the normal time for that trip in reasonable traffic. However, I didn’t care. I was finally finished and whatever had been left behind was simply lost to me.

The four of us were packed like sardines in the cab of the truck. Dustin was chilling, the younger cats were perplexed, the traffic was stop and go, and I was towing my beloved Honda Civic in this ridiculous traffic jam. I didn’t really care though. I was too numb by that time. Too shell shocked. But I was starting to cool off, so that was a good thing. I finally stopped at a rest area near Olympia to call my mother to tell her that we had finally escaped just barely with our lives and were on our way at a snail’s pace. There’s that snail thing again.

Had someone been able to tell me that if only I had listened to the snail that had fixed itself to my door that I simply needed to stay put for another two days and wait for the tribulations to pass over me, get some rest, and start out fresh again, I don’t know if I would have even been able to process that information. I had plenty of people who love me telling me to stop and rest, but I was hot and exhausted, and all I could think about was getting the rental truck back on time. I have a thing about timeliness. I guess it’s a Virgo thing, but I don’t like to be late. In the end I was two days late with the truck, but quite honestly, had I left two days later until the events foretold to me in a dream had passed over me, or at least until I was more rested, I probably wouldn’t have been any more late than I ended up being anyway, and I might have arrived more sane and less drained of my life force.

Once in the truck, things improved somewhat for a while. I was able to reach Oregon and find my way to 101, the route I wanted to take as a side trip down to Cannon Beach, which is the setting of my first published novel, Driftwood. That area of the world has long held a special place in my heart and became my most regular mini vacation destination.

It was easy driving the truck with a car in tow as long as I was on main roads and highways. Getting into Cannon Beach and traveling along Hemlock Street was interesting but doable, if a little harrowing in spots. The worst part is that the late start and traffic jam in Tacoma had so delayed my trip that it was dark by the time I got to Cannon Beach and was driving along the winding way beside the coast. There was a large resort I was going to try to pull into and check to see if they had a room for me. It was nighttime and cool again because we were on the coast and the fog was rolling in, as it does there. I was very comfortable with that.

What made me uncomfortable again was turning down a road I thought had a turnaround space so I could pull the truck and car through without having to back up in the dark and increasingly foggy night. Only it turned out that it didn’t go through unless I wanted to bounce truck and my low-clearance car over a curb. I was tempted, but I had already heard my car’s bumper scrape with slight bumps, so the thought of bouncing it over a curb was not an attractive one.

I pulled over to the side of the road and went over to where some restaurant workers were finishing up for the night and begged for some help turning the vehicles around. Finally a woman with some trailer-pulling experience agreed to give me a hand if some of her coworkers could help guide her. After a lot of effort and a 57-point turn, she got my vehicle pointed in the right direction. Noticing her server’s apron, I handed her a twenty and thanked her profusely. She tried to refuse it, but I told her that she had earned that tip so she finally acquiesced.

Off I went with my truck, car, and three perplexed cats back into the night. I drove the rest of the way through Cannon Beach until I got back on Highway 26 and headed for Tillamook and a hotel where I knew they had plenty of room to pull my vehicles through because I’d stayed there before. I had to steel my tired mind and body to drive along the winding Highway 101, which had been abundantly draped with curtains of fog. It was nearly one in the morning when I got there, and of course I had to park a long way away from my room.

I tried to carry my cats and luggage in quietly because it was so late at night. Everyone was fine with that except Anjolie, my sweet little terrified girl. So I took her back to the truck and took my boys in first. Then I came back with the luggage cart to get her and whatever else I still needed from the truck. I tossed my jacket over her to stifle the meows she’d let out the first time I’d tried to take her inside. To my surprise, she shut up totally. She was fine as long as she couldn’t see where she was going. Okay then. She trusted her mommy to take her wherever she wanted as long as she didn’t have to watch.

I finally got them and the luggage inside, and they prowled all over the room looking for places to hide. I convinced them that it was okay to eat, drink, and be merry, and they did so. I went to sleep while they romped happily around the room. The next morning when I tried to leave with them, I managed to round up the two boys pretty easily, though they were none too happy to get back into the carriers. Dustin got in first, and Bootsy followed his lead. Anjolie on the other hand was nowhere to be found.

I loaded everything else in the truck then located Anjolie behind the small refrigerator. Okay. No problem. I moved that out of the way and tried to get her, but she took off and ran under the bed. I slid the bed forward on the rails until it tipped forward. I could have reached down to grab her, but she had moved forward too. I couldn’t hold up the bed and grab her at the same time. After moving the bed up and down, backwards and forwards, a few times, I finally realized that I needed help. I went into the hallway and spied a young man who was just returning from taking his dog for a walk. I thought, okay, he understands animal issues hopefully. I stopped him as he was leaving his room again after putting the dog in there. I told him that I’d give him twenty bucks if he could help me get my cat into the carrier. I assured him that she wasn’t scary, but simply scared and smart and I needed more than two hands.

By this time she had gone back behind the little refrigerator again, so I flushed her out and she ran back under the bed. I slid the bed forward and tilted it again. I asked the young man to hold the bed up while I grabbed Anjolie and stuffed her into the carrier as gently as you can do that without allowing her to get the upper hand. I shut and latched the door to the carrier, thanked the young man, coughed up a twenty for him too, and loaded my smart little girl in the truck. I was glad to get in the truck and on the road again, realizing that at the rate I was handing out twenties I’d be broke before I got to Kansas.

I had learned a valuable lesson though. Anjolie really didn’t like that tiny carrier that used to be her older sister’s. Zuki was a Munchkin and didn’t need a big carrier, but Anjolie, while petite, really didn’t like the close quarters. Come to think of it, neither had Zuki. From that point on, I shuttled the cats in stages so no one had to use the small carrier. It got tossed into the car along with the little cooler I’d bought and everything else that hadn’t worked as planned so far.

I drove back up north to Cannon Beach so I could say goodbye and get some final photos. It was still really foggy that morning, but by the time I’d spent an hour (no exaggeration) trying to get Anjolie in the truck and drove back to Cannon Beach, the fog was just clearing, leaving behind a beautiful bluish-gray morning. I managed to get the best photographs I’ve ever taken of Cannon Beach.

Once I was back on the road, I dithered a bit over which route to take. After all the delays, I thought it might be faster to go south on 101 until I found a good place to cut across the country. Only in looking at the map again, I realized that I was probably better off going back to Portland and cutting across there and driving along the beautiful Columbia River Valley. I started off to do this, but after hitting a traffic jam near Portland, I had to get off to get gas. With the given traffic situation, trying to turn left back out of the gas station with a car in tow looked a bit challenging. Then I noticed a sign to the right that indicated that I could also get back to I-5 if I went that way, so I did.

After the world’s most circuitous route, which landed me finally at a rest area out in the middle of Hell, Oregon, I got out to make a pit stop and check the map to ascertain what planet I was now orbiting. I got back in the truck feeling relieved if not refreshed and asked the angels to give me a sign that I was in fact heading in the right direction. A few seconds later, there was a road sign that indicated that I-5 was still ahead in the direction I had been going. Ahem. Okay. Although it was at least 150 degrees out here, and I was driving on the world’s longest shortcut route, there were still angels looking after me. That was reassuring to say the least. Okay, so it was only about 105 outside, but I’m not kidding about that. It was hotter out there than it had been in Silverdale the day before when I was leaving.

Once I got back on the interstate, I realized that I needed to backtrack because of where the alternate route had taken me, so I headed back to Portland, got caught in bad traffic again, and then finally made it to Interstate 84, which would take me east across Oregon and maybe even allow me to leave this state. I’d been here since the night before, and I really didn’t want to stay here yet another night. At the rate I was going, it’d take a month to get to Florida if I didn’t pick up the pace a little bit. While I didn’t actually make it out of Oregon that night, I got pretty close, given the route I was traveling across and then down the state.

When I stopped late that night in Pendleton, I had to leave the cats in the truck because, while they did allow dogs, they didn’t allow cats to stay the night. I was in too tired to argue the injustice of that or hunt for another place at that late hour. It was considerably cooler by this time, so I cracked the windows enough to give them air flow but not enough to get out, and dragged myself off to a shower and a night of fitful rest. It is not easy to sleep when your furry children are locked in the cab of a truck. I got up once in the wee hours of the morning and went out to check on them.

Next morning, I had a big breakfast at Denny’s since it was right there next to the hotel. It was the first real meal I’d had in days. I had been snacking only on Raw Revolution food bars, and I was ready for something different. I ordered my food and sat in the truck and ate it with a little help from my kids. They ate only a nibble or two like they normally do, but they do like to know what their mommy is eating sometimes. Particularly when they’ve been cooped up in a truck for the past 24 hours. Anything to break the monotony.

Once we were back on the road, everyone got back into their self-designated places. Sometimes they rode in the carriers and sometimes they hid under the seats. After nearly sliding off one day, Anjolie decided the top carrier was not safe, so from then on she slept behind the passenger seat and Dustin periodically climbed into the top carrier for naps. Bootsy spent most of the trip beneath my seat, sometimes brushing against my ankles with his soft fur. At least I could reach in and pet him when I was getting in and out of the truck.

Although it was still hot during the day, we were starting to hit our stride on this trip. When we finally drove out of Oregon that day, I began to have hope that we might actually be able to do this. How little did I know that the upheaval had only just begun.

Photos of Cannon Beach:

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

2010-10-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

If you happened to be one of my Facebook friends or have read my first collection of essays, then you will know that I absolutely loved my home in Brownsville, Washington. I didn’t want to leave it, but I had a very strong internal nudge to go back to Florida for a time. Not for the length of a vacation, but for a much longer period of time. Like several months. I don’t know how many, but I knew it would be at least three months. There’s no point in trying to keep up with rent on a place when you’re not living there, so I had to let go of my lovely rented house that sat perched on a bank overlooking Puget Sound, Bainbridge Island, and picturesque Brownsville Marina at Burke Bay. I loved living there so suffice it to say that only a very strong compulsion could make me leave. I had that, but it was all intuitive. I simply knew that I needed to be in Florida for a time as the next step in my life. Where I go from there is another matter.

It was not without a lot of internal struggle, but also knowing resignation, that I packed up house and moved back to Florida. I was really hoping to figure out how to get someone else to do the driving of the moving truck, but alas I didn’t figure out how to do that until I got to Florida and found a company who does that sort of thing and has locations near Seattle too. Ahem. That is information I would have loved to have had before I left. I would have jumped at it in a heartbeat. I really didn’t want to drive a moving van (even though it was smallish) all the way to Central Florida, towing my Honda Civic. I didn’t have enough belongings to hire a big moving company. That would have been overkill. So instead I packed the moving truck only about half full, hitched up my car, and loaded up my cats for the 3500+ mile trek to the Orlando area.

I had been warned in a dream that by the time I got near my mother’s house that there would be major upheaval. Okay. Thanks for that lovely thought. I’m glad I had the dream because at least I wasn’t all that surprised when the earth opened up and tried to swallow me on the trip out there. No, there were no earthquakes or volcanoes as indicated symbolically in the dream, but my world did buckle beneath me, and I did have to watch my step carefully. Only it took me so long to get packed up that apparently the dream time sequence shifted to much earlier in the trip.

Had everything happened when I was close to my family, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad or as expensive. However, I delayed my departure for several days because I simply couldn’t get everything done even though I was working nearly nonstop. My back got re-injured on the first big loading day, and I couldn’t go at the pace I was accustomed to moving, so I had to make up for it by going at it for long hours each day. Even with that effort, I felt like a snail trying to move through molasses. In fact, so much like a snail did I feel that a real live snail attached itself to my back door and stayed there until I left. I have no idea what happened to it after that, but it was still there the day I walked out of there for the last time in the foreseeable future.

That delay in departure apparently shifted everything that was going to happen on the trip to the beginning of the trip instead of the end. Only I didn’t know that was going to happen. I was so tired from packing that I really didn’t know anything except that I didn’t want to pack any more, and I really didn’t want to leave my sweet home. Only I still felt strongly that I absolutely had to leave and go to Florida.

By the time I finally crawled into my car and went to the truck rental place to hitch my car to the already loaded truck, I was completely exhausted and very hot. Hot weather is a rare occurrence in the Seattle area. Super hot weather is even rarer. On the last day of loading, temperatures were in the upper nineties, which is absolutely ridiculous but sort of explained the whole molten lava theme I had dreamed about in connection with the trip. But as I mentioned before the whole nightmarish scene I’d been warned about was supposed to be at journey’s end. Only it wasn’t because I had delayed so long in leaving that I was already entering the earthquake and volcanic upheaval time where I had to watch my every step. I wish I had known that then. I don’t know if I could have stayed put for a few days until it passed or not because of how hot it got for a couple days, and my air conditioner unit was already loaded on the truck. If all hell had broken loose while I was still at the house, who knows what might have happened there. Maybe the snail on my back door was trying to tell me to stay put a little longer and I didn’t listen and paid the price.

Whatever the snail’s message, I was listening about taking things at my own pace. I had to go slow because my back would tolerate nothing more than my slowest speed. I wish I would have understood when the snail attached itself to my door and refused to budge. I should have done the same thing for a few more days. I’d already been driven to my knees several times literally while trying to pack. My leg muscles gave out several times from the stress on my back, and I would simply collapse wherever I happened to be, like one of those cheap little plastic toys with stringed joints. You squeeze the bottom platform, and it relaxes all the elastic strings, and whatever toy figure is on top of the platform collapses like a marionette whose strings have gone slack.

I could have stayed a few more days, which may have been plenty of time to allow the maelstrom to pass over me, and then perhaps the trip wouldn’t have been so long and harrowing. Whatever the case, I heard the clock ticking on the truck rental and felt as though I’d delayed as long as I could possibly delay. I’d just have to go at a snail’s pace to Florida, and that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

When I finally got the car hooked up, secretly hoping I’d not have to unhook it until the other end, I got in the cab with my cats after bidding an oddly fond farewell to the woman at the truck rental place. I was loosely acquainted with her because she used to work at the Red Apple grocery store in Poulsbo. Poulsbo is a fairly small town so if you shopped there a lot, you pretty much knew all the regular cashiers. We recognized each other, so when I left I gave her a hug, more to represent my hugging goodbye all that I had come to know and love about Kitsap County in particular and the Puget Sound area in general.

There was no one else present for this monumental departure on a long journey that would test me to my core. It seemed rather fitting that a relative stranger would be the only “family” I said goodbye to in that life-changing moment. In my seventeen years of living in the Seattle area, I had always lived and worked with people who had become my family through the connection of friendship and the general goodwill of the folks who live out there. True to their generous and kindly nature to the end, Lindsay gave me a cold can of coke and a bag of Sun Chips to restore me a little bit and then sent me on my way with a big, sincere hug.

I’m in tears now while I write this part. It may sound stupid, but I can’t find words to explain how much that meant to me in a moment when I felt like my world was coming to an end, and everything I had known as my life was slipping through my fingers. I had to drive away from all the friends, who had become my family in the seventeen years I’d lived out there, all in the same moment. It was as though someone had ripped my heart from my chest and chucked it back into the river of life. I could only watch as it floated away past familiar and much love scenery. There was nothing left to do but get into the truck cab, soothe my sweet kitties’ frightened voices, and start on my journey.

Since he was a seasoned traveler, I let my older boy out of his carrier first. Dustin jumped out and settled himself next to me on the platform I’d constructed for him because I knew he’d want to ride shotgun with me. We made this trip together before, although the last time had been in my car. He knew how to travel so he could lead the way. The younger two had not been in a car any length of time since I’d driven them home the day I adopted them two years previously almost to the day of that anniversary. They were pretty scared but I knew that if Dustin acted cool, then they would figure out eventually that mom had not taken complete leave of her senses. They did eventually get the drill of driving all day and romping through the hotel room all night, although it took most of that grueling trip to comprehend it completely. By journey’s end, however, they were also seasoned travelers. Dustin had done his job well.

Dustin the Seasoned Traveler

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Dilapidated Old Shack

2010-09-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

Dilapidated old shack, I watched you for years, looking out through dirty windows at the canal and the Olympic Mountains, watching the bald eagles as their population dwindled then decades later began once again to grow.

Dilapidated old shack, I peeked through your dirty windows, trying to discern your ancient secrets of campouts and love trysts, of hopes of building a house there one day, hopes that perished not long before you perished too in the rush to demolish your view of the world.

Dilapidated old shack, just days before they bulldozed you, I hauled away your hidden stash of wood left there years ago by hands unknown. Your precious wood warmed me through a winter storm that left me with no heat. You may have saved my life…at least you saved my health. Thank you for that.

Dilapidated old shack, I still mourn your passing. I realize that we are so much more alike than we are different. I too stood looking out through dirty windows at the canal and the Olympic Mountains, watching the bald eagles soar, hunting for breakfast to feed their growing offspring.

Dilapidated old shack, I don’t know if you remember me, but I will always remember you. I looked out my front window and down to the path that led to your rickety structure. I walked around you and pressed my face against the glass in an attempt to peer inside.

Dilapidated old shack, whatever treasures and secrets you once housed are gone now. You’ve taken them with you and left behind only a memory of your existence. Only those beings who came to know you best by sharing your view will ever have an inkling of how special you were and how lucky to stand there for so many years looking out through dirty windows, watching the wildlife live and die on the banks of the Hood Canal.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Winds of Change are Blowing Me Away

2010-09-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

(Reprinted from my Mystic Angel Healing blog posted May 3, 2010)

I just went down to the beach below the house where I've lived for nearly three years. This place has been a haven for me, but now I feel strongly that it is time to leave my place of refuge. I don't want to leave, but I know that in order to stay on my path towards fulfilling my life purpose, I have to be in a different place now. That means I have to let go of this place that is very much part of me. I have to let go not only of my rented house on the water, but I also have to let go of the Pacific Northwest, a place I consider my true home on this earth. That is a radical break for me since I've been here for nearly seventeen years. It is the first place I've lived where I really felt as though I belonged. While it will be easy enough to stay in contact with most of the people I know here, thanks to the internet, it won't be so easy to stay in the mental space where I've experienced a true sense of belonging. Moving here all those years ago, a big piece of the puzzle of my life fell into place. It seems contrary to all reason to walk away from the very place I spent the first two thirds of my life trying to find. Yet that is exactly what I feel compelled to do, and I've lived long enough to know that things are always better when I listen to my intuition, especially when the pull is this strong.

So I am spending the next couple of months saying goodbye to as many of the places I can get to between now and the time I pull out of the driveway for the last time. Sure I may come back some day but it will change while I'm gone, and I will change while I'm gone. That's the way life is, a constant state of flux. I went down to the beach today during low tide, hoping to connect to this place in a way that would allow me to carry this peace away with me when I leave it. Just as all of life is made up of change, I changed in the space of two hours while I was down there. I changed profoundly. I can honestly say that I went down there one person and came back another. If that much can change in two hours, imagine how much I will change in two years or two decades.

One of the ways I changed while I was down on the beach today was that I came to understand the concept of grace in another way. Grace has been one of the recurring themes of my life, one of my leitmotifs, if you will. How could it be otherwise when I was named at birth Beth Ann, which means "house of grace?" I have been, and always will be in this incarnation, a vessel of grace. While I no longer hold to the Christian religion, I have been and still am influenced by its teaching. I jettisoned the judgments and limiting dogma I was taught, but still embrace the kernel of truth that is in Christianity and every other spiritual path I've examined. Aldous Huxley popularized this concept of a "perennial philosophy" in his book The Perennial Philosophy, but he was hardly the first to recognize the recurring truths contained at the heart of all spiritual paths. Divine grace is one of those truths found in many faiths.

Whatever your understanding of the concept of spiritual grace, I came to see a different aspect of it today while I was down at the beach being buffeted by the winds of change that were blowing internally in my struggle to leave this place, as well as the winds of a storm that were blowing externally down near the water's edge. As I walked along the beach, I was battered lightly by the winds blowing all around me, but I noticed too that there were several places along my beach walk where I could move in closer to shore and the cliff wall where I could find shelter from the wind. Places where all became quiet, and I could experience a respite from the sound and feeling of the wind beating against me. I didn't create those quiet places. I did nothing in life to make myself worthy of finding those places, and yet there they were all the same, just waiting for me and any others who might pass that way. Waiting to give shelter in the midst of blowing wind and rain. These shelters provided moments of grace, moments of quiet in the midst of the maelstrom of life.

Upon having this new understanding of these shelters, these moments of grace, I sent a prayer out to the universe that I would be able to find places like these as I traversed the next year, walking with the winds of change at my back, pushing me towards places and people yet unknown. While I have an inkling of where I'm going, and I understand why I have to let go of my attachment to this place on the earthly plane that feels so much like home to me, I don't know or understand everything yet. I will understand more as I continue my journey through the next year. Right now I have to keep close to the front of my mind the message of Lao Tzu to anyone who feels intimidated by the road that leads away from home. "The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step." Another interpreter of this verse suggests that it could be phrased this way: "Even the longest journey must begin where you stand." [note by Michael Moncur,September 01, 2004]*

So I embrace this literal journey of several thousand miles from Puget Sound to Central Florida, as well as the figurative journey towards fulfilling my life purpose, knowing that it begins right here right now where I am standing in my little house on Puget Sound. I will never get to where I want to be if I cement myself to this moment in time, to this place in the world, to this little house by the shore. I've told the universe what I want in my life and for my life, and now I must trust the winds of change to blow me where I need to be in order to fulfill what I came here to do and become who I came here to be.

*http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/24004.html

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link: http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

The Last Day

2009-10-13T22:31:00.000-07:00

(Reprinted from a journal from c. 2002. Also reprinted at my mysticangelhealing.net blog.)

What would you do if you learned that today was your last day to live? What exactly would you do? When I asked myself this question, I wasn't surprised to hear the answers I gave. What surprised me was the thought that followed the answers.

I thought about the people who live far from me, whom I love dearly. I know I would need to call each of them to say "goodbye." Would there be any words left unspoken? I can't speak for them, but I can say that I haven't left much unsaid over the years. I'm one of those people who says, "I love you" rather frequently--in person, in letters, in actions. I want the people in my life to know that I love them. I don't love them all equally. I don't love them all the same way, but I do love them, and I think it's important to let them know that. While I couldn't very well call everyone I know individually, I would call those closest to me. For those less close, I would write a letter or an email to let them know that I was thinking about them too in my final moments.

I know I would need to say goodbye to my pets. Cuddle them one last time and assure them that I had been blessed by their presence in my life, and that I would meet them again on the other side. Then I thought that I would want to spend some time out in nature, walking along the shore or in the forest. Probably on the shore, if it were the very last walk I'd take. I know who I'd want to spend those last hours with, the one whose soul resonates most closely with mine. We would spend hours, walking and sitting by the shore, talking about everything or lapsing into silence when talking wasn't enough or was too much.

I thought about how this day would feel, how powerful and poignant it would be. Even if nothing is said and nothing is done, I would want to know that it was a day well spent, not cleaning the house, mowing the yard, or washing the dishes, however important those tasks may be in the day-to-day scheme of things. I thought about how rich all the colors would seem, how the smell of the ocean would be more enveloping, the sound of the waves more centering. I thought about how little I would need to say to everyone. My final words would probably be, "I'm not afraid, so you don't have to be afraid or sad for me. If you are afraid or sad, then be those things, but only for yourself."

I could feel the intense nature of this day inside my chest as I thought about it. It caused a quiet sort of hush inside my body and mind, rather like the silence between two waves crashing on the shore. That is when the words came to me, "Live each day with that kind of intensity." That is true awareness. That is true living. It is so much more than being alive. When you reach the other side, all our existence will be lived on that level of intense awareness.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Trip to Alki Beach with Facebook Friend

2009-05-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

(Reprinted from my other blog http://allgoodnewsalldaylong.com for May 24, 2009)

I got the wonderful opportunity today to meet up with one of my Facebook friends, Kerstin, who lives in Germany. I've only ever interacted with her on Facebook, but she let me know when her airline (Lufthansa) was coming to Seattle so we could meet. I went over on the Bainbridge ferry this morning and picked her up at her hotel. I found out that she loves pizza, so I took her to my favorite pizza place in Seattle (Pegasus on Alki Beach). We walked along the waterfront for a while in the beautiful sunshine, talking and getting to know one another a little bit. I want to share some photos of what we saw today. There are a lot more on Facebook, if you happen to be there too. Thanks, Kerstin, for being willing to meet up with a virtual stranger today and leave at the end of the day with a new friend.

Seattle Skyline from Alki Beach (Photo by Beth Mitchum)

Seattle Skyline (Photo by Beth Mitchum)

Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Photo by Kerstin Oswald)

Mount Rainier from I-5 South of Seattle (Photo by Kerstin Oswald)

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

NH Same-sex Marriages Legal but Not Made in Heaven

2009-05-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

In order to pass a law to allow same-sex marriages to be performed legally in the state of New Hampshire, the governor is asking for some allowances to be made for religious institutions to continue practicing discrimination and homophobia without censure. While I think it is good that the law is going to pass, I also believe that if religions are going to be allowed to operate in a manner that is clearly discriminatory against certain groups of human beings, then they should be stripped of their tax exempt status. Why should the ones who persecute the LGBTQ community for wanting "special rights," which amounts to the same rights as every other American citizen, be allowed the "special right" of not paying taxes? In what world does this make sense?

I ask only to be treated as an equal to all other citizens of the United States. That I would have equal rights under the law, equal rights that include being able to wed the person of my choice, to adopt and care for children in need, to obtain and be able to keep a home or job of my choosing. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream. It is one where Susie and Becky, Bobby and Teddy, will be able to run around on the playground holding hands without fear of taunting, when they are six and also when they are sixteen. A dream where parents correct their own children when they toss the word "gay" around in a way that is clearly intended to be taken negatively. Those kids would not do that unthinkingly if parents would educate them about gay children and teens who have committed suicide because of the teasing they received from peers. They would not do it if they knew that their parents would call them on it, just as they would if they had used a racial slur in their presence.

I have a dream that one day the rest of the population of the United States will wake up and realize that discrimination against same-sex couples has no legal foundation or justification. That it is only personal and religious beliefs, which have been drilled into all of us since birth, that makes anyone think they have a just cause to limit civil rights to certain groups of people in this country. A significant portion of the population has already realized this truth, and thankfully they are joining the movement to end legalized discrimination in this country. Hopefully too, more people will realize how wrong it is to allow special tax exempt status to religious institutions that seek to deny equal civil rights to certain groups of American citizens.

http://www.care2.com/causes/politics/blog/freedom-to-marry-and-freedom-of-religion-a-win-win/

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Corporate Greed: It's About Time for a Reckoning

2009-04-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

The United States, it seems, is sorting its priorities in a rather public manner. The citizens of this country are outraged at the chasm that has been revealed between workers and executives in terms of salaries and other compensation. While workers show up for work every day and perform the work that keeps the wheels of the operation turning, they are often paid barely a living wage. When executives show up for work to steer the operation, they are rewarded lavishly. Even if all the wheels fall off the business and it crashes, they are granted huge bonuses and for what reason? Because the company wants to keep these talented people on board? If they are so talented, why did the business crash?

For fifteen years I worked on the front lines of a Fortune 500 company. Okay, so they weren't a Fortune 500 company when I started there, but that's where they ended up, near the top, if never at the top. I was in retail management, an industry that definitely illustrates this chasm in pay between the people who make the company money on a daily basis and the people in cushy offices who are soaking up the profits with their high six and even seven-figure salaries and bonuses. Sure they were calling the shots up there, but their shots usually meant more work for the workers and managers with little or no tangible results and certainly no rewards for our extra efforts. Oftentimes what they had us do was counterproductive and counter-intuitive, wasting money on signing and staff, while granting us no extra allotment of payroll hours. Essentially, we as managers were forced either to do the extra work on our own time or have our staff do it while also attempting to offer excellent customer service. A scattered focus leads to scattered results every time. This was clearly displayed in sales data during the weeks when we had to take on these new corporate-initiated directives.

Originally the company I worked for had been owned by another corporation, a good organization, but one that began to struggle in the changing retail market and growth of big box stores. Our division of the company, however, was solid and, while it needed a little trimming, was largely successful and profitable. So much so that the company that owned us sold us to keep themselves afloat with the money they gained from our sale. Only they sold us to an upstart of a company that had barely cut its teeth in the industry, an industry we had survived and thrived in since the late 1930s. Yes, our part of the company had survived the Great Depression then expanded as America grew stronger, until by the early 1970s, we had stores in all fifty states. We were the first chain of our kind to achieve this and remained the only one with such a presence for more than a decade. The company who took over ours wasn't even in existence at that time.

When our new owners took over our division of the company, they squeezed the life blood and revenue out of it, cast thousands of talented employees aside, and have thus far reduced the number of stores by about eighty percent. They downsized perfectly viable and profitable stores because they wanted to expand their side of the corporation in the then growing economy. They are now in dire straits and deeply in debt to foreign investors. It's no wonder either, given that they closed the very stores that had provided the cash flow, which had enabled them to open more of their stores. The new "bigger and better" stores sometimes thrived and sometimes failed and have since closed their doors.

While I was a store manager, I led my team to victory after victory. Yes, we won awards (non-monetary, of course) and got bonuses (puny in comparison to the money we were raking in and what the executives were getting in stock options, salaries, business expenses, and bonuses). Only management (usually two people per store) got a bonus at all. From the start, I shared my bonuses in a small but tangible (read, monetary) way that my employees instantly recognized and enjoyed as most unusual for this outfit in its current incarnation. Small as they were, the rewards motivated my staff by helping them to feel like their input was making a difference. This sense of belonging and purpose then spurred our store on to greater successes, despite the fact that the company began making it harder and harder for employees to merit a yearly raise.

Most of the time, the workers got no pay increase unless they were a superstar in all areas, and, to be truthful, no matter how awesome an employee was, we were not allowed to give them superior ratings in all categories. We were not even allowed to give them a preponderance of above average ratings. We were required, in fact, to give them a "needs improvement" in at least one category, even if they had been with the company for twenty or thirty years and excelled at their jobs. We had employees in that category because originally, it had been a good company to work for. Sadly that is no longer true and their ledgers and payroll rosters reflect this reality. Although the huge bonuses and perks continued to flow at the top, they throttled the company by siphoning off the overflow to the workers. Executives got everything. Employees were lucky if they got a raise that was the equivalent of a cost of living increase. This new trend started about five years ago.

To make this more concrete, I offer the following example. After sweeping all the sales awards for our district and being one of the few stores in the company that made their yearly plan that year (never mind that we had exceeded our goal by between 5-10%), I received a piddling two percent increase that year as manager of that store. It became clear in that moment that my future in the company was counterproductive to making a real living. Never mind saving enough to make a down payment on a house. That was my thanks for having shaped a winning team of employees and growing my store sales $200k in two years. I had grown that store from an $800k store to a million-dollar-plus store in two years. I posted an extra $200k in sales and got a two-percent raise for my efforts (equal to less than $600/year). Plus I was told by my district manager that I should be happy with that, since most of my fellow store managers had gotten no increase that year because they had not met their yearly sales plan. I nearly choked on my shoelaces, I was so floored by this spin on the situation.

Meanwhile the executives were tossing around millions of dollars in bonuses for their efforts. Most of their efforts involved changing gears every year or two when they changed top executives. Each one in turn decided that the company needed to head in a different direction. Is it any wonder the whole corporation began to resemble a drunken sailor after a night on the town following a six-month tour of duty on the high seas? Stocks began to dip then plummet, and this was before the economy went down the tubes. This company, in fact, was part of the same sickness, a.k.a., corporate greed, that has led the United States to the brink of economic ruin. Only they started falling apart before the most recent debacles, so they will probably not be subjected to the same humiliation as AIG and now American Airlines. Their huge corporate bonuses are long since spent and cannot be called back, any more than the thousands of jobs that have been lost because of store closings.

While I have made peace with my departure from the company, and am glad for it actually, I am still happy to see a public reckoning for a vice that has been an integral part of our society for too long. None of this is written in malice towards the people in this company. Nobody wants to see good companies go down the toilet. I think, however, that what we are seeing now is that the truly good companies are the ones who reward their employees on a more sensible and realistic level. Lots of smaller bonuses and rewards for more people doing a great job. I have no objection to a top executive, doing an awesome job, receiving a nice bonus and a handsome raise. But that top person wouldn't be succeeding without thousands of workers who show up for work each day to do their jobs, which ultimately leads to that executive looking good. All I'm saying is that the workers should be getting a share in the spoils of success. The success of a business should lead to all of its employees, or at least the ones who are pulling their weight, being rewarded for their efforts. Remember the old phrase the "trickle-down effect?" Whatever happened to that concept? Oh yeah, the companies that are surviving the current economic situation are still operating their businesses using that model. It's about time the United States re-awakened to this simple concept of fairness in employee compensation. It is good for our economy. Corporate greed is not, obviously, and it's about time we figured this out and made big business accountable.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

Beth Mitchum's Books and Music

Desire, The Mother of Ten Thousand Things

2009-03-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

All of creation arises from desire. Was is not desire that created this entire world we live in? I know that it is from desire that I write novels, essays, poetry, and songs. It is a result of my desires that I paint pictures, photograph nature scenes and wildlife, and make love. Desire builds bridges and buildings, corporations and institutions. Whatever has come into being has gotten here as a direct result of desire. Yet we learn from Buddhism that all suffering arises from attachment to desire. So how do we desire without falling into the trap of attaching ourselves to the desire and thereby causing ourselves and others untold suffering? How do we desire and let go of the object/subject of the desire at the same time? Therein lies the paradox.

An example of fulfilling our desires without attachments could be the writer who writes because she/he cannot help but write. I have always tried to write what I would want to read and what I want to say. I may have an audience in mind, but I don't change what I write because I am concerned that it won't be acceptable to someone in that audience. Do I desire to be commercially successful with my writing? You bet I do, but I don't write with an attachment to the commercial end of it. If I did, it would take away not only the joy of the writing, but the purity of the writing act. I don't write because I want you to like me for it. I don't write because I want to become a millionaire. I write because that's what I do. That's who I am. I write because words and ideas and the DESIRE to express them arise from the depths of my soul and, like a fountain, bubble forth and splash onto others. If you don't like me for what I write, then the result is that you don't like me for what I write. Nothing else. I don't curl up and die over that, and I certainly don't stop writing because of it. The fountain will not cease to flow and run over. It continues to recirculate, to renew itself constantly because it does not depend on the end result for its renewal. It relies on the source, the desire itself. It does not become attached to anything else. In the writing, there is also release.

The same should be true of a love relationship. Do you love someone or do something for someone so they will love you in return? I hope not. That is the kind of conditional love that will fall apart as soon as the conditions cease to be met. You should love without requiring love to be returned and give because your life is so full that you want to share without thought of reciprocation. If love is reciprocated, then that is wonderful and a deep blessing indeed, and a relationship of mutual loving is born. This kind of relationship is like the fountain that is continuously renewed. In the loving, there is also release.

So how do we go about desiring without attaching ourselves to our desires? I think here we need to think in terms of the end result of our desires. That, I feel, is where the potential for attachment lies. We may have a pure desire that is good in itself, but if we attach ourselves to the end result of the desire, then we fall into suffering. We give and instead of releasing the act to go wherever it will, yielding whatever harvest it will yield, we try to control the end result. That is attachment. That is the road to suffering.

To avoid attachment to the end result, we have to maintain awareness. When we slip into unconscious living, we more easily fall into the trap of attachment, of wanting something in exchange for something, tit for tat. We want to decide on the outcome of our actions. But if we focus on the source, the original desire, to fill us, then we can move through our lives loving and releasing, giving and releasing in a way that we can't if we are worried about who is giving or loving back. If we allow the desire (the writing, the loving, the giving, etc.) to go forth into the world on its own terms, simply allowing it to have whatever results it will have, then we are yielding to our hearts' true desire and living according to our inborn purpose, while letting go of any control over the end result. I'm willing to bet that the more each of us lives according to the desires of our hearts, without attaching ourselves to the outcome, the more we will reap a harvest of blessing.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Beth%20Mitchum

Beware the Half-Warmed Fish

2009-03-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

(Reprinted with permission from http://mysticangelhealing.net)

"We all know what it is to have a half-warmed fish inside us." Rev. William Archibald Spooner

The beauty of the Law of Attraction is that, with focused attention, you can create a miraculous life, full of love and light and, well, fullness itself. You can have exactly what you want in your life, if you are willing to do what it takes to draw it to you. It's a very simple concept that is not so easy to do at first. The good news is that it does get easier with practice. The beastly side of the Law of Attraction is that if you don't follow-through with your beam of focused attention, you'll get the "half-warmed fish."

Apparently in my exuberance to throw open the doors of my heart and make a wish, I allowed my attention to meander a bit. I got a little sloppy in what I was putting out there, so what I got back was messy and a bit of a "half-warmed fish." By this I mean, instead of getting exactly what I wanted, I got sort of what I wanted, but definitely what I asked for by not being specific enough. It manifested back to me as the half-formed wish (or "half-warmed fish") that was sent out by my heart via psychic fax into the universe.

The fish reference is a partial quote by Rev. William Archibald Spooner, a nineteenth century Anglican priest and scholar, who had a peculiar habit of mixing his words up so you understood what he meant, but it wasn't quite right and usually ended up sounding rather comical to the listener. This type of speech pattern is called metathesis, which means essentially, transposing or switching around. Since Rev. Spooner's time, his special way of switching around words has come to be known as a "Spoonerisms."

Had Rev. Spooner lived out his life speaking seldom so that his verbal blunders didn't come into the spotlight, not only would we know less about this speech pattern, but many of us would have spent a great deal less time laughing and playing around with Spoonerisms. I was introduced to this concept from a friend of mine in college (thank you, Penny, wherever you are!), who used to tell the stories of "The Pee Little Thrigs," Wo Snite and Deven Swarfs," and "Rindercella," (you know, the gal who slopped her dripper that was later returned to her by the Pransome Hince).

Fortunately for us, Rev. Spooner didn't hide his gift for unusual speech in obscurity. Instead he became a well-known and unforgettable part of ecclesiastic and linguistic history. For sixty years he lectured at Oxford, and later became a dean and president at the same institution. At the bottom of the page, I will include, for your amusement and mine, links to some of his many oft-quoted transpositions. In the meantime, let's get back to the half-warmed fish.

If you've gone a long time without eating and have allowed yourself to get truly ravenous and probably a little shaky and unfocused from low blood sugar, you really have to be careful with yourself. If you go into a restaurant, sit down, take a look at the menu selections, and point somewhat haphazardly at something in your excitement at the prospect of eating, you may get something you don't want because you aren't paying close enough attention to what you were asking the waiter for with the careless placement of your pointing finger.

Now you can refuse to eat what gets served to you because of your shoddy communication style, but it's likely that you'll have to do a lot of apologizing, explaining, and some careful reordering from the menu. At best, this results in a delay in getting what you really wanted. When you're hungry, that may hurt a bit, but at least if you are careful the next time, you will get what you really want in exchange for a little delayed gratification. At worst, you may have to end up paying for both orders--the one you didn't want as well as the one you did. In this case, I recommend you check to see if it's tax deductible under the category of a lesson well-learned. Seems like an education expense to me. If, however, you decide to settle for what has arrived because you are too hungry and shaky to wait until what you really want can be prepared for you, then at best you'll be disappointed with what you get. At worst, it could make you sick.

What am I choosing to do? I'm sending back the half-warmed fish and going back to the source to order what I really want, much more thoughtfully and with greater attention to detail this time, and with the awareness and intention that I am actually ordering something. It's amazing how quickly I manifested the first order, the half-formed wish. Although it wasn't quite right, it was probably as accurate as I had been in my wishing. Even if it takes a little while to prepare what I order the second time, because I'm much more specific, it's still better than settling for less than the best for my life.

Now for more on Rev. Spooner and his infamous "Spoonerisms:"

http://www.badpuns.com/jokes.php?section=spooner&name=spooners

http://www.fun-with-words.com/spoon_history.html

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Beth%20Mitchum

Quick-Thinking Pilot Averts Collision with Van

2009-03-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

(Reprinted with permission from http://allgoodnewsalldaylong.com)

You gotta love Reuters "Oddly Enough" news feed. It's a great way to start the day scratching your head, wondering what on earth some people are thinking. This one today is a classic example of that. The good news of course is that it has a happy ending, although no doubt there were a few scary moments for the 80 passengers on board a Philippine airplane that was attempting to land at Legazpi airport.

Apparently a couple in a van were driving across the runway as a Cebu Pacific airplane was landing. The quick-thinking pilot managed to take off again, avoiding certain collision with the van in its path. It seems that the son of a local aviation official was teaching his girlfriend to drive, using the runway as a driving range of sorts. The man in question has now been suspended from duty.

Legazpi Mayor Noel Rosal told the press, "It could have been a disaster if not for the presence of mind of a veteran pilot."

Personally I would like to nominate the "driving teacher" for a near-miss Darwin Award. If you're not familiar with the Darwin Awards, you should become acquainted with them. They are given out on behalf of people who rather ingenuously remove themselves from the gene pool. I for one am delighted that this man and his girlfriend will be receiving only a near-miss honorary mention, since they probably would have taken out dozens of other unsuspecting bystanders with their thoughtless stunt. It's a airport, for goodness sake. What was he thinking? Ah, obviously, NOT! Anyway, all are safe thanks to the pilot of the Cebu Pacific airplane.

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE52G2ZW20090318

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Beth%20Mitchum

Where in the World is Delaware?

2009-03-11T22:13:00.000-07:00

Anyone remember the video game called "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?" It was a fun game if you lean to the geeky side of life, which I definitely do. I am interested in many topics and have been known to go off on research binges--hunting down listings for books on certain subjects, reserving them, and having them sent to my local branch of the library. Then I check them out as they come in and read like crazy on a subject until my curiosity is satisfied, I run out of books, or I veer off to another interesting subject. It's no wonder my masters degree is in humanities. Nothing like majoring in generalities. That would be my focus of nonfocus, a masters degree in lotsa stuff.

So anyway, I have liked geography ever since seventh grade when my mom was helping me studying for an exam, and she started singing a song about Copenhagen. I just googled the song and found it on YouTube of all places. To my knowledge I have only been exposed to that song from my mom's use of it as a way to help me remember Denmark's capital city. I aced the test and the class, so she must have done a good job drilling me. Anyway, I still enjoy learning about other places in the world, so the Carmen San Diego games were a sure bet for me.

Now there's a game on Facebook called "Kidnap!" where people kidnap each other and take them off to exotic or not so exotic hideouts. I'm currently in Dublin, although I change my hideout rather often. Once you've been kidnapped, you have to answer trivia questions to get out of prison. They give you a cheat sheet, but you have to go and read about the city where you're imprisoned in order to learn the answer, which is the key that unlocks your prison, unless of course you just happen to know the answer off the top of your head. I've gotten a few answers that way, but not all that many.

Now by this point you may be wondering what all that has to do with Delaware? The answer is absolutely nothing. That's just my rambling, tangential way of writing, while throwing bits of knowledge and trivia at you before getting to the point. You have to admit that more times than not, you probably learn something while reading one of my blogs. You can thank me later when you are able to spout bits and pieces of fascinating things at people during a dinner party. Just mind your manners and don't spit anything else at them please.

So back to Delaware, or more to the point, NOT back to Delaware. Recently on Facebook, I got one of those "lists" things where all 50 US states were listed and you were supposed to check off the ones you've visited. Although the vast majority of the traveling my mom and I have done has been separate from one another, we have both been to 47 out of 50 states. Oddly enough, we've been to exactly the same 47 states. Back in 1985, on a trip from North Carolina to Canada, we drove up Interstate 95 and purposefully tried to find Delaware along the way because it was one of the states neither of us had ever visited. As far as we know, we still have not been there. If we drove into Delaware, we did it without noticing it, even though it appeared to be on the map, and despite the fact that we were looking for it. I'm not utterly convinced that it exists anywhere except on a map. I know it's a small state, but so is Rhode Island, and we managed to locate that state without difficulty.

I finally concluded that all Delaware consists of is a single post office, which they built for credit card companies to use as a billing address, since that's the only thing I've ever noticed as having a Delaware address. Do you know of any people who are from Delaware? I've met people from all around the world, but I've never encountered one person who claimed to be from Delaware. Do they never leave the state? Are they too embarrassed to say they're from Delaware? I'm still convinced that it doesn't exist and you're going to have to take me there in person and solve the mystery of "Where in the World is Delaware?" before I change my opinion. So there.

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

Beth Mitchum's Books and Music

Cotton Candy Clouds

2009-03-01T09:19:00.001-08:00

The clouds are tangled in the trees today.
Spun white cotton candy stretched
and intertwined 'round evergreen spindles,
rising from the island across the way.

Grab a Book, Grab Your Knitting Needles, Grab Your Joystick?

2009-02-18T09:34:00.000-08:00

What do reading, knitting, and computer games have in common? According to a US study, these activities are amongst the things that can keep dementia at bay. Yep, it's true. Now you'd expect reading a book to be good for your mind. That's a bit of a no-brainer (insert groan from the audience here). But quilting and knitting? Computer games? That is the message from a recent study anyway. What wasn't on the list? Watching more than seven hours of television a day. Seven hours? Wow! That seems like a lot of television. I think they need to clarify what you watch for those seven hours. Discovery Channel or the History Channel would be good for your brain, but reruns of Gilligan's Island (raises one eyebrow)?

Okay, seriously, though, more research needs to be done because the study is based partially on asking people between the ages of 70-89 what their lifestyle was like twenty to forty years ago. In other words, what kind of mental activities did they engage in from age 50 to 65? I don't know about you, but I have to wonder about the soundness of this information. This was a study involving a group of people who had already been diagnosed with mild memory loss. (Raises eyebrows) How do we know they remember what they were doing twenty to forty years ago? (Scratches head and furrows brow) Do I remember what I was doing twenty to forty years ago for mental stimulation? Hmm. And what makes them think there wouldn't be a little bit of white-washing of the old memory banks? Forget the hours in front of the telly and cast a hopeful, hyperbolic glance at the three or four books on the bookshelf that they think they might have read during that time. They look familiar, after all. You really have to question the memory of an octogenarian who recollects all those video games he played when he was fifty. What was he playing? Pong? More to the point, do you remember Pong? It was less stimulating than staring at a hospital vital signs monitor (whack to the head). Oh! That's probably what he remembers as playing computer games.*

Anyway the good news here is that doing something is better than doing nothing. Keep the body and brain alive by keeping them active. It's really just common sense. Keeping the brain active helps to keep the old synapses firing, and physical activity keeps the muscles toned and the heart in good shape. So get out there and get some mental and physical exercise. Heck, you can even use your Wii Fit games to be mentally stimulating at the same time as you're getting some exercise. Whatever you do, make sure it feels good and you don't overdo it. Check with your doctor, etc., etc., and all the other disclaimers that go along with making sweeping health statements in a public forum. AND because I care about you all, here is a link you might like to use. You might want to put it in your "favovites" or bookmark it so you don't forget where you found it. I'm just saying.

http://www.fitbrains.com/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7896441.stm?lss

*Said octogenarian is a fictional character used to add humor (hopefully) to the article. How's he doing?

Editor of AGNADL

Ripple Effect of Good News

2009-02-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

On President Obama's Inauguration Day, I launched a new blog: http://allgoodnewsalldaylong.blogspot.com. I started it because a friend of mine was saying that it would be so great to turn on the television and get good news for a change. I had to agree. I too was tired of so much bad news everywhere. Following the advice of Mahatma Gandhi, I decided to be the change I wished to see. I don't happen to own a television station, but I am a writer. Thus the new blog, which now has nearly as many postings as this one, which was started a long time ago in comparison. The new blog operates on the spiritual principle that what you focus your attention on expands. Focus on good news, then good news expands. Focus on bad news, well... we're done with that now.

Today I learned from Seattle Times writer, Danny Westneat, that there is a radio DJ, Kevin Ebi, who is sharing only positive news on his morning news program on KJR-FM 95.7, the classic rock station in Seattle. Not only does it play very cool music, but now it has an upbeat news program to help you start your day.

So while we're all catching this good news vibration in the Puget Sound area, I hope it will become the pebble tossed into the water that creates a ripple that crosses the oceans and eventually returns to us in a tidal wave of positive energy and even better news for all of us around the world. That's my hope and wish for each of you today and for the rest of your lives. May good news follow you like a puppy in need of a home.

http://www.957kjrfm.com/pages/kevin_ebi.html?page=1

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2008746417_danny15.html

Each One Holding Up the Light

2009-02-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

(Reprinted from my other blog: http://allgoodnewsalldaylong.blogspot.com).

I came across an article in the Seattle Times today that brought tears to my eyes. Not because it was sad, though of course it was sad to think about where we used to be in this country in regards to racial issues. We've advanced a lot in the past couple centuries, although I'd say we still have a long way to go, and I definitely hope it won't require another couple of centuries to get there. The reason it made me want to cry was the deeply symbolic nature of the story.

The story is about the honoring of two Seattle gentleman, who are leaving tomorrow morning on an Amtrak train bound for Oakland, California. They are heading for a celebration "to honor railroad porters of yesteryear as part of Black History Month." I direct you to the full article to read for yourselves, but there are two parts that stood out in particular to me. The first was the recollection of Troy Walker, who was first hired by the railroad 65 years ago. While he really enjoyed his job, there was also a downside, which included Blacks being barred from being promoted to supervisory and steward positions on the railroad, muttered insults from passengers, and having to stay in separate hotel rooms from the rest of the railroad staff. It wasn't until 1971, when Amtrak took over the railroad where he worked, that Mr. Walker was promoted to a supervisory position. He retired in 1982, three years after he transferred to Seattle.

The second Seattle gentleman is Thomas H. Gray. He worked only summer jobs as a chair-car attendant while he was in college, so he's a little reluctant about this honor. But his late father, Thomas J. Gray, and his grandfather, Henry Jones, were members of the Pullman union. They both worked for over 35 years for the railroad. He recalls a most touching story about his grandfather. Sometimes in the summer when Gray was working, his train would pass the one his grandfather was riding on. They knew when this would happen, so they would each hold out a light to signal their presence on the train to the other. Thomas would hold up his lighted flashlight, and his grandfather would hold up his railroad lantern. The trains were traveling so fast (70 mph) that it was not possible to see the individuals, but they could each see the light, and they both knew who was holding up the light to the other.

That's the part that really made me cry because it is so powerfully symbolic. We each do our part to make this world a better place, and sometimes it may not seem like a lot and that it passes by all too quickly. But it in the end what is seen is the light, shining out into the world. During a time in American history when Blacks were not treated very well, Henry Jones held up the light to signal to his grandson, Thomas, that he was there. Gray, a 71-year-old retired Boeing engineer, will be going to Oakland this weekend, and I think Mr. Jones will be there as well even if Thomas can't see him. He'll still be holding up the light to guide his grandson's steps.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008717392_porters07m.html

Random Acts of Rugness

2009-02-05T17:19:00.001-08:00

No, that's not a typo. It's not supposed to say kindness or ruggedness. It's rugness, and it refers to a habit that my kittens seem to enjoy. They like to rearrange the rugs in my house. A flat, straightened out rug is BORING! They don't know why I go around straightening all the rugs behind them, and I don't know why they go around messing them up behind me. But we all keep doing what we do, and it's starting to get really funny. So I decided to lay out a rug carefully in their main play area. Not that they don't play wherever they happen to land, but it's what I think of as their main play area. They probably have different ideas entirely about that.

So I laid a rug out on the carpeted floor and just left it there to see what they'd do with it. It wasn't long before the little female, Anjolie, discovered it and decided that it was altogether too tidy for her tastes. So she messed it up. I haven't straightened it up either. I'm leaving it as is. Well, that's not exactly true. When I was playing with her today, I actually messed it up a little bit more and tossed a fake mouse under it so she'd have to go find it. That was a hit with her. She found the mouse and played on the rug with it for awhile. I must say that currently this random rug is her favorite spot in the play area to sit or lay. She stretches out on the rug, rolls around on it, burrows into it, and I just let her have fun with it. It seems to make her so happy.

The male kitten, Bootsy, has not really engaged with the random rug much yet. I've seen him playing with the rugs in the kitchen, so I know he does it too. He probably just doesn't mess about in the rugs as much as Anjolie. They both like to burrow, but he seems to be growing up faster, even though they're litter mates. She's definitely growing out of some of her kittenish ways too, however, because sometimes I'll start to play with her in some way that she used to love, and she just looks at me as if to say, "Mommy, I don't do that now that I'm all grown up."

It will be interesting to see how long the random rug is interesting. I'll have to straighten it up every day, just so it will seem like a "real" rug and not some decoy, which it is, of course. I will say that the rugs in the kitchen are in the same place tonight as they were when I got up this morning and straightened one of them slightly, so perhaps it's working, and I won't have to keep undoing the damage where I need to walk most of the day. I may, of course, have to move the random rug every few days just to keep it interesting.

By the way, the top photo is of Bootsy. He's enjoying the view from atop the ladder I had out to use for painting the interior of my house. The second one is Anjolie helping me fold kitty towels her way, which is quite similar to the way she prefers her rugs. She's also a huge help when I change the bedsheets, as you can imagine. The kittens are nine and a half months old now.

First Ever Openly Gay World Leader

2009-02-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

A new day is dawning around the world. Hopefully the United States' recent surge in understanding that the color of your skin or your gender doesn't determine your ability to do the job of leading a country will continue to propel us forward to becoming a country where all of our citizens have equal rights. What? You mean you didn't realize that not all U.S. citizens have equal rights? Surely you jest. In 1954, the Supreme Court sent a message to all of its citizens in every state. That message was that "separate" rights are not "equal" rights. That message was called Brown vs. The Board of Education. So where in our country are we experiencing separate but unequal rights? In the area of same-sex marriage.

Only one state out of fifty offers same-sex couples the right to marry and enjoy the same (i.e., EQUAL) rights as heterosexual married couples. It's 2009, people, and discrimination still reigns supreme in 49 states when it comes to same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court sent a very clear message in 1954 with Brown vs. The Board of Education. It was 9-0. Now why is it that the 1954 Supreme Court got the message that separate does not mean equal, and yet the people of the United States in the year 2009 still haven't gotten that message? Sure, it's illegal now to make African-Americans sit at the back of the bus, use their "own" bathrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains. But it's perfectly legal in 49 states to bar same-sex couples from enjoying the same rights, privileges, and, yes, responsibilities as heterosexual married couples. It's legal to discriminate against same-sex couples. LEGAL to DISCRIMINATE. LEGAL to treat ONE GROUP of CITIZENS as UNEQUAL to the rest. Why? How is it that more people in this country don't understand the concept of equality? How many centuries will it take before the United States grows up and into its own principles of equality? It's not about religious beliefs. It's about equal rights for all. Period. Same-sex couples pay EQUAL taxes. They should have EQUAL tax benefits and everything else that goes hand-in-hand with marriage rights.

I've often said that I won't believe that the U.S. has achieved a true state of egalitarianism (ALL are equal) until I see an African-American lesbian in the Oval Office. Now that we have a President who is partly of African heritage, I'm revising that to a Native American, Hispanic, or Asian-American lesbian, since we've begun to crack the racial wall that has kept African-Americans in second class status for so long. Geez, it took nearly 150 years after slavery ended to get this far. In another millennium or so, we ought to be on track.

But say, what would happen if we allowed ourselves to grow at a personal/social rate at a pace that equals the rate at which our technology is expanding? What would happen if we did something really radical and just passed laws that make us ALL EQUAL? You've already read my blog about it not being possible that same-sex marriage would lead to bestiality, since animal sex is already perfectly legal in more states than same-sex marriage and all the other forms of SEPARATE but UNEQUAL civil unions are legal. If not, go back and read it and be amazed that while it's not legal for adult, human, same-sex couples to enjoy the full rights of marriage, it is legal in a dozen or more states to have sex with your pets and livestock. That is so twisted and completely contrary to logic.

The United States has a long way to go yet, I'd say. A long way to be as advanced in our way of thinking as a country such as Iceland, where they have just appointed the modern world's first openly gay government leader and Iceland's first female Prime Minister. Yeah, their country is bankrupt and needs a strong hand to lead it away from the brink of disaster (sound familiar?). So who do they call in to fix it for them? In Iceland, it's Johanna Sigurdardottir, an openly lesbian governmental leader. In the United States, a man who is both of African and American heritage, an African-American.

A new day is indeed dawning, but it hasn't arrived in the United States just yet. Because, you see, PM Sigurdardottir is married to her same-sex partner, and if she comes to the United States with her spouse... Do you see where I'm going with this? In Iceland, this woman can become Prime Minister and no one blinks an eye. I quote from the BBC article linked in the title of this blog and again at the close, "'I don't think her sexual orientation matters. Our voters are pretty liberal, they don't care about any of that,'" Skuli Helgeson, Social Democratic Alliance's general secretary, told the BBC."

Now teleport PM Sigurdardottir to the United States, and even if she became a U.S. citizen, she wouldn't have equal marital rights. In Iceland, Prime Minister, in the United States, a second class citizen at best. I may say this a lot, but I'll keep saying it until this world changes. In what universe does this make sense?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7863923.stm

http://uk.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=98015&videoChannel=75

You Can't Say that I Didn't Warn You!

2009-01-31T13:08:00.000-08:00

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=6758210

You may recall that I told you earlier that the shoe hurling incident in Baghdad was likely to be the start of something big (and if you don't, please go back and catch up with the rest of the class). Well, I didn't exactly mean quantitatively big, but someone must have taken that a little too literally. The above link will point your servers in the direction of ABC News, which reported the unveiling of a sculpture of the Iraqi reporter's shoe. I'm a little concerned about the fact that this sculpture was unveiled in the hometown of the late Saddam Hussein, the fallen Iraqi ruler.

According to the ABC News report, the sculpture is the size of a sofa. Oddly enough, there is a tree sticking out of the opening of the shoe. A tree? Okay, so that's got to be symbolic of something, but I'm not sure what. So while I ponder that, click on the link and watch the video, but make sure you read the whole article from ABC News since it gives some background on the Arabic concept of throwing your shoes at someone in contempt, as well as some other links to reactions around the world to the shoe-throwing reporter.

Thoughts on the tree...From this one act of rebellion (shoe-throwing as a seed) grows a tree that symbolizes what? Iraqi freedom? I don't know. What do you think? If it is a date palm, then it all makes sense (see link below), but I can't tell what kind of tree it is from the ABC News video. It certainly doesn't appear to be a date palm. What is the meaning of the tree-growing shoe of the shoe-throwing reporter?

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2004/07/good-season.html

Can You Bamboo?

2009-01-30T15:54:00.000-08:00

I am already drooling over my next laptop purchase. I generally end up buying a new laptop every 2-3 years just because I use them constantly running a business or six at home. I reach the limits of how much it can do and still keep up with my programs and needs. But don't worry, I always pass on any old ones that are no longer being used to a friend or family member. Never, never, never do they just get dumped. People who aren't running such big memory-devouring programs end up being able to use them for many more years after I'm done with them.

While I'm totally loving my current one (at least once I figured out how to turn off the weird touchpad tricks Toshiba puts in their proprietary software), I am actually dreaming of my next laptop. I don't usually do that. For me, it's figuring out when I absolutely have to upgrade and waiting as long as I can to find the best deal out there. I never buy cutting edge technology because you pay too much for it and then have to suffer through manufacturers working out the bugs in the new stuff. I wait 6 months to a year and buy cutting edge technology once it's no longer cutting edge, but still will do what I need it to do to keep up with the workload I require of it.

But now I've seen the wave of the future and it is bamboo. I'm so ready to replace yesterday's plastic casings with the warm tones of bamboo. Maybe it's all those past lives I spent in China, or maybe it's because I really love stuff made from natural materials. Whatever it is, I've found my next love, even if I have to be patient for a year or two while I wait for them to test it out on the market and give it time until the innovative becomes commonplace. In the meantime, I've included a link so you can check out the forthcoming ASUS bamboo laptop.

http://event.asus.com/notebook/bamboo/index2.html

Seen Dancing

2009-01-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

(Reprinted from another one of my blogs, published originally on October 19, 2008 at http://MysticAngelHealing.org, now at http://MysticAngelHealing.blogspot.com)

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." --Friedrich Nietzsche

I love this quote by Nietzsche because it speaks to me of levels of perception. If your mind is closed to the possibility that something is going on out there beyond the world of your five senses, then you will miss so much of what is happening in the spiritual realm. I write and talk about concepts that I'm sure some people think are idiotic and perhaps psychotic. Sometimes my only explanation for those who don't "have eyes to see or ears to hear" is that I don't believe in angels just because I like the theory of their existence. I believe in them because I have interacted with them, and yes, even seen them with my own eyes. I believe in reincarnation not because I studied it and thought it was a cool subject. I studied it because I began remembering information about former lives. While my convictions about angels, reincarnation, and other spiritual concepts have been informed and shaped by my experiences, it is my openness to the possibility of the world of Spirit that has allowed me to have those experiences, i.e., experiences from the dimension of Spirit.

I never ask anyone to believe what I say because I say it or believe in it, but it is a good idea to set aside your judging mind when you read spiritual writings, much as you would have to suspend your preconceived notions of how the world works in order to watch the Star Wars movies. How else could you could enjoy the amazing power of "The Force?" When you read about angels or miracles or magic, allow yourself the same suspension of judgment accorded to works of fantasy and science fiction. If you can allow yourself, even for a short while, to believe in the existence of a Dark Lord (be it Darth Vader or Sauron from the Lord of the Rings), then you can also allow yourself to believe in angels. Shut off your judging mind just long enough to allow angels and the world of Spirit to make a positive impact in your life.

Just because you don't hear the music, don't judge those of us who are out here on the dance floor of life dancing with joy. Close your eyes for a moment and pretend that you do hear music. Begin to dance to the music you hear inside your head. That sends the message to your body and soul that you want to hear the music. Before long you'll be dancing because listening for the music has required you to unstop your ears and open your mind to what is beyond the physical world.

Namaste! Let's dance!

The Year of the Earth Ox

2009-01-24T08:48:00.000-08:00

When I think of oxen, I picture slow, plodding, hard-working animals, whose strength and accomplishments consistently exceed that of many humans. On Monday, January 26th, we begin the Year of the Earth Ox in Chinese astrology. If you're one of those people, like me, who thinks of life in symbolic terms, you'll appreciate the deep significance of this. The Year of the Earth Ox symbolizes health and prosperity that comes as a result of fortitude and hard work. As we begin a new political era under a new President, we are also beginning a new age of greater social responsibility, hard work, and a positive can-do (make that, "Yes, we can!") attitude. That "yes, we can" attitude is exactly what is meant by the term fortitude. The online dictionary I consulted defines it thus: "mental and emotional strength in facing difficulty, adversity, danger, or temptation courageously:"

In the coming days, weeks, and months ahead, we all need a good dose of fortitude, a good dose of Ox Medicine. We have much to do to rebuild our nation, and our world, since we are all connected, but it can be done. We have to be patient, focused, and diligent in our work. President Obama can't do everything all at once, and he can't do most of it by himself. He will need each of our elected officials to work with him, sharing their views, their wisdom, and even their dissent at times, in order for this nation to come back from the dark places it has experienced since September 11, 2001.

From a global perspective, we have to work to strengthen old standards and set new ones. It's time to build a new earth, each of us in our own nations, some of us in other nations. Whoever we are, wherever we are, we have to begin right now. The celebrations have ended, and President Obama started from the first day to forge a new way. We have to yoke ourselves to the plow to rebuild our own lives, and yoke ourselves together for the bigger projects of bettering our communities. Once we plow the soil, we have to begin to plant new seeds. Not just seeds of hope, but seeds of goodwill and right actions. Those seeds, if nurtured and tended, will yield bountiful crops of prosperity and good health.

President Obama is off to good start in his administration, and I have already read some accounts of him being a little bit stubborn and strong-willed. He is, after all, a man of fortitude, and no wonder since he was born August 4, 1961 during the year of the Metal Ox. Is it a coincidence that an ox is leading our nation into the New Year of the Earth Ox? I don't think so. I'd call it synchronicity.

For more about Chinese Astrology and characteristics of people born in the Year of the Ox, I refer you to the links below:

http://www.usbridalguide.com/special/chinesehoroscopes/Ox.htm

http://www.c-c-c.org/chineseculture/zodiac/Ox.html

http://sandbox14.clearconceptsllc.com/ox.aspx

A New Day is Indeed Dawning in this Country

2009-01-22T09:29:00.000-08:00

Newly-elected President Obama has issued directives to shut down Guantanamo within a year. I have to admit that for nearly a decade, I have not felt at all proud to be an American. Guantanamo was a large part of that reason. I know that I wasn't personally responsible for what was going on in the government and had not cast my votes in the direction to set that tone in our country. Indeed I cast as many votes in the opposite direction at every opportunity. I regularly contacted the wonderful senators and legislators in my part of this state (Washington) to inform them of my views, only to find that they already shared them. We were all on the side of human rights, yet still our nation moved towards the shameful actions that were taken in Guantanamo and elsewhere, secreted behind closed prison doors, away from reach of the voting public, cut off from the balancing powers of a government operating under the guidance of its own Constitution.

I supported the actions of Amnesty International and any other organization that called for the closure of these secret prisons, and while things toned down slightly in this area, still our nation continued to drift away from our longheld ideals and support of human rights. It felt to me as though many of us (myself included) had given up hope and were just biding our time until it was over, one way or another.

Ever since the Presidential elections of 2000, I have been, in turn, shocked, confused, appalled, and horrified at what our nation was coming to signify in the world. No, the United States has not always been loved by everyone around the world. We, as a people, have on occasion showed our ugly side as unruly guests in other people's countries. We have definitely showed our self-seeking side as the chief overconsumers of the world's resources. But never in nearly fifty years of my life have I been so saddened by the actions of our government, never been utterly embarrassed to call myself an American. That is no longer true.

I sit here writing this blog with tears streaming down my face because it has only been since November 4, 2008, that I have become proud of my country once again. I didn't realize how deeply the shame of this nation's actions had settled inside of my heart until now as I release those feelings. Yes, I've been angry. I've taken action where my voice and my vote could make a difference. But the shame of Guantanamo and the torture that was done with the consent of the United States of America was beyond reconciling in my mind.

But a new day has indeed dawned. It began with a man with a deep-seated hope that this country could be changed for the better, could be turned back from this nightmarish detour we had so recently taken, largely without our consent. This man managed to bring millions of people along with him on this journey of hope, and now in the fledgling days of his presidency, President Obama has shown us that he meant what he said about bringing change to this country. Do terrorists need to be captured and brought to justice? Of course they do, but justice is not found in the hands of those who view torture as an acceptable method of interrogation. It is not found in secret prisons and the chambers of Guantanamo. If it is to be found anywhere, it will be in a court of law in the light of day.

Yes, our existing judicial system sometimes fails to live up to our own standards of right and wrong. Sometimes it gets mired in the limited mindset of the majority of people in a given moment of time. It has denied people of African heritage the right to sit wherever they wanted to on a bus or in a restaurant. It has denied couples of mixed racial heritage the right to marry. But those laws were changed by the people of this country. As our consciousness becomes more enlightened, so do our laws.

The laws of this land still deny same-sex couples the equal right of marriage in all but one state, but those laws will change as well. They have to, because they are a denial of equal civil rights to millions of American citizens. Somewhere down the line, enough of us will realize that we cannot all truly be free until we all have equal (not separate) rights. Separate marriage rights are no more equal than separate schools, separate restrooms, and separate drinking fountains were equal for the African-Americans living in the southern portion of the United States of America sixty years ago. Those injustices began to change when enough people stood up and said, "Stop! This is not right!"

I grew up in the South during a lot of the upheaval that brought about the changes that were needed there. As an ten-old-girl, I was bussed fifteen miles from my white neighborhood to one of the "Black" schools, so we could begin to become an integrated society. I stood in a classroom filled with faces I had never seen before, most of which were black. I had never been around more than one "token" black student at a time. Suddenly I felt more like the token. Was it uncomfortable at first? You bet it was. Was I afraid? Oh, yes, I was afraid, because I didn't know what to expect from all those black students and my black homeroom teacher. They were not only strangers, they also looked different to me. But with some help from my mother and a sweet, loving smile from my first black teacher, I was able to choose hope over fear. In doing so, that school year became one of my most memorable ones, and that African-American homeroom teacher, Mrs. Scott, became one of my favorite teachers.

Changes in our way of thinking usually comes through experience, positively or negatively. For me, the change came through getting to know African-American students and teachers, one person, one smile, one friendship at a time. In those early years of de-segregation, I learned a powerful lesson. People are just people. No matter what their culture, heritage, religion, ability, IQ, social status, or, yes, sexual orientation. Those first years of change in the South were definitely ones of "de-segregation." It took a little time for it to become "integration," but it did finally.

I have the same hope for laws and attitudes surrounding same-sex marriage. I currently do not have a partner in my life, but that doesn't mean that I don't want the law to stand behind me and millions of other gays and lesbians in this country. We pay equal taxes. We should enjoy equal rights. Does that make you feel uncomfortable? Maybe it does. Does your personal discomfort make it right to deny some of the citizens of this country equal rights? No, it does not. You too must choose hope over fear. It is only your fear that stops you from seeing the members of the LGBT community as equally entitled to the rights you enjoy so freely. Maybe you should try standing in a sea of faces in the LGBT community some time. Then make the choice to embrace hope rather than fear, to begin making friends one person at a time. Embrace the dawning of this new day and know that it dawns on all of us, whatever the color of our skin, the shape of our face, or the gender of our beloved.

Never to Too Old Call "Do Over!"

2009-01-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

Reprinted with permission (smirk) from my blog "All Good News All Day Long" at http://allgoodnewsalldaylong.blogspot.com.

I had to laugh when I read that the Chief Justice led President Obama in Round Two of the Presidential Oath today. According to the New York Times article I read, the second oath took place this evening in the Map Room of the White House and took less than a half a minute. Well worth the small time investment to head off any accusations that President Obama isn't just an "almost" President.

Yesterday the two men stumbled over the placement of the word faithfully and already the political machinations were spinning an argument about the validity of an oath where a word is omitted and then reinserted in a different place. It was a case of better safe than sorry. There were, of course, witnesses present at this second attempt to get the wording of the Presidential Oath correct.

It was noted that Judge John G. Roberts, Jr. said, “Are you ready to take the oath?” To which President Obama replied, “I am. And we’re going to do it very slowly.”

You gotta love it. When at first you don't succeed... Do over! Just like when we were kids.

Link below for the original New York Times article:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/oath-is-administered-once-again/?partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

--Editor of AGNADL

President Obama Takes Presidential Oath (sort of)

2009-01-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Reprinted with permission (smirk) from my blog "All Good News All Day Long" at http://allgoodnewsalldaylong.blogspot.com.

What better way to start a "good news" blog than with the swearing in of a US President, who ran under a campaign of change and hope for a better future? What we, as a nation, can accomplish now with President Obama at the helm of the government is virtually unlimited. He can't do it alone. He is only human after all. Heck, he couldn't even make it through the oath without tripping over his tongue and getting twisted up in the incorrect ordering of the words fed to him by the Chief Justice, who was supposed to be leading him in the oath. Maybe it was embarrassing to him, but it showed the world that he is not infallible, nor is the Chief Justice. But the President seems to have an open heart and a clear vision that we can turn our country around and make it a great nation once again, a respected nation, a leader among leaders in a world that is hungry for change. There is a greater sense of accountability than ever before. Under our last administration we entered a war under a shadow of fear. Those fears, we found out later, were in large part unfounded. President Obama, in his inaugural address states clearly and pointedly, "We have chosen hope over fear."

By far, my favorite sentence of his inaugural speech was this: "To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you build, not what you destroy." So we begin here to build a website of good news only.

Need I Say "I Told You So?"

2009-01-20T16:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-inaug-protests20-2009jan20,0,3272330.story

A Los Angeles Times' headline captures the new trend I was expecting to surface: "Throw a shoe, sing for peace: Protesters gather in D.C." I knew that shoe-throwing Iraqi reporter was on to something big when I first read about the silly stunt of hurling his shoe at President Bush last month at a Baghdad press conference. Apparently throwing a shoe at an inflatable effegy of W has a bit of a cathartic effect on the thrower. According to the article, "Everyone who threw shoes smiled and giggled in spite of themselves." It's hard for me not to giggle just thinking about it.

Maybe this is a good thing. Not throwing shoes at real, live (heavily guarded) people, no matter what your opinion of them, but the release of the anger and frustration of the past eight years of political upheaval, government gaffs, and economic exploitations. Or anything else that annoys you. Go outside, kick off a shoe and hurl it at a pillow, if you don't have a blow-up doll handy. If you do have a blow-up doll lying around, perhaps you should seek more serious therapy OR set up a place for the whole neighborhood to hurl shoes at things/people that enrage/annoy/perturb or generally make them feel crazy inside. What a great way to meet people, make friends, and let off steam without breaking any laws or causing anyone bodily harm. They could be block shoe-hurling parties.

Of course, I'll have to offer the normal disclaimers lest someone come after me later waving litigation papers in my face, so here goes: Don't engage in any physical activity without first consulting your medical doctor (he may want to join you anyway). And you know, do it on private property and make sure no one gets hurt.

As for the karmic repercussions of shoe hurling? I'd say you're on your own there. But you might want to consider throwing that shoe in love. You are throwing something out there to the universe, so beware that it might throw something back. Forewarned is forearmed, and you may not be as good at ducking as Bush has proven himself to be.

Movie Warning: Some Same-sex Comments

2009-01-14T08:25:00.000-08:00

I was shocked to see a ratings warning on a DVD I recently rented. It states that the movie is rated PG-13 because of "some same-sex comments." Apparently the censors think it's hazardous to the minds of children under thirteen to talk about being gay. Never mind the all the simulated sex that was going on in the movie between dancing heterosexual couples or the female character who dons a fake red penis to simulate sex acts. This movie attributes its rating to one scene where a character comes out to himself. No gay sex involved. Not even simulated gay sex in a dance. I don't even recall if he kissed his newly found boyfriend. I don't think so, but if he did it was a quick, closed-mouth job with absolutely no sizzle to it. It was all so tame and as far as I'm concerned, completely unnecessary.

These days a lot of films are tossing bones to the gay and lesbian communities by having a minor character in their otherwise mainstream movie either be gay or come out during the film. It's to the point of what I'd call "gratuitous gayness." What is truly gay (as in gay male, not lesbian) about the film is that it is: 1)a musical, 2)rife with flamboyant costumes, 3)full of half-clad dancing men, 4)centered around the dance hits of the band ABBA. Other than having real gay content, it can't get much more superficially gay than that.

But I'm a little disturbed that the movie industry is using coming-out scenes to give out PG-13 ratings. I can't imagine that if you removed this one little scene that the movie would suddenly be acceptable for all audiences, including children. It is so not a "family" or "children's" movie at all. It's all about love, marriage, and SEX, 98.6% of it heterosexual. It's clearly a movie for adults because, face it, not too many adolescents, who would be allowed to watch because they're over thirteen, would watch it because it is: 1)a musical, 2)rife with flamboyant costumes, 3)full of half-clad dancing men, 4)centered around the dance hits of the band ABBA ("Who's ABBA?"). Unless of course the adolescent is a gay male teen. In which case, he'd feel right at home.

Now I'm not saying that I didn't like the movie because I did. It's funny and campy. Watching extremely famous and talented actors pretending to be ABBA is worth the price of admission alone. The movie, which is based on the international hit musical is Mamma Mia! It stars Amanda Seyfried, Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, and Christine Baranski. So if you love watching actors get paid a bunch of money to have a blast and make fools of themselves, it's definitely worth watching at least once. If you're a gay male, you'll probably enjoy it because of the reasons listed above. For me, watching Meryl Streep acting as though her character is still the young starlet she used to be is worth it all. The lady is amazing and still in darn good shape, I'd say. Make sure you keep watching as the credits rolls and the hits continue to play. The final show is the best part of the movie, I'd say.

But for goodness sake, people, lose the stupid ratings warning about "same-sex comments." Otherwise every contemporary film should have it, and be warned that the gay and lesbian community is not amused by what is definitely an insult. Hello? You have to warn viewers when you're going to TALK about being gay? That is so lame and so bigoted. Maybe my blog should have a ratings disclaimer: "PG-13 rating due to comments about half-clad men dancing to fabulous disco music and flamboyant costumes. Sheesh. I am so ready for a post-Bush world.

Same-sex Marriage Not Okay; Animal Sex Okay?

2009-01-11T18:28:00.000-08:00

I just learned today that although it is not legal in the state of Washington for same-sex couples to marry, until 2006, it was legal to have sex with your goat or your horse or your pig or even your cat and dog. In what universe does this make sense? Certainly not in mine. I've always been puzzled as to why anti-gay heterosexuals often oppose gay marriage based on the argument that it will somehow lead to bestiality. While this stance may tellingly indicate where their proclivities lie, it is an argument that has no basis in logic. On one side is a legally-recognized union that would allow adult, same-sex human couples access to federal and state tax and legal benefits that are equal to those of married heterosexual couples. It would also entitle the partner of an injured or ill lover access to the bedside of their beloved during times when hospitals restrict visitors to "family only." On the other side is the abuse of a being, who is not able to voice consent or dissent in a way that could be understood in a court of law, to a sexual act perpetrated on it by a human who has control over it, one way or another.

It doesn't even matter if the apples-to-oranges comparison isn't logical because the argument is backwards at best. Shouldn't they be worried that legalized bestiality will lead to...gasp... same-sex marriage? Shouldn't they be putting all that ecclesiastical weight behind banning a practice that is already widespread and legal in far too many places around the world? A practice that doesn't involve two consenting adults? According to the article I read, which dates back to 2005, it is legal in seventeen states (this has changed, but I'm not sure what the exact tally is now) to have sex with animals. And the tally for states that have legalized same-sex marriage? Only one state (Go, Massachusetts!) grants same-sex marriages that include ALL the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of a heterosexual marriage. Several more offer varying degrees of rights through legalized same-sex civil unions or domestic partnerships, but only one has a law that offers true equality in the marriage arena. Yet in a dozen or more states in the

United States of America

, it is perfectly legal to go boink your pets or livestock, unless you do it to a degree that clearly indicates cruelty or abuse, or, as is the case in Texas, you do it in public. In Texas, you're welcome to have animal sex behind closed doors. What happens behind closed doors is your business, after all. Unless of course you're having same-sex relations. Even though the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to make it illegal to commit same-sex acts, Texas has retained the law against it on their books, even though it's now indefensible. Hmm.

Just how do they determine that animal sex is not inflicting any damage on the animal, since an animal can't talk in a way that could be understood in a court of law? Do you have to have a physical wound in order for it to be constituted abuse? What message does that send to perpetrators of date rape or incest? Haven't we clearly established that emotional and psychological damage is present in a victim of incest, even if bodily harm is absent?

Supporters of animal sex say that it is no more cruel to have sex with an animal than it is to grind them into meat and eat them. As a vegetarian, I have to admit that I do see the logic behind that argument. That is a significant difference between the way our children are treated and the way animals are treated in our society. So, as a nation, we protect our children with legislation, but animals are on their own--in at least a dozen states and many countries around the world.

Curious as to which states allow such outrageous abuse of animals? I did a Google search to find out, and let me tell you, it is no easy task to find all that information in one place. After posting this blog, I discovered that legislation was launched immediately to outlaw animal sex in Washington after a man died from having sex with a horse in 2005, but I still can't find information regarding the status of these laws in all 50 states. It appears that about a dozen still allow it.

All of that to say...why not same-sex marriage? Why do we not understand the concept of relationships between consenting adults? Obviously as a nation we do not. What do you say that we all start lobbying AGAINST animal sex in all states and FOR same-sex marriage? It doesn't make any sense to restrict the civil rights of millions of gay and lesbian citizens, while allowing people to have sex with their animals. It boils down to this: In my state, the state of Washington, until it was outlawed in 2006, people having sex with animals had the right to do so, while I still don't have the right to an equal marriage under law with a same-sex partner. I repeat. In what universe does this make sense? Why aren't more of us outraged by this?

I've included a link below for anyone who would like to join the Human Rights Campaign, and me, in signing a petition in favor of same-sex marriage. It only makes sense.

http://www.hrcactioncenter.org/campaign/millionformarriageac?rk=L7fZPJ61sQJLE

I would love to offer a link where you could go to voice your outrage over animal sex in your state, but I don't know of such a place. If anyone has further information on animal laws in your state, please leave a comment for me here. I'll be glad to do a follow-up posting providing links to support legislation for criminalizing animal sex.

Cloudy with a Chance of Pelicans

2009-01-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought the headlines couldn't get much stranger, I come across an article in the Seattle Times that reads, "Pelicans fall out of sky from Mexico to Ore." Apparently something is making the pelicans on the west coast sicken and die. They have fallen from the skies onto cars and boats. They are huddling together in people's yards and in parking lots, as much as five miles inland. The birds that venture too close to the road in their disorientation are getting struck by cars.

A major bird rescue operation is underway, but rescuers don't really know what they are dealing with at this time. They don't know if it's a virus or if birds are being poisoned from an unknown source. Some cite possible poisoning from contaminants that washed into the ocean after the latest round of wildfires. But nobody really knows for sure. Some of the birds have swollen feet. There are clues, but so far they aren't adding up to any obvious conclusions.

So far the state of Washington and the northern part of Oregon hasn't been affected, or maybe we have but we've had our hands so full with rogue snow storms and widespread flooding that we haven't yet noticed the plague of pelicans that has beleagured our neighbors to the south of us. I've never heard of a plague of pelicans before, but it is both widespread and statistically significant. Hundreds of dead or already sickened birds have been rescued or recovered. Hopefully someone will figure out what is happening so we can help them. Pelicans falling from the sky is a noticeable call to action.

The whole thing would be terribly funny if it weren't so tragic. They're asking for help. They may even be acting as canaries to warn us of toxins in the sea that will affect all of us somewhere down the line. Whatever is happening, they've gotten my attention, and now, hopefully, they've gotten yours as well.

Lest you doubt my sanity, I've included a link to the original article.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008597545_pelicans07.html

And Me without a Size 10 to Hurl

2008-12-19T18:07:00.001-08:00

I have to admit that there have been times when I have been perturbed enough at our current President to hurl a shoe at him, but I have enough sense and self-preservation smarts not to do it. I mean, he is a world political figure and, more importantly, heavily guarded by people who would gladly give or take a bullet for him. So what made this Iraqi reporter think he could have a hissy fit in the presence of the President of the United States and get away with it? He's lucky the secret service men didn't take him out right then and there. He could have been throwing a shoe bomb at President Bush, for all anyone knew. Apparently that did occur to someone at some point, since the shoes were allegedly destroyed while testing them for chemicals. Personally I think the Bush Administration had them destroyed because it didn't want to be embarrassed by the amount of money the reporter might have raised by auctioning off those shoes on eBay. He could have easily retired early or at least gotten enough money to buy a small army to fight back against the schoolyard bully.

That's how that whole scene plays out to me, like a skinny little nine-year-old getting mad at the bully and his gang who keeps stealing his lunch money. I'm not saying the skinny kid doesn't have just cause to want to throw a shoe at his enemy, but I don't see what he hoped to gain by actually doing it. He'll be lucky if he gets off with just losing his job and press privileges. Of course he's become a folk hero amongst some of our enemies for that supremely childish act of rebellion. So if he manages to escape serious prison time, or a quiet death that appears to be an unfortunate accident, he may be able to write a book about his brave exploits and make it to the New York Times bestseller list. That's exactly the kind of stunt that's likely to end that way. But frankly, I don't think the reporter planned to do what he did. I just think his outrage at the current state of affairs got the best of him and he did what any unthinking human would do--he threw a temper tantrum, and that temper tantrum may very well land him in prison for a very long time.

If he gets off too lightly, for whatever reason, how many more of us are going to start carrying spare shoes to throw at unwitting political figures? I'm already thinking that stilettoes might be more effective. The scary thing is that the actions of a lone reporter is sparking a whole new craze in USA-hating countries. Heck, they may decide that it's noble and brave to hurl shoes at any American, and I really take issue with being blamed for the actions of an administration I very definitely did not even pretend to have voted into office. However, if they're going to start throwing shoes, at least throw some sensible shoes my way. Oh, I'm sorry. That's old school lesbian. Since the advent of the L-Word, I guess I should be requesting some expensive Italian pumps or maybe the stilettos after all. I'll just have to make sure I dodge as well as W or those stilettos might leave a mark. Personally, I think I'll stick to my non-leather Birkenstocks. Size 39 R, please.

Just in case you're living in a tent with no television or newspaper and have no idea what I'm talking about, I've included a few links to bring enlightenment to you.

http://www.metimes.com/International/2008/12/17/shoe-throwing_journalist_inspires_arab_jokes/2561/

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98496624&ft=1&f=1004

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/17/shoe.thrower.iraq/?iref=mpstoryview

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/mideast/shoe.php

Just When You Thought it was Safe to Return to the Mall

2008-12-10T09:30:00.001-08:00

We recently had a fatal shooting at a mall in the Seattle area. Truth be known, I worked at this very mall for about ten years, having left there this past summer only because the company for which I worked fifteen years decided to close our store location. This had nothing to do with the current economic situation. This was a matter of one company doing a non-hostile takeover after a merger several years ago. Turns out, it does feel rather hostile, after all, to the thousands of people left without jobs, once they did away with our executives and office staff and started closing all the existing store locations they viewed as superfluous. It'd be different if the company that took over was doing well, but they are not. They took over a company that has been around since before the Great Depression and has weathered many an economic storm and still remained profitable. The same thing could not be said of the parent company, who is becoming increasingly endebted to an Australian company that keeps bailing them out. Eventually, no doubt, when you go into their stores, they'll be greeting you thus: "G'day, mates."

All that aside, the shooting at this mall at the south end of Seattle, was gang-related and had nothing to do with corporate takeovers. It involved underage teens shooting underage teens. Two male teens were shot. One died; the other is still recovering from his gunshot wound. The shooter has been apprehended and has pleaded "not guilty," of course. After the shooting, the police had to put the mall into a state of lockdown and search the entire mall area, looking for anyone connected to the shooting. This was on a busy Saturday just before the Thanksgiving holidays, so of course, merchants lost oodles of money and mall customers lost oodles of confidence in the mall's security. But short of having metal detectors going into the malls, how is anybody supposed to prevent something like that from happening? It doesn't lead to a safe feeling.

Earlier this year, the mall went through something similar. The main difference is that no one died. I was working the night of that shooting and subsequent lockdown. I was the manager in charge and had to huddle a couple dozen captive customers in my store for four hours while we waited for the police to search the mall for the shooter. It's a big mall. Thank goodness we had a bathroom in our store. Not all of the stores do. It was nearly one in the morning before I was able to get in my car and begin the hour-long drive home to the safety of my house on the Kitsap Peninsula. When I got home, I immediately got online and sent a quick email to my mother. I didn't say anything about the shooting. I just wanted her to hear from me at a time that was clearly after the shooting incident. That way if she heard about it on the news, which wasn't likely since she lives on the opposite side of the country, she would know at least that I was alive. If she didn't hear about it on the news, I wasn't going to tell her about it and make her worry. I did finally tell her about it after I was no longer working there.

All this drama can't compare to a situation that occurred this week in a mall in Bangladesh. It seems that a bull got loose and went storming through the mall, wreaking general havoc amongst shoppers and causing damage to shops. No one was injured fortunately. Ahem. They do live in a different world over there, do they not? I mean, I've had plenty of experience with service dogs in my store, but never a service bull. As it turns out, it was not a service bull at all. Or maybe it was performing the ultimate act of service. It was on its way to be slaughtered to provide meat for the poor. Maybe it had gotten wind of its fate so it went on one last shopping rampage. Maybe it had simply heard about the sales. I don't know why it charged on the mall, but what truly puzzles me is how it charged the mall at all. Is this an outdoor mall, or did someone hold the door open for it? The article I read said that it was a "posh shopping mall" where this happened. I guess we define posh differently over here, or we don't use the word at all, lest we want to be subject to lots of sniggering behind hands. I just don't think of cattle markets and shopping malls as subjects that belong in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence. So which is worse? To be trampled by a rogue bull? Or shot by a stray bullet from a teenage gang member's gun? Hmm. I think I'll stick to shopping online for now.

If you'd like more bull, check out the article at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE4B75EA20081208

Warning: Kissing Could be Hazardous to Your Health

2008-12-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

Nope, we're not talking about mono here, we're talking about a man in China that kissed his girl to deaf. Not death. She's still alive. However, she is going to be deaf for a couple of months, courteous of her overly exuberant kisser of a boyfriend. I am not making this up. This is one of those times when truth is way stranger than fiction. I can't even imagine what kind of kissing would cause someone's ear drum to rupture. All I can say is that the guy's mouth should be registered with authorities as a deadly weapon.

Here's a link for you to read more about the deafly kiss, lest you think I've completely lost my marbles. I'm not making this stuff up. I just happen to come across it in the news online.

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE4B75EO20081208?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=69

This story brings to mind the lyrics of a song Faith Hill sings, "This Kiss," where she talks about a kiss being criminal. Well, this one certainly would certainly qualify.

Who Thunk of That?

2008-12-05T10:03:00.001-08:00

What's the deal with our beloved English language where a word and what would appear to be its opposite actually mean the same thing? For example, there is ravel. Then there is unravel. You would think by adding un as a prefix to the word that it would negate the root word's meaning. When the scarf you're knitting begins to ravel, it means that it is coming undone. When your knitting begins to unravel, it SHOULD mean that it is somehow magically coming back together, but oh no, it's not so. There's just more of it coming undone. It's like the Law of Entropy on steriods. In this case, you really are damned if you do and damned if you don't. One way or the other, you're going to end up with a pile of yarn and no scarf. Ravel and unravel mean exactly the same thing.

How about sever and dissever? Should you ever accidentally sever your finger, not only do you want to get to the hospital quickly with your injured hand and the severed finger, you also want to make sure that instead of instructing the hospital staff to dissever your finger, you make sure they know that you want them to sew the already severed finger back on. Otherwise you might end up with more than one missing digit. While that may be a little far fetched, it does make you scratch your head and say, "What the ...?"

The same is true with flammable and inflammable. In this case, the confusion is not merely annoying or uncomfortable, it could be downright dangerous and potentially deadly. If a material is flammable, you definitely want to take precautions and keep it away from a source of heat. Just make sure you don't fall into the word trick of thinking that a material labelled inflammable means that it won't catch fire. Otherwise your world might go up in smoke because the words mean exactly the same thing. Fortunately the word inflammable has become mostly obsolete, which I suspect had to do with the internal infernal conflict of the words in question. Still it makes you stop and wonder, "Who thunk of that?"

This Teddy Bear has Teeth

2008-11-25T18:45:00.000-08:00

Anybody read the ridiculous story about the guy who climbed into the panda zoo area? I know it sounds like the opening line to a really stupid bar joke, but it's for real.

Okay, so there's this guy in China who climbs into the panda zoo area...

What do you think happens? No, he doesn't die from that supreme act of silliness, but he also doesn't get the warm and fuzzy cuddles he was hoping for apparently. Instead he scares the crap out of a huge being with teeth. Granted they are the grinding and chewing sort of teeth rather than the tearing and ripping kind, but they do the job pretty well on bamboo stalks. According to one reference I checked, a giant panda can consume over 3500 stalks of bamboo in a day. Now that's a lot of chewing and grinding. It's the kind of chewing this one goofy young man was subjected to during his not-too-swift, nearly worthy of a Darwin Award, maneuver. The panda defended himself against the intruder by chewing on his arms and legs. Heck, he might have just thought they were a new kind of bamboo.

Anyway, that fool survived his trip inside bear habitat, but a drunk guy in the Ukraine this past summer wasn't so fortunate. He ended up being mauled to death by two brown bears when he fell into their pit while trying to get his picture taken near them. Now there's something wrong with this story on so many levels. To begin with, why is the guy drunk at the zoo? Do they serve alcohol at the zoo in the Ukraine or did he smuggle it in with him? Either way, getting drunk and then trying to get chummy with brown bears, whose teeth are the ripping and tearing sort, is not the world's smartest move. I have to wonder if he has been nominated for a Darwin Award yet.

Sometimes the human brain is a wonder to behold. And then stories like these surface. Makes you wonder.

Here are links to both stories in case you're curious.

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE4AN5NF20081124?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=69

http://russiatoday.com/news/news/27468?gclid=CKja6ujskZcCFQhJagodaAMq-w

Simply Irresistible

2008-11-24T10:41:00.000-08:00

Everyone once in a while I come across a quote by some famous person that moves me deeply in some way. Sometimes it's poignant, sometimes it sad, and occasionally it's a little shocking or funny. The quote I share with you today is one of the latter. They are the words of one of America's most beloved and influential First Ladies who, in case you're not up on your American history, quite possibly had a lesbian relationship with her long-time friend and companion, Lorena Hickok, known as "Hick." Only a few of the many letters written by Eleanor Roosevelt to Hick survived. They were preserved and published a few years ago. Many other letters, however, were burned by Hickok at the passing of the First Lady in 1962. The ones that survived certainly imply intimacy and affection between the two women.

Hickok was a well-known lesbian in her day. Apparently she wore masculine attire and drank scotch, which may seem a little tame in today's world, but would have tended to make her more than a little bit notorious in the 1930s. She also smoked cigars and played poker with the other reporters. She was one of the first female reporters in America. She covered the First Lady on behalf of the Associated Press until she was forced to resign because her relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt "compromised her journalistic integrity."1 Hickok gave Eleanor a sapphire ring, which she wore on Inauguration Day in 1933. Later Hick moved into the White House and went to work for the Democratic National Convention.

While people try hard to deny that this relationship was lesbian in nature, you have to do more than your fair share of sticking your head in the sand to deny it successfully. One line quoted from an extant letter from Eleanor to Lorena reads, "I want to put my arms around you & kiss you at the corner of your mouth."2 I don't know about you, but I rather doubt that a woman who didn't love another woman romantically would write a line like that in a private letter, particularly when the recipient was a known lesbian. One wonders what might have been revealed in the letters Hickok later burned. I, for one, am glad that Hick protected Roosevelt's private thoughts and words, given the homophobic atmosphere that prevaded the country at the time of her passing, which still lingers in the political arena today.

All that aside, I share with you some of Eleanor Roosevelt's more public thoughts and words. They certainly allow a glimpse into the lively internal world of this First Lady:

"I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: 'No good in a bed, but fine against a wall.' -- Eleanor Roosevelt

************************************************************************************
1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A493535
2. Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok: E.R.'s Friend, New York: William Morrow, 1980, page 111.

One Small Step

2008-11-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

9:51 PM PDT, July 12, 2008, updated at 7:23 PM PDT, July 30, 2008
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step."

This quote is from the Tao Te Ching, a book I find most helpful on my own spiritual path. Rarely are we required to drop everything and jet off to the other side of the world. Yes, it does happen on occasion, but most often we get some warning and preparation time. But every journey we take, including a sudden, unexpected one, begins by taking one small step in the direction of the door. There is at some point, an agreement made to undertake life's journeys--both the mundane ones as well as the whirlwind tours of the entire globe. Most often we have multiple opportunities to change the journey, to get off the path we're on and onto another. Every bit of progress we make along life's path is made in small increments. Even if you tend to jog or sprint toward your goals in life, each footfall comes in increments of one step. In the end, it results in a journey from one place to another, from where you are to where you end up. Maybe we make it to the end of the journey and find that we are exactly where we wanted to go in the first place. Sometimes we end up somewhere entirely different, yet all along the way, the small incremental steps we made led us to our ultimate destination, wherever that ended up to be.

Where you end up is not nearly as important as acknowledging that all along the way, you made choices that led you to this place rather than another place. Wherever you do end up is not necessarily where you have to stay, since in each moment we can choose to take another step in a different direction, down an alternative pathway. If you don't see a pathway open to you that you like, you can always choose to forge a new trail. That's what pioneers do. Anyone can become a pioneer. You just have to be brave enough to take one step and then another and then another.

Tired of Kissing Jessica Stein?

2008-11-10T19:21:00.000-08:00

Me too. I just watched that movie again, and it reminded me of what I never want to do again. It seems that straight, bi-curious, and sometimes conflicted and/or closeted women are attracted to me. Why? I don't know. Perhaps because I'm out and confident. A lot of women are drawn to strong women because it's part of themselves they want to affirm. Perhaps it's because I don't hang around with lesbians exclusively. Maybe that's a sign that I should. But I love diversity. I love people. I don't want someone's sexual orientation or even gender to decide whether or not I can be friends with them.

Even though I live near Seattle, I don't take part in the LGBT community really. I could say that it's because I don't have time, but the truth is that I'm mostly a homebody, which does make it a little harder to meet new women, women who love women, that is. I mean, I do meet them. I even found this one fast food restaurant near where I work, which has seriously skewed the Kinsey scale for lesbian representation in the general populace. There must be a fourth to a third of the staff there who are lesbian. I'm not sure how that happened except that maybe it was the domino effect. Let one lesbian in and next thing you know, that one will get a lesbian friend a job there too, and on it goes. Now all I have to do is find a few more places like that to haunt and I'll know half the lesbians in King County.

But seriously, other than on the internet, how do you find someone when you don't get out there where other lesbians hang out? I don't really drink, and I don't smoke. Vegetarians don't blend well at barbecues. Maybe I should get involved with another conservative Christian church. God knows I saw a lot of action there. Of course, that brings me back around to my original point. I'm tired of kissing Jessica Stein. I don't want to have to help yet another woman come out to herself, or worse yet, come out and watch her dive back in and deny that she was ever out there in the first place. That's a priceless experience. Moments like that make you wonder if you were imagining things or just acting out some totally self-destructive behavior.

I have had some relationships that turned out better. One was even with a woman who had originally thought that she was straight. She had even been married and had children. Only it turned out that she definitely is lesbian. Still is, after all these years. But too many times, women who have never been with women can't handle it once it happens. There are too many emotions and issues to deal with all at once. I feel empathy for them because it's not easy coming out at any age, and the older you get, the harder it is, and the older you are, the greater the chances that you have more cultural conditioning to unload.

But enough is enough. It's time to meet an available woman who loves women and isn't afraid to embrace that and admit it. I've spent years trying to get over the one who made a dive back into the closet not once, not twice, but three times. She deserves an Olympic medal for executing a triple twist closet dive, but now it's time to move on to lavender pastures. Not mauve, not lilac, not periwinkle. It's time to find a card-carrying member of the Lavender Menace who will watch movies and go for walks on the beach with me. Someone whose closet is filled only with clothes. Someone who isn't another Jessica Stein, just looking for a best friend.