The last few years have been very cathartic for me. I have had to say good bye to a lot of things that I loved from the time that I was very small. My grandmother passed away last summer, just ten days before my birthday. I had to haul ass to get home to talk to her just one more time before she left and she didn’t even get to say good-bye to my children. That was how fast I had to move just to be with her. After I said good bye to her, I said good bye to the house where I grew up. The yard was overgrown, but the trees were still there and I could still see the scars on the old maple where my swing used to be. I never knew how my grandfather managed to get the swing put up there, or if he made my dad do it. When I was a kid, it didn’t matter. But then, in that moment all I could see was that the swing was long gone and the remnants of my childhood hung in that yard like ancient material, too strong and durable to give way, and at the same time so delicate and fragile that a single touch would rend all to dust.
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Tags: facebook, grandmother, grief, optimus prime, peter cullen, star trek
Essays, News from the Random, Rants, Tech, Writing and Reading | Random Gemini | 
July 9, 2009 10:17 am | 
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As a parent, I have tried very hard to make sure that I do not buy my kids clothes that I will be embarrassed about later. Still, somehow, things manage to find their way into their closets that makes me stop in my tracks in the midst of my morning routine, stare at them, and say “Oh no… you are NOT wearing that!”
At least three times a week, I say this to my daughter, who comes out of her bedroom wearing some tank top or otherwise sleeveless contraption that she wore in the 6th grade. Since she will be starting high school this year, those 6th grade tops really do not work for me and I keep trying to find them as they come down the chute and dispose of them, but somehow they keep passing me by. This morning was a shocker though. I never have to have this lecture with my son, but today he changed all of that. This morning, my son was wearing these pants that have a hole very near the crotch area. I stared at him and shook my head and said, “No, you will not wear those pants out of my house.”
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I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks playing with graphics software for the Mac. Yeah, I know, there’s Photoshop, but I really didn’t want to shell out 800$ for software that I was going to whip out and futz around with four times a year when a mood takes me to redesign my blog logo. That’s really where this all begins… with my blog graphic.
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I woke up in the middle of a dream this morning. Somewhere amidst the sound of my daughter knocking on my bedroom door with extreme urgency and the dog whining and nudging my hand to get me out of bed, I remember seeing a face in my dream that I haven’t seen in my dreams since I was in Junior High. I briefly exchanged assurances with my daughter about how I would give her a ride to school since she’d missed the bus and then I sat up and felt like smacking my forehead to see if that would cause brain function to restart.
For the love of God, why was I dreaming about Wil Wheaton?
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The world has become an interesting place over the last 15 years. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I looked at the world and wondered what amazing changes were going to take place in my lifetime, but if I had to pick one… I’d say it was the internet.
It has really changed everything that we do and the way we think about doing it. Thus begins the story of Johnny and the Popcorn Popper. I’d like to preface the story by saying that any similarities to persons living or dead, is purely coincidental and almost assuredly, this story was not inspired by people that I follow on twitter or their escapades in the newsroom. Absolutely nothing to do with it. Definitely not.
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Most mornings, my husband gets my daughter out the door for school and I sleep in a bit until its time to wake up my son and do home school with him. This morning, there was a knock at my bedroom door at the ungodly hour of 7:35. I looked at the clock and said, “What is it?”
I heard this small, scared voice that I don’t normally hear from my teenagers anymore say, “Mom, can you give me a ride to school?”
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My son will be 16 this year. Normally, I wouldn’t tell you this because I am very private about my children’s identities online, but this time, it’s important for you to understand so I’m going to throw caution to the wind here.
Last week, he went in to take the test to get his learner’s permit. I was at the salon having my hair done at the time, but thankfully for my husband, the DMV was just the next shopping center over, so he took the kid in and the kid passed the test to get his permit on the first run through. At the time, I was so proud. I’d had to take the written test twice before I got my permit, but not my kid. He had studied, he was prepared. So I sent out a text message to everyone in my family and announced his joyous news. Driving is a rite of passage for us after all.
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I started working on a list of books a while back that I was going to place on a page on this blog for all of my readers to see. It was to be a list of the greatest books I have ever read and it was taking a very long time to compile it because these books all impacted me on a very personal and very deep level. The biggest problem is that a lot of the works that really influenced the way I think aren’t full length novels at all. They’re short stories. These are harder to come by in terms of purchase but I still think it is worth it for you to read them, and for me to talk about them, especially because I really cannot make a list of works that changed the way I think and merely limit that list to novels. And in order to do the list justice, I needed to give the ideas that I had about each individual work time to percolate.
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Red Dragoon, a buddy I hang out with on a forum, issued a holiday… well… not a challenge, but an activity. We both wrote poems for Halloween and will be posting them on the forum in the off topic threads in the morning, but you… my constant readers, can read mine now.
It is a sestina. A sestina is a poem that is written in six stanzas of six lines each. Each line of each stanza ends in a word that is pre-determined, so you kind of write them like you are solving a word puzzle.
Happy Haunting!
Prayer for Dawn
After a day spent listening to my entire collection of Gackt albums (I own his complete discography), I found myself falling asleep a few minutes ago, long enough to just barely start to dream. I don’t often remember my dreams, but this one was a doozie and made me realize that I had spent far too much time immersed in Gackt’s amazing voice today. It took me to another world… another life. When I woke up with my hair looking all ridiculous from having passed out on the dining room table, “Fan Girl” came out. I don’t promise quality here, I was half-awake when I wrote it.
I have to admit, sometimes it is really cool to wake up from a dream of some guy that you are never going to meet, with the most beautiful white wings, whispering to you in a language that you’ve immersed yourself in for the last year. The coolest part is realizing that you understood every word that he said.
Fan Girl
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