Why? Because sometimes people need to let loose. I tell my daughter that cursing is what people do when they can’t think of anything more intelligent to say, and I believe that. So why curse? Because sometimes I don’t have anything more intelligent to say. Sometimes I am so overwhelmed by stupidity that I let a few bombs go. While I take pride in having a sizable vocabulary, there are a few occasions where fuck, ass or shit are the best words for the job. Does it make me less intelligent? Dear sweet buttery Jesus I hope not, but it does make me feel a little better if I let fly every so often.

I discourage my kids from cursing because I know that, at their ages, they aren’t able to restrict that sort of language to semi-appropriate places. The last thing anyone in my family needs is for my toddler to let a few f-bombs fly in front of grandma. This means that I restrict my own foul mouth as well, which is only to be expected. However, cursing is still a part of self expression. If I go a little blue-light special every now and then, well, it means I’m still thinking, alive and kicking. If you’re someone who doesn’t like to see that side of me, by all means, I’ll make sure my blue tone is kept out of your rose-colored world as much as I possibly can.

This doesn’t just apply to sin–it applies to everything in life. Live large, take chances and don’t be afraid to stand up for what’s right. Being wrong is ok too, just be ready to change when you realize you’ve erred. Don’t confuse this with the John Wayne type of “Make my Day” macho christianity James Dobson and his ilk are trying to sell though–this is eyes open, fully conscious spirituality that’s not afraid to admit mistakes.

The Evangelical Lutheran church is doing this today, addressing the roles of homosexual christians in the church. They’re not traveling unexplored territory–the United Church of Christ has accepted homosexual christians for a long time and the Episcopalians have done so for years as well. What they are doing is bucking the increasing trend of hatred and bigotry within christianity. They’re finally welcoming people who were born different, want the same things out of life and want to worship God. That seems like a natural step, but sadly it isn’t one that the church has been brave enough to take until now.

I can’t tell you how many times the church has voted against accepting homosexual members as they are, in committed relationships. They were afraid of the outrage (cue pearl clutching) of their more “conservative” membership. They hurt a lot of people and alienated a lot of christians in their continuing decision to reject gays and lesbians from the clergy and from being “real” Lutherans. I can tell you that the ELCA’s continuing decision wounded my own family considerably and turned my own sister away from the church and from christianity. It also had a very large part in my boycott of organized religion.

I’ve thought for a long time that the ELCA has drifted far away from Luther’s original proclamation to sin boldly.
Luther was not one to shrink from adversity — he stood up to the Catholic Church, left a monastic life for brave new territory as a heretic, and married Katherine. Katherine was no wallflower either: she repeatedly ran away from convent life, once running away in a herring barrel with several other sister nuns, getting the hell out of a life she didn’t want. These were the founders of the church that would eventually play it safe? I wish I could have been there for the vote (which took place on my sister’s birthday, coincidentally), just to stand up and holler “What took you so long?” The ELCA played it safe for too long–at least they finally woke up.

Neither Martin nor Katherine lived safe lives. They took risks, and the risks weren’t always calculated. I look at both of them as true heroes, albeit deeply flawed ones, like every other human being. They believed that living, really living, is not always safe. Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t glamorous and the consequences ain’t always pretty, but at least you can take solace in knowing that what your beliefs aren’t being compromised.

The thing that I admire about Luther, in spite of his many flaws, is that he played David to the Catholic church’s Goliath. He nailed those proclamations to the cathedral door, knowing that he would be branded a heretic. That wasn’t a light weight charge in those days–it could have meant his death. Luther did it anyway, taking organized christianity and setting it on its side. The ELCA is doing that again, even in the face of a schism within the denomination. Just as Christ accepted people from all walks of life, so will the ELCA. If they keep going in this direction, the ELCA might persuade me to go back to a Lutheran church on Sundays. For now, I’ll just say it again: it’s about damn time.

My dad died two days later, on March 20th. I got a call from my brother on the 19th saying that my father’s health off the ventilator was going south. Because he had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, we didn’t take any heroic actions to keep him alive. Instead, the doctors taped a magnet over his defibrillator, took him off all medication except a few painkillers that eased his suffering. They kept him off the ventilator, made him comfortable, and we waited for the inevitable.

It was strange, watching my dad slip away. He had gone from the stern, quiet Scots-Irishman that I knew to a frail, shaking impersonation of my father. Still, when they took him off of the vent and all the other drugs, we saw glimmers of the old Dad. At one point, he shakily pulled my sister and me down to his level and whispered as loud as he could “Where did you guys find this joint?” It was as if he thought we had hoodwinked him into going to some seedy bar! Later on, when my mom, my aunt and uncle and my brother and his wife were sitting around talking in the hospice room about how my parents met and became engaged, my father woke up just in time to remind everyone exactly how much my mother’s engagement ring cost. It may have been the last time he was conscious.

I wasn’t there when he passed–it was at night, after I had taken the kids back to my parents’ house to sleep. My mother, my father’s brother and his wife, and my brother and his wife were all there. They said it was peaceful. I was there, however, for the following days of preparation, planning and grieving. It’s weird–I think the biggest emotion I felt the entire time was anger. Anger that my daughter would have to have her fifth birthday the day before her grandpa’s funeral, anger that I was so sick that I couldn’t sleep for all the coughing, angry at certain family members for letting my dad go on in his condition without considering his wishes. I was just a big seething bucket of pissiness. Tears didn’t really come until a lot later.

Really, the whole thing was surreal. Planning the funeral at the funeral home, finding out the different options for burial/cremation, having to go through all his old photos to find just the right ones to display at the wake (and it was a dry wake… damn Lutherans!). There are so many ways to spend money on a dead person and not many of them make much sense!

The viewing was, in a word, interesting. I’m not a fan of open caskets. With as frail as my father had been, combined with the wait for the viewing, it was something that will stay with me much longer than I’ll ever want. All I can say is that when I die I want music, booze and a box of my ashes spread over the Wicklow mountains, far from some sorry, lily scented funeral home. I want memories to be happy.

So why am I writing this over two months later? Many reasons, most of them don’t make sense. The biggest one is because I couldn’t put anything into words until now. There are so many things that have happened in the past few months, and so many more that are rendered sad now. The first Father’s Day without my dad, my daughter’s fifth birthday–the first one my father wasn’t there for. I called his cell phone to hear his voice one last time, only to be disappointed because the service had already been turned off. Good news is a little less so because there’s one less person to share it with. I measure things in how my dad would look at them. I see him in my son’s face every morning when he wakes up. I hear him laughing at my little family’s antics and I cry a little, then laugh a lot.

He agreed to sedation and a ventilator in order to rest. He then developed pneumonia, which was leading to kidney failure. By last Thursday, things were looking bleak. My family drove to Columbus to see my dad, perhaps for the last time. We sat down (at least the part of my family that was stateside) and discussed options, what Dad would want, and how we needed to proceed. I watched my mother grieve for her husband while he lay in that hospital bed, getting weaker and weaker. I watched small glimmers of hope that seemed like poison, from doctors that gave seemingly conflicting information. I prayed, or at least tried to.

Then, on Saturday, things appeared to turn around. My father’s kidneys started acting like kidneys again. His blood pressure, which had been dangerously low while on two different types of medication to keep it raised, was starting to stabilize. His heart was pumping with a somewhat regular rhythm. Grief turned back into hope for my mother, who took each one of these events as a sign for the better. I, however, just didn’t know.

We’d prepared our minds for what we thought was the inevitable. My family was saying goodbye to our miracle man–the man that had died and come back to life a decade earlier. When he started responding to treatment, I didn’t know what to think. I had prepared myself so thoroughly for the possibility of his death that I refused to believe there was any alternative.

See, in situations like this, hope is a bitch. She reels you in with whispers that everything will be different this one time, that things are going to turn around. That everything will be even better than “Okay”. She hooks you and then she poisons you. Reality falls short of expectations. Hell, sometimes reality just takes one look at hope and laughs. These are the times I worry about–the times when hope lies. This is what I was afraid of with my father, so I refused to give in to the hope that he would recover.

Seeing my father in that bed, unconscious and frail, that man wasn’t the man that taught me how to fish, how to use a hammer, how to ride a bike. That man was a shell. I was furious with anyone who tried to say anything to the contrary. I told myself that my father wasn’t in that shell anymore, but now it seems he was. My father is being weaned off the ventilator today. Time will tell whether or not his body will tolerate being off the machine, but he is better enough to try it. The miracle man may just ride again.

For those of you that don’t know, the Senator has taken his Mavericky Maverickness to the land of twitter (gosh, he’s so cutting edge, we’re all bleeding), where he’s keeping us all up-to-date on the “Top 10 porkiest projects” each day. He assures all of us in twitterland that Thursday’s will be posted soon. I love how the things he thinks of as pork all have potential to create new jobs, and how many of these jobs don’t apply to the “average” American. If you’d like an example, check out this one, from February 27th. Just throw out the window that if we’re talking about “American”, we’re talking about the entire continent, not just U.S. citizens. Wait, scratch that: include the entire continent. I’d like to see what Sen. McCain uses as a definition for the whole damned continent.

As much as all politicians like to think they’re fighting for the “average” guy or gal (or at least like having that appearance), Washington D.C. is like a interrogation room with dirty windows. We can see in (mostly), and politicians can sort of hear what we’re saying but, as long as they’re in the room (D.C.), they can’t see us all standing outside. McCain’s petty jabs at projects are the result of his obscured vision of the U.S. He sees everything through his partisan lens, which obscures the potential help any of these projects offer. Take the example I linked to above: McCain comments that investing in astronomy isn’t going to help “average” Americans. How’s that? Americans need jobs. Some Americans (and by American, I mean those of us living in the United States) happen to work in the field of astronomy, or are studying in that field. How is investing in astronomy a bad thing? Or is it because this investment is going to Hawaii, which probably has the least obscured night sky in the country other than, perhaps, Alaska?

Where McCain finds pork, I find jobs to be an avenue toward progress. Guess I’m just not average according to John and I think that’s a good thing.

Imjaddarah is a Lebanese recipe, often made for Friday Lenten dinners. The recipe I’m writing won’t be used for any Friday night though, since it calls for a cup and a half of chicken broth. Sure, you can use veggie broth for a Friday night or a vegetarian meal, but all I had in my pantry was chicken, so there you are. This has a few extra ingredients from your basic Imjaddarah, which you can find here: Imaddarah Lentils and Rice.
Recipe after the fold.

Ingredients:

* 1 C dry brown or green lentils
* 1 C brown rice (The basic recipe calls for the rice to be washed and soaked… I play things a little more fast and loose and just washed the rice)
* 2 C water
* 1 1/2 C chicken broth (or vegetable broth)
* 1 medium yellow onion, chopped fine
* 1 medium yellow onion, sliced lengthwise.
* 1/4 C olive oil (you can use canola instead, but know that this is sacrilege)
* 1 1/2 t salt and pepper (if you can, use sea salt–trust me, it tastes better)
* 1 t ground coriander
* 1 T minced garlic
* 1 t dry garlic
* 1 large carrot, peeled and chopped coarse

Wash your lentils. Look for any rejects (there will be a few), pick them out and wash again. This will remove any remaining “grit” from your dried lentils. Wash them a final time, drain out most of the water, then let the lentils sit in the bowl. Wash and drain the brown rice and add it to the bowl with the lentils.

Get a pot ready with the water and chicken broth and put it on the stove (on high) to start warming up. Add the lentils and brown rice, a pinch of salt, and stir.

Heat up the oil in a saute pan. Once the oil is hot (it will slide around the pan readily, like water), add the onions. When the onions are translucent, add the chopped carrots and minced garlic. Saute the vegetables until the onions are caramelized (golden brown, fairly see-through), then add the whole thing to the pot of lentils and rice. Stir that pot again.

Once the pot of lentils and rice is simmering, reduce the heat to medium-low and stir whenever you think of it. This is a fairly low maintenance recipe–about every ten minutes or so, give the pot some love and go on about your business. When the liquid in the pot is reduced to look like a gravy, add in the dried garlic, some more salt and some pepper to taste, and the ground coriander. Let the whole thing simmer until the lentils and the rice are soft, then take it off the heat entirely.

Since I cook this recipe as a “make-ahead”, I let it cool down a little bit and then put it into separate takeaway containers and pop those in the fridge. If you’re cooking this for a meal, let it cool a bit before you put it on the plates–it will be hot! If you like, you can get adventurous and try a little lemon juice on top of your serving, add a little parsley, or even a little cheese. Whatever you do, enjoy it–this is a hearty dish and will keep you warm with the blanket of snow we have on top of us at the moment.

I wasn’t what you would call an easy child. I was high strung, energetic, stubborn… what some people would call a free spirit. This caused me problems in school. My progress reports and notes from teachers always mentioned my attention span, my lack of organizational skills (worlds messiest locker, anyone?), and my temper. Back in the eighties, ADHD was still relatively new, not much was known about how ADHD manifested in girls, and I went undiagnosed. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I was diagnosed, and by then I had learned a whole slew of coping mechanisms.

On one hand, my experiences can help my daughter, regardless of whether or not she has ADHD. On the other hand, I have no desire for her to go through everything I experienced. I was on hellishly awkward kid. Prone to tears, extremely insecure, pretty much a walking target for bullies… that’s not what I want for my kid. Granted, she’s all of four years old, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not worried for the thirteen year old she’ll grow into.

I’m proud of my daughter for her fierce independence, her intelligence, her willingness to take risks. I don’t want that to be overshadowed. It’s times like this that deep breaths and living in the present are all I can do.

Two, I was pregnant. I was happy about this, still am, and I am now very happy to have two children. Even so, I am not, I repeat not a good pregnant woman. My last pregnancy damned near drove me crazy, and the aftermath completed the trip. Since I was actually happy about the prospect of another child, but very nervous about the possibility of going nuts again, I was naturally a little conflicted.

Stir in just a little bit of late-pregnancy complications, an unexpected c-section, and post-partum recovery, and adding a newborn to our little family, and you have a recipe for no blogging for a while. Just some links every few days.

Of course, now, the baby is out, I’m not crazy, and I’m out of the job I hated. Needless to say, I’m pretty thrilled. In fact, I feel like I got a piece of my soul back. Not only do I now have two kids that I adore, but I also have a job that genuinely challenges me and feels rewarding. The new job smell isn’t quite gone yet, but it’s still a thousand percentage points less stressful than my old one.

So that’s what’s going on, in a nutshell.

Honestly, it’s a little disappointing to hear that you really can’t afford as much house as you thought you could. It’s tempting to take the offer that will get you more, even if it may come back to bite you in the ass. I’ll be honest–I thought we’d be able to afford a lot more than we were able to when we looked four years ago, but once we realized what our monthly payments would be, we started aiming a little lower. Of course, not everyone had people looking out for them like our realtor–she was the first one who suggested that we were far out of our price range.

Four years later, we’re ready to get the hell out, as are at least four other households on our block. It could be that we’ve outgrown our house, that it’s on an extremely busy street, that my daughter can’t play outside, or that one of the neighboring houses has a residential count that defies noise ordinances, basic manners, and all laws of physics (oh… did I mention the neglected pit bull pup in their back yard?). Honestly, I don’t know how many people stay next door (I don’t say live, because being crammed into a three-bedroom bungalow like that ain’t living), but it’s a hell of a lot more people than that house was built to shelter. Our house has gone from being a little slice of our own heaven to hell in four years, and only part of it has to do with the scary article in the Times. A lot of it has to do with the state of our city as well.

The crime rate is going up. People are trying to move out and getting trapped by the fear of paying two mortgages at once (and that’s a very real possibility that could really crush a person’s/family’s financial well being), and Cleveland is looking less and less desirable. Just ask my other neighbor, who has had his house burglarized over five times (realistically I’d say around eight, but I’m not sure) by the same people, who have never even been brought in for questioning. The last time he was burglarized, the cops wouldn’t come out–serial burglary doesn’t rate as high when you’ve got drug dealing, gang shootings, domestic abuse cases, and everything else to deal with and not nearly enough officers to handle it all.

It’s more than I can cope with–and judging from the realty signs, more than a few of my neighbors agree. Cleveland was a wonderful place to live, but it’s going downhill and fixing it isn’t glamorous enough to get Frank Jackson or any of our city council members airtime. Taking on the banks, fixing the schools and public services is a hell of a lot harder than offering up a few soundbites, so I doubt most of our officials would be interested in the first place.

Quite honestly, after living here, all I want is a farm out in the boonies with a half mile between me and the closest neighbor. Cleveland, I’ll remember to visit you. Right now it’s time to pack.

Think that being a woman online means that you have to be a shrinking, anonymous, violet? WRONG.

If you’re one of those people who thinks that women need to protect themselves more than men for the sheer reason of their sex, turn off your television, read this opinion piece and do some soul searching.

This cannot stand. Seriously. If the FDA approves a proposed change to the definition of chocolate, our once messy, gooey and delicious sweets won’t have to contain cocoa butter, the ingredient responsible for the messy and gooey awesomeness that is chocolate. Such non-cocoa buttered chimera would be known as chocolate, duping consumers into allowing waxy and very non-delicious concoctions into their systems.

Just say no to mockolate!

_That is all._

It’s not that I’m really this creepy, it’s just that this sculpture is really that funny. Honestly–zombies as garden decorations? How delightfully tacky in a non-gnome sort of way! I may just have to get one of these.

If web design is your bag, or you know someone who designs, develops, codes or would just appreciate the knowledge, send ‘em here:

Coding Horror: Creating User Friendly 404 Pages.

A fabulous resource for anyone who takes typography serious… or just wants to learn how type on the web _should_ work. This is a serialized site — chapters are added periodically, and each one is easy to understand and its concepts are easy to apply.

Instead of ditching WordPress or not trying tumblr, I’ve decided to integrate them using something called [ReBlog](http://www.reblog.org), which allows you to syndicate posts from rss feeds. Now, I’m sure this tool is used for evil on a daily basis by link farmers and spammers, but I ain’t one of ‘em. I’m just using this tool for its sweet little integration feature, which has made life a lot easier in terms of the brain power I had to expend to get the two weblogs talking to each other. If you’re not evil and bent on making the internet a more cluttered place full of junk, I recommend ReBlog to splice your different blogs together.

“This is most wonderful. It is true, free vector grunge elements are the unicorn of the design world.”
— from a commenter.

• Word Wise
• Literally, A Web Log
• A “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
• National Punctuation Day

All I can say is wow. This little web-based photo editor is very nice for those photos that just need some touching up, or some special touches.

Picnik offers a free account, with promises of a premium (read: paid) version later on. It allows you to upload to your flickr account, or use Picasa, and does an excellent job of giving your photos some extra oomph.

Gmail tips and tricks–quite useful for me, since I now must check my email through the browser only on my work computer.

File under the “would be nice, but so would unicorns and teleportation” category. Seriously, how cool would it be if we could actually write off some of our telecommute expenses?

What can I say? This should be fun.

The other night I was in Columbus, visiting family. I stepped out of the madness for a bit to do some retail therapy (mama needed new yoga pants), and when I got over to Old Navy I saw a girl sitting in front of the store on a bench, with her head in her hands. She looked like she was crying, so I went over and asked if she was ok, and got her story.

She had just had a fight with her boyfriend, who she just found out was fathering a child with a different girl. Just found out as in the day before. Her boyfriend did a drive by to shout some choice phrases at her as she stood there talking with me, and drove off. Left her there in front of a store, talking to me.

I kept talking to her, took her to a nearby coffeeshop to warm up, let her make a few calls from my cellphone to see if she could get a ride home. She couldn’t call her parents–she’d cut them off a few years before. She lived on the far west side of Columbus, in a bad part of town, far from where we were. In the end, I left her with a warm cup of coffee, feeling like I’d taken her partway and dropped her.

I didn’t give her a ride. I still feel horrible about it, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking that the whole thing could be a scam. I tried to feel better about it, thinking that I at least got her a cup of coffee and listened to her story, but I wonder if she got home ok. Columbus isn’t like Cleveland–the buses don’t run late at night, and I don’t know if her boyfriend ever came back.

Is a little kindness enough? Is it ok to take someone part of the way and hope they get home? God, I hope so, but my gut keeps saying something else.

Have a cup of ‘nog, a little brandy, maybe a chocolate or two–just find some way to celebrate. There aren’t enough reasons to celebrate–we need to cherish the ones we have.

I’ll be working in the private sector for the first time in nearly a decade, one crummy summer as an intern at an alternative weekly paper notwithstanding. The new job came as a very pleasant, extremely welcome surprise to me, since I had just started looking for a different job. I had been considering leaving the university, looking for a larger paycheck, something closer to my field, something more satisfying, but hadn’t really gotten down to seriously looking yet. Opportunity gave me a swift kick in the ass, just enough to get me started down the road.

I’ve written about my job before, but always in glowing terms. I refrained from writing about the daily gripes, mainly because I knew that if I had, they would have been found by the wrong people and they would have unecessarily hurt some feelings. I also didn’t write about the changes that have been happening in the past few months, when the department that I had been a part of for nearly four years had been arbitrarily dissected. All I’ll say is that sometimes change is good, other times it just brings frustration. Perhaps, when I gain a bit of distance and perspective, I’ll write about it. Right now I fear that I don’t have an objective enough view to really go into the experience without sounding shrewish.

I’m grateful for the time I’ve spent at the university, and the experiences that I’ve had. It’s time to move on, though, and grow. Thanks, CSU, for the great four years. I’ve learned more than I ever anticipated — now it’s time to show off that learnin’ somewhere new.

In the US, and in most of the western world, weight is a great humor prop. The fat jokes, the sight gags, the willowy actresses that don latex to appear literally larger than life, we think fat people are funny. Sitcoms have the “fat friend,” a mouthy yet supportive heart of gold hiding behind a lifetime of ding-dongs. Strangely, the fat friend is usually far from fat, having some meat on her bones that makes her slightly larger than her hot, waify counterpart. Fat is funny–fat cares and fat will be there for you on the morning after, usually because fat is also the designated driver who never gets hit on (unless it’s a punchline). Fat has _personality_.

Being a plus-sized gal really isn’t that bad — I can still shop for clothes, I get exercize, I eat right. I just don’t lose the weight without radical dietary change (paging Dr. Atkins…) that borders on unhealthy. I have friends, I have a husband, I have more important daily issues than my weight, so I choose not to think too long or hard about it.

I don’t have many problems with the way my body looks, except for the daughter-related stretchmarks. I just have problems with the way it’s perceived. If that sounds strange, think about it: I may not have problems with how my body looks, but a potential employer might. While I think I look fine, I worry about being the punchline to some galactic fat joke. Insecurities abound about my abundant frame, even though I’m perfectly comfortable with it.

I feel guilty whenever a story on obesity makes it on the news, with the obligatory shot of someone’s ass waggling down the street in a pair of polyester stretch-pants that should’ve been banned a long time ago. I don’t feel guilty because I’m deemed overweight, I feel guilty because I’m looking at the video and thinking _I’m not that bad… not that freakish._ Yes, even among the fat, judgement happens.

I guess that what I fear the most is judgement — I fear that someone will see my Lane Bryant shopping bag and evaluate me based on the simple fact that I don’t shop JCrew or Banana Republic. I fear that my size will downgrade my importance in their eyes. Then I fear that I’m placing too much importance on what other people think of me. Then I worry about the black helicopters that are monitoring just how much cash I have in my wallet and my politically dissident thoughts (ok, so the last one was a joke–the medication has taken care of most of that… I promise).

Honestly, shape and weight are an issue for anyone. If you’re “too skinny,” you have a problem. If you’re “fat,” you have a problem. It seems like our culture and our society just won’t let us be happy with our bodies. With so many other things to be concerned about, it doesn’t seem like it should be such a “big” issue, but it is what we make of it. I’m off to eat some dinner.

Writing here has been an outlet for those times when the creative juices haven’t exactly been flowing– the “in between” times, if you will. When I’ve got a new piece in my head, or a new idea, I just can’t seem to concentrate as much on the writing. It’s a kind of benevolent neglect. This doesn’t mean I don’t think about writing, it’s just that I get distracted (ha ha) from my writing ideas and become obsessed with my current project.

To give you an idea of what’s been distracting me lately, visit my [flickr account](http://www.flickr.com/photos/tina/). There’s new artwork up — artwork so new it hasn’t even made it onto my portfolio yet.

In addition to creating new art, I’ve been a little preoccupied with another project: getting [my design site](http://www.burningriverstudio.com) up and running. It’s another project using [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org) as a content management system; one that I’ve needed to do for a while. If you’re looking for a designer, whether it’s for a personal weblog or for your business, stop by [Burning River Studio](http://www.burningriverstudio.com/) and take a look.

I got my first rejection letter today. It was for a juried “art show” in California. I use “art show” instead of exhibit or any other term because I saw the “winners.”

I’m not used to rejection — it’s something I haven’t had to deal with very often. My first reaction to rejection is usually a brief period of depression, followed by anger. In this case, the depression was _very_ brief. It was followed by a white-hot anger, once I saw the pieces that got in.

I know that rejection is sometimes good for the soul — having never gotten one of those “We’d _love_ to take everyone, but we only had X number of spots…” sort of letter before. My reaction? _Bullshit_. If you’d love to take everyone, why the hell did you make it a juried show?

That sort of “everyone would be a winner, but some just aren’t up to our standards” hypocricy just makes my stomach turn. It’s a lie. A lie that says “Thanks for your entry fee, now bugger off–we have more important things… but here’s a platitude, so we’ll feel better about telling you to bugger off.” Give me a break. If you don’t want to feel bad about telling people they couldn’t hack it, don’t put yourself in that position. Don’t try to make me feel better with a verbal reach-around. It won’t work. You insult my intelligence by trying the whole “Everyone’s a winner” approach. Perhaps other artists buy that schtick — I don’t.

Honestly, The rejection doesn’t sting half as bad as the half-assed consolation phrases in the letter. I realize that the writer is just trying to be nice, but there’s nothing nice about rejection. Anyone who’s ever been rejected can tell you that. Any attempt to be nice, to let someone down easy, to play Stewart Smalley, is just a ploy to make the rejector feel better about telling someone they weren’t up to snuff. My advice for anyone who has to write a rejection letter? Don’t do the easy let down. Just tell them: we could only accept so many, you weren’t in that group, thanks for applying, we won’t patronize you with a whole bunch of “But you were good too… just not good enough” type phrases. It’s like the “It’s not you, it’s me” break-up speech. No matter how true it is, it doesn’t hurt any less and it won’t make anyone feel good.

Just let me be bitter. I’ll get over it, I promise. I may not like you when I do but, then again, you probably don’t care and I know _I_ don’t. It will be alright.

I called the boy, who was still working in Toledo during the week, and asked where the spare antique fuses were.

“No, I don’t think it’s the fuse box. The power’s out here, too.”

Shit. It’s August, it’s hot, I’m at that bitchy, sensitive and exhausted part of my first trimester, and the power’s out. I climbed into the camaro and turned on the radio: the power’s out everywhere. No one knows why yet, there are traffic jams everywhere, there are people stranded in major cities. Wonderful.

I drive around for a bit, avoiding accidents and appreciating the volunteer traffic directors at Clifton and 117 for saving me from some spectacular sideswipes. Giant Eagle’s not out of water yet, so I stock up and pay with a check, since I can’t use my card to pay, or to get some yuppie food stamps at the cash machine.

I get back to the duplex of horror to find my neighbors preparing for an impromptu block party. Since no one knew when the power would be back on, there were fridges of meat and beer that needed used before either got warm and skunky. We gathered candles, any beverages we had available, and sat on Anita’s porch talking and joking.

We sat on the porch, coming up with our own conspiracy theories about the blackout (It was terrorists! No, it’s just incompetence. Maybe the government forgot to pay the electric bill). We gossipped about the house where that doofus blew up the bigwheel, about “Slipper Lady”, and slowly wound down. More people from the neighborhood showeed up, each with a story: Steve had to walk down over 30 flights of stairs to get out of work, someone else barely got out of downtown on a bus.

I don’t think anyone went home until after at least midnight. We were having too much fun — at one point a group of us walked over to the drugstore, which was letting groups of five people in at a time, with flashlights, to buy… you guessed it, flashlights! Flashlights, water, and batteries actually. They had a middle-aged off-duty Lakewood cop manning the back door and a cardboard box to hold cash. It wasn’t exactly a high-security event.

I know there were plenty of people having fun that night, despite the lack of electronically-powered entertainment — let’s just say that I had plenty of people asking me if my bump was a blackout baby (no, she’s about two and a half months too early for that). For me it was just a hot and sticky night, worrying about a spouse a state’s length away and trying to keep cool in the dark.

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So, instead, I’m contrite. I’m a bad, bad blogger, but I know it. Instead of more penance and self-effacement, I’m just going to throw some cool links at you. These are a few things that I’ve found lately that seriously rock my socks off.

• Blog Bridge — This is an open source, totally free (as in beer) feed reader that is absolutely stunning. Not only does it read the feeds, it allows you to create “guides”, which are groupings of feeds that you can share with others. Why is this cool? Because you can get other people’s guides, sync your guides on the ‘net, and sync your feeds from computer to computer. Sure, you could do it all on a web-based feed reader, but this one is so much more fun to use–you just have to try it.
• SuperDuper! — Not completely free, but dead useful. For macs, this is a backup program that works for “old” macs (powerPC types) and “new” macs (intel-based) and does a beautiful job of backing your stuff up. It’s free if you don’t want to schedule backups, or if you don’t mind not having a backup of your user files, but it’s only $27.95 for the full version.
• Canvas — Hat tip to SupaMB. Canvas is a very cool plugin for WordPress that allows you to have a “drag and drop” interface to design your weblog. Very cool stuff.
• Democracy TV — an open source, free internet television platform. Tons of channels, no boredom.
• Qumana — Sure, I may be behind on this one, but this is a pretty cool desktop blogging application. It works well with WordPress, which is always a plus.

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Eucharistic theology
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