Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head

Draft the SUV Drivers First

Yesterday on the way to Target, I got behind one of those stupidly large SUVs. It wasn't a Hummer, but it was Hummer in scale. The bumper sticker on the back read:

If you can read this thank a teacher. If you can read this
in English thank a soldier.

And I was, like, seriously? What the fuck does that even mean? Which soldiers do we thank? The soldiers who fought for the Confederacy? The British soldiers who tried to curtail the American revolution? They all spoke English, too, genius.

Is this is the level of political thinking in our country?

Sigh.

I Love Pretty Shoes, Too

Yesterday I was in Target's shoe department just walking the aisles and looking all the dazzling, pinchy (pinche?) high heeled shoes, the kinds of shoes that I am perversely drawn to and which are completely impractical for the life I live now. A middle-aged woman and her two seven- or eight-year-old children (a boy and a girl who were either twins or, at most, nine months apart) were also looking at shoes. The little girl held up a pair of sparkly high-heels and said, "Mommy, look at these pretty shoes!" and the mommy said, "Those are pretty, but those are for ladies." "Oh, yeah," the little girl said putting the shoes down, "those are ladies' shoes." The little boy touched the toes of the shoes and said wistfully, "Why do ladies get all the pretty shoes?"

That was my favorite moment yesterday.

You Can Quote Me


Me & The Quote Wall

One of the few New Year's Resolutions Dave and I made is to clean out a storage unit that is packed with the detritus of our former existences.

What does that picture have to do with our resolution?

Well, one of the things that I unearthed in my part of the avalanche of unused, stored stuff was a folder that contained the quotes from the quote wall shown in that photo. (That photo was, incidentally, taken in the apartment I moved into after Dave and I split up. I have a lot of self portraits from that time actually, because I didn't really have any idea who I was then. I thought by taking pictures of myself that I could somehow gain a foothold into my new identity. Just in case you're tempted to try doing the same thing, let me tell you that it didn't work. Even now I'm still just as thankfully clueless about who I am as I was then. It is a well-documented cluelessness however.)

It's no secret that I love to collect little snippets from writers whose existences have made my own time on this planet worthwhile. Now I blog those bits (here and elsewhere) but B.B. (Before Blog) I would write them out on 3 x 5 cards and pin them to my wall.

I'll be dropping those quotes in here from time to time; for now here are a trio that I especially love:

Nothing is too wonderful to be true. --Michael Faraday

(I lifted that one from one of my physics textbooks--or was it from a Scientific American?)

Write clear and hard about what hurts. --Ernest Hemingway

(I think I took that from A Movable Feast, but I'm not sure.)

And this, a rallying cry of writers everywhere:

Never ruin a good story by sticking to the truth.