Notes From A Newbie

Hello. I’ve been a Blog Sister for many months now, but have never made the time to introduce myself properly. So here goes.

My name is Marita Paige, and I live in the north-western part of the Island of Borneo in South East Asia. I work in the wildlife conservation scene here. I used to do a lot of jungle trekking as part of my work. Now I just do it for the sheer love of it.

I love animals, I love books, I love outdoor activities and exercise in general. I love travelling, but I hate plane rides and waiting at airports. I’ve been to Australia, New York, the U.K., Thailand and Singapore. And by the time I post this up, I would have been to Java.

I enjoy coming in here to browse the entries.

I can’t think of anything more to say, except that I will post entries here from time to time, and….come visit my blog!

Marita

The Immoderate Pact Song Parody

I'm very disturbed by the judicial filibuster deal made by the Senate "moderates." So I wrote a song parody which starts like this:

The Immoderate Pact Song Parody (Sing to When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again)
By Madeleine Begun Kane

The "moderates" made a voting pact.
We're screwed, we're screwed.
The "moderates" got their power back.
We're screwed, we're screwed.
Their deal betrays our democracy.
We're stuck with dreadful nominees...

The rest of my Immoderate Pact Song Parody is here.

If y'all haven't already seen this one in the New York Times....

A new study sez: Blogs haven't displaced MSM.

The findings were announced at a conference yesterday in New York. Dave Sifry threw his $.02 in on the matter (see the article).

Curious indeed.

Tish G.

i'm hype. about. sri lanka. but. not. leeches!

Debz was telling all of us at BK that one of her friends went trekking in some parts of the hulu jungles of Malaysia. She had lots of leeches bites. Couple of months later, her friends commented on how pale she looked. She, being a heavy flow kinda person, also noticed that her monthly flow had been greatly reduced. She went to the doctor. He gave her pills. However, it remained the same. She went to the docs again. He advised her to get an Xray done. There was something in her body.

They (surgeons) cut her open and found a huge leech inside, practically feeding off her.

What the bloody fuck!

I am terrified. Paranoid and plain terrified. The leech which bit my leg was not found. Could it be...?

I feel like my nasty big sister stole my jump rope...

In case y'all didn't notice, Arianna Huffington started a blog.

(heavy sigh)

Blogging, in general, seems to me to be a populist medium. So what's the deal with someone who has every possible medium of communication at her disposal saying to the rest of us by starting a blog?

When I read the Washington Post article on this, the image of a Round Table conference at the Huffington Conclave popped into my head...and the Grande Damme of all this asking all the advisors "Vat is a blog and how do I get you all to do this thing for me so I look like I'm one of those Little People?"

I wonder sometimes about the future of blogs...that the quantifying and qualifying of blogs is something like the whole .com thing, and that we might see a massive bust after this celebrety boom.

In general, though, she's just bugging the bejezers out of me!

Tish G

(oh, I've got a new baby meta-blog here and chronicled my Mother's passing here.)

The Madness Is Back

I've been traveling and unable to post for a couple of weeks. So I thought I'd celebrate my return with a poem:

The Madness Returns
By Madeleine Begun Kane

I've been gone for two weeks.
Did I miss something good?
Didn't keep up with the news,
Though I know that I should.

I see Dub's not impeached,
And DeLay''s not in jail...

The rest of The Madness Is Back is here.

Grace

My parents married in June of 1946. My dad [Gunnar] was 21. My mom [Grace] was 23. This picture was taken in front of the house on the corner of 36th & Bloomington Avenue in south Minneapolis, where my dad grew up. His parents were August and Matilda. Longtime readers of this blog will know that Matilda was the original Tild.

Grace and Gunnar were married at St. Petri Lutheran Church in Nielsville, Minnesota, my mom's home town. Nielsville is located about 18 miles south of Crookston, up in the NW corner of the state, that area aka the Red River Valley. This photo was hand-tinted by Grace's youngest brother, my Uncle Helmer.
Isn't she beautiful?

Here we have the young marrieds doing their utmost to look suave, sophisticated and worldly during a trip to Washington DC in 1947. No, don't smile. Don't show your teeth. We are very serious and very grown up adults here! Not to mention sharp dressers. Smoooth.

This is one of my alltime favorite pictures of my mom. I think it was taken in 1947, or maybe 1948. One day Grace and Gunnar attended some kind of outdoor picnic with Grandma Tild and Grandpa August, and as you can see, Grace and Grandma Tild are washing up the dishes after lunch. Grandma Tild looks pretty harmless in this photo, but in actuality she was a domineering, fire-breathing old battle ax who never missed an opportunity to make my mom's life the proverbial Living Hell. Now look at Grace. Check out the defiant gaze, and especially the jutting lower lip. My mom was so pissed off at her horrible fiendish mother in law that day, you can almost see steam coming out of Grace's ears.
Go Mom! Priceless.

It's 1954 and my dad took this picture of his family in front of our house on 54th and James in south Minneapolis. My sister Diane is 6, and I am 2. I have absolutely no memory of ever being shorter than my mother, but apparently I was for a little while, and this photo proves it.

Today I am a Lutheran. Or something. This photo was taken at Mt. Olivet on my confirmation day in 1965, and it's the only time I have ever seen my mom, me, my dad and Grandma Tild all together in one photo. Also, please note that at age 13 I am taller than my mother, which in my world always seemed to be the natural order of things.

I didn't stop growing until I reached 5'11", as you can see in this photo of Gunnar, Grace and me taken around the time my sister got married in 1968. Both of us girls turned out to be much taller than our mother, and I believe that had a measurable effect on our personalities.
Grace was a 5'6", bubbly, strawberry blonde Betty Grable look-alike. She was warm and funny and talked a blue streak and drew people to her like moths to flame; like bees to honey; like whatever to whatever [insert favorite simile of your choice here]. I felt like King Kong standing next to her, and whenever possible preferred to step back into the shadows and let my mother shine. I don't remember ever begrudging her that. It's possible I did at the time, but I don't remember it now.

Mom had been a widow for 5 years when these photos were taken in 1984. She was 61 years old. My dad, Gunnar, died in 1979 at the age of 54. He died of congestive heart failure, complicated by scar tissue on his aorta and an enlarged 'athlete's heart', both consequences of having rheumatic fever when he was a child.
Grace continued to be out and about a good deal of the time, as she and Dad had always been, with a social life I'd have killed for.
She did volunteer work at the Shriners' Hospital; went out to dinner with her Eastern Star chapter, and her garden club, and her 500 club, and "the St. Mary's gang", all the gals she'd roomed with at a boarding house downtown near the Basilica during WWII, when they were all flighty young singles working at Honeywell, assembling steering controls for bombers by day, and dancing the night away every night. She always said that in those days she wore out a pair of shoes a week, from all the dancing.

This is Grace on Christmas Eve 1987. She looks tired, as well she might, considering she'd had a mastectomy three months before, and was undergoing a 6-month course of chemotherapy at this time. Her doctors were fairly confident they'd gotten all the cancer, so they said the chemo was really just a precaution, to make sure the cancer hadn't metastasized into the lymph nodes. Grace was tolerating the chemo well, altho the steroids made her face look kind of puffy and she also said the steroids gave her manic bursts of energy when she couldn't sit still or stop talking. Everybody who knew her wondered how she could tell the difference.

This turned out to be the last photo ever taken of my mother.

Less than two months later, on the morning of February 12, 1988, Grace called my sister and brother in law at 4:45 AM. She'd been out dancing until past 1 AM, then had come home and settled into bed but suddenly felt "kind of funny". It was strange, she said; like she couldn't catch her breath. My brother in law told her to hang up and call 911 right away. Grace lived only a few blocks away from Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, and the paramedics could reach her within minutes if necessary. She agreed to call 911, and hung up. My sister and her husband waited for a minute or two, then called 911 to confirm that Grace had called. Yes, the dispatcher said, and the paramedics were already on their way.

BIL then jumped in the car and headed for Grace's house, about 15 miles away. When he got there he saw a policeman standing at the front door, which was all splintered and off its hinges. The paramedics had arrived within 3 minutes of receiving Grace's call, yet she was already unable to get to the door, so the paramedics had to use a crowbar to break the door down. The policeman said that Grace had had a heart attack; she was alive but it was "very serious". The EMTs had taken her to nearby Fairview Southdale, all the while frantically working to revive her.

My sister called at about 5:30 AM and told us what was happening. We then picked her up and drove to the hospital together. I was seven months pregnant with my first child at the time.
We arrived at the hospital within 20 minutes of getting the call. My BIL George met us at the entrance and said: "I don't know how to say this, but Grace has passed away."

The cause of death was found to be pulmonary embolism: a large blood clot had formed somewhere in her lower extremities and had travelled upwards through her system to ultimately become lodged in a spot near the juncture of her heart and lungs. Death came very quickly; within minutes.
Grace was 64 years old.

It's a long time ago now; 17 years; so the pain has had time to get dull and familiar and I don't feel it as sharply as I did then. Not a day goes by that I don't miss her and wish she could see my kids as they're growing up. Well, maybe she is seeing the kids somehow; I hope so. I guess what I want is to be able to see her seeing the kids.

And these days I've started thinking of how she died as being rather a good way to go, since we're all gonna go sometime, some way. Think about it: Grace lived her life fully and actively and joyously right up to the very last moment. No drawn out withering away for her. No watching her slowly become unrecognizable as disease consumed her.

She went to a party on that last night. She went out dancing til past 1 in the morning. She went dancing.

Housekeeping Liberally

I'll bet there are a lot of us out here who would like to participate in the weekly get-togethers sponsored by our local Drinking Liberally chapters, but who for a variety of reasons are unable to take part.

In my case, I cannot attend for two reasons. Reason One: After smoking a pack and a half a day for 14 years, I quit smoking 20 years ago this October. Altho I have never had even a single puff off a cigarette in the years since, still not a day goes by that I don't find myself in a situation where I would kill for a cigarette just to help me mentally survive the next five minutes.

And the number one cigarette craving situation is...? Yes, that's right: a social gathering. And what kind of social gathering makes me crave cigarettes the most? You got it: a social gathering in a bar. And what kind of social gathering in a bar? Uh huh, the kind where I've never met any of the other people there. I would light up my first Marlboro within seconds of entering Liquor Lyle's, and after that I'd never quit. I'd smoke everything in sight and I wouldn't stop until I was reduced to a wizened dry husk of a creature who finally fell down dead in a cloud of bilious yellow-gray smoke and the paramedics would have to pry the last cig out of my grotesquely gnarled nicotine-stained fingers.

Reason Two: if I had a cigarette in one hand then I'd have to have a drink in the other, and I Can't. Hold. My. Liquor. Ever since the onset of menopause I haven't been able to handle even tiny amounts of alcohol. The last time I had a drink was on New Year's Eve, when we went out to dinner at a local steak house and I drank half of a very small glass of white zinfandel; no more than 3 oz., tops. By the time we left the restaurant my skin had started to glow bright red and my body temperature had risen to over 350 degrees Fahrenheit. When we got home, I went down to the basement, turned off the furnace and stood in a corner radiating warmth in the direction of the airducts, thus keeping our entire house heated all night long. Ultimately, that 3 oz. sip of wine helped us reduce our January fuel costs by over 50%. By Grapthar's Hammer, what a savings!

So, since I can't show solidarity with my fellow local liberals by Drinking Liberally, what can I do instead? As usual, a bit of the old AgitProp will have to do. I think it does pretty nicely, too.

Posted simultaneously-- What multi-tasking skills!-- here and here.

The Runaway Bride

Over the past few days, we've all found out how Jennifer Wilbanks got a serious case of Cold Feet and faked a kidnapping so that she wouldn't have to get married this past Saturday.

The wedding was to be a massive to-do--600 guest, 14 bridesmades and groomsmen, and, considering her fiance's father is a fomer mayor of Duluth, GA, alot of social pressure and responsibility.

I understand how she could have got cold feet. Marriage is hard. The odds aren't good. And when there is alot at stake at the social level along with the personal, it could make a girl freak.

Many people don't seem to understand how marriage is not just about love and living happily ever after. It is a social contract between families as well as individuals. It is also a social contract with one's secular community and one's community of faith (if one is involved in one).

With marriage, two people are not only promising to "love" one another but also to build a stable home where the individuals involved will care about and for one another into old age. And if there are children, they will raise those children to be productive members of society.

And if y'all don't believe how marriage can be about the social contract between two individuals and an entire community, look at the way the community of Duluth GA, not just Wilbanks' fiance, his family, her family and friends, are saying about her now. The community is feeling "betrayed" by the kidnapping hoax, and some are now calling for Wilbanks to be thrown in jail, or to at least pay for the overtime in the police investigation.

There isn't much sympathy from the community at large. And very little understanding over how a young woman from such high circumstances, whose marriage appeared to be a three-ring circus of joy, could run away from it.

Isn't the type and kind of wedding Jennifer Wilbanks, her finance, and all that extended family and friends planned every little girl's dream?

Perhaps not.

Perhaps Jennifer Wilbanks realized that there would be far more people involved in her marriage than she may have wanted.

Perhaps the thought of that much hoopla and the doors it would close after it was all over became far too much for Jennifer Wilbanks to bear. Perhaps what she really wanted was freedom, not all that personal, family, and social responsibility. Perhaps she wasn't ready for it, but didn't know or understand that she had the option to call it all off--that, sure, everybody would be seriously pissed off, but that faking a kidnapping might piss off more than just her immediate and massive group of family and friends.


Maybe all she wanted, after all, was her privacy and her freedom.

I don't think the community's anger is at the amount of overtime she owes the police force. I think it has more to do with her cold feet--and that the betrayal of the situation is more about how she denied them the fairy tale vision that her wedding was scripted to be...and the beautiful children and the perfect example of a loving couple that her life was supposed to be.

And I wonder how many of us can identify or sympathize with Jennifer, or if we are, like the community, self-righteously angry at her because she threw away such such a grand send-off and the projection of so much perfection.

Personally, I think she should have packed a bag, emptied the bank accounts, and left an "adios buddy, catch you later" letter. Do the good chicken-livered thing and end the relationship from a few states away. But I don't believe that crminal penalties are in order for a case of bad judgement predicated on the feeling of being stuck like a mouse in a humaine trap.

I'd be curious to hear how other Blogsisters feel about what Jennifer Wilbanks did.

Tish G.