And There Are So Many

I found a diary, of mine, from ninth grade. Yes, it was kicking around under a bed at my mother's house. (Yes, the house is still on the market. Yes, it is still full of stuff. Yes, it is rather a poignant headache.)

The diary - an inane piece of gobbledygook - was a school assignment, for an English class. It's full of teachers, dreams, grades, boys, sleepovers, band, dances, "I got a desk chair, yellow" for Christmas. My handwriting changes on every page, the ink color changes almost more frequently, and the diary is called Katherine, Kitty, Kati, You, and Kathy. (Yes, my middle name is Catherine.)

In the margins, occasionally, there are notes from the English teacher. Apparently we had to hand it in - to what end, I cannot fathom. It seems like it might have been more appropriate to a psychology teacher or guidance counselor, because it's not creative writing, it's the mundane ramblings of a thirteen year old (a thirteen year old who was not smoking cigarettes or hanging out in cemeteries).

I did, though, like this passage:

Sometimes thoughts
just run [in] my head.
And there's so many
I can't write them
all down. Oh well, too bad.

Funny how not much has changed - today, instead of a diary for Miss Dissin, I'm writing here. And all day long, posts write themselves in my head - walking down the street, waiting for the train, watching the bread rise - and there are so many that I can't write them all down.

I think my grammar is usually better though.

Happy Birthday, Bobby Burns!

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!

Once upon a time, we went to a Robert Burns dinner. Actually, we went to the same Burns dinner several years running, a multi-culti fest organized by a Scottish woman and her Japanese-American husband at small Catskills hotel with a French restaurant. I know, the head spins. Men wore kilts, my husband addressed the haggis, Scotch was consumed. And photos were taken, with a disposable film camera that we had kicking around for some odd reason.

Many months later, many, I finished the roll of film and had it developed.

Much to my surprise, because of course by then I'd completely forgotten having had the camera at the Burns dinner, I discovered that some enterprising gentleman had "borrowed" the camera and taken a picture of what was under his kilt.

In case you are wondering, it was uncircumcised.

Gluten Free Baking With, Oops...

If you have a gluten-free friend with whom you get together for family meals, you think about gluten-free cooking and baking, at least I do, from time to time. That Deb, at Smitten Kitchen, recently posted a lovely sounding thing called "apple sharlotka", and we were having a pig roast with the gluten-free friend, and dessert was in my hands, and I thought, "oh, the apple thing will work fine with gluten-free flour".

So I made some lovely deep dark caramel sauce - another Smitten Kitchen recipe, because, well, let's put it this way, I'm totally buying her cookbook - and I chopped apples and I mixed up the eggs and sugar and flour, and just as I was about to dump the batter over the apples, I remembered the goddam gluten-free flour on the other side of the kitchen. Yup, I'd completely forgotten to use it.

But I only had two eggs left, and when I'd greased the pan, I'd used Baker's Joy, a wonderful product that combines grease and ... flour, so I couldn't have used the apples even if I did have enough more eggs, and I didn't have enough more apples, and I really should have been paying a little more attention in the kitchen.

Oh well. Gluten-free friend forgave me, and ate ice cream with caramel sauce for dessert. And the pig? The pig her husband made? The pig was hands-down awesome.

I still don't know if the apple sharlotka would work with gluten-free flour, but it is a really good and very easy thing to make for dessert, and it is divine with some deep dark caramel sauce dribbled over the top, and maybe I shouldn't try gluten-free baking anymore.

The Post About Breasts. And Cancer.

A long time ago - really, more than 20 years ago - I felt a lump in my breast. I trotted off to my gynecologist, she tried a needle aspiration, and sent me to a surgeon. Both the GYN and the surgeon were pretty sure it was a benign tumor, and I sort of shrugged and figured it wasn't worth doing anything about. Then I told my mother. She freaked - "how could you even think of not having it out?" - so I had it out. It was benign, a fibroadenoma. Having it out was the probably right thing to do - it would likely have gotten bigger, and would have been harder to excise later. But I really did think about doing nothing.

Sometime last year, I noticed a dark spot in my bra - and honestly? I figured I'd dropped chocolate into my cleavage. Then I saw a couple of drops of blood on the bed sheet - I asked my husband to tell me if I had a bleeding zit on my back. Finally, I realized that there was a tiny bit of dark ooze coming from my nipple. That's when I called my doctor.

My gynecologist managed to express a drop of greenish fluid, too little to even culture, so she sent me to a breast surgeon, and the quick answer is - after a number of office visits, multiple mammograms, and several breast ultrasounds - there's nothing the matter with me. It was probably a tiny little blockage or infection, there's been no discharge since, and yeah! I don't have breast cancer.

But.

In the past few months, two friends have been newly diagnosed with breast cancer, both cases found during routine mammograms. I've lost track of how many people I've known who've had breast cancer. Some of them have died, some of them have been successfully treated.

And Susan? Susan Niebur? Maybe you know her as WhyMommy, or as Toddler Planet. She's one of the most remarkable people I know - and yes, I've met her at several of the BlogHer conferences. She's been fighting a particular pernicious cancer for almost five years, with breathtaking grace. Send her your love - through the intertubes or in your heart - or by getting your own mammogram, joining the Army of Women, or supporting the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Love to you, Susan.

Exploitation, or, Blog Posts Written By Children

I'm probably a very bad mother, very bad indeed. I mean, last year, when my iPhone was clearly on its last legs, I replaced it with a new one and gave the old one to the kid. It's not got phone service, and its battery life is farshtinkener, but it does connect to the internet via wi-fi (at home) and she can use it as an iPod and play all manner of zombie games and send emails to her friends and take picture of the cats and make lists.

After she fell asleep clutching it in her hot little hands last night, I read all of her emails, looked at all of her pictures, and reviewed her "notes". She is one funny thing.  

Email to me and Daddy:

Subject: Periced Ears

Dear Mom & Dad,

I think it is very,very unfair that I am not allowed to get Periced Ears. I will buy my own my earrings and NEVER EVER complain about dinner. And I bet they will hurt about as much as my clip-on earrings. So PLEASE,PLEASE say yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

Email to a friend, about a sleepover they've got planned for next weekend:

Subject: Sleep Over

Here are 9 things we could do at the Sleep Over.
1.Go on Webkinz.com
2.Watch Comedy Movies
3.Torcher George
4.Play with Barbies
5.Play Dress-Up
6.Plan Money-Saving for Goth Girlz
7.Play with American Girl Dolls
8.Play Beauty Salon(With real Make-Up
9.Play Super Model  

Notes to herself (version as of last night):

MY WISHES FOR TONIGHT:
1.To have 12 inches of snow
2.To get my ears pierced
3.To have a really good singing voice  

 Notes to herself (updated sometime this morning):

MY WISHES FOR TONIGHT:
1.To have 12 inches of snow
It happened!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2.To get my ears pierced
Not yet!!!!BOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3.To have a really good singing voice
It is half-way their!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of an endless series of pictures of cats up in the ceiling of the cellar:

(In case you are wondering, we did not get 12" of snow - it was more like 6". I'm happy that she figured out how to spell "pierced" - I'd corrected her after she sent that first email to us. Of course, she spelled "torture" and "there" wrong. One step forward, two steps back. However, torcher/torture is kind of a nice homophone.)

Lute Soup

Sopa - the spanish word for soup.

Pipa - a Chinese lute with four strings.

 In a world without Wikipedia and Google, how would you have known that? Well, you might be a Spanish speaking ethnomusicologist, but probably you aren't.

Right now, Congress has two bills in discussion, SOPA and PIPA - one's in the Senate, the other's in the House. Both aim

"to cut off the oxygen for foreign pirate sites by taking aim at American search engines like Google and Yahoo, payment processors like PayPal and ad servers that allow the pirates to function."

Yes, piracy is wrong, stealing content is wrong, copyright has a point. But SOPA/PIPA won't stop piracy and will quash innovation and damage the internet.

Here, go read what Sarah Granger has to say. Or check out The Oatmeal (because kitten BBQ = bad. Oprah and Jesus on a jet ski in outer space = good). Protest SOPA/PIPA via Wikipedia or via Google or via a participating site of your choice.

Let us blather on in peace.

Unpacking

There’s a piece in the Times today that made my blood run cold. Editorial, entitled "Defriending My Rapist". Facebook had suggested that the writer "friend" someone who’d raped her nearly 40 years ago. In and of itself, it’s a strong well-written piece, a horrible story of a past event, brought back to the present by the weird prism of the social network. But the thing is? The reason I sat paralyzed in the living room this morning? I went to high school with her. I grew up in that town. I know the gates to that cemetery – it’s where my grandparents are buried. I may well have known those boys.

I don’t remember her, and her picture in my yearbook didn’t ring any bells. But I know people who know her. And despite the fact that I well understand the reasons - both hers and the editors - for not outing the rapists in the New York Times, I kind of want to know who they are.

What’s gobsmacked me is the little assault on my own innocence. There were rapists in my junior high school, or maybe they were older, in high school. There were 13 year olds drinking rum in the cemetery. Sure, kids smoked - I didn't use the bathroom in high school, ever, because it was a de facto smoking lounge. And I'll never forget the day that the school nurse made an announcement on the P.A. system to the effect that there was a bad batch of Quaaludes around, and if you'd taken any, please report to the nurse's office. But sex and alcohol? Call me sheltered, but no one I knew was having sex, or getting raped, or drinking in cemeteries. How could that be my town? Or do I just not remember? Or was I just living in a parallel utopian universe?

There is darkness everywhere, isn't there?