Florals, for spring. Groundbreaking.

OK so the Fashion silhouette of the moment is: Bad.

Got those high, high, HIGH-waisted pants paired with boxy crop-toppy things, often with sad 70s Office Working Girl ruffles (even if the top in question is a SWEATER, y'all) and weird flaps and tiebacks and shit. I mean -- not me, I'm personally not wearing it, but like. If it doesn't look good on teenagers, and ya can't make it look good on professional clothing models, then I just. Don't hold out a lot of hope for us Normals. Especially not for me, personally, who has a literal inch between hipbone and bottom-most rib. At 46, I'm in the best fucking shape of my life, my bod is ROCKIN, but I look like the most amazingly misguided/overmedicated child's drawing of a girl in those outfits -- it's truly an abomination unto the Lord who Made Me. Thank christ I'm old enough not to fall for that shit again, midway through my fifth decade on this boiling blue marble, right?

And if it's not that, it's Dresses. Why god why. I don't wear dresses, except on very formal occasions, for reasons I may yet detail here (where the fuck else would I, right?), but -- ok. Look. I like dresses in theory, they look really good on y'all, and DAMN I have the legs for a dress but I cannot and will not wear dresses as a regular thing, so all these cute dresses that like, fucking Gap and Boden and whoever the fuckall Kim France is loving at the moment (and don't get me wrong, I fucking LOVE Kim France, I just have no idea who she's talking about, designer-wise, at any given moment, on account of having lived an entire life of thinking $80 is a real lot to spend on a shirt) are just -- not gonna happen for me.

And so: Here we are again, with me in distressed black jeans, band T-shirts, a flannel as a stand-in for the Northern-California-Perpetual-Light-Jacket-Item, and whatever footwear is at the axis of my personal assessment of Cool vs. Comfortable that particular day. I have Fly London, and Frye, but also I have fleece-lined Cons. So ...

Fuck, man. My Birks -- yes ok I have them, this is who I am now -- need to be tightened after a winter of wearing them (IN THE HOUSE ONLY, I SWEAR) with socks. And y'all tryna get me to wear dresses, or Skinny Jeans with a gotdamn 11-inch rise and a shirt with the lines of a Chinese takeout box. [siiiiiiiiiiiiigh] Whatever.

Sometimes I included my great-grandboss, for a total of 54 dicks.

Here is a fantasy I used to run in my head at least twice a day for the last -- oh, probably the last 15 months of my eight-year tenure at the HQ of the San Francisco-based global apparel retailer: I'd be in a meeting with my boss, my grandboss, and some other people. Boss and grandboss would be their usual awful garbage person selves, undermining me, backhand-complimenting me, praising other "team" members, etc., and I'd finally at long last have had Enough of This Shit.

They'd address me directly on some bullshit matter or other, and as all eyes turned to me, I'd sit there with a clip-art "serious contemplative businessperson face" on, nodding agreeably before I replied, calmly and thoughtfully, "You know, I tell you what -- I would like to invite you both" -- indicating boss and grandboss with ironic finger-guns -- "to eat eighteen dicks." I'd give a businessperson half-smile (the kind you see in commercials for financial advice services), with a nod + sincere eye contact, to each of the two of them individually. I'd close the notebook I'd been doodling in, and in the shocked silence that ensued, I'd stand up, give a little half-wave to the room in general, and exit as if I'd just said I was going to Starbucks to get us all some lattes.

I'd walk a few yards down the hallway, then act like "Ooops, forgot my best pen in there," and turn around and go back. They'd all have just started sputtering and blarfgling and there'd be mutters of "calling security right now" and "what kind of a ..." and "think this is an HR matter" and that, and I'd poke my head in with another serious businessperson smile and say, "Sorry, guys, sorry, hate to interrupt, but I realized I might have made a mistake just now, and wanted to be completely clear: I meant that you guys should each eat eighteen dicks, for a total of thirty-six dicks -- not split it up and eat nine each. Sorry if there was any confusion on that!" And I'd wave bye-bye, duck back out, pick up my pre-packed duffel of personal items, and stroll unconcernedly away from the building, buoyed on waves of righteous justice and sweet self-satisfaction, the scent of a rotting bridge well burnt the only perfume I need wear forevermore.

The "Boots & Barkley" section at Target gives me the sads too, if you must know.

The saddest personalized license plate frame I have ever seen: I LOVE MY GRAND-DOGS!

I can't. It already makes me sad when people say their pets are "their children," but this is a level beyond. I hope it was a joke, like when people wear bowling shirts with "Wilma" stitched on the chest.

It was a joke, right? Surely.

Hiatus, disjointed;

I didn't want to write about this, about any of it, because I don't want to think about it and I don't want to have to read it again, and but so I am doing it, and then I'll probably bury this post under the type of silliness I am posting to the Facebooks these days (reason I post there is, the "likes" and comments and stuff remind me that I do have friends, people do know me, people can actually hear me).

***

Five days after my mother died, died in my arms, I am running in the bright cool blue California sunshine, watching my heart rate on my Garmin but mostly jumping my eyes around to all the beautiful things -- the breezes in the palm trees, the bright red blooms of a flower whose name I don't know, the baby shoots of green grass from the first rains we've had in a year, somebody's fluffy new Christmas puppy (little furball!) -- and I can feel the soft air on my arms and the breath in my lungs and the solid way my feet strike pavement and even though I know that my house is full of people who are growing more resentful of my absence by the second, I take another lap around the park and feel alive; not happy, not joyous, not anything really except alive.

***

Four in the morning, again. I am grateful that she got to have some fun these last few years. She lived in a new house instead of the old wreck in town, with its cracks and leaks and heavy ballast of 35 years of family memories. She had a great group of friends -- they had sleepovers! they took art classes! they traveled together and sent back pictures of themselves on barges, in pubs, at historic sites and in front of hilarious road signs! I am desperately sorry I never got to go on any of those trips with her -- the reasons were valid at the time (i.e., I was breastfeeding a newborn, etc.), but I knew she wanted me there.

***

Sunday afternoon. I think of all the times I didn't call. We had a longstanding tradition of talking on the phone on Sundays, but sometimes I didn't call. I would be too busy, or out of the house, or knew she was traveling, or just didn't fucking feel like it, or passive-aggressively testing the theory that she didn't know phones would work both ways and if she wanted to talk to me she could call ME, dammit.

***
She wasn't afraid of dying -- she was sure she was going home to Jesus. I'm glad of that, but I wonder what it feels like to have that certainty, and I further wonder what kind of a god would allow her to be so troubled by my lack of belief. That awful morning after she passed, the home health nurse (who is also a family friend) told me that my mother had said to her that she doesn't want to go to Heaven if her kids aren't going to be there. So I told the nurse that I'd take that under advisement -- I think those are the words I used.

***

We were planning a family trip next summer -- she wanted us (me & my fam, my brother & his wife, my sister) to all go somewhere together. I was looking up various destinations, but primarily Maine, which she had in recent years started really really wanting to visit. Those bookmarks are in my bookmark bar. I keep seeing them when I scroll down to look up my other sites.

***

Sixty-six. That's not old. It's fucking ridiculous, is what it is. It's one huge bad choice (smoking for 30+ years, although she quit in 1996, aka the Worst Summer Ever) and a whole bunch of other un-good ones (no exercise, Texas diet, complete lack of preventive health care of any kind), plus who knows what cards drawn from the genetic deck. Those pictures I have -- her as a bleached-blonde teenage cheerleader, a slim local TV personality, a hip young mama -- how are those the same person who only made it to 66?

***

My last words with her were via text. My kids are young and will not understand for years what has happened. I curse openly on Facebook now, and feel free to hit "like" on pretty much every Planned Parenthood and/or Obama thing I see. My sister, alone in the house we have to clean out and vacate by January 31, keeps sending me boxes of stuff from the house -- handwritten recipes, a ring, yearbooks 1964-67, uncatalogued photos from both sets of grandparents and great-grandparents. I can't wash or get rid of the navy Lands' End turtleneck I was wearing all that awful night and day and night and dawn when I was lying on the bed with her as her breathing gradually slowed, pinged awake from a light doze by the alarm on my iPhone every half hour to administer either atropine or lorazepam via liquid syringe the way I'd dose my babies with Tylenol back in the day, talking to her even though she couldn't hear me, reading aloud "To Kill a Mockingbird" from my phone when I couldn't think of any more ways to say it's OK mom, I love you mommy, I'm here, I'm here, I love you and it's OK. 

Theme weeks are BULLSHIT and I'm not going to do them anymore: A treatise on why not.

So my kid's school has this thing called Red Ribbon Week, which is something or other about not doing crack because it's a ghetto drug, although they just tell the first graders a whole bunch of vague shit about "making healthy choices." Which, fine, whatever.

The problem -- the fucking PROBLEM -- is that they send home, on Friday, this list of all the shit for the themed days for the week beginning the very next Monday. It's a full weekend, and ain't nobody got time for that. So I kiiiiind of ignore it, a little bit, figuring we'll find something that'll do. But then on Sunday night, there is PANIC AND SCREAMING from the first-grader about Monday's Theme: Wear Red.

Kid Gleemonex does not wear red. She doesn't have one stitch, one thread, one ruffle of red clothing. She wears blue and only blue. Always. It is her thing. I remind her of that, and that this is why she has no red: She won't fucking wear it, so I don't fucking buy it anymore. But she won't just wear her school uniform, either, which is the only non-red option allowed. Tears, weeping, a keening ambulance-like wail of distress, heavy yelling (from me), etc. The next morning, the WORLD IS STILL AFLAME WITH PAIN at the goddamned red thing. So she ties her hair with red curling ribbon, makes a braided belt of same which she ties over her uniform, and the screaming stops.

Tuesday: Yellow and black, because "I BEE-lieve in the best Me I can BEE!" Mindful of Sunday night/Monday morning's emotional hellscape, I spend two fucking hours at the mall -- the MALL, with a two-year-old in tow -- dragging every single awful shitty tweener store for something that will do. Christ, there are a lot of those stores -- Justice, H&M Kids, Crazy 8, Old Navy, etc., plus of course Target. I pick up something at Old Navy that is yellow and gray.

Monday evening: Screaming, thrashing, recriminations: "It's got graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in it! You don't understand! It's supposed to be blaaaaaack! I HATE YELLOW!" etc. to infinity. Next morning, more of the same. She finally puts on the black velvet dress that is actually the base of her Halloween costume, pulls the uniform skirt over the dress's skirt, calls it good.

Tuesday morning: Back to goddamned Target to try again to find an item for Wednesday's theme: Team/Sports jerseys or T-shirts: "Let's TEAM UP to Get Active & Healthy!" Fascist conformist bullshit aside, Kid Gleemonex -- predictably -- has no such item. They're not BLUE. I find a Giants jersey (you know, they're in the World Series right now -- but this is the only Giants shirt in the entire South Bay, as far as I can tell).

Tuesday evening: WHY DO YOU ALWAYS BUY ME CLOTHES THAT ARE TOO BIG? THIS IS UGLY! (this goes on for a fucking hour).

Wednesday morning: [repeat] [repeat] [crying] Feeling emotionally abused, I finally just snarl "Wear it or don't, but get in the goddamn car." She did, but bitched at me for literally the entire ride and walk and standing waiting for the pledge of allegiance; various accusations were hurled, including but not limited to: me being mean, not understanding things, doing it wrong, could have made our own, she could have worn her soccer shirt, it's my fault she buttoned her cardigan wrong.

The moral of this story is twofold: 1) I begin to see that my kid is just a little bit tightly wound, and 2) Fuck "CRAZY HAIR/HAT AND/OR SILLY SOCKS" day tomorrow, right in the crazy nads.

Need to get this in front of my exec team by EOD Monday so hoping to sync up EOD Sunday.

I do not ever miss my old job. Some of the people, I miss; I miss being in the city, eating in non-chain restaurants, taking a lunchtime walk along the San Francisco Bay. I miss office in-jokes, skiving off work to go get Blue Bottle, meeting up for drinks. I even miss, a tiny bit, actual editing, writing and website work -- I was good at it.

But I do not ever, EVER miss 98% of what I did, or the people who sent me goat-horned bullshit like this.

8 – Can we get more livestock and wild animals that move along the ground according to their kinds? Again, the passion points for our target users (slide eighteen) are ground and animals that move along the ground. Whatever we can do to increase the amount of ground will go a long way toward converting our users from passive consumers into brand evangelists.

E.B. White is a goddamn genius sorcerer magician, because he got me to love and read and reread and cry over a book about a fucking SPIDER and a fucking PIG.

Do you guys know this? This, which is: Pigs are fucking horrible. Just gigantic, awful, smelly and disgusting animals. 

I chaperoned Kid Gleemonex's class field trip to a farm yesterday, and y'all -- godDAMMIT, the pigs. PIGS! Christ, I haven't been able to get over it. There were all these adorable goats, sheep, some cows, some horses, a few dozen happy and beautiful chickens, lots of edible plants, a great blue heron, who knows what-all, and but in the middle of all that, we had to get right up close to pigs. They were the size of fucking Volkswagens, weighed hundreds of pounds, had longish bristly hair, and GODDAMMIT THEY WERE PIGS. 

The stink was ferocious, everything about them was repugnant on a major scale, they could've overpowered and eaten us all, they have PIG EYES and HOOVES and ASSHOLES oh my gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhdd. 

The pig is officially the only animal I have zero conflicted feelings about eating. Even a scallop, I feel kind of sorry for, but a pig? Motherfucker is MEAT, because it's too ugly and awful to be alive for any other reason. Yecccccchhhh make bacon out of them all, and so it shall be done. 

So many decisions: Real flower or artificial? Long or extra-long streamers? Lights or no lights? Over-the-shoulder or traditional corsage style?

30/40

I can't remember why this is in black-and-white; color would have revealed the full, garish spectacle of this item pinned to my clothing so much better. It's a mum, which is a Thing in Texass for the Homecoming football game. The town's young men go to one of the florists, fill out a lengthy order form, and pay all their Pizza Hut moneys for these monstrosities, which they then give to their girlfriends. It's not a casual undertaking; it's for Serious Couples only. And of course, the size and weight of your mum is indicative of your boyfriend's love for you (just like with engagement rings!). The only year I actually had a boyfriend at Homecoming was the fall of my senior year. I thought mums were hilaaaaaarious, and I thought he did too, but apparently he felt obligated to get me one, and make it big (I realized much later that this situation might have been engineered entirely via the ratfuckery of this one alleged friend of mine, who went with my boyfriend to order the fucking thing, but alas). I felt like a prize heifer taking a stroll down the midway with her minder, the whole time we were at the game. And when the boyfriend broke up with me a few weeks later, in a fit of teenage revenge-thirst I chucked it out into the very busy road in front of my house, where it met the fate of several of our favorite household pets over the years (but in a funny and satisfying way, instead of gruesome and sad, eh wot).

They've found me! I don't know how, but they've found me! Run for it, Marty!

13/40

My Compadre, alias Twelve, Is the Greatest Person in the History of Ever: Another Reason Why

Twelve managed to find online the un-googleably-named freshman-year roommate to whom I refer on this here blogge from time to time. And you guys, this shit is GOLD. 

I can't share much -- mostly because I have to maintain my distance from her, and she's the type who probably chases down hits from all unfamiliar URLs just to see what's doing. But oh my heck, y'all. If ever a person were able to remain completely unchanged by life, to only sharpen and strengthen all the elements of their own personality, to charge through the years the same as they were at eighteen but ever more so -- this woman has managed it. 

Here's what I blathered in an email to Twelve: 

OMFG, lookit that husband of hers -- he is EXACTLY EXAAAAACTLY who I thought would marry her (I've even assigned his last name an umlaut for old time's sake). You think he ever gets a single word in? You think she tells everyone she knows, all the details of their extremely personal marital life? DO YOU SEE THAT SHE STILL SAYS SHE'S A [PRACTITIONER OF OBSCURE RICH-PERSON SPORT]???

As self-aggrandizing and needlessly abrupt as always, she's got Glamour Shots, she's allegedly the CEO of something (her own thing, not like General Mills, a legitimate business), she's married with three young kids ... on the one hand, huzzah to her -- to anyone, really -- who looks to have gotten exactly what he or she hoped to get out of life. She does look genuinely happy, her kids are cute, I don't begrudge her any of that -- it's just, she is still so HER that it is fascinating/dreadful/astonishing. If you had asked me to make up out of whole cloth the story of what she is now, based on the college freshman I once knew, I might have come up with precisely this, whereas with nearly everyone else I've known in my whole life, there've been some unexpected detours, some discoveries, some chances taken, some wins, some misses, a few edges sharpened and a few more blunted or softened ... but not with this gal. She is indomitably, indubitably she. Amazing. 

She's a talented girl / she's tight

Some jokester -- or maybe some combination of my online ordering habits* -- signed me up for More magazine, and once I got over the sting of it, I realized it's actually a pretty OK mag to read on the treadmill at the gym (I mean, there's only so much that's readable in the sweaty magazine racks by the hand sanitizer; I can't do Glamour/Cosmo/DimSlutsMonthly anymore, Self and Fitness are all about spa trips and sad lo-cal recipes, Sports Illustrated gots too much football right now ... I'm down to Real Simple and the occasional rando Entertainment Weekly if it's not too destroyed, besides which More puts Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the cover and she's my spirit animal). I'm an old lady, fuck off.

Anyway -- but in an article on How To Get A Job These Days, The Way The Kids Are Doing It, someone on that magazine put in there a word which almost made me haemorrhage** out the earholes: Twesume.

Pronounced TWEH-zoo-may.

Like resume, but with Twitter getting his junk up way too close to the tight rear end of resume's $135 Lululemon yoga pants.

[checks the pantry] Nope, I'm all out of can. Nothin left but a pallet of can't. And those're expired.

--------------------------------------------------
*Including but not limited to: Lands End (kids' clothes), Ready for Hillary, Wendy Davis for Governor, Barnes & Noble, Boden, Banana Republic, Sur la Table, Wine.com, Planned Parenthood, Rolling Jubilee, the school uniform store, Ultimate Pilates Workouts ... 

**so badly that I had to spell it the British way

Yes, secular colleges have a lower price tag. But, what might that decision really cost your family?

What the fuck is with Christianists and their 55-gallon-drum-spilling use of adverbs & adjectives? It barely takes me one sentence to identify Christianist writing, they're so fucking predictable. This is also the way they halt all real conversation to tell stories -- oh, I'm sorry, "share testimony." And why does it have to be told as a story/parable in the first place? Do the dummies you're trying to convince not understand anything that doesn't have characters in it who sound just like them? Do they not get that these are never real people -- they're always completely fabricated composites? I JUST CAN'T WITH THIS. Anyway:

Courtesy of the wondrous potpourri basket of awesometacity that is Stuff Fundies Like, I bring you a wee parable of heavy Christianist bullshittery: A Bible college* blog post purporting to tell it on the real about why you should send your kid to Bible college instead of actual college. Everything about this makes my skin crawl -- I mean, it's hilarious, but -- OMFG. Read, writhe, puke, laugh.

--------------------------------------------------
*Which college, I'm sure, has the exact same degree-granting power as Schlotzky's Deli.**
     **I stole that from somebody long ago -- Jon Stewart maybe? but can no longer remember from whom.

Bill exhaled a small sigh of relief as he dropped the yellow legal pad onto the kitchen table. After hours of adding, subtracting, budgeting, and projecting, he had obtained clear-cut numerical evidence that his daughter Kelly would be attending State University in the fall. It was a less expensive option than the Christian college four states away where she was hoping to enroll.
Kelly sat down with Bill and looked at the numbers. The College Board reported in October of 2009 that tuition and fees at private colleges average $26,273, while the cost at public four-year institutions was $7,020. Bill was not made of money and, over the next four years, the numbers were not likely to turn in his favor. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education reported that, between 1984 and 2008, college tuition and fees rose 439 percent, while median family income rose only 147 percent.
Kelly would be eligible for a considerable amount of financial aid at the Christian college, but State U. would still be less expensive. She looked at the numbers, sadly nodded agreement, then threw on her coat and walked out the front door to catch a ride to the church’s monthly youth group activity.
As the door closed behind her, Bill looked at his notes again, wondering if he had missed anything.
Sadly, he had.
Lower price tag, higher costYes, secular colleges have a lower price tag. But, what might that decision really cost your family?
The cost of sending a young person to a state university will, in many cases, be a life marked by ambivalence toward spiritual things, regrettable lifestyle choices, or a complete disregard of the principles Christian parents had attempted to pass on to their children.
At least two recent studies have indicated that the educational environment plays a very large part in the future spiritual direction a young adult’s life will take.
The Henderson studyThe most visible study of this concept was explored in 2002 by Dr. Steve Henderson, President of Christian Consulting for Colleges and Ministries. Henderson was Vice President for Recruitment Consultation at Noel Levitz Center for Enrollment Management at that time and is the former Director of Admissions for the University of Arkansas.
Henderson’s study of 16,000 students attending 133 different secular colleges showed that 52 percent of those students had left Christianity behind by graduation. Yes, more than half of students who classified themselves as “born-again Christians” upon entering a non-Christian college no longer identified themselves that way, or had not attended church services in the past year, by the time they were seniors.
Another way to view those statistics is that approximately 65,000 high school seniors will strengthen their faith at Christian colleges this fall—but 148,000 will lose theirs at secular colleges. UCLA/HERI studyThe Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA launched a multiyear study that is exploring spiritual trends among college students and how their experiences affect their spiritual development. The survey was taken by more than 112,000 incoming freshmen in 2004. In the spring of 2007, 15,000 of those freshmen at 136 colleges took a follow-up survey.
The UCLA research showed a significant increase in the percentage of students supporting legalized abortion (52 percent to 60 percent) and legal marital status for gay couples (54 percent to 66 percent) over that span.
The percentage of students who never attend religious services nearly doubled over three years, to 37.5 percent. Only 7 percent said they attended services more frequently than they did in high school. The percentage of those who agreed with the statement, “It doesn’t matter what I believe as long as I lead a moral life” grew from 51 percent to 58 percent.
Faculty members have an impactYoung adults are influenced by the moral and political leanings of both their professors and their peers. In the case of students enrolled in public colleges, that is not such a good thing.
Students who took the UCLA study said only 20 percent of their professors frequently encouraged “questions of meaning and purpose” and 28 percent never encouraged it. Those students also said 60 percent of their professors never encouraged religious discussions.
Those professors who do encourage such discussions are likely to offer input and guidance that directly opposes what Christian young people have been taught at home.
Professors lean to the leftA Washington Post article on March 29, 2005, cited a survey of 1,643 faculty members at 183 four-year colleges. The report found 72 percent of those professors consider themselves “liberal,” only 15 percent “conservative.” In a 1984 survey by the Carnegie Foundation, only 39 percent of professors identified themselves as liberal.
Nearly two-thirds believe homosexuality is acceptable and 84 percent are strongly or somewhat in favor of abortion rights.
At “elite” schools (highly ranked liberal arts colleges and research universities that grant PhDs), nearly 87 percent of faculty members are liberal. The three researchers for the Randolph Foundation survey in 2005 found that conservatives, women, and more religious professors are less likely to land positions at the “elite” colleges.
Only 5 percent of faculty in English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies call themselves conservative.
“That’s why you need diversity, not just of race and gender, but also, maybe especially, of ideas and perspective,” George Mason University faculty member and co-author Robert Lichter told the Post.Lifestyle choicesChristian parents who have not set foot on a college campus in a while might be surprised at what they find.
State universities have been offering coed dormitories for many years. While some dorms have designated floors for male and female students, others put them on the same floor—boys on one side of the hall, girls on the other—or in the same rooms, if they choose.
While not every student will embrace a sexually active lifestyle, many colleges promote “promiscuity made easy.” In fact, a 2007 report in the Journal of American College Health says students in coed dorms are more likely to binge drink every week, to have more sexual partners, and to view pornography.
Most of the world today sees sexual experimentation and excessive drinking as part of the “normal” college experience, and the students’ behavior certainly lends support to that notion.
More than 100,000 students between ages 18 and 24 reported in a 2002 survey to having been too intoxicated to remember whether or not they had consented to having sex. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, citing a 2008 article by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, reports that 83 percent of college students drink and 41 percent admitted to five or more drinks on at least one occasion within the two weeks preceding the survey.
Drugs are also readily available from fellow students on most secular college campuses. A 2007 USA Today article, citing a study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, said 23 percent of the 2,000 students met the medical definition for drug or alcohol use or dependence. More than 8 percent of students reported having used illegal drugs other than marijuana.
My kid is differentOf course, not every Christian young person who attends a state university will turn their back on their faith. There are Bible studies and outreach programs available, although many have an interfaith emphasis that parents and students may find uncomfortable.
But, please consider for a moment just what your young person will be facing every day:

• Peers with a view of faith and morality that is ambivalent at best, antagonistic at worst.

• Professors who decry Christianity as “intolerant” and intellectually bankrupt.

• Fellow students who will question, and often ridicule, those with conservative lifestyle standards.

• A dormitory where they will be forced to share a bathroom, floor, or even their room with someone of the opposite sex.

• A social atmosphere where drinking, drug abuse, and immorality are encouraged and even expected.

While your son or daughter may enjoy a supportive home and a solid church, the constant bombardment of negative influences may eventually prove too much to overcome. That could result in poor decisions that will affect their relationship to God, and your family, for the rest of their lives.
The price tag is certainly a factor when deciding on a college. But, is it the only factor? Haven’t you taught your children that many things, including our walk with Christ, are more important than money?
When the time for a decision comes, be sure to pray for wisdom. The cost for your young adult to attend a public college may be much higher than you could ever have imagined.

Burban cowboys

So, would you guys say these items in the Cheetah's Growl* (Kid Gleemonex's school's weekly parent newsletter) are very passive-aggressive, or the MOST passive-aggressive?

Doughnuts and DadsTuesday, September 17th is Take Your Dad to School Day! We hope dads can make the time to take their children to school that morning and join us in the cafeteria after drop off for coffee and doughnuts. 

Calling all Dads!Next Tuesday, September 17th, Dads are bringing the kids to school, so why not come back at lunchtime! Have lunch with your child and their friends and then hit the playground for some serious fun. If you have an hour to spare around noon, I'm sure your child would love nothing more than to spend it with you ... so be sure to stop on by!

Pity the fool who's married to whoever wrote that, eh?

-------------------------------------------
*Not its real name

Ah ain' nebber seed nuffin lahk dat, sho nuff.

Wait, hold up, hold up -- did y'all remember that there is a minstrel show in Little Town on the Prairie? And that this minstrel show features Pa (and five other town leaders) in blackface, doing darkie jokes and singing darkie songs in darkie voices? And that everybody in the whole goddamn town thinks this show -- the climax of an entire winter's worth of Friday night Literaries -- is the best funniest most awesome and hilarious thing in their whole fucking lives?

Because there is.

And I, being slightly hung over, very tired, and decidedly not in the mood to explain cracker-ass racist fuckery at 7:15 on a Sunday morning, skipped -- for now-- the several pages devoted to its description, Shatner help me.

For instance: an ENTIRE YEAR'S worth of notes from English class with the word "Pritchard" in the headline. Because the English teacher making me write summaries and analyze poetry was EXACTLY LIKE the Pritchard textbook in Dead Poets' Society.

Ohhhhhhhhhh kids. You have NO IDEA what a golden goddamned treasure trove of insane pretentious weirdo nerdery and junior jackassitude I have discovered amongst the hantavirus-harboring nooks, floorboards and crumbling stuffed-full shoeboxes of the house your old pal Gleemonex grew up in. I'm still here, exploring this rich bounty in the 106-degree heat, so most of the full-body cringing and really hard forehead-slapping is mine alone, for now ... but I promise you riches beyond riches.

'All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.' He stared at the hills. 'You see a staircase and wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It's quite natural. Imagination.'

If you, like me, are a fan of all things apocalyptic and creepy as fuck, then you are going to like this thing which Mr. Gleemonex put me onto. His description alone was enough to make me think of taking an Ativan before bed (I didn't do it, but Shatner en pointe in a vintage DVF wrap dress did I want to): The Ghost Towns of China.

Y'all, this is so fucked up, it's getting a new tag: CHINA WHAT THE FUCK

Some writer I am, I can't even explain to you why this creeps me out so goddamn bad. Part of it is the realization that China doesn't have to tell us ANYTHING IT'S DOING and all we hear is whatever they want to tell us and all that shit they're NOT telling us? Is pretty bad shit. And if we thought our housing bubble-burst was a catastrophic mess, just fucking wait till we get a snoutful of the blowback from theirs. I feel a bad case of Doomsday Prepperism coming on, right in my own pantry.

But for this specifically, it's the empty-cities-after-a-plague thing, the real-ish, too-real-to-be-real fakery of the buildings, the complete insanity of it all -- I would lose my mind in about four goddamn minutes in a place like any of these. EEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeegh.

The cumulative weight of living in a terrifying world

Was just getting started writing a post this morning and whoops, turns out there was a lockdown at my kid's preschool because of some "threatening messages" directed at teachers, and we were "advised" to go pick them up. I have never cleared the house with the baby and gotten to that school faster. I pulled on the first pair of pants I found (it's VERY hot today, but the mad ticker-tape scrolling through the front of my head reasoned "you don't want to wear shorts in this kind of situation"), went to grab the deeply-asleep baby, hustled downstairs on legs shaking with adrenaline, strapped the shoeless, confused little guy into his carseat, and drove legally and carefully but very very fast, wasting no moves and waiting for no slowpoke drivers. Pulled up outside, snatched baby, flip-flopped across the parking lot in the house flip-flops I'd forgotten I had on, got through security and nearly imploded from DEFCON 1 anxiety while the kid futzed around putting away the placemat she was using and saying goodbye to her friends and all that normal-day bullshit. Wearing my "this is unusual but kind of fun! whee!" face, I made normal conversation as I prodded her to move move MOVE so we could get the FIZZUCK out of there. Christ that was rough. And as far as I know, nothing even happened.

On Boston

Nothing is safe. Nothing and no one and nowhere in America can anymore be presumed to be safe from violence. I get nervous shopping in Target, I'm a wreck at Five Guys, I have greater and lesser frissons of worry throughout the day as my older kid is at preschool or the both of them are in the gym's Kids Club. There are many days I'm more or less stable and don't think too much about it, but I'm almost never 100% free of it, and there are other days I can't stop doing my hoodoo magical thinking -- these mental gymnastics I do that I think might be the key to preventing myself or my family members being among the victims of this or that next mass shooting or bombing: I scan for the exits and potential sheltering places everywhere I go; I give the nervous side-eye to bathroom doors, staff-only entrances, odd dogleg floor plans; I hate to have my back to the room in restaurants; I have been known to check for snipers on roofs and in windows; I can be thrown into heart-thumping panic by anyone behaving strangely (talking to themselves, angry over something I can't make out, being too loud, or -- especially -- praying in public). I had a post all written about the 5K I ran yesterday, how fun and awesome and full of camaraderie it was and how proud I was of breaking through my old cobwebbing of negative feelings toward running in general and doing a running event in particular, of placing tenth in my age division (30-39) without even really turning on the gas, how excited I am to do it again, and to run the half-marathon I'm training for in June -- but now, who cares about that shit: More people just got murdered, permanently maimed, terrorized, for running one of the world's oldest, grandest and most respected foot races. Every day, it seems, someone steals from us all the idea that you can do something else completely normal without being murdered for being there: watch a movie, eat in a restaurant, go to the gym, show up to work, attend the first fucking grade, compete in an athletic event that you trained for over months or years. Where does this all stop? How do we accept this, living like this? Nothing is safe, nowhere is safe.