what a beautiful day

.....for Civil rights.....

and Women's rights!!

Yes, it's a beautiful day!

good news network

 Patrick Ballestreros 'As You Wish'

Well, the world did not end today.  So that's a good thing. 

And Patrick Ballesteros added to his kids drawings with an ode to The Princess Bride (which is almost as good as the Firefly one) so that's also good.

I've stayed away from the news of the events in Newton.  I know the gist of it, I know what happened and that is enough.  My heart continues to ache for everyone.  Everyone.  I think of how Ray let me sleep in that morning and I didn't get to see Emma before he took her to school.  I just can't imagine.

And so here we are, so close to Christmas and a New Year.  The news is full of people being awful to one another or complaining about insignificant things.  Still, hidden behind all the selfishness you can find the gems.

So here's a collection of good news stories.  I'm not saying they won't make you cry.  Some of them are good in that way too.  But I hope all of them bring a little bit of your heart some peace.

Stranger Buys a Car for Teen with Cancer 
Hana Berg has been going to cancer treatments off and on for a year and unable to attend school.  One of the teachers assigned to help homeschool her, Lea Mattson went online to ask friends if anyone could help out with rides after the family car died.  One of her friends asked her to come over and pick up some money and go buy a car.  So that's what she did.

Anonymous Donor Pays Off 43 Walmart Lawaways
Someone donated $10,000 to pay off Christmas layaways at a Walmart in Hastings, Michigan.  $7,800 was used to pay off the layaways and rest was given to a local charity.

Boy with Cancer Gets a Visit From Heroes  
So far this one is my favorite.  Five year old Nathan Norman is battling a rare form of cancer.  He was asking for Christmas cards from heroes.  He thought that would cheer him up.  A group of police officers, firefighters and first responders went a step further and delivered the cards in person.

Alec Baldwin Donates Thousands to Save Library
The headline pretty much says it all!  A year after donating $10,000 to save the Central Falls Memorial Library in Rhode Island he donated another $5,000 in response to an end of the year fundraising effort.

Eastman Student Gets a Tuba Surpise
Did you know that tubas cost around $13,000?!?!  I did not!  Tara Fayazi has played the tuba for years and is at Eastman School of Music as a Performance major.  She's always borrowed the school's instrument until her friends went behind her back and created a Facebook page to help raise money to buy Tara her own tuba!

Deaf Dog Learns Sign Language
After her Dalmation passed away, Jill Chanel knew she'd want to adopt another and decided to adopt a rescue dog.  She found a group that saves deaf Dalmations from being put to sleep and knew that was the dog for her.  Her other dog is a therapy dog and she was determined that Whitney would be too so she started training her using American Sign Language!

Awesome, Awesome Kids
Three kids who show us that it doesn't take a lot to make a huge difference.  Maybe this is my favorite story now.

Puppies Rescued From Storm Drain
Seriously.  Puppies.  Rescued.  Enough said.

3000 Bags of Food Given Out
The Latin American Chamber of Commerce hands out 3,000 bags full over everything needed to make traditional Noche Buena dinner to the needy in Little Havana.

Wounded Soldier Receives Keys to New Home
During his second tour in Iraq Sgt. Kenneth Harker was wounded by a bombing.  After recovering at Walter Reed Hospital for three years he returned to a home that was difficult to get around in with cramped hallways and narrow doors.  Four years later, thanks to Homes for Troops he and his family now how a wheelchair accessible home to celebrate the holidays in.

12-Year-Old Girl Saves Bus
When 12-year-old Rana Kraftson noticed her bus driver was unconscious she ran to the front of the bus and pressed her hand down on the brake, saving the bus full of kids from hitting a tree on their way to ski practice.  The bus driver had suffered a stroke and has since recovered.

So there's a few articles and I know there's more out there.  When I find them I'll share.  Happy Friday everyone!!

fifty shades of annoying the ever living crap out of me

I read an article today on cnn.com about Explaining 'Fifty Shades' Wild Success. And dang it, I wanted it explained to me!

This whole phenomenon is utterly baffling to me.

I have collected erotica for about 18 years now.  And no, I'm not talking about Johanna Lindsay-like smut books, but classics by Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Anne Desclos and then pretty much everything that Susie Bright puts out there as well as Maxim Jakubowski, so on and so forth.  Altogether I have over 30 anthologies and novels both fiction & autobiographical.

So maybe that's why nothing in here is 'tee-hee' shocking to me or blush rendering.  I've read it all before - and then some - except by authors who can write.  I swear this is some of the worst writing I've ever read and I do consider Stephenie Meyer a bad writer despite my love for the books.  I have repeatedly picked up the first book and just can't stomach the over the top obviousness of it, the terrible character names and the cliched catch phrases and 'oh my god no one should be this good-looking' lines.  Meyer already did that thankyouverymuch.

So when I read this article I realized how maybe I'm just not in that 50 Shades demographic.  Here's my take:

Most of the people I know who have read the books, raved about them and then badgered me to get them are Twilight fans.  Not surprising considering this trilogy was written by a Twilight fan on a Twilight fan fiction site.  There is an interesting phenomenon (ha!  I used that word twice and spelled it right each time) in which someone who is a Twilight fan will mention a book she likes and it slowly catches on until the damn thing has a movie deal (The Hunger Games, I Am Number Four - gag -, The Mortal Instrument series, The Beautiful Creatures series).  This can be both awesome (Hunger Games) and bloody awful (I Am Number Four).  One of the most common review quotes on the back cover of YA Supernatural/Romance books is 'Fans of Twilight will love this book!'

And it makes sense.  I wasn't a big YA reader until I picked up the Twilight books.  Now I would say I've read more YA in the past 3 years than general fiction.  When you find a genre you like you tend to stick with it until you've made yourself sick of it.  And the covers (which is pointed out in the cnn piece) is very Twilight like.  Very simple, bold, curious covers in only a few colors.  Even for me, someone who most certainly judges a book by its cover, it's appealing.

The subset of readers who were not Twilight fans that rave over this book are the people who rolled their eyes at the Twilight madness and called Bella a horrible female role model and Edward a psycho stalker.  They knew enough about the books because deep down they really wanted to read them, but their hipster attitudes didn't want to be part of that crowd.  So they turned up their noses to the series because it was childish and unrealistic because, you know, books aren't supposed to be any sort of fantasy.

So these people, they saw 50 Shades and thought, now here's a book I can read and I'll be cool because it's got handcuffs and butt plugs in it and that's soooooo shocking.  There's not a sparkly vampire to be seen!  Plus, you've got the added bonus of not having to be found searching the teen section at Barnes & Noble for the book.  You shall be in Grown-Up-Book-Land.

I'm not saying I won't read these books and possibly end up loving them.  I own them.  I owned the Twilight series for about 6 months before I finally gave in and read them, but I waded through 82 pages of that book and fell in love.  This one, it's been a shitstorm in my head just trying to get through the first chapter.

Honest to Buddha I just don't get it.  I cannot stomach this writing.  It's almost a crime against the erotica genre.  On the other hand it's nice to see women so readily relishing in some porn without being ashamed so, carry on! 

Power to the porn!

teach what you know

With Emma starting kindergarten I knew that some things would change, but I thought those changes would be more about me.  She went to preschool so it’s not like this is the first time she’s been away from home for a few hours and as far as she’s concerned that was school so to her, kindergarten isn’t that new of a thing.  So I thought it would mostly be me adjusting to this new 5 hour block of ‘free’ time I would have and the idea that my baby now goes to ‘big kid’ school.

And for the most part it’s been that way.  We’re getting used to getting up earlier every morning (we’re both kind of late sleepers), packing lunch, eating breakfast in a timely manner and walking to school.  We meet up with our friends who live nearby and I get to chat with them on the way home.

What I didn’t think about is that despite the fact that there’s only 20 kids in her class, she now has contact with the other kinder classes as well so she’s observing and absorbing attitudes from 79 other kids.

The charming parts are things like meeting a new friend in her class whose name is Jasmine.  She told us, “there’s a girl named Jasmine in my class!  She’s in real life, not in the movies!”  Of course, the other friend she has named Jasmine is in Disney’s Aladdin.

But then there’s the other things that I knew would be a part of elementary school life, but I just didn’t think it would happen in kindergarten.  Maybe because it’s been 30 years since I was there myself.  A boy in her class is quite overweight.  When Ray picked Emma up from school on Friday she told him how the other kids were making fun of him at lunch.  She told him ‘But I like him just the way he is.’

It occurred to me that while we’ve always told her that saying someone is ‘fat’ is not a nice thing to say we’ve never really explained that commenting on someone’s weight is not nice too.  We usually say ‘chubby’.  Since she pretty much has no more baby fat (and hasn’t since she was about 8 months old) when we tickle her tummy or squeeze her cheeks we would say we were pinching the chubs.  I’ve said how Mama has chubs or Ray will say he has chubs and we’ve never said it in a mean way.  When she says it, she’s not saying it to be mean, she’s just calling it like it is.

Then the other thought in my mind is how the mean spirited teasing has already begun.  Ugh.  You want to protect your children from everything without clipping their wings.  You want them to be able to stand up for themselves or let it roll off their backs without affecting them, but it’s hard.  It’s hard leaving her there every day hoping that she’ll have a good day and be a good girl.  That she won’t come back to me hurt.

I read an article yesterday about a French company, Jours Apres Lunes who have designed a line of lingerie for girls aged 4-12.  They called it loungerie as they say it is a mixture of lingerie and loungewear.  While that is disturbing to me, why do 4 year olds need bras and panties that look like sexy lingerie, what is most awful was the ad that shows some girls laying back wearing the loungerie and pearls bed headed or sporting sunglasses looking very adult.  To me, it’s fodder for pedophiles.  It was disgusting.

A friend of mine sent me this article after she saw my post on Facebook about the kiddie lingerie.  I couldn’t agree more.  And what can we do?  The best thing is to do my best with my daughters.  To teach them to be respectful to the people they come in contact with and to themselves.  To be confidant and strong, but not so much that the fall into arrogance.  To be compassionate.  To be heard.  To be fun.

Good luck to me.

news is sad

I am a newshound.  I constantly have CNN, USAToday, The Daily Kos, BBC & The Merc’s web pages open on my browser.  Some days I will systematically go through every single story.  Sometimes I share with Ray what I’ve read and sometimes when sharing the news I’ll cry over something because let’s face it, news is sad.

My hubby is very tech savvy.  It’s what he does for a living.  So he’s always threatening to put a block on all news sites so I can’t read the news and get sad.  He’d never do it though (I think) because that would make me sad too.

So it was surprising the other day when he told me some news that made me cry.  I don’t think he thought it would make me sad, but it did, very much so.

He read an article about how 200 Japanese retirees were volunteering to take the place of the younger generation who were exposing themselves to radiation at the power plant trying to get things under control.  They’re called the Skilled Veterans Corp.  Mostly retired engineers and other professionals.  They figure that they will die before the effects of the radiation made itself known to them whereas the younger workers have longer to live.

There are a few reasons that this made me cry.  One being that this is not going to be easy work and they are selflessly offering themselves in the place of someone else because it is what they believe to be the right thing to do.  The humanity humbles me.

But the main reason why it still makes me tear up is that at 73 Yasutera Yamada (who is spearheading the volunteer efforts) was about 7 years old when the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place.  He and most, if not al of the Skilled Veterans Corp. saw what the radiation from those bombs did to other Japanese citizens, some possibly had family members who died as a result.

It breaks my heart.

But I marvel at the human spirit and the bravery that people show in times of great need.  Who needs superheroes in this world when you have people like Yasutera Yamada?

When I was reading more about this story I came across this blog post which of course, I can’t find again.  She said that this sort of selfless sacrifice would never be seen in America.  I’m assuming she moved here well after 9/11.  I remember thousands of Americans volunteering amid the dust and destruction at Ground Zero and now, almost 10 years later hundreds have died from the toxins in the dust that they worked in. 

And there’s the hundreds of volunteers who stepped up after Hurricane Katrina when our government turned their backs on Louisiana.  There are the everyday heroes who wake up every morning thinking about how they can make someone else’s life better.  There are the THOUSANDS of military personnel who have fought for this country and others from the beginning of America’s birth.  There are their wives and husbands and children who carry on when some of their spouses or parents come home a shadow of who they were before they left, if they even come back at all.

Don’t tell me America has no heroes.  I will punch you in the mouth and call you a liar.