Living In the World, Not on It

Last week, I turned the tables on some of you who answered a recent edition of the Sunday Seven . Those who played that week had to come up with questions they’d ask me over dinner. The questions I got were so good, I couldn’t resist using them for the Saturday Six . I’ll answer the questions myself this week, but today, it’s all about you! Thanks for dropping by and I hope you enjoy this week’s set of questions! Be sure to check back this week and click on the links of bloggers who play along in the comments below! It’s a great way to find blogs you may not have visited and keep the conversation going! Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your blog… But don’t forget to leave a link to your blog so that everyone else can visit! Permission is not granted to copy the questions to message boards for the purpose of having members answer and play along there. Enjoy! ...

I watched a particularly effective episode of Harry's Law , a show that airs on Wednesday nights on NBC at 21:00. This is not your typical offering and I will also admit to being a big fan of David E. Kelley's shows. This is another law show, but not just another law show. It has its serious topics and its less serious topics but it is a lot more interesting... the scenarios posted and the responses to them. Last Wednesday, on 9 November, the episode centered around two things. Harry goes on vacation in a Mercedes Benz truck where in the town of Langford, she is pulled over. The reason? The mayor of the town (well played by George Wendt) made an ordinance that no one shall own, operate or otherwise bring a foreign-made vehicle into their town. They wanted her to pay $1,000 fine for this ridiculousness and she wouldn't. This is not where I am going with this. The second case that comes to the office is the less amusing side of the story. A couple from China c...

Welcome to Saturday: 9 . What we've committed to our readers is that we will post 9 questions every Saturday. Sometimes the post will have a theme, and at other times the questions will be totally unrelated. Those weeks we do "random questions," so-to-speak. We encourage you to visit other participants posts and leave a comment. Because we don't have any rules, it is your choice. We hate rules. We love memes, however, and here is today's meme! 1. In a relationship, have you ever hung in even when you knew for sure it was over? Once and I will never do it again. It's like being mired in mud and knowing I am going to sink. I hated the feeling and won't do that to myself ever again. No one is worth it and I know when it is time to move on. 2. If you had the ability to perpetually alleviate any pain on your body, what would it be? Wow. I have muscular dystrophy, so there is pain almost everywhere. I would have to say my back but I would make s...

When I was A little baby A mamma's boy No one could save me From those kids at school They would bully They would tease They would taunt me Haunt me "You're such a pretty boy" "You're such a pretty boy" "You're such a pretty boy" "You're such a pretty boy" Fear I grew up so scared The bible belt Redneck lifestyle One day I'll fly free In the airplanes "Where's my seat? Where's my champagne?" Champagne ... I'm such a pretty boy I'm such a pretty boy I'm such a pretty boy I'm such a pretty boy Heaven knows the lengths I'd go To please them every day They don't even notice when I'm Down Such a pretty boy Such a pretty boy Such a pretty boy I'm such a pretty boy Hotels were closed And the airport was clean I was stranded alone In my southwest dream Hotels were closed And the airport was clean I was stranded alone In my southwest dream I love this...

I suppose there are a lot of people out there who just assume they are adults, that they have reached the line of maturity that labels one as an adult, not a child, not an adolescent. And by far, being an adolescent, real or imagined, is the worst. I never liked being a child. I never liked the company of children to adults, ever. But as a child, physically, most people are reluctant to treat children as anything other than children. But I have always developed attachments to people who appreciated the adult waiting inside, the adult that somehow - at age 42 - I seem to consistently misplace. I always liked Harry, my father. Harry is my biological father and while he missed out on a lot of things, I have to wonder if he really did. I know all people have their regrets, but would having to deal with the child me and worse, the adolescent me, be regrettable? Ask my parents, Ray and Ma, if that is true. I suspect they'd have been just as happy to miss that - those - bullets. Harry...

If you haven't seen this movie, then see it. It's a charming, wonderful, fun movie. Ignore Steven Guttenberg's roll, which had a little too much of the ridiculous. Tahnee Welch was okay, but not amazing. But Wilford Brimley, Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Maureen Stapleton, Gwen Verdon and Brian Dennehy were just delightful. Some aliens come to Florida to rescue some of their friends who were left behind when Atlantis sank. While spending most of their time out in the ocean, they had rented the house next door to an old folks community with the assisted and unassisted living options. They discovered that something in the pool, now cluttered with strange, large rocks, made them feel really good, really young and revitalised. They asked their new neighbours to allow them to continue to use the pool. In the end, the aliens had an offer for them that was too good to pass up. It's a great movie. And maybe there is that element of fantasy - wouldn't you like to r...

From The Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New Jersey: "Since 1969 Elizabeth-born Judy Blume has been the patron saint of the Awkward Years, otherwise known as puberty. Anyone who's grown up in America in the last 35 years has probably had a Judy Blume book on hand to explain something that parents often felt uneasy discussing. Judy Blume, born Judy Sussman in Elizabeth in 1938, could have been one of the characters she wrote about in her own books, as she acknowledged in 2004: "I was a small, shy, anxious child with eczema, as fearful as Sheila the Great, as imaginative as Sally J. Freeman." As a girl, she was an avid reader--but not of children's books. The reason: "I never found my kind of reality in children's books. No child was anything like me. No child thought the kinds of things I did, leading me to believe I definitely wasn't normal." But with all that working against her, how did Judy Blume become the undisputed queen of a...

Every Thanksgiving is the same, whether we go somewhere or not. When I was little, Thanksgiving was a Grandparents' holiday. I was exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie (The then-lone Howard Jonsons restaurant on Route 80 right at the Delaware Water Gap on the Pennsylvania side) from my mother to my paternal grandparents, Grandma and Pop-pop (usually both grands have funny nicknames, but I wonder if my grandmother would have considered that beneath her dignity. I don't know, and it is unlikely I will ever know, but that sort of fits her. That lasted into my 11th or 12th year, maybe into my midteens. Once my grandmother allowed herself to show anger that I was getting my menstrual cycle, Thanksgiving became the Platt Family sideshow. Just a freaky little behaviour from my grandmother that no one could have predicted. All families have their idiosyncrasies and homegrown weirdnessess, but this was so pervasive that I elected to stay home for every holiday. They'd send gifts, but the...

I'm reading Erma Bombeck's Forever, Erma , which is a book compiled from various articles whe wrote. How many of you under 40 know who Erma Bombeck is? Show of hands? All of you. Yes, I know. Every day that I scoff and laugh at aging and say that I refuse to let it get me down, there is another example of why some cultures have ritual suicide at a specific age... Anyway, in it is one article entitled Marching to a Different Drummer , dated November 3, 1979. She talks about her one son, who didn't fit into any of those typical descriptions of kids. That's me. I'm the baby who used the stuff in my diapers to draw on the walls. I'm the kid who threw a rabbit skin (very soft and fluffy) out the car window and yelled, "Furs flew away!" I'm the kid who played in the dirt, hated girlie clothes (as you can see, little has changed that way), and traipsed around the house in my mother's work clothes... a sequined bikini (she was a go-go dancer. What, are...

Saturday 9: Settling the Score 1. Do you feel that you have “a score to settle” with anyone? No, I'm not one to hold a grudge. I'm a little pissed off with Governor Corzine, though. He wants to cut the EMS training budget in half, the same guy who was tooling down the highway at 90 miles an hour (speed limits apply to us, not him), wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and had an accident! Next time, he can set his own damn leg! 2. Do you own anything that you think is unbreakable? I have discovered that anything can be broken... the cleaning people have broken things, the kitten and both of my long-gone babies broke many an item over the 18 years that I had them. On the very rare occasion there have been kids in our house, they've certainly been interested in touching everything under the sun. That is not far from breaking things, which isn't their fault. Kids are not gentle. 3. Tell us about a crazy thing you did in high school. Ummmmm, that has to be a long list. I mean, cu...

It was gratifying to find this article, as both my husband and I had watched that episode and found him to be abusive, and not merely someone defending his way of life when a stranger comes into the fold to impose their views - the more typical reaction. This man seemed to lump all middle Americans into the same mold. And of course, the producers of Wife Swap were perfectly happy to exploit that by finding the epitome of what his idea of middle America is. While normally the shows have a "all's well that ends well" mentality and the outcome generally shows the promise and adaptability to new ways of thinking, see the world, seeing your kids and how you react to situations, in this case it was an abyssmal failure. Even myself, normally quite the anglophile, found myself wanting to forcibly send Fowler back across the pond. I was moved enough to post something about this... I'll find that posting and put it in here. --Aislinge It's 2009, the end of a decade which...

1. When was the last time you smoked pot? The last time I smoked pot I was 19, so 22 years ago. Luis will very rarely get some and smoke it. It smells as bad now as it did then and gives me a monstrous headache. It is difficult for me to figure out what people get out of it but clearly this is just my wacky physiology and not the normal reaction to marijuana. 2. What do you think is your biggest weakness? Oh, that is easy - money! Spending - something I do freely and all too often. 3. What is your biggest fear? Would you believe it is of falling on ice? I'm practically incapcitated by it. I hate that. 4. Is there a particular goal that you’d like accomplish this year? Just to be happy - that is always my goal. Being a natuarally happy person anyway, this is more easily obtainable than you would think! 5. What do you miss most from your youth? Hmmm. My grandfather. That's it. I hated being a child and was unhappy most of the time. I love life now. 6. What is your best physical f...

Here is the quote to go by: "We accept that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was you think we had done wrong. But we think you're cray to make us write an essay to tell you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us; in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?" I hated high school. I hated the people who turned a blind eye to the cruelty of others and I hated the peers who practiced that cruelty. I am glad I never went to my graduation - those hideous evil people did not deserve my time which is much more important to me than to spend it with them. I really disliked them. I don't remember too many students' names (which is actually fortunate for them, as I would happily and easily print them in this blog with all the things that they did. In all likelihood,...

I'd been thinking about this since Saturday night, but of course I'm just posting about it now. While doing the standby at the Parsippany Carnival, I ran into an old friend. He's not old, about 35 or so, but one of the few people I've known since I was a teenager. That is something for me. I left school feeling very distanced from the others I went there with and did not feel nostalgic about being a kid. I still don't. Getting through school was torturous. It turns out that this person I met from hanging out with someone else in school, but he did not go to school with me. I think we met in a bowling alley... of course, this was about 25 years ago... so I could very easily be mistaken - my memory being what it isn't. Brian did not at all like me at first - he was very jealous that I was taking his friend Kip away. Kip was a misfit in school, as was I. But in my junoir year I met Holly, and we became friends. She introduced me to Kip, who introduced me to Andy an...

There truly is nothing you can't find on ebay! It began so innocently - well, as innocently as anything with me and shopping can be. I began with looking for Old Farmers Almanacs. I bid on the first one - from 1968 - and thus began a couple of months of bidding on many, many Farmers Almanacs. I have almost all of them from 1850 - 1900, then from 1954 to current. I have some from the early 1800s - 1814, 1816... but then it is spotty. Same with the period between 1903 and 1955 - I have some of the 40s, but only one from the 20s and maybe none from the 30s. I just loved getting them, coming home and finding a new thing waiting for me that is not a bill or junk. (I'll be honest, I get far more junk mail than bills, which is good.) For a short time, maybe a month or so, I did very little to no shopping. I was holding on to money. Then around Thanksgiving I had the idea to look up bank notes. Wow! There are a gazillion bank notes! I keep wanting to get a US bank note from prior to 19...

I had to laugh when I saw this. How many teens did I know weeding my way through the mid-pubescent torture that is known as high school did I know into Dungeons & Dragons? This is from the age of paper, 4, 6. 10, 20 and 100-sided dice that you rolled to determine your supremacy in this or that field or fracas. I used to make fun of them in a kindly fashion (most of them were my friends, too, as I was a social outcast as well), and they did invite me to try it - once. Unfortunately, my love of details derailed my interest in this game way too much. I also wanted to know what the characters couldn't have sex. I was around 18 when I tried it. This is a game better suited to boys who still think that girls have cooties. Now, of course, all this is mostly in the annals of history with the advent of "Worlds of WarCraft", "Ultima Online", and sundry other online games and some still just for the stand-alone computer. Luis has tried them all and guess what. I wasn...

...there's a lot going on up there. And everywhere else. My back pain continues, unabated, just as my peers' eagerness to confirm that were I thinner, I'd not be in this sorry state. To add insult and injury to already existing injury, the medications I'm unwillingly taking once I have reached the "I-can't-take-it-anymore" point, have made me so constipated, nothing is moving as it should. I'm completely backed up so I am feeling pain in my nether region as well... Admittedly, this combined with the ever-deepening depression of the possibility of being in debilitating pain for the rest of my natural (and possibly unnatural) life, has actually been worsened by my reading selections of late. Reading Under the Banner of Heaven was enlightening (although it never did clearly spell out the Mormon sacred underwear thing for me), but Shattered Dreams was just depressing. Interesting, to be sure, but depressing. To think that so many women can be brainwashed...