I'm late, I'm late! By about 20 years....:)

The next ten years of my life require a real Buddha palm smackdown. I can't go back in the past and tell my younger self "Stop right there! You will get financial independence and be successful before you do ANY thing else."

I didn't care about money and power when I was young.  I wanted to be a writer who was also a good-natured college professor who was there to say, hey, crappy things happen, but we still have art, poetry, beauty, love, too.

 I would certainly get my own business while working on being a damn successful writer.

That way, if writing didn't work out, I'd have my business and keep creating wealth and infusing my community.
I've been trying a new time management schedule to do all the things I want to do.

I try to schedule an hour for writing (fiction, poetry etc) an hour for research, an hour on volunteer/internship work, and then I spend about two hours looking for and applying for jobs. I play with the kids.  I try to go for a run for one hour in the morning and at least half an hour in the evening.

 It is really hard for me to pull myself off one task when I'm "in the zone" and focus on another one.  Especially when I'm writing something I really like and I think it's good. Some part of me just wants to spend all my time writing.  I've been thinking maybe that would be the better investment. I haven't even gotten the Princeton Review for grad school yet! That's next. I want to be ready to take the GRE in fall and apply for grad school in winter.

“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.” Tom Robbins

When my dad asks me what I think Kim Kardashian named her baby, and proceeds to tell me, laughing, and my daughter says "They don't come up with very good names for kids" and everyone is so excited about well, things I think are stupid, despite my new anthropological training, I still have an overwhelming desire to run and hide in books.

I saw everyone getting excited about Pearl Jam touring in concert on Facebook this morning.

I liked Kurt Cobain.

I never liked Pearl Jam.

In high school, I thought those kids complaining about the world, and who were "liberal" and listened to Pearl Jam to be rebels, the ones with 4.0 GPAs and valedictorian, who came from well-to-do families, I just had to hold my piece and what I really thought about most of them all of the time. I still do, essentially.

I remember why I want to be a writer. Somewhere to put my imagination and entertain people. And be private while very public in other ways. This lifestyle is immensely attractive to me.

 I feel an imminent sense of a Vogon Ship on the horizon at those moments, when I feel humanity reaches new heights of stupidity, I think.  I have to hide until the feeling passes that the rest of the universe already knows a lot of the human race is idiotic.

There have been articles about transmission of our TV waves into outerspace. This means, for all intents and purposes aliens have seen humans at their most naked. Do I just embrace my own idiocy? I suppose, I have to own it.


Easier said than done for an introverted quiet kid with a large imagination who didn't bother to study and slid by in most of my classes in high school. I tried to come out of my shell and just enjoy the world's absurdity, to discipline myself in the studies of "Erleichda."

 My imagination often made more sense then the so-called real world.  It took about twenty years to come out of my shell.  I still have those feelings of wanting to hide and build my own spaceship, but for now, earth's all I've got. So, I've got to make the best of it. Ultimately, when I hyperventilate over an inanity of humanity,  I immerse myself in art and history and find beauty  and I come back feeling all right. Other people have their addictions, mine is thinking.

I really would prefer to continue to my education in Medieval Art History. I don't want to ever hear Pearl Jam again if i can help it, but I do like "Red Solo Cup." I do take a lot of pleasure in listening to  Jordi Savall.

I think I found the balance in part, thanks to writers like Tom Robbins, but mostly thanks to my own love like many people like me, of simple, delicious things in life, like a good taco and a beer. They seem so simple, but in fact, making a taco and a beer is a very complicated and intricate process.

Happy Fourth Of July -- some thoughts on the freedom of our children

Reading Encyclopedia Brown and other classics like the Ramona books with my kids, or watching ET,  the Goonies or the Navigators with them, I realize the biggest factor separating my generation from the ones after is NOT technology. It is, quite literally, the independence and freedom my generation was arguably the last to have as kids. You don't see kids now all over neighborhoods freely playing and constructing tree forts or going to the grocery stores on errands for family, playing alone in a park without an adult, let alone bicycling miles by themselves around town. My daughter, at nine is ready for so much more when it comes to participating in the community then there is opportunity available to her, in volunteering, or otherwise than there was for me at the same age.  Her options are severely limited to Girl Scouts. If we don't give kids responsibility and place in the community how are they supposed to grow into "mature responsible" adults who participate in the community? When I say community I refer to it in the broad, local and world sense. In the context of today's world, it is essential for children to learn who they are as a local and global citizen.

If we want children to take the initiative and be good leaders who can creatively and practically solve problems, there are things they need to learn by interacting independently on their own that they simply cannot learn otherwise.

That being said, we had a great Fourth of July. We celebrated watching the fireworks at the local middle school where they put on quite show. Since fireworks are legal in the county where I live, there were plenty of fireworks to be seen before and after the main extravaganza. It was not hard to imagine the fireworks hundreds of years ago and feel they answered a call to celebrate freedoms hard won.

Fall fashions: Not so Goth or Girl With Dragon Tatttoo

I utterly disagree with the tone and assertions made by fashion critic Booth Moore. As far as I know, Bettie Page is revered as a complete bad ass who was ahead of her time and in fact inspired punk movements and styles worn later by Madonn

a.You have to also be a kind of bad ass to wear corset, girdles and sheathes, and heels over three inches all day and curl your hair and work in an advertisement agency. The styles here supposedly inspired by Girl with the Dragon Tattoo mentioned in the article toy with the look of militaristic urban grunge. If anything this wearing pedal pushers/ankle pants with cut out heels and then a World War 2 styled get up and burlesque eyebrows does not say tough, but David Bowie to me, with the slicked back hair. Gender bending, okay. If they wanted to say these styles are inspired by Lisbeth Salander, or Katniss of the Hunger Games, they are missing the mark by a long shot, except for the dystopic urban future vibe. I need to see more evidence.

http://www.latimes.com/features/image/la-ig-new-tough-20120902,0,7176754.story

Summertime Musings

I have been walking all over the place, in the town I live in looking for a nook of magic where I would like to live one day, and as inspiration to succeed. I found a purrrfectly magical street. The trees line up down the middle and arch over a center of grass near the park. There is even a small bench for lazing about and enjoying the energy. After hoofing it all over town, this is definitely my favorite spot so far. Now if only I could transport the small scale hacienda style home on the north side to this neighborhood. While walking about, especially at at the park, I could barely help myself from helping myself to enjoying blooms and composed this poem as I walked around.

I am a cat.

I can't help it.

I talk to the trees.

I put my dainty paws upon their scrubby bark

where knobby protrusions grow that must be noses

or love handles or ears ball up under the amber green mosses

growing around and in the the cracks. 

Batman and Superman have their movies, it's high time for Wonder Woman to be taken seriously.

Fresh in my mind from seeing the Dark Knight Rises, which was everything I'd hoped it would be and more, and also watching the new Superman trailer, I know that if DC is going to get it together and have a "Justice League" movie, they're finally going to have to do justice to the other member of the big three of DC's trinity, Wonder Woman. It's long since passed time for a writer and director who take the character seriously to take the helm. I have been comic book fan from way back when my dad would buy and let me read his Silver Age Comics as a kid, to when I graduated to contemporary comics at 13 when I picked up the George Perez Wonder Woman.

The Perez Wonder Woman changed the way I saw and thought about not only comics, but my world view.  To date, no one has done the character anything like justice to her origins since the reboot that ended the Silver Age outside of the cartoon movie. This is worse than pathetic.

Joss Whedon looked like the best shot for a film, but all the fans new there was trouble in paradise when Whedon started complaining that Wonder Woman didn't have any good villains, like Batman, or Superman.

Excuse me, all the fans were thinking. Ares, God of War, not a good villain?




Mythology is at an all time high popular in American culture. The entire Greek pantheon of Gods -- Circe, the Furies, Athena, Zeus, Gaia -- get involved in the Wonder Woman story.





What about, Cheetah, scientist Barbara Minerva, who has to serve a vicious god?










The Silver Swan?






















 The other Amazons, the Bana-Migdhall, who were exiled,
and become a major source of contention for Diana and her sisters?








The actual villains of both Superman and Batman are idealogies they fight. Lex Luthor symbolizes corporate greed and American capitalism values gone to deadly extremes, and the Joker symbolizes chaos. Wonder Woman's similar ideaologies that she fights, and what she stands for have been the real problem for the directors and writers who've taken Wonder Woman on in the passed 15 years. It seems these professionals, do not  have the chutzpah to take on Wonder Woman's real villain, "the man" otherwise known as chauvinists, sexists and dictators everywhere, who want to keep women and humanity from achieving their potential for peace.  Diana is like Superman in that she's sent here as a potential messiah -- a female one -- with a message of love. One of  the upshots of writing Wonder Woman, is her wry sense of humor, as she finds much of what goes on in our world absurd. Unlike Kalel, Clark, she was not raised in this world. She is the divine, the magical, where Superman and Batman are the male epitomes of the Age of Reason, its light and dark sides, that have brought us the modern world, the enlightenment. And I think possibly this is the hardest part of dealing with Wonder Woman's character. Is our world ready for a female messiah figure???  There have been plenty of movies with female messianic type characters, as well as heroes. 


As a woman living in today's world, who is a mother and knows what is like to live int his world, I'd say it's time to realize some other things about the character that would make her more appealing today. Wonder Woman is pure of heart, but she's also a sexual being. Show her as a responsible woman of high principals who, being in the world of men, has to learn how to deal with that in a realistic way, while still being true to herself. That would make her both a hero, great role model and very human. So go ahead, add in some romantic elements for Diana. 


Part of what makes Wonder Woman so dynamic and interesting of course, is that, like Batman and Superman, and any great hero is that she has contradictions and paradoxes within her character. For instance, she was created, as an Amazon, to be a peaceful worshiper of the gods, for Love, yet, the Amazons were also created and trained as warriors. Diana is sent to our world as an ambassador with the Amazon's way of life, and must learn to adapt to living here. The Perez run was true to Wonder Woman's roots, and did not shy away from the tragedy, the nitty gritty. It is more in vein with what DC has done with Batman and now with Superman. 


If a director like Jane Campion was entrusted with Wonder Woman, someone who took the feminist aspect of Wonder Woman seriously, and also knew how to make a great movie, were at the helm, I think we could be assured Diana would finally get the movie she deserved.

The actress playing Wonder Woman has to look like a graceful, beautiful warrior, with statuesque features, a goddess, it -- not a slender super model who would break in a fight, or I'm not buying it.Whatever actress they pick, has to be someone who really can make us believe she's from an island raised by only women, who's never seen a man in her life till she comes here. Someone who can strive side by side with the rest of the Trinity. We need Wonder Woman more than ever in some ways. I hope to see a movie that is worthy of a great character who has inspired more great characters in fiction, and women in real life to fight for their rights. 

Earth Day

As I go to Evergreen Archery Free Range Day and then later, to Spokane's Earth Day Celebration, I contemplate a few things. Earth Day is just four years older than me. 41 years old. As the daughter of a couple of hippies, It's been interesting watching Earth Day develop from being pretty much a rag-tag band of hopeful people to the conglomeration of business it now is. It's so exciting to see so many green options -- straw bale houses, organic gardens, carbon footprint awareness, fair trade, natural birth, breastfeeding protection laws, -- but the question remains -- is there a truly safe source of energy?