The commandment that comes with an asterisk

Something occurs to me, reading headlines about teabag wingnuts and their consistently outrageous claims about President Obama.

These allegations are obviously lies. Sure, some of these people are truly around the bend -- especially those who have access to little more than a keyboard, and dutifully forward the wacky reforwarded e-mails they get from equally confused, pathetic people such as themselves. They sometimes don't know better, by virtue of insufficient education, low IQ, and/or social insulation. Sometimes they do know better, deep down, but it's easier to remain ignorant.

But then you have the people who promulgate this garbage. They are professional spinmeisters whose only purpose in creating these stories is to amass power. Many of them hide behind Judeo-Christian religion as an additional means of bashing those they don't like (atheists and Muslims). On some level, they genuinely believe in a higher power and believe that they are acting in obedience to it. But they have to know that the stuff they're spreading around the internet is a lie. So how on earth do they evade that commandment that says "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?" Libel laws they can easily duck, since libel is defined very narrowly as it is codified into civil law. But in a religious system that says you're committing adultery if you even think about being attracted to someone you're not married to, how would one justify the manufacture of out and out lies regarding not only the actions, but the motivations of your political opponents?

With the adultery question, you have the oft-used device of "confessing" to personal weakness and asking for forgiveness. But I've noticed that when the few people (like Frank Schaeffer) who wise up about their misdeeds change their minds and admit what they've been up to, they more often than not renounce THE WHOLE THING. The company they kept, the belief system they embraced, going all the way back to their formative years and families. The "sinners" who confess adultery, on the other hand, renounce very little. Instead of saying "I've been raised in the dysfunctional incubator of fundamentalist Christianity, where hypocrisy is a way of life, and if I don't get completely out of there I'll just continue having affairs on the down-low," they simply spew out more of the same, attributing their screwups to a failure to sufficiently succumb to the brainwashing! Instead of "Yes, I'm gay, and since the Southern Baptist Convention and most Christian denominations condemn me for this, I'm outa there! Time to live my own life as an intelligent human of free will, and I doubt I'm displeasing God because more than likely there's no such thing ANYWAY," they give us "I've let down my family and my church and will dedicate the rest of my life praising God because only with his help can I overcome this blahblahblah."

So what it boils down to is the matter of honesty. The "apostates" recognize that the system that forbids lies actually incubates them! They get out, so that they can actually live more by the relevant commandments (the honesty and adultery ones in particular).

Why does hypocrisy continue to have such a stranglehold on fundamentalists?

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Bob, the Polish Porn Enthusiast

Bob was a friend-of-a-friend. The friend who introduced us was a co-worker of my ex-husband Doug. Let's call him PV. PV was a social engineer long before Facebook. He absolutely loved creating connections between people. "Oh, do you know so-and-so? Let me introduce you." I think PV envisioned his friends as a collection, all displayed together artfully on a shelf. The only problem was, many of PV's friends had strange quirks, and they didn't mix well together. PV was the sort of person who could subtly alter his personality to harmonize with whoever he was spending time with at the moment. Not everyone can do this. So PV's attempts to create little subsets of friends usually failed in the end. There was the added factor of PV's propensity toward gossip. If he could get friend A to move in with friend B, sooner or later he'd do his very best to get the "dirt" on friend A from friend B or vice versa.

Doug and I moved from New York to Atlanta in the mid-1980s, and PV followed a few months later, for the same reason we did: job changes and a lower cost of living. PV lived with us for a few months, then got his own place. After a few years, he met the lady he later married. She was an eminently level-headed and sensible person, but even she needed a few years to wean PV off his never-ending frat party, the mad social carousel.

PV came to like the south quite a bit and did his best to persuade his old NY friends to relocate. A few did, but most either declined, or they moved briefly to Georgia, found it very much not to their liking, and high-tailed it back to the frozen north. Bob the Polish Porn Enthusiast belonged in the latter category.

I call him the Polish Porn Enthusiast, not as a joke, but because he made a point of building an identity around his ethnic heritage. He was a native New Yorker but the first generation of his family to be born in the US. After PV moved out, and about a year and a half before our son was born, Bob moved in with us. He decorated his bedroom and bathroom with Polish flags, old Bobby Vinton album covers, travel posters, and a homemade family tree populated by individuals with many, many consonants in their names. His favorite actress was Meryl Streep because she did such a good job using a Polish accent in Sophie's Choice. He also bought every Basia CD he could find and played them at top volume whenever he was home. Periodically, when we had occasion to converse, he'd bring a Basia CD upstairs and say "You like her? I like her. She's Polish. You can borrow this anytime you like." Since Basia's music was very hot on all the radio stations at the time, I had no need to borrow the CD and told him no thank you on at least three different occasions.

Bob had a girlfriend who lived in NY but visited him whenever she could. On these occasions, Bob would invariably excuse himself from whatever conversation or activity he might be engaged in with us, grasp his girlfriend by the hand and say "We're gonna go take a nap now." Bob and his girlfriend took lots of naps. They were probably the most well-rested couple in all of Cobb County.

It wasn't long before the subject of pornography began to materialize in our conversations with Bob. He didn't bring up this subject while his girlfriend was visiting, but once she had gone back to New York, he made it clear that her absence necessitated his finding "an outlet." Doug and I soon found plenty of excuses to avoid the downstairs portion of the house where Bob lived. If I were doing laundry and needed to use the bathroom, I'd go all the way upstairs to use ours. In Bob's bathroom was a 3-foot-high stack of porno magazines. Not Playboy, Penthouse, or even Hustler or Screw. Bob's taste ran to what he referred to as "specialty" or "connoisseur" publications. Much more expensive than run-of-the-mill stuff, he informed us. Having seen Hustler and Screw once or twice, Doug and I wondered what could possibly render those "run-of-the-mill" by comparison. But we didn't wonder enough to try checking it out. We just stayed away from Bob's space. Still, all we had to do was stand in front of his bedroom door when he opened it to notice similarly impressive stacks of "literature" populating the floor of that room, too. We wondered where he managed to hide it when the girlfriend came to visit. She was a nursing student, but she gave the impression of being very much in the conventional range of things. Not the type who would turn a blind eye to a library of porn.

Bob got himself a job at the same retail establishment where PV worked. Bob soon managed to irritate everyone at the store, and had a similar effect on Doug and me, even aside from his taste in reading material. Bob considered himself an expert on home design and frequently criticized everything from the doorknobs to the sink drains in our house. He had a withering opinion of our subdivision: "Not private enough. I want a house way out in the country on a dirt road with a big dog guarding it. I want to work on my car and have different cars to work on in the yard and make some money, without the neighbors giving me a hard time."

Uh-huh. Within a couple of months, we realized we couldn't stand the guy and would gladly forsake the nominal rent payments in exchange for a Bobless life. We got our wish once the store cut him loose; he decided he felt more "at home" in New York. Besides, he told us, the South simply provided too few Polish people and too little "good" pornography. We breathed a sigh of relief as he departed, but were soon preoccupied with the pending arrival of our baby. We had a house to prepare: Bob's old room would be turned into an office so that Wally could have the second bedroom upstairs for a nursery. There was a lot of cleaning, painting and rearranging to do. In the midst of this, I found what looked like a box in the vanity drawer of one of the bathrooms. Lifting it out, I determined that it was actually a large hardcover book. No printing on the cover. A quick perusal of the pages revealed some full-color "connoisseur"-type porn. But because it was in the upstairs bathroom, I let myself assume that Doug had put it there, and remained skeptically amused when he denied that he had. A month or two later, Doug found a stack of magazines in the vanity cabinet in our bathroom. He was clearly annoyed, and at last I believed that the book had not been placed there by him. But if not, who? I was so naive, so ready to assume that everybody shared our sense of boundaries, that it took an amazingly long time before I figured out that Bob had gone through the house while we were at work, scattering these little "treats" here and there like a sicko Santa. Evidently, he could think of no finer parting gift for us, his indulgent hosts.

Now, more than two decades later, I know my life experience has broadened and the naïveté has diminished. I've seen enough of humanity to be a lot less surprised when others' habits and values go forth on a path divergent from mine. But, one way or another, it comes down to knowing one's self and what one likes. Open-minded is one thing, but there's no point in saying "Oh, that's fine, no problem" when your heart and mind are saying something quite different. We were glad to see the last of Bob. Eventually, we parted ways with PV as well, having little confidence in his discernment or his inability to resist orchestrating bizarre social arrangements such as the Bob Adventure.

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Catching Myself in a Classic Lie, Part 2

Continued from the previous post: Why did I write “He paints the sky with stars” on the Facebook page of a respected non-theist who died earlier this year?

First off, the line comes from the title of a song by Enya. I listen to a lot of Enya, on Rhapsody and Pandora, as well as in the car. There are days when a good dose of “Only If” is the one thing that can ward off creeping depression. Enya is the sort of music you either love or hate. It’s perfectly formulated, commercially viable Celtic/New Age. It does exactly what the genre is set up to do. It calms, it soothes, it puts your mind at ease.

During my days as a believing Christian, I heard plenty of ominous statements about New Age, mainly that it was a “gateway” to occult or satanic practices. People like Bob Larson said it was “trance-channeling” music; he linked New Age with Hinduism, Buddhism, transcendental meditation, mind control, brainwashing and subliminal programming, all of which – and much more – are believed by fundamentalists to be in direct opposition to scriptural Christian doctrine. The list goes on and on. I don’t listen to enough New Age music to tell you if any of the more sinister allegations have any basis whatsoever. But I have listened to Enya enough to say that I discern no “spiritual agenda” of any kind in her music. It’s the vaguest sort of woo-woo. Believe what you want, it seems to say. It’s all good. You can sail away amid Caribbean blue china roses, experience storms in Africa, dream you dwell in marble halls, even follow the Sappho comet. On your way home, the memory of trees invokes the Celts … and vice versa.

“Paint the sky with stars” has lyrics very reminiscent of, and probably inspired by, the nursery classic “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” But the music is slow, ponderous, and more than a little sad. The first time I heard it, I thought “This must get played at a lot of funerals.” It’s a song of rest and transcendence.

I had listened to this song on the way home from work yesterday, and it was floating through my mind as I clicked Bill’s Facebook page to offer my birthday tribute.

What did I mean when I wrote that? Do I really think Bill’s spirit is “up there” with a little paintbrush and a palette, creating a starscape for his grandchildren to wish on? Or does the “he” refer to a sentient power that breathes life into dust and creates humans, and dazzles us with his creativity and artistry?

In the words of Lisa Loopner, that’s so funny I forgot to laugh. No, I support and honor Bill’s assertion that death’s prevailing characteristic is absence of life, and nothing else. Stars are billions of years old, at least, and many of them are just as dead as Bill. Where do we “go” when we die? Probably nowhere.

But

The view that death is not an ending, just a transitional phase, seems to be the one that predominates throughout history.

And

To quote Sam Harris (verbatim, this time):

The fact is that our intuitions are not always a reliable guide to the truth; in certain situations, they can be relied upon to be wrong. So why should we think that our inability/reluctance to conceive of our own nonexistence offers an indication of what happens after death?

[Please take some time and read the entire conversation between Sam and Andrew Sullivan – it rocks, as you might expect.]

In indulging the whimsical notion that the supremely rational and earthbound Bill has, in death, transformed into a sentient and creative spirit, I’ve simply proved that certain customs and thought patterns are hard to get around.

What does this mean for us non-theists? Are we selling out when we address the departed in the second person (“I miss you, Bill”)? Or when we give any indication of belief in an afterlife, however improbable? And what if Bill had told us a different story in that forum session, like “Could have been a dream, but I saw my ol’ grandpa, and he said ‘Don’t worry, boy, we’re all here. Grandma made a roast turkey with all the trimmins, and she’ll keep it warm for you!’”? What if Bill had wavered at that moment, and said the vision, or dream, or hallucination, had given him the assurance that his earthly mission would not end with his last breath, but carry forward (or upward, or outward, or thence to infinity and beyond, etc. etc.)? Would such a statement carry more weight, coming from someone we knew had never before yielded to such fancies? Or would the rest of us hard-noses have shaken our heads and said “Poor Bill, they must have given him a leeeetle too much Demerol.”

My conclusion, at the end of this very long train of thought, is:

That such statements and sentiments, with regard to the departed, are not reflections of things we know.

They are not even necessarily reflections of things we actually believe.

They are not reflections of things we assume third parties believe.

They are simply … things we say.

They are things we say because we have not collectively given ourselves the time or opportunity or thought to come up with a new vocabulary on this subject that fulfills the purpose of those time-honored but meaningless woo-woo words.

- We need something that honors the memory of the deceased. Actually, I think this one’s in the bag – sit in on any halfway decent memorial service (not to mention a perusal of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations) and you’ll hear some great oration, much of it quite spontaneous.

- We need something that comforts the survivor(s). This one is considerably trickier, because too often, the survivor who needs the comfort is us. I’m convinced that losing a friend, family member, or even a celebrity who made an impact, is the one thing that’s almost guaranteed to play with our heads and bring out our long-buried vulnerabilities. I’m willing to bet even Bill himself, and many of the hard-headed veterans of the forum, have caught themselves uttering such clichés as “He’s in a better place,” “She’s probably crackin’ jokes up there,” and “Your dad’s smilin’ down at you right now.”

I suppose we could say “Odds are, you’ll inhale some of her ashes sooner or later, depending on the wind currents,” or “One day an archaeologist will dig up your uncle’s remains and make a note of his quintessential 1970s wardrobe!” But somehow, the spiritual symbolism, however absurd, shopworn or rote, does more to comfort us.

We might as well accept it for now – while we continue to work on a more rational approach.

More to the point, though -- there is one perspective that won't force us to nudge our thinking into any new slots, because it's something we DO know:

Life is unpredictable and when we love someone, we are NEVER prepared to lose them.

My last conversation with Bill took place a day or two before his last trip to the hospital. He called me to confirm that I would be ushering the following Sunday, as I had been scheduled. It was the most mundane conversation imaginable. It shows two things: First, despite his faltering health, Bill was completely dedicated to the mission he'd taken up for himself. Second, it pays to be mindful of every encounter, no matter how insignificant. On the other side of that moment could be a wish that we'd given it the weight it deserved.

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Catching Myself in a Classic Lie, Part 1

Note: The quotes contained in this post are not verbatim, but accurate enough to convey what the speaker was attempting to say.

A very unscientific survey seems to confirm that 2009 has been a year of loss for a lot of people. We’ve had a rash of very high-profile celebrity deaths, and the pattern seems to be present for many closer to home, myself included.

In addition to my brother-in-law, who died about six and a half months ago, there have been numerous passings at the Unitarian Universalist church I attend. Shortly after I joined, the minister said to a group of us, “These next few years are bound to be tough ones for this congregation – many of our most active members are also our oldest, and I anticipate conducting a continual series of memorial services.” That prediction took a couple of years to come true, but now it has. We’ve lost close to half a dozen this year. It’s stressful for everyone.

One member whose death has especially touched me was Bill, who would have been 81 today. Bill’s passion was membership, though during his many years, he was a willing participant in nearly every aspect of church life. Bill was invariably the first person a visitor would meet, as was the case with me. Even though it was summer and the minister wasn’t there, Bill was, in his requisite tweed blazer with patches on the elbows. In a place where many attendees arrive in shorts, flip-flops, and kilts, piercings and tattoos blaring forth, Bill was always impeccably groomed. In spite of his relatively small stature, his bearing was one of authority and dignity. Bill knew everything there was to know about making a good first impression.

“What did you think of it?” he asked as I stood in the fellowship area with my coffee cup that first time. When I replied with my favorable views, he smiled and said, “Well, just keep in mind that it’s going to be a little bit different every time you come here. You won’t be bored.” That was a line I went on to repeat to every visitor I have encountered since. Bill’s friendliness was one of the major factors in my joining the congregation shortly after that first visit. A great many of the newer members can say exactly the same thing: They learned how to greet visitors by following Bill’s example.

Beneath that genial exterior was a tough guy. The toughness sprang from something other than just his many years in the military. It had to do with an inner certainty and serenity. Just as a theistically religious person will often exude that calm acceptance that no argument can displace, Bill, as an ardent rationalist, demonstrated similar qualities. There may have been a time that he went toe-to-toe with a fundamentalist, but I never saw it. With Bill, it was more a matter of “I'm confident in my beliefs and they are not threatened by yours. I’m interested in hearing your view. Go grab some coffee and we’ll talk.”

My other best memory of Bill was at the discussion forum our church holds before Sunday services. There are three qualifications for forum participation: First you have to be a morning person, because if you’re not, you will suffer when the moderator calls out your name and asks if you have any thoughts you’d like to share on the topic of the day. Second, you have to be thick-skinned enough to deal with some very strong opinions flying through the air, promulgated by similarly strong personalities. And third, you have to accept that while our minister and numerous members advocate tolerance for the more spiritual side of UU, the classically humanist view holds sway here in the basement and little or nothing is likely ever to dislodge it.

The forum was Bill’s other mainstay. He and his wife were there every Sunday.

A year or so ago, Bill’s health started along the path to failure that culminated in his death this past spring. We heard of a hospital stay, but that kept him away from church for two weeks at the most. When he returned, he had an oxygen tank and a breathing tube, but above the clear plastic, his frank and curious eyes returned your gaze and you knew Bill was still very much in the game. So it was that one Sunday, the forum topic was the variety of religious approaches to life’s touchpoints. Bill was eager to talk about his most recent hospital stay, because during that period, he had stood on the fine edge of death. His vital signs had slipped, with “codes” of various colors being signaled to medical staff, and his wife being asked to fill out forms that would give the hospital directions on how to proceed if need be.

Bill said “I can tell you, the evidence of my nearness to death was there in black and white – I read the medical summaries, and it was close. Very close. And I am very confident in relating to you all, that I saw no bright lights, heard no soothing music, saw no departed figures from my past reaching their arms in greeting. I saw nothing. My only awareness, in my intermittent moments of wakefulness, was that I was in the hospital. There was pain, there was certainly a wish on my part that I could just fall into a deep sleep, or even death to evade the worst of it. But when I came back, I was back. I was ready to pick up and keep going, but I had no fear or anticipation of anything. It just was what it was.”

And that suited Bill just fine. Another person may have felt great distress that all the “documented evidence” of other-worldly markers were absent. Bill felt affirmed and vindicated, and I have no doubt that when the illness came back and took him in June, he was simply having a repeat of the experience he described to us.

So, fast-forward to October 29, and Facebook reminds me that today would have been Bill’s birthday. His page is still open; several people have left memorial tributes over the months, and his wife checks in now and then to let us know she appreciates us.

I wanted to write something on his wall, and what ended up there was, “He paints the sky with stars.”

Yep, that was me, the UU skeptic/humanist/freethinker, with my offering of spiritual drivel in memory of one who would, under similar circumstances, have smiled politely and said thank you, but rolled his eyes in good-natured exasperation at such a vapid sentiment.

So, now that the words are on there for all to see, probably not likely to be removed by his wife, regardless of what she thinks of them, I ask myself:

What brought that on?

I feel compelled to share my thoughts on this and would love to hear comments. The next post attempts to answer that question. Click Here to Read More..

New Meme

Bad-Tempered Zombie, Professor B. Worm and Wandering Coyote have all stepped up to the plate on this meme, which comes highly recommended for People Who Can't Think of Anything to Blog About.

This may also come in handy as an insomnia remedy. You never know:

50 Things I Have Never Had:

1. A broken bone

2. A daughter

3. A grandchild

4. A basement

5. Measles

6. Mumps

7. Rubella

8. Polio

9. Smallpox [...I could also throw in leprosy, but that would be pushing it]

10. A professional pedicure

11. An arrest

12. A joint

13. Jaegermeister

14. Goldschlager

15. Haircolor that wasn't conceivably natural

16. A pet rodent

17. A pet bird

18. An iPod

19. A CB radio

20. The opportunity to learn to drive a stick shift

21. More than 10 sexual encounters

22. More than $24,000 in a retirement account

23. An annual salary exceeding $40,000

24. A piercing beyond earlobes

25. Any food that originally had more than 4 legs (unless you count lobster & crab)

26. Alligator

27. An unwanted pregnancy

28. A car with a CD player

29. A final class grade of F

30. A tattoo

31. The opportunity to be a bridesmaid

32. A Glamour Shot

33. Glamour

34. A passport stamp for any country except Canada, China, Hong Kong

35. Pneumonia

36. A sexually transmitted disease

37. Tapas

38. A free meal as reward for consuming massive quantities

39. A ride in a helicopter

40. A pet turtle

41. A pet snake

42. Cosmetic surgery

43. A sibling

44. A living great-grandparent

45. A surprise birthday party

46. A DUI/DWI/OUI (a citation for driving while loaded)

47. A reason to call the fire department

48. An eviction notice

49. A gun pointed at me

50. A major award

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Too Compulsive? Not Enough? Hell If I Know!

I spent about an hour today with this little red notebook I have. It's spiral-bound, lined, perforated and hole-punched, and I've had it for about 2 and a half years. My goal was to record daily events and also to house keepsakes such as movie tickets, programs, etc. to keep sort of a 3-dimensional record of my daily activities.

Today I decided to ditch the scribbles and just use it as a scrapbook.

A quick side-note: People either love scrapbooking or hate it. Those who love it are among those who turned "scrapbook" into a verb not all that long ago. I personally have no time or use for the type of activity that involves buying little cutout frames for a scrapbook. Watching shows like Clean Sweep, I've seen how the pastime can just suck you into a black hole of clutter and never-get-it-doneness. So, no, I don't "scrapbook" in that sense of the word. But I do like the idea of keeping souvenirs of what you've been up to. So I try to accumulate mine in a big wooden box that used to hold tea -- a gift from someone long ago. It's the perfect size. With a bit of extra time and ambition, I can pull my junk from the box and paste or staple it into the book. But that's it -- no captions, other than identifiers such as the date, no little frames, no stickers, no photos ... just proof that "I was there" if it's ever needed.

Making the decision to just use the book for memorabilia was such a huge weight off my mind! In addition to this blog, I have a couple others out there in the ether. Like this one, it gets updated when I have something to say, which obviously doesn't happen all that often. I've come to accept this. The world doesn't need to know what I had for dinner last night, and for those who do want to know, they can friend me on Facebook.

But I do try, very hard, to keep track of my activities, and get very upset with myself when I fall behind. I've kept a diary since age 12. Yes, of course, it was the kind with the lock and key. Then in high school I switched over to tablet-style notebooks. I had 3 of them taped together. At the time of my pregnancy, the hormones had my moods bouncing all over the place; I read some of my entries from high school and this got me so upset I burned the diary. Yes, the whole thing. Five years or so worth. Along with that went all the lock-and-key books.

The dedicated diarist who reads this is probably cringing. But it's okay. I don't really miss those books or regret tossing them. Part of the reason for re-reading them at the time was to congratulate myself on how much I'd changed since high school. It worked too well: I read some of my teenage thoughts and felt genuinely distressed to know that the obnoxious author was ME.

I still have enough photos and school records not to render my entire youth a blank. I always figure Wally will one day want to get a glimpse of his own childhood or the years that predate him. This is because there are too many blanks for me when trying to understand my own parents. Given their loud proclamations, accusations and ruminations while under the influence, I did get plenty of "information," but not enough that makes sense to me now. So I'd like to make it easier for Wally (or perhaps his kids) to piece it together.

Either that, or it's just good old fashioned narcissism...

At any rate, my desire to keep a connected thread going has given rise to:

• A monthly journal on my hard drive, subdivided into daily entries, weekly summaries, a monthly wrap-up, individual categories such as health, money, weather, home, marriage, Wally, friends, news, obituaries, and upcoming events
• Not one, but TWO logs on memiary.com, one for me and one for goings-on at work
• Ubernote, to save clips of interesting things I encounter on line
• Evernote, same as ubernote but a bit more versatile
• Day planners of various kinds, including 6 slipcased editions of the Franklin-Covey "7 Habits" organizer
• This blog, one on LiveJournal, one on MySpace (soon to be defunct), Twitter and Facebook

...and yet I wonder whether it's inadequate, or a complete waste of time.

Small Comfort: I'm not as bad as this guy.

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I may be wimpy and inarticulate, BUT...

...I can still promote better, braver bloggers here.

Better, Braver Blogger #1: P.Z. Myers tells us why he's not about to become a "nicer" atheist:

"Show me a reason not to be smug about atheism, and reason, and science..."

Better, Braver Blogger #2: Lugosi

Actually, I got braver than usual on Facebook this weekend and managed not to back down from a controversy.

Lugosi posted this great satire on the healthcare debate, including a reworked version of that infamous "Obamacare" witch-doctor poster.

"Reworked version" is in bold italics because, when I reposted it, a friend glanced at the picture and made the assumption that I was presenting from the "anti" side of the room. It was the most controversy I've ever had on my Facebook page -- it was so exciting!! In the end, everybody blew air kisses and made up and had coffee, and the best thing was, people read the piece and laughed and learned. Great way to start out a week.

I hoist my coffee mug to the better, braver bloggers I'm privileged to know.

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