Franklin Pumpkinfest 2008

Spiderman's alter ego seems to have another alter ego. Wonder what Batgirl is thinking...

Celebrities walking the square--guess who?

Balloon animals gone wild

sepsis of the profession

I recently discovered this fascinating line in The Emerald, a short story by Donald Barthelme. Being a critical care nurse, I could not help but be drawn to it.

For those of you not in the medical field, sepsis is a life-threatening full body reaction to an infection in the blood. That's a very simplified definition.

The dialogue contains a journalist, Lily, who is filled with disbelief at the sight of a 7,035 carat emerald speaking to her. She is told that disbelief is the sepsis of her profession. It hampers inquisitiveness. It kills the news story.

Indifference is the sepsis that plagues the nursing profession. How many times have I heard "I'm just here for the paycheck," or "I just do my 12 hours and go home?"

I guess it's because so many nurses have let go of the polished-white nursing shoe attitude that causes them to spring out of school proclaiming "I'm going to help someone!"

After several occasions of being threatened with a full airborne urinal, one can only muster so much patience and good-natured caring attitudes.

Maybe it is indifference that enables us to carry on with the job, though. To learn to not care about so many insignificant little things, to not take so many words to heart, to let them go in one ear and out the other. To be able to go home, sit down with a bowl of ice cream in front of the TV, open a book, read about someone else's life, and forget about the day where you successfully fended off an old lady who simultaneously wanted to bite you and get her pants off so that she could play tug of war with her foley catheter.

on the road with history

Sometimes I wonder if I am being too hypervigilant when it comes to Tennessee drivers. But the other day I spotted an unusual sight that deserved mention. The strangest thing about the scene was that nobody else seemed to think it was strange.

A woman pulls out of a fast food restaurant in a red sedan, maybe a Honda or Toyota. She was black, but I will give her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't from this country.

Why will I do that? Because she had a Confederate flag plate on the front of her car!

It was almost like I had entered some alternate universe.

Perhaps she is not a student of history. Could it be that she is trying to fit into her new homeland by using a symbol that she has frequently seen? Maybe she thinks the Confederate flag is trendy.

That's almost as bad as what I have been up to lately--a Northerner, innocently carpooling to work with a guy who sports a "Sons of Confederate Veterans" license plate. Hypocrite am I? No. Broke from gas prices? You betcha.

Sometimes you just gotta sell out to survive.

Chattanooga doo doo

The "trained naturalist." He is probably thinking "Why do they keep letting little kids on this boat? Are we that strapped for cash?"

Daddy and the girl face eachother down

Dark green kudzu grows unchecked near the shore of the Tennessee river. It seems impervious to the cold temperatures.

An oxymoron

Development on the banks of the river

The Tennessee aquarium in Chattanooga

The woman in the above photo is not a drug overdose. She is still breathing, but barely. This poor tired soul is the personification of the boat ride we took yesterday down the Tennessee River gorge in Chattanooga.

The worst part about taking a trip is waiting for it to start. Finally, after 15 minutes of holding down, cajoling, and bribing the 2-year-old, we were on our way.

Our first stop was to the sewage unloading dock, where the trained naturalist who narrated our cruise explained that the previous passengers had unloaded a bit too much themselves.

Ten more minutes of painful waiting, this time worrying that the little girl would make a break for the rear (no pun intended) of the boat and get caught up in the pumping hose while the toilets were being emptied.

Finally, we were on our way. We cruised for about 10 minutes, came to an abrupt stop, and tarried along for the next 2 hours looking at trees and hills.

Now, for those of you who follow or who have even taken a cursory glance at my blog, you know how much I am enamored by trees. However, the two-year-old does not yet share my views on nature.

The trained naturalist was quite well-informed. Unfortunately, I didn't catch a single sentence of the spiel, and he spoke for the entire 2 hours. Every so often I would hear "eagle," "old tale," "mermaid," or something along the lines of what you would expect to hear on a cruise like that.

Caught a few good photos in-between struggling with the girl to keep her from flinging herself overboard.

This is what family memories are made of.

VOTE, dammit! Just pick someone!

I am a blue girl living in a redneck state.

My neighborhood is pretty much a solid advertisement for McCain/Palin, and all it cost the party was the posters. Just recently in a white upper-middle class subdivision across town, the car of a black man was vandalized with a sharpie. You can only guess what was written.

This worries me. Makes me think that maybe my vote won't count for much here in Tennessee. This is wrong thinking, though. If everyone thought like me, elections would turn out differently.

Vote your conscience and what you truly believe will be the best choice for this country. Don't vote for McCain because Palin has great legs, or for Obama because he has such a non-threatening, non-"Dr. Evil" smile. I hate to even say that, but I know that this may come down to a popularity contest. The nursing station at work is littered not with news journals, but with tabloid magazines. Americans love celebrity. There's no sense in denying it.

I read an article that interviewed people from Detroit on how race and gender will affect their voting decisions. One man replied with something along the lines of "It's come down to a black man or a woman, so what's a [white] guy like me to do?"

This election is forcing a lot of people to confront their stereotypes and prejudices. I would not vote for Palin just because she is a woman like myself, even though I have espoused many of Gloria Steinem's ideas. I would not refrain from voting for Obama just because I grew up in the midst of white-flight in Chicago's south suburbs.

I will vote for who I believe will lead our country down the right path. I will vote for ideas.

The Bible teaches that we shouldn't cling to ephemeralities and materialism. The two are synonymous. Whether you believe in the truth of the Bible or not, in light of the economic situation of the country at this moment, this is wisdom.

My ultimate point in all of this rambling is: Vote for America, and the ideas that you still believe in, even though they may seem nonexistent in this day and age of lobbyists and bought politicians.

Or be a revolutionary. Screw both of the pre-packaged candidates and vote independent!

September at Winstead Hill

You can travel a familiar path a hundred times, but the moment you turn around and walk in the other direction it becomes a new place.

Amo

You will surely be missed

a case for the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

Trouble Child--lyrics by Joni Mitchell

Up in a sterilized room
Where they let you be lazy
Knowing your attitude's all wrong
And you got to change
And that's not easy
Dragon shining with all values known
Dazzling you-keeping you from your own
Where is the lion in you to defy him
When you're this weak
And this spacey...

So what are you going to do about it
You can't live life and you can't leave it
Advice and religion-you can't take it
You can't seem to believe it
The peacock is afraid to parade
You're under the thumb of the maid
You really can't give love in this condition
Still you know how you need it

They open and close you
Then they talk like they know you
They don't know you
They're friends and they're foes too
Trouble child
Breaking like the waves at Malibu

So why does it come as such a shock
To know you really have no one
Only a river of changing faces
Looking for an ocean
They trickle through your leaky plans
Another dream over the dam
And you're lying in some room
Feeling like your right to be human
Is going over too
Well some are going to knock you
And some will try to clock you
You know it's really hard
To talk sense to you
Trouble child
Breaking like the waves at Malibu

the "first day of kindygarden" mugshot that every mother dreams of

kindergarten begins for the boy

Why is it that 5-year-olds spend precious minutes describing to their parents how they are about to defecate on themselves while crouching and grimacing, when the toilet is only steps away? I thought that the Freudian anal stage ended several years ago.

That is the best I could do for the segue into this blog entry on my big baby starting kindergarten in the morning.

We took a trip to Marble Slab Creamery to celebrate "The End of the Summer." Of course, that's just an expression for "The End of Freedom and Unaccountability," because the summer temperatures will be with us here in Tennessee for a couple more months. As it is, the big oak tree beside my house in the backyard has been turning yellow. Rain from Hurricane Fay finally reached us, forcing the faded leaves to drop like it is October in Illinois.

I'm going to try to be organized and pack up the lunch tonight. I know this won't last for more than a week! The sandwich shouldn't get soggy when it only has peanut butter on it. The metal thermos is ready to make its long-awaited appearance (whether this will be an embarrassment to him or not remains to be seen).

His school clothes are hanging neatly in the closet. Hours of laundry finally put away, a vicious cycle in which I have probably wasted a year of my life doing. We will choose the outfit in the morning. You know how it goes--all the best clothes for the first week, then the much-loved overwashed t-shirts get to be worn after that.

I will make the 5-minute drive to the front door of the school everyday. In a hard-won compromise, I agreed to let him take the bus home.

After the drop-off, the school is hosting a breakfast for the kindergarten parents. It's supposed to make us feel better about sending our babies off to school. I hope they are feeding us biscuits and gravy (I am not morphing into a Southerner. I've always loved those soft refined-grain biscuits smothered in fatty white gravy, even when I lived in Illinois, but could really only find a good platter of it at McDonald's, sadly). But Southern food is comfort food.

I've heard many people say something like "I'm a better parent with this one, now that I'm older." I've come to realize that I am still very much the same person that I was ten years ago, with many of the same dreams and desires, and even more fears. Not a better parent, but a more careful parent. Careful to guard their feelings and youth, to commit to memory occasions that may seem insignificant now but will tell the story of their lives down the road, to nurture their sense of humor as much as their intellectualism, to recognize beginnings and endings and savor them as long as I possibly can.

He forgot to take his blanket to bed, the tattered crib comforter left over from my oldest daughter. The batting has been replaced, but it also succumbed to countless trips being dragged along the floor.

He's screaming down the stairs that he needs this blanket. I yell for him from my chair at the computer desk to come and get it. He finds it in the dark and bounds back up to his bed. He's yelling again, "You forgot to cover me!" I resist the urge to say "You're a big boy, you can cover yourself." This is one of the last signs of his babyhood that I have left, and I'm not quite ready to let it go. I pull away from my writing and tuck him in once more.