The Heebie-Jeebies

Some images give me the heebie-jeebies. This one was provided by the great Walt Disney Corporation, which is a little surprising at the same time it isn't surprising at all. Besides giving me the heebie-jeebies, I think it's funny, and I think it's funny that it gives me the heebie-jeebies.


Kinda like all those headless Barbie dolls, but worse since this was so much bigger. You know, we had a two-piece Barbie floating around our house for years... You'd find the head, put it in the drawer where you found it, then months later find the body - and the head was gone. I wasn't big on Barbies growing up. I preferred Weeble-Wobbles and Adventure People.

I think it's funny, and I think it's funny that it gives me the heebie-jeebies.


I really like having a cell phone with a camera in it.

She Who Deserves Honor

1972

2000

2007

Fun lesson

We had a dance lesson today. Because of the literacy training, I missed two weeks in a row, and I'm still adjusting to having just one lesson a week. Most days recently I've been feeling like I would prefer to have no lessons a week, feeling burned out on dance. And it is hard to go from three lessons to one, when you've had three lessons a week for three years (not counting leading up to the '05 Dance-O-Rama in Las Vegas, when we had five or six lessons a week).


However, I had fun at our lesson this morning. We warmed up with the west coast steps we learned from the video, and danced some foxtrot, and then studied tango and bolero. We got an introduction to a new step in bolero, which we haven't danced for awhile. Tango is my least favorite dance, because it's too staccato for me. Just when it seems like you're going somewhere, you stop. In fact, I refused to learn tango until after the aforementioned Dance-O-Rama when I realized that if I was ever going to dance in an All-Around I would have to know the six major dances. We reviewed a complex step we learned in a group class a couple months ago, so it wasn't totally new.

This photo is from the March 2006 Showcase (that's my re-purposed wedding dress).


I like learning new steps. Knowing lots of steps makes dancing more interesting to me. Zirpu and I want to be social dancers, not competitors. I tend to lose interest (and on bad days, patience) with lessons that concentrate on the finer points of technique and styling. Since we learned a couple new steps today, and they went relatively easily, it was fun. While we were dancing our foxtrot around the downstairs ballroom, I was thinking to myself, "This is fun, and it feels like a long time since I had fun in here."


I'm still thinking about what I do for fun, or could do for fun, by the way.

The News On TV

Last night I caught most of American Masters, a series that examines "the lives, works, and creative processes of our most outstanding cultural artists." Last night's episode was a rerun about Walter Cronkite. I was mildly interested in the words about him, spoken by all kinds of people I've been reading or hearing for years, including two who have recently passed away, Molly Ivins and David Halberstam. I was much more interested in the news films, because of course Uncle Walter was reporting on everything, and they showed pieces of his reports.


Turns out Cronkite loved the space program and followed it everywhere. He gives a report about the astronauts practicing weightlessness, during which Cronkite is strapped down on one of those parabolic flights and four guys are flying all over the place, one of them even hitting the camera with his foot. The first manned Mercury rocket, with Alan Shepard in it, leaving the launchpad, with a glorious U-S-A running up the screen, and later, the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

(It is really difficult for me to believe that NASA got those people up there using slide rules and pencils. It's like the smart people then must have been a lot smarter than the smart people we have now).


I don't think I've ever seen the film of JFK getting shot. Knowing, now, that he'd been shot in the head, it was easy to see that the President had been terribly wounded, and surprising to see the First Lady, always presented as terribly gracious, climbing in fear over the trunk of the car. I've seen the film of John-John saluting his father's casket before, but it again brought a tear to my eye. Such a little boy, and he did exactly what he was supposed to do, the way he was supposed to do it.


There's interesting film at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which Dan Rather, in his late 30s, gets manhandled and eventually wrestled to the floor, and though Rather says he is all right afterwards, a clearly disgusted Cronkite basically says that the press is getting treated so badly that they want to pack up their cameras and go home. Not to mention the riot outside the Convention Center, which I've heard about but never seen before, police beating people and pulling them into paddy wagons while you can clearly hear the chant, "The whole world is watching!"


There's a short clip of Cronkite reporting before, during, and after bombing run early in the Vietnam War, and he hops out of the plane and says something like, "Well, that was a great run, right, Colonel?" Like, Whoo hoo! We dropped a bomb and flew really fast! Later, his opinion changed (one of the people they interviewed, and I don't remember his name, pointed out that at the beginning of a war everyone's supportive) and the reports became more critical, and there was film of women crying while soldiers set their homes on fire with lighters and flamethrowers.


It was interesting to see the films, most of them for the first time. And interesting to see Cronkite in action; he retired just as I started paying attention to world events, and I never watch TV news on purpose now. The important stories are too short... Something that Uncle Walter would not have found acceptable, I think.

Snaps!

I've been going through a small box of photographs, cards, letters and a bunch of essays and fiction I wrote a thousand years ago (seriously, some are from college but most of them are from junior high and it's too painful to look at them). I also found my high school mortar board tassel in purple and white with a gold-colored plastic '86 attached.


The photos are generally from 1997 to 2002, though there are a few from very long before that, like a senior prom pictures (oh my god, the gloves!) and some pictures from freshman year in college in which Spudwhip and I are dressed like mimes for a fundraising event. There are pictures I don't want anymore: Some are just lousy pictures, and some are of people I barely remember. There are a lot of pictures of Denver D, because we did live together (not very happily, half the time) for three years and we did travel a lot together, mostly to Colorado, but also to Big Sur, Death Valley, and Maui.


So what to do with these pictures of Denver D? We haven't spoken in over four years, and I'm not willing to do anything to change that. It's possible that someday we could start speaking again; I believe we have two friends in common even now. Once upon a time, I loved him, and he loved me, and we had a close relationship for most of fifteen years. I don't want to throw the photos all out, and not just because I would feel guilty about doing so. He's part of the record of certain things we did together, or we look so cute in the photo that I want to save it because I'm so adorable in it.


I've decided to send several of them to Spudwhip. He's in a lot of them, anyway. Then he can decide what to do with the photos.


I really want a scanner. I know there are more pictures somewhere, because I know that as diligent as I was for awhile, I know I didn't put everything in photo albums.


I'll write later about the stuff in the box that isn't photos.

"That's a weed."

I love these flowers. I don't know what they're called and when I asked at a nursery once, the staffer wasn't interested at all.


Here's some with a bee doing the bee thing. Hopefully its hive is alive and well. The flowers don't last long and have all laid down their heads.

Once again, not what I was going to write about

I was thinking about posting a couple of things, a long thoughtful post about identity, or another story from my life (it's still hot, and I'm still thinking about ice cream with Mrs. P).

But I slammed my index finger in the front door this morning and I can't really type.


I was heading to the gym and shut the door by pulling it closed from the side rather than the doorknob - and then I didn't pull my hand out of the way in time.


It hurt so much that my whole hand hurt. I almost caused myself to faint from hyperventilating while I tried to think of anything that would make it feel better. I held the finger in a cup of cold water and I took some ibuprofen, which helped, but it still hurts like the dickens. The end of my finger is swollen with the bruise (which has gotten worse over the preceding twelve hours), trapped under the nail. It's taking me a long time to type this because I can only use four fingers. Because I don't use the ten-finger method, I rely a lot upon my right index finger and I can't even bend it without putting pressure on the bruise, so I am stuck using my middle finger for index finger letters and my ring finger(!) for middle finger letters.


I wonder how long this is going to take to heal, how much more purple my finger is going to get, and if I will lose the nail (I don't think so, but I've never had this happoen before so what do I know?).