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My mom reminded me today that it was, or would have been, my Aunt Susie's birthday.  I hadn't remembered, and, really, I never remembered her birthday when she was alive, either, I guess.

It was just a little over 4 years ago that I sat in a hospice room and watched her die.  I believe I was alone with her, though I could be wrong.  I'm not sure where everyone else would have been at that moment, just that I was alone with her.  But maybe it was just the gravity of what I was watching that rendered other people unnoticeable.

I never have thought that I was an easily shocked person, and yet.  And yet sitting in a room watching the last flutter of life leave a person you care about is shocking.  Yes, I believe shock is the right word for the numb, speechless feeling of watching a person slide into nonbeing and then just...stop. 

She died of lung cancer.  She might not have if our health care system weren't so screwed up, who knows?  But by the time they found it, it was basically over.  My mom went to be with her, to care for her in her last few months.  It was clear after a few weeks that my mom was overwhelmed, and I had just had a baby and my husband didn't have his green card yet, so he wasn't working either, so off we went.  We also thought the presence of the baby would add some fresh air to the situation, and we were not wrong, though I have been grateful every day since that he was too young to remember it. 

A person dying of cancer--really dying, I mean, with not even a hope of treatment, and probably not just of cancer but of anything--isn't really the person you know and love.  I remember one day towards the end, my aunt came out of her room in a wheelchair, naked from the waist down, screaming at my mom for some wrong--something, I don't know, that went back to their childhoods and hurts that apparently never entirely mended.  Of course, my aunt was near the end then, but still, it cut my mom deeply and left sucking wounds all around the room.  I remember my mom saying that the hospice people had mentioned that near the end, the dying often rally and find a sudden burst of strength; in the hospice literature, this was painted in a positive light, and my mom had believed that it would take the form of Susie maybe suddenly wanting to eat with us or sit up looking at old photo albums or something poignant or even cheerful like that.  Sure, who wouldn't want to believe that?  But it didn't happen like that. 

That was the day we sent her to stay in the hospice.  Until then, my mom had committed to taking care of her at home as per her wishes, no matter what it cost my mom personally.  But that day was too much.  Susie moved into the hospice.  My mom, I know, went home--to her own house, where her husband was, several hours away--for a much-needed respite from the needs of her dying sister.  My grandma, who had been around for most of this, too, even though there are almost certainly some things a mother should never have to watch happen to her daughter, I believe was out getting us something to eat.  I don't know where my husband and son were, but I was there in her room, probably waiting for my takeout dinner from Applebee's.  Her breathing was getting slower and slower with increasingly long periods of apnea between rusty little wheezes.  And then it just stopped.  There just was no more.  Whoever else may or may not have been there with me, I have never felt such a terrible sense of aloneness.

I did think, just as I thought when my dad died, that it would be good to be religious.  It would be good in times like those to believe that this person you loved would go off to some afterlife and maybe find some peace there that she or he had never found on earth.  But I'm not religious, and I don't believe this.  It was all end, no beginning.

But then in the end, I was back with my husband and son and nothing is ever so fresh and alive as babies and children are.  Circle of life, unbroken.

So, I have recently become aware that there are a lot of people out on the internet wasting a lot of time and type on obnoxious and overly serious criticisms of the Twilight series.  Many of these people claim that these books are horrible--but horrible!--because Edward is some kind of creepy stalker guy, and it's going to teach impressionable young girls the wrong thing about love. 

But let's say that young girls are just that impressionable, and let's also say that reading Twilight in such a way does not make you a small-minded ass of a person, and then I'll throw my hat in the Twilight-crit ring.

Sure, sure.  Edward can be a little creepy, and, let's face it, kind of a dick at the beginning.  But, you know what?  He's a vampire.  He could be a lot worse than creepy and dickish.  Not only that, he's a vampire who has to keep repeating high school, over and over, for a hundred-plus years.  That would make anyone dickish.

I don't think, though, that that is the only possible message our hypothetical impressionable young girls get from the tale of Edward and Bella.  Maybe they also learn that a guy worth having is not trying to get into your pants (your jugular, maybe) from the moment he lays eyes on you, and that is not a bad lesson to learn.  Guys worth your time really should want to get to know you and should ask intrusive questions in a quest to understand you because they can't read your mind.

Maybe they also learn that guys who love you should also want to protect you from those who would harm you.  It is an unfortunate fact that most mortal men will not be as equipped to do so as Edward is, but they should at least want to protect you.  They should not be the sort who will, say, send naked pictures of you to all of their friends.  Edward would never do such a thing, although Edward would probably also not want Bella to send a naked picture of herself, and that is also not a bad lesson for young girls to take away.

Really, I think if you want to go looking for lessons in Twilight, well, first off I think you're kind of a silly person, but also, I think there are a lot of ways you could read it.  Hell, you could even read it as some kind of "accepting people for who they are" tale, since Bella unfailingly accepts people as they are, whether they be werewolves or vampires or what have you.

Perhaps, there is an inconvenient truth here:  perhaps it is the case that young girls are so attracted to Edward and the Twilight series because girls long ago learned, for evolutionary purposes, to be attracted to strong, protective men, men who could and would fight on their behalf.  Perhaps, despite the advances of feminism, girls' basic needs in a relationship haven't changed all that much, and Edward--like most other men in fantasies and fairy tales--fills those needs, albeit in a sometimes creepy way.  Perhaps there is a reason that these types--knights in shining armor, princes on white horses, vegetarian vampires--endure and continue to speak to girls, because they certainly do.  And perhaps it is rather the myth that girls shouldn't want that kind of guy that makes so many girls so incredibly unhappy with their marriages later in life. 

"I’m just wondering why the nation continues incurring enormous debt to pay for bypass surgery and titanium-knee replacements for octogenarians and nonagenarians, when for just a small fraction of those costs we could provide children with preventive health care and nutrition. Eight million children have no health insurance, but their parents pay 3 percent of their salaries to Medicare to make sure that seniors get the very best money can buy in prescription drugs for everything from restless leg syndrome to erectile dysfunction, scooters and end-of-life intensive care."

(from Richard Dooling's op-ed in the NYT/IHT)

I wonder about this, too.  It irks me.  But, of course, the elderly have a great deal of political power, and that is only increasing.  And our fear of death also seems to be increasing markedly.  In everything from the health care debate to discussions about hunting and vegetarianism to Jane Goodall, of all people, saying that chimps are better off in a zoo since it's less cruel than nature, we seem to think that death is something we can or should eradicate, or at the very least delay as long as possible without much thought for the price.  Too often, in our attempts to avoid death, we lose the sense of what it means to be alive, and we've certainly lost the sense of what I think of as the elegance of natural cycles.  I was fairly appalled to see that even Jane Goodall has lost that. 

Yeah, well, unfortunately, children can die, too.  And for some strange reason, I'd a lot rather hear of an 85-year-old dying than a baby dying.  I guess I have some idea that the 85-year-old has already had a lot of life, a lot of chances.  Time to move over and let someone else have a chance. 

From the design to the features, what should the perfect kid-friendly laptop include? What would you leave out?
Sponsored by WePC.You dream it. ASUS builds it. Intel Inside®

What the hell does a kid need with a laptop?  Yeah, I know already that I am way, way old-fashioned. Maybe by "kid-friendly" they mean, like, college kids?  I doubt it.  I think college kids are nominally adults.  I am not a proponent of kids having their own computers before college, though.  I am aware that many do, but I am equally aware that while kids use computers more and more, they are becoming less and less able to, say, understand simple algebra or paragraph structure.  I know this because colleges and universities are being forced to offer more and more remedial classes to teach the shit kids didn't learn while they were surfing the goddamned internet on their stylish laptops.

I know.  I am already an old woman screaming at the kids to get the hell off my lawn.  I still care about algebra.  God help me.

If you were going to enter a competitive eating contest, what food would you choose to speed eat?

Takeru Kobayashi.  Oishii kana...?

What prevents your city/town from being the best place in the country to live?
Submitted by Cherney.

What a strange question...

A lot of things.  There aren't many jobs here, and the Idahoan plant (it makes various processed potato products, mostly dehydrated mashed potatoes and crap like that) is about to shut down.  It doesn't pay really well, but it does employ, I dunno, perhaps half of the employed people here in town.  What does a town do when suddenly half its labor pool becomes unemployed?  The options:  Work somewhere, even at another Idahoan plant, that's further away--but there aren't a lot of jobs close by.  There's a fresh potato packing plant 17 miles away, but it pays really crappy and the hours are horrible, too.  Then there are more potato processing jobs in towns 50 miles away.  My husband works at one of those, and he freakin hates it, although it pays well and has really pretty good benefits (although no sick leave, so if you get the a really nasty virus from your KFC mashed potatoes, it's possibly my husband's fault).  He hates the commute, too, not to mention the bleedin price of gasoline.  Other options:  Move away.  Sure, but the people who worked at the Idahoan are pretty invested in this place.  Many own their own homes, and a lot of the recent Mexican immigrants who work there have a pretty good deal living in some state-subsidized apartments that just about make their lives here economically feasible.  Where to go?  Aye, that's the rub.

Then there's the weather.  God, this place has the worst weather of any place I've ever lived.  It's got the wind like Great Falls.  It's got the cold and the 6-month winter like any similar place--I lived in Montana long enough to be used to that.  There is no spring or fall to speak of (seriously, the trees go from lovely summer green to brown in less than  week).  And then the summer's are unpleasantly hot and dry.  Usually.  This summer--and last one as well, now that I think about it--are cold all through June so that you can't get your tomatoes to grow properly and you end up having bushels of green tomatoes in September.  Because of course, despite the fact that it was still frosting in June, first frost will come again around Labor Day.  Yah, good luck with those Brandywines, sucker!  So much for global warming.

It has the usual inconveniences of a town this size and this isolated, too.  It's an hour's drive to do any of the usual things--get groceries, see the doctor, maybe take in a movie--which forces you to cram all your unpleasant errands into one day if possible, which not only makes scheduling something of an art form, it makes your kids damned cranky and probably you as well.  

Besides that, it has its own sets of annoyances.  All places do, of course.  But this one is special.  I've lived in towns much smaller than this (this town has about 600 people, nearly half of whom are Mexican and most of the other half are Mormon; the town where I went to high school in southern New Mexico had only around 300 people, most of whom were Mexican but with a not insubstantial Mormon population as well) that had about 8 times the life in it.  The town where I went to high school had regular dances at the community center and rodeos and all manner of things like that.  There wasn't *always* something fun going on, sure, not like in a big city, but it wasn't bad.  There was a bar and a couple of restaurants, and one of the restaurants had a big kind of pool hall in the back where we could eat nachos (damn good nachos, too) and hang out and be stupid.  There's really nothing like that here.  There isn't a restaurant in town anymore, not since the family who ran the taco place had some kind of family trouble back in Mexico and closed down.  There's word that some Californians are planning to open a cafe here, but there is also word that they're aiming to make it a "bistro" type place, so it's anyone's guess if it will last.  The taco place did a booming business, so it's too bad about whatever happened to them.  No restaurant, no pool hall, no dancing, and certainly no large-scale drinking, as I doubt the LDS approves.

It's got me to thinking.  I've lived in a lot of religiously oriented small towns.  The towns in Arkansas were mostly Baptist; in New Mexico, mainly Catholic.  And there was plenty of sinning.  The Baptists (at the time--by all appearances, they've lost their heads now) and the Catholics--I've attended both churches but never paid enough attention and always had a kind of inborn faithlessness--seem to have a notion that we're all sinners but God forgives.  So, we may as well sin, then.  There's a theme in country music, actually, about the sins of Saturday night getting redeemed on Sunday morning.  I can live with that kind of religion, man.  But the Mormons seem to have some idea that God actually means for them to be, like, good people and not sinners.  I just can't get on board with that kind of thinking.  The thing is that most of the ones I've known are good people--relentlessly good people, such that you feel like some kind of dirty whore just for wearing a V-neck T-shirt when you take your kid to preschool.  The local bishop, who is an incredibly nice guy, the kind of guy you think, "That's a good man, there" as soon as you meet him, works with my dad at the Forest Service, and I remember feeling a kind of low-grade shock the first time I saw him wearing his uniform shirt with the top button undone.  Normally, he buttons his shirts all the way to the neck.  He and his wife are like the poster children of niceness, and their kids, predictably, are well mannered and orderly.  I want to make cleverly ironic comments about their niceness, yet even thinking about doing it makes me feel like an asshole.  I'm so much more comfortable among the sinning set, though.  Yeesh.

There are good points about living here, too, of course.  The price of housing is very, very reasonable.  Nobody cares what you do in your backyard, whether you keep chickens or hang out your laundry or sit around in your pajamas drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and reading Richard Ford novels.  The lot sizes are generous so that, if you can ever get the damned tomatoes to grow in this weather, you can have a nice garden.  The niceness means that when you have a baby you will get presents from people you really barely know who just simply wish you well and like babies and people will bring you frozen meals so that when you're all exhausted from having a newborn you don't have to cook.  It also means that if you're of the type who still unironically says "ma'am" and "sir" (as I am and want my kids to be), nobody will look askance and make cheap jokes about you and your backwardness.  There are no metal detectors in the schools, despite the fact that nearly all the kids live in houses with guns in them and go hunting with them, and you can feel pretty safe about your kids never running into any serious crime here.  There is really no need to lock your doors, although some people do and that's OK, too.

Mmm, all things considered, though, and I hate to say this, but our tolerance for this place has just about run out.  Actually, my husband's ran out long ago.  He likes the small town vibe, but there are just too many other complications.  My son hates it because there is no ocean.  I hate the weather and the days when we have to go into "town" to do all the errands.  So, I have a feeling we aren't going to last too much longer.  My guess is that this town will not be much more than a Forest Service town in a few years.  And we'll be on to some coastal small town somewhere.

How green is your school, office, or home?
Sponsored by One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Cisco.

I'm so sick of "green," you can't even fucking imagine.  Ooh, everyone in a competition to be the greenest act in town--mostly by buying yet more crap or jetting off to some conference somewhere.  Oh, sure, I admit I was pleased--so pleased!!--to be lectured at by Obama who thinks it's somehow appropriately green to take the helicopter to Chicago for the weekend because he's homesick.  Sure, sure...it's not your helicopter that's the problem, Mr. President. 

See, there's a lot that bothers me about this stupid "green" thing.  First, it's been turned by the capitalist machine into yet another consumerist trend.  Second, I can think of hardly anyone at all who doesn't think that it's everyone else who needs to green up, while their own habits and behaviors are perfectly OK.  I remember when Slate published that piece urging people to "date local" instead of having long-distance--and thus fossil-fuel-intensive--relationships, and people who considered themselves quite "green" (but I drive a Prius!  and have a Sigg bottle!) were all incensed that they should have to give up their weekly plane trips to wherever their companions live.  Ah, so much for green.  Nah, it's always other people who are to blame, and especially, it appears, rural people because of our silly refusal to implement public transportation or whatever.  Third, there is hardly any subject anymore about which people get more smug and sanctimonious, and it is generally the case that the smugger people are, the less I want to associate with them.  Fourth, seriously, I cannot take part in any cause that has motherfucking Ed Begley, Jr. as one of its prime movers.  Ed Norton, maybe I could get behind, because at least he's talented and I admit to finding him rather comely.  But Begley--ach. 

Don't get me wrong.  I hate seeing waste, whether of food or energy or whatever.  I do, and I wish Americans would be less wasteful overall.  But I can't get behind anything as groupthinky as this "green" business. 

I will wager a week's salary that that is not the answer you were expecting.

What's the biggest obstacle you've had to overcome within the last 24 hours?
Submitted by ILoveYouMr.Dragon.

Feck--scheduling.  We're way over-scheduled right now.  It's kind of a long story and with multiple complications--many of which have to do with our living in such a small town and only owning one car and having a husband who works this stupid rotating shift--but our 4-year-old is in swimming lessons every day right now and also in an art class on Wednesdays, and, see, we just had a baby...So, today, I end up trying to breastfeed in a McDonald's playland while me and the two kids are waiting for my mom to come pick us up, and then the 4-year-old gets pushed off the slide or some damn thing so I can hear him crying somewhere in the innards of the play tunnels, so I instinctively rush over there to try to find him, which makes the 3-week-old lose his grip on the nipple and blah blah blah.  It's been pretty ridiculous, but fortunately the swimming lessons are over tomorrow, and there are only two more art classes, so now we can start settling down into more of a routine where the three of us are actually home and then we can all just feed at our leisure...what was I thinking, scheduling so much crap at the beginning of June when I knew we would have a wee baby?  Oh, right...the stupid complications of living in a small town...sure.  Just glad we all survived, although I am ashamed to admit the schedule issues are related to the sudden appearance of Hot Pockets in our house.  We don't normally eat things like that; I'm a made-from-scratch kind of girl.  Hot Pockets have so much cheese, man.  So...much...cheese...

However, today, for about a half an hour, I did manage to get both kids asleep at once.  Hurrah!  And now my husband is home, and I'm trying to work, but the thought of grading a bunch of punctuation exercises is, wow, really depressing.  Really, really depressing.  Commas aren't fucking rocket science, ya know?  How can my students be this bad at using commas?  And what the fuck is going on in public high schools that these semi-literates were somehow allowed to graduate?

Oooh, I need a drink.  

A conversation in the car today:

Son:  Do Liopleurodons have gills?

Me:  No, honey.  Liopleurodons aren't fish.

Son:  I know that.  They do, however, have gills.

Me (trying hard not to laugh):  Well, no, you know they're reptiles.  They have to breathe.

Son:  Yes.  But they have gills.  Well, only the males have gills.  The females don't have gills.  Males are always more fancy.  They have gills on their hips.

...Sorry, I just had to write this down somewhere.  I love when he uses "however."  What the heck kind of 4-year-old talks this way?  Why are gills considered "fancy"?  Why on their hips?  By the end of this, I was really struggling not to laugh.  He doesn't appreciate being laughed at when he's being scientific, though.  It didn't help that shortly after this conversation, he wanted to sing that Sammy Davis, Jr., song "Candyman," and he suggested we sing it together by saying to me, "You be the men part, and I'll be the ladies part."  He then sang the part of the backup singers in an *extremely* high-pitched voice, at times coming dangerously close to what one might call a shriek.  God, I love the way he talks.  I've been videotaping him a lot lately, trying to just capture his normal speaking, because it's incredibly awesome.  Four years old is such a great age.  I keep telling my husband that I wish we could keep a copy of him at this age that would never grow up; the real him could go on growing, but we'd just have this one copy around who could go on wild tangents about gills forever.  *sigh*

On a related note, I've always wondered why males of the human species aren't the fancier sex.  Unless by "fancy" we simply mean, "not soaked in leaking breast milk."  In which case, I guess they are pretty fancy.

It's things like this that make me hate women, especially the ones who think they're "feminists."  Oh, not the column itself--the comments.

Stay-at-home moms are "cute."  They're obviously intellectually inferior to working women, too, because, DUH, obviously being at home with kids and chores offers nothing in the way of intellectual stimulation (and, DUH, obviously that's all stay-at-home moms do with their days!).  It follows that stay-at-home moms are women without goals, without a life, obsequious and socially retarded.  It is equally obvious that women who become stay-at-home moms are "rich" (not moms who, as the column itself makes reference to literally can't "afford" to go back to work, even if they wanted to, due to the exorbitant prices of childcare and so forth--for some of us in more rural areas, the cost of transportation is itself prohibitive, and not everyone [yet] has the luxury of working online, as I do--my job effectively makes me a working-stay-at-home mom, which is really ideal for me). 

Oh, and I love the woman who writes that none of the well-educated women she knows don't work.  Where the hell does this woman live? 

God, women like this just do so much to advance opportunity and freedom for all women.  There is nothing that makes me, as a woman, feel more liberated and empowered than being told that I'm "cute" or intellectually inferior and poorly educated because I decided to be a stay-at-home mom. 

The ironic thing about it is that I was just helping a student, right before I read this, with his essay on The Awakening.  I've read that book about 5 times, and personally I've always thought it was stupid.  I don't think Edna Pontellier is notably oppressed by anything other than her own uselessness and incompetence (I understand that is not the generally accepted reading of the novel, and believe me, I caught hell in lit classes more than once for my opinion about it--in general, though, whining about how hard it is to break society's rules doesn't get anyone much mileage with me, although it does make me think of Devo...), but let's say she is.  Let's say Edna's real problem is being held down by all the sexist bastard men in her society.  She, because of her (flighty and weak) personality might be better off today, being told what to do by the female commenters of the International Herald-Tribune, but are we really to pretend that she would have fewer choices?  Or that the prescriptions and judgments laid down by today's society are actually less harsh and confining than what poor old Edna faced?  There is no real difference between being told you're intellectually inferior just because you're a woman and being told you're intellectually infererior because you're a woman who has decided, after surveying all your options, to stay home and take care of your kids.

I think, actually, the thing that infuriates me most about this (because in reality I am reasonably confident in both my intellectual abilities and my education) is that I still hear so many women talk about how "men" and/or the "patriarchal society" judge women's choices.  It's true that they do sometimes.  But no man of my acquaintance has ever believed that I suddenly became illiterate when I decided to stop working for pay.  Of course, no man of my acquaintance would dare.

And why, pray tell, does receiving pay make something worth doing?  I mean, if I was doing a boring, repetitive job that I hated for pay, these women would be so OK with that.  If I'm doing a sometimes boring and repetitive but oftentimes amazing and quite stimulating job that I love for no pay, then I'm like something they have to scrape off their shoe.   This just doesn't make sense to me, except by some standard societal notion that people are only worth their salaries, but I utterly reject that notion and always have. 

Feh.  I've had the satellite TV shut off, so that I don't watch the news anymore, and usually the IHT just doesn't upset me all that much, so things in my life have been relatively calm and happy.  I watch the chard grow.  I read, especially because I'm trying to get as much reading in as possible before the new baby interrupts that.  I walk down to the river--a river that will be dry in just a few weeks since it only has water in it during the runoff.  You know.  That kind of thing.  A nice, peaceable life, in which I get along with people.  And then this.  Damn. 

I will now go back to sticking my head in the sand and teaching my son about evolution, our current lessons revolving around his obsession with prehistoric life.  I take a great deal of pride in the fact that today, when two Mormon missionaries came to visit us, my son offered them each a piece of his Easter chocolate--the last two pieces of it.  I thought that was pretty cool for a 4-year-old.  He loves people and is so generous and kind to people.  The bloody remarkable thing about it is that somehow, despite my own misanthropy, I've taught him that.  I guess other stay-at-home moms, being braindead, don't teach their kids anything at all.  I guess it's just by virtue of the fact that I do work for pay, albeit very part-time, that I'm able to teach him these things.  Stupid people.  I'm done.