They say: Revenge is a dish best served cold. The mauses disagree.

Bunny Killer

Gather together…

• A small pan
• 2 perfectly regular dinnerware-sized mugs
• Milk enough
• 1 “Goldhase” (we preferred the tender 50 gram bunnies).

You don’t have to use Lindt although they are exceptionally yummy and are the variety that mulitply in our home. They line themselves up. They stare at me. It’s a challenge. (You can use any stray rabbit you like.)

Now: Put the milk in a pan on the stove and while it is heating, sing along with me…

Little Bunny FooFoo hoppin through the forr-rest
Scoopin up the field mice and boppin’em on the head.

Git outta here, Good Fairy! Are they dead?

This is the story of a vengeful field maus
Gettin pretty tired of Bunny FooFoo’s crap.

Next step: WOtB (Whale On the Bunny). Go ahead, crush’im to bits and smithereens, with your bare hands!

ZAP!
Little Bunny FooFoo swimmin in the hot milk
Ohhh! Poor Little Bunny FooFoo…

Finally: Share your Easter drink with a friend. Go ahead and add a shot brandy if you like, for celebratory purposes. After all, the good guys won.

But, the evil Easter Bunny FooFoo doesn’t give up easily…:

Little Bunny FooFoo I don’t want to see you
Drowning in the hot milk and hanging on my hips
That’s why we used twoooooo cups.

Hope ya’ll had even half as much fun as we did this Easter season.

I’ve been thinking about what I wrote the other day about secrets. It’s a paradox for me how unimportant the secret itself - and how over-the-top important the act of revealing it without compulsion is for my sense of self.

What I do not have, I can not give away.

It is a wonder and maybe you have found this too: The way it is that when a person reveals their secret to me - when, from a place of trust they reveal some tiny but carefully-kept-hidden part of themselves - they are transformed in my eyes.

Have you ever noticed this? How the sharing of secrets is the first step to friendship?

Surely you have, it’s no great secret.

I worry about us though. The more we flirt with becoming a society professing to believe that “having nothing to hide” is a virtue worth pursuing, the more we put a grave distance between ourselves and that most valuable of relationships: Friendship.

What you do not have, you can not share.

It seems to me that now is (always) a good moment to care about this.

P.S. I have no idea why the title of this post doesn’t want to be my friend…

[crackling static] Hello, gentle friends, it’s me.

That’s a creepy intro isn’t it? After nearly two years of radio silence…

Do you remember me? You do? You don’t?

To tell you the truth, I hardly remember myself. Looking back over those last posts - the ones you might have thought were my last posts, I notice mostly that I was pretty theme-less back then. I’m probably still without theme but I would like to get back in touch with ya’ll anyway because I’ve missed you. And I’ve missed blogging.

Whatever blogging means these days…

I’m inspired by my friend Pia Sylvia over at The Blusher’s Blog where she talks about her erythrophobia and strategies she used to overcome or neutralize her fear of blushing.

She’s got me thinking about secrets - those bits of information about ourselves which we keep to ourselves…

We all have things about ourselves that we don’t want to share with strangers that is, until we are ready to share them with strangers.

I think this is one of the misunderstandings in the privacy debate these days. It’s not that we, Joe and Jane Q. Public have anything which must forever remain hidden - or else. How silly.

If my “secrets” came to light I would not die, or go to prison, or even be laughed at by the neighbors. Your secrets are probably like that too.

Sometimes they are dreams that will never come true. This doesn’t keep me from having them and enjoying their company on rainy days. Other times my secrets are plans and schemes to surprise and give pleasure to my beloveds. And every now and then, I have a secret about myself that I am not simply ready to share with anyone.

Maybe, like Pia, my secret is a fear that I am struggling to conquer because I know that the conquest of fear is one way to independence.

Sometimes my secret is something I am struggling to accept about myself because for sure, acceptance of self is on the way to independence.

Other times it is something I am struggling to change about myself because, let’s be honest, I suspect that fortitude is also the way to independence.

My secrets fluid and ever-changing, I reveal one and keep another, they are equally silly and of vast importance - to me. And, I must keep them if I wish to be loyal to myself. And my friends, loyalty to self is the very first step on the way to independence.

P.S. Shhhh. Don’t tell my beloved writer’s group that you read this. They think I’m thoroughly blocked and on writing sabbatical…

So I, like all of you too probably, was talking Ice Bucket Challenge with some friends recently. It was the usual blah-blah until a woman in our group stood up and walked away saying “That just seems pointless to me. I lost my best friend to that disease and my awareness doesn’t need proving. If anyone nominates me I’ll write a check and be done with it.”

Now, normally this woman is the very best of the good sports. She is the kind of person that the German phrase “mit Ihr kannst du Pferde stehlen” (“with her you can steal horses” = she’s always up for an adventure) was written to describe. Maybe this caught her on a bad day. In any case, I was surprised by her reaction and I didn’t really know what to say. I understood her stance to be that her level of “awareness” by way of losing her best friend excuses her from playing along. Just write a check - Done!

That Got Me Thinking

For me, a bucket of ice water over my head is not about proving my awareness, it is about being uncomfortable for someone else. It’s about struggling in advance with a situation that I know is coming, a situation that I would really love to avoid.

It is about facing up to dread.

That bucket of ice water is metaphoric for the struggle with catastrophic illness. Dumping it voluntarily over my head is an act of solidarity with other humans who have a diagnosis and know, well in advance the horrifying details of their future lives and their own deaths. For them, anger, panic, fear, sadness will ensue - if not today, then next week, next month. A person can struggle all they like, they can walk around it, ignore it, walk away from it - but there IS no escape. That body IS their future.

That bucket of water in my hand acknowledges an important truth: There, but for the Grace of God, go I.

Don’t you, don’t we all know someone who’d be totally relieved to write a check if by doing so they could avoid the utter terror of being the noble reason the rest of us get together to have a few beers, laugh and challenge one another to do stupid things like dumping ice water over our heads? I think we do.

Thoughts From Beyond the Void?

My friend and fellow writer Pia Newman had this to say about the responses she received when she posted her Ice Bucket Challenge.

Did you write about the ice bucket challenge and it’s inherent challenges? Leave a comment below and I’ll put a link to your article up here.

After watching this about three hundred times I’m pretty sure that Dumli is my favorite. Then I found Part 2…

This is what comes of morning coffee on Google+.

“That night, she lay in a bed where her body was an unfamiliar shape, in this house that didn’t know her yet.”

It’s from the second page of Astrid and Veronika and it is important to me because of the way I stopped and wondered if I might not have written “That night she lay in an unfamiliar bed in a house she didn’t yet know” instead.

I saw after a minute that it would have been wrong: two sentences which say the same thing must not express the same thing. This morning my thoughts wander off to the abstract idea that we living-beings are “expressions” of the, well, of God, for lack of a better word. Is this how people are like sentences? Is this what Terence McKenna meant when he said “I don’t believe the world is made of quarks, or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe the world is made of language.”

Yes, well, let us disembark from that rollercoaster and get back to my poor sentence which doesn’t hold nearly the quality of alienation, the depth of foreignness that Linda Olsson’s beautiful sentence does. In mine, we would have been watching our heroine, one of them anyway, from the inside when we belong on the outside. We do not know her - only that she is, maybe, a stranger in her own life. We feel her strangeness and we know it would be wrong, too invasive, if we, the reading population of the entire planet were already inside of her head.

This where we start our journey into the story, on the outside looking in and understanding nothing. Just like Veronika herself. Who is she and how did she come to this isolation? How did she come to be “an orphan in an orphan house”? I read along, watching, waiting. I trust an author who minds her sentences like this one does to write a novel that will unfold and satisfy me.

I settle into my sofa with a cup of tea…

Her life slowly found its own organic rhythm. After a week she had established her morning routine. … It felt as if the house had accepted her, as if they had begun their life together.

Yes, after a few pages I felt the novel had accepted me too, as if we had begun our life together.

Veronika’s neighbor, Astrid Mattson is, according to a shopkeeper in the nearby village, “the village witch”. She “doesn’t like people. Keeps to herself. Not much of a neighbor, I’m afraid.”

And indeed, it is two weeks before Veronika gets her first glimpse of her neighbor.

The old woman looked almost obscenely exposed, a hunched solitary figure in a dark heavy coat and rubber boots uncertainly navigating the icy road on her way to the village. Her house had been her protector until then, the dark windows loyal keepers of the secrets of the life inside.

In the next chapter we are introduced to Astrid - a woman of indeterminate old age. A woman with memories of the past which require all of her energy to hold at bay.

The effort was a constant, draining task, absorbing all her energy. And there were moments when it failed. When she was overcome by feelings as intense as when they were new. The trigger were unpredictable and she trod cautiously. For a long time she had drifted in still backwaters, patiently awaiting the final undertow. And now this, a slight rippling of the surface.

We watch Astrid “wake up” to the sounds of her neighbor’s car door, her music, to the view of her starting off on her morning walk with a friendly wave in the direction of Astrid’s dark windows.

She listened and she felt the world invade. Life. and she turned her face to the wall and cried.

One morning we are privy to an extraordinary scene: Astrid standing deep and nearly invisible to the outside world in her darkened kitchen. While we are watching, she absently lifts her hand to return Veronika’s wave. At this early stage in the novel, when it is so clear that the two women are deeply inside themselves, I was as surprised by the small gesture as Astrid is. In my minds eye, I looked at Astrid’s hand and wondered that it looked so much like my own.

The rest of the novel is a glorious exploration of friendship, of that surprising love that springs up between two women who have naively assumed, as any of us might, that heart’s love, once lost is forever gone. It is not a novel full of daring-do except that the courage to face our disappointments is a courage many of us turn out to be missing.

I finished reading this evening in the last warmth of the sun on my balcony, my much beloved tulip fountain working hard to produce sounds of serenity between the cityscape noises and the motorcycles. White and purple, purple and white pansys bloom in my old Christmas tree stand cum planter on the faded yellow Mexican oilcloth, a cool glass of Sauvingon Blanc at my elbow.

Astrid and Veronika is a special brand, a rainy afternoon, a sofa novel and fittingly, it came to be in my bookshelf because of a surprise friendship - also very short in physical proximity but deeply satisfying. My friend wandered through my life as Veronika does Astrid’s and tonight, nearly a year since we saw each other last, she nests securely in my heart.

Sometimes it’s good when films come on the TV that we’ve seen already. Especially on evenings where the television landscape has more in common with a desert than an entertainment medium.

Like last night^[1].

I’m Not Scared directed by Gabriele Salvatores is truly one of my favorite films. This morning looking for something to help me convince you not to miss it, I found the slightly misleading trailer. It’s not a fast-paced action film, it is a story about right and wrong, beautifully filmed and lovingly told with plenty of deep, patient, breath^[2] for your imagination and that great Italian width for your eyes.

The main characters, Michele and Filippo are two boys who come across as having vastly more courage than most of the rest of us put together, but who, on second glance are only doing what we all wish we could, still - what we all wish we could still do.

They are childish in the important ways, the ways many of us, and maybe some of our children even, have lost. They don’t already know so they are open and willing to entertain any possibility. They are curious with no interest in judging, still they know right from wrong and they struggle to act appropriately.

If that sounds like a lot to ask of ten year-olds, the film asks us adults to consider why exactly, the children get it so right while the grown-ups have it all wrong? What are those essential qualities we lost when we gave up our childish ways?

What do you think? Have you seen I’m Not Scared? Did you love it? Hate it? Let’s talk in the comments.

[1] Last night was a clear example of why my grandmother regularly referred to the-box-in-the-corner-of-the-room as either “the idiot box” or “the boob-tube” (less for the number of breasts shown on an average evening, although that was the 60’s and Americans were more anatomy-tolerant than we are now, no, she used it more in the sense of the dictionary definition

[2] Typos happen, it’s true, but in fact I meant breath not breadth. Thanks for keeping an eye on me.

Nextly: Hi Reader, have you been around Octopress awhile? Know what you’re doing? I added the shortcut path just for you.

The Laughingmaus has been around since 2002 and slowly but surely my build times were raining on my parade. I’m one of those bloggers who has to try out photos and edit and read aloud and edit some more, then get a cup of coffee while my site built so I could begin all over again.

Octopress to the rescue with the isolate/integrate commands. Damned if I could get them to work though. No matter what I tried, my _stash folder remained stubbornly empty.

It took me awhile to figure out that my pain-point was the way that I daintily sort my posts into folders by year.

Solve This Problem

Have a look here: In your Rakefile search for the “isolate” function (mine started on line 169). There is that bad boy:

Dir.glob("#{source_dir}/#{posts_dir}/*.*") do |post|

You see out there just before the “do” command? The original code is asking for the isolate function to move *.* (anyfilename.anyextension). But a directory is not a file in that sense so let’s change the move specification to * which is broader and includes folders.

Dir.glob("#{source_dir}/#{posts_dir}/*") do |post|

And, in case you are curious, “#{posts_dir}/*” tells the isolate function to include everyeverything in the posts_dir folder. And, the posts_dir variable is specified towards the top of your Rakefile. The default is _posts.

Ok, now you’ll need to do this to the “integrate” function too, it’s just a few lines down from isolate in your Rakefile. The original reads:

FileUtils.mv Dir.glob("#{source_dir}/#{stash_dir}/*.*"), ...

And you are going to change yours to…?

FileUtils.mv Dir.glob("#{source_dir}/#{stash_dir}/*"), ...

You had probably already seen the pattern, hadn’t you? It’s the same as above and you’re going to change it in the same way to achieve the same effect: the moving of directories as well as files back into your posts_dir (_posts) when you are finished.

And finally, the only trick to this is that you should keep your recent posts in the _posts directory and wait to file them in the year directory until you are relatively sure you won’t be editing them anymore. The reason for this is that the command above can only move an entire folder. It doesn’t search the folder and move the file it finds out for editing.

Octopress for Creatives

Is a long ignored section of this blog. I hope to change that this summer. Please tweet me (@laughingmaus] or send me a mail if you are a creative with enough technical knowledge to think it might be interesting and fun to walk away from Wordpress and Co. Knowing that a real human being is waiting does shift priorities.

What Everybody Knows, Someone Had To Say

If you are reading about software hacks on my blog, it is not illogical for me to mention that: The * symbol is a basic regular expression and retains its meaning of “every-everything” all over the command line. So, if you’re a newbie to tech matters, and you might well be if you are still reading, I’ll add this friendly warning that back-in-the-day I was very grateful to have been given in advance: Think long and hard before using * with the rm command.

And ok, now you might be thinking that * gone wrong can rain embarrassment down on your head and you’d be right. But that’s what it’s all about, and I hope you won’t even think about slowing down over a little embarrassment. Just keep on experimenting and testing your limits and the limits of your tools and the next thing you know the moment is gone and forgotten - and you, brave reader, are permanently smarter.

It all starts with Al Filries, Kelly Professor and much more at the University of Pennsylvania, asking TC Boyle how he stays so trim.

I have the metabolism of a weasel. A weasel. That’s what does it. I have a lot of energy. I mean, I don’t know about you people, but I wake immediately and spring out of bed with the names of my enemies on my lips. Every day.

Let the fun begin. The rest of the interview overflows with all that energy. TC Boyle reads from his books, answers questions of readers, and points a generous hint-finger towards his writing processes. Al, as always, the perfect host, takes care that the audience has time for their questions (unlike the way things usually go when audience questions are saved for last). There is no lack of inspirational writing-inspiration talk. It’s worth the sixty-six minutes you’ll spend the first time around, and to be honest, I was happy to give another hundred ninety-eight minutes to watch it again and again.

The link is below, don’t miss the rest of the fun.

My Favorite Moment

“And again”, TC Boyle said “I’m repeating myself for the students, I’m sorry. I hope you’re not too bored. If you’re bored back there, you heard this yesterday, do your math homework, ok?”

“They don’t take math classes.” Al said this softly but clearly into his microphone and we all laughed, but underneath the words and their arguable truth, you can hear conviction and loyalty and staying-power. It’s Al doing what Al does: sharing always his unshakable belief that this thing we do with literature, with poetry, this, is not lesser.

Maybe it’s even better? I imagine him suggesting with a daring twinkle in his eye.

Here is the link: Kelly Writers House TV: Brunch with TC Boyle. Enjoy yourselves. If you’re looking for me, this afternoon. I’ll be writing.

There is great pleasure in making art. - TC Boyle

More about:

• The Kelly Writers House
• Kelly Writers House TV ReRuns
• TC Boyle
• Al Filreis
• ModPoPenn

Click On, Writers!

Get More: www.mtvu.com

What are the wonderful things about Autumn? The harvest; the last really warm rays of sunshine; the apples and pears; the anticipation of brussels sprouts and snow – and the tomatoes.

If you don’t live here in the heart of Southern Germany, you might not know that of all the things you can’t plan, the one thing you can is that you can’t plan the Samstagsmarkt. And especially you can’t plan mio bello Italiano who usually, but only usually and in no way always - and really without warning, towards the end of the season sells the last tomatoes for €1/kg.

“Si, si, Signora, maybe oooonly this week. Maybeeee next week too?” The answer to my hopeful question is accompanied by an expansive Italian shrug and he smiles confessionally, “I can not tell. I do not know. You know what is tomorrow?”

Saturday was the third week this year and the Roma tomatoes are lovely but they are small. Suspiciously small. Like they may be the last ones for real this time. So, even though I have a few jars put up already it was in a measured moment of panic that I heard the words “What do two flats weigh?” fall from my mouth.

And the sun came out for just a minute to warm my neck before a blast of Northern wind blew my hair over my face and dried leaves rustled winterly. I handed over my money feeling secretive and pleased. Taking my tomatoes I find myself actually beginning to look forward to winter, to chili, to porcupines and spicy tomato soup on a Sunday afternoon.

Bucking the System

In the past, I’ve tried buying my tomatoes the American way and reserving a given weight of them “for next week” so that I could organize helpers and jars. But then, when I arrive next week I find my usually laughing, sometimes singing Italiano, arms on his nearly empty table looking desolate – a little pile of lemons, an even smaller pile of red onions, and three green peppers arranged artfully to look like more - or to look like less, I’m never sure - in front of him.

I pull up looking innocent, and I thank him generously, innocently even, for keeping my reserved tomatoes somewhere under the table.

“Ohhhhhh, sorry!” (shaking head) “I’m so sorry, Signora.” He holds his hands helplessly in the air and looks first to the left and then to the right.

Clearly another customer had already been there, some few moments earlier than I, and spying my reserved tomatoes under the otherwise empty table, must have offered him an admirable sum of gold … surely I understand? Maybe I had been detained? Maybe my reserved tomatoes would rot, unloved and unsold under the otherwise empty table. One never knows…

I am the sheriff and he the well-intentioned, bumbling bad guy. Genre: Spaghetti Western. Where’s my poncho?

Consequences of Bucking the System

Following a performance like that, I must, of course, punish mio bello Italiano (and my dinner table!) by simply ignoring him for a while. It would not do to act as though I was less than desperately disappointed, as if I hadn’t trusted him - as if there wouldn’t be nights, in the dark, freezing winter when we would wrap our paltry shawls about our shivering wheelchairs and peer into our empty pantry wishing only for una piccola spaghetti…

Yes, I must play by the rules or risk my entire professional relationship with mio bello Italiano and playing by the rules means no “Good Morning”s, no gay waves on my way home, not even a coolish glance at his wares. At least not for awhile. Not until he has huge piles and crates full of sweet oranges and that won’t be until around Christmas. Then, protocol allows me to drive closer and look tempted. The next week I may deign to buy one or two delicacies from him and so on and so forth until we have patiently built our vendor/customer relationship back to normal by the end of January.

The Germans say: Die klügere gibt nach (the clever person walks away). It is their version of Discretion being the better part of Valor and let me tell you, after all that, and because I really like mio bello Italiano, it’s just feels more clever to throw my hands in the air, look left, look right and buy now! I’ll arrange help & jars later.

What Are You Talking About, Maus?

Are You Serious? A Poetry Course?

Yes, I am, this course is the pointerto. It’s the triggerfor. The Noticer notices this endless relief. They bubbleup together from my deepest self, pointificating myself’s very own Self.

Me! Me! This Self. Over here. I am the one…

Did you really think that meditation was the only way? Maybe it’s time to try poetry.

Well, here is a story for you, one that you won’t find anywhere else on the whole internet. It’s only here and in the fuzzy memories of the lucky few who were present.

Setting: It’s those swingin 70’s and my baby sister, who is so chic that she was born wearing white patent leather go-go boots, is learning to express her world-view and her musical talent in ways that we been-here-awhile folks can grasp. It’s a steamy summer afternoon and we somewhat-grown-upper kids are hangin over the back seat of Mom’s blue Vista Cruiser station wagon, fourth in line at the first drive-through bank in all of Kansas City. Our armpits are sticking to the vinyl.

Little, that’s my baby sister, has crawled over the back seat and claimed the entire backend of the car for herself. Fine, it is too hot to argue and the air conditioning comes from the vents up front anyway. We are all waiting semi-patiently for Mom to do her banking so the teller-lady will put suckers for us in the cannister along with Mom’s money. (I already have dibbs on the purple one.)

And that is when Little starts singing:

Here we are
at the Pee-pls Bank –
and youuuuu — are alllll –
my Peeps!

There in the middle, at the “youuuuu” point, she spreads her arms out like a miniature Ethel Mermann. I think I never saw Mom laugh that hard on a steamy August afternoon in the city.

The end is always the beginning - and this is the end of story but the beginning of getting to the point.

I struggled for the longest time (and my capacity for struggle is immense), about what to write at my blog. I can confess this now because I think I’m getting there… These days everyone says you need a theme in order to have a successful blog. Me ‘n the mauses rumbled with that idea for awhile until they called bulls**t on it and said their theme was Mauses, thank you very much and anyway, maybe I should just get on with being the change I want to see.

Begin Middle-Point Marginalia

I miss my internet - the one where I met Jens - in 1994. (I knowit we hardly even had a <blink> tag back then!) I miss the seven hundred other people who were hanging out etherierally^[1] just wanting to share what they knew about stuff they found fascinating. Nobody thought about SEO or making enough money to fill a semi-truck with twenties, or even about their popularity. We just kept our link lists and made links to other people with cool link lists and surfed around winding up in the most impossible places being introduced to stuff we didn’t even know was interesting. I never felt like I wasted time surfing back then.

That’s all gone now. The internet is surely very convenient these days, but have you noticed: it’s a consolidated trash heap of commercialism, sensationalism and their boring love-twins: sensational-commercialism and commercial-sensationalism!! Before you find something to delight your soul you have wasted the better part of two hours looking at shoes you don’t need, sucking down news about horrible happenings you can’t effect and viewing gossipy pictures of people you don’t know. And their cars.

End Marginalia

My nutcase mauses were right. Of course. I started consider: Maybe thousands of popular bloggers have already said what I want to say - and maybe, if I had gotten off my a** in the 90’s, I would be a popular blogger too … Yep, and it was just that quick that the whole thing spun off a tail of its own looking a lot like self-recrimination and how-could-you-have-wasted-a-prehistoric-chance-like-that and I was going down for the second time, waving my hands in the air and gasping for breath when I noticed those mauses all siting around with their little heads cocked at dozens of different angles (they do this to get my attention - they know I’ll laugh cause they look so funny) waiting patiently for me to drop the drama-lama so they could say:

Oh. Did you want to be a popular blogger?

Yeah. Well, no. Not necessarily. I just want to be popular with my peeps, that’s all.

So this post is to say thanks especially to my dear friend Brianne who wrote to me and told me that I am indeed succeeding. That’s really, really important to me.

[1] Etherially is Mausisch for in the ether.
More Mausisch here

If you know me, you know I’m stubborn uh, persistent and that because of errr - in spite of this thoroughly excellent character trait I was a top-notch failure in math class. Well take this: I am really enjoying the Stanford University OpenEdX course How To Learn Math. It’s a cool pre-course intended for parents, teachers and others with contact to children and young people learning math.

I know. That’s not me, but (shhhhh) I’m sitting in the back and being verrry quiet.

The first set of lectures and thought-problems have centered around discouragements and math stereotypes that are deeply integrated into our society through the way we think and talk about mathematics. What’s cool is that based on the information and ideas that Professor Jo Boaler gets from this course, she will be developing a course for students who want to improve their math-learning skills. I think that is extra high class and when I was a student, I would have been relieved to know that help was on the way; that twenty thousand (mostly only slightly disturbed) ex-math students were, as we speak(!), combining their creative What-If imaginations to help me learn math better.

That would have freaked me out in the very best way possible.

The (minor) psychological tics I acquired in 9th grade Algebra are healing. Taking part in a course actively searching for ways to avoid scarring creative young minds is making me wildly happy - as if all that struggle was worth it after all - just like Dad said it would be - except that I think he meant he wanted to see something besides an “F” on my grade card.

I’m taking the philosophical out: Maybe, just maybe flunking Algebra has helped to make me an A-grade human being. Yeah.

The course is available until 27 September, 2013 and is self-directed so you can start anytime. I have to finish by the end of August though because then it is that ModPo time of the year. It needs a little jingle, in my mind it has become a season of its own and I’d no sooner miss it than I would Autumn.

Kirsten Carlson Rocks Illustrator Saturday

Congratulations, Kirsten! Super informative and educational Illustrator Saturday! Way to go! And what a lot of great interview questions; Kirsten really shows her true colors - a dedicated artist and generous woman, Kirsten is open to trying new things - like writing and she is always chasing her goals. Best of luck in Hawaii! I’m looking forward to seeing what flows from your pen in that dreamy environment.

Disclaimer: Kirsten and I co-founded the Leonberg Writer’s Group, Birds of a Feather.

Jadi Campbell Gives Author Interview to Standoutbooks

And hooray for Jadi who gave a great author interview with UK publisher Standoutbooks.

One of the things I love most about Jadi’s writing is the way she crafts characters who are neither good or evil, likeable or hateable, they simply are who they are and sometimes you like them a lot and other times you don’t. Like a lot of real people you know. You know? One of the things that I love about Jadi as a writer is that she is always learning, always striving to improve her craft.

Here is a tidbit from Broken In the novel that Jadi is currently marketing.

Steve ran into the lake. He swam in the direction of the floating life ring, hoping the little girl had sunk somewhere in the general vicinity. When he reached what he thought was the point where she’d gone under, he began to dive.

Visibility was murky under the surface. He swam with outstretched hands and eyes searching desperately for signs of a body. Something kicked him hard in the cheek, and Steve resurfaced choking. The small child snug in his life vest simply paddled on past Steve in the water and flailed with skinny arms; he hadn’t even noticed the adult under the surface. Steve gasped in more air and dove again.

If you want to find out more about Jadi, you can read her blog or you can buy her book, Broken In, a novel in short stories.

Disclaimer: Jadi is a member of Birds of a Feather, although I believe she is talking about a more formalized group that meets in Stuttgart in her interview.

Carly’s Cafe

Carly Fleischmann lives with non-verbal autism and that doesn’t even slow the girl down. Great video, Carly. You’re opening doors…

Don’t Cage Me In

In July 1968, ethologist John B. Calhoun built a “mouse utopia,” a metal enclosure 9 feet square with unlimited food, water, and nesting material. He introduced four pairs of mice, and within a year they had multiplied to 620. But after that the society began to fall apart …

What happens next may have implications for us all…

J.K. Rowling and Literary Fame

Is JK Rowling by any other name a writer of genius? In this article is some good news for us all in the form of scientific research which suggests that cumulative advantage, that is popularity magnified through social feedback such as word-of-mouth is at play in situations where subjective experience awards the crown.

Just in case you are interested in how she was outed, its called forensic linguistics a field of scientific inquiry that works to identify an author’s linguistic “fingerprint”. An interesting article in National Geographic talks about how it was used specifically to out J.K. Rowling as John Gilbraith but also hints at other uses, among them how companies are using information gleaned from analyzing product review on the internet to adjust their advertising goals.

Save the Cat! What’s Wrong with Hollywood

This Slate article is about how a screenwriting book from the 70’s called Save the Cat!, in which the author, Blake Snyder did an exceptionally good job of analyzing story and creating a step-by-step guide to writing stories for film is affecting the quality of films we see today. It was never the author’s intent but instead a side-effect that his work has been increasingly misused by an overly cautious Hollywood to create a page-by-page minute-by-minute formula for movies that leave us film lovers wearied by the sameness and bored because in today’s film world yet another explosion is, after all, no longer a surprise.

My friend, the marine portraitist is leaving, moving away from this country where the largest body of water nearby is a bathtub. She will soon be living on a tropical island making fishy art and writing children’s books. I hope that, even as she is surrounded by sky and wind and water, she will remember with affection the time she spent living just over that hill right there. The one with the tower on it.

Inside the card is a little piece of Linden bark with a frog on it, and a beer coaster with a snail and three marks in black ink. The critters are sentimental and the beer coaster with the marks, practical: we use those marks to keep track of how many drinks we have ordered…

To create the various pieces I used quite a few found bits from the newspaper, some stickers that are part of an advertising campaing at a local grocery store, business cards from some favorite restaurants, etc. I attached the cutouts with gluestick and acrylic matte medium. In an effort to protect the artwork I coated it once with matte medium.

If I had it to do over again, I would only coat the envelope with the matte medium and leave the card it’s original form. Besides the change in “feel” of the paper, the small wrinkles which appeared in the inside of the card (most especially in the lower right-hand corner) came from the additional moisture in the matte medium coating and were not there before. Bad luck - but I learned somethin. Good luck, after all!

In the mid-nineties I, a woman in my mid-thirties with a slow-moving form of Muscular Dystrophy, met my sweet love in an online forum run by MDA. He has the same diagnosis as I do but his body’s interpretation of “slow moving” is somewhat different than mine. He is German, I am American. When we married, seventeen years ago, for reasons of his business and our health we chose to make our home in Germany.

I left my mid-western hometown with ten boxes containing mostly books, two suitcases containing not nearly enough sweaters and two-hundred pounds of dog who had to travel first to Dallas, to catch a flight on an airplane with cargo doors wide enough for his cage and the forklift he rode in on.

My family is small and we’re tight, we’re there for each other and still, after nearly twenty years, we struggle with our separation. All the technology in the world only allows the appearance of connectedness. From five-thousand miles away it is simply not possible to partake of each others every day life. To do that one must be present; present at family dinners, present at Christmas, Easter, Weihnachtsmarkt, Pferdemarkt, the fourth of July. Present for birthdays and measles, for new puppies and dying hamsters, missed buses, new jobs, for teeth coming in, teeth falling out, couples falling out and couples feeling their way back to each other again. Without physical presence and proximity, family life is but a dream, a fiction and a cherished memory.

Today I got the news that my first niece bought her first car. I haven’t seen it and there is nearly no chance that I’ll go with her for a little joyride while going for a little joyride is still filled with the beautiful, impossible innocence of new-adulthood.

This evening as the sun sets here on a simple summer day, America sits around the picnic table with burgers and beers; the kids are restless, fireworks are still hours and hours away and I am angry. No one should be forced to decide between the daily joys of family life that enrich us all and the solid long-term financial health of their tribe. For this, I feel betrayed by my country and my culture.

Hello, Stephen Fry. Yes, I know exactly what you are talking about - being lonely, and yes, it is fascinating, isn’t it? After all, how can it be true that one has plenty of company and wants nothing more than to be left alone to rummage around in one’s own thoughts even though one knows perfectly well that this is a dead-end?

I suppose one can love the paradox and it is an astonishing state of affairs that I can not go alone where I wish to wind up, because alone is not where I wish to wind up. However, the only way to see the path I must follow to get where I wish to go is to look for it when I am alone.

Is this is why being alone when I am writing or creating is wonderful? Creation is the act of searching for that path. The one that goes where I want to wind up. And is this equally why being alone is so frightening and devastatingly lonely when I am not creating? Because I know that she who does not search may also not find?

It boils down to this: I want to be left alone, until I don’t want that anymore, then I want to cross paths with friends, to touch and connect before I shoot out the other end wanting to be left alone again. Come to think of it, it is not even that I must be left alone per se, but I must surely and clearly be left to my own devices.

In a typical stab at understanding, I took it into my head to mix media and to see what would happen if I were to diagram those needs along a timeline.

For each of them I took a pen - that was then two pens. I started from a point, my moment of hesitation, of indecision. I drew the my wish to be left alone and my proximity to other people as lines that lead away from one another until, no wait, now they are drawing back towards one another at a point horizontal to touch at the point of their birth. Then passing through it they move away again, before searching for companionship again they curve back.

When I finished it made me smile. It looked like the symbol of Infinity. I am off the hook. I can’t fight, understand or change Infinity, bless its heart. I can only accept and embrace it. Now I am free to go and I’m off with my journal and seven different colored pens for a gelato in the hopes this reverent act of appreciating Summer will summon warm weather.