Morning List

Every morning, right after breakfast, I should get down on the floor and meditate. A mere twenty minutes will make me a calmer, happier person, but only if I do it every day.

A long as I’m down there, I might as well do a few yoga poses—just cat and cow and maybe tree so I’ll be more limber when I go to my Friday yoga class.

Which reminds me that on Tuesday I have tai chi, and it would be a good idea to run through the form a few times so I don’t forget the moves. You have to do these things every day to reap full benefits.

I mustn’t forget to take Bisou for her walk, especially since she has recently gained one pound, and needs to lose it (as do I). Morning walks are best, while the day is young and the scents of the night creatures are fresh on the grass.

And then there’s Telemann, the cat. After Bisou’s walk I should bring out his furry snake and make him chase it for a bit. It might help him to spend more time napping and less time flying around the house breaking things.

Speaking of Telemann (the composer, not the cat), I need to work on that Fantasia of his. My recorder teacher says that I’m only allowed to skip practice on the days when I don’t eat. As with other challenging things, it’s best to get it done early in the day.

Remember that old advice for writers, nulla dies sine linea—not a day without a line? I should do my writing before the morning’s gone. I always feel so much better, having written.

Also, before my eyes get tired from looking at the computer, I should do some drawing. As they say, use it or lose it.

Then there is the list of unanswered emails that has been haunting me. The only way to deal with it is to be disciplined and make it a part of my morning routine.

And I should definitely take a daily spin through Facebook—why do I seem to be the only person who can’t keep up with it? I should check it first thing every morning, while I’m still fresh….

Don't Link, Think!

At breakfast, sipping coffee, I said to my spouse, "Did you hear that thing on NPR about cyborgs?"

"What about them?" he asked, measuring honey into green tea.

If this had been the 1980s, I would have rummaged in my short-term memory and retrieved whatever shreds of the story I had retained. Then, flexing the muscles of my frontal lobes, I would have turned those concepts into coherent speech and voiced the results, thus giving myself a tiny intellectual workout before even starting my day.

"Cyborgs," I might have said, "are created by combining organic and inorganic parts in a single being. For instance, I became a partial cyborg when I got an artificial hip ten years ago. Merging the human brain with computers, which is already beginning to happen, will create the ultimate cyborg, with potentially alarming results."

But, this being 2017, I just said, "I'll send you a link."

(Here, in case you're interested, is the link to the cyborg story: http://www.npr.org/2017/02/21/516484639/are-cyborgs-in-our-future-homo-deus-author-thinks-so)

I'm suspicious of all this linking. Of course, the advent of hypertext has expanded our access to knowledge in ways undreamed-of in the era of shoulder pads. One click and I can read about Hildegard of Bingen's migraine-induced mystical visions, or find out how to make yogurt in a crock-pot. How can we not love this?

But this ease of access risks turning us into spectators of knowledge, passive enjoyers of an endless cornucopia of facts. And it's changing the way we interact with each other, as we increasingly express ourselves by posting links to what third parties have said or written rather going through the admittedly taxing process of putting things into our own words.

Consider Facebook. If you're like me, most of the posts on your news feed consist not of your friends' own ideas and opinions, but of links to videos and articles made by unknown others. I often click on these links, and laugh and cry along with the everyone else, but, unless we increasingly are what we link, they strike me only as indirect communications, at best, from my Facebook friends.

True, even before the hypertext era, few people managed to come up with really original ideas. Most of us just rehashed stuff we'd read, or heard others say. But even at its worst, rehashing is more mentally demanding than clicking.

Of course I know that fighting links is a losing battle. We Googlers and linkers are already cyborgs, letting the machine articulate and express many of our thoughts and feelings for us. But for those who would like to cling to the old ways of being human for a few more years, the strategy is clear: think, write, paint, sculpt, and compose more...and link less.

Confessing Sadness

(My mother died a few days ago, and I am not yet ready to write about that.  What follows is a post I was working on before the news came that she was failing.)

It's been dark and dreary lately, and my mood has plunged along with the barometer.  You know the feeling: you dislike the whole world, and yourself most of all, but it doesn't matter because death--preceded by a more-or-less protracted deterioration--is where it all ends anyway.

Nausea, spleen, acedia, Weltschmerz, the blues, the dark night of the soul--surely everybody over 40 and not a twit is acquainted with this state.

Every once in a while, there comes winging to me out of the ether a message that seems straight from the hand of divine providence--as when I  clicked on Brain Pickings and saw a review of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Stay, A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.  (Just to be clear:  there is a world of difference between feeling that life is not worth living and actually considering suicide.  While the former is not foreign to me, the latter is.)

I was reading along when the following quote reached down into my well of despair and yanked me, if not all the way out, at least high enough so I could catch a couple of breaths:

"If you have any energy at all for participating in this world, perhaps live now only for those small kindnesses and consolations you can render. Perhaps seek to help those equally burdened by sadness. Confess your own sadness to those in sorrow. Your ability to console may be profound."

I was immediately taken by the beginning, "If you have any energy at all for participating in this world..."  This was exactly my speed.  This person, I thought, knows exactly where I'm at.

"...perhaps live now only for those small kindnesses and consolations you can render."  Hecht is not talking about big gestures.  She's not asking me to sell all I have and go to Africa to dig village wells.  But small kindnesses and consolations--I can probably manage some of those.

"Perhaps seek to help those equally burdened by sadness."  I love that gentle, tentative "perhaps."

"Confess your own sadness to those in sorrow." What!  Isn't sadness un-American, a sign of weakness and self indulgence?  And isn't it especially bad form to confess sadness in the neon-bright skies of social media?

Studies show that Facebook, with its unspoken norm of posting only what is cool or cute, promotes depression among the peoples of the earth.  And here is Hecht, saying that by showing others our own sadness we may help them feel better.

Schadenfreude, you say?  Not necessarily.  I believe that, when someone whom we think happy and successful confesses his sadness to us, we are reminded that our own sorrow is not a defect in our character or a consequence of the way we have lived our life, but rather a result of the human condition.

"Your ability to console," Hecht concludes, "may be profound."  Or, as St. Francis put it, in seeking not so much to be consoled as to console, we may ourselves find healing.

Blog Bling

See that little blue icon a couple of inches down from my picture on the right?  It's my BlogHer decoration, kind of like a general's star.  If you want to see the post chosen by the BlogHer goddesses for syndication, here it is:   https://www.blogher.com/lazy-typers-need-more-button-facebook

It's the one about the use of "like" in Facebook.  If you're one of the kind souls who reads me regularly, you probably already saw it last March, and I apologize for sending you back to it.  But I've been urged by the BlogHer goddesses to publicize my tiny post all over the www:  Facebook, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, this blog, Google+...

If I were really with it, I would also be spreading the word on LinkedIn, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, YouTube, and who knows what else.

I can't remember how long it took me to write the original post, but it wasn't nearly as long as it's taken to go through the syndication and then the self-promotion process.

I would feel that all of this was "an expense of spirit in a waste of shame," as Shakespeare said of lust, except that with every step I believe that I am keeping up if only with the rear-guard in the fuzzy, misty but implacable world of the www.

Tomorrow, I'm going back to normal.   I might even make a drawing.

A Message From The Universe, Via Facebook

Does it ever happen to you that a message arrives from the outer galaxies just when you really need it?

I won't speculate about who sends these messages, but today mine came through Facebook by way of Bridgett (http://south-city-musings.blogspot.com/).  It's a quote from Thomas Merton:

(Here is the quote if you can't read it in the illustration:  "You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going.  What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.")

Is this not the ultimate prescription for sanity and happiness?

I think it's even a prescription for productivity, and here's why.  We've all been hammered by success gurus with the need to focus constantly on our desired outcomes, to ask of even the most mundane act, how does this relate to my goal?  With the result that we are always thinking about that other thing, the thing that we want and do not yet have, instead of concentrating on the water on our face or the soup in our bowl.

And if one does too much of this, as I am prone to, first anxiety and then paralysis set in, followed by the loss of courage, faith and hope.

On the other hand,  how relaxing, how energizing and inspiring and ultimately productive to embrace the possibilities of the present moment with courage, faith and hope.  And to just do what needs to be done, right now.

For me, the hard part is faith and hope.  I read Sartre at an impressionable age, and I can imagine his Gallic pout at those words.  But the time has come to adopt a more pragmatic stance.  Is existential anguish, the nausea caused by the absurdity of the human condition, going to make me a kinder, happier, more useful person?  It hasn't so far...

But with a bit of faith and hope--both of which take courage--I could sink into the embrace of the present moment, get stuff done, and have some peace.

Thank you, Unknown Sender of Messages,Thomas Merton, and Bridgett...and you too, Facebook.

"Like"

Originally it meant "resembling," or, as a verb, "to take pleasure in."  Then it morphed into a kind of verbal hiccup, a place holder while the mind caught up with the runaway tongue:  "And I said to her, like, who do you think you are?"

Then Facebook came along, and "like" went, like, viral.  It got a new opposite, "unlike," and an imperative, as in "like my page!"  I'm o.k. with being told to "love me, love my dog," or even better, "love my dog, love me."  But can I really be commanded to like a Facebook page?

The "like" Facebook button used to be a last resort when you didn't have time to write a response but wanted to signal approval.  But now that one half of humanity is FB friends with the other half,  "likes" accumulate on posts like drifts in a snow storm.  A wedding anniversary is worth at least thirty likes, a new profile photo fifty, a baby's first tooth--a baby's anything--as many likes as the proud parents have Facebook friends. The "like" reflex has become so generalized that I have even seen it in response to someone's post about mourning the death of a loved one.  Pelted by posts from morning til night, what can we do in the face of the gale but weakly like, like, like?


Facebook needs to broaden its one-click response repertory.  This might include "empathize,"
"congrats," and "envious." These would save us a lot of typing.  And we need something to balance "like."  I propose "hate," or even "abhor."  Maybe "yawn"?

I know, this social medium critique is making me sound quite antisocial.  But I will confess that when I was starting up my FB business page I shamelessly ordered my friends to like it.  They kindly clicked, and I in turn click whenever I'm asked.  And many times every day my finger hits "like" when what I really mean is, "your dog is adorable;  you don't look old at all;  I hope that dish you cooked and photographed agrees with you."

And when someone "likes" one of my posts I always read it as, "I live to read your every word!"

Adventures In Self-Promotion

If I've heard this once I've heard it a hundred times, from art biz gurus great and small:  if artists and writers don't take charge of promoting their own work, they are condemning themselves to a sales record equal to that of VanGogh during his lifetime (namely, zero).  And, the gurus add, with Twitter, Facebook, and all the wonders of the web within easy reach of everyone, those who fail to advertise have only themselves to blame if their paintings, pots, sculptures, symphonies, novels, and lyric poems are left to molder in attics and basements, their disposal one more post-funeral imposition on the hapless heirs.

I am happy to report that I have spent the last three weeks engaged in intensive self promotion, partly out of consideration for my heirs, and partly because it gives me real pleasure to see something I have made go to a good home.  The first week I spent getting ready for Open Studio, polishing and attaching bases to my sculptures, taking photos, inventing titles and prices, designing a display, packing up, setting up, buying (not baking--there's only so much I can do) dozens of cookies for the potential visitors, and making and posting signs to direct said visitors to the venue I was sharing with a friend.

Two of my pieces went to new homes, fewer than in years past, but what can you do with these gas prices.  One ("Small Meditator," see below) was bought by a man for his youngish but extremely frail-looking wife.  He handed it to her with a tearful kiss and said "Now you can have her with you every morning when you meditate," and she leaned on him and closed her eyes.

When Open Studio was over, I removed the roadside signs, packed everything into the car, unpacked and stored it at home, and hurried to do minimal maintenance on the garden, which had exploded over the hot weekend.

I also took a nap.

After that, as directed by the gurus, I made a new "artist page" on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/EulaliaBenejamCobb.artist.writer).  To do this, I had to retrieve the pictures of everything I'd ever made, sort them into categories, and select the ones to post.  This took me, literally, days to accomplish.

But the wondrous promise of this "artist page" was that, if I got 25 people to "like" it, it could then become a URL that would make my work accessible to the entire planet.  This meant that I had to go through my list of Facebook Friends, select the ones whose e-mail address I knew, and send them a bizarre little message asking them to "like" my new page.

In 24 hours, I had most--but not all--the "likes" I needed.  So I posted a status update on Facebook sort of begging people to "like" the page.  The response got me more than the required number of "likes," but did not eliminate the feeling that I was taking advantage of my friends.  True, asking for a click is not like asking for a kidney, but still....

After I get the new Facebook URL set up, I'll need to find someone to spiff up my ancient website, which when it is done will require some more trumpeting on my part.  Meanwhile I must be sure to sign up for "Foliage Open Studio" in October, and Art on the Green in September.  Must not miss deadlines for shows at Southern Vermont Arts Center or the Chaffee Center for the Arts, either.

All this--especially the vision of thousands of artists all over the globe simultaneously revamping their websites, getting friends to like their Facebook pages, and waxing eloquent about their work--was making me feel pretty discouraged with art as a business.  It was time to get back to the long-neglected real thing.  I went down to my basement studio, where the Madonna of the Bats (in honor of the East Coast's endangered bats) awaited.

I pushed the clay around, fixed her smile and her left knee, and gave her a couple of bats for company.  Three hours later, feeling much better, I came upstairs, washed the clay off my hands, and wrote this post.

Long Books

There is nothing I like better than a long book these days.  Don't you?  I am currently immersed in Robertson Davies's The Deptford Trilogy.  Davies is (was--alas, he died in 1995) witty, cultured, ironic, tender and smart, and, bless him, he wrote in trilogies (Salterton, Deptford ,Cornish, and Toronto), which ensures for me many hours in his company.  Elizabeth's loan of the Salterton got me through the third-snowiest-recorded winter in these parts.  Now Deptford  is getting me through those hours when I am too weary to pull another weed, but it's still light outside and I cannot go to bed.

When I find a book I like, I immediately look for more from that author.  Often, as I wander in a daze through the stacks of a local library (nothing puts me in a daze like wandering through library stacks--I can never think of a writer or a title to look for) I use as a criterion, in addition to New Yorker reviews, whether there is more than one book by that author on the shelf. My hermit-like existence prompts me to look for sustained company wherever I find it.

In my long-ago grad studies in French Lit, there were only a couple of women on the reading lists.  Since then, I have read lots and lots of women writers.  Unfortunately, in sheer output they do not compare to the men.  Why didn't Jane Austen write sixty novels, instead of six?  Because she was  busy making blancmange puddings for her father, which I hope he enjoyed.

As I await for the female equivalent of Dickens (whom I can't stand--such namby-pamby women characters), I revel in the likes of Trollope, Proust, P.G. Wodehouse, Robertson Davies.  And now that I'm grown up, I intend to give Balzac another try.

This need for a long-term immersion in another mind means that, try as I might, I cannot really get into contemporary media.  I hate magazines that make you hunt pages ahead for the ending to the (inevitably short) article you're reading.  I miss the almost-book-length essays in the old black-and-white New Yorker.  I detest "side bars," and advertisements that take up text space.  I'll leave you to imagine how I feel about web pages with pop-up adds, not to mention Facebook, even-less-to-mention Twitter (though I have accounts in both).

Fortunately, books--big, fat, full-of-print ones with no advertisements--remain.  I'm due for another trip to the library soon.  What do you recommend?

Facebook And Civil Discourse

I have a Facebook "friend" whose political views are the exact opposite of mine.  (How we became "friends" is irrelevant here.)  Every few days she posts a video or a link to some TV commentator, talk-show host, evangelist preacher, or what have you making accusations, sarcastic remarks about, or fun of Obama, Mrs. Obama, Nancy Pelosi (oh, how they hate her!), and other liberals.

I never click on the links, but I cannot help reading the first few sentences.  And I get mad--furious, in fact.  I begin to plot ways to discredit, dismantle, and utterly ruin her worldview and that of her fellow conservatives and members of the R party.  To make things worse, I imagine the reactions of this woman's fellow conservatives who are reading these links and getting a jolly laugh plus a heady hit of affirmation with every one, thus making escalating numbers of liberals like me angrier and angrier.

On the other hand, my in-box is regularly filled with status updates from friends whose liberal views I share, and who can be counted on every day to provide links to diatribes against and comedy bits about those benighted conservatives and their absurd causes.  I seldom click on these links, but I do read the first lines, and I feel affirmed and supported and confirmed as a member of what is clearly the smarter, more ethical side of the political divide.  I imagine that my fellow liberals get the same warm feelings when they read these messages, and conservatives who stumble upon them are enraged by them.

Multiply this effect by the millions of status updates and hits on Facebook every day, and is it any wonder that Congress cannot agree on a budget?

The thing is, if my conservative friend had to come up with these rants and sarcasms and accusations all by herself, she might pollute my in-box less frequently.  Likewise, if my liberal friends with their itchy link fingers had to generate the jokes and skits and put-downs themselves, the pages of Facebook would have a cleaner, sparser look.

I think that Facebook, with its ease of posting and linking, its absence of editors, is playing a perhaps unintended but real role in the disintegration of civility in public discourse.  Blogs and websites do this too, of course, but one has to choose to visit a certain blog or website.  Whereas all you have to do is get on Facebook, naively accede to a few friend requests, and you're in the soup.

I don't want to add to the political warfare by slapping my conservative friend in the face, so I'm hoping one of you can tell me whether it is possible to unfriend someone in a discreet, diplomatic way.  Or would it be a better contribution to civil discourse for me to let her diatribes live cheek by jowl with the rants of my liberal friends?

Here Today...

I read an article in the Times about how people no longer call each other on the phone, but use e-mail instead.  If they do call, they first arrange the call via e-mail.

So true.  Somehow we have all gotten the feeling since e-mail became available that to call people up on an impulse is presumptuous.  Now, if I call without obtaining prior permission via e-mail, I make sure to ask, the minute I identify myself, "is this a good time?"

Spontaneous, non-business phone calls have gone the way of drop-in visits.  Remember those?  I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of impromptu visitors who have come to the door in my adult life.  But when I was a kid, family and friends of my parents used to drop by all the time. 

In Spain, whether the visitor was a family member or a life-long friend, he or she was always ushered into the living room.  We were amazed, in our first years in the U.S., when people would follow us into the kitchen, leaning against the counter and chatting away while we made them coffee.  In Spain, you could visit your aunt weekly for decades, and never see her kitchen.

I remember certain visitors eliciting some covert eye-rolling on my mother's part.  I remember resenting having to interrupt my homework or get off the phone to go into the living room to greet them.  But a lot of visits turned into impromptu dinner parties, my  mother saying, "Why don't I make some omelettes?" and all of us welcoming the respite from daily routine.

With the entrance of women into the workforce, however, the spontaneous visitor first became endangered, then extinct.  What's the use of knocking on someone's door when only a lonely dog will answer?  And it would take one heck of a visitor--perhaps an archangel in human form--to pleasantly surprise a woman who, after a day in the office, is trying to hold on to sanity while sauteing onions and supervising the kids' homework.  Curiously, some people still say "come see us sometime," but who would be crass enough to take them up on it?

During the long era of phone calls,  I fixed many a dinner with the phone jammed between ear and shoulder, the long cord following me from stove to fridge, while on the other end I could hear my caller banging pots and pans in her own kitchen.  Now the phone, even with the advent of cordless sets and cell phones, has gone the way of drop-ins.

Instead--who'd have thought it?--we type messages to each other, and a whole edifice of etiquette has sprung up around e-mail, regulating whom to message and how frequently, the appropriateness of forwarding, the rules of attachments.  But who knows how long e-mail will last?  I  hear its death-knell on the pages of Facebook, which has already supplanted blogging for many people.

First there were impromptu visits, then phone chats, then e-mail, then Facebook.  This very minute, legions are abandoning Facebook in favor of Twitter, which eventually will itself be deemed slow and cumbersome and replaced by the flash between synapses recorded by implanted devices and instantly conveyed to a preselected list of "friends."

Longfellow To The Rescue

I'd been feeling discontented with my lot recently, resenting the limitations imposed by my condition (chronic fatigue syndrome), watching friends my age and older rush around accomplishing goals, crossing items off their to-do lists, and keeping up a pace that I cannot even dream of matching. Then by chance I came across these words of Longfellow:

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

I don't believe I have enemies, or hostility that needs disarming.  But often I look at the lives of people around me and think, "what would it be like to feel the way she must feel, able to count on a reliable supply of energy from day to day, to take on projects knowing that her body will see her through them?"

Envy has a nastier edge than what I feel, which is more a longing for other people's seemingly endless supply of energy, and a dissatisfaction with my own wavering limitations. 

I know that I am not the only one to feel this way.  I can imagine that some people might look at my life from the outside, and feel something akin to envy.  But that is because they wouldn't know my "secret history."


We all mostly keep our secret histories to ourselves.  It is what social norms demand.  People who disclose their "sorrow and suffering" at inappropriate times are rightly shunned as bores.  We are much more likely to make friends and have a good time if we put on a brave face and talk about cheerful things.


These social norms are especially stringent on the internet.  I don't follow many blogs, but on the ones I have seen writers mostly abstain from whingeing and project a positive, upbeat image. There may be some who do whinge, but I suspect they have few readers. 


As for Facebook, could there be a perkier medium?  People  communicate their dissatisfaction with politics, contemporary culture, and environmental disasters mostly by linking to relevant sites, but these are public issues, not personal sorrow and suffering.  


These, as far as I can see, are banished from Facebook, where acceptable topics include parties you've been to, food you've eaten or are about to eat, drinks ditto, trips you've taken, and cute things your children/grandchildren/pets have said or done.  The skies over the land of Facebook are singularly unclouded.  As for Twitter, everybody knows that birds don't tweet when they're feeling sad.


This is probably just as well.  Who wants to read bulletins about  people's unrequited loves or career frustrations?  But the cumulative effect of Twitter, Facebook and many blogs is to give a false impression that the population consists mostly of people who careen merrily from one fun thing to another.


In all this cheerfulness, there is no room for secret histories, no way for us to sense each other's sorrow and suffering.  The only sorrow and suffering we sense is our own, and this increases our feelings of isolation and dissatisfaction.


There are tragedies in people's lives that become apparent on short acquaintance:  the death of a child, disabling or disfiguring disease, financial ruin.  But we all know plenty of people who have experienced none of this, people whose emotional weather appears to be mostly sunny, with only scattered clouds.  People whom we envy.


These are the people that Longfellow is talking about.  Because if you probe deep enough, there is in every human life a secret sorrow that is no less piercing for being hidden.  We will never know what load of unfulfilled longings and devastating defeats other people carry.  We will never glimpse, inside our fellow cocktail-party goers, the weeping child, the cowed teenager, the betrayed spouse.  


No matter what we look like, we are all vessels full of unshed tears.  This should make us feel less alone in our miseries, but also open our hearts to compassion, and disarm hostility.

Bisou, who has no secret history

If I Have To Type Another Password...

...or my e-mail address, or my username, I'm going to give up all electronic means of communication and go back to pen and paper.

I have been trying to leave reviews for a friend's book on the major booksellers' websites, and of course to do that you have to register (invent a password, come up with a username, oops, you're already a member, have you forgotten your password, here, we'll send you an e-mail so you can get a new one, just go to this link and start all over again). Writing a review is nothing compared to all the clicking and making up of names that I instantly forget.

I have been trying to become more active on Facebook--I'm not sure why--and there again have come up with obstacles, such as thumbnails that won't upload (and what am I doing writing phrases like the last one?).

And finally, I have signed up on Twitter, and after many difficulties uploading my profile--caused by Twitter being "overloaded," go figure--am tweeting...which is all, as it turns out, that I have energy for.

Things To Do Before Spring

The Writer Magazine has an on-line column called Web Savvy that I thought I ought to read, but to get access I had to subscribe to the print edition of the magazine. Now I get The Writer every month, and even though I don't find it terribly compelling, I feel obligated to skim it so as not to miss some nugget of writerly wisdom. I should take a look at the January issue before the February one arrives.

And I should make it a practice to read at least one Web Savvy post every day. That's the reason for the subscription in the first place, and it would make me more web literate. Reading a single post every day won't be a big deal.

It was Web Savvy that introduced me to Technorati. I've looked at their site a couple of times, but it's like reading something in a foreign language about concepts from another planet. Still, if I read a little every day, maybe I'll begin to understand it and I'll be able to improve my blog.

Speaking of which, I should also make it a daily practice to check out Problogger, where I learned everything I know about blogging. One thing they recommend over and over is to read other blogs.

Therefore, to the list of blogs that I read because I like them, I should add some blogs about chickens and dogs, since I write about these topics often. And blogs about women's spirituality, too, as well as about simple/frugal/sustainable living. I must keep current on these subjects.

For example, I heard yesterday, on NPR's Speaking of Faith, that the program's website has a blog on the spiritual repercussions of the economic crisis. Can't miss that. Then this morning I heard a feature about Wangari Maathai who got the Nobel Peace prize for encouraging women in Kenya to plant trees. Women, trees, sustainability—what could be closer to my heart? Must find out more. And Julia Alvarez, who lives in Vermont, will be speaking on VPR at noon. Can't forget to listen to her.

Maybe one of these evenings I'll finish the New Yorker article I left open on the coffee table (I think a new issue has arrived since then—I lose count). And I have got to read Nourishing Traditions, the cook-and-nutrition book that, among other things, tells you it's good to eat lots of butter. And speaking of books, it would be fun to read Updike's The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to The Witches. Maybe the library has it.

But I shouldn't be giving in to the lure of the print media. I'm so hopelessly behind on the electronic kind. For instance, I know what a gadget is, on Blogger, but what is a widget? And Facebook. Not a day goes by that someone doesn't sing its praises. I actually have a Facebook page, but I haven't done anything with it. I don't understand the concept. Is the point of Facebook to boil human experience down to a single sentence? And is Twitter (which I have never seen) the ultimate expression of this trend, so that even words are eliminated and expression is reduced to bird song?

I don't know the answer to any of this, but I'd better find out now, while snow is on the ground. Already the sun doesn't set until after five. Before I know it, it will be time to plant the spinach.