We are not a gang, we are a club..

"We are not a gang, we are a club.." so said some character on a 70's TV show, the name of which I've forgotten.

I hear I'm the member of a gang, crew, clique, posse, called the Clean-up Crew. I'm disappointed, they could have come up with something better. Let's face it, batting clean-up is the best position, you get the base runners in. I like that, I think I'll embrace it.

I won't tell you who the other members are since we are secret society, with blood initiation, the car coat, the whole deal, but I will say I'm proud to be associated with them.

I think that those that bestowed us with our name must view us as something like this photo,

cool.

I'm a bad girl.

Oh and a free e-margarita for the first person who identifies the above photo.

Darkness Retreats

Today marks the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Over the past few days there has been no light here, cloudy, foggy, and raining, it is as it should be.

Somehow these dark days feel right. Tomorrow things will be different. The day will be longer than today, and each one after longer than before. Eventually things will grow again.

I welcome the short days as a time to slow down, as much of a hibernation as the modern world will allow. As others scurry about, preparing for the holidays, in what seems an effort to banish these days, I try to embrace them. I have always felt that one has the embrace the dark as well as the light.

One must pay homage to the dark in order to keep it from growing wildly as a neglected garden will. To keep the pansies and sweet potato vine from overgrowing the magnolia and asters, they must have attention. They must be cultivated, watered, fed, and yes, trained. Ultimately the dark complimenting the light, each making the other more beautiful.

Now things will change, I will look to the light. Through the bright winter days when the sun shines so intensely on the bare ground reminding me the corner is turned and brightness is returning. Through the first days of warmth when things struggle up through the soil only to be cruelly reduced to brown again by the brief return of cold.

It is from down on, I do know that the darkness will end, for a little while.

Competitive

My a-mom and I were recently discussing my sister's one-and-a-half-year-old son. A-mom had been to visit them and was so proud, and she should be, he's a beautiful, bright child. But she wasn't going on about his pretty blond hair, his bright eyes, or his mostly sunny disposition.

She was proud because she had seen him take a toy away from his cousin. That meant that he was competitive. This was the best thing ever.

Competitiveness has always been stressed above all things in my a-family. I came from a family of girls and we were expected to compete in sports, but oddly not in academics. When the school started a gifted program, my sister was removed because their "little projects" got in the way of sports training. The fact that this might keep her out of better colleges was not taken into consideration, as she wouldn't be allowed to play basketball at a major school. She was groomed to attend a community college where she could make the team. Nothing else mattered.

Early in life I was categorized as "not competitive enough" so nothing I did would ever measure up to the pride my a-parents felt seeing my sisters on the athletic field.

The odd thing is, I was competitive, and continue to be. I have a case full of racing trophies, a few appearances in national car magazines, a box full of ribbons and various accolades for my art, a quite a few published articles on a variety of subjects and fiction. None of this means a thing.

I continue to be competitive as my sisters do not. Neither have gone on to use these skills in business or life. The lessons they learned on those fields did not translate into their lives My continued competitiveness also bothers my a-parents.

They will not watch me race, they do not understand why I maintain a studio, they do not care to read what I write. They think I should "get serious about life".

What that means, I have no idea. I cannot just quit and go to the mall and hang around the country club. I'm too competitive.

Bite this

As most who read this are aware, there was the Pizza Hut dust up. For those that aren't Pizza Hut through a website that offered "bites" for adoption managing to piss off almost everyone who had any connection to adoption. While being able to get every member of the plane to agree on anything comes close to being a miracle, the website disappearing so quickly almost made it a non-event.

The one thing I'm left wondering about is the page on that site that featured "adoptive parents" pictures with their bites. I assume they were not for real. But, if someone was lame enough to send in a picture of themselves posing with a greasy bit of snackfood, I do wonder how they were effected by all this.

Do they feel that their rights as adoptive parents have been infringed upon? Do they feel that those of us touched by human adoption have taken away a true source of joy? Have they lost their bites, or do they continue to parent without the support of the internet? Do they feel we just don't understand "their story"?

There just isn't any way to tell.

All in all, I think this is probably a good thing.

Failure To Communicate

"What we have here is failure to communicate.."

The line delivered by Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke. I've had occasion to borrow this line in my message board crawls. The sad thing s, people take it for face value. That line wasn't delivered at face value, Captain knew that there was no misunderstanding, just as I do.

I don't use this line for the confused or obtuse poster. I don't post it to plead for understanding or as comic relief. I use it to point out that someone is not failing to understand a point, but refusing to.

Just as there was no doubt that Strother Martin, Paul Newman, and even George Kennedy were very well aware of the point being made, they all knew somebody was going into the box, as the poster knows that they belong there.

The subject matter being discussed seems to have little bearing on this phenomena, I've seen it happen arguing the merits of Van Halen albums and abortion, milkshakes and religion. The only common thread seems to be some personal dislike between posters, usually over anther earlier discussion.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this form of defense doesn't work, it does. The rational poster is usually either wore down or or just quits out of sheer boredom. The non-misunderstander then clams victory.

It's an empty victory, if you ask me.