Aid Worker Diary

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7802295.stm

Gaza on a Sunday

I'm writing the end of a Young Adut novel, a ghost/mystery/Tarot story. A break from my regular writing. Fun! I'm sitting on my red couch in front of a big window. Every now and then, I google Gaza, to try to find out what's happening. 

Musee des Beaux Arts

~W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

from Gaza

http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com

the deadline

I decide that I want my protagonist's wrapping paper to be designed with some detail from the Fool card in the Tarot. I google Fool card and get an image of the card. I mess around with the image, trying to make the little circles on the fool's shirt bigger. They would make a good design for wrapping paper: circles, with something inside them. But what is inside them? Are those stars? I decide maybe Wikipedia will tell me if they are stars.
But when I google Wikipedia, I see an article saying that the Wikipedia guy's appeal for money has worked. Wikipedia has been raking in donations. I read the reader's comments about the donation article. I get pissed off because some asshole complains about Wikipedia's entry concerning global warming. I start to get my debit card out to make a donation. Wait! First I should write a comment, telling the guy to stop being a jerk. Oh, a lot of people have already done that for me. I read through their comments. Most them agree. Shut up. Wikipedia is cool. We love it. Our kids love it.

Stop! I'm on a deadline. The first draft of the novel needs to be finished by Monday. Four days. My protagonist is still standing in the doorway with her present. I think they are little stars, little stars set inside circles. Just make the wrapping paper yellow and get on with it.

But first I want to go blog about all the things that pull at us, when really we just want to write a little scene.

easy to be mean

I just finished reading Anne Lamott's book about grace. I've resisted reading her  books because everyone I know says they are great and I will love them, and I hate people telling me what I will love. I finished it last night and went to Good Reads to write a little review, now that I am such a big Anne Lamott fan and want to be her best friend, and I was stunned by the shitty reviews people gave her book. Shitty and mean spirited. Yes, it is much easier to be clever and funny when you are being mean. This is not fair, but it is true. It's something we need to understand and to resist.

I was tempted to begin a new blog which would consist only of the most ignorant online book reviews I can find— but I already have one website and THREE blogs (this blog, a library lesson plan blog, and a pit bull blog.) I'm like the character in The Golden Notebook who keeps many notebooks, one for each aspect of herself, until finally she combines all the notebooks into one, the golden notebook, and that means she's integrated. I'm not going to combine my library and dog blogs with this one, but I will include this Good Reads review (by Robin) of Catcher in the Rye. 

"Is there a theme to this book at all? Is there any point to the story?" 

For crying out loud! (My editorial comment.)

Jane Eyre

I just finished reading Jane Eyre. The version illustrated by Dame Darcy. Yes, I have lived all my life and somehow never read Jane Eyre before now. This is what I thought: What a modern character! What contemporary concerns! (except for the part about not being able to divorce the wife, which was hard to fathom) What complex and intelligent writing! My next thought: Are we becoming dumber?

Also, regarding Dame Darcy's occasional illustrations—just a few days ago, Chuck was telling me that books will be replaced by Kindles before we know it. I showed him this book to prove, if he needed proof, that, aside from their function, books are wonderful in their physicality. If that's a word. 

Blanca

Blanca has come to the library almost every morning this week asking for me to give her tag board from the supply room. She is in 3rd grade. Her teacher is new and she must not realize we aren't supposed to give a child tag board every day, but I don't care. Blanca is a girl who always knows what she is doing. One day she needed it for picture she wanted to draw. The second day it was Saul's birthday and she wanted to make a birthday card. On the third day, she asked me if I had heard about the woman at Winco who got arrested because she didn't have her papers. Blanca needed tag board to make a sign. I asked what she was going to write on her sign, and she said, Stop discrimination, or something like that.

close but not quite

Today in the library, a 3rd grade boy named Brock Green was having an argument with some of the other boys. He was saying that Barrack Obama's name is Brock Obama, but the other boys were saying, No.

drown them in a bathtub

We are happy, happy, happy about Obama. We can hardly believe it's true. We are not used to an election that allows our side to win. Are those neo-cons small enough yet to be drowned in a bathtub? 

my swarthy ethnic niece

My niece showed me a blog in which someone accuses her of being a "Swarthy Ethnic." She is pretending to be white, the blogger says. He includes the photograph above,  my niece in an ad for Powell's Books, saying,  "Note above, at first you see the long blond tresses and think Swedish Girl! Nope! look closer, she is olive skinned, brown-eyed and belongs to the new group of Fake Blonds. It is not an accident Powell's has a hispanic or polynesian with fake blond hair on the front page. I find it interesting that as White people are shut out by the Media and Corporate American, the Swarthy Ethnics have co-opted our exclusive hair color of blond." 

Brother! My niece is a blue-eyed pale-skinned German/Irish and, yes, Swedish girl. Although, really: so what?

perfect: the enemy of the good

I got this in my email today, from the "no war" listserv, "Granted, Obama has far more charisma- but so did Ted Bundy! Oregon is a true-blue state, therefore safe to vote your ideals. Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader are both on the ballot."

As if my ideals are ego-mania and self-defeating political correctness.

why do we know more than those guys?

Greenspan said he is shocked by the current financial crisis. Hey, Chuck predicted it a few years ago. What's up with that?

PS We also knew there were no weapons of mass destruction.

humanizing evil

We went to see W. Okay, so I don't buy all the Oedipal stuff and, yes, Thom Hartmann, they left out the stolen election part, but a great movie anyway, in my humble opinion. Thank you again, Oliver Stone. 

literary merit

I’m reading the five Oregon Book Award nominees before the winner is announced next month. The books are judged according to “literary merit.” That is the sole criteria. But what does it mean? Which has more literary merit: a book with finely crafted sentences, rich sensual detail, carefully drawn characters---or a more simply told story with a strong narrative thrust, a compelling voice, characters, who despite being sparsely drawn, are complete and full?  I don't see how anyone can tell. 

do a google search

I've been watching newscasts of McCain rallies. People are saying that Obama is a terrorist. Whatever that means. He is Muslim. He is an Arab. Who are these people? Don't they know how to find information? Don't they know how to do a Google search?

Britney Spears of politics

My daughter says that Palin is the Britney Spears of politics, the train wreck that people can't stop watching.

might as well be a Moonie

Last week I ate lunch in the staff room with the teachers, and one of them said she just loved the way Sarah Palin’s eyes sparkled. They are torturing people. They are holding innocent people in solitary confinement for years at a time, driving them mad. Tell me you are a Republican and you might as well say you are Pinochet. You might as well be a Moonie, as far as I’m concerned.

not the Mormon girls' fault

I could hardly look at the Mormon girls, when they came to my door on their Mission. I know they will vote for John McCain because, even if he ditched his wife for a younger model, had an affair with a beer heiress, and another affair with a lobbyist, he is the Christian vote, the moral, family values vote, and that’s what they want, these earnest girls at my door with the Book of Mormon in their hands. I know it’s not right to blame them for 100,000 Iraqis dead, for water boarding, for the end of our democracy, the destruction of our natural world, the extinction of polar bears, wolves being shot from helicopters, people abandoned and dead in New Orleans, thousands of dead American soldiers, the wedding party massacres in Afghanistan and all the rest of it. My daughter says it’s not their fault.

Sarah Palin

McCain during Katrina

don't let him fool you now.