Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

In order to kick off Sumthin' Pumpkin' month, here are several pictures of food I have around the house which are not pumpkins. Bell pepper, you are not a pumpkin! Persimmon, you are not a pumpkin! Oh, dear, sweet melon, I'm sorry, hun, but you are not a pumpkin...

I never really went much in for sports, even when I was a kid. I might play a little recess soccer, and I did do both rec league soccer and modern dance, but I wasn't much in for going out for sports. Not wildly competitive, maybe. Recently someone asked me why I work out and I made some lame response like that I need to work out to be healthy and look good. But then, that's not all of it. It's fun to play physically. A hike, playing tennis, kayaking, these are fun. Well, duh, you say, but let me finish--the motion itself is fun. Some people like competitions and games and achievement, and I love these things as much as the next person (I love a box to check off, you know, and Ieven play a running video game on my runs), but motion itself is fun. I remember when I was first learning how to play racket sports like tennis and racquetball how strange it was to make a swinging motion and have my reach so extended. I was hitting around a ball the other day and the sensati...

Well, it's high election season, which means SNL's Weekend Update is slightly more tired (did all of the good political jokes already get drilled for and burned up at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?) and the leader of the free world has to divide his time between ensuring the safety of our embassies and shaking hands with vetted blue collar workers. Do I like this season? *Sigh.* Maybe? Politics is a term that is, like rhetoric, almost always used in a derogatory sense by lay thinkers. There's something down-and-dirty about the idea of having to go out and ask for people's votes, appealing, some say, to the lowest common denominator, that is, when the politicians aren't already appealing to the extremes of their own party during a primary. There's a lot of mucking around with broadly painted stereotypes, isolated incidents being expanded into character insight, hate and fear wielded like bludgeoning batons. It becomes like that old cynical saw about s...

So they say that your cells are constantly being replaced, different cells at different rates, but the schoolyard estimate is roughly every seven years, you are a new person. Which means that on this, the eve of my 28th birthday, I'm am heading into my fifth iteration of Mary. It's a little bit like different Doctors on Dr. Who.  Everyone is different and the same. They have different companions. They have different quirks. Some of them have leather jackets. So what are the Classic Marys? Here's how I see mes. 1) 0-6. Not much to say, but I've seen pictures. Got to be Rapunzel when placing with friends, got all my hair chopped off. Preferred X-Men to G. I. Joe when playing with the boys because who wants to be Scarlet every time? A lot of barefooting it over to the Cowles' and around the neighborhood in general. A little pet of her siblings, except her closet brother, for whom she is probably a pet peeve. I have a handprint I made in preschool somewhere, and ...

I can be freakin' crafty when I need to celebrate an administrative assistant.