By:
On:
In: Generational Divide, Technoculture
Tagged: , , , ,

I’m a paper pile person, and although I have an abiding obsession with time management systems, I always felt inspired to let the paper dragon frolic. Now I’m drowning in data and trapped in its undertow. As people around me sign up for various cults of productivity apps, I find myself overwhelmed by choosing which cult to join. The whole thing makes me throw my hands up in the air, which defeats the purpose of organization systems in the first place. After letting the elephant of Evernote, the blue box of Dropbox, and every other eye-candy logo capture my attention, I’ve opted for the simplestRead More →

By:
On:
In: This is my life?
Tagged:

I spent my high school years in a small Texas town named Splendora. Splendora, Texas. You have to say the name that way when referring to a small town in Texas. The whole thing, town and state. Humble, Texas. Conroe, Texas. I don’t know why, you just have to. Moving to Texas from New York City was traumatic. For a myriad of reasons, I never fit in. No need to go into that now. I’m sure you can imagine. From then on, that hybridity stayed with me. Here is one tale that encapsulates the quality of daily life in Splendora. I rarely cut classes. MostlyRead More →

By:
On:
In: All Things Feminist, Pop Culture
Tagged: , , , ,

I have always loved kd lang. I liked her country-punk performance-art style back from Angel with a Lariat. She caught my eye in the 80s with her spiky hair, Buddy Holly glasses, and country-western wear; she was a genre-bending artist as much as a gender-bending one. Somewhere in my Texas life, where I was raised by a family of genuwine wannabe cowboy poets, I developed a secret, half-assed appreciation for the older fiddle-and-banjo country sound. Probably at the roller rink. I didn’t pay much attention to Lang’s music until Shadowland, though. I played the heck out of that CD because it harkened back to aRead More →

By:
On:
In: Politics, Race and Racism
Tagged: , , , ,

ColorOfChange.org is sponsoring a successful boycott of Fox New’s Glenn Beck. I read AOL’s “Politics Daily” blog on occasion. The audience is heavily conservative, so the comments are vitriolic, vituperative, and vigorous (I needed another v-word for balance). They make me point-laugh. Yesterday, Carl Cannon wrote some stupid BS about the boycott, claiming that it’s censorship and not good citizenship. Well, after reading pages of comments, I got totally frustrated and I actually posted a comment. I suppose it’s just a means of blowing off steam. It’s buried 5,000 comments in, so I doubt a soul will read it. But it was fun and itRead More →

By:
On:
In: This is my life?
Tagged:

My Texas hometown, Splendora, is actually in Wikipedia. I don’t know what made me look, but I was quite shocked when I found it!

By:
On:
In: This is my life?
Tagged:

In ruminating on my college days, I had a flash of thought about people I barely and briefly encountered during the drunken haze at UT. They were charismatic enough to remember after all these years. 1. Paul Begala. Yes, “I knew him when.” Meaning, I met him. Back then there was no student government. The reason is a complicated story not worth repeating. Paul Begala worked tirelessly to get student government renewed on campus, a campaign that I worked on by collecting signatures. Big whoop. Then, of course, he ran for president. Wikipedia succinctly explains. Here’s the lazy, cut and paste version: While at theRead More →

By:
On:
In: Politics
Tagged: , ,

From a forwarded email about voting fraud in Austin: Yesterday a friend voted early at a polling location in Austin. She voted straight Democratic. When she did the final check, lo and behold every vote was for the Democratic candidates except that it showed she had voted for Bush/Cheney for president/vice pres. She immediately got a poll official. On her vote, it was corrected. She called the Travis County Democratic headquarters. They took all her information, and told her that she wasn’t the first to report a similar incident and that they are looking into it. So check before you leave the polling booth, andRead More →

By:
On:
In: Fun Facts
Tagged: , ,

It’s PEACH SEASON. A long time ago (1982 to be precise), I saw The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball,” which had a hysterical standup comic doing a spiel on “1001 things to do with cling peaches.” I remember laughing so hard that I spewed my coke. We’ve been bringing home peaches and nectarines and they are wonderful. July is the peak harvesting season for peaches and nectarines. What’s the difference between peaches and nectarines? The obvious difference is the skin: peaches are fuzzy and nectarines are smooth. Then there’s the size: peaches are smaller. Somewhere in my crazy life I heard that nectarines were peaches bred with tangerines toRead More →