she really IS devine!

Everyone's favorite Betsy Devine was interviewed by that Barbara Walters of Blogland, Frank Paynter, and the interview is here..

And as a side route on the road to enjoyment, and thanks to Dave, King of All That Is Blog (D,KOATIB), Betsy's DAUGHTER is now blogging from the netherregions of Harvard. Check out her blog--this woman child inherrited her mother's genes for wit and writing.

Seriousity!

I was saddened to see that it took frank FOUR questions before he asked Betsy anything sexual in nature. Frank, you've got to get back into practice. Remember, you act all innocent in question ONE and then throw the sex stuff in question TWO. I think you need to do a few more interviews to get back into shape over there at Sexhill Trek or whatever you call that joint, Paynter.

But seriously, great job, and fantastic interview with a gem of a subject. I admire Betsy to the eyebrows, even if she didn't like Locke's battered women recipe--something we riffed on during a phone call when he was making battered chicken or some such breaded dinner--and especially since Ms. Devine was thrown out of her first prep school, the Mary C. Wheeler School of Providence, RI, the year I was born. I'm more proud than ever of my birth year.

Rock on.

Growing Up Blog

Jenna was playing with her cymbals last night that Uncle Gary Turner and family sent her for her fifth birthday.

She's turning them over, looking at them top and bottom, and then she asks me:

"Who got these cymbals for me again?"

I said, "Gary Turner, honey." She must have remembered me telling her a year ago that Gary lives in England. Because she says:

"Mom, Is he the king of England?"

I'm smiling.

"Well, no. Not really. He's a blogger."

"Oh. Well, does he wear a crown?"

"I think sometimes," I say.


LONG LIVE THE KING!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GEORGE!

two minutes to mid-night and a post to wish George a happy June 14th birthday. Hey, honey, I skinned your blog for your present. There wasn't any other way to fix it. Hope you like your new look. Have a happy....

calling all template experts

if anyone can figure out what happened to george's blog, can you let us know how to fix it? Neither he nor I fooled with the template, yet somehow it's turned into a four-column free for all. huh? It was moved to the new blogger interface... but it had been working okay.

stumped,
-jeneane

The Jupiter Biz Blogging Event Group Photo: What Blogging Means for Business

[Actually I lifted it from Neik, who has an interesting take on why this bizblogconferenceblogging stuff is annoying some of us.]

I, on the other hand, am here pondering how there could be so very many very white people in Barcelona.

back to that

Against my better judgment, I go back to this, and point you to this new article, which declares Ethiopians are our shared ancestors. The writing is all over the place, and evolutionary scientists can't even agree on what it means, but I liked two quotes.

This one: We can conclusively say that Neanderthals had nothing to do with modern humans. - Dr. Berhane Asfaw, a co-leader of the discovery team from the Rift Valley Research in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

And this one: "The team concluded, 'In this sense, we are all African.'"

Wait til I run down the Quick Trip and tell Bubba!

Anything But

Over on David's blog Marc Canter gallops in and agrees with my not-so-casual jab at the Jupiter business-n-blogging event, where anyblogger who's anyblogger is speaking, real-time conference blogging, blogging about bloggers blogging, and thank goodness for Halley, at least, looking up a cheesecake recipe or two.

If Halley only knew that Victoria Secret's annual sale is on and that all the good stuff is going fast, I think she'd probably skip out of the Jupiter biz-blogorgy and get to where the real action is.

No. Seriously. It's like this. What the best teachers of writing tell you--and I did have some of the best under Leslie Fiedler at UB--is this simple secret: Don't take writing or English classes to learn how to write. Take philosophy, take history, take music, take anything but. It is the context that surrounds your voice that informs what you say.

So too with blogging. Don't paint it as a discipline. Don't cloak it in a methodology, Don't sully it with law. Live and grow, be bold enough to say what you see, and powerful blogging will follow. And if it doesn't follow us into business, then all the better. Because business will have to rearrange its context to keep up.

So be careful there, Jupiter gang. I love you all, but you're giving me a grand ulcer.

Unblogging the Boston Jupiter Blogging Conference OR meta meta meta meta blogging

First, there is something really creepy about a boatload of bloggers blogging a blogging conference.

I wonder why it feels like I just flipped top down with my feet on the ceiling all over again?

To say a blog is a proxy self would demand that you show yourself, non?

Those unsettling old corporate worries come to mind when I think of all that blogging intellectual captial in one place. What if something happened? PLEASE, Jupiter blog conference speakers and attendees, for the LOVE of GOD, take SEPARATE cabs home, SEPARATE flights home. Don't stay in the same HOTELS. We could lose everything we've built up in one fell swoop!

Anyone know where the restroom is?

I signed up for the distance learning panel called, "Stop talking about blogging and blog."

It is right after the session called, "You see me, but I don't see you."

I think I'm losing my mind.

I think two classes of bloggers will emerge: those who show themselves and those who replicate old media traditions, including conferences about disciplines that don't really have any discipline.

I think I know which type will make money.

I think I know which type will make art.

I think I know I better keep a day job.

Oh fuck, I forgot I don't have one.

Can someone pass me a Diet Coke?

Where the hell IS the bathroom in this place?

Nina June

When I was born, my father said, let's name her Nina June, the "I" in Nina being a long I, not a short i.

NineofJune, Nina June, that was my father's sense of humor. Quiet and stealth, and when he'd slide one in to home plate, he caught everyone off guard. My brother inherited that ability. He doesn't say much, but when he pipes up with the wisecrack, it's always the one thing you wouldn't have thought of. That rare breed of sense of humor represents an uncanny way of connecting with people--humor improvisation. Read the moment, interpret it back, surprise them all.

So I wasn't named Nina June, but I was named Jeneane, which is close enough to June 9 in its own right to have made my father happy.

I have always loved my name.

All during my school years, the Heathers and Susans and Allisons in my gang of friends hated their names. "I hate my name!" It was the cliche teenage suburban complaint. Too few other worries. One's name is easy fodder for self loathing. Or drama.

I would always announce back proudly, "I love my name." Maybe that's because I know the story of my naming, that I was almost Nina June, that they let my sister have the honor of spelling "Jeneane," and that she was nine, learning "the first vowel talks and the second vowel walks," which explains her choice of the "ea" in the middle. There aren't many of us. Maybe that's why I like my name.

Maybe it's because I could have been Nina June.

Maybe it's because I still miss my daddy.

Now for what will be another year of my life. This year will be my 35th year without him. It's hard to face your own mortality at six because your father had to face his. Each year it gets a little harder. I've been on borrowed time for a lot of years--at least on the clock I've kept for myself.

It made so much more sense a year, a decade, afterward. With each year I lose more of his face, his voice, his touch, his music, his smile. Now when they come, they surprise me. Except for Nina June.

Nina June is always with me.

Hi Carly...

wish we were there.

skin deep

It isn't in the mirror
that she sees the real damage
No, it's in touching wounds
full flesh giving in to kind hands
that aren't her own

she learned what beauty was
society smart class and manners
affected accents and false language
it is the thing writers are made of
this burrowing into the space between
what they say
and who they are.
The middle is where
stories are made.

How could she know
her beauty wasn't her own.
clarity of message unspoken
this isn't your place
it's mine,
my echo.

the roles we play
take their toll in self.
we meet the world with
a layer of cheesy white
protecting delicate skin.

We spend the rest of our days
raw.

wooden world

each day she awoke
a carpenter
hammering nails into
thin boards
building a world by herself
measure twice, cut once
splashing technicolor
paint onto flaws and knots
show me show the world
that nothing is wrong.

A mirage built for one
but you helped too.

It is in the best interest
of love 101 to keep things
as they aren't.

It takes tremendous care
work, cobbling, coloring
mostly imagination
splitting what is from what
should be.

It's never simple
except in pieces
one board at a time
keep your head down
square the edges
some glue here
some screws there
it is amazing what pain
will build
to protect itself.

when her world was finished
she marveled at its beauty
while underneath
splinters and blood
told the real story
slicing and bleeding
terror and peeling

nothing she made
was built to last.

grieving

it's not that it snuck up on me
like the stairway climb to my father's room
me with a brown paper sack of get well cards
made by the delicate hands of children
him dead.

It's not like that, grief.
you feel it coming
or I have at least
two, three days
up then down wondering
why I feel this way
knowing what I don't know

it eases down
not like terror
not like being jolted from sleep
not like the burning in your chest
before your heart shatters
not like nails dug into the
dirty ash tray on the side door
of the Buick, bearing your weight
hard away from the center line
pressing your 12-year-old feet
on imaginary brakes from
the back seat.

Grief is not like that.

It isn't the warm explosion
that starts in your thighs and
climbs to your cheeks,
dry mouth, clenched hands
immobile. That is still terror.

Grief isn't still; it moves,
finally.

in case that didn't make any sense...

I'm taking a few days off from the blog universe. But I will be writing.

Let me end the week with this. I had a really good therapy session today, if good is defined by hitting on hard things about what was real instead of what was neatly packaged and protected by me from a very early age and with good reason--reasons I'm not supposed to be angry at myself for. Okay. I can try that. I'm wiped though. I feel like my nerve endings are protruding through my scalp, but my body feels tired and slow. I wish I could sleep, but I have to go pick up energetic jenna. It's a feeling not unlike whiplash to go from therapy to jenna.

Mostly today I am amazed at people who can keep their heads above water with the freelance life. I have learned a fundamental truth: In general, it takes forever to get paid. Way longer than the cash in your bank account lasts. Is this one of Murphy's Laws?

I'm depressed today, but not in a bad way. In a good way. In a way that tells me it's good to be still. It's good to sit with this. Good to feel it. It's not going to kill me. It's not the terror i'm used to. It's something even bigger than that. It has to be, since whatever it's called has trumped my panic. And nothing has ever done that.

Maybe it's saying goodbye to a bastard of a 40th year. One I never saw coming.

One I wouldn't trade for anything.

I can't believe I'm saying that.

Who have I become?

me?

in my 40th year

I haven't been paying as much time to dates lately as I have to deadlines and creditor due dates. So when I noticed it was June 4th, I was mildly surprised. When I realized that it is precisely five days until my 41st birthday, I was, for some reason, leveled. Meaning I crashed. Came down. Time out. WTF. That kind of thing.

It isn't, this mood I'm in, specifically about no longer being 40, but instead being "in my 40s"; it's more about what a hard year it's been for me. This 40th year, rites of passage that have to come sometime. "Who me? I've been blogging since I was in my 30s!" I can say that. Hooopty doo.

When I run up against my face in the mirror--facing myself--I often run up against my blog too. Echos and mirrors--that's what's here.

Driving back from dropping Jenna at her summer camp, I was lost in thought. About another year passing. About who I am and who I'm not. About how since I started blogging--writing out loud--my world turned upside down. I thought about being at the tail end of a generation who can remember life before the personal computer, before the Internet mattered, before global conversation, when the real world was the only world, and the only way out of it was through books, music, movies.

I tried to name my feeling. Nostalgia? No, it's not exactly that. At least I don't think so. But maybe. And maybe not. With nostalgia, I think, comes a yearning for what was. I don't yearn for the real-world-as-only-world. It's not that I would have our loosely-joined pieces disappear. Nor wish that they had never emerged at all. But there is something to my day of discontent that I think I need to acquaint myself with, and I don't think I can do that, not today, not the next few days, here. I need some time to remember who I am becoming. I need to think backwards and forwards without writing myself in either or both directions. I need to be still.

I know more things about myself as my birthday approaches than, I think, at any other anniversary in my life. About the world, about people, I'm still not sure.

In discussing the theories behind evolution the other day, voicing my thoughts on how I don't believe in the notion--change yes, "evolution" as symantics that would have us believed we are decendents of ameobas and monkeys, no. Where once I might have felt unsure or timid in my stance, this time I wasn't. The more I see of humanity in this world we're building here, the more I know. The human heart. Accept no substitutes.

I've never heard anyone voice words around the opinion I formed years ago that evolution--the monkey kind--was spawned and is used most often to give credence to the argument that the white Ayrian race is superior and more highly-evolved than any other. That the proposition that our evolving from tree-swinging monkeys to stooped over monkey-men to complex human beings doesn't wash with me. Agreeing with creationists that civilization and the birth of humanity started in virtually the same area, evolutionists -- at least those I read growing up -- would also have me believe that "primitive man" just evolved his way along until, finally, he got smart and got out of the caves, then got out of Africa, where he left his less-highly-evolved kin. Then the great migration. Then whitey. Puh-lease.

So today, in thinking about my own personal evolution/revolution/stinking-traumatic-development, I flashed on the "big bang" and the development of flesh and consciousness as it relates to the Internet, which, if things progress as they are, will become more and more of an alternate world for all of us. Simultaneous and alternate. A separate but equal dimension.

How did we get here, to this place we co-habitate online? Was it change and growth, or would you call it evolution. I bet some will. And I fear the scientific connotations of that word could follow us here. If we let it. Would you define the beginnings of our online universe as a big bang? Did we crawl up out of the swamp of unintelligible beings, technical cave men evolved into a separate but related species, we people of the net? Hmmmm. I smell a missing hyperlink.

Yah, it's like that.

Let there be heart.

And so it was.

Things fix themselves.

I'd like to say our embeded houshold telematics kicked in and water was re-directed through other pipes, restoring water pressure to its normal strength. But the truth is, things fixed themselves. Whatever it was that made the thud thud and cut the pressure must have repaired itself. At least, I sure hope so!

In other news, I continue to be amazed at the friendships our daughter is developing. One friend leads to two, then three, kind of like blogging and blogrolls, every realword human interaction has the capacity to connect outward.

I think there's something for me to learn in all of this.

thud-thud-thud-thump-thump-thump-thump

Calling all plumbers.

Sound asleep I was when I was rattled awake by a not-too-good sound coming from the bedroom floor midway between the bathroom and the bed. At least that's where it sounded like it was coming from when I jumped up ready to kick some nighttime intruder in the balls. I wandered the house carefully, thinking maybe one of the dogs had been scratching him or herself against the sliding glass door below. It was that kind of velocity, like when a dog scratches, but way too loud I knew.

I turned on the water, used the bathroom. Water pressure seems to be cut by 3/4 its usual power throughout the house.

Checked the basement--no water pouring or leaking from anyplace. All is quiet now. But water pressure is in a sorry sorry state.

Ideas?

Little Girls and Fits

It has to be universal. Those scratching slashing fits little girls have. I told Jenna to go to her room after five minutes of her not listening and generally going out of her mind. Every time she fights me all the way to her room. I remember being sent to my room and hightailing my behind to my room at light speed. Home free. But not her. "NO! NO WAY! NOT EVER!" she screams as she runs and slithers, and finally when caught, strikes and scratches, until a fit of magnificent proportions blossoms at the foot of the stairs. It takes me dragging her there, kicking and screaming and biting. All I'm trying to do is to direct her anger to one place in the house where she can work it out while she leaves ME the heck alone.

So this time, I finally get her into her room, and she slams the door with a force no one but her father would believe. So hard, in fact, that the door buckles and the bottom half of the door is sticking out toward me while the top half is where it belongs inside the door frame.

"HELP! HELP"

Suddenly she needs me because she's gotten herself in quite a predicament. Essentially, she's locked herself in her room, and no amount of budging by her or me is moving the door. I take the opportunity to go get a glass of water, and wonder if either of the two ways I feel is right: 1) Ha ha. Now maybe she'll learn. 2) Holy shit I'm going to have to call the fire department to get her out of there.

I wait. Tell her through the door that she is GROUNDED for this one. No sleep over. No bike. And this time, I'm really really sticking to it. And this time, she seemed to know it.

It took a few minutes but I managed to jiggle her door so that the bottom popped back into the frame, and I was able to open the door and see her sad-sack face, "I'M SORRY MAMA! I'M SORRY."

"There are consequences," I tell her. "Yours are that you're grounded. No sleep over. No bike."

Five year old girls and fits.

JEESH!!!

George on Jaco

A nice article by George on a new article-blog-we'll-see-what-happens blogsite called The Low End. Good reading for any bass fan, and photos of George with Jaco Pastorius and Mike Stern from the 1980s that haven't been published before. Enjoy!

shower song

I was taking a shower an hour ago and found myself singing my own rendition of "The Wheels on the Bus."

Join me, won't you?

the voices in my head go round and round
round and round
round and round
the voices in my head go round and round
all day long

the voices in my head go swish swish swish
swish swish swish
swish swish swish
the voices in my head go swish swish swish
all day long

the voices in my head go chatter chatter chatter
chatter chatter chatter
chatter chatter chatter
the voices in my head go chatter chatter chatter
all day long

the voices in my head go wah wah wah
wah wah wah
wah wah wah
the voices in my head go wah wah wah
all day long

the voices in my head go shhh shhh shhh
shhh shhh shhh
shhh shhh shhh
the voices in my head go shhh shhh shhh
all day long

alllll dayyyyy loooooonnnnnggggggg.