Some uncertainty...

 and a digestion that doesn't deal with it well, makes me sad that the consistent thread is another rejection slip. It is not so much that this particular moment is so hideous, as much as my "down deep" is becoming used up and that my hope for a better future feels eroded.

Submitted a sketch about yard sales...and remembered...

 in addition to the fifty words the site wanted...

Nowadays, maybe I’d like to make it seem like I figured out there was a real problem from the people getting excited about equipment at swap meets.  If people believed that, I could out-Lisa Simpson Lisa Simpson in the eyes of my comrades in the health care fight(and considering where I was in the mid-eighties, and that Lisa might well have been nothing but a doodle in Groening’s sketch pad in those days, I could almost pull it off) Except I don’t like myself enough to give myself a halo, and because the real reason I felt deflated by “How much for the wheelchair?” is as revealing as it is shallow.(But, honestly, seeing it so often made the “real problem” thing not hard to figure out either…only as a grown person, I hope I would figure out a better response than my grandma, who saw in others’ crisis, something of a score.)
I used to think that when I sat in a chair like other people sat in—what I might have called a “normal chair” in those days—from about the time I was about ten till about thirteen, normal preoccupied me just as hard as I ignored it all those years before that and thought it seemed like a drag.  But I did think my disability didn’t show on the couch, or on a raft at the pool, or anywhere where the chair wasn’t directly in evidence. Like once someone fought me into shotgun in the pickup truck(another thing I sort of liked to pretend didn’t happen, and maybe a big reason why “Bewitched” was an early-morning rerun favorite.
And, sometimes, people didn’t seem to notice.  Or maybe they found it kinder to make a big deal over my little-girl’s long blonde locks instead. If you know what to look for(my posture’s never been good, and decades of sitting and tight muscles have somewhat conspired to fit my body for a chair more than anything else) it always showed, but where did I get the idea it’d be better if it didn’t? I don’t think anyone really told me that, though I guess I did hear “Such a pretty face,” a lot

Trying Not to Be Disappointed...

 Both the submissions I was so proud about on November 27 have come in as losses.  Which I knew was, you know, the likeliest outcome.  There are a lot of writers, and if changing your life was easy, every schmuck could do it.  The longer I hadn't heard, though, I did start to hope a little more, if not starting to spend the prize money in my head and all those types of things that are fun when you do them, but bittersweet when you think back.

I wish I hadn't used so much "I'll show you," just, you know, getting out of high school and stuff. Because I know that's what conventional wisdom would say I should do...take one of the rejected fragments and keep shopping it. But I have some I've submitted many times, so I'm not sure that that's the best way forward.  Or, I can act like my brain's a big idea tree and try to pick something else.(Which I guess is closest to what I'm doing this morning, but I can't say it's rolling off my back enough that I think that one, currently just one paragraph with a splash of promise, is, I don't know, the REAL winner and stuff.  I wish, but I'm not sure right now.)

A lot of these people that win end up teaching freshman writing and stuff while I sit here for another year, not getting a creative-writing degree.  Which I know a lot of great writers never had anyway...I could be a big deal if I had the time and energy to personally befriend every editor in America[befriend not being a euphemism, I hasten to add} just that people who've met me personally tend to like my work more, too.

It's not so much that I need either of these contests, but I need *something*
Sometimes I wish I could afford the creative writing degree, but if I had thousands more dollars, would I do that with them?

Bohemian Crip Watches Movies: Illusion(2004)

 Wanted to like this one better than I did(even though it might get a note in here for featuring post-stroke Kirk Douglas as sort of Hollywood Ebenezer Scrooge, mixed with the father from Cat's in the Cradle)
These are all concepts that sort of pull on my heartstrings generally, but somehow the films of the son's life without the father, and centered on high-school crush Isabelle as if she might be the last woman on Earth or something failed to convince. One of the few small movies I watched in a while to actually make me pay attention to location and budget limitations.  Mostly, because, in most films fighting about family stuff around a kitchen table, Nancy Meyers aside, doesn't really require an expensive kitchen table, and that's the kind of independent film I watch, mostly.  Since this one was supposed to have movement through time and space in it, I did sort of wish it looked like it in some way I'm still trying to quantify.

 Could a father's advice make that much difference in a young man's love life? I wouldn't know...my dad kind of just hit me with "Men and women can't really be friends," and considered his job done.  Well, until, he had a friend at work, I guess.
I don't think it came together exactly, but people on IMDB seemed to enjoy it much more than I did.

ETA: I edited this...somehow, one of one my sentences got posted without its predicate.I can be sloppy about copy-and-paste but I usually do better than that...just didn't catch my error. D'oh.

One Last Holiday Wish

"Passionate Kisses" lyrics 

Progressives get Our Due, Part 2...

Musical Interlude With Ray Charles 

Because you know we'd get the blame if the Warnock thing hadn't happened, so I will attempt not to let my own fashion-victim Senator steal my joy because she can't stand being out of the spotlight for more than ten minutes at a time.  One day she will drown looking at herself in a puddle, and I will expend my last bit of Sinema-related effort trying not to laugh really hard when it happens.

Just goes to show, adding broken women to a broken body like the Senate does not fix anything in its own right. 

Role models can be nice, but choose carefully, and you probably don't want to copy any one person too closely, even if you do pick one you like for more than a few years at a time.

But it is still really cool that we got someone progressive and devoted to voting rights elected(fully, this time) in a Southern state, and that needs to be said at least once more.

 

One of The Best Documentaries...

 that I've seen so far, especially about crime stuff.

The Witness looks behind what we thought we knew about  Kitty Genovese, her murder and the narrative about city-dwelling apathy that your Bohemian Crip took from journalism school.

There is a disability connection as well, since reaction to the murder led Kitty's young brother Bill to sacrifice his legs in Vietnam.(Watching Bill fight his way through gravel and such, while not the focus on the story, created a uniquely intimate viewing experience because I know how that feels.)