Maybe Plotinus Is Part of Our Problem...

 as disabled people, at least in the ancient philosopher's determination that happiness most lay in a complete split between mind and body.  Your Bohemian Crip has to give him credit for attempting to live up to his convictions, because in looking him up, I found out he allowed no likeness to be made of him in his lifetime. I have always wondered if being disabled would have been easier to cope with if more abled people remembered more about being babies, and therefore, depending on others.(Which would seem to create the civilization of the "Anti-Plotinus"which might create more room for people like me to exist in our full integrity, but maybe, barring that period between eleven and thirteen when I was always So Embarrassed, I've always been a more corporeal person than Dr. Cooper Jones.  Even if I could occasionally take solace in imagining innards lined in white paper that produce nothing more noxious than what's left after a shredding marathon.

I learned a lot from reading Easy Beauty, by Chloe Cooper-Jones and I don't just mean the difference between an academic background in philosophy and taking a few classes in community college from a very sweet guy who wore sandals and never quite clipped his toenails.(See, told you there are limitations from believing the life of the mind and the life of the body aren't, perhaps irrevocably, linked.)

Pleasantly surprised...

 by how much we liked The Young @ Heart documentary. It was lively as well as touching and the song choices were witty.

The chorus in the movierecently celebrated its fortieth anniversary(probably in many cases with a different lineup,)

Apologies for the technical issues. I've edited to include a clip ofsome ladies in the chorus doing "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" as popularized by Aretha Franklin.

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?