[Warning: talk of suicide and eating-disordered thinking]

I used to have a bag of eggshells under my sink. Rinsed out, but still. Eggshells. And along with them, a bag of used coffee grounds. I got the idea from a woman I was in a writing group with, who was also the mother of a guy I used to date. Apparently, these two things did wonders for her garden. Coffee grounds are pretty widely known as being good for gardens, and the eggshells apparently provided a specific corrective to a local soil condition.

There was just one problem with this. I didn't have a garden. I had good intentions that I was going to start one next year, but I didn't actually have a garden. I was really saving trash to keep from throwing it in the trash, like I did when I was in my second year of college and saved all the plastics that were "recyclable" at my parents' house but not at college. I usually had a dresser drawer or two full of plastic bottles and yogurt cups and such every time they came to visit. This was probably around the same time as my brief stint as a vegetarian, which had as much to do with saving the environment as it did with the simple fact that the Mary Baldwin College cafeteria could not cook meat. (It was so bad that my dad, as a prank, posted a Roadkill Cafe poster in the lobby one day.)

It's hard sometimes not to save trash. I can still use it! I can still fix it! There's something good to do with it, and I don't want to be wasteful, I don't want it just to end up in a landfill. I want to be a good global citizen and do the right thing and...

And.

And this was a good way to drive myself completely crazy, because no good is ever good enough in the rat race that is ostentatious simplicity. And it doesn't help, because my own personal flavor of brainweasels could always find a way to one-up whatever the latest advice in that regard was. Until I encountered the Church of Euthanasia and its doctrine of Save the Planet, Kill Yourself!

Not the best thing for a bright and slightly mentally "off" queer sixteen year old girl with a lot of inner conflict about being queer and a tendency to overthink everything to encounter. Really it's not.

Then I lost someone to suicide and decided that voluntary human extinction wasn't the way to go after all. Which is the first step, of course.

The rest of it is a lot harder to get over. It was a matter of considerable guilt to decide to buy a house somewhere that isn't even theoretical walking-distance from work. And there's that part of me that is still half-convinced that I should be limited to 1000 vegan, locally-grown calories until I am an "acceptable" weight, at which point I can maybe splurge at 1500 such calories, and that if I do otherwise I am contributing to destroying the world. (Never mind that I cannot eat that way and have the physical or mental energy to do ANYTHING ELSE at an acceptable level. Brainweasels don't care.) And all of my clothes should be secondhand, except for underwear and socks which should be fair trade sustainably-grown organic cotton. And my only "cosmetics" should be Castile soap and baking soda in lieu of toothpaste.

I think I've only really gotten over this in the last year or so. Yes, I'm a fucking sell-out. It's kind of funny, because I "blame" social work school for that change, even though I know some people change in the exact opposite direction.

Maybe it's just that I've gotten a lot more pragmatic, but I've noticed a few things:

1) Self-care is important, and those of us who are juggling a mostly-full-time job with internship and classes and family responsibilities, and who spend significant time on the road to one or more of those things, often have to lower our lofty standards to do an adequate job of self-care. If that means that your veggies for the day are in the can of Progresso soup that was lunch and fruit was the fruit & walnut salad from McDonald's that you enjoyed with your spouse while your kids ran amok in the PlayPlace, so be it. They don't HAVE to be fresh organic blueberries and hydroponic baby field greens. LIFE GOES ON.

2) There is this bizarre bubble-world that a lot of people still seem to be in, and that I know I spent a lot of time at least on the edges of, where apparently, "Anyone can do this!" means ignoring one of a number of meaningful practicalities. I just got in a bit of an argument over the "wastefulness" of K-cups, in utter frustration at my memory of a friend at the Independent Living Center where I do my internship, who was happy to be able to safely make her own damn coffee, which she then had to drink through a straw because her particular disabilities made it difficult and dangerous to try to raise a cup to her mouth and drink from it that way. And another on the subject of how "anyone" can quickly and easily cook a simple whole-foods diet, assuming a well-stocked kitchen that probably took serious cash to set up in the first place (but we'll ignore that last part LALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALA).

3) Sometimes a solution that "should be" possible isn't for psychological reasons - and that's OK, too. My version of that has become plain mainstream-brand shampoo and conditioner, which has Evil Science Chemicals in it, but which my particular combination of physical attributes and mental cues seems to require to feel that I have "clean" hair - and I have a personal association of unwashed hair with pretty bad depression, so it's worth it. I used to buy the fancier stuff from a company that had a better image as being environmentally friendly, but then they reformulated in such a way that I could NOT get my hair to feel clean enough no matter how much I used or how often I washed it. I gave up after about a week and went back to Suave, which I hadn't used in at least the last DECADE. Happier hair, happier Cheshire. Sometimes it's like that.

4) All saving stuff that I won't really use from the landfill does is bring the landfill into my house. I don't WANT that. Wait - it does one more thing! It makes me feel guilty that I'm not doing whatever I saved the stuff to do. Clothes that fit me 50 pounds ago make me feel guilty when I eat. Stuff "I can fix" makes me feel guilty that I haven't fixed it or don't actually know how to fix it. Eggshells for a garden? Make me feel guilty that there isn't a garden, with a side dish of feeling guilty about my lack of 1000 calorie vegan locally-grown diet.

5) I believe in meeting people where they're at. I'm learning to apply that to meeting myself where I'm at, not where I think I should be. Because it's never good enough. And then we're back to "Save the planet, kill yourself" aren't we?

baxaphobia wrote the life story of a service dog, from the dog's perspective.

Go read it, and I advise having tissues handy when you do.

Once upon a time, I knew how the story was supposed to go.

After all, I was a good girl. Really. I was. I got As and Bs in school, and I played volleyball and softball, and I sang in the school choir and even in the choir at the church I was more interested in going to than anyone else in my family. I had so much potential, I was sure to do well! I'd get into a "good college" and I'd do well there once I figured out what I wanted to be (something to do with science?), and maybe I'd meet someone nice there and we'd get married after we graduated. And then buy a house and have kids and all that stuff that you do.

The American Dream, right?

And then life interfered in the form of an oversexed overentitled jackass, who had nonetheless so thoroughly charmed the pants off of my mother that I was nothing to her in comparison. And I thought that the most I'd ever see of a "good college" was the dorm room floors I crashed on for a few weeks, and the parties that friends-of-friends of someone's older sister took me to. I'm glad the horror stories I'd heard about girls at parties never happened to me, but that was probably pure dumb luck, there.

So what? Maybe I'd write a story about it all someday. Once I figured out where and how I was going to have a safe place to sleep and food to eat, let alone a way to write.

And then the story changed again. I was just another out of control knocked-up teenager, who would have to give up all her dreams because she wasn't "careful". Just another cautionary tale. Just another troubled youth in need of services. Except not. Because, you know, getting kicked out by my mother had a lot more to do with the situation than being pregnant did - and I was still a virgin when I got kicked out.

So that was how it was, but then we managed to make a life of sorts for ourselves. And the story became one of how a couple of mistreated kids somehow managed to beat the odds and pull themselves up by their own damn bootstraps, thank you very much....

But we never did it on our own. We had each other, and that was the most important part. We had John and Elaine, our old boss and his wife, who set us up with a place to stay and took the best care of us that they could. And we had all the people who managed to see something worthwhile in us and believe that we were worth giving a chance to. That's not for nothing.

And we even had - horrors! - government assistance. Never "real welfare", no, but WIC and Medicaid and food stamps and Pell grants and student loans combined with the employers that took a chance on us and the nice old widow that gave away a mobile home she didn't want anymore and the doctors and teachers and counselors who took time to make sure we were OK - all of this made up this crazy-quilt we all huddled under to keep safe and warm.

So it was a story of how we made it, but not on our own. And it will be a story of figuring out how we can best do the same for others, in our turn.

We're still figuring that part out.

You could tell yourself all you like that you're too old to feel this way, that you should know better. That you do know better, and have for years.

Maybe there was something, after all, to all that moralizing crap they tried to shove down your throat in the hopes some of it would float up to your brain or down to your...heart. Maybe. All that stuff about not giving yourself away too soon.

It wasn't about the sex you never actually did have with your first love, though. It was about everything else. It was about growing up with Paul, the cliche of a boy-next-door, and assuming that you'd stay together forever and grow old together.

Didn't happen that way. You were best friends as kids, and he was your "first kiss" when you were in kindergarten together, and then again your first real kiss in sixth grade, and you went to every dance together, right up until your Junior Prom.

And that's when it all unraveled like the tiny run in a pair of pantyhose that somehow becomes a hole that your knee fits through. But you can't put cute calico patches on pantyhose the way you used to on jeans. You're too old for that. And now you're too old to ignore the things Paul believes in, the things his whole family believes in, that you just don't.

For the first time, you don't daydream about your life together - you think about it instead. And you question it. And the answer is a soft, small, unmistakable no i can't.

That damn poem from English class. This is the way your world is ending. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

In sorrow and anger and more regret than you can ever express, you hand back his class ring and manage a mute little nod when he asks if you can still be friends, even though you want to undo the breakup and you want to run far away and never EVER see him again all at once.

And you throw yourself into your schoolwork. And you don't even bother with the Senior Prom, or boys, or even friends. You just want to get in to a good college, far away from all of this. Preferably in the opposite direction of wherever Paul is going. And you do.

And you meet people. Lots of people. And you like them. And there are other boys, and even a few girls, because you've figured out that liking girls "that way" isn't such a horrible thing after all. But you're so afraid of letting weeks and months and years go by only to realize you're incompatible when you're in too deep to get out easily that you never let the time go by. You have friends with benefits, you have one-night stands, you have crushes that you know will never work out...

And suddenly, you're twenty-five. When the hell did that happen? And, because some part of you believes this is the way it should be, you're anxious because not only have you not settled down, you also don't think you know how to settle down. So you decide to try one of those computer-match dating things because, well, why not? You aren't figuring this out any better on your own, and maybe the computer can weed out the obvious incompatibilities before you have to break your heart trying to.

And the computer finds a match. George. You actually knew George in college - he was a soft spoken friend-of-a-friend who seemed nice enough but never really occurred to you as potential relationship material, whatever that was then. But this is now and you're both a little more mature, and he actually seems interested in you. And most importantly, compatible with you and your morals.

After a few months of staying the night at each other's place more often than not, you move in together to save money. And soon enough, there's a marriage proposal. No expensive ring on bended knee - not that you would have wanted that, seeing as how you want nothing to do with blood diamonds and there are so many other things you can use that money for anyway - but a rational yet loving agreement between two consenting adults that a relationship intended to be permanent is something that you would like to pursue, even if you both are experiencing proper liberal guilt because your friends Diana and Naomi can't do the same.

So you have your wedding. You wear a simple white cotton dress with little turquoise butterflies on the skirt for "something blue" and you wear your same old white sandals that you've had since college and you borrow a cute straw hat from someone. And you have a civil ceremony at City Hall, where you exchange rings made of recycled white gold, and follow up with a big potluck picnic in the park. And your parents exchange a sigh of relief that at least you aren't living in sin any more, even if they're still not sure about George.

And your friends tell you how awesome it is to be at a non-fussy wedding where people are celebrating each other instead of spending the down payment for a really nice house on one day of partying. But you know nobody else is going to have a wedding like yours, anyway, and the thought annoys you. So does the realization that this wasn't what you dreamed about as a kid - you sternly glare at your inner child until she shuts up and leaves you alone, because what you dreamed about was Paul and you wouldn't want to be with Paul, you want to be with George.

And you do. He respects you. He supports you. He believes in you. He cares about what you think. He sees the world the way you do, or at least as close as anyone is going to get.

But sometimes that's not quite enough. The next Valentine's day, when he's going on one of his usual snarky tirades (that you used to share in) about the financial and environmental waste of sending flowers, you try to put your junior prom corsage out of your mind, and the grocery store carnations for your eighth-grade graduation, and the double handful of buttercups and dandelions and Queen Anne's Lace for your "kindergarten graduation" when Paul first said he wanted to marry you someday.

It's like George respects you, but he doesn't respect your background, or understand that you miss the good parts of it. And you don't know how to make him understand.

Then you realize that you're pregnant, and blame this burst of emotionality on hormones and vow that motherhood isn't going to force you into a Norman Rockwell painting life. And you order your Maya Wrap and your organic cloth diapers and your double-electric breast pump, and you and George study up on how to be good and ethical parents like you're cramming for the National Merit Finals or something.

And your little Susie Antonia is the joy of your lives, just like you knew she would be.

And time goes by, and jobs are lost, and a second child is conceived, and the thing to do seems to be for both of you to go for your graduate degrees. If you can dovetail your schedules, you won't have to pay for child care, and you don't really want to put Susie and whoever your new baby is in child care if you don't have to.

The university that is the next big city over from where you grew up accepts you both, and it does have the lowest cost of living out of any of your options. You can make an OK living on a couple of grad students' stipends, as long as you don't insist on moving out to the suburbs, but you weren't planning to do that anyway!

So there you are, headed back home into your memories. Headed back to the land where Paul and his ridiculously huge extended family seem to run everything. Or maybe not. Maybe they were always just larger than life.

And fleetingly, you wish for flowers and music and romance, then sternly remind yourself that a hike through the woods at leaf-changing season and birthday gifts of painstakingly-chosen volumes of poetry from the local book reseller are romance enough.

And - strangely - you wish for fish sticks and tater tots the next time you sit down to sustainable wild salmon and a locally-grown baked potato. And you feel the baby-to-be rolling around in your uterus and hear Susie laughing and you think it's the influence of your children that's making you feel childish and you have got to get back into school so that you can properly concentrate on thinking like a reasoning adult human being again.

And you settle in, only to find that the classes make you think more, not less, about the child that you used to be. And it's hard.

And it's even harder watching Susie grow old enough to go to nursery school and make her own little friends. And you can't keep back all the tears when, on the last day of school, a little boy who looks enough like Paul to be his son or nephew or littlest brother hands Susie a fistful of buttercups. You pretend you're crying because baby Margaret just bit your nipple as she nursed, but that's not it at all.

You're sad because of what you've lost and don't want to admit you've lost, and you're scared, terrified, that Susie and Margaret are going to go through it too. And you can never tell George, he wouldn't understand, he's far too rational and practical for this foolishness you're feeling.

Maybe you need a therapist.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's OK to cry. And maybe George understands more than you think, as you sit down with your Macbook to write the last paper of your semester, and he sets down a cup of fresh-ground organic fair trade coffee with raw sugar and just a bit of whole milk and a tiny dash of cinnamon, just the way you like it best.

And next to that, the first of the spring dandelions to grow in the yard.

The tears come again, but you smile, because you realize that he does understand and that thinking about what was doesn't make you disloyal after all. Instead, it can make you appreciate what is all the more.

It's enough.

And if Susie or Margaret finds one of Paul's young relatives and falls in love, that's going to be OK too. No need to borrow trouble and assume that they believe what he believes, or (and this is harder) that the girls have to believe exactly what you believe.

And all such matters are many years away.

For the moment, there is coffee and a paper to write. And flowers and music. And sleeping children and a loving spouse.

It's enough.

[Warning: child abuse, mental illness-related fail]

So, in one of my social work classes, we've been studying about ACEs, or "Adverse Childhood Experiences". The basic idea is that there are environmental stressors in the backgrounds of children that create "toxic stress" and that this toxic stress has emotional and even physical consequences, both at the time and later in life.

So far, so good - well, not good exactly but you know what I mean, right? I can go along with this.

Except then there's the list of what constitutes an ACE. And, to quote someone I've forgotten, "Someone needs to go back to kindergarten and study remedial one of these things is not like the fucking others!"

Yes, that's right. Because both of the parents of my children have diagnosable mental illnesses (in other words, we're crazy-on-paper), for the purposes of scoring for ACEs, that is exactly as bad as if we were beating them, or if one of us abandoned them entirely, or if someone raped them.

Excuse me, but I take serious offense to that.

Yes, I understand that there is biological inheritance of mental health stuff and blah blah blah, but that's not the same thing as crazy-on-paper being the cause of our kids' "toxic stress" and thus the reason that they have whatever mental or physical health problems they might have later in life.

Especially because I went through the trouble of going from, "There's something wrong with my brain and the way it's processing things and I think it might be affecting my ability to be as good of a mother as I want to be!" to, "Yes, there IS something wrong, and it's called ADHD, and there's a medication that can help me and alternative ways of coping with the world that can help me, and hell, just knowing that there's something to be coped with helps!" And doing this made me a much better parent than I otherwise would have been.

Especially because the primary crazy-on-paper my spouse contends with is PTSD caused by religiously-motivated child abuse, and the understanding of the harm his family caused has turned him into an especially mindful and loving parent because he wants better for his kids than that.

But it would totally have been better for us to struggle with this on our own so we wouldn't be crazy on paper, because parents who are crazy on paper are worse for their kids than parents who are not mentally stable but haven't done anything to become more stable...right?

No?

Then WHY? Why the HELL is that item in there as written?

That's not OK. All you're going to do with an item like that is discourage people who need help from getting it, because they're not crazy! Because crazy means they're permanently damaging their kids, so they CAN'T be crazy!

(And yes, I said so in class, too. Had one classmate respond, "Holy shit, you're right!" and one go on and on about how SOME crazy people really DO hurt their kids and she's sure the question wasn't meant the way I was reading it. *headdesk*)

Since this seems to be the thing to do lately, go ahead and ask me anything. Anon is fine. Comments screened, let me know if you want them unscreened or not.

I will answer unless it violates someone else's privacy/confidentiality.

Just recently, there was an article in the paper about yet more unreasonable people with disabilities who are looking for technical violations of the ADA to get mad about and sue and put all these poor small business owners out of business, and about the lawyers who are getting rich off of this scam.

And I keep on thinking...really?

The Americans with Disabilities Act has been the law of the land for twenty-two years, folks. If the violations are "technicalities" but are also plain as the noses on our faces, it's hard to have any confidence that the ADA is not also being violated in much less "technical" ways.

One of my fellow interns at our local Independent Living Center has also found an example of this in the local paper, and is preparing a presentation on it. She was looking at help-wanted ads for administrative assistants and receptionists that had "functional requirement" descriptions that appeared to be more about avoiding candidates with disabilities rather than about whether or not someone could do an adequate job in an office. I've had a lot of office jobs. Most of them do not require regular lifting of 20 pounds, and many of them I'd get yelled at if I tried and told to wait for some man to do it for me. (I can lift my almost 50 pound kid, you know!)

After all this time, we still have so little understanding that a wheelchair can't magically climb a step into a house even though "there's just ONE!", that blind people with service dogs might occasionally like to go out to a restaurant with each other and can't leave the dogs in their nonexistent cars, that clinical depression is not something that will go away if you just learn to smile and think positively, that a speech impairment is not the same thing as a cognitive impairment (and that treating someone with a cognitive impairment disrespectfully is NOT OK EITHER), and that American Sign Language is not "signed English" but is a language in its own right.

It's frustrating. And it feels like all we can do is, "step by step" build the ramps and remove the barriers, and keep insisting that this isn't acceptable.

Not only am I not doing so great this week, vaudy (who was my awesome intersection partner a couple weeks back and added a very different look at the Runaways world) also seems to be falling off the poll, and that makes me especially sad. Votes for us would be incredibly appreciated.

Also also, if you haven't read ellakite's story of Princess Doorstop, you should (and give it a vote if you're so inclined, though he is in no danger in the poll). Have tissues ready first.

Pat didn't seem so imposing if you looked at him: A small, skinny Puerto Rican man, in a wheelchair that somehow made him look even smaller. But somehow, somehow he made himself bigger. At least, big enough to get in the way and to kick up an unreasonable racket about where he wanted to go and how he wanted to get there.

He wouldn't let people carry him around. The first college that accepted him, he wouldn't go because he didn't want to be carried up the stairs to class. The last time they had someone who couldn't walk, she was fine with that - but he had to be all unreasonable about it.

Same thing with another college, this one that he did go to. He kicked up a fuss about having to go around the block to use the service elevator. They had an architect, a real visionary, who wanted to make the campus beautiful - and there he was, that little pain in the ass, thinking that what would be easier for him was more important. And totally unwilling to compromise - the architect offered to ramp two of the steps, and he just glared and snapped, "And how am I supposed to get up the OTHER two?!"

No surprise, then, that this same little pain in the ass got some of his buddies together and blocked traffic on Madison Avenue. People were just trying to get home, and the buses couldn't leave and the cars couldn't leave, and they kept idling their fuel away in the middle of the gas shortages. Who did he think he was, being such an inconvenience?

And then the cops had to carry him out of the MTA building. Him and some more of his buddies. And you know what he said?

We're going to beat you at the polling place; we'll beat you politically; we're going to beat you in the streets; we're going to beat you in the media; we're going to beat you. We're going to get accessible mass transit in New York City.

And then when the guy who worked there said he didn't think it would happen in his lifetime, you know what Pat did? Just said, "I think you're going to die very soon." Who the hell was this little man, to make a threat like that? What the hell was his problem?

And then - then - he didn't even want to take the phone calls when someone tried to kill the guy at the MTA. Wouldn't say anything about whether it was one of his people, and seemed offended that anyone had even asked. He wanted to get in everyone else's face, but then wanted peace and quiet for himself and his wife - what was that about?

Yes, his wife. He had one - she was a wheelchair-user, too, part of that bunch of "we're so fed up" people or whatever. And then they had a kid! It was almost like he wanted to have the same kind of life everyone else did.

---

Funny how things change over the years, how what seemed so radical to my parents' generation seems like common sense and always-present public policy now, how in the United States we've gone from "there oughta be a law!" to seeing that the laws are enforced when it comes to accessibility and reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.

I didn't know Pat Figueroa very well or for very long, but I admired him very much and was sad to hear of his death. It had been just a couple weeks before, at a staff meeting of the Independent Living Center where his wife Denise is the director, that I had heard her ask about accessible consumer-market motor vehicles to accommodate two wheelchair users at the same time, so she could more easily travel with her husband.

At Pat's funeral, I realized that some of his "unreasonableness" must have rubbed off on me. The Funeral Mass for one of the leaders of the disability rights movement started off with a request:

All rise!

I shook my head in disgust as I looked around me at the men and women in wheelchairs who had strained the church's accessible seating to its limit. And I wondered why they couldn't have at least said, "Please rise if you are able."

It's a small thing, much smaller than the ability to get into the church in the first place. But it's still something that should be addressed. At least, I think so.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" Agnes mumbled. "That boy will be the death of me."

Her son was in trouble again. Incomprehensible trouble. She didn't understand it.

Most of the time, he seemed like such a nice boy. Such a good boy. He worked hard at school and got good grades and helped around the house. He was polite and respectful to all the people that he was supposed to be polite and respectful to, and even to some that she wished he wouldn't try so hard with - like the new colored neighbors. She hoped he wouldn't take it into his oddball head to actually date one of the colored girls he had befriended. That just…wasn't done.

He would bring home just about anything, she sighed, remembering the bumblebees and spiders and frogs and garden snakes in jars that turned up in his room on a regular basis five years ago, that she always demanded he take outside.

It was that curiosity of his, of course. Curiosity that killed the cat (or, well, the spider). Or that would one day be the death of him. Or of her. Curiosity that got notes sent home from his teachers, who were frustrated at the questions he asked - respectfully, politely, but insistently - about such things as what would happen when there was too much trash for the landfills to hold anymore.

Curiosity that was responsible for this latest incident. Her husband had saved up and paid good money to have a father-son day together at the Yankees game. And what did that son of hers do? He slipped out as soon as he could, on the pretense of wanting to buy a hot dog - and hopped the next #4 subway to some bookstore in Manhattan.

He lost track of time and missed not only the rest of the game but also the train back to Connecticut.

And what did that boy have to say for himself at his far-too-late return, with his eyes still lit up with the sheer sinful joy of this transgression?

"Mother, I can watch baseball on TV! But the Strand - there's nothing like it in Bridgeport! Miles of books!"

Miles of books. Instead of a baseball game with his father. And if she said anything about the cost of those tickets, she knew, he would only retort with how much he would have rather had that money to go spend at that bookstore.

She guessed there was nothing else like him in Bridgeport, either. She wasn't sure if that was a good thing for Bridgeport or a bad thing.

--

This is another intersection week, with the always awesome drjeff. Please support him as well. :)

You never know what you're gonna get when you stick a Help Wanted sign in the window.

This time around, it was a skinny redheaded kid with a face full of freckles, maybe 17 or 18 years old. His t-shirt and jeans looked like they'd seen better days, and he was wearing bright red high-top sneakers. Not exactly how most people dress when they're looking for a job.

Still, the last dishwasher up and quit on us, and the pizza pans were piling up. And the kid - Kevin - he said he'd start today. Right now, if I wanted.

I wanted.

The next ten days, he was there before we opened at eleven in the morning, and stayed past when we closed at eleven at night. And he threw himself into his work, stopping only to make a quick run to the men's room or gulp down a sub or a slice-and-soda.

He came back after his first day off looking tired and angry and smelling a little like someone'd spilled cheap-ass beer on his sneakers.

The next three days, he was a few minutes later every day. "Family emergency" he said. I didn't ask. And the next day he was on time and back to his usual self.

The day after that…it was almost noon before he showed up, his eyes almost as red as his hair or his sneakers, in a dirty shirt and jeans with holes in them. He was a total mess.

Other guys who'd done that got one last warning or even fired on the spot. Then again, other guys hadn't started out working as hard as Kevin.

So I told him to get a drink and then come back and talk to me. And I watched as he stirred packet after packet of sugar into his iced tea, focusing on the spinning straw so he wouldn't have to look at me.

And I listened as he told me that the abandoned factory he'd been crashing in at night got all sealed up so he couldn't even get back in and get his clothes and he'd fallen asleep riding the subway after being up all night trying to find someplace else to stay.

Wait. He's…

"Homeless? You're fuckin' HOMELESS?"

He met my eyes for half a second. "Y-yes, sir."

I shook my head in disbelief. Realized I'd probably scared hell out of the poor kid with that outburst. But I couldn't believe it! I'd never seen a kid work so hard as Kevin those first ten days. Never in my life. Jesus God, there had to be something I could do.

Jimmy. My brother Jimmy had rooms for rent in that building a few blocks south. There had to be an empty room for this kid who was sitting across from me with fear written all over his sunburned face. I'd better say something before he thinks I'm just going to throw him out.

"Well, no wonder you couldn't keep it up! I told my wife, Elaine, said this new kid, he works like a goddamn horse. And all the while you didn't even have a real place to stay at night. Damn, kid, I'm impressed."

And then he told me about the girl. Laura.

"What's that dumb old saying - if you love something set it free? Not like I had a choice, she was so sick I had to let the Darwin House people help her, but now they won't even tell me if she's there at the shelter or not. But I just know she is! I thought if I could work hard enough, we could get a real place to live and just stay together. If she still wants me after whatever they told her."

Should have known there was a girl. It was just perfect. Elaine was gonna love this. And the customers, they always like a pretty face. Maybe she could work the register.

"All right, kid. I'm gonna see what I can do to help you out. Go wash your hands, and your face while you're at it, and get to work. I need to make a few calls."

He flashed a tired grin at me. "Thanks so much!"

"Hey. You're worth the trouble."
----

Author's notes:

1) This is an Intersection week. My topic was "The Straw that Stirs the Drink." vaudy is my partner, writing the "Bridge" topic. Her entry is here.

2) This is part of my Runaways series, one of the earliest in the timeline. If you like the world, go here for the others I've written using these characters, and here for the Choose Your Own Adventure-style story that inspired the series as a whole. [Be warned that the scenario I ran with was one of the most optimistic. Also, I moved the characters from LA to NYC because I know it better.]

[Trigger warning: homophobia, suicide, child abuse, child trafficking]

In this fateful hour, I call on all heaven with its power...

I don't know how I pulled this off, but I've got the full and focused attention of the second-in-command of our agency. And he's standing behind me.

"What do you need? I'll make it happen."

I need about five weeks worth of travel vouchers, the statistical software SPSS installed on my office computer, and the assurance that I have authorization to do what I'm doing.

( And then I need to be able to talk about whatever I see and know that people will listen. )

I looked at my latest self in the mirror and sighed. Damnable appearances to be kept up as royalty of a minor kingdom. And because the body of Nayda, younger princess of the Golden Circle Treaty Nation of Begma, was on the verge of death before I showed up, I couldn't just leave it (her?) without causing a whole lot of trouble to a whole lot of people, some of whom I was actually quite attached to. Attached for reasons that, for ONCE, were completely and truly my own.

Well, I suppose if I had to get stuck in a body, there were worse choices. I remembered the brutish gangster in a fancy suit I had briefly possessed back when I was trying to figure out if...I laughed a little to myself...if Luke was "an assignment" or if it was actually Merle, his greatest rival turned best buddy. (And long-lost cousin, possibly on both sides, which accounted for at least some of the confusion.)

Being stuck there would have made all this much more awkward than it already was. But I'd told Merle the truth now that I could, now that he had officially stopped being my "assignment".

It was Luke's turn. It was only fair. Besides, he needed to know that the princess from a family that he was supposed to marry into (technically, it was my body-self's sister who had been promised to him, but maybe we could change that?) was the same person, sort of, as the seemingly ordinary mortal girl from California that he had dated as a seemingly ordinary mortal boy from California. I'd dropped a few hints about that when I'd possessed the body of the mistress of a man he had killed for revenge - mostly to keep her from trying to kill him, of course - and some recent events had given him reason to suspect that I might be a similar type of entity. But he didn't know yet that I was the consciousness he had met as all three, and briefly as a few others. Including that thug he'd been in a gunfight with back in Phoenix.

And if revealing myself to him went wrong, well, I wouldn't keep caring if this particular body lived or died, after all. I might even wish - scandalous, for one of my race to wish such a thing! - that ejection from the body would simply destroy me as well.

I had no desire to play spirit-spy-slash-bodyguard-for-hire any longer. Not after the last couple jobs. Not after I realized that it was Merle I was supposed to be spying on for his "protection" all along, and that it would theoretically mean needing to kill Luke. Not after nearly being forced to kill my new body's sister and her unborn child because a madman had replaced her eye with a priceless artifact.

But enough. I had to let Luke know the truth. It would be a betrayal, both of him and of my freedom from the spirit-for-hire world, not to tell him. He seemed to like this latest me well enough, and we had been spending considerable time together. It was a nice day for a walk in the gardens, which soon detoured to the beach, which was where I decided to begin.

I smiled up at him, nervous. "I was just remembering...a cabin by another beach." Damn this voice for shaking so! "I'm glad to see your health has improved. And..." here we go "...perhaps your memory as well?"

I've learned as I've moved from world to world that the laws of time are not uniform between worlds. It was only now that I truly understood they were not uniform within a world either, as something that was both fractions of seconds and endlessly dragging hours went by. We had stopped walking, and I watched as his face changed from puzzlement as if at a riddle...to shock and perhaps a bit of fear...

...to pure delight.

"Gail?!"

"In spirit, if not in form." I heard a nervous laugh escape in my newest voice before I could stop it.

"Well, spirit's what matters. Oh no, did I just make one of our old Philosophy 101 puns about spirit and matter?"

"I guess it's just like old times."

"Except...with more time. We tend to live a lot longer out in these parts of reality. I mean, if Luke Reynard and Gail Lampron had been plain old Earth mortals, how long would we have had...there?"

"Was that why you broke up with me?"

He nodded slowly. "It looked like the best of bad choices was to let you go. I could have stayed and watched you grow old while I never looked a day over thirty, which tends to create unwelcome questions. I could have tried to bring you into the worlds where you'd have a chance at living longer, and I was thinking about it...but then Julia called me up to vent about breaking up with Merle. She said she knew she sounded crazy, but I figured out then he had tried to do something like that with her and she couldn't deal with it and got mixed up with some very dangerous sorcerors. Folks like my mom. But you know about that, that's part of the crap you had to protect Merle from."

I laughed. "Yeah."

"But now that I know a little more about our...timetable...let's say we try two hundred years together, and see how it goes? Even if it means we're stuck playing King Rinaldo of Kashfa and his new Queen Nayda instead of just getting to be Luke and Gail?"

"You always were the deadliest salesman in the southwest, weren't you?" I pretended to think it over. "OK, I accept your offer. On one condition."

He raised an eyebrow, questioning.

"That we can still be Luke and Gail to each other."

"I was just about to suggest that myself!"

And we shook on it. A deliberate, formal Earth handshake. Just because it seemed the thing to do.

So...last week, drjeff wrote something that really spoke to me.

Sometimes it's hard, not to "be creative" but to actually commit to creating and to sharing the creation, when it feels like someone else has done (or will do!) a better job.

I'll have an idea for a story and I'll want to run with it, but then I'll get lost in the research. It wouldn't do to set a story in 1999 with a major character who works at a place that went out of business in 1993, now would it? I don't want to make those kind of mistakes and crash-land my readers back to reality.

And just when I think I've got something plausible-enough strung together, half the time I'll find out that someone has written what I thought was my own brilliant idea, only better.

For instance, several years ago when we thought it might be nice to get into the weekly dinner-and-roleplaying game thing again, ravenshrinkery and I started talking about a minor post-apocalyptic setting where there was kind of a three-sided war between a corrupt government, some REALLY bad bad-guys, and some petty rogues who were just kind of sort of trying to get by. I created a character for this game who was a once-well-off medic who was somewhat more lawful/"conservative" than the rest of the party, and who was trying to track down whatever was left of her family.

Of course, this has been done. Better than anything we could've come up with.

Mind you, since we didn't have cable TV or pay much attention to entertainment news, we had NO IDEA that Firefly was out there until about a year later. And there were differences - the version we had thought of was happening here on Earth, 100ish years into the future, and my medic was female and very observantly Jewish. Differences, but not enough. The show was out there, and even though I'd never seen it, I felt like an inadvertent plagiarist for coming up with what I had.

Even when I'm working off of a derivative work, I feel vulnerable to this. I had an idea for a great big epic Harry Potter fanfiction focused on Sirius Black, and then two things happened. First, Order of the Phoenix was published and with that, my entire carefully crafted backstory for Sirius went out the window. Then, I discovered someone else had done it better.

Sigh. Frustration.

And of course this happens even in the realm of non-fiction. Sometimes I really really WANT to explain something and it's IMPORTANT and I have something to say - but in the end, all I can do is point and say "go read what this other person wrote, because I feel the same way."

It's been said to the point of cliche that there are no truly original ideas, but can't I at least come up with some that don't read to my own internal critic like a high school student copying a Wikipedia article fifteen minutes before class?

Can't I stop being weighed down by my own perfectionism while the good writers write circles around me?

Sometimes I can. Sometimes I actually manage to get out of my own way and write something even I can acknowledge is good. Usually this happens when characters turn up in my head (or evolve out of something I encountered somewhere else) demanding that their stories be told, that they be heard, and that I be the one to write it down.

And sometimes I am not so happy with something I've written. I have a beginning and an end but no middle, or one brilliant line that I can't write a whole story around, or some other reason to be dissatisfied.

But then I have to remember the stereotypical exchange that supposedly takes place in many an exhibit of modern art: "Oh, my five year old could have done that!" "Yeah, but he didn't."

(That's kind of how I felt about my entry from last week, even though a lot of people went out of their way to tell me how much they liked it. Go figure.)

Maybe the "better" (or at least better-known) writers are writing circles around me, while I just spin around in place.

Maybe they always will.

Doesn't mean my comparative spinning-in-place isn't worth it, though.

Because it's mine.

For the benefit of all and sundry Dimensional Travelers, Planewalkers, Spelljammers, Tesseract engineers, Pattern or Logrus Initiates, Trump Designers, Teleporters, Starfarers, Quantum-Leapers, etc. - I wish to offer the following advice:

1. No traveler can access EVERY World

The Multiverse being the grand and glorious infinity that it is means that, for all practical purposes, anything you can imagine exists somewhere, alongside many things you can't or would prefer not to consider as possibilities.

That doesn't mean you can just get there from here using your particular mode of dimensional travel. Worlds that possess an understanding of particular forms of dimensional travel may have decided that one or more types of traveler is particularly dangerous or otherwise undesirable, and may have successfully barred particular forms of travel accordingly, or at least made them exceedingly difficult. Even when the major sentient population of a world is not aware of dimensional travel, or when there is no sentient population to consider, the geography of the multiverse and the form of travel being attempted may dictate the possibility as well as the advisability of your prospective travel.

If you are an adept of multiple forms of travel - for example, you are a competent Spelljammer as well as Tesseract engineer - you may be able to make your trip in multiple "legs" or "stages" by way of a world that allows both techniques. (The mundane Terran equivalent would be driving to an airport and then flying across the ocean.) However, you will have to remember which techniques work where, and that is not quite so simple when there isn't such a clear indicator as a body of water to remind you how you need to travel.

2. Check your local laws - of physics!

First, there is the necessary avoidance of obvious mistakes. If you have individuals in your party who need to be able to breathe in three dimensions, or if you are such an individual, be sure that the world to which you are traveling is not two-dimensional. If you are aware of specific gravity or atmospheric content tolerances of individuals, but not of world conditions, please ensure that all individuals accompanying you have durable, non-combustible portable atmospheres available by whatever means is customary in your culture.

Then, there are the more esoteric considerations. When you travel between worlds, it is all too easy to be caught unaware by a world with basic physical laws and tolerances that mostly resemble your homeworld or another familiar world - except that, for instance, the commonly-used ammunition on your homeworld is not combustible and thus will not fire on the similar world. It is strongly advised that travelers expecting to encounter violent conditions familiarize themselves with old-fashioned melee weaponry such as knives, clubs, and even swords - these are much less likely to simply fail to work in an unfamiliar setting.

The same holds true for non-combat considerations. Any sufficiently advanced technology, including those based on what is commonly called "sorcery" or "psionic energy", may not operate correctly (or at all!) on worlds with very different conditions from one's homeworld. This is especially critical to keep in mind when medical or communication technology is at issue.

Furthermore, even technology that functions as expected (or at least adequately) might not have a replacement source. If your travel is accomplished wholly or in part by means of a device - whether it is a symbiotic crystal that aids teleportation, a starship that requires a specific fuel source or specific materials for its repair, or the cardstock and paint of a Trump artist - it is best to assume that additional supplies of these devices will not be available locally, and to prepare accordingly.

3. Also check your local sentient beings' laws, traditions, and customs - preferably before arrival, if at all possible.

In other words, just because you can make a specific technology work in a specific location doesn't mean you should.

Some local beings may have simply outlawed certain technologies or power sources, such as firearms or magic wands, either due to past experiences with them or due to what may seem to be superstitious beliefs regarding the nature of the powers or their users.

Even if there is not a law against a specific technology's use, such as telepathy, local witnesses may assume the worst and react very violently or otherwise unpleasantly to a display of a taboo or unfamiliar technology.

Another source of discomfort for dimensional travelers can be local customs surrounding what is and is not considered food. Kentucki Fried Lizzard Partes may be a local delicacy, but that doesn't mean they'll be appealing to you - especially if you're a lifelong vegetarian. If this situation is likely to present a serious difficulty for you, you might wish to bring your own food with you or confine yourself to short, safe trips where you are certain that the foods you prefer to eat (or, indeed, CAN eat) are readily available.

It can be difficult to have this sort of awareness beforehand when using experimental dimension-traveling techniques (such as the rings created by Professor Diggory of England) or techniques that the traveler has not fully mastered - teleportation has a well-known range of error that can only be reduced with practice, some Planewalking portals are not properly marked, and the "break" of the Broken Pattern method can create all sorts of nasty surprises in this regard as well as others. In these cases, you will need to observe your surroundings carefully and to some extent, hope for the best.

4. Be especially cautious in "near-parallel" worlds.

While this might seem more specific to "time travel" than to dimension-travel, it is occasionally possible that parallel or near-parallel worlds (however your travel system defines these things) might be past or future incarnations of one another, and that "changing time" in one can have unpredictable repercussions in that part of the multiverse, even to the point of worlds merging or disappearing entirely.

Of course, sometimes this is exactly the effect you are looking for. I understand. The idea is not to create, merge, or destroy worlds - or to otherwise create a "time paradox" or alter the course of a world's history - unintentionally.

I wish you the best of luck in your travels, whether they are for pleasure, for profit, or for some mixture of the two. Stay safe and savvy!

"Wheels on-a bus go wound an' wound, wound an' wound, wound an' wound..."

I have a fuzzy half-memory of singing while I was waiting for the big yellow schoolbus. I wonder if I sounded to my mother like Elaine does when she sings as we all wait for the bus to take us to "school" - Kevin to his GED prep class, me to college classes, and Elaine to the day care she calls "preschool".

I wonder if she was happy with me even then. I can't remember. It's hard to remember being a kid with parents when those parents made it very clear that they didn't want you around before you were supposed to be an adult.

I wonder, though, like I've wondered a lot of things since I became a mother myself. And I - no, we, Kevin and I - we have to figure it out for ourselves. Because in the end, it seems like most of what we know is what not to do. But even that is not as simple as "take what we vaguely remember our parents doing, and do the exact opposite."

Surely, not everything they did was wrong. We're alive, right? If they had messed up that badly, we'd be dead. Or someone would have noticed and taken us away before we were thrown away and left to fend for ourselves.

I wish someone had noticed. Maybe. But then I wouldn't have the family I have now.

I wish I could have both, though. Child development classes and stacks of parenting books with exactly contradictory advice don't make a good substitute for talking to other human beings that have been through the things we're going through now.

We know we don't want to sit around getting drunk and ignoring our child, like my parents, and that we don't want to spend our days demanding some abstract thing like "respect" from her and smacking her when she doesn't give it to us just the way we want, like Kevin's parents. But that...that's all about what not to do.

I spend a lot of time feeling like all I know is what not to do. I don't know much at all about what to do.

...does anyone? Maybe that's it. Maybe we all have to come up with it for ourselves. For now, we can love her, and have fun with her. And join in singing:

"...the wheels on the bus go round and round, ALL THROUGH THE TOWN!"

Speaking of the bus, here it is. Elaine rides Kevin's shoulders up the steps, then Kevin and I sit next to each other with Elaine draped across our laps.

"Wheels on-a bus go wound and wound..." she sings softly. And the wheels do go around, taking us where we need to be. And tonight, they'll take us home.

Right now, that's good enough for us.

1) The following thoughts are about, oh, at least half a dozen situations that are going on simultaneously, some of which are tangentially related and others of which are not related to each other at all.

2) If someone says, "This hurts!" the correct response is NEVER EVER EVER any variation of "No it doesn't!" NEVER EVER. SERIOUSLY.
2a) [Note to self: this also applies to my kids complaining that head/eyes/tummy/other random body part hurts, even when I'm sure that's not the problem.]

3) The correct response to "This hurts!" is also not "...but I didn't MEAN TO!" Generally speaking, the correct response IS, "I'm sorry!" followed by correcting the problem if possible.

4) There's a world of difference between "I don't think that's moral and/or ethical" and "I don't think that's feasible and/or effective." Really, there is.

5) Why on earth are there so many people who take so much pride in offending people? Even those who "need to be offended"? If I disagree with someone, I'd much rather get that person to agree with me than to be offended by me. I mean...logic? *shrug*

6) A metaphor I've used before, which applies here. When a little kid swipes candy from the corner store, most of us can still agree that this is stealing, even though it's obviously not on the same scale (and should not receive the same sanction) as the career bank robber who just got busted mid-heist. So many conversations about privilege and lack thereof seem to be asking to not call what the little kid was doing stealing, or to act as though to say that it's stealing is to say that the kid is an unreformable thief who will never be anything else. And, really, no.

7) If I point something out that you personally did that bothered me, chances are very good that:
a) It is much closer to "kid swiping candy"-level than "bank robber" level, and
b) I don't consider you the equivalent of a hardened career criminal.
If both of those things weren't true, I wouldn't bother. Understand?

8) The previous two points (and all of them really) apply no matter how close we are or how awesome I generally think you.

9) I'm a PhD student and I work in a job that is fairly research-oriented. "Peer reviewed study or GTFO" is not a good place to go with me. I WILL find the studies.

10) Response time on this post may be very slow because my access to Internet the next few days is a bit on the limited side. So play nice in comments, please. I don't really want yet another mess to clean up.

[Trigger warning: anti-gay violence]

I still think about Roberto quite a lot, because he's the one who started it all.

That's not his real name, of course. I can't tell you his real name, or which agency, or which school district it was. Confidentiality and all that.

But I can tell his story. And I do, because people should know. Because my classmates at the School of Social Welfare should know that he has a lot to do with why I'm here. Because my co-workers at the Office of Children and Family Services should be able to put stories to the statistics, once in a while. Because...well, because Roberto is the reason why I spent last summer mostly on the road reading and capturing data from hundreds of case files. I wanted to know, not only "what the kids we serve are like", but also how many of the kids were like him.

Roberto was seventeen at the point where I read his file. He was placed through his home district's Committee on Special Education as a "Seriously Emotionally Disturbed" student, with clinical diagnoses of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

The PTSD, I'll grant, was probably a factor. Seeing one's father fatally shot in one's early childhood tends to create problems.

Oppositional? Defiant? This is the kid who, by the records, "everyone just loves" - residential staff, teachers, other students. He is the most often-noted "positive peer leader" in the place, and the extent of his disciplinary write-ups appears to be a few instances of "inappropriate verbal comments" rather than the fistfights and vandalism that characterize his fellow students. He works as a lifeguard on the campus rec center. His career aspiration is to become a chef, and he does things like cook Sunday brunch for everyone who lives in the cottage with him.

So why is he there? Well, before he was placed, he was skipping school and breaking curfew at home to hang out with his friends and smoke pot. And apparently, this was the simplest way to handle the situation.

It was also pretty wrong-headed on the part of that particular school district. Because, you see, the actual underlying issue was that Roberto is gay.

He was skipping school because bullies were threatening to "kill the faggot", which is particularly difficult to cope with if you've seen your father killed in front of you.

He was breaking curfew and generally not listening to his mom because she thought that, well, can't he just get over this and find a nice girl so that people stop threatening to kill him? She's lost her husband to violence, why should she have to risk losing her son over his "lifestyle choice"? Of course, it doesn't work that way, but she doesn't understand that.

He was smoking pot...because the local stoners accepted him. And nobody else did.

Good kid, really. Bad situation. Not really the sort of situation that SHOULD be solved by declaring the kid oppositional and defiant and placing him away from home, but sometimes it's easier to just get the kid out of the situation than to change all the elements of the situation.

And that...is upsetting, personally and professionally. It's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

I hope Roberto is doing well. I hope he's in culinary school and has found himself a nice boyfriend. I have a feeling that he is and that he has. I'll never know, of course. Just like he'll never know what he's inspired in the system he was part of. Confidentiality and all that.

I'm still amazed that it turned out this way. That it's turning out this way might be a better way to say it. The story isn't over. The story isn't over, and that's the best part.

It could have been over, so easily. It's not like anyone would have found my body if someone decided to kill me. It's not like I had anyone who would have cared enough to look. And if someone did happen to stumble on whatever was left of me, I might have been good for a cautionary tragic story. The latest nameless example of what not to be.

Or I could have lived. Lived through God only knows what. Maybe that's why He sent me - oh, I'm not going to say an angel. But another kid. Someone even younger and more lost than I was. And I guess that's where the "mysterious ways" thing comes in, because that's not supposed to work.

I know how that story goes all too often. These sweet and romantic lost souls, when they say they love you, they mean the idea of having a girlfriend. But Mary Jane'll win out over a flesh-and-blood girl every time, you know? And of course the boy wants you...to pay the rent and make him dinner and conveniently disappear when he wants to kick back a few beers with the gang and reappear when he wants to get laid. And that baby you're having? Sweet! Just don't expect him to change diapers or get up in the middle of the night or...do anything he doesn't want to do. And if the baby means you're no fun anymore, well then, you can't complain if he finds someone who IS, now can you?

But it wasn't like that, either, not for us. I don't know why. Luck or stubbornness or something. And love. You know how Kevin asked me to marry him? He put the ring in the bottom of our little girl's stocking, the first Christmas after she was born. He said the most important present we could ever give her was us. And then he got all worried about whether he'd done it wrong and whether I would think he was saying that he only wanted us to be together for her sake, when that wasn't what he meant at all. But he was scared, it's not like he'd ever asked someone to marry him before.

It's not like I'd ever said yes before, either. And I told him that. And we laughed. We've always been able to laugh about things.

I didn't say yes without fear. I didn't tell him that, of course. Not until years later. I knew the odds weren't good that we would still be together by the time we were legally able to get married. Not with the way we started off, not with the bad examples our parents set, not with the stress of being a couple of broke kids with a kid of our own. But he wanted to try, and I wanted to try. And somehow we succeeded.

And if my heart skips a beat when I see him, it's not from fear of what will go wrong or from the booze and pot and who-knows-what that a lot of kids like us get into so that life seems a little more bearable. It's just...love.

I never thought I'd be this happy. I'm amazed.

[Author's note: Laura and Kevin are back. I've missed writing them.]

"It can't happen here." "It won't happen here." "It can't." "It won't."

"Things like this just don't happen here." "We moved here because it's safe here, so how could...?"

But it can happen here, because it did.

***

Why?

Some might point to the Wrath of God that, of course, must be raining down upon this degenerate state for its most recent sacrilege.

Some might call the floods the tears of Mother Nature, Gaia's attempt to cool down her rising fever, and point their fingers at the naysayers.

Many would shrug, and mumble that it was Just One Of Those Things That Happens. After all, even improbably rare events are still statistically possible, and when one of them is headed right for you, it's a little late to insist on the improbability of it all. Not dying becomes the first priority, followed by salvaging what you can of life as you know it before the circumstances become beyond your control.

***

"Nothing will ever be the same after The Event."

That's what everyone said, and that's what everyone believed. And they were right.

The damage took hours to occur, and months to even partially undo. The floodwaters do not stop to spare historic landmarks or important public services, let alone anyone's home or place of business. They leave behind mud and mildew, shorted-out wires and waterlogged no-longer-durable goods. Some of the people forced from their homes may never return. Some did not live long enough to consider it.

***

Rebuilding, though, can occur. And so can celebration.

The Middleburgh Public Library, called the "heart of the community" of this small town, has been rebuilt and re-opened.

They have some new pages to turn, and are hoping that in time there will be more, as they continue the work of replacing thousands of damaged books.

Last week, I was at a conference for people who work in my field - social services and child welfare. I found myself incredibly disturbed by the choice of keynote speaker.

It wasn't just that, while talking about the need to relax and eliminate sources of stress, she spoke so rapidly that if I had been doing a clinical assessment, I would have been on immediate alert for additional symptoms of a manic episode. (For my clinically-minded readers: Pressured speech? OH MY YES!) What she was saying in all her fast-talking was far worse, especially for the audience in question.

You see, it was yet another one of those supposedly-inspiring speeches on PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and THINKING POSITIVELY and CREATING THE LIFE YOU WANT! The usual thing that tends to have the exact opposite of its intended effect on me. I suppose that makes me one of the negative people that everyone who knows me should be dumping from their lives.

Why? Because if it was truly as simple as she made it sound, we wouldn't be having that conference for her to speak at, because all of us would be working somewhere else and doing something else. If the simple, personal, individual solutions were truly effective in a world of complex, interrelated, systemic problems, then there would be very little if any need for social welfare programs of any kind.

The very fact that we were all there that day should have been a wake-up call to this presenter that the solutions she was proposing were not effective.

It got worse, though. She decided to bring up the nostalgic, romanticized version of the 1950s, when Kids Did What They Were Told. I'm guessing that, unlike most of us in the room, she either had never heard of places like Willowbrook School that warehoused children with disabilities in inhumane conditions, so that "the public" didn't have to be disturbed by the sight of them, or she was deliberately choosing to ignore them because it's not like they're real people that count.

I wish I could have walked out, but I was on exactly the other side of the room from the door and the majority of my supervisory chain of command was sitting there. I wish I could have objected to this loudly, publicly, and in such a way as to not simply be dismissed as one of Those Negative People You Should All Avoid. I wish I could have, at least, reminded her that people aren't nearly-identical widgets who can be put together on the assembly line and simply discarded-and-forgotten when found defective.

I wish I could have, right then and there, reminded all of us what we do and why we do it and who we serve. I wish I could have set up a revised version of my own presentation, with individual stories instead of aggregate numbers, and pointed out where responsibility and optimism alone WOULD NOT FIX IT.

I wish.

But I can't do this alone, either. The fear of being the one negative person in a room full of OMG POSITIVITY held me back.

Program for the Exceptionally Gifted.

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, or fingers, now does it? If I'm actually talking about it, the program name tends to come out in an awkward mumble, preferably while I'm looking at the floor. Or I don't mention the actual name and call it "a high-school college bridge program" or "an early admission program" even though I know perfectly well that this will give the wrong impression.

There are plenty of bridge programs out there. Most that I know of are a 3-1-3 model - the student completes three years of high school, one "bridge" year, and then three years of college, to graduate a year early.

Some allow, instead, the simultaneous completion of the last two years of high school and an associate's degree or the first two years of a four-year college program. Most programs of this type that I have seen are commuter programs, where the student remains living at home with parents.

This program was different. I left high school after ninth grade. Since I had skipped a grade in my local school district, that means I was thirteen when I first made the journey from upstate New York to the Mary Baldwin campus in Staunton, Virginia. I spent two years as a "PEG student" before transferring to a state school that was less expensive and closer to home.

It isn't particularly fun explaining this to people when it comes up. I've had my share of suspicious and disbelieving comments from people who have tried to reconcile my chronological age with my years in college and come up confused. I've had to write down on employment applications that I have a GED instead of a standard four-year diploma, which I'm sure has caused a few hairy eyeballs - after all, most GED-takers aren't teenage girls who do ridiculously well on standardized tests.

And yet, explaining it is almost worse. It's better than being thought a liar, but it's still embarrassing. If I had a dollar for every time someone called me Doogie Howser or made a related joke after hearing how old I was when I started college or reading the full name of the program, I could probably pay off my considerable student loan debt. OK, maybe not quite THAT bad. But still.

This tends to be followed by all sorts of exclamations about how I could have been anything! Usually with the implications that whatever I'm doing with myself wasn't-isn't-won't be enough. And yes, actually, I would have liked to be a doctor. (That's part of why the Doogie Howser jokes can burn so much.) I have the intelligence and clinical instinct for it. What I do not have is the requisite physical dexterity. I have always had processing difficulties with physical tasks, to the point that a comprehensive evaluation in my childhood noted "possible mild cerebral palsy" along with a statement that my IQ was somewhere around 150, maybe higher, but I had hit the ceiling of the tests the clinic used with kids my age.

And it's such a foolish statement, to say I could have been anything. I don't have the body of an elite Olympic gymnast. My relative lack of physical dexterity rules out dozens of career options from medicine to music to metalworking. I suppose that by "anything" those commenters mean something like "rich and famous" - sort of like the horrible social worker I once went to for practical help with moving informed me that only intelligent people use the Internet, therefore it is obviously not for me!

I might owe her gratitude, indirectly, for setting me on the path to my own MSW - the closest thing to an MD that I'll ever be, because it requires the skills I have without demanding the capabilities that I don't. And besides, even if it were true that I could be anything, I think I would have chosen social work in the end.

Or...not quite. I think, whatever else happened, in the end it would have been clear that social work chose me.

Take a group of girls, relatively close in age, who love the outdoors and have at least some other interests in common. Prior Girl Scout experience helpful but not necessary.

Select a summer evening (or late spring or early fall, perhaps), if possible one that is not too hot or too humid.

Choose your location. Some campsites have pre-set fire circles. If your does not, or if you do not wish to use the ones that exist, check the rules for where you are allowed to build. The area you select should, in any case, be free of tree roots and other things that could lead to a fire where you don't want fire. A good spot can be on the lake shore, if you have a lake.

If you're making a new fire circle, your girls will need to collect stones, enough to create two circles around where you intend to build your fire. The outer circle is the boundary past which only those girls who are actively tending the fire should be allowed, no more than two or three at a time. The inner circle is not for crossing but for marking the limits of the fire itself.

An existing campfire site will probably have rocks or logs or benches for the girls to sit on. If you've created a new site, you may wish to use camp chairs or water-resistant "sit-upons" that perhaps the girls made prior to the camping trip - a sturdy plastic shopping bag filled with old newspaper and sewn shut just below the handles will work nicely.

Next, you will need to ensure that you have the tools for safe fire maintenance - two metal buckets (one filled with water and one with sand), flashlights (for after the fire's out at night), a metal rake, a long stick, spare hair ties for girls with long hair, and of course your matches and striking surface. No lighters or lighter fluid are to be used on a wood fire, though you may use a homemade wax-and-cardboard firestarter if you wish.

A good campfire needs all types of firewood - tinder (thinner than a girl's little finger), kindling (the middle size between little finger-width and wrist-width), and fuel (logs bigger than a girl's wrist). Remember that dry pine needles make excellent tinder, as does birch bark. Also remember that wood is only to be gathered from branches that have fallen.

If you want to have the girls toast marshmallows or some other foodstuff over the fire, you may either use pre-made skewers or send them in search of appropriate branches, which they may also whittle to a point if they wish and if there is time. All this depends on how much time you have, as well as on your feelings about creativity and eco-friendliness vs. sterility and proper food safety protocols.

When you're ready to build the actual fire, start with the basic A-frame design: three pieces of large kindling in the shape of a letter A, with the top pointing in the direction of the wind. Add tinder and your firestarter, and be ready with additional small kindling to keep feeding the fire. Strike your match, light your tinder, and the campfire has started! Once it's going, you may switch towards a "teepee" or "log cabin" design.

Once the fire is going well enough that it does not need constant maintenance, it's a good time to start singing. If the girls are a troop or group that has been together for some time, chances are good they know what they would like to sing, and you can just teach a few extra songs when there is a lull. Traditionally, a campfire that opens a camping session has more silly songs, such as Baby Bumble Bee and Boom Chicka Boom and that sort of thing. A closing campfire is more likely to have the quieter, reflective songs featured - Linger and Barges come to mind as examples. When you are ready to wind down, but considerably before "bedtime" or "lights out", end with the traditional friendship circle and Taps.

Before anyone goes to bed, of course, the fire must be completely put out. Completely. That means BLACK ashes. White ashes mean you still have some active fire. This is not accomplished by simply dumping the bucket of water over the fire - that makes too much of a mess for anyone who might use the space later, and might not even be effective. Use your rake and/or long sticks dipped in water to scatter the fire within its circle, then start sprinking (NOT dumping) water on the individual pieces. If you have a fire that has somehow gotten grease dripped into it or that is so hot that water just evaporates, you'll want to use the sand instead.

This done, send the girls off to their tents to get ready for bed, but don't be too strict about bedtime after a campfire. Opening campfires, in all their silliness, inspire giggly slumber parties. Closing campfires remind the girls that they will be going their separate ways soon, and there is likely to be a lot of hugging and crying and promises to write. If you insist on quiet, you may get quiet, but you will not get sleeping girls!

She's gone. It doesn't seem possible. The world is quieter now - in the bad way. There's a reason we didn't say the Q word. *small smile*

But...my world is so much better for having had her in my life. I'm sad to say goodbye, and angry and disappointed that it had to be so soon, but glad to have had fair warning to the extent that I did. I'm used to experiencing death either as something that happens to someone quite old or something that happens as a sudden and horrifying trauma. This, too, is a gift she's left me, then - a different experience and understanding of death.

Above all else, I'm grateful for the years that we were able to be in each others' lives.

"Rest in Peace" doesn't seem right - the cancer and other medical problems before that left her much less active than she would have liked for some time.

So...have a blast in Valhalla, Lady, and enjoy patching up the careless fighters there. I love you.

I know my feet are a bit on the big side - US women's 11 Wide.

I didn't expect, when shoe-hunting on eBay, that many of the shoes on the first page of "best matches" would advertise themselves as being ***Perfect For Drag Queens!!!***

Not that I have a problem with drag queens, mind you.

No, what I have a problem with is the idea that feet of my size must belong to biological males, that no cisgendered female would have feet this huge. That even though I'm biologically female, I'm just a female impersonator anyway.

Maybe I take this stuff too personally. Probably. I don't know. And I don't know why this particular thing stuck with me when much more deliberately-offensive items regarding my overall body size, or that of women in general, has faded into mental oblivion.

Maybe it's because I am fat, and tall, and built in a way that doesn't go very well with the standard clothing-size system in use, and this was just one more reminder of how fat women like me aren't seen as feminine enough even when we are very comfortable with the gender we are and like pretty things.

Maybe it's because I have so many problems with the mobility and comfort of my feet, and feel restricted in choice of footwear as it is, and this was just one of those things that added mental discomfort on top of physical.

Maybe it's because I have a mental illness that is quite firmly coded as something boys have, thereby rendering a self image that is not only not-female but also not-adult, and I really didn't need that reminder coming at me from a bunch of shoe-sellers.

Maybe it's from exposure to a couple too many instances of large women as crude comic relief (large women all too often played by men for that matter) and I'd like to think that I have a place in this world that doesn't involve being the butt of jokes.

Or maybe I just want to buy attractive, comfortable, reasonably priced shoes that fit me - while still being recognized as female. But no, that can't be it. That would be too simple. Simpler to write me off as "oversensitive" and "overdramatic" as well as overweight and leave it at that.

Oh, how wonderful it would be if people would stop seeing it as that simple...

When you say you're walking a mile in someone's shoes, or when you're asking someone else to do so, what are you really doing?

Are you wandering in circles with a lopsided grin like my little girls playing dress-up, testing out a mythological role and seeing how it feels to be some fictional portrayal of another person for the day?

Are you putting on those (old-beat up-smelly-wrong color-wrong style-wrong size-just plain wrong) pieces of someone else's footwear so that your strong and sturdy legs can carry you for the next twenty minutes or so through an experience no more enlightening than Oh-thank-GOD-that's-over-I-am-SO-GLAD-that-I-am-not-YOU...?

Are you picking and choosing among the offered shoes for the ones that make the best story, selecting the snowboots for summer heat and the sandals for snow? Are you taking these exotic shoes somewhere their rightful owner would never go, at least not with them? Did you break out the high heels for the hiking trail, or show up to the dressed-for-success office in the Doc Martens?

Are you grumbling the whole way through your walk about how a person with any damn sense would have bought better shoes and taken care of them better? How you would have, how they should have, chosen something cheaper yet better made, more practical yet better looking, and just generally something almost exactly unlike whatever pair of shoes you borrowed? (Yeah, I'm talking to you over there. You are, aren't you?)

If that's all you're getting out of it...what's the point?

[Context? This and every other tirade of its type in which a white and solidly middle-class or higher adult assumes that poor kids who aren't white should think and act just like white, not-poor adults. Because, of course, personal and family and neighborhood circumstances have nothing to do with anything ever.]

I miss Grandma Josie's pierogi. She doesn't make them anymore. Then again, at the grand old age of 95, she doesn't really cook anymore - her hands are less steady, her vision less clear, her legs less happy with the idea of holding her up for any length of time than they were when I was a little girl.

What's sold in the freezer case at most supermarkets - large half-circles of pasta stuffed with mashed potatoes - only superficially resembles the pierogi I remember from my childhood. The closest readily available approximation is actually cheese ravioli, without sauce. Josie's pierogi were stuffed with farmer's cheese, not with potatoes, and they were fried in butter, sometimes with a cut-up onion fried in the same pan for flavor.

Once in a while, though - at a little store specializing in European foods, in a huge supermarket three hours from home, at a church sale or some little hole-in-the-wall diner a few blocks from the downtown of a college town - someone will sell packages of the pierogi I remember. And I will always buy them and bring them home and fry them up in butter (though generally without the onions). They're a symbol to my family of pride in our Polish heritage. My mother even uses pierogi as part of her e-mail address.

My grandparents spoke fluent Polish but they did not pass the language onto their children, out of fear that speaking it would stigmatize them even more than the weird last name that started with R-Z. They did, however, try to pass on their religious traditions, which also did not hold. My parents, once left to their own devices, were rather unobservant Catholics at best. As a little girl, I was the one dragging them to church - but then I got older and more politically aware, and left the Church for reasons that were always more political than spiritual.

We have lost most of the ties to our homeland, become part of the mythical American "melting pot." It is only our love for this one food - and not its dull and mealy Americanized imitation - that remains clearly outside of the pot, a tradition easily recognizable to others from the old country.

I need to start doing this again...

+1 - Funny: Most of the entries I enjoyed this week were serious, but hosticle_fifer made me laugh with his Superstrong Supergenius Dude.

+1 - Insightful: idol_sileri demonstrates how not to build a girl's self-esteem.

+1 - Informative: team_jessie on c-sections and cacophonesque on not breastfeeding. While it infuriates me that we even live in a world where their posts need to be written, because people are just that much of assholes to mothers who don't do the "natural" thing (no matter how much they intended to or how good their reasons), I'm glad these two ladies were willing to put this out there. Even if you don't give a damn about LJ Idol, go read these. No, really.

+1 - Interesting: walkertxkitty communicates with nature.

+1 - Underrated: solstice_singer and ravenshrinkery aren't doing as well in their respective polls as I'd like, and that makes me sad. :/

Poll is here and closes tonight.

So, there's this set of "rules" - often (erroneously) attributed to Bill Gates - that some people I otherwise respect a whole lot think is the cleverest and most right-on thing ever.

I disagree, to put it mildly. I think that there is nothing particularly different about "this generation" that wasn't said about prior generations of teens by the adults around THEM. I also think that crap like this is a lot of why the Adults Are Useless trope is so damned popular.

Anyway, onto the Rules, and my commentary.

Rule 1: Life is not fair -- get used to it!

I work with programs that serve mentally ill teenagers. I am also doing a social work internship that often involves working with the teenagers themselves. They're fully aware that life isn't fair, and most of them are sick of parents and teachers and service providers telling them variants of this in response to their disclosure of something that was incredibly painful for them or their request for some form of assistance that falls well within the boundaries of "reasonable accommodations".

Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

See above. Also, I don't support the failure to differentiate between "feel good about yourself" in the sense of being puffed up and arrogant and "feel good about yourself" in the sense of not experiencing disabling levels of clinical depression. This is how you end up with the bit in the recent Hyperbole and a Half about Allie yelling at herself for being sad when people have DEAD PETS and TUMORS.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

I actually agree with the first sentence. Most people will not make that kind of money right out of high school. Or college. Or (frequently) grad school. If I were working my full-time schedule, I'd be making just short of it five and a half years after getting my first Masters degree. In my experience, the only ways someone ends up making that kind of money directly out of undergrad are: a) the combination of privilege and sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time, or b) pursuing the accumulation of money at the expense of other aspects of the human experience, often with a good bit of luck and privilege thrown in as well.

It's the second sentence that's the problem, because the entire concept of "earning" is so incredibly complex. When "earned" means "inherited the position from a relative without accomplishing anything other than managing not to piss off said relative" in some cases and "hobbled for miles with broken feet uphill both ways in the snow" in others, the concept of earning one's position in society ceases to have whatever utility it might once have enjoyed. Neither extreme is what earning something should involve!

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

I've had a lot of teachers, and a lot of bosses. Some are "tough but fair", some are easy to please, and some are so demanding that pleasing them is not possible. There is very little difference between a teacher and a boss in this regard.

I'm combining a job and school right now, as a matter of fact. There are ways in which my job is more flexible. There are ways in which my school is more flexible. There are understanding people and rigid overbearing pains in the ass in both settings.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.

Oh for $DEITY's sake, can we NOT...? For every "over-entitled brat" I've heard actually say anything remotely resembling this, there are many more who either have some legitimate reason that "flipping burgers" is not a workable option for them - anything from physical conditions that contraindicate working in that environment to life circumstances that make inconsistent work schedules unacceptable - or who have applied for the burger-flipping jobs only to be told that they are overqualified. (Been there, done that.)

I suppose I could also get into the whole issue of things like abusive sheltered workshops being given a free pass because hey, people have jobs, and jobs auto-magically mean DIGNITY! But this is long enough as it is, so read the link if you're interested in the topic.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Right. Because nobody ever finds themselves unable to function as well as they'd like because of PTSD directly caused by chronic and severe childhood abuse, believing what they went through was simply their so-called caregivers practicing "strict old-fashioned parenting", and ends up blaming themselves for being "losers" and thinking that if their parents had abused them even more severely maybe THEN they'd have their proverbial shit together. For definitions of "nobody" that happen to include the person to whom I am married. This "rule" makes me so damn angry I'm surprised I can coherently address it at all.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Nah. Most of us got that way from being too tired, plain and simple, to be "interesting" by the standards of the young and able-bodied. And while some of that has to do with caring for our kids, a lot of it has to do with eventually hitting some wall of our bodies demanding that we not abuse them as strenuously as we did when we were younger.

Also, if the closet actually needs "de-lousing", there's usually something else going on besides simply a kid being obnoxious. Maybe the problem is a boy who has been taught that cleaning is women's work. Maybe the problem is that the parents have household hygiene issues of their own that the kid has inherited. Etc.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Actually, high-stakes closed-book testing as currently practiced bears far less resemblance to most things in real life than re-trials of the same activity being allowed until you get it right. If you burn dinner on Monday, does that mean that you won't be allowed in the kitchen on Tuesday? (And if that is the case, isn't that its own problem?)

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Part of FINDING YOURSELF, I always thought, is finding a good fit career-wise. So while the employers might not be directly interested, the good (read: not abusive) ones are interested in encouraging people who have a knack for the work they've been hired to do to continue to improve at that work and find satisfaction in it, and sometimes in gently encouraging people who aren't well suited to their work to try something else somewhere else.

As far as "getting summers off" is concerned, I don't know very many high school or college students whose "summer off" is not occupied with some form of effort different from the academic year routine, but at least as intense and often more so. Summer jobs, counselor-in-training positions at summer camps, even intensive summer practice for sports all take effort - generally effort of a more direct and physical sort than butt-in-chair academic coursework.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

OK, I'm not a big fan of television in general, but I can't think of any shows I watched where people of employable age didn't go to work on a consistent basis. Even when the central action of the show happened outside of working hours, the Job and the time it took up was always part of the plot. So I just don't get what the hell this is about.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what definition of "nerd" you're using and what field you go into. This is not to say that I disapprove of being nice to "nerds" or to anyone else who isn't actively harming you at the moment.

In addition to my problems with the individual rules, I also have a serious problem with the list AS a list, as a thing. The whole idea that this is somehow what Every Teenager Ever thinks and feels and believes and acts like is so asinine that it shouldn't even require mentioning. And yet, most of these items are so prescriptive that only one so much as bothers with "If you think..." The assumption is right there: this is what "kids" DO think. Full stop.