Random Thought

You know, I was thinking this morning about giant bank failures after Wachovia bit the dust.  Surprise surprise.  I looked through the FDIC bank failure list.  While it appears a few small banks have failed recently, the number of large bank failures to small ones is bigger in comparison to the overall number of banks.  [...]

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Need a Job?

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Drive Your Car, McCain

This piece can be seen on Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lara-m-gardner/a-leader-should-be-able-t_b_129341.html
Out of curiosity, I made a small survey of job postings just to see what kinds of skills employers are requiring of potential employees. Among other things, one of the primary requirements of job seekers is that they possess the ability to multitask. Multitasking is a simple concept [...]

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Pitiful

It just makes me sick, those poor babies made ill by milk powder in China.  It reminds me of Nestle going into third world countries, telling the women to stop breastfeeding and to “use formula like western women,” all the while ignoring the fact that the water is unsafe to drink.  The result is a [...]

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There Oughta be a Law…

How many times has something really catastrophic happened followed by people scratching their heads and saying, “There ought to be a law.”  I wonder how many of these same people would call such laws “regulation” because that’s exactly what they are.  Deregulation?  Deregulation is the removal of laws, including laws that protect us from harm.  [...]

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Smitten

I’m completely smitten.  Okay, here’s an aside.  How is it that a person who reads as many books as I do, who loves words and word origins, who loves language actually, can have gone through life and not known that smitten is a past participle of smite?  How is this?  I am completely pitiful.  I [...]

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Published!

So how cool is this?  I submitted an article to Huffington Post and they accepted it!  It is a piece I wrote here on this blog about Sarah Palin.  If you’re interested in viewing it, go to the link here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lara-m-gardner/lowering-the-glass-ceilin_b_128346.html
If you like what I wrote, feel free to hit the buzz up button.  The more [...]

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Sleepy

I’m sooooo tired.  Somehow adding the extra o’s makes it more.  I like that, that adding a few extra letters means emphasis.
When I first arrived here, my insomnia returned with a vengeance, mostly because I missed my boyfriend and sleeping with him.  Then a couple of weeks ago I started sleeping a bit better, actually [...]

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Enough Already

Every time I open up my blog or look at my web-based email or go anywhere I like to go on the web there is another article another analysis another something looking at Sarah Palin and John McCain and on and on and on.  I’m so tired of it.  She’s a disaster.  He’s a disaster.  [...]

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Deregulate Insurance Like We Deregulated Wall Street

Good one, McCain.  You’re on top of things.  You obviously know your stuff.  I cannot believe there are people out there who would make this man president…
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/20/mccain-deregulate-insurance/
Paul Krugman notes that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) published an article on his health care plan in the current issue of Contingencies — the magazine of the American Academy [...]

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Missing is So Unkind

What possible biological basis can there have been for us to evolve a mechanism that allows us to feel like a limb has been removed when we miss another human being?  Is it truly only the mating sequence? Why couldn’t our biology be content to know another mate will someday take the place of the [...]

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A Windfall Plum

I feel so crappy in the morning lately.  I would blame it on needing tea, but I have always had tea in the morning and it did not engender this level of unpleasantness.  I ache.  I think one reason may be my bed.  It is a futon on the floor.  It is hard.  It is [...]

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Obama and the Palin Effect by Deepak Chopra

I just had to post this here because it is so well written:
Obama and the Palin Effect
by Deepak Chopra
http://www.chopra.com/node/1064
Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis [...]

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Lowering the Glass Ceiling

See this piece on Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lara-m-gardner/lowering-the-glass-ceilin_b_128346.html
I would like to take you on a journey of the imagination…
Imagine that Sarah Palin is not a woman, but a man.  We’ll call him Mr. Palin.  Mr. Palin has been mayor of a small town in Alaska, and governor of that state for less than two years, a state [...]

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Miss Molly

In December 1996, I decided that I wanted another dog.  I had lived with my sweet dog, Autumn, for four and a half years. We had moved back to Oregon from the east coast, and I had finished college and begun working full time. I decided Autumn needed someone to hang out with during the [...]

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What IS it???

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My Response to a Comment

Some person commented on the letter I posted written by Lyra Kilston and Quinn Latimer.  In the letter, Kilston and Latimer make several statements about Sarah Palin.  They then ask that those who agree Palin is the wrong choice for VP and that she is not representative of women send them a statement to this [...]

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We Need to Help Haiti

Imagine Katrina hitting New Orleans not once, not twice, or even three times.  Imagine just as one storm flits away, people are dying and starving, levies are bursting, the city is in utter chaos.  Then it gets hit again, and again, and again.  This is the situation facing Haiti today, and Haiti has even fewer [...]

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Making Assumptions

For some reason my blog is read a lot more when I write about my feelings and relationships, especially when I’m feeling especially pathetic or bad.  I don’t get it.  Maybe there is some camaraderie in all of us suffering together. Maybe it is that I’m so truly pitiful that I am a relief to [...]

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Cute Fuzzy Thing

I signed up to elect Michael Palin for President.  You can do it too.  Simply click here to show your support.  Anyway, as part of my support, I got a free cute fuzzy thing!  It is so adorable.  I love it.  After I got the cute fuzzy thing, I received a thank you message from [...]

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Please Give Me a Big City

I want to move to the east coast.  I want to move to a big city on the east coast.  Boston, New York, Philadelphia.  As part of my gradual understanding of parental conditioning, I realized I had bought into the family story about me. This included certain statements that were presumed to be true, but [...]

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Are YOU Ready to Be President?

Do you think you can be president of the United States of America?  Should you be president of the United States of America?  Do you have the qualifications necessary to run this country?  Regardless whether you want to be the president, would you like to have a president you see as a person with whom [...]

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Ginormous Headache

My head hurts like nobody’s business, right at the base of my skull in the back.  I slept wrong.  I wear this eye pillow.  It was cockeyed, plus my regular down pillow had slipped under my shoulders, so I awoke basically balanced on this little lump of eye pillow and my skull screaming in pain.  [...]

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Latimer/Kilston Letter to Everyone

I received this letter in my email inbox today.  Because I agree with the letter writers, I have decided to post the letter here in an effort to disseminate the information.  After I posted this, I received a comment about it.  I have responded to that comment here, if you’re interested…

Friends –
We are writing to [...]

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Born to the Wolves

I wrote this morning, worked on a short story I’ve had rattling around my brain for years.  I’ve written versions of it, but it’s changed so much it bears little resemblance to the original.  I hate the original.  It sucks.  But I started it fifteen years ago and I am not the same person as [...]

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Miscellaneous Thoughts

So I’ve been convincing myself that it is okay to skip inconsequential writing because I’m working on a book.  The problem is that when I stop blogging or at least writing in my journal, then the words start pounding on the inside of my skull again and I start turning a little nuts.  That’s not [...]

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Palin the Distractor

The Republican party wanted to use useless, no-experience Sarah Palin to distract America from the fact that their candidate has nothing and to allow her to attack Obama while McCain looks like the good guy.  It’s working.  We need to get off the Sarah Palin bus and start looking at the team that is terrible [...]

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I Cannot Think of a Clever Title for this Post

I have not been writing as much here as I usually do because I have been working on a book idea that I have.  It’s an academic book so I’ve been doing some research in an attempt to solidify a thesis argument.  I have also been researching grad school programs to determine whether it might [...]

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