But Call Me Betsy

Have started taking this 8-week meditation class through Penn Medicine.  We meet every Wed. from 6-8:30 and then have daily meditation homework. This week, we're supposed to practice twenty mindful breaths four times a day and do a daily 30 to 45 minute sitting meditation. I can manage the 4 small meditations, but the longer one is more intimidating. The class includes mp3's to guide you through the process, but like yesterday, I had a hard time not peeking at the line signaling how far along we were in the meditation, becuaes I was thinking, Okay, I'm ready to be done now. And then it's easy to get distracted by the nosies of the cats--their nails clicking on the wooden floor as they do their cat things and I feel like I have to look to see what's happening, so that I don't miss Emma Carol licking herself or Henri cowering under the table for the hundreth time. I'm going to try to sit on the floor today when I do it, and I imagine that the cats will be even...

To sum up: "Connection. Connection. Amazing! Amazing connection! Most difficult rose ceremony ever.I get lost in your eyes ( cue 80s song ). I want that rose. I want to have the most difficult rose ever. She's a bitch. Not here for the right reasons. Her reasons for being here are not right, they are left. She's slutty. Why is that one girl's face so flat? Are you talking about me? Huh? Which one are you? I'm the blond. No, I'm the blond. We're the blond ( in choral unison )." Missed the first hour because of teaching a writing class. I'm going to like these students a lot--very intelligent and dedicated and open. Polite, but also willing to disagree with each other, I think, which is also important. I don't know if I'll be able to make a Bachelor video b/c Dan's not here and I also am already in my pjs and not really safe for video. Also, the camera is out of juice, so there will be nothing to record. Jake must let someone go. Who...

Due to the previously mature content of the video first posted, I've reedited to make this one a little more palatable (though not much). This Monday, I'll teach the first fiction writing class and so Dan won't be able to come over and consequently, we won't be able to make a video. I guess I could just tape one myself, but that might be weird. Anyway, here's the PG-13 version of last week's video.

Have missed a lot of the first 45 minutes--but in just turning it on for two seconds, I've already seen two women cry, Jake say, "This is so difficult," and "We have a connection," and the crazy girl explain how she wants a gran-baby to give to her momma. But she's not desperate, she adds. They are all here to find true love, and fall in love, and make love, and be lovely, and be around love, and love ya like a rock. They are obsessed with the roses. Why is Michelle so angry and why does she have tears in her eyes at every second? The Christian girl just took her on. She is crying about not being able to give birth to a grand kid right away. Elizabeth believes Michelle needs a therapist more than she needs a nanny or a husband. Michelle is explaining that she is honestly, 100% here for love, whereas the other women...And she just really, really, really, really wants a husband. She is crying in front of Jake, her nose getting redder. She needs to know if h...

Here's today's new X-ray. I think it looks better, but I'm almost always wrong.

Missed most of the first hour b/c we were messing around with a video, but one of the highlights we caught was the one on one girl going, "It was so beautiful to hear the sound of the grasshoppers..." Dan said, "Doesn't she mean crickets?" There has been an unbelieavel amount of bad music on this show--including Chicago and "On the Wings of Love." We're about to find out the big secret that's not a secret wherein one of the girls was supposedly flirting with one of the producers. Who cares? these women are pretty aggressive. I wonder how much time they actually have with him one-on-one...Like, it seems from the editing that it's only ever fifteen seconds. Vienna has admitted that she almost married her pastor's son and then married someone else and got unmarried. He gave it to Olivia, who must have confessed something great. Vienna is pissed off. He gave it to her because she asked him not to kiss her and htat's why he likes her. Sh...

I had lunch with a co-worker the other day who is also an avid fiction reader and we were talking about teaching the Philadelphia Stories ' fiction workshop. He asked me what stories we would be reading for class and I listed off a few of the ones I love to assign, including Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," by Amy Hemple, "Love is Not a Pie," by Amy Bloom,  Lorrie Moore's "Terrific Mother," and pretty much anything by Raymond Carver. My friend then told me that there had been all this controversy about Carver's work--that much of the final story was the work of significant edits and cuts by his editor, Gordon Lish. He sent me this link to the New Yorker article, "Rough Crossings: The Cutting of Raymond Carver." Basically, the article describes how Lish slashed huge chunks of Carver's writing, paring it down into the sparse prose that's been compared to...

That is what Jake has said to every single Bachelorette that he's met in this brand new, yet seems so familiar episode of The Bachelor. I missed the first hour, but I don't think it matters, because they all seem to do the same thing, except now they have gimmicks like bringing jelly beans or pretending to trip or bringing him aviator sunglasses or fake-speaking Vietnamese or coming at him like she's flying an airplane or wearing a dress the size of a napkin. Also, the girl who says that she is there to win. How much longer can this show go on? Dumb girl with the raspy cheerleader voice just fake tripped and ripped her dress. Oh, his three priorities are "dogs, fumbling, and flames." Or he may have said,  "God, fambly, and friends." The Asian girl said, "Jake, you can land your plane on my landing strip any time." Like he's never heard that before. Hey, here's an idea, don't wear your hair in a side pony tail past the age of 14 or...

Jodie came into town last week for the MLA English interviews and so we got to hang out a couple of times. Here we are in a restaurant. She would not give me her hat to keep, not matter how much I begged and pleaded. After dinner, we went back to the Sofitel , where Jodie bought me a chocolate martini for about $35 and we listened to someone go on about how life is the same for everyone around the world. At one point, he even said, "What is life?" We were not amused nor impressed. I took this picture of the matching cats b/c they remind me of Paul Skoles and Piper. Same cat family. My mother stayed to help me when I first broke my arm. Mainly, she just served as a place for the cats to sleep on. Not a job she took to with gusto. The blob on her stomach in the below photo is Emma Carol, in typical slug-shape. She attaches herself to anyone and everyone who walks through the door. I took this picture while exiting the Snyder subway stop earlier this fall. How many dogs do you...