This is the body of an email I sent to an old high-school friend.  This transaction occurred a few months ago when Edwards was still in the running for president.

I hope you enjoy my retort and please feel free to give me pointers for discussions like this in the future.

Cheers!

This picture will make sense by the end of this diary:

She's the mother of my daughter's best friend.  She owns her own small floral shop and works all the time.  

She's Caucasian, late 30s or early 40s.  She goes to a Mormon church - but I'm not thoroughly convinced she's going for the Mormonism than for the comradeship and she's said to me directly she wants her daughter to have some structure of "values" in her life - a reason I can appreciate, even if I, an atheist, hold myself accountable to some pretty high ethical standards.

She came to get her daughter from my house this evening around 7:30 p.m.  She knows I am a staunch Obama supporter and she's even called me on the phone to discuss the election.  But tonight while our children played in the yard, she nearly broke down twice, being genuinely conflicted with where to place her vote this November.

Every morning these days, I am angry before I even get out of bed.

Why?

Because every morning I have the teevee turned to MSNBC and I listen to Mika, her fained concern and premeditated and careful cadence, an acting skill crafted and honed to give the illusion of giving an off-the-cuff narrative, but to the trained ear, betrays her allegiance to her corporate scriptmaster.

And then, before the sun rises over my town, blinking and maniacally alert African-American "Republican strategists" explain to me why Barack Obama is destined for failure and would be a disaster if elected for president.  Which won't happen, so don't even get worked up about it.

I have a girlfriend in Memphis, my home town, who I have known since the second grade.  She is nine days younger than me and I have always loved her like a sister...I have always admired her beauty, her sense of humor, and her intelligence.  

Many of her neuroses mirror mine, and on just about all topics we not only see freakishly eye-to-eye, but it is almost as if we share the same mind.  Our viewpoints about relationships, fashion, and personality types are near-identical.

Of course, I moved away right after high school and we didn't connect for about 12 years.  Yet she never left my mind and my heart, and when we reconnected almost two years ago it was as if a great void in my life was filled again.

Well, here it is.  I'm going into no-man's land.  Good thing I'm a woman.  

I was hard-core Gore.  All he did was win a few paltry prizes (snark).  I gave my love to Edwards, but he had no stone.  Wait, that was the cherry I gave my love.  Edwards had no delegates.  Ok, he obviously had some.  But not enough.

So....decisions, decisions.  

I apologize for the last-minute nature of this diary, but I have just been made aware that I am available and "eligible" to attend Obama's rally at the Key Arena in Seattle tomorrow morning at 11.

LO.

(That’s what prophets say to get your attention.)

(ahem)

LO!

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Here I go agin', bitchin' and moanin' about our youngsters as if I were some old curmudgeon.  Well, I'm starting to feel like one.  Nothing like living with a 9 year old girl to make this woman in her early thirties feel like the oldest and most irrelevant fossil in the museum.

But I went on another field trip with her school today.  Last time I went on one I was overwhelmed by all of the overweight and abysmally out-of-shape youngsters I was left in charge of.  Today, though, left me with another fear - a fear for the continuation of the American disease of wastefulness.  My question is (instead of my just bitchin' and moanin' that kids don't give a crap about anything but themselves and what's on the Disney channel) what in the hell are we gonna do to fix this, because the only other alternative I see unless we do a REALLY QUICK 180 is waiting for the waters to rise and whatever other environmental apocalypse awaits us.

Astonishing.  

I do not normally write diaries off the cuff, but I have to relate what just happened here in my house with the guy who is here presently cleaning my carpets.

It is my honor to write this week’s installment of Feminisms.  In light of some of the more moving diaries offered today, I hope this is taken with the spirit in which it was written, and I would hope I could honor the lives of the people I have had the pleasure of meeting.

I sold cosmetics in department stores for nearly ten years of my life.  Yes, I was that girl.  Bleached-blonde and tall.  Talked a lot.  When one does what I did for a living, you, Dear Reader, must know that a person like me is often times HATED right out of the gate by the customer.  I am the ENEMY.   No matter how poor I am at home, how bad my feet hurt and stink when I take my shoes off in the evening, or how many horror stories I am living out in my off time, I am here at the department store to sell you pretentious things you do not need for an extravagant price.  

How does this apply to Democratic politics?  Well, it does at least as much as Pooties do, I can imagine.  But isn't raising well-balanced children just as important?  Hencefore, here is the first of what may become a series on the subject of breaking in a new member of an already-established, not-so-nuclear family, from the initial power struggles, to differences of opinions about things like diet and distribution of disciplinary duties, that I hope will bring forth some comments from my favorite public living room, Daily Kos...

Everything's going to hell in a handbasket, with little flecks of hope and light to keep us fighting for what we must believe will be our victory.  Here's a (hopefully) funny story about one of our darkest hours as Democrats...please have a chuckle at my expense.  

I really ought to take up knitting or kick boxing, because watching CNN is making me want to chain-smoke and bite the heads off chinchillas.

I've written before about being new to parenthood.  I make no claims of being perfect at it, but what I saw today while on my stepdaughter's field trip truly alarmed me inside.

This happened about 10 minutes ago.  Please help me.

I've been a step-parent for about three months.  The two children are a boy and a girl, ages five and nine, respectively.  The girl came across my copy of the book The Bush Dyslexicon by Mark Crispin Miller, a book of which I have enjoyed periodically and read sporatically, as I was cleaning up after dinner.

I am so excited right now that my hands are shaking.  For years and years I have lamented the fact that my highly intelligent, very successful, respectable and staunch Southern Baptist uncle has taken Bush's bait, voting for him twice.  My uncle and his family live in a mid-sized town in west Tennessee and drive SUVs, if you get the picture.

Well, my mom forwarded me an email from my uncle that has given me a reason to celebrate!

     A little bit of snow and I'm lost in it.  Ice from the sky.  It defines the world with its stoicism.  Whitewashing the evils and the known.  Tiny white angels with pitchforks for unique limbs, falling, turning the world into a mystic, fantastical narrative.  We fall into a story of lore with a wistfulness for days of yonder.  Suddenly, we love that we are older, and revel that we were once young.  We recognize those days and what wisdom we've gleaned hence, when the sky is a monochromatic canvas, daring us to succumb to the melancholy of sentiment.