Dianne Pearce's Blog, page 19

HELP A GIRL OUT

Okay folks, I live in a new part of the world, without connections, and I need to earn some money.

I am not one to brag, but I am damn good at college app. essays, as I should be, because I’ve been helping HS students and college transfer students write them for 20 some years (am I that old?). I am fast, efficient, and trained! And I know the essay topics all colleges ask for, and the traits a student should reveal about him/herself in these essays.

So, if you know anyone who may be heading to college, or transferring from a 2-year to a 4-year school, please tell them about me. I can do the entire thing in a few hours, and I can do the whole thing in text messages, as many students prefer.

So, help a girl out, and pass the above flyer along.

Many many heartfelt thanks~

Dianne

AND I QUOTE… THE QUOTATION

Recently I noticed something disturbing with the students that I have been working with, and that is a spate of assignments from their teachers that ask them to fill out a grid form with QUOTES from their sources.

*sigh*

C’mon people, who is proofreading these things?

Quote is a verb, as in TO QUOTE.

QUOTATION is a noun, as in this is a QUOTATION from John Lennon, “All you need is love.”

So, students and your teachers, you should not be filling your paper with QUOTES, you should be filling it with QUOTATIONS, and you shouldn’t be doing that in any case, because you should be paraphrasing, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Grammar pet peeve of the day.

I’m not perfect; I make mistakes too, and I seldom see my own errors, which is why everyone needs editing, but among a college full of English teachers, many with PhDs, somebody should be giving their course materials a proofread. Write once; edit twice.

That is all.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled good day.

BID ON TRICK OR SQUEAK!

Help a kid make her art dreams come true, and bid on her fabulous felt creation, TRICK OR SQUEAK! Thank you for your support!

HELP A GIRL OUT

Okay folks, I live in a new part of the world, without connections, and I need to earn some money.

I am not one to brag, but I am damn good at college app. essays, as I should be, because I’ve been helping HS students and college transfer students write them for 20 some years (am I that old?). I am fast, efficient, and trained! And I know the essay topics all colleges ask for, and the traits a student should reveal about him/herself in these essays.

So, if you know anyone who may be heading to college, or transferring from a 2-year to a 4-year school, please tell them about me. I can do the entire thing in a few hours, and I can do the whole thing in text messages, as many students prefer.

So, help a girl out, and pass the above flyer along.

Many many heartfelt thanks~

Dianne

LAST YEAR I CAME IN LAST PLACE… & FIRST

I was literally the slowest thing going when I ran this race last year. But I won one of the first place medals anyway, because I was the lone soul in my age group! That’s how I getter done.

This year I think I’m faster, and though I shuffle less while running. I still get very very red in the face.

You can register and run this race, or just donate the fee and stay in bed, then you can outpace everyone, in your dreams.

The Mispillion Art League is in a place in the world where there are few artistic outlets for kids, if any, and even less tolerance for the artistic or different. Help the Art League help kids and anyone with an artistic nature. We have to make resources available for the gentle as well as the strong.

ONE OF THE HAZARDS OF WORKING FROM HOME

DOG FARTS. Oh my god, the dog farts.

That is all.

IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 8 : YOU SAIL AWAY FROM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD ON THIS TRIP BABY

But you will pay…. you gonna pay tomorrow; you will pay tomorrow….

Ha! Maybe this is indicative of where I am in my life, but this song popped into my head about a week ago, and I cannot get enough of it. It is playing in the house constantly.

Today Dave woke me up to go running, which I think makes him a great guy, because when you move across the country there is a lot of fast food involved, not to mention that I have, really, two food obsessions only, Mack Mancos’ pizza (now called Manco and Manco after a bitter family feud, but for me it will always be Mack Mancos, and the bitter feud just makes it that much tastier. Delicious pizza made by questionable people… what could be better?), but that is in New Jersey, far far away, and my other food obsession is In-N-Out Burger, which happens to be never farther than five miles away at the moment. My daughter has a new friend who recently immigrated from China, and she does not have good English yet, but she knows how to say “double-double,” and she would eat there eight days a week if she could, and I’m not that far behind her, though my greed is limited to one cheeseburger, no spread, ketchup and mustard, raw onion, extra pickles. Man am I hungry! So, suffice it to say I was glad Dave woke me up to go running. But, I had trouble really waking up, and I lay on my side looking at him, eyes fluttering open and closed, and I thought, “preview to dying, here you go, it’ll be just like this, fluttering in and out until you flutter out. It won’t be so bad.” Ha! I’m not a dark person. Of course, Dave could always go first, in which case I’d be lonely, and I’d have to buy a Roomba.

“No! Save me, save me from tomorrow. I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools, no no.”

The singer, Karl Wallinger, also wrote the song, and the lyrics are just amazing, IMHO.

“Avarice and greed, gonna drive you over the endless sea.” What drives us all, except the desire to live better than we are currently living? And it keeps us going and going in an endless march of carrot and stick. If you’re not marching your either rich enough to stop, or you’ve given up.

Last night was my second night tutoring online for a new company, and it was a cluster fuck of experiences, beginning when the platform wouldn’t load and I literally had to delete it from my computer and re-download and install. Technology could not work if we weren’t all way more tech savvy than we give ourselves credit for; we’re all tech support now. But that’s Vanilla Sky, and we’re on World Party, not Paul McCartney. Every time I finished feverishly typing with one student a pop-up would appear advising me that there was another student and I had 14 seconds to prove I was there and accept the student. I imagine being the person on the other end of any chat service is like that, like when you chat with Amazon people, and I have a lot more empathy for them. I plan to be a lot less demanding in the future, which I think Karl Wallinger would probably be down with. It’s a rat race, driving me over the endless sea on a ship of fools I don’t want to be fucking sailing with. Karl, save me from tomorrow. I keep telling myself it’s only temporary, and I don’t have to show up if I don’t want to. But I’m gonna do it, “Drawn by the promise of the joker and the fool, by the light of the crosses that burned… you will pay tomorrow”

“Oh oh oh oh
Save me
Save me from tomorrow”

Which of us hasn’t had that sentiment?

“I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools”

It helps that Karl sounds like Mick Jagger on this track, and I love the way he smiles through the whole video like he’s having a great time prophesying my doom. And my doom is so damn catchy! This is an easy one to get stuck in your head over and over, but I don’t mind it being an ear worm, not at all. I can hear it in the shower, I can hum it to myself in the dark night, I can sing it while I pour the morning into the cup, dark, sugary, enticing me to keep rolling on the ship of fools.

Trust me on this one… get on board.

FAREWELL QUEEN ELIZABETH

Above is one of the many photos of the young Queen Elizabeth.

Below is a photo of my Aunt Sara, probably when she was a bit older than the above photo of the Queen, but it’s the only one I could find of her easily (without groping through shoeboxes full of photos).

In my family we always felt like they could have been sisters. And both were, I believe, very dutiful and correct ladies in their lives.

It’s most certainly the end of an era, and I feel that these two women, both gone now, would have had much in common and been good friends, had they ever had the opportunity to meet.

My Aunt Sara was, I think, a sensitive creative person who was married to the wrong man, a man who was extra intelligent, and extra devoted to rules and duty, and not very loving to a creative and soft-hearted woman who did not manage to remain that way during their marriage.

My aunt was a gifted water-color painter, and sewer. She could make complicated clothing like lined suit jackets and silk scarves with rolled edges.

My aunt once told me that, in the year or so before Marilyn Monroe passed away, she had often thought of inviting her to dinner, because she looked, in the news, to be sad, and tired, and she thought she could use a place to take a break from her life. When Marilyn passed away, my aunt was sad but not surprised, she’d said. I tell this story because I always felt it was perceptive of my aunt, to clue into another woman’s pain, and I think it would have been lovely if that dinner offer had been sent and accepted.

In many ways, the Queen, because she had wealth and privilege, probably had an easy life, and in other ways, for those same reasons, it was probably hard.

My aunt was married to an incredibly smart, respected, and talented doctor, who was also very critical of her and unkind. My aunt had a lot of money, children who had little to nothing to do with her, a lot of time alone on her hands, and a sensitive artist side that was largely unfulfilled. She was, I believe, also deeply in love with the wrong man.

Prince Philip seems to have been a strong and controlling person, dominant, and I wonder, had Elizabeth not become queen, with all eyes upon them, if he would have been loving, kind, and faithful for life. My uncle certainly took pride in being faithful, but it was like it was a chore he shouldered with little complaint, when in fact he complained a lot, and often, and embarrassingly publicly. Many times my aunt spoke in front of me of how she wanted to leave him, but she was, I think, too in love to ever go.

Queen Elizabeth had her problems and missteps like all of us, but she was who she was, it seems to me, unfailingly, when I am certain there were times she would have liked to have been different than what was expected of her. I think she did a lot to bolster morale and, in general, help her beloved country through the challenges all developed nations have. In any case, she seems to have done more than a good job at it, and I hope she’s enjoying a cocktail now with her beloved spouse, and all their former corgis.

And I think it would be more than lovely if she could, now, in the beyond places whatever and wherever they are, get to meet her doppelgänger, my aunt, Sara.

IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 7

“Grumpy Old Man” (by Remi Wolf).

Remi Wolf, you delightful youngster, I wish you lived next door to me.

I hope, if you read this post, you will take a listen to her song, and even try a few more by her.

This starts out with a little funk thing going on, bass guitar and maybe some upright bass too? What do I know? It sounds like it. When I hear that, I immediately want to get up and start moving.

Then you get these odd little bells dropping in at the end of a section, like someone’s rung the doorbell, or like the bell before an announcement in a 1960s department store, “Ladies shoes on special this week in our shoe department, floor three.”

“Bo Diddly buy baby a diamond ring, do do do, dodo dodo” wild little flourish there that seems to have nothing to do with the theme of the song lyrics except in the general “don’t take my stuff” vibe at the end.

And the video. Weird, Delightful. Odd. Funny. It looks like she made the video with her cousin Jeffrey and her neighbor Mr. Mackinaw. She definitely thrifted her awkward blue raincoat and her Devo energy dome hat from the 1970s, and she’s wearing a pair of glasses you could have taken off of Rhoda’s face.

I first heard Miss Remi on NPR.

Okay, let’s pause here and thank His Noodly Wonderfulness for NPR. Are you listening to NPR? OMGosh, I could write a whole thing about that. It’s the best, especially if you’re a poor adjunct and you have to commute to hell-and-gone to make a few bucks.

Anywho, I first heard Miss Remi on NPR, as well of a host of other music I just love, and will give a shout-out to Lily Allen, who was also brought to me by NPR. And I don’t think that Lily and Remi are anything alike, but they are both fresh crisp singers with a sense of humor, which I love, since I, myself, me, am also hysterical. I am. Come hang-out and see. And how do I know that both of these ladies are on fleek? Sophie likes them both too, and she doesn’t like anything musically that I like. No jazz, no Amy Winehouse, no Beatles, no Stones, no Split Ends. But, she does love Cake and Weezer… so go figure. Because they’re hysterical too, maybe, like her mom.

I heard this song, by Remi Wolf, when I was driving, and when I got home I immediately started asking my Alexa to play it. Then I looked up the video, and I was hooked, and I started doing her “pull the horn on the big truck” dance around the kitchen. I even kinda want that awkward blue coat.

I’m in my 50s, so, to Remi Wolf, sadly, I’m definitely an old lady, and probably not her desired fan base, but I love this woman. And I love, from what I can see from when I became aware of things that were “cool” in the 70s, to now, how society has really shifted, at least in terms of musicians and people we like on YouTube videos, influencers, whatever, to allow for so much more diversity. Wikipedia says that Wolf is bisexual, Russian, Persian, and Italian, so that’s a little diverse, and she’s not some “perfect doll” looking singer either. She’s funky and fun, and creative with her persona and her look. I just moved back to Los Angeles so that my daughter could go to this relatively new arts charter school, which is in collaboration with the public school in the area, and is awesome, and I see, there, though the principals of the combined schools still wear business formal, that the kids are really free, so free, and so imaginative, and so creative, and so accepting of each other’s weirdness, or lack of weirdness. My daughter gravitates toward funny people, as she would, having been raised by a mom who’s hysterical, but aside from that, she really doesn’t care, and everyone (only about 1/3 of the kids have opted-in to the art part of the school) is cool with each other. Anyone can eat lunch with anyone. My daughter hangs with all girls at the moment, opposite from elementary school when she hung with mostly boys, but some of them speak barely any English, some are of mixed heritage, some are probably not straight, but they may be too young to know, some are fancy dressers, some are punks, my daughter is a hoodies and sweats person currently (which is amusing because the little girl who hung with the boys was 100% dresses and glitter), some of the kids have hair color from the Crayola box, others have perfectly boring hair. If one of them hopped up from the lunch table and started doing a Remi Wolf sort of thing, I believe the rest of them would be delighted, and the more outgoing would join in and the more ingoing would enjoy the show. There is this freedom, with many school-age kids, that I don’t think we had when I was a kid, though I certainly had more than my parents had. My brother was 9 years older than me, and I am 8 years older than my sister, so a pretty big span, and I am going to say the acceptance for weirdness did not progress during that time. I was fairly openly weird t school, and my classmates thought I was fairly weird. It wasn’t a “that’s just her vibe; she’s okay” kinda thing. I’d even venture to say the 90s got more buckled down, and that may have stretched over the aughts too. But now things are loosening up.

And, in my view, Remi Wolf is a perfect example of the feeling I feel out here among the kids my daughter hangs with now. Everything is flowing, and free-to-be-you-and-me in a way Marlo Thomas could never have imagined. I know it’s not like that everywhere; it certainly wasn’t like that in Milton; those parents seemed to want their kids to be happy, as long as they weren’t too happy, and as long as that didn’t involve any tastes or interests different than family had always had. And you gotta love sports. Sports. And it seemed to come with a threat of losing your family if you were not in-step. Out here the kids I’ve met seem to flow, like seaweed in the Sargasso Sea, and their parents are there as home base, but not to make the rules. It’s cool. It reminds me of everything I feel in this song, free flow, but okay to be odd, have silly fears, wear clothing that is an awkward shade of blue and a ridiculous hat, and just go, feel the sun, feel the beat, feel the joy of being who and what you are. And the sports kids hang with the band kids who hang with the no-extra-stuff kids who hang with the autistic kid who flutters from group to group hugging everyone and no one minds or says, “This ain’t your group.”

So, yeah, I could hear this song all day. And, looking up Remi for this piece, I see it may have been used in a macaroni and cheese ad, and why not? Macaroni and cheese is delicious.

Remi Wolf is delicious. Rock-on Woman! I adore you.

DELAWARE

Route 1, runs from I-95 (where I-95 hooks a right into Maryland) down/south to Rehoboth Beach ALL of Delaware below the canal is called “Slower Lower.”

Not everyone is going to agree with me, of course. But all sorts of people like all sorts of different things, and dislike all sorts of different things, and that is okay. I dislike Delaware, where I previously lived, and that is okay.

Delaware.

I grew up in and around Philly, and Delaware was always there. In the days when people bought consul TVs and huge stereos Delaware is where you bought them because it has no sales tax. And I had an uncle in the Air Force, and he lived, when he retired from it, in and around the Dover area. We visited a bit, and I remember my father was impressed that they had larger houses on big pieces of land for cheap. And why? Because, Delaware.

The first state, second smallest, and, until recent years, almost entirely a rural. It’s that last part that get’s ya. I have read the stories about hipsters who leave the city and land in some rural area and open up a micro brew and live happily ever after. And I guess the beer guy, Dogfishhead beer, did that. He married one of the wealthiest girls in the county, and was able to get land and resources and everything else a guy could need to brew his overly-hoppy, painstakingly hipstery beer. What-ev. The rural thing ain’t it, IMHO.

They say that there are 200 chickens for every man woman and child in Delaware. Get it? One person = 200 chickens.

It snuck up on me, the rural.

At first I was just like, well, I’m 10 miles from the Atlantic Ocean; this is cool. And it was, at the time, cheaper than many areas in the USA that are 10 miles from the ocean, any ocean. And the fields, when you’re new, or maybe any time, are something. They blind the view in the summer and fall, when the corn is 6 feet high, and the rest of the year they lay out flat, expansive views of the land as far as you can bear to look, and they change color with the seasons and plantings. I like them in early spring best, when they turn bright green, and my second favorite is fall, when the chopped corn stalks stick up like daggers, and the bales of hay dot the fields in a way that always reminds me of the cover of Houses of the Holy.

But, in rural areas people are insular, and they like it like it is, and they like it even more, is possible, like it was, and not like it could be or might be. And they like the people to be the people who always were, and they don’t really want you moving here, and they’re not welcoming, and all that you might bring looks to them like a virus from Wuhan looks to the rest of us. How did you find this private place of theirs, and how can they get you to get out, and not tell anyone else about it? Brigadoon the place, that’s what they want. The whole Saturday Evening Post story that Trump sold to the white man, the rural folks bought that hook, line, and sinker..

This is not true of the whole state, but of the part they call slower-lower. The locals sell bumper stickers that say LSD and Lower Slower Delaware to trick the newbies, because the name is actually Slower, Lower Delaware, like that, so the newbies look stupid in the eyes of the born-heres. They mark ’em, right on their cars. They also mark themselves, with these special black license plates that are no longer available, so you have to have been here in the “before times,” which means any time before YOU showed up, to have one. Newcomers who really want to be real-deal rural will spend thousands to buy the plate from a dead guy’s car.

Facebook is a great place to see this kind of thing in action. Someone will post to a local group, “Is the corn man out today?” And someone will reply, “He just left; he ran out of corn.” And another person will say, “He ran out of corn because all you people moved here and now we can’t get any anymore.”

Never mind that the corn man might be damn glad to sell-out of corn, to anybody, local or not. There’s an open current of hostility. And don’t get me started on the pick-up trucks. But, just one story, imagine standing in line in a freezing drizzle to vote in the presidential election, and a huge pick-up, with gigantic Trump flags out the back, is circling the line playing Ted Nugent at a nuclear volume, and the truck keeps getting waaaay to close for comfort to the line of waiting voters. Or, imagine going to one of the many drive-on beaches, and a pick-up truck sets up camp next to you, and proudly plants their “Fuck Biden, and Fuck you for Voting for Him” flag in the sand next to you. Or imagine driving these country roads, and a pickup truck seems to be trying to run you off the road, and the driver yells something and gives you the finger when he passes you. Okay, that was three stories, not one, but, and there are so many more.

If you live east of The One (route 1, not Keanu Reeves), and only venture to The One for dinner out or some such thing, you can basically convince yourself that you’re in vacation wonderland, and everyone around you seems to be too. But if you’re west of The One it can be a very different experience, from your locally born neighbors to the chicken trucks carrying soon-to-be-dead birds everywhere in miserable conditions, to the general attitude of folks. I remember one time saying to my local produce lady how I liked her watermelons because they were never “sandy.” “Sandy?” she snapped. “What’s sandy? You mean mealy?” I guess yes, I meant mealy, but I grew up saying sandy. From that day on she seldom had a smile for me, because I was not from there; I’d used the language of a foreigner. A white person, like her, American-born-and raised, like her, and yet, a dirty foreigner. When a true friend of mine died, a friend who was a local as you could get, but who was, and thought of me as, a true friend though he was local and I was not, his family made certain I knew that I was not going to be included in any memorial of him, because I was not “one of them.”

I guess, if there’s someplace you’ve always wanted to try living in, you should be brave, and try it. If there’s someplace you need to be living in, whether you desire to live there or not, you have to be brave too, and look for those people who are open and accepting, like my friend who died, and take what you can get that makes it better when you can get it. For all the many many pro-Trump and Fuck Biden signs I’ve seen, for all the people who’ve yelled at me in parking lots because of my “Black Lives Matter” window cling, for all the church marquees that post rude and divisive messages in the name of Jesus-the-white-non-Jewish-man there have yet been bright spots, and I leave this post today with one that has always delighted me, what I call The Biden Barn. This photo is my photo, but I know not who The Biden Barn belongs to; I only know I love that person quite a lot.

Wait for it….Closer…..Dude, I love you.

I was always so happy to see this through my windshield. Now, I enjoy it being in my rearview mirror.