Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 18

Debate Debacle

I was, frankly, shocked to hear, immediately after the debate on Wednesday, that Mitt Romney had obviously won, hands down. And this came from people on MSNBC, Charlie Rose and, later, Jon Stewart. But a quick little poll among my own friends gave me a much-needed reality check. As usual, the nation saw two quite different debates. But very few on my side in the public arena saw the same one my friends and I watched. Read more

More Material

Another Monday, another old letter. Readers of
The Year of the Crow
will recognize bits and pieces of this: Read more

Mystery Quotes

This from the archives. And now that I read it over, I'm thinking that the quote below could only have been written by HST. So why did some guy named Ed Meece write it down on a scrap of paper, and why do I still have it 30 years on?

"I have no idea who wrote the following. 'Twasn't me. Could be a fella name of Ed Meece, whose name sounds vaguely familar and which actually appears at the bottom of the second little tiny sheet of note paper on which was written the following: Read more

Little Pink Houses

You may recall from a previous confession that sometime in the 1980's, convinced that the man I thought I loved could never really love me, I ran off with a No Good Boyfriend with a local motorcycle club which shall remain nameless here.

A club composed of a bunch of bikers can make strange (I want to say bedfellows here, but that could give a wilder impression than was actually the fact - only one of the "club" guys was actually a bedfellow).  Read more

More Than

Back when I was submitting chapters of
The Year of the Crow
to my writer's group, one set of criticisms from my fellow women writers set me back on my heels a bit.

Not only was my heroine not very kick-ass, an issue I addressed in another post. Even worse, she was too caring, too solicitous of others, too accepting of a traditional woman's role. She cooked too much. Read more

More Misty History

Labour Day Morning 2012 and I don't have time for something fresh so I'm reaching back once again to Labour Day 2004 when I was writing about November of 1962. Who says we don't have time machines? Read more

Talking to Them

Earlier this year, in a piece I called Diversity on Ice, I waxed semi-eloquently on my wish to more fully understand the "other side." To talk with, listen to, and perhaps learn something valuable from Them.

I still think it's possible, but efforts in that direction have not been promising.  Read more

Teenage Wasteland

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

No, that's not another line from a Who song. That is the quintessential core of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, a devotee of whose is now hoping to be a breath away from the presidency. It's a philosophy that once held great appeal for me. When I was 16 or so. It stands at the core of what Rand called "the virtue of selfishness." Read more

The Beautiful People

There's a Jerome Kern song that runs through my head every once in a while and, when no one is at home, I sing it around the house. The Way You Look Tonight brings back a time that, likely, never was. I think of myself in my young college years and a man I said I would marry. Lovely ... never, ever change. This song is about somebody I wanted to be, but I changed. Read more

Awash in NGB's

I'm spending Mondays cheating like hell - if I think of a whole new topic to write about, I'll spend the next two hours doing it, and there goes the day. And I'm giving a mega-party in less than two weeks. So these are pieces from a little blog I had on Blogspot once upon a time and which may have been read by two, maybe three people. As this one may be as well. I was taking pieces at random from a folder of stuff I saved (I actually have them labelled by year). This was 1985: Read more