Lisa > Recent Status Updates

in winter their [black-capped chickadees] their body temperatures drop nearly twenty degrees F each night to slow their metabolism to help survivie the cold. Their hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory, increases in size in late summer as the breeding season ends and seed caching begins. The better the memory, the more easily they'll find the cached seeds needed to survive the bitter cold.

Finished reading; RTC.

New to me words:

p. 21 krewe - a social organization that stages parades and/or balls for the Carnival season

p. 38 - boogalee - racial slur for Cajun

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

"Gilbert has never left me . . . as I age it feels so strange that the majority of people with whom I come in contact don't have the slightest inkling that he ever lived. I had him for so much less time than I've lived without him, and yet his presence is enormous, though I keep it to myself. It is as if I've swallowed a hot air balloon but try not to let on."

Finished reading. RTC sometime next week (I hope).

In the meantime know that I LOVE it!

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

New York was always enlivening, it was as if the air itself had some strange elixir.

Finished reading; RTC.

"you don't seem alive anymore. I look at your face and it's as if your sense organs are disappearing or as if they've already disappeared so that no one gets to connect with you. Always you've been hard to second-guess, but now you're impossible."

"So I was heard, and it felt good and respectful to be heard, to be got, not to be interrupted or cut off by opinionated, poorly attuned people."

" 'Madam, please write book for men about love, because they do not understand it as womas do.'

I had not the heart to tell er that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women."

"My attitude to marriage could indeed be gleaned from it [August is a Wicked Month], as indeed it could from a magazine with the incendiary heading "O'Brien Tosses a Molotov Cocktail Through the Stained-Glass Window of Marriage." In the article I had said that the marriage vows should be rewritten in favor of the wife; this in a room full of males did not bode well."

"Instead these local issue women spoke of . . ordinary things, such as walking down the street and getting hit by a guy . . . just because he was in a bad mood. Or having your bum felt as you're walking along. Or having a loud male comment passed upon your physical characteristics as you're passing. . . Then they spoke of ordinary physical violence [getting felt up in the process] . . . as if it was sexual violence."