Posts from — February 2008

I have had the most fun with The Great Interview Experiment at the Citizen of the Month blog. The experiment was to compile a list of volunteers and pair them off — Person 1 interviews Person 2, who interviews person 3, etc. It’s one great big merry conga line of interviews. And I got to meet Kerri Jernigan, who has an amazing, funny, irreverent, moving, and sensitive blog that I enjoyed plundering — be sure to check it out.

In my next post, you can check out her great answers to my interview questions, plucked from interesting tidbits hinted at on her site. :o) But first … here’s MY list — in no particular order — of …

5 Reasons to Lurve You Some Kerrianne:

• She has a big heart. It has the kind of depths in it that come from love, both given and taken, piercing loss, laughter, and attentiveness to the people who matter most in her life.

• Any woman who can cheer for grammar nerdiness, drool about pretty paper, enjoy an impertinent question about her husband’s sleekly elegant bald head, shake a virtual fist at the wench who sued her baby sister, and make me cry a bit over her long-dead father … well, I’d pop the cap off a cold Heineken for her any day.

• She calls her little sister “babycarrot.” BABY CARROT. You love her already, right?

• If she steps in some dog poop and then accidentally gets it all over her fricking pants, she is definitely going to blog about it.

• She named her blog’s categories … Kerragories.

In the next post … The Interrogation Begins …

Technorati Tags: The Great Interview Experiment, Citizen of the Month, Kerrianne.org, Kerri Jernigan, cool blogs, cool people

Pinching off your children’s heads isn’t legal, is it? Because it’s tempting.

I just got back from spending part of my lunch hour sleuthing to find out why my oldest had six recent unexcused absences or tardies for her first-period English class. It all clicked into focus when I spoke to her best friend’s dad, who said his daughter has study hall first period.

I correctly guessed that the gals had been warming a couple of chairs at the local Starbucks until oops-o’clock.

Now my beautiful, bright, decidedly NON-morning-person daughter is either going to have her mom driving her to her senior year of high school each day at 6 a.m. for before-school study hall OR she’ll be slouched onto a chilly seat on the school bus that she loathes. And she won’t be on her computer again unless it’s for schoolwork (and only then under active parental supervision) AND she won’t be going anywhere — anywhere at all — until she’s got passing grades again.

Taking such measures is an inconvenience and a drain on everyone in the house. (Guess where my girl got her non-morning-person genes.) But she hasn’t left much wiggle room because of her escapades. I’d be proud of nipping this in the bud if I weren’t so exasperated, tired, and sad.

It’s this kind of decision making that has been poisoning her grade point average. For such a smart and creative girl, she can sometimes fail to look at what she’s actually doing. What was she thinking? Does she want to graduate at all? Does she realize that she’s either facing summer school or a repeat of this grade if she doesn’t make utterly heroic efforts for the rest of the school year? Is she not interested in going to college?

I said all that, and more. I didn’t yell and I wasn’t mean, but I was frank.

And I kind of feel like I’ve been kicking a beloved puppy. She was home sick today (truly sick) and her crumpled expression made my heart hurt. But when you might not graduate, “senioritis” isn’t funny or cute or even excusable.

I’m back at work now … puppy-kicker that I am.

Technorati Tags: playing hookey, ditching school, ditching class, bad grades, senior year, senioritis, busted

I’m not sure what it says about me that I love both of these videos shown below — both the sacred and the profane. Perhaps that I’m an intellectually complex person. Perhaps that I don’t know who I am anymore, because I grew up Southern Baptist and now lean closer — but not quite over the line yet — to atheism. Or perhaps that I don’t like labels even though I pay attention to who I am.

Sacred (if you’re using a feed reader and don’t see the video below, click here):
[youtube]HfGytXRpfho[/youtube]

Profane (if you’re using a feed reader and don’t see the video below, click here):
[youtube]WPAC_cGVnUg[/youtube]

Do you have any dichotomies like this?

Technorati Tags: Christianity, atheism, dichotomies, complexity