Ooh la la.

Venus on the half court. Venus goddess of 40-Love. Venus the Olympian. Venus French-kiss Open. Ah, Venus Venus Venus. Never did tennis look so—Sting, could you strike up "Roxanne" about now?—red-light a.k.a. "Take all that white, proper, stiff upper lip, gracious tennis wear and wipe my pretty rear end with it." Yowza.

What do you suppose it's like to play against that? What do you think it measures on the richter scale of "psyching out your opponent"? And what will be next? Topless? Bottomless? The mind can only wonder. Which is, I'm sure, exactly what it's supposed to do.

Where have we been?

Well, the conventional answer would be, "We've been to London to visit the Queen" or something like that. But we haven't. We've done something far more monumental. We've been to Florence to see each other.

I trained down from Milan with my two girls in tow. And Janet and Rick bussed up from Siena, taking a break in their vacation to do what we don't get to do enough: be together.

I won't go into details. Suffice it to say that four hours when you haven't seen someone in oh-nine-years-give-or-take is a phenomenally emotional ride. I kept staring at Janet thinking: Is that really you, in the flesh? Can this be?

And through the veil of years and distance I must say that Janet is more beautiful than ever. More full of heart. More gracious. More chocolatey. I could have eaten her up on the spot.

And then, before it began, it was over. And all those fragments of conversation desperate to weave over the gaping hole that an ocean and two continents have dealt us came to a final teary hug. A kiss on that softest of cheeks. Arms that want to grasp something that should never be let go of. A goodbye that musn't be a goodbye, at least not for long. (Promise?)

Yesterday, I had the good fortune of hearing Florence and the Machine's The Dog Days Are Over..."Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back"...and I thought: yes, that is exactly what it was like. A bullet. That giveth and taketh away.

Here's till the next time, Janet. Love, Me

Florence and the Machine "DOG DAYS ARE OVER" Music Video from LEGS MEDIA on Vimeo.

Art & Artificial Blondes are such Beautiful Things

I paint because I am a woman.

(It's a logical necessity.)

If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.
I paint because I am an artificial blonde woman.
(Brunettes have no excuse.)
If all good painting is about color then bad painting is about having the wrong color. But bad things can be good excuses. As Sharon Stone said, “Being blonde is a great excuse. When you’re having a bad day you can say, I can’t help it, I’m just feeling very blonde today.”
I paint because I am a country girl.
(Clever, talented big-city girls don’t paint.)
I paint because I am a religious woman.
(I believe in eternity.)
Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn’t travel with the speed of light. That’s why dead painters shine so bright.
It’s okay to be the second sex.
It’s okay to be second best.
- Marlene Dumas

And I write because I'm an insane woman living in the woods staring at the ocean who quite often feels like an artificial blonde & who wants so badly to believe in some kind of eternity. And a writer who now adores the painter Marlene Dumas. She makes me, for a moment at least, stop thinking about oil spills, hypocrisy, and snow falling in May. - Janet

You Write Like A Girl

A few weeks ago I was reading about Then Came the Evening, the new first novel by Brian Hart. Most reviews compared him to Cormac McCarthy, an incredible author of spare, painfully gorgeous, textured prose. The kind of writer who forces me to stay up late, oh so late, reading and wishing I could write anything like that. But several of these 'reviews' just pissed me off. Because they were from women, all of whom commented in one way or another that Hart 'writes like a man'.

I'm sorry; he writes with his penis? With his testicles? While he's scratching his ass and farting? What the hell does this mean and why would anyone critique someone this way? It's a man's book, too tough, testosterone-fueled, too harsh, all muscle-bound, aggressive, violent, and really, really depressing. A woman would have never written this.

Really? Oh shut up.

Part of my anger at these bloggers and critics is that they're so unimaginative in their criticism. Part of it is any writer being referred to by gender or race - does Brian Hart write 'too white', too? Or too black, too Hispanic, too tall, too short, does he write as if he's part Irish or just a little too country? Part of it comes from what Oscar Wilde said over a hundred years ago: 'There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.' But then he wrote all gay-ish, so what did he know?

And the rest comes from the fact that I was labeled, early and often, as a 'woman writer'.

When what I was, I imagined prosaically, was a human being who writes.

Look, there are florid writers who are male. Depressing, dark writers who are female. It's 2010 and we still live with this idiotic distinction of how we use words?

Oh forget it.

I bought the book. It's fantastic, beautiful. Reading it along with Patti Smith, Lorrie Moore, Mary Jo Bangs, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood, Anie Proulx, Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, and all those other aggressive, ball-scratching, testicle-lifting unsentimental authors. You know, the men.

-JC

Holding the Universe Together, Part II

Thought for the day:

The violets in the mountain

have broken

the rocks.

- Tennessee Williams

And aren't most of us violets?

- JC

How to Breathe Underwater

One of my friends is this wonderfully amazing person who seems to be able to handle any crisis well. Which is fortunate because she's going through another one in her family right now.

J. wouldn't agree that she moves through the world like grace under pressure. Like me, I think, she tends to project some strange calmness to the outside world even when her head feels like it's just been cut off. But her face, everything about her, projects this strong 'I can handle anything life throws at me' attitude and people believe it. She's so open and generous and unbelievably giving it seldom occurs to people she may be drowning. And a lifeline, a raft, may come in handy.

So I guess today would be a shout out to people to recognize when our friends are doing the dog paddle, or the breast stroke, and things are good. And then to come a little closer when you see that they're barely treading water. No one, even the most graceful among us, can forever breathe underwater. Somewhere in Bend, Oregon, I hope my good friend is safe inside an inner tube, and the water is calm.

- Janet

Losing it. Finding it.

A beautiful article which needs to be shared. "Dominique Brown: Losing It," in today's NYT.

"Time hangs heavily on the unemployed soul. If I ate an egg at 8 a.m., by 9:30 I was starving. I became obsessed with eggs, gazing on their refined shape in wonder. Perfect packets of nutrients. I ate eggs all day long. When I had a job, I never thought about eggs."

Dominique Brown was the editor of that magazine we loved, House & Garden, which folded some years ago, dragging her also into the crease of its nonexistence. Her chronicle of that experience and the resulting blog SlowLoveLife.com are beautiful indeed.

I invite you to partake.

"How's the weather?" vs. Deep Thoughts

Maybe you saw it, maybe you didn't. But in case you didn't, here it is again: Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

This is a recent Well blog in the New York Times about the considerable benefits of talking—really talking—about the world, problems, relationships, etc. instead of that time-worn favorite, the weather. Apparently, studies do show that people who spend more time involving themselves in substantive discussions are happier than those who spread themselves thinly over the lighter fare.

Somehow, I'm not surprised by this.

About four weeks ago I left the rather sour post on Facebook that I was thinking about "getting off." Within hours, I received a shower of responses from people I'd hardly heard from in months saying, "Awwww, but we'll miss you." And the truth of the matter is that, weirdly, I kind of felt the same way. But how could that be true?

I think there was that sense that I would miss them because—and I am speaking strictly for myself here—with every Facebook "friendship" I've invited or maintained, the motive was based on this rather romantic notion of recapturing the bond I once had with that person, or of exploring what that person represents to me from my own past. That is not superficial stuff. I think this is, in part, how we end up with friends who aren't really friends. For me the idea is not to show off an astronomical number of acquaintances, but to somehow gather up the last remaining shreds of my own personal story. Those people are like the photographs that I keep in boxes and rarely look at, but when I do look at them, I realize that I would have the hardest time throwing them away. They have a value because they represent something. Me.

The flip side is that there is rarely any meaningful discourse with these people (now, mere Snapshots of Themselves). There's just that idle chatter on the Wall which is the Opposite of what I feel and want. Can I be blunt here? I hate that stuff. I mean, I engage in it, but it wastes loads of time and I always feel empty and sad and dissatisfied.

I know the writer of the aforementioned blog, and the conductors of the study, weren't looking at Facebook as much as they were looking at spoken exchange, but I think their thesis and their findings explain why I find Facebook so dreadfully saddening. It's also why, when I want to "talk" to someone, I prefer the private-messaging feature or that dinosaur of technologies, email, which reminds me of the even more protozoan personal favorite, actual letter-writing.

But the best of all, is talking. Really talking. Which is why, I also wish, every time I am posting a blog, that we were all of us miraculously reunited over a glass of wine and an endless amount of free time to let ourselves and our recent stories unfold. What do we really think? How do we really feel? What hurts, lately? What feels good? Why? And when it was all over, we'd go home thinking how good it felt to be alive, to be really connected, and to have maybe the tiniest hint of why we are all here.

(On that note, thanks to Joselin Martin for her fabulous posts on Journey Not Destination about running, being an athlete, running with MS, and the sheer persistence most things worthwhile require. It's been a joy to read, deeply satisfying. Nothing small-talky about it.)

The Cove is Secret No More

God knows I've quoted this before, but let's get it out there again:

Margaret Mead once famously said

'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people

can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.'

See 'The Cove'.

Not just because it won an Academy Award for best documentary of the year.

But because it's intelligent, humane, important, unflinching, truthful, necessary.

And because a small group of people can change the world.

And if we're lucky, we can be some of them.

-Janet

The Oscars May Not Feel Like History

But today they are.

And as much as the Academy Awards are often ridiculous and political and shame-facedly wrong ('Crash'? You've got to be joking)

a woman, yes, a woman, finally won not just Best Director, but Best Picture as well.

Some facts are in order here.

Yes, Kathryn Bigelow started out as an extremely talented artist.

Yes, she studied under Susan Sontag. As in: Susan Sontag.

Yes, she was in direct competition with her ex-husband, another kind of glorious first.

Yes, she's only the fourth woman ever nominated for Best Director in the history of the awards. Which is, yes, a weeping crying idiotic shame.

But she won.

And more importantly than that simple historic fact is this:

She and The Hurt Locker deserved it.

One small film - the lowest grossing film to win Best Picture in Oscar history - that almost went straight to DVD,

that almost wasn't distributed, that almost no one saw.

Until now.

With a woman finally holding the gold in her arms.

For the first time in years, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, I'm proud of the Academy Awards again.

- Janet

Of Earthquakes, Squashed Fingernails, and the Passage of Time

I am practically numb with the news. The deceased. The buried, still to be dug out. The fight for food and water. The sense of hopelessness for Haiti. Horror for Chile. I feel for these people, deeply, and yet, even as sadness and disbelief hog the marquee of my emotions, that other side of my brain grapples with the more existential side of it. The small opening act that gets less attention in the news: What does it mean?

Maybe it doesn't mean anything. I sometimes think that assigning meaning is the task of idiots. (Case in point: Pat Robertson's assertion that the earthquake in Haiti was God's payback for that country's pact with the devil.) And maybe meaning isn't even the right word at all. Maybe what I'm looking for is a kind of sense. Or something to take away from all this. Something instructive. And what I get, while the link isn't at all linear, has something to do with time.

Human time, geologic time, light time. Time.

We tend to think in lifetimes—our own. Or, more often, in the spans of weeks and days. To Do lists. Short term plans. Before I go to bed tonight. When the kids are out of high school. Before I die. Etc. And in our minds, it's all peculiarly concrete and measurable. Familiar.

But the fact of the matter is that we exist also in completely other time frameworks.

It's likely no consolation to the humans of the planet who are suffering loss right now, that Earth is living its own time, just as we are. That it needs to stretch and shrug, grow and shrink, address that itch on its back. It's probably no consolation that fault lines are going to toss us aside every 60 or 500 or 300,000 years, and that the Earth is going to count those years according to its own needs, not our careful human calculations. It's no consolation, no, but it is true.

(We read this morning in the newspaper, that the Chile earthquake was powerful enough to shift the Earth's axis by 3" and that because of this shift, we will now enjoy an almost infinitessimally smaller amount of daylight each day. So much for human timetables. Just like that, the Universe has demonstrated that our measurements are no longer valid. Wrong, in other words. Meaningless. Next?)

And what this all does, strangely, is make me relax a little my own concept of time. I have lived much of my life in a hurry to pack in as much as possible. I have tried to control and "make happen" and reach goals. This has not always been a bad thing, and I don't intend to say "What does it matter in the big picture?" even though it seems like that is where my argument is going. What I mean to say is that there's a proper time and place for such clocks to tick loudly. And there's a time and place for them to fall silent, because they just don't measure up, nor do they serve us particularly well.

Let me explain. I've begun to think that we humans have two times, perhaps three. The times of our minds (this is the To Do list time), and the times of our bodies and our psyches. My Italian husband always said to me, "Life is long." I thought he was crazy. (Didn't he perceive, like everyone else, that life is simply too short, i.e. ticking along at a rapid clip?) But now, I am beginning to understand what he meant. Even as we rush around, some things simply take time. They take the time they take. And no amount of disciplined action-taking will change that.

Four months ago, I smashed my finger in the door of my daughters' room. Blood began to spread under the nail. It throbbed for days. Then it turned black. Then the black spot began to grow out from the cuticle. For much longer than I thought, my nail continued to grow out black. A couple weeks ago, the top layer of nail came out of the cuticle separated from the new nail growing underneath. The "black spot," which was of course, dried blood, slowly disappeared as the water with every bath, hand-washing or dish-cleaning, did its invisible, gentle job of washing it away. Now, I have this unsightly layer of fingernail which looks like a dirty piano key. Thick, yellowish. Unattached at the bottom, still attached at the top. There's nothing I can do about it, and nothing I want to do about it. It would hurt! So I leave it, and look at it. Day after day after day. We're not talking great loss here. We're talking a single fingernail. But it's teaching me a whopper of a lesson: It's going to take as long as it's going to take.

That's a finger. But then there's my heart. In 2006 my father died. This is the sort of earthquake we all suffer, and there could be no more apt geographical metaphor. The plates shifted. My grounding, which I so trusted, fell away. Nothing was solid. And here I am 4 years later, still putting things right, or trying to rebuild with lighter more flexible materials the structure of my heart. The pain is still there, but it has morphed. And it has changed me. Time is passing. It will continue to pass. It will take as long as it takes.

Marriage. (That subject again.) My marriage is a miracle to me. It has grown and evolved according to its own clock. It has a sense of time that eludes me. It seems to have a timeless faith in itself that keeps it going, even when we have run out of patience or nice things to say. Darkness, light. Another day / month / year.

We have to trust in these times. We have to surrender to them. We are in their grasp and their flow. They will confuse us, serve us well, outlive us.

And so, as I've written this, I've overcooked my lunch, unaware of the time. Geologic time is no good for steaming vegetables.

For Chile

To all our friends in Chile, and to all those who have friends and family there as well, we send our hope and our sympathy and our prayers. Because, yes, prayers of any kind are needed now. - Janet

Violence and Women

I'm not talking about the horrendous act of violence against women. I'm talking about the violent acts perpetrated by women that, too often, our gender (and the media) assume are infrequent. Because, unfortunately, it's not actually infrequent at all.

Awhile ago several women wrote both The New York Times and The Oregonian about how they 'simply couldn't believe' women could be suicide bombers, as the Christmas Day Pants Bomber (we need a better name don't we?) warned.

Yet they can be and they are. There have been female suicide bombers, acting as martyrs, since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. And of course before that, for at least dozens of years. We can read about them online, watch them on TV, read report after report. But perhaps we don't want to, because it screws with our idealistic view that 'If women ruled the world, there'd be no war.' Again, it's pretty to think so. But reality, well, it bites.

What is about us that wants to believe women, and girls, are incapable of horrible acts like this? Why do we want to idealize ourselves in this way? Yes women commit far less violent acts than men do: a fact. But we've always been capable of it, and quite often act on our impulses. We're human and therefore culpable of terrible things. I think accepting, and demanding, absolute equality means refusing to think we're better, greater, deeper than an entire gender. The male one.

There is a terrific article about Amy Bishop right now in the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/arts/28bishop.html?hp. She's the neuroscientist who just killed three colleagues and injured three others in a rampage that everyone should have seen coming. To read about how she murdered her 18 year old brother in 1986, and yet served no time, is honestly chilling.

Women. We're wonderful, we're amazing, we create gorgeous art and bear children and advocate for peace and hold families together. We can do anything. We can even be Medea when we want to be. - Janet

Signs of Spring

Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.

Someone said that to me on the phone this morning, and as it's a line from one of the best holiday films of all time, I immediately agreed. Agreed even though this man works in a business where faith seems patently counter-intuitive (the stock market) and that I've had an awful lot of dumb, blind faith lately for someone who works in advertising, faith that's jumped all over me like some sadistic heavyweight boxer with a grudge.

But after all, what does common sense actually get us?

It tells us not to talk to strangers. And then we miss things like true love. Or that soul mate Charlotte spoke of.

Or some honestly terrific conversation once we discover he/she/the stranger isn't as creepy as we originally thought.

It tells us not to judge a book by it's cover. And when the cover is inordinately well-designed, that's just idiotic.

It tells us to stand in the shorter line when history tells us the shorter line is always going to get slower the moment

we join it.

It makes us surly and boring and common, common sense does, and no fun at parties.

And it tells us we can't make a difference in this world. A difference of twenty dollars to a cause we believe in. A difference of taking a working vacation and volunteering while we travel. A difference of saying no sometimes when we mean no, and yes when we believe yes, taking a chance, being who we wish to be. A difference of rescuing just one animal who desperately needs a home. Not all of them. Just one. One child, one person, one animal, one difference.

It may feel like the least we can do; sometimes it's actually the most.

I don't believe in God, not at all, not even a little. Although every time a fox hole comes up, I say the words out loud.

In case I'm wrong and somebody is listening. In case even the stars pay attention now and then.

Faith doesn't require anyone listening at all. That's pretty much the beautiful thing about it.

- Janet

Live as if you were younger.

This just in from Anna H. via email: a fascinating article by the BBC about psychologist Ellen Langer and her experiments to demonstrate, if not scientifically "prove", that living and thinking younger actually reap observable physical benefits.

In 1979 she conducted an experiment in which she asked a group of elderly men to re-live, well, actually to live, as if it were still in the 1950s. They spoke about all things 50s in the present tense, imagining that they still inhabited those halcyon days of their own youth. No one cooked for them, lifted heavy luggage for them, clutched their elbows as they went up and down stairs. They were asked to take care of themselves, live for themselves, all the while imagining that they were young.

The results were astonishing. One man, by the end of the trial, abandoned his walking cane. Blood pressures dropped. Participants were judged by witnesses to look and appear younger than before. Langer even adds that such youthful thought staves of dementia.

I believe it. Never having purposefully conducted this experiment on my own, I can say that I have proven it to be true over and over again without being aware: never do I feel older than when for some crackpot reason I am actually telling myself I am old. And never do I feel younger than when I am cruising around town on my bicycle from yoga to shopping to the post office to work.

I invite you to read the article, and check out the video, whippersnapper.

(Thanks Anna.)

—Charlotte

Soulmate. Schmoulmate.

Well, here I am back on the marriage bandwagon. It's a fascinating topic and one that seemingly occupies a large portion of my gray matter. But it's not really marriage I want to talk about, it's this notion fed by the media and, unfortunately often by our own best friends, that our soulmate is out there—somewhere. If we just wait long enough, look hard enough, bend ourselves into the right positions—eventually we will find, attract, and hold in an everlasting and perfect embrace "the one." The one that was meant for us.

I hate to say it, but what a bunch of crap. It simply doesn't happen like that. And expecting that it will or even should probably impedes the possibility of something much less glamorous but much more viable and fulfilling actually ever happening.

As often occurs, I've run across the topic out of the blue in two very different media sources just this week. The first time was in an Italian psychological monthly. The second was in the book, Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat Pray Love), which I can easily, even happily, recommend. Both recount as a departure point the mythic allegory presented by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. He tells us that "humans originally consisted of four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces, but Zeus feared their power and split them all in half, condemning them to spend their lives searching for the other half to complete them." (Wikipedia, "Soulmate.") Thus, here we are today, many of us, in perpetual search of the Mr. Right who just happens to be looking for us, Ms. Right. Hmmm. When you put it like that, it just doesn't seem like such an intelligent way to spend your time does it?

In Committed, Gilbert conducts fairly exhaustive, though admittedly purely personal and non-academic, research into the the marriage rites, rituals and raisons d'etre of many (often far flung) cultures. Places where being man are wife are more or less job descriptions. Places where marriages are conducted by arrangement. Places where divorce is all but unheard of. Places where the notion of your husband being Mr. Right is laughed right out of the grass hut...because it's just such an inconceivably inconceivable notion. (Do you think maybe if they'd read Plato's Symposium they wouldn't laugh so much?)

The funny part is this: no one disputes that your spouse or life partner can become your soul mate, in a sense. What's disputable is the notion that a couple can instantly click without the benefit of: maturation, sticking together, living and working side by side, tolerating each other's faults, being honest about their own, hurting each other, misunderstanding each other, irritating each other, etc. And I'm sorry, but the part where the other person "completes" you will forever and always remain a myth to be brutally debunked. Our task in life is to complete ourselves.

And so, it is with a heavy heart, that I say that there are women I love and respect and about whom I care deeply who continue, despite their intelligence and their talent and their otherwise brilliant insights, to look for the one headed, two-armed, two-legged creature that completes them and their soul. It is painful, really, to witness. If they could just visit the right country, go to the right cocktail party at the right time, go to the right book-signing of the right debonair writer, be in the right vegetable aisle at the right organic grocery store at the right hour of the right man's day...

Right.

I don't want to bruise their already bruisy hearts, but I want to tell them as lovingly as possible to stop. Not stop as in give up hoping for love. But stop as in stop looking for that kind of love. I want to tell them to shut their minds to the soul mate and open their hearts to the flesh-and-blood guy who's likely right in front of them. Right there. The one buying non-organic white bread. (Ick, bad choice of bread...but maybe he just needs someone to gently set him straight...or not...for the rest of his loving life.) See what I mean?

—Charlotte

With Love and Squalor

Because perfect sentences are a kind of prayer, I offer these of Salinger's:

She was sixteen, and beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence. Her hands were very pale brown, with slender, actionless fingers. When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

I don't really feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.

And I have one.

-- Janet

Sad Day.

Of course it had to happen. And maybe he's glad it did. But it still makes me sad. Very. Like another one of the necessary voices is gone. (How many can we afford to lose?) As the obit says (NYT, "J.D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91"), paraphrasing Janet Malcolm's article for the New York Review of Books, "That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point...and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there."

It feels like another goddam perfect day for bananafish.

I Feel Bad About My Neck, Eyes, Cheeks,Knees, Etc.

Ever have one of those days when you wake up and look in the mirror and think, oh, man, I'm beautiful? Me neither.

Sometimes the right lighting might trick me into thinking that yes, I really do have but one chin, but then that lighting fades or someone turns it off and reality slaps me back into shape. Wait, 'shape', that's the wrong word. Just slaps, that's all.

A few years ago I suddenly realized my face was a souffle, and it had fallen. Someone carefully took me out of the oven and then banged the door shut - cooks, you know the sad result. And as I pushed my souffle-face back into a resemblance of self I thought Well, what now? Injections? Plastic? Prayer? Needles and novacaine or whatever they use? All the above? Charlotte and I have talked about this through the years and we constantly come up with this: We're not against it, not at all. We applaud it, especially when its admitted. We just, well, I don't know. We still love Georgia O'Keefe and Virginia Woolf. I didn't want Bette Davis eyes but I had them by 28, maybe earlier. Was I supposed to fix them then? If so then youth really is wasted on the young.

We, Charlotte and I, maybe we're crazy. We still think our wrinkles do not define us. We know that age can't really be erased. Some days I feel 68. Somedays I feel 25. Somedays, I get so brave there is no number attached. And those, without a doubt, are the best days of all.

Let's give. The other kind of love.

Leaping from romantic love to love of mankind...

Blogging, particularly about personal observations / feelings / thoughts, seems horribly self-indulgent these days. There just seems to be one thing out there that is urgent enough to actually say: Let's try to help the Haitians, and let's pray that the people that are actually attempting to distribute our help, can soon figure out how to do it given the chaos on the ground. Here are some ways to contribute:

American Red Cross

Beyond Borders

CARE

Catholic Relief Services

Clinton Foundation

Clinton Bush Haiti Fund

Habitat for Humanity

Haiti Children

Oxfam

Save the Children

UNICEF

Yele Haiti

A more complete list is on the MSNBC site.

—Charlotte