Thanksgiving chez Alice, 2010

This would have to be the strangest turkey ever to drift onto a Thanksgiving table, but there you have it: chez moi, 2010, we did not have birds of any stripe.  The sole reason these creatures made their way to my table was, I believe, that my mom got annoyed that she'd been invited for dinner at the BF's a few weeks ago, with lobster as the advertised meal, but it didn't work out that way.

BF ordered had ordered filet mignon (after several discussions more lengthy than you can imagine or want to about lobsters and how long they would stay lively in the refrigerator), so steak it was.  Since BF is, for all intents and purposes, a vegetarian, I got to cook dinner.  Not exactly my idea of a dinner invitation: "I'd love to have you come for dinner and, oh, I bought the meat as you told me to, so won't you come to my house to cook it?"

Hence lobster chez moi.  If I had to order the critters, I was going to cook them in my own kitchen, not hustle up to BF's apartment and do the work there.  So, we were four: me, mom, BF and BF's husband.  Would not have been my first choice of dining companions, not with my mom there and white wine to follow her Dewar's.   Three sheets to the wind, my mom loses her vocal censor. 

Fortunately, she didn't have her eye trained on me, but BF got a full complement of mom's thoughts on BF's hair and why it looked terrible and how she should cut it....I quite agreed with mom, but kept my mouth shut.  It did, after all, take BF nearly 30 years to tell me she didn't like how my hairdresser cut my hair, and I don't know why she didn't speak up sooner.

Wouldn't have made much difference, since it's my head and my hair (at this point in time, I have to be proud to be able to say that, even if the post-chemo hair texture is fine but curly, and I don't recognize myself in the mirror. 

Funny part was, BF's husband agreed with the mom.  Several times over.  However, in the ten years they have been married, I've never seen the husband disagree with the BF, about anything: in their house, she rules.  Or, rather, I can talk to him about why they should fly business class, and he will agree, but won't actually buy the damn tickets himself.  BF buys air tickets, coach, even though her body won't make it through a five-hour flight.

But this is friendship, or at least how I maintain this one, though BF long ago stole a piece of my heart, which you might think would make me more hesitant.  Yet without her I would be more lost than I already am.  And these days, I am a wandering soul.

Do blogs have birthdays? anniversaries?

If so, mine is past due. October marked the end of blogging year number 6 -- a year in which most of what I've had to say had a lot more to do with blood chemistry than I ever hoped to need to know.

Hard to "share" the experience I've had except to describe it as a hand grenade thrown into my life, a chance for me to have a legit do-over. Problem is, what I'm ready to do-over is my life as an editor, and those days are gone. Judging from what I've seen around the Web, no one wants to pay writers what they are worth either.

By way of contrast -- in the 1920s, Fitzgerald earned $1 a word for magazine pieces. Today, those who seek literate web content want it for about 2 cents a word, if that. Over 80 years, the once livable writers' wage has sunk so far below the ocean, it got swallowed in the Bermuda triangle.

Makes me sad, that writing has come to this pass. Makes me angry that people won't pay for grammarians/copy editors to read for continuity and proper grammar -- because the world, as I see it, is growing less literate by the second.

The U.S. already sucks in math and science on a high school level. Now English is headed down the same path. If we don't get educators who can teach, whatever subject and whatever level, I shudder to think of where we're going -- time's not on our side.