My Facebook Page

It's a new year and with it came a promise to myself to get more active on my Facebook page. I’ve never particularly enjoyed or understood Facebook. I want layouts and colors to play with. I want more room to ramble. And I don’t like strangers showing up in lists of suggested friends. That’s creepy! But Facebook is Facebook so I decided to take the proverbial bull by the horns and figure out why it’s so popular.

After opening my Facebook page, I sat in front of the computer screen a full five minutes before my fingers made contact with the keyboard. And what came out after that long contemplation?---something thoughtful or deep to put on the ‘what’s on your mind’ line? No. My fingers typed: Why don’t angle worms freeze to death in the winter?

Where those words came from, I don’t know. I get loony that way from time to time, but the words were “shared” before I could think of something less lame to say. I waited. I waited fourteen hours and none of my 23 friends had an answer for me. No reply of any kind came back! Not one person was concerned for my mental health or for the worms outside in the frozen Michigan winter, for that matter.

I’m not a patient person so googled my question and to my shock there really is an interesting answer. “Angle worms,” according to John Johnson, “will begin hibernation with its tail in its mouth. It will then eat itself through winter right down to the last digestive tube. A 3-inch angle worm will decrease down to 1/4" over those months. Leaf worms, on the other hand, hibernate together in a large mass which looks like the inside of a golf ball.”

I’d share my new found knowledge with my Facebook friends but angle worms have survived for centuries without human sympathy for their dietary needs in the winter which leads me to my the other New Years Resolutions. Lose some weight. How I can type that resolution with a straight face while munching on a piece of Hershey’s dark chocolate is beyond explanation, but doing so has given me an idea: We can learn from the angle worms. We can live off our own body fat. So tonight when I go to bed I’ll attempt to sleep with my toes in my mouth. If I can extract some fat off my body to sustain me though the night I will finally have a reason to like my Facebook page. After all, it was because of Facebook that I came up with this bright idea. ©


John Johnson's full article on angle worms.

Another New Year, Another Resolution to Break

I started keeping diaries when I was seven or eight years old and I didn’t stop my daily recordings until I was in my late twenties. I guess I thought I’d grow up to be someone famous like my ancestors---James Otis Jr., Mercy Otis Warren, or Amelia Earhart---and in the distance sea of humanity someone would care about the naïve and disjointed ramblings of my youth. I’m nearly seventy now and I’ve barely read about the American Revolution let alone done anything as history book noteworthy as James Otis, a patriot and friend to Thomas Paine. Nor have I ever been pen pals with someone as famous as Abigail Adams or written anything as important as the first history book on the Revolutionary War like Mercy Warren did. As for Amelia, aviator extraordinaire---God, I’ve been afraid to get on an airplane every since I did it once and survived the ‘trauma’ back in the 60s. And the most adventurous thing I’ve done in recent years is to walk down our hilly driveway after an ice storm to get the mail. I’m such a disappointment to the little girl still deep inside me.

Even after I stopped writing daily diary enters I’ve still been relatively faithful about doing a list of New Years resolutions at the beginning of each year with a few paragraphs added updating my life’s journey This is my 2010 entry:

I woke up New Years morning with a dream still hanging on the edge of consciousness. I was lost and looking for an apartment where I lived. Being lost has been a life long reoccurring dream for me. Sometimes I'm in a school and I’m late for class. Sometimes I’m lost in the streets looking for my purse. Sometimes I’m lost and looking for a door out of a house of mirrors. There’s a dozen versions of my ‘lost’ dream. They say that being lost in a dream is really about the anxiety of leaving something familiar behind or about losing something of value. I can buy those theories as an explanation. But sometimes I have dreams that keeping me thinking all day long: Where the hell did that come from!

What made my New Years dream so different from the generic versions is what I was carrying around. While I was lost and looking for where I lived I ran into someone who asked me to baby sit their newborn. I said “yes” and then ducked into a copy center, stuck the baby in a copy machine and made myself a living, breathing baby of my own. Always a detail person, even in my dreams, I put a check mark on the forehead of one of the babies so I wouldn’t get the copy mixed up with the original then I continued on my way, looking for where I lived. Okay, I don’t know why I’m recording this for my infamous hereafter but what the heck, I’m old so I can get away with doing irrational things.

Now on to my New Years resolutions, most of which are pretty universal: Lose weight, get more physically fit, and finally get an accurate count on the number of legs on that centipede who lives under our filing cabinet. In addition I’d like to get back to blogging more often because I’ve always found writing to be therapeutic, and I’d like to stop hanging around a particular political forum that has been taking up a lot of my time this winter. Being there is like being thrown into a modge pit full of angry Hell’s Angels and that’s no place for an elderly woman carrying around a cloned copy of a newborn baby with a check mark on her forehead.

Happy New Year!

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