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Happy Easter. You should have killed me when you had the chance, I promise you will not get another. 

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Do you ever find yourself in a situation where the worst thing that could happen to you is the same as the best thing that could happen to you?

I'm a volunteer who has gotten herself into a leadership position at an organization...mostly from being too slow to find an excuse not to take the position rather than from talent or skill. So, there's no money involved...if anything money flows from me to them rather than the other way around.

The leadership position I have involves mediating between other volunteers and paid people with the bigger organization our organization supports. Whenever changes happen the other volunteers complain to me and the paid people kind of brush me off. Changes just happened.

So now when I'm stressed and trying to put things in perspective I note that the worst thing that could happen is that I get "fired" from this position. But....from my point of view it's becoming more and more the case that the best thing that could happen is that I get "fired" from this position!

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After clearing out all my mom's stuff, I've been trying to somewhat thoughtfully distribute some of the things that might have value to someone (not necessarily $value, but aesthetic or other kinds of value, too).

So today I took her stamp collection and donated it to the local stamp collector's club.

The guy went on and on about how the post office had this great scam going selling sheets of stamps for $7 to $10 to whatever dollars when they only cost a cent or two to print and how all these people spent all this time and effort buying stamps and preserving them for decades and now, while you could technically use them at face value, if you tried to sell them the best you could hope for is half face value, which of course is way worse with inflation considering that they're decades old and how stamp collecting is dying out and he's in his 70s and he's one of the young ones. (And this is the guy who runs the local stamp collector's office. He LOVES stamps!)

But then he tried to dial it back by saying oh she probably enjoyed looking at them and got a thrill from buying them and preserving them so nicely and they kept her from being lonely after all the kids left and stuff like that, but I was thinking "No. I remember her buying these when I was in middle and high school and she would take them home and stick them in a folder and never looked at them again. She totally thought they would be worth thousands and thousands of dollars someday."

Then he got my address and said he's going to send me a nice thank you letter. I hope he uses some of the stamps I just donated when he mails it!!!

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I received a invitation to fill in the American Community census survey (and by invitation, they mean you HAVE to fill it in!)

After much googling to see if it is actually a legit thing...which I guess it is...I filled it in to the best of my abilities. I had to look up multiple answers with utility and insurance companies, my bank, etc., and I still have no idea what a couple of those questions were actually asking.

And there's nowhere to ask! The FAQs are just stuff like: "Is this legit?", "Do I really have to submit this?". Nothing about what exactly does this insurance question cover...do you mean just fire and flood insurance or do you mean the entire property insurance premium including any extra fire or flood add-ons???? Why do you want my electric bill for just last month but the water bill for the whole year? (I have solar panels and it just so happens that last month is the only month I had to pay more than the $15 monthly base rate because I finally used up the summer's solar panel over-generation and it resets in March. So, if they take that number and multiply it by 12 it's wildly off! And we had a leak in our irrigation system for one section, but then got it fixed, so that's not really indicative of our actual water bill. But there's nowhere to mention stuff like that.)

Like, I really tried to be accurate....but....uh...

So now I have much less confidence in official Census data!

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There's an episode of Stargate SG-1 where this is the answer to why the time loop keeps going!!

"Stuck in the timeloop as a punishment" is cool and all, but stuck in the timeloop voluntarily though? Oh, brother. Stuck in the timeloop cause you just can't move on. Stuck in the timeloop even if you know that it's not real and whatever should've happen already did. Stuck in the timeloop even if doesn't makes you happy. You just can't bear the thought of not being able to see them ever again. Stuck in the timeloop even if you know you should move on. Stuck in the timeloop even if you know they would want you to move on.

But maybe just a little while longer.

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One of my favorite authors. I had no idea he was that old!!! "Jitterbug Perfume" and "Skinny Legs and All" are two of my most read over and over again books. And, boy howdy, could that guy describe the Pacific Northwest to a dank, damp, and beautiful T!!!

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Does anyone else feel like we're dangerously close to Dark Angel territory? Not the transgenic mutant part, but the part about all the ones and zeroes turning into just plain zeroes???

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Oh absolutely. (Says 57 year old me. I had several major awakenings in my 40s.)

i think you can be 40 and have a coming of age narrative

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I saw that as a personification of "Hunger". (But then, I haven't had breakfast yet....)

Some sort of a guy or perhaps even creature

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“[Television] has become what the American theater was in the 1950s, when writers like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were writing the plays that illuminated who we are and what we are as a society,” Dawidziak says. “Cable dramas have taken over that.”

Mark Dawidziak on pop culture amnesia:

“One of the things that breaks my heart is that I have seen, since I started teaching these classes—every semester, two classes each semester, since 2009—I have seen things recede and disappear from the pop culture consciousness. There are still a few things—thank goodness—that we still share, and we still all know. The Wizard of Oz. You can use a Wizard of Oz reference. Star Wars. Star Wars is a perfect example. You can say, ‘May the Force be with you,’ and have a pretty good shot at hitting most people in the room. But among black-and-white TV shows, there are only two shows that continue to jump [generations]. … I Love Lucy and The Twilight Zone are the only two shows that the majority of my students still know.”

Mark Dawidziak on Rod Serling:

“He was the first guy to realize that if you put something in the trappings of fantasy, or science fiction, or horror, or whatever you want to call the genre—and The Twilight Zone is kind of its own genre—but if you dress it up in those, the sponsors won’t care. All they’re going to see are the aliens and the monsters and the spaceships and things like that. They’re not going to see the message. Gene Roddenberry took this lesson from Rod. He said Rod taught him how to do this. You put it on a spaceship, send it out to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and you can talk about whatever you want. You can talk about racism, you can talk about war, you can talk about prejudice, you can do whatever you want and nobody’s going to raise an eyebrow over it.”

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Their world is full of Maple Streets.  We’ll go from one to the other, and let them destroy themselves.

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The Sound of Music (1965) dir. Robert Wise

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