RUBBER- BANDS

"Hey, Teach, I know the answer!" calls a kid who is waving his hand.

"Anyone else?" The teacher looks around the classroom, uneasily. "Teach" doesn't like the collection of colorful rubber-band bracelets, or the thumbs up grin the kid is giving to the other boys and girls, who are also bedecked with rubber-bands around their wrists.

(Teachers have been told, already, in more than three states, the "Silly-Bandz," the new fashion craze for kids, cannot be worn in the classroom.)

But Teach herself, is wearing Jennifer Anniston's hair style, and pooched-out, lipsticked lips, ala Angelina Jolie. Her hair and lips style isn't hot hot, but it's very NOW. Also, her skirt -- middle of the thigh short and tight -- is definitely in vogue. Teach is also wearing pumps with the very latest six-inch high-heels.

And Teach knows that fashion is merely fashion. It isn't a craze, is it?

The kids note what Teach is wearing, and think she's cool. Their parents, and older siblings, relatives, neighbors -- all grown-ups do stuff, have stuff they do like everyone else -- iPhones, sketcher shoes, old hula hoops, new exercise gizmo getting dusty in the closet. Atari games, books, Polaroid cameras, the family car -- weren't SUV'S a craze, like Viagra?

C'mon, what's wrong with rubber-bands? 5 bucks will buy a you 24. They're harmless. Hey, high-heels -- Teach is going to get bunions. A wrist, even with 96 bands -- you're not cutting off circulation -- bandz snap back into shape -- heart shapes, gears, reptiles, dog-bones, frogs, guns, stars, dragons, dinosaurs -- you trade 'em, every day you check out who's got something new.

It's a nice hobby like a stamp collection. And gee, everyone knows the more you forbid something, the more it's desired.

Hey, maybe ... if we keep on forbidding the bandz, then kids can have a secret craze that'll last longer. It'll keep them safer than yet another craze like mephedrone plant food, or a ... a ... militia, a kids' militia, with rubber-bands turned into sling shots. That could get dangerous!

I think we need fads -- we need crazes. It's part of growing up, becoming mature.

Remember the days, early nineties, when thumbs up or down became the cool way to say yes or no? I thought it was dumb -- something I'd never do.

I say, thumbs UP on rubber-band bracelets.

SARAH PALIN REVISITED

She gestures, smiles, chuckles, points a knowing-finger, conveying half-truths and her ideas,
her all-over-the-place constructs for solving the nation's problems ...

I cringe, I feel like yelling SHUT UP -- instead, I find myself shaking my head, listening to her, marching with her down her wrong track.

Her track is absolutely, definitely, unequivocally NOT my track! It's WRONG, but ... okay -- I march along with her to find out what she's selling, telling, promoting and convincing many people to believe.

Sarah P's getting more powerful. And with her the Tea Party. And there is the possibility that she'll be running for president in 2012 on their ticket. Or with Romney on a Republican-ish platform, while the old guard, the tight-faced bigots, keep on killing anything/everything Obama proposes.

What's intolerable is Palin telling the President of the United States that the Oil Spill is his fault. She said: "With your nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you’re doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You’re not preventing environmental hazards; you’re outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous."

Then, she said, "Radical environmentalists: you are damaging the planet with your efforts to lock up safer drilling areas!"

Good God! Palin is undermining the White House's efforts, all our discussions, thoughts, prayers, all our efforts to put a stop to what's happening and make sure it can't, it won't happen again.

Please, excuse me for exploding -- hooting, cheering the nasty cracks, the latest hoo-hah over Sarah P's boobs. Sure, they're bigger, but she's fatter, she's gaining weight, which she hates -- all women hate looking older, more matronly, less girlish -- oh yes, I love the jabs, the jokes about her boob job.

Please, someone -- give SP a title, an office, a fabulous job selling something that will be the subject of another book she can sell on a gigantic world book tour! Yay, yes -- and be optioned by a movie producer, paid a ton of money, plus gorgeous outfits, while she's shooting in ... in .. Siberia, Saskatuan OR Somalia -- oh whoopee -- Sarah P, Helen of Troy of Alaska, on prow of a pirate ship pointing the way ...

Okay, I'm babbling, blowing off steam -- I don't know what we can do about Sarah Palin. The thought of her being more important scares the hell out of me.

JORAN VAN DER SLOOT

I am focused on this guy. I don't want to be. I'm annoyed, pissed off by the fact that I'm hooked on his story again ...

The murder of Stephany Flores, a Peruvian girl -- the way he did it -- what he's confessed says Joran is a sociopath, a remorseless killer ...

I wonder if his lawyer can finagle something. A tenacious, determined lawyer looks for loopholes and often finds them. If the lawyer gets Joran back to Mom in Aruba -- there we go again, with Aruban courts fiddling around, rehashing what happened five years ago.

I don't want to hear all the details again, about the 17-year-old girl with the two "ees" on the name her doting mother gave her. I don't want to see, again, Natalee's attractive, oval face, eyes-outlined, not flatteringly, blonded hair, her dancing adequately in an chorus line with other classmates similarly celebrating that they were almost, but not quite grown-up, sexy girls.

Natalee was not, in my opinion, exceptionally pretty, talented, or a girl with an especially important future, but she was a beloved, nurtured daughter with her mother's dreams bubbling around her. I felt her mother's pain. All the sentences I've read about the child dying before the parent bring back my mom, screaming, unable to stop screaming when the phone call came and told her my brother's body had been found in the cold water, next to an overturned canoe.

Aside from morbid curiosity about the murder -- I wonder if he's spoken to his mother, how she's taking it -- her husband had a heart attack and died earlier this year.

And Natalee's Mother -- she looks better than she did a few years ago --younger, botoxed maybe -- I still feel her pain; and sense a twisted bitterness in her.

Okay, Joran grabbed us again. We're gobbling up whatever the media serves, swallowing expert opinions about a psychopath -- we want him to suffer, be punished, pay for the endless days he had us feeling sorry for the Holloways.

Chewing on the news, digesting what little there is to digest -- oh good, I'm thinking, noting Joran's less handsome looks -- frown lines, anger, insolence on his face. I think he's haunted by what happened five years ago. He needed to punish the Peruvian girl for trivializing him. Punching, slamming, choking the girl, he was blaming all the other women in his life for what he doesn't have, and throwing away -- trivializing -- his own life.

He trivialized what his parents gave him. Those tender hugs and encouragement Mom gave him -- the help, succor, the money Dad gave him -- he thinks Mom and Dad screwed up --it's their fault that he isn't the dreamboat, leading-man hero they wanted him to be.

He doesn't care about the dead girls. He was punishing them as well as his parents.

I'm aware that focusing on Joran is easier, better than thinking about guys dying in Afghanistan, Iran's nuclear weapons, North Korea, Israel, Gaza... I'd rather think about Van der Sloot being raped, beaten up in jail, given a life sentence, than keep thinking, feeling hopeless, wondering how we are going to recover -- .at least in my life time -- from the oil.

MR. AND MRS. GORE

Wham! The news hit us. That this couple -- who hugged, kissed, and embraced each other so lovingly in front of us, in front of the world -- that they are separating is a blow, a punch in the stomach ...

Not them? Yes them! But they love each other! Were they faking those kisses? Is it like John Edwards and Elizabeth - there's another woman? Another man for her?

But they've been together forever! She has her work, he has his work -- why separate? After how many years?

40 years! They belong together. They fit together. They're so right, together. They look right, they act right --they've always seemed like a loving couple.

We saw, we watched Hillary and Bill. If ever a couple had reason to separate, it was them .... Even now, we watch Bill Clinton, for Hillary's sake, thinking if he strayed again -- knowing he's got a pattern, a need, he's probably playing around-- and yet, respecting them both, we're admiring the way they're handling being apart and nevertheless together. We realize they're a great couple. Infidelity doesn't have to destroy a couple.

The fact is, if the Clintons separated we wouldn't be shocked. We're shocked about the Gores.

Is it one of the typical problems -- money? A religious difference? (That doesn't make sense after they've been together 40 years.) What about their children. Their daughter has announced that she's separated from her husband. Is Tipper encouraging the daughter and Al doesn't agree.? But surely that couldn't be the reason, could it?

It could.

It could be sex. They've been apart, off and on, for a long time. They, like all of us, have been made overly aware of sex statistics, how sex affects your health -- you need relaxation, orgasms, fun -- it could be a lovemaking thing!

That's not something to announce.

What's next? Rumors, paparazzi pictures? Enquirer photos, candid camera shots of something someone noticed somewhere ... Al conversing with a some environmental lady ... Tipper and a fellow photographer taking nature photos together?

I'm turning off my imagination. I've been married to my husband for a very long time. There are ups and downs; things happen, world events, friends, agents, managers, accountants, lawyers, minor incidents, major ones -- thousands of thoughts like thousands of birds migrate, appear, disappear, are shared, not shared, hidden, avoided, blurted out -- things that affect me, don't necessarily affect him, and sometimes affect him profoundly without my knowing it.

That's part of marriage. We are not one person, we are two separate entities. Yet, if we separated we'd still be together.

Maybe we're wiser than the Gores.

The Gores are truthful people in the limelight who are handling some things that are absolutely, totally, private, and none of our business.

My thought is -- let's keep it none of our business.