SORRRY

Sorry, Gentle Readers. No posts for awhile. Lola is one sick puppy.

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT

Gentle Readers,

Last night I watched the documentary My Kid Could Paint That.

Directed by Amir Bar-Lev, the documentary follows little Marla Olmstead through success with her art work and through attacks that other people - namely, her father - did more than just get the paints out for her.

I think I would find the documentary troubling if the parents were livin' large off the bucks Marla has brought in.

But they seemed to be a nice normal family living in a normal house. They weren't out spending the money. Reportedly, it has gone into Marla's college fund.

I think the one mistake the parents made was allowing people to do so many articles and tv shows about her. Their lives would have been much easier if the people who showed and sold her work at their galleries had simply said, This is a wonderful local artist.

But of course, when she was successful, then people would have been going nuts to find out who Marla was.

I think when someone is successful, especially if that someone is a child, a lot of jealousy will crop up and the dream-stealers will come along in full force saying, That's baaaad. She's not doing that herself. She can't really paint.

If her dad gave her some direction, so what? Everything is derivative. And schools today go overboard forcing children to work in groups because supposedly Business says that public school graduates don't know how to work together. Let's support some possible team work between dad and daughter - although Mark Olmstead's paintings look absolutely nothing like Marla's. (A friend once told me that the one thing her daughter learned from working in a group was that she didn't want to work in a group.)

I wish I had been smart enough to give my kids some nice big canvases and plenty of paint and said Go for it. Be as a big and creative and colorful as you want.

What a lovely way to look at art and colors and childhood.

Love,

Lola

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Happy Birthday (plus one month) Daddy. I miss you now more than ever. I wish I had told you every single day that I loved you and appreciated you.

SHE WORKS HARD FOR HER MONEY

Gentle Readers,

I regret to inform you that I am exhausted.

I put in at least 32 1/2 or maybe even 33 hours this week.

I am way behind on the following:

1. sleeping
2. watching tv
3. sleeping while watching tv
4. napping
5. watching movies
6. napping while watching movies

I am tired because I actually stayed awake during the census training. Yesterday one of my colleagues conked out and snored.

At least it wasn't the supervisor.

Love,

Lola

I'm hurt. That darn Dr. Heckle who was my follower for a couple of days and then jumped ship has a link on the WorkForced blog. What did Dr. Heckle do to rate that? I actually like WorkForced. I recommend reading Don Joe's current post on email. But whatever you do, don't click on that link to Dr. Heckle. Heckle, my two followers and I are out to get you.

But wait - WorkForced is one of my followers. Oh, 'tis a conundrum.

WE LOST DR. HECKLE

Gentle Readers,

I am so disappointed. For a couple of days I was up to three followers because someone new named Dr. Heckle had joined us and was even making some amusing comments on my posts.

But I just turned on the computer and alas, no more Dr. Heckle.

What a world, what a world, where people pronounce themselves followers and then drop out when the dirty question comes along - namely, how do people wipe in China and India if they don't have toilet paper?

Or was Heckle offended because I did not follow some blog protocol?

I guess I'll never know because I took a look at Heckle's blog, and I don't think I want to follow it. I just have so much room in my life for following. In reality, I'm a leader.

And as a born leader, tomorrow I finish my training as a crew leader for the census. Soon I will train the people who will pay you a little visit if you didn't mail back your census form.

I never thought I would work for the government. Never thought they would have a job that fits my abilities. I think I can handle this in spite of the fact that we couldn't get answers to some of our questions because our trainer/supervisor couldn't get answers to his questions.

I will do what I have done successfully many times in the past.

I will make it up as I go along.

However, that does not mean I will falsify information. I would never do such a thing. The census really is important. It decides how states will be represented in Congress and it brings funding to areas that need it, and probably some that don't, but that's life.

Love,

Lola

STILL ON THE TOILET

Gentle Readers,

If you click on View My Complete Profile, then you will see that one of the blogs I follow is called Meditations In An Emergency.

The author, Mysterg, has been travelling for quite some time now and in his most recent post he wrote about his visit to China. He has many, many questions about the Chinese, such as Why do they walk so slow?, but you can read those for yourself.

I found one question to be particularly interesting. He wants to know why the Chinese do not use toilet paper. Someone wrote in a comment that Indians (not Native Americans, people in India) also do not use toilet paper.

I am mystified by this. I used to live in such a rural area that I hung out with a bunch of retired farmers. They called themselves farm wives, but By God they drove trucks and tractors and worked in the fields and canned vegetables and washed and ironed and fed everybody and had babies and raised the kids, so I think they deserve a special name for what they did. I don't know what it should be, but these women were pretty darn amazing.

They all grew up on farms and from time to time the subject of outhouses came up because none of them had bathrooms in their homes until they were adults. They also said there wasn't any toilet paper in the outhouse - they wiped with the Sears Wish Book.

Now I sincerely doubt that in China and India they have LL Bean and Victoria's Secret catalogs in the bathrooms for wiping purposes.

So if they don't have toilet paper and they don't have the Sears Wish Book, then how in the heck do they wipe?

I can understand drip drying, but some unmentionable areas require more cleansing.

And what if you're from North America or Europe and staying in a hotel that caters to folks who are accustomed to having toilet paper? Do they not have toilet paper there either? I don't know where Mysterg is staying, but I pronounce myself utterly confused by this conundrum. And I am definitely not going any place where they don't provide me with toilet paper. And I will not accept a catalog as a substitute unless I have no other choice.

If anybody can explain the world toilet paper situation to me, I'd be thrilled to know the answer.

As you can tell, it doesn't take much to amuse or confuse me.

Love,

Lola

My farm women also spoke very casually about having polio as children. One of them had post-polio syndrome and suffered from such pain in her feet that she often sobbed when she stood up. Thank you, Dr. Jonas Salk, and please have your children vaccinated. Vaccinations do not cause autism, and I am the final word on the subject.

HOLOCAUST DAY

Gentle Readers,

I just realized today is Holocaust Rememberance Day. I can't let the sun go down without remembering the millions who died, and the millions more who somehow escaped death but suffered so horribly.

I once wrote a newspaper article about a woman from Ukraine who told me how the Nazis came to her village when she was a teenager. She said that overnight the Jewish families in the village disappeared. Then she and the other young people who were not Jewish were ordered to come to the village square.

She was afraid to go. Her grandmother told her to do whatever she was told to do and she would be all right.

And so she did. She obeyed every order as quickly as she could, no matter how hungry, exhausted, sick, or humiliated she was.

She was sent to Germany as slave labor. She survived the war and met a handsome young GI when the Americans finally arrived in Germany. They married and she became an American. By the time I met her, her hair was white, her handsome GI had been gone for many years, and she was so lonely.

She visited high schools and spoke to the students about how important it is not to use drugs. She said she would have given anything to have a crust of bread when she was their age, so they certainly had no excuse to use drugs.

I took my daughter along when I interviewed her. My daughter was 14, I believe. She sat across from this woman, who stroked my daughter's beautiful long hair and looked at her so lovingly. She talked and talked and told us stories. I could tell she was desperate to keep us there, to have some company, but eventually we had to go.

A story closer to the Holocaust that I've told before in my message center and will no doubt tell again is about the day my daughter, my husband, and I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I didn't want to go. We were in D.C. for a Van Gogh exhibit and we couldn't get in. My daughter wanted to go to the Holocaust Museum and I didn't because I already knew so much and had seen so many pictures and it was just too much.

But that day I encountered a real face from the Holocaust, not just a photograph. We were in a room with bunks from Auschwitz, these horrible wood frames with slats that people were crowded into. A woman was patting the wood frame and crying.

A young woman who worked at the museum asked her not to touch them. She said with a heavy accent, "You don't understand. I slept in these."

And there was the Holocaust right in front of me.

Outstanding books about the Holocaust abound and there's no better place for a young person to start than The Diary Of A Young Girl. It was the first book I read that taught me something about the true faces of the Holocaust.

I saw a documentary some years ago on PBS about what happened to Anne Frank after she and her family were taken from their hiding place. Anne and her sister Margot survived for a time in a concentration camp. A woman who was in the same barracks said that Anne and Margot became ill. They slept near the door and when someone opened the door, Anne and Margot would cry out "Shut the Door!" because it was cold.

But then their cries became weaker and weaker until finally Anne cried out alone and then no one was left to cry out. She died two weeks before the camp was liberated.

Lord, I ask you, let her be remembered forever.

Love always,

Lola