I’ve been playing solitaire quite a bit for several years.

jeani taught me to play spider solitaire. I marveled that she could play 4 suit spider solitaire while dying of cancer (with all the brain fuzziness that entailed). I could only ever play two suit.

I taught doug to play 2 suit spider solitaire about a year ago.

recently he started trying 4 suit spider solitaire, and learned how to do it, and how to win about 1 in 5 games. It’s so hard. I just thought it was practically impossible and never wanted to try. But since I taught him, and then he went beyond me, I felt I had to do it. so he taught me how to do 4 suit. the first time I won I was very excited. I can now win maybe 1 in 10 games (maybe less). I usually don’t try very hard unless I get to a point in the game where I realize it’s winnable, and by then I’m not doing very well.

Anyway, in really difficult solitaire games, like 4 suit spider solitaire, and the more difficult layouts of Freecell, and some regular 3 card draw solitaire games, you find that the way you’ve played it, even though you made moves that seemed to make sense because they moved your further forward than any other moves could at the time, have ultimately made it so you can’t win, and left you stuck. At those points, you are in a bind. You are so far along in the game that you don’t want to go really far back because that would take too much work. so you keep trying to find ways you can win without going too far back. And you go around in circles for a while. But eventually you realize you have to go back and undo the moves a long time ago that made it seem like you made obvious progress and do counter intuitive moves (moves you only could know you need to do from having played it out other ways) and then, having undone your game almost to the beginning, and spent a lot of time and effort, you are able to go forward again and win.

So today I was thinking that life is like that insofar as we get to points where we realize, having gone 20 moves down a certain road, that a long time ago we made choices that seemed to take us farther forward but that now we know actually really screwed our lives up and there is no way to make further progress. Only, the difference is, now that we know the key choice areas where we could go back and change those choices to have a better life (health being the key thing I’m thinking about in my own life) now, we can’t go back and change them! it’s so unfair.

old poems

old poems i came across today

Love Song

Will the old bottle be lost in time,

a cool trinket found in the attic

by young fingers—

something to blow in,

something to break,

something to wonder at

and imagine Granny young and in love?

I fill this bottle with flowers

picked only tonight,

and, for a moment, feel myself old,

watching their faces, now bleached

and brittle with sunlight.

In her senior photo

my mother’s skin is freckled, smooth,

her eyes full of train-whistle dreams.

This child is not her.

She was always dead or fifty

and I will always be eighteen.

Somehow, these flowers

already make me sad.

1992 (18 yrs) (edited 1998)

Rain 

There are slow-sleeping nights

when I envy her ability

to sink through these layers

of clay and cold earth

into the quiet underground.

1997 (23 yrs)

We Play Marbles

As children

Watching them spin and collide

and roll across the room.

Often we hit them too hard–

they scatter

with a sound of glass

that rushes through our heads.

We run to stop them

knowing that for each one we capture

twenty are escaping,

and we will need to gather them up

one by one,

from underneath furniture,

from down the stairs.

We never find them all.

1993 (19 yrs)

Ocean City

Seagulls float into harbor 

trailing V's of water.

Johnny and Martha kneel on the dock

and tie a plastic bag to the dock rope. 

They hope to catch jellyfish.

Seagulls sift through the wind

to land at port

on wooden water poles.

Johnny and Martha scrape their knees 

on the board plank

and scare the fish away.

Dark spots on the concrete

mark years of bubblegum.

A woman walks barefoot across it.

Seagulls wobble when they meet the wind

and shy off or burrow into it.

Martha's orange hair stands up 

and runs along the shore.

She doesn't mind tangles.

Sparrows beak at broken shells

and pitter-patter through the people.

Paper bags sweat around a trash bin.

Boys call out of a passing car.

The water raises its neck to look around,

bends gracefully over and slaps itself.

A man sweeps cigarettes into the gutter 

and scrapes slime from the pool floor.

Two herons circle the horizon 

and sit calmly down to sea.

We see them on the upward thrust.

Martha combs her hair.

Johnny throws a ball but cannot catch it.

The orange sun puddles at the edge

and slips off.

We never worry.

There are many suns.

1995 (21 yrs)

Sexual Objectification of Wonder Woman

Okay, I'm tired of hearing the praises of the new wonder woman movie sung. I haven't watched it, but it's clear from the pictures and previews that she is very, very objectified and presented as sexual attractiveness being her main important visual aspect. This could have been a great, wonderful, empowering movie, if they hadn't kept that part so emphasized. I'm tired of shows that ultimately are built on a lie-- speaking and telling one thing-- empowerment for women, strong women, but showing another-- scantily clad, objectified women whose main purpose is sexual attractiveness and titillation, while pretending to be powerful. They made her look just like the sexualized comics.  Overtly sexualized is not a good role model for girls-- it teaches them that that is their main value. It's a message they internalize from the images no matter what is spoken or what action there is. This is not a matter of being prudish or not. It's about being used! 

Wonder Woman's breasts are carefully molded and perked by her wonder woman uniform, in a very unrealistic and unnatural way. Who originally came up with the overtly sexual images of comic book heroines? Men--they were male sexual fantasies. Some women (more and more lately) have bought into them over time and internalized them, but they are buying into a patriarchal lie.
The Casualties of Women's War on Body Hair
I changed "hair removal" in the following quote to "being sexy," something people use to justify Wonder Woman's outfit, and it applies equally well.
"[Being sexy], at its core, is a form of gendered social control. It’s not a coincidence that the pressure for women to modify their body [] has risen in tandem with their liberties, Herzig argues. She writes that the effect of this [being sexy] norm is to “produce feelings of inadequacy and vulnerability, the sense that women’s bodies are problematic the way they naturally are.”

And yet, if you ask many women why they voluntarily shave or wax, they might say that it’s a method of self-enhancement. That they want to, it’s a personal choice, and they just feel better when everything is smooth. [Being sexy] as self-care might be one of the biggest lies women have bought into. It keeps us in an impossible loop, one in which we are constantly in pursuit of velvety limbs and the moral virtue of [sexiness]."

12 Lady Superhero Costumes Redesigned By Ladies

excerpt: "We've already been over this, but it bears repeating. Tube tops are not practical battle gear. They just aren't. Wonder Woman, warrior princess of the Amazons, deserves to save the world in pants and a cute supportive top, not a metal-emblazoned '50s swimsuit."

Age When Girls First Feel Ashamed of Their Bodies Is Shocking

excerpt: "I remember the first time my daughter came home from dance class talking about the fact that some of the girls in class "had abs" and some of them didn't.

She was 10.

And while it may sound young to be worried about scoring a six-pack, my daughter is far from an anomoly. According to a new Yahoo Health survey of 1,993 teens and adults ages 13-64, while the average age Americans first remember feeling ashamed of their bodies fell between 13 and 14 years old, teens ages 13-17 reported that their first bout of body shame occurred as young as 9 or 10.

According to Robyn Silverman, . . . much of the blame falls on the media. "Younger kids are getting messages earlier about how they should appear," she told Yahoo Parenting. "We've also got sexualization happening earlier on. Kids feel more hurried to behave [older] and wear adult fashions, and feel that their body needs to look a certain way. All those things taken together are creating a more self-conscious society."

Make sure your kids are media-literate. "That means not just sitting with them and talking with them about what they're seeing, but really being able to dissect it," Silverman said. "It's explaining to them that the girl on the cover of the magazine doesn't even look like the girl on the cover of the magazine. It's puling back the curtain.""

P.S. This this doesn't mean i couldn't potentially enjoy the good things about the wonder woman movie. 
If you like Return Of The Jedi but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism
excerpt: "“Return Of The Jedi is great, but the Ewoks are so annoying.” That’s a pretty common refrain from Star Wars fans. In fact there are whole fan edits dedicated to removing the little fuzzy bears from the film’s climax; I can only assume they’re made by the most hardcore of Star Wars lovers. The idea that a movie can be good despite its weaker elements is one of the most basic tenets of film criticism. Yet when it comes to dissecting films from a feminist viewpoint, we seem to have trouble keeping that in mind.

When I tweeted about my frustration with the female characters in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes (one human, one primate, both of whom contribute very little to the plot), a friend replied, “Sorry to hear it’s a bad movie.” But it isn’t a bad movie. In fact, it was one of my favorite action blockbusters of last summer. Yet my specific feminist frustrations were extrapolated into a larger condemnation of the film. No one assumes that critiquing the Ewoks means you dislike Star Wars. So why did my complaints imply I hated Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes?

We’ve fallen into an all-or-nothing rut with feminist criticism lately. Battle lines are immediately drawn between movies that are “feminist” (i.e. “good”) and “sexist” (i.e. “bad”). And that simplistic breakdown is hurting our ability to actually talk about this stuff."