Saying you were there...

Inauguration Day 2009

by Mary Alice Holmes on Monday, January 5, 2009 at 10:54pm


I had decided some time ago that Washington was going to be too much of a mad house. When the predictions of crowds reached four million I thought that was three million too many. But today I received an email from an old b.f. (who had not an ounce of political savvy in his 140 lb body when we were dating) who is headed to Washington for the occasion and I am now beginning to wonder if I should be going, too. I've experienced one million people in Washington before. With my sister, in 1988, for the pro-choice March on Washington. It was a fantastic experience, mind-bending and hyper-stimulating. And I love Washington.  I will probably dehydrate myself beforehand because por-a-potties are my least favorite thing but there is nothing like worshipping at the cathedral of Thomas Jefferson in the dark of night. Sure, the view will be better from my family room on the 56" telly but what about the roar of the crowd? I am thinking about that moment after he says "so help me God" when the crowd, the country, the world will scream with joy. Do I really want to miss that? It's like I said to a friend earlier today, it's a bit like being able to say that you've been to Times Square on New Year's Eve. If you go to one inauguration in your lifetime, shouldn't this be the one? (At least until Hillary gets elected.)

So, who's game? Anyone want to road trip?

25 Random Notions About Me

Originally Posted:

by Mary Alice Holmes on Friday, January 30, 2009 at 5:49pm

1. If I must eat “commercial, candy-store chocolate”, please let it be a York Peppermint Patty.
2. I do not willingly relinquish an open microphone.
3. I dream of a greener future in which I live close enough to my work that I can walk or ride my bicycle.
4. I have reinvented myself almost a dozen times in the last 20 years and it’s getting to be that time again.
5. I don’t eat chicken not because of health or PETA reasons but because I simply do not like it.
6. The last time I ate a steak was in Manhattan, Montana with Steve Bowen and James Gierman. I stopped eating beef because the rain forest has been decimated by clear cutting in order to graze cattle.
7. I once lived in a garret in Paris.
8. And I once lived on a commune in Upstate New York.
9. My 30th birthday was spent in Moscow where the gendarmes at the Hotel Leningradskaya attempted to arrest me.
10. I aspire to spend a night in jail for civil disobedience although I may have missed my opportunity (hope-fully.)
11. I believe my dead father leaves me coins.
12. The Grand Canyon is “awesome.” (I know because I’ve been there a few times.) Therefore, the use of “awesome” in response to providing my order to a waitress or completing a doctor’s health survey or to describe my macaroni & cheese drives me completely crazy.
13. I’m in better condition physically and emotionally than I was ten years ago.
14. Dogs make me laugh.
15. I know all the words to La Marseillesaise in French and I can spell it and translate it.
16. I love to research.
17. My therapist told me that I am not a leader. Nor am I a follower. “You are a goer,” she said, “and if someone goes with you, that’s fine and if they don’t, that’s fine, too.” And this is why I pay her.
18. There is a dent in my skull from the time I hit my head on a radiator when I was two. It is narrow and about three inches long and the edge of a radiator coil fits neatly into it.
19. I would rather be in Italy than just about anywhere else on Earth.
20. I adore high heels. They do not, however, feel the same about me.
21. Yoga makes my world better.
22. George is my favorite Beatle.
23. I’m a wicked stepmother.
24. An upper class British accent makes me weak at the knees. A real one.
25. If it wouldn’t kill me, I would so be a pack a day smoker. After all these years of not smoking, I still need something to do with my hands.

BBC 100 List

Here's the list that was making the rounds on Facebook about two years ago. I never did confirm that this list was actually from the BBC. Perhaps I'll do that now. I did make a note at the bottom that this was a "half-baked list", at best, given that it includes Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven. Also, that Shakespeare appears a few times on the list, sometimes listing a particular style of play for which he is known and sometimes listing specifics, e.g. Hamlet., is distracting and haphazard. It's that kind of inaccuracy that makes me think it didn't come from the BBC. Why the New Testament and not the whole Bible? No Bagavhad Gita? No Talmud. A Euro-centric list with a random American thrown in, but few other ethnicities. Get my drift? Still, it's a list guaranteed to stir up conversation!

BBC - 100 Books.
Originally Posted by Mary Alice Holmes on Friday, March 13, 2009 at 2:05pm

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: 1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. 2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE. 3) Star (*) those you plan on reading. 4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen- x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - I started it.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – (shouldn't this count as 7 books :)?X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee- X +
6 The Bible (New Testament) - X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte – I tried
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - X
14 Shakespeare – X – um, how much? 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - X
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - (every two years or so) X+
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - X+
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald- X ++ (and so we beat on, boats against the current…)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X(and So long and Thanks for all the Fish and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul and Last Chance to See. Should this count as four?)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - 2012 note: Now that I have seen Downton Abbey on PBS I may have to read this one!
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky And yet The Brothers Karamazov which I have read is not on this list!
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X 3
8 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X+
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert – oh dear God. Seriously?
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Set
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley – X+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X ("It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.")
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X (in French and English)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X (Consumed whilst on the road in Paris)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy – X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (Although I much preferred "Captain Ahab's WIfe")
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - *
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - *
80 Possession - AS Byatt
 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker – X+
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro*
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Are they kidding?)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X (In French and English)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X (Read whilst in England near Watership Down)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole – I tried but couldn’t finish
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – X (Didn’t we cover this above?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - X (again, in French and English)

This is a half-baked list at best. I'm at 61, not including the several that I started but never finished.And I think I should get extra credit for the ones I read in another language! But that's just me.

Comments from Friends: 
Kathleen Z: And don't forget all the Ernest Hemmingway you've read that is curiously missing from the list. Brits! March 13, 2009 at 2:45pm
ElizaBeth C: I think seeing the movies of some of these should count.... March 13, 2009 at 3:49pm
Laurel W: ‎47 and one half!...never got all the way through les mis! That is better than one per year given that I couldn't read until I was 5! March 13, 2009 at 4:59pm
Laurel W: It's too much work to copy and repaste! March 13, 2009 at 5:03pm
Rich B: I thought I read alot. Only read a quarter of these... March 13, 2009 at 5:33pm
Tricia M: Kind of an odd list...War and Peace AND Bridget Jones Diary? March 14, 2009 at 9:22am
Jane D: Do we get extra points for having read them multiple times and teaching them? Not surprising, MA, that you and I have read so many of the same titles. My total is 69, but like on your list, there are a few I started, then didn't finish. March 14, 2009 at 1:36pm
Alexa B: ‎43, with probably another dozen that I couldn't bear and didn't finish..sketchy list - my father would be appalled to hear that I got points for The Da Vinci Code but not for Ulysses.. March 14, 2009 at 3:33pm
Mary Alice: And my father would've been appalled that I got credit for Bridget Jones' Diary and not for War & Peace. But, seriously, do they really consider "Five People You Meet in Heaven" to be worthy of reading? Who are these people? March 14, 2009 at 6:56pm

The New Timeline

Although I am moving away from Facebook because I don't like how it works anymore, I am somewhat taken by the new "Timeline" feature if only because it allows me to look at what I posted over the four years ago since I first joined. Refreshing my memory and re-reading My Notes has given me a new perspective on my writing work. I expect to repost my personal notes here, where I can control them to a certain extent, over the next several days and weeks. They will appear in reverse date order and, because of the way this blog posts Posts, they will have the original dae embedded within them rather than as a definer on the post title. Let's go!

We don't really know what the rules are.

Originally Posted:

by Mary Alice Holmes on Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 11:10pm

We don't really know what the rules are. We don't know why we dodge a cancer bullet or why we don't. We don't know why it takes some of us while our babies are still babies and why it may leave those same babies to grow to be very old women and men. We don't know why cancer means we will never have babies or why we must leave our loved ones far too soon. The one thing that we can know is that we are each unique and we have a special touch of the Divine all our own that that we can share with those we love. It serves no good purpose to keep that unique spark of the Divine to ourselves. It's our right, our privilege and our true purpose to share that Gift as much 

as we can as long as we are able.

In which I agree that my novella is finished if I can write 26,200 words by midnight tonight.

I have never attempted to write anything like a novel before but when my college buddy, Julia P.Bennett, showed up a few weeks ago and told me about NaNoWriMo (nanowrimo.org) I was hooked.  What a challenge!  Not one in which I am actually going to succeed to the extent that the challenge demands (50K words) but one in which I will achieve my own personal goal of 26,200 words.  You know, marathon length!  Well, I probably will reach that goal.  I still have another 1,000 words to go and here I am, typing this, instead of figuring out how Mira becomes the Countessa di Liguria.  And there is still a masquerade ball to attend.  http://www.nanowrimo.org/

The followup is this:  I completed 28,065 words before the midnight deadline and, for that feat, I have a moderate level of pride.

One Within