"Eight Cousins" is a novel that is partly a propaganda pice for the idea that girls can and should move.

The book presents the idea that girls should run and skip and such, walk for long distances, and is opposed to the idea that girls should not move and should, when awake, sit mostly and stand occasionally.

The idea that girls should move was an idea that needed selling.

"Eight Cousins" is by Lousia May Alcott who is best known for writing "Little Women." She made a lot of her income writing thrillers under another name, in which scary people did scary things.

At that time, many people thought women moving, getting a full education, getting all kinds of jobs including doctor and lawyer, was very scary. And part of keeping women from moving into new areas was keeping them from moving at all.

You were standing weating a simple, elegantly cut, straight-up-and-down dress of the world's best unbleached, undyed cotton. Simple. Then something changed and under that was a Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty ball gown which you were now wearing. It had a half sphere skirt with bows and bright colors.

I didn't get how the hoop skirt had fit under the shift, but I didn't worry about it since I was happy both ways--a lot inside.

The answer is really, really, really, really, really little. And slow.

1. Things are simple. My idea of how they are simple will battle your idea of how they are simple until something dies.

2. Things are complicated, and that's okay.

3. Things are complicated, and it's kind of fun to keep pratfalling to new levels of understanding.

First ladies and books.

The limited range of expressions that politicians' wives were, for a long time, allowed, did not include any expressions that implied they read a lot.

Mamie Eisenhower, after Ike died, the other half of her bed was filled with books.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in her New York apartment, used piles of books as decorating features, which worked because of her stylishness. Several piles of books topped with something flat worked as a table. Stacks of books just sitting there were elegant people can arrange things just right and then will them to be elegant. And, of course, they looked good because she loved books.

She worked several days a week as a book editor at Doubleday and put out some smart, good-looking books.

Laura Bush was a librarian. She put on events at the White House promoting different parts of American literature--classic good librarian programming gone big-time. Compared to other library programming, it had more famous people. In contrast to other library programming, the most mild-mannered program could become contentious and have famous people noisily refusing to show up because of the Iraq war.

First ladies and first ladies reading lists?

It would be interesting to have around the dresses some books first ladies read in editions from the time they read. Maybe with also editions of the same books from right now that you could get a hold of and read right now.

To have a sample reading display of some books they read and to make it clear that people like Eisenhower, Kennedy Onassis and Bush swan in sea of books.

I suspect that the rest of the world exists, but I am more sure about the parts that I walk on myself.

On very early email program was called elm, for electronic mail, and because the early computer designers dreamed of saving trees by having people communicate while not smashing trees to do so.

A successor to elm was pine, named for a tree for the same reason.

When I first heard this, I hahed an inner "hah!" because it seemed like with wild printing out of this and that, computers were not saving paper and therefore trees.

However, now.

People are communicating in written form in ways that didn't exist before that often do not turn into paper. From one head and heart to another head-heart set without paper in between. Sort of saving trees although it's not so clear because the ways of communicating didn't exist before mass computers.

And newspapers, as paper based businesses are in trouble. Some are dead, and using less paper, less trees. I'm supposed to pine about that for some old days or another, but I don't know.

Must take in less news. Need to hear the forest rustle.

On.

On the planet with you. That works.

Maybe dancing till late.

Maybe feeling God died and then got over it.

Maybe knowing always somewhere trees are growing.

The door hanger inviting people to an Easter sunrise service had a tree photgraph shooting our rays and optimistic colors, pink yellow, gree, and looked like its tree came frm the same computer clip art series used to invite people on a club card to dance in a bar after sunset and before sunrise.

Hope. How to.

In the Arctic tundra, trees a hundred years old are as tall as a thumb. They, too, are always growing

Where and when are two parts of the same thing, as we travel around the center of the Earth, as we travel around the Sun, as we travel together with nearby rock and hearts.

A problem that can be solved by fighting.

A problem that can be solved by not fighting.

A problem that can be solved by stylized fighting.

A problem that can be solved by noticing reality is oozing toward a solution and oozing with it, quietly.

Soft and colorful?

Pensees, French for thoughts, is a relative of pensive and pansies. Flowers can cause different thoughts. The French are good at combining style and substance because they care a lot about both. Flowers combine great style with keeping-the-life-system- alive substance.

I've been enjoying walking through the park, enjoying walking through the grass that has in it small white flowers with heads about the size of a penny, structured like daisies only with proportionally skinnier petals and more petals.

Liking that, kind of used to it, I then didn't go exactly there for a few days and whoosh, the white little flowers have among themselves even littler blue-purple flowers, their heads about a third the size of the white flowers and set up kind of like pansies.

The green, white and bonus purple said to me, "Spring!" and I sprang, and now I'm someplace else.

In the mountains, we are praying.

In the valleys, we are praying.

Walking along in the flatlands, we are praying.

A little house in a tree in the wetlands of Lake Rosca in Romania in the delta of the Danube is there for watching pelicans. Lake Rosca has the most pelicans in Europe.

Pelicans store fish in the pouches of their bills to eat later, or to feed the kids. Moms put their fills down next to their breasts and open the bills so the babies can eat fish.

Watching that happen from afar, some humans thought the pelican mother wounded herself and fed her young blood from her own breast. Earth can feel us as easy as stored pelican pouch fish, but we've gotten into the habit of bleeding her to eat.

High and low, we are praying for the wisdom and restraint to take it easy.

--I saw a picture of a pelican-watching tree house above still water in early morning light in the March 2002 "National Geographic" magazine on a page that said, in reference to Lake Rosca being in a United Nations declared Biosphere Reserve, "A Haven to Cherish."

How she became an activist.

How she became an activist in Japan, where agreement is highly valued, at least apparent agreement.

She was often sick as a child. She spent a lot of time in hospitals.

While in hospitals, she saw many people with sicknesses that were the result of radiation from the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan.

The number of these people and how sick they were far exceeded anything that was ever talked about publicly. And even if the public numbers had been correct, instead of expotentially wrong, they would not have included the suffering she saw up close.

She learned as a child that the official story is the official story.

The official story works for officials. The official story works for officials to the extent that they are official. It may not work for them as humans.

I went to a demonstration against Lawrence Livermore Lab sponsored by Tri-Valley Cares, among other organizations.

There I met a special ed teacher in the Livermore school district who thought that the district had a high percentage of special ed kids because the lab had radioactive materials, carelessly handled.

The Livermore Lab was one of the two nuclear bomb designing labs the US had during the Cold War, the other being Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was designed.

The Livermore story had been, "Oh, we just think. We don't have nuclear material here, or not hardly any, anyway. Go away. Your job as member of the public is to not think."

Tri-Valley Cares, an organization of people living near the lab, discovered that the lab had quite a bit a radioactive material and handled it sloppily. I mean,if you're saying it doesn't exist, that is not going to lead to handling it well, right?

The Livermore special ed teacher said if you mentioned to parents Livermore's high percentage of special ed kids, you could watch them leave their bodies. It was like their eyes rolled back in their heads, sometimes literally.

I don't want to get perspective. I want to stay in the mood I'm stuck in that's making me miserable. Why is that?

** [new words at the end]At the beginning of Alec Guinness's autobiography, he says he grew up in London before there were automobiles, and he didn't remember it being at all quieter. Different noises, and just as noisy is what he remembered.


**
In the usually merry Pickwick Papers, Mister Pickwick visits a man in debtor's prison who is dying. The man says, "Open the window." Pickwick does and Dickens describes the sound of London in the first half of the nineteenth century. Noisy. The big difference seems to be that voices are discernably part of the loud hum, and that individual voices come through more than they have been doing in the age of the internal combustion engine.

In "Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood,"a book about growing up in Cambridge where her father, a son of Charles Darwin taught, Gwen Raverat wonders about horses. She grew up when horses did the economic moving things around in a city. She lived till when they didn't do that at all, and there were many few horses in existence. She wondered if, given the choice, horses would rather exist and be horribly mistreated, as they were when they mattered, or not exist at all.

An interesting thought. I didn't know till after I read her truly terrific book that Gwen Raverat was a part of the Bloomsbury set, and alternative culture person. It's worth it if it helps you look at things from your own angle, and shake the rest of us up a bit.

There could be a song about doing the job well for the good of everyone, a song called "Faithfully," a different kind of love song.

On the same planet as. Yes. Thank you.

"Nausea" is a straight forward novle about falling apart.

The man narrating reaches down and wants to pick up a piece of paper but just can't. Some objects seem like enemies. The feeling of anything having a point is not available to him now.

The narrator is a wreck, but the author stays in the world of stating clearly what's going on. The intention of clarity from the author, Jean-Paul Sartre, makes it easier to stay with tne narrator and his suffering.

*The narrator would say he isn't suffering. He would say, that's the way it is, and what do you expect, and who cares?

"Nausea" a count-your-blessings book for people who currently are living in moments that feel connected to each other.

At that corner, the letters incised into the concrete, pushed into the concrete when it was wet, want to say Stanyan, the name of the street, and basically do, but also say ST ANYAN, which I partly like, I like the an's. On the other hand, it's only one letter away from Aryan, an ok idea about language that became a terrible idea about some people being better and other people being killed.

I cringe around Aryan for the usual human reasons, and because I like and am interested in the history of language, and people who liked and were interested in the history of language started and some encouraged the bad turn of the idea of Aryanness. Also, as defined by Hitler, I look Aryan, a heck of a lot more Aryan than he looked.

If something had used to be called St. Aryan, now it would be called St. Indo-European. It's the name of the inferred pre-Sanskrit language that many other languages evolved from. But, like, if it existed, it was spoken, like Sanskrit, in the Indian subcontinent, and what with the weather and all, people there do not look like what Hitler said Aryans looked like. Dark skin, dark eyes, while my ancestors were not inventing the core European language and were paling out in Northern Europe where oft there is little sun.

The idea of Aryan, a pre-Sanskrit core language, got mixed in with the idea of some group of people is much better some group of people is much worse, and get inaccurate and nuts. The speakers of the theoretical language kept being placed further and further west of where they would have to be, if they existed at all--instead of being in the Indian subcontinent, they were inferred to be in Northern Europe, pale because of local climate, and better because of why? Partly because of speaking a theoretical language they never spoke.

As I sat down at the public computer I've used before at the library, I got hit hard by the morning sun in my eyes and squinted and looked down and saw that the name of this particular computer, is SUN209, which I hadn't noticed before.

A day to shine or notice shining or both.