I don’t have a cell phone with internet capability, but I like Twitter. I don’t ever text message people, but I really like Twitter. Hey, maybe that’s why — it’s filling that void in life. Wow, night shift feels really strange when my partner has a texting cell phone. I just start to think of how nice it’ll be to have company through the wee hours of the morning when coffee is the only thing keeping me on two feet when I realize that said companion is really totally brain dead to me and lost in a conversation only hinted at by flying thumbs.

Anywho, back to Twitter — I like its perks and enjoy using it. Even if I only really have access to it all day long a couple days a week rather than 24/7. In poking around lately, I found much amusement: an article by one of its creators telling how Twitter got started, a dictionary of all things Twitter and a few famous names that tend to say cool stuff or boring stuff in a cool way that makes me giggle. Either way they lift me up when I’m down. Neil Gaiman is one of those. I keep looking for more known authors with accounts to follow but all I uncover are authors hoping to be discovered, bloggers hoping to get paid, or similar rabble. (Finger pointing at myself. hehe)

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… removing my son’s booster seat to discover that he’s big enough to ride without it, then looking at the two jewels of them sitting as children in the backseat, babies no longer.

… watching my daughter go through Babysitter’s Club books faster than women read magazines, then realizing that’s exactly what those books are: chick lit for 8 year olds! My very next thought, thank goodness she’s also reading The Hobbit.

… hearing the thrill in my son’s voice when he says “I only have to kill a few more monsters to get my next level!” as he plays through a game, very like Wow but not Wow, which makes me happy again that I quit.

… listening to the both of my kids sing every word of Eye of the Tiger from memory (thank you Rock Band) and being transported back to an empty football stadium and into a very short skirt, watching the guys warm-up.

… waking up after night shift and a snooze to find my Canadian husband has started cooking the gumbo on his own. (it was fabulous btw!)

… seeing them come home from school and immediately set to the paint set in an effort to become the next Ted Nasmith. I now have the best version of Bag End on my fridge!

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I totally read to the end too fast. And I think I had my “light fantasy” reading cap on instead of my “English Lit for Homework” reading cap. Because somewhere just before the beginning of Part II, I realized with a horror that I had dropped a thread and that it was many many miles behind me.

So, I sprinted to the end, grasping that thread in my frantic hand, because I just could not wait. It’s hardly surprisingly that I found this last leg of the trip particularly unfulfilling. For now I see how it ends, but I do not really know how it ends.

Orual lives this amazing life as a queen. She brings security and prosperity to her people, enriching them and righting long overdue wrongs while always forsaking the dreams of her heart. And yet at her end, she seems cruelly bombarded with others perspective of her choices in life. She looks into a mirror held up by others and all they show her is the ugliness, not of her unattractive face for that she has hidden so well, but of her spirit. Yet the whole while we know that these mirrors are not held by guiltess hands.

I’m quite torn between anger at the ulterior motives of these people that caused my queen so much grief after she has already born so very much and a willingness to allow them to present their side of the story for her reflection and self-betterment. And before I could decide, she dies. It all felt just too cruel. (Pretty obvious where my sympathies lie, eh?)

I still continue to dwell on her veil. Most of the way through the book, I thought of it as a half-veil, only covering her nose and mouth. But in the description of the preparations for her fight against Prince Argan, she comments that a special veil with holes for her eyes was made and yet was pure silliness because she could see just fine without that precaution. Somehow a veil covering her entire face is really different.

As I said, confused I am. So hear I go a-rereading.

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Our cupboards were so bare and I could bear it no longer. I took myself off to the grocery and had an expedition down the cookie aisle.

Cookies are my favorite dessert of all. It’s the crunchy mixed with the sweet. (Though the first box I grabbed was Chewy Chips Ahoy’s for the hubby. hehe)

Instincts sent me to the chocolate, of all sorts, but after a moment’s consideration, I realized that a real treat would be to have variety.

And so butter oatmeal, cinnamon snap, maple leaf, imitation oreo, and caramel coconut fudge striped cookies came home. Not quite so many facets as they are parts of my personality, but quite enough for exploring today. My style of Mardi Gras for the year.

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This American Life podcast is always thought-provoking. The Valentine’s Day edition however struck something very close to home.

They tell the story of an American man falling in love with a Chinese woman, and the struggles they faced in their courtship. The language barrier and cultural differences were no small matter, but the pair end up together. (It is supposed to be a feel-good episode, after all.) Reflecting on their experience of marriage years afterward, the man spoke one of the most profound truths regarding marriage that I have ever heard.

He says, “No one ever asks ‘How did you two stay together?‘ Instead, everyone always asks, ‘How did you two meet?‘”

Their story is quite romantic. At one point he searches a city of millions for her, with only an old phone number as his guide. Despite those impossible odds, he tells how it is the years after they are married that prove the real challenge, how they considered splitting up, yet after time and dedication to each other became better friends, knew each other more deeply and remained… together.

Having a similar cross-border romance in my past, having married the man I wrote an email to in the dark so many years ago, we have been asked the same question of “How did you two meet?” innumerable times.

There was a day when only friends supposed me to answer, but now living in Canada, once anyone, anyone at all, hears that my husband is from the city where we live and that I am from the States, the next question is always always… well, you know.

Believe me, I am not devaluing the initial bloom of romance, but having pondered a great deal about the alternative one of “How have we stayed together?” I see how much more of an impressive story that is. And while your marriage may not have been through the family divorces, suicide, betrayals, rejections, physical injury, near financial ruin and two apartments as small as my bedroom when I was girl like we have, you have been through your own harrowing realities.

So, I’m wondering… Do we ask the question about the chance meeting that became a ring because we are afraid of sharing and showing our scars? Perhaps it is something we ought not to be broadcasting? Marriage is an intimate relationship between two people that no one on the outside of it can really know – nor should know – all its secrets. Yet there is still something inside of me saying that the truths that need to be passed on hide there rather than in the story we are more often asked to tell.

ps. Bookclub post tomorrow. This was on my heart too strongly to wait.

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