Elise Sereni Patkotak

There. I’ve said it out loud and I feel better admitting it. And now I get three hour stretches at a time of reruns on cable. Life is good.

It’s said that those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. I think of this while watching the Occupy Wall Street protests. My mind goes back to the French revolution. It was the obscene disparity between the haves and have-nots that finally led to that blood bath. If you don’t think that can happen here, I’d suggest you consider that at some point the have-nots will realize they have nothing left to lose because the “haves” control it all. Why not get extreme?

Interestingly, some bankers are now changing their tune and saying that even though they aren’t

When I was young, I thought Romeo and Juliet was the most romantic and tragic story ever.

Now I just think, “Kids!”

I was watching an ice dancing competition on TV the other night and saw one couple in which the man was black. I would use the politically correct term of African-American except I’m not sure if he was an American. At any rate, when he took the ice with his partner, I thought to myself, “Wow. Talk about being a minority. Being a black ice dancer has to win some kind of award in that category.”

These are the philosophical thoughts that come to my mind on a Saturday night as I sip my sugar free lemonade and tequila. Deal

Every time Harold Camping declares a day when the world will end or judgement will come or the apocalypse will occur, I spend the night before indulging in all sorts of activities I would normally avoid on the assumption that after the next day, it will no longer matter as the world will have ended. And it never happens. But those pounds from the cookies sure do!

Fall comics seem to fixate on the joy of jumping into a pile of raked leaves. It’s something I don’t understand. I was raised in the city. We didn’t have trees until much, much later when Donald Trump planted some along the street to make the approach to his casino a little nicer. Having grown up in the 50s, I imagine the nearest we could have come to jumping into a pile of leaves was to rake up discarded cigarette butts from the gutter and jump into them. But somehow that’s not quite as picturesque. 

Am I the only one who thinks that at the rate the Republicans are going in the presidential race, Obama can probably bank his campaign funds for his future because he will easily slide into a second term? I mean, have you seen the debates? OMG!

The weather turns cold. The snow creeps down the mountains. Every day I wake up and wonder if today will be the day that snow covers the ugly remnants of my summer lawn and flowers. But Mother Nature is sometimes nothing more than a big tease… she coyly turns the sky a steel grey, blows the leaves off the trees and turns the ground to frost every morning. Yet still no snow. Girls who were considered teasers in my generation did not have a nice reputation. I wonder if Mother Nature is aware of this?

Back in the day when Alaska was flush with oil money, programs for treating substance abuse, sex abuse and domestic violence flourished. You could find state funded programs from Barrow to Ketchikan and all places in between. So what happened? Why did all those programs disappear? And why are the citizens of Alaska now being told that they were actually quite cost effective in dealing with difficult problems?

A lot of points converged that led to the dismantling of the state’s efforts to deal with societal problems like abuse and dependency. Money was drying up. There were public cries to

If there were a nuclear war, members of my family would dutifully march down the ladders into underground bunkers to survive the hostilities. The minute the bombs stopped falling, even as the clouds of dust and smoke still filled the air, certain of those members – and you know who you are – would come up from the bunkers, briefcases in hand, wondering where the hell everyone else was and why they weren’t doing the same thing and getting back to work. After all, they would reason, the bombs have stopped falling, so what’s the problem?

I’m just saying, in