Elise Sereni Patkotak

So I have reluctantly been dragged into the last frontier on the Internet.  At least, this is the last frontier for me.  If I go any further, I’m pretty sure my head will explode.  Either that, or I’ll have to deliberately forget all the lines of “The Raven” that I so painstakingly memorized in my dorky youth in order to make room for more codes and passwords and access numbers and online names. 

The good news, of course, is that I can now never forget my great-grandmother’s maiden name because if I do I will forever be locked out of

I have become my father.  I found myself sitting at the computer planning meals almost a month in advance with one of my lunch buddies.  I can picture my father sitting in the living room after dinner asking my mother what she wanted for dinner the next night and her look of exasperation at the idea that she already needed to be planning the next meal when the one she just ate had not yet been digested.

Need I really say more. My waist, what little of it I can still find, contiues to rise like an old man’s pants. My pants, on the other hand, are designed to stop somewhere around where my hips used to be before they decided to migrate south towards my knees.

I now know why my grandmother wore one rather shapeless black dress from her widowhood till she died. It was just easier. And the support knee highs didn’t show. And she never had to worry that when she raised her arms, her butt crack would show at a time when

Are you like me?  Are you glad the Olympics have ended?  I was absolutely exhausted from all that armchair athletics I was doing. I’ll need at least two weeks of sleep to catch my breath before I can even think of starting to prepare for the summer Olympics in two years.

Despite the pain it has taken to get in even relatively good shape, and despite the fact that exercising will never rank higher than number 153 on my list of favorite things to do, I must admit that I am periodically confronted with proof positive that it works. A few years ago, when I was much heavier and not in very good shape, I fell on the ice and ended up in an emergency room with the kinds of bumps, bruises and contusions that are very painful but not visible enough to get you a whole lot of sympathy.  Yesterday

Does the government have a room somewhere in a bland ugly building in Maryland where they store people who write the language used for government grants so that they don’t accidentally leak into the gene pool?  Inquiring minds want to know.

In my humble opinion, when you have to walk on ice for your daily consitutional, and you take along an old dog who slips and slides and has to be carried to the few non-icy spots, god should let each step count twice so you can finish your walk quickly and get to safety before you break your keister.  And I don’t even know what a kiester is…or how to spell it.

Did you ever have one of those days where you wake up and there are just too many words in the world and they are all in your mind whirling madly?  Am I the only one?

The book excerpt has been found. The pages are as god meant them to be. All is well in my world.  And yet the Luddite in me still wishes for a time when stamps were a lot more important than they are today. I mean, how badly could you screw that up? Put the wrong amount on the letter?  Paste the stamp on upside down? Forget to lick the envelope shut?