I can’t stand it when anyone prefaces a comment like that. Actually if you’ve thought enough in advance to know what you are about to say is rude, just don’t say it. I mean, if you don’t want to be rude that is. I just watched 10 seconds of Larry King to see the Liberals all giddy and snide about Sarah Palin’s 17 year old daughter being pregnant. Two of the guests prefaced their comments with “I don’t mean to be rude, but…” with such a satisfied little smirk. So I have to ask myself, if the shoe was on the other foot would I be all over this too? Say Barack has a teenage daughter and turns out she’s pregnant, would I be on my moral high-horse about it? I can honestly say I wouldn’t. As a mother I just think kids are off limits. Its vile and trashy to strike out at someone by attacking their kids. The fact that this story came out after rumors were flying around that Palin faked a pregnancy to cover her daughter’s pregnancy is just sick. Photos of the kid comparing stomachs to her mom? I just think its pretty low. I don’t think that kind of ugliness wins people over…not for long anyway.

In college I took only the required math courses but I especially enjoyed one class because there was this female professor that was such a card. She absolutely did not care what the fashion of the day was, she was stuck in pleated “mom jeans” with an afro. She was awesome just because she was so self-assured she could comfortably talk about picking her nose while driving. Now, I am no fashion guru, far from it; But I *try* not to let my look get too dated (at least I hope so). Maybe I’m just blissfully unaware like my math teacher in college… But apparently EVERYTHING in fashion is cyclical. I was doing some on-line shopping over the weekend and I found this disturbing item at Old Navy

And then just now I was looking for a certain type of fabric and look what I stumbled across

This is the front page for Darlington Fabrics “market trends”. I don’t get it. First of all, this photo does not show any fabrics. Ack! Is that a fanny pack she’s wearing? Did I just wake up back in the 1980s or are the pleated mom jeans back in style? I am very disturbed by this.

On NPR I heard this:

“I had no idea there was a difference between a male hoe and a female hoe…”

And I totally had a giggling fit. (She was talking about the gardening tool of course.)

The word makes me laugh. 10 years ago in college we’d drive around with all our friends in our VW vanagon and one night, late a bunch of us were headed to the campus library for something??? Couldn’t have been to study… anyway Suzie, the only one of us who was an actual graduate at the time and working as an elementary school teacher taunted this girl who was taking her time crossing the parking lot we were trying to park in (from inside the car where she couldn’t hear) “Come on, ho, move a little faster.” It was so out of character and so perfectly punctuated, I can’t help but laugh about it still…

I was up late last night because I’ve been putting off processing the rest of my strawberries. I made 9 batches of jam the first day and lost steam. But after almost a week it was time to get the last 2 gallons of strawberries processed and I didn’t manage to do it during daylight. So as I was cleaning the kitchen and boiling strawberries I listened to NPR and they kept repeating the breaking news out of Austria where a man apparently had held his daughter prisoner in his cellar for 24 years and fathered 7 children by her. I can’t imagine anything more monsterous. The fact that this man deceived his neighbors, possibly even his wife into believing he was a normal, 73 year old grandfather caring for three of his daughter’s children is just horrifying. The idea that monsters are masquerading around as normal people in society is very unsettling to say the least. It makes me wonder how a human being decends so far. How many lies and justifications have to be rehersed until the dark ugliness takes over?

Elisabeth told police her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11 and he locked her up in a room in the cellar on August 28, 1984. (Sky news)

As early as 1978, Fritzl started plotting a basement cellar.

“Amstetten authorities authorised the building of a cellar in 1978, city spokesman Hermann Gruber told the Austria Press Agency.

Mr Gruber said inspectors examined the project in 1983 – the year before Elisabeth went missing – and did not notice anything suspicious,”(BBC news)

I can’t even begin to imagine, nor do I want to imagine the extent of emotional damage this evil has inflicted on everyone involved.

Austrian officials, while insisting that similar crimes had occurred in other countries, said they were struggling to make sense of the events.

“He was man of stature,” Franz Polzer, the chief of the criminal investigations unit for the Province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference, holding up a photograph of Fritzl, a heavyset, gray-haired man.

“He led a double life,” Polzer continued, “with one family of seven children, with his wife, and a second family of seven children, with his daughter…

“…The police said his wife, Rosemarie, 68, had no inkling of his secret life, believing that their daughter had fled the family for a cult and was unable to take care of her children. Fritzl forced Elisabeth to give up three of the children as babies, and he and his wife raised them. A seventh child died soon after being born.

By most accounts, the three children who grew up in the Fritzls’ care were well-adjusted, each learning to play a musical instrument.” (The news tribune.com)

Except that it probably isn’t possible now for these well adjusted children to be sheltered from the facts of how they came to exist. And how does a person even begin to process that? What do you do when you find out your husband is a monster? Did Mrs. Fritzl really not know? Actually this is one story I really don’t want to learn more about.

I finished canning my strawberry jam and turned on Stephen Colbert. Seeing a grown man put on a blue sequin tube-top pant-unitard somewhat restored my faith in humanity. There is definately ugliness, evil, perversion but at the same time there are people who make us laugh, heros, amazing parents, friends and children. The good people of this world outnumber the bad. The monsters are out there, but they are always looking over their shoulders because they know, eventually they will be discovered. And I take comfort knowing they will answer for what they have done, in this life or the next.