The News According to ME

5 Things I Learned This Week:

#1. Artificial intelligence will soon take over the world, as evidenced by Watson the Champion Supercomputer on Jeopardy. Apparently we should set our calendars for 2045. This is the date humans become irrelevant, immortal, or both. Not sure what the Mayan calendar has to say about this.

#2. Artificiality (in all its forms) seems to be where it's at. If you can't compete on a cerebral level, try a corporeal one. Case in point: Camille Grammar's new gig on CNN and The Kardashian-palooza that was (apparently) 2010. Further proof that Joan Rivers has just been a woman ahead of her time.

#3. Two fascinating men descended upon the Capital of the Confederacy this weekend. World renowned Picasso exhibit premiered at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Anderson Cooper spoke at the Richmond Forum. I'm not sure about Cooper's taste in women but apparently Picasso dug the curvy chicks. Extra eyeballs and displaced nostrils were apparently a plus as well.

#4. Borders files for bankruptcy and everyone wonders who is to blame? Is it the big box stores? the Internet, ecommerce, and ebooks? The publishing industry? The lack of people reading? I think we should blame libraries. I mean, who do they think they are? Letting people borrow books for free? That's just CRAZY!

#5. Jazz virtuoso George Shearing died this week at the age of 91. In a week where newcomer Esperanza Spalding beat out teen hearthrob Justin Bieber for Best New Artist, it's safe to say that America's musical genre is still very much alive. George has just gone to join his buddies for that great jam session in the sky.

What was your favorite news story this week?

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9. Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole. There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them." I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known. This...

To everything there is a season

It's been a while since I used the blog to share my thoughts. What started as some random musings turned into much more than a Facebook post. I started writing this over a week ago but it's taken a minute to actually hit the publish button. Thanks for your patience. Welcome back. It has been a week (or two) . One of those weeks where everything happens all at once. A week where things need to happen in a particular order or everything‘s going to go to shit. A week where you just seem to go from one thing to the next thing and you’ll figure out what’s going to happen next as it goes along. A week full of work and family and rest and sleeplessness and it never feels like there’s enough time for anything. But somehow it all works out. A plaque on the library walk in NYC My week started with a trip for work to NYC. It coincided with my birthday. Because of that, I had all kinds of feelings all week about life in general. The week ended with a trip to Florida that, unfortun...

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen. If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life. I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into ...

I See What You Meme

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