The Russian invasion of Ukraine and how far Putin is going to push it – what a tragedy!
Our upcoming trip to Europe: I just booked a cruise with an extension in eastern Europe. We start with five days in Poland, then get the cruise in Prague and sail to Berlin. I hope the War of Russian Aggression or a new variant of Covid-19 doesn’t interfere with our trip, which starts in April. I REALLY need to travel right now!
The environment/climate change. This is always on my mind. Also, getting a blurb to put in our weekly newsletter from the Environmental Concerns Committee, of which I seem to be chair.
The book I am currently reading, Braiding Sweetgrass – excellent! I’ve been taking notes!
Whether Republicans are going to retake the House and/or Senate in the upcoming midterm elections. They are projected to win because that’s the tradition in midterms, but does it have to be? The Dems need to do something to improve their messaging! More GOP control will be a disaster, especially with the kooks that run the party now!
Whether I have time to accomplish everything I want to accomplish this week.
I haven’t been on my blog for a few days – I’ve been busy! Which is why I’m late this week for Melanie’s Share Your World. Better late than never, though!
So here are the questions and my responses:
What was the last TV show you binge-watched? If you don’t watch TV (congratulations by the way) what’s the last thing you binged ON? We don’t “binge watch” the way some people do. If we watch more than three shows in a row, it’s probably things we recorded and want to delete from our DVR (to make space for MORE shows!). So I guess I will have to say MSNBC on a weekday! When there is “big news,” we have been known to watch several MSNBC shows in a row. Sometimes we are only half paying attention and then realize we’ve watched every show from Nicole Wallace to Lawrence O’Donnell! (For those unfamiliar with these programs, Nicole Wallace comes on at 3 pm CT and Lawrence O’Donnell ends at 10 pm! We are trying to cut back on this, though – confine ourselves usually just to Rachel Maddow and then watch something else.
That said, our biggest “binge” with recorded programs is either Call the Midwife on PBS or Anne With an E on Netflix. And I have to say, when we finished all of those, we felt lost…what will we get hooked on next??
What’s your most prized possession and why? This is a tough one. But it would have to be something connecting my hobbies with travel, so I will say my photo albums/photo files and my camera. (I know this isn’t all one thing, but they are interconnected.) Some time before digital photography, someone said that the cheapest and most important thing you can bring home with you is your photos. What better way to make memories of an amazing trip?! For as long as I can remember, I have loved making photo albums. I took after my mother in this regard – she always made albums of her trips and of each year, at least after her grandchildren were born. I have done the same thing, but got woefully behind and so some “photo albums” are just pocket pages in a binder with the photos stuck in the pockets.
Some of my albums, however, I am very proud of – pre-digital book of my trip to Cuba in 2001 and 2 volumes of my month-long stay in Costa Rica come to mind. To do these books, I spent countless hours at scrapbooking workshops or carved out a little space for myself at home picking out the best background papers, stickers and other embellishments for each page. I spent hundreds of dollars on books and supplies. (The time and money were worth it!) The best albums I made were with the company Creative Memories – their photo books are high quality and relatively easy to add extra and mix types of pages.
I haven’t done many photo books digitally – only 3 so far, and I’m working on a 4th. I only got started about a year and a half ago with Shutterfly on my trip to Israel. That book came out pretty well, but there were a few mistakes – it was a learning experience, and as a result, my 2-volume trip to Egypt came out much better. I’m now working on France.
Since I generally don’t get around to starting and finishing these books until well after the trip is over, I have to rely on my memory, aided by the photos in my files, to put them together coherently. Besides the photos, I usually go to web sites about places I went to where either I didn’t take notes, couldn’t hear the guide very well, didn’t remember what the guide said, or didn’t even remember exactly what the subject of the photographs was! But that is OK, even advantageous, because a lot is lost whenever you go on a guided tour, and refreshing my mind about a particular site we saw using information from the Internet is a great way to fix it in my mind and immortalize it in the photo book! I learn even more about and appreciate those places than I had before!
And finally, my camera is part of all this. I often snap photos with my cellphone camera, which is light and easy, but I do endure the hassle of carrying around my Sony camera and lenses, because the quality of the photos taken with that are in general much better – plus I can take photos of details close-up that are too far away for a cellphone to capture a good image of. It was especially helpful on safari in Tanzania – which is why I bought a camera with a good telephoto lens initially.
If you had the time and inclination, what would you volunteer for? Habitat for Humanity or projects in poor countries – such as teaching literacy or modern hygiene to people in a village, building a school, or something else they need. I have a friend whose travel itinerary was most often with Earth Watch – she would participate in projects in different countries, as well as take time for sightseeing. I wish I had done that. One of my cousins was in the Peace Corps, another great program where you are really immersed in a culture and people.
Also, I would love to participate in an archaeological dig. In southern Illinois, there is an ancient site called Cahokia, where people belonging to the Mississippi culture built mounds and henges as part of their communities. Cahokia accepts volunteers of all ages. I saw an elderly man there whose task was to sift through dirt for pot shards, etc.
Do you think that humans will ever be able to live together in harmony? Being an optimist and an idealist, I still have that hope. I think it can happen if all the countries of the world join in a effort to solve a global problem that affects us all – dealing with climate change. This is an urgent issue that needs addressing, but its components are so vast and diverse that people in different areas are affected in different ways, all of which could be part of the global project. There is a lot of politics involved on every level and in every country, social and economic disparities and needs, scientific knowledge, business considerations, and understanding why saving a particular species, say, benefits us all. All creatures need to be respected and considered, and included in the plan to solve the overall plight of our planet.
Gratitute section: Share something uplifting with everyone. It can be some writing or an image or photo you like!
Yesterday was Earth Day, so I’d like to share a few inspirational quotes – “food for thought.”
concept photo of earth on green nature ,Earth map by courtesy of visibleearth.nasa.gov
Another week, another installment of Melanie’s Share Your World!
QUESTIONS:
Do you think a person’s name influences the person they become?
“What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” so Shakespeare wrote in his most famous play Romeo and Juliet.
Depends on the name. Some people have really strange names that their parents have tortured them with. When I lived in Brazil, there was a comedy duo that had a contest for the most interesting or bizarre name which viewers were invited to participate in. And my husband told me one of his students was named “Lufthansa” – her mother went into labor on a flight home from Germany!
Even unusual names probably have a minimal effect on a person, except as conversation starters! My son’s name is long and rather unique, and he has told me it’s often an opener for conversation – a good thing, since he doesn’t always do well in starting conversations.
But some names do affect a person because their parents were trying to be cute or funny – but not so funny for the kid! I heard of a man who went by his initials W.B. followed by his surname. No one questioned it until he went into the army, where they insisted he reveal his full name! In embarrassment, he said his initials stood for “Welcome Baby” because his parents had finally had a child after a prolonged period of not being able to produce one! The army, after hearing this story, allowed him to use his initials thereafter! (Note: This may be an “urban legend” but it’s an interesting anecdote of how a name can affect a person’s life.)
Why do we dream? It is our brain’s way of relaxing. Everything gets jumbled…the brain doesn’t have to think to put it together in an organized way. Bits of past experience make their appearance in dreams. Sometimes dreams are really creative – when I took a writing course once, every night I had incredible, fantastic dreams that I remembered. At least one I turned into a short story, somewhat surreal, but that’s what dreams are like. Nowadays I almost always dream either about teaching or traveling or both, and usually I make some major mistake. I think my anxiety about being good at teaching is coming out in my dreams, even though I have been retired for five and a half years!
Does hardship make a person stronger? (example: What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger) I think it does to a certain extent. Certainly learning to deal with adversity does make a person more capable of handling various situations or knowing how to act in an emergency. It may make them more confident if they have been successful in enduring the hardships. People who have never suffered adversity or never learned to overcome it go through life, I think, feeling insecure and afraid to accept risks or challenges. They tend to resist change. People who are poor are more likely to be generous with what they do have than rich people, because the poor know how to live in society with very little money. Rich people are constantly worried about losing their money, and would have no idea how to survive without much income.
On the other hand, hardship can cause insecurity, anxiety and conditions such as PTSD, especially if the person has not learned how to deal with such challenges on his or her own. A child who has been abused, for example, must learn to overcome the trauma it caused in order to face the problems life throws at them. Some never really learn to cope. People who have been in war zones come home oftentimes with PTSD and may show a dramatic change in their behavior, including anxiety, paranoia, intolerance of loud noises, etc.
So it depends, perhaps, on what sort of hardship the person endures and probably when that occurs, as well as inherent personality traits a person has to be able to cope with life’s challenges.
Why do we judge ourselves by our intentions, but judge others by their actions? Self-preservation? Lack of empathy? We tend to think our intentions are good, but since we can’t read other people’s minds, we judge them based on what their outward motivations seem to be.
For example, the attack on the Capitol a week ago: on the news media, the people who were incited by Trump to storm the Capitol are called “terrorists” yet they don’t think of themselves as terrorists. At least some of them believed they had good intentions: Trump had convinced them that the election was stolen by the Democrats, that it was rigged. So they saw themselves as a self-styled militia bent on righting a wrong. I know that for many of them who are hard-core white supremacists, the chance to be a militia and wreak havoc through violence was the aim. But there were many others who thought of it as a kind of “revolution” – they were doing what had to be done to get our country back on the right path.
Protesters seen all over Capitol building where pro-Trump supporters riot and breached the Capitol in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. Rioters broke windows and breached the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. Police used buttons and tear gas grenades to eventually disperse the crowd. Rioters used metal bars and tear gas as well against the police. (Photo by Lev Radin/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
I use the attack on Congress as an example of intentions vs. actions and I am not condoning what they did in any way. From their actions, to outsiders they appeared to be just a brainwashed horde, even ready to hang Pence and kill Pelosi. But they THEMSELVES didn’t see it that way – at least many of them didn’t. They were brainwashed, yes; they were gullible, yes; still, Trump bears the ultimate responsibility for unleashing their worst instincts. They themselves thought they were being the ultimate patriots, that cheating had gone too far and they had to take matters into their own hands. They may have compared themselves to the insurrectionists of the French Revolution, or some other modern-day revolution in which the citizenry felt it necessary to do more than merely protest. There have been many arrests, but there were a lot of people there that didn’t do any damage or even get into the building.. They were, like sheep, following their leaders (both Trump and the leaders of the insurrection) instead of questioning whether it was the right thing to do.
GRATITUDE SECTION(Always Optional)
Feel free to share some gratitude in the form of images, photos or writing. Thanks!
I am grateful that some people still write letters. Isn’t it nice to receive a note or a holiday card from a friend instead of just bills and junk mail? The cousins on my dad’s side of the family started a custom many years ago, called “Round Robin.” They each write a letter with news and opinions about their lives, and mail it, along with the latest ones received from their sisters, to the next person, who then takes out her last letter and writes a new one. When my siblings and I found out about it, we wanted to join too, so we have been engaging in this Round Robin custom along with our cousins. I always look forward to receiving the latest batch – and yesterday I received it!
I have strong feelings about this week’s topic for Truthful Tuesday by PCGuyIV, so I have a lot to say to answer these questions, based on my own experience!
The old adage says, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Today’s questions stem from this bromide. Don’t worry if you aren’t currently working. The questions can easily be answered, and are likely better answered from a reflective standpoint.
Do you now or have you ever been employed doing what you love? The first 20 years of my working life, I worked in clerical positions, primarily in export shipping and freight forwarding. I didn’t love these jobs, but some were better than others. I enjoyed being able to use my skills, such as being able to use one of the two foreign languages I speak, and there were some other things I enjoyed, but usually I was somewhat bored and I felt I wasn’t really contributing anything meaningful to myself or society. That’s why I decided to change careers and become a teacher.
I would say that I actually loved my job for about three years out of my entire working career. These lovely three years occurred primarily when I was teaching and I had the ideal working environment: my principal liked and supported me, I got along with co-workers and they respected my opinions, I was working with small groups of students that came to my classroom, and I was doing what I best at. Sometimes I would be at school preparing for the day, and as I wrote on the whiteboard the schedule for the day, I would have a feeling of exhilaration: there I was, writing the date in Spanish and English, something simple like that, because I was good at what I did and I loved using Spanish in my job as well as teaching English to Spanish speakers. This feeling of exhilaration would sometimes wash over me when I was sitting at a table working with three or four kids on reading. I felt like I was really making a difference, I was doing something to help those kids by teaching them to read! When I saw a child make progress in an area difficult to him or her, teaching was the best job in the world!
During my three best years, I did projects with my students that were really enjoyable, and as long as I taught the curriculum and my lesson plans fit the standards, I could expand on it as I wished. I was great help and a good resource for the classroom teachers that my students were in. The kids felt comfortable with me because most of their day was spent in a classroom with native English speakers and that could be intimidating, even when they were competent in spoken, non-academic English. Although I did encourage them to do their work in the language of instruction, with me it was okay if they preferred writing in Spanish at first instead of English. I also tried to make connections between the two languages and we drew on their native culture whenever possible. I told all my students to be proud to be bilingual and not to give up their native language even if their academic work was mostly in English. I told them that being bilingual would help them get a better job in the future. (If I had not been what is considered bilingual, I doubt I would have ever gotten a teaching position in a public school system.) It was clear that I loved and respected their culture, and knew something about it.
These feelings of contentment sometimes happened outside of those three years in which I was truly happy, but three years out of 12+ years of teaching is only 25% of the time – the teaching profession is brutal these days! The other years either I had a principal that didn’t support me or didn’t care, I had either too much to manage or too little control over what I did, and/or I felt that I wasn’t appreciated or respected by the administration or my colleagues. I was only a mediocre classroom teacher – there were too many things pulling on me, I had to keep track of more tasks and more kids than I could manage well. With small groups, especially when they came to me in my classroom that was set up for their needs and mine, I was a better teacher and happier too.
But I have to say, when I was able to leave the profession and retire, I was very relieved and grateful. I hardly ever miss teaching.
Do you agree with this saying(If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life)or is it a bunch of poppycock, and why? Doing what you love is still work. Even those three ideal teaching years, I worked very hard – late nights planning and grading papers, early mornings preparing for the day, and I only allowed myself one day on the weekend to completely get away from my work. Ask the health care workers on the front line taking care of Covid-19 patients if they don’t consider what they are doing as work! Most people are not lucky enough to spend their working life doing what they love, and even when they do, it’s still a lot of responsibility. You can’t just take the day off because you want to. Sometimes you will be doing that part of your job that you love, when something you don’t enjoy so much imposes itself on you and you have to take care of it because that’s part of your job too. I don’t believe there is anyone on Earth who loves every minute of every day of their work – not even workaholics!
In an ideal world, we would all work less hours, have more leisure time, and the work we did would be fulfilling and a contribution to society. We would be respected for our labors. However, living in a country which values work so much that there isn’t even a law requiring employers to give their workers vacation time, this adage has even less chance of ever becoming reality!
What is worse than a dentist with bad breath? A dog who farts all during Thanksgiving (with a house full of people) because he gobbled up an entire pie that was left on the counter.
Have you ever been rejected by someone that you liked, or been told that you were not good enough for somebody else? I have been rejected, but never told I wasn’t good enough for someone else.
Did you ever want to have toast for breakfast, only to find that all your bread was covered in green mold? Yes, sort of. It is a disappointment, that’s for sure, but I just chide myself for letting the bread get neglected for so long. If the mold is just on the edges, though, I cut around it and eat it anyway.
If it looks like this, I’d find the slices that have the least mold, cut it out, and toast it.If it looks like this, I throw it out!
4. Did you ever sneeze so hard that your whole body hurt? I can’t recall that I have, but I have laughed so hard that I felt like I was having a heart attack or couldn’t breathe. Since it was temporary, I didn’t worry about it.
5. Did you ever buy clothing on the internet that did not fit, but you wore them anyway, since you didn’t want to pay the $5 shipping charge to send them back? Most online vendors do not make you pay to have merchandise sent back, especially now since shopping in a real store may be hazardous for your health! If the clothes didn’t fit me, I wouldn’t wear them. If they are a little too small, I probably would keep them so I can wear them after I lose weight (I have a lot of clothes in this category right now! 😉 ). Recently, I acquired a shirt that was WAY too large for me – I don’t mind wearing clothes that are a little large, but in this case it didn’t look good at all. I have a sister who is a lot heavier than I am, and her daughter is even bigger than that. So I gave that shirt to my sister. We determined it would fit her but not her daughter. It looks very nice on my sister!
To avoid the hassle of returning items, whether it’s free or not, I usually give it away to someone else or even to a rummage sale if I hadn’t paid too much for it.
Gratitude: Our community has a “tree” (cut out from paper) and each resident got a leaf to put on the tree. We were to write something we are grateful for on the leaf and tape it to the tree. Our message said: We are grateful for all the new friends we have made since we moved here! So I will leave it at that, since we rarely get to see them now – the new surge in the coronavirus has caused most of the activities we were beginning to have again to shut down.
Why do I write? I always have and probably always will. I blog, I write a journal (although far from daily), I write poems, essays, and autobiographical pieces mostly.
When I hear something about Trump that is particularly egregious, I will expound on the topic in order to get out my feelings and frustrations. These rants are part of my journaling, but sometimes I can develop them into decent essays to use for my “public” writing – either my blog or in my writing group. I have even written letters to the editor to be printed in our local newspaper.
When I am pondering a big or serious problem, I write to organize my thoughts. Sometimes this helps me come up with a solution.
I write in order to remember things (and almost forgot that I intended to write “I write in order to remember things” just now!). I have a poor memory and writing things down makes meaning for me, fixes the information in my mind. Sometimes people will see me taking notes at a lecture and ask me why I do it – I do it to remember it! But not only that, I also write to keep me from getting distracted.
In other words, I write to focus my thoughts.
Writing has always come easily to me and I love to do it. I’ve been writing stories and narratives since I was a kid. Once I learned to write and spell, I began writing coherently (but even before that, I wrote random letters because I liked it). I usually illustrated what I wrote, because I also like to draw. I dreamed of being a famous author one day. That never happened, but it’s okay – it doesn’t matter anymore. Although I am working on a book about my ancestors, I have put it aside after writing six chapters but vow I will get back to it.
Writing is something I’m good at. I write because I must.
I love words and language and I’m a stickler for grammar and spelling!!
Reading is important too – reading helps a writer write better. I do a lot of reading now, but I didn’t when I was younger, because I got distracted easily. Certain writing styles inspire me and if I read a lot of books by the same author, I start imitating their style by injecting it into my writing.
Nowadays, I seldom write longhand – typing is infinitely easier and since word processing was invented, it’s so much easier to edit. If I don’t have access to a computer, then I will write longhand – such as when we are on an overseas trip. A notebook is one of the first things that I pack! I endeavor to write a journal every night when we are back from sightseeing, which lasts a week if I really persevere, less than that if I’m too tired. Plus my handwriting is deteriorating as I get older.
Now I usually write a few things during my travels, but mostly use my photos to help me remember what happened and when, and then I write about it when I’m back home. An example of this is my travel journal and blogging, notably my Journey to Egypt posts. It helps me relive the experience, which is even more important now that I cannot travel due to the pandemic.
Writing ties into almost everything else I love to do – reading, photography, drawing, making scrapbooks (nowadays these are photo books that I create online). Sometimes I am inspired to write a book review, and have been known to keep a food & weight journal. I would write inspirational things to keep me motivated on my “weight loss journey.”
Writing is part of who I am. That’s why writing matters to me.
Do we control technology or is technology controlling us?
There are humans out there that control technology – they are the technology inventors, software creators, Silicon Valley movers and shakers, and the people in India that you call when you need maintenance on your computer. But the vast majority of the human population in modern society is controlled by technology. Once the technology is put out there with plenty of fanfare and advertising, people feel they simply HAVE TO have it. A lot has been written and speculated about this. Will computers eventually take on minds of their own and LITERALLY control us? AI (artificial intelligence) is a big subject these days.
When I make a call to a company, I get a recorded voice giving me the option of choosing 1,,2,3,4,or 5 and once I’ve made my choice, half the time the call hangs up. Most cars manufactured in the 21st century are computerized – I drive a 2017 Prius and the mechanics who work on it need to be knowledgeable about computers. Most of us are so attached to our cellphones that if we leave home without them, we feel as if we’re adrift at sea! I constantly worry about making sure my cellphone is charged – God forbid if it should “die” when I need it to stave off boredom.
There are both positive and negative aspects to technology. Computers supposedly make our lives easier – which they do, except when they break down! Then we can hardly function until they’re up and running again. Who uses maps anymore? GPS can do the work for us – except when we’re out of range of any satellite. TVs, cars, radios, cameras, copiers, ebooks, you name it, they all need highly trained techies to service them when they malfunction. Things that used to be basic technologically (like cars, books and cellphones) now have so many bells and whistles that you can’t possibly learn how to use them all.
With technology comes software and social media. I know that any social media can be abused, there’s cyberbullying, and people get addicted, but I’m not completely wedded to social media so I enjoy it when I go on Facebook or Instagram (I don’t have and refuse to get Twitter) to see what’s going on with far-flung friends and relatives. My email gets out of hand because I get inundated with junk email (a lot of it political) and the important messages get lost in the deluge. Right now I need to clean out both my email inboxes – they have 1,000+ messages in them that go back two years at least!
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I understand that this question was motivated at least in part by Fandango’s frustration with the new Block Editor that WordPress is forcing us to use. I didn’t like it at all at first, but then I didn’t know how to use it either and the tutorials they have you link to are not particularly helpful. As with a lot of things, you have to just try something new yourself and over time, you discover the best way to use it for your own purposes. I still prefer the Classic editor but I haven’t even bothered trying to use it lately because if I want to insert a photo, it defaults back to the Block Editor anyway. The only thing I ended up using it for was symbols, like foreign accent marks, but now that we can’t use Classic anymore, I have no idea how to insert these symbols (They are important for those of us who speak other languages – we don’t want to seem ignorant when we write something in one of those languages and it looks like we don’t know that certain words have accent marks, tildes or circumflex accents.).
something beyond my control, I just have to get used to it and adapt. Being able to adapt to changes in a society that sometimes seems to travel at warp speed is important for me to be able to live life with as little stress as possible. Oh, sure, I’ll complain about a change that I can’t understand the need for, but after awhile, I’ll just…accept it and adapt.
My ability to adapt has been a major theme in my life and something I take pride in. Until 2007, I had spent more than 50 years of life finding ways of coping and adapting to something in my brain that I didn’t have a name for. I had poor memory long before becoming a senior citizen and I have always had issues with distraction, reading and listening comprehension, fidgeting, and organization. In 2007, I was finally officially diagnosed with ADHD. I’d had it all my life and knowing this sure helped me understand a lot of the obstacles and difficulties I’d had over the years, and the decisions I made to either avoid them or cope with them. Those decisions were not always wise, but if I had known this was a part of me that I couldn’t change and had to live with many years earlier, I would have most likely made different choices and learned different ways of adapting. Instead I blamed myself as a failure. I cannot take the usual medications prescribed for ADHD, which are stimulants, due to a heart condition. However, if psychiatrists had known what it was in the early 1960s, stimulants probably would have been helpful to me.
It’s the same with technology. I either have to adapt or get left behind. As a result, I am as dependent on my cellphone as anyone. Having ADHD, being able to do so many things on my phone is additional distraction I probably don’t need, but on the good side, I have games and web sites to entertain me when I am forced to wait – in the car, in the doctor’s office, etc. And changes on WordPress – well, if I want to continue blogging, I guess I’ll just go with the flow.
Fandango’s Dog Days of August continues with today’s theme: “your first love.”
It was 1964. The Beatles had just come to America. I was in 6th grade and I sat behind Steve in school. Steve was nice to me and traded Beatles cards with me. He had a huge collection of Beatles cards! I didn’t because the cards usually came in a pack of gum, and I didn’t chew gum – it wasn’t allowed in school nor at home.
However, I did manage to acquire a few cards – mainly my friends’ duplicates – and it was enough for Steve to notice me.
Actually, Steve had already noticed me. Whenever I dropped something on the floor, he was quick to pick it up and hand it to me. I started doing the same for him, which made him smile. He would sometimes tell me dumb jokes or what he thought of that day’s math homework. When the teacher had volunteers write a symbol on the board which would represent a number in our “new numbering system,” his was chosen, but mine wasn’t because the teacher said it was too hard to write fast. Steve encouraged me, telling me to “try again” but alas – none of my invented symbols were chosen.
I had the biggest crush on him because no boy had ever really been nice to me before.
Sometimes Steve would pass me a note.
My best friend Gloria had a crush on another boy named Steve in our class, so we used to call them “Him 1” (my Steve) and “Him 2” (her Steve) so that no one would know who we were talking about. But of course, girls have a way of finding out who likes who and a girl in my class found out about my Steve and decided to tell him at recess that I liked him.
She waited until the group of boys he was in was nearby, and she called out to him, “Hey, Steve!” He looked over at her and she began to tell him, “Hey, Steve, Katy– ” That was as far as she got, because the other girl she was with thought it was better to keep it a secret from him that I liked him. So she interrupted and said, “Katy is mad at you because of something you said to her.”
I had no idea this had happened, so I couldn’t understand his change in attitude toward me. When he dropped a pencil later that day, and I leaned over to get it, he grabbed it himself and didn’t even look at me. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to see the new Beatles cards he’d gotten (I knew he had gotten them because he was showing them off to other boys) whereas before he always showed me his new cards. He wasn’t overtly hostile, but he tried very hard to ignore me from then on.
On the way home a few days later, I told Gloria that “Him 1” was acting very strangely toward me. The next day, through the girl gossip grapevine, she found out the whole story and told me what had happened.
So that was the end of our “relationship” (if you could call it that). I didn’t get over him right away, though. When I walked downtown with my friends to see the Beatles movie that summer, we passed right by his house and I looked at it with a mixture of affection and sadness. I wanted him to come outside right then so I could talk to him, but he didn’t.
The next year we went to junior high, and Steve was in some of my classes again. He had gotten over his disappointment and once more acted very friendly toward me. I could have taken his hints but instead I ignored him, which wasn’t hard because we didn’t sit near each other. Anyway, I took the easy way out because I was too shy to do anything about his overtures toward me, and eventually he lost interest.
![400+ Turkey Pictures & Images [HD] - Pixabay](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/04/01/09/08/turkey-1299176__340.png)
Wanderlust & Wonderment 