Guess who is coming to dinner?

Send out an invite, via snailmail or email....and whaddya get? Very often, silence.

Whatever happened to the fine art of the response? Personally, I think it may be a sign of the decline of civilization. Come join me over at Philly Moms for my post on the decline of RSVP'ing.

Comment away. You don't even have to tell me whether you are coming or not!

Cotton Candy Love Emporium

A week or two ago I got off the paid dating site, and signed up with the free one, OKCupid. If Match was kind of a motley crew, OKCupid is more like a Roman bachannal. In fact, I believe was the Greeks who did bachannals -- but those Roman folks knew how to party like it was 99.

It's fine to be a married guy or woman trolling for sex and love on OKCupid. Then there is the folk who call themselves available -- which can cover pretty much everything. Of course, the site also takes personal ads from bisexuals...I suppose, if you were a straight guy looking for a gay woman, you could find her here, also.

No secret that I am an egghead, a middle-aged woman, and definitely not in the hot babe category. So to find myself the object of unremitting male attention puzzles me a little bit. I don't understand why I'm being messaged by 30 year olds -- wouldn't they be happier with women closer to their own age? Of course, guys have been dating younger women for centuries without asking that question.

Unsophisticated moi, it still feels a little peculiar when guys I've never met ask me whether I'm dominant in the bedroom. Or want to have internet sex without having touched more than a cold screen and viewed my picture. At that point, I make myself invisible -- close the hall of mirrors, send the circus home.


It feels to me like a vast banquet -- where, if one seeks to take a sip or a bite, the food and wine is yanked out of reach. And when it comes to exploring love, or maybe even lust, we seem more greedy than smart.

So yes, I've been propositioned -- a lot, as I mentioned to the married guy who wanted advice from me -- and then accused me of thinking I knew the answers. I don't even take it personally anymore -- watching men and women in heat can be like viewing dogs rut.

If this is Cupid's idea of love, maybe he should hang on to those arrows! And yet, I do beleive, that in this group of revelers, there are a few souls as lost as I am. If we are fortunate, maybe we will find one another.

OKCupid is nothing more than American culture, with its so-called liberty, under the microscope. What does it say about our culture that we are lost in a sea of choices and yet can find nothing to nourish us?



Picture by David Shankbone under Creative Commons License on Wikimedia Commons.

A letter to Davila

My dear Davila,

I took my son to the bus stop this morning. It's a grey, rainy day in Glenmoore, with the quiet of the still early morning broken only by the sound of birds singing and the occasional car driving down to our main roads. People going to work. To the gym. To school. To the grocery store.

I took my son's lunch -- the organic apple, the juice, the protein bar -- and put it in his backpack. Shivering a bit in the chill rain, I chatted with another parent waiting with his stepson for the yellow bus to come.

When it arrived, my 12 year old flew out of the car and raced across the streets with his buddies. After a bit more yakking about cell phone plans, I turned the Volvo back on and headed down the cul-de-sac for home.

I didn't get the whole story, Davila.

I tuned into the radio report just around the time that you came across your 16 year old son's body -- and then discovered the 19 year old body of another son.

In Juarez, it takes little to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your kids were at a party, where it appears that a drug gang mistook a bunch of teenagers for dealers.

You called the Mexican version of 911. And it took two hours for the ambulances to arrive. The journalist told his listeners that doctors and ENT's don't want to be first on a scene -- in case the killing isn't quite over.

For a moment, just a moment, I thought I was there, too -- looking at the bruised bodies of children with you, Madonna of Sorrows.

For a minute, I imagined bringing up boys in a town where death lurks around each corner. Watching them make the right choices - and praying that somehow they might escape. Loving them with the helpless passion of a parent, knowing that you would do anything to protect them.

But I am not with you. I am here, tears cascading down my face.

I am amazed at your courage in calling the authorities and your willingness to speak up. And though I mourn your loss, I am aware that I cannot comprehend it.

How long, mi hermana?

All over this world, we hear the voice of the mother -- a voice heard in Zion, Rachel mourning for her children...because they are no more.