Thumbelina

Jodi and I are having discussions over what to name our cat. Well, not our cat. We are having discussions over whether we have a cat. Whether to have a cat. Are we adult enough? Do we want the responsibility? Can we get around the provision from our landlords that we are not, technically, allowed to have one? What happens at Christmas? Can we afford it? Who will let it out at 7:00 AM? To which I answer yes, yes, yes, we’ll see, sure why not, and me, if it means we can have one.

I have wanted a cat for a long time. Ever since we shared a blissful abode with The Kitten in New York. Oh, and Katie. Lest we forget Katie, the owner of The Kitten and my dearest friend. But do I have videos of Katie playing not just fetch, but catch, with a bell toy? I think not.


When we left that sweet sweet closet on the Upper East Side, I was bereft of satisfying cat presence in my life. I would relish the days at home when I could see Sara. Sara, light of my life…I’m tempted to make a Lolita reference here, syntactically of course, not because she WAS the fire of my loins, it’s just how can you write “light of my life” without “fire of my loins” after it and not sound like a CBS Dean Martin special? But “Sara” doesn’t really roll off the tongue like “Lolita,” not a paragraph’s worth of linguistic musings anyway. But I digress. Sara was the best thing about my childhood, she was its fire and constancy and softness and excitement. By which I mean, as sweet as she might be, you always knew she could rip your face off if she wanted to. It was that element of surprise that kept things interesting.

I remember getting Sara from our neighbors whose cat had kittens. I was seven and Robin was two and we walked up the block to where the kittens were nestled in a box and we chose from among the female ones (the one male had been claimed) and she was just a wriggling baby and we stole her from her mother. I mean, I guess she was old enough and everything because I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have let us take her if she wasn’t “of age,” but it still seems such a cruel thing to steal babies from their mothers, for all parties involved, and to expect the baby to adapt to a new family of oh, say, a different species. I remember holding her on the way home, how small she was, how light. How sharp her little claws, how like small suns her flashing eyes. She was not Sara then, oh no, she was a victim of the nameless limbo of a feuding human family, taken hostage from her feline roots. My parents had given me the opportunity to name her. With the depth and breadth of childhood imagination I had narrowed it down to “Midnight” (she was black), and “Tulip” (why, you ask? I have no answer). My dad told me I would regret these choices and we should go with either Sara, Grace, or Rebecca, which were names he had put in the running for when his daughters were born but which had lost to the ever-popular Katherine and Robin. At least the ever-popular Katherine, which when I wrote the phrase “ever-popular” I expected to see in the top-ten lists of female baby names for most birth years and was astounded to find that I rank 39th in top names of 1981, only two places ahead of “Brandy.” And this according to the Social Security Administration. So there you go.

Well, it sucks when your parents are right, but look what happened. Somehow my dad won, but I recall that it was on a trial basis, under which we agreed to try “Sara” for the time being and see if it worked. I realize now with my full adult mental faculties that I may have been duped—how would we have known if it wasn’t “working”? Would there have been signs, shadows, wonders? Torn curtains, kitten piss on our pillows, yowling in the night? But time went by, and Sara was Sara, and pretty soon it became clear that she was not really Tulip material. Midnight…maybe, but I bet if the SSA had a list of top ten black cat names, that would rank highly and then we would just be another set of uncreative WASPs. We showed them. We made Sara, the number-4 ranked female name of 1988, the name for not our baby, but our CAT. Hah.

Sara was the best cat ever. Yes, she was a teenage pregnancy (or, what are cat years? Maybe she was the equivalent of a mere 7 human years when she got pregnant at the ripe young age of 1), and yes, she ran away sometimes, and yes, she had no qualms about clawing your face off. But she was tiny, beautiful, feisty, frank, and individualistic, but would give you love when YOU needed it most. It was never what she needed, at least overtly, but she could tell when you were weak and required it of her. She was always gentle and kind to my grandfather in his ancient fragility. She loved to “make biscuits” on feather pillows while you were trying to fall asleep. When she had kittens, she would lose count of them (there were 5) and take 3 to the next hiding place she had devised (usually among my mom’s clean undergarments), leaving the last two mewling in their box while she contentedly nursed the others. Once, she had hidden (sans kittens, thank god) inside the car engine, and we drove several blocks before we heard her howl as we slammed on the brakes, and then saw her jump from off the tire onto the road, and then followed the railroad tracks home. Or maybe my dad had to come get her. My childhood memory fails me, except I couldn’t believe she had been under the hood and survived. Once she jumped out of the second story window in pursuit of a squirrel. Once (and this is the worst), she had been gone for a few days. I had to tutor this dumb jock boy in math. This is 4th grade. He said “You seem sad, what’s wrong?” and I said, “My cat is missing.” You can imagine the rest. In case you can’t:
“Oh, that’s too bad. What kind of cat is it?”
“Black. She’s small.”
“Ooh. Where do you live?”
“Central Ave.”
“Oh, God. I saw a black cat smushed on the side of the road this morning, on Central.”
At which point, I think I started bawling. Naivete yet again rearing its ugly head, preventing me from realizing that he had garnered all the necessary information from me before stating his fatal conclusion. Luckily, when I got home that day, Sara had returned, and although she would never kiss-and-tell of her adventures away, one could only imagine the things she had done and seen in her travels, free from her clumsy human appendages.

Sara died in 2005. I found out she was sick during a peace march. We were in Winston, had just walked a couple of blustery miles with several hundred other anti-warriors, and were standing at the five points brandishing signs when my mom called. It was like war had broken out in my heart, and all that marching meant nothing. I guess it’s callous, to feel that so much more acutely than the casualties of war, but I think it’s also natural. I drove home the next day to visit her, to say goodbye. She lay quietly but her breath was shallow. Something had ruptured. Something had been done that could not be undone. She was 17, but she would have had plenty of good years left if only…if only…

When I found out she had died, it was the only day I missed school that whole year. I didn’t think I would ever be able to go back. But somehow I did. Somehow, we do. How is it? How do we do that?

So now here I am, back at school again, and this cat has presented itself at our door. Well, two cats, but one is such a scaredy-cat that it seems unlikely to succumb to our taming in the near future. We think they are related because they both have thumbs. Yes, thumbs. When they walk, their front paws look like little hands, which upon extensive research I have found out is a rare and desirous characteristic of “polydactyl cats,” or Hemingway cats, so-called because Hemingway’s son had one. I love that. The one we think is the mother wears a hideous hot-pink collar but otherwise is beautiful. For awhile, we thought the collar meant she was someone else’s, but through rumors that we choose to believe we have determined that she used to belong to someone who moved away from the neighborhood and left her. I think she was once tame, but her kitten never was and so he is the slinky, nervous one of the two. For a few days, they both sat on our porch and yowled, until, driven to distraction, Jodi gave them some milk. In telling this story to our grandchildren, she will certainly blame me for initiating the taming, but I assure you it was she. Gradually, the mother, whom I’ve taken to calling Thumbs, or Thumbelina, came further and further in. We gave her solid food. On an impulse buy at Target, I bought catfood. So we stop feeding her expensive human food, I told myself. But really so that we could feed her more easily and more often. Then one day she let us pet her. Then one day she let us hold her. Then she sat with us on the sofa. Then she found our bed. And the rest…is history.

She’s up there now, curled up on the bed. Last night she slept there with us. Jodi said if I was going to let her do that, I had to let her out in the middle of the night or else clean up her pee from wherever it was in the morning. But when I woke, she was where she had been the night before. Awake before me, of course, much more in tune with nature than needful of alarms, and staring out across the mountains from the window by the bed.

Do animals appreciate a view? I’ve never thought about this before, one way or another, but I have today quite a bit. What was she looking at, what was she thinking, as she stared across the mountains in the early hours of light? Do they look different inside her golden eyes? How can she be so calm, face the day with such serenity?

There are lessons I can learn from this cat. I think she knows it, and she is going to stick with me till I do. I’m not sure what to do about the landlords. I’m not sure what to do about Christmas. But she found me. This, according to my dad, is the only way one is supposed to procure cats. In the back of my mind, I hear the Little Prince: “One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets oneself be tamed.”

I don’t know who is taming and who is being tamed in this situation. But somehow, I think it’s worth the risk.


*A note to my readers: thank you, THANK YOU for the guilt. It's what keeps me going. Also, the photo at the top of this post, of the paw, is not actually our cat. You can probably tell this from the human hand if nothing else. It's from Google images, but the resemblance is quite striking.

The Indiscriminate Universe

Cancer cells grow in an uncontrolled manner. They forget to die and therefore the diseased cells accumulate…Under the microscope, normal cells look uniform, with similar sizes and orderly organization. Cancer cells look less orderly, with varying sizes and without apparent organization.
—The Mayo Clinic Cancer Basics

So was it the end of dread? I’m sure you’re all anxiously wondering. Well. I began the week not, shall we say, at my physical or emotional peak. You may ask, when is a Monday morning ever one’s physical or emotional peak? And you would be right to ask this. But this particular Monday, I was suffering from a bout of ailments such as the first day of my period, utter exhaustion, AND the worst sunburn I have had in the last several years. After I left you last week, we went to the beach to spend the Last Day swooning in the sun. It was cool, one of those days where the weather is a manipulative sumbitch and you cannot FEEL the fact that your skin is being slowly broiled, due to the sweet salt air and the rush of the waves and the cries of happy children. We stayed out for hours. Jodi promptly feel asleep reading her art history book, and I was reading The Power of One and got quite carried away, forgetting that the bottle of sunscreen had run out halfway through my lathering process and that my legs had never gotten done. I didn’t even rotate, so I was literally toasting the backs of my legs. I got up once to go swimming, and it felt so good, I stayed in for a long time, happy the way you are when you’re a kid at the pool and you could stay forever, you are just so happy and diverted. I floated on my back trying to only see sky and nothing else, I swam underwater trying to use my whole body, feel all my muscles, dive like a dolphin, ride the waves. I felt my scalp tingle from the water smoothing my hair flat on my head (my flat head), and not once did my legs feel sunburned. But oh, they were. They still hurt, too, a week later, and I curse myself for my stupidity. Which makes me wonder:

Why are there some lessons you have to learn every few years? Like not to buy scotch tape from the dollar store (you KNOW it’s too shiny and it doesn’t tear right, and yet you do it anyway. It’s so tempting. It’s only a dollar! All the other tape is like $2.50! How can something that seems so right be so wrong?), or not to eat Cup-O-Noodles (it will never taste as delectable as it did when we were five), or not to buy $3 bottles of wine. Ever. No matter how pretty the packaging. Or Boone’s Farm. Or Andre. The list goes on. Or that crazy drunken college parties are not fun. Not really. Not unless you’re really smashed on one of the above fine spirits, in which case, you are already about to learn one of those crucial lessons all over again. Putting on sunscreen even when it’s not hot is one of those lessons. You think the worst that can happen is that you’ll get a little pink—so what? Soon it will turn into a lovely, luscious bronze. Not so, young friend, not so.

Which brings me to cancer. Which, I think we’ll all agree, is the worst that can happen from staying too long in the sun. I have been thinking about cancer lately. It seems like the invisible circle of Being Unaffected by Cancer that used to surround me like a shield is weakening. It’s like the ozone layer—it still basically exists, but there is plenty of room for evil to slip through the cracks. A fence with a hole in it is still mostly a fence, but a coyote can still get through and kill your cat, so you might as well have no fence. (Watch me use California-related metaphors with agility and grace. Anyone would think I had always been here).

I was trying to explain this to my students, and I still don’t think I’ve found a way to do it exactly right, but I always think about the health reports on the news, and how when I was a kid, and even to some extent now, when they talk about some exciting new drug they’ve developed or some breakthrough research in Lou Gehrig’s disease or some way to give people new hearts or eyes or hips, I listen to them but I don’t really hear. I think it’s because there are so many things in the world to worry about that when something so specific as a certain ailment comes along, I compartmentalize it. I think, “Maybe someday I will have to deal with that, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” and if I think about it much harder, I get scared or sad or convinced that I have it. Like head lice. You know how whenever anyone mentions head lice your scalp starts to crawl? I know fatal diseases are not like head lice, but when I think about them too much, my soul starts to crawl. So I tuck them away into the little pantry in my brain that I will never open unless I have to, where ominous eventualities are stored, the kinds of things you don’t want to think about because even if you could think about them rationally, without freaking yourself out, there is always the fear that the Law of Attraction will suddenly start actually existing and you will make these things happen just by thinking about them.

That’s where Cancer (specifically Breast) has been for most of my life. It’s also where I keep the Death of Close Family and Friends, Getting Blinded/Deafened/Lamed in a Freak Accident, Terrorism, and Kidney Stones. Every now and then something forces me to open the closet and face those things, but usually from a distance, across the dim musty light to which the closet is accustomed. Lately it seems like I’m getting closer and closer to having to take something out of the closet and really examine it.

First it was Dana, on The L Word. I should state that A) I know she’s not real and B) I realize this may be a silly way to begin to illustrate my point. But it felt like I had known her for three years. Known her from afar, maybe, in that…fictional sort of way, but when you think about how many women’s first true love is Mr. Darcy, it doesn’t seem so hard to imagine.

Actually, I lied. First, it was Justin’s mom. In college, when we were all so young and beautiful and busy and self-obsessed, we all quietly ignored the fact that Justin was losing his mother. Not ignored-ignored, I mean, we gave him hugs and everything, and tried to “be there for him,” whatever that means, but there was the terrible silence in which we knew that we all still had our mothers, maybe even complained about them or, hell, complained about anything, and while we knew that most of us would probably have to face that kind of pain someday, hopefully when we’re older and wiser and readier (yeah, right), Justin was having to do it now. And no matter how sympathetic we were, we could not possibly know what that was like.

Then it was Dana. And now, suddenly, there seem to be so many more. Sue, the mother of a boy I knew growing up, and whom I haven’t seen for years. My aunt gave me her son’s email address so that I could get back in touch, but I haven’t yet because I don’t know quite how or what to say. Jenn’s mom, to whom everything random and unfair in the world seems to have happened, now, on top of everything, has breast cancer. And Katherine, my mom’s best friend after whom I was named, after a sad divorce years earlier, finally became engaged to a good man she loved and then found out she had breast cancer. They still got married, this summer, but soon after that she had surgery, chemo, the works…which begs several questions. Why is life not fair??? And even if life is going to be not fair, why does it have to happen like that? Finally find happiness, and then bang, life plops in front of you a potentially fatal obstacle course.

There is a picture of my mom and Katherine where they’re both laughing so hard, the kind of laughing that completely distorts your face but you don’t know it because it’s too funny, whatever it is, so you lose all inhibition and just laugh. It’s in black and white, they are teenagers, and when my friends from college saw the picture at my house, they asked who it was in the photo with me. I didn’t understand at first, and then I realized that they thought my mom was me. I didn’t see how they could, but if I close my eyes and then open them on the picture expecting to see myself instead of my mom, it works. It looks exactly like me.

They were once as young and carefree as me. Once, they had something to laugh so hard about that their faces, morphed with mirth, transformed into the faces of their unborn children. And one day I will not be as young as I am now, and it could be, might be, hell, probably will be me and my friend from a longago, faraway picture having to negotiate a new and scary world. Will it be me, or will it be my friend? Why was it Katherine and not my mom? Why is it anybody? What’s weird is that, evidenced by the quotation that serves as epigraph to this essay, cancer itself, the cells themselves, mirror the randomness and unfairness with which they strike. They “forget to die” and so you must. Talk about life not being fair. And if breast cancer strikes one in eight women, which of my closest eight will it be? And if I think about this much more, will I draw this future negativity to me like a poisonous moon caught in my gravitational pull?

I tried to explain this to my students as we were preparing to go to volunteer for the day at the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. I told them I had no idea what we would be doing, and it might be menial and it might not seem like we were helping much in the grand scheme of things, but if it started to seem like that, they should think about One in Eight, they should think about the picture of my mom and Katherine, they cultivate empathy for perfect strangers so that when there comes a time when they need perfect strangers to have empathy for them, maybe life will decide to be just a little bit fair.

We had a beautiful day. It was a wonderful place to volunteer, because it was so well-organized they had plenty for us to do and everyone was genuinely friendly and positive and working in pursuit of a common goal. We spent the whole morning preparing to welcome the walkers to registration, and when we finally opened the doors to them, they came in droves and we were all cheering for them and they were so fierce and proud and determined (they had each raised a minimum of $1,800 in order to walk). And I watched my students, who, like me, had been bleary-eyed when we met at 7:00 AM, no doubt wondering why it was again that we were doing this and was it really going to look so good on a college application that it was worth such exhaustion. They worked so hard, with such enthusiasm, whether they were welcoming participants with pom-poms or putting together shelves or directing traffic or cutting off the long ends of participants’ wristbands. One of them was riding separately and got terribly lost, and when he arrived over an hour late he rushed in and said desperately, “Katherine, I’m here, how can I help?”

Simple words. “How can I help?”

How can I help feeling scared, how can I help my cowardice, how can I help the randomness and unfairness of life, how can I help when I am so small, how can any of us help?

But hearing those words, and seeing that work pour forth from kids who are so often shy or just caught up in their idyllic bubble of youth, I felt that dark and awful brain-closet become just a little bit less scary.

How can I help but feel a little better?

The History of Pirates

I have been spending a lot of time in bookstores. Most recently, I have been trying to find a book to teach me a very concise version of world history, so that I can teach my students an even conciser one. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. I mean, why they don’t have a short and sweet, riveting and yet simple summary of a few thousand years of human history, with plenty of pictures, that doesn’t relegate Africa, Asia, Latin America, and women to the sidelines and provides a variety of perspectives without being complicated is just beyond me. I think such a thing could easily fit in under 300 pages, and the print wouldn’t even have to be too small. I read some good reviews on Amazon of a German book from the early 20th century aimed at younger readers called A Little History of the World, which it said was appropriate for all ages, but when I browsed through it at Barnes and Noble it began something like, “Once upon a time, life on earth began as something very small, even smaller than you! Too small to even sit in your lap!.” And I didn’t think I’d be able to stand the next 299 pages.

However, where the bookstores (and probably the historical canon) lack such a book as I require, I discovered one thing they have myriad plethoras of. Yes. Myriad plethoras. That many. Guess. No, really. You’ll never guess. Books about pirates. Not just Johnny Depp as a pirate, but historical books about pirates. And we’re talking the section designated “World History” in both Borders and Barnes and Noble. It’s not a large section, considering what it should hold, and I would say as many as 40% of the books in it were about pirates. There was even, I kid you not, The History of Pirates for Dummies. There were first-person accounts of pirates, broad surveys of pirate history, geographical focuses such as the Caribbean or the South Atlantic. So many that now, in relating this to you, I have gotten to the point with the word “pirate” where it starts to lose all sense and form and begins to sound like gibberish. You know? Say it about 10 more times: pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate. Yep. Total gibberish.

It was as though I had gone to the education section looking to brush up on the foundations of educational theory and had not found any such books but instead found an abundance about Hogwarts and the “magical educational approach that made Harry who he is today,” including one entitled How to Pass Your N.E.W.T.s and O.W.L.s for Dummies. I mean, right? Or if I went into the art history or religion section and all I could find were “historical” spinoffs of The Da Vinci Code. Oh wait…

It’s interesting to me though, what it says about the correlation between pop culture and history. Pirates are fascinating, I guess, in the dangerous way that natural disasters and the wreck of the Titanic are fascinating, and in the transgressive, we-all-wannabe-outlaws kind of way that Robin Hood is fascinating. But would there be so many history books about them without Johnny Depp and his sweet sweet eyeliner? Is it good when movies, or any such pop-culture element, incite a temporary boom of historical exploration, which then becomes what people interested in history read and what bookstores carry? I’m all for the argument, when it comes to a literate public, that reading anything (like Sweet Valley High or car magazines or even the dreaded Left Behind series) is better than reading nothing at all. But if what we read about history becomes all we know about history, at the expense of learning about the influences of what brought us to where we are today (all the influences except piracy, that is), and at the expense of learning from our forefathers’ mistakes when it comes to thinks like, oh, say genocide or tyrrany, are we in the process of rewriting history for the worse? Will such tunnely knowledge of history infiltrate the collective memory of humanity like poison into an aquifer making this generation one step closer to 1984 where once you lack the words for a concept you lack the concept?

Probably, books about pirates are not the most important thing to worry about. But it makes ya think, huh?

In other news, the countdown to school starting is rapidly depleting. My mom says this is good because it can’t be as bad as I’m building it up to be. But I don’t even think it will be bad, it’s more…this unexplained dread, not the dread of it being bad, but the dread of it being. Like, the responsibility of it. The endlessness of it. The always-being-or-at-least-trying-to-be-one-step-ahead-of-the-gameiness of it. I doubt my students read this blog, but if they do, hi darlings! It’s not you, it’s me. I’ll be fine. Really. I used to dread going back to school as a student—not so much in college, but definitely in high school and oh god, definitely in middle school. But all you students out there, my dad and I can tell you that nothing compares to the dread of going back to school as a teacher.

But even though it’s the end of sleeping in day after day (not that I’ve done much of that), the end of waning afternoons at the beach, the end of doughnuts and optional seminars and whitewater rafting and the Orgasmic Spider Hair Tickler Thingy (it really is called the Orgasmatron, no joke, and even comes from the land down under), the end of MSCL, the gayest-themed-show ever, the end of “you are beautiful” and the hairy baby fan club, the end of being in one home in exchange for another that doesn’t quite fit yet, the end of sunlight that lingers past 9:00, the end of reading books for pleasure and the end of reading everybody’s tarot cards at 2am, even though all of that, perhaps my mom is right and it will also mean the end of dread.

And there is so much to learn about pirates, how can I help but be excited?

Of Hairy Babies and Halliburton

After years of searching for get-rich-quick schemes, I have finally found the key to success. I ask you, gentle reader, what is your reaction to the following image?



I expect that after your initial revulsion came the following thought: The only thing better than seeing this hairiest-of-babies on Katherine's blog would be to have it on a t-shirt. And you know what? Everything is possible. This is America.

Exhibit B:

From whence this revelation, you ask? Well, credit must be given where credit is due. Primarily to a Mr. B. Wynia, who was responsible for both the concept and the design of the Hairy Baby. You see, this summer we became intimately acquainted with the stages of fetal gestation, thanks to the pregnancy of our office compadre Robyn, and learned such gems as the fact that fetuses have TAILS which do not disappear until about 15 weeks (tails, people!) and that at about 21 weeks, a fine hair, called lanugo, begins to grow all over the baby's body AND FACE, and is usually shed before birth. Into the uterus. Your unborn baby, once rid of its TAIL, sheds hair into your uterus. And these creatures aren't considered parasites? Anyway.

Robin (my sister, not to be confused with Robyn, who is pregnant) was quite disgusted to learn this. We learned it right before a delicious Refectory lunch one day, and at lunch, Robin shared our newfound knowledge with all those sitting at the table, including Blake, who, as a second-year med student, is the closest GSW comes to having a doctor on staff. "Oh yeah," he says, laden with nonchalance, "you didn't know that? And that's why you can only have a limited number of babies in your life--with each baby, the hair gradually builds up in your uterus so there's finally no more room. That's part of why it's harder to lose weight, too."

As smart as all of us employees are at that haven of NC's best and brightest, some of us are also quite gullible, and Robin, bless her heart, believed this preposterous tale, and now, even after realizing her error, has sworn off baby-having for the foreseeable future. Which is good, since she's a mere wisp of a 20-year-old herself and since this is what they look like at 8 weeks. Parasites. Or aliens. But all's I know is, it ain't natural.


Still, natural or not, the hairy baby t-shirts have caused quite a stir among all who have seen them, an audience which now spans at least 4 states and 2 countries, thanks to the modeling efforts of Robin, Jodi, and Alexis. The best reactions are the simple ones, like from Jodi's kids at camp, whose jaws dropped as they ogled her shirt: "That's a HAIRY BABY." Because that's exactly what it is. I can see the shirts also coming in very handy as abstinence-promotion tools. Maybe we can sell them to public-school health classes and Christian fundamentalist camps across the country. The possibilities are truly mind-blowing, no? So keep the checks coming in, only $19.95 plus shipping. As seen on TV. Or at least the internet. I think I have a future in finance....

The other financial revelation I have had recently came about while perusing the prospectus for the mutual fund that will support me in my retirement. I have saved a grand total of about $3,000 to last me from age 65 onward. Oh, but don't worry, the Social Security Administration's got my back in case that's not enough. And I have the feeling that $3,000 is going to multiply exponentially given that there are over 6 billion people in the world to exploit and the U.S. Government and its favorite pet corporations have only gotten to maybe half of them so far. Let me explain.

So I'm looking at the prospectus for the "Cornerstone Strategy Fund," a name that holds just the appropriate amount of enigma for the average facile investor. I chose this fund because I was talking to the USAA mutual fund analyst and he said it was a good, stable choice with little-to-moderate risk, a variety of investments in a variety of companies, and great growth potential. How can you lose, right? I've had it for about two years, it grows steadily, I don't feel there's much risk involved, and so basically I'm getting exactly what was promised. So I'm reading the prospectus, which I have never done before, but after discovering that my grandmother has thriving stakeholdings in Monsanto (knowing only that she makes money off of them and probably totally unaware that it's blood money), I was a little worried about what I might find. As well I should have been. Because...drumroll...little old me, whose Facebook profile proclaims her to be "Very Liberal," who espouses progressivism, feminism, regime change, equality, love for one's fellow humans and planet, etc, has stock in the following companies:

Wal-Mart, the root of all evil
Halliburton (and about 50 other oil companies), the spawn of all evil
Lockheed-Martin, the perpetuators of evil
Procter & Gamble, the evil animal-testers
Altria and Loews (tobacco companies)/cancer manufacturers
Abercrombie & Fitch, sweatshoppers and damaging-advertising purveyors extraordinaire
A bunch of mining companies
A bunch of biotech, "healthcare," and pharmaceutical companies with sinister names like "Salix Pharaceuticals," "Viropharma, Inc.," "Immucor Corp.," and "Haemonetics Corp."

to name a few.

Now, I was listening to an interview with Dolly Parton in which she spoke of her songs as being like children to her, because they were going to support her in her old age. I think you see where I'm going with this. By this count, my children are Wal-Mart, Halliburton and friends. I now know what Shakespeare meant by "from forth the fatal loins...." I think I had better commit to abstinence before anything bad happens (o guide me, hairy baby). Or at least start looking for a green mutual fund. Or else in my next life, I might come back as a citizen of a third-world country at the mercy of my own evil children.