Monday, September 15, 2014

Blue Monday--or is it?

Mondays are often sort of dull days for me--I rarely have lunch or dinner plans, and if it weren't for Jacob and his homework, I could well go through the day without any human contact. But Jordan pops in when she drops Jacob off at school, and we have a short visit when she comes to pick him up. He has baseball practice on Mondays, so they never linger long and he and I move at a frantic pace to get homework done. Today we did a find-the-word puzzle with his spelling words--both of us stumped by "collision" and "sculpture." Jordan took one look and found them right away!
I do work on Mondays, which is good--today I finished a book and wrote a review, worked quite a bit on my next novel, did some marketing. And to my astonishment, got a letter asking for some quick material on the chili book I probably submitted three years ago to a university press. I thought their board was meeting this summer and, having heard nothing, dismissed the project once again. But it turns out their board meeting was postponed...and could I supply a CV, synopsis, and suggested 30 pages in the next two days. I haven't had a formal curriculum vitae or resume in years--wasn't looking for a job. I'm not sure I've even kept my list of publications up to date. But I wrote a biographical sketch, took a stab at a synopsis, and suggested the first 30 pages. Got it all off tonight.
I'd been wondering lately about all those young girls kidnapped in Nigeria, so I was interested and yet appalled to read that most of them are still missing. Some have escaped but relatively few, and Boko Haram has taken over other towns and taken smaller bunches of captives. Yet it has faded from the headlines. The international forces that were looking for them, including American, have about given up, and there are hints that corruption and bribery are involved. Meanwhile think of those poor girls and their families. Their story has been replaced by the horror of ISIS,
We live in a global world. Isolationism is not possible as it was in 1900. Technology has changed all that, and yet how do we decide what bad guys we're going after, which ones we're going to throw up our hands about and give up. I'm glad I'm not commander in chief, and I support President Obama who deals with these difficult decisions every day.
Lord, let their be peace--seems a bit of a futile prayer, doesn't it?

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