Susan's Scribblings the Blog

There was too much to talk about this past week. A deadly disease is visiting the United States: one man is dead, and two nurses who treated him are hospitalized. A cop murderer in PA has spent weeks on the lam and the local town is postponing Halloween to protect its citizenry. Joan Rivers’ death appears to be related to propofol, the same anesthetic medication which killed Michael Jackson.

But a few stronger news stories stood out this week.

A woman named Brittany Maynard has terminal brain cancer, and her doctors have been frank with her about the kind of death she will face: she has decided instead to end her life her own way, using assisted suicide laws in her current resident state. With her family by her side, on November 1st she will take a combination of drugs which will shut down her body and prematurely end the vicious assault of the tumors which are torturing her. When you think about cancer, it is a kamikaze disease, killing itself in the process of killing its host. Both are a waste. I recall an interesting scene in the film Soylent Green, in which Edward G. Robinson’s aging character “goes home” to a spa-like building in which he is given a drink which will end his life in 20 minutes, and he relaxes while movies of things and places he loved are shown around him and, essentially, has a peaceful ending his way. What happened after that is for you to find out if you’ve never seen the movie, but it involves Charlton Heston and food alternatives in a post-modern wasteland Earth. What it comes to is this: when we die, it’s not always the most pleasant way, but we are so stubbornly tethered to ideas about sustaining and prolonging life at any cost ,which hold us prisoner to our fears about the end of mortality, we can’t find it within us to offer the options of peaceful passing. We often treat our beloved pets better than we treat our elderly and terminally ill. May Brittany find the journey out of here a good one.

A Philadelphia charter school had some difficulty this past week, when their enrolled students exceeded the caps established by agreement when the school opened. The school’s founder lost an appeal in court and must now hold a lottery to determine which students can stay at the facility. The student population must be cut from 1300 to 675. It is hurtful to the students, who are only weeks into the school year, and parents must find alternative education options quickly if their children don’t make the cut, but the most disturbing aspect has to be the inabilities of the parents to communicate their frustration at the situation. On camera it was obvious that education has failed multiple generations, and schools which are struggling to find funding to teach the language of the world and obliterate the language of the street are losing the battle. It is because the parents were not educated properly that Philadelphia owes it to their children to break the cycle of poor education. All the schools are being affected, but the college campuses and job markets will feel the aftereffects years from now. How will children learn STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) if they can’t even spell “stem?”

Some of my coworkers have really surprised me lately, because some of them don’t think that books are a viable part of our culture, and some watch no television. Some others don’t read newspapers at all.

If I wore pearls, I’d be clutching them now. I read six magazines, two newspapers and watch the evening news and Jeopardy!

I’m clutching my pearls of wisdom: my books, newspapers, magazines and Alex Trebek (symbolically).

A society in which communication is whittled down to a select few bits of information often becomes repressed. Think of what the world was like before the scriptures were translated and people who were taught no Latin suddenly achieved a new understanding of their faith. They may not have been able to actually read it, but it made sense to them spoken in their own tongue.

I have found that online information comes through homepage sources like MSN, AOL and Yahoo, or in a post somebody felt was important enough to put in Facebook®. An actual newscast or newspaper, however, has a wealth of information in tangible form. It won’t get lost in your spam box or disappear into your timeline. It is seen in a way in which we don’t often connect on a computer screen.

I look at news anchors like Scott Pelley from CBS and admire their capacity for making news human. The days of the town crier are over, but a person delivering news vocally will likely never go away.

As for books, I keep them, and sometimes I also keep one on my Nook® to carry with me. It’s like an oversized paperback, plus I can get my email without toting a laptop or tablet around.

I hope reading and speaking do not become obsolete. Human contact is essential to our health and that of the planet.

It’s high school class reunion time again: when I see the invitation, the emotions start to get the better of me. I have never gone to the reunions. My mother went to her own just once.

There seems to be two types of people when it comes to high school reunions: those who always go, and those who never go until everybody is too old to really remember anything about what happened before they graduated in the first place.

Those who go regularly may well have been in touch over the years, or else they find reconnecting every five years less unpleasant. They mingle and talk, and cloud it all over with generous libations from the cash bar.

Those who don’t go have a variety of reasons, I’m sure. Some simply disconnect from the awkwardness of childhood and teen memories. Others never felt a part of the ritual of school loyalty and, as such, never joined a “cool” club or activity, but merely studied, went home after last period and collected the diploma on graduation day. Their loyalties have shifted to colleges, family, or turned within to their own peace of mind.

In our class of over 200, it has been hard to find some people. The invitation went on Facebook ®, and hopefully everybody will see it. However, I know of at least one person who told the alumni committee years ago not to ever contact them again. It’s understandable that, for some, high school sucked bad enough that they graduated and hit the erase button in their minds. In some cases, though, one would think that our school was so bad, people moved to Abu Dhabi or New Zealand or Antarctica to get away from it all. Some may have died, changed their names or gone into witness protection.

The devoted alumni like I have stayed in town. Some have thriving businesses, good jobs or other ties to the community. While we do stay close to the native soil of our alma mater, we don’t often see each other. My mother has seen more classmates than I these past decades.

When I think about what high school meant to me, I feel it would be improper to whine or embellish, so I just don’t bother. My education did help me find a good job, and I did finish college and get my BA. Enough said.

It will take some thought before I commit to going to a reunion. I will think about it, but the big question is whether I want to pay for memories I may not want to have, or get back.

There is nothing like the start of fall to cause so much upheaval in one’s life. I’m taking this week off from blogging and will have a new post next week. By then I will hopefully have cooled off and caught up on my sleep. Why did the end of summer and Labor Day have to come on the first of the month, anyway? Stuff must get done, so I’ll do it and get back to the fun stuff a week from today. Stay sane until then: that’s what I’ll be telling myself.