Some years ago Summer and I formed the Mean Girls Ice Cream Eating Club. We are both mean and vindictive and we both like ice cream and so we would just share a carton and pretend the it was an island and we were monsters eating its shores and digging holes to China. (Do they did to the USA in China? Nevermind.) We imagined little inhabitants on our spoons.

We are mean.

Today, though, I was surfing around and discovered that there is this huge glob of negative energy generated as people attack blogs and defend blogs. Comments sections have the most vicious remarks. And it is personal. I had learned about a site called Poops on Peeps when I first did a little research on Pioneer Woman. P on P didn’t care for her; she also didn’t like Dooce of whom I had not heard of, but now know is a really top blogger. Okay, her opinion. I don’t care . . . and actually I check in from time to time to get the latest.

Today, when I went there I saw she had blogged about  a site where the woman had complained that she had heart trouble and not cancer because if she had cancer, people would give her a new computer. That site is What Was I Thinking* and I thought, “Hey, I’ve seen that blog.” So I went there and that lady had written a rebuttal and then there were comments on the Poops on Peeps site and gosh, it gets a little scary.

IP address threats and HA! I spit on IP address threats, you computer nimcompoop.

Summer and I are backing away slowly.

*www.outtamymindwithworry.blogspot.com (What Was I Thinking)

Cameron is writing paragraphs about A Separate Peace by John Knowles that was assigned for summer reading. He is supposed to address the characteristics of two “round” characters in this paper. Okay, he writes a bit and then sends me what he has written and asks, “Is it right?” Duh . . . I don’t know; so I put him off and Google the book which takes me into character analysis and motifs and themes and symbols. Did Knowles figure all this out as he planned his book, or did he just write the story he had and let people make of it watch they will?

Since people have been looking at the themes and motifs and symbols in literature for a long, long time, I guess I must function at a lower level. I think I have always looked at the characters themselves in determining why they reacted as they did; all these years, I should have been paying more attention to the part of the question that asked what the author was telling you. Those characters, they didn’t have a chance. I guess novelists are Presbyterians – predestination, don’tcha know.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the kitchen . . .