I am wanting to hear from anybody who wants to lose 100 pounds or more and would like to try with me to lose that in about a year. That's about two pounds a week. I'm not sure how I am going to do it, but maybe some kind of contest would help. I can be very competitive, and I think it would help me tremendously if there's someone else out there that is just a competitive.

Otherwise, if someone can offer a very good incentive that doesn't cost a lot of money and can keep me on track with pushing toward that goal, I would appreciate it.

I don't know how I'm going to lose weight, but I need to do it!

Today the wheels were turning in my brain. Sometimes it's scary how my logic works. Today was a shining example of that.

I have to work with an adult woman that has not been diagnosed with autism, but--to me--her behavior is classical autistic. She has difficulty socializing, she has absolutely no idea of abstract thought, and she likes repetitive activities. This could not be a more text book situation.

And, today as I thought about working with her this weekend, I closed my left eye and my right eye--as usual--could not perceive anything as it truly is. If both eyes were like my right eye, or if my right eye were stronger than my left, I would be totally lost. I see people and things, but I can't "connect" with them. There doesn't seem to be depth perception, and the spatial relationships are totally absent. I can see things clearly, no blurring, but they don't "register" in my brain. And, recognizing that if both eyes focused so poorly, my brain wandered to this woman that I will work with....

And then I yawned. When my children were young and I thought it was time for them to go to bed, I had a trick. I just began to pretend to yawn. The more I yawned, the more they yawned...and pretty soon they were sleepy, and then they were in bed asleep. I don't think I've ever told them this little trick. It worked every time with them. However, I've noticed it does not work with this woman.

Yawns don't phase her. And it frustrates me. I get tired early. She likes to stay awake only when I'm sleepy. If yawning worked with her like it did with my kids, I would be a very happy lady. But it doesn't. Why not? It occurred to me that it's her eyesight.

I've noticed that if I tell her she has something on her face, and point at my cheek to somehow point out--as with a mirror--that she should wipe at her cheek. She stares at me like I'm nuts. If she looks in the mirror, though, and sees something on her face, she wipes it off. I suspect that if she saw my face with something on it in the mirror, she wouldn't even think to look at her face. And that would be true if she were to see herself yawn--maybe in a DVD film type of thing. I think if she saw herself yawn, she'd probably yawn as we do when we see others yawn.

What am I basing my thoughts on? I think she has the same kind of eyesight that I do--but she has it in both eyes, or her stronger eye is the one that is like my one bad eye. When she sees other people yawning, she sees there is a face with an open mouth--it could be screaming, yawning, laughing--but she has no visual concept of the difference between the different expressions because her eyes won't deliver an accurate, definitive message to her brain. However, she is so very familiar with her own face, that it is likely she could tell if something were unusual with her own face...and it is likely her brain could recognize her own yawn, but no one else's. Her other senses and experience would help her brain recognize the yawn, but it wouldn't recognize the same on other people's faces.

I think there's a lot more to autism than severe dyslexia, but it's a start--and the same mechanism that doesn't correctly deliver messages to her brain also fails to deliver other sensory messages to her brain. And, as a maturing baby, those failed messages put her in danger or didn't allow her to recognize what others would recognize as normal developments in a person's life. I would suspect hearing would also be a significant factor.

In the end, it's probably not just vision--but more the manner in which an autistic person learns--that predicts an autistic person's ultimate abilities. That's my theory, anyway. If I ever get back to school, I want to study barriers to communication, and this might be a great place to start.

Yesterday I listened to a radio conversation that, today, won't let me forget it. The co-hosts discussed possible reasons for the newspapers to have headlines about a popular singer being hospitalized and committed forcibly, and the war, suicide bombings and political activities took a second seat to that pop star's story. The two newscasters seemed to think that almost any story should have been prioritized more highly than the hospitalization of a pop star. They made a comment that the pop star's hospitalization would be great water cooler conversation, but not really "news."

When I took journalism courses (admittedly, quite a few years ago), this was often the topic of conversation. In these mass comm courses, "news" is defined by elements such as immediacy, currency and audience impact. If a story impacted a few neighborhood women, then it was probably gossip. If a story impacted women in a few neighborhoods, then it grew in importance--as long as the subject impacted several people and wasn't "just" gossip.

At the same time, I was taking a social sciences class about women and creativity. It discussed how "gossip" involved news that was important to women, amongst other topics.

I came out a bit confused---but in the end, I figured I'd know the difference between gossip and news if I saw it. Evidently, the news casters do not know this difference. This pop star's hospitalization should have been considered legitimate news. It was happening now, a large audience was affected by the fate of this young lady, and the impact had the potential to impact many lives. The story catches our attention because such stars seem to exemplify the extremes of all one can achieve, or all one can lose. This young lady worked hard to gain all she had. She, like everyone in America is encouraged to do, struggled to make her craft be the best it could be, and she was rewarded with financial gain. This is the stuff of fairy tales.

But that fairy tale left a bit of the story untold, and we--as a hard working people--need to follow this young woman's fate to know how things may happen in our own world. While she is beyond our own realities, all she had achieved reflected our own achievements--though her achievements and ours are on a different scale, they are in proportion to each other. We don't want to work out butts off and be successful only to fall apart and lose it all--and, so, we watch this young woman to see if she will lose it all. With all her greatness, her ability to overcome the difficulties reflects--in some weird way--our own ability to overcome difficulties. Following this somehow-twisted logic, her hospitalization is timely, current and it affects a lot of people--if only the potential for pain is there, it is still there. We root for this young lady because her fate reflects our own--and we want to know any news that will show us our potential fate when given similar circumstances in a much-smaller-scaled situation.

The war and the suicides are important. They are major events that deserve the highest prioritization. But, the truth is, we haven't learned from those mistakes that allowed those suicides in far away lands, and listening to the story be repeated is not going to help us in our personal efforts to succeed. Those stories only emphasize how helpless we are, and we want to have assurance that we have a direct impact with our decisions. We understand, already, the effects of the war, and it's daily reiteration reduced the ability to say the same stories are truly "news." Rather, they are simply a reporting of a status quo. The young lady forcibly admitted into a hospital and mandated to stay there for two or more weeks is something that can happen to any of us...if we work too hard or don't really understand the situation as it truly is around us.

I could go on and talk about the recession and how the news of its impact has been reduced in recent times...until it just can't be ignored. We need reality in the news, and it has to be stories that make a difference, that show us the future that each of us can expect if we exercise our free wills. The young lady's story can give us something new to think about, something that prepares us to think of similar sitatuions in our own lives. The death of soldiers has numbed us, and such death is no longer news.

Every soldier's death is a major story, and every soldier deserves respect and personal admiration by every one of us. I hope no one believes I don't think the death of our soldiers is important. Such soldier's death needs to be reported and reported fully--and each of us need to give that soldier every piece of respect we can bring to the fore. But what it should be is a story that gets reported with respect and not for ratings....

Still, generally, news of a star being put in the hospital is of great importance to every person. The two situations should never be compared in "value," but both should be offered as major stories. And a solder's death should never be forgotten.

News is news. Whether it involves a military hero or a pop star, both are news stories, and both need to be repeated to the entire listening public. The gatekeepers should know better than to disregard the stories that ordinary people in ordinary lives find to be of great importance.....

I need to start looking for a new job. Last week everyone in my department was informed we were going to all be fired because our company was bought. The plan had originally been for the new company to hire us all back; however, now there is a new president and he is re-examining the whole situation. He may leave us as we are, but he may also fire us permanently, or relocate us. In any case, the main production will continue, but my customer service position is unsure.

My thought is that no matter what the decision is now, with administration all being 600 miles away and production not needing customer service, even if our sales department remains here for now, every annual review will examine the situation again...and every year we will again be on the line. I don't like uncertainty. I like job stability. So, I think I need to start at least looking to see what's available.

Unfortunately, my position is very unique in Minnesota. Not too many calls for those of us who specialize in my area of expertise. But I do have skills that transfer to other positions. I keep thinking that I know no one else as familiar with my kind of work as am I--but that's because no one else needs to be as familiar. So, where do I go from here?

I will certainly find out....

Sunday I traveled four hours to attend a wake of an elderly lady, the aunt of my friend. Upon returning home yesterday, the phone rang with news of another death of an elderly gentleman. I awoke this morning to the obituaries on the news...and another friend died after a long illness, and a young friend of my sons was killed by a gunshot where four young men were "playing around" with what they thought was an unloaded gun--it actually held at least one round. I got to work, and the lady next to me is going to a funeral of another friend on Friday--and one that sits two cubicles down is attending a funeral tomorrow.

I understand that people die. I know it is inevitable. But, somehow, after all these people start to die at one time, your brain goes into an neutral zone where there's no time to think any more. Words like "condolences" and "unfortunate circumstances" start to pour out of your mouth where they had never been uttered before. It's a sad situation.

There's a song that most people my age and older will remember: Blowin' in the Wind. It says that "too many people have died." That line keeps going through my head--along with "the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in he wind." The truth is that life is for living, for enjoying and taking in every available minute and reveling in the very life that God provided to us. We enter the world a "mewling infant" and, in our time, we live many lives. A death is the result of life, and we have the ability to remember a person for their life--not their death.

The young man who died made me stop and wonder why such things happen. In this neck of the woods, you learn almost before walking that you don't point a gun at anyone. Ever. Period. Unloaded. Or not. You simply don't do that. Understanding this, it seems a senseless death. But that is not where our focus should be at a time like this--or at a time when a 69 year old woman dies as a result of lupus complications. In my mind, we should be thanking God for every moment we were allowed to share that life, to know the joy and unique special features that he provided in that person while on earth.

There's a thought that God only lends us the time on earth, that we are here only with his grace. And I believe that we need to reflect on that time and know that we didn't waste a minute...and, as I read somewhere, go to our graves in the spirit of "Wow! What a ride!"

Still, my thoughts tend to linger on all that could have been, should have been. And I want that life to continue, to be all that God intended. He intends so many things, yet he gives us free will, and through it all, like a parent who watches their teens make seemingly stupid decisions, He continues to love and offer his grace--and opens his arms with love when we come home, even when the free will allowed a choice that was perhaps not the best. Life is good, and we need to know that. Truly understand that--and then try to believe it and live it. That's the hard part. But we can only try.