Be Thankful For Girl Geeks

Family starting to annoy you by now? Tired of bland turkey and heavy foods and lard-minded relatives who wear Wal-Mart clothes and talk with their mouths full? Sneaking-off to a computer to get to your world?

From Mary Shelley to Paris Hilton, here's a fun list of Top Ten Girl Geeks to browse. Lemme add my dear friend Catherine Smith, Director of Marketing for Second Life, to the Gals of Geekdom list. Talk about making virtual worlds viable alternatives to this particular reality.

I'm thankful for a friend like her, who reaches out at a time when we can feel the sharpness of loneliness, particularly when we're surrounded by people in the midst of an all-American holiday.

Here's an interview with Cath. Plenty of others out there to be Googled too. Now get real wherever you're likely to be the most thankful!

Holiday Hell or Heaven

I'm never quite sure how to approach the holidays and the accompanying grandiose holiday meal. Seems I've been patient, overlooked and silent for, uh, decades at table now. And I've about come to the Shut Up I'm Going To Talk Now phase of life. This could end cordial relations with various and sundry relations for years to come if I take it too far, however.

Lordy though, if I have to hear, for the trillionth time, about how so-in-so in the forties did this or that bit of mediocre silliness during The War or at a dinner dance in the fifties, or the same tired old tale of how so-in-so used to be fat "as a child," I will surely not be able to sit still another century longer.

I got uppity last Christmas and asked a guest (who was dining with our family, bless her brave heart) loudly, while at the Big Meal, if one loopy aunty (there are plenty to go around) had shut her (the guest) up in the tack room yet and made her watch Charlotte Rampling films back to back. The aunty in question hasn't emailed me since.

Speaking of loopy relatives and mixing them all up just to see what happens at the big holiday meal, Garrison Keillor, the King of Geekdom fer sure, had a marvelous tale of a particularly memorable Thanksgiving dinner when he was a child -- The Thanksgiving Dinner When People Talked. Scroll to Segment 4 to hear it.