Difficulty Conceiving
Mothers Who Think
Claire Callahan Goodman - 08:53am Dec 14, 1999 PST (# 83 of 90)
I think the "relaxing" idea is just one of those 20-20 hindsight revelations that many couples (or observers) have when a couple who has not been able to conceive suddenly gets lucky. As I have said above, there are all sorts of reasons why a couple could go months or years without conceiving and then suddenly have it happen, because of the nature of their fertility impairment. I like to use the word "impairment" because almost nobody out there is completely "infertile", but many people have one or more impairments which make them effectively infertile as a couple. A man is completely infertile if he cannot make sperm, and a woman is completely infertile if she has no ovaries, but in the absence of these conditions, biology and medical science can go a very long way towards making biological parents out of the rest of us! And with sperm and egg donation, and surrogacy, even those who are completely infertile can become biological and/or birth parents. Adoption is also the right choice for many of us.
If you are having difficulty conceiving, take heart: you are not alone. The road to parenthood begins with many tests which may seem tedious and unneccessary, but will eventually lead you to a solution!
Joseph Heller (1923-1999)
Books
Martin Zook - 08:42am Dec 14, 1999 PST (# 9 of 23)
heller's one of the few authors that i have met. he lectured at the small liberal arts college i attended and i was able to spend some time with him along with a handful of other students and faculty.
there was only one thing i remember him saying. as a professor and i escorted him i asked him why he wrote. very straightforwardly he said, "to earn money."
hat was in about '74, or so. at first i thought he was putting me off. but now, as someone who writes to earn money, i think i understand what he meant.
like a reporter who wrote the washington post's appreciation piece about heller, there was a time where i thought catch 22 was an extraordary book.
but on rereading it on the threshhold of middle age, i was much less impressed with it. it seemed to need a lot of editing still. a lot of the phrasing seemed to need work. but the picture he paints is still wonderful and an apt description of our mad world.
glad to hear the good words for something happened. i bought it on the recommendation of a friend and will have to move it up on the to-read list.
"BON VOYAGE CHARLIE BROWN!"
Television
Myno DuEsp - 04:35pm Dec 15, 1999 PST (# 3 of 4)
Yeah, it's historic. I do think it's nigh impossible to keep a daily or even weekly comic strip funny after several years (witness Life in Hell or any number of others); 98 % of them are never funny once! But Calvin and Hobbes was, and the Far Side actually had me laughing out loud on many occasions. Peanuts is in the memory banks, though.
Those tv specials were like an essential drug; even the crazily incoherent and disjointed Christmas special (remember when Charlie Brown made that left turn during a speech on a completely unrelated matter, through the bullhorn, to say "It's the interest the actors show in their director! Am I right? I said, am I right?" (actors dancing), or later, also out of nowhere, "That's all right Charlie Brown, we all know Christmas is a big commercial racket" ??? Thanks, that's very precocious, but of course had nothing to do with what I was talking about).
And the strip itself had great moments; I loved the ones from the early years, like this one where Charlie Brown says to Linus, "Snoopy looks sad; we should comfort him" (walking over to Snoopy) CB: "Be of good cheer, Snoopy"; Linus: "Yes, be of good cheer"
Then, appearing over Snoopy's forehead: "?"
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