Happy Birthday, Cass!

There are no odes (or songs) to my name. I don't know whether to be happy or sad about that.

Todd? I sent an email to your profile addy a few days ago--did you get it? Is there another one I should use? Mine's good.

About the best friend thing. As a child, if there was one person I could feel comfortable enough to spend time with, I counted myself lucky. Bereft of the one, I can't imagine what deeper hell school would have been for me.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I see this move toward no best friend, friend everybody as part of the homogenization of the population beginning as soon as educators and bureaucracy get their hands on people as teeeeeny little children. Already we have intense distrust of the introvert child who sits in a corner alone, quietly reading, or building towers of blocks or forts of legos, using his imagination and bolstering his internal life. No, the introvert must be dragged into group activity, not allowed to process stress and information at her own pace in her own way. It's a role she learns, better or worse, quickly or slowly, to play. A public face to present to administrators, teachers, counselors: bland, happy, level.

Gods forbid a dark mood should ever pass over that innocent countenance, a dark feeling need be thought through to understanding, incorporated into his experience as part of a toolset for future use, or trust given that the individual can and will process at his own rate, to far better understanding than simple group rhetoric can provide.

I'm sorry, rambling. I've seen introvert-squashing and forced incorporation into ill-fitting group extroversion and the intense personal misery it causes and does not acknowledge or treat. Introverts are the researchers, the discoverers, the explorers, and the perceptors. Without them we might be a happy, homogenized, well-adjusted civilization of group-thinkers who never have an original idea or innovate a new theory.

We need introverts. We need to provide space for them to develop, and support to help them integrate comfortably, and allow them to socialize with a few trusted individuals. My perspective from inside the situation, anyway.

Erm, not that all introverts are Speshul Flowers, of course. Or that extroverts are not. Just--differences aren't dangerous, merely different.

Much, much ♥♥♥ to you, Bev, Sing it.

Name songs: 2 words of horror "Delta Dawn", God how I hate that song and any reference to it.

No songs use my name as a name.

At least you have a CAR.

Toss the one who looks like my idiot brother. Though I suspect this explains A LOT about why women continue to date said idiot brother.

Absolutely it does. Wait, which one is your bro again? Does he do accents?

Happy birthday, Cass!

Hee. I like singing "Delta Dawn" at karaoke--sorry, Dawn!

Delta Dawn is/was my mom's favorite song!

This is why I hate it so...

The song is said to have been inspired by a woman named Dawn Parsworth who waited aimlessly for days for a man who had stood her up after promising to marry her. She would walk up to the bus-stop every day slowly becoming more and more mentally-ill. She was later admitted to a Brownsville asylum where she died in a ward cell

I was in high school when the Tanya Tucker version came out, it was a nightmare.

I've never paid close attention to the lyrics of "Delta Dawn", but now it makes me thing of "Copacabana."

Of course another fun game was for people to ask me where Tony Orlando was... the 70s were not fun for people named Dawn