SOL March 10: The “F” Word

            I live next door to a K-8 school. As I was about to go out on this beautiful spring day, several 11 or 12 year olds streamed by. A boy in the lead yelled, “Fuck!” Three girls right behind him saw me standing in the doorway, old enough to be their grandmother, and their faces flashed laughter and shock at the same time. I wanted to say, “Do you think I’ve never heard or said that word myself?”

            It occurred to me, it’s one of those words that’s not intergenerationally shared. Parents aren’t supposed to say it front of their kids—so their kids won’t think it’s a word they can say any time. And kids don’t want to say it in front of their parents—for fear of punishment.

            But it’s an all-purpose word. We all say it and for a variety of reasons: anger, annoyance, surprise, distress, extreme emotion, and more. And it’s transcending language.

            I saw a Belgian short film yesterday, in Flemish. When the characters were upset or angry, they shouted the English “Fuck.” Just as that boy had as he ran past my door.

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I’m participating in the 18th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOLTuesday: Missing the Slice of Life Month

I don’t know how to tell this other than strictly chronologically, although it will probably bury the lead, as my tabloid journalist late husband used to say about my stories.

            About 17 years ago, I suggested that my women’s group might want to start a blog. We had organized ourselves about 10 years before that to talk about “women, aging, and sex,” and had by that time had many illuminating discussions. Perhaps we could share our experiences and insights, such as they were, with others. So I went to WordPress and set up the Women of a Certain Age blog, which gave me the profile name woaca2008.

            As it turned out, only three of us ever posted anything over the next few years—only three of us were writers—and the blog faded to nothing after 2011. But the blog still exists on WordPress. Meanwhile, I started my own blog, but on Blogger (I no longer remember why I went there instead of WordPress.)

 

            And here’s how I am missing the Slice of Life. Last year, a few days into the March Slice of Life Challenge, I noticed that my Slice posts to Two Writing Teachers were no longer getting posted. Whereas in the past I was asked to sign in with my woaca2008 password, from that defunct but not erased Women of a Certain Age blog, and that worked for the month, now I was being asked to sign in every time, and my sign-in didn’t register. I asked one of the Two Writing Teacher Slice monitors to look into it, but there was no obvious resolution, and since that’s the month when I got Covid for the first time, I never followed up. 

 

            I have written a few Slices for Tuesdays, but I don’t think they ever registered on the SOL Tuesday page. So what is happening? I will post this to my blog, then try to post to Two Writing Teachers, and see the result.