My good friend Mark of Going Like Sixty, who is mostly absent from Facebook although a member, warned me about this. Facebook and Twitter are going to result in the death of blogging. It’s just way too convenient to post a 20-second tweet or Facebook update rather than actually sit down and think out a chunk of something well-organized and meaningful. If you look at my blogroll, which I have not updated since approximately the dawn of time, you may notice that a lot of my reads have left off blogging altogether in the past year or two.

Part of the reason for this is probably that a lot of people I know write for a living at least to some extent. Oh, I only can claim to know one novelist on a personal level, and that largely because we nursed babies simultaneously. But a lot of my friends write for at least some portion of their gainful employment, and there is the endless legal writing that consumes us legal types, even though we’re not writers as such. Many of us are eager to take a break from writing, not to escape into it, for God’s sake.

Either way, people don’t much want to take the time for words, or an attention span, anymore. We’re all about Twitter and Susan Boyle and 15 minutes of fame, little dribs and drabs of this and that. No time, no commitment. Even as I write this, I’m losing interest in writing it (although this may be in large part for the reason that all three of my young kids are simultaneously running around screaming like loons). Even when they’re not distracting me, there are the glugs of arriving e-mails and the pops of arriving chat messages. And that’s for someone like me — a total misanthropic bitch! I can’t imagine the distraction level for people of normal socialization.

I don’t want to make the point I’m trying to make for fear of lapsing into a reverie about the good old days of snail mail and network television and morning and evening newspapers. But I think it’s pretty obvious. The Internet is a two-edged sword, and people have the attention span of gnats. A bunch of years ago I was on the cutting edge of blogging. Now I’m on the cutting edge of being too lazy to blog anymore. And I’m not at all sure this is a good thing.

See y’all on Facebook.

Is there anyone so self-absorbed as a woman on a diet? I’m not an unconscionable heifer, but early in 2009 I became aware that I had packed on some tonnage through the months of general depression and malaise that followed my mom’s death in November. Now, in my case, “overweight” means “more than a size 4″, which is really depressing. The fact is that I am a short sort of miniature person, and when I put on 10 or even 5 pounds, my ass starts to resemble the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Well, actually, that looks more like boobs. But I digress.

My husband is a pretty good sport. Of course, he has to look at my ass more than anyone else, so he has a personal stake in its lack of immensity. But I have suddenly become a general pain in the hindquarters as regards anything pertaining to food. It’s all Oh, I can’t eat that or I have to look up how many points or, worse, God, do you know how many grams of FAT are in that steak and egg breakfast you’re eating?  Honestly, I don’t know how he hasn’t killed me by now. Oh, that’s right, he has to watch me undress for bed every night. Never mind.

I’m aiming to take off 20 pounds and therefore get down to my fighting weight, as opposed to my I’m nearly fifty and had three kids in the four years after my 40th birthday, so back off, asshole weight. I’m figuring this will take a few months if I don’t get extreme about it, so I’m doomed to be a pain in my husband’s ass for the foreseeable future. It’s the plight of every human female above the age of 40 who can’t afford extensive plastic surgery and doesn’t have the time to work out 3 hours a day.

Still, I think back with extreme jealousy to the 25-year-old me who sat behind her desk eating M&Ms all day, never worked out, and weighed 105 pounds. If this sounds like you, enjoy it while it lasts, because it won’t last. Someday you’ll be just like me, eating a bowl of raw cabbage with noncaloric salad dressing (there is such a thing! and it doesn’t taste much like doodoo at all!) just to keep your ass from needing its own Congressman.

Just for Going Like Sixty, who made foul mention of my dreadful faux Dorothy Hamill wedge from 2007, I give you: My original Dorothy Hamill wedge from the ’70s. I would dearly love to have the face back, the sulky attitude hasn’t changed much, and I daresay the haircut is better too.

Last week, American author John Updike died at the age of 76 — of lung cancer, like both my parents. (I’m going to publicly flog any of my kids who takes up cigarettes.) I was sad to see him go. It’s always good to read in a book, or see in a movie, a truly accurate depiction of a marriage — not a miserable one, not a blissful one, but a real one. The two most real depictions of marriage I’ve ever seen are in the movie Fargo (between the pregnant police officer and her husband) and in John Updike’s Rabbit books.

The Rabbit arc encompasses four novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.  (There is also Rabbit Remembered, but I don’t count that one because Rabbit is already dead.) They follow a Pennsylvania car dealer through his entire life, from his teen years to his death. And the central element of Rabbit’s story is his marriage to Janice, his first and only wife.

Oh Lord, do these two put each other through hell at times. There is sporadic adultery on both sides, substance abuse, the accidental death of one of their children, their adult son’s cocaine addiction, separations, recriminations, and sometimes just the plain old sense of I hate you so much right now that rears its head in every long marriage. (Come to think of it, it’s probably even more common in short marriages.)

But Rabbit and Janice stay together until Rabbit’s death. It puts me so much in mind of my parents, until my dad’s untimely death cut short their marriage just short of the 50-year mark. Why aren’t more people writing and making movies about this sort of marriage?

Anyway. John Updike taught me a lot about what true love really is. If you haven’t read his novels, they’re wonderful and I highly recommend them. Goodnight, Mr. Updike, and thanks.

She passed away late Tuesday night, or early Wednesday morning if you wish to get technical. I have so many things I want to say about her, from picking corn in the field behind our Pennsylvania house when I was a child, to her sweetness and patience with my rowdy sons and headstrong Boolie toward the end of her life.

I’m a terrible Catholic. I think we’ve established that. But howsoever you believe, believe that she is now in some fantastic place. Because if there is ever a woman who deserved an ideal afterlife, it’s my mom. I’m a pain in the ass, and she put up with me with very little complaint. Think: How many people are that generous? Not so many. Please hug your loved ones tightly tonight, and be happy they are here with you, even if they are pains in your asses. Because someday they won’t be there, and your ass may be missing that particular pain. Mom, when all was said and done, was no pain at all. She was just love. That’s what Boolie thinks. Good night.

Like most people raised Catholic, I’m totally conflicted about religion. I’m a baptized, confirmed Catholic (my confirmation name is Cecilia! Little known fact!) who attended Catholic schools exclusively until university. Also like most Catholics, I rebelled against my faith, in spades. I explored everything: Wicca, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Reform Judaism. (Not Islam, but no offense meant there. Back when I was coming of age, there wasn’t the Islam stigma that Americans have these days.)

But I have to laugh like hell at myself, because you can take the girl out of the Catholic Church, but you can’t take the Catholic Church out of the girl. When I need the comfort of faith, I’m more Catholic than the freaking Pope. But I can’t believe in Catholicism. I’m sorry. I really tried, and I tried to believe in Catholic Lite (a.k.a. the Church of England, or probably Episcopal to you). (Did you know that “Episcopal” is an anagram for “Pepsi-Cola”?) I tried so hard, I had my husband and two sons baptized by the Anglicans. I mean the C. of E. I mean the Episcopalians. Whatever.

You know what, though? In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. It doesn’t feel true to me, and I have a strong faith in my instincts, if not in my Church. I can’t say I’m an atheist; I would like to believe in something. Honestly, I wish it was so. But I don’t believe. Not really. Except when times get tough. I really envy people like my friend Lisa from Wisconsin, who is a sincere Catholic. To me, it usually feels like an artificial construct.

Recently on Facebook I mentioned that I was wearing my Miraculous Medal (a Virgin Mary relic, for the uninitiated) because of the dire state of my mom’s health. I have also been known to do such things as light candles in California missions for various dying parents (it appears I’m on my second). I also believe in rainbows and shooting stars as good omens.

Humans are still completely superstitious. We like to paint ourselves as sophisticated and enlightened, but we’re still really just reading omens and augurs and believing in invisible men in the sky. I wish it wasn’t true. Now, more than ever, I wish I really believed all the Catholic rituals which, strangely, comfort me so. I just wish I knew what I really believe versus what was ingrained in my brain when I was too young to know the difference.

I mean this:

Blue crab population diminishing in Chesapeake Bay

I am not originally from the Chesapeake area, but I went to the University of Delaware, just a little ways off (in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic coast, everywhere is close to everywhere else). I had a boatload of friends from Maryland and Virginia, and therefore I claimed the Chesapeake as a little bit mine.

I used to go eat Maryland crabs at the Crab Trap on Elkton Road in Newark, Delaware. I understand it’s closed now and the building demolished, but all-you-can-eat crab night was awesome. They’d cover the tables with newspaper and serve up pitchers of beer and mounds and mounds of crabs, and we’d eat them with lots of Old Bay Seasoning until we were ready to fall over dead. (Well, the beer probably helped, too.) To this day, I keep a can of Old Bay in my kitchen spice rack. Not necessarily to use, but sometimes to just open up and breathe in the smell, and remember.

On some rinky-dink docks on odd bits of the Chesapeake, we’d fish for crabs this way: you tie a piece of spoiled raw chicken to the end of a piece of string and dangle it in the Bay. And wait until you felt a tug on the line, whereupon you’d pull up your string and there would be a crab holding on. You didn’t get big crabs that way, true, and shelling and eating them was a hell of a lot of work. But it was so cool to do. A day spent fishing for crabs in this way, with the Bay spread out in front of you, was as restful and refreshing as a week’s vacation.

Good God, do I miss the Delmarva Peninsula. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I was still there (although Pennsylvania or New Jersey would do nicely, too). So I’m really sorry I read about the vanishing crabs and the closing of the Crab Trap. But memories are like that; reality gets way too far ahead of them, and sometimes you’re best off not trying to go back home.

URGENT CRAB UPDATE: After posting, I got a total crab up my ass and called up my husband and said idda wabba Crabs and Old Bay and I MUST IMMEDIATELY COOK OLD BAY CRAB SOUP FOR TONIGHT’S DINNER. And he’s all like Okay, honey, whatever floats your boat. This despite that it is (a) Southern California, (b) high summer and (c) 83 degrees. I love him so much.

I was reading a true-crime book (surprise) today that mentioned a story breaking in the morning paper, then being updated in the evening paper. Remember morning and evening newspapers? Sometimes they were competitors; sometimes they merged. In Wilmington, Delaware, where I was living in the early ’80s, the Morning News and the Evening Journal eventually combined into the Wilmington News-Journal, which the local paper is still called today. They probably don’t have morning and evening editions anymore, but they sure were fun.

In the ’80s, before many people watched CNN and definitely before the Internet, the newspapers, combined with the 6 o’clock newscasts, were the news source for everyone. You would get the morning paper and read it over coffee; the evening paper was for some kid to deliver on his bike after school and for Dad to disappear behind at dinner, or if Mom intervened, afterward. If there was a big story, like the Kennedy assassination, they broke through the network shows, or you learned it from someone else by phone. News wasn’t instantaneous like it is now, and I sort of miss that.

We still take the Orange County Register, mostly because Ben likes the opinion page and their website blows chunks. (The L.A. Times, which is a well-known leftist rag, is out of the question.) But apart from that, we get all our news from the Internet and CNN. So why would we read the newspaper? It’s yesterday’s news, the stuff you read on the Internet the previous day.

The day Heath Ledger was found dead, Erika called me on my cellphone while I was driving. Heath Ledger’s dead, she reported. Quick, go on CNN. I wailed, I can’t! I’m in the car! I was going completely apeshit without access to instantaneous news. Finally I turned on the Los Angeles all-news A.M. radio station, KNX, and consoled myself with that. It was all I could get. But I will never forget that, the frustration at NOT HAVING IMMEDIATE NEWS, GODDAMMIT. The world has moved on since the days when you’d have just read it in the paper the next morning.

I miss coffee and the newspaper in the mornings. It was my daily ritual, as sacred as Mass. These days? I tumble out of bed, pull an espresso and sit down at the computer while the kids have their cereal. Not so sacred. But at least it’s immediate.

I’ve been resisting blogging about the death of George Carlin, because I can practically feel the Internet creaking from the weight of all the boomer bloggers’ tributes to him. What is there to say that hasn’t been said already?

But then last night Ben and I were watching HBO2, which this week is wallpapering George Carlin stand-up specials. This is a trend that always vaguely disturbs me. Remember after Heath Ledger died in January, they were showing 10 Things I Hate About You and The Patriot like every 10 minutes? Okay, it’s a tribute, but it also feels like cashing in.

Anyway. Watching Carlin’s stand-up act, I realized that I grew up equating comedian with George Carlin. The guy was — is — a fucking icon. And thus another one bites the dust. It’s a disquieting aspect of aging. Here’s a partial scorecard:

• The President = John F. Kennedy = Dead.
• The Novelist = Kurt Vonnegut = Dead.
• The Humorist = Douglas Adams = Dead.
• The Musicians = The Beatles = 50% Dead.
• The Pope = John Paul II = Dead.
• The Journalist = Hunter S. Thompson = Dead.
• The Comedian = George Carlin = Now Also Dead.

And I don’t especially see any new icons taking up the vacant spots. Damn. I hate to think that the next generation is going to have lame icons.