Tomorrow is Cancer Test for Don Day at Chez Anna, so things are... interesting. I tend to deal with stress by being RELENTLESSLY CHEERFUL THANK YOU VERY MUCH, while Don tends to be Must.Keep.Stiff.Upper.Lip. It makes for fascinating watching, I'm certain.

In light of that, I bring you links: You can think, so I don't have to!

School Boots Kids Who Might Change The Complexion

"When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

[Warning: Comments are toxic.]

I've had this sitting on my "to link" file since it was written.

Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

It was impossible to escape from Batman that summer. The Batman logo was on merchandise of all kinds. That Diet Coke commercial was constantly running on television. Batdance by Prince was always on the radio. The Edmonton Journal deemed it “the summer of the bat,” and even ran an interview with a graphic design major at the U of A who had painted the Batman logo all over her car. “I understand it’s all a fad, and I’ll repaint my car this fall,” she said. “I’m thinking maybe a soccer ball pattern.” Of course, all this didn’t happen spontaneously. It was all because of the movie.

How do you write the "other" when you are the "other":

I was thinking about this, the other day. All my life, I've written fantasy stories (well, all right, not all my life -- I didn't start until I was about 4 or 5). And even though I've had a strong desire to see disabled characters in my fiction, I've never been able to write any without being terribly self conscious.

It didn't occur to me until just the other day -- it's because I base my characters on the people I see around me, rather than on myself. And being a member of the first generation of kids to be mainstreamed in school, I was always the only kid in my class in a wheelchair. The only times I saw other kids with disabilities is when I'd go to the hospital for surgery or outpatient PT, and neither of those situations are condusive to thinking like a protagonist, if you know what I mean.

Being that it's taken me four hours to put together a list of three things, I'm giving up. Because we are CHEERFUL here. Relentlessly Cheerful!