People, politics, and pumpkin pie . . .

Dear you:

Did you watch the latest hearings, attempts to prosecute/catch Ms. Hinton for . . . anything? All extremist motivations aside, every viewer should have been blown away by her unwavering toughness.  ELEVEN HOURS!   Eleven hours of questions she has answered before.  Eleven hours of looking at that dude with the pointy white hair.  (That would have done me in totally.) And she never lost her cool.

Cool people.  What a good thing it is to be a cool person, in politics and elsewhere.  It seems that "passion" is praised excessively these days.  I hear about passion for careers, passion for hobbies, passion for food, passion for passion.  I am getting pretty tired of passion.  I may be becoming passionately dispassionate.  I've never been a fan of lethargy or passivity, but I am looking back at a good many of my passionate choices and am not sure they were as beneficial (or FUN!) as my "cool" choices.   For example:

PASSIONATE CHOICE 1985 -  accepting a dinner-theater Christmas gig instead of amassing waitress cash in NYC.  Stupid.
CONTRASTING COOL CHOICE 2012 - subverting scamming students at St. Pete. College before my exit-move to PCB.  Smart.

But it's not about me.  It's about today's TOP FIVE cool people:

1.  Ms. Clinton (as noted)
2.  Tom Brady (performing quite well during this season's fabulous revenge tour)
3.  Anonymous writing student I taught at the University of South Florida (name withheld to protect the talented) who created the coolest stories that never featured zombies or anatomically impossible sex scenes. (Warning - if you sign up to teach a basic creative writing course, get ready for hilarious descriptions of sexual acts as imagined by the innocent.  I was especially fond of one scene -- created by a virginal writer -- who thought he knew all about his heroine's GEE spot.  No, he wasn't kidding.  He thought it was called the GEE spot due its "ah, gee, that felt good" associations.  Actually, he wasn't cool, but I do want to hand him a high score for adorable.)
4.  Anderson Cooper
5.  Justice Ginsberg (the notorious RBG)

October is winding down; all things Thanksgiving are approaching.
Yes.  Pumpkin pie is cool!  Please do not blame the pumpkin and the classic pie for all the bullshit, "passionate" products that make us nuts:  pumpkin coffee, pumpkin cake, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin toilet paper, pumpkin tweezers, and (OMG) pumpkin spice anything.  Never mind; it isn't COOL to hate on helpless spin-off products.

Enjoy what is left of 10/2015!

Wishing you cool pleasures . . .

XO

Joyce