Doreen Michele

It's weird to me anyone would call me Miss because in The Deep South ma'am is used for any woman over age 18 . Southern honorics are a thing.They don't get called honorics in the south but that's de facto what they are.  Close family friends are frequently called Aunt or Uncle (plus their first name) by the children and in my family close German friends of my mother's were called Tante plus their first name. It's German for Aunt. In Asian cultures and languages, honorifics are common and this can be a translation challenge. If you have a rude character in Asian fiction who fails to use honorifics, they sometimes translate that as someone with a potty mouth because there's no cultural equivalent in English. There's also Mr. or Mz. (first name). When I worked at Aflac, the last living founder was called Mr. Paul by everyone in the company. It's both respectful and familiar which is an artifact of southern culture not found in most of America. Souther...

He turned 60 yesterday. Why does he look 700 years older than Trudeau rather that seven-ish? Good luck Canada. I wonder if Trump will even BOTHER to trash talk this dinosaur who looks older than Trump who is roughly 19-ish years older than him... I've been a bad girl today but the above snark (of mine!) has been food for thought: Why do people care so much whether or not one looks good for their age? Some thoughts as the unrecognized medical genius  I am: 1. Grey hair suggests a B vitamin deficiency and B vitamins are important to brain function. 2. Grey hair can also suggest you need adrenal support and that can suggest deeper health problems. So I think looking old  for your age or young  for your age is a little like my hypothesis about beauty being a proxy for other things. Because historically, a lot of cultures valued their elderly as repositories for valuable knowledge and wisdom about how to get shit done in this crazy making world. And yet, looking old for your ...

Article  showing a photo of Elvis, "The King", absolutely looking like a king, shaking hands with some ugly loser in a business suit named Nixon. Who is president in 1985? Ronald Reagan  The ACTOR? -- Back to the Future   The US seems to largely miss the significant impact Reagan's acting career had -- and still has -- on the presidential image. His presidency marked a sea change in how our presidents get depicted in photos and video clips because Reagan was always keenly aware of what was behind him and how that would impact the impression made upon the public. Historically, nobles, celebrities and others in the public eye had a more curated public image than they do today. Trump looks like such an idiot so much of the time because that's no longer true and he obviously doesn't know how to effectively navigate that issue. I imagine his "just plain folks" schtick goes over well in person and then bombs much of the time in the media. I'm twice excepti...

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. Mom was born and mostly raised in Danzig, a very cosmopolitan freistadt (independent city state), except for the years that the family spent in the country during World War II to try to safeguard everyone as best they could. When the war ended, she found herself in the newly created communist East Germany where she was required to take Russian in school, which is why I know a few words of Russian. She left East Germany to return her sister's baby to her , so she was a young illegal immigrant in West Germany when she met my father at a party. She spoke extremely proper High German. His American accent plus the fact that he mostly learned German from farmers, meant she couldn't understand a word he spoke and she asked someone what language he was speaking. My older sister was born in Germany. Her first language was actually German and she translated for my parents while she was a toddler. So I grew up in a bilingua...

My mother was born October 19, 1936 in Germany. She died recently on her 88th birthday last fall. She lived through World War II as a child in Germany and she could be difficult to deal with which it was easy to chalk up to her misfortune of having been a child in a war zone and having lived in Nazi Germany. Except I grew up in the German-American-military subculture unique to Columbus, Georgia and I knew other German women who were similar in age to my mother. My mother seemed unusually difficult in some ways even for a German woman of that era in spite of being an uncommonly kind, generous person, far more decent and diplomatic than average. My mother definitely had baggage and she was from a previous era and her beliefs were sometimes "primitive" beliefs even though she was unusually smart and she read a lot.  She believed in astrology and she believed in psychic phenomenon and she was always trying to convince people that if she dreamed something was going to happen, it w...

There's a story of two bricklayers being asked what they are doing and one says "I'm building a wall" and the other says "I'm building a cathedral." When I worked at Aflac processing accident claims, reading ER reports and police reports all day everyday as part of my job, coworkers often seemed traumatized by the job. In five years, I think there were between three and five claims that bothered me in a "take it home with you and have it interfere with your sleep" kind of way. I was a former military wife, homeschooling mom of twice exceptional kids and I have a serious medical condition. Most of the reports I read were not enough to get a rise out of me. We were allowed to wear t-shirts on casual Fridays if they had the Aflac logo. One T-shirt some people wore said "Property of Aflac." One of my coworkers one day remarked "I'm not going to wear that one because I already feel that way too much sometimes." I never felt t...