Kat, when you wrote:

"Thank you for your candidacy" I thought: I'm not running for anything!

But on second thought... maybe I am. ;-)

It's not painful to write about, though... more painful to white knuckle it and pretend that everything is hunky-dory... after all, I am a writer!

Yeah, hugs are important, and I've been told mine are dangerous! But I don't believe it. ;-) [so is music -- and you know those rafters would ring!] Say, 'Catters, watcha say we start up a collection for Kat's hundred acres (and Pooh and Piglet could come, too!)?

Peg (sorry I didn't reply to this earlier), you wrote: "Being handicapped need not leave you out of the love game, any more than being able-bodied means you're automatically in it. "

Oh, I never meant to imply that it did... I was simply replying to M.Ted's: "You know it isn't going to work out when they tell you they've never been married and have lived alone since college, 17 years ago--", trying to make the point that such a broad catagory cuts out a lot of people, at least a few of whom might make wonderful partners (myself included). I don't ask for much... only someone who will recognize my genius (and someone who has a genius I can recognize!) ;-).

But we seem to be living what I call a "sit-com culture" that devides people into distinct groups, and paints them with broad brushes. Constantly bumping into the consequences of that is rather frustrating. That's all.

For what it's worth, I am really deeply grateful to have grown up with a disability, because it's something that shaped my personality in many positive ways, among which:

1) It's given me a strong and abiding faith in the basic goodness and generosity of people (If you can go through your days and weeks without having to ask for help, it may be easy to believe that no one would give that help even if you did ask for it... but in all my years, no matter what scrape I've found myself in, big or small, there was always someone who was willing to help me out, often without my asking).

2) It freed me from much of that nasty teen-aged peer pressure -- because I couldn't be just like my peers in small ways, and I still had many friends, I knew I didn't need to be like my peers in bigger ways. So I just didn't feel the pressure to drink or do drugs or sex, or...

3) It gave me an incentive to really play with language, and led me directly to being a writer.