There was a swarm of dragonflies in front of my house the other night when I came home from work. They stayed on the east side of the house and were there for at least an hour. I couldn’t tell if they had found a different swarm of tasty bugs to eat or if they were attracted to my house for other reasons. Maybe it was an omen.

If you dream that a dragonfly lands on your body then you will have excellent news from someone far away from home. If you see a dead dragonfly, then the news will be bad. A dragonfly perched gracefully on some other object shows that you will soon be having guests that may be hard to get rid of. The Dream Dictionary

The problem is that it wasn’t a dream. The dragonflies were real and staying in my front yard. They didn’t land on my body. They didn’t die. They didn’t even perch on anything. They flew wildly and actively. There were no birds feeding on them. I couldn’t even tell if they were feeding on anything.

Dragonflies symbolize illusion, dreams, change, enlightenment, irresponsibility, unreliability, weakness, instability, swiftness, dreams and seeing the truth. They are messengers of the elemental world and the god/esses. They are connected to Summer. Wyldkat’s Pagan Place

So dragonflies can symbolize just about anything according to the Pagan world. It could be that the gods had a message for me and I missed out. It could be that the dragonflies were there to herald the end of the blistering summer that we suffered from all season. It could be that they were scolding me because of my irresponsible, unreliable, weak and unstable ways. Or they could be trying to tell me to keep dreaming, to be enlightened, to seek the truth and embrace change. With such a variety of meanings attributed to such a lively and active insect, I’m bound to find meaning there somewhere.

Dragonfly is the essence of the winds of change, the messages of wisdom and enlightenment, and the communications from the elemental world?Dragonfly medicine always beckons you to seek out the parts of your habits which you need to change. Native American Animal Omens

According to Native American mythology, the dragonfly beckons me to seek out the parts of my habits that I need to change. With that many dragonflies in one small area, I must need changing badly. How would they know? Sure, they’re helpful insects that eat the pests like mosquitoes and their evil West Nile Virus. That doesn’t give them the knowledge to discern which of my habits are helpful and which are damaging. Those damn dragonflies, how dare they judge my lifestyle?!

I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it. Oprah Winfrey (1954 – ), O Magazine

So what does it mean? A strange and large swarm of dragonflies came to visit my home. I ran into the house and called my husband to see them. Neither one of us had seen that many dragonflies in one spot that didn’t include a body of water. The neighbors went about their business and were completely oblivious to our visitors. We watched their seemingly erratic movement for about a half hour before we had to leave for an appointment. We didn’t see them arrive and we didn’t see them leave, but we enjoyed them for that brief moment while they were there.

Maybe that’s what it means. Stop. Look. Bring your loved ones. Enjoy us while we’re here because we won’t be here forever. Take the time to watch us. Pay no attention to the people who are too blind to see us. Don’t worry about where we came from or where we will go. Just drink us in while the summer evening is still warm. Soon it will be cold and we will all die, so look at us now.

• OMG! The snow was so bad! Glad I took the bus! (@ BetaLoft) http://4sq.com/6q3Ieg #
• The happiest dog! OMG SupaCUTE! http://twitpic.com/vk58k (via @CincySW) #
• TED talk about dragonflies who cross the OCEAN!! AWESOME! http://tinyurl.com/yfggsdp #
• One of the creators of Bejeweled talks about puzzles. http://tinyurl.com/yjzkuvb #
• Left BetaLoft early, but miscalculation has me waiting an hour for my bus. Got 343K on Bejeweled in the first 5 mins. Now what do I do?! #
• So cold! Can't believe I still have thirty mins left! Freezing fingers can barely tweet. #
• On the bus. Delicious warmth! #

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I’ve seen a marked increase in unique visitors this month. It didn’t quite double, but it’s pretty close. Part of that (4.77%) are people from the DDR Forum checking out what I have to say, but most of the visitors (88.61%) come from direct request, meaning they’ve bookmarked me and are coming back or are typing my url in directly. That’s really cool. Thanks for coming back every day, folks. I really appreciate it.

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Who knew that there were so many different ways to say those words? So many variations of those same words have brought tons of people to my site with my entry about the Weight Watchers Core List. If you haven’t seen the comments that have shown up there, you might want to check out that entry again.

I really meant it when I said that there are no excuses. When you email telling me that you live too far away from a Weight Watchers place to go to the meetings, I’m going to send you to Weight Watchers Online. When you say you can’t afford it, we’re going to have a discussion about the simple things that you spend your money on every day that you can forego for Weight Watchers. That’s what commitment is about. It’s about doing whatever you have to do to get to your goal.

If you start throwing excuses at me, all it tells me is that you’re not ready to start this journey. If that’s the case, don’t bother. Enjoy yourself. Eat whatever you want without guilt. Give yourself permission to have whatever you want whenever you want it and stop beating yourself up about it. For some, that has also been the path to healthy eating. Read Margaret Cho’s blog entry about her road to sensible eating. Maybe the Fuck It Diet is your destiny.

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I guess late summer brings dragonflies into the lives of those who need to see them. Last year’s entry about Dragonflies has collected a number of visitors and a few comments that you might want to read. For every comment that says, “ur site sux,” I remind myself of the rare comments that come by that make me feel like I am here writing for a reason:

I am a very aggressive driver and am always speeding on the road. I had a fender bender last week while speeding out of my neiborhood. I was on my way to a weekend vacation and when I got to my destination I noticed a dead dragonfly on the front bumper. I knocked it off and forgot about it, but when I returned from my vacation, I noticed another one dead in basically the same spot. It was wierd so i looked it up. What i believe now according to your article is that speeding is a bad bad habit that I need to change or there is going to be some sad news. This may just be some strange belief, but i will take it as a sign. Thank you for your research.

Comment by Doretha — 9/21/2004 @ 10:45 pm

sabrina martin

Four people were looking for Sabrina Martin and found me talking smack. That was my fear. I worried that I had said something derogatory about Sabrina Martin. I write every day, so it’s really easy for me to forget what I have said. When I saw her name come up in the search strings, I worried that I had said something catty. Here’s what I said, “I wanted to be like Sabrina Martin in fifth grade. She wore really tight pants and the guys liked her a lot. I wanted to wear tennis shoes like hers so bad that I saved up the money to buy some. My mom was surprised that I would rather buy tennis shoes than Barbies and offered to buy them for me. They cost $9.95 at Gibson’s Discount Stores. They were blue and white.” So much for being catty.

I feel like I did a disservice to her. I know the blog entry wasn’t about her, but I didn’t really say enough about her for someone to really know what she was like. I feel like I should write a whole entry about her. She had this funny thing she could do with her eyes. They would move back and forth so quickly they looked like they were vibrating. She was funny as hell. I could always depend on her to crack me up. Her parents lived in the Academy Park neighborhood, just like Dylan. I could point at the house she used to live in today. It was a big, yellow split-level with a big M on the screen door.

Sophomore year, she was a cheerleader. Junior and Senior year, she was a Chate (drill team). She dated Kava Afu, the star football player that took Kearns to State. She hardly ever partied at Sceverenia’s house. It was very rare that I saw her there, even though she was so very popular that she was always invited. I guess she just preferred quiet time with Kava to the loud and potentially dangerous parties that Scev’s parties usually ended up being.

I saw her about five years ago when I was a real estate agent. At the time, she was married with five children. She had been a single mom for a long time and she seemed happy to be married. Later, I learned that she was divorced again. I hoped that she was happy.

Last time I saw her was about a year ago. She was on a blind date with her mechanic. He took her to Port O’Call. I don’t know whose idea it was, but she seemed to be having fun. She told me that I looked very thin and I was so grateful to her for being nice.

I wonder where she is now. She looked so healthy at Port O’Call that I suspected that single life might actually be better for her than married life. I touch her life so rarely now, that I truly feel that I couldn’t give a full account of her personality. Where are you, babe? I looked your name up in the phone book and there’s a Sabrina Martin in Kaysville. Is that you? I hope you’re happy and healthy. Sending good karma your way, if you believe in that sort of thing…

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Ah, the return of summer and people all over the country want to know one thing: why are there so many dragonflies in my yard? What does it mean? Is it an omen? What do they symbolize?

Relax, people. It’s summer. They’re bugs. Look at them. They’re kind of pretty. They aren’t here every day. Stop and notice them. Don’t search the web for them.

who caroline outkast roses girl -mars video �beyonce

I don’t know what this person was looking for, but I have a question about Caroline from the Outkast song Roses. I don’t care who the actress is who played her, which is all I can find out about her. I want to know who the real Caroline is. What’s the story behind that song, because that’s one bitter dude. He wants her to crash her car into a ditch, probably just because it rhymes with the word bitch. If given his wish, she’d probably crash into a semi hauling thousands of gallons of highly flammable gasoline and explode in a fiery flaming ball of toxic chemicals. It’s just that it’s so hard to find a rhyme for the word chemicals.

Why does he hate her so much? Is it just a case of unrequited love or did it turn sour? Does she have anything to do with Ms. Jackson? What’s the story? I want to see the Behind the Music on this song. At the very end of the video, they turn through pages of a yearbook and focus on the picture of one girl. Is she the real Caroline?

rice heating pad

I get so many hits from this phrase that I was going to write an entry about how to make your own rice heating pad. Then I looked online and there are tons of sites explaining just that. If that’s what people wanted, they would have stopped there instead of at my site talking about them. What’s attracting them to me?

i2workout work, i2workout

I never gave you an update. I love i2Workout. It works much better on my computer than it does when I burn myself a CD. I’ve hooked up the laptop to the treadmill so that I can see the workout as it is progressing. Sometimes my treadmill doesn’t hear the command and it doesn’t change the way it’s supposed to, but the voice command always tells me what it should be, so I can just change it myself on those rare occasions.

The guy who made the program refunded the money I paid for the software because he liked my review of it. That makes me feel a little guilty because I really just was talking about it because it was easy for me to use and I was just so happy to be able to make my own iFit workouts. Then again, I’m happy to have the software for free, so it’s a strange feeling of ambivalence.

blonde levi 501   Sorry. I still have no porn here. Keep looking. There’s a ton of it out there and you don’t even have to pay to see it, but you’ll find none of it here.

It helps to live in a bubble. I haven’t kept up with the news, so it has taken me weeks to know of the deaths of each hostage. I stopped watching the news because I feel powerless. There is nothing I can do except vote against Bush in November, and even that is an exercise in futility because I live in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Utah. Our votes go Republican no matter how I vote.

People are dying and I am powerless to change it. There is nothing I can do to stop it. No matter how loud I squawked when this war started, none of the gung-ho guys listened. I imagined the families in Iraq receiving the wrath of our military and I dreaded the future. I could have never imagined the treatment of the prisoners in our own prisons. I could have never imagined this hostage business. It’s completely out of control.

Tony Blair says that the only reason they’re taking hostages is because they can’t beat our soldiers. The only weapon they have to use against us is our own televisions. I don’t know how I feel about that since I don’t watch the news. In fact, the only reason I’ve turned on the television in the last three months is to play Xbox.

In some respects, it feels selfish of me to hide my head in the sand. I should be informed. I should be shamed by my country. But information only makes me sad and I refuse to take responsibility for the actions of my country. I didn’t vote for him, even if my state did. My vote means nothing. My voice means nothing.

I’m not the only one who thinks my vote means nothing. There are no commercials for the either of the presidential candidates running in Utah. I only noticed this when we went to Las Vegas. I saw several commercials on the televisions at the gym in Las Vegas, but both presidential candidates are ignoring Utah. They don’t think my vote means anything either.

Even this blog entry seems like a waste. Why should I talk about the evil in the world when there is so much good around me? I have such beauty around me each day like cabbage butterflies, hummingbirds and dragonflies. A brood of spiders hatched in our house and we have been inundated with tiny spiders, not old enough to know to avoid the light bulb because it might be hot. I saw twenty baby spiders this morning. One of them singed his eight little legs on the light bulb in the hallway. How could something be wrong in the world when there are baby spiders to watch?

No time to talk about April Fool’s Day. I’ve got more interesting things to talk about than practical jokes.

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Hands down, the most searches hit me because I wrote the entry about how to quit soda. When I was quitting soda, there was no help on the Internet because there are so many herbal remedies trying to get your business. I guess my entry was the one voice that wasn’t trying to sell you anything. I hope it helped you guys.

cupcake, computer term for cupcake, #mormon cupcake   Ok, I’ll bite. What do these searches mean? Is “cupcake” a new slang for something that I wasn’t aware of before? Doing these searches taught me nothing I didn’t already know. Cupcakes are little cakes in paper cups. If there is a computer term for cupcake, I wasn’t able to find it and obviously neither were those poor searchers.

I did find a story about a guy that is using misspelled domain names to generate advertising dollars. This guy has registered thousands of domain names, each one housing thirty or forty pop-up ads. He makes a lot of money because of stupidity and poor typists. All the more reason to study up, learn to type and use Google instead of typing in what you think the domain name is. Cupcake was a hit because the guy registered a bunch of cupcake sites (i.e. Cupcake Party, Cupcake Patrol, etc.). I wonder if this is what those people were looking for. It doesn’t explain the Mormon thing, though. In fact, it makes me think that “cupcake” is some new slang for something pervy.

I found a really cool technical paper regarding The Cupcake Problem. I only understood the first page of this thing and it got all mathematical on me, so I stopped reading, but it showed me that there are people working on things that I never even conceived of. The Cupcake Problem is a study in which a younger child is given a task by an older sibling (who is in cahoots with the researcher). The older sibling says that they have just put some cupcakes in the oven and they need to be taken out in 30 minutes. It’s ok to keep playing on the X-Box, but you need to take out the cupcakes on time, got it? The researchers watch the younger child during that half hour, observing the number of times the child checks the clock. All of this has to do with calculating monitoring activities. It got really technical really quickly, but it showed me that there are cool people out there. Rock on, Paul Cohen, Marc Atkin and Eric Hansen.

I did find a funny site recreating the Janet Jackson fiasco in cupcake form. I found a news brief about a boy who drugged Mormon missionaries with cupcakes, but that was back in 2000. There was also a reference to the movie Orgazmo, in which a Mormon missionary is introduced to the porn industry. This movie was a hit at the underground theater here, but I never saw it. It sounded like it might be a little negative and I don’t really play that way. Apparently, “Cupcake” is the pet name for the missionary’s girlfriend back home. I wonder if that was it.

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />st john climacus, patron saint of obesity

Apparently, I’m not the only one looking for the Patron Saint of Obesity. I’ve had several hits with these search strings. Keep fighting the fight, searchers. It’s worth it.

%22gathering randomness%22

They found me on page 6 of the Google search. I don’t know if they found what they were looking for. These sorts of searches make me think that I don’t know what is going on. Do the percent signs mean anything? What about the number 22? The only reason I showed up is because there was a little note at the bottom of my entry about Gathering Randomness for the previous date. Is the percent sign some sort of wild card? Why didn’t they search for the number 42? I guess if they knew the meaning of the universe, they wouldn’t be searching.

bathroom exhaust fans stopped working

I have no idea what this person was looking for. I waded through seven pages of websites that were perfectly willing to tell me how to fix the problem. Maybe they were looking for someone who could fix their exhaust fans. Maybe my entry enticed him. This is how my entry looked at Google, “… for a second or two and then final darkness and an eerie quiet that I have never heard in that bathroom. The ever-turning exhaust fan had stopped turning. …” I didn’t know that my entry about Friday the Thirteenth would bring people because of the bathroom exhaust fan. How glamorous.

what does the dragonfly symbolize

Yes! Two people on this planet found my entry on dragonflies. They found my entry explaining exactly what I had been looking for. I had been wondering, “What does the dragonfly symbolize?” No single site was able to help me, but now, my entry is there for all those people in the future who want to know the same thing. Hint for the kids at home: dragonflies mean nothing or everything, depending on how superstitious you are and how much weed you smoke. Stay clean, kids.

iris/goddess

Honey, I think you were looking for Isis, not Iris.

That’s it for me. Let’s do this again next month!

I made the mistake of typing in some of the searches that brought readers to me. Someone looking for the phrase “drunk parties” ended up finding me, along with a million and one porn sites. I wasn’t even on the first twenty pages for that search. Someone looking for the phrase “skater punk boy pictures” found me on page eight of the Google search. Not even Avril Lavigne made the top five on that search. Porn, porn, porn.

We had parties that Nero would have been ashamed to attend. Ronnie Hawkins

The irony of all of this is now I’ll score even higher on things that I probably shouldn’t have a score for at all. I’ve said the words that brought the searches in addition to the word “porn” repeated several times. Do I need to guard my words so closely? If the words “drunk parties” brings up over twenty pages of porn, what would the words “poking a cheerleader” bring? I used those words last week. Oh, let me check. Only four pages of porn before I showed up.

How can I guard my words so that I won’t show up on anyone’s porn search? Is that possible? Maybe I’m just the kind of blunt woman whose words will be grouped with the unsavory and vulgar. What I need to say would only become more convoluted if I tried to guard each word. For all I know, the phrase “swarm of dragonflies” pulled up a bunch of porn too. No, I will say what I think in the way that it most naturally comes out of my fingers onto the keyboard.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. Lois McMaster Bujold, “A Civil Campaign”, 1999

Most importantly, it’s obvious these people weren’t looking for porn. They had pages of choices before my site to fulfill their fantasies. No, if they were looking for porn, the boring blurb underneath the name of my weblog wouldn’t have been enough to warrant a click. What were they looking for? Did they find it here? Should it even matter to me if they didn’t?

This is something I never had to deal with when I was putting my journal in a drawer. No one read it. No one found it while looking for erotica. No one found it at all. I can’t hide in the drawer anymore. If you were looking for hot lovin’ here, you’ll have to keep searching.

There are a slim number of people who don’t talk to me. They seem to be immune to my superpower. When a ride of more than five floors on an elevator is enough to hear the life story of a normal mortal, these people seem superhuman to me. I can know them for only a minute in the checkout line and recognize their immunity. What is worse is when I know them for years and they are still closed to me. Worse still, I have no stories about them.

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say. Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)

A typical story sounds like this: There was a woman that I worked with for three years at UBTL. She worked in the Histology department. They even put me in Histology temporarily when another girl went on vacation and I never got to know this woman. We played tennis together once and I learned no more than the fact that she had an antique typewriter stored in her closet and was wondering if she should sell it or give it away. It took me three years to learn that she had a typewriter in her closet that she never used and was unsure of how to dispose of it in an honorable manner. Three years?

There was a guy who worked in the sporting goods department at K-Mart when I worked there as a teen. He was a year younger than I was and he went to a different high school than I did. Even though he lived nearby (within skateboarding distance of my house), he went to Granger while I went to Kearns High. That’s all I can tell you about him. We had hours of lunches and breaks together in the few years that the two of us worked at that store, yet I couldn’t tell you one thing about him. He was must have been smart because he went from porter to the sporting goods department in a manner of a couple of months. That I learned just from observation. Anything else about his private life was a mystery to me. Years together and I learned nothing about him, when five minutes is usually enough to learn an entire life from a normal human.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence. Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims

Don’t tell me that these people are shy. The shy flock to me. I know shy. I married shy. I am friends with the shy and the outgoing alike. Shy people love to tell me their stories while their family members look on in amazement. Shy people confess things to me that their clergy would be surprised to hear. These people are not shy. Well, that’s a lie. These people are shy, but that isn’t their power of immunity. These people are so guarded that not even I can learn about them. That isn’t shy. That isn’t even uber-shy. That is another animal altogether.

I don’t believe these people fear me. It’s not like they are wary of the information that they will give me because I will hurt them with it. It’s not like they don’t trust me. It’s almost like they have no need to share. It is so rare when another human being is willing to listen to us that when most people find me, they want to talk until they are empty. It is only time constraints that stop them: the elevator opens, the lady behind the counter asks them to pay or their turn for a bathroom stall arrives. No, these people who don’t talk to me don’t fear me. They just don’t need to tell me their stories.

And what a shame that is because I would like to know their stories. Where are you, Sporting Goods Guy? Did you follow the typical path of a Utah Mormon boy? College, Mission, Marriage, More College, Job, Family, Bishopric? Maybe you were too smart and your dark night of the soul got the best of you. Maybe your path was College, Mission, More College, Loss of Faith, Grief and Separation from The Church? Are you grieving your life? Are you celebrating it? Where are you?

And what about you, Histology Nun? Were you ever married? If you were, what happened? If you weren’t, what about the one that got away? You worked at a dying biomedical testing laboratory. When they went under, where did you go? What is your story now? Did you go to a hospital? Did you go to the University of Utah? Did BYU hire you? Where are you and what is your life looking like now?

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time. Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881)

These people are like the dragonflies to me. I don’t know where they came from and I don’t know where they went. They were in my life for a brief moment and they didn’t deliver the message from the gods that they were supposed to give me. They didn’t tell me which of my habits were healthy and which were damaging. They flew and danced so quickly that I could barely see them when they were here. They remained silent when the world was screaming its stories to me.