Dwarf Planet in Purple

This won't be the most coherent post I'm ever going to write.

I knew that the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination would winnow itself down to two or three people, but the big culling happened so quickly. Whew. The pundits will be flying blind because the polls can't have caught up yet. As someone on Slate.com wrote, we have to wait for actual votes, just like the 1950s!

Also, my favorite political blog, Electoral-vote.com, started today with this quip: "If you are a fan of white men in their seventies, have we got the Democratic field for you." Yikes. Sanders, Bloomberg, and Biden aren't even Boomers -- they are pre-Boomers, Silent Generation, whatever.

I have been intrigued by how U.S. presidents born in the 20th century have been clustered in terms of their birth years. The first decade of the 1900s produced one president: LBJ. The 1910s saw four presidents: Reagan, Nixon, Ford, and JFK. (Yes, I know how Ford and LBJ became president, but let's look at the fact that they were presidents rather than the circumstances that brought them there.) The only two presidents born in the 1920s -- Carter and the first Bush -- were both born in 1924. Then there is a HUGE gap in birth dates until 1946, when *three* presidents were born: Clinton, the second Bush and the orange dumpster fire. No chief executives yet were born in the 1950s, and Obama, birth year 1961, is still an outlier.

I know some of this "clumpiness" is the product of external events. Obviously, service in World War II was a considerable boost to political careers, starting with Eisenhower, the last president born in the 19th century. So it's no surprise that the Greatest Generation is overrepresented in the list of White House residents as well as failed nominees from McGovern to Bob Dole. (I know that the "Greatest Generation" is defined by WWII service, but Pew's definition of birth dates -- 1901 to 1927 -- means that the latest Greatest Generation members could have been the children of the earliest members, which seems to fly in the face of the whole notion of a "generation." But then again, the WWII draft did apply to men ages 18 to 44....) Likewise, the American birth rate dipped during the 1930s and early 1940s, so there are somewhat fewer people in that age range to begin with, never mind now that they are all old.

But still, how the heck did we end up with *three* presidents born in the first year of the Boom, the generation presumably most hated by all the others?

And while I know I am a Boomer too, I find it hard to believe that I am in the same generation as those three presidents. In my mind I split the Boomer generation around halfway through, at birth year 1955. Why? Because the Vietnam-era military draft ended in January 1973, just as the 1955 cohort was starting to turn 18. The older Boomers were shaped by the very real threat of being forced to fight in a miserable war (or their brothers and boyfriends were, if they were female). The younger Boomers did not have to face that threat and were too young to march in the streets, drop acid, and roll around in the mud at Woodstock (though we saw that stuff on TV).

But I am really digressing from Super Tuesday. I *told* you this post wouldn't be coherent.

If I could vote today, I'd cast my ballot for Elizabeth Warren. But I have to wait more than a month to do that, because I live in Maryland, and who knows whether support for Warren will mean anything by April 28.

Last month, while going through some of my books, I found one of my two copies of Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach. (Yes, I have *two* copies, with two different covers. Fancy that.) Since the year was about to start, I thought it might be a route worth pursuing for my mental health in these trying times, even if it does read in places like something preciously, pretentiously straight out of the 1990s School of Self-Esteem.

I haven't done the gratitude journal *every* night, but when I can, I do (in my own handwritten diary, the latest volume of which began in February 2008 -- that's how much I have switched to online journaling). There have been a couple of nights when I was too tired, a couple of nights when I was feeling crappy about myself and/or my bank account, a couple of nights when I just plain forgot. I suppose it will end up being a helpful reminder of the good things about my life (because, honestly, my life IS mostly good except for the lack of a steady income).

There are a couple of indications of how times have changed since the book was first published in 1995. January 28th and 29th cover "The Illustrated Discovery Journal" and "Your Personal Treasure Map." Both are supposed to be exercises involving paper, photo-filled magazines, scissors, and glue. Nowadays, of course, people just use Pinterest. :-)

Today I bought my first jegging.

Now I feel every one of my 56 years. I feel like the old lady who buys a super-basic cellphone to keep in touch with her grandchildren and brags about her new purchase to all her senior friends.

Apparently, "jeggings" (plural) is already in the dictionary. And retail people like to shorten "pants" to "pant" and "jeans" to "jean," so "jeggings" similarly becomes "jegging."

I like the way my jegging looks on me. It actually fits my weird proportions (fat belly and butt, comparatively skinny legs) better than the thrift-store jeans I'm wearing now. But the word itself is just so ugly. Just because new words are being added to the English language doesn't mean I have to like them.

Back in January I bought the Day Runner two-page-per-day calendar set to go with the FranklinCovey compact leather binder a church friend gave to me. But not all the pages fit into the binder at once, so I've been adding them in as the year progresses.

So today I grab the next stack of pages, which is supposed to be July through September ... but it's October to December.

So I have TWO sets of October-to-December pages, but NONE for July-to-September.

And I know I will not be able to find the register receipt for this long-ago Staples purchase ... so what the hell do I do now??