of jem and sirens

My lifelong lack of piercings is sometimes met with shock. This has motivated me to dig up an image of the earrings I always wanted as a little girl -- those which gave Jem from the tremendously popular 80's cartoon Jem and the Holograms her remarkable... musical faculties? The earrings are pretty hideous in retrospect, although I swear I remember them being a pretty sparkly dark pink. Perhaps that image is just a fantasy of childhood formed in retrospect. I remember so little of the cartoon that entranced me for so long. The only scene I remember from any episode at all (I even forgot about The Misfits, their antagonists) is the one in which her earrings end up in a Japanese museum on display as an ancient artifact, no doubt thanks to The Misfits' schemes. As a child I supposed that, however unlikely this appeared to my untrustworthy sensibilities, if it was shown on TV (in a cartoon, no less), it could really happen. Television was the authority on what was possible in real life.

The cartoons I watched as a child have all blended together into a single stage, but I watched them over such a long period of time that they really could/should be divided into stages. I didn't even remember the name of Jem's cartoon by the fifth grade until Sophia named it for me, and since then (for over a decade) I have wondered on occasion whether she was right. To think that I didn't bother to check until now, yet I still remember the question.

Remember Mighty Max? Definitely one of my favorites. I was reminded of the owl, Odin, when I looked up the etymology of "Wednesday" on Sunday. It comes from Old English Wodnesdaeg, named after the Germanic god Odin. This is news to me, and further investigation of the days of week will undoubtedly yield more blog entries. I am thoroughly enjoying this life-of-the-mind reflective learning absorbing reviewing writing moment in my existence.

Today I awoke to the haunting wail of sirens. They ascended in spirals of pitch for an impossibly long time, and though I tried to convince myself that I could ignore whatever Dutch drill was going on, I finally stumbled out of bed thinking the city must have burst into conflagration.

The clock told me it was Monday noon. In Mr. Himberg's class at Hoover, we had always heard the testing of the sirens on Mondays at noon. And the city does it here too, only, as I began to remember groggily, the sirens must be for flooding. Entire towns in Zeeland have been flooded in disastrous breaches before. Last year, Kees drove us past a tower that was all that survived from a seaside town. An eerie sight.