Karen's stories have appeared in *Newsweek*, *The Christian Science Monitor*, and *Pack and Paddle Magazine* and she's the author of *Are You Taking Me Home Now?: Adventures with Dad*, *The Second Hundred Years: Further Adventures with Dad*, *The Brush of Angel Wings*, *The Madcap Christian Scientist* series, *A Poem Sits on my Windowsill*, *Finding the Rainbows: Lessons from Dad and Mom*, and co-author of *The Humoristian Chronicles: A Most Unusual Fellowship*. Her photos are featured in the spring 2014 edition of the *Bellingham Review*, and the "Photos from the Field" page of the April/May 2017, December/January 2018-2019, April/May 2019, and June/July 2020 issues of of *Mother Earth News*. Her photos can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/60803140@N06/
Her books can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Karen-Molenaar-Terrell/e/B0044P90RQ/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1312060042&sr=8-
Ohmygawd. I’m laughing so hard I have tears pouring down my face. Ohmygawd.
I lost my phone in my office upstairs and asked Scott to call my number for me. He couldn’t find HIS phone at first. He went out to his car to look for it. Meanwhile, I came back downstairs and decided to call my cellphone on our landline phone. Before I could dial the number, though, I heard a phone ringing somewhere near me. I thought maybe it was Scott’s phone. I started turning around and around in circles trying to detect where the ringing was coming from.
Scott came in at this point. He’d found his phone in the car, and dialed my phone before he came back inside. The ringing I heard was my own phone. But where the heck was it?
And then Scott says… he says… ohmygawd, this is even better than finding my glasses on top of my head… Scott says, “It’s on your ass. You’ve got your phone in your back pocket.”
Today may you love the hell out of the world. May you open the floodgates of Love and let Love water the weary hearts athirst for kindness and caring. May you refuse to allow fear and hate to steal your hope and courage. May the bigots, bullies, and busybodies be transformed by your open hearts and good will to all. May the stodgy, stuffy, and stingy be transformed by your irrepressible joy. May you bring laughter to those in sorry need of a good laugh, and hope to those ascared of the future.
Wants upon a thyme their lived a we buoy named Peat. Peat liked two run threw the fourest inn the mourning when the mist was still lifting from the earth and the day creatures were just waking up. Hee wood all weighs run two the top of the hill too watch the sun rise over the land below hymn.
Won mourning hee saw TOO suns rise over the land.
(Eye am now going two end this won like every student at sum point in grade school has ended an impossible story.)
Gone are the days of pencil and paper – of quick mental computation and physical maps. Now we depend upon calcuators and google, on thumbs and updates and apps. And with each update my computer seems to get slower – I think right now I could beat it in a race to find the answers I need with greater speed using pencil and paper and maps.
I have already voted in the midterm elections. And now I sit, cocooned in the recliner, watching Hallmark Christmas movies. There are no political ads on the Hallmark channel. I feel like I’m visiting a faraway foreign land. I’m being gently anesthetized by sparkling Christmas glitter, close-ups of pleasant faces, and an endless stream of background music sung by sweet-voiced sopranos, accompanied by a pianist playing only major chords.
I think I can watch Hallmark movies all night.
I tell my husband this, and he says, “Oh God.”
And then I mention to my husband, that the smile the leading man just gave his romantic lead was a little creepy, wasn’t it? And… all these characters in this movie were invited to this inn by an unknown benefactor… doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a murder mystery?
My husband and I begin creating an alternative plot for this movie. The husband says that “Chucky” will make an appearance. I say there’re going to be Christmas clowns – and not the cheery kind. And, I say, the Hallmark music is going to fade into something sinister with lots of minor chords.
We have fun with this for a while. And then I get back to the business of finishing this Hallmark movie. It turns out the leading man isn’t a serial killer, after all. The leading lady finds love. No scary clowns make an appearance. The benefactress has a happy connection to the other characters. Everybody survives. The major chords continue to the end. All ends well.
Another Hallmark movie begins. I make it about five minutes before I reach my Hallmark movie saturation point and need to turn the TV off. I’m ready to return to reality now. But I feel strangely refreshed – like I’ve just returned from a vacation on a happy, hermetically-sealed island.
A thank you to all my friends who’ve gotten me into the wordle word craze. What would my life be without you?
Thanks to all of you I now close my eyes to sleep and see wordle words rolling behind my eyelids instead of counting sheep
I wake in the middle of the night with wordle words in my head – “sight, tight, write, fight, light, might, right” – is “shite” a wordle word? I ask as I lie in bed.
One of you mentioned “octordle” last week and I felt myself getting ascared – What next? I asked myself in a panic – will there be Spanish wordles and French ones? Oh, merde. -Karen Molenaar Terrell
There’s this great show on Netflix called Late Night with Emma Thompson. Katherine Newbury, the character Thompson plays, might easily be labeled a “Karen.” She’s white, middle-aged, entitled, assertive and snooty. Like every other human, she’s flawed. But her character is also likeable because she’s smart, funny, brave, honest, and vulnerable. And, in the end, she has the ability to look at herself and change.
In the movie Thompson plays a late night talk show host. And, as I watched this movie, it occured to me that, in reality, there aren’t actually ANY middle-aged white female late-night talk show hosts, are there? There aren’t any middle-aged white women representing middle-aged white women. There’s no opportunity for middle-aged white women to make fun of THEMSELVES because the late-night airwaves are controlled by middle-aged white men, doing that for them. And so we have these men – most of whom I actually like and respect most of the time – but men, nonethess – entitled and privileged men – who smugly joke about “Karens” and belittle the struggles of those dealing with alopecia, and deride strong women who have the guts to talk to the manager (and that’s another thing – most managers are MEN, right?!!!).
My favorite scene in Late Night is where Mindy Kaling’s character, just hired as a writer for the show, tells Katherine Newbury that she’s “a little too old and a little too white.” And they set about using that to do a recurring bit where Katherine Newbury plays “The White Savior.” I love that. I can relate to it. That scene in the movie gave me an opportunity to laugh at myself. And there’s a world of difference in being given the opportunity to laugh at yourself, and being used as a target of ridicule by others, you know?
There’s no balance in late night comedy right now. There are no middle-aged female late-night talk show hosts who can keep the privileged middle-aged white male talk show hosts on their toes. We’ve got a Jimmy and another Jimmy, a Bill, a Stephen and a Seth – and thank goodness we have a Trevor! – but we don’t have a Katherine or a Susan, a Debbie, a Jenny, or a Karen. And there SHOULD be! Dammit. There should be someone representing the laughable AND the admirable in the White Women of Middle Age.
humoristianity 