On the way to screenwriting group on Tuesday, I twisted my right ankle. I was wearing my oh so comfy dankso clogs and mindlessly walking down the sidewalk to my car, fantasizing about something or other, when I felt my ankle buckle and then sharp pains shooting through my ankle. I do this all the time, so I didn't think anything of it. I even did a 45 minute workout later that night in guilt for eating like a pig vacation.

On Wednesday while getting out of the shower, I look down at my right ankle and I notice it's a little swollen but still I shrug it off, thinking the swelling will go down during the day. I even went on my usual two mile walk at work during my morning and afternoon breaks.

On Wednesday night I'm at my chiropractor and he starts freaking out because my ankle is really swollen and he tells me I need to ice it. He keeps asking me if it hurts and I say no, it only hurts when I bend it or stretch forward. Still, he freaks out some more and begs me to ice my ankle.

I spent the rest of the night watching my Ken Burns' Jazz series which I taped last year with my ankle elevated and an ice pack on it. Still no pain.

Not today. Today my right ankle is killing me so I have a brace on it that I remembered I had. My left leg and knee are now also hurting because I'm walking funny and not putting that much weight on my right leg, so my left leg is taking all my weight and it's protesting in a serious way.

I can't believe this! I've never had my ankle swell like this before. So weird. I feel old and like a total invalid. Is this what I'll have to look forward to when I grow old? If it is, I'm definitely going to find a way to die before my god gets totally messed up.

Then this morning, I had a dream about Nazis. I don't think I've had a dream about Nazis since high school and college, when I was into my Holocaust phase. In my previous dreams, I was always running from the Nazis and they were always chasing me. They never caught me though and in some of the dreams, I even joined the resistance.

In this new dream, I'm in some kind of prison or concentration camp and we're putting on some kind of play or circus for the prisoners and the Nazis are watching, but it's really just a front for some big escape we're planning. How strange to have a Nazi dream after all these years and to be caught and in a prison camp? I wonder if this means something. At least I was trying to escape and I looked pretty healthy.

Maybe I had this dream because I finally watched that italian movie "A Beautiful Life" a few weeks ago. I had no idea it was about a Nazi concentration camp. Or maybe it's all those years of watching Hogan's Heroes as a child coming back to haunt me. I'm not sure.

So today I'm not walking and I'm bummed, so I'm eating my new comfort food, lentils and rice and tabouleh. I love this dish and it's part of new kosher levitical diet so I can eat as much of it as I want.

I'm bored at work today. I'm supposed to be working on some project that's due next week, but it's very hard to do and I don't feel like doing it. Instead, I'm surfing the net trying to find a video store that carries Ken Burns' Civil War and Baseball series.

A friend of mind recommended I read "Confederates in the Attic" while I was on vacation in West Virginia and I did and I loved it. The book made me want to watch Ken Burns' Civil War series. I think I am slowly getting into a civil war kick. I even bought a civial war book at a library book sale in West Viriginia. The name of the book is "A Stillness at Appomattox" by Bruce Catton. I definitely want to read all of Shelby Foote's books too. In fact, I want to read all the Civil War books, the good ones at least.

I've been thinking I will use the Confederacy as a model for my Elf Kingdom series . The Confederacy was basically a rural/aggrarian region making war with the industrialized north. Unlike the confederacy, the Elf Kingdom people were enslaved after they lost the war and I can use the black slave stories of the south as a model for the elf people enslavement. I'll use my knowledge of Holocaust history too, so I'll probably combine both the black slave south stories with the jewish concentration camp stories and come up with a totally new enslavement story for my elf people. I have a feeling that enslavement of human beings by other human beings is the same, no mattter what the time and culture.

In Confederates in the Attic, Shelby Foote said something like the worst thing, the tragedy of the civil war was the North freeing the black slaves. The idea of freeing the black slaves was a grand one and a right idea, but then the north didn't have a plan for what to do with black slaves and left them on their own. We're still suffering the effects of this failure. This point was reinforced in the first episode of Ken Burns' Jazz series. The narrator of episode 1 said that after reconstruction, the northern republicans and the southern democrats made a deal and out of that deal came Jim Crow laws and segregation. The narrator then went on to say that segragation would rule the south for the next 50 years and with segregation came regular lynchings of black people and the emergence of the Klu Klux Klan.

This fact made me sad, very sad. It made me think that the Civil War was all for nothing. So many people died in that war. In the north 1 out of 10 northern soldiers died in the Civil War. But for the south, the death toll was worse. 1 out of every 4 southern men died during the civil war. And all for nothing because about 20 years later, Jim Crow laws took slavery's place.

Interestingly enough the deal was brokered by Northern republicans since Lincoln was a republican too. Didn't that movie "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" make a point about the betrayal of the south by the southern democrats?

And when the Jim Crow laws were finally dismantled in the south and integration took place, the public school system went from okay to really, really bad. History is very complicated isn't it? When you do one good thing, along comes another bad thing that is sometimes even worse.

I'm probably the only woman in America who doesn't like "Sex in the City". I don't have cable premium channels so I don't watch it, and from what I've seen of it, I didn't like it. It's boring! Why would I want to watch skinny women dressed in what looks like very ugly clothes and shoes and their totally boring lives?

Honestly, I tried to watch it and I did try to relate to it, but I couldn't and I love clothes and fashion and have been a serious Vogue reader since I was 13 years old. I think their clothes are pretty trashy and those shoes! Do they have jobs? I wouldn't be taken seriously in any fortune 500 company meeting worth their salt if I walked in wearing shoes like that.

But maybe that's the difference. I actually work for a living and spent time climbing the corporate ladder where I competed with men and sometimes other women for position and power. If I behaved at all or dressed like any of the girls in Sex and the City, I wouldn't be sitting in my cushy office right now in my cushy office job.

I guess people like watching fantasy shows, but isn't that what soap operas are for? And didn't people get enough of wanting to watch fantasy shows with old shows like Dallas, Falcon Crest and Dynasty?

The pink section on Sunday had all these articles on the Sex and the City girls. BORING! This is one cultural phenomenon I'm glad I'm missing and I don't think I'm alone.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from screenwriting group tonight and I heard this voice that sounded to me like Robert Smith from The Cure and so of course I fell in love with the guy's voice and song.

The name of the group is called Dashboard Confessional and the name of the song is called "Screaming Infidelities".

You gotta love a line like this one "Your hair, it's everywhere. Screaming infidelities And taking its wear." I was of course, singing along in my car.

My journal entries from the first days of my West Virginia trip. The tenses are all off. This is what happens when you write late at night when you're on vacation. I'm too lazy to fix it. Besides it's a good exampe of why you should never try to write seriously while on vacation. Vacation is about having fun and relaxing and not writing. Unless of course, it's a working vacation, then well, that's different. Some of it may seem repetitive.

More Day 1 - July 1
We rented a mini suv instead of a compact car. Thought that a chevy tracker would somehow look better on country roads than a Hyundai. For $3 more a day, it seemed a good bargain. I was bummed that we had virginia license plates instead of west virginia ones. Didn't want the locals to think we were tourists.

The people at the rental car place call Charleston "Charley-West", we think to distinguish it from the other Charleston in the Carolinas.

Day 2
My friend and I take a walk to see horses on someone's farm. It's along the country roads. This is my first real view of West Virginia. The road is windy and the hills are rolling. We feed the horses grass. How bucolic!

My friend's aunt was flying into the Greenbriar Airport and we go to meet her. It's raining on the way there. One of those emergency alert services message comes on. Only it's not a test; it was real. My friend and I had never heard a real emergency alert service message before. The message said there was a thunderstorm approaching with heavy rain and hail and to not be afraid to pullover. The message said to be alert until 2:30. We don't know if it's for 2:30 pm or 2:30 am. The car clock said 2 pm. We both looked at each other both saying we'd never heard a real emergency alert service message before. My friend tells me that we needed to count the seconds between the thunder noises because the number of seconds will tell us how many miles away the storm was. We stop and count and it's 10 seconds, but we still aren't sure if the storm is heading our way and if we were driving into it. We see other cars driving in the direction of the airport, so we decide to move on. The emergency alert services message comes on every 5 minutes.

We get to the airport and the plane we are waiting for is delayed. Finally the plane lands and my friend's aunt is okay. She didn't know why her plane was circling. Guess they don't tell the passengers what's really going on.

Later than night, we go to a brass concert at Carnegie Hall in Lewisburg. The concert is supposed to be outdoors but because of the rain, it's moved indoors. It's the event of the evening in town and many townspeople show up. Afterwards, we head over to a small bar call the Hobnob. They tell us it's the hippest bar in town, in Lewisburg West Virginia that is. Four old white guys play jazz in the front. They tell us the literati of the town hang out there. The bar is full of locals and young kids. There is even a table full of women wearing hats like in The Divine YaYa Sisterhood book. There are about 30 people in the bar and they tell us it's a swinging night there.

Day 3
Another walk this time on my friend's sister's property. She lives in a holler. From the air, it looks like a wedge shaped strip of land in the forest. We see deer, possums and the beaver pond that the pesky beavers made when they tried to flood the farm out. There's a barn on the property full of hay and another one where the cows come to escape the heat. My friend's sister rents her land out to a farmer for his cows to graze. My friend thinks she sees a snake. She calls me over to look but I told her I didn't need to see a snake. We pick green apples to take to the horses. The horses love the small green apples.

Next, we drive to my friend's mother and stepdad's property which is beside Droop Mountain. They live up on the next mountain over. The farm is a 150 acre parcel of land. It's beautiful up there and they live in a two bedroom house that they built themselves. We walk around and talk and eat dinner. My friend and her family talk about old times. I think about the joy of my not so close dysfunctional family.

Day 4
It's the Fourth of July and we're invited to my friend's sister's boyfriend's cousins' house in another small town called Renick for a holiday lunch. He says he's obtained bikes for us so we can bike along the Greenbriar trail and then go swimming in the river. The Greenbriar trail is 76 miles. We bike about three miles and then swim in a muddy murky river. We see lightning on the ridge in front of us and we worry about the lightning hitting the water, so we head back.

At the picnic, we have home made bread and butter pickles which are divine and authentic west virginia barbecue pork. We also have two different kinds of potato salad and a baked bean dish. The meals is a very authentic West Virginia type of meal. Since I don't normally eat this kind of food, I eat way too much and ended up sitting in a chair on the lawn outside bloated from my gorging. Everyone else seems to have done the same, so I'm not embarrassed.

We hear the Shrub is in West Virginia that day giving a speech in some town called Ripley. We speculate that maybe he came here in case the terrorists bomb DC. There's a former bunker nearby. Maybe he wanted to be close to the bunker. The whole point of our trip was to be somewhere safe where the terrorists wouldn't dream of bombing and the Shrubmeister comes here. So much for planning.

To see fireworks we drive to the Greenbriar Resort. The local people park their cars along the road and invade the golf course. The Greenbriar resort security patrol is there so the riffraff like us don't get too close to the hotel. My friend and I settle on a spot, which turns out is directly in front of the fireworks launcher. We're also close enough to the hotel to hear the music they're playing and the sound of people clapping. The fireworks show, surprisingly, lasts half an hour. The Greenbriar must have lots of money. Some of the fireworks are like strobe lights and we're definitely too close because we have to shield our eyes. We're so close that we can see the dud fireworks that don't go off and crash to the ground instead. The local townspeople are there with their coolers and lawnchairs. Children run around the perfectly manicured golf course while the security patrol looks on.

Day 5
Rest day. Our hostess made us a typical West Virginia breakfast. I had cheesey corn grits for the first time. It tastes like cream of wheat only grainier. We also had the totally fatty bacon that people in San Francisco would never dare admit they eat and crave and homemade fresh out of the oven biscuits. Our hostess is known for her baked products. We sit around and laze in the West Virginia sunshine, since the storm has since disappeared.

Later, we go to a party in Lewisburg that our hostess is invited to. The party is at a country type mansion and it's obvious that the people there have alot of money, since there's a brand spanking new grand piano in one of the living rooms. The people pretty much look like they could live in California and are at some hot summer party out in the suburbs, that is until they open their mouth and speak to you. California we are definitely not in.

Since we have a 45 minute windy road drive back home, I decide not to drink. The drive normally makes me a little nauseous with all its twists and turns and I could see myself having to hurl my cookies if I drank too much. Besides the weather is very muggy now and it's just too hot to drink.