She Does Her Crying in Private: Part II

People keep asking what's up post-retirement.

Uncomfortable confessing to volunteerism, the standard reply is, 'working at a hospital.'

--doubling as a PTSD reaction to serving chronics in the way our Lenten guru D-Day says she was once accused of being "eaten up with pride and self-love."

You own your guests via an insider's knowledge of their tragedies.

Larger ramifications are politcal, tempered, at best, per D-Day, who "can look back on the early religious fervor which underlay my radicalism and finally saved me."

Yet another refuge is cirmudgeonism,

--or career enhancement for David Cameron, who upon his son's death, the NY Times reports, found "those insights lent a powerful humanity," to a politician, "who is Eton and Oxford educated and his wife the daughter of a viscount."

--or redemption for Big Brother racist Jade Goody, per the AP, once "the actual posterchild for British boorishness," now determined, "to spend her dying days in the spotlight; her frankness largely winning the media over."

After it becomes known BL fathered a disabled child, and DH lost one, their lunatic rants, or eccentricities, soften.

Can we attribute, then, Jerry Lewis' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award speech, to a defensive curmudgeonism, or is he just a plain and simple a-hole?

It's possible to land, undefined, larger than yourself, dispensible.

Joseph Ellis maintains George Washington's "Mt. Vernon correspondence allowed him to retain a zone of personal control amidst an increasingly, discordant political world that seemed to defy control altogether -- the last sliver of his private personality never made the trip."

--never making the trip: this, the second lesson of Lent.