We here at SUC...

are committed to boring journal entries.... blah blah blah. I just noticed that my blog becomes the word suc when abbreviated. How nice.

Strangely enough, this is quite contrary to the origins of the Seattle Umbrella Conspiracy.

About a year ago I was downtown on a business day in late fall and the skies opened up and a deluge of quite literally biblical proportions began. The funny thing about Seattle is that it sprinkles, mists, and drizzles, but it hardly ever rains. It was chilly and people were completely soaked but about half of them still met my eyes and gave me a smile as if to say, "Well, would you look at that."

I, luckily, had brought an umbrella. About 40% of people had an umbrella, and the rest were huddled under the cherry trees. As a group of us stood waiting to cross I walked up to a stranger and offered to share my umbrella. The surprised man accepted and we stood grinning like idiots. Then another guy with an umbrella offered to share his. And soon three umbrellas had six people under them.

That's when I had this day dream. In Japan you could buy cheap plastic umbrellas for less than a dollar. If each of us could just keep a cheap umbrella in our trunks, we could give it away. That could mean something. I know it wouldn't stop world hunger or cure cancer, but maybe it could make this craptastic world just a little better.

It's like my obsession in college with the contagious smile. When you smile at someone and then they smile and sometimes it sticks. I love that concept. In college I actually kept tally and graphed progress of smile to smile growth. I used to think that maybe if I smiled at someone, they might smile at someone else and then they would smile at someone else and on and on. Then maybe that 6 second smile that I started could last for days.

Sorry to be such a Pollyanna, but that's where the name came from. Back to bitching and moaning tomorrow.