There were all of these news items on the radio today about the Republicans taking over the House of Representatives, and between bouts of just Turning Off the Radio, I kept yelling answers to the question, "What will the Republicans do now?"
My answers included:
Screw over the poor.
Institute REAL death panels, just like in Arizona!
Deny climate change.
Start tattooing immigrants.
Be totally stupid.
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!!
All in all, not the most productive news-listening day for me. Luckily, I wasn't in the car that much, and thus only listened to the radio sporadically.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
The Cat Is Better Now
I love my kitten—who is not a kitten at all but a three-year-old cat—with a love that is completely out of proportion to the fact that she is a cat. I got her when I was 39, right when it became really really clear that I really really wasn't going to ever have children, and she has an endearing ever-kittenish personality that worked on me to make me love her, as I just said, disproportionately. Last week, she was sick with something that (despite Very Expensive Tests) remains a mystery, but had ratcheted up her temperature to almost 105°. She wouldn't eat or drink or be happy. But, after a course of antibiotics, she is all better, which is so relieving that I feel dizzy. Here is a picture of her:
She's gone back to crying for pets, and running around, and being ridiculous and my life is thus much improved and I'm grateful to my vet, despite the expense, and I'm weirdly grateful to HER for being kind enough to get better.
Oops!
Only the third day in, and I already missed a day. The reason: I was so irritable for the first half of the day that Everything Single Thing felt like sandpaper. Then Anja and I took a 6-mile hike with the intensity and fervor of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Then I was pretty much incoherent for the rest of the evening. Today, I shall do better.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
This Poem Comes to Me This Time of Year
Perhaps it's cheating, but today's post is a poem by Helen Pinkerton, c. 2002
Nature Note: The California Poison Oak
Dry summers flaw the leaf to a rose flame
Where, as a vine, it seems to flicker higher
Than live-oaks it consumes, or where it leaps
As a free-standing shrub or tree—ablaze
In wild-oat hay fields. Yet, with winter come,
The stems shrink back and almost disappear
In sinuous tangles, while a few white drupes
That look like snowberries hang to trick the eyes.
Nothing will warn but old experience
The ignorant damp hand that comes to dig
In winter rain the dormant trillium:
Seeking to bring a wild spring beauty home
It finds, as parasitic as a drug,
Pain stinging flesh that brushed the stems but once.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Fun-a-Day
Last year for Fun-a-Day I did an Explore-a-Day, and then printed out photos of my explores and fastened them to some grape stakes along with some words written onto tea-dyed gift tags. It turned out okay. Mom did Leaf-a-Day, wherein she pressed a leaf or leaves each day, then mounted them on paper and made a mobile. It was cool.
This year, Mom is doing Recipe-a-Day, in which she is rewriting her recipes onto new cards. She's quite exercised by the whole idea, and had it planned months ago. I, on the other hand, just figured out that in the interest of writing, a skill I fear I am losing (if I ever had it, really) I am going to do a Post-a-Day. I don't know if anyone will read them, but that's not the point.
So, random thought for New Year's Day: as I listen to my various public radio podcasts, I keep hearing a sponsorship message about the new Chevrolet Volt, with the tagline, "It's More Car Than Electric." My reaction, every single time is, "No, it's not."
I like this person's take on the slogan: "Maybe 'The electric car you can just put gas in on those days when you’re not giving a crap about the environment' was too long."
Friday, November 20, 2009
Kurgan-Teppa, Part One
Maybe it's strange to have waited so many months to write about my trip, but I was in Tajikistan in May and June, and it was...fairly indescribable. Therefore, describing it? Difficult.
Kurgan-Teppa is also spelled Qurghonteppa or Kurganteppa. Or Қурғонтеппа in Tajik. Formerly known as Курган-Тюбе (Kurgan-Tyube) in Soviet times. Don't ask where my particular hyphenated spelling comes from, because I don't actually know.
We drove through the city, then south, past mixed flocks of sheep and goats being herded along the road, over hills green as Scotland ("Fuck Scotland," I said), where men, women, and children used scythes to cut the grass, laying down another shade of green in squares and rectangles, sometimes on improbable slopes that seemed to threaten to dump the harvesters off into the valleys.
The grass packed on donkeys, or on bicycles, or in the trunks and backseats of cars, or piled onto square two-wheeled metal wagons, pulled by horses, or donkeys, or men, or boys. Mud towns, with corrugated tin roofs, in the distance or, twice or three times, surrounding the two-lane highway. The highway like a road and a farm road and a trail and a sidewalk all at once. The towns all shades of cream and ivory and tan and light brown, with the women's gowns and scarves flashes of color, vivid and strange.
A choikhana with tapchans on both sides of a small steep arroyo, seemingly advertising itself with a few abandoned tent frames over empty tapchans, set a hundred meters before the real teahouse.
In a village, a whole empty bazaar, with concrete-and-tin stalls and frames for sun shades, and tables and places for tables. Is it a weekly bazaar? Does it fill up? Or is there nothing to sell; does everything get sent on to the capital?
At a curve in the road, a line of brightly-dressed (always brightly-dressed) women, each sitting at a little table, each displaying the same small selection of sodas and snacks. Why there? And how does one choose which woman, that day, will take one's money?
A mural on the face of the road cutting, with an eagle and a deer and some nature. Very fetching, but what is it meant to tell us?
We get to Kurgan-Teppa, and pass a tractor--old, spare, awesone--on a pedestal, backed by a park with a collection of arching white cement pieces making a vaguely half-egg-shaped dingus. A monument to the greatness of the TRACTOR, a monument to nothing, as I have only seen the fields being worked by hand, groups of men, women, and children using hoes and shovels, stooping or crouching, working acres by hand, all by hand, the stupidest use of human labor imaginable. While at the moment what appears to be the only thing that the Industrial Revolution did to really, materially, improve people's lives is to make a tractor. Then make tractors.
No fuel? No parts? Just no damn tractors? What's the issue? That would be my NGO: Get the People Tractors. Give them a fuel allowance. Train tractor mechanics. Smuggle in the parts or pay the bribes and keep doing it over and over and over because each hour of working the fields by hand is another hour without rest, literacy, or (so I imagine, barreling by in our fancy Lada Niva four-wheel drive) hopefulness.
Dogtiredness.
Never mind. Tractors can't take away dogtiredness and no doubt the hours freed from the fields would be focused anew, to new back-breaking chores.
Neal Stephenson writes that, "In the real world--Planet Earth, Reality--there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s." That's the choice. I have other choices but my place is so privileged that the spot I take up cannot be doubled. The only way to free my spot would be for me to leave that spot, which I cannot do, because even were I to become a Tajik fieldhand, I would still carry my place of privilege with me; I would be choosing to act downtrodden.
Only when I die will my place be empty, but when that happens, that place will not be available to a Tajik fieldhand. No, it'll go to a nice infant, born of Western parents in a clean Western hospital. Maybe being born in a place with modern sanitation is the initiating mark of privilege. Maybe clean water and disinfectants are the baptismal fluids, holy, altering.
Kurgan-Teppa is also spelled Qurghonteppa or Kurganteppa. Or Қурғонтеппа in Tajik. Formerly known as Курган-Тюбе (Kurgan-Tyube) in Soviet times. Don't ask where my particular hyphenated spelling comes from, because I don't actually know.
We drove through the city, then south, past mixed flocks of sheep and goats being herded along the road, over hills green as Scotland ("Fuck Scotland," I said), where men, women, and children used scythes to cut the grass, laying down another shade of green in squares and rectangles, sometimes on improbable slopes that seemed to threaten to dump the harvesters off into the valleys.The grass packed on donkeys, or on bicycles, or in the trunks and backseats of cars, or piled onto square two-wheeled metal wagons, pulled by horses, or donkeys, or men, or boys. Mud towns, with corrugated tin roofs, in the distance or, twice or three times, surrounding the two-lane highway. The highway like a road and a farm road and a trail and a sidewalk all at once. The towns all shades of cream and ivory and tan and light brown, with the women's gowns and scarves flashes of color, vivid and strange.
A choikhana with tapchans on both sides of a small steep arroyo, seemingly advertising itself with a few abandoned tent frames over empty tapchans, set a hundred meters before the real teahouse.
In a village, a whole empty bazaar, with concrete-and-tin stalls and frames for sun shades, and tables and places for tables. Is it a weekly bazaar? Does it fill up? Or is there nothing to sell; does everything get sent on to the capital?
At a curve in the road, a line of brightly-dressed (always brightly-dressed) women, each sitting at a little table, each displaying the same small selection of sodas and snacks. Why there? And how does one choose which woman, that day, will take one's money?
A mural on the face of the road cutting, with an eagle and a deer and some nature. Very fetching, but what is it meant to tell us?
We get to Kurgan-Teppa, and pass a tractor--old, spare, awesone--on a pedestal, backed by a park with a collection of arching white cement pieces making a vaguely half-egg-shaped dingus. A monument to the greatness of the TRACTOR, a monument to nothing, as I have only seen the fields being worked by hand, groups of men, women, and children using hoes and shovels, stooping or crouching, working acres by hand, all by hand, the stupidest use of human labor imaginable. While at the moment what appears to be the only thing that the Industrial Revolution did to really, materially, improve people's lives is to make a tractor. Then make tractors.
No fuel? No parts? Just no damn tractors? What's the issue? That would be my NGO: Get the People Tractors. Give them a fuel allowance. Train tractor mechanics. Smuggle in the parts or pay the bribes and keep doing it over and over and over because each hour of working the fields by hand is another hour without rest, literacy, or (so I imagine, barreling by in our fancy Lada Niva four-wheel drive) hopefulness.
Dogtiredness.
Never mind. Tractors can't take away dogtiredness and no doubt the hours freed from the fields would be focused anew, to new back-breaking chores.
Neal Stephenson writes that, "In the real world--Planet Earth, Reality--there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s." That's the choice. I have other choices but my place is so privileged that the spot I take up cannot be doubled. The only way to free my spot would be for me to leave that spot, which I cannot do, because even were I to become a Tajik fieldhand, I would still carry my place of privilege with me; I would be choosing to act downtrodden.
Only when I die will my place be empty, but when that happens, that place will not be available to a Tajik fieldhand. No, it'll go to a nice infant, born of Western parents in a clean Western hospital. Maybe being born in a place with modern sanitation is the initiating mark of privilege. Maybe clean water and disinfectants are the baptismal fluids, holy, altering.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
I Felt a Feeling, and I Told You with Punctuation Marks
Last week, I got a message on this dating website where I have a profile. I don't know why I keep the profile on there. Maybe because I think I might want to meet someone in the future. I certainly couldn't be bothered now. Anyway, the message was...okay-ish. But then I read the guy's profile and under the "I’m really good at" section, he had included "oral sex."
Here was my (not very nice) reply:
"Dear Gene Simmons,
I was considering your proposal semi-positively, until I read your profile and saw your claim of oral sexual prowess. I see you have removed that reference, but the damage has been done. I no longer, nor have I really ever, spent any time with people who want to talk about sex unless they are actually having it (though wordlessness is often better even then), or who would talk about how good they are at it in a public profile.
Also, just so you know, not all women even enjoy said activity.
Reading your profile unfortunately made me feel a bit soiled, and I will be too busy taking multiple Silkwood showers to ever be able to leave the house again.
Sincerely,
Blaize"
He responded with a combination of passive-aggression and aggression-aggression, and a couple of insults followed by a repeated invitation that we do something together. While strange, this reaction didn't bother me, because I figured I had gotten what I deserved. What DID bother me was his repeated use of ;^D
Putting ;^D after calling someone crazy and a prude; what's that supposed to MEAN? "You're crazy and a prude! Winky nosy big smile!"
My reply to the the message, and his reply to that, all occurred during work, and this is why I love my work: my coworkers decided to enact the winky nosy smile In Real Life, and this is what we got:
Inevitably, this led to the recreation of other emoticons. I hope you enjoy the following.
X-)
o__o
D: (Two versions)
>:)
The ever-popular :(
And finally :-D
Here was my (not very nice) reply:
"Dear Gene Simmons,
I was considering your proposal semi-positively, until I read your profile and saw your claim of oral sexual prowess. I see you have removed that reference, but the damage has been done. I no longer, nor have I really ever, spent any time with people who want to talk about sex unless they are actually having it (though wordlessness is often better even then), or who would talk about how good they are at it in a public profile.
Also, just so you know, not all women even enjoy said activity.
Reading your profile unfortunately made me feel a bit soiled, and I will be too busy taking multiple Silkwood showers to ever be able to leave the house again.
Sincerely,
Blaize"
He responded with a combination of passive-aggression and aggression-aggression, and a couple of insults followed by a repeated invitation that we do something together. While strange, this reaction didn't bother me, because I figured I had gotten what I deserved. What DID bother me was his repeated use of ;^D
Putting ;^D after calling someone crazy and a prude; what's that supposed to MEAN? "You're crazy and a prude! Winky nosy big smile!"
My reply to the the message, and his reply to that, all occurred during work, and this is why I love my work: my coworkers decided to enact the winky nosy smile In Real Life, and this is what we got:
Inevitably, this led to the recreation of other emoticons. I hope you enjoy the following.
X-)
o__o
D: (Two versions)
>:)
The ever-popular :(
And finally :-D
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