Two Ukrainians at work having an argument and come to me to solve it.
“Deborah, does ‘a quarter of one’ mean 1:15 or 1:45?”
“It means 12:45.”
“Oh, okay.”
Archive for September 17, 2006
This is my life
The Sesame Street Personality Quiz
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You Are Big Bird |
 Talented, smart, and friendly… you’re also one of the sanest people around. You are usually feeling: Happy. From riding a unicycle to writing poetry, you have plenty of hobbies to keep you busy. You are famous for: Being a friend to everyone. Even the grumpiest person gets along with you. How you life your life: Joyfully. “Super. Duper. Flooper.” |
Like a pigeon From Hell—what’s up with THAT?
Tom tagged me with this evil bit of humiliation. Name five songs that make you cry and explain why.
The humiliation part is that I am a total sap. A sappy sap. And the songs that make me cry are sappy songs. I am not one to have guilty pleasures, I will gladly tell you my favorite schmaltzy movie or corny TV show, but the songs? The songs are a genuine red-faced guiltfest.
And here they are.
Emphysema in the Haunted House
Roberta has some great musings about quitting smoking. (I kicked in with some comments.)
I have long mulled the issue of smoking-related illnesses. Why don’t the threats of cancer and heart disease and emphysema have more impact on people? Why do we persist in smoking? One of my very best friends is a cancer survivor who still smokes (and when I was a smoker, I held her up as a role model whenever people nagged me).
In our modern Western culture, we fear death, not mostly as the end, but as the unknown. And I don’t mean, “What happens when you die?” as in, afterlife, reincarnation, white light. I mean as in, what does it look like, smell like, sound like. Death is away. In the hospital or hospice, in the slaughterhouse, at the vet’s, not at home or in the yard or on the farm or in our arms.
So when the threat of cancer is dangled before us, it’s just one more scary ghost in the haunted house. Not scarier than our general sense of the end of life as unknown, possibly terrifying, and probably painful. Isn’t that what we think anyway? So why is cancer actually worse than that?
It’s interesting that when most people talk about being influenced by the threat of cancer, they talk, as Roberta does, about witnessing cancer with their own eyes. (My friend, by the way, had a quick diagnosis and successful surgery, no chemo or radiation, so she skipped many of the gruesome experiential features.) Without that witnessing, that confrontation, that face-to-face this is IT I’m not scared of the unknown I’m scared of THIS, it isn’t motivating. Being scared of something real and specific is motivating, being scared of a general malaise of unknown terror just makes us shut down and deny. Which probably relates to why Bush’s constant terror-mongering is not working, but I digress.
So part of the solution feels like getting real. Not about smoking, so much as about life, death, and disease in general. Only then can we see smoking in the context in which it belongs.
Friday Kittenblogging: Chair Cat
This is a re-run of the disappeared Kittenblogging from last week.
Notice how his tail is resting on the footstool. That’s just very cool.
Spheroid Crocodiles and Non-linear Floor Lamps
Over at Lover of Strife, Evn made the following aside:
Speaking of perspectives, my personal perception of reincarnation is spherical rather than linear. As such, I sincerely hope [Steve] Irwin comes back as a crocodile in ancient Egypt.
The problem with perceiving reincarnation as linear or spherical is that any perception of reincarnation is de facto a perception of time. If time is an illusion, as physicists and philosophers increasingly agree, then a shape for time, like a line or a sphere, is also an illusion. Or, more accurately, a construct that we use to help us perceive it. And to keep our brains from hurting.
What if time is really simultaneous? What if all of the moments of now are co-existing in a way we can’t perceive?
I like to compare time to space. When you enter a room, you reach the lamp, then the couch, then the table, then the TV. So objects in space can be perceived as linear, occuring one after another, and indeed, if you are born blind, this is how you perceive them. But if you can see it, you can know space is really simultaneous.
I think past and present and future are couches and floor lamps and television sets. Crocodiles in ancient Egypt exist simultaneously with Pagan bloggers and swashbuckling pirates (who are, after all, eternal).
It’s a very informative view of reincarnation, really, because instead of having past lives that influence future lives, we have many simultaneous lives influencing one another. Which is cool.
Cross all fingers! Light all candles!
I have tantalizing news from a publisher, who is “very impressed” with The Study of Witchcraft. It still has to go through a committee process, so please, send your successful thoughts my way.
A new spam twist
All of a sudden I’ve got a wave of spam for football predictions. I never even heard of football predictions as a thing until I saw Two For the Money. Do you think it’s because I wrote a review?
Lie by Lie
The current issue of Mother Jones has a timeline of administration lies and deceptions in the lead-up to war.
My stomach now officially hurts.
I knew 90% of it. I’ve been paying attention as it happens. But to see it all together is devastating. Devastating that the enormity of it just sits there, un-acted upon. Devastating that the American people paid so little attention that a lot of this surprises them. Devastating that our values as a country, as a people, have been so thoroughly trampled on by the criminals in the White House.
My instinct is to look away. But there’s one reason not to.
Read it, and now think again about what’s being said about Iran. Read how much was falsified about Iraq, and ask yourself how you can believe anything about Iran.
This is the Administration That Cried Wolf. Don’t get fooled again.
Five Years
I wrote the Monday Movie Review on Saturday. I have been trying not to think about today’s date. Of course, log onto any blog and boom, there it is. Five years. Five. Fucking. Years.
I can write for hours about the day, about the surrounding days, about the people who lost people, the people who were going to be there and then weren’t, the fear, the horror, the smoke.
I could write about my profound resentment at my city being used as a prop by a president who hates it and its values. How I can’t even stand to hear him pronounce “September the eleventh.”
But for me, this is a personal and painful day, a phantom limb that aches, and I’d just rather not.
