Hello all.
I don't have a proper post for you all tonight. I just wanted to wish everyone a safe and happy New Year's Eve. Ring it in safely! I'll make a note to post tomorrow morning. And for anyone who lives outside the US, who has already rung in 2008: I hope you had a fabulous evening.
In the meantime, I'd like to share the lyrics of a song that I love during this season. It calls for bells ringing out for Christmas, but I like it for New Year's Eve, too. (Plus, I like the liturgical calendar that celebrates Christmas through January 6 or 7. Why stop the festivities on the 26th?) It's called "The Closing of the Year" and was written for the movie Toys, back in 1992. (I loved that movie, btw.) I've always loved it and its desire to bring hope in times of coldness. Apparently Sarah Brightman and Placido Domingo like it, too because they performed it last year at some Christmas concert.
Since I haven't figured out how to embed video so you can just click and play, here's a link to the original movie video on youtube. Enjoy!
If I cannot bring you comfort
Then at least I bring you hope
For nothing is more precious
Than the time we have and so
We all must learn from small misfortune
Count the blessings that are real
Let the bells ring out for Christmas
At the closing of the year
Let the bells ring out for Christmas
At the closing of the year.
If I cannot bring you comfort
Then at least I bring you hope.
Now all the winter bells are ringing
Hear them echo through the snow
And the children's voices singing
on the streets so far below
This is a time to be together
And the truth is somewhere here
Within our love of people
At the closing of the year.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Sad and confounded
Benazir Bhutto is dead.That was not the breaking news headline that greeted me at 8:30 this morning. Instead it was "Suicide Bomber kills 2o at Bhutto rally ... more details to come." It was only as I was pulling into the parking lot of my office that I heard the announcer on our local NPR station say that the blast also took Bhutto. I felt a welling sadness sink into my stomach and my eyes began to wet.
I liked Benazir Bhutto and I'm not really sure why. Like most Americans, I don't keep up with Pakistani politics, other than knowing they get into nuclear pissing contests with India every few years. I know that Bhutto was controversial and probably marginally better than other Pakistani leaders, at best, if that. I don't know if her human rights record was any better than anyone else's. Nonetheless, she seemed to be modern and unashamed. She seemed to be exactly the kind of female the Muslim world needs in a leadership position. (Hell, in a visible position at all.) My God: she didn't marry until she was 34! And she really only did it because she knew her political career needed it. Maybe she was otherwise happy being single. She did not demure, publicly, once she was a wife. Her marital status did not subject her to being a submissive piece of property. Hell no! And though she wore a veil when in office, she made it look good, girlfriend! How I WISH the Muslim world produced more women like her! Now that she's gone, what Muslim women carry the banner of Strong, Public and visible at all? Queens Noor and Rania are the only ones I can think of. Bhutto was a kind of hero in my book. ... of course, it doesn't hurt that she at least gave the impression of being pro-American during my lifetime.
And now she's dead.
Another bloody idiot with a bomb strapped to his chest sent her, and 20 innocent human beings, to their deaths! I am so angry and sick and tired of these self-hating, self-righteous morons who feel that other people should have to suffer - AND DIE - for their own pain. Your life sucks. I get it. So if you're not going to get help, kill your own self. Don't barge into a classroom and knock out a couple dozen students before you spray your own brains; don't go park-and-pop next to a group of job applicants trying to feed their families after a botched to hell invasion; ; don't barge into church or a mosque and take out some worshippers and the clergy because your wife hates you or whatever; don't brood-and-boom on a public bus because the ruling class in your country is treating you like shit; don't hijack a plane and crash it into heavily populated buildings because the owner of the building is an imperial prick. The adage of "if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem" is not only true, it should have an extra line for suicide bombers: "you make the problem worse for everybody - and 1,000 times worse for everybody you think you're helping."
Of course, I can't help thinking Musharraf might be behind this. He may have been helpful to us post-9/11, but seriously, this is dude who took over his country in a military coup. I can never tell what to make of him. Sometimes I want to like him, and others ... not so much. Especially in the last year or so. I don't envy his position. But I don't take him off the hook for this one. ... Pervez, you'd better not be behind this one. Jon Stewart gave you a Twinkie, for God's sake!
Friday, December 14, 2007
What a difference a week makes
This time last week, I was strapped to a hospital bed, with an IV drip in my arm. I also had a morphine button to juice me up when I needed. And I was totally loopy from anethesia. Now, my scar is itchy, but the pain is diminishing in noticeable increments.
My mom is coming up to visit this coming week. I'm looking for it. She's going to help us out while I recover from my surgery. By the time she gets here, I'll feel even better than I do, now, but her assistance will still be appreciated immensely. Honey will be working a LOT, and I can't decorate the house with these stitches, so Mom will have her work cut out for her.
Operation recovery has been harder than I thought. The doc said to take one to two weeks off of work. I'm playing it by ear, right now, hoping to return to work by Wednesday. But I find that I'm still pooped. It took me forever to wake up this morning, and it's been a week! My scar is healing up okay, but if I'm up and about too much, I just get malaised and tire quickly. I just made the mistake of checking my office email. There's an irritated customer there. I don't know if my body needs that kind of stress right now. (Yeah, that's the ticket!) But frankly, as I'm paid by the day, I really don't have the luxury of waiting till I'm fully recovered. Eh. I'll probably be okay enough by mid-next week, at least to do half-days.
In the meantime, I am going to count my blessings, like my grandmother told me I should:
1) Everything was caught in time.
2) Everything so far feels like it's healing up alright.
3) I'm catching up on Netflix and TiVo.
4) I'm blogging more.
5) My cousin just had a baby.
6) My dog no longer smells like the dead bird she excitedly nosed around in in our backyard.
7) I'm getting some reading done.
8) I'm take a legitimate breather after a year of hectic activity.
9) Showering is optional, since I'm not going anywhere. (Woohoo!)
10) I'm getting lots of my Christmas cards done.
11) I have discovered how utterly fantastic my friends are.
There are many more, but it's about lunchtime and I'd like to cruise the fridge.
My mom is coming up to visit this coming week. I'm looking for it. She's going to help us out while I recover from my surgery. By the time she gets here, I'll feel even better than I do, now, but her assistance will still be appreciated immensely. Honey will be working a LOT, and I can't decorate the house with these stitches, so Mom will have her work cut out for her.
Operation recovery has been harder than I thought. The doc said to take one to two weeks off of work. I'm playing it by ear, right now, hoping to return to work by Wednesday. But I find that I'm still pooped. It took me forever to wake up this morning, and it's been a week! My scar is healing up okay, but if I'm up and about too much, I just get malaised and tire quickly. I just made the mistake of checking my office email. There's an irritated customer there. I don't know if my body needs that kind of stress right now. (Yeah, that's the ticket!) But frankly, as I'm paid by the day, I really don't have the luxury of waiting till I'm fully recovered. Eh. I'll probably be okay enough by mid-next week, at least to do half-days.
In the meantime, I am going to count my blessings, like my grandmother told me I should:
1) Everything was caught in time.
2) Everything so far feels like it's healing up alright.
3) I'm catching up on Netflix and TiVo.
4) I'm blogging more.
5) My cousin just had a baby.
6) My dog no longer smells like the dead bird she excitedly nosed around in in our backyard.
7) I'm getting some reading done.
8) I'm take a legitimate breather after a year of hectic activity.
9) Showering is optional, since I'm not going anywhere. (Woohoo!)
10) I'm getting lots of my Christmas cards done.
11) I have discovered how utterly fantastic my friends are.
There are many more, but it's about lunchtime and I'd like to cruise the fridge.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Ooh! A Meme!
Rules: Once tagged, you’re supposed to link to the person who tagged you. Then, post the rules before your list and list 8 random things about yourself. At the end of the post, tag and link to 8 other people and then leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged.
I have to admit, I'm not exactly sure how to link back to someone, but this was from Pearl, so if you click on her name, you can visit her blog, which is very interesting and, I think, inspiring. So, before I begin my 8 random facts, I'd like to tag: Devinoni, Darla D, Mommanator, Sonnjea (who has probably long since stopped reading this), VirginiaGal, NubianTemptress and JoeinVegas. I've pared down some of my blog-reading in the last few months, so if I haven't included you and you're reading this, just please forgive me as I'm trying to get back on the horse. (Seven is almost 8, right?)
1. Unlike most people I know, I never went through a phase when I disliked my middle name. I have always loved the fact that is unusual and evocative. To this day, I love seeing people cock their heads to the side in amusement when I tell them what it is.
2. When I was a little girl, sometimes I'd be very disoriented when waking up. It wasn't the disorientation you feel like when you wake up in another room and you've forgotten that you went to sleep there. Nor that you're coming out of a dream. I would lie in bed, hear the voices of my family throughout the house and intellectually understand they were my family, but feel emotionally unattached. Almost like I was a character in a play, aware that I was in a play. I would hear my parents in the hallway and think: "They are not really my parents," and I could feel in my bones that I had been somehow dropped into this realm accidentally. Like something out of Quantum Leap - but these episodes predated Quantum Leap, so the idea was my own. I knew, for those nano-seconds, that those voices did not belong to my real family. Because my real family lived in outerspace and we were all fuzzy Sesame Street-style monsters. And if I closed my eyes and opened them again, I'd see my blue familiar parents hovering over me. It would take me a few seconds to shake out of it and sometimes I'd have a little twingey head pain. I outgrew this by about the time I was 9 or 10.
3. Also as a child, I had recurring dreams of Mahatma Ghandi falling into infinite blackness against a neon spiral. I was worried for him and it scared me.
4. I tend to dislike things that people like, or that are expected of me to like, just to be contrary. Not that my dislike isn't genuine, it's just if it's expected of me to feel positively about something, I'm going to approach it with a dim view first. The same is true about things that are expected of me to dislike. I'll probably like it at the outset, just to be contrary; but I'm not going to dislike it just because everyone else feels strongly about it.
5. Despite my mother's best efforts to fight it, I really do like Willie Nelson. And Johnny Cash. And any country music that tells a heartbreaking story; not dolled up for the slick Nashville types. (see number 4.)
6. Even in my ugliest cynicism, I can't deny that I still believe the sun'll come out tomorrow.
7. In 1995, I had a random, unsolicited metaphysical experience with the color yellow.
8. I think one should know when her life is a movie. It's important to recognize certain plot points and recurring elements in your life. You should always be aware of visual motifs and musical themes as well as cheesy dialogue. It's becoming increasingly clear to me that sometimes my life is a movie. Oh, look, there's that irritating tertiary character from act one emerging in act three to save the day. She's going to try to pull off what? Well, in the real world, she'd get away with it, but this is a movie and karma has a way of making sure she won't. ... and I don't. I'm learning to listen for the swelling music and look for the visual motifs.
... and a bonus. For all of these above random things about myself, I am stunned that there is a person willing (and I hope happy) to spend the rest of his life with me.
I have to admit, I'm not exactly sure how to link back to someone, but this was from Pearl, so if you click on her name, you can visit her blog, which is very interesting and, I think, inspiring. So, before I begin my 8 random facts, I'd like to tag: Devinoni, Darla D, Mommanator, Sonnjea (who has probably long since stopped reading this), VirginiaGal, NubianTemptress and JoeinVegas. I've pared down some of my blog-reading in the last few months, so if I haven't included you and you're reading this, just please forgive me as I'm trying to get back on the horse. (Seven is almost 8, right?)
1. Unlike most people I know, I never went through a phase when I disliked my middle name. I have always loved the fact that is unusual and evocative. To this day, I love seeing people cock their heads to the side in amusement when I tell them what it is.
2. When I was a little girl, sometimes I'd be very disoriented when waking up. It wasn't the disorientation you feel like when you wake up in another room and you've forgotten that you went to sleep there. Nor that you're coming out of a dream. I would lie in bed, hear the voices of my family throughout the house and intellectually understand they were my family, but feel emotionally unattached. Almost like I was a character in a play, aware that I was in a play. I would hear my parents in the hallway and think: "They are not really my parents," and I could feel in my bones that I had been somehow dropped into this realm accidentally. Like something out of Quantum Leap - but these episodes predated Quantum Leap, so the idea was my own. I knew, for those nano-seconds, that those voices did not belong to my real family. Because my real family lived in outerspace and we were all fuzzy Sesame Street-style monsters. And if I closed my eyes and opened them again, I'd see my blue familiar parents hovering over me. It would take me a few seconds to shake out of it and sometimes I'd have a little twingey head pain. I outgrew this by about the time I was 9 or 10.
3. Also as a child, I had recurring dreams of Mahatma Ghandi falling into infinite blackness against a neon spiral. I was worried for him and it scared me.
4. I tend to dislike things that people like, or that are expected of me to like, just to be contrary. Not that my dislike isn't genuine, it's just if it's expected of me to feel positively about something, I'm going to approach it with a dim view first. The same is true about things that are expected of me to dislike. I'll probably like it at the outset, just to be contrary; but I'm not going to dislike it just because everyone else feels strongly about it.
5. Despite my mother's best efforts to fight it, I really do like Willie Nelson. And Johnny Cash. And any country music that tells a heartbreaking story; not dolled up for the slick Nashville types. (see number 4.)
6. Even in my ugliest cynicism, I can't deny that I still believe the sun'll come out tomorrow.
7. In 1995, I had a random, unsolicited metaphysical experience with the color yellow.
8. I think one should know when her life is a movie. It's important to recognize certain plot points and recurring elements in your life. You should always be aware of visual motifs and musical themes as well as cheesy dialogue. It's becoming increasingly clear to me that sometimes my life is a movie. Oh, look, there's that irritating tertiary character from act one emerging in act three to save the day. She's going to try to pull off what? Well, in the real world, she'd get away with it, but this is a movie and karma has a way of making sure she won't. ... and I don't. I'm learning to listen for the swelling music and look for the visual motifs.
... and a bonus. For all of these above random things about myself, I am stunned that there is a person willing (and I hope happy) to spend the rest of his life with me.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Getting in my own way
Last week, I took a freelance colleague of mine out to lunch, since it was her last day on the project. She told me about a cousin she and her husband are hosting in their house. He's trying to make a new start of it in the area and they were happy to help. Except now it's been several months more than they all originally thought it would be. He's not taking temp jobs, not really actively seeking out permanent employment and is basically being a drag on a pair of newlyweds who were just trying to offer the kind of support they hoped someone would offer them if they were in a similar situation.
During our conversation, my colleague told me that her cousin, who is 30, often complains to her that he doesn't have the degrees that she does - bachelor and post-grad - so he's not as marketable as she is and that's why he's not getting jobs. She was frustrated by this because even though she is degreed, he is prior military, which counts for a lot in the marketplace. Additionally, she has been busting hump looking for work in our field since she got her graduate degree, and having mixed success. Here's what struck me though: he's imprisoned himself with his negativity.
That got me thinking about how much and how often we define ourselves by what we are not (or what we have not) as opposed to what we are. I am not educated, married, a parent, accomplished in my field, living in the "right" town, wealthy enough, religious enough, traveled, fashionable, and so on and so on. There may be plenty of people who don't do this, but the majority of us do, that's why we're always impressed with the people in the world who accomplish things; they're not stopped by their own naysaying.
The silly thing about naysaying is that it shackles us to the very negatives we supposedly resent about ourselves. I can't do this, I'm too old. I can't do that, I don't have enough experience. Nobody would let me do this because I'm not "insert reason here." Anytime we think we can't because of some "no" hanging over us, we certainly can't, because we won't. We won't even give ourselves the opportunities to try and fail or try and succeed because we're too married to the "no" of our situation. I feel like I wasted a lot of my 20s because I told myself I was too old for some things or too inexperienced for other possibilities. And it was fucking stupid. I wasn't too old. I'm probably still not, but as long as I put that speed bump in front of myself, I couldn't proceed.
There are plenty of roadblocks we cling to that are largely beyond our control. For the last two years, my body has been telling me "no" about some things. And this last weekend, it shouted "HELL NO" at me. I don't know if or when it will ever give me a resounding and final "no." I'm hoping and praying not for some "yes" from my body. But I'm feeling very beat down, crushed and angry these days. Life can still be good even if my body ever gives me a definitive no, but right now I just don't know how. But I want to learn how to climb out of this hole I've been sliding deeper and deeper into. It hurts and there's a whole world of happiness out there, if I only remember how to find it. My body's telling me "no" has been impeding my happiness. I want to learn to live with the "no" and realize that there is still a pulsing, vibrant world of "yes" beyond this ugly shadow of "no" that hovers over me.
In the meantime, I want to start dispelling all the nos I've put upon myself all my life. I am exactly as pretty as I am. I am exactly as young as I am. I am exactly as talented as I am. There are aspects of my life I can control, and I want to work to be in charge of them. There are aspects of my life that I cannot control, and I want to work to not let them be in control of my happiness. I don't want to be a prisoner to my own insecurities anymore, the way my colleague's cousin is. It's self-defeating.
During our conversation, my colleague told me that her cousin, who is 30, often complains to her that he doesn't have the degrees that she does - bachelor and post-grad - so he's not as marketable as she is and that's why he's not getting jobs. She was frustrated by this because even though she is degreed, he is prior military, which counts for a lot in the marketplace. Additionally, she has been busting hump looking for work in our field since she got her graduate degree, and having mixed success. Here's what struck me though: he's imprisoned himself with his negativity.
That got me thinking about how much and how often we define ourselves by what we are not (or what we have not) as opposed to what we are. I am not educated, married, a parent, accomplished in my field, living in the "right" town, wealthy enough, religious enough, traveled, fashionable, and so on and so on. There may be plenty of people who don't do this, but the majority of us do, that's why we're always impressed with the people in the world who accomplish things; they're not stopped by their own naysaying.
The silly thing about naysaying is that it shackles us to the very negatives we supposedly resent about ourselves. I can't do this, I'm too old. I can't do that, I don't have enough experience. Nobody would let me do this because I'm not "insert reason here." Anytime we think we can't because of some "no" hanging over us, we certainly can't, because we won't. We won't even give ourselves the opportunities to try and fail or try and succeed because we're too married to the "no" of our situation. I feel like I wasted a lot of my 20s because I told myself I was too old for some things or too inexperienced for other possibilities. And it was fucking stupid. I wasn't too old. I'm probably still not, but as long as I put that speed bump in front of myself, I couldn't proceed.
There are plenty of roadblocks we cling to that are largely beyond our control. For the last two years, my body has been telling me "no" about some things. And this last weekend, it shouted "HELL NO" at me. I don't know if or when it will ever give me a resounding and final "no." I'm hoping and praying not for some "yes" from my body. But I'm feeling very beat down, crushed and angry these days. Life can still be good even if my body ever gives me a definitive no, but right now I just don't know how. But I want to learn how to climb out of this hole I've been sliding deeper and deeper into. It hurts and there's a whole world of happiness out there, if I only remember how to find it. My body's telling me "no" has been impeding my happiness. I want to learn to live with the "no" and realize that there is still a pulsing, vibrant world of "yes" beyond this ugly shadow of "no" that hovers over me.
In the meantime, I want to start dispelling all the nos I've put upon myself all my life. I am exactly as pretty as I am. I am exactly as young as I am. I am exactly as talented as I am. There are aspects of my life I can control, and I want to work to be in charge of them. There are aspects of my life that I cannot control, and I want to work to not let them be in control of my happiness. I don't want to be a prisoner to my own insecurities anymore, the way my colleague's cousin is. It's self-defeating.
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