Be it hereby known by those here present that on Tuesday, 23 February 2010, I completed the entire New York Times crossword puzzle in the Houston Chronicle by using only the clues in the Across column.
And got it all right.
As you were.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
News flash! Plant bites dog!
Okay, so the schefflera didn't actually bite my little barker dog, but she certainly thought it was about to when it chased her across the den a little while ago.
I have no idea what has been making the Alpha Bitch as testy as she has been lately, but she has barked at everything that moved outside and growled and snapped at Pointer Dog at every opportunity. PD is typically not one to make a fuss over things, but he's been unusually likely to join in the noisemaking over the last few days; I'm beginning to think they both just may have serious cases of cabin fever because of the yukky weather in our backyard (including a dusting of snow for a little while a couple of nights ago), and they're just letting off steam.
At any rate, AB headed for the windows a while ago to explain property rights to something moving in the neighborhood of our front yard when she managed to brush past the schefflera in such a way as to snag her collar on the handlebar of the little tricycle-like potholder it has occupied for the past several years. I'm pretty sure AB thought she was headed to the back door to continue her argument when she was surprised by the plant chasing her across the room and attempting to strangle her.
I, of course, was in my lounge chair under a layer of warm blankets and my laptop, so I couldn't easily hop up and disentangle the collar from the handlebar. Instead, in my usual hysterical mommie fashion, I yelled at her to Stop! Sit! Wait a minute!
She looked up at me frantically as she continued to drag the plant—now on its side and strewing dirt, leaves, and a stream of nasty water in a twisty trail—behind her, up to my chair, and into what she expected to be the relative security of a space under the end table next to me.
By the time she ran out of space to run any more, I had disentangled enough from computer cords and blanket to reach down and slip her collar off the end of the handlebar and to see that she had come out of the battle unscathed. Somewhat remarkably, I thought, the plant appeared not to have lost any of its live leaves and the pot didn't show any signs of cracking.
The floor, of course, was a bit of a different matter. This plant grows in a "self-watering" pot that typically has at least a little residual water in the base (and that may explain some of the somewhat stale scent in the room over the past few weeks while it's been inside, away from the bad weather). Since I had such an odd lot of parts to clean up—a remarkably small amount of lost dirt, an assortment of dead leaves and twigs, mostly collected from the summer and fall outside, and a trail of water—I grabbed my handy Swiffer "broom" for the cleanup.
It turns out that the "heavy-duty" class of Swiffer pads is just great for dry stuff but not sufficiently absorbent to make much headway with water. I'm too cheap to use up a lot of disposables for a mess like this, so I grabbed an old washrag out of the cleaning supplies, punched it into the mop head, and Bingo! Much easier than down on my hands and knees and much more effective than the "official" Swiffer pads. A quick rinse in the kitchen sink on the way to the washer appears to have pretty well recouped the usefulness of the rag.
What remains to be seen is whether AB has learned her lesson about picking fights with plants.
I have no idea what has been making the Alpha Bitch as testy as she has been lately, but she has barked at everything that moved outside and growled and snapped at Pointer Dog at every opportunity. PD is typically not one to make a fuss over things, but he's been unusually likely to join in the noisemaking over the last few days; I'm beginning to think they both just may have serious cases of cabin fever because of the yukky weather in our backyard (including a dusting of snow for a little while a couple of nights ago), and they're just letting off steam.
At any rate, AB headed for the windows a while ago to explain property rights to something moving in the neighborhood of our front yard when she managed to brush past the schefflera in such a way as to snag her collar on the handlebar of the little tricycle-like potholder it has occupied for the past several years. I'm pretty sure AB thought she was headed to the back door to continue her argument when she was surprised by the plant chasing her across the room and attempting to strangle her.
I, of course, was in my lounge chair under a layer of warm blankets and my laptop, so I couldn't easily hop up and disentangle the collar from the handlebar. Instead, in my usual hysterical mommie fashion, I yelled at her to Stop! Sit! Wait a minute!
She looked up at me frantically as she continued to drag the plant—now on its side and strewing dirt, leaves, and a stream of nasty water in a twisty trail—behind her, up to my chair, and into what she expected to be the relative security of a space under the end table next to me.
By the time she ran out of space to run any more, I had disentangled enough from computer cords and blanket to reach down and slip her collar off the end of the handlebar and to see that she had come out of the battle unscathed. Somewhat remarkably, I thought, the plant appeared not to have lost any of its live leaves and the pot didn't show any signs of cracking.
The floor, of course, was a bit of a different matter. This plant grows in a "self-watering" pot that typically has at least a little residual water in the base (and that may explain some of the somewhat stale scent in the room over the past few weeks while it's been inside, away from the bad weather). Since I had such an odd lot of parts to clean up—a remarkably small amount of lost dirt, an assortment of dead leaves and twigs, mostly collected from the summer and fall outside, and a trail of water—I grabbed my handy Swiffer "broom" for the cleanup.
It turns out that the "heavy-duty" class of Swiffer pads is just great for dry stuff but not sufficiently absorbent to make much headway with water. I'm too cheap to use up a lot of disposables for a mess like this, so I grabbed an old washrag out of the cleaning supplies, punched it into the mop head, and Bingo! Much easier than down on my hands and knees and much more effective than the "official" Swiffer pads. A quick rinse in the kitchen sink on the way to the washer appears to have pretty well recouped the usefulness of the rag.
What remains to be seen is whether AB has learned her lesson about picking fights with plants.
Friday, February 12, 2010
In search of the 29-hour day
I can't figure out where the hours in my day are going, but I'm pretty sure I need about 5 more of them to sort my life out the way it's supposed to be.
I know I got a little off the mark last week when my sister's heart attack ate a rather serious chunk out of what my week was supposed to look like, but I was hugely grateful that my scheduled sick day allowed me to get my own health reviewed and to spend some time at the hospital with her. (My checkup suggests that my own chance of having a heart attack in the next 10 years is about 1%; that does not, of course, reduce my chance of being hit by a bus. Her prognosis is excellent.)
I've become somewhat absorbed by the computer lately, spending probably way too much time playing the Mah Jong game that came with my new operating system and following several of my professional friends on Twitter. That foolishness has cut way into my newspaper reading and crossword puzzle time, although I do try to follow at least several news items online so I don't feel totally in the dark. Still, my laptop almost never cools down if I'm in the house. I'm thinking that may not be a good thing; I don't think "surfing the web" counts as "heart-healthy" exercise, and I'm thinking that's at least some of what I need here.
I have tried working out a bit. After Christmas I acquired a "wave," a supposedly hot new exercise toy that I could stand on and rock as I did some fairly common routines, but that fizzled because (a) it was obviously for persons a whole lot of years—or maybe decades—younger than me and (b) about 90% of the workout was little more than what I had been doing on a homemade exercise step for several years. So I took that back to Wally World, dragged out my old exercise videos, and managed to work in one or another of them a couple of times a week for the past couple of weeks. Still not exactly what I think the heart association folks expect of me, I think.
I've been cranking out nominations for professional organization awards at work, and that has taken hours out of my evenings; my mornings are usually filled by grading papers and my afternoons often involved counseling students on how to write or revise assignments. That sticks me at the office after hours to work on the nominations, or I wind up bringing some part or the other of my job to do at home.
I sort of like the idea of helping Number One Son fix supper around here, but that doesn't work well if I'm catching up on work, and weekends are going to be packed for a while now with a consulting project that I need to crank out. I like the money, but I do miss being able to sleep in now and again!
I think 5 more hours a day would just about get it. I don't like the sound of 6 because that would be just too many, and the 30-hour day just sounds so wrong to me. That extra hour would no doubt just be extraneous.
So I'm off in search of the 29-hour day. And maybe whatever it is that's making my "m" key stick.
I know I got a little off the mark last week when my sister's heart attack ate a rather serious chunk out of what my week was supposed to look like, but I was hugely grateful that my scheduled sick day allowed me to get my own health reviewed and to spend some time at the hospital with her. (My checkup suggests that my own chance of having a heart attack in the next 10 years is about 1%; that does not, of course, reduce my chance of being hit by a bus. Her prognosis is excellent.)
I've become somewhat absorbed by the computer lately, spending probably way too much time playing the Mah Jong game that came with my new operating system and following several of my professional friends on Twitter. That foolishness has cut way into my newspaper reading and crossword puzzle time, although I do try to follow at least several news items online so I don't feel totally in the dark. Still, my laptop almost never cools down if I'm in the house. I'm thinking that may not be a good thing; I don't think "surfing the web" counts as "heart-healthy" exercise, and I'm thinking that's at least some of what I need here.
I have tried working out a bit. After Christmas I acquired a "wave," a supposedly hot new exercise toy that I could stand on and rock as I did some fairly common routines, but that fizzled because (a) it was obviously for persons a whole lot of years—or maybe decades—younger than me and (b) about 90% of the workout was little more than what I had been doing on a homemade exercise step for several years. So I took that back to Wally World, dragged out my old exercise videos, and managed to work in one or another of them a couple of times a week for the past couple of weeks. Still not exactly what I think the heart association folks expect of me, I think.
I've been cranking out nominations for professional organization awards at work, and that has taken hours out of my evenings; my mornings are usually filled by grading papers and my afternoons often involved counseling students on how to write or revise assignments. That sticks me at the office after hours to work on the nominations, or I wind up bringing some part or the other of my job to do at home.
I sort of like the idea of helping Number One Son fix supper around here, but that doesn't work well if I'm catching up on work, and weekends are going to be packed for a while now with a consulting project that I need to crank out. I like the money, but I do miss being able to sleep in now and again!
I think 5 more hours a day would just about get it. I don't like the sound of 6 because that would be just too many, and the 30-hour day just sounds so wrong to me. That extra hour would no doubt just be extraneous.
So I'm off in search of the 29-hour day. And maybe whatever it is that's making my "m" key stick.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
I'm not ready for this!
My sister Job had a heart attack yesterday.
Okay, her name isn't really Job, but I've often thought that is the "right" name for her. She hasn't suffered the losses that Job did, although life has dealt her probably more than her share of disasters and disappointments, all of which she has weathered with strong faith and good humor and love.
Even the heart attack didn't change that. By the time I saw her—five hours after the attack and surgery—she was alert and cheerful, reveling in being alive even though she was ticked off about being stuck on her back in a hospital ward where she couldn't do much but lie flat.
It had started around 11 o'clock in the morning, when she told her husband she felt nauseated, then she felt pressure around her heart, then pain running down her left arm, then a blurring of vision. The Alka-Seltzer and the aspirin her husband brought her didn't make it go away, so he called the doctor and the hospital before whisking her away to the nearby emergency room.
By the time I got to the hospital several hours later (feeling pretty guilty about having had to go to work for a while first), she was "having a procedure" somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, and her husband was taking a lunch break in the hospital cafe. He told me the story so far, including that the doctors had Roto-Rootered and vaccuumed out the blockage in what they called "the widowmaker" artery, inserted two stents where they had removed two clumps of extreme damage (one of which had ruptured), and gotten her functioning again.
When we got to go in to see her, she was already in remarkable shape for a person who had been through the experience she had had: her skin was sallow and she looked really vacant without her makeup, but she was warm and friendly and spent the next several hours chatting and joking with me and her husband.
Before I left, she was alert enough to make jokes about the hospital food she was getting (although her supper last night was clearly better than her meals in CCU today), but she was decidedly resentful about having had a heart attack. Aside from the fact that she has tried for some time to take better care of herself, her health focus has for years been on the breast cancer that killed our mother and has manifested itself since then in our sister and her daughter; heart attacks, as Job said, are for the men in our family—they killed our dad at 56 and our brother at 64.
She relaxed a little when I reminded her that our grandmother had had a pacemaker installed at some time in her 102 years. Although neither of us could remember when, we were both convinced that Nana event was probably in her middle 60s, which we recall in our grandmother as much older than Job, who is 63 herself. But that, of course, didn't seem to either of us to equate with Job's major heart attack.
I am hugely grateful that she is still alive, and I am equally hopeful that she will come through this will relatively little damage and great promise for a long, bright future. But I hate seeing her hurting, even though she insists the pain is only local where needles went in and nowhere near the heart.
But I'm just not ready for this!
Okay, her name isn't really Job, but I've often thought that is the "right" name for her. She hasn't suffered the losses that Job did, although life has dealt her probably more than her share of disasters and disappointments, all of which she has weathered with strong faith and good humor and love.
Even the heart attack didn't change that. By the time I saw her—five hours after the attack and surgery—she was alert and cheerful, reveling in being alive even though she was ticked off about being stuck on her back in a hospital ward where she couldn't do much but lie flat.
It had started around 11 o'clock in the morning, when she told her husband she felt nauseated, then she felt pressure around her heart, then pain running down her left arm, then a blurring of vision. The Alka-Seltzer and the aspirin her husband brought her didn't make it go away, so he called the doctor and the hospital before whisking her away to the nearby emergency room.
By the time I got to the hospital several hours later (feeling pretty guilty about having had to go to work for a while first), she was "having a procedure" somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, and her husband was taking a lunch break in the hospital cafe. He told me the story so far, including that the doctors had Roto-Rootered and vaccuumed out the blockage in what they called "the widowmaker" artery, inserted two stents where they had removed two clumps of extreme damage (one of which had ruptured), and gotten her functioning again.
When we got to go in to see her, she was already in remarkable shape for a person who had been through the experience she had had: her skin was sallow and she looked really vacant without her makeup, but she was warm and friendly and spent the next several hours chatting and joking with me and her husband.
Before I left, she was alert enough to make jokes about the hospital food she was getting (although her supper last night was clearly better than her meals in CCU today), but she was decidedly resentful about having had a heart attack. Aside from the fact that she has tried for some time to take better care of herself, her health focus has for years been on the breast cancer that killed our mother and has manifested itself since then in our sister and her daughter; heart attacks, as Job said, are for the men in our family—they killed our dad at 56 and our brother at 64.
She relaxed a little when I reminded her that our grandmother had had a pacemaker installed at some time in her 102 years. Although neither of us could remember when, we were both convinced that Nana event was probably in her middle 60s, which we recall in our grandmother as much older than Job, who is 63 herself. But that, of course, didn't seem to either of us to equate with Job's major heart attack.
I am hugely grateful that she is still alive, and I am equally hopeful that she will come through this will relatively little damage and great promise for a long, bright future. But I hate seeing her hurting, even though she insists the pain is only local where needles went in and nowhere near the heart.
But I'm just not ready for this!
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Incredible
I went to my first-ever 3D movie today and came away thoroughly gobsmacked. Avatar was mostly what I had heard—cutting-edge special effects wrapped around the hero myth of the outsider who joins up with the natives and reveals to the rest of us the basic human qualities even the "different" among us have. So the story, as I had heard, wasn't new, and some of the contrasts—the gentle forest dwellers with bows and arrows fighting the futuristic armored war machine (which may turn out to be an inaccurate model, anyway)—were somewhat over the top, even though the forest dwellers won.
Film critic Roger Ebert said he "felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977" when he saw Avatar, and I certainly could relate to that. I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling of sitting in that Star Wars theater and hearing the fighters zoom in overhead from behind; I think the sound (including the music) in Star Wars engaged me as much as anything.
But watching Avatar helped me see why my own kids were so nonplussed by Star Wars when it made a return trip to the theaters a few years ago: Star Wars was too big a movie, in many ways, to be appreciated on a small screen, even with the huge televisions that are now part and parcel to many homes, but it was too mundane for my teenagers, who were born after the first Star Wars hit the screens.
I have to agree with Soldier Son that 3D may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread; he said he's gotten nauseated at 3D flicks (although I think he's only seen them on "home theaters"), and a couple of times today I peeled off the goofy glasses to relax my eyes. That worked okay for scenes that were in closed spaces so 3D wasn't really necessary; I sort of had a Wizard-of-Oz sense that I needed the 3D in Oz (Pandora in Avatar), but not back in Kansas (which was black and white in the Oz movie. I didn't know that until I was an adult; I must have watched the annual rerun of Wizard for 15 years when I was growing up, but nobody I knew even owned a color TV, so I never thought of Oz as being any more colorful than I Love Lucy. I knew Lucy was a redhead, but my mental picture of her never, ever made it out of black and white).
Still, I was glad the theater was dark as I sat gawking at the special effects in Avatar. When the 3D was at its best, I felt as if parts of the image were floating out of the screen and over the rows of viewers in front of me or that I could see deep into the forest or the layers of a world constituted partly of "floating mountains," huge chunks of rock suspended in space. That was amazing.
I also have to admit I marveled at the imaginations of the designers (was that all from the director, or did the other artists have voices in it, too?) of both the imagined planet Pandora and the machinery of future warfare. Pandora seemed to be stuck in a sort of dinosaur age (the closest thing I saw to what I'd consider a mammal looked a lot like seals to me) with plants that I could imagine being predecessors or progeny of plants we have on earth.
I appreciated the need to retain enough familiarity to be recognizable by a determinedly earth-bound audience, but isn't it odd that we might envision every other universe to be so much like our own? I heard a talk yesterday about the "dangers" of having only "one story"—one perception of ourselves and stereotypes of "others"—and I saw today how that plays out in our films: the Na'vi (people of Pandora) were much like our stereotypes of peaceful American Indians (even shooting bows and arrows much like theirs), and the corporate/military machine was clearly a fast-forward of today's civilization into the future. I almost giggled out loud at how much some of the robot warriors reminded me of the robot my kids and my brother built out of the Construx kit the grandparents gave them for Christmas one year.
I'm skeptical of thinking that even English-speaking Americans fit into that picture; I have so many fears for a nation that seems not to want to face a future that is bound to be different from its past, partly because of our own breakneck speed of invention and reinvention and partly because of the changing world around us that begs for different responses than in the past. We are already seeing warfare change; the military machinery that shouted power and victory in World War II didn't work in Vietnam, and it doesn't work in Iraq or Afghanistan. While we pour resources into failing wars, China and India pour theirs into infrastructure and cyberspace; imagining that bigger, better, meaner machines will dominate our future seems really out of step to me. And imagining that America will maintain its dominance for more than a few years—in the movie, more than a century—seems highly unlikely to me.
I don't think we're going to lose our might because of war; I think we're going to lose it because of economics and politics. And I think a lot of what I saw in Avatar was a message—fuzzed over, but maybe there—that military might isn't the right answer. In Pandora (an ironic name if ever there was one), the answer was the way I felt a decade or so ago when I believed that the world respected America, when I was glad we had survived for four decades without a "real" war and for a couple without a losing "conflict," and I thought I would see my babies grow up in times of peace.
But now Soldier Son has been to a real, ugly, expensive war once, and he's back in training to be a part of the tail end of that war and another that have been the feature of all three kids' adult lives. We aren't winning these wars; I don't think we can because I don't think they are wars of people being killed until their leaders give up. I think it's time for us to ditch the hubris of the Bush administration, to accept the fact that some people are heartless haters, and to win our enemies over by making their hateful ways losing ways, not by making their hateful fringe into martyrs. It absolutely galls me that Bush was so incensed by the deaths of 3,000 innocents on our soil that he cheerfully sent 5,000 of our own to theirs to die and thousands more to be injured, all in the name of hubris. And I don't believe that hubris can ever win.
In fact, I hated seeing the war scene in Avatar, not because I hated seeing people (on both sides) dispatched to their deaths but because I think there has to have been another way. Maybe 2154 (they year Ebert says the film is set) isn't far enough into the future; maybe we will need more time to learn to "beat [our] swords into plowshares" and "not study war no more." I think the current administration understands that, but I think our political system is too broken to let it work. I have hope, but it is fading—not because of what Obama has or hasn't done but because of the power of political idiots who are passing out the Kool-Aid.
One thing I did see in Avatar that I glommed onto was a scene in which a creature died and the leading lady (a Na'vi) explained that its soul would go on although its body would become a part of "the people" (for dinner, I presume). In a similar, earlier scene, she had said it was a shame to kill any creature; I don't remember the words exactly, but the point was that they are all part of the brotherhood of life.
The earlier scene might support Darling Daughter's vegetarian ideology; the later one fits more with my calm at having her brother go off to war: I know he could die, but I also believe in my very fiber that if his body dies, his soul and spirit will live on. I know that sounds corny, especially when I freely admit that I am religiously, if anything, a deist; I'm not willing to say I believe in resurrection, I'm not willing to profess that Jesus is the only way to God, and I'm not willing to be part of an order that seems to me to profess hubris above all, even though I know some lovely Christians who don't fit that description at all. My head says it's stupid to think my own Mother and Daddy are somehow still present, still with me, still watching out for me; my heart says it's absolutely true. I won't go around arguing the illogic of your religion with you if you don't argue the illogic of my philosophy with me.
And that whole range of thinking was spurred by this amazing adventure into special effects in film-making. I'm not sure whether DD is really going to stay in that industry; her heart may lead her another way, maybe in the coming months. But I do have to say that it's an amazing one, and even if the plot was worn and corny, I found the thing incredible.
Film critic Roger Ebert said he "felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977" when he saw Avatar, and I certainly could relate to that. I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling of sitting in that Star Wars theater and hearing the fighters zoom in overhead from behind; I think the sound (including the music) in Star Wars engaged me as much as anything.
But watching Avatar helped me see why my own kids were so nonplussed by Star Wars when it made a return trip to the theaters a few years ago: Star Wars was too big a movie, in many ways, to be appreciated on a small screen, even with the huge televisions that are now part and parcel to many homes, but it was too mundane for my teenagers, who were born after the first Star Wars hit the screens.
I have to agree with Soldier Son that 3D may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread; he said he's gotten nauseated at 3D flicks (although I think he's only seen them on "home theaters"), and a couple of times today I peeled off the goofy glasses to relax my eyes. That worked okay for scenes that were in closed spaces so 3D wasn't really necessary; I sort of had a Wizard-of-Oz sense that I needed the 3D in Oz (Pandora in Avatar), but not back in Kansas (which was black and white in the Oz movie. I didn't know that until I was an adult; I must have watched the annual rerun of Wizard for 15 years when I was growing up, but nobody I knew even owned a color TV, so I never thought of Oz as being any more colorful than I Love Lucy. I knew Lucy was a redhead, but my mental picture of her never, ever made it out of black and white).
Still, I was glad the theater was dark as I sat gawking at the special effects in Avatar. When the 3D was at its best, I felt as if parts of the image were floating out of the screen and over the rows of viewers in front of me or that I could see deep into the forest or the layers of a world constituted partly of "floating mountains," huge chunks of rock suspended in space. That was amazing.
I also have to admit I marveled at the imaginations of the designers (was that all from the director, or did the other artists have voices in it, too?) of both the imagined planet Pandora and the machinery of future warfare. Pandora seemed to be stuck in a sort of dinosaur age (the closest thing I saw to what I'd consider a mammal looked a lot like seals to me) with plants that I could imagine being predecessors or progeny of plants we have on earth.
I appreciated the need to retain enough familiarity to be recognizable by a determinedly earth-bound audience, but isn't it odd that we might envision every other universe to be so much like our own? I heard a talk yesterday about the "dangers" of having only "one story"—one perception of ourselves and stereotypes of "others"—and I saw today how that plays out in our films: the Na'vi (people of Pandora) were much like our stereotypes of peaceful American Indians (even shooting bows and arrows much like theirs), and the corporate/military machine was clearly a fast-forward of today's civilization into the future. I almost giggled out loud at how much some of the robot warriors reminded me of the robot my kids and my brother built out of the Construx kit the grandparents gave them for Christmas one year.
I'm skeptical of thinking that even English-speaking Americans fit into that picture; I have so many fears for a nation that seems not to want to face a future that is bound to be different from its past, partly because of our own breakneck speed of invention and reinvention and partly because of the changing world around us that begs for different responses than in the past. We are already seeing warfare change; the military machinery that shouted power and victory in World War II didn't work in Vietnam, and it doesn't work in Iraq or Afghanistan. While we pour resources into failing wars, China and India pour theirs into infrastructure and cyberspace; imagining that bigger, better, meaner machines will dominate our future seems really out of step to me. And imagining that America will maintain its dominance for more than a few years—in the movie, more than a century—seems highly unlikely to me.
I don't think we're going to lose our might because of war; I think we're going to lose it because of economics and politics. And I think a lot of what I saw in Avatar was a message—fuzzed over, but maybe there—that military might isn't the right answer. In Pandora (an ironic name if ever there was one), the answer was the way I felt a decade or so ago when I believed that the world respected America, when I was glad we had survived for four decades without a "real" war and for a couple without a losing "conflict," and I thought I would see my babies grow up in times of peace.
But now Soldier Son has been to a real, ugly, expensive war once, and he's back in training to be a part of the tail end of that war and another that have been the feature of all three kids' adult lives. We aren't winning these wars; I don't think we can because I don't think they are wars of people being killed until their leaders give up. I think it's time for us to ditch the hubris of the Bush administration, to accept the fact that some people are heartless haters, and to win our enemies over by making their hateful ways losing ways, not by making their hateful fringe into martyrs. It absolutely galls me that Bush was so incensed by the deaths of 3,000 innocents on our soil that he cheerfully sent 5,000 of our own to theirs to die and thousands more to be injured, all in the name of hubris. And I don't believe that hubris can ever win.
In fact, I hated seeing the war scene in Avatar, not because I hated seeing people (on both sides) dispatched to their deaths but because I think there has to have been another way. Maybe 2154 (they year Ebert says the film is set) isn't far enough into the future; maybe we will need more time to learn to "beat [our] swords into plowshares" and "not study war no more." I think the current administration understands that, but I think our political system is too broken to let it work. I have hope, but it is fading—not because of what Obama has or hasn't done but because of the power of political idiots who are passing out the Kool-Aid.
One thing I did see in Avatar that I glommed onto was a scene in which a creature died and the leading lady (a Na'vi) explained that its soul would go on although its body would become a part of "the people" (for dinner, I presume). In a similar, earlier scene, she had said it was a shame to kill any creature; I don't remember the words exactly, but the point was that they are all part of the brotherhood of life.
The earlier scene might support Darling Daughter's vegetarian ideology; the later one fits more with my calm at having her brother go off to war: I know he could die, but I also believe in my very fiber that if his body dies, his soul and spirit will live on. I know that sounds corny, especially when I freely admit that I am religiously, if anything, a deist; I'm not willing to say I believe in resurrection, I'm not willing to profess that Jesus is the only way to God, and I'm not willing to be part of an order that seems to me to profess hubris above all, even though I know some lovely Christians who don't fit that description at all. My head says it's stupid to think my own Mother and Daddy are somehow still present, still with me, still watching out for me; my heart says it's absolutely true. I won't go around arguing the illogic of your religion with you if you don't argue the illogic of my philosophy with me.
And that whole range of thinking was spurred by this amazing adventure into special effects in film-making. I'm not sure whether DD is really going to stay in that industry; her heart may lead her another way, maybe in the coming months. But I do have to say that it's an amazing one, and even if the plot was worn and corny, I found the thing incredible.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Family time in the modern era, with boys
I love working a good jigsaw puzzle now and then; when we were kids, my brothers and sisters and I spent lots of hours with a big puzzle spread out on a card table, and for several years now, our family gatherings have featured at least the sisters (including the sister-in-law) seated around a puzzle while we chat about events since we last gathered.
This year I had found a silly puzzle titled "One Hundred Chickens and a Worm" that was mostly white with line drawings of mostly white chickens (and a few reds and blacks and purples), mostly dressed hysterically: one was a stripper, one was Bat Chicken, a couple appeared to be the Blues Brothers, one was reading a newspaper—you get the idea. Working it together made us sound as if we'd already escaped from the home: "I'm working on this Cat-in-the-Hat chicken; do you have any of these red stripes over there?"
After I had gotten the chicken puzzle home, I read on the box that the series included 100 frogs and a fly—perfect for the sister who likes frogs, I thought, and 100 dogs and a cat, and 100 cats and a bird. My local Wally Worlds didn't seem to carry the frog puzzle, but I bought the dogs for Darling Daughter and considered getting the cats for Number One Son.
DDr got away after Christmas without opening the dog puzzle, but I had had fun with the chickens and thought the dogs—which came in a much wider variety of colors—would be fun for me, since right now I outnumber her in dog maintenance by two to one.
I opened the box and took a tip from my sister, who had used made color copies of the box so all four of us could have one when we worked on the chickens together. (Amazing how technology has taken over even low-tech jigsaw puzzles; when I made my copies, I enlarged them to the size of a page so I could see details better!) Instead of fishing out all the border first, I sorted the pieces by color and started assembling dogs from the smallest pile first. Before the evening was out, I had assembled several green dogs, a few blue ones, and most of the pinks. NOS drifted by the table a couple of times on his way in and out of the kitchen and commented that he just didn't have the patience for jigsaw puzzles.
By the time I gave up for the evening (on grounds that I had to work the next day), I had done maybe half the puzzle and finished most of the border around it. The next evening, I started in again as soon as I got home from work, and when NOS came in a couple of hours later, the puzzle was really taking shape. Like the rest of my family, he couldn't resist, so he picked up a piece or two and tapped them into place, and then he was hooked on multicolor dogs, too.
Shortly after NOS started to work with me, Soldier Son called from his post in Georgia, where he is working through whatever training retreads former reservists into full-time duty. He didn't sound wonderful (hauling a 45-pound pack on his back in freezing weather has never been his idea of fun, and I think he was coming down with a cold), but he said something that got his brother's attention. I tried unsuccessfully to switch the phone to its speaker setting, but I gave up and handed the phone over to NOS.
I really thought NOS would give up and walk away to carry on the conversation with his brother, but I realized a few minutes later that I was glad he didn't. When my marriage broke up and NOS moved away from home with his dad and then again in a huff because my rules didn't suit his image of how he was allowed to behave, our "family time" pretty much fell apart. SS and DD and I found our opportunities to have "family time" without him, but "family time" with him has been sparse for the past 10 years, to put it mildly.
But this week, it seemed to be back, and I'm glad of that. I was sorry it couldn't be a face-to-face time when he and his brother and sister could all clown around together, but I was glad I got to feel as if his brother and I mattered to him in a way that let him relax and be comfortable just chatting and playing with us. I know he had tried to get there with his brother before SS left for Georgia, but somehow they never really seemed to "click."
It took the telephone to make it happen, but it was a nice little "family time" moment to share.
This year I had found a silly puzzle titled "One Hundred Chickens and a Worm" that was mostly white with line drawings of mostly white chickens (and a few reds and blacks and purples), mostly dressed hysterically: one was a stripper, one was Bat Chicken, a couple appeared to be the Blues Brothers, one was reading a newspaper—you get the idea. Working it together made us sound as if we'd already escaped from the home: "I'm working on this Cat-in-the-Hat chicken; do you have any of these red stripes over there?"
After I had gotten the chicken puzzle home, I read on the box that the series included 100 frogs and a fly—perfect for the sister who likes frogs, I thought, and 100 dogs and a cat, and 100 cats and a bird. My local Wally Worlds didn't seem to carry the frog puzzle, but I bought the dogs for Darling Daughter and considered getting the cats for Number One Son.
DDr got away after Christmas without opening the dog puzzle, but I had had fun with the chickens and thought the dogs—which came in a much wider variety of colors—would be fun for me, since right now I outnumber her in dog maintenance by two to one.
I opened the box and took a tip from my sister, who had used made color copies of the box so all four of us could have one when we worked on the chickens together. (Amazing how technology has taken over even low-tech jigsaw puzzles; when I made my copies, I enlarged them to the size of a page so I could see details better!) Instead of fishing out all the border first, I sorted the pieces by color and started assembling dogs from the smallest pile first. Before the evening was out, I had assembled several green dogs, a few blue ones, and most of the pinks. NOS drifted by the table a couple of times on his way in and out of the kitchen and commented that he just didn't have the patience for jigsaw puzzles.
By the time I gave up for the evening (on grounds that I had to work the next day), I had done maybe half the puzzle and finished most of the border around it. The next evening, I started in again as soon as I got home from work, and when NOS came in a couple of hours later, the puzzle was really taking shape. Like the rest of my family, he couldn't resist, so he picked up a piece or two and tapped them into place, and then he was hooked on multicolor dogs, too.
Shortly after NOS started to work with me, Soldier Son called from his post in Georgia, where he is working through whatever training retreads former reservists into full-time duty. He didn't sound wonderful (hauling a 45-pound pack on his back in freezing weather has never been his idea of fun, and I think he was coming down with a cold), but he said something that got his brother's attention. I tried unsuccessfully to switch the phone to its speaker setting, but I gave up and handed the phone over to NOS.
I really thought NOS would give up and walk away to carry on the conversation with his brother, but I realized a few minutes later that I was glad he didn't. When my marriage broke up and NOS moved away from home with his dad and then again in a huff because my rules didn't suit his image of how he was allowed to behave, our "family time" pretty much fell apart. SS and DD and I found our opportunities to have "family time" without him, but "family time" with him has been sparse for the past 10 years, to put it mildly.
But this week, it seemed to be back, and I'm glad of that. I was sorry it couldn't be a face-to-face time when he and his brother and sister could all clown around together, but I was glad I got to feel as if his brother and I mattered to him in a way that let him relax and be comfortable just chatting and playing with us. I know he had tried to get there with his brother before SS left for Georgia, but somehow they never really seemed to "click."
It took the telephone to make it happen, but it was a nice little "family time" moment to share.
Monday, January 11, 2010
A binary kind of day
One of my friends noted yesterday that we've had a few days this year (and we'll have a few more) that are binary—that is, they are written with only the digits 1 and 0. Of course, what they "mean" in binary code isn't the same as we see in good ol' decimal numbers. Today, for example, is 1/11, which written as 111 would be equal to one hundred eleven in decimal code, but in binary it represents seven (although I always wonder whether it would be read "one hundred eleven" or "one hundred and onety one" or something). We'll get a few more of these this year, come October and November, and then we'll reprise them next year.
Part of the reason I started thinking about this today is that I had to get the car inspected. Okay, I should have done it last month, but I was busy hating my job at the time, and I just didn't get out of the house to get a car inspected. So I did it today.
While I was in the showroom of the dealership where I bought my car, I laughed when I saw that the inspection sticker on one of the cars had my birthday on it: 11 11 (another good old binary number). And then when my car came out of the shop, it also had a binary number on it—this month next year: 1 11.
Or today's date, depending on which way you look at it.
Part of the reason I started thinking about this today is that I had to get the car inspected. Okay, I should have done it last month, but I was busy hating my job at the time, and I just didn't get out of the house to get a car inspected. So I did it today.
While I was in the showroom of the dealership where I bought my car, I laughed when I saw that the inspection sticker on one of the cars had my birthday on it: 11 11 (another good old binary number). And then when my car came out of the shop, it also had a binary number on it—this month next year: 1 11.
Or today's date, depending on which way you look at it.
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