She complimented the man from Georgia on a nicely done profile on a well-known online dating site. She said, you looked at me so I looked at you. You live too far away and you’re too conservative but your profile was well-written and entertaining when so many are predictable and kind of boring. Good job! Good luck!
He said:
“You are freshly divorced, you stink in bitterness, photos and profile. Give yourself the time. Do not judge people for their politics when you yourself describe yourself as being a fleeting leaf on the wind. You have no basis. No foundation, bitter with God, don't believe in anyone or anything. You need time. I will include you in my prayers despite yourself. It will take time for you to cycle out.”
She said, noting that in the very first line he stated that since his friends include felons that he’s clearly non-judgmental:
“Non-judgmental for sure!”
He said:
“The kettle calling the pot black? lol ;)
No, but really, an observation, if you have never been divorced before, or never really noticed, the first relationship after a divorce NEVER works. It just doesn't probably because the person never gives themself enough time to heal. Just an observation, not judgment.”
She said, even though she swore she was going to drop it:
“Well! At least you don't sound so sadistic this time.
And I never said that I'm non-judgmental on my profile... like you do. Everyone is judgmental in one way or another, and the entire basis of this site is to make judgments. Right?
The nature of romantic relationships is such that it may include a wide spectrum of possibilities... and what does it mean to have something "work out?" That you're together until your dying day, and if you're not that it's unsuccessful? That's a rigid view, in my opinion. I'm not necessarily looking for the love of my life and I'm sure other people feel the same. That's not a bad thing, it's recognizing that we may need/want different things at different points in our life and if things change it doesn't necessarily negate what we had.
These are rhetorical questions. You don't have to answer.”
He said:
“I will share, placing an emphasis on hope.
I believe that we are challenged, we are here to learn things that we cannot learn very easily in the spiritual realm.
Yes, we existed before this time, we are temporarily robbed of those memories due to the profound psychological impact during our stay here.
We are immortal, but we did have a finite beginning.
We volunteered to come here, actually a gift to be accepted or not.
Sort of a lotto ticket.
The goal is to channel our hearts and minds to be constructive, positive, creators of sorts, trying to physically fabricate our lives to good positive things.
The reason for this is because when we arrive back into our true home environment, after the death transition, our thoughts become manifest, here we actually have to physically make things happen.
So we take what we learn here back with us to create, to share and instruct others and do things in the positive.
Those that do not have a handle on that positive thought process are self-constricted to be within an environment that is the most comfortable to them.
So the saying “A self-made hell” may be a heaven to that one within the hell.
To others it would truly be hell…..lol
The hope is that, even then, everybody has the opportunity to improve and extract themselves out of a self-imposed hell.
So now, as we move through our trials and tribulations, we are being prepared for our next journey, like clay on the potter’s wheel.
Then that would place our relationships as possibly the most formidable tool with which to shape us.
At least for me, and hopefully those things will make me wise beyond my years.”
Okey dokey then. Why didn’t we let the South secede when we had the chance, I ask? I give this thing a few more weeks.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Little Slaughterhouse in the Big Woods
I am so very excited! I have moved beyond reading the torturous Scooby Doo books to reading chapter books to my youngest goober. A couple years ago I bought the entire set of Little House on the Prairie books, which were a huge favorite of mine when I was growing up. I am a total sucker for pioneer frontier stories. And I tried to get Evan into it, but he never got past the first book, Little House in the Big Woods which I paid him a dollar to read, thinking that maybe he would be drawn in enough to keep going on his own.
I’ve been reading chapters aloud to Luka, and I’ve been so thrilled that he’s interested. After the first night that I read the first chapter, though, I was shocked to see him crying. He was upset over the graphic descriptions of Pa hunting and slaughtering a pig. I just couldn’t believe it. Evan never showed any animal-eating sensitivity whatsoever. When Evan went to daycare when he was about three years old, I would supply the caregiver with meat alternatives, but I told her that it was okay to give him the meat version if that’s what the other kids were eating and if that was what he wanted. We talked about how the meat came from animals, and Evan was fine with it. He was all, “I don’t care.” I cook vegetarian, for the most part, but I’ve always felt the boys need to make their own decisions about being a vegetarian or not.
I told L that if he was that upset than maybe he should stop eating meat, and he told me that he tried not to think about where the meat came from when he was eating it. I've heard people say things like that before, and I guess I find it kind of odd. We talked about how, during the Little House times, that their survival depended on killing animals, they made use out of the entire animal, but that we don’t have to do that now.
So the goober has been looking worried when I’m reading and appear to be heading towards a hunting scene. He was enormously relieved during the part that describes where Pa decided to spare the lives of the animals that he’s watching instead of shooting them. Now, it’s going to be interesting to see if he eats any more meat.
I’ve been reading chapters aloud to Luka, and I’ve been so thrilled that he’s interested. After the first night that I read the first chapter, though, I was shocked to see him crying. He was upset over the graphic descriptions of Pa hunting and slaughtering a pig. I just couldn’t believe it. Evan never showed any animal-eating sensitivity whatsoever. When Evan went to daycare when he was about three years old, I would supply the caregiver with meat alternatives, but I told her that it was okay to give him the meat version if that’s what the other kids were eating and if that was what he wanted. We talked about how the meat came from animals, and Evan was fine with it. He was all, “I don’t care.” I cook vegetarian, for the most part, but I’ve always felt the boys need to make their own decisions about being a vegetarian or not.
I told L that if he was that upset than maybe he should stop eating meat, and he told me that he tried not to think about where the meat came from when he was eating it. I've heard people say things like that before, and I guess I find it kind of odd. We talked about how, during the Little House times, that their survival depended on killing animals, they made use out of the entire animal, but that we don’t have to do that now.
So the goober has been looking worried when I’m reading and appear to be heading towards a hunting scene. He was enormously relieved during the part that describes where Pa decided to spare the lives of the animals that he’s watching instead of shooting them. Now, it’s going to be interesting to see if he eats any more meat.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Raising Sand
It’s been awhile since I’ve been excited about new music. The last time I bought something that I couldn’t stop playing was the new disc from Blanche. But the other night I was flipping through the free videos on cable and I came across a Robert Plant/Alison Krauss concert and I was blown away.
It used to be that I would mostly catch new things while I was driving around listening to the radio. I listened to Martin Bandyke when he was on WDET and that’s where I first heard music from Blanche, Feist, Beth Orton and the Eels. I also discovered Howard Stern as I drove to UM to public health school and I was hooked but I had to stop listening when the kids were around. Which was all the time. I tried to get a Howard Stern fix once while driving but I couldn’t flip the channel fast enough when it got raunchy and next thing I know my kid is asking me, “Mom, are you wearing panties?”
I bought Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and it’s fantastic. These are two talented people that can obviously belt them out, and they do sometimes, but more often hit the songs with restrained wistful achiness. With T-Bone Burnett on guitar and producing, which I guess is really good because all the reviews mention it. But I’m just name-dropping.
Here are two videos from the concert. The first song is on the disc and the second isn’t but I wish it were. It's a traditional called The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe His Corn that is on another Alison Krauss record.
And in a nod to positive ageing, I would just like to say that Robert Plant is looking quite fine in all his non-surgified cragginess.
It used to be that I would mostly catch new things while I was driving around listening to the radio. I listened to Martin Bandyke when he was on WDET and that’s where I first heard music from Blanche, Feist, Beth Orton and the Eels. I also discovered Howard Stern as I drove to UM to public health school and I was hooked but I had to stop listening when the kids were around. Which was all the time. I tried to get a Howard Stern fix once while driving but I couldn’t flip the channel fast enough when it got raunchy and next thing I know my kid is asking me, “Mom, are you wearing panties?”
I bought Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and it’s fantastic. These are two talented people that can obviously belt them out, and they do sometimes, but more often hit the songs with restrained wistful achiness. With T-Bone Burnett on guitar and producing, which I guess is really good because all the reviews mention it. But I’m just name-dropping.
Here are two videos from the concert. The first song is on the disc and the second isn’t but I wish it were. It's a traditional called The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe His Corn that is on another Alison Krauss record.
And in a nod to positive ageing, I would just like to say that Robert Plant is looking quite fine in all his non-surgified cragginess.
Monday, March 3, 2008
I Just Saw The Most Asinine Bumper Sticker
It said, “SMILE Your mother chose life.”
That is so wrong on so many levels.
First of all, I was born in 1965, when abortion was still illegal. My mother didn’t get to choose anything. She became pregnant the first time she ever had sex. She didn’t finish high school but she did “the right thing” and married my dad at age 17. She did, however, choose three years later to have another child who is my sister.
For as long as I can remember, my mother seemed depressed and unhappy in a hostile kind of way. She kept my sister and I in an upstairs bedroom and interacted with us as little as possible. She brought us meals in our room unless my dad was home to eat with us. We were sent to our aunt’s or grandparents on weekends and summers. Now that I’m a mother, I can’t believe some of the things she did. Things like send us by ourselves to eat at a restaurant which required crossing a major road. My sister and I now wonder if she may have hoped that we would get hit by a car or something. For real. Finally, we were sent away to live at my aunt’s permanently when I was just starting the 7th grade and she told us then, “I just can’t live with kids”.
She suffered the ups and downs of depression for years, was a closet alcoholic and self-medicated in various ways. Now that I am a mother, I can understand to a certain extent what she was going through. She was really just a kid when she got pregnant, and at that time it was expected that the women were all housewifey. Not so much from my dad, but more like what society expected from women in general. Personally, I hate housewifey and if I were expected to comply with that role I would probably resent it and lose it, too.
When she started having a hard time breathing and lost a lot of weight, she refused to go to the doctor. It was nearly three years ago that, at age 57, she died of a lung hemorrhage in her bathroom while my dad was away on vacation. The autopsy showed that she had tuberculosis and that it had slowly eroded her lungs until it destroyed a major vessel. She died as a combination of blood loss and drowning. My sister and I watched her covered body rolled out of her house to the medical examiner’s truck before we were allowed in to clean up the blood she had spilled. As the medical examiner later reported, she’d had tuberculosis for “a long, long time.”
No, my mother did not choose life. But maybe I would SMILE a dumbass smile if I walked around with a patronizing simpleton’s view on extremely complex and personal issues.
That is so wrong on so many levels.
First of all, I was born in 1965, when abortion was still illegal. My mother didn’t get to choose anything. She became pregnant the first time she ever had sex. She didn’t finish high school but she did “the right thing” and married my dad at age 17. She did, however, choose three years later to have another child who is my sister.
For as long as I can remember, my mother seemed depressed and unhappy in a hostile kind of way. She kept my sister and I in an upstairs bedroom and interacted with us as little as possible. She brought us meals in our room unless my dad was home to eat with us. We were sent to our aunt’s or grandparents on weekends and summers. Now that I’m a mother, I can’t believe some of the things she did. Things like send us by ourselves to eat at a restaurant which required crossing a major road. My sister and I now wonder if she may have hoped that we would get hit by a car or something. For real. Finally, we were sent away to live at my aunt’s permanently when I was just starting the 7th grade and she told us then, “I just can’t live with kids”.
She suffered the ups and downs of depression for years, was a closet alcoholic and self-medicated in various ways. Now that I am a mother, I can understand to a certain extent what she was going through. She was really just a kid when she got pregnant, and at that time it was expected that the women were all housewifey. Not so much from my dad, but more like what society expected from women in general. Personally, I hate housewifey and if I were expected to comply with that role I would probably resent it and lose it, too.
When she started having a hard time breathing and lost a lot of weight, she refused to go to the doctor. It was nearly three years ago that, at age 57, she died of a lung hemorrhage in her bathroom while my dad was away on vacation. The autopsy showed that she had tuberculosis and that it had slowly eroded her lungs until it destroyed a major vessel. She died as a combination of blood loss and drowning. My sister and I watched her covered body rolled out of her house to the medical examiner’s truck before we were allowed in to clean up the blood she had spilled. As the medical examiner later reported, she’d had tuberculosis for “a long, long time.”
No, my mother did not choose life. But maybe I would SMILE a dumbass smile if I walked around with a patronizing simpleton’s view on extremely complex and personal issues.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Frog is the Messenger
"Change will come when the white men in this society realize the chemicals in the environment are causing their testicles to shrink. Then the money's going to flow like water to the environmental movement." Native American author and activist Winona LaDuke, quoting Indigenous Environmental Network founder Tom Goldtooth.
A certain frog maniac friend recently sent me an e-mail about the year 2008 being the Year of the Frog. I would recommend taking a look at this site to become informed about what is happening worldwide to, and the importance of, these little amphibians. What I found particularly telling was this information about amphibians as environmental health indicators:
Amphibians’ thin skins help them drink and breathe, but also make them susceptible to environmental contaminants, particularly agricultural, industrial, and pharmaceutical chemicals. For example, atrazine is the most widely used herbicide in the US with an estimated 61 to 73 million pounds used per year during the 1990s. Scientific studies have found that atrazine may cause a variety of cancers and act as an endocrine disruptor, mimicking the feminizing hormone estrogen and harming human and animal reproductive and hormone systems. Atrazine is generally applied in spring and can accumulate in amphibian breeding pools.
According to this fact sheet from the Natural Resources Defense Council, it’s not only frogs that are showing alarming signs of exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals. Fish in the Great Lakes, which are contaminated with PCBs and other human-made chemicals, have numerous reproductive problems as well as abnormal swelling of the thyroid glands. Fish-eating birds in the Great Lakes area, such as eagles, terns, and gulls, have shown similar dysfunctions. And since all vertebrates, including humans, are fundamentally similar during early embryonic development they (we) are similarly susceptible to chemically-altering changes that occur.
How fitting it is that amphibians, whose thin skins and weighty little bodies make them so testicle-like, are serving as indicators for changes in the environment that are known to affect reproductive health. And that is the somewhat known part of the equation. Who knows what else is linked to the pervasive use of chemicals that are manufactured and applied and disposed that invariably end up in the environment and bioaccumulate in our bodies? We can imagine the impact of these renegade chemicals and we know it isn't pretty.
It’s the year of the frog. Perhaps, for many, it is a stretch to feel a connection to this strange-looking species that span this planet. So here's a little spring peeper to put some perspective on this issue and why you should care. All you men out there, just think of your testes as your own thin-skinned, bulbous and weighty frog that you keep warm and carry with you everywhere. Women, we are all mothers, daughters, sisters and friends to someone who carries a life-giving frog.
Clearly the money is not flowing like water to the environmental movement yet, so the message hasn’t gotten out to the white men and everybody else about those shrinking testicles. Major changes still need to happen, at many different levels. To some extent I know I’m preaching to the choir here about supporting the work that is being done and reducing your own chemical load, because you know what to do. But we can all do a little bit more, try a little harder. Listen to what the messengers are telling and do your part to protect those frogs.
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