Me and silver

Losing my mom 2 years ago had a component that's probably universal.  Regrets.  They're a stupid way to live, considering that linear time is going to keep marching forward, but maybe it's inevitable that I not only miss some of the things we shared but badly miss some of the things we could have shared but didn't.

For every special occasion, Mom and Dad's wedding silverware came out of the hutch, got polished up and got placed at the dining room table.  And with the approach of every special occasion, I made sure my mother knew how much I despised the silver, the polishing, and the formality, and would never, ever have such things as part of my life.

Kid, teenager, Young Woman, endlessly I hauled out the same snide comments about the silverware and she'd smile and preempt my beaten-to-death joke :  "Yes, yes, I know, when I'm gone you're going to melt it all down into ingots and sell it."

No, she didn't smile because she knew I'd come around.  She smiled because she never took material things all that seriously.  She mentioned my distaste for the silverware to a friend just a few years ago.  She really thought I hated it, and there's a good reason she thought so.

I thought I hated it, too.

And maybe she and I share responsibility for our complete lack of understanding about the silverware and why I claimed not to want it.  With some communication we might have uncovered the real problem.

Because what I actually hated was silver polish.

It seems unfair to name the brand.  It was a good product, it was all there was back in The Day, and it did the job.  Nobody had invented anything better, or at least nothing else was commonly publicized. The brand is still around and I think they solved the stench problem awhile back, so it no longer needs to be dissed.

But back then, W------ Silver Polish had a nasty, sour smell.  And taste.  As the pre-holiday polishing job got underway, it formed a nauseating little atmosphere of sulphurous sourness in the kitchen, where she polished the utensils, and maybe it was my imagination, but I could taste the stuff on my dinner fork, a sour-ish encore to every bite of turkey or rice.

I doubt if anybody liked the smell, but it may be that I'm just built to react strongly to it.  The smell gave me the kind of headache that in turn causes queasiness.  However mild both sensations were -- and they were.  I ate and socialized normally through the meal -- still, it took a form of Formal Dinner self-control for me to sit and eat with the smell clinging even so gently to the whole table spread.

To her end, she thought I hated this silver that she cherished.  For so long, I thought I did too.

Possibly she suspected that my dislike had eased some when she gave me this pitcher about 10 years ago.  I've positioned it so you can see one of its dents, center-bottom.  There are more dents, and lots of scratches.  It's silver plate, and she kind of waved it off, saying, "Would you like that?  Now, it's not any good, but you're welcome to it."  And I responded with a happy "Yes!"  Plate needs care too and so, by my taking something silver when she offered it, I hope she knew I would at least treat her flatware with respect.

But I doubt she knew it would ever be real love, and it is.  The pieces are beautiful, and she loved it, and for her sake and its own, I love it too. I probably would have loved it long ago if i'd known that my problem was NOT that silver was an inherently sour and nauseating metal, but that W------ Silver Polish was making it act on me like kryptonite.

She'd undoubtedly get a big kick out of seeing me spot this little tray in a thrift shop and actually want it. This too is plated and came cheap, but I loved the shape and the clean, classic design, and finding my initial on it closed the deal for 10 bucks.

Spending the present regretting the past simply piles up more lost minutes squandered, but still, sometimes, I wish....

In which we discover that we're supposed to clean our birdfeeders

I don't just mean knock out the old crud, or even hose the feeder out periodically.

I mean, really clean them. With a 1/9 bleach-to-water ratio : one part bleach, to 9 parts water.
Every month.

Is this one of those things that everybody knows about except me?  I expect not.  So here's what we learned today, and if my readers decide to clean their feeders, even at somewhat less frequent intervals, it's bound to be beneficial.

Today we stopped at our storage unit and a little finch was standing there in the drive.  The car driving by didn't inspire him to fly away, so as Larry went to check the unit, I said I'd walk back down the alley and check on the bird.

I made Bird a little nervous but no matter how close I got, he didn't bolt, which worried me.  Then I noticed his eye.  I carefully picked him up and he stood calmly on my palm, then transferred himself to my index finger and perched.  Now I could see both eyes, badly infected.  He couldn't see at all, and had gotten trapped here in this tunnel of steel buildings and concrete.

I walked back down to the car  -- most of the way down that concrete drive you see behind me -- with the bird perched tamely on my finger.  And we tried to decide what to do.  The bird got tired of all this and flew away, but in blind random spirals, and landed on the other side of the building where he hopped in desperate circles until we picked him up again, and drove him a couple miles down to the local vet that specializes in wild rescues.  As Downy's friend Mojo would say, they are Sooperheroes.

It is utterly cool to have no Boss docking us for getting back late from break time.  Tourist season is on in full and Larry had a tedious driving job while I sat with my fingers forming a little cage to keep the little guy from taking off inside the car.

Back home, Larry did the research.  This bird had conjunctivitis.

There are undoubtedly many places they can contract this disease, but one source of it is unclean bird feeders, which can harbor the bacteria.  As we'd just seen, an otherwise healthy bird can die without the use of its sight.

It had never occurred to us to actually bleach-out the feeders, ever, much less every month.

What we're thinking about doing is getting a second feeder for each station, so we can switch them out without leaving the station unsupplied for a couple days.

We've even found that they take awhile to accept a new feeder placed in the same spot as one it replaced, and, though I'm guessing, I figured the new store smell had to weather off.   So even at one-tenth strength, wild birds might reject the bleach smell and it probably needs to be thoroughly soaked away after the germs have been soaked away.

The Graduation Speech. Yeah, that one.

The topic is "You're not special."

Like thirty million other bloggers, I'm sure I have something Special to say about it.  Jumping on the sound-byte of the minute bandwagon.  Blast it, I just did that and here I am doing it again.

The speech.  Here it is.  12 minutes-plus on yahoo video, just so you know.

I can agree with so much of what he said, and still think he said nothing new or important.  Is he terribly innovative for finger-pointing at a society in which every participant gets a trophy and every student gets a "Great Kid!" bumper sticker at McDonald's even if he/she didn't qualify for his school's actual Student of the Month, which started the whole sticker mess?

Not really.  True, he pulls out the wit and a little bit of the insight.  And true, he says in the middle of the speech that "Everybody's special so nobody is" and then redeems that at the end with "[Recognize that] you're not special, because everybody is" which is more like my philosophy.

He's OK at seeing that the patient is sick, but not very good at diagnosing the problem and therefore even worse at offering a cure.  These kids do indeed need to find a different source of inner fulfillment, and learn that it really is more important to see the world than to have the world see you.  He says some good stuff.   The self-esteem-movement generation might have a harder time shifting to a deeper focus than will later generations, who will be raised with what we've learned from the trophies-for-all silliness.

(The first of which is that the kids know exactly how meaningless something everybody gets is.  So it's not like getting it actually strokes their egos much. Does anybody think most kids can't figure out when adults are being patronizing?)

I'm more inclined to critique the whole phenomenon of contempt for a product -- that product being the kids raised in the self-esteem bubble --  that we've worked so bloody hard to create.

I too hate the attitudes he complains about:  the entitlement, the carefully created (BY parents, teachers and product-pushers)  attitude that kids have to do and work for and achieve nothing and should have accolades anyway;

that a kid needs to never, ever, feel less-than, even when s/he absolutely has done less than another kid;

that hurt feelings, when the other kid gets a ribbon or an honor, are actually harmful to any child who didn't earn one herself.  Not an impetus to try harder, set goals, blahblah, but a psychic wound at a deep level that risks making her just crawl under the bed and suck her thumb till she's thirty.

The over-use of awards and honors comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about self-worth.  Very few people have been taught the difference between "what I do" and "who I am."  Very few people realize that the embarrassment or grieving experienced by a kid who lost the trophy is NOT causing a lack of self-worth.  It is, and should be, a cause of feeling that s/he didn't try hard enough, didn't learn the task well enough, or in some cases is not really talented enough to get as far in the field as another kid.  If he hasn't been raised to have true self-worth, then sure, losing an honor will pluck that string, but losing is the pick, not the string.

Accepting that the other kid who's a champion swimmer is just built better for swimming doesn't blast a child's sense of self to smithereens.  Those tears are gutwrenching to watch, but are just part of learning who he really is and growing into his individual powers.

The trick is to know, and then to teach the child, that "You're not as good a swimmer" and "You're not a good enough person" are two radically different things. It's about something you do, not about who you are.  It's the same knowledge that needs to be applied to mistakes and even to deliberate naughtiness.  "You did something wrong."  Not "You are bad."

What this has to do with the speech is that:

(1)  If this diploma is actually another meaningless thing that everybody gets, then he's indicting the school a whole lot more than he's indicting the kids who navigated a system they didn't create.

If the school is a reputable one, then I suspect this graduation is a real achievement.  Likening these graduates to those of violent, deteriorating schools from which students graduate barely able to spell is probably plain inaccurate, and those gold tassels for higher achievement mean something, too.  He makes much of numbers, but numbers shouldn't alone devalue effort.  The definition of ordinary can change.  Up or down.

(2)  The importance of instilling good self-esteem is not fundamentally wrong.  It just needs to be done with the aforementioned knowledge of what true self-worth really is, and that hurt feelings and disappointment do not necessarily indicate damaged self-worth. Sometimes they're a lesson to try harder and sometimes they're a lesson to try something else. Feeling the discomfort of contrast is a crucial part of learning.

(3)  The kids didn't make the bad award rules or riot and throw Molotov cocktails demanding trophies and stickers.  They took the direction, and the stickers, that they were given.  To show contempt for them, after this ignorant system processed them into the Everybody's Special corral, is ridiculous.

"You're special!"
"I am?  All I did was show up."
"That's special!  You're special!"
"Cool! I'm special!"
"No, you're a little slacker nothing."

is Theatre of the Absurd.  Hello, grownups?  Who made the rules?

You.
And you did it with good intentions.
And in ignorance.
Now do it better.

Obscene T-shirts and free speech

The culture war over taste and public expression has flared up regarding
a T-shirt that got a wearer kicked off of an American Airlines flight.

Stories like this can seem trivial when there's a lot of real death and destruction to worry about.

But over and over, we're seeing, not considered thoughtfully-formulated policy as to what a business or institution will allow on its property, but a real sense of entitlement by The Offended to make policy on the spot.

To demand that their taste be enforced on customers :

 - without advance notice to those customers;

 - without oversight by any policymaking body for the firm;

 - without planning or consensus;

 - and without consistency in implementation or enforcement.

There is a very very gray area in which the question of what people should do, and what they have the right to do, gets tangled and difficult to sort out.   If you click the link above, you'll see that the offensive word has been partially blocked out in the news story.

Superficially, this can seem laughably stupid.  I mean, is the exact word in any doubt whatsoever?  What difference does it make to put that little black box over the middle letters?

Which leads to the question of....why use the word?  The word "screw" or the euphemism "sleep with" would convey the political message perfectly well.  Heck, context means that the word could be blacked out on the shirt itself and the wearer's opinion, and exact word used, would still be abundantly clear.

The black box does make a difference, and here's why: it doesn't seek to prevent us from reading the word or knowing what it said, but has a different purpose; to affirm the reader/listener's disapproval. Those who find the term offensive can feel that their standards of civility are considered reasonable and are still society's Default Setting.

Whether it was tasteful or necessary isn't the issue.  They were wrong to throw her off the flight.

Let's take the most stringent view of rights, just for the sake of argument, and let's say that AA had every right to make clothing rules.

What they do NOT have the right to do is:  to let a crew member make up a policy and enforce it at the gate without notice to this or to any passenger.  The airline's policy on this matter, included in this article, is not a specific interdiction of known words and phrases, but a blanket assertion of the right to NOT spell out what is and isn't acceptable.  And to make any expression of another passenger's distaste override the offending passenger's rights. 

The shirt made a political statement, and it made that statement with an anger that is neither small nor trivial.  According to the airline, the F-word -- not the political viewpoint -- was the issue.

Maybe it really was apolitical.  But loathing for the political point of view could be shrouded in the claim of obscenity.  It's happened before.

Airline crew encounter all kinds of absolutely nasty and grotesque passenger behavior that leaves this in the dust.  Now, me, I'd be fine with any passenger who showed no sign of doing other than turning off her electronic devices for take-off, fastening her seatbelt, and quietly sitting with her drink, her snack mix and her e-reader.  Nobody on the first leg of her trip seemed to consider disciplining her for the word to be their personal crusade.

The shirt may be obnoxious in some eyes, but it was emphatically not a use of the word for a trivial reason.  The escalation in women's anger comes in response to an escalating ultra-right push on every aspect of a woman's life, way beyond terminating pregnancies.  It is very well stated here.

My "own"  (please, let me out)  state of SC recently tried to forbid state employees to have, in their health coverage, a provision for abortion, even in clear and established cases of rape.

 It failed by one vote.  Not that I'm not relieved, and not that I didn't know how extreme are many peoples' stands on abortion, but the thought of how close it was - how many lawmakers support forcing a woman who has been raped to bear a child from it leaves me gobsmacked.  There are positions of integrity on both sides of the abortion issue, but this mentality can't be considered anything but an assault against women.

The strange opposition to contraception in health plans .....  to money for life-saving gynecological care at Planned Parenthood, which uses NONE of it for abortion .... the idea that if the anti-abortion movement cannot win the hearts and minds of the people of this democracy, they have the absolute right to make the process lengthy and expensive to a punitive and contorted degree...

 ..... and especially that they have the right to insult and shame women using that process, but then have the "right" not to see a bad word on a T-shirt....

Please understand the twisted thinking of this.  Go ahead.  Hate abortion.  Hate irresponsible behavior.

But also hate the mentality that calls for opposing views to be suppressed.  This is one of those cases.  The shirt did not say "[....] Personal Name"  or even   "[....] Big Corporation Everybody Hates"  much less "[....]ing is Fun".  It expressed political rage.  The shirt did not speak for the airline, the crew, or anyone but the wearer, and could never be construed as being the statement of anyone else.

Obviously, I think the rage is justified and that no toned-down term would convey the feeling of violation that many women in this society are experiencing right now.  So yeah, to tone it down would indeed be suppression of the person's free expression.  Telling her she can say it, but must do it nicer, is telling her she can't really say it at all.  There's nothing Nice about the fact that a frightening number of people would grant liberty, authority over one's own body, and self-determination to men and fetuses, but not to women.

If American Airlines or any other business that serves the public wants to make regulations that have absolutely ZERO to do with passenger safety, terrorism, etc., then they need to spell them out at corporate level so that any passenger can choose to comply, or choose to protest, or choose to fly on another line.

The airline might get more business for doing it, or they might lose business.  To avoid spelling out what is disallowed in an above-board, full-disclosure way is cowardly, unethical, and possibly illegal.

If I were an airline official, and that crew member had come to me with some personal demand that a customer's shirt message not offend him or her, I would tell said crew member that we appreciate good employees, and it's up to you, but if you expect your personal taste to determine who may fly, you might want to work somewhere else.  Unemployment is rampant out there and I would be very happy to pass your job on to someone who does not demand that this company serve only customers of whom s/he feels entitled to issue on-the-spot approvals -- or disapprovals.

And I guess you'll all have to take my word for it, that I would apply this to all points of view.  If you want this kind of policy, then do the procedure for policymaking.  Convince the company to put some thought into a policy for passenger attire and behavior that ticket-buyers will be clearly informed of in advance, and that will be applied consistently, and then enforcing it is my job.

Their claim that it's "virtually impossible to write down or precisely delineate every situation that may, or may not, create an issue" is bull.   The list of common obscenities, profanities, and depictions of crass nudity would be quite easy to put together. They have a right to ban specifics, but this vague "policy" to ban just any old thing that someone does not like goes way too far.

Try this:  The exact same shirt, with a black box masking the F-word could still offend some other passenger, who would find it a strident and obviously obscene pro-choice statement.  The American Airlines policy would allow them to kick off the wearer, even under those circumstances.

If any of my readers want a similar T-shirt, they can buy one at this site.  But be forewarned.  The F-word is not blacked out here.  Oh, and for a little moment of rude comic relief -- if you're thinking of choosing the white shirt, you might want to preview it before ordering.

Not exactly in tune*

Rainbow 2008

There are ways in which my brain doesn't quite work the way other peoples' do.

For one thing, I have no evidence that those great exercise endorphins I hear rumors about actually exist.  I am an unrepentant Aendorphist.  Or maybe an Agnostendorphist.  No matter how hard I work out, run, whatever, I never get any rush of endorphin euphoria, even a mild one that scores more as "kinda nice," so I strongly suspect that exercise endorphins are a myth, like Santa, that They use to get us to be Good. Which is probably why I'm so out of shape.  But that's another problem.

This one is the healing powers of nature.  I don't get that either.

Instamatic shot, 1971

Which might be kind of odd for a forest-primevil lover, which I am.  Cities are great for brief visits to partake of concerts and stores but I have a perpetual kind of low-grade tension in them and my readiness to get away appears in a few days.  I crave our finding a piece of property far away from all noise not produced by nature.


Our semi-annual nerve-frazzling, brain-grinding biker rally may be why I'm thinking about this.

But anyway, that's different from finding nature healing.  Or, I guess it is. When my life has been in bad shape, I have never found that the woods or the ocean or the gardens or anything makes me feel at all more empowered, hopeful, or at peace.  I read about others who go through a bad life-passage, and who take to the woods or the desert and find it healing in some way.  I like it out there with the trees and water, but feel just as lousy.

Instamatic, 1972

The closest I've ever come to having a nature experience that made me feel any better-centered, or that notched my mood up a hair, was by the ocean on a dark night.  I haven't walked by the ocean at night in many years. We don't live all that close, and you kind of need to be in walking distance since the whole driving/parking thing makes this particular experience horribly ordinary.  But when I have midnight-beach-walked in the past, usually on a vacation with a beachfront rental, the Atlantic Ocean at night was wonderfully overwhelming.

35mm basic camera, 1981

By day, I can easily perceive the build and crash of breakers, many yards away out there, as being .... well, as being many yards away out there.  But in the dark, the surge feels threatening and kind of adrenalin-rush overwhelming, and feels that way over and over, no matter how many times I experience it.

Safe on shore, I see this black featureless horizon, swelling up and roaring at me, building so tall that it doesn't seem possible that it won't engulf the sand and me with it.  The black wall rises and I have to fight the urge to hold my breath, and then it topples and crashes and is gone while I just can't quite make my mind believe such a massive rushing entity has simply dissipated.  That is the only force of nature that has ever helped me, and I'm not sure why.  It's Huge and makes my life feel comfortably trivial, but no other natural landscape, equally immense or majestic, can produce the feeling.  Maybe the sense of being in danger is the key component.  Maybe that works sort of like a drug to overwhelm any other anxiety I've got going on.

Brookgreen Gardens Live Oak, May 2012

So I do have a type of nature experience that helps me, but the difference is that it doesn't make me feel better in a way I can keep.  It's for the moment.  Not only is whatever was bothering me still bothering me, but I feel no forward movement.  Nature gives me only a brief break, but there's nothing wrong with that.

--
* My post title refers to this cool poem.

Defending belief. Defending believers.

The summary is:  I don't defend my beliefs, because that slips over the line into proselytizing and I don't go there. But I do defend believers, as people of thought, reason and justice.  There.  Those of my readers who are sick of my rants on this subject can click on to something more fun.

There's an old anti-war poster that says "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"  That's been my general philosophy about some issues.  Stop the escalation by not participating.

But the escalation of the belief war keeps on because there are more than two sides.  In the atheist/Believer war, you've got some Believers who think all atheists (and other faiths) must be converted, and you've got some atheists who think all Believers must be "educated" into non-belief.  They'd be into it anyway, but those who'd prefer to opt out keep getting dragged in.

There's a third group with members of all belief stripes, which holds to the "live and let live" position. I'm with them, but we still have a battle to fight because so many in both camps would impinge on and outright deny freedom of belief to others.

And one of their weapons is a mockery that bleeds outside the boundaries of attacks on belief itself, and gets into a show of -- probably sincere -- contempt for the believing person and for all the person does or thinks.

McCalls, 12/67

If it were only a form of trolling, to get us to fly off the handle, it wouldn't be worth responding to, but I meant that part about them being sincere. Too many really believe that our faith in a Higher Power IS the SAME as opposing science, dumping our critical thinking for dogma, wanting Biblical law encoded into civil law, assigning values and roles to women and minorities based on ancient teachings, blah blah blah.

I've just had a verbal sparring match with an atheist who spouted a ubiquitous atheist cute-ism: that believers think some being lives up "in a cloud" and turns traffic lights green for us, when He feels like it.  Etc., etc., etc.

  

I have honestly never, ever, run into anybody who thinks this.  I even know a guy who believes the whole thing about how earth was created in 4004 BCE, but have never met anybody who thinks God lives in a freaking cloud.  If any of you are out there, let me know, and I'll recant.

Wall Chart of World History, facsimile edition, Barnes & Noble 1995

The vitriol levied at us believers is nothing new but sometimes it gets to me, especially when there's been a lot of it in a short time frame.  This guy who hauled out the Cloud Entity thing got my response, pretty much because he was just the Hundredth Lucky Caller. I suggested he mock something we actually believe if he must mock at all.

What?  Can't find anything?  And if you have to make up a belief to mock, then how weak is your argument?

Here are some examples that show what I keep encountering. This, if I need to reiterate it, is about why I defend the working brains of believers, so my examples are of infringement on us.  There are plenty of examples of believers pressuring non-believers and none of this denies that.  This whole post, in fact, is based on the phenomenon of both sides doing it.

Some of these are old but are still getting cited and recommended.

Take this one.  It's extremely long; here's a passage :

By all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people's words do, but not by censoring the words as such. 

And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I'd expect most of you to be so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture today to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.

I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed—even expected—to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.

[....]

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Yes.  Legal enforcement of a ban on teaching tenets of faith, even to your own children in your own home. That's what he said.

Here's another one .  This extremely good, fiercely intelligent, but extremely arrogant writer critiques beliefs that don't even
-- she admits this -- participate in or approve of religious abuses:

The “I’m spiritual but not religious” trope is trying to have the best of both worlds… but it’s actually getting the worst. It’s keeping the part of religion that’s the indefensible, unsupported-by-a-scrap-of- evidence belief in invisible beings; indeed, the part of religion that sees those invisible beings as more real, and more important, than the real physical world we live in. It’s keeping the part of religion that devalues reason and evidence and careful thinking, in favor of hanging onto any cockamamie idea that appeals to your wishful thinking.  It’s keeping the part of religion that equates morality and value with believing in invisible friends. 

The operative word in that is "indefensible." She sees the two sides as endlessly trying to defend their views to the other despite the fact that many of us don't come to that war.

In another entry she explains that religious belief that's strictly personal and has no pubic policy agenda still must be opposed :

I think it does harm even in the absence of overt religious intolerance. I think it encourages gullibility, vulnerability to bad ideas and charlatans; I think it discourages critical thinking and the valuing of evidence...

[...] 

So while, on a practical, day-to-day political level I'm going to fight for tolerance and ecumenicalism — creationism out of the public schools, evangelizing out of the military, public health policy not being written by fundamentalists, that sort of thing — I'm also going to keep fighting against religion in general.

There's a kind of circular reasoning going on, in which religious belief gets indicted for causing repression and causing opposition to science and evidence, so you point out believers who also support science and evidence and social justice, and get back :
"Who really cares; you believe in 'invisible friends.' "

I'm pretty well convinced that free thought isn't what it was 200 years ago, and is not about freedom and respect for everyone.

I keep wondering why all that thinking doesn't lead to the logical conclusion that subordinating one's own decision-making to the authority of the group is the problem, not the group per se.  You'd think they'd be interested in what scientific research tells us about the human mind, and about how we're social beings who crave the safety and status of membership in groups.

Heck yes, we want to Belong, we want to demonstrate our loyalty and our support and we gain acceptance and status by doing so.  We'll ignore evidence that indicates our group might be wrong on an issue, because defending the group's position both strengthens the group and raises us in its ranks.  If the joy of discovery and questioning authority isn't taught us early in life, before the stage in which peer pressure gains its maximum power over us, we'll turn our critical thinking off and defer to that peer group a whole lot more.

Religion is merely one of those groups.  A powerful one, but totally, absolutely secondary to the fundamental need to belong.  Eliminate religion and you eliminate all that violence and inhumanity done in its name?  The naiveté of this is amazing.

The minute we eliminate religion, other forms of group identity will still be there, making us just as inhumane to other groups as we always were.  We will still need to say "We're better than them, we deserve their land, resources and forced labor."

What we need to reduce is our craving to be the Us instead of the Them.  Both of us, all of us, need to do it.

All unsolicited proselytizing is unethical. Debate on anything is fine as long as both parties are doing it voluntarily.  Proselytizing should be done only at the request of the seeker, and should never, ever be initiated by the believer or the atheist.  If a person has not asked me what my idea of The Big Truth is, then I should be quiet.  What that person believes is none of my business.

So I come to another author and blogger, from whom I am probably theologically about a light-year apart.  I know about her because she followed me on Twitter, though briefly (which happens a lot, since I don't tweet much. I find it kind of a chore).  Anyway, my beliefs are vastly more Nicene than hers are:

Those that have changed the names of God to ones that are less dominated by the traditional pictures the word “God” evokes are now faced with scientific and archaeological findings that challenge the idea of God as creator; philosophical ideas that undermine the ultimate reality of God as a being separate and distinct from human experience; anthropological examination that exposes the human need to create deities and supernatural forces.

but she takes a post-acrimony position that I can completely share:

  I think it is high time we stopped feeding the acrimony between atheists and people of any faith tradition and start looking at the values that lie at the heart of whatever it is we believe.  If those values are grounded in a respect for the dignity of all life and in creating and sustaining right relationship with self, others, and the planet, then who cares what religious or philosophical perspective one holds?

This, folks, is how we allow freedom of conscience and still move humanity forward.

I don't debate the existence or nature of God.  I do debate the accusations made about believers, because they are claims to know who I am and what I think and they don't get to do that.  They claim authority and I question them.

In which we consider breakfast, with digressions

Probably the only legal thing worse than sleep deprivation, for adolescent mental and physical development, would be vitamin deficiency.   This post was sparked by my running into an old ad and realizing what a huge debt I owe to Carnation Instant Breakfast [TM].  Which I did not have for breakfast, but for after-school snacks.

Good Housekeeping, July, 1965

Inferno Junior High school was an awful place, academically OK, but socially and hierarchically brutal.  I demanded of The Universe that it give me more hours of my own outside of the school, but since the universe didn't really give a crap and only provided 24 per day, I had to simply rob time from another activity, and the only one left was sleep.  So I stayed up deep into the night.

Mornings, I was exhausted and had no appetite for breakfast.  My poor mother fixed a real breakfast for me every morning and scraped most of it into the trash when I was gone, since I picked at a bite or two, if I ate anything.

I need to add that Mom was not a morning person, and her cooking reflected this.  Her lunches and dinners were great, her desserts heavenly, but her breakfasts .... it's a tribute to her that she willingly got up and made a meal at 6 AM, and no more should be asked.

Anyway, bless my mother, I didn't like her eggs, but really, after being awake till somewhere between 2 and 4 AM and then getting up at 6, I had no appetite for anything.

At school, lunch hours were to be feared.  Faculty really couldn't discipline the roiling mob of kids who milled around the cafeteria building and the quad and grounds near it, so it was prime bullying time.  After little breakfast, I also had no real lunch and instead ate saltines in the only place I felt safe, the girls' bathroom.

But when I got home, life was good!   I could mix up a luscious glass of Instant Breakfast --usually two of them -- and forget Inferno Jr. High even existed, by immersing myself in the fantasy worlds of whatever soap operas were on that late in the afternoon.  General Hospital and Dark Shadows were favorites but TV was pretty much my feeding tube when I got out of Inferno.

Digression : I saw the very first episode of One Life to Live, where ailing but plucky Meredith Lord watched from the hospital parking lot in horror as two young doctors, who both had hopes of hooking up with Meredith, argued, up on a balcony, and one plummeted to his death, leading to serious legal troubles for the other one.

You may have guessed that my daily exit from Inferno Junior High was as great a joy for me, as entering it was a misery.

Anyway, in the process of being a chocolate reward for surviving the day, Instant Breakfast gave me a daily mega-dose of basic vitamins, and if I have any mental faculties at all, I owe a large portion of them to those shakes.

Unfortunately Instant Breakfast and I broke up when Carnation decided that the very fact of my drinking a sugar-free meal replacement product meant that I was statistically likely to be a moron who is too  irresponsible to be trusted with getting adequate fiber.

I really really think that this assumption is a stretch.

 

Whoever grows and markets chicory must be rolling in the dough, and must therefore be able to pressure every food company into adding this wretched stuff to every product they can think of, because you will notice "Inulin!" cheerily declared on many product labels, and that's what inulin is;  chicory root, powdered.  Only those of us who have to avoid sugar are punish-- I mean, provided with this unwanted fiber in the shake mix.  The sugared formula doesn't add it.

 

It's been about 5 years since since I sadly gave up Instant Breakfast after being a forty-year customer, but there are other tasty nutrition shakes these days, and I sometimes eat real food for breakfast now that I don't contend with junior high each day, and I've moved on.

But I drink chocolate meal-replacement shakes more often than I have anything else, and it's a comfort food habit that i formed in about 1967.

The Persistence of Jabbering

Just remember - I never said I would confine my Temperamental-ness to Tuesday posts!  This happened this morning and I'm not waiting 6 days to gripe about it.

Long ago, I joined this site for business owners, called Merchant Circle.  You join local networks of other businesses and honestly, I've never put much time into it.  But they send me occasional emails and statistics about how many people have checked my neglected profile and all that.

They sent out a political survey a couple of days ago, I guess to gauge the specific political interests that small business owners have in the coming election, so, since I kind of like doing surveys, I filled it out and hit "submit".

Only I was not allowed to submit my answers.  One question listed 4 forms of social media that, I guess, normal people use to follow candidates and political organizations, only they worded it as you see there.

"DO you follow..?"   This implies that one can answer "no" as well as "yes" but that screenshot shows you what I got when I left it blank.  A red error message.  I  was given no grief about the other questions, which, as you see by the one above it, offered choices I could relate to.

I am required to listen to politicians' self-promotional jabberings via social media.

Well, of course not, the question really means not that I must, but that I do.  Surely I do!  Because everybody does, don't they??

Or at least, anybody who would join a networking site must also want to get campaign messages telling her that "I, the Candidate!"  or "OUR candidate!"  is the one favored by God and the ghost of
[ ]FDR
[ ]Reagan (choose all that apply).

But, no, I do what social media I do to get away from political crap. The truth is that I do follow The Christian Left on Twitter, and nobody can say they aren't political, but they are neither a candidate nor a "related organization."   Maybe i'm defining related organizations too narrowly, by including only those tied to and campaigning for a candidate, not for tolerance and help for the poor in general.

Self-promotion by politicians, in any medium, is, OK, not devoid of, but weak on information. Nowhere did it give me the option to say that I prefer news sources, to see what they really think, plan, contradict themselves, and screw up about.

The degree to which the whole thing is driven by social media now slightly horrifies me.

Metaphysics fatigue

My mind lately is a rather pointless and wearying metaphysics hamster wheel. In December we dealt with two deaths, neither someone we were very close to, but close enough for sadness.  One young and expected, after a long fight, and one seemingly out-of-nowhere suicide that really flummoxed me.

Stuff has kept piling on as the new year gets underway, and we're kind of battle weary.

I keep coming back to my great great grandmother, Georgia.  I wrote here about my discovery of her apparently lifelong chilliness toward her granddaughter.

But I've got this kind of cognitive dissonance about her because every other clue I have says really good things.  Starting just after the Civil War, she had a passel of kids, eventually including Iola, my great grandmother. This was a hazardous era for even genetically lucky babies.  All her kids lived to grow up.  Luck certainly played its part but it still tells me something good about their mother.

Keeping the kids fed and clean and healthy doesn't necessarily mean you've nurtured their spirits, but Georgia's children were all good people, not just well-respected but well-liked.  Some I know only through anecdotes and scraps of letters and inscriptions.  A couple, I knew personally.  Their descendants are a funny and nice, sometimes charmingly weird, generally terrific bunch of cousins I see every spring at a big gathering, and some I see regularly in daily life.

Georgia disliked Iola's firstborn, but none of Georgia's children seems to have emulated it.  Iola's siblings were warm and loving toward their niece, my grandmother.   Much that was nurturing and good for Gran had to be Georgia's legacy as well. If she had a weird prejudice, her children still seem to have been able to think for themselves. What was this woman about?  Of course, what is any of us about? and the answer is complex beyond imagining.

On the metaphysical side, I want and hope, so much, to meet her.  Want and hope that in 1984, when that granddaughter, whose feelings she hurt so deeply, left this life, they were united again in a dawn of understanding and a mended love they couldn't seem to get to while they were on earth.

I guess those of us who believe in an afterlife, or crave one, see no way that any kind of balance within this universe can be achieved without that chance for reconciliation.  But call it wish fulfillment if you want to.  My comprehension of the issue is too weak and muddled to offer anything except few observations, some postulations, and maybe a shrug.   If I ever get any answers, it won't be in this life.

But when I try to focus instead on good examples of living this life, I can't avoid Georgia.  I loved my grandmother dearly, yet I can't help but feel that Gran would be glad I consider Georgia's to be a life well lived.   Life has sort of forced on me awareness of how there's a whole mysterious universe inside every person. If we flower and fade in cosmic seconds, like time-lapse photography, we are still complicated and mysterious and, I can't help but think, eternal, in a way that defies explanation.

Yeah, yeah, isn't that special. But i'm examining what others made of their lives in part because my own confounds me.  My life is easier than that of 99% of people on earth, but I am SO tired and so discouraged with how little I can do to fight the entropy, not only in Haiti or Thailand, but for those I love, or those sitting across from me.

I can sit and banter about our Hondas with a guy and not have a clue that he's weeks away from putting a gun in his mouth. I'm not down on myself about that -- he successfully hid it from his nearest loved ones -- I'm more down on the UNintelligence of this Design in which we care and are all Oh So Spiritually Interconnected but that fellowship of all creation does these massive system-fails.

I can say prayers till I'm blue in the face but a 25 year old will still lose her fight with leukemia.  Somewhere someone wakes up to a day in which their family has been wiped out in a single fire or plane crash or tsunami, yet I have the audacity to feel like crawling under the blankets and saying "I can't face another goddam Christmas dinner."  Even though I suk it up and smile and do the celebratory thing, and end the day both glad I did it, and glad it's over.

I know, it's all a reminder that none of these other peoples' lives are in my hands, and God knows, I don't want them to be.  My AA program says "Let go. Turn it over."  My own life is all I've been given to handle, but the swear words keep welling up, as in, like, Who the  %@#!  is handling things, then?

I understand those who say there's no Big Guy In Charge, this life is our responsibility, we're the ones in charge.

But we're not.  See, that's the thing.  We can get a lot better at reducing intolerance and killer pollutants, we can do vastly more to heal disease, and make the world safer and kinder, and we'll be overjoyed that we've increased humanity's health-and-happiness rate from .... whatever, the 20% that it is now, to 60-70%.  Heck, make it 90% if you want to get real optimistic, but millions will always remain at the mercy of random miseries, pain and loss too horrible to bear thinking of.

That.  Will.  Not.  Change.  Ever.

Which doesn't mean we shouldn't demand of ourselves that we shoot for that 90% rate;  only that too much will always be beyond human power.  We can't make Paradise on earth, even at our very very best.  More than the "how" of coping, I keep wondering why we all have to be so powerless and why we're so interconnected when it doesn't, and can't, solve much.

When I read Candide for a class in 1975, I adored it instantly.  It just might be my favorite banned book.   I know, opinions by literary experts abound, and it has been 30+ years since that class, but I swear, the book stopped way short of claiming any final answers about a metaphysical realm and admitted that premature claims of understanding are simply .... premature.  Voltaire himself, I dunno, but the book stopped short.

There's a kind of wonder in realizing that all of our explanations of The Meaning of Life are the equivalent of toys.  Screw self-help books, Candide is the best depression-buster I've read.  Oh and it does it with delicious sarcasm.  That didn't hurt, either.

Depression for me is mired in craving Big Answers, and I'm thinking that I need to stop needing big answers.  If we tend our gardens, we've confined our hopes to the possible. There's nothing wrong with caring about and contemplating big answers, wanting is fine, but needing them -- though I may never disable that need -- can be paralyzing.

I think Georgia tended her garden, and that's more important than whether she screwed up in one, even a hard and unjust, way.   I have to more than accept, to actually take comfort in my limitations and say, "I can't take responsibility for this. I'm depleted, ask somebody else."  And maybe I need to reread Candide for fun.

Faith is for the things that take a while.

Meanwhile, I saved the best thing I got for Valentine's Day, for this post, though i really wish the whole sentence could show in one photo. But I need to keep this in sight, because letting it take time is something I need to remember to do.

OK, Christian conservatives. Why hasn't Santorum teed you off?

There are a couple things I usually try not to do on my blog.  One is: state the obvious.  A big news story about something (stupid / dangerous / terrible) comes out, and every writer everywhere has to do an entry about how, Yes, it really is (stupid / dangerous / terrible).  Waste of time.

I also try not to give attention to fringe people with only niche influence.  While Rick Santorum is certainly a fairly major candidate for the GOP nomination, he's too extreme -- whether you like his stances or not -- to get elected.  He's a news byte and unlikely to be more, though I guess stranger things have happened.

I'm making an exception.  Not that I have read all the response to his comments about education, so it's likely that I have nothing new to say about it, but...

Never mind his diss of educated liberals -- why aren't conservative Christians themselves outraged and insulted by his sneer at education??

For a man who has earned three degrees in three major universities to tell the rest of us that higher education is screwing up peoples' minds and values, is both absurd and one of the most noxious examples of "I deserve it;  you and your children are too stupid to use it properly."

Because that is exactly what he's saying.  His complaint that increasing opportunites for higher education makes "snobs" and Obama clones is insulting to conservatives as well as to liberals.

He -- with his 3 degrees -- would claim that post-secondary learning is a tremendous danger because the kid, who's over 18, and you, as a parent, aren't quite up to the task of navigating a place like Penn State and coming out with your values intact.

He managed to, but I guess he's much smarter than you are, which is why he thinks you not only will fail to use critical judgment in what you read and hear, but that your/your child's access to a lot of careers, like computers and business and medical technology, is best limited, to keep you from finding out that some professor doesn't believe in God.

He also thinks that you're so stupid that you can't find educational institutions aside from them Godless places.

Never mind that the list of accredited colleges is huge.  Has the Rickster even looked at the size of any college guide??

1739 pages. Six pounds.

Never mind that this hefty volume includes loads of conservative and / or parochial colleges that also offer valuable programs.

And never mind that  "college education"  is a term that envelops a big spectrum of programs, from advanced esoteric subjects to career education certification at tech college level.   Public 2-year colleges need most of their time for teaching things that get you jobs, and don't have a lot left over for advancing the atheist agenda, and are a lynchpin of the opportunity that putting education in reach is all about.

I'm not bothering with arguments as to whether there are major universities pushing a liberal agenda, because it doesn't matter how much or how little truth there is to that.  Let's grant it,  just for argument's sake.

Alternatives to such institutions abound, from smaller schools, to faith-based schools of all sizes, to 2-year colleges that are letting hardworking and highly motivated people gain careers and be part of the dream.


Perhaps he would find comfort in discovering that liberals and Democrats will not select your college for you.

From the National Center for Education Statistics comes an important thing to ponder:

 From 1998–99 to 2008–09, the number of associate's degrees earned by Hispanics more than doubled (increasing by 101 percent), and the number earned by Black students increased by 77 percent, while the number earned by White students increased by 28 percent.

These are people who want a life for their families and the chance to make a difference in the community.  People whose parents work long hours and collect aluminum cans by the roadside to build tuition money and a better life for their kids.  But even with multiple jobs, tuition is getting beyond the reach of the many of the best, most valuable people who could contribute vastly more to this country with developed skills.

If he thinks that faith depends on keeping education levels low, what Christian wouldn't find that insulting in the extreme?

Elitism?  He patronizes people of faith this way, and has the gall to complain about elitism?

Every Christian conservative who has a college education, or wants one for their kid, who has spent 18 years teaching that child values, who thinks he or his child, or both, is bright enough to make choices, should be up in arms about this attack on their ability to think and discern.

Don't cry

When you go to any Twelve-Step group meeting, you notice something.  The room has a box of Klee--  oops, sorry, shouldn't use trademark as generic term -- a box of Facial Tissues located in some sort of central spot.  And if someone bursts into tears, which has been known to happen, they go grab a handful.  Nobody gets up or hands it to them or comes over to hug and pat and say "There there."

The idea is both that the person needs to cry, and that the rest of us need to not impede it by rushing over and "helping them" get back under control faster.  That's not as harsh as it sounds, since sympathy and empathy are fine in 12-step, but comforting can too often be a way to get you to stop crying before you're ready.

12-step is absolutely not comfort-less.  A lot of good "I understand" and "I've been there" happens and it helps you get your mind and heart working together instead of at cross-purposes.  But breaking that traditional rush to console is one of the many lessons in living and thinking differently, which 12-step programs are trying to teach.   There are things normal people can do that alcoholics/addicts just cannot, however unfair that is and however much that sux.  Things like: have a really hard gut-wrenching day and say "I wanna tie one on."  Or, indulge in self-pity.

And say, or expect to hear, "Don't cry."

The program can occasionally sound absurd, like, is every freakin' ordinary little thing wrong now?!  One friend actually felt guilty about doing crossword puzzles because she was using them to "avoid her issues."  Sheesh.  I mean, come on.  But the thing about this new way of thinking is that it asks only that you look at your coping mechanisms, not that you dump them entire.  You see plenty of people smoking multiple packs a day to stay off the sauce.  It's only about how some overuse of innocuous comforts can slow your progress.

What we learn is that a lot of us have done too much of the not-crying thing, under parental or cultural pressure to not express sadness, to not grieve, to Man Up, stop being childish, etc etc.

So one of the 12-step things you hear is that "Don't cry" can be part of that, and is awfully tempting to say as a false show of caring and support,  when somebody's crying makes you squirm and want to bolt.

True.  True true true,  I have to acknowledge this before I complain about it, because dismissing 12-step wisdom (or saying a teaching doesn't apply in this or that situation) is like a writer breaking grammar rules.  You have to master the wisdom and work it awhile before you have the discernment in place to legitimately discard it.

One of my favorite parents'-generation relatives ran a daycare when I was a teenager and hired me on as a classroom assistant, and I recall some of the lessons she was trying to teach kids about not getting hysterical over a scrape or bump or altercation with another kid.  I remember one little girl who was on the edge of a giant meltdown over a banged knee and my cousin talking her through it while she bandaged the scrape, distracting with sympathy and kindness until the wailing danger passed.

When does "Don't cry" prevent us from processing feelings, and when is it teaching us to shift into reasoned problem-solving mode?  To apply it takes that discernment.

But "Don't cry" becomes one of those Old Behaviors that I'm willing to say I miss.  I miss the days when collapsing in tears brought a heartfelt and caring "Don't cry."  I miss the comforting version, the one that means "It's going to be OK.  It's not a disaster.  You don't need to be so sad."  It's been tossed along with the "Stop sniveling" version.

Like wrecking my blood sugar with stress eating, or shrieking "Screw everything!" it's one of the old behaviors that I can't say is always bad, much less possible to completely overcome.  Nobody would expect that, but what I sometimes miss are the days when i didn't have to think about it.  There's something about the default "Don't cry" that I miss as much as I miss or embrace other comforts that range from unrealistic (and embarrassing) like J. D. Robb mysteries and Eight Is Enough, to downright harmful, like the days of being a young child on car trips without being trussed up in a car seat.

Tribute

An old acquaintance died yesterday.  John and I lived on the same street as kids, but he was way down the block, and the kids clustered at my own end of the street were more my daily companions.  He was also a year younger than I was so we weren't in classes together either.  A year ago he found me on facebook and I had an all-too-brief chance to discover that this person I'd known only as Generic Neighbor Kid was this kind, joyful, positive and giving person I wish I'd known better.

Another writer has written better about him than I could.  I really liked her tribute, so here it is.

In which I give appallingly short shrift to a lovely Valentine's Day, to rant about tofu

I had a delightful Valentine's Day, and really should spend this entry writing about it, but then again, a picture is worth a thousand words,

 
 ...and it is also Tuesday.  And it is a Tuesday that practically requires a Temperamental entry because I decided to eat a nice healthy dinner to make up for chocolate indulgence, and there, neatly hidden in my frozen dinner, unsought, was:

Tofu.

I hate tofu.

Lurking on line 4

It certainly ought to be declared a lot more clearly.  Like on the front of the box.  Sure, it's lurking in the back-panel ingredients list, but part of what's so deceptive about this is that, in some products by this same company, it is listed on the front.

So I naturally think, well then, these other products don't include it!  Right?

OK, OK, I should have read the entire ingredient label there in Kroger, but tofu is used for protein, and these are bean dishes. Who expects the stuff to be added to foods already full of black and pinto beans, not mention (in one of them) cheese?  Is it just a health-food icon?  Do they think the word "tofu" dings a little Pavlovian bell in shoppers' heads to make them chirp "healthy!" in a sort of autoresponse?

I don't know, but tofu is soy and soy disagrees with me, though mildly enough to let me eat the dish if I perform tofu removal.  I'm glad it's mild because soy seems to be in every freakin thing under the sun.  People who have serious reactions to it must have a difficult time.

But this is twice in a week ....

End of line 5

that I've found myself missing the murder on our dinnertime viewing of CSI: Miami while I tediously pick the unappealing fleshy little bits out of my bleepin' dinner.

I'm happy to say that I lucked into one of their products that's Tofu-Free.

Where were we....?  Oh, Valentine's Day!  It was wonderful.  I have a husband who knows me well.

Refusing it.

This is nobody's favorite subject and I apologize, but when I'm angry and frustrated, I have to rant in my blog, so today, I'm afraid I have to explain why I oppose almost all routine precautionary radiation, and to do that I have to talk about melanoma.

There's high risk for melanoma. There's very high risk.  And then there's me.
 
I am Celtic fair-skinned.

Despite that, at age 14 I got UV acne treatments.

Also, despite the pale Celtic-ness, I tried repeatedly to tan when I was 12-16 or so, and had more scarlet, blistering, skin-peels-off-in-sheets, fever and woozy-head, sun burns than most people ever have.  They say even one of these deep burns skyrockets your risk.  I literally can't count my moderate -to-severe burns.

Also, three generations of my family have developed melanoma. NONE of whom ever had as much burn history as I've had.  My grandmother had 2 of them 30 years apart.  My mother had 2 of them, about 5 years apart.  My brother has had one, 12 years ago.

When my dermatologist recommended the UV acne treatments to 14-year-old me, only one of those cases -- my grandmother's first case -- had occurred and I'm not sure he even asked about that.  It was 1968.  I was miserable over my complexion and I did adore that gentle rosy glow I got every other week(!).

That I haven't had any skin cancers yet is practically a miracle.  It certainly defies science.  I take a lot of vitamins.

But I also avoid any more stupid radiation, especially on my face.

And for a long stretch, that meant no dental care at all.

It is possibly because of damnable insurance companies who create a one-size rule and demand that dentists perform endless dental x-raying to protect the profession from lawsuits.  Beats me.

But in the case of my dentist -- let's call him Dr. Z -- it seems to be an infuriating, yet genuine belief on his part that yearly x-rays are more vital than any mitigating circumstance .... well, mitigates.

It wasn't the case with dentists I saw 20 years ago.  They wanted the x-rays, you bet, and I had to endure the patronizing lectures about  What A Teeny-Tiny Amount!  of radiation it involves, and about How Vital It Was For My Oral Health!  to which I would listen politely, because that was my role in the negotiation.  I understood the bind they were in.  I understand that x-rays can reveal some hidden problem in early stages, a problem that would be much worse when it finally grew big enough to make itself known. 

I'd listen to the requisite lecture. Then they would have me sign a disclaimer absolving them from all culpability and they'd clean my teeth, and I'd pay them and everybody went home happy.

Apparently, now I may not make this decision for myself.  No matter how seriously I have thought it out.  No matter how entitled I am to make my own health decisions.  Dr. Z, who, I repeat, is a truly good and conscientious guy, seems to think that forcing my hand by refusing me as a patient is kosher.  It's so important to him, that the fact that having no dental care at all is hazardous to the health of my entire body doesn't seem to have any pull.

A year ago, because of that hazard, I gave in.  He took a set. I became his patient, and think highly of him, and decided that a one-off set of x-rays was a good trade-off, and we could argue about it again in 5 years or so.

That's where I discovered that something else has changed in the dental profession, because not only did I get to refuse x-rays 20-15 years ago, but my old dentist requested them only at intervals of several years.  Today, ONE year later, Dr.Z demanded more x-rays.  And he and his tech are telling me all the dentists do this now.  It seems that I will have nowhere to turn.

When I gave in a year ago, I had not been to dentist in 8 years.

If that seems incredible, I can only, sheepishly, confess that God gave me the Rolls Royce of teeth.  It's one genetic luck of the draw that I got.  Apparently from my grandmother.  I've had 6 cavities in my life; at ages 14 (4 of them. Bad eating, I guess), 23 (one cavity), and one last one, sometime in my 30's.  One of the 4 1968 fillings was replaced about 10 years ago, the others are all original.  Even without dentistry for those 8 years, I had no problems at all, and those x-rays he forced on me last year revealed .... not a gallblasted thing.

But here I am again.  I refused them today. 

If he denies me care on this basis, I 'll have to hunt and phone and research and try to find someone who will honor my wishes.  It's still an "if" because he let it go today.  Apparently we will discuss it in 6 months, and I pray that all my excellent reasons, especially my family history and personal cancer risk, will allow me to keep seeing him, because he is absolutely wonderful, and is doing it to out of (in my opinion, bizarrely rigid) conviction, not for revenue or any other sleazy reason.  That's the thing.  Finding another one would be a lot of trouble, but the fact that he's one of the best dentists, and best people, I know makes me hope we can work this out.

I don't know if routine precautionary radiation is another topic or not.  I utterly despise it.  Yet I also understand the many benefits it has had to a lot of patients.  Everything is about flying blind and weighing odds, and you won't convince me that it never causes a tumor and only detects.  I doubt if even the imaging industry would claim that, but they do insist that I play odds that their bean-counters post as beneficial to "the whole."   In some cases, and facial radiation is one of them, I absolutely will not do it.

The toaster that gets you dates!

Sometimes I look at the bloggers who commit to blogging every day for some prescribed period of time and think, "No way."

I know that ordinary little things can lead to interesting and important musings.  But take days like today.  Bought a toaster.  No emotional or philosophical implications.  No drama at Costco.  No fires or thefts led to replacing the old one.  It wore out.  That's all.

Nothing to write about.  At least, that's what I thought.  Then I read the Instruction Manual.

I won't razz the people who need instructions on how to toast.  There are too many people who hand over their bank account numbers on email-request, or who eat the silica gel pak in the aspirin bottle.  They probably need a course in toasting.


I will quietly acknowledge the genuine need for those instructions, and move on to Item Two in the list of warnings:

The danger of Toasting Alone!

I was unprepared for this restriction on my toasting freedom.  Sure, I don't live alone, but what if Larry goes out of town?  Or even just up to the Home Deepot?  And maybe I want toast, and maybe I don't want to wait till he gets back.  Do I await my Attendant, or eat something safer, or heck! just throw caution to the wind and toast with abandon?

It's grossly unfair that there's no notice on the box warning you that this toaster cannot be used by single persons.  They get your money, you go home and unpack it and not only are your hopes of making a crunchy, buttery piece of toast dashed, but your mental competence has been insulted, AND the toaster is pouring salt into the wound of your unattached status.

But then it hit me.  They've done you a favor!   Finding a new and amusing pick-up line is never easy but this toaster gives you one for free.

You spot an attractive prospect.  You sidle up to the bar and do all the "Hi, what government program would you cut?" or whatever they're icebreaking with now.  Then, with shy charm, you say:  "Look, I need your help.  I'm not allowed to make toast tomorrow morning unless I have...you know....somebody else there.  I sure hate to be all alone and toastless..."

The instructions fold for easy pocket transport to the local bar, so when you encounter skepticism, you can even produce the interdiction against toasting alone.

And I wlll say that it makes lovely toast.