My fascinating new afghan and bookcase

Sometimes I try to craft an interesting post title, but other times, I just want to warn people how mundane it will be.  This is one of the latter.

Larry needed a bookcase so I looked at the beat-up white cubes I was using and decided I needed one too.  The new ones came in pieces and were assembled with one screwdriver and much swearing.

There's no discernible rhyme or reason as to what's on it.  This is my dumping ground for books I look at or read over and over because I love where they take me, and some that I want to read -- unread books are EVERYwhere in this house, so that's just a selection -- and some research that's really not underway yet, and the growing Complete Peanuts collection because it outgrew its previous shelf. If you see a classic in this group, it's probably one I have NOT read, with the exception of Robinson Crusoe which I pick up for serenity.

Those white cube-shelves have had a thousand uses over the years since around 1998.  They're getting rather beat but are still useful for utilitarian purposes.  Maybe a closet.  Not sure yet. 

Dismantling the cubes provided Downyflake with a Shelf Cat opportunity.

The striped afghan is the new work-in-progress.  When I finished the previous afghan, my father dropped several hints that he wanted one.  This one is for him and is proceeding as fast as I can manage.  It's smaller, and it's not going to need a whole secondary project of sewing it together, and there is no pattern.  No plan.  Nothing.  I pick up whatever shade of blue looks like it should be next.  So what you see is only (I amaze myself!) 2 weeks' work and I hope to have it done in 6-8 weeks.

And that's the update!

We'll call it a Learning Experience

The First Afghan is finished.  It's the 4th one I ever attempted, but the first one I ever completed; in fact, it's the first one that ever got past 6 inches, before I abandoned them.

And it is beyond ridiculous.  Here I've spread it across a double bed so you can see that it's the Babe The Blue Ox of Afghans.

I know yall won't think it's stupid-looking, and if I had intended it be be as big as a DOUBLE bedspread, then that would be cool.  But I didn't.  I intended it to be about 5x7 feet.  But it somehow grew to double-bed size.  It took forever.  And never, ever again will I let that happen.  I'm also not entirely pleased with the pattern, but it's OK. I'd like to have inserted a couple more green squares and broken up that big dull medium blue expanse, but it's pretty nice, plus it taught me some things.

Meanwhile, here's a cool thing.  My grandmother's sewing cabinet, which was later my mother's sewing cabinet (even sewing-averse people have to put on a button or something at times) is over at Dad's/Mom's house, and in it I just discovered my great grandmother's crochet hook.

I'm making an assumption that it was hers, since my grandmother did knit and do needlepoint, but I'm not aware that she ever crocheted.  Either way, it belonged to one of them.

Back home in my own venerable junk, I also turned up a bundle of my own crochet hooks from circa 1970.  One of them, a "size 00" , is almost a duplicate of Gran-or-Granny's.

But not quite.  And I will never get the two mixed up because thanks to inflation -- something I'll probably never again have occasion to say -- they are clearly from different decades:

If you can't read the prices, the photo should enlarge enough for you to see them if you click and "view photo."

I. Will. Not. Be. Moved.

You missed the beginning, because I couldn't get the phone camera ready.

This is a little cat, half kitten, not over 5 months old, tops.

He and a grownup cat were at the side of the road examining that puddle.  Grown cat saw a large vehicle coming and sensibly dashed away.

Half-kitten sauntered to the center of the road, sat and faced the car down.

We played Chicken. He won. Carefully, we circled around him and drove on.

It's hilarious but it's not, in that many drivers would run him over. Is he too young to know danger, or is he the early landing of the Kzinti?

I dunno.  If he survives to adulthood, I bet he'll be a force to contend with.

Trust but verify

Within one day, the issue of media reports and their trustworthiness came up twice for me, in 2 different venues.

Months ago, Dann Todd -- libertarian/conservative blogger, linked for you over on the sidebar in my list of good reading -- posted a blog entry about the filmmaker whose film trailer was at the time being blamed for the Benghazi attack.  Dann was referring us to another source, and I had some serious criticism of that source.  OK, I did also rake Dann over the coals for believing it....

A couple days back he posted a followup responding to some of my objections.  I'll let you read it for yourself, his original September post, with my critical comment, and the followup post.  They cover both our points, no need to go over it again, but Dann's willingness to take second looks and respond thoughtfully is engaged in by too few people and should be admired all the more for that.

He mentions the problem of responding to a current news story quickly, instead of letting response simmer for awhile.  It is difficult to juggle that.

Journalism has never been infallible, nor has it claimed to be, and it's always been important to take time with a piece and cast a critical eye on its points.  Nowadays with some bloggers being granted pro-journalist status by their massive readerships, it's even more important.

They can be full of it, liberal and conservative alike.  The instant "wisdom" of many liberal rant-ers after the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the Newtown shooting, was often jawdroppingly ghastly.  I'm not letting conservatives off the hook.  Ill-considered reactions are more about lack of professional training than about political leanings.  It takes education and experience to look at one's raw feeling and evaluate whether it has basis or logic, or is oversimple.

Hard to keep a blog timely, keep response heartfelt and not over-edited into blandness, without reacting early, while data is still coming in. If you're not a reader of Comic Strip of the Day, you should be because it often covers editorial cartoons and the issues they present, and Mike Peterson is a pro journalist and a fast sorter of wheat from chaff.

Dann also does that point-by-point unpacking in the followup entry, and casts his critical eye on the claim by the filmmaker's son that his father isn't tech savvy.  The no-computers terms of the dad's probation for bank fraud make that suspect.

Sometimes, doing that critical evaluation is absolutely all that I, as the reader, have to go on.

I speak of the other issue I had, a Facebook post I'd responded to the afternoon before.

There's a internet story that's been circulating for nearly a decade - a pastor named Mathes posted a blog entry almost 10 years ago, about an experience he claims he had.  In his account, he attended a state prison volunteer-training program conducted to discuss the three major religions and help volunteers understand inmates' various beliefs.

Mathes says that after the Muslim Imam spoke, he had some questions for that Imam about the instruction in the Koran to kill infidels.  In Mathes' account, the Imam sheepishly admits that, yes, they are called to kill Christians and others who do not convert.

That is assuredly one radical interpretation, but not the mainstream one. 

Mathes then answers the Imam, compares that concept of Allah to the God of love presented in the narrative of Christ, and is just made of win.

Many old classmates from my high school have friended me on FB, and show they've gone in a hard-right direction.  One posted this story, with a final statement that we should all "For  Christ's sake, pass it on!" because Islam was growing and would soon be a US voting majority (?) and elect a Muslim president.

Here is the snopes.com assessment of Mathes' account. I tried to do my usual polite thing, but i expressed skepticism and posted a link to snopes in my comment on my old classmate's post.

The whole thing stayed very civil, but another commenter directed his comment to me, pointing out that each source -- the original account by Mathes and the snopes debunking -- was only a source. He concluded his comment with:  " 'Trust but verify' - isn't that what Reagan said?"

I acknowledged that, because it's true.

Snopes is a source;
the prison officials who say it didn't happen the way Mathes claimed are a source;
Mathes, who was there, is a source.

That leaves only us, and our ability to think critically.  So, no, I can't say that i take snopes as infallible. To their credit, snopes calls the reliability of the account "mixed," because Mathes did write it and DOES declare it accurate, while others who were also present differ.

I disbelieve the Mathes story because it sounds absurd.

That's what decided me.  It made no sense.  The program directors in a prison are unlikely to choose a radical jihadist Imam as their source for Islam info for a program.  Any presenter would be thoroughly vetted.

But sure, a radical could work hard to hide his radicalism and slip through.

Only, we're then asked to believe that he'd not only get through the vetting process, but that he'd come right on out with Kill The Infidel, there.  There, in a panel discussion, in a prison manned by state law enforcement types.  Not in whispered private discussion with somebody after the presentation, but in the panel.

I mean, that would be great.  The newly created Department of Homeland Security would be going through that Imam's phone records, financials, known associates, and bagged trash, as fast as a newly-created department could pull it together, but it's highly doubtful to me that he'd say this stuff even if he believed it, and it's even more doubtful that in 2003, after 9/11 and the same year that the Iraq War started, he'd be so unprepared to hide radicalism as to be that caught off guard by a question that was not even a trick question.

Between the implausibility of the Imam's response, and the accounts of prison officials who say that not only was there no Imam present (a Muslim inmate gave the Muslim presentation), but that the question did not come up  ... the 2 things together leave little room other than to call the pastor an intentional liar.

A lot of people default to trust in a minister.  Would a clergyman have such weak faith in Christianity's ability to prevail on truth alone, that he'd make up stories?  Or is it ego, a need to be a David-mops-the-floor-with-Goliath hero in the eyes of his readers?

If it did not happen as he claims -- and I do not claim it is objectively proven (that would need unedited one-take video or something) -- he both demonstrates a lack of faith in the Christian message, and he violates the trust --or what's left of it-- that people have in him and in the ministry.

Finally, he asks us to believe that the Imam was sheepish and shamed and head-bowed.  Do ardent Christians really need to believe a radical jihadist Imam would melt in the face of such questions like the drenched Wicked Witch??  For serious?

Come ON.  Logic.  Critical thinking.  Hello?

We do need to verify, but in too many cases, we can't do it.  We have to trust.

If varied, and even opposite accounts of an event do not reveal an obvious "no way" factor like this, it's a lot harder to sort them out.  This is why these journalists, writers and bloggers hold a sacred trust.

Sacred.  There are things we can sort with our mental abilities, but many we can't.

I dunno about Reagan's admired quote, because no media seems to be truth-driven anymore.  I
might prefer Agent Mulder: "Trust no one."


 

Scenes from a Christmas

Sleep is very important. Always make sure you get enough sleep.

Artist daughter painted me this awesome homage to Lucy Van Pelt!
 

It will live in the Reading Corner.

That basket you see, currently collecting crocheted squares, is kind of a gift to myself.  They're made by a rural artisans in Bangladesh and sold by SERRV - click here to buy these or many other awesome Fair Trade crafts by rural farmers and artisans around the world.  You buy them in a bundle of three, and I gave 2 as gifts and kept this one.  The nifty M&Ms stress relief ball was a Christmas gift from my dad.

When in doubt, sleep.

The annual Scooter Calendar is always a cherished gift. The 2013 is its fourth edition.

Oh, and the dining table collapsed.

Fortunately Christmas dinner was over. It's done this several times, about once every 15-20 years. The repair guy picked it up yesterday.

Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow!

It's 11:25 PM. Do you know where your enthusiasm is?

New Year's Eve. Midnight approaches.

I know where mine is.

Happy New Year, everybody!

In wartime

At this turn of every year, I wish, and probably most of us wish, for a world more at peace.

This year I'm disturbed by seeing my country at war with itself.  It's been divided for a long time, but now it looks to me more broken than ever.

Optimism does not come naturally to me.  I have to fight for it.  Yet I will try to hope that the ugliness of this past week will be the straw that breaks our stalemate's back and some good and sane changes can come about.

Peace to you all this Christmas and new year.

An old album finally gets digitized!!

Finally, I can blog this album!

The Obernkirchen Children's Choir had one huge-selling record, "The Happy Wanderer," in the 1950's and was briefly a household name for that.  Their Christmas album appeared in 1966 as a gift to my parents by a close friend, and immediately locked in as THE sound of Christmas at our house.

For no particular reason, I've checked the internet periodically for any info or sign of revival of this album.  The original family copy is still around -- that's it, above -- but we wore it out so thoroughly that it sounds like it was used for First Base.  About 10 years ago, I found another vinyl copy on eBay and got it to burn my own CD's off of.

This year, way back in summer, I offhandedly typed "Obernkirchen" into a search and somebody somewhere has finally discovered it and made it available again!  You can get it on amazon.

No CD is available -- it is MP3 downloadable, only.

There are a few awesome things about the digital age.  Nobody has to invest in a lot of disc production and distribution to make something obscure available.

So now that it's there, I can recommend this album, if you want something slightly different.

But READ THIS FIRST : It is not flawless musicianship.  This is an album for people who love good amateur work and care more about joy than technique.

The story of the Choir is basically this :  After the devastation of World War Two,  social worker Edith Moeller and a fellow social worker were finding and caring for German war orphans and they badly needed money.  She made some of them into a choir and raised funds.

This is not the cherry-picked magnificent voices of the Vienna Boys' Choir, or other pro groups.  This is real, ordinary kids, and they work their butts off doing pretty amazing choral work, but they hit a clinker sometimes.  Not that often.  The fast songs work a little better than the slow ones, but still and all, these kids are singing their hearts out.

And they are singing each carol in its original language.  It's heavy on German carols for obvious reasons, but one of the most touching things about it is this choir that originated in war singing about something that transcends nations.  In French, Spanish, English.

They learned them all phonetically, and that shows, but has a particular beauty.  They've learned to pronounce the English "Go Tell it on the Mountain."  And the French "En Flambeau." (Jza-nette Ee-sabella in their German accents) and it's wonderful.

It's delightfully joyous and imperfect, and even though this album came enough later to feature a newer crop of kids than the original survivors of the war, Moeller is making a choir out of kids whose life events have landed them in her care.

Mostly the carols are familiar, a couple were not, to me as a kid, and aren't that common.

You can get it here at amazon.com

And the other awesome thing about the digital age is that you can put the tracks you like on your playlist and skip the ones you don't. 

If Liberty can't bend, it breaks.

I'm unloading. I am feeling really really bad about the country right now.

So "This election was ugly and vicious and I'm glad it's over" has all been said already, everybody's sick of the subject, but too frikking bad.  Suk it up.

And if so many of us feel apart from the mud war, if the fringe on both sides did it and we Good Guys, liberal and conservative, looked on in disgust and often horror, then why are there so many casualties of the battle?

There's material for TWO posts in this.  (1) "We need to get along" and (2) "It's not settled, we still need to fight for our agenda." But this will only be the first one.

My mom had a lifelong best friend, and that friend has a daughter who's one of the kindest, most compassionate, and most astoundingly active conservative Christians I've ever met, in her advocacy for the poor and helpless, her willingness to listen and engage in that civil dialog we keep whinging about nobody doing.  Our mothers were very different and took delight in that, loved each other dearly, enjoyed their differences and stayed close for life.

Daughter Jane and I are politcally on different pages, but I'm not sure how different, since we're on similar spiritual pages.  Maybe we're an illustration of precisely HOW little correlation there can be between the two.

Or not.  I don't really know, because lefties have apparently been so vicious to her that she doesn't even want to talk about any of it.  She's retreated from any and all discussion of where we go from here and blah blah, tho she says it's a break while she recovers and processes what went on, including the end of friendships.  That means it wasn't just strangers who reamed her.

A break sounds healthy and like good self-care. 

But I'm more thinking a temporary break won't help me.  When I hate every side, life gets poisoned.

When I was young, elections were more abstract.  I cared about the issues, but ultimately, I never felt that the outcome was going to affect my daily life.  Many less privileged had BIG reasons not to feel so confident in the system and life's general stability, but I sure did.  I got my education handed to me, I used it responsibly enough to get decent grades and a career out of it, I knew my job and car payments and grocery shopping weren't gonna change a lot.  I had county health insurance, and once a year I'd fill out all the yellow forms and attach all the doctor's description-of-services things, and get a check back for 85% of everything I'd spent, and do some Christmas shopping.

Elections are not abstract anymore.  With a child who has a chronic illness, we will be very directly affected by the winning party.  Any attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care act would begin the end of our future.  Without the Act, our every resource would be gone in x-number of years, our budget would shrink to a very basic way of life, and we'd have nothing to leave behind.  It's that bad.

So elections mean a lot more to me.  As genuinely, personally, deeply worried as I would feel if the GOP had won, I understand that that's how genuinely, personally, deeply worried, many GOP supporters are now.

The divide is religion.  Even non-faith-based voters have to admit that the GOP fiscal plan would have gained a lot more voters without the social agenda.  And since that's a major dividing point in the US population, I can't think of a way for us to live and let live on it.

And if we can't, it really is all over.

And none of us can talk about it, either.  There's nothing to discuss.  You can't compromise on the uncompromisable.

There is no one I can talk to about this.  There is as great an impossibility of my compromising on it, as there is of a believer in Biblical inerrancy compromising on that.

So the problem, I think, is not based on the erosion of civility and the absence of central sources for information and news.  Those are huge, but I think they're a result, and the cause is that it took until now for the US to come up against a major uncompromisable divide.

Is there anywhere to go from here?  Theoretically it ought to be possible, since freedom for those who choose to live by fundamentalist doctrine should be as sacrosanct as freedom to reject it.

But social conservatives hold the astounding belief that freedom for all impinges on their own freedom.  Whether they're right or wrong, THAT is where the dividing line lies.  Neither of us can cross it.

I'm grateful to see our kid's medical care safe for 4 more years, but I see the nation with freedom-fatigue, and I feel this weird, slightly paranoid need to put myself and my loved ones in a blue area and give up on coexistence.

In the past, the US concept of Liberty let us be any faith, be atheist, live in hippie communes or Amish communities, or suburban neighborhoods.  We've tested it up to this current gay rights/evolution/abortion era and at the risk of  hyperbole, it looks to me like we've come to the breaking point.  Freedom advocates can't allow freedom of faith to someone as terrific as Jane, and fundamentalists can't let public institutions remain secular.  Like metal fatigue, our liberty has lost its ability to flex and it's going to snap.

The one thing I do know is that collateral damage is mounting on both sides.  Good people on both sides, people who never engaged in the vicious rhetoric, are being mown down with indiscriminate rhetorical fire by those across the aisle.

It'd be cool if those capable of talking it all out could just do it, set aside and marginalize the nutjobs.  But we can't.  A lot of us will retreat to writing about weather and hobbies and pets, and give up saying what we think, because the most respectful statement that the other side has a point about anything is likely to get us abused.  I've taken the coward's path myself, but that's another post.

40 years of voting

My first election was in 1972.  As a fresh-out-of-the-pen 18-year-old voter, it was a Big Deal.  Today, therefore, marked my 40th voting anniversary.  It's still a Big Deal.

I hit my polling place twice.  When Larry and I voted this morning, I saw a neat-o parking spot labelled "Curbside Voting."

While my dad can walk, and drive, he has some joint and a lot of foot pain, and it takes some effort, and standing in line on a cold, rainy day wasn't an option.  He was planning to forgo voting, till I told him about the curbside service.  So, since they had also changed our polling place to one out in the boondocks,  I went back with him later in the day.

The poll worker came out with this cool little portable voting machine  - they bring it out to your car and hand it in to you through the window.  Totally awesome. 

I'm extolling my great civic virtue and voter-vigilance as a preface to explaining that I am all in.

It's been a good-ish but long day, the election and the nation worry me, and I cannot imagine anything worse than following the returns all evening.

I'm not baffled by the desire to watch it all, if people want to.  I can kind of understand wanting to.  I did it for years.  But I am QUITE baffled by the people who say that it's unpatriotic to not watch. I can't cite where I hear this.  I've heard it several times, it's kind of a "they say," but I gotta disagree.

What knowledge, what positive change, would happen if I kept up with the slow accumulation of electoral votes, that will not happen because I wait for the result?  Am I apathetic to want a quiet, de-stressing evening of a good book, and to find out tomorrow, either who won, or what Constitutional problems have been triggered?

Well, I can only say, I need a break. Tomorrow, we deal with whatever we've come up with.  Tonight, I'm dressing down, making a hot chocolate, and reading Life in a Noble Household, 1641-1700.  It traces the the Russell family in England and how they weathered (or failed to survive) the economy and politics of the era.  It's both fascinating, and a reminder that whenever we live, we can find ourselves in turbulent political times and we just, basically, deal with it!

Frankenstorm and Frankenthrow

I've spent the day watching a slow, drippy, blessedly boring rain and trying to finish my first big crochet project.  We're far enough south that the so-called "Frankenstorm" is very wimpy here, but I dearly hope all my northern friends and loved ones are ready.

I also hope that, like most impending disasters that I've prepared for in the past - such as the 3 hurricanes aiming for us in 2008, or the Y2K global crash - this turns out to be nothing.

The Frankenthrow is another matter.

I call it that because I did not crochet one huge piece.  I crocheted 63 squares, finished the last one yesterday, and now have to stitch them together, patchwork-style. It qualifies as a monster, big enough to be more like a twin bedspread.  I really did not intend that.  Let's call it an Opportunity For Growth.  I learned something about patterns and planning.

So it's at the assembly stage.  I'm starting with the center row, with its unique diamond-in-a-square design.  That light blue yarn forming the corners is only used in that one square.   That's because it comes from a special skein of yarn.

My maternal grandmother left a basket full of yarns, which came to me back in the 1980's, since the needlework thing skipped a generation.  My mother's aversion to needles and thread was kind of a family joke.

But I lacked the patience for it too, and gave away the yarn.  It's (almost) all gone.  URGH blast crap, what was I thinking?!

But it made sense at the time.  I'd started at least THREE afghans/throws, and found the process endlessly tedious, and abandoned them all.  I thought I'd never do it again - and I didn't, for most of 3 decades.

When I resumed, it was gonna be small projects or none.  But now I'm tired of making mufflers.  I decided to rethink the afghan idea.

Only, I need to adapt the project to my psychology.  I have to feel I've completed something.  I'm not good at deferred gratification, and especially when it's deferred by monotonous handwork.

 Voilà!  The answer!  Don't make one big square, make a bunch of little ones.  Say "Cool, I finished that!" 63 times.  Watch the pile grow.

 And incorporate into it just a little of the one skein of Gran's yarn that somehow escaped my purge.

Much smaller squares, and to be a much smaller throw

See that skein of blue, next to the little pile of squares that will start the next one?   This is all that's left of that big workbasketful.  It's 40-50 years old.  I don't even know what it's made of, but before I started, I crocheted a little piece with it, washed and machine dried it and it did not shrink, so I guess it must be synthetic.

I use only a little of it in each project.  A single square in this, a couple rows in that.  I put a row of it in a muffler I made for myself.

So in the last photo posed with Graymatter, you see the one patch of Gran's yarn that I'm using in the next throw.  The rest of the throw will be other colors.  Oh, and smaller.  A LOT smaller.

None dare call it Heaven

Nothing illustrates religious division in this country better than all the anger that's falling on a neurosurgeon, who interprets the visions he had during a coma as a visit to the real and true Heaven.

And the pile-on he's getting makes me wish and, haha, pray that somebody in the rationalist community would suggest cutting him some slack. I'm here doing it, but I'm a known Buh-Liever and am therefore suspect as to my motives.

One post railed that he has no right to call himself a scientist after this.

Let's admit that he's declaring an unproven - probably unprovable - interpretation of an experience to have a final-answer meaning, and scientists aren't supposed to do that.  He's not being very scientific about his visions, and the question of whether that disables him as a scientist in any unrelated endeavor is open.  I'd argue that the near-death experience is uniquely overwhelming and is not a general science deal-breaker.  But I'm not a scientist.

Come hither...

Ignore the frog...

Let's also admit that the images he experienced in his vision are inane in the extreme. A lovely woman guide in blue robes with flowing golden brown tresses?  It's tempting to say, "Oh, come on."  Do blonde hotties get all the jobs there, too?  Can I have a large, bossy cat guide me?

It's not like this is anything new.  Many other such experiences have been documented.  Our brains are built to have these events under certain circumstances.  They undoubtedly craft them out of images that our history and imagination (or lack of it) resonate to.

But that doesn't mean they're illusions.  They might not come from God but the neuroscience and the imagery are not proof that they don't either.  The occurrence of these experiences can't be pointed to as proof of anything except that we're human.

It means we evolved to have them.  Our chemistry either creates the experience...

...or is the wiring through which God connects with us.

Either way, the chemistry is part of what we have evolved to be, and its reality has to be accepted, no matter its first cause.

I know, yeah yeah. So do LSD trips, so do allergy attacks, so do a lot of perception-changers, all of which should be viewed objectively.

Here's the thing - the near-death experience, once we admit we're built to have it, evolved to be powerful at a level so deep, so central, that reaction can be full, unquestioning embrace of it.  If it were weak enough to allow the person having it to stand back, to say, "This is biochemicals," then it would not be what it is.  It evolved to declare itself absolute.

I keep referencing evolution, not to placate non-believers, but because it's real. Not that I know much more than high school taught me, and it's slightly crazy for a non-scientist to explain anything scientific.

But so much of any science vs. faith debate -- when they are about what ordinary people should be taught and should think -- depends on the understanding we non-scientists have; ordinary schleps like me who need a simple version, and who are in danger of embracing an inaccurate simple version because we haven't the training to comprehend the more accurate complex version.

I need to address it as an ordinary schlep, but I need to do it as a Believer one who is willing to take a scientific explanation as far as it can be taken, because faith is worthless if we're not willing to shine light into every dark corner.  It isn't faith if we've got anything to fear.   So.

It makes sense to me -- with that aforementioned limited knowledge -- that, in a social species with minds complex enough to need hope and wonder and reasons to stay brave against pain, the divine experiences of some members can benefit all, and that this need selects for such an experience, even though it often comes later in, or at the end of, life.

Acknowledging that the evolution of the human species can explain this brain chemistry doesn't answer the God question either yea or nay.  It's about the building's structure, not about what built it.
 
So, whatever the source, it's ridiculous to rage at the guy for seeing it as real and true.  It's like raging at someone for finding that salt tastes salty.

It.  Is.   How.  Our.  Bodies.  Are.  Built.  By God or by process, the building is what it is, regardless of the builder's moniker.

But this man's experience seems to threaten a lot of people.

It's common enough to label non-believers who get angry or contemptuous about Believer claims, as feeling threatened.  I've run into a few who find it offensive to be told they're acting threatened, but they are.  Why else should anyone care what this man experienced or to what he attributes it?

But more important, why deny feeling threatened, since there's a very real basis for it?  The Visit To Heaven, at a few removes, is a threat to separation of church and state.  At least, it gets used by Believers to further a political agenda.

So.  I wish they'd just admit they feel threatened, O-freaking-kay?  Because that is not a statement that they're being irrational.  They're being quite rational, so let's just admit that too.

I'm not stupid.  The evangelical political right's issues -- abortion, gay orientation, evolution, Israel, SpongeBob -- might seem several steps removed from any issues about near-death experiences and the afterlife, but to deny that anything shoring up claims of God and afterlife strengthens the religious right is denial of reality.

That's the issue.  Increasing Rightwing political power.  The Right Wing has no right to use these accounts for recruitment by leapfrogging them over the whole vast body of faith to land them on Biblical Literalist Christianity, but they try to do exactly that.

If his experience could just be taken as his experience, without the ridiculous and absolutely untrue idea that it has to mean joining the AntiMuslim MegaTemple of Holy Lobbying, we could look at it on its own terms.

My mom was talking happily to people she'd lost, during her last hours.  My mom-in-law was seeing them for days, and this while fully awake and totally lucid in every other way, completely engaged and sharp in conversation with us, able to connect to things previously said and keep track of statements we'd made the day before.

What-the-bleep-ever caused this for both of them, I like.  It brought them peace and joy as they passed.  I can no more prove its source than anybody else can, and I'm more than ready for everybody to stop declaring that the other point of view is absolutely disproven.  If we could get past that insistence, we could all believe what makes sense to us without others fearing that we're trying to use it to force doctrinal compliance on them.

Any theory about these experiences is fully compatible with keeping doctrine out of civil law.

Away!

Bicycles for use by guests, Whistling Swan Inn, a photo by nickelshrink on Flickr.
(a little too big for the blogger frame, but clicking it will take you to the flickr original)
 --

We're just back from our first vacation since 2007. More to come, but here's a photo that I oddly love.

We stayed in a wonderful bed-and-breakfast where they've thought of everything, including bikes for the guests to use. I was standing inside, at the jar of homemade chocolate chip cookies, trying not to have another, and I looked out the window onto the side porch.

This sight called out to me - the bikes ready to fly off into the autumn sunlight and falling leaves. I wanted to capture it, and it was a rare case of my ipad's camera doing exactly that. This is what I saw, the light, the mood, everything! How often does that happen, especially with no cropping or enhancement?

We were away for 5 days, 2 for airports and only 3 to do anything with, but it was perfection and a break from cares that neither of us has had since 2008.

More pix coming.

Everything old is...still old, but spruced up!

They're new bikes.....!  Wait! No! They're old bikes, refurbished!

And nicely.  Not only does GS Bicycles sell swank new bikes for both athletes and comfort-riders, but they'll restore your old ones with quality parts.

I won't pretend that I didn't look on the new ones with a little lust in my heart.  To be more accurate, I lifted one of the new ones and its light weight sparked lust in my heart.  The Trek Larry uses is 18 years old, and my Schwinn is 15, both very well built, but not exactly Space Age high tech metals.  I figure I'll burn extra calories just propelling its poundage down the path.

It's OK. I love my old bike.  I loved it when I bought it, and its association with our much-missed NJ house adds to that.

And my cycling has been sporadic, so until I figure out whether I'll actually get serious about it, refurbishment made sense.

But man, the search goes on for a form of exercise that I don't loathe!

[UPDATE] Old post cards, old books

In the process of looking through junk and/or consignment shops (and trying not to bring home dozens more blasted books), I sometimes run into bins full of old post cards.  Mostly, and especially if they're unsorted, I don't try to really systematically search them..... but once in awhile, like a couple days ago, it seems worthwhile to see what treasure is in there.

There's no particular reason why one appeals to me except that it's cool -- or, in this case,

....that it's strangely cool-looking and that I have actually heard of the place (thanks to my online acquaintance with ronniecat!).  I always wonder who took a trip and bought it in around 1910, and how the bleep the post card ended up in a basket in a shop in South Carolina.

UPDATE : Thanks to the aforementioned ronniecat, and a link in her comment, I found a beautiful video of this bay and why it's a natural wonder - click here for it!


Sometimes, a card is just beautiful :

I have no relationship with Rome, Georgia, but I love the old cars in this street scene:

Dante gets a glimpse of Major Babe, Beatrice:

There was a whole series from the Tower of London.  This is the one that first caught my eye.  I love the choice to photograph the Armoury through this stone entrance :

Lincoln's birthplace:

And this one just had the Awwwww! factor :

The time it took to go through the card basket kept me from getting into worse trouble buying dorky Cold War textbooks.  Like I did last time we went secondhand-shopping.

Man's Story: World History in Its Geographic Setting.  By T. Walter Wallbank.  Published by Scott, Foresman, 1961, and apparently the third edition.

They're cheap enough, since nobody on earth but me wants them, but they weigh a ton and take up an awful lot of space.

 And yet....somebody has to preserve this stuff!  It's part of our history!  Yeah, that's it.

Not to mention that it's full of little groaner cartoons in which a bespectacled character named "Hy Story'  (Get it?)  drops in on various eras and crassly disobeys the Temporal Prime Directive by being in and possibly messing up history:

A career for the introvert

Listed, ready to shelve so they can await buyers.  Downyflake finds the whole process rather boring.

Selling books is probably the most ridiculous job a person could have.  OK, one of the most ridiculous.  Well, pretty ridiculous.

Books are becoming a specialty item for a niche market.  Readers are still pretty abundant, for read-and-toss (which is also a great book type for digital reading) and for Fifty Shades of DaVinci or whatever.  But readers who want to collect them, or to pay postage for cheap copies, are getting fewer.

There's just one problem.  I love doing it.  I love books, but more than that, I love connecting readers with books by offering them something they love, or finding them a deal.  This is why the invention of online selling is as close to heaven as I can get on this earth.  I can match-make people with books they want, and still retain control over my interactions.

The fan of free enterprise who bought this never paid for it.  But we sell online!  We don't ship till we're paid!  Sale was cancelled and it's been relisted.

So, OK, online selling is what I love.  When somebody discovers our online store and buys a whole boxful, I'm not just a businessperson.  I don't just say commodity in, commodity out.  I picture the pleasure of the customer getting a box and opening it and finding it full of books.

You'd think I was a People Person or something.

I am emphatically not.  People stress me.  A real bookstore owner would, should, love jawing with customers and talking books and responding to requests.  I really prefer to just pick my own stock and let it sink or swim, so I'm not only not very People-y, I'm not very business-savvy either.

That's not me.  My ideal bookshop was going to be called Bad Attitude Books, and the philosophy was going to be; "If you want something, buy it, if not, go home."

Or maybe my own version of the "You break it, you've bought it" sign, which would read, "You talk me to death, you've bought it."

Really, put 4 bucks in the tip jar, and then yap away.  I'll apply the $4 to a purchase, but if you force me to act interested in Christian Amish romance novels  (It's a really big genre.  Seriously.), then buy nothing, I'll keep the dough as a listening fee.

See how awful I am?

Counter-leaners come in three types, and one is interesting and supportive of the store.  I'm cool with that.  The others are the dreary ones, and the ones who are out to distract us.  The best was the husband-and-wife shoplifting team.  He leaned on one elbow and yacked congenially while she pocketed paperbacks.  And little gift items.  More profit down the tubes to buy a video surveillance camera.

No we don't do special orders.  Nobody ever comes back for them.  Literally nobody.  We had a 100% forget-it rate on them.

No, I haven't read Lifetime TV-Type Plot of the Month Lady Novelist.  The whole "wasn't it great?" thing rarely happens between me and another reader because I read strangely.

That doesn't mean I read better stuff, just that I'm never in sync with other readers, good books or bad.  Surely everybody's read The Help!  I might get to it eventually.  I am an unrepentant lover of some of Dean Koontz's books, but tend to dislike the ones others love. I've never even read The Age of Innocence, but I did read The Children, which absolutely blew me away.  I think it gets wrongly classed with Edith Wharton's potboilers and is much finer.  In other words, I am a book person, but entirely the wrong book person for whatever topic others are on.

Excuse me, what were we talking about?  O yes, ways in which running a real store (which we did for a year in 2004-5) was taxing.

No, we can't "do better" on the @^%#ing price.  You enjoy wheeling and dealing, negotiating is a form of recreation for you?  Congrats.  I find that about as much fun as cutting my toenails.  Know what I enjoy?  Paying the @^%#ing  rent, that's what I enjoy.

So I stubbornly plug away at selling books online and try to believe it's what I'm meant to do;  that it's one of the ways in which I make a difference that I don't necessarily ever see or know about.

We do fantasize about opening a walk-in store again, in a place where it might be appreciated, but that, and the necessity of doing it on our own terms, are critical.  I want to own the building, and I want to welcome interesting people who actually support the business, and I want to be able to tell the tedious ones that lean on the counter extolling the virtues of O'Reilly's newest so-called history book, that it's junk.

I had to draw my own.

It's not that I've looked at every single cartoon about the "legitimate rape" thing.  Maybe somebody else has done it, and undoubtedly better. 

And having to choose between denial of science, and hideous lack of compassion is absurd, but still, the realistic scientific view that violent assault does not trigger some kind of mythical bodily defense against pregnancy, makes the absolutists' to-hell-with-you treatment of women who've been impregnated by assault much much nastier.  To me.  I wish I could draw.

Control Issues. [R] language warning

I've always lived by the idea that we have some control.  Maybe not as much as we want, maybe over surprising things and not always over what we want to have it over, but that applying some wisdom increased our ability to control outcomes. 

There's the Serenity Prayer:  serenity to accept what I can't change but courage to change what I can, with wisdom to know the difference.  Maybe I interpreted that the way I wanted to, more than the way it ought to be interpreted.   And there's the Gandhi quote I repeat over and over:


But life for a few years now has sent disquieting messages that nothing is certain; that being an emotionally well-centered adult requires acceptance of that, and ability to enjoy life anyway.

I sit here in a comfortable house some people would sell their souls for, and I want to flee, and then hate myself for my ingratitude, which is kind of a useless pattern unless I go deeper into why I'm so tense and unhappy.

But the reason is the pervasive uncertainty of it.  A parade of funerals.  Storm vulnerability.  Exposure of this formerly out-in-the-boonies little dirt road to the outside world.

I'm very grudgingly revisiting a book I bought a year ago and have avoided reading : Comfortable with Uncertainty.  The fact that I bought it long ago indicates I dimly realized I needed to deal with the issue, but that's as far as I got.

About once a year we see swaths of road-bank grass on either side of our house, and saplings just inside the woods, brown and wither in an obviously unnatural manner.

It also shows up all over the county, and there was no doubt that the county was poisoning the vegetation, for reasons unknown - I figured it was cheaper than mowing the shoulder.
 
It wasn't quite the reason, but I was close. The other day we caught the county employee spraying nauseatingly day-glow-purple-colored poison along the edge of our woods, and he insisted it was required to keep limbs from interfering with the power lines. Never mind that no limbs are anywhere near the lines.  The worst ice storm on earth wouldn't bring any of those limbs into contact with the lines.  Never mind sending a crew to cut limbs instead -- too expensive.  It's standard county policy; spray poison within X-distance of the lines. The groundwater or marsh runoff be damned.

Not a great photo - but last year's poisoning shows in the brown patch and dead saplings. THIS year's, sprayed the day before the photo, is just starting to yellow out - see  foreground, and background just behind the discarded drink cup.

The bypass highway is one block over from our street, and the traffic noise has always been there, but the neighborhood used to be left alone when it was not a destination to anywhere.  Then the bike bridge brought SUV after SUV of tourists, blocking the road (It's just dirt!  It can't be a road!), dumping trash.  Our neighborhood is theirs to do with as they please.

Take the green snake.

Here comes the bad language. And no, that "damned" in the paragraph a bit above was Jane Austen-esque compared to my feelings about some other things.

In the brush next to our driveway, there lived, past tense, a small green snake.  One morning about 3(?) weeks ago, I came out and it lay dead at the side of the dirt road, its head cleanly chopped off.  Not run over by a car, not attacked by an animal.  Neatly cut by a man-made implement, and left to rot in the sun.

Some total and complete fucked in the head tourist came into OUR neighborhood, decided to walk/jog/bike down our little country lane, did not approve of the little country wildlife on our little country lane, and had the arrogance to decide the snake was not entitled to live.

I understand snake fear.  I understand quick reaction that can't take time to look at head shape -- venomous snakes have distinctive heads -- and I'd have understood if this snake were at all sizable, or had any kind of scary markings.  Some harmless snakes look similar to venomous ones unless you know the markings.

But WHO on this godforsaken planet is LEFT that doesn't know small plain green snakes are harmless?  Who doesn't know that they eat little pests and certainly hurt nobody?  Jerknuts tourists from concrete jungles?

Am I supposed to feel sorry for the daily lives of those property-rights-challenged touristas, and not begrudge them this brief vacation in a place with country lanes whose wild residents are so unfamiliar?

I don't feel sorry for them and I do begrudge them.  They can go to goddam zoos, where the wildlife is protected from them behind walls, and they could realize it's, duh, not their neighborhood or their place to make any bloodydamn decisions here, and they could learn some basic kind of response to new experiences, like, say, leave it alone if it's not affecting your life or wellbeing.  There is no way that this Touron felt threatened or trapped.  The snake was not invading the moron's space.  There was plenty of space to avoid the snake, which lay at the SIDE of a wide road going in two directions.   Even massive ignorance doesn't make killing it, rather than dashing off, logical.

Why couldn't I have caught them at it?  I know, best I didn't.  It would have been unpleasant.

My reaction is awfully big, considering the fact that the species isn't in jeopardy and there are are plenty more little green snakes living large all around the area.  I feel like it's not just another wildlife anecdote, and it's not just another lamentation about how this quiet little street that used to be nowhere anybody would walk to, now is violated by trash and crass stupidity and now, thefts, over and over. 

Someone has broken into our basement again.  Our ground floor linen closet holds only some old bedspreads and a black-and-white screen gameboy.  They were terribly disappointed.  I'd like to disappoint them further with a cartilage-popping kick to the knee.

Someone else has stolen some small hockable items of cherished sentimental, more than monetary, value from inside the house.  Family obligations have sent us off on several short trips in the past few months, and we still think that the people to whom we needed to give access while we were gone would never do this.  We're saddened, angered and baffled because no answer makes sense, except that someone left the door unlocked, but it adds to the bafflement and the uncertainty.

Yeah, we're looking into ways to take back some control over this.  We can do more about the house than we can about the Nature Lovers. No locks will keep away the poison or the trash dumping or the wildlife abuse.

Eventually yall will realize that I am not being funny when I say I am not a nice person. I dream of painful justice.  I also feel like it's been a long time since I posted anything joyful or positive.  Anger is a natural response to most of this and I don't want to beat myself too badly about it, but I do feel spiritually off-kilter in my loathing for so many fellow human beings.

You see dead animals on roads all the time, and I always hate it, but the death of that one little snake just tore it for me.  We feel we have so little control over our home and lives anymore, and it's just the precise illustration of that.

OK, so, Gandhi's quote.  It's about leaving results in other, or Other, hands, but not about saying we can't make a difference.  In our tiny little ways, we help the birds and the garden spiders and an occasional turtle or lizard, and we take some cans to the food bank, and maybe I only need to believe we have power to make an actual difference.  Unless we're given something else to do, these must be what we're meant to do.

And of course, somewhere inside, I have the fantasy that there's a Shangri-La we could get to where there are no natural threats like fires or storms, and no jerks, and I'll never get teed off again and can sit and sip tea in blissful serenity.  I know it's rot, but my knowledge is intellectual, not heartfelt.

I'm not sure I can let go of the need to have some power. The idea that I really have no control over anything disturbs me, so I'm sitting in a comfortable house with air conditioning and a refrigerator stocked with food, and swearing anyway, because I'm starting the grieving process for the idea of Control now.

I may be through the Denial phase but I'm probably gonna be stuck in Bargaining for awhile, mixed with Anger and gloom, before I get to acceptance.  I might not ever get there.  It's not lookin' good.

A Princess for Jesus

In Biblically conservative Christian culture, I keep running into endless invocations of Princess-hood as a lure for self-esteem and confidence in young girls.  God knows (ha ha) when you're raising daughters and trying to sell them that "man is the head of woman" tradition, the bitter pill needs some kind of sugary coating.

Christian Living and Bible study books with this theme abound.  You are a Daughter of the King.  The King of Heaven. You are therefore a princess.  High ranking, important, wealthy.

The invocation of the wealth is not deceptive, since the authors and leaders make it quite clear that we're talking about the treasures of heaven, not the ephemeral gold and stores of earth.

But from that point on, the Christian Princess Culture is pulling a bait-and-switch.  It tells little girls their worth and excellence but does it to keep females in the subordinate position that so many New Testament passages pound into literalists who consider Paul and other letter writers to be channeling THE very Word of Very God.  Women are to be subject to men.

The misunderstanding held by little girls raised on the adventurous and romantic kid culture, which they're encouraged to act out with tulle and tiaras, is fully exploited with this Daughter Of The King bait. Girls think princesses have power along with that high rank.  That they have privilege and freedom.

In truth, ask any royal or aristocratic renaissance woman just how much power she had.

She was bought and sold.  She was lucky if she got an education, though the wealthiest did.  But she was a bargaining chip for property or political alliance.  She could not choose her husband or her way of life, and if she was to be "given" to the church, she could not marry or become a mother at all.

As recently as 1921, Princess Mary  (the only daughter of George V and Queen Mary) was forbidden to marry the man of her choice.  He was a duke not only of suitable rank, but of no family "difficulties" of suspect inheritable traits.   No, his only dealbreaking quality was that he was not rich enough -- quite rich but not rich enough -- and she was therefore forced to ally with the much wealthier family that was chosen for her.  It's said to have been a major row, after which she finally acquiesced and married the chosen Duke, who was an OK guy and a chance to get out of the house, and this was considered an admirable case of bowing to Duty. Today, the royal ranks would salivate over such a suitable choice as the forbidden duke.  But that was 1921. What princesses went through from time immemorial eroded only that gradually.

As recently as the 1950's, Princess Margaret had to give up the divorced man she loved, or give up her right and that of her children to a place in the succession. As recently as 1981, the pressure was still strong for any woman who married the Prince of Wales to give her virginity to him alone and never "know" another, a requirement that eliminated a couple of the PofW's serious girlfriends and had his parents pressuring him to ally with a 19-year-old.  The results were tragic.

But each was a small sign of progress, in that it was a stage in the slow erosion of using women as chattels.  By Princess Mary's time, she could at least marry an English aristocrat and was not used for political alliance with a foreign prince she'd never met.  By Princess Margaret's time, she could at least choose, even a commoner, if he met the slowly loosening list of requirements. 

In worldly life princesses have more freedom, but fundamentalist culture lures girls with the Princesshood they know from fairy tales, and then switches it for the retrograde form; the true state in which they are expected to live, serene in their certainty of a place in heaven, but expected to embrace rule by men in this life. In heaven there may be equality, but here, you are to follow, obey, submit, and consider it a privilege to do so for your King. Yes, fairy tales in both print and film are loaded with obedience by girls, but once you get your Handsome Prince, your days of serving, sweeping and being locked in towers without freedom to ride away are over.  Restraints will now come from noblesse oblige, not your gender, and your reward comes at your wedding, not at the end of life.

The base problem is a primitive concept that everything on earth is in a linear hierarchy;  that difference can't be equal.  Many smiling Christian conservatives have sincerely and reasonably told me that wifely submission is simple practicality:  "Somebody has to be the boss."

Another favorite is to point to the whole Ephesians 5 passage which certainly makes the role of a man more one of tremendous responsibility than of profligate privilege, and then to say "Hey, look at the demand made on husbands!  Who has the harder job?"  But it's quite clearly assigned to the gender considered more able to do it.  You can say, and you'd be right, that all Christians are called to a difficult and sacrificial life, but there's no escape from the message that males are made of better stuff.

Are we still hanging on to that swill?  We should so have outgrown that need to rank every single shred of Creation, especially when it concerns the human soul.  Isn't US politics alone proof of gender equality in susceptibility to the crassest forms of corruption?

A life well lived by anybody, Believer or Un-, is often about selflessness, and nothing about abandoning the whole genital basis for who bosses whom needs to lead to a self-centered existence.

Personally I'm not a believer in wifely submission, or in the necessity of obeying Paul of Tarsus in order to be a Christian.  I know that's a shock, since I hid it so well.  Maybe I should provide a little break, here, while you recover.

But I'm also not about telling anybody how they should live or what they should believe.  I don't have all, or even many, of life's answers.

My objection here is that this Christian Princess thing is not an honest way to teach the principles. Attracting girls with something they think is about happily-ever-after and freedom, when it's really about lifelong submission and obedience, crosses the line between correcting a misconception and exploiting it.

But further, "prince" and "princess" are about status in society.  They are about some people being higher and others lower. I don't think appealing to the natural craving kids have to be special and superior is the right message for teaching the Christian life.

Sure, you're teaching the Sunday School class that every single kid in it, as a child of the Heavenly King, is equally a prince or princess; smart, cute, dumpy or unpopular, rich or poor.  But a royalty metaphor carries the strong implication that there is an Us and a Them, and that We are superior in some hierarchy.  Royalty is above the common folk in social structure, which is the only context in which the labels have any meaning.

This is so not a right or accurate depiction of the concept of God's love for the humanity that we're claiming is all, every one, made in His image.