maybe miracles
Driving home through the mountain dusk, I glimpse, out of my eye's corner, a young stag waiting between the tree line and the road. He is the color of shadows, and it is a miracle that I notice him standing there, still as the mountain. I slow down, look into his eyes that are looking into mine. At moments like this, I really do know what the word "frisson" means.
I am the only car on the road, and he waits until I pass him before he starts to move out. I can see him in the rear view mirror as he trots across the road and through someone's dark yard. Unlike me, he is singly attentive to where he's going -- unlike me, who is still looking at where I'd been.
I am driving home through the mountain dusk on the way back from taking my mother to Mass. That, in itself, is a minor miracte. She's been asking to go for several weeks now, but this is the first Saturday that she's been in any mental shape to get dressed and go out in public.
In my lifetime, I have been to hundreds of Masses in dozens of churches, and it's been what seems like another lifetime since I connected with the maybe miracle that the Catholic Mass is supposed to imitate. Tonight, I sat and watched the rote rendering of what is supposed to be as moving as any poetry, remembering that, as a child, when I got bored during Mass I would turn the pages in my Sunday MIssal to the Gospels, where I would pick up on the continuing saga of the miracle maker. Unfotrunately, the missals provided in the pews tonight were gospel-less, so I resorted to literally twiddling my thumbs, stopping only to help my mother stand, sit, kneel, stand, sit, kneel....
A stag waiting in the shadows for me to pass -- more moving than any Mass.
Categories:
fanatics by any name are still fanatics
Speaking in tongues, weeping for salvation, praying for an end to abortion and worshipping a picture of President Bush — these are some of the activities at Pastor Becky Fischer's Bible camp in North Dakota, "Kids on Fire," subject of the provocative new documentary, "Jesus Camp."
"I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places," Fisher said. "Because, excuse me, we have the truth."
"A lot of people die for God," one camper said, "and they're not afraid."
"We're kinda being trained to be warriors," said another, "only in a funner way."
-- ABC News
It seems to me that the Evangelicals are doing to their children what the fanatic end of the Muslim faith are doing to theirs -- preparing them to fight and die for their version of god.
It seems to me that, while everybody can't be right, everybody can certainly be wrong.
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the makers of the Jesus Camp film, made some fundamentally important statements in an interview posted on courttv.com. most notably:
Rachel: I think there is a fear, on my part, of any religious group to have political power. I'm Jewish. If the Jews took over America, if they overtook the government and no one could work on Saturday, I would be uncomfortable with that.
Heidi: There are certain things that are very American, that we all are used to, like massive amounts of American flags flying all over the country. There are certain things you grow up with. One of the things that we grew up with - which is part of the deal with being an American - is the separation of church and state. You hear it since the time you are five. And I think a deviation from that is a mistake. I am definitely aware and concerned that that line is being blurred and that makes me uncomfortable. [But] I don't blame the evangelicals. They have a plan, they have a vision for how they think America should be, and, like any lobby group, they are going to try to make that happen. The protection should be in place by the three branches of government. I think blaming them is a waste of time.
Personally, I believe that we should blame them for further straining the tenuous line that holds church and state apart. I am often afraid that it's already too late, what with Bush and his minions continuing to desecrate that sacred boundary.
And I also blame the anti-choice fanatics, like those who are promoting "abstinence only" instead of forthright sex education. The following from the Advoctes for Youth newsletter :
The fact that some U.S. teens report oral and/or anal intercourse while considering themselves 'virgins' underscores the fact that lacking information does not prevent young people from having sexual intercourse. It may, however, prevent them from making healthy choices about sexuality.
However, abstinence-only-until-marriage education goes further. It discourages young people from using contraception. It encourages young people to believe that condoms and modern methods of contraception—such as birth control pills, injectable contraception, implants, and the intra-uterine device (IUD)—are far less effective than they, in fact, are. Many abstinence-only-until-marriage programs discuss modern methods of contraception only in terms of failure rates (often exaggerated) and censor information about their correct use and effectiveness. Thus, many of these programs keep young people in ignorance of the very facts that would encourage them to protect themselves when they eventually become sexually active.
* By age 18, about 71 percent of U.S. youth have had sexual intercourse.6
* One recent study found that, by the age of 18, more than 75 percent of young people have engaged in various heavy petting behaviors.7
* Another study found that 25 to 50 percent of teens report having had oral sex.8
* A third study focusing exclusively on adolescent 'virgins' (defined in the study as teens who had not experienced vaginal intercourse) found that nearly one-third of respondents reported having participated in masturbation with a partner. In the same study, 10 percent of teens who defined themselves as virgins had participated in oral intercourse and one percent had participated in anal intercourse.9
* Data from a nationally representative survey indicate that, in 1999, 49.9 percent of all high school students have had sexual intercourse. The percentage rises by grade level—38.6 percent of ninth graders have had sexual intercourse compared with 64.9 percent of seniors.10
* By the time young people reach age 20, about 80 percent of males and 76 percent of females have had sexual intercourse.
I remember talking to my daughter about engaging in sexual activity. While I urged abstinence, I also laid out the facts and shared personal experiences. I had no illusions about her making her own choices; what I wanted her to understand were the consequences, both physical and emotional -- to understand (again from the newsletter cited above):
* Every individual has dignity and self-worth.
* Sexual relationships should never be coercive or exploitative.
* All sexual decisions have effects or consequences.
* Every person has the right and the obligation to make responsible sexual choices.
My parents never discussed any of that with me. I found out about sex when I was a pre-teen from a magazine article I ripped out of a magazine when my Dad took me to the allergist to get my weekly shot. I remember how nervous I was as I folded up the torn pages and stuck the wad into my waistband.
That was the early 50s, and there were lots of things we didn't talk about then, believing that what you don't know can't hurt you. That wasn't true then and it isn't true now.
Fanatics, whether religious or political (and they're even more dangerous when they're both) control their followers by only telling them what they want them to believe, leaving out all kinds of information that might shake their belief. That's what indoctrination is, what brainwashing is.
And when you start the brainwashing when the individuals are young children -- as the Jesuits supposedly say, "Give me the child before the age of seven, and I will give you the man" -- you can easily mold fanatics in any way you want.
Are you scared yet? Hah. Watch this. And this.
Categories:
hanging in a jar
For I once saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, "Sibyl, what do you want?' " she answered, "I want to die."
I thought of this quote today because my 90 year old mother has been crying a lot lately, and when I ask her why, she says she wants to die. Like the mythic Sybil, she's in some kind of stasis -- neither really living nor finally dying. She spends most of her days walking around her rooms -- walking and moving objects and dropping used kleenex like breadcrumbs. While she walks, I sit, busying my hands with crocheting. I'd rather be reading, but I don't like being interrupted when I'm reading, and she interrupts frequently --
...where is my money? ...where is my brother? ...are you my mother? ...where are my glasses? ...where are the men? ...are you going dancing? ...is it raining?..... ..what should we have for supper? (this last asked an hour after we had supper)
If I run over to my computer to check email or such, she is in her doorway, calling "Elaine....Elaine!" I'm stuck an audio clip from The Graduate.
Back to Sybil. Several years ago, I blogged a piece about Sybils and such that I still like and am reprising below. Interesting enough, while googling for additional information about Sybil, I happened upon a wonderful blog that I had never seen before. It is written by a woman who is indeed a kindred spirit. I will have to find the time and go back to read more of her posts, many of which echo my sentiments exactly.
Meanwhile, here's my old post about...
Cybill Sibyl Symbols
I am an old woman with a deck of cards
A witch, an Amazon, a Gorgon
A seer, a clairvoyant, a poet.
I have visions of becoming and
I dream in female
--(Barbara Starrett, 1974)
I adored the character that Cybill Shepherd played in her '90s sitcom. Raunchily relevant in menopausal splendor, she laughed a lot --mostly at herself -- loved largely, and dreamed in female. The Lady of Situations.
Sibyl is another gut-grabbing female, one I first encountered the first time I turned to the first page of T.S. Eliot's "Wastland." (I still have verses from that epic endlessly looping through my brain: Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant/ has a bad cold nevertheless/ is known to be the wisest woman in Europe/ with a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, / is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor (those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) / Here is Belladonna, the Lady of Rocks, / the lady of situations.)
*****************
For I once saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she answered, 'I want to die."
The quote which prefaces T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland," "NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis . . ." is taken from the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, a Roman of the first century B.C.E. The Sybil is a prophetic character who, when granted a wish by Apollo, asked to live for as many years as there are grains of sand in a handful. She forget to ask for eternel youth, however, and is confined to a bottle so as to prevent her body's disintegration..... The Sibyl, then, is a bit of a paradox: she strove to live eternally yet ended up in constant danger of decay and pain. Her quest for eternity was a failure that Eliot finds terribly important yet terribly dangerous. His goal is not to end up like the Sibyl, but to free her. (quoted from a link that is no longer active)
Cybill and Sybil, symbols of women with strong voices -- strong with meaning, with intention, with visions of constant becoming -- with guts full of female dreams and hearts used to surviving great tides of sorrow. A lot like the many women bloggers I know and love.
The road I drive into town is edged with farmland. During first days of autumn, I pass so many signs of endings -- fields of corn stalks the color of caramel; acres emptied but for the baled rolls of hay; wayside strips of sunflowers, heads bowed low with their burdens of shedding seeds. I am, these days, envious of endings.
Categories:
read a banned book
It's Banned Books Week
Would you believe -- according to this site, a recently banned book is on computer hyperlinks.
Categories:
HUHs? and HAHs! From Harper's Weekly
Excerpts from Harper's Weekly Review, a day late:
In Fernald, Ohio, the Environmental Protection Agency was planning to cart away 5,800 tons of contaminated soil so that a former nuclear production facility could be turned into a "natural" park.
Big box retail stores were employing anthropologists to help sell their products.
Fruit farmers rallied in Washington, D.C., to protest a shortage of low-wage, uninsured, illegal immigrant laborers.
In Maryland, the National Black Republican Association ran radio ads claiming that Martin Luther King was aIand that Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan.
The recipient of a penis transplant in Guangzhou, China, requested doctors remove the organ after he and his wife began experiencing "severe psychological problems."
Australian researchers determined that lesbian women were 10 percent more orgasmic than their straight female counterparts.
A survey showed that rap music fans are unlikely to recycle
Scientists announced that breakfast may not be the most important meal of the day.
Bill and Hillary Clinton both agreed that they were "sick of Karl Rove's bullshit."
Categories:
no surprise/s
First of all, liberal hearthrob Keith Olbermann played another riff on the antics of various Bush administration groupies, lending even more power and clarity to Bill Clinton's much-publicized ripping apart of the position taken by a conservative nework interviewer. It was no surprise that Olbermann again ended his MSNBC program with another of his hell-bent rants, focusing on the distortions that the neocons continue to disseminate in an effort to blame Clinton for the sins of their camp's leaders.
Former President Clinton's emergence as a powerful presence at this point in the politics game is no surprise either. What I did find surprising, however, is that I didn't hear any commentator note that Clinton's strong, honest, fiery,and decisive statements should serve as a model for the wimpy Democrats as they attempt to dislodge their current conservative opponents.
Those wary Democrats should take as their slogan the words of Happy Harry Hard-on in Pump Up the Volume:
TRUTH IS A VIRUS.
TALK HARD.
STEAL THE AIR.
Here on the home front, it was no surprise that she finally showed her true predatory colors. I caught her with a chipmunk hanging out of her mouth -- she looking at me proudly and defiantly; the chipmunk looking definitely dazed and confused. My cat Calli was an apartment cat until we moved out here to the mountains. She loves to meander outside around the house, exploring the flora. This time she found the fauna. The poor creature hung from her mouth, dead motionless weight.
Of course, I yelled at her and grabbed her, and she finally let the critter go. It lay in the grass, white underbelly up for grabs. I carried Calli back into the house and went back to assess the damage. Relieved, I watched as the chipmunk slowly righted itself and took off for the underbrush.
The cat, of course, locked behind the screen door, looked at me in confusion. I'm sure that she was very proud of herself, doing what is natural for a cat. Somewhere in her non-verbal brain, I'm sure she is very confused and disappointed that I was not pleased at her success.
One's man's meat.....
Sort of like the Righteous and the rest of us.
Categories:
changes and cheesecake
Well, I left town, and now I'm back.
It's a comforting thing to have friends whom you've known for a decade and a half -- friends who know you because the bunch of you have spent many hours, days, weeks, sharing fears, foibles, and failures. Because you've spent even more time celebrating strengths and successes.
We used to go on vacations together, one gloriously rainy week in a house we rented on Chappaquiddick Island of Ted Kennedy infamy.
But things change. My taking on the care of my mother was the biggeest change the group had to face. Years ago I had started a discussion group for single/divorced women. We six are what is left of the original large monthly gathering. We have helped each other through marriages, divorces, illnesses, and accidents. Together, we have celebrated marriages, divorces, partnerings, births, and deaths. They are more my sisters than any I might have had.
And so getting together with them over the weekend was really like being on vacation for me. Saturday night was pizza and beer and wine and catching up -- on children, grandchildren, male partners and, for me, family of origin. We all agreed that Keith Olbermann was the guy we all would like to be stranded on a desert island with, and we are all fans of The Daily Show, so you can imagine what our political rants sounded like.
Sunday was a deliciously fattening breakfast at the newly opened Cheescake Factory in Albany. It's amazing how much has changed since I moved a year ago. New mcmansions being built where the nursery was where I used to buy my plants; the strip mall where I would hunt for bargains at TJ Maxx, empty.
And we are changing, too, as each, in her own time, reaches retirement age. Four of us had careers with state government, so our pensions are better than most. The other two are worried that they will never be able to retire, since their work histories are different. One, for example, works for the post office. Her retirement pension will be only $7000 a year.
And so we bury our concerns under mounds of fluffy French Toast and various flavors of cheescake. ( I chose the sweety tart Key Lime cheescake.) And then each of us goes her own way, vowing that next summer we will do the vacation thing again and pencilling in plans for another get together next month, a gathering that will include the Cheesecake Factory again, of course.
All around me, changes. The leaves on the mountain are starting to turn and fly. The hummingbirds seem to have gone already.
But within these walls here, nothing has changed. I walk in the door, back into the exact environment I left.
Next summer. Vacation. Someplace by the ocean. Maybe Maine. The group of us drinking wine under the stars and sharing sweet and tart fantasies about Keith Olbermann.
Categories:
good for a laugh
The above via the Parody Motivator Generator, thanks to a link from Chris Locke.
Categories:
funk! funk! funk!
Iam in a major funk. Can't get myself motivated. So I'm going to visit my women friends in Albany this weekend. Pizza and a movie. Maybe a few beers. And brunch on Sunday. A stop at BJ's to load up on staples.
Autumn has always been my favorite season -- the air crisp, the sun still warm. But somehow, this year, it's a Funking Fall.
A lot has to do with the fact that I can't remember when I last laughed -- belly-cramping laughed. The kind of laugh where you can't stop. And everyone else is laughing that hard too. OK, ladies. Your assignment is to make me laugh my way out of this Funk! Funk! Funk!
For starters, here's the best chuckle from this past Tuesday's Harper's Weekly:
"On the advice of his witch doctor a Serbian premature ejaculator had sex with a hedgehog and had to be hospitalized for pricks."
Categories:
lurkin' on PhoneCon
Well. I tried. I actually managed to hook up my headset and get into the PhoneCon. These are definitely multi-tasking people -- on-line chatting, blogging, talking, uploading photos. Someone calls in from his car on the way to work. There's no way I can keep up. I don't know what to say. And then I hear some commotion from my mother's rooms, and I have to hang up.
I get on my laptop and into the Chat. Tamarika is there. I manage a couple of posts before I have to help my mother find her glasses.
The world is passing me by.
This blog is my tenuous link to a community that's always moving a few paces ahead of me. I'll never catch up.
I wonder if Jeneane managed to link up 95.
Categories:
Hello? Hello? It's PhoneCon 2.0
Well, I was never a part of that insane 2004 Con, and I'm not really well-informed about anything the least bit techie-related -- if they ever actually get into any of that. But what the hell. I'm going to take Jeneane up on her offer to join the PhoneCon 2.0 gathering -- not because I have anything to contribute or have any opinions about what's going on among all of the techie ingroups, but because it's there.
I've got my badge.
Now all I have to do is get out of bed at a reasonable hour. What the hell, I can put the phone on speaker and leave my weary head on the pillow. Ah, the wonders of the telephone.
Categories:
help b!X walk for AIDS
He's half way to his goal and has five days left to reach it. Go here and give him some monetary support.
Categories:
Stress
I feel it across the middle of my back when I bend down to pick up her trail of used kleenex. It radiates around to my front, where it constricts around my lungs. I feel it in my knees when I bend down to tie her shoelaces. I feel it in my skull as the day stumbles along its well-worn track of miscommunication.
I sit and take deep breaths and Nexium. I raise my arms, stretch, bend over and let the weight of it all drain out my fingertips. I take Excedrin.
The leaves are starting to turn on the mountain, reminding me how quickly time is passing about me, without me. I am contained, constrained, remaindered.
Categories:
new virus
It's called the Lorena Bobbitt Virus. It turns your hard drive into a 3 1/2 inch floppy.
That's a line from this weeks's Eureka.
Categories:
It's Harper's Tuesday
But, instead of Harper's, today, I'm doing the harping. If I don't get out of here for a couple of days, my head is going to implode, explode or do something equally damaging to this place on the mountain. So I'm going to my daughter's tomorrow -- just for one overnight, but at least it's not being here.
So, while I'm gone, if you haven't heard Keith Olbermann's rant on MSNBC on 9/11, please go here. Read it if that's all you can do, but if you can, LISTEN.!
To spur your interest, here's how Olbermann ends his piece, using a quote from a Rod Serling "Twilight Zone" episode "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
We need to do a lot more harping on that issue.
Categories:
frog in the garage; magnets in the mail
At first I thought it was a leaf, but then I saw it hop under some assorted pieces of wood my brother has stored in the garage. He's going to have a fit because he's told me a million times to make sure I close and lock the side door to the garage. I was out working in the garden the other day, which I access through that door and I forgot to lock it. It blew open in the storm yesterday, and I'll bet that's when the frog got in. Anyone know how to get a frog out of a garage?
I've got an idea about how to give my mother something to do that will engage her interest. I've ordered two magnet boards and a bunch of magnetic pages that are supposed to work with an inkjet printer. I'm going to make a geneological magnets for her, with photos of her relatives (and their names) on magnetic paper, and she can practice putting them in the correct family order. It's taking me forever to crop out faces from scanned in photos, but it will be worth it if having the whole set will entertain her. It will also help her remember the names of her children and grandchildren. Heh.
Categories:
Storm Large
Turn on your speakers. Get ready for your toes to curl.
I dedicate this post to Michaela, Pam, Joan, Susan, and Penny.
She's my idol.
Bigger than life.
A survivor.
My kinda woman.
Categories:
just thinking
Got an email today-- you know, the kind lthat's forwarded with an attachment that you have to open four or five other forwarded emails to get to -- the kind that includes the email addresses of everyone on the list of recipients for each of those four or five forwarded emails. If I have to open more than one email to get to an attachment, I usually just delete it all and never bother reading what has been so eagerly forwarded by some friend.
Why don't people forward the very first permutation of the original email (eliminating the need to open and open and open) and, before they do that, why don't they delete the addresses of the original recipients. As it goes now, what a great way to collect email addresses to spam!
Having said all of that, nevertheless I did the open, open, open, open thing and finally got to this, which I actually think is worth sharing (in case you haven't seen it elsewhere):
THINKING
It started out innocently enough. I began to think at cocktail parties. Now and then -- just to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time. That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's. I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What exactly is it that we are doing here?"
One day the boss called me in to his office. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find employment elsewhere." This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking ..." "I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!" "But honey, surely it's not that serious."
"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!" "That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors... They didn't open. The library was closed.
To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. As I sank to the ground, clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. "*Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?"* it asked.
You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster. Which is why I am what I am today: a Recovering Thinker.
I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed...easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I believe the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.
Today, I registered to vote as a Republican.
Categories:
the ten-minute respite
Somehow, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I found myself without my mother at my side. She had wandered over to my brother's space, and he was showing her his computer set-up -- not that she understood any of it, but it was a distraction for her.
For ten minutes, I was able to sit, drink a glass of iced tea, munch on a tomato sandwich, and read.
What I began reading is a novel recommended by my Ex. (He still has the best eye when it comes to picking out what I would enjoy reading.)
For ten minutes, I read Adriana Trigiani's Milk Glass Moon. I was entranced by the rhythm and cadence of her writing. When my mother returned at the end of those ten minutes, I found myself thinking my thoughts in Trigiani's style, it was that compelling to me.
I hated to have to put the book down; yet I was glad at the same time because I didn't want to finish it too quickly. I have a habit, when I start reading a novel I really like, of sitting down and not stopping until I've read to the last page. And then it's over too soon.
Of course, I really don't have the luxury of doing that kind of marathon read these days anyway.
Toward evening, it seemed as though my mother's old "shingles" site was bothering her. Five years ago or so, she had a severe bout of shingles on her forehead and around one eye that could have blinded her in that eye. For years after that I made sure she took L-Lysine, which kept the residual effects of the shingles under control. I forgot all about giving it to her since we moved her a year ago. My bad.
She's back on it as of tonight.
And now maybe I take another read/respite. More than ten minutes this time. I just hope that I don't wind up staying up all night reading. Can't deal with her tomorrow if I get no sleep tonight.
Categories:
no rest for the wicked
My favorite tv shows are back for a new season. I can't watch them while I'm sitting with my mother in the evenings because she gets upset by anything that looks like blood or a hospital or dead bodies. So I have to tape them and stay up late to watch them.
On Nip/Tuck (which repeats at midnight and so I can watch it then) last night, Brooke Shields took on a dark and serious role as a therapist, and she pulled it off quite nicely. It took me a few minutes to finally recognize that it was Shields. I think her character is supposed to get even darker as the series progresses. Nice challenge for someone who has always been considered a lightweight in the acting department.
And then there's House and Bones, and Lost will be starting up again soon. b!X is a Lost addict as well, even more than I am.
And, of course, there's the bizarre Desperate Housewives. I started watching Three Moons Over Milford. I really miss Kyle XY, which won't be back until next summer. Yup, I'm a tv addict.
But I never just sit and watch tv. I'm also always knitting or crocheting or fixing clothes -- both mine and my mom's (she's shrinking fast).
We have an electric eye set up to beep both my sib and me when my mom gets out of bed. When I went over to her room this morning to check her out, she was standing in the middle of the room in bare feet, clutching the bottom of her nightgown. She looked at me and said, "I forgot how to get up." I think what she meant is that she forgot how to get dressed. This is what is happening more and more. The forgetting.
In the morning, before I've had to deal with her all day, I can be very nurturing. I hug her, do a few dance steps to songs I make up on the spot (this always makes her smile and makes her forget what she was upset about forgetting), and coax her along on starting her day. My personal day ends when hers begins and vice versa. Her needs and her fears are all consuming, and when she "sundowns" about seven each evening, I don't have much left to give her, and my sib usually has to take over for an hour or so while I take care of myself. He gets up at night with her; I take the day. We're both pretty stressed out with the whole thing.
I've always wondered whether the saying was "no rest for the wicked" or "no rest for the weary." Now I know.
Categories:
If it's Tuesday, it's Harper's.
From Harper's Weekly Review:
Worth repeated highlighting:
The Pentagon announced that civilian casualties in Iraq had increased recently by more than fifty percent, and death squads were said to be torturing and killing as many as 1,800 people per month.[New York Times] At least 200 Iraqis were killed in bombings, rocket attacks, and shootings, as were 19 American and British soldiers.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quoted Georges Clemenceau, who said, “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.”[Washington Post]
SAT scores in the United States showed the largest decline in 31 years.
The following seem to be all connected to the actions of men, although Harper's didn't relate them in that way.
Warren Steed Jeffs, who reportedly has 80 wives and 250 children and serves as the leader of a polygamist Mormon sect, was arrested in Nevada on suspicion of arranging marriages between underage girls and older men. [AP via New York Times]
Researchers warned that countries with unnaturally high male-to-female population ratios, such as China and India, could foster violence, organized crime, and terrorism.
In a courtroom in Duluth, Minnesota, a cocaine trafficker ate his own feces;[Duluth News Tribune] a vigilante mob in North Carolina beat and killed the wrong man;[AP via CNN]
in Russia a participant in a sex-doll river-rafting race was disqualified for sexually abusing his rafting apparatus. “I think,” said the man's friend, “it was an expression of his great desire to win.”[MOSNEWS.COM]
In the Indian state of Bihar, high-caste landowners were raping and gouging out the eyes of low-caste residents.[India eNews]
And these seem related to the ways of women:
Miss England, an Uzbek-born Muslim, declared that stereotyping leads to terror.
It was reported that the average British woman spends two and a half years on her hair during her lifetime.[Daily Mail]
A British professor announced that five-year-old girls were worried about their weight,[AFP via Breitbart]
A study revealed that the brains of nuns “flicker” in the presence of God.
A woman in Hohhot, China, crashed her car into another vehicle while allowing her dog to drive.
I can't help comparing the unique newsworthy things that men do with the unique newsworthy things that women do. Which only makes me even more convinced that if there were a way to keep testosterone at a reasonable level in the males of our species, there would be less violence committed by males against those less aggressive and/or strong.
I don't see much newsworthy violence being perpetrated by women.
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the brown booties
A photo from the 1920s of my mother (a pre-teen) and her two younger sisters when they came back from living in Poland for several years shows them dressed alike -- right down to their scuffed high-top laced-up shoes.
My mother insists on wearing a pair of brown leather "booties," which she guards with her life, convinced that someone is going to steal them from her. She has always told the story of how, while living in her grandmother's thatched-roof farmhouse is Poland (along with her four siblings and their own mother), someone somehow got into the house one night and stole all of their clothes, even their shoes. Although I had never been sure that this story was true, it was verified by our 81 year old cousin who visited a few weeks ago.
My mother has become overwhelmingly paranoid that someone is going to steal her clothes, especially her shoes. Every evening she manages to hide her shoes somewhere else. Of course, when she gets up the next day, she doesn't remember hiding them and believes someone has stolen them. She does this with her eyeglasses and her purses, too. It annoys me that I have to spend so much of my time looking for the things she believes were stolen. The fact that we always find those objects hidden somewhere in her room is irrelevant to her.
I'm annoyed a lot lately. But then I go over and read By Bea's Bedside, where Alexandra muses about her bedridden mother for whom she is caregiver. They have such a different relationship than we have here. They obviously always have been close and communicative. Not so here. Alexandra's attitude toward taking care of her mother is so much different from mine; Bea's daughter never sounds annoyed.
I should be grateful that my mother is not bedridden (although when I have to spend an hour looking for her brown booties while she follows me around complaining about "those people, I often wish she were). And I don't have to change diapers. Not yet, anyway.
My mother has never been much of a reader or a thinker or a doer (of anything but housework). She was not much of a television watcher either. So now, there is absolutely nothing that she is interested in doing except move things around in her closets and drawers.
Her attention span in front of the television is about 15 minutes, and she prefers programs from the earlier days of television -- ones with no shooting and no car crashes and no expletives. So yesterday, I ordered a used set of seven VHS tapes of the Loretta Young Show from the late 50s. She always liked Loretta Young, and maybe those stories from more calm and secure times will hold her attention.
There was an item on the local news station the other day about a computer program that's supposed to help older people revitalize their brains. The more I read about it, I realized it was much too complicated for my mom. I started searching for some pre-school DVD memory games, and they're much more suitable for where she's at these days.
I just wish I could find something that would interest her and get her mind off those damned brown booties.
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