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Some things are worth causing a stir about.

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My local paper has the story on the hard copy front page, but I can’t find any link to it on their online version.
So, here’s congratulations to my friends Elissa Kane and Lynne Lekakis who were married by a Unitarian minister in a controversial same-sex marriage ceremony here in Albany yesterday. There’s a great photo of Elissa (with Lynne and their 9 year old daughter) holding up her arm in the power salute. I worked alongside Elissa for more than a decade and remember when her daughter was born. We got along well and got a lot accomplished because we both liked to stir things up, but we knew how to do it with political and personal style and tact. And Lynne is one of the best West Coast Swing leaders I’ve ever danced with. You go, girls!!
The online newspaper does link to Ellen Goodman’s column today, which is about all the fuss that Michael Newdow is stirring up in the Supreme Court about separating out that “under God” inserted for “Cold War” propaganda purposes and mucking up our American commitment to the separation of church and state. She ends with:
What a pain this Michael Newdow is. Who needs this in the middle of an election? Why stir up the culture wars? Why make such a big deal of two little words? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry?
Here’s the problem. God save this honorable court (oops), Newdow is right.
Hee hee. Cackle cackle. Double double, toil and trouble….. Some pots you just gotta keep stirring.

It’s all such a gamble.

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You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table
There’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done
Now Every gambler knows that the secret to surviving
Is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep
Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

Too soon old, too late smart.

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I say that a lot these days.
I wish I had been smart enough at a much earlier point in my life to develop some sense of self-discipline. Then I would be able to restrain myself from stirring sticks in ant hills (metaphorically, that is).
I wish I were smart enough to recognize that if angels are not treading, then I sure should keep away. That statement’s in reference to responding to group emails I should ignore and then linking to the sender, who, I should know by now, will only respond on his blog the way he always does. (No link here; no foolrushing this time. While there are times that a good verbal battle gets my juices going, this is not one of those times.)
Blogging, for many of us, is such a self-serving egocentric pastime. (I’m including myself that that reflection.)
For me, I think I blog because it’s about the only place in my life where I can be self-serving and egocentric. I sit here struggling to decide whether to take my mom to the emergency room (where she insists, in tears, that she doesn’t want to go) or call her primary doctor tomorrow and see if I can get her an appointment. She likes her doctor, who’s female and my daughter’s age, and shares with other elderly patients my (literally) sage — and successful — formula for getting my mother’s hair to stop falling out. She hugs my mom after every office visit and gives her a kiss on the cheek. Ah yes, flies with honey. Much better than ants with sticks.
I have three days of dishes in the sink and my fabric boxes are in upheaval all over my bedroom because my mom asked me to tinker with her lumbar support belt and add a piece because it was too tight. Heh. Of course, I did, and it works. These days, I am the mother of invention.
I think that some bone in my mom’s lumbar spine must have been injured somehow. With the kind of severe osteoporosis she has, all she has to do is twist and a bone could break. I borrowed a wheel chair from a friend whose mother passed away a couple of years ago, and at least my mom feels less in pain when she’s sitting it in.
What to do? What to do? No linking to other bloggers, that’s for sure.
Do the dishes while my mother sleeps. Clean up my mess. Don’t make any more. Breathe.

Acknowledging the Equinox

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Yesterday was the Vernal Equinox, but my women friends and I celebrated it today, with our usual pot-luck gathering. where we sit around and complain about the aches and pains that plague our bodies and the aches and pains of the plague that is our country’s leadership. And then we share in some sort of creative ritual or ceremony. Today, it was a variation on this.
Of course, I can’t pass up the opportunity to pass along some Equinox lore, which just shows how contemporary religious Spring rituals and stories harken back to other, much, much older ones.
In ancient Rome, the 10-day rite in honor of Attis, son of the great goddess Cybele, began on March 15th. A pine tree, which represented Attis, was chopped down, wrapped in a linen shroud, decorated with violets and placed in a sepulchre in the temple. On the Day of Blood or Black Friday, the priests of the cult gashed themselves with knives as they danced ecstatically, sympathizing with Cybele in her grief and helping to restore Attis to life. Two days later, a priest opened the sepulchre at dawn, revealing that it was empty and announcing that the god was saved. This day was known as Hilaria or the Day of Joy, a time of feasting and merriment.
Sound familiar? Easter is the Christian version of the same myth. Even the name Easter is stolen. It comes from the Saxon dawn-goddess Eostre, whose festival was celebrated on spring equinox. The date of Easter is still determined by the old moon cycle. It is always the first Sunday on or after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
One can only hope that there will be some kind of rebirth for this country after its looming demise at the hands of the Almighty Burning Bush (see previous post), who needs some major help finding his way out of his own Fog of War. He would do well to internalize the “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”
Like that’s ever going to happen. Unless course, god tells him to. Oh Yeah!

237 and counting

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A report released on March 16 by the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, Special Investigations Unit is described as
…a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five [Bush] Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq…. It finds that the five officals made misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 125 public appearances. The report and an accompanying database identify 237 specific misleading statements by the five officials.
Complete with charts, graphs, timelines, quotes, and categories of disinformation, the report, Iraq on the Record offers substantial proof of either the incompetence or the deviousness of our leadership. Or maybe both.
Meanwhile, In Cincinnati, Claire Mugavin wore a biohazard suit to a protest that drew several hundred people. She pretended to look for weapons of mass destruction beneath benches and garbage cans. “We figure they’re not in Iraq,” said the 24-year-old Cincinnati resident. “So we figured we’d come look for them in Fountain Square.”
I like nonblogger myrln’s response to that:
You gotta love it. What we need is a National Mockery Movement that daily mocks Dumbya and his gang…a relentless, ruthless campaign for the next 8 months. Make them into a national joke, and we’d get rid of them. Laughter may indeed be not only the best medicine but maybe the best weapon, too.
The Ben of Ben and Jerry’s is already full speed on that one. To keep up with the lies being shoveled at us about even more than Iraq, keep checking here.
liar.jpg

At the Heart of It All.

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At the heart of it all is the heart. Literally. If it’s not keeping up, we can’t. That’s what’s happening to my mom. Her heart is beating only about half as fast as it should. Well, what do you want; it’s 88 years old. It’s dealt with the tribulations of two odd-ball offspring, another two odd-ball grand-offspring, and now a great grand-offspring who keeps getting really bad ear infections. Between the two great World Wars, it found itself in Poland living a “dust-bowl of the 30s” kind of life. It outbeat its spouse’s heart and the hearts of all four of its siblings and most of its friends. This is a tired heart. A pacemaker would help it to keep up. But that’s not what she wants, and I understand that. She wants to rest, wants her heart to rest with all of those other hearts that have left her behind. And so, at the heart of the matter for those she’ll leave behind is to be OK with what she wants — to let her heart do what it will naturally do. Beat..beat..beat…….beat……..beat……..
beat…………..beat……………….beat……………….beat…
…………………………………..beat…………………………..
……………………………………

And then there’s the boob on the tube.

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Hee hee.
My daughter emailed me that my 19 month old grandson just looked at Bush on TV and said “boob.” Another dissident is born!!!
Meanwhile, the boob “celebrates” the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. Congratulations, Dumbya, on getting 571 Americans (and countless others) killed in pursuit of your Amerikan nightmare.
And then there’s all these other monumental things you’re doing for our country, as Molly Ivins so clearly explains at the beginning of her piece of “Red Alert at the White House.”:
How much fun can one administration have? More dead GIs. New record trade deficit. Stock market plunge. Defeated ally in Spain. New Spanish prime minister says the occupation in Iraq is a “continuing disaster” and he’s pulling his troops out. Still no jobs. And then they guy who was supposed to be the new jobs czar turns out to have laid off 75 of his own workers while building a $3 million factory in China to employ 165 Chinese people………