A few years ago I fell into writing for the internet. Not just blogs. I sometimes do freelance work for a company that uses the internet to create interactive fictions. These are elaborate serials that tell their stories over weeks, using web sites and emails, phone calls, video clips, even payphones. So when I read a Newsweek story about a website called MarryOurDaughter, I admit, my first thought was, This is brilliant.

MarryOurDaughter (the website is intermittently down, perhaps more overwhelmed than even the usual slashdot) is ostensibly a site where people who wish their daughters to marry can post a photo, a profile, and a price.

Ashley R. Age 15, Location: Midwest, Bride Price: $37,500

Ashlee is into sports, clothes, jewelry and current pop music. She is a typical teenage girl except that she is impatient to get on with her life, which she sees as having a husband and raising kids. She tells us none of the boys her own age are interesting to her because they “are still little kids” and she is looking for an adult to start a life with. Read More »

I generally don’t let the various icks to which the human body is heir slow me down. I have a household to keep on track, a dog to walk, children to torment, writing to do, and sickness is so…sickly. Which isn’t to say that I don’t get sick; I just don’t tend to pay much attention.

It has been pointed out to me that this is stupid. I am married to someone who has so close and personal a relationship with his health that he can (and does) alert me whenever he achieves a state he calls “pre-coldish.” I probably know what he’s talking about, except that when I feel pre-coldish I don’t think about it. He starts up with the zinc lozenges and vitamin C and going to bed early. In fact, he rarely progresses beyond the pre-coldish stage because he leaps on it and mashes it flat. Whereas I, who laugh in the face of bacteria, occasionally find myself the butt of the joke, knocked out completely and feeling pathetic. So maybe the zinc lozenges are a smarter move than I realize?

And then there are The Young. Both of my kids are very in touch with their aches, their pains, their nausea, their flat feet or warts or boo boos. My job, as Mommy, is to soothe the aches, quell the nausea, install arch supports or freeze off warts or bandage the boo boos. I am the attendent. When I cut myself or scrape a knee, I tend to treat it the same way I treat their minor hurts–efficiently, without much fuss. But I don’t do the soothing-Mama-comfort-thing to myself because…I’m the Mama. The girls would love to flutter around me and supply all the soothing-Mama-comfort, which I appreciate but rather dislike; it slows me down.

In the same way, when I am not feeling well (ie., this morning) the wave of concern from the family is huge. Spouse immediately sends me off to bed; the young are solicitous and want to make me tea; only the dog (who is a dog) is more concerned with her walk and breakfast than with my welfare. Everyone popped in to my room off and on to ask me how I was before heading off to school. Everyone wants to be the Hero who fixes Mama. All Mama wants to do is sleep (and Mama did, for another five hours).

It used to be, if I fell over, nothing got done and everyone panicked and I wound up dragging myself from my bed of pain to take care of everyone. Not anymore; they’re all old enough (except the dog). I’m going to take a leaf from the Spouse’s book and forget the SuperMama act for the day. They can figure out what they want for dinner, and produce it. I’m going back to bed.

“Kid, stop scaring the horses!”

We’ve gotten so polarized and paranoid that I have trouble listening to this song. It’s informed by the only strain of Christianity that I was at all comfortable with when I was growing up. Now I find myself looking for hidden agendas just because it’s religious at all. I don’t know any more if that’s good or bad.

Chris DeBurgh’s ‘One World’:

:

:

I generally avert from soft rock anyhow, but it’s knowing that he also cut ‘Spaceman‘ that influences my reaction to ‘One World’.

I suspect that most of us here could get along fine with him, as long as we didn’t talk directly about religion. But maybe not anymore.

There’s an article in today’s Washington Post on a related subject that you might find interesting.

EDIT #1: I just followed a few other links, and found his song ‘Patricia the Stripper‘. DeBurgh is my guy now. We’re buds.

EDIT #2: I also just encountered another version of ‘Patricia the Stripper’. There is something soooo wrong about sock puppets with nipples.

So, I had planned on doing a post about this, but there wasn’t a lot I could add without being really obnoxious and a wee bit unfair.

Before you go any further – there is kinda gross talk in the rest of the post, so if you’re of a squeamish bent, please stop reading now…

My Mom’s birthday is today.  It’s also, as she likes to remind us, Mexican Independence Day.  (Mom’s big on combining education and helpful reminders.) And in honor of her Mom-ness, I’d like to tell a true story:

A number of years ago, we went to my folks’ house for some holiday.  I can’t remember which.  It may have been Arbor Day.  Maybe Christmas. One of those.

So I’m in the kitchen helping out.  And Mom says to me, all casual like, “Be careful if you open the freezer in the garage.”

This is suspicious.

Warily, I say, “And why is that?”

She doesn’t look up from the onions she’s chopping. “There’s a deer in there.”

I’m perplexed.  Neither of my parents are hunters, despite the fact that they live in Texas.

“Why is there a deer in there?”  I ask.

“Oh, it hung itself on the fence.”

“Was it depressed?” I ask.

“I don’t think so,” she replies.  “I think it just didn’t make the jump.”

I stir the gravy.  “And why is the deer in the freezer?”

“Well,” she says cheerfully, “it was really pretty and I thought I’d have it stuffed.”

At this point, I taste the gravy and decide it needs some salt and pepper.  Maybe a little sherry.

“And how long has the deer been in the freezer?” I ask after attending to the gravy.

“Oh, about six months.”

“Ah,” I say.  “I think it may be past its expiration date.”

“Oh, well, hmmm.”

She starts cutting up celery.

Read More »

Deaths/Mortality in the US in 2004

• Number of deaths: 2,398,343
• Death rate: 816.7 deaths per 100,000 population
• Life expectancy: 77.9 years

Number of deaths for leading causes of death

• Heart disease: 654,092
• Cancer: 550,270
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 150,147
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 123,884
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 108,694
• Diabetes: 72,815
• Alzheimer’s disease: 65,829
• Influenza/Pneumonia: 61,472
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 42,762
• Septicemia: 33,464

I currently fall in the 45-54 group, myself, but of course my family, friends, and acquaintances occupy all the different slots of the above chart.

And of course, none of them are really reducible to mere numbers.

I own a black suit. I probably shouldn’t get rid of it anytime soon.

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) September 11, 2007 – The Russian military has successfully tested what it described as the world’s most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered bomb, Russia’s state television reported Tuesday.

. . . Channel One television said the new weapon, nicknamed the “dad of all bombs” is four times more powerful than the U.S. “mother of all bombs.”

“The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability,” Col.-Gen. Alexander Rukshin, a deputy chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, said in televised remarks.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn’t hurt the environment, he added.

**********************************************************

COMPLAINT FOR DIVORCE

Comes the Plaintiff, Marge D. MotherOfAllBombs, pro se, for her Complaint for Divorce filed herein against the Defendant, Homer D. DaddyOfAllBombs, respectfully states and alleges:

Read More »

I had to share this post from biologist blogger PZ Myers of Pharyngula, as it reflects my sentiment precisely.

The appropriate testimonial would be to disband the thugs at TSA.

While we’re at it, impeaching Bush/Cheney and repealing their damage to our civil liberties would also be a good start.

I’m not impressed with moments of silence or candlelight vigils or noble rhetoric about this event. If you want to do something to remember that tragedy, the best thing to do is to simply stop living your life in fear.

Thank you, PZ. Well put.

My Golden Retreiver is thirteen years old.

I know that we anthropomophize dogs. I am aware that the money I spend on my dogs would more than double the income of the average family in Chad. It’s an intellectual consideration that is completely overwhelmed by my emotional reaction to the dog. I could no more decide to euthanize the dog and send the money to Chad than I could decide to euthanize Bob.

Dogs trigger the same general reaction in us as family. That’s the biology of the dog/human relationship. And of the cat/human relationship as well.

We tend to think that we domesticated dogs. We saw dogs, we decided we wanted them in our lives and we set about making it so by breeding them for the traits we liked. Actually, evolutionarily speaking, dogs exploited us. We’re their ecological nitch. Read More »

Peter Sellers reads a classic lyric

A lot faster.

Today was the first time I actually got to do anything with her, though I’d certainly seen her around for the past few months. I picked her up at the little place over on College Street where she’s been staying for the past three weeks. Honestly, I’ve ached to touch her for all of that time.

We spent much of the afternoon together, and I was cautious, perhaps even a little fearful. You never know how these things might turn out. And it took a while to understand both her paradoxical complexity and her elegant simplicity.

I was clumsy at first, but, after dinner, unexpectedly, we found ourselves together again. I’d thought I was too tired, but I was wrong. This time I was more… in control of myself.

I blush to admit that I spent more than an hour upon her, riding her with increasing confidence.

She’s marvelously responsive, and I believe that she’ll do almost anything I ask of her, once my own shyness has further passed. She is a sensous cornucopia.

I plan to spend a lot of time with her in coming weeks. Months. Years.

It’s as if we were made for each other.

I am in lust.

At one point during the epic and storied Eat Our Brains Board Meeting, Maureen McHugh asked me how I was doing with our move from New York City to San Francisco, and touched me by noting that she thought of me as a total New Yorker. Because that’s exactly what I am: born there, raised there, fully alive to its flaws and dangers, I am never so alive as when I step onto my home earth.

I love cities–I can do the forest or the desert or the mountains for a short time, then I want to go urban again–and of all the cities I’ve seen, I love New York the best. (I will note that my brother, born and raised in New York right behind me, detests New York. It’s a highly personal thing.) I love the quality of light, and the feeling of the air on my skin, the compression and volatility and the pockets of magic and strangeness you can find all over town. I love the feeling of enclosure that comes from walking down streets built up to the sky. I love the people (serious pockets of magic and strangeness!) and the way New Yorkers are startled by their own kindness. I love the energy, I love the subway, for God’s sake. Face it: I’m hard core. Read More »

Brainiacs, I’m laid low by a head cold and my own real post will be a little delayed. But meanwhile, here are two thoughtful posts on a couple of related subjects. The first, by Rana of Frogs and Ravens, is about the challenges of individual versus collective action, with regard to living an environmentally friendly lifestyle.

I couldn’t find a bit to excerpt that captures the point adequately, but what I took away from it is that yes, we are caught up in a huge machine that is rapidly consuming the world’s resources, and yes, we are part of the problem–but the fact of the matter is, it takes a great deal of effort to buck that flow, and we must be gentle with ourselves and each other for all those things we do not or cannot do.

As individuals, we can only do so much to reduce consumption of non-renewables and eliminate our carbon emissions, and so on. The fact is, our entire world economy is set up to consume vast quantities of resources. Our actions as individuals are important, as Rana says, but without change at the governmental and corporate level, they are largely only symbolic, and I agree with her that it’s a bad idea to beat up on each other for only being willing to do so much. Bucking the flow takes a tremendous amount of energy, as Rana says, and it’s not as easy for some of us as for others. My own personal philosophy is to see it as a lifelong journey, and add a little bit of eco-friendliness into my lifestyle at a time. What I feel I can handle. If I can’t handle it, I don’t do it, and I don’t feel guilty about it.

I honor my colleagues who manage to do more, as I recognize that they have invested a great deal of effort to effect change in their lives. However, I also honor my colleagues who can’t. None of us can know what challenges others face in their personal lives.

The environmental crisis won’t be solved without a huge, tectonic shift in the way human society operates, and that will have to be rung in by our political, business, and religious leaders. The best way we can be effective, in my view, is to keep up the pressure on them.

Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s quite thought-provoking and important.

The second post is related. I came across Rana’s post via Chris Clarke of Creek Running North, a blogger who writes beautifully about a variety of issues, primarily but not solely environmental. His piece is about the undeclared price paid—and who pays it—for “dying well” (i.e., home-based care for the elderly) and for eco-friendly living. I.e., women are often the ones who end up shouldering much of the burden of change in the environmental and quality of life movements. There’s so much good here that again, it’s hard to excerpt, but here’s a chunk:

In a paper published a couple weeks ago, Dr. Sherilyn McGregor of Keele University in Staffordshire points out that when environmentally sound living requres [sic] extra work, that work is usually “women’s work.” Her paper is a useful and readable summation, and if it weren’t encrypted read-only I’d paste some of it here. Still, this is not news to environmentalist women. What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling. …

The fact is that for all the ills the increasing corporatization of society has brought us, it has assigned value to certain forms of labor that were once devalued. It certainly hasn’t always assigned enough monetary value to those tasks, but even a paltry amount is more than nothing at all. Opposing that corporatization doesn’t have to include rolling back that valuation, trying to build an Illichian paradise where people quietly fulfill their forced gender role differences.

I’m a huge supporter of the various movements for restoring the quality of our lives, but until they rid themselves of this blind spot they will go nowhere worth going. Sadly, that patriarchal romanticism is seductive. Look at this Wikipedia description of the “Slow” movement’s goals:

Even in the recent past in the West it was standard to have a day of relaxation because all shops were closed on Sundays. However, the current tendency in many parts of the world to operate at 24 hours a day has disrupted this tradition. Now, because people can do everything all the time, some feel they have to do things all the time. The Slow movement counteracts this by extolling the virtues of the enjoyment and savouring of living.

I don’t know what it was like for your family, but I seem to recall my grandmothers working just as hard on Sundays as they did on Mondays. Though maybe they were just enjoying the process of vacuuming before people came over to relax and savouring the sinks full of dishes the relaxing generated. Ah, the good old days.

Again, RTWT.

I just had to react to Rory’s post on the Loudness Wars. Here is a type of music that absolutely depends on dynamic range. It may seem a little lame at first but, like their version of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” it just gets better and better.