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The Emotions I’m Not Second-Guessing

September 11, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holidays, Isms (religion), movies, music, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Department Of This Date In History

Yep. Twenty-five years ago.

*   *   *

Department Of  Yep #2:  This.  Yep; This.

As a longtime reader of (select) advice columns, moiself  has come to think that they can open an interesting window into human motivations and behaviors.  Over the years I have noticed an irritating pattern to many of the letters sent by advice-seekers:  ( trigger alert:  massive generalization ahead)

* A man will report his emotions sans even the slightest modicum of introspection
( “Why doesn’t she understand how she’s annoying me?!?!?” );

* A woman will report her emotions and second-guess herself ( she reports an astoundingly annoying thing – a thing that would even piss off Mr. Rogers or the Dali Llama – which was said or done to her, yet asks,
“Am I right to be annoyed by ___?” )

 

“Yes, you can stop second-guessing yourself, sweetie, your boss really is a flaming asshat.”

 

Aside from the indisputable entertainment value of kitten-bops-enormous-dog’s-nose  videos, social media ‘s worth goes up a few notches when you consider how it can be an effective way of transmitting insightful observations and analyses about the politics of personal relationships.  One such analysis which I recently came across online (from “The Inner Pattern” ) addressed and partially explained the roots behind the complicated advice-column-letter-dynamic moiself  mentions above.

What’s the most damaging thing patriarchy ever pulled off? Convincing everyone that male anger counts as objective reality, but female emotions get filed under subjective instability.

Watch how differently the same emotion gets treated depending on who’s feeling it. He slams a door and it’s “he had a rough day.” She raises her voice once and it’s “she needs to calm down.”

His frustration gets a cause.  Hers gets a diagnosis.

 We grew up watching men’s reactions get treated as data — something to analyze, respond to, take seriously. Meanwhile women’s reactions got treated as noise — something to soothe, dismiss, or wait out. So, we learned early to run our own feelings through a filter before anyone else even heard them. Is this reasonable enough? Am I being too sensitive? Will this get taken seriously or will it just get me labeled?

That filter isn’t caution. It’s conditioning. It’s decades of being taught that our inner world needs to justify itself before it’s allowed to exist.

Your anger was never irrational. It was just never given the same benefit of the doubt his got by default.
(my emphases, FB, first seen by moiself  on  9-5-26)

 

*   *   *

Department Of There Goes The Neighborhood

Dateline:  The morning of August 5; SeaTac airport; Alaska Airline’s first-class lounge; waiting to board our flight to Iceland.  Checking out the massive, multi-buffet table breakfast spread set out for the lounge passengers I see that, on the end buffet table, there is a contraption that look like a 3-D printer.  This machine is labeled, “pancake printer,” and moiself  alerts my family to its presence.  None of us actually want a pancake, but we have to see how it works, and so I press its start button.

Five seconds after I start the pancake printer a woman walks past the side of the buffet table and eyes my family with confusion.  She is dressed in that casual money style   [1]  and holds a plate of pastries which looked like they’d have French-sounding names.  Meanwhile, my family – MH in his tie-dye tee, son K in his black leather jacket /death metal band shirt, daughter Belle in her in Pacific NW/Columbia lumberjack gear, and me in my CatZilla t-shirt – is crowded around the pancake printer. 

 

 

I remain standing while the rest of my family bends forward, practically down on their knees, as they watch a blob of (ostensibly) pancake batter make its way down a series of the printer’s criss-crossing cooking treadmills.  I make eye contact with the woman, and with widened eyes and a knowing nod of my head, I project (or so I intend) an amiable, joking,  yeah right – like we’ve never seen a pancake before  vibe.  In return, her facial expression and body language…

Oh, how can I put it?  So much attitude is succinctly and clearly expressed in the rolling/stink eye stare she flings toward me and mine:

“OMG, who let the Beverly Hillbillies into the first class lounge !?!”

 

Y’all come back now for the pancake breakfast, y’ hear?

*   *   *

Department Of Yeah, The Date…
September 11 Memories

Twenty-five years ago, since those horrific ( and/yet mesmerizingly cinematic  [2]  ) terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.  So much has changed in our nation; so much of that change is not for the better, and so much of this not-for-better change has been and is attributed to needing to Get Tough On Terrorism®.

I remember the unscripted eloquence of British PM Tony Blair, who interrupted his planned speech on a domestic issue to express his profound shock and sympathy for the American people and pledge his and his country’s full support for his allies.

 

 

I remember the stark contrast of Blair’s heartfelt articulateness with the glassy-eyed,  aardvark-caught-in-the-headlights expression of the clearly-not-up-to-the-gravity-of-what-lies-ahead “leader” which was George W. Bush.  The only solace I had been able to take from GWB’s mistaken ascendency to the presidency was that, up until 9-11, he had seemed destined to be a one-term president.

 

“Uh, Dad?  Dick Cheney?  Somebody, tell me what to do…”

 

But I’ll let the pundits and historians elaborate on that.  After all these years, moiself  is more interested in the personal stories – select memories, from those at Ground Zero and those of us across the country and out of the country  [3] – of we who were affected by the attacks.  It is the stories of our reactions, the memories of that impactful, holy-shit-am-I-watching-a-movie-or-is-this-real ?!?!?!  day, which we will impart to our children who were too young to remember (or who were born after) the 9-11 attacks.

Moiself  will always know that September 11, 2001 was on a Tuesday, because I was in my home office that morning, getting ready to leave for my Tuesday 7 am book club.  I gathered my book club items – coffee mug,   [4]  purse, jacket, the book the group was currently discussing – and stepped out of the office.  Before I could head down the hallway to the garage, I looked up at the sound of MH’s voice.

MH was standing in the upstairs hallway, leading against the stairway railing, a confused look on his face.  He said he’d been listening to NPR’s  Morning Edition,   [5]   which had just reported that an airplane had hit one of New York City’s World Trade Center Twin Towers.  I replied that I remembered reading, several years ago, that a small/private plane had collided with a large sky scraper in some big city – I found that to be an odd and accident, as you’d think the pilot could see such an enormous building in his path…

MH, still confused, said, no, this was a commercial-sized jet, and the report was that less than a half hour later another jet hit the second tower, and “…what kind of air traffic control mixup or other accident could account for…”

I gasped as I interrupted him: “TWO jets? That’s no accident.”

 

 

After listening to a few news reports I grimly drove to book group, which met in the pastor’s office of our local UCC church.   [6]   Every member of the book group showed up, despite or because of having heard the news.  We all had the same feeling: we wanted to be together.  I was one of the last to arrive, and made my entrance feelings-first:

“Well, we are ALL  FUCKED.  This is how wars start.”

I forget the name of the book we were discussing.  The leader of the group, the pastor, obviously felt some obligation to try to steer us toward the book, even as she was glassy eyed with shock and worry (her beloved sister-in-law was a flight attendant who often worked the American Airlines route from Boston to LAX) . [7]   But (of course) we spent most of the morning discussing the attacks, speculating about all that we knew and did not know, and what might happen in the days to come.

Two weeks later, when details of the terrorist plot were being revealed, the book group again set aside our book for the day and mostly discussed the attacks.  One of the group members brought in an article he’d been reading, written by a foreign correspondent who’d been researching the recruiting process for Islamist terrorist groups.  The article addressed a seemingly unfathomable question:  given the human instinct for preserving one’s own life,  how do you recruit young men for a suicide mission?  The book club member began reading the article’s list of commonalities found among the terrorist recruits:

“…strong ties to hard-core religious beliefs; weak ties to their own families; political idealism; religious and cultural conservatism – and while not necessarily virgins themselves, the young men were attracted by the enticement that their martyrdom would be a righteous deed which would earn them a shortcut to heaven, where they would enjoy the sexual attentions of 72 dark-eyed virgins….”

I heard my own snorting-with-ridicule interruption as if it were coming from somewhere other than my own mouth:

“Yeah, right – that shows you what kind of mindset fanaticism appeals to.  What kind of sexually ignorant, inexperienced idiots want – I mean, seventy-two *virgins*?  That’s an enticement?  Give them just one middle-aged woman who knows what she’s doing…”

I looked around the circle at my book comrades’ wide-eyed, Is that so? expressions, and thought, maybe middle-aged moiself  should have kept that to moiself?

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Not One Damn Recipe

I recently got a new cookbook, which is one of my favorite things to get.  Cookbooks – moiself  tends to read livres de cuisine like novels, as in, getting inspiration from more than actually following a recipe step by step.  After reading through this new book I found moiself  wondering, Why did I order this?

The book’s recipes concentrate on a culture whose cuisine is mostly unfamiliar to me – as do several cookbooks in my collection, so it’s not that.  Sourcing many of the key ingredients would be difficult, but…see previous comment.  It’s just that there was not one recipe that stood out, not one recipe that made me think, I’d like to try that, or work up a variant moiself.  My get a new one get rid of an old one policy,  [8]   has kept my cookbook supply steady at seventy-four. And it will remain at 74 as this new book goes into the list of sixty cookbooks I have recycled.  [9]

 

Woe to anyone who recycles one of my cookbooks.

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [10]

A cigarette pack is one of the few consumer products…that practically insults its own customer. Buy a pack and you are greeted by…blunt declarations that your habit may kill you. Governments force tobacco companies to confess the danger directly on the packaging because the evidence is overwhelming: smoking causes cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and millions of deaths annually….

Yet the satirical image asks a deeply uncomfortable question: if cigarettes require warning labels because they can harm human beings, why do religions—whose histories include crusades, inquisitions, sectarian wars, terrorism, witch hunts, executions for heresy, honor killings, forced conversions, and systematic oppression—escape similar scrutiny?

The meme…exposes an asymmetry in moral outrage.
Society treats physical harm as measurable and ideological harm as sacred.

The irony is brutal. A cigarette company cannot advertise without legal constraints, but a preacher can tell children they deserve eternal torture for doubting a doctrine and still be called a moral authority. Tobacco executives are condemned for manipulating fear and addiction, while some religious institutions have built entire civilizations around fear of invisible punishment….

Imagine if holy books carried labels modeled after cigarette warnings:

WARNING: This ideology has been linked to violence, intolerance, and persecution when interpreted literally.

WARNING: Excessive exposure may impair critical thinking and increase susceptibility to authoritarianism.

( excerpts, Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly )

 

(from my supply of stickers I carry with me when I travel, in case the hotel room has a Gideon bible or other religious book in the dresser drawer.)

 

*   *   *

May you see your emotional reactions as data, not noise;
May you practice the get a new one get rid of an old  one policy;
May you benefit from the experience of even one middle-aged woman who knows what she’s doing;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Like pornography, I know it when I see it, even if I can’t describe it…and so can you.

[2] I watched footage of the two places crashing into the towers, over and over, in a way trying to convince myself that it was real – it seemed like something out of a movie…but CGI was in its infancy then, and a Hollywood special effects crew couldn’t possibly have pulled off such an epic job.

[3] LS, in the Netherlands, are you there?

[4] That was the one day a week that I drank coffee in the morning.

[5] Which was his Monday – Friday morning routine, before he got out of bed and we got our kids breakfast and ready for school.

[6] The church MH and I were members of for years, until we came out of the Happy Heathens® closet.

[7] She had no news about her SIL at that time, but later that day was assured that her SIL was not working that day.

[8] Which I apply to most “things,” from cookbooks to household items to clothing….

[9] As in given away to friends and/or family and/or Goodwill.

[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Fond Childhood Memories I’m Not Reliving

August 28, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, community, current events, extended family, family life, friends, games & puzzles, Holidays, movies, politics, school, TV, Uncategorized, Yikes! , , , , Comments Off on The Fond Childhood Memories I’m Not Reliving

It’s time for a…

 

 

Moiself  sincerely hopes that y’all will have a modicum of amusement with these blog reruns from Fridays of August past, while I, along with MH and our offspring K and Belle, are enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime bit of family fun.

 

 

*   *   *

The Fond Childhood Memories I’m Not Reliving ( 8-28-20  )

Department Of Now I’ve Seen Everything

 

Dateline: Wednesday, circa 4pm, outside a grocery store.  A woman who exited the store ahead of me scurries to a spot around 30 feet from the store’s exit door. She pulls a cigarette and lighter from her purse, pulls down her mask and lights up.  She proceeds to take several long, desperate drags of the cigarette, pulling her mask up inbetween, in a bizarre ritual: lower mask; suck on her death sticks; exhale; raise mask; wait five seconds; repeat.

Lady, just take down your mask, go into a filthy public restroom, run your bare hands over every surface and then touch your hands to your face and mouth and rub your eyes. Get it over with.

 

Celebrities like Ben Affleck won’t let a pesky pandemic stop their slow suicide, so why should she?

*   *   *

Department of Yep, This

*   *   *

Department Of My Defund The Police Story

In the ongoing Defund the Police ® debate, some folks declare that an alternative phrase for police reform is needed. It seems that too many (white) people read or hear “defund” and lose their shit react defensively.  They interpret “defund” as doing away with police forces entirely, instead of the how the term is used by reform activists: as shorthand for reallocating funds from police departments to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, (e.g. social, mental health, housing and education services).

Moiself  has heard this defensive reaction explained along these lines:

White people get defensive and even frightened at that notion (doing away with police) because white people associate police with security, in ways that communities of color, because of their collective history with aggressive and discriminatory policing, do not.

Sometime in the late 1970s-early 1980s, I read a feature article in a So Cal newspaper about police officer recruitment.  Police chiefs were just starting to realize that for community policing to be effective the police force needed to be representative of all members of the community.  Given the rising number of Vietnamese immigrants in So Cal, local police departments were trying, and mostly failing, to recruit Vietnamese-Americans.  The reason for that failure was not apparent to the majority white police staff, until a cultural liaison enlightened them:

The police forces in Vietnam, and several other Asian countries, were considered to be corrupt, and the average Southeast Asian immigrant’s contact with them had been unpleasant.  Thus, young Asian men   [1]  who might have been interested in being recruited were discouraged from doing so by their parents, who thought policing a dishonorable profession.

There’s a very basic lesson here: your experiences color your perception.

 

Yep, that seems evident on a Psychology 101 level.  Moiself  thinks it’s a bit more far-reaching than that, and ties into the Black Lives Matter movement in a variety of ways and from a variety of perspectives…including the one I am about to share here.

Little known fact about moiself :  from about my 5th to 8th grade years, I hated and feared the police. I held particular fear and loathing for men I suspected were undercover cops in unmarked cars. This is because of an experience I had….

Translation: there is a story to be told.

Key elements of this story (“The Wagner Incident”) became much beloved by my family as the years past.  My parents in particular loved for my older sister and I to recall the tale, and I always obliged.  However, most of my family never knew that I was actually quite traumatized by what happened.

There is (unfortunately or yee-haw! depending on your enjoyment of background information) stage-setting to be done, for this Drama of Shakespearean Importance.  [2]

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, my family lived in a house on Martha Lane in Santa Ana (CA).  Martha Lane extended west from a major thoroughfare down to a cross-street (Pacific Ave.) which led to the local community college.   [3]  Across Pacific Ave., Martha Lane continued as a cul-de-sac, where my family’s house was located.    [4]

The Wagners were an older couple  [5]  whose house was on the main part of Martha Lane (ML).  The Wagners had gained a reputation – not a good one – among the other denizens of ML.   Mr. Wagner, occasionally accompanied by Mrs. Wagner, walked their massive dog twice daily around the neighborhood.  They made of one or two loops around the main portion of ML (they did not cross the street to the cul-de-sac), and they let their dog defecate on other people’s lawns. They made no attempt to pick it up the droppings or at least “curb” their dog; they let him go where he wanted to go.   [6]

Some of the neighbors began to come out of their houses and speak to Mr. Wagner as he made his rounds.  At first they politely suggested – then, as time passed and the poop accumulated, they increasingly and more frustratingly demanded – that the Wagners’ dog should do its doggie business at their own home, and not foul other people’s property.  The Wagners ignored all such requests, with Mr. Wagner on a couple of such occasions responding with strongly-worded suggestions as to what the other homeowners could do with his dog’s “business.”

Petty, inconsiderate neighbor shit, so to speak, right? Nothing either novel or earth-shattering.

There were other actions the Wagners took that, looking back, seemed almost intentionally aimed at making them the scourge of the neighborhood.  It was as if the Wagners got some kind of petty pleasure in taunting their neighbors, in particular, the Young People ®.  I can find no other explanation for their behavior.

As a Girl Scout, moiself  had the twice-a-year fundraising duties (which I loathed) of going from house to house in my neighborhood, peddling Girl Scout Cookies in the spring and Girl Scout Calenders    [7]  in the fall.  The Wagners did not have a no soliciting sign on their porch; nevertheless, the first time I rang their doorbell on behalf of the Scouts I received a very snooty dismissal from Mrs. Wagner, when a simple, “We’re not interested” would have sufficed.  The second (and last) time I approached their house as a Girl Scout (having forgotten about the first incident, since six months had passed), Mrs. Wagner apparently saw me coming, and couldn’t wait until I set foot on her porch to reject my sales pitch.   Before I’d taken three steps from the sidewalk to her driveway her front door flew open and she came barreling out of her house.  Her voluminous bat wings shook along with her index finger, which she waggled at me while she bellowed about how she didn’t want to buy anything.

I fled the Wagner driveway with as much dignity as I could muster.  Later, I compared stories with other neighborhood kids, whom, I discovered, had experienced similar treatment when they were seeking donations for, say, a school paper drive or other charities.  The next time I had to do my GS soliciting I remembered my lesson, and as I left the porch of the house *before* the Wagners’ I proceeded on to the house *after* the Wagners’.  As I did so, Mrs. Wagner once again came charging out of the house into her driveway – how strange, I later thought, as she must have been sitting by her front window, just waiting for…what?  For a youngster to yell at? – and proceeded to berate me. Apparently, I was a stand-in for all the neighborhood children, as she began her rant with, “YOU KIDS….”  I hadn’t even made the slightest indication of stopping at her house – I was just walking past it, on the sidewalk!

At least she wasn’t armed with a garden hose.

Sharing and comparing stories – that’s what kids in a ‘hood do. As the years passed the older kids began to compile a hefty dossier of Wagner Incidents, many of them involving the holidays.  A few neighbors told about “Christmas incidents,” stories I cannot now recall,  [8]  and every July 4 we heard about how the Wagners did their own fireworks in the street in front of their house, then loudly complained if their next door or across-the-street neighbor’s – in particular, their neighbor’s children or grandchildren – did the same…or just yelled at teens who were walking on the other side of the street, on their way to a friend’s family’s fireworks party.

October 31 seemed to bring out the worst (or weirdest) in the Wagners. On Halloween night the Wagners always turned their porch light on and hung Halloween decorations on their front door, then were randomly and mystifyingly rude to the kids who rang their doorbell.  In our neighborhood the trick-or-treaters tended to go in groups of four or more children; the Wagners would often single out someone in your group, make disparaging remarks about a costume they didn’t like, then give candy to some kids and not to others.  Sometimes, as if on a whim, they would answer the doorbell, refuse to give candy (from the big jar they had on display) to anyone, and shoo your entire group off their porch.   [9]

 

Like many grade school-aged children, I found the world of adults both baffling and boring. Unless a home contained children of my or my siblings’ ages, I didn’t pay much attention as to who lived in what house on my block. It took a couple of years for it to sink in:  you don’t go to the Wagner‘s house for Halloween…or anything else.

Can you guess what kind of attitude among the neighbors, in particular among the youth of Martha Lane, was engendered by the Wagners, toward the Wagners?

 

“I knew you could, boys and girls.”

 

There were many more incidents that my older sister and her friends shared with moiself  and my friends. Slowly but surely, a vendetta arose. The older kids in the neighborhood had had it with the Wagners, and conspired to tease them at every opportunity. My older sister and her friend rewrote lyrics to the tune of, “We Love You Conrad,” (a song from the Broadway musical, Bye Bye Birdie): 

♫  We hate you Wagners
Oh yes we do
We don’t hate anyone
like you
When you are near us,
P.U.!
Oh Wagners we hate you.  ♫

 

Yeah; I know – hardly cutting-edge satire. Still, I thought my sister and her friend were so clever when sang me that song, and they were obviously proud of themselves.  They taught the song to all the neighborhood kids, and made us all vow to sing it at any Wagner-sighting opportunity.

Things escalated, as they say, from there. 

Early one hot summer night a bunch of us ML kids were hanging out on the corner of Pacific and ML, negotiating which chase/tag game we would play that evening (Green Monster? Hide n’ Seek?)  We spotted Mrs. Wagner up the street, identifiable from even 200 feet away by her towering, glow-in-the-dark white beehive hairdo and imperious, waddling stride.  She was walking her dog, and one of us in the group – I can’t remember who but it might have been me or my older sister – had the brilliant idea to begin humming the Miss America theme song:

♫  There she is…Miss America…
There she is, your ideal…. ♫ 

Silly stuff – hardly the material of celebrity stalking lawsuits.  Even so, it apparently put a burr under Mrs. Wagner’s saddle (or that ridiculous beehive).  Unbeknownst to us kids, when Mrs. Wagner returned home she told her husband what we kids had done, and he called the police and insisted they open a harassment investigation.

We hummed the Miss America song  – that’s what put them over the edge?  We didn’t even sing the words.

 

Also unbeknownst – to me, at that time – were other incidences of kids taking revenge on the Wagners.  Some older teens who lived on the main section of ML had, with their parents’ knowledge and approval, saved some of the “droppings” the Wagner’s dog left on their lawn.  After accumulating several days’ worth, the kids delivered shovelfuls of feces to the Wagner’s lawn.  When this failed to deter Mr. Wagner from his dog walking/dumping, on July Fourth one family’s teenage son played the proverbial, flaming-sack-of-poop prank on the Wagner’s front porch.   [10]

That and other incidences enabled the Wagners to convince the police to open a harassment file…or a case…or whatever it was.

 

” ‘Martha Lane Kids v. Wagner’? – what is this bullshit, Danno”

 

So.  This “case” was going on, without my knowledge.  Then, one day….

 

 

I’ve always wanted to say that.

The story continues, in next week’s post.  ( The Saga I’m Not Ending,” 9-4-2020 )

*   *   *

May you get to say something you’ve always wanted to say;
May you be mindful of how petty neighborhood disputes can escalate;
May you bear with me until next week;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

 

*   *   *

[1] And it was only men who were being recruited, at that time.

[2] A slight exaggeration.

[3] The imaginatively named, Santa Ana College.

[4] Those two portions of Martha Lane no longer exist. Under eminent domain, the community college took over the properties in the early 1980s. In archetypical, SoCal development fashion, the area where my family house once stood is now a parking lot.

[5] In their late 60s – early 70s?

[6] Do people still use that term?  For the young ‘uns who may be unfamiliar with it, to curb one’s dog involved pulling it off the curb – away from someone’s  lawn or sidewalk – and making it poop in the street gutter.

[7] Anyone remember those?  The Girl Scouts stopped selling them in 2008.

[8] The Wagners scared off Santa’s reindeer with a shotgun?  Nothing would surprise me.

[9] But they would leave the porch light on – the universal sign of “open for business” for trick-or-treaters – and answer the doorbell when the next group of kids came by.  Yep, we watched, to see what happened.

[10] He filled a brown paper bag with the Wagner’s dog’s droppings, put the bag on the Wagner’s front porch, set it afire, rang their doorbell, and hauled ass up the block.  And yes, when Mr. Wagner answered the doorbell he attempted to stamp out the flames….

The NDR I’m Not Signing

August 14, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, friends, health & wellness, nature, Oregon, politics, science, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , Comments Off on The NDR I’m Not Signing

It’s time for a…

 

 

Moiself  sincerely hopes that y’all will have a modicum of amusement with these blog reruns from Fridays of August past, while I, along with MH and our offspring K and Belle, are enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime bit of family fun.

 

 

*   *   *

The NDR I’m Not Signing
( August 14, 2020  )

Department Of Things That Will – Or Should – Blow Your Mind

Did you know that the post-slavery, Jim Crow Law society of the USA served as a model for the Nazis’ system of establishing “racial/Aryan purity”?

“It turned out that German eugenicists were in continuing dialogue with American eugenicists. Books by American eugenicists were big sellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich….of course, the Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. But what they did was they sent researchers to study America’s Jim Crow laws. They actually sent researchers to America to study how Americans had subjugated African Americans, what would be considered the subordinated caste. And they actually debated and consulted American law as they were devising the Nuremberg Laws. “   [1]
( “It’s More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America’s ‘Caste’ System,”
Fresh Air, 8-4-20 )

 

“Captain, you’re shitting me, – I mean, fascinating….”

 

In her recent Fresh Air interview with host Terry Gross, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson spoke about discovering, while researching her latest book, that Nazi Germany modeled their system of codified racism in part on (what Wilkerson calls) America’s racial caste system.  Wilkerson suggests that we look at America as having created a caste system (as opposed to using the overused and often misapplied blanket term of “racism”) to keep down African Americans.

GROSS:
In the comparisons that you make between the Nazi regime and the caste system in America, you describe…what qualified in each country as being white…. Would you compare the two countries in defining that?

WILKERSON:
Well, that was a source of tremendous debate, I came to discover. I had no idea how they (the Nazis) had arrived at their delineation of people. And they sent people to study the United States and how it had defined and codified, categorized and subjugated African Americans and delineated who could be what in the United States. They also studied the marriage laws – intermarriage laws. And in doing so, they debated as to who should qualify to be considered Aryan in Germany at that time.
And in studying the United States, they were stunned to have discovered the one-drop rule that was the common distinction in the United States for determining whether a person could be identified as Black…. That idea of the one-drop rule – that was viewed as too extreme to them.

GROSS (incredulously):
Too extreme to the Nazis?

WILKERSON:
Stunning to hear that…stunning to see that, stunning to discover that. The Nazis, in trying to create their own caste system…went to great lengths to really think hard about who should qualify as Aryan because they felt that they wanted to include as many people as they possibly could, ironically enough.
In trying to define who could qualify to be Aryan, the Nazis were more concerned about making sure that those who had Aryan blood would be protected…. They actually had greater latitude in defining who could be Aryan and who would qualify as Jewish than the United States had determined with who could be African American or who could be white.

 

Too extreme to the Nazis?

Terry Gross’s reaction keeps coming back to oiself. 

Once again, historical scholars and journalists are doing fascinating research, bringing to the forefront information and historical documentation, via sources and materials readily available, that we Americans are just not taught in school – or anywhere else.

Another intriguing quote from the interview is from when Gross and Wilkerson were discussing the fact that “the idea of being white is an American innovation.”

GROSS:
“You were talking to a Nigerian-born playwright, and that playwright told you there are no Black people in Africa…. Africans aren’t Black.
What did they mean?“

To find out what that playwright meant, and how Wilkerson came to believe that “caste” is a more accurate description of Black people’s experience in the USA than racism, listen to the interview (or get the transcript here).

*   *   *

Department Of How’s This For A Life Strategy?

* Live your life so that you never have a reason to request
even one non-disclosure agreement, from anyone, ever. *

“For decades, (He Who Shall Not Be Named In This Space ) has relied on broadly worded nondisclosure agreements as a powerful weapon against anyone who would say something critical of him. Among those who have signed agreements are a porn star, two ex-wives, contestants on ‘The Apprentice,’ campaign workers and business associates….
Now, in one of the most sweeping efforts by a former associate to undo nondisclosure agreements, the _____ campaign’s former Hispanic outreach director last week filed her latest effort in a class-action suit to void all such campaign contracts. She says they are so broad that they deny individuals their First Amendment right to say anything critical of the president — even as he routinely takes to Twitter to mock and deride his critics.”
( The Washington Post, 8-7-20,
“t**** long has relied on nondisclosure deals to prevent criticism.
That strategy may be unraveling.” )

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Nostalgia
Sub Department Of Yet Another Reason To Fear For The Youth Of Today

What with virtual schooling perhaps being the norm at least for a while, combined with the gradual replacement of chalkboards with whiteboards in schools, will an entire generation of children grow up unable to appreciate the metaphor of describing a hideous experience as “…like fingernails on a chalkboard?”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of It Can’t Be Scarier Than Letting Them Drive

Y’all heard of the campaign to extend voting rights to 16- and 17-year-olds?

Calm down, Grandpa, and think about it.

The goal of vote16usa.org is “…to support efforts to lower the voting age on the local level, help start new local campaigns, and elevate the issue’s prominence on a national level.”

This is something moiself  supports.  I hope that you will as well, after researching and considering the issues – like these ones:

Your child must file a return in any of the following situations for tax year 2019:
Unearned income was more than $1,100.
Earned income was more than $12,200.
( from Kids and Taxes, figures for 2019 filing year )

The 16-year-old with an after-school job and a paper route will have to pay income taxes, just as a part- or full-time employed 18-year-old must, if their incomes exceeds a certain amount.  But unlike the 18-year-old, the 16-year-old cannot vote for her political representative to decide tax policy.

Most of us are familiar the statistics behind auto driving:

* Over 37,000 Americans die in automobile crashes per year.
* An additional 3 million are injured or disabled annually.

Driving is quite the responsibility.  Yet, a 16-year-old can get a driver’s license and also, at the DMV, can sign a legally binding consent to be on an organ donor registry.  But he himself cannot vote on how those life-altering policies (the licensing of drivers and organ donation) are implemented, nor can he elect representatives to do so for him.

 

 

No taxation without representation.  Remember that rallying cry?   [2]   Our political forebears fought an effin’ revolution over issues like that.  It seems only fair that, if you can work a job and pay taxes, you should be able to vote.

Because of our culture’s fucked-up misunderstanding of the 2nd amendment  lively debate on issues surrounding firearms, 16- and 17-year-olds have the “right” to attend high schools where they must participate in active shooter drills, but they cannot vote in or out the adults who set national and state firearms policies (they are old enough to be murdered, but not to vote).

Do you remember how, after the Parkland High School shooting, many of the school’s students organized marches, and addressed their adult political representatives:

“Every kid in this country now goes to school wondering if this day might be their last. We live in fear. It doesn’t have to be this way. Change is coming. And it starts now, inspired by and led by the kids who are our hope for the future. Their young voices will be heard.“
( Parkland students say, ‘We are going to be the last mass shooting’,
Daily Journal Online )

Do you also remember how many adults, from news pundits to politicians, dissed the students for doing so?  Do you think politicians could so easily ignore those young voices if those same voices had the power to organize and vote them out of office?

 

 

One of the more common arguments older people give against lowering the voting age is their claim that 16- and 17-year-olds aren’t rational or informed enough to be involved in political decision making.

Seriously? What qualifies as “rational” or “informed-*enough,* given our populace?  Do you know how many Americans over age 18 watch reality TV shows? At the height of its popularity, Here Comes Honey Boo-boo, arguably the worst reality show ever, drew 2.9 million viewers  (the show ran for two years, and was only cancelled when it was revealed that the mother of the show was dating a registered child sex offender).  

Many 16- and 17-year-olds are more sensible and better informed on politics and social issues than adults thrice their age.  When I was in high school I ruefully noticed that so many of my peers – in particular, those of us in the journalism group, where being interested in and informed about currents events was both an attraction and a requirement –  knew much more about politics and current events than most of our adult family members and even some of our teachers – a frustrating fact which was evidenced when we tried to initiate discussions of said events and the adults openly copped to being unfamiliar with the issues.

From my junior high – high school years, I can recall many a baffling dialogue with my parents, in which I tried to engage them on political issues – not just to express moiself’s  own thoughts; I genuinely wanted to hear their opinions.  I was almost always unable to satisfactorily do so, because they knew few (and sometimes no) specifics of the issues I wanted to discuss, from a local school board election to international criticism of USA policy on Vietnam.   And in some (read: too many) cases, they frankly admitted they just didn’t know and didn’t care… And yet, there were no “rational and informed” poll tests nor requirements they had to pass: by virtue of their age alone, they were able to register to vote and then go to the polls and cast their ballots on issues about which they knew or cared nothing, and/or elect other citizens who would make those decisions for them.

I used to advise religions that forbade female clergy, “Either ordain women or stop baptizing them.”   [3]   (For some reason, the various RC popes never took moiself’s  advice on that…or any other matter.).  Fair is fair.  If you’re old enough to pay taxes you’re old enough to vote for those people who make those tax policies.    [4]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Thoughts That Wake Me Up At 3 AM

2020: it is the present year, and also the term for normal visual acuity. When we say that someone “…has 2020 vision,” we are complementing that person’s accuracy of perception.

I began the year with optimism: maybe 2020 is the year when the collective WE ® will realize that international problems require international solutions.  How appropriate, moiself  dared to dream, if 2020 turned out to be the year when WE began to get our proverbial shit together!?

Now I despair that 2020 will be the year when we ultimately lost our sight.

The viral pandemic and the resulting medical economic and political upheaval have put other pressing issues on the back burner.  Speaking of burning, the most crucial of those issues is that we are burning the planet up – we are setting our own house on fire. Aside from our nation’s own pathetic excuse of non-leadership on this issue,  I don’t see any other international leader with the standing and influence (or, seemingly, the desire) to take point on this issue.

This is why leadership is so important — why leadership is a thing in the first place.  Because there are 7.7 fucking BILLION of us, and moiself  and my friends trying to “do our part” by never buying another plastic bag ( “refuse, reuse, reduce, recycle, and other ways to reduce your carbon footprint” ) may help save a sea turtle or two but it’s not gonna hack it in the long run.

It’s just too damn depressing. I need a baby sloth moment.

 

“Oh sure, you wanna talk about burning up? I live in a tropical jungle and y’all put me in flannel pajamas?”

 

*   *   *

Department Of My Phone Knows Me Too Well

Here is how my smart(ass) phone, at 3 am, translated my dictation of,
“Department Of Thoughts That Wake Me Up At 3 AM”:

“Department of farts that wake me up at 3 AM.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of You Can Pee In The Yard, But Don’t You Dare Enjoy It

Our across-the-street beach neighbor, JK and his wife CK,  [5]    live next to a house which is almost always rented out. This (edited) email from JK was in response to my giving him a “heads up” that my son K and his friends would be staying at our place last weekend:

 You might have noticed the group of 11 staying at the rent house next door (rated for 8 occupancy)… black SUV and black pickup truck… the SUV arrived before the pickup truck guy (who had the key) arrived to open the house. The three (SUV) women tried the front door, to no avail, went around back, which started our dogs barking. I went out to the deck to see why the dogs were barking so viciously and got there just in time to see a woman hook her thumb into the back waistband of her yoga pants, pull them down and squat in the backyard between the fern and the picnic table. After a few seconds, presumably emptying her bladder, she stood up and pulled her yoga pants back up. It was obvious that she neglected to put her panties on that morning… yes, commando yoga pants. The three women got back in the SUV and headed south.

Upon hearing this story, CK reported the event to the rental agency and the Manzanita Police. The black pickup truck arrived about 15 m after the SUV left;  the guy couldn’t figure out how to work the house key, and made the dogs bark again. He got on his phone and shortly drove off in the same direction as the SUV. When officer M arrived, he and I had a nice discussion about these events, and he agreed with my suspicion that the gals were just early, had to go NOW, and then decided to go to the beach. He also informed me that, according to Oregon law, peeing in the yard is not illegal but trespassing is. If the woman was part of the group renting the house, she’s entitled to do so (pee in the yard). As long as she’s not touching herself for pleasure.

My response to JK:
Thank you – this is hilarious.  As long as it’s not happening next door to us.  😉 Hey, good to know that, in Oregon, I can drop trou to pee, but not “pleasure” myself.  Does this law also extend to men?

JK:
Yes the law applies equally to both/all genders.  If you are on property that you do not own, you must have permission to be on the property.
The Oregon code states that a person has “… a reasonable expectation of privacy …” in a number of places including “… residences, yards of residences, …” and it makes no distinction between front or back yards. Exceptions are included for touching one’s privates for pleasure and “… causing arousal in others …”

 

You are correct to notice that this picture in no way relates to the above story…
but do you really want a picture of a woman peeing in someone else’s yard?   [6]

*   *   *

May you never sign nor request others sign a non-disclosure agreement;
May we all continue to learn the parts of our national history
which make us uncomfortable;
May you always have other options than having to pee in the yard;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1]  The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws in Nazi Germany…. The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households, and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. The remainder were classed as state subjects without any citizenship rights.

[2] And by remember I mean, from your American history class…not that you heard it personally.  I mean, moiself knows my readers tend to skew older, but not *that* old.

[3] Or stop cashing their checks.  Now I just want women to stop writing those checks. Imagine what would happen to religious organizations if women stopped giving them time and money? I sometimes do, and I sleep better at night when I do.

[4] If you can’t, then you shouldn’t have to pay income taxes until you’re 18.

[5] Who gave me permission to share this story, in case you were wondering.

[6] And if your answer to that question is “Yes!” then please stop following moiself’s  blog.

The Yoga Pose I’m Not Practicing

August 7, 2026

Robyn Parnell community, current events, exercise & fitness, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, movies, nature, Oregon, Recreation , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Yoga Pose I’m Not Practicing

It’s time for a…

 

Moiself  sincerely hopes that y’all will have a modicum of amusement with these blog reruns from Fridays of August past, while I, along with MH and our offspring K and Belle, are enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime bit of family fun.

 

 

*   *   *

The Yoga Pose I’m Not Practicing
( August 7, 2020 )

Department Of Even Yoga Teachers Need To Be Careful What They Ask For

Backstory: A couple of months ago, when we were all new to this streaming business, my 9 am yoga class teacher held a pre-class video chat for us streamers. She told us a “yoga joke,” then said that if anyone else knew any yoga jokes, she’d love to hear them.  

Dateline: Monday; circa 9:30 am; doing a vinyasa (yoga) class via streaming. The regular teacher is on vacation.  As the substitute yoga teacher leads the class into Triangle Pose, my mind wanders – which *not* the point of a yoga class, I realize…

 

 

“Bad yogi!”  [1]

Ahem.

…my mind wanders to ponder the many different yoga pose names, both their English “nickname” and the Sanskrit names and translations, and as I do this, a joke begins to develop in moiself ‘s  un-mindfulness-practicing mind.  There are a few twisting yoga poses which are notorious for producing, in certain people, a certain bodily response – in fact, the Sanskrit name for one such pose translates as:

 

My joke is a play on the Sanskrit name for Triangle Pose, which is Trikonasa (TREE- kone-ah-sauna).  I will ask my yoga teacher if there is a yoga pose known for inducing bladder leakage, and if so, would that pose be called, Trickle-asana?

 

My guess is that Trickleasana would look something like this.

*   *   *

Department Of Extending The Metaphor

Yeah, hipster, since you obviously don’t care about trashing your own lungs, go right ahead and give no thought to trashing your small portion of the planet, which happens to be shared by everyone else.  That’s the true American Spirit.    [2]

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Actually, not. Not something *completely* different, that is.

Instead, a smooth segue into….

Department Of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes… And Nowhere Else, If You’re Lucky

MH and I have two fireplaces in our house.  One has never been used; the other has been used once, not long after we moved in (~ 26 years ago), and never since.  This is because of moiself’s  killjoy spirit  high livability standards.

I have been the family spoilsport when it comes to wood fires, be they fireplace fires or beach bonfires or campfires.  When on vacation, burning wood is “permissible” only if necessary – e.g., if your accommodations have a wood-fire stove as the only heating source.  You see, I am one of those annoying,   I-can’t-pretend-to-not-know-something-once-I-know-it  kinda people, and cannot justify sitting around a pollution source sans a more compelling reason than my personal entertainment.

 

 

And yes, I have fun, sitting-around-the-campfire  memories from childhood.  And yes, I have been pooh-poohed for my anti-wood fire attitude (  “Oh, c’mon, it’s not really that bad…” ).  And yes, I am thanking someone else for doing the legwork on the It Really Is That Bad ® statistics I once knew but have forgotten and was too lazy to look up.

That info via Someone Else ®  was provided in yesterday’s Ask Amy column, wherein Amy dealt with a woman’s am-I-right-to-be-disturbed-by-this question. This (nonsmoking) woman has been accused by her (non-smoking) husband’s “big smoker” sisters of over-reacting because of the woman’s concerns about the fact that when she and hubby go for “chats and s’mores” to the sisters’ place, the sisters toss their butts and partially smoked cigarettes into the fire pit: 

“…since we don’t smell any cigarette smoke as the fire burns, (the sisters claim that) second-hand smoke isn’t an issue.
I feel this is second-hand smoke and a very real health concern.”

Amy lays it on the line (my emphases):

 “Cigarettes aside, the backyard fire pit itself presents risks to lung health. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (epa.gov), ‘In addition to particle pollution, wood smoke contains several toxic harmful air pollutants, including: benzene, formaldehyde, acrolein, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).’
Cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate, which is a finely spun plastic (not cotton, as I had always assumed). Burning plastic sends off toxic fumes. The leftover tobacco on the spent cigarettes will also release ‘second-hand’ smoke.
So yes – this bonfire is basically a flaming pit of toxins.”

 

“The Scoutmaster says we’re only two requirements shy of earning our Flaming Pit of Toxins merit badges!”

Are you lost in the forest in the dead of winter? Ok; build a fire. You and your friends just wanna sit beside a pile of wood and watch it burn for…oh, that warm, glowy-feeling, or whatever?  There are other ways to enjoy each other’s company that don’t involve needless production of toxic waste.  How about playing charades, or that game where you find clever ways to trash your hypocritical friends who make you feel guilty about, say, things like polluting for your own pleasure?

Or how about this: re-purpose some old holiday lights, and if you put them on twinkly-mode you can pretend it’s flickering flames.  Imagination is good for the body and spirit.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Could The Editor Have Cut The Movie To Give You
All At Least Five Minutes Before Contradicting Yourselves?

Dateline: a week ago, this evening; watching The Go-Go’s documentary with MH.  One of the Go-Gos was doing a voice over about the early 1980s Los Angeles punk scene (from whence the Go-Gos was spawned); specifically, about how accepting the punks were:  it didn’t matter if you were gay or straight, white or black, male or female etc. you were welcomed for however you were/whatever you were.

 

This kumbaya declaration was made literally seconds before the band went on to recall how the other Go-Gos demanded that their new drummer, Gina Schock, an import to LA from Baltimore, undergo a makeover when she arrived – they cut and dyed her frizzy blonde hair to short and dark, to be more suitable to the punk scene.

Confession:  the picture of Gina’s “Baltimore” hairstyle that flashed onscreen during that recollection…it *was* really, clownishy, wretched, even by 1980’s hair standards.  [3]    Open and accepting only goes so far; I guess even punk rockers have standards.

 

Yep; it was worse than this.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Stopping Moiself  In The Nick Of Time

Dateline: Tuesday, circa 7 am, walking north along the beach at Manzanita. There are few people on the misty beach.  About 200 yards ahead of me I see three creatures walking south – a man, a woman, and their dog. The man and the woman each hold a large takeout coffee cup in their respective right hands.  The dog, walking between the two, is looking up at the man.  Dog pays the woman no attention; dog’s eyes stare up at the man.

As the trio gets closer I notice that the dog’s laser focus is on the man’s left arm, which the man has tightly clenched to his left side, and I get a glimpse of the halves of two brightly colored orbs the man is carrying between his upper arm and armpit/chest.

As our two groups (well, moiself  is a group of one) we both do the polite, COVID-appropriate thing, moving to the side and smiling in acknowledgement and greeting. The woman says a few words to the dog, which gives no indication it has heard her – it never tears its gaze from the man and the toys he has “hidden” under his arm…and the woman sees that I have noticed this.  As she gives me a What-am-chopped-liver? look and shrug of her shoulders, I stop myself at the last minute from pointing to the dog and to the man and saying to the man,  “Oh, I get it – you’re the one with the balls!”

 

“In a just world, I’m the one with *all* the balls.”

 

*   *   *

Pun For The Day

I can’t believe I got fired from the calendar factory – all I did was take a day off!

 

 

*   *   *

May you enjoy the simple pleasure of wasting precious brain wattage
on composing a bad joke about your favorite form of exercise;
May you be the coveted one with the…uh…balls;
May we all hope that the nostalgia for pre-pandemic times does not presage
a return to 1980s hair;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] No no no – not *that* kind. A yogi is anyone who practices yoga.

[2] Can you make out the cigarette carton brand?  Do ya get it, huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?

[3] I can provide no still picture of that hair, from the documentary – I think it would have burned the camera lens to even attempt it.

The Ephemera I’m Not Minimizing

July 31, 2026

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Department Of Be Aware Of Mono No Aware

“There’s a wonderful Japanese term, for which there isn’t a precise English translation.  The term is Mono No Aware  ( mo no no a- war -ey ) loosely means, a sensitivity to ephemera; the bittersweet feeling of seeing things change.  Mono no aware is a wistful awareness of the transitory nature of existence.  Since everything we see all around us will one day be gone, we must appreciate every millisecond.  According to this idea, cherry blossoms are not only beautiful despite only blossoming for two weeks once a year, they are beautiful *because* they only blossom for two weeks once a year.

When you notice yourself fearing or resisting change, perhaps you can remember the concept of mono no aware, and find harmony with the impermanent nature of all things.   As Jack Kornfield   [1] said, ‘Like a sandcastle, all is temporary.  Build it; tend it; enjoy it. And when the time comes, let it go.’ ”
( from Daily Calm morning meditation, 7-22-26 )

 

*   *   *

Department Of Apropos Of Nothing…

…or at least the nothing that now seems so important, or at least, memorable.  Recently, both a book I was reading and a podcast I was listening to, on the subject of the history of the radical undergrounds  [2]   in the 1970s-1980s, mentioned an incident in Chicago where the boxer Muhammed Ali ( “the most recognizable man in the world” ) joined in on an action to disrupt the eviction of a poor Black family living in a Chicago tenement.   I didn’t know about that incident; while I admired his acting on behalf of that family, hearing about it got me to thinking of the impressions I carried of Ali, and still do, to this day.

My parents were not very interested in boxing.  Moiself  actively opposed and was confused by its very existence:  why were select men given money and medals for doing something that, if they did it in the streets instead of in a sporting arena, they’d be arrested ?  [3]   I refused to watch any boxing matches as a matter of principle, but when it came to the Ali-Frazier competitions I –  like the entire country, it seemed – was well aware of the pre-matches hype and the post-matches analysis.

 

When it came to that classic rivalry –  the three Frazier-Ali matches known as The Fight of The Century (1971) and the rematches Super Fight II  (1974) and the Thrilla in Manila –  my parents, like most Whites of that era (so it was assumed), supported Joe Frazier.  Joe Frazier was shy, respectful, softspoken, and humble;  those traits of his were ridiculed by Ali and his supporters as being more palatable to White people whom, they sneered, saw Frazier as a Good Negro®.

I admired Ali for how he stood up for himself and was willing to go to jail for his principles.  I’d never heard of a Black man talking back to White people like Ali did.  It wasn’t so much that Ali talked back, it was that he unapologetically stood up for himself.  I loved that.  And I hate hate hated the way Ali talked about, and to, Joe Frazier.

Joe Frazier supported Ali ( both publicly and financially ) after Ali refused induction into the US Army and was subsequently stripped of his title, banned from boxing, and threatened with jail.  Frazier even lobbied the boxing powers that were ( and President Nixon! ) for Ali’s being able to return to the sport. Here is what Frazier got in return:  Ali boasted about how “pretty” he himself was, and contrasted his own handsome visage  [4]  with the features of Frazier,  called Frazier “ignorant” and “dumb” and “ugly,” and actually compared Frazier to a gorilla.

 

 

Those astoundingly racist epithets would’ve been called out as being just that if they had been uttered by a White person instead of being brashly spewed by the self-proclaimed   [5]   “Greatest.”  You could try to excuse Ali’s taunting by saying it was part of the boxing culture’s pre-match hype; but Frazier didn’t, and never forgave Ali for the taunting and bullying he (and his family) endured from Ali supporters.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) was the celebrated agnostic orator of the 19th century, sparking what became known as The Golden Age Of Freethought.  A Civil War officer, abolitionist, civil rights and women’s rights advocate, author, and skilled orater, Ingersoll’s lectures attracted thousands, and he was the person most responsible for the flowering of Freethought in the USA.

 

 

Although I knew *of* Ingersoll I did not encounter Ingersoll’s vow until after my own coming out as religion-free.  Moiself  got goosebumps, the first time I read this essay of his, to think of how the experiences of a someone of over 100 years ago so paralleled those of my own.  It’s as if he was emptying my thoughts onto his pages.

The *news,* was not what Ingersoll realized he was convinced of ( e.g., the natural, not supernatural, origins of our world; the fact that religions are mythologies ) but rather of his ability – his*need,* his obligation, even –  to express this openly.

 

 

Ingersoll’s Vow ( emphases mine  [7] )

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myths –  there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust.
I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free –

* free to think, to express my thoughts;
* free to live to my own ideal;
* free to live for myself and those I loved;
* free to use all my faculties, all my senses;
* free to spread imagination’s wings;
* free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope;
* free to judge and determine for myself;
* free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books
that savages have produced,
and all the barbarous legends of the past;
* free from popes and priests;
* free from all the “called” and ‘set apart;’
* free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies;
* free from the fear of eternal pain;
* free from the winged monsters of the night;
* free from devils, ghosts, and gods;
for the first time, I was free.

There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought – no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings – no chains for my limbs – no lashes for my back – no fires for my flesh – no master’s frown or threat – no following another’s steps – no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain – for the freedom of labor and thought – to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains – to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs – to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn – to those by fire consumed – to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.”

 

*   *   *

May you remember, or soon discover, the first time you realized that you are free;
May you know the wistful joy of appreciating ephemera;
May you feel free to spread imagination’s wings;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Jack Kornfield  is a Jewish-American writer and teacher of the Vipassana style of Theravada Buddhism.  He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, and has been teaching mindfulness meditation since 1974.

[2] The Weather Underground, The Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. 

[3] I still don’t get it.

[4] Which, as more than one White and Black pundit pointed out, was the result of having some European ancestry in his lineage – specifically, an Irish ancestor from County Clare.

[5] “To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.” “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.”  Muhammed Ali In His Own Words.

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[7] As well as some punctuation

The Energy Crisis I’m (Still) Not Solving

July 24, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Energy Crisis I’m (Still) Not Solving

Department Of Things That Hold Up Overtime

MH and I have been re-watching the TV series ER.   Aside from some older technology artifacts – the hospital records and procedures are not fully computer-integrated (e.g.,  the staff keeps index card files on certain patients! ) – the issues, both medical and personal, remain, IMO, compelling and contemporary. Except for wanting an old-fashioned schoolmarm’s stick to whack George Clooney’s character on the back (  “Stand up straight!  Look people in the eye!  You’re a doctor, FFS!” ), the performances are spot-on.  Although (for moiself  at least) Clooney’s hangdog/horndog, mannered performance as Dr. Doug Ross takes some getting used to, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how… fresh… everything seems.  It’s fun to rewatch a great episode I haven’t thought of in years, and turn to MH and say, “Oh, wait, I think I remember this…no I don’t/no, wait – something weird is gonna happen here….”

 

Someone who’s on the cusp of being a ginormous movie star and making an obscene amount of money should have better posture.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Why Isn’t This A Thing Yet?

Percussive energy is the thing that isn’t, yet.  And it should be.  After all, moiself  blogged about it four years ago ( The Clean Energy Source I’m Not Yet Inventing ). And yet the eyes and ears of the scientific community remain blind and deaf to my far-fetched ranting well-thought proposals?

I wrote about percussive energy as the counterpart, or rather compliment, to solar and wind energy. Short recap:  utilizing all that  tap, tap tap  [1]  of raindrops – as in, designing a surface, which could capture that energy find a way to use or store it (an answer to the old school people who decry “clean” energy by saying,  “Yeah well solar only works when it’s sunny/wind power only works when it’s windy….” ).

The world is still waiting for, still needing, youth science fairs and contests to challenge and/or incentivize their entrants to…basically…save us from ourselves.   Or at least help us out with our existing problems, rather than translate their budding scientific and entrepreneurial skills into designing yet another mind-numbing gaming/entertainment app.

 

Lilly Downs, eighth grader from Osteen, Florida, wins Lemelson Early Inventor Prize winner at her 2025 science fair.   [2]

 

*   *   *

Department Of Gems Discovered While Seeking Something Else

That would be a blog segment from five years ago, specifically 8-20-21 ( The Butt I’m Not Kicking ) where in moiself  wrote about MH’s colonoscopy:

Department Of Post-Procedural Updates

Background info: MH has never been able to roll his rs, which is the main reason, he told me many years ago, that he took German as a foreign language in high school.  He’d thought Spanish would be more useful/practical, but he simply could not roll his rs as is required for the correct pronunciation of many Spanish words, and he was somewhat intimidated/embarrassed by his lack of being able to perform that particular linguistic feat.  And it’s true: over the years, I’ve tried to get him to do it (or trick him into it), and he simple cannot roll his rs.

Dateline: Thursday, 10:50 am. MH is back home after his colonoscopy.  He thinks he’s fine, but it’s obvious to moiself  that the effects of the Versed (the sedative used during the procedure) are still reigning.    [3]    He’s… goofy

He stands at the kitchen counter, looking at the color printout he was given at the hospital, which includes a map of the lower intestines. He begins reading off the “map sites” to me:

MH (in a voice much higher than his usual range):
“The ilium!
The cecum!
The rrrrrrrrrrrectum…”

Moiself:
What?!?!?!  Holy crap; did you hear yourself?!  You rolled your rs!

MH (in miffed toddler mode):
“No I didn’t.”

Moiself:
“Oh yes you did!”

MH proceeds to say “rectum” over and over, drawing out the r sound without rolling it.  But for one glorious, Versed-induced moment, them rs were rolling like a river.

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Not Completely Different
But Similar, As In, Involving A Memory

 

MH and I met in a Lutheran Church.  Yep; yours truly the flaming atheist, Humanist, Freethinker, Skeptic, religion-free apostate/heretic was raised by Lutheran parents and was herself, like her now equally religion-free (  but less flaming  [4]   ) spouse was once an active church member.  But that’s a story for another day (preferably, a day involving cosumption of gin and tonics by both the storetellers and story listeners ).

A momentary digression for Educational Purposes®:  moiself  has been referred to, by other active and former Christians, as both a heretic and an apostate.  Neither word is one I consider pejorative; both are arguable as to their applicability as labels for my beliefs and experiences.  [5].  In general, both labels refer to someone’s rejection of the religion they are/were “in” and/or were raised in.  The difference is in the degree of rejection.  Apostates totally reject or renounce their religion; heretics stay (or attempt to stay) within their religion and/or religious community but openly hold and assert beliefs that contradict their religions’ theologies and doctrines. [6]   (interesting factoid: at some point in time, every new religion/demonization has been accused of heresy/apostasy by their onetime co-religionists).

 

 

Moiself  recently overheard a tidbit of a conversation in which one person was relaying to another their experience of being challenged as to their worthiness of ascending to a certain position in their work. This reminded me of a story shared with moiself  by one of the pastors at Grace Lutheran Church in Palo Alto, the church where MH and I met.

Grace Lutheran was a congregation in the ELCA synod, the most liberal synod or wing of the American Lutheran churches.  At that time (when MH and I were attending) Grace Lutheran had two co-pastors, one male and one female.  I became friendly with both of them, in particular the female pastor, SK.  This was in 1986, and although the ELCA had been ordaining women pastors since 1970, their acceptance was a slow process, and women pastors were not automatically welcomed with open arms.  One afternoon a few months after I’d joined the church SK and I met for tea in downtown Hillsboro.  During our wide-ranging conversation the subject of her being called    [7]  to Grace Lutheran came up.  Specifically, I asked her how smooth the process had been:  did she feel accepted by all of the congregation, or at least the majority?

SK told me that her call to Grace Lutheran went smoothly, although she was aware that the final vote of the congregation (to accept her call to be one of their pastors) was not unanimous.  On her first Sunday at Grace Lutheran, the leaders of the congregation held a reception for SK in the church’s Fellowship Hall, after the worship service.  The reception wound down after about two hours, which was a relief to SK, who, although grateful for the warm greetings she’d received, was beginning to think her petit frame could not bear another well-meaning handshake or congratulatory hug from the throngs of parishioners who introduced themselves to and welcomed her.

SK headed to the Fellowship Hall kitchen, intent upon helping the staff with KP duty, when one of the few parishioners remaining in the Fellowship Hall approached her.  A Tall Elegantly Dressed Older Woman (TEDOW) smiled broadly at SK, introduced herself as a “long-time” Grace Lutheran member, and said, in a friendly tone of voice that belied the rebuffing sentiment she was about to utter, that she would like to take SK to lunch to tell SK why she had “voted against your call, as I don’t think you belong here.”

SK kept her composure, smiling in return as she thanked TEDOW for the lunch invitation…which SK declined.

Moiself  was impressed by SK’s graciousness under fire, so to speak, and even more so by the rational simplicity of her response:

“No, thank you.  I *am* here; I don’t have to defend my being here.”   [8]

 

“Someone hand me the mic so I can drop it.”

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [9]

 

*   *   *

May you have fond memories of a loved one’s post-colonoscopy rantings;
May you enjoy binging an old favorite TV series;
May you never have to defend your being where are you;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] And oft times, stomp stomp stomp.

[2] Society for science; Courtesy photo from Lilly Downs.

[3] I suggested he go upstairs and sit or lie down, as he was rather wobbly standing.  He wanted to go up the stairs by himself; I insisted he hold on to the handrail, which he did, while vaulting up the stairs two at a time.  When I snapped at him to slow down he said, “It feels better this way!”

[4] Except when he’s high on Versed and flamboyantly rolling his r’s….

[5] But, I’ll take ’em!

[6] For example, some Unitarians consider themselves Christian, but were/are rejected by other Christian denominations because Unitarians affirm the “unity” of the “one god” and reject the Christian doctrine of the trinity established by the apostle Paul.  Thus they are (in Christian eyes) heretics, not apostates.

[7] Being called refers to the process by which churches find and employ their pastors.  It varies between denomination and churches; here’s the link to ELCA call processes.

[8] I never met TEDOW.  She (and her husband) left the congregation before I began attending.  According to another congregant whom I quizzed about the incident, TEDOW and her husband were opposed to female ordination and also had problems with the other ways in which they felt their church was embracing heresy/leaning more liberal, and when they left Grace Lutheran they made sure that certain people knew they were leaving and were “taking their money” with them (implying that they were generous financial supporters of the church, which, that person I spoke with said, they were *not.*).

[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Safe Driver I’m Not Raising

July 10, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), music, radio & podcasts, school, travel, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Safe Driver I’m Not Raising

Department Of My Work Here Is Done

MH and moiself  recently received this text from daughter Belle:   

“Mom and Dad; you guys raised me to be such a safe driver that I am being urged to drive more dangerously by my friends.”

She then sent a copy of a message from a coworker…

 

…and added, to us:

“but don’t worry, you also raised me to not give in to peer pressure “

*   *   *

Department Of The Things We Rarely Do Via
Venues Which Could End Up On Social Media

That would be tell the truth about knotty issues – truths that may not present ourselves and/or our loved ones in the best of light.

Sub-Department Of The Unflattering Memories I Did Not Write
On The Post Right Before And Then Right After My Late Mother’s Birthday…    [1]

That was because it felt wrong to complain about her on or near that day…although my truth-telling was not so much complaining as it is realizing.

 

 

Department Of Self-Analysis

Dateline:  a weekday some time ago; circa 7:30 am-ish; morning walk while listening to NSQ ( No Stupid Questions ) podcast.  It was a repeat episode:  How Can You Stop Comparing Yourself With Other People?      [2]   The main topic the hosts   [3]  were discussing was – wait for it – comparing yourself to other people. They of course mentioned social media, where it’s very easy to feel yourself dull and/or unfulfilled   [4]  when you look at the posts of other people, and see their pictures of them and their well-mannered, high-achieving children travelling to beautiful, exotic places …

These images came through my earbuds as I was about to take (and then post) a picture of the morning sunlight glistening off the top of the waves at Manzanita beach.  I snickered at moiself,  and resolved to do my part to fight this trend:  Instead of posting a picture of this enviable costal sight I’ll return home, take a picture of the cat litter box, and post that instead.   But before I could make a note to moiself  to actually do that, the  NSQ  hosts distracted me with their comments on aspects of Social Comparisons Theory   [5]  (specifically  upward and downward comparisons).

 

“Having more fun than you’ll ever have – I mean, wish you were here.”

 

“…the upward comparison is what people worry about with social media. You go on Instagram and it’s always sunset, and the wind is always blowing just so, and everyone looks amazing…. that is the dark side of upward social comparison.
‘…

schadenfreude, the idea of taking pleasure in somebody else’s misery, is kind of a form of downward social comparison. When we look down on other people and that, at least temporarily, boosts our self-esteem…”

The talk of upward/downward comparisons brought back a not-so-pleasant memory.  Since I have included in this space ( in, e.g., The Summers I’m Not Forgetting, 6-28-19 ) an epic moment of my mother’s parenting (making me my favorite “fresh” apricot pie for my December birthday), equal time will now be given to an epic parenting failure of hers.

 

 

Backstory: From junior high through high school, the girls in my circle of friends were good-looking.  As in, ranging from beautiful/cute to down-right-gorgeous, in both the face and “figure” departments.  I didn’t befriend them for that reason; that was merely a fact, which was born out by another fact: they each had several of our guy schoolmates either lusting after or sincerely smitten with them.  Moiself, I had conversations, and phone calls.  Initiated by those guys.  About my friends.  With the phone calls, it would typically take the guy who called me many minutes (sometimes over an hour – no exaggeration) to get around to the real reason for his call.

The most memorable of those calls went on for two hours, during which time Guy Friend® AC and I discussed, among other pointless diversions topics, the possible interpretations of the rock group Chicago’s song, 25 or 6 to 4.   [6]    AC was the most prolific phone caller: from his first call,   [7]  to every single time he called, I found out I had to talk around the reason he’d called me.  If I asked him to directly confirm why he’d called, it would take even longer to get to the point – I would finally get around to dragging out of him what he was really after.  [8]  Which was always something along the lines of:  was (my friend) RR going to be at the JV basketball game after school tomorrow, and if not, could I figure out a way to get her to stay after school and watch the game with me, so AC could at least see her there and maybe even get up the courage to talk to her by coming up to the stands after the game to talk with me ( he had no qualms in doing that because, he said, I was “easier to talk to” )?

 

 

After that 2 hr marathon of a call I had a case of dry mouth and brain.  I schlumped into our kitchen, shaking my head to (I thought) moiself  as I reached into a cupboard for a water glass.  My mother was at the sink doing something.  [9]   She noted the puzzled look on my face and asked me what was up.  I told her about AC’s most recent phone call (she was aware of his series of calls), and my other conversations with male friends about my female friends whom they had crushes on/wanted to date.  I told her that I found it all so…odd, and silly.  I couldn’t understand the obsessions; certainly, my friends had positive – and in some cases, outstanding – qualities, which is why I was friends with them.  These guys are missing so much!  They’re intimidated by, for example, LM’s and RR’s beauty or MB’s body…if they’d just talk to them, they’d see how much more they have to offer than their…uh, pulchritudinous-ness….

I was just sharing (what I thought of as) the cluelessness of my male friends and acquaintances.  My mother either misheard or misunderstood the situation, and jumped to the conclusion that instead of being bemused on behalf of my friends I was disappointed by the fact that moiself  was not the object of the same kind of attention.   In an oh-so-awkward, cringe-worthy, kinda-joking-but-kinda not  manner, she began to give me advice I’d not asked for, which began with: Perhaps I needed to find myself a less attractive group of girlfriends?….

 

 

 

Oh yes, she did.

I didn’t let her finish all of her thoughts. I walked away, once again gobsmacked by how someone I’d lived with for all of my life could seemingly not know me at all.  Was I adopted by aliens, or I was I the alien, whom my parents had adopted? 

A tender motherly insight, shared with her daughter: 

If you hang out with homely girls you’ll look more attractive by comparison.

Gotcha.  Message received.

Gee, thanks Mom!

When contemplating the phone call scenarios, never-had-I-ever thought about my own appearance vis-à-vis that of my friends’ until *you* brought it up.  But now, I certainly (and forever, gawdammit, ’cause that’s how memory works    [10]  ) will.

 

 

Decades ago, when I first heard (what was to be a series of comments from friends and family) someone mention my mother’s and moiself’s  facial similarities, I blurted out, “Yep, I got my mother’s bones – she’s 65 now, and I’d like to give them back.”   My mother and I were the two in our family (of six) who looked the most alike, in terms of general facial structure.  When I look back on her boner-of-a-mother-daughter-moment, it is because of this physical similarity   [11]  that I can forgive her ham-handed comments.  I interpreted them as a reflection of her insecurities about *her* own appearance.

All these years later I realize how significant her blundering “counsel” was to me at the time.   Fortunately, all these years later it doesn’t sting with freshness of that moment, but now and then I still feel the wispy, wistful regrets, re the fact that she never really knew me…and it’s too late now.  There can be no answers to the questions I would like to pose to her, given the chance.

 

 

Also, once and again/as she was wont to do, my mother had failed at Communications 101.  That could have been an intimate, kitchen-sink-conversational-moment between the two of us.  I was not asking for her guidance; why couldn’t she have just listened, instead of providing the totally unsolicited (and truly  wretched, ego-deflating) advice that in order to make myself seem more attractive –  which BTW was not my goal in life (which she would have known had she paid the least bit of attention to *who* I was, and what kind of person I was striving to be) –  I should hang out with homely females, or at least ones even less attractive than moiself.

For that incident, and a few others which followed over the years, I am soooooo grateful for not growing up in the world of social media.  I mostly put that situation –  and my mother’s unintentionally   [12]  yet nonetheless degrading comment – out of my mind.  Although it later reared its ugly head several times.   [13]

 

 

Particular head-rearing examples from the After College Years®:  on more than one occasion a man with whom I had a passing acquaintance/lives-down-the-apartment-hallway/met at a mutual friend’s party/co-worker  kind of relationship, asked me about a friend/acquaintance/coworker of mine (or in one case, my younger sister).  As in, he found her attractive and wanted my advice re asking her out.

Not for the first time I was bemused by the request, and not for the first time, my answer was hardly earth-shatteringly original: I encouraged him to approach her directly.  Strike up conversations in the hallway and/or at the mailboxes; pay attention to cues…DUDE, just ask her.  And not for the first time, such basic, straightforward advice of mine was countered with, You just don’t get it, followed by his confession that he found talking to “girls” difficult, to the point of being intimidated.  “But, we are, at this very moment, are talking,” I would point out.  To which he and all the other he’s over the years, would respond with a version of:

“Yeah but, this is different.  I don’t know what it is,
but I can’t talk to a girl I find attractive.
Sure, I can talk with *you,* no problem….”

 

Each time it happened, I decided not to further enlighten the clueless Date Fail Men –    [14]   all of whom, with their obliviously demeaning comments, reminded me of my mother, in ways I didn’t see at the time.

Another reminder came from the source itself, from a letter my mother sent me when I’d been married for less than two years. Not long after MH and I had visited my parents at their home in Santa Ana, I received a four-page letter (two pages of a yellow legal pad, written on both sides) from her, the gist of which is that she and my father had found my then-current hairstyle unattractive.

 

 

Really.  Four pages.

Some of the page space was devoted to examples of people she knew (mostly her age) who’d found a flattering hairstyle in their twenties and stuck with it.     [15]  Was it a matter of money, she posited?  If so, she offered that she and my dad would be happy to pay a competent stylist….  Also, after my and MH’s visit, she felt moved to get out her favorite picture of me, the one where I’m waving goodbye to her and my father after they’d helped me move into the UC Davis dorms the fall of my freshman year.  How sad, she wrote, that I now looked “ten years older” than I did in that picture.

 

 

Holy epitome of obliviousness.  I look ten years older?  Uh, yeah, I’ll take that.  Mom – I am, as of this writing, almost *fourteen years older* than I was when that picture was taken.  Cutting/styling my hair in *any* way ain’t gonna change that.

(And that wasn’t the worst comment/jab.  She also wrote that the way I was currently wearing/styling my hair wasn’t how I had it when MH first met me…and implied that if I looked then how I looked now, he wouldn’t have been attracted to/married me).

After I got over my initial WTF!?!?!? shock, I xeroxed her letter, circled and numbered the major points she made ( so that she could see – and not deny – what she’d written), and wiped the floor with her obtuseness addressed them all in a letter of my own, which I attached to the copy of her letter.  I was brutally upfront:  Your opinion about my hair is the forest you can’t see for all the straggly trees in your way.   Imagine how I felt, getting a four-letter page from my parents essentially telling me how old and unattractive they find me.

I reread the letter one more time before I sent my response, and realized what was at the root of the hairstyle red herring.  Of their four children, I was the one who lived farther away from my parents.  Several times I’d discussed with my siblings how, when I saw our parents in person, I was very cognizant that they were getting older.   [16]   This can be jarring for an adult child to realize, but it is also the Natural Order of Things ®.  What we don’t often think about is that it can happen the other way.  When I’d made the trip to SoCal (which prompted the haircut-diatribe letter) it had been almost a year since I’d seen my parents.  For whatever reasons,  I  looked older to  them.  Now, if a parent notices that their adult child is getting older, what does that say about *their* own aging?

 

 

Here is the gist of how I ended the response to my mother, followed by my signoff:

I get it, Mom, even though you obviously don’t.  Since we share some bone structure/facial similarity, if you notice that I seem older to you, well then, what does that say about *you*?  I hate the be the one to break it to you, but you are – surprise! – getting older.  And you need to deal with whatever issues you have about that before dumping your own insecurities onto one of your children.

I love you because you’re my mother,
but I don’t like you very much right now.

She telephoned me as soon as she received my letter.  She apologized, said she was so embarrassed for having sent the letter; she asked me to throw it away, and she promised that she would throw away her copy.

I can’t remember how I phrased my bald-faced lie.   [17]  I agreed with her request, even though I had NO intention of throwing that letter away –  Are you effin’ kidding me? This is exhibit A.  No way was I giving her the nonexistence of the letter as a proof of her likely denial ( “I never said, would never say, such a thing” ! ), should the subject ever come up again.

*   *   *

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [18]

 “If the veil of self-condemnation, inherited shame, religious fear, and psychological self-rejection were finally pulled back, we might discover something terrifying to systems built on control: that human beings are not cosmic mistakes in need of metaphysical cover-up. We are expressions of existence itself, carrying immense depth, creativity, consciousness, relational capacity, beauty, and becoming within us.”

( Jim Palmer, Author, Professor, “Post-Religion Spiritual Director,”
Founder at The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality,
excerpt from his FB post on sin and shame and control )

 

*   *   *

May your safe driving inspire (or intimidate) your friends;
May you talk to people you’re crushing on directly, instead of going through mutual friends;
May you share the hidden meaning (if you figure it out) behind Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Those blog posts would be either the last Friday of June or first Friday of July.

[2] Originally aired 8-9-2020.

[3] Psychologist and author Angela Duckworth and economist and Author Stephen Dubner.

[4] The FOMO experience…which sometimes seems to be the primary purpose of social media.

[5] Nutshell presentation: Social comparison helps us evaluate ourselves by comparing our traits and abilities to others.  The upside: – upward comparisons may push us to improve; downward comparisons make us feel better about ourselves.  Either way, comparing ourselves can also lead to misleading judgments about our abilities.

[6] (aside from it’s amazing guitar solo, what was the song really  about?)  

[7] We were somewhat friendly and were in a couple of classes together.  The first call came as a surprise, as he’d never asked for my phone number.  He must have gotten it from that retro form of information dissemination, the phone book.

[8] I never hung up on him; the calls – thanks in great part to MY conversational skills –wandered into some really interesting and entertaining territories (e.g. music and art and politics)…. Or so I thought when I was seventeen.

[9] Not the dishes – that was my after-dinner chore.

[10] Many a psychological and/or neurological study has shown that “…insults linger longer than praise or compliments….”  (“Spoken Insults Stir Up More Brain Activity Than Compliments And Linger For Longer, Too,” sciencealert, 9-4-22), and that humiliation is the strongest emotion we can feel (“Does This Brain Research Prove That Humiliation Is the Most Intense Human Emotion?  Wired.com)

[11] Which I always found ironic, once it surfaced, as we were the two least alike (re interests, personalities, worldview) in the family.

[12] Gaaaawwwwd, I hope so.

[13] yes, times plural, as in, this happened more than once.

[14] Several of whom later tried asking me out, perhaps as a form of practice.

[15] even in their sixties, which I found hidebound, and not flattering

[16] Even so, I never wrote to them, telling them how old they were looking….

[17] Framed by an unattractive hairstyle!

[18] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Belly Button Deodorant I’m Not Using

June 19, 2026

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, exercise & fitness, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Belly Button Deodorant I’m Not Using

Department Of Yep, This Is It:
Succinctly Brilliant Life Advice (Before The Inevitable Snark)

“You’ll regret it if you get married.  You’ll regret it if you don’t.
You’ll regret it if you have kids, and you’ll regret it if you don’t.”

The following is attributed to Kierkegaard  [1]   (my emphases):

“Regret is inevitable because the human mind
will always romanticize the life it didn’t live.
It’s not about making the ‘perfect’ choice;
it’s choosing which regret you are willing to make peace with.”

So.  Choose your path.

 

*   *   *

Department Of, And Now, On To The Snark:
Could This Be The Sign; Is This The End Of The World?

Dateline: Monday morning; 7:54 AM; watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding III   [2] while doing an elliptical workout.  During the commercial break I behold an advertisement moiself  has never see before – it’s from    [3]   a series of ads for Cottonelle toilet paper known as the  Come Clean campaign.   [4]   The ad begins with a discreet shot of some guy sitting on a toilet, then we see him (after he has presumably done his business and hiked up his trousers)    [5]  walking into a family/TV room in a (his?) house, where friends and family wearing team jerseys and eating copious amounts of snacks are watching a football game on the room’s wide screen TV.  The man has a beatific smile on his face, as if he’s just received enlightenment from a guru or had another kind of spiritual experience.   Apparently, after having used Cottonelle toilet paper to wipe himself post-deuce-dropping he has the cleanest hindquarters he’s ever had.  [6]   He is so overcome with the bliss of butt cleanliness he decides to “come clean” with his friends, confessing, among other things, the fact that he doesn’t really “get” football….

 

 

*   *   *

The Saga Continues: Department Of Bodily Functions Sell Products,
The Neverending Story

Back to moiself  on the elliptical, continuing to watch  My Big Fat Greek Wedding III  (which primarily takes place in – surprise! –  Greece).   [7]   After fifteen minutes, there is another commercial break:  three ads in a row featuring products related to those pesky bodily functions:

* #1:   [8]  It’s one more Cottonelle  come clean ad, this one featuring a woman, who, after having the tush mop of her life, comes clean to her homework-doing child about the fact that she never “got” algebra;

* #2:  Yet another ad for that    [9] ( “doctor-developed!” ) whole body deodorant, Lumē.  And by whole body, the Lumē folk mean your entire body – including parts you maybe didn’t realize you had, much less had to worry about being…reekified.

“Anywhere you have odor but wish you didn’t….just a pea-sized amount rubbed in like a lotion…all over your body:  “pits, privates, underboob, belly buttons, tummy folds, thigh creases, feet….”

 Underboob?

 

 

You name it, if it’s a body part, Lumē wants to you to be concerned that it might stink.

feet; tummy folds; thigh crease….  I think they left out that space between your fingers – for which there should be a name.  Actually, there is: the interdigital folds. But, moiself  suspects there’s a better word for it in German, like FingerSchlitzen….

Ahem.  That omission aside, the not-so-subtle message these Lumē advertisements convey is that your entire body is an odiferous swamp in need of aroma-masking.  As for the bemused skeptics who ask, “Um, why not just take a shower?”

 

Silly geese!  If you feel felt cleaner after taking a shower, they can’t sell you anything.  Check here if you’d like An Expert® to explain why you’re so stupid as to think that bathing is better than using Lumē products.   [10]

Just in case you’re not sure how the product should be applied to someone’s, er, privates, here are the handy instructions (found here; my emphases):

“For privates – the short story:
A little goes a long way. Using fingertips, swipe onto thigh folds, undercarriage,
and sweep up between the butt cheeks to the tailbone.

For privates – the full story:
Working front to back (never work back to front due to increased risk for urinary tract infections), apply to the clitoral hood & labia majora (not inside the vagina or around the urethra), continue back further to the perineum (the space between the rectum and vaginal opening), and sweep up between the butt cheeks to the tailbone.
Apply around the base of the penis and between the folds of the legs, work back to the space between the scrotum and rectum, and finally sweep back between the butt cheeks and up to the tailbone.”

 

 Undercarriage.  In all my years in health care…

 

 

… moiself  never heard the word at word undercarriage – heretofore used for the structural and mechanical foundation supporting the body of an automobile or truck – to refer to human anatomy.

 

 

Listening to this insulting shill ad, moiself  be getting my undergarments in a knot ( this could be a job for Lumē! ) as I consider the commercial’s underlying premise: your entire body is a stinkpit.  Yeah, thanks for the empowering message, brought to us by a woman OB/GYN ( a fact much touted in the product’s various ads).

Ah; once again, moiself  digresses.  On to Advertisement #3, which was concerned with infant and baby number two – specifically, with the idea that not all baby BMs are manageable ( as in, containable ) – via the average disposable diaper.  And this certain brand of diaper – damned if I can’t remember the name, [11]  is for “…people who’ve seen some sh*t.”   [12]  Translation:  it can handle your biggest baby’s biggest poop!

Now then:  although moiself  wasn’t paying close attention to My Big Fat Greek Wedding III, I’m fairly certain it contained no overt nor clandestine themes of cleaning up after defecation and/or malodorous body parts.  Thus, I’m forced to conclude that the clustering of these particular ads during  MBFGWIII  commercial breaks was just a happy coincidence.

 

 

*   *   *

Speaking Of Products Related To Crap…

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [13]

Notes I wrote to myself a few years ago after someone, who’d discovered my “unbelief,” tried the What-you-need-is-a-personal-relationship-with-Jesus crap on me:

What I do not need is a “personal relationship” with Jesus,
or the Christian god, or any deity.

What religious believers need is a personal relationship with reality – the same reality to which they appeal when they critique the tenets and validity of Scientology, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism – of any faith but their own.  The same reality they use when they evaluate evidence to make any important decision in their life: such as, which investments are sound, which physician to see for an illness, etc.

Oh and by the way:  How is it that, for all their much-touted (but in reality, scantily practiced   [14]  ) reading of their scriptures, Christian fundies never seem to recognize that their “personal relationship with their personal savior” rhetoric never occurs in the Bible.  Jesus is never quoted as speaking this way in the gospels, nor does the founder of Christianity, Paul, do so in his epistles.  This “personal savior” piety is no older than 18th century Lutheran Pietist movement in Germany.

 

 

*   *   *

May we all have a personal relationship with reality;
May you not romanticize the path you didn’t take;
May we give our respective undercarriages the honor they are due;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, (1813 – 1855), Danish philosopher.

[2][2] It was either that, or some May Day Airline disaster show…which I actually like – the parts about the investigations and the problem solving involved (not the crash reenactment).  

[3] Yep, I googled it afterward.

[4] Slogan: “We are coming clean: your booty deserves gentle care.”

[5] I could have written pants, but I think trousers is a work we should all use more frequently.

[6] doesn’t say much for the character’s potty hygiene and/or showering skills, does it?

[7] So I don’t really mind or pay attention to the plot; I just enjoy the scenery.

[8] Shouldn’t this have been add #2, since it’s about cleaning up about number…you know?

[9] I say that because you’ve likely seen at least one of those ads – you can’t spit (or sweat) without hitting one.

[10] BTW, the company is facing several class action lawsuits accusing Lumē’ of false advertising/deceptive marketing of their products.

[11] Which I attribute to my brain being overloaded, at that point, with this ad shit.

[12] The word is bleeped in the ad

[13] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[14] The bible is a huge collection of writings; still, it’s mind-boggling how many Christians cherry pick their readings to “the happy” or familiar, G-rated stories stuff.  Most of them seemingly have no idea what is in their scriptures, from the three different version of The Ten Commandments ( Version 1: Deuteronomy 5:6-21; Version 2: Exodus 20:1-17, differs slightly from the Deuteronomy version; Version 3: Exodus 34: 14-28 – Hmmm, these commandments are wildly different than the first two versions, although the writing claims it is the LORD speaking.  Guess he’d forgotten what he’d said the first two times?  Also, although this list is never referred to when religious leaders and politicians talk of the Ten Commandments, this version – in verse 27- is the only version referred to in scripture as the “ten commandments” ) ,to the passages where Jesus contradicts himself, to the scriptural guidelines for killing and raping women….

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