Those seven words are from a Clear + Vivid podcast moiself heard several weeks back. The subject was…many subjects. It’s an episode I can’t find now – which Ifindironic in that one of the episode’s topics was discerning regular/age-related forgetting v. dementia-type forgetting. The podcast’s guest explained why, for example, I can tell you what I had for dinner eight *years* ago on a warm summer evening with my daughter in Paris bistro, but I likely can’t remember what I had for dinner eight weeks (or even days) ago.
There is a science (as in, cognitive strategies) to make meaningful memories at any age. However, as C+V host Alan Alda and his guess discussed, people would rather have the science behind such discoveries lead to a Magic Pill® to boost memory (or anything else). This is because – surprise! – we evolved to be…well…effing lazy. [3]
* * *
Department Of Mark Your Calendars:
“You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time,
but I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime.”
First things first: get the silly Old Testament proscriptions out of the way:
Eli, Saul – y ‘all heard? Life is great; nothing’s unclean! Shrimp rolls, anyone?
In the spirit of ecumenicism, a gentle dig at those gentle Zen Buddhists:
Get real, Grasshopper The sound of one hand clapping Sounds just like one clap
I’ll kill two birds with one stone in this swipe at a tenet of many forms of Hinduism
and Buddhism and – wait, make that three birds! – the New Age/past lives crowd:
Reincarnation? Right – get a life! But next time Come back with some proof
And of course, no Blasphemy Day contest would be complete without a California surfer’s
take on the Christian sacrilege that was heliocentric theory:
Telescope; awesome. So, like, we spin around them? Copernicus, dude!
For several years there have been Blasphemy Day t-shirt slogan contests, inspired in part by a United Nations resolution meant to pacify uber-sensitive Islamists. But that resolution was the very reason I took a “why bother/what’s the point?” attitude toward composing a Blasphemy Day slogan (or even haiku) for Islam. I mean, considering the possible reactions, who is going to wear a shirt poking fun at something that mandates death to fun-pokers?
The oft-quoted [7]Robert Ingersoll was one of the most notable orators and speechmakers and civil rights activists of his time (post-Civil War America)…yet few remember him today. Trained as an attorney, ’twas his oratory tours – speaking on topics as wide-ranging as Reconstruction period to Shakespearean literature to religion to science – that made him famous. He was…”the friend of Presidents, literary giants like Mark Twain, captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie, and leading figures in the arts. He was also beloved of reformers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Other Americans considered themselves his enemies, (as he bitterly opposed the Religious Right of his day. He was an early popularizer of Charles Darwin and a tireless advocate of science and reason. More, he argued for the rights of women and African-Americans. Ingersoll also praised the virtues of family and fireside. And he practiced what he preached. Contemporary sources say Ingersoll enjoyed almost idyllic contentment in family life. Opponents frequently despaired of finding anything to disparage in his personal life.” [8]
* * *
May you value your daily habits more than your magic pills; May you prize making memories over conserving energy; May your opponents despair of finding anything to disparage in your personal life; …and may the hijinks ensue.
[2] Translation: Nurture once again trumps nature, in that your lifestyle – your daily habits, from what you eat, how much you sleep, how you move through the world) are more impactful on your health and longevity than any magic pill ever will or could.
[3] “We evolved to conserve energy” – sounds more respectable, doesn’t it?
[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
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 onerecipe 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]
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.
(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.
[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
…though, damn, I’d seriously consider it if there were a snowball’s chance in Chuck E. Cheese. [1] that one of the countries would want me.
First blog back from vacation. There’ve been four weeks of reruns in this space, and a part of moiself is still on Iceland time – WE WENT TO ICELAND AND SAW THE TOTALITY OF THE SOLAR ECLIPSE AND OTHER COOL THINGS, WOO-HOO!
Confession: we were *IN* the zone of totality, but it was cloudy in the Westfjords region where we were staying (of course it was, after a beautiful/sunny morning) during the early evening hours of the eclipse. So we got the instead ofversion of the event. Even so, what we were able to see was way cool/eerie, in a way that made me think that had we been living centuries ago and had no idea that the eclipse was coming and/or what were the forces behind it, we might have said to ourselves, “Holy solar obscurance, ourselves! The gods must be pissed with us – quick, go find a virgin or six and drop ’em into a volcano….”
What the totality of the eclipse did not look like in the Westfjords, Iceland
* * *
Departments Of Notes From A Civilized Way Of Life
Inspired by this trip, plus our visits to Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland four years ago ( The Vacation Schedule I’m Not Maintaining, 7-1-22), here are some of moiself’s randomly organized observations about Iceland in specific and the Norse countries in general.
* I lost track of how many times, when I was impressed by Icelanders’ friendliness and hospitality and invited them to visit my state, the genteel Icelanders told me they’d love to take me up on my invitation to visit my country…but would only do so when we get “… a new government.”
* Many Icelanders were most eager to enter into a discussion of our federal government’s “leadership crisis” (much more than MH and I were), and they revealed that in many ways they knew a lot more about what was going on in the US than most US citizens.
I got the impression (and was told so directly by several Icelanders) that Americans don’t seem to be aware of how our country’s actions affect the rest of the world. Icelanders do not forget this, and are reminded of it almost daily, especially when our crusty orange Commander-In-Thief confuses their country with Greenland and blames them for our stock market failings.
* Quiet. The quiet. Standing still, I can hear the sound of… quiet? In the Iceland countryside (which is most of Iceland), outside the major city of Reykjavik…but even in parts of their Big City ®, there is less clatter, more quiet.
* All toilets should be European style (dual flush)
* All bedding for couples (queen or king beds) should be like this: ditch the top sheet and instead [2] use two duvets. [3]
* All public toilets/restrooms/WCs should be individual stalls, floor to ceiling walls, with WCs separate from hand-washing area
…preferably unisex but separate gender also okay
* This is the last toilet-related entry, moiself promises. The public bathroom situation in Iceland: at the tourist attractions of the country’s natural wonders (waterfalls; glaciers; waterfalls; geothermal mudpits and geysers, more waterfalls) there is either free parking and pay WCs, or free WCs but you pay for parking. And these WCs are functional, available, and clean.
* Roundabouts please, not stop signs/stoplights.
* Iceland is basically a cashless society (as were Denmark, Sweden and Norway). And speaking of a ___ less society….
* Please oh please oh please can we do whatever it takes to get a tipless society?
Of course people will have to be willing to pay higher prices for higher wages. [4]
Guess what: it seems you don’t have to bribe people to get them to provide competent and friendly service. The traditional venue associated with tipping in the USA, food/restaurant establishments – the service was good to excellent in no-tip Iceland.
* * *
Department Of I Had Good Food While Traveling – And Now This Food For Thought.
Before embarking on our Icelandic adventure moiself had read a piece on travel philosophy or style, if you will. This article from in the Seattle Times will be quite controversial, I’ve no doubt. The author addresses ideas I’ve been struggling with re my own past trips and desire for future travel.
“…For the past decade, the travel industry’s golden rule has been to live like a local: Shun the tourist traps, skip the hotels and embed yourself in residential enclaves to find true authenticity.
I’ve had a front-row seat to this gentrification with a passport…I’m writing this from an Airbnb in Newmarket, a neighborhood in Auckland, New Zealand, and it’s located between a car repair shop and a Chinese grocery store.
Let’s stop this disruptive force…. Experts say it displaces residents, inflates housing costs and ruins the neighborhoods you claim to love. Maybe the most ethical — and enjoyable — way to travel now is to stop pretending you live there and embrace your status as a tourist….
The problem with living like a local is simple math: When everyone does it, no locals are left. Tourists push out the very communities they claim to love….
The cost of this fantasy is real housing. Short-term rentals strip homes from the market.
Jennifer Kaplan, a sustainability strategist, argues you can’t find an authentic experience in a hollowed-out neighborhood….
‘When authenticity becomes commercialized at scale,’ she says, ‘it loses its authenticity by definition.’
Why do we persist? Ego. Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University, suggests we are driven by ‘virtue signaling and narcissism.’ We want to feel superior to the masses on the tour bus. We want to be travelers, not tourists. But by refusing to visit the places built for us, we destroy the places built for others….
The alternative is the one thing we are trained to avoid: the tourist trap.
Urban planners and sustainable tourism experts argue that designated tourist areas — often derided as “traps” — act as necessary protective barriers for a destination. They concentrate the noise, the trash and the crowds in areas designed to handle them, leaving residential neighborhoods for, you know, the residents….
If you want to avoid gentrification with a passport this summer, you don’t have to give up on culture. You just need to change your approach.
‘Why not act like a tourist *and* a local?’ asks Thomas Swick, author of the memoir Falling into Place. ‘Stay in a hotel, but eat where the locals eat. Visit the sights one day and explore neighborhoods the next. Embracing both identities will result in a broader and richer experience.’
“Only a fool could believe that a god who serenely watched over the slaughter of innocents over and over and over again would answer their prayers about anything.”
( exceprt, Let’s Grow up and Cut the Bullshit: Burying the Lies of the Ancients,” by Jester Crank )
* * *
May you work for the change that will makeall those lovely Icelanders want to visit our country; May you enjoy bed linen and WC modernisms of Scandinavian design; May you ditch the virtue-signaling and travel like a respectful tourist; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] My version of the hell I don’t believe exists. Chuck EC comes close.
[2] As was the case in *every* hotel/airbandb/inn we stayed in ( in Iceland, and also in the majority of our lodgings during our Scandinavian travels).
[3] Known as “The Scandinavian Sleep” method, couples sleeping in the same bed use two separate duvets rather than sharing a duvet. The separate bedding allows each person to sleep how they want ( e.g., heavier or lighter covering; off or on or partial covering) without disturbing their partner, avoiding the need for two separate beds despite differing sleep habits and preferences.
[4] Higher wages, not to be confused with “a living wage,” which is a phrase bandied about that often has nothing to do with the realities of jobs, as in, traditionally entry level jobs are just that – entry level, meant for training/stepping stones to positions with more difficulty and responsibility. Burger flipping was never intended to be a career that can support a family of four.
[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
“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 awareis 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 lovedthat. 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.
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.
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.
[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
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 energyis 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 aboutpercussive 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 rsound 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]
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.
[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….
[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
Dateline: Circa 7:45 am; taking my morning constitutional. In a neighborhood where I sometimes walk, I pass a house that is heavily trashed accessorized: its front yard décor includes a multitude of plastic multicolored flowers, garden gnomes, smiling animals, faux garden implements stapled to the house’s siding, etc.
A sign on the front door of the house reads, “This is my happyplace.” My first thought as moiself reads the sign:
The Very Nice Exterminator Man (VNEM) tried unsuccessfully to stifle his laugh when, as he followed me on the pathway around the side of the house to the place where the squirrels were using our trees to access our roof, he told moiself that the traps he was going to set were kill traps, and I blurted out an enthusiastic, GOOD!
“Wow, it’s a squirrel howitzer,” I said, when I saw the first trap.
“Your attitude,” VNEM chuckled – then quickly added, when I turned around to see if he thought I was A Terrible Person ® , “I like it. It’s, uh…very different…when I’m in Portland.” He explained that when he’s setting up traps in optimal places ( for where the squirrels are accessing the house ), his Portland clients often ask him – whisper to him, he said – if he can “hide them (the traps) so the neighbors don’t see.”
I correctly surmised that was because they don’t want their neighbors to know about the kill traps. “Let me guess,” I replied. “Portlanders fear their neighbors’ judgement because they, like their neighbors, are misinformed. They think it’s somehow better or more humane to trap the squirrels and ‘relocate/transplant them,’ when they in fact know nothing about squirrels, including that
* squirrels are highly territorial; thus, depending on how far away they are transplanted, they will find their way back to your property and continue to be a problem/do the damage for which you wanted them gone in the first place, or
* they will be beaten and harassed by other squirrels into whose territory they have been released, [1] not given a moment’s peace to establish their own territory, much less forage, and they’ll starve to death;
* the majority of Oregon’s squirrels are *not* native, but are introduced species which, through being larger and more aggressive and via spreading new diseases, have taken over the native squirrel population…”
“You *do* know a lot about squirrels,” VNEM said, as I finished my Why It’s Okay To Hate Squirrelsharangue explanation.
“Enough to loathe them,” I said. “Look; I love animals; my diet is 99% plant-based; I escort spiders from our house (even bought a special device that traps, rather than squishes them)…and I detest squirrels.”
Ater one week with the traps up: the body count is two traps, two dead squirrels. [2]
The following is not a picture of a dead squirrel. The Picture That Does Exist But That I’m Not Showing You [3] is of a squirrel tail trailing out of one of the bazookas, the tail waving in the slight breeze, like a flag of surrender…. [4]
She’d never want us trapped in a sloth bazooka, but then, we’d never chew on her house or electric wires and cause hundreds of dollars worth of damage….
* * *
Department Of Traditional Foods Whose Existence I Acknowledge…
…but will not touch with a ten-foot pole. Or narwhal tusk. Or whatever is available to push the hákarl as far away from moiself as possible. The idea that you can call such a thing “food” is, IMO, an insult to all which is considered edible.
You’ll be safe with me, lady. Let’s order the tuna casserole instead.
Y’all may have heard of hákarl, the infamous Icelandic “delicacy.” If not, videos of people chunder-spewing immediately after having tried it are just an internet search away.
Ahem. Written by the person who, attracted by the title, purchased, Does Anyone Actually Eat This?Nanna Rögnvaldsdóttir, Iceland’s “best known food writer,” wrote this slim ( 73 pages ) but mildly intimidating book about 16 peculiar Icelandic delicacies. Besides the better known hákarl – Greenland shark meat that is fermented (read: putrified) in a way to remove the copious amounts of uric acid (read: piss) in the shark’s flesh so that you may eat it and not vomit blood (a common reaction to piss-shark-flesh eating) – curious culinary minds might want to read about other Icelandic delicacies, including
* Svið (a sheep’s head, halved and singed, then boiled with the brain removed;
* Súrsaðir hrútspungar (sour ram’s testicles) – yep, just that: sheep’s testicles, boiled, pressed into blocks and preserved in fermented whey. Some Icelanders consider it rude to call the dish by its name; thus, several euphemisms are used to refer to it, including millifótakonfekt( “between-the-legs candy” );
*Hverabrauð, a hot sprin- baked, dense, pumpernickel-rye bread, which at first sounds rather tame until you get to the details: “the bread…has a reputation for causing flatulence and is sometimes nicknamed, þrumari, aka, “thunder bread.”
Dude, a chase of thunder bread will absorb the urine/blood vomit aftertaste.
* * *
Department Of The Idealism Is Nice, But Your Age/Gender/Privilege Is Showing
Datelimne: earlier this week; listening to Clear + Vivid podcast, of 6-30-26. Host Alan Alda’s guest is American journalist, editor and biographer Walter Isaacson. The episode: Walter Isaacson: Are These Truths Still Self-Evident? From the episode’s description:
On the eve of our nation’s 250th, Walter Isaacson takes a deep dive into the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. It’s what he calls “the greatest sentence ever written.”
After discussing the history of the declaration and the interpretation and implementation of that so-called “greatest sentence, [5] Alda and Isaacson discuss the current fragmentation of our nation and the fact that we seem to have lost our ability to compromise, which is what led to the crafting of Declaration, and later, key elements of the U.S. Constitution.
( Excerpts; my emphases ):
Alda: Now, what about the big question…how can we accomplish the return to this great sentence…and make it no longer merely aspirational or largely aspirational, but make it truly happen? What kind of things need to be done…can be done?
Isaacson: …Among them is look for ways where we can have shared national service, whether it be being part of civic life in your town or teach for America….
We should form the type of civic organizations that, when you and I grew up …you’d go into town, there’d be the Kiwanis Club, and the Rotary Club, and the bowling League, and the Elks and the Moose.
We all had whatever our religions, whatever our ideologies, we all rubbed elbows together. And so I think in our daily lives, we can say, how do we do it at a local level? We can’t do this at a national level now….
My reaction: Gawd, does he (Isaacson) ever sound old/white/male/upper class!
The community and social institutions Isaacson lists – it’s not a bad thing, IMO, that they’ve faded away and/or drastically lost their impact. In their heyday they exerted great influence in the business and social lives of their cities, and membership in them and other “fraternal” organizations were steppingstones for business and political success. But, the we all rubbed elbows togetherideal – what orifice did Isaacson pull that out of?
“My orafices are none of your beeswax, sweetie.”
Those institutions, whether community/civic or fraternal, were *not* welcoming and inclusive. They required an invitation and/or sponsorship from current members for your membership application to be considered. If you were white and male (and had an “in”), you had a chance.
Many a story I’ve read about those organizations’ resistance to change. In particular I remember a community newspaper article about the blowback faced by an Oregon Coast man, a longtime member of his local fraternal organization (Elks, maybe?), who lobbied his fellow members to allow women to join the organization. He pointed out that his wife and other wives of members already did the lion’s share ( maybe it was the Lions Club!? ) of the work when it came to organizing, setting up (and – surprises! – cleaning up after ) the group’s yearly fundraisers and other events, and that they and other women in the community had expressed interest in joining…. But, no. His fellow Elks/Lions were content to keep the ladies in auxiliary status. Women were capable of doing the work, but heaven forbid they get the recognition (and status and influence) of membership.
Two personal examples: Over a decade ago I congratulated an acquaintance of mine when I saw an announcement in the local paper about how she’d joined the local branch of a nationwide service organization (ala Kiwanis Club). She was one of three businesswomen who’d been invited to “integrate” the previously all male [6] club, which had gained a reputation among newer-to-the-area, younger and nonwhite/nonmale city residents as stodgy, elitist and out of touch. Two years later I saw her at a city event, and told her I’d once again [7] intended to support her in the group’s annual fundraising sales, but that I didn’t find her name on the group’s roster. She rolled her eyes in disgust and told me she’d resigned from the group, as she was tired of banging her head again the proverbial wall. “All those old men are going to have to die[8] before anything will change,” she huffed. [9]
Another friend of mine started her own business in her small Oregon town, and as her success grew she joined her local Chamber of Commerce. Her C of C experiences…
* being either ignored and or patronized by old time (read: white male) COC members
* her ideas dismissed/discounted by her male colleagues one minute, then ten minutes later appropriated by another COC member, who presented them as his own
…spurred her to rally other women business owners in her town to form the ____ (name of town) Women’s Business Association.
So yeah, definitely encourage people to get off of social media and find other outlets for personal connection. But before advocating a return to those old organizations, a remaking of them is in order.
And, BTW, what’s so bad about having bees that don’t wax?
* * *
Department Of A Documentary I’ll Have To Get Back To
A friend recently sent me a link, along with this message:
I don’t know if you’ll like this, but this week’s independent lens is about a woman dealing with her father who is the last creationist in their family. I appreciated her struggle.
The episode he linked me to was released earlier this week by the PBS documentary series, Independent Lens. Its title and description: Flood, directed by Katy Scoggin: A filmmaker revisits her evangelical roots to find connection with her estranged father.
I thanked him and wrote that I’d watch it later. I did, then sent this reply:
Oh… Holy crap. Figuratively and literally.
I love the Independent Lens documentary series, but I could only get about 20 minutes into this particular documentary before I had to stop watching it. I know there had to be a setup of the filmmaker’s conservative evangelical background in order to establish the estrangement between the filmmaker, who left those beliefs behind, and her father, who still holds them, but still…ICK.
If I never again, no matter the context or pretext, have to hear grownass adults serious singing/discussing about being “washed clean by the blood,” then I will have lived a happy life and can possibly withstand even global warming.
Listening to children reciting the gibberish of theology provokes a physical reaction in me. It actually twists my stomach, to hear children spewing things they’ve had to memorize but have no idea what they’re talking about. [10] Particularly retch-worthy was the scene at the filmmaker’s father’s dinner table, when one of his cherubic blonde granddaughters (maybe four or five years old?), chirps, “I know all vowels: A E I O U!” Then, smiling, she recites in a sing-song voice the first four letters of the alphabet, which she has been taught to link with bible verses:
“A – All have sinned and gada fada baba… ( it’s hard to make out many of the words, as she lisps and runs the words together [11] )…the glory of god
B – Believe in the lord jesus christ and thou shalt shall be saved
C – Children obey your parents in the lord for this is right
D – Depart from evil and do good….”
It’s child abuse; it’s emotional and intellectual child abuse. And I can’t watch that, any more than I can stand by and watch someone beat a child and not intervene.
* * *
Department Of Damn, It’s Inevitable, But They Rip A Piece Of Your Heart Out When They Go
May your bees continue to wax; May you remember to never eat a slice of thunder bread before yoga class; May your sweet tooth steer clear of between-the-legs candy ; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] I have seen some epic squirrel territorial battles in a nearby park which I regularly walk through/around – battles that have drawn blood between the combatants (and which unnerved me, years ago, when I didn’t know much about squirrels) and which would make MMA combatants envious.
[2] Upon completing his inspection the VNEM thought one or at most two squirrels were accessing our roof, trying to chew their way into our attics. Which was somewhat better than the last invasion, which included an entire squirrel family.
[3] But which I sent to select friends/family, who almost certainly wouldn’t rat me out to PETA.
[4] I did send the picture to the exterminator (when he asked if we knew if either of the traps had been sprung), with the caption, “My heart soars like a hawk.”
[6] And mostly all White, despite the city’s growing Hispanic population.
[7] I had donated to the group’s yearly fundraiser only because she was in it.
[8] A lot of them did…but then their nepo-stodgy sons “inherited” their memberships, so change as continues to be slow.
[9] And she even had an “in” – she was the former mayor’s daughter-in-law.
[10] And I have a similar aversion to kids reciting loyalty oaths, such as the Pledge of Allegiance, in schools. I stopped saying the pledge when I was in the fifth grade.
[11] It’s likely the Christian tenet, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god…” from Romans 3:23
[12] I was so NOT able to even type that last week.
[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
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 soooooograteful 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.
“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.”
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.
[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.
[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
Department Of Things I Love To Say ( Or Even Think )
This one came to me after returning from an early morning walk and passing the fruit tree in our front yard: “It’s time to pare the pears.”
Gotta make sure the branches stay healthy and will be able to do their holiday duty, supporting the Partridges we host in our pear tree every Yuletide.
* * *
Department Of What Would Sir Paul Do?
If it had been anyone else’s post, I might’ve sent a private message along the lines of,
“Check your account. I think you’ve been hacked. Someone posing as you posted an embarrassing, cringe-worthy, face-palmingly clueless, humble-brag-of-a-tone-deaf…”
Why did I keep reading after the first sentence, of theyou’ve-gotta-be-fucking-joking-but-no-apparently-it’s-serious post I saw on a friend’s social media page? I’m still asking moiself that question: Department Of Why Didn’t I Just Scroll Past After The First Line… Like I’ve Done 1000 Times Before?
As for the post’s last sentence/request: “I would love to hear what others have experienced!”
Really. I really doubt it.
I loathe that which makes me experience one of my least favorite states of mind: being embarrassed on behalf of someone else (if you know what I mean and I think you do)…
…regardless of how strong, or so-weak-as-to-be-essentially-nonexistent their connection is to moiself .
Readers of this blog, and anyone spending a modicum of time on Social Media Sites, likely have at least one acquaintance among their group of SMS friends fitting this criteria: they are someone whose friend request you accepted on behalf of a childhood/long-ago friendship you had with them, even though your present relationship is for all intents and purposes nonexistent, or merely social media functional…. [1]
So, why not, Department Of I Should Just Let It Go, Right?
Instead…
Department Of Yep, I’m Gonna Do It
A burning bridge is perhaps not the best, or most apt, idiom for the situation. But for someone whom I (used to) respect, who posts such claptrap and then solicits responses…are they to get off Scott-free?
BTW: why is the expression Scott free, and not Andrew-free, or Thomas-free or Ian-free? A brief bit o ‘web research shows me that, first of all, the phrase is actually “scot-free” (one “t; not capitalized”), and is used to imply that one had escaped punishment, blame, or penalty for a wrongdoing. The idiom goes way back; it refers to medieval European financial penalties and has no relation to, say, a tax cheat named Scott.
Yet again, I digress.
Here is the claptrap post that frosted my butt:
“I thought it might be kind of cool to share some of the wonderful things that God has done for me in my life. Here’s one of my favorites:
Several years ago, at a very challenging point in my life, the upper hinge of a frequently used kitchen cupboard broke in half when I went to open it. Not knowing what to do and feeling utterly overwhelmed, I asked God to please send me some help for it. I assumed He would soon bring across my path someone who could fix it, a common enough answer to prayer. But a few minutes later, as I went about my tasks in the kitchen, I gingerly went to open the broken cupboard, only to find that the metal hinge was now completely fixed and restored to an unbroken state. My Miracle of the Hinge 💖
I would love to hear what others have experienced!”
Yep. That’s it.
Again, regarding that last sentence: Unless the what others have experienced would be self-delusional -reinforcing, along the lines of the proverbial choir singing to itself ( “Jesus found my lost car keys when I was late for the PTA meeting *and* removed that pesky grass stain from my husband’s trousers!” ), it’s strongly likely the poster really doesn’t want know what others are experiencing.
The poster is someone I knew from…
…and our current relationship/only point of contact for the past decade plus is that we’re social media friends in, as I earlier mentioned, The Way That One Often Does® with old friends who have morphed into acquaintances. It’s because of posting like the above that I’ve had to silence this person’s posts every once in a while. But this one….it felt patronizing to *not* respond in some way.
But Paul’s currently on tour and doesn’t return my texts. So, here’s the reply [2] I wanted to make, but didn’t:
Are you fucking kidding me?
* All over the planet, sincere and desperate people are appealing to their god(s).
* Many (if not the majority) of these prayers for intercession/assistance are directed to the deity whose belief in/worship of they share with you (aka Yaweh; “The Christian” god; Jesus Christ ).
* Many (if not the majority) of these prayers for intercession/assistance are asking for help in situations far more dire and consequential than that of malfunctioning kitchen hardware. They’re asking for help in surviving/preventing/healing from
– chronic, fatal, debilitating, painful and humiliating illnesses; – horrendous, disfiguring and disabling accidents; – vicious physical and sexual assaults; – persecutions based on religious, gender, sexual orientation and civil rights identities; – soul-crushing betrayals by loved ones; – death and destruction from hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters; – school children gunned down in their classroom; – the devastation caused by wars, armed conflicts, and acts of terrorism
There are recordings of terrified passengers on the Sept 11 United Airlines flight 93, praying with a 911 operator, a family member, and even telephone answering machines…. Despite those prayers for help – as heartfelt and sincere as ever such a plea could be, considering the circumstances – their hijacked plane plummeted down, killing all aboard.
Your god, [3] whom you believe has the ability to act in the natural world (which you believe it has created), has dropped the ball on countless of these and other “please send me help for…” requests – requests which so many of my friends and family and neighbors and coworkers have shared with me. These people are/were true believers in your same god, and had to/have to juggle and justify the devastating silence from that same god, as they, their loved ones, and the entire world continue to suffer.
Your fellow Christians call out for help to your god, both alone and in groups, as the false comfort of scriptural promises lie flaccid on the pages of their holy book. [4] Their god, your god, idly stands by, effectively deaf when it comes to rescuing the displaced Nigerian Christian woman, who screams Someone help me! Help me Jesus! as she is beaten and gang-raped in the refugee camp…and yet this god somehow found time to save you from the hassle of your allegedly broken cabinet hinge.
‘Twas interesting to do a bit of self-analysis on my reaction to this post, on why moiself ultimately decided I needed to write about it. Is it because I used to be a part of that world – or, at least I let everyone think that I was – and I carry guilt over not speaking up sooner/more often at the ultimately harmful (even if surface-seemingly silly) ideas that were propagated by it?
Translation: I should’ve called bullshit more often than I did, and I didn’t.
May you examine your criteria for what constitutes a miracle; May you take Sir Paul’s advice better than I did; May you remember that it’s never too early to prep a soft landing spot
for any partridges that may want to nest in your pear tree; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] As in, every now and then they do post some adorable animal videos.
[2] language toned down, if you can fucking believe that.
[3] Whom you believe exists so I will write as if it does…but I do not capitalize the name god, seeing as how it is not a proper name…and even if your deity existed its name would not likely be, god.
[4] “Whatever you will ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. (John 14:13; World English Bible; ) “Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth concerning anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in Heaven.” (Matthew 18:19 KJV )
[5] “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
( review excerpt ):“The 1970s were thick with New Age spiritual fads and movements, from the benign (crystals) to the unspeakably toxic and cultic (Jonestown). Somewhere in the middle of that woo-woo spectrum lies the work of Carlos Castaneda. A UCLA anthropology grad student turned self-appointed guru, Castaneda became a counterculture icon with the publication of his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, in 1968, purporting to find enlightenment via psychedelic mushrooms, peyote and the cryptic musings of Don Juan, an Indigenous spirit guide.
That book (…and those that followed) seduced millions of readers….That Castaneda’s books were largely flimflam isn’t in dispute. But Ru Marshall’s hefty biography, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Casteneda, reveals the depth of his deception — and…how easily people can be taken in by it.
‘He didn’t lie out of convenience or opportunism,’ Marshall writes. ‘He lied because he loved to. Lying was, for him, an art, and he did it exceptionally well.’…
Born in Peru (not Brazil, as he often claimed) in 1925 (not a decade later, as he often claimed), Castaneda demonstrated no particular intellectual promise. But in the mid-1950s…he developed an affection for writing, philosophy and history. While pursuing a graduate degree in anthropology in the ’60s, he grew enchanted with Buddhism, Theosophy, existentialism and Native American spirituality — all key elements of the spiritualist goulash he would eventually cook up for his books.
His timing was impeccable: From Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments to transcendental meditation, non-Christian religion and drugs fueled the zeitgeist. And Castaneda’s manuscript of The Teachings spoke effervescently about both.
It hardly seemed to matter that the book also demonstrated his ignorance of both: He had little understanding of psychoactive drugs (you don’t smoke shrooms, dude), and there was nothing meaningfully Yaqui about Don Juan. Still, the book — and their follow-ups… were massive bestsellers.”
The writings of trained [1] anthropologist Castaneda, in particular his Don Juan series, were all the rage during my early college years. If often seemed that, when walking down the residence hall hallways, you couldn’t spit (and I did try) without encountering a fellow student, slumped outside their dorm room, taking a break from cramming for their chemistry midterm by searching for some stoner wisdom from the mythical [2] Yaqui “Man of Knowledge” Don Juan Matus. Castaneda’s books portrayed Don Juan as a shaman (of the indigenous Yaqui people) who imparted his wisdom to Castenada via a purported apprenticeship Casteneda had with Don Juan in the early 1960s.
I tried to understand the appeal by reading [3] the first and some of the second of what would eventually be a series of quasi-spiritual drivel nine books. [4] My reaction to what I read was further evidence to moiself that I would never be as hip as my comrades…and I was relieved to be so.
I only said, You realize he made up all that shit?!?! a few times to Castenada/Don Juan true believers. The reactions my skepticism received made me realize that if the reason for my lack of mystical illumination after reading the books – the reason moiself couldn’t understand the deep spiritual enlightenment wisdom of the books’ teachings – was that I wasn’t stoned while reading them (as one devoted Castenda follower informed me), then that was a burden I was willing to shoulder. I got more enlightenment, and a better use of my time, via playing a game of racquetball with friends.
* * *
Department Of Sometimes The Analogy Can’t Be Stretched
The third segment had some key insights into why some sports develop and maintain a loyal audience while others – e.g., women’s sports – have a harder time doing so. Obstacles include good old-fashioned sexism…
…coupled with cultural traditions, familiarity, and generational inheritance.
Journalist Kate Fagan:
“When I worked at ESPN…I was always pitching women’s sports stories.
It almost never worked. Every once in a while, it would work. But this thing would happen when we would do a women’s sports segment. Many of the other men on the segment – they didn’t really do their homework. So they were kind of blah, then the segment would be kind of blah. There’s actually a term for this. It’s called gender bland. And then the segment would end, and the producer would be like, ‘See, this is why we never do women’s sports, ’cause they’re boring.
When a men’s segment fell flat, the problem was us. We would redo it. All right, come on, do your homework. Pick it up. We’re doing that again. When a segment on women’s sports fell flat, the problem was women’s sports. The reality is that, just existing in our culture, you will know a dozen men’s storylines… these things are literally push-notified to your phone. Or you’re at a bar or a doctor’s office, and the talking heads are giving you the latest NBA drama. In America, osmosis will have you knowing men’s sports storylines…”
Fagan:
“There’s so many veins of generational inheritance in sports. There’s the one that does take time and literal family generations where you can actually say, Why am I a New York Met fan? Well, ’cause my grandpa was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. And then they left for LA. And then the next team that we got was the New York Mets…. And there’s something bigger than yourself about that. I think why we love sports at its core is for the culture and community of it. And whether it’s your literal community, it’s like your city team, or you live out of state, and it’s your grandmother’s favorite team…That’s all part of community as well.
And then pair that – and they often go hand in hand – with cultural value….We want to be in on what culture is talking about.”
Fagan and other podcast guest spoke of factors that get people interested in more obscure/not-so-popular-in-our-culture sports – factors such as when we understand the stakes to the games and the storylines within them (e.g., the underdog USA ice hockey team battling the heavily favored USSR team; the Romanian gymnast struggling in poverty…). Then Fagan shared a story of how her father, who taught her basketball, guided her with two pieces of advice about the game, which she applies to life today:
” ‘Always make your last dribble the hardest’….
The other one I loved was…‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’ And that’s a standard basketball one, but…my wife and I will say it to each other all the time when we want to do something we’re not sure we should. It’s like, ‘Well, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’ “
Moiself’s mind immediately began trying to analogize that shot-taking adage to other sports and activities. For some reason, rock climbing was the first one I thought of:
“You survive 100 percent of the cliffs you don’t fall off of from the mountains you don’t climb….”
Hmmmm? Needs more work to reach pithy aphorism status.
* * *
Department Of Why AI Sucks
Moiself looks forward to AI applications that can assist doctors to more quickly distinguish between benign and malignant tumors, and which can also help medical researchers fine-tune existing/invent new treatments and for illnesses from cancer to tuberculosis…and help scientists discover non-toxic ways to eliminate air- and waterborne pollutants and develop non-toxic, renewable energy sources…
As for the rest, this sums up my feelings and fears. When it comes to writing (both fiction and nonfiction/journalism) and the creative arts, don’t be fooled by a seemingly bland term like, Artificial Intelligence. It’s counterfeit coding ; it’s plagiarism software.
BTW, that ingestion of written output…without consent, compensation, and credit…? It’s happened to moiself.
BTW 2.0: for any other published writers out there, whether or not you are involved in one of the many class action lawsuits re AI-enabled pirating, [5] AI-enabled pirating of your work has already happened or will happen to you, whether or not you are aware of it.
May you be able to spot spiritual flim-flam; May you not be the easiest person to fool; May you not fall off of the cliffs you do not climb; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] But never professionally employed as an anthropologist.
[2] As in, Casteneda pulled Don Juan (and their encounters) out of his ass.
[3] By the second book, it was more like skimming, as I found it so uninteresting I couldn’t concentrate on paying actual attention to the twaddle.
[4] The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, Tales of Power, The Second Ring of Power, The Eagle’s Gift, The Fire From Within, The Power of Silence, The Art of Dreaming.
[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
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.
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.
[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).
[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….
Active, reliable, sarcastic, affectionate, bipedal, cynical optimist, writer, freethinker, parent, spouse and friend, I am generous with my handy supply of ADA-approved spearmint gum and sometimes refrain from humming in public.
