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The Mental Gymnastics I’m Not Doing

March 21, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Me so happy, nature, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, science, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Mental Gymnastics I’m Not Doing

Department Of Good News First
Warning: Entering Parental Bragging Zone

 

 

On Tuesday I found out that daughter Belle, who works as Quality Assurance Manager for Schilling Cider,  passed the exam  [1]  (which was given during the  2025’s CiderCon convention ) to become certified as a professional Pommolier. 

My heart soars like a hawk.   [2]   Ya, hoo!!

 

 

A pommolier is the hard cider industry’s analog to a sommelier.  This, from from the American Cider Association website’s “Meet Our Certified Pommoliers ®  (where Belle will soon be listed):

“Becoming a Certified Pommelier is a remarkable achievement that celebrates dedication, perseverance, and a deep passion for the art and science of cider. It requires hours of rigorous study, sensory analysis practice, and a commitment to mastering the intricacies of cider. From learning about different apple varieties to understanding the complex flavors and aromas of ciders, Certified Pommeliers have honed their skills to expert levels. Their hard work and preparation not only showcase their knowledge and expertise but also exemplify their love for all things cider-related. Cheers to all Certified Pommeliers for their dedication and commitment to the craft!”

MH and I were impressed and also intimidated by the length and breadth of the knowledge Belle would be tested on, from the chemistry of brewing and fermentation to knowledge of/ability to identify obscure European apple varieties.  The test was given in February; she was told results would take (at least)  six weeks.  As we neared the results deadline I was a teensy bit anxious for her (the test is designed to fail at least 80% of those who take it).

Monday noontime I was at my favorite sushi restaurant here in Hillsboro, waiting to meet a friend for lunch, when I got Belle’s text.  I knew that she was at a local (Pacific Northwest) cider conference in Tacoma, and figured that, as she’d done earlier in the day, she was texting between symposiums to share conference stories.  Apparently the involuntary squeal of delight I emitted when I read Belle’s text (“ HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT:  I  DID ITTTTTTTT ”) was loud enough for the two sushi chefs to hear, as they both looked up from slicing saki and maguro, nodded across the sushi bar at me, and said, “Congratulations.”

I thanked them (and the people sitting at the two tables on either side of moiself, who also smiled at/congratulated me), and explained that there indeed was good news, but it was about my daughter….and would you like to know what a pommolier is?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Seasonal News Second

Happy Vernal Equinox, y’all. 

Hope you yogis were inspired to do 108 Sun salutations to mark the turning of the season.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Yet Another Sign Of The Impending Apocalypse

Dateline: Sunday 9:55-ish: MH and moiself  are sitting in our respective Norwegian “stressless” recliner chairs, after having watched  Ordinary People.  Despite the admittedly comfy chairs’ claim to fame, we are actually stressed – as in, under emotional duress – as each of us has forgotten how achingly devastating the movie is.  We exchange comments about that, then MH grows silent, looks out at his feet resting on his chair’s ottoman, and asks, “Do these socks make my feet look really long?”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Ugly Americans  [3]   Down Under
Sub-Department  Of One Of The More Stupid Attempts At Self-Redemption/Justification Moiself  Has Read In A Long Time…

…the source of which would be the story about an American “social media influencer” (Instagram handle,  Sam Jones from Montana )   [4]   who was visiting Australia.  One evening while traveling on a remote road this influencer spotted a mother and baby wombat off the side of the road.  Instead of acting like a normal/respectful person and taking a photograph of the animals, she exited her vehicle, snatched the baby from its mother and ran back to her car (where she apparently had a camera/phone mounted).  She held the wriggling baby wombat up to record its distress, which she narrated, while both baby and mama wombat squealed their displeasure:

“ ‘Mama’s right there, and she’s pissed, ’ the woman said in a video posted online. She went on to release the joey   [5]   on the roadside in the darkness, illuminated only by her car’s headlights….

The indignation was bipartisan…Tony Burke, said officials would review the woman’s visa to see if any immigration laws had been breached, and that any future applications from her would receive intense scrutiny. The government did not release her name but Australian news media identified her as Samantha Strable.

The drumbeat of criticism included calls to deport the woman. On Friday morning, ABC Australia, the national broadcaster, sent out a news alert saying she had left Australia….

Mark Heinz, a reporter for the Wyoming-based Cowboy State Daily, said he believed the woman in question was…Ms. Strable, whom he had interviewed in 2023 about her enthusiasm for hunting….

In the interview with Mr. Heinz, Ms. Strable, then a resident of Pinedale, Wyo., recounted her adventures of having hunted red stag in Chile with a bow and killed pigs and wallabies in New Zealand. ….

Detailing her pig hunting experience in New Zealand, in which dogs corner wild pigs allowing for the hunter to plunge a knife into the animal’s heart, she said it was ‘intense.’

‘Honestly, I cried,’ she said in the interview. ‘I don’t like killing. I like the hunting, I like the chase. It’s not fun to see anything die.’ “

( excerpts, my emphases, from “Outrage in Australia After American Woman Grabs a Baby Wombat,” by Victoria Kim, NY Times, 3-14-25 )

 

 

No surprise ( to moiself ) that this self-aggrandizing, social media slut influencer who terrified and stressed an infant animal and its mother, is a hunter.  And what a bummer to read that, after all the effort Strable put into her “adventures,” the hunter claims not to enjoy the end result of the hunt.  What a shock, that it wasn’t  fun for Ms. Strable to see the wild pig die – the living creature whom she’d sought out and terrorized by siccing dogs to chase and corner it – the living creature into whose heart she’d then plunged a knife ?!

 

Poor baby.

 

Yo, Strable: None of the animals you killed had to die.  The wild pig didn’t have to die, Ms. Strable. You could have just left it alone.  Or enjoyed the challenge – without using tracking dogs to terrorize the poor creature –  of getting close enough to the pig to take a picture of it.  Or enjoyed the “chase” by chasing a living being (a fellow homo sapiens?) who voluntarily agreed to participate in it.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Wanted Distraction While On The Elliptical;
What I Got Was An Aha Moment

I’ve been doing my pre-breakfast workout for the past few weeks while re-watching some Grey’s Anatomy seasons that I don’t have much memory of.  Dateline: last Friday morning I’m on Season 11; it’s the heart-rending episode where Dr. April Kepper gives birth to her and her husband Dr. Jackson Avery’s doomed/premature baby.  Relevant character background: April is a fervent evangelical Christian;    [6]   Jackson is an atheist.

April is distraught after an ultrasound at 24 weeks gestation gives bad news about her pregnancy.  Further testing reveals that her fetus has the most severe form of a devastating genetic disorder,    [7]  which will cause it to die either before birth or shortly thereafter.  April is gutted by the news, and after learning that her baby’s bones are already starting to break in utero, she opts for what her supportive husband and their OBs and pediatricians recommend as the least awful choice: to induce labor, and thus be able to hold their baby before it dies.

At one point, when April and Jackson are discussing their options, she is a walking open wound, ranting about how unfair it all is.  She’s believed in her god all of her life; she has followed what she thought was her calling, from her god, to be a doctor and to heal the sick; she is a believer; she has tried to do good; she has prayed; she’s done everything right and this is so unfair, so unfair….  She rages on about the unfairness, then adds….

“…and it’s *cruel.”

All her husband can do is listen in supportive agony.  And I found moiself  wondering if    [8]   he was thinking what I was thinking:   that while what has happened is certainly awful, it’s only *cruel* if you believe in (a) god.

It is only cruel because April believes in a god that made this world, and that she believes her god can and does act in this world, which leaves her with only cruel options:

*  either her so-called loving god gave her baby this horrible death sentence, or

* seeing as how April has expressed how she believes her god is all-powerful and all loving and that all over the world, “miracles do happen,” that when no miracle happens it is because her god is choosing not to fix what it could fix.

 

 

Translation:  What is cruel, actually, are her beliefs; what is cruel is her religious faith, which has filled her heart and mind with cruel, supernatural nonsense.

When people experience such tragedies they go through pain and mourning, the what-ifs, the sorrow, the frustration, the anger… This is true for people who hold any religious faith, as well as for people who are religion-free.  All of us suffer when tragedy strikes.

But Humanists, Atheist, Freethinkers, Skeptics – we who are religion-free – do not have the added burden of the gut-twisting sense of betrayal, of second-guessing of what we could have or should have done re our faith-based rituals, of agonizing over what our supposedly all-powerful god did or did not choose to do.  When tragedy strikes, we whose worldviews are free from superstition/religion/theology also suffer the same emotions of grief and loss, *except* for that huge one, because we acknowledge the truth of the natural world.

We know that we are neither punished/cursed by tragedy nor rewarded/blessed by prosperity; we know that when our loved one dies that there is no supernatural cause of, nor relief from, our suffering.  We know that sometimes, shit just happens…which means that a core part of being human is to wade through the shit, relying on and accepting the comfort and support of our fellow human beings.

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Things That Never Get Old   [9]

Welcome to yet another new feature of the new year, which may continue on the third Friday of each month.  Or…not.

When was the last time you rewatched Airplane!    [10] 

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [11]

“So I’m not really interested in the mental gymnastics that allow a person to believe
in both a loving god and baby cancer. Over and out.”

( anonymous poster on online religious debate bulletin board )

*   *   *

May you have reasons to be audibly delighted in sushi bars;
May you be free from the gut-twisting mental gymnastics of theism;
May you enjoy a joke/scene/song that never gets old;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] given by the American Cider Association, to cider professionals qualified/nominated to take it.

[2] Little Big Man.

[3] The pejorative “Ugly American” originates from a 1958 novel of the same name.  The book portrayed Americans’ attitudes ( be they tourists or business tycoons wishing to do business with/in foreign countries) toward non-Americans as those of ignorance, arrogance, and condescension.  The term has come to mean a stereotype of loud, ill-mannered, insensitive American tourists who offend the citizens of the countries they travel to.

[4] There is a “title” or job description that has had its 15 minutes of bullshit fame and needs to go the way of leech collectors, phrenologists, caddy butchers, and other obsolete professions.

[5] A baby wombat.  Yep, the same term is used for a baby kangaroo.

[6] Which doesn’t stop her from having fervent premarital sex with Jackson in hospital on call rooms – but this seems to be part of the contract those doctors working in Seattle have to sign.

[7]   osteogenesis imperfecta II (aka “brittle bone disease”)

[8] Well, if that character were real….but, although that was fiction, thousands of people face such dilemmas every day, around the world.

[9] At least, to ever-youthful moiself.

[10] Best disaster film parody ever.  In fact, I recall reading a comment from one film historian about how studios stopped making disaster films for a time after that movie’s release, because no one would take them seriously.  

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

The Best Advice I’m Not Giving

December 27, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holidays, Isms (religion), music, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Best Advice I’m Not Giving

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself  is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard’s pear tree.   [1]

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

 

*   *   *

A belated Happy Winter Solstice to all.  And to my fellow yogis, if this tradition is in your practice, I hope you had a memorable 108 Sun Salutations.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Year End Lists

As seems to be the plague custom at this time of every year, The Posting Of the Lists ®   is in full swing.  From movies to concerts to podcast episodes to soup recipes, the critics and pundits scurry to list their best (or worst)  _____ of the year.

Moiself  has but one entry to contribute in the best of ____category.  Unfortunately, I’d love to give attribution but can’t recall where I saw this.  So, to whomever came up with this phrase     [2]    to define social media’s power to make users feel left out,    [3]    I nominate you for  Best Description of The Downside Tech’s Effect on Our Collective Psyches – a very competitive category this year:

“Inventing a new way to feel miserable.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of But If You Do Have To Read At Least One
Best Of/Worst Of List….

…It might as well be the one excerpted here:

“If you are on the Internet long enough, there comes a year when you will be forced to rank something. Now it is my time. So I am taking the liberty of going through the 100 holiday songs being foisted upon us everywhere and ranking them from Most Especially Heinous to Best….

100. ‘Little Drummer Boy.’ My hatred for this song is well-documented. I think it is because the song takes approximately 18 years to sing and does not rhyme. The concept of the song is bad. The execution of the song is bad. There is not even an actual drum in the dang song, there is just someone saying PA-RUM-PA-PUM-PUM, which, frankly, is not a good onomatopoeia and probably is an insult to those fluent in Drum. I cannot stand it. Nothing will fix it, even the application of David Bowie to it. Every year I say, ‘I hate this song,’ and every year people say, ‘Have you heard David Bowie’s version?’ Yes. Yes, I have. It is still an abomination.

101. ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ A better name for this song would be ‘I Assume You Cannot Hear Anything I Am Saying and so I Am Going to Repeat All the Words Twice.’ This contains things that in another, better song, would be welcome: A star! A star! A shepherd boy! Rhetorical questions! But the problem with this song is the problem that arises any time you are forced to repeat something you said because someone didn’t hear it properly: namely, that you didn’t phrase the thing very well in the first place and having to say it again just makes you more painfully aware of how awkward your wording was. “WITH A VOICE AS BIG AS THE SEA.” What? “WITH A VOICE AS BIG AS THE SEA,” you shout, regretting that you ever thought it was a good idea to introduce a simile here.

( A ranking of 100 — yes, 100 — Christmas songs, Alexandra Petri,
Washington Post, 12-24-24 )

Whaddya waiting for – follow the link for just 98 more.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of This In Between Time

This week, the one between Christmas and New Year’s, is one of moiself’s  favorite weeks of the year.  I thought it should have its own name, and as it turns out, others thought the same:

“ ‘Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings,’ says Zuzu Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. But that incessant chiming you hear might also be the ping of emails bouncing back with out-of-office notifications as the year — and our motivation to work — grinds to a halt. Welcome to Twixmas, aka Dead Week, or Feral Week: that stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve when we get the urge to take off and tune out, and our outstanding projects, deadlines and other responsibilities become 2025 You’s problem. Whether they’ve actually gone on vacation or have just mentally checked out, many people see it as a time to (hopefully) rest and do less.”

( excerpt from “Some call it Twixmas. Others call it Feral Week. The period between
Christmas and New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to do nothing — and experts say we need it.”
yahoolife.com  )

That article, and the Dead/Feral Week moniker, is mostly about what happens in and to one’s business life, or work life, during this in-between week.  I prefer the Twixmas label.  The effects of this week, whether positive or negative – or a combination of both or just plain…weird – are arguably most acute outside of the workplace. 

 

 

Twixmas feels both charmed and bizarre for several reasons, some if not most of which can be attributed to the simple disruption of routine, as you take a break from your regular schedule (many people travel or take vacation days; kids are out of school; some businesses close).  Other reasons include the fact that no matter how much you may anticipate the holidays, the genuine positive feelings they can bring exist alongside the cultural pressure to celebrate, feel joyful and grateful, or reflect upon the past year and anticipate resolutions for the coming year….  And then there is the letdown, when the great buildup seems to be all over.  Or, you may feel guilty when you don’t feel like celebrating with your family, or you may experience buyers and eaters remorse ( Yikes, I overspent on gifts/over-indulged on all the sugar treats).

But, if you can manage it, Twixmas can be a wonderful and even rejuvenating limbo time.  Get yourself to set aside the what-ifs and what-is-to-comes: relax in the Now, and treat yourself to whatever twinkles *your* star, or just take a walk around the block to enjoy (read: make fun of) your neighbor’s holiday light displays.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of One More Thing About Lists

One of these days I’ll get around to sharing my list of Best Advice Given And/Or Received.   [4]

When it comes to giving advice, those most in need of such guidance are often the least likely to heed it (and certainly are not prone to soliciting it).  Nevertheless, moiself  shall fling this into the ether, with best hopes for even a shred of enlightenment for the kind of  Young Men Working With The Public Who Either Have An Ocular Impediment Which Renders Them Unable To See Women Over The Age of Forty Or Whose Attitude Makes Them Treat Such Women As If They Were Invisible. ®  

Specifically, this advice goes out to a certain morose, indifferent, drug store clerk:

Do not pivot from ignoring to flirting with the middle-aged woman
in your checkout line after you notice she’s buying a personal lubricant.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [5]

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought To Hold For The New Year

“The best explanation for ‘the good old days’ is a bad memory.
When we take an objective look at how the country is doing and which way it has been going, we see that American life is not a hellscape of carnage and decline.  What stands out is a resilient democracy that tends to recover from setbacks and make halting progress.”
( Harvard professor, author, and FFRF honorary President Steven Pinker, in his column,
“Trump says the country is ‘dying.’ The data says otherwise”  )

*   *   *

May you have fun composing your own year-end lists;
May you stop inventing ways to make yourself miserable;
May  you have an enjoyable Twixmas;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Specifically, in the pear tree daughter Belle purchased and (with the help of MH) planted many years ago

[2] I’m thinking, a writer for The Atlantic?

[3] As in running across pictures of/reading about family/friend/neighbor/coworker activities that didn’t include us.

[4] Which means that one of these days I’ll have to do a better job of compiling that list.

[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

The Mirror I’m Not Looking Through

September 20, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, radio & podcasts, school, The Write Stuff (literary life), TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Mirror I’m Not Looking Through

Department Of The Latest Lie

Dateline Sunday, 7:40a; morning walk; listening to a podcast.  The podcast pauses for a commercial break, which begins thusly: a young, male, cynical/world-weary voice says,

“We all know credit cards can be stolen, but you know what’s harder?
Stealing your *face*.”

The ad goes on to tout a feature in the Apple wallet app which uses your facial ID to authenticate your purchases.  The point of the ad is to get you to use this feature for all of your purchases.  Because, you know, if you stop using your credit cards the cards won’t get stolen, and of course, your face never will be appropriated by others.

 

 

You may have heard about the very real, very disturbing problems with facial recognition technology, including the technology’s gender and racial biases.  We have been told by the AI industry that, for facial identification software development purposes, in order to fine tune the facial recognition capabilities you need as many people as possible – read: everyone – to enable facial recognition on their phones and other devices, to increase the data base for “training” the AI facial recognition technology.     [1]  The more faces it has to study, the more it will learn.

 

 

The very technology allowing facial ID authentication is the very technology which will be used, by the inevitable  Someones, to alter facial IDs and hijack more face images.  As the AI industry acquires more and more images for their identifications software, they will have a more comprehensive base for the manipulation and imitation of existing images.   Apple wallet and others aim to convince you that their facial recognition ID is just another handy tool, but in moiself’s  not-so-humble-opinion, you are the tool if you participate.

 

 This public service rant announcement has been brought to you by
I-may-have-been-born-at night-but-it-wasn’t-last-night
(a.k.a. the Pay Attention Society)

*   *   *

Department Of Apt Political Analogies

You know that kid in grade school, who had passed gas or who was about to, and who always, preemptively, made the accusation to steer suspicion elsewhere:

Who farted?

Of course, everyone else eventually figured out it was that kid (ala, Boyle’s Law of not-so-noble gasses,  “He who smelt it, dealt it.”) .  

We have the You-Know-Who led, far-right Republicans claiming that there will be election fraud in November.  Translation: they are the ones who are planning to, literally and figuratively, fart all over the polling places while pointing their fingers elsewhere.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Yet Another Reminder

These days there seem to be certain kinds of readers who complain about “…not seeing themselves” –  or people “like” themselves – in books.  Particularly, in books of both historical and contemporary fiction.

 

“Poor baby….”

 

Moiself  believes this complaint is related to the knee-jerk critiques of cultural appropriation and the “write what you know” paranoid, victim-oriented, censorious mindset creeping into editorial – and unfortunately, readership – cultures.

News flash:
Novels and short stories aren’t supposed to be mirrors,
they’re supposed to be doors.
A book is a door to discovering The Other:
other thoughts; other worlds; other peoples.

And The Others can even be those you mistakenly think are “like” you, due to similarities in skin color, gender, language, worldview, economic class, etc.  The paradoxical reward of reading about others is that it can be a powerful way to learn about yourself.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Jesus Axial Tilt Is The Reason For The Season  [2]

 

 

 

Happy Autumnal Equinox to all!  This year it falls on Sunday September 22.  And to my fellow yogis, if this tradition is in your practice, moiself  hopes you will have a memorable 108 Sun Salutations.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of, Seriously, Don’t Those Ad Writers Know
What That Phrase Euphemistically Refers To?

Dateline: Monday afternoon scrolling through local news headlines on my phone (read: stalling) before exercising.  I find it odd that, within only three finger swipes across the screen I  come across two medical-related ads which use similar phrasing.

Ad #1: “Multiple myeloma is silent, but deadly – know the signs.”    [3]

Not to be outdone, Ad #2: “Plaque psoriasis is silent, but deadly…”

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [4]

“If there is a god, it knows exactly what it would take to convince me and has refused to provide it. In fact, it has gone to great lengths to hide any evidence of its existence. That doesn’t seem like a deity that wants to be worshiped to me.”

(  David G. McAfee       [5] )

 

*   *   *

May your reading open doors and not the reflect mirrors;
May you avoid the Far Right Flatulence ® in your particular voting venues;
May you celebrate the return of Autumn;   [6]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Training for faces other than young white males, we are told, which are the primary training tools. 

[2] For all of the seasons.

[3] Yet another farting reference, in the same blog.  You’re welcome.

[4] “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

[5] From his website bio:  “David G. McAfee is a Religious Studies Graduate, a journalist, and author of The Belief Book, a children’s book explaining the origins of beliefs and religion, among other titles…. (McAfee) believes strongly that religious education and history should be taught in public schools…where general knowledge about those topics is severely lacking. It is only by understanding how the religious systems work, and not by ignoring them completely, that McAfee says we can help others to make rational decisions about them.”

[6] And you don’t even have to do 108 Sun Salutations to do so.

The Husband I’m Not Tempting

June 21, 2024

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, exercise & fitness, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, Isms (religion), movies, music, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), theatre, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Husband I’m Not Tempting

Department Of Belated Summer Wishes

Happy Summer Solstice to all!  And to my fellow yogis, if this tradition is in your practice, I hope you had a memorable 108 Sun Salutations.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Get Thee Behind Me, Satan
Sub-Department Of Stop Tempting My Husband, Bitch

Dateline: Saturday morning, circa 8 am, sitting at the breakfast table with MH.  MH picks up his copy of yesterday’s (Saturday) NYT crossword puzzle, which he hasn’t yet finished; he works on it a bit, then tells me he’s stuck with the 49 across clue and the down clues which cross the answer are not helping him.

Moiself  did the puzzle yesterday but can’t remember the clue.  MH reads it to me:

” ‘Noted tempter’ …I  can’t figure out the missing vowel;
I have “S _ _ AN.  Susan?  Susan is a noted tempter?”

He’s serious, and I can’t stop laughing.

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Another Family Contemplation Of The Theory Of Relativity
Sub-Department Of My Daughter, The Content Creator

Dateline: Tuesday am.  We’ve had some home maintenance projects – new gutters and downspouts installed/exterior house painting – that are 99% completed.  MH shared pictures of the house exterior on our family’s message board, so that our offspring could see the progress.  The following hijinks exchange ensued.

MH:
All done. Except for a gutter adjustment tomorrow.

Moiself:
Actually/unfortunately, the gutter adjustment isn’t until Thursday.

MH:
I’m living in an alternate timeline.

(daughter) Belle:
If you don’t actually go to sleep tonight, then maybe Thursday is tomorrow?

Moiself:
Don’t go getting all quantum time bending on us.

Belle:
Is time a fixed variable that we have no influence over? Or is it a mutable part of the universe that we simply haven’t figured out how to manipulate yet?  Is our perception of time the definition of it?  So many things to consider.
But yeah, for now we’ll just say Thursday.

Moiself:
This conversation is so going in my blog.

 

Yeah, but what time is dinner?

*   *   *

Department Of The Best Pasta Shape Ever   [1]

That would be Sfoglini’s reginetti.  Soon I will be ordering another case of it (the whole grain, which is my fave) because I’m down to three boxes, and moiself  cannot be reginetti-less.

What is not to love about this shape – it’s like a teensy-weensy lasagna noodle.  Makes me happy just to look at it.

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Respectfully But Vehemently Disagree

Moiself  recently heard a Tony-nominated playwright interviewed on an NPR show ,   [2]  during which he talked about his years of struggle to write his play, and how he scraped by due to the kindness of friends.  He used his experience as an example of why “we need government funding” of the arts.  I guess he meant we need more funding than we already have ?  For as I heard him whine speak about the subject, I wondered if he was somehow not aware of the NEA and other state and local government grants and funds, as well as the hundreds of private individuals and organizations offering artistic grants and funding?

 

 

Dateline: Sunday evening watching the latter half of the 77th annual Toni awards. There is that same playwright – David Adjmi, accepting a Tony award his award for Best Play for Stereophonic.  In his acceptance speech, Adjmi gushed about how “this was a very hard journey, to get this play up here….” and named the friends who let him sleep on their couch for seven years so that he could write the play, and then, again:

“It’s really hard to make a career in the arts; we need to fund the arts in America – it is the hallmark of a civilized society….”

Admi brought himself to tears as he recalled his struggle.  Of course when he made the plea for funding there was the obligatory applause from Supporters Of The Arts ®, who must whoop it up reverently with their version of, say amen.  Preach, brother!

As I do with most preaching, be it religious or artistic, I’m listening, then thinking…

 

 

Adjmi decries how hard it is to earn a living in the arts. This is nothing new; it always has been hard to earn a living in the arts.  It always should be hard to earn a living in the arts.

I’m not denying his or any composer, singer, actor, writer, painter, potter or other artist’s struggle.  I *am* calling for all who have chosen to pursue their art to check their privilege – their sense of exceptionalism –  if they think, for whatever reason, that their particular job should not be a struggle, and/or is deserving of endowment.

Struggle is the common lot of most people in the working world, who do not receive any kind of artistic accolades nor have opportunites, e.g., award shows, for public forums in which they may complain about their struggles. They plow the fields, fix the cars bag the groceries manufacture the semi-conductors, empty the bedpans, collect the lab results, interpret the data, bake the bread, comfort the bereaved, put out the fires, clean the kettles, sweep the movie theaters, mend the crab pots, patrol the demilitarized zones…

Adjmi didn’t mentioned receiving financial aid or grants for Stereophonic, and his play’s success belies his plea for funding.  Somehow, he managed to produce this work of art without the government’s help – and  let us always remember that the translation of “the government,” means the tax dollars of moiself and y’all.

Save for those rare artists born to wealth (or the nepotistic receivers of artistic funding and opportunities), life in any artistic field has always been that of financial struggle before commercial success (and often afterward), usually involving multiple side jobs and other means of support.  How would the playwright who thinks there should be more public funding of the arts, and others who hold similar sentiments, define what would constitute more support of “the arts,” and who will get to define what is an art worthy of support, and which artists will get support, and for what length of time such support is given….?

There are museums and art galleries wherein I’ve lingered for hours, and others I’ve fled after15 minutes because, content, meh.  I’m a fan of performing arts and patronize live music, theater and other events.  There’ve been plays and concerts I’ve attended/movies I’ve seen where I left feeling entertained and even aesthetically transformed, and others – even a few ones which won prestigious awards and were recommended by “everyone”  [3]  –   where I left during intermission, or if I forced myself to stay to the bitter end, I left the venue thinking, Holy imaginative waste of time, how did this piece of embarrassingly trivial, reductionist, hackneyed crapola ever get produced? It’s a bad enough that I spent money on a ticket, but to subsidize this playwright’s/director’s/performer’s delusion that they are “artists” worthy of third party “support”….?

 

 

Sorry, starving artists.  Eat less, get a second job, a third job, a patron, a couch to surf on.  Struggle, like the rest of us. Government support for the arts? You take their money, you play by their rules.  In Russia during the USSR era there was little art seen by the public apart from that which was funded – or allowed – by the government.  Remember any great works of socialist realism that came out of the Soviet-sponsored art?

Socialist Realism
A form of modern realism imposed in Russia by Stalin following his rise to power after the death of Lenin in 1924, characterized in painting by rigorously optimistic pictures of Soviet life painted in a realist style

The doctrine was formally proclaimed by Maxim Gorky at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, although not precisely defined. In practice, in painting it meant using realist styles to create highly optimistic depictions of Soviet life. Any pessimistic or critical element was banned…. It was quite simply propaganda art, and has an ironic resemblance to the Fascist realism imposed by Hitler in Germany (see ITAL Entartete Kunst – degenerate art       [4] ).

(excerpt from the Tate Museum’s “Socialist Realism,” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socialist-realism  )

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [5]

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I love it when I come across a new (to me) George Carlin witticism; I hate it when I remember that Carlin died years ago and isn’t here to reflect on today’s wackadoodle.

*   *   *

May you have strength when tempted by Susan;
May your art remain free of government supports and constraints;
May you decide to have a favorite pasta shape;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] As decreed by the Most Omnipotent Italian Saucy  Epicurean  Loving  Foodie,  as in, moiself.

[2] Can’t remember which program…a Fresh Air interview, most likely?

[3] for example, not to deny the creativity and hard work of Lin Manuel Miranda, but I couldn’t abide Hamilton (or In the Heights) – both of which I so wanted and expected to like (or maybe, thought I *should* like).  With the rapid-fire, rap-ish dialog, I felt like the cast was shouting at me the whole time.

[4] Degenerate art ( Entartete Kunst)  is the label the Nazis applied to art they didn’t approve of – any art which did not extol or depict “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” ( family, home and church), which was the Nazi party’s and Hitler’s view of the virtues of German life. 

[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

The History I’m Not Finding Surprising

June 23, 2023

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, freethought/humanism, health & wellness, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), politics, The Write Stuff (literary life), Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The History I’m Not Finding Surprising

Happy Summer Solstice to all!  And to my fellow yogis, if this tradition is in your practice, I hope you had a memorable 108 Sun Salutations.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Hearing What Is Arguably The Understatement Of The Millenia
While Listening To A Fresh Air Podcast

“There is a very dark part of the Catholic church’s history…”

“No shit, Sherlock,” moiself  snorted, before FA host Terry Gross could finish her opening sentence.  Nevertheless, Terry persisted…with her interview of journalist and professor Rachel Swarns.

“There is a very dark part of the Catholic church’s history, that has only recently come to the attention of the public. For more than a century, the church financed its expansion and its institutions with the profits from the enslaved people the church bought and sold.  Without the enslaved, the Catholic church in the United States as we know it today would not exist…

‘…the priests prayed for the salvation of the souls of the people they owned, even as they bought and sold their bodies.’ “

( “How the Catholic Church Profited from Slavery – the ‘272’ explains how,”
Fresh Air, 6-13-23 )

 

 

For anyone shocked by the idea that religious folk and/or those under their sway would do such a thing, may I remind y’all that we’ve been warned about this for centuries:

“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities.”
(Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer and philosopher, who somehow managed to escape the guillotine despite his anti-religion pronouncements.     [1]  )

Subdepartment Of An Excerpt From The FA Podcast Which Demonstrates Why I Am Not Terry Gross Nor Am I The Host Of Any Other Interview Show:

Terry Gross:
“You’re Catholic and you’re Black. When you first found out about the church’s role in slavery…you certainly didn’t learn that in school. What was your reaction?”

Rachel Swarns:
“I was astounded…. I have a better than average familiarity with the 19th century and slavery….This history was certainly familiar to historians, but it is not well-known…. I am Black and Catholic. I had no idea. And the reason why is that…enslaved people have been largely left out of the origin story that is traditionally told about the Catholic Church….”

TG:
“Has it changed your relationship to the Catholic Church?”

RS:
“…it has, but perhaps not in the way that you might expect. I am…a practicing Catholic.”

Moiself , in my dreams, standing in for TG:
WHY  ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

RS (my emphases):
“…in a lot of ways, it has actually deepened my connection to the church…. as a Black Catholic, I didn’t always see myself in the church. I think I saw the church as it’s often portrayed, as kind of a northern church, an immigrant church. But now I see myself in the church. And these families who were so determined to hold onto their faith and to make the church true to what it said it was – a universal church, a church that welcomed and accepted everyone….”

 

 

Swarns’ phrasing, re (Black) people “determined to hold on to their faith,” both frosts my butt and breaks my heart.  The basic idea – clinging to the religion you’ve been taught – is understandable with regard to desperation and survival instincts.  But to hold on to a faith that was not theirs to begin with – a faith forced upon enslaved Africans after they’d been kidnapped, forcibly shipped across an ocean and stripped of their own faiths and spiritual traditions? This is not, IMO, something to admire, but to lament.

 

 

Again, the human instinct to survive, and the psychological phenomenon known as The Stockholm Syndrome – a coping mechanism wherein people in a captive or abusive situation develop positive feelings toward their captors or abusers over time –  make such choices understandable.  But it is this very same, naïve, survivalist, WTF ?!?!? mindset which allows myth and superstition (and the resulting abuses that accompany such beliefs) to also survive, and even flourish.  Teaching those they enslaved to lean upon Christianity –  with its scriptures authorizing, rationalizing, and even promoting slavery  [2]  and its admonitions for slaves to obey their masters   [3]  –   proved to be a most effective antidote to that which slaveholders feared most: a slave rebellion.

 

 

*   *   *

Yet Another Illustration Of The Reasons Why…

…in this “everyone is offended” literary atmosphere, moiself  considers it a wise marshalling of my mental health faculties, to no longer be submitting work for publication.  Witness what has just happened to author Elizabeth Gilbert, she of White Women Whine  Eat Pray Love renown.

” US author Elizabeth Gilbert is pulling her novel The Snow Forest from publication, in response to a backlash from Ukrainian readers unhappy about the book being set in Russia….”
( “Gilbert withdraws Russia-set novel from publication,” Books+publishing 6-14-23 )

Worse than what happened to Gilbert is her reaction to it.  She fell into the ultimate trap for a writer: she didn’t wait for publishers to censor her; she censored herself.

 

 

“The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech… is not the direct interference of any official body. Intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.…
The sinister fact about literary censorship… is that it is largely voluntary.”
( George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984 )

 

The ALA’s trendy button may soon have a companion: “I write books and ban them myself before anyone else can.”

 

Excerpt from a PEN America’s town hall-style discussion on writers and self-censorship (described on their website as “…a sprawling, impassioned but overwhelmingly civil conversation among four prominent writers about art, identity, appropriation and the state of free expression…”):

“John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University and author of the new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, opened the discussion…on a blunt note. ‘To be a writer today, in the current climate, is to be someone who certainly probably censors themselves in some way,‘ he said.

…he recalled an academic talk he gave in the mid-1990s, about Creole languages and women, which some in the audience chose to interpret as offensive and sexist.

Listening to their criticisms, he said, ‘I thought, I don’t deserve this. And I decided I would never again say or write anything about issues having to do with women or sexism.’ “

(“Is Self-censorship a problem for writers?”  NYtimes 12-9-21 )

And another rational voice is silenced…or at least diverted.

 

 

*   *   *

Department of Is Zen Enlightenment for Real?

A Freethought Today blog post, Is Zen Enlightenment for Real?, caught my attention with its provocative title.  I’ve been reading about Buddhism for many years – not for the sake of personal practice (although I do use Buddhist-informed techniques via mindfulness meditation) but for the same reasons I read about Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant forms of Christianity, and other religions and/or spiritual traditions:  to try to comprehend how fear/ignorance superstition have ruled the world for so long my fellow human beings.

As I understand it, the answer to the oft-posed question, Is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion?  is, *yes.*  Buddhism can be – and is – practiced as both, around the world.   [4]

Many years ago, I attended an annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation at the FFRF’s headquarter city, Madison WI.  I was attending solo, and struck up conversations with another “solos,” one of whom I’ll call Dan.  I can’t remember how we got on the topic, but Dan told me that his wife, Evelyn, who was from China, and that Evelyn was raised, as she put it, “both Buddhist and (nominally) Christian,” as were her family and neighbors.

Evelyn had said this when she and Dan were first dating and had begun sharing their respective family stories.  When Dan asked her how that was possible – to be both Buddhist and Christian – she told him how.  Her story caused Dan to look at missionary “conversion” statistics with a keen, if jaundiced, eye:  Evelyn and her family, and many people from their village, were “Rice Christians.”  The RC term is something I’d heard before; nevertheless, my foreknowledge of the phenomenon did not lessen the impact of what Dan told me.

Evelyn’s family, like most families in her rural Chinese village, were very poor.  In the early through mid-1900s, Christian missionaries came to her village.  The villagers, many of whom were closet skeptics as to their own culture’s spiritual traditions, were not impressed by the missionaries’ proselytizing; thus, once their curiosity re the strange Americans had been slaked, they avoided the church services the missionaries invited them to attend.  However, the villagers ended up signing the missionaries’ religious enrollment forms, because if they did so the missionaries would give them huge sacks of rice (and send pictures of the enrollment forms – proof of success in converting Chinese heathens! –  back to the American churches and individuals funding the missions).

 

How many pounds of rice?  Hell yeah – I mean, Hallelujah! – I believe!

 

Dan attended FFRF events solo because Evelyn was not interested in any organization which had even a remote connection to religion.  She was dismissive of “American religions,” and held her greatest scorn for Americans who, while not born into a Buddhist culture, claimed to be Buddhist and/or revere the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist teachers.  Dan said Evelyn cringed whenever she encountered non-Asian Buddhist Americans (“Amerboos“ she called them).  In Evelyn’s experience, such people knew nothing but “Buddhism light:” a Westernized version of Buddhism which had little relation to the superstition-laden, reality-denying religion of her homeland.  Evelyn said Amerboos had no idea that, beyond the mindfulness techniques which have been scientifically demonstrated to be useful, Buddhism is just another religion/superstition in many places around the world.  For example, in the rural China where Evelyn was from, upon the death of family members and for other major life events, villagers felt pressured into paying Buddhist priests to perform ritual house cleansings and/or blessings.

Dan and moiself  had an interesting discussion about the subject, including the idea that yes, Buddhism can be just another superstition/religion exploiting the poor and ignorant…but can’t it also be practiced in a more modern way, ala those who claim to follow Buddhist teachings as a secular philosophy?

 

“But those westernized Buddhists always want to put me on a carb-free diet.”

 

And after that long-winded introduction, on to that Freethought Now blog post, which provoked this portion of moiself’s  post.  The author wrote “please share this article,” and I shall do so in its entirety (my emphases):

“I’m intrigued by Zen meditation as a supposed path to enlightenment.

I’ve tried repeatedly — lying silent in bed, blanking out my mind, hearing nothing but the rhythm of my breath, seeing nothing but dark blurs behind my eyelids. But all it does is put me to sleep. In the end, I never get a smidgeon of enlightenment. I’m still just the same old me.

I wonder whether anyone finds enlightenment — or whether the quest is self-deceptive, a fantasy leading nowhere.

American Buddhism is a mushrooming field with many gurus. It’s followed by intellectuals such as brilliant atheist Sam Harris. Researcher John Horgan wrote some years ago: ‘The number of Buddhist centers in the United States has more than doubled to well over 1,000. As many as 4 million Americans now practice Buddhism, surpassing the total of Episcopalians. Of these Buddhists, half have post-graduate degrees.’

Horgan wrote in Slate that he plunged ardently into the exotic pursuit, but … ‘Eventually, and regretfully, I concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than the Catholicism I lapsed from in my youth. Buddhism’s moral and metaphysical worldview cannot easily be reconciled with science — or more generally, with modern humanistic values.’

Buddhism’s insistence that suffering is an illusion theoretically could make followers less concerned when bigoted police kill unarmed Black men, or women are victimized by predators, or other outrages occur.     [5]

Horgan added that supposedly enlightened gurus can be unappetizing: ‘Chogyam Trungpa, who helped introduce Tibetan Buddhism to the United States in the 1970s, was a promiscuous drunk and bully, and he died of alcohol-related illness in 1987.’

Robert Fuller, former president of Oberlin College, made an intense study of meditation gurus and their adoring followers. Writing in Psychology Today, he summed up: ‘Getting a close look at several individuals who were advertised as enlightened led me to conclude that there’s a lot of hype and hypocrisy in the business. A good many of them, not unlike a fair number of academics I’d known, seemed to be in it primarily for the lifestyle. Many gurus are treated like deities and hold absolute power over their devotees. As ‘enlightened beings,’ they’re accountable to no one, and their foibles, appetites and excesses are given a pass.’

‘The language of enlightenment tended to be esoteric, obscurantist and elitist, and the teachings attracted more credulous dabblers than credible seekers,’ he continued. ‘In my quest, I did not come across anyone who could be said to dwell in a state of permanent enlightenment.’

I’ve never known any meditator who seemed enlightened. Have you? Have you ever seen amazing insights or remarkable creative output by an enlightenee?

( “Is Zen Enlightenment for Real?” By James A. Haught, Freethought Now blog, 6-8-23.  Longtime editor at the Charleston Gazette, Haught is a senior editor of Free Inquiry. )

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [6]

“When you’re black there’s like no religion to turn to. Christianity? I don’t think so. White people justified slavery and segregation through Christianity, so a black Christian is like a black person with no fucking memory.”
(Comedian Cris Rock )

 

 

*   *   *

May you examine those mindsets with which you may have
a Stockholm Syndrome-relationship;
May you never be described as a person “with no f****** memory;”
May you smack upside the noggin any literary lunkheads who conflate setting a book in a particular country with supporting that particular country’s politics;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] Which included sharing his opinion that priests of every sect are those who. “…rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God.”

[2] Numbers 31 tells the particularly galling story of sex slavery: how the taking of female captives is encouraged by Moses, who, after being instructed by Yahweh to take vengeance upon the Midianites, tells the Israelites to kill Midianite male children and nonvirgin females but take the young virgins for themselves.

[3]    “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear.  Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ.”  (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)

    “Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed.  If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful.  You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts.  Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them.”  (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)

   ( Using the following parable, Jesus approves of beating slaves even if they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong):

     “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”  (Luke 12:47-48 NIV)

[4] To relate one personal experience, years ago I attended a Buddhist “church” service in Portland (with a friend who had practiced Buddhist meditation for years and wanted to check out the church).  The structure of the service was very reminiscent to me of various Protestant services…perhaps, to match the comfort or familiarity level of (non-Asian )white attendees, who comprised ~ 50% of the attendees, I wondered?

[5] I have those same thoughts myself, and have heard them from people born into a culture that held some belief in “karma,” and/or reincarnation, such as a man from India who said that he rejected his family’s hindu beliefs when he saw saw how practicing Hindus justified their not helping fellow citizens out of poverty because their suffering wasn’t real, or was brought on by their own deeds and if they live a good life they can be reincarnated under better circumstances….

[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

The Binary Thoughts I’m Not Thinking

September 24, 2021

Robyn Parnell annoyances, current events, exercise & fitness, freethought/humanism, health & wellness, music, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

 

Department Of I’ve Told You Before, I Can’t Make This Up This Shit

“Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor under Donald Trump, claimed during an appearance on a conservative radio program that COVID vaccines were being added to salad dressing….
‘Somebody sent me a thing this morning where they’re talking about putting the vaccine in salad dressing…..’ said Flynn.
‘These people are seriously thinking about how to impose their will on us in our society and it has to stop,’ he added. “

( “Michael Flynn claims salad dressing is being infused with COVID vaccine,”
The National Post, 9-23-21 )

 

With the right vinaigrette, I could RULE THE WORLD !!

 

*   *   *

Department Of A Blast From The Past

Fortunately, I don’t need a really big time machine to go back only two years…

 

 

…to December 2019, when I first blogged about the yogic tradition of performing 108 sun salutations to mark the change of the season (solstices and equinoxes):

Department Of If My Hamstring Muscles Are Still Sore After 36 Hours,
Have I Reached Enlightenment?

Yoga Class:
“Why 108 Sun Salutations?”

Yoga Teacher:
“It’s an auspicious number in yoga; I know 108 sounds like a lot…”

Moiself:
“That’s because it is.”

Last Sunday (12/22/19), to celebrate the winter solstice, my yoga studio held an “Om-a-thon,” which is what Someone In Charge Of Marketing ®  called an hour and a half class consisting of 108 Sun Salutations.  A sun salutation, for you non-yogis, is a yoga exercise incorporating a sequence of nine or more linked asanas, or yoga poses/postures. The asanas are linked by the breath – inhaling and exhaling with each movement – and Sun Salutations involve moving from a standing position into Downward and Upward Dog poses and then back to the standing position, with many variations and modifications.

Why 108? It’s apparently an auspicious number (in the parts of the world where yoga originated), for many reasons.  Non-woo reasons include the fact that the distance between the Sun and Earth is roughly 108 times the Sun’s diameter and ditto for the ratio of the moon’s diameter and the distance between the moon and earth – scientific realities not likely surmised when the originators of yoga decided 108 was a magic special number.

There are plenty of woo reasons for venerating the number 108, and the teacher leading the class mentioned a few of them: there are 108 Upanishads (a series of Hindu treatises ca. 800–200 BCE); there are 108 beads in a mala (a meditation tool, an idea early Christian/Catholic missionaries stole “adapted”  from the Hinduism & Buddhism, and morphed into the Catholic rosary beads    [1]     ); there are nine planets and twelve astrological signs, and 9 x 12 = 108   [2]….

Oh, and most significantly of all, a Uno deck contains 108 cards. That’s gotta be a sign.

҉       ҉      ҉


That was then; this is now.  On Wednesday I celebrated the Autumnal Equinox by doing 108 Sun Salutations at home.  How does one keep count, inquiring minds want to know?  Moiself  has a glass bowl, containing 108 small, smooth glass beads, which I keep on the dining room table. Four times a year, when I’m doing the 108 Sun Salutations (Winter Solstice; Vernal Equinox; Summer Solstice/ Autumnal Equinox) I dump out the bowl in front of my yoga mat.  At the end of each sun salutation I move one bead into the bowl.

 

 

This year I decided to do 109 sun salutations, adding my avatar (visible in the above picture) to the bead count.  It just felt like the right thing to do, and if we’re going for auspicious numbers and all, 109 is a prime.    [3]

*   *   *

Department Of Is This Either/Or…On Or Off?

Dateline: Saturday 7 am-ish, walking along a totally deserted beach – deserted in terms of fellow bipeds.  There is a light rain falling, a welcome change after a previous night’s wind/raid downpour/power outage.  Leaving the house, moiself  noticed the wind had skejewed my yard sign, which I straightened up before heading down to the beach.

I mention the yard sign because the podcast I was listening to reminded me of the sign, in a way the podcast host and producers likely didn’t intend (nor would care about, I’d imagine).  Moiself,  however, found it a fun coincidence.

The podcast, No Stupid Questions (co-hosted by research psychologist Angela Duckworth [author of Grit]  and Stephen Dubner [co-author of the Freakonomics books and host of the Freakonomics podcast] ), is one I’ve mentioned several times in this space.  This episode of NSQ, “How Can You Escape Binary Thinking?”,  made me smile from the moment I heard the title.

 

 

Angela Duckworth:
“One of my life goals is to help people *not* binarize so much…. It turns out that for almost everything that psychologists study, including things that seem categorical, they really are continuous…and you do have to, at the end of the day, either allocate a therapist for this person or not, based on a diagnosis, but if we all *knew* that the underlying phenomena were continuous for *most* things, in psychology and maybe most things in life, that would be an advance.”

Stephen Dubner:
“Plainly, there is value in binary thinking. Literally, the fundamental building block of computing, as far as I understand it, is the bit, which is short for binary digit, which is either a zero or a one, and the reason that’s useful is that it makes it easier to do huge computation, which means you require less circuitry, less cooling, things can be smaller, things can be cheaper…

AD:
“It’s a massive data compression.”

SD:
“Yeah! So, it is a heuristic for computers, but I’d like to think maybe this is one way we could be better than computers, is not having to compress.  On the other hand, I am a fan of what I believe is called, generally, categorical thinking.  I just want more categories than two….“

(excerpts from NSQ episode cited above)

Although I concede its utility in certain areas, I’m not a fan of binary thinking.    [4]   The yard sign I’d previously mentioned was a product of my distaste for that kind of thought.

 

 

An employee of the sign shop where I had my yard sign designed and printed asked me if I was critiquing “those other yard signs.”  I told him that my sign was 95% just for the fun of it…and, yeah, maybe, 5% satirizing “those others:”

 

One “The Others” variant

 

I agree with most of the sentiments expressed by the variants of Those Other Signs ® …but not all of them.  There are so many complexities and nuances to the positions alluded to in various versions of Those Other Signs ® I’ve seen.  In an ideal world, I’d hope that if my neighbors wanted to know my thoughts on certain issues, instead of having to read my lawn signage and extrapolate from there, they’d ask me, and we’d have a thoughtful and civil discussion about it.

 

Yep; happens all the time.

 

For example, as per illegal/undocumented immigration.  A line like, “No Human Is illegal” is a form of data compression.  No human is illegal – what does a particular person mean, when they say or write that?  Certainly, it is a pejorative to refer to a person as illegal – is that what they are objecting to – the un-charitableness of referring to a person as “an illegal?”  Also, and just as certainly, some people do things that are illegal, including violating the immigration laws of a country.  So, what is it that the no human is illegal line is conveying or signaling to others – your position on immigration, or your concern with word choice when referring to a person who is in a country unlawfully?

Binary thinking; data compression. I didn’t have the words for it when I was younger, but the first time moiself  ran across these terms I thought, *That’s* why I never felt at home a political party – the world is so much more complex than left and right.

Alas, binary thinking/data compression seems to be the norm for politics.  “You either agree with all of these things (insert your political checklist and/or party platform) or you’re not with us,” or, expressed in another way, “You must *disagree* with *everything* promoted by The Other Side ®, or you’re not with us.”

Zero or one; on or off. Data compression is great for computing, but can be disastrous for human relations. Very few people are completely ‘”on or off,” “this or that,” as per anything. To think otherwise is to opt for the safety of categorization versus risking seeing (and dealing with) complexity.

Lest y’all think I am perfectly consistent on avoiding the pitfalls of binary thinking…

 

 

…I recognize that moiself  has my own litmus tests when it comes to certain issues. I’ve had some interesting discussions with a few people who’ve called themselves feminists but who are also anti-reproductive choice – as in, not only do they say that they personally would not have an abortion under any circumstances, they would go further and deny the choice for others.   [5]   I have not decreed to them that an anti-choice feminist isn’t actually a feminist, as I am not the boss of that word.   [6]    I have presented my take on the matter:  people make decisions all the time, about matters trivial and momentous – decisions that I sometimes don’t like or vehemently oppose.  This is part of living in a pluralistic society.  But when it comes to this particular issue, I’ll go all binary on your ass:  you either support a person’s bodily autonomy, or you don’t. 

*   *   *

Department Of What I’m Listening To…
(Sub-department Of Not That You Care….)

This would be Lindsey Buckingham’s new, self-titled album.

I mistakenly watched a rerun of a recent Stephen Colbert show where Buckingham was the musical guest – the “mistakenly“ part was watching the show right before bedtime.  The energy of the song Buckingham played was so infectious and the melody/lyrics so catchy, I could not get to sleep after that.

The song (“On the Wrong Side“) seems to be a meditation on looking both backward and forward, with references to life in a touring band (Fleetwood Mac’s halcyon days, I assume) and living in the present, acknowledging the passage of time.  Not the lightest of subjects, yet the rumination is encased in an incredibly catchy pop rhythm and melody, with soaring and layered harmonies. ‘Tis a song that could easily be mistaken for a new Fleetwood Mac single. 

♫  Waitin’ for the night to come
Waitin’ for the moon to rise
Wondering just what have I done
That I never realized

Time is rolling down the road
Love goes riding in a hearse
We were young and now we’re old
Who can tell me which is worse  ♫

Buckingham’s solo work reveals just how much he brought to Fleetwood Mac, and how so much of the band’s sound   [7]  was due to his influence and contributions.

I dare you to listen to On the Wrong Side and then *not* walk around having the chorus stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

♫  I’m outta pity/I’m outta time
Another city/ another crime
I’m…
on the wrong side… ♫

 

 

 

*   *   *

Q & A Punz For The Day
Popular Music Edition

Name a rock group where none of the members sings or plays music.
Mt. Rushmore.

What kind of music do bunnies like?
Hip Hop.

Why did the hearing-impaired jazz musician bring a sweet potato to rehearsal?
He thought he’d been invited to a yam session.

How many guitarists does it take to play Stairway to Heaven?
Apparently, all of them.

 

Sorry about the bicycle wheel, but I couldn’t find any yams.

 

*   *   *

May you eschew most forms of binary thinking;  [8]

May you enjoy listening to at least one song from Lindsey Buckingham;

May you embrace your humanity by holding fast to at least one binary opinion;    [9]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

 

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Although the Catholics halved the number to 59 beads, in perhaps an effort to claim originality or refute charges of plagiarism.

[2] Except of course/again the originators of such superstitions did not know there were nine planets…and now we all know (though some of us refuse to accept the fact) that there are not nine planets, but eight.  And longtime readers of this blog can likely surmise what I think of astrology.

[3] A prime number is a whole number which is divisible only by itself and 1.

[4] Binary thinking (urban dictionary): “Denotes a system of thought that predominantly considers things in an “either, or”, “right, wrong”, “black, white” way, ignoring any subtleties or consideration of third or more alternatives.”

[5] As in, they support making abortion illegal, or at least highly restricting its availability.

[6] Yet.

[7] In that particular configuration during 1975 – 1987, when he and Stevie Nicks joined.  There have been many, many personnel configurations in the band’s fifty-plus year history.

[8] Except when it comes to black licorice: you either hate it (correct!) or love it (so very, very, wrong).

[9] Like, the one about black licorice.

The Temptations I’m Not Eliminating

March 26, 2021

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, friends, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, music, politics, radio & podcasts, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Temptations I’m Not Eliminating

Department Of This Should Not Come As A Surprise

“Recent polling shows that 39% of Americans believe that the election that just occurred was rigged…  You may not agree with that assessment, but it is nonetheless a reality for nearly half the country.”
(Senator Ted Cruz, 1-6-21)

“In other words, ‘We have no proof the election was stolen, and you may have verifiable evidence that it wasn’t, but that doesn’t matter. It only matters that we believe it.’

  And that’s when you’re at religion: that you have to respect something just because people believe it. Does that include professional wrestling?”
( Comedian Bill Maher on Real Time With Bill Maher, re the remarks of Senator Cruz )

The fact that many evangelical/conservative Christians believe and promote QAnon conspiracy theories seems to confuse and embarrass Other Christians ® .  Even some leaders of ultra conservative Christian churches and nationalist groups have wondered aloud about the fact that many of their followers are part of a “mass delusion.”

“Why is it our people are so vulnerable to this stuff?”
(Lance Wallnau, self-proclaimed prophet, Christian Nationalist, and
“7 Mountains Mandate” creator, The Washington Post, 1-14-21 )

 

 

The embarrassment of these Other Christians is itself an embarrassment – especially when I hear or read my mainstream/progressive Christian family and friends wondering:

“How can those QAnon Christians believe things that make no sense?”

Y’all ask this…seriously?

My religious friends, whose hearts and intentions I deeply respect, the answer is simple, and you’re not going to like it:

The reason those QAnon/Trump/Confederate Flag/Proud Boy Christians can believe things that make no sense is because they already believe things that make no sense. Your fellow Christians  [1]  believe such things in the first place *because* of their religious faith, not in spite of it.  Religion has already primed them to accept outlandish claims sans objective proof (other than the “proof” they say they find “in their own hearts”).

The January 6 insurrection was a faith-based initiative, and Trumpism/White Supremacy are Christian nationalist movements.

Freethinkers/Humanists/Agnostics/Atheists/Skeptics have long known this, and while we sometimes tiptoe around this subject with our more mainstream and progressive Christian friends and family…c’mon folks.  Why do you keep acting so shocked?

It’s not a giant leap from believing some major things that cannot be proven – aka, taking them on “faith” – to believing other things that cannot be proven.

During a recent New Rules segment of his show, comedian and magical-thinking eviscerator   [2]  Bill Maher used his incisive wit to point out the overlap between QAnon theorists and (white Christian) religionists.  He pointed out that Christians who roll their eyes at or mock QAnon and its baby-eating lizard people/pedophile pizza parlors scenarios seem not to have read their own Book of Revelation.  Right there, in the Christians’ “holy book,” are bizarre tales of “…stuff you see only after the guy in the park sells you bad mushrooms.”   [3]

It was evangelical Christians like Senators Ted Cruz and Paul Gosar who spouted the unjustifiable claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from #45. Who is seriously surprised by the fact that most of the senators who objected to certifying the electoral college votes for Biden  – Cruz and Gosar and their frothing cronies, Senators Josh Hawley, Cindy Hyde-Smith, John Kennedy, Roger Marshall and Tommy Tuberville – were fundamentalist Christians?  Not only did each of those senators identify and campaign as fundamentalist Christians, Alabama Sen. Tuberville even filmed a campaign ad equating Trump to Jesus .

The January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol  “…looked like a revival meeting,” Maher quipped.  Watch the videos of the event, and you’ll see the signs that read, “Jesus is my god and Trump is my president,” and “Trump/Jesus 2020.”

 

 

“Magical religious thinking is a virus and QAnon is just its current mutation. That’s why megachurches play QAnon videos. We need to stop pretending there’s no way we’ll ever understand why the Trump mob believes in him.  It’s because they’re religious…they’ve already made space in their heads for shit that doesn’t make sense.

There’s a lot of talk now about how Republicans should tell their base who still believe the election was rigged that they need to grow up and move on and stop asking the rest of us to respect their mass delusion.  But the inconvenient truth here is that if you accord religious faith the kind of exalted respect we do here in America, you’ve already lost the argument that mass delusion is bad.

( Bill Maher, New Rules, 2-5-21, my emphases.
You can see the entire segment here. )

*   *   *

Department Of One More Thing
#379 In An Ongoing Series

In a recent blog post (3-12-21) , re my rant highly nuanced disagreement with the idea that Muslim women are “free” to “choose” whether or not to wear the hijab, moiself  forgot to mention one relevant, veil-related anecdote.

The 9/11 attacks took place on a Tuesday morning, which was the meeting time for a book group I’d been attending for years. The book group met at the church MH and I had attended for years.   [4]   The pastor of the church (which belongs to ” among the most liberal of the mainline Protestant denominations,”) was the book group’s leader.  She, like the rest of us “bookies” (book group members), was stunned by the news,   [5]  even more so because of personal reasons: she had a sister-in-law who was a flight attendant for American Airlines out of Boston,  [6]  and a brother-in-law who was from the Middle East, and she was concerned for his safety re the growing anti-Arab sentiment.

Moving right along….  One by one the group members staggered into our meeting room as our pastor put on a fresh pot of coffee to brew (she’d already downed one entire pot herself).  Glassy-eyed with “WTF just happened?” confusion, we babbled with one another about the attacks (although I’m not sure my opening remarks – “We’re all FUCKED – this is how wars start!” –  count as a babble).  The pastor was, eventually, able to steer us into a half-hearted discussion of the book we were reading.

The next week the pastor told us bookies about the latest news from the ecumenical group of ministers she belonged to. The group, which was mostly comprised of ministers from liberal Christian denominations but also with Jewish, Muslim and Bahá’í clergy,   [7]   had been brainstorming re how to be of support to local Muslims.  The news was filled with accounts of how, across the nation, Muslims (as well as people who were not Muslim but who were “suspected” of being Muslim) were being threatened and even physically attacked.  Because of the hijab, Muslim women’s religious affiliations were more visible than that of Muslim men, and many Muslim women and girls reported being harassed while riding public transportation or at the grocery store – or just out in public.

Another (female) pastor from the ecumenical group announced that, to express solidarity with Muslim women, she had started wearing a veil in public, and she was “inviting” other non-Muslim women to do so as well.  Moiself  expressed the same, immediate, visceral reaction that our pastor said she’d had when she heard Well-Meaning Veil Pastor’s suggestion. It was a reaction my pastor and I vowed to share with everyone we knew who might was supportive of the veil-solidarity gesture:

Solidarity; right on!
Yes indeedy, we’ll be happy to don a veil in support of Muslim women – providing Muslim men and boys first do the same, to show support for *their* mothers/sisters/wives/daughters/cousins/co-workers/neighbors….

Guess what? No takers.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of More Good Clean Fun Brought To You By That All-American Combo, Misogyny And Religion  [8]

Last week a 21-year old man attacked three spas in Atlanta, shooting nine people and killing eight of them, seven of them women (who were his targets; the men were in the wrong place at the wrong time). The alleged suspect told the police that he killed them because he needed to “eliminate the temptations” they presented to him, and that by doing so he would help other men by removing those same “temptations.”

I don’t get it. What could anyone possibly have against The Temptations?

 

 

Ahem. “Temptations,” as in, women.  You know – female human beings.

 

 

If you’ve been paying attention, it’s not the first time you’ve heart this kind of story. In California, Oregon; Toronto…you can Google more, about male killers who target one woman or all women, but it’s too damn depressing. Two years ago, in a refreshing change, a 27-year-old Denver man was arrested on a terrorism charge *before* he was able to carry out his intended rampage. This enabled the press to write “Here is why he said he was going to commit a mass murder” stories, instead of after-the-fact, “The killer said he killed all those women because…” stories:

A 27-year-old Colorado man…arrested on a terrorism charge…cited his virginity as the reason he said he was planning to carry out a mass shooting: “…its is why I’m planning on shooting up a public place soon and being the next mass shooter cause I’m ready to die and all the girls the (sic) turned me down is (sic) going to make it right by killing as many girls as I see.” (sick sick sick).
(“A man cited his virginity as reason he planned to kill ‘as many girls’ as he could, police say,” Washington Post, 1-22-19)

As shocking as most of us find these rampages, moiself  posits that they are also predictable and even inevitable outcomes in our society, due to the mixture of two poisonous cultural ingredients:

*online sexism and incel forums wherein young men commiserate and encourage one another to blame women for their sexual desires and frustrations;

* religious teachings (in particular, “Purity Culture”) which set the stage and fuel the fire for those frustrations by shaming and pathologizing sexual activity – including masturbation, and even the mere *desiring* of sex – outside of heterosexual marriage, and which hold females responsible for male thoughts and behavior.    [9]

 

“Her ankles have caused me to fall!”

 

“It should come as no shock that purity culture is steeped in contradictions:
1) Women hold the sexual reigns and are wholly responsible for any sexual encounter that escalates to something sinful because men lack the ability and should not be expected to control themselves…but
2) somehow, women also hate sex and use it as a punishment/reward system for their husbands…yet
3) women are weak and need the protection
of these feeble-minded, animal-like men.”
(“Freedom From Purity Culture“)

“When Brad Onishi heard that the man accused of a rampage at three Atlanta-area spas told detectives that he had carried out the attacks as a way to eliminate his own temptations, the claim sounded painfully familiar.
Dr. Onishi…grew up in a strict evangelical community…that emphasized sexual purity….
The evangelical culture he was raised in, he said, “teaches women to hate their bodies, as the source of temptation, and it teaches men to hate their minds, which lead them into lust and sexual immorality.”
(“Atlanta Suspect’s Fixation on Sex Is Familiar Thorn for Evangelicals,” NY Times 3-20-21)

 

 

A former roommate of the alleged   [10]   Atlanta shooter told police that the shooter

* didn’t own a smartphone because he feared he’d use it to look at online pornography;
* was ashamed of masturbating;
* expressed suicidal thoughts as per his fear that he was “falling out of God’s grace” and “living in sin” because he had masturbated and visited sex workers.

“…the idea that men’s sexual issues are women’s responsibility isn’t new, nor is it a fringe ideology confined to the internet — it’s a mainstream belief held by many Americans…

These thoughts mirror traditional conservative evangelical Christian teachings about sex and the idea that it’s women’s responsibility to avoid leading men into sexual situations.

This kind of purity culture has a reach far beyond religion. Abstinence-only education classes taught in over half the states across the country tell young people that the onus is on girls not to tease or tempt boys, whose sexual compulsions, they say, are near uncontrollable.

But rather than curb sexual activity, these programs seem to normalize misogynist impulses. A 2017 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health, for example, found abstinence-only programs often ‘reinforce gender stereotypes about female passivity and male aggressiveness.’

(“How Many Women Have to Die to End ‘Temptation’?
The Atlanta murders follow a terrible pattern of misogynist violence,” NY Times 3-22-21)

 

I really wish I was both making up this chart, and the organization it comes from.  But…no.

 

And let’s not forget another key ingredient in this toxic stew: the romanticized reporting of violence against women, which often frames murderers as reflexive sad sacks “at the end of their rope” or “having a bad day.”  Various media headlines, and even comments from law enforcement officials, reinforce the sexist idea that the men and boys who hurt women are themselves victims – casualties of their unrequited desires.

Horrific, brutal killings of women by men have been described as being committed by “a lovesick teen,” and the murderers as suffering from “unrequited love.” The lab tech who strangled a pharmacology grad student and stuffed her body behind a wall was referred to in the press as “lovelorn.”  And now, in Atlanta, the County Sheriff investigating the killings said the suspect may have been “lashing out,” and another member of the Sheriff’s office said that the subject had had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did.”

 

No, (real) love doesn’t kill. But when a notorious punk rocker stabbed a 20-year-old woman to death, some media presented it as a Romeo and Juliet story.

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Apropos Of Nothing…
And I Know We Have Some Serious Issues Facing Our Country, And The Entire Planet, But This Is Something Which Might Unite Us – Yes, Even Across
Seemingly Insurmountable Borders Of Religious, Political, And Cultural Identity

 

Can we all agree to get rid of the first *r* in February?

 

*   *   *

Department Of Oops I Did It Again

What I did was a whole lotta yoga: 108 Sun salutations, in honor of the Vernal Equinox.

 

Now if only I could find a colorful toucan to join me next time.

 

In a less-honorable tribute to the arrival of Spring, once again, hearing the term *Vernal Equinox* made moiself  think of a Tennessee mother yelling across the fields for her son.

 “Vernal!  Vernal Equinox, you git yer butt back home this instant!”

*   *   *

Pun For The Day

I changed my smart phone’s name to Titanic. It’s syncing now.

 

*   *   *

 

May you try to say February ten times, as fast as you can, pronouncing both rs
(and then agree with moiself  about getting rid of the first one);
May you not be deluded as to why *other* people believe crazy shit;
May you celebrate the arrival of Spring, no matter how you feel about a term like
“Vernal Equinox;”
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] And yes, they are Christians, whether or not you approve of them. You don’t own the term; they claim it too, and spout the theology.

[2] If Maher can have “New Rules” then I can have new words.

[3] Maher’s delightful recounting of one of Revelation’s major stories: “The book of Revelations will tell you exactly where the world ends – Megiddo, Israel. That’s where all of the armies of the world will gather and Jesus will come down to earth on a flying horse shooting swords out of his mouth (Jesus, not the horse), and have a 1000 year cosmic boss battle with Satan, The Beast, and The Anti-Christ. It’s like ten Avenger movies plus ten Hobbit movies plus a night out with Johnny Depp.”

[4] It was also the church I was on the cusp of leaving – not that church in particular, but any church, as in religion in general. I had known I was a non- believer for decades yet stayed “closeted” for complicated reasons.

[5] Our gathering time was 7 am, Pacific time, so we all knew at least something about the attacks on the East Coast.

[6] One of the four hijacked airplanes, the one which crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was an American Airlines flight originating in Boston; the pastor’s SIL was not working that flight.

[7] Well, representatives, in the case of the Bahá’í, who do not have clergy.

[8] And very likely, racism. Although as of this writing the (alleged) perpetrator has denied a racial motive (he blamed his “sex addiction”),  six of the women were Asian. Others are addressing that issue, including here, here, and here, far better than I could.

[9] To cite just one of hundreds of disgusting examples, the federally funded Heritage Keepers curriculum teaches students that ‘girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.”

[10] I’m not going to patronize either moiself  or y’all by continuing to use that modifier.

The Sun Salutations I’m Not Counting

December 27, 2019

Robyn Parnell books & magazines, current events, exercise & fitness, extended family, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, games & puzzles, health & wellness, Holidays, movies, music, nature, Oregon, science, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Sun Salutations I’m Not Counting

Department of Just Wondering, Winter Edition

Dateline: Boxing Day (December 26), 2 pm, downtown Portland’s Keller Auditorium with MH and Belle, to see the last 2019 performance of “The Nutcracker.”

Watching the impressively limber members of The Oregon Ballet Theater as they do their pirouettes, I can’t help but wonder:  when ballets are performed at locales south of the equator, do the dancers spin counterclockwise?

 

 

Added cultural bonus: Belle pointed out that one of the OBT’s principal male dancers looked like Seth Meyers.

Wished-for cultural highlight: to see The Nutcracker, or any ballet, performed by Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of If My Hamstring Muscles Are Still Sore After 36 Hours
Have I Reached Enlightenment?

Yoga Class:
“Why 108 Sun Salutations?”

Yoga Teacher:
“It’s an auspicious number in yoga; I know 108 sounds like a lot…”

Moiself:
“That’s because it is.”

Last Sunday (12/22), to celebrate the winter solstice, my yoga studio held an “Om-a-thon,” which is what Someone In Charge Of Marketing ®  called an hour and a half class consisting of 108 Sun Salutations.  A sun salutation, for you non-yogis, is a yoga exercise incorporating a sequence of nine or more linked asanas, or yoga poses/postures. The asanas are linked by the breath – inhaling and exhaling with each movement, and Sun Salutations involve moving from a standing position into Downward and Upward Dog poses and then back to the standing position, with many variations.

Why 108? It’s apparently an auspicious number (in the parts of the world where yoga originated), for many reasons.  Non-“woo” reasons include the fact that the distance between the Sun and Earth is roughly 108 times the Sun’s diameter and ditto for the ratio of the moon’s diameter and the distance between the moon and earth – scientific realities not likely surmised when the originators of yoga decided 108 was a magic special number.

There are plenty of “woo” reasons for venerating the number 108, and the teacher leading the class mentioned a few of them: there are 108 Upanishads (a series of Hindu treatises ca. 800–200 BCE); there are 108 beads in a mala (a meditation tool, an idea early Christian/Catholic missionaries stole “adapted”  from the Hinduism & Buddhism, and morphed into the Catholic rosary beads    [1]  ); there are nine planets and twelve astrological signs…9 x 12 = 108  [2]….

Oh, and most significantly of all, a Uno deck contains 108 cards. That’s gotta be a sign.

 

 

People who’d participated in previous year’s OM-a-thons told me it was a lot of fun, so I decided to try it this year.  Indeed, it was fun. And I only spent about five seconds of the class resting in Child’s pose.

*   *   *

Department Of Serves Me Right

Dateline: December 24, 10:30 am; in a Kaiser Hospital pharmacy waiting to pick up a prescription for a friend, for whom I am acting as “surgery buddy” for her outpatient hand surgery.  The pharmacy is surprisingly (to moiself) hopping for a Sunday morning, and I have plenty of time for people watching while waiting for the Rx to be filled.

Moiself is noticing how casually most people, especially the men, are dressed. Read: the average Joe is a Sloppy McSlob Face.  [3]   This is not an original observation;  it most likely came to my mind due to a recent rant well-thought out opinion piece I read, written by a European writer who bemoaned the tendencies of Americans to dress “down ” (e.g. as if they are sprawled in front of their TV at home) in public spaces.  As I look around at my fellow Specimens of Humanity ®, I must admit that complaining dude has a point.

Then, a very dapper older gentleman takes a seat about 12 feet in front of me.

 

 

He is wearing a grey tweed suit, vest and tie, nice (but not overly fussy) black herringbone shoes, and a gray short brimmed fedora. Dapper Gent’s posture is dignified as he leans over to pick up a magazine from the end table next to his chair. This same magazine had been recently perused by one of the previously mentioned Specimens of Humanity who’d schlumped passed by the table  – a Specimen whose plumber-inspired butt crack was on generous display atop his pathetic, pajama-bottoms-substituting-for-pants when he leaned over to glance at said magazine.

I admire Dapper Gent’s contribution to Public Space beautification, and allow myself a moment of smugness as I recall Complaining European Writer’s observations.  I look up at the line of pharmacy clerks kiosks and wonder when my number will be called.  I return my gaze to Dapper Gent, just in time to see him ever-so-slowly guide his index finger into his left nostril and dig deep, deep, and deeper, as if he is mining for precious ores.

*   *   *

Department Of Petty Pleasures
Number 387 In The Series.

Daetline: Christmas Day, Powell’s Bookstore, ~ 2 pm, for our traditional Shopping-at-Powell’s-after-Christmas-Day-lunch-at-Jake’s outing. I love it, I absolutely love it, when I espy a long of patrons waiting outside the men’s, but not the women’s, restroom.

 

*   *   *

Family friend LAH is an artist, and it shows in every aspect of her life. Come the Yule season she is known for exquisitely wrapping the presents she bestows, which are so beautifully adorned with artfully tied and arranged ribbons and bows and other accessories that Belle and K, even as young children, would stare at their respective gifts from LAH and declare, “It’s too pretty to open.”

No such declaration has ever been thought, much less uttered aloud, about any gift wrapped by moiself. The presents I give, which are chosen in all love, care, enthusiasm, and sincerity, end up looking as if they’d been wrapped by an orangutan with ADHD.  It’s not that I don’t try to do better…let’s just say that my family has long joked about how you don’t need a gift tag to know if the present is from Robyn.

This Christmas morning, when MH, son K, daughter Belle, and moiself were reaching the end of our opening-presents session, I picked one of the two remaining gifts from my pile – one whose tag read “to Robyn from Santa.”   [4]   I turned the gift upside down, flashing a smug “See, I’m not the only person who does this” smile to my (now young adult) offspring, to show them how the wrapping paper didn’t fully cover the back of the gift package.  Belle’s indignant/kneejerk reaction:

 “Mom, did you wrap a present for yourself!?

 

*   *   *

Department Of Stop Asking Me That

“Oh, yeah, so you all liked that Elf on a Shelf thing?”
(Misinformed persons who feel compelled to ask about all the elves
in our house during this time of year)

Much of moiself’s holiday décor, in all its tacky seasonal glory, is in homage to my mother, who died three years ago on Christmas eve. Marion Parnell loved Christmas and especially her Christmas decorations, which included the “tradition” (which her family started and mine continues) of placing certain kind of elves – the kind with small plastic, doll-like faces and bendable, felt costume clothes bodies,   [5]  all around the house.

 

Like this one, a (rare) yellow/green costumed variant.

 

The idea was that from any vantage point, whether you are sitting in the living room or getting a drink from the kitchen sink, an elf is casting a friendly eye upon you.  Some of our elves indeed are on a shelf, but most perch atop curtains, peek out from bookcases, lurk behind candlesticks, nestle behind dishes and clocks and art and….

But, this “Elf on a Shelf” thing? Never heard of it, until recently. It is, apparently, a picture book about…honestly, I don’t know or care what it’s about. I looked it up:  the book has a 2005 publication date.  Neither I nor MH knew about it, nor had our two children (DOBs 1993 and 1996) grown up with EOAS as part of their kiddie lit repertoire.  My extended family on my mother’s side has been putting up elves since the early 1920s, so none of this EOAS shit fruitcake feces references applies to elves on MY shelves, okay?

Y’all must excuse moiself  if (read: when) I respond with a most yuletide inappropriate profanity should you mention that book to me. Actually, moiself  finds it funny how much it irritates moiself  when someone, after seeing or hearing about our houses elves, makes a reference to the book: such as the antique store owner last week who, when I asked if her store had any elves and began to describe what I was looking for, said, “Oh, you mean, like that book?”   My customary cheerful/holiday visage darkened, and I answered her with utmost solemnity.

No.
Nothing.
Like. That. Book.

Which might not be entirely accurate, seeing as how I’ve never read nor even seen the book…which may indeed be about something akin to *our* family tradition.  I just want…oh, I don’t know…attribution, I suppose.  WE THOUGHT OF IT FIRST, OKAY?  So, stick that Elf-on-a-shelf in your Santa Hat and – I mean of course, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

 

*   *   *

Department of Epicurean Excursion   [6]

Featuring this week’s cookbook, author and recipe:

The Silver Palate Cookbook , by Julee Rosso & Sheila Lukins

Recipe:  Lentil and Walnut Salad
My rating: 

☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

Recipe Rating Refresher   [7]  

*   *   *

Department Of The Partridge Of The Week

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself will be hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard.   [8] Can you guess this week’s guest Partridge?

*   *   *

Department Of Simple Pleasures

Having both Belle and  K home for Christmas reminds me of an old adage.  Passed down by amateur philosophers over the ages, the saying endures because it is true:

SIMPLE PLEASURES 

( e.g., knitting;
sitting over the bathtub drain when the water runs out;
listening to the lamentation of your neighbor’s children when they discover that
someone (ahem) has stolen their front yard’s inflatable Santa decoration and replaced it
with a snowman made from 10,000 laminated oral care pamphlets
from the Pediatrics Dental Association )

ARE THE BEST.

And so it is with all sincerity that I wish y’all the simple pleasures of Happy New Year.

*   *   *

May your present-wrapping skills bring you wide acclaim;
May we appreciate our fellow Specimens of Humanity in all our sartorial glory;
May your simple pleasures by simply maaaahvelous;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi! 

Jusqu’à l’année prochaine!

*   *   *

 

[1] Although the Catholics halved the number to 59 beads, in perhaps an effort to claim originality or refute charges of plagiarism.

[2] Except of course/again the originators of such superstitions did not know there were nine planets…and now we all know (though some of us refuse to accept the fact) that there are not nine planets, but eight.

[3] Although, with my idea that I’m dressed up when my tie dye shirt doesn’t have any mustard stains on it, who am I to talk? 

[4] Yes, that would be MH.

[5] Many of the oldest ones have a tiny Made in Japan sticker on them and date from the 1950s, or so I was told by one antique shop dealer.

[6] A recurring feature of this blog, since week 2 of April 2019, wherein moiself decided that moiself would go through my cookbooks alphabetically and, one day a week, cook (at least) one recipe from one book.

[7]

* Two Thumbs up:  Liked it
* Two Hamster Thumbs Up :  Loved it
* Thumbs Down – Not even Kevin, a character from The Office who would eat anything, would like this. 
* Twiddling Thumbs: I was, in due course, bored by this recipe.
* Thumbscrew: It was torture to make this recipe.
* All Thumbs: Good recipe, but I somehow mucked it up.
* Thumby McThumb Face: This recipe was fun to make.
* Thumbing my nose: Yeah, I made this recipe, but I did not respect it.

[8] In our pear tree.