Mi chupacabra es su chubacabra

Oh, sort of a random round-up.  For instance, I built a new chicken coop from scratch this weekend, to accommodate 3 new girls (though we've ended up adding 4, when one of the chicks we originally raised came back to us from the friends who had lost the rest of their flock to predators).  I'll put up some pics of it on facebook.

I also made a German chocolate cake from scratch last weekend, which isn't that big a deal, though it sure was good.

I have been in something of a writing hiatus, which isn't that good, but I am feeling less tired and getting more done generally, at work and at home.  My next big writing project has to be my master's thesis, which is going to be a poetry collection, and will take some real work; first off, though, I need to find a third person to be on my thesis committee... my two main writing mentors from grad school have bowed out.  Which is sort of demoralizing, even if they both said very nice and regretful things as they did so.

I am also pleased to say that I'm reading again, for pleasure, and not just in my car pool.  It unsettled me on some level that I hadn't been for some time, and not just due to grad school; I wasn't reading for pleasure even when I didn't have classes.  It felt like I wasn't really living my life, if I wasn't writing and I wasn't even reading... just moving automatonically through the motions of life and work.  No surprise that it got me depressed now and then.

But at least I've been making things, reading, and even exercising more regularly.  I was inspired this week to try to walk a mile first thing in the morning, more or less right after I roll out of bed, and it makes a huge difference in how my day goes, how everything looks.  I'll see whether I can keep it up after it becomes routine (that's always the challenge for me, after something ceases to be a novel accomplishment) but the value of making changes to my rut and routine are invaluable in giving me the chance to make the changes I really want in my life.

Besides all this stuff, here are a few things I've enjoyed listening to, recently:

• Journalists trying to get to know Hezbollah fighters by challenging them to a paintball match
• Apparently, dinosaurs main not only have been warm-blooded, but also fuzzy and had to put up with giant fleas
• Speaking of insects... why waste that protein?
• In farming news, yet another story of the widespread transition to women farmers; women also seem to be on the forefront of "guerilla grafters" who are transforming city trees into fruit trees
• A good discussion on whether to bring back the Glass-Steagal Act.  I'd be all for it, but do banks already wield too much power in Congress for this to ever become more than hypothetical?
• Finally, a very entertaining chat with Sacha Baron Cohen (out of character, thank goodness)... esp. when Terri gets him talking about his various run-ins with various state cops.

Sit with your friends, don't go back to sleep. Don't sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea. Surge like an ocean, don't scatter yourself like a storm. Life's waters flow from darkness. Search the darkness, don't run from it. Night travelers are full of light, and you are too: don't leave this companionship. Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish, don't slip into the dirt like quicksilver. The moon appears for night travelers; be watchful when the moon is full. ~~Rumi      (courtesy of Meg Hutchinson)

Once there was a man who became a thief, whose crimes grew so great that he was forced to flee for his life.  His greed had mastered him, and one night without meaning to (but not meaning not to) he caused a death.  Once found out, he was a marked man, wanted dead just as good as alive.

And so the thief fled from his city.  They hunted him for a time, so he traveled across the fields, and into the hills, and finally into the wild, where he knew they would no longer bother to search for him.  Living there was difficult, but he was able to find enough food to stay alive.

Then came the rains, and without shelter the thief was cold and miserable.  He sat shivering beneath dripping trees, and knew he must find a better place or he would die.  He forced himself to go higher into the hills, toward the mountains, struggling in the pouring rain through thick woods and up rocks.  And near evening, he found a cave large enough to shelter in, and he went in and collapsed, falling asleep at once.

The thief awoke in the night to the sensation that he was no longer alone in the cave.  Something large had come in, breathing, dripping.  It gave off a wet musky animal smell, and it was very warm.  He lay the rest of the night awake, too terrified to move.

At dawn, he saw that beside him in the cave was a tiger.  Now he knew what he feared, but he was no less afraid.  When the tiger woke, it looked at him with yellow, opaque eyes, and said, "You came into my cave.  Why should I not eat you?"

The thief had no answer.  He only trembled.  But the tiger did not eat him; it watched him for a time, then watched the rain falling outside, then slept again.  The thief's fear never waned, but eventually exhaustion overcame him and he slept too. 

The next morning man and tiger woke, and again the tiger watched him, asking, "You are in my cave, so why shouldn't I eat you?"  Again the thief had no answer but quaked in fear, but again the tiger did not eat him.  Both sat in the cave together while it rained, and slept at night.  And so it went again for another day, and another night.

On this fourth night the rains stopped, and at dawn the man saw that he could leave.  But first he bowed to the tiger and asked, "Why, while I sheltered in your cave, did you not eat me?" 

The tiger studied him, and then said, "It is a mystery."

He waited, but it said nothing else.  And so he turned and left, a man marked for life by something he could not explain.

Or any day, really.  My profile now has two classic arcade games for you to avail yourself of any time you like. =)

(LJ does not allow embedding Flash in entries, alas.)

Rant of the Day: Mitch McConnell is such a putz.  After the spending bill was pulled from the floor, he said he couldn't believe Democrats tried to push through a bill so bloated with earmarks -- never mind that he was himself responsible for $85 million worth of them in the bill.  (And never mind that earmarks don't cause any more money to be spent, they just direct money already budgeted.)

Reason for Hope: On Ashura, many devout Shi'ite men publicly whip and cut themselves to remember the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali (Muhammad's grandson).  Part of his tragic story is that he died because there were none to help him, so leading Afghan clerics are calling on Afghans to donate blood instead -- pivoting the holy day's commemoration from one of grief over the past to help for those in need today.  (It's also a practice that women can directly take part in.)  This actually seems to have been spreading across the Muslim world for a while, taking down a myth that giving blood was against Islam as it went.

Whoa... interesting.  Long story short: Jim Swilley, leader (bishop?) of a megachurch in Atlanta, GA, came out as gay to his congregation after encouragement from his ex-wife, children, and a sense of conviction from hearing homophobic reactions to the recent gay teen suicides.  (NPR story here, incl. extended interview and full video of his church address in which he told his story.) 

It's a startling step closer to the day when a rejection of homophobia is no longer a conservative or liberal issue, in the church or in society.  There is so much that distinguishes this from other high-profile outings (like Ted Haggard), most importantly that Swilley isn't just trying to get out in front of some scandal.  In fact, it bears none of the usual sense of hypocrisy: he doesn't treat it as a sin from which he must repent, and he says that he's never made derogatory or homophobic remarks.  He just wants to be honest about who he is.

There's lots of good stuff in the interview; for instance, Swilley seems willing to consider marrying a gay couple, and rejects the "marriage only for procreation" argument by saying "I marry folks on their 2nd or 3rd marriage who aren't going to have kids... and am I supposed to do fertility tests on all the couples I marry?" I'm not clear exactly what your title as bishop means, but -- right on, Bishop Jim!

It was also fascinating to hear him seemingly working through the issues anew even as he's talking to the interviewer, as if he's still just realizing the new vistas that have opened to him for thinking about civil rights, marriage equality, and so on.  For me, his most touching comment was: "Saying all these things out loud is just so new for me..." 

Bart one, Homer zero.

And no, this is not, I repeat not, an Onion story.  Just Amarillo, TX.

Actually, just an excerpt of a speech Robert Kennedy gave at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968.  It is a rare and elegant sort of truth-telling that remains stunningly true many decades later:


"Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.  Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

"It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

"And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

for chaiya


If the world was round
like an egg, what do you think
it would some day hatch

into? Each day is
an egg itself, I suppose,
incubating good

or ill. We've all seen
stillborn potential. We know
that anything can

happen. From a book
on multiple-cat households
Kellyann relates

to me how each spot
added to your house -- a chair,
a rug -- represents

to cats separate
territories; each one a
new option, perhaps

home turf. But to get
back to eggs, what I wanted
to suggest was to

consider when you
eat these eggs, how you will use
their potential. Each

moment (I know you
know) is its own world; each meal,
each visit with friends,

each day (even the
humdrum type), each one a world
waiting to break open.

I had an instructive day earlier this week, on the focus of media narratives.

Apparently in the last week or so, the narrative had developed that the President was not showing enough anger about the Gulf oil spill disaster. Driving in to work, I heard on the morning news that a recent interviewer (Matt Lauer from NBC) had actually told the President:

"This is not the time to meet with experts and advisers. This is a time to spend more time in the Gulf and -- I never thought I'd say this to a president -- but kick some butt."

I'm fascinated that interviewers don't ask questions anymore, they tell their subjects how they should be doing their jobs.  But that aside, the President -- conscious, I suppose, of this narrative against him, and aware that strong sentiment trumps shrewd thought in American politics -- responded with this:

"I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

First off, kudos for his nice effort there to try to play the demanded "angry" role while still conveying a logical point.  But what's interesting to me about the discussion surrounding this exchange is not so much just that we are being told to focus on the President's emotive abilities rather than on the actual corruption and incompetence of the industries and those tasked with regulating them.  I mean, we've learned to take that for granted in our modern punditocracy.

No, what fascinated me was that by my drive home that afternoon, the narrative had moved on apace.  The discussion by this point was now: had the president been too vulgar?  Was this demeaning to the office?

Aha!  I was wondering what I should be distracted by next.