Dichroic Reflections

Dichroic Reflections https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/ Dichroic Reflections - Dreamwidth Studios Thu, 14 Jul 2016 13:23:45 GMT LiveJournal / Dreamwidth Studios dichroic personal https://v2.dreamwidth.org/110499/158737 Dichroic Reflections https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/ 98 48 https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/326425.html Thu, 14 Jul 2016 13:23:45 GMT Turning protest to pablum: when will they ever learn? https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/326425.html <p> To the people who want to take “This land is your land, this land is my land” out of copyright: there’s really no need. I bet Woody’s heirs would be glad to let you use it if you just use ALL the verses he wrote:</p> <p>There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;<br /> Sign was painted, it said private property;<br /> But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;<br /> That side was made for you and me. </p> <p>In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,<br /> By the relief office I seen my people;<br /> As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking<br /> Is this land made for you and me? </p> <p>Nobody living can ever stop me,<br /> As I go walking that freedom highway;<br /> Nobody living can ever make me turn back<br /> This land was made for you and me.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/2016/07/14/turning-protest-to-pablum-when-will-they-ever-learn/" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=326425" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/326425.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/311389.html Mon, 23 Nov 2015 22:47:52 GMT why having money helps you not buy https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/311389.html <p>I’ve just realized a corollary to the <a href="http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Economic_Injustice">Sam Vimes theory of economic injustice</a>. I don’t have a catchy name for it yet, but the gist is that having enough money – and being confident that you will have enough in the foreseeable future – saves you from making unnecessary purchases.</p> <p>Here’s how it works. Let’s say you have three pair of jeans. That seems to you to be about the right number of jeans. And then one day jeans go on sale at a store you sometimes shop at. You feel like you need to buy a pair nownowNOW! Because they’re on sale! And even though all the jeans you have are in perfectly fine shape, some day they will wear out and you will need a new pair, and they may not be on sale then. </p> <p>Problem is, by the time this happens, you may be a different size. Or you may prefer a different style of jeans, or you may have decided to wear exclusively kilts. Even if none of these things is true, you have had to store the extra pair of jeans all that time, and they’ve been cluttering up your closet. (Also, there’s the fact that you could have been earning interest on the money tied up in those jeans, but I think we can assume the interest on the price of jeans for 6 months or a year is negligible).</p> <p>If you are in a state of financial comfort, you don’t have to buy the jeans when they’re on sale. So what if they cost $10 more when you’re ready to buy them? You’ll be able to afford it then – and if you don’t buy them or if you decide to buy a different version, then you’ve saved yourself from buying something you can’t use or no longer like.</p> <p>(This post derives from me trying to persuade myself not to buy a gray sweater to replace the one that has just developed a hole. Not only do I have plenty of sweaters, I actually already have multiple gray sweaters, even though all the others are heavier, lighter, longer or differently styled than this one. If I decide I can no longer live without a dark gray merino pullover, I can do something about it at that time.)</p> <p>Why, yes, I did just spend (pause to count) four paragraphs explaining that not having enough money leads to making decisions based on anxiety. In other news, water is wet – and falls from the sky in Oregon for 8 months of the year.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/2015/11/23/why-having-money-helps-you-not-buy/" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=311389" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/311389.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/311164.html Fri, 20 Nov 2015 20:35:08 GMT ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/311164.html <p>I heard a story the other day that made me sad. It’s not my story to tell so I won’t give details, but in summary, the guy wanted to buy something and was offered it at a price so low that it could have hurt the naive former owner (FO). He told the FO that he should be charging more, and left his card so the FO could call when he’d thought it over.</p> <p>The wife of the guy telling the story was mad at him for not buying the thing at the low price, and that’s the part that makes me sad.</p> <p>There’s a happy ending; FO talked to his wife and called the guy back offering to sell at the price he’d originally quoted. Their children were dead so they had no one to pass the thing on to, and they’d make some money over what they’d originally paid years ago, so they decided they’d rather sell to an honest man than maximize their profit. </p> <p>It’s a nice story, overall, but I can’t get past the wife’s complaint. It seems to me that if marriage is for anything at all, it’s for supporting each other. Some of that is sharing the chores of running a life and raising children, if you have them; some of it is holding each other up during hard times and cheering each other on during good ones. But surely some of it should be about supporting each other to become better.</p> <p>Shouldn’t it?</p> <p>Also, this purchase was not a thing the family really needed. You might have more responsibility to your family than to strangers when all else is equal, but screwing over someone else to get your family a luxury is what I think of as the “I Got Mine” mentality, and I think it’s one of our biggest failings as a society.</p> <p>Years ago, there was a Hagar the Horrible Sunday comic strip, in which they portrayed the family’s motto as “I Got Mine!” and showed various images of how happy each family member was with their particular “mine” people/stuff. Ever since then I have thought of the sort of thinking you describe as the “I Got Mine” school of thought, and I think it’s downright evil:</p> <ul> <li>My family came over here as refugees, but no one else should come – my family wanted to work and make a better life for ourselves and just needed a little help, whereas all these new people just want to suck us all dry.</li> <li>I had my abortion for the right reasons, but all these other women shouldn’t be allowed that option because they just want sex without consequences.</li> <li>I need freedom to celebrate my own religion because everyone hates us, but I want to ban these other religions because they’re full of violent people and anyway they’re wrong.</li> </ul> <p>(Note: I copied my explanation of the “I Got Mine” mentality, and those three examples, from a Ravelry post I wrote on November 2 – before the attacks in Paris.)</p> <p>I Got Mine is not my family motto, and I hope my own spouse would hold me to a higher standard – or at the very least, help me hold myself to it.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/2015/11/20/ordained-for-the-mutual-society-help-and-comfort-that-the-one-ought-to-have-of-the-other/" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=311164" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/311164.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/301499.html Thu, 14 May 2015 00:01:47 GMT a long entry, because I don’t have time to make it shorter https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/301499.html <p>It’s not that I haven’t blogged in the last week – but it was a work-related rant so I made it a private entry. Also, I spent last week on a work trip to Toledo, so I was mostly either at meetings or in transit. Landed back in Portland at 1, drove home (yay me – no issues or brain weirdness this time), transferred a few things to a backpak and headed to the lake house for the weekend. Unfortunately it was fairly windy all weekend so we didn’t get much rowing in; Saturday we kayaked a bit and then Sunday I took my open-water single out but only for 5km. (Poor Ted had a headache and didn’t get to row at all. So not much distance, but I operate on a general principle that any is better than none. </p> <p>Another of my general principles is that I will only knit for other people is a) they are related to me or b) I really want to. I put a package in the mail today for someone who makes me really want to – we’re not close but she’s put conscious effort into maintaining our friendship over many years and it’s really meant a lot to me, especially with all of my travel. So I guess I just ruined that surprise somewhat – maybe I’ll write more about it later.</p> <p>There have been another couple of entries I’ve been mulling over. One hasn’t gotten written because it’s going to take a lot more focus than I’ve had so far to give it, but I can summarize: if you actually read the Jewish and Christian Bibles, it turns out that they talk mostly about how to regulate your own conduct (the Torah is also about how to run a communit, but in those cases it’s about structured action and setting up laws, not making your own judgement). What they don’t talk about, and in both cases militate strictly against, is judging other people’s conduct. Similarly, an online acquaintance pointed out that in the Torah, “the prohibition against pork is mentioned twice. There’s 30+ instances of not engaging in various kinds of “evil speech.” So, really, there’s a better argument for eating a BLT than there is for critiquing someone’s choice to eat one.”</p> <p>The other thing I want to talk about is in response to reading Sarah Vowell’s essay collection “Partly Cloudy Patriot” (which I liked a lot in general). She mocks people comparing all and sundry to Rosa Parks, with a couple of odd and egregious examples (Ted Nugent?) including people who were actually trying to stifle others’ freedoms. But where I disagree is where she goes on to say that really, no one can be compared to Rosa Parks “except maybe that young Chinese guy who faced down cannons in Tiananmen Square”. For one thing, I’d rather stare down an angry bus drive, even if he calls the cops, than a cannon. But avoiding that comparison (because there’s plenty of praise and respect to go around and it’s not a zero-sum game), there are lots of people even just in the US struggle for Civil Rights whose bravery, I’d say, was on a par with Mrs. Parks’ – all those young people on the Freedom bus, for example. Hosea Williams and John Lewis on the Pettus Bridge, on the March to Montgomery. Anyone who walked ten miles to work rather than taking a bus during the boycott. And all the people I can imagine in circumstances I don’t know of, putting out arson-born fires, facing mobs, sitting at soda counters. More importantly, if we put our heroes and hera on too lofty a pedestal, we make them unique and inhuman – and impossible to live up to. I’m not diminishing Rosa Parks in any way when I say that she was just a woman, a good and brave one – I’m just stressing the possibility and the responsibility to live up to her example.</p> <p>(In <em>My Life with Martin</em>, Coretta Scott King discussed the question of whether Rosa Parks’ action was preplanned, and whether she was chosen to take that action. No idea, but if it was, I don’t think that diminishes her bravery either. It’s probably harder to have to look forward to danger than to do something dangerous on the spur of the moment. And if your character is exemplary enough that the people who know you choose you to be the prow on the ship of their movement, that’s a tribute.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/2015/05/13/a-long-entry-because-i-dont-have-time-to-make-it-shorter/" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=301499" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/301499.html daily updates knitting musing books public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/299225.html Tue, 31 Mar 2015 16:47:02 GMT religious differences https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/299225.html <p>Some days I’m amazed at how much Christians and Jews differ in their approach to theology. Some Christians, anyway.</p> <p>I am not even talking about Indiana’s recent “religious freedom law” now (I’m embarrassed to see in the Indy Star that people present at the private signing of that bill include Orthodox Jews as well as Catholic monks and nuns, conservative lobbyists, and so on.)</p> <p>Yesterday, I received a postcard from a local church advertising their Easter service, talking about how they offer a “fresh message”. That’s the part I don’t get. First of all, if you’re going to be a Christian at all, how could any new message be more powerful than the age-old “He is Risen?” Second, isn’t some of the power of that precisely because it isn’t fresh at all but because people have been celebrating that same message for the last two thousand years? This confuses me, but maybe that’s because the whole point of Passover is to repeat the same story we’ve been telling for a few thousand years.</p> <p>(Said church also mentioned their “authentic worship”. I take that to mean “we really mean the words we’re saying – we’re not just repeating set prayers”. This is also different from Jewish tradition where it’s important to say the words in community, even if they get mumbled more as a mantra than a literal prayer, but that discussion probably needs a better theologian than me.)</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=4098" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=299225" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/299225.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/293891.html Fri, 19 Dec 2014 18:27:49 GMT time to light a candle https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/293891.html <p>I post the lyrics to Peter Yarrow’s song Light One Candle every year at Chanukah, because I believe deeply in the message in it. It’s also relevant to a couple of articles I’ve recently read; <a href="http://teruah-jewishmusic.blogspot.com/2007/12/channukah-day-3-peter-yarrows.html">one</a> describes the song as being controversial because it’s “not Jewish enough”; in my opinion if that whole Chosen People idea means anything, it means that we have certain responsibilities toward other people that come out of our own experiences. “Light one candle for those who are suffering the pain we learned so long ago.”</p> <p>Tikkun Olam, healing the world, is a Jewish value; to quote the <a href="http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2014/11/a-better-world.html">Velveteen Rabbi</a> quoting the Pirke Avot, “Jewish tradition teaches us to cultivate hope in place of despair. It’s not incumbent on us to finish the work, but neither are we free to refrain from beginning it.” That is also why I agree with <a href="http://tcjewfolk.com/black-lives-matter-jewish-issue/">another article</a>, that “Black Lives Matter!” is indeed a Jewish issue. All lives matter.</p> <p>Light one candle for the Maccabee children<br /> With thanks that their light didn’t die<br /> Light one candle for the pain they endured<br /> When their right to exist was denied<br /> Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice<br /> Justice and freedom demand<br /> But light one candle for the wisdom to know<br /> When the peacemaker’s time is at hand</p> <p>[Chorus:]<br /> Don’t let the light go out!<br /> It’s lasted for so many years!<br /> Don’t let the light go out!<br /> Let it shine through our love and our tears.</p> <p>Light one candle for the strength that we need<br /> To never become our own foe<br /> And light one candle for those who are suffering<br /> Pain we learned so long ago<br /> Light one candle for all we believe in<br /> That anger not tear us apart<br /> And light one candle to find us together<br /> With peace as the song in our hearts</p> <p>[Chorus]</p> <p>What is the memory that’s valued so highly<br /> That we keep it alive in that flame?<br /> What’s the commitment to those who have died<br /> That we cry out they’ve not died in vain?<br /> We have come this far always believing<br /> That justice would somehow prevail<br /> This is the burden, this is the promise<br /> This is why we will not fail!</p> <p>[Chorus]<br /> Don’t let the light go out!<br /> Don’t let the light go out!<br /> Don’t let the light go out!</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=4005" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=293891" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/293891.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/293334.html Wed, 03 Dec 2014 17:47:22 GMT noodling with theology https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/293334.html <p>In honor of Curt Schilling, I’m going to ramble on about theology for a bit. I’m just noodling; the below is speculation, not to be construed as a statement of everything I believe and certainly not an attempt to convince others. But I do believe that if you’re going to espouse a faith, then you ought to examine it and yourself, and make sure that what you say you believe is consistent with what you do believe.</p> <p>Also, it’s pretty clear that Schilling doesn’t have the faintest understanding of evolution, since he’s made comments about “missing the intermediate stages between monkey and man”. No one ever claimed that humans were descended from monkeys; the fossils of stages between the earliest hominids and later ones like us certainly do exist, as well as the fossils of stages between those hominids and their ancestors, from primates on back to microfauna.</p> <p>Anyway, those disclaimers aside, what bothers me is that Schilling espouses an almighty God but seems to actually believe in one created in his own image, who populated the earth in the same way as I might create a diorama – first drawing the background, then putting in little figures here and there. I don’t <em>need </em>a God who’s just a slightly bigger version of me. If I’m going to believe in a deity I want one who contains cosmoi. It’s been understood since Darwin’s day that evolution isn’t inconsistent with religion; the preacher Henry Ward Beecher said “Who designed this mighty machine, created matter, gave to it its laws, and impressed upon it that tendency which has brought forth the almost infinite results on the globe, and wrought them into a perfect system? Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail.” For that matter, it’s been understood since at least St. Augustine of Hippo that science in general isn’t incompatible with belief and that ignorance is not next to godliness. </p> <p>If I’m going to believe in a God who is worth believing in, I want one who set the universes in motion, who laid out the physical laws that allowed drifts of primordial dust to develop into suns and comets, black holes and galaxies, amoebae and fungi and plantlife, other animals and us, and for all we know other forms of life that are currently beyond our ken.</p> <p>I want a God who is beyond my understanding; I don’t need one who looks like me. Still, I have to think even a transcendental and omniscient deity would want me to use my brain, whether it’s personally marked with the Shekhina’s “thumbprint” or the outcome of a million infinitely complex processes, to understand the universe in which I exist and to delight in its beauty and intricacy. However they developed, intelligence and free will are gifts, the best we’ve been given, and I have to believe that the best I can give in return is to use mine to make the best choices I can and to try to understand, within the limits of my mortal comprehension, where I am and how we got here.</p> <p>Literal Bible believers dislike the idea of evolution because it doesn’t match the Bible’s precise words. But even if you believe in the Bible’s inerrancy, the stories in Genesis are a few thousand years old. They weren’t even written down for the first part of their existence; they had to speak to the people of that time in order to be remembered. When you tell a three-year-old about where babies come from, you don’t tell her about gametes and zygotes or the growth stages of an embryo and fetus; you tell her some variant of “the Daddy puts the seed into the Mommy and it grows into a baby”. (I don’t have a kid; maybe those discussions are slightly more accurate these days, but I bet they’re just as simplified.) What you tell the three-year-old is true, but it’s only a platform for her to build more understanding as she grows up. You’d be a bit appalled if her understanding hasn’t progressed beyond that when she’s twenty-three. One of my less favorite Biblical quotes is “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.” I’d prefer “when I grew up, I saw childish things in a new light,”; either way it applies here. Like the average twenty-three-year-old, we’re far from knowing all there is to know about our world, but hopefully we’ve learned a few things since our species’ early childhood.</p> <p>Mostly, I just want people to stop telling me I should follow their God, when all they can offer is a version of themself, just with better toys.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3998" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=293334" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/293334.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/289770.html Wed, 03 Sep 2014 21:48:05 GMT on goose poop and being Ms Cellophane https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/289770.html <p>I have two injuries from last weekend. The scrape on my elbow from picking up a kayak seems like a reasonable one to have, even if I did scrape my left elbow while picking up the boat on my right side. The other injury, though, is much more ridiculous: I had a blister and then ripped the skin off from sweeping goose poop off our dock. The first year, the geese avoided our dock; now they have found it. After two weeks away, it had a truly amazing amount of crap on it (“amazing amount of crap” is a phrase you never want to have to use when speaking literally). In case anyone cares, the best methodology for goose poop removal seems to be to start with a light sweeping (“light” being what I didn’t do and why I got the blister) to remove the dry stuff, followed by alternating buckets of water tossed with strategic aim and sweeping to get everything else off. Fortunately there’s enough of a current to carry it away once it’s washed or swept into the water, and I don’t feel guilty about sweeping it in since presumably geese poop there too.</p> <p>WHINING AHEAD: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED</p> <p>I am feeling a bit invisible and isolated lately. Not so much online, really, but in meatspace. I’m grateful that I do still get responses here, considering how infrequently I post, and I do get a lot of interaction on Ravelry, my other main online space. </p> <p>On the other hand, in physical space and even online areas based more on in-person acquaintanceship, things are different.</p> <p>At work, I sit in an area with only a few other people. Most of my colleagues eat lunch at their desks; I miss the way my groups in Taiwan and the Netherlands would all go eat together. More more of my meetings are telecons than in-person, and I have somewhat fewer meetings and more solo work than in my last job. Lots of meetings get postponed, though always for valid reasons. I do get pretty good responsiveness to questions and requests.</p> <p>Socially – there pretty much is no socially here. A lot of our social life both in Arizona and in the Netherlands was through rowing, but we don’t have any water close enough to make it practical to row during the week. We do have some rowing contacts at the lake house, but it’s not economically feasible to join their club when we only get out there every other week, or sometimes less (plus we use our own equipment and don’t need club boats). I take a longish lunch one day a week to go to my local knitting group, and that’s about it for social interaction. I try to go to work social events when they have them. I could do more knitting stuff – there are multiple knit nights a week around here – but it’s hard to drag myself back out of the house after I’ve gotten home and worked out, and the times I have gone were nice but not so great as to make me feel I’m missing a lot.</p> <p>When we moved here, we did meet up once with an old friend of Ted’s but she’s way on the other side of town. I’ve tried to get together with a longtime acquaintance from the LordPeter list who lives very close by; she’s said she wants to but has pled illness for a year and a half. (No, I haven’t nagged. We emailed a couple times early on and then I checked back once recently.) If she wanted, she could invite me to come to her to to a neutral place close to her. I’d guess this is most likely an excuse but if not, then she’s clearly just not well enough to have new people in her life. </p> <p>I’ve kind of run short on people to just call and talk to. I used to talk to my uncle and grandmother fairly regularly, but we lost her in 1997 or so and him in 2009. (Dad died a few months ago, but never liked to talk on the phone anyway.) Mom is a bit unsatisfactory to talk to these days because she focuses only on what and who she sees daily and isn’t that interested in much else – to the point that she’ll refer to “them” and “he” with no warning and I’m just supposed to know the former is my brother and SIL and the latter my nephew (because why would anyone want to talk about anything else?). I don’t really care what she ate yesterday or if everyone at her new place thinks her grandson is cute. (Of course I do talk to her regularly and listen to her talk about these things anyway, because I need to support her. And I don’t want to give the wrong impression, having met a few too many people with horrible uncaring mothers. She does try – she called just yesterday to check back because I’d mentioned on Monday that Ted wasn’t feeling well. It’s just the way her mind works – out of sight <i>is</i> out of mind, to some degree.) </p> <p>As for friends elsewhere, I never did spent much time on the phone with them anyway – more to make plans than just chat. A lot of people don’t email much these days. Some of my physical-world friends do or did blog, but I can’t read blogs during the day from this job. Somehow it seems to be easier to catch up with Facebook’s two-line updates and skippable memes than to read blogposts in my very limited evening free time, especially with fewer and fewer people writing those posts. (I realize I am a part of the problem here and I keep resolving to do better.)</p> <p>Even on Facebook (where my friendslist is a blend of people I went to school with, people I’ve met along the way, dnd people from assorted online contexts) I feel a bit isolated. People answer when I comment on their stuff, and they ‘like’ or comment on mine some, but of course you rarely get real conversation there. And, though this sounds silly, I don’t get tagged for stuff. I didn’t particularly want to dump ice water on my head (and I’m perfectly capable of donating to a charity on my own volition) though coming up with ten books that have hit me hard might have been fun. But it’s not really wanting to do those things, which of course I could do on my own anyway. It feels stupid to even complain – after all, I don’t like tagging other people, because I don’t want to inconvenience them and because some people dislike being called out in public. It’s just, I don’t know, sort of a graphic demonstration that I’m not particularly in the forefront of anyone’s mind. (Don’t get me wrong; I am not asking to be tagged for anything, either – that wouldn’t really solve the problem.) </p> <p>Of course there’s Ted as a constant in my life; I couldn’t be luckier or happier to have him there. I just don’t think it’s either effective or fair to expect one person to serve as the majority of my human contact.</p> <p>It takes a while to make friends after you move. Moving frequently means you will be more isolated for a while. Some jobs have less contact than others. None of this is problematic on its own; it’s just all hitting me together, and not having a local rowing club cuts off one more thing that’s been a support for me elsewhere. </p> <p>People at this company like to quote studies about how no one can really multitask and you (=everyone) get more done if you focus. I’m not convinced. I like being interrupted now and then. I like having people around to bounce ideas off, and I like conversations that meander. Without those, I think I get a little down – not clinically depressed, just mild situational depression – and I function less effectively. The other point is that I’m not *really* alone; I was happier when I was working at home on my book and could wear what I wanted, work on the schedule I wanted, lounge comfortably on a sofa, take time to relax and let ideas percolate if I needed to. Right now I have all the constraints of working in an office, without the fun of talking to other people much, and without much people contact outside work to make up for it.</p> <p>There are some problems that can be solved by throwing money at them. I think this is one you can only solve by throwing time at it – wait, meet people, be friendly, and hope things change gradually.</p> <p>Oh, and also: the complete lack of reviews on my book doesn’t help. Even if someone said they hated it, at least you’d know they read it.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3942" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=289770" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/289770.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/288969.html Thu, 21 Aug 2014 03:10:36 GMT musing https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/288969.html <p>Forgive me if this is long-winded and driveling; something just hit me but I’m not sure I’ll be able to explain it. </p> <p>When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I was friends with some neighbors whose kids I babysat – still am friends, at least in a vague Facebook-and-holiday-card way. Obviously they were older, 30ish or so when I was sixteen. His parents were Holocaust survivors; I’ve seen their tattoos. My husband still has both grandfathers, lucky man; one was a conscientious objector in WWII, and the other was a bona-fide hero in the Pacific war, Purple Heart and everything. So the thing is, I’m old enough to know people who showed extraordinary valor in that war, but they are / were old enough that we don’t just sit around and swap stories. (My husband’s grandfathers have been willing to share more of their stories in recent years, but they do feel like history.) As a young engineer, I did work directly with people who made history as part of the Apollo program, but I don’t think that’s a common experience.</p> <p>Dorothy GIlman is famous for her Mrs. Pollifax mysteries, but I’ve just been reading one of her older books, The Clarivoyant Countess. It’s a series of short stories about a clairvoyant in the 1970s; in it, people discuss psychic powers, reincarnation, and a lot of the other arcane stuff in fashion then. (Some of the conversation in the stories has the feel of the dinner parties Madeleine L’Engle describes in her nonfiction, so I believe they fit with the zeitgeist.) The story that hit me hard has a minor character who went through the concentration camps and saved his wife from them by a brilliant ploy. </p> <p>And it sort of hit me: yes, the fifties were mostly a time of nesting and reaction, but the young (and older) people trying to change the world in the late ’60s and early ’70s had an intimate knowledge people who had done exactly that – changed the world and won out over evil through heroism, courage, and determination. They knew them as well as my younger coworkers might know me – I’m not old yet and I have clear memories of the ’80s. No wonder they believed in their own abilities to measure up and change the world again. If their parents could do it, why not then?</p> <p>And the WWII generation had at least a head start; I don’t know that I could say that people who lived through WWI changed the world exactly but they had it change around them, dealt with it and survived.</p> <p>Now, when we see a need for change as in Ferguson, those examples are farther back in history from us. The amazing leadership and perseverance of the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the feminist changes that meant I could major in engineering and get jobs with no real resistance are all forty to fifty years in our past now. They don’t feel like yesterday to the middle-aged, let alone to the young.</p> <p>On the other hand, we know through direct memory that we can survive massive change around us – just look at the Internet. The WWW has only been around since about ’92. We know that with a concerted effort we can make real change happen now – look how many US states allow same-sex marriage, illegal in all fifty states within the lifetimes of people who aren’t old enough to drive. it might be harder for us – especially our youngest – to believe we can change the world when we don’t have so many obvious heroes among us, because it’s harder to see history made when you’re inside it. It’s hard to have a historical perspective on current events, but I think if we can take that step back to be objective, there are plenty of examples to build those hopes on.</p> <p>Does that even make sense?</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3932" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=288969" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/288969.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/287081.html Tue, 01 Jul 2014 23:16:05 GMT our boys https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/287081.html <p>Oddly, what brought me to tears over Eyal, Gilad and Naftali, the three kidnapped Israeli boys, is from another religious tradition already. John Gorka based his “Let Them in, Peter” on a poem found in a Philippine hospital during WWII:</p> <p>Let them in, Peter<br /> They are very tired<br /> Give them couches where the angels sleep<br /> And light those fires</p> <p>Let them wake whole again<br /> To brand new dawns<br /> Fired by the sun not wartime’s<br /> Bloody guns</p> <p>May their peace be deep<br /> Remember where the broken bodies lie<br /> God knows how young they were<br /> To have to die<br /> God knows how young they were<br /> To have to die</p> <p>So give them things they like<br /> Let them make some noise<br /> Give dance hall bands not golden harps<br /> To these our boys </p> <p>And let them love, Peter<br /> For they’ve had no time<br /> They should have trees and bird songs<br /> And hills to climb</p> <p>The taste of summer in a ripened pear<br /> And girls sweet as meadow wind<br /> With flowing hair</p> <p>And tell them how they are missed<br /> But say not to fear<br /> It’s gonna be alright<br /> With us down here</p> <p>Let them in, Peter<br /> Let them in, Peter<br /> Let them in, Peter</p> <p>And hoping I don’t have to call to mind the words Tommy Sands wrote about yet another war: “another eye for another eye / ’til everyone is blind”. (My brain’s other native language is song lyrics, apparently, and it retreats there in times of emotion – witness the singing of Sunrise, Sunset at my Dad’s funeral. One advantage of a blog is being able to speak in them.)</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3897" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=287081" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/287081.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/285657.html Thu, 12 Jun 2014 22:13:25 GMT dumping out the brain https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/285657.html <p>Still not convinced I’ve actually done my grieving on the whole dad thing. I just have this feeling someday I’m going to be ambushed by a major sobfest, because I atill haven’t done that and it seems wrong not to. On the other hand, given that I’ve seen him maaaaybe one week in a year in the last two decades and rarely talked much on the phone because he didn’t like to, it honestly doesn’t feel much different. I mean, I can still remember him, talk to him and know what he would say, and talk to Mom about him, same as I could have done five weeks or a year or ten years ago. I feel much worse thinking about what the the whole period of health issues was like for him, or what life is like for Mom now (because I know how big a hole Ted would leave in my life) than I do in thinking about my own bereavement. I suppose grief does what it wants – or as Dad would say “We’ll see what’ll be.” </p> <p>Meanwhile my SIL’s birthday is coming up and she’s not that much easier to buy for than he was, so I don’t even miss the annual June rituals of buying Father’s Day and birthday gifts for someone who doesn’t seem to need much. (At least she’s got a new house, so there’s always relevant gift certificates.) I could do with less Father’s Day advertising, though.</p> <p>Mom’s getting ready for her move next week – getting stressed out and pre-nostalgic about leaving the house where she’s spent all of her adult life. She’s looking forward to having people around her, though, and being in a place where every single thing isn’t a memory of Dad. I mean, it’s not just furniture – it’s the adjustable mattress they got because he liked soft mattresses and she liked firm ones, and the nightstands they got when they were first married, and the sectional sofa she got so he could nap and she’d still have room to sit. And <i>every single thing</i> in the house is like that. It’s not like she’ll move and forget him, but a few less reminders would be nice.</p> <p>Last week I flew out to Providence Wednesday, got up early Thursday (6 local, 3 Pacific time), gave a speech, then flew home. To be honest I was most worried about the drive to and from the airport, but both went fairly smoothly. I think the speech went well; one of the arrangers seemed surprised when I told him afterwards it was the first time I’d spoken about my book, so that’s good. I’m still a bit boggled by how much they paid for 2 hours of my time (airfare, hotel, books for all their members). All I need is for people to pay twice as much (so I could have an honorarium) and book me every week and I’d be set. </p> <p>And otherwise, life goes as it goes. Stuff has happened, but most of it just doesn’t seem exciting to write about. Last week we went to the lake house, and got to row and kayak both. Right before that our 16-month-old washer died, and was going to cost almost as much to fix as a new one. So Sunday after returning we went shopping and bought a new one (again a top-loader high efficiency, but this time not a Whirlpool) that will be delivered this weekend. We also fired our cleaning service this week, after it became clear that they hadn’t vacuumed the living room carpet at all, or the area under Ted’s desk that had furballs so big I think it was breeding whole new cats. We’d complained a couple of times about the rug not being done well, so this time we just told this service to stop coming, and the other one we’d gotten a quote from to start in two weeks.</p> <p>Next week we’re holding a knitting retreat at the lake house – the Black Sheep Gathering is only 20-30 minutes from the house, so I invited people from my local knitting group to come bunk with us. We’ve got the spare room queen bed, a futon with a comfortable spring mattress, an inflatable double bed, a thick foam memory foam pad we got because our Taiwan spare bed was rock hard (we slept on it at Christmas – it’s comfortable even on a bare floor) and an unfolding chair. We have plenty of sofa space inside; might be a bit short on dining chairs inside and out but we’ll manage. We’ve told people that we’ll supply burgers (beef and veggie versions) and hotdogs for Saturday dinner and they can bring sidedishes and their own breakfast stuff. This will be the first time we’ve really had a gathering there other than family; we’d like to eventually have big open-house parties and rowing gatherings there, so this is a first trial. </p> <p>And you know, just stuff. Life in general. Maybe I need to start writing more often just to get in the habit of telling a continuous story. Now whenever I do blog I feel like I’m boring myself; maybe it’s because it’s such a discontinuous narrative so everything has to be explained. The other problem is having to explain everything at once because updates are rare; that doesn’t help. Or doing multiple entries, one topic per. </p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3858" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=285657" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/285657.html daily updates musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/284159.html Mon, 28 Apr 2014 22:12:41 GMT lights shine brightest when it’s dark https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/284159.html <p>I wouldn’t have expected this, but it turns out that sometimes, going through hard times can give you a new respect for your family.</p> <p>One thing I know is that love brings fear – as Archie Fisher sings, “The more that you love, then the more there’s for losing.” In particular, every marriage ends, and probably everyone who’s ever been hapily partnered has the occasional painful realization that someday, one of you will have to go on alone. (Side note: one of my grandmothers told me she was disappointed and maybe a bit angry when my grandfather died – they lived by the ocean, and apparently they’d planned to just hold hands and walkout into the tide some day. For her at least, it was a serious plan.) Mom’s going through that now. Yesterday she bought a new bed for the apartment she’ll be moving into; neither of us said it, but I bet I wasn’t the only one thinking how weird it is that Dad’s not likely to ever sleep in it. </p> <p>Another thing I know is that my mom is strong when it comes to big things. She can be fairly incompetent in small matters – when traveling with her, I got in the habit of just lightly nudging her in the right direction at street corners, because she’d <i>always</i> turn to go the wrong way. She gets nervous if you’re with her in a museum and she loses sight of you; she takes forever to find anything in her purse and then to get it put back away; she has to potter and fiddle around before she gets moving to go anywhere. She won’t drive on highways, and she’s gotten more and more nervous as she’s aged. She needs a lot of coaching to use anythign electronic. But put her in a really hard situation and she’s a tower of strength. She can always do anything that really needs to be done. (My brother worries about her falling apart after Dad is gone, but I don’t even think she’ll do that, at least not to any great extent. Her mother didn’t (until she had a heart issue a bit after my grandfather’s death), and Mom’s at the stage of life where she’s seen friends go through this several times. I suspect for her this is the sort of thing where you cry, and you just go on living your life, stopping to blow your nose when needed.)</p> <p>A third thing is that my brother is reliable when it comes to important things. He never finished college, lived with our parents until he was thirty, and in general comes off as having the maturity of someone about twenty years younger than he actual is. (That would be early twenties, an age when many people hold responsible jobs, are good parents, and are in general adult – just still figuring out the details and goofing on them now and then. I’m not saying he’s a fuck-up. His wife says he’s a great husband, I know he’s a great father, and they just bought a house, so 20 years might be an overstatement.) He can also still be pretty annoying, often when he’s not even trying. But on important stuff he’s solid. I could have told you when he was 13 that he’d be a good parent, and I knew I’d never have to worry about him treating a girlfriend badly. In the present situation, he and his wife are always there when Mom and Dad need help, driving and visiting and whatever. I think Mom finds it comforting that she knows we’d both rather they spend all their (Mom and Dad’s) money on caring for themselves properly and don’t leave us anything, and that we’ll never squabble over their stuff or who gets what. (As noted, Brother and SIL have a new house, and so they’ll be getting some of the furniture Mom can’t take with her to the new apartment. SIL insisted Mom check to make sure I didn’t want the china hutch before they take it. I told them, I have two completely furnished houses – I’ll take photos, but I don’t want furniture!! Nice of her to want to check though. I think SIL has been a responsible adult since she was very young, and she’s also a kind one.)</p> <p>Anyway, I’ve known those things for a long time – about Mom’s strength in adversity and Brother’s reliability when it counts – but there’s nothing like being where it all goes pear-shaped to highlight those characteristics.</p> <p>(I don’t update all that often these days, so it’s probably hard to keep up. The hard cirumstance I’m referring to is that Dad’s dying of cancer and was moved to hospice last week.)</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3825" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=284159" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/284159.html daily updates musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/235027.html Fri, 17 Aug 2012 10:47:52 GMT reactions to assorted things online https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/235027.html <p><a href="http://taelle.livejournal.com/">Taelle</a> has posts a <a href="http://taelle.livejournal.com/312527.html">fic</a> quote that should probably be checked out by all LMM fans.</p> <p>I read this one a couple of days ago and have been wanting to link it and get all and sundry (“all and sundry” including most particularly those of you who are interested in the ideas of faith and identity) to read it. <a href="http://kippahandcollar.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/mysterious-stones/">Alana moves from mysterious stones on Orkney</a> to reflections on what religion is, in particular what it means to be Jewish.</p> <p>And finally, as everyone probably knows by now, <a href="http://jaylake.livejournal.com/2921449.html#comments">Jay Lake’s cancer has returned</a>. (Spit.) I’m not sure why this hits me on such a personal level; I don’t know Jay and I’m not even a fan of his fiction (I am of his blog, though). I think it’s a combination of things. </p> <p>First, you do feel like get to know someone when you read his blog for a while, whether oth not that’s actually true. He bcomes Jay, a known person, rather than an anonymous member of the masses whom you can only care about in a sense of “for I am involved in mankind”. Second, I’m still sensitized to how brutal cancer can be, after losing my uncle three years ago. His great-nephew will never know him and I’ll have to fill both our roles for him. I’ll never get the fun of traveling with my uncle again, of hearing about the places he’s been and telling him about mine, and teasing him for the way in which he remembers every good meal he ever had. I blame cancer for that, and the grudge is personal.</p> <p>Thirdly, I think a lot of it is just because I’ve lived my life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I didn’t happen to be around gay communities in the 80s when AIDS was really ravaging through them; past that, the only diseases I’ve had experience of have very low mortality rates or were quickly controlled. I’ve never had to fear the Black Plague sweeping through my town. I’ve never lived through a flu epidemic that took the adult and healthy and left old people and children to mourn. The other major killers of my time are either random and rare (yes, accidents kill people, but each one is different and has unique causes), or actually have intent (murder, terrorism) or most often happen to people who have already had long lives. Cancer kills diverse people, too often can’t be stopped – or can be stopped only for a while, and seems to come without sense or warning. (I’m saddened but actually less aggrieved by the lung cancer that hit my father after decades of smoking than I am by my uncle’s rare cancer of unknown cause – though a lot of this is really also because Dad’s now OK.) Cancer is sort of a unique thing in my world, and that makes its random brutality all the more painful.</p> <p>I hope Jay is able to find a treatment that heals him, or at the very least keeps him in relative health for a long long time. That’s the main concern for the best opart of me. But there’s another part that just wants to see cancer lose this time, be eradicated totally in ignominious defeat. I don’t know you, <a href="http://jaylake.livejournal.com/2921449.html#comments">Jay’s Cancer</a>, but I don’t like you and it’s <i>personal</i>.</p> <p>(And someday I will learn to organize my writing to put the most important stuff first.)</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3021" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=235027" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/235027.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/233750.html Mon, 06 Aug 2012 09:54:49 GMT feet of the future https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/233750.html <p>I feel like I’m the only liberal in the world who doesn’t think Oscar Pistorius being allowed to compete in the Olympics is an unmitigated good. To me it all comes down to the question “Do his prostheses give him an unfair advantage over unmodified runners?” where by “unmodified” I mean the ones who run on the feet they were born with. If they do, then he should not be allowed to compete with them. In this case it isn’t clear and so it’s right that he was allowed to compete.</p> <p>Sports Illustrated has a <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/olympics/2012/writers/david_epstein/08/03/oscar-pistorius-london-olympics/index.html">very good article on the technical issues, and</a> why it can’t be conclusively determined at this time – basically, the prostheses have some advantages and some disadvantages, and it’s not clear if they cancel each other out. But someday we *will* produce prostheses that are more effective – at least for a given purpose, like competitive running – than natural limbs, and at that point it will become unfair to the other athletes. I think what we’re going to have to do is to make rules about the equipment, just as we do in every sport requiring individual gear, and to say “you may compete only with equipment meeting these rules”, so that no competitor has an advantage over another. </p> <p>(For instance, in rowing a boat has to weigh more than a given limit, and some special configurations like sliding riggers are outlawed; golf and sailing have specific rlues about what clubs or boats may be used, and so do lots of other sports. Even in weightlifting, you have to pass drug tests.)</p> <p>When we get to that point, we should allow amputees to compete in any sport – but with prostheses that match but do not exceed the capabilities of natural limbs. I can imagine foot prostheses designed specifically for golf, equestrian sports, swimming – I can even imagine artificial hands so good they allow someone born without hands to do gymnastics, but that’s a long way away. The attachment points seem like the most difficult issue there. I hope we do get there, and I hope we can do it in a way that’s fair for all.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3008" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=233750" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/233750.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/233481.html Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:12:51 GMT and maybe this is why https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/233481.html <p>Catching up with <a href="http://matociquala.livejournal.com/2146364.html#comments">Bear’s post on why women react so strongly to even “minor” harassment</a> has triggered me to think that there may be another reason I want to hang out and not go anywhere much this weekend. The thought I’ve been aware of and trying to ignore all week is that this trip is probably the most dangerous thing I’ll do all year. Rowing in a tippy single when it’s near-freezing is nothing to this.</p> <p>I am in Japan to train a new employee of my company’s. I’m the logical person to do it, as I was covering some of the responsibilities of his position for the last year, until we could hire someone local. I’m also one of the people most familiar with the processes he needs to learn about. We’ve been joined at the hip all week, at work and in the evenings afterward. And here’s the thing: I didn’t know this guy until Monday. No one at the company knew him until the hiring process commenced. Of course he has a stellar resume, but so do lots of men you wouldn’t want to be alone with. He’s just moved to this city and his wife and kids are staying in Tokyo for a bit, and also I’m supposed to be not only training him but developing aclose working relationship, so we’ve had dinner together most days except Monday (I was too jetlagged) and today (tired after travel and used it as an excuse to get some alone time, since it’s been a talkative and busy week). Yesterday we traveled to another city and stayed in the same hotel, and went to dinner there in a tiny restaurant on a dark street.</p> <p>Now, I’m not saying anything against this guy in particular. I like and respect what I’ve seen of him so far. As far as I can tell, he’s smart, has integrity and will be a good addition to our team. He listens intently to what I say and has treated me no different than male colleagues except for a greater tendency to insist he’s the host and should buy lunch (he did let me pay for a couple of meals after I not only argued but pointed out strongly that I will be reimbursed by the company) and to give me preference in seating on crowded trains. He’s been a kind and thoughtful guide to restaurants and in our travels. My instinct says he’s straight-up and trustworthy.</p> <p>But what if my instincts were wrong? How could I know? No mutual acquaintances of more than a month’s duration. (No, wait, there is one he had some acquaintance with at a previous company, but they barely knew each other there.) Furthermore, we’re in <em>his </em>country, where I am very much a stranger who doesn’t understand how things work. If things went direly wrong, I think my company would believe me, but I don’t know what I could do to ensure allies at the local level. Of course my male boss doesn’t think this is a dangerous assignment or he wouldn’t have sent me. I don’t think it’s dangerous, either statistically or at the gut level. But other women will understand why that thought has lurked in the back of my brain all weekend. and why I didn’t make overtures to share activities over the weekend.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=3006" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=233481" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/233481.html musing daily updates public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/209122.html Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:55:29 GMT Occupying my brain https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/209122.html <p>The thing is, I don’t actually begrudge executives and CEOs big salaries and luxurious lives, in return for performance. (Notice I said “big”; “big” is not necessarily synonymous with “mind-bogglingly humongous”. Also, giving someone a massive bonus for inadequate bonus is just bad business.)</p> <p>I’ve met a few, and had enough exposure to others to be able to judge them. I get the impressive that a lot of motivation behind the Occupy movements is the idea “Those guys are no better than anyone else, so why should they get all the rewards and power?” In my experiencea lot of people at the very top levels of management actually are something special; they have brains, knowledge and intuition in their areas of expertise that far outweighs that of most people, me included. When I worked at Honeywell, I was always amazed to watch their broadcasted all-employee meetings, when Dave Cote, the CEO, could give an intelligible answer to any question on any part of that huge company. (I don’t think the questions were pre-screened.) The board of management of my own company are similarly hypercompetent, especially our CTO who is something of an icon in the field. One of the things that prompted this post was our conversations last night with a retired Shell executive, father of a friend of mine. Our company isn’t even in his industry though it is prominent locally, yet he had all the facts about us, our products, our market share and so on off the top of his head and understood our culture and our challenges. (This was after he’d told me I wasn’t rowing hard enough recently. He’s also a former Olympian.) These are scary-smart people and they deserve to be compensated well.</p> <p>Of course, they’re as prone as anyone else to have their vision obscured by their own privilege; while I do say that few people make themselves rich without lots and lots of ability, no amount of ability will get you anywhere without some outside help. You can only seize opportunities if you are given opportunities. </p> <p>Also, helping people in need is not only morally sound but also good business. On the business side there are lots of arguments to be made. Foreclosures hurt eveyone in the long run – what can a bank do with houses when no one is buying? How does it help a company to give big bonuses or golden parachutes to failed executives? How productive is a company whose workers are all disgruntled because management got huge bonuses and everyone else was denied raises? And if brains are distributed throughout the population, then giving everyone opportunities for education and advancement is the best way to get the most capable people into the workforce, at their highest level of performance.</p> <p>Helping people is also morally right; the other spur for this post was something posted on Ravelry by a woman whose handle there is CeallachKnits (reposted with permission): </p> <blockquote><p>“Privilege … is occasionally “used” to negate someone’s right to join protests or take a stand against injustice because “it’s not their fight”, but way more IRL. I think that this is problematic (EFC), because it negates the responsibility to fight for social justice that comes with that privilege, which is also called <i>Noblesse Oblige</i> (The obligation of nobility, which could just as easily be called the obligation of privilege). The concept goes back to Homer’s Iliad in Greece. Why are we trying to abandon it now when we need it so much?”</p></blockquote> <p>This is something I’ve thought about particularly because of being Jewish – that whole ‘chosen people’ thing. I don’t think I believe in special rights; what I do believe in is special obligation. It comes in two flavors, and right now we’re only serving one. The one most people do pretty well with, I think, is helping people who are where you’ve been. Of course there are people who say “I got mine” and never look out at the outside world again, but more people I’ve met reach a hand back. People who have been poor help the poor; people who have been abused fight to help others in abusive situations; people who have been bullied for being gay make “It gets better” videos (and in many cases give time or money also). That loop isn’t perfect, but it looks functional, to me. I hope I’m not wrong.</p> <p>The link that’s broken is the other side of noblesse oblige: helping people who are where you’ve never had to be. (This is where being Jewish comes in to it: the lesson of the Passover story is <strong>simultaneously</strong> that we have an obligation to help the stranger in a strange land because when we were strangers in Egypt we were treated well (at first) and because we were enslaved (a dynasty or two later).) To make it personal, I have a responsibility to help abused women not because I was abused, but because I <i>wasn’t</i>, by the grace of God, my parents, and pure luck. I have a responsibility to help people who don’t have enough to eat, because I never had to worry about the next meal. I have a responsibility to help kids who have no access to books, because my city provided an excellent library that was close enough to walk to even before I was allowed to cross the major streets. </p> <p>The richest percent have those responsibilities too, for both nobless oblige and good business practice. I think a lot of them probably deserve to be richly compensated, because a lot of them are really, really good at their jobs (also, the life of upper management kind of sucks – you do get the luxuries, but your job is your whole life). Given infinite resources, I wouldn’t care how much they earned or how much control they had. I just think their right stops when it get to the point that other people don’t get fairly paid, or that the control is used to benefit a few in ways that hurt the many.</p> <p>All of which is to say, in a great many words, that I agree with most of the goals of the Occupy movement – even though I think a lot of the top 1% earned their way there.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2655" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=209122" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/209122.html musing politics daily updates public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/201494.html Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:01:09 GMT the contagion of outrage: outside influences, part 2 https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/201494.html <p>This is the second part of me maundering on about how my feelings and opinions are affected by discussion online. In the <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2549">first part</a> I talked about how sometimes I get too affected by other people’s discussions of their very real problems, like a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students'_disease">medical student with hypochondria</a>. That is entirely my own problem. Not only do I not want other people to stop talking about their issues, I don’t want to stop reading about or discussing them, because those are people I care about and I want to know how they are.</p> <p>Warning: this gets even longer than the first part.</p> <p>Then there’s the problem of contagious outrage, and that’s a more general phenomenon, for good and bad. It can be good; there are many, many times when I read of someone’s outrage with something going on and realize that I should be outraged, too … only I missed it, either because I hadn’t heard about it at all or, more insidiously, because I’d heard about it and completely missed the aspect I should have been outraged (or at least annoyed) about. Sometimes I am not as sensitive to moral issues as I want to be. It’s all too fatally easy to feel discrimination against your own groups and to miss discrimination against someone else. An example I happened to be thinking about earlier today is the movie <i>Avatar</i>. I’m a fairly uncritical movie-watcher; if I hadn’t read a lot of the discussion before seeing it, I would have been annoyed by all the things the movie wanted me to be annoyed by – of course I’d have rooted against the big evil Earth interests cutting down forests and destroying innocent native culture. But I’m not sure I’d have cottoned on to the pernicious trope embedded in the movie itself, in which it requires a Noble White Man to ride in and save the day. I’m glad I was alerted to that; now I can look out for it elsewhere and try to avoid perpetrating it in anything I say or do.</p> <p>The problem comes when the outrage is wrongly directed. Here’s one I’ve seen a few times today; people are upset that a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/03/lesbian-couple-norway-utoya-massacre">heroic lesbian couple who saved a number of lives in the massacre at Utoya</a> have been ignored by the news media outside Norway and the region. The implication is that they’ve been ignored specifically because they are a lesbian couple. I don’t actually think it’s true in this case. Have you heard about <a href="http://www.lhrtimes.com/marcel-gleffe-german-man-saved-20-youngsters-at-utoya-island-in-norway.html">this man</a>? He is a German expat living in Norway who did the same thing – possibly not as effectively as the women because people in the water were less inclined to trust him, but that doesn’t diminish his heroism. I happened to hear his story at the time via a link to a German article that understandably wanted to laud a German native. But I doubt he’s been extensively covered in international media either; I think that as usual they’ve already forgotten the story, moved on to the next thing, and aren’t writing about those heroes at all. (In fact, when I Googled just now, there were more storys about the two women than the one man.) There’s plenty to blame the popular media for, short attention span and a tendency to cover villains rather than heroes for two – but in this case, I don’t think anti-gay bias is a factor.</p> <p>(I am glad to have written the above paragraph, because all three of those rescuers deserve lots of praise and attention. Another thing about contagious emotion is that reading about heroes can inspire bravery, even in small everyday ways.)</p> <p>Even worse is the phenomena of the directed snowball, in which people aggressively try to change others’ opinions by claiming that there’s only one side for all right-thinking people to be on. This seems to happen a lot lately in relation to -isms: racism, sexism, heterosexism, and so on. I think in an ideal world, a conversation would go something like this:</p> <p>Person 1: “Person 2 wrote this thing that can be taken in this awful and demeaning way.”</p> <p>Then it diverges. One possibility is:<br /> Person 2: “No, really not. I was misquoted or misheard.” (Example: “I said “niggard”, not what you thought I said.”<br /> Person 1: “Oh, thanks for explaining!”</p> <p>But more often, still in this ideal world, it might be:<br /> Person 2: “Oh, my God! I totally didn’t mean that, but I can see how it can be taken that way! Thanks for pointing it out – I will try to do better next time!”<br /> Person 1: “Thank you for the apology; I appreciate your trying,” </p> <p>But it’s also reasonable to say something like “Thanks for your apology. I’m afraid I’ve been hurt so many times that I don’t want to risk more. I won’t be buying your next book, but I do appreciate your answer and your good will.” No one has a responsibility to stick around and be hurt, or to read stuff they don’t want to.</p> <p>This not being an ideal world, the conversation, unfortunately, more often goes like this:<br /> Person 2: “How dare you call me an -ist! I have impeccable credentials and anyway you’re way too senstitive and anyway I was only joking and anyway you obviously can’t read because that’s not what I said!”<br /> Persons 3-10 (Person 2′s friends): “Yeah! How dare you! Person 2 is wonderful and you are an insignificant dung beetle!”</p> <p>At that point Person 1 goes public and Persons 11 through 862 join in condemning Person 2. In the case just described, that might be a case of using a sledgehammer to kill an ant, but it’s not entirely unreasonable; after all, person 1 does deserve condemnation and those 851 people are each one person with one opinion to express, and all of the defenders have made it a bigger issue than just Person 1′s original words anyway. </p> <p>There are a couple of ways it can all turn into an ugly case of mob rule. One is when some of those attackers team up, and start to attack Person 1, their friends, and anyone who might remotely want to point out that it’s not a completely simple case, and maybe Person 1, while certainly in error here, perhaps ought not to be excommunicated from humanity as an instance of all that is vile. An even worse case is when Person 1 does issue an honest apology, maybe even asking their friends to back off on the defense, and gets attacked anyway just as severely as if they’d defended their hurtful words. Worst is when both of those happen at once: Person 2 has apologized honestly but still gets daily attacks and sometimes personal threats, which then expand to anyone seen as being “on the wrong side”. </p> <p>The thing is, often as not the people doing the snowballing actually are on what I think is the right side (against all those -isms). That makes it a bit easier for me to get swept along and I have to make a conscious effort to step back and make up my own mind. I’ve gotten to the point of believing that an ethical person who is good with words has a moral responsibility to make sure that they use persuasive invective only in a good cause, because it can have such an inflammatory effect.</p> <p>I believe that the most brilliant and chilling character JK Rowling ever invented was not Voldemort but Deloris Umbridge, who (before Book 7) used bullying and brutal tactics in service of the “right” side. Barry Goldwater was wrong: extremism is a vice, even in defense of liberty.</p> <p>ETA: based on some of the conversation in comments, I have changed the word “dogpile” to “snowball”. The image I want is one of a force that can be used for good or bad, so it’s clearer to start with a term that isn’t emotionally loaded with negative associations. Also, I don’t want to seem to condemn righteous outrage; it’s one of the most effective forces I know of for positive change in society. (In fact, that’s exactly why I hate to see it sometimes co-opted by bullies. When the outrage is genuine (either inherent or raised by having unjustness pointed out), you can get anything from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to Abolitionists to the people twirling rainbow umbrellas to protect affianced same-sex couples waiting for marriage licenses from protestors.) </p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2553" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=201494" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/201494.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/201334.html Fri, 05 Aug 2011 08:57:50 GMT outside influences, part 1 https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/201334.html <p>One of the things I worry about, being online so much around so many fabulously articulate people, is how much my own feelings and opinions are unduly influenced by other people. This plays out in a bunch of ways and not all are bad, but some are. It’s getting long, so I’ll split it into two entries. (The bit about dogpiles will be in the second part.)</p> <p>First, there’s a problem that is really my own problem and not anyone else’s. (I’m going to be repeating this several times: I am not meaning to diminish anyone else’s experiences or decisions in any way. This part is only about my own reaction and those are entirely my own problem.) I have is that I really am pretty susceptible to having my brain taken over by what I’ve been talking about. Sometimes this is good; the one mountain-bike race I did owed a lot to my working with a dedicated mountain biker at the time, and I did lots of climbing when I had a boss who was into it. (Also, he did some classes in lead climbing, so it was a direct as well as indirect influence.) Other times, though, it influences me for ill, when I get wrapped up in thinking in ways that are right and true for other people but not for me. For instance, there are a number of people on my reading list who have all kinds of physical and mental illnesses, probably a lot more than I encounter in the flesh (which makes sense; often if you don’t have the ability or energy to get out, you can at least keep your mind active and get some social interaction online). Those are all very real issues (I can’t stress that too many times) and since they’re big influences on people’s lives, of course people talk about them. And since many of those are people I care about, of course I want to know about them. The problem for me comes when I start applying the thoughts that are valid for other people to myself, in cases where they’re not valid. Especially when I’m pushing myself close to limits, which is just what you do routinely as an athlete, it can be a hard line to determine; when do I legitimately not have enough spoons to work out that day and when am I just being lazy or malingering from a minor issue?</p> <p>It’s a problem for driving as well; there are also a bunch of people I interact with online who don’t, can’t, or won’t drive, for good (and very varied) reasons of their own. They’ve arranged their lives to allow this and (for the ones who won’t rather than can’t) have decided it’s acceptable in their lives, or at least more acceptable than the alternative. The thing is, <b>for me</b> it’s not an acceptable restriction. There are too many things I want and need to do that require driving. I’m pretty sure my own issues with driving were one random panic attack (back in Taiwan), which totally blindsided me, and anxiety due to the fear of others. That means problem is entirely in my head entirely in my head; this doesn’t mean it is in any way imaginary but that it very susceptible to being influenced by what I think and feel and what others say. I’m doing better now, but it took some work. For one thing I figured out that when I get nervous I breathe funny and that hyperventilation was why my head felt funny. But to get there, I also have to convince myself at a gut level that no, while this may be OK for others it is not OK for me; that I am *fine* and completely able to drive and do whatever I need to get wherever I need to go. (This is still in work; I don’t have much need to do highway driving these days.)</p> <p>I need a bit of a firewall around my brain, really.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2549" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=201334" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/201334.html daily updates musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/200399.html Tue, 26 Jul 2011 09:18:08 GMT a small rumination on the news from NY https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/200399.html <p>I don’t think anyone who reads my blog needs convincing, but it seems a bit obligatory to write something when you’re faced with history.</p> <p>Way back when we lived in Texas, my husband (then fairly newly promoted to that title) was standing around chatting with two co-workers. Both were griping about recent or impending divorces, horrible exes, and how you can’t trust anybody and there are no good men/women around anymore. </p> <p>Finally one of them turned to Ted and said “So, what’s your story?”</p> <p>He answered, “Well, actually I’m happily married.”</p> <p>When he told me the story, all those years ago, Ted said the other people seemed to be flabbergasted by this – the whole concept that someone might be married because they liked being married, instead of because it’s what you do or what you’re stuck with seemed totally foreign to them.</p> <p>I can’t help but think that’s what weakens and devalues the institution of marriage – the idea that you’re stuck with it, and it’s just what you have to put up with or go through a lot of pain to get out of, rather like a stormy teenaged relationship with your parents.</p> <p>People coming together in love, joy and the desire to build lives together, not so much.</p> <p>(Also, there’s the personal history. in the 1930s, Ernestine Bayer was being told, in the city of my birth, that women couldn’t row. (I can only conclude that men there didn’t read Dorothy Sayers.) Whenever I’ve been in the air as pilot or passenger, it’s been rare enough to be notable to hear another female voice on the radio. In 20 years working in engineering, I have worked with only a scant handful of female engineers older than I am. It would be thoroughly hypocritical of me to judge others by their gonads.)</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2531" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=200399" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/200399.html musing politics daily updates public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/189871.html Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:25:04 GMT someone’s little girl? so what? https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/189871.html <p><a href="http://rhymeswithjulie.tumblr.com/post/4383046142/i-was-somebodys-little-girl-once">This article</a> irritates me a bit, in the same way that Kipling’s “Unknown Female Corpse” from “Epitaphs of the War” does:</p> <blockquote><p>Headless, lacking foot and hand,<br /> Horrible I come to land.<br /> I beseech all women’s sons<br /> Know I was a mother once.</p></blockquote> <p>If the idea that a woman was someone’s little girl once, or someone’s mother, makes observers more likely to help a woman escape abuse, then I’ll take it – I’m a pragmatist. But it isn’t the reaction I want to see. Both leave me wanting to say, very gently to the women concerned and loud, straight and very clear to their abusers:</p> <p>No.</p> <p>That isn’t why a woman matters.</p> <p>She is somebody’s <strong>me</strong>, and that is why she’s precious; it has nothing to do with her value to other people.</p> <p>It doesn’t matter if she was a mother of sons, or a wife, or daddy’s girl once. She is somebody’s me right this minute, and for that she deserves decent human treatment, as we all hope we do.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2388" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=189871" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/189871.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/188635.html Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:48:20 GMT the menopausal vampire https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/188635.html <p>It was just brought to my attention that Arabella Keneally, an early “feminist” (in more or less the way Phyllis Schlafly and Sarah Palin are feminists) wrote a cautionary tale about “the menopausal vampire”. I can’t help but think that would have been far better as a fantasy novel:</p> <p>The menopausal vampire only sparkles when she damn well feels like it (or sometimes during a hot flash, but those are more like sparks).</p> <p>The menopausal vampire doesn’t bite young people because she knows they already think they’re immortal. She bites old people, who thank her for it.</p> <p>The menopausal vampire looks good in black.</p> <p>The menopausal vampire has a cape with a hood, to combat bad hair days.</p> <p>The menopausal vampire sometimes bites anyone who crosses her path, because some days are like that.</p> <p>The menopausal vampire gets <em>day </em>sweats.</p> <p>The menopausal vampire really wishes she’d been bitten five years earlier or later. She worries that she’ll be like this forever now.</p> <p>What else?</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2370" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=188635" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/188635.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/183445.html Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:39:15 GMT menopause “seminar” https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/183445.html <p>I’m still a little ticked off that this body didn’t come with an owners manual, but of all the things I’ve been through menopause stands out for being a normal stage that half of the population goes through, yet is so little discussed. I didn’t think that I’d just stop bleeding like turning off a tap, but as far as it’s discussed it sounded like the bleeding tapered off, there might be some crankiness and a few hot flashes or night sweats, you had to worry about brittle bones and that’s about it.</p> <p>Wrong wrong wrongity wrong wrong.</p> <p>Menopause and perimenopause have a huge range of possible symptoms, some things you never think of, and some you’d never think were associated. I would like to put together a list of the possible symptoms of menopause that you’ve experienced, read about, or heard about from other women. I hope this will be a useful reference for all of us. I’ll start with the ones I know about, but first some notes:</p> <p>Note 1: I want to hear from as many women as possible so I am cross-posting in the “This is What a Feminist Knits Like” forum on Ravelry (it’s a wonderful place for discussion, if you happen to be both a feminist and a knitter). I will ask permission to post symptoms listed here over there and vice versa, to keep both references as complete as possible.</p> <p>Note 2: A friend of mine who’s gone through some alarming symptoms points out that one danger is dismissing something as “just menopause” when in fact it’s an indicator of a serious problem. So please be careful with this information – but for me at least, it’s less stressing to know that a symptom can be caused by something not harmful, even as I go to the doctor to check it out.</p> <p>Note 3: Since my blog gets reflected in three places, I ask that you post comments for this entry only over at the<a href="http://dichroic.livejournal.com/308311.html"> LiveJournal entry</a>, so they’re all in one place.</p> <p>Symptoms everyone knows about (and even these are far from universal, except the first one):</p> <p>menstruation ceases (duh)<br /> irritability<br /> hot flashes<br /> night sweats<br /> loss of bone density<br /> vaginal dryness<br /> less interest in sex</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2302" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=183445" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/183445.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/167701.html Thu, 14 Oct 2010 05:28:16 GMT speaking up from a different perspective https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/167701.html <p>The following is an expanded version of what I posted on Facebook today, and in a comment to my original post. (Facebook statusesuseses can only be 420 characters, so I had to cut a lot of what I wanted to say there.)</p> <p>Bullying is getting a lot of attention lately, and so I think it’s time for me to speak up from a different perspective. There’s no doubt I was a weird kid in school – too smart for my own good, not much on social skills, mouthy, more interested in books than in much of anything else. I wore glasses from age 3, bifocals. I was the smallest one in class and the youngest, having skipped kindergarten. I had friends, but never had a date in high school, and didn’t get invited to a lot of parties except the ones from youth group or the school play that anyone involved could attend. Classic victim material, right?</p> <p>Yet I was never bullied. I never went in fear or had to hide, as so many of us did. Someone threatened to beat me up <i>once</i> in seventh grade – that was the worst of it. There are a lot of people on Facebook who went to school with me; I don’t think they were saints, I think they were ordinary decent people who were busy enough dealing with their own lives and insecurities, and didn’t need to beat up on anyone else to justify themselves. And for that, I have just said thank you (on Facebook). The world needs more ordinary decent people, and I hope they bring their kids up to be the same way, or better. (I know at least one parent, the little sister of a friend of mine through my school years, who has stated that her goal is for her daughters to have fewer biases than she and her husband do.)</p> <p>Part of why I wrote this is in response to <a href="http://kateharding.info/2010/10/06/on-good-kids-and-total-fucki...ng-assholes/">Kate Harding’s excellent post</a> and all the similarly excellent responses to it I’ve been seeing. Kate wrote: </p> <blockquote><p>“I simply can’t understand why so many adults are so eager to dismiss bullying as a childhood inevitability of no real consequence, something on a par with skinned knees, maybe a broken wrist at worst. Something that heals quickly and turns into a distant memory or even a funny story. I can only assume those people were once bullies themselves — perhaps they still are — and are thus loath to acknowledge how much serious, long-lasting damage they might have done.”</p></blockquote> <p>I’m speaking up to say that bullying is *not* inevitable – my experience proves it. It’s not an inescapable part of human nature, and it’s not a thing that can’t be changed. Youth is no excuse for not knowing better. My classmates did. </p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=2116" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=167701" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/167701.html daily updates musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/153770.html Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:28:10 GMT Crowley spoke Dutch?? https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/153770.html <p>Half the fun of learning Dutch, for me at least, is hearing the echoes of an older English. (I’m pretty sure that Kind Alfred and his compatriots would have found the Zeelanders of their time intelligible, or nearly so.) On my way home from my second Dutch lesson tonight, I realized that Aleister Crowley, in trying to sound archaic, was very nearly speaking Dutch. “An ye will, so mote it be” translates to “Als je wil, zo moet het zijn” (I think – not sure about that weird case of ‘to be’ and if it would really take the infinitive form). I knew about “will” in the older English sense of “want”, as in “as you will”, but hadn’t realized the moet-mote connection before. </p> <p>That last word is closer than it looks, too, because the Dutch for “to be” is almost as irregular as the English:<br /> I am -> ik ben we are -> wij zijn<br /> you are -> je bent you (pl) are -> julllie zijn<br /> he is -> hij is they are -> zij zijn<br /> Note that ‘hij’ and ‘zij’ are pronounced respectively as ‘hay’ and ‘zay’ (well, nearly) and the connections are closer still. Looking at it, I’d guess that the Dutch, like the English, evolved from the mashing up of two or three roots that meant slightly different flavors of “to be” – which gets even more likely when you reflect that Spanish still has two words for it, “ser” and “estar”</p> <p>Of course Spanish is Romance while English and Dutch are Germanic, but they’re all Indo-European. Anyway, English has a strong Romance influence from the centuries when it was ruled by Normans (not that they ever lost power, just that they integrated) and Spain ruled the Netherlands for a while, plus there’s a lot of borrowing from French due to proximity.</p> <p>Anyway, I thought it was cool. Dutch is easy for an English speaker with a good ear to pick up anyway – my mom was nearly reading menus after a week here – but my reading and studies on the history of English definitely helped a lot.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=1937" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=153770" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/153770.html musing public

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https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/148658.html Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:06:33 GMT facing a whole weekend with nothing much I have to do and a whole Richard Thompson mix https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/148658.html <p><a href="http://stillnotbored.livejournal.com/774564.html?view=3729316#t3729316">Jaime’s</a> post reminded me that there’s a lot of Richard Thompson on YouTube:. Just imagine hearing him play in your living room. Or someone’s living room, anyway:</p> <p><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/AxKTzwaEa2o&hl=en_US&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="sameDomain"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/AxKTzwaEa2o&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></p> <p>And if you click on that video and go over to YouTube, on the right side of the page you see the “Richard Thompson mix”. After 1952 VIncent Black Lightning it went straight to my <em>other</em> favorite of his, Beeswing.</p> <p>Which reminds me by a not-too-circuitous path, for those of you knitters who haven’t seen it yet, there’s a thread on the Ravelry Shadow U-knits group asking “If you could knit something for one of the Shadow Units characters, what would you make?”</p> <p>(Not too circuitous path: Emma Bull has Tick-Tick refer to 1952 Vincent Black Lightning in <em>Finder</em>, and Elizabeth Bear has an anthology whose name comes from – or at least matches – a line in Beeswing, <em>The Chains that You Refuse</em>.)</p> <p>Extra treat in the mix Thompson covering Britney Spears’ Oops, I Did it Again, with an instrumental break where he somehow makes the guitar part sound like a madrigal.</p> <p>Also, while I’m rambling (both mentally and around YouTube): if I love Richard Thompson and Townes van Zandt, why did no one ever sit me down and make me listen to Nick Drake? (Even more random Shadow Unit thought: Chaz Villette probably doesn’t listen to Nick Drake much – I picture him mostly liking stuff a bit louder and further out. But I bet his *mom* liked Drake! And Townes, who even looks a little like Chaz.</p> <p>Further ETA (the things you learn on YouTube): I didn’t know Kate McGarrigle died this year. Crap.</p> <p>Also, kind of interesting seeing Teddy Thompson (Richard and Linda’s son), Rufus and Martha Wainwright (Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle’s kids) and Sean Lennon (duh) performing together. I guess they have a lot in common. Talent, too.</p> <p style="text-align: right"><small>Mirrored from <a href="http://www.riseagain.net/wp/?p=1845" title="Read Original Post">Dichroic Reflections</a>.</small></p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=dichroic&ditemid=148658" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments https://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/148658.html books musing public

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