Posted by mofembot
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:45:00 GMT
[Written in transit from Walldorf, Germany, to Marseille, France, on January 15th]
The catastrophe in Haiti saddens and appalls me — I am saddened for the loss of life, for the unfathomable sorrow of the survivors, the pain of the injured, for the fact that the survivors have lost so many and so much. Some have lost their entire families in addition to escaping with only what they were wearing at the time the earthquake struck.
I am appalled because much of the loss of life was preventable. Hmm. That may be hyperbole borne of wishful thinking: preventing the deaths in Haiti would have meant years of fixing so many systemic problems as to render “prevention” meaningless: replacing, for example, the shantytowns with affordable, built-to-code structures; providing meaningful employment; benefitting from competence rather than corruption at all levels of government, and so on infinitum ad nauseam.
The photos tell the story: there doesn’t seem to be one building anywhere in Port-au-Prince (among the ones left standing) that is undamaged. So much unreinforced or inadequately reinforced concrete! So many houses dwellings without any foundation whatsoever on inhospitable hillsides (many now in ravines)! It is catastrophe upon catastrophe.
The lack of heavy equipment and infrastructure will result in a death toll that will be far higher than the “should have been.” A 7.0 earthquake is nearly always going to result in deaths in any densely-populated area. But when people (notably the Haitian president himself) are speaking of a toll anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000, and possibly more, the world’s collective failure to pay attention to this poverty-stricken, wood-denuded one-third-of-an-island can scarcely be atoned for by rushing in trying to rush in however many search-dog and rescue teams and emergency aid.
…My saying this must mean that I think we, the world, the Earth, Earthlings, Terrans, human beings, including our governments and even our corporations, are indeed responsible for one another. And that we ought to think ahead and invest in our collective futures, rather than only reacting to disasters of such magnitude as to pique the most hardened heart and conscience.* (Oh, that does make me a socialist, yes, it must, and if so, I say: I am glad to be one.—But I digress.)
The lack of equipment means that many who are buried who might have survived will die for lack of water. It is hot in Haiti — 32/33ºC, and for better or worse, no rain is forecast. (Perhaps some water would have made its way to those buried, but I suppose overall it’s a good thing that there is no rain there. [16 Jan update: Now I wish that there were a bit of rain so that those going without water on the streets can fill up bottles and buckets, given the problems of distribution.])
Then there will be the aftermath victims: those rescued but injured whose wounds will be infected for lack of adequate medical attention immediately after. Whatever water infrastructure there may be (to say nothing of sewers and electricity) is hugely damaged, and the risk of cholera and typhus and so on is rising hourly. [Addedum: Apparently crush injuries are particularly insidious: once a victim is freed, the toxins that have built up in the affected limb(s) rush through the body and overwhelm the kidneys. This can only be counteracted by immediately administering IV saline solution plus “mannitol”… and of course most Haitians’ access to these life-saving substances is next to nil.]
Is there enough money in the world to fix what is wrong with the world? I don’t think there’s any way to answer that question: even if there is enough, it will never get into the hands of those who need it and/or those who are competent to use it wisely and well.
Scenes of looting and sheer chaos in Haiti seem to be on the screens of CNN International here at the Frankfurt airport. This social breakdown is not unexpected, certainly, but once again, a hideous tragedy is compounded by the failure of leaders on all levels and in all places and venues to address the problems of this locus of heartbreak long before the Earth ruptured.
How sad to see people trying through sheer brute force to move slabs of concrete with their own unaided strength. Dogs who are trained to sniff out the living will soon be replaced by cadaver dogs. (I’ve heard that rescue dogs get depressed if they end up dealing only with the dead.)
[At this point, it was time to board my flight to Marseille.]
*Apparently Rush Limbaugh has neither a heart nor a conscience.
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:05:00 GMT
(Pardon my instinctive response to this posting’s title; it is heartfelt: Ah hahahahahaha, ha! ha! ho! ho! Heeeeeeee!)
I just now finished a kind of second breakfast with Gisela and Gerald. As I have written elsewhere, my German is pathetic. Gisela’s English is slightly better than my German, Gerald’s English is much better than my German, but not fluent by a long stretch. So having a conversation is challenging, but do-able. They always seem fascinated by the bizarrities and (quite honestly) outright horrors of some of America’s ways, especially in terms of health care and workers’ rights and all. The fact that a long-time American employee can show up at work and find him/herself fired, entitled only to two weeks’ pay, and often escorted to their desk, supervised as they pack up their belongings, and escorted out — without even so much as the chance to say a proper goodbye to one’s coworkers — astounds them.
They worry that the German safety net, as with the French, is being slowly reshaped to resemble that of the barbaric American system. In Germany as in France, people on unemployment are having to show much more proof that they are actively searching for work, or they will be cut off from support. I don’t know if it’s the same in Germany as in France, but I’ve heard a number of stories about people being penalized for not accepting employment offers, even when the logistics of doing so are completely unworkable.
I think of the job that I interviewed for with an English-language learning center, supposedly in Manosque, a 45-50-minute one-way drive from Quinson. Well, for the princely daily rate of 20 euros, it turned out that the job was really in Sisteron, nearly an hour and a quarter away. I was very, very glad not to have been hired, and had they offered me the job, I may well have had to accept it or stop getting unemployment benefits. Such benefits didn’t amount to very much, but better than nothing. Ironically, of course, the gas and time and social charges and so on would have reduced my net earnings to less than the unemployment benefits, especially since I would have only had work a couple of days a week.
Yipes.
And yet America is so much more damned bass-ackwards about this sort of thing. When I finally got a job (= when I started my own business, given that at my age, the odds of being hired on a regular contract were practically nil, as the employment office people readily acknowledged), I got a surprisingly large lump sum deposited into our bank account (about 4-5 times the amount of my monthly unemployment sum). My initial reaction was WTF, someone’s made a mistake, I’m going to have to pay this back — but no. Apparently France recognizes that people who have been out of work for a while might need some extra help to re-enter the workforce, such as perhaps needing to pay a deposit on an apartment if they relocated to take a job, or if they have to pay for childcare, or even work-appropriate clothing.
I was, to use a Britishism, “gobsmacked.” But it is such a sane, humane, sensible, and economically wise thing to do… one would think America would want to follow suit, instead of cutting off support the very damned instant a person is hired (never mind that they may have to wait several weeks before actually getting paid something). America punishes the jobless and poor, and (as Gerald and I discussed this morning) part of it has to do with America’s Calvinistic bent: people are poor because God is punishing them (wealth being interpreted in the American psyche as a sign of God’s approbation… really and truly).
Well. My object in writing this was not to digress into the politics and social dynamics of European v. American social policy and all, but rather to lament my inability to speak German, and once Gerald had to leave, my inability to completely understand everything that Gisela had to say about dealing with her kids (and me dealing with ours, specifically with Youngest). We both have our “unsupervised parties gone awry” stories, we both can share our unhappiness at the cost of living and the cost of paying for kids’ education and training, etc. But I swear to god that if we ever end up living in Germany for any length of time, I am going to make learning German a priority. I now wish that I had taken the time to follow the online courses… but I guess I didn’t expect to find myself here again.
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 08:56:00 GMT
It seems odd to be writing a little something about Chiune Sugihara while working here in Germany, and about whom I just learned in reading the second of the two Hark! A Vagrant! comics on this page. “Japan’s Schindler” went unnoticed and unsung back in his native Japan, after having risked his career (and possibly his life) to save anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 Jews by granting them transit visas as a vice-consul in Lithuania.
Had I known to look for the monument in his honor in Vilnius, and the other one in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, I would have done so.
Sugihara puts me in mind of Hamburg’s golden paving stones, sprinkled here and there in the sidewalks (usually in front of apartment buildings), and inscribed with the names and fates of the deported Jews who had lived in those places. Some apartment buildings were torn down, of course, and stores and markets put up in the spaces, but the paving stones remain, seemingly unnoticed by the hundreds of customers and passers-by.
I tried to notice.
I have not noticed any comparable tiles or stones or plaques in Heidelberg, though thousands of Jews were deported from here, and two synagogues were burned during the infamous Kristallnacht.
During one of my stays here, my landlady showed me a book of their family’s genealogy, including a photo of an ancestor in a Wehrmacht officer’s uniform. I did not ask her where he had been stationed nor what his duties had been. I am told that the rising generation in particular is taught and re-taught all about the atrocities of the Nazi era in public school, supposedly to the point of being thoroughly bored and sick to death of it all. I have to wonder about that; on the other hand, I do not recall having the greatest sins of America’s past (e.g., slavery, genocide of indigenous peoples) taught and re-taught when I was in school… but granted, I was in school rather a long time back and talking about such things, or feeling it appropriate to do so in public school, was only beginning to catch on.
Do German kids say, “Yeah, yeah, the Nazis, yeah, yeah, they were bad, they did horrible things, but that was a long time ago”? My landlord’s grown (and almost-grown) kids say yes. To which I have to reply (at least in my mind): maybe they’re not teaching the Holocaust in the right way.
I remember when Ingrid’s dad came to our seminary class to talk to us about what it was like to be part of the Hitler Youth and then conscripted into the army in his mid-teens in the waning days of the Third Reich. I remember the German army vet who was missing an arm and with whom I regularly played ping-pong at Skipper Steimle’s Pine View Lodge near Lake Arrowhead, CA. He was a good player, that one, with just a flap of his deltoid muscle remaining that would flex “reflexively” as he played. I never asked him how he lost his arm; I assume now as then that he lost it in the war. And I remember meeting a few Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, including some who had numbers (badly) tattoed on their forearms. Most of the camp survivors are now dead, and most of those who were part of the Nazi war machine (willingly or unwillingly) are dead as well.
It is too much to say that we as a species haven’t learned anything from the Holocaust, but given the continued slaughter of innocents in so many countries, the prolonged episodes of ethnic cleansing in many parts of the world, the best I can proffer is that perhaps things would have been worse without at least some people having taken to heart the horrors that Hitler unleashed on such a massive scale such a relatively short time ago. That is cold comfort, however, and as the world’s population continues to grow unabated, and as water and food shortages loom on an increasingly closer horizon, we may yet experience things even worse than those suffered by the targets of Hitler’s paranoia and wrath.
God forbid.
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Posted by mofembot
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:57:00 GMT
(With apologies to Lemony Snicket.)
So I am back in Germany for a few days, and as I told my landlady here in Heidelberg, I really would like to drop 20 kilos (more like 30, actually). If tonight is any indication, this weight loss is not going to happen while I’m here: it being a holiday and all, with everything (including most restaurants) closed, the von R’s invited me to have dinner with them and two of their sons and their sons’ respective girlfriends. And then proceeded not just to heap my plate high, but to re-heap, and attempt to re-heap yet again. Mercifully, there was no dessert. But Gerald & Gisela had already served me lady fingers with coffee in the mid-to-late afternoon, so I was “pre-desserted.” Gack.
This all said, I am going to try hard not to overdo things at the employee cafeteria while I’m here. If I do take extra food for an evening meal, I hope to confine myself to salad (and not of the potato or macaroni variety, either).
I’m beat, so it’s off to bed for me. (Yes, at this early hour. And yes, this is my second blog post for today and that makes up for the lack thereof yesterday.)
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Posted by mofembot
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:01:00 GMT
(Let me toss in a Shakespearean “forsooth” here to counterbalance the LOL-cat title.)
I didn’t post anything on January 5th. I thought I would, but got distracted (a) by a certain party (not me) who spilled her beverage onto a laptop keyboard (not mine), then (b) by cleanup (not particularly of laptop per se; Mr Mo kindly came back to Aix from Quinson, where he had driven just that very morning, to deal with this); then (c) by packing. But mostly, if truth be told, (d) by wanting to finish reading a book that I cannot take with me to Germany in a few hours. (I did not finish the book. It will keep.)
And thus it is. Amen. I will cut myself some slack if I manage to post another entry later today (at some sane time this afternoon, that is; this is a wee hours’ “I cannot sleep anyway” extravaganza).
Anyway, yes, back I go to Walldorf (the small one near Heidelberg where Johann Jakob Astor, aka John Jacob Astor of Walldorf Astoria fame, came from) to work for a few days. Too many technical questions to want to deal with off-site, given the tight deadlines. Fortunately, transport costs are surprisingly low and I will be able to sleep at Gerald and Gisela’s (the same people I’ve stayed with since the very beginning of my German gig; and also fortunately for me, while The Awful German Toilet is still there, other creature comforts, such as a shower curtain (!!) have gradually made their way into life at G&G’s).
The price of familiarity and convenience — the fact that I get to stay at G&G’s, who live fewer than 10 minutes’ walk from the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof, and whose neighborhood I now know well, etc. — is somewhat offset by the fact that I will have to leave my room by around 7h15 every morning, because Gisela tends at least one baby early on in the day. (I think by the time I arrive in Heidelberg this afternoon, around 15h if my flight and train connections go as planned, daycare will be over.) Ah well, I am planning on putting in long days at my client’s. At least the room is entirely mine on Saturday and Sunday. I expect to mostly stay ensconced, given that the forecast for Baden-Württemberg calls for snow showers essentially every damn day I’m there. (I have bought long underwear and more warm socks in preparation for the evil. How is it that at my rapidly advancing age, I’m still not living in a warm climate year-round???)
The other price of familiarity and convenience is yet another round of “omg, I wish I (a) had taken more German in college, (b) had remembered the German phrasebook” (not that it really helps that much for the context of my trip and sojourn, really; I’ll see if Larry has one here at the apartment in Aix), and “(c) had a prayer of remembering what I ended up learning the last time I stayed for awhile.” My conversations with Gisela are extremely limited, to say the least, and Gerald doesn’t usually get home until late, and while his English is better, it is far from fluent. (Much, much, much better than my German, however.)
I can only hope that I will form a few dementia/Alzheimer’s-off-staving neurological connections by all of these comings and goings. But now I should really try to get a bit more sleep. Gute Nacht (more like “Guten Morgen,” but hey, it will still be dark outside for hours yet).
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Posted by mofembot
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:27:00 GMT
Day Four of the New Year, and look-see at me, I’m posting another entry on my blog. This is a new record for most consecutive blog postings.
To blog, or not to blog. Do I have anything to say? Do I have too much to say that’s simply all pent up and jumbled up? At one point earlier today, I thought about writing something about the beggars in Aix, and how I usually give the ones I encounter 50 euro cent-pieces, and how I studiously try to avoid any contact when I have no change on me at all. I think about how hard it must be to beg, to be outside with a sign and a cup and (for some) having to endlessly repeat some variant of the French equivalent of “do you have any spare change?” And how many people (like me when change-free) don’t even look, or give without even the slightest bit of human interaction.
I also saw an elderly lady, functionally blind. (I think she had some sight left, even though she used a white cane.) This brought to mind the happy thought of how perhaps the only voices she hears, the only social contact she may have are the daily exchanges at the market or bakery. And she is only the tip of the veritable iceberg of the widowed whose days are… what? Alone? Lonely? Boring? I have no idea, but I find I am still adept at projecting how I think they “should” feel in circumstances that my imagination insists on painting in the most tragic hues possible.
At this point in the evening, neither beggars nor aged loneliness is achieving much traction with the Blogging Muse.
On an entirely different note, I see that Oldest’s flight has landed in San Diego. I am looking forward to hearing from her about her trip to Brazil. Hopefully she was well enough to enjoy it. Middle daughter’s flight is due to land at JFK in about 10 minutes. It was nice having her home for Christmas. She is a formidable Scrabble (and other word games) player. And I am glad that I have a full day here tomorrow in Aix to get ready for my ~10-day stint in Germany.
Fine, this piece gets no prizes, but at least it is a posting. Of sorts.
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:40:00 GMT
This morning we brought the trappings of an “American breakfast” up to Jim and Claudia’s — a Dutch/German couple who speak English to one another, and who have bought a condo in an old farm complex up on the Plateau de Valensole above Quinson. Claudia’s parents are visiting until Tuesday from Greater Frankfurt, and it was somewhat at the instigation of Claudia’s dad that this event transpired. (He’d mentioned in the course of our going with them for an impromptu drink at the local bar the other night that he and the missus loved, loved, loved American breakfasts, especially the breakfast buffets with all the bacon and eggs, etc. I/we offered to make them an American breakfast; however, given the fact that our tiny eat-in kitchen could not possibly accommodate seven adults, we prepared everything and took it up to J & C’s gracious and spacious place.)
Despite his fears that they would not turn out well and thus embarrass him, Mr Mo made pancakes and they were delicious as ever. We also brought with us our waffle maker and made Norwegian rice waffles, and I made scrambled eggs and bacon (cooking the bacon here at home ahead of time so as not to perfume J & C’s kitchen; as Claudia is vegetarian these days, I wasn’t sure if she’d find the bacon-waft offensive. Turns out she’s a recovered bacon-a-holic from her Boston days, during which she and her roommate apparently would eat entire packages of bacon — as in the family pack size — in one sitting.)
I had my bacon-with-breakfast for the 4th quarter of 2009 last week. I have now had my bacon-with-breakfast for the first quarter of 2010, though I suppose it’s possible that I’ll have some bacon and eggs at the quasi-American-style diner in Heidelberg this coming weekend. (Yes, I’m going back to Germany for about a week and a half, unless I wind up in Paris for the last part of my time away from home instead. When in Germany, I usually muesli in yogurt for breakfast on workdays — eating at my desk, since I leave for work at a time that is impossibly early to eat anything. Here at home, I often have cold cereal, but sometimes just a couple of pieces of toast and a fruit cup with my one daily cuppa joe… mostly without Bailey’s these days. Sigh. Mr Mo makes pancakes mostly on a weekly basis.)
I always have enjoyed an American breakfast. I was going to write that it is my favorite meal, but there are too many non-breakfast dishes that please my palate as much or (gasp) more than the breakfast spread. Growing up, my mom had a very regular schedule: we’d have some form of eggs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; cold cereal on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays (except for the first Sunday of the month when we fasted as a religious observance), and then often something a bit more elaborate on Saturdays (pancakes from a mix being a frequent feature).
A noteworthy breakfast “accomplishment,” if one can call it such, was the Ward Breakfast (on the Fourth of July)… in particular the one at which I ate 65 (yes, sixty-five) little breakfast sausage links — and who knows how many scrambled eggs, but I lived for those links. We never, ever had them at home (my mom was strictly a Bacon Woman). My ability to eat in such astonishing piggish quantities has thankfully diminished with time.
Living in a land in which breakfast (for adults, at least) tends to consist of a measly tartine (toasted bread with butter or jam or spreading cheese) and coffee is a continuing source of disappointment, especially when paying for a “breakfast-included” hotel or guest room. I utterly refuse to pay 7+ euros for a most euphemistically-named “continental” breakfast (as mentioned, toast and coffee — and if one is lucky, maybe a yogurt or the possibility of a semi-stale bowl of cornflakes or “factory floor sweepings-style muesli)”, but that’s what they often charge at hotels in France and some other benighted parts of Europe. I don’t mind paying for a more robust breakfast, such as one finds — or usually can find — in Germany, the UK, Spain, and so on.
One would think, given France’s overall gastronomic reputation, and the French Health Ministry’s apparently futile effort to promote breakfast, that some chef somewhere would figure out a way to get the French to pay more attention to the first meal of the day. The overall effect of the health ministry’s push has been the expansion of supermarket aisles laden with sugary-crap kiddie breakfast cereals. I do not blame French adults for (a) not eating the sugar-shit themselves and (b) caving into the marketing for their kiddies.
As for me, bacon and eggs (scrambled, fried) notwithstanding, I think the traditional breakfast I most enjoyed during our travels was in… Turkey: hard-boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, a kind of feta-like cheese, and bread. (And often some kind of muesli-esque cereal would be available as well.) For reasons that quite frankly escape me, I have not ever tried to adopt this and other healthier-seeming breakfasts into my daily routine. But maybe I should. And maybe I’ll give it a go when I get back from Germany in mid-January.
NORWEGIAN RICE WAFFLES
(Corrected per Mr Mo’s comment)
3 cups soft-cooked rice
1.25 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tsp ground cardamom (best to grind these up fresh from the whole seeds if possible; feel free to add more cardamom than the recipe calls for)
Prepare as per usual in a waffle iron. Serve with butter. (FIne, you can top it with jam or powdered sugar or maple syrup or whatever if you must, but the cardamom-y flavor of these waffles is great with just butter.)
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Posted by mofembot
Sat, 02 Jan 2010 10:28:00 GMT
As with 2009, I’m off to a roaring start with my resolution to blog more often. I think the few people (family members) who follow my blogging should start a pool right now about how many days I will manage to blog (a) in a row; (b) for this month, and/or (c) for 2010.
Yesterday we (Mr Mo, Middle Daughter and I) spent a little time driving out a bit past Montmeyan toward La Mouchotte in a vain effort to find a tumulus (well, a pair of tumuli) — that is, two human-made mounds (but not tombs) from the neolithic period. We were impeded by a road that was impassable by car and by weather that was anything but conducive to walking the remaining ~kilometer to where we think one or both mounds are located. (I personally wanted to go to Salernes’ Tholos Lauve — another neolithic site featuring a well-defined round stone foundation, a bit reminiscent of some of the Anasazi ruins in Arizona, only here the rock is limestone, rather than sandstone, but by the time we made up our minds to do anything, going much farther than Montmeyan in the fading light seemed… impractical.) Though the outing was fruitless from a paleontological point of view, I now have two more great Scrabble words at my disposal. So not a total waste.
Today we are going to see “Vieux Bras,” a hilltop collection of mostly ruined houses overlooking the Asse River. (This is my favorite river in all of France, and yes, that’s the scatological streak coming out in full force here. Bizarrely, however, the short little Asse doesn’t even figure on what I think is France’s official hydrology maps, even though there are several towns — Bras d’Asse, St Julien d’Asse, for example — that have been situated along this legitimate river flowing down from Digne since the Middle Ages or earlier.) The two central structures in Vieux Bras are a château and a church, both of which have been largely restored (or very much well underway as of the last time I stopped by sometime last year). I am curious to see if the Belgian couple who owns much of the property there have made more progress on their overall project: not to restore all of the houses and structures on the hillside under the château and church, but simply clearing away the brambles and under- and overgrowth to allow (potential) tourists to stroll around the alleys of the old village. This hilltop location was abandoned around the turn of the XIXth/XXth centuries for Bras d’Asse down below on the river and for La Bégude Blanche (the “blanche” part is new to me, visible on google maps but not on the entry/exit signs on the main road) across the Asse. The Belgian couple (whom Oldest and I met in the chapel last year) said that the abandoned village was used for artillery target practice sometime before World War I.
We are getting ready now to go, stopping first in Riez for lunch. Thence to the ruins, thence perhaps to some tiny villages (via a most circuitous route back to Riez and its Intermarché), then home again. I am a bit interested in seeing St Jurs: it is easy to think of Quinson, with its 350 residents as a tiny village (which it is), but St Jurs has only 80 permanent residents (swelling to ~150 or so in la belle saison). Now that is truly tiny. I’ll be surprised if there’s a bar or a bread depot or anything (beyond, perhaps, a few closed-up artists’ galleries and the obligatory church/château). St Jurs once had 500+ residents at its height in the XIXth century, while its 5 gypsum mines (for plaster manufacture) were in full flower. The mines and mills are shut down and in ruins. I personally would like to find a nice chunk of alabaster there, assuming we go. As Middle Daughter is prone to carsickness, and as the roads are windy (as they always must be in Upper Provence), the odds are not good that we’ll make this detour. But we’ll see.
En avant, les gars!
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Posted by mofembot
Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:59:00 GMT
Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Back in the days of my hyper-religious youth, I would “celebrate” New Year’s Eve/Day by writing down a list of all my faults and bad habits and symbolically burning it at midnight. (No, really, I did this for several years running during my teens. No snide remarks about my social life, s’il vous plaît.) I am not so obsessed by the never-ending pursuit of perfection as I once was, that’s for sure, but I’m still a Goal-Oriented Person, at least on virtual paper, so here’s what I’d like to accomplish over the next decade, and hope to get a good start on in 2010 itself:
• Lose Weight. The tonnage is hard on my hips, knees, and feet, and I don’t need to read any more articles on how bad “belly fat” is for women, thanks very much.
• Blog More Often. Off to a roaring good start on this one, I’d say. (But then, I would say that.)
• Finish Writing the Damn Book. And deal with the several other book ideas I’ve had floating around in my head and on bits of paper for decades (literally). Publish the Damn Book (online or some other way). It would be nice if the writing and publishing were followed by fame and fortune (and movie rights and all that). I guess I might be willing to settle for not getting sued and/or kicked out of France, along with some kind of cathartic effect, but I’d frankly rather have the money from a mega-bestseller.
• Learn the ins and outs of shooting in RAW. This means buying a camera that shoots RAW. This means paying attention to the content more than the form and language and syntax of my Paris client’s website (dxo.com).
• Get back into music.
• Master certain technologies that I have shied away from up until now. I have Serious Doubts about social networking, twittering, and the rest. But I should at least reject them for reasons other than my own fear of and ignorance about how they work (procedurally, I mean). I guess this means using my iPhone “better” as well. But by “certain technologies,” I’m also referring to music notation and art/illustration apps and so on.
• Get back into serious art much more.
• Deal with memorabilia/scrapbook stuff (as in sort, organize, etc. … see final item below).
• Find a way to be able to use the same time-slots over and over again. I mean, seriously, doing everything I’d like to do requires time. I recognize that hitting “refresh” over and over again while online (reading, say, DailyKos) has become a Huge Time Sink. This needs to stop. Discipline, discipline, discipline. (Good luck to that. But I will try, regardless of what Yoda thinks of trying. What a stupid philosophy, come to think of it, brought to us by a fictional creature out of George Lucas’s head. Given Star Wars 1, 2, & 3, it’s hard to imagine giving any credence whatsoever to anything coming out of Lucas’s head.—But I digress.)
And finally… after an entire lifetime, I think I need to do something about how poorly I sleep. Given sleep’s role in memory creation, it’s a frickin’ miracle that I can remember anything at all, but the scary/sad thing is that I have huge gaps in medium-to-long-term memory. The kids ask me if I remember thus-and-so, and depending on how expectantly the question is asked, I may respond that I do remember even when I don’t. (Saying I don’t remember often provokes such distress and disappointment and incredulity and so on that I find it’s easier to pretend that I do remember. Fortunately, further discussion/verbal clues often actually awaken the deep-down, deeply-hidden memory fragment. But sometimes it’s just a blank. I probably can’t do much about that except perhaps refresh my mind via memorabilia and such. … Sorry, kiddies. Sorry, Mr Mo.)
But I’d like to be able to sleep better for its own sake as well. Losing weight will help, as should following such advice as “don’t read in bed,” and so on. Do I have apnea? Unknown. But it’s been longer than I can remember, quite literally, since I had what I’d consider to be a truly good night’s sleep — when I wake up feeling refreshed and renewed physically as well as mentally. (I dream well, I just don’t get enough of the deep, dreamless, restorative sleep.)
Such are my thoughts as we head towards 14h00 on this, January 1, 2010… the Aughts over, and marked particularly by our Becoming French (but more on this at another time).
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:42:00 GMT
Monday, November 9th will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years. I remember when it happened, I remember what an astonishing, unexpected, earth-shaking and totally miraculous event it was. And twenty years is a long time ago.
We were in a very different place then than we are now — not just geographically, either. Mr Mo and I were both still active Mormons, clinging to the comfort that discovering Sunstone and Dialogue and lds.net and mormon-l and so on had brought us. There was still hope in liberal circles for significant changes with regard to women’s place in the church, among many other things.
And we still felt stirred by the possibility of modern revelation, of “the stone cut without hands” filling the earth. So when the Berlin Wall came down, we saw it as a fulfillment of a never-quite-officially-articulated (or at least not ratified) prophecy about God moving in mysterious ways to allow the gospel to be preached “to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.” The church sent missionaries into all areas behind the former Iron Curtain as quickly as it could (only to find, not too far down the line, that the Orthodox church was not especially welcoming)….
Um.
So the stone rolls forward a bit more slowly these days, helped along by an above-average birthrate, but impeded by attrition cutting into the true number of converts. Given recent events — the mormon church placing itself squarely yet again on the wrong side of both history and overarching moral justice with respect to gay marriage (just as it fought against the ERA and civil rights for blacks in the U.S.)… well.
It has been at least 14 years since I last considered myself an active member (it’s been longer for Mr Mo). CA Prop H8 (and most recently Maine Prop 1) is pushing me much closer to making my disaffection both complete and official. Quite honestly, one of the only things keeping me from sending in an official letter of resignation is that then Salt Lake would know where we are. (They seem to have lost track with our latest move.) That said, I am somewhat, but only slightly less concerned about parental feelings in this matter: still, it was a genuine shock to see at least two siblings’ names on the list of big donors to Prop H8 (and I suspect the 3rd active sibling contributed, though not enough to make the list); it was a shock to see a cousin’s name on the list; it was a shock to see the names of at least two other old friends (the saddest one being that of the sister of a fine young man who committed suicide because he was gay).
I think of my friend Steve (not his real name) and his partner of 20+ years. —No, let me correct that: I think of Steve and his now-husband (his California marriage having been upheld), and I keep waiting for a cogent response to the question of how their marriage in any way, shape, or form devalues or damages or threatens my marriage or anyone else’s. I find the church’s willingness to shake down its members for cash and time to destroy what Steve and his husband have despicable, the moreso because of its bankrolling of fear tactics and reliance on flat-out falsehoods to do so. The homophobes at the top of the hierarchical heap have dialed back even the slight bit of rhetorical progress the church had made some years back re: homosexuality not being a choice, as Bruce Hafen’s recent crap-science talk (posted on the church’s official website) makes all too clear. (While I prefer fingering Darth Packer as the instigator of all of this, Monson seems still functional enough to blame as well. The bigger disappointment here is Dallin Oaks, Jeff Holland … they, at least, should know better.)
I don’t have much in common with the politics of the current church, and see little hope for significant change along those lines. Too many US active mormons (such as my parents) are outright teabaggers or strong sympathizers, filled with fear and in some cases hatred of President Obama, of Democrats, of access to health care for everyone, and (ironically and painfully enough) of the rule of Constitutional law. Too many think W and Cheney were right to approve of torturing detainees (never mind that the vast majority were innocent and never charged with anything) — and this despite both U.S. and international law (and never mind that torture does not work). And far too many are blown about by every teabaggy, conspiracist email that circulates, convinced that these are The Last Days.
(I have postulated before that getting caught up in this sort of Last Days excitement helps people feel more important — adds some zing to their otherwise mundane lives. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, were the consequences of their ignorance — their sheer lack of logic, discernment, and critical thinking skills — so grave.)
—But I digress. (This post, it seems, is one long series of digressions.) What I am coming around to saying in my circuitous way here is that my personal wall is coming down. Can resigning be more wrenching than choosing to no longer pay tithing to the church (following the “September Six” debacle)? than ceasing to wear temple garments? For me, personally, no— and yet I think — no, I know my parents would be crushed were I to resign, and were they to find out about it: formalizing my disaffection would be a real blow. Further, were I to do this (having read plenty of messages — not directed at me, btw — encouraging people to “teach mormons/catholics” a lesson)… I know very well that my parents would not learn any positive lessons at all from such an action. I wouldn’t be shaking them up to such a degree as to make them reexamine their commitment to the church. Instead, they would (continue to) hold me up as an example of “intellectual pride,” of where too much education, too much exposure to the world leads the unwary (and ultimately, the “non-valiant”). They would be in mourning over their lost child for the rest of their days.
The same is true for my active siblings. “I’m quitting because you paid good money that could have been spent helping the poor on denying equal rights to gay people”… Yes. But they were “following the prophet.” Making a financial sacrifice to “save marriage” because their church leaders told them to. If I still had “the Spirit,” I would have done the same thing. It is only my pride and hard-heartedness that has led me down this path away from celestial heights.
Still. My wall is crumbling like that in Berlin 20 years back. How long will it take for it to fall away entirely? (“Falling away” being synonymous with apostasy.) I would prefer to wait until my parents have passed on, but we are a long-lived family. My head says, “Tear down this wall!”, but my heart is not yet fully reconciled to the damage it would do to my already too-tenuous relationships with my parents and siblings.
A place and time very far removed from where I was 20 years ago, indeed.
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