Kristine Virsis & Hope.

 As we grow up we are encouraged to use our free time doing things like watching tv, shopping, and eating out. Things that keep us sitting still and spending money, as the concept of play that was so natural to us as children becomes foreign. For me learning to ride a unicycle has been more freeing than I could have imagined. - Kristine Virsis


Word of the week: HOPE [the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.]
What to do with it: GET SOME. 

 I've been letting things get me reaaaaal down lately. Things like the oil spill and homeless animals and rape and classism and racism and borders and how sad people look as they go about their daily routine. Optimism seems to get harder...but I keep reminding myself that there are (probably? hopefully?) as many good things happening in the world as there are bad. They just aren't dramatic enough to appeal to the masses, so they don't get televised.

For instance:
This week Sarah Reilly saved dozens of tadpoles from a rapidly drying puddle; they now stand a chance at becoming frogs! Marvin Reilly rescued a tiny kitten from a stack of tires at his work and it is now sleeping beneath his beard! A bittersweet farewell-to-the-pool party was had at the PleasureDome! Steve Bates didn't drown in the flash flood! Lauren Matlock and all her housemates didn't get shot even though they live in the for-real ghetto! Endangered crocodiles hatched in Cambodia! Thousands of rubber ducks raced down the Connecticut River to raise money for charity! People are overcoming stuff! Folks are loving each other! Songs that don't suck are being written! Trees are still growing nice 'n' tall in lots of places and grass still conquers the sidewalks, doggone-it!

I'm tired of the gloom.  Gonna build something better.
Amen?

I have no time to waste, Mr. Brown!

Today: Baking cupcakes and refusing to wear pants! (The kitchen AC unit is d-e-a-d dead.) Looking for a recipe for peanut butter frosting with ingredients that I have on hand. (My favorite game to play.)

One of my customers brought me an Appalachian Trail hikers' magazine. She's giving me big dreams for 2012.

I may have concocted an herbal tea capable of conquering my insomnia. I drank some last night and apparently slept through a gigantic thunder storm. Marvin wasn't so lucky. he woke up around three and ran around the block searching for one of our cats who was outside. Such devotion.

I've had two songs stuck in my head all day:





&




It's a good life, isn't it?

Happy Earth Day.

We may as well acknowledge that we're all fucked. I don't mean this in the delightful sense of lovers...meeting in the middle of their hearts and minds and bodies, but in the sense that we're in far more trouble than words can say. Wild salmon are disappearing, as are great apes, coral reefs, native earthworms, wild forests, wild places of all stripes. Last week two more chunks of Antarctica fell into the sea. Dioxin contaminates polar bear fat, and it contaminates mother's milk. Three corporations control more than eighty percent of the beef market, and seven corporations control more than ninety percent of the grain market. Military scientists have placed computer chips in the brains of rats, and can force the creatures to go left, right, backward, forward by pushing buttons on keyboards...

We're fucked. We all know the numbers. We know that twenty-five percent of all women in this culture are raped within their lifetime, and another nineteen percent have to fend off rape attempts. Which means of course that unless one guy is excruciatingly busy, an awful lot of men are rapists...

We know also that 565,000 American children are killed or injured every year by their parents or guardians. We know, too, that there are more slaves in the world today than came across on the Middle Passage. And we know that in the 1830s a slave in the American South cost between $500 and $1000, the equivalent of $50,000 to $100,000 today. And now a slave costs about $50, making them not even a capital but a simple expense, to be used up and thrown away. 

We're fucked. 

If we're so fucked, one might reasonably ask, why not just go ahead and off ourselves?...the answer: life is good. Life is really, really good. Not mediated life. Not televisions, cars, stereos, jobs, professional sports, colognes, perfumes, skyscrapers, steel, asphalt, brick, mortar. But life. Waking up with the sun on your face. Tasting your lover's sweat. Stubbing your toe, petting a dog...helping your mother plant her garden, feeling your body grow heavy at the end of a hard day, and waiting to catch up to your dreams. But to merely reside in the sensual as the world burns isn't good enough. Nor is it good enough merely to mourn the losses both inside and out. Both of these are necessary, but not sufficient...If things are so bad, one can also ask (this time unreasonably, I think), why not just withdraw into the sensual, why not just party (or cry)? Because...this question reveals nothing neither more nor less than an inability to love. If you're in love, with your life, with your body, with your lover, with the tree outside your door, with the world that gives rise to all of these, the fact that we're all deeply, deeply fucked doesn't matter a damn to your actions: if you're in love, you act to protect your beloved. If we are to survive, we must recliam our planet from those corporations which-and people who-are destroying it. But even before this, we must reclaim our own bodies and our hearts from that same grasp. - Derrick Jensen, May 2002

[*photos from my Admirable things folder...found who-knows-where. Yours? Ask me to remove 'em or give you due credit and I will gladly do so. <3]

The past couple of weeks have been all hammock-lounging, Gibran and Psalms-reading, campfire smoke-inhaling, UTI-healing, whole wheat bread-baking, LOST theorizing, cat fur-wrangling, (gladly) pollen-sneezing, clutter downsizing, and plan-making. So the normal routine, plus a few seasonal additions..and the UTI brought on by too many ginseng root beers last week. (I knew better.) 

Four little tomato plants have sprouted in the container garden, plus about a million lettuce plants. The artichokes are hanging in there, but the wildflowers are looking a little floppy.

Last night Marvin and I went to dinner with my co-workers and a rep from NOW foods. They talked a lot about things that happened before Marv and I were born, but none of the terribly exciting topics. I zoned out and kept trying to remember what it was like to be an egg and a sperm and not a whole person, but failed. We left saying that it was time for our Mad Men marathon date, but it was loud in the restaurant and Louie's husband thought we sad Batman marathon. We didn't tell him otherwise.

Back to the hammock and the breeze.

LOVE,
Sarah.

P.S. - Andrea, I found ANOTHER band-aid in the pair of shoes of yours I inherited at the junk swap a couple of years ago. This makes, what? half a dozen band-aids out of a single pair of shoes! It's starting to get a bit eerie because each time I'm positive that I've gotten the last of the band-aids out...but then another one magically appears a few months later. Is it voodoo that youdoo?

An Arkansan blizzard and RuPaul.

Marvin got really excited about the snow. Partially because it got him out of half a day of work and partially because he hasn't seen a whole lot of it in his lifetime. Normally I have to pester him to smile in photos, but this time he supplied ample grins on his own:

Being the fatso that I am, I ate some flakes:

And we tried in vain to take a kissing pic:


Apparently we just aren't emo enough for that garbage.

This quote from RuPaul made my day: "Culturally, many women feel they have to play along with how things are set up. Women are supposed to 'be this' and 'do this,' but drag queens mock that setup. The whole identity of being a woman, and the rules about what a woman can or can't do, it's all such a crock of shit, and drag queens embody the hoax of it all."

Love it.

I also love being back on the Funeral. Daily doses of no-longer-local friends in a non-stalker setting can't hurt. Who needs Facebook when you've got a nineties style forum?

Other loves of the day: Quinoa & sauteed veggies, endless cups of hot cocoa, seeing the castle church in a winter wonderland, and BUST magazine. I usually read it straight through, but I'm having a hard time doing that with this issue because I'm dying to get to the article about Lurlene McDaniel. (No pun intended*, I promise.) She was my favorite author as a pre-teen.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Lurlene McDaniel, she writes books about girls who are faced with terminal illnesses.

Misogynist noise canceling headphones.

Searching the internet for advice on how to get one's husband to cut back on his video game playing was an unsurprising waste of time...with the exception of this:

"Ah yes, the noise-canceling headphones. You could lock Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly and Mullah Omar in a room together with a stack of Hustlers and 10 ounces of meth, and they couldn't come up with anything more misogynist. I storm back to my desk and type the phrases "my husband" "addicted" "video games" "HELP" into the search engine. Hundreds of links appear.

I click on the first one, a Christian counseling Web site, where a desperate woman named Tiffany, whose husband plays video games nine to 11 hours a day, is reminded by the nonaccredited Christian counselor that man is master of her dominion and tells her to pray to Jesus to restore her husband's love.

This isn't going to work for me. Besides, I have already prayed to the Jewish God for guidance, and the Jewish God, as he has done for millions of Jewish wives since time immemorial, advised me to rip my husband's headphones off his head and scream at him for never putting his leftovers back in the fridge. This tactic proved less effective than I hoped.

I click on another page, where a forum of concerned women instruct me to regain Ben's attention by walking around the house dressed in skimpy outfits and waggling my hips provocatively. One enterprising poster, aptly named Cyberhottie69, even suggests draping one's naked breasts somewhere impossible to miss -- like the coffee table, or on his head, like a doughy, undulating hat."

Yessss.