This is a really great essay by a woman named mai'a on Flip-Flopping Joy. This kind of essay has really shaped the things I believe in my head, and whenever I see this kind of essay, it pushes it a little farther into my subconscious, my heart, and my actions.

Quote:

...then it started to make sense.  whether or not i drank coke.  had much more to do with the relationships i had in that office in chicago, or with other progressives.  than it had to with my relationship to colombians.

and then i started to add up all the hours and dollars and energy that i put into my lifestyle choices.  i thought about how i could have actually been using that time to do build relationships with people and ideas.  how much more time i  could have spent studying history so i had a better grasp of the present.  learning from my elders.  and mentoring.

Quote:

i do think that there is some personal good in being conscious about how i spend my money.  but that good is a personal one.  as in me choosing to spend my money on this rather than that.  acts as a spiritual practice.  like fasting. or prayer. a reminder to take a second in the midst of consumerism. and remember another person’s story.  another community’s story.  so when people tell me they dont buy this product or they just bought this green product and then they start going on about how important it is to think of the environment.  i just smile and bite my tongue and remind myself.  this is just their way of having a modicum of a spirtual practice.

and some people. a lot of people can get awfully self righteous about their particular spirtual practice.</p>

Quote:

...we do what we have been taught.

we buy green stuff to replace all of our not-so-green stuff.  we spend money. or we spend time.  washing plastic bags, raising worms in our kitchen, and preparing the organic foods.

imagine what we could do with all that time and money…if we organized ourselves and our priorities differently…

Tags: culture, environment, policy, politics, power
Current Music: Boilermakers - Hey Good Lookin' (in head)

I highly suspect that I have tendonitis in my left foot.

Either that, or someone has jammed a barbed spike lined with razor blades into the lower end of the heel of my foot and extended it along the outside of the arch.

I can't even begin to tell you how much pain I'm in, right now, and I really don't understand why it decided to do this, all of a sudden! (I was TOTALLY FINE until I was walking back from my car after lunch.)

Yeah, I had the occasional twinge, but it was just in the annoying category.

This, though... omg. Each step sends burning, searing, stabbing, blinding pain radiating through my foot and up my leg. I actually saw stars. I almost cried in line at Target.

And laying down with it propped up on pillows is not helping! I've taken some naproxen sodium, and am hoping to almighty that it does something soon.

Tags: foot, omfg, pain

Almost 6 months ago, I was approached by a family member searching for idea for a gift that the family could give my cousin Heather and her FI, Nik. She was lamenting over the fact that with this economy, and with several family members health failing, not everyone could afford to make the trip out to AZ. She really wanted to do something that all family members could partake in. So, I suggested creating a quilt. She and my aunts jumped on the idea. They acquired mailing addresses of both the bride and groom's family. (Groom's family is all in England.) They then mailed out squares with fabric markers asking each member to decorate their square and mail it back.

Heather's mom (mother of the bride) then lovingly put it all together and this was the end result:
( Pictures! )

So the big hullabaloo lately is that Kate Moss said in an interview that one of her mottos is "nothing tastes as good as thin feels." And she is being blasted for basically encouraging anoerexia.

Hmmm....where have I heard that phrase before? Oh, that's right, my Weight Watchers meetings. Kate didn't make that up. It's a pretty common mantra.

At least Kate isn't making me hug myself while I say it.

Evidently students have taken over Wheeler Hall in protest.

Tags: berkeley

So I decided this might be a good week to not spend any time, y'know, thinking. Which hasn't been hard. It's involved going to the gym every morning and pushing myself until I ache. Then going to work, which has been a fucktastrophe of intense overclocking due to all the huge, complicated Best Of The Decade pieces on top of our normal workload, plus having to get the print edition together a day and a half early due to Thanksgiving deadlines. Then I've seen one or two movies — usually two — every night, which has meant a lot of dragging home at 1 a.m., then getting up at 7:30 to go back to the gym.

At least this has been good for getting caught up before our best of the year in film coverage. Every year, our film editor Scott Tobias puts out a list of films we should all try to watch before writing our best-in-film pieces, and every year I post it for the generally curious and completist. Here 'tis. I'm way behind this year, though as usual, many of these haven't even come out yet, and the next few weeks will be packed with screenings and screeners. Also, this is the year I finally accept that my tastes and Scott's do not overlap all that often; in particular, I just don't get much out of gory horror films, and I have no particular intentions of taking him up on watching The House Of The Devil. Probably not Paranormal Activity, either. I'm still mad at him and Keith for suckering me into seeing Drag Me To Hell.

( The ones in bold, I've already seen. )

Current Mood: BUSY

Hey! Ho!

Tags: music, photography, sf

• 14:41 @NandoVel what did you have @kogibbq? #

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Tags: mutants
Current Music: Signal to Noise -- Nanobugs

tonight as i put one foot up on the bed to put on some socks, i smiled at the memory of being hugely, miserably pregnant and unable to put on socks at all, much less by putting one leg on top of the bed to do it. then i had this strange moment of doubt and unreality, as if that had never happened to me; that it must have been a character in a movie i saw. but of course it *was* me, and yet- not. i joke all the time about how other people say "yeah, you'll change, your life will be totally different after a child, blah blah blah," but that it's really more like you actually die and are reborn a totally different person. at least i feel that way sometimes (and i miss that other holly!)

something i wasn't prepared for, because it wasn't mentioned in any book: the concept that PPD is not, in fact, linear. you don't find the light at the end of the tunnel and start steadily walking through it, until you are bathed in happy-perfect-mommy light. the tunnel is more like a labyrinth, or even a funhouse of mirrors; deceptive and ...long.

i find myself gritting my teeth a lot, and my chiropractor makes me feel good for about 5 hours out of an entire week. i'm internalizing my stress and it's affecting my physiology in a painful way, not to mention my emotions. julius tries to "ask the right questions" to figure out why i find myself pissy or antagonistic, but i feel at a loss.

in less depressing, more fun news, i've been reading this book on "real" food (i.e. if your grandmother wouldn't recognize it or you can't pronounce something in it, you shouldn't be eating it). the author described the method she used to introduce her child to solid food. no spoons, no bibs, no highchair, no food processor. she just stripped him down, put him on a plastic sheet, and put food in front of him. and of course it was hugely messy and didn't even come near his mouth the first few times. but then it did. and got better fast... so that her 6 month old was feeding himself. this is crazy, but sounded like fun so we tried it today. hey, she needed a bath already anyway. i considered it a success, since she actually got a couple of pieces of sweet potato in her mouth. but mostly it was fun to mash it into our hands, legs, clothes, floor...

good times.

Tags: journey, ppd, solid food

• 13:17 more bonding with the laminator today #

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• 21:43 Is at IO West so much I'm thinking of getting the "+21" stamp permanently tatooed on my wrist #
• 12:11 overheard at work: "the puppies... we'll give them a 12:30pm call time." #
• 12:52 @drewfansler finally went to my first real Kogi truck and everyone there was wearing your t-shirt. Great job!! #
• 13:33 the whole gourmet LA food truck thing fascinates me. Finally hit up @kogibbq and walked by a major line at @buttermilktruck #
• 15:03 @drewfansler The Chicken Burrito and a Spicy Pork Taco. What do you recommend? #

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Neil Patrick Harris is singing to me from New York Street.
Well... not to me, but he is singing.
Must refrain from running over there and shouting "I love you, Dr. Horrible!"

Postcard winners!

We wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude for sending so much joy our way. Frank is still blushing with excitement over the love notes, proposals, propositions, and occasional intimate photos sent from his admirers around the world (China, Norway, Japan, and Poland just this week)! At his request, we blindfolded Justin, one of Frank's BFFs, spun him around in five dozen counterclockwise circles, and asked him to point to ten random postcards/envelopes pasted to the wall. After a brief trip to the bathroom, he chose the following lucky winners, to whom we will give a six-month paid account token (for paid, basic, and plus users) or, for our permanent account holders, a $15 voucher for the LiveJournal gift shop.

So, without further ado, the winners are:

1. seraphene
2. fotog
3. boykitten
4. seshat_6
5. anti_aol
6. lisalees
7. katrinkacat
8. mistyboston
9. _woody_lein
10. another_slender

Bugs, Tweaks, and Enhancements

1. We fixed a bug from the last release that was causing screened comments to become unscreened if they were edited
2. If you happen to be gaming around the corner, check us out on Facebook and be sure to spread the word!
3. We've added new vgifts to celebrate Thanksgiving! Check out our feathered friend, below!

Give more with charitable vgifts

In honor of national adoption month, we're offering a charitable vgift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that provides healthcare and adoption to orphans suffering from life-threatening diseases. LiveJournal will donate 100% of gross proceeds from the sale (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries vgifts in the Virtual Gift shop. We'll keep you posted on how much we raise!

Photos of the week

We're delighted to showcase yet more incredible photos from some of our brilliant LiveJournal photographers around the world. Keep posting (and tagging). And be sure to show some love by commenting on the awesome view at lj_photophile.

Check out this week's photos and more amazing user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. See you next week!

Tags: comments, facebook, lj_cares, photos, postcards winners, writer's block

http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2009/11/dbacks-acquire-aaron-heilman.html#comments

Now if we can just get rid of that other Aaron character. Bag of baseballs and a slightly used third base maybe?

Fake Tree Vortex Threatens to Suck in Entire Backyard

"The wall and floor planes are actually entirely flat and perpendicular, and the tree vortex is an illusion created by the sloping lines."

Tags: pranks
Current Music: Los Campesinos! -- The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future

Tags: wtf

Some people seem to be born anxious. Too much fear is never a good thing, but does not enough fear predispose one to criminality?

Tags: fear, htdyoc

I think about weird things when I drive. Today on my short commute I was thinking about gas mileage and how my Fit gets about 30 mpg city, while a hybrid might get around 40 to 45. Then my mind wandered to how cars in the aggregate use up tremendous amounts of gas. Then I thought about how humankind, for almost all its existence, was only able to harness human and animal power; as a result there was a limit to how much population could be fed. Then along came machines and as a direct result we were able to generate unbelievable population growth by basically converting petroleum into people.

The final thought in the sequence was "if we ever invent a near limitless supply of clean energy (solar, fusion?) the population will grow without limit, so maybe it's better we run out of gas and five out of six people starve to death". (I know, it's a pretty uncool thought. I don't actually want five billion people to die.) I kept thinking about the humanity-wide consequences of possessing a limitless supply of energy:

The planet would probably be bored out so that the top two miles or so would generate another couple dozen Earth-sized surfaces we could live on.

We would colonize the solar system eventually (although other stars would be doubtful unless the limitless supply of energy were portable -- man-made black hole?)

Most species would go extinct.

There would be a lot of warfare over who controls the energy supply.

There would either be an explosion of technology or an explosion of lotus-eating. Or both.

You would be able to travel anywhere very, very quickly.

Recycling would be effortless since you could decompose anything to its constituent elements.

We could, in theory, harvest asteroids for raw materials (especially water).

It would, basically, be the futuristic society dreamed of by Golden Age science fiction writers.



I want my flying car.

need advice... my iPhone sounds aren't always working. hrm. i can play music, and the settings say all my sounds are on... but i can't hear my phone ring, and i get no sound when i use various apps (e.g. games). it's been this way since i used it in my dock at home to play music last weekend. any thoughts?

The thing that bothers me most about our cat's death is that she used to be a cat — a complicated ongoing process of personality and interaction — and now she's just a story, a couple of bloodless lines of text. She was a feral rescue. She was shy around strangers but very affectionate. We had her for 12 1/2 years. She developed liver cancer and we had to put her to sleep. The end. And one reason I got so emotional when she was diagnosed was that we were doing this before she was even dead: pruning her story down to base elements, simplifying it into a form that we could agree on with strangers. Streamlining the horrible, fearful days of illness and diagnosis and second-guessing down to She developed cancer. Turning more than a decade together into She was shy but sweet. We told the same few lines of story to several vets and techs who asked for it, including the one who euthanized her, and the more I heard the story in my own mouth, the more it didn’t have anything to do with her, or with what I was experiencing—it was just a bunch of pro forma stuff to say. But I felt like we were discarding most of her.

The simplifying process happens with everyone and everything eventually, and it's always tragic. That's actually a favorite theme of mine in fiction — the generational story where you find out that a person’s neatly packaged—in fact possibly deliberately repackaged—story handed down to the next generation really has nothing to do with the actual life from the previous generation. (Margaret Atwood's book Alias Grace and John Sayles' film Lone Star are particularly terrific examples of this.) But where reading about it can be fascinating, being part of the process is just depressing.

I couldn’t help realize at various points, as people asked about her, how easy it would have been to tell them any damn bullshit we wanted. We only got her a year ago. We liberated her from a testing lab. She was an experiment in animal cloning. How would they know? They hadn't shared her real story.

Granted, a housecat's story is not really worth sharing with the world, no matter that a billion Internet sites think differently. Even the vastly expanded version, the "real" version, would just be a lot of variants on mundane habits — the way she liked to sleep on my butt when I slept on my stomach. The way we had to hide our hands under the blankets at night, or she'd come poke her wet nose into them to see if she could nudge them into petting mode. The way she carried our other cat around by the neck when they were both barely out of kittenhood, and she was only a little bigger than him, so his feet dragged on the ground, but he passively accepted it anyway. None of this is relevant in the way even the shortest or more mundane human life is. But there’s no way to bring it across to other people.

All of this is the kind of irrational emotional reaction that takes over a brain in times of stress; I don’t know that any of it means anything. It’s just been bugging me the last few days. I’m feeling better; as I told komainu, I’m intellectually where I need to be with all this, I just haven’t caught up emotionally. To which she wisely replied that there’s no particular hurry on that.

Weirdly, we’re probably going to adopt more cats almost instantly. Cass has been wanting a third cat for years now, and I was reluctant to bring a new one into the mix, given how stranger-shy both of ours were. But the surviving cat, Balrog, has become increasingly needy and neurotic on his own, and we’re gone most of the day, and Cass thinks it’s cruel to leave him on his own all the time, especially since he was always more cat-social than people-social. So we’re going to the anti-cruelty society by my office tomorrow to meet new cats. It’s going to be very, very strange, but I imagine any cats we take home will be grateful for a new life.

• 09:19 Who turned the satellite radio to 90s pop? Wannabe, Too Legit, and now KLF all in the last hour. I feel like I'm at a cheerleading camp. #

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• 21:34 is finally done with school & putting in a late night in the soap shop. #

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I find that I barely watch actual movies any more, because they all suck. But Sleep Dealer was fantastic, and you should watch it at once. It reminded me of Varley's Blue Champagne mixed with Haldeman's Forever Peace.

Also Moon was really good.

I can't actually remember any other movies I saw this year that I enjoyed. (Oh, Up. That was cute.)

Then there's the televisions.

The Prisoner	This was kind of amazing. Ian McKellen does a fantastic Mr. Roarke, it's very surreal, and the final reveal of what's really going on was interesting and something I hadn't seen before.
Flash Forward	I've been enjoying this. It feels like Lost but with less of the bullshit. I read the book it was based on which is ok (but not great). I think the changes the show has made from the book have actually improved matters, which is unusual.
Stargate Universe	I almost hated the first episode ("Did I really watch two hours whose plot was 'find the broken window'?"), but it grew on me. They're addressing the resource-scarcity of the stranded crew more than any similar shows have, and there's a lot less comedy than in the other Stargate shows. I hope that the magic "talk to Earth" rocks stop working soon. It would be much more intense without that lifeline. Also, Lou Diamond Phillips is annoying.
V	To my great surprise, this has been not-terrible so far. I expected to hate it, because "hate" is the only sensible reaction to a (purportedly) science fiction show that features a priest as one of its main characters. That tells you that the writers expect to do a lot of hand-wringing about "faith" versus "science" (or as I like to call it, "reality"). Fortunately, this priest doesn't actually seem to be very interested in priesting, so that's been ok so far. I enjoyed the David Icke-isms, and that they didn't bother beating around the bush about getting the resistance going.
Dollhouse	This show followed the same pattern that Buffy did: the entire first season was slow-moving poorly-plotted terribly-acted garbage, and then he pulled it out of the crapper for the last two episodes of the season, which were like they were from a different show entirely. Season 2 has been much better than season 1, but of course now it's going to be cancelled (again). If you end up watching any of this, fast-forward through an episode or two from season one, then watch the two parter finale in 11 and 12, plus the future-apocalypse episode 13 (which never aired, because it's the best episode of the whole series, and you wouldn't want anyone to actually see that.)
House	I grudgingly admit that a doctor show can be worth my time.
Castle	I grudgingly admit that a cop show can be worth my time. But only because Nathan Fillion is fun to watch. The actual plots are completely unmemorable.
The Venture Brothers	This season is not wowwing me so far.
Dexter	Fading. But still good.
Californication	Consistently hilarious.
30 Rock	Consistently hilarious.
Supernatural	Often dumb. Occasionally hilarious.
Why am I still watching this crap:
Heroes	Apparently something went wrong with Tivo and I missed almost an entire season. And yet, apparently I missed nothing, except an explanation of why Whiny Blonde's power changed, and why Indian Dude isn't a lizardman any more. (Things about which I apparently don't even remotely care.)
Sanctuary	I watch most of this in fast forward or while playing games on my phone.
Fringe	Well, it's not as bad as Sanctuary.
Lost	Isn't it over yet? If I could fast-forward to the series finale episode, I'd do that right now.
True Blood	Season 2 was a lot better than season 1. Faint praise.
Eagerly awaiting more of:
Mad Men
United States of Tara
Weeds
Doctor Who	Though the xmas special sucked.
Leverage
Burn Notice

Tags: movies, reviews, tv
Current Music: Ab Ovo -- Nocturlabe