tuesday, september 18

I miss you and your stories about your life! Stop being so stunned and start being creative again, goddamnit! The world needs you now more than ever!

A Buddhist friend emailed me yesterday and told me how large portions of his family are starting to distance themselves from him, because they percieve him as a heathen devil-worshipper, and don't want to be too associated with him now that the end times are coming. Amazing.

Then of course there's all the stories of people who look even remotely middle-eastern being harassed.

In Seattle that sort of behavior is so passe that I get a little insulated from the extreme ball of ignorance that the US can be sometimes. Then someone beats a gay man to death or starts insulting arabs in the streets, and I remember...oh yes, Alabama exists. Hehehe. Really though, if only it was confined to Alabama. I'm know there's just as much prejudice in Western Washington.

monday, september 17

I am now a catsitter. I have been for a week. Somehow, my lovely charge got some kind of wicked case of the fleas.

She yowled and scratched against anything that wouldn't fall over for 2 days before I finally got some flea medicine and dosed her. Days later she was still miserable.

It was a bonding experience, really. She would come over to me and whine and writhe around and I would feel great pity. After a week I couldn't stand it and went and got flea shampoo. I wish I had done that right off the bat.

Now she's wet and pissed and I have the scratches to prove it, but I think she's looking a little less...fleabitten.

saturday, september 15

``He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,'' in those who harbour such thoughts hatred is not appeased.

``He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,'' in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred is appeased.

Hate is not overcome by hate; by Love (Metta) alone is hate appeased. This is an eternal law.

The others know not that in this quarrel we perish; those of them who realise it, have their quarrels calmed thereby.

- The Dhammapada - Yammakavagga - The Pairs
(verses 2, 3)

friday, september 14

The man at this public address lambasted me a bit for my choice of articles (see They Can't See Why They Are Hated).

Jeff Ward, who maintains the blog as well as Visible Darkness, implies it's tactless. I agree with him, it is tactless. But it also needs to be said so much more than it's going to be said!

He says in his post that there is an implicit message in the article that the British are somehow presenting themselves as free of any fault...I just didn't get this idea from the article. I just hear it saying, "Americans are clueless", which is hard to refute.

I live here! I will tell you that I have never felt so American as this week, and I am proud and ashamed at the same time for that. I know what Americans know about Palestine, and that is shit. Hell, I know nothing about Palestine and I still know more than most Americans. We thought we could do whatever we wanted to make our lives more comfortable and it had to backfire.

Are we going to learn any kind of lesson about how to live with all of these other people on the world? No, because now we are justified in having "a quiet, unyielding anger" from which we can strike all the enemies we wished we could strike before.

He partially concluded, "I have no choice but to stand with my country. Not blindly to follow it into Armageddon, but to stand with it in the intolerance of terrorism. Sink or swim."

What does it mean to stand by one's country? I feel like it means taking partial responsibility for what the way this country conducts itself. I will be very curious to see how this is actually handled...but I don't see much beyond the same jingoistic "who 'lil ol' us?" rhetoric in almost all of the writing about September 11th. That's why I chose to highlight the article.

thursday, september 13

All the folks at Meeting of the Minds are suspending their regularly scheduled topic to discuss September 11th for a while. Go check out the ongoing discussion there. See "collective consciousness at it's worst" aimed at the current world situation.

Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

[via not.so.soft's news include]

Bruce Willis: Me and the guys voted to take 'em down honey. I'll talk to you soon.
Meg Ryan: I love you, honey...go get 'em.
Bruce Willis: (snaps shut his cel phone) Alright boys, we got a job to do. Yippie-ki-yay, motherfuckers.

(Only in the film Bruce heroically lands the plane and Meg Ryan punches the dickhead reporter.)

You know, so many people are just either writing about the event...or...more commonly it seems, linking to people who are writing about the event. All of the blogging as usual seems to be suspended. All of the people who I'm accustomed to hearing about the details of thier lives, suddenly all have the same details. In spite of the fact that there's all of this conversation about it and support and such, I feel inestimably lonely in the vaccuum.

After days of listening to NPR in my car nonstop I have some thoughts, but nothing anyone hasn't said yet. There simply isn't enough information to allow for very a complex interpretation of things. Suddenly somehow the world situation is the simplest it has been in thousands of years. Everyone knows what happened, everyone has similar information, everyone is standing by, concerned. Yassir fucking Arafat is giving his own blood for the American people.

I guess it will all get complicated again very soon.

[link via the excellent Server Side Include provided by not.so.soft]

wednesday, september 12

Poagao's Journal is a surprisingly under-read blog in my opinion. It's kind of an understated little number by an articulate and subtly funny man from Taiwan. A good example? Watch him poke gentle fun at "the A-Listers".

You'd never guess he wasn't living in the US by his writing style until you see the photos. It's a site that's sure to go on my sidebar as soon as I get things ship shape around here.

tuesday, september 11

Also, I wrote the ickle entry for today: nuerons are ickle. I have always admired ickle, and I'm honored to have had the opportunity to write a feature. Ickle is totally tiny...and sometimes tiny is ickle.

It felt weird to go back and look at my entry the day it happened...particularly frivolous. It made me a little uneasy seeing it there, since that's certainly not what I felt like today.

Normally I feel pretty staid in the face of such things, but I listened to NPR today, and several eyewitnesses made me cry. One cop came on and could barely keep it together, "I thought it was blocks and peices of debris falling, and then I saw they had arms and legs...I can't say anything else about it right now."

Also it made me cry for some reason when they talked about how all these people in Manhattan were lining up to give blood. The thought of all those stunned, earnest people standing in line, trying to do something, just made me lose it.

About two weeks ago a friend emailed me and asked if I could cat sit for about a month. A couple he knew was coming into town and needed a stable place for Gwyn (the cat, short for Guinevere) while they couch surfed and looked for an apartment. For some devoid-of-sanity reason I unhesitatingly said yes.

Well, now these people are in town and as of last night, I am cat sitting. My apartment looks so much different with a scratching post and litter box in it. I've lived with cats before...but it was always someone else's responsibility.

So far I have diligently avoided the sole responsibility for another being's life, and I've liked it that way. But now there's this being wandering around in my apartment, complaining loudly, and knocking over my favorite peanut cactus, Mr. Spaghettihead. There is food and water in her dish, and a scratching post, and she's be on my lap with my undivided attention, wailing at the top of her lungs.

I sing to the cat like Micheal Stipe: don't talk to me about being lonely.

I had Gwyn for a whole day by the time her parents were able to come over for visitation rights. I set up a little WinAmp playlist so that I wouldn't have to DJ.

So there we were all sitting around mellow on my floor, when Destiny's Child came up on the playlist. In a sudden wave of self-concious embaressment for having something that's on the top 40 on my playlist, I reached up and stopped the song after only a couple of notes and put on something else.

Not even the beat had started, just the little funny sounds at the beginning of the song, but Gwyn's mom looked up at me and said, "You're listening to Bootylicious, aren't you?" I was so busted. I laughed, and then decided to go ahead and play it.

Do you know what they're saying? They're saying I don't think you're ready for this jelly, my body's too bootylicious for ya babe. Girls don't usually even wanna acknowledge the existance of thier jelly, so I was impressed. I was never into Destiny's Child before but this 14 year old girl got me into that song. Once I heard it, though, I knew that I had to set aside any indie coolness and just listen to the brilliance of Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Rowland, and Michelle Williams, or whoever wrote that song. Plus, I think my name should be Beyoncé. Catsitta' Beyoncé, yo.

Just Guinevere and Catsitta' Beyoncé and a WinAmp playlist full of Destiny's Child against the world. Too bootylicious for ya, babe.

monday, september 10

Yes, I am a big dork, as opposed to small or medium dork. Yes, it's related to nerd and geek, but don't even bother to look it up in the dictionary. I tried that.

A kid in middle school told me I was a nerd in my 8th grade English class. I told my mom about it and together we looked up the word. I went back and told this kid the definition of nerd, and he presented that very fact as conclusive evidence that I was, in fact, a nerd. I guess he was right.

Some people would argue that just by having a little website I'm a big dork, implicating most of my readers I think, as well. I beg to differ. Maybe that was true ten years ago about being online (and I was there), but I suspect there are some pretty cool people online right now. I'm not going to name names, because that would stir up a controversy I don't want to spearhead, but I think it's fair to say that I am not one of them.

Well for one thing, there's all of that Advanced Dungeons and Dragons background, and I was a Dungeon Master, no less, a sure hallmark of dorkism. If you know who Gary Gygax is, then you're in good company.

Mostly though, I'm just uncontrollably silly and I bite my fingernails and toenails and don't know any carpentry. I can magnetize people somewhat on a one-to-one basis, but I can never generate that kind of broad shouldered confident broad appeal that the "winners" do. I was picked last in gym class...even for dodge ball, even though I was the most wicked dodger of a red rubber kickball that ever was. I don't know about any truly cool bands (read: good bands that everyone doesn't know about yet) except for the bands my cool friend Beth tells me about.

Okay, speaking of Beth, she's really my only claim to coolness. When I'm out with Beth, then I feel cool, but it's temporary. As soon as I go home I'm a big dork again, yo.

Okay...there's some corner of cool. I'll admit it...I know my way around a somewhat cosmopolitan city, I've been in a ménage á trois, and I don't live with my mom. But let me just say, that any cool that I have developed, has come as a result of accepting my own inner dork completely.

thursday, september 6

I find great pleasure in peeing outside. It just seems natural. Being a boy, I can usually find a discreet place anywhere, even in the city. I'm averse to doing it on cement, or somehwere it's going to dry and smell, but anywhere it will soak into the ground is not in bad form in my opinion.

I know, I know. Usually such behavior is reserved only for drunken frat boys and chronic public inebriates, but I cannot help the way I am. Even given the choice of a fine marble bathroom or the great outdoors, I will always choose to go behind a tree in the twilight. Only then do I feel I can truly relax.

But not everyone is such a fan. My sister can tell by the tone of my voice, "Hey Elisabeth, hold on."

She sighs, "You're gonna go dangle your weenie?"

"Yep."

Sometimes girls say they wish they had a weenie to dangle, but I have seen plenty of girls who could whip out thier booties and hang it out over the ground (watch out for tall grass!), take care of business and have no one be the wiser. I speak of her and her. But alas, it seems to be a rare skill, and they still do have to actually get a waistband down to thier thighs.

So if you ever meet me, and we are out for a walk, and I say, "Hang on a sec...", then simply look the other way and tap your foot if it bothers you...or just continue the conversation, I don't care...I'm sure you've all seen one before.