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You Communicate With Your Ears |
 You love conversations, both as a listener and a talker. What people say is important to you, and you’re often most affected by words, not actions. You love to hear complements from others. And when you’re upset, you often talk to yourself. Music is very important to you. It’s difficult to find you without your iPod. |
Archive for Miscellany and Whatever
How Do You Communicate?
Which Sandman Character Are You?
| Which Sandman Character are You? |
 You are Dream! Many people see you as living in your own little world. Though you would never try to harm someone needlessly, you are not always aware of the consequences of your actions. Take this quiz!
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What Alcholic Beverage Are You?
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You Are A Martini |
 You are the kind of drinker who appreciates a nice hard drink. And for you, only quality alcohol. You don’t waste your time on the cheap stuff. Obviously, you’re usually found with a martini in your hand. But sometimes you mix it up with a gin and tonic. And you’d never, ever consider one of those flavored martinis. They’re hardly a drink! |
The New Black
I was raised by people with highbrow educations, but I do not, myself, have such an education. I was raised by people who have read the classics, who distinguish between “fiction” and “literature,” but I make no such distinction, and I haven’t read Beowulf. Or Tolstoy. Or Chaucer.
My mother in particular has highbrow tastes, and I have heard with my own ears the phrase “déclassé” pass her lips (in reference to me, of course). (In my defense, my mother doesn’t know how to use Unicode to get accented characters. So I’m not without my charms.)
Anyway, that’s me. Déclassé.
My mother likes drawing room dramas. Merchant & Ivory affairs. Wouldn’t dream of attending a genre film. No spaceships, no James Bond, no elves. Déclassé.
I am bemused by the fact that the brightest, most talented, and most creative people out there, my age and younger, are not, in fact, participating in highbrow creation. The blazing talents of 40 or 30 are working with style, even style-over-substance, with comic books and vampires and hobbits, with sloppy rock-n-roll and vulgarity.
Déclassé, ladies and gentlemen, is the new black.
Like a pigeon From Hell—what’s up with THAT?
Tom tagged me with this evil bit of humiliation. Name five songs that make you cry and explain why.
The humiliation part is that I am a total sap. A sappy sap. And the songs that make me cry are sappy songs. I am not one to have guilty pleasures, I will gladly tell you my favorite schmaltzy movie or corny TV show, but the songs? The songs are a genuine red-faced guiltfest.
And here they are.
Emphysema in the Haunted House
Roberta has some great musings about quitting smoking. (I kicked in with some comments.)
I have long mulled the issue of smoking-related illnesses. Why don’t the threats of cancer and heart disease and emphysema have more impact on people? Why do we persist in smoking? One of my very best friends is a cancer survivor who still smokes (and when I was a smoker, I held her up as a role model whenever people nagged me).
In our modern Western culture, we fear death, not mostly as the end, but as the unknown. And I don’t mean, “What happens when you die?” as in, afterlife, reincarnation, white light. I mean as in, what does it look like, smell like, sound like. Death is away. In the hospital or hospice, in the slaughterhouse, at the vet’s, not at home or in the yard or on the farm or in our arms.
So when the threat of cancer is dangled before us, it’s just one more scary ghost in the haunted house. Not scarier than our general sense of the end of life as unknown, possibly terrifying, and probably painful. Isn’t that what we think anyway? So why is cancer actually worse than that?
It’s interesting that when most people talk about being influenced by the threat of cancer, they talk, as Roberta does, about witnessing cancer with their own eyes. (My friend, by the way, had a quick diagnosis and successful surgery, no chemo or radiation, so she skipped many of the gruesome experiential features.) Without that witnessing, that confrontation, that face-to-face this is IT I’m not scared of the unknown I’m scared of THIS, it isn’t motivating. Being scared of something real and specific is motivating, being scared of a general malaise of unknown terror just makes us shut down and deny. Which probably relates to why Bush’s constant terror-mongering is not working, but I digress.
So part of the solution feels like getting real. Not about smoking, so much as about life, death, and disease in general. Only then can we see smoking in the context in which it belongs.
Spheroid Crocodiles and Non-linear Floor Lamps
Over at Lover of Strife, Evn made the following aside:
Speaking of perspectives, my personal perception of reincarnation is spherical rather than linear. As such, I sincerely hope [Steve] Irwin comes back as a crocodile in ancient Egypt.
The problem with perceiving reincarnation as linear or spherical is that any perception of reincarnation is de facto a perception of time. If time is an illusion, as physicists and philosophers increasingly agree, then a shape for time, like a line or a sphere, is also an illusion. Or, more accurately, a construct that we use to help us perceive it. And to keep our brains from hurting.
What if time is really simultaneous? What if all of the moments of now are co-existing in a way we can’t perceive?
I like to compare time to space. When you enter a room, you reach the lamp, then the couch, then the table, then the TV. So objects in space can be perceived as linear, occuring one after another, and indeed, if you are born blind, this is how you perceive them. But if you can see it, you can know space is really simultaneous.
I think past and present and future are couches and floor lamps and television sets. Crocodiles in ancient Egypt exist simultaneously with Pagan bloggers and swashbuckling pirates (who are, after all, eternal).
It’s a very informative view of reincarnation, really, because instead of having past lives that influence future lives, we have many simultaneous lives influencing one another. Which is cool.
Story of my love
Because I haven’t told it before.
I miss the times when we were together, when we were really being together, but I suspect, in our ten years, those times cumulatively make up three or four. The rest was breaking up, or being together but not being able to get together, or making and cancelling plans, or catching sneaky kisses in elevators.
I loved those elevator kisses.
I hear his voice in my head, even three years since I last heard it. He had a deep rolling voice that hit me like a shot of whiskey; burned the core and then moved through me, warming the fingers and toes.
I miss listening to the things he said, his infinite opinions about the world and the theater and politics and cooking and actors and things that mattered and things that didn’t matter. He taught me a trick for opening a jar and every time I open a jar I hear him.
I miss the presence. He had an aura, a weight, a just being there, sitting on the couch or in the next room or in this room, not talking. Like he generated more heat than other people. No one else ever feels that way to me. I miss that weight.
I miss the idea of the relationship. When I think about other relationships, the idea of it, the abstract, was something important or meaningful or anxiety-producing or delightful. But this one relationship, when I had it, in those moments, was peaceful. I could tell myself that I had Bob, and that was a soothing thing to hear. Even when we were apart for weeks because of scheduling, the in-between times were filled with that peace.
Which he stole from me every chance he got. Maybe it’s a mistake to love an abstract, and I think he wanted both less and more. He wanted me to have more, and he wanted to give me less and so he withdrew it all. What a martyr he imagined himself to be! Abandoning me because I deserved better. Bearing the burden, he could tell himself, of being the bad guy, to spare me. I cannot roll my eyes enough to express the bullshit. Because there was something so crazy there, so pathological, that I cannot even type up a plausible explanation for blogging purposes. He just walked. Just like that.
I miss the gin rummy.
The sex was amazing, fantastic, and my desire for him was constant and infinite, but I don’t miss the sex. If he was here now, I think I’d make him a cup of coffee, and sit across from him and look at him while he drank it, and then sit in his lap. I think about that more than I think about jumping his bones, although undoubtedly I’d jump his bones.
I don’t regret a minute.
What Alternative Paradigm Are You?
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You scored as True Alternative. You are a True Alternative! Labels do not suit you well, particularly as you tend to strike your own path and to grow purely via experience. No armchair quarterbacking for you! Originality and creation are your specialities, and sometimes you can even articulate what the hell just happened. Someday you may find yourself drawing the maps for other people… lots of other people.
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What Subversive Alternative Paradigm Are You?
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