Those Who Know, Chuckle.
Because the word “community” is over-used.
Today: Don’t shame anyone.
Explanation: When you make someone feel painfully self-conscious, you destroy a little piece of the world — and not only for them. Your own soul / psyche / personality suffers as well. In today’s hyperpartisan social climate, the temptation exists to make others hurt as much as they want to hurt you; but that’s a trapdoor without a bottom.
Exercise: Ask yourself: “Do I really want to be That Guy?” Tone down the snark, online and off. And act according to your ideals.
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
— John Dominic Crossan
THE PHRASE OF THE DAY — let’s face it, of the hour (or even minute) — is “an abundance of caution.”
As I write this, I am anticipating a shelter-in-place order for my county (Sonoma) to begin today. No telling when it will end, or even if. It may not happen at all.
The mood at the Attinson Digs continues to be stop-and-go watchful. I imagine that’s true for most people in the world right now. As for me, I am delving more intensely into my daily routine (Torah and astronomy study, handwashing, cooking [actually, baking, as the fresh fruit and vegetables have all been picked over by my fellow locusts], loving the cat, handwashing). It seems to help, somehow, either as an escape or a connector. Or both.
The early morning Sonoma streets were largely empty today, but the grocery store parking lots were crowded. Continue reading “Hunkerin’”
AS DETAILED IN A PREVIOUS post (c. 2010), every March my sister asks what I would like for my birthday (it’s on the 22d, BTW) and my answer is always the same: “I already have everything I need.” That said, and for the sake of obliging my sibling for my 58th year, I do still have a semi-whimsical list, with some items apropos an autodidactic home cook. Go wild, Susan!
– Working tricorder or lightsaber
– Warp-capable spacecamper (preferably Danube-class)
– Several plain black short-sleeved T-shirts, size L
– Hawaiian shirt (or two), size L
– Pea coat, size L Continue reading “Blow ‘Em Out”
SOMETHING ELSE THAT HASN’T SURVIVED into adulthood is the kid-concept of “blood brotherhood.”
It works like this: Two boys (did girls ever do this?) make an incision or a pinprick on their thumbs, then rub the wounds together. “Now we are blood brothers,” they will intone (if they intone anything at all, which they also may not). It’s an expression of intimate friendship; a ritual of bonding with what’s-today-called one’s BFF. And not to be entered into lightly.
I don’t know how old is this gesture is, or even if, in this hazardous fluids-aware world of ours, it is still practiced. Continue reading “The Brotherhood of Blood”
Well, I ain’t often right, but I’ve never been wrong —
It seldom turns out the way it does in the song.
Once in a while, you get shown the light
In the strangest of places, if you look at it right…”
— Robert Hunter, a”h
DO WE RESEMBLE OUR TOOLS, or do our tools resemble us? (I’m including in this equation notional tools like webspace, word-processing software, Facebook’s post-ranking choices, etc.)
PEOPLE WHO LIVE WITH CATS are the only people who understand people who live with cats.
AS WE WIND DOWN DECEMBER, the social air is thick with anticipation — and, alas, some rancor.
It seems once again that some are taking issue with some who take issue with being greeted by the adherents of our country’s majority-religion, who in turn are peeved at what they perceive to be a “War on Christmas” — as though it’s somehow un-American to be polite or play well with others. Allow me to once again proffer a solution to this non-problem — an all-purpose response to someone who wishes you a happy holiday-outside-your-affinity-group. Simply say to them, “Same To You.” (After all, it’s not like anyone has a monopoly on Northern Hemisphere winter light-festivals.)
SERIOUSLY ASK YOURSELF THIS QUESTION: “Who (and what) profits from pitting one generation of progressives so viciously and stereotypingly against another?”
TODAY KICKS OFF THE WOULD-BE novelists’ annual motivational event, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day for a total of 50,000 by November 30. (I participated one year, and have a fairly mediocre time-travel novel to show for it.)
But some of us who write aren’t het up on novels so much as, say, short stories about a mercenary cook who used to be a holyman but can’t quite shake his past. Toward that end, I invite you to join in the alternative: NaSSWriMo, an acronym which I just made up and won’t insult your intelligence by defining. Continue reading ““NaSSWriMo!””
IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE THE feeling I get around 1 or 2 p.m. on Yom Kippur afternoon with no food since the previous evening. It’s an intellectual, buzzy sort of consciousness: colors are brighter, outlines sharper, and an almost euphoric state of clarity sets in. At our synagogue we take a service-break from about 12:30 until 4:30 p.m. — some people go home to nap or introspect, others hang out at the sanctuary to pray or meditate or just sit in community. As for me, I go home to feed the cat, engage in (what I hope is) honest self-criticism, and study something appropriate. Continue reading “Day of At-Onement”
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