Yes, we're obsessed. We always are. All that changes is the object. Today it is "Tuesday Morning" by the Pogues, which seems to us to sound like happiness.
Other standard obsessions (Dinosaur Comics and the Fugly blog) have been satisfyingly worth the space they've occupied, while the other (Theodore Dalrymple on City Journal) has been too coy about making his article available, so I end up reading other articles and then thinking out elaborate blogs on them when I should be sleeping but then forgetting it all when blogging time rolls around.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Bloggiversary
We are within one week of my three-year blog anniversary, and since it's the first time that I've remembered that I had an anniversary within a few months of it occurring, I felt I should commemorate it.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Today at work
Someone applied for bankruptcy protection against their animal licensing fees.
It's the $10 that makes all the difference.
It's the $10 that makes all the difference.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Implausible Plausibility
I keep telling myself that I'm not addicted, I'm only watching because I want to, etc., but a couple weeks ago I decided that I hated Ty-Ty Baby and all the rest, and yet have I fallen behind in the shenanigans in would-be model world? In a word, no. The episodes have been watched and what's worse, I have opinions about them. And yet it's all so implausible.
Apart from ANTM, these two sites have been keeping me busy. What they have in common (other than awesomeness) is that I totally love them. I haven't been feeling great, so I'm not usually in the best of moods when I get home, but two hours spent supine† reading these greats usually has me ready to face the world without shaking it until the stuffing and the squeaky toy come out.
†cf. The Waste Land line 295.
Apart from ANTM, these two sites have been keeping me busy. What they have in common (other than awesomeness) is that I totally love them. I haven't been feeling great, so I'm not usually in the best of moods when I get home, but two hours spent supine† reading these greats usually has me ready to face the world without shaking it until the stuffing and the squeaky toy come out.
†cf. The Waste Land line 295.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
On Temperance
I read the packaging my food comes in. Not just the nutritional label and ingredients (which are studied intentionally) but also the type that takes up space on the back of the box. Usually I regret this, but never so much as with Cheetos bags. In fact, I usually try to keep my eyes unfocused (a trick I learned for Magic Eye pictures) while handling the object to make reading harder, but sooner or later the thing is read and the weight of the world is on my shoulders. My first impression is always that the authors would be shocked and amazed if they knew their words had been read. Advertising type usually is not fit for human consumption, but this reminds me of the kind of thing 8th grade boys write on a chalkboard at the end of a long field trip in which a lot of sugar was consumed, and they feel the need to work off the high spirits before the teacher comes to erase it all. Generally the theme is best described as an aggressively-conceived campaign for crack cocaine in which the only downside is that if you eat cheese snacks until you have split yourself open from mouth to elsewhere (like the fellow in The Inferno) you must at least pause while you figure out if namebrand snack foods exist in the afterlife.
But all of this needs to be changed to the past tense. A few weeks ago a new bag of Cheetos forced itself upon me, and I found they'd fired the 8th grade boys and hired a Victorian spinster, one Miss Letitia Sprue, author of "Why Too Little Is Better Than a Feast: A Moral Fable." In earnest terms it urged me to eat 21 and no more (repeating this several times, by the end of which I had begun to figure out that they wanted me to eat 21 pieces and then stop). At the bottom was a little coupon which, if clipped out, filled in, and mailed, would automatically enroll you in The Temperance League, which would send you pamphlets on "The Demon Rum (Which Can't Be Imbibed Moderately, Unlike Name-Brand Cheese Snacks which Are the Soul of Moderation.)"
But all of this needs to be changed to the past tense. A few weeks ago a new bag of Cheetos forced itself upon me, and I found they'd fired the 8th grade boys and hired a Victorian spinster, one Miss Letitia Sprue, author of "Why Too Little Is Better Than a Feast: A Moral Fable." In earnest terms it urged me to eat 21 and no more (repeating this several times, by the end of which I had begun to figure out that they wanted me to eat 21 pieces and then stop). At the bottom was a little coupon which, if clipped out, filled in, and mailed, would automatically enroll you in The Temperance League, which would send you pamphlets on "The Demon Rum (Which Can't Be Imbibed Moderately, Unlike Name-Brand Cheese Snacks which Are the Soul of Moderation.)"
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Meaning Good and Bad
I just read "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok, which I never read partially because I thought it was fruit of the propaganda arm of the Black Panthers. (Sometimes associations are no less strong because utterly unfounded: I should perhaps clarify that the book is about the friendship of two Orthodox Jewish boys in Brooklyn during and immediately after WWII.) One of my roommates just loaned it to me and I was enthralled. Partially it seems like a fictional meditation on Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." The main character's father frequently talks about finding meaning in suffering, especially after news of the holocaust breaks on American shores. And ideas about psychology run throughout the book, primarily in heavy skepticism of Freud.
I love Viktor Frankl. But one thing I've been thinking about is that it's true that man must find meaning in his suffering in order to be at peace, but so many times that meaning is very harmful and the peace is only the apathy of despair. The main character's father, an utterly admirable man, is so distraught over the destruction of European Jews that he insists they must make meaning for themselves by making the Messiah come (or at least forcing the good associated with the coming of the Messiah to happen) through Zionism. The other meaning he made for himself was a distinct elevation in the role of teachers and rabbis in the American Jewry, since it was the only one left in the world: this was a good and constructive meaning. But the first was harmful in so many ways, partially in the theological evil of shoving God aside, and partially in the assumption that the only way for the horrific loss of life to be redeemed was through the establishment of Israel, whatever the costs. And I didn't realize that the costs had included terrorism by Jews against the British.
When the state was formed and the Arabs responded with more terror, the people in the book were flabergasted, which fits the hazy impression I'd had of people's actual reaction. But Macchiavelli and the Old Testament have already explained what has to be done to successfully displace another nation: even their newborn babes have to be thrown from the city walls. Macchiavelli pointed out that if you're determined to do evil to someone, you must utterly destroy them, as otherwise they will have nothing to lose and will make it their sole aim in life to destroy you and this state of affairs will remain until one or the other party is quite gone. But who can read that passage from the Old Testament without horror? Commentators from St. Augustine on have agonized over the correct interpretation of the verse: endorsing it as a practical course of action for the present would be unconscionable. Yet that is the choice that must be made when one group desires to usurp (not to rule over, which is much more easily done) another. This desire on the part of the American settlers was the driving force of the long, drawn-out tragedy summed up by the game "Cowboys and Indians."
And we (countries who participated in the vote in the United Nations) should have been able to see that this was the choice we were making, but that would have meant the loss of that "meaning" for the suffering of the holocaust. This is what I mean by a bad meaning: it pushed us into an evil action and fear of losing that meaning kept us from admitting to ourselves how bad the action was. Now it is made and reversing it could well be as bad as making it in the first place. You'd never want to be cruel to the heartbroken Jews who agitated for the state of Israel in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust: as Viktor Frankl says, the only normal response to an abnormal situation is an abnormal one. But it was a bad meaning to make for ourselves.
I love Viktor Frankl. But one thing I've been thinking about is that it's true that man must find meaning in his suffering in order to be at peace, but so many times that meaning is very harmful and the peace is only the apathy of despair. The main character's father, an utterly admirable man, is so distraught over the destruction of European Jews that he insists they must make meaning for themselves by making the Messiah come (or at least forcing the good associated with the coming of the Messiah to happen) through Zionism. The other meaning he made for himself was a distinct elevation in the role of teachers and rabbis in the American Jewry, since it was the only one left in the world: this was a good and constructive meaning. But the first was harmful in so many ways, partially in the theological evil of shoving God aside, and partially in the assumption that the only way for the horrific loss of life to be redeemed was through the establishment of Israel, whatever the costs. And I didn't realize that the costs had included terrorism by Jews against the British.
When the state was formed and the Arabs responded with more terror, the people in the book were flabergasted, which fits the hazy impression I'd had of people's actual reaction. But Macchiavelli and the Old Testament have already explained what has to be done to successfully displace another nation: even their newborn babes have to be thrown from the city walls. Macchiavelli pointed out that if you're determined to do evil to someone, you must utterly destroy them, as otherwise they will have nothing to lose and will make it their sole aim in life to destroy you and this state of affairs will remain until one or the other party is quite gone. But who can read that passage from the Old Testament without horror? Commentators from St. Augustine on have agonized over the correct interpretation of the verse: endorsing it as a practical course of action for the present would be unconscionable. Yet that is the choice that must be made when one group desires to usurp (not to rule over, which is much more easily done) another. This desire on the part of the American settlers was the driving force of the long, drawn-out tragedy summed up by the game "Cowboys and Indians."
And we (countries who participated in the vote in the United Nations) should have been able to see that this was the choice we were making, but that would have meant the loss of that "meaning" for the suffering of the holocaust. This is what I mean by a bad meaning: it pushed us into an evil action and fear of losing that meaning kept us from admitting to ourselves how bad the action was. Now it is made and reversing it could well be as bad as making it in the first place. You'd never want to be cruel to the heartbroken Jews who agitated for the state of Israel in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust: as Viktor Frankl says, the only normal response to an abnormal situation is an abnormal one. But it was a bad meaning to make for ourselves.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Dinosaur Pennames
I've been loving Dinosaur Comics lately. I was trying to remember what it reminded me of, when I realized it sounded just like my youngest brother, and for one crazy second I imagined him being the *secret* author. Now I think it's probably just by someone from the west coast who likes to say totally a lot.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
I'm so ashamed
But Freud tells me I'm well on the road to pushing knickknacks in from the edge of small occasional tables (and other similarly tragic behaviors) with all this repression, so here goes: I really like the reality TV shows like America's Next Top Model, Dancing with the Stars, Project Runway, and so on (this is in the order of my liking for them, too, I think). Now it's time for me to return to Mr. Conrad, with whom I am having an passionate dalliance since I don't have a TV. But to paraphrase a girl from work, just because I'm seeing him doesn't mean I wouldn't leave for a TV were one to appear in our apartment.
Friday, September 12, 2008
I Like Ike
There is a 100% chance of rain tomorrow, and the 14,500 stubborns in Galveston who've exempted themselves from the mandatory evacuation are being told that they face "certain death." I need to go to the laundromat tomorrow as our dryer is AWOL, so I guess this is just a little spur to get up early enough to be done and back home by 1 pm (when the fun is really supposed to start.) I'm kind of looking forward to it, as I won't really need power tomorrow, and as long as the plumbing works life should be good. The sky at sunset was gorgeous this evening, featuring the main colors from a spreadsheet chart I'd been working on earlier.
And in more important news, I got expensive shampoo and conditioner since my hair is long enough that it needs encouragement to avoid knots ("If you don't talk to your hair about tangling, who will?"). This will be totally fun to try (what will the smells and textures of these epithelial condiments be?), and I expect to be combing admirers out of my "long luscious hair"* starting tomorrow.
*A quote from a girl on the subway, NOT referring to another girl. At first I thought the young man's obvious lack of interest was because she was making him sound like even more of a fruit than he was, but I misjudged him. He suddenly awoke from his coma when the girl said she supposed his long luscious hair had very little product in it: as it turns out it had five and his lack of interest previously was that the connection to himself† was a little more tangential than he found appealing. In the end, the girl was a sympathetic character as she was at least trying to be congenial, while the young man seemed to have found someone he really liked (himself) and was too entranced to notice others.
†It had been a story of another young man with similar long luscious hair who had been made to cut it off.
And in more important news, I got expensive shampoo and conditioner since my hair is long enough that it needs encouragement to avoid knots ("If you don't talk to your hair about tangling, who will?"). This will be totally fun to try (what will the smells and textures of these epithelial condiments be?), and I expect to be combing admirers out of my "long luscious hair"* starting tomorrow.
*A quote from a girl on the subway, NOT referring to another girl. At first I thought the young man's obvious lack of interest was because she was making him sound like even more of a fruit than he was, but I misjudged him. He suddenly awoke from his coma when the girl said she supposed his long luscious hair had very little product in it: as it turns out it had five and his lack of interest previously was that the connection to himself† was a little more tangential than he found appealing. In the end, the girl was a sympathetic character as she was at least trying to be congenial, while the young man seemed to have found someone he really liked (himself) and was too entranced to notice others.
†It had been a story of another young man with similar long luscious hair who had been made to cut it off.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Early Morning Songbird
I've been listening to a lot of Johnny Cash lately, which comes up in unexpected ways. One is that I'll find myself a couple of bars into "If I were a carpenter..." while in the shower in the early morning. Then I realize what I'm doing: "did anyone hear?" as I look guiltily around the tiles and shower curtain (as if the absence of a visible audience will prove that no one did hear.) Of course, since it's early morning and I haven't yet wrested my iron self-control away from Mr. Sandman, these thoughts are also said out loud (remember, this is only about twenty minutes since I've realized that yes, I am the kind of thing that can do something about that alarm clock). And for about the same reason, the entire scenario repeats at least once more before the shower is over and I can escape downstairs (and away from my soon-to-be-sainted roommate who is usually attempting some of tired nature's sweet restorer).
Of course, once downstairs the urge to sing does not recur. There are probably deep-seated psychological reasons for this (and physiological reasons, since I'm not the kind of thing that can sing and eat breakfast simultaneously). Also interesting from a psychoanalyst's point of view is why some songs are so very popular for ablutionary singing ("Oh Bury Me Not" is a perennial favorite) without overlapping the playlist ("Hurt" and "The Mercy Seat.") "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" shows up reliably on both, but I think that's because I really like the bit where he locates his dog before he rejoins his arm.
I'm not going to ask my roommate if she's heard me. Once when I was thirteen, a lady who was staying with us told me I had a lovely voice and that she'd particularly enjoyed the rousing version of "Dixie" and it was years before I could shower when company was at the house.
Of course, once downstairs the urge to sing does not recur. There are probably deep-seated psychological reasons for this (and physiological reasons, since I'm not the kind of thing that can sing and eat breakfast simultaneously). Also interesting from a psychoanalyst's point of view is why some songs are so very popular for ablutionary singing ("Oh Bury Me Not" is a perennial favorite) without overlapping the playlist ("Hurt" and "The Mercy Seat.") "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" shows up reliably on both, but I think that's because I really like the bit where he locates his dog before he rejoins his arm.
I'm not going to ask my roommate if she's heard me. Once when I was thirteen, a lady who was staying with us told me I had a lovely voice and that she'd particularly enjoyed the rousing version of "Dixie" and it was years before I could shower when company was at the house.
Monday, September 01, 2008
I've been watching a bunch of "Arrested Development" on Hulu (free but apparently legal with lots of commercials), and enjoying it overall. However, the most recent episodes (last half of series two) were yet another proof of how much the TV/movie industry needs a "Christian consultant" to help them produce Christian characters who are more caricatures (realistic portrayals are not the series' forte*) and less Frankenstein's monster. These last episodes featured evangelical-episcopal-Catholic Baptists.
*Someone also needs to tell them that gun rights enthusiasts are usually NUTS for gun safety.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Mother Teresa
Today is the day to start the novena to end on Mother Teresa's future feast day (Sept. 5) if you are so inclined.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene is revisiting his old topic of the sins of those who love being much better than the sins of those who don't love, but it is fascinating and really well done when the two people contrasted are lovers, rather than dreary as in The Power and the Glory. And now it is moving into an even better topic: the discovery that one is loved when one could hardly deserve it less.
The book visits a topic I've been mulling over. Are the easiest people to love those who find it easy to be loved? I read somewhere that when God begs us to be as little children what He is referring to is how they just assume that people will love them, so they accept His love. But for adults there is amour propre and self-consciousness and woundedness and all the rest.
The book visits a topic I've been mulling over. Are the easiest people to love those who find it easy to be loved? I read somewhere that when God begs us to be as little children what He is referring to is how they just assume that people will love them, so they accept His love. But for adults there is amour propre and self-consciousness and woundedness and all the rest.
Time and Old Ladies
My job has segued into having some customer interaction, and I feel like I wasted the last two days trying vainly to help fightin'-mad old ladies who were too confused to fight their way out of a paper bag. I didn't need to spend so much time with them, but I felt so badly for them, having had the same feeling of baffled impotence and knowing that old-lady-ship is in my future, too. One old lady owned four standard dachshunds, so she was also worth the extra effort. Just so long as I don't get in trouble for wasting time.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Eye on the News
Theodore Dalrymple muses on Solzhenitsyn.
Incredibly important legislation to pray for (God bless George W).
Incredibly important legislation to pray for (God bless George W).
Cat Ladies
There are lots of cat ladies out there. By which I mean women who own more than eight or so cats at once. There are also cat men, or at least men who take their wife's many cats to the vet, but these are but a tithe of the population.
This phenomena really confuses me, since I have owned cats in the plural and the only one who was happy with the situation was the dominant one: the other lived what she viewed as a stunted life, unable to really develop her potential until the first had moved on. This is nothing compared to three or more cats in the same house while the situation is actually made worse if the animals are allowed outdoors as well, since that always increases cat's negative behaviors.
When I'm entering a couple of new records for a person who was already pretty well into the double digits, I find myself musing at what a homecoming there will be. The owner, believing their household to be more than ever one big happy family, carries the new animals bodily into an atmosphere already thick with feline hostility. Cats range through the rooms, strung out with stress and frustration since no matter how many times they mark their territory the interlopers Just Won't Leave. And although the human is excited to have saved another furry life from the grim reaper, the other inhabitants are saving their party until the census count debits their house and credits the happy hunting grounds.
This phenomena really confuses me, since I have owned cats in the plural and the only one who was happy with the situation was the dominant one: the other lived what she viewed as a stunted life, unable to really develop her potential until the first had moved on. This is nothing compared to three or more cats in the same house while the situation is actually made worse if the animals are allowed outdoors as well, since that always increases cat's negative behaviors.
When I'm entering a couple of new records for a person who was already pretty well into the double digits, I find myself musing at what a homecoming there will be. The owner, believing their household to be more than ever one big happy family, carries the new animals bodily into an atmosphere already thick with feline hostility. Cats range through the rooms, strung out with stress and frustration since no matter how many times they mark their territory the interlopers Just Won't Leave. And although the human is excited to have saved another furry life from the grim reaper, the other inhabitants are saving their party until the census count debits their house and credits the happy hunting grounds.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Lots of smoke, no fire
A fellow employee who started around the same time I did appears to have shuffled off this mortal coil, by which I mean that my boss mentioned he was not longer with us and I would get to be trained in some of his tasks as well. (This is actually really fun. Her approach to training an assistant is for that assistant to meddle in pretty much everything, which I totally approve of.) And this event, though sorrowful, was by no means unexpected, since his approach to the job was more of a sociable solitaire-playing sort that made sure his facebook profile never suffered from his employment. He was very successful at this, and his friendliness does make the loss sincerely lamentable.
The funny thing is that I spent the rest of the day feeling furtive and more or less like a rabbit that expects a dachshund to come bursting out of a nearby bush. I turn my cellphone off while I'm clocked in, and have been getting up early to make business calls before work and then follow-up on my lunch break. I feel guilty about making coffee while being clocked in (unless this computer is frozen). I am almost always entering data within two minutes of clocking in, and only allow myself to look up dog breeds/colors that need to be researched for data entry purposes, rather than ones that look interesting (again, unless the database is frozen). Email is, of course, verboten. And if I am criticized on the conversation front, I would expect such criticism to take the "so, how's life as a mute" angle. And yet I spent the rest of the day guiltily trying to remember if I'd given the ax any excuses to come looking for me now it had whetted its appetite.
The moral of today's story, children, is that for some of us the guilty conscience is more or less a perpetual motion machine, whirring away in the void.
The funny thing is that I spent the rest of the day feeling furtive and more or less like a rabbit that expects a dachshund to come bursting out of a nearby bush. I turn my cellphone off while I'm clocked in, and have been getting up early to make business calls before work and then follow-up on my lunch break. I feel guilty about making coffee while being clocked in (unless this computer is frozen). I am almost always entering data within two minutes of clocking in, and only allow myself to look up dog breeds/colors that need to be researched for data entry purposes, rather than ones that look interesting (again, unless the database is frozen). Email is, of course, verboten. And if I am criticized on the conversation front, I would expect such criticism to take the "so, how's life as a mute" angle. And yet I spent the rest of the day guiltily trying to remember if I'd given the ax any excuses to come looking for me now it had whetted its appetite.
The moral of today's story, children, is that for some of us the guilty conscience is more or less a perpetual motion machine, whirring away in the void.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Thoughts on pet names
I see a lot of pet names in my line of work (about 500-700/day), and am forming categories for them. The following is an unscientific as possible.
There are a lot of names based on the animal's color (Blackie, Patches, Snowball*), which somehow strikes me as a cliché which that classic cat name, Kitty, eludes. I haven't come across any canines named Dog but have seen a couple named Kitty.
Macho female dogs such as boxers and pit bulls are often given ironically girlie names such as Baby Girl, and a dog named Killer is either a pit bull or a chihuahua. For a while I thought that Bella was reserved for non-ironic use (especially appropriate for golden retrievers), but then ran into a spate of German Shepherds and boxers sporting the name. However, Isabella is reserved for small, pretty dogs or for cats.
In the unexpectedly popular name category, hoards of female dogs come when they hear "Hannah", and Scooter is seen as eminently suitable for both dogs and cats of either sex.
A huge number of Americans think highly of themselves as pet owners and name their dogs Lucky. Classic people names such as Molly, Maggie, and Sammy are probably in the top ten. There are occasional literary references, such as gray cats named Gandalf, but not as many as I would expect, and so far none from books which were not also made into movies (Mr. Darcy can hardly be escaped). And one elderly lady from California sent in information to license George Clooney and Brad Pitt (the Siamese and short haired cats) but forgot to send any money. George W made an appearance, and a few chihuahuas have been named Paris.
If I ever have to sue for emotional abuse, it will be over the enormous number of pets with sickeningly cutesy names, but I will leave that shame for their owners and not retell it here. There is also a less alluring subset of the population which gives their pets names like Stinker and Fart, and if I could tell them a thing or two it would all center on how words have power over us and influence our emotions and affections, so they probably love the animal less than if they had given him another name.
And so far my favorite name for a cat was Potlicker and for a Jack Russell Terrier, Chase Little Foot.
*Although these names are also gives to animals of different coloring but not in a way suitable for irony (such as the brown dog named Blackie), which boggles the mind.
There are a lot of names based on the animal's color (Blackie, Patches, Snowball*), which somehow strikes me as a cliché which that classic cat name, Kitty, eludes. I haven't come across any canines named Dog but have seen a couple named Kitty.
Macho female dogs such as boxers and pit bulls are often given ironically girlie names such as Baby Girl, and a dog named Killer is either a pit bull or a chihuahua. For a while I thought that Bella was reserved for non-ironic use (especially appropriate for golden retrievers), but then ran into a spate of German Shepherds and boxers sporting the name. However, Isabella is reserved for small, pretty dogs or for cats.
In the unexpectedly popular name category, hoards of female dogs come when they hear "Hannah", and Scooter is seen as eminently suitable for both dogs and cats of either sex.
A huge number of Americans think highly of themselves as pet owners and name their dogs Lucky. Classic people names such as Molly, Maggie, and Sammy are probably in the top ten. There are occasional literary references, such as gray cats named Gandalf, but not as many as I would expect, and so far none from books which were not also made into movies (Mr. Darcy can hardly be escaped). And one elderly lady from California sent in information to license George Clooney and Brad Pitt (the Siamese and short haired cats) but forgot to send any money. George W made an appearance, and a few chihuahuas have been named Paris.
If I ever have to sue for emotional abuse, it will be over the enormous number of pets with sickeningly cutesy names, but I will leave that shame for their owners and not retell it here. There is also a less alluring subset of the population which gives their pets names like Stinker and Fart, and if I could tell them a thing or two it would all center on how words have power over us and influence our emotions and affections, so they probably love the animal less than if they had given him another name.
And so far my favorite name for a cat was Potlicker and for a Jack Russell Terrier, Chase Little Foot.
*Although these names are also gives to animals of different coloring but not in a way suitable for irony (such as the brown dog named Blackie), which boggles the mind.
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