End of my weekend

Well, its the end of my five day weekend. I really, really needed this time off. I'm not really sure why, but last week really tired me out. Maybe I hadn't fully recovered yet from the crazy last month and all the stuff leading up to and including peacefest. And I do feel a little guilty saying that the kids really wore me out, meh, oh well. I think I knew that I hit my limit and that this would be a good recharge.

Yesterday was fantastic, a nearly perfect day. I woke up early to catch a metra train to the Chicago Botanic Garden's on the north side. The weather was perfect, there was even some good cloud cover to keep it nice and cool. The gardens are beautiful! I think it might be one of my new favorite places in the area, and I only saw about half of it even though I was there for over three hours. I really got a kick out of the fruit and vegetable garden that they had, it was on a four acre island and very well designed. Gave me a lot of inspiration should I garden next year.

After that I went with Mike to a Russian grocery where we got some fantastic food to dine on. We got a loaf of heavy dark rye bread, pickled herring, black sausage, and ate it with good cheese and mustard. To finish it, we had some gin that he has, which I didn't like at first but I'm starting to like it more and more. When I drink it, it smells like a juniper bush. Very fun. AND to top it off, the "Mighty" Ducks won game one of the Stanley Cup Finals, which I was very happy about.

I want to write another little story. I had a lot of fun writing the one about the kid on his bike, but haven't found inspiration yet for what to write about next. Maybe I should just start typing and whatever comes out of my fingertips will be it. I am reading a book right now that must have been made for me, in fact I'm convinced it was. It is a collection of short stories from a farmer in Vermont. How cool is that!

Right now as I type this, there is a grown man in my apartment looking at Josh's futon, he's going to buy it for his adopted son. He has two adopted children with a third one on the way. Very respectable and admirable.

I'm icing my thumb right now, burned it real bad making a batch of fried rice tonight.

Peace all.

Funny how this works, my mind has been full or stuff for the last "long time" or so, and I wanted to put some of it down on my blog. Its 12:59 a.m. and day two of a five day weekend. And for the life of me I can't think of anything to put down, I just emptied out my brain in a long email to a friend.

I guess more reasonable writing will come soon as my brain "reaccumulates" fresh material and needs the pressure valve to be released. For now though, I'll leave you all with the cool Bass line of a Miles Davis jazz beat I'm listening to right now.

Boom ba boom boom, da da booom yeaaaa.....

Bike at dusk

When I was eight years old, I was biking with some friends late on a free saturday. The sun had just dipped over the horizon and I was third in line on the darkened sidewalk, underneath a canopy of thick leaves. Bugs were already sticking to the sweat on my skin and I was pushing hard to keep up with my friends, my lungs burning with each breath of humid summer air. Suddenly my shoelace got stuck in the bike chain and I stumbled to the ground, scraped up my knees and bloodied up my palms. Not to be deterred, I reached back and furiously tried to untangle my shoelace from the bike, but was unsuccesful as my friends bike ahead without noticing my accident.

Then I started to panic. I was in an unfamiliar neighborhood, my buddies had left me alone on the sidewalk with blood trickling down my scraggly legs, and my attempts to get untangled only seemed to be making my problem worse. I thought, I would never get out of this! The howling dog that I hadn't heard before was probably on its way over to bite my arm off, leaving me deformed. Maybe it would eat my leg, and I'd be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. After struggling for another minute, I gave up and slumped on the sidwalk in front of an empty house with darkened windows.

For what felt like eternity, I sat there and picked at the gravel in my palms. The last remnants of daylight finally gave way to darkness and the scattered clouds shone pink from the city lights. Small bugs crawled on my skin, probably waiting for me to die so they could devour my carcass. How long would it take for them? Would bigger bugs come and eat me? Neighborhood pets, would they come and feast on my bones? Then out of the blue my two friends came back, from the same direction the left me from. One shouted out as he sped down the sidewalk, "Are you coming?!?" I responded, "Uh, yea... hold on!" and somehow magically was able to untie my laces from the bike in one easy attempt. They flew by me on their bikes not noticing my earlier fall. I jumped on my bike to follow them as fast as I could as we headed back home.

Looking back at this year so far makes me think of a Weird Al song called "Everything You Know is Wrong". While the song is a joke, that's how I feel at this point. How could I be so wrong on so many things? On so many "issues"? Have misjudged so many people? Wronged them because of how I have judged them? And how do I make it up to them? I need to find answers to these questions and am not entirely sure where to begin.

Today I spend some time downtown just enjoying some free time that I haven't had much of this week. I walked around enjoying the sun and the cold wind on my face and arms. The great lawn was open and I lay down on the grass with my sweatshirt over my face, the sun shining down on my body keeping me nice and warm. At one point I heard little kids voices asking, "Mommy, is he dead??" Hehe, I was very tempted to sit up and shout like a zombie, but was able to resist the temptation. I then walked over to Buckingham fountain which was going and it was a beautiful sight. Finally I walked over to Panera for a quick snack where I ran into a friend, being surprised I blurted out a few unintelligible things, and ran off. Silly huh?

Tomorrow I need to get my life in order. Clean my room, the kitchen, the living room. Spend some time to make a decent meal in the evening, hopefully socialize some. I have too much going through my head with work. I have too much stuff going through my head outside of work. I need to get my thoughts centralized and back into one place, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to do it these last couple of weeks.

A haiku to end this post:

Mind awash in thoughts
Distant lands beckon to me
No end is in sight

Daily Kossack

Well, I posted my first diary on Daily Kos this evening. I hope I did well and I want to keep a high standard with all my entries, hopefully well recieved. Check it out here at:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/15/214048/082

The Invitation

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living,
I want to know what you ache for,
and if you dare of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are spanning your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow,
if you have been opened by life's betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed from fear of futher pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own;
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful,
be realistic, or to remember the limiations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you're telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be to yourself,
if you can hear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day,
and if you can source your life from God's presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the moon,
'Yes!'
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have
I want to know if you can get up after the night or frief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn't interest me who you are, how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not
shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with who you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
- Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Indian Elder

Thanks Wes

Truth, Tolerance, Justice

"She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to - even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites - but, above all, an inherited belief, derived from both her parents and entrenched by Tessa, that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist." - John Le Carre, "The Constant Gardener"

Greedy bastards

So millions and millions of people are starving to death in Africa, and a whole lot more may die because food aid is running out. American laws say that food aid must be grown in the United States and shipped overseas, a very long and expensive process.

So when its recommended that the law change and food be purchased in developing countries during emergencies rather than grown in the U.S.....

***

But Congress quickly killed the plan in each of the past two years, cautioning that untying food aid from domestic interest groups would weaken the commitment that has made the United States by far the largest food aid donor in a world where 850 million go hungry.

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, warned last year at a food aid conference in Washington that decoupling food aid from American maritime and agribusiness interests was “beyond insane.”

“It is a mistake of gigantic proportions,” he said, “because support for such a program will vanish overnight, overnight.”

***

This man is such a scumbag. How can it be that American "business interests" are more important than potentially saving 50,000 lives? How can it be "beyond insane" to suggest that these people's lives are more important than the pockets of business?

The MORAL thing to do would be to support these people who are dying of starvation. The CRIMINAL thing (in my eyes) would to be to hold back aid that can easily be given to save their lives. Not only to hold it back, but to couple it to American business interests and profits. Truly disgusts me.

Of course these people will probably starve and die. Of course there is probably big agribusiness behind this, lobbying for this law's protection. And of course, more people will make money off these people's misery.

*sigh*

Source: New York Times

Hope

"A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn't kill you, nor did it make you less effective. In fact, it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems - you ceased hoping your problems somehow get solved, through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself - and you just began doing what's necessary to solve your problems yourself...

...What are you going to do about suffering [human and earth]? Are you going to hope this problem somehow goes away? Will you hope someone magically solves it? Will you hope someone - anyone - will stop this from killing us all?

Or will you do something about it?

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that it kills you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that once you're dead they - those in power - cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell - you can still live because you are still alive, in fact more alive than ever before - but those in power no longer have a hold on you. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who depended on and believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think, but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or won't) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or won't) to defend the others you love. The you who will fight (or won't) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depend. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase. Not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.

When you give up on hope - when you are dead in this way, and by being so are really alive - you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the co-optation of rationality and fear that Nazis perpetrated on Jews and others, that abusers perpetrate on their victims, that the dominant culture perpetrates on all of us. Or rather it is the case that the exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to perpetrate this co-optation on themselves. But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like those Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

When you give up on hope, you lose a lot of fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to just protect those you love, you become dangerous indeed to those in power.

In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing." - Derrick Jensen, Endgame

What is love?

I wonder, well I have always wondered, but what does it mean to love? I don't know why I thought about it, but I have been able to define it a little bit better in my mind.

I think it means sharing, both giving and taking and the willingness to do so freely and without anything attached. What does I mean to share? Love means giving my time and affection whenever it is needed and when its not. Love means sharing food and sharing shelter. It means to share one's body and feel totally safe and comfortable doing it. To me it's as simple as that.

Its not about sharing money or any sort of material wealth. Its not about proving oneself through acts of physical prowess or even courage/bravery. Love shouldn't be aboutthese things.

The speaker this morning for some reason made me think of this, as well as the book I'm reading right now.