It FEELS Personal
A good friend who is also a psychologist often talked about how things FEEL personal even when they are not.
• When your best friend betrays your deep dark secret to another friend because she lacks self confidence and it made her feel important for a couple seconds
• When your young wife sleeps with your brother because after two babies she wants to feel exciting and attractive and young again
• When your brother uses drugs again, after you paid for rehab and he swore up and down he would never never use again
• When your father divorces your mother and leaves her to raise the kids alone
• When your oldest friend in the world stops returning your calls and communicating with you and you later learn that she if fighting a losing battle with cancer
• When your aging husband buys a small red convertible and turns you in for a younger model, too, because he wants to think he’s hot
• When your internet phone service is declared illegal and gets shut down to spare “government wastage”
In every case above, the situation has more to do with personal issues than with you, but man, it sure FEELS personal. The fact that is doesn’t have to do with you is almost insulting, because the impact can be so painful.
And so it is with internet service. This morning, I was missing internet service for a while. It happens sometimes, but rarely longer than three-four minutes. This time it went on and on. Of course my first reaction is “oh no! Am I being penalized for having written about internet phone service being blocked???” But no, this time it wasn’t all about me. It was just an outage, and – for now – just temporary. Alhamdallah!
But this policy is going to impact on all of us painfully. Please, please raise your voices. You know better than I do where it will be the most effective. It’s important that we be able to communicate with our family and friends in a reasonably priced way. The internet phones don’t hurt anybody. Let’s keep them legal.
Read and Comment from WordPress
This is to my non-blogging readers, those who have never commented, those who think you have to have a blog to comment. . . you don’t! There are ways to sign on with most of the major blog hosts and you never have to use your real name, never have to blog, but you are registered, have an “avatar” and a “home”.
WordPress just initiated a global desktop, just for you.
What’s new? Before, people who didn’t have a blog but just an account didn’t have any sort of dashboard so they couldn’t edit their password, get their API key, upload an avatar, track their comments, or any of the other fun stuff you can do under your dashboard.
Read more about it here and click to start your own global desktop.
You will want to have two or three names, just in case your first choice is already taken, and you will want to have a password in mind. Sign up, and start commenting from your own home base at WordPress.
Dying Laughing: Al Qaeda in Seattle
My niece, Little Diamond has found a SATIRICAL article (I can’t figure out where, it is not The Onion ) on Al-Qaeda buying property in Seattle. If you know Seattle, and the pride Seattleites take in civility, friendliness, and neighborliness, then you, too, will die laughing. Click on A Diamond’s Eye View of the World for your grin to start the week.
And a part of me thinks – isn’t this what we are supposed to be doing? Be kind to our neighbors? Isn’t it the only way to interrupt the spiraling cycle of hatred and violence? Sometimes, an unexpected kind word changes everything – I know it has in my own world.
Who Knew? Skimmed Milk Affects Fertility
Today’s Kuwait Times 1 March 2007 has a front page on women who drink skimmed milk having reduced fertility, inspiring a whole new category for my blog entries: Who Knew?
Skim milk as been a mainstay for women trying to maintain desired weight, along with non-fat yoghurt, low fat cheeses, and tofu – all which help women maintain bone density by providing calcium in our diets. The study, done in the United States between 1991 and 1999 concluded that non-fat dairy products may well be contra-indicated for women desiring to become pregnant.
When I was pregnant, I got nervous. I’m normally NOT nervous, but the new hormones bombarding my system made me really nervous and a little anxious, and it had a spiral effect. When I talked to the doctor – in Germany, where I was living – she just laughed and patted me and said “drink a little wine, my dear, and you will feel better! Have a glass at lunch and a glass at dinner.”
I followed her instructions. I felt better. I had my glasses of wine religiously. Thank God, my son turned out just fine, because now people react with horror to the very idea of a woman having anything to drink during pregnancy. But then – Who Knew???
The truth about the world as we know it changes daily. Our assumptions are challenged, and we have to be flexible, and move with the times and with the newest information. But I’m happy not to have to give up skimmed milk.
I have an apology to the Kuwait Times, too. I thought they had misused “affect” and should have used “effect”. I was wrong. They were right. I looked it up, and here is the information:
* Note on affect and effect from answers.com: USAGE NOTE Affect and effect have no senses in common. As a verb affect is most commonly used in the sense of “to influence” (how smoking affects health). Effect means “to bring about or execute”: layoffs designed to effect savings. Thus the sentence These measures may affect savings could imply that the measures may reduce savings that have already been realized, whereas These measures may effect savings implies that the measures will cause new savings to come about.
Shaking My Head
Today, two bloggers found my blog by typing “is mayonnaise made of turkey sperm?” It’s bad enough if it were only one, but two??
Lord have mercy.
(Shaking my head in despair)
Saturday Low Statistics
Saturday mornings are also a little slow for me, so this morning, as I looked at my statistics, I thought I saw a pattern. I counted back every seven days, and, sure enough, every week my statistics take a small dive on Saturday.
I am guessing that the quality of what I publish doesn’t vary that much, but that the majority of my readers come from places where they have a Saturday – Sunday weekend. Saturdays are always busy days for getting things done – getting the new garden in, getting shopping done, bringing in the groceries for the week, if you are a working Mom, going hiking or boating or some activity you can’t do during the work and school week . . .
Last night we visited friends who had just accomplished a major project in their garden here – transferring palm trees. It took a crane and a whole team of people to dig the huge holes, dig the trees out of one spot and transfer them to another. What an undertaking!
It was one of those lovely evenings in Kuwait – our friends were relaxed and enjoying the glow of having accomplished a major task, the evening was soft and sweet, and the fire glowed with eucalyptus wood. I came home smelling so good, and knowing it was one of those evenings I will long remember. Kuwait in February – the sweetest time of year.
Tomorrow is Kuwait’s National Day, and the day after that, Kuwait Liberation Day (from Saddam’s troops), so the Kuwaitis are enjoying a four day weekend at this sweet time of the year. Some have taken holidays in connection with the five day weekend (somehow Saturday became a weekend day, too, because it is sandwiched between the Thursday-Friday weekend and the Sunday-Monday holiday) and made it a full nine or ten day holiday.
Happy Holidays to all our Kuwaiti friends.
Book Meme – Too Much Temptation
Friday mornings in Kuwait can be VERRRRRY quiet. Today, I explored Technorati, and found people who have linked to me. One was PearLady and oh, what fun, she published a Book Meme.
I don’t do tags. I don’t do memes. Oh well, she found my weak spot. Here goes. Please read all the way to the bottom.
Hardback or paperback? I prefer paperback, just because I read all the time and paperback is more portable. And because I like to pass it along, and paperback is cheaper. But I buy hard cover when it is brand new from an author I love and I can’t wait.
Amazon or brick and mortar? Hands down Amazon, although if I am in the states, I can’t resist Barnes and Noble, and I always spend money there, and Half Price Books. Both ruin my weight allowance when I come to fly back to Kuwait.
Barnes & Noble or Borders? Either. Both. And all the little independent book sellers, too.
Bookmark or dog-ear? Bookmark is preferable, but occasionally I dogear sections I want to blog about. (Gasp) – occasionally I even underline.
Alphabetize by author, alphabetize by title or random? First by subject, then by author, but not by title.
Keep, throw away, or sell? Part with a friend??? Ah well, sometimes it is necessary. I even keep shelves of books for people to borrow, or to take. I buy multiples of the best ones, and trust that they will find new friends when they depart from my shelves.
Keep dust jacket or toss it? I take it off to read the book, then put it back on and give the book away. Hardcover books are too heavy to ship!
Read with dust jacket or remove it? Oops, see above.
Short story or novel? I love them both. Good science fiction often comes in short stories, stories you can remember years later. And novels – those are the friends that you keep around.
Collection (by same author) or anthology (by different authors)? Collection by the same author, because I am particular and don’t like all authors.
Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket? I prefer Harry Potter. I don’t know why, but I find Lemony Snicket a little creepy.
Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks? Prefer to stop at chapter breaks, but sometimes I fall asleep and just have to give it up.
‘It was a dark and stormy night’ or ‘Once upon a time’? For me, once upon a time. Love history.
Buy or Borrow? Mostly buy, but sometimes the book I want to read isn’t available for sale, and have to borrow.
New or used? Both. Some books you can’t find new.
Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation or browse? Often look for specific authors, always looking for recommendations and often ask fellow travellers who look absorbed in what they are reading.
Tidy ending or cliffhanger? Tidy endings are nice, and I also find that the ones that end without resolution are the ones I think about the longest.
Morning reading, afternoon reading or nighttime reading? Any time. Usually, I use it as a carrot to make me get work done and projects finished, so normal is later in the day.
Standalone or series? Both. I like the Dickensian continuity of series.
Favourite series? Dorothy Dunnet’s Niccolo series. Fascinating characters and I learn so much. Great, vivid images, takes you back to the mid 1400’s.
tag…you’re all it…show me the meme! (If you don’t have a blog, you are welcome to comment below, or cut and paste.)
Egypt blogger jailed for ‘insult’
From BBC News:
An Egyptian court has sentenced an internet blogger to four years’ prison for insulting Islam and the president.
Abdel Kareem Soliman’s trial was the first time that a blogger had been prosecuted in Egypt.
He had used his weblog to criticise the country’s top Islamic institution, the al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator.
A human rights group called the verdict “very tough” and a “strong message” to Egypt’s thousands of bloggers.
Mr Soliman, 22, was tried in his native city of Alexandria. He blogs under the name Kareem Amer.
A former student at al-Azhar, he called the institution “the university of terrorism” and accused it of suppressing free thought.
The university expelled him in 2006 and pressed prosecutors to put him on trial.
During the five-minute court session the judge said Soliman was guilty and would serve three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition, and one year for insulting Mr Mubarak.
Egypt arrested a number of bloggers who had been critical of the government during 2006, but they were all freed.
“This is a strong message to all bloggers who are put under strong surveillance that the punishment will very strong,” Hafiz Abou Saada of the Egyptian Human Rights Organisation told Associated Press.
Surveys and Statistics
We have a unique expression “to eat crow.” It means when you make a flat statement that you believe to be true but you later find out it isn’t, you are obligated to say those words were untrue, and you have to say them to the people you first said them to. Or at least that is how it works in my family. You “eat” your words, they don’t taste good, you “eat crow.”
So today I am eating some crow. Remember when I talked about Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics and I told you about a survey I had filled out about building management and maintenance? I was so cynical; I thought the survey was really going to be a marketing took, a pat-myself-on-the-back kind of thing. I was wrong.
Recently, a management team came to interview my husband and me, and as they are building more complexes like ours, they wanted our input – what was working and what wasn’t. They asked honest, open ended questions. And they weren’t just looking for the good things, they genuinely wanted to know the weak spots and criticisms.
Seeking critical input, as I see it, is a great strength. I don’t do it a lot. Just putting myself out here in the blog is risky enough for me. I’m not about to ask you all how I’m doing; I figure you have plenty of opportunity to tell me in the comment sections. If I DIDN’T get readers, I might wonder, but I think that since I am out there, you can take me or leave me, and I also figure some of you probably won’t like what you’re reading and go elsewhere. My initial reaction to criticism in denial. As the pain lessens, I can begin to evaluate more objectively and perhaps (insh’allah) learn from the criticism.
In the commercial world, customers going elsewhere is not a good thing. The building operators don’t have the luxury I have; if their customers go elsewhere, their investment goes bust. There are a lot of apartments and residential units going up in Kuwait – I admire this management team for intelligently seeking out what they are doing right, what they can do better, and what is hands down annoying. They asked about maintenance, security, internet connections, suggestions. Very open ended, very uncontrolled.
As they listened, they were writing things down. We had comments in multiple areas, and they listened, wrote, asked further questions. I’m impressed. This building isn’t bad, and I bet the next one is even better.
Personal Debt and Blogging
Came across this article this morning in the New York Times. Overcoming debt is not unlike overcoming other addictions – and getting support online can help. Interesting article with international application.
Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs
When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered last week that she owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt.
Theo Rigby for The New York Times.
Leigh Ann Fraley, a financial educator, writes a blog about how she overcame $19,947 in credit card debt. “I teach people how to get out of debt for a living,” she said, “but I couldn’t do it myself until I started the blog.”
The King and Queen of Debt Tell All
Yet from the laundry room of her home in northern Michigan, Tricia does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a generation ago: she goes online and posts intimate details of her financial life, including her net worth (now negative $38,691), the balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of debt she has paid down since starting a blog about her debt last year ($15,312).
Her journal, bloggingawaydebt .com, is one of dozens that have sprung up in recent years taking advantage of Internet anonymity to reveal to strangers fiscal intimacies the authors might not tell their closest friends.
Like other debt bloggers, Tricia believes the exposure gives her the discipline to reduce her debt. “I think about this blog every time I’m in the store and something that I don’t need catches my eye,” she told readers last week. “Look what you all have done to me!”
A decade after the Internet became a public stage for revelations from the bedroom, it is now peering into the really private stuff: personal finance.
The blogs open a homey and sometimes shockingly candid window on the day-to-day finances of American households in a time of rising debt, failing mortgages and financial uncertainty. In 2006, the average American household carried about $7,200 in revolving debt (mostly on credit cards) and $21,000 in total debt.
A blog called “Poorer Than You” (kgazette.blogspot.com) describes the financial doings of a 20-year-old film-school dropout. (Typical post: “Yesterday we ate lunch at Subway for a total of $8.00, and went grocery shopping … with a list! And didn’t buy anything that wasn’t on it!”) On saveleighann.blogspot.com, Leigh Ann Fraley, 37, provides daily accounts of her escape from $19,947 in credit card debt.
“I teach people how to get out of debt for a living, but I couldn’t do it myself until I started the blog,” said Ms. Fraley, who conducts seminars in personal finance for a bank in Northern California. “I started to write everything down, like, ‘I saved 20 cents today by parking at a meter that still had time on it.’ I tell things I wouldn’t tell my family.” When she got out of debt in December, she said, “The blog was the first people I told.”
A Boston couple who call themselves the King and Queen of Debt started their his-and-hers blog, “We’re in Debt” (wereindebt.com), last March as a way to talk to each other about their debt. They owed $34,155.70 on their credit cards at the time, and an additional $120,000, mostly in student loans.
“My wife and I have good communication skills in every avenue of life except finances,” said the King of Debt, insisting on anonymity because, he said, “We don’t want our parents to find out and kill us.”
Starting the blog, he said, “was a way to communicate.”
Tricia started her blog after reading the online account of another woman, thedebtdefier.blogspot.com, who said she had paid off her credit card debt of $19,794.23 in a little more than a year.
Like other bloggers interviewed for this article, Tricia said she and her husband had arrived at their debt gradually, not by big financial crises but by regularly spending more money than they made, using credit that was offered freely by credit card companies.
“It was nothing over the top,” said a Georgia blogger who calls himself N.C.N., for No Credit Needed, describing how his credit card balance reached $11,510.22.
“Just pretty much what everyone I know does and continues to do,” N.C.N. said. “Every month I’d say, ‘We’re going to pay off this credit card completely.’ Then I’d say, ‘O.K., just this month we’ll let it slide.’ Then you wake up and you have $5,000 on your credit card.” He says on his blogs (ncnblog.com and ncnnetwork.com) that he has no debt now and no credit cards. Like other blogs, his sites run advertisements for debt-reduction services, and N.C.N. says he makes a small profit.
Tricia said her credit problems began in her freshman year at Michigan Technological University, when she opened a Visa account in return for the campus signup premium, a large candy bar. Since then, she said, she has rarely made more than minimum payments. As credit card companies offered her more cards and deeper credit lines, she said she kept her balance close to the maximum, eventually topping $37,000. Even as her credit card debt surpassed her annual income, she assumed that someday she would make more money and pay it off.
She said she never discussed her debt with family or friends. “You don’t want them to know,” she said. “Our parents hope for the best for us, and it’s hard to let them know we’re struggling. And with friends, you don’t want them to think less of you. And when you go out with friends you don’t want to say, ‘Oh, I can’t do that, I don’t have the money.’ ”
Keeping the blog, she said, has made her conscious of her spending. Though most of her readers are strangers, she worries about letting them down.
“I know that if I use my credit card, I’ll have to go on there and say I used it. I’ll have to fess up. I’ve been wanting one of those L.C.D. TVs for quite a while now, but every time I see them, I think about having to come on the blog and say I bought it. Because we don’t need it, we have a TV, but it’s still a temptation that’s there. And I’m sure if I wasn’t blogging we’d already have it.”
For the engaged couple who say they are behind a blog called “Make Love, Not Debt” (makelovenotdebt.com; net worth: negative $70,787.94), the feedback from readers has not always been gentle. “People have very strong feelings about debt,” said the blog’s female half, who calls herself Her. “People were appalled by my spending, like buying a $500 pair of shoes.”
“Just having the amount of debt we have is offensive to a lot of people,” said Him, the blog’s other half. “People will levy personal attacks for mistakes we acknowledge. We don’t think that’s quite necessary.”
When they discussed wanting a $25,000 wedding, one reader scolded them: “Grow up, a wedding isn’t about how much debt you put yourself or your parents into. If you are worried about that, in my opinion, you are not ready for marriage.”
Tricia said the comments she had gotten had been overwhelmingly supportive. But she acknowledges that the fear of censure can be useful as well.
“I feel embarrassed about it,” she said of her debt. “I try not to, though. I try to put a spin on it when I start to get too down. I think to myself if we didn’t get in this mess and get out of it, we would’ve just kept going the way we were. But now we have health insurance, we’re saving for retirement. We could’ve just been living on the edge, but not underneath.”
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