Giving it Up for Lent
Lent started today, our own holy season of repentance and fasting. When I was a little girl, children would gather and figure out what they were going to give up, like chocolate, or coca cola, or candy. Mostly, in truth, it didn’t last too long. We meant well, we took it seriously, but we didn’t have the capacity for that kind of long term commitment – 40 days (and 40 nights, too; we don’t get time off from sunset to sunrise.)
As adults, we can be equally wacky, but in different ways. We can give up something that is too easy to give up. We can give up something and then obsess about it until it makes up a major focus of our day. If we are very fortunate, with prayer and God’s help, we can truly give up something meaningful and stick to it, offering it up as a spiritual sacrifice to God.
I had a blessing this week. It didn’t feel like such a blessing at the time, but a great deal of the time this week I was driving, and I had riders in the car.
I had no idea my language in the car had deteriorated so far. I’m a pretty good driver, but this is Kuwait. There are things that are out of my control. And I discovered that occasionally, bad words pop out of my mouth.
I can only guess that it happens when I am alone, too, but I am not conscious of it. All of a sudden, when some bad word pops out of your mouth and you are NOT alone, you become VERY conscious of it.
I’m giving it up for Lent.
At first, I was going to allow myself non obscene words like “Idiot!” “Imbecile!” and “What are you thinking??????” but after lengthy thought, I think it defeats the purpose. No. I am going cold turkey, no obscenities, no outraged exclamations.
Perhaps an elaborate “I forgive you” from time to time. . . . Pray for me!
“Was That Funny?”
When my son was little, he went through a time when he would make up jokes and tell us, and watch our reaction and ask “was that funny?” He wanted desperately to catch on to humor, but humor is a whole new way of thinking, and he was only four or five years old.
We started with riddles, I think, jokes in which words had more than one meaning, and then we moved on to knock knock jokes. But when he first started making jokes, he started with pure nonsense.
Around eight, we introduced him to Shel Silverstein, a brilliant poet, who writes books for kids that are also a joy for adults.
(photo courtesy of Amazon.com.)
Where The Sidewalk Ends
Light in the Attic
Falling Up
We all loved Shel Silverstein. Our son would read the poems aloud to us as we zipped around the back streets of Europe. We never got tired of him. His poems are funny to both children and adults “One Sister for Sale” “The King Who Loved Peanut Butter” . . . and sometimes poignant, or even sad.
Slowly, slowly, our son built up a huge repetoire of humor. Today, he is one of the funniest men I know, albeit most of his wit is very dry, and sometimes . . . I don’t always get it.
And that doesn’t begin to tackle the problem of “what is funny” crossing national and cultural boundaries! I think you have really arrived in a language when you can tell a joke in another language, and the native speakers find it funny.
I Never Knew There Was a Word for it
From this weeks A-Word-a-Day (see Blogroll)
This week’s theme: porcine words to mark the Chinese new year.
epigamic (ep-i-GAM-ik) adjective
Of or relating to a trait or behavior that attracts a mate.
Examples: In an animal, bright feathers or big antlers.
In a human, a sports car or a big bust.
[From Greek epigamos (marriageable), from epi- (upon) + gamos (marriage).]
-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)
“The change from the young, intellectual, epigamic Jays, to the more
diplomatically sophisticated Hendersons also reflected a sharp change
in Washington lifestyle.”
Peter D. Carr; It Occurred to Me; Trafford Publishing; 2006.
Global Terrorist Incidence Map
My husband told me about a website, Global Incident Map.com where terrorist events are entered on the map and refreshed every 300 seconds (sometimes a little faster and sometimes a little slower.)
You first see a map of the world with flashing incidence icons – explosions, planes, some I am still figuring out. You can click on any one incident to get more information. You can also zoom in and out a la Google Earth – same kinds of controls, to get a closer look at any one part of the globe.
As you scroll down the page, you find a listing of the 25 newest events, listed by country. Scrolling down a little further, you find a search feature, and just below that, events divided into categories (airport/aviation, arson/fire, biological incidents, threats, bomb threats, chemical events, etc.)
The one drawback I have is that every now and then as the maps and incidents refresh, the program hangs up for a matter of seconds to a minute. It clears up faster if you just sit there and do nothing, but I am not good at sitting and doing nothing.
The map is worth a slot on your favorite places list, just for it’s astonishing relevance. Today, for example, in Kuwait, it says:
Kuwait increases security alert
“Officials said authorities did not rule out the prospect that Al Qaida insurgents from Iraq would seek to infiltrate Kuwait and conduct attacks during Hala.”
During HALA????? Strike the desperate bargain and entertainment seekers in Kuwait? We’re that dangerous???
On Wcities.com, HALA is described thus:
“Tourists flock to Kuwait during the period of Hala February. This month-long shopping festival celebrates the beauty of the spring season in the majestic deserts. Whether you come to enjoy the lush springtime greenery and animal life or to purchase items like spices, jewels and ornaments at great discounts, Hala February has it all. The city comes alive with its annual parade, cultural celebrations, entertainment and various organized events. Experience the true, warm Arabian welcome and make your stay a fun-filled experience.”
I don’t think life gets any sweeter than February in Kuwait, but I have a real hard time buying into tourists flocking here for the shopping experience. And a harder time imagining Al Qaeda crazies targeting bargain-crazed shoppers.
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.
Getting Into Heaven
Getting Into Heaven
After a long illness, a woman died and arrived at the Gates of Heaven.
While she was waiting for Saint Peter to greet her, she peeked through the gates. She saw a beautiful banquet table. Sitting all around were her parents and all the other people she had loved and who had died before her.
They saw her and began calling greetings to her. “Hello!” “How are you? We’ve been waiting for you!” “Good to see you!”
When Saint Peter came by, the woman said to him, “This is such a wonderful place! How do I get in?”
“You have to spell a word,” Saint Peter told her.
“Which word?” the woman asked. “Love.”
The woman correctly spelled love, and Saint Peter welcomed her into heaven.
About six months later, Saint Peter came to the woman and asked her to watch the Gates of Heaven for him that day.
While the woman was guarding the Gates of Heaven, her husband arrived.
“I’m surprised to see you,” the woman said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I’ve been doing pretty well since you died,” her husband told her. “I married the beautiful young nurse who took care of you while you were ill. And then I won the lottery. I sold the little house you and I lived in and bought a big mansion. And my wife and I traveled all around the world. We were on vacation and I went water skiing today. I fell, the ski hit my head, and here I am. How do I get in?”
“You have to spell a word,” the woman told him.
“Which word?” her husband asked.
“Czechoslovakia.”
Stephen King and Hearts in Atlantis
You can be talking with serious people and watch their eyes change when they find you read Stephen King. I refuse to back down. Yep, I read Stephen King. I think he is a brilliant author, some books better than others, but when I am reading, sometimes I can feel my blood move faster through my veins as I wait for a life-threatening situation to resolve itself.
I can trust Stephen King. He taps into who we really are. I can also trust that most of the good guys will still be standing at the end, and most of the bad guys will meet a truly horrible and well-deserved death. I can trust that when bad things happen to good people, other good people will gather round, band together and the gestalt of all that willingness to help one another will prevail against the darkness.
The scariest book I ever read by Stephen King didn’t have any monsters, per se. It didn’t have the Walking Man, or any Wolves of Calla or any great evil, other than the evil that lurks in the human heart. The scariest book I have ever read by Stephen King was Hearts in Atlantis.
Hearts in Atlantis wasn’t even a novel, it was several shorter stories combined in one book. But the title story, Hearts in Atlantis, was about addiction. Not just any old addiction, either, but an addiction I had experienced.
It was my sophomore year in university. I had sailed through the trauma of freshman year with grace, great grades, I felt very confident. That summer, back home, I had taken bridge lessons, and holy smokes – I loved the game. It all made sense to me, and I loved figuring the probabilities and the possibilities, who had what card, how I could finesse that card, how I could WIN. I loved winning.
During the summer after my freshman year, I played a lot of bridge. So it was no wonder, when I got back to school, that I discovered a whole world of bridge players. Early in the morning, before my first class, I would head for the student union and pick up a coffee – and often a game.
The problem was, if I had a particularly good hand, the little devil on my shoulder would whisper “if you skip your class, you can win this hand!” and the bigger problem was – I would listen. I could afford to skip a class here and there, I did the homework. But through the year, I spent more and more time playing bridge and less and less time in the library. At the end of my sophomore year, my grade point average had fallen one full point.
That got my attention. I really wanted academic success. I spent my junior and senior years desperately working to get my grade point average back up to an acceptable level. Once the GPA falls, however, it only inches back up incrementally. It took almost straight A’s to undo the damage I had done to myself the year of bridge playing.
After graduation, I fell back into bridge playing on the duplicate level. But after a while, I noticed that while I travelled from place to place, it was the same smoke-filled room in every new city where we ended up, surrounded by a vampire-like culture that slept a lot of the day and only came alive at night. I also noticed that most of the conversations were about “the one that got away” – how such and such a hand might have been played best. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. So one day, I just walked away, and never looked back.
Like all addictions, from time to time I hear bridge calling. From time to time I will enter a friendly game – party bridge, but it is no longer irresistable, no longer so seductive, so attractive. Thank God. Reading Stephen King brings back the terror of addiction.
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.”
Q8 Cafe in Texas
Little Diamond, leaving El Paso, TX, posts a photo of the Q8 Cafe in El Paso.
Anne Rice and Christ the Lord out of Egypt: A Novel
Remember Interview with a Vampire? Remember the feeling, as you read it, that you were probably treading very close to the essence of evil, and that evil was seductive and incredibly attractive? Anne Rice created a world of believable vampires, vampires you could identify with, vampires who created a cult following, and a legion of goth vampire wannabe’s, her prose was that seductive, that inviting, that . . . . irresistable.
Like a siren song, the voice pulled you from book to book, leading you along. With each book, a twist, and suddenly all the assumptions from the previous book were turned upside down, no longer valid when seen from another perspective. Rice lured you down the garden path step by step, and it’s hard to tell at what point you give up your will to resist the siren call.
Recently Anne Rice experienced a re-conversion to Christianity, and is now devoting her writing talents to serving God. This newest book, Christ the Lord out of Egypt, is as thoroughly researched as all the earlier books, and speculates on the early years of the Christ. The book opens in Egypt, with a seven year old Jesus, wise beyond his years but still a child. He sees things he doesn’t understand, he hears things he knows to be significant but doesn’t know why, and when he asks questions, like what happened in Bethleham around the time of his birth, Joseph and Mary, his parents, won’t answer. In fact, they don’t want him to bring up the subject at all, and they tell him they will give him the answers when he gets a little older.
Meanwhile, he hears things, and ponders them. He asks older relatives, and wise teachers. Little by little, he gathers pieces of a puzzle, the puzzle of his background and his identity. He accidently kills a playmate, and brings him back to life. He prays for snow, and it snows. He learns self control through the exercise of powers he doesn’t know he has, he learns to limit himself, and to hide himself.
With his family, they leave Alexandria and return to Jerusalem and then Nazareth, building a new life with their extended family. He grows, he ponders, and he is given a few more pieces of information.
You would think that with Anne Rice’s talent and with her research skills, this would be a fascinating book, but sadly, it is flat, and dull. I wonder why it is easy to make evil so seductively alluring, but it is so hard to bring goodness to life in a believable way? I read the book all the way through, hoping it would get better, but it never did.
There are people – Jan Karon comes to mind – who write about goodness and good people in a vibrant way, making goodness vital and attractive. Wish Anne Rich could find that vein.
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Early Voting in Florida
