Challenge

Sometimes I wonder why I pay the annual "rent" for this web site. I constantly think of things I should be posting, writing about, uploading ideas, pictures, etc. and yet here it sits. (Oooh..not too shabby, it's been "only" exactly 2 months since my last post. Groan.)

I've been watching Jennibellie's videos on YouTube. She's got me all fired up about art and things to do with all the paper and paint and ink and beads and ribbons, and CRAP I've accumulated over the years. I even now have ideas about these ancient kids' books I have.

My challenge is a post a day for the next 30 days. About anything, but I hope some will be about a project or something nifty I've done.

Ta.

Blatantly stolen from someone on FB. Haven't laughed that hard in a bit.

The ideology gap...is it really a lack of respect?

I have to admit, I did not really read this article, but I did peruse the first page of comments. Pretty standard fare these days, with the exception that some of this bunch seem to be a little better educated than your average right-wing keyboard-thumper (although in rereading some, I'm considering withdrawing that statement). Don't get me wrong...there are plenty of left-wing idjits out in the netosphere, too.  I will say, though that usually the left-wingers seem to attack substance rather than just hurling the standard epithets at "liberals" like: uneducated, ignorant, stupid, mentally ill, etc.; not to mention using the word "liberal" as a pejorative, much like "leper" or "mother-fucker." (And, in looking over the article, I think what it really means is that conservatives just get wasted more...juuust kidding. I think. ) I think it very telling that conservatives malign progressives almost as much as they do liberals. Think about that for a moment.

I suppose, since I don't fall into their particular definition of "conservative," to them I am a "liberal," with all its nasty connotations. I'm not. I'm not conservative, either, nor moderate.

I think about each issue.

Just to give you an example, I have absolutely no problem at all with drug-testing to get welfare or food stamps, thank you very much. I have no problem with my tax dollars going to help someone who really needs it, but if you're getting my hard-earned money, you won't be spending it on drugs, booze, fast cars, big TVs, or fancy cookware...or cigarettes.

That's a pretty conservative notion.

Contrast it with the fact that I have absolutely no problem with gay marriage. In fact, "gay marriage" is a misnomer as far as I'm concerned. If two people love each other and want to join in a legally sanctioned partnership, I could give a rat's patootie about their sexual orientation.  A friend of mine (well, she's married to a friend—both of them are so ultra-conservative they make GW look like a 60s flower child) posted something about liking an FB page "...in defense of marriage."

In defense of marriage? Whaaaat?

So, if I understand this correctly, Sam and Tom get married, you're suddenly going to run off and get a divorce or start sleeping with goats? How does two guys or two women marrying each other really hurt you?*  Please explain this to me.  I can understand if you really and truly feel homosexuality is wrong (which in and of itself is misguided, because we have scientific proof that almost all gays and lesbians are born that way, for one reason or another; their orientation is not a lifestyle, it's who they are). Fine, don't marry someone of your gender. But, just as in the case of abortion, your beliefs are not someone else's problem—or they shouldn't be.

And therein lies the problem. Conservatives think liberals are all pushy for wanting things like clean air and water, pure food supplies, good education, and healthcare. Things that benefit everyone.* Conservatives seem to think it's okay to push their religion off on you, tell you whom to marry, whom to sleep with, what you can do with your body (particularly if you have the bad luck to have been born female...sucks to be you).

To be fair here, I find some of the idiotic things the far left does to be utterly mind-boggling. Carrying the PC bit to extremes, for instance. Like this little jewel. The NYC Board of Education requested that 50 words be taken out of standardized tests. Words like "dinosaur" and "birthday" and "divorce."  I'm not making this up.  Most of this was based on not wanting to offend certain faiths.  Fortunately, someone got a clue-by-four for their birthday, and the request was withdrawn.  I can only imagine the original request was drawn up by some left-wing committee somewhere.

Back to the comments—and by the way, this whole thing broke my personal rule of not reading the comments (reading the comments erodes my faith in the human species), but it was like a train wreck—here are two that epitomize some of what I'm talking about (the second bullet is in reply to the first):

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  So how does that explain the fact that 90% of under-educated blacks vote Democratic, as do uneducated whites and felons? The people that make this country work and pay the vast majority of taxes and obey the law vote Republican. Go figure.
  
  

  
  

  
  


• Like they said people who are productive and busy (you know actually contributing to society) are conservative and the ones that have all that free time not really doing anything with plenty of time to think about how this world has wronged them or is unfair are liberal.

I would love to know where they get these facts, although I suspect they got them the same place many of these people do: Faux News. I'd be willing to bet that, yes, many blacks, uneducated or otherwise, vote Democratic. Why? Not because they want hand-outs—necessarily—but because they know the Democratic Party is much more likely to protect their rights. In almost everything I've read uneducated whites tend to vote conservative, largely because they tend to be closer to Christian fundamentalism, I would think.  And some people might add racist, as well, but I won't go that far, simply because I don't like to be characterized as being this, that, and the other simply by how I live or vote. And last time I checked, felons lose their right to vote.

So if I'm to believe these paragons of political knowledge, a person, simply by virtue of being liberal, is a lay-about hippie who only votes for people who would give him or her handouts.

Bull. Shit.

The more I read those two comments, the angrier I get. Either because I identify with some liberal tenets, I'm a lazy lay-about or because I DO work hard for a living, I'm a conservative? How neat and simple. Why bother with going to school, when these folks have it all figured out for us? You know, it's quite okay to disagree with me, I'll honor that, but when you think you know me, categorize me, and can vilify me all because I think women should have control of their own bodies, anyone should be able to marry, your religion has no place in my child's school, or that I think you should prove to me you're not spending my money frivolously, then I draw the line. I'm not evil, ignorant, mentally deranged, or lazy simply because of my ideologies (whether I might or might not be otherwise is for another post).

The thing we lack in today's world is respect. And the internet aids and abets the lack of respect. Instead of sitting down and carefully crafting a letter to an author or the editor, any individual with internet access can just fire off what they're thinking at the time, usually proving their lack of knowledge, spelling, and respect. Back when Johnson and Goldwater were running for president—and of course I was a lot younger—I just don't remember the level of nasty that people rise to today. Laughable as it seems to one of my generation, Goldwater, who was about as conservative as you could get in American politics in his day, wouldn't get his foot in the door of the tight-ass right-wingers club of good ol' boys of today.

I respect your right to disagree with me. I might not understand where you're coming from or how you can read things differently, but I'll shrug and agree to disagree. I probably won't have much respect for you if call me stupid (I'm not), uneducated (I most certainly am not), ignorant (I could probably read more, but if you mean I don't listen slavishly to Faux News, ah, well...you might have a point), or mentally ill (I might be, but it has nothing to do with my politics). I won't have any respect for you at all if you tell me my rights are less than yours simply because of my gender.

And I won't have much respect—or patience—if you come on my blog and rant at me. My place. You go rant at your place.

 

*I have my own theories about conservatives being married to the bottom line being the real reason they don't want gay marriage or controls that cut into the profit margin.

Getting your shit together, as it were.

This, right here, scares me more than anything. It's not that my house is like this—although if you looked at my garage, living room, or craft/sewing room/studio, at the moment, you might wonder (more on that later)—it's that I'm afraid of my house looking like this. Okay,  not the one with the kajillion cats or the 2500 "pet" rats. O.M.G. But just accumulating too much crap, shit...stuff you don't need. Frankly, I look at some of those houses and wonder just how...how....when did you start throwing the empty cat food cans in the bathroom, for God's sake?  And now they're two feet deep?  I lknow hoarding is a sickness and not an easy one to tame, but some of these places look like just plain laziness. But, I'm not the expert... (just an ellipsis abuser!)

I've always been a bit of a clutterbug. Somewhere, there's a picture of my room when I was in the 4th grade. Daddy was taking a pic of my little blackboard, upon which I had printed "EXOTIC HAIRDOS" (don't ask) and in the surrounding area are piles of kid stuff.  My brother got the neat genes, I got the clutteriffic genes. There is a reason, though. My mother took the time and taught my brother how to do it, and him being a tractable, amiable sort, took to it quite nicely. By the time I came along, 5 years later, her approach had changed, but also, me being the distracted, stubborn, ADHD* type...she would finally give up and just come in and do it herself.  That set a bad precedent, lol, but not at all my mom's fault.** I guess subconsciously, I just figured someone else would always bail me out of my clutter-prison. Sort of a Cinderella complex.

The weird thing is, I can organize the hell out of things...but let me get started projects? Oh...dear...  While I'm working on any given project, I'll think of a dozen other things I could ALSO do and drag the materials out to look at them, and then lose interest in all of it and move on to something else.  The ADHD has the weird affect of making you avoid things. I look at a pile of stuff and literally do not know where to start, so I go read a book. There's also the perfectionism theory put forth by Marla Cilley.  "You can't do it perfectly, the way you want to now, so you don't do it at all."   Between the ADHD and the perfectionism...oh, man.

This past weekend, my mother and I drove down to visit my aunt and uncle.  I won't use her real name, but Auntie Di is one of those pre-programmed, born-organized, never in a fluff kind of women you admire, wish to emulate, and hate all at the same time. There's never a speck of dust or anything out of place in her house. Ever. You can't catch her with her guard down. Her pantry is always stocked, her kitchen neat and spotless. She works her butt off in her own business, she and my uncle garden (we had a salad with winter greens they had grown themselves. In Texas!). Oh, wait...I forgot, her myriad plants were still sitting in groups by the garage, waiting to be distributed around the yard in their spring and summer locations--they'd just taken them out of the greenhouse.  *sighs*

If you're like me, you ask, "How does she do it?" Well, I'll tell you. Aliens. That's gotta be it. Aliens.

No, seriously. Here's the secret, as Marla's site will tell you: Routines.  I'd bet you a month's salary if I sat down and asked Auntie Di about her routines, she'd say, "yep, every day I do this, and once a week, I do this, and once a month this."  Because I know that if you clean before you see the dirt (or pile of crap), you'll never see the dirt. I also gave a lot of thought to the notion that you'd never, ever find Auntie Di sitting down playing a stupid-ass computer game for hours. She reads, she watches some TV, and she and my uncle have their cocktails on the deck at dusk...well deserved rest time. But I know that lady is up and doing things all day. And it shows. She's in better shape at almost 74 than I am at almost 60.

So, Auntie, you should be happy, because it's more you prompting me to get things cleaned up and organized than all those gruesome pictures of houses that should more than likely be bulldozed.

As to the rooms that need the most help, really only the living room has no excuse, except that I used it as a staging area for crap from other rooms while I was working on them...and so it hasn't gotten cleaned properly in a long time. This is open-heart admission, here, folks...but I still won't go into detail until I post the after pics. :)

*donning deep-shit diving gear now* If you don't hear from me in a week, call out the Texas Rangers...I've most likely gone down in a crapalanche.

 

*I was not actually diagnosed as ADHD until I was 49...and sure did 'splain a lot, Lucy.
**I've done the same thing with my son, it's easy to do without realizing you are.

A Little Piece of Austin Has Died

If you're not from Austin, I can understand not having heard of Leslie. If you are from Austin--or at least lived here for the last 10 years or so--you've been under a rock if you don't know who Leslie Cochran was. Was. He died this morning at 1 AM. He was just a year older than I.

Leslie was one of the weirder things about a city that prides itself on being weird (much less so than 29 years ago when I moved here).

To read about Leslie (you can Google him...there's lots out there, so I won't be redundant here), one gets the notion that he was mentally ill...crazy...his cheese slipped off his cracker...but I don't know. To look into his eyes...



(c) Austin American-Statesmen 2000

...those aren't the eyes of a crazy man.  Somehow, I think Leslie had the best laugh of all. He lived out those wacky fantasies we all shove into some dusty shoe box at the back of our closet (not that I really want to walk about in a thong and not much else) while enjoying the reactions and adoration of the "freaked out normals." He made enough to live on and did what he wanted to do, when and how it suited him. Society, of course, will label someone like Leslie as mentally ill, or at best nonconformist, simply because he didn't fit the simple, round, 9-to-5 hole.

It's not a life for everyone. And, of course, we need doctors, lawyers, beauticians, mechanics, musicians, and politicians...okay, so we don't really need politicians, but you get my drift. The world works the way it does because everyone fills a niche. Leslie filled a niche, too. He provided entertainment, a topic of conversation, a distraction, a reminder to not take life so bloody seriously all the time. The thing that made Leslie weird was not his supposed insanity, but his chosen avocation. Just another wacked-out homeless dude is not that weird, to tell you the truth; every city has a gazillion of them. As the article points out, Leslie did not have to be homeless, and often wasn't. He could have held down a regular job, too, I'm guessing.  If choices make us who we are (Professor Dumbledore said so), then so do our lack of choices. So much of my life has taken place on auto-pilot, doing whatever the path of least resistance led me to rather than where my heart would have rather been.

So...stuck in a dead-end job, doing crap you'd rather not...or being free to wear a thong in public and run for mayor in silver fuck-me shoes...when you're a guy...and yet still getting by. Makes me wonder who was the more successful....

Farewell Leslie, fair winds and following seas.

Happy New Year and All That Jazz...

2012

Twenty-twelve.

It beleaguers the imagination.

I've been trying to figure out why this particular new year's has been so devastatingly depressing. I mean...for a long time now, new year's has been one of those days I try not to think about. Just another day, new date on the checks, etc., etc. You know, the new year...is. It's just the inexorable march of time. One more year I can't go back and salvage. And I ain't gettin' any younger, either. That's a huge part of it, I know. I'll be 60 this year.

60

SIX-ty.

Shit.

That, in and of itself is enough to make me want to jump off a bridge (if I weren't afraid of heights). Part of the disconnect is that I do not feel 60, hell...I don't feel 40, mentally. Physically, my body is a disaster zone. Physically, I feel like I'm 90 most days. All this BS about 50 is the new 30 and 70 is the new 40, or whatever...those spinners never lived in my body. 60 is the new 90. Bah!

Instead of chronicling what I feel the issues are (which sounds suspiciously like making excuses), I'm going to try to take a page out of the sunshine and lollipop spin and look at ways to make 2012 a better year. I mean, you know...just not sitting around being morose would make it a better year, right?

First up, I'm decluttering the house. It's a gargantuan undertaking, but I'm gettin' 'er done, by gosh. In that vein, I've decluttered Mdme B's space here. My previous theme mirrored the usual state of my desk (might have even been cleaner...but I'll never tell), but I've noticed most of the well-read sites are simpler, with white backgrounds.

Before you get all mushy and think this is a list of resolutions, don't. I don't do resolutions. They set you up for failure. These are things I've already been working on or need to do anyway, new year or not. It just seems like a good time to trot out the list since one of the things I'd like to get in the habit of doing is actually, you know, like...USING my web site--what a novel idea. Which reminds me of another one on the list. Setting up a time to write, every day, same time. I might actually get that novel done before I really am 90.

Dump about 80-90 pounds. Didn't say pounds of what, now did I? (Technically, I've already done this: in decluttering in the last couple of days, I've trashed, recycled, and donated well over 100 pounds of schtuff. HA!) But yeah...part of the feeling 90 thing is this extra couple of bags of mulch I'm carrying around. Hee. In order to clearly demonstrate what carrying weight on your body is like, I use the following analogy: you know those bags of garden dirt, compost, or mulch? Each one weighs 40 pounds. I can barely tote ONE of those around. And I'm carrying at least two on a small, 5'5" frame that wasn't intended to carry more than about 145 pounds at the most. TWO! No wonder my knees are going and my feet hurt so much.  (218 when I last weighed myself at work before the winter break, if you MUST know.)

Another thing I'm going to try for is consistency. Juliet said something about the moon's inconstant orb...but you know, the moon is rather consistent. Each month, she does the same thing, perpetually. I'm not sure I'd want to be quite that predictable--and boring--but one could do far worse than be as consistent as Lady Luna.

Getting back on track being a vegesaur. Several times over the holidays, whether it was just because I was tempted by some yummy-meat thing or because there really wasn't anything else to eat in the house, I've had things to eat which I regretted later.  Regretted either because of guilt or because they upset my system something fierce.  This goes along with actually planning some meals, doing shopping, and cooking! Gah...I have a teenager, for crying out loud, and I rely on my husband to cook most of the meals, but he doesn't make veggies and green things, so no one gets the nutrition they should. *slaps own hand*

One last thought on this is time spent on the computer. It is a very useful tool, when used properly, but I spend too much time on FB and playing games, and not enough time doing creative things with it. Posting projects and the like here will be a part of a renewed effort putting what little time I have left on this earth to good use. Believe it or not, I actually go days without checking FB, I don't twitter, or Google-group...but I still manage to waste an inordinate amount of time on teh intarwebs. I love googling ideas, items, history, pictures, etc. THAT can really eat up time, lemmetellya.

So. I'm off to clean that other catbox, start a back-to-work-and-school washing marathon, finish scanning a kajillion photos for my boss (he's paying me), bake two more loaves of banana bread, wash dishes and continue sorting and culling 20 years of crap that grew in my house  and wonder if clutter is like mold or a fungus...does it spread by spores?

Farglesnoppers...I suck.

Every day, several times a day, I compose marvelous posts. I right the wrongs of the world, chew out ignorant drivers, belittle Christians who apparently have never read a word of the Gospel, and enlighten self-absorbed boobs who think Republicans are human. I chronicle all my various projects (I have projects. Really.), describe with humorous aplomb all the antics of my pets and lanky, truant teenager, and wittily discuss my latest reading adventure.

In my head.

My excuses for not actually writing these posts are legion. I can't really write that ;way; I'm doing real work, I have no before pictures, so why write about a project if no one can SEE the before and what a magnificent difference I've made?

Truth is? I'm lazy. And I suck. There you have it. The Universe is doomed. I could have saved the Universe, but I'm lazy. And I suck.

Did I mention I'm also rather silly?