A brand-new week looms, and promises to be, how shall we say, emotionally taxing for us all. Let’s have some beauty so that we may brace ourselves.
Ryan (Glacial Till) came for a visit, and we headed over to Washington Park Arboretum. They have an utterly lovely Japanese garden there, which is always a delight to wander about in. I have many and wonderful shots that will make appearances as time goes by and themes like carp or turtles or stone lanterns present themselves. For now, we’ll have some of the somewhat artistic bits.
I just want to take a moment to thank all of you on this side of the rift.
Not so long ago, I might’ve ended up on the other. Our culture had battered me with so many messages about how women were and should be treated and should react to that treatment that I thought all that shit was normal. Upset because some dude cat-called you on the street? Chill out, girl! Didn’t get that promotion? Well, most women just can’t hack it like dudes can. Why did that idiot stay with her abuser? Why did she get drunk knowing she could get hurt? Where does she get off saying women aren’t equal – we totally are, and if we aren’t, well, it’s probably our fault, ladies! Hey, I’m one of the guys. I’m not like those girls.
Being one of the guys really can insulate you from a lot of bullshit. It also allows you to perpetuate the worst of our culture rather than recognizing problems and fixing them.
You brought me out of that.
What feminism is: the radical notion that women are people. Sign me up! Image courtesy Julie Jordan Scott via Flickr.
Your roach analogy reminds me of something so I’m going to piggyback a bit and I hope you don’t mind…
Many years ago, a girlfriend of mine and I traveled across the country to a southern state for a music festival. Staying at her parents’ house, I went to use the bathroom one day and out from the baseboards crawled a huge cockroach, quite bold and content to be where my feet were without fear of me stomping on it. I freaked, running out to the living room where my girlfriend’s family was located and informed them of the giant roach, what should I do?? They laughed. Roaches are normal, a part of life here, they said, yes they are gross but you get used to them after a while, besides, they hardly ever come out in the day, they are usually content to patrol the house at night, yes we know they carry all sorts of disease, but what you gonna do?
Cockroach! Image courtesy Ted & Daniel Percival via Flickr.
Cue moving to FL some years later, similar experience to yours with the apartment except our landlords engaged in blaming us for the roach problem that was there when we arrived, saying we must have caused the infestation with our dirty habits (of living the normal lives of busy people with children) because none of their other tenants had complained about roaches before, imploring us to spend hundreds of dollars on plastic containers for our cupboards so the roaches wouldn’t be tempted by our food, we should put our pets on a schedule and keep the pet food dishes clear of leftovers after every feeding, take our garbage out daily, vacuum daily, and engage in all other sorts of “common sense” hypervigilance maneuvers because they were completely unwilling to admit that the roaches were a problem they should deal with. *We* were supposed to alter our lives according to the habits of the roaches, *we* were supposed to spend money we didn’t have to protect ourselves from a problem that our landlords weren’t even willing to admit existed, let alone take steps to solve. We were forbidden on threat of eviction from using “chemicals” on our own. We were forbidden from calling in experts to help us. We tried to follow their instructions, we tried to be good, compliant tenants, but the problem kept getting worse, and after a year of exhausting hypervigilance and increasing denial+hostility from the property owners, we finally gave up and moved.
These experiences mirror my experiences with calling out sexist bullshit, trying to hold people accountable for actions which harm others. The roaches are everywhere, what do you expect, what you gonna do, besides they’re mostly hidden in the walls which is perfectly natural and it’s your fault they come out because you tempted them so you just have to get used to it and suppress your horror and hang your clothes up where the roaches hopefully can’t reach, seal up all your food, show some self discipline, and take your shower/eat your breakfast/attend that conference/frequent that space anyway. Or move, and leave the problem behind for someone else to fall unsuspectingly into.
“Where you see one, there are hundreds more you can’t see,” my stepmother said. She’d gone with me to look at apartments. She’d pulled open a drawer to reveal a dead cockroach beneath. Other than that, the apartment was just what I was looking for, and the managers said they’d take care of the pests before I moved in. So I signed a lease.
It was fine for a while, but then I began noticing the occasional roach. Nothing horrible, and I’m not easily squicked out by insects, but still. You expect to live roach-free when you’re paying to live in a middling-decent place. So I called the managers, and they called the exterminator.
One year and one day ago, back when I was a smoker:
Vanna Whiting a hummock at Coldwater Lake, August 4, 2013. Snapped by Cujo359.
ZOMG I miss those shorts…
One year ago, when I was a non-smoker:
Suzanne and I in front of a truck that didn’t survive the May 18th eruption. August 5, 2013. Photography by Cujo359.
ZOMG, I miss those pants…
Anyway. Yes. Just realized, going through photos from last year’s Mount St. Helens jaunt, that it’s been a full year since I’ve lit a cigarette. I miss the shorts and pants I used to fit in to, mostly because they don’t seem to make decent shorts for women anymore and I loved those capris, but it’s not often I miss smoking. Oh, here and there, when I’m bored or shopping or just randomly out of nowhere, I’ll get a craving, kind of like feeling a phantom limb. It goes away nearly immediately, though. I don’t miss the smell, or the expense, or the hacking of a morning. I finally met my goal of gaining five pounds (and kept on till I gained 30). This means I don’t get as many people wondering if I’m anorexic, then wondering if I’m bulimic after they’ve seen me eat. Which is nice.
I’ve forged an identity as an ex-smoker now, so I don’t feel quite as not-me as I did when I first quit. Wellbutrin took care of the stress, and has done far more for me than nicotine ever did. And I can run, which I couldn’t do back then. So it’s nice to be ex. Figure I’ll keep on keeping on until the opportunity to take up the habit again is gone forever. Very hard to inhale a nice deep puff o’ smoke when you’re no longer breathing, amirite?
Tell you something, too: everything tastes better. Hence the 30 pounds. Food and I, we’ve become bosom buddies. I’m not as mouthy as when I first quit, but despite not needing to constantly have a cigarette substitute in the cakehole, I’m still loving the eating. Oy. In fact, I think I’ll do some more of that before bed, here.
Thank you for all your encouragement and cheerleading and commiserating, my darlings. You got me through those initial difficult times (Chantix made it much less difficult, but you lot gave me the will). You did it! Now you can stop worrying, because if I’ve done 365 days without wishing I could go back, I never will. And even if I start having fond memories, the knowledge of what you’ll do to me if I backslide will keep me from breaking down. :-)
Besides, I’m spending all my spare cash on food. And adventures. And books. And new pants. And lotsa other stuff. That’s as addictive as the cigarettes were, and far more fun.
Should any of you need a cheerleading section as you embark on your own career as an ex-smoker, let me know. Ye olde lungs can hold a lot more air than previously, so I should be able to give you a good shout!
Ho, hum, another day, another dumbfuck claiming atheists have no basis for morality. I see Avi’s given them a right proper fisking. Good thing he’s a good writer, because this shallow shite’s points look like they came off an apologetics-for-assclowns site. Oh, my heck, does our Avi have patience. I’d’ve chucked this garbage in the trash after the first paragraph. This is just so century before last – ooo, what’s this? Continue reading “Someone’s Been Living in an Alternate Reality Again”→
Skepticism matters, but it’s not enough. This is what happens when we stop at skeptical:
The other day in the break room, I got into a brief banter with coworkers about people who believe they can live without eating. One person brought up a guru in India who claims to have lived without food for decades.
People are not plants. We’re animals. Animals haven’t got chlorophyll. You need chlorophyll to live off of sunlight and water. Therefore: don’t try to live like a plant unless you want to die like a starving person.
Being a skeptic is a good thing: we should be skeptical enough not to get sucked in by patently ridiculous claims. But it’s not enough to merely point and laugh. When we stop there, we forget the cost. We miss the opportunity to prevent a fellow human being from losing their money, their family, their life.
Anyone who believes in that stuff is stupid, amirite? How often have we thought that? There’s a subtext of superiority, of “It can never happen to me, and fools get what they deserve.” But we can all be fooled. Give us someone who seems confident and sincere, in a situation where we don’t know enough about the subject to easily detect bullshit, and given information that, no matter how bizarre it seems, appears to be plausible, and we can easily become the fools. Do we deserve to get hurt because we were unaware? If you’re not skeptical enough about one thing, do you deserve to lose everything? Should skeptics who know the truth just point, laugh, and abandon you, or would you want them to make an effort to help you realize the truth?
It’s not enough to recognize erroneous and/or irrational ideas that are so factually incorrect as to be absurd. Sure, some dude trying to tell people he can live like a plant is funny – but stopping at a belly laugh without addressing the real harm such a person can cause does no one any good. We can point and laugh – but we should also be pointing out the harm. We shouldn’t be leaving those ideas unchallenged. We need to lift the curtain so everyone can see. We may not be able to rescue those who have already fallen too far into the bullshit, but we can prevent onlookers from stepping in it. And we can change this attitude so many seem to have, that these bizarre frauds are harmless, that we can just let them get on with being fools.
The world isn’t improved by smart people sneering at the duped. Skepticism can go beyond that. It must. And we can have a lot of fun teaching folks how not to get fooled. Everybody but the crook wins.
It’s no secret that Husband and I own property in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, about five miles south of the intersection of highways 108 and 395. On our property, cliffs of granite come close to or against the hwy 395 road; this is called the Devil’s Gate, for the muddy grief it gave travelers during the pre-hwy-395 years. There are springs there. There’s a Spring creek there. Very annoying water, if you’re trying to take a wagon through the Gate in June, and there’s no hwy 395 to help.
Relatively near the gate, there’s an alluvial fan with a creek that runs for a couple of months in the Spring. We’ve chosen a building spot on the fan, well uphill from the creek, but not so close to the granite wall that it could drop large rocks on us.
Down by hwy 395, there’s a low spot. It wasn’t there before the construction of hwy 395 in the ’20s — the road builders should have put in a culvert — and we got a county permit to fill it in with the excess excavation material from our home site. Then someone complained that we were filling in a wetland.
The expert we hired from an independent firm has not yet released her results, but her preliminary finding was that it was probably not a wetland under Federal law, but might well be under California law.
At this point we’re just hoping we don’t have to mitigate the damage already done to the “wetland”. We have REAL wetlands on our property on the other side of hwy 395, fed by those springs, and we’re as determined as anyone to preserve them. But this is just a Spring mudhole.
I got to thinking today, “I’ll be there’s a geology story behind fireworks. Betcha I can be lazy and link to the people who’ve already written it.” And lo, it was so. I found you some great articles: explanations of the science (including geology!) of fireworks for both kids and adults, plus a neat-o experiment you can do cheaply, easily and safely your own self. How cool is that? Setting things on fire: almost always awesome.
I also found you some gorgeous photos courtesy of folks on Flickr. Here’s the ones I couldn’t fit, but were too beautiful to pass up. Enjoy!
Fireworks over Darling Harbour. Image courtesy Nigel Howe.
Fireworks in Santa Barbara, CA. Image courtesy Damian Gadal.
I haven’t any substantial content for you today. I’m not sorry. In fact, I’m about to do something so vicious and evil that you will be mopping yourself off the floor for the next three days.
Prepare for kitten…
I know. I’m a bad, bad person. Bad, evil, cruel Dana. Perhaps these will help.
Paper towel photo courtesy Mets501 via Wikimedia Commons.
