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September 6, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
God is Greek. In case you were wondering with all the religions in the world who is right, I can tell you unequivocally that he (or she-not enough evidence about that yet) is Greek. So whatever the Greeks believe, go with them.
Here’s the proof:
1) First of all, most obviously, Greek people get to live in Greece. That’s pretty compelling evidence on its own, but since Italians also get to live in Italy, it wasn’t enough information to create a conclusive case. To be honest, Italy is so breath-taking that until this morning, I was convinced that God was Italian. Only favored people could live in a land that magnificent.
2) Greeks have all those delicious desserts and Phyllo dough. It is Godly delicious food. Phyllo dough itself is wondrous and has many times made me seem a far better and more interesting cook than I actually am. It is the only food that is a close second to crabs. Let’s consider another fact, who invented the word ambrosia? The Greeks. And what is their food? Ambrosia.
3) I had another point of evidence, but I can’t remember it at the moment. It was very compelling though.
4) And finally, the irrefutable proof that God is Greek, this weekend is the annual Greek Festival in Charlotte. Last night we looked at the forecast and it was projected to rain all weekend from Hanna. It would have been the only time that I can remember there being rain during the Greek Festival. This morning, though, the forecast has changed completely. The rain turned north and we’ll have nothing but sunny skies for the rest of the weekend.
For some reason, the Indian Festival, which is normally in April, and is always held indoors, is also being held this weekend. “What are they thinking?” my friends and I have queried to each other. You cannot compete with the Greek Festival. It is one of the biggest annual events in Charlotte, and is the kind of thing you plan vacations around. If for some reason, you had a brain lapse and left town the first weekend in September, you’d be sorely disappointed when you realized what you had done. For years you would berate yourself, “I can’t believe I missed the Greek Festival that time.” I know. We missed it once, not from leaving town, but just from being stupid. I’m still regretting it.
Last night when I saw rain, a lot of rain, in the forecast, I had a moment of doubt. I worried for the Greek Festival, but was comforted that the Indians might get more traffic since their event is indoors. As it turns out, nothing can stop the Greek Festival.
So, there you have it. God is Greek.
Personally, we couldn’t miss either festival. Later today my husband, a handful of friends and I will head out with our Tupperware, as we always do to avoid Styrofoam waste, and will make our way through the dessert line at Yiasou, ordering at least one of everything to bring home for dessert throughout the week. We’ll have a Gyro and some spanikopita, browse the Greek gift shops, admire the ornate chess sets, consider buying one, but decide against it, watch the Greek dancers for a bit, and catch up with a handful of people that we inevitably bump into for the first time in several years.
Next, we’ll head over to the Indian Festival and gorge ourselves on Indian food. Then, like a human Weeble, we’ll waddle over to any place we can find to sit down and will do what we do every year, we’ll look at each with dismay, full of the discomfort that only eater’s remorse can give you, and we’ll say, “I shouldn’t have eaten so much.” “Yup,” we’ll nod in unison, resolving to do better, but knowing in our hearts that neither of us will ever have willpower over the Indian food. Just this year, we’ll have started with the Greek food first.
On second thought, maybe God is from Charlotte. Who gets to have both a Greek Festival and an Indian Festival in the same weekend, but his favorites? Nah. We don’t have crabs or baseball.
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July 4, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
Please don’t hate me, but it’s true, I think there’s an upside to high gas prices. Before your mouse navigates to click the “Send Mail Bomb” button, please hear me out.
I have a belief, that only time will reveal as accurate or far-fetched, that our lives will get better as the price of gas increases. Maybe not initially. There will be a lot of resistance to change, as there always is. We feel entitled to our lifestyles. We don’t want anyone to tell us that we don’t have a right to drive a Hummer or consume as much as is humanly possible. But there might be (there is!) an upside to high gas. Before I get too far into this discussion, let me clarify that I exclude those already at the bottom of the economic ladder from “better,” though I think they may eventually benefit too.
Before I get into the potential benefits we may derive, let’s start with why Americans are angry over the price of gas. It’s something I find remarkable. Is it really a brand new concept that oil is not an infinite resource? Are we really that short-sighted? Can we really be that naive as to assume that we can behave however we wish and the earth’s resources will bow to our insatiable will? We lived through gas shortages in the 70s. Scientists have been sounding the warning for fifty years (yes, fifty) that oil would peak in the 90s. Even heads of oil corporations acknowledge that time is limited. But, we’re angry. “Drill! Drill! Drill” is the demand. No matter that it will take 10 or 20 years to see the fruits of the drilling, if there are any. It doesn’t matter that more drilling will likely produce very little. Do it now!
I ask, “And then what?” What happens if we do find more oil? Will we heed the advice of scientists to move to other energy sources? Will we change our ways? To find the answer, we only have to look at our behavior after the 70 gas shortage. Did our cars get smaller and more gas efficient or larger and more gas guzzling? Have all the warnings of the past been enough to motivate people to buy small, gas efficient cars? No, only an economic pinch, only a tight squeeze on the pocketbooks speaks to us. Even now, there are those at the top of the economic ladder who are unconcerned with how much gas they’re using. As long as there is money, they will never see a reason to change. Not even in the interest of providing a better world for their offspring.
It appears to be our human nature to live to the fullest extremes that we can muster and to live in denial about our behavior.
More often I hear and see news stories profiling good, hard-working citizens impacted by the cost of rising gas. These stories are meant to tug on your heart-strings, evoke your pity or outrage at how someone, whoever that someone was, allowed gas to get so expensive. Just once I would like to hear the people profiled in these stories to own some responsibility for their choices, “Yes, I know I should have been more informed, but I liked the look of the Hummer, and since I have no personality of my own, I use my possessions to serve as a substitute and to make a statement about my absence of character, shallow waste of oxygen that I am. If I were to use the matter contained within my cranium, and mind you, I won’t, but if I did, I suppose I’d realize that it’s my own fault that I spent an utterly foolish amount of money on a car meant to consume every last drop of oil left on earth so that I can show everyone what an utter selfish asshole I am, money that could easily have fed a village in Africa or India for a year if I could be interested in anything beyond that which exists several feet beyond my own self-absorbed nose. Yes, I brought this on myself.” Okay, I’ll concede that they wouldn’t likely allow the word “asshole” on the news. Fine. Call me harsh, but it’s true.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, let me turn to the potential upside of high gas prices.
1) Finally, people are becoming aware of the possibility that resources are not infinite. We are at last waking up.
2) As oil becomes less of an option for meeting our energy needs, it will cripple the powerful lobbyists who currently control Congress (car and oil industry). Perhaps instead of heavily subsidizing oil, our tax dollars can heavily subsidize renewable energy research and implementation.
3) Cities will (re)establish the clean, safe, reliable public transportation infrastructure destroyed by GM, enabling Americans the choice to reduce the large portion of their budget spent on car related expenses: gas, insurance, maintenance, purchasing and repurchasing cars, interest paid on car loans… With a good public transportation system, perhaps families could be connected to distant parks and spend a Saturday with a picnic, playing games, telling stories, facing each other on a fun train ride. Commuters could relax on the way to work, reading, listening to podcasts, thinking, instead of sitting in traffic inhaling fumes and getting irate at the morons on cellphones in the fast lane who are oblivious to the world around them.
4) We might live closer to work, have a shorter commute and more time for more important things.
5) We might carpool and develop friendships with our carpool mates.
6) We might finally have the excuse we needed to eliminate some of the unnecessary activities that aren’t really adding to our quality of life.
7) We might walk more, and eventually, our suburbs might become neighborhoods again, where we know each other, talk to one another, and have each other over for tea or lemonade, or even a stiff drink now and then.
8 ) We might stop and rest. Instead of always looking to “upgrade” our home to find something that is bigger, we might decide to stay where we are, trading quantity for quality and take an interest in building communities, and loving, nurturing, and taking care of what we have.
9) The neighborhood grocery might return as a locally-owned shop, with an owner who has an interest in the health of the community.
10) We’ll drive less. Our roads will be quieter and the air will be cleaner.
11) Without our car independence, we might become interdependent on each other to share driving chores (”Sandy can you pick up the kids today? I’ll get them tomorrow”) thereby simplifying our lives.
12) Employers will be more supportive of telecommuting. While we’re working at home, we can throw in a load of laundry and check on the pot roast. We might have more time for home-cooked meals.
13) We won’t have as much disposable income to waste on junk food and fast food, so we’ll get healthier from eating less garbage.
14) We’ll have to use our legs more to get where we’re going, getting more exercise and thereby improving the health of our hearts and our brains.
15) Perhaps cities will be designed with more of an eye towards bike paths and bike friendly byways.
16) We’ll start growing our food locally, giving us more nutritious options (the further food is transported the more nutritional value it loses) with less adverse environmental impact.
17) We’ll have less sprawl, so we’ll all live closer together, making a night together with friends less complicated to plan.
Yes, in order to accomplish these things, we’ll have to change our culture and how we think. Many are hard hit right now because they didn’t have room in their budgets for the extra cost of gas, and they have my sympathy. My hope is that the future is brighter, that we will become less dependent on our cars, that we will have more options, that after we adjust, we find that our lives are better and less complicated. Yes, it’s a dream.
Update: I shared part of this list with some friends last night and they suggested that I am on crack and might want to consider rehab. Particularly considering my overly-optimistic point that the current power structure might ever be ousted. I concede it’s a dream, but I continue to hope nonetheless that we begin to embrace some changes that can result in a stronger community-oriented way of life.
Alright, alright, I’ll look into rehab.
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July 3, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
For the last couple of weeks, I have been struggling with a crisis that nearly set me on a path to surrendering this url and removing this website. It may sound trivial when I relate why, but it was enough to leave me feeling a spot of despondency.
It was sparked by a conversation with a coworker that started innocently enough in a discussion about a Bill Bryson book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” It’s one of my favorite books because it’s well-written and about one of my favorite subjects, science. My coworker who is reading the book isn’t so taken with it. He doesn’t much like science and admits he’s never been good at it. He shared his opinion that evolution is a philosophy, not a study grounded in any concrete provable science. Really not interested in engaging in a debate over the validity of creationism or evolution, I suggested a book that explains evolution, including defining what “theory” means in the context of science. It explains how the scientific method is used for evolution, as well as other sciences, and is consequently continually tested for its validity. Now, here’s the part that bothered me. He replied “No, thank you. “I’m not interested in science.”
The conversation bothered me on many levels. Principally, I’m troubled that someone who I consider otherwise reasonable and intelligent blindingly accepts science from those who are not experts in science though they may be experts in religion. In our modern age of technology and scientific advances, how does someone so easily dismiss the scientific method in only one field of study, but accept it when comes to flying or medicine? How is that someone who isn’t otherwise a conspiracy theorist, is so easily convinced that scientists are in cahoots around the world to hide and ignore all this proof offered by creationists? If you’re going to be a conspiracy theorist, I mean, hello, let’s start with the first B*sh election.
I don’t think there are many areas in which there is one truth, and I don’t think that science has everything figured out, but as far as truth goes, I think science is as close as it gets. As close as it gets, in an ever continuing effort to get closer. This determination to believe in a religious viewpoint, and the ability of an intelligent person to dismiss science as philosophy has set me off course. If people need convincing to acknowledge the truth, what hope is there for solving world peace? There are an infinite number of stories we can create to describe the world around us, but if we can’t agree to acknowledge where truth is truth and philosophy is philosophy, if we’re not willing to admit where we’re delving into the fantastical, if we’re willing to convince ourselves that it’s a blurry line between reality and a colorful story, we’re doomed and my mission is indeed impossible.
How does one reach people like this? Is it possible? It seems not.
There were also other reasons the conversation bothered me. I wondered when science became political or controversial. While my friend felt comfortable expressing his opinion that his religious perspective was the true explanation of our origins, I felt silenced because anything I said would be treading on religious beliefs and consequently, inappropriate for the workplace. Worse, whatever I might say in defense of evolution may potentially hurt my friend, who is obviously very attached to his extremely conservative literalist viewpoint.
The conversation left me feeling in some ways like I lost a friend. I like my colleague personally, as well as professionally. While I don’t think that a solid friendship requires identical beliefs, the bridge between “science is opinion” and “science is at least somewhat factual” is a pretty steep divide. It leaves few topics open for casual conversation, and that leaves few opportunities to bond and develop a real friendship.
I also felt frustrated and disgusted with living in the South. I miss being in an environment where the default is people who are curious and intelligent and accept science. Sometimes I grow weary of the religiosity here, literalist Christian religiosity that is mutually exclusive with valuing any other field of study or religious point of view. I told my husband in frustration that I was done with living here. I was ready to move back to DC where I could be surrounded by smart people for whom science is not just opinion, where education matters, where the second question someone asks after meeting you is “What school did you go to?” not “What church do you go to?” (Then I remembered what I don’t miss about the North — more on that later.) If someone is going to engage me in a debate, I’d much rather it was about something that matters, like how we can address the problems illegal immigration has created and how to make the tragic conditions better in the countries from whence they escaped, or how to end a cycle of violence in places like El Salvador or most of Africa.
Finally, the conversation troubled me because I realized that I wasn’t sure where my own personal line for tolerating differences lie. I tell myself a story that I’m tolerant and open-minded and I often say that I really don’t care what someone believes as long as they keep it out of the public arena, out of legislation and out of the education system. However, the more I thought on the subject, I realized that if I’m honest with myself, I’m not so neutral.
I began asking myself questions trying to clarify my own beliefs, “What if someone believes something fantastic or untrue, but keeps it to himself? Is that okay?” I posed myself multiple scenarios and the one that best answered the question for me was this one, “What if someone is racist, but never expresses the opinion? What if that person behaves just the right way and never reveals his attitudes?”
I don’t want to sound communist or Big Brother, but in fact, it’s not good enough to me. Diverse viewpoints are good when they help us to grow, when they challenge our notions of truth, when they serve to advance us as a society. There are some ideas though that don’t merit further consideration and when there are members of society who embrace them, they collectively hold us back and prevent us from reaching our highest potential. Every time we waste energy debating these topics, it diverts us from solving real problems that require our greatest imagination and full attention. Even if someone never expresses an opinion, the fact that he holds it, even privately, prevents him from fully participating in efforts to advance our society.
I’m bothered that even in writing this post, I worry that I might offend someone, as if we’ve regressed to the 1920s. It’s incomprehensible to me that there are more than two people left in this country outside of some very remote, rural place in Kansas who don’t believe in evolution, that these people are resolutely determined to ignore every fact that science has to offer, stubbornly clinging to a fantastic story so tenaciously that they’re willing to divide our country over the subject, to keep us trapped, moving us away from rather than toward enlightenment, cementing us in the last century.
Our attachment to our beliefs, our refusal to pursue truth with the same vigor with which we pursue religious studies makes the possibility of solving world peace insurmountable and leaves me disheartened. When there is so much work to do, I resent that we squander air time giving more publicity to the frivolous and far-fetched in the interest of being “fair and balanced.” I remember the day years ago when Oprah decided that she would no longer have shows with skinheads or racists. What was the point except to give them undue attention. Perhaps, we too should be more discriminating in how much attention we give to the ignorant, crazy, and politically rancorous. (I include in this category Oprah’s new fascination with the “Laws of Attraction.” As much as I love her, I think she’s lost it.) When there is so much work to do, it saddens me that there are those who aren’t interested in the truth, but are interested in advancing their own agenda at any cost, suggesting uncertainty and debate exists where it doesn’t. We should be especially careful who we trust as authorities and from whom we accept information. The fact that Fox “News” continues to exist probably tells me all I don’t want to know about Americans lack of interest in critical thinking or intelligent dialog. There is enough that divides us already without inventing new causes.
Then with considerable effort, I remind myself about great leaders like Martin Luther King who must have felt the same hopelessness at times, who too must have wondered, “how do you reach these people, how do you change their minds?” Yet, these heroes didn’t give up. It’s a fact that nothing is accomplished by losing hope. We find the answers to the questions that we trouble ourselves to ask again and again using imagination and determination to find solutions. There is so much love in the world. We are as “good” by innate nature as we are “bad.” It is this goodness that we must draw out by giving less voice to those who only sit with their other half, who set out with the express purpose to divide.
So, I don’t have the answers. I may have easy ones about how to solve world peace like “eliminate extremism,” but how to implement it, how to reach those who don’t want to be reached, who don’t want the truth, but want their story, this answer I don’t have. But I will not give up.
At least not yet.
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May 28, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
My plane touched down at 5:38 a.m. in Charlotte. After spending a week in the Arizona desert surrounded by cacti, I have never loved Charlotte and the lush climate of the East, humidity and all, more than I do now. For the last hour, the rains have been pouring forth from the heavens with great determination and speed, rushing to the ground as if in a competition. The wind is bending the tall tree branches until they scrape repeatedly back and forth across my cubicle window. The gray skies have darkened the day like an early winter evening.
Passing over one dry river bed after another in the West, and still recovering from our own drought in the Southeast, the rain, always a welcome sight these days, is even more treasured, for in each precious drop there is nourishment. No living thing survives without water. Water is life. In our space exploration, it’s what we seek first when we hope to find other potential current or former celestial life.
For the few minutes I was home this morning before heading to work, I peered out my bathroom window at the weeping cherry I planted some four years ago at a mere three feet tall. At the end of last summer it stood tall in the middle with a few weeping offshoots, nearing perhaps twelve feet in height. It now towers over the deck, having gained at least another foot during our wet Spring. Today, I would swear it’s grown another two feet since I last gazed at it, using each rain in an attempt to wrest more share of the sun hoarded by the tall oak that shadows it and the entire right-most portion of our garden.
The peach tree planted with only meager hopes that it might live to supply edible fruit one day, it too is thriving in our wet Spring. Last year, its branches too weak to hold much weight, bore only one peach (whose pit I saved as a momento of our first peach). Today, the strong branches are weighty with many round blossoms. We watch them with anticipation, the tree clinging to and nurturing each one, growing it’s circumference little by little. like a mother grows a baby, letting it expand according to nature’s clock protected in her womb. Soon, we hope, we will have free peaches, sweet and delicious as they only are when allowed to ripen to maturity on the tree, enough to accompany a meal, enough for pies, enough for the wildlife. The Yoshino Cherries in the front garden, which I assumed to be only ornamental, are likewise ripening to bear free, fresh, untainted fruit.
Last year, there was not enough water. We lost rhodendrons. We lost hydrageas. We lost hundreds of dollars of hostas. This year, the rains return and with them, the life that cannot exist without them. The rain is magnificent and we so blessed by the frequency and relative dependability with which it comes.
Posted in Gratitude | Print | 1 Comment »
May 17, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
In the mid-1940’s, frustrated with growing bigotry, Stetson Kennedy set out on a mission to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy, posing as a fellow racist, joined the Klan with hopes that, in figuring out how they operated, he might find a way to destroy them. He largely succeeded and is attributed with making the Klan impotent and preventing a post-war Klan revival.
One person can make a difference, and in the case of Kennedy, a remarkable one in changing the course of history and the fate of a nation.
Creating positive change takes courage, imagination, and determination, and what we’ve learned from Kennedy, is to be undaunted by the size of the job. While the mission for change may seem insurmountable, and we too small to tackle it, we must remember all the examples of history that have proven how much difference one person can make. How often the whistle-blower, the sole individual with courage to speak up among a sea of participants who further enabled that which they knew to be wrong, that one intrepid person of integrity and character, unraveled a tangled plot of deliberate, intentional, and destructive misconduct. Conversely, one self-serving individual, one man consumed with pursuing the desires of his inflated ego unchecked causes irreparable damage.
Information and disclosure are the tools that protect us. Often the answer to change can be as “simple” as revealing that which the power structure wants to remain hidden, that which happens behind closed doors, or as in the case of the Klan, the cowardly and ugly that lay hidden beneath their bed linens.
The Klan’s source of power came from their secrecy. When Stetson revealed the Klan’s secret codes and passwords, he removed all their allure and power. We have too many examples from recent years showing us the harm that is done by secret societies. Politics, Enrons in the stock market, a war, the pharmaceutical industry, sub-prime loans. Too many examples of a few profiting at the cost of many. We should regard authority with the same eye as the hippies of the 60s. It is not disrespectful to question. It is disrespectful and, yes, immoral, for those in positions of authority to introduce red herrings that cut-off dialogue with distracting arguments about patriotism. (We are fools for falling for it.) Those who have nothing to hide are not afraid of discussions and disclosure.
Even in our personal lives, we see the negative effects of secrecy. Our employers threaten disciplinary action if we disclose our salary to a coworker. Who profits? We, as employees? No, we stab in the dark when we timidly ask for a raise, not knowing how much the person in the next cube with a similar, or inferior, skill set is making. The lack of information about salary ranges leaves us on shaky ground, never knowing for sure if we’re being fairly compensated. Our employer is completely at his own discretion to make things equitable, with a whole arsenal of rationalizations about shareholders and “the good of the company” to allay any self-doubt, protected as he is from ever owning up to any unfairness, encouraged to give as little as possible.
To some extent our economy is built upon a foundation of secrecy. We have a cultural taboo about speaking too directly about money. We don’t feel comfortable sharing our salary or bank balance. We solve this by consuming lots of things so that we can say through them that we’re doing “okay,” okay always defined as and measured by our material possessions, not by our charitable acts, volunteerism, leisure activities, vacation time, or how happy we are. If we’re keeping up with the Joneses, no one has to know the staggering, crushing debt we’ve accumulated. Sales are made by tightly guarding the amount of profit made on the good or service. Whether it be a negotiation for a car or a consulting service, the person in power is the one who has the most information.
Information and disclosure keep our democracy intact and people safe. As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner state in their book, “Freakonomics,” those who control the flow of information control everything.
Read Levitt and Dubner’s account of Stetson Kennedy here and more about Freakonomics in my next post.
Posted in Ponderings/Musings, Heroes, Books | Print | No Comments »
May 12, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
“Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars to come out… and then it was nice. It was like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bayou. There was always a million sparkles on the water… like that mountain lake. It was so clear, Jenny, it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other. And then in the desert, when the sun comes up, I couldn’t tell where heaven stopped and the earth began. It’s so beautiful.” ~ Forrest Gump
I wish the weekends would last forever. Alas (or should I say, “Blimey!”), it’s Monday again.
I wonder where Desert O is now and what he’s seeing on the Appalachian Trail. I hope he wasn’t adversely affected by the strong winds that blew through here yesterday. I suppose the rest of us who aren’t on the AT should try to make peace with the fact that today’s scenery consists of cubicle walls, not trails, trees, and chirping birds.
Hope your Monday is full of happiness, despite it’s Mondayness.
Posted in Ponderings/Musings, Quotes | Print | No Comments »
May 7, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
“The more you recognize and express gratitude for the things you have, the more things you will have to express gratitude for.” ~ Zig Ziglar
We notice what we focus on and we seek evidence to support our beliefs. If we (unconsciously) ask ourselves, “what’s wrong with people and the world,” we’ll search for examples to answer the question. Similarly, if we ask ourselves, “What’s great about life? What should I be grateful for?” we find very different answers.
There is much, too much, that needs fixing in the world, but while we keep an eye toward making conditions better for all the world’s inhabitants, we can also remember all the blessings for which we should feel joyous. We become accustomed to our circumstances and environment. What we live every day seems normal and blends into the background of our consciousness.
Much of practicing gratitude is considering our world without that which we love. Sometimes we become automatons and need an external reminder, an event that forces us to look outside of our inner world and routine. Through comparison to others, we are jolted out of sleepiness and staleness, and are reminded of our fortune and all that we treasure.
While downward comparisons can serve to open our eyes, we must use caution in measuring our lives by the conditions of others as we run the risk of setting our expectations inappropriately. We may feel more grateful for our small home after seeing a homeless person, but considerably less so when we visit the grander home of a colleague or friend. To experience gratitude, we must manage the delicate balance between acknowledging that there are always those who are doing “better” and those who are doing “worse.” We must assign the appropriate value to our circumstances, focusing on what we love most in our lives and not obsessing about what’s missing, particularly when we have contrived something “missing” that would never really serve us anyway.
As we make gratitude a conscious practice and habit, we need downward comparisons less as a reference point. We find gratitude intrinsically; that is, we notice what we love in isolation of other markers or references.
There is another challenge is practicing gratitude: to make it a habit in a way that keeps the experience fresh and conscious, but without making us complacent or lazy about what we have and where we are. Being grateful does not excuse us from being social activists. Being grateful does not negate our continued struggle to improve ourselves and the world around us.
At the risk of becoming like the Alec Baldwin character from an episode of “Friends,” not necessarily in any order, here is my very short and incomplete gratitude list for today:
What’s your list?
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May 6, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
North Carolina is holding it’s primary today. It seems like it took forever for this particular election day to arrive. I want to keep this post positive so I won’t say much except that, I harbor no positive feelings for anyone in the current administration and have felt frustrated for a long time with the shenanigans that we have let them get away with. I would love to see many of them locked behind bars until their skeletons turn to dust. I’ll stop there.
When I cast my vote a few minutes ago, I felt a little choked up. For one, when I vote, I feel lucky that I have some reasonable certainty that my vote will be counted (at least in this election). On the Likert scale, I’d choose “I agree somewhat.” In the 90s I would have chosen “strongly agree,” but we all know the awful stories and all about the cronies who control the machines.
The other reason, the primary one (so to speak) why I felt a little tickle in my throat is that when I pushed the “cast ballot” button, I voted for a change, a change for which our country has long awaited. I’m hopeful once again. With Obama, there is a prospect of a president who is still close to his ideals, who hasn’t been in Washington long enough to be ruined by the tit-for-tat game of politics, compromising his fundamental beliefs and selling out on one count to get his way on something else.
Maybe I’m wrong and Obama isn’t all he promises, but from where I stand now, I see a man who is intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, and values the people and the future of this country. I believe that he will make decisions that have nothing to do with growing his own purse, that he won’t be in Washington because he has an ego bigger than the state of Texas. It will be refreshing to have a president who has integrity, who refused to participate in the mud-slinging, who is so good that he could be elected for who he is and what he stands for, instead of lifting himself up only by pushing others down through lies and spin and hatefulness.
There will be a lot of pressure on Obama. He will inherit a costly war that seems to have no desirable way out, an economy is that is floundering by many counts, a staggering national debt, a country with a lot of corporate welfare and comparatively little social welfare, an agenda to reform the health care industry, and damaged foreign relations. He has his work cut out for him. Obama will succeed though, better than maybe anyone else could. His ego will not blind him the way it does others. He will be open to diverse opinions and will be able to make informed choices instead of operating in a tightly-controlled, single-focused, top-down hierarchy of secret agendas where only “facts” that concur are discussed. Obama won’t have to wait on creating green policies while he rearranges his stock portfolio. Obama won’t have to disguise pro-pollution laws in environmentally-friendly names.
Obama’s election campaign showed us his cool-headed poise and grace, his ability to think quickly on his feet and respond eloquently when he had no scripts to tell him what to say. The only controversies with Obama were contrived and hollow. For the voters who couldn’t see through them, Obama responded with characteristic dignity and brilliance.
Obama’s agenda will be what is best for our country as a whole. Perhaps he will help re-create a country that we’ll be proud to pass to future generations.
That is what I see in Obama and that is why I am hopeful today.
Posted in Inspiration, Ponderings/Musings, Charlotte | Print | 1 Comment »
May 3, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
So how do you pass the time while you’re listening to the Orioles game? There are lots of fine ways. For example, one could turn on the Bluetooth headset and listen to the game while accomplishing some of the numerous tasks on the “to-do” list. One could knock out the apple muffins and banana bread, or make scones and chocolate chip cookies, or attend to the laundry. One might even attend to the stack of papers that need filing, or finally complete the odious, oft-avoided chore of mopping the kitchen floor. All of these would be very useful ways to spend a couple of guilt-free hours while having the pleasure of listening to Joe Angel describe the play-by-play of one’s favorite team.
Or…
One could become utterly fascinated with the dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail and spend hours trying to document it using the terrain map on Google maps. As some of you may follow the Desert O’s blog, Weaver’s Tantrum, you may know that he is hiking the AT at this very moment. It’s long been a dream of mine too. I met a woman once who had just returned from hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (alone) with a foot injury. She hiked the entire thing, downing bottles of ibuprofen to get through the pain over the six months it took to complete the distance. At the stops in towns, she would polish off gallons of ice cream. I met her at a party and was so fascinated that I couldn’t bring myself to follow party etiquette to mingle with other people or let her mingle with other people. I couldn’t stop asking her questions about the training involved and what the experience was like. She was my instant hero and I added the Pacific Crest Trail to my “life to-do” list that night. But you know how life is. You realize that some dreams, like owning my own farm, and a house in Italy, or being good friends with Oprah or Brooks Robinson will likely never come to pass. Some dreams are just too big for a little gal like myself to realize.
Now, after reading Desert O’s blog, I find that my dream to hike the AT is resurfacing. I’m determined to hike the Grand Canyon from rim to rim. Maybe next year. My husband refuses to buy into my craziness and has promised the most he’ll do is meet me at the other side with cookies. However, hiking the AT I’ve tried to put out of my mind. It’s one thing to wear yourself out and deal with short-term misery of a couple of days hike, but to take time off work and be uncomfortable, cold, and hungry for months at a time, is quite a different question of stamina and endurance. After reading Bill Bryson’s book, “A Walk in the Woods,” I tried to tell myself that a hike like the AT wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway. Yet, now I’m finding it hard to convince myself again that I’m not intrigued.
So I have already wasted a couple of days following the Appalachian Trail where it’s marked on Google, creating my own map, tracing the trail with placemarkers, researching on the Internet to find more maps to explain what happens to the trail after the Davenport Gap shelter near Highway 40, where the trail seems to end abruptly, and remembering all the other places I still want to visit here. Numerous places I’ve heard nice things about: Hiawassee, Georgia, Mount Rogers, Virginia, and for once, to time a visit to crisp Roan Mountain, Tennessee when the rhododendrons are actually in bloom.
I’m behind in my chores again, and the stack of magazines and books refuses to get any smaller, but what a rich, wonderful life I have. Times like this, I wish I could find the fountain of youth so that I could see and do all the things on my long, long list. The short hikes, I know I’ll get to one day. And for now, I’ll have to settle for doing weekend hikes and reading and thinking about Desert O’s adventures. He needs a trail name. Consider visiting his blog and making a suggestion. I think it should be an Oriole name.
I’ll keep dreaming and maybe it won’t happen for me, but I’ve already picked out my trail name. I don’t want to give it away but it has something to do with an outstanding fielder whose name conjures up images of peaceful mountain streams. Who knows? Maybe one day you’ll be reading my adventures of hiking the AT that hopefully with have nothing to do with bears, starvation, or frost-bite, but will include copious amounts of ice cream, and peaceful mind-clearing days.
(Hey if I can believe the Orioles are going to the World Series this year, I can convince myself of anything. And yes, I know that just because you believe something, it doesn’t make it true.)
Posted in Gratitude | Print | No Comments »
March 19, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
I’m being harassed by my company. They’re not intending to harass me, mind you, I just happen to be a the unfortunate victim of my husband’s bright mind. (All good things come with a trade-off.)
Last night, I was having a rare, blissful night of deep sleep. Apparently, my snoring and dreaming was displeasing in the sight of the Sleep Gods. I was jolted out of a dream by a very loud ringing sound coming from the general area of the phone. When I looked at the clock, it was 3:24. I picked up the phone, not knowing what to expect, and managed to utter something not quite resembling a greeting but considerably friendlier than what I wanted to say. The voice on the other end was cheery, bright, and asked to speak to my husband, who seems to be the only intelligent employee who understands one of our systems. The third party support team who should understand it, and is paid to understand it, sure as hell doesn’t. So they call on Friday nights, and at 3:24 in the morning, and even again this evening for two hours.
The kicker is that the “problem” the “support team” needed help with is the very same one my husband troubleshooted with them a week ago, so should have known how to fix.
I’m not complaining that my husband doesn’t get overtime or any sort of extra compensation for the off-hours help. I would just prefer it if the “support team” scheduled their 3 am calls around my insomnial nights. Is that so much to ask?
As I wander off to bed, I wonder if I will again find myself answering the phone tonight at some unspeakable hour, involuntarily muttering, “I can’t believe it” as I pass the phone over to my husband.
What are the rules around restraining orders?
Posted in Mad Ravings | Print | No Comments »