Spontaneous Musings

Ah the countdown to Y3 begins, which I'm not doing. So this daily log is ending at Y/D365. After D365, we're going back to our previously scheduled programming on this journal - which is basically me posting whenever and whatever I please. It could be anything really. It's not all that different than what I'm doing now - just not necessarily every day.

Good news? BYT approved my vacation day for Wednesday. So, I get my birthday off at least. Also got the Addendum out. (I had to fight to get the thing out - with BB and BYT's help. We were having fun with charts today - we work for a state agency and they are not only very bureaucratic, but also insanely disorganized, with poor tracking systems, and constant charts tracking things...which no one can make heads or tails of. This in a nutshell is why pure socialism is a bad idea. If you think the government is better at running things than corporations? You'd be wrong. It's kind of a toss-up honestly, I'm not sure which is worse half the time.)

[Mother felt the need to tell me that my brother came down into the city on Sunday to visit friends - it was a party of sorts, and the restaurant was more crowded than they anticipated - although the vaccine requirement was in effect. They stayed the night in a hotel - and went home the next morning. I'm very glad I can experience NYC without spending money on a hotel. Hotel's are bloody expensive in this city. Mother likes to gossip.]

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We discussed West Side Story at work today. Mel agreed with me, and was very pleased that I had the same take on the film that she and her husband did (he's Latino). Which was the 1961 film was the better adaptation.
Waiting to get Gabe's take.

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Chidi had mixed feelings about Batman. He told me I might like it better than he did and should see it in the theater - since it's beautifully shot. I decided to wait for it to come out on HBO Max - it's too violent, and I'd rather not watch a dark, violent action movie at the moment on a big screen. My first movie theater post-Omnicron is calling to be Doctor Strange and the Multi-Verse of Madness, I think.

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Plodding away on my revisions of my 800 page novel. We'll see where it goes. Or if I continue. The scarf that I'm knitting doesn't look too bad. Although I think my counting got off somewhere in there.

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I looked at the news, it's depressing. Wales feels the need to keep me apprised of the nastiness in the news. She's worse than my mother, who has actually gotten better now that my father is in the long-term facility more or less permanently. (Alzhiemer's is a horrible disease, there is no cure, and all you can do is make the person as comfortable as possible. Mother can't take care of him - hence the long-care facility.)

Regarding the Ukraine. I live in NYC, we have a lot of Ukrainian immigrants in NYC. At the company that I worked for prior to crazy org - aka the video game company, I was seated next to a woman who had immigrated from the Ukraine. She was lovely and kind, and we had long conversations about her homeland - and why she left. Also how Russia had destroyed it prior to the Ukraine finally claiming its independence - this was in the early 00s.

Anyhow...Crazy Org asked for medical supplies - but it was the agency in Manhattan that was requesting them (Transit), so I couldn't do anything.

Here's an interesting article I found via Twitter on the Ilya Kaminisky on Ukrainan, Russian, and the Language of War

A crowd, including local media, was gathered around Boris as he spoke out against the bombings, against yet another fake humanitarian aid campaign of Putin’s. Some clapped; others shook their heads in disapproval. A few months later, the doors, floors, and windows of Boris’s apartment were blown up.

There are many stories like this. They’re often shared in short, hurried sentences, and then the subject is changed abruptly.

“Truthful war books,” Orwell wrote, “are never acceptable to non-combatants.”

When Americans ask about recent events in Ukraine, I think of these lines from Boris’s poem:

people carry explosives around the city
in plastic shopping bags and little suitcases.

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Over the last twenty years, Ukraine has been governed by both the Russian-speaking East and the Ukrainian-speaking West. The government periodically uses “the language issue” to incite conflict and violence, an effective distraction from the real problems at hand. The most recent conflict arose in response to the inadequate policies of President Yanukovych, who has since escaped to Russia. Yanukovych was universally acknowledged as the most corrupt president the country has ever known (he’d been charged with rape and assault, among other things, all the way back to Soviet times). However, these days, Ukraine’s new government continues to include oligarchs and professional politicians with shrewd pedigrees and questionable motivations.

( continuation of lengthy excerpt on the Ukraine, Language, and Poetry... )

*****

Thunderstorm. Lightening. Hard rain. Wind. And the smell of the tropics.
Yet, it is winter in NYC. However, it smells like Florida at the moment.
I like the smell of rain, particularly warm rain.

Been quick to tears of late. Very weepy. Not sure why. Most likely menopause.

NYC has decided to lift the vaccine and mask mandates in restaurants, and indoor establishments - dammit. Just when I was getting up the courage to see a movie or a Broadway show, or go out to eat. The Mayor thinks this will encourage a return to normalcy and more people will go out to eat, etc. (Uhm no.)

Mother tells me that my brother feels the same way that I do. That he doesn't want to travel either.

Me: And yet he is.
Mother: Well, yes and no. He is coming down to help me, and he did travel into the city by train to see friends, and they'll go out in June to pick up their daughter from the UK, but no plans to do anything over there.
Me: Meanwhile I've not been anywhere but my workplace and back, and well Hilton Head in December, and Valatie, NY in July, but not sure that counts.

The worst bit? Mother is scared to go to church. It has no restrictions, no vaccine mandates, no masks, people can do whatever they want. And she can't afford to get COVID or get sick for that matter - she has teeth and knee surgery coming up, plus is visiting my father. Getting sick in December - scared her. And she got sick because of her stupid church. It scared both of us. [Bad Catholics. Bad.]

I've decided her Catholic Church is being very bad. (I was raised Catholic even though I am Unitarian Universalist). It's not being a good Christian or Catholic denomination. It's selfish. Instead of putting public health, the health of the community, the elderly, and others first - it's putting its own greed and convenience first.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Universe aka God would still "smite" bad people and organizations? Like in the old testament stories? You don't wear masks and don't get vaccinated and infect someone with COVID? SMITE! SMITE! Or you preach Putin was right to go to war with the Ukraine? SMITE! SMITE! Or you allow idiots to wander about your church without masks or vaccination? SMITE! SMITE!

Of course we'd probably all be dead, but still.

[Note I don't believe that God ever smited things, or any of that biblical stuff, I'm joking. I think the Bible is mostly a work of fiction or mythology. I don't take it that seriously. ]

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Eh, here...have a picture:

Just found this US Court Decision posted by Lawyers for Good Government on FB. It's inspiring.

Our country has a long and ignominious history of discriminating against our most
vulnerable and powerless. We have an equally long history, however, of brave
individuals—Dred Scott, Fred Korematsu, Linda Brown, Mildred and Richard Loving,
Edie Windsor, and Jim Obergefell, to name just a few—who refused to accept quietly the
injustices that were perpetuated against them. It is unsurprising, of course, that the burden
of confronting and remedying injustice falls on the shoulders of the oppressed. These
individuals looked to the federal courts to vindicate their claims to human dignity, but as
the names listed above make clear, the judiciary’s response has been decidedly mixed.
Today, G.G. adds his name to the list of plaintiffs whose struggle for justice has been delayed and rebuffed; as Dr. King reminded us, however, “the arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends toward justice.” G.G.’s journey is delayed but not finished.

G.G.’s case is about much more than bathrooms. It’s about a boy asking his school
to treat him just like any other boy. It’s about protecting the rights of transgender people
in public spaces and not forcing them to exist on the margins. It’s about governmental validation of the existence and experiences of transgender people, as well
as the simple recognition of their humanity. His case is part of a larger movement that is redefining and broadening the scope of civil and human rights so that they extend to a vulnerable group that has traditionally been unrecognized, unrepresented, and unprotected.

G.G.’s plight has shown us the inequities that arise when the government organizes
society by outdated constructs like biological sex and gender. Fortunately, the law
eventually catches up to the lived facts of people; indeed, the record shows that the
4 Commonwealth of Virginia has now recorded a birth certificate for G.G. that designates
his sex as male.

G.G.’s lawsuit also has demonstrated that some entities will not protect the rights of
others unless compelled to do so. Today, hatred, intolerance, and discrimination persist —
and are sometimes even promoted — but by challenging unjust policies rooted in invidious
discrimination, G.G. takes his place among other modern-day human rights leaders who
strive to ensure that, one day, equality will prevail, and that the core dignity of every one
of our brothers and sisters is respected by lawmakers and others who wield power over
their lives. G.G. is and will be famous, and justifiably so. But he is not “famous” in the hollowed-out Hollywood sense of the term. He is famous for the reasons celebrated by the
renowned Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shehab Nye, in her extraordinary poem.Despite his youth and the formidable power of those arrayed against him at every stage of these proceedings, “[he] never forgot what [he] could do.”

And it ends with a beautiful poem by Palestine-American Poet Naomi Shehab Nye, entitled "Famous".

N. S. Nye, Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

1. Been having troubles falling asleep lately...and this poem which I read today more or less explains the problem in a nutshell. Busy brain.

Night Light by Kate Barnes

Lying in bed in the pitch black, a little breathing underlies my own;
It is my dog on the floor; we are both alive here.
And I struggle with the old illusion; there is something else in the room,
A story in the darkness – if I wake up I can write it down.
It is the light of the purple grape, the deep glowing light
That emanates from my black horse’s flank, the knee-length, straight,
Shiny black hair of the round-faced girl in Sonora
Dancing with her groom at the fiesta while all the aunts sat and smiled;
Or it is the telephone pole with Black Beauty stamped on it, or the thin black dog
Named Ink spot, or the one sleek all-black cow with black horns –
In the herd of Holsteins always a silhouette; it is the screaming games
Of murder in the dark house, the quick uncertain kiss in the pantry, the running feet;
They are all here in the darkness with me, they crowd me with their light.

2. While this poem by W. H. Auden really addresses something I've been pondering lately. When we have fights online or off with folks, rather they be about politics, religion or just a tv series...I think we don't always know the story behind it. And the difficulty with science, particularly the so-called soft sciences, or at least that's what they were called when I was in school, psychology, sociology and anthropology - is they based a great deal on observation and observation like it or not is not entirely objective, and the assumptions and generalizations we make regarding those observations are often wrong. We never know all the information. And I think we have a tendency to project our own views onto it or own perspective, when half the time - it's completely off. This poem in a way expresses that.

At Last the Secret is Out by W.H.Auden

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.