Culture
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Crisis of Faith
I know, that’s an odd title for a post written by an atheist, isn’t it? But it’s what I feel sometimes. And atheists have faith, too, as much as the next person. I don’t believe in a higher power, but I believe in the human spirit, in beauty and hope and love, in the miracle that is a baby being born, and the devastation that is a loved one lost. Some days, however, I truly should stay the hell away from the newspaper/TV, etc., because the real world has the ability to crush me, casually, as though it doesn’t even care that I exist. The evil that men do to each other…
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Stopping Abuse
I read over on Roc Rebel Granny about blog against abuse day, which was last Thursday. I didn’t read about it in time to do a blog post at the time. Coincidentally, I read about a study which suggests that teens with several close friends, especially same sex friends, are less likely than other teens to be in abusive relationships. Here is the article, in its entirety: Teenage girls who stick close with their circle of friends are less likely to take abuse from the boys they date, a new study suggests. The intricacies of the teen years include more than the physical sprouting and associated zits. Teenagers begin to…
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Why I Heart This American Life…
You may or may not know that I like to download podcasts of a few of my favorite NPR programs, which I then listen to on my beloved iPod while walking Genevieve in the morning. I download three shows from NPR. The first is Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, which makes the people walking past me think I’m insane, because I just start laughing out loud to myself, seemingly at nothing. The second is To The Best of Our Knowledge, which I’ll admit is last in my queue, and sometimes I get to it, and love it, and other times it falls by the wayside. The third show I download…
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Calorie Restriction
A few weeks ago, the Sunday SF Chronicle had an article on people who practice calorie restriction as a way of life. I’m sure you’ve read the hypothesis by now…scientists have found that if they feed lab mice 25% fewer calories than their recommended daily intake, the mice live longer. In people who practice calorie restriction, also consuming 25% fewer calories than their recommended daily intake, the health benefits are evident: lower bad cholesterol, higher good cholesterol, healthier arteries, and lower levels of triglycerides. Other benefits include very low blood sugar levels and a very high response to insulin, indicating a very low risk for diabetes. So, if we take…
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On a wire between will and what will be
Have you ever woken up on a Saturday morning with visions in your head, scenes that tell you exactly how you’ll be spending your afternoon? You lay there, eyes not yet open, and you see a middle aged fat man, dancing in a bunny suit at a Halloween party. You hear the sleazy strip club owner call the failed comic in the alligator suit, “Izod”. You hear Alex calling for her elderly friend…”Hannah…Hannah…”, then the capable older woman bluntly says, “She died….yesterday.” Then you see Alex smoking cigarettes and picking at the threads in the holes of her 501s while Kim Carnes sings “I’ll be here where the heart is”,…
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Tasteless…
Back in December of 2006, a zoo keeper at the San Francisco Zoo was partially mauled during a public feeding of a tiger, a practice at the zoo since the 1940s (the feeding, not the mauling!). She lost the use of one arm, and had severe damage to the other. Updates have been made to the area, so that zookeepers now more safely feed the lions and tigers, and so that the public can safely witness the feedings. With the changes now in place, the area was recently opened to the media, before reopening the area to the public. This small quote, from SFGate: A steel barrier closes the gap…
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September 11
Last year, I participated in the 2996 project, which was an attempt to recognize all of the people who died on September 11, 2001. I was assigned a name, and I did a bit of research, and copied and pasted what I found about Mr. Abad. After that, I felt the need to write something more personal, and since I (happily) didn’t lose anyone that day, I wrote about my thoughts and feelings at the time. I was kind of proud of this post, so I’m repeating it for you today. Edelmiro Abad of Brooklyn at a wedding with his close-knit family: his wife, Lorraine, and in white from left,…
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Happy Labor Day
Summer repeats…this is a post from last Labor Day. Enjoy your long weekend, and take a moment to thank those who worked so hard to get you the day off. 😉 Who Put the Labor in Labor Day? We did, that’s who. When I think of labor day, my mind first thinks of the end of summer…the crisp fall weather on the horizon, the cool weather clothes, school starting up again, the return of the good TV shows… Then there are the Labor Day celebrations…one last bbq of summer, maybe a trip to the beach, the lake, or the shore… For some people it is a chance to get caught…
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What’s in a name?
I was shocked, SHOCKED I’ll tell you, to read over at Bite My Cookie that she does not consider herself a feminist. She said she wouldn’t make a good feminist, because her husband is the breadwinner, while she is at home with the kids, and cooking up an idea for a cookie business, which will be funded at first from money saved from her husband’s job. So, because she loves her husband, she needs him, and doesn’t want to do away with him and do it all on her own, she doesn’t think she would make a good feminist. She’s smart, articulate, well educated, strong willed, opinionated, loving, entrepenurial, motivated…
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A.T.&T. SUCKS HOLE
Why, you may ask? Because they lie. Maybe a month or two ago, we received a stupid sales call from AT&T, wanting us to migrate our internet over from a cable modem to their DSL line. They claimed it was just as good, for half the price. Just try it, you’ll like it, and if you don’t, there’s no penalty, just send the DSL box back, and they’ll remove any charges, no harm done. OK, we decided to give it a shot. The box came, we hooked it up, and you know what? IT SUCKED. SLOW like molasses. We took one look at that, and decided, never mind, let’s stick…
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Mawige*…
A random train of thought that started out with me thinking about my new glasses went on to my contact lenses, and somehow derailed into coworkers from 15 years ago, and then took a surprising turn and ended up with me thinking about divorce. Specifically, I was thinking about this coworker of mine way back in the early 90s, an older guy who was on his 4th or 5th marriage. He met this woman, fell in love with her, and they zoomed up to Tahoe to get married, post haste. Those of us who were a bit younger thought that was kind of strange…what’s the big rush? His reasoning, though,…
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Blonde Jokes
Way back when I was 16, I worked first as a hostess, and then as a waitress, at the local Mr. Steak. I worked there for about 2 years. The first year I was there, the owner had a Christmas party at his house, and there were awards given for the person deemed to be the most this, best that, whatever. Guess who was the only blonde working there? Me. Guess who was voted ‘biggest airhead’? That’s right, me. The blonde. The blonde who was working and going to school and getting decent grades and had plenty of brains AND common sense, thank you very much. That really, really hurt,…
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Six Degrees of….nothing really
I was watching Sex and the City the other night, and I was remembering the first time I saw Kristin Davis, aka Charlotte York…which would be on Melrose Place, where she played the ill-fated and psychotic Brooke, who married Billy, who was played by Andrew Shue, who was the brother of Elizabeth Shue, who was pretty darned good in Adventures in Babysitting and Leaving Las Vegas, which are two movies that are about as different as they could possibly be. But I first saw her in one of the lamest movies EVER, Cocktail, in which she played Tom Cruise’s idiot girlfriend/wife. Idiot because she loves Tom Cruise, really, who I…
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Leonardo…
Yesterday, I was roped into driving on a field trip to Sacramento, to the AeroSpace museum, which is located at the former McClellan AFB. They are currently hosting an exhibit called The DaVinci Experience. It was pretty cool…they started out with a short video of DaVinci’s life, telling about his genius and some of the discoveries that he made. I was a bit concerned, thinking that if I drove an hour and a half at $3.32 a gallon to watch a video, I wasn’t going to be happy. Esp since I saw gas for sale in Sacramento at $2.99 a gallon, which made me madder. Anyway, I got over that…
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Safety
This week was the final week for the PEP program I’ve been teaching at Maya’s school, and the lesson was on health and safety. One of the exercises that we did was to write categories on a flip chart, and have the students (4th and 5th graders) give as many examples of how to be safe within that category as they could think of. The categories were: safey in the home, personal safety, water safety, bicycle safety, outdoor safety, and nutrition and exercise. One thing that struck me when they were brainstorming their answers is, these kids are pretty sure that they or someone they know is going to be…