taking comfort in kittens

after a wonderfully hectic week last week, involving being onboard four different ships and some very late nights, i've succumbed to a summer cold. the weather has deteriorated from glorious summer sunshine to dreary rain in tempo with my health. i have the comfort of kittens. and what a comfort they are. i'm utterly depressed and rendered speechless by the latest shooting in orlando and the vitriol of the fundamentalists and bigots of the world (all of whom seem to be filling my facebook feed). not even instagram was safe ground as my own nephew shared a worryingly pro-gun, pro-trump post. i wonder if he even knows what he's saying? or if he's parroting the society around him? it's all too depressing, so i retreat to the comfort of kittens and cups of tea and chicken soup with kale from the garden. and i wish that it would all go away - the terror, the bigotry, the hatred, the guns, the rain and this cold.

a little assemblage of thoughts on the tragic events in paris

the tragic events in paris at charlie hebdo are on my mind, like they surely are for you as well. i'd frankly never heard of the magazine before, but my french is pretty weak, so it's no wonder. i have great affection for biting satire that forces you to think deeper and from what i've seen and read, they produce a newspaper in that vein. it is a horrible tragedy that they were slaughtered for doing so by people who didn't agree with their views and methods. it's so horrible that i think on some level i can't even really fathom it. it seems quite unreal, even in the face of graphic videos shot by bystanders. so it's taken me a few days to begin to collect my thoughts enough to write something about it. but i have been reading a lot of articles about it in a variety of places, from the nytimes to the guardian to danish newspapers to a friend's blog. that blog is probably the best, most sensible piece i've read.

i find it exceptionally disheartening what the tragedy seems to have done to people. i see it in my facebook feed, but i'm also reading it in the various opinion pieces online. it's not only the blood and gore of it, but how it has turned on a hatred of an entire religion, based on the actions of a few fanatics. my facebook feed is full of people calling for closing denmark's borders and sending home syrian refugees, calls to withdraw all resources from programs which help people in need who happen to be muslim. there is a mass reaction that is very black & white, very unnuanced and which, in my view, contains as much hate as those men with the guns must have felt on wednesday. it's a similar kind of reactionary fanaticism.  and it's tinged with more than a little racism and xenophobia. and to me, it means that the terrorists have won beyond their wildest imagination. if they can make us fear and hate at the same level as they do, they have reduced us.

i am heartened to see pockets of rationality and sense here and there. twitter is our barometer these days and like in australia, where a supportive hashtag surfaced, saying #illridewithyou, after the lunatic held all those hostages in the lindt café, there seems to be a groundswell of folks rallying around the policeman they so brutally shot, saying #jesuisahmed, rather than #jusuischarlie, which carries with it a more radical connotation.

it is hard to see what good can possibly come of this, but i do hope that we are able to take up a discussion which allows us to discuss the nuances and actually begin to address the problems that underlie these things...like the imbalance of resources in this world, the imperialist notions of those in the west, so sure of our own superiority, like getting education to women and the young populations of the muslim countries, so that they can see that they have options other than violence. rather than saying we need to send all of the foreigners home, maybe we should make them more welcome around here. it's much harder for people to hate and kill when they are your friends.

we're not a tribe anymore

they're apparently celebrating on the streets of kosovo. it seems after much lobbying of facebook "officials," they are now officially a country. on facebook. ironically, this makes me wonder if we are witnessing the beginning of the end of countries and nations as we know them. what's next, will countries send ambassadors to facebook and google? and perhaps apple and microsoft while they're at it? maybe coca-cola (just so they're not all tech companies) and disney? just because some wing nut who probably couldn't find kosovo on a map changed a bit of code in the backend of facebook, kosovo now feels legitimized. who cares if the united nations and the european union don't agree? facebook likes us! we're not a tribe anymore.

the next thing you know, they'll be opening starbucks in denmark...

simplicity

in an increasingly complex world, i feel an increasing longing for simplicity. there's so much information, so much strife, so much shouting (see the american elections or any american sitcom). so much people being hard on themselves and others. so much scheming, so much unnecessary bad energy. so much anger, so much arrogance. so much filling the calendar and planning and so many deadlines. it makes a person despair a little bit sometimes.

can't we just simplify things? laugh instead of shout? smile instead of frown? relax instead of being tense? go back to basics? nurture a tree in a windowsill. can some pears. pick raspberries in the rain. make some raspberry jam. stop by the bakery for some pastry on the way to the meeting. visit a friend out of the blue, unannounced. snuggle up with a cat.

do something small today. something simple. just imagine if we all did it? it just might help.

in which she frets about the state of the world

i love to read newspapers and follow what's going on in the world (tho' somehow i managed to completely miss today's solar eclipse). but i'll also admit that the stories begin to blur together...another pakistani politician is murdered by his own guards, another african dictator that lost an election and won't step down, another american sentor caught soliciting sex. you start to wonder if it's even possible for the world to be any different. or if anything will ever be ok again (which, i realize, begs the question of whether it was ever ok in the first place).

and i find myself wondering when it began to go wrong. can we blame the advent of the motion picture? or the two world wars in the last century? was it mccarthyism? or communism? christianity? islam? hollywood? reality t.v.? or is it just people and all of their human frailty?

i think it has something to do with individualism. with being out for ourselves and losing any view of what might be for the common good. or common sense. the proliferation of legisation of things that used to be common sense...like how large a stall you should provide for your horse or how many horses you should have (just to name a couple of horse-related ones that are on my brain since we're building stalls)...is a worrying trend, to say the least. we apparently can't be trusted to think for ourselves anymore, since we only think of ourselves.

what will be next? our employers telling us how to raise our children?

where is dostoevsky when you need him?

this morning, while i was getting ready, i flipped on CNN. it's what i do when i'm in a hotel. this morning, it was all chilean mine rescue, all the time. i watched the third guy coming up out of the hole and being released from his little cage, which is dubbed the fenix, i guess to signify rebirth. and it was a birth of sorts, as he came up the long canal into the light of the world again, to the waiting arms of his wife. and it was a touching moment.

but the endless analysis and gushing and hype by the newscasters was simply too much. they showed a psychological "expert," who, sounding no more authoritative than a random person on the street, exclaimed in completely general terms, about how psychologically difficult it would be for them. the CNN reporter simply exclaimed along with her, not asking any deeper questions to elicit a more meaty expert response. but perhaps she knew she didn't have an expert on her hands at all. what i fear is that she didn't know that. she simply thought it was her role to play sentimental drama queen together with this woman on camera, as they breathlessly watched footage of the first three miners hugging their families. it's a pity, as i think the psychological aspects of this experience on the miners must be fascinating.

the job behind this rescue is a big one and it is an amazing story. i was a little surprised that the strongest were brought up first. i'd have thought they'd bring up the ones most in need of medical attention, but maybe it made for better television that the first men stepped out, smiling and looking surprisingly robust in their trendy sunglasses (for eye protection since they'd been away from the light for 2 long months and undoubtedly donated by oakley or ray ban or some such company).

i wonder if, thanks to the instant transmission of information and the way that news is covered completely while it's happening, rather than waiting for it to happen, we have lost our ability to know what the story actually is. if we're developing the story on the fly, as it's happening, there's nothing reflective it and no opportunity to draw deeper meaning, or get at the essence of the story.

dostoevsky developed the brothers karamazov on the fly. he published it under great duress and financial pressure, as well as time pressure, in weekly installments, plotting it as he frantically wrote. but sadly, it seems that there are few dostoevskys out there today, and so we watch stories unfold on television...