Time Touches All

There's a news story out that Fidel Castro has temporarily relinquished power, for the first time since taking it in 1959, all because he is about to undergo a major surgical procedure. He's just this side of 80, still a spring chicken by geriatric standards, but the carrion are circling in anticipation of feasting on his bones. A recent film romanticizes his youth, but the U.S. media continue to villify him and present him as a monster. Whatever the truth of the matter, he has certainly demonstrated the ability to evoke response. No one who enters his orbit can ignore him, and few who hear of him do so either. What is amazing to me is that this man who so epitomizes charisma has outlived every American of his generation who might have been characterized as charismatic as well. There's something awe-inspiring about enduring, surviving and thriving, and outlasting one's critics. Still, like Mount Rushmore, Castro is beginning to show the wear and tear of time. No one wins that clash, and that in its own way is a good thing.

Health Bulletin Heading

Proof positive that weight loss is/may be detrimental to one's health and well-being:

A premature announcement from an initial study suggests that weight loss in older women is a sign of incipient dementia. Gotta tell ya: if a woman is losing weight, willfully or otherwise, you don't want to stand in her way. There's a distinct sense of pms around women who are midstream on a diet. If, indeed, initial evidence suggests that loss of weight is a sign of dementia, I don't find that to be a newsflash. The only real newsflash is that some moronic male considers it news at all. Anyone being deprived of adequate sustenance, oral gratification, (or any other kind, for that matter,) is going to be cranky. Gender is irrelevant; sex is the issue. When one gets hungry, one gets hungry, and denial... by anyone... is unacceptable. Of course you're gonna lose your mind!

Monkey See

I guess if it's okay for one country to bomb the heck out of another, it should be okay for another country to do the same, especially if they share people, financial interests, and nominal complaints. After all, it's the patriotic stance when one's leadership feels the need to look like it actually cares about what has happened to a conspicuous (read, been seen on mass media) segment of its population.

Perhaps I've been reading too much Lois MacMasters Bujold lately. Now there's a writer who's not afraid to use multisyllabic words and argue multiple viewpoints on contemporary controversies amongst her characters, all while retaining a light, humorous touch and rapid-fire pacing. She argues against war while modeling patriotic heroism, feminism featuring decidedly male heroes, theism in the mouths of acclaimed agnostics. Oh yes, and she touches on economics, class, culture, education, influence, biology, technology, bureaucracy, etc.

So bombs away! I've got a good book with which to sit this one out as well...

Gotta get off this darned fence someday... but not today...

Telephone Buzz

My ear's been affixed to my piece
But finally I've a moment of release
Playing phone tag all day long
Wears down a will that started out strong
Talking to disembodied voices
Eventually seems like just more noises
Battering my fragile, overcaffeinated head
Making me long for my abandoned bed
Talk is cheap, demanding dead trees' sacrifice
As the only action that will suffice
To substantiate all that chatter
Making hot air really matter

Change of Pace

Thoughts have filled my mind, then slipped away again
Eluding alike keyboard and pen
I need to switch gears now that I'm back here
Juggle who's in charge, what's far and what's near
Time zones differ by quite a bit
Temperatures too, making me feel more fit
Time to sort illusion from truth
Time to admit I'm no longer in my youth
But old age hasn't caught me either, I'm sure
I just need less coffee and more water that's pure
I have to ignore the joints that ache
For my own and everyone else's sake
Time once again to take charge of my kitchen
And end all that needless restaurant-related twitchin'
Cooking's a sport, just like any other
Not just domestic, restricted to Mother
It's chemistry and physics applied just right
That can leave you hungry or make your pants feel tight
Time to take charge and improve the cash flow
To make use of paid tuition and all I'm supposed to know
Wash the car, weed the yard, cut the grass, make things grow
Because while I was gone, someone let everything go.

Time to change the pace of things
Time to get moving with a new set of wings.

Home Again Home Again

Home Again Home Again
2 July 2006

Traveling from home to home is a time warping experience for me. Roles flip as completely as the weather, and I go from being in charge and all wet (in more ways than one) to cosseted and coddled, and who am I to complain? Max and JJ make me feel so welcome, so missed, so loved, so needed and kneaded. It’s a less desperate neediness, more pleasant because it seems less urgent. What does that say?

Tomorrow the Boyz will speak for themselves once again, but today I celebrate my much missed and freshly renewed Internet access. It’s hard to believe that a short decade ago this was all still fairly novel, primarily the province of governmental and educational institutions. Now, it’s an integral part of much of contemporary society, at least in this neck of the woods.

Woods – that’s where I think I’ve been; lost in some frontier space where things are still done manually, mechanically, or not at all. We nearly lost a little one in the weeds in the backyard, debated whether or not George Washington had the right idea about chopping down a tree, tried to define the difference between a weed and a tree,  buried the front yard in plastic bags filled with the waste that was once the backyard.

The birds of paradise are blooming. I raided them twice in one month for visits to Mom, would have done so a third time had I not run out of time. The blooms still linger, fertilized by the rodents now rotting silently in shallow graves beneath the tropical awning. The neighbors watch in wonder, puzzled by the seeming ease with which life thrives amidst the wilderness that is the homestead yard. Neighborhood cats prowl in answer to some silent siren call beneath the sagging floorboards. Life and death tango amidst the tangled brush, but I cannot linger. I have my own menagerie to which to attend.

Duh!

Rocket scientist I am not; it only took me two weeks to figure out why my laptop didn't want to talk to the local cable feed. I plead heat exhaustion. Yes, Hawaii is Paradise; who needs to be able to think clearly in Paradise where everything is easy at hand?

The world spins by in all its angst, but do I care? Not I? I am in a world of my own, clearly out of touch, both here and there. You may call me a here-and-thereian, but the truth of the matter is that I am neither here nor there. If this makes no sense, then welcome to my world.

I hear Canada has survived a terrorist threat. Indonesia has survived a devastating tsunami and volcanic eruptions? Okay, not everyone survived - and that's sad, or would seem more so were I not so overwhelmed by torpor.

The Mavs and Heat are two first-timers in the NBA playoffs, though each has warriors already ringed. Do I care? Not since I have no access to a television, much as I have enjoyed the occasional glimpses I have caught.

There was a fierce soccer battle between Sweden and Trinidad? I wish I might have seen more, for it seemed to be a battle of titans. Ah well...

Now, at last, I have figured out how to sustain my Internet access for more than a few paltry moments, and what am I doing? Squandering valuable time recounting banal trivia even I do not care much about. Ah well...

This heat!

Hm... maybe I should turn on the fan in my room...

Missing My Boyz

3 June 2006

Four nights have passed since I last saw my Boyz. I wonder if they miss me. How does one concentrate when far from home? Just do the job as expeditiously and efficiently as possible, I guess, and quit wasting time online... ;->

Lewis Carroll said that the "sun was shining on the sea, shining with all her might," and that's just what she's doing, though how a neuter object often referred to in the masculine picked up a feminine pronoun is beyond me, I'm sure... It's blazing hot here, crisping my skin and certainly causing physiological reactions that will displease my general practitioner if she ever gets wind of it.

Wind: I wouldn't mind more wind right now. A good trade wind is just what we need, and what we don't seem to be able to sustain, thanks to the concrete blockage everywhere here. The wind was kicking up back in the Bay Area as I was leaving, bad stuff for the incipient fire season, but just what would really benefit these subtropical islands right about now. Auwe!

Of course, if my Boyz were here, we wouldn't be cuddling; we'd be looking for and fighting over shade. Still, I miss them very much. (There, I've circled back to my starting point, for what it's worth.)

Caffeine Addict

I've tried to kick the habit that I so successfully avoided until I was in my mid-thirties, but temptation once indulged does not easily turn away again. I'm not willing to blame society or the current state of the economy for my weakness, for I'm the one who keeps going back to the stuff when I crave its smell and taste. Curiously, my addiction is despite the way it makes me feel, rather than because of its beneficial boost, except, of course, on days like today. Today I felt the need for any boost I could get, any way I could get it.

After all, what's a little caffeine drip, fed intravenously or otherwise? It's legal, even though it frequently comes from South of the Border or from other maligned agricultural areas of the world. It only adversely affects half the population that drinks it, the other half being unaffected by it, according to the most recent scientific study. Of course, my chances of being in that latter category are right up there with my chance of winning any pool besides a jury pool...

Eh, who wants to live forever? It's the quality, not the quantity of our years that matters, right?

Coffee, please, and keep it coming.

Spin Please

Spin, Please
19 May 2006

Visiting Workers’ Visas: A magnanimous, perhaps overly generous offer to legitimize the widespread and necessary use of neighboring laborers or another sly attempt of the U.S. government to impose Big Brother bureaucracy on a portion of the working population at present elusively untracked, like liquor during Prohibition?

Larry Hughes: An essential cog in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ well-oiled machine, or the one whose absence has served them better than his presence?

Inter-League Games: Valid athletic competition or crowd-pleasing, money-grubbing ploy?

Coaching Changes: The result of incompetence and/or inexperience or scapegoating?

Iraq and Afghanistan: Contemporary battlegrounds for human rights and democracy or pawns in multinational chess games?

Hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other Acts of God: True potential human tragedies or only true media headlines when tech countries or their interests are involved?

I gotta stop listening to this activist music and read the daily comic strips more. No, wait; I stopped reading those because they got too political – I’m beginning to remember…