baratin debordant

No emoticons will appear here. the trouble with blogs.....

i posted yesterday and it did not post. it just kept "posting" with the little dots moving, but nothing ever happened. let's see what happens today.

I think i've solved THE shoe problem for the trip. gotta wear the hikers. No trail running shoes to be found in my size here in St. Louis. And it is too late now to break anything in. So, hikers, maryjanes, and flip flops. New flip flops from some sport company--they are purple. When i am old, i will wear MORE purple.

As i grow older, color becomes more important. I have always been rather beige in what i wear, with an off-white thrown over my shoulder. But now i see value in red and yellow. Though, right now i'm partial to primary colors. Pastels are too much like no color.

Is it just because it's July or have i begun to turn into a slug for no reason? I can't seem to get anything done. i can't actually seem to BEGIN to do anything--really constructive.

yesterday I had my hair cut for our trip out to the wild wild west...national parks and hiking and so forth and 6 nights on a train. I said, I love this style, just like it is. Can you do this but a bit shorter for travel. She said, Great. Next thing I know i have no hair. It's darn near pixie in length. And wouldn't you know that those photos of me styling the pixie cut when i was 6 would emerge from my mom's basement just the very week i have my hair cut.

i did wash three windows yesterday. i wrote to my editor. i took care of lots of business calls--and no one was IN. So, i have to wait for them to call back, and it feels as if nothing is getting done.

I am struggling with what shoes to bring on the train trip out west. I don't want to bring more than two pair you see. So, they must be chosen with great wisdom. The hiker-shoes are just too oafy looking with shorts but tennis shoes won't hold traction on hiking trails and i don't want to break my ankle. The Clark's Mary Jane's are cute for walking about and a skirt for dinner, but not LONG walks, maybe, as they are new. And the train people recommend covered toe shoes so that rules out my perfect Rockport sandals. Maybe the oafy hiking shoes will distract people from my pixie hair cut.

Let's think about the "privlege walk" described in SOC 3005 - Studies in Resentment and Guilt: and see what happens.

I had a similar discussion with daughter K yesterday about what passes for racism and what is just a matter of making choices. We'd get so far with people's limitations in life and always circle back to BUT they are stuck where they are because of institutionalized racism. As in the "institutions" of America build upon racist ground and it continues. My point was institutions are made of people. People run systems---systems don't run themselves as if from some hidden force from the beyond. If we change people --even one person at a time--showing by our example how not to be racist and judgemental, one day people we say, Hey what a way to live without anger and guilt and hostility and supremacy. But humans being what they are want to feel better than all others. Thus we have clans, tribes, and even family loyalties.

Points in op-eds and blogs about the PW mostly spout on about the historic nature of oppression and the hard work that past generations gave to being where the future generations are today. yes, BUT what about choices. Some people make really bad choices despite the color of their skin and royal blood that flows thru their veins. One day he's a prince and the next he's a headless corpse. or one day he is president and the next he's tabloid news. Or one day she's a white 19 yr-old with a future and the next day she's working at a casino all night while her mother babysits and cleans her trailor during the day while 5 snot nose babies pull at her jeans and cry. hey, what choice did you make to get you where you are? Even if your parents chose rightly --to leave ireland and make for the new world, work hard, suffer the indignities of bias and name calling to send the children to school even if it meant working like a slave in a factory, ONE day the children's children's children's will make really stupid choices and end up being bad risks for loans, let alone a college education. Choices. Willpower. Defying instant gratification. Taking responsibility for your choices and blaming NO ONE else for what happens to you. Are you happy? it's your choice.

I emailed Aquarium to let her know I read the blog. i hope that's not the most productive thing I do today.

Have been catching up with In the Aquarium - Londoner's Blog. Very clever that one. Wish I was in London. Always makes me want to be observant when I'm out and about. it's entirely possible that we have some interesting things to make note of in St. Louis. I'm rather skeptical. or maybe i don't go to the Right places for observing. so many more Right places in London. i saw many interesting things there everyday. But it was all so different from life here that I thought that was why it interested me. Now i see that Aquarium thinks it's interesting and she lives there all the time.

The question of church authority has been around a long time. In fact, it was a central issue of the early church. Three questions occupied the minds of Ignatius of Antioch and Tertullian: What was the true interpretation of the Old and New Testament?; Who is rightly placed in the seat of the apostles to guide the believers?; and What evidence is there of what the apostles and Jesus actually taught? The heretical teachings that the early church guarded against were perhaps more clearly divergent from what most of us would consider the Church’s teachings at the time, but the issue of authority and finding a RULE by which to judge who IS and who IS NOT a true believer or Church member is very similar to what we find ourselves discussing today.

Ignatius’ Rule (as stated by Henry Chadwick, historian) is that “the whole Church believes ‘in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth ….and in one Christ Jesus the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit who through the prophets preached the dispensations and the comings and the virgin birth and the passion, and the rising of the dead…’” you can guess the rest. Tertullian would add that the due to the complexity in interpreting Scripture, one must take into consideration Tradition as a source for revelation.

And we know what Tradition tells us. Some folks just don’t like tradition or Tradition. Nonetheless, we do believe, do we not, that the Holy Spirit is alive and well in all of us and not just the bishops. The early church believed it is so. And based the belief on Scripture (Acts) with a nod to Paul’s order of hierarchy (1Cor 12:28). It does not appear that much has changed since then.

Mark Shea [in the comments to a 7.7.03 blog] is wise in pointing out that though any of us may disagree or challenge the authority of the church, or find it difficult at times to adhere totally to absolute doctrine coming out of Rome, our culpability is not to be judged by one another.

What about this - why do we fish for fish and not for birds? My husband asked me this question yesterday. He was thinking that if you can throw out a line with a worm on it into water and hope to attract and catch fish, you should be able to throw out a line with a worm on it and attract a bird. And he thinks I'm weird because I think about double rolled toilet paper.

If we did "fish" for birds it wouldn't be called fishing. What would it be called?

A friend of mine commented last week on the word invaluable. Why IN-valuable to mean very very valuable when the prefix IN is mostly reserved for words that will mean NOT-soemthing. Like Indescreet, i suppose.

People think of very strange things.

An article in Real Simple magazine answers questions all posed from the "What's the worst that could happen if I....(fill in the blank)..?" Like What's the worst that could happen if I don't change the oil in my car every 3,000, miles? Or if I eat hamburger that isn't cooked well? or if I eat a cracked egg? and other less likely ifs.

I could think a lot of questions. Things you don't do because you always heard you shouldn't do them. I usually think of these all day long and ponder them for minutes at a time. I intend to look them up and explore the options. But then time passes and so does the thought.

Man o man, the last time i blogged was june 10. how can that be? i ask myself. talk about constipation of ideas.

nice segue to - lately, I've been thinking about toilet paper. Not the paper and its use exactly, but the fact that all toilet paper now comes in "double rolls." Who defined the single roll? And now that its all double, isn't that a meaningless description or classification? You can't hardly find a "single roll" anymore. All the pricing is based on this twice as much economic comparison. But twice as much as something that no longer exits--or at least not readily--doesn't really count. Not to mention that it makes it exceedingly difficult to do the math involved in which package is actually the best buy. No doubt, this confusion is precisely what the manufacturer and distributor wants.

Was changing the roll that much trouble that we needed to only change it less often? To save time? Measured in seconds. Or could it be that due to the American obesity problemo these days, we actually use twice as much toilet paper in the time it took to go through one roll - the single kind.