The Sounds of Love.

 

 

Hubby and I had a great morning.  He has been gone golfing and golfing and golfing for days because ... it's a gift. 

He was home for awhile this morning so after we had our breakfast party complete with the welcome home bacon and decorated pancake stacks with fondant cutouts resembling family members in case he had forgotten names ... I was showing him all the lovely things I have been working on as I go through the house and wash curtains and fix things.  I also have been doing most of the cooking and have been making really different and gourmet meals.  I do it because I am incredibly talented and because Betty Crocker and Easy Bake Oven  made a huge impression on my life and when you have a maid growing up who does all the cooking and cleaning, you have this kind of never ending childhood where you think it is cool to be allowed to actually touch kitchen appliances and take the pots out of the drawer.  Don't judge me.

I kept popping up at his office door with one achievement after another.

Jumping Off The Double Masectomy Cliff.

There are times in life when I have been convinced I am down the rabbit hole and running around in an insane nightmare where people's disturbing behaviour is only trumped by the mass acceptance of it all as normal.

 

Angelina Jolie has had both her breasts removed because she does not want to die of cancer.  Next she will have her ovaries removed.  Her husband applauds her move as courageous and talks about what a bonding time it was for them to share that journey.  Other women are lining up at the surgeons office as we speak, wanting the same procedure done. 

I hope they know that looking and being like Angelina Jolie does not then genetically predispose them to getting a husband like Brad Pitt.

Is this not like a mother's worst nightmare of "if your friends jump off a cliff ... are you going to jump too?"

I know, I know.  Watching a loved one die, suffering with cancer, is horrible.   I know that will be the argument set out.  It is the new way of covering our ears to protect ourselves from anything we don't want to hear.  We throw out heart wrenching incidents that make everyone uncomfortable.  You don't tell someone who has just nursed their own mother or sister or wife through breast cancer to their death that they should behave or think in any certain way.  You put your arms around them and be there. 

They all deserve us to be there.  They also deserve dignity and truth and answers.  They have a right to be afraid and to do everything they can to make sure it does not happen to anyone else in their family.

Powerful Video "This is Water."

David Foster Wallace's excerpt from a speech given to Kenyon College's 2005 graduating class that has been made into this amazing video is worth watching again and again.

We decide the world we live in.  We make judgements about people and situations every day in our lives that are simply a choice for the narrative that makes up the story of our lives.  As David so eloquently points outs .... that woman could be a dead beat loser or she could be the person that just helped your wife at the motor vehicle branch.

How often I have listened to people going on and on about someone online, about what a loser they are, or how they are nothing compared to someone's virtual identity only to shake my head in disbelief.  If they only knew who the person they were disparaging really was they would hang their heads in shame.  They would probably give their eye teeth to hang out with them if even for a few moments.  Perhaps they were not a big name model in SL, or a designer .... but they are a famous entity in real life, a hero at 911, or the woman instrumental in changing views on women.  Sometimes THEY are actually the real life Fashionista!

Mother's Day Guilt

(revised and lengthened)

I always feel guilty on Mother's day. I wish I could be more like the Mom's who march right up to sit in the VIP seats and accept their awards and accolades but ya ...no ... not me ....

I usually am at the back, on my hands and knees trying to crawl out of the place to get into the get away car ... that is in the car lot with the motor running and being driven by a really butch feminist who hates mothers everywhere. She showed me once where she buried her own mother after she found out she actually worked for Avon.

I have a hard time listening to all the people giving award winning glowing reports about their moms and the sacrfices they made for them and all the swell things they did. I sit there and remember those nights I went through my kids Halloween Candy sacks and ate most of the good stuff and told them they must have eaten it and not remembered, sugar does that to the mind, puts you in a stupor and you have no idea what you are doing. They believed me. Well two of them did. The other beat up his little brother for it.

A Woman's Prison and My Day ... Not as Dissimilar as You Might Think.

I am watching Wentworth the remake of an Australian classic called Prisoner that they recently reran on TV here .  I was amazed at the depth of the stories considering when the programme was made.  They covered some touchy subjects for the day.

 

It is set in a woman's prison.

 

I am watching it because I am having fantasies about being on the inside and getting to rumble regularly.  Mainly because lately I have a lot of anger issue built around Butter Chicken.

For The Love of Those Who Serve.

The sun was warm.  I did not know any of these people – these men who had served with my husband all those years ago in Vietnam.  We were strangers to one another in so many ways – our countries, cultures, and experiences creating more than an ocean of physical distance between us.

 

Until that day I never fully understood the meaning of being a soldier.  Nothing I had held in my heart, nothing I had allowed my intelligence to study, nothing I knew about my fellow man had ever come close to explaining what being there that day taught me.  I watched them as they greeted one another – it didn’t matter whether they had seen one another last week or if this was the first time since the war.  There was something about the hand shake and the extra few seconds of contact where they seemed to fighting within themselves as to whether to let go, or to grab hold and never let go.  As they separated, hands would look for some place to belong – a pocket, folded under arms …. almost as if, failing to contain them, would be a failure to contain themselves.

Flow.

People are real.

They have feelings and everything that is said and done to a human being in a day impact upon them for either the positive or the negative.

People carry those impacts with them and they begin to form the person they are.

People are not cattle to climb over on your way to the top, to use and abuse to make sure you stand in the spotlight.  They are not disposable.  Friending them when you don't care about what happens to them or that they are happy is disgusting.  Playing at love and intimacy when it is just a game to you is even worse.

Everyone wants to be loved and to feel that they belong.  Everyone likes to feel valued and recognized and people have a right to be supported to find that for themselves.  We do not MAKE other people.  We might be lucky enough to share a part of their journey.  We might be lucky enough to even play the role of a teacher or a mentor for a small part of that journey but the wisest teacher recognizes that he, above all else, is a student and that he learns far more from the people he teaches than he ever imparts to them.