Status Update
Am I over the silly cold? I've been feeling better since Thursday, but when I went out to burn the trash (lots of tissues) Serena took a good long look at me and visibly warned her daughters, "No running games! Don't touch! MY human is still shedding virus." No hand sniffing for me this weekend. The water-sharing ritual was fine, because the cats' share is poured out before I take a sip. Serena has an excellent sense of these things. Cats can't smell as much as dogs but can smell much more than humans.
Photo from Walmart.com.
History
Grandma Bonnie Peters and I had some disagreements we didn't want to make into arguments. She liked W Bush. She was in Florida at the time, and liked Jeb Bush and thought his brother was doing a fine job as President. Well, her attention was mostly on her health ministry; she was living with a private patient while also leading the youth group and teaching classes at her church. She was not reading the Washington Post in 2001.
I was in Washington, reading the morning Post with the toast. Like many Washingtonians I felt revulsion when W Bush orated about freedom and then signed the loathsome P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.I I wanted to say, "Liar, liar, pants on fire!" I had a husband who had legally adopted a younger relative, my stepson who is just about my brother's age, who had gone underground. Children and students always loved my husband, and he loved them right back, but the cousin he'd adopted to be his son and heir, of course, most of all. I had to watch my husband not-knowing whether my stepson had been shipped out to Afghanistan. I wanted to say, "Why don't you send your own children to Afghanistan, W-For-White-Privilege? Sober them up! Better yet, why don't you go, yourself?" I said bland neutral things like "He's certainly got that 'blond' act down," because it was war, and that's one of the things I hate about war. In war lying is a valuable skill.
One thing, though, that I did like about W Bush: Although the War On Terror was war, W Bush refused to give Al-Qaeda the status of a nation. We were going after individual criminals who happened to have hidden in other countries. We had nothing against those countries. We just had some murderers to deal with by any means necessary. W-For-Walking-Target would have done better to stay out of Washington, where his presence inflamed our enemies; but, having attracted an act of war to the city itself, he did at least wage war in a commendably fine-pointed way.
Holidays
While today's frivolous fiction takes place at a Halloween-and-Christmas party, and one book reviewer actually proposed combining the two merely-commercial, un-holy days...they are actually separated by Thanksgiving. Which, unlike Halloween and Christmas, has a biblical basis and a certain "holiness" for Christians. Though more directly descended from the Harvest Home celebrations in some parts of Britain and Germany, and most specifically linked to incidents in US and Canadian history, North America's Thanksgiving Days can trace their origins to the Bible's autumn holidays, which began with a general assembly, a fast and days of penitence, and culminated with a feast and time of rejoicing. It's what we do in place of Simchath Torah and Rosh Hashanah. It's one of two holidays my parents observed consistently every year when I was growing up (New Year's Day was the other; they weren't sure what to do about Resurrection Sunday).
There's a delightful Thanksgiving story in Barb Taub's new book Oh My Dog. While wandering about in cyberspace this week I stumbled across the first draft on her blog. The story is told better in the book, but the blog has an actual color photo of Peri, not yet a Pandemic Therapist With Paws.
Philosophy
Not new, but worth viewing again. I've not found a copy of the book. I want one.
A word about the "loneliness," or "anomie," DeSmet talked about...For extroverts roaring around with a crowd may prevent the despondent feelings associated with "loneliness." For introverts it may provide some temporary relief, but few things are closer to the analogy of a Band-Aid on a broken leg. We don't need a lot of social contacts, as such. We can tolerate social contacts as a possible way to find the one or two real friends we really want. Those friends are people who do at least one of the things we do, well enough that, when doing that thing with them, we accomplish more together than the two (or more) of us would accomplish alone. Their age, race, sex, social background, even religion, does not matter but I suspect they have to be introverts, or at least people born with introvert brains who have "become more extroverted" after some sort of illness or injury.
So, do extroverts want real friends, although they're not physically wired to be real friends? If they do, can anything be done about this? I have no idea.
Then there are people like this poor sex-ridden idjit. At a club he might meet somebody who might love him, he thinks, but when nobody comes home to flop into bed right away he gives up...he's very unlikely to be anything but lonelier every year. He's not looking for a real friend. People can marry mere bedmates who are not their friends, and stay with them, at the cost of all possible friendship with half of the limited number of potential friends in this world...but I've never understood why. They're still lonely.
Some prefer to use "masculinity" in a good sense. At one site people have given the name "Toxic Masculinity" to a good husband's care for a cancer survivor. Whatever. A faithful husband is a wonderful thing. But then there is a toxic, and false, sense of masculinity that keeps people--women as well as men--from thinking that the "masculine" reaction to situations is not always best. After the cowardly Yom Kippur attack fifty years ago Israeli young men sang a splendidly appropriate song, now preserved on YouTube. In the basic modern Hebrew that speakers of Arabic can understand, they roared, "This is Judgment Day! God is not with you! Here we come to beat you again...They sneaked in under the sound of the shofar," part of a religious service, "and they went out...in pieces!" The video is a traditionally "masculine" delight to watch. The young men sound as if they're running out to a game; they're shown soaring through the sky in planes and slicing through the water in speedboats. Right. The day after the attack that reaction was as natural and inevitable as blood pouring out of cut skin--those heroic little corpuscles pouring themselves out, to be wasted as a nasty stain on clothes, or to be the ones that seal and heal the wound, they don't know or care which. The day after that, when the corpuscles have spurted out and it's time to heal...? In pieces is probably the best way for Hamas scum to be; now how do those who claim descent from Isaac make peace with their cousins who claim descent from Ishmael?
Men who care for others, heal, build, are certainly no less masculine because those are less gender-limited activities, because women do them too. Men who can teach little boys how to do things are sexy as all-get-out. Men who can make plants grow are magical. Men who have nursed girlfriends through some trivial, yucky condition like flu will be loved and respected forever. Women tend, mend, and befriend in a feminine way, men in a masculine way. Do we teach young men this?
Zazzle
It's that time again...I wanted to do a beautiful full-color American butterflies daybook, with a butterfly for each State, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and possibly St Croix. I could do one but, even without paying editors and typesetters and suchlike, the cost of just printing it would be over $100 per book. So, time for a special offer. I will put together a beautiful printable full-color daybook with a butterfly for each State, etc., and e-mail it to you as a PDF for $25. You can then print all or part of it as you wish.
If, as a sponsor, you want not to be outdone by the sponsors who are currently connecting this web site to the Internet and having Purina kibble, bottled water, and minimally contaminated provisions delivered to the front gate, you may order Deluxe Collectible Editions of the Butterfly Day Planner printed and bound by me in "Save the Butterflies" binders, with a personal hand-lettered poem in each one, for just $200 per. This option is strongly recommended to any millionnaire cousins who are missing our elders and would like to get in touch.
For the rest of us, here are your basic Zazzle day planners. The big one is recommended to retirees who write large clear letters they can read, and to very busy people who collage memos and business cards onto the pages.
The smaller one is for people who hand-write information in neat little letters and numbers, rather than stuffing cards into their day planners.
Here's the 2024 Save the Butterflies Calendar, with almost all new butterfly pictures. If it sells more copies than the 2023 Save the Butterflies Calendar did, the 202 5Save the Butterflies Calendar will feature twelve completely new butterflies. But hello? It's Zazzle. If you want to order a Save the Butterflies calendar for your mother-in-law, customize it around the theme "Grandchildren," upload 14 pictures of the kids, I will be pleased, and the grandmother of the children will probably invite you to use the beach house next summer. And PIRG will get the same five percent.
This Swallowtail mouse pad isn't mine, but it's so cool I don't even need to design a mouse pad calendar.
https://www.zazzle.com/2024_2025_swallowtail_butterfly_calendar_by_janz_mouse_pad-144768367442854182
And I feel a new collection coming on. Fifty-four butterflies will be bearing holiday greetings this winter. Obviously butterflies know nothing about Christmas or Hanukah or Kwanzaa or Festivus or why anybody might prefer one of those to the others. Butterflies do, however, know all about a new year, when they come out of their diapause mode and even we thickwitted humans can tell that they're alive. So they will be wishing people a good new year. The butterfly greeting cards will be suitable for mailing to Members of Congress, who still receive postcards faster than letters, or to friends and neighbors.
Oh, and maybe I should mention again...Save the Butterflies is US-specific, though Monarchs and some other butterflies are sometimes found in other countries. That does not mean it's not global. It's the pretty face of Glyphosate Awareness; how could it not be global? This web site regularly features foreign butterflies. (Around Christmas we should finally get to a species I've actually seen.) As Zazzle opens sites in more countries I'd love to see people in those countries designing "Save the Butterflies" images around their butterflies. I always look on Zazzle and see all these Brazilian Morpho butterflies, the big bright blue ones. People like to look at Brazilian Morphos. Well, somebody in Brazil should be designing "Save the Butterflies" gear with Morpho images.
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