Sweetness and Power

This one is probably going to ramble a bit.

In the most recent episode of “Once Upon A Time” we got Cora’s backstory. Cora is the mother of Regina, the Evil Queen, thus making her the mother of all evil, and she was certainly a key factor in Regina’s development.

Cora was humiliated by a princess, and a king, and that seems like something you should be able to get over. However, as she was learning to do magic, which was going to be necessary for saving her life and for revenge, part of her process was going back to that moment of humiliation over and over again, and her desire to turn the tables on them, and draw strength from that. She almost gave it up for love, but still wanting revenge led to a conversation where she decided to choose power, and that love was a weakness, so she removed her heart. 

My vacation reading included a Smithsonian and a Psychology Today. The Smithsonian (January 2013) had an article on scientific studies on infants and toddlers conducted at Yale that showed a clear preference for altruism, both in terms of observing others and their own behavior.

(The article was by Jill Greenberg, and actually, if you are into that sort of thing, the article was fascinating, for the results but also the discussion of the methodology and the variations. It’s a recommended read.)

Now, I thought I read something in the Psychology Today indicating that where this may start to change is around the age of four, where children start to get drawn towards power. I could not find that again. It may have been a reference to a book about how scary stories help children work things out and build stronger selves (Killing Monsters by Gerard Jones), and then extrapolating that with other things I have read.

One reason I am thinking about it is because of bullying, and especially cyberbullying. I do not understand why you would tell anyone to kill themselves. At the same time, I have at times wanted to emotionally hurt people. Usually they had hurt me, and I was frustrated that they were not hurt or bothered. I guess on one level I was looking for power over them, though it was a passing thing, and I’m glad of that.

I could keep focusing on my wounds and on the way I was wronged, and I could become very cold-hearted and miserable, and probably cruel. Maybe I would hurt others who were not involved, but who were easier targets. I read something recently where a girl who had been bullied confronted one of her attackers. He stopped bugging her, but also he killed himself a bit later.

Obviously he had his own issues going on. It does not justify any cruelty he committed, but you can see how a lot of people hurting each other can lead to even more people hurting each other, and nothing good comes from it.

In addition, when I am studying sexism or racism, one of the constant threads is the dehumanization of the other party. Objectification is especially overt when it comes to sexism, but it happens in other –isms as well, and what it keeps coming down to is power. Exert power over them, and it’s more power for yourself.

This is important because these power struggles are used to divide those who should have shared interests. Referring back to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, slavery and then Jim Crow laws were used to divide poor whites from blacks, and keep the poor whites feeling like they had the same interests as the wealthy whites, though they did not, and the wealthy whites absolutely did not have the same interests as the poor whites.

Look at Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn, and there are so many examples of how greater opportunities for women improve the lives of the entire society, but the societies that aren’t there yet have the men feeling threatened by it. The power over women is all they have, but it ends up only being a power to cause and prolong misery.

Paul says that the love of money is the root of all evil, and there are a lot of ways in which that seems true, but it is starting to feel more like the real root is actually the desire to exert power over others, and maybe money is just a convenient way of getting there.

So, I think I am just going to throw two other points out there, and let you draw your own conclusions. I mean, these topics are going to come back up.

I believe I read this in Daphne Rose Kingma’s work, but somewhere I read that with controlling personalities, that behavior often started when they were prevented from developing a talent. Think about that. You are starting to develop something beautiful, and it is cut off, and the reaction is to want to do the same thing to others. So perhaps something that we really need is more opportunities for self-actualization, with children and adults. Take up with the violin again, or start to draw, or do something to cultivate yourself and let others bloom.

The other point goes back to my “Three Keys to Happiness” post that I keep referring back to, where one of the keys is serving others, and part of why that helps is that it shows that you have power. You are capable of doing some good for someone, regardless of the things you can’t do. It’s an important reminder:

http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2009/03/october-2008-three-keys-to-happiness.html

There is appropriate power. Development of power over one’s self is huge, as we establish good habits, and follow through on goals. Interest in power over others, though, that leads down a dark path, and a lot of evil comes from it.

He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. Proverbs 16:32

When did I become this kind of a writer?

I have posted about feminism and misogyny and objectification of women and morality quite a bit, even just within the past year, and those are things that are important to me, and remain relevant, and that I will be posting about again and again. Given that, it is of a concern to me when I have two of my heroines lose their shirt in the same week.

One is in the comic book. Jane has to do some field dissection, and she gets covered with blood and brains during it. It was an important scene for me to write, in that doing so was the first time I felt like I could ever write about zombies. (I still haven’t yet, but I believe I can.) There are important things going on there with the plot and with the characters, and ultimately she was always going to need to change. I knew that.

What I realized on rewrite is that kind of wiping herself off before she has a chance to change clothes is insufficient. The sterile wipes that she has available would be completely insufficient for blood on fabric, and turning it inside out would be disgusting, and there is no way that she is going to keep that one. The source of the blood has been such a horror to her and her new husband that she could not get it off fast enough. It’s all how it needs to be, but then it leaves her in a bra.

The other is in Family Blood. As I originally wrote the scene, Chris is bleeding and Sarah asks for a first aid kit, and on rewrite I cannot convince myself that these guys keep a first aid kit in the van. It would be a good idea, and very responsible of them, but they are young musicians, and not accustomed to fighitng vampires, and they don’t. So she whips off her shirt, and she does have a tank underneath.

Medically, it would really be better if they had the first aid kit, and she could unwrap some sterile gauze. For the character, it’s kind of another step in this transformation she has been undergoing.

She starts out literally buttoned down. She is wearing a buttoned shirt over a t-shirt, and she has her hair in a french braid, and those are little things, but they are outwards signs of how very hard she has been trying to cover everything and just be good enough that things will work out. And it doesn’t. They get found, her brother dies, and everything that she worked for his gone. And so, she is getting stripped down in a sense, and turning into something new.

I know, and actresses will do nudity if its integral to the plot. Well, no one is nude, but still, no one should be leering at them. These are women in times of crisis, who sacrifice a lot for those they love, and they maybe aren’t the strongest or the fastest, but they are kind and persistent, and ultimately resilient. They have to be.

I know it could be worse. And there is some equity, because there are scenes where Gerard and Mikey are shirtless too, and it is completely integral to the plot. I wouldn’t want to be gratuitous with the males either. Just because it’s not such a pervasive issue doesn’t make it right.

And of course, obviously, more people should have first aid kits in their vehicles. You just never know when you will need one.

How to succeed in business

Yeah, there’s no “without really trying”; you will need to be trying a lot.

The scariest conversation I’ve ever had involved a friend telling me that, on my advice, she had invested in another friend’s business.

While I was unemployed, I took a class, and briefly did some tax preparation. Seeing the different sources of income and deductions and liabilities, as well as dealing with my own job situation, really got it into my head that things have changed. Pensions are rare now, as is starting at one company when you’re young and retiring from there decades later. People who had been very responsible savers and investors had suffered huge losses. That wasn’t just stocks. People believed in homes as good investments, and that bubble burst.

It just felt like all of the rules were out the window, and it was as good a time to gamble as any. If you had something different you wanted to try, and some resources to do it, go for it.

I told her that being supportive of something that she was already doing. I was saying, “Good for you!” Well, I thought that’s what I was saying. What I didn’t know is that another friend was also trying to get something started, and she needed funding, and apparently what I said sounded like “Go!”

It seems to be working out okay. They both still have their day jobs, and they have the sides where they are following their abilities and their passions. It keeps them busy, and more satisfied than they would be with only the day job, which – well, I better not even go there.

So, it’s not that I was wrong, or I didn’t mean what I said, but the bottom dropped out of my stomach when I realized I was responsible for the allocation of a few thousand dollars. Don’t ever sneak something like that up on me.

I have been thinking about this more as there is sort of a perfect storm around the topics of money and creative endeavors now. First of all, there is me wanting to be a professional writer, though still being much better at writing than at marketing it. There was a storm over an email thread between writer Nate Thayer and The Atlantic over payment, which led to many other comments and tweets and blog posts from various writers on the topic of getting paid for work.

In addition, it is something I think about a lot with music. The bands that I review are at different levels of establishment, and they are doing different things to try and succeed. Some of them may very much hope to get signed by a label, and for some of them that would be a bad thing.

It’s not an automatic bad, but again, the rules have changed. Under the old model, it was fairly common that the label would get the money from record sales, and the band would get the touring money. That worked for a lot of people. The problem now is that record sales don’t make the money that they used to, so you get this thing called 360 deals, where the label is taking from everywhere.

Now, I’m not saying that the label shouldn’t make any money. The point is that there isn’t as much money now, period, and you need to know that going in. You are probably not going to get extremely wealthy. It’s not a reason not to try and succeed, but you should probably be doing it for more than the money, and also, you need to have the right frame of mind. If someone offers you a contract, you need to decide its real value. What are they really offering?

Part of the reason this is a concern for me is that some of these bands that I will eventually be reviewing, or possibly a few that I have reviewed, seem like they are being corporately molded, and so while they could have had a unique voice, they are becoming something not of their own making. And yes, you can become extremely wealthy being a corporate product, but not everyone goes down that route successfully either. There is a limited market, even for that, and it feels saturated to me, though that could be personal aversion.

Don’t be afraid to read things carefully, and ask questions, and propose changes. Most of all, don’t be afraid to walk away. Sometimes you can do exactly what they would have you do on your own, and then they are not taking a cut.

I was impressed with some of the different things In Passing has done. They have been creative. Some bands are using Twitter effectively. Bands set up channels on Youtube, Reverbnation, and SoundCloud. I can only imagine some of the things that I will be seeing as I keep this up, and if at some point I see things that are really effective or not effective, I will post about that.

A lot of them keep their day jobs. I have my day job. With some of the mailing lists I am on, there is a lot of push to go into copywriting, or various kind of freelance writing, because “You can be getting paid right now to write!” Well, that’s kind of true, except that I would have to build up a customer base, negotiate, deal with people who wanted to pay me with “exposure”, and it would take up a great deal of mental energy, which this job does not (and it has good health insurance). That’s my choice.

In terms of whether I will be effective, getting in where I want to, I don’t know. I had all these things I was going to do when I got back from vacation, and a cold that I picked up while there has dragged on, bringing in a secondary and a tertiary infection, and I am really behind schedule. I can confrim that would have been worse if I was freelancing, but then I probably woulnd’t have been able to take a vacation.

So, how do you follow your dreams? First, have your eyes wide open. That’s going to take some courage, but then it should also inspire some creativity. If you can get that idea that no one else has, about how to be heard and seen, then go for it. This is the time to be non-traditional; now more than ever! But we’re creative types, right?

Now, if your goal is merely to be rich, or famous, possibly the best starting point is to be venal, but I just can’t recommend it. Sometimes you need new goals.

Band Review: Bonaventure

Again, this is a band that followed me on Twitter, leading me to follow and listen to them. Initially I thought they were fine, but they weren’t making much of an impression on me, and then I had a very bad reaction to their video for “Silent Night”.

What’s odd to me now is that I can’t find the video at all. It’s not on their own site or Youtube. I may not have looked hard enough, but I remember seeing a lot of compliments tweeted about it.

I am going to try and see if I can explain what bothered me about the video, and then connect that with how the band does not work for me.

First of all, their performance of the song is completely fine. I have listened to it a few times via Spotify as I have been preparing to write this. From a vocal and instrumental point of view, the band is fine.

The video shows a girl whose father is disabled, which embarrasses her, and she acts out at school and he is continuously supportive, and then, and I could be getting parts of this wrong, she tries to kill herself, and he donates his blood for that, and she lives and he dies. Merry Christmas!

Granted, for that song, an allegory for a father’s sacrificial love, and ungrateful children, may be appropriate, but it was just kind of ugly. It felt horrible and depressing, and beyond that it felt shamelessly manipulative. And yes, I totally cried. That was the intent, and it succeeded, but it felt too manufactured and I resented it. Again, a lot of people loved it.

So, how does this relate to the band as a whole? I think my real issue is some artificiality, and I believe the reason for that is that they are trying to convey a depth and a meaning that they do not really feel. I would also say that about “Our Excuse”, one of the tracks from their album.

I don’t mean to imply that the band has no depth, but I do feel they lack a strong sense of identity. There is an unevenness of tone and sound. It’s not that a band can’t do a lot of experimenting and still be them, but ultimately it doesn’t matter how many times I have listened, I have no grip on who Bonaventure is. 

I would say that my two favorites are “These Shoes” and “Tiny Fraction”, but I could totally believe that they were by different bands. Some songs sound a little bit like there is is a Irish pub influence (ala Mumford and Sons), like “The Forgotten Waltz”,  and some songs are very techno, like “Restless”, and it is interesting that they suddenly go French in “Charmant Paysage”, but it is all disjointed. Interesting riffs appear, and then don’t necessarily feel of a piece with the rest of the song.

Now, identities can be found. On their web site there is a new video “I Dare You” that was not on Spotify, and it seems to be heading in the right direction. The video itself conveys a mood without really getting anywhere, but that doesn’t mean the band won’t. So, a little disappointing, but there’s potential, and I hope they realize it.

http://www.bonaventuremusic.com/

Band Review: Daniel Pearson

Daniel Pearson is another musician discovered through Twitter. We do follow each other, but he does not seem to have been doing that thing of following lots of people randomly to gain exposure, so I’m not sure how it happened. Possibly we connected over Gaslight Anthem.

Actually, I am not sure that I originally knew that he was a musician. He will occasionally link to videos or press releases, but I have really enjoyed his commentary on the Brit awards and other things that are going on in music. What I’m saying is, you are not just following a musician; you are following a smart and interesting person. Anyway, it was a good discovery, and I don’t mind having a little bit of mystery.

Daniel Pearson is a singer/songwriter from Leeds. His debut album Satellites came out in 2011, and was quickly followed in 2012 by Mercury State, inspired by the recession and social inequality.

With the social and political emphasis of the music, many of the reviews draw comparisons to Bob Dylan, and based on content, this is somewhat fair, but Pearson is a much better singer.

I know, I’m throwing away some credibility by admitting this, but Dylan is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. I get that there is a social impact, and that he means a lot to a lot of people, and I simply do not care. Maybe I’m the wrong age, maybe I’m not enough of a hippie, but apparently he is just not for me. Sorry.

Daniel Pearson, on the other hand, sings and plays well. Comparisons to folk are not unreasonable, though the more accurate label is probably indie rock. Especially on Mercury State, the overall sound is often mellow, with stripped down acoustics that would be completely appropriate for sidewalk busking or a peace rally.

He can rock, and he does. The best example of that may be his single “One for Conversation”, but grooving lines come up on several songs on both albums, including “Promises” and “Tracks”. “4^th July” starts off as practically honky-tonk with the rhythm of train tracks running through it.

The rock elements are there, but the simple melancholy of “Factory Floor” may seem more characteristic, as it takes a hard look at the uprooting of a life that will be hard-pressed to find a new direction.

That sounds depressing, but that would be an oversimplification. “Hard Times” is about hard times, obviously, but there is an unconquerable spirit beating through it, and if there is longing in “I Still Believe”, it is longing that believes relief is possible, so there is some optimism there. Add “Waves in the Sea” to that, as a song that believes in good outcomes, and human relationships.

CDs can be purchased through Pearson’s web site, but the music is also available through iTunes, Amazon, and eMusic. Also, all albums and tracks that I have mentioned can be heard through Spotify.

http://danielpearson.net/

Forget blogging; I have bronchitis!

I’ve been sick for three weeks now. It started February 13^th, with just a scratchy throat. On the 14^th, my voice was gone.

I still didn’t feel awful. I was tired, and it slowed everything down. I have been crawling through books lately, which is frustrating, because there is so much that I want to read.

That’s been the main issue all along, really. There are things that I want to do, and I don’t have the energy to do them. I have done some reading, writing, and exercising, but not nearly as much of any as I would like.

The thing is, I remember colds in my childhood lasting 3-5 days, and everyone who has gotten sick this time around seems to be having it for three weeks. If I seemed to be on my last day I would be thrilled, actually, but the cough is new, and getting worse, which makes me worry that I may be going in to bronchitis. Of course, the cold that led to my bout with pneumonia lasted a month.

So part of me is wondering if we have created super strong cold viruses, perhaps by feeding them antibiotics which we knew were ineffective, but some people are saying this is just part of getting older—you don’t shake things off as quickly. That is true, actually, but it’s still no reason to be sick for three weeks.

Anyway, a very nasty cough started up a few days ago, and I was thinking I might have bronchitis now, which the doctor just confirmed. Not great, but better than some of my other thoughts (pertussis, mono, tuberculosis).

I had started a real blog post, and then it didn’t feel right, so I started another, but my poor foggy brain will only mishandle an important topic, but I don’t want to break my daily blogging rhythm, so this is all you’re getting from me.

I’m sick. Wah.

Stay tuned for the country song, “Tired of being tired, sick of being sick.”

Working from home

The whole concept of working from home has been getting some discussion lately due to newly appointed CEO Marissa Mayer pulling the plug on it for Yahoo employees. There has been talk for and against, but since I have been telecommuting for several months now, I thought I would weigh in.

The pros of telecommuting as our company had found were that oeprating expenses go down while employee satisfaction goes up, making it a win-win. Add the benefit to the environment by removing commuters, and it seems like a really good deal.

Well, it is if you get a higher or equal level of productivity from the workers (because greater worker satisfaction does not automatically translate to higher productivity) or that if there is a decrease in productivity it is slight enough that it will be offset by the reduced operating expenses.

Our conversion was not done lightly. There were pilot groups, as groups rolled out it was done in stages, and before they even got to planning that we all took tests that predicted whether we would do well in the home environment or not.

For our team it seems to have gone pretty well. That has been common with many companies, though it sounds like it was not the case with Yahoo. We all had pretty good work ethics all along. When we were less productive it was usually because a conversation got started and went on a tangent and pulled multiple people in. Based on that, we are probably more productive now. Numbers seem to bear that out.

In my case, I got back over two hours a day that was spent in transit, which leaves me better rested, and with more time to give to my personal life. That is helpful. It is certainly a money-saver, because even though it should be really easy to pack a lunch, I was always forgetting or running out of time. Our bus pass was partially subsidized but not all. We may use slightly more electricity at home now, but it has not been noticeable. The financial benefits are fairly small compared to the time benefits, but they are still there.

The biggest gain is the relative freedom. I generally did not have specific things to do on my breaks, so I would go to the bathroom, fill up my water bottle, and it wasn’t particularly restful. Here I may get some laundry going, or start dinner, or even lie down on my bed for fifteen minutes. Plus, at random points during the day, dogs come up and nuzzle me, and some day breaks will involve petting kitties again. All of those things are more of a boost.

Also, we no longer pass germs around.

There is a downside, such as it is, in that I am less engaged with the team. I have been thinking about that recently because it came up in my review with my supervisor. That has not been caused by the change to working from home, though it helped. What happened was that I started getting sick of my coworkers.

Actually, it was only three. There are coworkers I like a lot, and when we have on-site meetings, seeing them is great. There were just three that bugged me. One is very needy, and she really thinks she is cute in this, but she is not. She is not a bad person, but it gets tiresome. Another is friends with my sister, and so at times she would mention something she had heard from my sister, or my sister would mention things she had heard from the coworker, and I did not like that. Still, the biggest problem was the third one.

I had noticed that she seemed to have some social anxiety, I guess, or possibly that she hated us all, but we started this new process for contacting people if we found that they had made mistakes. I hit a run where I forgot an exception that could happen with one business line that I had not worked with much, and I forgot it at a time when we hit an unusually high number of incidences of that exception. This allowed me to notice how amazingly passive aggressive she could be. Like, I thought she had social anxiety, and all along it was really borderline personality disorder.

I have since learned that she does this to everyone, so I don’t feel like it is personal, exactly, but it doesn’t warm me up to her either. I have gotten some others that have been about things that were not wrong, but she would have done them differently. (Bully for her.) Still, this was the first time her issues came up for me, and no matter how clear her own issues were, they coincided with a real failure on my part, which I am not used to in a job situation.

This affected my feelings for this coworker, but it also dealt a huge blow to my confidence. I am used to being good at my job. For a while there I was feeling very vulnerable and insecure, and I just didn’t want to be doing it anymore. I started really getting into gear on my writing on my own time, and ultimately, that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to advance within the company. I want to establish myself as a writer and leave the company.

It hasn’t changed everything. I still have good output, in terms of both quantity and quality. I will never forget Idaho ERISA rules again. That one is burned in my soul. At the same time, I am not as engaged. I don’t chat as much. If I were still in the office, I know I would find myself pulled in more easily. At home it is easy to be more reclusive. My life satisfaction is higher, but it is less intertwined with my job. I think that’s healthy, but I could probably be more balanced. I am going to try and participate more.

So there is a definite risk to sending people out of the office. You can lose that esprit de corps. We did great things with the toy drive in previous years that were just not matched this year. I mean, I think we still won, but just the fact that I am not sure shows that it was less of an issue. There are people for whom losing that sense of belonging could seriously reduce their motivation to work. There are people for whom there are too many distractions at home. Those issues need to be looked at.

Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels alone is reason enough to look at a wider implementation of telecommuting. The potential personal and economic benefits are good reasons for looking at it too. The risks to productivity and team spirit also need to be weighed. Okay, I don’t feel a strong need to be connected to my job and all of my coworkers, but it may be important for management, and I do understand the need to feel connected to society at large, and for some people their job might be the biggest part of that.

So, those are some of the things to think about. I can only tell you my own experience, and now I have. Your mileage may vary.

Max

The alternative title to this is “Grief”, because that is the word that is lodged in my head, but it’s not very specific, and Max is. I’m afraid this is going to be a little self-indulgent.

October 1995 started off a pretty bad year. That was when my father left, and then Frank, my RA died, and then one of our dogs, Alexander, started just wasting away from an undiagnosed congenital heart condition, and with college and things it felt like I could never be where I was needed, and I was getting so burned out on classes, and then Frosty died.

Frosty was the last of Sheba’s kittens, and he had lived to fifteen, which seemed like a good age for a cat, especially one who’d had as many medical problems as he had (skin cancer and a hereditary urinary issue that had required surgery). He had outlasted everyone, and he went peacefully, but now we had lost a dog and a cat too close together.

With Mom volunteering with the greyhound adoption group, we would always find more dogs. At the time, we did not even realize how true that would end up being, because it was so new. But from 1978 to 1996, our cats had been Sheba and her kittens. We had tried other cats, and they had run away, but somehow Sheba had decided she loved us, and her kittens had known us since they were born. It was the end of an era, and as much as we loved cats, it did not feel right, or even possible, to just go out and get another one.

That fall, there was a stray siamese cat hanging around the block. Our neighbor across the street fed his cats outdoors, which was attracting the stray, and he was threatening to shoot the stray, so we started leaving food out, which this cat then started eating. This was Max.

Max actually looked a lot like Sheba. They were both chocolate Siamese. A patch of white on Sheba’s chest indicated she may not have been purebred, and Max had that patch, plus splotches of white on her feet that may have shown some tortoiseshell. It took a while to get a good look at her though. The other thing she shared with Sheba was being easily spooked.

She must have been starving. She started plumping up so quickly we were afraid she was pregnant, so we started calling her Chloe. As we realized it was not kittens, but just finally having reliable access to food, we also though that a stray female would surely have had some kittens by then, so she must have been a boy, and that is when we came up with Max. Once we were able to handle her, she was clearly female, and had just been spayed before she was cut loose. She had a flea collar too, though it was getting too tight and needed to be cut off. Someone had owned her once, but we had no idea whom, or for how long (or how old she was), or what had happened. All we knew is that she was eating the food, and getting stuck on the roof.

It was during my temp assignment at Protection One. I remember it clearly because I remember going to K-Mart on my lunch break to buy a saw. Max would climb the cherry tree to get up on the roof, then not be able to get down, and she would start yowling. I would climb up, but she was still afraid to come near, so there was luring and grabbing and it did not take many rounds of this game before we decided that the tree needed to come down.

She would also climb the fence into the back yard, which was a concern because of the dogs, but it worked out. Sometimes when she was eating you could pet her, and she would not run away. One day, she walked into the house. Tradition says that man tamed all domestic animals except for the cat, which tamed itself. It seems plausible.

It was a very gradual process. She started spending more time inside, and eventually became indoors only. She took to the litterbox right away, so she must have been trained at some point, and remembered it.

That being said, her street time always showed. She never liked being picked up or being held. She liked being pet while she was eating, and then when she was sitting or lying down you could pet her for a little while, but she would suddenly turn and scratch or bite. Apparently this is not unheard of, but it was a first for us. I don’t think she meant to hurt us, because she would look surprised when she got us good and we made sounds of pain. Usually it was just a glancing blow, and there was usually a warning shot. Still sometimes there was blood, and you just had to accept that the pattern was purr-purr-purr-CHOMP!

About four years ago we got Jack, who wanted to chase her. This was funny, because they had tested him with cats at the kennel, and he didn’t pay any attention to them. I took him for a walk before we brought him home, and we saw a cat, and he completely ignored it. I have to assume now that he was bluffing.

Since Max mainly stayed in Julie and Maria’s room, we ended up sticking with that, and the dogs getting the rest of the house. It worked out. Max technically had less freedom, but it was amazing how much she managed to assert her will about where she wanted to be, and when, and how she would get there.

After being remarkably vigorous where no one believed his age (we got Jack when he was 10), age suddenly caught up with him a few months ago and he died. He was a fawn like Alexander had been. Age seemed to be catching up with Max too.

It wasn’t a lot. She lost some weight – down to nine pounds – and she had a patch of thin hair on her back. Her allergies got worse. (She had periodic bouts of hay fever, with sneezing and watery eyes.)

About three weeks ago, it escalated, and she got really thin, and we knew it was coming. She got down to five pounds, three ounces, and you could feel every bone in her body. She stopped protesting when we held her. We all started crying every time we held her, which I would not have expected her to have any patience with, but I guess she got mellow. It was time.

We all got to hold her Saturday. I got to hear her purr again. I couldn’t bear to put her in the cat carrier, so I wrapped her in a soft blanket, and she took the car ride very well. Normally she would have complained. She looked around, but she didn’t fight me. She didn’t fight anything. That was so not like her. That, more than anything, let us know it was time.

So, for the first time in seventeen years, Max is not around. Again, we don’t know how old she was. 17+, I guess. Part of grief is the initial loss, but there is also that cycle of forgetting and remembering. I walk past Julie’s room and I glance on the bed expecting to see Max, and she’s not there. I think I will go visit her in Maria’s room, and then no, she’s gone. The longer they have been in your life, the longer it takes to get used to the absence, so we’re going to be dealing with this for a while.

Again, it does not feel right to go looking for a cat. She found us. Actually, Geno and Jack, and a lot of the greyhounds, found us. Technically we did go looking for Jane, but somehow in doing so we stumbled upon the one dog who needs us most, and would probably have been labeled unadoptable if a third placement had failed, so okay, I guess that’s going to be our thing.

The dishes and the carrier have been put away for now. The food is going with Misty, for her cats. There’s some leftover litter too. We may return that, or give it to the shelter. I don’t know. I know there will be another cat. Julie and Maria still say we should move up to eight, so we have two cats each. That would require some rearranging. For now, there’s going to be a hole.

So that was our Max. She could not handle catnip, getting really freaked out. She found the red dot of the laser pointer interesting, but not interesting enough to chase. Ribbon or yarn was something else, though after losing her dignity she would pretend she had not. She would not use the Emery Cat, and she thought most traditional toys were stupid, unless they were strong with catnip, and then she would get fascinated, followed by stoned and paranoid, so that we had to stop letting her have them. And right up until her last few days, you could only pet her for a minute or two without getting bitten. Even then, she could still deliver a good snub. She was her own cat. She was also ours.

Band Review: Our Fold

Our Fold self-describes as a four piece Indie/Rock band from Bolton (England). They are not indie rock in the same manner as some of the other bands I have reviewed, in that they are not overly techno and do in fact rock. So, I appreciate that about them, right off the bat.

Again, this is a band that came to my attention because they followed me on Twitter. Based on the timeline of when they followed me, I should still not be reviewing them for a few weeks, but they did this thing where you could sign up to get a download of their entire catalog, and that kind of moved them ahead of many others. Yes, it does give me something to work with, but also I have really been enjoying them.

Influences listed are Nirvana, James, Stone Roses, Echo & the Bunnymen, U2, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Metallica & More. That’s quite a list, and while those aren’t necessarily whom I hear when I am listening, the range makes sense. It’s not that Our Fold does not have their own sound – they do —but they encompass a lot of variety within that range.

The verses in “Back in Check” remind me of Johnny Cash, while they hearken back to traditional minstrelsy on “King of Howfen”. I would definitely describe them as guitar-driven, but they make effective use of other instruments as well, including really creative and fascinating percussion. Sometimes there is more cowbell, but then there may be castanets or something else non-traditional that completely works within the song. “Victim of Lies” may be the best example of this.

The guitars groove hard. Sometimes it seems more like jangle (I think that’s the right term), and sometimes it leans more towards hard rock. I can totally believe that they were influenced by Metallica, even though that had not occurred to me on first listen. Personally, the first other band I thought of was The Cult, followed by The Clash, and maybe a little bit of The Replacements. Eclectic? Yes, but I just have to give them that much credit for having such a clear identity, and being so much themselves.

Some of this may be their emotional openness. There is a lot of heart in their songs. Sometimes they are plaintive and pleading, but always there is feeling. And that’s not to say that I love all of their songs. Some of them don’t sit as well with me. Those tracks seem to be a little more hippie-ish, which is ultimately a matter of my taste, but what I think when listening is that they are experimenting. They are being inventive, and risk-taking, and they come up with a lot of good results.

For personal favorites I need to call out “Victim of Lies”, “She Goes On”, “Reap What You So”, and “Descension”. Check out these for sure, and then keep going.

I’m including several links below. I think the Soundcloud one is the most useful for listening. I could not find that they were currently available on Amazon or iTunes, and they are definitely not on Spotify. From the Facebook page you can find a list of upcoming performances, and a phone number for bookings. Obviously, they are not as far along as they could be, but I hope they get there. They have a lot to offer.

https://www.facebook.com/ourfold

https://twitter.com/OURFOLD

https://soundcloud.com/ourfold

http://www.reverbnation.com/ourfold

https://www.youtube.com/user/Ourfold

Band Review: Crow Black Sky

Crow Black Sky is another band that followed me on Twitter. At least, I think that’s how I came across them. They don’t seem to be following me now. It only hurts a little bit.

The first thing that I saw on them was that they were an African Black Metal band, from Cape Town, South Africa. At the time they only had two songs on Soundcloud, but while metal is really not my thing, I felt both songs were really well-done, and powerful.

Those specific songs were “Stars of God” and “Retribution”, and initially I thought that was all there would be to review, so I was going to cover them on vacation. But wait, there’s more.

Not only is their entire album, Pantheion, available on Spotify; it is also available as a free download off of their web site. So, I found out that there was so much to them that it would need more time, and here we are two weeks later. It’s not just that there are more songs, but there is a lot to the songs. Also, I knew nothing about black metal.

With a little bit of research on that, I realized that I was familiar with black metal, because I had read an article on its growth in Scandinavia. Based on that, it should have been a lot more Satanic than it seemed to be. I have to admit, I was not picking any of the words out, but I found lyrics online.

These were very interesting. Several of the tracks are instrumental, but the first three with lyrics reference Ancient Greece, Egypt, and Vikings. The common theme is clearly war, and that continues with “Our Path Disdained”, which while distinctly more modern still follow a theme of war, and the separation from love, and the desire to get back to her and never leave again.

There is a great deal of mention of pagan gods, and there is a common thread with the involvement of these gods in the culture of war. It’s not exactly Satanic, though in “Stars of God” it moves towards self-worship, and some people have described that as the true point of Satanism, though it comes off more as an (angry) acceptance that no one can be relied on so to seek internally to rise above it all.

What made this interesting is that I had recently read an article about Nordic Noir, where there is a literary trend towards hard-boiled crime novels coming out of Scandinavia. The article was focusing more on how the protagonists were female, which was new. Talking with a friend specifically about the band though, we wondered if maybe just not being part of the local scene accounts for the change. Perhaps you get more nihilistic and hateful when you are locked in grey skies and ice than when it is sunny and there are beaches and when you live in a safari destination. Of course, they have still had their share of political and economic problems.

So, the side note that I would like to add on the religious issue is that while I blame it on human nature, religion has come off badly a lot, and I don’t blame anyone for noticing that. Being able to take a hard look at these situations rather than blindly accepting the wrong is very important. However, many just end up with a general disdain, whereas I would say that truth is accessible and it is worth it to keep looking.

However, I am writing about a band, so we need to focus on the music.

I was a little proud of myself, because I was listening to them and thinking about the intricacy of the guitar work, and then the web page used the word “intricate”, so hey, I did get something right.

Their guitar work is strong, but musically they are capable of a great deal of variety, getting very orchestral at times. The first track, “Vita Satus” sounds like it could be from a movie score, and there is a lot of passion and theatricality infused in the entire album, and clearly it is strong intellectually.

It is metal. It is loud, the singer seems set to a permanent growl-shout, where I almost wondered if there was some distortion. I don’t think there is, but that’s why I’m not hearing the words. The music is harsh, though perhaps more melodic than some metal. There are no claims to be otherwise; this is a metal band.

It is metal done well.

http://www.crowblacksky.com/

https://www.facebook.com/crowblacksky/app_221882241223465

https://twitter.com/CrowBlackSky

http://www.youtube.com/crowblacksky

https://soundcloud.com/crow-black-sky

http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/crowblacksky/pantheion.html#1

Thoughts on Midnight in Paris

First of all, let me say how much I loved this movie. My sisters and I thought it was so fun, and there was depth to it too.

I have only seen two Woody Allen films. The other, Scoop, had a lot of good lines and interesting twists and good performances, but it felt disjointed. Maybe it was an editing problem, or maybe the clever lines didn’t fit together naturally enough. Midnight in Paris just flowed perfectly.

Being enamored of the movie, and pondering various points that it raised, I went to the IMDB message boards to see what people were saying. Of course there were people groaning about the exclusions and the caricatures and all of the quibbles that you would expect. What really surprised me, though, were the questions about whether the portal would be closed now that he has met that other girl, and if maybe she was from the future and used the portal to find him.

Well, assuming the girl in the nostalgia shop was also a time traveler seems like overreaching based on not very many clues, but it also seemed so completely beside the point.

Yes, it is nice that he has romantic possibilities, but I am not at all convinced that Gabrielle is going to be Gil’s soul mate. I suppose arguments for it are that she likes nostalgia, and walking in the rain, and that he is talking to her at the stroke of midnight at the end, which has been when magical things have happened. Going one step further, she is much younger than Gil (the actress was born in 1985, compared to Owen Wilson’s 1968), which may make her a reasonable Woody Allen dream woman.

However, I did not take it as that. Gil had a much stronger connection to Adriana, but she let him go because she was going to keep chasing the past and Gil decided to embrace his present. He could date Gabrielle, or the museum guide, or find someone completely new, but the important part is that he is now going to follow his desires and dreams rather than living in fear. That’s really important for a neurotic guy who started having panic attacks after he got engaged. Anything that happens afterward is going to feel better, because he has taken ownership of his life.

This may be a good argument that Gabrielle was not a time traveler, but it also leads to a good question about Adriana, as to whether it was reasonable of her to decide to stay in La Belle Epoque. Arguing against it, Gil told her that it would be kind of disappointing too, and maybe that’s just life, and he might have a point. However, she wasn’t just staying there to watch the can-can and stargaze. She was going to make costumes, which had been her original life plan, before she started getting romantically involved with modern artists.

With her, it’s more of a moot point. We can’t choose to go back to our favorite historical area and set up shop there. Still, there are things we can learn from it. Adriana was surrounded by great creative minds, but she longed for a different time, and when she got there, they longed for something else too. Part of that is that we don’t know how things are going to turn out while we are in the middle of them.

There’s a scene between Gil and Hemingway that hints at it. Hemingway asks if Gil liked his novel, and Gil’s like, I love all of your writing, because he is looking back over time and seeing this great body of work. However, for Hemingway, he has written one novel. He probably has plans to write more, he could totally have great ambitions, but he doesn’t know what place he is going to hold in literature. None of them do.

For a lot of them, not only is the outcome uncertain, but the process probably has some growing pains. These are artists who are changing their scenes, and they receive criticism and opposition as well as praise. Plus, artists aren’t always the most stable people, which leads to its own issues. Yes, there are a lot of ways in which life can end up disappointing.

But for all the things that we can’t control, it just emphasizes the importance of making good choices where we can. We can choose a life that is more satisfying, and that will almost certainly mean not making decisions based primarily on fear, and that we do honor our creativity.

I love that film.

More thoughts on The Hobbit

I am at one of those junctions where I find my brain running in several different directions, and I am not sure which one to follow. Several of them could get very involved, and they are interrelated, so what order do I go in? So, I’m just going to talk about movies for a couple of posts, and then do my Thursday and Friday music reviews, and then we will see. Punt!

Going back to that night we went to see the movie, one thing our friend was asking about was to try and figure out who were the good guys and the bad guys. It’s not completely cut and dried. You are identifying with the dwarves, and the one set of elves will be adversarial to them, even if Elrond is helpful. I was explaining about how in the end you are going to have the Battle of the Five Armies, and different groups uniting together.

As I told her that, I remembered something my father had said back when I first read the book. This is going back many decades ago, and is about disputed information, so I may not convey this exactly correctly. I guess there was a school of thought that the books, and I was thinking about The Hobbit specifically, but maybe it was more about The Lord of the Rings, were an allegory for WWII.

As far as I know, Tolkien specifically chose not to confirm that, but I guess he didn’t deny it vehemently enough for some people. Anyway, my father specifically said the hobbits were the English, all about being cozy and keeping their meals regular. There was more to it. Apparently the elves were going to Ireland, and yet I don’t think they were the Irish, and the men were the Americans, who were more admirable and heroic.  

So, even if the basic allegory works, about groups who would not normally join together cooperating to fight dark forces, going into that level of interpretation is probably overreaching, I would think, but I have had a couple of thoughts related to that.

One is that for a long time the Americans as the heroes made sense, because both world wars ended after we got involved. I sometimes wondered if it was irresponsible of us not to join in sooner. When we would get to reading about the Holocaust and Anne Frank, it seems like so many people died shortly before their camps were liberated, that you wonder how many could have been saved.

At the same time, perhaps it was not that the US addition was miraculous. Maybe by coming in later, when everyone else has been wearing each other down, you get the better deal. There would probably be more American dead, a lot more, if we had gone in earlier.

And you know, I’m not really going to get anywhere there. War should not be entered into lightly, but sometimes it is necessary, and trying to make good decisions just based on what is right, let alone all of the things that leaders really have to end up thinking about, seems like a losing proposition.

More recently though, I have been thinking about what is heroic. Another thing my father was fond of saying was that Italians fight with their feet –meaning they are cowards who run away. (In case anyone isn’t clear, the Italian is on my mother’s side.)

One of the most beautiful places I have been to in Italy is Bassano. It is physically pretty, but the reason it was so beautiful to me is that it felt so peaceful. I remember standing on the old bridge and watching trout in the water, and it felt very serene. Its history has not been that.

There is a plaque on one of the churches that maps out all of the places where they were hit. There were many. There are some well-maintained trees up on the hill; people who were caught working for the resistance were hung from those trees. The bridge is an important symbol of the town, but it has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. If the Italians prefer peace to war, they’ve got some good reasons.

So I was thinking about all of that and hobbits. One of the lines in the movie, which I believe was added, was Gandalf explaining to Galadriel that he recruited Bilbo because Bilbo gives Gandalf courage. That scene was definitely not in the book, but the sentiment kind of was.

Yes, hobbits like cozy homes and six meals a day, but they are pretty good about rising to challenges. Doing the right thing, is very hobbit-like. I don’t remember Bilbo in the book wanting to go home, but deciding to stick with the dwarves so they could have their own home, but yes, I can imagine hobbits relating to the plight of someone else and accepting some personal sacrifice to help.

My older sister said the real point of the trilogy was friendship, and you can make arguments for that too. I think what Tolkien does say, regardless of whether there is complex or simple allegory, is that those are the people you count on. They aren’t going after riches and glory, but they care about fairness, and loyalty, and good. Those are the heroes.

And for what it’s worth, England did produce plenty of strength and courage at the time.

Please don’t make me defend Katy Perry

One of the things I am doing for church now is working on the single adults committee for the area. If you are 18 to 31 you are a young single, and then from 31 to dead, when unmarried, you are a single adult.

When I was a young single, I did sometimes notice the vastness of the age gap, because there is a lot of space between 18 and 31, and even 18 and 25. That is somewhat amplified once you get past 31. I mean, sure, you’re an adult. Even if you have never married you are probably working and paying your expenses and doing relatively grown up things. Of course, in this case, many of the single adults have in fact been married, and then been widowed or divorced. Frequently they have children. Sometimes they aren’t even that many years older, and yet it still feels like a lot.

Anyway, I was originally called for A1 ward, but then got moved to CM ward, which already had someone, so I thought perhaps I should focus on mid-singles, since they do sometimes have events specifically for 31 – 45. Also, I am the only person under 45 on the committee, so it seemed to make sense. One thing this led to is that I volunteered to do the decorations for the mid-singles New Year’s Eve dance.

I did decorate, but I did not stay for the dance, because I just didn’t want to. I used to love dances, but they used to be different, and music used to be better, and yeah, I was not in the mood. However, when we were discussing the dance afterwards in committee, another member had dropped by, and she felt the music was very inappropriate because when she came in they were playing Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”.

I had to admit ignorance. Yes, I did go through that period of listening to popular teen music last year, and there was some Katy Perry in it, but not that one. Honestly, I can’t really remember how most of her stuff sounded. I kind of remember “Firework”, and there was something about “The One that Got Away”, but I couldn’t hum it.

Here, though, there was a real consensus that this was just filthy. I was a little surprised, because in other circles the song with the filthiest reputation has been “Whistle” by Flo Rida, but I hadn’t heard that either. I was skeptical, but did not have enough information to weigh in.

Let me add some background to this. Another activity that I was asked to be in charge of was a music video night, and I turned that down because it conflicted with my birthday party and because it sounded like pure torture. There was all videos from LDS performers, and included a seminary group doing an a capella version of “What makes you beautiful”. Well, I did remember that One Direction song, because that was part of the overall trend that offended me greatly of boys loving girls with perfect looks and lousy self-esteem and offering to buy them stuff, while girls sing about manipulation and then have nervous breakdowns in real life. But gosh darn it, there are no bad words in it!

I listened to and checked the lyrics for “Teenage Dream”. Yes, she is talking about having sex. It’s direct, though not terribly vulgar. Actually, it’s interesting following the path of the song and the title, because the point seems to be that this love takes her back to feeling carefree and innocent, so she is using the language of teenagers (“Let’s go all the way”) as the logical expression of that. And yes, I believe in chastity, and would never have sex with someone who wasn’t my husband, but I still have to say that’s not really that dirty.

While I was looking up lyrics anyway, I also checked out a few others. “Umbrella” may be code for “condom”, but you don’t have to take it on that level, because it totally works as either a literal umbrella or a metaphor of sharing shelter. It may sound sexier than that, but I can’t remember now. I can see why people hear “Toxic” and think “oral sex”, but it’s a lot more obvious in “Whistle”, so I would have to call it dirtier. I’m not sure that any of them are great for dancing. Not a single one of them stuck in my head, which seems like a bad sign.

So here’s my dilemma. I believe strongly in the power of words and of music, therefore I do think it is worthwhile to make some judgments about what we listen to. I do not blame anyone in that room for being concerned about what was playing.

I do think, however, that it is also worthwhile to question the way we are listening, and the values we are applying. There are lots of songs about sex out there, but sex itself is not bad, even though it is often used badly. What is being said about sex? What mood does it create? What relationships does it promote? I will take the one that makes me feel innocent and carefree and safe versus the one where I will never feel good enough based on my looks, and the resulting poor self-esteem is exploited by men.

No, that’s a lie; both songs are dreck. One just has a more offensive message. Shoot, a lot of the bands that I listen to now don’t even write that much about romance. They swear a lot though. I’m not saying I have it all worked out yet. I will say that a lot of the performers who look clean cut and innocent are only more dangerous because of their appearance.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/04/its-different-for-girls.html