In which I have a failure to adult.

Aka Catherine is having trouble buying a car.  I don't know why.  I just have a fear of buying myself a shiny, new, working car.

I know what I want, one of those cars that is a little sportier than a "mommy" car.   I just wish they'd give them jazzy colors.   This middle-aged lady wants lime green, or purple, or hot pink, something fun.   Not beige, greige, grey, silver, or white.

I guess part of me still wants a sexy car too.

After all, I'm not doing theater as much, or choir, or teaching CCD.   Or working at the Library.

But it would be useful for CSA, for going up to the Lake, etc.... to be able to go buy a full-size rug!  Or a piece of furniture.... and bring it home...


It just feels like such a big purchase.   And a permanent purchase...

Its not so much the car, its that I have an odd love/hate relationship with permanence.   I hate change, but sometimes it is necessary.  

Piles of papers, boxes of books, towers of trivia....

Ok, so, I am not the most organized person in the world.   An Internet friend of mine uses the phrase "The Cupboard of Doom".  I can SO relate.  

I have piles.  Piles of papers, piles of proxies, piles of produce, even.  

I have boxes full of papers, some from my fleeing the ex 12 years ago.   And I fell behind on important things, I fell behind on catching up and organizing.

So I made a promise to myself this year.  As the weather gets cooler, I am going to sort at least one bag of recycling, old bills, statements, etc, every day that the weather is inclement, until I am clear.  

I filled my recycling bin with shredded stuff.   I ran out of paper bags!  

I still have piles, I still have a ways to go, but I am seeing an end to it.   I am seeing progress.

Sometimes, it is the baby steps.   It is the elimination of one pile a day.  

But man, so much paper.

SO MUCH.

Now I just have to go redeem all these bottles.   For what won't even be gas money.  

The Day The Internet United.

It was the day of Robin Williams' death.   Never have I seen my twitter and Facebook feeds so full of sorrow and of love.   Robin touched the hearts of my generation so much.  I grew up with him, Mork from Ork, The World According to Garp, What Dreams may Come, Bicentennial Man, Aladdin, Mrs Doubtfire.

He touched us all.  He appealed to our inner humanity, to the sense that there is always something a little alien inside us.  To the quirky, the people who would go to great lengths for the ones we love.  

And we all loved him.

I wish he had known how much he was loved.  It might not have helped.  But I just wish, wish, wish he had known.  

He was an incredible talent, and his movies helped me through some of the darker times in my life.

And he is gone, and the whole world, from Scotland, Egypt, India, Australia, grieves.

We grieve in part because he embodied "everyman".

We grieve for that part of ourselves that he touched.

We grieve because it helps us grieve for others we have lost.

I grieve because I saw such light, such kindness, such sadness in his movies.  He let us see his humor, but also his pain.

And I hope this, at least, helps his family.   That he was able to unite the Internet through love.  

The bright spark in the darkness.  Love wins.

And Robin, you are loved.  You are loved so much.

You have touched many, many lives.  More lives than you will ever know.

And I hope that you are looking down from a great mountaintop, and feel that love envelop you and take you to safety.   You have left us with incredible characters, part of a generation of people, and will live, in our hearts forever.

Goodbye, oh captain, my captain.  Nanu, nanu.

Anthem for Doomed Youth.

To Wilfred Owen, who would have dreamed that your poem would still be appropriate, 100 years on.  Now it truly is doomed youth, doomed children.   I have no words anymore, for the horrors I see on my Twitter feed.  The bodies of children being stored in ice cream freezers, because there is no room at the morgue.

I feel that I have to keep testifying, because our, as Americans, complicity is so strong.   We are providing the bombs that kill these children.  The deaths, oh god, the deaths.

And you never thought your words would apply to babies.

And when does it all stop? When does the hatred and the anger stop?   Israel will NEVER feel safe.  The Iron Dome was not put into place as protection from Hamas, it was put into place as protection from Lebanon.   Hamas was a nuisance, until they became a scapegoat, again.

It is complex, and there are layers and layers of hatred, of anger, of...  and some of it was the arbitrary division of Palestine into Palestine and Israel.  Without regard to where the lines should be drawn, or forethought into the settlement/resettlement and future of the land.

And we come to here, from genocide to an ethnic cleansing.  From the Holocaust to children's deaths, yet again.

And the cycle continues, and children die.


CHILDREN DIE.

And I feel so helpless.   But I have to speak up.

Imagine losing 18 family members at once.   I have a friend, who supports Israel, who has four brothers.  All of whom have kids.  Dan, if you read this, put yourself in their shoes.   Imagine losing your whole family in one blow.  Your brothers, their wives, most of their kids.   Imagine the impact it would have on YOUR family if you lost that many people at once.  I am not engaging you on Facebook, because it kills me that you seem to support this wholesale slaughter of families.

They have no way of burying the bodies.

The morgues are overflowing.   The power station has been bombed.

This morning, on Twitter, I read a tweet that said that Israel accidentally bombed the UN school because they were aiming for three men on motorcycles.  How does that possibly make sense?  A bomb large enough to obliterate a school, targeting three men who would have been a moving target?

STOP.  Please.  Hasn't there been enough death?

"First, they came for the Socialists"

Flaming Feminism, Batman!

So, I've been reading up on the "third wave" feminism.    One of the sites I had found, via a great blog, was named S-H-A-K-E-S-V-I-L-L-E (spelling it out because I don't want a "third wave" of comments coming here when people google for it).   The actual "feminist" posts on the site were good, and the idea behind a "safe commenting space" is also good, but, in practice, it falls short.   I had, before I started commenting, thought it seemed like a safe space.   But...  it is a "safe space" for the moderator only.  If you can't disagree, how can you grow?

So the moderator took an unexpected hiatus from her blog.   And I had been seeing things that just made me feel as if something wasn't quite right.   They edit your comments on S-ville.   The first time that one of my comments was edited I was furious, because, if I had not gone back and looked at it, I WOULD NOT have known that it had been edited.  They were MY words, before they were edited.  Why not, instead of editing, start a conversation about "hey, this was not cool, and here is why"?    At least send a note when you edit someone's words.    I had been furious, stepped away for a few days, came back, started commenting again.  But that editing made me feel like a horrible person, like a "bad feminist".  Which I am not.  I am careful with what I say.  I don't want to antagonize anyone.

I did read the commenting policy, feminism 101, and whatever else they wanted you to read before commenting.  But, when you have an overly elaborate commenting policy, that turns a safe space into a "lack of growth space", it makes it harder to comment.  And makes it harder to see what is ok to talk about.

When the mod went "walkabout", I googled her, I googled S-ville, and I came across another blog.   I came across one that was started by people who respected the work she had done in the past, but felt that the blog had, in some ways, jumped the shark, and become more of a cult.  And you know, there is some truth to that.

Melissa, the mod in question, does do some things that don't seem respectful to me.  There is a lot of "The worst thing ever" or "The best thing ever", "blubs", and "welp".   How about using English?  Proper English?  You can't disagree, or offer advice.  Advice is bad, bad, bad.  Because you are taking away the ability for rational thought and "eliding her lived experience".  Well, maybe YOUR lived experience has some things that hers hasn't.

Boy this is getting long.

Anyway, with various red flags going up, not only via the commenting policy, but my reaction to the commenting policy, I have been watching the out-in-the-open war between these two sites.

Long story short, both sides have a point.   The site has been overzealous with its commenting policy, and the opposing site does have some nasty remarks.  The opposing site says that they have never encouraged anyone to track Melissa down, or harass her.  They have kept their comments and observations to their own site.  That being said, including S-ville in the name, yes, it is targeted, to an extent.   But they did confirm a lot of my own observations about the current state of S-ville.  

So I don't agree completely with either site.   I think S-ville has done some good work in the past, and still has some good content, but is overly moderated.    It is, in the end, a personal site, belonging to Ms Melissa.

The current conflict and the heartache I feel.

Death.  That is what I'm seeing on my newsfeed.  Death, hate, anger.   And I just feel heartbreak.  Because something that was potentially so good turned into something so bad.

I am not in favor of Hamas's tactics.  But it is a bloody, vicious cycle, which is only going to continue.   I am not in favor of Israel's tactics either.  They have a defense shield system which does not let the rockets through.  I am not pro-anyone sitting under a hail of missiles, but why not just let Hamas use up their rockets?   Why respond so viciously that children die?

That is what is bothering me so much.  Children are dying.   Civilians.  Entire families of 18 at one blow.

And they are not letting aid through.  They are not letting doctors through.  

They are threatening the journalists.

I saw a post yesterday from Mayim Bialik, on FB, asking people to please not attack her because she is Jewish and a celebrity.   That she is pro-Israel, but also supports a peaceful Palestine.

I've seen my Jewish friends commenting on anti-Palestinian posts.  There was one that was supposedly a children's program that was teaching children to hate the Jews.   (Full disclosure: I could not watch it).

I don't know what the solution is.  I really don't.  I'm not sure there is a solution, at this point.  Go back to the outlines of the original Israel as outlined by the Balfour Agreement?  Scrap it all and start over? divide the country in half, equally?  The problem with the current situation is that the relatives of all those who are dying are going to have incredible anger and sorrow.   We need to heal that.   Israel needs to do something to say "I'm sorry your relatives died, here is what we can do"  A united rebuilding effort.

I see the pictures of Jews cheering on the bombs, and the pictures of the dead babies.  And it hurts.   It hurts that there is so much hate, from two groups who really just want to live in peace.

Both groups want the other GONE.  That is the real problem.  

I don't know what the solution is, but we need a long-term plan.  Not a band-aid.  And the anti-ads need to be banned.

(And yes, this is the legacy of colonialism).

What we need to talk about when we talk about shootings.

Do we need to talk about this guy and his rampant misogyny?  Yes.  But we need to talk about more.

Do we need to talk about the role of guns in this culture and society?  Yes.  But we need to talk about more.

We need to STOP this culture of celebrity.  Where there is a flurry of activity and "another shooting! Ban the guns!", and plastering his videos over youtube and the Internet.

We need to treat every mass shooting as a terrorist event.

We need to do a better job of tracking psychopaths.   The evidence is always there, after the fact.

We need to track stockpiling guns, stockpiling ammo.

I read a comment from a doctor on one of the articles I read, where she had been treating an elderly dementia patient, who could no longer drive, yet still had a concealed carry permit.  Maybe we need to have recertification tests.  If you wish to have a permit, you have to pass an interview,

If someone is seeing a battery of therapists, maybe you revoke his carry and lock up the guns?

I just feel that we need better options, altogether.  

We need to talk about the idiots who "open carry" rifles/etc into Chipotle and such, saying "look at my big gun, haha".

If someone posts a video with stupid gun behavior, then they should have to explain that and go for training on how not to use a gun.

We are having a conversation on #yesallwomen, and even #yesallBiblicalwomen, which is something that has needed to happen for a long time.   We live in a culture, a world, where women are sexually objectified.  Most men don't realize how much.    And the women in the Bible are mostly referred to by omission, by afterthought, or as vessels.   The good and virtuous man who saw a woman bathing, had her husband killed, and then brought her to his home and raped her.  Or the omission of Mary Magdalene.  A priest was commenting on the radio that only one of Jesus's followers came to the Crucifixion.   I believe Mary Magdalene was there, as well.  And she was the first one Jesus showed Himself to.  And yet...  she is not considered one of the Apostles, because she is a woman.

I do think we need more checks and balances.  There was an article that said that Elliot Rodger was a misogynist because he was a killer, not vice versa.  And that Adam Lanza loved guns because he was a killer.  But I think that is too simplistic.  

These are complex things, and only by driving at the root, and being more aware, can we fight this.  We have to stand up to the stupid, to the scary.  Gun owners need to insist that people not behave stupidly.  Just because you are responsible, doesn't mean that someone else will behave responsibly.  And thus, to behave responsibly, call out the irresponsibility.  

Call out someone when they are behaving chauvinistically.  People say "Well, the crazy people are going to get guns".  Well, why not put laws in place to stop that?  Adam Lanza was apparently stopped from buying a gun by those gun laws.   But why didn't this carry over and create an alert that there was a potential problem?  If there had been some kind of follow-up, perhaps a shooting could have been avoided.

If Elliot Rodger had had some kind of follow-up, maybe that would have been prevented.