Gray, gray day
Warning: this is not going to be a post of sweetness, light, or cute things my daughter did (although there are some). It's a gray day, which matches my mood.
1. I had to (as in, felt compelled to, not as in, was forced to) stop this morning to move a dead cat out of the middle of the busy street my daughter's Chinese program is on. We passed it on our way to school, and I sort of hoped it would either have been moved out of traffic, found by its owner, or even smushed into cat paste that I would no longer feel capable of moving. No such luck. So I stopped the car, scooped up the poor cat, trying NOT to look at its injuries. (Just like I'm trying not to recount those injuries to you, now, especially the grotesque aspect that is stuck in my head right now. Why is it that we feel such a strong urge to share something particularly horrific, as though by making other people see what we have seen, our own burden of it is lightened?). Two guys in some kind of commercial truck stopped and held up traffic while I moved it, and gave me a thumbs-up, which I
hope was for moving the cat--not because they thought I had killed it. A collar but no tag. Not a great start to the day.
2. I am delighted that this
chubby kitty has found a home. But WTF, people? Note the final quote from the shelter director: "Thousands of people from as far away as London and California called to inquire about adopting the cat, Harr said. Unfortunately, she said no one who contacted the shelter was interested in adopting any of the more than 200 other cats and kittens in the shelter's care." This depresses the hell out of me. Not
one person wanted a pet, instead of a curiosity piece?
3. Working at home today, while the piano repairs get underway. I am slightly cheered by the fact that a) when all is said, done, tuned, and paid for, I will have a piano worth playing; b) it looks like existing casters can be made to work, saving me a couple hundred dollars off a bill that skyrocketed when the tuner found some cracks in the sound board and some keys that are missing something essential to making them play.
But all in all, not a happy morning in Dorcasina-land. And now, back to my dreaded article.
Labels: bitch and moan, doom and gloom; random stuff
All those things I must....
...get out of my head if I am
ever to have any hope of going to sleep.
1. Edwards endorses Obama. I haven't read the coverage yet, but I'm interested to see how Edwards, whose too-brief (for me) run focused on economic disparity and poverty, addresses the recent claims that Hillary was the champion of the economic underdog. I've always like John Edwards, and hope he will help Obama with that whole potential "elitism" problem (yeah, don't ask me to explain how Obama is somehow more "elitist" than our current silver-spoon, Yale-legacy, daddy-financed executive. Evidently "elitism" has something to do with a fundamental mastery of the syntax of American English).
2. Suffering all over in Asia. The sheer scope of the devastation and misery is unimaginable, and the intentional thwarting of relief efforts is heartbreaking. My adoption has made me feel perhaps naively connected to the people of China, and I am very upset by the string of anti-China news prompted by the Olympic scrutiny. It doesn't help that my in-laws seem to think it's okay to bash China (well, their granddaughter is "just American," according to them) for its economic policies, exploit its laborers, resent its increasing global presence, and minimize the sheer horror of this disaster ("Well, it's not like they had much to lose..."). And things
had been getting so much better since the detente (with my in-laws, not between China and the U.S.). I'm haunted by images of forlorn children, or desperate mothers digging through the rubble.
3. Myanmar: see much of above. I don't understand, however, why if Myanmar's current regime is such a sham, why we don't continue to call it "Burma." It seems to me that one of our simplest methods for identifying an "illegitimate regime" (which this one, unlike some of our recent targets, certainly seems to be) is stubbornly to refuse to adopt the preferred term.
4. In general: how can there be so much more suffering than there is relief for the suffering? How can people bear so much?
5. Frontline's magnificent and dreadful episode on
Everest last night. I was entranced, appalled, and exhausted when it was over. I've been something of an armchair afficianado of mountain-climbing since reading Jon Krakauer's
Into Thin Air. (Yes, I know that Krakauer has a wretched habit of writing every story as though it were about
Himself. I know that many people have legitimate issues with his depiction of several key players, and that there are varying interpretations of what went wrong on Everest 12 years ago. I still found the story fascinating. And I read Boukreev's equally self-serving version, too, along with some of the later reconstructions.)
I'm the kind of girl who thinks a car-ride of over 20 minutes
must involve provisions, so I have no interest in actually testing myself against the elements. Still, the Brashears/Frontline version was harrowing. The re-enactments were excruciating--the dark, the bleakness, the constant wind-noise, the huddled climbers, frequently all-but-unrecognizable as human, rocking and jerking almost involuntarily. I suspect it's hard for any of us to imagine the kind of climate where leaving people to die is not only the wisest but the most obvious choice, or the kind of conditions where a single wrong step is death, or the situation in which one could freeze to death within 20 feet of safety. I was mesmerized, and completely and utterly spooked after watching it. By what, I don't know. But I was too afraid to take the dog out (thank gawd he has a bladder of apparently infinite capacity) and lay shivering in my bed for a long, long time before I drifted into an uneasy sleep and dreamt of primitive ape-like creatures wielding charred sticks.
6. How much I hate the "trading up" type home-improvement shows. I love the ones where they show you how two paper bags, a ball of twine, and a bottle of nail polish can transform a home from a dump to a palace, but I
hate the pretentious, snotty, arrogant shoppers who complain about how the kitchen doesn't have granite, or stainless steel appliances, and vow that as soon as they drop 3/4 of a million dollars on this dump, they are going to rip out the perfectly functional appliances and kitchen, send them to the landfill, and put in something gaudy. I don't want to hear the childless couple going on and on about how they
must have the "master suite" with double sinks and multiple showers and a jacuzzi. They are simply unwatchable, of course, juxtaposed with the recent news reports. How many children could you help with just the price of those upgraded countertops? The appliances?
Labels: doom and gloom; random stuff
