I have been sad lately because my nephew, 14 years my junior, suffered from juvenile diabetes his entire life. That life ended last month. He was 40 years old.
My family has become estranged from each other, but even so, at least for me, the loss of someone I loved hurts.
Pete, our name for him, and no relation to his given name, had juvenile diabetes since he was a toddler. I was a freshman in High School when he was born. His dad, my brother, was 14 years older than me. Now they are both gone.
Juvenile diabetes cannot be prevented, but it can be managed, and life does not need to be shortened as it was for my nephew. He lived in a small, Midwestern town where smoking is still fairly common. He smoked for most of his young adult life. He ended up with peripheral artery disease and nerve damage and ended up losing his feet and legs. This does not have to happen. I know individuals who have Type 1 Diabetes who are older than I am and who are in very good health. It all depends on taking care of our bodies.
For more information about Type 1 Diabetes you may check out the section of of the American Diabetes Association website that deals with Type 1. You can donate to the ADA too.
Rest in peace, MJH.
If I Had My Life To Live Over
WEEK #56 (6-10-12 to 6-16-12): If I Had My Life to Live Over…
One of my standard “lines” in my cocktail conversation portfolio is that in a neighboring alternate timeline or parallel universe, barely removed from this one, in which I think I’ve been fortunate as an adult, I’m living in a trailer park on U.S. Highway 30, Indiana taking care of 5 snotty nose grandkids by the time I’m in my 40s. Small, seemingly inconsequential acts can totally redirect the course of a persons life.
How Have I Missed Garfunkel and Oates Until Now?
Seriously, someone has been holding out on me. Why hasn’t someone told me about these two before now? I hold you, yes, you, responsible. You should have told me. How the hell is a 55 year old over the hill fat lady supposed to stay up on these things so that my inner skinny 23 year old punk rocking soul stays nourished, if you don’t share such amazing things with me?
I haven’t laughed so hard since I don’t know when. Holding my side laughing and laughing out loud laughing. Didn’t know which video to share. Sex with Ducks is a favorite, but then so is This Party Has Taken a Turn for the Douche. And I find Gay Boyfriend hysterical. But since this is a politically themed month of posting, I have to share this one, Save the Rich. It is a bit more PC for office viewing in case you are watching this at work.
Seriously, get the app.
Check out their site.
Just Saying, Bless His Heart
“Just saying” is a new version of old turn of phrase, just saying.
I love language. It is all arbitrary sounds associated with meaning that we create in our heads. How amazing is that? That we can communicate with each other at all astounds me. We have layered meaning on meaning and teach everything to each new generation. That is what culture is. While our brains are hardwired, so to speak, for language acquisition, there is no specific language or culture to which we are predisposed at birth.
It is even more staggering that we can not only learn all that we do, but that we also learn to be deceitful. Then recursion on top of recursion, we can also say something, treat it like a lie, but imply that it is really true but that we are not saying that. We are freakin’ amazing!
The first time I noticed this stuff was late in life, like 10 years ago, while living in Virginia, when I was clued in to the fact that you, me and every church lady in the country, but particularly in the southern U.S., can something terribly mean, scathing, snarky, and generally just not nice about someone, but make it okay to say in “polite” society, by simply adding the words, “bless his (or her) heart” at the end of the disparaging sentence and magically whatever preceded the phrase is neutralized and acceptable to say, except that everyone knows that it isn’t.
An example would be, “Poor Sally, her cooking is so bad that hungry goats wouldn’t eat it; bless her heart.”
The phrase, “just saying,” seems to work in the same way. I’m not a linguist though I studied the area a bit in Grad School, but this seems like it would be interesting, and maybe informative, to study how the two phrases are used in real life conversation, by whom, and in what situations.
Maybe the phrase, which seems to have enjoyed an increase in use, is used by groups who are not allowed to honestly express themselves. Just saying…
Day Late and a Dollar Short
My timing sucks! I came down with the flu, aches, chills, cough, the whole enchilada, right at the time the political and news editor of BlogHer suggests that I write a counterpoint to a member post on the site in a comment to that post.
Thank heavens Mona Gable wrote a counterpoint piece.
I only got back to my full service, regular old, full-sized, desktop computer today. Size matters. Don’t let anyone tell you it doesn’t. I missed Julie Ross Godar‘s comment until this morning. (I’d like to link to the comment itself, but I don’t know how 🙁 and I’ve already linked to the post that made my blood pressure jump.)
It wasn’t that I could ‘t sit upright at my desk until today, for fear of dying or anything; I could have worked there the last couple of days if it hadn’t been for the #&@! litter box. I didn’t even want to walk down the hall toward my office and the attached bathroom that houses the litter boxes. Cleaning the cat box every single day is essential in a multiple cat house. More often than that is recommended. I hadn’t cleaned it for days. I was trying desperately not to breath and not to vomit while I cleaned it this morning. It was horrible.
Some domain transfers also got totally screwed up during this past week’s unwanted down time.
The last couple of weeks have not been good. I swear I must have jinxed the month somehow. Actually I don’t believe in jinxing. Karma, maybe. We picked up Mr. Worf’s ashes yesterday; actually Hubby picked them up. They are on the mantle.
There are calls and text messages to which I still haven’t responded.
Horrific pet death and missed opportunities… Oh well, “life is hard, and then you die.” I attribute this quote to Johnny Winter.
So what did I do in response to all this? I signed up for the June Jump for Nablopomo on BlogHer. I’m such a frigging masochist! It will at least get me back on track. I would much rather commit to blogging 5x a week, but that isn’t what NaBloPoMo is and I need the structure of the report-back, and the positive reinforcement of seeing my stats increase in meaningful ways, to right the jumble that is currently my daily life.
Some of the things I might write about in June:
- Rhetorical Tactics of the Right (and how they are used in broadcast media, print media, social networking, and yes, even on wonderful sites like BlogHer)
- Why the Original Gen Xers, the Late Boomers, Could Change Everything This November
- Framing Political Differences in Meaningful, non-hateful, ways
- The Last Time the Fascists Planned a Coup d’ Etat
- Disenfranchisement is Unconstitutional
- Voter Registration: Where Are Unregistered Women? We need to be where they are.
- Less than Monkey-wrenching but More than Passive-resistence
- Book review of Beautiful Trouble
- Writing Desk (program), Logitech Accessories, and My iPad
- Build your own Vector Graphics with inexpensive drawing/illustration programs
- The #&@! litter box
- More on BlogHer ’12
- The origin of the phrase “the whole enchilada”
I desperately need structure to be successful. I have two months to both beef up and hone my business and it’s presentation before BlogHer 12 in NYC.
This “little” conference is one of the ways I gauge the passage of time and the mileposts that mark its way. It provided the first respite for me in the weeks immediately after her funeral. I tried to attend the previous year, but if I had gone to it, I would have ended up divorced. No drama in my life. Nope. Not ever. Sigh…
I attended my first BlogHer Conference in Chicago in 2007, very, very shortly after my mother passed away. It provided the first respite for me in the weeks immediately after her funeral.
The other significant dates for me are the Summer and Winter Solstices. Dates of maximum light and darkness within our yearly cycle seem like very reliable markers for assessing where I am and what needs to be adjusted to get where I want to go. I’m not a “pagan,” nor do I worship Gaia. I do, however, feel Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis has more supporting evidence than not, but it is not religion for me. But I digress… I want to be back on track by June 20-22nd. I’m not even sure when the actual moment of the solstitial alignment occurs. (It is: June 20 2012 at 11.08pm (23:08) UTC.)
Note: I actually wrote most of this late last night but didn’t polish it, add links, and create a featured image until today.
Iconic Figures Receive Presidential Medals of Freedom
What an amazing group of people honored at the White House today! Those bestowed with the Medal of Freedom included:
Bob Dylan, Juliette Gordon Low, Toni Morrison, and John Glenn topped the list of those honored this day who touched my life and are household names for large swaths of the America public. I get a bit sappy here and say, “The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.” For me it blows among the trees of campsites where Girl Scouts learn to lead and take charge. The backpacks of older girls are apt to contain a book with a strong woman’s voice on issues of equality and pride in difference. And somewhere within this web of good and proud actions and service, the final frontiers for us expanded beyond the bounds of the earth. There were many honored today, 13 in all, including the four individuals already mentioned in my sappy little tribute.
Honorees:
- Pat Summitt, retired University of Tennessee women’s basketball team coach who lead them to NCAA Final Four appearances, bringing women’s basketball national attention and respect.
- Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first woman to hold the job.
- John Paul Stevens, former Supreme Court justice.
- John Glenn, the first American in space to circle the Earth.
- Toni Morrison, writer,
- Shimon Peres, president of Israel. He will receive his medal at a White House dinner next month.
- John Doar, Assistant Attorney General in the 1960s, who actively implemented civil rights laws at a turbulent time in hostile locations.
- William Foege, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who helped lead the effort to eradicate smallpox as a Director of the CDC.
- Dolores Huerta co-founded the organization that eventually became the United Farm Workers of America. Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth.
- Folk singer and rock icon Bob Dylan changed the voice of America and captured the sentiments of a vast human rights movement.
Posthumous recipients:
- Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts, who died in 1927.
- Jan Karski, a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. He died in 2000.
- Gordon Hirabayashi, who fought the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He died in January.
Media coverage of the award ceremony emphasizes President Obama’s acknowledgement of the profound impact of the honorees had on him personally. I was moved by the group as a whole. At first I did not understand why the ceremony leapt out to me as significant. Then I realized it is because President Obama is from the same cohort as me. He is member of the later born Baby Boomers, a group called Late Boomers a group distinctly different from the Early Boomers. There have been two other Presidents who were at the very leading edge of the post World War II baby boom; both President Clinton and George W. Bush were born in 1946. President Obama was born in 1961. The Baby Boom spanned 1946 to 64 as officially defined by the U.S. government and 1946 to 68 demographically as defined by birth rates.
The culture of the 1960s and 1970s was extremely different from the Post WWII culture. This collection of individuals honored today probably resonates with a group of Americans who are proud of a very different America than the one to which Romney wants us to return. Geesh, didn’t he ever read Thomas Wolfe? You really can’t go home again.
Anyway, the things I did yesterday were still spinning around in my head when I flipped on the TV today and saw the Presidential Medal of Freedom award ceremony. I felt a sense of pride beyond militarism or jingoism that I don’t get to feel for my country as often as I would like.
I spent yesterday reading about General Smedley Butler as a way to educate myself about military history. I can’t watch or read about wars since the Korean because it makes me think of my brother who was injured twice in Vietnam in 1968, can no longer walk, suffers from PTSD, and is in real decline and receiving far less from the V.A. than he, or any veteran who served and gave so selflessly, should be receiving. Then last evening I watched Hemingway and Gellhorn on HBO, a great depiction of two important 20th Century writers, within the framework of the Century’s wars that brought them together. Together, this juxtaposition made me consider the elemental nuance of time periods that can be lost if we do not search them out and honor them. No one wins wars any longer. So who writes history? The answer of course is that we do. What we choose to do becomes life, and what we choose to remember becomes history.
I was really moved to see the times within which I have lived most of my life being honored through some of the best people who shaped those times. It made me proud to see people who shaped good parts of my world be honored for shaping good parts of my country and world. It gives validity to my cohort that has so often been besmirched as a ruthless or shallow “Me Generation.” We see our first Presidential representative shown more disrespect than any President since the Civil War. But there is something good happening even though we are living in disgustingly divided times; it is a recognition of the good people who shaped the people who are beginning to lead the world as elders. It is heartening.
The Medal of Freedom was created by executive order of the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, on July 6, 1945. Over the decades it has expanded from being awarded to civilians for meritorious service that aided the security of the United States, as in its first awards to civilians who served in WWII. Amendments to the executive order have renamed it the Presidential Medal of Honor and expanded its scope to include eligibility to military and government personnel, and eventually to extend to civilians who have furthered our national interests in profound ways.
The large hubbub created by the awards ceremony, at least it was large relative to the usual amount of press received by such events, signaled not just an interest in Bob Dylan but, IMO, a changing of the guard. These folks influenced not only Obama, but Obama’s cohort, and that signals a turning of the cultural clock as to whom we as a society consider to be our honor-worthy elders. Lots of women and a rock star folksinger… I can dig it!