Random Thoughts

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Seersucker is an odd word. It sounds as if it should be either an insect or an obscure insult from a fantasy novel.

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As far as I can tell, my kitchen garbage can has only two states--empty and completely full; I have never seen it, say, a third full. I wonder it it's some sort of reverse Schroedinger's cat thing.
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I wonder if the most lasting result of my reading Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons will be that I'm haunted by the term "voluntary quadriplegia".

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Another thing that haunts me is Jung's (?) line about how everything that irritates us can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves. It often wanders through my head when I'm--again often!--irritated by some petty thing or other. What does my irritation say about me?

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Community is very important, but any place-based community will have one or two people who just don't fit in and never will. Humans may be social animals who work best in packs, but some of us are lone wolves. In the Renaissance, I would have been that eccentric woman on the outskirts of the village, happily talking to the toads and plants, who, if she were sufficiently unlucky as to her time and place, ended up on a fire. Valuable as it is to bloom where you're planted and to learn to get along with people you might not have much in common with and all that, I have a lot of sympathy for the guy who strikes out for Alaska to be a hermit in the wilderness.

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I've seen beautiful older women (two famous ones would be Sophia Loren and Maureen O'Hara), but neve a cute one. Until recently. I was watching Rosemary and Thyme and UP remarked of the now 60-ish Felicity Kendall (whom we both know from the delightful Good Neighbors), "She's cute." He's right, but I might not have thought it possible for a woman that age to be cute before I saw her.

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We often say/think how fragile life is--how one seemingly light blow to the head can kill a cat or a man, a tiny clot of blood can fell someone in otherwise perfect health, etc. But at the same time, it can be very hard to kill a person or an animal. Look at how much effort it took to kill Rasputin or how even a caterpillar will fight when you try to knock it to the ground to step on.

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Green tea probably doesn't count as a St. Patrick's Day food.

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I wonder if the women who obsess over dress size would be helped by stopping themselves saying, "I am size 12" (or whatever) and instead saying "I wear size 12".... Then again, probably not. I've heard of women who won't let a friend sew them something, because they would have to buy a pattern in a size larger than their RTW size--never mind that the physical objects, unlike the numbers attached to them, would be the same size. That kind of obsession is probably beyond any help vocabulary juggling could provide.

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Are more people suddenly saying "if I was" instead of "if I were"? Everywhere I turn this past week I hear/read someone saying "if I was". When I mentioned this to him, Uncle Pookie had something to say about "bundling", but maybe there were always so many people using this construction and I just never noticed until now.

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Heard from Uncle Pookie: "I don't have a sarcastic bone in my body. My cartilage, on the other hand..." Change that sarcastic to smart-assed and it's a perfect bon mot.

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Why when we say "martial arts" are we always talking about traditional Asian fighting skills? Martial arts should describe all the martial skills, modern as well as old, Western as well as Eastern. An American recruit in basic training is learning martial arts, yet when we say martial arts we picture Bruce Lee or the kids in the local tae kwon do school.

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Perfectionism is a more complicated problem than it might seem (saying "Just lighten up!", while sensible advice, won't cure it) and perfectionists often have what's called poor self-esteem, but I wonder if sometimes there isn't a bit of arrogance in the mix too--"I'm too good to make a flawed product or perform badly." You have to be humble to be willing to make a mistake.