Yay! The IRS finally deposited my refund!

As a side note, I found it interesting when I discovered the other day that the IRS has a Where's My Refund? page set up just for checking refund status. I guess I'm not the only one who wanted to know when I'd get my money back.

A response from my grandmother to the rice forward:

I have seen that, Kathy, but thanks for sending it. I read in the paper the other day that people all over the country were sending their bags of rice, but the white House wouldn't say how many had arrived. In one post office some bags burst open and messed up the automated postal machinery. I've been busy the last two weeks with another version of protest. A group of friends are enlisting people to sign a paper with twelve good reasons why the U.S. should not attack Iraq. The paper and names will be published in the local paper next week as well as sent on to the president and congress persons. I also took part in the virtual protest through e-mail and telephoning last week. Did you know about that one? I guess they were innudated with calls and mail.

I got the following email forward today:

There is a grassroots campaign underway to protest war in Iraq in a simple, but potentially powerful way.

Place 1/2 cup uncooked rice in a small plastic bag (a snack-size bag or sandwich bag work fine). Squeeze out excess air and seal the bag. Wrap it in a piece of paper on which you have written:

"If your enemies are hungry, feed them. Romans 12:20.
Please send this rice to the people of Iraq;
do not attack them."

Place the paper and bag of rice in an envelope (either a letter-sized or padded mailing envelope--both are the same cost to mail) and address them to:

President George Bush
White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500

Attach $1.06 in postage. (Three 37-cent stamps equal $1.11.) Drop this in the mail TODAY. It is important to act NOW so that President Bush gets the letters ASAP.

In order for this protest to be effective, there must be hundreds of thousands of such rice deliveries to the White House. We can do this if you each forward this message to your friends and family.

There is a positive history of this protest! In the 1950s, Fellowship of Reconciliation began a similar protest, which is credited with influencing President Eisenhower against attacking China. Read on:

"In the mid-1950s, the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, learning of famine in the Chinese mainland, launched a 'Feed Thine Enemy' campaign. Members and friends mailed thousands of little bags of rice to the White House with a tag quoting the Bible, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him." As far as anyone knew for more than ten years, the campaign was an abject failure. The President did not acknowledge receipt of the bags publicly; certainly, no rice was ever sent to China.

What nonviolent activists only learned a decade later was that the campaign played a significant, perhaps even determining role in preventing nuclear war. Twice while the campaign was on, President Eisenhower met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider U.S. options in the conflict with China over two islands, Quemoy and Matsu. The generals twice recommended the use of nuclear weapons.

President Eisenhower each time turned to his aide and asked how many little bags of rice had come in. When told they numbered in the tens of thousands, Eisenhower told the generals that as long as so many Americans were expressing active interest in having the U.S. feed the Chinese, he certainly wasn't going to consider using nuclear weapons against them."

From: People Power: Applying Nonviolence Theory by David H. Albert, p.43, New Society, 19

It's an interesting idea. I don't know how widespread the email is or how many people are actually acting on it, but I'm thinking about sending a bag of rice.

I hate being awake and alone in the middle of the night, without even anyone to talk to on IM; I don't think any other time of day ever feels quite as lonely.

What horrible affliction would you be? Take the Affliction Test Today! Grant and I are disease-mates; we're both rabies. I've never had a disease-mate before.

Guh.

I stumbled onto some websites about animal cruelty today and read a few specific case histories. I'm not going to post links here because they're pretty brutal and I don't know that anyone who reads this blog will get anything positive out of reading them.

It's sick, what some people in this world are capable of. And it's sad that even in cases of severe animal cruelty the perpetrators often go unpunished, nothing done to prevent them from doing the same things to other animals down the line.

I don't even have words for what I'm feeling. Upset? Sick to my stomach? Sad? Bleh.

More on the flourescent rabbit:

Kathryn: did you read the link about the flourescent rabbit?
Jeremy: yep
Jeremy: kinda scary
Kathryn: I think it's scary that he found scientists willing to help with that.
Kathryn: so you're of the view that it's "unethical"?
Jeremy: um.. hard to say
Jeremy: probably
Jeremy: art should not harm other creatures
Jeremy: there's no justification for doing so

What if it isn't really "harmed"? How is harm defined?

If the rabbit lives a full, productive life and dies a normal death, was it really harmed?

How is the creation of this rabbit different from people who breed hybrid parrots - breeds and matchings that wouldn't happen on their own in nature, but are genetically possible and are then engineered in captivity?

I guess, though, that there are ethical arguments against the breeding of hybrid parrots, tigons, ligers, and any other sort of hybrid animals, as well.

I was going through some old papers my apartment complex had tacked up my door a few weeks ago, and came across this one:

. . .Archstone has been notified by the National Apartment Association of a possible terrorist threat targeting apartments and hotels. . .Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and FBI Director Robert Mueller raised the national terrorism threat level to "orange" indicating a "high risk of terrorist attacks". . .All residents are asked to be aware of any suspicious activities and report them to the local FBI Field Office. . .

Can you say "paranoia"? Blah.

Ack. Meet Alba, the genetically altered, flourescent green bunny. Art? Social statement? Highly unethical? Just plain crazy?

"For his latest work, GFP Bunny, he created a living green rabbit. With the assistance of French scientists, Kac used genetic engineering to inject a rabbit zygote with the green fluorescent protein gene --hence the work's name -- that exists in jellyfish. The result: a lovable bunny named Alba, whose fur -- under optimum frequency blue light -- glows green."

Rabbit postcards! Kick ass!

I've been feeling a little light-headed today. Not a good thing. I felt like I might pass out for a moment there when I was out with my dog just now. I'm thinking that maybe it isn't such a good idea for me to be driving into the city for the dance tonight.

---

I've been cleaning like crazy today and yesterday. I have my air filter out in the living room while I'm working on cleaning in here, sitting right next to the kitchen. It's rectangular shaped; maybe two and a half feet tall, two feet long, and one foot wide. It does make noise, but not all that much; comprable, maybe, to the noise that a box fan might make.

My poor dog is scared shitless of the thing. He's too scared to walk past it into the kitchen to get to his food and water, unless I actively coax him by. The minute I move away from it again, he hightails it back into the living room to hide as far away as he can possibly get. Poor puppy. :(

Brian's on strike. Mike hasn't posted anything interesting lately. If I can't peer over the fence into their lives, why should I give anyone the satisfaction of peering over into mine? I'm on strike too, then. So there.

Either that or I haven't been posting because I just haven't had anything worth saying. Or something. Blah.

A short response to Brian's most recent blog post:

We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

That portion of the email forward he posted jumped out at me because when I was a kid, another kid from my church was out playing at a vacant construction site with friends when a huge pile of sand collapsed on him. They dug him out and rushed him to the emergency room, but he'd already gone into a coma. He died a week later due to complications. That's the only time in my life so far that a peer of mine has died. It sucked.

That aside, however, I generally agree with the email Brian posted. You should consider reading it if you haven't already.

Alright, alright, so that you don't have to actually click a link and browse over, I'll post it here. You lazy bum.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have.

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

Our baby cribs, toys and rooms were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.

We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not available.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade.

That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), the term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.

I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot?

He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.

Oh yeah.... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked (physical abuse) here too ... and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough...it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations.

I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent

Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents?

Of course, my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny Reynolds from next-door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes?

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

How did we survive?

(Anonymous)

So, yeah. I agree with a lot of that. I believe our society has become paranoid and stupid. I hate the litigation-happy mentality that we seem to have slipped into. I hate all the ass-covering that schools, hospitals, individuals, businesses, organizations, etc. end up engaging in due to fear of litigation.

I worked as a counselor at a girl scout camp one summer a few years ago. They were so paranoid about litigation that they just cut out all sorts of activities that had I enjoyed at the same camp as a kid, and they really put limits on how counselors could interact with kids. This got in the way of a good camp experience for the kids more often than not. For instance, the girls are no longer allowed to learn how to put up tents. Knife safety courses are gone; no more whitling, no more carving sticks for marshmallows. They could hurt themselves. Girls aren't allowed to share or trade food; what if one is allergic to something the other give her?! When I was a kid and it rained at the camp, we put on our ponchos and continued with whatever we were doing. We felt good about ourselves because we were "roughing it", and it was fun. Now they force all the kids indoors; wouldn't want anyone to catch a chill.

One week when I was assigned to one of the five-year old units, one of the girls whacked another with a stick. The injured girl came crying to me. She wasn't really hurt all that badly; she just wanted to climb up on my lap for a hug and some consolation. I had to tell her no and keep her at a distance, which left her feeling all the more upset. Any sort of contact like that was distinctly against the rules, rules which had been put in place to give the camp administrators peace of mind about protecting themselves from any sort of sexual harassment litigation.

I loved the kids, but it was just depressing for me seeing how much the camp had changed in 10 years and how much it was still changing (for the worse, in my opinion). I didn't go back to be a counselor again for any of the following summers.

It's good to worry about safety. It's good to hold people, organizations, schools, etc. accountable for bad things that they are responsible for. But I think we've gone way overboard. And it pisses me off.

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I drew that. Isn't it pretty? Ah, the joys of ASCII art.

Damnit. I just screwed up my post and now have to re-type it. I hate when I do stupid crap like that.

---

For whatever reason, last night as I was falling asleep I found myself trying to come up with an analogy for a stifling relationship.

Imagine two flowers in a field. One is blue and gold, rounded petals, a soft scent. One is a stunning red with a clean white center, its petals more angular. Both are stunning and beautiful, but they grow well next to each other. Neither draws away from the other. Both have ample access to sunlight and to water and minerals in the ground, and both are able to grow to their full potential; healthy looking, good size, vibrant colours.

Now imagine the same blue and gold flower in the same field, but neighbored instead by a large bush full of delicate yellow buds. When they are small both the flower and the bush may grow well together for a time, but as the bush becomes larger and more beautiful it will begin to block the sunlight available to the flower and it will draw more water and minerals out of the ground, thereby limiting the resources needed by the flower.

The flower in the second example may still live a full life, and it may still be pretty, but in having its resources limited it will never be able to reach its full potential. Its growth will likely be stunted, its colours will never be as bright, and it will never look quite as healthy as it might under other conditions. Looking at this particular flower on its own you might not even realize that was the case, but if you were familiar with the breed of flower, if you could see it in comparison next to the flower in the first example, it would be blatantly apparent that the flower here was ultimately something less than it could have been.

So I fell asleep thinking about flowers and bushes.

Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier.
Ooh-oo child, things'll get brighter.
Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier.
Ooh-oo child, things'll get brighter

Some day, yeah, we'll get it together and we'll get it all done.
Some day when your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun.
Some day when the world is much brighter...

("Ooh Child" - written by Stan Vincent, sung by many)

I was a little unhappy earlier, and this song started playing in my head. I don't even know the song all that well so I'm not sure where it came from, but I found it strangely comforting.

So I was looking at plane tickets, found some really nicely priced ones... I went to just browse around a little bit to see if I could find anything else comprable, not more than 10 minutes, and then popped back to the original site to find that the original tickets I'd found jumped up in price by $70. Coincidentally, it turns out those 10 minutes were the difference between "before midnight" and "after midnight" (a new day). Blah. Suck.

Other than that, it's been a nice night. It's Tiff's birthday, and she's all about Karaoke, so they set up a machine! And games night has been Karaoke night. Lots of fun. Back to singing...

Wow.

I had just left to go over to a friend's place, and turned around to come back before I'd even left the apartment complex because I remembered that I'd left the coffee-maker on. Ran upstairs, and found that my dog had ALREADY gotten into the kitchen. He found the most recent bag of dog treats I'd purchased for him and was busy helping himself. (Better that than chocolate.)

Well, at least he's a go-getter. Or something.

This time I caught him before he'd feasted, but soon enough into it for him to feel guilty. He's on the couch in submissive mode as I type this.

Anyhow, I'm off again, now that I'm certain I'm not going to burn down the apartment while I'm away.

I feel indescribably happy right now.

My electric griddle is the ultimate kitchen tool. It can do anything.

I just manged to use it to make popcorn. Mmm, freshly popped popping corn with just a hint of butter and salt, and none of that microwave @#%$.

I have ULTIMATE KITCHEN POWER! :)