Category: Writing

Pockets

My rants about the fashion industry are legendary. One reoccurring theme is the absence of pockets in women’s clothing.  Then there’s the ire that fake decorative pockets on women’s clothing causes me. Whereas men’s clothing  has pockets on damn near everything, including their pajamas.

With this raging argument always brewing inside me, I went to the bank to rollover my 401k into an IRA. The banker who helped me had her cellphone lying on the desk. I noticed that the phone case included a double pocket where she kept her credit cards, driver’s license and perhaps her medical card. Seeing that phone case was all it took to wind me up.

As she typed up my application, we both confessed about how it was a pain in the ass to carry a purse in some situations and the general lack of pockets in women’s clothing. She even admitted that one of the reasons she’d bought the dress she happened to be wearing was because it had pockets stylishly sewn into its gentle folds.

Then she asked, “Why do men need so many pockets?”

“For porn!” I answered.  We both burst out laughing.  I’d never questioned why men needed lots of pockets, always focusing my rant on why we women often were shortchanged.

About a week later, I retold that male pockets/porn joke to a male friend and a woman before a filmmakers roundtable event began. She laughed. He didn’t. Instead he fast tracked that joke to its grave by asking me to explain why it was funny. I indirectly explained that the joke may only be funny to women. The other woman said, “Men are always watching porn.” He still didn’t see any humor in that.

Another guy joined us at the table. After we all introduced ourselves, in no time flat, that guy explained that his filmmaking genre was some niche porn I cannot recall because, as the other woman and I said, men are always watching porn.  Here was this guy who was producing it. I didn’t bother to count how many pockets he had.

During the 15-minute intermission in the middle of the roundtable event, the other woman and I made haste to the bathroom and were the first two in the two-stalled women’s bathroom. We both finished up around the same time and saw a line of women waiting–of course.  I seized the moment to test out my hypothesis and told the men’s pockets/porn joke to the women in line.  They all laughed.

Some weeks later, I female friend and I got together to catch up.  I couldn’t resist.  Even she laughed, agreeing that men view a lot of porn. At least that’s what we women think.

Set in Motion

As soon as Trump was elected, the resistance began. Trump supporters called us many names, including “snowflakes.” Throughout 2017, the snowflakes grew in number and energy, creating a blizzard. One of the most powerful storms: The Me Too Movement.

A spotlight has now been shined on the open-secret incubation of sexual predators across workplace environments. Coddled from legal and professional consequences because they were “high performers,” these powerful men indulged in flexing illegal power since they made money for their corporate pimps who protected them.

Yet, I’d love it, if, just for once, one of these powerful men, an open-secret sexual assaulter, would be as explicitly honest as he was when he explicitly trolled for his victims, and confess, “Well, in the past when I’d flash my penis, talk dirty, grope someone or act out any other of my deviant sexual machinations at the workplace, I was never blamed for my own actions.  My career never suffered because my victims were always blamed, never quite believed, and their careers were either diminished or ended as a result of my behavior; so I thought that occasionally paying for their silence and departure, although it wasn’t an admission of guilt on my part, was just the cost of doing business.

“Then, something changed. I’ve heard that the election of our current president triggered it. Whatever the case, from one day to the next, I was held accountable for my own actions beyond paying hush money.

“Suddenly the same media and industry institutions that put me at the pinnacle of my field and looked the other way as I broke laws lesser men would have been imprisoned for, or at the very least fired, is now punishing me. I was untouchable, so to speak, but now I’ve lost my job. My career has imploded.”

Of course, I’m not holding my breath for such a great, revealing confession. They’re probably still swirling around thoughts about how the empires they built are collapsing, but really, every industry that these fallen titans have thrived in, still exist.  How humbling it must be for them to see their pillars, their solid connections to fame, fortune and power destroyed and the industry itself continue to thrive, new pillars created to strengthen the ever-changing cultural standards, absorbing the shock of a new generation of change makers.

Once the initial shock of the beginning of the end for these crumbled pillars settle, the long-lasting consequence of their wrong-doing lie not in how the collective battle cry of #metoo waged against them, but how swiftly they were replaced.  Reeling from the disillusion of their inflated self-worth, they’ve been tossed into a sexual predator tar pit and the vacuum created in their absence is being rapidly filled.

Nature abhors a vacuum.  Human nature roots for the underdog.  Twenty-eighteen is The Year of the Dog.

Time’s up.

Aunt Teresa’s Burlesque Dictionary

Last Christmas, when my immediate family got together, I had a few conversations with one of my nephews, who was 25 at the time. During our conversations, he asked me what certain words, like “ambiguous” and “prolonged,” meant since I’d peppered my conversations with such vocabulary. At one point, I told him that if he’d read more, he’d know the meaning of those words.

Unlike other members of my immediate family, I’m not induced into thinking that just because this particular nephew is on the autism spectrum that he can’t do better. I’ve witnessed him manipulate other people, especially my parents, into doing things for him. He ‘d mastered that behavior at age three. Since I’ve lived out of town for most of his life, I have always seen through the learned helplessness charade. Not every struggle can be written off as intellectual disability, especially with someone smart enough to scheme.

For that Christmas, I’d gifted him a nonfiction book and two literary magazines. I knew he liked history and the novel was about a married autistic man’s journey to being a better father and husband by learning how to be more empathetic–lessons I thought my nephew needed to learn as well.

Just on a fluke, I told him for next year’s Christmas gift (2017), I’d get him a dictionary to help build his vocabulary. Then I added that I’d probably had to decorate it with pictures to get him to read it. I asked him with which kind of pictures he’d like me to decorate the dictionary.

“Big titties and Kim Kardashian!” he answered without the slightest hesitation.

I told him I wasn’t going to buy any porn, but I still kept the request in mind as I flew back to Texas. The more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued with the challenge of modifying a dictionary to the point that a 25 year old man would actually look at every page.

So, on January 2nd, I went to Half Price Books and checked out the reference section. I wanted a dictionary that had around 300 or fewer pages, medium-to-large print, hardbound, and thickish pages. I loved the irony of the small print at the top of my dictionary choice: “A vocabulary book for people who don’t need one.” Oh, my nephew definitely needed one!

While at the checkout counter, I told the guy my intentions for buying the dictionary. Then I asked him what Half Price Books did with their old magazines, emphasizing that I didn’t want porn. He directed me to the recycling center in the back of store, telling me that perhaps there were some gentlemen’s magazines that hadn’t been recycled them yet.

So, I explained my project to one of the women who worked in the recycling center. As fortune would have it, she had a shopping cart full of vintage Maxims and similar magazines. She handed me a heavy stack of 12 magazines. I’d originally thought I’d have to go through a lot of junk mail to get such pictures from racy ads. The universe conspired for me!

Then, I went to one of my favorite craft stores, told the story behind the dictionary project and asked for a recommendation for a pen I could use to write on the pages. Again, the cashier was more than happy to direct me to the scrapbooking section where I found gel pens that were chemically neutral and wouldn’t bleed. My intention was to write a comprehensive sentence at the top of each page, using the framed vocabulary word.

When I say “framed,” I mean just that. For each page, I planned to paste, using the acid-free glue sticks I bought at the craft store, an eye-catching picture, which will cover up some of the other words.  With colored pencils, I’d create a colorful scenic/decorative background to make all the other words on the page recede, leaving one vocabulary word and its definition(s) uncolored; so he’ll be able to see the definition of vocabulary word I write at the top of the page.

In about six weeks time, I’d decorated every page with, what one woman had referred to as “cheesecake shots.”

Regardless of whether the page had text on it or not, I made use of all the available space.

The overall plan was to add inspirational quotes from famous women on those pages where no vocabulary word was highlighted. Since my nephew is a history buff, I wanted to make sure he’d read the words of a variety of successful and influential women.

Based on which word I chose to highlight, I glued an appropriate-sized picture for that page.

After all the pictures were placed, I then boxed in the highlighted word, using a gel pen. 

For certain pages, such as the index, I wanted my nephew to still be able to use them, yet I decorated those pages as well and added the inspirational quotes later.

The next step involved writing sentences for each highlighted word. Ever the perfectionist, I knew I’d edit them later. Yet the sentences guided me on how to decorate the dictionary with colored pencils and stencils. Having the handwritten sentences were much easier to reference and saved ink and paper of printing out typed up sentences.

I thumbed through the book to see which pages needed inspirational quotes from famous, successful women. Those identified pages were the ones that had no highlighted vocabulary word. So, I knocked out getting quotes for those pages in one setting.

The most intense labor of love had to be designing the background for all the pages with highlighted words. I spared my sanity by searching for image outlines online to print and trace rather than drawing them freehand. This saved time and helped make the illustrations look better.

Just think: mastering cutting paper and coloring in kindergarten still served me so well much later in life.

October 7th marked a significant day in the making of the burlesqued dictionary: all the hand-illustrated backgrounds were completed! Months of reading the sentences; looking up a black and white outline to copy and paste into a word document; printing out the outlines to use as stencils; finally tracing and coloring the resulting backgrounds.

The penultimate stage has begun. I’m now writing in the inspirational quotes on the pages that lack vocabulary. I’m not sure that I can take the project out to other places and complete this stage like I could when tracing and coloring the backgrounds. I could still follow conversation while doing those things, but I’d like to have no conversational obligation when copying sentences. I need more concentration. At least I have white out.

I figured this last stage would zip by. Compared to designing the backgrounds by hand, this last step in dictionary design was a breeze. The only things that slowed me down was when I inevitably edited the sentence or had to white out something that was sloppily or erroneously written. Nonetheless, what a pleasure to revisit the example sentences I’d written just months ago.

Once I completed writing the sentences by mid-October, the only thing left was to scan all the pages for prosperity’s sake. Thank goodness I finished relatively early since I needed to practice the scanning technique. Most importantly, with all the choices I could save the images to, I initially had no idea which format worked best for which platform.  I’ve since learned that TIFF is the best for an overall record; PDF is best for book publishing; and JPEG is best for this blog! I’ve no idea what PNG is good for. I’m sure I’ll find out after I’ve gifted the dictionary to my nephew!

I forewent the normal Christmas card and wrote out my thoughts on an index card instead. Even so, I don’t think I tricked him into thinking it was a normal study guide.

Speaking of whom, here’s the satisfied gift recipient.

And just as I’d hoped, he’s now reading in bed! Now, all that remains is how many words he’ll actually learn. At least other people can build their vocabulary as well, reading Aunt Teresa’s Burlesque Dictionary.

Internet Porn Birth Control

A male friend recently told me of an alarming crisis: younger men have become so used to having multiple tabs of different pornographic websites open, which they rotate through several times in one setting that they cannot get an erection when they are in the presence of a naked woman since they are under stimulated. As he articulated the horrors of a heterosexual man, who’s fortunate to be in the presence of a consenting, naked woman, and not able to perform, my thoughts drifted elsewhere, as they usually do.

If the younger generation of men are no longer aroused being intimate with a naked woman, might this possibly be the answer we’ve been looking for? “We” meaning those of us who are concerned about all this rampant fertilization. There are already over seven billion people in the world, wouldn’t it be wonderful if internet porn became the birth control of choice for younger men? Finally, men can enthusiastically embrace a form of birth control.

There are lots of men who claim that the “real reason” they watch so much porn is that they don’t have enough money to have a girlfriend. Let’s transform the poor man’s plight. Instead of focusing on these guys’ lack of money, let’s think of all the resources they’re saving by not fathering more people to consume them.

Now, if we’re going to honor men who use internet porn birth control, we shouldn’t shame them about their selective erections. After all, when these guys actually want to reproduce, they can always store some of it in a sperm bank. If this becomes really popular, men will eventually have their own personal sperm banks at home.

Plus, and here’s the real exciting part, men who have erectile challenges can get the latest designer penile implant, but this isn’t your grandfather’s penile implant. These are the new and improved devices that can be controlled by an app.

Imagine girlfriends or wives using a cell phone app to select from several different vibrator settings. Now the implant pump that controls the reservoir of saline solution to produce and deflate an erection will still be done manually. Wouldn’t want an app to activate an erection at an inappropriate time.

Another fine feature will be that women could keep track of their men via the penis tracking app, especially for those powerful men who need reminders avoid forbidden places.  Warnings would be pinged to their penises when in they are about to enter certain places. A cloaking feature, emanating from the implant, will render the penis invisible to cameras, preventing dire consequences during those momentary lapses in judgment when a man tries to take a dick pic.

Of course, those are the special upgrade features offered only to rich, powerful men who need to be saved from themselves. Poor men, on the other hand, are still expected to exhibit self-control of their penises. As the saying goes, dear fellows, “You have no excuse because you have no money!” But take heart, all men can truly think on their feet when thinking with their penis.

Internet porn birth control…a family planning solution that men will enjoy using!

Interactive Life Puzzles

Life is composed of many pieces that can be put together in several different ways, unlike a static jigsaw puzzle where you separate out all the edges, put them together and fill in the rest, using the convenient pretty picture on the box. Those puzzles can only be done in one way, regardless of your ethnicity, religion, gender, politics, or socioeconomic level.

Interactive life puzzles are a beast in comparison. None of the pieces fits together in a neat picture. The infinite number of pieces can be put together and interpreted in an infinite number of ways and are only limited by one’s lifetime.

An entire lifetime collecting pieces of the puzzle, either making sense of it or not. Pieces may have meaning or not. Each piece has no more value than any other until it’s part of something meaningful. And we don’t even agree on what’s meaningful or not.

Puzzling, isn’t it? We’re not creating the same overall picture even with access to the same pieces of information. Some have a financial or political obligation to interpret the puzzle in a logic-defying manner like saying the way to curb gun violence is more guns. Or by blaming mental health issues for violence perpetuated by guns and then taking away affordable health care, which could help remedy those mental health issues.

Now, just throw freewill into the mix. Could you imagine when opening a jigsaw puzzle box and the individual pieces had freewill? They could flip themselves over to hide what’s printed on the other side or change their picture. Edges could become curvaceous and vice versa. Or a certain group of pieces could refuse to join with other pieces, regardless that they’re all part of the same puzzle.

We’re all puzzle piece collectors, dragging around our incomplete collections. Over time, even the pieces we’ve lugged around for so long become misshapen, not truly representing what they originally stood for. Pieces that loomed so heavily on us when we were children have been long buried and forgotten until something random triggers its activation. Upon reflection, we may detect patterns in those pieces most personal to us while being mere buoys raising and falling in the change of pieces that affect our community.

Let’s not forget those historians emphasizing the winning side’s interpretation of the puzzle while conveniently omitting those pieces that mar its pretty view of the past. Perpetuating those glossy celebrations of decorative pieces of history magically filling in the factual gaps with lore, exaggeration, adult fairytales and outright lies.

Whenever someone wishes to return to the good ol’ days, I always wonder which part of the past are they conveniently forgetting or oblivious to, which existed back then that even those ol’ time contemporaries didn’t like and fondly looked further back since all those modern-day, new and improved pieces with their jagged edges still pierced into the pretty picture they were trying to make with inflexible pieces.

There’s never been a golden age of human beings or civilization. They all rise and fall. We are the same vicious assholes we’ve always been. Despite technology, innovations, living longer, access to creature comforts those in the good ol’ days could never imagine, yet our species still drags around a self-destructiveness, which manifests itself in the form of greed, jealousy, hate, irrational reactions to the unknown, especially when the unknown is in the form of another human being with such perceived differences, the fearful forgets their humanity.

And therein lies our self-destruction, not really new and improved. Just reinvented with the latest upgrades to handle the same shit we’ve struggled with all along. The picture on the puzzle pieces may look different, but it’s the same struggles as before.

Always some group who view themselves as being above the law and deserving more than others, using the same tried and true strategy of divide and conquer with whichever modern twists that gives the illusion of something different, but it’s still the same ol’ puzzle. No matter which pieces you get in life, it’s the same puzzle. Make the best picture you can.

How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep

Years ago, I started working out on a regular basis just to get a good night’s sleep. For the longest time, that was sufficient. In the past couple of years, I’ve managed to work out every day for at least 30 minutes, which serves to reduce stress, but not remedy anxiety dreams.

As much as I hate to admit it, whatever I’m doing professionally has now become such a huge influence on whether I get a good night’s sleep. For the first year I taught at a private school in Honduras, I had a principal who turned out to be a very despicable person and for that school year, I hardly ever got a good night’s rest and one of the results, my hair thinned out. Vowing to never exhaust my health like that again, I stood up to him at the beginning of the second school year when he mistakenly thought we’d pick up where we’d left off, but I managed to change the dynamic and started sleeping well.

Since leaving the classroom as math/science teacher, I’ve had several different jobs, trying to find that delicate balance among challenge, creativity and happiness. For the past couple of years, I’ve been working from home, but not quite as my own person.

As a matter of fact, since resigning from the last job I deadened, I’m no longer bored, I’ve proven myself to be a quick learner (once again!), and my schedule is flexible. This is what I’ve envisioned for myself all along when I started working from home: freedom.

Freedom from worry, boredom, rigid schedules, underemployment, and underestimation of my skills. I sleep like a baby! With proper rest, I have so much more energy. Plus, since I’ve completed my on-boarding training, I’ve been exercising in the mornings–just the way I like it.

Sleep has become my accurate barometer of whether all the other elements in my life work productively. By the time my head hits the pillow, if I have lived the day with integrity (being true to myself), then good rest is my reward.

Patio Furniture

The latest leasing agent staff has let me know I’ve worn out my welcome. Perhaps many of us long-time residents have. I’ve not kept an accurate account of how many times the entire staff has turned over, but I think they’re at least the fourth group to come in and they apparently have the most critical eye.

Ever since moving here, I’ve viewed my patio as my art studio, especially for painting. Granted, none of them have probably seen me out there painting, but what they have seen, they haven’t liked. The first email I received months ago, listed all the “acceptable” things that could be on the patio, which were short list of furniture and plants, real or fake.

As far as I’m concerned, I only had three things on my patio, which weren’t clutter nor trash; so I ignored their email. For months. Until the monthly email became aggressive about having the maintenance guys remove the offending things from my patio at my expense. I took the above picture and attached it to an email in response to their escalation, asking which of the three items was “inappropriate.”

Of course, I never heard back from them. I forgot about the email until the second month I received it. In a huff, I wheeled my portable drawer of oil paints to the corner, put the flower pot underneath the drawer, threw an old sheet over the whole thing and placed my hideous clay sculpture of a nude lounging woman over it.

With such a fine concession, I figured this was the most creative thing I’d done on the patio in a while; so the aggressive emails should end, right? Nope. Got the same threatening email the following month.

Next time I hand-carried my rent check to the office, I politely-as-possible inquired about the email. One of the nameless staff members informed me that everyone receives the email. I turned on my heels and calmly walked out, all the while scheming how long it would take me to save up enough money for a down payment for my own place.

Not too soon after, I quit my old job, where I’d dead ended after a year, but had to remain a few months longer until I lined up something more lucrative. Now that I’m in my final week of independent health agent training with ACA open enrollment right around the corner, I’m looking forward to an increased call volume and working six days a week for those six weeks.

Thanks to blanket threats, regardless of whether I’m in violation or not, I’m more motivated than ever to get the hell up at of here. I know bullshit exists wherever I go, but it’s time I start earning equity to mitigate that bullshit.

At least my patio situation was easier to remedy than one of my neighbors. They must now drive around with a canoe on their SUV since it can no longer hang neatly from their patio.

Stormy Nights

Most of my “dark and stormy” takes form as reoccurring anxiety dreams, independent of the actual weather. Adding flavor to the nightmarish experience are sleep apnea and teeth gnashing.  Like everything else, these dreams have evolved.

My earliest recollection of a reoccurring anxiety dream was when I was a child prior to being school age. I’d dream that one of my grandmothers lie supine on a circular metal slab that rotated. As it began to move, sharp automated synchronous blades sliced her like a pie. I’d wake up, run to the bathroom and vomit. One time, I took control of the nightmare and stopped the blades from chopping her up. That was the last time I dreamed about it.

When I was a young child, I had a funny digestive track and couldn’t mix my food while eating. I had to eat all of one thing on my plate, then the other or else I’d throw up. Eventually, I outgrew that digestive problem.

Then as a Peace Corps Volunteer in my early twenties, my reoccurring nightmares involved my teeth falling out. The worst one was when my teeth had fallen out and a variety of bugs swarmed out of the sockets. Those ended as soon as I finished my Peace Corps service after nearly two and half years. In addition to stress, the malarial prophylaxis I took contributed to “changes in sleep,” as warned on the label.

The latest and most long-lasting genre of anxiety nightmares involve me frantically looking for something: my car keys, my car, a missing shoe. In those dreams where I’m looking for my keys or a shoe, I’m usually in some fancy hotel, going down an endless series of hallways, never quite retracing my steps to find what I’m looking for.

Now, you’d think in those dreams where I’m looking for my car, the setting would be a parking lot, but I’ve yet to have that dream. Instead, I’ve parked my car on some sketchy street and the farther I walk, the more apocalyptic the neighborhood becomes. And it’s always nighttime. Sometimes, I’m walking down a craggy hill or through the forest. Other times, there were some not so friendly-looking clowns walking all around me or chain-wielding thugs.

Occasionally, I even find my car, but I’ve never been able to get in it and drive away. It’s always in some visible state of disrepair where I have to get a tow truck at that time of night, in the middle of an apocalyptic event and my cellphone doesn’t have reception, so one of those sketchy-rapey thug-clowns volunteer to escort me to a bar, but when we get to there, it’s one of those darkened out, dilapidated places with broken out/boarded up windows, no one inside for apparently years as evidenced by all the cobwebs and dust, but allegedly has a working phone.

So, that was the worst of those looking-for-my-car nightmares since during that dream, I declared, “Fuck this!” and not dreamt it since.

Obviously, the moral of these nightmarish anxiety dreams is that once I face the fear in the dream, they no longer reoccur in the same fashion, but there’s always something for me to worry about.  The week before I quit my latest dead-end job, I had a beautiful baby girl in my arms and I was frantically looking around for her parents. Clearly, that little girl did not represent any maternal instincts on my part since I’ve never desired having children and I’m blissfully past child-bearing age. I believe she was a metaphor, either representing my inner child or creativity.

Since I resigned from teaching, I’ve had a series of jobs where I’ve enthusiastically thrown myself into and hit a dead end within a year since none of them have held the intellectual challenge and creative outlet that teaching allowed me until the combination of oppressive high-stakes testing and asshole administrators, ie the anti-educational Texas two-step, motivated me out of the classroom.

I remember years ago when one of my friends declared that people just needed to do their self-actualization on their own time and when they’re on the job, just work. After all, she reiterated, that’s why it’s called “work.” This is the same friend who’d also confessed in an unrelated conversation that her inner child was dead.

Well, my inner child is alive and still creatively curious and energetic about the world. At times, my mind is so stimulated about pursuing a new project or worried about something that I need to strategize my way out of, I can hardly sleep or when I do, I pick up on a new genre of anxiety nightmares like tuning into a new season of American Horror Story.

Here’s the latest one since starting my new job: the setting is one of those big multilevel houses horror movies just love. For some inexplicable reason, I’m one of the chaperones of a children’s birthday party in this dimly lit house. The woman of the house, who’s also the only other adult besides this creepy-looking maid, comes to me in a panic about some of the children having wandered off and she wants me to go find them since she suspects they’ve gone upstairs unsupervised.

I recruit four kids to go with me and we all hold hands as we walk upstairs where the lighting is even dimmer. As we get to the middle of the staircase, I notice a doll version of the creepy maid with her back against the wall, slowly sliding down just above the banister. Before she goes past us, I quickly grab her and run to the kitchen.  I have the doll by her throat and I partially wake up at this point to slow down the progression of the nightmare to consider my options.

Then I go back into the dream. I still have the doll, clutched by the throat in my left hand, and I use a kitchen torch burner to set it on fire, but then I rewind the dream. Instead have the doll clutched by the throat with metal tongs so I don’t burn my hand when I light it on fire. I rewind the dream again. I have the doll clutched by the throat with metal tongs, but before I set it on fire, I gesture a cross with my right hand over the sink full of dishwater, saying, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I bless this water.” Then I set the doll on fire, burn it to a crisp and plunge it into the water I just blessed. I was determined not to have that demonic doll return in another anxiety dream! She represented the doubts I had whether I’d make enough money as an independent health insurance agent.

Why, it was absolutely delightful the next week when I dreamed that my sandals had disappeared when I’d slipped them off while attending a meeting. That anxiety dream was joyfully clown-, thug-, and demonic doll-free. I did the prerequisite searching under skirted tables, looking for my sandals before I took control of the dream. I declared during that dream, “I’m going to reach into this bin, pull out my sandals, put them on and walk out of here.” And so I did.

All-Knowing Goddess

Essentially, the other me is an all-knowing goddess. Yes, with a lowercase “g.” Kind of like how Batman is a superhero, but his superpowers are having lots of money and cool, high tech gadgets.  Well, my cool gadgets are books. As a matter of fact, I read a wide variety of things and feel a little anxious when I don’t have time to get a daily dose of everything in my reading pile, which I’ve started limiting to four to six things since reading merely three different things seems too sparse and more than six, unrealistic except on the weekends.

Whereas Bruce Wayne lives in a bat cave, I live in a creative cave. Full of books and reliable high-speed internet because whichever project I’m working on, I want to know as much as possible about that subject to move forward with my project.

The difference between being an all-knowing goddess and a bookworm or nerd is in the attitude. You have to have confidence when you’re a goddess. And being an all-knowing goddess isn’t the same as being a know-it-all. If I knew everything, I’d be a goddess with a capital “G” or a teenager. I remember knowing EVERYTHING when I was 17, not being the least bit aware of the things I didn’t know.

As a seasoned all-knowing goddess, I embrace the fact that I cannot possibly know EVERYTHING, but I can access up to the limits of public knowledge. I fiercely and boldly wield this superpower. Besides, I don’t need to know it all to be successful, especially now that facts come in a variety of alternative forms and words may or may not retain their meaning, depending on how much political clout you have and how much money there is to be made in the ensuing confusion. Who could have predicted years ago when spelling was de-emphasized in school that we’d come to point where the meaning of words would also be de-emphasized?

I don’t claim to be a clairvoyant goddess, but I predict that if the integrity of the meaning of words disappears, then my archenemy, Ignorance, prevails. Once we stop respecting the meaning of words, Ignorance will no longer have to ban or burn books.  We’ll do that ourselves.

For me, reading continues to be a revolutionary act. Imagine my slave ancestors who weren’t legally allowed to learn how to read. Then my relatives who lived during segregated/Jim Crow America where they didn’t have access to certain books in their section of the library and were educated with outdated, dilapidated and often egregiously biased textbooks. Now the very words we read, write and speak are under assault. Ignorance has moved beyond trying to block access to literacy and books, finding it more efficient to attack semantics.

Just like when millions of Americans protested when the word “freedom” was being erroneously used to describe “not having federally-subsidized health insurance,” we must guard against the twisting of words, especially when there are so many ways words are disseminated from the Tower of Babel to confuse the masses. If they ever manage to coordinate their splintered narratives through their verbal sleight of hand, then I will have to increase my reading intake to build up my superpower of knowledge, especially building my vocabulary.

Regardless of whether you see yourself as an all-knowing god or not, empower yourself with the true meaning of words. Read from a variety of sources. Gather firsthand experiences of the power of words. Enrich your vocabulary. Articulate your own personal narrative.  Defeat Ignorance.

Fluidity of Life

How fitting that Earth began as a gas that condensed and gave rise to such a watery planet. The fluids of our primordial soup led to our destiny of always being in flux. We live within interacting environmental systems and internal systems, which sustain us.

We create artificial systems of government, society, religion, and economy that tend to clash with the flow of the natural systems. Pure human hubris have led our species to believe that we command the natural systems without much regard to the consequences to our actions. As if everything we see and want we should consume, not giving much thought to the biogeochemical systems that brought those resources into existence.

At the same time, when we are exhilarated by an activity we’re doing, we harken back to our fluidity by saying we’re in the flow. Or when we are overwhelmed, someone reminds us to “go with the flow.”

The flow is inescapable. My only wish for humanity is that we increasingly work with the natural systemic flows and stop being destructive obstacles that block the flow. We’re making ourselves sick and destroying our habitat. For all of our collective intelligence, what good will any of our cultures, innovations, wit and almighty currencies be if ultimately we destroy ourselves?