And says "This is a goodbye kiss, you dog!"

With video!!

The Indigos are growing up! And it surely delights me to see it. Saw this video and it brought tears to my eyes.

Think about it: a whole generation of intelligent, educated, culturally diverse, optimistic, peace-loving, environmentally and socially aware individuals with hope, love and energy. I, at the ripe age of 30, am too old to be considered part of this group, but clearly in spirit I'm right there with 'em.


Generation WE: The Movement Begins... from Generation We on Vimeo.

I was just listening to a Fresh Air interview with Bill Moyers on his "View of Contemporary America" and was pleasantly surprised to hear him use the phrase "Reptilian Right." It's nice to hear someone in the mainstream use a phrase like that. It's obvious Cheney is a lizard.

And anyway, haven't you seen the mini-series "V"? It was originally aired in 1983 and starred Marc Singer (of Beastmaster fame!). A fleet of human-looking aliens, known as the Visitors, come to Earth and act very friendly, claiming to help the humans by helping them find natural resources that they'll need. What they end up actually doing is enslaving humans, stealing natural resources (sound familiar?) and are eventually exposed -- with their masks off -- as lizard beings. If you think about it, Reptiles want global warming! A hot, desert world! How lovely if you like sunning yourself on rocks!

The Reptilian Right. Tell it like it is.

Cynical me wants to say that, hey, Cheney won't give up all his power so easily. He'll pull strings behind the scenes somewhere. And things are so rigged and controlled now, surely Obama is somebody's puppet.

But wow wow wow. Finally a multi-cultural, intelligent person to interface with the rest of the world. The Cowboy Years were embarrassing. I'm grateful we have a President that I can relate to, he's educated and well-traveled, has parents from another country, etc. I'm glad Obama can go around the world and speak with other leaders without inspiring utter disgust.

Unfortunately Bush/Cheney are taking their final 2 months to push through a lot of crappy, destructive legislation. Obama will have a lot to fix. Wish him luck! A Democrat Congress should make things easier!

And I really hope Obama appoints Michael Pollan as an agricultural advisor on his cabinet! It would be a dream...

Let's enter a new, beautiful, wonderful world! Can I dream?? Can I keep on dreamin'??

hey y'all, cuzzin, sistah, and whoever else...

I'm pregnant!

3 1/2 months.

Otto and I are happy. He feeds me well. My belly is growing quickly. I'm pretty much over the morning sickness, but still puke once in awhile. Boy that sucks! Otherwise, I smile really really big.

I plan to give birth at home in a tub of warm water with a midwife, kickin' it old school.

I'm happy and healthy!

Cheers!

Here's a post I found pretty interesting. It sorta fizzles out near the end but the first few paragraphs are thought provoking. I especially like this one, as it really makes a strong point:

"White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay. "

A true Frank Zappa classic. He starts off singing kinda fast, so you gotta listen, but man, I have never heard anybody describe the perils of stinky, slimy kitchens to eloquently... so jazzy! Brilliant man!

A truly brilliant author, he wrote Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, among others. This guy was like the super-ultra-smart guy you wanna hang out with because he has a huge vocabulary and speaks so eloquently, but somehow brings it down to the juicy bits for the above-average among us to understand. Genius.

Unfortunately, he musta been too sensitive about what BS is going on in the world right now. At the tender age of 46 he hung himself. Sorry dude. I shed a little tear.

I read Infinite Jest my freshman year of college, shortly after it came out. I lugged that hardcover 1000+ page book around for a month and devoured it, so amazing that it was. I can't even tell you now what it was about, but I really loved it. This guy is twisted, but delightfully so.

RIP

livejournal told me it's your birthday tomorrow...

sorry you're a virgo heheheh

just kidding :)

i have a virgo vendetta cuz my mom and dad both are, and for an aquarius child, that is not much fun!!!

HAVE FUN GET CRAZY!!!

Oh I'm sure you've seen this one before... like... whoah...

Gem Sweater... please, stop creating all this shite!! What will our alien friends from Jupiter think of us!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn436DFTUQ 

I can smell it. I smell it most Sundays.

Someone is roasting dead cow meat on their BBQ. I smell the toasting blood, it permeates the air. This is disgusting. This ought to be illegal!

I never thought I'd say it, but I am. Thank you LA.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to ban plastic bags in shops, following the lead of San Francisco and Ireland.

Three cheers for an iota of ecological intelligence in LA!

Bush Administration wants to destabilize Iran, and make them do something out of anger that we can use as an excuse to go to war. THOSE FUCKERS.

Please listen to this interview with the man who broke the story:   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92025860

We have to stop this. We cannot have more war in the world, especially senseless war (does war ever have any sense??)

I am SO READY to live in a culture of PEACE.

I haven't owned a TV for years, but every once in awhile I'll be at someone's house and watch a show or two. I knew pharmaceutical companies have had ridiculous drug commercials going for years, but when I saw the ads for Restless Leg Syndrome I had to laugh. I mean, c'mon, give me a break.

Then, you know, a few nights later I was lying in bed and I realized my legs were feeling squirmy too... I really just wanted to get out of bed and move around. I couldn't keep my legs still.

You know what folks, I think is a pretty common situation. Human bodies were built to be very active, and these days most of us leave very sedentary lives. If I've gone a whole day without any significant exercise, I'll have squirmy legs by the evening. If I've been out hiking or dancing, then I've got no problem.

Check out the RLS symptoms:

• You have a strong urge to move your legs which you may not be able to resist. The need to move is often accompanied by uncomfortable sensations. Some words used to describe these sensations include: creeping, itching, pulling, creepy-crawly, tugging, or gnawing.
• Your RLS symptoms start or become worse when you are resting. The longer you are resting, the greater the chance the symptoms will occur and the more severe they are likely to be.
• Your RLS symptoms get better when you move your legs. The relief can be complete or only partial but generally starts very soon after starting an activity. Relief persists as long as the motor activity continues.
• Your RLS symptoms are worse in the evening especially when you are lying down. Activities that bother you at night do not bother you during the day.

Yeah folks, this isn't a disease; this just means you need to get up and move around more. The drug they prescribe for RLS causes a side effect of drowsiness... so, like, it's a sedative? So they wanna put my whole body asleep just to calm my legs down? Why not take up jogging instead!

YEESH! I think the fall of the Roman Empire was pretty ridiculous too. And how quickly we ourselves are falling...

...but after listening to this guys podcasts (and I"ve only listened to 3, out of a few hundred), then I guess I'm a Pacifistic Libertarian.

(www.freedomainradio.com    Good stuff, I recommend it.)

I like that.

Peace. Freedom. Peace. Freedom. I LOVE IT.

Here is a study in sensual product design given to groups of women aged 18-30. The design is for pagers, and two designs are supposed to work with different ideas of sensuality. It's a long page, but scroll down to see the design differences.

The first design is soft, mysterious, had light-up a petroglyph-type symbols (a bird, a snake, a couple holding hands) in order to communicate different nuances into your messages, as well as iPod-style slide controls, which generate feelings of softness. My own response to it is that I felt closer to the Earth and to the feminine mysteries. I didn't need to communicate using words on this pager, I could choose a symbol and allow the vastness of poetry to take over.

The second design is based on the idea of fleshiness (as another form of sensuality), and looks like a throbbing red penis. It's quite repulsive presented in such a fleshy, disembodied way. The pager is hard, red and bulgy and uses push-button controls and makes beeping noises. Ugh. It's oriented very much in the idea of the physical body and the fleshy world.

I guess you can decide which pager I'd choose -- most certainly the first one...as it offers access to the profound mysteries of symbolism, a sort of ethereal telepathy aided by small technological tools. The other one reminded me of the 3-dimensional world limitation, focusing only on the body, the flesh, the material reality...and paying no heed to the Spirit (the poetry, the intuition) imbuing life upon all things.

i have begun thinking of the matter of birth groups within the broader contexts of specialization and of duhumanizing beauracracy in the U.S.

as has been broadly discussed, there is a birth industry. women are moved through the conveyor belt of this industry, given pitocin to induce labor with horrifying regularity, rushed into surgery for c-sections when the fetal heart beat goes kaflooey as a result of the pitocin, sliced with horrifying regularity with episiotomies that not only do not help prevent tearing but can cause far worse tearing, subjected to IVs that restrict movement, though movement is part of how birth happens -- naturally. all this keeps things moving quickly and efficiently.... for someone. it's a nightmare for women -- and we're only now beginning to get to a place where we understand that the trauma of a difficult, medicalized birth is a trauma for the baby, too. (i recently heard a story in which an infant began to cry violently every time her parents spoke of her birth, which had involved, unfortunately, a suction vac pulling her out of her mother.)

and after the birth specialists come the lactation specialists. because we don't know how to do that anymore either.

i wrote a joke elsewhere saying that it is astounding that we do not think we require menstrual doulas to have our periods. someone asked what the menstrual doulas would do. well, first you'd have to get somebody to start making us even more scared of our periods than women in this culture generally are. and then you'd need to get something going where people stopped believing they had the common sense to know when things were okay. perhaps put out the idea that some colors of blood are safe and some aren't -- but that none of us are expert or experienced enough to make the distinction. and of course lord knows we need quite a bit of emotional support in those trying times -- and we can't always be expected to hold it together when those hormones kick in! not on our own. menstrual doulas would be credited with saving jobs and marriages, for co-managing our PMS. and then there are the women who are not so regular. they need all manner of special coaching. truly, there would be no end to the menstrual doula's work.

you have to marvel at the fact that doulas are touted as "mothering the mother" while hopital OB/GYNs or midwives see more to the birth proper. specifically, doulas are there to run interference between hospital staff too aggressively offering to drug, cut, speed along birthing women. and they are there, at bottom, to behave as human beings should behave toward a birthing woman, and to make sure those present for the birth maintain a resonable level of support for the woman. what does this say about hospitals and the level of sensitive, empathic care we expect of our families and partners, that we are willing to pay doulas to run interference between us and those who are supposed to care for us as medical professionals and to teach the human beings close to us to behave appropriately in the midst of a chaotic miracle? who ever needed an advocate against her shaman? why do people in this day and age no longer know how to be around these juicy, wild happenings?

just as there is a birth industry, so, too, there is a death industry.

when my gramps died and i went to sit with him the night before his burial, i was originally shown a room and told i could sit there. when i asked where my grandfather was, they pointed to a door. he was in among a whole bunch of dead people. i had to be quite strident that i wanted to sit with him and that i'd appreciate if they got him out of the freezer. for heaven's sake, he may have been just another dead guy to them, but he sure wasn't to me! and perhaps his consciousness, disembodied, still knew itself as distinct, somehow, from the other bodies in the freezer or knew me well enough to appreciate my company. they took me into the big, cold room and we fished gramps out. i wish i could have sat with them all, though i don't think i could have lasted a night in the freezer and only a few of the dead could fit in the narrow hallway where i was allowed, somewhat reluctantly, to sit with my grandfather. grandpa's burial was quite rushed -- apparently the big digging machine was needed for another corpse. I tried to object that they should leave us alone and let us dig with our shovels in our own time -- but got overruled on that one, as i recall it, by relatives who thought it might be unseemly to not follow the cemetery's own protocol. the death industry, like much of the birth industry, operates to the benefit of somebody.... just not the mouner or the dead.

thankfully, some people have begun reclaiming death. i know of one woman who asked friends to paint her a gorgeous coffin that stayed in her room beside her -- along with many of the friends until the time of her death. i know of others who take the time to sit with their dead before allowing them to be whisked off into the machine.

just as there are birth and death industries for us, so too there is a machine for dealing with the beings we eat. and that industry treats animals with distinct personalities and dispositions as "meat," and on the whole, prioritizes manufacturing foods with long shelf lives. for the longer the foods can sit on the shelves, the greater the chance of selling and reaping profit from them. and so the preservatives that go into our foods and the deadly things that are done to the oils that go into our foods to extend shelf life and the highly addictive substances like HFCS that sweeten our foods and make us think we like these hideous frankenfoods are advantageous to somebody.... just not the consumer, who becomes sick, depressed, cancer-ridden, migraine oppressed, ADD-addled, etc. the suffering of humans in this system is somewhat calculable -- of the extent of the suffering of the non-human beings forced through this machine, i shudder to think.

at least tantamount in its abuse of the human spirit to the birth, death and food industries, in my opinion, is the education industry. in it, people are warehoused for the most energetic, creative period of their lives. it does not take decades to learn how to read and considering how far many of us (even within competitive private schools) got in math -- it certainly wasn't worth the decades in those little chairs with wrap-around arms or the vision damage. this system is not profitable to the most privileged, who should be allowed to begin specializing at such point as they begin to be clear within themselves what their interests are (and this is at least far more the case outside the U.S., where, for e.g., four years of undergraduate work need not precede med school for those who know they mean to be doctors). nor is this system profitable to the most disadvantaged, who rightfully should be angry and in a state of rebellion -- not getting beaten into submission in public schools. for whom, then, i wonder is the education industry profitable?

if the education industry warehouses the young people most recently birthed into this world, it is the elder care industry that warehouses those on the other end of the age spectrum. there are places to send the elderly -- a whole industry dedicated to helping us not care for (or even see) the elderly. like children, they must be put somewhere, it seems. these places, at least in me, produce an instant, physically palpable sense of shame upon entry -- and this seems true in the upscale, non-abusive variety of elder care arrangement/nursing home, and not just in the lousy ones where people get left in hallways tied to their wheelchairs all day (or worse).

the death rate of women giving birth in hospitals is on the rise, likely due to the normalization of c-sections. and we are facing an autism epidemic, the rise in incidents of autism paralleling the rise in use of pitocin to induce birth when women fail to give birth on somebody's -- whose?! -- schedule.

that things are going so terribly wrong in the birth industry in this, one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced (if morally backward) nations in the world is not surprising. notice what happens to the elderly, to the young, to the dead, to your food.

things are running ass backwards for most of us -- and quite profitably for some.

An ill man asks Mitt Romney if he'll have sick people and their doctors arrested for using and prescribing medical marijuana. Mitt Romney shows what a prick he is. ARGH. Things like this really piss me off. How inhuman of him to talk and act like that. GRRRRRR.

A man in China was buried alive when he was digging and the excavation wall collapsed on him. He had only a tiny pocket of oxygen caught in his helmet and he managed to minimize his oxygen intake and relax himself through quiet focus and meditation. Two hours later he was rescued. Had he panicked, squirmed and hyperventilated, he would have surely perished!

Who says meditation is useless? Simple breath control and focusing techniques can save us from all kinds of sticky situations, relieve stress and bring us closer to a spiritual view of reality. I admit, I don't sit down and meditate as often as I'd like...but I'm glad I have the calming skills when I need them.

Hey cuz and sis, here's a good video to briefly explain to people what happened in Iran in the 50s, when the Brits and US helped put the Shah back into power, etc. It's fast moving and interesting and a good way to show how Iran really got screwed from their own path towards self-sufficiency and democracy. Please enlighten the ignorant with this video if you need to!