Power of silence

Environmental activist and UN goodwill ambassador John Francis gave one of the best Ted talks I've heard, and I encourage everyone to take the 20 minutes to see it.

The man's story is amazing: in his twenties, after witnessing two oil tankers collide, he decided to stop riding in any motorized vehicle. Then, after realizing that he spent quite a bit of his time arguing with people about this decision, he decides to shut up. He shuts up for 17 years. In the talk, he tells what he learned through silence.

Girls with Guns

My friend Bonnie is into genealogy, but she goes a step farther then most. She likes to write hysterical fiction, featuring her female ancestors.

What is a hysterical fiction, you may ask? Well, it's kind of like historical fiction, where a writer does quite a lot of research and takes only a few reasonable creative liberties. Bonnie also does quite a bit of research; but her creative liberties are not restricted to the reasonable. In fact, if an event might have happened, she assumes that it did.

For example, in her latest novel, Barbary, Bonnie has her protagonist somehow participate in every interesting historical event that happened near Johnston County, Tennessee anywhere between 1775 and 1851, like meeting Davie Crockett. The lady apparently was quite a riot in her own right.

Hoping to capitalize on the recent interest in girls with guns, as evidenced by the vast support of Sarah Palin, I painted a possible book cover illustration. I figure that around Christmas, people buy all kinds of stuff, but especially stuff with girls and guns. 'Tis the season!

Crack and Wheelchairs

Being a wheelchair user is a bit like being a drug addict, specifically when it comes to repairing or updating your wheelchair. Recently, I have gone into the blackest markets of Los Angeles, sneaking down dark alleys behind nursing homes and special education schools to find tires which I have been waiting for Medicare to deliver. Like crack, I really don’t want to buy $500 tires and yet I need them desperately, and Medicare well I suppose, after 6 months of waiting, are hoping I'll outgrow the disability before they have to pay for new tires.
So once paying the scruffy Permobil user for the tires, shoving them in the back of a van, I needed to find a special mechanic to actually put them on the chair. Wheelchair mechanics my friends, are far worse then regular mechanics as they prey on the Medicare abandoned wheelchairs users who have no where else to go, and are a bit more desperate for a working wheelchair than most are for a working car. And then as every wheelchair using woman knows, showing a bit of leg will get you access to the good stuff. The air modulated seats with knitted cotton covers, hydro electric backlights, impenetrable tire tubing, electric shorts increasing speed and the holy glory of it all, the massaging, heated, pressure sore sensitive back seat.
Yes this is the dark hidden world of disability, and just think I haven’t even described the amputee black market.

The Fig Sutra: my chant

Those who follow (or precede, as the case may be) the Fig Sutra want to jump on to the chant / prayer bandwagon. Here's mine:

"Я НЕ ПУП ЗЕМЛИ!"

The proper pronunciation of the chant is:

ya-n'e-poop z'em-l'ee

where the bold syllables are the stressed ones, and the apostrophe signifies a softening of the preceding consonant. The chant is an old Russian proverb, and literally translates to: "I am not the navel of the Earth."

There are many interconnecting interpretations of the significance of the chant; I will list a few of them here.

1. The navel is the central point; the chant acknowledges that I am not the central point of the Universe. It serves as a reminder that my solipsistic perspective is not shared by other components of the world.

2. The navel is also the belly button, a vital connection between conception and birth, but a useless decoration afterward. So is the Fig Sutra.

3. EARTH is deliberately written in all caps, to preserve the ambiguity of whether it's referring to something as global and enormous our our planet, or something as local and trite as dirt. I'm not the navel of either.

4. The chant is actually a slight modification of the Russian proverb, which actually says, "you are not the navel of the Earth". The Fig Sutra chant, on the other hand, always refers to the chanter. After all, do we really need reminders that other people ain't all that?

The proper time to chant: any time you feel overwhelmed, or upset, or elated. The proper duration: repeat the chant until you believe it.