Author: Tracey

This wicked cool animation from sesame street, Dan found for me. My Dan is one awesome guy.

http://kottke.org/09/10/philip-glass-on-sesame-street

English has only one word for love. Greek has three- and more if you broaden the definition.

Eros
something like- attraction, desire, intimacy
Romantic love as between lovers

Philos
good feelings and enjoyment, friendship,
Affection as between friends or family

Agape
this means a deep love beyond friendship and beyond a simple attraction
In Christian biblical usage it means an unconditional, self-scrificing love

The new testament is all Greek to me! Translated into English!

I am going to be wrong. Often. Every day. When something sounds stupid to me and I think so, I am not going to say it is stupid. I am going to say maybe, because I can be wrong. I am going to be wrong more. When it doesn’t really matter, I am going to be wrong. I have decided. Practice makes perfect. I am going to be wrong.

…wish me luck.

I don’t care what anyone says, Precious Roy is the non-sequiter champ in my book.
(these quotes are all supposed to be promotions for Roy’s shopping channel)

This is precious Roy; I rode the disco dolphin back to Xanadu! (promoting genius in a box kit)

This is Precious Roy; you kids get off my property! (promotion for pirate cripplers)

This is Precious Roy and I just got offered the lead in CATS! (promo for a self-defense kit)

This is Precious Roy and the kids at the pond feed me bread! (selling a laser peeler)

This is Precious Roy and I just ate a handful of honeybees! Buy my soda taffy! (lice monkeys)

This is Precious Roy and I listen to the Indigo Girls! You guys smell like old soup! (squirrel zappers)

Recently home for a visit, I collected a bunch of stories about our family.

My grandmother was a war bride from WWII. She met my grandpa because of her friend. Her friend was supposed to go on a date with an American guy who was an ambulance driver (my grandfather). He showed up to pick her up where she roomed with my grandma. Grandma’s friend got nervous at the last second and said, “I don’t want to go. He looks cute, why don’t you go out with him?” So my grandma went out with him, fell in love and they wanted to get married. Her priest told her not to do it because she might not get claimed. Apparently the wives could not come over with the husbands. Instead they had to be sent for, then claimed off the boat in order to enter the country. Some women were never claimed and had to go right back to England. When my grandmother came over she was nervous for a while that she was not going to be claimed and that my grandpa had left her. Someone finally nudged her and said, “They are calling you!” They had been asking for ‘Elizabeth’ (her full first name) when my grandmother was expecting them to call ‘Betty’ which she always goes by. Once they were together again my grandmother learned that grandpa didn’t have any money really and was taking her hitchhiking up to Plattsburgh. She was annoyed. They hitchhiked as far as Nyack, then got money from grandpa’s aunt Mary for a bus the rest of the way.

Something I didn’t know was that grandma traveled to England with my dad when he was a baby. At the time grandpa owned a bar and had gotten into drinking and spending a lot of time away from home. Grandma wanted to stay with her family in England and not come back here at all. Her family told her that she had to go back to her husband, so she did. Some time after she returned, grandpa decided to sell the bar and buy a gas station. He kept the gas station even into my lifetime.

We heard a good story about how grandpa was afraid of mice. My dad and his mom both used to play tricks on him regarding this. Dad and some kids caught a mouse and tied a string to its leg so they could hold it. When grandpa was working underneath a car on a roller-board, my dad tossed the mouse under the car near grandpa. He was basically freaking out trying to get out from under the car and kept hitting his head on the underside of it and the kids were all laughing at him. He came out and cursed them out and they all ran off. Grandma used to trick him as well by taking a mouse in a paper bag to grandpa (or getting my dad to do it) and making him think it was lunch or something.

When my dad was very very little he liked to touch fur. Grandma must have had a coat that was fur or like fur. So once when he was out somewhere he started playing with a lady’s coat because he thought it was his mom. He noticed it was not mom and got scared and ran away to find mom.

Dad has a memory of the schoolhouse across the field from his house. It had two rooms and he went to school there. The teacher used to make naughty kids sit underneath her desk near her feet. Dad would pop his head out and wave at the kids in the schoolroom to make them laugh. Then he was usually moved to the corner and had to wear a dunce hat.

When my dad was 19 or 20 he and a friend raised spiders. A couple spiders had webs somewhere and he and his friend would catch flies and bugs and toss them into the web for their own spider to eat. They each tried to raise the biggest spider.

“Come on lint, let’s go back to my trashcan and mess it up!” -Oscar

“Because if you have two handles, YOU’RE A SUGAR BOWL!!” -Freeze session, variation on I’m a little teapot

“THIS MAN IS ABOUT TO GIVE BIRTH!” -same freeze session, Meredith Vanderminden to Mark Devitt

Basic Assumptions
Dan and I talk about this from time to time. Basic assumptions are the things in a person’s head that they know are true. They are not necessarily the same from person to person although they can be. A basic assumption is something one uses to build more complex opinions for any given topic. It is something embedded so deep in someone that they may not know it is different in other people. It seems so obvious there is no need to discuss it. When two people have different basic assumptions about a thing, they may have trouble understanding each other’s viewpoint and reasons for that viewpoint. It’s important to know that basic assumptions exist so you can understand why you might not be getting to the same conclusions as someone else. You might end up having to disagree, but you will at least know that the person is not suffering from stupidity or flawed logic, just different basic assumptions.

Emotional/Intellectual Projection (my own term)
The way I use these words is not exactly the classic definition of them. What I mean is the way people tend to assume others are thinking, feeling, reacting to things in the same way they themselves would. It isn’t a strict rule, everyone is a little different. I believe it happens to everyone to some extent, because your basis for knowing what another person is experiencing starts with what you experience. There are degrees to which you could essentially ‘guess’ what another person is going through. When I was younger I did a lot more projecting. I used to see someone sitting alone for lunch and imagine they were very lonely for company. Because I would be lonely for company. Now I know that some people just don’t want to be bothered, or just plain enjoy time alone. Of course that example is very simplistic; there are much more complicated things you could be projecting about. But before I could understand that I had to know in my head that what applies to me doesn’t apply to everyone. I’m still workin on it, so someday maybe I’ll be good at it.

Do unto others favors,
I recently came across the assumption that doing one something for a person means they will automatically do a single something for you. And as a corollary the number of times you do something for a person should be returned in roughly the same number of times. I found this highly weird. Not because I think people shouldn’t do things for each other. I found it weird because I was confronted with such an expectation of it in such a numerically definite way. I’m not sure what to make of it.
(BTW, we are talking outside the realm of close friendship here- this happened with an acquaintance about acquaintances, friendship is probably another topic)
Anyways, adding to my confusion, the word Christian was tossed into this discussion as well. I’m pretty sure Christian teaching makes it clear that you need to do good without expectation of reward, and even if you in fact know you aren’t getting any reward. But maybe its the “knowing” part that’s the key to what I encountered. If you know someone is not going to do anything in return, you can be ok with it. But if you incorrectly “knew” that someone would reward you and they didn’t, you may end up annoyed. You may even feel like you have to re-categorize them as a person. They are not what you thought they were; they didn’t follow the favor-for-favor formula. Is it that important? I guess I just don’t understand.

Exasperating the problem:
The problem is all like, “I’m so freakin annoyed that I’m still a problem!”

When you set a pan aside from the oven to cool, is there a difference between letting it sit and letting it stand?

What is up with the expression “now then”? I mean, pick one, you really really can’t have both.

Random spoilers to follow, mostly about characters.

Stargate/Farscape shared actors

Claudia Black- She’s cool as Aeryn Sun, but I think her prowess as an actress is shown off way better as Vala Maldoran. Vala is so deceptive and street savvy. She really is a very interesting character. Aeryn is cool but much more straightforward. She has her personal rules and lives her life by them, end of story.

Ben Browder-I like him alot as John Crichton, but then he shows up on Stargate and becomes the most boring character ever. Just because you are the replacement for Jack doesn’t mean you have to be Jack. I wish they’d let him show his range more often. That episode wherein the crew all exchange bodies was way hilarious.

Stark- my new favorite character! When you first meet him he seems completely crazy. Then by the end of the deuce episode he seems infinitely wise- but this isn’t his whole character either. We see so much more of him later on. At this point in the show, he is a man with potential for infinite wisdom and absolute madness. When he’s feeling emotional he loses control and cannot function. But there are times he has total clarity and seems to be capable of anything. He’s this weird dichotomy and can swing from one to the other like a pendulum. It makes him so interesting and I can’t wait for more with his character.

TV show plot transparency-

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now. It has to do with how much information the audience is given as they watch a show. Some shows will have information left unavailable to the viewer so at the end they can solve the problems by simply- “AHA, that’s what they were really doing!”
A famous example is the episode where Kirk and Spock fight. At the end of the fight Spock thinks he’s killed Kirk, and so does the audience. Back on the ship it is revealed that Kirk was given a drug by the doc to make him appear dead, so all is explained and so solved. The situation was not totally transparent to the audience until the end reveal.
For a long time when I first watched Farscape I expected this type of hidden information format. They would get into situations that seemed impossible to solve, then you’d see that there was no trick and they still manage to escape by the skin of their teeth. In one such episode John is turned into a statue to preserve him for several centuries and someone kills him by cutting off his head. I thought for sure that something was up, he wasn’t in the statue at all and we’d find out later. Nope. All they have to do to save him is weld the head back on. So I’m getting used to knowing that as the Farscape audience we basically have all the information there is, and not to expect any clever reveals.

You must unlearn what you have learned.

For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

L: I can’t believe it. Y: That is why you fail.