Health and Architecture

Hi anonymous, thank you for commenting. Have you read about the town in Florida called Celebration? It's designed to encourage walking to do errands and visit neighbors, for kids to ride their bikes everywhere independently...I'd love to have architecture and design support health. For example, I was thinking once, if children designed airports, the waiting spaces would have ladders to climb to get to the chairs, slides to go down to the baggage claim, etc. We could easily have little rock walls to climb on while we're waiting at the supermarket, wouldn't that be as fun as reading the magazines? and we could have steps to go up and down on while filling the tank with gas (I actually do this already), chin-up bars on the street corners....

Red Dress

Laura Bush should have stayed the course at her recent party, where she and three guests all turned up in identical gowns. She took advantage of being in her home to run upstairs and change, thus abandoning her three guests in their uncomfortable state. As a hostess, her job is to make her guests feel at ease. She could have taken a picture with them, said to the others, "Didn't you get the memo?", planned with everyone to do this again with red sparkles all around, etc. What a missed opportunity.

Let's greet them as liberators

Let's welcome the Democrats in the House and the Senate, and the first female Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, by greeting them as liberators - as per Bush and pals idea of how our troops would be received in Iraq. My thought is, we coordinate to send flowers for the first day they are in session, and we send a bouquet to Nancy and flowers for the chairs of every Democrat in the place. With a sign that says, "Welcome!" because we don't have to rub it in to the Republicans - I think they'll get the point.

Never Sad Again

Democrats have control of the House and the Senate! And while we were still rejoicing, Rumsfeld resigned, and made it that much sweeter. That second day, I decided, I would never feel sad again. This was a conscious decision, because the other thing that happened to me on Election day was a call from the doctor - a "shadow" on my mammogram. A requirement to get another mammogram promptly, and a jolt of physical fear to go with the jolt of political joy.
As I calmed myself with the mantra, "could be nothing, could be nothing", I thought of my almost-grown son as a nursing infant on that breast. Wept. Then, irrationally, I thought, "If losing a breast is the cost of winning the election, that's a price I'm willing to pay."
It's a strange condition, connecting two dots that don't logically connect, but it's secure here. I feel like a warrior, connecting my possible disease to a vital step towards saving everything. Saying, OK, if this is what I sacrifice for the safety of the world, I can gladly give up a breast. And never be sad again.

Compassion for the Cat

Can anyone help me obtain compassion for the elderly cat I've inherited? Or, the freedom to have her put to sleep while remaining a good person? I could list all the irritating things about her, but they aren't the point. I could list all the irritating things about myself, while I'm at it.
Try existentialism, would be my advice if someone were asking me for this help. If I loved the cat, what would I do as I encounter her yowling at all hours of the day? Acting as if one already feels the emotion wished for in the situation creates a space in one's life for that emotion to come into being - a compassion-sized hole in the universe, to paraphrase the title of a sculpture of Lauren Levy's. Emotions are manifest in our bodies, not our imaginations.
I'll try this.

And, I'm going to see this blog as less a request for attention from others, and more a diary, and stop looking at the number of comments space, waiting for changes from 1 and 0. How much attention do I need for self-esteem?

The Sparklebelly Diet

This summer I read several books that continued my thinking about diets, women, and my body. Diets have damaged our ability to know whether we are hungry or not, to see how we are beautiful, and are absorbing so much of women's time and energy that could be spent doing who knows what wonderful work in the world. Also we judge each other so instantly and so harshly based on each other's weight.
'Sparklebelly' is my word to remind myself of the origin of life, of what the pagans had right - worshipping the womb. Fat is a support to gestation. To hate fat is to hate femininity. And dieting makes me crazy anyway - it makes me think only about food. I'm better off when I plan what I'm going to eat, eat slowly, savoring food with joy, and then feel when I'm full.
And then think about what else I love doing, and spend time doing that.

Halloween and Christianity

Nowadays, some people are pointing out (with an attitude somewhere between "holier than thou" and "grumpy") that they don't celebrate Halloween. This is because it is pagan, they say.
One question is, why are we against the pagans? If it is because we are Christian, didn't we already win this war a few thousand years ago? To seek to remove all evidence of paganism from our Christian lives, such as declining to celebrate Halloween or declining to have a Christmas tree, is to pursue an inquisition. To relentlessly and savagely examine every trace of our modern lives for remnants of a time before Christianity existed, and work to purge these traces completely away, is not the spirit Jesus brought to the world. It's the spirit of anorexia. And of hate.
Another question is, what's anti-Christian about Halloween today? The answer is, nothing. To dress as a monster isn't to uphold the monster as right, it is to subdue the monster by controlling it. Evil cannot be eliminated, but it can be controlled. In the real world, Halloween is about community (visiting your neighbors and getting candy, like a blessing, really) and creativity (costumes and decorating the outside of the house).