Fannish links

  Other Stuff

Saturday, October 19, 2002

Notes to self, on a grey gloomy autumnal day in which some basement-cleaning has occurred:

1) You really are never going to need all those cardboard boxes. Trust me on this.

2) You have gift wrapping paper! Lots and lots of it! No need to buy any more! Just put it somewhere where you can find it again!

3) Your mother has been dead for fifteen years. You can get rid of her old tax returns and cancelled checks. Really. She's not going to need them anymore.

4) All of M's stuff that he stored in your basement because it was easier than moving it with him? He's somehow managed to live without it for eight years now. Give him two weeks to pick it up, then dumpster ho!

5) There certainly are people in the world who find nostalgic pleasure and enjoyment in going through old memorabilia. You, however, are not one of those people; you will instead get massively depressed. Anything you are not actually using, or that does not have a good likelihood of near-term utility, should be summarily tossed. The past is a bucket of ashes.

6) If, however, you pigheadedly insist on spending time going through old memorabilia, at least for the love of god put something cheery on the stereo. Doing this to a soundtrack of the Bach Mass in B Minor is going to make you want to stick your head in the oven.

6) If you get this tired, just from an hour of hauling stuff around the basement, you really need to step up the gym routine. Seriously. You're too young to be this damn old.

Posted @ 01:23 PM CST [Link]5 comments

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

OK, knock wood, thanks to a most helpful comment by Citosa, (thank you very much!!) I think I've got archives and comments working again. I hadn't even known the comments were effed up. Sigh.

Posted @ 06:04 AM CST [Link]No Comments

Monday, October 14, 2002

Bloody HELL. For no reason that I can discern, the link to my blog archives is suddenly fucked up. ::seethe::

If there are any Greymatter mavens out there ... hellllppp ...

So (abrupt topic swerve), I was biking home from work this afternoon, and I turned a corner and saw two guys standing in the street next to a car, who stepped out and flagged me down, with cries of "Excuse me! Ma'am! Need some help!"

I stopped, quickly ran the situation through my danger-scan (broad daylight; reasonably well-populated street; they don't feel threatening), and braked. They regaled me with a sad tale of how they'd driven to town from Milwaukee, for the Vikings game, and had had their car broken into in the night, and their suitcases, money, and checkbooks stolen, and needed some help with gas money to get home. There was much opening of the driver's side door and lifting up of floor mats, to show me the broken glass on the floor of the car.

I sat a moment, and did another quick tap into the intuition circuitry (they feel OK; there's somebody half a block away watching us), then reached into my bag, took out my wallet, and pulled out a five. One part of my brain was telling me You're in a vulnerable position just now; your wallet is in grabbing distance; your hands are occupied, which means you couldn't pedal away fast. I handed the money to the guys, told them to take care, get home safely. They shook my hand, babbling all the while about the unexpected dangerousness of Minneapolis and how they'd be careful the next time they came to town. Then I pedalled off home. I was a block away before it struck me that I hadn't checked the car to even see if, like, it had Wisconsin plates. (They could have just stationed themselves beside some random broken-into car they found in the neighborhood, and set up a scam.)

Do I even want to get into the racial aspects? No, not really, not at all, but ... the truth is that they were black, and that I'm rather more likely with unknown black men to both carefully check the intuition-circuitry, and to go with it when it says This is OK--to not automatically react with distrust, aversion, suspicion. If they'd been white, I might have just said sorry, no can do, and pedalled on.

In my 49 years on the planet, I've never been the victim of a direct violent crime. (I've had my house broken into, but that's different, impersonal.) This is not because I do everything according to the live-safely dogma, obviously; I've put myself, at times, into some *amazingly* stupid situations. And while I'd like to believe that my intuition functions pretty well, in my honest moments I can only attribute my continued survival and well-being to dumb luck. If somebody, some stranger, approaches me with a sad story, my impulse is to help out. I've been helped at times by strangers, and I feel the imperative to give back.

I do know that if my life history had been somewhat different -- if, say, I'd been living in Florida, or Washington or Oregon or Utah, back when Ted Bundy was at large, and I'd turned down onto the wrong street, the one where he was working his "Hey, I'm a nice guy who's got his arm in a sling and could use some help!" deal, I could very easily have ended up raped and dead. (I was the right age; I was his type, even--young, thin, long dark hair parted in the middle...) This chills me, when I stop and think about it; but then I try to set the rarity of a Ted Bundy against the great number of hapless ordinary folk, who just need a hand, or a handout. Back when I started living alone, I told myself that I wouldn't let myself be controlled by fear, and I've tried to live by some balancing act between compassion and healthy caution.

In this situation -- well, hell, maybe they did scam me, maybe they didn't. All I can be certain of is:

a) I'll never really know for sure, one way or the other; and

b) if all it's about is money, and it's a choice between withholding money I can spare from somebody who might really need it, or giving money I can spare to somebody who might not really need it, I'll go for the latter.

And also, that I'll probably never have a final and satisfactory answer for how to handle situations like this. I hop over to shell's LJ, where she's posted the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, and I read, and ponder...

Posted @ 08:47 PM CST [Link]5 comments

Sunday, October 13, 2002

Te asks, "What do you think your last five completed stories say about you, if anything?" And because I'm feeling self-indulgent, I answer, but because I'm embarrassed about my self-indulgence, I put it on cutaway. [more]

Posted by jones059 @ 12:59 PM CST [Link]No Comments