Listics

Today at the farmer’s market…

Notice how the coffee cups switch hands and the parent in front of the camera has to hold the lisyanthus.

"…narcissists are damaged, broken in some fundamental way, in some
essential inner heartspace. And they pass this damage along to others
so they don’t have to feel it in themselves." 

Chris Locke’s writing has substance.  That’s one reason I read him. Today’s post at CBO has me thinking about an experience with a young woman who translates her anxiety about about the world from one horrible medical condition to another.  I foolishly called her out on the matter ("I thought you said yesterday that it was dengue fever.  I’m surprised to hear that you actually need a liver transplant.  Oh… both dengue and the transplant… how terrible for you?")  I wish I hadn’t stuck my head up out of the foxhole on this one.  Narcissists take few prisoners.

You fuck up, you move up.  That’s only one of the rules of promotion of course.  The Peter Principle also comes into play. I was briefly honored to have been named Cardinal, but now that I’ve learned il papa was pulling for Schumacher I’ve decided to take off the hat. I mean, I’m a long time fan of the red cars (and trucks) myself, but I draw the line at enchantments, hexes, and spiritual mumbo-jumbo. 

Your birth on the 27th day of the month (9 energy) adds a tone of selflessness and humanitarianism to your life path. Certainly, you are one who can work very well with people, but at the
same time you need a good bit of time to be by yourself to rest [they got that right!] and
meditate. There is a very humanistic and philanthropic approach in most of things that you do.

This birthday helps you be broadminded, tolerant, generous and very cooperative. You are the type of person who uses persuasion rather than force to achieve your ends.  You tend to be very sensitive to others’ needs and feelings, and you
are able to give much in the way of friendship without expecting a lot in
return.

Found this link at Doc’s today.  But I’m a Capricorn.  We don’t believe in this stuff.

Thanks to Jim Roberts for the link to another quiz…  The quiz has some good questions but I’m afraid most of my answers are more than two dimensional constructs on an axis from agreement to disagreement. I’ll bet yours are too.

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 81% Modernist 75% Existentialist 75% Cultural Creative 56% Idealist 31% Postmodernist 25% Romanticist 19% Fundamentalist 13% What is Your World View? (corrected…again) created with QuizFarm.com

There’s a person named "mcd" whose bright comments abound in blog spaces I frequent. At least I think mcd is a person, but we could all be dogs on the internet.   Mcd is merely a recent addition to my list of people I’d like to know who prefer to remain anonymous.  These people have a right to their anonymity, and they certainly do no harm with it.  The expository exchanges in blogs and mail lists lower the potential for mischief that seems implicit in dealing with the anonymous, be they people or dogs.  Except for ideas, nobody is trying to sell much in these quarters.

This week, Andy Borrows writes about the choice of transparency and how it influences us, shapes our writing away from some personal areas, and therefore represents a paradox.  I know what he’s talking about.  Common sense and a sensitivity for the privacy of others prevents me from addressing topics related to my work, yet it’s in my work that I experience some of the most profound difficulties of my mundane life.  And, while I’m quick to applaud achievements of friends and family here, I’m more discrete when it comes to mulling over difficulties we may have.

So would it be better to write anonymously?  In general I think not.  But from time to time I’d like to let it all hang out about a cluster-fuck at work or a favorite relative who has recently fallen off a cliff. Yet, I don’t want to make people mad at me, and I certainly don’t want to alienate my clients or my co-workers.

What’s a poor bloggy boy to do?

A dead bluejay is where this starts.  Molly picks it up and runs off with it.  I roar for her to "LEAVE IT!" and I take off after her.  She whips away around the arbor vitaes and is half way down to Cathy’s place before I round the grove.  I see her there on the other side of the fence.  The bird is gone, dropped during the excitement of the chase no doubt, certainly not out of obedience. 

I ignore the little West Nile carrying brat and let the old dog out of her kennel.  We oldsters shuffle away, out the path toward the orchard.  Pretty soon Diggy wanders away and Molly whips past like a bullet train, tightens her trajectory around a clump of red twigged dogwood and barrels on in with a grin.  I give Digster a wave and she catches the hand motion and ambles our direction.  Molly is off like a shot again, twice around the woodlot, back to the house and then back out on the bullet train orchard path cutting as close to Diggy and me as she can without knocking us down.  I walk over the little rise and I see the beekeepers out by their hives in the orchard.

Shit.

Molly has burned off the first few stages of rocket propulsion so she’s back in a nominally biddable state of dog.  I suggest that she be seated and remain there while I leash her.  Mirabile dictu, she obeys.  I suppose I could have turned my little herd back toward the house at this point and avoided conflict.  I knew there was a chance that Diggy was going to do the next wrong thing.  But she vectored off toward the road and I wanted to check out the service berries that we planted a few weeks ago, so I led Molly on the west side of the orchard headed north, well away from the beekeepers.

The shrubs were doing fine.  We headed back and of course there was the Digster tail-wagging on her arthritic way toward the guys in the moon suits.  She’s deaf so I didn’t call.  I waved at her, trying to give her the signal to come back our way.  The spacemen waved back.  "The dog!" I yelled and they got it, too late.  She’s being stung anbd they’re doing nothing and I have  to go down there and try to rescue her and she rubs her nose in the grass, and comes my way, and I tell these guys, "I’m really angry.  If you had stopped by the house I wouldn’t have taken the old dog out in the field." 

They didn’t handle the anger part very well.  They gave me back attitude, kind of a "humph - well now we know how you feel" kind of thing.  I’m not a fully realized master.  I said, "Well, you can get the hives off my land then."   

Guy says, "Okay, we will.  When I get back from Mexico."

To which I politely replied, "If that shit’s not gone in a week, I’ll burn them."

"Thanks for the warning," the guy says. 

This stuff may be deeper than it appears.  I went back to apologize for my hostility after I put the dogs away, but they were gone.  Last year, the people who have the CSA here at our place kind of invited the bee keepers to do their thing and I was in the position of agreeing or looking like a jerk.  So this is kind of the slow reflex.  I look like a jerk a year later.

If the guys had stopped back at the house to talk, to ask about Diggy, to connect, then this thing would have resolved itself.  They didn’t.  Life’s too short to let people take advantage of you.   Diggy is only going to be around another summer.  Why mess it up with a bee-stung nose?

This beats the hell out of duct tape and and a polyethylene poncho.  I’m buying several "totally encapsulated suits" right now.  They can’t hurt me anymore.  Thanks to the CBO for the link.