Re-balancing

My husband and sons left for a few days to southern California.  I was supposed to go with them initially, but I'm staying home to rest, relax and re-balance.  The last few years have been hard on me, and my family, but things have been particularly difficult recently.

This is an opportunity for us to all spend some time apart; the kids will be staying with my cousin for a couple of days while my husband attends training.  Over the weekend, he'll also get a taste of what being the care giving parent is like.  Me, I'm getting an opportunity to spend time doing things on my own.

Maybe, time apart will remind us all why we need each other before the situation is no longer salvageable.  I'm hoping so, at least.

I've caught baby fever

As you all know, motherhood makes me crazy, yet here I am seriously considering doing it again.  My baby is starting kindergarten in August, and the natural window of opportunity for pregnancy is dwindling.  Now or never, right?

I don't know.  One part of me thinks another kid, especially another boy, might drive me to the loony bin; the other, says I'm tougher than that.  The arguing between these two parts of me has turned into a name calling contest.

Rapid attitude adjustments

This is my year for rapid attitude adjustments and reality checks, and it's happened again.  Sunday was spent at an impromptu barbecue with friends.  Un-showered, unplanned and unhurried we sat around our friends' home and talked and ate and laughed.  Then we went home, basking in contentment, put the kids in bed and tried to go to sleep.

Our little guy woke up an hour later coughing so hard his lips were getting blue, so he joined us in bed.  The next morning was a scramble to get back into our routine.  My wallet went missing and I got grumpy over all the housework that still isn't done.  I was ranting to my mom, who takes my crises much more personally than she needs to.  as soon as I got off the phone with her, it rang again.

From the moment I picked up the phone, my attitude was twisted around.  The friend I had spent the evening with was telling me that her husband had spent the night at the hospital.  She was talking fast and occasionally lapsing into Spanish, which she only does when she's really agitated.  Her husband was fine, but his friend and employee, who we had just seen the night before, was in the hospital in a coma with multiple skull fractures.

We don't know what happened.  The police are investigating the incident, but this poor man, may have been attacked or hit by a vehicle.  My friend and I have the same horrible fear, though: this case isn't in the local news, the police don't seem to be doing much, and it looks like it's because this man is a Mexican immigrant.

I must say, I don't know him well, especially since he doesn't speak much English and don't speak much Spanish, but I have celebrated holidays with him.  My older son used to follow him around while he was working around our apartment complex, and he always watched out for the kids when they were outside playing.  His son is the same age as my younger son.  He's always been courteous and gentlemanly to me (he even helped look for my little guy when he escaped the house once and wandered off.).

Suddenly, my issues weren't important, again.  So, I'm lighting a candle for him, and his family.  Watching the local news websites for information, and wondering what, if anything can be done.  Amazing, isn't it, how much things can change overnight.

~Magickal Graphics~

Stench-o-grams

My husband loved my newest idea for dealing with politicians who can't be bothered to act like decent human beings, represent the people of this country or even think logically.  I think somebody should find a way to mail farts to elected officials to illustrate just how much they stink.

Alright, I'm done being inappropriate, for the moment.

Silly, sanitized histories

If you've ever read good translations of ancient literature, you probably have at least a vague awareness of the fact that our human ancestors had minds and mouths every bit as filthy as ours. Art is also a great place to see that humans have had a sense of humor, a love of sexuality and an ability to insult each other that predates written language.

I read "The Odyssey" for the first time in 1997 in a course on Western literature and history at UNR.  The translation (Robert Fitzgerald) was awkward, but poetically beautiful, designed to preserve the poetry of the original Greek.  I read it again, for a Classics course at SFSU, and I had a bit of an awakening.  The second translation, by Stanley Lombardo, was easily grasped and full of ribald humor and nasty insults (which were part of the original, but often left out of translations because they interrupted the beauty of the poem).  The same course included a reading of Gilgamesh that led to several lectures about ancient sexuality (an eye opening experience for a few romantic souls in the class who envisioned a beautiful, polite past).  Sex as a civilizing force, sex as hospitality, sex as religious worship were known throughout the past.  Sex is a power laden act that our ancestors were well aware of (homosexuality, as we define, has been around a long time, as have been sexual fantasies and art).

Now skip forward a few centuries to the Victorians: the very people who are often held up as shining examples of morality and family values.  When you peel back the veneer of your expectations, there is a lot of sex, drugs and violence to the era.  They were obsessed.  Furniture, books, paintings, newspapers, science, medicine, psychology were all focused on sex, which brought in quite a bit of the drugs and violence.  Female sexuality was labeled deviant. Tools (the vibrator being the most enduring) and illnesses (hysteria, nymphomania) invented to control it.  Sex was used as a weapon and a rallying cry to Victorian England against India's attempts at throwing off the yoke of Imperialism.  The idea of the lily white, untouchable virtue of white women was invented, not for our benefit, but to demean others.

Then we get to the "sexual revolution" of the 1950's and 1960's when people begin to both question sexuality, experiment with it, and to decry the loss of morality.  Was it anything new? Probably not.  Sex is part of life, and while each time and society deal with it differently, it is perfectly natural and simply cannot be ignored on the grand scale.  All the repression in the world will fail, if we all get itchy.

These examples are not an exhaustive list or study, they are simply the examples that pop into the forefront of my mind when I think about the history of sexuality. Here's my thought, as an anthropologist, as a historian, as a thinking human being-  human's haven't really changed much, ever.  We still feel the same needs and urges;  we still struggle to deal with the hand we're dealt in life, and we still wonder what the heck we're doing here.  There is nothing new under the sun, and what goes around, tends to come back around.

As an entertaining footnote, I scheduled this post and closed the page to check my email.  Among the local news headlines on my home page was an announcement for a new San Francisco museum: The Antique Vibrator Museum .  It opens next weekend, and my now blushing husband has agreed to go with me.