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Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
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9:27 pm - blindsided by sadness
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So, yeah, it's been a Very Long Time since I posted. Much has changed, much is the same.
I have a Facebook account, but don't watch it all that much. I really dislike the format.
I do get email alerts, though. And today I got an invitation to a memorial service for a friend of mine, Glen Gyldersleve. WTF? As far as I knew he hadn't gotten sent back to Afghanistan...
I read his wall, and couldn't get a lot of detail, but it seems he committed suicide on September 25th. I'm floored. Glen was one of those people who was almost always energetic and upbeat.
Almost. There was a bleakness that peeked out on occasion.
Still, it's a shock. I keep thinking about his daughter, who is 8 years old. I only saw him every few months, at a game day (he was the person who brought me to my first GameStorm) or social gathering. It was always great to see him, and I always felt the connection we had.
And now he's gone.
I'm so bad at staying in touch with people. I keep saying I want to work on it, but nothing happens.
Anyone reading this who wants to get together sometime, please let me know. If I don't contact you it's probably because the inertia has swallowed me. I'm not isolated because I want to be. I just can't seem to find my way out of it.
I'm feeling really bleak right now...
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| Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
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6:57 pm - Lowell / Chelmsford Restaurant Suggestions
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I'm meeting several friends for dinner in the Lowell / Chelmsford area next week; since the location was chosen based on proximity to one of their workplaces and centrality, none of us actually knows the area especially well.
Do any of you fine folks have any suggestions for good places to eat?
We're also hoping to meet up with a couple of people earlier in the afternoon, so suggestions for someplace to sit comfortably and chat over "coffee" would also be welcome.
Feel free to pass this request on to anyone you know who might have more knowledge of the area. :-)
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| Sunday, June 29th, 2008
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6:29 pm - The Book List
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I've resisted this before, but now I have to do it. Must be  jennkitty's mesmerising effect...
According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.
The instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ.
( Here be the list...Collapse )
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| Monday, June 23rd, 2008
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11:46 pm - Brief Happy Dance Post
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Okay, I know I haven't posted much, but I just had to share today's news.
The first part is actually last week's, but it got celebrated today: I got my 4th 5-lb star and my 10% award at Weight Watchers. Stephe got his a couple of weeks earlier (his 10% -- he's lost almost 40 so far).
So today I was at Fred Meyer, and I saw that all swimsuits were 50% off. The one I have is quite a few years old, and was getting baggy already before I started WW. I found one I liked; they had it in 18 and 14, but no 16. I would have been happy with the 18, but tried the 14 on first just to see how close it would be.
It fit.
I still can't quite believe that I can wear a size *14*! I looked at the old one when I got home; it's a 22. That's a big honkin' difference.
Oh yeah, and according to the charts I'm no longer obese, just overweight. Yay me! :-)
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| Saturday, May 31st, 2008
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11:26 am - A Video Well Worth Watching
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| Sunday, May 25th, 2008
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2:14 pm - Heading East...
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Stephe and I are going to be in Connecticut in July for his sister's wedding. We're going out a week early so we can visit friends, staying in Meriden from July 9th - 15th. Anyone interested in meeting up, please let me know.
We're also thinking of heading up to the Boston area if folks up there are interested in getting together. Given the logistics of the week, the best day for us to do that would be Wednesday the 16th. I was thinking we would drive to the end of the Green line and take the T in, so meeting someplace reasonably close to a T stop would be best.
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| Sunday, May 11th, 2008
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10:51 pm - Meditations, Affirmations, and Walks in the Woods
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ankareeda_rm always takes one class at PSU every term so that she can keep her library privileges. When the Math classes got to be too much of an energy drain, she started taking 1-credit courses in Women's Studies. These are offered over a weekend, with one session Friday night and another Saturday. I go with her to take notes and otherwise support her (all the instructors have been fine with this; ADA aside, Women's Studies profs are usually aware of disability issues).
This past weekend was a class entitled "Women, Care and Self-Love", and it was amazing. It was taught by the same fabulous instructor we had last term (a bit about that can be found here). We talked about the nature of love and self-esteem, and what it means to love yourself. There were a number of writing exercises, including more timed writing.
The core of the class was learning 2 self-care practices: Meditation and Affirmations. Both of these are things ankareeda_rm does on a daily basis; for me they're things I've known about and tried, but never been able to make work.
With meditation, I've always had trouble with keeping my mind from focusing on how uncomfortable it was for me to sit upright. I generally prefer sitting cross-legged over sitting in a chair, so that's what I always tried. I could kind of do it lying down, but even so really getting my mind to let go of the racing thoughts was difficult. I never felt like I was getting anywhere with it.
The first time we did meditation in the class, I discovered something that amazed me: I can do it much more easily if I'm sitting in a chair with my feet on the floor, at a table on which I can rest my arms, hands open and facing down. I automatically shifted into an upright posture away from the chair back, and when time was called I was surprised that it was over so quickly. It got better as we did it several times over the 2 days.
This afternoon I went for a walk in the woods; at one point I went to sit on a fallen log, set my phone to vibrate in 20 minutes, and went into meditation. There were birds and and one point a lawn mower, but I was able to let them be outside me and just stay with my breath. It was really cool. I ended up stopping after 5 minutes because I felt that I didn't want to take a longer break than that from my exercise, but it was still a success.
Affirmations are similarly something that I've tried with no real success before. I think a lot of the problem came from the way they were phrased. They were always things that I knew weren't true, and I couldn't suspend disbelief in order to make them true.
In the class, we wrote our own affirmations, and I was able to phrase them in ways that worked for me. It's suggested that we pick one or two to focus on each week; for my first I chose "I am attuned with my purpose in life."
I can already feel the effect that it's having. I chanted it while walking through the woods, and made up a song with it while folding laundry. I feel more balanced than I have in quite a while, and much more connected with the energy around me. We'll see where it takes me...
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| Sunday, May 4th, 2008
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10:34 am - My Own Thoughts on the Holocaust
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After posting this yesterday, I received an email from my Mom with the following information:
irene is the widow of my first cousin david, oldest son of grandma molly's oldest brother feiwish, who died in concentration camp.
She says she "must have" told me David's story -- he was taken prisoner early in the war as a British soldier, and spent the war in a German POW camp. I have no recollection of any such story, nor do I remember ever hearing her mention an Uncle Feiwish. The only sibling of my grandmother's I know by name is Ernestine, who was my mother's favorite, and in whose memory I have the middle name Tina. She and her mother were taken away by the Nazis after my mother and her brother and parents had gotten out of Italy and gone to New York. They had gone to Italy, in one of the towns in the Alps that went back and forth between Austrian and Italian rule, in 1938, and lived there for over a year. The fact that her father was from there and still had family there (my great-grandmother ran a pensione) was what allowed them to escape; the quota for Italy was not as heavily used as those for other countries.
After my Dad died in 1998, my Mom took my sister and me on a trip to that town in Italy and to Vienna. We happened by chance to run into an old woman who remembered the day the Nazis took the town's Jews away, and told us about it. We also met the older sister of the girl who had been my Mom's best friend in school there. That trip made many things more real for me.
It took me a long time to realize how profound the effects of all this were in my life, and I still find new connections. One of the biggest was when I realized that my mother, who is very social and generally makes friends easily, must have left behind and lost a number of friends when her family fled Vienna.
I also realized a while ago that all the rage that my Dad carried around didn't really have anything to do with us, even though it seemed to when he was angry (or even just irritated) with one of us (which didn't require a lot of provocation at times).
I have sometimes felt as though every member of my generation whose family survived the Nazis represents a dozen or more others whose lines were wiped out before they could be born.
There's so much more to say about all this; I feel like I could write for hours. But I don't have the time today, so I'll end it here.
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| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
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10:59 am - Thoughts on Holocaust Remembrance Day
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My brother sent me the following. The first part is an email from an Israeli relative of ours; the second is his response.
Holocaust Remembrance Day was Thursday, but it doesn't really matter when we remember, just that we do.
Today is "Holocaust Remembrance Day" in Israel. All media programs are about this sad period in Jewish history, all newspapers are full of it, and a short while ago, at 10.00 o"clock, the sirens went off all over the country. No, it was not an air raid or terrorist action - it lasted for two minutes and all (most) movement in the country stopped. It was for remembering the six million dead during the holocaust, and cars stopped in the streets, people stood still wherever they were at this moment.
I was alone at home, but even so I stood up and tried to think of the millions of Jews so brutally murdered by the Nazis during World War II, but for some reason I could only think of my own immediate family - my parents, my elder brother and sister. And I tried hard to remember what they looked like, but I couldn't see their faces in my mind. I was a ten year old child when I last saw them, the only one in the family to survive the war - and suddenly I felt my eyes filling with tears. I felt so terrible about this, my own private sorrow. And I feel guilty that during those two minutes of silence my thought were not about the other 6 million murdered.
There is no other subject I can write about today, so will close my blog. Shalom from Irene
Dear Irene,
I will not speak to you about "survivor's guilt" and all of that; there has been much that has been written on the subject and I'm sure you've read and heard more than enough of it.
I will tell you, all the same, that you are blameless, in the focus of your sorrow on your own loss. The victims of the Holocaust are not only those who died, nor even those who were in the camps or in forced labor who survived to liberation. The victims number far more than six million, they include every person who lost someone she loved. They include every person who was born with a grandparent, or grandparents, who were already taken from us. They include every person who suffered, because someone close to him had been damaged in one way or another by this horrible plague. The victims include those who participated in the slaughter, and those who "learned" from this horror that such a thing is possible, and the victims of each new plague of hatred and murder, in Tibet, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in Darfur, in far too many places. The victims even include those whose minds are so twisted by hate that they feel the need to deny that this monstrous campaign never happened.
Martin Buber wrote that, "In each person there is a priceless treasure that is in no other." Each life lost was, in its own way, irreplaceable; each priceless treasure cast into the flames impoverished many lives that could have shared it.
If there is anyone who can truly mourn for all of these victims, anyone who can really comprehend the enormity of the loss and at the same time feel and understand each individual loss, he or she is far, far more holy than I could ever hope to become.
So -- if my mourning focuses for the most part on the priceless treasures that were taken from my life -- in my case, before my life even began -- I will accept that my sorrow is less than "perfect," and that this is no more than human, and no less.
Shalom,
Barry
ETA: I found out who Irene is. She's the widow of my Mom's first cousin, whose father (my grandmother's oldest brother) died in a concentration camp.
I also wanted to give explicit permission for this to be shared, either by linking here or by copying to email.
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| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
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10:43 am - More detail on why I'm cutting back here
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As most of you know, my friend Stephe (pronounced Steve) moved out here last November. He knew that my love for him was far less intense than his for me, and was okay with it. He also knew that Rachael was my primary.
Neither of those is true anymore.
Hopefully I'll have time at some point to post more details, but for now I'll just say that things have progressed very quickly, to the point where we are doing full-time D/s. He is the Master I've always needed, and long ago gave up any hope of ever finding.
This isn't something he's always wanted -- he's moved into it in response to my desires and needs -- but he's found himself liking it a lot. He's a natural, and a very quick study.
He's set constraints about what I do with my time. The most recent addition is that I'm allowed 1 hour per day (usually 10 - 11 AM) for "internet entertainment" which includes LJ, personal email, reading comics, etc.
Meanwhile, I've been getting a lot more done on all the various things I've needed to be doing but haven't. GameStorm is much, much farther along than it was a year ago. Our refrigerator is truly clean, and there's enough room to put new things in it without fighting the chaos. My bedroom is better; this Saturday is slated for the full-out overhaul, since I've reached a point where an hour a day isn't working. And so on.
He's an anal-retentive Virgo, and he likes his world neat and orderly. I do too, but I've never been able to make it happen for myself. I can do it for him, though, and I have the joy of providing a service along with a living situation and life about which I'm ecstatic.
I've known him for 25 years, so I'm not too worried about this being a flash-in-the pan infatuation! :-) It's been almost a month since we entered the D/s relationship, and there hasn't been a moment yet when I've questioned whether it was what I really wanted.
Rachael, by the way, is very happy with the situation after a day or two of adjustment and reassurance that she was no less important to me than ever, and that Stephe has expressed his understanding and support of that.
I'm in poly heaven! :-D
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10:13 am - Less of Me: Good News and Not-so-Good News
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The good "Less of Me" news: Weight Watchers is working really well for both Stephe and me. He's lost almost 20, and I'm closing in on 15 pounds lost.
The not-so-good "Less of Me" news: my time for LiveJournal has been cut way back due to a number of factors (most of them happy, just time-consuming, which is why it's not bad news!). I've already lost several weeks of posts from my friends' page.
I'm going to be paring the people whose journals I read down to a very few -- if you keep getting replies from me you'll know you're on that list (or you can ask). Whether or not you are on that list, if there's something you especially want me to see, please send email to phoenix_14159 (at) yahoo (dot) com. Note the underscore; it's unfortunately not the same as my username here.
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2008
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10:31 am - Back from GameStormLand
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I just realized I haven't posted since before GameStorm, and it's been over a week since the Con.
I'm still 2 weeks behind on my friends page, and lost about a week (and may yet lose more), so if there's something you wanted me to see please reply here and I'll catch up on your journal separately.
GameStorm went really well. There was a potential crisis (no sign-up sheets for events) that was averted at the last minute, and the biggest glitch was in my construction of the schedule grid for Friday, which had events in several rooms off by an hour. Oops. It did mess some people up, but I don't think it destroyed anyone's entire weekend. The vast majority of people never noticed.
I have a long list of things I'm going to do better next year, which includes making a schedule for myself! I had intended to go to the Guest of Honor panels, but missed both because I hadn't made a schedule. There's lots of other stuff, too, which has to do with the running of the con.
Things with Stephe are going astonishingly well; I'm in the process of putting together a post on the story of how we came to be together. For now, suffice it to say that NRE with someone you've known for 25 years is both strange and wonderful! :-)
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| Friday, March 21st, 2008
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1:50 pm - I've Got Buttons!
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Our shipment of Obama '08 buttons just arrived, earlier than expected (they were backordered, with longer than needed estimates).
I realized that I hadn't seen any of them around at all, even though I know quite a few people who support him. So rather than just ordering a couple (at $5 each, 2 for $3), I ordered 25 at $.75 each (about $1 with shipping). I'm going to carry them around with me, and if someone comments on mine I'll offer them one. If they want to give me $1 to cover my costs that's fine; if not I'll consider it a contribution to the campaign.
Okay, back to GameStorm...
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| Monday, March 17th, 2008
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3:28 am - The Crunch is Here
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GameStorm starts in 11 days.
I've just spent pretty much the entire day on GameStorm stuff, and there's so much more that needs to be done.
Clever me wanting to be chair.
Even more clever to say I want to do it again next year (it'll be easier next time. I believe this).
I get to sleep now. Yaaaaaay.
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| Friday, March 14th, 2008
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2:51 pm - In the Days of the Lone Ranger
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| Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
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3:06 am - Too brilliant not to share
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Courtesy of arwensouth:
30 Things That Should Never Be Adapted to Film.
I think my favorite is The Adventures of Sisyphus, though Finnegan's Wake is a close second.
And yes, I know this doesn't count as a real entry. I've been fighting with a headache for the past few days; I got acupuncture today, so hopefully it'll be better (so far so good, but it's often okay at night then I wake up with it back again).
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| Monday, March 10th, 2008
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12:30 am
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Check out this bird that mimics other birds... and other sounds it hears.
It gets really interesting about 2 minutes in.
[ Edited to fix the link ]
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| Sunday, March 9th, 2008
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11:28 am - Daylight Saving
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I love the extra hour of sunlight in the evenings.
I do not love having to get up an hour earlier than my body thinks it should. Even though I woke up before my alarm, it still feels wrong.
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| Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
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9:00 pm - Color Me Turquoise
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from beth_
you are turquoise
#40E0D0 |
Your dominant hues are green and blue. You're smart and you know it, and want to use your power to help people and relate to others. Even though you tend to battle with yourself, you solve other people's conflicts well.
Your saturation level is higher than average - You know what you want, but sometimes know not to tell everyone. You value accomplishments and know you can get the job done, so don't be afraid to run out and make things happen.
Your outlook on life is bright. You see good things in situations where others may not be able to, and it frustrates you to see them get down on everything.
| | the spacefem.com html color quiz |
Seems pretty spot-on to me.
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| Monday, March 3rd, 2008
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9:17 pm - Weighing In
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Monday is Weight Watchers day. I was down 1.6, which is quite good really, except that I expected it to be more. I was down more than that on my home scale. It doesn't really matter, of course -- I'm on program, and will continue to be on program. It was just... odd.
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