[snork]

i have another cold.

another one.

this is not fair. i have had my quota of colds for the summer, no, actually, for the next six years.

one of my coworkers just handed out another set of american flag ribbons. these were the clearchannel relief ribbons. first, i have waaaaay more respect for my mom's cousin danny who went out and made her own rather than waiting for a megacorp to print some up. second, clearchannel. bleh. bleh, i say again. third, when i explained to my coworker why i wasn't going to be wearing it, he didn't even understand.

i'm not christian, and haven't been for a long time. but this, from the onion, is a reallly powerful piece of writing. God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule. (satire can be good and helpful. even now.)

wish you were here, from the village voice.

nathan bought new cables for the tv. or maybe the receiver. or maybe the cable box. i'm a little unclear on this. but he's downstairs happily futzing away with it.

i need to remember to ask the people at dujour's to please not put onions in my lunch. now i smell all oniony.

here is a very recent picture of my family. it's also very large. (i have no skills in resizing things. oh, well.)

hurray for my mom! yay, mom!

her ssi application has been approved. the first time. this never happens. never ever. but they did it! yay, mom!

we went out to the minnesota renaissance festival today.

we got very, very wet.

very wet. oh my goodness.

it's hard to think of more normal things to say, now.

work is pretty much back to normal. the parking garage under the building is still closed, and there's no posted date when it will reopen.

i'm fine, nathan is fine, the puppy is fine.

from lizw, in alt.polyamory:

For me, that conversation usually goes along the lines of "I thought I should explain that you may hear me or [husband's name] talking about other people who are more than friends. I just wanted you to know that we have an open relationship and that we're both happy that way. I'd hate you to worry that we were cheating on each other."

how sensible lizw is. how enormously sensible.

so, in the interests of being that sensible when i grow up, i'm going to practice some now.

i thought i should explain that you may hear me or the one i live with talking about other people who are more than friends. i just wanted you to know that our relationship is polyamorous (the short explanation of which is that it's an open relationship) and we're both happy that way. i'd hate for you to worry that we were cheating on each other.

(most of you knew this already. but still.)

rush limbaugh has been possessed by space aliens. i hope they don't give him back. go look.

ceej had some good things to say in her journal from earlier in the week.

"What do you do once you've invaded Afghanistan and made it yours, once you've spent the years and thousands upon thousands of lives to take those mountains? What then? Do you have the guts to spend the 30 years rebuilding it? Schools, roads, sanitation, water, hospitals, hope? If you don't, you'll have more terrorists growing up and trained there."

yeah.

(poetry from rose's mother.)

My daughter's married lover is missing.
Liam. Liam Colhoun,
sometimes mispronounced Calhoun.
He forgives you when you do that,
almost chagrined,
as if the tricky spelling were his fault.

Liam, married to Helen.
Their boyfriend's name is Harry.
My daughter, you may know, is Rose.

It's important to say their names.
Names, not numbers, go missing.

Rose lives in San Francisco these days.
She was booked on USAirways 318,
due in Wednedsay night at 10:16 at LGA.
Liam was to meet her flight and bring her home to us
--us being Albert, Bob, & me.
He'd be wanting then to get back to Helen
and their four-year-old daughter Brigid
but, yes, he would come in for a tea.
The rest of the weekend-this weekend--
Rose would stay with Harry or all of them chez Colhoun.
For Rose that is also "home."

I am telling you these things
because the focus of the weekend was a romp in Central Park:
the Poly Pride Picnic, hurray.

"Poly" is short for polyamorous,
which gets underscored by Spell-Check;
the computer politely suggests ploy or polio.
Means openly having more than one lover
of maybe more than one gender.
This weekend the Poly's would say,
"We are what we are; we do what we are;
it's our right, our joy, our duty to celebrate."
Rose was making the trip cross-country
To wave that particular flag
And so I wave it here for her.

We will never get things right in the world
until we are happy that love
comes in more different flavors
than Ben and Jerry's.

The Poly Pride Picnic
is not my particular feast--
hey, I'm fifty-nine--but
I'd cater it if they asked.
The poly's are no better than the mono's
nor are they any worse.
We all know Hallmark loves
that succumb to dread and hate--
from Niagara Falls to the swamp,
just like that.

O, don't you think I sometimes wish
that Rose were happily engaged
to a tall New England Jew--
liberal and bright, saving the world
and a strong second serve?
Hers and hers alone,
with a wedding for me to cook
and grandchildren already named?

But we love whom we love.
My Rose loves Liam,
and her love for him hurts no one
by being different from other flavors of love.
Her prayer that he is alive
deserves our fervent echoes.
Rose does ask for prayers.
Her voice shimmers with hope
I don't have to tell you
the terrible weight of hope.

Helen called Wednesday from Queens
to ask my help in seeking Liam's name
on a list of survivors at the New School,
a few blocks from where we live.
Last seen wearing khakis and a beige button down shirt.
Moustache and goatee, two tattoos.

And our wedding ring--a puzzle ring, Helen said,
and a celtic cross with a garnet stone,
a gift to him from Rose.

Her wedding ring and the cross from Rose;
described in the same steady voice.
My daughter's lover's wife keeps her faith
even when the world falls apart.

There are so many ways to love.
If we open our hearts to them all,

maybe we'll crowd out the killer hate.

Liam Colhoun,
sometimes mispronounced Calhoun,
worked on the eighty-first floor
of Tower Number One.
He called home after the hit,
and his boss remembers (she thinks)
seeing him outside and okay
at ten o'clock.

He isn't in Hawaii surfing.

New Jersey, maybe, concussed,
and his wallet vaporized-
how strange that such an image comforts.

His cell phone doesn't answer but I never hear mine either.

Bring home the men who have only ever loved one woman
and the men who have only loved men
and the men who have only wondered
what is this thing called love.
Bring home my daughter's married lover.
Bring home everyone's Liam.

--Nancy Weber
Gipsy Trail, 15 sept 2001

i am now home from a weekend spent with my sister, my mother, my grandmother, my two great aunts, one of my mother's cousins, and the wife of one of my mother's cousins.

wow, but i disagree strongly with some of my relatives.

i think that killing innocent people in the guise of striking back at those who have hurt us makes us the same as those people who just planned and carried out killing thousands and thousands of people by crashing planes into the two world trade center towers and into the pentagon and into somewhere else (we don't know where, since the plane crashed, thank the gods, into a field in pennsylvania instead of into another building).

i think that this is unacceptable.

at least some of my relatives think that it's just fine that if we do that, it will make us the same as those people, and think that "that's just fine" that it will continue the cycle of violence, and that this will end up with more people who survive the violence and who think that the thing to do, the thing that will solve this once and for all, will be to go kill some innocent people and maybe some of the ones who are responsible, as well.

since when is "but he hit me first!" an acceptable justification for violence? i don't recall it being acceptable when i was a child. now that i'm an adult, and i can do more damage than simply biting my sister's nose, why is it okay now?

The Universe speaks in many languages,
but only one voice.
The language is not Narn, or Human, or Centauri,
or Gaim or Minbari.
It speaks in the language of hope
It speaks in the language of trust
It speaks in the language of strength
and the language of compassion
It is the language of the heart
and the language of the soul
But always, it is the same voice
It is the voice of our ancestors,
speaking through us,
And the voice of our inheritors,
waiting to be born
It is the small, still voice that says:
We are one
No matter the blood
No matter the skin
No matter the world
No matter the star
We are one
No matter the pain
No matter the darkness
No matter the loss
No matter the fear
We are one.
Here, gathered together in common cause,
We agree to recognize this singular truth
and this singular rule:
That we must be kind to one another
because each voice enriches us and ennobles us
and each voice lost diminishes us
We are the voice of the Universe,
the soul of creation,
the fire that will light the way to a better future
We are one
We are One.

--- J. Michael Straczynski, "Paragon of Animals", Babylon 5
(via charles stanley. thanks, charles.)

But dehumanizing the victim makes things simpler
it's like breathing with a respirator
it eases the conscience of the most conscious
and calculating violator
the power of words
don't take it for granted
when you hear a man ranting
don't just read the lips
be more sublime than this
put everything in context
is this a tale of rough justice
in a land where there's no justice at all
Who is really the victim?
Or are we all the cause, and victim of it all?
--disposable heroes of hiphoprisy.

vicki is fine, piglet is fine, patrick and teresa are fine, nick and cat are fine, seth is fine, elissaann is fine, helen and harry and brigid are fine, cousin john is fine. rose's liam is still missing but presumed okay at this point.

jules is on vacation, so she wasn't working, sigrid had just started her days off for the week so she wasn't working either.

the newspaper websites are starting to have partial lists of the dead. i have been reading them. the only thing that i can do for the dead is to know who they were, it seems.

for the living, i'm trying to figure out if i can donate blood or not, and if there's anything else i can do.

went down to nathan's parents house on saturday. we took pirate, who got to meet their dog, mr. aaron pupland. aaron was quite excited to meet a girl dog, as he is not fixed. he was very very excited. further deponent sayeth not.

unexpected hamsters

wow. if i had a livejournal, i'd use these.

late friday afternoons at work are the worst. it's very very very slow.

i've worked places before where friday afternoons were the busiest, because people would realize that they just had to get thus-and-so done before the weekend started. that was no fun either.

the thing about having a public journal or weblog is that it's public.

if it's on a public server (that is, one connected to the outside world in any fashion) it will eventually be discovered by people you know.

some of them will tell you they're reading it. some of them won't. some of them will read it for amusement, some of them will read it out of spite.

if you talk about people and they read it, some people will assume you have good intentions, and some of them will assume that you have bad intentions. and some just won't care.

that's what you're signing up for when you make it public.

if that's not what you meant to sign up for, then unplug your server and go back to writing your thoughts down on paper, where the big danger is that the dog will eat it.

well, piffle.

nathan has managed to catalog nearly all of our fiction books. (this excludes most of the ones that we've bought since we started, you understand.)

it's one thousand and forty four books. not a bad number.

but not nearly as many as i thought we had.

oh, well.