arse poetica

My New Best Friends

O, dear VapoRub!
Is anything more sublime?
I can breathe again.

In other Household Minutiae News, the piggy finches have eaten half a sock of food since late Monday afternoon! Dude! I haven't seen our hawk friends this year, but more cardinals are visiting, and last week a dove dropped by. How nice! The little birds who live near our front porch are singing up a storm, though they haven't nested in our hanging pots like last year. And lest anyone be worried, Finny is standing guard.

Well, at this moment, Finny has gone all ninja on the Dingo. It's the Daily Living Room Brawl!

TypePad's On My Last Nerve

In two weeks I'll hit my 1-yr anniversary w/ this blahg. One whole year! Never thought I'd make it. That said, I almost didn't, and for once it wasn't writer's block, staring into the abyss, or Repugnican chicanery (but I repeat myself) to blame! It was my blog software managers. Yes, TypePad is the culprit. What went wrong? They held such promise -- the ease of use, the swanky digs, the smells like teen spirit of the up-and-coming, entrepreneurial young folk running the show. Alas.

TypePad's been screwing up since at least July when they first corrupted my dang file somehow and reverted my blog to some random template, causing me to have to jump through hoops to get it back to my high-concept [::cough::] design specifications. Before then, they were screwing up stats and referrers for ages. According to TypePad, 12 of you have visited this year. Many thanks to the Dirty Dozen! It's been a bumpy ride, culminating in the last couple of days with going down completely, losing posts, reverting to archived posts on our index pages, &c. and &c. Like any good American, when pushed to my limit, I sit down and pen a limerick, because I know if anything can stick it to The Man, it's a lim'rick. Take this, TypePad!

There once was a platform called TypePad
Whose code-writing skillz were quite bad
They lost our blog posts
And behaved like drunk hosts
So we all ran off to the next fad.

And in case that doesn't hit them where they live, a bonus haiku:

Unavailable!
TypePad's inertia renders
Error 404.

These boots may be walkin' soon. Hmmph.

 

On the Occasion of the Dumbest-Assed Dumbass EVER to Luck Into a Life He Did Not Deserve, by God.

5 weeks too long for
his Sunday afternoon life!
Mind you, it's hard work.

==================================

Dumbya hates Daddy.
Mirror: wars, weapons, and wimps --
Oedipal times three.

==================================

Preznit or Prophet?
Know him: Less lamb, more lion.
The Gun of Saud.

==================================
[Photo credit.]

Haiku on the Occasion of Dining at Super Taqueria

Tacos durados!
Papa con chorizo, oh!
Happy full belly.

Run, don't walk to Super Taqueria, at the corner of Roxboro and S. Bonaire (?) for some happy belly-makin' fare! It was wall-to-wall packed when we arrived at 12 p.m. for lunch, a sea of happy faces looking kindly at the gringos to make sure we weren't lost. In fact, we weren't lost, and we got to use our nearly perfect Mexican Menu Spanglish, so we were pleased. A quick review here (scroll down 3/4 of the way to the 3rd P of the "Saturday: Rock and Row" section). Don't speak Spanish? This will help, though our amigo taking orders today...  hb ugvyyt [<-- Dingo on lap contributes to the discussion as we play fight.] ... did try to engage us in English, which he did not try last time. More gringos and gringas have found the wonderful Super Taqueria, perhaps? Quick! Get in before the Americanos influence it too much! As the review notes, this ain't yer mama's ye olde taco shoppe replete with Polaroids of drunken Americanos in sombreros. No, it's real authentic, like this guy.

Afterwards to Ooh La Latte for a tour through The Untidy Museum w/ a very tasty hot chocolate in hand -- thanks, Mr. Barista Man! Then to some completely random warehouse to hunt for a new door handle for the front door (no luck), and then to the Hound Grounds for some playtime for the dingo. Lots of cute, energetic, puppy-ish even, doggies there today, so Kate's tongue was dragging within minutes. She lapped the park 3 times easily. My faves today: a scruffy bigger-than-Benji Benji-looking dog, a gorgeous Boxer puppy, and the super-graceful silver bullet Weimariner. There was a prissy, long-haired Golden Retriever that was making all of the mushy people coo. Ha. The dogs are great at the dog park, but it's the people watching db and I go for. Hoo. Talk about animal instincts.

Still thinking about the Triangle Bloggers Conference yesterday. Wonderfully energizing, and for the one person visiting this blog by accident, I encourage you to stroll through the participants list. Nice variety of styles, concerns, opinions. Thanks to everyone who's dropped by. If I could do math, I'd tell you how many times above my average the hits have been in the last two days, but these things do not come easily to my math-challenged self. I'll take a guess and say eleventy jillion percent over average. That should be in the ballpark. I'm so thrilled to see David, Anton, Pam, and Sally have visited! Hi, all! Pardon the newbie gushing. Visits from these four have, well, quadrupled readership. =D

Best Band Name I Did Not Come Up With + Moving On + Hope

Haiku d'Etat. Damn, that's good.

Tolerable day at work, because I have Moved On. (See the photo inset for sophisticated symbolic representation of personal sentiment. Oooh.)

"Moved On" = after Friday's impromptu j-o-b talk with the director, I am all about hitting the road, sailing the seas, soaring the wild blue yonder. Funny that. I had as positive and ideal a conversation as I could have hoped (short of offering me double my salary to stay at home) and following it, all I want to do is run screaming from the place. It's nobody's fault, certainly not the director's. He did everything he should have in telling me that my contribution is valued, that of course I deserve more and better compensation, and that I am free to present to him a re-written job description, which he will more than likely approve. Fair enough. Respectful words, frank exchanges, and a hand shake later, and I felt pretty good about what had transpired. I should note that I did not expect that this would go badly; I had just not planned to take whatever minor grievances I have about the nature of my work to the director at this point. I wanted merely to telegraph to my boss that if the job responsibility horizon did not expand and soon, i'd be forced to look elsewhere for more desirable opportunities.

After the director scooted, I chatted with my boss, and though he and I have a significantly better relationship than the director and I (and the director and he), I was less heartened by our discussion and something didn't sit right for the rest of the night. Though he is and was supportive in his way, I didn't feel that he was actually listening to what I needed out of this decidedly stepping-stone job. He has one script, and I have another, which is fine, until those two collide or conflict. Bottom line: He will have his professional needs met, beccause, among other things, he has the power to assert them. And he will do what he can to support me in my career advancement, I have no doubt about that. What will happen in the short-term though, is that nothing will change unless I act definitively. Fine. It is my responsibility, I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that the little guy has to do all the work, as usual, and it's tiring. Whither a world which recognizes talent and advances without nudging, prodding, and concerted personal advocacy. Whither merit? Bwaaahahahaahhahah! Hoo, that was just too earnest for words.

In other news, our pal B is back at work from her 2nd round of chemo on Thursday, and she was looking great and even had enough of an appetite to head out to lunch with me and P. Nice! She's now lost all her hair and was in her first of what will be many scarves. She's unusually even-keel, though she has her moments, of course, but we're all thrilled to see her at work being the B we're accustomed to her being. I hope that we can provide some normalcy for her amongst our usual lunacy. She's got a ways to go yet in her treatment, and whatever we can do, we'll do. Bless you, B.

Graphix note: The miracle that is G00gle image search yielded this when I typed in "hopefulness," and I just thought it too perfect that someone, somewhere thought to parse it. Rueful chuckling ensued.

DeLay Tactic

I really can't stop thinking about that asshole Tom DeLay and his callous condemnation (in effect) of hundreds of thousands of people he's never met who have suffered terribly. He's a sick, sick man if he can believe that not only could God allow the tsunami to happen, resulting in the deaths of countless people, but that he would make that happen. There is a difference here. The first is, I believe, the more common response to tragedy, a despairing wail, i.e. How could a just God allow this suffering? We've all been there. The second is the most pinched, uncharitable, hateful thing someone could assert. That God tsunami'd your ass, you heathen, precisely because you're not a member of the correct congregation/denomination/expatriation, or your skin is darker, or you forgot to pay your dollar in the Book of the Month Club. It's that absurd and hateful. 150,000 dead (so far) and half a million displaced, and this self-righteous bloviator reproaches us. What a pig.*

And it makes me worry, because I've seen articles arguing that this disaster is or is not the work of God. God is absent, God is present, God is in the wings, God micromanages...and it all makes me think, We don't really believe this hocus-pocus, do we? We're not really thinking there's a kind/punitive, fatherly-type (Santa Claus/Sauron) up in the sky directing tsunami traffic, right? I mean, I think I believe in God, but if "God" is what these psychotically punitive wackos are saying God is, I do not want any part of it. I certainly believe in a transcendent force, in hope, in imagination, in intellect, in things I don't understand, in mystery, the unknown and unknowable, in the endless quest, all of which makes being human being human. It even makes being human divine on occasion. I've seen a dead person, and it's obvious that there's definitely something missing there; that the person lying in the coffin is not your Uncle Julio or Grandma Bette, and we can call it a soul or life force or whatever, but it's plain as the nose on his or her face that it's missing. So, yes, force of some kind.

Tom DeLay sees those people lying dead, torn asunder, and thinks, That's what you get, heathen. He is a depraved person -- what else can he be? And he's terribly uninformed and doesn't understand parable to boot. I mean, to hold a view in Jesus' name that Jesus himself would revile? You've got the wrong end of the stick, old boy. Tom DeLay clearly does not understand love. Or Jesus, for that matter. Damn him. Damn him with haiku.

DeLay speaks for God:
His Jesus raging lion
Your country the lamb.

DeLay loves God's work
His earthly convictions firm:
Your world sits on sand.

*I need another word here. Pigs are, actually, quite smart -- smarter than Tom DeLay, for sure -- and they have the capacity to grieve loss -- unlike Tom DeLay -- and I hate to keep disparaging them. My apologies, pigs. It won't happen again. Maybe I can say, "What a Tom DeLay!", from now on to register my utter disgust? Hmm.

On the Occasion of Starting a New Blog on the First Day of the New Year

Bon voyage, my dear
New Year--no fear!--desire's here
No longer tongue tied