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More Wisdom from The Log Lady

A log is a portion of a tree. At the end of a crosscut log–many of you know this–there are rings. Each ring represents one year in the life of the tree. How long it takes to a grow a tree!

I don’t mind telling you some things. Many things I, I musn’t say. Just notice that my fireplace is boarded up. There will never be a fire there. — The Log Lady

A new productivity machine?

I would just like to get this out there before I find out for sure the answer to that looming question: Do I want to purchase an iPad? Let it be known that at present, I am at a very high level of productivity. Which is to say, I’m real, real busy. I have a full-time job, am holding down 3 steady freelance gigs, am in a band, and am studying to become an astrologer… And I’m trying to start my own business… And I have a nasty addiction to Doodle Jump. That said, if my work were easily accessible and done quickly and on the fly, my level of efficiency should improve.

Enter the iPad? I already have a laptop, an iPhone and a Kindle. But I hardly ever have my laptop on my person, and my iPhone doesn’t allow me to add HTML to my website on the fly. And could I update my blog on my phone, but the WordPress iPhone app doesn’t have all the functionality that the actual CMS does. But that iPad app does look pretty cool…

The conundrum is that I work entirely too much, so why should I carry it with me everywhere I go? It strikes me that many of the technologies that we have at our disposal do nothing more than create more work, not make our work more efficient. For example, I love my Google Reader, but spending an hour per day reading 200+ blog posts seems like so much work. And that’s the one thing that I don’t need any more of in my life.

Family Ties

“Family Ties” by Clarice Lispector

I want to write the red blot of blood
with drops and coagula dripping
from within to within.

I want to write yellow-gold
with rays of translucency.
That they understand me not
maters little to me.

I have nothing to lose.

I toss everything to the violence
that has always populated me,
the rough, acute and prolonged shout,
the shout which I,
because of false respect for humanity,
did not give.

But here it goes –the hollow womb
from where the ambitioned rattling sprouts.

I want to embrace the world
with the earthquake caused by a shout.
The climax of my life will be death.

I want to write notions
without the abusive use of words.

All that is left is for me to be naked:
I do not have anything else to lose.

— Copyright © 2010 by Rosangela M Vieira (English Translation of Laços de família). Found here. (Hopefully I got the page breaks correct.)

Smoking Found Object

Taken from a series of Post-Its found in a book, written the day after I quit smoking, September 16, 2008. I had endeavored to write down each time I thought of smoking:

11:30A –> Post-coffee consumption

1:39P –> Accidentally typed “smoke” instead of “some.”

3:04P –> Post-lunch. Trying to get work done. Would normally rush through QA so as to smoke a cig soon.

4:39P –> After reading a lot about smoking cessation, sucking on a tea tree toothpick.

5:11P –> Thought about new job prospect, reaction was to want a cigarette (*Normally want after I get a good/interesting idea / *Walking and smoking pleasurable…Ultimately, I lack the attention span for genuinely interesting thoughts.)

5:47P –>Anxious to go home

5:47P –>cont. — Why must this be the thing that I look forward to? (**Find something else to look forward to: A. Seeing People. B. Record shopping! C. Walking (w/o smoking).

Note –> Did I ever look down on non-smokers?

—

Today, NYC banned smoking in public parks and beaches. I know that quitting is hard, but at $11/pack and a whole city warring against you, it might be harder to keep smoking. As friends who knew me back in the day can attest, I was one of the biggest fans of cigarettes. A friend of mine even nicknamed me Serge (as in Gainsbourg, pictured above). If I can do it, anyone can.

The Right Wing, Wrong Again

My book group and I are reading the new Cleopatra biography, Cleopatra: A Life. One of the first facts that it corrected for me was that Cleopatra was Greek, not African. I think that somewhere around the age of 19, some professor had told me that Cleopatra didn’t look anything like Elizabeth Taylor. I took this to mean that she “wasn’t white.” My conclusion made sense, given Egypt’s geography and white people’s insistence on claiming every ounce of history for themselves. But as the book points out, I was under the wrong impression.

I was also under a false impression about something else. A seemingly well-intended Republican claimed on the house floor the other day that Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, started the organization as a means to an evil end. Conspiratorial history tells us that she was a believer in eugenics, or the science of “improving” a human population by means of controlled reproduction. This led me to assume that Planned Parenthood’s foundations were rather shady, but no one ever talks about it.

But of course I thought wrong. This argument has been used by anti-choicers as a means to tug on the heart strings of The Left, which in this case they take to mean “black people and those who have their best interests in mind.” As this post strongly points out, this argument is used to instill fear into the hearts of women who are in need of care. And as this Representative points out, Planned Parenthood is a much-needed presence in the lives of many women throughout the country who need access to reproductive care.

Though it doesn’t seem as though it will pass, this bill brings up the fact that the Right Wing loves to prey on our misconceptions, often created by their own imaginative view of what the truth of the matter really is.