Thessaly's Tooth

So I haven’t written anything for a while, and now there’s a few things I feel like writing about, so I guess I’ll begin on one and see where that goes. But before I get started with that, I offer my best wishes for the New Year to all who are, for reasons best known to themselves, reading this.
I’ve read a couple of books recently which I’ve been thinking about blogging about. I think I’ll save one for some other time. You’ll all just have to deal with the suspense.
The other is the book I mentioned in my last post, The Night Country by Loren Eiseley. Eiseley was an anthropologist and writer who was originally from Nebraska. This is a book of essays, and I’ve tried to explain what they are about to a few people, but wound up just recommending that they read the book. It made me feel like re-reading Thoreau’s Walden, though the books are not particularly similar. However, The Night Country, among other things, put me into a “winter” frame of mind: a feeling of longing for that austere, strange, aloneness that one experiences also when reading about that small, solitary person living alone in the woods through the cold dark months.
Winter is really the season for introverts, the others are so associated with bright, smiling, friendly nature and getting together with people outdoors. But in winter, if you are outside at all, you are outside alone. People are inside where it’s warm, birds’ songs are fewer, many animals are hibernating, the appearance of the leafless trees tells you they are sleeping, the snow damps all noise and there is silence. You can hear your own thoughts, there is no danger of being caught by an acquaintance and forced to come up with the correct things to say and do. Gradually your own thoughts fade away though, and you just look, listen, smell, if you stop walking even the sounds of your self are gone and you are standing, watching, waiting, dreaming with the trees and the sleeping animals and the bulbs underground, and that is Winter.
Moving right along, on NPR the other day, some fellow offered a quotation from Arthur “optimism is a bitter mockery of men’s woes” Schopenhauer along the lines of “there is no point in getting upset over any particular aspect of life, since all of life demands tears.”
Yesterday, on aldaily.com I find this. The angst-ridden high school debater who still lurks deep within my psyche is calling out “Go, Art!”, though I recognize the inappropriateness of that response.

I’m back from my week in Nebraska. I had a good time visiting with family and friends. Activities included watching the 1981 BBC television adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with my friend Jen, which was quite fun. On Wednesday morning I met another friend at the new Panera Bread in town, both of us having agreed to bring a book in case the other was late. Oddly enough, we both independently decided to bring The Night Country by Loren Eiseley. What are the odds? It’s a really good book, I recommend it.

The flood of spam comments continues, but we refuse to be intimidated.
I am heading home to Nebraska tomorrow for a week, while Andy holds down the fort here. Looking forward to seeing the family and friends, and also looking forward to getting back here to celebrate our second Christmas as married people. Weirdly, the predicted weather in Nebraska is a lot like the weather in California: sunny and in the 50s.
It’s nice being at home all day again, though school work is coming along somewhat slowly. I’m taking my Hebrew stuff (not very nice of me to make some poor airport employees hoist my Biblica Hebraica Stutgartensia (what a ridiculous name), lexicon, and the dreaded Lambdin textbook around, but then I trucked them back and forth from campus often enough, so I know it can be done) and my pottery forms to memorize, and now that I’ve told everyone this, maybe I’ll feel shamed into doing something with it.

Comments will be shut down for a while due to spam. All of your brilliant remarks will reappear here before long, I hope.

Funny article title of the day: “(Un)masking gender–Gold foil (Dis)embodiments in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.”
(For)tunately I (don’t) think I’ll need to read (this) one.

Don’t you think that would be a good advertising campaign for Pepsi? Kind of sacrilegious though. Unless it didn’t refer to Christmas, but a new holiday centered around Pepsi. I see a very ambitious campaign coming out of this idea.
I’ve been having all kinds of good PR ideas lately. For example, as we were walking through the Grand Rapids airport on Monday, I thought of a new tourism campaign for Grand Rapids: “It’s Time for Grand Rapids.” The campaign would involve lots of clocks all over the city, decorated to represent various local things of interest. (“Things” of interest, now you understand why I don’t work in tourism). It would be like those cows in Chicago and Kansas City, or the famous Bicycles of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Anyway, all of these valuable ruminations were sparked by my purchase of a Holiday Spice Pepsi today. It was like eating a cinnamon candy and drinking a Pepsi at the same time, something I never would have thought of doing, but I guess the Pepsi people did. It was okay, but I’m ready to take an offical stand against this proliferation of soda flavors. Sure, cherry and vanilla colas are tasty, but Pitch Black Mountain Dew? Just not a good idea at all. They should have come to me: so you want a successor to Mountain Dew? How about Prairie Thunderstorm? or Steppic Seasonal Precipitation? I have all sorts of great meteorological soda concepts.

We put up the Christmas tree today. There was snow on the ground this morning. The all-Christmas-music stations have been going full swing for quite some time now. And the mall has been decorated with fake evergreens and ornaments since shortly before Halloween. So, I guess it’s that time again.
If I ever write a Christmas song, its title will be “So, I guess it’s that time again.”

The blog looks kind of nice blank and gray. I almost hate to clutter it up with a bunch of words.
Our California trip was very fun. We did some tourist stuff, including a visit to Anza Borrego Desert State Park, some shopping, and visiting with family and friends. We got home yesterday, and were greeted by some attention-starved cats (both of whom are sharing my chair with me right now, it’s a little crowded). Today I’m cleaning my work area and getting my school stuff organized, and this evening I think we’ll work on the Christmas tree.
It’s looking wintry out, though the snow has melted. I did see some snow in California on the way to the desert though…weird…

I was in Evil Walmart the other day, and saw a movie called The Satanic Rites of Dracula for sale. I’m just wondering, if they don’t have a problem with Satan, who do they think Jon Stewart is?

Decided to post responses to the comments to the post below in a new post. This is the kind of thing you learn when you spend far too long in school–now it looks like I’ve written a brand new post.
Thanks so much for the interesting comments. Jeff, your comment about trust resonates in several different ways. Both conservatives and liberals distrust government, and distrust each other even more than usual right now. I have actually wondered why some people propose entrusting important elements of peoples’ lives such as health care to an entity in which they have no trust whatsoever, and putting welfare recipients to some extent at the mercy of the other party should it gain power. Bush has incorporated this into his proposals for health care and Social Security, saying that the individual is more to be trusted to make decisions about these things than the government, and so wants to “privatize” these things.
Of course, medical savings accounts etc. would seem to depend on actually having enough income to put into the accounts, which is a dangerous assumption. I have income now (at least Andy does, as I’m busy frittering my life away in grad school), but when I lived in Chicago, if I had the money I spent on health insurance or FICA I would have used it for groceries, not put it in any medical savings account. And I’m not sure what kind of magic would need to happen to make Bush’s Social Security plan (or Kerry’s, for that matter) work. In any case, with all the talk of healing division and working together these past few days, I hope we can actually put this miserable election season behind us and find some common ground to begin to figure out how to trust each other at least enough to solve the problems that affect us all.
Kim, I agree completely with your assessment that while private charities are better able to meet needs in unique ways, but that the public safety net is necessary. During the eleven months or so I worked at child support enforcement, I came to believe that because government has to treat everyone equally, it is incapable of taking into account peoples’ individual situations. Private charities can, and can build relationships with people and work with them to find solutions for their individual problems. However, in addition problems of funding and scale that you noted, there are others: in the cases like that of child support, individual charities don’t have the law-enforcement clout needed; and also the government is accountable to the public not to discriminate based on religion, race, etc., whereas private charities are much less so.
I’m a big believer in the American spirit, which does believe in individualism and personal responsibility as well as the need to work together and to help those in need. I’m hoping that we can figure out some kind of synergy (augh, not that word!) between public and private welfare that will work as well for us in solving society’s problems as Europe’s does for it.
In other notes, there were homeless people in England, England [meant to say London here, I obviously don’t spend a lot of time editing] and Edinburgh were the first places I encountered numerous homeless people asking for money on the street (this was pre-chicago). The numbers probably are less than for American cities though. On the religion thing, churches in England seemed to be pretty active too. I’m wondering if the interview guy’s findings had anything to do with either (1) the guy not being a church-goer himself, and assuming that other people weren’t either unless they talk about it all the time like Americans apparently do; or (2) self-reporting, Americans describe themselves as more religious or as bringing religion into political decisions or whatever more than Europeans because that means different things to them, or they just talk about it in a different way.
Thanks again for the comments. If either of you have any info on where I could learn more about the European welfare system, could you let me know? I tried googling “socialized medicine” one time and all I could find was an article on the libetarian site, which was interesting but not necessarily informative.