My brother knows that I like Gregorian chants. In fact on a scale that ranges from "smell of skunk" to "chocolate while PMSing" my Gregorian chant appreciation falls just slightly short of relaxing in a bubble bath with a glass of champagne and a good book. So when David called and offered me an mp3 of some happy frolicking friars doing a cover of Queen's Pressure, I wasn't much likely to say "no".
And now I'm in a sharing mood! Enjoy
I watched the last installment of Oprah and Eckhart's discussion of "A New Earth" last night. There were many profound statements about joy, accetance, enthusiasm and the like. But the thing that made the biggest impression on me was when Oprah asked on behalf of all the curious how old Eckhart is.
I'll admit, I've been curious because he has this timeless quality about him. I had decided that he might be about my age, or a tad younger. (I'll be 45 in June.) No, the man is 60 years old. His skin is smooth, his eyes are clear, he has almost no wrinkles, and his hair is thick and brown. He's 60.
If being zen keeps you looking like that? Sign me up.
New rule, from here on out, when someone cuts me off in traffic, I will hear the sound of one hand clapping and I will think to myself, "peace, joy, and good skin"
Did I mention that the man is 60?!?
I ordered glow in the dark stars. I said that I was getting them for Tucker, and he will definitely get some on his ceiling, but I ordered a second set for me. How cool will that be to turn out the lights and enjoy my night sky?
Looking now for a start chart so I can put real constellations on his ceiling. For me? I don't care, I just want the pretty.
** The pack of stars was $6.95 and each pack comes with five sheets of decals. I bought two packs, but one would have been enough for two rooms. I ordered them from www.scientificsonline.com - they were shipped via UPS and arrived within a week of my placing the order. Can't wait to get them up and install a blacklight in my room.
So I ran across this story* while browsing through the headlines yesterday.
"Penis Theft Panic Hits City .."
It appears that a number of men are accusing others of being sorcerers who have the power to curse. As proof, they display their shrunken, stunted, puny, little ... "members" ... The accused sorcerers are then attacked by lynch mobs determined to do them in before they have opportunity to rob others of their ... "vitality".
Does it not seem at all likely that MAYBE these accusers were little to start with?
I couldn't fix the link so I've copied and pasted the entire story below. With apologies to Reuters ...
By Joe Bavier
KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.
Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.
Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.
"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.
"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.
Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.
"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.
(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mary Gabriel)
Is it personal or political? The 1960's slogan that the personal is political seems to have gone so far out the window that most of us feel apologetic if we have a "personal" problem even when that problem is obviously the result of industry wide or systems saturated unfair practices.
We react to people who've had problems as though the problems were their fault. (Just scan back at all the quotes regarding people in trouble from subprime mortgages and it seems that the vast majority include some language like, "they should have read the fine print"). I think it makes us feel safer if it's possible that the victims of such things somehow contributed or brought it on themselves. But to one degree or another we are all vulnerable and sometimes no amount of education can save us.
I could play in that sandbox all day, but I'd rather make you aware of new rules announced yesterday by the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Reserve Board, and the National Credit Union Administration. Pay attention folks because these are HUGE consumer protections and they will be bitterly opposed by banks and credit card companies.
"For credit cards, the proposed rule would address: (1) unfair time periods for making payments; (2) unfair payment allocations; (3) unfair interest rate increases on outstanding balances; (4) unfair fees from credit holds; (5) unfair methods of computing balances; (6) unfair security deposits and fees charged to an account for the issuance of credit; and (7) deceptive offers of credit. For overdraft protection services on deposit accounts, the proposed rule would address: (1) a consumer’s ability to opt out of overdraft services; and (2) unfair fees for debit holds."
Have you ever made a debit purchase, and then discovered that you had a "hold" on your account that caused you not to be able to access your funds? That happened to me for the first time when I was driving across Nebraska during a family vacation about ten years ago. We'd traveled from Kentucky to Minnesota, then I was driving to Kansas to visit my cousin, down to Oklahoma to see more relatives and then back to Kentucky to oversee the final stages of construction on our home. Apparently every time I stopped for gas, there was a $50-$100 hold placed on my debit card even if I only purchased $10 of gas. It didn't take very many of these until my little bank card was maxed out.
So I pulled up to the hotel where I'd made my reservation in Omaha and to my shock I was told that the charge was rejected and I was told that my account was overdrawn. (Luckily, I also had a credit card with me and was able to use that for the rest of my trip.) When I got back to Louisville I didn't let any blue grass grow under my feet before I was at the bank demanding how less than $100 of charges had resulted in overdraft fees when I had over $800 in my account. My bank refunded the fees and released the holds as I presented them with my receipts, but they weren't required by law to do that. That's because it has been perfectly legal for banks and credit unions to assess overdrafts based on the amount of a hold on your account rather than on the amount of actual charges.
Have you noticed that the time between the receipt of your credit card statement and the due date has been shrinking? I've heard reports of people receiving their bill and having the due date less than a week away. Some credit card companies have a less than 30 day billing cycle because that trips up people (like me) who schedule their monthly payments and then don't worry about it. The due dates change from month to month and sooner or later you will not only be late, but you'll have two payments due in the SAME month. (Not to call any names WASHINGTON MUTUAL but it's not just the little shady companies that do this.) The new rules say that statements have to be mailed out at least 21 days before the due date to give consumers a reasonable amount of time to make payment and avoid late fees.
There is a 75 day window for the public to voice it's concerns and response to these new rules and you can bet every one of the $17 Billion dollars that the financial services industry raked in last year JUST FOR OVERDRAFT FEES that the big guys, your bank and your credit card company will be inundating the agencies named above with their objections.
Folks we can do something. We can lend our voices in support of these rule changes. And we need to tell everyone we know to join in and email or call. Here's the link to the announcement on the OTS website which says that once the proposal is posted to the Federal Register it will be open for comments. http://www.ots.treas.gov/docs/7/778014.html Get ready. Tell EVERYBODY, we all need to speak up about this. This is our chance to see real effective change that will help people avoid unfair charges.
I have a secret vice.
Brace yourselves.
I like vampire stories.
I got really disgusted with the Laurel K Hamilton stories after they became so much about gratuitous sex that hardly any real vampire/zombie/were creature stuff ever happened any more. But in recent years, I've discovered a couple other authors who write much better stories of supernatural happenings and manage to avoid the weirdness that LKH sunk to.
First on my list is the Kim Harrison series starring Rachel Morgan, a leather wearing witch who lives in a church with a living vampire, consorts with pixies, and is an honorary were creature and member of a pack of two. I was a little unhappy with the ending of the last book I read "A Few Demons More" because one of my favorite characters got killed off. And there's tension in every book because the pixy, Jenks, has been established to have a life span of about 20 years and he's pushing that so any book now, we are probably going to lose him too.
The stories though are smart, funny, contain enough twists and turns to keep me guessing.
For several years now, I've been seeing the Charlaine Harris books on the shelf next to the Kim Harrison ones, but to be honest I was a little put off by the cover which to my way of thinking made them look ... cheesy. I know, you can't (or shouldn't) judge a book by the cover, but I do. So there you have it, another little vice of mine.
Well, last week when I had dinner with Jeri at the Jade restaurant the fortune in my cookie said that I deserved a treat. Then I had a coupon for 20% off at Borders, plus they were doing buy one get one half price ... and I decided that it was time for me to pick up some of the Southern Vampire series and see what all the fuss was about.
Sookie Stackhouse is a great heroine. She's a telepathic cocktail waitress in a small Louisiana town when a vampire moves into her neighborhood and puts the moves on Sookie. Sookie is drawn to him because she can't read his mind, and the blissful silence allows her to relax with him as she can't with human boyfriends. As though the possibility of a supernatural boyfriend weren't enough to keep her busy, she's also drawn into a murder investigation when a serial killer begins targeting women who work with Sookie and it looks like she's next on his list.
Harris combines mystery, horror, and romance in a genre bending series with something for everyone. She's won numerous awards for her work and continues to turn out stories of a high caliber to satisfy her growing band of international fans. I kind of like it that she lives in Arkansas and has an obvious Southern flavor in her writing.
Like this excerpt from the first book, Dead Until Dark, "Predictably, Gran was excited out of her gourd. She fluttered around the kitchen as if Prince Charles were the expected guest.
"Tomorrow night. Now what time's he coming?" she asked.
"After dark. That's as close as I can get."
"We're on Daylight Savings time, so that'll be pretty late." Gran considered. "Good, we'll have time to eat supper and clear it away beforehand. And we'll have all day tomorrow to clean the house. I haven't cleaned that area rug in a yes, I bet!"
"Gran, we're talking about a guy who sleeps in the ground all day," I reminded her. "I don't think he'd ever look at the rug."
"Well, if I'm not doing it for him, then I'm doing it for me so I can feel proud," Gran said. "Besides, young lady, how do you know where he sleeps?"
Take this quote from book three (Club Dead) when it appears that Sookie's boyfriend Bill may have been killed and she's contemplating her future. "I'd been a virgin until Bill. Now the only sex I might possibly have would be with JB du Rone, who was so lovely you could almost overlook the fact he was dumb as a stump. He had so few thoughts that his companionship was almost comfortable."
I like it that even though her boyfriend is a vampire Sookie's relationship difficulties are no different than any other woman trying to work things out with a man. She gets angry with him when he's less than truthful, when he is highhanded and unconsciously disrespectful, he doesn't pop the question, and he thinks he can smooth everything over with great sex.
Which for the most part he can, because Sookie has all the standard weaknesses of any normal woman with a secret vice or two.
We are nearing the end of our study of "A New Earth" and in the final chapter Tolle talks about the three modes of awakened doing: enthusiasm, enjoyment, and acceptance.
I love that he contrasts our usual means of doing with what he describes as the awakened doing. Most of us work with stress, tension, and drive. Tolle points out that stress diminishes both the quality and effectiveness of anything done under it's influence. In contrast is the work done with enthusiasm. The very word comes from the Greek words en and theos and means to be possessed by god. He says that enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy and then all you have to do is "ride the wave".
He says that enjoyment is the second mode of awakened doing. When the creative power of the universe become conscious of itself, it manifests as Joy. You don't have to wait for something meaningful to come into your life so you can enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in Joy than you will ever need. I have written here recently about discovering the empowering satisfaction of doing things just because I enjoy them.
Reading this chapter has been a powerful affirmation of these truths that I've been incorporating into my life. I'm not sure where I got the idea, and it's not really important to dig to the roots, but I know that for a long time I've carried the notion that real work was not enjoyable and that if I was having fun, enjoying what I was doing, then I wasn't working hard enough. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the work I do with enjoyment is more productive, more effective, more satisfying, more valuable than all that I managed to do with striving and effort?
The last mode of doing he talks about (although he really mentions it first, I twisted the order here) is acceptance. He only spends a short time, about one page, on acceptance but that's all he needed. He said it beautifully. In his example you probably won't enjoy changing a flat tire on your car at night in the middle of nowhere and in the pouring rain, let alone be enthusiastic about it, but you can bring acceptance to the task. Acceptance means you are at peace while you do it.
If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do - stop.
How freeing is that? What a wonderful way to live. That's the essence of responsible living, to know when to carry on and when to move on. I wish I'd gotten this lesson when I was younger.
******
It's still warm with clear blue skies overhead, but there was no talk this morning of skipping school due to sweaty feet. Tucker in fact was happy as he skipped out the door with his favorite tuna sandwich packed away in his lunch box. He had to take the "emergency lunch" today because he forgot to bring home his nice fancy insulated lunch box yesterday.
******
The noisy neighbors moved out over the weekend.
******
I think I have an answer to the insurance problem. New Mexico has a program for insuring people who have been denied health insurance due to high risk factors (like heart disease). Being overweight isn't on their list of conditions for which they provide insurance services, but I called and the customer service rep said that the fact that I'd been denied by the company I applied with first automatically qualifies me for their program. So I'm sending in my application as soon as I can have it notarized.
It's expensive, doesn't cover as much as I'm used to thinking that insurance covers, and has a deductible that has to be met before it will pay for anything, but it's better than nothing. If I fall and break my leg, I know that there's a maximum of about $2500 that I would have to pay before they would cover the rest. So lets hope now that I'm accepted and can move on from dealing with this.
*******
Happy May Day!
Tucker told me this morning that its too warm for him to comfortably go to school. He says that yesterday his feet even got sweaty. 
He's going to school, in spite of his sweaty feet.
******
Thank you for all the love you gave me yesterday. I have been (obviously) thinking a lot about what it means to be healthy and about why it is that I'm so paranoid about my lack of health insurance. I'm a generally healthy person. I get the standard issue colds and flu from time to time and I have seasonal allergies. But I'm not sickly.
I'm in a season of life when I'm extremely unlikely to become pregnant. I mean I might meet someone tomorrow, fling caution to the winds and so forth, but as I said, that's extremely unlikely.
You'd think that health insurance companies would be lining up to take me on as a client. They would be getting at least a couple thousand dollars for their service over the next year, and I'm unlikely to use more than a couple hundred because well, it has been a long time, so I should probably be thinking about a check-up. But then I'm good to go for at least another ... five? years.
******
I know how to lose weight. I can do that. It's pretty easy. Every time you feel hungry, you go to the refrigerator and check the "list" of alternatives to eating that you have thoughtfully posted on the door. My list looks like:
Once a week you weigh yourself and whenever you reach a new "five pound" mark, or if you've met some other goal like five days in a row of recording your food, or a week in which you stayed within your daily calorie goals, you give yourself a treat.
When you reach a major milestone like 25 total pounds lost, new dress size etc, you give yourself a major treat.
A monumental goal acheivement such as hitting a 50 pound mark is worth a monumental treat such as having the Merry Maids over to clean the apartment. Which I can afford to do because I will have saved that much money off my grocery bill in the months it took to get there.
*******
Today is the last day of April, so I'm happily adding up my house account to see whether there's progress and I can report that this month I added enough money to buy approximately 6.5 square feet someday. Tucker has been paying attention to the house saga and he asked me about it last night. "If the bank would be willing to loan you the money, why wouldn't you just take it?"
I thought about trying to explain about taxes, interest rates, PMI, home repairs, budgeting and so forth then I realized there was an easier way so I told him it's like the Three Little Pigs.
Remember the first little pig? And the load of straw? He got a house, but the financing materials weren't very solid, so the rise in the prices of gas, eggs, bread, and shoes put a huge strain on his budget and when the big bad wolf came to collect the house payment the pig had no money left so what happened? The house fell down and he was worse off than before.
The second little pig did a little better, he had a larger downpayment, a little better financing, and his house was more solid, but then that fall there was an accident where a driver with no insurance ran a redlight and smashed into the little pig's car totaling the car and putting the little pig in the hospital for two days. Since the other driver was uninsured and the little pig had a high deductible, he owed thousands of dollars in medical bills and had to buy a new car to get to work. So when the big bad wolf came for the house payment there was no money left and ....
The third little pig had not only herself but two littler pigs depending on her to make wise choices so she waited until she got solid bricks to build with (best interest rate, excellent credit rating, 20% down payment, and a seller willing to pay closing costs). Made sure there was a cushion of money in the account and adequate budgeting to cover the monthly bills plus continue to put a little more aside for emergencies. So when the big bad wolf came to collect the pig wrote a check and the wolf had to go away. And when the wolf came back? The pig wrote another check and the wolf had to go away leaving the pig alone to pick the apples in her orchard.
The big bad wolf was tricky and said, "Housing prices have fallen in your area so your house isn't worth as much and I'm going to make you pay PMI." (That's the mortgage equivalent of the wolf trying to sneak down the chimney.) The little pig lit a fire under the cauldron in the fireplace and boiled that old wolf so the wolf got NO check and a blister on his tail. That's because the little pig was smart when she chose her neighborhood, and had a recent appraisal showing that her home had more than maintained it's value.
So the little pig, and the two littler pigs lived happily ever after with plenty of apple pie to eat and a lovely house to keep the rain off their heads.
I was denied medical insurance because of my weight.
I'm too fat.
I wonder what they would have said if I'd tried to apply before I lost the hundred pounds ...
The thing that keeps me on the brink of being drpressed about all this is that it FEELS like I've made monumental effort and acheived great things and they aren't enough. Just when I think I'm about to get there, the bar gets raised.
Save 25% of your annual income - that's not enough.
Lose 40% of your body weight, you're still too fat.
If you'll excuse me, I think I hear a chocolate bar calling my name.
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