Oh dear…we started her on politics…watch out.

During the debates, Sarah Palin repeated several times her allegation that the Obama campaign was looking to the past, and that the American people were going to get tired of it. I’m sure lots of people believed her and appreciated her logic. I wasn’t one of them.

What Biden was generally doing when she leveled that accusation was explaining that the policies McCain and Palin are advocating are not new ideas. They’ve been tried. Over the last 8 years. And they resulted in outcomes like, oh, the biggest expansion of federal government in history. The biggest deficit in history. The deaths of somewhere between 100,000 and a million Iraqi civilians. Unprecedented expansion of the role of the executive branch in government. Unprecedented numbers of home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies. These conservative ideals aren’t new, they aren’t untested. They have been very successfully implemented, and we’ve seen the results.

Clearly, the results are beneficial to a small, select group of individuals. Clever individuals. They want to keep things just they way they are, because for all their cleverness they have not learned the one of the key lessons of history – when the gap between the rich and the poor gets big enough, it stops being safe to be rich.

You may not like Obama, or liberals in general. Fine…but don’t pretend that the tragedies we are facing as a nation right now were caused by new ideas or liberal ideology. This is what happens when you follow the conservative agenda. The gap between rich and poor gets bigger, because trickle-down economics doesn’t work. Businesses take advantage of individuals, because deregulation allows them to do so. And we the people, the human beings who make up our great nation, get screwed.

Of course Palin doesn’t want to look too closely at these realities, because they certainly don’t help her election chances. But maybe the rest of us should pay a little attention in history class and see what the current situation has to teach us. Just sayin’

I don’t understand people.

In the vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin scoffed at Joe Biden’s assertion that it was patriotic to pay your taxes. I’ve heard other people scoff at the same idea. My question is, do they not understand the link? Has the frame of “tax relief” taken such hold on our country that people really and truly no longer understand the connection between the taxes they pay and the society they live in?

Oliver Wendel Holmes said “I like to pay my taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

In a time of war, when we have troops in harm’s way overseas, it’s even simpler. The war costs $10 billion a month – and those dollars are tax dollars. Everybody likes to talk about supporting our troops – and the most practical thing most of us do to support the troops is to pay the taxes that fund their salaries and training and equipment.

Taxes are, at their core, the way we pay to fund our government. And, as a republic (no, we’re not a democracy. Never have been. Sad that people don’t quite know that – but nevertheless…) our government is a representation of what we the people feel is important. Community investment, in things like infrastructure and the common defense, in technology and in support of small business, in oversight and regulation (how happy would all those “drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub” folks be right now if the money they have in bank accounts wasn’t insured by the government, for example). Taxes support our society.

I’m a little tired of government being a dirty word. We do get things for our tax dollars. We get a common defense. We get roads. Businesses get employees who know how to read and write. We get fire and police protection. We get a court system and regulatory structure that enforces the rule of law, making it a safe and predictable society in which to do business. Without any one of these things, business could not function.

I’m not saying government is perfect. But I get a little frustrated with people who believe that it’s horrific that government wastes money, but who have no problem with, say, utility companies wasting money. Anybody who’s ever worked in a corporation, or read Dilbert, understands that business isn’t perfectly efficient, either. Organizations on this planet aren’t perfect. We can be pissed off about that and say they should all be destroyed, or we can grow the hell up and work to make them better.

It seems pretty self-evident to me that the things we want and need to do as a society will cost money. Apparently it’s not self-evident to everybody. Apparently some people think that things we want to do as a society can be done for free. Or, more likely, they think “someone else” should pay for them.

Me, I think paying my taxes is a hell of a lot more patriotic than flying a shredded flag from my car antenna, or buying a yellow ribbon for my car. Maybe that’s just me.

Moisturize your neck, as well as your face.

I think I first read this advice in a Martha Beck column, where she talks about the fact that many women who use moisturizer and sunscreen religiously on their face and thereby avoid sun damage and wrinkles are later given away by the state of their neck skin. It was a metaphor for keeping your focus wide enough to get all the important stuff covered in your life.

I heard the same advice recently from a friend. She said it was advice she gave all her younger friends. I remembered reading the advice, and I’m pretty sure I told her it was advice I was regularly taking.

The next morning, I was thinking of her when I went to moisturize my neck. It felt really weird – like something I was trying for the first time, rather than something I was used to doing all the time. I realized that even though I thought I probably did that, I must not really. And it made me wonder what else I think I do, or think ABOUT doing, that I really don’t.

My intentions are bigger than my calendar, in the same way that my eyes are sometimes bigger than my stomach. Keeping everything on the list isn’t possible for any of us in this overscheduled age. And even things that don’t take a lot of time, like moisturizing my neck, get missed because I’m on auto pilot and don’t think about them when I’m at the mirror taking care of what needs taking care of.

My first gut reaction is to think I need to do more. I suspect, going back to Martha Beck if you’ll indulge me, that I need to do nothing – for at least a few minutes each day, so that I can really begin to be aware of what I think I’m taking care of, but am really neglecting.

Saturday night I held my 6th Chocolate Party. I think more people should have Chocolate Parties. Here’s how it works. Make a light dinner (not too much food, nobody wants to spoil their appetite here) and invite all the cool women you know. Have each of them bring a chocolate dessert to share. And settle in for one of the best evenings ever!

It wasn’t my idea – the inimitable Victoria Wesseler came up with the idea. I stole it from her (with her blessing), along with her recipe for pesto cheesecake (which is so much yummier than it sounds). She held chocolate parties for 10 years, and I was fortunate enough to come to the last 3. Then she moved out to dirtpatch and on to other events, and I took up hosting chocolate parties.

The secret about the chocolate party is that, for me, it’s really not even about the chocolate. It’s about getting awesome women in a room and settling into the conversations that erupt. The chocolate is unbelievable. This year’s outstanding dish was clearly Andrea’s chocolate-covered fruit “floral” arrangement. Andrea, I hope your arm has recovered from holding it steady for the 45 minute drive from Carmel to Greenwood! If I ever figure out how to post pictures here, I’ll put up a picture – it was almost too pretty to eat. (But not quite).

Clearly, what the world needs now is more chocolate. Maybe not literally the food…maybe more just the feelings of love and kindness chocolate unleashes in our brains.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m addicted to good conversation. The process of sharing or creating meaning with another person or people is just addictive.

I participated in a World Café conversation on Wednesday. The discussion was around building community, and although I didn’t expect to take much from the topic (my interest in attending was more about the process than the topic), I did come away with a couple of epiphanies. (This, I think, is why I love good conversation…for the epiphanies.)

The first was around community. I realized that the communities of which I have been a part have very little to do with the physical location of the members’ homes. The yoga community that is important in my life has members from all around Indianapolis. The scifi convention community that is coming to be important to me has members all over Indiana, not to mention LA and Atlanta.

While regular physical proximity is important in these communities to some extent, many of my closest connections have been built and maintained largely through e-mail and telephone calls. It makes me wonder whether the internet is stepping into the gap left when we stopped knowing our neighbors business, or even their names.

I also realized the extent to which it is possible, in this day and age, to exist outside of any community. I know that there have been times in my life where I wondered, if I were to disappear or be killed in a car crash, how others in my life would find out. If it were just me, my husband would be the conduit of information, but we often drive around together…so what if we were both in a car crash together…who would the office call to check up on me? How would my friends find out what had happened? How would my parents find out? These musings make me all the more grateful to be part of a community now.

The other epiphany I had was around speaking your mind. I live in Indianapolis, and I am a liberal. For a lot of years, I was not at ease sharing my opinions. I either kept them to myself, because I was afraid of offending the people around me, or I tried to make those around me share my opinions through argument and advocacy. In the conversations Wednesday night, people talked about a welcoming community being one in which people could speak their opinions without fear of retribution of exclusion.

While I’ll admit, I still generally don’t share my political or religious ideas with many of the people around me, I am more comfortable than I used to be. Part of that is due to the fact that I’ve found more people who share at least my political views. And part of it is that I no longer feel quite so strong a need for others to agree with and share my opinions.

I suspect that’s because I am more secure than I used to be in what I believe. I think many of the people who are out there beating their beliefs into other people’s heads are really trying to shore up their own insecurities. I no longer see scary blow hards, instead I just see the fear.

I am beginning to suspect that our culture has forgotten what people from
this planet look like.
Seriously.

The tabloids print pictures of some young starlet with cellulite as though
cellulite were something to be ashamed of, rather than the natural state of
human backsides. Magazines put “Fat” labels on size 2 actresses. Worse yet,
the actresses sometimes turn around and go on diets as though the magazines
had a valid point instead of a literally inhuman need to create sales.

We love our celebrities. We love to hold them up, and we love to tear them
down even more. There seems to be some sort of theory that if we pull down
the gods, the gates to Mount Olympus will open for the rest of us. 

There’s a conflicting theory too, of course. Judge not, lest ye be judged…
or something to that effect. The thing about that theory is that, more than
anything, it is a kind piece of advice. The sort of thing a good mentor or
favorite aunt would share over a glass of wine. It’s meant not to protect
those we would judge, but to protect us from judging others.

Judging others exacts a toll on us. Those standards we think we’re creating
for other people will always come back to bite us. They will be
impossible standards. How else can we be so sure that everybody else will
fail them? And since they will be impossible standards, we’ll fail them too.
Of course we’ll make excuses when we fail them. We’ll tell ourselves why it’s
not the same thing. But we know. And who needs that?

Seriously…

It’s been awhile. It’s been long enough that my blogging friends have stopped mentioning that I haven’t posted in awhile.  It’s been so long that it feels less like continuing my blog and more like staring over.  So I begin again.

This isn’t the first time my intentions have failed to match up with my actions. I have a lot of good intentions – a lot of big plans and goals and ideas.  When I begin to realize that my actions aren’t matching up with my intentions, my first reaction is usually to inflate my intentions. In this case, when I started feeling like it had been too long since I’d posted, I simply told myself that I would write a post that was good enough to “make up for” the gap.  I inflated this quality idea in my head for awhile, conveniently ignoring the fact that I had zero idea how to actually write a post that would change the dynamics of the space-time continuum.  Details.

As my perception of how amazing my return post would be began to grow, the time I figured it would take me to write said post grew. When things start to feel like they’re going to take longer, they have a tendency to float down toward the bottom of my to-do list.  This doesn’t tend to make them happen any faster.

I began to realize that in my first attempt as a blogger, I failed. After a suitable mourning period, I realized I could think about my failure a little differently.

So that’s out of the way, then. I’ll probably fail again. Hopefully, when I do, it won’t take me quite so long to realize that I can simply begin again.

Back to work today, after 11 days off that went by incredibly quickly.  It’s tough to get focused when I first come back to things…which isn’t a problem if you don’t have immediate deadlines.  I, however, had immediate deadlines (explaining, perhaps, why I’m writing this at 3 a.m….to unwind so I can get to sleep after my long, long day.)

Meditators and yogis say that the untrained mind is like a monkey, jumping around from branch to branch. My mind monkey had Mountain Dew and sugar pops for breakfast this morning. It was mid-afternoon before I could even focus, and 2:30 in the morning before I got enough done to pack it in and get ready for bed.

My lesson for the day, I think, is that when I can’t seem to focus I should get up from my desk and go hit the yoga mat or the gym.  Something to burn off that monkey mind energy so that I can get into the flow and focus. I would be going to bed a lot earlier tonight if I’d done that today. New year, same old lessons. But eventually they’ll stick.

OK, granted this is a little late, but still almost relevant.  I keep seeing signs and t-shirts that postulate that Jesus is the reason for the season.  I want a t-shirt for next year that says “Solstice is the reason for the season.”  I’m just saying…historians tells us that Jesus wasn’t born this time of year, and that the majority of what we think of as Christmas traditions come instead from traditions that have very little to do with christianity. 

Celebrating the return of the light means very little to us in the modern era.  We can get light whenever and wherever we want simply by flipping a switch.  We have so much light in our daily lives that most of us never see the stars.  Heck, for years I hardly saw the sun during the week, with my basement office and convenient cafeteria, alleviating any need I might have had to go outside during the day.  But as disconnected as we are from it, I believe that the light has an effect on our lives and our health and our mood.

The light is on its way back now…has been for almost a week.  Definitely a good reason to celebrate.

My holiday break is half over…and I’m finding myself struggling between doing what I want to be doing and getting done what I want to get done.  Funny how those aren’t exactly lining up.  I have been telling people that I would have my first book proposal ready to send out by the time I go back to work on Jan 2.   I have spent exactly no time on it.

Now the good news is that I have very little planned the next few days…and when I’m working on something that intimidates me, sometimes I do better work under pressure.  I will hit Panera tomorrow morning around 10, and stay there and work until I have at least a draft of each section of the proposal done.

Wish me luck!