2004-07-18 - 12:32 p.m.

Thanks to wench77, I've had some more fun quizzes to play with:

You're The Poisonwood Bible!
by Barbara Kingsolver
Deeply rooted in a religious background, you have since become both isolated and schizophrenic. You were naively sure that your actions would help people, but of course they were resistant to your message and ultimately disaster ensued. Since you can see so many sides of the same issue, you are both wise beyond your years and tied to worthless perspectives. If you were a type of waffle, it would be Belgian.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

I've not read that book, but I've heard a lot about it, so maybe I'll get myself a copy.

You're Palestine!
There's a lot of debate among those who know you about whether you deserve anything at all... a place to live, rights, shelter, a job, or anything. �That fact has really made you upset over the years, and this has led you to resort to just about any means you can to get the word out that you exist. �Hard to say whether all that anger is going to work out, but in the meantime, you've gotten peoples' attention. �The cycle of abuse in your life looks ugly and doesn't show much signs of stopping... many people now even more firmly believe that you don't deserve anything because of what you've done.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

I don't quite agree with what they said as being like me or my situation (not exactly), but on some levels I do relate to Palestine, or feel that I understand them in some way. But I don't approve of terrorism and I wish Palestinians and Israelis would finally solve their differences.

You're Kansas!
You like big sunflowers, wide open spaces, and your little dog too. Whether in black and white or in color, you take life a little slower than the rest of the world, and that works just fine. You get up early, go to bed early, and would really prefer it if the Late Show were on at about 6:30 in the evening. Just when you think that this all makes life a little boring, houses might start falling from the sky.
Take the State Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Now this one I definitely love, as every time I have taken a trip across country that includes Kansas, I have loved Kansas and the people who live there. Unfortunately, as far as states go, Kansas is about as far from an ocean as it is possible to be and so, for me, Kansas has only been a state to drive across, not a place to live. And that is even in the face of an appealing presentation I once went to in which a guy was talking about self-sufficient communities he had built in abandoned counties in Kansas. The whole thing was amazingly fascinating, both the abandonment of the counties and the communities the guy had been building. For some mysterious reason, the entire population of whole communities would just up and leave, as if they had finally just had it. The man showed photographs of classrooms where the kids had been in the middle of tests, partially-repaired cars were still up on hoists in gas station garages, kitchens were empty with half-eaten lunches still on the tables, cigarettes had been left in ashtrays in mid-smoke, refrigerators were full of (now rotten) food. The man had been able to buy whole towns, the schools, the churches, the stores, all the houses, for only a few thousand dollars.

This isn't such an isolated phenomenon, believe it or not. Throughout history there has been evidence of entire civilizations that have just up and left. The last work that Thor Heyerdahl (of Kontiki fame) had been working on was archaeologicaly uncovering the abandoned city of an advanced culture in the jungles of Peru. And I believe the Olmec civilization in Mexico is another one that disappeared without a trace of an explanation as to why. And I saw a program on TV about a beautiful city that had been entirely carved into soft cliffs in a region near Jordon or Israel, from which all the people suddenly made an exodus.

A lot of that has to do with the loss of water due to climatic changes. Surely that's what happened to the city carved into the cliffs in Jordan; whereas at the height of their culture water was abundant, a shift in the climate put them into a rain shadow and they became something like an Oklahoma "dust bowl." The introduction to John Steinbeck's marvelous The Grapes of Wrath is really about the abandonment of a community, a civilization, a way of life.

California, a semi-desert state, nevertheless had been the promised land in Steinbeck's book, possibly because due to having damned virtually every river in the state coming out of the mountains, California had an all-but-ensured water supply. Just for fun, look at the map of Oklahoma nowadays and you will see an intricate, extensive network of reservoirs, rivers, canals, and Army Corps of Engineers created tributaries. Never again will they be caught short. It was my aunt who used to live in Fort Smith, Arkansas, who first alerted me to the fact that a person could now take a boat from Montana all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, or up to the Great Lakes, through the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and out to sea in the Atlantic. I am fascinated by our country's inland waterways, where virtually all of our major intramountaine cities (that is, those between the foothills of the Rockies and the Appalachians) are all connected to each other via rivers. Also, one could, for example, take a boat from New Orleans to New York, or to Montreal. I just love this kind of stuff.

* * *

I haven't been writing very much in this diary lately, mainly because I have been caught up into writing so much more on this site, where the responses to some of the things I say are immediate and gratifying. I'm still not someone who enjoys communicating in a vaccuum, speaking my words out into a silent, dark space. I recommend to anybody reading my diary that they add that site to their Internet Explorer "favorites" or Netscape "bookmarks" list. I think there's a good chance you may be impressed by what you can read there.

Here's an excerpt of something I felt like writing for that board, but which I see could fit quite well here in my dairy, so I will reproduce it here as an entry. The genesis of these comments was that on the linked board there were was a discussion over the use of the word "tard", which one woman did not like because she thought it was offensive, but with most of the others thought was okay to use in the context in which they used it (describing President Bush). So here's what I offered on the subject:

I'm not inserting myself into the use of the word "tard" argument, honestly, I am not, but yesterday I went to have a meal at Taco Bell (alright, that's not meant to be the "retarded" part). Normally, I'm not one for fast food places and particularly with Taco Bell (but this time, all I wanted was something FAST), I had one of their combination meals and it cost only $3.69 and while I love the cheapness of the food, with it being so cheap, it makes me wonder in a creepy way just what is actually in it. Also, the drink that I dispensed into my plastic cup was colored a nuclear-reactor puce. I'm killing myself with every sip and chew.

Since the food is so cheap, the place was full of very peculiar people of a kind...let's just say that I don't normally run into. People with economic problems. People with emotional issues. People with a way of seeing things that are alien to me. Homeless elderly ladies chewing their food very, very slowly, as if they really want to make it LAST, because it will be quite a while before they manage to beg another one. An odd couple consisting of a huge, filthy woman who, for half my meal, I thought was man until she spoke, being waited on hand and foot by a little bird of another woman who seemed to be her slave. "I need another burrito," the man-woman demanded, and the little bird woman squeaked "Beepity beepity beepity" and scuffled across the floor to go order it. When she returned, the man-woman took a bite out of it and then complained "I thought you were going to get me something with potatoes in it." (I'm thinking huh?) Then the man-woman said, "I need another refill," so the bird woman jumped up and, "beepity beepity beepity" scuttled over to the drink dispenser and filled up the immense cup. "You didn't spill any of it?" demanded the man-woman. "Beepity beepity beepity," answered the bird woman. It went on like this with them throughout their whole meal, making me imagine a conversation another friend of the bird woman might have with her along the lines of "Why do you put up with her, you don't need that, stick up for yourself" and I then wondered if the relationships people get themselves trapped into are purposely self-created and unavoidable, necessary for their spiritual and emotional growth and it's therefore better to just leave it alone and stay out of it.

At the ordering counter was a really hot-looking but quite nasty guy, attempting to order something but he couldn't remember the name of it. "It has a hard taco shell wrapped up in a soft shell, you know what I mean, you know what I mean, huh?" and the guy trying to take the order didn't have the best English in the world plus whatever the guy was vigorously describing didn't sound like any food item in the known universe. The belligerant guy kept saying "You know what I mean, it's wrapped up, it has to be that one, I don't want anything else, don't you dare give me anything else" and I'm thinking Jesus Christ, it's just junk food at Taco Bell, not some gourmet food with the properly curdled creme brulee sauce, look at the pictures on the menu board and simply pick one.

In an effort to erase from my senses the man-woman and the bird woman and the homeless woman chewing in slow motion and the belligent guy getting ready to punch out the Taco Bell employee, I panned the room and suddenly saw buried within a crowd of variously-aged people (who had gotten three full trays piled high with food) a tiny little pocket of serenity: a rather small, skinny, young, quite cute-looking boy, aged somewhere in the late teens, early twenties, waiting patiently for the middle aged woman sitting next to him to notice that he had finished his taco and was now wanting another one. She did see that he had neatly finished his taco, so she pulled another one from one of the trays, unwrapped it, and placed it down in front of him. Very quietly, he picked it up and started to eat it. No fanfare, no judgment, just simply eating whatever was put in front of him with no fuss at all. There was something about him that was so beautiful, particularly in the midst of this room full of humanity's left-behinds. Yes, he was obviously mentally retarded (okay, what is the current politically correct term, "autistic", maybe?)...he was obviously autistic, and yet he seemed to be the only person in there that someone could stand, and even enjoy, being with. He was so sweet, so peaceful, which I guess you WOULD be if you really hadn't a care in the world and somebody else eternally took care of you. But still, I felt he was wonderful. I really wanted to continue to look at him, to watch him, but of course that would have made me the rudest person in there, so I had to satisfy myself with occasional surreptitious glances.

I was reminded of one of my favorite books, Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe, and the woman in the book who had had the severely autistic little boy that the doctors said had to be institutionalized, but the woman refused, accepting nothing but raising him herself. Her speech in the book about what a God-send that little boy was, and what a treasure he had been to her all her life, is one of the most beautiful things ever written about accepting a child no matter "how they come" or whatever abilities or disabilities they have.

Thinking about that book and about the boy in Taco Bell, I formulated the idea that while they are less "here", they are more "there," that is, they are more wherever they came from and just didn't quite complete the journey of incarnation into this world. This explains to me why they have such a powerful Buddhaic aura, despite being so disadvantated on Earth that they really can't take care of themselves. I've experienced this several times before, so I now think of it as more the rule than the exception.

So now, to me, the word "tard" doesn't apply to them at all, it's misplaced, inappropriate, and just plain wrong, but to Bush and his ilk, it fits them like O.J.'s glove, and by that I mean, it really FITS and they don't deserve "to be acquitted".

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