post comments and pose questions

Thank you all so much for the birthday wishes. I mean to respond more personally but I wanted to acknowledge all your good wishes today. I have to write an entry for a goal I completed yesterday!

Hey, you guys, can you go welcome my friend Ali? She’s here. I finally recruited someone to 43Things! Not that I want to recruit a lot of people really, because I don’t want everybody all up in my business (you know how this gets personal sometimes!), but she’s very sweet and lots of fun to hang out with (she came to my soul line dancing party and got down!).

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. (John Quincy Adams)

We’re living on a tiny little dust mote in left field on a rather insignificant galaxy. And basically this is it for humans. It strikes me that it’s a shame that we’re squabbling over oil and borders.

If people can see Earth from up here, see it without those borders, see it without any differences in race or religion, they would have a completely different perspective. Because when you see it from that angle, you cannot think of your home or your country. All you can see is one Earth…

I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.

But I’m not a complete cynic. I do like some token acknowledgement of affection on February 14. Anyway, I was reading this interview with James Mercer of the Shins, and I thought something he said was sweet:

You remember as a kid in elementary school, you’d make your own little mailbox and decorate it with hearts and stuff, and then each kid would make valentines for the whole class? I used to actually really like that. I think that I liked it because there was always that girl that you had a crush on, that you were allowed for this one day to have some sort of interaction with, without getting shit from your friends or from anyone else. You could do it without anyone even realizing that it was something special to you.

_{Yes, I remember.}

My sister turned to me to solve this literary puzzle, and I’m feeling inadequate because I can’t. She’d remembered it from Poe and I remember seeing it in Dickens. The question she asked is:

“Why is it in some novels that certain words are left blank with only the first letter written?” Example:

In 1812, I went to “the Stone,” the holy house at C___, a village straddling the ill-drawn borders of Brittany and Normandy . . .

I’ve noticed it in street names and town names. I can’t find a definitive answer, but I always guessed it was because the author thought there might be believability issues if he either named a real location that people might be overly familiar with or named a fake one they would be skeptical about. But I really don’t know. Anyone?

I am banned from Zeitgeist. Have been for a long time. At least it looks that way to me. Am I really so profane and offensive? Maybe once in a great while, but overall I am vanilla, am I not?

Edit: Flirt informed me I’m not banned. Apparently not every post shows up there?

I hope your goals and dreams come true in 2007. :)

So. I have my little group of people I talk to or cheer frequently. And I have a larger group I talk to or cheer periodically. And then there are A LOT of other names I recognize and know something about even if I don’t interact directly with them all that often. So what I want to know is . . . are there entire other large groups of connected 43T people out there who have no clue who the people in my unofficial group of contacts are? I have been on here about a year now, so I recognize a lot of people and names. And I think some people are just so charming, funny, interesting, articulate, outspoken or odd that they must be known widely throughout this website, at least by people who have been on here for a while. Am I making sense? Am I ensconced in my own little 43 community? The people in it, to me, seem so central to 43 Things – particularly the people with a sort of mass appeal – you know, the ones who have like a zillion subscribers and talk to everybody. But are they really central to 43 Things? Or is that just my perception? Example: is there anyone on 43 Things who has been a regular user for a while who couldn’t tell you something about Absnasm, Flirt or Heaveemetal? I mention those names in particular because I think they have a lot of subscribers (and I’m subscribed to all of them). I guess if you made a chart of everyone’s contacts it would just be this huge overlapping mess with certain people, such as more veteran/regular users, who had more name recognition than others. Maybe I’d know more about this if I ever went to Zeitgeist. I rarely do. That could be why I feel like I’m in my own little world here. Don’t get me wrong, though – I like my world.

Tonight we went out for a nice family evening, taking our daughter downtown to a free concert by the Florida orchestra. It was a lovely night, despite the way it started. We were confronted en route by a group of bystanders holding obnoxious signs and blaring hateful, condemning messages through a loudspeaker. The gay and lesbian film festival is going on in town, an annual event, and I hadn’t thought twice about it until I saw these people gathered near the theatre.

“How do you feel about this, ma’am” he demanded. I was too shocked by his ignorance to be able to compose myself and say something intelligible, so all I could do was flip him off. Middle finger, up high.

“And you a mother! You ought to be ashamed! You’re going to burn in hell!”

“Well, you’ll be burning right there with me,” I told him, matter-of-factly, not wanting to be too confrontational in front of my little girl.

We moved on, and I didn’t let it ruin the night. But I thought to myself, how would I handle that if he were talking to a child of mine that way? I know you can’t reason with those people, and it’s probably the best thing to ignore them completely, give them no reinforcing attention whatsoever. But it’s so hard!

I asked my husband why he thought they were so misguided, and he said he honestly thinks some people are just more evolved than others, and the more evolved ones are better able to overcome ignorant things they may have been taught by their parents. I think that is true. Neither of us was raised in the most enlightened environment, but even in our teens, we knew better.

So tonight, I want to send out my love to everyone out there fighting ignorance. I want to kill all that poison with my love, especially to all my gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered brothers and sisters. I love you!