MotherPie

Political Marketing to Women: Bill Clinton's Personal Appeal...

Junk mail and spam and all that noise and clutter. It is hard for marketers to get through to women with the political message.

Oh my. I've just written a huge rant.  I just hate it when I get so verbose and go on and on and on. Is this what happens when women get to be my age? So, I'm putting my verbosious (rhymes with halitosis) rant on the flip. If you care.

What Would You Do? Read the Diaries?

Writing is remembering, but who needs to know? 

As I get into the car to pull out of her driveway, my mother leans in and tells me that her lifelong collection of diary writings has her ventings and that my Dad says he'll burn them if she goes first.

She might have been a prolific blogger.  But some things aren't meant for the eyes of others... or are they?

What would you do with your mom's diaries if they fell into your hands? 

Publish?

I'm not sure if I want to read things I don't want to know.  She leans in and tells me that all she writes is not tidy.  She says this with a glint in her eye as her mouth turns up in a smile.

My door slams, my car goes into reverse, my life moves forward yet again.  I drive away from my past to my present.

Hospital Chart Notes...

HOSPITAL CHARTS notations from actual charts

1. The patient refused autopsy.
2. The patient has no previous history of suicides.
3. Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
4. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she
      was very hot in bed last night.
5. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.
6. She is numb from her toes down.
7. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to
      be depressed.
8. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.
9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
10. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches.
11. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid.
12. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.
13. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.

14. The skin was moist and dry.

15.  Patient was alert and unresponsive.

Do Death Differently: Eco-Coffins

Cardboard coffins are the ecological way to go and are part of a growing market trend in the death industry.  In the U.K. there are woodland burial sites that do the dust-to-dust bit.  Eco-coffins is a firm providing these but I don't know what options are here in the U.S. 

The chemical preservation and metal coffin trend is slowly changing in the U.S. as cremations take more of the funeral market.

So... I think this is the way to go if you're not yearnin' for an urn.

Odds of Dying...

Will death soon become irrelevant? Ray Kurzweil has been the subject of a lot of Wired magazine articles. Gary Wolf wrote the latest article, Ray Kurzweil, Staying Alive this spring.  (I forget which issue, sorry). His ideas about singularity are something I know very little about.  NASA Ames Research Center had a meeting late last year to explore the establishment of a singularity university.  The idea of renaming the concept of singularity "accelerating change" came up. Will humans really be rendered obsolete biologically, with add-ons to human intelligence that will extend our human reach and we will become immortalized?  Our personality may become downloadable?  Our current changes are exponential so maybe these ideas are not too far off.  His ideas are behind the Lexis Nexis database.  Paul  Boutin wrote an article in 2001, Kurzweil's Law.

These ideas, when coupled with the stats on the odds of dying by various causes, below, made me think that stepping on a rattlesnake while hiking, might be unreasonable.  One thing I don't like to do, is be up in the mountains while hiking or on horseback, during the summer storms.  Maybe being struck by lightening will be totally irrelevant anyway soon, in our tech future.

Wisdom from Dad...

If you camping in the woods with a friend, and a bear comes up and you both get up and run away,  you do not have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than your friend. 

This was Bear in the Woods advice from father to son.  And I blogged it.

This means:
1) Blogs are stupid.
2)The son is getting excellent advice.
3)Mountains in New Mexico can be scary.
4)The son needs direction.
5)Mom should MYOB.
6)Mom should get a life. 
7)McCain can just sit back and let the laggards duke it out.  McCain doesn't have to "beat everybody"
7.5)This is a political explanation for campaigns at the moment
8)The zen of the wisdom of FatherPie
9)Those who function by impulse would be eaten.  Strategy is all important.  If you are camping in bear country, go with a friend who runs slow.
10)If you are a good Dad and go camping with your children you will be the slowest runner and know to raise something up to mark a line on the tree as bears regard the "highest" as the "biggest" and the bear might back off. Otherwise, be prepared to die, Dad.  So says Mom, who has camped more than Dad and wears a bell on the backpack to ward off the bears, noting that mother cats don't change stripes and will fight to the death to protect children.  Mom has camped in groups (with boyscouts on the family camp out and with son on archeology digs).  Not like a single tent in the woods, mind you.    
11)All of the above
12)None of the above
13)Bear in the Woods as an idea works on a lot of levels

The Mammy...

Wow. You know how things sort of tumble around in your mind and become stronger with time and the thinking of them. I went to visit one of my best lifelong friends. We ambled through her house....She pulled out photos from a letter rack on the wall in her kitchen; old photos from various relatives that came in old bibles and boxes and contained bits and pieces of her family history.  She wanted her history to be tangible and tactile, so she put them in a main hallway where every visitor will notice them. These old photos are there, asking to be pulled out, touched, interacted with, questioned.

I thought about the archival way to store these things.  Handling can't be good for historical longevity.  But my friend wanted the past to be present.  We flipped through the photos, identifying various ancestors, placing them in her family tree.

We came to this photo, at least 100 years old. Only the white children are identified on the back.   Would this impact us if the mammy was a nanny, or Hispanic?  Has the idea of a wet nurse become so antiquated that we no longer recognize it? Do we see this as racist only? As a public iteration of servitude? As politically, in our times, incorrect?  What if the white children were black and the mammy white? Would this change the dynamic?  How does this impact you?

Interludes...

If you must think of life as linear (which I don't - I think of it as circular), but really, either way you package this thinking, life is full of interludes. 

Time changes pace during these in-between intervals.  Priorities shift.  Relationships flux and flow in variations. Are you threatened by these, energized, changed in these moments?

Interludes can be defining moments and we all need them.  Some would term an interlude a sabbatical.  Or a pregnant pause.  Or interruptions.

One moves from one stage to the next.  Life is never static nor does it progress as we think we have planned it.

Interludes have the potential to be more than hibernations or dramatic shifts and I prefer to think of them as intermezzos.

I'm in one so I'm thinking of this.  An intermezzo/interlude where I'm on the bridge and in a pause.

New Life...

Oh so tiny...

This image from October 24, 2006, shows the world's most premature living baby, Amillia Sonja Taylor's, feet held in contrast with adult hands, just after her birth at a Florida hospital. Taylor, only slightly longer than a ballpoint pen at birth, spent months in neonatal intensive care.The Reuters News Picture of the Year was one of the top emailed photos on Yahoo! but I can't find any updates.

Winston Churchill was born at 7 months gestation.  But it isn't the story about preemies or new technology that I am thinking about.  It is that this story had visuals with such impact and then we don't know how this baby is doing now.  It was a story just for the moment.

Update: Thanks, B, for sending me an email for the link to the one-year birthday  update on Amillia.

Black Swans...

Unexpected events change the course of lives and history. This sad graffiti at left (click to enlarge) is in a bathroom stall on I-40 at Clovis, New Mexico.  It bears a message posted by a mother of a son who died eight years ago at age 14.  The dead boy's mom writes: Never leave mad. 

Perhaps her mission is now to post advice; can you imagine how she feels, leaving a relationship forever on a bad note?

Unplanned circumstances can alter us, uproot our directions, shift our purpose and leave us different, completely.  9/11 was such an event.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb called these events Black Swans.  His book, Black Swan, was published last spring and I read it right before everything was packed up on the moving truck in NYC.  Black Swans dynamically shift everything.  The illness of my friend in OKC was a Black Swan until death and the experience has altered her life and many others.  My parents immediately put copies of their living wills into my hands as just one result of the legacy of that Black Swan.

The death of a child is certainly a personal Black Swan.  Thinking back on my life, I can pinpoint such events in my own life and that of others.  Some are changed for the better, turn weeds into roses and become stronger from events.   I also know some who are devastated and never recover.  Look back and think what are the biggest Black Swans you've encountered and how have you changed as a result.