Back in the land of the living

Wow. There is nothing like a good health scare to make you appreciate what you have. 

Even today, when the vog is making everything look rather meh, I am so happy. Terry brings me excellent decaf, the cat sits with me, and there is so much to read, thanks to the Kindle. I don't feel like a shut-in at all. Every day I'm stronger and can do a little more.

From the deck.

Looking toward downtown Hilo through Grandma's tree next door.

I'm off politics for the time being. What a bunch of dullards those people in Washington are. I'm tired of them.

The current New Yorker, which I read on my Kindle,  had three fascinating articles. One of them would have justified the whole issue, but three...

1.Notes from the Underground by David Owen, about the "sinkhole phenomenon" in Florida. Evidently, a lot of Florida is just a "Swiss cheese" limestone structure, dissolving away under a thin layer of soil and occasionally reaching the surface to create those scary sinkholes like the one that swallowed a man and his bedroom. I was fascinated to read about divers exploring underground rivers and caverns not even known to the people living above them.

2.Danse Macabre by David Remnick, which explores the history of the Bolshoi and its current scandals, the one involving the director, Sergei Yurevich Filin, who had acid thrown in his face, simply being the most crass. It raises questions about the value of art and culture. Can we imagine a Russia without the Bolshoi? What does the Bolshoi illustrate about Russia and about the culture industry in general? Fascinating.

3. About a Boy: Transgender surgery at sixteen by Margaret Talbot. This was very disturbing . Bodily alteration in such young people seems to me to be a great mistake. In fact, I question the whole premise. What is wrong with being gendered as you are, and sexually oriented as you are, without subjecting yourself to hormone injections and surgical mutilation? And what will those alterations do to a person's health later on? And what if it all turns out to have been a mistake?

What is behind this rush to identity anyway?

There's a lot of pressure to be out these days--to own your identity and declare it, proudly, to the world.

So here is the idea of the fascinating "me." Sure, these kids are troubled, but I think,  just as with cosmetic surgery, risky diets, tattoos, faces full of metal, etc. that it's mostly something that has been sold to people.

As a mother of a self-declared transgendered teen puts it:

The kids who are edgy and funky and drawn to artsy things--these are the conversations that are taking place in dorm rooms...There are tides of history that wash in, and when they wash out they leave some people stranded. The drug culture of the 60's was like that and the sexual culture of the eighties, with AIDS. I think this could be the next wave like that, and I don't want my daughter to be a casualty.

I am glad she is standing against this "tide of history." Young people are being hyped up in some way to feel that this is the exciting stuff, before they have even had a chance to live.  It's crazy. So many of the parents sound goofy, too, like they have no common sense.I was thinking about the parents in that film, Juno, who kind of didn't really mind that their daughter was having a baby.  Why weren't they reacting? What were they on? Or maybe they didn't care or thought it was cool? Is this some sort of new approach among affluent parents, to be "supportive" no matter what?

So off to fix lunch. We'll eat out on the deck, because it is warm and not windy.

 

 

Comments

[Tabor]

Wow, sort of surprised where this went...from being home after and illness!

[Hattie]

Tabor: Well, this is what I do, I guess! There is a thread connecting all this seemingly disparate matters. It is thinking about people lives, the decisions they make, the question of mortality.

[TheQueen]

What a pretty and organized house!

[barbara]

I occasionally wonder about all the tatoos and metal that are riding on our young folk's bodies. I am sure they feel cool and all but give them a few years and they might wonder what were they thinking of when they were trying to be cool. Oh well each generation has their weirdness. The individuals that join the cool crowd often end up on the short end of the stick. These problems all seem minor compared to the wholesale degradation of mother earth. -- barbara

[Hattie]

Queen: Thanks! You could say that some of my house is pretty and organized. Not all of it, by any means.
Barbara: What worries me is that they are not having much fun. They are not carefree, as we were able to be from time to time, in spite of our troubles.