Velvet Verbosity

I know we’re almost in February, and that oft dreaded holiday is just around the next bend, but I’m still basking in the pile of gifts I and my children got for Christmas. That put me off shopping for a while. Sorry I’ve been negligent in my Etsy duties. I hope you know I still care.

With all fronts on economy surrendering and throwing up their white flags, I won’t be doing any shopping anyway, but hey, a woman can still look can’t she? Besides, how I can I deprive you all of my latest handmade finds on Etsy. That would just be wrong.

By the way, I love the “connections” search feature on Etsy. I find a few things I like, then I get to see who else likes it too (and that makes them automatically cool in my book) and what else they like. That’s how I found these stupidly cute kitten wallets. True, I might not buy one even if I did have the money because I’m not sure my reputation could weather such cuteness, but YOU might want one, or know someone else who might want one. Come on. They ARE stupidly cute! Handmade of canvas and wool by Bubbledog, you can also visit www.bubbledog.com

“There is nothing more awkward or crude than a person absorbed in self-importance. And there is nothing more graceful and elegant than someone who is not.” — Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

“Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Things that are Elegant…

* The hands of a lover…
* A string of pearls…
* Bare slender birch trees…
* The tall Dutch gardener carefully tending his plants…
* Fingertips…
* Fighting entropy…
* Water flowing down a gentle slope…
* Miss Ellie Rothman…
* Tea served in delicate china…

Please add your own list in the comments area…

He stands softly in line, thoughtful and adorably rumpled. His soft black hair, his gentle smile, remind me of someone very dear to me. My heart takes a deep breath as I remember slender fingers brushing hair from my face, dark eyes meeting mine and a relentless, invisible electric current.

Moments later, a woman pulls up next to me in the parking lot. She has the same shabby-sharp blond haircut and the same longish turned up nose as another person from my memory. The resemblance is so startling, so very close, that I keep staring, keep double-taking until it reaches that point of awkwardness where she notices I am staring, stealing glances. She shoots me a look that says, “What? Do I have a booger hanging? Because if I don’t you better stop looking at me.”In the short space of a few minutes I am reminded of two people from the same point in my past, and all the rest of the way home I am remembering a place where time stood still, or at least moved a little differently on our little piece of the planet. The memories are not visual, but visceral. My cells seem to pop open, filling me out completely, stretching and shining in my skin and for the rest of the evening I am radiant, just radiant.

Image “Radiance” from Digital Blasphemies Gallery

I lifted this speech from Sid’s blog (thanks num-num) and Sid lifted it from I don’t know where.

It’s sad that great leaders and great visionaries have been saying these things forever, and we just don’t listen. Maybe it’s because they all get assassinated before we get a chance to? Just sayin’.

In 1968, three months before he would be assassinated, one month before Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated, Robert Kennedy gave an address at the University of Kansas.

“We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the gross national product. For the gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of the carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for our people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods, and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads…. It includes Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

And if the gross national product includes all of this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of public officials…. The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile; and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.”What’s more chilling, is that he also said this earlier in the speech (from www.jfklibrary.org):

“I’m glad to come here to the home of the man who publicly wrote: “If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.” And despite all the accusations against me, those words were not written by me, they were written by that notorious seditionist, William Allen White. And I know what great affection this university has for him. He is an honored man today, here on your campus and around the rest of the nation. But when he lived and wrote, he was reviled as an extremist and worse. For he spoke, he spoke as he believed. He did not conceal his concern in comforting words. He did not delude his readers or himself with false hopes and with illusions. This spirit of honest confrontation is what America needs today. It has been missing all too often in the recent years and it is one of the reasons that I run for President of the United States.

For we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don’t want to run for the presidency - I don’t want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don’t want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we’ve gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.”

Still, I retain hope. There is always hope, and once again Robert Kennedy puts it well exactly two years before the date of his death (again, www.jfklibrary.org).“Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation…It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Day of Affirmation Address, University of Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966.

Thank you Robert Kennedy. Now, let’s all do our part to bend history, eh?

Please take anything you read from Wikipedia with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you really want to know facts, there are better places. I link to Wikipedia articles as a launching pad and for my convenience.

Lately my blog has taken a decided and sudden turn toward feminist issues. Let me explain. Some recent exposure to men who objectify women without batting an eyelash and as long as it’s not anyone they know, and “no one is getting hurt”, has compelled me to look for the evidence that this justification is ludicrous. Not only have I found sufficient evidence to confirm my gut feelings, I’ve found enough evidence to make my gut sick.Second, raising two children in a culture that is becoming rapidly disconnected as fast as it is connecting, and becoming increasingly media driven and pornified, I am reaching a point of ORANGE ALERT.

In my research, I found Sparkle Matrix, who has opened my eyes to issues I wasn’t even thinking about. Take this rape campaign poster that clearly blames the victim. Horrified as I was, still, I thought Sparkle Matrix’s interpretation of the intention was overkill. After all, Britain was trying right? Maybe their attempts were slightly misguided, but change and progress is a slow and painful process. Lighten up already! At least there WERE posters being made.

Then, because it was on my mind, I brought this up to a few people, and I was a little dismayed that they could not immediately see the connection between the message and victim blaming.

Still, I thought, we’re making progress, right? No. Not enough.

We’re not making enough progress when Harriet McCormick, a bright young woman who lives in the very same country that produced those progressive anti-rape posters, made the mistake of getting drunk and blamed herself, suffered for almost a year, before finally taking her own life. This woman would have contributed great things to society. She was already on her way to doing so. Instead, she took her life because she couldn’t live with the guilt, the trauma, or the conflict between the two. I wonder what her rapist is doing today? I wonder if he is giving his life in service to others? I wonder if he is racked with guilt? Somehow, sadly, I doubt it.

The thing is, Sparkle Matrix and others are right on this issue, and I see that now. Maybe one out of three rapes happen when a woman is drunk, but three out of three happen when there is a rapist involved. Why focus on the 1 out of 3? Why focus solely on the woman’s responsibility in the possibility that she will be raped? Why not focus on teaching men that rape is just wrong. It’s wrong. It’s always wrong. And you know what else? Women do NOT fantasize about being raped. Not the way real rape happens, but I will talk about that in another post. The reality is, it’s more like this.

What’s more, I did a Google search after reading the story of this girl to find the post I had read about the rape campaign posters. I found this one instead. Maybe I’m just being overly sensitive after reading about a young woman throwing herself off a bridge and plummeting to her death, leaving behind family and friends to pick up the pieces. Maybe I’m just being a silly woman. Maybe I’m just being an angry feminist.

Or maybe this ad is using sex to sell anti-rape. How else would you get a guy to look at it, right? “Must put a woman in panties on poster”.

When people think it’s no big deal that anti-rape campaigns use such misguided messages as these, please read her story. Read it over and over until you are sick with the idea that the message in our culture is still to blame the victim, and to still use women’s bodies to sell everything from deoderant to “please don’t rape us, it hurts”.

People, it is 2008. When the hell are we going to evolve? And women…it is time for the next wave of rebellion. Honest to goddess, it really really is.

Stay tuned for “A Letter to Men”, “A Letter to Boys”, “A Letter to Women”, “A Letter to Girls”. (John B., I’m talking about it.)

And if you’re not angry enough yet, read on here about how a convicted rapist of children was just buried with full military honors. If you are angry, sad, or otherwise moved, please share this, bookmark it, and talk about it.

You know those little flaps of lip skin you get in the winter? The ones that when you insist on tugging on them finally come off with a chunk of healthy skin?

So how stupid does it make me that I do this every single day all winter?

From behind, which is how I first see her, she looks like any teenage girl. Dressed in pink fuzzy pajama pants with a striped hooded sweater, her hair curled up into a casual loose bun. She is the epitome of adolescent girl. But her face, oh my god, her face. She hears my footsteps approaching from behind her and turns toward me. I can only hope that my own face does not reveal the shock at what I see when she turns, because the truth is, I’m ill prepared and horrified.

It is a ravaged face of 40. A skin that has seen too many harsh winters. Eyes that are nothing more than portals into a shriveled dark hole that smells of putrefying memories. A mouth whose only and rare smiles are bitter. Her features are chapped, blotchy and abnormally swollen. All the pain of her life that might have made her young face look this way curls into my stomach, delivering a cold hard punch.

I am reminded of the faces of so many models in fashion magazines. Nearly pre-pubescent looking girls made up to look strung out. That’s fashion. Only there is no makeup on this girl’s face, and this is no glossy ad. This is real life run hard, and the only thing it makes me want to buy is a hot cup of coffee so I can stuff it into her chapped fingers and pray that it might contain some magic that will bring her soul back to her.

The thoughts all mothers think begin to rise up.

I want to protect this girl from more pain. I want to protect my own daughter from girls like her. I want to take her home and let her get a warm meal and a warm bed. I am grateful that my own daughter’s face, as angry as it can get, has never ever come close to looking like this. I want to find all the people that did this to her and make them pay. I want to run home and tell my daughter how very much I love her. I want to take her pain into myself and relieve her of it just long enough to show her a path out. I want to buy her a coffee.

I can’t. I don’t. My own children are waiting for me, waiting for their orange juice and milk. I know it’s not fair.

Image from http://www.vivagallery.org/exhibits/NWS_2006/powell.jpg
Artist Lonnie Powell

From the BBC comedy Man Stroke Woman.