Music is my boyfriend

Have you tried the Genuis sidebar in iTunes? You know, it takes what you have in your library and figures out new playlists for you based on what playlists other people have made?

Because I am the type to get in a rut, this has been amazing at pulling out all kinds of songs I forgot I had in my library, or songs Kevin downloaded, and making a playlist around certain subtle moods.

I do want to know, though, why it insists on putting the Carpenters "Merry Christmas, Darling" in so many of my playlists. There it is, next to Beck's "Where It's At" or Feist's "1234." But I swear I have other songs in my library.

I'm thinking of loading up Lex de Azevedo's "A Time to Love" soundtrack to mess with everyone else's playlists.

Coneflowers

Right now the only Echinacea I'm getting is in my cough drops.

Contrast

I wouldn't even call the day I took this picture of downtown a particularly clear one.

Hey sky, remember me?

Hopeful Celebration

May this Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day be an especially reflective one. And as we go forward with new oportunities, may we be the change we wish to see in the world.

A little brightness

Something bright emerging on a typical pollution-ridden January inversion day.

Platinum Man

There are times in a marriage that are golden. And when a certain husband finds a certain favorite painting for his wife and gives it to her, without even really knowing how much she has admired it, you have one of those times.

Then he tells her he loves it because it reminds him of the beauty of the "divine feminine." It's not just gold, it's platinum.

Sunset on Oquirrhs

It may be an absolute week from hell, but last night I found this fleeting vision as I walked to my car. By the time I was on the freeway, the clouds had closed in and it was gone.

My passion is to part a curtain

"My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight."
-- Eudora Welty

Homer : Well I won the belching contest at work. (belches in Jay's face, everyone laughs)
Jay : Nice, Homer. (belches longer and louder, car alarms go off outside)
Lisa : Wow! How many Pulitzer prize winners can do that?
Jay : Just me and Eudora Welty.
--The Simpsons, "A Star is Burns"

I love the quote from Eudora Welty (actually, I love both of the above quotes). This hits on my favorite philosophy from grad school, Emmanuel Levinas' post-modern ethics.

Lately I've had words on the tip of my tongue for others--why didn't they say this thing I wanted them to say? Why can't I get this friend of mine to be the kind of friend I want them to be? Why do they have to keep doing these things they do? (No friends, I'm not talking about you. These are examples.)

It's very easy for my to become absorbed by my own thought and perceptions. This self-absorption makes me want to create other people in my own image--hey, how can that be bad? It means that I can set up expectations, with or without informing the other party, and then wonder why they didn't say the thing I expected them to say or do what I expected them to do. They don't because they're not me. They're other.

I would say that the "veil of indifference" Welty refers to is only exists because to us it appears to be a reflection, that veil that tricks us into thinking that the other is actually the same with us, that we have some control over the other, that we are free and they are confined to our minimal understanding of them. That we know all their deepest thoughts.

Stepping beyond that, I begin to see those around me for who they are, for their otherness wrapped up in their infinite number of experiences and thoughts that are different than mine. At first I'm learning to be OK with this, that I can't make someone be who they're not. But I hope for more than that. I hope that eventually I will learn to love them precisely because I cannot make them be who they are not. Because in that otherness, I learn to see the immense enormity that is another human soul. Also, the idea that I don't know everything actually brings me hope (I'll explain this sometime if that seems odd).

I love how Welty describes this thought process as a passion. I don't know that discovering others' otherness is yet a passion for me, but I want to move that way.

Snow

Celestial white winter's light

Slippy, drippy

Stopped, ossified

Surfeit and superabundance

Fixated, roaring in static

First Cat Pic of the Year

Even a feral-born cat knows how to make herself comfortable under soft, warm blankets.

Here's to the new year with happiness, love, and comforts for all.

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.