The Labyrinth of Life!

I needed to hear this today.

Purplerays

Today, if you’re confronting an issue for the ten thousandth time, or feeling that your life is going nowhere, or panicking over how little you’ve achieved, stop and breathe. You’re not falling behind on some linear race through time. You’re walking the labyrinth of life…. In the moments you stop trying to conquer the labyrinth of life and simply inhabit it, you’ll realize it was designed to hold you safe as you explore what feels dangerous. You’ll see that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, meandering along a crooked path that is meant to lead you not onward, but inward.

~ Martha Beck
Art by Nicole Cadet

• Text and image source: Rivers in the Ocean https://www.facebook.com/222770714439924/posts/3553917861325176/

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Religious Test Bigotry

Wow, I couldn’t agree more.

CLAYTOONZ

Don’t take my word for it that Republicans are going to lose in November. Take theirs.

Republicans know they’re going to lose the Senate (even South Carolina is competitive. South Carolina!). They’re going to lose the White House. There is no chance they can retake Congress.

Republicans know the will of the American people is against them. The majority of the nation rejects Republicanism and Trumpism. In the past 32 years, they’ve only won the popular vote in a presidential election…ONCE. In 2018, Senate Democratic candidates received 12 million more votes than Republican candidates. And despite the will of this nation being against Republicans, they control the White House, the Senate, and will soon have six out of nine justices on the Supreme Court which will rule for decades. Do you think that’s fucked up? Good, because it’s fucked up.

Republicans know the majority of America doesn’t like them. They…

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Seen at the corner of Colvin & Hertel Avenues, Buffalo, NY. 10/13/2020

The Miracle of the Trump Economy

I’ve said this for YEARS. In fact, if you look at my own personal employment history, even when I was working full-time, I NEVER made enough money to support myself. NEVER.

Mock Paper Scissors

It’s a fixer-upper with potential.

Axios has a truly shocking economics report up:

A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can’t find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1%, according to an important new dataset shared exclusively with “Axios on HBO.”

This is one of the many reasons I never buy into the notion that the stock market has any relationship to the economy. When companies lay-off thousands of workers, investors reward them; when American companies move overseas, investors reward them, too. The Stock Market Plutocrats sees employees as a burden, not as an asset.

Do continue.

Why it matters: The official unemployment rate is artificially depressed by excluding people who might be earning only a few dollars a week. It also excludes anybody who has…

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Sunday Sonnet

Today’s sonnet is from The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, edited by Edward Hirsch & Eavan Boland. I had no real reason for choosing this poem; I chose it simply by opening up the book & picking the first poem that I saw upon the page.

References

Hirsch, Edward & Eavan Boland, editors. The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. page 234.

Saturday Caturday

I knew as soon as I took the large screen off of the front door & put up the heavy storm window, it would get warm again! I propped open the door with a box of books to let in the warm southerly afternoon breeze & of course, the cats wanted to go out on the front porch. Here’s Jack exploring the porch:

I had to shoo him back into the house when he decided to go on the far side of the iron railing because I didn’t need to have him try to jump from the second floor! He’s fourteen years old & ought to know better but you never know!

all photographs © polly macdavid

On Masculinity and Disease

A great read.

Going Medieval

Over the past few days I have, of course, been laughing very hard as we collectively watch Miss Rona skip through the White House staff like, well, a highly infectious virus because that is literally how it works? ANYWAY, while that is very very funny, it is not the thing I have been thinking about this week. Instead, what caught my attention was the interest from a huge swathe of Americans in relating to illness and the vanquishing thereof as a specifically masculine trait. By this, I mean, all the insistence that Trump can just man his way out of a disease and that other men are feminine for doing stuff like wearing masks.

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Absolutely F*ng Brilliant

Digby nails it again :

from yesterday’s Hullabaloo:

link here ~~~> https://digbysblog.net/2020/10/trumprop/

About this new Block Editor from WordPress

I subscribe to dozens of WordPress blogs, as well as blog on WordPress myself. I have been reading LOTS of complaints about the new “Block Editor” from WordPress. This was imposed on us bloggers, whether we wanted it or not. The complaints I have been hearing range from how difficult it is to work with to outright hatred & threats of bloggers leaving WordPress for other platforms.

Honestly, I don’t see the problem here. Yeah, it’s not as easy to use as the old “Classic” mode of WordPress but it’s not at all difficult. & the truth of it is, WordPress has been changing things for quite a long time & for someone like me … who has a free domain … it’s so bare-bones now that I have to do a lot of playing around with the format just to get my poems to look the way I want them to & I had to do that YEARS before the Block Editor came around. Ya know, you take the good with the bad no matter what.

I dunno. Maybe it’s because I started working with computers back in the old Fortran & DOS days, when you had to know the “language” of whatever platform you were using & it wasn’t really easy to produce anything at all … but I really don’t see the problem with this new Block Editor. Maybe it’s different with a paid subscription? Again, I don’t know. Maybe I would feel differently if I was paying for this. But honestly, I don’t have any reason to “hate” this new format or even to complain about it. There’s lots of things to complain about in this world – even to hate! WordPress’s Block Editor isn’t one of them.

Just my two cents for today.

Saturday Caturday

As it gets colder here in Buffalo, I have been putting down the storm windows. It’s wicked windy here so even on a sunny day, if it’s windy, you feel the cold, especially in an upper apartment. Although I pay a LOT of money for this apartment, some of the windows don’t want to work so I put the storms are down even though I couldn’t get the windows down … I’m hoping that they will come down eventually. Probably when it’s less humid. But we’ll find out.

Of course, the cats hate it when the windows get closed & they act like they’ve been locked in prison but if the storm window is down & the regular window is up, they can still get in there to look outside & enjoy the sunshine & nap. I wonder if they realize if there’s no screen but of course they must. Still, they love to be in the open windows even if they storm window is down.

Here’s Radar in my bedroom window (which very well might be open all winter long because it just won’t budge)

pulling away the curtain so you can see him …

Obviously, he didn’t want to be bothered! Look at that face! What attitude!

photographs © polly macdavid