Noticing the year: 01/10/08

I've been noticing my mood lately. Despite the unusually warm weather, I've still been more down and surly than usual. It's kept me from posting much (well, that, and the craptacular quality of my latest photos). I've been seeing my life this way: I leave for work before the sun is up, come home as it's coming down, and after walking the dogs and whatnot I just want to go to bed. Night before last I went to bed at nine, almost indignantly (take THAT, stupid life), and pretty much just fell asleep. I definitely have a better time at work when I've slept more, but work is not my life (should it be?) and I want more time with my life.

Feeling a bit better today, and I'm really looking forward to the weekend. The sad part is that I'm most looking forward to making the laundry pile disappear.

While I'm at work I think of things I want to write, or produce, or make art about. When I get home I just diddle on the internet, eat, and sleep. I haven't even watched all the movies I keep getting out of the library and netflix. The "no time for art because of work" thing is as old as the hills. Anyone found a way to deal with it?

Caffeine + Silence = inspiration

If I were to write a book, what should it be?

Noticing the year: 01/11/08

Thanks, as always, to my many wise, witty, and wonderful lj friends for your commiseration, counsel, and compliments regarding my earlier posts today. Much to think about, more to do.

Today, as I was starting my work day up, cleaning and refilling footbaths, there came a clatter as if a tree had fallen on the roof. At my previous job big pieces of trees fell on the roof with regularity, owing to its rustic location underneath brittle white pine boughs. My current workplace is considerably more urban, and so I dashed with some urgency out to a room with windows, to see what was the matter. What had happened was the very television-like break of calm weather with an enormous thunderclap, followed by sudden torrential rain. At 7:30 in the morning, on January eleventh. Times like these I like to recall Lewis Black, who, upon seeing snow and lighting in Boston one February morn, "There isn't weather like that in the Bible!"

And it continued to thunder and rain most of the morning, staying in the mid forties for the most part, turning mid-winter into an early mud season. I got to work a little late, partly on account of the fact that it never looked light enough for it to be time for me to leave. It stayed looking like an hour after sunset for the lion's share of what should have been the daylight hours.

Tomorrow is supposed to be likewise as mild (for January) but sunny. We will take the dogs to the beach, which you are allowed to do in New England in the winter.

Shouldn't we be setting our sights higher than the Stone Age?

In art school, I was taught that some 40,000 or so years ago, there was matriarchal society (or societies) across much of Europe, if not the whole of the peopled world. (I should stress that I was not taught this in the context of a history or anthropology course.) This society, peaceful and artistic, produced artifacts like the "goddess of Willendorf." Many people I was close with embraced the notion of this society as fact, and moreover, as a model of what we--should we choose to discard the patriarchy--should aspire for our own culture.

Alas, there is a paucity of facts to back up the existence of this great matriarchy, and a great deal of wishful thinking. My bs detector wasn't as sensitive back then, but I did sometimes wonder how the fact of this unknown society had come to be so obscure. Shouldn't I have learned about it in, well, a history class? I should have, if there was any evidence that it ever existed, or any actual scholarly research done backing it up. For more than a decade I've let the possibility that it existed simmer on the back burner of my mind--it's a good story, at least.


Today's Straight Dope describes the idea, what's right with it, and what's wrong with it. Always good to hear from Uncle Cecil.