It’s been a sad few days. My laptop began to freeze and refuse to reboot. The good news is that it required a new hard drive and now it works fine.
The bad news is, I lost all my contacts for all my friends and such. I did not lose my writing files, so I cannot cry forever. But I hope that I can re-create connections to my friends.
Please, email me with you contact info if you wold like us to stay in contact with one another.
I’ve been really mulling this one over for a while.
Things have come to a pass. I have questions about why certain political choices are being made,and the voices I am hearing from media outlets are almost exclusive liberal voices.
I am trying to follow the tangled thread. Here are some of the things that concern me:
Health Care
Cost of Living
Whether jobs will be available
How much stuff costs
Being fair to everyone
Taking good care of natural resources
These seem really basic to life enjoyment. I have to live, I have to pay for stuff, I have to have a job to pay for said stuff. I think that we have to be fair to everyone, because it’s the right thing to do. Plus, if we aren’t fair, they will exact revenge.
And we have to take care of natural resources, like the EARTH for a big example, because I have to look at it when I am not working or shopping for stuff. And I like the earth. It’s where I keep my stuff (okay, that’s a quote from The Tick).
If we take care of the stuff that keeps my list of concerns taken care of, we’re doing okay.
Alright. So who pays for Health care to keep me living? In the USA, insurance companies do. That’s really really convoluted. I mean, at one point in history, Doctors used to take their knowledge and think of a way to cure the person, and then they would take money or some trade item from the person they were treating. That was the end of that.
Now, getting your tonsils out takes huge statistical charts and indexes to pay for. Whoa. That’s strange and weird. But that’s really what we are living with.
The people that pay the insurance companies to pay the bills for our medical needs are:
the employers, i.e. Large Corporations
Mostly, that’s true. Some individuals can pay the premiums themselves, if they want. The governmentactsd as a safety net, that picks up the slack sometimes for those who don’t have an employer to pay.
That’s how we do it in the US. In Europe, the government picks up the tab for the whole bill. It’s called socialized medicine. And socialized medicine has a whole host of problems, such as lowered quality of care and restaints on compensation for the professionals who are therefore unmotivated to innovate and invent such needed things as new cures.
Socialized medicine is not the best way to do it. But neither is our way. Both of us are figuring out what to do next.
But things being the way they are, Large corporations are the biggest customers of the health insurance companies who control the health care in america.
So, when you are dealing with health care, it’s really a lot about large corporate interests.
Large corporate interests = the Republican party
right? well, maybe.
But the democrats are the ones who are always bringing up health care concerns. And they are full of speeches about how new programs can be funded by new taxes that will be paid for by big business or ‘the rich.’
But, if the democrats expect to milk the corporate cow, it would seem to require checking that the cow is well fed. If we learned nothing from the stock crash of 2000 it’s that businesses are quite apt to fail.
Interestingly, the democrats are for ‘equality’ too. That is what they seem to talk about a lot. I hear a lot about people being underpriviliged. Or people being minorities or poor. Sometimes, they even talk about people being oppressed.
These are pretty big words. The conservatives tend to say things like “Idiots” and “Morons” about the liberals. Not very helpful, just to oversimplify into name-calling.
But the liberals voices seem to forget where their bread is buttered. I have listened for a long time, and I can see that their basic idea is to take money from rich people and from big business in the form of taxes and redistribute it (through government branches) to ‘the less fortunate’.
That bothers me. This country has a high regard for independence, and we seem to be setting up a structure whereby people become dependent on the government, that thing that NO ONE, conservative or liberal, trusts.
It seems to be better to take obtacles out of people’s way and let them do what they feel like doing.
I like the idea of compassion that the democrats supposedly espouse. I’d like to be a democrat and help out where help is needed.
But this constant talk of ‘the less fortunate’ seems to place those speaking on a superior plane than the others. Sure, they may be speaking about compassion, but there are ways of giving help without stripping the recipients of their dignity. But the speechers raise themselves by referring to others in a one-down position. It’s as if they are attempting to become patrician by designating all others as plebian. But it is smoke and mirror. We do hold to the truth that all people are created equal.
It is non-humanitarian to create a system of whereby people become dependent for their basic needs. That’s infanticizing the ‘less fortunate.’
So, I have a bad taste in my mouth for these psuedo patrician non-humanitarian democrats. I know there may be plenty of truly compassionate charitable people who work hard to help the less fortunate, but the loudest voices in the democratic party (at least those around me in liberal LA) are terrible examples.
Well, I’ll be honest. I’m sitting in a coffee shop and I am supposed to be organizing the writing I’ve done recently on my book. I am pleased, it’s going well.
But writing is not easy. I remember when I was in the middle of working LONG HARD DAYS, I would write on the bus. Or sometimes on the weekends. I couldn’t manage to do it every day, and there would be weeks at a time when I didn’t work on it at all. But I remember it as a joyous thing. Writing was my release.
Now, I guess I don’t have anything I need to be released from. So, it’s tougher. Not that I am not pleased, but it’s different.
So, my release from writing has been painting. Sounds toity, doesn’t it? But no, I just mean slapping white paint on my cabinets in my kitchen, and now my walls.
I am trying to imagine a time when I will NOT be working on covering the dark black walnut color of my kitchen cabinets with white paint. It has been more than 6 months that I’ve been working on it.
“You’re really almost done.” Chris is hopeful. Notably, Chris has not painted stroke one. To be fair, his job is the bathrooms, which are frightening all by themselves.
For variety, I bought some paint for the walls. THAT task will happen like lightning in comparison to the cabinets.
I already painted one section. I meant it to be a light yellow. It is VERY VERY light. Looks just white at the moment. But, too late. I already bought the paint, and white is not such a bad color. It is a vanilla-ey white. Maybe after I paint the whole place, it will be more obvious.
We’ll see. The point is, once the things are all done, we’re going to sell the place anyway. So, it’s not for our aesthetic enjoyment. Realistically, it’s about cash money.
Ah, the cold facts of life.
Which brings me back to the fact that I should be organizing my work. SIGH. My favorite organizing tool, the table of contents, has started to go wonky on me. It’s still there, but when I look at it on my monitor, it shows
{TOC/0 “1-3” \H\Z }
It prints the chapters, but I can’t see them on the screen. I don’t want to kill trees everytime I re-order the dang thing. Anyone have advice?
Oh, I’ll figure something out.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Well, it’s been 3 month of living at home with Chris and the cat. We are rubbing elbows (and fur) more than usual, but I am finding that I like my family very much and it’s been wonderful.
One of the thing that Skellig does for me is give me what I call I kitty massage. He’ll sit on my tummy and push his declawed paws against my chest. Sometimes he will get into my face, too. He seemed to aim for my mouth, but maybe I am mistaken.
Cat are weird you know. My greatly increased presence has given the cat an excuse to be weird. And..Well…He has decided to take his piddle to various areas that are not piddle approved.
I HATE cat pee…It’s as bad as skunk for staying power. I got some books from the library about cat behavior.
Well, look out. According to many authors of cat books, Kitty is just the most amazing smart and incredible creature to ever hit the earth. And any human who does not understand this is obviously far below the intelligence of any common cat.
That would be ‘overboard.’ I think my cat is smart, I think he has feelings and all that jazz, but come one.
These authors have all sorts of recommendation. “My cat loves being massages. Sure, at first he was skittish, but now he comes up and begs for a full-body massage.”
Massage? I thought my cat massaged _me_, not the other way around. But I thought I might give it a try. I was always scratching Skellig’s head and neck anyway.
He has a pretty big knot on the side of his neck. Who would have thought? I guess sleeping with his head curled around really can give him a stiff neck.
He loved the massage, though. He gets all half-lidded and purry.
Learn somthing new every day.
So I celebrated my parents 40th year anniversary last sunday at an open house. They were very happy to have all their friends and relative come around. It was the first time that Chris had met a lot of the cousins, and we had fun.
Since we were up north anyway, we had planned to take a trip up to Yosemite. It’s so nice to have time to enjoy life.
Now, Chris does not understand things like camping. He has a philosphy of life that includes private bathrooms and daily showers. So we got a motel inside the park.
It’s not such a bad thing, to have a hotel room inside the national park. One of the amenities is TV, which you’re not really supposed to have when roughing it. But they actually have two Yosemite channels.
Back in the 50s, they used to send down a shower of coals down along the waterfalls. Amazing! Everyone would stop and sing the Indian Love Call while they did it.
Apparently the workers at the restaurant and the camps were very social. A lot of people fell in love. I can believe it.
It’s a great place.