There have been times when I have vomited words onto paper and never looked at them again or allowed others to look at them.

When I began to journal publicly, though, I developed a completely different relationship with my own writing and the audience. In fact, because I know so much about my audience through the journal community, I am very sensitive to how my words will be received. It is as if sometimes I limp, or favor an elbow…my writing altered by whether it will hurt or affect some larger part of my body. All the while, though, I rely on that audience to bring the words to life. Because, honestly, I can write privately forever…but those creations cannot come to life until someone else has read them…and I, as a writer, am not real flesh and blood, until that need has been appeased. (Although I am certainly flesh and blood as a teacher, or a daughter, or what have you. I cannot be a writer, however, until I have readers.)

That very statement is what made me buy the book.

These are good answers. Coolio.

Yes, you can hit Alt-Esc to make all the open windows disappear and then the desktop is visible but I personally still find that tiresome compared to the sliding drawers. And it does nothing to address the inevitable randomization of the desktop icons.

That, and if you have any program open and maximized you can’t get to the desktop icons to do something else. With the tabs, everything that would otherwise be at least one more semi-annoying click away is right there. More semi-annoying clicks if you have more than one program maximized. Even on a 3GHz machine, the Start->Program menu takes an annoyingly long time to draw because it (stupidly) doesn’t cache the little icons ahead of time.

Anyway, it’s good for me. YMMV.

Wow… what crawled up your *** and died? ;-) I had no idea that your feelings on the matter had become so polarized. It’s clear the guy is a bit perturbed because someone using Outlook sent him a copy of SoBig and it eventually destroyed his entire mailbox; we’d all be more than a little upset about that.

Emotional entwinings aside, have you tried Mozilla Thunderbird since 1.0 was released (not so long ago)? Or are there features unique to Outlook that you enjoy? Not that I’m trying to convince you to muck with your email again — I know what a perturbing history you’ve had yourself with mailboxes — but it doesn’t hurt to take a look at new stuff now and then. Granted, Outlook 2K3 is much better than previous versions. It bugs me just because the database format is non-portable and eventually gets altered to the point where if you don’t commit to being “locked in” to Outlook forever the files eventually will be unreadable. I know it’s prehistoric, but there’s something to be said for plain ol’ ascii text flat files. In a corporate environment with terabytes of email a database format makes sense; not for home users, though.

Recently there have been viruses for Linux and security issues for Mozilla/Firefox. I’m curious about if every hacker on the net set their sights on screwing over either of these…whether their security would stand up to the scrutiny.

There’s definitely a reason Microsoft products are targeted: they’re easy to find, and they’re always wholly insecure out of the box and tend to stay that way. The average time-to-infection for a Windows box on the Internet is down to something like 12 minutes. Some Linux distributions are pretty bad too but they all give enough time to download patches to close the holes. Then again, anyone not behind a firewall, not running on the same Windows machine, of some kind doesn’t deserve any sympathy but then these are the very people propogating virii at nausea-inducing rates. People like you, chrys, are the exception to the rule, but the exceptions are only a few percent of the total — not something to discourage by any means but also far from adequate.

As for the Mozilla/Linux stuff, there’s also one other significant difference between them and Windows: the vast majority of Windows users run the box as a user with administrator privileges — this is Microsoft’s’ fault entirely and is really the biggest possible security hole one could imagine on that OS — but the alternative “restricted” account is basically unusable and this is reflective of the fact that the entire operating system was not designed to be secure. At least on the Linux/Unix boxes, potential damage is limited to the user’s home directory, and this is the advantage of having evolved from systems designed to be multi-user and secure. If a Windows user were to install Linux, the only exposure to the root account they’d have, by default, would be setting the password during the installation process; every distribution I’ve ever used forces a non-root user be set up at the same time and, typically, that’s what gets used — if you login to XWindows as root there’s lots of bright red stuff and dialog boxes warning you not to do that. If Windows had a usable alternative non-administrator-privileged account, and complained when one with those privileges was used, maybe we could make a dent in the virii propogation… at least until the bad guys figure out a way around that; $deity knows there are plenty of ways now.

Of course there’d be more break-ins and virii in the wild if any other OS had a larger market share; that’s just natural. But let’s not forget that Linux in particular is not a trivial presence on the Internet; it runs millions of web servers (check out Netcraft for statistics) so there’s not really any shortage of target machines exposed to the Internet.

Windows is the target of choice first because it’s easy, second because there’s more of it on desktops than anything else (for now).

I’ll admit, I’m not really a fan of messy desktops and find myself continually rearranging my own. I’d probably like the whole sliding tab thing…but I can’t find a way to justify another way of opening the same program.

Yeah, this guy can bite me. I am not going to defend Microsoft’s continual failure to fix security issues, but boycotting mail from the most popular e-mail clients on the net is cutting off your nose to spite your face. It may well be an act of protest, but it isn’t one I am particularly impressed with.

I’m joe average user. My e-mail client is Outlook 2003. It is scanned not just by my personal anti-virus software with worm scanning, but it is sent somewhere else and scanned at another location provided as a free service through my ISP. Fool proof I’m sure it isn’t…but these are reasonable and honorable precautions.

Recently there have been viruses for Linux and security issues for Mozilla/Firefox. I’m curious about if every hacker on the net set their sights on screwing over either of these…whether their security would stand up to the scrutiny.

I give my credit card numbers, social security number, and license number to a dozen people a month, though, online or off…with the same faith.

This isn’t the same as a blog site getting indexed by Google, by sheer scale alone. In your entire life, you won’t directly share sensitive personal info with as many people as can see a web site in an hour. Such as jimbala.net…, for an easy example; as far as popularity goes it’s a lame site based on the daily hit count, but since Jan 1 2005 more people have seen the front page than all the people who’ve directly obtained personal info from me in 34 years.

Imagine if you had a public blog site with a couple years of posts (minimum 1-2 posts/week on average which is really low) where you freely discussed deeply personal things. Any single post, or even three or four, containing personal details (pet name, mother’s name, etc) isn’t a huge deal, though it’s also non-trivial. Consider those 200 posts in aggregate. If just 10% of them contain sensitive personal info (assuming no duplication), that’s more than enough for some extremely easy social engineering to get access to the juicy stuff like financial info. You might be amazed just how much identity theft is initiated this way (not from blog-posted info necessarily, just from one bit of personal info being discovered somewhere).

Identity theft is already bad if the most conservative estimates are remotely accurate and of course will only get worse with time. The continued use of, for example, the last-four-digits of your SSN as the sole way to authenticate a person’s identity will within 5 years be the quickest and easiest way to become someone else. I won’t even mention how most credit card companies’ self-serve customer service lines want merely the billing zip code to authenticate you. The amount of information divulged by the self-serve lines varies from nothing useful to very useful and that’s just my personal experience with a handful of them.

Want scarier than that? Anyone with Internet access, your license plate # from your car, less than $200, and the balls to do a little social engineering can have your drivers’ license number and SSN within 24 hours without breaking a sweat. Then they get your credit report well within the next 7 days. If they work or know someone who works in the debt-collection industry, to say nothing of anything related to law enforcement, there’s even easier access to even more info in less time.

The really shitty part is that even if they get caught, you’re still screwed basically for life because there’s no real system in place to help ID theft victims recover, in part because your personal data is spread so far and wide — and as we all know, computers never lie or provide false information (yeah right) — but probably more because it’s expensive and extremely complicated to implement any such system. Ultimately, for the victim it means new SSN (along with updating/replacing anything that uses it as part of your ID), drivers’ license, credit cards, possibly refiling some tax returns under the new SSN; if you’re married, spouse needs to do some work too because the SSNs are forever connected and their credit report has probably also been damaged if the ID thief used any joint-account information.

Hopefully within 5 years there will be a better system in place to help people recover but I’m not holding my breath unless some big-wig politician or Microsoft executive gets a personal taste of ID theft; I say this simply because before that happens it won’t be important enough to become a priority for the government or any part of the corporate world that has the power to control the issue. The always-infamous “Someone Else’s Problem” syndrome.

I heavily filter most of my entries with any identifying data, career information, or adult topics. (I have a friend filter, an adult filter, a food filter, a close filter, and a few filters that go to specific individuals. I love the filter feature of LJ) Again, that is with the faith that the admins aren’t evil.

I give my credit card numbers, social security number, and license number to a dozen people a month, though, online or off…with the same faith.

The only issue I ever had with LJ, or any other online journal (hosted by someone else), is that there’s nothing on the backend preventing someone with access going Postal(tm) and reading/stealing/mutilating/etc anyone’s content; i.e., no encryption. That said, having seen the code firsthand as of a couple of years ago, there wasn’t (and probably isn’t) any practical way of offering that bit of protection. Call it a geek thing if you like, but don’t call it irrelevant.

Additionally, but separately, I’m way too f-cking paranoid about publishing the sort of personal details generally found on LJ. Anything on the ‘net eventually gets found by Google and then it’s more or less forever. With the sorry state of affairs with identity-theft prevention — web sites using birth cities, pet names, mother’s maiden name, former addresses/phone numbers, etc for authentication — it’s a heckuva lot easier to not say anything than worry about what tidbits of information you might reveal that, collectively over the course of a year or two, would be a goldmine to some unscrupulous loser. It bugs me that I’m that paranoid about it, but maybe it’s just heightened awareness because I know what’s out there and how easy it is to get all of anyone’s personal information if you can get at least one item on your own; no sense making it too easy for them. Still… sucks bologna. :P

I’m a paid member of LJ. I don’t know if I’ll re-subscribe in April. I’ll be watching the changes very carefully.

When I started reading your blog and your link to other blogs, I was pretty baffled, having been used to the extremely tight knit communities on LJ that talk not only about politics but about deeply personal, touching, life-changing things.

LJ has a flavor that I’ve not seen in any other online community. Interestingly enough, even though most of my entries are filtered for friends or for sub-categories on my friends list…I still manage to pick up totally new readers ever few months.

LJ is a way to share your lives with people. All the other blogs I see just seem to be a way to share your thoughts. Or share someone else’s thoughts.

Thanks for the link. I posted it in my LJ.

The ’stingy’ remarks are overblown by the media and are bound to make us feel defensive. But this “America does it better than anyone else” is unhelpful.

;)

Yeah. Got it. Heard it a few times. Shouted it a few times, too. Let it go for God’s sake.

The key is ‘respect’. Not ‘respect for expertise’, but respect period. If there are people working in these groups who are not being respectful…I don’t care if they are ‘the unwashed masses’ or the ‘experts’, boot their asses on out of there.

It’s a simple matter and its got nothing to do with elitism. Once a simple environment of respect exists, nobody will need to worry about ‘respect for expertise’…it will already exist.

I’ve been curious about what kind of help was being given to assure tourists that actually survived found their way back home. You know, I haven’t seen CNN cover this at all.

I gave blood yesterday, too. O-

I’ve been watching Anderson Cooper on CNN covering the Tsunami. Amid stories from tourists who survived, supermodels who hung on to trees for 8 hours, and scuba divers who were underwater when the waves came in, there are pictures and stories of dead babies and grief-stricken parents. I watch, mesmerized, tears welling up in my eyes…thinking…I should turn this off.

Then Cooper comes on and he says something to the tune of “We are receiving e-mails already that tell us that people don’t want to see these kinds of pictures of the dead babies.” He then says that while nobody wants to see these kinds of pictures, it is what is happening.

And I try to process this. Should I be outraged that CNN is showing us dead babies? Should I be outraged that they might consider showing less of them because of the complaints? Am I appalled that the news media is sensationalizing the situation? Am I relieved that these tragic, horrifiying pictures finally evoke some emotion in me…finally touch something within me that makes me think about the tragedy in a way I simply hadn’t been able to before? These pictures…justified or unjustifiable…make me think of this disaster in the terms of individual humans. The face of one dead child. The wailing of one grieving parent. I’ve sorted through some pictures on the web, carefully chosen so that they show the damage in economic terms. They show destroyed buildings and debris strewn everywhere. In providing understanding, though, they cannot compare to the image of a mass grave or a broken child or a father’s face distorted by a wail.

These are brief images, interspersed in some surreal manner with the image of a preening supermodel, the only footage they must have of this star who survived the tsunami by hanging on in a tree.

24 hour live news coverage.

I don’t want to see this stuff, but it is what is happening. Thank God all -I- have to do is turn it off.

The recording industry has consistently failed to either take into account or conveniently neglects to mention one important fact:

- If someone obtains a digital pirated copy of some music and would not have otherwise purchased it anyway, they are not taking money from any one, except the cost of bandwidth which would be used even if they’d obtained a non-pirated digital copy (say from iTunes).

Aside from all that, though, the RIAA is just scared of new technology because they don’t understand how to take undue advantage of it. Same thing happened when VCRs came out (with the MPAA).

As for the essay, I thought it rather sucked for the reasons you enumerated. I thought, “Crap like this gets anyone an ‘A’, in high-school?” Not that I was or am an excellent writer, but at 16 I could at least get ‘I-before-E’ (he consistently misspelled ‘thieves’ as ‘theives’).

I probably would have passed this paper with all the same arguments and comments that the teacher made…but I’m not sure that is actually the best thing to do. In fact I suspect passing this paper based on effort and creativity is a little over-indulgent for a student that can most likely write a much higher caliber paper than this.

Aside from the fact that I’m disturbed at the idea of ‘gated community’ becoming some standard symbol or image in American metaphor, this is really the crux of it all. More and more, lately, I am reminded of the necessity of treating others with dignity and compassion. This is really just another case of that.

As someone who recently had a very serious need to contact her ex-husband, I can also understand the need to reach out and once again touch some of the colassal fuck-ups in our lives.

Most of the Wiccans I know really like Halloween and all the trappings that come with it. Costume parties, The Witch’s Ball, and a myriad of other costumey celebrations are enjoyed by witches, pagans, and mundanes alike.

Granted, there is usually time for a separate and reverent celebration of Samhain…much in the same way that Christians celebrate Christmas in many ways that go beyond decorating a tree and sitting on Santa’s lap.

Anyway…this is odd. It’s odd because it is a step in the right direction in theory…but silly in practice.

On a related (but not so related) note…The British Military is allowing one of its members to register as a Satanist. Now, I’m not a particularly big fan of Satanism…in fact, the theory and religion irritates the bejeebers out of me…but this is, again, a step in the right direction of recognizing that not everyone fits neatly into a religious category…and that freedom of religion shouldn’t be a lofty theory…it should be everyday practice.

The point this article made about Ford and blogs by people working on the cars as opposed to some official press release is a good one. There are issues all over the place with this, though.

Allowing your employees to do your PR requires that you 1) have happy employees and 2) Trust those employees to convey that happiness.

Blogs at their best eliminate the opportunity for a company to control their PR machine.

Blogs at their worst are just another part of the PR machine and are filled with propaganda and the company line. I mean…why not just -hire- someone to blog for your company. It can be their full time position.

In a country filled with people that value their freedom and first amendment rights, we’ve become total weenies when it comes to letting our employers take away our liberties. I’m as guilty as anyone. It is in my contract that I can’t talk to the press about my job without clearing it through our PR person. And yes…we HAVE a PR person…and she has damned near as much power as any of my official bosses.

I think they’ll continue to do well as long as they stick to their principles. People, as they’ve been conditioned to do, will be wary until their trust is duly earned rather than coerced (Microsoft anyone?). Actions speak louder than any We-Reserve-the-Right-to-Crap-on-You-Without-Notice privacy policy.

What are your thoughts on Google? I mean, it seems like when a company gets this big and this good at what it is doing…and looks like it might actually make money doing it…the whole geek world suddenly turns against them shaking their fists.

Is there any part of you that is concerned/annoyed at Google’s success?

Indeed.

I’m remarkably drama-free at the moment…although not in the least bit bored or boring. (At least not in my opinion) ;)

It’s not that I’m bored, or boring per se; just, I suppose, suburban, except for the 2.5 kids. When I think about what to blog, I look for things that are different from what most other people see or do every day and lately, I think, there’s been a lack of ‘different’. It’s definitely an observation though and not a complaint. Trust me, I know how to make life interesting if I want to, heh; as long as there are women in my life, this is no magic trick. *duck*

There is no small amount of irony in the fact that when I first met you ever, I declared vehemently that I liked my life boring.

I haven’t been bored since.

So…be careful what you say about this anhydrous interlude. ;)

I will point you, however, to George Lakoff at UC Berkeley who has had a lot to say lately about the way Conservatives phrase things so as to win public opinion. Lakoff is a cognitive linguist. I have a couple of his books, (one of which is Moral Politics) but I have not read them yet. From what I gather, one of his main premises is that the language and catch phrasing that the Republicans use are putting them far above their opponents…and that Dems and Liberals are going to have to fight back at the same linguistic level if they want to reverse the effects.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/08/25_lakoff.shtml

(ī´nōd) (n.) Data structures that contain information about files in Unix file systems that are created when a file system is created. Each file has an inode and is identified by an inode number (i-number) in the file system where it resides. inodes provide important information on files such as user and group ownership, access mode (read, write, execute permissions) and type.

You had to know I would look this up. And now I am intrigued. As a big fan of totem animals and spirit guides, I am curious now about the symbolism of geekdom.

I like the banner and the name. May all your symbols serve as Muses.

I consider ‘geek’ a term of affection and ‘nerd’ a complete insult. I have no idea how those words began to take on those connotations for me, though.

I entered this one because it looked intriguing and I knew you’d have some valuable input with respect to it. I did not, however, read his entire paper; only the Slashdot review which was apparently a mistake (not because it got you riled up but because the review clearly omitted some very significant points).

And I know it’s your journal and you marked this for future perusal…etc…etc…

But dammit, now I’m all riled up.

This guy calls his work ’speculative history’ and a ‘work of intuition.’ And then he warns us that he isn’t particularly concerned about the facts: “No doubt I’ve made some factual mistakes, but essays since Montaigne have been about locating truth, not about assembling facts. Truth and fact aren’t the same thing.”

And then he blantanly spells out his objective: ” My essay is meant to mark out crudely some ground for a scholarship of schooling, my intention is that you not continue to regard the official project of education through an older, traditional perspective, but to see it as a frightening chapter in the administrative organization of knowledge—a text we must vigorously repudiate as our ancestors once did. ”

His intention, from the beginning, is to tell lies that are big enough to frighten and outrage us. We are supposed to look at education with a whole new perspective…his. For a man who is talking about critical thinking and education as a tool to dumb down society, he doesn’t seem to be leaving much room for his readers to think for themselves. Seems to me he’s feeding us the same shit with a different spoon.

Our education system deserves all kinds of criticism for all kinds of cruelties and misdeeds. I cannot disagree with that. I am one of the system’s loudest critics and at times one of the most wicked perpetrators of evil deeds. This guy is so very far over the top, however, that he lost credibility with me before I even started on Chapter One.

I followed their advice. I now use Mozilla Firefox.

The scan did find one vulnerability and it is now patched.

Thanks for the link!

These questions are good ones. The brought a few of my own to light.

Is the desire for power and the strength to actually reach out for power more likely to be bred in adverse conditions or in pleasant ones?

SAD itself can manifest itself in so many ways…as depression in general can. In teenagers (and I assume in adults) depression can be just as easily recognized by the anger and aggression it breeds in some people as it is recognized by the listlessness, hopelessness, and indecision it brings about in others.

I suppose I’ve always been a fan of anger and aggression when in a pinch.

The little receipt that could. :-) I can hear it sighing in relief right now, next to me: “Mission Accomplished!” Yesss…good paper. Niiice paper. Precioussss paper…

I particularly like this line of the article: And even though a headline there reading Bandits Raid Homes Demanding Liquor — Cow Women, Seek Whisky contains nary a scare quote, it was too good not to mention.

Using Chris Farley’s SNL routine as support in this article also amused me.

Yes, I am a scare quotes abuser.

National Punctuation Day

The irony of using this day to start out the school year is that…nobody has actually started the school year by this date yet.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves…

This book was on sale at Meijer’s a couple of months ago. I picked it up, read a few very brutal lines…and thought of you. ;-)

(Mmmm. Yes. I abuse the ellipsis, too.)

You know…this weirded me out. I’ve never actually considered that I (we) could have been created by an advanced civilization that does not somehow equal God.

As I was contemplating it, I began thinking…that means that we could advance quickly enough to actually catch up with and become like our creators someday. Then it occurred to me that this actually is sort of my basic belief. We are all God-like. We just haven’t quite developed or figured out how to access our abilities.

And then the thoughts just started melting down completely. I had some flashback of the 1980’s and one of my Middle School Teachers suggesting to us that the whole Universe as we know it was just an atom in a hair in the armpit of some great Cosmic giant.

I think I can find as many reasons to be cynical and wary of ‘Science’ as I am about ‘Religion.’ There are plenty of scientists who are unethical. They lie, cheat, steal, and fabricate information to compete for resources and recognition. The most powerful of scientists seem to gather minions that are vested in making them look good. Governments and Corporations buy Scientists and then demand that their research support particular doctrines. Numbers when statistics are twisted to seem to mean what we want them to mean.

And when is the common man ever really privy to the mysterious workings of Science? We read research articles and other people’s interpretations of what an experiment means in the same way that Catholics were once forbidden to read the Bible for fear that reading it might make them question what the Priests were teaching them. We gather our ideas without any real clear knowledge or understanding of what the actual method or procedure was. We take it on Blind Faith that there weren’t extraneous variables or shoddy investigations. Why are we more likely to trust that a Scientist will be ethical than we are that an evangelist will be?

I’m a fan of Science and God. I’ve read in some of my metaphysical magazines that there’s significant research being done to blend the two. I’ve read in some of the counterarguments that even with all the recent publicity surrounding the “Science of God”, only something like 7% of the Scientists surveyed admitted they believed in a God, so I guess all the Time and Newsweek articles about Proving God isn’t really a fair representation of how many resources are actually being invested in it.

Perhaps, taken together in appropriate proportions, faith and science will get us there, wherever there is.

Yeah. I refuse to believe that I actually have to choose Faith or Science. I’m pretty sure the world will keep spinning if I believe in both. I’m also pretty convinced that the world is just a more interesting place for me to live when I believe in both.

It’s all about perspective. God is someone who understands the workings of stuff that you don’t and makes it look like magic. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Could you imagine taking a “simple” PDA back to merely 1965? Beyond comprehension to most and certainly they lack the technology to figure out how it works. 1915? You’d be burned as a witch, or something. More basic than flashy displays of technology, imagine, if you will, presenting a modern high-school chemistry or metallurgy textbook to, say, Da Vinci (language issues notwithstanding). That would surely earn you at least demi-god status… right before they roast your butt for heresy. Maybe someday you’d get sainthood though.

It’s easy to suppose that a species Out There that’s managed to figure out long-distance space travel, a la Star Trek, and all the accompanying/requisite technology would appear to us as gods.

Having said that, there’s an implication that Creationism, as a principle, has at least enough validity that it can’t be written off out-of-hand. I’m not sure any good scientist does so in light of recent developments (stem cell research, etc) that make it seem plausible that a sufficiently advanced civilization might be able to create just about anything they want to, biological or otherwise. That’s a far cry from creating the Universe in six days, of course. I’m not suggesting that. How far a stretch is it, though, to suggest that humans might be a (runaway) science experiment for some wildly-advanced civilization? We have yet to find the Missing Link, after all, and until we do we’re merely making educated guesses about our origin(s). It’s offensive, naturally, to implicitly trivialize 250,000+ years of homo sapiens existence but that’s purely an emotional response. I’m not saying we’re still a science experiment; that doesn’t mean we never were.

Science is the only process which can reasonably determine these things. Faith/religion may provide a process for introspection and incorporating yourself into the world immediately around you, and that’s something more people would benefit from if it weren’t for 5,000 years of baggage, but it has historically provided little help or means for adequately or accurately explaining any thing in the world or the universe around it.

Perhaps, taken together in appropriate proportions, faith and science will get us there, wherever there is.

The revamping of his theory led Hawking to announce solemnly to science fiction fans everywhere that the new information he had on black holes would make it impossible to ever use a black hole as a way to travel to other universes.

I tell this story because I believe it is an example of how even some of our most brilliant and creative minds in Science are still just kind of banging around in the dark as they try to figure out the keys to both the smallest of particles and the largest of systems. New scientific theories negate old scientific theories daily. In the end, it is the ‘Process’ that is important.

It is easy for any thinking mind to poke holes in religious theory and dogma. Many of us go through stages of downright disdain for the contradictions and riddles inherent in any religious system. In the end, there is nothing logical about them. Some of us find ourselves on the other side of that disdain with a strong and clear skepticism of religion but a very real belief in God. (I personally believe in God when I am thinking with my head and Goddess when I am thinking with my heart. Either way, it is simply a construct representing one concept that helps me create my own way of thinking about and understanding something that is really not understandable.)

Some of it is Faith. A lot of it, though, is Process. See, I set up my own spirituality. I pray/do ritual/do magick. I get results. Maybe they are random results, and I just attribute them to some Higher Order of things. Maybe they aren’t random, but are events completely manipulated by my own intentions, actions, and subconscious. The pantheist in me has no difficult taking God status, and if I am a part of God, why shouldn’t I be able to get results when I put my will to it?

To me, Science and God are not opposite ends of the spectrum…and learning about or understanding both of them requires following a clear and simple Process. Keep your variables to a minimum. Pay attention to what you are doing. If you can repeat the same procedure and end up with the same result with some consistencyBla…you might be on to something.

With all that said, I still have to admit that given the choice between Scully’s “God put it there” and Mulder’s “Aliens put it there” …I’m likely to vote with Mulder every time. ;-)

And, of course, having a series of perceived ‘good’ decisions behind you, future ‘good’ decisions become easier to make both because the reward is known and because the consequences aren’t acceptable.

Yes! Absolutely.

Taking each decision by itself isn’t practical, at least not in the literal sense. There has to be some consideration, fleeting as it may be, of past related decisions. For example, the decision to have a drink after 15 months on the wagon nullifies everything gained by the previous 15 months’ accumulated decisions to not have a drink. And, of course, having a series of perceived ‘good’ decisions behind you, future ‘good’ decisions become easier to make both because the reward is known and because the consequences of a ‘bad’ decision aren’t acceptable.

Hey, Scharffen-Berger is available in a lot more places now. Look at their site for retailers near you. :-)

Every time I act to do or not do something that is physically or emotionally healthy boils down to that particular decision during that particular moment.

The overall committing can be so overwhelming…but take each decision by itself, and well…progress can be made, even after repeated failure.

I probably shouldn’t mention that I’m wishing I had a little Scharfenberger Mocha or Dark to test my resolve. I think, now, it wouldn’t be so bad to fail a few times…

And I’ve also decided I agree with you on the idea that if you eat the good stuff…you don’t really need a whole lot of it to appease the craving…as long as the craving IS for chocolate and not something more ephemeral.

Some kid stopped by my door today selling candy to make money to send himself to youth camp. I looked at his collection of Nestle products and sighed. I handed him $7.00 and told him to keep the chocolate, too.

As for the cards, well… story of my life, isn’t it?

You know, I thought exactly the same thing. ;)

I think I once talked to you about a Medicine Card deck that a friend let me borrow, but it wasn’t a Medicine Woman Deck. In fact, I’ve never seen this deck, but I shall certainly be on the lookout for it. (As if I -need- another deck to add to my collection)

I had wondered if the post was whole or not when I commented. I’ve read both cards several times now and am struck by how it all seems so contradictory one moment as I read it…and then seems to perfectly parallel each other the next.

Either way, they’re pretty words and lovely sentiments.

The last paragraph in the Emperor explanation particularly catches my eye as a theme you awakened as an obsession in me during my visit. The night we were discussing chocolate and diet, you said something to the tune of “It all comes down to making a decision…”

I sort of brushed it off at the time with a comment like, “Yeah, well, everything does.”

But after that conversation, I began to filter a whole bunch of ideas, incidents, worries, anxieties, and hopes through that very simple and practical phrase– “It all comes down to making a decision.”

Funny how the simplest of concepts can suddenly seem so profound.

Funnier how I can make the simplest of comments suddenly long and meandering…oh…and about me. ;-)

So to get back on the appropriate topic…

Any of this Medicine Woman Card praying/advice that you’d like to latch on to?

Don’t you have this deck? Maybe just something like it… if nothing else, it seems like something you’d have. :)

You already know I don’t believe the prayer card was an ‘accident’. I am curious, however, did you get to choose this specific deck or are the Medicine Women Cards the only deck she offered?