Z is for...

This is my last entry for the Alphabet Game. I am finally at 'Z'. Unlike my friend Jane of the messy hair, from whom I got this idea, who finished her series in a timely fashion, it has taken me 1 year, 9 months, 15 days to get through mine. Once again, if you haven't been following along all this time and would like to see the other entries, there is a link on my side bar under the heading 'stuff about me'. If you are from the link, keep clicking on 'older posts' at the bottom until you finally get to A.

Z is for...zany, zebra, zone, zipper

Z is for zipper.

I have a pet peeve. It's one shared by many people, I think, only my peeve is in direct opposition to theirs.

The peeve in question is how drivers act when approaching a lane ending sign on a highway.

Quite a few people believe that as soon as they see that sign they should, must, move over to the lane that continues even if it doesn't end for another 500 or 1000 yards. They dutifully move over as the traffic gets slower and slower as it approaches the merge point.

And they get angrier and angrier as they sit there 'doing the right thing' in their minds while other drivers speed on by to the merge point. A lot of road rage is generated this way with some people in the continuing lane edging over to try to prevent drivers from passing them in the lane that is ending further up.

I don't get that. What is the purpose of abandoning a perfectly good lane long before it ends just to get slowed down to a near stop as you creep toward the merge point? Perhaps they see it as good manners on their part and bad manners on the other driver's part.

Me? I'm one of those drivers that speed along to the merge point and then move over.

There are also overpasses where highways intersect that take you from one freeway to another, and these ramps often start out as two lanes and merge down to one. No one is moving over long before they get on the ramp even knowing it will merge down to one lane. No one gets upset, no road rage, no one trying to prevent other drivers from passing them before the merge point. The two lanes simply merge at the merge point and people continue on.

It's like a zipper. You take turns. One car from this lane, one car from that lane, one car from this lane, one car from that lane. Easy.

So why is it different when a freeway or highway or even a surface road loses a lane and traffic must merge? Because there is a sign that alerts you to the loss of a lane?

It's a zipper, people! Just keep going til you merge at the merge point. Be polite, take turns, don't be a jackass if you choose to move over early and get slowed down by the drivers passing you and merging before you.

Now, those people who use the shoulders to pass a long line of slow traffic and then barge in in front of drivers in an actual lane is totally different.

I'm all for paint balling them as they pass.

If I had a paint ball gun that is.

Y is for...

sun salutation

This is the second to last entry in my alphabet game. If you want to read them all, there is a link on my side bar under the Stuff About Me heading but you'll have to scroll down all the way to the bottom to get them in the proper sequence. Not that it really matters.

Y is for...yellow, yarrow, youth, yoga

Y is for yoga

I was introduced to yoga when I was 20 years old...I think. It could have been a year or so earlier when I was initiated into TM (that's transcendental meditation) when I was 19 but I don't really remember any instruction in yoga, just sitting in the group sessions or alone at home with legs crossed trying to ignore how uncomfortable I was becoming. The meditation thing didn't last long with me. I was only successful with it a time or two. Mostly I just fell asleep or was fidgety trying to focus on my mantra til the time was up.

But the following year, the year I lived in Chicago, some friends and I hitch-hiked to D.C. for the anti-war rally and we met some folk who were involved in Ananda Marga, a meditation group with a different spiritual leader than TM. I had become disenchanted with TM early on because they were very much about the money. They charged you to be initiated into their organization.

In D.C., my boyfriend and I had become separated from our friends and we were waiting, had been waiting for a while, at the designated 'meet up again' spot when we were approached by a couple of guys offering us respite and an eye out for our friends.

They offered us food and water and a bathroom and rest, united us with the rest of our group and found us a ride back. They asked for nothing in return. Neither did they try to convert us or entice us in any way but they were so serene and selfless and kind and you name it and so we learned some stuff about who they were. Which I am not going into now because this isn't really about them.

It happened that there were only three teachers in this country at the time who were qualified to initiate anyone into their 'meditative' life and one of them lived in Chicago. So one evening found some of us at the home of an Indian man and his family while he talked to us about his spiritual leader and meditation and yoga and then he led us in some simple yoga to relax our bodies and he initiated us one by one into meditation with a mantra. I don't remember if it was all on the same night or if it was the second time we went but what I do remember is that while he softly spoke to us, his aura expanded with a bright white light until it filled the room. Seriously. It was awesome.

My friend and I continued to go once a week for a while but we had to take the train out to a suburb and it was in the evenings because the man had a regular job and then a few months later I moved back to Texas. I did not become an adherent to the Indian guru but I did retain the yoga and the mantra.

Even though I've never been able to develop a daily or even weekly home practice I find yoga to be very beneficial and it's one of the things or habits that I attribute my fairly good health to. It keeps you limber and agile and strengthens your muscles. It massages your organs and helps them function, it rids you of toxins through measured breathing and teaches you to pay attention to your body.

I have used meditation and yoga sporadically as needed or as opportunity presented itself in my life. For the past 20 years or so I have been involved in one or another weekly gatherings with a teacher, though not always every week or even every year.

My most recent weekly get together was in the home of a wonderful amazing woman who would lead a small group of friends in yoga and meditation. Alas, she moved to New Orleans to be near her daughter and her family.

It's been over two years now since I have done any yoga on a regular basis and I can feel the difference. Out here though my options are limited so I best find a way to set aside a little time one day a week at home if I want to continue being able to get up off the floor.

Not that I'm on the floor a lot unless I'm doing yoga.

X is for...

(I may or may not return to the genealogy, the third post I mentioned. Right now I'm busy so I'm going for the easy out.)

a xebec

X is for X

Do you know that my very old dictionary which I still use even though the cover and the first couple of pages are missing (and the back cover is not in any great shape either and I'm pretty sure a couple of the pages are taped in), given to me by a neighbor (she owned a bookstore) as a high school graduation present (that would be 1968), only has one page of words for the letter X?

It begins with:

x n 1 a : the 24^th letter of the english alphabet b : a graphic representation of this letter c : a speech counterpart of orthographic x  2 : TEN  3 : a graphic device for reproducing the letter x  4 : one designated x esp. as the 24^th in order or class when order and class, the 23^rd in order or class when j is not used, the 21^st in order or class when j, v and w are not used or the first in an order or class that includes x, y and sometimes z  5 a : an unknown quantity  6 : something shaped like or marked with the letter X

and ends with:

xylotomy n : the art of preparing sections of wood for microscopic examination

in between are these:

xebec n : a usu. 3-masted Mediterranean sailing ship with long overhanging bow and stern

xeric adj : low or deficient in available moisture for the support of life

xiphoid adj 1 : shaped like a sword 2 : of, relating to, or being the xiphisternum (you're going to have to look that one up yourself)

xylan n : a yellow gummy pentosan present in plant cell walls and woody tissue

xylography n : the art of engraving on wood or of taking impressions from engravings so made

Now, don't you feel smarter?

PS. if you want to read all the alphabet entries, there is a link on my sidebar under 'stuff about me'.

W is for...

W is for...watermelon, wind, whittle, whistle

W is for whistle

Did I mention I collect whistles?

I can’t whistle. Not pursing and blowing, not sucking in, not using two fingers placed strategically in the mouth, not no how. Well, rather, I can do all those things. Silently. Whatever the genetic code or the shape of mouth and throat or the neurons that connect the brain with the tongue, whatever it is that makes people be able to whistle, I don’t have that.

my first whistle

So if I want to be heard I have to yell really loud, which I’m pretty good at, or use a whistle. Not that I actually use whistles. But at some point I got interested in them.

By interested, I don’t mean find out how they work or how to make one. What I mean is...look at all those different whistles! And for some reason, I decided to collect them.

It wasn't really a conscious decision and I didn't announce to the world that that's what I was doing because we all know what happens when people find out you collect something. That's all you ever get until you're sick of it.

But I did tell my grandkids to be on the lookout for whistles and quite a few of them have been confiscated come from their hands. The others I picked up here and there at craft shows or little stores or resale shops.

These are all ceramic. The leopard god and the brightly colored oval from Peru are more rightly ocarinas since they have four or more holes. Apparently there's some disagreement about the difference between a whistle and an ocarina. The man in his bunny suit has three holes, the whistling face next to him has two as does the little barrel on the cord, and the little white fish or frog or whatever it is has one. The little peanut shaped one in the very front is the smallest whistle I have and also the loudest and most shrill.

These are all made out of wood. The bird has two tones since it also has one hole. When you press down on the crest it covers the hole and changes the note. The dark brown one right next to it plays two different notes at the same time. The bamboo is a slide whistle, the tone changing as you pull out or push in the stick at the end. The bee on the left was made by an artist who carves these whimsical sort of groupings and all the pieces are whistles. The little dragonfly makes more of a buzzing sound.

The stick in the back was whittled by a very clever man I had the great good fortune to know for a couple of years until our paths split off. It was, after he finished it, a working whistle but it would only work while the wood was still green. The next day the stick had dried out and it no longer worked.

I took another picture of it since you can't see the business end in the group shot.

These are all metal with the exception of the deer antler on the right. The antler is equally as shrill as the little clay peanut. The long one in back is another slide whistle. I once tried to whistle the Star Spangled Banner on it without much success. The brass and copper on the left is a bosun whistle, next to it is a dog whistle (I should have opened it), and next to that is an 'authentic' English Bobbie's whistle.

These are all plastic. That long yellow straw like thing in the back is not intended to be a whistle I don't think. I'm not sure what it was supposed to be but it does whistle if you blow in it. The orange one on the left makes more of a siren sound, the bright green also blows two tones at the same time. When you blow on the one bottom left, the little windmill turns and the circle next to it is another kind of dog whistle I think. Of the three common plastic whistles, the white one came off a Ukrainian life jacket (long story) and the dark green one came from the army. Neither one blows very loud.

They've been packed away since we moved because I didn't want to put them back in the secretary where they had been because it was dark and hard to see them. I finally have a little display case to put them in but it's from a resale shop and needs some repair.

I've picked a few to demonstrate for you.

antler whistle:

plastic siren whistle:

wood two note train whistle:

metal slide whistle:

gray ceramic whistle:

V is for...

Really, it's time I plowed on through and finished this alphabet thing, don't you think?

V is for....vasectomy

Marc and I decided early on, like most people in love and starting out their life together, that we wanted two kids, a boy and a girl, and we wanted them two years apart. And then we got exactly that. Two years and three days after our daughter was born, our son was born and it was time to go back on birth control.

We knew we didn't want any more kids and I didn't tolerate birth control pills well and the IUD I had had previously caused me to be in severe pain for the first day or two of my periods and those were basically the only two options for birth control available at the time besides condoms, which we had used between pregnancies, or a diaphragm, neither one of which we were thrilled about using. Sterilization or abstinence was the only sure way to avoid pregnancy and I don't know about y'all but abstinence was not an option.

Sterilization for women was serious business. Back then it was major surgery with hospitalization and anesthesia to get your tubes tied. Now, with the advances in medical technology, it's a much simpler out-patient procedure and there are several choices. You can get them cut, pinched, or plugged.

For us, hospitalization was out of the question and since vasectomy was the only available simple inexpensive out-patient procedure at the time and Marc's sense of manhood and virility was not centered on his ability to deliver sperm whether he wanted more kids or not, he made the appointment.

A bit of topical anesthesia, a little cut, a little snip, a little stitch and we were out of there in less than an hour.

Vasectomies were not that common back then. Just about all of our male friends were horrified at the very thought of 'cutting off their manhood'. Ironically, these same men had no problem with their wives undergoing major surgery to 'cut off their womanhood'. Just one of the many double standards women faced back then.

I don't know how men in general feel about vasectomy these days. Now that we have entered our 60s, the topic of avoiding unwanted pregnancy doesn't ever seem to come up. I would hope though that any man who is certain he does not want to be a father, takes the matter into his own hands and gets himself sterilized instead of expecting his female partners to be responsible for avoiding pregnancy.

All I can say is, Marc's vasectomy was the best thing to happen to our sex life and I thank him for it.

U is for...

Image via http://www.buzzfeed.com/provincialelitist/keep-your-boehner-out-of-my-uterus

U is for uterus.

I give you fair warning, this post is about a very controversial subject.

There was a march on our state's capitol recently by the anti-choice crowd, you know the type, the ones who want to make your decisions for you and then leave you to handle the consequences by yourself, the ones who champion the unborn but can't be bothered with the born.

Somehow, their religious convictions tell them that it's OK for them to be that way, that it's OK to insert themselves in the private lives and circumstances of other women, to interfere and thwart and then leave them with the mess while they go interfere in someone else's life. They can't be bothered with the results of their interference. Unwanted children are still unwanted, often resented, abused or abandoned, causing meager resources to be further stretched affecting all.

It would be so much easier to take those anti-choice people seriously if they were out there adopting all the unwanted children that are already here or at least making sure that they have access to adequate food, housing, and healthcare. I posted as much on my FB page to which I received this comment: It's about believing life is sacred, period.

I don't really have an argument with that but life doesn't begin until birth with that first breath of air. A baby who grows in the womb, who is born and does not breathe is not alive. A fetus in the womb is the potential for life but it is not alive and it is kept growing and developing by grace of it's mother's blood and oxygen. Yes, a fetus responds to stimulus. So does a nerve bundle growing in a petrie dish.

I find them not pro-life so much as anti-choice. Because once it is indeed a life and not just the potential for life but an actual living breathing human who needs care, it seems their interest wanes. For all their anti-choice stand you would think that they would be for sex education and making pregnancy prevention devices readily available so that abortion would not be a necessary option but many of these same people are against this as well.

From this site (a brief fact sheet about who, when and why women get abortions):

88% happen in the first trimester with 61.8% by the first 9 weeks. Only 1.5% of abortions happen after 20 weeks and I would venture to say (but have no documentation to back it up) that the majority of these have to do with saving the mother's life, something else these far right christian people are against. If you get pregnant and something goes wrong, then the living breathing human's life is forfeit. Where's their belief in the sanctity of life then?

The idea that women are going blithely about and having abortions because they can't be bothered to prevent pregnancy or raise the ensuing child assuming it makes it to full term is not just ridiculous, it's ludicrous. It is a terribly personal decision, some more easily made than others perhaps but I would not ever begin to impose my judgement about this on someone else. It is none of my business. Period.

And so I say to all the anti-choice people out there...

Don't want an abortion? Don't get one. And I promise I will never force you to get one as long as you never prevent me from getting one if I so wish.

Do not presume to tell me that you are right and I am wrong especially when your 'truth' comes from a book of myths written to promote a particular version or vision of 'god' that I do not share instead of scientific data.

Do not presume to claim the moral high ground just because I do not believe in your version of god and creation because I am no more interested in christian sharia law than I am muslim sharia law.

U is for uterus. Step away from mine.

T is for...

T is for...tree houses

I think we moved from the house I was born in to the house I grew up in when I was about 6 or 7. Well, I wasn't actually born in the house but it was the house my parents lived in when I was born in the hospital like all good modern babies were.

We moved from a post-war housing neighborhood to a custom built home on one acre in a neighborhood carved out of a pine forest across Buffalo Bayou from the heavily wooded and mostly undeveloped (then) forest of Memorial Park. We didn't actually live on the bayou but it was a short walk down the street and through the yard of a house that did back onto the bayou.

A couple of years after we moved, my father built us kids a tree house. He selected three large pines on the wooded side of our acre so that our tree house was triangular in shape and built maybe 10' off the ground, perhaps 6' x 10' on two of the three sides. The only picture I have of it is the one in my head so I'm guessing at any and all dimensions. It had a board ladder nailed to the trunk of one of the supporting pines, low walls probably 3' high and was roofed and sided with cedar shakes.

Well, probably he built the tree house for my brother, but I spent many an hour up there.

Like all kids in all neighborhoods we would, every so often, divide up into factions and war on each other. Every year after christmas, we would make and raid each other's christmas tree forts but what I really remember were the pine cone wars. Not for the meek were they. They would always start in someone's yard, pine cones were plentiful and hurt like the devil if one of the missiles hit their mark, but once we retreated to the tree house, we were unbeatable. We had not only the advantage of high ground but we also kept a stockpile of the closed hard prickly pine cones up there.

Eventually, as we all grew older, the tree house was abandoned and after we were all grown, my parents sold the house. A high rise stands now where our house and the tree house once stood. The woods and fields we played in are also gone.

I've never lost my love of tree houses, gained though watching many a Tarzan movie, and I sometimes wish we had moved out to the country sooner. Any one of the three large pecans in the big back yard or even the tallow in the little back yard would hold a small tree house. I fear the grandkids are already too old though for one to hold much mystery for them.

While the one we had as kids was quite simple, I could easily live in one of these.

If you would like to catch up on the rest of my alphabet posts, click on the link on my side bar. It's up there near the top under 'stuff about me'.

S is for...

image via:  http://sensualdanceart.com/2010/11/02/organic-sex/

S is for sex! (now you didn't really expect me to pass this up, did you?)

I'm almost afraid to post this as I already get an avalanche of search engine hits from the repressed middle east for my naughty nakedness N post.

I want to thank Europe for sending all the prudes over to the New World.

Not really.

For all the near nudity and come hither of Madison Avenue ads, America is still one uptight country when it comes to sex.

When I was growing up sex outside of marriage was tawdry, dirty, meaningless, not to mention shameful. And many Americans still feel that way today.

It hasn't been all that long ago when 'nice' people did not talk about sex.

Kids were kept in the dark as if talking about it would ensure that they went out and did it. As if keeping them ignorant about it would keep them from doing it. Of course all it did was make sure that teenagers got pregnant and got married right out of high school.

There are still battles every couple of years in my state over sex education in schools. There are parents who still pull their children out of those classes. My sister-in-law was outraged that the students were going to be shown how to wrap that rascal with a condom and a banana. Or maybe it was a cucumber. I don't know that that was actually going on in the lesson on human sexuality but she sure was ranting and raving about it. Mostly ending with 'not my daughter'.

Abstinence, they say is the only way. But let's face it, sex is the strongest biological imperative there is. People are going to have sex, married or not. And teens are going to have sex because their young plump little bodies are oozing pheromones. It's why abstinence doesn't work. Life wants to replicate. Life demands to replicate. And it's pretty damn good at breaking down resistance.

Besides that, it feels really good, it's a great stress reliever, good for your abs and cardiovascular system. When you are poor, it's one of the few forms of entertainment available to you. There was even a time when sex was one of the ways you worshipped the gods. Many people still do...oh god, oh god, oh god, oh do that again!

But then women became property and their vaginas were used to further family fortunes and positions, to secure inheritance and descendents, male descendents if you don't mind and nobody cared if we were having fun. Virginity became the only measure of a woman's worth. Well, that and having boy babies.

So what's up with that, btw? What is the big deal about a woman's virginity?

I abstained from sex until I graduated from high school and let me tell you, it wasn't easy. I had to break up with my boyfriend as our petting sessions were getting a *little* heated. It wasn't because I wanted to save myself for marriage, like all good girls were supposed to do when I was a teenager, but because I simply did not want to get pregnant in high school. I personally knew of 4 girls who got pregnant in high school and I didn't know that many people. Living at home was hard enough without throwing that into the mix.

After I graduated though (this was in 1968), I determined to do it the next opportunity that came along. Love had nothing to do with it, it was just a thing to be shed of by then and one of the best decisions I ever made concerning love and sex and believe me, I made plenty of bad ones.

From that point on and armored with the new birth control pills, well, let's just say if Jimi Hendrix had asked me 'are you experienced?', I'd have to have said...

emphatically

Yes!

edit:  oops!  on my computer the 'pertinent parts' are in deep shadow.  I have just been informed that that is not necessarily the case on everyone's computer.  So my apologies to any who have been offended by the sight.  I'd alter it or take it down or at least make it smaller but that would seem a little cowardly since it's already been up there for half a day and besides, it doesn't offend me at all.