Celebrating Today, Today

I just saw on:
http://www.louderbacks.com/home/dict/days.html

that today is Start Your Own Country Day.

which should definitely be a much more important holiday. I say this as someone who LOVES creating nations, and worlds, and races, and cultures, and ecosystems. I also love, with caps but not because it is a bit distracting on the screen, reading about the worlds and nations that other people have created.

I wonder if there is an important difference between starting a country and creating one.

In any case, here is a country:

Ghailan -

Ghailanders are known throughout the world for their mastery of the distillation of poisons. The nation of Ghailan contains vast stretches of tropical forest, with species uncounted -- or at least uncounted by anyone other than the Ghailandish Taxonomists Guild (GTG). The GTG is funded by a small portion of the exorbitant profits made by the sale of completed poisons, which are perfectly legal trade goods in Ghailan, and mostly illegal in the rest of the world. This has also driven a thriving business in items useful for smuggling. While this may make Ghailan sound like a lawless sort of place, nothing is further from the truth. While many things outlawed in other lands are allowed within Ghailan's borders, the policies and laws that do exist are strictly enforced. The cities are pristine, as improper disposal of waste is punishable by public flogging; collection of any natural resources without proper permits or authorizations is considered poaching and receives the death penalty, generally administered by efficacy and dosing testing of novel toxins.


Ouch! not someplace i want to live. strange what flows out after i get one interesting-sounding sentence written.

Bed of Roses

A multicolored bouquet of roses,

wilted, rattling while water sloshes

and the vase gesticulates wildy.

An ant inside clings to a faded stem;

waves crash and thorns fly by,

threatening to impale.

The world upends, the vase hurtles,

hurled away until the harsh hand of gravity

brings a dizzied ant down

into a blooming rosebush.

Eat, Pray, Love

Audrey and I watch Eat Pray Love last night, and it was a nice movie. In summary, this woman played by Julia Roberts encounters a Balinese medicine man who prophesies about her future. Then she gets divorced, apparently for a lack of feeling toward her husband, meets another guy who fails to fulfill her, but introduces her to a Guru and some associated spiritual practices. To get herself away/together/a new appetite for life, she takes a year away and goes to 1)Rome, 2)India to meet the Guru, and 3) to Bali to revisit the medicine man, who promised to teach her some mysticism if she taught him some English. She eats, prays, and loves in each of these places, respectively. Toward the end i was thinking how similar the movie was to 'Under the Tuscan Sun', where the divorced woman starts over in Tuscany. I was wondering "why the drive to go somewhere foreign to repair from divorce?" when the movie addressed it directly, with the woman's theory that, should one devote oneself to a physical or emotional journey, and be honestly willing to accept signs, teachings, and change, then one will discover new truth. I really like the concept - it seems Truthy.

I also really liked two pieces of spiritual-themed advice from the movie: from the guru experience, the woman was told that "God is in you, being you". The sort of intensely personal-God relationship that this mindset sets up is something I also find very truthy, and often very lacking in lots of practices of Christianity, maybe because in the emphasis on what Christ has done FOR someone, once can lose focus on how the Spirit is IN someone. Plays into my general feeling that the spirit bit of my god needs more face time in my religion.

Second, I really liked the meditation advice from the Balinese medicine man about smiling. He said, while sitting there 'being', to do so with a smile on your face, in your mind, and even in your liver. My translation is something like - 'smile like you mean it, and then, you know, mean it'. Personally, I am very prone to the trap of letting my surroundings dictate my mindset and my emotions. If instead I could just decide to smile right down to my liver, and Be Happy, ... well, i think it sounds like a big improvement over just being happy in response to really nice things.

neck nubbery

Yesterday morning, Raechel and Ethan combined forces to disseminate stickers from the back of a few Junie B Jones books. I received 3 stickers - the first has a picture of a hot pan with the text "Goose is cooked means your goose in is big trouble" The second is a pair of scissors that says "i am not that good at cutting hair", and the third is my favorite. It is a rooster, proclaiming "A rooster can peck your head to a nub"

I wore them to work yesterday, in part because I thought they were cute and funny, and part because they made sort of a badge letting folks know I was playing with my kids. Also, I think there was a little enjoyment that I might be ever so slightly subverting the stoic, conservative image of a mayo clinic employee. Not that the image holds up at all in the research building anyway, so I guess I can chalk it up to my pointless subtle personal statement of the day. I mean, in addition to having cute stickers.

WotD: Doppelganger

hee hee! I like doppelgangers as D&D villains. I like pronouncing slight variations of 'doppelganger'.

Sometimes I think I contain within myself a doppelganger of myself, and I don't like him much.

Unrelated to dopplegangers, so far as I can tell, The color green has been adopted. That sentence was going to have more, but I like how it looks ending there. The color green is anxious, because it still hasn't met its new parents. It has sent and received messages from them, sent by raven. i want to be like the color green, and sending things by raven is one reason why. i have never sent anything by raven, but the color green does that sort of thing all the time.

also, i've been eating a lot of eggs for breakfast lately.

Come on Eileen just went by on Pandora, and I love that song. It has lots of memories of dancing, frequently at theatre parties in college. But it isn't green. Actually, it is blue, streaked a bit with variation blue-ish colors.

Mouth in my mouth

For two days, I have been playing with Cain at breakfast by arguing with him about whether or not I can keep my mouth in my mouth. This morning I even made up a song about having my mouth in my mouth, and then we were all singing everything until Cain and Rae left for school. This is particularly adorable with Ethan, because anytime he sings anything, it is to the tune of 'twinkle twinkle', and he tends to get stuck just singing the same word over and over, not quite able to put a sentence together while carrying the tune.

Later, he switched to the game where he puts cars in my pockets. For some reason, his favorite is the big front pocket on my Packers hoodie, which i am most definitely wearing today (GO PACK!). He upped the ante by putting his new Chuck toy (chuck is an animated dump truck designed by the geniuses at Tonka) in my pocket, as well as Chuck's friend fire truck. It is then my job to try and run away with the cars in my pocket, get caught, and surrender the cars/trucks so that we can start again.

also, I am assistant directing/kind of stage managing an Easter musical at our church. I like to describe it as Romeo and Juliet meets the Crucifixion. She's a jew, he's a Roman, and He's the son of God.