REDONDOWRITER'S SACRED ORDINARY

The Wise Old Man Meets the Fool - SoulCollage®

 Yesterday I made two SoulCollage® cards and both of them are in the Council suit. That's where the archetypes reside and those things that are larger than life. I am extremely restless right now as the academic year comes to a close; I only have four more weeks to work until I get 10 weeks off for the summer. I've been thinking too much. Doing the various kinds of art I create--and writing--and reading--makes me stop thinking so much. 

This card is called "The Wise Old Man." My late spiritual director Betsy Hedberg Caprio nudged me once to really focus on the masculine in my art because I do have a tendency to create predominately feminine images. Starting with SoulCollage's "IATOW" statement, I am the one who was taught that God the father was a wise old man and that the Bible was filled with wise old men. I still carry those images, of course, but the personification of it was my dear paternal grandfather who came to live with us from when I was five until I was twelve. His death was the first one I encountered as a child. He became my best friend in so many ways and hanging out in his trailer and hearing his stories really enriched my life. I carry you in my heart forever wise old man Ed Streur.

The archetype of the fool, jester or clown plays a key role in my SoulCollage® deck and I have made several cards with this theme. I am the one who has played the fool purposely, especially in adolescence, to get people to laugh at me--and themselves. I realized my zany side early. Everyone always seemed to take most things in life so seriously and by making people laugh, I guess I hoped they wouldn't notice my imperfections. I have a good sense of humor and allow the zany side to surface with my dear old friend Rick Hammond and his late wife Orma. I am the one who adores watching stand up comedy and have to keep myself in check when life gets too serious. There is such a fine line between comedy and death. 

SoulCollage® Cards: Explorer and Ellen DeGeneris

On Monday I got together with friends for our monthly SoulCollage® group and made two cards. I'm far behind scanning my cards for Pinterest and have neglected Sacred Ordinary blog so much. If one thing is certain in life, it's change.  Facebook has definitely affected the blog. 

This card is called The Explorer and is in the Council suit. I am the one who recently took yet another silly quiz on Facebook called "Which Jungian archetype are you?" and to my great surprise I was the Explorer. I equate explorers with travel and adventuresomeness and though I travel, I'm not driven to it and I would not call myself a physical explorer. However, I'm definitely an interior explorer. I love to explore people, places, animals, history and thought. Books and the Internet are my playgrounds. I am the one who looks every day for the sacred in the ordinary of my average days. I am the one who for years traveled alone in the U.S. after my divorce and I would research whatever town I was in and then explore its sites and history. I am the one who realizes I am an explorer after all. 

This card is in the Community suit of SoulCollage® and now Ellen DeGeneris has become part of my community/family in a more aware way than ever before. I like this description of the community suit, a favorite suit in my deck. "The Community Suit, or the communal dimension, is for the people and pets who have loved you, taught you, and challenged you.  These people can be family, ancestors, friends, teachers, healers.  You may know them personally, or you may only know them through their art, writing, or special accomplishments.  They may be alive or dead.  Relationships are honored in this suit, and your support system is represented here."

I am the one who has loved Ellen DeGeneris's style of humor and timing ever since I first saw her on television. I have been attracted to her as my next door neighbor girlfriend who is funny as hell but also has the wisdom of a sage. When she had the courage to come out publicly as gay, my admiration increased. I am the one who admires her courage and wishes I had it. I rarely watch her show because of the time frame and my ignorance about programming my TV, but when I do, I am so darned happy. She is a mentor to me of finding light and love even in the midst of what seems like disaster. I am the one who was utterly delighted with her large group selfie at the Academy Awards. I wish she were the permanent host. 

 

The Triumph of the Blue Dresser

This may seem like a silly story, but it's my true story of refinishing an old dresser. Bear in mind, I've refinished small pieces in my life, but nothing so large and beat up. 

It all began last summer when I found a picture in a magazine of an old dresser that someone had painted this color blue and then stenciled in Navy blue. I put it in my ideas binder. Then late last fall, at one of my weekend estate sale forays, I found an old, beat-up white dresser for $30. Hmmm. I can practice on this without too much guilt, I thought. I called my son-in-law and grandson and they came with a truck and loaded it in the patio. 

I began the stripping and sanding and it was arduous and I didn't know what I was really doing. When I removed the drawers, I marked them for placement as I do know that can be problematic if they aren't in the right spaces. November rolled around and the weather grew colder so I dragged the dresser up in an alcove and there it sat all winter and spring, and my Inner Critic kept going berserk about my inability to stick with projects. 

On my list of tasks to accomplish this summer while I'm off work, the dresser was #1 on the list. I had to sand it down once again, threw drop cloths all over, and chose the paint (twice as much as I needed). It took me one day to paint the frame and then second-coat it. The next two days I tackled the five drawers. I took a few days break and then went to put the drawers back in thinking I was finally done. Not one single drawer fit anymore. My father was a wood worker and my former husband was excellent working with wood. You'd think some of it would wear off. I do love to sand, by the way, and I adore the smell of shavings and wood dust. 

I arduously began the sanding of the tops and bottoms of the drawers, and a little of the interior, and got two to fit, but I was so darned discouraged by then, I'd get all teary every time I saw the ongoing mess on the patio. I was determined I would only ask for help if all else failed. (One of my character defects is being stubborn about not asking for help.) Last night while visiting my son Tony, Gretchen, Henry and Fritz, I told them my about my incredible frustration. Tony, who has done a lot of refinishing himself suggested that I concentrate on sanding down the interior frames rather than the tops and bottoms of the drawers themselves. At 4 p.m. today I went out, scoped out the project, and got out my trusty sander and a jar of Dorlands Wax Medium. I gritted my teeth, asked for my late father's help, and then threw in Joseph and Jesus because they were carpenters. It took more than two hours of sanding and continued waxing, but all those drawers now fit. Is it possible to feel triumphant over refinishing a piece of furniture? It wasn't like medaling at the Olympics, for God's sake. 

I now have touch up to do and I'm not so sure about the stenciling. I kind of like the dresser a plain blue, although it has more to do with simply not being able to face into trying something else I don't really know how to do and screwing up. Now I have to ask for help again from my son-in-law and grandson. I'm hoping they will carry the beast up the stairs into the guest bedroom. Although, I wonder if I should keep it in my own room as a testament to my tenacity, which my Inner Critic often says I have little of. 

Who Do You Write Like?

Thanks to Rain at Rainy Day Thoughts, I received the link to “I Write Like.”

You can submit text from your blog or some of your fiction, poetry or other creative writing, and the writing analyzer tells you what writer you most write like. Like Rain, I decided to submit two pieces of my text feeling positive both entries would compare my writing to a woman's. Not so! I submitted an entry from a recent blog and a few paragraphs from a novel I started several years ago for Nanowrimo.

To my great surprise, my blog seems to be in the style of Bram Stoker.

I write like

Bram Stoker

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 Three paragraphs from Alexandra’s Time Capsule, yielded this result: 

 I write like

James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 

I'm very surprised and suspect that if I kept going I might write like everybody who ever wrote. What's that old story about an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters?

So, who do you write like? 

A Little Road Chicken Philosophy To Make You Smile

It stopped raining and I've been giddy with possibilities. A blue sky in the day, stars and a moon tonight. There's only one day until Christmas and I never finished the art gifts for my family. Instead of knuckling down and working with what I have, I decided to be naughty and not nice. In the service of "my art", I took a five-hour tour of the local thrifts which I have not done for a long time. Grocery shopping for Christmas dinner was the ultimate shopping experience. Junque? Baby, I've got junque! Is this blatant consumerism in a different form? Mixed media artists are strange creatures. I've been dancing around and trying to sort out several sacks and then I remembered something profound. In my iPhoto a chicken crossing the road has been lurking thanks to my daughter's recent download. This chicken calls to me! So, it must have called to her, too.

What kid, or adult kid among us, hasn't told the chicken crossing the road joke? There are whole papers written on it when you Google. Yes, I know--she crosses to get to the other side. Damn! That's profound. I think the meaning of life might be in this riddle.

But, I hope the following excerpts, which I found at Philsophy E-Server, will make you smile like it did me.

WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?

Plato:  For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue?  In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.

Hippocrates:  Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!

Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:  The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history.  An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus: For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

Ronald Reagan: I forget.

John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Mr. T: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!

Henry David Thoreau:  To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain:  The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.

The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.

Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.

Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.

Othello: Jealousy.

Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.

Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.

Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.

Whitehead:  Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Hamlet: That is not the question.

Donne: It crosseth for thee.

Beheading the Hydra: Have You Ever Used That Term?

My kids called me a silly mother when they were growing up and all my grandkids call me a silly grandma. I love to play with them largely making a fool of myself. I specialize in animal voices and making up wild stories where they are the characters. I seem to have the gift of making them roll around on the floor laughing and yelling, "Silly grandma." In a way this is out of character for the "public" me in that, insecure as I am, I am cautious about showing a side of myself that might represent crazy, immature, or senile. As a kid myself, I wrote many plays where all the characters were silly and told jokes back and forth. I was usually the moderator, egging them on. I guess this side of my personality got it's start there.

You know how people say they wear many hats, meaning they switch from one activity to another? This is grandma in a new hat: hydra. I do love to wear hats, by the way.

The WiseGeek says, "The Hydra or Lernaean Hydra was a many headed monster in Greek mythology which terrorized visitors near the lake of Lerna in Greece. Killing the Hydra proved to be quite a challenge, as two heads would grow back whenever one was cut off. Hercules seized upon the idea of cauterizing the neck before the new heads had a chance to grow, ultimately defeating the monster as part of a series of tasks he completed which are collectively known as the 12 labors of Hercules. The Hydra is such an enduring mythological figure that the term “hydra” is sometimes used to describe a challenge which seems to keep getting bigger and harder to handle, no matter how hard someone tries to metaphorically behead it."

So, next time I wear my grandson's hydra hat, I may be actually acting out my inner bigger and harder to handle personality--and all of you may need to metaphorically behead me.

Toilet Paper Protocol: There is a Right and a Wrong, Isn't There?

In A Course in Miracles there is a question: "Would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy?" When it comes to toilet paper on the roll I must admit I have very strong opinions. I have no idea why I became OCD about the rightness and wrongness of how TP should present, but this diagram says it all for me.

Are you saying, "Get a life, Fran?" I'll admit that in the big scheme of things, who cares? I don't know why, but I do--and it only began a few years ago out of a clear blue sky. I'll admit I have changed the TP in private homes if it is "wrong," but who am I anyway to try to impose my beliefs on someone else? When I used the bathroom in a restaurant tonight the TP was hanging wrong. I debated about changing it and then I thought, get a grip. Usually I'm a live and let live kind of gal.

At Current Configuration there is an entry called: Essential Life Lesson #1: Over is Right, Under is Wrong that corroborates my anal beliefs. Anal, get it?

So, are you an over or an under?

 

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to Host Opposing Rallies in Washington D.C.

POSTED BY: Eric March at Comedy Central's Indecision Forever

What's that dull, scraping sound? It's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, sharpening their knuckles for a face-off that promises to be bigger than Nixon/Kennedy, Ali/Foreman, Aniston/Jolie, 50/Nas, Joe/The Volcano, Alien/Predator, Bunny/Fudd and Ecks/Sever combined. Put Sept. 30 on your calendar. 

On October 30, 2010, Jon and The Daily Show will lead the first-ever Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall in Washington D.C. — a movement of "people who have been too busy to go to rallies" — to beg America to stop shouting, throwing and drawing Hitler mustaches on people other than Hitler (or Charlie Chaplin).

Not to be outdone, The Colbert Nation is calling on all freedom-loving patriots to challenge The Daily Show's dark, optimistic forces by marching on the Mall at the same time to help Keep Fear Alive.

Which side are you on? Visit the rally pages and declare your allegiance!

 

 

Tonight I watched both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and got a really big kick out of the National opposing rallies to be held by them in Washington, DC on Oct. 30, 2010. Wish I lived in DC.

 

Cupidtino: Apple's Beta Dating Site for Mac Enthusiasts

Because I’ve been the newsletter editor of my Macintosh User Group, SBAMUG, the past few years, I read a lot of websites about all things Mac. I especially got a kick out of Cult-of-Mac's Mike Schramm's June 8, 2010 post about a new Mac dating site called Cupidtino.

Schramm said, “Cupidtino, the Mac dating site that we posted about a little while ago, has finally moved into open beta. Now anyone can go on over there, make a profile and start meeting Mac-minded single men or women looking for a partner. Anyone with a Mac, that is -- the site is only accessible via one of Apple's devices, of course. Once you set up a profile, you can add pictures, post about when you "became a Mac," add your list of gadgets, or go looking for the Mac nerd of your dreams. The pickings are pretty slim right now -- I found about 71 lovely ladies in my age range. Search is currently limited by country, as there probably aren't enough people on the service to get any more granular than that.

But the good news is that in my objective single male opinion, there were some good-looking Mac fans to find. If you happen to spot someone you think might be the "one more thing" of your life, you can "Mac her" (tamer than it sounds, basically a "poke"), send a message (free for now, the page says), or find the nearest Apple Store between the two of you, so you can meet up and make eyes at each other over the iPad table.

I don't know if we really need another dating site (unless you think being a Mac fan is a major dealmaker), but it is cute, and given what we know about Mac users, maybe we do really deserve each other. I set up my profile on the site -- if I happen to Command-F the girl of my dreams, I'll let you know."

When I checked out the site, I noted there were no senior folks signed up at Cupidtino. I must admit that I know a couple of older geeks in my club who would be good company for a Mac woman of a certain age. 

Christmas Tree Redux: Every Day a New Beginning

Thank you so much to all of you who commented here about my fully decorated Christmas tree falling down last night--and baptizing my new wood floors with water from the defective tree stand. I did a major salvage job of the old tree, jury-rigged the tree stand, and dragged it into my TV room for redecorating tomorrow. 

Here is my first ever artificial tree which I bought this afternoon at K-Mart. I'm a "green" person and said I would never buy fake, but my old age and lessening stamina brought me to the crowded store to at least check the trees out. I loved this one and it was on sale. It is 6 feet tall and prelit. I can't believe that I will never have to string tree lights again in my lifetime. The box was pretty heavy but the very nice salesman told me that I would easily be able to handle it. It wasn't easily, but it was doable. I rarely read directions but I read them religiously as I did not want another disaster. I still have the house to decorate and the other tree to decorate, but the lights on the disaster tree somehow or other hung in there. 

Now I'm going downstairs to journal with gratitude. Another change has come to Villa Redondo and today I accept it gracefully.