Re-posts for Father's Day: The Daddy State

...while there is still a Western Civilization left to save.

Socialism. Where did it come from? We see it eating like an acid into the foundations of our entire civilisation, corroding initiative, personal responsibility, individual and corporate courage, family life... it is everywhere. But how did we end up with it in nearly every western country? We could look at the history of the Great Change in western countries (Britain, Canada, Australia, N. Zealand,) from governments based on individual liberties, Common Law, objective reality...all that manly stuff, to what we have now: the nanny state.

But I think we have it wrong. I think we shouldn't be calling it the Nanny State. I think it should be called the Daddy State.

I was discussing this with a friend the other night and he said something that he knew I already agreed with, that it is the fault of the female vote. When did all this Fabianism get itself hooked into the political structure? When did we start thinking that government should hold your hand and do things for you? Even when you've grown up, left home and got your own apartment, the Daddy State should be coming over and fixing things for you and buying you groceries.

Socialism is a chick thing. As a private characteristic of the feminine mind it is right and good for women to want to be looked after. It's wired into us from our hunter-gatherer days. We need men to do the heavy lifting. It's a good thing for women to have the instinct to want to be looked after by a big strong man who can ward off cave bears and hunt the mammoths.

But feminism has used that natural need, the thing that makes us like and want men and that makes marriage desirable, and turned it against both men and children and ultimately against women. Feminism, you will note, has not actually accomplished anything but misery and destruction. A counterfeit freedom, exchanged for all the things we used to think made our lives real and meaningful.

I mentioned that one of the triumphs of feminism is to teach women that they should not get married to an individual man. Marriage, so the legend goes, is slavery, particularly after the kids come. Feminism reveals its Marxist origins when it says that women should instead marry the State. Men leave, we are told, and leave us holding the child-rearing bag alone. Much better to be married to the state. The state will never abandon you.

Indeed, women who divorce are often encouraged by social workers to either take up welfare as a replacement marriage, or send their ex-men taken through the various government-sponsored wringers like Ontario's Family Responsibility Office. Institutions like the FRO are designed for a two-fold purpose. They enslave the woman to the state, make sure she depends on the FRO and the welfare office for all the defence and support we once expected a husband to provide, and to punish, impoverish and disempower men.

And when did such structures start being put into place? About the same time women got the vote and started taking over the driver's seat in politics. Socialism is woman's politics. Indeed, we call it the nanny state because it tends to infantilise entire societies. But really, the new state that the woman's vote has created should more properly be called the Daddy State.

It comes from and is powered by the natural instinct of women to be looked after. Feminism is doubly insidious because it plays on that need and turns it into terror. I know from my own experience that women have been trained to be terrified of men, of wanting a man, of marriage and most especially of motherhood. It is an ideology of fear and hatred that teaches women their lives will never be secure until they give themselves and their children to the state.

Socialism, the Daddy State, comes from feminist panic attacks. Feminism whispers that men leave, they abandon women and their children, so it is best to replace the entire edifice of family life with the state.

The Daddy State was created by the womyn's vote.



And...

~ * ~

Melanie Philips talks about the welfare underclass and "youth crime".

I've been reading about the problem in Britain with "youth crime". How it is such a big shock to all the experts and professional heart-bleeders.

It really remains a puzzle to me why anyone us puzzled by any of this.

I know perfectly well what happened and why. I was there the day the world ended.

I'm not sure if the history of the Divorce Cataclysm really adequately takes into account the speed with which the change came. It came at us like a tidal wave while we all just stood on the beach watching helplessly. I have always liked movies about the end of the world. Remember that MFTV thing, Deep Impact, where an asteroid hits the earth? I always think of that scene where the reporter-girl is standing on the beach with her father watching a thousand foot high wall of water rushing at them at a hundred miles an hour. It is no wonder to me who lived through it that nothing was done about it, or even written about it, until it was too late.

Melanie Philips writes about a couple of sociologists Norman Dennis and A.H. Halsey, who produced a book "Families Without Fatherhood (Civil Society)" in 1992.

1992?!

Seriously?

Is that really the first time anyone in this country noticed that the world had ended?

I know what a lot of Catholics say about the legalization of contraception (eugenics movement anyone?) but I really think the civilizational apocalypse started when we decided it was not necessary for married people to remain married. Trudeau, of course, decided that things in Canada would move along more smoothly if he got all the bits and pieces of the apocalypse into one year and so we had the Divorce Act - which, unsurprisingly, came in the Great Year of 1968 - immediately followed by the Omnibus Bill legalising abortion, in case anyone was left in any doubt as to what Divorce was meant to lead to.

Didja catch that?

1968. And it took decades for anyone to notice and start writing about what the fall out was. Was it because everyone was just having such a great time sleeping around that we were too busy to see what was going on?

I was two and three when the Acts were passed. By the time I was in school a few years later the wave was only beginning to build offshore, but it picked up speed and strength pretty quickly.

In the early part of the Divorce Wave, which started about the same time I was starting school most of the kids I knew were born to married parents. When I was in early elementary school, the first generation of hippies hadn't broken up with their first "partners" (as we call them now) and even in the hippie free school ("Sundance"... I kid you not) I was pretty much the only kid in school who had "visits" with daddy. This lasted until we, the first generation, made it to the fifth grade. In those days the partner turn-over rate was a lot slower. "Relationships" lasted years, sometimes as many as four or five and marriage was still fairly common. It would be another ten years at least before these vestigial conventions were abandoned and the turn-over was reduced to the few months or weeks we're enjoying now.

By the time I was in junior highschool ("middle school"; grades 8-10) I knew almost no one whose parents were still together and the partner turn-over meant that most of the mothers and all of the fathers were on "partner" number three or four.

Of course, abortion tidied things up quite a bit, but there was still plenty of flotsam bobbing around in the filthy waters. We, the early generation, were offered courses on the weekends at the Y with titles like "The Divorced Kids Group" (yes, that was the actual title, from memory) where the kids could come and shaaaaare how they felt about their universe coming abruptly to a halt and the lights going out.

This was short lived, however, since the people running it quickly learned that the kids had a disconcerting tendency to say things that really ran counter to the Great Plan. After that early blip, there was nothing until I was in my 20s and I started noticing articles appearing in the Emancipated Womens' Magazines about the kids who just, for some reason,

just.

couldn't.

be.


arsed. ...

about anything.

Who were in a state of near catatonic apathy and hopelessness, had no plans, had no hopes, no aspirations and were filled with cynicism and loathing for everything their parents cared about. It was about this time that the suicide statistics started to be really alarming for kids born after 1965.

Melanie writes about an entire generation, now branching into three or four generations, who simply made no plans for the future, who knew that everything their elders said to them was a lie, that no other human being could be trusted, unless it was to trust them to be self-serving and callous. That in any case, no one would help them in whatever aspirations they may briefly entertain.

Underlying this was a deep well of rage and hatred for what had been done to them.

So, actually, no. Not all that surprised by the "youth crime" problem.



~

Half a million!

Well, I just noticed that we have topped half a million page views (since Blogger put an automatic counter thing on, which was, I think, after about five years of blogging, but oh well...)

503,954 pageviews.

and exactly 4700 posts. This makes 4701 since September 2005.

Maybe I'll do a retrospective, if I've got time.

I know we get about 500 regular Picnickers a day, which is fine by me. Every now and then we get a spike when someone famouser links to us, like Kathy. Her last link, (to the post about Gay Sex!!) caused us to spike to about 1500 that day. I was so horrified at the thought of all those strangers tramping through my living room that I wanted to shut down for a few days go make them go away. Fortunately, they all took a short look around and went chattering off somewhere else, so we're back to our regularly scheduled tea and biscuits hour.

Really! Who do these grubby people think I'm writing for? Them? Huh!

Nope. It's you lot. My regulars.

I started writing blogs about nine years ago, experimenting with styles and topics, titles, templates and tone until settling on this. I switched for a brief while to a different hosting site, which really didn't work out. Did very Catholic religious blogging for a while, but ran out of holy steam, and finally couldn't stand my own pretentiousness. I swung round to being very political for a while, but became equally nauseated by my own cynicism. But things seem to have settled down and we all seem to be pretty content in our little club. I have come to think of the 'blog as a parlour where my nice internet friends can come round and have a chin-wag and a cup of virtual Darjeeling.

It's a funny thing but in all this time, I think blogging has helped me, yes I'll say it, grow as a person. And without doubt it has made me a better writer. And this is to no small degree because I have had a lot of interesting comment and conversation, advice, feedback and even fights, with readers. Some of whom I have even met in person.

Y'all have read me, criticised me, agreed and disagreed, offered suggestions and information. You've sent me lovely presents, books and things, and donated to help out in my various difficulties. You've followed all my philosophical ramblings and tried the recipes and I know that at least one has taken up art classes. I kept writing all through cancer and out the other side and you lot just kept right up along side me. It might not seem sensible, since the likelihood is that we will never meet, and I know writers and people like that are always saying this and it sounds soooo fake, but my readers actually mean a lot to me (and I mean that not in a horrible narcissistic ego-y way).

You've put up with my rambling, my periodic bursts of ill-temper, my fleeting enthusiasms, and even my steadfast love for William Shatner. This blog, in various forms, has exsited since 2004 and I've come to feel kind of responsible in a way, to keep writing and posting. This is because I know you're going to come back every day to check it out, whether I'm posting or not, and I'd feel bad if I didn't offer something in the way at least of entertainment in return for this loyalty. Every time I've had a little blog-cation and shut things down for a week or two, usually to throw off the extra people who will accumulate, you've always come back.

So, thanks. Here's some flowers for y'all...


Bonus recipe for spicy squash and carrot soup to follow.

(And we'll have to talk some more about the Youtube cooking show idea.)



~

Exercise Questions

OK, all you health nut types among the Picnickers, some questions about exercise:

1) a colleague of mine, who also spends a lot of time working hunched over his computer, sitting on his duff, suggested doing little short bursts of exercise interspersed throughout the working day, so we don't turn into blobs of goo. Blobs of goo with stiff, inflexible muscles and permanently shortened spines. Any idea if there is merit in the suggestion? A break to do ten crunches and ten push ups? If you don't really break a sweat, is it still doing anything for you?

2) If you've been pretty sedentary for a while and start exercising, of course, even the little bits you're going to start out with are going to make you at least a bit stiff and sore at the start. What is a sign that you're doing too much or over straining muscles?

3) and how long should you wait before doing it again? Should you wait until all the stiffness has gone, or only a bit? Like, do a full workup the next day and just ignore all the pain, or wait a day or what? Can you do your little bits and bursts while you're on your down day or do you have to just be a blob for a day.

I've noticed that I'm doing a lot better pretty fast with the teeny weeny exercise regimen. I was dismayed but totally unsurprised when I finally stood on the scale and discovered that I'd gone up 10 kilos since about the same time last year, shortly after the surgery. I knew full well that I had only myself to blame, so didn't do any of the dumbass stuff like railing at God/the universe. While I was lying about on the sofa all winter, not going to Rome to the studio, being kind of miserable and not really seeing anyone, and drinking quite a lot of prosecco, (...ahem... like every day...) it really wasn't too hard to figure out what the outcome was going to be.

The chemo and surgery really did take quite a lot out of me, and I lost a bunch of weight just by being unhealthy and not eating. The two years (!!) it took me to recover were spent nearly entirely on my back, in the wheelchair and later unable to do anything very physical for a long time. Then by last autumn when I should have been starting to get active again, the sedentary habit had sunk into my brain, and the days got short, I had no classes to go to and an internet connection at home and ... well... that's the story. All that weight that I lost during recovery, right the heck back on, plus a little two or three pound bonus. Sigh.

So, when Andrea got back to Italy and I had an excuse to leave the house every day with classes going again, I started by first walking a lot, then riding my bike around Rome, for about 1/2 an hour to 45 mins a day. It felt so good, I kept doing it and shortly felt better enough to sign up for Pilates classes a few weeks ago, here in S. Mar where there's a nice shiny new gym. I explained to the very kindly instructor that I was trying to get back in shape after all that stuff, and he's been very helpful.

After All That, and many years of being more or less inactive, I'm all out of alignment, all cramped up and inflexible, all flabby and un-toned and the guy really seems to know how to tailor the programme to suit what you need. We do our muscle exercises, and our long stretches, then he comes along and kind of diagnoses you. He picks up your feet and squeezes you and stretches you and picks you up by your ankles and sort of shakes you back into shape. This is three times a week and I'm already starting to feel the good effects. Along with doing the exercises at home and doing my little situps and crunches and stretches and pushups and some stuff with the resistance band, I'm better. Yay! Still fat, but less flabby and way less stiff.

I was also getting slackadaisical about the diet, letting sugars and carbs creep back in, at least when I went out to eat with friends. But the biggest change is that I'm not indulging in 1) any sugar at. all. (stopped taking honey in anything) and not buying wine to have at home. With Gardone coming up, we'll have to see how that will pan out when I'm surrounded by all my cool Traddie Gardone friends and we're all whooping it up and talking Traddie shop into the wee hours every night for two weeks. Gardone was where it all started going south last year, so we'll see.

But on the whole, I feel a lot better just for doing these wee bits of exercise. I can feel years and years of stiffness and flabbyness starting to seep away, very slowly. And slow is better, I think. I've read many times that sudden shifts of weight or body tone really only result in your body kind of backlashing against the shock. Which probably played a part in the weight gain after surgery. Slow and steady wins the race, and teaches your body the new normal.

So, can't recommend Pilates strongly enough. It was, after all, designed to help athletes and dancers recover from injuries, so if your "injury" is just being out of shape, it's going to do you wonders.



~

Everybody need see Buckaroo

Before Firefly, this was the awesomest.


Lectroids from Planet 10 by way of the 8th dimension.



~

Noisy

I've got noisy neighbours. Actually, the little old lady who lives upstairs is very quiet, (though deaf as a stone, so when she watches TV we all watch TV together) but she has rather horrible relatives who nearly always get into screaming shouting matches with her when they come over (and don't get me started on the horrible grandchildren... a six year old girl clanking around in high heeled shoes...Italy!@%)*#%!!)

Now, when I was a very small child, my parents did the same thing. They screamed at each other, and it terrified me. I remember having a cupboard-cabinet thing I used to climb into whenever they did it.

Also, I'm an Anglo, which means we don't really express our feelings... at all...ever.

So the sound of someone screaming in anger still terrifies and discombobulates me very badly. I've worked out a method of dealing with the shouting neighbours involving Vivaldi and my very, very good Bose computer speakers. They are very loud.


The loud neighbours have learned that when they hear Vivaldi's Concerto Alla Rustica for strings in G, (presto) that, "Hilary wants us to stop shouting." It works a treat.



~

Hilary's Italian kitchen... or something like that

So, doing my imaginary cooking show today, narrating lunch to the invisible camera with lots of fun kitchen tips, it was my favourite English fry-up replacement:

take
two large slices of melanzane/aubergine/eggplant
two tomatoes (the lovely little Italian kind shaped like teardrops that are in the shops right now, and sooo sweet!)
buncha mushrooms
six slices of bacon or a packet of pancetta affumicato
two eggs
1 oz. butter

Chop the bacon into bits and cut the mushrooms into big thick pieces and the tomatoes in half lengthwise, saute the lot together over a medium heat in just a little of the butter for five minutes and push to the edge of the pan. Turn the flame down, and melt the rest of the butter, and lay down the two nice thick slices of melanzane (remember, butter burns at quite a low temperature, so keep the heat down).

Turn the m. after a few minutes and pile the mushrooms and bacon on top of the m. and make a little well in the middle. Crack an egg each into the well, so the yolk stays on top and the lovely eggy stuff oozes all through the bacon and onto the pan. Drop a few teaspoons of water into the pan and pop the lid on quickly. This will steam cook the egg very quickly. A teeny bit of balsamic vinegar in the steam water will add interest to the flavour.

Now your tomatoes should be nice and cooked but not squishy and you just ladle the whole thing onto a plate and eat. Nomma nomma!

I've been watching a lot of Jamie Oliver's cooking shows on Youtube lately and have fallen back into the habit of narrating all my cooking as though I'm doing my own YouTube cooking show. I grew up watching Graham Kerr and doing my own imaginary cooking show at home. My mum would often oblige by holding the imaginary camera and being the studio audience all at once. It was so much fun. And she always sat down and tried all my stuff. I suppose it was just a way of supervising me in the kitchen, but it always felt very supportive. Grandma also taught me cooking but she thought making an imaginary cooking show was silly (though she was also a Graham Kerr fan... who wasn't?).

I keep thinking that now with Youtube and cheap-o digital video cameras and whatnot, I could actually make this little dream hobby come true. Wouldn't it be fun to actually get together for (virtual) tea and triangle sandwiches? I'd have to do more housework, I guess. But maybe the camera wouldn't pick up much of the dust.

And we could take little trips together to the weekly farmer's market on Thursdays. I could show y'all around Santa Marinella, and maybe we could take little trips to the big daily market in Civitavecchia once in a while and y'all could meet the nice fishmonger and the garden centre lady.

We would need to come up with a good name for it. I'm really a terrible name-thinker-upper, so suggestions?



~

Peach panna cotta a la Inghilterra

In my endless search for the perfect combination of fresh fruit and cream, I've invented a new dessert. Peach panna cotta a la Inghilterra. Kind of a combination of Creme Anglais and classic Italian panna cotta. With fruit.

250 mls of whole milk
250 mls of panna
2 peaches, peeled
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
3 bustine stevia (about 3 tsps natural sugar substitute)
two egg yolks
1/4 tsp sale
4 leaves gelatine

Place the gelatine in a bowl of cold water to soften. Heat milk and cream together over a low heat. Puree the peaches, stevia, salt and vanilla and a little of the milk in a blender on high for two minutes. Whisk together the peach puree with the milk and cream. When the mixture is close to the scalding temperature, quickly whisk in the egg yolks. Remove from heat and add the softened gelatine and whisk until it's dissolved (will be almost instantly).

Pour the mixture into bowls and allow to cool to room temp, then into the fridge for about 3 hours or over night.

Serve with a puree of fruit or just by itself.

Awesome.

If guns kill people, spoons make them fat.

I was watching a thing the other day in which British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver worked in Los Angeles to try to convince the school boards to give students better food (ie; less pizza, chips and chicken nuggets) in their cafeteria lunches. He worked with a group of students to whom he taught basic culinary skills and nutrition, and it all seemed to go quite well. The kids, and some of their parents, responded well and after some difficulties, general improvement became the order of the day.

At one point, he asked the kids if any of their family members were suffering from a chronic diet-related illness like diabetes or obesity or heart trouble. One of the kids, just 16 years old and herself significantly overweight (though I'd say not obese) said that both her parents and her 13 year old sister had type 2 diabetes and she was terribly afraid that she would develop the disease. Jamie was very helpful, telling her that these things can be greatly helped by improved diet (and exercise, but the show didn't record him talking about that part) and that it could be avoided all together if she put her mind to changing things. She was in tears several times and it was all very affecting and heartwarming, etc.

On another part of the same show, Jamie was working with the owner of a fast food joint to bring up the level of nutrition in his place without increasing cost. The man was very resistant, however, so Jamie arranged a meeting with the girl and the man, in which she told him about her family's health troubles that, she said, had come from a steady diet of fast food. The man was mostly unmoved, and the idea was that he was very hard-of-heart, but at one point he said, "Well, there's an element of choice about this, isn't there."

Ah. There, as they say, is the rub.

I don't remember once in the programme a moment when Jamie, or anyone else, suggested that the people suffering from diet-related illness have a choice in what they eat. That, essentially, they not only had only themselves to blame, they could drastically improve their situation by making different choices. No one holds a gun to their heads, or a spoon to their lips, and demands that they eat nothing but crap. I've been to American supermarkets, and while it is true that they are filled to bursting with the most guddawful prepackaged rubbish, every, single one of them has a produce section.

The health (and social) problems the kids and adults experienced and talked about so tearfully on the show were treated as though it was something that simply fell on their heads from the sky. They talked about "it happening to me," as though it was a kind of evil spell cast on them by fast food purveyors and the carelessness of the school boards' dieticians. The show was premised on the idea that if schools just provided better food for kids, they'd be healthier.

But wait, since when did schools start being the source of all food in a kid's life? Or the source of all information about what was and was not good for them to eat? When I was in school, it was more or less taken for granted that the kid knew the basic necessities of how to walk, talk, dress himself and eat before he got there. The school was there to teach him math and reading skills. The attitude seemed to be that it was normal for the school to be a primary source of food for these kids. Which I thought was really weird. And if we assume that this is the kind of role that is appropriate for schools, why wasn't anyone at the school calling the parents of the fat kids in and talking to them about what they were eating? It seemed that the whole message was that these poor kids, and their poor parents, were being forced to eat badly and be unhealthy. Not once did anyone seem to suggest that any of them take the slightest responsibility for what had happened to them.

It was indeed heartbreaking to see the kids in this show, most of whom were about 15 or 16, and nearly all fat. I know they don't go their entire lives without hearing that junk food makes you fat, or being told, at least by someone, that a steady diet of fast food-joint burgers and fries (or in the case of Britain, frozen chicken tikka masala meals) will cause significant long-term damage to their health. I've seen the ads on tv, I've seen the magazines, the dietary charts in every doctor's office, every school nurse's room and plastered all over the walls of classrooms. The information is there and it is simply absurd to suggest that until the day Jamie Oliver showed up in their school, no one in their collective lives had ever suggested to them that they needed to eat properly to stay healthy. It's kinda intuitive.

But we don't live in a world that tells people to be responsible, and to face the consequences of their decisions. Funny, isn't it, that the kids have probably heard nearly all their lives, (and in Britain, absolutely certainly have) that they need to make "responsible choices" about sex. (Which means, "Got an urge? Go ahead, knock yourselves out but use a condom, and if it breaks, get an abortion... Here, let us help with that.") British school children are bombarded with precisely this "safe sex" advice from early primary grades to graduation and beyond.

But the thing about all that is that the message isn't actually about making responsible choices. It's about avoiding the consequences of indulging your whims and appetites. We have an entire culture that is totally addicted to appetite. Is there anyone left who is surprised that the kids are fat? And that they are having illicit sexual relations as casually as you and I go shopping for socks? Everything in our world tells us that we can do whatever we want all the time - and heaven help anyone who suggests a little self-control! - and there will be no consequences whatsoever. Pregnant? For heaven sake! get an abortion as fast as you can!

Is it possible that the "safe sex" message has percolated down to infect everything else? "Safe sex" really means totally unrestrained indulgence, which kids are told will have no long-term consequences as long as they're "responsible". Kids aren't stupid (no, really!) they've heard the underlying message loud and clear: "Indulge every single one of your appetites, every single time they bother you. Nothing bad will happen, and if it does, the school/state will step in and help you avoid the consequences". And this message has been sold to them by every one of their authority figures. Kids respond to authority. So, completely surrounded by a culture of total indulgence, how are we surprised that the kids are fat, flabby and out of shape? And getting diabetes at 13? And getting pregnant? And getting STDs?

Frankly, I like frozen chicken tikka masala meals, and ate plenty of them in Britain. I also like fast food, beer, pizza (esp. Roman pizza), pasta, bread, cake, chocolate, prosecco, gelato and pie. If I thought I could get away with it, I'd eat nothing else. I also, though this is changing lately, like sitting around on the sofa more than I like exercising; it's certainly easier. But I know if I choose these things, I'm going to be very, very sorry afterwards.

When I was done with surgery last year, I weighed about 73 kilos, and (once the swelling had gone down) looked pretty good, actually. It was quite heartening and helped a lot with my mental state... for a while. What didn't was the news that between the removal of ... well, between the type of surgery I'd had, and the drugs I was now going to have to be on, as well as my age, my metabolism had slowed to next to nothing, and the average weight gain was between 25 and 40 pounds. Lovely. And it was shortly after this that a sense of hopelessness came over me, and I sank into a depression that lasted until the spring.

But I did the reading and though the news was not the best I'd ever heard, it wasn't the worst. It wasn't inevitable. There were things I could do. And really, it's not rocket science. Reduce carbs (including sugars) and get regular exercise, 20-30-40 minutes a day. And it doesn't have to be really strenuous exercise either; just walking up the steep hills in town, or biking every day, plus a few sit-ups and push-ups and whatnot to improve muscle tone, and I'd be right as rain.

But I didn't do them. I didn't eat a lot of junk, but I did spend the last year until April mostly staying at home, not exercising and drinking a lot of wine (mmmmboy! nothing like inactivity and a lot of prosecco to make post-operative depression better! I tell ya). And guess what? I gained more than 20 pounds. Am I complaining now to the heavens that I've been hard done by? Am I trying to blame the prosecco manufacturers? Am I even surprised?

Ah, no. It was me and the choices I made and these are the consequences of them. I knew perfectly well what I was doing and what would happen. (And yes, I'm doing something about it now.)

This is also the basis of the argument between the gun control people and the law abiding gun owners. It's true that guns don't kill people. People kill people, often using guns. It is statistically verifiable that in many places with strict gun control laws there are serious problems with gun crime. I'm not suggesting that this is a cause-and-effect thing. I don't think gun control laws cause increases in gun crime. But I do think that in cultures where people are told all the time that they can and should indulge their every whim, violent crime rates go up. And in these societies-of-indulgence, it is equally impressed upon the populace that while they are indulging their appetites and whims, the government will take care of all their problems, including that of violent crime.

We live in such a culture and it seems clear that as long as we continue to maintain the Fantasy that we can indulge all our whims and appetites without consequences, violent crime will continue to plague us. It isn't confiscation of the guns of law abiding people that will decrease gun crime. It's returning to a culture that tells people, from childhood up, that there are consequences to the choices they make, and that these consequences can't be avoided.

There is a reason gun control is a favourite hobby-horse of the left, the left that wants no one to take personal responsibility for their actions and choices. It's the left that thinks the solution to every problem is to have someone in authority take care of it, to have the Mummy State come and clean up their mess. It's the same left that has spent the last 40 or 50 years pushing the notion that kids should have as much sex as they want, every time they want, and that the state should pay for the abortions, or keep the single mothers in high style in their council houses. The same left that decided to make divorce easier. To spread artificial contraceptives to every school child. To put a Planned Parenthood abortion mill in every black neighbourhood in the US.

Indulge, indulge, the consequences aren't your fault

But the Real here is that it's not guns that create violent crime, and it's not spoons that makes us fat.



~

Walter meets Buckaroo Banzai; talks about God

Why I loved this show.

Oh, Walter, how I miss you.

Here's the song Buckaroo was playing at the beginning of that scene.

I've been on this huge 80s synthpop kick lately. Whatever happened to Gary Numan, anyway? I heard he quit showbiz and got a respectable job.



~

Found a new painter

Rosemary Adcock


whose somewhat abstracted, cartoony religious paintings took a little looking-at to get to like, but the first thing one notices is the joy.


And the series of Russian peasants, in a much more realist style, will take your breath away.




~

Miss Potter

Beatrix Potter has always been one of the guiding lights of my life. Of course, having been raised by my very confused hippie but-underneath-still-traditional mother and my darling and proper English grandmother, I was given the Potter books as a child, and for the rest of my life I've carried around in my soul the little magical world of Peter and Mrs. Tiggy Winkle as a kind of icon of heaven. Just seeing the pictures is enough to lift me right out of the horrors and falsities of our degraded world.


I know that "eye has not seen nor ear heard" etc. but we have to try to imagine, don't we? My mind's idea of heaven comes to me often as I'm sleeping. It's an amalgam of Narnia in the Golden Age of the Four Sovereigns, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle's kitchen and my grandparents' house in Nanoose Bay, British Columbia. Sometimes I wish I could climb into that little world, which I have always sought right at my feet in tiny, beautiful and magical things.


Although I thought the film a little flawed by the casting (I find Rene Zellweger's accent too exaggerated and her mannerisms too flippant and ironic for the honesty and delicacy of the subject), Miss Potter instantly became one of my all-time favourites.


There's something about her work that makes me suspect that she approached it the same way I try to approach mine. I think she was trying to show people the Real World, the one underneath the veil of the world we usually have to live in. The world of the Old Narnians, living in hiding as the outside world grows increasingly far from it.



~

School-hate

When I was a kid, I hated school. Hated it with a passion and determination that made both my life and my mother's miserable from the first day. I've always loved learning things, but hated school. I begged Mum to homeschool me. She was a qualified teacher, but in those days it just wasn't done, not really even among the hippies.

When we got back to Canada from England I was put back into North American "grade 1" and I concluded that the kids were all idiots. We had been rather more advanced in the English school I had gone to, and I couldn't understand why the only thing we did all day was "play". What was the point of that? Why did I have to go to this horrible, sterile place that smelled bad and was filled with screaming morons to do something I could do much more effectively at home? Besides, the only place I could get my hands on any books was at home.

School has never made sense to me. Learning things is interesting. Wasting your days sitting in a row of desks listening to a tired, underpaid functionary tell the other kids to shut up and pay attention was decidedly not. I was given my first library card when I was five. Libraries, books at home and my mother, the university undergraduate in maths and marine biology, was where you learned things. It was where the secrets of the universe were being revealed. School was prison.

After my first day of school in Victoria, my mother was walking me home and I asked, "How long do I have to keep going there?" She said, "About 12 years." I burst into tears and was inconsolable for the rest of the day.

For a long time, I thought my hatred of school was my fault.

Now I know I was right when I was five. As was so often the case.



~

Becoming Italian

The weather this month has been, by Italian standards, mostly crap. We've only had a few warm days and I've only been swimming once. Normally, we'd have been in the water all month in May, but we've been averaging no higher than 15-18 degrees C and lots of stormy, cloudy, rainy days. The Italians are staying away from the beach in droves, and walking around bundled up in their ugly padded jackets and scarves like it's the start of a new ice age.

Of course, this Canuckistani is still wandering around in shirtsleeves and skirts, (hey! 18 degrees! woot!) but even so, I'm starting to think wistfully about all the beach days we've missed and wondering if my 50 spf is a little redundant. Last year I noted out loud that I seem to be acclimating to the Horrible Heat and didn't mind it nearly as much as before. Of course, last summer was milder than usual too.

And as an acclimated Canadian in Italy, last night I had the following conversation with my Brain:

"I'm cold. I'm going to put the heat on."

"Don't you dare. It's May! In fact, it's almost June. You can't put the heat on in Almost June in Italy."

"But I'm cold!"

"Put a woollie on."

"I don't want to put a woollie on. It's almost June!"

Of course, I see that other people are getting their summer early, with 30-35 degrees in the Toronto time zone. Bleah. I'd be begging for death. So I guess I won't complain too much when the gas bill comes.

Here's a Blondie song to put you in the summer mood




~

Ghosts

Wow, if you want to get a cute Budgie like Disco, you've really got to be prepared to commit.

Budgie 10 -15 yrs
Cockatiel 15 -20 yrs
Conure 25 - 30 yrs
African Grey 50 - 60 yrs
Amazon 50-60 yrs
Macaws 50 - 80 yrs
Cockatoo 60 - 80 yrs

I was just enjoying once again that lovely glimpse of Old Britain, just before it all ended forever, one has in the old Ealing Comedy films. The Ladykillers remains one of my all time favourites, and always reminds me happily of the ladies who lived near my grandparents' house where I spent a lot of time as a child. (Two of them, Mrs. Helen MacDonald and Miss Dorothy Black, a widow and a spinster, lived in separate but adjacent houses where they allowed me to play, very carefully, with the antique - and I now realise extremely valuable - porcelain figurines of ballet dancers. But never let me win at Scrabble.)

It always gives me a terrible case of nostalgia and it occurred to me again today, rather sadly, that everyone in the film (which was Peter Sellers' first screen appearance) are long since dead, starting with the darling Katie Johnson as little Mrs. Wilberforce who was so wonderful she stole the show from no less a person than Alec Guinness (not yet "Sir" at the time).

Then I realised that not all the actors are necessarily gone. The cockatoo and Amazon parrots could very well still be with us.



And the internet has astonished me again by bringing my distant personal past, that I now think of as semi-mythological, into the present.


Here are the little ballerina figurines, made in Ireland, that were in Mrs. MacDonald's glass cabinet. Not the exact one, of course, and she had quite a few, but this is the exact style. It gave me rather a strange feeling looking at all the photos of the Dresden figurines. I suppose there were quite a lot of them floating about the world in old ladies' knick-knack cabinets, but now I imagine they are priced out of the range of normal people by these monomaniacal loons we call "collectors".

So much has changed, with me and in the world since then, that I sometimes wonder if my memories are really memories. So far away and so utterly vanished are all the figures from my past life that I often have the odd feeling that my memories are just my imagination. Virtually nothing remains of my childhood and life before my twenties, neither people nor artifacts. My life now is almost entirely recently constructed, and no one I currently consort with has known me more than five, or at most, ten years. It really does contribute to the feeling I have always had that I'm really just a replicant with implanted false memories. Am I haunted, or am I really a ghost from the past who's doing the haunting of the modern world?

Now and then, something physical bobs up from the depths to the surface and I am left with a strange shocked feeling. Who are we, really, other than our pasts?



~

That does not go there

Speaking of "gay sex"...

I recall a conversation I had with a friend of mine, some time ago, discussing the objections to the global normalisation of homosexuality. She summed up the sexual progressive's position rather neatly, saying, "It fits there." She was, of course, responding to my simplification of the "naturalist" argument: "That does not go there."

"Yeah," I replied, "and it would fit down a vacuum cleaner hose too, but it doesn't go there either."

My friend was verbalising what has become the general view, which reveals much about what the world doesn't want talked about.

Homosexuality has come to be couched around with the same kind of protective verbal and social wadding that abortion has enjoyed for some years now. When you say the word "abortion" in most secular company, the thing that pops into the minds of your hearers is not going to be gruesome photos of dismembered infants, but a loud shout of "WOMEN'S RIGHTS!!!". In a similar way, when we hear the word "homosexual" we have recently been trained to think kind thoughts of civil rights and of friendly young men in turtlenecks who like showtunes and suffer "oppression".

But there are quite a lot of things about homosexuality that we might want to consider, if given sufficient "social space".

First, my response above was facetious: the truth is that it doesn't actually fit there. One of the nastier things that the public doesn't hear about on those charmingly written sit-coms promoting the ideology, is the physical damage entailed by repeated misuse of the posterior fundament. It's not pretty reading, but perhaps the terms "anal fissures," "chronic anal incontinence" and "rectal prolapse" would give the imagination a little boost. And it's difficult to see how "discrimination" accounts for the incredible profusion of incidents of anal cancer among gay men. In short, if we are speaking strictly in terms of biological function, that bit is designed to, ahem, have things come out, not go in and to attempt to use it regularly in a different way will cause extremely unpleasant, permanent harm.

And this brings me to my second thought, that homosexuality is a negation of a philosophical principle that says the purpose of a thing is built into its nature. Sex, and consequently the sex organs and the whole physical system, is something that exists to fulfill a specific biological function. The idea that it is also something that we like to do is a kind of bonus that makes us want to do it enough to set aside, at least long enough to get the job done, the less pleasant thoughts of what parenthood entails. Doing it in a way that is intended to thwart that natural purpose is going to cause harm. That's just the way it is with these biological realities: that does not go there.

In our times, starting with (as I have maintained for some time) the dismantling of the divorce laws and moving on to the incredible blow of artificial hormonal contraceptives, we have created a social myth, a Fantasy if you will, that sex does not have to have anything at all to do with its natural, biological function. Indeed, so enamoured have we become with this Fantasy that there are entire university faculties dedicated to teaching and expanding upon the idea that your reproductive bits are merely arbitrary flesh-bumps that can be used, cut off, drugged and modified to suit one's preferred peculiarities. It's called "gender theory," and, as an outgrowth of "women's studies" has become very popular among academics with more time and money than sense.

But in the Olden Days, we had other names for it. In the 13th century, we called it "nominalism," the idea that reality has no objective, external foundation, that it can, in the modern parlance, be anything you want it to be and that you can "create your own reality".

Nothing new under the sun, as they say, and nominalism is very popular today. It is the idea behind the notion that "gender," for example, is a merely arbitrary, cultural or social label, and that a person can be born into the "wrong" body, that he can designate himself a her. And even weirder, that he can have some kind of surgery or medical intervention that changes his sexual nature.

But sex is what it is, biology is what it is, no matter how the extreme feminists and homosexualists rant about its "injustice". And this denial of biology is, extended out to the furthest reaches of the envelope, a denial of external reality, and an assertion of the will to power, that we can just decide for ourselves how reality is going to go.

Of course, this kind of extreme relativism, probably better called solipsism, always works best for those with the most raw power. This is why homosexualists (those promoting the ideology, which of course, does not mean all homosexuals) have turned to the courts and to direct lobbying of government, to enforce their private Fantasy on the rest of the world. The one thing a Fantasy needs to survive is a safe environment: people have to be convinced to play along.

And play along we all have up to now. We are at the point, and long past it, where we all must say "Yay" and only "Yay" to "gay marriage". We have municipalities agreeing to let self-designated "trans" people, with or without the surgery, into the bathrooms of the opposite sex, and never mind that this means a grown man will now be allowed to flash his thing around a womens locker room at a public swimming pool. We have governments insisting that a man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman can change his sex on his passport.

My friend above was verbalising the general view, that your bits are just flesh-bumps, attached arbitrarily to a set of nerves that produce particular sensations when rubbed up against something else. And that all of this has nothing whatever to do with anything else. The notion is that sex is divorced (pun intended) from its purpose ... and living in Vegas.

We started with sex without marriage, moved on from there to sex without children and more latterly to children without sex. None of these things have necessarily anything to do with any of the others.

This Fantasy, however, is going to cause more and more problems, as any lie does when it is adhered to.

Do you remember when you were a kid, before you had learned that it's actually a good idea to try to be a moral person, and you routinely lied to get out of difficulties? Remember how the lie had to be maintained by more lies and bigger lies and eventually that it took over whole sections of your life? You had to maintain greater and greater contrivances to make sure The Real never broke in on the lie?

Well, it's kind of getting like that, around here, isn't it?



~

Re-post: Let's Talk About Sex!

In honour of Britain's latest Great Leap Forward, a re-post of one of my most popular recent posts.

Let's talk about what we're talking about, for a change...

Specifically, gay sex.

Wait, where's everyone going?

It's a funny thing about the Newfangled people, that though the whole world appears to be totally obsessed with sex, the people at the heart of the Sexual Revolution (MPs) seem to be unable to bring themselves to talk about it. We talk around it. We look at nudie pictures and watch hotsie-totsie videos that imply all sorts of boinking, but the actual physical realities seem to be something none of the Englightened wish to address.

Consider this little point by homosexualist promoter Chris Ashford, writing about the "Gay Marriage" (yes, scarequotes are obligatory, especially now) bill in the UK:

He notes that the bill is actually pretty sweeping, and among other things, removes from the law on marriage the idea that sexual congress is a definitive requirement. "Gay marriages," under the new dispensation, will not need to be consummated in order to be considered valid. This appears on the face of it to be an acknowledgement that they can't be. That "gay sex" is not, in fact, sex at all...

The act of consummation is deemed not applicable as a voidable ground (whereby you essentially argue that a marriage never really existed as you didn’t consummate it with a sexual act) for same-sex marriage but remains in place for different-sex couples.

Why? Well, he says it's because "Civil Servants...just couldn’t figure out how to define the sexual act for same-sex couples."

Mmmm... actually Chris, I think that's probably not it. I think they know, as we all do, what "gay sex" is. It's just that one man sticking his thing into another man's bum, isn't. Sorry, but until very recently, all laws that ever had anything to do with sex, anywhere, ever, knew and acknowledged that sodomy is not sex. Sex, despite what the culture desperately wants to believe, is a biological thing about creating children. It's not about mutual self-gratification, but about physical survival of the species. And that part only works one way.

I think maybe it's time to start talking about what we're talking about. If the drafters of legislation that is proposing to abolish the legal traditions of nine or ten thousand years of human civilisation can't talk about what it's doing, then I think it's time that we stopped being little girls about all this. A man sticking his thing into another man's bum and jiggling it about until orgasm, isn't sex. At most it's a form of self-gratification, using another person as a sex toy that doesn't require batteries.

That in some cases some homosexual men may have genuine warm human emotions towards their sex dolls, is more or less beside the point in marriage law. In fact, wait, it's totally beside the point in marriage law, the same way laws regulating fishing quotas are beside the point in marriage law.

So far the entire argument has been "But we weally wuv each other!" and cries of "It's not FAIR!" But marriage law, sadly, has never had anything to do with love. It has never been interested in the question of how spouses feel about each other. That's because, until the Global Temper Tantrum, the law wasn't about feeeewings. It was about rather more hard-nosed things like biological reality, money, property and taxes. Things that are pretty relevant when you're making laws that pertain to children.

I don't know whether it is a good sign or a bad one that the UK's legislation drafters couldn't bring themselves to talk about the gruesome nitty gritty of homosexuality, but it seems certain it's a sign of something. Perhaps that, though the Sexual Revolution, shortly to be codified in law in Britain, is determined to continue not to believe it, and apparently to force everyone else to pretend it's not true, marriage is about sex and sex is about procreation. And rubbing your bits against another object, whether that object is another person or not, and whatever your feelings about the act or about the other person, doesn't make it sex.

Perhaps, and here's me going out on a wildly thrashing limb in a high wind, there was just enough of a grip left on reality by the bill's drafters to stop them from coming out and actually saying, "Why yes. Sticking your thing into another man's bum is exactly the same as natural procreative sex."

It has been noted elsewhere, here and there, that the Sexual Revolution has had some odd long-term side effects that weren't perhaps what everyone expected. It's being documented lately that people, though more saturated than ever by sexy stuff in the media, are actually having way less sex. Married women in some countries are just giving it up as pointless (since they're mostly contracepting, this seems merely sensible, actually). Men, in increasingly large numbers are giving it up as a bad risk (don't conceive and she'll start manipulating you; conceive and you'll find yourself in court and losing everything). I don't know about gay men, but I'll take a wild guess and say that the bath house parties are losing their cachet.

And the SR seems to have had the odd effect on legislators of turning them into even bigger prudes than our Victorian ancestors. At least we could be sure that Queen Victoria, Shelley and Lord Byron knew what sex was. And all without the benefit of Marie Stopes bringing them condoms to fit on bananas in their schoolroom.

~ * ~

An interesting side-note: Chris Ashford also says that the only place in the bill where "gay sex" does actually get a mention is in the bit that "allows for a marriage to be voidable if a partner was suffering from a communicable venereal disease". Reality biting a little hard there?

~

Streets of London "flowing with much blood"

So, who's ready to apologise to Enoch Powell?

Anyone?


Bueller?... Bueller?



~

What seems to be the profficer?

He's not a crook. His name is Disco, he's a parakeet.

Meet my lastest internet obsession; Disco the Parakeet.

I think he may out-cute all the kitten videos put together. It's making me what to get a budgie, but I think Winnie would make pretty short work of him.



~

Scribbling in my book

On the train and while watching TV.



~

My buddy Chris explains it all to you

Chris Ferrara breaks the mould of the Catholic Trad. He's one of the leading voices in the Traditionalist movement in the US. And you will never meet a more cheerful, fun-loving and personable chap. Never an unkind word to or about anyone and always ready for a laugh or a song or a beer or a gelato.

Here he helps to clear up some misunderstandings.

One often hears the phrase, "I'm just a Catholic" from people who are at once trying to place themselves above the Church's interior War and to deny that there is anything they need to learn about their Faith.

It is annoying.

Where there are differences, one must make distinctions. And in the Church there are differences (and how!) and therefore we make the distinctions as best we can. (Taxonomy is the least exact of all the biological studies).

It is not pious or noble to try to ignore these differences or to sneer at the people who are attempting in good faith to clear away the dishonest effort made by many churchmen over the last 50 years to paper over and ignore these differences, to the harm of millions.

Chris Ferrara explains that we use these distinguishing terms because there are differences, one might say "divisions" in the Church that, for the good of souls, must be identified.

"Because of these novelties that have infiltrated the life of the Church, we've developed a kind of neoconservative Catholicism... And that is unprecedented in the Church. Before Vatican II we were all 'traditionalists'. We all went to the traditional Latin Mass; we all believed there was one true Church; we all prayed fifteen decades of the Rosary. We all pretty much practiced and believed the same way as our fathers and their fathers did for century after century after century.

"But now as I stand here, it becomes necessary for me to say I'm a Traditionalist. Why? Because there has arisen in the Church a kind of division of the Church into strains of Roman Catholicism.

"Now we have the charismatics. We have the conservative Novus Ordos. We have the very conservative Novus Ordos, the liberal Novus Ordos, the moderate Novus Ordos, the Traditionalists, the very extreme Traditionalists, the sede vacante Traditionalists... and so on.

"Whereas before Vatican II, we had heretics and Catholics."

He's the one who finally put my mind to rest about the Church. In a conversation at Gardone, he said, "Whatever goes on in Rome, stay Catholic. They can't take the faith from you unless you're willing to relinquish it."


"You can't take the sky from me."



~

Durrr...

New study finds women prefer to be housewives than corporate execs...

The first thing Feminism had to do was convince everyone that there is no such thing as an inherent feminine and masculine nature.

But The Real always wins.



~

Spring in Rome

Last Angelus... not a dry eye in the Piazza.


"You are Peter, stay."




Conclave adventures: Vatican's media centre


The only clear shot I got of the white smoke.


Rather a large crowd.


The long, weird pause where he just stood there.
"Pssst... buddy, you're supposed to wave..."

For the first five minutes, I just called him Pope New Guy, then someone with a smartphone got it from the interwebs. Yes, standing in the Piazza listening to the announcement in person, we still needed the internet to tell us what was going on.


Santa Marinella in the spring... April is best in Italy.


Roman Acanthus Spinosus. I was going to dig some up and put it in a pot on the balcony, but had second thoughts when I saw how huge they get.


Close up of the purple flowers on that tree. Cercis siliquastrum.


Fibonacci was here... lots of spiky Mediterranean things around.


"I live here. I really live here." Sometimes I have to say it out loud because it just seems unreal.


Pink Oxalis


Flowering crabapple


April, definitely Italy's best month.




Some relative of the Yucca plant, they grow long strands of pointy leaves in a bunch then this flower spike comes up. V. beautiful.


This stuff grows all over the hills, but I haven't found it in any of my wildflower books.




Freesias growing wild in a cow field.


Also still working on this one. Square stem and purple bract flowers on a single spike with opposed toothed leaves and furry surface. A bunch of taxonomic characteristics that would put it in the mint family, but no minty scent.



Santa Marinella is built on the teeny little strip of flattish land between the beach and the base of the hills. In about five minutes walking, you find yourself at the base of a very steep hill that takes about 1/2 an hour or 45 minutes to climb. At the top is a plateau of rolling countryside leading off into the Etruscan hills. All farmland up there.

It's my favourite walk. (I think that's a volcano in the far background).


I love the zoom on my camera.


One of the older farms... typical Lazio stone construction.


Looking positively English, it's so green and pleasant. The yellow stuff blooms all through the spring, turning the fields golden. It's wild mustard.


Borage, useful medicinal plant, and you can candy the blossoms. Watch out for the prickles though.


On the Via Marguta in Wisteria season.






I gatti di Roma...






I make a joke about modern "art" - that it's the "school of nailing chairs to walls". And here they are in a gallery.


At the Santa Marinella train station. Some people see weeds, I see flowers and a lovely natural garden.


Lots of thistle-like spiky Mediterannean things. Anyone?


Greater Plantain. I know how to make them into projectiles. Do you?


People vastly underestimate the beauty of grasses. So elegant.


Dramatic cat.

Euclid Book 1

or, why I wish I had a blackboard in my living room.

There's this great thing on YouTube, "Mathematicsonline" that has a whole bunch of beginner Euclid. But his playlists are all messed up and out of order, so I'm putting them together.


Here, now you can learn something while you surf.

A long time ago I found a reason to upgrade my math skills (I may have told y'all this story before.) so I enrolled in this rather neat thing they had in Vancouver to help adults catch up with educational things they'd missed for various reasons in school. It wasn't exactly "adult upgrading". Being the Left Coast, they gave much thought to creating something that wouldn't hurt our "self esteem" (ie: our egos) so they set it up, quite ingeniously, to have upgrading "streams" in the various subjects into which you could find your starting point and go forward as fast or as slow as you wanted and as far as you wanted. In theory, you could start with first grade math and go all the way through to calculus (or whatever) and physics, (assuming they could find a teacher who knew it).

It was staffed by retired university professors and people like that who wanted to help out but who knew what they were doing. It was a drop-in sort of thing, so you just went when you could. Everyone was very friendly and supportive, and they were careful not to make you feel like an idiot for having blown off your education the first time round. It was pretty great, actually, and if there were ever to be a highschool set up like that, it might be worth a try for homeschooling types.

So, anyway, I started with a tested math level of about grade nine and quickly discovered that my math troubles had been more connected to my difficult home situation than anyone had previously thought, and I shot ahead like a mathematical bullet. I was greatly relieved, actually, since I had thought all that time that I was somehow mentally defective. That the math part of my brain simply didn't work as well as normal people's. It turns out that I'd just had lousy teachers, starting with my mother.

She, with her undergraduate degree in Math and her authorship of a math text and then her engineering degree, had no idea how to teach someone who "didn't get it," and all of our attempts at either teaching me math or doing math homework had ended up with the following screaming match: "I can't do it! I just CAN'T DO IT!!!" "I DON'T KNOW WHY, AREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE MY KID?"

Anyway, I was glad to discover that there wasn't actually anything wrong with my brain except a habit of panicking whenever I sat down with a math book. If they'd had YouTube at the time, I'd have not bothered ever touching a math book again.

Ultimately, the thing I learned about myself was that I LOVED geometry. There was that memorable moment when I realised what geometry and philosophy had to do with each other: geometry was just a kind of way of diagramming the underlying nature of reality, and proving that it is real, that the rules that set up everything, the universe (and presumably whatever there is other than the universe) are absolute, immutable and non-contradictory, that the universe was rational.

Ahhhhhh... rational...Mmmmmm...



~

The Laws of Nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God."

Euclid

One smart SOB.



~

Allie explains what depression is like

"...

as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same.

"I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse's Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled. I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience."

Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.

Welcome back, btw. We've all missed you.

~