Hekate
Hekate's JournalVertigo. I'm getting vertigo & my feet are cramping. I need to breathe into a paper bag or something
Oh my god.
You know what I want to live in? A single story hobbit-home with all woodwork panels and beams. I was taken aback when my teenage grandson told me how much he loves my place because it was hobbit-like — not round, of course, but with the wood. And I looked around and realized that the kid was right, and that was definitely why I fell in love with it at first sight too. Lucky us.
But the “world’s tallest building” is not for me. You couldn’t pay me enough to even visit the damn thing.
Or maybe that's why they split. All I know is the sheer number of DUers who instantly...
…follow their observation that she’s icky in the present by indicating it gives them pause when thinking about Governor Newsom’s character in the present has finally gotten on my nerves.
Like I said, it seems to be some kind of trope here. It’s literally been going on for several years. “Eww, Kimmy’s a gargoyle — so I guess he is too.” And the usual hinted subtext has to do with his possible presidential run some day.
Sooo — I guess this means we shouldn’t consider him as a presidential candidate some day? Because Kimmy’s a gargoyle? California is an incredibly complex state of almost 40 million people — but Kimmy’s a gargoyle who snorts coke with Junior Trump, so that says something about her ex-husband, who is the Democratic governor of California?
It’s not you at all, mobeau, so I hope you will forgive me. I should probably do this as an OP one of these days, just to see who bites.
iPad query re lost tabs. Basically my collection of tabs cleared itself...
This has happened before, and all I could figure was that I might have accidentally hit something on the screen with my thumb that told it to clear. It’s really annoying, but I’m usually able to retrieve by googling.
This time, however, I was trying to catch up on my daily newspaper for the past 2 or 3 weeks, so over a dozen tabs were up. The e-version of the LA Times comes in my email, I click in the link, and get to read it online. BUT, I have to click every day and keep the tab open till I’m done. For reasons I don’t know, I can’t just go back to day before yesterday’s email link and get day before yesterday’s newspaper — it automatically reverts to today.
So an hour ago I did something that caused the whole damn thing (the tab bar) to clear. All I have left are today’s newspaper and DU. Did I inadvertently open a second window? If so, how do I undo, and find the window with all the tabs I’m not done with yet?
I feel stupid. But I’m also really hooked on the convenience of this pad — I can sit wherever I want, and (of increasing importance) I can blow up the font for readability.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.
I went to my 50th and it was lovely. There were about 600 in Class of 1965. For various reasons...
…I’ve been out of touch — my high school is on O’ahu and I moved to California in 1979, the last of my family to do so. I have depression issues.
But I loved it so. I went to the 25th alone (actually worked out well, as I was looking good at 40 and felt optimistic.) I took my husband and our two pre-teen kids to a wedding of old family friends once. That was it for being able to go back.
This time my husband came with me and we stayed in a cute hotel just off Waikiki (I hate Waikiki, actually, but we were on a side street with a view of my beloved mountains, plus my husband found an early morning — like, before dawn — handmade udon noodle shop that was amazing: I think they must cater to local workers and Japanese tourists ).
Aside from our classmates the reunion planners doing a great job finding venues (clearly someone had a membership to the Windward Yacht Club, and someone else had a membership to the Windward Country Club, and yet another person had a membership to the funkiest cutest wooden beach club on “our” Kailua beach) — well, aside from that I kept bumping into people I remembered and it was nice to see who remembered the shy awkward girl.
And it was so nice to get stories filled in. I was talking to a Filipino guy I distinctly remembered being below my eye level (I’m 5’4”) only now I was looking up to meet his eyes. He said he grew over 6 inches after high school, and I said wow, that’s a late growth spurt. To which he said, there were 7 kids in his family, and it was only after he joined the military that he could eat all he wanted. I wondered how many others there were, hungry and I never knew…
So many random stories. A couple of the guys were dying, and one said so: Patrick said he’d invented a beach sandal in California, made money, and felt he’d been ripped off in the sale of the business. Now that he knew what his fate was, he decided to spend every cent on friends and travel, and do it soon.
One was a Chinese-American guy I’d known since 5th grade — bright, funny, Wile E Coyote. Ended up in Los Vegas, ultimately. On the rare occasions we’d seen each other over the years, it was like no time had passed. His business ideas were so out there that I could only laugh — I mean so sketchy and creative I felt like I was listening to stories from another planet. You want to know how to build a 10 story building on a lot the City of Honolulu will only permit a standard 8 story height? Lower the ceilings in each unit. You want to know how to move a gigantic historic floating Chinese restaurant? Don’t even ask — I can’t possibly remember, but I laughed.
He looked sick, and some of his old pals were making sure he got back and forth to the dialysis clinic. He absolutely refused to admit he was dying until the very end a few years later.
Being from the Vietnam War era, I wasn’t sure what kind of “I got drafted” stories there’d be — I’d volunteered with the Vets for Peace in Santa Barbara during BushCheney’s war, and knew there was bitterness to be found. But for the men I talked to at my 50th, the common thread was: what a big wide world there was beyond the Islands. Oh, and for some, the food was definitely a feature.
Another one of my Chinese-American friends I knew since 5th grade spent several years in China as an English teacher. He had many stories of how he dodged the incessant surveillance, and enjoyed himself while doing so. At the time we re-connected at the 50th, he’d been doing farming in Thailand, with a sideline of rescuing or at least diverting sex-workers and their children. My husband absolutely fell in love with his girlfriend, a much younger woman from California who was of Armenian descent.
And so it went. Surprising encounters. Some sweet, some funny, some sad. I saw a woman who’d been awful mean to me for no reason back in the day, and I mean even at our 25th. But she was in a small group of her old friends, and clearly hadn’t bought a ticket to the banquet so was just saying hello before going. She looked shrunken, sad, old, and somewhat impaired. I kept walking, but my heart suddenly went out to her.
I’m pretty sure you won’t get a ukulele orchestra, though. At the beach house one guy pulled out his uke and started in on the pop standards from high school days. By the time he finished those he started on the “book” of Hawai’ian music and about 10 other people dragged out their ukes and joined. My husband never wanted to leave, but I knew this is where I’m from, and this trip was just a piece out of time.
Hubby and I drove around to see some places I dearly wanted to revisit. I did get to see the museum, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, endowed by one of the last of the royalty. It was rebuilt from the ground up since I last saw it and, well, stunning in its collections and display of Hawaiian and other Polynesian ethnography, archaeology, history, ancient art, geology, oceanography.
We had a hard time navigating what Honolulu has become. The whole time I attended UH I lived and worked in the city, and I could hardly recognize any of it. (My home town of Kailua seemed hardly changed at all.) We saw homeless encampments in an underpass we had to drive through on our way back to the hotel every night. There’s a lot of homeless now.
We got lost (in the daylight) on the way to Valley of the Temples, saw some beautiful rural areas, and a lot of homemade signs telling developers to go to hell. Finally turned around and found our destination.
Another old friend, from UH days (she married and divorced the guy I called Wile E Coyote) was still working real estate but couldn’t afford to retire. She drove us around to some of her favorite places. One was a gorgeous-gaudy Chinese temple with monastery attached. Just something on a side street in the residential area of the city. She’s a Scandinavian from Minnesota, but has found herself the last member of her ex-husband’s family who goes to this temple, mostly funerals these days, tho some weddings. Stories.
That’s my point. You don’t know what you’ll find or not. My memories are specific to where I came from — but apply generally, I think. After 50 years we are who we are, not just older, but old. Our various careers hardly matter any more in the scheme of status, just markers along the way. Photos of grandchildren are nice. Old “sins” are forgotten, God willing. Some cliques — or just call them tight groups of friends — still exist, but hopefully fail to pack any punch after all these years. We all built a whole other life after HS. Oh, and as to remembering names and faces, pull out your old yearbook and have a look— and hope to goodness the organizers make name tags with your name and old photo on them.
Just want to say sorry for rambling if I bored anyone, but thank you Debbie for giving me the chance to take this walk down memory lane.
The operative question is: Is the Police Dept an occupying army? Are we civilians, or citizens?
Do they have a license to be judge, jury, and executioner on the spot?
Time to take away the military hardware, not add to it.
The problem we have with the SCOTUS now is that they self-regulate. Period. There are no rules...
…that apply to these lifetime-appointed people. Unlike any other federal judges, they are not even required to recuse themselves in the case of a conflict of interest.
This works only as long as everyone makes it work. Like the “norms” and “guardrails” that Trump kept smashing — the talking heads bleated and wrung their hands, and nothing was done that could make him stop.
I finally figured out “norms” are not laws. What they are is the equivalent of a gentlemen’s agreement from a bygone era. People who have solid ethics and/or an acute sense of social shame will not break norms — and with Trump we were confronted for the first time with a president who had no shame whatsoever. An oath of office worked well in a society where most people took the Almighty seriously enough that they were not only wary of social shaming and prison, but really believed in repercussions in an afterlife. The very meaning of oaths has been slipping for quite awhile.
The Supreme Court has been corrupted beyond belief, imo. Thanks to a 40+ year plan, we now have a 6-3 majority of religious fanatics in charge. As has been proven throughout human history, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — and when you truly believe the Almighty (see above) endorses your behavior rather than restrains it, very bad things happen. Alito is so confident in his place in the universe of a punitive and hateful god that he has no difficulty citing a medieval cleric and a 16th century witch-burner in an opinion affecting the life of every woman and girl in a 21st century nation founded on secular 18th century Enlightenment principles.
Now he has publicly smeared the good name of a fellow Justice who is a single woman and a Jew.
You are right: this is sexual harassment. It’s also revelatory of the sheer contempt he holds for everybody who isn’t male and his brand of Christian.
But who is going to stop him now? He has a 6-3 majority, a lifetime appointment, an undemocratic mindset, and the endorsement (in his mind) of God Almighty.
Do you even know who Viola Liuzzo & Chaney, Schwerner & Goodman were? They were murdered...
… in the Civil Rights movement.
There’s your shout-out to “Christians and Jews” — Warnock spoke the names of 3 young men murdered by the KKK for travelling together in Freedom Summer, one Black and two Jews, in 1964. In addition, Mrs. Liuzzo was a white Civil Rights activist, also murdered by the KKK, in 1965.
During the Civil Rights era, and indeed during every great progressive reform movement in the history of this country, many of the participants were people moved to act by the best tenets of their various religions.
Deal with it.
First they came for Planned Parenthood, and I mean that literally. PP has been dealing with threats
… and the murder of doctors, nurses, and clinic staffers for many decades. They were doxxed before doxxing was a thing. “Wanted” posters went up online. Their children were stalked to and from school.
Now that the radicals have the SCOTUS of their dreams and Roe has been overturned, they have to move on to other targets while we sane people are distracted by cleaning up the wreckage of Dobbs.
The future is here, right now. We hang together — or we will surely hang separately.
Texas bounty hunters cartoon, by David Horsey
This struck me deeply when it was published several months ago, and still does. I wanted to use it in a DU conversation recently and it took me days to find it and more days to figure out a way to copy it here. Too late for the person I was trying to communicate with, but I hope you will be okay with my putting it here where I can find it again. Now I can bookmark it properly, and add it to my Journal.
Any comments welcome, but not necessary. I know you all get it. Thank you.
🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
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There are so many that I want a "Favorites" on YouTube and a DVD to keep forever
Pointing at Trump in a meeting of powerful men all looking at their hands: “With you, it always comes back to Russia”
Another time: “Do not underestimate the power I bring to this”
Stalking out of the White House in that red coat.
Ripping up his “Manifesto of Lies”
and last but certainly not least:
Saving our democracy while under personal threat of death from a mob and a renegade potus
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 90,653