Dita Parker
Thursday, December 18, 2008
...look closer.
I submit to you
That love and peace are verbs,
They are doing words,
Compassion is the marriage between heart and intellect,
Reason a bully when not a thing of beauty,
That being of service has been sadly mistaken for servitude,
That pessimism, loneliness and hatred are mass murderers,
We do teach our children the value of money but not the indispensability of a warm heart,
Constant instant gratification equals serial dismay,
No one is born evil, only disadvantaged,
Multitasking is looking busy while getting nothing done,
Those who choose not to believe in Santa are not eligible for gifts,
And Groucho was right: If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Heads will roll
I'm a movie buff who happens to like Tim Burton's stuff. I decorated the door to my den with a poster for Sleepy Hollow on Halloween. Not the one with Johnny and Christina even though they are beautiful together, aren't they, but the one with the headless Hessian Horseman. That is one hauntingly beautiful, and grisly, image, too.
My kids are old enough to not have him riding into their nightmares waving that axe. They are also young enough to respect his authority when they haven't respected that closed door. Halloween went by but the Horseman stayed. The kids think it's a cool poster, a little scary but not too much. They stop to stare at him as he watches over me. And they forget to knock. They forget to barge in altogether.
So I'm hanging onto my Hessian fiend of a friend and letting him hang on my door for the time being. He has worked wonders for my writing peace if I've indulged while the children are still awake. They have seen Mom's head on fire when interrupted for the twelfth time in twenty minutes. The fact that the Horseman doesn't have one is ten times more effective.
My kids are old enough to not have him riding into their nightmares waving that axe. They are also young enough to respect his authority when they haven't respected that closed door. Halloween went by but the Horseman stayed. The kids think it's a cool poster, a little scary but not too much. They stop to stare at him as he watches over me. And they forget to knock. They forget to barge in altogether.
So I'm hanging onto my Hessian fiend of a friend and letting him hang on my door for the time being. He has worked wonders for my writing peace if I've indulged while the children are still awake. They have seen Mom's head on fire when interrupted for the twelfth time in twenty minutes. The fact that the Horseman doesn't have one is ten times more effective.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thank you for the music
...the hypnotizing and the haunting, the cheesy and queasy, the infinitely memorable and the imminently forgettable (the latter amplifies the effect of the former, the former puts the latter to shame). Then again, taste is a subjective issue; my favorite band sucks, now so does yours.
Say what you want, think what you will, they're the best thing to hit a note (or graze it) while striking a chord within us since that first rhyme you ever beat into the ground and your family over the head with. You may have trouble remembering those all-important memos and messages, the birthdays of the near and dear, the text you'll be tested on tomorrow (and you've gone through that damned thing 27 times over the past 72 hours), but how many 80's (or, fill the blank) songs do you know by heart? Start counting... Uncanny, isn't it? Scary, actually. And only human.
Songs that make you happy to remember, tunes that make you wish you could forget. To dance, to play, to sing, even if only by yourself; think of it as a gift. It is a gift. Everyone on the planet does it different from you. Someone may even do it better than you (yeah, we really love to hate them). But no one in the universe does it exactly like you.
Thank you for the movies; the ones I watched only once and will never be able to watch again because I cried over whose brilliant script was tossed to make this mockery, or because they were so dead-on, true to life, painful and poignant I bawl my eyes out merely thinking about how they made me feel. And they made me Feel. Those I will carry with me always, like little jewels I found. You might look at those pebbles and shrug them off as fool's gold.
Thank you for the books; the disturbing and the inspiring, the uplifting and the mind boggling. So many beautiful languages and voices, some centuries old and indestructible, some young and formative and fragile. False friends, old friends, true blue friends. You wish you would have written them. You only wish no one would have come up with some of them. Where's a language policeman when you need one? But those that flow...they make your spirit sing.
Nature is perfunctory and evolution the ultimate in waste management. They are the final word and judgment on art: we need those chords, those images and words. They nourish us and console us. They bring us together just when we start to think it would be easier to let it all fall apart. They shake us up when we start to believe that maybe we won't get hurt if we sit tight and play dead.
They reach out and transcend all barriers. They remind us that we are not alone, that there is life out there. And that there is life and fight and laughter in us yet.
Say what you want, think what you will, they're the best thing to hit a note (or graze it) while striking a chord within us since that first rhyme you ever beat into the ground and your family over the head with. You may have trouble remembering those all-important memos and messages, the birthdays of the near and dear, the text you'll be tested on tomorrow (and you've gone through that damned thing 27 times over the past 72 hours), but how many 80's (or, fill the blank) songs do you know by heart? Start counting... Uncanny, isn't it? Scary, actually. And only human.
Songs that make you happy to remember, tunes that make you wish you could forget. To dance, to play, to sing, even if only by yourself; think of it as a gift. It is a gift. Everyone on the planet does it different from you. Someone may even do it better than you (yeah, we really love to hate them). But no one in the universe does it exactly like you.
Thank you for the movies; the ones I watched only once and will never be able to watch again because I cried over whose brilliant script was tossed to make this mockery, or because they were so dead-on, true to life, painful and poignant I bawl my eyes out merely thinking about how they made me feel. And they made me Feel. Those I will carry with me always, like little jewels I found. You might look at those pebbles and shrug them off as fool's gold.
Thank you for the books; the disturbing and the inspiring, the uplifting and the mind boggling. So many beautiful languages and voices, some centuries old and indestructible, some young and formative and fragile. False friends, old friends, true blue friends. You wish you would have written them. You only wish no one would have come up with some of them. Where's a language policeman when you need one? But those that flow...they make your spirit sing.
Nature is perfunctory and evolution the ultimate in waste management. They are the final word and judgment on art: we need those chords, those images and words. They nourish us and console us. They bring us together just when we start to think it would be easier to let it all fall apart. They shake us up when we start to believe that maybe we won't get hurt if we sit tight and play dead.
They reach out and transcend all barriers. They remind us that we are not alone, that there is life out there. And that there is life and fight and laughter in us yet.
Monday, November 24, 2008
November rain
It snowed all weekend and now the landscape is in perfect postcard shape. Or it was until my family and I rushed outside and stamped all over said landscape. People, they're everywhere.
Snow angels, snowballs, snowmen, toboggans and snow plows, and roughing it outdoors for all it's worth since it will all turn to slosh in a day or two. For now, it is a winter wonderland, and I much prefer it to the normative gray and grim November. And October. And December. January... Somebody stop me.
I'm stuck in Scandinavia for the time being. This isn't a suitable climate for humans, and I'm not fit for human consumption when the sun doesn't shine for a week or three. I know it's out there, but I need proof. I need to see it. I need it. The desolate dark and the even bleaker stamp it imprints on people's faces is all the evidence I need to confirm the nagging suspicion that some of our ancestors had brains the size of peanuts.
They traveled north and did not travel back south after experiencing their first winter? Those who did not starve or freeze their hinds off must have been too weak to move a muscle when summer finally arrived. And it is devious, the Nordic summer. It's a trickster. It is breathtakingly beautiful, such an unbelievable metamorphosis you stop to stare at it in awe and forget to run for your life and some warmer spot on the map.
Before you know it, it's winter again and you're stuck. Maybe that's what happened to those poor pilgrims. Nature seduced them into thinking it would be all right. It takes all my spirit to step out into a cold, rainy, windy November day and smile. No one else is smiling, why should I go first? It takes imagination to remember the sun, that it still shines, that it even exists.
It will soon be summer in my southern home. That much I know for a fact, that I can remember vividly. So I concentrate on that image, dig it up, conjure it with all my might; that invincible summer Monsieur Camus wrote about lying within me. It tugs at the corner of my mouth, seducing me into thinking it will be all right, to keep on smiling even if only to irk the natives.
That is what people will think you're trying to do: throw them off course, mess with them. Or they will think you're plain crazy. What is there to smile about on a cold November day? Looking out the window at the cotton covered landscape while thinking about the sun ascending over my favorite beach strip, the best of both worlds... Plenty, my friends, plenty.
Snow angels, snowballs, snowmen, toboggans and snow plows, and roughing it outdoors for all it's worth since it will all turn to slosh in a day or two. For now, it is a winter wonderland, and I much prefer it to the normative gray and grim November. And October. And December. January... Somebody stop me.
I'm stuck in Scandinavia for the time being. This isn't a suitable climate for humans, and I'm not fit for human consumption when the sun doesn't shine for a week or three. I know it's out there, but I need proof. I need to see it. I need it. The desolate dark and the even bleaker stamp it imprints on people's faces is all the evidence I need to confirm the nagging suspicion that some of our ancestors had brains the size of peanuts.
They traveled north and did not travel back south after experiencing their first winter? Those who did not starve or freeze their hinds off must have been too weak to move a muscle when summer finally arrived. And it is devious, the Nordic summer. It's a trickster. It is breathtakingly beautiful, such an unbelievable metamorphosis you stop to stare at it in awe and forget to run for your life and some warmer spot on the map.
Before you know it, it's winter again and you're stuck. Maybe that's what happened to those poor pilgrims. Nature seduced them into thinking it would be all right. It takes all my spirit to step out into a cold, rainy, windy November day and smile. No one else is smiling, why should I go first? It takes imagination to remember the sun, that it still shines, that it even exists.
It will soon be summer in my southern home. That much I know for a fact, that I can remember vividly. So I concentrate on that image, dig it up, conjure it with all my might; that invincible summer Monsieur Camus wrote about lying within me. It tugs at the corner of my mouth, seducing me into thinking it will be all right, to keep on smiling even if only to irk the natives.
That is what people will think you're trying to do: throw them off course, mess with them. Or they will think you're plain crazy. What is there to smile about on a cold November day? Looking out the window at the cotton covered landscape while thinking about the sun ascending over my favorite beach strip, the best of both worlds... Plenty, my friends, plenty.
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