Dreaming Kid Dreams

Ever notice that as a parent we sort of vicariously relive our pasts through our children's adventures? Daughter #1 is college hunting and trying to figure out what she wants to "be". She switches identities daily. Drives me batty but sort of delights me too. But I find myself reliving my high school senior year (yech) along with her. Lots of terrible pressures and feelings of not living up to my peers. I'm trying to figure out how much to help and how much to watch. It is very difficult.

Sorry haven't posted much but I've been very very depressed and harried/hassled/frazzled with RL.

I'm enjoying the FSRV talks over at Ben Browder Online Forum and enjoy the lovely people over there. I've also belatedly discovered all the fantabulous stories solicited by kazbaby in her Potluck Ficathon. Such talented writers and I'm so dry in that department at the moment. I think gigerisgod's story and kixxa's story touched me the most and Kaz's story scared me the most. Thank goodness Farscape fic is not dead.

It is funny that Live Journal bugs you when you haven't posted in awhile. So, life has been one roller coaster ride after another, health problems again, a Bat Mitzvah to plan (and daughter 2 did beautifully and family behaved crazily--all normal), we are college hunting and pushing my Junior to pay attention in school (what else is new?) while she wants to draw and create films. I think she will go to Junior College for a year and then Film School or to be a psychologist. I think there is way too much pressure around my community about all this. It is very catching too. Freelance sucks. BUT, I'm having fun designing Anthony Simcoe and Nat Dean's new web site www.livescifi.com--head over an see what is going on.

Anybody want to write reviews? columns? post vids? Contact buckscaper at buck@livescifi.com. He desperately needs artists. Tariq has posted his Season 4 storyboards and concept drawings for Farscape and some of his other work. Brilliant!

I'm watching Supernatural and am riveted. Cathy1967 flew in from Denmark for the Bat Mitzvah (Scapers are the best of the best!) and turned me on to it. I'm way behind everyone else, but whatelse is new? I'm still watching Farscape reruns and Stargate to talk to friends over on Ben Browder Online. I guess I just felt I had nothing to blog about here. I have been lurking, though (somewhat).

Kaz, thanks for the nudge. Hope to see you in November. Hope you are doing okay.

That's all for now. I'll try to be a more timely poster.  

I'm feeling very blue and anxiety-prone due to family matters and this quiz did cheer me up. It is weird how close it is to me (or how I see me).

( the birthday quiz... )

the five quotes meme....

quotes that i found on the link that jenlev point me towards...

as she posted: "Go page through the quotations look until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe." i've posted them here. feel free to pick your own and so forth. *g* here's the link: www.quotationspage.com/random.php3


1. Do it now. It is not safe to leave a generous feeling to the cooling influences of the world.
Thomas Guthrie

2. Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 - )

3. It is only to the individual that a soul is given.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

4. As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

5. The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
Kilgore Trout, (Philip Jose Farmer), "Venus on the Half Shell"

I finally received the mood icons from LithiumDoll's charity auction by luridmuse and the wait was so worth it. They are gorgeous and I just wanted to thank her/him in person.

Got back from Summit, NJ on a business trip. Humid, hot, hazy and successful. Now I have to do the work.

jenlev, where are you??? Can you believe this stuff???

I got this by following a link pointed out by scaperdeage that was posted on mock_the_stupid. I just cannot believe that anyone can pretend to believe all this garbled stuff. It is so, so beyond messed up, mushed up. My anthropologist inner person is cringing. And then the guy deletes comments that ask him for proof saying that it behooves the doubter to refute and that research, archeological materials can be faked, so aren't proof. GAAAAHHH

Here's why Man Could Not Have Evolved In Africa... oh, and this is posted on the anthropologist community. Gotta say the guy has guts.

The African theory came up when people discovered an old skeletal remain in Africa. The assumption thus was "if this is the oldest, it has to be the origin of the species." Since then, every nutcase who stumbled over that idea began to spout it. Since this is an anthropology group, which archaeology is very entrenched in as a field of study, then I am sure that these commonly known facts will show why "glamwhorebunni," a poster here who will not listen to anything because she claims to be a "climate expert," is wrong on this issue and how people who agree with her are wrong.

1. To start off, he claims that she knows that man had to come from Africa because she is a climate expert. This has a lot of flaws. First, man's closest relatives, Neanderthal, and Homo Erectus, were not found in Africa. They were found in Europe, Asia and SouthEast Asia. This shows that man, genetically, was unfit for the African environment, as their genetic counterparts, who also lacked claws, fur, et al, did not survive in such a warm terrain as Africa, then man likely could not. Since we do not have a genetic trait that separates us (such as canines having different fur structures for different climates) then we would have to exist in the same climates.

2. Man cannot, archaeologically speaking, survive in Africa as primitive. As anyone who studied Anthropology and archaeology, man needed tools in order to evolve. Before tools, they could only exist off eating staple foods. As these staple foods, which man survives on for nutrition, can only come from temperate conditions that have inundations (annual flooding), then they could only have genetically rose from a river valley. Since Africa only has one, the Nile (which is not considered Africa anthropologically, but connected to the Middle East), which has conditions in this way, then Man could not have originated in Africa.

3. Why couldn't man survive in the jungles of Southern Africa? Well, first of all, the other river valleys aren't jungles. Second, jungles only provide fruits, which man cannot survive strictly off of. Three, man did not have the tools in jungles to hunt for meat, and flint and other tools were brought into Africa, not made in Africa.

4. If man did come from Africa, and had food, then he would have spread out slowly through rabid increase, or suddenly leave. If he spread out, then there would be far more remains found in Africa, as the population density would have to be significantly higher than the population density now, which has increased greatly in the past hundred years.

5. If they did spread out, they would have stopped at the Nile or Euphrates. Instead, there are traces of integration with neanderthal and a spread over Tibet and into China. Since China's culture is significantly more complex and older than many of the Nile/Eurphrates cultures, it would seem strange that man would move from the first (Nile and Euphrates) and into China, after going through such a harsh terrain with little technology.

6. Darwin says that if man does evolve, then original man must have every trait that comes apparent, unless it is through genetic mutation, which is very rare. Thus, man, in Africa, would need to have the same traits found in all other cultures, and many of these traits would have kept the population of man in Africa down, denying any "spread" out of Africa based on over population.

There are many more reasons, but it should be obvious that those who are so stuck on Africa really have no clue about anthropological, socialogical, evolutionary, genetic, or archaeological methods or understandings on Man's origins.

All I can say is now I see why our school systems are failing.

I clicked on the petition large icon on kernezelda's thread and followed it to a very confusing diatribe about the changes that are going to take place (and have taken place) on live journal. I wanted to comment on the hoopla.

I am a lazy soul. I rather like the revised layout of the customize section of live journal. It clarifies where to go for what types of changes, clears up confusion of those myriad check boxes, and makes it easier for newbies to create their own blog space. It leaves the advanced features alone for those who know how to use them, but opens up the masthead to the masses, if you will. I like that. I think that ranting about change because it is change is truly annoying.

On the other hand, the fact that it seems that the parent company of Live Journal is siphoning off "older bloggers" to a new service called Vox that looks pretty dumb to me. The qualities of the site are cute and very media-driven whereas live journal is extremely word/text driven. I don't know why they are positioning live journal for younger bloggers and vox for older bloggers except that this day and age needs to segregate everything into little places. Vox is positioned as a more secure and private area whereas Live Journal is more wide open.

So, if the petitioners wish to make themselves clear, they should re-write the petiton so that it makes sense because I couldn't figure out what was going on until I followed the various links and read the diatribe that started it over here at lj_design.

snurched from twitchie when I should be working.

( Cool lj friends meme )

Early Monday morning (5 am), my husband woke with an intense pain in his left side. We waited until afternoon thinking that it was some sort of stomach bug, but when it didn’t get better and started to get worse, I made him call the doctor and off to the emergency room we ran. We spent from 3 pm to 11 with him getting tests to figure out what was going on and he is one sick man. It seems he has a severely inflamed gall bladder and they are doing more tests (they admitted him at 11 pm and I was falling apart from stress and needed to collect the girls from my mother’s house). If the tests come back positive, he’ll have the gall bladder removed. If not, they keep him until his white count goes down (at least I hope they keep him).

It is funny how different people deal with pain differently. I’ve grown pretty insensitive due to my chronic pains and what I’ve gone through that past two years. My husband has always been sort of a big baby and I think that is what threw me or I would have had him call the doctor sooner. They of course put him on the oncology floor (murphy’s law) and he is pretty sanguine and I always freak when he gets sick because it can bring on a seizure. You can tell, I’m a mess.

So, send hugs for my hubby (he is pretty comfortable at the moment, but still sick) and speak to whomever that this mystery gets solved.

I spent the weekend chaperoning middle school boys through Gilbert and Sullivan (man, are these guys loud and rather vulgar, but cute) and fun was had by all. My middle school daughter was a fairy in Iolanthe and it is amazing how beautifully the girls sang. I can’t say the same about the boys, but they will mature into themselves soon. I’m very tired (also chaperoned the cast party on Saturday night where the pizza place was charging $10 per head--which meant that if you wanted to stay inside the restaurant without even eating, you got charged. So parents stood outside looking into large windows while the kids threw ice at each other. My introduction to middle school life. lol

We went to an interesting meeting yesterday from Loren Pope (of the Pope-Leighey House by Frank Lloyd Wright) who wrote 40 Colleges That Changed Lives and had a fascinating if overwhelming time learning about these small schools. The college search has begun (or at least getting my daughter interested in pushing herself in school so as to attain admission into one of these places where she is excited to go). She is interested in ancient history (look jenlev another convert! And there was many interesting programs. She got overwhelmed and scared very fast so we left early and went book shopping (a favorite pastime).

I then got my hands dirty underneath the hood of Live Journal. I found a wonderful set of tutorials for customizing Live Journal and got very frustrated but stubborn compiling and debugging until I had learned how to change colors, backgrounds, sizing, etc. I feel very proud that I wrestled this thing to the ground (I think). It hurts my head. But I managed to change the look of my page using Component (because it is extremely modular).

Happy Birthday markhanson and may all your wishes come true!

I got this from _happyme_ and it depresses me because I barely recognized so many bands on the list. And the bands I do like weren’t there--such as Lifehouse and the 1970s groups and singers I truly love. I really lean towards Adult Alternative or Contemporary Folk. Anyway, here’s the results:

Your Taste in Music:

80’s Pop: Medium Influence

90’s Pop: Medium Influence

Adult Alternative: Medium Influence

Classic Rock: Medium Influence

Progressive Rock: Medium Influence

80’s Rock: Low Influence

90’s R&B: Low Influence

90’s Rock: Low Influence

Punk: Low Influence

I’m such a geek.

I got a 100% on the Farscape Primer test!

Click here! to take it

I've been reading posts by my friends while I work my last week at a temp job doing extremely banal web page updates (converting PDFs to HTML pages verbatum--over 500 of them) and it got me thinking about obsolescence. I graduated with a Master of Arts in cultural anthropology almost 30 years ago--a lifetime in research. When I was in school Eric Thompson was king and Freud/Jung his mentors, per se. Symbolism, psychology, and dreams were my passions as was how religion is so conservative that original thoughts and beliefs stick around even when the culture is overwhelmed by another (ala my study people the Maya of Central America). We didn't have computers and we didn't have the other tools used today. Participant Observation was taught and became almost a religion in itself.

I got out in 1978 and found few opportunities to use my skills. And they withered as I became a writer and graphics designer (skills I used in anthropology). I'm telling this history because I've been reading posts that are about the struggle to find one's self in a profession that is difficult to enter. I keep banging my head against design and now I am back to thinking that writing is where my direction should be.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Michael Coe's "Breaking The Maya Code" again and his history of the stupidity of letting ideology master one's research and how it delayed decipherment of Maya writing for 50 years has me shaking my head. I left school at the tail end of this war of symbol vs. phonetics and it was raging very strongly. It colored my education. Science throws down old, outmoded ideas in a paradigm shift and I watch my entire MA go down in flames. Basically, the Maya wrote in Chontal in a very complex mixture of logograms (phonetic syllables) and signs to give additional contextual meaning to the words (sort of like Japanese).

So what does that have to do with my career thoughts? It is possible to find a way to convert my writing skills (15 books and articles) combined with my computing and design skills (5 web sites designed from scratch) into some sort of work that won't bore me to tears. Meanwhile, I watch my older daughter begin her years that count towards college applications and without extracurricular activities (due to an extreme sense of inadequacy) with ADHD and get very scared of her future in a world that changes so fast.

By the way, please send your senators a letter from the American Cancer Society to hault the insurance bill that is being discussed in the Senate this week. It would emasculate all cancer screenings and other state-mandated insurance coverage under the guise of helping small businesses. It is a lousy bill and panders to insurance companies.

Just ramblings on a Wednesday morning to avoid beginning more HTML cleanup. Any thoughts?

What Lies Beneath humansrsuperior created this amazing illustration for my story "What Lies Beneath."

Here is another long snippet of The Addendum. I’m not getting much reaction, but I’m posting it anyway. I’m pretty pleased by how it is turning out and HRS likes it, which matters a lot to me.

( Another part of The Addendum... )

Well, I sent off another snippet to HRS and I thought I’d share it here.

( Addendum to  )

HRS likes what I wrote. This makes me feel more comfortable with the direction of this story. So, here’s another snippet of The Addendum to Wanted Man.

( Another bit for Addendum... First Draft )

Snurched for fun from kazbaby and CKO:

( An interesting Spirit Guide quiz... )

snurched with coolness from sabaceababe

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post [if you want] a comment with a memory [real-life or online] of you and me.** When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your lj and [perhaps] be surprised at what people remember about you.

So, what do you guys remember? hummm?