Saturday, December 6, 2008

Hajj 2008

Still on an admittedly febrile cruise of the web, I found this site that offers continual live coverage of the Hajj, courtesy of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington. Estimates of the number of pilgrims range from 2.5 to 3 million faithful.



Edit: In what is a fairly creepy move, the Saudi Embassy checked out this humble blog within 10 minutes of this posting.
Aasalaamu Aleikum!
Ahlan wa-Sahlan!


photo credit

A la recherche


I enjoy haphazard travel in the blogosphere. With Blogger, it's as easy as a click -- look to the upper left and choose "Next Blog."


Should your faith in humanity flag a bit, doing so may well restore it. People are amazing: They have tiny babies, and little ones, upon whom they depend (despite the folklore that posits dependency as the child's role!); They make beautiful paper and Bento boxes; They make better flashlights and mousetraps; They explore rhythm and wine.


Anyway, it's the time of year wherein we desperately want to suspend our disbelief, and if you are a cat-crazy socialist... Well, you, especially, are in need... You, especially, may want to embolden and italicize your desperation.


And so, my first click took me to The Holmes Family Adventure and a world of celebration -- with not one, but *three* lovely Christmas trees in the house: the white tree, the gold tree, and the family tree. Don't miss the annual Hartford Festival of Light -- and definitely pause a moment to admire their Scotty and his various ensembles. They are clearly a family of faith, but I confess that I am starting to get the willies, so let's move on...


Click.


And voilà Gavroche, who begins her blog of visual appreciation with works by Jim Warren and has, most recently, wrenched a bestiary from the grips of medievalists (annoying folk who get their panties in a wad over something as ordinary as a lettre historiée!). Admittedly, I opened yet another browser window to welcome a wonderfully tangential blog, Chimaera, which somehow foisted itself into my blogroll. Strange how these serendipities serendip!
I had to forcefully reel myself in!


And... click!


Errrr. Okay, I love the collie and -- lacking the translation skills of La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore -- am perplexed by the rest of Treeniblogi ja vähän muutakin. But heck, the blogger is 19, from Helsinki, and loves The Lord of the Rings, both the movie and the books, so she hasn't had time to be all bad! She writes about orbits, barriers, and I am lost.
Again, love the dog -- whose name, I think, is Niki.

Click...


We're in Norway now, in Oslo -- visiting min skravleblogg! [Help, someone. Skravle = Jaw. My jaw blog?!] Aase enjoys knitting, crocheting, most handwork -- and also wants to share recipes. I confess that what most tickled my fancy was learning the Finnish for that abominable expression "LOL" -- *ler*! She has a Christmas tree widget that is counting down the days to what must be, for someone as "crafty" as she is, the most important day of the year. Her photos of Vinter i Oslo are charming -- there is a wonderful snowperson who looks a lot like Mrs. Butterworth.


I'm all aquiver as I prepare for my last coincidental click.
Click!

Ah, well. It is the price for playing an honest game. Ligeiramente Blasé. Diego, from Brazil, promises us a traumatic time as he details the quotidian, mixing his "no-good Portuguese with his Mexican," and planning to combine this doggerel prose with his propensity for... drama, for the "lightly blasé."


Good luck to you in your travels, Dear Reader! Click...
image credit: Chimaera, British Library, Harley MS 4751, Folio 6v

Friday, December 5, 2008

أنا انظر إلى الضحك لي في هذه المرآة الجميلة



Good evening from Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé. La Belle et Bonne Bianca is booming through her inevitable "je ris de me voir..." -- except that she is putting herself through some linguistic paces. Whenever I hear her relax into Italian, I am reminded how difficult it must be for her -- she is Italian, after all, even if a rabid francophile. We make no allowances and she is so incredibly fluent that it rarely occurs to me to -- "to" what? Recognize her exile? Sooth her marginalized soul? Please, this is no grand drama! She can wield whatever language she likes, whenever she likes, but she, like most of us, has this incredible fondness for having people respond to what comes out of her mouth.



En tout cas, it is sounding not unlike a papal Christmas greeting around here tonight. Around her, tonight.




I ridere a vedere me in questo bellissimo specchio!




Late last night, my Personal Physician, the Boutiqueur, e-mailed me the wonderful news that *nothing* grew in the cultures of the personal ambrosia that was the aspirate from my left shoulder. From the expansive comfort of my wheelchair, I have been Happy Dancing à la Snoopy ever since.

Actually, I just now got out of bed and while in bed was hurting too much to attempt dance of any sort. (I've been known to do a mean horizontal shimmy. Ar! If you knew the shimmy like I know the shimmy, you'd know I wouldn't be caught dead in mid-shimmy these days. I mean, really, I only have *one* shoulder at the moment and the other one is nothing but a troublemaker.)


Ik lach me te zien in deze mooie spiegel!

What is difficult to explain is my steady tendency to take less pain medication as I hurt more. It's actually not complicated and the logic is stellar, but I am receiving odd silences and regards askance in response. Dr. Paindude's PA, the Lovely Lass, added a fourth dose of 10 mg of methadone. I tried it for a week and know that it will be -- perhaps -- another week for it to leave my system. While there was less bone pain overall, there was not one iota of benefit to the specific pain that is sucking my sanity into its black hole. (Is this where women toss in the odd "LOL"?)

My preference is ibuprofen. It has the important advantage of also bringing down my temperature.

Я смеяться видеть меня в этом прекрасном зеркало!

[These things write themselves -- think Rita Skeeter with her Quick Quotes Quill -- still, the Cyrillic alphabet comes off as uppity when italicized, don't you think?]

Fred is trying to be happy about it. Neither of us think back to July, when this scenario was last in play. The Boutiqueur has conveyed the lack of results but the orthopedic surgeon, ShoulderMan, has yet to weigh in. I imagine forlorn tones as ShoulderMan calls the ID-Dudette, who has already told me that another surgery to remove the remaining shoulder "must happen."
There are times, and this is one, where I think my teetotalism is ill-advised, and is -- indeed -- contrary to good health.


أنا انظر إلى الضحك لي في هذه المرآة الجميلة

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Hilary Lister

I confess that I rolled my eyes, and swore.

Jim Broatch is at it again, leaving salient little e-news report thingies in my already overstuffed inbox. There is, thank God, no stopping the man. He's always shamelessly trying to promote that rag -- the RSDSA Review.

Still, as I read the first few lines of his e-alert, I could not help but think how tiring it is to be exhorted continually by tales of Super People. This time? Some quadriplegic yachtswoman. First of all, she doesn't even have CRPS, she is a quad, that is something totally different! Second, I don't take well to language such as "yachtswoman." Such appellations make me want to cry "[H]ow piquant!" and dig out my jar of capers -- after replacing all my onions with shallots. (I haven't had breakfast, lunch, or brunch, yet -- although afternoon tea in the gazebo is looking providential.)

Iceberg lettuce is much maligned, you know, you friséed arugula freaks!

(Pssssssssssssssst! Nasturtium seed pods make a nice replacement if you can't put your manicured hands on that jar of capers.)

(Did I type my schizophrenia out loud?)

What... oh, yes! I remember. A quadriplegic. Who "yachts." And Jim Broatch.

I felt totally manipulated without even subjecting myself to a reading of the article. What? Me, sitting here in my wheelchair, in more pain than I care to express -- what am I? Is CRPS not a pitiable disease? Hasn't Jim heard that we're on the map now -- that our wee little brains are white instead of grey proper, and smaller than the brains of your average bear?

In other words, what am I, chopped liver? (One day, I will have to extol my readership with the tales of my many famous malapropisms... "What am I, chopped suey?" comes to mind... so wrong, on so many levels. And my well-known version of The Turtles lyric: "No matter how they toss the tights... it had to be...")

I almost feel sorry for little Miss Quadriplegic Yachtswoman, trapped as she is in her dry, humorless life of leisure, her private pinky-up. How would she like to be stuck in a wheelchair on dry land, in too much severe and constant pain to zip on down to the marina? I don't even get to float in the bathtub, for Christ's sake!

Okay, so it was kind of humiliating to have my eyes trip and fall near the end of the rich bitch's story -- "progressive neurological disease, reflex sympathetic dystrophy..." Oh. Ohhhhh! Major oops. How faux is my pas!

Still... yachtswoman?

Am I supposed to conclude that CRPS/RSD occurs in a demographic other than my own? Am I supposed to be shocked that the condition of quadriplegia even *happens* in CRPS patients?

Whatever. What I resent the most is the continual exhortation to be extraordinary. To stop whining "I caaannnn't! It huuuuurts tooooo muuuuccchhhhhh..."

Yeah, well, I'll show that sadist, that Jim c'mon-you-can-do-it Broatch. I'll publish a copy of Hilary Lister's show-off of a story. Geeez, can't a person be a person just by waking up in the morning?

[Shhh! Way to go, Hilary! I can imagine the frothy spray, the smell of sea salt, the blues, the greys, the many kinds of white, the clang and flap of the sails, and your beautiful happy face...)



Disabled sailor to attempt record

A yachtswoman is to make a second attempt to become the first quadriplegic woman to sail solo around Britain.

Hilary Lister, who is paralysed from the neck down, plans to embark on the journey next May using a "sip-and-puff" system of straws to control her yacht.

Her first attempt was abandoned in August because of technical problems and bad weather.

Mrs Lister, of Faversham, Kent, said she was "confident" she would succeed.

She spent six months preparing for the first record-breaking challenge, which was expected to take three to four months in her specially-adapted vessel, an Artemis 20 called Me Too.

It has been designed to be operated through three "straws".

One works the tiller and one the sails while another allows her to select five different functions to help control the craft.

Mrs Lister became the first quadriplegic sailor to sail solo across the English Channel in 2005 and two years later was the first quadriplegic woman to sail around the Isle of Wight.

Her round-Britain attempt started in Dover in June and ended in Cornwall two months later.

Mrs Lister, a biochemistry Oxford graduate, said: "I'm confident that with the experience gained this year, we will achieve my round-Britain dream in 2009.

"Despite terrible weather, this year we sailed the entire length of the South Coast, which is further than any female disabled sailor has achieved before."

'Light switched on'

She was wheelchair-bound at the age of 15 because of a progressive neurological disorder, reflex sympathetic dystrophy.

Mrs Lister lost the use of her arms and hands in 1998, aged 27, but in late September 2003 she was taken sailing on a lake by a friend and fell in love with the sport.

She said: "Sailing came along when life didn't seem worth living any more.

"Within seconds of being on the water, a light switched back on inside me. I knew that I had found what I was going to do with the rest of my life."


Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Unraveling Patience::Persistence Is On My Mind

Odysseus
W. S. Merwin (1927- )
For George Kirstein

Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore

The identical reproaches and somewhere
Out before him, the unraveling patience

He was wedded to. There were the islands
Each with its woman and twining welcome
To be navigated, and one to call "home."
The knowledge of all that he betrayed
Grew till it was the same whether he stayed
Or went. Therefore he went. And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure
Perils that he could never sail through,
And which, improbable, remote, and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to?