Category: Stream of Consciousness Saturday

SoCS: March On!

Here in the United States, we are doing a lot of marching these days.

I participated in a sister march for the Women’s March on Washington on January 21st. These marches took place throughout the United States and around the world, even Antarctica! We had about 3,000 participants in Binghamton, although we had expected only a few hundred.

There have since been other major marches, including one for indigenous rights.

April will see two major marches on Washington with satellite marches elsewhere, one for Science on April 22, which is Earth Day,  and a Climate March on April 29. I wish I could be in Washington for both of those, but will probably have to settle for a local combined march.

The marches themselves are energizing, but the larger point is that people use them as educational tools to raise awareness of important issues and then continue their advocacy through follow-up actions. That has been an encouraging thing that we are seeing in the US this year, that so many people are getting involved in civic life at a new level, so…

March On!
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “march.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/03/24/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-mar-2517/

 

SoCS: short and sweet

This post is going to be very short, because I just spent a bunch of time writing a post about the Sappho’s Circle poetry reading last night.

I guess the other thing I should mention is that I had to adjust the mike last night because I am so short…
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This short and sweet post was written in response to Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week, which was “short.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/03/10/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-mar-1117/

 

SoCS: too many

I have way too many projects going these days.

Most of them, like preparing tax returns, are not especially fun.

My blog and other writing are suffering a bit as a result, but, someday, I will have a bit more control over my time and will be back posting and poet-ing more.

Thank you all for your patience.

JC
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “project.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/03/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-mar-417/

 

SoCS: How?

“How is this going to turn out?” may be one of the most frequently asked questions in the United States these days.

Most often the answer is “I don’t know.”

There is a certain comfort in routine and predictability. but DT is proving to be about as predictable as a two-year-old.

I wake up in the morning and put on the news and am relieved if there isn’t a “Breaking News” caption splashed across the bottom of the screen.

It’s so confusing that every time DT says or does something, the Vice-President or a Cabinet Secretary or spokesperson explains that isn’t really what he meant.

It’s even worse with the tweets.

I can’t keep this level of adrenaline or cortisol flooding my body for the next four years.

We’ll manage, I guess, but I’m not sure how.
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Join us for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. The prompt this week is “how.” Find out more here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/02/24/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-feb-2517/

 

 

SoCS: sowing and sewing

So, I used to sow seeds on occasion, back when we had a vegetable garden. We always had one when I was growing up. We tried to have one in our yard in our current home, but had to give it up when the groundhogs kept climbing the fence and eating everything. Now, we just go to the farmers’ markets and farmstands and let others do the sowing and reaping!

I wish I could say that I sew, but I am not good with sewing machines. I do like hand sewing, though. I tried to take a beginner’s quilting class years ago and really enjoyed it, but the problems with the tendons in my right arm make that kind of fine work difficult for me. So, I need to let others sew for me, too.

I’m such a delicate flower…
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “so/sow/sew.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/02/10/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-feb-1117/

 

SoCS: Crowning Glory

For most of my life, my hair was, well, just my hair. Not much of a topic of discussion. It was brown and wavy and thick and heavy and a bit cowlick-y.

Of course, there was always discussion with my hairdresser, because that is their business. She was not a fan of my decision to let my hair go grey naturally. “Men with graying temples look distinguished, but women look old.” This was not helped by the fact that I started to have stray silver strands as a teen, with a lot of acceleration in my thirties.

When I was mostly silver, I decided to let my hair grow longer. The natural thinning that happens with the change in hair color actually worked to my advantage, because I could let my silver hair grow longer without having it get overly bushy, which it did when it was mostly brown.

What I hadn’t expected was that my long, silver waves would become such a topic of discussion. Friends, acquaintances, even complete strangers often comment on my hair. They tell me it is beautiful and that if their hair looked like mine, they would stop coloring it. I tell them they should try and see, as some don’t really know what their hair looks like naturally.

I even wound up writing a poem about my hair when Silver Birch Press did a series called My MANE Memories. You can find the poem, entitled “Crowning Glory” here. My husband took the photo that accompanies the poem. I liked it so much that I started using it as my gravatar.

So, maybe my hair does make me look older.

I prefer to think it makes me look more beautiful.

At least, I have lots of people tell me so….
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “hair.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/02/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-feb-417/

 

SoCS: What would you do?

People sometimes ask themselves, “What would you do if…?”

We in the United States are now getting the answer to to those hypotheticals when it comes to questions of what we would did if our liberties, rights, and Constitutional protections were threatened.

The answer is “We organize and fight!”

I don’t mean fighting in a physical sense; we are fighting non-violently. We are marching, calling and writing our members of Congress and the president, getting the word out in traditional and social media, and working through established organizations.

One of the heartening things to me is that we are helping each other with various causes, even if we are not directly affected by them.

I have been involved with various organizations for environmental and social justice for years. Most of them would co-ordinate with some other closely related organizations within their areas of interest, such as environmental or health care causes, but not think about other areas, such as racial justice or poverty. Now, everyone is pitching in to help any injustice that appears.

We are all in this together.

It isn’t easy and how effective we will be is unknown, as these are early days.

But we must keep at it to ensure our rights and the fate of our nation.

There is an old story about not speaking out when “they” (meaning the authorities in an authoritarian country) came for the members of this group and that group because the narrator is not a member of those groups. When they come for the narrator, there is no one left to speak up for him.

We are not making that mistake.

And for that I am grateful.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is wood/would. Join us for SoCS and/or Just Jot It January! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/01/27/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-and-jusjojan-jan-2817/

 

SoCS: RiverRead

Last night at Open Mic at RiverRead Books, my poet-friend Merrill Oliver Douglas read a new poem that she had written after visiting the Corning Museum of Glass.

I read “Thanks to the Department of Public Art” which also mentions glass. “Broken shards of glass and lives…”

I had especially wanted to read this poem at RiverRead because it is located amidst the public art in Binghamton to which the poem refers.

The very sad thing is that this was the last Open Mic at RiverRead. It will close at the end of the month, going the way of many independent bookstores.

So, we celebrated books and poetry and the bookstore together one last time.

We know we will continue to celebrate books and poetry. Just not in this place. And not in a bookstore, as there isn’t another independent bookstore available in our community.

😦

Note:  If you visit the link above, you can see RiverRead in the background on the left side of the photograph.
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It’s another double dip, Stream of Consciousness Saturday and Just Jot It January! Linda’s prompt this week is “glass”. Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/01/20/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-and-jusjojan-jan-2117/

 

SoCS: panic-inducing problems

Panic must be setting in.

Why else would I be up writing this post at 2 AM?

With DT’s inauguration less than a week away, more and more information is emerging about Russia’s influence in the election, and, even worse, about possible collusion between the campaign and Russia and about the threat that our incoming president could be blackmailed by Russia.

The problem is compounded by the fact that DT won’t release tax returns and won’t divest his business holdings, so there is no way to know if he owes money to Russian oligarchs or banks – or how many other countries or financial institutions may have financial power over him.

Further compounding of the problem is that many of his cabinet and staff picks have not completed financial disclosures and ethics agreements and that some may be confirmed despite that.

DT is also phenomenally unpopular. Public opinion polls show him with the lowest approval ratings of any incoming president and the approval rating for his transition is even lower.

Our Constitution does not prepare us for this situation. The Congress could impeach and try the president if their investigations show he committed high crimes or misdemeanors, but Vice President Pence would be implicated as well. If they were both out of office through resignation or trial, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan would become president in a nearly impossible governing situation.

Is it any wonder I am having trouble sleeping?
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Join us for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday and/or Just Jot It January! Today’s prompt was to base a post on a word beginning with the letter P. (I started with panic, but wound up more with problem and president.) Find out how to participate here: https://lindaghill.com/2017/01/13/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-and-jusjojan-jan-1417/

 

SoCS: coat

A lot of places in the US are under a coat of white from snow.

Not exactly a surprise in January, except that, while there is snow in places one expects, like Colorado, the Dakotas, and Vermont, but also in some places where it is more unusual, such as Alabama and the Carolinas. Seattle, Washington has also recently had snow.

Weirdly, we don’t have much here in the Binghamton, New York area.  While some parts of the state have had massive lake effect snows, the wind pattern is preventing them from reaching us here. The storm systems are coming up the coast and we are too far inland to get major amounts of snow from them.

Also weirdly, the cold and snow dipping into the Southern US are caused by the warming of the Arctic region.  This pushes the polar vortex south.

This weekend, we are having some of our coldest temperatures of the winter. I am pulling out the heavy coats.

Postscript: You can tell this is stream of consciousness because I misused a correlative conjunction and couldn’t go back and fix it.
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It’s a double dip! This post is both part of Linda’s Just Jot It January and Stream of Consciousness Saturday. The prompt is “coat.” Join us! Find out more here:  https://lindaghill.com/2017/01/06/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-and-jusjojan-jan-717/