Sunday, July 16, 2006

Chronicles for July 16 Part 2 Hi!  I've changed addresses.  To jump to the new and improved version of this blog, please click on this link.   The Flatland Chronicles for Sunday, July 16 [part two!] Journal. A correction from Mr. Rumcove himself At last, after a certain amount of arm-twisting by e-mail Mr. Rumcove granted me the boon of a telephone call.  During the course of our conversation, he reminded me, not without a note of rebuke in his voice, that while some people who live in Essex (such as Mr. R) have an estuary accent, not all people in Essex have an estuary accent.   The real and authentic Essex accent is different.  He said that the pure or original form of the Essex accent mainly exists these days above the Crouch (a river, if you're not a Brit).  He said with some annoyance, "I told you that before, you know!"   And it's true, he did---in, what was it, 1998?  But I do remember, now that he has reminded me.    So I am publishing this amendment, but I am NOT going to go back and edit my Estuary Englishman publication.  I shall link to this amendment and call it a day. No Angels for Me! After a spirited discussion with a group of women friends about whether there are angels and--if so---what angels are like, I took a look at a few sites that purport to deal with angels.  I came away with a distinct feeling of envy and dissatisfaction;  why are there all these people who get to have these reassuring supernatura/religiousl experiences and I never do?  A couple of sites deal with the nature and appearance of angels.  I wish I still had the links because they were fascinating; also bizarre, but in a fascinating way.  One woman who claims to have met a certain number of angels said that angels all look different and that their 'appearance' tends to reflect their personality.  Her personal angel was called 'Bernard.'  She talked about how some are feathery, some billowy, and many enjoy a joke just as much as you and me.  I forget which sort Bernard is.  Why don't I get personal visits from angels? ANGELS:  Girl, please. Okay, I admit that I am ambivalent about angels.  I do not live in a milieu that is receptive to such entities. Nick is an atheist; Rumcove an agnostic; and my other friends quite pragmatic people.  My family, who are all religious to a certain degree, would be quite embarrassed, I imagine, by a serious discussion of angels.  The Gnostic Gospel called The Book of John discusses angels.  It also sets forth an account of the creation of the world that is quite a bit different from the one in Genesis.  (For one thing, God has a wife.)  There are a lot of angels in that book. Eventually I intend to take a closer look at it.  But I would not like to meet any of the angels mentioned in this gospel, even if I believed in them.    The most convincing account of angelic encounters that I've ever read is Martha Beck's Expecting Adam.  Beck is a Harvard educated ex-Mormon who now writes a column for O Magazine.  I love her, at least as she presents herself in her books and in her columns; and I like her books; while a bit more kaffee klatsch in tone than I generally prefer, she's good at getting across both the experiences themselves and her resistance to them.  At the end of it, I felt very jealous of the strange experiences she had while pregnant with her extraordinary child, Adam.  She tells the tale convincingly.  Furthermore, her beliefs tally with my own occasional intuitions about what such an experience could be like. Anyway, to cut a long story short---I am really not ready to deal with either Martha Beck or angels---I am interested, in an abstract skeptical way, in people's accounts of their meetings with angels.  I don't feel any obligation to believe in angels myself.   But my own conception of angels, to the extent I have one, comes from a very cool story by Flannery O'Connor---I can't recall the title at the moment---in which a self-satisfied (and very bigoted) nominal Christian farm woman in Georgia who gets a much merited rebuke through one of the Lord's mouthpieces.  Afterward, she has a vision in which she sees the sky full of spinning eyes.  This concept was reinforced by A.S. Byatt's The Conjugial [sic] Angel, which deals with a 19th Century spiritualist, Tennyson, his sister Emily Tennyson, Arthur Hallam (the subject of In Memorian), and Swedenborg.  It was probably this story (the second novella in Angels and Insects) that first made angels interesting to me.  I didn't care much about them before. For reasons I am unwilling to explain, it is my thought that the eyes of angels are invariably green.  It is full of the sort of personal angels I would have if I had any. TODAY'S DIGEST: MELANIE MORGAN & ANN COULTER THROW DOWN OVER THE ISSUE OF HOW TO EXECUTE THE LATEST 'TRAITOR.'  Ladies, ladies.  Calm down.  There is room on the lunatic fringe for you both, though we all know there can only be ONE Ann Coulter and only Ann Coulter may wear the crown!  So step off, Ms. Morgan.  Seriously though: this crap?  Disturbing.  Can you imagine the outcry ("GOTCHA!")  if Democrat made similar statements?  In Versus. Image © 2006 Jupiterimages Corporation.  Used pursuant to license from Animation Factory.com. 11:49:36 PM    So you say!  [] Chronicles for July 16 Hi!  I have changed addresses.  To jump to the new & improved version of this blog, please click here.   The Flatland Chronicles for Sunday, July 16 Journal. My Brief Stint at the Top of the Pops  Ever since I worked out what they are for---I am very slow that way---I have loved reading my list of referers to see what wild-ass searches had led people to me.  The fascination never palls. In the only fairly small hours early this morning, I noticed that someone had reached my site through the Top 100 Rankings at Salon.  Curious about this---it's certainly not something that has happened before since I started paying attention--I opened the Salon "Top 100" daily ranking by page reads for Salon Blogs, and lo, my blog's name led all the rest.  At this I was much abashed.  85  of the hits were from my very own address while I was trying ineptly to make something work---I was under the mistaken impression that I understood how to make some changes to a certain template using HTML--- were counted in the total.  As it was 2 or 3 a.m., I was slightly consoled by knowing that this inflated number would soon be out-stripped by hits to worthier contenders for the honor, but really, I felt like a complete impostor.  WHY do they list my own hits to my own blog during editing and trying to see if my technically inept attempts to make adjustments to my site are working???  I am assuming that there are people (I am not one of them) who take this "Ranking by Page Reads"  listing seriously.  Personally, I can't possibly take it seriously.  I have been compiling a list of some of the searches that have led people to me under the mistaken impression I might offer information germane to their search.  Most of the hits that lead people to me lead them straight back to the search engine of their choice. One search that has garnered me quite a few hits is "flatland training" or "flatlanding," which apparently is a skateboard technique.  A lot of sk8ters in quest of information about Tony Hawke or whoever land on my site only to find that it's not so much about the skateboarding.  Dudes!  (I love skateboarding and I love to watch it; if there were a 24 hour round-the-clock skateboard channel, I would spend a portion of my life in a hypnotic daze of skateboard-watching enjoyment. I also get a lot of people searching for commentary on the wonderful and remarkable novel Flatland. Someday perhaps I should provide some.  I studied the book in a philosophy class in college.  I loved it.  Another that actually yields a result is "Cirencester pronunciation" or the equivalent.  This gives me hope; obviously I am not alone in finding anomalous the pronunciation of the name of this ancient city.  (If YOUR search brought you hear, click on this link.)  Now if only the people of Cirencester could be made to realize it!  I never did send them my posting because Rumcove said that it would be mocked and derided.  A few people have landed on my posting about epilepsy which is germane and which I hope helped them develop a sense of perspective.  Many, strangely, have reached it through the route "constant metallic taste," but that is okay.  You're not alone, guys! Also I get a lot of hits to the long screed I wrote on H. H. Munro (Saki), doubtless from students looking for help with their homework.  (If that's you, [teacher voice] do your own work! [/teacher voice].) Sadly, nobody reads The Chronicles of Clovis for pleasure anymore, even though they totally should (for the pleasure). But fascinating as the referers are, the ranking by page-reads doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  Out of most of the searches that have brought people to me, only a very small percentage would have paid off in terms of giving them information they really wanted.  ["Der prat der pillock" (presumably from some German speaker who must have wanted to learn to insult someone using British slang or who had been insulted and wanted to know how badly) comes to mind.  I absolutely intend in the near future to write on this fascinating subject, but I haven't yet.]  To tot up "page reads" is like totting up the number of times a car passes through a particular intersection and using it as evidence of the popularity of the intersection.  It's not exactly random, but most of the people pass through on their way to somewhere else.  The quantity of page hits doesn't really reflect popularity very accurately (though it took me a while to figure that out after the joy of seeing my blog listed at all in the "top 100" for Salon).  If people want to know which blogs are really pulling in the traffic, the list of subscriber rankings is really much more informative.  RELATED POSTINGS Blogging;  why? The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #1 The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #2 The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #3 My Brief Stint at the Top of the Pops. Searching for Employment in the Too Much Information Age.   3:22:37 PM    So you say!  [] Chronicle from July 16                                                                             Hi!  I've changed addresses.  To jump to the new and improved version of this blog, please click on this link.           The Flatland Chronicles for Sunday, July 16 Journal. Moilings and Roilings Yesterday was a day of adjustments to my web pages plus grocery shopping plus a bit of blogging.  That really sums it up.  I worked hard, determined not to think about today or tomorrow, which are now finally here.  Yes, I am officially floating my barge up de Nile, as the posters in a certain website are always saying (and as I always wish they wouldn't.) And the thing I am diligently trying not to think about is really trivial.  Nick, who is never ill and hardly ever even feels under the weather, is going into the hospital for a precautionary colonoscopy.  I had one myself (because of an actual suspected problem) last year and I wasn't this nervous. It's the afterburn from Don's death, of course.  I have control of most of my anxieties these days; after about eight months of undergoing severe panic attacks after I precipitously ceased taking estrogen, I feel very capable nowadays of handling most of the things that arise in my unusually placid life.  But anything to do with Nick: no.  The idea of having him given general anesthesia for even a common procedure such as this fills me with,not terror itself exactly because I do have it under some rational control, but intimations of terror.  "Intimations of mortality."  Most of the time I try to ignore them, because that's what you have to do if you want to get through life, but every now and then fear comes bubbling up to the surface. Hence the fevered activity. He's upstairs now trying to sleep.  Prior to a colonoscopy there are certain, uh, cleansing procedures that make it wise to stay in proximity to the requisite facility.  He is uncomfortable; he has "stomach" cramps, which at least are taking his mind off the fact he can't eat anything but chicken broth and non-red Jello and popsicles.  The main thing that has upset him about the whole process is not getting his usual three meals a day.  He is one of those long skinny people, and he eats moderately, but he has never in his life deliberately gone without his meals. I am aware that my anxiety is idiotic and I certainly don't want him to realize how irrationally nervous I am.  And I don't want to look too closely at that anxiety because I know from experience that panic is the fear of the proximity unseen threats and ultimate moments.  It gets its force from the fact that nothing is happening.  Your body goes into full fight or flight mode, but there's nothing to run from (and nowhere to go; I was at home already) and nothing to fight but your own fear.  And when you try to grapple with it, it just gets bigger because it's all made out of speculation (often farfetched) and air.  I am getting on fine in that respect.  I haven't had a panic attack since last October---not one---and I never had one before till last June.   I didn't even have them when Don was actually dying; there was just the incessant voice in my head saying It's happening; it's happening now; the thing you've been afraid with all your life is actually happening now.   It was the same feeling as when my dad died in 1988 at much too young an age and very unexpectedly (though of course I always expect it).  I was too numb from shock to feel anything at all. So I'm definitely doing better than I would have been, say, last summer, when everything in my peaceful (comparatively) low-stress life seemed to be brimming over with dread and when I felt too insignificant to be noticed by God or to expect help from anyone else.  I'm nervous, but with the sort of butterflies I used to get as a kid just before a swim meet.  I know that it will be unpleasant while he is actually being anesthetized and going through the procedure and I can't be there, but that I will be fine before, after, and during, because---even if worst comes to worst---he needs me to be. There, I just wrote the sort of blog posting I really hate reading:  an in-depth look at one woman's pyschic moilings and roilings.  Ugh.  Perhaps it was therapeutic.  RELATED POSTINGS Epilepsy.  It’s Like this:  Bzzzzt! Antic Panic. Paging Dr. Zed! Your Health Care Provider Secretly Hates You:  The Unbearable Hostility of Hospital Waiting Rooms.     Image © 2006 Jupiterimages Corporation.  Used pursuant to license from Animation Factory.com. 2:05:26 PM    So you say!  []

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