Only Dogs Can Hear

A little giggle

Was reading through a few of the "Best Of" category at Postcards From Yo Momma.  Found this.  Laughed out loud.  At work.  Difficult to explain to my colleagues.  Didn't even try.

What Men Want--Me: I don’t know what to get my husband for his birthday
Mom: Well, I don’t know if the standards are higher in New York, but in Oakridge, a 6-pack and a blowjob would do. That’s all men around here want.

I know I know

Facebook Friday never happened this week.  Largely because I've had difficult internet access in the evenings and crazy full days of orientation at this new job of mine.  In the meantime I've had plenty of opportunities to read books on the Metro, but rather less time to follow up with Facebook.  I'm behind.  From today's train reading:

"One of the things that has been especially good for me has been to broaden the idea of struggle.  In the sixties there was this idea that we were supposed to be revolutionary - very serious," she [Assata Shakur] says, making a mock grimace.  "You were supposed to just talk at people, not to people.  You know, so many people that I met in the sixties who were locked into that style of struggle are looking and saying, first of all, it was boring.  You know?  And we do not have a right , in the name of social justice, to bore people to death."

                             ~Adventure Divas, Holly Morris

Harsh reality

I find the time I spend reading books on Buddhism to be full of these moments where a mirror is held up a little too close in front of me and I am faced with my habits and patterns.  And it's usually not pretty. 

  "We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards...It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security.  So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
  "Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet."
~Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Ethics in research

Research on people can be so questionable.  In Afghanistan, there was a big push by a major US university to do research on the impact of village based schools.  Randomly selecting villages in an area to have resources invested in village schools and teachers.  And studying the difference between those villages and the control villages, in the same area, that had no intervention.  Seems unethical to me.  So does this:

In a study of elderly nursing home patients, one group was told they could decide how their room would be arranged, and could choose a plant to care for. Another group had their rooms set up for them and a plant chosen and tended to for them. Eighteen months later 15 percent of the patients in the group given control had died, compared with 30 percent in the passive group.

Covert Canadian

Quote of the day.  Follow the link.  Enjoy the Canada love fest.

Back in the election campaign, some people spread rumors that Barack Obama might be a secret Muslim conspiring to impose Sharia law on us. That seems unlikely now, but what if he’s a covert Canadian plotting to impose ... health care?

Something to think about

"At any given instant, the quality of your life is directly related to how interested you are in it."

~Joel Kramer, Yoga as self-transformation, Yoga Journal, May/June 1980

Loving Dr. Oz

Most of you...ok all 3 people who read this blog...know that I don't have tv at my house.  That's not to say I don't have a tv.  In fact I do have a tv.  It is hooked up to a DVD player.  So really it's just that there is no "tv" in my tv.  There is the regular potential for movies, although we take advantage of that potential less and less. 

But I digress.

Apparently the Oprah Winfrey Show has made famous many of its regulars.  That Dr. Phil guy who I just think is weird, although I've only seen him.  And Dr. Oz.  I was skeptical at first.  But it seems he's totally legitimate.  Then my friend Laura recommended his 'Food Myth' bit on Oprah.com.  I loved it.  Check it out.  Twelve days in the zoo eating eleven pounds of raw food per day?  That's pretty impressive stuff.

All teary

I read this article at my desk today and, by the end, I was all teared up over it.  It made me think of how wonderful it is to live in a tight-knit community, with everyone taking an interest and responsibility for the wellbeing of everyone else.  It's nice.  It also made me think how terrifying it would be to suddenly have to move after years of living somewhere that maybe you thought you'd never leave.  And of course I thought of immigration policies.  Especially policies that divide families up arbitrarily and force them into dramatically less than ideal situations.  Of course the couple in this article had somewhere to return to and family to fall back on if things didn't work out.  But too many people don't have those safety nets.  Why can't immigration policies work in favor of families rather than against them?  What kind of a shift in philosophy and perspective needs to happen for our policies to serve people rather than some statistical calculation? 

Damned by faint praise

After making taco salads for her daughters' lunches, my friend Charlotte gets a zinger from her oldest, "Mama, thank you for lunch. It was much better than nothing!"  I think it would've been more satisfying if both girls had stuck with the gross-I-hate-it-and-will-never-eat-it-again strategy so that Charlotte could have told them to suck it up. 

I'm not sure this dirty secret is really very secret

I love this line: "GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning."  So mean and evocative.  I'm imagining all these Ph.D. students wandering sullenly in a post-industrial wasteland, ivy covered buildings dilapidated and crumbling, undergraduates scurrying fearfully from one class to another.  Some of them are wondering with deserved anxiety, when their major professor will ever let them finish up their research instead of pushing them to write more and more articles with only a 3rd, 4th or (horror) et al level credit on the byline.  However, I've met lots of very happy Ph.D. students who have stayed well over a decade on subsistence pay by choice.  The life of a student isn't all bad afterall.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.