Stuck on Stupid

A few years back, during Hurricane Rita, there was a military commander (LTG Honore) who coined this phrase when answering reporters' inane questions about the relief effort -the reporters kept asking why such and such was done in the past while the general was trying to give out information that would be helpful to the survivors. He chided them for being "stuck on stupid" for focusing on irrelevant details that could not be changed while ignoring potentially lifesaving info that needed to be broadcast.
I commented on a similiar phenomenon in post (Not All Gloom and Doom) three years ago in which I talked about people who were "stuck" in some trauma that had happened years ago. I know a couple of people who are frozen emotionally at the point of their marriage break-ups over forty years ago. They are almost like the character of Miss Haversham in Dicken's Great Expectations. Miss Haversham had been jilted on the day of her wedding many decades before, but had shut herself up in her house wearing her dress with the cake and flowers still laid out as though expecting her tardy groom to show. Her disappointment had turned to bitterness and bitterness into hatred for all men as she trained her young ward, Stella to exact revenge on males by breaking their hearts once they had fallen in love with her.
These real Miss Havershams continue to relive their moment of pain, sometimes crying their hearts out as if the trauma occurred yesterday. Like Miss Haversham though, their hurt has turned into bitterness and over time they have become quite unpleasant to be around, save for a select few that they allow in. The ones who are even worse are the ones who seek to settle the score -not with the actual object of their victimization (the villians themselves might be dead or out of the picture), but others that these Havershams view as apt surrogates. On more than one occaision, I have been unwillingly selected as their foil. I really want to say to them,"I am not X, get over it."
I've had a Miss Haversham in my life; I wish I knew what her problem was -she definitely seems stuck in what may have been a happier time for her when she was a teenager, but that was a very long time ago. She also doesn't seem to want to have "grown-ups" around who might frown on her childish ways. In her mind, I am the evil one -the one that ruined her blissful return to her youth (or perhaps I just remind her of the one) and so she attempts to "get even with me". How silly and pathetic! Her lack of forgiveness and lack of desire for healing only hurt her, not me. Her heart, like Miss Haversham's wedding cake, becomes dark and moldy, full of the sin of bitterness.
You might say, "Aha! I know exactly of whom you speak." No, unfortunately, you may guess wrong because there are more than one Miss Haversham-types around these days. However, if you see yourself as one who is stuck on stupid and is bitterly reliving the past in order to try to feel right about yourself, get some help. We all can get in a rut every once in a while -the Miss Havershams though, end up living there.

A Small Pause to Reflect

As I have mentioned earlier, my MBA coursework has been grabbing all the attention that would otherwise be reserved for blogging. In a sense, the weekly Blackboard discussion boards that we do for our classes is a form of blogging, just not readable by the general public. I probably could re-post some of my thoughts from the Ethics discussion, but it is like listening to one side of a phone conversation -you miss the whole back and forth that defines the dialogue.

This term is somewhat different in that we are having a dialogue not only with our fellow classmates from work, but also with classmates we haven't met from the main campus. It was interesting to imagine what these other students were like based on their writing styles and thought processes. However, on Saturday the two classes came together for an ethics panel in Riverside, sponsored by the University. Although we were not introduced to the others, I observed some familiar names on the name tags. There, just two tables over, were a collection of a half-dozen twenty-something males - bright and shiny MBA students.

I shouldn't have been surprised that the MBA students from the main campus were youngsters, fresh off their undergraduate programs, but I wonder if they were surprised that most of their off site counterparts were more than twice their ages. Perhaps they even felt an air of superiority over their elder classmates. I remember the cockiness of my own youth -the feeling that I and my companions had the world by the tail. We just knew that we were that much smarter than "older ones" who either had never learned what we just did or who had forgotten it many years before. Yet with age comes experience and with experience,wisdom. It is a wisdom gained not by textbooks but by living life. That life has caused me to stop form time to time and reflect upon how I got here. Hopefully, my young classmates will begin to do so as well.

Tripping Up the Gender Analyzer

There is this site that takes the content of a blog and "uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman."
The results?
"We think http://thruaglassdrkly.blogspot.com/ is written by a man (63%)."

Wrong, AI, I am definitely a woman. Maybe it's the high concentration of engineer-speak in my writing. My friend Laura comes up as a woman on hers. Maybe she uses more feeling-oriented language.

Reflections on 2008

Now that we have finished a full week of the new year, I have decided to blog about some of the events of the past year. It was a year full of change - both for our world and for me personally. It gaves us an election season that ushered in a leftist president and equally liberal congress, propangadized for and abetted by a MSM intent on demonizing anything right wing, conservative or evangelical Christian. We saw the collapse of the financial system along with the loss of our retirement and investment assets. Gasoline prices skyrocketed only to plunge to levels of a decade earlier. All of my favorite sports teams made it to the playoffs only to lose out on their championships. Even the Beijing Olympics were more frustrating to me for what didn't happen for the USA athletically (US Women's Softball, for example) and for being the showcase for a hardline communist regime than for the truimphs of Michael Phelps.

Personally, there were also a number of highs and lows. I became an aunt for the first time just a few months before my uncle died, my mother's only brother. While I was not particularly close to him recently, it still reminds me of how small my extended family is and how my only remaining relatives from her side of the family are all only cousins now. I realize how old my father is (83) and remember that his side of the family is not long for this world either. I became re-acquainted with an older cousin who has supplied some family history but there is so much more that is unknown than known about my ancestors. I have gone back to school for the first time in over 20 years while my education-loving roommate deferred starting her doctoral program for the whole year. I have stayed in the same job and same office but now have a new boss. One of my nemeses was finally exposed for being a cad while another one who seeks ill for my life has only partially been revealed (I must say that this one will probably suffer a similiar fate, perhaps this year - people who sow discord and attempt to rip others down in order to build themselves up emotionally or further themselves along in life, work or ministry tend to reap their own destruction. Since I know this particular evil one reads this blog, I must say to them, consider yourself warned. The Lord will repay you for what you are doing; no amount of self-justification by you will make your deeds right.)

Yet in the midst of this disappointment I have mentioned, I am more at peace than I've been in a long while. This is because I know that God is on the throne and in control. Those who do evil (to me or others in the world in general) will get theirs, either in this life or in the world to come. Those who follow Jesus closely will receive great reward in heaven one day. God is Judge and rules in righteousness. As I discover the reality of this truth and apply it to my life, I can have confidence even as the world goes crazy.

School Days

So if you've been wondering where I've been instead of blogging, I have gone back to school. Yes, for the first time in more than twenty years, I have re-entered the world of academia to begin an MBA program from the University of Redlands held at my worksite. I'm more than half-way through my first class and it has been a real adjustment to have to do so much writing - afterall, as an engineering major, I never had to do much written work except in my G.E. classes. I will say that my blogging over the past few years has helped to enhance my writing skills and the websites that I regularly read help to challenge my thinking, both reading and writing being essential to doing well in this course.

Anyway, I'll try to come for air from time to time to blog about how things are going.

To Bee or Not To Bee

Yikes! Two months since my last post. Bad Ann. Anyway, it's not like I haven't been meaning to, I've just not made blogging a priority. One reason for the lack of posting is that I'm instead trying to be more diligent with my "gardening". Now if you know my living situation, you know I live in a condo without a yard. I do have a balcony but most of the plants there are of the cactus variety. Although I am a farmer's daughter, I have a tendency towards a brown thumb -it's hard for plants other than cactii to be healthy when you forget to water them for over a week. For the past few years I have been practicing my horticulture skills on the plants in my office at work.

After killing the first few potted plants I tried, I have been having more success in the last two years with my pothos (devil's ivy) and my peace lillies. (I also have an orchid that never blooms because the temperature is not variable enough inside). This success emboldened my to try at home. Using some empty pots from the last failed attempt at growing herbs, I went out and bought some more seeds -basil, thyme, parsley, chives, sage, rosemary to plant. The basil, parsley, chives and sage grew right away while the others faltered. I went out and bought some already young plants to replace the thyme and rosemary. I also bought a small grape tomato plant to grow in my kitchen along with the herbs.

While I'm still having problems with the thyme, rosemary, oregano and now, unfortunately the chives (all are dead as I write this), the tomato plant outgrew my kitchen and had to be moved to the balcony where it began to produce a few tiny tomatoes. "Hooray", I thought, "success!" That was somewhat short-lived because my homeowners association made me clear my balcony for powerwashing which they claimed was only for a few days. The few days became a few weeks and although the tomato plant had plenty of blossoms, there was no fruit on the vine.

My dad said I needed to play bee to get it pollinated properly but he never explained exactly how I was to do this other than brushing the flowers. That gave me all of about three tomatoes. Consulting the internet for help told me that yes, I needed a bee or a least a wind to blow the pollen around (not things you find indoors, BTW). Well, finally the tomato vine went back outside but even then the flowers would drop without fruit -no bees were coming to my balcony. One more visit to the internet told me the proper technique to play bee; I needed to vibrate the tomato plant behind the flower, perhaps using an electric toothbrush, to simulate the bee vibrations and to drop the pollen out. While I do have an electric toothbrush, I thought I'd try tapping rapidly with my finger first and shazam! I'm starting to get tomatoes. So when I step out on my balcony every other day between 9am and 4pm, it's just me playing bee.

The July That Was

When I last blogged, I was sitting in my dorm room at High School camp. Now, a month later, I am finally able to get back to it. As soon as camp was over, I drove from San Diego to begin my vacation in Lake Arrowhead. (perhaps I'll get around to putting those pics on the flickr badge). There it was family (both my brother and sister were there for the 4th), fireworks, food and fun. Oh and Laura and I did manage to do some work projects around the house -she has fully documented them on her blog.

I was back at work for only two weeks before I was off again to Lightseekers Camp from which I just returned yesterday. Lightseekers is our children's camp that I have been a part of now for the past five years; I do all the audio visual tech stuff (sound, video, pictures) for worship and host a blog describing our events so the parents can read about their kids. You can read my daily postings here.