me_n_mr_t

They are playing the beatles at the cafe i'm in and it makes me want to poke a pencil into my ears to make it stop...

I realize now where all the smarmy crappy anti-christ cliches we hear in pop music comes from....

Hi everyone, I sent this to Senator Feinstein tonight and thought it was funny enough to post here.

Cheers everyone,

-mnmrt

Dear Senator Feinstein,

 

Please accept this email from one of your loyal constituents. I have voted for you, asked my friends and co-workers to vote for you and have been a life-long Democratic ticket voter.

 

I am upset by the course of action, which our Democratic Senators have taken during the past 10 days regarding the Wall St. bailout plan. By all counts the Country has already given Wall St. and the Senate 300 billion for bailouts with no positive results. Now Wall St. and the Senate are asking for 700 billion more, with no fair approximation of how much positive effect said expenditure will have in shoring up our worsening "financial crisis".

 

Amazing, had Our government had the same level of consideration for the people of the 9th Ward, I would have a bit of respect for the velocity in which the Senate is acting to save the skins of a few errant hedge funders and bankers from their self-induced deluge of bad paper, but that is aside from my primary question:

 

WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING TO COME FROM?  CHINA?

 

Undoubtedly. I read this morning that China is buying our debt at an alarming rate of 1 billion per week!

 

In case you do not know, which I find extremely difficult to believe, I will tell you exactly where the bailout money is going to come from, it is going to come from OUR pockets in the very near future. But more importantly is where we are going to feel the sting of pouring a trillion dollars into this rat hole, we will feel it in lost services, in the potholes in our roads, in the heat that will radiate from our angry and desperate neighbors who are out of work and struggling to buy food, in the anguish of parents who are unable to pay for medical care for their children, need I continue?

 

Again, I am a bit upset because I believe that the Senate and in particular our Democratic Senators, have lost their way. We already know that profit not people is the primary directive and motive for Wall St., and long has it been my suspicion that the Senate is just Wall St.'s legislative arm, but never have I been more certain in this most depressing of theories than I am today.

 

( Read more... )

So here's the latest update on T. He goes in for surgery tomorrow to have a gtube placed. It's basically like a hole in your tummy that has a button on the outside that you can pour food into, I know it sounds a bit weird but people who have problems eating generally end up with one of these sooner or later.  

Anyway, it is a quick in and out kind of deal, (if you don't count the 6 years of worry and three hour long meals, endless consults with doctors over the content and quantity of his nutrition, and generally lying awake at night wondering if your kid ate enough this week),  it amounts to, 45 minutes on the table and 4 days of observation at Stanford, (yay). 

It's not my favorite place, Stanford. It's pretty, like a new college campus, crossed with a circa 1998 starbucks, but the energy there is so desperate, you can feel it radiating from knitt-browed parents like heat coming off a house fire. You can hear it in the quick shuffled steps of the 20-something interns who have spent the past 12 hours watching  their instructors give more bad news to more "nice people" than they probably care to think about. I really don't know how they sleep at night. I couldn't do it.

Well we'll be there again tomorrow morning, and home again on Monday or Tuesday if all goes well, and I will have the added convenience of not having to worry about whether or not T has had enough to eat, on any given day.  At least I can cross that reason to stay awake at night off the list.....now on to Global Warming...

I have been learning to wok it up in the kitchen lately. Just look at what we had for dinner tonight!



Well that's just some of what we had, I cooked the tofu separately and there was some very sweet corn on the side!! See all that dark stuff around the edge of the wok??? That's is what is called "wok hay" (sp?) by some folks. I read that in a book by a woman named Grace Young about wok culture called "The Breath of a Wok", in which her Dad would say things like; 'this food has good Wok Hay', which to my western way of thinking loosely translates to, "the special essence in wok cooked food, that can only be produced by a properly seasoned wok", so basically, the black stuff is where the flavor comes from...kind of like a lightly scrubbed BBQ grill, you know all that black stuff that's on there that comes to life when you heat it up....yeah, you know what I'm talking about...mmmm.

It also reminds me of my grand dads salsa pan, he would only use one pan for salsa and it was ruined, it was awful,  you see all he had to do to chase us out of the kitchen was to fire up that pan and put some oil in it, and the resultant smoke was tantamount to having sprayed mace around the room. Now that was some good "pan-hay", it brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it, I wonder who ended up with that pan...

Cheers everyone,

-mnmt

Anyway Wok'ing give it a try, it makes cooking dinner fun and tasty!

I liked this video, it made me feel nice about the new year...I think it answers a few questions from the other night too:

 

This guy is a brilliant genius and is also what it took to get me to post again, he's playing on the stereo in the cafe where i'm posting this. I took a break I hate to say it, but my life was getting exciting again and the confusion gave me writer's block. 

So this guy in the video above is basically the Argentinian Jimi Hendrix of the Bandoneon, and is the guy whom the whole new modern small chamber ensemble (Tin Hat Trio, 3 Leg Torso, The Brunos) that is happening in the Northwest is referencing. Which is basically, three or more folks playing what sounds like klezmer/jazz manuche/tango with a pirate flavor. 

It's good and moody, not Argentinian I feel like cutting myself moody, but more you know, Northwest American Plucky/Moody, like I should cut myself but I had coffee so I'm OK right now....you know kind of like what Seattle did for riff rock in the 90's, but with less hair. 

Tigo: Sick as a (very small and very cute) dog. He's got pneumonia. I have seen 4AM every night since Thursday and the dark circles under my eyes are quite Noferatu'ish. He caught it at school, some kid must have sneezed on him or something like that, normal stuff. But it's awful listening him gasp at night... you know what, its hard to sleep when you think your kid is about to asphyxiate at any moment. Really, I just pass out at around 4AM. But then I'm up again at 8am to get to work...

But Tigo had his first full meal yesterday since Thursday, which was a relief and he actually played with me for a while before falling asleep again which was really nice. And today he seems to be doing better, this is his third time getting pneumonia so I think I've got it down. Antibiotics, and a breathing treatment every few hours, it's keeping me on my toes and giving me plenty of down time to finish all of my knitting projects before xmas. 

Me: I'm burnt. I need a break. But tonight I'm going dancing for the first time in a couple of weeks, my tango partners keep calling and asking if I have a girlfriend or something... 

So Devi just showed up and I'm going to have to sign off.... 

(Later) I'm back, we went to Tango and I had a great time! All of my favorite partners were there and I didn't sit down all night. But I'm bushed. I didn't think I would make it, but perked up when the music started. Devi's coming along quite well, her salsa is paying off, she's going to be great.

Life: Interesting Times. Just when you think you've got a flow going, the river changes direction and there you are just cruising along and seeing where it takes you. I've gotten good at that lately, just being ok with seeing where the current takes me. Sometimes I think about putting my oars back in the water, but then think better of it yet. I'm just not ready to start dealing with plans going awry again. I kind of like floating....for now. 

Cheers everyone, drop me a line!

-Mnmrt

 

 Life is twisty and turney. I can never quite figure out which way it will go next and quite frankly I think I've stopped caring. It's (life) always interesting and the people I meet along the way always make it worth while.  So that makes up for the twisty part & since I'm in control of the turney part everything is ok.  

I visited my folks last night and stayed up till 2 am talking and drinking coffee with them and my sister. It was so much fun just to sit up and laugh all night. But at 2, I announced, "you people are crazy" and shuffled off to bed. My folks are funny, they just sit there and tell stories for hours and laugh and laugh. They're getting more like that the older they get which is really nice. 

It's like they're not worried any more. I think worry is for adults, kids and old people get to just say fuck it, the rest of us in the middle get to burn for a while. I'm not that old but I'm definitely getting back to fuck it, lately.  Watching my folks yuck it up yesterday was good for me. 

My sister and I drove into Fresno together which was great as we don't get to spend enough time together any more and she's my favorite relative and ranks in my top 5 people on the planet. She's smart, funny and fierce which makes for very interesting conversation, this trip touched on subjects as far ranging as racial politics and voluntary bi-location and time travel, which made the 3 hour drive seem like 20 minutes. 

Tigo is fast asleep and smiling at someone who is not in the room, I have a new pic of him which I'll post soon, he's so handsome it's unreal.

Halloween was amazing, I went out with Devi and we had a blast, we dressed as gangsters and went dancing, first Tango then Salsa then a drink at 515 where we ran into an old friend of mine who was dressed as a farmer.  life has been good to me lately. I'm always amazed at how easy everything is turning out. 

Good night everyone,  mnmrt

My boy is amazing, today the speech therapist called me to say that they have rigged a button to his head and have started to teach him how to use it.  This is great because then we'll be able to teach him yes/no, on/off; in short a binary form of communication and once he gets that, we can move on to the alphabet then language. There is a kid like him in Ireland named Christopher Noland, well he was 14 when they figured this out for him, he writes the most beautiful prose now. It's truly amazing, if you have a chance to look at his stuff, check out "Under the Eyes of the Clock". It's heart breaking stuff, but just amazingly written.

Anyway it'll be nice to get something out of my boy other than telepathic messages about being hungry or tired or wanting to play. Oh yeah, I do get those kinds of messages from him, it started when he used to have seizures all day long, I could be in another room of the house, and get this feeling that he was about to have one and I'd go sit with him and within a minute it would happen. Then he started to tell me when his diaper was about to be wet...he always hated being wet, and I would come in the room and then he would go...

He also shows up in my dreams a lot, mostly as a flame that just burns the crap out of me, but sometimes as a little boy in a blue and white striped soccer jersey or sometimes as a young man dressed in white. The flame always burns down the house I'm standing in, but I'm ok, just freaked out, the little boy is always running away from me, and the young man is always surrounded by people, strange recurring dreams huh?

Anyway I don't sleep much any more, I'm too tired to sleep, I don't know what it's like to sleep anymore.  I can't fall asleep, I sort of half pass out. I can lay down at 9pm and stare at the ceiling until 1am waiting for something to happen. Then right around 3am Tigo wakes up choking on his own adenoids and tonsils, as his condition makes them squishy and they fill his throat if he's been laying in one position for too long. So i have to wake up reposition him and make sure he's breathing ok and I pass this time by knitting or reading or playing guitar while watching him sleep. Usually by then it's like 4am and I pass out again until 7am when i have to start the next day. 

One time he turned blue on me, it was kind of a weird shade of blue, not like light blue but purplish, but it wasn't the color that screwed me up, it was the noise he was making. That noise is what keeps me up at night or rather the fact that within the next 4 hours he'll be making that noise again, and he'll need someone to tend to him. It's times like these that I'm glad we live alone. I don' t like the idea of having to deal with someone else's fear around all this crap along with my own. But then I remember that it is nice to have company some of the time, I just wish they couldn't hear it...hangups are a drag right?

Well that's the Tigo update, he's in bed now it's nearly 1am and I'm hitting the wall. I'll be up in a few hours though. 
Good night everyone, mnmrt

I am becoming Imelda Marcos, well by guy standards anyway....I have 18 pairs of shoes.  I have shoes for hiking, dancing, running, biking, walking, work, play, sunny days, rainy days, tango, salsa, for when when I feel like going barefoot but think better of it, for when my toes are cold at home, for going in the ocean...you name it.

but there is one thing that was missing and I had been waiting but could wait no longer...(there was a sale!) and so I bought them, perhaps I'm being self deprecatory when I say it  was "too soon" but my dance partner won't hear any of it....

Anyway, these bad boys caused quite a stir at their wharf debut a couple of weeks ago,  Devi had on a pair too and we had a ball:

Notice how they look like they're floating a bit above the ground....yeah well they're like that!

And a side shot:

 Tell me they don't make you totally freakin' jealous!  hahaahahahahahah!!!!

Ok I'm a bit in love w/ my self today....it's October! & I'm always happiest in October.

Today the wharf went off, but it got cold, we all could see our breath and steam was coming off some people, but it was still beautiful out there today. I missed my partner though...

Cheers everyone,  mnmrt