Saturday, March 11, 2006
My blog just got more colorful
You probably spotted it right off; a new sidebar doodad with a bunch of colored boxes that says "Change my background." If you haven't already, give it a try; don't worry, the upper right one is plain white, so you can get back to normal without having to refresh the whole page.
That little strip of multi-hued squares caused me more stress and trouble than almost anything else I've put on this blog... and my husband will be complaining about how much effort HE made helping me with it for the next 20 years. I found the background color changer on the same site that had the title-changing doodad, and I exerted so much self control in NOT putting them both in the day I found them that my eyes were bugging out from the strain; sadly, my efforts to put off gratification and thus get to bed earlier were NOT rewarded. When I went back to that site a couple of days later, feeling virtuous, I discovered, to my utter horror, that the owner had TOTALLY redone it, and had kept all his doodads EXCEPT, you guessed it, the background changer. I was SCREAMING, literally, because it naturally hadn't occurred to me to copy out the code in case it frigging VANISHED 2 days after I found it, and I'd never seen anything like it anywhere else, and I'd been bursting to install it and get my delayed gratification, and... and I was one majorly thwarted and freaked-out geek. My husband rarely offers to do work of any sort, but my screams could crack titanium, and this prompted him to declare that he could duplicate the code; he went right to work on it, while I started frantically searching for similar code based on what I could remember about it. I struck gold when I recalled that it had inexplicably called a nonexistent gif at FlamingText.com, and that led me to the only place Google knew of that had the code
http://www.fulltimewebmaster.com/myforum/cult-about12.html
a forum where someone had offered it up in a post. My husband didn't want to look at it, of course, but he has having trouble getting the mouse-over to work consistently, and finally figured out that the problem was that with the cells "empty," in other words with nothing in them other than color, mouse-overs inexplicably become unreliable, and the only ways around it were to insert characters into the cells, which'd make them too big... or to do what the original doodad had done to circumvent the problem and call a nonexistent gif so that the table "thought" there was an image in each square when in fact there was nothing. Reluctantly, he used elements of the existing code to come up with his own fake-gif calls, and it WORKED.
That wasn't the end, of course; geeks can't resist enhancing and expanding upon a program if they can see a way to do so. I wanted 3D borders like the other version had, and my husband figured out how to do that, with some help from me and a cool table-making site
http://www.bagism.com/tablemaker/
which refreshed our memories as to what the different table-related terms like "cellpadding" meant. Then, we spent hours, and I do mean HOURS, with me going through sites that had lists of color blocks with their corresponding hex codes and coming up with new ones to try (in addition to the basics, including "karma color," lavender-blue), and him putting them into the code to be compared with the others we had, and then arranging them in an aesthetically pleasing and logical way. I wanted a much bigger selection than the original code offered, with wild choices of course, but also some nice light ones that folks might actually use for my background while reading here instead of white; to allow people to keep the color of their choosing for as long as they wanted, we did NOT use the commands from the old code that changed the background to its former color as soon as the mouse was rolled off... why even HAVE a color change if you couldn't KEEP it, right?
After that, there were little tweaks to get everything the right size and put the title on, get it the right color, and center it despite its desire to right-justify; having ignored my husband's insistence that the 2nd table he'd created to hold and position the title was just as good as using the proper command, I tried and failed at a couple of versions of centering commands before he grudgingly suggested that I move the caption code inside the table code proper (DUH!!), and that fixed it.
Then came the scary part; when I'd put the old code into my template, it had made the table perfectly, but it didn't WORK, which turned out to be because the Blogger code was defining my background color in the CSS and the table code couldn't override it... so I had to mess with the Blogger code for my basic template, which made me really nervous that I'd lose track of what I was doing and screw up some little thing that'd wreck my whole blog. My background color was defined in 3 places: one for the body, one for the sidebar, and one for the header; I pulled all 3, defined an overall background color within the body tag, inserted the color-change code and republished. SUCCESS!! I decided that I didn't like the way the top of the page looked when I altered the background, with part of it changed and part of it still pale purple, so I redefined the header background as white again... after a panicked search for where the prior version of the template had been stored so that I'd be sure to get the colons and quotes all formatted correctly (I DO have a backup copy of my template, but not where I could get to it without altering the network configuration). Finally, after FAR more work than can be justified to a non-geek, I had my color-change doodad exactly the way I wanted it; I hope you get a kick out of it, and that if you've found my black text on white to be too bland (I myself can't read any other combo as easily, which is why I have it that way) that one of the lighter colors will enhance your reading experience.
My husband is still grumbling about how much of his precious screwing around on forums time got used for this project... but he's also starting to ponder how the same effect could be achieved with JavaScript and/or CSS, so I'm not feeling too guilty about it. I AM grateful, though, so as a reward I put a movie that he wants to see, but that I don't care about, at the top of our Blockbuster online queue; I guess it won't kill me to see "Bambi" again. ;-)
That little strip of multi-hued squares caused me more stress and trouble than almost anything else I've put on this blog... and my husband will be complaining about how much effort HE made helping me with it for the next 20 years. I found the background color changer on the same site that had the title-changing doodad, and I exerted so much self control in NOT putting them both in the day I found them that my eyes were bugging out from the strain; sadly, my efforts to put off gratification and thus get to bed earlier were NOT rewarded. When I went back to that site a couple of days later, feeling virtuous, I discovered, to my utter horror, that the owner had TOTALLY redone it, and had kept all his doodads EXCEPT, you guessed it, the background changer. I was SCREAMING, literally, because it naturally hadn't occurred to me to copy out the code in case it frigging VANISHED 2 days after I found it, and I'd never seen anything like it anywhere else, and I'd been bursting to install it and get my delayed gratification, and... and I was one majorly thwarted and freaked-out geek. My husband rarely offers to do work of any sort, but my screams could crack titanium, and this prompted him to declare that he could duplicate the code; he went right to work on it, while I started frantically searching for similar code based on what I could remember about it. I struck gold when I recalled that it had inexplicably called a nonexistent gif at FlamingText.com, and that led me to the only place Google knew of that had the code
http://www.fulltimewebmaster.com/myforum/cult-about12.html
a forum where someone had offered it up in a post. My husband didn't want to look at it, of course, but he has having trouble getting the mouse-over to work consistently, and finally figured out that the problem was that with the cells "empty," in other words with nothing in them other than color, mouse-overs inexplicably become unreliable, and the only ways around it were to insert characters into the cells, which'd make them too big... or to do what the original doodad had done to circumvent the problem and call a nonexistent gif so that the table "thought" there was an image in each square when in fact there was nothing. Reluctantly, he used elements of the existing code to come up with his own fake-gif calls, and it WORKED.
That wasn't the end, of course; geeks can't resist enhancing and expanding upon a program if they can see a way to do so. I wanted 3D borders like the other version had, and my husband figured out how to do that, with some help from me and a cool table-making site
http://www.bagism.com/tablemaker/
which refreshed our memories as to what the different table-related terms like "cellpadding" meant. Then, we spent hours, and I do mean HOURS, with me going through sites that had lists of color blocks with their corresponding hex codes and coming up with new ones to try (in addition to the basics, including "karma color," lavender-blue), and him putting them into the code to be compared with the others we had, and then arranging them in an aesthetically pleasing and logical way. I wanted a much bigger selection than the original code offered, with wild choices of course, but also some nice light ones that folks might actually use for my background while reading here instead of white; to allow people to keep the color of their choosing for as long as they wanted, we did NOT use the commands from the old code that changed the background to its former color as soon as the mouse was rolled off... why even HAVE a color change if you couldn't KEEP it, right?
After that, there were little tweaks to get everything the right size and put the title on, get it the right color, and center it despite its desire to right-justify; having ignored my husband's insistence that the 2nd table he'd created to hold and position the title was just as good as using the proper command, I tried and failed at a couple of versions of centering commands before he grudgingly suggested that I move the caption code inside the table code proper (DUH!!), and that fixed it.
Then came the scary part; when I'd put the old code into my template, it had made the table perfectly, but it didn't WORK, which turned out to be because the Blogger code was defining my background color in the CSS and the table code couldn't override it... so I had to mess with the Blogger code for my basic template, which made me really nervous that I'd lose track of what I was doing and screw up some little thing that'd wreck my whole blog. My background color was defined in 3 places: one for the body, one for the sidebar, and one for the header; I pulled all 3, defined an overall background color within the body tag, inserted the color-change code and republished. SUCCESS!! I decided that I didn't like the way the top of the page looked when I altered the background, with part of it changed and part of it still pale purple, so I redefined the header background as white again... after a panicked search for where the prior version of the template had been stored so that I'd be sure to get the colons and quotes all formatted correctly (I DO have a backup copy of my template, but not where I could get to it without altering the network configuration). Finally, after FAR more work than can be justified to a non-geek, I had my color-change doodad exactly the way I wanted it; I hope you get a kick out of it, and that if you've found my black text on white to be too bland (I myself can't read any other combo as easily, which is why I have it that way) that one of the lighter colors will enhance your reading experience.
My husband is still grumbling about how much of his precious screwing around on forums time got used for this project... but he's also starting to ponder how the same effect could be achieved with JavaScript and/or CSS, so I'm not feeling too guilty about it. I AM grateful, though, so as a reward I put a movie that he wants to see, but that I don't care about, at the top of our Blockbuster online queue; I guess it won't kill me to see "Bambi" again. ;-)
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
The karma of abortion
For the record, here's where I stand on the abortion issue:
When does the result of the union of egg and sperm become a human being? I don't know; there's no PROOF of any of the available theories (and no, whatever religious text you prefer does NOT constitute proof to people outside of your religion). Is abortion murder? I don't know; we need to know if what's being destroyed is a human being before we can answer that one.
Leaving the world of the physical, in which there's nothing for me to go on, and entering the spiritual/metaphysical world, I look at it in terms of the soul; a human being has a soul, and a thing without a soul is therefore NOT a human being, even if it resembles one... some religious types are with me on that one, as they believe that only their deity can give a person a soul, and thus that a clone, which would NOT be created by their deity, would be soulless and therefore not human. On the one hand, I believe that the soul is created by our thoughts and feelings, and that would mean that a fetus, which isn't exactly contemplating the mysteries of the universe in the womb, would NOT have a soul. On the other hand, by the principles of animism (see my post of 3-16-04) every bit of matter has an infinitesimal amount of soul associated with it; since living cells radiate energy, they'd have a little more soul, and a fetus might reasonably be assumed to have occasional surges of emotion in the womb, plus the energy emitted by its evolving brain, and those things all together could give it what we might call a pre-soul... or is it enough to provide the fetus with a true soul at some point before birth? If so, WHEN?
I don't know.
What I DO know is that the MOTHER is a human being, and forcing her to go through pregnancy and childbirth, which can be truly miserable experiences even for women who passionately want their babies, can be quite expensive, and carry the risk of many health problems including DEATH, after which she must either raise an unwanted child or give it up and have nothing to show for all that she went through, is a little too harsh of a decision to make on the basis of maybe's and could be's... no matter what they think in South Dakota.
The various uncertainties make judging the karmic outcome of an abortion very iffy, but it's worth thinking about as a spiritual exercise:
Is killing a blob of cells, even if it has a soul, karmically equivalent to killing an actual child, or an adult, which has a far "larger" soul? How about when it's farther along, and has some human characteristics? How about once it has all its major parts?
If a fetus DOES have soul, then abortion IS killing a human being, and that can't be good karma; is the mother's relief at not having her life ruined by the pregnancy, which releases massive positive energy, more or less than the negative energy caused by the fetus's death? It seems as if the strength and duration of the mother's feelings would win out, but there's no way to be SURE that fetal death doesn't deliver a massive karmic hit, so... if I ever had to have an abortion, I'd work hard to build my karma up, just in case. If the mother ends up feeling sad, guilty, or other negative emotions, that's pure negative karma; an excellent reason to be REALLY sure you want to abort before taking that irrevocable step.
What's the karma of a doctor performing abortions? The overall karma for most abortions might be good, but what about when the mother is swamped with regret? That's a clear-cut case of negative energy and thus bad karma, which could be a bad deal even if the doctor acted out of purely helpful intentions; good intentions only offer limited protection.
What's the karma of legislators who deny abortions to women who want them? In my post of 2-18-06, I had my 1st spiritual revelation of the year, which was:
"dozens, or even hundreds, of people could eventually be affected by an action you took, and you could get karmic energy, positive, negative, or possibly both, from every one of them."
In the case of legislators, far more people than that could be affected by decisions they make... YIKES, remind me to never run for office!! For each woman denied an abortion, there's her misery and other negative emotions, all the discomforts and problems of pregnancy, the agony of childbirth, the possibility of lasting health problems (which becomes a near-certainty if she can't get the weight off), or DEATH, the stresses of having a child in a situation bad enough that she wanted to abort to avoid it if she keeps the child, the hormonal screaming for the child if she gives it up, her dismay over her ruined figure either way... how'd you like all that negative karma coming to YOU because YOU made it impossible for her to abort? How about all that negative karma times THOUSANDS of similar women?
And it can get worse; what if a woman was raped, and forced to carry the rapist's child because she was denied an abortion... can your mind encompass the negative karma THAT would produce? The rapist would of course deserve it, but the legislators who thought they were doing a great thing by saving fetuses might be in for a nasty surprise.
What if it's a minor being forced to have a baby? And what if she was raped?
What if it's a 12 year old victim of INCEST being forced to have a baby? Would you want the karma from THAT pointed in your direction?
What if a woman has to give birth to a baby that's not the same race as she or her husband and he kills her in a jealous rage?
What if a young girl gets thrown out of her parent's house once the pregnancy that she couldn't abort starts to show, and she ends up as a crack whore?
The mind boggles.
If science becomes able to detect souls in my lifetime, and there's proof that a fetus has a "full soul," if abortion is still available despite that proof my advice to women will be to really, REALLY think about how unhappy carrying the child to term will make them, because although a blob of cells would STILL not be the same as a human body, nor would a fetus too young to survive outside the womb, abortion would be separating a soul from its flesh... but nothing, NOTHING, could make me cast a vote or take any other action that would DENY women and girls access to abortion, because the consequences, both to the mothers and, far less importantly, my karma, could be indescribably bad.
I'm guessing that most folks would call killing a fetus murder if it was proven to have a soul, but, as I've pointed out before, what's morally right and what's karmically best are NOT always the same; morals are based on human judgment within a given culture, and karma is based on simple movements of energy with no judgment applied to them. In our culture, we see death as being worse than any amount of suffering, and that's probably true much of the time from most perspectives, but I just can't view the long-term suffering of a woman/girl as "less" than the death of an unthinking fetus; I'm generally all for taking the higher moral road even when there are unpleasant consequences, but not with this one.
This stuff makes me wish that the scifi idea of babies being grown in bottles and such was real; if a pregnant woman could transfer the fetus to a bottle, where it would grow and be born just as healthy as if she'd carried it, all this hysteria, all the political battles, all the despair, both of people who think abortion is murder and of those women who fear being unable to abort no matter what a wreck a pregnancy would make of their lives, all the protests and violence and hatred would vanish.
Is it just me who thinks that all this ugliness from people who claim to love the women and/or the fetuses is one of the sadder dichotomies of American culture?
When does the result of the union of egg and sperm become a human being? I don't know; there's no PROOF of any of the available theories (and no, whatever religious text you prefer does NOT constitute proof to people outside of your religion). Is abortion murder? I don't know; we need to know if what's being destroyed is a human being before we can answer that one.
Leaving the world of the physical, in which there's nothing for me to go on, and entering the spiritual/metaphysical world, I look at it in terms of the soul; a human being has a soul, and a thing without a soul is therefore NOT a human being, even if it resembles one... some religious types are with me on that one, as they believe that only their deity can give a person a soul, and thus that a clone, which would NOT be created by their deity, would be soulless and therefore not human. On the one hand, I believe that the soul is created by our thoughts and feelings, and that would mean that a fetus, which isn't exactly contemplating the mysteries of the universe in the womb, would NOT have a soul. On the other hand, by the principles of animism (see my post of 3-16-04) every bit of matter has an infinitesimal amount of soul associated with it; since living cells radiate energy, they'd have a little more soul, and a fetus might reasonably be assumed to have occasional surges of emotion in the womb, plus the energy emitted by its evolving brain, and those things all together could give it what we might call a pre-soul... or is it enough to provide the fetus with a true soul at some point before birth? If so, WHEN?
I don't know.
What I DO know is that the MOTHER is a human being, and forcing her to go through pregnancy and childbirth, which can be truly miserable experiences even for women who passionately want their babies, can be quite expensive, and carry the risk of many health problems including DEATH, after which she must either raise an unwanted child or give it up and have nothing to show for all that she went through, is a little too harsh of a decision to make on the basis of maybe's and could be's... no matter what they think in South Dakota.
The various uncertainties make judging the karmic outcome of an abortion very iffy, but it's worth thinking about as a spiritual exercise:
Is killing a blob of cells, even if it has a soul, karmically equivalent to killing an actual child, or an adult, which has a far "larger" soul? How about when it's farther along, and has some human characteristics? How about once it has all its major parts?
If a fetus DOES have soul, then abortion IS killing a human being, and that can't be good karma; is the mother's relief at not having her life ruined by the pregnancy, which releases massive positive energy, more or less than the negative energy caused by the fetus's death? It seems as if the strength and duration of the mother's feelings would win out, but there's no way to be SURE that fetal death doesn't deliver a massive karmic hit, so... if I ever had to have an abortion, I'd work hard to build my karma up, just in case. If the mother ends up feeling sad, guilty, or other negative emotions, that's pure negative karma; an excellent reason to be REALLY sure you want to abort before taking that irrevocable step.
What's the karma of a doctor performing abortions? The overall karma for most abortions might be good, but what about when the mother is swamped with regret? That's a clear-cut case of negative energy and thus bad karma, which could be a bad deal even if the doctor acted out of purely helpful intentions; good intentions only offer limited protection.
What's the karma of legislators who deny abortions to women who want them? In my post of 2-18-06, I had my 1st spiritual revelation of the year, which was:
"dozens, or even hundreds, of people could eventually be affected by an action you took, and you could get karmic energy, positive, negative, or possibly both, from every one of them."
In the case of legislators, far more people than that could be affected by decisions they make... YIKES, remind me to never run for office!! For each woman denied an abortion, there's her misery and other negative emotions, all the discomforts and problems of pregnancy, the agony of childbirth, the possibility of lasting health problems (which becomes a near-certainty if she can't get the weight off), or DEATH, the stresses of having a child in a situation bad enough that she wanted to abort to avoid it if she keeps the child, the hormonal screaming for the child if she gives it up, her dismay over her ruined figure either way... how'd you like all that negative karma coming to YOU because YOU made it impossible for her to abort? How about all that negative karma times THOUSANDS of similar women?
And it can get worse; what if a woman was raped, and forced to carry the rapist's child because she was denied an abortion... can your mind encompass the negative karma THAT would produce? The rapist would of course deserve it, but the legislators who thought they were doing a great thing by saving fetuses might be in for a nasty surprise.
What if it's a minor being forced to have a baby? And what if she was raped?
What if it's a 12 year old victim of INCEST being forced to have a baby? Would you want the karma from THAT pointed in your direction?
What if a woman has to give birth to a baby that's not the same race as she or her husband and he kills her in a jealous rage?
What if a young girl gets thrown out of her parent's house once the pregnancy that she couldn't abort starts to show, and she ends up as a crack whore?
The mind boggles.
If science becomes able to detect souls in my lifetime, and there's proof that a fetus has a "full soul," if abortion is still available despite that proof my advice to women will be to really, REALLY think about how unhappy carrying the child to term will make them, because although a blob of cells would STILL not be the same as a human body, nor would a fetus too young to survive outside the womb, abortion would be separating a soul from its flesh... but nothing, NOTHING, could make me cast a vote or take any other action that would DENY women and girls access to abortion, because the consequences, both to the mothers and, far less importantly, my karma, could be indescribably bad.
I'm guessing that most folks would call killing a fetus murder if it was proven to have a soul, but, as I've pointed out before, what's morally right and what's karmically best are NOT always the same; morals are based on human judgment within a given culture, and karma is based on simple movements of energy with no judgment applied to them. In our culture, we see death as being worse than any amount of suffering, and that's probably true much of the time from most perspectives, but I just can't view the long-term suffering of a woman/girl as "less" than the death of an unthinking fetus; I'm generally all for taking the higher moral road even when there are unpleasant consequences, but not with this one.
This stuff makes me wish that the scifi idea of babies being grown in bottles and such was real; if a pregnant woman could transfer the fetus to a bottle, where it would grow and be born just as healthy as if she'd carried it, all this hysteria, all the political battles, all the despair, both of people who think abortion is murder and of those women who fear being unable to abort no matter what a wreck a pregnancy would make of their lives, all the protests and violence and hatred would vanish.
Is it just me who thinks that all this ugliness from people who claim to love the women and/or the fetuses is one of the sadder dichotomies of American culture?
Sunday, March 05, 2006
All they have to do is JUST...
How many times have you heard this said in reference to something the speaker thinks OTHER people need to do that's horrifically difficult, but because it can be described simply is made to sound like an effortless thing that anyone who doesn't do is weak, stupid, etc. You know the sorts of comments I mean:
"If people want to lose weight, all they have to do is JUST put their forks down"... said by a naturally thin person who eats all day long and has never had to withstand real, excruciating, desperate hunger in their entire life, much less struggled to combat it every moment of every day for big chunks of time.
"If a person needs to stop smoking, all they have to do is JUST not put the cigarettes in their mouth"... said by someone who's never been addicted to anything and has no clue as to how ferocious the need for whatever the addiction is to becomes, or what the agony of withdrawal feels like.
"If someone's kid is getting overweight, all they have to do is JUST give them less food"... said by someone who's never cared for a child and thus has no idea how many different places they can get food from, or how impossible it is to monitor them every moment, AND has never endured a child begging and crying for something for even a few minutes, much less the endless barrage of misery a constantly hungry child would subject the parents to all day every day for MONTHS, and has no inkling of how every cell in a parent's body rebels against not acting to end their child's suffering.
"If they're depressed, all they have to do is JUST 'cheer up'"... said by people who are inexplicably unable to grasp that depression is an ILLNESS, that NO medical condition is cured by "cheering up," and that no one is able to alter their emotional state by force of will in any case.
The word "just" doesn't always appear in these statements, but if what's said, and the way it's said, is such that the word could be put in there without altering the intended meaning, it still counts... counts as the person saying it being smug, ignorant, arrogant, compassionless, and a bunch of other unpleasant things.
Now of course there ARE statements in this format that are NOT indicative of these things, such as "If he wants to get better grades, all he has to do is just quit going out every night and do some studying instead"; this one refers to something that anyone CAN do, and withOUT having to deliberately undergo infinite and unending pain, so it's in a totally different category than the earlier examples that contemptuously dismiss the simple fact that when people seem to be consistently unable to do a thing without extreme difficulty, if at all, it means that that thing is HARD, or even impossible, NOT that those people have failed to see some quick, easy, obvious thing that they SHOULD be doing to end their problem.
If you find yourself wanting to opine on a topic with "All they have to do is JUST," stop and think for a moment; are you intending to point out what a lazy person would be better off doing... or are you about to be insensitive and mean-spirited?
And now for the news:
My mother is in the hospital; she's got pneumonia in her left lung, and because of her status as a breast cancer patient they're keeping her overnight and will decide at some point later in the day if she needs to be there any longer. It's belatedly occurred to me that some of you might have sent out good wishes to her, as many of us do when we hear about an ill or injured person, and to all that have I want to say thank you; thought creates reality, and every little bit helps.
On a positive note; if you check in my sidebar... you know what's coming, right? Yes, it's a new doodad; if you put your cursor over where it says "Want to change my title?" a box will come up that asks you to "Type in a new title"... enter anything that comes to mind, hit "OK," and whatever you chose will appear at the very top of the screen. I've been having a ball with it; my current favorite is "Every blah blah blah."
I had a nearly problem-free installation... 2 in a row, that's sorta scary. It was a little tricky figuring out which commands I really needed, though, because in the source code I got them from they were surrounded by "div" this and "id" that, and I had to think it through and sort out which bits were actually doing something from those that were... formatting and who knows what else. My intuition proved correct, which gave me thoroughly disproportionate pride, and now I have something new to play with; I hope some of you get a couple of minutes of fun out of it too.
"If people want to lose weight, all they have to do is JUST put their forks down"... said by a naturally thin person who eats all day long and has never had to withstand real, excruciating, desperate hunger in their entire life, much less struggled to combat it every moment of every day for big chunks of time.
"If a person needs to stop smoking, all they have to do is JUST not put the cigarettes in their mouth"... said by someone who's never been addicted to anything and has no clue as to how ferocious the need for whatever the addiction is to becomes, or what the agony of withdrawal feels like.
"If someone's kid is getting overweight, all they have to do is JUST give them less food"... said by someone who's never cared for a child and thus has no idea how many different places they can get food from, or how impossible it is to monitor them every moment, AND has never endured a child begging and crying for something for even a few minutes, much less the endless barrage of misery a constantly hungry child would subject the parents to all day every day for MONTHS, and has no inkling of how every cell in a parent's body rebels against not acting to end their child's suffering.
"If they're depressed, all they have to do is JUST 'cheer up'"... said by people who are inexplicably unable to grasp that depression is an ILLNESS, that NO medical condition is cured by "cheering up," and that no one is able to alter their emotional state by force of will in any case.
The word "just" doesn't always appear in these statements, but if what's said, and the way it's said, is such that the word could be put in there without altering the intended meaning, it still counts... counts as the person saying it being smug, ignorant, arrogant, compassionless, and a bunch of other unpleasant things.
Now of course there ARE statements in this format that are NOT indicative of these things, such as "If he wants to get better grades, all he has to do is just quit going out every night and do some studying instead"; this one refers to something that anyone CAN do, and withOUT having to deliberately undergo infinite and unending pain, so it's in a totally different category than the earlier examples that contemptuously dismiss the simple fact that when people seem to be consistently unable to do a thing without extreme difficulty, if at all, it means that that thing is HARD, or even impossible, NOT that those people have failed to see some quick, easy, obvious thing that they SHOULD be doing to end their problem.
If you find yourself wanting to opine on a topic with "All they have to do is JUST," stop and think for a moment; are you intending to point out what a lazy person would be better off doing... or are you about to be insensitive and mean-spirited?
And now for the news:
My mother is in the hospital; she's got pneumonia in her left lung, and because of her status as a breast cancer patient they're keeping her overnight and will decide at some point later in the day if she needs to be there any longer. It's belatedly occurred to me that some of you might have sent out good wishes to her, as many of us do when we hear about an ill or injured person, and to all that have I want to say thank you; thought creates reality, and every little bit helps.
On a positive note; if you check in my sidebar... you know what's coming, right? Yes, it's a new doodad; if you put your cursor over where it says "Want to change my title?" a box will come up that asks you to "Type in a new title"... enter anything that comes to mind, hit "OK," and whatever you chose will appear at the very top of the screen. I've been having a ball with it; my current favorite is "Every blah blah blah."
I had a nearly problem-free installation... 2 in a row, that's sorta scary. It was a little tricky figuring out which commands I really needed, though, because in the source code I got them from they were surrounded by "div" this and "id" that, and I had to think it through and sort out which bits were actually doing something from those that were... formatting and who knows what else. My intuition proved correct, which gave me thoroughly disproportionate pride, and now I have something new to play with; I hope some of you get a couple of minutes of fun out of it too.
