The New York Times ran the following graphic today in connection with a story about the shelling of the mess tent inside the “secure zone” in Mosul yesterday:
 "Deaths of U.S. servicemen and women by day")
View graphic larger (will open a pop-up window)
Just something to think about when factoring the “cost” of the war and how our government is handling it…and this doesn’t include numbers for “enemy” or civilian deaths.
One of my duties at the new job is to open my boss’ mail. Since it’s both holiday card and end of the year appeal and donation season, there’s a lot of mail these days. One of the groups that we received a card from sent this very simple piece of natural brown card stock onto which was glued a small rock with the word HOPE etched into it. The message, too, was pretty simple saying just “Because everyone deserves a little hope. Please pass it on.” above the Executive Director’s signature.
I thought it was a neat idea in these very trying and troubling times, to send out a little reminder of hope, or of peace, or joy.
What do you think would happen if I sent the same note, with a little rock that said Hope to a dozen random strangers with no signature? Would they take comfort from it or would it freak them out?
I know in these times of war, bad economies, pandemic disease, disconnection and intolerance that I need to be reminded that all is not lost, that the only constant is change, and that there is still a chance that things can get better.
Perhaps I can incorporate it into my guerilla war campaign to change thought. Back in the late 1980s/early-1990s someone got the bright idea to raise gay and lesbian visibility by stamping money with the words “gay money” or “lesbian money” to show that we are part of society. I’ve personally decided to resurrect this concept.
See, the money circulates and if enough of it gets stamped then, eventually, it’ll get to those places that want to shove us back into the closet (or worse). Maybe it’ll give a little breathing space to and reduce the isolation of some scared lesbian teenager handling money while doing some shitty, minimum wage in a place where she doesn’t have a support system. Maybe it’ll make someone who thinks she “doesn’t know any of ‘those’ people” give a little more thought to how her community is actually constructed.
Activist groups and marketers have taken over the urban stickering campaign; indeed, Micro$oft was fined several hundred thousand dollars last year for stickering in Manhattan to promote the launch of the new version of MSN. Most activist groups get pinched because they want to direct someone to a URL to get more information about what ever issue it is they are stickering about and that URL gives the authorities an easy way to fix responsibility.
But what about plain stickers that just say hope on them? Or ones that say Question authority, because we certainly need more of that to be happening.
Maybe it’s useless, I don’t know. All I do know is that I need to find a way to break my own paralysis, not so much to feel in control again — for we never really are in control of our lives — but more a way to not feel so fucking helpless about the world around me.
This is from an actual e-mail a writing teacher received from one of her adult students:
“hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again,” one student wrote to her recently. “i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respond . thanking u for ur cooperation.”
What’s so scary about this is that this woman teaches business writing to mid-career professionals. Not only are they mid-career professionals, they are mid-career professionals for whom English is their first language. Yes, that’s right, people who have been in the business world a minimum of five years are writing e-mails where misplaced punctuation would be a blessing over the none that is being used and verb forms routinely do not agree with the subject of the sentence. This advertisement snapped from the New York Times web site is a very good example of business “speak” that fails the good writing test.
What scares me even more is what is going to happen to written language when phrases such as “wat r u wrng 2 dinr” become the common parlance of actual adults. This is why I now declare my intentions to become a Punctuation Avenger. I will make it my mission to fight the good fight for proper grammar, subject and verb agreement, and the correct use of punctuation. The permanent marker, — Sharpie brand for me — carefully constructed stick on labels in the shape of apostrophes, and a lack of tolerance for abuse of the language shall be my weapons.
There will be no cape, though, for as we learned from The Incredibles, your cape is always your downfall as a superhero.
After a long, scary, hard pregnancy my cousin, The Kite, finally had the baby: it’s a girl, 7lbs, 5oz and 21 inches long with a shock of thick, dark hair and a wail to match the outrage of being born.
It’s not finished. My characters are in limbo and I can feel them standing on the edge of something big, something life changing. Nevertheless, I made word count and completed my first National Novel Writing Month learning a lot about myself as a person and a writer in the process.
A few statistics:
The goal is to finish the rough draft, which is what this is, before the end of the year.
Time to get a bit of sleep now, I think, give my eyes a rest, and catch up on some TV.
