The Proust Questionnaire
Tiffany introduced it to me, via Jason via Anna. (And Sam begat William and William begat..)
I like these types of exercises, especially when I'm foggy and panicked generally unclear (as this Monday morning finds me). The Proust questionnaire is named for the French writer Marcel Proust, serving as the inspiration for more introspective interviews, an exercise in self exploration and a peak into the true motivations of the people providing the answers.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Emotional health and physical health, the ability to cover my expenses without any great anxiety, knowing without hesitation that I am loved, supported and valued by the people I love, support and value...and the freedom to create things with my own two hands.
2. What is your greatest fear?
That the things currently causing me grief, will never pass. That this, right now, is all there is to life.
3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My fear of inadequacy.
4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Cowardice.
5. Which living person do you most admire?
My aunt Elizabeth. She finds the growth in every challenge. She does amazing things but remains incredibly humble. She can hug you and reduce you to tears just from the love coming from her pores. She sees the best in you and never lets you deny that it is there. She finds joy and beauty in the things many take for granted. She's faced incredible adversity with the courage of a lion and never reduces herself to bitterness. She loves hard, thinks unselfishly, fights for what she believes in and...she's just a wonder.
6. What is your greatest extravagance?
Art supplies.
7. What is your current state of mind?
Afraid. Confused. Scattered. Isolated.
8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Chastity. But only because of the other recognized virtues, it is the one least inclined to impede your ability to be a healthy, happy, productive individual. I know lots of people that ain't "chaste" but live life with fulfillment and purpose.
9. On what occasion do you lie?
When I'm afraid that the truth is going to really hurt someone with no positive consequence, self included.
10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My stomach.
11. Which living person do you most despise?
Well, there are a lot of people I don't like. The world is chock full of regrettable people. Though I find it more often to be a curse more than a blessing, I can sympathy or empathy for most. The living person I most despise right now might be Rush Limbaugh. He's dangerous and stirs unscrupulous passions for his own amusement. That sort of small minded deviance works on my ability to think kind thoughts.
12. What is the quality you most like in a man?
Integrity. Not just one's ability to speak truthfully, but to do so at the cost of your own comfort and ease. Someone that is willing to be seen for who they are. To stand in their truth and not the shadow of what they want others to believe they are.
13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Grace. The ability to consider feelings and actions with wisdom and well being and to act gracefully even when it might be difficult to do so.
14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I can't.
15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
My dog. I can always count on her to love me, tend to my wounded feelings and remind me that there's a being out here that will always give as much as or more than she takes. My childhood best friend, Jameel. Over thirty years and going strong. He's been the only one to always be there, to protect me on those occasions I couldn't protect myself and to keep all of my truest thoughts, fears and feelings safe and secure. He's probably the only person I've known that closely or long who has never snatched the rug out from under me.
16. When and where were you happiest?
The day I graduated from college and saw absolute blissful joy and delight on my father's face, knowing I had everything to do with it. A time long ago when I thought I was in love with someone just as in love with me. While everything else is in that story is but a work of fiction, that feeling I had was truer than most anything I've ever experienced. And I try to remain grateful for it.
17. Which talent would you most like to have?
The ability to read minds.
18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
My tendency toward self-preoccupation.
19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I think that's yet to be discovered.
20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
An eagle. (feathers, not helmets)
21. Where would you most like to live?
Sometimes I think New Mexico. Loads of pottery there, lots of ceramic inspiration, still away from the hustle and bustle of life in a city. Places I would spend a year or two? London. Toronto. New Zealand. Portugal.
22. What is your most treasured possession?
My laptop.
23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
A life with no other passion but material gain or personal recognition.
24. What is your favorite occupation?
Potter. Followed by writer.
25. What is your most marked characteristic?
I honestly don't know. I don't trust that I've ever had a clear lens for how others see/observe me.
26. What do you most value in your friends?
Their sincerity.
27. Who are your favorite writers?
Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, Pearl Cleage, Paulo Coehlo, C.S. Lewis, Anchee Min, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maya Angelou
28. Who is your hero of fiction?
Ellen Ripley from the Alien series.
29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
I don't think I know enough about the inner workings of any historical figure to say who that person would be.
30. Who are your heroes in real life?
The people who are driven each and every day to the commitment of human services, community service and charitable efforts.
http://www.crikey.com.au/
5 . Rundle: a win to Obama, but the Senate battle awaits
Guy Rundle writes:
President Obama has won a first, though hardly decisive, victory in the health care campaign, with the passage of HR 3200, the Affordable Health Care Act 2009, through the US House of Representatives.
Passage of the bill is the first stage in reforming the US non-health care system. Importantly, it contains the all-important "public option" -- a state-owned health insurer which can offer coverage at lower rates than the private carriers, thus forcing their exorbitant premiums down.
Other provisions within the 2000-page bill include a ban on excluding people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance, new controls on provider (ie doctor and hospital) charges, huge funds for integrating and computerising health care records across the country, and much more.
The bill seeks to limit the ballooning cost of health care by making cutbacks in "Medicare" -- the open-ended 65+ public care which half of the "Obamahitler" protestors are covered under -- and bringing in some controls on the ludicrous amounts big Pharma can charge the government for drugs.
However the bill only just squeaked through the House, with a majority of 5.39 Democrats voted against it, and only 1 Republican -- a Vietnamese-American from Louisiana, pretty much the unhealthiest state in the Union -- voted for it.
While getting any sort of a majority is seen as a triumph for speaker Nancy Pelosi -- the vote occurred on Saturday night after a week of near round-the-clock arm twisting -- there were serious misgivings about some of the deals that had to be made.
One in particular, which excluded abortion from public insurance or from any subsidies to private insurance, was an exceptionally bitter pill. Since non-emergency abortion is scarcely available under public provision currently, the amendment does not make coverage any worse, but it now makes termination an even more "special" case than hitherto.
Others are whackier still -- an amendment (supported by Republican Orrin Hatch and previously by the late Ted Kennedy, for negotiating purposes) that allows public funding for spiritual healing -- ie Christian Science intercessionary prayer at $20 a pop.
Mad stuff, but the bill is through, and as Mark Steyn notes -- ruefully -- that's the important thing. To get something passed in the House is further than Bill and Hillary Clinton's 1993 bill got.
Now however, there's the Senate. Pelosi had about 38 Democrats she could lose (with a 77-seat House majority), and some of them were released from the whip, so that their Big Insurance backers can be assured they got their moneys worth, but the Senate is on a knife-edge.
Ted Kennedy hasn't been replaced yet, and slimy Joe Lieberman, who usually votes with the Dems on social issues, has indicated he won't support a bill with a public option in it. He won't even support "cloture", the vote that prevents a filibuster, and allows the bill to go to a simple majority vote.
That leaves the Democrats with, at most, 58-41, against a filibuster, and needing a 60-40 split. Their best bet is to convince Maine's moderate Republican senator Olympia Snowe over, and one or two others from godknowswhere.
But that presumes a 100% Democratic whip, and that looks unlikely, with a half-dozen "blue dog" Democrats having already vowed to vote against a public option.
Should they be able to persuade the Blue Dogs to vote for cloture, and then against the bill, the bill will come to a majority vote and pass around 53-46, and the Blue Dogs' blushes will be spared.
But if they can't get them to yes on that, the Democratic leadership has another option, which is to make them perform an actual filibuster.
Currently, all you have to do to filibuster -- ie to prevent the bill from coming to a majority vote -- is for 41 senators to indicate that they would filibuster it if required.
That removed the need for senators to stay on their feet reading from cookbooks, Dickens, etc, with a series of explicit rules governing their behaviour (no leaning on surfaces, no physical support by other senators, no toilet breaks).
The automatic filibuster dramatically changed the nature of American governance, but by stealth -- the Senate became a de facto supermajority chamber, an inherently conservatising option.
However, at any time, by a simple majority vote, the automatic filibuster can be removed -- and the minority opposition would have to talk the bill out to the end of the current Senate session.
The advantage of this is that the US public would see the filibuster for what it is (the word comes from a dutch word for pirate or 'freebooter'), a mad obstruction tactic being executed by people desperate to hold back change.
Will the Dems go there? Or will they observe what has become a sort of collective Senate alignment against the House - that it is in the interest of all Senators to keep the automatic filibuster, and hence their vastly increased power within the bicamera.
The look-out is that they won't even let the bill come to the floor before the Senate breaks for 'the holidays', as the Christmas season is very multiculturally called. This will allow the Democratic leadership to craft a complex "trigger option" -- one where there is no public option immediately and lowcost health care is provided by non-profit insurance co-operatives effectively, big insurers pool resources to offer more basic coverage at cheaper prices, on a sliding scale that ensures near universal coverage of some description.
The problem with co-ops is that they would have no power to affect the prices health insurers set for their regular premiums so individuals and businesses continue to pay a mozza for cover. Worse, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out in Counterpunch, this would be combined with a mandating system, similar to car insurance, where you would be required to have health insurance -- effectively the state would be holding the gun while Big Insurance picks your pocket. Only in America.
The trigger option would allow for a rollout of a public option if, after three-five years, average premiums had not come down to set levels. Since they wouldn't, this is a public option by stealth. It would allow Republican Senators Snowe and Collins from Maine to support it, and one or two others, while able to save face with their constituents and soft-money corporate donors.
Should that fail, there is a final option, which is to abandon HR 3200, and roll it into the 2010 budget bill as a series of provisions -- it is then subject to a "reconciliation" vote, which is a straight majority in both houses, and guaranteed to pass. The White House could then argue that the will of the people was expressed in the HR 3200 and the Senate obstructed it -- reconciliation is then in the spirit of the original vote. Indeed, that may be the overall game plan.
Whatever the case, HR3200 is an enormous victory, the first serious universal health care bill to get through a House of Congress ever. The Senate will be tough, if not insurmountable, but this has months to run. Quite aside from the manifold improvements any sort of serious bill will offer in American life, it will give Obama a victory he can go back to his base with, and fire them up anew for the Herculean labour of making change in America.
Rupert Cornwell: Why can't the US learn to love its government?
Out of America: Suspicion of rulers dates to the founding of the nation – and even Obama is unlikely to change that
What is it about Americans and government? The tea-party crowd were back in town the other day – more than 5,000 of them, gathered on the West Lawn of the Capitol to rail against the historic healthcare reform bill that the House of Representatives is expected to pass this weekend.The passions the measure has generated among its Republican opponents have been remarkable. One Republican Congresswoman has declared that health reform was a greater threat to America than Osama bin Laden and global terrorism, while John Boehner, the party's leader in the House, urged the protesters to join Republicans in "defending our freedom".
A neutral observer would not know whether to laugh
or cry at this so-called "Super Bowl of Freedom", featuring inter alia
a giant banner describing the proposals as "National Socialist
Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945". Yes, the tea-party movement,
currently touring the country, contains more than its share of cranks
and nutters. But the fringes, too, can express political truths. This
particular truth is that Americans just can't bring themselves to love
government.
When President Barack Obama came to power, the stage seemed set for government activism unmatched in decades. The parallels with the early 1930s were palpable. Talk of a second Great Depression was everywhere, economists were urging a "new New Deal", Franklin Roosevelt was suddenly back in fashion. Nine months on, however, the urgency seems to have vanished. And why this cooling of reformist ardour? True, the economy has improved (though not by much, as evidenced by the news that unemployment last month rose to 10.2 per cent, the highest level in a quarter of a century.) The huge deficits being run up by Washington are also legitimate cause for concern. A more important reason though is America's ancestral suspicion of government.
The governors' elections in New Jersey and Virginia last week, in which Mr Obama's Democrats were soundly defeated, were largely local affairs. But in so far as they sent a message to the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, the message was plain: slow down, the voters said, don't force change down the people's throats. With a young and charismatic President who won power by promising change, it's easy to forget that the US is a conservative country. Mr Obama triumphed in 2008 not by harnessing a vast tide of liberalism, but by persuading the wavering centre that he was a better bet than another four years of discredited Republican policies. In Virginia and New Jersey, exit polls showed, the centrists (moderates, independents, call them what you will) changed their minds and decided to put on the brakes.
A fascinating Gallup survey last month found that despite the Democrats' victories in 2006 and 2008, fully 40 per cent of Americans, more than ever, describe themselves as conservative, while 36 per cent call themselves moderates. Only 20 per cent are avowed liberals. It's not a question of government having failed the country. It's just that Americans aren't comfortable with the beast when its role, as now, threatens to expand – even when the deficiencies of the unfettered free market have never been more glaring.
Mr Obama secured his record-breaking $787bn stimulus package last February, albeit with virtually no Republican support. But that might be it. Yes, the House will probably pass a version of healthcare reform, but the measure could yet founder in the Senate, where party discipline is weaker, and a 60 per cent majority is required to pass anything of significance. If it does fail, it will basically be for fear that the reform amounts to a "government takeover of healthcare". The most contentious part of the bill is the "public option" – whereby a publicly financed scheme would be set up to provide some competition to rapacious private insurers. But that option now hardly dares speak its name. Leading Democrats prefer to speak of a "consumer option".
And health care is but one of three massive public policy issues on the table, beside a green energy programme to combat climate change, and regulation of the financial markets, aimed at preventing a repeat of last year's crisis. But there's no guarantee any of them will get through. For Europeans, all three would be no-brainers: assured health coverage for all (or rather almost all), steps to reduce both pollution and imports of costly foreign oil, and curbs on the excesses of Wall Street. Not so in the US – because each implies a substantial increase in the role of government.
And it has been ever thus. Suspicion of government is as old as the Republic. The movement that turned up on Capitol Hill again last week takes its name, of course, from the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Americans like to see their War of Independence as a revolution against government – back then the far-away government in London that taxed the colonies without allowing them representation – and the habit has never died.
These days, one thing unites every presidential candidate: a readiness to denounce the federal government in Washington and all its works. That the candidate in question might have made a long and comfortable career in that den of corruption and iniquity makes not a scrap of difference. Usually – as now – the sentiment works to the advantage of Republicans, but not always. Sometimes, the beneficiary can be a genuine outsider like the eccentric Texan businessman Ross Perot, who in 1992 came closer to winning the White House than any independent in 80 years. Sometimes it takes on the hyperbolic aspect of the tea-party crowd, and last summer's raucous town-hall protests against health reform. And on occasion it spills over into tragedy, into the raw hatred of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
No one is more aware of how distrust of government is part of America's collective political DNA than Mr Obama. Whether he can tame it is another matter.
via Center for American Progress
Census Shows Most Poor Adults Are Women, Particularly "Women on Their Own"
Elderly, unmarried women—many of whom are widows or divorced—are particularly susceptible to poverty, particularly as retirement funds dwindle in the recession.
By Liz Weiss | September 10, 2009
New data released today by the Census Bureau shows a statistically significant increase in the national poverty rate in 2008. Most adults (18 and over) in poverty are women; 59 percent of adults in poverty are women; and 13 percent of all adult women are in poverty. Three-quarters of these women are women on their own—widowed, divorced, separated, or never married—despite being less than half (47 percent) of the population of adult women. These unmarried women have appreciably higher poverty rates than married women—20.8 percent versus 6.2 percent. Yet unmarried women live in a variety of situations—they may be living with partners, they may be mothers, they may be elderly—and each group has unique circumstances and needs. Indeed, poverty rates vary greatly for women by family status, age, and race.
In 2008, 39.8 million people—13.2 percent of Americans—were in poverty, a statistically significant increase from 2007 (12.5 percent), and a marked increase since 2000 when poverty was at 11.3 percent—its lowest level in a generation. Unfortunately, we know that the poverty picture has worsened in 2009, and these new numbers reflect only the first part of the current economic downturn. Unemployment in August 2009 was at 9.7 percent nationwide and nearly 12 percent for unmarried women (seasonally unadjusted). What’s more, long-term unemployment has grown considerably and food stamp participation increased by more than 20 percent between June 2008 and June 2009.
Women are more likely even in better economic times to face poverty than men, and unmarried women have higher poverty rates than married women. Yet the marital disparity has worsened since early in the decade. The poverty rate of unmarried women was 13.4 percentage points higher than married women in 2000, but it was 14.6 percentage points higher in 2008. The risk of poverty for women of color is even greater, especially for those who are unmarried. Thirty percent of unmarried black women and 29.5 percent of unmarried Hispanic women—of any race—were poor in 2008, compared with 18.5 percent of unmarried white women.
And before I begin let me qualify my thoughts as I am a Cancerian and emotionally-driven person who cries when she's happy, cries when she's said and many times feels first and thinks second.
Don't make sensitivity a weapon.
I'm all for explaining to people that you may potentially be thin-skinned and making requests to consider your heart before entering into a potentially combustible dialogue. At all times we should take into consideration how our thoughts and expressions of them may make others feel. A defensive maneuver will almost always beget a defensive maneuver. It's the fundamental rule to conflict. You hit me, it hurts. I hit back, you hurt and the dance escalates until two people are saying or doing regrettable things. Rather than using your sensitivity as a license to kill, use it as a means to find more productive ways to speak with love. Rather than letting your sensitivity give you an unrealistic sense of entitlement and petulant expectation, try and commit to the notion that it always takes two parties to create a disagreeable relationship conflict. You are hurt...in some ways big or small, they are likely hurting, too.
Don't make sensitivity a wall to constructive criticism.
There comes a time in every adult's life when you have to suck it up and face tough talk. Especially when the tough talk potentially saves you from a choice, an action or measure that could have long-term or especially painful consequences. While I am sensitive, I expect and almost demand that the people I love, give it to me straight, particularly when I screw something up. Because I am human. I am going to do that. And yes, you can give straight talk without pulling out the clubs and knives. So keep in mind that sometimes when people speak sternly to you, it is more important to identify the value in their statement...especially when you know behind the annoyance that statement is coming from a place of love. It's nice to hear only about the wonderful things we do; but it's better to hear about the ways we can grow and elevate to keep amazing ourselves and others. Never use your 'sensitivity' as a means to avoid owning your stuff.
And you know how I feel about owning your stuff.
Crazy world we live in... via BBC News
Abas Hussein Abdirahman, 33, was killed in front of a crowd of some 300 people in the port town of Merka.
An official from the al-Shabab group said the woman would be killed after she has had her baby.
Islamist groups run much of southern Somalia, while the UN-backed government only control parts of the capital.
This is the third time Islamists have stoned a person to death for adultery in the past year.
Al-Shabab official Sheikh Suldan Aala Mohamed said Mr Abdirahman had confessed to adultery before an Islamic court...
The other day, I stopped in at a fast food joint to get something to eat. I gave my order to the person standing behind the cash register, who did not acknowledge the order in any way and made no move to enter it into the cash register. Instead, he was looking around me, silently trying to get the attention of someone out in the dining area. No customers were standing in line, so I figured it had to be someone already seated. The person behind the register moved down the counter, still gesturing to some unseen person, extending a hand, but did not call out to whomever it was. Nor did he say anything to me, such as "I'll be right with you."
Slightly put out, I waited as the person returned to the cash register. Again, I gave my order, and again, the person ignored me, still looking around me at some unknown person. Now completely pissed, I asked him, "Are you going to wait on me or are you going to talk to somebody else?"
Finally, the clueless clerk spoke. "I was just trying to give him his change!" and showed me three pennies. First of all, there was no "him" to be seen -- the ordering area had been empty of people the entire time I'd been inside the restaurant -- and secondly, you don't get that invisible person's attention by gesturing silently, however much you stare and wave your arms.
Thoroughly irritated by this time, I said, "Fuck it" and stalked out, getting my meal elsewhere, from a place where I was actually able to get someone to take my order.
