Define modesty

photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike


Now, I'm not what they call a Bible-believing Christian, even though I do believe in God and the Holy Spirit, but I think that Richard here has a good point.

1 Peter 3:3-4 Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair, the wearing of gold, or the putting on of clothing— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

The inspired words of scripture here use such techniques to help keep us on track. Peter says, "Do not let your adorning be external." He then ensures the reader's understanding by giving some examples: "the braiding of hair, the wearing of gold, or the putting on of clothing." He then continues the clarification with an opposite parallel: "but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit." Quite clearly this passage is not encouraging women to be careful that they cover themselves appropriately with clothing. It is in fact saying that this should not be their primary focus.

You can read the rest here.

Oh, and going on about your clothing is not the only thing. I think it can also apply to focusing on how little you eat, how much you work out, how sick you and/or your children are and what you're doing to your house. As well as a number of other things I'm sure a lot of people could list.

You go to work in a soup kitchen with your kids. Do you come home and blog about how you and your daughters worked in a soup kitchen in a skirt instead of jeans, and how awful all those women looked in pants? Blog about how you only ate 4 grams of carbs and walked 2.86 miles to get there and back, burning some trace amount of calories? About how you were so upset because someone left a jar of peanut butter in there where your sensitive son may have sniffed it? About how you want that kind of a professional quality stove in your kitchen?

Or do you say you worked in a soup kitchen today?

Or do you work in the kitchen, and then come home and talk about finding ways to help end poverty?

Hey, I'm as guily as the next person. But he does have a good point.

More on Stacy McDonald and the rest of the Patriarchal group at another time

How to knit socks

Knitting class, Henry Street Settlement, NYC, by Lewis W. Hine, 1910 (LOC). Found through Creative Commons

I was going to make a very snarky post about why you never see Patriarchal women discussing knitting on their blogs. Granted you see them sewing clothing all the time, but it's usually very modest dresses in very feminine prints and styles. Vision Forum doesn't even have a beginners knitting kit in their catalog, although they do have some beginner embroidery kits, doll dress patterns, and a beginner quilt kit is a perennial favorite. But never knitting. You would think this would be the perfect way to relax, express themselves, and do something quintessentially American Female. But no, you never see it.

I thought it was odd. Maybe knitting was too hip for them. Maybe the Yarn Harlot was too much a feminist. Maybe Ann and Kay were a little too out there. And Lord knows, Knitty even did an issues about sex.

Well I went to LAF, just to double check, since she does have all the best links, and I have to take back the words I had yet to even write. Jennie does have a post there on knitting. Specifically the best tutorial on sock knitting I've ever seen. I'd forgotten I'd even seen it.

Well, color me mistaken.

But I can see why VF wouldn't carry a knitting kit. Who knows where learning to knit might lead.

Please note, that last link is NOT safe for children or work.

Too delicate for prime time

The Lily Cardigan from Marie Grace

Now, I would love to make something this kind of delicate for myself. This kind of, dainty, femme, tiny. I would do it in a wood rose, or perhaps a misty lavender, or a steel blue. The husband would suggest it in a rust or burgundy or perhaps a midnight blue. We might settle on a mahogany or a walnut.

Except there is no way that shape would ever look good on me. I'm not the dainty and delicate type. Even if I lost all the lumps and bumps and even if he stretched me so I could bend like a pretzel, I'd still have the body of a sturdy Sicilian peasant, not the delicate English lady of my dreams.

Sigh.

At least the tea cozy fits.

What's up with the bookshelf.

It's clickable, takes you straight to Amazon. I was going to code it myself, just for that since I do like to share books with people, but I'm lazy.

Now if I could find a widget for the music, I'd be good.

UPDATE: And then I took another look at it and discovered a list view. Better, I think, less hokey.

The Movie Meme answers

Since no one ever put up an answer to the movie meme, I figure I might as well tell you....

1) Speaker 1: It could be worse.
[creature growls]
Speaker 2: It's worse.

- Star Wars: A New Hope

2) We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

- Jaws

3) There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours.

- The Princess Bride

4) Amazing how you can do without the essentials of life, so long as you have the luxuries.

- Pitch Black

5) But the worst mistake you made...empty gun rack.

- Chronicles of Riddick

6) Personally, I'd give us one chance in three. More tea anyone?

- The Hunt For Red October

7) By the way... you have to *ask* for absolution to be forgiven... asshole.

- Constantine

8) He still digs humanity, but it bothers Him to see the shit that gets carried out in His name - wars, bigotry, televangelism.

- Dogma

9) I'm never gonna get paid.

- Stargate

10) It's coffee time! Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee! Cappuccino, java, YES!

- Dante's Peak

11) Now I want yous all to cheer like Protestants!

- The Quiet Man

12) Everybody in this family needs to just calm down and eat some fruit or something.

- Signs

13) Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?

- Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

14) Dude, you have a bazooka. Stop thinking Prague Police and start thinking Playstation. Blow shit up!

- xXx

15) Laugh it up, fuzzball.

- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Oro o plomo

Uncle Gonzo told me a story once. It was about his father, and the days he rode with...oh hell, I don't remember now. The Mexican army perhaps, after Pancho Villa maybe. Not the point. He was with some military or paramilitary unit in Latin America. He was a young officer.

Anyway, one day his Captain sent him to a nearby village with a bag of gold to buy food for the men. He rode into town, up to the tavern, put his gold on the counter, said he wanted to buy food. They told him they didn't have any. So he rode back and told his Captain they didn't have any. The Captain asked if he was really that stupid. He pardoned himself, rode back to the tavern, put his bag of gold and his gun on the counter, and bought food for the men.

Moral of the story: You can get sh*t done if you have gold or lead. Oro o plomo.

And why in Karnac does this matter now?

Anyone else notice that gold went over $1000 today? That it went up over $300 in the past six months? That the US saved Bear Sterns, one of the largest global investment banks, securities trading and brokerage firms in the world, by the skin of JP Morgan's teeth this morning? That the whole funny money house of cards is slowly sifting past out ears?

My husband was shocked, shocked, when I explained to him a few years back that you can no longer go into a bank and trade your money for silver. Used to be that way, they still bring it up in the schools, but they never tell you that Nixon got us off that standard. (Who came up with that brilliant idea is fodder for another post). These days you can't even go into a bank and trade your electrons for cash. Mother laughs on a regular basis, yes she works in a very small bank branch now, but her entire bank has less than a third of what she kept in *her own till* in the 1980's. And she was one of 12.

It's nuts I tell you.

So in case the sh*t does start to roll downhill (and you were wondering how the picture at the top ties in) how do you protect yourself? I thought about the power being shut off, but we're in hydroelectric land, we don't need fuel from other countries to keep us going. It's the Pacific Northwest, our water levels are good. Food is kind of iffy, I doubt we grow enough around here to feed the valley, but the herd will thin, I hate to say, and we can stock up. Medical is going to be harder, meds have to come aways, and we have a high percentage of well-medicated elderly. I predict that will be a rough time there, that thinning. The husband and I are on one med each, and we can live without it if we have to. Mother, and Dad and my step-mom, *sigh*.

Imports? Forget it. Starting with oil, and gas. And what happens when the great unwashed can't work or drive or buy plastic crap anymore?

One of the best thought exercises I ever saw on the idea of what happens if was the World Without Oil project. Unfortunately I came across it too late to join in. I think a lot of it would apply to a world without greenbacks as well.

Just something I'm thinking about this morning is all.

Tipping my head in a currious way

Picture by Francesca Woodman

So I found this today - Stuff White People Like - a whole blog that, from the looks of it, is dedicated to telling some group (Non white people? Recent immigrants? ) about, well, what's popular with "white people", so they know how to blend.

On the one hand, I'm almost sure this is intended as a joke. It might be an angry rant, it might be meant to be irony, it might be meant as racism, or reverse racism, but I'm going for joke.

Full disclosure - I'm white. And I'm not laughing.

The funny thing is, to me at least that it's not really talking about white people. Not as a cohesive, stereotypical whole like you would expect from real racists. Example, from # 84 T-shirts "It is also imperative to understand that faux vintage shirts (”Getting Lucky in Kentucky”) are completely unacceptable. They are beloved by the wrong kind of white people, and must be avoided at all costs." So there are the right kind of white people, the kind you use this intel to suck up to, and the wrong kind of white people. Now what are we doing when we divide a group, any group, into the right kind and the wrong kind? We are classing people. Yep, this blog is about class. It's saying "white people", but what is really meaning is "upper middle/upper class people", regardless of color. Really. Go look at the list, if you haven't yet, and come back. It's all about class, not color.

Funny thing. In this country, you can talk about race. But heaven help you if you talk about class.

Full disclosure - I'm at least upper middle class, if not upper class. And I'm still not laughing.

How do I know? I've been studying this for a while now, call it a hobby. Not that there is all that much written about it, discussing class is one of the last great taboos in the US. Paul Fusell, in his book Class, which was also meant to be humorous but has a grain of truth, I think divided up the classes best. The distinguishing mark of the lower classes is anger, they are not getting ahead, their lives are hard, and they are angry at "the man" for it. The mark of the middle classes is fear, fear that they are going to slip into a lower class, fear that their coworkers and neighbors are going to think they don't belong, fear of standing out in any way. And the mark of the upper classes is ease. Not angry or afraid, they tend to march to their own drummer, or snuggle happily in to the cohesive order of their class without a worry or thought.

This is how I finally figured it out. It wasn't my years in prep school, or my college degree, or any of the rest of it. I do my own thing, and don't give a sh*t what anyone thinks. That's the distinguishing mark of being upper class. If you're angry because you feel you've been put down all your life, you're not it. If you're worried about what your boss or spouse or children or neighbors or friends will think, you're not it. If you're neither, you're more likely to take risks, accept failures, and finally achieve success. That's what does it, right there.

I look at this blog and I see someone either very angry, or very afraid poking fun at members of the upper and upper middle classes, from the sound of it because they think we feel superior. Because we enjoy our lives, everything from the organic food to the college degrees, to the trips around the globe, to being outdoors, and so on. We're happy and unafraid, and you're not.

No, we don't feel superior to you. On a day to day basis, we don't think of you at all.

I'm going to go knit, and drink tea, and listen to NPR downloads on my iPod now. And odds are, at some point, I'll be enjoying myself so much, I'll be laughing.

(h/t to Doc for pointing out the blog.)

PS: Don't be surprised if I update this when I think it out more clearly.

I gave up on the dragon

I gave up on the dragon. I just never got enough clicks for it to hatch. Oh well. Someone else will take it and hatch it. In the mean time I'll go play auntie to Vox Gygax over at Kate's. I think she has a girl, which means breeding, which means knitting baby things.

Now here is a question for you. Dragons eat sheep, which means a wool baby blankie isn't liable to last, but acrylic will melt as soon as she gets her fire breath in. Maybe bamboo....

Edit: Maybe not.

RIP Vox Gygax

On California and homeschooling

My take on the whole California Homeschooling mess.

I didn’t realize it was such a little known fact, but homeschooling has ALWAYS been illegal in California. That’s right folks, if you homeschool your children in the golden state you are in fact breaking the law. Mostly. Kind of.

Unless you invoked the loophole.

Let me explain. In one of my favorite books “Cryptonomicon” , a bunch of geeks have to go out and defend their favorite server farm (don’t ask) from the evil head of the FBI (still, don’t ask). In order to do this they used a loophole in California law. Like most states California says that if you want to carry a concealed weapon, a handgun, you have to have a license, even if it’s only partially, temporarily concealed, such as sitting on the seat of your car and you sweater lands on it. But it is perfectly legal to carry openly. So the geeks brought shotguns and hunting rifles instead.

They invoked the loophole.

It is illegal in California to teach your children at home without a teaching credential. It is legal to teach at a private school without a teaching credential. However, it is ridiculously easy to set up a private school in California. So you set your home up as a private school and hire yourself as a teacher. Technically you’re not homeschooling. And technically you’re legal because you’re not concealing the gun.

Make sense? Good.

The problem comes about when you call attention to yourself. No one is going to care if you’re walking from the car to the range/gunsmith/friend’s house. And no one is going to care if you’re raising healthy, well cared for/well educated children. However, they are going to notice if you’re standing in the street, waving that rifle at people. And they are going to notice if your children are battered, hungry, not healthy, being molested, and can’t read or add or subtract.

If you call attention to yourself, they will push you out of the loophole. If enough people call attention to themselves, they will close the loophole.

I have noticed that a lot of the Fundamentalist/Dominionist/Patriarchal types are calling attention to themselves.

They beat their kids (and yes, I believe most forms of spanking are beating. So does a majority of the state. You have to deal with this opinion, you live with us. This goes triple if you use plumbing line.)

They don’t feed their kids and have substandard housing. (For every quiverful family with 6…8…10..12 kids who is doing well there are at least 4 who are living below the poverty line or who have no parenting skills or who are too overwhelmed to keep up the house.)

They don’t get medical care for their children. (I give you Candy as an example, who let her baby’s 104 deg fever work itself out and treated her elder son’s conjunctivitis by wiping his eyes with fermented mushroom and bacteria juice.)

They teach their children nothing about sex, and they teach them never to stand up to an older male. (If you can’t see how that would lead to victimization, then you have not been paying attention.)

Their children don’t learn. Even if their children do learn to read and write and spell and basic math, sorry, that’s not enough. The state has a right to expect its citizens to be trained well enough to function, to drive and vote and get a job and understand a doctor’s orders. That means science folks, not just Genesis. It means real US history, starting with St. Augustine being the oldest city in the United States NOT Jamestown. It means you can’t stop educating girls at 13 because they “are just going to be mothers, anything more is a waste of time and resources”.

It’s a loophole, people. If you’re going to invoke it, don’t call attention to yourself, do the right thing by your kids.

And as a final note, for those of you who say “it is my Constitutional, God-given right to homeschool”, I give you

The Constitution of the United States of America

And

The Christian Bible

Show me where either says anything about homeschooling.

In which we have cozy tea

Yes, it's a tea cozy fit for a hobbit. I do like the way it came out.

Cleaning things up around here

It's a little less irritating, putting an opening picture in each post, then having that odd right angle bend. You just have to use a large enough one, or so I'm finding.

What is it about this that annoys me so?

Is it the way these women, who look to be maybe 25-35, meaning settling into their careers, taking responsibility for raising families, or both, look to be about 12, the way they are sitting on the floor in goofy t-shirt, their hair in pigtails or bobby pins?

Is it that made up word, "papercrafting", which is trying oh-so-hard to give some kind of legitimacy to playing with markers and stickers and glue?

Is it that this new "craft tradition" (from the inside of the flyer) consists of taking pre-coordinated stickers and putting them on pre-coordinated papers, sticking a picture in the middle, maybe writing a sentence or two about it, and then saying you have created art?

Is it that society has over the past 20-40 years taken every true skill and art unique to women, knitting, sewing, cooking, and so on, and degraded them to the point where they are considered a waste of time, not worthy of the modern, liberated woman? Then when women expressed their longing for a creative outlet, they were given kindergarten craft time?

Is it that back in the horrifying olden days playing music, sketching, painting with watercolors, lace knitting, fine embroidery, cooking both plain and fancy, sewing elaborate dresses ENTIRELY BY HAND, keeping a garden, making soap and candles, preserving food as well as running a small business (yes, those farms were small businesses too, just like they would be today) knowing animal husbandry,bookkeeping, and raising AND homeschooling 2-10 children was considered AVERAGE for a woman? While today we're impressed with stickers on construction paper?

Or is it that women are resurrecting those old crafts, women bloggers and artists and authors are promoting the hell out of them, and women owned businesses are making a small fortune selling both the tools and results of them, while the major chains are devoting more and more floor space to toys for the complacent children the expect women to be?

Kee-riste, I hate being belittled.

/rant

(And before anyone points out that women work today, I used to work too. I spent 8 years teaching, 6 hours a day actually with students, 30 minutes to an hour a day prepping or repairing things, and 2 hours minimum goofing off, simply because I had to be there to collect a check. In addition to 2 hours of commute time a day. Yes, I did resent the waste of my time and energy with those 4 hours a day. When I was a bookkeeper before I was teaching, it was closer to 6 hours a day. And all I did when I was working was teach, or crunch numbers. If you work, ask yourself honestly, how much time a day do you really *need* to do your job? How many skills do you really use? Think about it.)

She did it.

Pointing to Kate. She inspired me to geek.