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We have been moved since around May 5th, but usual craziness of moving, bla, bla, bla...

Here are some photos of the house that I saved off of the realtor's website. Of course we haven't even made our own photos yet... Well, Gabriel probably has, but maybe still not posted online.

[front and back pictures of a strangely shaped house with vertical wood siding.

the upstairs is like a loft, and is a lot smaller than the first storey.
the flat roof comes down to make the walls of the upstairs, so the walls up there are not vertical, but slant inwards.]

More news soon, I hope...

a million or three things have happened since last life-post

soon i will tell some of them properly. not like anyone reads this blog anyway...

• spring break trips to visit family in PennsylvaniA and then by train...
  
• to VermonT ... where we were eyewitnesses that Amanda Baggs is a real person (as if there had been any doubt)
• finally (sDq) getting our own house (!) ... will post photos as soon as i know it's real. that should be this week.

a nice idea

[picture of a lotus and the words "kind blog"]

Not sure if i could manage it (does that mean no posting, however obliquely, about people who've "done me wrong"? and no gut-instinct rants about how certain politicians are evil?)

On the other hand, as regards any dealings with people i care about, i like to think i try to do this kind (of) blogging.

PS: thanks to MOM-NOS for the idea.

"COMMUNICATION" for IF

[IlloFriday thing is at the bottom of the post. Thanks in advance for reading what is inbetween! (^_^)]

My post for the Illustration Friday topic "Communication", is drawn from this video:



In My Language

I am glad to be able to call Amanda Baggs a friend, because in the past approximately half-year I have learned a lot from her blog and also got to know her as a really cool person.

And now she has been on CNN and everything. I am not the only one finding this to be part of something good and useful...

Anyway. The point of the video, if I can try to explain it in my own words, is this: There are other kinds of communication than words in the majority language of the country that you are in. People without words, or who don't function best in words, are just as much people and deserve respect. People who communicate in ways that most people don't understand or value, are still capable of communicating (with others who know or learn the same system). And regardless of whether they get someone to communicate with them, they are still thinking and they are still HERE with the rest of the people. They are here, just being people, and interacting with the world, maybe in their own style that many people don't understand.

I have something tangential to add to this. I have known (for much longer than I have known I was some kind of autistic) that communication is a very tenuous thing: no matter what the neurological, cultural, male/female, etc. commonalities and/or divisions among people, communication is a nearly impossible thing and whenever it really happens it's a small miracle.

Anyway... Here is my picture. This is not sign-language, although Amanda has told me that a conversation can be carried on in this language (which is not just hers but is shared with some subset of autistic people) in what seemed to me to be a similar way to how one would carry on a conversation in ASL. I kind of envy this language, which she describes as simply interacting with the everything around her, because it has a wordless poetry to it. I wonder if I could learn it. Maybe one day I will find out.


[picture of a gently gesturing hand, with various things in the background: a turquoise mesh scarf, a purple tree, a fluttering flag, a fluttering manila colored paper, a bush, and sparkling lines all around to signify movement]

just enough winter + "SPROUT" for IF

[IlloFriday thing is at the bottom of the post. Thanks for looking! (^_^)]

As compared to Syracuse NY, with what seemed like 6 months of winter, last Thursday's 1 day of snow was just enough.[2 photos of outside of a house with snow covering the cars and the yard]

We will have to make up missed classes on the day that we had planned to go early to SC Tech Colleges conference at Myrtle Beach, but... oh well. We will just get there late, I guess.

In honor of the various plants that didn't even stop growing under the snow, here is my illofriday post for this week's topic SPROUT:

[picture of a green curly plant with a yellow closed bud coming out through purple earth and silver snow against turquoise sky.]

This is an ATC... my second ever 'proper' one. I am still experimenting with "painting" with sharpie markers. The snow parts are silver-metallic marker, but it just looks grey like old snow in this scan. If you click for the large view, though, you can kind of see the metallic.

Please also check my last-week's IF submission. I am not sure anyone saw it, because I had an error in submitting. Thanks!

"Red" for IF

"Red" for illustration friday (best copy)
Originally uploaded by Natalia & Gabriel.

[drawing of a thinnish dark-haired man in vaguely european-academic-looking clothes, standing in a martyr pose with arms spread out and face looking upwards, but also with his legs in a rebellious -almost dancing- gesture. people around him are shouting "rojo" at him. one of the "rojo" shouts has red ink dripping from it like blood.]

This is a person during or maybe even just before the Spanish Civil war. He is maybe an intellectual, a professor or a poet or a free-thinker or something like that, because that is what could get you called "red".

I was thinking of the teacher character (don Gregorio) in La Lengua de las Mariposas (Butterfly) and Federico García Lorca... and my favorite Spanish poetry professor Dr. Jaime Ferrán who fled Franco's Spain in self-imposed exile.

This guy in the picture is about to be cornered by the crowd and authorities and taken away to be imprisoned, tortured, or maybe even to be executed... so he is posed in a martyr stance, but he has some kind of satisfaction and even freedom in his face and in his pose, because he was not giving in to the cultural and political pressures.

(added red ink to the original sketch: to make it more sinister, to remember that many did die for their non-conformism.)

Obviously this is not the first or the last time that this sort of thing has happened. The labels might change...
"If you do not know where you have been, you cannot know where you are going ... can you?"


(original sketch done with ballpoint pen in my office on printerpaper.)

strange days and strange weather

rain & rainbow
Originally uploaded by Natalia & Gabriel.

many things have been happening to practically everyone; many anxieties and crises inside and outside and all around. am not going to go into details, cos that's for other people's blogs, or not.

NOT ready to go back to Tech. Not. At. All. could have used a couple of months, not a couple of weeks. am doing the usual pre-semester freak-out, after which comes the calm... but not until the first day of classes is over.

was saying in SL that i will have to Do Something, manufacture somehow the patience i didn't have time to build back up, because i just HAVE TO. that's all there is to it.

nazi christmas card & rocky balboa

Ok that oughta get people's attention.
So I was reading **here**, on a serendipitous tangent from a googlesearch... Seems to be part of a site to encourage students' critical thinking about propaganda, specifically Nazi ones. And I found this very 'pretty' greeting that was part of a 'Christmas' booklet:
I will post their translation, as it's surely more accurate than I could attempt:

"This page has a quotation from Adolf Hitler, which hardly seems consistent with the standard Christmas story:

All nature is a gigantic struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.

—Adolf Hitler"

And the translator person has a point with that comment. Unless you consider (outside of temporary appearances) God as the ultimate "Strong" and all forces of evil as "Weak" in comparison. But somehow I don't think that's what Hitler was going for with that quote.

So I was thinking... I donno... about the war and stuff. I mean this one, now. And Saddam being executed the other day... OK he was really evil. He did stuff to his own people that was at least a serious imitation of the sorts of things Hitler and Stalin did. So yeah, he needed to be gone. But... all the rest of it, I don't know. It still, at gut-level, seems just as wrong as it did on Sept. 12, 2001 or whenever it was that we knew this was going to start. Well, actually, knowing now how 'well' it has worked, no... It seems even more wrong. And I'm not going to say it's ALL about oil. Although things are always more complicated than people let on; I think that's a given in politics. I'm just saying my gut feeling here, is the same as it has always been.

When I think about the Nazis, though, and about the Jews, and how almost nobody understood/believed what was happening in the Camps until after... Would I have been a pacifist in WWII? Would that have been wrong? I'm not exactly a pacifist, though. I think some wars are necessary. But I have no conclusive theory of how to tell which ones. So does that mean I shouldn't even talk about this stuff? Oh well, not for nothing does this blog have a readership of like 3 people.

And the other thing is... the strong and the weak. We are supposed to protect the "weak" whether that means people physically or mentally "damaged" (and who isn't or won't be, if you look deep enough or wait long enough?!) or people with stricter compunctions against certain things (as in the "brother with the weaker conscience" that we are instructed not to try to make him do stuff he believes is wrong). God is not only Strong compared to all that is evil, He is also Strong compared to all of us, and our strength is supposed to be from Him, not from our own abilities. Maybe this is part of the problem about what my friends that are disability activists call "able-ism". I didn't get where I am (for example, having a decent job) because of my abilities, I got where I am by Providence (though abilities are part of Providence). A person could be just as good or better at their field and get nowhere, if that was the "lot they were given" for lack of a better phrase at the moment. And just as the trials of the Israelites often happened through the sins of their neighbors, someone's life may be made more difficult by the intolerance of others, and they may not get to where they wanted to, or it may take a lot more effort. This may be an opportunity for them to learn something, maybe an opportunity for them to fight against injustice. The people acting with injustice against them are still wrong. And if a person has strength, it's not because they are better than another person. I mean, yeah, we are supposed to be brave and stuff. But what reaction takes how much strength is so relative to the person and even the moment.

OK, maybe I am also thinking of the movie we saw the other day. Gabriel has been strange, kinda shutdown, for some days (finally coming out of it, lately) and I asked would he like to go to a movie and which one, and he picked ROCKY BALBOA. [Groans from this woman, who thought, Oh no a boxing movie full of blood, sweat, lost braincells and broken noses. Anything but this.] But there was nothing else that looked promising, so we went.
Really. Nice. Movie. Appropriately titled with the guy's name, this is a not-terribly-deep but very nice movie, about Rocky the person, a decent sort of socially inappropriate (though charming) gentleman to women, teenagers of various races, poor people and (possibly illegal) immigrants... This is practically a chick-flick until the old boxer (with his oddly-assorted new entourage) starts training for the actual fight, and by then you are already totally attached to the characters and you don't mind all the ugh ugh grunt grunt macho stuff.

Anyway. The quote I remember is, like I said about the whole movie, not terribly deep, but it's been turning itself over in my head all this time. At some point, Rocky is talking to his son (maybe some kind of junior accountant, maybe just a bit geeky, so... on the surface the opposite of him) about life. And he says this:
"It doesn't matter how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward."

Which on the surface is a really basic (and catchy) kind of underdog pep-talk, a kind of rallying-cry for the one who isn't expected to win. And it sounds like it would be a great slogan for the disability rights people, too, right? And you want to think, YEAH! I'm gonna try that. I'm gonna be strong against whatever gets thrown at me.

Except, wait. Because I also have **this song** flopping around in my head. And I know in my gut that this is also true. That Strength is not always --to borrow a word I have learned in a similar context lately-- volitional. And you can think of any struggle. Were the victims of any genocide who "let themselves be killed" any less brave than those who "tried to fight back"? Not Necessarily. Does Might make Right? Obviously, No. Are the 'weak' (however you define that) less deserving of help? It's precisely them (us) that need help. And does the strength that God gives people for getting through stuff always look like strength? Maybe Not.

So, again, quotes that sound like they make perfect sense at first, are producing more questions than answers...

[edited for clarity... I hope.]

"the dove is never free"

Another picture not mine. Check this guy's illustrations... amazing.

Rancho y Papagayo

"the holy dove, she will be caught again;
bought, and sold, and bought again;
the dove is never free..."
-- Leonard Cohen

a card for everyone

I don't know who made this picture that is on this card. I also don't know who made the quote. But it's one of my favorite cards that I have received, ever. And it came from one of my mother's oldest dear friends, for my birthday. But I would like to recycle it as a Happy Next Year card, and put it here for all my online friends and the few face-to-face friends that know my blog. And I would like to say:
In 2007, please know that God is in control... because if the past years are anything to go by, we will need to remember this.