Little Bits

I am now ready for the winter. Just in time too, tomorrow the high is only supposed to be in the lower 90s. I picked up my rain coat and parka and it can proceed right on to winter. It could start, say Tuesday. I would be fine.

When I was getting my stuff from the tailors, the Tailors’ Maid she shoved a petition in my face and a pamphlet about yoga (hey, why did "papist" come up as a spell check option for "pamphlet"? why does Word even have "papist" in its word bank? why does Word care if a bigot spells it correctly?) about Fulan Gong .

I was like "Oh. Okay. You’ll give me my stuff if I sign your petition?" she did the petiton shoving in the manner of a person who has shoved a lot of petions. The petion she shoved at me is adressed to President Bush and it’s an appeal for him to do “something” about the treatment of Fulan Gong in Communist China. “Communism is bad” the girl told me “No freedom in Communism”. Well. Yeah, it is Communism after all, it's not historically big on the rights of the individual and does not claim a lot of tolerance for relgions. It is well documented that Shrub loves the religions - so I see where she was going with this. My question to her would be "Does Shrub feel that way about pan-Asian splinter groups?" Shrub is all about The Khristians. I don’t think Shrub cares a whole lot about how his enormous trade partner's abuse of religious people unless they are abusing Khristians and in which case, he would be concerned. He would be especially non-concerned about the treatment of non–Khristians that poisoned a huge trade partners subways. I also don’t think Shrub does yoga.

I hated to burst the girls bubble by pointing out that Mr. President really doesn’t care about the plight of his own people much less the plight of non-Khristian subway gassers in a huge trade partners country. I signed her petition anyway and accepted the pamphlet because I wanted my coats back.

After I left the tailors, I went to Poverty Barn and bought water and six pack of work gloves. The rescue mission down the street from me is having a drive for the hurricane relief and I need to contribute something. I just don’t have the capital right now to write a check or hand over my credit card. I want to, I would, but I can’t. The need isn’t going to stop being great before I can finally really donate some cash. The little I can donate now will help somebody somewhere if only in the short term. Every little bit helps and if everybody helps a little bit at a time, things will brighten for those people… Okay, in reality, things aren’t going to magically get better or even less awful in the short or long term. No one in the affected areas or the scattered refugees are going to wake up from this nightmare anytime soon. Its ugly and it’s going to leave scars, deep scars and for the rest of their lives the people of the gulf coast will count time as Before Katrina and After Katrina, but somebody somewhere will have some clean water and someone else won’t get splinters while they are clearing what is left of their house or clearing what is left of their neighbors house off where their house used to be.

This is interesting, to me, in a morbid, ghoulish way and those who know me know that I can be both morbid and ghoulish,This story says “Health fears as bodies lie in water” it links bodies in the water to health concerns, but here it says “Despite common belief, there is generally no health danger from corpses in the water”. Ew. I want to wake up from this.