Sara Cohen Goodman 1916-2008

The epic of Gilgamesh is the story of one man’s quest for immortality after the death of his best friend, only to find that it is in his legacy he leaves behind that will grant him his wish. My grandmother would always joke about how she was the follower of all her sisters, but to me she was an example. How she lived her life and ultimately how she died should be an example for everyone. She will live on in my heart forever.
My fondest memories of her as I grew up are nothing spectacular, but she always seemed to make the ordinary memorable. Lunchtime meals at her basement apartment on Carlton stand out in my mind. The food she served may have been the same as what I had a home, but it always smelled better, tasted as if I was trying it for the first time, and seemed never-ending.
As I grew up, I realized that she was a wellspring of fascinating stories. I remember the time she told me of how she learnt how to swim; her sister Dorothy pushed her into a lake, which as she said, forced her to learn quickly.
There was also the time she told me about what happened to her when she lived on Cumberland. Where they lived, there was a long hallway with the bathroom at the end. The front door was never locked as Ava, David, and my mom were always coming in and out. She was in the bathroom, sitting on the throne doing what she had to do, when she heard someone in the house and yelled, “Who is it?” A man walked up to the bathroom and opened the door. She yelled, and he said, “I thought you were so-and-so.” When she got up, she found her wallet on the bureau, the money gone.
This past year had been a tumultuous one for my grandmother. I feel fortunate that I was able to be with her during that trying time. It was besheret that I could be there to take care of her and spend the precious time with her. One day I brought over a box full of family pictures and had her tell me the names of everyone in them. She reminisced as we went through the lot of them. A picture of her and my grandfather at Bear Mountain, circa 1947, had her exclaim: “Oh look how dark I was! I was always the darkest!” She would also express her sentiment about things that she could no longer control with a firm and confident “to hell with it!”, her favorite expression she assured me.
She was an example to me. She lived comfortably within her means, was a bargain hunter – although I am told no one could beat her sister Belle at flea market bargain hunting – and was always considerate and sweet. If she had one fault, it was that she only saw the good in other people, no matter what. Everyone who met her would inevitably comment how sweet she was. No one disliked her, and I do not know how anyone could.
I feel fortunate to have been her only grandchild, and to have been able to receive the love and affection she wholeheartedly gave me. The last thing I told her 2 hours before she died was that I loved her.

AAR! It's Talk Like a Pirate Day!

My pirate name is:

Iron Ethel Rackham

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.

"Nara" by E.S. Posthumus

If you haven't already heard it, you soon will, and if you have, you will soon meet someone who will say "have you heard this amazing song?" and you can say, "yes, I have, and I have listened to it so many times that I am almost sick of it!" It has appeared in all the wrong places - movie trailers, t.v. show themes - but never at the appropriate time, when the mood is best, the lighting just right.

Call Me "Farmer Steph"

I just thought you should all know, this is how I score.

Modern, Cool Nerd 60 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 30% Dork

Face full of fuzzball

Recently, I saw a picture of a primate - not sure which kind - holding a kitten, and something came over me. It reminded me of a question posited by my college psychology professor: we had been watching a video of apes interacting. At one point, and infant ape was acting silly which caused the class to giggle. After we finished watching the video, our professor asked us what was so funny to which one person replied something on the lines of "it looked like something a kid would do".

That is when my prof asked us: "is it funny because we see human actions in the ape infant, or do we see ape actions in ourselves?"

When I saw the picture of the primate, holding on to the kitten for comfort as I usually do with my kittens, I felt a connection to all other primates as I had never before.

The picture was on my mind for some time after, and it may stay with me for a while to come.

Breathe In and Out.

A friend of mine posted a question on one of the forums I go to, asking what are some of people's favorite smells. It got me thinking, so I posted these:

New Macs (yes, I'm a she-geek).
My "Lilly of the Valley" body talc.
Books: old or new but only when not cigarette smoke infested.
Country air.
My cats (they have natural deodorants in their saliva, and there is nothing better than putting my face on their soft fur and inhaling!).

There are of course others, but these are what I first thought of.

Open Book

I began my love/hate relationship with writing at the tender age of nine. My whole life I have had a strong imagination, which would have me spend hours in solitude, dreaming of far away places, celebrities, and myself as their leader. I would have these intense and powerful dream sequences with amazing story lines, characters, and twist endings. It occurred to me one day that I should sell these ideas to big time Hollywood directors and have them made into movies. You know, just give them the idea and run with it. All this from a seven year old!

As I said, at the age of nine, I wrote the worst story of my life. I had a school assignment to write a seven page story. I don't remember any other details of the project, however I found myself writing and writing until I had over 18 pages. It was the beginnings of a harrowing tale of child abuse - from someone who had never experienced it nor seen it. The protagonist of my novella is able to divorce his greedy self-centered parents only to be adopted into and even more horrible family where abuse and neglect was ten-fold worse than he had experienced before! Oh the tag-lines, the movie offers, the millions in cash that I would be given on a silver plate for writing the most amazing story ever told! I could taste the fame!

Um, no. My teacher told me to slim it down and stop writing the story. I had to find an ending and fast! Well there goes my story line. Wait! I don't actually have one, I thought. How am I going to end this nobel prize winning work of literature?
Well basically the protagonist ends up going back to his birth parents who promise not to hurt him anymore and insists that they have reformed. Great Hollywood story, right?

As it turns out, the best part of my story was the cover. I had found in a magazine a collage of people's faces that I used as my cover art, with the title, "Why Me" emblazoned on it. Profound, but not all that interesting to be honest. So did I learn something from this experience? Yes: That experience taught me to have a plot in mind before you even start to write. Did I keep that new adage in mind the next time I wrote? Yes, but over the years I have come to learn something even more important. It is a good thing to have a plot and especially and ending in mind, however a story is a being, it may change over time. Plots evolve. They don't have to stay the same as you first imagined, but that makes them only better.

I'm Not the Only One (1/8/05)

All eyes stare at me as I place my Styrofoam coffee cup on the ground next to my chair. I clear my throat and begin: “I, Stephanie, am a Mac addict.”

Rather than elicit a gasp or stare from this comment, all I get is “yeah, so?”

“So? What do you mean so? I’m a minority, I’m special, I think different! I am different!”

“Not anymore you’re not,” the glazed eye, half stoned member of my small confession group answers. This floors me.

I stamp my foot in desperation, which sends the coffee cup falling however since it is empty; it gains the same amount of attention my statement received. Yet it hits me. I am no longer a minority. What happened?

I’ll tell you what happened. The third generation iPod happened. Why the third one you ask? Let me explain:

I have been a Mac user basically all my life. Blame it on brainwashing from my dad, sure, but I’m a diehard. I’m 20 years old and on my fourth computer. I have bought all of them myself save this last one, my precious Aluminum Powerbook that my parents helped me with a last financial boost. I am also on my second iPod, a gift from that same father, because my second generation, 20-gigabyte music marvel, had no more room.

Now, unlike my fictional confessional group, which I conceived solely for dramatic purposes, I do not proclaim my affiliation very openly. Sure my friends know, and I do carry my precious iPod around with me, however even there you would have to be a diehard to recognize it. I have forgone those blaringly visible white earbuds for far better black inner ear Sony ones. Yet there is my faithful little remote clipped to my bag, getting no notice whatsoever, even with the apple logo emblazoned upon it. Let the other five people on the bus with iPods get ripped off. I used to wear the earbuds, before the iPod was popular but all that got me was the seemingly ignorant question: “is that a computer in your bag?” in reference to the remote. Well, in some cases, yes, it is, but no. Not in the way you think.

So what happened, you ask? Yes, yes. I’m getting there. For some reason other than the obvious, the world finally took notice of an Apple product. This time it was the third incarnation of the iPod. I already had one so I knew what the whole fuss was about but it seemed so amazing to people who had finally opened their eyes to it. Now, anyone who had one is cool, but not I. Seemingly, my iPod is just not cool enough. It’s big with sharp corners, and buttons that – gasp! – do no light up. How dare I own such a contraption?

Now, with my new fancy fourth generation iPod that can only be eclipsed by the iPod photo (though you would not know it if they are both off) and the U2 iPod, I am one in a crown of too many, in my opinion. No longer elite, my connection to my small community of loyal diehards who have been with me in this boat since before “switchers” ever made the scene seems to be harder to grasp. I can no longer spot my fellow addicts, and came to this conclusion when I commented on the coolness of a fellow students’ iPod. Rather than receiving a stout “oh man, I love this thing, isn’t Steve just a god among men?” I received an almost nonchalant shrug. Before, only Mac users could use them, now anyone can. It was the Christmas present; everyone was either getting them or giving them.

What am I to do? I do see many ‘books in school, however I am uncertain as to their owner’s allegiance. Have they too been a result of the so-called halo effect? Sure I could also bring my computer to school, but what for? I need it for trips and at home, not in school. Besides being less conspicuous, my class notes do not require energy, nor will they incite people to steal it. You want it? Sure, take it; just bring it back when you’re done photocopying it.

Let me also stress to you the fact that although I am a gadget girl, there are still aspects of that collection that simply do what they are supposed to do; my camera, though digital, is a simple one. Yes, I would love one with new features however I have been able to make do with what I have and it seems that people like my photography. Similarly, my cell phone is just a cell phone. I don’t want it to have a camera on it and I personally find camera phones moronic and in most cases useless. The picture quality is lacking and they have been used for more bad than good. Finally, my iPod just plays music. It has no color but I honestly don’t need that, and I don’t look at it enough to need that.

So where does this leave me? I have never been one to openly show which side I’m on, in almost every aspect of my life. I surprise people when they find out what religion I am from, and that actually brings me gratification. My musical taste is so wide that I have on many occasions been met with the response: “you listen to that?” I’m fine with being somewhat of an enigma, so that will not change any time soon. I have no obvious affiliation and therefore people seem to open up to me easier. I suppose my problem is not being able to identify my own anymore, but maybe that is the whole point.

My story will end here, so as not to drag on too long, nor to add any more historical context because I believe that my feelings about this issue will last. I am very happy for Apple, they are getting the recognition they deserve. My fear is that this will change a fundament aspect of them. They will no longer be the underdogs.

Maybe I should look into other, more obscure, Unix environments. Hm.

Nah.

I sit back down in my seat, straighten the coffee cup, and resume my quiet, observant stance on the computer industry.

Any color (colour?) you like. (6/3/04)

I recently picked up Lynn Truss' newest book, Eats, shoots and leaves, a wickedly funny satire about the horrors, misuses, and misconceptions about punctuation, thinking it would make me feel good about my sometimes anal attitude towards the proper use of the English language. Yet scarcely fifty pages in, it has me feeling embarrassed at my lack of thorough knowledge of the subject. For years I would be the one who would cringe every time a friend would proclaim happily "I did so good on my last exam!" and icily correct them, "you did well!" In this I would find supreme satisfaction. That is not to say that I am completely aloof and snooty about proper use of punctuation, in fact I edit anything I can get my hands on. I yearn to teach people how to use my mother tongue to its fullest. But now I have doubts as to whether I wrote any of the above statement correctly. (Should I or shouldn't I have used but at the beginning of the previous sentence?)

My sojourn into the vast world of proper and often self-centered use of English began at a relatively young age when I read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Don't get me wrong, I was one of the worst spellers in elementary school. Try as I might, I could not get my head around words like "writing" ("you're a writer and you can't spell writing?" I was once asked), which to many people seems easy enough - not to me. The Phantom Tollbooth offered new and humorous ways to look at words and their relationship to one another. If you have yet to read this book, do so! It is never too late nor are you too old. I digress.

Somehow I got over my spelling stumbling block with flying colors - colours? - and am often asked how to spell seemingly hard words. Next came punctuation. I can say with no disrespect to any of my wonderful and not so wonderful English teachers over the years that I am self-taught in that area. So I thought. I had mastered the Oxford comma ("apples, oranges, and bananas") years before my grade ten class was given a full week devoted to the pesky little bugger. Then came college.

My psychology - yes, psychology - teacher was a man who was a stickler when it comes to misusage of "itses". He handed back my paper on Erik Erikson (I can proudly say I did well on that one!) and I was blinded by all the red marks scattered over my writing. The content was great, but I never deviated between "it's" and "its". How could I have missed something like that. Something that may be the simplest and clearest punctuation rule in the English language. "It's" means either "it is" or "it has". If not, the proper word to use is "its". Simple really.

I'm glad I mastered that before cracking open Mrs. Truss' book, or I may have died of mortification. Her view of people who cannot understand the difference between the two and plainly refuse to try and eventually end up using only one regardless should be drawn a quartered, in not so many words. No pun intended.

I know now that my complete grasp of English punctuation may not be any time soon. I may yet still misplace a comma, form fragmented or run-on sentences, put either too little or too many apostrophes. But learning comes from mistakes and I acknowledge now that every one makes them.

After that, I think I will work on forming proper introduction and conclusion paragraphs, but don't get me started on those.

Old thoughts

I figure a good way to start my blog (as I think to myself: "why the heck am I doing this anyway? Everyone else has one, why should I?") is to post a couple of older "blog-ish" things I have written.
More to come, I suppose.
So, the next two entries are old, but still feel current to me.
-Stuph.