China Regulates Buddhist Reincarnation

“In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.”

And how, exactly, are they planning on enforcing this?

As I am a rather “artsy-fartsy” girl and my husband is an engineer, it is not surprising that we have very different communication styles:

-he enjoys finding ways to turn everyday situations into helpful, instructive math problems; I enjoy finding ways to turn everyday situations into sarcastic, snark-laden posts for my blog which allow for the frequent use of words like “ass” and “bongjillion”, as well as the breaking of every grammar rule known to man.

-he describes his world in precise, easy to understand terms like, “My ear hurts.”; I am incapable of communicating without the assistance of exaggeration and hyperbole as in, “There is a monkey drumming through my eardrum with a nail that has been heated to the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns!”

-I view everything in life as either the best, most amazing thing EVER! or the worst possible travesty ever to be inflicted upon mankind for which someone deserves to DIE!; the most common level of emotional reaction to a situation to which he is willing to commit is, “perhaps”.

So needless to say, we’ve had to work to find some common communication ground.

Through some unfortunate trial and error my husband has learned that if I ever send him the following text message:

I HATE EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING!

that he must drop whatever he is doing and perform an immediate intervention, so as to prevent me from sending a piece of our electronic equipment to its fiery doom.

However we have managed to find one area of mutual understanding and that area is, of course, the scale by which we determine The Urgency Of Our Need To Pee, as measured in Units Of Riley.

Riley is my in-laws’ little Cairn Terrier, and he is famous in the family both for the amount of pee he can contain within his tiny, canine body, as well as the intensity with which he can release it. And so being the kind of people that we are, people who notice the random, goofy crap that most people miss, people who like to bring up private, bodily functions in everyday conversation so as to horrify our mothers, we naturally took advantage of Riley’s urinary prowess and coined the phrase, “peeing like Riley”.

And so, while we may differ on which is the preferred political party, and we may disagree on whether or not women should be allowed to be priests, and we may be worlds apart when it comes to deciding whether a given song should be classified as “country” or “Southern rock”, when one or the other of us proclaims,

“Dude! I’ve gotta pee like 5 Rileys!”

Our minds are one.

The other day my husband and I were in Subway buying dinner. As we were placing our orders a couple of men joined the line, one of whom was wearing a shirt proclaiming, “Three Things You Should Never Say To Cops” (such as, “If I buy the donuts, will you let me off?”)

My husband struck up a conversation with the two men using the shirt as an icebreaker, and mentioned that we have a friend who is entering the police academy later this month.

As soon as he mentioned that this friend is a girl, one of the gentlemen piped up and asked, “Oh, is she hot? I’ll get her to pull me over!” I think he might possibly have had a mistaken perception of his own hotness, as he was sporting a wild and graying beard, a rather large belly, and might possibly have been wearing sandals with knee socks. (Important Side Note: And why is it always those people who think that the “hot people” would want to have anything to do with them?)

Yesterday we went out to dinner with the friend in question and one of her friends, who has been a police officer for the past two years. We recounted our little Subway adventure, which actually turned out to be quite tame compared to their stories (See: People Who Answer The Door Naked, People Who Attempt To Hit On Cops While In The Process Of Being Arrested, People Whose Gay Lover Wakes Them Up From A Sound Sleep By Biting Off And Eating One Of Their Fingers And Part Of Their Ear)

“You know, I’ve never been pulled over by a female police officer,” said my husband, “but if I were I don’t think my first thought would be, ‘Hm…sex’!”

“Well,” replied the veteran police officer, “that’s how you know they’re creepy.”

-I really do think it’s quite interesting that a noun’s a person, place or thing.

-I often have wondered, Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?

-I frequently do need to stop and unpack my adjectives.

Many thanks to Lianne of Maternal Alchemy for this.

“As the great 14-century Sufi poet Hafiz reminds us:

Just sit there right now

Don’t do a thing

Just rest.

For your separation from God,

From Love,

Is the hardest work

In this

World.”

Every week my friend and fab-o-rama coach, Lynne pulls a Tarot card or a rune for the week, to give us readers something to think about or to explain why certain issues might be “up” for us. This week’s was quite a doozie but I knew exactly what it was talking about, because it pretty much sums up what this past year has been like for me. You can read the entire text at her blog; I’ve excerpted the parts that were particularly applicable to my experience here.

“The role of Nauthiz is to identify our shadow, our dark or repressed side, places where growth has been stunted, resulting in weaknesses that are often projected onto others.”

“This is a time to pay off old debts, to restore, if not harmony, at least balance.”

“When something within you is disowned, that which is disowned wreaks havoc. A cleansing is required here; in undertaking it, you will fund a will and strengthen character.”

“Thus you are required to undergo the dark side of your passage and bring it into the light.”

Yup, that pretty much sums it up quite nicely. But as you know, if you’ve ever gone racketing around in your own unconscious for an extended period of time, there’s a b-i-g difference between reading these words on a page and actually undergoing the process. A difference which I think can best be expressed by the phrase HOLY. F&%@!!

[Read more…]

Have you ever had one of those days where you actually fear to go outside because your hair is just basically giving you the finger?

And on one of those days have you then had to spend the entire afternoon in the doctor’s office thanks to the fact that you are experiencing your very first ever, searingly painful, urinary tract infection?

And as you were walking out the door, with the precious, infection-clearing prescription in your hand, did your doctor mention that this problem could be caused by a combination of hot weather and “Wearing Fancy Britches” (meaning non-cotton, non-white underpants)?

Have you ever had one of those days?

Yeah, me too.

-the number of years you’ve been out of high school now equals the age you were when you graduated

AND

-the highlight of your week was the purchase of a brand-new, self-cleaning!! litter box