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Don’t give me shelter, just let me fade away

Jonna — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:32:59 +0000

When I was in my 20′s I had a motto, ‘Whatever you do, just don’t bore me’. I was rather full of myself in those days, thought I was the hippest chick in San Francisco and truthfully, I was a bit of a snob. Age takes care of vanity and if you are smart it even teaches you a bit as well. I’m much less likely to be bored these days, I can find something interesting in almost any situation. Almost, you noticed I said almost didn’t you?

I’ve been thinking about my youthful motto and boredom in particular a lot this last month. I even made a list of things that bore me. #1 on that list? Illness in general and my being ill in particular. Luckily I don’t have to deal with it often because I’m really quite terrible at it. I get grouchy, resentful, rebellious… all the same symptoms I had as a youth when I was bored.

Moving on, because I hate thinking about being sick as much as being sick, I decided to explore what bores me even in my dotage. Ready?

#2. Politics and Politicians. All of them, in whatever language. I care who is elected but I surely do not care to listen to any of them stand up and lie. Write it down, I may well read it right before I vote but I certainly am not going to listen to a word a year early. Since the main item on the English news from the US is politics and politicians and even the Canadian news is full of it and BBC is not only full of politicians but also wars and what politicians think of them… bleh! I don’t watch the news in English. You think Mexican news is better? Not really, there is an election pending here too and the ‘public service’ announcements are getting thicker and thicker. Thus, I don’t watch the news. I occasionally read the Diario de Yucatán and the LA Times online because I can jump around and skip the boring stuff – which is most of it.

#3. Religious Belief. Frankly, I can’t take any of it very seriously. In my head all I can think is how odd it is that a functioning adult with a brain can believe these fairy tales. I will admit, once someone tells me they are a devout ___ (fill in the blank with any religion or occult belief) I subtract 10 to 20 points from my estimate of their IQ. Just saying. Don’t tell me about it, I don’t care and I will only think less of you.
(you should notice that I did not mention the trappings and art and music and bizarre rituals involved in some religions? I do love those. Great theater, but not something I’m tempted to emulate.)

#4. Drama Queens. Leapin’ Lizards Batman! There are so many of these folks. This is one lesson that I finally learned sometime in my 40′s, how to identify and stay away from these vampires of the soul. The expatriate community in Mérida is not deficient in these meddlers, I’m pretty sure they comprise at least 10% of any population. How do you know if you are a Drama Queen? Well, if your first idea on perceiving a wrong somewhere is to call up 20 of your friends and tell them how horrible it is – you’re a Drama Queen. If everything that happens to you is someone else’s fault and you feel it is your duty to warn others – you’re a Drama Queen. Lately there has been no shortage of subjects in Mérida for these lifelong adolescents. They pile on anything that looks like it has scandal legs and they do their best to make it worse. Bad things happen, people argue, there are hurt feelings, none of these things are helped by a full on backstabbing fight. Compromise, taking time to let your feelings settle a bit before confronting someone, listening to the other side, looking for a workable solution – those are the things that help. Walking quickly in the other direction or hanging up the phone as politely as possible is the solution when one of these DQs tries to enlist me. I haven’t had to resort to strings of garlic but it is plan B.

That’s as far as I got, not a long list although I may have forgotten something. If so, it must not be too bad or perhaps it doesn’t happen around me often. What’s on your list?

You made a difference Steve

Jonna — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:51:59 +0000

The death of Steve Jobs hit me kind of hard, even though I expected it. I’ve been an Apple fan for a long time. I’m a bit of a geek, I used to say that I was bi-OS’d. I was fluent in MacOS and Windows and I could order food and find the bathroom in Unix and Linux.

At home, there was always at least one Mac. They just work, they let the user decide what they want to do instead of telling the user what they will allow them to do. I think that was one of the biggest differences between Microsoft and Apple, the user came first at Apple.

I have a small idea of how much work it is to reduce design to the simplest form. I designed some databases in my past and that gave me a tiny insight into the incredible hours needed to simplify, remove the extraneous, make the user experience easy and intuitive, the things that Steve Jobs insisted upon and that rightly made Apple famous.

He was a lot of things, a very complex man, but his insistance on good design, usability, and beauty of form – those set him apart from the rest of the geeks of his time. It was almost a mantra back then that if you were a real geek you didn’t care how it looked. How many strings of unrelated letters and numbers you had to type to make it happen, how many beige boxes with tangles of cables erupting you had, those were considered unimportant, not worth a true geeks time. Well, Steve Jobs proved them wrong. It matters; how things look, how simply they work, how enjoyable it is to use them. It matters a lot.

I’m honored to have lived in his time. He did so much in such a short time, I wish it could have been longer.

Ni perdón ni olvido jamás

Jonna — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 06:51:21 +0000

picture from LA Times

Ten years ago I was getting ready to retire, on my last few weeks of work and goodbyes. We had our new Lazy Daze RV, we were ready to take off on unknown roads. I almost canceled. To serve and protect… just a phrase, but that day it got very real. I felt that I would be abandoning my post, could I just walk away after such horror? I spent a lot of time thinking about it and decided that had the attack been in San Francisco, I couldn’t go. But, it was in New York and it was just the beginning of a new kind of warfare, a new kind of terror. It was a battle for the young, because it was not going to end soon.

Unfortunately that is true, it changed everything and those changes will never go away. This is the new reality, the way things are and will be for the foreseeable future.

I blame religion. Yes, the ones who did this were extremists but what does that mean? That those who are religious but not extreme are only half as bad? a quarter? These types of horror seem to come from religion more often than anything else. It doesn’t seem to matter what the religion is, there have been equal examples of horror and terror from Christians, Jews, Muslims, and the other flotsam and jetsam of the religious world. Religion is the perfect excuse to hate your neighbor, kill those that are different, torture those who don’t believe as you do. It is the perfect excuse to be intellectually lazy, to not have to learn because you can just believe, to protect the rights of you and yours against them and theirs. I wish there were a cure.

Meanwhile, I along with millions of others are angry, vengeful, and disgusted with those that would do something this heinous. For what? There is no vengeance, there is no satisfaction. It stays with you though, that fury, that wish for vengeance. That was the real blow, the distrust, the anger, the isolationism. But, to forgive, to forget, would be to deny the heroism of those that died, to deny the horror of their unnecessary deaths, to allow this atrocity to fade and be swept under a carpet of political correctness somewhere.

Never forgive, never forget.

Where are we after 235 years? (and 2 days)

Jonna — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:56:57 +0000

Just to make sure my early US history hadn’t abandoned me, I admit to googling the 4th of July. What I hadn’t remembered – or perhaps it wasn’t pointed out to me in grade school – is that the actual resolution of independence was issued on July 2nd, 1776. Whatever. It’s the 4th that is celebrated and really, who is keeping score?

So, what does the US look like to a citizen who has not returned in 4 years? A bit scary, muddled, afraid, and full of hate.

I know that when you are outside of something, when all you can ‘see’ are the news reports, the rhetoric of politicians, the constant blare and vitriol of those who think their opinion counts – the view gets a bit distorted. I know that because I see the huge gap between those accounts of my adopted country México and the reality of living here. I live in peace here, in a big city that feels more like a country town, a place where people say good afternoon as they pass you on the street and where I wave at my neighbors whenever I go out. I can walk around the center of this city at any hour with only a minimal of street awareness, less than I would use in any city I’ve visited or lived in in the US.

But, back to the USA. The other thing that influences my view of my homeland is that I now watch much more foreign news than I did. That was easy since I watched zero when I was in the US. Now, I regularly watch the BBC and Canadian news because it is available on my sat service and I sporadically watch Mexican news from the capitol. For the nostalgia, I also watch the local news from Los Angeles. I love the almost nightly car chases, they have the best helicopter video in LA.

That’s not really the News though, News with a capitol N. It’s local gossip and cute kitten stories and sad kid stories and disasters and chases. It may be that this is all the news that most Americans watch? Or… do they pick their news shows based on their beliefs? Do they watch Hannity because they know they agree with him in the same way that I watch Rachel Maddow? Do either of us get any true news with our opinion? Is there such a thing? I really don’t know but I’m fairly sure that watching the news as it is seen from different angles leads to more truth than not.

So could it be that those of us who are American, who carry all the core concepts of culture and world view and ideas of what is true that were handed out with our cereal and in between recess at school, but who no longer live in that culture, who no longer live where those values and beliefs and norms are present, could we perhaps have a clearer view looking from the outside with eyes born inside?

I can’t help but point out that the above paragraph-which-is-one-sentence is incredibly Spanish in its wandering endless structure. I can’t believe I wrote that. I must be absorbing more Spanish than I thought, although in my English speaking way I did manage to put in a whole lot more commas and other such dividing artifices than you would find in a real Spanish sentence.

I think we do see the homeland clearer. I don’t remember living in an environment of hate and distrust up there, but that’s what it looks like from here. I remember the friends, the kindness of strangers, the beauty and the incredible expanses of land and ocean, the small pleasures and the feeling of belonging. I also remember the hate and the distrust and the seeming impossibility of the many enormous problems in my country – but I didn’t choose to focus on those. They were there, I was focused on the personal, and on the parts of life that I felt I could control or influence. Without that feeling of personal, without the option of looking at the small because the large is too overwhelming, things look a lot more depressing and hateful.

Did my country always celebrate a lack of education? Why is there this appearance of pride in the denial of science, as if just saying that they don’t believe in something will make it go away?

Why is there pride in only speaking one language? I get it that American might has pushed English as the language of business and diplomacy, we beat the French. Yay! But, what does that mean? Does it mean native English speakers are better off and have no need to learn another language? I don’t think so, speaking English with a non-native speaker is very different than speaking English with a native speaker. If you don’t speak another language you will never understand the nuances that are missing in a second language, you won’t know to allow for them and you will be at a distinct disadvantage even in your native language. That’s just one reason why the US needs to become more inclusive of other languages, we are putting our kids at a disadvantage by not requiring that they be bilingual at least.

What happened to that pioneer concept that we so love to commemorate on the 4th? That ‘can do’ attitude that says the real American will take on any challenge and give it their best shot. It’s been replaced by the fear of failing, the fear of liability, the fear of getting hurt. We overprotect and we hobble our citizens, we don’t expect failure to be part of the learning process. We don’t let our kids fall down, we don’t let them lose and we stack the deck to make sure that everyone wins. Here’s a clue fellow Americans, the rest of the world will not respect your stacked deck. They are going to clean your clock unless you learn to take risks.

What happened to that American dream that your home is your castle? It’s your castle but your neighbor’s castle has to conform to what you like, right? The correct lawn, the correct language, no noise, no animals, no parties, and no choice. Get over it, people are loud and messy and they don’t all agree on what is the ‘right’ way to do things. Forget policing your neighbors and just try and show them some respect. Hey! That would be a good idea for world relations too.

The US is behind the rest of the world in many areas. Saying that they aren’t important or that we don’t care about those things, is not just wrong but stupid. I find it sad that the country I do love, that was the first to put a man on the moon, is now proposing a return to the dark ages and debating things that are no more significant than the number of angels that can fit on a pin.

A friend and blogger from here in Mérida wrote a post the other day that resonated with me and apparently with a lot of other ex-pats. It’s worth reading, please go and have a look at Barry and Nancy’s blog on US anger and hate.

let’s start again…

Jonna — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 06:07:07 +0000

I first want to say how much I appreciated the comments on my last post. Thank you my friends, your encouragement is a tonic for the gloom of the subject matter. One of the things I have to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day is the connection I feel with so many people from so many places through this blog.

I had not intended my first blog after the Blogger’s Conference to be that. I was inspired by the conference, felt I had the tools to figure out the focus I wanted for this blog and the renewed drive to blog more often and improve my pictures. sigh This could be a preview for my New Year’s resolutions.

No, I’m not going to make the focus of the blog my rants about things I don’t like. If I did I’d be blogging even less than I do now since I’m pretty happy with life these days. I’ve perfected the art of ignoring most of the things that bug me, I highly recommend it as a post retirement skill. I’ve decided to just write about things that I find interesting, things that make me smile, make me think or puzzle me… with the occasional thing that pisses me off just for flavor.

Homophobes and Drama

Jonna — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 07:29:04 +0000

Yes, there are idiots everywhere. Here in Mérida, among the ex-pat population, there are more than a few. One stands out though, he’s a real nut job. Think of the worst conspiracy wacko you’ve ever read and then add a big dose of closet queen homophobia and you’ve got the owner of Casa Catherwood. He apparently has done this before to the point of restraining orders and lawsuits in the US.

I’m a bit allergic to drama, I’ve removed people from my life because they either loved it too much or attracted it… is there a difference? That’s my excuse for not commenting here about this huge pissing match that has been going on for the last 6 or so months. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to address it without contributing to the drama and I was hesitant about attracting the attention of this bunch of wackos. Now though, I keep hearing that nazi quote in my mind… first they came for the gypsies and no one cared. Something like that. When do you have to stand up and say ENOUGH?

Here is my take on the whole thing. First, you have an obsessive closet case with a lot of public homophobia, add to that a bunch of sycophants that want attention. Start bandying around words like ‘fraud’ and ‘pedophile’ and send it out to as many email addresses as you can harvest from several mailing lists here in Merida. Does attending a lecture on the production of chocolate really deserve receiving these diatribes? Shouldn’t people know that any time you go to some innocuous event about orchids or chocolate or birding and give your email address that you will be inundated with hateful, slanderous trash?

There are many theories on why this nut started this vendetta, some involve real estate deals gone bad, some involve lovers spats, some involve drama queens who just like to stir the shit. Whatever. Soon it takes on a life of its own and with a little more gasoline thrown on the fire it can ruin the lives of many people who have nothing to do with the original spat.

Why do these publicly liberal people involve themselves in this kind of broad smear campaign? …in this kind of homophobia that contaminates all gays in Merida? Do they consider the collateral damage involved? Do they realize that when they accuse “gays” of being pedophiles; without facts, without any kind of sustainable evidence, without any chance of defending themselves publicly, that they are equal to or worse than any other right wing bigot in the world? How do they feel when the nut job that they supported now turns on other upstanding members of the ex-pat community and starts to slander them as well?

I hope they are as embarrassed and humiliated as I think they should be.

As for the nut job, he has more money than brains or sense and is apparently quite obsessive when he starts on these campaigns. Now he has attacked an upstanding man who has worked at the Merida English Library… for no valid reason. If you do not join his vendetta then you are the enemy and he attacks without reason and without honor. Using mass mailings and constant repetition to batter anyone who doesn’t agree with him into submission.

There is a point where we should all take a stand, but it’s not easy… putting yourself in the line of fire never is. It is much easier to think that while it is distasteful it is not really my fight. I’m a woman, no one seriously is going to accuse me of pedophilia and the stink of those accusations will not stain me. I am not on the board of any ex-pat charities or the Merida English Library. I haven’t designed a web page for anyone that is on this man’s hit list, nor have I accepted advertising from anyone he hates. No one will seriously accuse me of fraud. I’m gay though, I’ve always felt that gay men and gay women are in the same fight and should stand together. It’s a lot easier to talk the talk than walk the walk. I really respect those ex-pats that are straight but are still standing strongly against this travesty, how can I do less?

I’ve had it. I’ve had it with the innuendos, I’ve had it with the outright slander, I’ve had it with the threats and the intimidations. There are a lot of very honorable ex-pats in this city, there are a lot of GAY honorable ex-pats in this city and I will stand as one of them. I can no longer keep silent about these attacks and about the damage that this kind of attack does to ALL of us.

A more reasoned response

Jonna — Sun, 03 May 2009 05:34:44 +0000

On May 1st, the New York Times had an op-ed article by Julio Frenk, Mexico’s minister of health from 2000 to 2006, currently the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. It’s well written and he also says that Mexico responded in a quick and effective manner. I don’t think it is just political BS, maybe a little, but what he says about the discovery and reporting ring true.

EVERY year approximately 10,000 Mexicans die from the effects of seasonal flu. Usually they are the elderly and the very young, people whose immune systems are not robust enough to fight off the virus. But this year has been different. The Mexican disease surveillance system, a network of more than 11,000 hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices, picked up a minor but troubling trend in April. Across this nation of 110 million people, a handful of young adults had apparently died from influenza. An immediate investigation led, within a few hectic weeks, to the isolation and full genetic sequencing of the microbe causing the illness. The experts’ worst fear was confirmed: it was a new kind of influenza virus.

Some have complained that the Mexican government did not act fast enough to identify this new bug and sound the alarm. But such criticism fails to take into account the real-life complexity of recognizing and responding to an unexpected public health emergency.

I recommend reading the whole article.

Sneezing in my elbow

Jonna — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:11:12 +0000

The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday.

That’s got to be one of the most ridiculous statements I’ve read lately. Whenever they try to mix religion and science it just comes out stupid. If your god has problems with pork, tell him not to use pigs to mutate diseases. Shit, tell him to skip disease altogether since he’s god.

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