inkgrrl's inkblog

As usual, her writing is as clear and eloquent as her message:

“Dissent is as alive and contentious and as rude as ever, but just because someone does not agree with you does not mean you are the spiritual heir of Mandela or Ghandi, being persecuted for your noble beliefs. It just means that they disagree with you. If you can argue your point cogently, without calling names, so much the better.”

Go read the rest – she’s wunnerful, as are the rest of the grimy greasy gopher guts (grin, duck, run-run-run, pull moss back over head) at Sgt. Stryker.

I’ve been thinking a lot of thunk about fear and accomplishment the last week or two, as the year turned and the resolutions were resolved. I just found this entry posted at Naked Writing, and I echo almost every detail of it – I’ve quoted a huge amount of the post but not all, so go read more:

“How much time is still mine? If I get a full 75 or 80 years or if my time will simply be a shorter work, the pages of years forming a novella, or novelette or just a common, unfinished tale. At 34, it’s kind of a ridiculous thought I know — odds are I haven’t even reached the mid point of my life — but I do wonder what lives between the tick tocks of whatever time is mine. Mortality is such a pesky thing. Realizing how powerful and powerless you are within it simply produces a thought pretzel tasting of both sweet excitement and bitter fear with each twist pondered.

Really I just don’t want to make a mistake. I don’t want to be fearful and afraid within my time and therefore miss something extraordinary along the way. Silly, yes. That’s the point, not knowing. But as someone who is in control more days than others, I want to see back from “my last day” so I can tell myself on this day of all the places I need to be sure I go, the chances I must take and the people I should be sure to meet so as to get the most out of life.

Most out of Life.

Most out of Life:

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.””

Yeah, what she said.

Or, all about places The Lonely Planet can’t take you; or, what that pesky Balkan war was really about; or, the History of Spanakopita:

Spanakopita was formally established in 1914 as the result of a Greek separatist movement formed when a bunch of hot-blooded young shepherds decided they would no longer tolerate being criticized for their sheep-loving activities. The shepherds marched west, intending to herd their lovers to the New World, but grew fatigued with repeated conflicts against south-ranging Boyars.

After a particularly brutal battle cost them a much-adored ewe and her two daughters, the shepherds claimed about 42 square kilometers of a particularly grassy-hilled, cave-riddled area just east of the Pale and held it against all comers until 1953, when the Soviet Union invaded. Tragically, since the entire population of the country save a few token milkmaids (who were more interested in fondling each other’s breasts than entertaining the lanolin-smelling shepherds who wouldn’t have been able to perform sexually anyway, as the milkmaids were far too hairless to stimulate the shepherds’ tastes) was male and in their late-middle age to early senescence, there was no available rank and file of young, healthy men able to resist the Red occupiers.

The surviving population fled to France, where they rallied and reformed their government-in-exile, living happily in one of the few other countries that allowed, even encouraged, their sheep-loving activities and refusal to bathe. Sadly, time and death have attrited the once-lusty regime of glorious Spanakopita, which currently consists of a sole surviving founder who spends the remaining days of his life consulting with Provencal cheesemakers.