The Farmer’s Market
Well, dear readers, I am absolutely dumbfounded. How, in all this time that I have been sharing my radical amazement and total grouchiness with you, have I neglected to discuss the Farmers Market?!
The Farmers Market, on Sundays in my neighborhood in the city, is the highlight of the week! Streets are closed and a bank parking lot is transformed. The white tents of the vendors can be seen from blocks away, like a mirage in the desert. You can hear the sounds of the musicians as you approach. Music is interspersed with the calls of the homeless men selling their newspaper and the barking of the dogs, as they scamper around playing with each other on the grassy rise at the edge of the market. Coffee- drinking owners chat with each other while they keep one patient and forbearing eye on their pets. The market is alive with people, pets, and produce!
I wander up and down the rows of vendors admiring the fruits, vegetables, yogurt, meat, eggs, mushrooms, soaps, yarn, and seafood until my nose leads me to the huge bakery. Oh! Yum! How beautiful the pastries are; how luscious the breads look; how overwhelming, the pies. I use all my internal powers to tear away from the magnetized oatmeal and chocolate cookies, and I am rewarded. Rewarded by even more happiness…because here live the flowers! Beautiful yellows and pinks and purples and orange! I always add a stalk or two of fresh mint to my flowers. Breathe in the minty sweetness!
I talk to the newspaper vendor while I buy one. He proudly shows me the article he wrote about his fellow patrons of the homeless shelter. He’s had it tough, but he is talented, interested and interesting.
I watch the people. Couples holding hands; parents pushing strollers; students planning their day and their dinner; old friends meeting and leaving for coffee somewhere. Everyone admiring the beautiful produce, the savory empanadas, the silky tofu dessert.
It’s funny. How can you be in the middle of so much hustle and such an avalanche of sights, sounds and smells, and end up feeling total peace and happiness?
What Goes Around, Comes Around
Abby’s been thinking about ”what goes around, comes around”. Now you know, if you read my blogs on Totally DeTestable Technology, that I am a Know-Nothing about Technology, just as I am about art and music and much, much more. And you also know that this lack of knowledge does not stop me from writing about a subject and expressing my know-nothing, but strong, opinion. So it shall be today with the Cloud.
“Gobbledygook” is one of my favorite words. It is such a good example of one-word onomatopoeia. Someone wants to sound fancy and learned and they end up gobbling nonsense like a turkey. Gobbledygook is especially omnipresent when vendors are trying to sell their “cloud-ware.” “Virtualizing your desktop environment with VMware allows you to accelerate your agency's mission by delivering desktops accessible across devices and locations - built on the world's most trusted cloud platform - as a secure, managed service.” I guess, if Abby may try to translate that to English, they mean that using their secure software, you can reach your documents and data from anywhere you have internet access. I doubt this will accelerate your agency’s mission, though. Your mission is your mission. Maybe they intend to suggest that it will speed up realizing the mission, by allowing people to work from anywhere, anytime, even more easily than they can now. Uh oh, is this Cloud the next step in the Elimination of Any Personal Life Whatsoever?
Now when Abby was a young graduate school student, nobody, of course, had their own computers, neither desktop nor laptop nor tablet nor smartphone. One’s work was not stored on one’s own hard drive, or on the company’s hard drive, because such hard drives did not exist. No, back then there was a room and this room housed a huge machine and this machine was miraculous because it did computer magic for you. So it seems to Abby that what is happening now is that this room with the huge machine has been levitated into the sky, where it is now called the Cloud. And because we have the Cloud, we no longer need our own hard drives to store a lot of stuff….just like back in good old 1973!
The Miracle of the Newspaper
Abby loves the newspaper. No, not reading online. Holding the paper while sitting in a big easy chair or reading at the kitchen table during breakfast – those are the ways to go! My Sunday paper is $2.00, and of course the weekday paper is much less. What a bargain! For much less than the cost of a latte (see Abby’s blog on the detestable Starbucks), you can soak up knowledge about a myriad of subjects; you can get your hackles up; you can laugh out loud! Just in today’s paper alone I learned:
• The Scots are talking about independence from Great Britain. Surprisingly…. Tartan pride aside, something about who owns oil is underlying this discussion.
• Weather Underground is a website that provides weather forecasts by zip code. How times change. I thought it was going to be an article about the 1969 birth of the leftist youth movement.
• Wealthier older people (Abby does not like the epithet, “seniors.”) pay more for Medicare than lower-income people. They do not get a free ride. As Abby gets to be rich-and-famous (a noble goal), she will be glad to pay more.
• I have to admit, I love the crocs even more than pig. (Pearls Before Swine)
• There are fruits you can get in Florida that Abby never heard of: chocolate pudding fruit, carambola, mamey, sapodilla, and jackfruit to name a few. Yum! Maybe.
The only complaint I have about the newspaper is that I never have enough time to luxuriate wantonly amongst its treasures.
Another Little Blog about Art
As you know Abby loves Kandinsky. Happy symbols chasing each other across the canvas…
But my true confession is this: I adore Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir. I could stare at it for hours. It looks like such a perfect afternoon – beautiful scenery, delicious food and drink, great conversation with friends. And such a lot of flirting going on!
On the technical side, I am amazed at how Renoir managed to convey all that reflected light, but most of all…I want to be at that party!
Do you know the movie, Midnight in Paris? I would insist on being transported right into that painting. A lovely Sunday afternoon with friends…and I think there is some wine left in the bottles for me to join right in.
Road Rager vs Granny
Abby is really a patient, understanding soul. But behind the wheel something happens. I turn into a furious, impatient maniac. Well, not really a maniac. I don’t drive crazy, but I do get unreasonably mad at people going too slowly or too fast or whatever they are doing to annoy me. I yell and curse (all with my windows up so nobody can hear.) “The gas pedal is the one on the right, granny!” I will yell. Or “You have a turn signal don’t you, Idiot?!” And stuff like that. I researched road rage (well, I got as far as Wikipedia) and I learned that it is an official mental disorder called “intermittent explosive disorder”. So now being a jerk is a disorder. I am surprised I have not yet seen commercials for a drug for this…”Do you suffer from IED?” (See my blog on acronyms.) Anyway, the truth is that Abby is not a jerk, but is an unfortunate victim of IED, so her screaming at other drivers cannot be helped.
But poor Abby does have really bad eyesight, and driving at night is a challenge. I tend to drive slowly and sometimes brake when I shouldn’t and sometimes use my brights when I shouldn’t. People pass me and it really appears that they may be yelling. Do you remember Pogo, that old comic strip character, who said “We have met the enemy and he is us?” Well, I have found the granny driver that I yell at by day, and she is me, by night! Who would have guessed that the mirror image of the furious road rager is the squinting old granny hunched over the steering wheel, inching along? “Get a move on, Granny, or get off the road!” Ooops, I mean “Pass me if you want to, Road Rager, and let me drive the way I want to.” Wow, I can give myself whiplash just by driving day into night….
Is Tolstoy Right About Families?
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is how Anna Karenina begins. I have been reading Anna Karenina all year, [Have you ever taken a full year to read a book? I think I am absolutely disgraceful!], and I am still not finished, so I have yet to judge how Tolstoy will prove this to be true. However, this declaration strikes me as false. Since every family, and every person, is touched by happiness, sadness, worry, sickness, pride, satisfaction, anger, delight, and, in short, every human emotion, the extent of happiness, I think, is how we make peace with the negatives and are able to focus on the positives. Some have more trouble making this peace than others, due to illnesses - mental and physical - and extreme hardship, but nonetheless the extent that one can do that goes far to determine one’s level of happiness. I would say happy families put up with, with good nature, the foibles of their relatives and do not bear grudges, and are helpful to one another. Unhappy families are stuck in a negativity of the past. So maybe now that I am thinking out loud, I am beginning to believe that perhaps Tolstoy is right. Happy families all have short memories; unhappy families dwell on their particular “slings and arrows” of the past.
Words are Beautiful!
Loyal Readers: Abby has been kind and thoughtful as 2011 ended and 2012 began. Enough of that! It is cranky time again.
Words are Beautiful!
Why can’t we use them?! Abby does not like acronyms! Things seem to be getting worse and worse in this domain. You will see on TV that you cannot have a descriptive disease anymore. You must have something that is described by three frightening letters. Abby has AAI* syndrome. There is no help.
Would you believe….my kitchen trashcan is proudly marked in big letters: FPR! FPR? What the heck is that? A warning? Fear Produce in my Refrigerator? A call to political action? Face Proudly the Reactionaries? No. It means Finger Print Resistant. Well, there’s a vital product. I spend a lot of time putting my hands all over the lid of my trashcan, and now I can proudly proclaim myself so very FPR!**
*Annoyance At Idiocy
** Frequently Peckish and Ridiculing
Abby’s Random Thoughts as We Begin 2012
I think there is a force in the universe that wants us to be happy, at least some of the time. Why else would there be rainbows, fluffy clouds of all shapes, sweet-faced dogs, music that makes us dance, toddlers learning to walk, geraniums clambering all over, and sun-showers?
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Astronomers have recently discovered two gigantic black holes in far-away galaxies. Each black hole is 10 billion times the size of our sun. Other astronomers have discovered an earth-like planet circling another star, and this planet would appear to have a temperature of 72 degrees. In other news, it is estimated that the number of stars in the universe is greater than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. Upon reading all this, do you feel as small and insignificant as an ant?
__________________
I know, I know, I have dissed ants. I understand that ants have a complex and highly evolved culture and I should be more respectful of them. Many different types of scientists have studied ants, from social biologists to computer scientists, and have gained important knowledge from these petite and industrious creatures. Abby vows, as we begin the new year, to be more careful to acknowledge the contributions of all beings.
Happy New Year, FOAs!
Abby Loves Maimonides!
8. Giving grudgingly.
7. Giving less than one could or should, but willingly.
6. Giving directly to the poor upon being asked.
5. Giving directly to the poor without being asked.
4. Giving when the recipient knows who you are, but you don’t know the identity of the recipient.
3. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient is unaware who donated.
2. Giving when the donor and recipient are unknown to each other (through a third party).
1. Preventing people from becoming impoverished or lifting them out of poverty by providing a loan, or helping them establish a business, or find employment. This is similar to the ancient Chinese adage: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Abby wishes everyone the very best 2012 – good health and great happiness!