Skip to main content

Survivorship.

Yesterday we were walking around New Orleans' neighborhoods, Audobon Park, the French Quarter.  It's odd to be in a place that you know was visited by such devastation only six years ago.  We place such a high premium on survivorship in our society and I'm here in a city seemingly dedicated to revelry,* and everything you see that was here before 2005, people included, is a survivor.  It conjures a kind of awe that is quickly forgotten, gilded over with Mardi Gras beads and drive through daiquiri bars.

But really, is this so unusual?  Aren't we all survivors of something?  Who hasn't lived through a tragedy of some kind, a loss, a misfortune, an event that threatened to tear your world apart?  It's an amazing aspect of the entire human existence that we forget, overlook in the day to day.  It's interesting that the very indicator of survival, the ability to go on with your day-to-day life, means forgetting that there are things to survive in the first place.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts from last Thursday: Tonight we set up our Indie Bits game, and I'm consumed by nervous anticipation. I imagine this is not unlike when your firstborn child goes to kindergarten. OK, maybe it's not that serious. But the feelings of, please don't bite anyone , and I hope you make friends translates roughly to please don't break while someone is playing you , and also please no one play this game because What if you don't like it?  What if people hate it? What if it doesn't work? What if it's uninteresting? What if the puzzles are too hard? There are so many ways this can go wrong. These are not feelings I typically experience with the things that I make, as I usually make things just for myself. I've always been more of an engineer then an artist. At middle school art camp, I was competent at various techniques, but I never had any great ideas. We would be set free to our own creative devices with a new method, and I sat there, feeling inad...
Post a Comment
Read more

2011 Reading Challenges

On the first day of this new year, I am pulling together the reading challenges in which I want to participate.  There are so many that sound interesting that I'm not doing, particularly a bunch of them that are regional authors, which I'm trying to cover with my Global Reading Challenge.  I've chosen a bunch of them, but the problem won't be reading quantity, but more like reading strategy.  I read 3 or 4 books a week and most of these challenges allow crossovers, so I see no problems reading enough books, merely reading the right books and then, perhaps more challenging, writing about them, which some challenges require, and some only suggest.  Either way, it's a neat way to prioritize reading for the coming year. The Challenges in Which I Shall Participate Southern Literature Challenge - I've never read enough Southern Lit, and while some of the newer stuff is truly awful, I'd like to explore some older books. It's any book set in the South by a S...
4 comments
Read more

2021 Reading Challenges

Apparently a blog is forever, since this one is still hanging out there. I could be using it to write about being a traveler, but that's been done and most of my thoughts should remain private anyway (they are *not* flattering). So I'm going to track my 2021 reading challenges instead because that's the only set of goals I'm really setting for myself this year. (2021 goal = have fewer goals.)  League of Extraordinary Penpals It's a secret! This challenge is part of a penpal group that I pay to be in, so they don't want people sharing the challenge. I'm going to try to figure out how to review and track these books here without sharing the challenge in ways that aren't okay.  For now, I'll just say that I'm tackling the Genre-tastic, Book Club, Around the World, Dewey Decimations, and Social Butterfly challenges, not all of which involve reading a book.  Current point tally 4/5/21: 150 5 Countries I'm in an Around the World group on Goodreads ...
Post a Comment
Read more