Lydia Schoch

This film is very short. It only requires about a minute of your time.

I don’t normally share more than one video per week on this blog, but I really loved how this one was put together. It reminded me of all of the stories my parents told us about their childhoods:

How mom’s pet goat used to climb on top of her father’s car;

The time dad set his bedspread on fire while pretending to be Superman. He thought he could easily blow it out;

Mom’s odd relationship with a little girl in her school who was obsessed with squishing the skin and muscles on other people’s arms down flat;

How dad accidentally broke a window once.

My mind also wandered to the newer family stories my nephew, Aiden, knows by heart:

Dad (That is, Jesse) making parachutes for stuffed animals and then throwing them out a second-story window.

Uncle Aaron’s insistence that all of his buddies (read: stuffed animals) be tucked into bed next to him every night. He’d panic if any of them got misplaced or wedged between the bed and wall while he slept.

Aunt Lydia herding balloons around the house. She pretended they were sheep and moved them upstairs and downstairs over and over again.

I wonder which of these stories Aiden might pass onto his own children one day.

This film feels like a classic to me. It’s a little too early to tell, of course, but I have a hunch that I’ll be returning to it over and over again.

What stories do you like to revisit?

Created by Maéva Gruaz, Amaury Rospars Maxime Couturat, Jean-Baptiste Bellande, Sebastian Durouchoux and Jordane Koessler at Bellecour Entertainment.

No, I didn’t misspell the title of this short film.

What I find most interesting about it is that the whole story is told without almost no use of dialogue. It takes a lot of creativity to pull that off.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, photo essays,  and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

‘White Canada’ and the Evolution of Racism. This is really interesting stuff. I very briefly lived in Vancouver once and heard a lot of these arguments from the people I met there.

How to Make Love to a Trans Person via NaomiClareNL. I loved this poem.

Okay, I’m Weird, but Everybody Is Weird. I was thinking about writing a reply to this post, but I couldn’t quite stretch it out enough to justify such a thing. Maybe I’ll return to it someday.

Let’s Talk About the Weather via dorsalstream. How’s the weather in your neck of the woods?

Fictional Characters Whose Lives Would Be Improved By Abortion. It’s hard to argue with any of these.

From Thinking It Over via gemma_corden:

I talk to myself. As far as habits go it’s not exactly the worst. But it’s started to get embarrassing because I find I’m now doing it outside, in public – rather than in inside, alone. Technically, it’s not myself I am talking to now – it’s the world.

From The Struggle in Black and White:

Photographs of the civil rights struggle helped galvanize those outside the South against legalized discrimination, exposing them to the indignities African American citizens suffered under a system of state-backed racism.

The most interesting about I Stand Corrected: How Teaching Western Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson for me was see exactly how much the definition of a polite person can shift from one culture to the next.

According to this book, it’s perfectly acceptable to do the following things in China:

• Spit on the sidewalk.
• Pause an important business meeting in order to answer a phone call from a government employee.
• Ask other people how much money they make, why they’re not married yet, and why they’re so fat.

I’ll leave it up to my readers to discover which North Americans habits are considered to be horribly rude in China. Many of them surprised me, and I think you’ll enjoy learning about them more if I don’t give you any spoilers.

What have you been reading?

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

This reminded me of the endlessly blue skies I grew up under in Wyoming for several years.

I loved being closer to my grandparents when we eventually moved back to Ohio, but I really missed those skies. They were so beautiful. Ohio has a lot going for it, but clear, blue skies aren’t on that list.

Image courtesy of ©DesignerClipart.com.

Drew and I jokingly wished my side of the family a Happy Real Thanksgiving earlier this weekend.

I hope my Canadian readers are having a great three-day weekend.

I hope my American readers realize just how much they’re missing out on by waiting until the end of November to celebrate Thanksgiving. 😛

If you celebrate Thanksgiving at a different time of year (or maybe not at all), I’d love to know the story behind it.

I’ll be back later on this week.

Cheers!

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, walking tours, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

A Hobbit’s Guide to Walking. This is fantastic whether you’re a fan of Lord of the Rings or try to walk 10,000 steps a day. I happen to like both of them.

My Boobs & Me via swbigvoice. I don’t have this writer’s figure, but I do share her policy on figuring out what to wear.

Matter of a Pronoun via blackinkpinkdsk. Wow. Just wow.

How to Skip Small Talk. The list of alternative conversation starters provided in this post are fantastic. They’re the kind of questions I wish others would ask me more often.

Dare Not to Care via jackiejoneslive. I’ve been trying to learn this lesson for a long time. It’s not an easy one.

The Mashed Cauliflower Incident. A few different thoughts flitted through my mind as I read this: 1) I can’t believe that adults argue about this stuff; 2) Who has the time to care what other people do or don’t eat?; 3) I’d much rather occasionally eat the real thing than regularly eat a “healthy” substitute that tastes nothing at all like what I’m actually craving.

I have mixed feelings about Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do if You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World.

Sensitive Affective Disorder isn’t in the DSM. Reading this book made me wonder if it ever will be included in it. The symptoms of it are related closely enough to one another that I wonder if SAD is a previously undiscovered disease. It will be interesting to see what studies, if any, are done to explore this issue in greater depth.

Some of the cures for it come from alternative medicine that have never been scientifically proven to do anything to help. This made me raise my eyebrows while I was reading, but people have been trying all kinds of home remedies for real diseases and disorders for as long as we’ve been human.

What have you been reading?

Picture by Anynobody.

Someone found this blog recently by searching, “What’s the point of gossip?”

I’ve talked about gossip before on this blog, but I’ve never shared my theories about why people do it.

1. They assume the worst interpretation is the most honest one. If you sneeze, you have ebola. If you drink one beer, you’re clearly an alcoholic. If you say you like X, that means you hate Y.

2.  It makes them feel better about themselves. This reminds me of the parable about why you should put more than one crab in a bucket. If there are two or more of them in there, none of them them can escape because the other crabs will pull the first one down if he or she climbs up too high. (I wishes Snopes would verify whether or not this story is true!)

3. They want to be accepted. The problem with this is that if you make friends with a gossiper you never know what they’ll say about you when you leave the room.

4. It’s a habit. And habits are hard to break.

5. The truth is boring (to them). What I find most amusing about habitual gossip is that it’s virtually never about people living happy, quiet lives. There is almost always the assumption that if you appear to live this way, you must have even more to hide than the average person.

Sometimes I have to explain the videos I share with my readers, but the title explains it all.

I think I’d really like Andrew Roblyer if we ever met in person.