Lydia Schoch

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

If you don’t have a twitter account yet you’re missing out on some fantastic stuff. There have been times when one friend tweets a funny story, another rants about politics or world events, a third shares a thought-provoking quote and a fourth tweets something that makes me smile. I love the juxtaposition of it all.  A few of my favourites from this week:

Always answer the person who asks you “are you happy?” because anyone who cares enough to ask will probably try to make sure you are.. – Coyote Sings

Just got called a “nice little girl.” Turns out that’s the fastest way to make me into a big, mean woman. Grr. – Zora

If any country really does belief in the future of its children it will do EVERYTHING possible to give them the best education. – A Space Alien

Remembering Mom and Dad. If this isn’t a good reason to get a tattoo I don’t know what would be a good reason.

Amazing Memory. Do you know anyone with this type of memory? It would be wonderful to access more memories of friends and family who have passed away (even if they were of very mundane interactions) but I wouldn’t want to remember that many details about in general.

Skull Flower. It took me a few seconds to see the skull. I wonder how many people walked past this flower before someone noticed what it could resemble?

What Time Is It? Click this link to find out.

This week’s recommendation is actually a book my Dad told me to read. These Is My Words is the diary of Sarah Agnes Prine’s young adulthood in frontier Arizona. The story is fictional but from what I understand certain events and characters were modelled after the lives of the author’s ancestors. I’ve borrowed from real life in my own stories and know how fascinating it is to mix truth with what you think or wish might have happened.

What have you been reading?

Forgotten Heroes is a series of posts about extraordinary men and women who are (probably) not remembered by the average person.  Previous heroes include Charles Loring Brace,  Emily Murphy and Jane Jacobs. 

If you know of a forgotten hero who should be included in this series let me know about him or her in the comment section or via my contact form. 

Time: 1972

Place: China

While out collecting trash one day to recycle or sell in order to support her family Lou Xiaoying heard a baby cry. The infant had been abandoned on the street and was surrounded by garbage.

Lou was already raising one biological daughter in a culture and time when daughters were not considered as socially valuable as sons. A son takes care of his parents in their old age but daughters are absorbed into their husband’s family. It would have been so easy for her to continue walking and ignore what she had just seen or, at most, to bring the child to an orphanage or leave her in a more densely populated area so someone else would find her.

Instead Lou picked the baby up, took her home and adopted her.

Over the next four decades this scene was replayed dozens of times. Most of the babies Lou discovered ended up being adopted by family or friends but several of them, including the girl she found in 1972, became permanent members of her immediate family.

How did abandoning babies become such a common occurrence? In the early 1970s China had a population problem. For decades infant mortality had been declining  and average life expectancies surging. Until the 1960s the Chinese government actually encouraged their people to have large families but as the population grew more rapidly this began to change.

In 1970 citizens were encouraged to delay marriage and have no more than two children. By 1979 a one child policy was set into place to slow the birth rate. It was at times brutally enforced.

One of the consequences of this law was that parents began to abandon baby girls in ever-increasing numbers. If your culture believes that only a son will financially and emotionally support you in your old age and if you’re only allowed to have one child many people will choose to have a son as their only (official) child

I know this isn’t a typical Forgotten Heroes post: Lou Xiaoying is still alive and  her legacy has not yet been settled but this is a story that needed to be told.

Respond

Your challenge today is to look suffering in the face. Those of us living in western cultures will almost certainly never find abandoned babies on our streets and even if we did there are a long list of families waiting to adopt such children.

But there are many other ordinary crises happening just outside your door. We might not know how to solve them  (yet) or what form they may take but so long as there are compassionate people in this world willing to help there is hope.

In my neighbourhood you cannot walk down the street without passing at least one homeless person. I haven’t figured out the best way to help them yet but I do smile and say hello when they make eye contact. Most people refuse to acknowledge their existence.

What will you be doing?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, photos and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web. For some reason there is quite a bit of humour in the links I discovered over the past several days. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win. Every four years  ordinarily  reasonable people transform into frothing ideologues and in the months leading up to the big election it becomes increasingly impossible to steer conversations clear of politics. This article pokes fun at how seriously many Americans take the political process and how similar the parties sound if you listen closely. Can you tell how much I abhor this time of year? 😉

Customer Reviews – BIC Cristal For Her Pen. Recently the pen company Bic released a line of pink, inexpensive pens specifically for women. This link is full of hysterical reviews written by people making fun of this terrible idea. (Seriously – what in the heck does  gender have to do with which disposable pen a person should use?) I’ve linked to the one star reviews specifically but be sure to click through the higher ratings for equally comical reviews.

Man Killed Attempting Bigfoot Hoax. This is such a sad story. It’s also one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever read.

Girl’s Hair-Do Reveals Love Life. Are those of us who avoid fluffy bows at all costs not supposed to fall in love, then?

I have the following questions about A Horse in a Dress:

Where does one find a horse-shaped dress?

Why in the world would one dress up a horse?

Are the other horses jealous?

Somebodies and Nobodies is about social status,  how we treat those “beneath” us and why those “above” us can be so dismissive. Too often wealth, social positions or job titles dictate which people are afforded basic respect and dignity and which ones are treated like inanimate objects. It’s not an easy book to read but it does cover an incredibly important topic.

What have you been reading?

“Missione genovese del Guaricano – Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) – Foto di Donpaolo” – from the description of this photograph on commons.wikipedia.org.

I’m starting a new series of posts here at On the Other Hand about making friends. Most of my current friends live far away or have very busy lives. As much as I love and appreciate them I’d like to meet some people who live nearby. There’s nothing like getting a warm hug in person or calling up a friend last-minute to see if they wanted to go to the park this weekend or check out that parade or art festival.

But before we begin let me tell you a story.

It Was the Summer of 1994…

I was 11 and my parents had just moved cross-country to pastor a new church. We’d spent the last four years living out west and pastoring a small, independent church. Most of our members were young college students living away from home for the first time and so many weeks my brothers and I were the only children at church. Later on there were a few babies crawling around but never anyone my age who wasn’t a sibling.

The new church was about ten times larger than our old one. Suddenly we were surrounded by other kids. As much as I’d loved the adult attention at our last church there was something exciting about the prospect of making friends with some girls my own age. On one of our first Sundays at the new church I gleefully walked into the 5th and 6th grade Sunday school classroom only to be greeted by a half dozen rowdy (and even worse, flirtatious!) boys and one flicker of hope – a tall girl who turned out to be the daughter of our teacher and who was just stopping by on her way to the high school class. She’d later become one of my closest friends as a teenager…but that was a few years away.

 I was girl-less and unimpressed. My predicament must have filtered up to Dad between Sunday school and the sermon because during the announcements he asked the congregation if anyone had little girls close to my age. After the service a few different adults stopped to say they had a sister or daughter who would be at church the next week. And they were. For the next two and a half years we spent at that church I was never surrounded by only yucky boys again. 😉

It Was the Summer of 2012…

And I’m wondering why it’s so much more difficult for adults to meet new people. Is it because we’re busier? Or maybe it’s because there are fewer clear-cut places for adults to meet up? As a kid I made most of my friends through school and church, two institutions I no longer attend.

So how do we make friends as adults? I’m especially interested in this question as someone who doesn’t have children or pets, watch sports or regularly drink alcohol.

This is also a question that I think may be a little more difficult to answer in a reserved city like Toronto. People who’ve lived here more than five minutes tend to live in their own little bubbles when they walk down the street. They’re not (generally) rude or unkind….they’re just completely uninterested in talking to strangers.

This question is going to take more than one post to answer. I hope you’ll join me on this journey as I figure out how to go about doing this. The next post in this series will be a compilation of ideas. Do I want to try the platonic personals on Craigslist? (Probably not.) A more organized site like Meetup.com? (Maybe.) What about starting conversations with people on elevators? (Might be creepy.)

Respond

How have you made new friends as an adult? Is there any advice you can offer to those of us giving this a try?

Entertaining search terms used to find this blog in August 2012.

What do pollutants smell like? Cloying perfume/cologne, stale cigarette smoke, olives and the nauseating combination of freshly ground ginger and tumeric.

Why do I go quiet when it’s my turn to speak? Maybe you’re easily embarrassed?

Can a talkative and quiet person make it in a marriage? Probably. 😉

Can you forgive someone for violating your trust? It depends on how you find out about it and how they’re planning to behave in the future.

Does Bruxy Cavey allow swearing? Years ago I briefly attended his church and I didn’t get the impression that he’s the kind of guy who is easily offended. From our handful of conversations he seemed like someone who meets people where they’re at and doesn’t expect non-Christians to act like Christians. If I ever see him again I’ll try to remember to ask him this question, though!

Is violence more sinful than sex? I don’t necessarily believe in the Christian definition of sin but violence is almost always going to be many times more harmful than sex because it tears down the emotional, sexual or physical selves of other human beings. It’s designed to achieve that end and if anything sex is meant to do the opposite. If I had kids I’d much rather them watch a (consensual) sex scene than someone being brutally beaten or murdered on TV.

Prosperity theology and the law of attraction… are more or less the same idea wrapped up in different words.

Meaning – normally quiet person is chatty? I don’t know why this happens but every once in a while I suddenly cannot stop talking. All of the thoughts I’m normally content to keep to myself suddenly feel like things that must be shared.

Why do I keep reading the stupid news? Because you haven’t discovered this site yet. It’s much funnier (and probably just about as relevant to your daily life) than reading or watching the news.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, quotes and videos from my favourite corners of the web.

“The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.” ― Maya Angelou

How to Talk to People in Wheelchairs. This is good stuff. I’ve wondered about the etiquette of helping someone who is in a wheelchair before. It’s not a topic that’s brought up in conversation very often and as someone who has never been in this experience it can be difficult to know what to do. I’d never want to offend anyone by asking a dumb question or overstepping my bounds.

From How Easy Is It to Spread Disinformation?

 …are we really aware of all information flowing up over the net? What is really true and what’s not? When someone presents a bit of loose facts on Twitter, I usually respond with something like ”64% of the facts on the Internet is 48% incorrect according to 52% of respondents”, completely made up numbers out of my head, but it makes people think a little extra.

It is somewhat disturbing at times when the bandwagon takes off and speeds up, without people being critical.

 9 Billion Years of the Universe Condensed into 80 Seconds. The best dream I’ve ever had involved billions of years of time travel. I started out as myself and travelled back in time (glimpsing scenes from multiple lifetimes, human and otherwise) to a time in which there were no planets or galaxies, just the matter that would one day create it. This video was the next best thing to experiencing that dream again.

Truer words were never spoken from Post-Posting Depression:

So keep on writing, and keep on posting.  Know that the most important and meaningful posts you write are the ones that may not get you big fat numbers but that touch our hearts so deeply that we can’t express ourselves.

Agnostic, Atheist, Deist and Humanist readers, my friend Bruce needs your help:

Above all, I am going to need atheists, agnostics, humanists, and deists who are willing to join the Leaving the Faith Forum and be a help to those who are contemplating leaving Christianity or who have already left Christianity. You must be patient and kind, willing to guide people rather than throw information at them.

The forums will be private and are scheduled to launch on October 1. I hope to see all of you there. The more perspectives we can give people struggling with their beliefs the easier their journeys will be. More than anything I wish something like this had been around for me when I deconverted. I’m in a wonderful place now but some of the intervening years were pretty lonely.

Gathering Blue and Messenger are the sequels to the book I mentioned last week, The Giver. Gathering Blue introduces an entirely new set of characters who live in a hell on earth. Society has crumbled and everyone left is scrambling to survive. People who are disabled, weak or injured are routinely left to die. Enter a disabled orphan named Kira whose incredible skill at weaving is the only thing keeping her alive. Messenger is the continuing story of what happens to certain characters from the first two books.

What have you been reading?