. Spinning .

Normally I dodge these things, but for Squip at Dusting My Brain, I’ll do it:

Which is your one favourite weblog and why?

Metaxucafe because it is a gathering place for writers; a shortcut to view all aspects of all levels and forms.

Your two preferred philosophies for life ("worldly wisdom")’?

To thine own self be true. (Shakespeare)

A lousy ballerina will claim her skirt’s too long. (Mom) (Sounds better in Polish; basically means finding excuses instead of facing up.)

Three songs you like to listen to. what do you like about ’em?

If You Could Touch Her At All – Sung by Willie; reveals male sensitivity.

I’m On Fire – Sung by Waylon; sexy as all hell.

Love Hurts – Sung by Emmylou Harris; just amazingingly poignant and haunting.

Four foodstuffs or meals you hate. and why?

Number #1:  Runny whites on eggs; just disgusting.  2. Anything salty and sweet together, such as pineapple on ham; I don’t know why, but I even dislike the colors pink and yellow together.  3. Super sweet frosting; cause it’s teeth-hurting sweet.  4. My mother’s stringbean soup; because she always brought it hot for picnics in the middle of summer.

Five movies you would like to watch in 2006

Lord of the Rings;  The Corpse Bride; anything else with Johnny Depp; a couple of the new cartoon movies like Monsters, Inc. and Ice Age II.

Six words that come to your mind spontaneously. in which context?

I wanna go home now.  (wanna counts as two)  I don’t know; I think I’m still trying to find a place to feel comfortable in.

Who would you like to answer this stupid questionnaire next?

That’s a toughie because I normally don’t answer these things and hate to then push somebody else.  But I would say, Loretta at Pomegranates and Paper; Mark at Clear Lake Reflections, and anyone else who wants to.

So each Easter holiday shows changes, just as Christmas, birthdays.  Children grow, get bigger, bigger, pop open to replace those missing around the table with new little people cracking eggs and delighting elders if they love the milk and vingegar kielbasi baszcht.

Traditions change with people present.  Recipes made by families for centuries are altered by the lack of sour cream and company coming all too soon.  The cooked sour cream drops from the bulka ingredients in years thereafter if no one noticed any difference after all.

Polish overwhelms the marry-intos in the family.  Tradition here especially at Easter overrules.  But even after family has broken up and scattered, even after someone chokes on money to change the guest list, even with a French-Canadian English Scotsman and a half and half English Scot, his father, at my table, I cannot not make piorogi.  Altered by the influx of non-Polish family members through the years, the fillings now include what I call Polish Ravioli served with sauce. 

I bought the ham, kielbasi, horseradish and the eggs.  I will color Easter eggs, and then eat them all next week.  I will make piorogi. The English/Scotsman likes the ham and the potatoes.  He doesn’t mind my Easter meal for sixteen years now.  This tradition too will change next year.

Mentally singing this song from the late Waylon Jennings’ CD, Cowboys, Sisters, Rascals and Dirt.  Balancing the shop checkbook I see that a deposit didn’t show up on the statement.  Heading to the bank to make another and discuss this, I had a suspicion and felt under the car floormat.  There it was, from a month ago, along with a couple of unmailed bill payments. 

Got home to find out that the home phone had been disconnected.  I’d made sure the whole nine months of J’s unemployment that all bills were paid even more than on time; in advance sometimes.  Just in case the last month was rough.  Then I forgot about checking on them while waiting for the first semi-monthly paycheck.  Now I have to sit down and write out a bunch of payments before the powers that hold us hostage to them disconnect us from our lives.

Meanwhile, on the Macromedia Flash front, I keep losing the second letter of my title word while I’m trying to stick it into a timeline so that the whole word floats and sways in wondrous activity.

There’s little doubt that stress over the last couple years has taken a toll, but it’s beginning to affect not only my mind, but my actions.  Gotta get back on the highway somehow.

Cripes.  This living thing is getting harder and harder to do.

I just love this, the concept, the execution:  Hannimals (via Leaves of Grass) Art by Mario Mariotti.  (Thanks to Ronni at Time Goes By.)

I listened very hard in all directions, but still I did not hear an outraged cry of discrimination nor ethnic slander against Comcast’s Slowskis. 

Why not, I wonder, though I am only second generation American-born.  My roots came through the legal portal of Ellis Island.  From Poland.  Why no sense of affront?  Because it’s funny.  Because it’s just a seed of myth that became something we can laugh at ourselves about.

I wonder if this wouldn’t solve some problems:  Line the borders with airstrips.  Allow immigrants who sorely need good jobs to board direct flights to Asia, India, wherever.  They get their dream of American jobs and the U.S. isn’t hammered as badly by unemployment, healthcare and benefit costs and housing and schooling problems here.

It shouldn’t happen this way.  A man works hard all his life, sometimes holding down three jobs to provide for a family of five kids.  Losing a spouse within a year after his retirement.  As if that matters; it happens to anyone.  It comes down to human dignity.  Remaining independent until he’s struck down with sickness that eats away at his insides.  Wondering if he’ll ever go home again, while he sits in a health care facility where Henry next room over hollers out day and night for "Henry!"  Where the aides ask his family to bring more clothes because he messes his daily. 

Where for one night, he’s picked up and brought over for what always was his Monday night meal, though he knows he can’t eat much even though it’s his favorite.  Where he loses control and slowly, painfully is helped into his son’s house, leaking shit that’s dripping down his pants leg onto the floor in a trail.  Depending on his son to clean him up, his daughter-in-law to clean the floors, his clothes.  He sits and eats dressed in a woman’s bathrobe while his own shirt, pants, shoes are snuck away and laundered.  His son and daughter-in-law remembering they planned to ask him over for Easter, but remaining silent until they can discuss it.  They say nothing to him, but decide to ask him tomorrow anyway.  They’ll prepare.  No one else will take him for that day, because they’ve all been through it.  He can’t help it.  Everyone understands.  It’s the medicine they give me, he says.  As if we’re cleaning white aspirin off the floors, off him.  I wonder what he’s thinking; I worry.  It took him the first two years of his life to learn to control his body, to listen to what it tells him.  He’s come full cycle; it’s telling him that.  Beginning to ending. Pride is gone, and all he can do is hope that he is forgiven.

It shouldn’t happen this way.  "So it goes," says Vonnegut.