Went up to mom's last night to see if hubs could figure out what was making her plumbing fail to drain. It had always been sluggish since she bought the house last year, but now it wasn't working at all - not the kitchen sink, not the shower, not the washing machine and worst of all, not the toilet. Poor mom was stuck spongebathing and hiking out to the old outhouse in winter weather. Not good.

Well, after much exploratory surgery on hub's part (and a few glasses of blackberry wine next to the fire for mom and me) the two of us were called outside to witness what the dear boy described as a "39 inch hickory spider."

Turns out, a local hickory tree had insinuated a root into a pipe joint and had produced a prodigious net of root filiments which had subsequently collected and enrobed a solid, yard-long mass of...well...we'll just say it was solid and leave it at that. The pipe had been totally blocked by this impressive hunk of ugly, which had completely filled the pipe on both sides of the seam.

We gaped at it a bit, like looking at a car wreck where you want to look and know you shouldn't, and tried to imagine how long it had taken to get to that size (probably years). But it was too cold to linger and mom's dogs were starting to show an unhealthy interest in the object, so hubs went ahead and got rid of it while mom and I returned to our fire and wine, duly sobered. And seriously grossed out.

But all's well that ends well. Mom has free-flowing plumbing now. And a healthy respect for the hickory trees out back. Suddenly, we're all rather fearful of the thought of laying down at the base of them on a summer afternoon, within reach of their roots. I mean...you just never know, do you?

I've started to notice that when I'm talking to my grandmother, either on the phone or as I'm leaving the house, her normal farewell isn't of the "I love you" or "Have fun" or "Talk to you later" variety.

It's "Be careful!"

Just that, with apparently no further explaination required.

If I'm going for a walk in the park - "Be careful!"  If hubby and I are going out to dinner - "Be careful!" If I'm ending our phone conversation to resume my previously uneventful exercise of laying about on the couch watching Law and Order reruns - "Be careful!" (and I'm looking out for...what, exactly? The couch is going to swallow me whole? The cats might get peckish and start eyeing me as a food source? Aliens are going to take over my brain through basic cable?)

Granted, as my mom pointed out, this is more or less her way of saying "I love you." But to me, that seems kinda sad. I mean, from her point of view, darkness borders every one of life's activities, just waiting to decend on those foolish enough to go forth cavalierly and without due loin-girding against the vagaries of fate. Real life - the going-out-on-a-limb, charting-a-course-for-waters-unknown, head-out-on-the-highway sort of life - is a horrific, terrifying thing. Her perpetual fear and greatest conviction is that Something Awful (the dreaded, formless Something Awful) could happen to any of us at any moment. And her most immediate and comforting expression of love is a brief prayer that we'll all be able to foresee this darkness coming and with that foreknowledge, be able skate through life completely ensconced in a fluffy cotton-wool cocoon of blandness experiencing nothing unpleasant or unsettling. Be careful!

OTOH, to my mind the worst thing that could happen to me is that my grandmother's ideal would come true - that nothing bad would ever happen to me. Because, quite simply, it's impossible to open oneself up to the glories of life without also being vulnerable to harm. In order to live the sort of double-bubble-wrapped sort of existence that would make gran breathe easy, I would also have to completely insulate myself from anything good and fun and new and inspiring. Because the reality is that if you run around on the playground long enough, you're going to trip and fall and skin your knee. That's just life.

Of course, I no more relish the thought of stubbing my metaphorical toes than anyone else does. Like any human, I flinch from pain and flee toward reward. That's just human nature. But getting sick builds our immune system. Heartbreak teaches us about the ins and outs of love and helps us make better choices next time. Standing up means falling down. Over and over and over again. But the view from up here beats the view from down there by a long shot, so we keep on getting back up knowing that sooner or later we're going to end up on our bottoms again, dusting gravel off our behinds and cursing gravity like it was some implacable foe rather than a fried that helps us keep our feet on the ground and our heads pointed toward the stars.

I know that if I want to taste all of life in it's raw, unfiltered state I can't protect myself from the possibility of swallowing the occasional bitter bite. But what gran doesn't seem to understand is that that's okay. That's part of life. You just swallow hard, grab a drink of water to get the taste out of your mouth, take a deep breath and go right back to the table.

The only alternative is to get all upset and go sit in the corner, preferring to starve yourself of life rather than risk hitting another bitter spot. I don't know, but I suspect that's what happened to gran somewhere down the line.

Not me. I love life too much to let "Be careful!" become my mantra, as it has become my grandmother's. Growing up in this environment of fear, I had to work hard to rid myself of it. And now that I have, I refuse to let fear motivate my actions and direct my decisions - I won't step away from the banquet simply because some of the dishes aren't to my liking or are even potentially dangerous. Neither should you.

So, ta for now. I've got a whole plate full of life going cold on me while I type. And, uh, do me a favor? Try not to be too careful out there, will you?

Mmmmmm...Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. What more is there to say?

(For those of you who managed to miss the 'napoli' Googlebomb, here's your vocabulary lesson for the day: Bill Napoli)

Over on Seth's blog, he asks if there is a qualitative difference between doing something for love and doing it equally well for money.

How much do you care about authenticity?

[snip]

When David Chase built the Sopranos, he wanted to tell a great story first, and get rich second. It was authentic in its first goal, and he accomplished his second. But when you eat at the fifth or sixth restaurant opened by a celebrity mega-chef, it's pretty clear that the goals are reversed. Does that make the meal worse?

My view is that anything done with a clear view as to intent, regardless of what that intent is - to make money, get famous or scratch a passionate itch - is to be considered authentic. Is the goal of dying rich by creating great works of art any less valid than the goal of creating great works of art regardless of money made? Is either effort any less authentic than the other if they both unambiguously succeed? Is a commercially successful genre novel written with the intention of being a commercially successful genre novel, then, any less authentic than a novel written for any other reason? Of course not.

What is authenticity anyway? Etymologically speaking, the word authenticity comes from the same root as author, and means 'genuine, real or original.'

Genuine is as genuine does. Dolly Parton is the queen of kitsch and there isn't a molecule on her that isn't pumped, plumped, painted, bedazzled or bleached. And yet is there one person out there, upon seeing and hearing her perform, who would dare label her as "inauthentic?" I think not. Because Dolly is absofrakkinglutely true to who she is and what she wants to do. And that is to dress like a Barbie, sing like an angel and have a ball doing it. That being so, to tone herself down into looking and acting like a "real" or "natural" person rather than the fun-loving and joy-bringing caricature she is would be the true fakery.

Authenticity is about the intent and follow-through of the act, not about the focus of the act. Authentic forgeries, done well and labeled as such, are as real as authentic originals. Authentic crap, created with that end in mind, is as authentic as lovingly handcrafted art and more so than haphazardly done work fobbed of as the real thing.

Authenticity is intent. Everything else is just description.

In the wake of all the SmartFilter furor - most notably the blocking of BoingBoing as a "nudity" site by many oppressive countries and corporate servers, when over 95% of their stuff demonstrably isn't nudity - comes proof of what a creative, loving community who isn't afraid to act on their own nifty ideas will do for you:

Introducing: Distributed BoingBoing. This is a bit of fan-written code that anyone can run on their server that effectively mirrors BoingBoing, rerouting it links-n-all through proxy servers, thus handily clearing the SmartFilter net o' totalitarianism.

With so many vastly trafficked commercial sites (CNN, Microsoft, iTunes, etc) this sort of thing could never happen because the helpful coder who dared such a thing would be shunted off to some shadowy corporate Guantanamo for copyright infringement or some other nonsense.

The fact that BoingBoing loudly stands for community sharing, creative commons and user-generated growth has resulted in a live demonstration of the lengths that the company doesn't have to go to to get stuff done. Show your community enough love and they will literally move heaven and earth for you without asking (in this case, creating ways to allow literally whole continents of oppressed people once again access a wrongly-blocked site), often in creative, cool and cheap ways you never would have thought of or had the time/money/energy/priority to develop yourself.

Okay, I'm convinced. Creative Commons mentality r000ls. Where do I go to surrender to our new open-source overlords?

Heh. Check out the victory post over on Smart Bitches blog. The number one Google result for Bill Napoli is now the SB napoli definition page.

Wow. The birth of a new word - and uh, aborting that birth just might be a problem for dear old Bill Napoli. Especially if he has to get permission from all the parents. Bummer, dude.

Hey, look...a new word! Like Santorum. Only uglier.

Bill Napoli.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. - Anne Lamott, writer

Oh, snap!

Seriously, though, I think this is why Christianity and other religions have failed to produce a congregation of peaceful, loving and compassionate sheep and have instead become the milieu of dangerously powerful and hate-mongering shepherds. It's simply far easier to envision God as a larger reflection of your own psyche than it is to rise up to the challenge of loving all those people who violate your own personal sensibilities.

But annoyingly enough, the Bible, the Koran and many other texts quite literally saturate their pages, repeatedly and consistantly, with message that God's overall orders are to love, regardless of who, what, when, where, why or how. So these leaders have to latch onto some obscure, one-time example of violence or hatred that God let slip by without (visible) punishment, and then keep shouting that one bit of isolated text so loudly that no one can hear the rest of the entire book disagreeing with you.

I don't know how it is where you are, but around here a big controversy is a group of "Christians" who are picketing and protesting the funerals of slain soldiers, going so far as to harass the family members as they drag themselves to the graveside of their son or daughter, brother or sister, mother or father for the final goodbyes. The thing is, these protesters aren't protesting the war. Their convoluted spiel is that God is killing our soldiers because America has become to immoral (no doubt the spectres of gay marriage and whatnot play a big role in the weekly meetings). And somehow they've decided that protesting in the face of grieving family members is supposed to get that message across.

Huh?

So let me get this straight. You're going to protest the immorality of America by harrassing a grieving family who are burying someone that probably died doing what they thought was right, moral and good for this country? *insert Louis Black seizure here*

Pot, I'd like you to meet kettle. Kettle, pot.

It's sickening, really. All in the name of God. No wonder religion is having as hard a time as the military is in finding new recruits.

The most sickening thing to me is that now I have to go out and try to love these people, because I don't have the handy God-as-Soni's-evil-twin doll. And to me, that's the true nature of evil - that whatever vision you have of evil incarnate doesn't waste time with penny-ante immorality, which really only affects a small radius of people, but goes for the gusto by convincing people to behave in such dispicable ways, all in the name of God, that even hard core God freaks can't stomach following God's mandate to love them and end up abandoning association with Godly organizations and labels altogether rather than risk being associated with such vile creatures.