1. I am fascinated by faces. The mindful, authentic, observant face-to-face encounter might be the essential ingredient in most relationships – and certainly the test of most ethics and “values.” The very definition of pathology for me is someone who can look you in the eye, see your soul, and then still hurt or kill you.
2. I’m not adjusting to getting older very well. When I look at my face in the mirror, it doesn’t look like me and I feel a bit alienated and depressed. But at the same time, I love to see the changes in the faces of people I love. This last year, it was an amazing experience to go to my high school reunion and to see the faces of people that I’ve known since I was a child. The recognition-within-difference really touched me very deeply.
3. I do miss some aspects of other times and places in my life, but overall there is more kindness and caring and love and meaning in my life now than ever before. Sometimes that kind of stuns me.
4. Sometimes the only thing that will motivate me to attack my list of things to do is the prospect of being rewarded with some time alone in which I’m not required to do anything in particular. I’m a fierce guardian of that dreamtime – no obligation, rich imagination. My thoughts travel on their own -and mix up and ferment and rearrange and become resonant and meaningful. Not only is this ultimately the source of every major insight I’ve ever had, but without it, I wouldn’t be me to myself. My secret world is the heart of who I am.
5. I love to socialize, but it totally exhausts me. This is partially because I tend to overcompensate in various ways for my introversion. Later, I usually feel that I’ve not listened enough to others. I curse this recurring and almost irresistible urge to try to be amusing and likable and clever. It takes a lot of energy, I’m not very good at it, and I know that I should just zip it a lot more often than I’m able to do.
6. I’m still looking for my ideal pair of shoes – the shoes that don’t hurt my feet, that look gorgeous but have a heel of less than an inch, that are strapped or tied over my incredibly high arch and don’t let my tiny heel slip out, but that are wide enough at the front not to smoosh my toes or put pressure at the widest part. These mythical shoes would be perfect for any occasion and any outfit. I could wear them with jeans or a cocktail dress. Let me know if you find them. I suspect they have to be black.
7. I can’t let go of my books. I have too many, but I can’t let go of them. Even the Karl Barth.
8. My spiritual beliefs and practices are at once so eclectic and yet oddly inflexible that I doubt I’ll ever be a member of a religious community. I have the strangest things on my alter.
9. I’m almost absurdly grateful when I feel like someone I like “gets” me.
10. I miss the kind of cheerful feminism represented by such songs as Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” and the tv theme song for Wonder Woman. Although I love the angry music and the whiny music, too, I wonder what happened to that soaring sense of confidence.
11. My energy level is never very predictable. I never know how productive I’m going to be. I work in very efficient spurts, but then I’m overwhelmingly fatigued. This can be measured in hours or in days. When I feel exhausted, I tend to become a bit reclusive. I still think of the couple of weeks that I had to be on corticosteroids (for systemic poison ivy) with a lot of fondness, because it gave me just enough of that little extra adrenaline boost to let me feel like I imagine many people do most of the time.
12. I like to take a walkabout from time to time. I love to travel alone. I used to disappear into the woods for a week, but that’s neither possible nor even really desirable anymore.
13. It’s kind of predicable – and I don’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes – but our son Ben really is the most beautiful sweet smart amazing kid ever. I hope he continues on his own path – just the way he is already doing.
14. The greater percentage of what I write is still never read by anyone but me.
15. I would prefer to die in a manner and a moment of my own choosing. Skydiving would be the ideal, and although I don’t have to ride down on a missile like in Dr. Strangelove, I can understand the appeal.
16. I love the moon, and I love to sing to the moon and to the night sky, especially if the songs are actually about the moon and sky and stars. Some favorites: Sister Moon, Sting; Fingernail Moon, Annie Lennox; Sisters of the Moon, Fleetwood Mac; Goodnight Moon, Shivaree; Stars, The Weepies; Galaxy Song, Monty Python; In the Deep, Bird York; Small Blue Thing, Suzanne Vega – and for some reason, Strawberry Fields.
17. I’ve finally come to terms with the reality that I’m never going to be a Jungian analyst, a comparative mythologist, a well-known poet, a best-selling novelist, or an accomplished singer. I doubt I’ll ever play the piano like Tori Amos.
18. I love paranormal romance novels – especially those involving vampires or fae. John (the hubby) is amused by this and often teases me about my “porn collection.”
19. I don’t often wear perfume, but when I do it’s usually either a vanilla-musky Must de Cartier or a combination of lavender, mandarin, lemongrass, and bergamot. One drop of either is enough to alter my experience of the world for hours. I hope other people like it too, but that’s not really as important.
20. I have twice had the opportunity – and twice refused – to swim in the Mediterranean.
21. I deal with melancholy much better than I deal with anger. You can try to make me depressed if you must, but don’t piss me off. I’m not easily angered at all, but hell hath no fury like a Heidi-grr.
22. The thing that most infuriates me is the sense of powerlessness I feel when I want to somehow make everything all better for someone who is suffering. I can be very empathetic, but at a certain point I feel like a minor prophet waving my fist at the sky. That’s when I most need a little alone time to breathe and reorient myself.
23. When I was younger, I used to be petrified – really petrified – that the people I love would be killed. I had nightmares about my brothers (most of all my brothers) and other relatives, and my son and husband, and some of my dearest friends, and even a couple of my teachers. The worst part of the dream was always that they might have been saved if only I had done one little thing differently. After my Dad died, these nightmares went away. I don’t know why that happened, but I’m grateful.
24. I do often dream about my Dad. He’s different in my dreams than he was in reality, but it still helps – or maybe that’s why it helps.
25. I don’t know whether or not I can still pet a fuzzy honeybee until it goes to sleep in the palm of my hand. I haven’t seen one of those bees in years. I miss the lilacs too.

And here are the old ones:

• 8 Random Facts about VirusHead – December 2007
• VirusHead Random 8 – June 2007
• 5 Weird Things about Me – July 2006
• Meme Me Me – November 2005

Actually I think the guy was trying to be “cool” and he was the wrong guy, talking about the wrong women, at the exact wrong time. Of course, he has said a lot of nasty things in the past, and had even vowed to stop, so both public opinion and the voice of the marketplace have now spoken.

(By the by, let’s not pretend those young men at Duke are pillars of society, even if the charges have been dropped. It was a pretty unsavory scene – and a common one for the college sports community.)

Imus does do some good work in service to others, though, and that should be factored into moral judgments as well – as it seems to do rather easily for Sharpton and Jackson. Although they have been leading the attack (on the basis of race), they both have histories of inappropriate remarks of their own. For them to lead the moral outrage response on this is about as hypocritical as Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr attacking Clinton on grounds of sexual morality.

I’m always interested in what motivates someone to throw the first stone.

Here’s what is continuing to bother me about the coverage.

Everybody’s talking about race – what about gender? The sexism across all our communities – black, white, everybody – seems (pretty much) to go unquestioned.

Imus’s remarks were not only about a heavily racially-coded form of hairstyle with a cultural history. They were also sexist – a form of prejudice, contempt, and domination against women.

He called them whores! – or “ho’s” – and yet the pundits make no room for a feminist to speak on that issue.

The coach and the women on the team made the point, but who in the media will pick it up? Is it ok to call accomplished young women whores, but just not to do so in a racially-tinged way? Is that the message?

I research and evaluate workplace assessments as part of my flex-hours consulting job, so I’m “asssessed” all the time. I’d love to see how they crunch the numbers for this “Personal DNA” Quiz, since there is so much variation and subtlety in the choices here. I love the flexibility of the answers. The spine of it looks like a variation of the 4-quadrant model developed by Marston and Jung, with some alternative vocabulary. Comments from the developers are welcome.

My results seem about right for the puppet CEO of Benevolent Deities Inc:

About You: You are a Creator

Your imagination, confidence, willingness to explore, and appreciation of beauty make you a CREATOR.

You are independent, and you enjoy your self-sufficiency.

Defying convention, you are very innovative, and you have a vivid imagination.

The look of things is important to you, and you have a keen eye for aesthetic beauty in multiple arenas.

You have a strong interest in what is new and exciting—and that includes forging ahead with new ideas, not simply discovering what is already out there.

Your eagerness to seek new and varied experiences leads you into many different situations.

You’re not set on one way of doing things, and you are creative when it comes to finding novel solutions to complex problems.

You trust yourself to be innovative and resourceful.

Your confidence allows you to take your general awareness and channel it into creativity.

Your independent streak allows you to make decisions efficiently and to trust your instincts.

If you want to be different:

Appreciate the earthly, practical elements of things—there is beauty in form as well.

While you are good at thinking abstractly, focusing on details a bit more may help you discover things about the world.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

How you relate to others: You are Benevolent

You are a great person to interact with—understanding, giving, and trusting—in a word, BENEVOLENT

You don’t mind being in social situations, as you feel comfortable enough with people to be yourself.

Your caring nature goes beyond a basic concern: you take the time to understand the nuances of people’s situations before passing any sort of judgment.

You’re a good listener, and even better at offering advice.

You’re concerned with others at both an individual and societal level—you sympathize with the plights of troubled groups, and you can care about people you’ve never met.

Considering many different perspectives is something at which you excel, and you appreciate that quality in others.

Other people’s feelings are important to you, and you’re good at mediating disputes.

Because of your understanding and patience, you tend to bring out the best in people.

Your independent streak allows you to make decisions efficiently and to trust your instincts.

If you want to be different:

You spend a lot of time taking care of others, but don’t forget to take care of yourself!

Sometimes you can get overcommitted, and when you sacrifice spending time with those close to you, it can make them feel unimportant.

Then there’s a bar graph display of thirteen personality trait rankings based on the answers of 30,000 other people. I’d want to know more about the sample if I were paying for the quiz.

I’m not sure about some of the results. For example (and maybe I shouldn’t go there), it ranks me as much more “masculine” than “feminine.” I think I’m a pretty even mix – psychologically speaking – of whatever we mean by that. Is there substantial agreement on what is psychically/spiritually/psychologically more masculine and what is more feminine? I wonder what descriptors they would use to label the gender of a psychology?

I know I’m leaving this wide open to all sorts of comments, but hey – comment anyway.

(thanks to Mr. H.K. – that was a good one! )

There is a short explanation of why the blog is named VirusHead.

There is also a long rambling section about theoryheads and postmodernism (only for the intensely curious).

I’ve also added a page dedicated to Jehovah’s Witnesses issues, news and resources. In addition to page links (to bits of the main VirusHead site), the page lists all the titles of the blog posts on this topic, so that you don’t have to click through the category pages to get a sense of what’s there.

I’ve also moved my tag cloud to its own page, which includes all the tags. All of them.

Online NewsHour: South Dakota Bans Most Types Of Abortion — March 3, 2006

BILL NAPOLI: When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: You really do?

BILL NAPOLI: Yes, I do. I don’t think we’re so far beyond that, that we can’t go back to that.

Sounds almost sweet, huh? Like the "wild west" reference, which frames the whole thing. In the actual "wild west," women didn’t do very well… Of course, the west wasn’t "wild" when this guy was growing up.

Under what circumstances would Mr. Napoli concede that a woman (or her community) might be allowed to consider abortion? Rape or incest? um… well…. actually….even those cases would have to come under "danger to life of the mother."

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

The case he allowed that might actually "endanger the woman’s life" would be if she were a religious virgin saving herself for marriage" and she was not only brutally raped but also sodomized (because she was sodomized? Does he need some basic sex ed on how pregnancy occurs?). Note that just being a virgin isn’t enough, and that he assumes virginity isn’t actually a choice made in full knowledge and self-value, but only in "religious" conviction (or more likely, quasi-religious pressure).

Note also that the ideal situation is where the community makes the decision for the people involved – both that the woman will carry to term and that the two will marry. What a great basis for commitment – an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy. Maybe we should hear some autobiographies from people who had marriages with that auspicious beginning. I can’t think of many men who would welcome a return of the shotgun wedding either. Oh, and should uncle or brother daddy marry the one they "savage"?

His delivery was shocking. It was almost as if the thought of the brutalization of the woman – oh wait, he said "girl" – was a turn-on for him. The last sentence was a bit of an afterthought. Here is a man who clearly views women as property to be controlled and dominated (and even protected – as property). How is he that much different than the rapist he cites?

In any case, "danger to the life of the mother" is usually interpreted in quite narrow terms – that carrying to term might well result in the literal death of the mother – such as with an ectopic pregnancy or other medical conditions.

Is it virgin sodomy that makes all the difference for him? Is a woman who isn’t a virgin less traumatized by rape or incest? Is it all about the qualities of the rapist – the brutalizing, sodomizing defiler of religious virgins? Is it enough to be an anal virgin? (Actually, anal and oral intercourse are on the rise among the "no-sex" pledgers. Hope they don’t catch a disease while they’re trying not to get pregnant without birth control.)

Watch for other moves back to the "good old days" too. For people who are so against abortion, they are oddly and ferociously opposed to the proven factors of reducing the number of abortions: birth control, sex education, women’s education and training, equality, and freedom of opportunity. What next? Barring women from the vote or from owning property? Will American women be disallowed from wearing miniskirts, working outside the home, going to college, driving a car?

Fundamentalist sexism and domination of women looks very similar to me across religions. It’s about the same thing as rape – it’s about power, it’s about controlling and dominating women into a semi-subhuman status. Watch what happens to those women in those communities when they don’t have the abortion. See how friendly their neighbors are to a single woman with a child, or to a struggling family with five. Shall we bring back the good old witchcraft charges too?

In a way, I understand. Some people don’t want to have to face reality. There is so much change, and they don’t know where or how they will fit. It’s clear that many of us will be sacrificed to the Mammon, the "god of money." There is meth addiction, there is crime, there is disrespect to "elders" – surely it feels like apocalypse approacheth. It’s strange that they refuse to look at economic factors – but it’s clear that our children and grandchildren will live in a very different world. My generation is the first that has not (on the whole) done as well as our parents did. So some of us can’t actually face the world we live in – we’ve had it relatively easy and some have an irrational assumption that the world owes us something whether or not we’ve earned it or deserve it (shall we call it the W syndrome?). We pretend that there is no poverty while it’s actually increasing, that all parents must by definition be wonderful people, that kin don’t rape or otherwise hurt one another, that everyone who is the least bit different from our comfort group must be evil, that people who do their own thinking and make their own ethical choices are a threat to those who simply submit to authority (hoping they will be spared?). Some people can’t even really understand that there are other countries or people different than the "folks" on our street – most Americans only speak one language. Of course our own "group" has its problems as well, but if we are not directly affected we tend to ignore that as much as possible. We want to protect our kith and kin and we like to hide in the safe comfort of our folk mythologies.

But these are childish reactions, and they bring out very bad things in us. They bring out the very things that every prophet warns against. America is living in a very thin veil of self-induced hallucinations. Part of the "good old days" mythology has to do with dominating women – oh, and killing Indians in the "Wild West." Violence against immigrants, especially Mexicans, is on the rise.

A religious response would have to listen compassionately to narratives of actual, truthful experience (as you would have your God hear you) before proposing solutions or making judgments. These politicians don’t do that very much – and neither do many of their constituents. Listen to the stories of the women who are desperate enough to abort their pregnancies that they travel hundreds of miles to the only clinic in the state to get it done. Listen to the circumstances by which a woman decides to end a pregnancy – it is no easy thing to decide. The stories are often heartbreaking. There are women who have had abortions and regretted it deeply – this is true. There are women who have not, and paid dearly.

This issue is a handy tool to drive people apart because abortion is a very controversial and difficult topic. Ultimately, though, it is not the job of the government to mandate a woman’s reproductive life. Such decisions have to reside with the woman, with her God (if she is a believer) and in consultation with her doctor.

Maybe that’s the beef – that finally there is a matter in which a woman has the final say-so. How threatening to the fragile male ego.

Roe v. Wade was the compromise. If your daughter or your sister or your mother or your friend were in a position where abortion had to be contemplated, you might think differently. Or maybe not – maybe you’re in that group who wants to turn America into a theocracy – complete with stoning?

Added March 4th: Mark Morford’s reaction to all this is much more strident – and witty. Read "S. Dakota Slaps Up Its Women: Another state you should never visit passes an appalling abortion ban, because they hate you"