Little Things

I've been thinking about how it's really the little things that mean everything in life. Most of the time they're all we get.

Better

So I just had my first experience of being out sick from work in the Netherlands. It was better. I'm better. Just for reference, you can lose your job if you get sick in America. I know because I have a direct comparison.

Cheer Up

Well, the griep turned to bronchitis, but I managed to interrupt the sequence before it turned to pneumonia, so there's that.

I was thinking about how years ago if you were being a downer people would tell you to cheer up. Not always helpful, to be sure, but then again sometimes it's appropriate. I decided to cheer myself up with music.

Immigration

A little while ago I found out that a friend of mine who had immigrated to the US from the Netherlands was being given 33 days to liquidate and leave the US. I am beyond disgusted with this. Since the new draconian immigration guidelines were put in place, the INS has been auditing the immigration paperwork of thousands of legal immigrants for errors so as to have an excuse to expel them.

Police And Thieves

Many years ago I worked in a place which was used as a sort of vocational training segment for criminal justice students at the local college. People who were on their way to becoming law enforcement officers, or LEO's. Some time later when some of them had become police officers, I had them as friends on facebook. I kept seeing these memorial banners for police officers who had been killed in action. I had the bad taste to ask how many people the cops killed every year. This led to some unfriendings after bitter words and name-calling. This was years before the Black Lives Matter movement, before anyone had done any research and found out the true scope of the problem.

Griep

So I've been down with the flu all week. "Flu" in Dutch is "griep", pronounced phonetically in English as "greep". It comes from the French occupation of the Netherlands. The French word for flu is "grippe". We used to use that word for it in English too, but somewhere along the way we switched to the Italian word for it which is "influenza", so named because the original Italian theory before germ theory came along was that it was caused by the influence of the stars. It seems to me that there was some sort of tug of war between French and Latin when it came to medical terminology. Latin won.

Anyway, I'm sick. Monday I had a fever and I was freezing cold on the inside and burning up on the outside. I've gone through two boxes of tissues and I feel as weak as a kitten. Hopefully this confers some immunity to whatever else goes around. I'm going to post some music themed to sickness. Unfortunately none of them seem to refer to being down with the flu, but that's what you get.

Nun Abuse

Today the pope spoke about the exploitation of nuns. Part of the exploitation that was going on was sexual slavery. Stories about women being kept in what amounted to captivity for sex and then forced to have abortions. Women who presumably had gone into a convent out of deep religious devotion only to be confronted with the truth about organized religion and the men who run it. 

Tuesday Tunage

Still working, still tired. Here. Have some music. This time the theme is women with interesting voices. Sometimes the lyrics or the general soundscape are pretty interesting too. It's a mixed bag in no particular order.

Monday Meanderings

I'm working a lot and not in much mood to work on posts after work, so instead I will take the easy way out and post some music.

And You Can't Make Me

I was thinking about all of the things I was taught as a child and a young person and how lackluster my efforts and the results were. I finally realized why that was. It was because someone was making me do it. It wasn't because I wanted to, but because someone was forcing me to do something I didn't want to do against my will.