moderation.
for the first time, i've been hit by a troll. my recent post in response to the supreme court ruling on the partial-birth abortion ban act of 2003 drew a rather vitriolic comment, which i deleted (although i preserved its only reasonable content). what ensued was ridiculous in the extreme. said troll (who posted the vitriol in the first place) commented on several of my posts from the last couple of months in an effort to insult me and some of the people who read and comment here. and he or she did so with very little imagination and a great deal of ignorance. so disappointing. if i must be insulted, at least he or she could have tried for some humor and intelligence in his or her insults.

as a result i've enabled comment moderation for the near future. so your comments won't be appearing immediately. hopefully this person will someday mature to the level that they understand that it's okay for people to have differences of opinion. but i'm not holding my breath.

in the meantime i'm simply looking for moderation. it's something i value, particularly in political discussion. most particularly in discussion of abortion, which discussion could desperately use a more moderate tone and rhetoric. please feel free to espouse whatever opinion you may have (even you m. troll). just use a modicum of respect and moderation.

wordless.

anecdotes.

• bug & shirt. last night i was sitting on the couch, directly under the picture that sheltered the spider i had warily been watching earlier in the afternoon. and i just knew that spider dropped into my shirt cause i felt something fall in and crawl down my spine. and then i felt it again. and even though JP checked and assured me there was no eight-legged monster in my shirt, i felt crawly things on my skin all night.
  
• bug & shirt--reprise. ten minutes ago i was sitting on my bed minding my own business surfing the web when i felt something crawl down my neck. i immediately thought of my spider and decided i must be imagining things again. until i felt it crawling on my chest and brushed my chest and felt a bump. which fell into my shirt. when i went in after it, i found a little beetle crawling around. and i'm again feeling crawly things.
  
• curses. so today, just as i was making a most eloquent point during sunday school, i swore. i said damn. although i wasn't exactly swearing--it was the hypothetical sower in my example who swore; i just reported his hypothetical reaction to a stone in his field. and then i realized what i had done and blushed while laughing about it. perhaps this will mitigate my asset-hood in the ward. but i doubt it, since the man next to me found it 'endearing.'
  

happy.
some simple (and sometimes silly) things that make me happy:

• rain dripping on the metal rain gutter just below my window
• hot chocolate and a book on a cold, blowsy afternoon
• the way the cap screws on so cleanly on a new tube of toothpaste
• clothes folded perfectly and arranged in a rainbow of colors
• the ruby gleam of a hummingbird's neck in the sunshine
• cut daffodils opening in a vase
• new growth on roses
• a single albino poppy plant in the middle of a field of golden yellow
• email from a friend just asking how i am

to be continued...

realize.
yesterday i watched a fly die. it was strange. he crawled up in front of me on my desk and tipped over. he stayed there, off kilter, one wing in the air the other under his side until i flicked him off the back edge of my desk. he seemed so big, sitting there dead on my desk. much larger than the pesky nuisance i would have considered him had he been alive, buzzing around my head. somehow his death made me realize how real his life was in a way i never could have had he been his normal buggy self.

sometimes i have moments like that--realizations of how incredible the world and life are. strangely, many of those moments involve insects. lying on my back on the grass, looking up at the trees thinking that this must be what a beetle sees. standing in the dark face to face with a hovering fire fly the summer I first discovered them. finding two beautiful fuzzy, black & white, striped and spotted caterpillars crawling their crazy crawl along a fence post. i don't care about the science of insects, about how their lives work biologically. but the facts of their lives amaze me.