What'd You Learn

The goal is to learn something everyday
regardless of the manner in which the information might be obtained --
this is a journal

--of sorts...nothing is detailed, that would take up too much space...

30 March 1999

I read somehwere that if you suddenly cut your sugar intake you'll start to get headaches. I know this to be true because I've experienced it.

19 March 1999

I hate spiders. They freak me out. They have way too many legs if you ask me and if I see one you can bet I'll be out the room and screaming ---well maybe not screaming but definitely repulsed.

Last night I had a spider drop down on me from the ceiling. Fortunately, it was rather small so, while still unnerved, I let it drop to the floor and continue to live. Since I moved to Houston, you see, I've been forced to befriend the spider. ---

Not every kind of spider though. Houston has this giant brown variety --it's huge and has giant skeletal looking legs --it can see you coming if you raise your hand to smack it, it starts to run --its smart and i think its highly evolved. I don't know what it is. Spiders have obviously never been my thing so I've never made it my business to educate myself about the different varieties of spiders. But I know what this one looks like and if I see it coming its gone.

On the other hand, there's this other nice little brown spider with really wiry legs that just builds its house in the corner and goes about eating whatever happens to land in it web. This is the kind I have taught myself to tolerate and we have, in fact, become quite friendly. I have several of these living in the corners of my apartment and I don't do anything about it. If you lived in Houston you'd do the same thing ---You just wouldn't believe the bug problem down here.

Anyhow, in lieu of my new respect for spiders I found myself watching Bill Nye the Science Guy this morning. ---Now you might think I'm way too old to be watching an early morning edition of Bill Nye the Science Guy, but I found it rather informative.

Here are the facts:

• Spider silk is the strongest natural fiber in the world - even stronger than steel
• If a spider loses its legs it can grow new ones
• Most spiders get eaten by other spiders
• Spiders have 8 legs
• Never scare a tarantula, it starts running all over the place
• Spiders keep the insect population under control
• I learned what a beating net was ---It's a cloth net that you place under a plant such as a fern and then go about beating the top of the plant/fern so that the spiders are dropped with the help of GRAVITY into the net
• Only 20 known species of spider are poisonous
• Spiders are predators, and they're good at it
• Daddy long legs are not spiders, they have no silk, they have one piece bodies, they have no fangs or venom --that's too bad too because I really like daddy long legs
• Spiders are not insects
• Without spiders insects would run out of food because they would eat up all the vegetation

OK ---so I already knew all of these facts and I am way too old to be watching Bill Nye the Science Guy but maybe someone will get something out of it
Besides forcing yourself to look at the creepy things is a great step in getting over the fear --and its an irrational fear so i should get over it
...and it never hurts to reiterate...

18 March 1999

I haven't been working outside of the home. My husband has been working and I have been staying at home. This was never a plan for my life. It always made me angry to think that I might by chance turn out to be one of those "housewives" (a word that I loathe) that stays home and acts very domestic while her husband goes out into the world and succeeds. But here I am. --Don't think that I'm dissappointed though because it isn't what you think. Well, it sort of is, but wait and find out why it's been worth it.

In the first place, I'm self-employed, and while the business has yet to really take off it has some definite potential. I get to do what I want when I want in that respect and if you're going to work that's really the best way to do it as far as I'm concerned.

In the second place, I have time. I've been to interview after interview "trying" to obtain a job that would put me right in the center of all the corporate goings on but found upon retrospect that I (at least I think I have) have sabotaged myself into never getting the job and as a result have had to find better things to do than waste my hours trying to rat myself away. --(you know --the rat race)

And now (having skipped right to it) we come to the meat of it all: Today's bit knowledge:
I was reading my bible today (which i don't do --if you knew me you would know that i do not consider myself a christian and haven't for many years, but i happened to come across one of those daily reading editions that i had from my childhood when i was forced to go to church and set about reading todays entry just for the heck of it) and found a proverb --

Proverbs 11:16-17
Honor goes to kind and gracious women, mere money to cruel men. Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel.

So maybe this: And I hesitate to even write this because of the way it is likely to be misinterpreted and used to the wrong advantage. --Men are not the winners, and those women who wile away the hours watching soaps or even responsibly towing their kids around to football, soccer what have you game after game teaching them to get along in this society (read: travesty) are wasting their valuable valuable time. (Or vicey versey --in those very few and far between cases) The buddhists say (and I am of course paraphrasing) that everything you need to know can be learned without ever leaving your home. To be spiritual...to commune with the spiritual (ie the children) that is the essence of life. ---Some men (the misinformed ones) will of course read this and go about proclaiming --See See --i told you so its in the bible, women should stay home. But that is not what i said and those are not the ones who really see. They think themselves the winners, the superior, the controllers, the trappers of women ---but they (in this capactity) --are simply the grunts. The tedious is left to the grunt so that the truly important --spiritual, philosophical, life enhancing pursuits can be done by those that would do it. If you ask me, though, nobody should go to work, should do the tedious --not work the way it is today. The shallow will respond, without giving it much thought, that one must make a living, but as i say, they haven't given it much thought. There is good work to do in the world and that should be pursued by anyone who finds him/herself called to do it. ...but people should THINK about what they are doing and not waste their precious hours trying to "get ahead." It isn't worth it.

There is so much more to say and so many better ways to say it but I won't waste the space here. E-mail me if you'd like to converse....