I used to never respond to comments because, well, I had like 3-5 readers and I talked to them on an almost daily basis, so responding to their comments wasn’t really neccessary. Over the past year or so though, my readership has grown a bit and now I find myself regularly getting 10 or more comments a day. I realize on the food chain of blog commenting that puts me somewhere in the vicinity of krill but hey, you take what you can get, right?

So I’ve been getting more comments, which range from sage advise to supportive WOOHOO’s and I’ve been answering them via e-mail, if I feel the need to answer, thank or inform the commentor. Does that mean that I don’t read or care about your comments if I don’t respond? No, not at all. I have a queue of comments sitting in Outlook so that I don’t forget to respond to the commentors. I’ve even been approached for advice on immigrating to Belgium by a couple people through this blog and I’ve done my corresponding with these people via e-mail. I don’t typically answer comments in my own comment section and this is for several reasons:

1. I personally don’t check a person’s comment section after I make a comment so I don’t assume others do either. What’s the point of me answering in a place the commenters might not even check?
2. I like to personalize my responses and sometimes it can get a bit lengthy or personal, so that is done better in an e-mail, in my opinion.
3. Sometimes comments come late. I can have comments show up three days after I post and if I’ve already answered other commentors, I dont want that last person to feel neglected or ignored (Holly is notorious for cluster comments every few days and I can’t stand the thought of the BESTEST person feeling left out of my comment/answer loop).
4. This one might sound harsh, but if I answer other comments in the commonly accepted list of answers in the comment section, that means I have to think of some sort of answer to the WOOHOO brand of comment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as appreciative of a woohoo as I am of any other comment, but those ones are sort of hard to answer…nor is it really neccessary in my opinion, to respond to woohoo. If I leave a woohoo somewhere I don’t expect it to be answered.
5. In my humble opinion, the best way to repay a comment is to visit that person’s blog and comment back on their thoughts and posts. I always visit my commenters blogs and do my best to comment back if they took the trouble to stop by and leave their words for me. I think that is the most equal and pleasing exchange of all; the exchange of words as opposed to thanks.

That being said, I will continue to answer comments through e-mail (but I promise to be more diligent about it) and I will also continue exchanging comments by visting your blog if you stop by (except Carrie and Judie cause they don’t have blogs, but I’ll definitely start e-mailing you guys some responses, sorry if I’ve been a turdburger for not doing so).

I am also going to ask for the answering of my comments by other readers please stop. I’ve been noticing a trend wherein certain readers go so far as to address and answer comments or questions posed by my other readers. In my opinion, if you want to answer the comments you can do so on your own blog and not in my comment section. If you think that certain comments require an answer, chances are that I’ve already done so via e-mail.

Thank you for reading. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

I’ve been doing a lot of link clicking and extra blog reading (outside of the insane amount of blogs already on my reader-note to self: remind self about last note to self to update blogroll) lately and some issues have been coming to the forefront again and again.  Pro choice, failure to conceive, miscarriages, inept mothers-to-be, women and men champing at the bit to be parents and struggling with infertility.  All around me in real life people are getting engaged, getting married, having children.  Every day it feels like I hear about another one of my sorority sisters (yes I was in a sorority in college…I haven’t paid alumni dues in quite sometimes, but I’m still a sister on some level dammit) getting engaged.  My little is getting married in October and I’m not going to be there for it.  One of my good friends/sisters got engaged last month.  At least 3 of my pledge sisters have kids.  I’d be lying if I said that these things don’t bother me.

I know what a lot of you are probably saying: “But you have a wonderful boyfriend and you live in Belgium, for crying out loud! You’ve always wanted to travel and now you’re getting your wish! This should be a dream come true.”

And on many levels it is, it really is something that I always wanted to do and that most people I know will never do.  Do I feel as brave as people keep telling me I am? No, not at all.  I feel lonely a lot and I miss my friends from home.  I never kept in touch while I was there and I’m trying to contact several of them now because I need those people to lean on.  But the shitty thing is, even if I do reestablish my friends in my life, they are all in another time zone.  A 6 hour away time zone and pretty much inaccessible. And I feel far away from them.

I feel like, to them, I’m just some abstract idea of the girl they knew 5 years ago.  I’m just a cold, digital font that flickers on their montior every now and again.  And basically that’s what I am to most of you too.  You’d think that would make it easier to open up some of my darker closets to let the skeletons breather a bit, but it doesn’t.

It makes it one of the hardest things in the world.

Wordless Wednesday

I make it a point not to frequently get political on my blog. There are many relevant issues that I have opinions on but I personally tend to avoid heavily political blogs. They depress me and make me feel helpless and angry. However, I do have very strong feelings towards the current state of the United States and it’s current regime government and if you ever meet me in person, I’d be much more likely to give you an earful than I would on this blog. CB, however, made a request for a Music Monday post and that’s rare so I can go along with it. Especially since I agree with every word of the song.

Let’s Impeach The President - Neil Young

Let’s impeach the President for lying
And misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

Who’s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
They bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let’s impeach the President for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government’s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Flip - Flop
Flip - Flop
Flip - Flop
Flip - Flop

Let’s impeach the president for hijacking
Our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he’s cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lots of people looking at big trouble
But of course our president is clean.

Thank God

me in front of the townhall (you won’t see body shots of me very often, but eh, I’m in a good mood today)

one of the famous canals

street performers

a traditional begijnhof

swans, all over the park

these are thrown right after weddings in the town halls in some cities on Belgium…kind of sad after everyone is gone though

soap cakes in an awesome soap store we found - CB had to hide his wallet

blue and pink hydrangea in the begijnhof garden

traditional candy making…this was black licorice

Yup, after all my nail biting and worrying and crying and apologizing ahead of time for letting CB down (he was not happy that I thought that letting him down was so important…but, well, I’m a giver, what can I say), in the end, after some rigorous studying, I passed! I’m not sure how I did, as grades aren’t posted until Monday, but my teacher was merciful and let me know via e-mail that I had passed.  Really, she was an awesome teacher and I’m bummed that I won’t have her for level 5 (she’ll be teaching for 3 weeks in Indonesia).

So, yeah, I just wanted to say something now since my mom decided to post it on her blog yesterday and I didn’t want anyone that reads us both to think I was holding out on you.

Anyway, CB and I had been planning a daytrip to Vlissingen but it changed to Brugge and I need to go take a shower and get ready.  I’ll post some pictures when we get home.

Have a lovely day everybody!!

all so different
language is the tie that binds
us all together

countries represented: Romania, Iran, France, Indonesia, Malawi, United States, Brazil, Cameroon

]]> http://www.lilacspecs.com/2008/06/27/my-first-time-with-haiku-friday/feed/ http://www.lilacspecs.com/2008/06/25/wordless-wednesday-historia-mundi-or-where-we-were-on-sunday/ http://www.lilacspecs.com/2008/06/25/wordless-wednesday-historia-mundi-or-where-we-were-on-sunday/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:24:30 +0000 Lilacspecs http://www.lilacspecs.com/?p=414 Historia Mundi

More Wordless Wednesdays

So after much debate (I wanted to talk about Paul Revere and CB told me that was boring and then brought up Civil Rights…yeah cause that’s what I want to talk about with a bunch of the Africans in my class that I’m friendly with) I decided on women’s suffrage. Inflammatory to the Africans that I have befriended in class? No. Potentially subtly inflammatory for the group of men from the Middle East who are constantly making disrespectful remarks about women and joking about terrorism and bombs? Could be I suppose, but they haven’t even bothered looking in my general direction since I mentioned being an atheist during a classroom discussion in which a guy from Iran tried to convince me that my “without women there would be no life” statement was false because God created Adam before Eve.

I thought that saying I was an atheist (which I am) was wiser than mentioning I was Jewish but apparently, according to most Muslims, atheists are even worse than Jews (better to believe in the wrong god than none at all). Ever since then a group of 3 Middle Eastern men in my class have been outright ignoring me. I mean the kind of ignoring where they look right through me or start a conversation with the Dentist (in Persian) while we’re standing together and just step in front of me like I’m not there. So did I care if a simple history lesson on suffrage irked those that have chosen to ignore me? Nope.

I kept my presentation simple and factual, with very little opinion and mostly dates and names. It was definitely a little dry, but it gave some information about my country and it was a topical theme. Some other presentations covered things like Dracula, the fall of Tenochtitlan, old marriage traditions in Uganda and sex robots. Some topics were more interesting than others, but all of them were informative and give you some insight into the person talking.

Then, towards the end of class, one of the Middle Eastern guys (the one who wears muscle shirts under his sports coat and tends to have some pretty strong B.O.) gets up for his presentation and writes on the board: “Amerikan heeft seks met autos”. He was referring to this article about some guy in Washington state who apparently has a car fetish. You can read it for yourself, but suffice it to say, the guy is definitely one card short of a deck. The guy presenting decided to summarize the article while constantly saying things like “I think it’s crazy, you think it’s crazy, but yeah, this is how Americans are.” He finished up his presentation by again reiterating how this was the mindset of all Americans. When he had first written the line on the board, my friends glanced towards me to see my reaction, which was simply to sit back in my chair with my hands clasped. I gritted my teeth and was quiet and simply didn’t clap at the end.

Should this bother me? Apparently not, according to my mom and CB and my own common sense. Sticks and stones and all that, right?

Does it bother me? Yes, it fucking bothers me! I’m so sick and tired of always feeling like a target. If it’s not my gender, it’s my weight. If it’s not my weight, it’s my culture. If it’s not my culture, it’s my nationality. If it’s not my nationality, well you fill in the blank. There’s always ALWAYS something that I feel self conscious of or discriminated for. In America it was mostly my weight and sometimes my gender. In Plum or Indiana it was often my religion (or lack thereof). So far here in Belgium, no one has given me shit over my weight (except for myself) or my gender and I really don’t discuss my culture much with anyone so that’s a non issue. Half the people here have no clue about Judaism or the culture behind it, besides the fact that they don’t believe in Jesus and most of them live in Israel. But in this level I’ve been offended by remarks about my gender, culture and now, very blatantly about my nationality.

I hate being the butt of someone’s poorly veiled animosity. Sure, I’m a civilized, educated human being who knows the proper way to handle this sort of insult is to just swallow the vitriol and pretend like it doesn’t bother me, but it DOES bother me. I wanted nothing more than to say something cruel and nasty to this guy. I wanted to spit in his face or insult something important to him. I don’t care what anyone says, it is not more acceptable to pick on the stronger powers over weaker powers. I didn’t choose to be born in America anymore than this guy chose to be born in whichever country he was born in but that doesn’t seem to matter. When he said what he did today, he said it about me. When I hear people criticize the United States, in effect, they’re criticizing me. When I’ve said that in the past, others have told me that that I’m mistaken; that no one is judging my based on the actions of my country, but I saw today, very clearly, that that’s not true.

Plenty of people judge me by the actions of my country and they can’t wait to smile blandly while throwing it in my face.

So last week I gave you a little bit about some of the stereotypes that Flanders has about the Dutch. And sometimes I can agree…I mean, how many giant day-glo floral patterns can a sane person take?

And yeah, the Dutch are a little crazy with their gouda, which would totally be cool if they sold ANY other kind of cheese. But sadly:

As for the cheap thing, well, I’ve yet to witness a miserly Dutchman in person, but I’ll let you know when I do.

But for all those things, the Dutch have some things to say about the Flemish too. One thing they tease about is Belgian brainpower, which I think is absurd but I guess when you speak “official” Dutch and then try communicating in Belgium, the land of a thousand dialects, the locals could be perceived as stupid for not speaking “correctly.” This one is pretty much an acknowledged joke between the two cultures from the secession of Flanders from the United Kingdom of Netherlands during the Belgian Revolution.

Then there is also the perception that Belgians are highly introverted, which, um yeah they are. I have yet to hear anyone say “gezonheid” on the bus when someone sneezes. Small talk in the checkout line? No! Forget it, move along you’re holding up the line and I only have to work 38 hours a week, thank you very much!

But anyway, once I showed you all Anouk, I decided to follow up with a Belgian group (Sarah Bettens has a solo album and I like her that way as well) that I discovered long before CB and I started our relationship, K’s Choice

Not an Addict

Breathe it in and breathe it out
And pass it on, it’s almost out
We’re so creative, so much more
We’re high above but on the floor

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side

The deeper you stick it in your vein
The deeper the thoughts, there’s no more pain
I’m in heaven, I’m a god
I’m everywhere, I feel so hot

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side
I’m not an addict (maybe that’s a lie)

It’s over now, I’m cold, alone
I’m just a person on my own
Nothing means a thing to me
(Nothing means a thing to me)

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side
I’m not an addict (maybe that’s a lie)

Free me, leave me
Watch me as I’m going down
Free me, see me
Look at me, I’m falling and I’m falling.

It is not a habit, it is cool I feel alive I feel…
It is not a habit, it is cool I feel alive

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side
I’m not an addict (maybe that’s a lie)
I’m not an addict…