Like Sands Through the Hourglass, These are the Days of Our Lives

I'm seriously considering enrolling Neo in a home school program for next year. She's been taking placement tests, which is a bit disconcerting to her as she's not testing out as well as she would have expected. (I think she KNOWS the concepts, but is unaware of the vocabulary that goes along with them. Therefore on a "fill in the blank" test, she can't recognize some of the vocabulary linked to the concepts themselves. Ah, well, it will all come out in the wash.) She's an A student in 7th grade math, and this curriculum already warned us that they're about a year ahead of California. She tests as being at the 5th grade level. That stings when you're bright and accomplished. But she's doing well on the language arts stuff. She does know her pronouns, but not any other grammatical rules. Sigh. More to learn.

I think I just hit the wall along with her. Every time we talk about stuff, she's dying to learn more. But there's not much of anything going on for her. I used to worry about her not being social, but she's stepped that up quite a bit too. These pics are from about a month ago. She was so bored in class, she decided to "henna" her hand. I think they're quite cool. She's found a good group of friends, and she meets up with them after school (Finally!) and on weekends. I'm pretty confident that stepping her out of the school environment to kick her brain into gear isn't going to affect those friendships. One of her friends is looking into the program himself as it is.

Up top there is her most recent piece of artwork. These days she's really blowing me out of the water. At the Wondercon a few weekends ago, Dear Butcher bought her a manga graphics program. Currently she takes her pencil sketches and scan them into Photoshop to create images such as this:



With the manga studio program, she can add preloaded textures or tones, and create panels for mange creations. Compare the portrait at the top to the green one here from late last year. She's jumping ahead. Now if she can only learn what the associative property is in math, we'll be all set. (Just kidding.)

In other daily news on the "Kidlet" front. Dear Butcher and I visited an intensive therapeutic educational program run jointly by county mental health and a neighboring school district. There would be professionals working with him, not untrained mommies. There are psychologists right there to help kids when they start rolling out of control. There are four adults for every ten children--very small classes. But then there's some other stuff which is difficult to process. The padded room. The violence of the other children. I dunno. Still churning away on that one. Maybe he really is a candidate for this program. His psychologist recommends it. His psychiatrist recommends against it. Sigh. Thing is, I'm sure I'll never make the right decisions all the time for all my children.

Cult of the Goddess

I don't usually repost my comments on other blogs over here, but in this case, I dunno, I decided to.

Dear Author posted a thread a few days ago which veered off into strange lands of redefining Romance, porn, and the actions of the goddess Aphrodite Porne. Something of a trainwreck. At the very end, I ended up posting this:

Jeez.

As someone who started studying Ancient Greek in tenth grade (age 15) and continued right on through college, studying Plato, Homer, Aristophanes, Herodotus, and various New Testament writers in their original language(s) (Yes, Dears, the languages and vocabulary change throughout time and Homeric Greek is not the same at Attic Greek), can I just say that you are GREATLY misinformed about Aphrodite Porne?

You can create a new mythology for her all you want, and come up with new and intriguing ideas of what sort of love that goddess represented, but you’d have to first understand a whole lot more about the practice of ascribing descriptive epithets to gods and goddesses. Different cults used different names for the same goddess. When the goddess was acting differently, a WHOLE NEW epithet would apply.

Phoebus Apollo from the Homeric epics is NOT the same god as Apherteros Apollo. The god remains the same, his parentage, his symbols and familiars, but his meaning within the culture is totally different.

To link Porne with some odd description of one type of love (as in agape, philia, etc.) is to completely misunderstand how the gods and goddesses operated in Ancient civilizations. But that’s okay. As long as you can “prove” your point.

edited to add: Porne is the epithet which a sect ascribed to Aphrodite. But this does not mean that that particular sect’s view of Aphrodite’s role in Greek society was recognized by the larger Greek community. Sects were in the habit of taking on powerful goddesses to suit their individual needs. The most goddess the largest sector of Attic Greek women routinely prayed to was Hestia, not Aphrodite. Hestia was the goddess of the hearth, virginity, hospitality, and the home; hardly a goddess one would want to tag your aspirations of tipping over the patriarchy onto.

I get a bit tired of people using their own perceptions of the “wise and omniscient” ancient cultures to back up their modern points of view.

I'm sure I sound like a geek, but I just hate the idea of this goddess culture that has sprung up and completely misrepresents the original goddesses and what they stood for, or how they were worshiped or used In The Original Culture. I can put a statue of the Buddha in my living room and burn incense, but this does not make me a Buddhist. Appropriating the sectarian worship of one form of Aphrodite to prove a point shows to me a tremendous disrespect of the people who were worshiping her in the first place.

Carry on.

Hospital visits

Beth wrote a post about her father's death. A funeral on a leap year.

And looking over her posts, I'd love to comment there, to say, "I know," and "That shock is so unique that no one else will ever know," and to somehow say, "I'm sorry." But all that would seem trite, a me-too comment, and Beth, ever-wise, has turned off her comments.

When Joyce was getting chemo, she asked me not to visit her in the hospital. She only wanted to see me at the farm, because everything she experienced in the hospital was too disgusting and painful to bring home. So I didn't.

At the end there, when she went into ICU for broken ribs, I stayed away. The cancer had sucked the calcium right out of her bones and they shattered while she was vomiting one night into her toilet. Her husband waited four days before taking her in. Her lungs were filling up with fluid and then there was morphine, and soon we knew she was going.

I remember walking into her room to find her all pale on the bed, the IV's and monitor leads snaking around her chest. Her head had been shaved, and it was too big for her shoulders. My extended family was sitting around the bed looking into their laps. I started sniffling, but came to hug her anyway. She said, "Oh no. Not you too."

I have that image in my head, and I knew at that moment that it would be the last time I saw her alive. I knew that she would die within a day. I remember thinking, "Now I know what an almost dead person looks like."

The next day I traveled on the T from Huntington Street to Charles Street through the Park Street station to visit her. That morning my mother had called to say she was still alive, but I started crying on that trip because I knew she would be dead when I got to Mass General. That poor man sitting next to me on the Red Line. I tried to keep my face to the window so he wouldn't have to be embarrassed by my tears and puffy face. But really, that poor guy. I was already crying on the platform at Park Street. Idiotic, really.

For all that I knew she was going, it was somehow still a surprise that she actually died. She wasn't supposed to do that.

I had a full year to prepare for her death. It was not like Beth's dad, who left them in a sudden shock. Mine was different. But somehow, I still don't know why, I was absolutely shocked that she died. Gut-kicking doesn't begin to describe it. But I had preparation, so it's not the same as Beth, so it's not fair to leave a me-too comment there.

Beth is ever wise. Don't mean to trivialize. But I know what she knows.