Independence of a sort

RantWoman's Meeting has a practice of cycling through the queries in NPYM Faith and Practice on a more or less annual cycle. RantWoman basically likes the practice of intentionally revisiting all the associated life themes. However, RantWoman sometimes becomes annoyed that the particular cycling practice tends to put the same themes in the same months. RantWoman's experience is that people need to attend to these themes on individualized schedules.

For instance July, aside from being RantWoman's birth month is a time when RantWoman tends to need to attend to memories of lots of deaths.

Today, in addition to a shoutout for everyone working all or part of the holiday, a shoutout to some sibling urchins who spent a couple Fourths of July hawking helium balloons at longago Symphony concerts, it is time again to remember RantWoman's friend who declared his independence of this world 20 years ago on the Fourth of July

http://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2009/10/varlam-robo-fag-and-doctors.html

The actual departure was, um, kind of an anticlimactic fizzle. On his way there, RantWoman's friend

--loved learning languages, birdwatching, and creating fantasy baseball teams based on his ratings of the players' physical attractiveness

--served enthusiastically as Seeing Eye Faggot to help a blind friend scope out suitable dates. RantWoman is perfectly well aware that, as a feminist and spiritually oriented person, she is supposed to object vigorously to all this abject objectification of people based only on appearance. Alas, most of the time, this blatant and shameless cruising was so hard to take seriously, so ineffectual as a relationship strategy for either the blind half or the sighted half of the game, that RantWoman really could not bring herself to do more than laugh, occasionally very hard.
Because this friend was about to receive a public service award for his AIDS education work when he decamped to other realms, RantWoman fielded a call from the newspaper. The newspaper wanted to know whether it was okay to print this friend's scathing opinion of the AIDS quilt. RantWoman, never one to sugarcoat or play very nuanced spin doctor, said that would be fine but also assured the reporter that her personal opinion is that the AIDS quilt is for the living and that people make all kinds of things of different memorials

RantWoman was determined that this friend have some Jewish pallbearers; it just happened that all his Jewish friends that RantWoman knew of were all women. RantWoman found 3 men and all three women were unfailingly honored to be asked.

RantWoman thanks this friend's father for teaching her the custom of sitting Shiva after a death. RantWoman apologizes to Jews everywhere who might be appalled that RantWoman once recently decided that sitting Shiva was exactly the ministry needed for two friends grieving a deceased German shepherd.

There! Now that RantWoman has gotten some needful memorial meanderings out of her system, here's wishing everyone a safe, festive Fourth of July!