Cornucopia

Pink Abundance

RantWoman,, PLEASE, no more metaphors. No more Moments of Massive Personal Significance boiled into a few elliptical words.

 

Not even if there is a cornucopia of gratitudes involved?

 

RANTWOMAN!

 

Really! RantWoman wants to acknowledge just a cornucopia of gratitudes. RantWoman acknowledges in advance that she is feeling a little sarcastic and charm-challenged. RantWoman thinks such states of mind can in fact make for interesting holiday conversations even when there is high risk that people will just choke on their cranberries.

 

RantWoman, NO CHOKING!

 

Metaphors

Um, sorry. RantWoman is a woman of great faith. RantWoman knows some people can handle metaphors much more adeptly than others and RantWoman dares to think that the metaphor over endowed can coexist blessedly with the metaphor challenged  RantWoman will chime in with one of her standard issue messages: it is glorious to worship together across differences. The message gets dressed up under a BUNCH of different stories, and RantWoman is probably too charm-challenged right now to see whether she can evoke enough questions to help anyone arrive at that or at RantWoman’s other most common message. Maybe the other message will tumble out in the rest of the words here. Maybe.

 

Story 1: the flag.

Not the flags on pointed sticks from a demonstration and some other adrenalin junkie protest moments from RantWoman’s youth, on RantWoman’s mind, thank you oh great Orange One and your view of the INF treaty.

 

This flag is more recent. Once upon a time at a blindness convention a couple years ago, it was time to open the first plenary with the customary color guard and presentation of the flag.  RantWoman sometimes suffers great conniptions of ambivalence toward the country, allergy to idolatry, and fervent passion for freedom of religion when faced with this ritual. This time, though, there was …no…flag.

 

RantWoman was not in charge of arrangements. Apparently someone looked high and low. Remember, it was a blindness convention. Looking high and low probably had limited utility. Finally, the presiding generator of women’s restroom consternation suggested that everyone should just imagine a giant Stars and Stripes strung across the wall at the front of the room. Everyone imagined. Every duly pledged allegiance and the day went forward, at least far enough for the next round of restroom chatter: “That was RUDE.” “How insensitive!”

 

The Cornucopia

But back to the cornucopia, as in images on the internet. RantWoman has been messaround with images and tactile graphics software and testing what kind of images reproduce well enough for someone to feel the right level of detail and identify what is in the image. Lately it has occurred to RantWoman that she could skip the internet searches for full-color images and just look for line drawings. Sigh. RantWoman has found many images DESIGNED to be printed out for coloring. However the images are NOT in a format that can be loaded into the tactile graphics software for kids who color differently. Sigh. Whine. Moan.

 

 

Not that standard-issue bright colored fruits and pumpkins are exactly the cornucopia on RantWoman’s mind. RantWoman’s mental cornucopia right now is running heavily toward overripe persimmons drawing raccoons, dinged zucchini threatening to drown the display, and incompletely pollinated stalks of corn. Hence the cornucopia label.

 

And if the cornucopia images accidentally look like the joyous Christmas cactuses of various Quaker Plant Exchange provenance instead of like half-composted harvest, I say turn the compost over again and run with the blossoms.

 

 

 

 

white abundacne

God is in the phenomenology

God is in the phenomenology

 

RantWoman offers the following souvenir moments from today’s excursions around Planet RantWoman:

 

“…communication….30 years…” implying on Planet RantWoman, RantWoman is not sure what.

 

Have you visited the part where RantWoman gets to untangle the unholy creole generated when bad Russian <> English phrasebook interacts with ASL syntax?

 

Or the part where the interpreting client has suffered a stroke and timelines are not linear and RantWoman’s task is to render what is said and let the listeners form their own conclusions about what to ask if clarification is needed.

 

Or the part where RantWoman gets to filter the mistakes many native Spanish speakers make in English and file with the helpfully supplied info that the speaker also suffers a brain injury.

 

Or the cycles where Biblical interpretation gets mixed in with what comes and goes as meanings cross different language boundaries?

 

Or maybe the part where RantWoman previously has erupted ferociously about incredibly sloppy use of mental health terminology in a conflict resolution context where, quaintly, RantWoman thinks other vocabulary should work JUST FINE and RantWoman is HAPPY to contribute further thoughts about “could we please try…?”

 

RantWoman! Most of us need to stick with English. (Why is that so hard for you?!?!?) and NO, we are not guaranteed to be interested in all the places your Excessively Plain English to Quakerese is short-circuiting.

 

No? Could you MAYBE please just try to appreciate the phenomenology.

 

RantWoman, WTF is phenomenology????

 

GOOGLE IT. Meanwhile some more examples, with content not just language.

 

Old friend to RantWoman about a mutual friend not a native English speaker who uttered something in perfect idiomatic English: “RantWoman, how does he DO that?” He’s an actor trying out lines. Why don’t you ask him what that line means to him?

 

Same old friend as above as this odd gift: RantWoman’s first reaction many times: ”Old Friend is just flipping out like he sometimes does.” However a time or two recently, Old Friend has just blurted out something where RantWoman has been able to say “Oh thank you. I had no idea what I said was coming across that way. Here is what I really meant.”

 

Different Friend recently opened a conversation about a RantWoman email by first needing to tell RantWoman about the friend’s experience with numbers. RantWoman does not necessarily have the right credentials to call something synesthesia, but thank you Wikipedia, thinking of numbers as people sounds to RantWoman like a case of synesthesia. The friend says this works fine for addition and subtraction but not for multiplication and division. Here RantWoman tried with no success to explain what she found so cool when she figured out fractions.  Friend then explained how useful it had been to have a dyslexic math teacher used to having to think about many things along multiple pathways. RantWoman means to interrogate this experience some more at some point, but in the moment RantWoman just kept thinking “Why do you need to tell me about your synesthesia issues with numbers when there were no numbers at all in the email you are calling about?”

 

What WAS the problem from the email? It turns out that people at Meeting are not the only people who get emails where RantWoman makes giant leaps over chasms of meaning without really specifying how she has gotten from point A to point B.

 

Ohhhh! Clarification easily (or sometimes not so easily) forthcoming. THANK YOU FOR ASKING.

 

 

Discomfort, delivered via gigantic gratitude.

Attention Readers

 

Spoiler Alert: this blog post brought to you with DEEP #gratitude for a marriage of Adobe products and various approaches to screen reader accessibility with special appreciation for links from a table of contents to articles and links back to the Table of contents in the latest electronic issue of Western Friend.  These links require some extra effort for editor Mary Klein and rantWoman deeply appreciates the effort. Those of you who only read Quaker publications for occasional invitations into esoteric meditations on our various content presentation / publication of Truth technologies are invited to skip to the Technical minutia heading.

 

What? You looked and there is no Technical minutia heading? I am sure there is a technical minutia heading. It is near the bottom. I am sure of it.

 

But first a special announcement: This blog will be taking a break from augmenting and documenting massive interpersonal consternation and praying for paths through. Please welcome both a moment of #gratitude and a technological “what the HELL?” No, you may not have the gratitude without the technological WTF. They are a package. You have won today’s daily blindness tourism lottery.

 

What? You think Quakers do not do games of Chance? You think you forgot to buy a ticket?  You feel like you have come home with someone else’s laundry and are wondering how the heck this lottery applies to YOU.

 

Does it help to think of God grabbing someone by the fingers and emailing YOU, maybe emailing YOU along with a bunch of people you daintily might rather not email with? On Planet RantWoman God not only is like that, God reminds people regularly that there are many other modes of divine presence besides “God as Personal Butler.” God frequently convinces RantWoman of the value of shared conversation, of specific contributions possible from everyone invited into the sacred space of electronic conversation or electronic conversation spilling over onto phone or live conversation. And we will not even discuss highly intrusive manifestations of the divine such as winter storms, volcanic eruptions, floods and even honking cars and bus born anthropology projects.

 

For now, consider something a bit gentler, this wonderful quote from an article called The Strengthening Power of Discomfort by Christine Betz Hall in the November December 2018 issue Western Friend:

A friend of mine bicycled 2,700 miles this summer along the Continental Divide. In an article she wrote for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner (8/12/2018), she said,“When doing endurance races, I have a question I ask myself when I want to quit: ‘Am I in danger or just uncomfortable?’ If I’m just uncomfortable, I tell myself to keep going. Things will get better. And they usually do.”

 

 

My friend’s observation about the positive role that discomfort can play in athletics is similar to observationsI have made in my work with participants in the Way of the Spirit program, which I direct. Learning to benefit from discomfort is an important aspect of spiritual growth.

 

I am a complete and enthusiastic cheerleader

for spiritual discomfort.

 

I am a complete and enthusiastic cheerleader for spiritual discomfort – especially the discomfort that comes from engaging in non-dangerous “stretches” with others that reach across faith divisions, from exploring our different from discomfort is an important aspect of spiritual growth. I am a complete and enthusiastic cheerleader for spiritual discomfort – especially the discomfort that comes from engaging in non-dangerous “stretches” with others that reach across faith divisions, from exploring our different experiences of the Life and Power of the Holy.

 

Back to Planet RantWoman and today’s excellent high quality blindness tourism excursion. What ? You think you did not choose to be here? You clicked on the link. Or your came to worship. Or God plonked you in the vicinity of RantWoman!

 

RantWoman understands that many of you are already in PAIN and complaining mightily about being dragged along on this excursion. RantWoman cannot guarantee a pain-free journey. This corner of Planet RantWoman is long and rocky, sometimes a long cavern full of bat guano, dripping stalactites, weird lighting, rocky treacherous paths. RantWoman does NOT intentionally inflict pain, but RantWoman does believe in gravity, in physics, in sometimes things happen. RantWoman thinks she has been TRYING to offer suggestions to minimize discomfort, but it is possible Planet RantWoman needs to try something different with the Communications director.

 

The RantWoman office of blindness tourism also has a customer service division, albeit a sort of erratic and unreliable customer service office. RantWoman is sorry but the blindness tourism customer service is not very good at detecting pain if people do not speak up in their own words. RantWoman had to remind herself of this recently and did speak up and received an adequate apology. Alas RantWoman also feels she is OWED some apologies. RantWoman thinks she is owed some apologies by people who keep discounting RantWoman’s experience and jumping up and down on things RantWoman has already, she thinks multiple times tried to make clear. But RantWoman digresses to the realms of other excursions in the Blindness tourism catalog.

 

The Blindness Tourism Customer Service office is also really bad at dealing with secondhand PAIN. RantWoman is so bad at dealing with secondhand PAIN that she is about to tell anyone who brings secondhand pain on someone else’s behalf that RantWoman needs to hear directly from the individual in pain. RantWoman things the bringers of secondhand pain may have a valuable role as spiritual accompaniment while pain is discussed, but RantWoman is no longer going to interact with secondhand pain.

 

Technological esoterica

[Planet RantWoman has been known occasionally to joke. At the beginning of this post, RantWoman promised a different heading, Technical minutia. The heading delivered above is Technical Esoterica. This kind of text shift happens all the time in the world of accessibility. Developers mean to be consistent, but they do not always manage and it helps to plan on a little guesswork sometimes.]

Planet RantWoman sightseeing may include collision with a number of different technologies. RantWoman has done tech support for decades on a number of different platforms. Tech support requires precise descriptions of the technologies and behaviors involved. Planet RantWoman technological excursions may get boring. But they are part of the experience customers have bought into. Tonight’s offerings:

 

1. RantWoman received the Western Friend issue as an attachment in Gmail. This is GREAT because  in windows 10, IE 11, JAWS 2018 (are readers bored yet?) using the Gmail view as HTML option, all the articles have their own links and RantWoman was able to send her screen reader straight to the article she wanted to reread. Less time getting to the content one is interested means MORE time for tending the substance of one’s Light.  Not like RantWoman would benefit from, say, time with an editor or anything like that.
    
2. RantWoman was able to find the Western Friend email attachment on her Android Phone. RantWoman tried to read it with either Drive PDF viewer or with Acrobat. Both produced unsatisfactory results RantWoman is not going to troubleshoot.
    
3. RantWoman also downloaded the PDF from the Western Friend website both to her phone and to her Windows machine. Something is imperfect on both platforms, but RantWoman needs to stop for now.
    

The short version, despite #a11y (electronic accessibility) imperfections on several paths and having to go through many steps other people never think about, RantWoman has been able to read the whole issue of Western Friend and then navigate around enough to go back to one article without rereading the whole issue. RantWoman is VERY grateful.

Now Readers, please read the rest of the article about discomfort. Read the other articles too if led. Andp please consider this exhortation an invitation to live conversation.

 

In Light and faithfulness.

 

RantWoman

 

What to say?

Excerpt from one email thread.

 

“Friend, RantWoman does not want so many reasons to think you are an idiot!”

 

Thought question: Does RantWoman actually think this Friend is an idiot????

 

Spoiler alert: despite EVERYONE else’s interpretations, NO!  RantWoman sincerely apologizes.

 

This Friend seems to be a very smart techie and one who at least thinks of himself as having better than average people skills. RantWoman cannot evaluate actual workplace performance but DID recently send a business-themed question as one possible path past stuck points. For now, as much of RantWoman’s opinion as can be blogged of without mentioning questions which arose in a workplace context.

 

Cue digressions! Friend does not work for Google, but Google news is sufficient metaphor{:  Carly Fiorina’s experience about being taken seriously or not,  Google Dude’s MANifesto, the latest on Google and Sexual harassment, RantWoman’s meditations on women in tech, middle aged workers and millennials, inclusive workplaces, the podcast Battle tactics for your Sexist Workplace, the Star Trek Next Generation episode where the Alien of the Week can only speak in metaphors, oh, and a musical threesome with Hector Villa Lobos, Astor Piazolo, and Richard Wagner as performed on classical guitar.

 

RantWoman, the NOT idiot? And not the Dostoevsky one!

 

If RantWoman had the SLIGHTEST desire, RantWoman would not have to look very far for reasons to consider this Friend an idiot. But RantWoman tries to add up data in different slices.

 

 

Consider a slightly edited example of a gratitude RantWoman expressed recently in reference to life in Meeting:

 

 It has taken YEARS but one person in a key role has evolved. There was one moment in a meeting where Friend spectacularly missed the point about accessibility. This Friend used to try to fit phone conversations into late evening juggling with dinner with spouse. Then he needed to be texted multiple times in a week to get to one phone call. Then he graduated to evening phone calls on the Saturday night before business meeting. Then there was a months long dance trying to schedule a meeting. The Friend did not either read his email or consult his calendar and the meeting had to be rescheduled. And then other dramas and fiascoes ensued with another person part of the meeting. But FINALLY in recent months, this Friend has actually shown up IN PERSON to TWO meetings. For which as a first step, RantWoman wants to express UNDYING gratitude.

 

Please forgive RantWoman for unrealistic expectations about communications subtlety, poorly calibrated sarcasm filter, underdeveloped suck up reflex, malfunctioning Excessively Plain English to Quakeres translator, and assorted other interpersonal sins. RantWoman is trying to be faithful to her Light as kindly as possible. As kindly as possible? Yes, reality is pretty scary. RantWoman is sorry; for now that is the best she can do.

 

Further Light: RantWoman actually has a sense of this Friend needing HELP, but RantWoman is unclear how to cause that to occur. RantWoman thinks teamwork is on point somehow, but RantWoman is a slow learner about Teamwork. RantWoman keeps expressing the thought that dads are pretty important. Then RantWoman again trips over her own father issues and has NO further Light about how to tend the fathers concern in general.

 

Please hold the whole circus in the Light.

 

In Light and Faithfulness.

Beads. Blind spots. Adults

RantWoman has been sitting with meditations the nature of vocal ministry and Friends’ expectationws of same, including feedback RantWoman has heard. RantWoman has also been considering the nature of ministry during the two weeks of the Brett Kavanagh confirmation process. The following is RantWoman’s experience. Others’ mileage may vary. In fact, far from being distressed by others’ points of view about a given week’s worship, RantWoman is sometimes very grateful and intrigued to see something from a different perspective.

 

Week 1.

Settle into worship. Wonder how many people in the room are triggered out of their minds. Settle.

 

Nature Just Wow Friend. male: “I was out in the woods and looked up at the stars. Just Wow!”

 

Glad I Am Here Friend, who has another nom de blog: long windy maybe dream sequence message making RantWoman wonder repeatedly where his message is headed. Then winding up, I come into a circle and isn’t it wonderful we are all here?”

 

(Um, Guys, there is a room full of women who, I am guessing, would be thrilled to hear the voices of guys who get it, but okay…)

 

More silence.

 

Three messages from women: as RantWoman heard them

 

--“small shifts in how we view situations can make a big difference.”

 

--Small things add up to big things.

 

(Somewhere RantWoman fell asleep briefly. Sigh)

 

--RantWoman: a message about 5 beads to string together. RamtWoman now has no memory of exactly what the 5 beads were but does recall that they would not obviously fit together and at least one of them contained allusions to World Events.

 

Close worship.

 

During joys and concerns, Young Adult Friend:

“Does anyone know where I can go to express Grief and Rage?”

 

Feedback to RantWoman:

 

Friend 1: Thank you for the 5 beads.

 

Friend 2, the next day: “I don’t like your 5 beads.”

 

RantWoman to herself: ” You don’t like? Take it up with God!  Or as Buddhist Friends would say, what is that reaction trying to teach you? “ RantWoman is grateful for the conversation that followed even though things got pretty testy on both sides. RantWoman invites Friend of the Small Changes in Outlook above to meditate upon her views of RantWoman’s blog with that thought in mind.

 

The following week, definitely not saving Grief and Rage for Joys and Concerns

 

(All meeting long, RantWoman meditations about Ivy League university students, drunken irresponsible behavior, behavior, the academic provenance of Supreme Court judges. For the record, RantWoman and3 sitting judges all attended the same university and RantWoman’s time on campus overlapped with the career of one of them.)

 

First out of the block, Grief and Rage. RantWoman apologizes for not being able to be more specific but it was stirring and real.

 

Message about raising better boys and smarter girls

 

Message about local politician dislodged due to allegations of a drunken groping of some kind.

 

(RantWoman thinks there were some other messages but in her self-absorbed fog has wiped them from accessible memory.)

 

Silence: the hour is ending but the children have not yet joined adult worship.

 

RantWoman rises to speak. RantWoman speaks of:

 

--underage drinking among overprivileged youth and among youth in general.

 

--“A sense of I do not know…”  about many things, whether things will be as bad as they are being painted…

--the academic provenance of the Supreme court, geographic diversity or lack thereof on the Supreme  Court, college political activism while one Justice was in the student government. 

 

--the evolution of many things to do with women’s representation in academia

 

--bomb threats when organizing events about the Middle east and an implied thought that Quakers taking an hour and a half to figure out how to pray seemed preferable.

 

Yes, OF COURSE it was going to be a crap shoot to see whether it would all hang together, but Fear Not! God intervened?

 

RantWoman had heard kid noise but then not heard it. That is the children are doing a nice job of gathering in quiet before they enter worship. Okay, some of them get squirmy as soon as they enter but this time, Interrupting Friend growled at RantWoman that he saw the adult across the room checking while children were waiting.

 

Adult? RantWoman has no idea that an adult checks because she cannot see across the room.

 

Furthermore, if the point of asking children to wait is not to interrupt messages, RantWoman felt clear to tell Interrupting Friend  in email while asking others in email to uphold the exchange, that she considered his interruption RUDE. RantWoman also asked whether the problem was that he did not like or understand the message.

 

Interrupting Friend assured RantWoman he had a message from God. RantWoman is not in a position to evaluate. If a Friend says the message they receive is from God, RantWoman, unlike someone else in her email stream,would never presume to disagree. God appearing RUDE is not out of the realm of possibility for RantWoman and RantWoman also recalls that the faith tradition was founded by someone known for capacity in others’ churches to be RUDE for hours at a time.

 

Back to the Children.

 

Another Friend chimed in that waiting to enter was a pain. Sorry. RantWoman is an oldest child. Children get to wait sometimes. Cope!

 

Then God sent a message to RantWoman, “WAIT JUST A MINUTE!”

 

Is RantWoman the only person it is not RUDE to interrupt????

 

It is not rude to interrupt RantWoman because:

 

--one does not like or understand the message, a possible interpretation still stuck in RantWoman’s head?

 

--because our children want to enter…?

 

What the hell kind of example does THAT set for children?

 

RantWoman was a nerdy kid. RantWoman liked the part in the New Testament about “let the children come” because adults were often much more interesting than other children. This includes going to worship, though that also came with psychodrama.

 

RantWoman likes Quakers because of ASKING children about their experiences and taking their experience seriously.  RantWoman wants to know children might be wanting to enter even if she is speaking. RantWoman is interested in knowing whether kids think yet about offering messages.

 

 RantWoman does not want to undo months of work about learning to enter worship gently.  RantWoman is not clear there should be different rules for RantWoman than for other people. RantWoman generally does find interruptions RUDE and the process of being faithful to a message is challenging enough without interruptions. But RantWoman would like the possibility of a way to stop, breathe, invite the children to enter and then resume the message.

 

And right now RantWoman has no freaking idea how to accomplish this. RantWoman for many reasons is not automatically easy with phone conversations.

 

A key point of contact has TOLD RantWoman that all of RantWoman’s email goes to spam. RantWoman’s Excessively Plain English to Quakerese filter melts about this point, but it comes on the heels of over a year of colossally missing the point about the accessibility aspects of conference calls, alternately demanding to meet in person and then not being able to find time in a busy schedule and then multiple other fiascoes including a terminology flipout documented somewhere in these here hallowed electronic emanations.

 

In other words, there is room for many of us to…g.g.grow!

 

For now, please just hold this whole circus in the Light.

 

 

Predictable? Whiny? Memorial, in EXTREMELY tiny print.

Is RantWoman going to be too predictable?






How many accessibility issues is RantWoman likely to be tempted to have a tirade about?


RantWoman could consider the possibility that this handout was created by grievintg family. Even so, a large percentage of those in attendance at the memorial mentioned were in the same age bracket as the deceased Friend and might well have found teeny tiny print on a quarter sheet handout as inaccessible and annoying as RantWoman does.

Photo of handout in teeny tiny print
created for a recent memorial