Katdish.net

image courtesy of photo bucket.com

The days preceding to start of a new year prompt many of us to reflect upon what has transpired over the past year and resolve to make some positive changes in the new one. Whether it’s relational: Spend more time with family and friends, career oriented: Get a better job or a promotion, financial: Get out of debt and save more towards retirement or physical: Lose weight, eat healthier, quit smoking, exercise, most of us make New Years Resolutions, or at least have made them at some point in our lives.

I stopped making New Years resolutions a few years ago. It’s not that I don’t have goals or things I wish to accomplish. I just got tired of being a constant disappointment to myself. Once I made a resolution, I would subconsciously begin to sabotage my own efforts because apparently, no one is the boss of me. Not even me. In other words, I don’t like ultimatums. If I tell myself I have to do something, I don’t want to do it.

Maybe everyone’s a little crazy like that and I’ve just been around long enough to realize setting pie-in-the-sky aspirations for oneself often leads to disappointment.

This is typically not the case for young people. Take my 16 year old son for example. He has his whole life ahead of him with plenty of time to accomplish great things. As a bonus, he has the added confidence (cockiness) born of not having experienced many of the bone-crushing disappointments that time spent on this earth tends to bring.

This past Sunday at church, we were encouraged to write down some of our resolutions for 2014. My bulletin remained blank save for the anime doodles done by my daughter.

But my son? He had some impressive goals for the coming year:

Keep climbing (towards) your potential.
I should probably mention here that my son plays high school football. In Texas. I’m sure he’s heard a thing or two from coaches about reaching his potential.

Never compromise your integrity.
I love this one. Kids these days have ample opportunity to make bad decisions, but he’s never been one to go along to get along.

Accept that A is A.
Okay, I had to Google that one. “A is A” refers to Aristotle’s Law of Identity which states:

Everything that exists has a specific nature. Each entity exists as something in particular and it has characteristics that are a part of what it is. “This leaf is red, solid, dry, rough, and flammable.” “This book is white, and has 312 pages.” “This coin is round, dense, smooth, and has a picture on it.” In all three of these cases we are referring to an entity with a specific identity; the particular type of identity, or the trait discussed, is not important. Their identities include all of their features, not just those mentioned.

Identity is the concept that refers to this aspect of existence; the aspect of existing as something in particular, with specific characteristics. An entity without an identity cannot exist because it would be nothing. To exist is to exist as something, and that means to exist with a particular identity.

To have an identity means to have a single identity; an object cannot have two identities. A tree cannot be a telephone, and a dog cannot be a cat. Each entity exists as something specific, its identity is particular, and it cannot exist as something else. An entity can have more than one characteristic, but any characteristic it has is a part of its identity. A car can be both blue and red, but not at the same time or not in the same respect. Whatever portion is blue cannot be red at the same time, in the same way. Half the car can be red, and the other half blue. But the whole car can’t be both red and blue. These two traits, blue and red, each have single, particular identities.

The concept of identity is important because it makes explicit that reality has a definite nature. Since reality has an identity, it is knowable. Since it exists in a particular way, it has no contradictions.

And for the second time this week I’ve found myself wondering, “Who is this child?” The last time it was a different kid.

Gain 20 to 25 pounds of muscle weight.
Again with the football–Left Offensive Tackle. Yikes! He’s already a beast.

And last, but certainly not least:

Usher in the 2nd Renaissance.
I’m not sure if he means a personal renaissance or if he’s planning to conquer the world in the next twelve months. Maybe a combination of both. Good luck with that.

Lofty goals.

Sort of made me feel like a slacker. I didn’t even come up with one. Oh, I’ve thought of several, but then I shy away from committing to them lest I fall short of the goals I’ve set and feel like a failure.

But if I’m failing at something, at the very least it means I’m working towards something.

And each time I fail, if I pay attention and try to figure out where I went wrong then it’s not complete failure.

It’s incomplete success.

That’s what I’m going with.

So, I’ll share with you all one of my New Years Resolutions:

I’m back to blogging on a regular basis again.

Can you think of anything more incompletely successful than the act of writing?

Yeah, me neither.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Brand new year, same old me. Even though I try not to make new year’s resolutions, I do tend to think about moving forward this time of year. A big part of this thought process involves evaluating what’s not working anymore and what, if anything, I plan to do about it. A logical answer to “What’s not working anymore” would be either fix it or let it go. But we grow comfortable with things, don’t we? Change can be uncomfortable, and when faced with the worked involved with making things right, sometimes we simply choose to do nothing at all.

Take our master bathroom (please–ba-dump-bump!)

No one has used the shower in there for months. It seems there was a crack in tile where the shower door meets the threshold which caused everything to buckle. The end result being that the shower door no longer closes. Fortunately, this is one of three showers in our house, so we’ve been using the shower in the guest bathroom. This was meant to be a temporary solution until we fixed the shower in the master bath, but we’ve since decided to renovate the entire bathroom. Which is great, but now we’re faced with more decisions to make–new cabinets, tub, etc. Like I said, sometimes it seems easier to do nothing because doing something gets overwhelming.

But my husband got the ball rolling last week:

And honestly? Even though I still really like how I’ve decorated the bathroom

I think maybe I like it more for sentimental reasons than practical ones. The faux finish on the walls? I did it myself. Actually, probably one of the first times, if not the first time I’ve done so. The window coverings? My mom sewed them. She also made the bedding and window coverings in the master bedroom, which coordinates with the master bath.

If the bathroom gets redone, so does the bedroom. And even though these rooms have looked like this for 9 years, I’m still having a hard time letting go. Mostly because of the hard work involved in creating these rooms. Not so much mine, but my mom’s. But it’s time to move forward. There’s a loose tile on the tub held up by duct tape. Nothing says “elegant bathroom” like tile held together with duct tape.

And the cabinets have seen better days.

Soon begins the process of moving forward. I anticipate things getting a whole lot messier before the process is complete.

Change is messy sometimes, and almost always pulls us out of our comfort zones.

But I’m anticipating something better and more functional after the chaos.

I’ll let you know.

Got any projects that need starting?

image from multimediaseattle.org

The above photo depicts a brutal form of execution known as necklacing, carried out by forcing a rubber tire, filled with petrol, around a victim’s chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die, suffering severe burns in the process. The practice became a common method of lethal lynching during disturbances in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photojournalist Kevin Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by necklacing in South Africa in the mid-1980s. He later spoke of the images:

“I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”

He went on to say:

“After having seen so many necklacings on the news, it occurs to me that either many others were being performed (off camera as it were) and this was just the tip of the iceberg, or that the presence of the camera completed the last requirement, and acted as a catalyst in this terrible reaction. The strong message that was being sent, was only meaningful if it were carried by the media. It was not more about the warning (others) than about causing one person pain. The question that haunts me is ‘would those people have been necklaced, if there was no media coverage?”

(Source: Wikipedia: Necklacing)

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to Sudan. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to an emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. (Source: Wikipedia: Kevin Carter)

image courtesy of photobucket.com

It is unknown what happened to this young girl after this photo was taken. What is widely known is that Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this photograph, presented to him on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University.

On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfontein Spruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. Portions of Carter’s suicide note read:

“I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky.”

This is certainly not a new story, but it’s something that’s been on my heart lately. Photographers, journalists and writers give voice to suffering and chaos. Hopefully in an attempt to draw the world’s attention to it, thereby calling others to action. But in that moment and the moments immediately following, what are they doing about it? Would Kevin Carter be alive today if he had set down that camera and come to the aid of that little girl? Would the darkness have consumed him had he chosen to be a light instead of a neutral observer? I just don’t know.

I’ve said before that one of the occupational hazards of being a writer is that you’re always writing. Every situation becomes a potential story. But I never want to come to a place where what I put on paper becomes more important than inserting myself into the bigger story of life. Especially if by abandoning my mental pen and notebook I might have a hand in changing a tragedy into a happily ever after, or at least an after.

“Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there’s all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.” – Arthur Gordon

“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction” – William Osler