Disaster-preparedness/ Xmas card

I. At Work

Opening a box of Xmas donations yesterday,  I laughed to see these cards.  Are they perfect for the mood this season?

Could they be more funereal? There's even weeping willow, popular Victorian symbol of mourning, often on gravestones:

I didn't buy the cards, but if they're still there today, I'm going to.

Today is Hot Lunch Day. I'm taking in two batches of minestrone (vegetables in tomato base w/ spaghetti & cannellini beans)--one with Italian sausage (pork), one without.
One coworker thanked me last week for a vegetarian option. A couple Muslim coworkers don't eat pork, and a couple don't eat any red meat, but I know others love it.
I just use whatever ingredients I get at the food shelf.

Work has been great, but Amina, my replacement, is not keeping up. I worked five hours in BOOK's yesterday and had to leave it looking like this (and this is just one corner):

Amina's a lovely girl (almost twenty), and very smart, but not very physically attuned.
I like her as a person, if not as a coworker.
She's from a  Somali family, and she wears a hijab and long brown or black dresses. She's also a fantasy fan, and the other day she was wearing a Star Wars hoodie, with the hood pulled up over her headscarf.

"You look like one of the Sand People," I said, "with your hood up."
[Looking them up, I think I meant Jawas?]

Later I thought that might be insulting, and I apologized the next day.
"No, no, I thought it was funny," she said.
_________________________

II. Life During and After Life

Speaking of funereal matters, I want to add to what I wrote yesterday that while I find the story of reincarnation helpful, I take the more Jewishy perspective that we can't know if there's an afterlife, and it doesn't much matter:
What's more important is what we do here, in our life on Earth.

Reincarnation is, for me, a reminder that a person might not be able to do all that much, and that's okay.

My actual beliefs pretty much line up with author Marge Piercy's:

"What you’ve got is what you’ve got. It increases the poignancy.
You’re given a life, you do the best you can, you do what you must do, what’s right for you,
and then you wear out and you’re done."

--From this interesting article-- different Jewish writers and thinkers respond to the question:
"Is There Life After Death? Jewish Thinking on the Afterlife".
(Judaism, as you may know, doesn't take a hard line on the subject.)

Max Brooks, author of a favorite book, World War Z, about zombies--says he's more concerned with Disaster Preparedness in the here-and-now. He says,

"I have no idea if there’s an afterlife. I’d like there to be. I’d like to think that when I said goodbye to my mom, it wasn’t forever.
But how would I know? Because some guy in the desert wrote a book and told me so? I don’t go in for that stuff.

I grew up in California, so it’s all about disaster preparedness for me.
We had earthquake drills; nuclear war drills, because it was the Reagan era; and then we had real disasters, we had fires, we had the Rodney King riots. L. A. was never safe.
And now [2011] it’s even worse—9/11, global warming.
So I took that mindset of disaster preparedness and applied it to a science fiction concept.

Zombie culture has really taken off in the last decade and it’s because of the times we’re living in.
The world hasn’t been this inside-out since the 1970s, and that was the last time zombies were popular."

That was 2011--it hasn't gotten more right-side out since then.

Hm... Disaster Preparedness could make a good zine topic...
Only this year did I procure a first-aid kit, and a length of rope.
I don't know what for, exactly--but rope always comes in handy in disasters, right? For tying up zombies?
Like Michonne, here, in The Walking Dead:

III. Reading

Speaking of books, here's one of my favorite paintings, "The Magdalen Reading", by Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435 (at the Nat'l Gallery, London):

I'd sent the picture of "Durga Slaying the Orange Monster" (posted a couple days ago) to a friend, who thanked me for the detailed explanation I included.

The friend is someone I 'd met years ago at the Catholic Church, and I wrote back saying I needed the explanation of Hindu iconography myself, but neither of us would for, say, this Christian painting, which we can easily read:
To Mary's right dangles a rope of prayer beads.
The jar on the floor must signify the ointment she anointed Jesus' feet with.
I don't know, but I'd guess she's reading the Psalms---at any rate, it must be the Hebrew scriptures.
Her hair is covered modestly, but are the drapes of her skirt rather... fleshy? That fold between her knees? A reminder of her renunciation of her sexual past?

Hm, I know these visual cues mostly from studying art history, but Catholicism fills in the story.
It's funny what you know, what you think you know, what you know you can't know... etc.

Tootle-oo, all. Go forth! Be Prepared!