18th Birthday! /Atoms & Other Trinkets

Today is the eighteenth birthday of this blog! 
I've left the address the same, but this morning I changed the name "noodletoon" back to its original l'astronave. That's "starship" in Italian. 

I chose the name in 2007 (!) for Star Trek's l'astronave Enterprise, but also for the Earth in space, and us on the planet--in our "ten fingered space suits" as Ram Dass said.

As I get older, this vision of existence means more to me:
that we are blips of carbon with consciousness riding on a rock in space FOR A MOMENT... 

Though hopefully I'll last a couple more decades, this spacesuit's life-support systems are getting old. I can tell my physical ride is starting to run down. 
But other systems have come online...

 No great claims . . . but I do notice some wisdom I didn't have before. Mostly, I have an ability to stand back, sometimes, just a little, and to observe myself and others with some dispassion.
Only some!
Only sometimes!

Or, maybe it's that I'm able to do that--get perspective--sooner than I was before.
I think that's it---I have seen this movie before. 

What role does blogging play?
It's a mirror, a record--of things I have done, and things I have failed to do.

I think of this graph often. It's like a picture of my philosophy/theology: 
We can only see a tiny range of light waves. Similarly, we can barely sense the repercussions of things we have done (or not done). 
But, we develop other tools to sense them. To study the effects of gamma rays on man-in-the-mood marigolds.* (Remember that book (play) by Paul Zindel? I read it in high school.)


One thing I see in blogging is how I am not less-reactive than I ever was! 
Ha. Not at all.
I did all this flip-flopping of blog-addresses in order to shake off some commenters I could not stand. 

I see plenty of other bloggers blithely tolerate inane comments--even welcome them!
 But I still see red when I think of comments that annoyed me the most.

And it's funny---one I felt "hottest" about is really lukewarm-- even benign:
 In the midst of my agonizing over my city coming apart after the police murdered George Floyd, someone I barely knew (I've even forgotten who!) commented,

"Remember, most people mean well."

It was clearly meant to be comforting, I can see that.
Couldn't I take it as that?
Guess not!

To me, it represented a kind of pop psychology that papers over the intensity of life, that says, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
I don't mean the commenter was such a person. 
(I have no idea!)
But the timing was terrible.

People "meaning well" doesn't help when people around you are acting like monsters, when the man behind the curtain is Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck.
And,
when you're maybe even feeling your own ability to be monstrous.

Good intentions aren't meaningless--intentions can set a course--but it's if and how I practice putting them out into the world that matters. 

So, that's one vision the blog mirror shows--what I have "failed to do". No big deal--we fail every day--and what's helpful is not to judge it, but to see it, clearly:

"Huh, that seems to be the material, the system, I am working with at this time. Let's see if I can tweak this reaction so it's not eroding the seals on my space suit!"

The blog also shows some things I've done shimmering in gold.
Sometimes I'll browse through old posts, see something, and think,
"But, this is exactly who I want to be."

And I was! 
For a moment, anyway, and that's lovely to see. Not a place to stop, but an encouragment to go on....

To hang on. It's a wild ride on this starship Earth!

Statistically speaking, I have around another 18 years until I use up my life-expectancy... 
I hope I do and that I can keep blogging through it.
________________

II. Movie Tie-In Toys

Yesterday I asked Sander (Hannukah coworker) what a couple plastic animals were. I think there were meant to be bears, but were more like... prehistoric sloths?

He held them a moment and said, 
"Rodents of Unusual Size."

That's a reference to a movie--can you name it?
And the others? Turtle Diary (well, that's obvious);
 and, does everyone know "I want to be a dentist"? 
I'll put the answers in the comments.

BELOW: I've saved these toys to live in my housewares work area. 
That's an Infant of Prague (baby Jesus) in the box, and St. Francis with the skull. 

My favorite is the papier-mache woman with the pin-cushion hat.
 A search says she's mid-century, made by Italian-born Gemma Taccogna (1923–2007) of US and Mexico. (It sells for an average of $35.)

The rabbit on the bottom shelf is knitting ^ --but its wind-up mechanism is broken.

Below: Gemma Taccogna with one of her hat stands, from an online gallery of her work.  

_____________________

* Monologue from The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, by Paul Zindel (1965).
I'd totally forgotten this till I went browsing on the internet just now, but it's probably the first time I encountered the fact that we are made of stars:

Tillie: He [her high school science teacher] told me to look at my hand, for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine. This part of me was formed from a tongue of fire that screamed through the heavens until there was our sun. And this part of me
–
this tiny part of me
–
was on the sun when it itself exploded and whirled in a great
storm until the planets came to be.
And this small part of me was then a whisper of the Earth. When there was life, perhaps this part of me got lost in a fern that was crushed and covered until it was coal. And then it was a diamond millions of years later
–
it must have been a diamond as beautiful as the star from which it had first come.
Or perhaps this part of me became lost in a terrible beast, or became part of a huge bird that flew above the primeval swamps.
And he said this thing was so small
–
this part of me was so small it couldn’t be seen
–
but it was there from the beginning of the world.
And he called this bit of me an atom. And when wrote the word, I fell in love with it. 

Atom
Atom
What a beautiful word. 
___________________

[end of monologue from The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds]