Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Help Save Zimbabwe (and, On Cheering Up)

Professor Zero, friend of Momo, posted a link to Help Save Zimbabwe, which has a petition to the UN Secretary General you can sign. They also have a place you can donate money.

I'm feeling low today, partly because my ambitions for my next vid are proving way beyond my current skills.
But really, what a luxurious thing to be depressed about!

To a limited extent*, I am a fan of the "it could always be worse" school of cheering-up employed by the boy in My Life as a Dog. He was always trying to feel better about his sad life by thinking of awful things that happened to other people--like someone who was walking across a sports field accidentally getting a javelin through the chest.
The worse the bad examples you need to employ are, the more you know your life is tragic.

Today I do NOT have to compare my life to Zimbabwe to feel lucky.
This is only a "some-people-don't-even-know-how-to-upload-pix-off-their-digital-cameras" day.
Yep, writing that out just perked me up quite a lot.

*(In fact, this "it could be worse" technique really only works for minor, self-indulgent pains.
True sadness and grief need recognition and comfort, such as, say, for lost love, an evening reading Pablo Neruda, weeping, and drinking sangria. Jollying-up of the "get over it" variety is illegal in these cases.)
_____________________

And, here--I can't publish a post without a photo anymore, so here's a photo I'd saved a while back of the grave of Philip Larkin, who cheers us up by reminding us that we are not dead.
He was a rather unpleasant character, but he deserves his epitaph, WRITER, more than most.

Note it's the same one Douglas Adams has on his tombstone. What otherwise entirely different fish.

2 comments:

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo said...

But what a poet!

Days


What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Fresca said...

Oh, God yes--being unpleasant is not barrier to that.
The last stanza of his "Whitsun Weddings" makes my chest hurt, I love it so much:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.