rambles

I spent the morning tacking up pictures in my room and making a bigger mess as I tried and failed to reduce the existing one. As I type, I'm looking at a small pile of laundry, a stack of borrowed books, my camera, and a rather hungry looking snake.

My bookshelf really wants reorganizing. I've over three hundred books, and as of right now, they're all alphabetized. However, I'm acquiring a large enough non-fiction section that I think I may soon divvy them up into genres. The next time that I am bored, I will probably do that.

As I was driving up the highway today, I passed one pickup truck and had another pickup truck hot on my tail, and it occurred to me that there are really only two kinds of truck drivers. The ones that drive ten mph over the speed limit, and those that drive ten mph under the speed limit. I have never in my life seen a truck driver drive the actual speed limit, or anywhere close to it.

Where I live, it has been rainy and gloriously sad for days now. Which is good news for me, but not for the two potted plants I am attempting to keep alive in my room. My first attempt at indoor plant-keeping was an aloe-vera plant named Hamlet, who, true to his name, soon died. Now, many years later, I have a chocolate mint plant named Horatio and a small purple succulent named Nymphadora. They seemed appropriate when I named them, but I'm now no longer sure that Horatio will outlive anyone, and Nymphadora seems to be losing a bit of her color. Although that may be that, against the purple of my room, she looks rather gray.

Back to the snake; I own a little ball-python whose uninspired and unfortunate name is Kevin. The reason for this name is simply that I did not choose a name for him. My friend did. In my defense, as this makes me seem like a deeply neglectful pet-owner, I was in the process of picking one out, it simply didn't happen. Kevin is the most timid snake you could ever hope to meet, which, I realize, is typical for ball pythons, but he seems especially timid to me.

Timid animals seem to be a theme in my life; my dog, a golden lab named Eowyn, is also rather timid. I decided that, really, I ought to switch names with the dog. Grace is such a non-threatening, kind name; perfect for our dog. Eowyn, well, Eowyn killed the witch-king, and our dog is afraid of laundry baskets.

On a side note, it is apparently no longer socially acceptable to say 'pet-owner.' One of my friends has elected, instead, to say 'nonhuman enslaver,' in an attempt to demonstrate the idiocy of this sociological move. And while it's all well and good to laugh about the way our society is going, it really is something that we should stop and think about.

Our desire to be politically correct and offend no one is robbing us of the ability to speak, and it seems to me that the people who champion these new 'politically correct' terms are not people who are actually affected by the current terms, and instead, merely afraid of offending someone, especially in terms of race. It seems to me that people are people, and sometimes they have a different skin color. If we truly want to change racism and sexism in the world, perhaps we need to stop merely revising our terms of reference and start advocating the idea that our skin color is irrelevant to the type of person we are. Imagine if we went around constantly changing how we referred to blue-eyed people! We'd never get anywhere.

Perhaps the key to tolerance is, in fact, tolerance for those who do not do things exactly the way we would prefer.