Tag: names
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Bouba-Kiki…?
Now that I’m well into my dotage, and taming my thoughts is harder than trying to herd the ants that live on the porch, I have to wonder why nobody seems to understand why I have taken to calling myself G. It’s a perfectly balanced name, and seems to act as a subtly nuanced, although…
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The respect that makes calamity of so long life
Now that I am old -or indeed because I am old- it sometimes strikes me that there are many important personal questions yet to be answered -even to be asked, for that matter. I suppose some might think it strange that I’ve already wasted so many years placing other lesser queries at the front of the…
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I go by…?
I realize that I am still swimming upstream on many issues -no doubt it’s a function of the number of years that I drag behind me like an anchor in mud; and yet I suspect we’re all at least partially tethered to our past. Take names as an example[i]: there was a time when a…
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Would that we might also pray in the fullness of our joy
Prayer! I think I should be careful here: I have no enduring patience for obsequiousness in the face of eternity; I would not beseech a god, or gods, to treat me well. And yet… And yet perhaps there is some benefit to discussing a problem with a higher power -a different power anyway: laying it…
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Omne ignotum pro magnifico est
There are some bits of wisdom that are hard to forget -especially if they verge on the personal. Take, for example Virginia Woolf’s observation that ‘A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.’ I like that: it gives me permission to change my mind -or perhaps more to the point,…
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Was it about God, or god, we were taught?
Is God dead -or for that matter was He ever alive? Could a god really be gendered, and if so, which one would it pick… and why? What is a ‘god’ anyway? I’ve wondered about these things for years… To take a step back for a moment, when I was a child, I assumed my…
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The Temple of Clothes
I caught someone inspecting me the other day. Okay, it wasn’t an inspect exactly –it was more of a look… Well, maybe a glance, but it bothered me all the same. I could feel her eyes doing a quick little dance on me. They started on my mud-caked running shoes, before appraising the hem of…
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What We Value
I think it’s about time I revisited the concept of ‘disability’, both in its description and in society at large. It seems to me that the word itself is too value-laden to accept at face value. We are all disabled in one way or another and yet we may not see ourselves like that. And why…
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Eeny Meeny
I have always been fascinated by the idea of choice –the philosophy of choice. What does it mean to choose? Does the act of embracing one thing necessarily exclude the other, or merely prejudice it? Blemish it? Dishonour it? Alternatively, given an either/or situation, is it possible to throw the pair into a box and…
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Is there really Something in a Name?
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. So said Shakespeare’s Juliet. And yet even then –especially then- it mattered. Tribes have always mattered; we have always been known by our tribes: we are all either us or them aren’t we?” And little has changed…