mermaidcamp
Keeping current in wellness, in and out of the water
You can scroll the shelf using ← and → keys
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
You can scroll the shelf using ← and → keys
The American Dream of EOW is like all things in our world. It ironically stars Charlton Heston as the celebrity Head Horseman of the Appocalypse. All attention is given to sets, costumes, and rehearsals. While wildly distracted with what you will be wearing to Armegeddon you completely ignored the fact that the Anti Christ is your banker. You failed to see the signs of impending doom even when the horses of the Appocolypse thundered down Wall Street, veered off to the Jersey Shore, then set up a camp in Connecticutt. Denial cum negligence.
Notice that the Catholic Church, blazing a trail into excellent customer service for those who desire express service at this important time , has set up the @Pontifex twitter account. The NRA, a religious institution of massive power in the US, is taking a look at being open to the idea (a vitriolic debate about) of banning assault weapons for casual use. Congress is redesigning itself as a newly reborn baby dysfunction, while the world knows the political power in Washington resides on K street, so it hardly matters who goes to Capitol Hill. There is not even a flimsy disguise of that fact.
The folly in all of this is that it is based on not only ignoring reality (the negligence part), but also on the belief that human beings will cast, costume, write, direct, and produce the EOW. Ask your local Jehovah’s Witness. They can tell you, as they have been, what the Bible says about this particular subject. It is their specialty. They have a boutique religion for EOW, preparing all the Witnesses for the eventual probability that they will not even be in the rapture group. If the EOW is handled with the style and grace to which my fellow Americans have become accustomed, the USA will truly miss a once in a lifetime opportunity to go out representing liberty and justice for all.
Just as a hypothetical question, what are you planning to wear? The Swiss have practical advice. They say that the last suit has no pockets. They mean that you will not be taking your CHF to the rapture, because a new kind of value will be established that is superior even to Swiss Francs. Imagine that. The guys below are not only well dressed, but they have a full explanation for everything. This is the special season in which we can ask not,” Are you ready for Christmas?”, but “Are you ready to meet your maker?”
My friend Steffi Burger is one of my German teachers. She was actually born in Germany but will soon join the Swiss club, the most exclusive and hard to join club in the world. She has lived there for about 20 years I think, and fully knows Switzadootch. She will never be able to speak like a real Swiss because she uses German as it was learned in Stuttgart, and will not be able to hide that ever.I am in a category of Swiss speaking much worse than Steffi. I do not speak or read hochdeutch, based on my theory that it has nothing to do with the language and culture of Switzerland. I have tried to learn this very funny and dialectic local code by absorbing it. Results vary. Sometimes I can read stuff and discover the meaning, and others I am totally off course when I read. They capitalize all nouns, which I joke about and have never found to be all that helpful. This is why….the noun is likely to be an entire paragraph. They just love to combine words in their language. I often really like them just for the way they sound. My new favorite word in German is weltuntergang. It is giving me flashbacks to the very first things I learned to say. My friend Beth and I learned a phrase from Ursula of Berlin, the most fashionable woman we had ever met. She taught us to say, ” Let’s be friends. The world is a village.”( Luts uns freude sein. die welt ist ein dorf ) It was my only full concept so I used it in response to everything and everyone. I knew some nouns and the verbs to ice skate and to ride a bicycle. But if the nouns I knew neither ice skated nor had a bicycle I had no way to make any coherent sense with my vocabulary. Welt, or world was in my initial lesson. Now the welt is going under in a single word. Wow, so much as happened, but one thing that has not happened is my magical acquisition of German or Swiss languages by osmosis.
I asked Steffi about parties in Langweiss or Zurich to celebrate the end of the world. She said this had not caught on as a festivity. It is sometimes hard to explain humor when the cultural background is missing. It is complicated to tell someone that the end of the world pot luck party you are excited to attend is to mock the people who are actually afraid of the end of the world. Gives new meaning to you had to be there. I spent the summer of the World Cup partying with the Swiss when the event was in held Germany. I could never convey to an American how the Euros feel about soccer. You truly have to be there to see what they do. Same with Fastnacht, it is inexplicable to people outside the culture. There are intense reasons to celebrate that are generational and not yours if you are born elsewhere. So the Swiss really do Advent, and appear to be skipping the idea of weltuntergang celebrations. I hope the world will not end before I get the chance to go back to Switzerland to party Swiss style. Stay neutral, my friends.
mermaidcamp 