http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold a search for beauty, compassion, honesty, humor, and intelligence in whatever comes my way. Mon, 12 May 2008 03:20:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If I could read five pages at once, I would be doing that. My hunger to know is so great. I'm dimly aware of the rest of the world: 360 women, many of them Tibetan nuns, arrested in Nepal. Unimaginable suffering in Burma, where a Red Cross boat full of ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/so-much-to-learn.html I just went for a long, long walk down 21st Street and back up 23rd Street on a Friday night studded with stars, flower petals, and teenagers with pink hair and nose rings, trying to take in the staggering revelations of this day and to make sense of the existential ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/finding-my-people-part-2.html For the past couple of days I've been obsessively and delightedly exploring my Jewish grandfather's life story, as far as I can piece it together from historical records. I'm riveted. About an hour ago I got an email from a genealoger who says my Virginia grandmother was not Jewish, but ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/race-part-2.html I'm going to write about race again, and I will get back to Rev. Wright and Barack Obama, but first, this hot news flash. While I was fiddling around on the internet yesterday, I found out who my father was, who his parents were, and that they were Jewish. I ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/finding-my-people.html  I've tried to make my life my statement about race, even though we've known since W.E.B. DuBois said it in 1914 that scientifically "race" doesn't exist.  Race is not inscribed in our genes, any more than "class" is. But the perception of race exists. People have been enslaved, imprisoned, lynched, ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/race-part-1.html Conjunction of events at the mailbox yesterday afternoon: I received a remarkable letter from a prisoner I've known for some years who is 42 and locked-in (in what is called Administrative Segregation or Ad Seg--spends his life literally in a cage surrounded by the din of other men locked into cages ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/locked-in-syndrome.html Thanks to Hafidha, whose blog brought this amazing ten-minute argument to my attention! I haven't heard such a powerful anti-racist statement in years. Those of you who are not in the USA may not understand the whole argument--and you don't need to understand the whole argument. The core of what ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/father-mike-pfleger-rocks.html I've been diddling around on the computer all day while I could have been out marching for immigration in the streets of Portland. I feel vaguely guilty for sitting on my butt, but here I am anyway, and here's what I've discovered. Flickr has changed the rules. Now if you ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/flickr-down-blogs-up-good-news.html As all the people who have been part of my life know, I get migraines. I have chosen not to write much about them on the blog, because it's just boring as hell to talk about, but I've decided to do this one post now and then shut up about ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/migraines.html Part of my exit from Houston involved getting rid of most of my books. The post office lost the large part of the ones I meant to keep. So I'm just home from the Friends of the Library used book sale, where for a total of $37 I got such ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/the-power-of-old-books.html