Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Easy Virtue.
I haven’t donated blood in twenty years – which gave me the status of first-time blood donor today at the Canadian Blood Donor Clinic around the corner from my office (extra cookies and juice for me!). Gotta admit, I’m feeling virtuous at the moment, even as I note that my spelling/typing is a bit off – and it’s obvious from the way other donors in the clinic carry themselves that they feel pretty good about donating too. Funny that, of all things – blood donation is pretty simple way to get to a selfless act and doesn’t take more than an hour every couple of months. If you want to get really serious, you can go for stem cell and marrow donation too – which are a lot more invasive and require time off work for recovery.
Things I found out at the clinic today included:
- Apparently I pump blood up to three minutes faster than the average for women. 10 minutes is the average, and I pumped a litre in 7 minutes which they promised me would be even quicker next time.
- Federal government workers are *big* donators – which I am guessing is linked to some notion of civic responsibility and public service.
- Lots of things can screen you out from donating (having had cancer or malaria, having lived in England during the Mad Cow years, being gay after 1977, having been born in Africa after 1977, etc. etc. etc.), – which means that only a certain percentage of society is allowed to donate.
- The reason we don’t see mobile blood clinics in our workplaces and campuses anymore is due to funding cuts.
- The majority of donated blood is actually used in patient treatment – and there is a shortage of blood in the donor system to treat to the level of need.
Interesting stuff, yes? So I’m a newly-converted donor and thinking this is something I could do every 56 days or so. The clinic is just right around the corner and it feels good to be in a room full of people feeling they are there to do the right thing. It’s some easy virtue and it doesn’t cost a thing.
On J. S. Bach
The best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free.
J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year
To wit: validation of the above statement can be found in the Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor among other amazing works.
My Sunday thought.
I have long thought that the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of Adam and Eve as an allegory for the advent of civilization – and specifically the transition from hunter/gatherer existence to agricultural toil. The timelines don’t quite match up (7000 years since the fall of man, 10,000 years since the establishment of agriculture in the fertile crescent), but even so, the journey of Adam and Eve describes perfectly the loss of cohesion with the natural world and the separation of humans from the animal world.
I find it curious that upon the transition to agriculture, cities and so forth – humans have felt such a great need to pretend superiority from the natural world even as we devise whole core mythologies that lament our losses.
Matching Market Bags
As an early birthday present, Brian gave me six yards of beautiful, crazy fabric last week – which I wasn’t expecting at all (he gave it to me to prove a point in an argument about how “yes he would so buy me fabric”)….. and this weekend I spent some time making a couple of market bags out of an Alexander Henry print which turned out quite nicely (if I do say so myself). I’m just learning about interfacing – which I used on one side of the fabric – and I even made wallet pockets inside each of these bags (interfaced and lined!)
To make the bag, I used this tutorial from Oh Fransson for lunch bags and altered it according to the size of fabric I had to work with. Also, I decided to attach a strap instead of doing the grommet-handle thing because I wanted a wider strap that could go over the shoulder. Now that I’ve got the pattern figured out (you can see my prototype bag sans interfacing below), I can knock one of these off in under an hour. Easy-Peasy!
Bad to worse.
“…it is questionable whether Christ departed from life with the words we find in the Holy Scriptures, those of Mathew and Mark, My God, my God, why hast Thous forsaken me, or those of Luke, Father, into Thine hand I commit my spirit, or those of John, It is fulfilled. What Christ really said, word of honor, as any man on the street will tell you, was, Good-bye, world, you’re going from bad to worse.”
Jose Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Red Cedar 