Charissa’s Comments (group member since Nov 17, 2008)

Charissa’s comments from the Axis Mundi X group.

lol... that would be awesome! books that you can shrink really tiny, and then add water to expand! Yay! Shogun is another one you should be able to do this with.

hehehe... you need a specialized chocolate architect!!

LOL!!!!! actually, I don't mind when guys try to give me advice about backing up a trailer. that way I can turn to one of them and say, oh shoot, why don't you just do it for me? : )

backing up with a trailer on your hitch is one of the rings of hades. essentially, that is what you have to do for eternity if you are mean to kittens.

the gremlins love to mess with us.

Rvs are just frightening! they go all marshmallowy on curves. yipes!

heee!!!! i drove one of those once. it was fun!!!

ha ha ha... well, who doesn't need more bulldozers, really?

mmmmm.... cat.... shiny.

Hi Ginnie, Happy T Day. Yes, I can imagine they must be very concerned. This is a level of attack that hasn't been seen in recent memory. A whole new can of worms. Such ugliness. XOXO

Larry... this is why I travel with headphones and an iPod. Me and my soprano arias were well protected from crying babies and chatting lunatics. Happy T Day!

The articles I have read all cites them as being mujahudeen. I am guessing from the Afghan/Pakistan border. But who knows... there's just so much hate out there.

1) by Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux:



I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving.

This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.

Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing "Land of the Pilgrim's pride" in "America the Beautiful." Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing "Land of the Indian's pride" instead.

I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some "inside" knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses came to our homes.

When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry -- half of them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them. Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through the winter and taught them how to grow their food.

These were not merely "friendly Indians." They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a hundred years or so, and they were wary -- but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father's people, they say, when asked to give, "Are we not Dakota and alive?" It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all -- the exact opposite of the system we live in now, which is based on selling, not giving.

To the Pilgrims, and most English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people, themselves.

Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world. Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the "first Thanksgiving" the Wampanoags provided most of the food -- and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving.

What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities. By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way "for a better growth," meaning his people.

In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil.

I see, in the "First Thanksgiving" story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.

Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.

Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.

And the healing can begin.



2) by I.J. Singh, Sikh, professor of anatomical sciences at NYU



I have always found pleasure in the fact that the first Thanksgiving in 1621 was a joint celebration by pilgrims in Indians, even though these were the Native Americans, not Indians from India as I am. I discovered the power of this day to bring together families and friends almost by accident in 1965. I was in my first year of graduate school in Oregon. I was the only Sikh in town and perhaps in the state.

A lab exam had been scheduled for Monday following the holiday weekend, so the morning of Thanksgiving Day the lab was teeming with medical and graduate students cramming for the test. But by noon, the place was deserted. Everyone else had gone to their families and friends for football and food.

A financially-strapped student, I tried to find a modest restaurant. But none were open, not even McDonald's. This was Oregon, not New York; even restaurant workers and grocery stores seemed to have taken the day off. So back I went to the lab and tried to push away any thoughts of food.

Soon entered a fellow student. He was in a hurry and wanted to spend a few last minutes at study before rushing home. When just about out of the door, he turned to me and casually wondered where I was headed for the holiday. When he saw my predicament, he immediately called his mother, and then invited - nay insisted - that I come home with him.

Truman Sasaki was Nisei-Japanese. It was modest home, a small family headed by the mother. It was a not a food fest but a most welcome meal in the warm embrace of a loving family. Sure, there was the turkey but it was accompanied by miso soup and hot Saki. I wondered how Truman Sasaki got his name. I didn't know anything about the travails of the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. I learned how almost 120,000 had been interned by a government that distrusted their loyalty. My young classmate was born around that time. The parents named him after President Harry Truman to reassure others.

As I enjoyed myself through this Japanese-American Thanksgiving, I understood why the holiday is important. People come to the Thanksgiving table for a variety of reasons and expectations. Most immigrants like me come to the Thanksgiving table as the pilgrims did -- with a sense of hope; with dreams and the energy to pursue them, perhaps to reinvent ourselves and our lives here in a new world.

For the Sasakis that Thanksgiving was more than 20 years after their ordeal. For me it was over 40 years ago. Now every Thanksgiving gives new life and meaning to the hopes and dreams I came with. Most Sikh places of worship (gurdwaras) have a kitchen that serves a simple meal to all those who come to the service. Many American gurdwaras now celebrate Thanksgiving by donating meals at homeless centers.

Every Thanksgiving now, the idea is to invite someone ho has no place to go. The turkey stuffing has become like me; it mixes the best of American cuisine with the treasured flavors of the curries of my childhood in India.



Happy Thanksgiving Everyone. Today I am thankful for being able to come see my BFF... and for all the support I have received during my NaNoWriMo odyssey. Blessings.

25,000 words.. only half way there, but I haven't given up, despite being in Denver visiting friends.

I used to leave my books out in the rain. My paperback copies of the Lord of the Rings are swollen like a turgid member and missing pages. Shocking. Shocking.

Look at your list of books finished since January 2008. Pick out your favorite three. Post them here and we can see if any of our picks overlap.

Mine are:

The Other

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=l...

Let there be light! Looks like computers could be powered directly with just a little sunlight. Saweet!!!

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNew...

I saw this on the news earlier this evening before heading out to get groceries for Thanksgiving meal. My thoughts are with my few friends who live in Mumbai this evening. Over 100 dead. 900 or more wounded. Such a shocking and all-out attack.

this universe is a tourist attraction? you know, that explains so much, really.

I dunno, a storm that has lasted over 400 years is pretty dang weird!

I think it is less weird than many other planets, which of course makes it possible to actually be alive on. Can you imagine trying to live on Ion or something?

I don't know why people would live without a chocolate cupboard.