Friday, April 19, 2013

The Boogieman



I don't know who created this, if you do please let me know so I can give proper credit.
     The Boogieman to some has been someone that doesn’t look like them. If you weren’t what they saw when they looked in the mirror, you were The Boogieman. Male or female, or black or white, it didn’t matter, different = bad.
After 9/11, The Boogieman had a new face for some; he was a terrorist, Middle Eastern looking and wanted to kill all Americans.
Neither example is 100% correct for the vast majority of people I know, however most of the people I know have experienced something similar.
We expect The Boogieman to look evil, we expect him to be frightening and scary, we don't expect him to look like he's a baby face child, we don't expect them to be clean cut people that we would see at the grocery store, and we don't expect him to look normal.
Jason wore a mask, Freddy Kruger had a scarred face, The KKK wore hoods, Jim Jones, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, the guy who shot up the movie theater in Colorado,  we want our crazy to look frightening and scary when we finally see them.
We don't want to believe that our neighbors, our friends, people we pass on the street could be evil. We don't want the face of evil to be the face of the boy next door or the girl next door or your teacher or your nurse or your doctor.
That is the comforting thought that gets us through the days and the nights, that we would know that we could see who the bad person was. We would know if somebody was crazy.
This is how we rationalize events like this.
Watching horrible events unfold in real-time brings this to the forefront of conversations. There is no normal, everyone is different and no one can tell who is crazy, damaged, out to get them, or harmless.
I have said crazy is crazy, way too many times in the past year. We have collectively watched a series of events unfold that have left children dead, families torn apart and all of it played out on tv.  These things do not happen because of movies, or bad parenting, or tv shows, or video games, or gun laws, or music. These things happen because The Boogieman has something not right in their brain. There is a damage somewhere that leaves The Boogieman without compassion, or a sense of right and wrong, or a sense of entitlement that they are the only person that matters on the planet.  The Boogieman is a broken person, a selfish asshole, a deluded zealot, or an arrogant fuck that wants attention.
I not only mourn for the people that have lost their lives, I mourn for the loss of our hard earned sense of security.
But I will not fear The Boogieman

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

The Ides of March kicked my butt!

     It's been to long since I sat down to type anything but it's been a really hard month. When last I left off I was all excited about the next Iron Craft Challenge. It was a "green" challenge and I had the perfect idea.
 I'm a huge up cycle girl and an even bigger purse girl so I combined the two and made a sweater bag.

      I took a sweater that I never wore but was reluctant to donate and up-cycled it into something that I would not only use but love so much more.
 This was one of the first things that my Hubby ever bought for me and it's just not really appropriate for living below the Mason-Dixon line. It becomes hot and itchy in a heartbeat.
    Now it's a great size and perfect for the season that just ended with a vengeance down here. However it'll be perfect when the cooler months return. I'll have a how-to up later this afternoon.
     
     So this was the first Iron Craft Challenge that I was done within the first 2 days and I was so excited to be on time! Then my nickname came into play once again. I have a medical thing that reared it's ugly head
and I was knocked off my feet for a week or two. Perfect time to blog you'd think, but the last thing I want to do when I feel awful is to post it for the entire world to see.
So after I dug my house out of the piles of housework that had occurred when I'm ill, I was taking laundry down to the laundry room and did something to my ankle that resulted in tendon damage.


     So March pretty much kicked my butt, and I've been digging out of the hole since.
I missed the Iron Craft Easter craft, working with Peeps and that'll be one of my two "free passes" that I've given myself. I did manage to pull something out for the Ethnic Challenge with Swedish Hearts that I used to make with my Dad at Christmas time. I whipped up a mobile that helps cover my ugly slider door in my workroom. I used the other hearts for some more coverage and it's nice an spring-like now. Not to mention, it's a great distraction from the pollen drifts that are accumulating outside of the door.

     The next challenge is due on 4/23 and it's the Playtime Challenge. "Let’s embrace the child in all of us. Make a toy, something using toys, or something inspired by a toy" I'm so into this one, mostly because I'm nothing but a 10 year old at heart.