I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
November 03, 2015 - 1:00 p.m.
Every night the last three weeks or so at 2 AM or so I contemplate on blogging about the same thing, then I don't. Today I will. It's the reason I slept late and don't feel guilty about it. I couldn't get to sleep last night or many nights recently, why? Mosquitos. Seems odd that in November that I'm being inflicted by them but I just saw on Time Hop that I complained about them exactly a year ago too. My room has a door that leads to the roof. My theory is that there are puddles in it where mosquitos breed. It's been warm so the eggs are hatching and the females mature and come out looking for a meal so they can lay more eggs. As the mosquitos buzz around my head and I scratch my bites I think about mosquitos. I picture their feeding apparatus. 
I think about their evolution. How did they feed before they evolved that proboscis? The males eat nectar, is that what their female ancestors eat? Did some star lapping up blood from animals that were bleeding and more of them survived because they got that extra protein? That's what I'm guessing. I picture the entire scheme of their evolution. I think about how they find me in the dark. They are following the carbon dioxide I exhale back to my nose.
I try to total cover myself with my top sheet but it was too warm for that. My arms want to keep out to keep cool and of course my hands are exposed and that's what they attack. Because I wear a hoodie they can't get my ears or neck. I keep as little of my face as exposed as possible. When I got very warm and took the sheet of totally they went for my ankles. I got out of bed to run cold water over the bites as that lessons the itch. Maybe I should fill my ice pace when I got to bed and keep it near me and apply it to the bites so I don't have to get out of bed.
OK that's enough on mosquitos. I had to get it out of my system.
I went to therapy yesterday and was going to see Tara O'Grady but by the end of therapy my knee was hurting and I decided to have one more day of rest. I stopped and shopped at Stop & Shop and stayed home the rest of the night. The Stop & Shop is new and still has some growing pains. I wanted to buy matzoh so I can make matzoh brei. There is a chart saying what aisle things are in. Matzoh wasn't listed but kosher food were aisle nine. Aisle nine is ethnic food. There was no matzoh. There was no kosher section. The story also has no challah. Is this antisemitism? Stop & Shop was the supermarket I frequented when I lived in both Oakland Gardens and Briarwood and it's where I always bought my matzoh and challah. What's wrong with this one? I filled out product request forms for matzoh and Taylor ham. I'm not that great at being Jewish.
When I got home I tried to watch TV on my computer but the bandwidth hog was on again. I tried to track him down but the landlady changed the default password on the router so I couldn't access it. I'll have to ask her what it is. She's find with me figuring out where the bandwidth is going. I ended up crashing and sleeping. Not sure why. It might be because I didn't sleep late and had trouble getting to sleep the night before too thanks to the mosquitos. I indulged myself for dinner, hot dogs and French fries. I tried thin cutting the potatoes for a change. An advantage is that I need less oil.
After dinner I had enough bandwidth to watch The Librarians on TNT online. They keep changing the format and I keep loving the show. They made a very sophisticated in joke for the cognoscenti. The show this season has new arch nemeses Prospero from The Tempest and Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes. Yes they are fictional characters come to life. The joke is that Moriarty used the alias Doctor Worth. Arthur Conan Doyle partially based Moriarty on the real life criminal Adam Worth. I sadly was not part of the cognoscenti but part of the wikiscenti. The show had me looking up the professor on Wikipedia and I discovered that. I am a big Sherlock Holmes fan so I feel that I should have known that.
Do any of you watch the show? I have forgotten most of the connections I've found to Angel but two are in every episode. Christian Kane who plays Stone played Lindsay on Angel. The character Cassandra is not played by Amy Acker but she is still clearly Fred from Angel. The actress Lindy Booth looks like Amy and has the same verbal and physical mannerisms and of course both characters are mathematical physics geniuses.
Wow this was just supposed to be the introduction to what I was going to write but I'm 872 words into this. Well I'm going to plough on. I have a lot of things on my "Diary Ideas" list. I should have used them all up the week I've not gone out but I didn't
One of the things on my list is "Pay gap for female professions." It's actually the first thing on my list, I've thought about this for a long time. Why write about it now? One of those professions is librarian.
Back in the bad old days which too many people think of as the good old days women were constrained to a limited number of occupations, teacher, librarian, nurse, waitress, secretary, receptionist, etc. As there are a lot of women and not that many jobs in those fields even without overt discrimination the laws of supply and demand would depress the wages for those jobs. Then a vicious cycle sets in. Lower paying jobs command less respect. Jobs with less respect command lower wages. Men who have more options can avoid them making them more female. The sex ratio makes them "women's work" which also causes them to get less respect.
Things are better now but even if there weren't still sexism the effects would linger. It's how the jobs are perceived. There is still a huge sex divide. How many men do you know in early childhood education? I know none though I know many women who do it. Do those teachers get paid like they are the people in whose care we leave the next generation? Of course not. Do librarians get paid in accordance with how much study it takes to become one? Not close. Do names matter? Weren't librarians the first IT people? Isn't there a move to calling them "information specialists" now? I have plenty of friends that are librarians, all but one women. I think we need to start thinking of them as "librarians." I was talking to a friend who recently got her degree and I teased her and said, "What do they teach you in librarian school; how to say shush?" I know better of course; I was pointing out that's how many people think. Nurses are medical professionals, teachers have a huge influence on how children develop; we need to give them the pay and the respect they deserve.
So we get situations where when are the victims of prejudice against women. People go into these fields because they are things people are passionate about, things people love to do. And so supply and demand keeps the wages low; employers are not forces to raise the wages to attract employees. Thanks to women entering medical school they have had to increase the wages of nurses to attract people to the profession. Things can get better. It takes time but that doesn't not mean we should just let nature take it's course and eventually there will be equity. Real people suffer in the meantime. I don’t know what to do but I write this in the hope of getting you to think about these professions in a different light. If everyone starts respecting them the wages will follow.
A mosquito just flew in front of my screen. Will somebody come here and kill them all so I can get a decent night's sleep?
Now it's time to eat, I bought those great stop & shop sub rolls and I'll make breakfast sandwich on one.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
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Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
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Horvendile November 03, 2015
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