Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

OK. I may not be an über-geek, but I certainly have geeky tendencies. And let me tell just how excited I am two recent additions to my online life: GMail and Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2.

GMAIL

I’d heard of GMail lore, heard everyone was trying to get an account because it’s an invitation-only situation. You have to know someone else cool enough to get an account with GMail, because it is still in its beta version.

First, they give you 1000 megabytes of storage, which is quite a lot! Also, in GMail, you don’t ever really delete anything. Sure, you can send it to trash, but it never really goes away, just in case. Instead of sorting your messages into discrete folders, you assign labels, and any given message can have multiple labels, so an e-mail from my Dad with an attachment might be in with all the other e-mails with attachments, and it might also be in with the e-mails from my Dad. I can also set up filters so that messages coming in from Dad are automatically given the label “Dad.”

Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation. It’s like a little clump, and you never have to delete all the stuff that came before to save space. It displays it in this really clever way so you can click on any part of the conversation you are interested in reading. If I send a message to Anne, then she responds, it’s all gonna be clumped as a conversation. I never have to go see what it was she was replying to in the first place. Whenever you get an e-mail from anyone, they are automatically added to your contacts list. I love that! I also love how you can import addresses from Outlook and Yahoo. They’ve automated that. The only ads I ever see are Google ads, which are really non-intrusive, and I’ve received almost no spam. When I have, there’s this handy button that says, “Report as spam,” which I find really satifying to use.

It’s just seriously cool. I was going to say that you should try and befriend someone who has invitations to give away (sadly, I have not yet been offered any by Google), but no! I came across this site, so you can get going right away! Do you have anything to offer that is as cool as these people in exchange for a GMail account? Haha!

MOZILLA FIREFOX 0.9.2

The other really groovy addition to my online life is Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2. Oh MAN! It’s so great. There are all these groovy extensions you can get, and they are all organized really well in one place, so that you can tweak the options any time you want. It’s tweakability it beyond stellar! It loads way faster than the last Firefox, too. When you use Mozilla, you don’t have to deal with stupid popup ads. It’s much safer from spyware than IE. All the really good spyware is written for the browser in which it can do the most damage, and that is, of course, Internet Explorer. After my rabid spyware outbreak earlier this summer, which resulted in me having to do a full system wipe, I decided to look into other options. Firefox 0.8 was good. 0.9.2, which I just downloaded a couple of days ago, is EXCELLENT!

No, they aren’t paying me. I really am this excited!! 😀

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The Kingdom of Oz is Within You 

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I have had a lifelong interest in The Wizard of Oz… Although honestly, when the Oz Convention was held here a few years ago, I learned that I, in fact, am not actually obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. Oh no. I’m far from obsessed. I didn’t know the meaning of “obsessed” until I saw these nutty Oz-heads. See some press coverage of that event here, here, and here.

A N Y W A Y, back to the subject at hand. I love Oz. My Dad read me all of the books when I was a kid. I adored the movie and ended up asking for and receiving an Oz playset for Christmas, which I actually found a few days ago when I was sorting. In the third grade, I played Dorothy in my school’s version of the play. I actually found the program for that when I was sorting, too! The theme of Oz actually came up in therapy when I began to do that thing girls do with their fathers, pushing them off a pedestal. I learned a bit late that Dad was not The Great and Powerful Oz, but the man behind the curtain, or somewhere between the two. I adored the books Was by Geoff Ryman (a man Hamilton actually knew as a child) and Wicked, the story of the Wicked Witch of the East. Both books bring these characters into a more realistic and less magical, over-the-rainbow world. The beauty and metaphor of Oz has always captivated me, and not in an oh-boy-let-me-get-the-Munchkin’s-autograph kind of way.

As I wrote yesterday’s post about home, I was reminded of the theme of home in The Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy is in Oz at the end, and the Wizard has left in his balloon without her because she has run after Toto, Glinda appears and tells her that she has always had the power to get herself home. Before she leaves, the Tin Man asks her what she has learned in Oz. Her answer is something I’ve had memorized since I played Dorothy when I was 8.

It wasn’t enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, and it’s that if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard because, if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.

Oh, that’s so good. And it’s how I feel now. Home is not my apartment. It isn’t my parents’ house. Salmon Rushdie wrote a beautiful essay about the Wizard of Oz and the theme of home. Remember that palaver in 1989 when he had to go into hiding because the Ayatollah Khameini had issued a fatwa on him for writing The Satanic Verses? Talking about losing your sense of home! Rushdie knew that home wasn’t present in the walls of a house. It’s something you create within yourself. Who better to speak about this than an articulate Oz freak in exile?!

In Dorothy’s Progress: The Wizard of Oz as Spiritual Allegory, the author David F. Godwin sums it up so very well that I’m just going to paste it in here:

[T]he ultimate spiritual reality lies within each individual person-in their ‘own backyard’-and not off somewhere over the rainbow. ‘The kingdom of Oz is within you.'”

I mean, what a fabulously secular and relevant lesson to reflect upon right now, when everything in my life is changing, when the physical manifestations of home are unstable. And it even reflects my Buddhist leanings. Everything I need is right here, right now. Everything is exactly as it should be.

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My sense of home isn’t stable right now. That isn’t a bad thing. It just is. Losing my marriage brought on a really scary sense of the rug being pulled out from under me; instability. So I learned to dance on a shifting carpet. I’ve been living here for seven years, and although I didn’t like it at first, I’ve made so many great connections here. Leaving is sad, and yet, I’m very excited to be doing it.

When I’m here, I know where the grocery store is. I know where to buy the best brand of canned tomatoes. I know when and where the farmer’s market is. I know on what night choirs rehearse. I know where to take a yoga class, where to kayak, where to karaoke, where to hike. I know where I can find the really good cat food. I know enough people to throw a party and know that it will be a great time. When I move, I will have to learn all of this stuff again. That’s not bad. It just is.

At the same time, my parents’ have sold their house. We moved into that house when I was 10 years old. Now I am 34. Before we lived there, we lived in a place about a mile away in the same neighborhood. We first moved there when I was four, so for 30 years, my parents’ neighborhood was the place I went wen I said I was going "back home." It was "base" when things weren’t going quite right.

So I don’t have the stability of a marriage. I don’t have the stability of the place to go home to, and I don’t have the stability of staying here. This has been home for 7 years. I’ve been here through a lot, and it’s a hard place to leave. I have packed 10 boxes now. This study is starting to look bare. Empty shelves. Empty closet. A large pile of boxes.

And yet, there is stability in my life, and that is in the form of people. I have wonderful people in my life. My parents don’t have that house, but I still have them. And on a more daily-basis, I have Jeep and Maggie. I adore these girls. I have my old friends, who live all over, and who I know I can call for both important and mundane reasons. I also have my online friends, many of whom have become friend in real life, too. I think of them as hanging out in a box (my computer), ready to chat no matter where I live. I’ve seen it so many times. An online friend moves across the country, and I’m still talking to them the next day, usually about something silly and unimportant. Silly and unimportant gets me through the day sometimes.

The world just keeps getting smaller and smaller.

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