Patterns of Dishonor

It is strange when recieving good news makes you both happy and disturbed at once. But sometimes it happens.

I recently found out that (barring unforseen circumstances) I will be getting the new computer that I have been wanting. A Macintosh Laptop running OS X 10.3, exactly like I wanted. This is reason to be happy, right? And I am...

But then I put the events into context, and am disturbed. This is not an altruistic gift, first of all... I will be getting it because my mother's computer is being sent to minnesota sometime in the coming month (where she is living and working at the moment) and my father will be wanting a computer to use in the evenings so that he can talk with her on AIM. Since my use of this computer would interfere with that, I get the computer I've been wanting. By itself, this would not even be enough to disturb me, however... it's looking at the larger context along with this set of facts that really disturbs me.

My parents have been telling me for a very long time now that they just don't have the money to pay me more (ie: a decent amount) to stay at home and look after my grandmother. (Who requires 24 hour supervision by someone, the majority of which falls upon me and the rest of which is taken up by my father who is on social security disability anyway and is not being kept from earning a living by it.) I had been getting 20 dollars a week for doing it, and got a whopping raise a while ago of an extra sixty a month, which evens out to about 35 dollars a week. (To do a job which a professional would get 11 an HOUR for in this area.) They don't have the money to pay me more than that. And yet... when my father decides he needs the computer in the evenings to chat with my mother, he suddenly has all the money necessary to purchase a piece of equipment for me that costs in excess of a thousand dollars?

This is part of the same pattern of behavior I've seen where, on the same nights that my parents have told me they don't have the money to pay me more, they come home with him having bought three or four video tapes at 9 to 15 dollars apiece. Hell, recently he's been getting worse... he bought one video and rented another that we ALREADY OWN. This is money that is basically being flushed down the toilet by people who claim to be short on money for important things. (Including money for repairs to the house here, this pattern extends beyond my own immediate concerns.)

Here's a riddle: how does someone go about teaching one's own parents about the concept of financial responsibility? Can it even be done?

Words have Power

It's an old truth, the power of language and the spoken or written word. It's been known by many cultures in many forms. Even our modern society recognizes it, in the freedom of speech and of the press, and in common phrases that carry the wisdom of past generations such as "the pen is mightier than the sword".

I've had a lesson in this concept tonight, while exploring my normal researches. It started with reading an essay about the meaning of words and the way definitions work (especially within the context of logical discussion and debate), and I was intrigued to see how much of a word's meaning is independent of any lexical definition (and in fact that lexical definitions are themselves only attempts to codify words which have entered into common usage already).

Part two of the lesson came in another essay that I was reading... in a name which was spelled differently than I've seen it spelled before. The Morrigan. Only this time, it was spelled Mor Rioghain... and the word Mor is one of the few celtic words I do know. "Great". I was intrigued. A goddess of battles, often seen in modern times as more to be feared than anything else, and yet she was being described as great? I stopped what I was doing and looked up the second word, Rioghain. Took me a while to locate, but I finally found the translation for it: Queen. Great Queen. An interesting way to refer to someone who is of late seen only as a goddess of battles, symbolized frequently as a stormcrow... a harbinger of ill fortune. I had known for a while now that this prevalent view of her is not accurate (primarily due to its incompleteness), but it was very interesting to me to learn how much clearer that fact would be if someone knew the translation of her name. I wonder how many other bits of info about celtic deities can be found simply by looking at the translations of their names?

And then there was the final piece of my lesson, one that I've actually been looking at for a few days but that didn't fall into place until now... phrases, bits of wisdom passed down over time, tell us as much in the way they say things as they do by actually saying them. Take this celtic example, for instance: "air is fire's water". By itself, it expresses a scientific truth... fire needs air to fuel itself, much like our bodies need water. But that truth is expressed through the language of poetry, using metaphor to show that air's function for fire is analogous to water's function for us. It shows that the celts valued the process of reasoning through analogy, and also that they did not feel it necessary to express scientific concepts about the world in emotionally neutral language... they found a way to express scientific truth poetically without losing the truth of the concept to the vagueness of emotional connotation. Interestingly, this same process seems to make the expression of a line of reasoning in the form of a syllogism unnecessary... the metaphor itself carries the information which shows the line of reasoning that one might follow to reach the same conclusion. Awful lot of information for just four simple words, isn't it?

It's been an interesting lesson.