Small triumphs

The past hour has been a lot like that show "Pimp my Ride", except for the glamour part, and the part where women want to have sex with you. Pimping a ride is like all of a sudden getting perfect skin, a soothing voice, money, a sense of humor and an orifice-pleasing penis. I did no such thing, so I really don't know why I even made this comparison in the first place. I was screwing around with the HTML, trying to get a links list going, and had to republish this thing because the slightest breeze sends everything crashing down. But I survived it; I am better for it. And I can add more links lists, if I so wish. I can go out and make enemies and make a list of them. I can promote my favourite sites.

Small triumphs are for the small people. To someone like me, even doing the dishes is a triumph against the enternal changing universe. In scrubbing the pans and putting them in the dishwasher, I add my own little speck of food colouring into the streams of time. Who knows where little specks of it will end up? A little of the cleanliness might end up at a fairytale wedding of some British royal, it might save a drunken man from being hit by a bus, it might make a media darling graphic artist feel proud of herself for the first time in her life. I cannot justify it by any tortured logic, but that is my extremely starry-eyed view of my own marginal importance.

But enough of self-pity couched in nonsense! I also do the dishes so I can eat off them the day after. Those meals are sometimes delicious, sometimes a little too clean.

Choose your own metaphor, again:

Cutting down an impenetrable thicket around your backyard to build a fence is like a) dropping a thermonuclear bomb but forgetting the detonator b) forcing an elephant to trample a den of snakes c) pushing a stone up a hill only to have it roll down again just to push it up again, and so on d) feeding a turtle beer and throwing it into East Jerusalem in hopes of stopping the intifada e) jumping a rope on an asteroid.

Consider: "in France, the unexploded shells from WWI and WWII will likely not be cleared or exploded in 700 years. So, the French are in no danger of forgetting those monstrosities. Canada, luckily, is not a country of artillery shells and land mines, but we have to make a conscious effort to remember."