Blah, Humbug

Today was supposed to be the first day of the hot season, Thai Songkran festival where people splash each other with water as a "blessing". Outdoor recitals of dance  music and Thai food outdoors. But it is chilly and overcast, and I'm taking a rain check, so to speak.

Bummer.

On Poetry

Over on the Face of Bo Facebook I made a comment that I thought something was poetic, but she thought I was being sarcastic, because she knows me well enough to know I disagreed with what she had posted, and that I'm usually sarcastic.

Truth is, the words were pretty. I was being sincere. The words were not words I agreed with, but that did not make them any less well-written.

Kind of like the Bible. There is a lot of poetry in  there, where the phrasing is beautiful but the content is repulsive to me. King David wrote a lot of that. Praise to a God whose every commandment he eventually broke. Solomon is a bit easier to swallow because he's often  cynical. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Ernest Hemingway. You get the picture.

Tangentially, one of my favorite quotes is from cellist Pablo Casals, who was asked if someone has to understand music to truly enjoy it. He said, "When you sit down to enjoy a nice juicy steak, do you have to understand it?"