there is birth

A friend from Paris sent me this photo of a new baby kitten, Crevette.

And another thing he shared, from a post on his motorcycle forum, which made me grin: "Life is all about a$$. You're either covering it, laughing it off, kicking it, kissing it, busting it, trying to get a piece of it, behaving like one, or living with one."

My neighbor also cracked me up the other night when he did an impression of Juneau:
(curling up in fetal position) "I'm Juneau. Don't touch me with your roads! Bad touch!"
Not that I'm for the road. But it was really funny anyway.

My sister & I talked on the phone for two hours yesterday. One thing we talked about was the newly revealed, Gospel of Judas. Anyone else completely intrigued by this?? It seems like the media barely glanced at this, but from a devoutly Catholic family, it has turned me upside down. My sister railed, "What are you, hopping onto the Judas Bandwagon all of a sudden?" It's not that I'm totally believing all of it; it's that despite questioning automatic faith as a youth (i.e. voluntarily not getting confirmed after 6 years of Sunday school), it had never occurred to me to wonder about Judas's role as the betrayer. It's ingrained so deeply how atrociously self-serving he was. It's not the possibility that he may not have been after all that has me taken aback (I'm not going to be so hasty as to embrace Gnostic faith), but the realization that I, like virtually everyone else for the past thousand+ years, haven't even slightly thought, ever, of giving him the benefit of the doubt. Are we so eager to believe in the worst of someone? Do we need uber villains? How can we desire such black and white two-dimensional pigeonholes for people when I'm sure we come to realize that very, very few things in life lack hidden layers and unspoken reasons and secrets.

So the president of the caving club gave me a card and a scanned copy of one of the larger cave maps I'd drawn for him (with a personal editorial I'd drawn in last minute of him doing all the work while his 4 co-cavers were napping and exchanging caving tales lies. I'd also been transcribing memoirs of a commercial fisherman from his tape recorder. The different ways we make connections with each other really take me by pleasant surprise sometimes.

New books for my business trip to Anchorage April 10-12:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being ~Milan Kundera
A Hat Full of Sky ~Terry Pratchett