SUPERLATIVE ABSOLUTES

I get impatience with misuse of language.

I admit I am not a master of English - perhaps simply an admirer from a distance.

But we seem to have lost the idea of what an absolute is.

Everything is "the very best" (which is redundant, isn't it?) - we advertise with "the newest/greatest/cheapest.:

And my personal most irritating use - "never in history...." or "for the first time in history..."

5,000 years may be the longest time we have preserved records of historical events. And most of those from an extremely limited number of uncovered artifacts.

Yes, we may have some writings - some pottery - some drawings on a cave.

And from these we make HUGE leaps of imagination to "well, then obviously EVERY one(meaning the one person or group whose art/writing/craft we have uncovered) from this period of time (documented by an dating technique discovered 1950) were doing / making / exploring /living such-and-such."

Without considering that hey, maybe we DON'T know what everyone else WAS doing. We don't have a record of the people in Australia - we don't know what the Chinese were doing at this same time - heck, we don't know what this dude's next-door-neighbor was doing!

We probably only have the record of a man, since most historians seem to be male, and most records appear to be patriarchal - so at least HALF of the population, the home-making, family-rearing, nurturing and generally peaceful half, is not represented at all.

So we get an account of the ONE person or group whose writings/art/interpretations survived the floods, chaos, fires and war - and make a generalization from THAT?

Okay - let me cease from my panting rage - and calmly and gently suggest that perhaps we do NOT know much of anything.

So we might want to admit this, especially in our use of absolutes.

Now please, allow me to lock myself up in a padded room for a few hours to calm down.

SLEEPING ON A RAILING

I have used sleeping medications ever since a hysterectomy  removed my ability to sleep longer than 2-3 hours at a time as well as my uterus.

But recently I went cold turkey to see if I could find rest on my own.

I am currently in the ideal situation for this - I live alone, with two dogs who are house-broken enough to make it through the night (with Cissy only leaving occasional offerings in the living room) - I do not have scheduled work hours - and the Internet is always working at 3 a.m.

I live in a rural area, with my nearest neighbor several acres away - and I have black-out curtains in my bedroom.

Surprisingly, it only took a few nights to settle into a routine.

I do need to go to bed right when I feel sleepy, even if it is unfashionably early, such as 8 p.m. (thank goodness for the DVR that can still record The Walking Dead, Castle, and Jon Stewart).

When I get up to pee around 2 a.m., I must go right back to bed.

And I must get right up when the dogs begin nosing around right before daybreak and take them on a longer-than-usual walk.

With my two daytime naps, I am getting MORE sleep than I was on the medication.

Pretty nifty, eh?







And the nicest thing about all of this - waking up alert and fairly cheerful.

But still - let's go take a nap right now, okay?

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL MORNING

The sun rose over a clear horizon.

The scattered clouds caught some of that rosy glow.









The dogs scampered and sniffed and saluated bushes, making their Facebook updates for the morning.



The horses whinnied and pranced and ran, celebrating the cooler morning air.

The scriptures quoted Isaiah about the Lord's loving kindness never being removed.

It's a nice morning.