Sorry, guys: I'm removing everything that I am submitting for publication. Not to be a jerk, just to cover my ass.
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Show posts MenuQuote from: Nigel on November 28, 2008, 08:07:08 PM
One day about seven years ago, I was driving home from work. It was evening, late summer, absolutely gorgeous out with the sunlight sliding from golden to plum as the sun set. The leaves on the trees were just starting to yellow. It was the hardest time I've ever gone through in my life: A man I had fallen in love with, hard, had recently broken my heart and moved to Chigaco. My husband had left me a little over a year earlier, with a two-year-old and a six-month-old baby. I had the kids six days a week, but was paying my ex child support due to an "error" in the divorce paperwork, wherein my ex had calculated child support as if he had full legal and halftime physical custody. I'd just hired a lawyer to file for an adjustment to our parenting plan/child support, and my ex was being vindictive. I was getting up at horrorshow-thirty to drive the kids to their babysitter before work, working a full nine hour day, and then picking them up after, going home, making dinner, putting them to bed. I paid the babysitter $400/month, my ex $265/month, and the house I was renting and trying to buy was $700/month. My piece of shit 1977 Plymouth Arrow leaked fluids like an open wound, stalled out at every full stop, the passenger door flew open every time I took a sharp left, and the muffler had rusted through some time before. Problem was, I only made $12 an hour.
So I was feeling kind of sorry for myself. Actually, I was severely suicidally depressed, on tranquilizers most of the time, and the only thing that kept me going was my children.
And then, as I rounded a corner and my passenger door flew open, I had an epiphany; things could get, arbitrarily, infinitely worse at any moment with no warning. My home could burn down, my children could die, I could become catastrophically ill and unable to keep my house or care for my kids.
And then the world was beautiful again, and I relearned how to be happy.
For the most part my Eris is a reflection of the arbitrary universe I see around me, sometimes beautiful and sometimes devastating, and it is up to me to be the comforting, stable mother-nurturer. I don't need an external one.
Quotehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(mythology)
In Hesiod's Works and Days 11–24, two different goddesses named Eris "Strife" are distinguished:
So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature.
For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due.
But the other is the elder daughter of dark Night (Nyx), and the son of Cronus who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.