"S'posin'"

I didn't take to this song as quickly, or at all, actually. I gave it a good try, but it just didn't grab me. I did find out that the lyricist's full name is Andreamenentania Razafinkeriefo, who was the nephew of Ranavalona III, the last Queen of Madagascar. That's worth knowing.

I think if I stopped watching television I wouldn't be obsessing so much about death. It seems as though every tv show somehow features death, and usually death in some weird way that normally I wouldn't be worried about. I feel sure that death is waiting around the next corner, because surely so many shows wouldn't feature it otherwise. I thought that when I stopped watching BBC criminal dramas (which my husband and I both love) this would ease. It probably doesn't help that now we've started to watch Season One of 'Six Feet Under' on DVD.

This ongoing obsession also features wondering about the individual deaths lost in mass deaths: when those 66,000 people died in Chile in that earthquake (--a while ago--I'm reading National Geographic, too, never a cheerful endeavor), that means that 66,000 individual lives, with dreams and visions and beginnings and realities just suddenly stopped. It boggles my mind. All these people being born and dying every day, and I'll never get to meet even a significant percentage of them, much less have coffee with them. There is absolutely a part of me that wants to do exactly that: who are you? what are you leaving for the world? what makes you laugh? who do you love?

I've been trying to get a handle on issues of differences around race, or sexual preference, or financial status, and it occured to me that I can't escape my basic feeling that we are still more similar than not: we deal with family, friends, money, and the inescapable issues of life and death. This keeps feeding my belief that surely we can be kind to one another, be patient with our differences, for the brief period of time that we have here.