Fate or Fate?

My wife asked if I thought we'd still have met if she'd made different choices.  "Not in the same way," I said.  As much as I'd like to believe true love would always have brought us together, the reality is much more important to believe: that whatever mistakes I may have made were worth it, for the life and love I've found now.

A time for sun, a time for rain, a time for sun.

Ready for Rain: Why Seattleites crave the end of Summer.  Exactly this, except a different northwest town.

I had a great summer, I packed in a lot, but not too much.  I'm a total sun-whore.  And yet.... for these same reasons, I welcome the beginning of the long rainy season.  I keep wanting to have a 'stay in my pajamas' day on my weekend, but it keeps turning back to cool and sunny for them.  

It's weird, that pressure they talk about in the article, that stress to do enough in that short time.  It's the same thing that overloads vacations until you need a vacation from them.  It's the same thing I got wrong a few years ago, when I had my first few weeks alone away from the wife and kids in a half dozen years- I felt like there was so much I had to get done- that I didn't enjoy it, and had nothing but disappointment and how little on that list got done.  

I've learned lessons. So I no longer put much into my when-the-kids-aren't-around-and-I-have-time-to-concentrate file on my todolist- because honestly-  there's just never that much time.  And also, though I haven't internalized it, I can remind myself to try to stay in the now- that there's never enough kid-free-time, never enough sun-time, never enough feeling-in-the-mood-to-write time, never enough rainy-pajama-time, and certainly never enough before-they-grow-up time to do everything we want - to do everything we could. What matters is to do things, deliberately, and with time to savor them, and time to reflect on them.

As best we can until the rain comes.

I hate customer service

We require happiness, smiles, and, frankly: servitude -all in the name of the invisible hand, in the name of bottom lines and profitable strategies and all these mundane mathematical economic things.  But really it's just a distant, now socially acceptable way, of buying fealty for a short amount of time.  It promises to be accessible to everyone, and it is- but some can buy it all the time- and some buy it once for every 100 times it's performed.  And that's what it is, customer service is a performance, worthy of an aristocratic court.

Buy my shirt.  Maybe I'll be a jerk about it if you are.

http://members.cafepress.com/products/product_edit_design.aspx?itemno=1388151090&side=F

FCC Net Neutrality

This is what I wrote to the FCC about net neutrality:

Media has such a dear effect on us, it's important that the volume at which we hear the voices in the world depends only on our willingness to hear them, the quality of their message, and not their money, their power, or their willingness to extract value from the world

Media has such a dear effect on us, it's important that the volume at which we hear the voices in the world depends only on our willingness to hear them, the quality of their message, and not their money, their power, or their willingness to extract value from the world

The reason people are up in arms is because, since we weren't forced to Yahoo or Comcast like an arranged marriage, that we fell in love with what we wanted to, we fell in love with the internet.  It's easy to forget that even AOL was once the little guy who succeeded on it's own merits.  .  Everything that we think of when we think about what is good about the internet *would not have* if rich companies had not been forced to play fair (and so far, often lose) because of net neutrality.

In a world where advantages accrue to the advantaged, leave some level playing field, or else.

 

Here's another one I came across worth a quick read:

https://misfitcitizens.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/net-neutrality/

Forces against Wrong on the Internet

BoingBoing talks about a court opinion that references this xkcd comic.  Read it.  It's easy to make fun of the people, who tire endlessly, ad nauseum (ours not theirs), and quite irritatingly, to challenge the accuracy of everything on the internet*.  However, really, think how bad the information on the internet could get, if it wasn't for that irrepressible urge to prove oneself right?

BoingBoing article on american lawns

Two great quotes from an article that, if anything, ended too soon, just before going from great to fantastic:
http://boingboing.net/2014/05/07/the-revenge-of-the-lawn.html

"(Parenthetically, I have to wonder if the fashion trend away from the untamed hippie bush, in American women, to depilated porn-star pubes is yet more evidence of our neurotic fear of wild things, an android mons for a CGI world.)"

"A vestigial remnant of the more strenuous masculinity of pre-industrial days, mowing the lawn, like manning the backyard grill, was Viagra for overstressed executives and working stiffs alike, putting suburban men in touch (if only symbolically) with their manlier sides."

Irony

There seems to have long been an impulse, in the young, to distinguish themselves.  It often was an adventure, either geographically or intellectually.  That is: they could travel, and bring back stories of strange customs, exotic goods, and mysterious people.  They could also explore in depth some field of study, some esoteric religion, some philosophical movement, some craft.  There the adventurer gained cachet through the same mechanism: some mystery that they were able to 'bring back' and introduce to others, and act as guide and expert.  

Famously, our modern world offers none of these avenues for a person.  I don't want to imply that any of this is negative: but the globe has been explored, and although travel is still underutilized for self-growth, it's now possible to travel to the far reaches of the globe while only superficially engaging with a culture other than your own; skills can be learned quickly on youtube, the web offers a quick course in any sort of though that you'd like to understand; there are no new religions; people a world away can be communicated with in seconds- to play games.  People still try, and at least at a certain age, they will put in some time and try to understand Sartre and impress someone with it - but impressing has become more difficult.

If the borders have all been explored, is it any surprise that people are instead going deeper in to distinguish themselves and their life?  That the desire to set one apart, when nothing exotic can be brought to the group, is to delve deep into one subject, to- in other words- give rise to the sort of obsessive competitive fandom that thrives on the internet.  Is that pervasive sentiment that nothing new can be brought to bear, that all solutions have been tried, that all arts have been explored- is that not the driving force behind the rise of irony as a dominating ethos?

Character

I enjoy being able to do things, that is to have some metis, some knowledge of process.  How the first time is always awkward realizing you should have clamped the piece that way, or held it across your body, or let it simmer longer before blending.  That familiarity, that... not expertise, but competency.  It gives me a rush.  

I could look back at my childhood and remember embarrassing moments when I really didn't know ANYTHING about something, and everyone else did.  Instinct is to ascribe the then (my enjoyment now) to a simple why (my childhood embarrassments, fleeting as they were).  But of course the opposite might be as true.  And does it matter?  Why are some of these things presented as deviations from some perfect and/or perfectly bland upbringing?  Even if it wasn't part of me at birth, how boring would I be without? Obviously children endure a great deal of extreme things that they absolutely should not have to, but focusing on the deviations makes us lose focus on the abominations.  

Normal Health

A lot of attention has come to the DSM and the criticism that they are pathologizing everything, including the parts that fall well within normal (I remember being told that a lack of any neurosis is seriously abnormal ).  The question is usually: what negative affects on mental health does this view of mental health cause?
I wonder how much the same could be said of medicine.  Science "knows" there is a cause (when, of course, some chronic disease might be viewed as emergent) and so it keeps defining, as do other (shall we say...less scientific) folks trying to speak in the accepted language of the time.  Sick House, Fibromyalgia, general autoimmune disorders.  I think that we live in a weak enough way that these could all grow from this unhealthy relationship with the world.  But dammit, what about just being sickly... surely that happens some time... is it actually something "wrong" with that person or has science once again confused theory with practice and is hurting us with its comparison to it's fantasy ideal?

A serious cookie habit

"I own all cookies brought into this house. It's like living with Hunter Thompson, you don't bring drugs there without expecting that he's going to do them. I'm the Hunter S Thompson of this house, except for cookies."

Where the Red Fern Grows?

I haven't read it in ages, but I remember "Where the Red Fern Grows" in the same vibe that "Stand By Me" is sad: when childhood friends die, it sometimes makes you remember how much deeper things felt then, when even moving away from friends felt like someone died.

Distance from the ideal, or: imperfection as blessing

I saw an eight or nine-year-old kid with a birthmark on his eye at my work yesterday.  Nothing too unusual.  I would have been strange, but I wanted to tell him that it was pretty cool.  Because it was.  And, at that age, it wouldn't hurt to hear it. 

I use the phrase 'it has character' a lot, usually to describe the odd and sometimes half-broken things that surround me, and have interesting stories, or undiscoverable mysteries.  What I'm really saying when I praise something as having character is that I find it interestin because it is imperfect. Why rivers are more interesting than irrigation canals, why a real leaf is more interesting than a model, and why reality is more interesting than a computer simulation.  

I wonder sometimes at the harm of comparing ourselves to an ideal. Where does it come from?  Religious often have a divine image to which they have to aspire.  Even evolutionary biologists work from a point that assumes a 'most reproductive' individual, and compares variation in a population to them implicitly (and those many who misinterpret it, with incredible foresight and smugness, often lay out exactly what they believe an individual needs to thrive and survive) 

If I were to design a personality test, I think one criteria would be: Do you measure distance from the ideal as a negative or as a positive.  Do you see your flaws as making you worse than a template, or better?  I guess you can figure that I fall into the latter. 

(Maybe that just illuminates their faith in expertise? also: What about distance from the mean?).

I think the greatest element of wish-fulfillment in modern cinema, or stories in general, is that of the villain.  There's a reason simple-minded military buffs remain fixated on world war 2, and probably will for a long time: it had a villain.  Modern civilization's layers obscure relationships.  We have made the last corners of the globe part of our society, and so are offered no 'other' to serve as the bogeyman of our stories.  Instead the forces we feel aligned against us result from the bureaucratic banality of business, the well-meaning ineptitudes of government, or the constrictions of a broken system with no shared vision of the future.  Where everyone is tainted by the thin threads holding our social web together- the multinational that kills for oil in Africa? Does my retirement fund, invest in an indexing fund, own shares in that company?  when our government acts the bully, kills civilians, colonizes, are we not complicit in this? Couldn't we have done more? Could it be me? Might I not care? We ask ourselves.  

We are all guilty.  We are all villains.  To have someone worse, someone explicitly evil.  There would be a compass point to which to align our lives.  There would be a story we would share.  Even if it is a fiction.