I went on a walk.
I realized the unhappiness of the sedentary screen life creeps up on you. Likewise, the joy of walking and noticing comes upon you equally subtly.
I don't know how I'd begin to convince someone to shun the one, prefer the other. It's all a case of availability bias, the philosopher's toothache, even Buridan's donkey. I go through long stretches of not knowing how to convince myself.
===
Bibliography
===
I Sing the Body Electric. Whitman.
Much Ado About Nothing. Act V, Scene 1, lines 34-40. Search "toothache."
O Me, O Life. Whitman.
Showing posts with label slice of life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slice of life. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 5, 2020
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
An Essay on Texas
This essay has been brewing in my mind for a while, as I think most essays should. There is a time and place to jot down an idea and send it out immediately to the world, a "hot take" as the youths call it. Likewise, there is a place for an expert, often credentialed by the educational system, giving a proclamation based on the facts as we have them with due diligence completed and all things considered. An essay takes the middle ground. It is an individual's honest attempt to grapple with an issue after some careful (but not exhaustive) examination.
I already knew what general ideas I wanted to express about Texas, and I had gathered some lovely quotes by John Steinbeck which I will weave into this text, but I was lacking a way to rightfully begin the essay. Of all places, I found the right quote to begin when I was rereading Pride and Prejudice [1]. In the scene a minor character, Mary, is eager to get some attention so she takes to playing music for the party, leading to this description:
Before I get too far in this essay, I want to be clear that I am not trying to totally tear the state down. Texas is a great state. I think I could be happy living there, but only by doing the same things I have to do in Oklahoma -- surround myself with books, find whatever pockets of woodland are available, and spend the time I can with the weirdos who will have me. If I lived in one of the large metropolitan areas, I would dread driving there even more than I do here; on the other hand, I could enjoy some artistic and cultural opportunities. No one should feel ashamed of living in, or being from, Texas. After all, life is what you make it nearly anywhere in the first world. But still. I wish these people could tone it down a bit.
Steinbeck in his book Travels with Charley writes:
The Texas bluster doesn't work with the sophisticated, and so it didn't work on Steinbeck, who had the good fortune to marry a beautiful Texan, but the misfortune to watch a Texan (LBJ) ,who was the husband of one of his wife's most intimate friends, picked as vice president and thus witness Texans at their most empowered. Steinbeck again:
And all of that is even worse when you are an Oklahoman. For people not from this part of the world, there is an intense rivalry in the game of football between the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas. And while since I've turned two both teams have won the same number of National Championships -- one a piece -- OU (as we call it, creating an acronym that reverses the letters in the name . . . for some reason) has had the upper hand in the games played. This is called the Red River Rivalry and is played every year in Dallas, Texas at the Texas State Fair. To fill out the local color of this bizarre ritual, there was a man from Oklahoma who went by the name E.Z. Million who repeatedly ran for political office on the one issue of trying to get the game returned to Norman every other year so that the tax revenue would not be lost to Texas. As far as I, or anyone I know of, can tell, none of the offices he ran for had the authority to say where the game would be held. However, his passion was evident, his core argument sound, and as he is no longer with us, I have no wish to speak ill of the dead. His obituary is an interesting read.
It's hard to know how much the football thing influences the experiences I've had, but an outside appraisal of the two states would lead you to see that a boasting Texan is just punching down. The population of Texas is around 29 million people, and its annual state product is around $1.9 trillion. Oklahoma has about 4 million people and state product of about $200 billion. For my part, I have no problem pointing these truths because I define my life to a greater extent by more granular groupings: my community, my neighborhood, my block, my social circle, the person I am trying to make friends with at the moment. It is the Texan who insists on grouping identity at the level of a landmass that takes hours to traverse even by car.
My main theory is that the losses in the king of college sports as well as perhaps bad experiences with belligerent Oklahoman leads Texans to think they are protecting themselves by going on the offensive against "my type" (sure would help if they investigated more deeply what my type was before launching a tirade). People from other states probably get a more charming, less insulting version of Texas pride. To again draw a parallel to Pride and Prejudice, at one point Elizabeth says of Mr. Darcy, who had mad an ass of himself on his first impression with her:
To some extent Texans are correct in asserting that their pride comes from being "the Lone Star State," like a whole other country. Let's move past the thornier issues of the Texas Revolution having roots in too much illegal immigration from whites into what was at the time Mexican territory (irony!) and a desire to preserve the institution of slavery. The fact is that Texas fought and won a war of Independence. To some extent that makes it a different from the other states. But that didn't seem to be enough to explain the out-of-proportion intensity, which in no way resembles how the truly self-assured talk.
And then it came to me. Not too long after independence, Texas became one of the united states only to join a rebellion against the Union sixteen years later and be crushed along with the rest of the South in the Civil War. I think this more than anything explains the maniac behavior outsiders observe and the gullible admire.
As I said, I later on came across some history that somewhat supports this idea. In the book Look Away! William C. Davis shows how unenjoyable the end of the Civil War was for Texas:
As I draw near the end of this essay, I want to lean on Steinbeck's words one more time:
===
[1] I reread this greatest of all novels in English as part of a reading list I made in response the corona crisis. I thought at the time that were many books I wanted to read one more time if I was going to die. Apparently, since I have reread so few of them after making the list, it turns out there weren't as many as I thought, but Pride and Prejudice was one of them.
[2] There was a time I was really into the OU/Texas rivalry. Then I joined debate, and had tournaments most years on the date of the game. Later on, the knowledge that has come to light on the effects of repeated collisions on the brain has really soured my enjoyment of Concussion Ball. As I have moved outside of the ritual, as well as grown older, it also seems odd to me to emotionally live and die based on the decision-making skills of young men aged 18 to 23. When the crowd is booing, I just think to myself, "well, of course they did something stupid. What did you expect?"
I already knew what general ideas I wanted to express about Texas, and I had gathered some lovely quotes by John Steinbeck which I will weave into this text, but I was lacking a way to rightfully begin the essay. Of all places, I found the right quote to begin when I was rereading Pride and Prejudice [1]. In the scene a minor character, Mary, is eager to get some attention so she takes to playing music for the party, leading to this description:
Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. (emphasis mine).There is more than one way to make yourself appear ridiculous. One is to be of a low quality. Another is to put on a brazen bluff that something of middling quality is the very best. This is my critique of white Texans, and their cult of Texas.
Before I get too far in this essay, I want to be clear that I am not trying to totally tear the state down. Texas is a great state. I think I could be happy living there, but only by doing the same things I have to do in Oklahoma -- surround myself with books, find whatever pockets of woodland are available, and spend the time I can with the weirdos who will have me. If I lived in one of the large metropolitan areas, I would dread driving there even more than I do here; on the other hand, I could enjoy some artistic and cultural opportunities. No one should feel ashamed of living in, or being from, Texas. After all, life is what you make it nearly anywhere in the first world. But still. I wish these people could tone it down a bit.
Steinbeck in his book Travels with Charley writes:
Writers facing the problem of Texas find themselves floundering in generalities, and I am no exception. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word (165).This is far as I can tell a unified front that white Texans deliver to the rest of the world. And it is worth saying that this front is not without its admirers. I once saw an online thread where more than one person said how great it was -- inspiring, even -- to hear people so uniformly "positive" about their state, and how wonderful is it to hear such pride! These admirers are plebs -- plebs, I say! -- who have been ground down by a wider culture of endless advertising and vulgar self-promotion to the point that they come to expect it. If someone says they are "the best" enough, these people start to think there must be something to it. This is how you get a con man as President.
The Texas bluster doesn't work with the sophisticated, and so it didn't work on Steinbeck, who had the good fortune to marry a beautiful Texan, but the misfortune to watch a Texan (LBJ) ,who was the husband of one of his wife's most intimate friends, picked as vice president and thus witness Texans at their most empowered. Steinbeck again:
I've studied the Texas problem from many angles and for many years. And of course one my truths is inevitably canceled by another. Outside their state I think Texans are a little frightened and very tender in their feelings, and these qualities cause boasting, arrogance, and noisy complacency -- the outlets of shy children. At home Texans are none of these things. The ones I know are gracious, generous, and quiet (166).I have not had the pleasure of visiting any acquaintance of mine who is a Texan in their native land. Instead, I have only been a tourist of that great state. All I have ever received is the "boasting, arrogance, and noisy complacency" that was obvious to Steinbeck in the early 60s.
And all of that is even worse when you are an Oklahoman. For people not from this part of the world, there is an intense rivalry in the game of football between the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas. And while since I've turned two both teams have won the same number of National Championships -- one a piece -- OU (as we call it, creating an acronym that reverses the letters in the name . . . for some reason) has had the upper hand in the games played. This is called the Red River Rivalry and is played every year in Dallas, Texas at the Texas State Fair. To fill out the local color of this bizarre ritual, there was a man from Oklahoma who went by the name E.Z. Million who repeatedly ran for political office on the one issue of trying to get the game returned to Norman every other year so that the tax revenue would not be lost to Texas. As far as I, or anyone I know of, can tell, none of the offices he ran for had the authority to say where the game would be held. However, his passion was evident, his core argument sound, and as he is no longer with us, I have no wish to speak ill of the dead. His obituary is an interesting read.
It's hard to know how much the football thing influences the experiences I've had, but an outside appraisal of the two states would lead you to see that a boasting Texan is just punching down. The population of Texas is around 29 million people, and its annual state product is around $1.9 trillion. Oklahoma has about 4 million people and state product of about $200 billion. For my part, I have no problem pointing these truths because I define my life to a greater extent by more granular groupings: my community, my neighborhood, my block, my social circle, the person I am trying to make friends with at the moment. It is the Texan who insists on grouping identity at the level of a landmass that takes hours to traverse even by car.
My main theory is that the losses in the king of college sports as well as perhaps bad experiences with belligerent Oklahoman leads Texans to think they are protecting themselves by going on the offensive against "my type" (sure would help if they investigated more deeply what my type was before launching a tirade). People from other states probably get a more charming, less insulting version of Texas pride. To again draw a parallel to Pride and Prejudice, at one point Elizabeth says of Mr. Darcy, who had mad an ass of himself on his first impression with her:
I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.But what is this Texas that it's boosters (and boasters) are promoting? (Really, I just want an excuse to share another Steinbeck quote I had copied. They are fantastic):
What I am trying to say is that there is no physical or geographical unity in Texas. Its unity lies in the mind, And this is not only in Texans. The word Texas becomes a symbol to everyone in the world. There's no question that this Texas-of-the-mind fable is often synthetic, sometimes untruthful, and frequently romantic, but that in no way diminishes its strength as a symbol (169).So how did this symbol come to be? In true essay fashion, as established above, I thought about this problem for a few days, and came up with my best attempt at an answer. I then sat on that thought for some time, and eventually (months later) came across a quote in a book that lends some credibility to my thinking.
To some extent Texans are correct in asserting that their pride comes from being "the Lone Star State," like a whole other country. Let's move past the thornier issues of the Texas Revolution having roots in too much illegal immigration from whites into what was at the time Mexican territory (irony!) and a desire to preserve the institution of slavery. The fact is that Texas fought and won a war of Independence. To some extent that makes it a different from the other states. But that didn't seem to be enough to explain the out-of-proportion intensity, which in no way resembles how the truly self-assured talk.
And then it came to me. Not too long after independence, Texas became one of the united states only to join a rebellion against the Union sixteen years later and be crushed along with the rest of the South in the Civil War. I think this more than anything explains the maniac behavior outsiders observe and the gullible admire.
As I said, I later on came across some history that somewhat supports this idea. In the book Look Away! William C. Davis shows how unenjoyable the end of the Civil War was for Texas:
As late as April 8, 1865, just hours before the final gasps of surrender commenced, Governor Pendleton Murrah in Texas still struggled to put clothes on his people's backs, but found not a single machine in his frontier counties. He had dreamed of making Texans self-sufficient, but instead now they were reduced to selling the few cattle that escaped the impressment officers, in order to buy fabric brought though the blockade, or misappropriated from the military and sold on the black market, and at grotesquely extortionate prices (286).Texas: born in insurrection, seasoned early by defeat and humiliation. That would absolutely make for an "us against the world" mentality.
As I draw near the end of this essay, I want to lean on Steinbeck's words one more time:
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery and paradox (166, emphasis mine).I think an essayist should be willing to tread where others dare not. I have explored some of the depths of the Texan psyche, or at least how the Texas diaspora takes to the road. I want to be clear that I neither hate nor love the Texas religion. I have no passionate feelings for the state whatsoever, and have not since I was in my early teens [2]. Instead, I just wanted to unravel the puzzle of what some otherwise decent individuals flip a switch and become so braggadocios, if not nasty, with so little cause (And I assure you, I never try to provoke the Texas response. . . well, in person). What makes someone lose all taste, proportionality, fair-play, and reason? I think it's an interesting case study in identity formation. It's also more enjoyable and safe to investigate because the stakes are low. Frankly, I find the absurdity of it all amusing.
===
[1] I reread this greatest of all novels in English as part of a reading list I made in response the corona crisis. I thought at the time that were many books I wanted to read one more time if I was going to die. Apparently, since I have reread so few of them after making the list, it turns out there weren't as many as I thought, but Pride and Prejudice was one of them.
[2] There was a time I was really into the OU/Texas rivalry. Then I joined debate, and had tournaments most years on the date of the game. Later on, the knowledge that has come to light on the effects of repeated collisions on the brain has really soured my enjoyment of Concussion Ball. As I have moved outside of the ritual, as well as grown older, it also seems odd to me to emotionally live and die based on the decision-making skills of young men aged 18 to 23. When the crowd is booing, I just think to myself, "well, of course they did something stupid. What did you expect?"
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Infestations, Interesting and Boring
"All art is infested by other art." He had this as a sign on the wall. It was hand-written in marker on cut poster-board. I am not sure whether or not he had the attribution, but just I looked it up today and found it was by Leo Steinberg [1]
We are social beings and we exist in a historical context, even down to being carried away in contemporary movements of memes [2] and shifting emphasis. To achieve excellence, we must gather much. On the other hand, if you spend all your time with other art, even if it's just art better than what you can do, you don't have time to create your own. And the benefit to feeling alive through experiencing the edge of creation is of profound importance. If I can be happy and still create (or vice versa) then I have won . . . existence.
Back to the handwritten sign: These types of decorations as non-decoration are common enough for male teachers, especially at the high school level. His entire instructional method was lecture. You may think that is my criticism of him; it is not. Rather, it is that he lectured poorly. Not only that, but that he lectured poorly on purpose.
My proof is that he had two stories from his life that he shared with the class, but the only way he'd tell them was if someone said "tell us the ____ story" by name. This meant that someone who had heard the story before had told someone in the class to ask him about it. See, it was an ego-trip, you dig?
In the telling of these two stories, he showed the fundamentals of a good communicator: facial expressions, set ups, punchlines, expressing the doings and states of mind of interesting people. The stories were excellent. But none of these abilities were used in teaching literature. For that, his job, he read in a monotone off notes that were turning yellow with age, showing no desire to breath life into any text, or make any of it human. I mean he had great things to work with -- Hamlet, Hesse's Damien, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gardener's Grendel, the Death of a Salesman, and Waiting for Godot.
So why did he do this? In part it was to keep his class sizes small, which I got on good information from another teacher who I worked with later on. Also, it enabled his two stories to stand out so much that they achieved legendary status. But really, I think the biggest factor is that he got off on the notion that he was smarter than everyone else. If eyes were glazed over or students fell asleep, it just went to show how much greater his ability to take on the higher realm of abstractions was. Holy shit, I just remember I took his philosophy course as well, and that in that course he stated that was a Platonist [3]. Now that I remember I took more than one course with him, I think that I might have heard at least one of his two good stories more than once.
. . . I'm now going to undermine my own humor a bit. I've taught, and I would hate to read an essay like this from a former student of mine. So I want to give the man his due. He had once expressed the idea that he thought people learned best from their own reading, and that what was particularly beneficial about going to college was access to a good library. The pacing of his reading assignments stacks up favorably in light of the watered-down education students are now receiving. He taught in a way that was emotionally sustainable for him and was professional in all his interactions with students. In conclusion, I received no harm from taking his classes and would gladly have a conversation with him if we ever happened to cross paths again.
===
[1] This lead to me reading up about Mr. Steinberg. Doing so lead to this gem:
[2] Be aware that meme was well-defined when it was coined in Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
This article summarizes it as "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" and furthermore includes this explanation:
We are social beings and we exist in a historical context, even down to being carried away in contemporary movements of memes [2] and shifting emphasis. To achieve excellence, we must gather much. On the other hand, if you spend all your time with other art, even if it's just art better than what you can do, you don't have time to create your own. And the benefit to feeling alive through experiencing the edge of creation is of profound importance. If I can be happy and still create (or vice versa) then I have won . . . existence.
Back to the handwritten sign: These types of decorations as non-decoration are common enough for male teachers, especially at the high school level. His entire instructional method was lecture. You may think that is my criticism of him; it is not. Rather, it is that he lectured poorly. Not only that, but that he lectured poorly on purpose.
My proof is that he had two stories from his life that he shared with the class, but the only way he'd tell them was if someone said "tell us the ____ story" by name. This meant that someone who had heard the story before had told someone in the class to ask him about it. See, it was an ego-trip, you dig?
In the telling of these two stories, he showed the fundamentals of a good communicator: facial expressions, set ups, punchlines, expressing the doings and states of mind of interesting people. The stories were excellent. But none of these abilities were used in teaching literature. For that, his job, he read in a monotone off notes that were turning yellow with age, showing no desire to breath life into any text, or make any of it human. I mean he had great things to work with -- Hamlet, Hesse's Damien, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gardener's Grendel, the Death of a Salesman, and Waiting for Godot.
So why did he do this? In part it was to keep his class sizes small, which I got on good information from another teacher who I worked with later on. Also, it enabled his two stories to stand out so much that they achieved legendary status. But really, I think the biggest factor is that he got off on the notion that he was smarter than everyone else. If eyes were glazed over or students fell asleep, it just went to show how much greater his ability to take on the higher realm of abstractions was. Holy shit, I just remember I took his philosophy course as well, and that in that course he stated that was a Platonist [3]. Now that I remember I took more than one course with him, I think that I might have heard at least one of his two good stories more than once.
. . . I'm now going to undermine my own humor a bit. I've taught, and I would hate to read an essay like this from a former student of mine. So I want to give the man his due. He had once expressed the idea that he thought people learned best from their own reading, and that what was particularly beneficial about going to college was access to a good library. The pacing of his reading assignments stacks up favorably in light of the watered-down education students are now receiving. He taught in a way that was emotionally sustainable for him and was professional in all his interactions with students. In conclusion, I received no harm from taking his classes and would gladly have a conversation with him if we ever happened to cross paths again.
===
[1] This lead to me reading up about Mr. Steinberg. Doing so lead to this gem:
Steinberg took an informal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers. This was in juxtaposition to many formalist critics at the time, such as Clement Greenberg, who were known to be resolute in their writing.This goes to show that the "objectivity" pose in criticism was something constructed out of a historical moment, and one that was not really all that long ago. As a quick summary, the arts developed physics envy as modernity was ramping up. Then the sentiment was hardened into rules and procedures during academia's metastatic growth, which in turn was a subset of the Great Cultural Suicide after the Great Oil War, aka World War II. No "I" meant no ethos, which fit in just fine with the systems that were growing in power and seeking to defend themselves. Mistakes were made, indeed.
[2] Be aware that meme was well-defined when it was coined in Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
This article summarizes it as "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" and furthermore includes this explanation:
Dawkins explains how an "internet meme" is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity. Unlike with genes (and Dawkins' original meaning of "meme"), there is no attempt at accuracy of copying; internet memes are deliberately altered.This brings up an interesting question. Do we make efforts to defend that meaning or do we let the word semantically drift along it's merry way as over-repetition of images, mostly from -- but sometimes creating -- pop-culture? I am left fascinated with these kinds of fights. And if you never fight for anything, you cede all of natural language to fools. (Note to self: keep working at math. Even if you remain laughably inadequate, at least you can operate inside of truth).
[3] I think that "holy shit" actually works on a pretty significant level here. We defecate because we are embodied. Human bodies experiencing the world are what took the time to pen literature and even philosophy. I don't think there's supposed to be pooping in the Platonic realm, at least not in the reading presented in that survey class.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Bird Wave
I had written the first draft of this months ago, before the long quarantine had begun.
==
It's a work day, by which I mean it is a job day for the majority -- whether that majority is Silent, living lives of quiet desperation, or even happy, I cannot say. Only that they are at a job and I am not. I am at a library, on the third floor.
My frugal phone has a radio function enabled, something nearly all phones had available for years, but only recently turned on; folly and greed can outrun technological progress. I listen to a classical station and a piece I've never heard before uplifts me. The outer walls of the library are just glass -- window after window, what I thought was absurd modernism now shown to be very useful. I can see the flights of birds, most of it below my level. I see groupings swell up in light and come back down in waves, close enough to the movements of the music to be exhilarated further.
A perfect hour, the bloom of the moment [1], but I had errands to run, and so I was to leave very soon after that, but not before the next song was over.
==
[1] My second reference to Walden in this quite short piece.
==
It's a work day, by which I mean it is a job day for the majority -- whether that majority is Silent, living lives of quiet desperation, or even happy, I cannot say. Only that they are at a job and I am not. I am at a library, on the third floor.
My frugal phone has a radio function enabled, something nearly all phones had available for years, but only recently turned on; folly and greed can outrun technological progress. I listen to a classical station and a piece I've never heard before uplifts me. The outer walls of the library are just glass -- window after window, what I thought was absurd modernism now shown to be very useful. I can see the flights of birds, most of it below my level. I see groupings swell up in light and come back down in waves, close enough to the movements of the music to be exhilarated further.
A perfect hour, the bloom of the moment [1], but I had errands to run, and so I was to leave very soon after that, but not before the next song was over.
==
[1] My second reference to Walden in this quite short piece.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Sunrise, Earned
The first and even the second draft of this piece was written few weeks ago. I like to let ideas incubate for a while, and I try to give some space so I can catch all the typos that I can. The events depicted were from a freer time, when there were jobs to go to. I mean, I didn't go to one -- but they were there.
==
This piece will be about my experience watching a sunrise and some of the implications of such an activity, but before that I start in one of my favorite places -- a coffee house.
When my wife and I showed up, all of the tables suited for sprawling out were taken. Instead, we sat a little nook with four of the kind of chairs you could sink into, positioned in a circle gesturing at the kind of intimate conversation over coffee I think many of us long for but virtually never have [1]. Well, I didn't know it when I sat down, but two ladies were about to have one of those conversations. The first to arrive sat some items down and then asked if anyone was sitting here. As I had already given my wife my headphones in an act of kindness, the question fell upon me. I chirped some polite welcome to the seat. She sat down and pulled the other seat close to her. I'm not sure whether or not I felt trepidation about it at the time, but it sounds like something I would feel.
Her friend showed up shortly after that and they began a very bougie conversation -- career, remodeling, the personality of a boss, soccer tournaments, etc. I had been working on the second draft of a piece, but I couldn't concentrate with their conversation going on. To give some insight to my writing process, if I am writing a second draft on a yellow notepad rather than typing it out it means I have some problems with structure that I find particularly knotty. In that situation, I need to be able to clear my head. And a bougie conversation does not help me to do this.
After dealing with their bougie conversation for a while and attempting to start with the problem several times, I saw a seat had opened up by the window and I moved to it for a while. Finally free from the bougie conversation, I was able to quickly see a solution and proceeded to smoothly write the piece. Truth be told, once I had the puzzle figured out I probably could have returned to where I was and worked effectively enough, but coming back after such a short amount of time away would have seemed rather odd. As it was, when I finished the draft and was looking to return, I was nervous that the ladies would give me a perplexed look when I took my seat again. Fortunately, they did not. They continued right on, rapt in their conversation (did I mention it was in the manner of the bourgeois yet?) They spoke a short time longer and I was able to pull out a book and half-read it and half-listen to them with a spirit of slack, and thus some pleasure. They departed soon enough after that.
After they left, I wondered what it was that was so distracting about their conversation. Their volume was perfectly appropriate for the setting, so it couldn't have been that. They weren't saying anything offensive or cruel or even callous. Instead, I think the answer is that they kept hitting topics I could find interesting, then proceeded down paths I could follow and agree with, but then just . . . veered off. It's not that they were too different from me; it was that they were too similar.
I think it's great that someone is attempting to free-lance. In fact, it is one of my life's aspirations to one day be self-employed. But then if you talk about the need to re-model to make an office, I distrust your ability to stay profitable. Maybe your connections will bail you out. It must be nice to have those.. . . Oh, one your offers is something involving George W Bush. This leads to bougie agreement that while W wasn't a great President -- ha ha -- Trump shows he's not that bad, I mean W's a sweet man who does those paintings.
I want you to know that at that point, I didn't formulate a thought. But I know that listening to this at the time felt mostly right. . . then wrong. And this pattern kept happening in the conversation. The feeling is what prevented me from seeing a solution to the structural puzzle I was trying to solve in my prose. I think the subtle off-ness of the conversation took up my "feel space" so I couldn't feel what to do with the writing.
If it came up, I could tell someone the "Bush is better than Trump because he paints now" felt off to me. If the person I was talking to gave sympathetic body language, I and the person would feel closer, but then I could be done with it, having never formulated the feelings as thoughts. But if someone asked me why I felt that way (and their tone could be curious or accusatory, with different emotional implications, of course), I would provide something like "Jesus Christ! How stupid does someone have to be to get their information only from social media? I've seen that shit too, and when I did I immediately did something called thinking. What does painting or politeness have to do with policies and how they materially impact people? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. The banking crisis brewed under his 8-year watch. The punitive nature of No Child Left Behind. The normalization and even fetishization of torture. The rise of mass surveillance [2]. And don't forget about what Katrina showed about the levels of competence and care."
That's what I would say, if asked to elaborate on my feeling. If I were to write out a position on the matter, I would reverse the arguments about material impact and social media group-think trying to make civility the only short-cut for goodness. Also, I'd remove the the insults and curse words. However, again, I want to emphasize that I didn't think any of those thoughts at the time. This is because I'm not the habit of constantly signaling my moral intuitions. Instead, I sat there more or less placidly until I saw a way to change my micro-environment to get the task I valued done.
But before I got up one of the two ladies, the one who wasn't experimenting with free-lancing, but instead thinks the taciturn nature of her boss is interesting and has her kids in too many activities including, of course, soccer, said something that I can honestly say has changed my life. She mentioned waking up at 5:00 am in order to get her exercise in. For one thing, she said she has discovered that she won't do it in the evenings. For another, when she gets a workout done in the morning, even if she gets nothing else done in the course of the day, she can at least say she did that.
By golly, I'm glad my mind was placid [3] because I was able to hear her and weigh the merits of what she said. The women saying this wasn't particularly thin, so this wasn't a moment of pleasantville-like positivity propaganda, or a kind of managerial eugenics. Instead, she was earnestly sharing an idea that let her feel good about sacrificing a little bit to the the right thing. I thought about it for a few days, and then started setting my alarm for 5:30 am and doing exercises in the morning. I have started very small, almost laughably small to avoid injuries, but it feels like the kind of habit I want to keep. It gives me structure to my days here in a sabbatical and it is something I should be able to do even when I return to work.
Part II
===
I remember listening to a Joe Rogan podcast, something I do rarely enough, and he mentioned someone who wakes up even earlier than I am proposing, say 3:30, to work out. Rogan said with admiration "he earns his sunrise."
I had been working on my habit of rising early to work out for three days. The first two I had missed the sunrise. On day one, I fell back asleep after the exercises and breakfast only to wake up at noon (reasonably enough as I had originally gone to sleep after 2:00 am). On day two I stayed up but had missed the sunrise doing other things. But on the third day, after I dropped my wife off to her job and filled the gas tank, the sky looked beautiful with pastel pinks and blues playing on the clouds. Being the student of Life that I am, I knew the closest location to get a good view of the sunrise was the Walmart parking lot. (The perfect spot of sunsets used to be a grocery store parking lot. There was even a bench at a bus stop where I could sat and watch, but then a Chick-Fil-A was put in. Since there are not buildings behind that, I assume the Chick-Fil-A parking lot is now an optimal place to watch sunsets, but I have not explored this possibility yet).
I parked my car and soaked in the early morning. I let two songs play on the radio before I turned off the engine to just watch and Do Nothing. First: "Shallow".
. . .
After the music, I settled into silence. At that moment, for the first time, I wished I had a more sophisticated phone, so I could take a picture and send it to my best man, as I like to call Nat Wernick, who was naturally enough the best man at my wedding. Through the years I had a smartphone and data plan, I would send him photos of sunrises and sunsets. This happened infrequently and randomly enough to serve as a good ice breaker and reminder of presence. I made a mental note to text him when I got home, after the aesthetic experience was done.
. . .
A little later I heard some geese in the distance, which is always such a wonderful surprise gift to receive. I basked in the smile (is it right to call it "my" smile? The dance of the moment created it; I was just choosing to notice it). And then I saw that the geese were coming toward me. I watched them fly by in two waves. I had never seen a goose honk mid-flight from a profile directly in front of me before. It looked like the goose in question was straining forward, as if the strain in the beak and neck was pulling the rest of the bird body along.
I was overwhelmed with feelings of compassion and love. I have had so much death in my life that I have deep understandings of it (ones I wouldn't wish on anyone) and many times deep experiences will activate these understandings. So much happened nearly simultaneously and jumbled together that "think" is the wrong word, so I will use the word "perceived" instead.
I perceived that all the geese would one day grow old, and one day would die. I perceived that death is often a struggle, that I have have spent hours ruminating that there is a high likelihood I will be very scared the moment I die [4] and I will probably struggle. I was reminded of other times I have been flooded with love and compassion for animals, like one time with a mouse (something I have not yet written about).
All that happened in a second, perhaps two. But I think you'll admit it was a good moment.
. . .
It was back to Doing Nothing and watching clouds for a bit. Eventually the composition of the colors changed, regressing back to the mundane. The sun also moved up to a position that hurt my eyes. It became time to go. As I drove away, the song was "Faith" by George Michael.
Implications
===
I want to be a writer about, and defender of, perfect, unhurried moments. But more importantly, I want to experience them. With that said, it is often better to plan and monitor in larger blocks of time -- say, a week. If all I do is chase beauty and stillness, I find I get kind of habituated to that and it makes knocks down my energy levels very close to, if not in fact, depression. Also, I then have nothing to show for my time and people around me do not approve. (And "no thank you" to changing my tribes. I like the ones I have just fine).
There is a time to create, a time to maintain the body, and a time to contribute. These are all recognized within bourgeoisie habits. I merely add that there are times for beauty and transcendence.
===
[1] Especially for me, considering caffeine is too prone to make me far too manic to do my part to keep the conversation feeling like an inter-play, a dance, a true act of intimacy. I really need to experiment more with tea and mint teas.
[2] I know that Democratic politicians are complicit in nearly all of this. . . And? Do you think bad things are only bad if they score points for one political party or another?
[3] I already mentioned that I am not in the habit of public signaling as one reason why this is so. I also think my work in the discursive cluster of so-called Eastern thought helped me form the habit. (the Western tradition of Stoicism could potentially work; it's just not the one I got to first). While I haven't done all that much sitting meditation, for decades I have built up experiences noticing narratives forming and then pausing them, questioning them, or just letting them pass over "me" (the observing self). Because of this perhaps many judgmental or angry narratives don't often come up to play. Or perhaps I'm not a dick. And perhaps those are the same thing.
[4] I did not perceive in that moment my other thing I had ruminated over, such as I could one day die in my sleep or under anesthesia and not have any experience of the end. I know a lot of people have a stated love for this way to go, but I see such meaningless in it that it has caused me terror. If the last moment is meaningless, what about the second to last moment? The third to last moment . . And so on to every moment. Not the kind of thoughts happy people think, I know. I feel blessed to not be trapped in these mental grooves anymore. I don't wish it on anyone.
==
This piece will be about my experience watching a sunrise and some of the implications of such an activity, but before that I start in one of my favorite places -- a coffee house.
When my wife and I showed up, all of the tables suited for sprawling out were taken. Instead, we sat a little nook with four of the kind of chairs you could sink into, positioned in a circle gesturing at the kind of intimate conversation over coffee I think many of us long for but virtually never have [1]. Well, I didn't know it when I sat down, but two ladies were about to have one of those conversations. The first to arrive sat some items down and then asked if anyone was sitting here. As I had already given my wife my headphones in an act of kindness, the question fell upon me. I chirped some polite welcome to the seat. She sat down and pulled the other seat close to her. I'm not sure whether or not I felt trepidation about it at the time, but it sounds like something I would feel.
Her friend showed up shortly after that and they began a very bougie conversation -- career, remodeling, the personality of a boss, soccer tournaments, etc. I had been working on the second draft of a piece, but I couldn't concentrate with their conversation going on. To give some insight to my writing process, if I am writing a second draft on a yellow notepad rather than typing it out it means I have some problems with structure that I find particularly knotty. In that situation, I need to be able to clear my head. And a bougie conversation does not help me to do this.
After dealing with their bougie conversation for a while and attempting to start with the problem several times, I saw a seat had opened up by the window and I moved to it for a while. Finally free from the bougie conversation, I was able to quickly see a solution and proceeded to smoothly write the piece. Truth be told, once I had the puzzle figured out I probably could have returned to where I was and worked effectively enough, but coming back after such a short amount of time away would have seemed rather odd. As it was, when I finished the draft and was looking to return, I was nervous that the ladies would give me a perplexed look when I took my seat again. Fortunately, they did not. They continued right on, rapt in their conversation (did I mention it was in the manner of the bourgeois yet?) They spoke a short time longer and I was able to pull out a book and half-read it and half-listen to them with a spirit of slack, and thus some pleasure. They departed soon enough after that.
After they left, I wondered what it was that was so distracting about their conversation. Their volume was perfectly appropriate for the setting, so it couldn't have been that. They weren't saying anything offensive or cruel or even callous. Instead, I think the answer is that they kept hitting topics I could find interesting, then proceeded down paths I could follow and agree with, but then just . . . veered off. It's not that they were too different from me; it was that they were too similar.
I think it's great that someone is attempting to free-lance. In fact, it is one of my life's aspirations to one day be self-employed. But then if you talk about the need to re-model to make an office, I distrust your ability to stay profitable. Maybe your connections will bail you out. It must be nice to have those.. . . Oh, one your offers is something involving George W Bush. This leads to bougie agreement that while W wasn't a great President -- ha ha -- Trump shows he's not that bad, I mean W's a sweet man who does those paintings.
I want you to know that at that point, I didn't formulate a thought. But I know that listening to this at the time felt mostly right. . . then wrong. And this pattern kept happening in the conversation. The feeling is what prevented me from seeing a solution to the structural puzzle I was trying to solve in my prose. I think the subtle off-ness of the conversation took up my "feel space" so I couldn't feel what to do with the writing.
If it came up, I could tell someone the "Bush is better than Trump because he paints now" felt off to me. If the person I was talking to gave sympathetic body language, I and the person would feel closer, but then I could be done with it, having never formulated the feelings as thoughts. But if someone asked me why I felt that way (and their tone could be curious or accusatory, with different emotional implications, of course), I would provide something like "Jesus Christ! How stupid does someone have to be to get their information only from social media? I've seen that shit too, and when I did I immediately did something called thinking. What does painting or politeness have to do with policies and how they materially impact people? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. The banking crisis brewed under his 8-year watch. The punitive nature of No Child Left Behind. The normalization and even fetishization of torture. The rise of mass surveillance [2]. And don't forget about what Katrina showed about the levels of competence and care."
That's what I would say, if asked to elaborate on my feeling. If I were to write out a position on the matter, I would reverse the arguments about material impact and social media group-think trying to make civility the only short-cut for goodness. Also, I'd remove the the insults and curse words. However, again, I want to emphasize that I didn't think any of those thoughts at the time. This is because I'm not the habit of constantly signaling my moral intuitions. Instead, I sat there more or less placidly until I saw a way to change my micro-environment to get the task I valued done.
But before I got up one of the two ladies, the one who wasn't experimenting with free-lancing, but instead thinks the taciturn nature of her boss is interesting and has her kids in too many activities including, of course, soccer, said something that I can honestly say has changed my life. She mentioned waking up at 5:00 am in order to get her exercise in. For one thing, she said she has discovered that she won't do it in the evenings. For another, when she gets a workout done in the morning, even if she gets nothing else done in the course of the day, she can at least say she did that.
By golly, I'm glad my mind was placid [3] because I was able to hear her and weigh the merits of what she said. The women saying this wasn't particularly thin, so this wasn't a moment of pleasantville-like positivity propaganda, or a kind of managerial eugenics. Instead, she was earnestly sharing an idea that let her feel good about sacrificing a little bit to the the right thing. I thought about it for a few days, and then started setting my alarm for 5:30 am and doing exercises in the morning. I have started very small, almost laughably small to avoid injuries, but it feels like the kind of habit I want to keep. It gives me structure to my days here in a sabbatical and it is something I should be able to do even when I return to work.
Part II
===
I remember listening to a Joe Rogan podcast, something I do rarely enough, and he mentioned someone who wakes up even earlier than I am proposing, say 3:30, to work out. Rogan said with admiration "he earns his sunrise."
I had been working on my habit of rising early to work out for three days. The first two I had missed the sunrise. On day one, I fell back asleep after the exercises and breakfast only to wake up at noon (reasonably enough as I had originally gone to sleep after 2:00 am). On day two I stayed up but had missed the sunrise doing other things. But on the third day, after I dropped my wife off to her job and filled the gas tank, the sky looked beautiful with pastel pinks and blues playing on the clouds. Being the student of Life that I am, I knew the closest location to get a good view of the sunrise was the Walmart parking lot. (The perfect spot of sunsets used to be a grocery store parking lot. There was even a bench at a bus stop where I could sat and watch, but then a Chick-Fil-A was put in. Since there are not buildings behind that, I assume the Chick-Fil-A parking lot is now an optimal place to watch sunsets, but I have not explored this possibility yet).
I parked my car and soaked in the early morning. I let two songs play on the radio before I turned off the engine to just watch and Do Nothing. First: "Shallow".
Tell me somethin', girlIf I didn't like the next sound, I was going to turn the radio off, but the next song was "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey. This lead me to dance seated, thrashing my shoulders around a bit.
Are you happy in this modern world?
Or do you need more?
Is there somethin' else you're searchin' for?
. . .
After the music, I settled into silence. At that moment, for the first time, I wished I had a more sophisticated phone, so I could take a picture and send it to my best man, as I like to call Nat Wernick, who was naturally enough the best man at my wedding. Through the years I had a smartphone and data plan, I would send him photos of sunrises and sunsets. This happened infrequently and randomly enough to serve as a good ice breaker and reminder of presence. I made a mental note to text him when I got home, after the aesthetic experience was done.
. . .
A little later I heard some geese in the distance, which is always such a wonderful surprise gift to receive. I basked in the smile (is it right to call it "my" smile? The dance of the moment created it; I was just choosing to notice it). And then I saw that the geese were coming toward me. I watched them fly by in two waves. I had never seen a goose honk mid-flight from a profile directly in front of me before. It looked like the goose in question was straining forward, as if the strain in the beak and neck was pulling the rest of the bird body along.
I was overwhelmed with feelings of compassion and love. I have had so much death in my life that I have deep understandings of it (ones I wouldn't wish on anyone) and many times deep experiences will activate these understandings. So much happened nearly simultaneously and jumbled together that "think" is the wrong word, so I will use the word "perceived" instead.
I perceived that all the geese would one day grow old, and one day would die. I perceived that death is often a struggle, that I have have spent hours ruminating that there is a high likelihood I will be very scared the moment I die [4] and I will probably struggle. I was reminded of other times I have been flooded with love and compassion for animals, like one time with a mouse (something I have not yet written about).
All that happened in a second, perhaps two. But I think you'll admit it was a good moment.
. . .
It was back to Doing Nothing and watching clouds for a bit. Eventually the composition of the colors changed, regressing back to the mundane. The sun also moved up to a position that hurt my eyes. It became time to go. As I drove away, the song was "Faith" by George Michael.
Implications
===
I want to be a writer about, and defender of, perfect, unhurried moments. But more importantly, I want to experience them. With that said, it is often better to plan and monitor in larger blocks of time -- say, a week. If all I do is chase beauty and stillness, I find I get kind of habituated to that and it makes knocks down my energy levels very close to, if not in fact, depression. Also, I then have nothing to show for my time and people around me do not approve. (And "no thank you" to changing my tribes. I like the ones I have just fine).
There is a time to create, a time to maintain the body, and a time to contribute. These are all recognized within bourgeoisie habits. I merely add that there are times for beauty and transcendence.
===
[1] Especially for me, considering caffeine is too prone to make me far too manic to do my part to keep the conversation feeling like an inter-play, a dance, a true act of intimacy. I really need to experiment more with tea and mint teas.
[2] I know that Democratic politicians are complicit in nearly all of this. . . And? Do you think bad things are only bad if they score points for one political party or another?
[3] I already mentioned that I am not in the habit of public signaling as one reason why this is so. I also think my work in the discursive cluster of so-called Eastern thought helped me form the habit. (the Western tradition of Stoicism could potentially work; it's just not the one I got to first). While I haven't done all that much sitting meditation, for decades I have built up experiences noticing narratives forming and then pausing them, questioning them, or just letting them pass over "me" (the observing self). Because of this perhaps many judgmental or angry narratives don't often come up to play. Or perhaps I'm not a dick. And perhaps those are the same thing.
[4] I did not perceive in that moment my other thing I had ruminated over, such as I could one day die in my sleep or under anesthesia and not have any experience of the end. I know a lot of people have a stated love for this way to go, but I see such meaningless in it that it has caused me terror. If the last moment is meaningless, what about the second to last moment? The third to last moment . . And so on to every moment. Not the kind of thoughts happy people think, I know. I feel blessed to not be trapped in these mental grooves anymore. I don't wish it on anyone.
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
It Begins (Again) With a Salad
The salad I had yesterday:
chickweed, mint, arugula, olive oil, garlic salt, pepper, a smattering of feta cheese.
All of the greens came up this year on their own, and I can probably get a salad a day from them for at least a month, maybe two or three before I need to come up with other sources of greens. I don't want to over-romanticize this, but I also don't want to leave it so marginalized that it isn't even acknowledged -- my grounds provide me a salad a day if I am willing to go get it.
The arugula has self-seeded from a planting I made years ago. (It was at least three, but maybe four or five). I find it interesting to watch each year's self-seeding move a few feet away from the year before, walking across the lawn in time. The mint originally came from my father-in-law. He had some that escaped containment and sprawled out into a portion of his lawn. That sounded like my kind of plant -- and still does. I find the mint to be mild enough to be the base of a salad, but that is a fairly recent revelation. Lastly, chickweed, as the name says, is a weed that comes in on its own. For some reason, dandelions don't come in well on our grounds, but I count myself fortunate that chickweed does. (I might go for a walk today to see if I can find dandelions in a park or greenbelt, but for now I have a cat curled up on me -- one that rarely does, at that).
And just like that, I can be re-connected after almost a year away. I had my reasons, such as finally letting grief run its course. I needed to take away the responsibilities of a garden, and that got me out of the habit of checking the grounds. In that time, I found great joy in creating, and I hope I can live a life that allows for creation, connection to nature, as well as any thing I need for happiness. But it is nice to start in a place, ie the salad, where the real bounty comes independent of my efforts.
As long as it isn't sprayed down with herbicide, the grounds can provide. I once read in a book by a botanist that those of us with weedy lawns are a silent majority. I hope that is the case. But if it isn't, the larger of a group we are, the better. One sign I keep looking out for that the ideologies and systems that work to rob us of our humanity have run their course is when I stop seeing poisons sprayed on lawns, attempting to create totalitarian mono-cultures. The critique goes deeper than rednecks and suburban conservatives. I agree with Mark Boyle when he questions the formulation that
But even if we come of crises unscathed, perhaps using something like vertical farming and smart logistics, I will like feeling a sense of connection as well as a sense of place when I experience what the earth can produce.
==
You may also like this article from Tree Hugger on lawn weeds you can eat.
chickweed, mint, arugula, olive oil, garlic salt, pepper, a smattering of feta cheese.
All of the greens came up this year on their own, and I can probably get a salad a day from them for at least a month, maybe two or three before I need to come up with other sources of greens. I don't want to over-romanticize this, but I also don't want to leave it so marginalized that it isn't even acknowledged -- my grounds provide me a salad a day if I am willing to go get it.
The arugula has self-seeded from a planting I made years ago. (It was at least three, but maybe four or five). I find it interesting to watch each year's self-seeding move a few feet away from the year before, walking across the lawn in time. The mint originally came from my father-in-law. He had some that escaped containment and sprawled out into a portion of his lawn. That sounded like my kind of plant -- and still does. I find the mint to be mild enough to be the base of a salad, but that is a fairly recent revelation. Lastly, chickweed, as the name says, is a weed that comes in on its own. For some reason, dandelions don't come in well on our grounds, but I count myself fortunate that chickweed does. (I might go for a walk today to see if I can find dandelions in a park or greenbelt, but for now I have a cat curled up on me -- one that rarely does, at that).
And just like that, I can be re-connected after almost a year away. I had my reasons, such as finally letting grief run its course. I needed to take away the responsibilities of a garden, and that got me out of the habit of checking the grounds. In that time, I found great joy in creating, and I hope I can live a life that allows for creation, connection to nature, as well as any thing I need for happiness. But it is nice to start in a place, ie the salad, where the real bounty comes independent of my efforts.
As long as it isn't sprayed down with herbicide, the grounds can provide. I once read in a book by a botanist that those of us with weedy lawns are a silent majority. I hope that is the case. But if it isn't, the larger of a group we are, the better. One sign I keep looking out for that the ideologies and systems that work to rob us of our humanity have run their course is when I stop seeing poisons sprayed on lawns, attempting to create totalitarian mono-cultures. The critique goes deeper than rednecks and suburban conservatives. I agree with Mark Boyle when he questions the formulation that
destruction - carbon = sustainability.I see this idea implicit in imaginings, rhetoric, and most importantly, life-style choices of many people who think their hearts absolutely bleed while they beat on the left.
But even if we come of crises unscathed, perhaps using something like vertical farming and smart logistics, I will like feeling a sense of connection as well as a sense of place when I experience what the earth can produce.
==
You may also like this article from Tree Hugger on lawn weeds you can eat.
Back to Manic Intellect
How's my year going? Good. I tip my hat and thank you for asking. [1]
I got to the 23rd day of the year without finishing a single book. This happened in part because I decided to slow down my reading to focus on writing. Also, I started tightening up my Algebra II to prepare for my math certification test. I think I was only past page 80 of the only book I was reading. But around the 20th I realized I was starving for information. I can't describe the feeling much differently than that. It was the kind of tingling you get when something is lacking. So I ended up at the library. First I wrote like a good boy, and located the quotes from the Peter Korn book I used in my essay Wise Words. Then I walked around the magical land of print access, eventually seeing The Lives of the Surrealists.
Oh hell yes. I felt a back tingling of I-want-information-but-grounded-in-humanity-(particularly-those-who-want-to-explore-life-and-its-possibilities) signaled before any conscious narrative was formed. My hand held the book still before the narrative's arrival.
Hypothesis: information lust, particularly information as adventure, is so deeply ingrained in this "me" you speak of that it is habit. It is muscle memory. It is very close to the metal indeed. Time distorted around a new interest, more pages read in a day than the rest of the month combined. Read a bit to go to sleep, and read a bit when waking up.
Perhaps I overdid the binge or (perhaps and) [2] I was making up for sleep debt, but I was left with a really crappy zombie day. A multi-hour nap in the middle of day which was in the middle of REM cycle was broken by Happy (we didn't name him) the sad cat expressing his loneliness and/or existential dread by repeatedly crying out in a room away from both me and the other cats. Also, it was cold and rainy. So I had a no-account day and I felt guilty about how little I had done. `
The next day I went off to a coffee house to get back to working on math. A former co-worker of mine, now retired, came in and we began a "small world" conversation built on the lattice-work of coincidence. I had previously noticed that his wife and sister-in-law were the artists featured on the wall display, so I could give my regards there. His daughter works at the school my "teaching baby" (student of mine who became a teacher) taught at. And he had a photo of himself and Elizabeth Warren recently taken at a local restaurant on main street. While she was a great celebrity of the hour with the Iowa caucuses coming right up, it probably wasn't that odd that she would be seen in Norman, Oklahoma. For one, she went to high school in Oklahoma City. It very easy to imagine her having friends in the region. Also, Norman is a common enough fundraising stop for Democrats.
Two nights before, I guess partially buzzing from the surrealism book, but also thinking about On the Road, I had given thought to going to Iowa and spending a few days on the ground there. It is anti-democratic and ridiculous that one state has so much leverage, but the fact remains that they do, and going there would have put me in the scene. The planning never got much past the impulse phase. However, I did look at the prices of flying in and renting a car.
After my acquaintance left, I switched locations to the new central library. Just as I was writing the first draft of the paragraph above a group of VIPs was being shown around the library. The congressman for our district, Tom Cole, stood not ten feet away from this locus of perception (me).
Before that, but after my conversation with the old acquaintance, I had been buzzing on caffeine, math, and print access, and grabbed two more books: The Grapes of Math and The Joy of Mathematics with the intent of tearing through them. I had positioned myself at the large wooden tables, simply wanting to write about the feeling of elation, I guess you could say I try to be a documentor (or philosopher) of feeling alive. But this is what you get when I am in a manic state. And in that state I noted: "thank god I have some stuff to read or I'd be insufferable to my wife when she gets home."
===
[1] I wanted to avoid simply saying "Thanks for asking," because that wording has become to easy to parse as sarcasm, along with any "Thanks for ___" or "Thanks ____." We really do have a problem with gratitude in our culture. Thanks, hipsters, and each of the assorted irony-mongers repackaged for each cohort of consumers who want to believe they are different than the ones before. Assholes.
[2] "and/or" has become fossilized and/or leads with and, so it is too often parsed as simply "and."
I got to the 23rd day of the year without finishing a single book. This happened in part because I decided to slow down my reading to focus on writing. Also, I started tightening up my Algebra II to prepare for my math certification test. I think I was only past page 80 of the only book I was reading. But around the 20th I realized I was starving for information. I can't describe the feeling much differently than that. It was the kind of tingling you get when something is lacking. So I ended up at the library. First I wrote like a good boy, and located the quotes from the Peter Korn book I used in my essay Wise Words. Then I walked around the magical land of print access, eventually seeing The Lives of the Surrealists.
Oh hell yes. I felt a back tingling of I-want-information-but-grounded-in-humanity-(particularly-those-who-want-to-explore-life-and-its-possibilities) signaled before any conscious narrative was formed. My hand held the book still before the narrative's arrival.
Hypothesis: information lust, particularly information as adventure, is so deeply ingrained in this "me" you speak of that it is habit. It is muscle memory. It is very close to the metal indeed. Time distorted around a new interest, more pages read in a day than the rest of the month combined. Read a bit to go to sleep, and read a bit when waking up.
Perhaps I overdid the binge or (perhaps and) [2] I was making up for sleep debt, but I was left with a really crappy zombie day. A multi-hour nap in the middle of day which was in the middle of REM cycle was broken by Happy (we didn't name him) the sad cat expressing his loneliness and/or existential dread by repeatedly crying out in a room away from both me and the other cats. Also, it was cold and rainy. So I had a no-account day and I felt guilty about how little I had done. `
The next day I went off to a coffee house to get back to working on math. A former co-worker of mine, now retired, came in and we began a "small world" conversation built on the lattice-work of coincidence. I had previously noticed that his wife and sister-in-law were the artists featured on the wall display, so I could give my regards there. His daughter works at the school my "teaching baby" (student of mine who became a teacher) taught at. And he had a photo of himself and Elizabeth Warren recently taken at a local restaurant on main street. While she was a great celebrity of the hour with the Iowa caucuses coming right up, it probably wasn't that odd that she would be seen in Norman, Oklahoma. For one, she went to high school in Oklahoma City. It very easy to imagine her having friends in the region. Also, Norman is a common enough fundraising stop for Democrats.
Two nights before, I guess partially buzzing from the surrealism book, but also thinking about On the Road, I had given thought to going to Iowa and spending a few days on the ground there. It is anti-democratic and ridiculous that one state has so much leverage, but the fact remains that they do, and going there would have put me in the scene. The planning never got much past the impulse phase. However, I did look at the prices of flying in and renting a car.
After my acquaintance left, I switched locations to the new central library. Just as I was writing the first draft of the paragraph above a group of VIPs was being shown around the library. The congressman for our district, Tom Cole, stood not ten feet away from this locus of perception (me).
Before that, but after my conversation with the old acquaintance, I had been buzzing on caffeine, math, and print access, and grabbed two more books: The Grapes of Math and The Joy of Mathematics with the intent of tearing through them. I had positioned myself at the large wooden tables, simply wanting to write about the feeling of elation, I guess you could say I try to be a documentor (or philosopher) of feeling alive. But this is what you get when I am in a manic state. And in that state I noted: "thank god I have some stuff to read or I'd be insufferable to my wife when she gets home."
===
[1] I wanted to avoid simply saying "Thanks for asking," because that wording has become to easy to parse as sarcasm, along with any "Thanks for ___" or "Thanks ____." We really do have a problem with gratitude in our culture. Thanks, hipsters, and each of the assorted irony-mongers repackaged for each cohort of consumers who want to believe they are different than the ones before. Assholes.
[2] "and/or" has become fossilized and/or leads with and, so it is too often parsed as simply "and."
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
My Personal History with Language.
In a sense, this is a companion to the piece Wise Words.
===
I was called a "motor mouth" in elementary school and I had many, many people fooled into thinking I was a scientific genius because I loved to use words like "molecular" and "atomic" -- and can we agree that "molecular" sounds much better? I was merely imitating the techno-babble said by "smart" people on television, which I watched far too. I didn't know I wasn't saying anything because I didn't know those "smart" people on TV weren't saying anything. Also, I was cute, so I was praised.
I guess it makes sense that I fell in with science fiction, the perfect place for someone who agrees with the scientific paradigm yet can't do the math to access its precision. Asimov, Clark, and Bradbury were still easy enough to find both at the library and used books stores -- and, wonder of wonders, with complete series in the case of Asimov's Foundation and Clark's 2001.
In middle school I dabbled in poetry, memorizing scraps of Longfellow and Whitman. Also in middle school through sophomore year I got into philosophy, first scraps of eastern, then western. It was always scraps at that age; only years later would I learn what depth is and why it is important.
This Junior and Senior year I did debate, not the best of places to learn depth, but somewhere to cash in a motor mouth for some medals and trophies. Also, it was nice to not be lonely.
Meanwhile, I suppose you could call my academic path "the humanities," mostly history, with interest in literature, especially when literature was willing to play with language. I took every English "exploratory" class offered at my high school. (I had avoided history "exploratories" because they were mostly joke classes taught by athletic coaches, or and/were "current events." Is it possible that even at that young age I knew that current events were too chaotic to really study and that events are best understood digested by some time? Perhaps, or perhaps I just got the word that those classes sucked. Still, I read and read and read for my AP history classes and scored well on the tests. Ironically, this meant that I ended up not taking a single college class for my favorite subject in high school.
When I realized that I would become a teacher, I choose English as because as I said "there is more history in English than English in history," and I find this especially true for interesting and mind blowing sociological content, though I do in fact love memorizing events and dates (more on that some other time, if I feel like it). Also, it really is true that in Oklahoma social studies is by and large a system of make work for sports coaches.
In college, I didn't read as much of the assigned literature as I now would have liked, instead reading a bunch of political philosophy as well as books on economics and science. It was the loneliest time of my life, and I read for comfort. But comfort for me is synthesizing ideas, not following simple plots. The best book I read in that time was Douglas Hofstandler's Godel, Esher, Bach. I was seeking realities and Truths. . . but that's is a different story than the one I'm telling. (I have no idea when or even if I will want to write a piece on my personal history as a seeker).
In my career teaching English "Language Arts" and debate, I found a place to live and play in language a large portion of my days. When you teach, you have such a great opportunity to learn. No, not from the kids, at least not all that much beyond trivia that will be dated in a couple of years [1], but from sharing your subject to those with a novice minds. Day after day I shared literature, some of it fitting for the age, some of it from the great masters, and in working to make bridges between the narratives and where my students were at, my own education moved forward bit by bit. Debate was a wasteland, for one because students, at least the ones most forcefully trying to use up my time, were always demanding the easiest way out. There were not seekers, and were disrespectful of seeking. They had no integrity and were disrespectful of integrity. Luckily, every year I taught debate I also had some English sections.
After I said good bye to all that, I caught up on literature, at least to my satisfaction. I would describe this time as finally, more or less comfortably, using my own voice. It is the type of play that most fits my location in life's journey. It is also the extension of all of the playing came before it.
===
[1] You also can develop strong instincts for human nature by teaching. You can read people and their motivations, and figure out approximate baselines for what people know when they are unlearned in a subject. All of this comes from proximity with a large cross-section of the population, not directly from their views on topics.
===
I was called a "motor mouth" in elementary school and I had many, many people fooled into thinking I was a scientific genius because I loved to use words like "molecular" and "atomic" -- and can we agree that "molecular" sounds much better? I was merely imitating the techno-babble said by "smart" people on television, which I watched far too. I didn't know I wasn't saying anything because I didn't know those "smart" people on TV weren't saying anything. Also, I was cute, so I was praised.
I guess it makes sense that I fell in with science fiction, the perfect place for someone who agrees with the scientific paradigm yet can't do the math to access its precision. Asimov, Clark, and Bradbury were still easy enough to find both at the library and used books stores -- and, wonder of wonders, with complete series in the case of Asimov's Foundation and Clark's 2001.
In middle school I dabbled in poetry, memorizing scraps of Longfellow and Whitman. Also in middle school through sophomore year I got into philosophy, first scraps of eastern, then western. It was always scraps at that age; only years later would I learn what depth is and why it is important.
This Junior and Senior year I did debate, not the best of places to learn depth, but somewhere to cash in a motor mouth for some medals and trophies. Also, it was nice to not be lonely.
Meanwhile, I suppose you could call my academic path "the humanities," mostly history, with interest in literature, especially when literature was willing to play with language. I took every English "exploratory" class offered at my high school. (I had avoided history "exploratories" because they were mostly joke classes taught by athletic coaches, or and/were "current events." Is it possible that even at that young age I knew that current events were too chaotic to really study and that events are best understood digested by some time? Perhaps, or perhaps I just got the word that those classes sucked. Still, I read and read and read for my AP history classes and scored well on the tests. Ironically, this meant that I ended up not taking a single college class for my favorite subject in high school.
When I realized that I would become a teacher, I choose English as because as I said "there is more history in English than English in history," and I find this especially true for interesting and mind blowing sociological content, though I do in fact love memorizing events and dates (more on that some other time, if I feel like it). Also, it really is true that in Oklahoma social studies is by and large a system of make work for sports coaches.
In college, I didn't read as much of the assigned literature as I now would have liked, instead reading a bunch of political philosophy as well as books on economics and science. It was the loneliest time of my life, and I read for comfort. But comfort for me is synthesizing ideas, not following simple plots. The best book I read in that time was Douglas Hofstandler's Godel, Esher, Bach. I was seeking realities and Truths. . . but that's is a different story than the one I'm telling. (I have no idea when or even if I will want to write a piece on my personal history as a seeker).
In my career teaching English "Language Arts" and debate, I found a place to live and play in language a large portion of my days. When you teach, you have such a great opportunity to learn. No, not from the kids, at least not all that much beyond trivia that will be dated in a couple of years [1], but from sharing your subject to those with a novice minds. Day after day I shared literature, some of it fitting for the age, some of it from the great masters, and in working to make bridges between the narratives and where my students were at, my own education moved forward bit by bit. Debate was a wasteland, for one because students, at least the ones most forcefully trying to use up my time, were always demanding the easiest way out. There were not seekers, and were disrespectful of seeking. They had no integrity and were disrespectful of integrity. Luckily, every year I taught debate I also had some English sections.
After I said good bye to all that, I caught up on literature, at least to my satisfaction. I would describe this time as finally, more or less comfortably, using my own voice. It is the type of play that most fits my location in life's journey. It is also the extension of all of the playing came before it.
===
[1] You also can develop strong instincts for human nature by teaching. You can read people and their motivations, and figure out approximate baselines for what people know when they are unlearned in a subject. All of this comes from proximity with a large cross-section of the population, not directly from their views on topics.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
On Coffee Houses
When I or anyone else looks back on my life, I want it to be known that I spent quite a bit of time at coffee houses in my mid-thirties. It wasn't as easy as it sounds.
I first had to overcome the social anxiety well-ingrained in my youth. No blame here -- my mantras for these things being "whatever happened happened" and "I will accept those who have accepted me." And I proclaimed these mantras before wind, trees, clouds, and flowing water, so I have sanctified my oaths to the best of my abilities.
I don't know what made me first go to the Gray Owl, my starter coffee house. The event is simply lost to imperfect memory. However, I remember how nervous I was. I will say one thing in favor mental blocks: once you finally do something contrary to them you feel an elation, like you are getting away with something.
After my first few times going through the nervousness to elation cycle, I learned the rhythms of the place. Norman is very much a college town, so I wouldn't want try to find seat in the early afternoon when the University of Oklahoma is in session. However, it's easy enough to get a spot in the morning. And, of course, you can have relatively free run of any coffee house when the students are on break. Other people have figured this out as well, so a place is never completely empty for long, moving toward a beautiful social equilibrium. I like having people around, which was a little bit to my surprise. My childhood (both atoned for, as well as forgiven) left me thinking my best life would be as a spiritual hermit. It turns out that was wrong. While the snip-its of conversation and people watching afforded at a coffeehouse are not in themselves all I need for an effective dose of human contact, it's pretty close. Remarkably close. . . perhaps it warrants further investigation. The social aspect of a place expands my world and adds on to my dimensions, if just a little bit. It's nice to know I can consciously call upon the knowledge of a coffee house as a good place when I need to, something that was not in my arsenal for all of my twenties.
Lastly, I had to overcome my tendency toward cheapness. Like all people far along on the frugal/cheapness spectrum, I like to identify as frugal, but I have to admit I often lapse into cheap. So, when our new Central Library opened in Norman and it had great deal more seating, I thought that I might not ever go to a coffee house on my own again. The flaw with this line of thinking is that more people know how to follow the norms of a coffee house than a public library (by at least an order of magnitude). The day before I wrote the first draft of this piece, there was a child running around on the furniture on the third floor of the library. There is a children's section on the first floor. It's nice and spacious, and where energetic children belong . . . Then some old ladies came into the section I was sitting, speaking very loudly. I find the young and old to be the biggest problems at a library, but of course the mentally ill have their part to play in driving me away. I wish I had brought headphones, and will try to in the future, but there is a joy in packing minimally as well as a joy in being in the scene of a place aurally as well as visually.
Therefore, I vow that the true meaning of my inheritance is that I can pay for an overpriced coffee any day I want to rent a space. I do this rental of space via beverage purchase in order to write and think. I don't read at a coffee house unless I am on a long session and need a break. Instead, I am stacking low-grade social connection with a creative state. Caffeine doesn't hurt, but I find it overrated to the point that I allow myself the heretical thought that one day I might exclusively order mint teas. Time will tell if I can get there, but either way, coffee houses are how I control my environment to live my best life. I think it it is an absurd luxury, but one well-suited for an absurd universe. Also, holding in it in my mind as a luxury and not as an entitlement helps me to appreciate it more. And when there are fruits of my creative work, I do try to share.
I first had to overcome the social anxiety well-ingrained in my youth. No blame here -- my mantras for these things being "whatever happened happened" and "I will accept those who have accepted me." And I proclaimed these mantras before wind, trees, clouds, and flowing water, so I have sanctified my oaths to the best of my abilities.
I don't know what made me first go to the Gray Owl, my starter coffee house. The event is simply lost to imperfect memory. However, I remember how nervous I was. I will say one thing in favor mental blocks: once you finally do something contrary to them you feel an elation, like you are getting away with something.
After my first few times going through the nervousness to elation cycle, I learned the rhythms of the place. Norman is very much a college town, so I wouldn't want try to find seat in the early afternoon when the University of Oklahoma is in session. However, it's easy enough to get a spot in the morning. And, of course, you can have relatively free run of any coffee house when the students are on break. Other people have figured this out as well, so a place is never completely empty for long, moving toward a beautiful social equilibrium. I like having people around, which was a little bit to my surprise. My childhood (both atoned for, as well as forgiven) left me thinking my best life would be as a spiritual hermit. It turns out that was wrong. While the snip-its of conversation and people watching afforded at a coffeehouse are not in themselves all I need for an effective dose of human contact, it's pretty close. Remarkably close. . . perhaps it warrants further investigation. The social aspect of a place expands my world and adds on to my dimensions, if just a little bit. It's nice to know I can consciously call upon the knowledge of a coffee house as a good place when I need to, something that was not in my arsenal for all of my twenties.
Lastly, I had to overcome my tendency toward cheapness. Like all people far along on the frugal/cheapness spectrum, I like to identify as frugal, but I have to admit I often lapse into cheap. So, when our new Central Library opened in Norman and it had great deal more seating, I thought that I might not ever go to a coffee house on my own again. The flaw with this line of thinking is that more people know how to follow the norms of a coffee house than a public library (by at least an order of magnitude). The day before I wrote the first draft of this piece, there was a child running around on the furniture on the third floor of the library. There is a children's section on the first floor. It's nice and spacious, and where energetic children belong . . . Then some old ladies came into the section I was sitting, speaking very loudly. I find the young and old to be the biggest problems at a library, but of course the mentally ill have their part to play in driving me away. I wish I had brought headphones, and will try to in the future, but there is a joy in packing minimally as well as a joy in being in the scene of a place aurally as well as visually.
Therefore, I vow that the true meaning of my inheritance is that I can pay for an overpriced coffee any day I want to rent a space. I do this rental of space via beverage purchase in order to write and think. I don't read at a coffee house unless I am on a long session and need a break. Instead, I am stacking low-grade social connection with a creative state. Caffeine doesn't hurt, but I find it overrated to the point that I allow myself the heretical thought that one day I might exclusively order mint teas. Time will tell if I can get there, but either way, coffee houses are how I control my environment to live my best life. I think it it is an absurd luxury, but one well-suited for an absurd universe. Also, holding in it in my mind as a luxury and not as an entitlement helps me to appreciate it more. And when there are fruits of my creative work, I do try to share.
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Artisanal Texts
Somewhere between running errands to go to my last day of shooting the movie and getting to Chickasaw, I lost my phone. When I got back into Norman, I retraced my steps through several stores and asked about lost and founds to no luck.
I decided to use this opportunity to down grade my phone. It's something I've wanted to do for a while.
On the hand, I think I did so far less cost efficiently than I could have because I wanted to take a path of relatively low resistance, staying with my carrier, etc, etc. On the other hand, even including this purchase (a Nokia 3011 reboot), I have spent less on phones my entire life than the cost of a single new iPhone. You people really set the bar low. I may or may not stress out about why I don't have a pay-as-you-go plan at some other point, but that is not the point of the story.
As all of my contacts were saved on my SIM card in my now-lost phone, I was glad that I had used the major memory system to memorize several numbers. One of the numbers I had memorized belonged to the best man at my wedding, Nat. After confirming I did in fact remember the correct number -- I would stake a fortune on the digits; it is the order that might have been wrong -- we had the conversation below. Nat's texts will be italicized. Mine will be block quoted. I've added footnotes because they are fun.
When it was the only game it town, it was fine.
===
[1] I didn't want to pull up the "$" symbol because that requires going through another menu. Having to type out each letter extra slowly also forced me to seek extra terseness in my writing.
[2] I was hoping he had seen A Clockwork Orange and thus knew that lil' bit o' Nadsat slang. At the slow . . . pace . . . I . . .was . . . going it sure seemed like a hilarious punchline. It was no one's fault the joke didn't land, and I certainly wasn't going to text an explanation!
[3] My phone is on 3G. I guess it will be a useless brick when 3G is phased out (or ends because of outside factors).
I decided to use this opportunity to down grade my phone. It's something I've wanted to do for a while.
On the hand, I think I did so far less cost efficiently than I could have because I wanted to take a path of relatively low resistance, staying with my carrier, etc, etc. On the other hand, even including this purchase (a Nokia 3011 reboot), I have spent less on phones my entire life than the cost of a single new iPhone. You people really set the bar low. I may or may not stress out about why I don't have a pay-as-you-go plan at some other point, but that is not the point of the story.
As all of my contacts were saved on my SIM card in my now-lost phone, I was glad that I had used the major memory system to memorize several numbers. One of the numbers I had memorized belonged to the best man at my wedding, Nat. After confirming I did in fact remember the correct number -- I would stake a fortune on the digits; it is the order that might have been wrong -- we had the conversation below. Nat's texts will be italicized. Mine will be block quoted. I've added footnotes because they are fun.
This is a 60 dollar dumb phone. [1]
The last decade can suck itI love it. Fuck the system.
I try. I mean this is hitting keys more than once and everything. Real horror-show [2]Yeah. Only horrible when going back to it.
When it was the only game it town, it was fine.
Know that every word I text is slowly, lovingly handcrafted, like texts were . . .two gens ago. [3]Meaningful texts seemed like an oxymoron until now
Have I stumbled upon artisanal texts?Move to Brooklyn, buddy. You're ready now.
===
[1] I didn't want to pull up the "$" symbol because that requires going through another menu. Having to type out each letter extra slowly also forced me to seek extra terseness in my writing.
[2] I was hoping he had seen A Clockwork Orange and thus knew that lil' bit o' Nadsat slang. At the slow . . . pace . . . I . . .was . . . going it sure seemed like a hilarious punchline. It was no one's fault the joke didn't land, and I certainly wasn't going to text an explanation!
[3] My phone is on 3G. I guess it will be a useless brick when 3G is phased out (or ends because of outside factors).
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