pirandello

I've become cynical at times.  Less trusting.  Probably for good reason.  Being miserly with time.  Hoarding the time I have left and spending it more selfishlessly than I ever have in the past.  I've determined the catalyst of this change and I'm trying to determine its worth. I like the word "catalyst" for it's precise meaning in the natural science world.  A catalyst is not destroyed or changed in the (thermodynamically) irreversible process to which it makes its contribution. The process that it starts is neither a good process or a bad process.  The catalyst itself is no more responsible for the reaction than any of the reactants. 

The phrase "All change is good" has been particularly grating lately.  I hear it roll off people's tongues as if it had some value.  As if a change could be judged and a value placed on it.  Or that somehow this natural process was always a positive. 

Before you can know what you want, you must know what is important to you.

We live in illusion
And the appearance of things.
There is a reality.
We are that reality.
When you understand this,
You see that you are nothing.
And being nothing,
You are everything.
That is all.
  -- Kalu Rinpoche

Bene ascolta chi la nota
  -- Aligheri

Bill Moyers on Patriotism and the Flag

I heard this on KPFA on the drive in this morning -- it's rare that I do listen to KPFA during my commute because it does tend to go off track in its commentary.  The rabid portion of the right has jumped over Moyer's speech, and PBS in general.  Listening and reading the comment in it's entirety, I can't find any point at which the speech is wrong or shows bias.  This is exactly the sort of commentary that a patriot and an American would make.  It's the sort of thing that a middle-school child in the 60s would aspire to in an essay on the flag.  It's exactly what any Boy Scout would believe.  The hate-mongering of the right and the ill-informed harpishness of Anne Coulter on this particular point is shameful and embarassing. No American educated in the public school system should be displaying that level of laziness in their analysis. Here's Moyer's speech:

I put the flag in my lapel tonight. First time. Until now I haven't thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans. Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart's affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove her son's love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what's this flag doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo -- the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. And during the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's Little Red Book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war -- except in self-defense -- is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomatic skill. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

What do you think?

I love that image -- the flag being high-jacked and trademarked as a neo-con corporate logo.  Maybe that's been the source of my uneasiness with the loudly agressive patriotism I've observed.  Maybe it's because of decades of observing the quiet patriotism of service people, their widows and the children left behind.  Maybe it's because I've never felt a need to drag out the flag I got when my father was buried in 1969 and wave it around to prove something.

Entropy is a drag...

When I first started the long commutes it was too easy to succumb to the vampire distractions of impatience and anger. There's a price to pay for these twin distractions, whether the cause is another's actions or inactions, or the cause is your own impatience and misperceptions. Distractions, by definition, waste time and energy better spent elsewhere. It’s a matter of choice on how that time and energy is spent. Once it’s spent, though, it’s gone. The same as in managing a checkbook, maintaining a positive balance, making quality investments, and planning ahead are all important.

I spend a lot of time in the bath at night, reading and thinking, for pleasure, pain, illness, and wrestling inner demons; Most of the important decisions in my life are made there or by the following morning. And maybe this is not uncommon. In all cultures, baths have been important and important decisions were made in them.

There’s always a long lead-time for getting to the decisions points. Time has to be spent collecting information and weighing alternatives. The decision points need to be clarified. And all of these must be known “to the bone” at a subconscious level. 

Making the decisions and executing on them are two different things, though.  So I’m in the bath and let my brain process the decisions. The white noise of the running water as well as the privacy provides an atmosphere conducive to focus. The water’s heat and support allows me to spend more energy than normal on thought. Then I go to sleep and then I wake up. And most times, I’m a different person than the one that went to bed. At a subconscious level, now, I am committed to whatever decisions were made. 

Like downhill racing, you can’t waste time or energy making a decision at every gate or second-guessing decisions made at past gates. You need to know from the start that your body and mind will do the right thing as you work a path of minimal energy. You race to win. Or you stop. And start all over again.

Simple processes take embellishments easier.

After spending several months and visiting several locales, I still have not found anything to compare with the chai at Raman's (Coastside Gourmet Coffee Tea & Health Nuts) in Half Moon Bay, California.  Located on the corner of the Albertson's strip mall, at the west end next to the laundromat, at the intersection of Highway 92 and Highway 1, this is the best chai I have encountered.  Raman or Raj has the shop open from 6 am to 4:30 pm every day of the week.  There's a surprising  variety of people and many regulars most of which have discovered or been introduced to the chai at the shop and are now regular chai consumers.  This is one place to visit if you are in Half Moon Bay and want to know how good chai can be -- it will reset your expectations of what chai is and what others produce.

Here is a new article from the Half Moon Bay Review on Raman's...

I finally got my Burning Man ticket in the mail!

"One cannot divine nor forcast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere."
-- Willa Cather

This Tom Peters article came to my attention from a tech blog I read every day.  It's still as important and useful today as when it was published on New Year's Day in 1993.  I came to the same conclusions given in this article early on in my education, and more importantly early on in my career, while working at an old line company were many of the employees had been for decades at a time when technology was coming to the crest of what would become the rollercoaster ride that we've been on.

Just downloaded the latest Mozilla calendar client and it seems to be working fine:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird_download.html.  Now I need to find a server that I can place my remote calendar so I can access it from home and work as well as a way to access it while I'm on the road.
 

I took my first yoga class last night (http://darshanayoga.com/index.html) with Catherine De Los Santos.  Darshanya is a great place offering yoga instruction and interesting events.  I really enjoyed this class and intend to follow through w/ the 10 week course.   Last night was a small group of four and we received a great deal of attention.  The 90 minutes went by suprisingly fast.

• San Francisco Socrates Cafe 1, Wild Awakenings Coffee Shop, 142 McAllister Street @ Hyde,  San Francisco   6:30 - 8:30 PM every Wednesday   
• SanFran Socrates Cafe, Cafe de la Presse @ 496 Bush Street at Grant (facing the entrance arch to China Town) with convenient parking is at Sutter and Stockton garage. 6:30 to 8 p.m., every other Wednesday.

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

-- Goethe

Boing Boing is one of the default tabs in my Firefox browser (near the top, above all of the work-related reference sites, newsletters, and email)...  Today it took me to The Wandering Moleskine Project which lead to The Moleskinerie and Le Moleskine à  Beleg.  A short detour through the Lovemarks Ode to Moleskines.  Then to the Nobody Knows Anything Ode to the Moleskine  to metafilter.com for this and to 43 Folders for More Moleskine Hacks.

Speaking of Firefox, the following extensions are the ones I've been using the most:

• Tabbrowser Extentsions
• Adblock
• Web Developer
• LiveHTTPHeaders
• Language Menu
• Javascript Console Status
• ForecastFox

Fear of the Inexplicable

But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished
the existence of the individual; the relationship between
one human being and another has also been cramped by it,
as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of
endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the
bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation
to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively
from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of
the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident
that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a
place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and
down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous
insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in
Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about
us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
We are set down in life as in the element to which we best
correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of
years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we
hold still we are, through a happy mimicry,scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to
mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors,
they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke"

The one piece "So Beautiful" by Indran Amirthanayagam on the soundtrack CD for "The United States Of Poetry" can make the entire CD worthwhile.  Another good reason to listen, as well as read, poetry. Listen to a sample from Amazon here.

So Beautiful

So beautiful that couple
in handsome black and red clothes
walking along the street
her arms folded, his in pockets cold...
Scarves loosely wrapped about white necks,

And in the subway car
a black man takes a black woman's hands,
and her eyes look far away
beyond the walls under the sea,

and his eyes concentrate on her hands
as glasses drop slightly down his nose
as she turns and smiles, as he looks up
at clay made whole,

and she takes her hands about his cheeks
makes a vase, and he smiles
as roses are put in his mouth and hair,

and her brown leather coat crumples
as she kisses him,
and his black windbreaker is crumpled
by her kiss,

And for two subway stops their kiss
moves a man to write
and get up in the morning
and sing an old song

to remember a woman in a dream
who held his hands
wearing ear rings of white moons,
in black hair open as a fan,

blowing honeyed wind about the room
in which they loved and loved,
as kingdoms came and went,
in which they loved and loved

as the black man and woman
left their embrace
to slowly get up to the door
by an old man in the window seat
into whose hands dropped two white moons.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam

The Robot Co-op has done some great work and has some very fine ideas.  Check out twinkler.43things.com.

"I was always dreaming that I could fly. When I did, in my dreams, I felt very light. I loved those dreams. My flying dreams were exhilarating. Sometimes I had great wings which could be seen by everyone, wings so big that they were even unwieldy. Other times, I didn't need wings, I just took off, propelled by a power within me. Sometimes I had a destination. Sometimes I was just exploring. It's strange, because there is nothing I hate more than flying in an airplane. The only way I have ever wanted to fly was without a plane. I would be asked by colleagues and collaborators, Why did I want to make a film about a man who could fly? They know I hated being in an airplane. I'd answer,'It's a metaphor.' That kept them quiet. At a certain point in my middle age, some might call it early old age, I began to dream I could no longer fly. I was someone who had been able to fly. The implication was clear. Once I had known how to do it and had been in total control of my own power. But now I was deprived. It was terrible. Terrible. To have lost such a gift. I, who had had the gift, knew better than others the wonders of the experience."

-- Federico Fellini, "I, Fellini"

"Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you will arrive there and know them by inhabiting them."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson,  "The Over-Soul"

Spring and Fall
to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving      
Over Goldengrove unleaving?    
Leáves, líke the things of man, you    
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?    
Áh! ás the heart grows older            
It will come to such sights colder      
By and by, nor spare a sigh    
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; 
And yet you wíll weep and know why.    
Now no matter, child, the name:       
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. 
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed   
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:    
It ís the blight man was born for,      
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Poems"

To a Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

-- William Carlos Williams, "Collected Poems: 1939-1962, Volume II"

"Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life.  If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep seems bliss... If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss... The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity.  It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome.  As one deserves a good night's sleep, one also deserves to die.  Why should I hope to wake again?  To do what I have not done in the time I've had?  All of us have so much more time than we use well... Lives are spoiled and made rotten by the sense that death is distant and irrelevant... [B]ut it makes for a better life if one has a rendevous with death... There is nothing morbid about thinking and speaking of death.  Those who disparage honesty do not know its joys." 

-- Walter Kaufmann, "Faith of a Heretic"