I got a ticket the other day. Highway Patrol saw me from a block away, pulled over and waited, and when I turned off the street, came after me and pulled me over. I knew what it was for.
Three and a half years ago my Jeep was stolen. When it was recovered the cops noted the front license plate was missing. Oh, I’ve got it, I said. Took it off for the paint job. It’s in the garage somewhere.
Now and then I get a letter asking about it.
So I finally got my fix-it ticket. He said, go to the DMV, give ‘em your old plate, they’ll go get new ones made, after you get new plates, come down to the courthouse to show ‘em. He wrote all sorts of stuff on a little piece of paper, I signed it, got my yellow copy, have a nice day.
Today at lunchtime I figured, I got nothing else to do. On the ticket he’d written “301 Bicentennial Cir”. Oh yeah, I remember that place. Off I went. Twenty minute drive down the freeway, offramp and around, almost pulled into AAA. Nope, that ain’t it, must be that government building. Yeah, it’s a courthouse, but I guess they have a DMV inside.
I gotta pay a dollar to park? Screw that, is this not a public building? But there was nowhere else to park. Put my last dollar bill into the machine (the second one -– the first one wouldn’t take it), went in through the metal detectors, went to the counter ...
Yeah, this was a courthouse. County courthouse. DMV is a State thing. Ain’t no DMV on Bicentennial Circle.
Calmly and sedately drove back up the freeway to the office (believe that?). Guess I’ll hit up the Department of Motor Vehicles some other day. Yeah, there’s one right here in town. I knew that.
So now it’s late afternoon and I’m bored with the boredom of being between times of heavy lifting. One always has to prove one’s value at this place, so I try to come up with shit to do that the next level up won’t have to wonder about. Oh, Don’s doing such and such, okay, cool. Obviously, anything I come up with is a lot less interesting than anything I would come up with that does NOT return value to the company, but whatever. So I need a fix. Some kind of upper to inject. Cruised by the vending machines, decided a Diet Cherry Coke and some sort of chocolate bar ought to create a fine intersection of chemical imbalances such that I get energized and sweet-tooth-happy and vaguely sick all at once, help push the afternoon along.
Did I mention I spent my last dollar on a parking permit I didn’t need?
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
Hot Chicks Update
Since two weeks ago they've grown but are still under the heat lamp, and peep-squawk and rustle and peck each other and poop in their food, and when the lid is off, hop up and perch.
Outside, their cousins scratch about and confound the dog ...
... and their neighbors wait patiently for more birds to hang out with.
Outside, their cousins scratch about and confound the dog ...
... and their neighbors wait patiently for more birds to hang out with.
Hunted
A post of mine was automatically linked to at a site that wraps up the news as if it were fish fresh off the trawler. Some news wrap. No discernment at all. I feel like a dolphin caught in a drag net. Except I'm not dying, exactly.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
B.S. Alarm
Two hundred years after Britain's abolition of the slave trade, Africans blamed the modern-day problems of their continent on the crippling legacy of the trans-Atlantic traffic in human beings.
- A Pseudo-Random News Source
Maybe the intent is to make the West feel guilty and send more money. More money wouldn't hurt, but it's wasted if root causes aren't understood honestly.
European need for labor to develop profitable sugar and other plantations on islands in the Atlantic and then in colonies across the New World created a boom in a pre-existing African slave trade, it is true. The weapons and other goods that Europeans gave to African kings in exchange for their prisoners certainly impacted African economies and culture significantly. But Africa's current problems have little to do with the slave trade.
Africa is still in culture shock from being brutally colonized by the French, the English, the Portuguese etc. The desire of Westerners to control African resources propped up countless post-colonial dictators. Floods of aid have provided little incentive for Africans to generate viable economies. Tribal dislocations created stresses that continue to play out. Modern geopolitics, from drilling oil to chasing terrorists and everything else, continue to screw around with the place.
But the sorry state of much of Africa is not due to the slave trade. That is to blame for the unhappy circumstances of countless people on this side of the Atlantic.
- A Pseudo-Random News Source
Maybe the intent is to make the West feel guilty and send more money. More money wouldn't hurt, but it's wasted if root causes aren't understood honestly.
European need for labor to develop profitable sugar and other plantations on islands in the Atlantic and then in colonies across the New World created a boom in a pre-existing African slave trade, it is true. The weapons and other goods that Europeans gave to African kings in exchange for their prisoners certainly impacted African economies and culture significantly. But Africa's current problems have little to do with the slave trade.
Africa is still in culture shock from being brutally colonized by the French, the English, the Portuguese etc. The desire of Westerners to control African resources propped up countless post-colonial dictators. Floods of aid have provided little incentive for Africans to generate viable economies. Tribal dislocations created stresses that continue to play out. Modern geopolitics, from drilling oil to chasing terrorists and everything else, continue to screw around with the place.
But the sorry state of much of Africa is not due to the slave trade. That is to blame for the unhappy circumstances of countless people on this side of the Atlantic.
Fresh Air
I don't feel like blogging but I do want to procrastinate for a minute or two so I'm just going to say that if you keep concrete in your garage for several years, it's going to absorb some moisture, and when you bring it out to mix it and it comes out of the bag all clumpy and needing to be broken apart, probably it's not any good anymore. If I had known that last weekend I wouldn't have found myself pulling a fence post out of crumbly gray pseudo-concrete yesterday and digging a fresh new hole. Now I have to go get me some new concrete and try again even though it looks like it's going to rain, because weather dot com says the odds of precip are only ten percent, and being a man of the twenty first century I believe what I see on the internet and not what I see in the sky.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Thursday Thirteen: Teenage Romance
Thirteen memories of back when they showed porn in real theaters
1. My girlfriend wanted to see The Story of O.
2. I didn't really understand it.
3. In Berkeley, California, in 1976, the theater people didn't care that my girlfriend and I were only seventeen.
4. Probably why I didn't understand it.
5. Pretty sure it was the California Theater at Kittredge and Shattuck. Maybe not. Long time ago.
6. The only other people in the theater were single men scattered about the place.
7. We also saw The Joy Of Letting Go. For someone reason that is my fondest porn memory. You can't get it on DVD or even VHS. I've looked.
8. And looked.
9. The single men ignored us, I think.
10. We didn't do anything anyway.
11. Not in the theater.
12. Other than pulsating body parts up on the screen in humongous technicolor detail, it was a normal theater like any other.
13. I'm so glad my kids don't have an adult theater with an open door policy to go to but instead are home alone watching instructional videos downloaded from the safe and well-regulated internet.
1. My girlfriend wanted to see The Story of O.
2. I didn't really understand it.
3. In Berkeley, California, in 1976, the theater people didn't care that my girlfriend and I were only seventeen.
4. Probably why I didn't understand it.
5. Pretty sure it was the California Theater at Kittredge and Shattuck. Maybe not. Long time ago.
6. The only other people in the theater were single men scattered about the place.
7. We also saw The Joy Of Letting Go. For someone reason that is my fondest porn memory. You can't get it on DVD or even VHS. I've looked.
8. And looked.
9. The single men ignored us, I think.
10. We didn't do anything anyway.
11. Not in the theater.
12. Other than pulsating body parts up on the screen in humongous technicolor detail, it was a normal theater like any other.
13. I'm so glad my kids don't have an adult theater with an open door policy to go to but instead are home alone watching instructional videos downloaded from the safe and well-regulated internet.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Early Early Adopter
Question: What President single-handedly invented ...
1. Centralized electronic command and control
2. Government electronic control of war news
3. The concept of calming down before you send an electronic message
Hint: He was also the only President to be awarded a patent.
* * * * *
The line between a great President and a mediocre or even failed President is very thin. Early in the summer of 1864, Lincoln had few illusions that he was going to win re-election. Careful politicking and some fortuitous turns on the battlefield – Sheridan achieving control of the strategic Shenandoah Valley, for example, and Sherman’s capture of Atlanta – made the difference. But if any one great thing had gone wrong and the election gone to the Democrats, President McClellan would have negotiated a peace deal with the C.S.A. Would slavery exist today? No, but the road to freedom would have been even more painful and much longer, with much further yet to go. Lincoln would probably have retired to an obscure life as legal counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad, remembered forever as the man who presided over the breakup of the Union.
* * * * *
Lincoln was the first war President with access to the telegraph. In the Mexican War (1848), the telegraph was not a significant tool. General Scott had near total autonomy while in the field. Not so Lincoln’s generals. By late 1862, frustrated with General McClellan’s apparent inability to achieve much of anything, Lincoln took to monitoring the telegraph for any and all war news, and increasingly added his own questions and suggestions to the war traffic. By war’s end he had long established a personal link over the wires to every commander of general rank. He was the first national leader in time of war to have a simultaneous view of every theater. Without any historical precedents or prior experience to guide him, Abraham Lincoln, during a time of war and national crisis, essentially created the model for centralized command and control as it is understood today.
The Associated Press or AP was established in New York in 1846 to consolidate news sources. In time they developed wire services through which they could sell news to papers across the country. The Civil War brought a thirst for news that led to countless reporters embedded with military units and a terrific bottleneck at the telegraph office. In 1862, Congress authorized the War Department taking possession of all American telegraph lines. Censorship followed, and access to the coveted wires was predicated on telling the stories as Lincoln wanted them told, as opposed to fresh off the battlefield, unvetted, unrestrained. The AP was given preferential access and made the government’s preferred voice. Government spin on war news was from then on the established reality.
A huge volume of letters and telegrams and other documents written by President Lincoln remain. Among these are quite a few written in a heat of frustration, perhaps even anger, at this general or that’s apparent inability or unwillingness to do the job before him. But Lincoln was a man of strong personal relating abilities. He always preferred to handle difficult matters face to face. Letters and telegrams were always a last resort. They were also too often the only resort. A significant number of the more passionate telegrams, written in the President’s hand, were never sent. He wrote them, but then put them in a drawer. After giving himself time to ponder, the telegram might then remain unsent, being a bit too hasty and perhaps not likely to achieve the desired effect. Thus with no history to guide him, Abraham Lincoln pioneered the good habit of calming down and reviewing a message before hitting the Send button. Despite a century and a half of experience with electronic communication, people in our society too often fail this one courtesy.
* * * * *
The magnetic telegraph was an example of what we now call a disruptive technology, and Lincoln what we call an early adopter. It changed the way people lived. Modern examples of disruptive technologies include the automobile, the personal computer, and the cell phone. Change is most swiftly forced by crisis. The Civil War was the ultimate crisis. It is part of Abraham Lincoln’s peculiar genius that he was able to adapt to a new technology and find new uses for it, in order to perform a job that very likely, not too many years earlier, would have been completely impossible.
Reference: Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails
1. Centralized electronic command and control
2. Government electronic control of war news
3. The concept of calming down before you send an electronic message
Hint: He was also the only President to be awarded a patent.
* * * * *
The line between a great President and a mediocre or even failed President is very thin. Early in the summer of 1864, Lincoln had few illusions that he was going to win re-election. Careful politicking and some fortuitous turns on the battlefield – Sheridan achieving control of the strategic Shenandoah Valley, for example, and Sherman’s capture of Atlanta – made the difference. But if any one great thing had gone wrong and the election gone to the Democrats, President McClellan would have negotiated a peace deal with the C.S.A. Would slavery exist today? No, but the road to freedom would have been even more painful and much longer, with much further yet to go. Lincoln would probably have retired to an obscure life as legal counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad, remembered forever as the man who presided over the breakup of the Union.
* * * * *
Lincoln was the first war President with access to the telegraph. In the Mexican War (1848), the telegraph was not a significant tool. General Scott had near total autonomy while in the field. Not so Lincoln’s generals. By late 1862, frustrated with General McClellan’s apparent inability to achieve much of anything, Lincoln took to monitoring the telegraph for any and all war news, and increasingly added his own questions and suggestions to the war traffic. By war’s end he had long established a personal link over the wires to every commander of general rank. He was the first national leader in time of war to have a simultaneous view of every theater. Without any historical precedents or prior experience to guide him, Abraham Lincoln, during a time of war and national crisis, essentially created the model for centralized command and control as it is understood today.
The Associated Press or AP was established in New York in 1846 to consolidate news sources. In time they developed wire services through which they could sell news to papers across the country. The Civil War brought a thirst for news that led to countless reporters embedded with military units and a terrific bottleneck at the telegraph office. In 1862, Congress authorized the War Department taking possession of all American telegraph lines. Censorship followed, and access to the coveted wires was predicated on telling the stories as Lincoln wanted them told, as opposed to fresh off the battlefield, unvetted, unrestrained. The AP was given preferential access and made the government’s preferred voice. Government spin on war news was from then on the established reality.
A huge volume of letters and telegrams and other documents written by President Lincoln remain. Among these are quite a few written in a heat of frustration, perhaps even anger, at this general or that’s apparent inability or unwillingness to do the job before him. But Lincoln was a man of strong personal relating abilities. He always preferred to handle difficult matters face to face. Letters and telegrams were always a last resort. They were also too often the only resort. A significant number of the more passionate telegrams, written in the President’s hand, were never sent. He wrote them, but then put them in a drawer. After giving himself time to ponder, the telegram might then remain unsent, being a bit too hasty and perhaps not likely to achieve the desired effect. Thus with no history to guide him, Abraham Lincoln pioneered the good habit of calming down and reviewing a message before hitting the Send button. Despite a century and a half of experience with electronic communication, people in our society too often fail this one courtesy.
* * * * *
The magnetic telegraph was an example of what we now call a disruptive technology, and Lincoln what we call an early adopter. It changed the way people lived. Modern examples of disruptive technologies include the automobile, the personal computer, and the cell phone. Change is most swiftly forced by crisis. The Civil War was the ultimate crisis. It is part of Abraham Lincoln’s peculiar genius that he was able to adapt to a new technology and find new uses for it, in order to perform a job that very likely, not too many years earlier, would have been completely impossible.
Reference: Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Freshly Beaten Paths
I put on my very comfortablest shoes and jogged on down the road. The sun crept over the treetops and the air was cool and fragrant. Why don’t I run outside more, I wondered. I usually plug myself into a treadmill at the workplace rec center. Tune out for twenty minutes or so with the readout saying 7.6 mph until I’ve finished ten laps. Very much in the machine. But now I was passing in and out of oak and sycamore drip lines and looking at houses.
Past the old one with the trailer in the driveway and the roof that has taken two years to put on. Lots of people around here are low income but own their house, so their best course is to remodel the place with their own hands, and take as many years to do it as needed.
Past the 1970s-era ranch style with odd angles and decorative stone that spent so many years completely obscured by overgrown shrubbery. It was a mystery house for a long time. Someone had run a chain link fence straight across the driveway and planted oleander all across the front, and the lawn was long and weedy and littered with fallen branches, and the front window was not curtained and had only cobwebs and darkness. But someone has recently trimmed the trees, and there’s occasionally a pickup truck on the lawn.
Past the corner lot with the horses and the stable and the long horse trailer. Said good morning to a pair of puppies who followed me along the corral fence, alternately watching me and chewing on one another’s faces.
Up along a trail into the park, along a path worn into the grass, under the trees and into the quiet wooded space behind the middle school baseball fields. Disc golf targets everywhere. I ran through a group preparing to tee off, good mornings all around. Boom boom over a small wooden bridge, splosh through the mud, up this little hill and that, all under countless oak trees and the fresh green carpet that early Spring brings. Up a slope and into the sun where more disc golfers were warming up, tossing their little Frisbees around. Quite the weekend sport, I’m thinking, and after I cross one more little creek and hit the parking lot I see the long trailer for a traveling flying dog show, and people coming in and out of the restroom as if after a long drive, and banners everywhere for sports shops and so on but especially for the Professional Disc Golf Association. Professional disc golf? Who knew? But it was some big tournament, the St. Patrick’s Classic, with prizes in the thousands.
And then I ran up against the main thoroughfare and found another route home again. Half hour, a few miles, something like; and then out in the fresh air another hour to therapeutically pull weeds. It was lovely and I learned something: I need to run outside more.
Past the old one with the trailer in the driveway and the roof that has taken two years to put on. Lots of people around here are low income but own their house, so their best course is to remodel the place with their own hands, and take as many years to do it as needed.
Past the 1970s-era ranch style with odd angles and decorative stone that spent so many years completely obscured by overgrown shrubbery. It was a mystery house for a long time. Someone had run a chain link fence straight across the driveway and planted oleander all across the front, and the lawn was long and weedy and littered with fallen branches, and the front window was not curtained and had only cobwebs and darkness. But someone has recently trimmed the trees, and there’s occasionally a pickup truck on the lawn.
Past the corner lot with the horses and the stable and the long horse trailer. Said good morning to a pair of puppies who followed me along the corral fence, alternately watching me and chewing on one another’s faces.
Up along a trail into the park, along a path worn into the grass, under the trees and into the quiet wooded space behind the middle school baseball fields. Disc golf targets everywhere. I ran through a group preparing to tee off, good mornings all around. Boom boom over a small wooden bridge, splosh through the mud, up this little hill and that, all under countless oak trees and the fresh green carpet that early Spring brings. Up a slope and into the sun where more disc golfers were warming up, tossing their little Frisbees around. Quite the weekend sport, I’m thinking, and after I cross one more little creek and hit the parking lot I see the long trailer for a traveling flying dog show, and people coming in and out of the restroom as if after a long drive, and banners everywhere for sports shops and so on but especially for the Professional Disc Golf Association. Professional disc golf? Who knew? But it was some big tournament, the St. Patrick’s Classic, with prizes in the thousands.
And then I ran up against the main thoroughfare and found another route home again. Half hour, a few miles, something like; and then out in the fresh air another hour to therapeutically pull weeds. It was lovely and I learned something: I need to run outside more.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Digital Muse
Easier for me to work with music in my ears. Depends on the music. Classical, vocal, good stuff that tugs at the heart strings, quality rock and roll -- none of these are any good for working to. It's gotta be something that doesn't take a hold of my brain yet keeps me awake and motivated. Currently that means either this hard rock stream from 525 or some tasty downtempo from somafm. That's good for me. Anything else is too distracting.
Away from doing work (traveling, folding clothes, whatever) the trusty old MP3 player does fine. Portable, programmable, holds a shitload of music. Can be loaded up one song at a time with files purchased off the net. This leads me to my question:
What are all those metallic discs in a rack over by the stereo?
I vaguely remember a distant age when we had large black plastic discs in cardboard sleeves. They played music in a persistent serial order and required manual intervention every half dozen songs or so. They were also subject to damage and a fairly predictable quality decline, and ran on high-maintenance equipment (e.g. needle replacement). We don't miss those any more than we miss the need for daily removal of horse manure from city streets.
But in-between that primitive time and the unfolding modern era, a sort of hybrid technology held sway. The music was digitized, but it was also on disc. Very strange, if you think about it, yet for a couple of decades it was in fact the norm. Many people today have a collection of the old things. Mine collects a lot of dust because it is mostly music from the 80s and 90s, and not the best music either. Just whatever I happened to be in the mood to buy while at the store with money in my pocket. Rather narrow constraints, those, when added up.
But some of them were gifts, and some of them are unique; and one of them has the distinction of being my first-ever compact disc. The first CD I ever bought was a good one, and I still listen to it once in awhile and am never disappointed. There is some true musicianship encoded thereupon.
Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms
What was your first CD?
Away from doing work (traveling, folding clothes, whatever) the trusty old MP3 player does fine. Portable, programmable, holds a shitload of music. Can be loaded up one song at a time with files purchased off the net. This leads me to my question:
What are all those metallic discs in a rack over by the stereo?
I vaguely remember a distant age when we had large black plastic discs in cardboard sleeves. They played music in a persistent serial order and required manual intervention every half dozen songs or so. They were also subject to damage and a fairly predictable quality decline, and ran on high-maintenance equipment (e.g. needle replacement). We don't miss those any more than we miss the need for daily removal of horse manure from city streets.
But in-between that primitive time and the unfolding modern era, a sort of hybrid technology held sway. The music was digitized, but it was also on disc. Very strange, if you think about it, yet for a couple of decades it was in fact the norm. Many people today have a collection of the old things. Mine collects a lot of dust because it is mostly music from the 80s and 90s, and not the best music either. Just whatever I happened to be in the mood to buy while at the store with money in my pocket. Rather narrow constraints, those, when added up.
But some of them were gifts, and some of them are unique; and one of them has the distinction of being my first-ever compact disc. The first CD I ever bought was a good one, and I still listen to it once in awhile and am never disappointed. There is some true musicianship encoded thereupon.
Dire Straits: Brothers in ArmsWhat was your first CD?
Movie-picks something
Jeff says people should post their picks in his classic movie match-up. I spent a lot of time on it a few days ago -- several minutes at least -- so what the hell, here:
I don't remember what my picks were but I'm sure I would agree with many of them if I looked at them today.
Then again, maybe not. I just looked.
p.s. - All I did to make it look all neat and tidy was open it in Paint and use copy and paste. That was about three times as fast as typing out a list of numbers would have been.
p.p.s. - You're wondering, don't I have a job or something? Well, yeah, but Staff in just a few minutes so, you know ...
I don't remember what my picks were but I'm sure I would agree with many of them if I looked at them today.
Then again, maybe not. I just looked.
p.s. - All I did to make it look all neat and tidy was open it in Paint and use copy and paste. That was about three times as fast as typing out a list of numbers would have been.
p.p.s. - You're wondering, don't I have a job or something? Well, yeah, but Staff in just a few minutes so, you know ...
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Penny Foolish, Pound Wise and Gift Card Idiotic
My employer, bless its flinty corporate heart, has instituted a program of employee health awareness. We are all lured by the promise of a $25 gift card to make an appointment at the site health clinic for some sort of health evaluation. We then get another $25 gift card if we finish the program, whatever it is, that they have us do later, I forget, blah de blah. Point is, free gift card. I made an appointment.
This morning, after a twelve-hour fast (and a short night’s sleep, dropping a son off for swim practice at 5:45, and thirty minutes to stare uncomprehendingly at a list of unopened emails at my desk), I went down to the nurse’s office. I filled out forms (writing the date European-style, just to mess them up), got weighed and measured, had my body fat computed by squeezing the handles of what looked like a game console controller, and followed a very tired, very bored phlebotomist into the back office to get poked and squeezed. Only my arm got squeezed, and my other arm got poked. Blood test results will come back in a week. Blood pressure was surprisingly high.
So high, in fact, she wanted me to check it every day for a week, and call my doctor if it doesn’t go down. WTF? I thought my BP would be low, being as I eat well and exercise and don’t really worry about anything. Well, but I do. Maybe it’s all suppressed and my BP reflects some massive state of denial. What do I know?
What’s this all about, you ask? You don’t? You should. My company tends towards the leading edge of trends, so what they do, others might do too. If they’re willing to pay for all this for tens of thousands of people, there must be a reason. Something in it for them, and by extension, something in it for your employer too. Provided your employer is a massive corporation that looks at every little thing as an opportunity to save money.
Cause that’s what it must be about. Why else would they spend money except to save more? I figure their strategy is to get the employee base to be more health-aware. This will result in a) a healthier workforce hence lower healthcare and insurance costs, or b) an opportunity for the legal team to assert the old we-told-you-so we-covered-our-ass routine when they start trimming benefits to lower healthcare and insurance costs. Either way, they win. If we choose to be healthy and have a little luck, we win too. The poor sods who have health issues that these little blood pressure and blood test bandaids can’t address are another issue. Down the hall, second door. Yeah, the one with an emergency bar on it.
So they spend a little to save a lot. Yay for them! And yay for me! I got a gift card! Useable lots of places. I figured, hey, I got a couple for Best Buy from Christmas. Maybe I can combine them all and get me something neat. So I spent part of my lunch hour over at Best Buy.
Walked through the place.
Lots of TVs and MP3 players and cell phones and DVDs.
Nothing I wanted or needed. Nothing at all.
What is it with gift cards? What is it with only seeing things you want or need when you don’t have any money? These sun-za-beaches will still be in my wallet at the end of summer. They will.
I wonder if I’ll still have high blood pressure too. But nah, not if I don’t worry about it. Right?
This morning, after a twelve-hour fast (and a short night’s sleep, dropping a son off for swim practice at 5:45, and thirty minutes to stare uncomprehendingly at a list of unopened emails at my desk), I went down to the nurse’s office. I filled out forms (writing the date European-style, just to mess them up), got weighed and measured, had my body fat computed by squeezing the handles of what looked like a game console controller, and followed a very tired, very bored phlebotomist into the back office to get poked and squeezed. Only my arm got squeezed, and my other arm got poked. Blood test results will come back in a week. Blood pressure was surprisingly high.
So high, in fact, she wanted me to check it every day for a week, and call my doctor if it doesn’t go down. WTF? I thought my BP would be low, being as I eat well and exercise and don’t really worry about anything. Well, but I do. Maybe it’s all suppressed and my BP reflects some massive state of denial. What do I know?
What’s this all about, you ask? You don’t? You should. My company tends towards the leading edge of trends, so what they do, others might do too. If they’re willing to pay for all this for tens of thousands of people, there must be a reason. Something in it for them, and by extension, something in it for your employer too. Provided your employer is a massive corporation that looks at every little thing as an opportunity to save money.
Cause that’s what it must be about. Why else would they spend money except to save more? I figure their strategy is to get the employee base to be more health-aware. This will result in a) a healthier workforce hence lower healthcare and insurance costs, or b) an opportunity for the legal team to assert the old we-told-you-so we-covered-our-ass routine when they start trimming benefits to lower healthcare and insurance costs. Either way, they win. If we choose to be healthy and have a little luck, we win too. The poor sods who have health issues that these little blood pressure and blood test bandaids can’t address are another issue. Down the hall, second door. Yeah, the one with an emergency bar on it.
So they spend a little to save a lot. Yay for them! And yay for me! I got a gift card! Useable lots of places. I figured, hey, I got a couple for Best Buy from Christmas. Maybe I can combine them all and get me something neat. So I spent part of my lunch hour over at Best Buy.
Walked through the place.
Lots of TVs and MP3 players and cell phones and DVDs.
Nothing I wanted or needed. Nothing at all.
What is it with gift cards? What is it with only seeing things you want or need when you don’t have any money? These sun-za-beaches will still be in my wallet at the end of summer. They will.
I wonder if I’ll still have high blood pressure too. But nah, not if I don’t worry about it. Right?
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Whereas, Ovine, I Follow
Today's meme, which I do because I do, is about books read. Done by Looney, then Paula, now me, and so on. Idea: Append READ if you've read it, WANT TO if you want to, AGAIN & AGAIN if you keep going back, TRIED if you tried but couldn't get into it, and leave it blank if you don't care.
I'm not adding little editorials. It's enough to put TRIED on the first Hairy Potty book so you know I couldn't slog through that bilge if you paid me. Same for that Hitchhiker's Guide thing. Hey, I got my own weird standards, sue me. But I loved Gatsby and want to read other American classics, just haven't got round to it. Some of these I've never heard of, but since some of the others are popular rather than good (hello Dan Brown) I don't feel bad about that. (There're also one or two I probably read in high school, or pretended to, but I can't be certain.)
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) - READ
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) – WANT TO
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien) – AGAIN & AGAIN
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien) - AGAIN & AGAIN
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien) - AGAIN & AGAIN
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) – WANT TO
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Rowling) - TRIED
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King) - READ
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien) - AGAIN & AGAIN
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) - READ
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) - TRIED
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis) - TRIED
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) - WANT TO
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert) - TRIED
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) – WANT TO
34. 1984 (Orwell) - READ
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley) - READ
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible - TRIED
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) – WANT TO
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) – WANT TO
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - READ
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) - READ
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy) – WANT TO
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) - READ
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) – WANT TO
69. Les Miserables (Hugo) - READ
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) – WANT TO
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving) - READ
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White) - READ
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) – WANT TO
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) – WANT TO
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) – WANT TO
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) - READ
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) - READ
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) - TRIED
I'm not adding little editorials. It's enough to put TRIED on the first Hairy Potty book so you know I couldn't slog through that bilge if you paid me. Same for that Hitchhiker's Guide thing. Hey, I got my own weird standards, sue me. But I loved Gatsby and want to read other American classics, just haven't got round to it. Some of these I've never heard of, but since some of the others are popular rather than good (hello Dan Brown) I don't feel bad about that. (There're also one or two I probably read in high school, or pretended to, but I can't be certain.)
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) - READ
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) – WANT TO
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien) – AGAIN & AGAIN
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien) - AGAIN & AGAIN
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien) - AGAIN & AGAIN
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) – WANT TO
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Rowling) - TRIED
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King) - READ
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien) - AGAIN & AGAIN
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) - READ
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) - TRIED
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis) - TRIED
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) - WANT TO
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert) - TRIED
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) – WANT TO
34. 1984 (Orwell) - READ
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley) - READ
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible - TRIED
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) – WANT TO
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) – WANT TO
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - READ
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) - READ
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy) – WANT TO
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) - READ
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) – WANT TO
69. Les Miserables (Hugo) - READ
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) – WANT TO
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving) - READ
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White) - READ
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) – WANT TO
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) – WANT TO
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) – WANT TO
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) - READ
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) - READ
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) - TRIED
Monday, March 12, 2007
Paying Attention
I just went to a class. The leader had a presentation going on the screen. I thought it was fun to see her pointing her remote control at the screen all the time and press the buttons harder when it didn't work. This is because her laptop was back by the projector and she should have been pointing her remote at that.
The other day I was somewhere with my camera and this is what I saw.
Spring came too fast and some of the brightest colors just aren't happening. Every year I nearly swoon as I pass under the hillsides in that glorious moment when the grasses are bright green and the wild mustard bright yellow, and scattered amongst them stand the old oaks who have not yet put forth foliage and whose grayness contrasts into a violet so uncertain the eyes can never quite focus into it. But this year it's not so intense.
If I could figure out the routing for the vacuum hoses, I could get my old motorycle running again. Needless to say I'm not a talented mechanic. A few years ago my son and his friends took it apart and though it looked pretty simple to put back together at the time, it now turns out none of us was paying attention.
The other day I was somewhere with my camera and this is what I saw.
Spring came too fast and some of the brightest colors just aren't happening. Every year I nearly swoon as I pass under the hillsides in that glorious moment when the grasses are bright green and the wild mustard bright yellow, and scattered amongst them stand the old oaks who have not yet put forth foliage and whose grayness contrasts into a violet so uncertain the eyes can never quite focus into it. But this year it's not so intense.
If I could figure out the routing for the vacuum hoses, I could get my old motorycle running again. Needless to say I'm not a talented mechanic. A few years ago my son and his friends took it apart and though it looked pretty simple to put back together at the time, it now turns out none of us was paying attention.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Hot Chicks
It’s said that good fences make good neighbors. This is because a good fence makes it harder for your neighbor’s german shorthaired pointers to get in amongst your chickens. I carried the dead bird over to where he was waxing his truck. He was very apologetic and at the end of the day we’re all good neighbors again because he bought us four more baby chicks and a 50-lb bag of Chick Start. I returned the carcass to the local ecosystem.
I should have just given it to the dogs. Maybe they’d choke on a chicken bone.
Now we have little things under a heat lamp in the breakfast nook that go PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP. Another neighbor’s little girl came over to see. She giggled and was cute. The chicks were cute. Everyone was cute. It was a cute end to a strangely carnal day that went by very quickly thanks to this stupid daylight savings extension.
I should have just given it to the dogs. Maybe they’d choke on a chicken bone.
Now we have little things under a heat lamp in the breakfast nook that go PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP. Another neighbor’s little girl came over to see. She giggled and was cute. The chicks were cute. Everyone was cute. It was a cute end to a strangely carnal day that went by very quickly thanks to this stupid daylight savings extension.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Waah Anyway, and So On
The previous post is an example of why it's a bad idea to post from work. It makes me very sad when ancient buildings are thrown down to make way for some self-centered rich person's inferior schemes. It really does and if I lived near there, I'd be protesting and carrying on and all. But, you know. I don't. And I was at work and had checked my heart and soul at the door.
But I'm fixed now. I was just sitting in The Buzzy Chair. The Buzzy Chair is a chair in the living room with a vibrating heating pad on it. I don't normally sit there but the other decent chair was taken. So I sat in The Buzzy Chair and started to play with the controls and wound up vibrating my entire backside and going "A-a-a-a-ah" because it made my voice funny. And then I noticed it was manufactured by HoMedics and immediately pictured a bunch of trashy girls posing in white lab coats.
That's how we are around here.
So is this. I read about the growing trend of video screens being installed on gas pumps and immediately imagine finding a video-less gas station harder and harder to find until one day I finally lose all patience and get arrested for taking a hammer to one of the damn things.
Died eight years ago today: Joe DiMaggio, who said, "They call a man graceful because he hits a little ball with a certain swing. My father hammered piles on a railroad out of Martinez for 10 cents an hour to support a family. That was grace." Amen to that. My grandfather gave a Martinez address when he joined the Army and went to France. Got there after the Armistice. Now there's a green office building there that my mother says my grandfather refused to let them name after him, despite their best efforts (they being the county administrative staff who remained after he retired). There's a transcendent grace in humility.
I wouldn't know. Yesterday, but in 1876, a patent (No. 174,465) for an Improvement In Telegraphy was awarded Alexander Graham Bell. Bell only made it really work by incorporating the ideas of his rival Elisha Gray, who had filed his petition for a patent just two hours after Mr. Bell had filed his. His main intent was to multiplex signals, that is send multiple messages simultaneously along a single wire. But in so doing --
"The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, as herein described, by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds, substantially as set forth."
-- he happened to invent the telephone. Being me, I'm more interested in the less practical but no less forward-seeing ideas of one Charles Bourseul who published a scheme for the electrical transmission of speech in 1854. Needless to say it didn't work but what did work the year before, believe it or not, was the world's second fixed-wing aircraft. Sir George Cayley did not fly the glider himself, however; he left the small glory and substantial risk to his hired man.
Second? Aye, the first was also of Cayley's design and flew several years before, sometime in the late 1840s, about the time Juana Briones was building her stamped adobe house. But history records neither the date, nor the name, nor the thoughts of the ten-year-old boy who rode in it. In later years, as he sat at the tavern spinning tales, I'm sure no one believed him anyway.
But I'm fixed now. I was just sitting in The Buzzy Chair. The Buzzy Chair is a chair in the living room with a vibrating heating pad on it. I don't normally sit there but the other decent chair was taken. So I sat in The Buzzy Chair and started to play with the controls and wound up vibrating my entire backside and going "A-a-a-a-ah" because it made my voice funny. And then I noticed it was manufactured by HoMedics and immediately pictured a bunch of trashy girls posing in white lab coats.
That's how we are around here.
So is this. I read about the growing trend of video screens being installed on gas pumps and immediately imagine finding a video-less gas station harder and harder to find until one day I finally lose all patience and get arrested for taking a hammer to one of the damn things.
Died eight years ago today: Joe DiMaggio, who said, "They call a man graceful because he hits a little ball with a certain swing. My father hammered piles on a railroad out of Martinez for 10 cents an hour to support a family. That was grace." Amen to that. My grandfather gave a Martinez address when he joined the Army and went to France. Got there after the Armistice. Now there's a green office building there that my mother says my grandfather refused to let them name after him, despite their best efforts (they being the county administrative staff who remained after he retired). There's a transcendent grace in humility.
I wouldn't know. Yesterday, but in 1876, a patent (No. 174,465) for an Improvement In Telegraphy was awarded Alexander Graham Bell. Bell only made it really work by incorporating the ideas of his rival Elisha Gray, who had filed his petition for a patent just two hours after Mr. Bell had filed his. His main intent was to multiplex signals, that is send multiple messages simultaneously along a single wire. But in so doing --
"The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, as herein described, by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds, substantially as set forth."
-- he happened to invent the telephone. Being me, I'm more interested in the less practical but no less forward-seeing ideas of one Charles Bourseul who published a scheme for the electrical transmission of speech in 1854. Needless to say it didn't work but what did work the year before, believe it or not, was the world's second fixed-wing aircraft. Sir George Cayley did not fly the glider himself, however; he left the small glory and substantial risk to his hired man.
Second? Aye, the first was also of Cayley's design and flew several years before, sometime in the late 1840s, about the time Juana Briones was building her stamped adobe house. But history records neither the date, nor the name, nor the thoughts of the ten-year-old boy who rode in it. In later years, as he sat at the tavern spinning tales, I'm sure no one believed him anyway.
Down She Goes
Settlement of California didn't really kick into gear until the 1840s. Absolutely anything that survives from those days is worth its sentimental weight in gold. But if it's private property, it's worth a lot more as real estate. So the Briones House in Palo Alto will soon be no more.
Property rights are foundational to a just society. If the broader community can arbitrarily redefine that which we have taken risks to obtain as being at public disposal,* then all of us are ultimately subject to the whims of the bullies and the rabble-rousers. It's just a damn shame that the property owners in this case are individuals who value their new dream home more than an irreplaceable historic property. The proper answer would have been for the public (as represented by local government) to buy the place for preservation. The public did not. And so, down she goes.
* - There are many exceptions, needless to say, where eminent domain supercedes individual property rights. But sentiment should not weigh much, and historic interest is not the same as historic value.
Property rights are foundational to a just society. If the broader community can arbitrarily redefine that which we have taken risks to obtain as being at public disposal,* then all of us are ultimately subject to the whims of the bullies and the rabble-rousers. It's just a damn shame that the property owners in this case are individuals who value their new dream home more than an irreplaceable historic property. The proper answer would have been for the public (as represented by local government) to buy the place for preservation. The public did not. And so, down she goes.
* - There are many exceptions, needless to say, where eminent domain supercedes individual property rights. But sentiment should not weigh much, and historic interest is not the same as historic value.
Best Thing Ever of the Moment
This kept cropping on people's pages and I couldn't figure out what the hell it meant. This is mainly because if something isn't obvious to me in under two seconds I get bored and stop trying. But just now I managed to click this and click that in under two seconds and wound up choosing from among some very cool pictures as to what this and what that is really me. So, here's the result. Or a result, since if I did it again the result would prob'ly change.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Empty Room
Nature versus nurture. Of course the two work together. How and to what extent is not yet fully understood. But there’s no doubt that we are heavily influenced by our parents to become who we are, as they are the source for both the genetic and the environmental.
We are also influenced by our siblings. Modern psychological theory does not yet fully grasp how much. Freud spoke of sibling rivalry and Adler of birth order. But not until the 1980s did anyone seriously consider the effects on a person of a sibling’s death.
How terrible to lose a child. Everyone’s worst nightmare. When it happens, the parents are devastated. They retreat from the world. They go into seclusion. Bereft siblings are left to handle arrangements, speak to family, transmit condolences. How often are they consoled themselves? Who thinks of their grief, not the grief of a parent or a spouse, but the grief of a person who has lost a major part of what defines them? For that’s what siblings are: defining fellow travelers, contemporaries, partners, rivals, companions, part-time enemies and full-time friends.
Too often, people lose a sibling and their world is forever turned inside out. They honor the grief of their parents, their dead sibling’s spouse and children – but not their own. Their loss is ambiguous, their grief disenfranchised. Often they never even give themselves permission to grieve, knowing that there are others who grieve more deeply. This neglect can leave the wound open for years and years. The effects can be devastating, and, misunderstood and suppressed, may last the rest of their lives.
So much for my inadequate synopsis of The Empty Room by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. What does it mean to me?
I was surprised, reading this book, to learn how few psychologists, even now, appreciate the effects on a person of the death of a sibling. But I’ve known all my life how huge it is. I was only fifteen months when Jimmy died, yet that one event thoroughly colored the rest of my life. Not so much directly, of course, for I never really knew him. But he remained in the family, a palpable presence created by his absence, a mysterious other person that everyone knew except me, a brother I wondered about but about whom I had no questions, only vague ideas.
I’ve no intention right now of describing a life led with someone who isn’t there. Somewhere in this blog-world I wrote of my earliest memory, of a family gathering, with a sad boy off to the side that no one else could see. Elsewhere I hinted at my poor interpretation of what the loss may have meant to my other brother. I only mean now to mention one small aspect of the experience that came to light while reading the above book. A tiny glint of self-knowledge that may someday be useful.
In the early 1960s, common wisdom was that young children don’t understand, they won’t remember, they’ll get over it. It was considered best for them to let their dead sibling fade in memory: take down the pictures, don’t talk about him. Our parents did the best they knew how to do. What they couldn’t know was that it wasn’t the best.
I remember my father’s second wife remarking one day that when she first met me, when I was nine or ten, it was clear Jimmy’s death still bothered me. I doodled a lot. A frequent theme of my doodling was to write out that I wished Jimmy hadn’t died; that everything would be all right if he hadn’t died. Still an open wound.
It was as natural to me as breathing to wish that a random illness had not taken my never-known older brother away. I tied to his death all the other disappointments of childhood, because they all seemed to spring from what I thought was the obvious result of it: my parents’ divorce. I spent my entire childhood, literally on a daily basis, completely convinced that whatever was wrong would not be wrong, that everything would be okay, if Jimmy hadn’t died.
I reasoned this away later. When I was significantly older than it was ever given him to be – he died shortly after turning five – I understood that the great questions in life, the great problems and challenges, would not much be changed by the addition of another older brother. I might or might not have a guide, I might or might not have a friend. That was about it. No big difference. Time to move on.
But the fact of something missing was encoded into my DNA. The unresolved loss morphed into other forms of loss. Not rational, not necessarily real, but fully burned into my psyche. When I look back, whether to when I was nine or to yesterday, I see my day – yes, every single day – dominated by the sense that the world just isn’t right, that something is missing; and that it is something I can do nothing about. A sort of fatalistic never-ending sense of irresolvable disappointment is as normal to me as are the clouds in the sky.
Shallow, uninformed pop psychology is always suspect, especially when directed at oneself. But it make sense to me. And now that I see that, and can hypothesize a reason for it, there’s a chance I can find a way beyond it. A sense of something wrong was encoded into my being by the pervasive boy-shaped hole in the heart of my childhood. Now that I see this – I lived it, but for forty-seven years never saw it – I might be empowered to change it; which is to say, to live towards a day when nothing that truly matters is missing, when everything really is just fine.
p.s. - Read the excerpt. If you or anyone you love has lost a sibling, take a close look at this book.
We are also influenced by our siblings. Modern psychological theory does not yet fully grasp how much. Freud spoke of sibling rivalry and Adler of birth order. But not until the 1980s did anyone seriously consider the effects on a person of a sibling’s death.
How terrible to lose a child. Everyone’s worst nightmare. When it happens, the parents are devastated. They retreat from the world. They go into seclusion. Bereft siblings are left to handle arrangements, speak to family, transmit condolences. How often are they consoled themselves? Who thinks of their grief, not the grief of a parent or a spouse, but the grief of a person who has lost a major part of what defines them? For that’s what siblings are: defining fellow travelers, contemporaries, partners, rivals, companions, part-time enemies and full-time friends.
Too often, people lose a sibling and their world is forever turned inside out. They honor the grief of their parents, their dead sibling’s spouse and children – but not their own. Their loss is ambiguous, their grief disenfranchised. Often they never even give themselves permission to grieve, knowing that there are others who grieve more deeply. This neglect can leave the wound open for years and years. The effects can be devastating, and, misunderstood and suppressed, may last the rest of their lives.
So much for my inadequate synopsis of The Empty Room by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. What does it mean to me?
I was surprised, reading this book, to learn how few psychologists, even now, appreciate the effects on a person of the death of a sibling. But I’ve known all my life how huge it is. I was only fifteen months when Jimmy died, yet that one event thoroughly colored the rest of my life. Not so much directly, of course, for I never really knew him. But he remained in the family, a palpable presence created by his absence, a mysterious other person that everyone knew except me, a brother I wondered about but about whom I had no questions, only vague ideas.
I’ve no intention right now of describing a life led with someone who isn’t there. Somewhere in this blog-world I wrote of my earliest memory, of a family gathering, with a sad boy off to the side that no one else could see. Elsewhere I hinted at my poor interpretation of what the loss may have meant to my other brother. I only mean now to mention one small aspect of the experience that came to light while reading the above book. A tiny glint of self-knowledge that may someday be useful.
In the early 1960s, common wisdom was that young children don’t understand, they won’t remember, they’ll get over it. It was considered best for them to let their dead sibling fade in memory: take down the pictures, don’t talk about him. Our parents did the best they knew how to do. What they couldn’t know was that it wasn’t the best.
I remember my father’s second wife remarking one day that when she first met me, when I was nine or ten, it was clear Jimmy’s death still bothered me. I doodled a lot. A frequent theme of my doodling was to write out that I wished Jimmy hadn’t died; that everything would be all right if he hadn’t died. Still an open wound.
It was as natural to me as breathing to wish that a random illness had not taken my never-known older brother away. I tied to his death all the other disappointments of childhood, because they all seemed to spring from what I thought was the obvious result of it: my parents’ divorce. I spent my entire childhood, literally on a daily basis, completely convinced that whatever was wrong would not be wrong, that everything would be okay, if Jimmy hadn’t died.
I reasoned this away later. When I was significantly older than it was ever given him to be – he died shortly after turning five – I understood that the great questions in life, the great problems and challenges, would not much be changed by the addition of another older brother. I might or might not have a guide, I might or might not have a friend. That was about it. No big difference. Time to move on.
But the fact of something missing was encoded into my DNA. The unresolved loss morphed into other forms of loss. Not rational, not necessarily real, but fully burned into my psyche. When I look back, whether to when I was nine or to yesterday, I see my day – yes, every single day – dominated by the sense that the world just isn’t right, that something is missing; and that it is something I can do nothing about. A sort of fatalistic never-ending sense of irresolvable disappointment is as normal to me as are the clouds in the sky.
Shallow, uninformed pop psychology is always suspect, especially when directed at oneself. But it make sense to me. And now that I see that, and can hypothesize a reason for it, there’s a chance I can find a way beyond it. A sense of something wrong was encoded into my being by the pervasive boy-shaped hole in the heart of my childhood. Now that I see this – I lived it, but for forty-seven years never saw it – I might be empowered to change it; which is to say, to live towards a day when nothing that truly matters is missing, when everything really is just fine.
p.s. - Read the excerpt. If you or anyone you love has lost a sibling, take a close look at this book.
Self Restraint
It's exciting to see the product I went to Asia and Europe to kick off development for get splashed all over the news in an announcement of its release later on down the road. But dang, I've got this hide-my-full-name-as-well-as-who-I-work-for thing going on, as most people do, and I just ... can't ...
Monday, March 05, 2007
Four-meme
Bunch a other people are doing this one, I decided to also. Good thing they didn't jump off a cliff.
Four jobs I have had in my life:
1. Forklift operator at a tomato-sorting facility
2. Swing shift worker at a block ice and crushed ice factory
3. Quality lab technician at a vegetable oil refinery
4. Electronics technician at a maker of wind farm monitoring systems
Four movies I would watch over and over (and have):
1. Casablanca
2. Office Space
3. Back to the Future I, II, III
4. Terminator I, II, III
Four places I have lived:
1. Orinda, CA
2. Berkeley, CA
3. Dixon, CA
4. Moraga, CA
Four TV shows I like to watch:
1. CSI: Wherever
2. Wild West Tech
3. Mythbusters
4. The Daily Show
Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Christchurch
2. Coeur D'Alene
3. Kyleakin
4. New Orleans
Four of my favorite foods:
1. Barbecued salmon
2. Radishes
3. Peach ice cream
4. Those cheeseburgers cooked outside by the president of Sunrise Little League
Four of my favorite animals:
1. Dog, large
2. Puma
3. Red-tailed Hawk
4. Bobcat
Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Sydney
2. Isla Mujeres
3. Lago di Como
4. Brighton
Four jobs I have had in my life:
1. Forklift operator at a tomato-sorting facility
2. Swing shift worker at a block ice and crushed ice factory
3. Quality lab technician at a vegetable oil refinery
4. Electronics technician at a maker of wind farm monitoring systems
Four movies I would watch over and over (and have):
1. Casablanca
2. Office Space
3. Back to the Future I, II, III
4. Terminator I, II, III
Four places I have lived:
1. Orinda, CA
2. Berkeley, CA
3. Dixon, CA
4. Moraga, CA
Four TV shows I like to watch:
1. CSI: Wherever
2. Wild West Tech
3. Mythbusters
4. The Daily Show
Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Christchurch
2. Coeur D'Alene
3. Kyleakin
4. New Orleans
Four of my favorite foods:
1. Barbecued salmon
2. Radishes
3. Peach ice cream
4. Those cheeseburgers cooked outside by the president of Sunrise Little League
Four of my favorite animals:
1. Dog, large
2. Puma
3. Red-tailed Hawk
4. Bobcat
Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Sydney
2. Isla Mujeres
3. Lago di Como
4. Brighton
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Sunday Night Random
My eyes are tired.
My hands are gritty from playing in mud and dirt all day. I took a shower so they are clean. But they are rough. Handling seventy-pound blocks, and shovels and rakes, and hauling heavy rain-damp dirt around. A few days wasting away at the docking station at work will soften them up again.
I read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. It's very good. But the ending is ambiguous. I don't usually like ambiguous endings because I don't understand them. I think they are very fashionable. An ambiguous ending is a way for an author to appear more clever than his audience. Of course, in this case, he is.
I have a novel inside that won't die. So I must write it. But when I try, I cannot. I have many ideas as to why this might be and therefore ideas on what to do about it. None of them will happen overnight. Some of them have taken years to not happen.
After the audition yesterday we went to lunch at Fannie Annie's in Old Town. Annie's has been there forever, a fun place with a bar and kitchen on the first floor, and you have to find yourself a table somewhere on the second or third. I think there's also a bar in the basement. All the walls and ceilings are covered with pictures, ancient newspapers, musical instruments, shoes, sports equipment. From our table an entire four-person horse-drawn buggy could be seen hanging over the stairs. I wondered why someone had written "Rudy V" on a framed picture of President McKinley.
It was a beautiful warm sunny day and the bikers were everywhere. Bikers aren't what they used to be. They wear leather vests and all, but have extraordinarily expensive motorcycles and all work for professional wages either as systems analysts for the State or software engineers at local corporations. Just another club to join. But they feel tough and stand around looking confident. I enjoy pushing through them when they block a narrow passage. One small heart challenges another. Always, politeness.
A dye in my wife's new tattoo raised an allergy and an infection and it hurts a lot and we don't know how it'll look once it has gotten better and the swelling gone down and the skin returned to normal. I am not satisfied with my own ink, but corrections / additions have not yet become clear.
My hands are gritty from playing in mud and dirt all day. I took a shower so they are clean. But they are rough. Handling seventy-pound blocks, and shovels and rakes, and hauling heavy rain-damp dirt around. A few days wasting away at the docking station at work will soften them up again.
I read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. It's very good. But the ending is ambiguous. I don't usually like ambiguous endings because I don't understand them. I think they are very fashionable. An ambiguous ending is a way for an author to appear more clever than his audience. Of course, in this case, he is.
I have a novel inside that won't die. So I must write it. But when I try, I cannot. I have many ideas as to why this might be and therefore ideas on what to do about it. None of them will happen overnight. Some of them have taken years to not happen.
After the audition yesterday we went to lunch at Fannie Annie's in Old Town. Annie's has been there forever, a fun place with a bar and kitchen on the first floor, and you have to find yourself a table somewhere on the second or third. I think there's also a bar in the basement. All the walls and ceilings are covered with pictures, ancient newspapers, musical instruments, shoes, sports equipment. From our table an entire four-person horse-drawn buggy could be seen hanging over the stairs. I wondered why someone had written "Rudy V" on a framed picture of President McKinley.
It was a beautiful warm sunny day and the bikers were everywhere. Bikers aren't what they used to be. They wear leather vests and all, but have extraordinarily expensive motorcycles and all work for professional wages either as systems analysts for the State or software engineers at local corporations. Just another club to join. But they feel tough and stand around looking confident. I enjoy pushing through them when they block a narrow passage. One small heart challenges another. Always, politeness.
A dye in my wife's new tattoo raised an allergy and an infection and it hurts a lot and we don't know how it'll look once it has gotten better and the swelling gone down and the skin returned to normal. I am not satisfied with my own ink, but corrections / additions have not yet become clear.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Bar Stangled Spanner
We met at the home plate entrance to Raley Field. It was a beautiful sunny day and we talked about yard work. Down on the field, someone was singing the national anthem. She changed key, probably without knowing it, and we winced.
Didn’t mean to. Don’t want to be a snob. But a key change that was clearly not intentional –- there went another one -– it kind of hurts, you know?
Went across the promenade and over to the edge of the seats. A bright green empty baseball field was spread out below. A few dozen people were scattered about the seats behind home plate. A teenaged girl held a microphone just past the foul ball screen.
She finished and there was polite applause and a child took her place and sang the same song. For a child, she was pretty good. For professional sports, well. We’ll see. But full credit for trying!
For half an hour we milled about, the four of us and two of our collective wives. Mostly sat in the warm sun and watched the show. A quartet of teenaged blondes in long black dresses (they were quite good); a few women in middle age, colorfully dressed, belting out the anthem as talented amateurs do; a big man who looked and sounded like Paul Robeson; a young blonde boy with a guitar; a little black girl; a little white girl; a group of tough-looking women in red coats embroidered with their Sweet Adelines group name (they were very good but didn’t utilize the microphone well); and on and on.
Our turn. We crowded around the mic like four very friendly boys sharing a milkshake. Tried to place ourselves to match the response pattern of that type of mic (one of our number, not me, knows about such things). But with our four mouths just inches from the thing, we were pretty much in a group hug. And so we sang the national anthem (David Dickau arrangement for four male voices). I was leaning into the bass and he started to vibrate. I thought he was nervous but later it turned out he was just pushing back at me so I wouldn’t push him over.
We sang it just fine. We better: we practiced it over and over and over and oh. As we do every other song. Unlike every other song, however, I know the melody to that one. All the other tunes we do, I only know the baritone part and couldn’t dredge up the melody to save my life. I’m naturally a bass but I sing baritone because I like that part and have the range. In close harmony barbershop-style arrangements, the baritone part does interesting things. Well, they all do. Depends on the song. Depends on the arranger, really.
So anyway, we think we have a shot, judging by the other people we heard and the surprising volume of the applause we got –- and considering they have thirty or forty home games to cover and only about a hundred people showed up to the auditions. In a few weeks we’ll know; and this summer one of the things I’ve wanted to do for years just might happen when we sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a professional baseball game. Batter up!
Didn’t mean to. Don’t want to be a snob. But a key change that was clearly not intentional –- there went another one -– it kind of hurts, you know?
Went across the promenade and over to the edge of the seats. A bright green empty baseball field was spread out below. A few dozen people were scattered about the seats behind home plate. A teenaged girl held a microphone just past the foul ball screen.
She finished and there was polite applause and a child took her place and sang the same song. For a child, she was pretty good. For professional sports, well. We’ll see. But full credit for trying!
For half an hour we milled about, the four of us and two of our collective wives. Mostly sat in the warm sun and watched the show. A quartet of teenaged blondes in long black dresses (they were quite good); a few women in middle age, colorfully dressed, belting out the anthem as talented amateurs do; a big man who looked and sounded like Paul Robeson; a young blonde boy with a guitar; a little black girl; a little white girl; a group of tough-looking women in red coats embroidered with their Sweet Adelines group name (they were very good but didn’t utilize the microphone well); and on and on.
Our turn. We crowded around the mic like four very friendly boys sharing a milkshake. Tried to place ourselves to match the response pattern of that type of mic (one of our number, not me, knows about such things). But with our four mouths just inches from the thing, we were pretty much in a group hug. And so we sang the national anthem (David Dickau arrangement for four male voices). I was leaning into the bass and he started to vibrate. I thought he was nervous but later it turned out he was just pushing back at me so I wouldn’t push him over.
We sang it just fine. We better: we practiced it over and over and over and oh. As we do every other song. Unlike every other song, however, I know the melody to that one. All the other tunes we do, I only know the baritone part and couldn’t dredge up the melody to save my life. I’m naturally a bass but I sing baritone because I like that part and have the range. In close harmony barbershop-style arrangements, the baritone part does interesting things. Well, they all do. Depends on the song. Depends on the arranger, really.
So anyway, we think we have a shot, judging by the other people we heard and the surprising volume of the applause we got –- and considering they have thirty or forty home games to cover and only about a hundred people showed up to the auditions. In a few weeks we’ll know; and this summer one of the things I’ve wanted to do for years just might happen when we sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a professional baseball game. Batter up!
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Thursday Thirteen: Thirteen Things That Annoy The Mess Out Of Me
With sundry notes as deemed fit.
1. Cables that tie themselves into knots.
How do they do that? I toss a pair of headphones and an audio cable and a couple of USB cables into my suitcase and by the time I get to my hotel they have knit themselves into a ball so tight only the sword of Alexander can untangle it.
2. Garrison Keillor.
I picture hoards of NPR listeners gathering round their radios to enjoy his homespun stories and high-pitched mellifluous voice and am transported to a warm world of muted tones and glowing windows and Saturday Evening Post covers and Thomas Kincaid prints and before you know it I want to barf.
3. Thomas Kincaid.
4. 158th and 185th Avenues being consecutive exits.
Once you get out of the airport and figure out how to get past Portland and finally find yourself westbound on U.S. Route 26, it should be enough to know that your exit is a numbered street with a 5 and an 8 in it. Why should any out-of-towner anywhere ever have to remember more than that? So you see 158th Ave -- that has to be it -- and move over to exit. But wait! The next exit is 185th Ave! Fuck! Which one do I want?!
5. George W. Bush's voice and everything he says with it.
6. The American date-style (mm/dd/yy).
The rest of the civilized world uses dd/mm/yy, as is only logical; and if you interact with the rest of the civilized world, you have already experienced no end of confusion over whether a given milestone was supposed to be the 5h of April or the 4th of May. I strike back by using the European style if the date isn't ambiguous, for example yesterday at Kaiser I dated some forms "28/02/07". Today I would have written "01 Mar 07". It is up to each of us to subvert the system!
7. Leaving a brilliantly hilarious and insightful comment at someone's blog somewhere and wanting to follow up on the undoubtedly riveting conversation that surely ensued and being totally unable to remember where the hell it was.
8. Television "news" media.
Yes, all of it. Every aspect.
9. The United States still not having gone metric.
10. Use of the present tense in television documentaries.
Worse yet, mixing past and present tense and evidently not being aware they are doing it.
11. Jokes about Mexicans, Nee-gros and queers.
I don't care if your name is Carlos Mencia, enough already.
12. People who drive the speed limit when they're in front of me.
13. Developing the best damn character-building and plot-moving dialog ever and not being able to recreate one sentence of it once I get out of the shower.
1. Cables that tie themselves into knots.
How do they do that? I toss a pair of headphones and an audio cable and a couple of USB cables into my suitcase and by the time I get to my hotel they have knit themselves into a ball so tight only the sword of Alexander can untangle it.
2. Garrison Keillor.
I picture hoards of NPR listeners gathering round their radios to enjoy his homespun stories and high-pitched mellifluous voice and am transported to a warm world of muted tones and glowing windows and Saturday Evening Post covers and Thomas Kincaid prints and before you know it I want to barf.
3. Thomas Kincaid.
4. 158th and 185th Avenues being consecutive exits.
Once you get out of the airport and figure out how to get past Portland and finally find yourself westbound on U.S. Route 26, it should be enough to know that your exit is a numbered street with a 5 and an 8 in it. Why should any out-of-towner anywhere ever have to remember more than that? So you see 158th Ave -- that has to be it -- and move over to exit. But wait! The next exit is 185th Ave! Fuck! Which one do I want?!
5. George W. Bush's voice and everything he says with it.
6. The American date-style (mm/dd/yy).
The rest of the civilized world uses dd/mm/yy, as is only logical; and if you interact with the rest of the civilized world, you have already experienced no end of confusion over whether a given milestone was supposed to be the 5h of April or the 4th of May. I strike back by using the European style if the date isn't ambiguous, for example yesterday at Kaiser I dated some forms "28/02/07". Today I would have written "01 Mar 07". It is up to each of us to subvert the system!
7. Leaving a brilliantly hilarious and insightful comment at someone's blog somewhere and wanting to follow up on the undoubtedly riveting conversation that surely ensued and being totally unable to remember where the hell it was.
8. Television "news" media.
Yes, all of it. Every aspect.
9. The United States still not having gone metric.
10. Use of the present tense in television documentaries.
Worse yet, mixing past and present tense and evidently not being aware they are doing it.
11. Jokes about Mexicans, Nee-gros and queers.
I don't care if your name is Carlos Mencia, enough already.
12. People who drive the speed limit when they're in front of me.
13. Developing the best damn character-building and plot-moving dialog ever and not being able to recreate one sentence of it once I get out of the shower.
