FOUR IN THE MORNING

A Post

2010-01-20T08:05:00.002-06:00

I find the time available to write this blog has become very limited. Certainly an amount of time does exist that could be used to write, that time however, ends up being devoted to other things.

This blog was not supposed to act as a replacement for a Facebook page, I will never have one and I will never want one. The purpose of this was to write and to help myself think some things through. Most of the content was rather dry and I hope, at least in some circumstances, thought provoking.

I have plenty to say and my thoughts have not dwindled but magnified with time, this may not be the medium for them anymore; or perhaps it is, perhaps a renewed effort to write could and should be made, I don't know really.

Life continues to shock, amaze and surprise everyday.

I will post some things that I wrote awhile back put never published in the coming days. Maybe then I will begin to write again, but probably not.

Autumn

2009-09-17T07:09:00.004-05:00

...is not here yet, but it's on the way. The temperature has dropped, the highs are now in the 80's and compared to what it has been, it feels down right cool. The mornings and nights are very comfortable and Austin is once again a walkable city.

Other signs of fall are emerging, kids are in school, football is back on TV and Sam Adam's Oktoberfest is in the grocery stores. Autumn is my favorite season, it's not as nice in Texas as it is in the northeast, but it is good enough.

On Aging

2009-09-15T08:18:00.002-05:00

For the first time in my life I actually feel my age, if anything, I may feel even older than my age. I will be 29 years old soon, that means I am almost 30, and that means I am almost dead.

What do I mean that I "feel my age"? I think it means in part that my perspective has changed, a touch more mature and a touch more realistic. This mental construct is paired with a physical element, I look older and I have gray hair.

I talk to people younger than me and I can relate to them, but it is from a remembrance of youth and not a contemporaneous realization of it. I am not a grizzled veteran of anything by any means but as much as I look ahead, the road behind me is long and that past lingers. That is what separates me from youth.

I am still immature, I do stupid things and act childish. The concepts of "youth" and "maturity" are relative, nebulous and subjective, one can "feel" a certain way and always change.

I am older, I do not think I am neccessarily wiser, I would like to be. I am still making my way in the world. I am not sure where I am going,but the gray hair tells me where I have been.

Hot, Hot, Heat

2009-08-27T10:30:00.006-05:00

So far this summer in Austin we have had over 50 days at 100 degrees or higher. The heat is unrelenting and awful. There is no rain, we are in constant drought and even a cloud, no matter how small, is seen as a gift from the Gods. It is August, at least another month of summer remains.

I hate the heat, even more than Texans or ignorance, it is what I hate most about Texas.* The heat and I do not get along. The heat in Texas makes me, as my Catholic grandfather would put it, 'sweat like a whore in church'. Actually I sweat more than the whore in church, if she even goes anymore.

The time outside can be limited though, one goes from air conditioned apartment, to air conditioned car, to air conditioned gym and to air conditioned work. I am not doing road work, digging ditches or repairing electrical lines. My milieu is middle class, my job is white collar and my exposure to the heat is mostly limited to my bourgeois preoccupation with soccer.

In October the weather will be different. Autumn will come to central Texas and my heart will be full of happiness. The days will be still be warm but the nights will be cooler. I await this with fervid longing and barely disguised impatience.

*some of that was a joke

The Posting...

2009-08-18T10:01:00.001-05:00

has been very light recently. The last thing I posted was in July and it wasn't even a new post but something I wrote about three years ago.

I have been busy, not work busy though. Work has been slow but my downtime in Austin has been limited. People, Austin, soccer and Netflix have dominated all my time. I did not have a TV and now I do. The TV can only be used to watch DVDs and this has led me back into the warm embrace of Netflix.

My Netflix queue is up to about forty discs and it is growing. I have already decided to re watch The Wire, Six Feet Under and and start some series that people have recommended. I feverishly work to finish movies and get them into the mail and deal with the short interval before the next ones arrive. And then...gratification is achieved! All my old friends are back, Stringer Bell, Ricky Gervais, and now lots of homely Dutch people in these indie movies someone keeps recommending to me.

Now, I am not a hermit, as I previously stated there is other stuff occupying my time too. The confluence of all these events and happenings has cut down drastically on my reading and writing time. Life has been busy and complicated, which I guess is how life can be at times.

I was thinking recently about how life can be comfortable and interesting but very rarely both at the same time. Comfort quickly can lead to boredom and complacency. When life is interesting it can be both enjoyable and terrifying; it leads to action, it leads to decisions and consequential occurrences. Events get in the way of abstract philosophizing, as they should.

The key, I assume, is finding the balance between comfortable and interesting. Currently I am very rarely bored and only occasionally terrified, I guess that is a start.

He Man

2009-07-31T19:13:00.003-05:00

*Editor's Note: While perusing some old word documents I find this post. I believe it came from a previous blog I had. It's a little less serious than most of my usual nonsense, enjoy.

Growing up I was an avid He-Man fan and thoroughly enjoyed watching him destroy evil and save the day while battling the maniacal Skeletor. After watching He-Man again after many years and also reading this article here, I have to ask myself this question: Is He-Man gay?

The evidence is very compelling, He-Man is in good shape, well groomed and spends most of his time (when not crushing skulls) petting his large fluffy kitty cat. The amount of phallic symbols in the show being thrust by and at He-Man is almost too numerous to count. Certainly his choice of outfits is suspicious, I mean furry speedos, Ugg boots and tight fitting pink V-neck blouses (and they are blouses, not shirts)? His hair cut is precious as well. And to top it all off his friends are named Fisto and Ram-Man for chrissakes!

So is He-Man gay? It appears the answer is yes. And yet that ultimately changes nothing. Still he remains my hero, and should serve as a role model for children all over the World. He-Man is a figure we all should aspire to be like; he works out, takes care of his pets, and destroys evil. He-Man is not only a power-top, he is also a true American.

On Living In Texas, Semantics and Labels

2009-07-25T19:33:00.001-05:00

I live in Texas but I will never be a Texan. This is not necessarily an exclusive thing, I lived in Hungary and I will never be Hungarian. One might assume there is a distinction here, 'Hungarian' is a nationality while 'Texan' is a geographic label, if you live in America long enough, you can be an American.

Perhaps this all is merely semantic parsing, a distracting deconstruction of language that ceases to have form or function. However, I assert that it does matter, what we label ourselves or are labeled, plays a significant part in how we define ourselves and are defined.

It's all part of our narrative (see this post here for more). The label represents our character in the story. These labels can be lots of things; texan, teacher, renter, swimmer, drug addict, straight, gay, republican, reader, asshole, yankee, etc, etc. These labels serve as nouns and adjectives, they both identify and describe.

Every term is loaded, every term carries preconceived notions about it and the carrier of it. For example, the term 'hipster" is a label that to me carries a negative connotation of shallow materialism, even shallower intelligence and conformity. However others may embrace this term for themselves or feel it represents fashion, uniqueness and sophistication.

We all labels ourselves in different ways and to different audiences. We label through our careers, religions (or lack thereof), political parties, class, race, gender...the list goes on. We also label others of course, it can be useful shorthand in discussions, or a lazy way to make a point.

Labelling is tribalizing, see, look at that, I just labelled labelling. What I mean to say is that as humans we think of ourselves and others in tribes. We are all part of some groups and not of others.

The purpose of this post was due to my awareness of this habit in myself. Labelling seems to be a very common tool most use, and perhaps one that cannot be avoided. To label in some cases can be dehumanizing, or at the very least strip an person of their individuality. People are people, tribes are tribes, one does not completely define another.

Maybe next time I am complaining about all the hipsters in Austin or republicans I'll take a second to pause. They can't all be that bad I'll think to myself, or maybe they are.

On Telling the Truth

2009-07-21T02:51:00.002-05:00

What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all. (John 18:38)

We all lie, some more than others. Lying is part of the human condition and it's something we all share. However, I want to discuss lying here and the truth, which should be an antecedent to a lie. The truth must exist, it must be established before a lie can be born, spoken or thought in lieu of truth.

I am not attempting to get all metaphysical here, although it sounds that way, I am not going to survey what "truth" is supposed to be mean from an historical, religious, philosophical sense; not about what is true from the perspective of being, our ultimate existence and creation. It is simply the case that we don't always tell the truth.

Here I think I should drop the royal "we" and stop using it as a cop-out. When I say "we" lie I am referring to myself. I lie, all the time and not in a grand sense but in the banal, everyday. I lie when it is convenient, when it easier than telling the truth. Some lies are to avoid harm or hurt to others but most seem to be pointless and serve no purpose.

There is truth and there is "truth", life is full of both insignificant and penultimate questions that can be dealt with. I say "dealt with" because we in many cases these questions and issues are not dealt with, they are ignored or hidden through lies and misconceptions. Truth can be revealed through lies but more often than not, lies hide truth.

That last statement sounds fairly obvious but the key is defining lies, not necessarily truth. What does it mean to lie exactly? If we believe something, is it a lie, even if it is not the truth? Okay, so now I am getting metaphysical but bear with me. Lies happen for a variety of reasons and to serve a variety of purposes. These reasons and purposes can be both nefarious and noble, worthwhile and cowardly.

This post is rather jumbled and I keep making broad generalizations and assertions while jumping back and forth between 'truth' and 'lies'. I want to think on this more and do a bit of reading before I discuss further.

On Kant, Moral Law and Happiness

2009-07-05T21:03:00.006-05:00

Back to some boring philosophical musings, you've been warned.

The plan was to do a series on the concept of happiness through the ages starting with the Greeks and moving towards modern interpretations. This probaly won't be happening but I am still going to discuss from time to time various perspectives on this idea.

I am going to talk about Immanuel Kant and his definition of happiness. Kant was an 18th century German philosopher and his work laid the cornerstone for much of modern philosophical thought.

Kant never truly defined happiness in-of-itself, but as part of a larger idea, the idea of moral law. Kant saw happiness as a nebulous concept based on needs and desires, not an iron clad rule or law in any sense.

To be happy was not necessarily important or a central tenet or goal of life. Humanity must be defined by the moral law, a law that all who are rational must adhere to, as an obligation, as a duty. Adhering to this moral law may bring bring happiness, but than again it may not. Kant writes in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science that we must act in accordance with moral law in ways that have the "worthiness of being happy".

Morality trumps happiness and only acts that are moral can lead to any semblance of happiness. To Kant, morality can be measured, examined and quantified and is a law much like gravity. Happiness is merely a human construct and is subject to the whims and passions of the rational and irrational.

Maybe Kant is right and to much attention is focused on happiness, missing the forest for the trees, so to speak. Or maybe Kant's belief in moral law as a natural law is mistaken and it is just another human construct like happiness. This does not mean moral law is unimportant but that it is not in fact a law like gravity, but a law that exists ii the eye of the beholder.

Kant is not easy to read and it is far easier to read about him than to read his actual work. Perhaps I am misinterpreting some of his ideas, or perhaps not. But to sum up: we may be happy, but we must be moral for any happiness to exist, even if we are not the recipients of it.

A Public Service Announcement

2009-06-29T17:59:00.003-05:00

Recently while very bored I started to read over some of the older blog posts from this site. Either I had more time on my hands or I was just much more intelligent and articulate a few months ago. My posts have gone from long treatises and essays to youtube clips and snarky takes on news articles.

Of course much of the content (all?) of this blog is really a reflection of what is happening in my life. Not that each post is about some event that occurred but what I post about and the nature of the posts are a meditation of my present reality at that time.

Life continues to be a fluid thing; new events, people and thoughts intrude everyday. It is not possible to really quantify all that occurs into a general trend (things are steadily getting better, worse, etc). However life can become full of distractions and our outlets of expression can vary. This blog was serving as a significant outlet for my thoughts and that has diminished lately.

I soon will get back to more long form writing and boring the hell out of the three people who might check this site once in awhile. I will attempt to write more about literature, philosopy and life in Austin among other fascinating and noteworthy topics of interest.

Please Find the Unintentional Hilarity of this Business Article

2009-06-26T20:28:00.004-05:00

Read the story and find it here, it's in the second paragraph. Even The Onion could not have come up with this.

This is Texas

2009-06-11T07:55:00.003-05:00

On Transitioning

2009-06-01T20:58:00.004-05:00

I keep saying it and it must be true, I am in a period of transition. The questions really seems to be: to what, to where and how?

I have options, which is good in that it is better than not having options. However options play to my weakness, which is making rational decisions about anything.

I recently started thinking about going back to grad school and getting another Master's degree (yes, that's right, another one, I feel compelled to make sure you know that). I would obtain an MA and eventually a PhD and do what I was born to do, bore college kids with history ("and then Charlemagne says, wait for it, you'll love this...").

If I decide to enroll in graduate school or even a doctoral program, its going to be possibly a 7 year commitment. That means that many more years, at the least, in godforsaken (okay, it's not that bad) Texas.

All this would entail not jetting off to foreign locales like Krakow or New Jersey anytime soon.

If I really want to be a college professor then I have to do this now, while gray hair only has a minority share on my head. Every year that passes is a year that it gets closer to being something I wish I had done rather than something I am going to do.

Nem Tudom.

This is Real

2009-05-30T18:48:00.002-05:00

Apparently there was an anti-pornography conference in Idaho a few weeks ago, this was an ad for the conference. I never realized how dangerous internet porn could be, it's worse than gay marriage even!

Bats Under Congress Ave. Bridge

2009-05-25T10:11:00.009-05:00

During the spring and summer at dusk 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats emerge from under the Congress Ave. Bridge in Austin. The bats rest under the arches of the bridge during the daylight hours and fly off to feed every night. This has become a big tourist attraction in Austin and I finally decided to see it for myself.

My goal was to paddle under the bridge at dusk in my kayak and try to get an up close and personal view. I was able to accomplish this without being covered in bat guano or dunking my camera or myself in the river.

Here is Congress Ave. Bridge from the river about 75 minutes before sunset.

Looking west from under the bridge awaiting the sunset.

The crowds awaiting the bats.

Bats!

I actually took many pictures of the bats but most were extremely blurry. I blame this partly on my mediocre photography but primarily on the fact that I was in a tiny boat in a river with a strong current. For more information and certainly better pictures of the bats go here.

Bohemian Rhapsody

2009-05-19T09:01:00.003-05:00

My new place is interesting. It's an apartment complex built in the early 70's and it makes me reminisce about the communist block housing in eastern Europe. The complex is an eclectic mix of young professionals, old lesbians, musicians, artists and random detritus of society.

As I was moving in a girl came up to me and asked me if I spoke German. She was getting a tattoo on her back in German and wanted to check the spelling. She showed me the text and although I do not speak German, it appeared to be the collected works of Goethe, due to its apparent length. I assumed the print was going to be very small.

I think about 15 people have asked me where they could get some weed. I don't really think I look like the guy who would know, I just direct them to the guy with the tie dye shirt and the bongos, he might know somebody who could tell them.

Austin is becoming gentrified.The apartment was going to be demolished a few years ago to make way for expensive, hi-rise condominiums. The location of the apartment, downtown, on the river, makes it ideal for a gated yuppie complex. However, due to the downturn in the economy and some zoning issues, it has been pushed back for at least three years. This means the complex carries a sense of finale, the Goths are approaching and they have their Range Rovers and fancy running sneakers at the ready.

The apartment complex is not fancy, it would even be hard to describe it as "clean". It is what I think Austin is, or maybe was at some point. A city with a unique culture and perspective, but not in an overarching , homogeneous sense. Texas is different than the rest of the United States and Austin is different from the rest of Texas. I'll never be a Texan, but I could become an Austinite.

221 in the 78704

2009-05-14T21:13:00.004-05:00

I'm going to stay in Austin. I thought about living overseas again and may do that, just not yet.

I got an apartment downtown in Austin. It's cool. I'm in the city, I bought a new bike and I'm on the river, I bought a kayak.

It should be fun, or not, we shall see.

"This is Water" by David Foster Wallace

2009-04-25T12:27:00.007-05:00

The following is a commencement address given by the late author David Foster Wallace in 2005. I had referenced an excerpt of this speech in a post about meaning and narrative in life (see post here). The speech, which will soon be published in book form is worth taking the time to read and digest. The speech follows this paragraph in it's entirety.

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

No Comment

2009-04-19T08:26:00.000-05:00

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NASA Name Contest

On the Metaphorical Night Bus of Fate

2009-04-18T03:42:00.003-05:00

I do not sleep anymore. what I mean is that I sleep very little. I generally go to bed when everyone else does, between ten and eleven pm but I awake between three and four am and that's it, I'm up; so on a good night I sleep six hours and a bad night maybe four. This isn't healthy of course and I have yet to find a remedy despite many tried.

What bothers me however, is not the lack of sleep, it is being awake at four am and being left completely with my thoughts, with no distractions or stimuli to divert or detour my meandering consciousness in disparate directions. My thoughts go where they want and generally this is into painful memories, forgotten responsibilities or dense philosophical musings.

This morning I woke up and thought about the concepts of fortune and fate. Many people believe in these and "believe" is the right word because to me these concepts are analogous to "believing" in the tooth fairy or a Santa Claus. When we are children these serve as constructs, i.e. I received money for the tooth I left under the pillow, ergo the Tooth Fairy exists to facilitate these transactions. As we get older people tend to see luck or fate play a similar role, "I just have bad luck" or " we were fated to meet and fall in love".

Fate is clearly the heavier idea here and the one that is easier to disavow. If fate does exist then what part does free will play? If everything happens for a reason, then what the hell is the reason? Lots of unreasonable things seem to occur everyday. Fate leaves little wiggle room, if fate does exist then we are prisoners to it, both the good and the bad.

Fortune or luck is harder to avoid and thus easier to accept because luck can be folded into randomness. You can just get "lucky" or have a string of reversals that is just "bad luck". Good or bad luck can happen without calling into question the metaphysical nature of the universe and our place in it.

I don't believe in luck but it is a lazy syllogism I sometimes fall into. Sometimes when bad things occur it's like I am wandering innocently down the street and then WHAM, the bus of misfortune takes me out. It completely surprises me and I had no chance to avoid it. When some bad things happen in my life this is how I see it. This is completely false and dangerous. Things do happen randomly all the time but a good portion of what occurs is directly tied to some action by ourselves. Why did you lose your job? It wasn't bad luck, it was the fact that you suck at it. How did you win the lottery? It wasn't luck, you actually took the trouble to play it. Of course we are not responsible for everything that occurs, good and bad things happen through no fault of own own.

The tension lies between what just happens and what we in fact, cause to happen. Fortune and fate take away our responsibility, our culpability. Conversely by taking responsibility for everything that occurs we are lifting a burden that shouldn't and cannot be carried alone. We must find the happy medium, the compromise between chance and the destiny we create for ourselves.

Consequently I am waiting for the sun to rise before I go running, I want to see that bus coming.

SXSW 2009: IN PICTURES (A Few Weeks Late After I Figured Out the HTML Errors)

2009-04-13T09:18:00.003-05:00

Jesus was among over a thousand live acts to play in Austin. Jesus opened for Metallica at Stubb's.

There were free shows at Auditorium Shore all weekend, and because my friends and I, are: a) poverty stricken and b) cheap, that's where we decided to go first. This was the line to get in.

Beachouse at Auditorium Shores

I attended SXSW on Thursday and Saturday. Travis, Tim and I really seem to be enjoying ourselves immensely right here.

All the white people say "hey"!

Thursday night, after the show we went somewhere, this is where my memory started to get a little foggy, no doubt from all the great music consumed.

Friday I worked all day and didn't attend SXSW, all the white people say "booo"!

On Saturday it was back to the music and the randomness that is 6th Street.

Apparently, every year Rachel Ray (yes, that one) has a free party at SXSW that features free food, free drinks and really good bands. This year the party was at Maggie Mae's and The New York Dolls, among other bands were playing. Jesse and I waited on line for TWO AND A HALF HOURS to get into Rachel Ray's party. Yes, that Rachel Ray. Here is the happy ending to the story, we gave up and never got in, this was as close as we got.

6th, looking west towards the Driscoll.

Super Light Bike, a Texas band that had some good original songs and did a great cover of Radiohead's "Everything in it's Right Place".

Taking a break at The Mooseknuckle Pub.

The final show on Saturday night . Overall, I saw (or really, heard) about a dozen bands and had lots of fun.It was a great few days in the live music capital of the world.

On Taking a Stand That is Meaningless

2009-04-12T20:12:00.007-05:00

I don't have a TV, I don't think I will ever have one again. Maybe that's sounds very naive or just stupid, maybe it is. Over time I have moved away from watching TV and have come to the conclusion that I really don't need it. For the past year or two I did watch TV, but the only things I watched were Lost, Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. and lots of DVDs from Netflix. Currently I do not own a TV and am not planning on buying one.

Now here is the problem, I can waste time and oxygen watching things on my computer. I can watch South Park, Lost, The Office and millions of things sitting on my ass, and pause them to grab a drink. By freeing myself from the chains of TV I have merely been ensnared in the tentacles of the Internet. I am on a computer a lot, all day at work and then home to my trusty, tiny and awesome netbook. The Internet has become my exclusive medium for information and my primary method of communication.

I cannot live without the Internet (oh my god, I'm using it right this second!) much like at one point in my life, I could not live without TV. I need it and if I don't have it I am frantic and agonized over what I am missing and who is waiting for a reply to their email (my mom). Without the Internet I am like a meth addict who drank gallons of Red Bull, I'm intense and will burn down your house if I get the chance. This is not healthy of course, but hey, at least I'm not watching television right?

I don't need a TV, that is why I don't have one and probably never will. Taking a stand against television is like taking a stand against punching babies, it's easy and means nothing. To be clear, I am against TV and punching babies. That baby better not be blocking my Internet though, I have been know to change my mind.

To read a post that discusses this subject and inspired this particular one please visit this really excellent blog here. That post really encapsulates what I am saying here in a much pithier and amusing fashion.

Eternal Spotless of the Sunshine Mind?

2009-04-06T06:26:00.015-05:00

Recently I was out with a friend and while talking we realized both of us really liked that Jim Carey movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The problem was, we both knew the movie, really liked it, but could not remember the title of it. For at least twenty minutes we worked to remember the title of the movie, we knew the key words but could not recall the correct order, various combinations were laid out over and over again. Finally, an hour later, after moving on to other topics of conversation it just appeared in my memory; I blurted it out triumphantly.

This came to mind recently when I read this article from the New York Times, Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory. This article piqued my interest because it discussed the possibility of erasing memories, the subject of that unforgettable movie. Neuroscientists have created a drug that can be administered to the brain and block a chemical that facilitates the retention of certain memories. Experiments with rats and mice have shown that, by using this drug, the animals can "forget" conditioned behavior and memories.

The research is still in it's early stages of course, but the scientists are optimistic, they think this drug could potentially be very beneficial. They view it as a way to erase traumatic memory, or block an addiction or a troubling psychotic condition. This, of course, raises all sorts of red flags and potential problems. Awful, horrible things happen to people everyday, is there something of value to be gained from it, the experience itself, the memory that remains? How can selective memory and trauma be erased without have a significant impact on collective memory and experience? These questions will have to be answered of course, among many others.

Of course the movie does not deal with horrendous torture or a severely traumatizing recollection. The idea is the same though, the elimination of pain through erasure of the experience that caused it. The movie deals with it profoundly and I won't give away the end, but who hasn't seen it already? Jim Carey's character wants to erase the memory of his ex-girlfriend, thinking that what he perceived as being so good, so beautiful, will haunt and skew the rest of his days; because he cannot be that happy again. He no longer wants to revisit the moments they shared, the experiences they had. I think this movie does really hit a lot of people because many people feel that same urge, that compulsion to forget, to not have to compare yesterday to the harsh reality of their today.

Today is not all that bad for most and memory of course is subjective, it is not necessarily a reflection of a past reality. What we remember being so great perhaps wasn't, and times of trial and strife are not always as harsh as we recall them being. The temptation to block certain memories is alluring, 'ignorance is bliss' and all that. For most people though (those without severe mental trauma, psychological problems, etc) memories are the evidence of our existence. We need them, all of them, the good and the bad.Our memories makes us, mold us into our present and future selves, for better or worse.

I could, perhaps do without the memory of tearing my underpants on the monkey bars in front of the entire school though.

Views From The Gutter

2009-04-04T08:18:00.005-05:00

I used to be a big fan of star-gazing, sitting outside and just staring up into the night sky for a long time. I used to do this quite often, just sitting, staring and thinking of something either on earth or beyond the stars. I always talked of getting a telescope (still do) but I never did; the very act of looking and observing with my own eyes was and is enough.

Of course I enjoy sunrises and sunsets too, I go out of my way to witness them from points high and low, from every perspective possible. However, the start and finish of day does not compare to the long night, they are temporary and signal either an end or a beginning.

Night of course is a transition but it is one that takes much longer, one that does not happen in a blink. The stars move slowly across the sky, planets appear and dim, satellites, planes blink and arc slowly through. Night takes time, it allows us to breathe, to observe, to ponder thoughts deep and shallow.

I have not done much of this in a long while. I leave for work in the dark and often as I pull out of the driveway I stop in the street, step out of my car and look up at the dark, starry sky; eyes wide, mouth open, amazed at the scene above, as if this was the first time I had seen it. This is for a moment only and it is off to work for another day. In this sense, night is like a sunrise, a moment that passes and is no more.

Last night I sat outside, it was a cool night with a clear and beautiful sky. I sat down and stared up, all my friends were there, Orion, the Big Dipper and Mars glimmered faintly on the periphery of my vision. As it always does, the view stunned me, awed me.

Look up at the stars one night, take a seat, grab a sweatshirt or a beverage and just sit; it won't change your life, it won't make anything better or worse. Just watch, take it all in and stay awhile.

The Haunting (!) In Connecticut (?)

2009-03-29T20:46:00.009-05:00

Earlier today I put together a really nice photo blog about South by Southwest 2009 but I kept getting HTML error messages when I attempted to post. I have yet to resolve the problem and probably won't, so if you want pics of SXSW, you are SOL.

But I did get to see the movie, The Haunting in Connecticut on Friday night. It is one of those movies that is "based on a true story" so you know it has to be good. I won't bother getting into the whole sordid plot of the movie, but will drop some keywords from it: kid, (has) cancer, (needs) treatment, dad, (is an) alcoholic, house, (was a) funeral home, (had seances, in the) basement, (used) corpses, (for) rituals, (became) ghosts, (lots of) blood, (lots of) vomit, (lots of) blood, fire, reverend, (broken) light bulbs, (why does the kid still sleep in the) basement!.

I won't give away the end, suffice it to say, it could have left you very happy or disappointed, depending on your general outlook on life.

The movie relied on that common technique used in horror movies. The scene would slow down and then as you tense up, and the ladies and certain male members of the audience (you know who you are) would cover their eyes and peek out between their fingers and then...BAM! Scary ghost/monster/shadow/corpse/creature would appear in the room/mirror/house right in front of/behind/under/above the unsuspecting protagonist of the story. People in the audience would collectively shriek, laugh, cringe or act like they didn't and the movie would continue on it's merry way.

This scenario I just laid out took place every five minutes in this movie. It took place so many times your esteemed reviewer started to greet it with derision and stifled yawns, without even the hint of surprise or fear (or so I'd like to think). It was overused and the movie wasted no time on things like character development, background or special effects beyond the bare minimum required.

The title of the movie also seemed to be wanting. Yes perhaps there was a haunting and yes perhaps the haunting, did in fact, take place in Connecticut. I assume the movie people used the very simplicity and tediousness of this to make a point. The point being (in this account I am creating) that the event was so crazy-scary that no elaboration or dressing up was needed. The haunting was so badassed, and it just happened to take place in Connecticut. There was no need to make the title something like: "Death Orgy in Connecticut" or "New England House of Horror" or (my personal favorite) "Haunted Former Funeral Home That is Rented By Stupid Fucking Family That Will Not Just Leave And Stay At The Holiday Fucking Inn Down The Street".

All that being said, and I've said a lot, it wasn't the worst movie ever. The guy from the show Weeds was in it and that other guy who seems to be in other stuff was in it too. It had it's moments and for what it was, I am being perhaps a bit unduly harsh. It provided what one expects from a scary movie; a story, a scare and an ending.

Amusing

2009-03-24T08:11:00.000-05:00

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

This Quote Made Me Laugh

2009-03-23T21:12:00.008-05:00

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

-W.H. Auden

It's funny because it's true.

Happiness: The Quest Continues

2009-03-22T20:46:00.000-05:00

The ancient Greeks used a word that is commonly defined as happiness, the word is eudamonia. This word can be broken down and I am told (by wikipedia) to mean good spirit or fortune. Socrates, according to the dialogues of Plato claims eudamonia, or happiness can be gained through arete and episteme, virtue and knowledge. Virtue is essentially the ability to know right and wrong and knowledge would be to act accordingly.

In The Republic, Plato using Socrates, takes a slightly different approach, the soul has three components: rationalism, emotion and appetite. Eudamonia is reached when these are ordered correctly. This means rationalism governs emotion and appetite, virtue is achieved and thus happiness, the ultimate good. This seems to echo the ideas of Democritus, who stressed a conservative, stoic path to happiness through self control and patience.

This stress on rationalism and knowledge are what I think, made the Greeks so consequential and such a fulcrum of western thought. These tenets were contrasted with the great tragedies and comedies by Sophocles and Euripides, among many others. I will avoid here diving into a survey history of ancient Greek culture and philosophy and just get to my point. The Greeks created the disparity between tragedy and comedy versus knowledge and virtue. That gulf still is with us this day, it still defines our perspective and our happiness.

Perhaps that is too broad a characterization, perhaps I cannot say "our" perspective, perhaps what I mean to say is "my" perspective. I believe in knowledge and ultimately I guess, in virtue. I also believe in comedy and tragedy. These concepts are linked, they are two sides of the same coin and a life, any life, will contain plenty of both.

Happiness is tied into all this. While Platonic and Socratic thought stress acquiring knowledge to gain happiness, there is something to to be said for the phrase "ignorance is bliss". Of course, the knowledge they stressed is almost beyond knowing, it's an ideal, not a happiness gained by reading a Dr. Phil book, but the happiness possessed by an all powerful deity. This knowledge is discussed further in Plato's theory of forms. In part, the theory held that every entity in life had a perfect form that could not be seen and that we mere mortals could only witness the imperfect copy of the perfect form.

This is all a rather back of the envelope summation of really complicated concepts. I am not really giving it's due diligence and really cannot here. If anything I have merely muddied the waters more and made this post more complex, obtuse and indecipherable as I go.

So to sum up, happiness for the Greeks thus far, is not about emotion, or a sentiment of some kind. Happiness is about self control, virtue and knowledge. To know right, act right and behave right is to achieve happiness. You don't "feel" happy, you are happy.

Well this post is too long, I'll stop here and again pick up with Aristotle and his thoughts on the matter.

A Stranger In A Strange Land

2009-03-14T09:19:00.007-05:00

I have been many places and I have seen many things in my life, but I had never seen 100 people in cowboy hats, line dancing in unison to a Nelly song. This I witnessed last night, a friend of mine, recent to Texas, wanted to check out a club in Pflugerville called Graham Central.

I am not the clubbing type, I am not the type who generally tries to have "fun", in any sense of the word. In this case I humored my friend as I really had nothing better to do. This club is massive, it's actually about 5 clubs in one; a hip-hop club, techno, biker, country-western and karaoke. Now people may react to hearing about a place like this in two different ways. One, "whoa, those clubs sound really cool" and two, "those sound like the descending circles of hell from Dante's Inferno".

I would fall into the latter and my friend into the former. We both have a similar demographic profile, but a remarkably different taste in adventure. Needless to say I felt really, really out of place. Without the necessary accessories of boots and a cowboy hat or a sleazy overweight girl in tiny halter top-I didn't blend, I couldn't if I wanted to. Now, I have been to lots of clubs; clubs all over North America and overseas, but this is Texas.

We ventured from club to club taking in the various scenes, horrific renditions of Foreigner and Rush in the karaoke bar, listless, awkward dancing in the techno area, lumpy bodies moving against each other in the biker bar and the country bar was a sea of cowboy hats and button down striped shirts. After musing over the various spots, I picked an area adjacent to all the spots but not really in any particular one.

This was my limbo, or my purgatory if you will. I used this as my observation post, much like primatologist Jane Goodall would have done to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania. I could monitor, observe and not interfere with the group and their society. So I watched, no doubt with a slight quizzical and bemused expression on my face. In one hand clutching a poor domestic beer and the other itching for a notepad to record my notes on the strange mating ritual of the Homo Sapien Texacanus.

I watched on one side, elderly cowboy couples line dance to some Hank Williams and on the other, lone forlorn clubbers looking for love, sipping their beers and nodding their heads to C+C Music Factory songs. This was fascinating to me, quite honestly I was fascinated by the whole thing. In the interest of brevity I won't elaborate much further on my observations.

My friend and I had a good time, he enjoyed the scene. I enjoyed it, much like I would have enjoyed watching a prairie dog colony or a community of aborigines. Now I am not any better or worse than these people, I am not making a value judgement. However, there is just nothing in common between me, the skinny white guy from New Jersey, and say, the 6"6, 330 pound black cowboy in the shiny silver shirt and bolo tie who (I am quoting) "love me some Lone Star Beer and Randy Travis on a Friday night".

Yee to the Haw indeed.

On LIfe and Death as a Narrative with Meaning

2009-03-10T19:29:00.004-05:00

Recently I wrote a long post that discussed, among other things, David Foster Wallace, fiction and the purpose (or lack thereof) of life. In a part of that post I mentioned the idea of life as a narrative that we attempt to gain meaning from. While reading Julian Barnes' book Nothing To Be Frightened Of I noticed he tackled this very same subject. He rejects this idea of life as a narrative and thinks it is merely randomness. Barnes writes

...I resist this line of thought. Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact...if we are lucky we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not)...it may be a narrative, but it doesn't feel like one to me.

Barnes further elaborates and writes about our need for a narrative, our own personal narrative that we construct for our own needs. So he doesn't reject the notion of a narrative at hand but rejects the objective reality of it.

I do not disagree with any of this really; we feel a need for a narrative and some (a few?) know that that life is a game of chance and patterns emerge, diverge but we all are at the mercy of the throw of the dice.

We need the narrative, we need to have some kind of meaning from life, whatever it is. All the heartbreak, despair and moments in the sun have to mean something.

The narrative, our narrative keeps us going, gives us meaning, it will be a story that has an ending, as all must. We are not just static in the ether, spontaneous, random and ephemeral.

Or at least we'd like to think so.

Call of the Mild

2009-03-07T10:39:00.010-06:00

I just returned from my first solo camping expedition, and by using the term "expedition", I am making it out to be more than it was. Due to the heroism displayed during this event this post will be over-long and diverge into several different, almost completely unrelated fields. I was originally going to title this post something like "Trail of Fears" or "Oregon Trail: Texas Style". However after a moment of reflection, I picked the present title based on that book/movie about the guy who abandons all his possessions and goes to live in the woods in Alaska. I'll assume it has a happy ending, I never saw it.

With a brand new backpack, tent, lantern, compass, sleeping bag, water bottle thingy, flashlight, book, fleece jacket, hat, three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crackers, bananas and last but not least, toilet paper; I set off to hike and camp in Bastrop State Park.I was heading for the "Lost Pines Trail" but I wasn't sure that it wouldn't have been better titled the "Lost, Pines Trail". I was going to do what I found is called, "primitive camping". Primitive camping is camping in an undisturbed natural area with no benefit of water, electricity, bathrooms and it seems, people. All that you need, you bring with you and that's what you leave with. So all I needed I brought with me, six and half hard miles into the woods and out again.

Jean-Paul Sartre once famously said "Hell is other people", and if this is true then I must have been in heaven. For over 24 hours I did not encounter a single living human being, or a dead one for that matter. I did not see people until I exited the trail on my way out. I entered the trail like Frodo Baggins, energetic, with my staff and departed like Yoda, bent over and clutching the staff for dear life. I hiked, a lot. I was carrying a great deal, it seemed, and I went as far as the park allowed me to go, away from civilization. The day was warm, not overly, but with a little up and down terrain and some gear, it was warm enough. After reaching the furthest extent of the park I found my campsite, a hill behind another hill, a few hundred years from the trail.

On a side note I must bring more water next time, I brought what I thought was an adequate supply for drinking and bathing, but it wasn't. I needed all the water for drinking and so was completely filthy, as well as being extremely thirsty. I had to many salty snacks too. I dare you to try to three eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches without a liter of water at least. I conserved and never ran out but I was cautious and thus always thirsty as I made sure to only take sips now and then. I stopped on the return from the park and consumed three bottles of water.

So the day passed and then it was night, and it was as dark as it could possibly be, which left me with two options: read in my tent or read right outside of my tent. So I read in my tent, I had with me a slim volume called "Nothing To Be Frightened Of", by British novelist Julian Barnes. The book is a quasi-memoir that discusses death and the various horrors and beliefs associated with it. The book, while dark at times, is also irreverent, serious and could be quite amusing. The author pulled no punches in examining the various thoughts about death over the ages and his feeling that as an agnostic, all that awaited once the icy hand of death gripped, was the void, nothing. The book is Julian Barnes' attempt to deal with this idea as he approaches his later years and eventual demise.

It seems this was some heady reading for a camping trip, especially one where I was completely by myself in the dark woods miles away from anyone or anything. This did not really occur to me at the time, the book was quite interesting and it was only after I had finally finished it around 2 am and turned off my lantern that I had a realization. As the light dimmed to nothing I realized my small backpacking tent was shaped exactly like a coffin and this utter night I just descended into was as close to experiencing the grave as I will ever get. While this thought may sound deep, dark and perhaps even perverse it did not strike me as such. I was in a good mood and dark thoughts of the next stage did not weigh on me. Besides, I plan to be cremated.

Jean-Paul Sartre once famously said "Hell is other people". Most people misunderstand this. What Sartre meant is not that people in general are awful and should be avoided but that we view ourselves and build our perception of self through other people. True hell, true horror only comes from criticism, or rejection by others. Of course Sartre was a communist, so we must take everything he said with a grain of salt.

I made it out of the woods with soreness and some mediocre pictures. The trip did give me time to think and reflect however. And what conclusions and intellectual epiphanies did I achieve in this time? Hell is not other people, it's being really thirsty in a coffin shaped tent in the middle of the night.

On Purpose and Meaning in Fiction and Reality

2009-03-02T20:32:00.001-06:00

I read an article today about David Foster Wallace, an American writer who died this past September. While reading this story a quote jumped out at me. Wallace gave a commencement address in 2005 and said true freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” The phrase “construct meaning from experience” really stood out, its seems to illustrate a concept I had not been able to articulate before.

This idea of meaning really has defined storytelling. Novels and movies are powerful forces because the lives we live follow a narrative form; these mediums are extensions of such. In stories we find meaning, whatever the characters experience builds a structure in which to view them and their story. The beauty of a story is that we are the ones who build meaning from it, we decide what the meaning is. This idea of building meaning from narratives applies to our own narrative, our struggle to find our meaning or a meaning. This is the huge existential dilemma that we all live with. All who live have experience, all search for meaning, consciously and subconsciously. Our lives, our narratives are, I think essentially about this search for meaning.

This idea of meaning is not to suggest necessarily a purpose. Purpose and meaning in this sense, are different. Purpose implies a direction, a goal to be achieved. Meaning more easily can be defined as a significance, not a reason for or a goal to. Many may use purpose to define their meaning. The meaning they gain from their experiences point to a larger purpose, a direction to be followed from point A to point B with whatever detours along the way.

However, I believe that life does not need to have a purpose to have meaning. That’s not to say life doesn’t have a purpose (a topic I may delve into at a later date) but to say that a purpose is completely unnecessary to derive meaning. Reading about David Foster Wallace and his interconnected struggle in life and literature really encapsulated this idea. Life can be purposeless, but when life ceases to have any meaning, it can become superfluous.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September, he hung himself on the back patio of his house, his wife found his body. He had severe problems with depression his entire life and struggled to overcome them. I know little about him, I wish I had read him while he lived, I will read him now. What meaning is gained through experiences is different for everyone; there can be no quantitative relationship between an experience and the meaning gained from it. David Foster Wallace was an author; he exercised a choice and constructed his meaning.

On Free Time

2009-03-01T14:38:00.008-06:00

Recently I have acquired more free time than I really have any idea what to do with. So in the interest of thrift and some vague idea to release my inner Thoreauvian (Henry David Thoreau -ed.) impulse I have started to hike a couple times a week. I grab my bag, my camera and a handy branch and without the aid of a map or any sense of direction, I go. Austin and the surrounding area has a large variety of parks and trails and I am going to go through them one by one.

Zilker Park I has traversed many many times so far, my last trip out was quite an ordeal as the combination of trail running, some JV rock climbing and hot weather made my body hurt for three days. Today I have just returned from Walnut Creek Park, it has a lot of trails and is perfect for those who have mountain bikes and/or dogs. Myself, having neither relied on my wits and my keen sense of falling off things. Twice I tried to take shortcuts and ended up doing a fair bit of climbing, at one point being in a position where a lucky branch saved me from if not certain death, at least bloody, horrendous pain. There were easier ways, I just chose the better way, ie the way that involved climbing things and almost getting really hurt.

Next week I shall blaze another trail, while wrestling grizzy bears with ham in my pockets.

Happiness: An Investigation

2009-03-01T08:51:00.004-06:00

As the sole reader and creator of this blog I have decided to take an in-depth look at happiness. What is it? Where does it come from? How do we gain and lose it? This will start an overlong solitary dialogue that if anything helps me to articulate some ideas I have may have and develop some others.

Happiness is an interesting concept, I have told a loved one before "I just want you to be happy". This is true of course, but what does it mean? Is happiness contentment or satisfaction or something else? Is happiness for one the same as for another? Most people do experience happiness in their lives and the pursuit thereof.

While on our pursuit do we always realize when we are happy contemporaneously? Or is it more a matter of looking back, a recollection where we say "ah, yes, I was so very happy then, that was a time"? This could be illusory, this flashback, things were never as good as they seemed in retrospect, we were never so "happy" as we remember being. However that does not mean we weren't happy to a degree.

First we must look at some ideas about happiness and I will start with the Greeks. Democritus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher believed happiness to be produced by moderation, equanimity, the absence of desires for the unobtainable and ephemeral.

Democritus, in terms of Greek thought, is considered conservative. Happiness was about acceptance, patience and self control. The pursuit of fleeting pleasures or wishes cannot lead to true happiness. In other words we can only be happy by taking the long-term path and the short term, the immediate will fail to fulfill. Democritus' perspective will later be shared by some stoics in the Roman period. The pursuit of happiness is negated in this sense, it is the very chase that will prevent happiness.

This view of happiness has some obvious qualities though. Self control, moderation and the focus on the future over the immediate are all things we can agree are to the good. However, is this a realistic perspective? One of the major issues in original Greek thought is emotion versus reason. Here, obviously Democritus is stressing a reliance on reason over emotion, dispassionate calculation over sentiment. This reining in of emotion is supposed to lead to happiness, this suppression of desire, is similar to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.

Happiness, in this sense, is not an easy thing to gain. The unfortunate masses will yearn in futility for it and it can only be gained by philosophical contemplation. The very idea of gaining it is brought into question. We must be governed by our reason, an endurance against the instantaneous must be maintained with due rigor. Happiness is achieved when this struggle ceases to be, we are not pushed by our passions, we take all in stride, we are happy.

I have left many unanswered questions here and I will circle back and expand on them in later posts.

PREFACE

2009-03-01T04:48:00.006-06:00

So this is my initial posting to this blog. I do not expect anyone to actually read it. This will serve as a receptacle for my various musings, rants, digressions and pictures. Among topics that will be discussed are: current events, philosophy, literature, going-ons in Austin and my hopes/dreams/fears and various related issues. In the coming days and months ahead I will post whenever until I find something better to do.