On getting a reminder from the universe: mindfulness and practice

So I'm playing a little guitar with Dan the other evening, and we're aiming to dervish our way through "Blackberry Blossom" when I keep seeming to hit the wrong chord every time I went to play a C.

What the hell? Did I suddenly go terminally out of tune? Did I hit a peg and not realize it?

I kept going, thinking the problem must be on the fretting end, and in the dim candlelight I'm twisting the guitar and my body the way one does when you're trying to see what the fingers on the left hand are doing. Still couldn't see very well, so I called for a time out and simply tried the G-C-G-C transition a couple times.

Finally figured out that a confused index finger was going to the wrong location.

Seriously? My fine muscle memory spaced how to play a C chord? How long have I been playing C? Isn't this something that should work completely on auto-pilot?

Guess not.

So I did what I guess kind of amounts to a guitar version of a hard reset on the C chord, and everything went pretty smoothly after that.


(Well, except for trying to play "Blackberry Blossom" along with a Tony Rice version on my iTunes. That was just funny.)


Anyway, that happened a couple of days ago now, and the memory is still tapping at my consciousness. And it has me take pause this morning to think about how many aspects of my going about life operate on something like autopilot, and whether any of those might be a bit out of tune (so to speak). Maybe I'm not even aware of it, given how the thrum of everyday existence can be so cacophonous, I don't even hear my own contribution through the din. But even if my addition is small, it is something. Wouldn't it be well to be more mindful of even its small components, and make my existence ring as true and harmoniously as possible?

Sangraia Love, with notes on how I went about making it

What follows is the recipe that is the inspiration (that makes a pitcher-sized amount), line by line, where each line is followed by what I actually did in making a cooler full of the yum for final faire weekend. All ingredients just get dumped straight into the container.


Official fancy cooking magazine title: Peach-Riesling Sangrai.


1 750-ml bottle dry Riesling
I've got 3 bottles I picked up at Bev-Mo; I'll start with that.

1/2 cup peach schnapps
Hmm, so that's a cup and a half since I'm tripling it...shake bottle. There's so little left - what the hell, use the whole thing.

1 1/2 cups white cranberry-peach drink
I know from past experience this drink will knock a person on his or her ear after a glassful, and the cooler's looking mighty empty. Drop in 2 to 2 1/2 bottles of the drink.

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice.
And I'm making this in the last second; do I really want to take the time to measure 9 tablespoons out? Nah. Halve a couple lemons. Yup, they're nice and juicy. I'll call that good.

2 tablespoons sugar
To add up to 6 tablespoons of sugar - seriously? No effing way. I do use 2, for a token sense of completeness.

1/2 vanilla bean, sliced sideways.
Damn these things are expensive! But the vanilla bean really makes it special. I use a whole one - use the thumb to scrape out the seeds, and deposit them and the beans themselves for extra good measure.

2 1/2-inch-thick lemon slices
I've got 2 lemons leftover from the store, in case I didn't use enough lemon juice before, I'll slice up the lot.

2 1/2 inch-thick orange slices
I've got 2 oranges from the store; slice up the whole lot.

2 peaches, cut into wedges
I bought 3 peaches at the store - is there really a thing as too much tastey fruit in sangria? Not where peaches are concerned - use the lot.

10 raspberries
And I bought 2 containers of raspberries. Add in one - stir it up. How does the balance of sangria goodness to fruit look? Sure, we can use more raspberries. Empty in the second container.

Ice


There ya go! For best results, let it sit overnight so the flavors can all blend.

Coupon fashion victim

I'd like to be the kind of person who saves money by using coupons, but it is ever disappointing to see the cover of the coupon section of the newspaper announce "save $30!" but upon looking inside find discounts for:



Makeup

Hair coloring equipment

More makeup

Age-defying emollients

Cheap cat food

Credit card offers

Checks with cute kitty and doggy pictures on them

Frozen pre-prepared food

Home alarm systems

Hideously ugly bras

Axe stinky soap stuff

Frozen pizza

Microwaveable brownies

Prune juice

Olive Garden

More pre-packaged frozen food

Yet more pre-packaged frozen food

Chocolate milk

Followed by kid's sized vibrating toothbrushes

Freight tools?

Really ugly flannel shirts

Therapeutic "cozy-toe" socks

Chuck-E-Cheese



Le sigh.

Seasons

In an idle but interesting conversation the other day with the OM and Anders, we were pondering which, if any, season we like best. The conclusion I reached was that in sooth I enjoy them all, but what I really like best is the sensation of their changing. To my perception, there's a difference in the air, sometimes subtle, sometimes more distinct, that announces itself as not just another fall/summer/spring/winter day. I find these assorted environmental whispers and declarations of change exciting.

It might be that even though the temperature and degree of cloud cover is similar to the day before, the air has a peculiar sort of briskness to it that announces: fall. Or, it might be that one day it suddenly hits me that the daylight is sticking around for a lot longer that it had been of late, and that communicates to me: summer (or, alternatively, that it's suddenly apparent that the light isn't, broadcasting: winter). Or, that the rain, as ever present as it had been on consecutive winter days, seems to possess a degree of gentleness and the scent of the earth emits a burgeoning potential that signals: spring.

It's kind of interesting. I know that there's a lot of noise made about the equinoxes and solstices and about how these astronomical alignments analytically define the first day of fall or summer or whatever. But in the fullness of my astronomy geekdom, I put little stock in that. At best, these points in the Earth's orbit around the sun mark the relative number of daylight to nighttime hours, but that's about it. To my mind, the seasons come with a change in the sorts of activities they sponsor or afford. And it's interesting, to me at least, to reflect on different places I've lived and what those affordances are and how the environment has signaled to me their statuses changing.

I've got Chicago on the mind now, and it's setup there of having, say, 9 months of winter immediately followed by 3 months of summer. Or something like that. I remember, after my first runthrough of the Windy City's seasons, how it was to my mind that right around Labor Day the temperatures would drop on friggin' dime, and it wasn't a "oh, this is just a chilly day, the temperatures will pick back up" kind of drop. I made that mistake in interpretation my first year, and spent several months of going "what the fuck? What the Fuck?!" No. Chicago's hit-you-upside-the-head drop in temperature broadcasts: "break out the waterproofing for your shoes and the tubs of winter clothes, because now I'm going to kick your ass and make you wonder how you manage to say alive. Now." It's a peculiar sort of overwhelmingness and sense of inevitability - that everything is about to Massively Change, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Except gird your loins and waterproof your shoes.

In the Bay Area here, the change in seasons is more of the subtle variety. As with Chicago, there seem to basically be two, where here they are (1) persistently cloudy and often rainy, and (2) sunny and warm(er) with the occasional hot. And these of course do not neatly overlap with an ordinary sense of "winter" and "summer," for as those who live here or have visited know, while the rest of the northern hemisphere is enjoying their summer, it is unobligingly chilly (for the tourists, at least) and San Franciscans I believe are now heading in the autumnal months into the sunniest and warmest part of their year.

All the same, there are fallish signs. The air, in the morning at least before it warms up, does have a fall kind of briskness to it. The trees that can are starting to change their color. There are noticeably more dead leaves on the ground. The varieties of produce at the farmers market are changing. The days are remarkably shorter. Some nights are very chilly. All these signals transmit to me an upcoming change of activities. A difference in the foods we prepare; slow-cooked stew and pies; hearty fare whose long oven or stove times are welcome as they also help heat the house. The fireplace no longer is a mere dust-magnet, but beckons becoming another source of heat. The chances of rain in the weather forecasts are starting to shift, in places, from 0% to 20%, and maybe will afford me a car wash courtesy of mother nature.

Do the changes in the environment trigger in you your own sorts of behavioral differences?

Ecstacy

A gorgeous sunny afternoon in San Francisco
Sitting in Patricia's Green, that little park there in Hayes Valley
Puppies
Smiling, friendly people all around
A cute couple sitting a little down from me
Blue Angels flying right over top the skyline, just above us
The girl in that couple who got just as squeaky excited a I did, when the planes came close.
This great art piece, titled "Ecstasy" that I had hitherto thought was made of wood, but upon closer inspection see that it is constructed of metal.

Things in the car

organization thinking while I have one last cup of coffee

hay
dirt
my new hood ornament
(also on the car, with decorations courtesy of Dan)
cooler
beer
water
pedialyte
scotch, single malt
hard boiled eggs
yogurt
watermelon, bananas, cantaloupe
ground turkey
did I say beer?
salami
truffle mousse
a sandwich
odwalla juices
ice
flannel sheets, pillow, blankey
fuzzy boots
costume
other clean clothes
jackets
knaekebrod
freeze-dried camping food, for just in case
geek light
lantern
books
air horn
no, not really
yoga mat, in case I get up and 6 and feel inspired
air mattress inflater thingie
bathroom stuff
washcloths, towel, makeup, sunscreen, noxema, toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, contacts, saline, moisturizer
camp chair & stool
pretzels
music

2 guitars

I think that should do it.

So, how many policemen DOES it take to extract a naked man from a hot tub?

I now know, for I was at the Kiva spa place yesterday - where, allow me to say up front - according to all persons talked to, This Sort of Thing Is Not Normal.

Now, Kiva I've learned is a really sweet place just off Water Street in Santa Cruz. I'm tempted to call it a bathhouse, but being a fan of bathhouses of the Asian variety, I'd withhold that descriptor.

The bathhouses I've frequented have lots of showers and sit-down scrubbie stations where, in short, you bathe. There are also employees who, if you ante up, will obligingly scour several layers of dead skin off your body. And then there are the hot tubs and warm tubs and cold tubs and dry saunas and steam saunas. Fancier places offer massages and facials and cups of sea salt for taking into the steam room, and jugs of ice water with lemon slices and iced dishes of sliced cucumber, and low-level mellow new-agey sounding music. But to be sure, even the most basic kind of establishment fine by me. As long as the sauna is seriously hot, it's golden.

But being ever-ready for the new experience, and having heard good reviews of the Kiva, off I and the Other Michelle (the OM) went. And the reason for not wanting to call it a bathhouse, is that although there are showers there - well, a single one but big enough (and set up, plumbing wise) for 2 - that's all there is to taking-a-bath part.

One of its perks is that the tubs are outdoors, and the sensation of sitting in a huge jacuzzi tub of warm water with jasmine flowers floating in it that have fallen from the surrounding plants, on a nice cloudy chilly coastal day whose temperature caused steam to rise off the water's surface was sublime. This tub is near the exit from the changing rooms and adjacent to a station where there is hot tea and cold water. Next to is a grassy lawn, where you can sit on a bench or lay out a blanket and have a little picnic. Continue to walk back along the stone pathway, and there is a smaller hot tub and a cold tub; they both look like giant half-barrels buried down into the ground.

Always all around are these beautiful plants, and further back still is the dry sauna. It's really big, with 3 levels of seating you can choose from. It could easily hold 20 people, probably more. It smartly has a vestibule so that every time the door opens, the hot air doesn't easily escape. The shape is interesting - the ceiling is domed, and the room is round; it was quite nice. And very hot. Awesome. After getting all sweaty you can go right outside for a cold shower, or walk further to take a dip in the cold tub, or do what I did, which was to spread the towel on the grass and have a sit down in the garden and just enjoy the oxygen.

They also have private hot-tub rooms, one of which I got to enjoy because - as I remarked in the title here - there were police and a not-wanting-to-leave-naked-man in the bigger, warm tub there by the changing rooms.

When the OM and I had arrived, we were the only ones there, which was totally fabulous. But during the time we both had our massage, I could hear voices and the sounds of more people opening lockers downstairs, so I took a look outside to see what the situation was. The massage room I was in had a window affording a view of the back where the tubs and all were. And that's when I saw some uniforms. Hmmm.

They were talking to the guy in the warm tub, who was fully submerged except for his arms which were resting along the edge and his head which was resting upon his arms. He was talking to the police. Hmmmm.

You might think, "what the hell was a naked guy doing there in the first place? how did you >know< he was naked?" I should say more about how the Kiva rolls. My previous bathhouse experience always had it such that if it was co-ed, men were in one wing and women in another. Or, if there were not separate wings, then only men go on some days and only women on others. Or, if men and women attended together, then it was clothing-mandatory - an option that, to my mind at least - really doesn't enable one to reap all the benefits of going to a sauna.

Anyways, another thing that makes Kiva special is that it is co-ed, men and women share the same spaces, and clothing is optional. When I read the information on their website, I interpreted "clothing optional" as meaning that all options would be exercised. But it was indeed as my friend Jack explained last Saturday: everybody is naked.

Thus: naked man in the warm tub. Other men, too. Some not naked. Those would be the police.

(And in case you might be thinking, "what the hell were YOU doing in a place with strange, naked men in hot tubs?" I just have to say, you don't know me as well as you might think.)

It is a safe space. There are signs about warning people off of doing things like unsolicitedly massaging their neighbors, and in the women's dressing room a sign that says if anything at all happens that causes one to feel uncomfortable, to report it to the staff. So, upon viewing the scene downstairs, my first thought was that this guy had caused a woman some discomfort.

I stood up there for a few minutes, but the situation downstairs didn't look to be changing. So I wrapped myself up in my towel, and went to the dressing room where the door was open to the outside and I could hear a little better. The guy in the tub was saying something like, "I have as much right to be here as anybody," and "If you want me out, you have to come in here and get me."

Hmmmm.

So I went out into the lobby. The receptionist was profusely apologetic. This guy had come in, didn't pay the admission fee, and went and stationed himself after undressing in the big tub. So she called the cops. Good move.

It just seemed the cops didn't know quite what to do.

The receptionist offered to let me use one of the private rooms, until the situation resolved. I didn't know where the OM had gone to; I looked around inside for a bit, but then took the receptionist up on her offer for the private room, which was pretty cool. It's also open, up top, to the outside, with its own hot tub and a steam shower.

But after a few minutes I got bored. And right there, just a few feet away, was something pretty bizarre that really deserved to be checked out.

So off I trotted, back to the women's changing room, where I had a big bag of sliced up fruit stored in a locker. I grabbed me a little snack, and stationed myself there by the exit door to take in the show.

There seemed to be more uniforms. Some were outside, and some inside, on the men's changing room side. They were all wearing these blue latex gloves. Two of the fellows outside were helping the man who had been in the warm tub down the steps from the deck. There was one on either side of him, and he slipped on the stairs. I heard a few moments later one of them say, "the ground is level here, you can walk safely."

I thought, "Is he blind?" How on earth does a blind man manage to evade a receptionist, undress, find the jacuzzi, get in, find and harass a woman all before the police arrive? The policeman right next to the women's door leading outside caught sight of me, and asked me to go in and close the door. I guess that was the decent thing to do. So I did. But the dressing rooms are right next to each other, and they're open to one another along the top, so you can hear everything that goes on next door. The police were asking this fellow which locker was his. He thought it was the third from the left on the bottom. They'd know it was his if they found the candy and cigarettes.

Candy and cigarettes? This is not getting any less weird.

But by this point, I figured the show was pretty much over, so I took my bag o' fruit and went back to the private room, and shortly after was joined by the OM. She had been braver than I, and after her massage had towelled up and walked around the scene outside and back to the sauna where folks were all a-twitter about the situation. One person had said, "Can you imagine if this was the first time you had ever come to the Kiva?", and Michelle was, "uh, yeh, I can!" And then they were all apologetic about it, too, stressing that This is Not Normal, and Michelle was, like, no worries.

She had heard the police asking if the receptionist could drain the hot tub. They were trying to figure out a way to get the naked (and possibly blind?) man out, without any of them having to get in. The receptionist declined. Hence the bunch of standing around - what, it took on the order of 30 to 45 minutes? - before he was extracted. The naked man had also, it seems, acted to fend them off by throwing candy at them from his stronghold there in warm tub. There were, as I found later, indeed several multi-colored bits all over the ground, kind of like confetti. I think they were Nerds.

The rest of the time there was just dandy. The people were all really friendly and nice. It would probably be traumatic if you went in full of body-image issues, but then maybe it's a good place to go if you are, to get a lesson on just being, and not hiding behind multiple layers of baggy clothes. There was more eye contact there, than if clothed in a low-cut dress.

But now to the answer you've been waiting for: it takes 7 policemen, and a bottle of pepper spray, to get a recalcitrant naked man out of a hot tub. So: he wasn't blind after all; they had sprayed him to be able to incapacitate him, and that's why he couldn't see. And he hadn't harassed any women, but just had refused to pay the entry fee.

Fearsome mindfulness, part the second

When last I was rambling, I was thinking about folks' resistance to explore their minds for reasons justifying the things they believe. Bracketing aside mundane laziness, I speculate that maybe it's because of timidity, or perhaps it's because of excessive confidence in one's own prima facie intuitions.

To the latter, I'm reminded of a fantastic line from Hobbes' "Leviathan" (there are so many good lines in that book!): "For such is the nature of men that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything than that every man is contented with his share."

In these cases, the harsh pill the student has to learn how to swallow - and sometimes in conversation after an assignment has been graded, I've worked with the resistance to take this bitter medicine - is that their thumbs up or thumbs down is not good enough. "I'm sorry, but in order for that kind of "argument" to pass muster, I have to assume you're some kind of expert on the subject such that your intuitions as such are stand-alone reasons. But even if you WERE a philosophical expert, your intuitions alone would not be sufficient. You have to go deeper."

Now maybe this thinking exercise getting somewhere. For I think part of the difficulty is that it's just >hard< to work through the justification for our thoughts and intuitions. I think it's true the adage that there's nothing so ridiculous that some philosopher hasn't said it, and in that vein I think that many people approach the subject - or process or whatever it is you want to call "philosophy" - as though it's a matter of saying any old thing, and that's good enough. But of course that's not good enough. For any crazy-sounding thing a philosopher has said or written, that comes with a retinue of reasons which - ta da! - are the argument for that crazy position. So it goes, too, for the "it agrees with me/doesn't." There are some folks who take deep umbrage at their say-so not being good enough.

At bottom, though, I wonder if the timid writer who thinks there's nothing left to say, and the one confident in her intuitions, actually share a common core? The core element I have in mind is fear: fear that there is nothing there, an abyss, no reasons, no justification, no anything. The timid soul worries about it more immediately, whereas perhaps the other masks that fear behind an unreflective confidence?

Ah, but you see, to my mind at least - and I don't think I'm bizarre in thinking this - exploring that worrisome place is where the philosophy can really get started. There is not nothing there behind the intuition, but it is true that maybe what you find is not as veritable or as convincing as one would like to think. But we are all improved, I believe, by confronting that space and seeing it for what it is. And if our reasonable space is not as we would prefer, then it's incumbent upon us make it better. Not muffle it or ignore it or bewail its insufficiency.

Why do you believe X? What is its source? Your parents? Your church? Your teachers? Fox "news"? The Daily Show? The internet? What are the merits of the source? What is their track record? Was the belief beaten into your head, or did it come with a justification? What was the justification? Is it any good? What now?

It is a far better thing to fumble inelegantly through these questions, and be prepared to subject the answers to critique, than to rest contended on beliefs where one never questions why they're held. Hmm. Is that proposition an intuition of my own? No, I've got my reasons, but the idea is noted down as bloggedy-note topic to pursue another time.

Fearsome mindfulness, part the first

It's the time of year in the college teaching market when job announcements start sprouting for the next academic year. Reading over their teaching requirements reminds me of being up there in the classroom, and for whatever reason this morning I recall one of the more difficult things to accomplish in the philosophy classroom. Particularly in the intro philosophy classroom.

In those places, there are a great many young minds being introduced to formulating a meritable argument for the very first time. Of course, by 'argument' here I don't mean shouting and screaming, or all-capping and multiple exclamation-pointing. Everyone knows how to do that already.

The assignments I'd give would usually have two primary elements: first, that the writer shows that (a) he or she can recognize an argument given by another author, and (b) that he or she understands it by putting it into their own words. Second, that the student shows a basic mastery of argumentative principles by defending or rejecting the point of view previously discussed.

I don't know if you'd believe how often I'd get the defense: "X's point of view is right because it agrees with what I believe," and the rejection, "X's point of view is wrong because it goes against what I believe."

Le sigh. Seeing it show up repeatedly breaks a thinking person's heart. And regrettably, although I won't take the time to explore it here, I think it's like a small mirror reflecting the level of public debate and discourse that is prevalent in our culture. I'm thinking things like Mr. Limbaugh's "ditto-heads" and folks hollering "you're wrong because you don't think like I do."

Most unsatisfactory. But how to counter it? That is the difficult thing.

An instructor can spend hours going over how to connect ideas up together in a logical fashion, how to recognize cogency, and basic but easy-to-slip-into fallacies to avoid. Encouraging the student to actually employ those tools is another matter altogether. It's the ol' leading a horse to water thing.

So I try to parse it down to motivation: what is so compelling about the "it agrees/disagrees with what I believe already," such that it shows up so often? If I can but figure out how that works, then perhaps I can short-circuit the process and try and re-route the thinking strategy.

A straightforward motivation is that it's easy, and here I'm thinking especially about the ever-recurring-paper-written-the-night-before-it's-due. We've all been there. And from a teacher's point of view, these essays are often, but not always, detectable by a variety of symptoms, this being one of them. It's 3 in the morning, you're tired, it has all the appearance of a reason, there - done! But these kinds of essays typically have other factors working against them - such as extensive copy/pastes from the internet - so the presence of the "it agrees with me/doesn't agree" is usually the least of its problems.

I'm considering more the kind of written work that evidences the occurrence of thoughts. What is going on in the student's mind, that she (or he - I'm gonna drop the disjunction now) is seemingly incapable of scouring up her own independent reasons?

The best I've come up with is the following. One one hand, maybe the writer thinks that the author she's covering has said everything brilliant that exists in defense of the argument at hand, such that her intuitive agreement (or disagreement) is all she has left? Alternatively, perhaps the writer takes her own confidence in her intuitions as the sine qua non for her intuitions' strength? These are two different vectors, and I'll talk about how I analyze them anon.

Me and ANTM: WTF?

I guess I'm thankful for all the folks who, when they hear I've got a thing for watching ANTM, they sound a bit shocked. I wouldn't think I'd be the kind of person to watch it, either. But for goodness' sake, as Dan commented to something I wrote earlier, if I'm home when there's a marathon series of re-runs on a weekend afternoon, I'll happily let it play while I'm doing whatever else, and take breaks to (re)watch it here and there.

But good lord, why? Thusly I have my morning write and see what happens as I put words down.

Firstly, I'll point out the parts I'll readily mute or walk away from: the great moments of truth that Tyra pronounces, and the idiotic junior high school level of drama among the girls. But hey, it's Tyra's show, and from what I've read she had to fight hard to get it off the ground and now it's become sweepingly popular all over the place, so if she wants to stand up and be all-knowing, then you go, girl. And for the drama, meh. Maybe I'll endure all these elements on the first view, but they certainly aren't worth repeating.

That means there's a good 50% - maybe as much as 70%? - of the show that I usually tune out. Works out really well, then, as something to have playing as I clean, because going elsewhere in the house for half an hour means I'm not missing anything.

So what's the hook, then?

I think part of it, is in learning about the technique involved in doing a fancy, modelley photo shoot. What's involved in translating an abstract concept into an attractive or interesting visual form? For all I usually see is the end result, and it's kinda cool to see what it takes to get there. That's in keeping with other things I like to watch, like "How It's Made," and "Dirty Jobs," "Project Runway" - I like getting seeing what happens behind finished products.

I >would< say, to agree with another woman who I know watches the show whose intelligence I respect, to learn more about what to keep in mind when in front of the camera to make a pretty picture. And she has very good reasons for finding that information useful. And I enjoy this aspect as well - about how the camera perceives big and small (such as, even if you don't have a big feet, if that's the closest thing to the lens, you're gonna wind up looking as though your feet are bigger than your head). About the use of light and angles. It's kinda cool.

But unlike the friend of whom I speak above, I'm not really much - I dunno, either able or inclined - to put that information to work for me. It's always a surprise when a picture of me gets taken, where I don't look like I'm being shocked. Maybe if I practiced and took a bazillion pictures of myself I'd finally realize THAT'S what I need to do in order to not give myself a double chin, or THIS is how to look at the camera so I'm not all bug-eyed. But I don't have the patience. So, I'm not watching it in order for me to learn how to get the camera to love me.

I think another big part of the interest in watching it, is that for sure I was never the pretty girl when I was these kids' age, and it's interesting to see a sort of day-in-the-life of what it is like to be that girl. I know the scenarios are to some extent scripted or directed. But it manages to capture my voyeuristic curiosity all the same.

I think another draw, is seeing for however pretty these young women are, that it's not straightforward to get a good picture. It was earlier in the series, I believe, that they'd show more of how things looked before and after touch-ups and photoshop (this probably goes to getting an insight to behind-the-scenes techniques mentioned before). But also, it is interesting to see that sometimes for the shoots, for the TV camera the ladies look plain freaky with the hair and makeup, but for the photo, it works. Which goes to suggest the (maybe?) interesting point, that for whatever it is that counts for pretty or beauty, it's not always something that is copied straight up from the World, to film or pixels, to the eye.

And finally, I guess perhaps because there is something to the show that is so polar opposite to me, I am like a magnet attracted. In the main, for this show, success revolves around what one wears, and one's hair, and spending countless hours in front of a mirror. But it's curious - there are a plethora of other shows similarly diametrically opposed to my outlook, such as "Real Housewives" and "Bad Girls' Club" to name a few. I've watched an episode or two of these, just to see what they're about. I'm positively repelled. Maybe its because, at least in my imagination, I conceive that the product that often is used for judging for ANTM, is some kind of attempt to reach the level of art, that puts it above them in my mind.

Vampires don't sparkle!

I enjoy writings that bash "Twilight" because its rabid fan base is a sad testimony to an apparently low IQ rampant among readers (but bless them, there at least ARE people reading). But it's not all disdain; I'm sorry for the die-hards' lack of luster and sizzle in their lived experiences, such that this dreck that passes for a story so successfully captures their imaginations.

I ran across the comment "vampires don't sparkle!" earlier this morning, and it recalled other times I've seen the assertion posted, sometimes with lengthy elaboration (because it tends to come up in the midst of "Twilight"-bashing). Without pretending to intuit the mind of any person who holds to the truth of that assertion, I just have to wonder: is this any kind of real critique? And, believe it or not, I'm going to take a few moments out of my morning to stand in Ms. Meyer's defense, and support the oh-so-shiney-ones.

Well, I guess I should start out by saying I don't think anyone who makes the "vampires don't sparkle!" observation, and holding it to be true, is making it from the point of view that there >really< are vampires, such that as a possibly abbreviated but kind of real critique, it's not "real" in the sense that there is some Truth about how Real Vampires are. Yanno? Rather, I conceive it's an assertion drawn from a background in the folklore. It's as, if someone were to represent a unicorn with 2 horns, the response "unicorns don't have two horns!" doesn't mean one believes that unicorns really exist. Not that there aren't people on the fringe who believe they really are vampires, or that vampires really do exist. I'm talking within 3 standard deviations here. Okay, that being said.

I've been a sort of a gothy-vampire fan from way back in the days of kid-dom watching reruns of "Dark Shadows." Not a HUGE fan. I haven't read much of the literature. Just some of Anne Rice's novels, until I couldn't stand seeing the word 'preternatural' one more time - which means I think I made it through maybe 2 books. And, in the satisfaction of a morbid perverted sense of curiosity, the Twilight series which, although ridiculous in terms of page length, is quite short in terms of time needed to scan.

I think I've been more drawn to visual representations, so when I googled up "vampires film tv" and got a run-down of different productions, I was a little surprised to see how long my viewing list is:

Nosferatu
Blade 1-3
Buffy (some)
Lost Boys
Dark Shadows
Dracula
The Munsters
Interview/Queen of the Damned
Bram Stokers Dracula
30 Days of Night
Van Helsing
True Blood (some)

There might be things I missed, like something with Boris Karloff in the cast. But to the point, there are, all throughout these media, places where someone might go "vampires don't X!": vampires aren't attractive! vampires don't have a guilty conscience! vampires don't have cool, orgiastic rave-like parties! And so on. I mean, have you seen the vampire in Nosferatu? Sure don't want to dance with that guy.

I don't pretend to be familiar or chattable with the psychological archetypes or repressed fantasies or suppressed fears that vampire lore is spun out to vent or satisfy. I just, for whatever superficial reason, enjoy it - in its creepy manifestations because it's scary, or in its sexy portrays because it's, well, hot. Unfortunately, the Twilight series is a huge fail on both those grounds, but whatever.

But what seems to be a constant across the different representations I've encountered, is that people take artistic liberties with how the vampire is portrayed. Maybe, at a very glancing level of analysis, the only thing that runs constant across them is that they all drink blood. And Ms. Meyer took the liberty of introducing, for whatever the fuck reason, that they sparkle in sunlight. And maybe other liberties too, I don't know, I'm not that committed to the what and how of vampire portrayal. I say: let a thousand flowers bloom. Let there be sparkley vampires. Why the hell not!

Thanks, I needed that!

It's been a kind of peculiar set of days lately. You know how you can have days where every sensation comes to you brimming over with hope and possibility and beauty. And then there are days where things are, well, not. The sort of days where everything is just what it is. No pointing outward to something meaningful. Nothing insanely weird or captivating.

A series of these, and it threatens to induce a bovine-like mentality, that if left unchecked could conceivably lead a person to afternoons in front of the TV during the times of day when the commercials are targeted to the unemployed or terminally ill. And a person watches the trainwrecks unfold on "Jerry Springer" or whatever the hell idiotic programming is on, I imagine, because those people on the screen at least have a spark, they are animated. Even though it's about something nuts, like, a guy's cousin who swore she loved him but then ran off with his best friend.

I digress somewhat. More to the point, that sensation of life being a series of going-through-the-motions: that's the kind everyday darkness I confront as personally embattling. As a good existentialist, I acknowledge that there isn't any ultimate meaning and magic to it all, but I also can, and do, affirm that we can create our own sense of it through how we consciously choose to engage. But sometimes, it's simply difficult. The world seems to be deliberately resistant to being perceived as hopeful or promising, and trying to find a way to perceive it so through a tidal wave of mundanity is simply tiring. It would be so easy to succumb to it and become just another thing, acting and reacting to what's going on around, without reflection or passion or hope or love.

I think there's something about these feelings that are key. Because the conscious choice part is only part. Choosing something, and feeling something are two different things. My moment viewing the aftereffects of the tragic accident yesterday took me to chose to see life in all its everydayness as precious and fragile. But I didn't feel it; the day still felt mundane and uninspired. Maybe it's partly due to being in the middle of a couple of projects, where the onus of effort is on doing a bunch of bookish and electronic leg-work, and that can get to feeling like being in a limbo-like state.

But what joy. Even in the midst of typing this note an event happened, the drama of which I'll spare any reader save that nothing life-threatening is involved, that has thrown the preciousness of everyday mundane experience into sharp relief.

On, however, a more exuberant note, I have a clip from a column by one of my most favoritest writers that I'll share here below. Thanks, Mark Morford! I needed to hear that from a voice outside my own head. You rock:

[...]
Or maybe not. I prefer to think of these fine denizens of dumb as the darker, skankier parts of our individual consciousness, the red flags of the soul. Should we not be grateful they exist? That they are here to remind us to be ever vigilant and wary? Hell yes we should.

After all, the Fred Phelps, the Glenn Becks, the Terry Jones of the world are but our basest natures made manifest, the bleakest, most paranoid, lazily ignorant parts of each and every one of us. Deny it at your peril. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion." He should know.

These wretched little demons, they are eternal. They have always been here. And they exist to deliver but one message: If you're not conscious, if you don't pay attention, if you don't fill your cup to brimming every single day with laughter and paradox, love and possibility, if you don't deeply appreciate the madhouse irony of this completely gorgeous, impossibly ruthless human experiment, well, they will but fester like a sore on your big toe, and you'll no longer be able to dance.

###

Let us dance, then!

Sonic Drive-In: never again. You suck.

Maybe I should actually be grateful that the last fast-food hamburger joint holdout has now been scratched off my list.

Sonic has, in my book, maintained staying power because as far as the fast-food delicacies go, in any state I've consumed one of their burgers, it's tasted as though it was freshly prepared. Hot meat. Cold veggies. Doesn't bear marks of heat-lamp effects. They make their shakes with real ice cream. If you don't have the time or inclination for a gourmet burger sort of experience, Sonic for me has filled the bill.

And I was in just a mood for a fast-food burger experience; I think it's been nearly a year since my last one, so I think I'm allowed. So yesterday in the hunger that's triggered after several hours of music rehearsal, I made a U-ey on 152, near 101 around Gilroy, to catch the Sonic there. Oh boy! Cheeseburger and onion rings! Yum! I don't know the last time I ate an onion ring!

Big geek that I am, I was listening to a Minstrel CD in the car when the roller-skating delivery girl came up, and we chatted a few moments on how much she liked the tunes I had playing. Everything was all good. I fetched a piping hot crispy onion ring from the bag on the way through the exit.

And all I could taste was: sweet.

WTF?

I know that onions sweeten up when they're fried into an onion ring - that's what, for me, makes them yum. But this was SWEET-sweet, like maple syrup sweet.

I put the ring (minus the one bite) back in the bag. I'll do the hamburger first and return; maybe in my starved state, the taste buds were off.

The burger was fine. OK, let's try this onion ring thing again. Finished off the one I had started earlier.

Still sweet.

Maybe that was a dud? I took another onion ring out and ate it.

Still can't get the idea of maple syrup out of my head.

Then, in a moment of pure stubbornness, thinking that they seriously couldn't all taste so gross, I took a bite out of a third. Go ahead, call me crazy. You know you want to, and I know the definition that I was embodying then and there (a definition I often see attributed to David Hume, that I've not happened to come across in his text and somehow kinda doubt, attribution-wise).

Yup; the epiphany of grossness. But why? Who the hell needs an onion ring to taste like a General Mills breakfast cereal?

I had a bag of pretzels in the passenger seat, and I must have consumed half the bag on the rest of the way home, working to get the taste out of my mouth (well, that and I love pretzels anyway). It took nearly 45 minutes before the edge of the sweetness wore off. Which means that whatever the fuck disgustingness they put into their batter, it wasn't only an ingredient that hit the sweet spots on the tongue, it was a vicious substance that stuck there.

Gah! Never again. Thanks a lot, Sonic.

Dispositional properties

It's a subject I've been seeing come up frequently in the literature I'm reading here of late. Por que, you ask? It's because I'm working up my intellectual chops to write kinda Heideggarianly about technology and astronomy.

Some of the work I've got before me currently involves the way information about the environment comes to be perceived by conscious creatures such as ourselves, either via our senses in direct observation, or as mediated by the technologies we use.

Dispositional properties are interesting in the sense (or, at least in one sense) that it makes perfect sense to talk about them existing even while the quality in question is not actualized. That might sound a little confusing, so let me refer to a common example: fragility.

It makes perfect sense to say this wine glass here IS fragile. But what does that mean? You might be tempted to answer: the glass's being fragile means it's breakable. But breakable is another dispositional property - the glass has the >capacity< or the ability to be broken, and saying it is break-able doesn't mean it has to actually BE broken. If it is broken, then its moment of fragility has kinda already passed, you know?

So for fragility: to say the glass IS fragile means that the glass >would< break WERE certain conditions met that don't actually obtain (e.g., that it would make forceful contact with a hard surface, were a dart be thrown at it, that it would be dropped, that it would be exposed to a person singing a note at just the right frequency, etc.). So talking about dispositional properties is interesting in one sense because it invokes subjunctive vocabulary, and questions about how to clearly work that out.

Back in the day when I was a phil science grad student, I read a mind-numbing quantity of logic-chopping analytic work which focused - as this brand of intellectualizing tends to do - on how to construct the right kinds of sentences capturing the truth about dispositional properties, either in symbolic logic or in everyday language. So for fragility, for instance, the analysis might go something like:

X is fragile {realizing condition 1} or {realizing condition 2} or {realizing condition 3} (and so on)

I know: exciting, right? And that's just the beginning of the fun. Because after someone might suggest up a way of parsing out such a schemata, the critical response begins: either about the content (such as, that the realizing conditions are insufficient), or about the logical form (say, shortcomings of using a string of disjunctions - I'll just leave that at that).

Nowadays I find it much more interesting to think about the metaphysics of dispositional properties - in what kind of space to they exist, if their very mode of being means that they (actually) exist in a potential state. What a peculiar sounding sort of existence! Scientists touch on something of this, on the topic of potential energy and kinetic energy. But don't let the fact that they have mathematics to describe the transformation from potential to kinetic imbue you with a sense that the mathematics gives an answer to their metaphysical strangeness.

How on earth does all that tie in with the perception of information from the environment? I'll sketch that out, as I am understanding it currently.

There is one way of thinking about information, or content, about the environment that goes: there is no information out there in the world in any rich, significant sense of the word. The information, or content, is supplied by conscious, perceiving creatures who receive sensory stimuli, and then process that stimuli through some kind of mental activity (relatively coarse or refined, depending on the creature). That processing is what adds the content or information. Content or information is a cognitive, or mental phenomenon - thus its occurrence must come as an addition by cognitive creatures. It cannot exist in a purely inert, unconscious, materialistic space - which contains all the non-mental stuff of the universe.

An alternative view I'm looking at now rejects the outlook in the paragraph above. It holds that the natural world is information-rich, and when we perceive the world, we perceive it with the information it provides. This information, on at least some accounts, exists in a dispositional state (aha! there's the tie-in, at last). It exists in a potential state, ready to be actualized upon the existence of a creature with a constitution to detect and make use of it.

Thus, to take a fairly primitive example, consider the quality or property of being edible. A thing's being edible is not a quality that is projected from a conscious creature onto the environment. Instead, being edible is a potential or latent quality in things themselves that, were a creature existing with a digestive system suitable to ingesting it, the quality would become manifest.

It's an interesting way to think about information in the universe, and it's a real joy to read about it in ways that do not turn the text into a logic book. Let's see what happens with this...

New term butterflies

If you don't, or never did, experience some form of disequilibrium before the start of a school term, especially college, I call you lucky. At the start of every college semester, I have always dealt with jitteriness in some form or other, and for me it meant riding the beast until it worked itself out. Not always pleasant, but it wasn't ever fatal, either.

When I was an undergraduate student, I think I'd be wide-awake for mostly happy reasons. A thrill of uncertainty: would this or that class be as good as I hoped? Would the subject matter be harder than I expected? Where would my mind and imagination get to be taken on an adventure? Would any of my teachers hold the kinds of high expectations that would require me to study furiously for a month in order to pass their exams like that one really awesome but totally sadistic constitutional law professor?

When I turned into a grad student the situation, appropriately enough, became more complicated. I think my very first grad school semester nerves were basically benign, maybe a slightly heightened form of undergrad nerves, for I then had No Idea What I Was Getting Myself Into. New school, new location, new teachers, new peeps. But what an adventure - whoopee!

But two things made matters more complicated in grad school.

One was the massively increased standards of performance, and massively more difficult course work. Naturally I vaguely expected things to be harder, but I was utterly a priori unprepared for just what that meant. Grad school - at least, the ones I attended - is to undergrad ... well, I'd say like night to day but I don't even know if that's a right comparison. I don't know that there's an adequate way to phrase out the comparison. It didn't just rock my boat; it flipped the boat overboard and threw me out. However hard I worked as an undergrad was nothing - I mean, NOTHING - compared to what I needed to do just to tread water in grad school.

It wasn't enough to peruse over the material before the start of classes. The classes begun expecting you to be familiar with that, and much more besides. I'd go to the library and check out all kinds of secondary material, and read, read, read. And it never seemed to be enough. Thence started, like clockwork, at the beginning of each and every grad school term The Pattern.

First: manically prepare before the start of classes. Second: experience the first week of classes where I'd invariably feel completely in over my head, utterly out of my element, like my teachers were talking an entirely different language. Third: a VERY unpleasant 2 or 3-day period where I'd lock myself in my apartment and have a mini-meltdown. I'd sob at the sensation of being completely insufficient. I was torn apart by feeling both so eminently fortunate to be in whatever fantastic space I was - the institution, the awesome teachers, the great location - while simultaneously being certain that I had gotten there by some gigantic cosmic mistake because I was clearly the biggest dumbass on campus and I must have fooled someone real good to have tricked the powers that be to let me in.

Then classes would start again I'd hitch myself up, and get back to it. and it would turn out all good. I don't know WHY on earth, for as long as I was taking graduate-level classes, I'd have my mini-nervous-breakdowns. But I did. But I didn't let them have me. i mean, I let them run their course, and although I wouldn't have used the language then, was present to them. However I was processing it, it seemed better to let it out, to let it go, than to repress it or bottle it up or try and ignore it. And I think I managed to keep confidence in the small voice in the back of my mind that all the while calmly and quietly maintained that of course I was good enough, that my being where I was wasn't a huge mistake, so that after my psychic flu ran its course, I had something positive left there to work from.

If that weren't enough, a second thing complicating grad school was starting in on the extraordinarily difficult task of learning how to teach, when the opportunity presented itself while being a teaching assistant. That was a whole new bag of challenges and, sometimes, horrors. Grading - oh my god - who knew how difficult that was? Standing up and talking in front of a classroom - who knew how nerve racking that was? All my teachers had made it look so easy! Ha!

The nervousness with teaching paled in comparison to the angst I had about classes when I was a grad student. But it returned to the forefront after I gathered up all the sheepskins I could and it was time to take the training wheels off and go at it on my own. Yay! More insomnia the night before the start of classes.

Of course there is usually excitement. A new semester! New sets of students! Maybe a brand-spanking new course to teach! New adventures!

But then too there were worries. Would I walk in on the first day and get hit with stage fright (yes, I always did) - and if so, would I manage to work through it (yes, I did)? What if I got a challenging class - did I have enough tricks in my arsenal to charge it back to life? Did I prep enough? For believe me, for any teacher worth his or her salt, for any single thing assigned to a student to read and evaluate, the teacher has read 10 or 20 things more, for insight, for seeing the material from a different angle, to have background, to have tools to try and explain a difficult idea more clearly to a confused audience. Did I arrange my syllabus fairly? is the workload too high? Should I have put more things on reserve? Did I give enough assignments? Did I leave myself room in there to have a some semblance of a life without becoming utterly submerged in grading and prep? Would, in spite of everything I tried to do to make the challenging material interesting and relevant and my standards and grading fair, I be stigmatized as tyrannical or uncompromising or incompetent? Do I have enough clothes so that it doesn't look like I'm wearing the same thing every day? Damn, I should have gotten that cool pair of shoes. .... and so on.

So there you have it. Maybe I am a little weird for always having pre-semester nerves, but I don't think I'm especially weirder than the average bear for it. Just as long as the nerves don't have you, it's all good.

Concerning the "bachelor wash"

One time when I was chatting with someone about it, I learned of the phrase "bachelor wash," which means the phenomenon must extend beyond my household and the times I've seen it executed (frequently) by my darling husband and (a few times) by his somewhat wayward nephew.

And I'm not using this symbolic space to complain, only to muse about it. Well, ok, maybe I'll complain a little.

For those who don't know - and I'm by no means a professional on the topic but I'll take an educated guess - a bachelor wash generally means, a sloppy dishwashing job. Define "sloppy"? I suspect it can be a variety of things. In >my< experience, it means: putting some dish soap on the fingers, running the fingers over the surfaces of a dish/glass/what have you - but only those upon which a nutritive substance has obviously made contact. So, for instance, that means the inside of a glass, or the top of a plate. Rinse. Done!

Ya know what I'm talkin' about? Can I get an "amen"?

Mark well, the decent side of my character usually comes to the fore when I notice signs of the bachelor wash. I usually think, "well, bless his heart, at least he makes an attempt," as I re-wash the item(s) I've found.

There was one time I went kinda spasmotic. We had both the husband and the nephew living under the same roof. In our kitchen, our dish situation is thus.

Our kitchen is wee small; very little counter space. So, above the sink there is a good-sized window; on either side of the window there are cabinets. In front of that window, bracketed to the sets of cabinets, we've run 2 rows of racks that we use for letting the dishes air dry. Pretty smart, I think. Drying dishes are out of the way, the dripping water (mostly) falls down into the sink, and there's enough rack room to hold the aftereffects of a decent-sized dinner party.

So, on the spasmodic day in question, I schlepped into the kitchen for a cuppa joe, where the early morning sunlight came beaming murkily through a top rack of rather filthy-looking glasses. It's one thing to pull out the occasional dirty glass out of a cabinet. It was another thing to see a whole set of purportedly clean dishes that would need to get re-washed. Dealing with one male doing the bachelor wash was one thing; I wasn't going to re-do the work of two.

Thus I shepherded the menfolk into the kitchen, explained that I was tired of re-washing their dishes, and explained that BOTH sides of dishes get dirty, and both sides need to witness the cleansing effects of soap and a sponge (or some other device that will make good, wiping contact with the surface area), not just an index finger. One might think that this would be already obvious. I mean, just look, for goodness' sake. See this wine glass? See the fingerprints and smudges all over it? Do you really want to have a guest over and serve him or her a nice bit of wine in this? Do >you< really want to drink a nice bit of wine out of this? I sure wouldn't. And that's to say nothing of plates the undersides of which are greasy where they were once sitting atop another dish that was dirty, and so on.

I am >pretty< sure, if I remember the looks on the faces rightly, that I came across as a total, overreacting, bitch. Didn't care, and still don't. I wasn't going to - and still wouldn't were I similarly situated again - re-do TWO people's work.

But at bottom, I just couldn't understand, and still don't, why anyone would do the bachelor wash in the first place. Does it satisfy the prime directive (i.e., to have clean dishes)? Not really. Is it faster than washing dishes well? Absolutely not. I've slung suds more than any normal person should have to in my years of barrista-ing, when the dishes really and truly did need to be all clean and sanitized. Washing them well and washing them fast are not mutually exclusive. Mind, I know I'm not one to get every single thing perfectly spot-free (looking at the outsides of our pots and pans will make that clear enough). But you sure won't get a finger-printed lip-smudged wine glass from me when I'm done, either.

So, yeh, the bachelor wash. Don't get it. And fortunately, even though our house has been full of people all summer, I haven't had to deal much with it - thanks, y'all! But still, every now and then, I still pull out of the cabinet a "clean" glass all covered in fingerprints, I'm sure symptomatic of G's dishwashing. Sigh. Bless his heart, at least he makes the attempt...

Why "Ender's Game" fails

The few folks I've talked to about this book were pretty enthusiastic, so I set out with decent expectations of a nice sci-fi read. I'm sorry to say that more pages I turn, the more it's coming from a sense of duty to finish this book than an interest to see where the storyline goes.

The main thing that I think is supposed to be the "hook" for the story has failed to grab me: that the warriors in this world, and particularly in the main character Ender's case, are children.

Admittedly, I think I was set up to be resistant to the hook by a line - one single, eensey sentence - fairly early in the story when Ender was being recruited. He asked something about whether there were girls in the Battle School. His recruiter said that there were a few, but that females in general had evolution working against their favor in becoming soldiers.

That stopped my reading dead in its tracks. What? There wasn't anything in the setup of this alternative reality thus far indicating that women were especially different. The assertion came completely out of the blue, and as such bore all the significance of an author-ial device that would insert into the narrative an explanation for why the writer didn't include many female characters: because the author, for whatever reason, didn't want to deal with them. The stupidity of that move grinded increasingly into the back of my mind as I've read, because the secondary agents receive effectively zero character development - they could be utterly sex-less (excepting the few cases where someone gets kicked in the balls) as far as the story's concerned. So why not include females? Methinks I detect a hint of sexism, and it isn't stymied by the fact that one of the lead characters is female: Ender's sister, Valentine. But now, 7/8ths of the way through the book, she is a female mainly is all the cliched senses: empathetic, loving, and supportive. She's a bit rebellious, but it all is performed under the devices of being agreeable and submissive.

So anyway, with that irritation flagging away in the back of my consciousness, still I read on. And the tragic note that I think supposed to be sounded in the story - Child Soldiers! - I'm just not getting lured in. There's no clear tension. For all of the behavior and inner experiences that are revealed, the characters could just as well be adults, and the ONLY thing that creates a pause in my mind as I read along is an occasional tag to the effect of a character saying "but I'm only 11 years old," or, "this is a pretty serious political movement we're causing, especially considering we've got only 8 pubic hairs between the two of us."

Without sentences like that, the reader can effortlessly forget that the characters are anywhere from 8 to 16 years old. At best, it's a repackaging of stereotypes - the ineffective leader, the efficient soldier with a conscience, the plucky underdog who rises to the occasion - inserted into different, younger bottles. Yawn.

One might say, my easy acceptance of the story's premise evidences the tragedy, the acceptance of child killers, err, children who are killers. I say: absolutely not. If there is a dramatic tension between childhood innocence (or whatever - honestly, I can't tell what the author thinks is so dramatically at stake) and ruthless behavior, it is the author's job to bring it. And the author needs to bring it by more than a counting of pubic hairs which, as executed, comes across like adults with hormonal problems more than anything else. The reader shouldn't have to supply half of the narrative tension him or herself.

At bottom, the story is a gimmick drawn about a single shiney idea the author had when he was young - this zero-gravity Battle Room and suits that cause their wearers to "freeze" if they get hit during practice fights (sort of like laser tag). (More interesting to me are the "desks" that sound an awful lot like the modern-day iPad.) Most of the book's action deals with the Battle Room. But now, as I've gotten to the place where Ender is about to be trained as a Commander, after reading - what? a couple hundred pages of Battle Room interactions? - I can't help but think: what's the effing point?

Now we're on about Star Cruisers and all the ships they carry in preparation for battling against the enemy (which - to flag another frustration - has been one big McGuffin for the whole book) in a way that looks to be conducted in anything but in-person combat. So, absent of devices like teleporters or whatever to get these characters to fight one-on-one, or troop-on-troop, what the FUCK has been the purpose of all the Battle Room training? Unless the ships carrying soldiers - ships which will have GUNS that can BLOW UP other ships, there is no reason for Battle Room training. Unless we get the ships to approach each other, stop, dispel their troops out into the void of space where then they can proceed to shoot each other. Really? This this where we're going in the story? Gawd, I hope not. Far as I'm concerned, this book is one big "fail."

Concerning the mosque to allegedly be built at or around "Ground Zero"

I've been hearing a fair bit of NPR air time being dedicated to this subject lately, and this morning I was going to sit down and reflect on why the idea doesn't faze me so much.

But then it occurred to me, that going on about what >I< think didn't sound so interesting. Why don't I try inverting the picture, and consider reasons for why the construction of the mosque would be such a phenomenally BAD idea?

So off I trotted into imagining all sorts of farcical fear-laden reasons for opposing the mosque. But I stopped again. It didn't seem fair or respectful. To my mind, excepting cases where you're dealing with someone who is certifiably institutionally bat-shit crazy, it's a good move to hear the other side of the story and take it on its own terms.

Thus I spent a fair bit of time this morning perusing various blogs and websites, of both politicians and common folk, and listening to video commentary. I found consensus circulating around the reasons that follow (without any order except sequentially, as they came across my field of view):

1. The person in charge of the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, thinks the U.S. is to blame for the 9/11 attacks.
2. If Feisal Abdul Rauf were so interested in handshaking and harmonizing across different faiths, then he should have proposed building a multi-religious site, not just an Islamic one.
3. The plan to build a mosque is a disguised attempt to assert Islamic superiority
4. U.S. support of a mosque at ground zero effectively honors the terrorists who caused the deaths of the 9/11 victims
5. Just because there is a constitutional right to practice religious freedom, doesn't mean we should practice religious freedom
6. There are already plenty of mosques around - and if they want to build another one, they can build it somewhere else.
7. Even if the site would not endorse violent radical behavior, it is a place where non-violent means (cultural, economic, political, legal) can be used to further Muslim totalitarian "stealth" supremacy.
8. "Moo-slimes" build mosques on the sites they conquer - letting this site be built signifies that we've been conquered.
9. We should heed the "Islamification" of Europe, and not follow in its footsteps by allowing a mosque to be built at ground zero.
10. Any religion that endorses violence is incapable of delivering spiritual enlightenment, and has no right to call itself a religion. It is a "religion" of hate, and has no right to display itself at ground zero.
11. The ground zero mosque, to be called "Cordorba House" is intended to symbolize the conquering victory of the Muslims in Cordoba, Spain - thus sending the message that the Muslims have conquered us.
12. The mosque would symbolize a jihad victory.
13. The mosque, and the people it would indoctrinate, would foster their black-and-white, us-versus-them mentality.
14. Preventing the mosque being built will be a stand for everything Americans value: justice and equality for all men and women.

I'm not making any of these up, and some of them - such as #14 and #5 - simply make my mind reel. But I won't go on a rant (brief memory flash of Dennis Miller, back when he was funny); I'll let these ideas simmer a little in my brain and maybe I'll come back to say something about at least some of them later.

Glad to have the happy back, back

It starts as a vague, dull, ache: the kind that can be easily brushed off. But the sensation of dread quickly mounts as its signature changes. Oh god, it's been what - 2, 3 years since this happened last? But all that happy-body in-between time collapses into nothing as the memory from before is so vivid, it is as though it happened only yesterday.

I shift around and think, maybe if I just change my position I can short-circuit it. I've just been sitting too long too often lately. I mentally pat my back on the head, sort of like how you do a car that's threatening to stall and you try to encourage it to make just a little bit further so you can park in safety. I rub that spot, just under my left shoulder blade, to hopefully calm the muscle down.

But no, a half hour later and the awful spasmey rhythm increases in amplitude: rather than a persistent kind of tension it turns into a moment of ache, and then a rest, then another ache, and a rest. I envision the poor muscle, located somewhere in the wee areas between my ribs (as a physical therapist explained once to me). I managed to stress it out somehow, and I have to battle my native inclination to do some stretching to work it out for past experience has taught me, that only Makes It Worse.

God, I've only got two more tasks to do and then I can take you home, I tell my body, and lie down. Just give me another hour. I swallow down about a thousand milligrams of ibuprofin that Rich offers. But it's no good. Another half hour later and I'm incapable of sitting still; my whole body tenses up as the muscle strengthens its grip on a nerve and when it lets go, I'm practically panting in relief. I manage to make it through one of my tasks, jump up and suddenly announce I've got to go. I probably should have left earlier because now the drive back to Mountain View - thankfully not in rush hour traffic - is heinous.

At home I make a beeline for the bathroom where the heating pad is kept, grab some Doan's and the bottle of ibuprofin, a large glass of water, and make my camp on the couch. It still hurts like hell, but the heating pad helps, as does lying as still as humanly possible. Everything else: bathroom breaks, trying to sit up and eat at the table in a semblance of normality, taking a deep breath, sucks.

I'm not myself. I have no sense of humor. I have no patience. I have a completely and utterly one-track mind: to be on the heating pad and resting, and whatever interferes with that is like an enemy to me. I know that my routine will get this spasm to calm down in quick time without heavy pharmaceuticals.

I don't know where this damned spasm came from. There was a time once, several years ago, when I was trying everything short of going on heavy muscle-relaxing drugs, to get relief. I tried out acupuncture. I went to a physical therapist. We had family visiting from overseas, and I wanted to be up doing things with them, so as soon as I'd have a good day I'd return to bouncing around doing whatever, just to have the damned pain flare back up again and return me to my writhing, prone position. It was, like, just kill me now and get it over with.

Finally, after I think a couple of weeks, I gave in and went to the doctor; I didn't care anymore - I'd take whatever they gave me. And thank the gods, she gave me some heavy-duty muscle relaxers. And the most excellent advice: "lay down, and stay down for a week, no matter how good you feel." The muscle relaxers put me to sleep, and in a mostly unconscious state I remained for several days, which quite helped me to follow the advice of not getting up and moving around like I would have wanted to had I been more aware.

Luckily, now I know that the most effective medicine is the lying still (as much as I dislike it, when I feel just fine) for a couple of days. If I catch it at the quick, and distract myself with bad TV or computer games, the body heals itself and I can let the heavy medicine be. And I guess that, as much as I hate that muscle spasm when it happens, I'm grateful for that, at least.

Dreams are awesome!

I had the presence of mind to write down what I remember dreaming last night, so I wouldn't forget. I looked back to my last entry (several months ago - I'm not very good at this), and found something pretty hilarious that I thought I'd share.

I dreamt that I met up with Val and Dre for lunch, and we wound up at the Mythbusters site. I was super excited to be there. We drove past the two main guys, Jamie and Adam, who were loading up their pickup truck with gear.

Shortly thereafter, we discovered that we were being pursued, not by police, byt it initiated a high-speed chase. Dre kicked in with some serious evasive-driving skills, and next thing I knew, I had a gun! So I was leaning out of the rear window and shooting at the car behind us, and I managed to stop them (I hope, by doing something like blowing out their tires or engine).

Right after that, Dre pulled our car around into a fabulous 360 and we skidded to a halt right at the edge of a drop-off into the bay. Jamie and Adam came running up to our car, and we were sure we were all about to get busted. They had seen us on surveillance, and were wowed by our awesome skills, and there were jobs for everyone! Crazy.

Last night's dream was also righteous, but in a different way. I went to go visit my mom (who, in actuality, passed away a few years ago). I was so happy to see her and talk to her, and hug her, and be back home. I slept in that dream, and in it, I slept like a baby - no holds barred all peaced and blissed out. I think it transmitted over into my actual sleeping experience last night!

Concerning trust

Back in the days when I was grossly underpaid but making a helluvalotta more money than I do now...ah, nice flashbacks. Back when I could contribute regularly to independent radio stations during their fund-raisers. Back when I could shop for my favorite colorful fashioney clothes at Oilily (now out of business, boo) and trendy boutiques. Oops. I was drooling a little bit there. Sure am jonesing for a new pair of jeans.

Anyway, back when I didn't have nagging second thoughts about spending money generally, I answered the call from a firefighters' relief fund, or maybe it was a disabled police officers' fund. It's hard to remember, but I answered with some small donation, on the order of $20 or $25. That opened a floodgate of similar calls. Well, "floodgate" is not quite right. It opened up a trickling that turned into a floodgate.

After a time, I got a call from a different, but similar-sounding, organization. Some kind of support service - like firefighters, or police officers, or ambulance drivers, or whatever, and maybe a different way of their being disabled and needing help. Such as having become injured in the line of duty, or killed in the line of duty, or having their funding cut and wanting help to host a camp for at-risk teenagers.

Goodness, well of course I can send you $15. The forms and information they sent - although this was a different "charity" - looked exactly the same as for the first one I donated to, which started up some low-level alarm bells. But $15: no big deal.

After a year, I guess, they call back again - "you gave so generously last time, do you think you could manage donating a little bit more?" Now the alarm bells get a little louder. "Is this a charitable organization that I can write contribution off to on our taxes?" Not that I'd contribute very much, but I guess it was my way of asking if the organization was bona fide.

"Of course," was the answer. I'd find the information on the back of the form they mailed me, upon which receipt I would send them my check.

I got the information in the mail, and read the small print very carefully. After that and a little internet searching I found, not to my complete surprise, that things weren't quite as legit as one would be led to believe. Although somewhere in there, a camp for at-risk teens or a fund for disabled firefighters MAY have been involved, it was orchestrated by a fund-raising business that kept anywhere from 85 to 90% of the money.

(here's a url for helping you to spot these thieves, in case you get a similar call:)
http://www.fraud.org/scamsagainstbusinesses/tips/charity.htm

Naturally, that struck me as positively criminal. So I didn't send any money in. I called the number on the back of the donation card to talk to someone at the organization about what scam artists they were, but got a place where I could leave a voice mail. So I did, telling them I thought they were bastards, they could kiss my meager donation goodbye, and they should take my number off their calling list.

After a couple weeks, they called back. Where was my donation? I explained I had left a message about that, but it must not have gone through. I asked the person I talked to whether he understood what a racket this money-raising activity was. He didn't know what I was talking about. I asked him to put me on the line with someone who would. I got someone else on the phone, and I asked straight out whether what I had found was true about the organization and how they kept nearly all the money for themselves. At least he was honest. I told him to take my name off their register and never to call me again.

Then the OTHER organization I had given money to before, called again and asked if I can afford to donate more. I said "no," and told them to take my name off their calling list.

Then another organization called. Similar emotional tug: widows of police officers killed in the line of duty or whatever. No, please take me off your calling list. Help the firefighters fund circus tickets for a kids' night out? No, and take me off your mother fucking master call list already! It's no exaggeration: it got to where every 3 weeks, we were getting a call from a needy emergency services group to sponsor something. (Mind: once you get on the register of a "charity" kind of thing, the do-not-call list doesn't help, and these calls are one of the reasons we don't answer our land line any more. Don't ask why we even have a land line anymore; that's another matter entirely!)

I remember once taking one of these calls in a bad moment, and I did something like called the person on the other end of the line a prick for participating in manipulating people's heartstrings so that they give money that the firefighters (or whatever) never see. And he quietly responded, "I *am* a firefighter, and I'm donating my time to work the phones to try and get contributions."

Pause. Giant pause.

What was I gonna do? There seemed two basic options. (1) Believe the guy on the other end of the line, and go with my trusting and generous instincts, and do a donation. (2) Don't believe him. Think instead: this is all part of the same operation, and the person on the other end of the line (for the likes of whom there is a special circle of hell set aside) is prepared to say any goddamned thing in order to sucker people like me into giving money.

I sadly went with the second option. I hated doing it. I apologized to the guy on the phone; if he really was a firefighter, then it wasn't him or his fundraiser (which in truth sounded in script an *awful lot!* like the other asking-for-money calls) that was the problem, but this thefty money-raising organization that was to blame.

It sticks out in my memory, because in that giant pause while I deliberated through that conscious choice I vividly perceived what crumbling trust feels like.

That phenomenon can happen - and I think it often does happen - so quickly that it's hardly noticed: when a homo-phobic politician gets busted for hiring a rent-a-boy to "carry his bags," your priest gets busted on child molestation charges, companies hire expensive lawyers rather than take responsibility and pay up for their mistakes. In those fast moments, it goes, "well of course you can't trust X" - maybe the crumbling of trust happens SO quickly, it's as though the trust was never there to start with. You know?

But when you can feel it, at least, how it seemed I felt it, it's like a horrible sense of psychic erosion. Like a balloon deflating in slow motion, where that balloon is your hope, and your love, and your support for all things good, all collapsing in on itself. (Interesting side-speculation about the choice of "balloon" to capture the sensation, and symbolic connotations balloons have....)

It sucked it feel it, but also curious is the pondering now of the effect of this happening - in the moments when it occurs so quickly that it's not even noticed - by the myriad moments and news stories that cross our paths.

What can we do to maintain a state of buoyancy? I think I'll ruminate on that and maybe answer my question, at least for myself, another time.

What if drugs all had good side effects?

I've got eye pressure that's been tending toward the high side, my eye doctor has observed. It doesn't seem to be glaucoma-ish, no family history and I've had field vision tests and pictures taken of the innards of my eye to check for optic nerve damage and whatnot. No foul signs, thank goodness. But the man wants to be safe so he put me on these eye drops to lower the pressure. And after a checkup the numbers have gone down, so everything looks all good.

But here's the thing that got me to thinking about the query that's the title of this note. When he was talking about the eye drops to me, my first concern was whether I'd still be able to wear contacts. He said yes, 15 minutes after putting the drops in I'd be fine for wearing them. Would I become extraordinarily sensitive to light? Lose my night vision? No. So what are the side effects? There's always gnarly side effects.

Your eyelashes will get thicker, and darker, and longer. Your eye color (the irises, not the whites) might darken. That's it.

That's IT?

It's the same kind of stuff the cosmetics industry has latched hold of, such as with the product Latisse(tm) as advertised with an oddly-strained-looking Brooke Shields (somehow, I never got the attraction of Brooke Shields, and I'd call myself as appreciative of a beautious woman as anyone). Of course, for folks not experiencing any eye pressure quirks, the stuff is applied externally, at the lash line. (insert icky imaginations of people using it as eye drops who have normal eye pressure, who after a few weeks have their eyeballs caving in from a loss of inner pressure...).

That news about the side effects kinda blew a small section of my mind. It's a first, in all the news I've heard about all the different kinds of medicines out there on the market: a product that doesn't come with a long list of potential side effects some of which sound worse than the ailment one wants to treat. You know the lists. Anal seepage. Suicidal ideation. Loss of sexual desire. Erectile disfunction. Heart palpitations. Stomach ulcers. Stomach cancer. Death.

Why can't more medicines be that way? What IF more medicines were that way? Can you imagine the conversation with the doctor? "To lower your cholesterol, I'm putting you on blabbedy-blah, and you may experience a side effect of shedding that 5-to-10 pounds you've been trying to get rid of. Oh, and you hair will become more luxurious. And it'll whiten your teeth, too." Or, "people who've used what I'm prescribing you for IBS report a heightened sense of sexual arousal, and multitudinous orgasms."

Would people clamor to take pharmaceuticals even more? ">I< want to lose these damned 5 pounds that stubbornly stick to my hips and thighs, I need to be on that cholesterol-lowering drug," people might say, who don't have any cholesterol problems. And then they might develop them because of the drug lowers their cholesterol even more (momentary recall of my imaginary person using the eye-pressure-lowering drops to get thicker lashes).

But then again, maybe it wouldn't suck so much to have whatever kinds of illnesses leading a person to be medicated in the first place. Can you imagine the inversion of status these people might achieve?

Christine: Kayla, girl, you're looking like a million bucks! Have you been working out?
Kayla: In a manner of speaking! I hadn't told anyone, but I've got irritable bowel syndrome, and my doctor put me on blabbedy-blah, and my sex life has gone through the roof! My girlfriend and I are fucking like monkeys, every day - it's crazy awesome!
Christine: Dammit. Wish >I< had irritable bowel syndrome.

Maybe it IS possible to have pharmaceuticals be this way, but in order to keep healthy people off them (and increase the incidence of unnecessary illnesses from causing changes to normal function), the scientists devise them up in such a way that the only people who will take them, are those willing to risk enduring unpleasant side effects in order to (hopefully) alleviate the other problems they have. Which is the kind of situation we have now, isn't it? Coincidence?

"What I'm FEELING is..."

I was thinking today that I'd like to write about something annoying - just to mix things up a bit. On a sticky note thingie on my laptop's desktop I found one: the oft-heard utterance that is the title of this note.

Is it an annoyance about people vocalizing their feelings? No, not in the least. People maybe ought to be more aware of their feelings and vocalize them more often. Some people, at least. I'm also not advocating putting substantive conversation entirely in the vernacular of feeling-talk, which I think would annoy me as well.

So now I get closer to the heart of it, which is a >misuse< of feeling-talk.

I remember the time I heard someone say this most recently that got my ire up. I was listening to NPR in the morning, and there was a discussion about some political matter (the exact nature of which I don't recall) on which there were opposing viewpoints. And in an interview with one of the disputants, he or she started with a "What I'm feeling is..." and then continued to give some assertion of fact, like "the representative is a dickhead."

(stream of consciousness association to the movie "Taladega Nights" when WIll Farrell's character says: "With all due respect, I didn't realize you'd gotten experimental surgery to get your balls removed," and the character he says that to gets annoyed and replies something like "saying 'with all due respect' doesn't mean you can go on to say anything you want to say.")

Ok, so back to a misuse of "what I'm >feeling< is...". To MY mind, that kind of preface leads the way to generally emotional kinds of talk: "I'm feeling hurt by what you said," "I'm feeling joy at the awesome epiphany you experienced." Maybe even semi-cognitive kinds of talk: "I'm feeling confused about what you mean."

In these kinds of situations, the claims are fairly uncontestable. If a person feels joy, or anger, or hurt, or confusion, and truthfully reports on that, there's not much room to say the person is wrong. There >are< things to say - such as to apologize if the case is that you've done something to hurt another's feelings, or seek to be more clear if a listener is confused. Also, it's possible that the event triggering an emotional response was perceived incorrectly, maybe the listener misheard what was said, for instance, and that can be discussed, too.

And I'd still like to leave some small room for critique. I mean, if a person says something like "I'm feeling so happy that you just kicked that stray dog for no reason," I hope someone would point out that there are things that not appropriate to be happy about. I mean, to put it another way, there are at least two different things that it's good to keep distinct: (1) an authentic awareness of one's emotional state, and (2) a mindfulness in connecting up appropriate emotional states with the things that trigger them. I mean, again (x3), if for example a person feels "dissed," or deeply hurt or offended by every negative word, well, he or she's not connecting the dots right. But that starts to get complicated and threatens to veer me off-topic so I'll just leave that there.

So, to recap where I'm at now: "what I'm >feeling< is..." to my ear, signals an upcoming report of the speaker's emotional or quasi-cognitive state. And as truthful reporting of what the speaker subjectively experiences, is, in that respect, largely immune from critique. In short: it just is, what it is.

Ok, fine. So what's the annoyance factor?

The extension of the phrase to places it doesn't belong. Sometimes, in the case of someone who is mildly clever, I imagine that she might detect the seemingly protective function of "what I'm >feeling< is..." and follow that up with an assertion of fact rather than an emotional subjective state - you know, like, "what I'm feeling is that you're a douche." I cannot recount the number of times, as a teacher, I heard this kind of thing from students. It was maddening. Well, they didn't call me a douche (at least, not to my face). It would be more like "what I'm feeling is that you graded me wrongly on this paper and you should give me an 'A'," or "what I'm feeling is that feminists hate all men and their claims ought to be rejected wholesale on that basis."

In these cases, what we have is a claim that calls for argument and defense, where the proclaimer attempts to avoid that difficult work by being prefacing it by "what I'm >feeling<...." That there is an avoidance factor is clear when in discussion you try and coax out the person's reasons, and the response is "that's just what I feel." What a nice bit of rhetoric. How simple! No being held to account needed! Not. And I find that kind of laziness to give reasons for what one >believes< (not: feels) annoying.

Which brings me to a second element of annoyance: a kind of laziness to take careful inventory of the sorts of mental states we have. Every mental state is not a feeling. We've got beliefs, thoughts, questions, fantasies. All sorts of stuff, and who knows, maybe they all come with an emotional component, but that doesn't make them all feelings. And it frustrates me to see conversation turned into one-dimensional emotional discourse. "I'm feeling you're wrong for giving me a 'B-' on this paper; I feel I deserve an 'A'." "I feel you're wrong for feeling you deserve an 'A'." What else is there to do with that? And doesn't that dilute the significance of feeling-talk where it is legitimate? I kinda think it might.

On being irrepressibly all-good

"In the world before Monkey, primal chaos reigned. Heaven sought order, but the phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown. The four worlds formed again and yet again, as endless aeons wheeled and passed. Time and the pure essences of Heaven all worked upon a certain rock, old as creation. It became magically fertile. The first egg was named 'Thought'. Tathagata Buddha, the Father Buddha said, 'With our thoughts, we make the world.' Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it came a stone monkey. The nature of monkey was irrepressible!!"

Such were the words kicking off the recently-attended workshop on philosophy and martial arts: a presentation about martial arts and media/pop culture, with an eye specifically toward a popular TV series in Australia called "Monkey," based on the 16th century Chinese novel "Journey to the West."

What with having monkey on the brain (not = "monkey mind"), and monkey tokens popping up all around (thanks, Dan!), you can imagine my walking into the conference room the first morning to see projected on the wall big as day the logo "Monkey" from that TV series. It was just hilarious. I go halfway across the globe, and still can't get away from the monkey.

If you'd like to see a video of the intro, complete with a bit of the show's theme song "Monkey Magic," see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iUMWy4hqAg&feature=player_embedded

Well, to hear the monkey affiliated with the nature of irrepressibility sounds quite acceptable, as opposed to its other connotations with chaos. Because - thinking rather fancifully - if I'm psychologically channelling monkeyness somehow, and my thoughts are also all about the all-good, then I'm all about being irrepressibly all-good. Right on! And according to the tale, the Monkey became a buddha too, in the end. That's not half-bad, either.

Reflections on Melbourne

Starting off with: why the hell do people clap when a plane lands?

It's not something I've encountered all that often in my flying experience, but it does happen occasionally, and it did when we landed in Sydney after a rather uneventful trans-oceanianic cruise.

I know it was uneventful because I was in the very back row, a.k.a. the whiplash section when it IS good and turbulent. I slept as much like a baby as one can when one is crammed into a teensy space next to a crabby woman who couldn't get a seat next to her husband and was thence committed to sighing, very loudly, at least once every five minutes at the injustice of it all.

Or maybe I misread her - maybe her sighs were heavy breathing induced by sitting so close to me?

Anyway, hardly a wobble for 13 hours and we land in Sydney to a big round of applause. I looked around at the people thinking, "have you lost your minds?" It would have been one thing if the energy would have been one of "woohoo! we're in Sydney! rock!" But it felt more like "praise Jesus we landed safely!" I've experienced kinda crazy landings, like in Hawaii when it's seemed for all the world like we'd scrape a wing on the runway for sure, by the tilt we'd hit just before the wheels made contact. If we landed safely in the midst of a lightning storm and hurricane-force winds, I'd understand it, too. But a routine landing after an uneventful albeit very long flight? Don't get it, and it seems almost like an insult to the pilots' skill level to applaud that. But maybe I'm weird.

Perhaps I digress. So: a quick stop in Sydney to change planes and head thenceforth to Melbourne.

It's a really nice little city! It is winter there now, so that was pretty interesting, switching seasons so abruptly, but it wasn't too odd, San Francisco weather being what it is and treating its fair residents to a blustery chill in the midst of June and July. But some of the trees being bare did token a definite change in seasons, as did the sidewalks of people with scarves and gloves even on days when in the sunshine it felt a full 65 degrees. That was interesting.

Their internet situation is not the same as it is here; it is neither ubiquitous nor cheap. So odds of going any old place and seeing people all zoned into their laptops are low. While for my first day when I was on the hunt for an internet cafe that was a sight that dismayed me in my desire for a web browsing fix, it turned out to be refreshing to be in an urban situation without people being plugged into their gizmos at every turn.

The exchange rate of Aussie dollar per U.S. dollar is quite nearly 1-to-1. But prices for things, in Melbourne at least, are quite high. For instance, my last dinner at a not-very-fancy-restaurant there I had a beer and a bowl of soup = $18.

So I'm glad I had arranged to stay on the cheap in a dorm on the campus of the University of Melbourne. The university is HUGE! I was over the moon at all the gothic architecture. I also loved the old-school feel of all the different colleges - it's different from how it's arranged here. Here, you've got the college of liberal arts, of sciences, etc. They might have an academic arrangement similarly there, too, but the colleges I speak of now are things like Queen's College (where I stayed), St. Mary's College, St. Hilda's College, etc. And these are something like different, gated, residential facilities - think something like the different houses in Hogwarts. It might be, though I don't know, that to be a student assigned to a particular college carries information such as that you're a liberal arts type or a science type. But it looked so interesting to see all these different colleges, all with their own assortments of dorms and dining halls and castle-y looking main buildings, and then, separately, the university itself.

I learned that the kind of coffee drink I like the most (no-foam latte) has a special name in Australia (a flat white). When I asked the difference between a flat white, and a regular latte, the answer was "a latte is a flat white, with foam," and the difference between a flat white and a cappuccino is "a cappuccino is a flat white, with foam." As I learned it, back in my barrista days, "latte" means "milk," period. Tenley, you must have trained me weird.

Did a LOT of walking. That being the case, the whole phenomenon of getting used to driving on the opposite site of the road, in the opposite side of the car, from what is standard here affected me only indirectly. It gave me pause to be extra careful when crossing a street because I never felt exactly sure in which direction traffic would be coming from and didn't want to become a traffic fatality because I only checked to the left before crossing when the traffic was coming from the right, or vice versa.

What was funny, is that their leftward (and our (U.S.) rightward) tendencies express themselves in places I didn't realize. For instance, in places where there'd be moving walkways, at first I'd catch myself just in time before trying to walk forward on the walkway on the right which was turning in the direction toward me. In other words, to move forward, you take the walkway on the left.

More frequently, the Australian leftward tendencies were apparent from the near-collisions I'd have with other pedestrians on the sidewalks. I'd see someone approaching, and in accordance with habit, I'd veer over to the right side of the sidewalk. The approaching Australian, probably working the same kind kind of impact-avoidance habit, would likewise veer, but to his or her LEFT. Which put the person right back into my pathway, at which sight I would nudge further to my right. Which would trigger the approaching person to nudge further to his or her left. I'm not kidding! This happened couple times before I finally noticed the pattern - winding up with both of us being squished up alongside a building and heading straight for each other. And then there was that time in the jam-packed full of people Queen Victoria's Market where in heading to the right got me caught into a flow of people moving in the direction opposite to that which I wanted.

After becoming conscious of it, I'd deliberately move leftward in the face of another oncoming pedestrian, and didn't have another problem with it. The experience led to an interesting conversation I had with a fellow, who happened to be from Melbourne, when I was in the security line at LAX on my return trip. I mentioned something about this "pass to the left" thing and he had an "aha!" moment, when he said that explained the difficulties he had experienced walking about here in the U.S., in nearly colliding with other pedestrians as well. A pleasant bit of unexpected strangeness.

Took pictures of things that caught my attention (see my "Melbourne" album if you're interested). But also learned that in a trip that involves me working, the time prior to my official presentation of labor is largely consumed by (over-)preparing for my official presentation of labor. Which is to say, I don't think I got to enjoy Melbourne as much as I could have; would that I have had time afterward to really relax and take in more sights.

But the workshop went very well and I met some excellent people. And I definitely want to go back to Australia again, but maybe in a warmer month, and hopefully one with some clearer nights. Didn't get to see the Southern Cross for the first time; nights were consistently overcast. And though I could hear that the birdsongs were different from what I'm used to here, I should very much like to see more of the wildlife than I got to in a city.

So: things for the future. Return to Australia, in the warm weather, and get more into the country. And the beaches. Oh, and don't get sick, or stay long enough that if I do, I have time to get over it and enjoy the country in full health!