$disanpoter

tilting at mountains

the nice thing about jet lag is that it builds solitude into even the most ambitious travel plans. like here on this overnight bus to bilbao with Bis sleeping, albeit fitfully, in the seat next to me, and darkness all around. it's close to 3 and i'm far from sleep. outside the terrain is growing hillier and more ragged, and i'm realizing the minor miscalculation in scheduling all our travels between destinations for times when i won't be able to take in the landscape. in the darkness, what i can mainly see are the texture of the wild grasses, the stretches between the larger bushes and trees, the smoother tracts of the dustier surfaces. they form a cadence in their passage across the bus window. It'll be interesting in the morning to see if it is as arid as this midnight vision suggest and it will hold any of the colors my mind anticipates...

a moment ago, we passed a random hill with 2 upright trees on it which looked almost exactly like an illustration of Don Quixote I once saw. i could be wrong, but i believe that's from an entirely different part of the country. just goes to show how willing a mind can be to find connections, yet it's still got me wondering about how much of what we see as fresh and new in works of art and literature is not so much to the credit of the creator as to their surroundings or the social context of their life - or not even that, so much as the difference (or differential, really) between what is familiar and real to them and what is familiar and real to us who are absorbing their work. not such a mind blowing thought, that...it's funny though, because i think it also highlights how much energy people can spend pursuing a contradictory ambitions of experiencing a different reality from their own (however temporarily) but also perpetually seeking out intersections among ones personal reality and that of others that serve only to reassure them that there is such a thing as commonality and communal experience.

where ever we are now along this route, there's a persistent glow along the horizon. it gives the impression of massive cities aglow, just behind the hills (or mountains, i suppose, though we're in them so i'm not sure of the right term, here), but then the road rises and the countryside is only vaguely dotted with towns or clusters. with the nature of my own thoughts, it's as if the landscape is playing tricks on me, feeding into my own skepticism about human connections. like it's winking at me.

...i'm going to have to read Don Quixote again; i remember too little of it...

location irritations

following up on the dorky data-based posts, i've spent a sizable chunk of the day researching options for a static resource that can be referenced dynamically to provide location information, because really, how many local, independently established copies of city-state-country data does the world need. it's a waste of effort and resources for every sales, product, mailing system to have it's own in-house set of tables for this information when they all must comply with rules and conventions established by national organizations. it's ridiculous and i resent the fact that i live in a world that hasn't come up with a better more widely adopted solution for this. oh...incidentally, this is a rant.

trust and violence

the new york times has an article today on bantu traditional belief in witchcraft fueling an upswing in instances of child abuse. the sociological explanation given for this is the continued strife and hardship in the area forcing families to seek out reasons for expelling from the family otherwise unsupportable children. its the darker side of the same traditions underlying ben okri's The Famished Road, so my reading of the article was peopled by the colorful spirit world described therein. It certainly brought insight into the commentary that the police too often believe in witches and will back away from cases a child abuse where the child is suspected of being a witch. i found myself caught in the eternal trap of wanting to use logic to combat religion. if you accept that if you believed to be true what the actors believed to be true, you would be likely to behave in the same manner, how do you go about telling them they are wrong because you do not believe in the outcome of their actions. so i want a world where children are not strung up by their ankle and beaten. i'm not convinced that world is possible. on a micro level pastors and social-workers try to intervene, but beneath this particular manifestation lies a sociological need to preserve resources. without one form of witchcraft there would be another. on a macro level we can try to balance the distribution of the worlds resources, support micro-credit, but then there are just increasing costs. teutonic plates shift; water-levels rise; the ferocity of storms increase;  houses collapse; cities crumble; breadwinners are crippled or killed and life moves forward; civilization caves to unrest.
and then you ask yourself if those children survive, will they too believe in witches at opportune times. you remember last week's article on cognitive dissonance and suspect that when the conditions are right few are immune to believing the most convenient explanation at the time. you wonder if you yourself would be complacent in the deaths of innocents and have no answer, and so you go out for a drink with your friends.

burn baby

there's a dramatic reading tonight of the Daughters of Troy that i'm thinking of going to. like the touring cabaret, though, it's a thing i would want to see with a few others so that i can have people to talk about with after. i've learned this. somethings one can get just as much out of alone; other things gain there value when the serve as a starting point for discussion among interested parties. not that it has to be deep and serious discussion; it can be casual and light or boisterous and punchy or any number of things. it's just that some experiences forms of are meant to be absorbed by the many and something is lost when they are instead absorbed only as a solitary mind. i was disappointed not to see the cabaret, but it would not have been the thing i was disappointed to miss even if i'd gone. Daughters of Troy is a bit less solidly located in that range of things i'd want to see in a group, so i may go even if no one else does. also, it's at mcnally robinson, and the stone there suits my mood today.
my mother's coming in tomorrow; we're supposed to meet in the morning to go to bloomingdales. i'm really not looking forward to this. i hate bloomingdales; it's a waste of resources, even if they're not my resources. also, my mood's been shifty lately. i find myself craving time to myself and still getting myself into time with others - because individually, i do want to spend time with each of those people. it was easier when it was all fluid-like and intoxicated.
other than that the last two weeks have been fairly rewarding. i'm stilling liking my work environment, and all the people i've met there. it's a nice mix. i saw my friend cecilia when she was in from san fransisco, and i always enjoy catching up with her. i've promised to compile a cog sci book list for her and i'm looking forward to the review of my own readings (and planned readings) that that will necessitate. also, i went to a developers meet-up for facebook applications, which inspired a near frenzy of information-structuring and -facilitating pipedreams that drove me through the first half of the week in hyper and high spirits - though, as you can probably tell already from the tone of all this, that's faded somewhat.
the latter half of the week has returned me to one of the major philosophical currents of my life: the nature of friendship and interconnectedness, of possibility and often its lack, and the minor-tragedies and pleasures that come from that.

when i don't want to be feeling what i'm feeling, i tend to flip it into a drifting contemplation of the literary or folk-historic tradition of it. thus the event bulletin for Daughters of Troy set me to thinking again about how very interminably long we've been subject to these hopes, fears, horrors, joys, insecurities, intractibilities, sufferings, humors, rages, snatches at eternity or glimpses of truth that compel us through life and generations - of how long we've been these human creatures that we are. thus, my frustrations with pottery class last night and my own temperament going into it steering my thoughts on the platform this morning towards selkies and short germanic peoples in the woods and by the sea weathering darkness and blustery winters and the high aching scent of solitude in the night air.

the dangers of sure why not *

certain trends remain constant when i attend parties: for starters, when they're over i feel like i've barely spent anytime with any of my friends. also, i'll let conversations fall off mid-sentence to go dance or to follow the tug of a hand that's leading my own (though i'm selective with which hands can do this), and most significantly, i go into that willfully distributed consciousness mode i've mentioned before where i delay analysis and absorb experience. the drawback is that in this mode, i'm more likely to let someone have my number who in a more alert state i would recognize immediately as someone i'm not going to be interested in.
i think perhaps, also, i'm more attractive in this state than i am as my normal self, because people will latch on to me, change their plans and come back to where i am, hang around all evening, etc - and this doesn't really happen when i don't let go. this is a side consideration and one i'm not terribly thrilled about.
so anyway, i gave my number to a guy at a party on friday. he called multiple times on saturday without leaving a message. so i called him back in the evening to say - hey got the phone calls, but can't talk. let's talk sometime later. actually i don't remember if that was saturday or sunday. but today he calls and leaves a message at 7:30. it's a busy night for me and i'm not so happy (see previous post). i don't really feel like talking to a potential date. 11:27 rolls around; there's a text message: "hey - are you asleep?"
now, i can understand that this may just be impatience. but from a guy who got out of the cab friday night at my stop instead of continuing on, who could have watched me head down the block and up the stairs to my building, this is kinda creepy. hell, it's downright creepy either way.
so to recap, things not to do if you'd like to maintain someone's interest. don't -

• get their number on your way out, then decide come back and spend the remainder of the party at their side
• call and not leave a message
• call multiple times without leaving a message
• call multiple times until they pick up
• call and then text them asking why they haven't called (this one didn't happen)
• call and then text them within a half hour of midnight to ask if they're still up

unless, you didn't get their number and instead you hooked up, then calling multiple times without a message or calling right before midnight and asking if they're still up would fall under booty-call behavior and could conceivably be amenable depending on how the initial hook-up went.

creepy boys.

* or, 'when boys consider any gesture of interest tantamount to desperation'

il faudrait l'inventer

there's been more discussion regarding a permanent position for me at the place i've been temping at. it's exciting, but it also inevitably comes with reflections about the path my life is tacking versus the one expected of me, not just professionally but socially, romantically, etc. today, these reflections hit me in the form of an image (and a fairly cliched one at that): an empty road through barren land and a figure who has just stepped off it and stands looking toward the horizon the road leads to. of course, being delivered an unsolicited vision from your mind comes with it's own chain of amendments. the idea that the road can't be so easily regained, that in this representationi of divergent paths it should be something that is slightly out of reach once left - a path through an endless chasm of only air or at least a floating strip above the figures head. and this change in turn, recalls the fall. lucifer and choice, free will. the heal upturned, the moment where the ball of the foot remains in contact with the path departed but the body has passed the point of balance and must, has no choice but to continue.

none of which is to say i'm unhappy with this situation or feel i've made profound mistakes. it's just interesting how starkly my mind portrays it to me - how very real and ever-present is the sense that my life is developing counter to this other set of options rather than simply emerging from a course of its own.

brain child of the bubble chart

i was standing by the cubicle of my collegue CRD, recounting how i had accidentally quelched a conversation the other night by expressing my aversion to Michael Moore (and being gratified with CRD's parallel revulsion while watching an interview of MM) when a minor epiphany revealed itself to me in the form of a phrase: "brain-child of the bubble chart." Just below the surface my mind had been plasmating...following a series of links that went sloppy logic => gleefully, spritely concept hopping => brain-storming exercises => bubble charts => hippie era education reform movements.

i've yet to fully research this impression i have of him -and i've also yet to see Sicko, so it's possible if improbable that his MO has changed since i last checked - but from what i know, his narrative style in film and writing remains is an exercise in fully exploring the fecundity of a-logical reasoning, in how far you can stretch the boundaries of association. it's not so much that the individual expositions lack foundation or basis, nor is it that there is no connection between the things he juxtaposes; it's simply that he goes about merrily stringing together a confluence of data with no real effort to properly relate the nature, scope, or strength of the connections he makes. my skepticism towards him is similar to that i developed for deconstructive literary readings. one can place some merit in the credibility of the information presented, but the leaps and conclusions are immediately suspect. well, but i'll still have to see Sicko. the point was, i feel like perhaps i understand the man and what he was going for better now, having related him to the bubble chart exercises. it almost inspires me to cut him a bit more slack.

interestingly, from this perspective he reminds me of both the subject and the author of that other book i read recently, Finding Atlantis. There, too, the thrill of pursuing potential connections and detailing interesting tangents ultimately removed from the narrative its original intent.

I is for Individual

Last week sometime, a conversation i was having with a friend touched upon the term 'soul' and its relevance in a world of science and empirical data. it wasn't a particularly unique topic of conversation in the history of my interpersonal relationships;* what made it noteworthy was being succinctly informed that the reason i could get away with continuing to use the term 'soul' was because i had effectively redefined it  in such away that it no longer contained those elements that conflicted with an agnostic or atheist worldview. it was quite the good point, though my summary probably leaves you wondering about that. in pointing out that my concept of a soul was more a concept of inviolate individualism, it got me reflecting on how central that concept it to the values that govern my life. (and a little bit worried about them)

it went 'soul' -> soul = non-biological/psychological essence -> inviolate individual. and that got me thinking about how central the concept of individualism is to my system of values. it's not just that i place a premium on my own individual experiences; it that my understanding of other people and their lives begins with the axiom of their equal status as individuals. my impulses to contribute to the world and what efforts i make to be a better person or volunteer more or what have you, they all begin not with a vague notion of all the people out there to be helped, but of all the individuals out there who deserve to have the individuality of their experiences and efforts respected. i don't know how to explain it better. my concept of what it means to be human begins with being an individual. it's not that that's a unique concept; i mean we as a culture have tried to differentiate ourselves on the basis of reason or sentiences or self-awareness or other cognitive features for quite sometime, but today i'm less worried about that than about the possibility that i might be overlooking some very crucial elements of being human by over-prioritizing this notion of the individual.

or i was. then i went looking for my post a while back on the so small self and found this one instead, which is chock full of half-cloaked secrets but is really about how important it is to not only be an independent individual.

anyway. i don't think i'm wrong in the intensity of my appreciation for people as individuals. i think it's one of the few things that redeem me for not always being emotionally up to par, but i do think that maybe i'm less able to see those aspects of humanity that don't emerge from an underlying premise that we are all unique autonomous creatures.

*this can be explained by my habit of talking about the things i haven't made up my mind on yet

it looks grey but it's really green

so facebook has this 'wellesley flyer' thing. i'm not sure where it's getting the content for that - i assume all y'alls other colleges also get facebook flyers too - but regardless, today's flyer is about this do-it-yourself ink cartridge refiller. Both eco-friendly (in enabling you to reuse your cartridges) and cost-cutting, it looks pretty nifty. if only i were an office using ink with a frequency to justify the $150ish cost of purchasing it.

post script on the facebook flyer...you only get them if someone's willing to pay to reach you as a target demographic. comforting, aye?

i am amused by this: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=seattle+to+moscow&layer=&sll=48.21109,-39.288454&sspn=112.000672,286.875&ie=UTF8&z=2&ll=48.458352,-42.1875&spn=111.756931,286.875&om=1

http://www.google.com/googlegulp/faq.html

April 1st may become my new favoritest holiday.