Bloopers

Yesterday—that would be Tuesday, I guess—we did business going first to a broker who confused and perplexed the hell out of us with his talk of genni maes (whatever the hell those are) mars (whatever the hell those are), but Carol managed to get the money her mother her left divided up (between her and her sister) and then we went to a bank to make the wire transfers from another account Mrs. Press had there and as soon as I saw the three women in charge of what was going on I got up and left immediately because I just knew I couldn’t stand watching three incompetents make a wire transfer….and sure enough, when I came back, Carol said it had been hell and had she not been there to direct the three it would never have gotten done, but was done while I was sitting at a Starbucks tired out of my mind and about to scream at all those people screaming over their cell phones many of them in foreign tongues that I could not identify at all.

seagul

 

So finally we got to the little hotel in downtown SD where we planned to stay the night down by the water so we could walk down there and vacation a tiny bit, but—what do you know—their boiler had blown its top and they had no heat at all.  We checked out the room but you could have stored frozen food in there so they found another room for us at a Hampton Inn along an ugly strip of motels and fast food joints, right next to the damn railroad tracks.  So the room looks ok but the TV goes on and off of its own accord when ever the hell it feels like it as if a ghost is screwing with the remote.  So Carol calls down and finally Gustavo comes up, the TV guy for the building, and shows me how to unplug the TV to keep it from going on at night while we are sleeping because he says the TV picks up signals from cells and all manner of electronic apparatus.

 

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So then later on after we had a good dinner at an Italian place, I plug the TV in but we can only get one channel.  I monkey around with the cords in the back so finally we get more than one channel but only half the ones we are supposed to get.  So Gustavo comes back up and checks it out  and decides the thing needs a whole new box and he goes down to get one and get it programmed at the front desk but I mess with some cords in the back because a connection seems bad and bingo we get all the channels though of course there is nothing at all worth watching, except for episodes of that purposefully disgusting Family Guy, which was pretty awful except for one inspired bit with the bloopers and outtakes of that Osama guy making a video tape threatening to take out the Western World.  And while we are watching the bad TV people keep trying to break into our room because they can’t read numbers I guess and so they rattle the door knob when their key won’t work, and then people come rapping at the door saying they are all looking for Mr. Kim and Carol says Mr. Kim is not in the room but they might try the door right next to ours because some really popular person seems to be in that room.  Lord Knows what Mr. Kim is up to but he is in high demand.

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So all and all the trip served to confirm me in my opinion that the United States is falling apart right before my eyes, that things have become far too complex for anybody to manage properly, and that cell phones should be banned from any and all public places.  People using them outside of their cars and their homes should be forced to go stand in the places reserved for people who smoke.

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I got a strong vibe from that seagull right outside our hotel window, so I took a pic.

The second one is the fore mast of the Star of India an actual sailing ship in the SD museum of old ships.

The last one is the main mast of the Star.  I like all the lines. 

Clan Gathering

The flight to SD went well; rented car and drove straight out to Brother Dave and Sister in Law Teresa and we have not moved since.  We sit and talk.   We are in Spring Valley; but it is not the Spring Valley I remember at all.  New freeways and roads everywhere and traffic, traffic, traffic.

 Here we are attempting to communicate by computer while sitting directly across from each other.

 
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That’s Sister in Law, Teresa to the left, then Carol, then Brother Steve and I would be off to the right sitting in front of my computer, were I not taking this picture. 

Lucky Lindy

Carol and I will be heading down to SD via aeroplane tomorrow about mid-morning, I guess.  We just don’t want to drive through LA ever again and especially not now at the Holidays, plus a new airline is flying out of SB that offers rates half as much as American Eagle was charging for there and back.  So we are going the elderly route and will sit on our butts up in the air for a mere 55 minutes before landing at old Lindberg field, named after the Lindberg who flew solo across the Atlantic in what I think was called the Spirit of Saint Louis, though it was mostly built in SD.

I am going along to keep Carol company while she does bank, accountant, broker stuff with her mother’s trust and so they can see me in the flesh and conclude I am not an active terrorist on the basis of my complexion and advanced years.  I don’t look forward to the trip, not for any particular reason maybe, except that I have too much mushroom in me and not like to have my environment changed that much. 

But I will get to see Brother Dave, and Brother Steve, and Sister in Law Teresa, along with their Boys, David and Stephen, and also Stephen’s two kids, Jake and Blake, and wife Julie tomorrow evening.  So we will sit and talk and eat and stay over at Brother Dave’s and head out early Tuesday morning to go up towards Escondido to visit banks and such.

Well, that safe we bought was a real crap out.  We got it bolted it to the floor, and I must say it is really bolted, but then Carol couldn’t get it to lock when she closed it.  So I closed it, with a bang, and it locked, and we unlocked it and Carol tried it again, and it didn’t work.  So I closed it with a bang and gave the handle a jerk, and the damn handle broke right off in my hand—some sort of composite plastic.  That shouldn’t have happened because I am like no Jack LaLanne or something to that effect.  So now we have this useless safe bolted to the floor just when I would like to throw the freaking thing out the window.

I was sorry to hear Cousin Janet has the pneumonia; I had that stuff last fall, I guess it was, and it is nasty and lingers and drains you of energy.  And at the holidays no less….though I must say I have real mixed feelings about the holidays, though I won’t go into that now.

BC sent us the most Christmassy card she could and I must say it is impressively Christmassy.  This picture makes the card seem like a picture in a magazine, but it isn’t—it’s one of those fold out cards with a complete multilayered Christmas scene.  That’s my finger over to the left so you can tell it’s a card because I am holding it and taking a picture of it at the same time, which pretty much maxes out my multi-tasking abilities.

 

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December 14, 2007

So I have just returned from my birthday dinner.  On the way we stopped at an auto shop to get a new brake light for Carol’s Honda, since she had been cited for not having one.  I am bloated and somewhat groggy because we went to the nearby Sizzler that was held up by some crazy person a few months back.  I mean who would hold up a Sizzler:  hand over all your steak!

So far it’s been a good birthday because I have not hit anything or banged my head against the wall or thrown anything.  I haven’t even cursed out the TV.  But then I haven’t watched it yet.

Yesterday I started cursing out this while guy seated in my car.  I wanted to turn right as did all of the five cars in front of me.  But here comes this pedestrian and the first person in line being ultra polite I guess didn’t cut in front of the guy, so we had to all had to sit and watch this jerk amble, nay saunter, across the walk with an ipod wire sticking out of one ear and his cell phone plastered to the other yakking away as if there was nobody in the damn world other than his holiness.  And in the middle of the road he pauses to let fly a “snot rocket.”  Not only was he slow; he was damn disgusting.  I wanted to rip out his heart out and shove it down his throat!

But so far today, I have thrown no fits nor have I felt particularly fit to be tied.  I was annoyed at the club when the guy at the front desk, whom I don’t know from Adam (not like my student who works there) wished me a happy birthday because somehow when he typed in my ID number the computer told him it was my birthday—the personal impersonal touch you know—and so he said, happy birthday but without much conviction, I must say. 

And the only workout machine left was the oldest one of all and it doesn’t ask you your age or weight, so I didn’t get to punch in 62, as I had planned and was looking forward to doing.

At the Sizzler I said I was a senior and wanted to order off the senile menu which I did, getting a 6 ounce steak and a baked potato with every damn thing in the world on it, what with real butter and sour cream, and then there is the salad bar where I had real Thousand Island dressing on a salad with real bits of bacon sprinkled on top as well as some sort of macaroni.  I used to make my own Thousand Island dressing years ago, by throwing some real mayonnaise into a bowl and mixing in some catsup to get the right sort of color and then I would pour in sweet pickle juice and pepper it up a little.  Now I used your damn balsamic vinegar something or other, one serving of which is 15 calories.

When I ate my baked potato I also ate the skin.  I was told that the skin was the most nutritious part, so I always ate it and it helped to fill me up besides.  I don’t understand it when people don’t eat the skin of the potato.  That’s the best part.  And when I had my fried chicken leg—back in the old days—I would always eat that crunchy part at the end of the leg and then I would bite off the end of the leg and suck out the marrow—because I was told that was the best part and it helped to fill me up too.

But now I am all growed up and have my own money and go to the Sizzler and eat till I am bloated—my god they even have onion rings!—and all for 8.99 off the senior senile menu.

If I remembered any of my other birthdays—which I don’t—I would probably rank this one in the top five, I guess.

Thanks to all who have sent me birthday best wishes.  I appreciated them.

Thank you.

They Say It’s Your Birthday

Tomorrow, if I go to work out, my workout machine will ask me, as it does every time I work out on it, how much I weigh.  I will punch in 165.  And then it will ask me how old I am and for the first time ever in my life, I will punch in 6 damn 2.  That’s 62.  So the Brothers are right in suggesting my birthday is this week; and Brother Dan was dead on when he said he thought it was December 14.

Yep, I was born—do the math—on December 14, 1945.  According to my calculations and something Joan said that I didn’t really need to do know I was probably conceived sometime in April in that year.

So I was cooking in the womb or just about to be around the time FDR died on April 12, 1945 and about the time that Hitler guy killed his ugly ass, April 20, 1945.  Of course, I was pretty much a primordial state of cellular development at that time, but it freaks me out to think even the gestational me was around when FDR walked and Hitler was down in his bunker doing whatever crazy shit he was doing at the time.

I am making no connection except chronological here and not at all suggesting that either FDR’s or Hitler’s spirits transmigrated to my developing being.

1945 just seems so damn long ago.  Even to me and I was there.  I can’t imagine how long ago it must seem to my students.  The damn dark ages, I guess….when the world was in black and white and before it got color or High Def.  WWII is pretty much Low Def and the sound isn’t too good either.

So let’s say the average student I teach was born—well, about 1987.  That means I was born about 42 years before most of my students saw the light of day.  And what the hell do I know about the world 42 years before I was born; damn, that would be 1903, I guess.  I think that other Roosevelt was President, Teddy.  But I don’t know who came after, right after. Was it Wilson?  No, there had to be somebody in between.  So I guess I really shouldn’t worry that much about what students don’t seem to know about the past.  Though I was a bit alarmed that one thought the Great Depression was in the 50’s.  And another thought the war to end all wars was WWII.

So tomorrow’s my birthday.

I have changed the Moody Guy page where I put up what I call songs; I have been revamping it and put up songs that I have tried to write over the last two years or so.  These songs are pretty depressing dealing as they do mostly with death.  Also they are not very musically appealing.  But I have been working on my software stuff, so I have stuck in a little drum.  And occasional effects, to lighten the load a little.  Also my voice is wearing out. I am working on another batch of songs.  Love songs!  Can you believe?  But if I sing them like I sing the ones I just put on the web these will be some pretty downer Love Songs. 

No More Apnea!

As I noted a while back, I went in for another sleep apnea test, all attached to cords and wires and stuff and had a terrible night’s sleep.  Yesterday finally I had my appointment with the pulmonary guy who specializes in apnea.  My blood pressure was up of course since being within ten feet of a doctor plunges me into an anxiety ridden state.

But hell this time the news was good I suppose. No more apnea, according to the test, so said the doctor.  All gone.  My sleep efficiency is sort of lower at 73%, meaning I had trouble getting to sleep and I may have returned to consciousness a few times during the night of that test, but I am no longer suffocating myself to death with my own tongue, soft palette and uvula attached.

 

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That’s a relief—I can’t describe the hell I went through with those damn sleep apnea masks.  Burping, farting, hissing noises in the mask, lash marks across my face from trying to tighten the things so I wouldn’t hear those hissing noises.  And I would wake up sometimes with the tube attached to the masked wrapped clean around my neck.  But I stuck it out because clearly the apparatus helped to clear up the dark fatigue I was feeling at that time.

Then I began to lose weight.  I am convinced of course that the weight loss is due to some disease eating me up inside and that I am slowly wasting away, due either to that disease or pre-mature aging.  I got up to 202.  I was watching the protein, but not the carbs and I didn’t know the med I was on at the time, Effexor, was a known weight gain promoter.  Then I cut back on the carbs, started eating all kinds of green stuff, and got off the Effexor, and whap! Since spring of last year (2006) I dropped 40 pounds.  At least I was at 162 pounds yesterday (so that would be 40) though I have learned that weight can vary two pounds or better depending on one’s bowel movement cycle.

So the weight loss seems to have cleared the apnea issue. But that still leaves the snoring problem.  I wake Carol up with that snoring, so the doctor gave me a referral to see the ear, noise and throat people to see if they think cutting off some of my soft palette and my uvula would help with that.  I sure don’t like waking Carol up but swear and be damn if I am going to have them hack at my soft palette, which according to the doctor, goes “all the way back” in my case.  Where else is it supposed to go but all the way back I wondered?

Goddamn that soft palette that goes all the way back and that enormous uvula!

If it ain’t one thing it’s another.  And I am still dragging my ass from point A to point B possibly because as the doctor indicated—and I know anyway—depression is associated with fatigue.

So I am back to square one, but, happily, without a sleep apnea mask.  Now when I go through the air port security thing, I won’t have to led off to the side while they check to see if the cpap (that’s the machine that pumps the air into the tube that goes into the mask) is a bomb.

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Now does that look like a happy camper?  Or what? 

Dialectically Speaking

I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the years trying to understand the dialectic. There are different kinds of dialectic. Plato’s for example. But I am thinking particular of Hegel’s. He laid out the "structure" or "form" of the dialectic pretty clearly. Thesis; Antithesis; Synthesis. Usually this form if represented pictorially by a triangle:

 

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This looks simple enough, I guess. It’s the kind of things teachers like to draw and then stop talking about it. Because actually the whole damn thing is damn complicated. Hegel appears to claim for example that the synthesis does not represent a canceling out or answer to or something like that to the first two terms (thesis, antithesis) but that the first two terms are lifted up and preserved in the synthesis. He uses the word "aufhebung" frequently translated as sublated." Or to put it another way, nothing is lost in the process of the dialectic.

I have been interested in this partly because I am interested in the dialectic and partly because I am interested in the development of the psyche-soma. In the development of the psyche soma–nothing is cancelled out, everything is retained starting in the womb. Without the first primordial steps in the womb, none of the later steps in the development would be possible. Or for example, some people are concerned–whether they should be or not–when their child begins to walk and never crawls. Crawling is a prelude–and some thing necessary–for the next state of walking.

So in these diagrams I am trying…with great difficult..to fathom the notion of sublation. Yes, the primal steps are necessary. But more than that the steps that come later are not "higher" or "superior" stages of development–since all the steps in the development are necessary to the overall developmental process. It is hard to call the primal steps inferior when no steps would be possible without them.

The following represents my attempt to think about this critical issue of sublation (also related to the negation of the negation).

level1

 

Here I plug some simple concepts into the dialectical triangle. Sometimes under thesis I have seen A and under antithesis I have see Not A. The synthesis would be then (A=not A). This suggests a pretty unstable configuration and one reason the more logically oriented have dismissed the dialectic entirely. How can A equal Not A? But here comes the negation of the negation (necessary to preserve the sublation as it appears in the synthesis). A is negated by Not A which turns out to be A in the synthesis as the negation of the negation (not A).

So I write in yes and then no which is the opposite of yes; and I arrive at Maybe–which preserves both the yes and the no–but in qualified form. The definitive yes and the definitive no are both cancelled out, yet preserved (I think) in "maybe."

Here’s level two:

 

level2

 

Here again, I attempt to preserve, sublate, all the terms so far encountered. The prior synthesis splits to become maybe yes or maybe no. Now things get even more tricky. Hegel’s dialectic feels like it jumps; and people have complained about the transitions in the Phenomenology of Mind. Like, OK, I buy this, but how the hell do you get in the above diagram from maybe yes maybe no to Who Knows? Hell, it seems like a logical step to me…Maybe Yes, Maybe No..who knows? Also I think I am doing what Hegel does overall which is to move from the flat assertion of the truth of something–yes this is so, no this is not–to the role of the human subject in the construction of "knowledge."

Take the nature and nurture debate. Personally I consider this a completely sterile chicken-egg debate. Scientists have tried to study the subject statistically and come up with the surprising conclusion, hey, as far as we can tell it’s 50% nature, 50% nurture. Freaking idiots. More alarmingly though as I see it is the fact that this question is viewed sub species aeternitatis (i.e. outside of and beyond time). Given this perspective, the subject (i.e. the person who is nurtured or natured) is completely left out of the equation BECAUSE the subject exists only in and by means of time. So there may be a sort of logic to my "who knows" because I am returning to and rooting the prior terms of my dialect in a subject, a who, that exists in time

OK…here comes level 3:

 

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Well, I am not entirely satisfied with this third step. True, I have preserved the terms, all terms so far, in the thesis and then in the antithesis; but the synthesis strikes me as lame. Maybe I should drop that "can" and just go with "Who knows maybe yes, maybe no." Or perhaps I am getting at the idea or the question of whether or not it is possible to claim that one knows "confusion," or "conflict," or "contradiction," or "ambiguity" or "paradox." And perhaps also if one can claim to know "ambiguity" is one claming to know the unknowable as "ambiguity" and so in the process closing off the dialectic completely.

I don’t know frankly. Frankly I don’t know what it is even that I am trying to think. But this may say something about the dialectic generally; it’s a bit of a trip; it can turn this way or that at any one of its hinges. The idea here–if there is an idea at all–Hegel would probably call it a notion, not an idea–is "knowable" only in its unfolding.

Enough unfolding for now. But I am pretty sure this idea of the dialectic is related to the bildung and the bildung in turn is related to a view of the education as developmental or as rooted in the development of the individual.

 

Citrix

Brother Dan works for a software/service firm called Citrix.  I used one of their products a few years back before I knew they were located right here in town.  I subscribed to “Go to My PC.”  Windows comes with a lame-o version; go to Accessories, under that go to Communication; click on remote desktop and if you have all the right numbers you can hook up your home computer to say your computer at work, of if you are off traveling somewhere you can use it to hook up directly with your home computer.  And I do mean directly.  If you subscribe to Go to my PC it works real easily and once you get it to work, you can click on a spot and immediately up will come the screen of the PC you are trying to access, I mean the desktop and through that you can go directly into the distant PC as if it was sitting right there in front of you.  Say you need a document from your distant PC on the PC in front of you, you can go in, find the document, and email it to yourself to the PC in front of you.  They sell other more complicated services for business, and well, it’s a good product and they have been making money hand over fist.  If I were a traveling business man, I couldn’t live without it.

 
Brother Dan came by yesterday and he took me over to the new digs that Citrix is in the process of moving into—their corporate office.  Turns out it’s less than a mile from where I live, in a pack of buildings I hadn’t noticed before.

 

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Here is Brother Dan in his new office.

 

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Here’s a view of the big office.  Note the snazzy carpet and the open ceiling effect.  Designed Iexpect to make the whole room feel more open.
 
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Here’s Dan in what will be the "game room"–can you believe–of the entire office floor. 
 
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Here’s what Brother Dan is looking at.
 
I don’t know why these pics. came up fuzzy.  My little camera is usually pretty trustworthy.

 

Mixed Feelings

I have mixed feelings about everything.  I am sort of a master of ambivalence.  When my buddy and I were starting up the union and walking on thin ice with the administration and with our colleagues, sometimes—since he was more active in a daily way than I—he would come to me for a consult because he said I was the “conscience of the writing program.”  He was a funny guy and actually said things like that…

I felt sort of odd being the conscience of the writing program, because I didn’t know what that meant.  But he would have a bit of a dilemma about something; should we tell x what we had heard y say about z.  Or something to that effect.  Or should we hold a secret meeting to plan policy because d and e were disruptive.  And then I would say, well, I have mixed feelings, and go round and round looking at the question, all the time making the question less a matter of whether we should or not and more a matter of the nature of the question and what might be implied in it from a moral, ethical point of view, so in the end I wouldn’t be talking about the question at all, but about what it meant to be a human being, and the nature of decency, and the role of trust.  And he would listen and say, yes, you are right (not because I was right but because he knew he tended to think more in terms of strategy and power politics and I didn’t).

 

littlerain

 

 

 I was doing the mixed feelings thing this morning at the club.  We had a tiny bit of rain last night, finally.  One guy said, “Well, that wasn’t much rain.”  He seemed to be condemning the tiny bit of rain for being tiny, so I said, “Yes, but maybe it’s the amount we need right now to get the green stuff growing a bit on the hills, so if the next rain is a big one we won’t have flooding.”  And another guy said, he had gone out to check his garden and the rain hadn’t gone down very far, and I said, “Yes, but I bet your garden is happy for the little bit it got.”  “You are certainly right about that,” he said.  So I said, “But of course the weeds will be happy too.”

 

I think I do this all the time and am not even aware I am doing it.  My favorite sentence construction must be “yes, but.”  A student says something and I say why yes of course that’s right, I can see that.  But..”  I think the “yes, but” comes from some sort of attempt on my part to get the whole picture into focus.  This can cause problems because you can come across internal contradictions in your own thinking, and if you are trying to look at the whole you have to admit there’s a contradiction.

This one old guy has been talking at me for several days about Global Warming.  So, he says, “If there is Global Warming, why are these people, especially liberals, going on about rebuilding New Orleans.  Shouldn’t we just close the whole thing down?”  I felt hoist on my own petard because I believe there is global warming, and if there is then he might be right.  Just shut down New Orleans.  Then as I was talking with him, the whole question switched to another level.  This guy doesn’t believe there is global warming or let’s say he believes in it but not as a byproduct of humanity’s destructive habits, but because the globe is simply warming up as we go out of an ice age.  For him the whole global warming thing is beyond human control (and human responsibility).  In the face of this implacable reality “New Orleans” should be closed down; this would be the logical and rational response to a change in nature.  But since I believe Global warming is at least partly the result of human activity, I don’t see the warming thing as being quite as implacable.  Thus save New Orleans because who knows, if we change our ways a bit, it might not just disappear under 20 feet of water. 

 The guy I was talking to is not into “yes, but” thinking, he is more either/or.

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We had a little bit of rain yesterday, but the clouds are still hanging out….as they go further north.