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I should simply not own a cell phone. I have a pronounced dislike for telephones in general, and I'm afraid it manifests in my acting out toward my cell phone. Sometimes I leave it in my backpack. Sometimes I let the battery run down so that it doesn't even start up when I turn it on. Often I forget to turn it on at all. Today, I left it in the glove compartment of the car. Actually, I think I left it in there yesterday and only found it about fifteen minutes ago. Um, whoops.
Sadly, my error today meant I missed a call from randomgirl which I had been looking forward to receiving. And, let me tell you something interesting about cell phones; if you leave them in your glove compartment, and you receive a voice mail message, the message will sound as though someone is standing next to the other person's phone doing a tap dance or possibly playing spoons while the caller is trying to talk to your voice mail. Although it sounds kind of spiffy, you can't quite make out what said caller is saying. Something about a condo, something about freaking out, something about trying to call later. You can make out the tone of voice, though, which in this case, sounds exhausted and just a wee bit distressed.
I am heading out to the beach tomorrow, and perhaps I should take the phone so I can call randomgirl since being able to talk to her was the motive for the phone in the first place.
Daisy, daisy
Give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a fancy marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two
Clonk sold the kayaks in anticipation of our move from waving waves to waving fields. This saddened us both greatly, but the proceeds from the sale have been partially re-invested in a more plains-appropriate mode of transport and recreation: a beautiful Specialized tandem bicycle! The last tandem Clonk bought was a very heavy but cute old green Schwinn, which had no gears and which bit my knees when I got out of the seat to pedal up hills. Cool-looking but not functional. Sucked in fact.
This new beauty is an ugly metallic fuschia; however, it has twenty-eight gears, is incredibly light, has amazing hydraulic brakes, and has a ride as smooth as good cream sauce. We took it up the biggest hills in our neighborhood the other day, and had no trouble. I got out of the seat and my knees were safe. Riding is very fast and easy with two engines, and it's super fun to have a nice long conversation unimpeded by the multitude of two-bike distractions.
Happy happy happy.
I am off to Vancouver with Quippish, who has reserved us a glass hotel room in between downtown and Stanley Park. We've decided to spend a lot of time in the whirlpool there, and Quippish is jonesing for room service, from which I'll probably abstain. She loves spending money, I don't.
Interesting thing about Quippish is her love of, nay obssession with, games of any kind. I generally hate games. Won't play them except on occasion with Quippish when absolutely forced. She'll probably bring something this weekend; she's always trying to find the game that I'll like. I admit that I enjoyed charades in college, and I always liked this game a friend made up. Each person gets several peices of paper and draws a picture on each leaving space at the bottom for words. All pictures are collected and shuffled and then dealt out to each person. Once you have your pictures, you order them however you like and write a narrative to accompany them. Drawing + fiction-writing = fun! More often than not, though, I have (usually inadvertently) ruined games for others by not taking them seriously.
I dated a guy once whose family we spent a lot of time with, and they always always always played games. Of course, you had to participate or you were a spoilsport, anti-social freak, and this fairly conservative Southern family already thought I was weird. I played as little as possible and tried to be a gracious onlooker when not playing. He was a wrestling coach, so I guess I should have expected game-love ran in the family, but I loathed the games and still think it was part of why he and I broke up. I have often felt frustrated by the way games structure social interactions except when playing Canasta with my grandma, and that was because it was usually a time she and I would spend all to ourselves. And, I loved spending time with her, which is the same reason I'm willing on occasion to play games with Quippish.
Quippish is utterly devoted to games, plays something regularly, and almost always wins pretty much anything she tries. Connect Four, wrestling, foosball, tennis, Scrabble, poker. She's always calling to tell me about some new amazing thing she's won: the wrestling contest was the best. And, she always really gets into it, learning the ins and outs of each game. Her strange litany of two- and three-letter words from her Scrabble days were a particular cause for concern. So, I was worried when she picked up poker. Gambling is not something I would usually support, and really I don't support her gambling, but she seems pretty even-headed about it, keeping track of how much she wins and loses, using her winnings to finance participation in new games . . . and our hotel room this weekend, so I can't complain too much. But, I do check in, probably to her annoyance, to make sure she is being wise about this habit. I'm pretty sure her wife keeps tabs on it too. And, my anxiety is reduced because I know she always gets bored of a game after a while (quite often after she's mastered it to her liking), so I figure she'll grow tired of poker as well.
So, I'm off to pick her up at the train station at noon, and then we'll drive up to BC for a weekend of lounging, noshing, and goofing, hopefully not punctuated by too much gaming.
But what I want to know is why the Californian dialect is not tested for in this quizlet?
Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 65% General American English |
| 20% Yankee |
| 15% Upper Midwestern |
| 0% Dixie |
| 0% Midwestern |
On work: I think I can work on revising this article now even though I have not wanted to face it, feeling great frustration with the limitations of formulaic academic writing. But, in some ways, I should be grateful for the formula which makes the revision much easier.
On suicide: Great comments from Randomgirl and Smelt, and apologies to Smelt for misrepresenting her part of the discussion. That is certainly my fault for condensing the conversation to just one key issue, one comment really. I merely nod to the idea that thinking suicide is selfish could keep one from committing suicide. My goal was to target the comment not the commenter. I will certainly be careful to make this clearer in future posts.
I wanted to explore the idea a bit more not because I think it is bad or because I don't share it, but because I do to some degree agree with it and have heard several other people make this claim. Still, I have found it unsatisfying and ultimately limited, which is why I refer to it as reductionist. I think, too, as someone who has seriously considered suicide and who plans to keep that option open, I (probably selfishly) want to encourage more charitable thinking and more thinking in general on the subject.
Contemplating suicide (others or our own) means contemplating suffering, and that is something we don't do particularly well. I generally avoid books and films that are full of suffering. I couldn't finish Stone Butch Blues, and while I was once obssessed with Holocaust literature, I can't bear it now. Others have noted the way our cultural artifacts are saturated with violence but rarely attend to the suffering that results.
Granted, suicide results from an inability to further contemplate and/or experience suffering, and in this sense, the suicide is "selfish," unable to imagine or care about the suffering the act will cause others. But, it is also "selfish" for those of us who are alive to derogatorily label suicide self-centered. It is selfish to wish to avoid the suffering of mourning even if another's death means an end to their suffering. If we support assisted suicide to put an end to physical suffering, why not to put an end to psychological suffering? Psychological suffering is not always cureable, and often the cures effectively trash one's quality of life. More significantly, though, it is selfish to foreclose further (painful, difficult, terrifying) contemplation of suffering at the expense of understanding why someone might choose suicide, why we ourselves might choose it. When we label something selfish or self-centered, we are employing a morally laden discourse that seeks to chastise its object into submission. Indeed, as Smelt and I discussed, the idea of suicide as selfish has kept us both from committing it. But, just as labelling suicide self-centered can foreclose actual contemplation of suicide, which is generally a good thing, it can also foreclose intellectual contemplation of suicide and suffering, which I suspect is not so good.
And, because Clonk understandably doesn't like it when I talk too much about suicide, I'll stop selfishly disregarding his feelings, and leave it at that. For a while anyway.
The house is insane. We've moved everything from the living room to wherever we can easily fit it. All other rooms are full and unnavigable: the coffee table is in the middle of the kitchen; the couch cushions are on the floor of the bedroom; the CDs and stereo are in the office; the CD cabinet is on the front porch. All books except those I really need are packed (yikes!), and the 4-piece bookshelf is in both the basement and the carport, where the couch is also in temporary residence, getting a bit wet I'm afraid. There's plastic sheeting up on the doorway between the kitchen and the living room because the dust is unbearable.
Yesterday was spent moving everything out, wood puttying the floor, and attempting to sand with block sanders. Clonk thought using block sanders, which means sanding the whole floor by hand was going to be fun and economical. We do have heavy duty knee pads which are quite useful for doing cool dance moves, but this floor is fairly damaged in places and has tons of paint all over it, so after about half an hour of sanding down on our knees, Clonk decided his circular sander might be a more efficient tool. We only have one of those though, so he's in there now sanding away, arms turning to vibrating jelly. I should probably go offer to take a shift.
Randomgirl responds to the suicide post with what is essentially Smelt (the friend I referred to in the post)'s argument, and I agree with it in part, but I think it doesn't go far enough and, as noted, has some problems. I want to post more about this, maybe tomorrow, but right now, Clonk is insisting I help him refinish the living room floor. I think I'd rather be blogging about suicide.
I was chatting with a friend the other day about suicide. She had recently concluded that suicide is, at base, self-centered. While I agree that this viewpoint is a useful approach to guilting oneself out of committing suicide, I ultimately find it to be a moralistic reduction. I suspect it is a secularization of the Christian injunction against suicide, which views it as an act of placing one's will above God's. In my friend's view, it was placing one's own interest above that of the community.
Suicidal urges may indeed begin in withdrawal and self-absorption, but self-centeredness implies a kind of self-concern that places one's own needs above those of others. If a need is something required, something necessary for life, then self-centeredness is a primary focus on self-preservation. Suicide, then, is not self-centered. Instead, the feelings of alienation that lead to suicide ultimately extend to the self as well. How else explain the startling ability to hack at one's wrists, to shoot oneself in the head, to throw one's own body off a bridge? Only a lack of centeredness, a vertiginous alienation from "self," could enable the kind of distance required to do such damage.
So, I have basically excised TV from my life for the past ten years or so. I have had other points in my life when I've not had TV; kind of like my vegetarianism, it was something that I dabbled with and then eventually embraced. It's not because I think TV is evil although I definitely think it can be evil, and it's not because I think TV is stupid although I think it can be quite stupid as well. In part, it is because TV is a timesuck and it depresses me. But, mainly it is because, in my experience, TV doesn't give back.
Despite my distaste for TV, most people I know watch, and through them, I try to keep up on new or interesting shows just to know what's happening in that part of our culture. While I have no interest in most shows I hear about beyond hearing about them, I recently rented a couple of TV shows on DVD (which I must say far surpasses actual television viewing for its lack of commercials. I do miss the serialized element but whatever.)
Most recently, I discovered Freaks and Geeks. I know that I am a complete loser for saying in 2005 this is a cool show, but I don't give a damn about that. I've found it belatedly, and that is in plenty of time for me. I like it because this show gives back. There are plenty of critiques to make of it, but I find myself thinking about it and finding relevance in its plotlines and narrative devices and characterizations. I suppose it has something to do with the period that it represents and the way it feels like a witnessing of my own experience. Clonk drew my attention to this. But there's more to it. It is surprisingly not what we call in lit crit "overdetermined" like most TV, which is a fancy way of saying it's not utterly cliché or bogged down in fulfilling your expectations. It can surprise you: not by being sensational like "reality shows" or violent like the dozens of cop/crime/spy shows, but by being real and astonishing and quirky in the way life is. It cares about human relations and it dwells in the sometimes unexpected ways we come to appreciate and understand one another and what we then make of that understanding. This is what I prefer in fiction and it is what I prefer in film, and I suppose this is what I find lacking in TV and what I would wish for more of.
As requested by clonk, I here present a brief analysis of Fifean verse.
Well-documented in the annals (anules) of Fifean verse is a love of wordplay. Influenced by the Zen koan (and a well-developed wiseass mentality), Fife poems often begin with a play on words whose multiple and multplying meanings become a springboard to a sort of coy Zen meditation. In the Fifean spirit, you could say, a koi Zen meditation, attention to the way words and ideas, like koi, move -- slipping around a pool, skittering in and out of view, sliding beyond recognition as reflections on the surface meld with reflections on the koi's skin.
The most recent addition to the Fife ouevre, "Fife Barometer Part XIX.A&1/2," falls into this category. He begins with the word "apart" and in considering its relation to the words "a part" develops an extended meditation on what it means to be either "a part" of something or "apart" or both or neither or all of these things. He considers apartness and partness as they relate to emptiness, wholeness, holeness, and community. As in much of his work, Fife is concerned here with human interaction, with human connection and failed connection, as well as with individuation. The piece concludes by finding connection in apartness; indeed, in this poem, accepting apartness (holeness) enables connection (wholeness).
I would recommend for further reading on these themes and stylistics, Nothing Doing, by Fife.
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