…of divers topics lately arisen within my sphere:
Advancement
Blood, mine (again)
Consciousness, the question of
Employment
Exam preparation
Expansion, activity participation
Faith, questions of
Family, fundamental trade-offs
Friends, new and old
Growth, personal
Imperative, Kantian
Purpose, eternal
Swordplay, brilliant
It’s not the life we would have chosen, but it is the life we have made for ourselves.
Things are tentatively set to be really great / tough on the employment front. I shan’t too closely calculate my flightless avians until we’ve reached an appropriately post-gestational point.
Hope to have some presentations and surprises re: HEMA prepped in a week or two. I imagine it’s not much of a priority for anyone but me, nowadays, given where we all are in our respective lives, but I’d like to share it anyway.
And finally, it’s been quietly exhilarating to know that my secular humanist faith has been tested and found sufficiently robust. Many atheists and less rigorous believers in science find in times of crisis that theirs is a brittle faith when they suffer too-great personal loss or challenges. It sometimes gives spontaneous rise to some sort of home-grown agnosticism, and possibly eventual conversion.
But I feel.. well, blessed, if you will, that I’ve successfully upheld my faith in the god of Science. That is, science as a metaphysical philosophy. It can be a tough reconciliation to make, in the face of multiple deaths and personal losses, difficulties, etc.
Apparently, I made mine years ago, b/c I’ve weathered recent events with an almost indecent aplomb. I had moments of doubt, wondering whether I was just callous and insensitive to e.g. my parents’ problems. Objectivity can seem heartless, but I have the best reasons I can find for the manner in which I’m helping them — which no longer means doing what they want me to do. There’s no calm postgame here — it *is* tough, and we’re not nearly done yet.
And a lot of my strength to face it has come from the fatalistic belief that we are all ultimately in a zero-sum game. It has led others to nihilism, cynicism, Gen X angst, or emo (goth, punk, or grunge in earlier eras). But I think the billion-year death throes of our planet’s constant decline are beautiful.
As the sun dies ever so slowly, it indiscriminately casts its prodigious energy into the void. The merest ray happens to glance off our planet, which itself is slowly cooling from its fiery birth to a lifeless, cold end. Ancient light fed and induced unthinkably random molecules and compound substances to recombine again and again, until seeds and squirrels, mushrooms and mammoths, sea cucumbers and swords, and pretty girls in short skirts all came about.
Now we have chemical combinations existing in such complex dynamic stability that they each perceive themselves as a gestaltic consciousness beyond mere molecular reactions. We have created sorrow, war, religion, anger, joy, romance, spoken word poetry, and whimsy. It’s like a firework rocket that explodes and cascades into countless swirling submunitions — they all flicker out after a too-brief flash of brilliance.
How is that *not* grand in its tragic elegance, its simultaneous sophistication and simplicity? A beautiful profusion of life inevitably headed for death.
And when it all ultimately ends someday, either when our star becomes a red giant, goes supernova, or beyond at the heat death of the universe, it’s okay. Because, for a brief billion-year instant, we existed.
So it comes back to us individually: No death is cause for grief, because it means we existed for a short while. That is our wyrd, and it is the wyrd of our gods. All that remains is how we go to meet it. Concern yourself only with what’s within your power to effect; don’t worry about what you can’t affect. Live the best life you can, always growing, learning, doing, screwing up. Be satisfied with what you’ve done, who you are, but never settle. Difficulties and failures serve to teach, and thus are natural parts of our existence. There can be no stasis so long as there is time.
So what is consciousness, then? A computer runs on on/off bits, zeroes and ones. Put gajillions of them together, and you get… an electronic copy of the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s work. Hydroelectric turbine performance figures. Rag doll physics and first-person shooters of unnerving verisimilitude like CoD 4.
All of which is meaningless zeroes and ones without a human observer to interpret them in 32-bit color. A dog or a fly wouldn’t see all the color and detail of the computer screen.
The natural world would similarly be meaningless without a human observer to appreciate fresh spring breezes, smog-tinted rosy sunsets. Glass-sheathed skyscrapers and Argentinian tango are just as natural, though we usually and arbitrarily call man-made artifacts unnatural or artificial. All of our endeavors are natural, because we’re part of the natural world. There is nothing unnatural in the universe, because it all *is*. And we can each say about ourselves: “I am.”
In their own way, maybe that’s what the ancient Hebrews were trying to capture — that sense of the self — in their simpler, pre-Kierkegaardian language.
And when it all dies or burns, it will be. What is, is natural. Nothing to regret about a lifeless lump of rock — because who will be around to regret it?
But I am working at living a rockin’ life long before we get to that point, and to ensure the best possible quality of life for my spiritual or genetic descendants.
:D
Hurricane Ike has made access and communication difficult, so you can imagine my surprise when I got a couple calls from friends old and new. Some I had tried calling and some I had not. But regardless of whether we’ve reached each other, it’s good to have friends.
I got one particularly nice call earlier this afternoon.
For our part, there’s a lot more sunlight coming through the trees now than three days prior. Our power and water were out for about half a day and a day each, not at the same time. That’s about it.
On Tuesday, I attended a memorial service for Emma Hutchinson, the younger daughter of my favorite professor. I met her when she was 7, and wondered how she would turn out, growing up in such a wild environment full of college kids and all their rambunctious excesses. She spent more than half her life on campus at Rice. And the 700+ people who attended (some of them from New York, Chicago, Wyoming, and London — on 3 days’ to 8 hours’ notice) are testament to the way she and her parents have lived their lives. Students from before and after my time spoke at the service, as did Dr. Hutchinson and Ashlyn, Emma’s older sister.
Throughout all their words, I heard a constant thread which was: She lived her life well despite the odds when she started. Do everything, do it well, and do it a lot.
Ashlyn said that she had prepared for this moment from when she was seven, and learned that Emma was born minus a kidney. And after twenty years of readiness, what can one say that hasn’t already been said? She was just glad that Emma got to go to college, graduate, see Ashlyn’s wedding just two months prior, and, trivial as it sounds, finish the Harry Potter series. Ashlyn said she’s always found inspiration to keep going in Emma’s attitude: In 20 years, Emma went to and spent more time in hospital than most people go on holiday. But she was always upbeat, using all the time she was granted to surf, ski, help her friends with homework in college, watch the Simpsons religiously, and on and on. To Emma, every moment was an opportunity. Ashlyn concluded that, now that Emma can’t do these and other things, Ashlyn will do them, in part, for Emma. She’s terribly slow going up the Colorado trails — she’s always the last one to finish. But she will finish them, for herself and for Emma. Ashlyn’s hope was that everyone who’s ever known Emma would use her memory as a positive source of motivation to do and be a little more than they started out, each and every day of their lives. My synopsis may sound as though we who are left behind will live the rest of our lives under a cloud of unworthiness, but that’s not at all the meaning intended or learned from Tuesday’s service.
Hutch said that Ashlyn and the others had already touched on many of his biggest points. He thanked everyone who had ever known Emma, and all the doctors who had given years of their time to her; he appreciated how the doctors had treated Emma seriously, talking to her as an adult from the very beginning. Then he talked about how he became greedy, wishing for just a few more hours with her when she was born, then a few weeks, then months and years. Finally, he realized that he needed to enjoy what he did have. It’s okay to be greedy, to say, “Well, at least we had that. At least she had that.” Or “I wish we could see another year together.” But it’s equally and perhaps more important to say, “This moment, right now, is wonderful.”
In 2002, I went to Vietnam for a research trip. In Hanoi, my great aunt Tam took us around and showed us how to haggle like a local. She was an energetic old lady, bubbling over with conversation and nosy questions. :)She came to Houston last year, and seemed as vital as ever if a bit grayer on top.
About two months ago we heard that she’d had a stroke and was in hospital, unresponsive to any communication.
Today, I took my mother to the airport for a flight to Chicago, where my remaining grandfather also lies oblivious, at my aunt’s house, without the energy to eat these past three days. She called and told my father that my grandfather lies there, looking at her or anyone who comes in the room. He doesn’t give a sign that he knows who she is, where he is, or what’s happening.
I dropped in to see how my little sister was coming along on her homework, and looked up at the wall. There we’ve hung a framed painting on a ceramic mat. Ba Tam gave it to me in 2002, to convey to my parents with her compliments and best wishes. It depicts in abstract style a quaint street in one of Hanoi’s older sections, a holdover from the French colonial days. It’s competently executed, though it never really grabbed my attention. The painting was probably worth about $7-15 USD at the time.
Even then, I realized it was the thought, the effort — on the parts of both the artist and my great aunt — that mattered, more than any sum of money can ever capture.
These are just some of the thoughts that cross my mind this balmy summer afternoon.
Where does the time go, and to what end do we live out all our days, hours, minutes, and seconds?
As these fellows write about John Allison, it’s the simple joys, the unlooked-for successes and foregone failures in his characters’ lives that appeal to us. And so it is with the characters in our lives as well.
These past three-plus months have been filled and stuffed with work in half a dozen flavors, like some ghastly turducken from the bowels of holiday hell. The various duties I’m called on to carry out include project management, finance, client / employee / vendor relations, research for due diligence, and a little hard labor. I enjoy everything tremendously, the hard labor perhaps most of all because it’s a nice physical break from paper-pushing. I feel like I turned some unseen corner in May, and by June I was rocking it 14 hrs / day. Juggling two-plus jobs requires a lot of rapid gear changes, and constantly. But I’m more than competent, I’m on top of it all. Every week poses new challenges. Every day I see my MBA working at capacity for me. Hell, I’ve even had to pull out my old Stat and Accounting books that I vowed to never crack again ere the hosts of Heaven and Hell assembled. And I liked it.
And maybe I could happily define my worth by my work because it is worthwhile in so many ways. But I shouldn’t and won’t.
Because the only real success I’ll count is if, when it’s my turn to lie somewhere (a ditch, a hospice) in a coma, someone remembers me fondly and thinks on what meaning he can bring to his own life.
In a world of 6+ billion people, the sun casts no doubtful shadows — there is nothing new left for us and those who will come after us. That doesn’t matter. Winning and losing often don’t matter either. The only thing that matters in the end is that *we* do. Something. Anything. Learn, grow, change, adapt, and savor the doing of it.
That was a lot of fluff and window-dressing, but there it is. Live well, leave no regrets, and trust that you’ll inspire something in those you leave behind.
I’ll catch up on lesser things later, like what I’ve been spending 60-70 hrs / week of my life on these past some-odd months.
I need to get me a great gulpin’ 40 of Shut-the-hell-up.
Sigh.
Life signs stable. Strong pulse.
Interesting work, and lots of it.
HEMA going super-strong.
All of it but a house of cards, laid low by the breath of a missed call.
Ah, wherezzat 40? <hic>
“Mommy, why is that man in the car next to ours holding a can or something to his ear?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“There’s blood. He frightens me.”
“I’m scared too, honey.”
Between cupping a block of ice to my left ear with my offhand b/c driving with proper signaling trumps habit, and realizing that forgetting my glasses while driving down commercial office parks and residential streets with patchy lighting poses a navigational challenge… I’d say this evening lacked even a soupçon of what normal people would call good sense.
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More linkage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20080523.html
This is a brilliant metaphor for my recent work actions — solving problems with clients by means of the exuberant application of violence and reason in carefully-metered portions.
The only consequences that matter are the ones you wanted.
Well, I say that, but I don’t believe it. It’d be more accurate when rendered as:
Nothing doesn’t matter.
Which is nothing like what I say. But that’s the kind of hypocrisy I can live with.
…Or just crazy.
[People not interested in HEMA can skip down to web links of late. Be forewarned that this entry reads like a Joseph Conrad story printed on cheap, splintery Soviet TP.]
Gawd, CAS Iberia put out some awful thing on sword and shield combat. I won’t link it, b/c it doesn’t deserve any more viewings. It’s already ranked 1/5 on YouTube, thankfully.
OTOH, www.achillemarozzo.it has a number of YouTube clips posted on sword and buckler, round shield, and single.
User Tossetoke has some very cool vids extrapolating Viking shield combat from German fechtmanual techniques. I’ve seen articles before (by e.g. Paul Wagner), but this is the first accurate set of clips I’ve seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXPujfwQJUg
Or you can do a search for HEMAC 2008 vids. Three guys have posted a fair number of bouts from the longsword tournament. Some terrible footwork, some decent demonstrations of skill (timing, distance, etc.)… Maybe I’ll go next year and show ‘em how an Asian fences. I’ll be the Cuong Le of HEMA!
Other web links perused of late:
http://members.aol.com/illinewek/faqs/casting.htm
http://www.theodoregray.com/periodicTable/Stories/030.1/index.html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng99519.htm
http://www.rc-soar.com/tech/casting.htm
How the hell can you consume 2900 calories in a single drink?! Most days, I struggle to reach 2200 (assuming crude estimates of 1200 for my main meal, 300 in nuts and dried fruit, and 800 in milk / OJ / assorted no-sugar-added fruit juices).
http://www.menshealth.com/eatthis/20-Worst-Foods/index.php
http://health.yahoo.com/experts/eatthis/5027/americas-unhealthiest-drinks-exposed/
http://health.yahoo.com/weightloss-motivation/how-to-lose-weight-like-a-guy/prevention–23299.html
Go, market corrections.
http://promo.realestate.yahoo.com/five-cities-with-biggest-decline-in-home-values.html
This was happy good webtrawling for combating depression. Started off innocently enough, with searches for ballistic ceramic.
http://www.armorusa.com/Ballistic%20Ceramic%20Composite.htm
This led to a thirst for greater understanding of what NATO peacekeepers can do to misbehaving targets.
http://www.dec.fct.unl.pt/projectos/impacto/Public_Papers/Report%20on%20Ceramic.pdf
The average insurgent often experiences difficulty in procuring B4C ceramic / aramidic-weave polyethylene fiber plates. Morbid curiosity prompted the search for ways to evaluate bullet performance on flesh.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/gelatin.html
In the name of science, the expression denoting unfeasibility “…like nailing Jell-O to a wall,” had to be assessed for veracity.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/j-wall.html
A side jaunt into enzymatic interactions and effect on proteins was called for here.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/activities/proteins/advice.cfm
Busting adages with the liberal application of science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%28season_2%29#Needle_in_a_Haystack
Then a resumption of the descent into madness and the merely insipid.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/beer.html
By random link association.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/viagra-flowers.html
The very heart of darkness.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/condoms.html
If you read this far, you need to get a life. If you followed every link, someone should take you out to the pasture and put you out of your misery.
That said, I leave you with a cliffhanger:
The past two months have seen WW I-era Gallic quantities of angst, resignation, fear, sweat, tears, and blood (*mostly* internal lacerations). The blood was from HEMA practices. Everything else was not. Within another month, I should either have stupid-good news, or I’ll be evicted from the poorhouse and put in a Frigidaire box.
It could be worse — I could still be doing door-to-door sales.
OK, as usual, the baggage crap no one wants to read comes last, after the post split.
Saw the 40th anniversary Hello, Hamlet show last night with Dorota. She’s not a huge musical fan, but even she enjoyed a fair bit of it. In a word, it was awesome. Totally lived up to its 40-year heritage. One of the guys originally involved with it came out and took the role of the introductory narrator / minstrel. Amazing set (that I know Charles gained many gray hairs over). Pretty strong cast with some duds (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were really cute eye candy, in a strange turn of casting, but they totally weren’t the hams that pair of roles begs for; Polonius was decent but a little tiresome).
The thing that got me most was the .. dunno the term of art for it. Physical acting. Dramatic gestures. Blocking. Choreography for song / dance numbers. The actors’ actions during dialogue and singing were .. brilliant. Really, really amazing. This is the 5th show I’ve seen and 3rd that I’ve been involved with, and I was really impressed.
They majorly reworked the script and songs. A lot of the older ones (mostly Gilbert and Sullivan) got cut, to be replaced by newer stuff that I didn’t recognize (except for the two Phantom of the Opera songs and a Les Mis number).
Threw myself over way too many walls and park benches on Sat. It was so good to run with those guys again. Had a really cute (nay, gorgeous) girl come out. I was really impressed by how all the guys were friendly and supportive (not oppressively so), but no one got any smarm on her. No feeding frenzy. That little thing says a lot about their character.
K-Swiss is bringing a parkour promo tour to Houston this Thursday. Some sponsored traceurs will be simultaneously exhibiting their amazing athleticism and complete lack of typical sensibilities (both of which are compliments in my book, for the terminally dense).
Chris and I actually gave Scott something to work with in free fencing today. We were excited. We can *almost* see the opportunities and windows. Sometimes we manage to get them. We each got Scott cleanly with one or two hits. All of us were working on a few specific things. My right shoulder, forearm, and left ribs got punished. We are awesome. :)
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…plus 119 hrs 55 mins precisely and 1 respiratory infection. (more…)
It’s off we are to Chicago.
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