The One Thing

How much is this you?

You must you have something to look forward to.
You are are always facining upstream, as the shark does: move or asphixiate.
You think you constantly hold near an idea of the one great thing or experience
that will make you happy, as if all else would waste your time.
Yet the little pleasure that is in reach does tide you over for now
and only later on shows itself to be just another among the litter of small "nows",
Blurring into a past that predicates as blurry a future.
But negotiation is always tainted with loss or dillution and
"Other" a synonym for the imperfections of existence?

How right, or off the mark, is this guy? Are the riposts of the bloggers that comment there definsiveness or observation?

The pleasures of print on paper

I have received my copy of Bora Zivkovic's compilation of first rate science blogging posts. I was not sure I'd be impressed by the physical book since the publication process is novel and requires damn quick turnarounds by the parties involved in the chain of publication. I am happy to report the LuLu binding of the blogs is as substantial and handsome as anything I pick up off the book racks in the airport or bookstores. Bora and Anton found ways to get a modicum of links into the hard copy, charts and diagrams came through clearly. His preface gracefully directs you to the blogs themselves since blogged writing really is a living thing, "conversational" as Bora puts it.

The book makes great reading in several ways. It is, as I think it was intended to be, an intro to on line science writing for those who have not caught on to blogs yet. It is great reading for both style and content, having been culled from the best of the best. For a person with a few minutes a day to read before dropping off to sleep, the shorter format of the blog post as compared to typical book chapters is ideal. And mostly, it will be a great time capsule of where science was getting traction in a very non-science-oriented society of 2006. 2006 being a good year for the vindication of Darwin's ideas despite the full court press against it by an ignorant but populous rabble, I am reading the posts from Panda's Thumb and Phyrangula with particular relish.

Maybe next year we get more clarity on what to keep and what to toss regarding string theory? In any event, I think this is a fine start to what would make a valuable series of yearbooks from on line science writing.

Nostalgia

One should never permit themselves to confuse self with the props of self. My dictionary uses "yearning" as the verb to define nostalgia and that is apt. Yet when you read about nostalgia, too often it has been commandeered, like sex, as a marketing hook, a motive harnessed to commerce. The vintage car then and now the new car with a "retro" look, the oldies rock-n-roll, yearbooks, marriages and any number of other sometimes expensive aids to memory can be a delicious little rush. But they are of the past. If the past has not been used to make the present better, which seems much the case for our politics, why try to relive it? If what you think was lost with bygone days was youth and opportunity, you are only right if you also see that you are younger now than you will be later and possibilities lay open to you that have yet to vanish. The looking forward then and the looking back later all miss the now.

And like sex, when nostalgia is willfully employed for manipulation or advantage, the focus is diverted to the props, the objects of desire while the desire itself is abandoned for the poets to retune, reshape and recolor so that later, we may recall. The objects we lean upon to conjure up memory, to revivify dead moments, are empty. Their only art is that we can so readily pour out ourselves into them.

Nostalgia is for the sake of the nostalgic, not for the sake of the objects of nostalgia.

War on the marrying class

Not all marriages turn out to form families but that is still the best arrangement I know of. So I found this article in the NYTimes rather interesting. I will paste a few quotes but RTFA, all of it please because its an eye opener.

It’s worth repeating: the “marriage gap” isn’t about men and women. It’s about class and education.
...
The emerging gulf is instead one of class — what demographers, sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about the wedded state call a “marriage gap” between the well-off and the less so.
...
Why have things changed so much for women who don’t have the choices that educated women have? While marriage used to be something you did before launching a life or career, now it is seen as something you do after you’re financially stable — when you can buy a house, say. The same is true for all classes. But the less educated may not get there.
...
“The way we used to look at marriage was that if women were highly educated, they had higher earning power, they were more culturally liberal and people might have predicted less marriage among them,” Mr. Martin said. “What’s becoming more powerful is the idea that economic resources are conducive to stable marriages. Women who have more money or the potential for more money are married to men who have more stable income.”

This would not be much of a surprise to you if you understood the economics of a nation that has its tax laws written by the lawyers of corporations and the very wealthy.
As Thom Hartmann explains it in his book SCREWED the undeclared war against the middle class, the forces that presently have the upper hand in setting up and taking away legal and tax advantages could not care less about the middle class. Family values and middle class! Who in this administration would have thought they had anything to do with each other? Of course, for them "Family Values" doesn't mean "make it easy for people to stay in a relationship" but rather its an empty pass phrase to mollify fundamentalists.

Gay marriage won't destroy the institution. But not being able to afford marriage seems to be doing a pretty good job. The Republicans are the party that is "for" family? My ass they are!

Just because you are still screwing doesn't mean you aren't already screwed.

Yes a very interesting survey. And my little rant were better lodged at A Bomb A Nation except for one little sentence in the article. It had one passing assertion about why men put off marriage which, if accurate, reeks of an antique sexism: "They don’t trust women to tell the truth about past relationships,..." Really, I am aware there are men like that. Don't they know that if that is their worry, it comes from insecurity and they will never be free of it by virtue of which woman they choose? Nor does the poor woman particularly deserve to live with a man chasing such ghosts...he should never marry and thus spare two heartaches. [Lets just see if Amanda picks that up slaps me with it!]

What do you really want?

In my unschooled mind, "burnout" and depression are not easily distinguished. Have I grown tired of blogging. Have I lost interest in reading others think or even the news? Can life itself let one down?

I think many such questions are faces of a very basic question that most of us have had to ask on some occasion: "What do I want...what do I really want?"

If you answered "I don't know what I want. Nothing seems to interest me..." then your friends and family would be on you in a flash with suggestions of good prescription drugs, or therapists who had been effective when they were depressed.

There are circumstances in which I see that question as a rational response to the situation rather than a response driven by unhealthy low levels of norepinephrine, serotonin, N-AcetylAspartate and high ratio of choline to creatine. The clearest but least pertinent case is havng two equally unpleasant options of which you must choose one. Far less clear and far more pertinent is having to choose between two lovers when underneath it all, the reason you ever had two lovers was that you don't know how or truly want to be in love with either of them or maybe with anyone at all. Perhaps your family has been asking you when you are going to settle down. Far more common but so vague that you really have to examine particular cases is when one is struck with boredom. You reach for food or for the remote out of reflex when a moment's reflection would tell you it will not satisfy. As we are wired, novel dross will sometimes trade even with familiar gems though only so long as the novelty has not worn off. We can careen, brainless as a pendulum swinging between the potential of dread and the kinetic of titilation, from attraction to attraction and never be distressed by it until we begin to notice the careening as much as the attractions.

Always consider the possibility that if you don't know what you want, it might be because you don't want anything. Its kinda like the perfect stillness of the deep woods when birds and insects are out of season and the wind has stopped. You might not notice silence if you aren't listening for it.

Who said you had to want something in order to be happy?

Would you believe the wanting of things, no matter how refined or primitive its form, is the seed of all enslavement?

and now, a word from our unsponsor

This weeks post was withheld from you by...
Mt Moosilauke. Yep, another weekend, another ascent. This time junior picked an easy hike of ten miles and only about two thousand feet of climb, no crampons or ice axes this time around. And, oddly uncharacteristic of this so-called winter, snow. Ah but we got a lesson. The plantless rocky deserts above treeline are that way for a reason.

Only a few hundred feet below the summit and in protection of trees, its cold but calm.

On the summit, you can't see 100 yards, the temperature has dropped to the low twenties and the wind is a steady 50 mph, making the icy footing even more precarious.

Safely down from the summit, ice still clings to the brim of my hat and clouds cling to the peak, which never saw the sunshine that broke out elsewhere.

"stay the curse" or "scourge", the policy still sucks

Sorry for not posting. Kinda working two jobs just now.

I simply could not let this go unnoted. It strains forbearance, it strains credulity that this embarrassing accident of a president, this disgraceful son of a Bush can, after sound political defeat and inevitable military stalemate of his hare brained plans for empire, still say things like this. I turned off the TV so I don't know what else he said. But why should I listen further? Either he is an idiot or he thinks we are idiots. What other sense can you make of this assertion from the speech he made in support of his call for a new "surge" plan, a call for 22 thousand new victims of patriotic folly :

"A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them,..."

Reality, which has been admitted to not be his base, quite literally is the opposite his assertion. The Bush/Cheney instigated war in Iraq has removed an ugly political power that had no trust and hardly any business with a rival like Al Qaida. Clumsily decapitating the Baath party only created a political vacuum and putting a 100 thousand of our soldiers in an Arab country with no clear purpose [what WMD?] just became a beacon cause to Islamist martyrs. We shall be decades undoing the damage. Damn this fool. Call your representative and tell them to vote not one nickel for more war. Bush is rich as hell, let him pay for this hell.