Reshared post from +Gary Levin
Occupy Wall Street has no leader…it won't go away !
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Wind and high water: Columbus Day, 2011
We awoke to torrential rain and uncertain power this Columbus Day morning, and by the time high tide rolled in on the South Newport River, the east wind had driven the tide to the highest I’ve ever experienced here.
More images from the day:
Note the two pictures of the two docks, taken from the same vantage, from storm tide to mid-tide…
Multi-culturalism can grow on you…
Multi-culturalism can grow on you…
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Truth.
Thoughts about Blogs
Things I think about while watering plants:
The problem with blogs is that most of them–this one included–are self-centered, ego-driven missives of (hopefully) rather short length. Go see this movie/read this book because *I* liked it. Here’s what *I’m* thinking. In an era where we bemoan the entitlement feelings we see in our children, we simultaneously tell them that the world, yes, revolves around us. Is it any wonder they feel the center of their own universes? Some of that is, of course, just a normal growing up expansion of boundaries. But too many of us never outgrow it.
Perhaps this drive to share our own feelings is an expression of the child within all of us. “Look at me! See how well I can write!” That’s my own little voice. Perhaps yours says, “World! World! Let me tell what just happened to me!” or “Hey, wow, you gotta see this!” (which translates to: “Look at me! I saw it before you did!”). Even worse, though, are the marketing-driven blogs geared to surreptitiously sell us something. I feel dirty, used, when a blog sinks to that level. (An occasional mention of something doesn’t count here–I follow several authors’ blogs and I’m glad to know when they have a new book out. But if every blog started with “You can buy my books here and here and over there” I’d lose interest before I found the little x to close the site.)
Very few blogs cause us to think about things in new ways or teach us something. Note I didn’t say “lecture” anywhere in that sentence. If it’s not a teacher telling us what to do, it’s that damn little voice inside our heads. Most of us don’t need more lectures, just more learning.
Reaching out to see things from another point of view is difficult, especially when we’re all wrapped up in our own minds. Could I borrow your mind for a while? Just to see what it’s like. And, come to think of it, that might be the appeal of some blogs. I *can* see what you’re thinking suddenly. Or at least what you want me to think you’re thinking. I sense a do-loop in there somewhere.
And my last thought while watering plants? Damn mosquitoes.
Is it me?
In my current drive to be an individual, a character, and not just a sheep (or even worse, a mouse), I find myself striving to do things my way, and sometimes for no other reason than to simply declare my independence from that which is “normal” despite what commonsense tells me.
For example, I was/am trying to lose weight. For nigh onto a year, the dreaded pipsqueak voice on the wii told me, as soon as I stepped on, “That’s overweight.” Grrrrr. Like I didn’t know? A month or so ago, I stepped on (after a long hiatus from wii training), and it said, “That’s normal.” Suddenly, without warning, that little voice inside my head whispered, “Who wants to be normal?”–and the ice cream fell victim to my independence.
This morning, I logged onto my daily challenge (www.meyouhealth.com). For weeks now, I’ve been getting encouraging emails trying to get me to participate more, to earn more points by smiling at posts, completing simple challenges, replying with encouragement to the woes and tribulations of those in need. In each email, there was a counter that kept track. “Kathy C. earned the most points this week of all those in your group.” “Wanda R. smiled at the most points.” Wow, I thought, they must really be active. I should do better.” Finally, at long last, this week “Ann B. earned the most points.” Sheesh, I thought, you need to get a life.” Where was that envy I felt earlier, the feeling that all would be right in my world if only I had more…more points, more weight loss, more (God forbid) smiley faces?
And what is wrong with me that as soon as I get what I want, I no longer want it?
Thankfully, I came to my senses with the hot tub. “I want a hot tub,” I’ve said since we moved down here. “I miss my hot tub.” Whine, whine, whine. My 60th birthday popped up (as if it were unexpected) and Elliott started investigating hot tubs. We walked the porch, the back deck, everywhere to see where we could envision one. The back deck looked perfect. But there’s this problem…I’d have to walk out on the back deck in my altogether to get into it, and there’s this one corner where my next door neighbors–if they were sitting in a specific spot–could see me. OK, I could put on a swimsuit–but I’m lazy. I wouldn’t. Hot tubbing is too sensual to waste on a swimsuit. And spend that much money and still know it wasn’t the best it could be? Wouldn’t work. Starkers, or nothing. So one day at about 10:30 a.m. I told myself that if I couldn’t walk out on that deck right that minute, naked as the day I was born, then purchasing a hot tub would be a big mistake. And I couldn’t do it. I’m still not sure why. I’m not normally THAT modest or THAT embarrassed about my body. But I couldn’t do it. At night, maybe. But in the broad daylight, in front of God and everybody? Nope. And there went the dream of the hot tub.
So I ask you, is it just me who doesn’t want something as soon as she (almost) gets it? Is this normal? Or am I trying to hard to be “different”? “Not normal?” (no, I didn’t say “abnormal…”) Normal has come to equate with “mediocre” rather than “sane, healthy.” The “normal” person reads at a sixth-grade level, we hear. So I definitely don’t want to be normal. When did normal become something bad?
Maybe if I had the courage to get out on the back deck in a mouselike manner and eat a tub of ice cream while refusing to send smiley faces I’d figure it out. (And thanks, Elliott, for all your patience with me while I flip-flop on issues of import that rank right up there with national security, world hunger, and global poverty.)
So, let me introduce you…
Today I shall blog! I’m a federal employee, I’ve cleared my desk of all the necessary work, and for the next 30 minutes I’ll be feeding the blog, which says something about the value I put on keeping in touch with… um, … with THE WORLD! Or, y’all… or …whatever.
The day before yesterday I had one of those unpleasantly instructive days where you rediscover a truth about yourself. It was this: I can be seriously thrown off balance by a tiny episode of personal embarassament. It doesn’t even need to be particularly public, like when Nixon threw up on Chairman Chou En Lai, or when Reagan joked into a live microphone about launching a nuclear assault on Soviet Russia. Or perhaps you “know someone” who farted noticeably on an elevator. That sort of thing…
The thing is, this was really nowhere near as bad as those gaffs, but still managed to leave me rattled to a point where I doubted my ability to unwrap and chew gum without injuring myself, or marring the furniture.
So what did I screw up? I was suddenly called upon to make an introduction, and then, without thinking, I extended a handshake to one of them, as if it was me who had been introduced. Yeah, I know, pretty clumsy… I don’t get a lot of practice at social graces, and this sort of thing has blindsided me before.
Lord knows, I’ve been a social twit all my days, so why do I worry about it, or keep trying? I mean, I really admire those gifted with that easy grace, so suave there’s never a sense that they so much as think of what to do in a social moment. It just comes naturally to them. I simply can’t trust myself to navigate those moments on autopilot, I dream someday I might. Big mistake.
What really alarms me is how much personal embarrassment AFFECTS me. I’m absolutely sure there are people who shrug off their clumsiness, social or otherwise, with nary a cough, shrug, nor blink, but why not me?
I even get upset at movies that depict people similarly plagued. If it ever came to torturing me to extract the location of the terrorist bomb, they need only lash me to a chair and force me to watch a Ben Stiller film. If they used ‘There’s Something About Mary’, I’d offer to ingest the plutonium to defuse the thing…
So my “misplaced” handshake left me shaken, in a cold sweat, and wanting to cower in a dark closet until my self-confidence might return, which it did the next day, albeit, with me being very careful not to undertake any introductions for a while. Y’all can just sort yourselves out without my help, thank you very much.
Marathons
I’ve signed up to do the Walt Disney World marathon/Goofy Challenge* in January 2012 with my younger sister Katie (younger as in almost 15 years younger–still a kid). Right now, 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in August, all I want to do is crawl into bed and ignore my impending doom. I *know* I have to train, I just don’t want to. It’s hot out there, and buggy. I have a corn on my toe and it won’t go away. I have lots of work to do, and I want to get some writing down. I even have to run to the grocery today, which always takes at least an hour out of an already packed day.
I know that by running (defined as slow jog for 1 minute, walk fast for 1 minute–yes, a slow jog and a fast walk are about the same speed. Don’t ask.) I’m doing all sorts of good things for my body. And probably my mental state (though you couldn’t prove it by my current attitude). Logically, this is stuff I know. Emotionally, I want to curl up with a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts still warm from the oven and say to myself, “Nobody lives forever. Enjoy it while you can.”
I need to find some path between these two extremes. I suppose what I’m doing could be considered somewhere in the middle–I could be running 5-minute miles, for example, instead of 13-minute miles. Still, it’s a balancing act. I guess it’s just a matter of priorities. Right now, today, I will run 3 miles. Tomorrow I might eat the Krispy Kreme donuts. One day at a time. And isn’t that what any of us do, all day long, every day?
*The Goofy Challenge is 13.1 miles on Saturday (3.5 hour time limit) and 26.2 miles the next day (7 hour time limit). I’ve done it twice before, once within the time limits and once not quite so fast. My fastest ever marathon time was 6 hrs 43 min. I’m aiming for 6 hrs 30 min this time.
‘All Clear’ by Connie Willis – a review
This feels awkward, because ‘All Clear’ is not so much a sequel, but is in fact a second half of its counterpart, the earlier novel, ‘Blackout’, which I reviewed prevously here. My assessment of ‘Blackout’, could be described as “tepidly enthusiastic”. I was so enthralled by her work,’To Say Nothing of the Dog’, and was primed for some wild kind of “book-gasm” with ‘Blackout’. Well, I was disappointed, but hopeful as I launched into ‘All Clear’.
When I wrote my little review of ‘Blackout’, I should explain that I had no conception of Ms. Willis’ stature and success in the SF/F genre. Holy cow! Ten Hugo Awards, seven Nebula Awards, (which INCLUDES the award for ‘Blackout/All Clear’), and a flotilla of nominations besides. So why, I ask myself, does this monumental and highly regarded dyptych still leave me unimpressed, and, frankly, a bit confused?
I think it comes down to this: that some “genre writing” (as one author recently referred to a conglomerate of SF/F/YA books) doesn’t necessarilly require nor focus on STORY as its main staple for the reader, or maybe a tight, well-crafted story. The Aristotelian model of beginning, middle, end, with lovely, crisp story-arcs, that sail and rebound like the path of a tennis ball in a spirited volley; THAT is what I was left craving as I read through the 1000+ pages of Willis’ masterpiece. This book hinges much more on setting, atmosphere, the ephemera of bric-a-brac, costuming, the tinge of colors borrowed from other literature of the time and place of which she is writing. It IS brilliant, and wonderful in its way, and necessitates a wholly different approach to the reading of it to extract and enjoy its savor.
Alas, it requires work and patience.
Two other comparisons come to mind: these books flow and feel a bit like quest-gaming. Reading them reminds me of my hours spent in the world of Zelda-Twilight Princess. There’s such sumptuous detail, and a grinding journey through a hazardous world. The other comparison I would make is that of listening to complex music. You cannot breeze through a 40 minute sax improv by John Coltrane, and you cannot breeze through ‘Blackout/All Clear’, but you would do very well to devote the energy and attention to either.
The fault in my earlier take is one of learning to appreciate a different kind of reading. I will try to get better at it, for it does have its rewards…
Jasper Fforde – ‘One of Our Thursdays is Missing’
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In the wake of reading the most recent Thursday Next novel, ‘One of Our Thursdays is Missing’, I found myself reaching for an earlier volume,’First Among Sequels’ and re-reading it, in doing so, I discovered that ‘One of our Thursdays…’ is actually a kind of re-boot of ‘First Among Sequels'(TN-5).
This is interesting, because I hadn’t realized that the practice was becoming commonplace, or could work so well, but I’ve noted it in the work of at least one other writer in my reading of late (John Scalzi’s ‘Zoe’s Tale’, as a re-working and re-release of ‘The Last Colony’).
And in this case, Fforde hasn’t actually re-written TN-5, but he HAS appropriated a lion’s share of the groundwork of the earlier novel, and re-imagined it afresh. In ‘One of Our Thursdays…’ he provided yet another construction of his BookWorld, with vast interconnected islands of the genres, transit between them in flying taxis, the mechanics of life for its populace, to include the sundries of life as a book character, the politics of the place, and the special role of his heroine, Thursday, in stabilizing it all.
The real Thursday Next is, as you probably know, an Outlander; not of the BookWorld, but deeply concerned with safeguarding it. Then there are the various iterations of the “written” Thursday Next. Both of these novels hinge deeply on the relationship and interaction of the real Thursday and her written representations.
All of this material is the mortar and brickwork of the newest TN novel. Re-visiting ‘First Among Sequels’ has made that much clear to me. That said, I’m also delighted to report that the additional work does no harm to the earlier book, and magically avoids feeling stale or repetitious in the new one. The whole TN canon is a wonder of imaginative, playful, literary delights. My hope is that Fforde tries this approach again.