In your part of the world, what do you see? I want to see out of your eyes right now and learn how a different landscape view changes a person. My view of the world outside the window is a still life painting in three dimensions at 08:08 in the morning. Just as well...
My time with you this morning lasts but a moment, for the past two days and the next days occupy my thoughts, so that this moment holds nearly no memorable events to share with you. Being with you is all I can offer.
You are my life. Every one of you. Your smiles, your laughter, your tears, your joy, your sadness, your running and playing around.
I spent time with some of you yesterday and the day before, first attending a wedding rehearsal in the chapel of a local church. I saw the head guy, the big cheese, Dr. "Brother Jimmy" Jackson, take a small skip down the aisle and reveal the boy in him that still likes to have fun and see the innocent joys in his world.
I watched the movie, "Synecdoche, New York," on BluRay disc - imagine "The Truman Show" as written by Woody Allen and you get an idea what the movie is about - real life observed and neuroticized.
The wedding chapel is probably five times the size of the church around the corner from me - it serves as an intimate setting for weddings and funerals at a church that boasts five thousand members. Three stained-glass windows - one to the left of the altar, one above the altar and one to the right - detail the Biblical ideas of FAITH, LOVE and HOPE.
Despite the size of the general congregation, I have come to know and recognize many of the church members in the center of the church's administration as well as those who circulate through the lives of my wife's brother's family members, Pat, Jonathan and Jana. Some of them I know by face only, including ones like Mark and Kathy. Others I have my own idea what they're like, such as the Spains and the Freemans, and I like them, even love them, because of my belief. [I love everyone I meet but I don't like them until I meet and get to know them.]
Yesterday morning, I spent a couple of hours at the technical institute meeting the new crop of instructors - I sensed a higher caliber of instructor "material" for the institutional administration to rely upon and the students/customers to learn from. Let's hope I'm right. Again, I heard the administration stress numbers, no different than organizational goals anywhere else, and cringed, asking myself why we tend to reduce humans to statistical anomalies. They can worry about numbers - I'll worry about opening the hearts and minds of the people I contact and hope the ones in my classroom learn more about themselves while picking up some details about the course material at the same time.
I have three minutes to wrap up this blog entry and two hours worth of tales and tidbits to relate to you about my niece's wedding. Of course, she was an angel, a beauty, up there on the stage/altar, a real-life Pocahontas giving her pledge to spend the rest of her life with her handsome man. Her mother seemed to be in her own element, too, shining with a glow that makes her youthful. Their son/brother performed his duties well, filling roles of brother, son, father, photographer and videographer. His girlfriend and parents are slowly merging into the family circle, it seems.
I saw my semi-nieces, Sarah Becky and Holly, one a college student and the other a new mother. I am happy and pleased that they grow up in good health and seek broad horizons, celebrating the vistas that spread out before them, bumpy as the road may be that they travel.
My wife's extended family joined us in this affirmation of ancient rituals. Oles, Judy, Margo, Maurice, Fay, Dan. Pat's family, including her parents and brother, sister in-law and niece, also shared hugs and smiles with us, telling tall tales when we could. Fay asked me to read, "My Name is Asher Lev." After discussing it over dinner at the Schnitzel Ranch last night, I'll add the book to my list.
My niece's new family enjoyed the festivities. I had the privilege of getting to know many of them over the past few weeks, including her father in-law, mother in-law, and sister in-law. Their lives are similar to Uncle Ralph's so that time spent with them is like time spent with my mother's family, with whom I'll mingle later today (and thus, the title of this blog entry).
Overall, yesterday was like a walk back through time, revisiting the friends and family of my niece's life. Her pastors, Brother Jimmy and Brother Dick, have tied the bow on the package, having blessed her birth and now her marriage, handing a gift to the world that was conceived and nurtured by her mother, family and friends.
That is the view outside the window of my thoughts today - I can see no view more perfect than that but still I wish I could see more lives filled with the sole purpose of having kids and taking care of family. If we treated each other as family, putting the past behind us, could we overcome most of the tendencies toward liars, cheats, crooks, and murderers that lurk in our collective souls? Today, I believe so!
31 May 2009
29 May 2009
Age Limits
Yesterday, while my wife and I were enjoying our last night out with her mother before she returns to her home in east Tennessee, eating a multi-tapas meal at Chef's Table, my sister called to let me know our uncle, Ralph Maximilian T., had died.
I was just thinking about him and his siblings yesterday while I was showering, wondering if I should blog about my family's humble lives, where my father and my mother and her two siblings all grew up on farms in east Tennessee. Of those four people, two of them ended up with master's degrees, one of them ended up with a PhD and the fourth one, Uncle Ralph, ended up working at the aluminum processing plant with his father.
Now the only ones alive are the ones who pursued baccalaureate and post-graduate university education. Is there a connection? Perhaps.
Uncle Ralph had a long history of health problems but I don't know how many of them are directly related to his line of work. No doubt his skeletal joint problems originated in repetitive, strenuous labor. His wife, my Aunt Polly, died of Alzheimer's disease about two and a half years ago - her health decline was genetically related and her death led to some of Ralph's health decline. He missed her strongly, and spoke of Polly visiting him sometimes, especially in the last couple of weeks (I know how he felt - in my thoughts I still have conversations with my girlfriend who died when I was 10 (37 years ago!) and sometimes the conversations feel real enough to make me believe she's nearby; an active imagination is good for one's sanity!).
Perhaps his children and/or grandchildren will detail Ralph's life in the blogging world. I recall him serving in the Navy during World War II - he was going to visit the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., next month with one of his daughters. He maintained the family homestead outside of Maryville, Tennessee, and it still belongs in the family. Beside me in this study I have the hardbound book, "Blount County, Tennessee History, 1795-1995," which includes the history of Ralph's and my mother's side of the family.
I'll miss my uncle. He was a kind-hearted man, whose face resembled both my grandfather and grandmother. He takes some family lore to the grave with him, tiny details that swam around in his thoughts that he probably never shared with us because he had the details of daily family living occupying most of his time. I wish I'd spent time with him in his physically active days to learn some of the woodworking skills his father taught him (my grandfather built furniture and other wooden items like the bookcase on the other side of this room, as well as little knickknacks like miniature hillbilly people he made out of walnut shells, including one on the bookcase beside me). In a drawer of an inaccessible clothes dresser I have a wooden whistle with one end carved in the shape of a squirrel that Uncle Ralph made for me as a kid when he visited my house. From him, I got my love of wood carving, having made a few items for my wife - nothing fancy, mind you, but something I can create with a pocket knife and bare hands.
Uncle Ralph and Aunt Polly taught me to enjoy the journey as much as the destination. They owned a caravan converted for road travel (a "conversion van," if you will) and drove their grandchildren on cross-country trips, careening along long-forgotten highways and byways, taking their time to see the curiosity shops and meet local people outside of tourist areas, as opposed to vacationers who rush to a tourist spot like a beach or amusement park and stay trapped within a false world the whole time.
In other words, my uncle and aunt were real people who still had their hands in the soil and lived a quiet life in the country side of suburban living. With their passing, a part of reality goes with them, leaving me to ponder where in this technology-filled world do people like my uncle and aunt still live. A few years ago, my uncle learned how to use a computer, played Solitaire and sent emails as long as he was able to sit at a computer and type.
I am a simple person. I see the world in simple terms. We humans live to reproduce ourselves. Uncle Ralph and Aunt Polly raised two children and cared for their grandchildren. They did not aspire to international fame and fortune but they did travel around the world with their family. In them thrived the secret to species success, even if their way of life and genetic heritage limited their maximum age of good health.
My grandparents lived into their 70s. My uncle and his siblings are living into their 80s, it appears. I gather that their children will live into their 90s (if we exercise, eat well, and take our life-extending prescription drugs, of course, while working in our desk jobs until retirement age).
My uncle takes his Rook-playing skills and family discussions into eternal sleep, too. He had opinions that differed from his brother (my uncle Gordon) and sister (my mother). I've always missed those times when they gathered to play Rook and had serious but fun discussions about politicians or political changes, since one was a staunch Democrat, one was a staunch Republican and one was a moderate in comparison to the other two.
Uncle Ralph, I salute you. I lift a beer in your memory and will cheer during an upcoming NASCAR race, knowing that you still enjoyed sitting and watching those motorsports events on television right up to the end of your life. I'll carve a wooden creature when I take a vacation trip soon and will stop at local shops to see real people along the way. Thanks for everything you taught me!
= = =
My wife and mother in-law attend a bridesmaid luncheon right now, staying on course for celebrating events with our living relatives this weekend, including the rehearsal dinner tonight and my niece's wedding tomorrow. We'll find out later today when my uncle's funeral is planned, hoping that it's on Sunday or Monday so we can visit family during memorial services for my dead relative, Uncle Ralph. We will celebrate both events in sadness and happiness, fitting well into my belief that life and death are one and the same, contributing to the only true measure of human wealth: family.
I was just thinking about him and his siblings yesterday while I was showering, wondering if I should blog about my family's humble lives, where my father and my mother and her two siblings all grew up on farms in east Tennessee. Of those four people, two of them ended up with master's degrees, one of them ended up with a PhD and the fourth one, Uncle Ralph, ended up working at the aluminum processing plant with his father.
Now the only ones alive are the ones who pursued baccalaureate and post-graduate university education. Is there a connection? Perhaps.
Uncle Ralph had a long history of health problems but I don't know how many of them are directly related to his line of work. No doubt his skeletal joint problems originated in repetitive, strenuous labor. His wife, my Aunt Polly, died of Alzheimer's disease about two and a half years ago - her health decline was genetically related and her death led to some of Ralph's health decline. He missed her strongly, and spoke of Polly visiting him sometimes, especially in the last couple of weeks (I know how he felt - in my thoughts I still have conversations with my girlfriend who died when I was 10 (37 years ago!) and sometimes the conversations feel real enough to make me believe she's nearby; an active imagination is good for one's sanity!).
Perhaps his children and/or grandchildren will detail Ralph's life in the blogging world. I recall him serving in the Navy during World War II - he was going to visit the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., next month with one of his daughters. He maintained the family homestead outside of Maryville, Tennessee, and it still belongs in the family. Beside me in this study I have the hardbound book, "Blount County, Tennessee History, 1795-1995," which includes the history of Ralph's and my mother's side of the family.
I'll miss my uncle. He was a kind-hearted man, whose face resembled both my grandfather and grandmother. He takes some family lore to the grave with him, tiny details that swam around in his thoughts that he probably never shared with us because he had the details of daily family living occupying most of his time. I wish I'd spent time with him in his physically active days to learn some of the woodworking skills his father taught him (my grandfather built furniture and other wooden items like the bookcase on the other side of this room, as well as little knickknacks like miniature hillbilly people he made out of walnut shells, including one on the bookcase beside me). In a drawer of an inaccessible clothes dresser I have a wooden whistle with one end carved in the shape of a squirrel that Uncle Ralph made for me as a kid when he visited my house. From him, I got my love of wood carving, having made a few items for my wife - nothing fancy, mind you, but something I can create with a pocket knife and bare hands.
Uncle Ralph and Aunt Polly taught me to enjoy the journey as much as the destination. They owned a caravan converted for road travel (a "conversion van," if you will) and drove their grandchildren on cross-country trips, careening along long-forgotten highways and byways, taking their time to see the curiosity shops and meet local people outside of tourist areas, as opposed to vacationers who rush to a tourist spot like a beach or amusement park and stay trapped within a false world the whole time.
In other words, my uncle and aunt were real people who still had their hands in the soil and lived a quiet life in the country side of suburban living. With their passing, a part of reality goes with them, leaving me to ponder where in this technology-filled world do people like my uncle and aunt still live. A few years ago, my uncle learned how to use a computer, played Solitaire and sent emails as long as he was able to sit at a computer and type.
I am a simple person. I see the world in simple terms. We humans live to reproduce ourselves. Uncle Ralph and Aunt Polly raised two children and cared for their grandchildren. They did not aspire to international fame and fortune but they did travel around the world with their family. In them thrived the secret to species success, even if their way of life and genetic heritage limited their maximum age of good health.
My grandparents lived into their 70s. My uncle and his siblings are living into their 80s, it appears. I gather that their children will live into their 90s (if we exercise, eat well, and take our life-extending prescription drugs, of course, while working in our desk jobs until retirement age).
My uncle takes his Rook-playing skills and family discussions into eternal sleep, too. He had opinions that differed from his brother (my uncle Gordon) and sister (my mother). I've always missed those times when they gathered to play Rook and had serious but fun discussions about politicians or political changes, since one was a staunch Democrat, one was a staunch Republican and one was a moderate in comparison to the other two.
Uncle Ralph, I salute you. I lift a beer in your memory and will cheer during an upcoming NASCAR race, knowing that you still enjoyed sitting and watching those motorsports events on television right up to the end of your life. I'll carve a wooden creature when I take a vacation trip soon and will stop at local shops to see real people along the way. Thanks for everything you taught me!
= = =
My wife and mother in-law attend a bridesmaid luncheon right now, staying on course for celebrating events with our living relatives this weekend, including the rehearsal dinner tonight and my niece's wedding tomorrow. We'll find out later today when my uncle's funeral is planned, hoping that it's on Sunday or Monday so we can visit family during memorial services for my dead relative, Uncle Ralph. We will celebrate both events in sadness and happiness, fitting well into my belief that life and death are one and the same, contributing to the only true measure of human wealth: family.
28 May 2009
The Philosophy of Aging
I shared an online article with my father:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/professors-guide/2009/05/20/17-ways-college-campuses-are-changing.html
He commented that he has already experienced at least part of the changes, with more to come. Some of his colleagues, "old-time profs," are bowing out because of the changes -- they don't want to change. He added, "Change is not comfortable to one desiring stability in life and an unchanging personal world. I appreciate that point-of-view at age 74!"
The philosophy of aging is interesting to me, also. I have concluded that as we age we find ways to succeed in daily living that work no matter what happens in the ever-changing marketplace, so "change for change's sake" becomes less and less necessary as we age; at the same time, there are aspects of our lives that we enjoy changing, which may or may not coincide with our successful daily habits; therefore, aging and changing meet only when we find the intersection of the two a fun learning experience. Even I, who grew up during the heyday of the computer revolution, find some technological changes unenjoyable simply because they don't add anything useful or fun to my daily habits but that doesn't mean it excludes enjoyment for others. Live and let live, respect each other's differences, etc.
I have three new books to read (in addition to the used books I haven't finished and the Linux texts I'm reading to prepare for the Linux course I will teach this summer):
During my freshman year in college, at Georgia Tech, a residence hallmate of mine was a long distance runner. He grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and told us about an interesting habit of his. He'd run along the beach, using sand as a form of weight resistance training. During tourist season, he made sure he ran before tourists typically got up in the morning. Then he'd "rest" in a tourist beach area, wearing a sad look on his face (remember he was 15 to 17 years of age at the time). Young women would come up to him and ask him why he was so sad. He'd concoct a story about breaking up with a girlfriend and how despondent he felt, thinking about drowning himself in the ocean. Inevitably, he'd end up making out or having sex with the women. Another habit of his I still remember - he distrusted the sanitation of public toilet seats so he'd stand on a toilet seat and squat over the toilet bowl to defecate. We laughed that when we walked into the men's toilet and saw blond hair sticking up above a toilet stall, we knew who was taking a dump. I wonder if he still has these habits in middle age.
Back to my stack of reading!
But first, a thanks to Zazzy's on Airport Road in Huntsville for carrying copies of Huntsville Event magazine where I'm featured on page 40 of the May/June issue, in the section named An Irish Evening. You can see me wearing a Guinness hat I bought in a shop next to the O'Connell Street bridge in Dublin, Ireland, on St. Patrick's Day (I'm also wearing a green Celtic-patterned tie my sister bought me in Ireland).
Hard to believe my oldest niece gets married in two days ("the day after tomorrow," she finally gets to say today!). She's marrying a great fellow - a secondary school football/baseball coach and history teacher. Seems like she was just born yesterday! Or maybe the day before yesterday, anyway.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/professors-guide/2009/05/20/17-ways-college-campuses-are-changing.html
He commented that he has already experienced at least part of the changes, with more to come. Some of his colleagues, "old-time profs," are bowing out because of the changes -- they don't want to change. He added, "Change is not comfortable to one desiring stability in life and an unchanging personal world. I appreciate that point-of-view at age 74!"
The philosophy of aging is interesting to me, also. I have concluded that as we age we find ways to succeed in daily living that work no matter what happens in the ever-changing marketplace, so "change for change's sake" becomes less and less necessary as we age; at the same time, there are aspects of our lives that we enjoy changing, which may or may not coincide with our successful daily habits; therefore, aging and changing meet only when we find the intersection of the two a fun learning experience. Even I, who grew up during the heyday of the computer revolution, find some technological changes unenjoyable simply because they don't add anything useful or fun to my daily habits but that doesn't mean it excludes enjoyment for others. Live and let live, respect each other's differences, etc.
I have three new books to read (in addition to the used books I haven't finished and the Linux texts I'm reading to prepare for the Linux course I will teach this summer):
- Out of Our Heads: why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness by Alva Noƫ
- The Ego Tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self by Thomas Metzinger
- Selfless Insight: Zen and the meditative transformations of consciousness by James H. Austin
During my freshman year in college, at Georgia Tech, a residence hallmate of mine was a long distance runner. He grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and told us about an interesting habit of his. He'd run along the beach, using sand as a form of weight resistance training. During tourist season, he made sure he ran before tourists typically got up in the morning. Then he'd "rest" in a tourist beach area, wearing a sad look on his face (remember he was 15 to 17 years of age at the time). Young women would come up to him and ask him why he was so sad. He'd concoct a story about breaking up with a girlfriend and how despondent he felt, thinking about drowning himself in the ocean. Inevitably, he'd end up making out or having sex with the women. Another habit of his I still remember - he distrusted the sanitation of public toilet seats so he'd stand on a toilet seat and squat over the toilet bowl to defecate. We laughed that when we walked into the men's toilet and saw blond hair sticking up above a toilet stall, we knew who was taking a dump. I wonder if he still has these habits in middle age.
Back to my stack of reading!
But first, a thanks to Zazzy's on Airport Road in Huntsville for carrying copies of Huntsville Event magazine where I'm featured on page 40 of the May/June issue, in the section named An Irish Evening. You can see me wearing a Guinness hat I bought in a shop next to the O'Connell Street bridge in Dublin, Ireland, on St. Patrick's Day (I'm also wearing a green Celtic-patterned tie my sister bought me in Ireland).
Hard to believe my oldest niece gets married in two days ("the day after tomorrow," she finally gets to say today!). She's marrying a great fellow - a secondary school football/baseball coach and history teacher. Seems like she was just born yesterday! Or maybe the day before yesterday, anyway.
27 May 2009
Power-Free
In order to understand I am not alone in feeling unique among seven billion people, I read books and stories from different cultures and different time periods. I accept the fact that my subculture is not the best or brightest all the time.
I stopped watching television regularly a long time ago because most of what I needed from the television screen I can find in my daily walks and hikes or in scanning websites. However, I hear a television right now because in a nearby room my mother in-law has the volume turned up so she can watch television without using her hearing aids. I am exposed to the hot news topics of the day, which bounces around my brain while I concentrate on what to write today.
Three topics I meant to cover in this blog entry: OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching. Maybe I will.
Instead, I'm going to lean on you for a moment and take a breath. Just press your shoulder against the computer screen and I'll press my back against you to prop us both up. There. Thanks, that feels better.
Can you see where we sit? I see us on a large rock outcropping, overlooking the eastern ridges of the Appalachian Mountain chain. A few buzzards fly in a thermal a couple of miles away. Some boats and other watercraft write white lines and carve V-shaped troughs in a lake down below. Here's an apple I brought for you. I've got a bottle of wine if you aren't too dehydrated from our morning hike.
I'm glad you're here with me. I'm more of a hiker than a runner and kinda figured you are, too, since we met here. Who would have thought that two people who enjoy the outdoors are the same two people who also enjoy using technology?
Yeah, I know what you mean. I wonder what our technology side is doing to the environment. I just heard an ABC news report on global warming and its extinction effect on cool/cold weather species ranging from butterflies to frogs to orchids. That's why I needed to lean on you for a moment. I feel tired. Worn out. Wisdom is a heavier burden to bear than I thought it would be when I was child admiring the elders I wanted to be.
The world I knew as a child is gone but human social development has always gone that way, changing from one generation to the next, with the definition of what "generation" means also changing.
In a dream last night, I saw the human species as a giant organizational chart on a website, where we could trace the location and daily occupations of every person on the planet, showing us exactly how many people similar to us exist, and see how many people are performing tasks just like us at any one moment (either at the same time (say, at 15:00 in each time zone) or literally at the same moment, no matter what the local time is). We could see people practicing the same religious ceremonies, people speaking the same language and people buying the same clothes/food/houses as us. We could categorize our habits in generic terms and see people doing the same things as us but in different cultural contexts. And in this future website, our bodies are connected to the Internet more directly than the way we send/receive external stimuli now so that we can see each other's brain patterns and hormonal changes, too, if we want. We also can figure out who is not directly connecting to this future network and determine who has handlers that manipulate images of people like celebrities, politicians and business leaders. Urban legends pass through our cultures instantaneously and become basic forms of population control for commercialization and political purposes.
I know that my dream is just the fluff-and-stuff of material I read, flowing through my nighttime thoughts and hanging out during the day, waiting for my attention. To get to that dream, I want to focus on my three topics, OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching, but in reverse order.
First, Interactive Teaching. I am a result of a childhood spent in front of professional educators, people who earned their livelihood giving young people lessons in assembling cultures from the basic building blocks of language and mathematics. The best teachers I remember were the ones who chose the emotionally stable and mature students to aid in the education process, thus getting students in one age level to recruit other students to join them in the joy of learning. Barriers prevented the completely free flow of information, including class bullying and stereotyping (often reinforced by the worst type of teacher, the tenured "lifer" who was just doing his/her job to get a paycheck and reach retirement age, happy to keep a class from collapsing into chaos, much less create a learning environment). From this, I believe the ideal learning environment is one where teachers work with the exceptionally gifted/focused students to help train those students in the classroom who are not as gifted academically or not focused on classroom learning so that both social skills and academic learning are enhanced. Difficulty lies in coordinating learning activities outside the classroom with those in the home where parental goals may not match the goals of public/private professional educators (in a separate subject, I hope that home-schooled children have parents/guardians who align their home activities with their learning activities and from what I've seen, many or most of them do).
Of course, at the institute where I instruct, students/customers are older than the state-mandated education age level but many of the same aspects of teaching still apply and which I saw demonstrated in college-level professors/instructors of mine. Every class I taught last quarter allowed me the flexibility to apply this technique and except for a few cases, I think I succeeded. One thing I learned, this technique requires a level of commitment from me that I wouldn't ask of every instructor. Equality is essential - every student enters my class with the same level of skills which means I don't/won't engage conversations with other instructors about students'/customers' learning abilities. I don't have a solution for the students/customers who show me their cheating habits other than to assign them to teams with students who do not cheat and hope they see the joy of learning while they're not able to easily cheat because I give different assignments to each team.
Which leads me to the next topic: Project Management. A project manager and a teacher have the same goals - improvising magic tricks with unknown resources. In business, I have managed more successful projects than ones that failed (or rather, in PMA terms (PMA = Positive Mental Attitude), I never had a project that failed, only ones that showed me how to succeed with unusual circumstances such as too much time, too much money, too few resources or not enough customers).
I am not a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I am a human being and live with other humans in daily living. Therefore, I do not worry about how to operate a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I only focus on the one resource I understand: human beings.
Humans are not numbers. Humans are not satisfaction surveys. Humans are not the products they buy or the complaints they make. Humans are me and I them. I don't care about their broken items or their inadequate training. I do care about what makes them human, their special traits, their dreams, their wishes, their desires, their disappointments and their losses.
Success is a big word with a lot of meaning that falls outside of a dictionary's precise definition. I'll let you define what success means to you. To me, success is just another word for you. You are the successful output/conclusion of you. Thus, you are the unknown resource with whom I want to perform the magic trick (i.e., project) of your learning.
And now I reach the final topic: OpenCourseWare. Life is an open classroom with no syllabus and no assigned textbook but with plenty of homework and lots of pop quizzes and tests. How do you prepare for a situation like that? What else but constant learning! If you want to get serious about having fun learning, you start by unplugging yourself from unfettered entertainment, including over-the-air television, DVRs, video games, texting, or any other passive resource which artificially stimulates you such as drug abuse or obsessively shopping. You learn by doing, including reading, writing, and interacting. Learning also means paying attention to your body, feeding yourself good food and exercising yourself to have a relatively healthy body to provide an open mindset for learning.
I happen to instruct a small set of students/customers at one technical institute. They have busy lives that at this point barely gives them the time they need to eat, exercise their bodies, absorb the course material and spend time with their kids and families. However, they, like me, will complete their formal education and go on to new careers. To be successful, though, we/they keep learning.
That's where OpenCourseWare comes in. It used to be that I listened to audiobooks on my way back and forth to work because I had about a 30-minute drive each way, matching the length of an audiotape. With CDs, audiobook learning stretched into my lunchtime driving at times. Now, with the Internet, I can listen to podcasts anywhere I go, downloading them to my iPod or listening to them when I'm on the computer. The advent of OpenCourseWare has opened up a new world to me. Instead of spending time reading lots of old books (I'm still working my way through "Melmoth the Wanderer" that I bought how many weeks ago?), I spend time picking and choosing OpenCourseWare courses to read or listen to. We should inculcate this habit in our web-connected youth so that they are prepared for college courses before they take them, an idea that goes with the nontraditional training track that Maya Frost proposes.
Everything in moderation, including moderation. Don't spend too much time alone learning. After all, we really only learn by sharing. In our lives, let's learn with our kids and families so that we see a subject from more than one perspective. Next time, put away the DVD player and turn a summer vacation into an interactive learning session - you'll be surprised how much fun it will be.
And remember, you don't have to use electronic technology to learn - take a bird, tree, or plant identification book on a road trip and reward one another for first identifying a bird and or reciting a tree's uses. We humans are part of this planet so spend some computer downtime together and have a power-free evening, eating grilled food by candlelight under a moonlit sky in the backyard. There's nothing like beer, shish kebab (vegetable and/or meat) and some shooting stars to say it's summertime! Which means I better go shopping before it gets dark. See you later, alligator.
I stopped watching television regularly a long time ago because most of what I needed from the television screen I can find in my daily walks and hikes or in scanning websites. However, I hear a television right now because in a nearby room my mother in-law has the volume turned up so she can watch television without using her hearing aids. I am exposed to the hot news topics of the day, which bounces around my brain while I concentrate on what to write today.
Three topics I meant to cover in this blog entry: OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching. Maybe I will.
Instead, I'm going to lean on you for a moment and take a breath. Just press your shoulder against the computer screen and I'll press my back against you to prop us both up. There. Thanks, that feels better.
Can you see where we sit? I see us on a large rock outcropping, overlooking the eastern ridges of the Appalachian Mountain chain. A few buzzards fly in a thermal a couple of miles away. Some boats and other watercraft write white lines and carve V-shaped troughs in a lake down below. Here's an apple I brought for you. I've got a bottle of wine if you aren't too dehydrated from our morning hike.
I'm glad you're here with me. I'm more of a hiker than a runner and kinda figured you are, too, since we met here. Who would have thought that two people who enjoy the outdoors are the same two people who also enjoy using technology?
Yeah, I know what you mean. I wonder what our technology side is doing to the environment. I just heard an ABC news report on global warming and its extinction effect on cool/cold weather species ranging from butterflies to frogs to orchids. That's why I needed to lean on you for a moment. I feel tired. Worn out. Wisdom is a heavier burden to bear than I thought it would be when I was child admiring the elders I wanted to be.
The world I knew as a child is gone but human social development has always gone that way, changing from one generation to the next, with the definition of what "generation" means also changing.
In a dream last night, I saw the human species as a giant organizational chart on a website, where we could trace the location and daily occupations of every person on the planet, showing us exactly how many people similar to us exist, and see how many people are performing tasks just like us at any one moment (either at the same time (say, at 15:00 in each time zone) or literally at the same moment, no matter what the local time is). We could see people practicing the same religious ceremonies, people speaking the same language and people buying the same clothes/food/houses as us. We could categorize our habits in generic terms and see people doing the same things as us but in different cultural contexts. And in this future website, our bodies are connected to the Internet more directly than the way we send/receive external stimuli now so that we can see each other's brain patterns and hormonal changes, too, if we want. We also can figure out who is not directly connecting to this future network and determine who has handlers that manipulate images of people like celebrities, politicians and business leaders. Urban legends pass through our cultures instantaneously and become basic forms of population control for commercialization and political purposes.
I know that my dream is just the fluff-and-stuff of material I read, flowing through my nighttime thoughts and hanging out during the day, waiting for my attention. To get to that dream, I want to focus on my three topics, OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching, but in reverse order.
First, Interactive Teaching. I am a result of a childhood spent in front of professional educators, people who earned their livelihood giving young people lessons in assembling cultures from the basic building blocks of language and mathematics. The best teachers I remember were the ones who chose the emotionally stable and mature students to aid in the education process, thus getting students in one age level to recruit other students to join them in the joy of learning. Barriers prevented the completely free flow of information, including class bullying and stereotyping (often reinforced by the worst type of teacher, the tenured "lifer" who was just doing his/her job to get a paycheck and reach retirement age, happy to keep a class from collapsing into chaos, much less create a learning environment). From this, I believe the ideal learning environment is one where teachers work with the exceptionally gifted/focused students to help train those students in the classroom who are not as gifted academically or not focused on classroom learning so that both social skills and academic learning are enhanced. Difficulty lies in coordinating learning activities outside the classroom with those in the home where parental goals may not match the goals of public/private professional educators (in a separate subject, I hope that home-schooled children have parents/guardians who align their home activities with their learning activities and from what I've seen, many or most of them do).
Of course, at the institute where I instruct, students/customers are older than the state-mandated education age level but many of the same aspects of teaching still apply and which I saw demonstrated in college-level professors/instructors of mine. Every class I taught last quarter allowed me the flexibility to apply this technique and except for a few cases, I think I succeeded. One thing I learned, this technique requires a level of commitment from me that I wouldn't ask of every instructor. Equality is essential - every student enters my class with the same level of skills which means I don't/won't engage conversations with other instructors about students'/customers' learning abilities. I don't have a solution for the students/customers who show me their cheating habits other than to assign them to teams with students who do not cheat and hope they see the joy of learning while they're not able to easily cheat because I give different assignments to each team.
Which leads me to the next topic: Project Management. A project manager and a teacher have the same goals - improvising magic tricks with unknown resources. In business, I have managed more successful projects than ones that failed (or rather, in PMA terms (PMA = Positive Mental Attitude), I never had a project that failed, only ones that showed me how to succeed with unusual circumstances such as too much time, too much money, too few resources or not enough customers).
I am not a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I am a human being and live with other humans in daily living. Therefore, I do not worry about how to operate a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I only focus on the one resource I understand: human beings.
Humans are not numbers. Humans are not satisfaction surveys. Humans are not the products they buy or the complaints they make. Humans are me and I them. I don't care about their broken items or their inadequate training. I do care about what makes them human, their special traits, their dreams, their wishes, their desires, their disappointments and their losses.
Success is a big word with a lot of meaning that falls outside of a dictionary's precise definition. I'll let you define what success means to you. To me, success is just another word for you. You are the successful output/conclusion of you. Thus, you are the unknown resource with whom I want to perform the magic trick (i.e., project) of your learning.
And now I reach the final topic: OpenCourseWare. Life is an open classroom with no syllabus and no assigned textbook but with plenty of homework and lots of pop quizzes and tests. How do you prepare for a situation like that? What else but constant learning! If you want to get serious about having fun learning, you start by unplugging yourself from unfettered entertainment, including over-the-air television, DVRs, video games, texting, or any other passive resource which artificially stimulates you such as drug abuse or obsessively shopping. You learn by doing, including reading, writing, and interacting. Learning also means paying attention to your body, feeding yourself good food and exercising yourself to have a relatively healthy body to provide an open mindset for learning.
I happen to instruct a small set of students/customers at one technical institute. They have busy lives that at this point barely gives them the time they need to eat, exercise their bodies, absorb the course material and spend time with their kids and families. However, they, like me, will complete their formal education and go on to new careers. To be successful, though, we/they keep learning.
That's where OpenCourseWare comes in. It used to be that I listened to audiobooks on my way back and forth to work because I had about a 30-minute drive each way, matching the length of an audiotape. With CDs, audiobook learning stretched into my lunchtime driving at times. Now, with the Internet, I can listen to podcasts anywhere I go, downloading them to my iPod or listening to them when I'm on the computer. The advent of OpenCourseWare has opened up a new world to me. Instead of spending time reading lots of old books (I'm still working my way through "Melmoth the Wanderer" that I bought how many weeks ago?), I spend time picking and choosing OpenCourseWare courses to read or listen to. We should inculcate this habit in our web-connected youth so that they are prepared for college courses before they take them, an idea that goes with the nontraditional training track that Maya Frost proposes.
Everything in moderation, including moderation. Don't spend too much time alone learning. After all, we really only learn by sharing. In our lives, let's learn with our kids and families so that we see a subject from more than one perspective. Next time, put away the DVD player and turn a summer vacation into an interactive learning session - you'll be surprised how much fun it will be.
And remember, you don't have to use electronic technology to learn - take a bird, tree, or plant identification book on a road trip and reward one another for first identifying a bird and or reciting a tree's uses. We humans are part of this planet so spend some computer downtime together and have a power-free evening, eating grilled food by candlelight under a moonlit sky in the backyard. There's nothing like beer, shish kebab (vegetable and/or meat) and some shooting stars to say it's summertime! Which means I better go shopping before it gets dark. See you later, alligator.
26 May 2009
Shoot For The Moon
The cursor flashed on and off, reminding her of all the years she'd sat at a computer and watched flashing bars, chevrons, boxes, pipes and other symbols of waiting.
She filled her lungs with air and felt nothing.
The boy beside her looked up at the ceiling and watched a spider crawl out of an air duct register and walk upside-down above his head.
"Mommy."
"Yes, dear?"
"Why can't I walk upside-down?"
"Why would you want to walk upside-down, honey?"
"I dunno. Just 'cause."
"Well, let's think about it for a minute. What's the largest animal you've ever seen walk upside-down?"
"A monkey."
"A monkey?"
"Yeah. He was climbing up his momma's belly."
"Oh, I see. Well, I guess you could say he was walking upside-down. Sort of."
"Uh-huh."
"Any other creature you've seen walk upside-down?"
"Uh-huh."
"What?"
The boy pointed at the ceiling.
The woman looked up and saw the archnid making its way across the top of the room. She thought to herself for a moment. 'Why can't we use the ceiling like that? I mean, after all, we waste four walls and the ceiling with decorations when we could be living on them.'
"Well, dear, we don't have feet or bodies designed to walk on ceilings. We'd be too heavy for the type of hooks or suction cups that it takes to walk on the ceiling."
"Suction cups?"
"Yes."
"You mean like on an octopus?"
"That's right."
"Does that mean an octopus can climb on our ceiling?"
"Darling, that's a wonderful question but I don't know the answer. Why don't you google it and find out?"
"Mommy."
"Yes, dear."
"Why do you sit at home all day and play on the computer instead of having tea parties and regular card games like all my friends' mommies?"
"Because I work, dear."
"But all my friends' daddies go to an office and work. They don't sit at home."
"Well, my office is right here. I telecommute."
"Is that why you have a card game and those words on your computer screen?"
"No, dear. I'm taking a break. I'm playing Rook with your aunts and talking with them via chat."
"Rook? What's that?"
"Honey, that's a card game that your grandfolks used to play all the time, when we'd get together at their house every Sunday after church."
"Do they play Rook at the nursing home?"
"No, dear, they don't. Your grandfolks have Alzheimer's."
"Oldtimers?"
"Yes, dear, something like that."
The woman looked at the screen. "Play!" one of her sisters had posted on the IM window. The woman sighed and typed a message to her sisters.
"Do you reckon Momma has any memories of Rook...or square dancing...or churning butter?"
She filled her lungs with air and felt nothing.
The boy beside her looked up at the ceiling and watched a spider crawl out of an air duct register and walk upside-down above his head.
"Mommy."
"Yes, dear?"
"Why can't I walk upside-down?"
"Why would you want to walk upside-down, honey?"
"I dunno. Just 'cause."
"Well, let's think about it for a minute. What's the largest animal you've ever seen walk upside-down?"
"A monkey."
"A monkey?"
"Yeah. He was climbing up his momma's belly."
"Oh, I see. Well, I guess you could say he was walking upside-down. Sort of."
"Uh-huh."
"Any other creature you've seen walk upside-down?"
"Uh-huh."
"What?"
The boy pointed at the ceiling.
The woman looked up and saw the archnid making its way across the top of the room. She thought to herself for a moment. 'Why can't we use the ceiling like that? I mean, after all, we waste four walls and the ceiling with decorations when we could be living on them.'
"Well, dear, we don't have feet or bodies designed to walk on ceilings. We'd be too heavy for the type of hooks or suction cups that it takes to walk on the ceiling."
"Suction cups?"
"Yes."
"You mean like on an octopus?"
"That's right."
"Does that mean an octopus can climb on our ceiling?"
"Darling, that's a wonderful question but I don't know the answer. Why don't you google it and find out?"
"Mommy."
"Yes, dear."
"Why do you sit at home all day and play on the computer instead of having tea parties and regular card games like all my friends' mommies?"
"Because I work, dear."
"But all my friends' daddies go to an office and work. They don't sit at home."
"Well, my office is right here. I telecommute."
"Is that why you have a card game and those words on your computer screen?"
"No, dear. I'm taking a break. I'm playing Rook with your aunts and talking with them via chat."
"Rook? What's that?"
"Honey, that's a card game that your grandfolks used to play all the time, when we'd get together at their house every Sunday after church."
"Do they play Rook at the nursing home?"
"No, dear, they don't. Your grandfolks have Alzheimer's."
"Oldtimers?"
"Yes, dear, something like that."
The woman looked at the screen. "Play!" one of her sisters had posted on the IM window. The woman sighed and typed a message to her sisters.
"Do you reckon Momma has any memories of Rook...or square dancing...or churning butter?"
25 May 2009
Free Pain
Today, I joined two-thousand, one hundred persons and ran/jogged/walked/shuffled 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). I guess the fastest runner covered the event in about 30 minutes, which means that as I was crossing the two-mile mark, the finish line was in sight for the front group. When I crossed the three-mile mark, the winners were cooled off and deciding whether to stay for the awards ceremony or leave. When I crossed the four-mile mark, the organizers were getting ready to start the awards ceremony. When I crossed the finish line, the official time read one hour, nineteen minutes and some seconds.
I beat my goal of one hour and 20 minutes. I would even have celebrated one hour and 30 minutes since I had not trained and only decided at the last minute to register for the race last night. Thus, my late race entry means I don't have a posted race time this year because they had run out of "ChampionChip" timing devices - as I told the person at the registration table, my competition days are over and I'm just glad to have feet that can carry me 6.2 miles.
I weigh 30 pounds more than I did when I ran a marathon a few years ago. Where did the time go and how did I find all this weight? "Teacher! Teacher! I know the answer! You spent too much time in front of the computer screen!" Indeed, I did. Lifting weights for a few minutes every other day will not help you lose weight - in fact, I think it added a few pounds.
Last year my wife and I played spectators and cheered the runners. I snapped photos and shot some video of the event and posted a small tribute on YouTube. This year, I was the overweight runner and let others cheer me on.
In the running crowd, I saw a neighbor of mine, Linda Christian, a former coworker, Pete Engler (?), and a few familiar faces such as a fellow season ticket holder for a football team. She and I stood around a while and talked about the new head coach and what this season might be like. She also told me she planned to finish the 10k course between 40 and 50 minutes. A coworker of mine from my GE days, Bob Gustafson, sang a song before the start of the race. The new mayor spoke a few words and a local politician, Parker Griffith, stood at the halfway point and waved. I also saw a trumpet player who teaches music at UAHuntsville, Carolyn Sanders.
I saw thousands of happy, smiling faces, on shouting sidewalk supporters and even on those of us who dragged ourselves across the finish line after the throngs of supporters had thinned out.
Along the way, I was offered water by Boy Scout troops, frozen tubes of flavored ice by neighbors, beer and mixed drinks from some holiday revelers (who also offered to let me sit with them and drink a while - now why am I here, instead? hmm...) and cool sprays from water sprinklers. Members of the police department and medical emergency units stood in traffic intersections to keep civilian vehicles out of our way so I made sure I waved and thanked every one of them for using their holiday to secure the road for serious runners and casual joggers alike.
I spoke with a few runners, enjoying the roving party atmosphere, like moving from room to room at a social gathering, never spending more than a few minutes with any one person and sometimes running into the same person again 30 minutes later. I would have talked longer with a few guys and gals I met but our jogging/walking paces rarely matched up. One woman said many things to me but my tinnitus blocked much of what she said - life is full of missed opportunities and deafness cut out anything I could have learned from her. Oh well.
One nice thing about road races in town - I finished the race at 8:20, returned to the car at 8:25, walked into my house at 8:45, and showered, ate a snack, played with the cats, kissed my wife and got here by 9:15.
= = =
I ordered five copies of my book, Are You With The Program?, to give to the five best students/customers in the spring quarter course I taught, Strategies for the Technical Professional. All the students/customers in my classes need to know they can do anything they set their minds to accomplish but I don't have unlimited funds so I've selected the top five in one class to plant the seed of success in them and hope they grow and share their successes with others.
= = =
Time to rest, relax, drink a beer and enjoy this holiday with my wife! Adios, amigos!
I beat my goal of one hour and 20 minutes. I would even have celebrated one hour and 30 minutes since I had not trained and only decided at the last minute to register for the race last night. Thus, my late race entry means I don't have a posted race time this year because they had run out of "ChampionChip" timing devices - as I told the person at the registration table, my competition days are over and I'm just glad to have feet that can carry me 6.2 miles.
I weigh 30 pounds more than I did when I ran a marathon a few years ago. Where did the time go and how did I find all this weight? "Teacher! Teacher! I know the answer! You spent too much time in front of the computer screen!" Indeed, I did. Lifting weights for a few minutes every other day will not help you lose weight - in fact, I think it added a few pounds.
Last year my wife and I played spectators and cheered the runners. I snapped photos and shot some video of the event and posted a small tribute on YouTube. This year, I was the overweight runner and let others cheer me on.
In the running crowd, I saw a neighbor of mine, Linda Christian, a former coworker, Pete Engler (?), and a few familiar faces such as a fellow season ticket holder for a football team. She and I stood around a while and talked about the new head coach and what this season might be like. She also told me she planned to finish the 10k course between 40 and 50 minutes. A coworker of mine from my GE days, Bob Gustafson, sang a song before the start of the race. The new mayor spoke a few words and a local politician, Parker Griffith, stood at the halfway point and waved. I also saw a trumpet player who teaches music at UAHuntsville, Carolyn Sanders.
I saw thousands of happy, smiling faces, on shouting sidewalk supporters and even on those of us who dragged ourselves across the finish line after the throngs of supporters had thinned out.
Along the way, I was offered water by Boy Scout troops, frozen tubes of flavored ice by neighbors, beer and mixed drinks from some holiday revelers (who also offered to let me sit with them and drink a while - now why am I here, instead? hmm...) and cool sprays from water sprinklers. Members of the police department and medical emergency units stood in traffic intersections to keep civilian vehicles out of our way so I made sure I waved and thanked every one of them for using their holiday to secure the road for serious runners and casual joggers alike.
I spoke with a few runners, enjoying the roving party atmosphere, like moving from room to room at a social gathering, never spending more than a few minutes with any one person and sometimes running into the same person again 30 minutes later. I would have talked longer with a few guys and gals I met but our jogging/walking paces rarely matched up. One woman said many things to me but my tinnitus blocked much of what she said - life is full of missed opportunities and deafness cut out anything I could have learned from her. Oh well.
One nice thing about road races in town - I finished the race at 8:20, returned to the car at 8:25, walked into my house at 8:45, and showered, ate a snack, played with the cats, kissed my wife and got here by 9:15.
= = =
I ordered five copies of my book, Are You With The Program?, to give to the five best students/customers in the spring quarter course I taught, Strategies for the Technical Professional. All the students/customers in my classes need to know they can do anything they set their minds to accomplish but I don't have unlimited funds so I've selected the top five in one class to plant the seed of success in them and hope they grow and share their successes with others.
= = =
Time to rest, relax, drink a beer and enjoy this holiday with my wife! Adios, amigos!
24 May 2009
Pill Hill
I live here, in this place, with unimaginable treasures surrounding me - namely, you. You teach me why material items have no value to me - you are infinitely more valuable than a shiny bauble, more fun than a handcrafted, personalized one-of-a-kind sports car, more luxurious than a fur coat made from the last Tasmanian devil, and more fiery delicious than the purest mixture of capsaican and cacao stirred into a cup of Kopi Luwak coffee.
I have proven many things to myself. I can take on the challenges of an occupation and achieve success. I can earn money, I can invest money, I can throw money away, I can carelessly give money to nonthrifty charities. I can think. I can write. I can collect stories. I can recite stories. I can make up stories of my own.
Neither poet nor prolific prose writer am I, although I have gladly profaned the labels.
A Carolina wren, Thryothorus ludovicianus, is upset with me for standing next to its nesting site.
A friend of mine faces the dilemma of her in-law son's self-destructive (i.e., partying) behaviour that interferes with my friend's daughter's ability to keep a regular job and take care of her two kids. My friend wants her in-law son to put aside his drug/alcohol use/abuse and hopes he can make it through a 28-day course at a local addiction treatment center. I want him to do well, to find a place where he is useful to himself and his family but only if... are some of us incapable of having kids and taking care of our family no matter how much support and patience our family gives us while always hoping their efforts are useful? I believe not. I know that it all boils down to individual enlightenment and time is irrelevant while we walk our paths alone but wow(!), the effect we have on others while we walk through fire!
J-, you are a man and it's all right to break down and cry while you figure out what you're good at - we don't mind you showing your mixed up emotions as long as you aren't mixing your tears into beers and drugs. We know you aren't perfect so celebrate your imperfection with the rest of us tattered human beings! You can't step into the future if you keep yourself tied down to the past. I have been there, brother. It ain't easy to burn away the scars of old but you will heal and find the path's brighter when you put your past behind you. The past does not define you - your previous moments only define where you've been, not where you're going or where you can go. Your wife wants you to be her husband and father of her kids. We all do. So drop your so-called friends who just want to party and set your sights on your kids and family.
I promise you'll find a new drug-free life that has highs and lows much more exhilarating than drug-induced ones. It'll take a while to clear your mind of the artificial highs and you will feel some awful lows but on the other side you'll see an open horizon that offers the world on a plate to you. I assure you you will excel in ways you never thought possible. But it starts with this next second and the one after that and the next indetermine, numbingly impossible to count seconds that eventually turn into minutes, and then five-minute stretches and then 10-minute ones and maybe an hour will be your next moment of comfort and after some time you'll start seeing days that you can live through. Finally, you'll go weeks, months and years without remembering the fears and insecurity that drove you to hide in the instantaneous roller coaster rides that drugs offered.
And another thing, the most important persons in the world to me are your children. They are your wife's kids and my friend's grandchildren. They are more important than me. Thus, you are more important than me. But I can't be you. Only you can be you. I want your kids to have two parents raising them, preferably their natural parents. So you see, I know you're going to get your act together.
= = =
Are emotions simply the remnants of our fight-or-flight syndrome, mating rituals, and baby rearing, unnecessary in today's complex society ("today" being a word that covers a couple of thousand years)? In other words, how do we advance our bodies' hormonal outputs to match the rapid-fire input of memes, the visual/auditory cues which trigger the intricate brain patterns of our current civilization? Can we genetically modify humans to have faster pathways in our bodies for fluid/neurochemical transport?
= = =
Took my wife and mother in-law to attend the 11:00 "traditional" service at the church to which my wife and I belong, Covenant Presbyterian, where hymnals and Bibles no longer exist in the pews, where song lyrics and Bible verses are projected on the back wall of the sanctuary. This is Stephen Ministry Sunday, when we learned of the Stephen Ministry and its mission - to train church members to confidentially help grieving people or people with emotionally distressing issues. I agree with the ministry's mission but I sure miss singing from hymnals - not into solely melodic singing - I like four-part harmony. At least the two solo pieces that were accompanied by piano had good harmony and the two male singers exchanged melodies with the piano.
= = =
Visited lakehouse home of my wife's coworker and husband, Anna and Henry, near the confluence of the Elk River and Tennessee River. Reminds me of my lazy summer days spent at Helen's and other friends' parents' places on the lake in upper east Tennessee in the late 1970s.
The 13-year old daughter of a church friend of Anna (they attend Faith Presbyterian Church together with other people at this party) owns a mottled corn snake who just dropped 13 eggs after a visit from a friend's snake. The mother had lost the snake for a week after trying to put the snake in its enclosure in the dark and accidentally securing the top upside-down, leaving a tiny opening for the snake to slither through - all because the girl brought the snake downstairs into the living room to show her favorite animal while they were watching the second Narnia movie.
The girl's mother has family from North Carolina and Tennessee. Believe she said her grandfather was the minister of First Presbyterian in Vonore, or was it Madisonville? She also mentioned Tellico Plains and Tocoa, among others, as well as having spent time in Banner Elk, North Carolina, with visits to Montreat. Has a brother or uncle who lives in New Zealand. Got her master's degree as a nurse practitioner but became pregnant after years of infertility and stayed home to raise her three daughters, now ages 20, 13 and 9. Too much information that I didn't memorize because I was having fun casually eating, observing and talking with John's wife (her twin would be Margery McDuffie Whatley, if I didn't know better). I gave her Rosemary McMahan's yellow handout of the Halverson Benediction, knowing she will pass it on to someone else, most especially new school graduates for whom she owes cards of congratulations.
Lots of redheads at this party and lots of young people - teens to twenties. Here to celebrate birthday of a young man, his 21st. One young woman just finished her freshman year at the University of Arkansas, thinking about majoring in engineering (industrial?) but just working on calculus, physics and other basic classes for right now.
= = =
I am at peace, seeing my meditative beliefs manifested in local religious practices, knowing they reflect universal truths that surpass human understanding.
Henry had a Nikon camera and accessories that gave me lens envy, including 500mm and 1000mm lens attachments. But then again he's a professional photographer.
Downed a few sips of a margarita to celebrate the young man's 21st birthday, almost as good as a man's first Guinness or shot of Redbreast whiskey. I'm not a man to shy away from a drink, or even two, but my days of delirium are over...or at least that's what I keep telling myself until the next time I've had one too many. lol
Before you ask yourself why I'm telling a young man to give up the drink while I talk about myself enjoying the bottle, do you see the ironic humor in what I've been saying in this blog entry? Project alternating images to prove that the solution to success is not consistency, it's believing you have no limits and following through with your belief. When you give yourself limits, you'll live by them. Our only limit is being human. Everything else is illusion, even our being human.
[Jogging/walking the Cotton Row Run 10K road race tomorrow at 7:00; at 22:06, it's time to go to bed]
I have proven many things to myself. I can take on the challenges of an occupation and achieve success. I can earn money, I can invest money, I can throw money away, I can carelessly give money to nonthrifty charities. I can think. I can write. I can collect stories. I can recite stories. I can make up stories of my own.
Neither poet nor prolific prose writer am I, although I have gladly profaned the labels.
A Carolina wren, Thryothorus ludovicianus, is upset with me for standing next to its nesting site.
A friend of mine faces the dilemma of her in-law son's self-destructive (i.e., partying) behaviour that interferes with my friend's daughter's ability to keep a regular job and take care of her two kids. My friend wants her in-law son to put aside his drug/alcohol use/abuse and hopes he can make it through a 28-day course at a local addiction treatment center. I want him to do well, to find a place where he is useful to himself and his family but only if... are some of us incapable of having kids and taking care of our family no matter how much support and patience our family gives us while always hoping their efforts are useful? I believe not. I know that it all boils down to individual enlightenment and time is irrelevant while we walk our paths alone but wow(!), the effect we have on others while we walk through fire!
J-, you are a man and it's all right to break down and cry while you figure out what you're good at - we don't mind you showing your mixed up emotions as long as you aren't mixing your tears into beers and drugs. We know you aren't perfect so celebrate your imperfection with the rest of us tattered human beings! You can't step into the future if you keep yourself tied down to the past. I have been there, brother. It ain't easy to burn away the scars of old but you will heal and find the path's brighter when you put your past behind you. The past does not define you - your previous moments only define where you've been, not where you're going or where you can go. Your wife wants you to be her husband and father of her kids. We all do. So drop your so-called friends who just want to party and set your sights on your kids and family.
I promise you'll find a new drug-free life that has highs and lows much more exhilarating than drug-induced ones. It'll take a while to clear your mind of the artificial highs and you will feel some awful lows but on the other side you'll see an open horizon that offers the world on a plate to you. I assure you you will excel in ways you never thought possible. But it starts with this next second and the one after that and the next indetermine, numbingly impossible to count seconds that eventually turn into minutes, and then five-minute stretches and then 10-minute ones and maybe an hour will be your next moment of comfort and after some time you'll start seeing days that you can live through. Finally, you'll go weeks, months and years without remembering the fears and insecurity that drove you to hide in the instantaneous roller coaster rides that drugs offered.
And another thing, the most important persons in the world to me are your children. They are your wife's kids and my friend's grandchildren. They are more important than me. Thus, you are more important than me. But I can't be you. Only you can be you. I want your kids to have two parents raising them, preferably their natural parents. So you see, I know you're going to get your act together.
= = =
Are emotions simply the remnants of our fight-or-flight syndrome, mating rituals, and baby rearing, unnecessary in today's complex society ("today" being a word that covers a couple of thousand years)? In other words, how do we advance our bodies' hormonal outputs to match the rapid-fire input of memes, the visual/auditory cues which trigger the intricate brain patterns of our current civilization? Can we genetically modify humans to have faster pathways in our bodies for fluid/neurochemical transport?
= = =
Took my wife and mother in-law to attend the 11:00 "traditional" service at the church to which my wife and I belong, Covenant Presbyterian, where hymnals and Bibles no longer exist in the pews, where song lyrics and Bible verses are projected on the back wall of the sanctuary. This is Stephen Ministry Sunday, when we learned of the Stephen Ministry and its mission - to train church members to confidentially help grieving people or people with emotionally distressing issues. I agree with the ministry's mission but I sure miss singing from hymnals - not into solely melodic singing - I like four-part harmony. At least the two solo pieces that were accompanied by piano had good harmony and the two male singers exchanged melodies with the piano.
= = =
Visited lakehouse home of my wife's coworker and husband, Anna and Henry, near the confluence of the Elk River and Tennessee River. Reminds me of my lazy summer days spent at Helen's and other friends' parents' places on the lake in upper east Tennessee in the late 1970s.
The 13-year old daughter of a church friend of Anna (they attend Faith Presbyterian Church together with other people at this party) owns a mottled corn snake who just dropped 13 eggs after a visit from a friend's snake. The mother had lost the snake for a week after trying to put the snake in its enclosure in the dark and accidentally securing the top upside-down, leaving a tiny opening for the snake to slither through - all because the girl brought the snake downstairs into the living room to show her favorite animal while they were watching the second Narnia movie.
The girl's mother has family from North Carolina and Tennessee. Believe she said her grandfather was the minister of First Presbyterian in Vonore, or was it Madisonville? She also mentioned Tellico Plains and Tocoa, among others, as well as having spent time in Banner Elk, North Carolina, with visits to Montreat. Has a brother or uncle who lives in New Zealand. Got her master's degree as a nurse practitioner but became pregnant after years of infertility and stayed home to raise her three daughters, now ages 20, 13 and 9. Too much information that I didn't memorize because I was having fun casually eating, observing and talking with John's wife (her twin would be Margery McDuffie Whatley, if I didn't know better). I gave her Rosemary McMahan's yellow handout of the Halverson Benediction, knowing she will pass it on to someone else, most especially new school graduates for whom she owes cards of congratulations.
Lots of redheads at this party and lots of young people - teens to twenties. Here to celebrate birthday of a young man, his 21st. One young woman just finished her freshman year at the University of Arkansas, thinking about majoring in engineering (industrial?) but just working on calculus, physics and other basic classes for right now.
= = =
I am at peace, seeing my meditative beliefs manifested in local religious practices, knowing they reflect universal truths that surpass human understanding.
Henry had a Nikon camera and accessories that gave me lens envy, including 500mm and 1000mm lens attachments. But then again he's a professional photographer.
Downed a few sips of a margarita to celebrate the young man's 21st birthday, almost as good as a man's first Guinness or shot of Redbreast whiskey. I'm not a man to shy away from a drink, or even two, but my days of delirium are over...or at least that's what I keep telling myself until the next time I've had one too many. lol
Before you ask yourself why I'm telling a young man to give up the drink while I talk about myself enjoying the bottle, do you see the ironic humor in what I've been saying in this blog entry? Project alternating images to prove that the solution to success is not consistency, it's believing you have no limits and following through with your belief. When you give yourself limits, you'll live by them. Our only limit is being human. Everything else is illusion, even our being human.
[Jogging/walking the Cotton Row Run 10K road race tomorrow at 7:00; at 22:06, it's time to go to bed]
23 May 2009
Springtime Flood
Most of you do not know where I live or more specifically, where my main mailing address is. Software applications allow you to find me and even look at my house on a certain day. But I do not reside there.
I am a wanderer, roaming Earth in search of new adventures. I have another house that sits on stilts in the middle of an island surrounded by moving water called a river. You will not find the house with Google or any other search routine. I do not own the island and the house has no legal rights. I built the house from rocks and nonliving plant tissue - it is not a weatherproof structure in the suburban safety sense. Instead, it offers me shelter from the storms formed by my species.
When I sit in my home away from Rome, I think about the ways I can reach this paradise rich with blood-sucking insects. I can use a floating transport device like a canoe, a kayak or the inner tube of a tire. I can tie a rope upstream of the island and guide myself across the river. I can drop from an airplane and steer a parachute into the trees on the island. I can swim. I can build a bamboo bridge. I can sit on a log and hope it lodges itself on the overhanging roots and branches of the island.
There are many ways to get here, but not all of them work well during the rainy season.
I know many fellow wanderers who would like to find my rustic retreat. I see wanderers, homeless people, if you will, treating highway structures like bridges and overpasses the way I treat the island - temporary lodging that belongs to everyone, free for the use and worth every penny.
Only one aspect of civilization bothers me: if we belong to this planet then we should not have to pay other humans for the right to live here. Many dissertations, treatises and arguments over a beer in a pub have centered on this issue so I will not cover all the pros and cons related to property ownership. I know it will not go away - we have too long enjoyed the advantages of housing that the agricultural lifestyle afforded us and will not return to the nomadic, communal land ownership lifestyle until our current civilization collapses hundreds or thousands of years from now.
This isle of idleness, or self-idolatry, serves more as a meditation platform than a place to live. Recent floods have flushed out landlubbers like snakes, turtles and rabbits. The smell of dead fish and light mudlines on vegetation many feet above the river's surface tell me that I missed the height of the flood and thank my previous self for building a suspended seasonal residence.
A heron, perhaps Ardea herodius, flies overhead. I have seen otters but do not know where they live. Birds of all types come and go throughout the day, making me wonder if birds have daily routes they take in search of food and fun, or do they wander aimlessly like my thoughts?
Today, I finished the last class of my third course of my first term as an instructor. I admit I'm a little sad seeing my first "crop" of students go on to their next courses at ITT Tech - it's like watching little birds test their wings and leave the nest - I sure hope my teaching methods gave them the strength and knowledge they need to succeed.
I received a preliminary set of student survey results from this quarter and reviewed them with the department chairs this week. The students gave me the equivalent of an A rating. The feedback embedded in comments was very helpful. Although high scores are good news, I'd rather see comments that give me the specific feedback I need to address shortcomings in the classroom. Like the mosquitos and ticks around here who feast on my blood, I can never get enough comments from surveys, positive or negative!
The sun, the moon and this planet do not know the definition of a week or a weekend. Even a day is not something the sun or moon clearly understand. However, I do. Thus, today and the next two days constitute an extended weekend here in my local culture, giving me the time to enjoy a little getaway. The sky grows dark so either I throw a pole into the river to quickly catch a bite to eat or I continue to meditate on an empty stomach. In either case, I am saying good night to you, twilight letting me read for a short while before laying down and disappearing into the landscape.
I will teach a class on Linux during the summer term so it's time to pull out my Linux Bible and brush up on the all the little tips, tricks and techniques I learned in my days as a test lab manager at different companies that I have pushed into the background of my thoughts during my midlife retirement years as a writer. Zhhhh...smack! Dang skeeter!
Won't be long before I take a full dive back into the river of work life again. Whitewater rafting, here I come! Yee-haw!
I am a wanderer, roaming Earth in search of new adventures. I have another house that sits on stilts in the middle of an island surrounded by moving water called a river. You will not find the house with Google or any other search routine. I do not own the island and the house has no legal rights. I built the house from rocks and nonliving plant tissue - it is not a weatherproof structure in the suburban safety sense. Instead, it offers me shelter from the storms formed by my species.
When I sit in my home away from Rome, I think about the ways I can reach this paradise rich with blood-sucking insects. I can use a floating transport device like a canoe, a kayak or the inner tube of a tire. I can tie a rope upstream of the island and guide myself across the river. I can drop from an airplane and steer a parachute into the trees on the island. I can swim. I can build a bamboo bridge. I can sit on a log and hope it lodges itself on the overhanging roots and branches of the island.
There are many ways to get here, but not all of them work well during the rainy season.
I know many fellow wanderers who would like to find my rustic retreat. I see wanderers, homeless people, if you will, treating highway structures like bridges and overpasses the way I treat the island - temporary lodging that belongs to everyone, free for the use and worth every penny.
Only one aspect of civilization bothers me: if we belong to this planet then we should not have to pay other humans for the right to live here. Many dissertations, treatises and arguments over a beer in a pub have centered on this issue so I will not cover all the pros and cons related to property ownership. I know it will not go away - we have too long enjoyed the advantages of housing that the agricultural lifestyle afforded us and will not return to the nomadic, communal land ownership lifestyle until our current civilization collapses hundreds or thousands of years from now.
This isle of idleness, or self-idolatry, serves more as a meditation platform than a place to live. Recent floods have flushed out landlubbers like snakes, turtles and rabbits. The smell of dead fish and light mudlines on vegetation many feet above the river's surface tell me that I missed the height of the flood and thank my previous self for building a suspended seasonal residence.
A heron, perhaps Ardea herodius, flies overhead. I have seen otters but do not know where they live. Birds of all types come and go throughout the day, making me wonder if birds have daily routes they take in search of food and fun, or do they wander aimlessly like my thoughts?
Today, I finished the last class of my third course of my first term as an instructor. I admit I'm a little sad seeing my first "crop" of students go on to their next courses at ITT Tech - it's like watching little birds test their wings and leave the nest - I sure hope my teaching methods gave them the strength and knowledge they need to succeed.
I received a preliminary set of student survey results from this quarter and reviewed them with the department chairs this week. The students gave me the equivalent of an A rating. The feedback embedded in comments was very helpful. Although high scores are good news, I'd rather see comments that give me the specific feedback I need to address shortcomings in the classroom. Like the mosquitos and ticks around here who feast on my blood, I can never get enough comments from surveys, positive or negative!
The sun, the moon and this planet do not know the definition of a week or a weekend. Even a day is not something the sun or moon clearly understand. However, I do. Thus, today and the next two days constitute an extended weekend here in my local culture, giving me the time to enjoy a little getaway. The sky grows dark so either I throw a pole into the river to quickly catch a bite to eat or I continue to meditate on an empty stomach. In either case, I am saying good night to you, twilight letting me read for a short while before laying down and disappearing into the landscape.
I will teach a class on Linux during the summer term so it's time to pull out my Linux Bible and brush up on the all the little tips, tricks and techniques I learned in my days as a test lab manager at different companies that I have pushed into the background of my thoughts during my midlife retirement years as a writer. Zhhhh...smack! Dang skeeter!
Won't be long before I take a full dive back into the river of work life again. Whitewater rafting, here I come! Yee-haw!
The Rocket Ship Left Without Me
My Dearest,
Thanks for your honest reply. It was more than I could have hoped for.
I apologize for being a cad - fear of what a new physical relationship with you would do to me reignited all the confusion and strong emotions of my childhood and I didn't know how to stop those feelings except by cutting them off abruptly. I found myself once again feeling like a man, and daggone it, I hate to admit it was a good feeling that I don't feel like I deserve anymore! [...makes me jealous of your husband that you can still make a man feel like a man...] You always had that effect on me and always will. I will not apologize for the emotions you invoked in me or I invoked in you - no matter whether you never respond to me again, your kind voice, sweet smile, warm hugs and physical attraction will be in my thoughts to the day I die.
I pray that your health improves and that your daughter finds the life she deserves. May you and your husband resolve the issues that occur when couples become empty nesters, rediscovering what you mean to each other. In my heart, I know that your future will be bright! May your life be blessed with grandchildren and may your parents be there to celebrate that new phase of your life with you!
I will miss you - the only consolation I have in seeing that we will never be emotionally involved together again is knowing that my actions have shown your daughter, the neutral observer during the time you and I spent together, that guys like me who are nice on the outside have emotional shortcomings that get in the way of long-term relationships. As a friend told me when I was so despondent after our breakup, love means opening up our emotional side, making us vulnerable, exposing us to so many wonderful feelings but at the same time possibly leading us to letdowns and emotional disasters. As only I thought I knew, I don't trust my emotional side at times and now there's clearly someone else out there who can agree with that and warn people away from being attracted to me. I'm sorry it had to be you. As you said, my loss of you I have to live with the rest of my life, something that will hit me every time I see a red-haired woman or a sweet, smiling face, real people in real moments that always remind me of you. Nothing ever replaced my relationship with you and now, sadly, nothing ever will.
Love always...
Thanks for your honest reply. It was more than I could have hoped for.
I apologize for being a cad - fear of what a new physical relationship with you would do to me reignited all the confusion and strong emotions of my childhood and I didn't know how to stop those feelings except by cutting them off abruptly. I found myself once again feeling like a man, and daggone it, I hate to admit it was a good feeling that I don't feel like I deserve anymore! [...makes me jealous of your husband that you can still make a man feel like a man...] You always had that effect on me and always will. I will not apologize for the emotions you invoked in me or I invoked in you - no matter whether you never respond to me again, your kind voice, sweet smile, warm hugs and physical attraction will be in my thoughts to the day I die.
I pray that your health improves and that your daughter finds the life she deserves. May you and your husband resolve the issues that occur when couples become empty nesters, rediscovering what you mean to each other. In my heart, I know that your future will be bright! May your life be blessed with grandchildren and may your parents be there to celebrate that new phase of your life with you!
I will miss you - the only consolation I have in seeing that we will never be emotionally involved together again is knowing that my actions have shown your daughter, the neutral observer during the time you and I spent together, that guys like me who are nice on the outside have emotional shortcomings that get in the way of long-term relationships. As a friend told me when I was so despondent after our breakup, love means opening up our emotional side, making us vulnerable, exposing us to so many wonderful feelings but at the same time possibly leading us to letdowns and emotional disasters. As only I thought I knew, I don't trust my emotional side at times and now there's clearly someone else out there who can agree with that and warn people away from being attracted to me. I'm sorry it had to be you. As you said, my loss of you I have to live with the rest of my life, something that will hit me every time I see a red-haired woman or a sweet, smiling face, real people in real moments that always remind me of you. Nothing ever replaced my relationship with you and now, sadly, nothing ever will.
Love always...
22 May 2009
The Future of Netbooks
Depending on your view, technology usually enhances either your business life or your personal life. I remember when a tiny form factor computer called the Timex-Sinclair 1000 hit the market, people said it was either a toy or a great computer for small business owners, almost exactly the same stories I heard when the TRS-80 computer appeared in Radio Shack.
In other words, no one knew exactly how or where these new general purpose tools would be used.
General purpose technology is like an unlabeled cardboard box or plastic bottle - somebody figured out how to build a great product but who really needs it? The companies that use cardboard boxes may not have a product that'll sell well in a plastic bottle or at least aren't sure if they do until they try it. In some cases, they won't - unsealed cardboard boxes don't store liquids very well and two-liter plastic bottles aren't made to store reams of paper.
The same goes for portable computing devices. I used to have a Gateway2000 subnotebook computer called the HandBook 486 (that sported a 486 DX2-50 processor - 50 MHz!). It handled Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Office applications pretty well. I could comfortably type Word documents and review Excel documents anywhere I traveled, but didn't use it when I was seated at home or in the office - it was neither an office productivity computer nor a gaming machine (unless you like playing Solitaire). Later, I purchased an HP Jornado 720 for portable typing. In both cases, my purpose for purchasing these devices was reading offline emails and writing short stories and or novel chapters. The Handbook I had bought as a used/preowned model at Unclaimed Baggage Center and it contained a lot of financial data about a company called Saudi Aramco so it was obvious to me that the subnotebook was capable of serious business spreadsheet use on the go.
For portable computing, I have also used the Palm series of PDAs and an Archos Jukebox [loaded with the RockBox OS]. My wife occasionally uses her iPod Touch.
By now, many of you use cell phones or smartphones to accomplish your lightweight-duty office/home computer work, replacing the old days of email with texting and using mobile apps to look at files stored on your home or office PCs.
Cloud computing, after many years of fits, starts, promises and vaporware, seems to be catching on, making me wonder if netbooks are the real future of handheld computing, offering big-enough computer screens for data entry/review and limited capability for browsing and photo/video viewing.
While researching this subject, I came upon an article about the next generation of netbooks:
A smaller market existed for precloud computing devices, including UMPCs like the OQO, a product I drooled over a few years ago, thinking that a portable PC that worked as your desktop PC would be the wave of the future. News today implies that OQO has called it quits. No one wanted to pay the price of a fully-loaded desktop PC to get a miniaturized version of an average or even pretty-good desktop.
On the opposite end, the OLPC generated a lot of buzz when it was slated to be a $100 low-end portable PC for third-world countries. Now you can only donate $199 to send one to a child in a third-world country.
Meanwhile, special-purpose devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony e-reader carve out a niche for digital books. I remember my impression of the first e-book I read on a Palm III - I liked the pocket portability of some public domain books I loaded, including Aesop's fables and John Donne's poetry, as well as being able to search the text, but I missed being able to hold my fingers in three sections and flip quickly between them or scribbling handwritten notes in the margins.
I own another device that falls in between a portable digital audio recorder and a tablet PC, a digital pen called the livescribe pulse. The pen seems to best serve the lecture hall or office meeting environment or any place where one would want to tie audio recording to handwritten notes (journalists like it, too). I have used the pen at family functions and found it rewarding to go back and listen to family discussions again while reading what I wrote at the time. Otherwise, business colleagues of mine don't like me to make audio recordings of our meetings because it puts them on the record when sometimes they like to talk off the cuff or crack the occasional dirty joke, something they don't want to be recorded for posterity.
I am a middle-aged man who no longer desires new technology like a starving fox in a henhouse or a hungry kid in a candy store. So, for me, the netbook, no matter what form it will take, seeks a younger buyer, whose needs and desires will drive the low-cost, handheld computer market, combining some office and some personal computer use but probably not heavily leaning toward one or the other, remaining somewhat general purpose, so that the major computer manufacturers can survive on the economies of scale that allow them to eake out a slim profit margin. No one wants to be the next OQO.
In other words, no one knew exactly how or where these new general purpose tools would be used.
General purpose technology is like an unlabeled cardboard box or plastic bottle - somebody figured out how to build a great product but who really needs it? The companies that use cardboard boxes may not have a product that'll sell well in a plastic bottle or at least aren't sure if they do until they try it. In some cases, they won't - unsealed cardboard boxes don't store liquids very well and two-liter plastic bottles aren't made to store reams of paper.
The same goes for portable computing devices. I used to have a Gateway2000 subnotebook computer called the HandBook 486 (that sported a 486 DX2-50 processor - 50 MHz!). It handled Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Office applications pretty well. I could comfortably type Word documents and review Excel documents anywhere I traveled, but didn't use it when I was seated at home or in the office - it was neither an office productivity computer nor a gaming machine (unless you like playing Solitaire). Later, I purchased an HP Jornado 720 for portable typing. In both cases, my purpose for purchasing these devices was reading offline emails and writing short stories and or novel chapters. The Handbook I had bought as a used/preowned model at Unclaimed Baggage Center and it contained a lot of financial data about a company called Saudi Aramco so it was obvious to me that the subnotebook was capable of serious business spreadsheet use on the go.
For portable computing, I have also used the Palm series of PDAs and an Archos Jukebox [loaded with the RockBox OS]. My wife occasionally uses her iPod Touch.
By now, many of you use cell phones or smartphones to accomplish your lightweight-duty office/home computer work, replacing the old days of email with texting and using mobile apps to look at files stored on your home or office PCs.
Cloud computing, after many years of fits, starts, promises and vaporware, seems to be catching on, making me wonder if netbooks are the real future of handheld computing, offering big-enough computer screens for data entry/review and limited capability for browsing and photo/video viewing.
While researching this subject, I came upon an article about the next generation of netbooks:
Netbooks of Tomorrow: Notebook, Meet theIf predictions are correct, Apple will jump into the netbook market with a larger iPod Touch (or do they plan to just take on the gaming world of the PSP and Nintendo DS, instead?). Are we moving to the keyboardless tablet PC again? Touchscreen computing works fine if you're searching the Web or looking at photos/video but I certainly wouldn't want to type large documents or spreadsheets and rely on my fingers resting in the QWERTY keyboard typing position for long stretches of time on a flat surface. I don't like holding a Blackberry or other thumb-oriented keyboard for very long, either, even when on the go.
Smartphone - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership [Posted using ShareThis]
A smaller market existed for precloud computing devices, including UMPCs like the OQO, a product I drooled over a few years ago, thinking that a portable PC that worked as your desktop PC would be the wave of the future. News today implies that OQO has called it quits. No one wanted to pay the price of a fully-loaded desktop PC to get a miniaturized version of an average or even pretty-good desktop.
On the opposite end, the OLPC generated a lot of buzz when it was slated to be a $100 low-end portable PC for third-world countries. Now you can only donate $199 to send one to a child in a third-world country.
Meanwhile, special-purpose devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony e-reader carve out a niche for digital books. I remember my impression of the first e-book I read on a Palm III - I liked the pocket portability of some public domain books I loaded, including Aesop's fables and John Donne's poetry, as well as being able to search the text, but I missed being able to hold my fingers in three sections and flip quickly between them or scribbling handwritten notes in the margins.
I own another device that falls in between a portable digital audio recorder and a tablet PC, a digital pen called the livescribe pulse. The pen seems to best serve the lecture hall or office meeting environment or any place where one would want to tie audio recording to handwritten notes (journalists like it, too). I have used the pen at family functions and found it rewarding to go back and listen to family discussions again while reading what I wrote at the time. Otherwise, business colleagues of mine don't like me to make audio recordings of our meetings because it puts them on the record when sometimes they like to talk off the cuff or crack the occasional dirty joke, something they don't want to be recorded for posterity.
I am a middle-aged man who no longer desires new technology like a starving fox in a henhouse or a hungry kid in a candy store. So, for me, the netbook, no matter what form it will take, seeks a younger buyer, whose needs and desires will drive the low-cost, handheld computer market, combining some office and some personal computer use but probably not heavily leaning toward one or the other, remaining somewhat general purpose, so that the major computer manufacturers can survive on the economies of scale that allow them to eake out a slim profit margin. No one wants to be the next OQO.
The Ten-Inch Size Factor
What size do you like? When you look at a computer screen, more than likely you use a GUI-based operating system like Microsoft Windows or a flavor of Linux, so you dedicate some portion of the screen to static images - icons, text menus, etc. Therefore, what size computer screen best fits your most frequent use of a computer?
And in this day and age, are you always looking at a computer screen when you're using technology? Good question.
I have used large CRTs to manage computer programs (four 19" tubes to run a CAD program for designing the space shuttle main engine controller) as well as a cell phone to look at spreadsheet data (about a 2.5" viewing area).
From my experience, the breaking point between serious computer work and casual/quick work falls around a 10" piece of viewing real estate. Anything smaller and you're good for surfing the Web, typing emails or playing a computer game.
More later...gotta go.
And in this day and age, are you always looking at a computer screen when you're using technology? Good question.
I have used large CRTs to manage computer programs (four 19" tubes to run a CAD program for designing the space shuttle main engine controller) as well as a cell phone to look at spreadsheet data (about a 2.5" viewing area).
From my experience, the breaking point between serious computer work and casual/quick work falls around a 10" piece of viewing real estate. Anything smaller and you're good for surfing the Web, typing emails or playing a computer game.
More later...gotta go.
Coarse Course, Of Course
If all human one-to-many education is teaching to the least common denominator because a teacher with one set of limited knowledge, skills and capabilities is trying to impart a subset of knowledge to a group of others with a mixed set of limited knowledge, skills and capabilities, then how do we create an education system where we expand rather than contract the limits, and emphasize individual talent rather than reach group consensus through standardized tests?
That is my quest in which I have already failed during my first attempt, seeing some students/customers lose interest because the material in one course was not challenging enough and/or I was not challenging the students to absorb and go beyond the class material. I was too worried about not offending their sense of self and now I know I was wrong.
I am already willing to be wrong and to let my students excel in ways I cannot, thus pulling myself aside so that I don't hinder my students'/customers' personal learning process. However, my personality still exists because I am their single human teacher/instructor; thus, how do I find a way to exert/assert my personality without suppressing some of my students/customers who have low self-esteem or not a strong desire to learn? My goal is to focus students/customers on knowing themselves and believing in the power of their knowledge, skills and capabilities so they can build upon their complete selves, both strengths AND weaknesses, and see themselves learning as if I am not guiding or instructing them.
Classrooms become mini-cults of personality - the successful instructor avoids becoming the worshipped guru and truly puts the individual personalities of the students/customers first. When I become the invisible instructor whose students/customers master the subject at hand - the course material - I have achieved more greatness through my students/customers than what being a popular instructor achieves.
How does one become invisible? Tag-team teaching, perhaps, with multiple instructors canceling out each other's personalities. Another approach is to identify and designate other students in class to assist in the teaching/learning process while avoiding a system of favoritism.
And then there is the student/customer with another view of the classroom, where learning is a matter of figuring out the best way to get a good grade, no matter whether one photocopies/prints the homework assignments of other students or memorizes the answers to tests. How do I reach out to those students/customers and get them to enjoy learning the course material rather than learning how to cheat their way through class?
Time to assign all students/customers individual portions of the course material and have every one of them share their assigned material with the rest of the students/customers. If we are to meet as a group and the instructor is to become invisible, then as the only instructor in the room I must treat my students/customers as my equals and let them demonstrate their learning to one another. My role as their equal will be to bring my learning into the circle (a/k/a the round table) and tie the course material to real-life business situations.
To accomplish this goal and meet the accreditation requirements of the technical institute, I must open up and present the details behind the syllabus so that students/customers know what's individually required of them at the beginning of the term, including short instruction presentations on their assigned course material, as well as the usual assortment of homework, labwork and tests/quizzes.
And all of this must take place in a fun learning environment, where mistakes are allowed to be made and we can joke around with each other without violating basic written/unwritten rules of decency.
No problem!
That is my quest in which I have already failed during my first attempt, seeing some students/customers lose interest because the material in one course was not challenging enough and/or I was not challenging the students to absorb and go beyond the class material. I was too worried about not offending their sense of self and now I know I was wrong.
I am already willing to be wrong and to let my students excel in ways I cannot, thus pulling myself aside so that I don't hinder my students'/customers' personal learning process. However, my personality still exists because I am their single human teacher/instructor; thus, how do I find a way to exert/assert my personality without suppressing some of my students/customers who have low self-esteem or not a strong desire to learn? My goal is to focus students/customers on knowing themselves and believing in the power of their knowledge, skills and capabilities so they can build upon their complete selves, both strengths AND weaknesses, and see themselves learning as if I am not guiding or instructing them.
Classrooms become mini-cults of personality - the successful instructor avoids becoming the worshipped guru and truly puts the individual personalities of the students/customers first. When I become the invisible instructor whose students/customers master the subject at hand - the course material - I have achieved more greatness through my students/customers than what being a popular instructor achieves.
How does one become invisible? Tag-team teaching, perhaps, with multiple instructors canceling out each other's personalities. Another approach is to identify and designate other students in class to assist in the teaching/learning process while avoiding a system of favoritism.
And then there is the student/customer with another view of the classroom, where learning is a matter of figuring out the best way to get a good grade, no matter whether one photocopies/prints the homework assignments of other students or memorizes the answers to tests. How do I reach out to those students/customers and get them to enjoy learning the course material rather than learning how to cheat their way through class?
Time to assign all students/customers individual portions of the course material and have every one of them share their assigned material with the rest of the students/customers. If we are to meet as a group and the instructor is to become invisible, then as the only instructor in the room I must treat my students/customers as my equals and let them demonstrate their learning to one another. My role as their equal will be to bring my learning into the circle (a/k/a the round table) and tie the course material to real-life business situations.
To accomplish this goal and meet the accreditation requirements of the technical institute, I must open up and present the details behind the syllabus so that students/customers know what's individually required of them at the beginning of the term, including short instruction presentations on their assigned course material, as well as the usual assortment of homework, labwork and tests/quizzes.
And all of this must take place in a fun learning environment, where mistakes are allowed to be made and we can joke around with each other without violating basic written/unwritten rules of decency.
No problem!
Grandfathers I
For the past few days, I have felt overwhelming love and care above and beyond my normal emotional state. You are the reason.
I have seen you, see you now and will see you again. You are with me all the time in one form or another.
I keep telling myself that I am less than you but you tell me and make me feel otherwise.
All of these feelings, unsellable, unmarketable, take place in the midst of a commercial world. We cannot trade emotions or barter them for other non-emotional items. Every one of us owns our emotions, even if we let outside influences increase or decrease certain emotional states.
Why are you so important to me and vice versa? Why does my love of other humans have no bounds except when I let misguided others slip their negative emotional outbursts into my thoughts?
I have studied religious texts from around the world. I hold images in my thoughts of wise elders like Black Elk, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, Alex Haley, Jesus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joseph Campbell, Joan of Arc, Gandhi (Mahatma and Indira), Desmond Tutu, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elizabeth I, and Cyrus.
I hold to the tenet that time does not exist but I do not exist outside of time. In fact, I do not exist. Only you exist. I know myself only because I am made of everything that is not me which is made of you which is everything that is not you.
I live a life of luxury and always have because I have you to love. I loved you the moment I was conceived, receiving my continually-changing essence from you. I am your effervescence and you are mine.
Yet, because I am made of all of you, I am also made of your negative influences. So how do I take the advice of people like my sixth grade teacher, Miss Snow, and let my life be a sieve which holds only the good influences and lets the negative influences flow on through and out of me, so that I prevent me, myself and I from absorbing and passing negative influences on to others?
In that, I have to be my own wise elder, taking the images of my elders into account, letting go of the direct influences in this moment to see the universal image available to me. I meditate as I type, ignoring the parts of me that see this screen and the world around me, understanding that the path of wisdom I tread has opened up onto a cliff overlooking an ocean. A thin line separates the vast horizon of the ocean from the limitless sky. My rational training imagines the depth, width and volume of the ocean as well as the height of the atmosphere. I open my thoughts beyond what I see, expanding past the planet and its eternal circular path around a sun.
Life is a set of patterns, cycles, clashing and breaking apart, remixing and forming new cyclical patterns, always interjoined.
There is no such thing as good, bad, positive or negative. It is all the same, the forming or reforming of patterns. I must get beyond the labels of death and life and see unity. That is what my elders' wisdom represents. We are all in this human condition together. There is no heaven or hell, no devil or angel, no yin or yang, no male or female. We are being and nonbeing at the same time.
Therefore, emotions do not exist and I am not influenced by negative or positive beings. I am neither and both. I am not overwhelmed by emotions of loving and caring. Instead, I am free of feelings altogether. I have reached the state where I am free to be me, a temporary confluence of you who are all the not-mes/not-yous around me.
I am me because I rediscover myself in what you do everyday. We can pay attention to one another or ignore each other - it is all the same. We exist. The one who wrote this and those who read this are humans but all of us exist, including the ones who have no comprehension of these words, like the table lamp, wall, window, tea, pen, gnat, moth, spider, bird, tree, road, power pole, sun, cloud, sky, air, moisture, humidity, quark, chlorophyll, clock and any other label we want to give to the parts of our existence that are me or not-me at the same time.
I use a common human language to express these thoughts and use my body which was born on a specific place of this planet which always proves I am still just this one person but that is all right because it is acceptable to embrace one's human condition. Some of us will starve to death before our fifth birthday. Some of us will live more than one hundred years. Some of us will purposefully kill others. Some of us will sacrifice our lives to save others.
I follow my elders and understand a little more about the phrase, Ī³Ī½įæ¶ĪøĪ¹ ĻĪµĪ±Ļ ĻĻĪ½, or "Know thyself – and you shall know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe."
I will tell a story or two in the next blog entry.
I have seen you, see you now and will see you again. You are with me all the time in one form or another.
I keep telling myself that I am less than you but you tell me and make me feel otherwise.
All of these feelings, unsellable, unmarketable, take place in the midst of a commercial world. We cannot trade emotions or barter them for other non-emotional items. Every one of us owns our emotions, even if we let outside influences increase or decrease certain emotional states.
Why are you so important to me and vice versa? Why does my love of other humans have no bounds except when I let misguided others slip their negative emotional outbursts into my thoughts?
I have studied religious texts from around the world. I hold images in my thoughts of wise elders like Black Elk, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, Alex Haley, Jesus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joseph Campbell, Joan of Arc, Gandhi (Mahatma and Indira), Desmond Tutu, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elizabeth I, and Cyrus.
I hold to the tenet that time does not exist but I do not exist outside of time. In fact, I do not exist. Only you exist. I know myself only because I am made of everything that is not me which is made of you which is everything that is not you.
I live a life of luxury and always have because I have you to love. I loved you the moment I was conceived, receiving my continually-changing essence from you. I am your effervescence and you are mine.
Yet, because I am made of all of you, I am also made of your negative influences. So how do I take the advice of people like my sixth grade teacher, Miss Snow, and let my life be a sieve which holds only the good influences and lets the negative influences flow on through and out of me, so that I prevent me, myself and I from absorbing and passing negative influences on to others?
In that, I have to be my own wise elder, taking the images of my elders into account, letting go of the direct influences in this moment to see the universal image available to me. I meditate as I type, ignoring the parts of me that see this screen and the world around me, understanding that the path of wisdom I tread has opened up onto a cliff overlooking an ocean. A thin line separates the vast horizon of the ocean from the limitless sky. My rational training imagines the depth, width and volume of the ocean as well as the height of the atmosphere. I open my thoughts beyond what I see, expanding past the planet and its eternal circular path around a sun.
Life is a set of patterns, cycles, clashing and breaking apart, remixing and forming new cyclical patterns, always interjoined.
There is no such thing as good, bad, positive or negative. It is all the same, the forming or reforming of patterns. I must get beyond the labels of death and life and see unity. That is what my elders' wisdom represents. We are all in this human condition together. There is no heaven or hell, no devil or angel, no yin or yang, no male or female. We are being and nonbeing at the same time.
Therefore, emotions do not exist and I am not influenced by negative or positive beings. I am neither and both. I am not overwhelmed by emotions of loving and caring. Instead, I am free of feelings altogether. I have reached the state where I am free to be me, a temporary confluence of you who are all the not-mes/not-yous around me.
I am me because I rediscover myself in what you do everyday. We can pay attention to one another or ignore each other - it is all the same. We exist. The one who wrote this and those who read this are humans but all of us exist, including the ones who have no comprehension of these words, like the table lamp, wall, window, tea, pen, gnat, moth, spider, bird, tree, road, power pole, sun, cloud, sky, air, moisture, humidity, quark, chlorophyll, clock and any other label we want to give to the parts of our existence that are me or not-me at the same time.
I use a common human language to express these thoughts and use my body which was born on a specific place of this planet which always proves I am still just this one person but that is all right because it is acceptable to embrace one's human condition. Some of us will starve to death before our fifth birthday. Some of us will live more than one hundred years. Some of us will purposefully kill others. Some of us will sacrifice our lives to save others.
I follow my elders and understand a little more about the phrase, Ī³Ī½įæ¶ĪøĪ¹ ĻĪµĪ±Ļ ĻĻĪ½, or "Know thyself – and you shall know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe."
I will tell a story or two in the next blog entry.
21 May 2009
Madam I'm Adam
For some reason, words like palindrome, oxymoron, and onomatopoeia stick in my thoughts this morning. I suppose it's because I received an email implying that the world is coming to an end due to the recent antics of the political entity in which I live, thus reminding me of the phrase, political intelligence. The more things change, the more they stay the same - we live in history and feel out of control while historic changes take place, not realizing that all human conditions are repetitious and change is illusory.
In order to better understand the unusual actions of my mistress I read a book I hadn't picked up in years, Madame Bovary. My mistress did not suffer the economic distress of the book's main character but some of her actions and phrases reflected that of a novel published in 1856. I seek novelty and all I find are novels! Alas, must my newness smell of musty old tomes?
A few phrases from the book stand out:
In order to better understand the unusual actions of my mistress I read a book I hadn't picked up in years, Madame Bovary. My mistress did not suffer the economic distress of the book's main character but some of her actions and phrases reflected that of a novel published in 1856. I seek novelty and all I find are novels! Alas, must my newness smell of musty old tomes?
A few phrases from the book stand out:
- "human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars"
- "But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers."
- "As to the inscription, Homais could think of nothing so fine as Sta viator, and he got no further; he racked his brain, he constantly repeated Sta viator. At last he hit upon Amabilem conjugem calcas, which was adopted."
While mulling the book's storyline in my thoughts, I reclined in bed with the cats. My wife stood in the bathroom, doing whatever she does to dress herself up in the morning for a day of work, with the shower radio broadcasting music that bounced against my eardrums.
A few times in my life I have heard unique musical rhythms in my thoughts that made me wish I'd taken my piano lessons more seriously so that I could repeat the rhythms on the piano and record the score. For the most part, when I hear rhythms, it's usually the rhythms that word-sounds make. Occasionally, song phrases, advert jingles, or whole songs from popular culture repeat in my thoughts.
When a song played on my wife's shower radio this morning, I suddenly saw myself in my younger days, roller skating with friends when we were in our early teens, going round in circles and swaying to the music. My roller skating days melted away and my bowling alley days (ninth grade, I believe) reappeared, accompanied by The Eagles and southern rock bands. Those days faded and my earlier sock hop days appeared, when I danced in my socks on the gym floor in grades five through nine because shoes were not allowed. Then, memories of secondary school dance days popped up, when "heavy petting" took place on the dance floor in the high school commons area. Next, I jumped into my punk rock dancing days on the Strip in Knoxville, when I had a shaved head and wore a large can opener as a single earring, making people think I was a Buddhist, a devotee of Hare Krishna, or a punk wannabe (this was before shaved heads became popular). And finally, the early days of my marriage, when my wife and I joined our other newly married and single friends in club hopping, danced in my head.
Not many of us sing aloud when we work. We listen to music through headphones or earbuds, if we listen to music at all. Some of us listen to "talk radio." I listen to myself talk out ideas in my thoughts, sometimes focusing on the sounds of the words, sometimes focusing on the images the words invoke (or provoke, as the case may be) and sometimes seeing ideas themselves as concrete structures.
This blog has helped me empty out built-up thought patterns so I can go on to whatever else I want to think about, serving as a daily workout routine equivalent to my light workout with 10-lb weights to strengthen my arm, chest and back muscles, preparing me to lift objects, real or imagined.
All this talk about music moved me to turn on my iPod. Right now, "Bleed For Me," by the Dead Kennedys, plays on my iBlast orb iPod speaker appliance - flashing images of my punk rocks days in my thoughts again - preceded by the last few seconds of a work by Kitaro and followed by a live performance by Weather Report.
I live during historic times, always have and always will. I have watched political movements rise and fall. I have watched insects eat insects and then get eaten by birds whose nesting trees have been cut down to make way for human housing (or human nests, if you will). Change is constant. If nothing else about my existence is certain, I am change.
When you read these words, remember that I have nothing to offer you. I am not leading or following. I am not selling or buying. I am not intentionally teaching. I only observe and learn for myself. I am just like all seven billion of us, making my way across this planet, the result of parental pairing I did not pick, in an age I did not choose. All the possibilities of my species are available to me and I limit myself to a few of them, even though I know I only have this one life to live. I am not pushing this blog on you (well, I have told a few of you the location of this blog) so if any of the words I write affect you, positively or negatively, you are responsible for assessing how you want the effects to change your life.
I wish you peace, happiness, joy and elation during the changes in your life. Regardless of your religious beliefs, know that whatever happens to you is supposed to happen because we cannot escape the illusion of time and what happened in every previous moment cannot be undone. Have kids and take care of your family. "Family" is just a word, with no specific meaning, so treat everyone and no one as family - take care of yourself first and family will take care of itself. Words are meaningless - you are more important than one word, a single book, any library, every library, the Internet or the World Wide Web.
I am a storyteller, a writer, and I am not you. I appreciate all the gestures you make to indicate the importance my actions and words have on you, including notes on white boards in classrooms, but keep in mind that I believe every person's life is more important to him/her than mine is, including yours. If, despite my admonition that I am an example of who or what not to be, you still state that my life is important to you, then do me a favor and follow my advice while you're having kids and taking care of your family:
- Live your life wisely.
- Love everyone you meet.
- Remind yourself often that no one is more important than you.
20 May 2009
Shh! Quiet, please...
Listen. Can you hear it? Block out all the other distractions and look up - can you hear the blue sky?
When you look up, how high does the sky seem to you during the day? Sometimes I forget the thin thickness of our atmosphere. I saw a photo taken by one of the space shuttle crew members during the recent visit to the Hubble space telescope this week and there in the photo a sliver of blue, like a thick hardback book cover, coated the surface of planet Earth.
We hear about global warming and see diagrams about heat-trapping gases bouncing UV radiation back to Earth, getting the idea in our thoughts that the atmosphere is taller than the Earth is thick.
Perspective changes everything, doesn't it?
I heard the sky today. I drove my mother in-law over to visit her granddaughter and she spent the whole trip exclaiming about how beautiful everything seems and how gorgeous the sky was. She's 91 years old (I keep thinking she's 92) and yet she still finds a clear, blue sky just as wonderful as when she was a child always looking up. That, my friends and colleagues, is the sky speaking to you - I hope you look up and hear it, too!
I threw away some money today to pay to sit in a theater by myself, drinking a carbonated soda from a waxed paper cup, eating popcorn out of a paper bag, and watching a movie called "Sunshine Cleaning."
The movie's plot you can read about on other websites. I grew up on the edge of the lives of the people in the movie, having worked in jobs similar to the ones performed by the movie characters. Working class jobs, as they say. The students/customers in my courses at the institute, many or most of them, work in similar jobs.
My family has roots in working class jobs. Many of my living relatives have or had worked in hourly wage jobs tied to the minimum wage, so-called nonexempt jobs (eligible for overtime pay).
Yet I was raised to expect something "better" of myself. It was looked down on to work for others as a laborer. Many of my secondary school friends were given summer jobs as laborers at factories where their fathers were engineers, scientists or managers so that they could see the difference between an uneducated worker and an educated one. This type of workplace "education" was supposed to enlighten us and cause us to concentrate our efforts on expanding our learning in order to acquire valuable work skills.
I am in a classification of people who have the brain power to perform complex mental tasks but not the burning desire to push ourselves to work in highly-paid jobs all the time.
Why am I here in this class? At first, I thought it was because I am lazy and spent years punishing myself mentally for not participating in the rote work that my neighbors seem to enjoy. From their perspective, I am lazy because actions speak louder than words and I don't spend a lot of time working around the yard, fixing the house or performing other domestic duties. From my parents' perspective, I didn't get the engineering or science degree that my test-taking skills implied I'd master. From my perspective, it's because I don't buy into the whole purpose of building a more complex society.
I am this one guy with limited thought-processing capabilities, who's not always detail-oriented and who takes a partial, high-level, "big picture" view of life. I am, and obviously it's not enough.
I contemplate my next move. I have held menial labor jobs, clerk-level jobs, management jobs, business ownership jobs and now a teaching job. I think I'm jobbed out. In my youth, I read an illustrated book and saw an animated movie about a fantasy version of the King Arthur tale, where Merlin transforms Arthur into the bodies of nonhuman animals (a universal hero transformation tale found in all cultures). I wanted to have that kind of life but knew I'd never be a nonhuman animal. Instead, I've tranformed into various human animal embodiments, a type of reincarnation or rebirth, if you will.
I am not a religious person. I expect nothing more than what my body can sense as long as it is alive and my brain functions normally, maintaining the sense of self I've carried with me up to now. I have no myths to perpetuate, no children to persuade. I have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. The remainder of my life includes continual deterioration of my body functions, leading to death. I may have one second or one hundred years before I die - I do not know.
What do I do next? As always, I learn. I find something new to occupy myself. I take my time, keeping my balance between slow steps, feeling the wind in my face and on the bottom of each foot as it hangs in the air, sensing the tension and release of every muscle cell. I enjoy the moment, which is all I have. I sit and listen to the sky.
When you look up, how high does the sky seem to you during the day? Sometimes I forget the thin thickness of our atmosphere. I saw a photo taken by one of the space shuttle crew members during the recent visit to the Hubble space telescope this week and there in the photo a sliver of blue, like a thick hardback book cover, coated the surface of planet Earth.
We hear about global warming and see diagrams about heat-trapping gases bouncing UV radiation back to Earth, getting the idea in our thoughts that the atmosphere is taller than the Earth is thick.
Perspective changes everything, doesn't it?
I heard the sky today. I drove my mother in-law over to visit her granddaughter and she spent the whole trip exclaiming about how beautiful everything seems and how gorgeous the sky was. She's 91 years old (I keep thinking she's 92) and yet she still finds a clear, blue sky just as wonderful as when she was a child always looking up. That, my friends and colleagues, is the sky speaking to you - I hope you look up and hear it, too!
I threw away some money today to pay to sit in a theater by myself, drinking a carbonated soda from a waxed paper cup, eating popcorn out of a paper bag, and watching a movie called "Sunshine Cleaning."
The movie's plot you can read about on other websites. I grew up on the edge of the lives of the people in the movie, having worked in jobs similar to the ones performed by the movie characters. Working class jobs, as they say. The students/customers in my courses at the institute, many or most of them, work in similar jobs.
My family has roots in working class jobs. Many of my living relatives have or had worked in hourly wage jobs tied to the minimum wage, so-called nonexempt jobs (eligible for overtime pay).
Yet I was raised to expect something "better" of myself. It was looked down on to work for others as a laborer. Many of my secondary school friends were given summer jobs as laborers at factories where their fathers were engineers, scientists or managers so that they could see the difference between an uneducated worker and an educated one. This type of workplace "education" was supposed to enlighten us and cause us to concentrate our efforts on expanding our learning in order to acquire valuable work skills.
I am in a classification of people who have the brain power to perform complex mental tasks but not the burning desire to push ourselves to work in highly-paid jobs all the time.
Why am I here in this class? At first, I thought it was because I am lazy and spent years punishing myself mentally for not participating in the rote work that my neighbors seem to enjoy. From their perspective, I am lazy because actions speak louder than words and I don't spend a lot of time working around the yard, fixing the house or performing other domestic duties. From my parents' perspective, I didn't get the engineering or science degree that my test-taking skills implied I'd master. From my perspective, it's because I don't buy into the whole purpose of building a more complex society.
I am this one guy with limited thought-processing capabilities, who's not always detail-oriented and who takes a partial, high-level, "big picture" view of life. I am, and obviously it's not enough.
I contemplate my next move. I have held menial labor jobs, clerk-level jobs, management jobs, business ownership jobs and now a teaching job. I think I'm jobbed out. In my youth, I read an illustrated book and saw an animated movie about a fantasy version of the King Arthur tale, where Merlin transforms Arthur into the bodies of nonhuman animals (a universal hero transformation tale found in all cultures). I wanted to have that kind of life but knew I'd never be a nonhuman animal. Instead, I've tranformed into various human animal embodiments, a type of reincarnation or rebirth, if you will.
I am not a religious person. I expect nothing more than what my body can sense as long as it is alive and my brain functions normally, maintaining the sense of self I've carried with me up to now. I have no myths to perpetuate, no children to persuade. I have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. The remainder of my life includes continual deterioration of my body functions, leading to death. I may have one second or one hundred years before I die - I do not know.
What do I do next? As always, I learn. I find something new to occupy myself. I take my time, keeping my balance between slow steps, feeling the wind in my face and on the bottom of each foot as it hangs in the air, sensing the tension and release of every muscle cell. I enjoy the moment, which is all I have. I sit and listen to the sky.
19 May 2009
Numb About Numbers
I have enjoyed the past three months, dipping my toe into the still pool of academia. Although my experience has only shown me what teaching and instructing feel like at a for-profit institute, I have seen life from the other side of a student's desk, which gives me the writing material I need to complete a novel that has tumbled around in my head for years, waiting for the instructor's personal viewpoint to coalesce.
I have sketches of fellow instructors ("In Duluth, we did it differently"), department chairs ("I have FOUR degrees!"), a dean ("nobody leave - this is a tornado watch"), a director and others. I have reams of material on students, all of which gets mish-mashed together so that not a single student stands out - if you only knew some of the stories I heard - I don't even know which ones are true but does it matter, anyway? I can't/won't repeat most of the stories due to confidentiality.
And to think it all started because a person performed an in-class review of an instructor the night I was a guest speaker and invited me to submit my CV. Not once did I express an interest in teaching - the whole time they seemed to pursue me, a person with a business degree, to teach at a technical institute. Who knew I was so special? [Or at least a warm body they needed to fill in for another instructor. lol]
It's like what I've told my students - enjoy your life because you never know what's going to happen. I was sitting here happy in my mid-life retirement, writing about philosophical issues and thinking about business successes, wondering if I'd ever step into the corporate world again when all of sudden, WHAM! I walk into a half-corporate, half-academic environment headed by a dean who seemed out of control (and who's no longer there). Today, I saw a new sheriff's in town (or two of them, I can't tell) and the law's been laid down - it's all about the numbers.
My life is beyond complete. Now I'm reaping rewards for my lifelong journey, spending every day in a tropical paradise where sunshine never ends and 24-hour meals last indefinitely. Humor, mirth and merriment fill me up - my cup runneth over with laughter. I've seen all there is to see.
Never work because you have to. Never become an expert in a job that's easy for you to perform. Those two lessons have shown themselves to me repeatedly through my coworkers these last 10 weeks or so.
I will miss the people I've met and hope they learn their own lessons about success. It's not about hard work or getting good grades - it's about lifelong learning. We can all work hard at jobs that aren't fulfilling. In fact, most humans do just that. And many times they feel satisfied that they've done a hard day's work. But what if the job you're performing is ultimately unsuccessful because of leaders who focus on the wrong objectives?
I am lucky. In my first fulltime permanent corporate job, the CEO of the company, Jack Welch, had cajones and showed me what success was all about. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, my boss had me post above our conference table six rules of successful leadership from Jack Welch:
The for-profit education business is just as cut-throat as any profitable organization. It's in the details of a company's vision, when daily practices hit the pavement, where one finds leadership that shines.
I am still getting over the warm buzz of the instructor's life and haven't yet decided the ways that the institute's leadership shines. Perhaps the newness of the particular location where I worked does not give me the full picture I need to make a balanced evaluation. Sometimes I felt like I was in the henhouse with the other chickens waiting for the farmer to come in with his axe. But you get feelings like that in other places, including mature businesses in decline and brand-new startups with very little funding - nothing new there. Sometimes I felt like I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, but then again the local leadership was still getting formed, with holes in the organizational chart, so I can't say that the absence of direction was attributable to poor leadership skills.
There's something else I can't quite put my finger on about this job...time will tell. Before I write my novel, I'm going to compare notes with friends of mine in the nonprofit/government education world to make sure my observations are unique enough to be worth writing about. Otherwise, why bother? I could just as well spend my time fishing, hiking, biking or just sitting on the deck drinking a beer and pondering the many ways that humans find to needlessly occupy their time, watching dragonflies and birds use my backyard as their playground.
One last observation for the evening. Do you know the acronym ETDBW? Easy To Do Business With. Not exactly catchy but true! Simplify, KISS, you name it. All of these mean one thing - giving your internal/external customers what they want/need when they want/need it, nothing more or less. Thanks to my father, I have a knack for business process analysis. Had I felt a burning desire, I would have constructed a business process analysis report for the institute, identifying where the institute had overcomplicated their processes. Instead, they were more interested in my performing the repetitive and unnecessary tasks of the teaching job for which they hired me. So be it. My business analysis becomes part of the novel, transformed from one place of employment to another, another satire in my collection of stories.
It's not always about the numbers. It is always about the customer, both internal and external. Products and processes change but the customer is always the same: a human being operating inside the concept of time. We use words like "multitasking" to give human capability a feeling of depth but humans operate rather linearly, albeit with multiple stimuli affecting the senses. If you treat customers as something other than human animals in linear time then you've missed the opportunity to serve your customer well.
Enough said. Time for bed. A former mistress of mine confessed to me today that she made the mistake of getting emotionally involved with me again and I admit I'm rather worn out, having spent the last four days thinking about her, knowing I'll miss her even though she'll always be a part of me. I'm not completely a robot. Not yet.
I have sketches of fellow instructors ("In Duluth, we did it differently"), department chairs ("I have FOUR degrees!"), a dean ("nobody leave - this is a tornado watch"), a director and others. I have reams of material on students, all of which gets mish-mashed together so that not a single student stands out - if you only knew some of the stories I heard - I don't even know which ones are true but does it matter, anyway? I can't/won't repeat most of the stories due to confidentiality.
And to think it all started because a person performed an in-class review of an instructor the night I was a guest speaker and invited me to submit my CV. Not once did I express an interest in teaching - the whole time they seemed to pursue me, a person with a business degree, to teach at a technical institute. Who knew I was so special? [Or at least a warm body they needed to fill in for another instructor. lol]
It's like what I've told my students - enjoy your life because you never know what's going to happen. I was sitting here happy in my mid-life retirement, writing about philosophical issues and thinking about business successes, wondering if I'd ever step into the corporate world again when all of sudden, WHAM! I walk into a half-corporate, half-academic environment headed by a dean who seemed out of control (and who's no longer there). Today, I saw a new sheriff's in town (or two of them, I can't tell) and the law's been laid down - it's all about the numbers.
My life is beyond complete. Now I'm reaping rewards for my lifelong journey, spending every day in a tropical paradise where sunshine never ends and 24-hour meals last indefinitely. Humor, mirth and merriment fill me up - my cup runneth over with laughter. I've seen all there is to see.
Never work because you have to. Never become an expert in a job that's easy for you to perform. Those two lessons have shown themselves to me repeatedly through my coworkers these last 10 weeks or so.
I will miss the people I've met and hope they learn their own lessons about success. It's not about hard work or getting good grades - it's about lifelong learning. We can all work hard at jobs that aren't fulfilling. In fact, most humans do just that. And many times they feel satisfied that they've done a hard day's work. But what if the job you're performing is ultimately unsuccessful because of leaders who focus on the wrong objectives?
I am lucky. In my first fulltime permanent corporate job, the CEO of the company, Jack Welch, had cajones and showed me what success was all about. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, my boss had me post above our conference table six rules of successful leadership from Jack Welch:
- Control your own destiny or someone else will.
- Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
- Be candid with everyone.
- Don't manage; lead.
- Change before you have to.
- If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.
The for-profit education business is just as cut-throat as any profitable organization. It's in the details of a company's vision, when daily practices hit the pavement, where one finds leadership that shines.
I am still getting over the warm buzz of the instructor's life and haven't yet decided the ways that the institute's leadership shines. Perhaps the newness of the particular location where I worked does not give me the full picture I need to make a balanced evaluation. Sometimes I felt like I was in the henhouse with the other chickens waiting for the farmer to come in with his axe. But you get feelings like that in other places, including mature businesses in decline and brand-new startups with very little funding - nothing new there. Sometimes I felt like I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, but then again the local leadership was still getting formed, with holes in the organizational chart, so I can't say that the absence of direction was attributable to poor leadership skills.
There's something else I can't quite put my finger on about this job...time will tell. Before I write my novel, I'm going to compare notes with friends of mine in the nonprofit/government education world to make sure my observations are unique enough to be worth writing about. Otherwise, why bother? I could just as well spend my time fishing, hiking, biking or just sitting on the deck drinking a beer and pondering the many ways that humans find to needlessly occupy their time, watching dragonflies and birds use my backyard as their playground.
One last observation for the evening. Do you know the acronym ETDBW? Easy To Do Business With. Not exactly catchy but true! Simplify, KISS, you name it. All of these mean one thing - giving your internal/external customers what they want/need when they want/need it, nothing more or less. Thanks to my father, I have a knack for business process analysis. Had I felt a burning desire, I would have constructed a business process analysis report for the institute, identifying where the institute had overcomplicated their processes. Instead, they were more interested in my performing the repetitive and unnecessary tasks of the teaching job for which they hired me. So be it. My business analysis becomes part of the novel, transformed from one place of employment to another, another satire in my collection of stories.
It's not always about the numbers. It is always about the customer, both internal and external. Products and processes change but the customer is always the same: a human being operating inside the concept of time. We use words like "multitasking" to give human capability a feeling of depth but humans operate rather linearly, albeit with multiple stimuli affecting the senses. If you treat customers as something other than human animals in linear time then you've missed the opportunity to serve your customer well.
Enough said. Time for bed. A former mistress of mine confessed to me today that she made the mistake of getting emotionally involved with me again and I admit I'm rather worn out, having spent the last four days thinking about her, knowing I'll miss her even though she'll always be a part of me. I'm not completely a robot. Not yet.
What Can One Person Do?
Outside the window, tree leaves grow out of a limb and stay within a small area during their yearly existence, subjected to wind, rain, sun and animals. Caterpillars have reduced some leaves to near uselessness as far as photosynthesis goes. A chickadee jumped and flew between the leaves to remove caterpillars for a meal so the leaves, no matter what their condition, served as feeding grounds for the bird. The tree and the bird have a loose symbiotic relationship.
The bird also feeds on the seed I place in feeders behind the house. The bird seed I buy was grown in other parts of the world, including "nyjer" seed from India and Ethiopia. When I buy this seed, I think about the infrastructure needed to grow, transport and sell the seed, and wonder about the number of birds or bird feeding grounds that are destroyed by the bird seed industry so I can feed a few birds to please my aesthetic sense of humanity.
A reader named Sushil Yadav from Delhi, India, left a comment on this blog about his thoughts on his blog, "Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment." He and I have connected with one another through the infrastructure/network known as the Internet which has its own set of industries that not only destroy bird feeding grounds but also rearranges much of what we would call the natural environment.
I agree with many points that Sushil Yadav has made. Can we ever know the true limits of human comprehension and in that same vein can human comprehension limits be increased?
Certainly, many of us have become robots in that we're merely extensions of computers, spending most of our days tethered to computer keyboards or cell phone keypads, acting as a kind of switchboard operator using complex texting as code between ourselves for connecting computer systems together, giving little time for us to feel and enjoy our emotional side.
Sushil wants to spread his message and is using the Internet to make the ideas of his message grow. He and I live in the paradox, do we not? Should we teach/preach that technology is numbing us to the wonders of a slower life at the same time that we're using technology as the medium? Somebody in the technological world is working overtime to keep the technology running, not to mention developing and selling newer technological devices to improve the Internet experience for all of us.
I thank Mr. Yadav for formalizing many of my thoughts and hope that he can prove his points scientifically. However, he and I both know that you can't stop an ocean wave with a plow. All we can do is tell those who seek a slower, simpler life that finding a place with a lower cost of living is becoming more difficult as technological advance increases the standard of living and makes itself more appealing to the masses by those who want an even higher lifestyle and are willing to sell technology no matter what the cost. Hopefully, there will always be places where one can find a cheap and relatively safe place to live, whether it's out in the country or in rundown parts of cities.
Every day I ask myself if I should abandon the Internet and cut these ties that bind me to a society that keeps growing in complexity and cost. I have no need to stop the society - "progress" seems to be an inherent feature of human social interaction. We crave newness just so we have something to talk about that's different. I admit that's why I'm here.
I am one person. I proved to myself that one person can make a difference by starting a recycling program for the pine/cedar/spruce trees people cut down and decorate in their homes to brighten the dark days of winter. I know that the recycling program is a drop in the proverbial bucket as far as the amount of trash that gets collected and dumped in city landfills but the recycling effort itself exposed people to the benefits of recycling. The trees were chopped into mulch that could be used around people's yards.
Eventually, our current round of civilization will self-destruct, one way or another. However, we can push out the day of destruction firstly by allowing numbers of our global citizens to maintain a slow lifestyle and secondly by teaching our fast-paced citizens to recycle the materials they use. In areas near where I live, farming communities are run by groups of people labeled Amish or Mennonite, small societies that do not use modern technology. Let us hope that local political organizations (towns, cities, counties, states, nation) allow these farming communities to maintain a lower tax base so that they can continue their low-tech ways. Perhaps political entities around the globe could designate similar low-tax, low-tech farming communities just as they have designated world heritage sites that create environmental preserves free of human development.
I know that popular culture will continue to build up stories about the the end of the world supposedly predicted by the Mayan calendar to occur in December 2012. I don't know enough about that calendar system to say what, if any, truth lies in that cyclical system. We know from history that humans have a tendency to overuse resources that push them to the brink of survival just as global climate cycles make survival even tougher. Perhaps there is a link between the two.
I know I've discussed this already but let's say the two systems are a fact, no matter what the timeframe may be. You are one person among almost seven billion but you have the power and strength to make a difference. What are you doing right now? How about something simple like stop buying and drinking liquids stored in plastic bottles? If every one of us took the time to reduce or stop one habit of ours, our children, grandchildren and maybe even our great-grandchildren might enjoy healthy lives on this planet.
Sushil Yadav has proved it to me once again. One person can make a difference and it starts with you!
The bird also feeds on the seed I place in feeders behind the house. The bird seed I buy was grown in other parts of the world, including "nyjer" seed from India and Ethiopia. When I buy this seed, I think about the infrastructure needed to grow, transport and sell the seed, and wonder about the number of birds or bird feeding grounds that are destroyed by the bird seed industry so I can feed a few birds to please my aesthetic sense of humanity.
A reader named Sushil Yadav from Delhi, India, left a comment on this blog about his thoughts on his blog, "Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment." He and I have connected with one another through the infrastructure/network known as the Internet which has its own set of industries that not only destroy bird feeding grounds but also rearranges much of what we would call the natural environment.
I agree with many points that Sushil Yadav has made. Can we ever know the true limits of human comprehension and in that same vein can human comprehension limits be increased?
Certainly, many of us have become robots in that we're merely extensions of computers, spending most of our days tethered to computer keyboards or cell phone keypads, acting as a kind of switchboard operator using complex texting as code between ourselves for connecting computer systems together, giving little time for us to feel and enjoy our emotional side.
Sushil wants to spread his message and is using the Internet to make the ideas of his message grow. He and I live in the paradox, do we not? Should we teach/preach that technology is numbing us to the wonders of a slower life at the same time that we're using technology as the medium? Somebody in the technological world is working overtime to keep the technology running, not to mention developing and selling newer technological devices to improve the Internet experience for all of us.
I thank Mr. Yadav for formalizing many of my thoughts and hope that he can prove his points scientifically. However, he and I both know that you can't stop an ocean wave with a plow. All we can do is tell those who seek a slower, simpler life that finding a place with a lower cost of living is becoming more difficult as technological advance increases the standard of living and makes itself more appealing to the masses by those who want an even higher lifestyle and are willing to sell technology no matter what the cost. Hopefully, there will always be places where one can find a cheap and relatively safe place to live, whether it's out in the country or in rundown parts of cities.
Every day I ask myself if I should abandon the Internet and cut these ties that bind me to a society that keeps growing in complexity and cost. I have no need to stop the society - "progress" seems to be an inherent feature of human social interaction. We crave newness just so we have something to talk about that's different. I admit that's why I'm here.
I am one person. I proved to myself that one person can make a difference by starting a recycling program for the pine/cedar/spruce trees people cut down and decorate in their homes to brighten the dark days of winter. I know that the recycling program is a drop in the proverbial bucket as far as the amount of trash that gets collected and dumped in city landfills but the recycling effort itself exposed people to the benefits of recycling. The trees were chopped into mulch that could be used around people's yards.
Eventually, our current round of civilization will self-destruct, one way or another. However, we can push out the day of destruction firstly by allowing numbers of our global citizens to maintain a slow lifestyle and secondly by teaching our fast-paced citizens to recycle the materials they use. In areas near where I live, farming communities are run by groups of people labeled Amish or Mennonite, small societies that do not use modern technology. Let us hope that local political organizations (towns, cities, counties, states, nation) allow these farming communities to maintain a lower tax base so that they can continue their low-tech ways. Perhaps political entities around the globe could designate similar low-tax, low-tech farming communities just as they have designated world heritage sites that create environmental preserves free of human development.
I know that popular culture will continue to build up stories about the the end of the world supposedly predicted by the Mayan calendar to occur in December 2012. I don't know enough about that calendar system to say what, if any, truth lies in that cyclical system. We know from history that humans have a tendency to overuse resources that push them to the brink of survival just as global climate cycles make survival even tougher. Perhaps there is a link between the two.
I know I've discussed this already but let's say the two systems are a fact, no matter what the timeframe may be. You are one person among almost seven billion but you have the power and strength to make a difference. What are you doing right now? How about something simple like stop buying and drinking liquids stored in plastic bottles? If every one of us took the time to reduce or stop one habit of ours, our children, grandchildren and maybe even our great-grandchildren might enjoy healthy lives on this planet.
Sushil Yadav has proved it to me once again. One person can make a difference and it starts with you!
18 May 2009
Last Week
I took my wife and mother in-law back to the little country church in the woods yesterday. The pastor, Rosemary McMahan, was out of town celebrating her 30th wedding anniversary with her husband so the associate pastor, Houston, presided over the weekly ceremonies, instead. He quoted several sections of the holy text, including one that stated, "This is my command: love each other." I also found the yellow slip of paper that Rosemary had handed out last week, which stated:
I don't purport to have working knowledge of this place where I live, including the local climate, the planet, the solar system, galaxy, supergalaxy, cluster and/or universe. I am not a scientist, philosopher or theologian (or any combination of those professions). I'm just me, a simple guy with simple needs. I happen to possess the characteristics of the male gender of my species and tend to see the world through the eyes of a male human animal. The only thing I know (or think I know) is that my species has turned this planet into a playground, reducing or eliminating many daily threats to individual survival from other species, including large game animals and small bacteria/viruses, and acting generally as if our species's survival is a guaranteed right.
We built civilization into what it is today, having rebuilt upon previous civilizations. Future civilizations will rebuild upon ours. Superstitions of the past have been recreated by our generation, will be forgotten and recreated by our descendants. Myths and legends will come and go just as urban legends come and go today.
We believe what we believe. We see what we see. Our only purpose, goal, reason for being, or any other concept we can develop to disguise the fact is summed up in the phrase, "have kids and take care of your family." That's it.
Yet we allow ourselves to be trained otherwise, to be led by others to believe and act in ways contrary to species preservation.
I hear people say, "well, I can't do [something to guarantee my family's survival/happiness] because I don't have any money." When I examine these people's claims, I see they can afford cigarettes, cable television subscriptions, Internet service, automobiles and automobile accessories, cell phone subscriptions, clothing and clothing accessories, housing redecoration (including monthly rent on furniture and computers), yard maintenance payments, credit card bills, etc. Not having money is a misnomer. Not managing monetary resources is the issue.
We let ourselves believe that the trappings of society are requirements to live. Somehow my grandparents and great-grandparents survived and enjoyed their lives without all the modern conveniences provided by monthly payments for superfluous items.
A funny thing happened on the way to the bank. We got lost amid all the product advertisements. We fell for the trick that says you must keep up with the Joneses. We have these bodies that can handle baby production and rearing with relative ease and act like we must find a way to fill the time between emergencies or other attention demands from our offspring.
Whatever happened to something simple like sitting down and talking with one another? I don't know. Admittedly, I sit in a room piled almost to the ceiling with yellowed newspapers, photo albums, defunct computing equipment, college textbooks, toy animals, half-built balsa wood flying models, souvenirs, tax receipts, hobby materials and other unknown items buried in stacks. I am a good example of a human with too little time spent on having kids and taking care of one's family.
More importantly, I represent the vast majority of humans who go through the education process in a capitalist society. We raise the excitement level of our children by stuffing them constantly with education so that they only know how to live by filling their time stuffing themselves, either literally with food or figuratively with more education or similar activities like computerized time-compressed entertainment (cell phone chatting/texting, myspace/facebook/baidu/twitter posting, etc.). It's almost as if we're training our children and ourselves that it's not okay to take it slow. Move quickly or die, we seem to say subliminally.
We are raised to want to spend money on stuff, including trips away from home and other time occupiers. Of course, the faster we move, the more opportunities we have to participate in a consumerist society. Spend, spend, spend!
What do you believe? Do you believe in an omniscient/omnipotent being (or beings)? Do you believe the being wants you to surround yourself with unnecessary stuff that adds nothing to having kids and taking care of your family? If you do, can you see what I see, that you're going to keep chasing your tail until you collapse?
This is my last week at the institute. I will hand out final tests for two courses I've taught and hold one more lecture/discussion class with the students/customers in my third course. In the students/customers who've sat in front of me, I wonder how many of them will continue to maintain the simple lives they've led so far, raising their children without needing to accumulate vast quantities of junk. I hope they do. For those who haven't yet settled into a family life, I wonder if they will focus their lives on having children and not on amassing rooms full of trinkets.
I spent most of my adult years working for organizations that depended on a consumerist society, or at least on a growing civilization. Therefore, I sit here having directly benefited from mass consumer-based education. Am I being hypocritical, suggesting that such an education does not match my idealistic, utopian world? No, I'm not. I believe what I believe. My belief can conflict with the beliefs of others because I know I won't change the world. I can only control what I do. I am not going to walk around all day and preach to others that their lives are mostly filled with useless time wasters because they're ignoring their kids and family when they spend money on stuff because society hasn't taught them how to manage their resources on what's the only important activities we should be doing -- my friends who own businesses in this capitalistic/consumerist society probably don't want to hear it.
I'll close with these thoughts. My life is essentially over. I am a product of mass education. I have filled my life with trinkets and it's too late for my wife and me to have kids. Let me be an example, even a warning, to you. Fill your life with the love of/for your children and family. Love like that has no monetary value so don't hook your kids on TV, Internet, cigarettes or consumerism, and avoid mass education systems, if you can. The time and money you'll save will increase your net worth beyond measure!
The Halverson Benediction
Wherever you go, God is sending you. Wherever you are, God has put you there. He has a purpose in your being there. Christ who indwells in you has something he wants to do through you where you are. Believe this and go in His grace and love and power.
Submitted by Elder Rosemary McMahan, Pastor
I don't purport to have working knowledge of this place where I live, including the local climate, the planet, the solar system, galaxy, supergalaxy, cluster and/or universe. I am not a scientist, philosopher or theologian (or any combination of those professions). I'm just me, a simple guy with simple needs. I happen to possess the characteristics of the male gender of my species and tend to see the world through the eyes of a male human animal. The only thing I know (or think I know) is that my species has turned this planet into a playground, reducing or eliminating many daily threats to individual survival from other species, including large game animals and small bacteria/viruses, and acting generally as if our species's survival is a guaranteed right.
We built civilization into what it is today, having rebuilt upon previous civilizations. Future civilizations will rebuild upon ours. Superstitions of the past have been recreated by our generation, will be forgotten and recreated by our descendants. Myths and legends will come and go just as urban legends come and go today.
We believe what we believe. We see what we see. Our only purpose, goal, reason for being, or any other concept we can develop to disguise the fact is summed up in the phrase, "have kids and take care of your family." That's it.
Yet we allow ourselves to be trained otherwise, to be led by others to believe and act in ways contrary to species preservation.
I hear people say, "well, I can't do [something to guarantee my family's survival/happiness] because I don't have any money." When I examine these people's claims, I see they can afford cigarettes, cable television subscriptions, Internet service, automobiles and automobile accessories, cell phone subscriptions, clothing and clothing accessories, housing redecoration (including monthly rent on furniture and computers), yard maintenance payments, credit card bills, etc. Not having money is a misnomer. Not managing monetary resources is the issue.
We let ourselves believe that the trappings of society are requirements to live. Somehow my grandparents and great-grandparents survived and enjoyed their lives without all the modern conveniences provided by monthly payments for superfluous items.
A funny thing happened on the way to the bank. We got lost amid all the product advertisements. We fell for the trick that says you must keep up with the Joneses. We have these bodies that can handle baby production and rearing with relative ease and act like we must find a way to fill the time between emergencies or other attention demands from our offspring.
Whatever happened to something simple like sitting down and talking with one another? I don't know. Admittedly, I sit in a room piled almost to the ceiling with yellowed newspapers, photo albums, defunct computing equipment, college textbooks, toy animals, half-built balsa wood flying models, souvenirs, tax receipts, hobby materials and other unknown items buried in stacks. I am a good example of a human with too little time spent on having kids and taking care of one's family.
More importantly, I represent the vast majority of humans who go through the education process in a capitalist society. We raise the excitement level of our children by stuffing them constantly with education so that they only know how to live by filling their time stuffing themselves, either literally with food or figuratively with more education or similar activities like computerized time-compressed entertainment (cell phone chatting/texting, myspace/facebook/baidu/twitter posting, etc.). It's almost as if we're training our children and ourselves that it's not okay to take it slow. Move quickly or die, we seem to say subliminally.
We are raised to want to spend money on stuff, including trips away from home and other time occupiers. Of course, the faster we move, the more opportunities we have to participate in a consumerist society. Spend, spend, spend!
What do you believe? Do you believe in an omniscient/omnipotent being (or beings)? Do you believe the being wants you to surround yourself with unnecessary stuff that adds nothing to having kids and taking care of your family? If you do, can you see what I see, that you're going to keep chasing your tail until you collapse?
This is my last week at the institute. I will hand out final tests for two courses I've taught and hold one more lecture/discussion class with the students/customers in my third course. In the students/customers who've sat in front of me, I wonder how many of them will continue to maintain the simple lives they've led so far, raising their children without needing to accumulate vast quantities of junk. I hope they do. For those who haven't yet settled into a family life, I wonder if they will focus their lives on having children and not on amassing rooms full of trinkets.
I spent most of my adult years working for organizations that depended on a consumerist society, or at least on a growing civilization. Therefore, I sit here having directly benefited from mass consumer-based education. Am I being hypocritical, suggesting that such an education does not match my idealistic, utopian world? No, I'm not. I believe what I believe. My belief can conflict with the beliefs of others because I know I won't change the world. I can only control what I do. I am not going to walk around all day and preach to others that their lives are mostly filled with useless time wasters because they're ignoring their kids and family when they spend money on stuff because society hasn't taught them how to manage their resources on what's the only important activities we should be doing -- my friends who own businesses in this capitalistic/consumerist society probably don't want to hear it.
I'll close with these thoughts. My life is essentially over. I am a product of mass education. I have filled my life with trinkets and it's too late for my wife and me to have kids. Let me be an example, even a warning, to you. Fill your life with the love of/for your children and family. Love like that has no monetary value so don't hook your kids on TV, Internet, cigarettes or consumerism, and avoid mass education systems, if you can. The time and money you'll save will increase your net worth beyond measure!
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