Following the trail of sweart

Sweart was a word from Anglo-Saxon meaning dark.  It was used when two items were being compared.  It also meant black and was used in describing skin color and sky color.  As time passed people began to only pronounce the a in the word, as in the word father.  So, lo and behold, the spelling changed to swart.  Apparently, some of the peasants of the country didn't know much grammar and thought the word was a noun instead of an adjective.  So when they wanted to say the adjective form of the word, they added y.  By the time Edward DeVere was writing plays under the pseudonym William Shakespeare, the word swarty was popular.  Then, the pronunciation became a function of where a person lived around London.  The ever-popular d alternation with t in words like hearty (pronounced hardy) became both a glottal stop (swar? i) in some outlying regions and an eth sound (voiced th, swarthy) in some other outlying regions.  By the time England began colonizing America the eth version of the word fell from the lips of the sailors and pilgrims making their way across the pond.

That is the microscopic version of a word journey from about 500 ACE to 2012 ACE.  It shows that change happens in language over time.  In fact, language change is the rule for words and grammar rather than stasis.  The change principle of language helped me see that life was like that too.  Things change.  A person's environment changes several times over one's lifetime.  A person's tastes in clothing and food change.  One's personal orientation changes from being single to include a partner and children.  One's attitudes toward others and important issues change from staunch to mellow as years pass.  Beliefs change either by addition or by deletion.  And, physically, one's body changes.  Ear lobes and noses elongate, skin loosens and eventually sags, bones compact, and hair thins.

I can't help but reflect on my own journey of change.  I have learned to expect it.  Life comes in phases.  I can tell you about a certain time in my life by referring to where I lived, what job I had, or whether it was pre-children, with children, or post-children.  Many types of phases and milestones mark a person's journey.  Mine is no different.  I have some interesting phases in my life, several beautiful phases, and yes, a few swarthy ones. I might have 3 or 4 phases left, but I look forward to them.  They'll be different from the ones that came before.  I will make the same journey from sweart to swarthy.

When I seek harmony

The scenery was like few other places on Earth.  I still have the pictures.  The mountain top was 14,000 feet high.  It really wasn't the tallest mountain in the world, but it was for me that day.  Peaks surrounded the summit I was on, but I was looking down on all of them.  Clouds hovered, suspended on most of them.  They drifted by me in the thin air.  I saw valleys carved by glaciers, and pools of deep alpine water dotted those valleys.  Others walked around on the summit, but I could hear nothing but silence.  14,000 feet in the clouds of the sky, but total silence draped the mountain sides all the way to their valleys.  Stupendous moments indelibly printed their time-stamps in the recesses of my mind.

On occasions when I need total peace, I retreat to this mountain top.  I breathe in again the cool, soothing air.  The intoxicating landscape takes me from any worry that has crossed my mind.  It revives in me the faith I have that once again life can rest in such breathtaking beauty. 

Then, I can make the descent to the mountainside floor for harmony with the flow of regular life.

Doubling what I know

My college roommate came to town last week, so we met for lunch.  We were comparing some of the experiences we had had with our children and some of our philosophy on raising them, given certain situations.  I made some comment, I don't remember what it was at this point, and he just laughed and said, "You really only know something about one thing in life and this is really not it."  We both just laughed.

But I get to thinking how true his comment really was.  And the irony is that that one thing I know something about has rarely appeared on my agenda in life.  It was not something that I really knew about until my 40s (so most of my life, I didn't know something about one thing.  I guess I knew nothing about everything), so I have spent most of my life knowing nothing.  I guess that is a point of humor.  I probably shouldn't have laughed about knowing nothing.

Of course, my roommate knew me before I knew anything at all, so he's qualified to make such an observation.  And, he has never wandered onto the one subject I might know something about.  So, it's only hearsay to him that I might have gained knowledge of one thing.  There's a comfort being around him.  He has known me in every stage of life from college onward, probably through 5 distinct stages.  But, he's knowledgeable about one thing in life too (it's a different thing).  So, we're even and it's no wonder that we were laughing about raising our children.  We didn't really know what we were doing.  Now, I have two things in life I'm relatively sure about.

Water for my heart

The earliest human records with any meaning come from Sumeria and Akkad, the birthplace of civilization (not human settlement, but civilization).  Water was important to the people of Sumeria, which is why they had settled along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the Persian Gulf. Water was something they had depended on for life, and something they could not create themselves, so they assigned a supernatural origin to it.  That deity filled river beds and dry inlets with life-giving water.  A temple to this deity has been found in Eridu.  He had other attributes as well, but he was named for being responsible for the life-giving water he made sure humans had.  So they called him The One Who Presides Over the Earth, or Enki.  Later, the priests who represented Enki took the title En (the equivalent of lord).  Enki's personal number was 40.  His symbol was the fish at first (he allowed them to flourish since he was the provider of water).  Later, he also was given the symbol of the goat since that was the plentiful meat that was the source of life-giving food from the earth.  When people looked to the sky and imagined the zodiac, the goat was named among the stars and given the name of Capricorn.


It's a story that resonates with me.  On nights when I need to listen to my heart, I look skyward and see the stars of Capricorn, the sign of Enki, the one who provided life-giving water.  But, I don't think in terms of goats and fish, but in terms of laughter, smiles, cheer, and generosity... attributes of the one who has given my heart life.

What's the right measure?

How much does a person really know?  A lot or a little or somewhere in between? 

It's virtually impossible to know.  Tests  have been designed to attempt the answer to that question, but they fall very short in measuring what the human mind uses as knowledge and have no predictive power about how a person will create or react in given situations, under duress, or in relationships. Love in the Wild, Survivor, and  Bachelorette are as good a test for measuring these ideas as specially designed tests are.

I suppose a person could say that one should check her/his grades in school.  That suggestion is the most laughable of all solutions.  If you are talking about college, everyone knows that professors have to give grades according to a Bell curve.  In addition, only about 25% of the population graduate from college, so the comparison is not how much one might know against the general population, but how much memorization or  knowledge from practicum one can reproduce in comparison to others who want to mortgage their futures in pursuit of a certain level of a quality life.  It is even more absurd on the high school level.  Teachers are forbidden to give less than a 50, so automatically the grading field is reduced to 50 points from 100.  That means a 70 isn't 70% any longer, but is the 40% marker in a 50 point grading field.  Students graduating with a 70 (or a 65 that teachers magically turn into 70 to move the student through the grade level) are really, really subpar.

One could compare financial income assuming that the people who know more make more money.  But knowledge doesn't work like that.  Given that hard work can substitute for knowledge in the workplace, or connections to the right people can substitute for knowledge, it is impossible to look at the tax return and determine how much a person knows.  There is also the lack of equivalence among work fields.  If one works in a "hot" field such as computer programming, natural language analysis, geophysics, petroleum engineering, actuarial tables, medicine and the like, then (s)he makes much more than public servants with the same experience, education, number of connections, and desire.

Life experience is a pretty good teacher, I would have to say.  So maybe the best way to know how much one knows is not to compare oneself against people but against previous experience.  How much better does one react to life's situations?  How much better does a person create, preparing for potential situations?  How much fear or courage does one have in making it through unknown situations?  Then, maybe one can know how much knowledge has been gained.

If true, I would like to think that experience prepares one to make great decisions given cumulative effect.  So, instead of grades, money, or tests, a much truer measure of how much a person knows is performance after a catalyst.  That (catalysts) is what makes people creative, or determined, or courageous, or failing, or recovering, or contented, or happy.  Catalysts come in many, many forms.  Sometimes a catalyst is a difficult time.  At other times a catalyst is having a simple conversation with someone because the way becomes clear after talking.

I have a good idea of how much I know because I can predict now what catalysts might be lurking around the next corner when I used to be surprised a lot.  Some catalysts I have imagined and never had to face.  Other catalysts have repeated themselves a few times, so I know what to expect and when to expect them.  Some catalysts are even hoped for.  I have one of those catalysts.  It's more of a craving.  If it happens, I would be the most knowledgeable I have ever been in my life... and the most satisfied.

Old word - new application

Ancient Greek has a word for setting things aside because they are special.  I like this word because it allows me to express the very special place a group of pictures has for me.  I have albums and albums of pictures.  Some are important because they are old and contain my college experience.  Some are put in albums because they represent firsts in life, such as first child or first birthday or first bike ride.  Some have been kept because they simply chart the journey of life.  But, there is a group of pictures totally set aside for special remembrance.  If I spoke ancient Greek, I would apply this word for setting aside something special in this circumstance.  The group of pictures is not a closed set.  I just added a few more to it in the last couple of days.

Religion has translated this word as either holy or sacred.  Their translation and subsequent application of the Greek word takes it out of its natural context and distorts its meaning, or at least specializes the meaning to an extent not intended.  The semantics might include the idea of "special" and "other," but not the many other attributes conjured by religion for holy and sacred.

But misuse of the principles of translation doesn't deter me from assigning this Greek word to my very, very special pictures that I have placed in their own category.  Agios works for me whenever I ponder, gaze, study, and otherwise simply enjoy looking at these pictures - over and over, time and again.

Oh, to be 4!

It's that special day again.  She's 4 today.  She will grow up using technology like it is first nature, not second.  She will demand to know more until she is satisfied.  She is determined and won't stop till she gets to her goal.  I know this because her amazing mother is the same way...  Happy Birthday... I hope you never outgrow your beautiful bows.

Stifling heat both inside and out

The temperature set a record today.  The old record was reached in 1939.  The new record exceeded the old  by 3 degrees.  Heat waves literally could be seen rising from the concrete on sidewalks and roads.  I can count on two hands the number of times in my life I have been in a place of 112 or more degrees, the hottest being 118.  The heat is stifling past 110, so today was 2 degrees above stifling.  Sweat appears without any movement.  Add tiny movement and it feels as if one has run a marathon.  I am more than thankful for the taste of refreshing water on days like this. 

Some days my soul hits record high temperatures when it is bereft of the laugh and smile that made it quite an oasis once.  Fortunately, the refreshing taste of a picture satisfies the soul's palate and allows one to move past the empty space creating such stifling heat.  I am more than thankful for such images.

What informs us?

I was speaking with a man who taught Spanish in a high school not long ago.  As we talked about his job, he spoke of the "Natural" method for learning language.  It's not a new method.  It's been around for a great number of years.  In fact, it may be the original "method" assuming the word means a systematic order by which to learn something.  The thinking is that babies have to go from 0-60 in a quarter mile.  Since many babies begin speaking by around 9 months and continue learning language at a very rapid pace until around 5, then the stages through which they pass in piecing together language must be the proper sequence for all learners to acquire a language.

I can't believe the method is still around.  I thought it had been reasoned that the onset of reading changes the language dynamic.  Most 8-year-olds can read, so that would preclude the "natural" method from being followed for people 8 and above.  Puberty also changes things.  Cognition, especially how thought is organized, is fundamentally different after puberty than before.  That would certainly prevent the "natural' method from being followed by teens and those older.

But, here I was in the summer of 2012 talking with someone who had been presented the "natural" method and had accepted its premise.  I thought that maybe someone had reworked the idea and used an old name for a new method based on current research.  But, alas, this was not the case.  Wherever he got the notion that the way young children learn a language is the correct way to learn a language should be the last place ever to offer this method as viable.  Children learn their first words as a result of a caretaker modeling the language.  Nowhere in the public schools is this modeled no matter what the grade level, particularly not high school.  Children go through an identifiable two-word utterance stage.  Teenagers and above don't even come close to thinking in these terms.  Children experiment with sounds for the nine months they are in waiting for language to spring forth from their mouths.  That is not the case for older learners. 

Brain studies alone over the last 10 years obliterate the "natural method."  There are two periods of time when the brain prunes its organization of connections, one at around 10 months, one at around 14 years.  After each of the "prunings" the brain advances in its organizational capacity and structure.  There is no way a person after the prunings could return to the stages of a previous organization after it takes place.  And after the first organizational restructuring, the brain learns according to exposure to a child's environment and internal impressions such as interest, motivation, personality, and utility.  By age six, children are set on a learning track unique to themselves.  By age 10 the corpus callosum thins and allows more nerve endings to develop to connect the two hemispheres of the brain.  Language learning is totally different after this stage than before.

I could go on.  The idea is obvious.  The "natural" method has no basis for modern language learning because it has no truth in its learning principles.  This is also a good corollary for life.  Basing one's lifestyle and habits on some notion that life should be lived according to principles we learned as children or as teenagers (even young adults) is probably flawed.  Just as the best method for language learning is probably the one that pays closest attention to the state-of-the-art research, the best way to live life is to do so according to our latest wisdom based on experience and knowledge of our own personality in the situations we have encountered.  Then, we won't be trapped by youthful ideas that go awry in the face of true situations, teachings that were supposed to guide us through childhood but that were never intended for adulthood, or missteps that cost us in time, energy, money, and love along our journey's way.

Turning the performance

Once in a while the opportunity arises to perform the thing for which you have been formally trained to do, the craft which you have worked so hard to perfect.  Not that it is appreciated; it is just an opportunity to perform it.  I have often wondered what it would feel like to do this.

It comes so naturally that it doesn't feel like work.  Your mind feels so totally at ease that the manipulations required to perform the task are automatic.  There's a lot of energy in doing it.  It's not tiring, but synergetic.  Had I been able to make a job out of doing this for most of my life, I think I would have had a whole different outlook on life.  The only thing left is to turn performance into something people have to have and can't live without.  That would be the apex of reward for two reasons: people would appreciate the performance and my life would have buoyancy.

Once again

One of the smallest yet most influential linguistic centers in all the world is nestled in the hills out of the way from a heavily trafficked interstate just a couple of miles north of it.  I took a course there once.  My professor was a visiting professor for the summer from Brown University.  It was one of the best courses I have ever taken.  He had a knack for guiding one into large amounts of knowledge in a very short time.

Today when I visited the campus and meandered among the offices of the esteemed instructors, I couldn't help but notice the great diversity of the faculty there.  One office had a sign "Wild-eyed bibliomaniac" on the doorpost, another had "Second Language and Culture Acquisition."  These teachers have all been in the field for a long time before they ever wind up in the halls of academe here. But, that only enhances the intrigue they bring to the place.

The teachers do have one thing in common.  Every single one of them has had to go to various groups, individuals, and corporations to raise their support.  The university doesn't pay them at all.  They have lived such sacrificial lives (in that they have sacrificed prestige and a certain level of prosperity for the passion of working in the field and trying to impart that knowledge later in life to those who come behind them).

I am always impressed with their knowledge, but inspired as well.  I am inspired that the professors there, some of whom I know and have gone to school with, know so much, work hard at transmitting their knowledge to others, and act so humbly as if they are regular people.  I am inspired by their discipline in the midst of austerity.  I am awed by their wit and humor because I am very short in both of these categories.  I am so aware of the tiny little niche I may fill compared to the vast array of opportunities for learning the average student is exposed to there.  But, that inspires me to do well in my little space in the world.

I needed the trip to this private, backwoods, semi-hidden, tranquil environment to be around such an assorted crew of individuals.  I needed to be prodded and to be inspired once again, for I had lost a step in getting to the top and staying there in a very specialized field.  Inspiration is such a positive feeling.

Lord of the Flies

I passed through Colorado City not long ago.  As a person enters the town from the east side, a billboard still carries the image of Hailey Dunn with contact information if you have seen her.  Travesty, sham, and farce are three words that come to mind whenever I see that sign.  The sign has been there for a year and a half.  Of course, no one has called the number on the sign in recent history because no one has seen Hailey.

The local police decided early on not to press the disappearance because they knew not to delve too far.  It wasn't for ineptitude.  They have investigated other crimes with some forensic skill.  The FBI decided it was a minor case and let local authorities handle it.  Given limited resources, no leads, and the location and size of Colorado City ( a really small town in remote West Texas), one could have predicted their quick exit.  The Texas Rangers stayed somewhat longer.  But they did so only to make the community think they were doing something.  They are understaffed with more to police in a  large state than a missing girl in her early teens.  So, other than entertaining cold tips, they were never really a factor.

Hailey's mother was on the fringe of society, popping a few pills, having a good time in life, subsisting on very little money (which is why she was selected in the first place by a third party), so the police found it very easy to ignore the real issues.  They knew that Hailey's mother didn't have the background or the means to resolve this crime.  Instead of focusing on finding Hailey, they arrested the mother a couple of times for her drug use.  Her interrogations yielded little because the police deliberately questioned her about murdering Hailey or being an accomplice to her murder.  Of course, they fully realized that murder wasn't involved.  But, they had to deflect attention from themselves since their every intention was to look good in the beginning and let the case fade with time.

It's beyond comprehension that the one who knows what happened to Hailey and has been laughing in the background every time he goes to the bank was never pursued.  The lies this person has told to satisfy the smoke and mirrors put up by the detective in the case only show the depth of corruption involved in not finding Hailey.  The legal system wasn't ever allowed to kick in because of Hailey's mother's status in the town.  The townspeople eventually ran her out of the town.

What a travesty.  A young teen was whisked away from her roots and replanted in an evil environment far away from everything she knew and loved.  What a sham.  Local authorities from law enforcement to school officials, from the mayor to the mother's attorney have turned their backs on someone down a few rungs on the prestige ladder in the community.  What a farce.  All the searches that were encouraged, but that were of no use even from the beginning, and the total lack of reliance on any true forensic techniques that could have been brought to bear on finding Hailey shout to the heavens that a miscarriage of justice has happened.

But, as the sun sets tonight in Colorado City, someone knows about Hailey Dunn.  It's hard to imagine a human being so calloused and emotionally detached that he reeks from the smell of his singed soul still smoking from the sulfurous flames of the Great Inferno!

The grass is greener...

I have a friend who goes on a semi-regular basis to a close casino to play his games.  He rarely loses money.  One could call him lucky.  He has a certain knack for slowly building his gains and an uncanny will power to be able to shut it down once he hits his goal.

I could use his luck in the routines of life.  I really don't know how to slowly build on anything life dishes out.  Life seems to give, then take away as if the odds were stacked in favor of the house.  I have tried to build on some really important things only to have them vanish as if my hands were sieves for important things to filter through, then vanish.  I would like to once hit my goal and walk away with my gains in hand.

It's ironic that if you talk to him about the routines of life, he'll tell you he'd rather have stability (which he says I have in life) than the ability to win at betting.  He considers himself to lack that.  I think it's a matter of perspective here.  He would trade luck for stability, but I would trade my routines for the ability to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em.  Perhaps my friend is right and I'm stable.  Or perhaps, I should still strive for knowing when to make a bold move and walk away happy.

Love the green

This year I water the grass about every other day to keep it green.  Heat is high, so without the water, the lawn turns brittle brown.  Even with watering it pretty often, cracks appear in the ground below the grass.  And the bald spots of the edges of the lawn don't have those creeping runners to help spread the lawn.  Fertilizer has not even greened the lawn like one would expect.

Keeping a lawn is reminiscent of how things turn out over the long haul.  High heat, high maintenance, cracked ground, and no spreading.  That's just how life is, isn't it.  I will say, though, that when the patches of green turn the lawn in its entirety to green, there is jubilation, and sometimes it is jubilation that lasts till the next greening event.  And since life happens in cycles, jubilation of a once green lawn gets a person through till the next greening event.  That makes jubilation that much sweeter.

Living in dystopia

In literature, the study of a utopian society that has unraveled over time or spiraled far away from its utopian ideas is called a study of dystopia.  Two of the most studied of all dystopian novels in the United States are 1984 and Brave New World.

People have grown to disdain intrusion into privacy since our country's inception.  1984 shows a great departure from the premise of a treasured American value because a government has been created that intrudes to a major extent into people's private lives.  A leader (probably manufactured by The Party) knows almost every move of the society's citizens.  The Party revises all events from history and its current events to fit the official party line of the government.  Individual thinking is named a thoughtcrime.  Mind control is everywhere present in the book.  Doublethink and Newspeak are terms that were coined in the book to represent the type of mind control taking place.

Brave New World is a world created to show what would happen in a society controlled by a one-world government.  Sex in the book is experienced for pleasure only; it has nothing to do with propagation of the species.  A person is supposed to experience multiple sex partners in a lifetime.  Multiple might be the wrong word because in the book multiple could mean 50 to 100 not 10 or less.  People are born from test tubes and designed genetically to have a certain amount of intelligence.  This allows for a caste system to ensure that menial work gets done by the lowest thinking humans and the research in science gets done by the highest thinking humans.  Children are raised in schools run by the State.  Everyone in the society takes Soma, a drug to make people feel good, and it is passed out free to citizens to make sure that everyone is taking it.

The society of Big Brother was eschewed by the people of England and the United States in 1949 when Orwell wrote 1984.  And the readers of both countries thought Aldous Huxley was way out of bounds when he wrote of the World Controllers in 1932.  The book was banned in some places.

Let's see... Fast forward 80 years from Huxley's time and 63 years from Orwell's day.  I live in a society that
1) sends a ticket to me by mail if I run a red light because a camera was monitoring the intersection,
2) sends a bill to me by mail for my toll usage because a camera snapped my presence on the toll road,
3) can tell my location on Facebook (if enabled by me, at least for now) when I make an entry,
4) can show who I am with and my activity when I am tagged in Facebook,
5) tracks every single call I make on the phone (and my emails, and my texts, and my voice messages),
6) requires all children to go to a state-run school to obtain a standardized curriculum approved by the state (with an exception for home-schooling, which few people opt for),
7) encourages young people to choose multiple sex partners (5 or more is common among seniors in high school, so this is only through age 18),
8) forces all its citizens to pay an income tax for access by underdogs of the state and has just now added access to insurance to that list, (disincentives for people to perfect their life's crafts and charge for it),
9) allows revisionist history to exist on all major networks and many cable networks and to align with one of the two major parties' official lines,
10) pays for drugs (generics are basically costless) of all kinds of diseases, regardless of side-effects, so people can be addicted to feeling good constantly.
11) has deceived the public about intelligence and grading practices in its schools, so that now people think there are levels of intelligence, and they make decisions about careers based on those ideas as if they were born that way (such as restricting jobs to certain levels of educational attainment),
12) puts forth charismatic leaders as puppets of the party in power to further agendas of the party.

This list is incomplete, but one gets the idea.  Every major, onerous, dystopian idea proffered by both books has been incorporated in today's society in the U.S. either in whole or to a great extent.  There are books about what society will look like in another 60-80 years, but I will be cryogenically stored on a space vessel headed for terraformed Mars for a life outside of that society.  It's hard enough to live in the one we have today.

Secrets of going deep

Medical advancement is really nice.  I am alive myself from some of the advancements made in sleep technology and in control of hypertension.  It should make me better for the wear when I turn 85 and 90.  But I am told that it is attitude that makes one live long.  Perhaps one day there will be some advancements in evenness of attitude.  But even if not, then I have taken advantage of the adjustments that have been documented as having an effect on longevity.   Laughter being the best medicine, making lemonade from lemons, and being content (accepting) in difficult situations have all lengthened my life.  Fortunately,  I had lessons in both anger and bitterness management and formal training on deception and use of language by both genders to help in navigation of other things that can cause stress.  Am I headed for 120 years of age?  This should be a fun journey!

An imprint person

The Mayan Empire stretched out all across Latin America and into a location or two in the United States and South America on its extreme ends.  One historian would even have the empire's reach extend to some islands off the coast of Peru.  It operated at the same time as another more famous empire halfway around the world whose base was in Italy.  Both empires lasted approximately 1000 years.  Both ruled with iron fists.  Both had violent, brutal methods of handling their enemies.  Both used science, especially astronomy, to construct calendars and use knowledge of the stars for travel and soothsaying.  A number of other similarities exist.

The difference in the two empires was that Rome's conquests included England, so its influence on law and military prowess trickled into the books and educational system of the United States.  Everyone knows the about the rise and decline of the Roman Empire.  People can tell you who the 12 first emperors were or can quote the poets and historians who wrote throughout the empire.  The Mayan Empire which was in our own hemisphere has been unknown until just recently.  Its writings are hieroglyphic in nature and are translated but are not widely read.  The only remnant from any of its writers is the highly disputable meaning of the end of the Mayan calendar.  Its temples and cities have long been abandoned and grown over by jungles.  Its conquests included non-English speaking countries, non-European for that matter, so people in the United States have little knowledge of its existence.

But there is another difference.  Rome declined over  a long period of time.  When the final demise came, it was well publicized and chronicled in all the countries it brutalized.  The language it spoke had been a lingua franca and lives still in 5 main European languages.  Roman values lived beyond the empire, and its history was kept in books and embedded in architecture for all to remember.  The Mayan Empire seems to have met its end rapidly and suddenly.  Posterity has nothing but guesses on the reasons for the apparent quick end to a 1000 year reign.  Any descendants have lost the language it spoke, the values they had, and the history that might have accrued during its reign.  The Mayan story stopped as the jungles crept over its temple and housing structures.

This tale of two empires has a lesson for me.  I don't want to live so that at life's end people have to piece together what I may have been about.  I don't want to leave a vague reputation or indecipherable legacy.  I want to plant seeds that outlast my life and that create memories for others to cherish.  It's more the Roman way than the Mayan way.  Books have been written about the glory that was Rome's.  But the only writings about the Mayans contain questions about who they might have been and what some of their writings and sciences may have meant.   I want to be an imprint person. 

In all the way

Sometimes we act or change our actions based on perspective.  That's why education is important to give a population of people.  Education let's us know what is important to a lot of people (the norms) and what is important to a few people (the extremes).  Education provides perspectives from a number of points of view and from a number of different disciplines.  We all settle on which of the norms we want to see things from or which extreme, but at least we have an idea how far away from the middle we may be.  Experience is a corollary to education.  It's just that education allows us to experience life through books and artificial situations to get ahead of the normal learning curve that life supplies so freely.

When I learned a second language, I did everything I could to learn it.  I even went to some events where mostly the second language was spoken.  But, after seeing life from the perspectives included in the culture of the second language, I decided I liked the point of view I had before immersing myself in the second language.  But, at least I had a better idea where my point of view lay on the Bell curve and how many people I didn't share that view with. 

On the other hand, when we participate in something and have an emotional attachment, all bets are off.  Perspective is based on the heart, on the strength of an attachment, not the perspective that education provides.  Passion drives us to perspectives that we wish for or that we want again or that give us pleasure of some sort.

When I was young, I was told to make a list when making a major decision, keeping pros on one side and cons on the other.  Now I know that is a really simplified version of how people make decisions or develop perspectives.  Now I know that people consult their perspectives first.  They see the ramifications of something based on facts from education or experience, and they see other ramifications if acting from merely an emotional attachment.

Anymore, I know that I will base most decisions on checking ramifications against education and experience, but will act on those decisions based on strength of emotional attachment.  So, when I make a decision, you can know that I am in it heart and soul.

Wonder and savor

I'm always fascinated with what is in the Earth's past.  Not too far back (11,000 BCE) is an ice age.  Humanity's advancement has only come since the ice melted and the climate around the Earth warmed.  Humanity was around a long time before that, however.  One has to assume humans weren't idle. Then, there was the explosion of a volcano 75,000 years ago that created such a tremendous volume of ash that a cloud covered the Earth for 10 years.  The human race nearly went extinct.  Fortunately, 10,000 people survived.  Before the eruption, at least 9 different types of humans existed (like the characteristics today that Caucasion, Negroid, and Asian races have, but 9 of them).  All those differences would have been fun to see.  Then there was the fire that covered all of Siberia, the asteroid that annihilated every dinosaur, and the period in which the Atlantic Ocean didn't exist.  All of it so fascinating.

We all have events that change us, destroy us for a time, and restore us in a different form.  We don't look at all of the events happening to us as fascinating so much.  But, maybe we should.  Perhaps we should stand in wonder at what we have been through and savor each change, each destruction, each new form that emerges.  If we did, maybe life would seem more breathtaking.  Even at that, though, I still know which event represents the most scenic part of my life.  And, perhaps, there is something breathtaking up the way a bit that I don't know about yet.  If the past is a sign of the future, then I'm pretty sure there is.

The great enhancer

Where is the luster?  Some say you have to work at having luster.  It's the polish on silverware that requires elbow grease often for the silverware to shine.  Some say you have to find something like a diamond in its rough form and remove layers to get to the diamond and spend a lot of time cutting and polishing it.  Some you have to simply take a cloth and rub off the dust from something like ceramic.  Some say its like shoes that get scuffed and you have to polish over and over to restore the shine.

To me, luster is automatically apparent and attractive.  You might shine something from time to time to enhance its distinction, but luster is always apparent.  When an object has luster, everything else in the background is faded, blurred, or otherwise insignificant.  So, when luster is absent, you know instantly what's missing because it enhances everything else around it in the picture.

I've tried the elbow grease, cutting, and adding polish.  My, how I miss the luster in my life...

Preparation

I have a linguist friend who is on holiday in this country after spending two years in Nigeria.  I love it when he gets furloughs.  We always set aside time to talk about the cultural and language differences between the two countries.  I find his work fascinating.  He works with the Nigerian people in a translation school and has story after story of how these people learn language from him.

He hasn't always done this.  It's new for him.  He's been a linguist for a long time, but going to Nigeria was recent.  For about half of his life he worked either preaching or working in a warehouse.  Then, he got his formal training in languages and discourse analysis.  The second half of his life he taught at a university.  Finally, after many years and two halves of his life working jobs to prepare him, he is finally getting to a job that he has always wanted to do - field linguistics.

I admire him for doing this because I know that I couldn't.  But he has taught me a lesson or two about life.  Most of life is the warm-up for the main event.  And, when you get to the main event of your life, enjoy it second by second.  I know that's true.

Neil Diamond wrote a song a long time ago talking about the same thing.  I liked the song then, and I still enjoy hearing it.  It's about the main event.

Did you ever read of a frog
Who dreamed of being a king - 
And then became one.
Well, except for the names
and few other changes,
If you talk about me,
The story's the same one.
(I am I said)

And, how do I know it's true?  I went through the first half of my life working hard like everyone else.  Then, the second half, I got to do work that included what I had formally trained for.  Finally, I got to a place for a main event to happen.  It did.  Every second of it was a memory worth waiting for.

What about those outliers?

Scattergrams are useful for showing trends, progressions sometimes, norms sometimes, and continuous attempts at trying to replicate results.  If given a large sample, most points lie on the predictable course.  But, then there are those points that don't.  They lie far away from the trend or norm.  They can show a disruption of a pattern.  They're called outliers.

A person has a choice about outliers - discount them as just the exception to a much broader rule of behavior or find out what causes the point to be off the beaten path.  Sometimes, there are nice little surprises when one goes to the trouble to find the reason for the outlier's position off out of the norm.  They tell their own story.  And if lucky, one can see a separate pattern emerge from the outliers.

Our lives have a scattergram pattern to them.  Most events lie along a trend line as time passes.  That's because we mainly stay the same.  Our values don't change all that much.  Our location doesn't change all that much.  Our jobs, at least in type, don't change all that much.  But, now the outlying events off the trend line have interesting stories to tell as to why they are there.

One of my outliers is the blackest dot on the page because something unnatural happened - the death of a child.  Another of my outliers is the brightest, most colorful dot on the page because the loveliest of all things happened.  Both dots changed the direction of the trend line although they were opposite in nature.  I'm very glad my story didn't end after the blackest dot happened because the bright, colorful dot happened in time after the blackest dot.  But, if my story should end now, I am satisfied that I have seen the best life has to offer.

There may be more outliers on my chart, but I seriously doubt they could top either of the two events that have changed my life.  Only one event that I could think of would top the two that have happened.  It would be a progression changing outlier if it were to happen.  Perhaps...

Night dances

My daughter told me about a dream she had.  It was not one she liked, and it stuck in her mind for about a day.  After she told me what she dreamed, I understood why she dreamed it.  Our minds take our conscious thoughts from the day and randomizes them into possible scenarios no matter how crazy.  Her dream was one of the implausible scenarios that had come from jumbled plausible threads.

Dreams are like that.  They can go the other way too.  They can take thoughts of scenarios from real life that didn't work out so well, randomize them, and get them to work out in our dreams.  I'm sure we smile during such episodes.  Dreams can mix present and past, make up settings for real people or put unlikely people in real settings.  They can play out the possibilities for us, so that we don't have to be timid in real life because we have seen it eerily before in our dreams, which makes us stronger in the real world.

What does our will have to do with them?  Can we drive our dreams to certain outcomes?  Do they represent what we wish would happen, really?  Yes to all.  It's still our minds.  Alien thoughts don't come into play.  Real thoughts from real scenes play out according to the way we want them or allow them to be randomized.

I had this dream last night...  I felt a smile on my face this morning...  I'm hoping for a repeat tonight...  same time, same place...  what are the chances, right?

Equivalence shouldn't suffice

Language has a phenomenon that has a great parallel to life.  In language, when people hear words that they don't know or have heard very few times, they guess at the sounds of the words.  And, when people hear sounds that are not in their own tongue, they assign equivalent sounds.  It is almost hilarious to see the written differences (although there are legitimate phonetic processes at work) between ancient Hebrew and ancient Persian.  For example, King Ahasuerus is mentioned in the Old Testament as a king of Persia.  The Greek form of that word is Artaxerxes.  Persian for the word is Artakhshatra.  (Some scholars go with the word Xerxes to be the equivalent of Ahasuerus).

Another example from modern times, and using English, is the last name of a number of immigrants from Vietnam, Nguyen.  English doesn't ever begin a word with the combination ng.  It can end a word with that sound, but never start one even though the sound is the same combination of nasal and gutteral.  The Vietnamese don't have a problem with starting a word with that sound, and English could too, but its speakers have a tradition of not doing it.  Also, most varieties of English in the United States use a blend of i and u (like the pronunciation for yu) for the second sound of the Vietnamese name, the long vowel u.  The Vietnamese would pronounce the letter like Americans pronounce the sound oo.  So, the ng + u + y to an English speaker sounds just like some slightly distorted sound of w.  Thus, Ngyuen becomes Winn to the American ear.  That's as hilarious as the Persian to Greek and Hebrew example.

There are a huge number of examples of changed sounds when going between languages because language speakers resist learning a foreign way to say a word.  They merely select some close sounds in their native tongue and call it good.  That has a great parallel to life's events.  When we experience them, we compare them to what has happened to us before.  Or, we compare the event  to some model we have seen before.  That's dangerous.  We try to have equivalent experiences, then, instead of letting the authentic experience speak for itself.  I had a number of experiences in my 20s and 30s that I tried to fit into some teenage model of mine or that I tried to fit to some prior experience (mine or my friends' or family's).  That didn't get me very far in life.  I missed a lot of authentic experiences.

Not anymore.  It is the highest compliment to someone in Vietnam to take the time to learn to pronounce their names as they would.  And, it is the highest compliment to ourselves to take the time to follow an experience for all it is worth on its own merits.  It makes us more well-rounded people, better people.  Some experiences in life are comparable to other experiences.  But, when I start with an event that has no precedent, I no longer try to make it fit some category that I recognize.  I am certainly better for that.  I understand the human experience a whole lot better... and much more joyfully.

A splendid speck

There was something outstanding tonight about watching a speck pass in front of the sun.  The speck was Venus.  For 6 hours and  40 minutes Venus' speck of a shadow crossed the face of the sun where people in countries facing the sun would be able to watch.  It will be another 105 years before that happens again.  It is grand to be a part of a generation that gets to see the transit of Venus because not just everyone who has lived on Earth has gotten to see it.  Pictures of the transit were very clear.  I enjoyed it in pictures since I didn't buy any of the glare glasses to watch the sun directly.

Life's events intersect us sometimes full force like a meteorite hitting the Earth's surface.  But, sometimes they are distant enough for us to see the whole thing taking place, knowing full well that it is a once-in-a-lifetime intersection and that one can enjoy the whole spectacle from start to finish in a short span of time.  Viva la life's transits... enjoying the splendid events that are simply outstanding for the entire length of time they last!

The idea is to be without pain

Healed is an interesting word in that it has different meanings to different people.  Some people merely use it to mean what makes them feel better than they did before, as in going to a spa for "healing therapy."  Some people mean that sickness is cured, it goes away either by medical treatment or it merely goes away because of what the body normally does with its immune system.  Still others use the term for a supernatural miracle cure that earthly medicine couldn't handle.

I've had holes in my heart before.  Those have healed.  Some of the holes were created years ago.  Time has certainly overlaid them with events to eclipse the previous ones.  Some have been created by family because of the kind of treatment received from someone close that shouldn't be shooting arrows.  I have learned to get past those through lowering my expectations.  Some are created by a spouse.  Those disappear by redefining love, kindness, intimacy,  or whatever idea caused the hole in the heart, to a definition different from what I held first.  Two people rarely have the same definition or even agree on a common definition for emotional terms like the three above.  So, that's generally how I have experienced healing.

In the ancient Hebrew way of thinking, there was a season for every activity under heaven - a time to love and a time to hate, a time to make war and a time to enjoy peace... and a time to see  injury inflicted and a time to see healing occurring.  I love the latter and try to be part of that process.  I don't see the supernatural kind.  I am not a doctor of medicine to help the medical kind happen either.  But, as far as making a wound (usually emotional) get better or go away, I can help with that or at least express happiness to someone when I see it happen.

For the walking wounded...  I'm with you all the way, whether or not you deal with healing like I do or like someone else.  I am working on a couple of wounds right now myself.  I know how you feel.

I watch the sky

Sometimes I just want to sit outside, watch the sky, and imagine.   I play out different scenarios to their logical conclusions.  So, if something happens as I had imagined it, I can say, "It worked out just like I thought it would."  But, often, something happens differently from the way I had imagined it.  I usually don't comment on that.   I still think, though, that if it had worked out, then... and I have various paths to go down in my mind.

There are a number of recent developments that I have imagined.  They haven't all come to finality yet.  So, when they do, I will either be shaking my head, wishing for a different conclusion, or saying, "It worked out just like I thought I would."  If I could do anything to tip the scales in favor of the latter, I would sure do it.  However, I don't think I have much control over the outcomes this time.  Much of what happens is in the hands of someone else.

I have faith, however.  So, I am not practicing ahead of time moving my head from side to side.  I am watching the sky, imagining, reimagining, imaging, and reimaging, so that I can say, "It worked out..."

Tops determine margins

The Titanic accident is the perfect example of what happens when people navigate the waters they're in by sight only.  Yeah, they see the tops of icebergs all right.  But, they don't leave any margin for error for what is beneath the water.

So like the waters of life we navigate.  It's not that we don't know that more than half the iceberg is out of our view.  It's that we operate with no margin for error. 

My boat has been sunk before.  So, I know to leave that margin.  It still saddens my heart beyond belief when my boat sinks even though the margin was allowed.  But, speaking of belief - I have it.

Too many are content

The poetry of Stephan Crane is like an old, leather shoe to me.  His poems are form-fitted to my foot.  I have read, reread, memorized, used as illustration, and recited the short, pithy lines he created because they speak volumes.  I am an admirer of ideas succinctly stated.  Crane is the best.

From time to time, when I get frustrated, I call up a Crane poem.  It comforts me.  It lets me know that my frustration is not new, that the behavior I get frustrated about is the behavior that frustrated him and hundreds of thousands before him.  So, I pull out his poem from my collection or from my mind and recite.

A youth in apparel that glittered
Went to walk in a grim forest.
There he met an assassin
Attired all in garb of old days;
He, scowling through the thickets,
And dagger poised quivering,
Rushed upon the youth.
"Sir," said this latter,
"I am enchanted, believe me,
To die, thus,
In this medieval fashion,
According to the best legends;
Ah, what joy!"
Then took he the wound, smiling,
And died, content. 

On this weekend, through the week, and next weekend as well, institutions in grim forests cloaked in medieval garb, scowl with drawn daggers at youths who look at them, thank them for the legendary knowledge and skills they learned, shake a hand, and cry "What joy!" for the sheepskin that will wound them and kill them, its value drawn from the 19th and 20th centuries.  But they will die content.


Crane is right, at least for another decade.  I am fortunate to live in the days of another poet who speaks of everyday matters, Bruce Springsteen.  My hope is the same as his.  I may be deluded, though, because hope springs eternal...

Beauty... smiles

Not often, but certainly more than in the past, I get to soak in the beauty of surroundings that are either the result of nature's forming hand or of humanity's ostentatious craft.  Today was such a day.  I found myself staring at a 15-story, shaved, marble-like stone edifice with dark glass panes.  It was in the heart of the city and belonged to a sequestered, nestled boulevard 1 block long.  Manicured shrubs, grass, trees, and flowers surrounded the building.  It was complete with valet parking for the hotel of the same height and stone look on the other side of the boulevard from the place where I had business.  After finishing what I had come to do in the miniature sky-skyscraper, I meandered over to the Starbucks that adjoined the hotel to enjoy a drink and a morsel of food.

When I get to sit in grandiose places, my mind takes a journey to its own realms.  Today it was to some of the beautiful events that have happened to me and delightful words that people have said to me in years gone by.  It  seemed like just yesterday those events happened or words were spoken.  I finished my drink and food with my lips bowed in a smile.  I sighed thinking how different a road I travel now than the one that carried the events and words bringing the smile to my face.  At least, though, I have the beauty of delightful memories to bring to the beautiful places I get to sit in now.  At least that.

The picture comes clear

The scientific method makes so much sense.  You start with a question: What is the truth about... ? or What if... ?  Then, you try answers that both fit what you think is true or what could be a counter-argument with evidence.  Finally, you pick out the patterns that emerge and explain those patterns.  How beautiful.

But, it took a while to get to that point in civilization.  The first people had to make observations.  They tried explaining those observations but didn't have time to worry so much about the truth of them.  The next wave of humans decided to put the observations into myths to perpetuate them or implemented the observations into laws to abide by.  Inevitably, the farther away from the observation people grew, the more it gave room to question its truth or its old patterns for a current world with new observations.  So, new observations were made.  This went on for a long while.  Finally, people wanted to know what would be true over time, what would be constant and what would be variable.  They developed rules for following hypotheses and calculations to measure the patterns.  How brilliant.

Now we're trying to apply those rules and calculations to the exploration of space.  It might work.  It's likely that a new way of thinking about what is true will be discovered.  And, there will certainly be new questions to ask on the stem of "What if... ?" with a plethora of new answers and observations.

That is so much like our own lives.  When we were young, we made some pretty good observations and tried to live by them and perpetuate them.  Then we experienced that what we had come up with didn't apply across the board even if we wanted them to.  So we were able to ask "What if... ?" and find patterns that were constant and variable.  Then we saw ahead of us that the method might have to be applied in unknown territory because people are living longer than ever on average, new territory.  How contemplative.

Scientific reasoning brought civilization from darkness to light over time.  Our journeys from immaturity to maturity are much the same way.  We go through the beautiful stage, usually arrogantly.  Then, we face reality and get to the brilliant stage, confidently.  Eventually, we get to the contemplative stage, humbly.

It feels like 1816 around here

No one knew on New Year's Day in 1815 that the world was about to change.  The year started as it normally did any other year.  Winter ended, spring started, the world was spinning around as if nothing special was going to happen.  But, the Earth had an opinion about what should happen next.  Too bad the people of Indonesia didn't know that.  They went to bed on April 13th as if the world would continue as it had. But the next day, they heard the Earth's complaint very loudly.

Mount Tambora had a magma chamber beneath it that had been building a long time.  It began to smoke, voicing its complaint that the Earth had built up too much pressure through early warning signs.  The people then didn't know too much about volcanic activity, so they missed the sign.  12,000 people regretted that since they were the casualties of the first round of eruptions and tsunamis.  Mount Tambora exploded on April 14th, 1815, with such ferocity that agriculture around the Polynesian Islands came to a halt.  Plants were rained on with all kinds of lava, hot rocks from the air, pyroclastic flow, and soot. Another 60,000 couldn't find anything to eat and tasted their last meals about a week after the eruption.  Recorded history had never seen an eruption of this magnitude.

That was just the immediate effect on the Earth. The summer and the fall passed while people around Mount Tambora were struggling to get back on their feet. The rest of the world hadn't even heard of the eruption, but they were about to experience its effect.  The winter started, and as it deepened in the early months of 1816, it became really harsh.  Spring was supposed to come, but it was bypassed.  Temperatures were really cool.  Summer was next.  Well, normally it would have been next.  This is the year that was named The Year Without a Summer.  No summer... no crops... famine... cold temps in summer... People died worldwide because of the famine of 1816.  Plants struggled to live without too much light.  Clouds from the volcano were still in place in the atmosphere making photosynthesis difficult.  Volcanic Winter had occurred.

Eventually, the Earth warmed up and had seasons again.  But not in 1816, The Year Without a Summer, the year of Volcanic Winter.  The people of Earth had to endure the effects of Earth's fury whether or not they had heard on April 14, 1815, of the worst eruption in human experience since the Ice Age ended.  That makes me a bit wary as I go through life.  I don't always hear of the matters that affect me, some of them in the greatest way.

I haven't really heard anything lately that might affect me.  But, I see some ash in the sky and it's been a cool spring.  I'm thinking that...

(X)

A Tale of Two Cities portrays two characters opposite in nature and station of life but identical in purpose for living.  The protagonist of the novel is noble in his ambition but not admirable in character.  The other character (at times a true antagonist, but mostly a minor protagonist) ignoble in ambition (because he was born into status, so he really only has to maintain what he has) but admirable in character.  The story is written so that the two characters get a crossover effect in character development.  By the end of the story, a person cannot believe that, when Carton takes such great pains to get into prison and try to force Darnay to switch places with him, Darnay actually does switch.  What a scoundrel to let someone else take his place for execution.  There is nothing admirable about that - just selfishness.

A number of stories studied in literature have the dynamic of the crossover effect between two characters.  A character starts one way in a story, but through a series of circumstances beyond what the character can control, (s)he makes an about face from the way (s)he was originally portrayed.

Not everyone has the experience of the crossover effect in his/her life.  Most people operate under the belief that consistency is the best policy (and many times it is for image's sake).  But, I have found myself to have undergone the crossover in the matter of politics, religion, and philosophy of the heart.  I was with a high school friend not long ago, and in the three matters just mentioned we have changed places.  Another way to achieve crossover is to measure it against someone who has remained consistent over time.  I have a lifelong friend who fits this mold.  One of his admirable traits is that I can count on his steadiness of purpose, which we share.  But when I measure myself against him, I can see how much I have changed because we used to be much alike.

In stories, a person doesn't have to worry so much about whether the crossover is moral, costly, advantageous, or unnatural.  But in life, I have to evaluate all four of those.  I only live once, so the stakes are really high to cross over in the three matters of life mentioned.  Tonight, though, I can sleep well.  Sydney Carton and I have crossed over in much the same way.  And, if Carton and Darnay are but representations of the dual nature that lives inside each one of us, I hope people don't view me in disbelief, shaking their heads at my selfishness because I have let the Carton side of the dual nature switch with Darnay's side

It's all in the rub

I guess I am a counter-culturist at heart.  But, there have been others, and they have been very famous and influential: Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (at the top of the list).  Every poet probably qualifies as a counter-culturist, particularly so, though, Gwendolyn Brooks, e.e. cummings, and Walt Whitman.  And there have been those standouts through time like Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Leonardo Di Vinci, Herodotus, ad infinitum.  So, I love it when the status quo gets challenged.

People get comfortable in their routines, which is why routines exist.  But, when routines that work for a few are made into routines that become law for everyone, I get disgusted because precious little is a one-size-fits-all shirt for all to wear. Certainly business in the world knows the beauty of custom design.  Something simple like a pen has so many variations that it is hard to describe their appearance anymore.  The clothing industry for sure knows not to make clothes look alike.  Ask someone about what (s)he likes in a car, and you would get many different answers.  The car industry knows that.

Then there are the social sciences.  They seem to be shielded from the reality of the colors that exist in life.  Psychologists, for the most part, have tried to reduce the study of personality to 4 or 5 traits and put those traits in a test for people to take and match to.  Educators want to reduce everything to a 4-core curriculum and create tests to compare everyone to.  Politicians want to reduce society to blocks of voters and make laws that benefit those blocks.  Athletes get reduced to skill sets and traded as a commodity to teams needing those skill sets.

So I applaud people like Freud and Piaget who refused to have their thinking reduced to match some known model.  I laud educators like Dewey, Montessori, and the founders of the University of Phoenix who know that education cannot be done in a cookie-cutter factory.  I support people like Noam Chomsky, Ted Kennedy, and Ron Paul who try to get people to see that routines need to shaken up once in a while so that progress doesn't pass us by.  And I love to follow teams whose owners know to stick with a player and not abandon him if he gets hurt or goes through a slump like Robert Kraft's Patriots, Nolan Ryan's Rangers, and Jerry Buss' Lakers.

In order to get a spark to start a fire, a person has to rub two sticks together or two flint rocks against each other.  Progress depends on the rub, not the straightjacket.

NO to control through language

Recently I was in a discussion group whose members were expert grammarians of the English language.  It was an international group, so several spoke varieties of English from a region other than North America.  The discussion was about someone's phrasing of ideas with expressions that many thought were either ungrammatical or non-standard.  There were several ideas expressed, some rather vehemently, that the person's phrasing needed "fixing."  So, I brought up the viewpoint that all kinds of dialects existed within a language and that some dialects achieve wider acceptance than others.

The idea of a "standard" English doesn't exist really.  There are some conventions for writing that people agree on for professional standing in the larger English speaking communities of the world, but in a context other than professional writing, people rely on their spoken dialect to think in and express themselves with.  Thus, their spoken dialect will surface in contexts other than the professional writing community, and should have equal footing in that context.  A couple of others in the group were of this persuasion too.

One would have thought that a bomb hit.  The notion that a "standard" English didn't exist certainly went against the grain of most of the contributors' training.  I only vaguely remember hearing in the class in which I learned about the variationist approach to categorizing English that it was a minority viewpoint.  But, with the venom that some of the group struck back for dismissing the idea that the conventions of written English should carry over into one's daily speech and be called a prestige dialect (many call it a power dialect), I quickly gathered how much of a minority the point of view really was.  And these were the experts talking.

I am so glad to have had the course in sociolinguistics which taught the viewpoint of prestige English.  It has helped me understand human thinking and communication so much better.  Life doesn't get communicated in "standard" terms except in a professional world.  Those who communicate otherwise have backgrounds in certain families, who have roots in certain regions, who have identities in certain countries, who all express themselves according to their marked phrasings.  One good example is that I would never say, "God gave me you."  It is ungrammatical to me.  But when the smash hit song came out using those exact words, who was I to say, "I can't believe people are listening to a song that uses an ungrammatical sentence in it."   Blake Shelton would just laugh all the way to the bank because a huge number of people didn't know or care about the song's grammatical properties.

So why is the notion of a "standard" English taught to every student in the schools across the world?  Why should all students learn the discipline's written form used by its professionals and be taught that they also should try to speak this written version of professional English?  It's not the truth about reality.  Learning the prestige dialect for financial gain might be taught in schools.  Even if students understand the correlation between hiring practices, amount of salary, and prestige dialect, it should still be left to them as to whether they want to learn such prestigious governance of a language (or power dialect).  If they would rather take their chances using their home-grown dialect in the oilfields or the coal mines or the lumberjack industries, that's their business.  Those industries have their own jargon anyway, very separate from the prestigious written dialect scribbled on a few papers in a course that would never apply to their way of making a living.

But, the world is full of people who want to control others through every means possible.  Language is just one more way to exercise that control.  Keeping people on a notch below them is a game people seem to want to play.  Don't play that game with me, though.  I will decide when I want to adopt the rules of the prestige dialect and when I want to express myself in the flavorful dialect of the region of the English speaking world I grew up in (a region, incidentally, that ends sentences in prepositions and uses "that" freely in substitution for "which")!  I reserve the right to communicate with the audience who I know about (or about whom I know, if that is my audience) in the language they will understand best.

And the person who understands God Gave Me You will understand it whether or not its prestigious form is God Gave You to Me...

Digging for grandeur

Atlantis is one of those mythical, bigger-than-life, legends perpetuated into eternity because the people there were so advanced for their time that when it disappeared, the world lapsed back into darkness.  Something like that happened when the Roman Empire disappeared and the "Dark Ages" followed.  But the Roman Empire, as large and influential as it was, was not the stupendous, advanced place that Atlantis was.  It had knowledge of the universe that the Romans never gained.  But, myths are made of such stuff.

Troy also was a legendary city that hosted the fight of the millennium for an entire decade, then was burned to make it disappear for all time.  That was the myth anyway.  But Heinrich Schliemann found the Troy written about by Homer, and myth turned to reality in a heartbeat.  All the fictional characters suddenly became real.  Myth was founded on truth and reality.

Archaeologists have been digging around for years for the lost city of Atlantis.  Plato is the ancient philosopher who has perpetuated the myth.  He wrote, as Homer did, about a city that had been lost to history but that lived through literature.  What if Atlantis could share the same luck as Troy and "get discovered?"  Enter Richard Freund of the University of Hartford.  One day while viewing satellite photos of the coast off of Spain in 2009, he found anomalies in shapes that reminded him of the description of Atlantis in Plato's writings.  Could it be?

Over the last three years, Freund and others whom he asked to join his team have uncovered a number of indications that Atlantis had really been discovered.  The last word is not in, but how exciting it will be to find the city of the legend and myth.  And who knows but that some of the world's secrets, known so early on, will be revealed.  Exciting, exciting!

Tapping our oft-buried attributes of grandeur is hard.  It takes work... and faith that those attributes will surface... and hope that those attributes will illuminate what is possible for us.

Passing the test

 Signs

And the sign said long-haired, freaky people need not apply,
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why,
He said, "You look like a fine, upstanding young man, I think you'll do."
So, I took off my hat.  "I said imagine that.  Huh, me working for you."

Chorus:
Signs, Signs, everywhere signs.
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.
Do this, don't do that. Can't you read the sign?

The sign said, "Anybody caught trespassing will be shot on sight."
So, I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, "Hey what gives you the right
to put up a fence to keep me out or to keep Mother Nature in.
If God was here, he'd tell it to your face, 'Man you're some kind of sinner.'"

Chorus

Now, hey you mister, can't you read? You've got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat.
You can't even watch, you can't even... You ain't supposed to be here.
The sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside...  uumph!

And the sign said, "Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down, and pray."
Then they passed around the plate at the end of it all.  I didn't have a penny to pay.
So I got me a pen and a paper, and I made out my own little sign.
I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking about me.  I'm alive and doing fine."

Chorus

It was in 1971 that young people became tired of being told what to wear, how to think, what to make of themselves, or who to associate with.  So, the song Signs was a big hit.

Here it is 2012.  Deja Vu.   It seems as if so many people want to tell me what to do, what not to do, or how to do the simplest things.

I was told...
I should not have a patty melt to eat because it wasn't healthy.
I was driving too fast in a 40 MPH zone.  I was driving 45.
Not to drive 75 MPH even though that was the speed limit.  The person didn't like going that fast.
I should leave at least a car length between cars at a stop light.  I was too close to the car ahead of me.
I made too many out-of-town trips.
I don't make good business decisions.
I made too many allowances for my daughter.
I needed to lose weight.
I needed to go to the cardiologist.
I needed to be more religious.
There was a certain way to change a baby's diaper (& I wasn't doing it the right way).
That my choice of music wasn't satisfactory.
That I looked shaggy in a beard.
That my hair was too long.
That I had made a poor career choice.
That I need not try to fix a toy train for a niece because I'm not handy.

Blah, blah, blah.
All of this in a two-week period of time.
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.

It's a test.  No, I have more character than to succumb to the many voices that say, "Can't you read the sign?"

A disruption in conversational acquisition

I did a study a number of years ago that featured women's speech and their pattern in turn-taking.  It was interesting enough,  but there was a by-product of the study that was a surprise.  The women in the study were of different, graduated ages from 16 to 76, representing increments about a decade apart.  It was very clear from the tapes that the older women were accomplished at conversation building and the younger women were not.  In fact, the younger the woman, the less engaging she was.  A particular conversation typified the principle, one between a teenager and her grandmother.  The teen was at a loss for topics or elaboration a number of times.  The grandmother provided the extra elaboration or a timely topic switch every time.

That little surprise tucked away inside the larger study was what many would consider common sense because people have believed in the "art" of conversation for a long time.  But the "art" turns out to be linked to the socialization process, and it is that process that can be and has been studied for better understanding.

Some people have believed that conversation is something a person is either good at doing or they are not.  If that is true, then language in general is not developed evenly from birth.  But, every human's ability to learn language, manipulate it for her or his benefit, and communicate with it no matter what language it happens to be, seems to mitigate against that notion.  So, something else must be in play, and that would be socialization.  The true test for this is about to be seen.  Today's youth have opted for texting as their mode for conversation rather than face-to-face.  That should change the socialization process.  At the very least it will disrupt the process for "learning" to have a conversation.  Texting operates by different rules from face-to-face conversation.  Already I have heard the loud laments of those 60 and older of the dying art of conversation or the anger they feel when "all they get" is a text once in a while from a grandchild.

I look forward to reading a study someday about the new socialization process as it affects conversation, if that is what the texting mode is still called.  It might be titled to illustrate the quantum leap in efficiency the process has taken since machine delivery of a message is involved.  Or it might take the tenor of today's 60-year-olds and try to prove the denigration of the benefits of face-to-face conversation.  It doesn't matter to me.  I live in both worlds.  It will be easy to side with the winner.

Not this or that, but this or this or this

Every time the gate is open is one of those phrases that comes from the old days when people built fences  to keep livestock from roaming into their neighbor's fields.  The gates let people and horses and wagons through but were to be shut after coming through them in order to keep the livestock in.  If the gate was left open, the animals got out, had to be rounded up and put back in their rightful place.  This happened frequently.

Once in a blue moon is a phrase that comes from a couple of hundred years ago when sailing the high seas was a major mode of transportation and exploration.  The moon had a blue cast to it every so often when it was full and there was a great amount of humidity in the atmosphere.  The phrase meant something happens infrequently.

When pigs fly is a phrase that comes from about the same time period.  It was coined when someone was certain that an event wouldn't happen.  Pigs aren't designed to fly anatomically, so it wouldn't just be rare that something would happen when pigs fly, it would be impossible.

Language is colorful and can be used for all kinds of reasons including taking a phrase and changing it from its literal meaning to something figurative.  These figures become well known and become embedded in language as idioms.  Idioms can also take on syntactic ideas.  In this case, all the idioms deal with time and are, thus, adverbial in nature.  And anytime a person deals with adverbs, (s)he can have gradations and comparisons - gradations in this case, from frequent to never and in between.

Life is not a dichotomy.  It is not black and white.  It is not always just right and wrong.  People don't have to decide something is either this or that.  Life has beauty to it and richness and spectrums and continuums and depth and height and flavors of sweetness and a thousand reasons for change.  Even our practice of language bears this out.  It is our pleasure to see that multivariate nature of life and not our narrowness to reduce life to right and wrong, black and white, this or that.

What gets done

Today 2 items on my planned list actually happened.  The list contained 6 items.  4 remain to be accomplished.  Maybe tomorrow?  Well, maybe, but tomorrow has a list of its own with timing of its own.  So of the 4 remaining 2 might be accomplished.  And what happens to tomorrow's list if its items do not get accomplished?  They get pushed back too.  At some point, though, the items get pushed off the list for good and never happen.  The list tomorrow contained 4 items, but now has 8 items.  I don't see all of that happening.  I know for sure that one of the items had a shelf life of one day.  Well, that's off the list.  I am down to 7, but still don't see that happening.  One of the items can be done at any time in the future.  I doubt it gets done tomorrow, then.  Now, I'm down to 6.  5 of the items all depend on the length of time it takes to accomplish the first two items on the list.  One of those two items is very time sensitive, one is not.  So, I'm thinking that I will be at 50% max tomorrow on getting things done.  That might be high.

Oh, my. How does anything ever get done around my place?  No wonder civilization hasn't advanced to its maximum potential.

A myth disappears, fortunately

Intelligence is a much debated subject.  The spectrum of beliefs out there contain a good number of followers for each.  Personally, I follow the end of the spectrum that contains the null set - there is no such thing as intelligence.

That, to many, is a contradiction in what I have done all my life.  But, I see no contradiction at all.  Once a person understands about personality, the power of interest, the allure of prestige, the drive of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and the need for utility, then intelligence becomes blended into the 6 above forces for learning and intelligence disappears.  So, why does education in this country gear everything to levels of intelligence?  That has a clear answer if you study the history of education in this country, but clearly education was never meant for the masses.  Since the 1960s, when the United States began experimenting with mass education, educators here had to buy into the intelligence belief system so that grading could be correlated with it and begin the charade of intelligence measurement..  Several measuring systems have been drawn up and justified because the masses who have gone through the 50-year-old experiment now believe it and will perpetuate it in their own and their subsequent generations.

Sad, since it doesn't really exist.  On one hand you have the general populace who try to believe that they can do anything they set their minds to and the same populace who have been educated to think that they are smart in music, art, math, language, history, or literature and dumb in one of the same list of disciplines.  They can't discern between the truth of one over the other since their education has failed them.  By 2100 A.C.E., history will refer to the current period as the time of the failed American mass education experiment.  But, they don't see it that way.  They still think that somehow both of the above principles are true.  They cannot see that the two are mutually exclusive.  Maybe after the next generation is over 30, technology will be in such a state that it will become abundantly clear that people can concentrate on something of interest or something they are driven to accomplish, let others (or machines/software) around them help them accomplish their goals, and forget this talk of levels of intelligence.

Even software is not built that way.  And eventually software will be very intertwined with the way people think.  For the moment, though, I'm stuck in a deluded world, and I await the maturing of those who are not quite in school yet to run the world a bit more practically (rather than intelligently).