Not coming, but here already

I'm pretty sure the electronic age has arrived.  When I go to eat, even at lowly McDonalds, there are a couple of TV monitors in each of the rooms.  My favorite place to go has 4 areas to eat in, and each of them has at least 6 TVs in them.  One of the rooms has a couple of screens that are about 6 feet across.  When I go to a movie theater, I see TVs in the snack area and down the halls leading to the film rooms.  Every football arena has at least one jumbo screen on the scoreboard.  On the way to work everyday, I pass at least 5 digital billboards not to mention the state's digital information boards telling of tickets, kidnappings, and number of deaths around the state.

I spent Thanksgiving with my family.  Within 10 minutes of arriving, my nephew was showing my mother on his iPad what he had looked up on ancestry.com about her lineage.  My brother was taking pictures with his new Samsung tablet and showing them all around.  My other nephew's wife was using her phone to take pictures and post them on her Facebook page.  The afternoon event was to fire homemade rockets using electronic ignitions.  Of course, there was the football game on a flatscreen in the afternoon after the meal.

Yep, it's the electronic age.  When I work, I use a laptop in every aspect of the work.  At home in off moments, I am looking up things to buy, to go somewhere, or to read the news online.  In my car on trips to anywhere and everywhere, it uses electronic power to display all the information on a couple different screens to keep everyone safe and entertained during the ride.

For my granddaughter of 2 1/2, any environment that she learns in that is less than what I am around most of the time, most days of my life, is something I will not in the least indulge even for the smallest amount of time .  Her world is electronic and will stay that way.  She  very likely will have to deal with artificial intelligence, and she will be ready.  She will go where I only dream to be  at present.  I am glad for her.

Interaction is not simplistic

There is a particular psychologist who has been really popular among very conservative people.  He has written books, established a radio presence, and produces platitudes for posters on Facebook.  Someone used his poster quote on me not long ago to point out that an action of mine didn't fall within the parameters of his counsel.

The whole field of psychology is analogous to reverse engineering.  Sometimes we can discern what is going on in the mind, and sometimes it's not so clear.  So, when reading the research from psychologists, we have to be really careful about what its conclusions are.  It is easy to generalize from a study to a wider population, for instance, when the study was conducted with a sample that was not large enough to be representative of all people.  Or the sample in the study was one that involved only college students or selected participants by other narrow or non-random method.

The psychologist mentioned above was sensitive to these issues when he first began practicing his craft many years ago.  But, after his first couple of books and popularity from his radio program and political activism, he has developed a God complex.  He speaks as if people's actions are a result of good or bad teaching.  He should know better.  People are not computers where the saying used to be true,"Garbage in, garbage out."  That principle has so many counter-examples, it shouldn't even apply to human behavior.  People are complex.  Their personalities, experiences, and backgrounds make for thousands upon thousands of possible combinations of reactions in given circumstances.

So, when he gives advice about parenting and marriage, he shouldn't speak in terms of certainty.  Love between any two given people is dependent, not on a general morality nor on religious doctrine, but on what two people's understanding of what governs their relationship.  When that understanding has been undermined, the relationship suffers.  Its continuance is solely up to the two people to agree to continue or part ways.  When children and parents interact, discretion has to be used.  One doesn't have fast and unbreakable rules.  Parents factor in love, danger, long range goals, difference in behavior acceptable to one parent but not to the other, family traditions, region of the country, whether the child's behavior is predicted to continue, personality differences, and many, many other factors when disciplining and guiding her or his child.

I dismiss this psychologist's simplistic stance to loving someone and raising children.  He needs to revisit his roots.  I am sorry that so many people continue to put their faith in his platitudes and certainties.  People need to strive for understanding of each other in their close and intimate relationships, not basing judgments on what an unconcerned, third party says is normal, godly, or right.

1 second late

The book, 212 degrees: the extra degree is a motivational book about going the extra degree to change hot water into boiling water, 211 being hot water, 212 being boiling.  The idea is to create extra energy, usually called synergy, and that extra energy creates the power to do mighty things, like steam which drives a train.

I had my own little "extra" several evenings ago.  It was equally motivational for me.  I was driving home at night.  I had stopped at a traffic light in the turning lane.  The particular intersection wasn't well lit, so I couldn't really see around me very well.  When the arrow appeared to turn, I only had to wait an  extra second for the car in front of me to start her turn.  I merely followed since it was really too dark to see much of anything beyond the intersection.

Two ticks later I saw the car in front jolt sideways as if it was bouncing off of a median.  I immediately thought the car had hit the concrete dividing the north and south bound traffic, but in a fraction of a second, I thought again, There's no median in this street.  Then I saw a second car bounce off of the first.  That really surprised me because I never saw it coming.  I didn't see it enter the intersection, and I didn't hear the crashing noise of metal popping.  I merely saw two cars after the initial impact, bouncing off of each other.

My mind flashed the thought, Now if I had been the first car to go through the traffic light, the first car would have been mine, and I would be in bad shape right now.  But, it wasn't.  I was divided in time from the accident by one second... just one second... ONLY one second.  

Timing is everything.  Time it right and life works out well.  Time it wrong and life sends you crashing into things you didn't see coming.  I am proud to have been one second late.  I hope it is representative of the ventures I will have in the coming year.  I could use that timing of things.  Just one second of time dividing something shattering from something smooth, satisfying and relieving.

Manipulation after quantification

It depends on how it is used, but most of the time I cringe at the use of the title Language Arts.  It apparently became fashionable when the free thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s decided that the expression of English was purely aesthetic in nature.  Free form of English standards in poetry led people of that time to consider that there should be styles of writing in every genre independent of forms and standards.  Thus, the idea of English as an art form began.  That worked its way into the normal way of titling the subject taken in school.  Teachers wanted students to learn the art of expression using words.

If anyone were to come to me for writing help, the first thing I would want to do is quantify it - turn words into numbers.  Numbers don't really allow for art form.  They lead one to draw certain conclusions.  Style comes after conclusions have been made.  Style comes as a manipulation of pieces of thought within the parameters set from conclusions drawn from numbers.

Quantifying words?  Yes, and there are two measures of language that act as an index number that tell the general health of writing.  They are reverse measures of each other, and they speak of the maturity and comprehensibility of one's writing.  After taking these two measures from samples of one's writing, then a person can understand style.  A person has to know what to fix in his or her personal development of maturity and comprehensibility before (s)he really knows when, where, and why to create a particular style.  The quantification process factors in complexity of sentence, that is, clause use, and comprehensibility, length of clause beyond what is expected.  Vocabulary is a different issue and is not figured into the quantification of the clause, or the terminal unit.

These two measures chart growth accurately much like taking a child to the doctor to show growth by getting height, weight, and general health condition.  Once maturity is reached, then one can begin to enhance the physical features such as cosmetic qualities of teeth appearance, face lifts, wrinkle control, breast size, and lap band surgeries.

Language arts can happen for those who know how to control when, where, and why a particular feature of a clause is expressed in a certain way.  But, language arts doesn't really happen for those learning to write.  In the learning stages, one learns to plan and organize thought and throw in a little vocabulary to make the paper shine.

There is one more benefit to quantifying writing.  The process helps one understand the bigger picture of communication better.  When the digital world emerged, color, pictures, and music all became binary code for transmission purposes.  Communication is largely oral and thought.  Writing only makes for a small percentage.  Communication is enhanced in different ways.  Musicians write songs with a video in mind that will match the words.  They also make music that is much clearer or that can be repeated because the electronic world makes repetition easier to mix into  a song (like a copy and paste function for word processing) and the notes don't taper off at the end making the tone sharper or flatter.  The digital code is simply one note, not the sharp or flat of the note.  Social media allows for most ideas to be communicated in pictures.  Uploading, downloading, and sharing are the skills used, not writing.  People merely put short captions with the picture in order to ferret out a particular part of the picture to comment about.

So, the  environment for language use has changed from the days of descriptive writing for stories and persuasive writing for artificial and hypothetical topics.  Quantification of language helps a young person to realize the limitations placed on writing and helps in the transition of the worded environment into the digital environment, which is the real key to the future.

A headshaker

Once in a while I get a good reminder of the way things used to be and the way some people still want things to be.  I was asked to review a "curriculum" (in reality, it was merely a syllabus) for a particular course.  After review, I told the two people in charge of administering it that it was good if the goal was to have a classic education.  I didn't mean it as a compliment.

The two administrators, however, were quite satisfied with that assessment.  They wanted to continue with their plan of implementing this syllabus.  I left shaking my head, thinking to myself that some children were about to be prepared for living well in the 19th and 20th centuries.  That's not just a headshaker, though.  It's a grand disservice that borders on grand deception.  Imagine their surprise when they get to the real world in about 2 to 3 years and the world doesn't require writing skills, but computer and mobile app skills.  Their ability to read and write has been absorbed into the bigger world of presentation, speaking, and graphic preparation of ideas.  Their knowledge of literature has been trivialized compared to knowledge of manipulating the world of numbers, algorithms, video splicing, and cropping for immediate upload.

Any programmatic approach to curriculum that ignores the capability of the computer and the enhancements the digital world expects to see in the next 10 years is an approach that needs to be shelved immediately, if not sooner.  In the U.S., time is money; productivity is not measured in literary elements but in dollars and cents; time is always of the essence; and vision is measured by the saying, "If you snooze, you lose."  None of these are reflected in the art of reading for reading's sake. Reading for problem solution... yes, and experimentation, experience, presentation, video logs, and video presentation yield those productive, long-lasting results.

While it's a shame for the students who will be subjected to this syllabus, I don't worry.  Natural Selection has a way of taking care of that part of the species who are weak and have no built-in plan for adaption.  These students share a common destiny with saber-toothed tigers, mastadons, giant sloths, and wooly mammoths.  The Ice Age was good while it lasted, but then, glaciers melted and global warming allowed a human race to progress quantum leaps from where it was.

True to life

How characters are developed in a story is many times the breaking line between good stories and great ones.  The writer has to keep in mind her or his purpose in writing, balance the action of the character with that of the conflicts involving the entire mix of the other characters, figure where the character needs to start in order to reach the end of the story in the condition the character needs to end up, and remain static and true to her or his colors or change in accordance with the dynamic required by the purpose, setting, and overall direction of the action.

In the movie St. Vincent, the main character has been smartly and intricately developed.  Vincent, called Vin throughout the movie, starts out as a man who has accepted his place in the great scheme of things.  He is portrayed with habits that would normally be unacceptable to “decent” people.  He smokes – a lot- and drinks to excess when the occasion calls for it.  He is used to caring for himself without the help of others, which is depicted when he falls to the floor in a drunken stupor.  After a few hours, he picks himself up, goes out to challenge movers who have destroyed his fence, yard and tree, and eventually cleans and bandages the cut to his head from the fall.  That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the movie.

Soon after this episode, Vin is seen driving home a prostitute and paying her for her services – at least partially – telling her he would be good for the rest of the money soon.  The scene is constructed to indicate that this behavior is routine.  Not long after that, Vin goes to the race track to bet on his winning horse.  But, of course, he loses.  And on top of this, character from the track hits him up for debts owed to him, which, naturally he couldn’t pay.  So, the character threatens him and extends his time by two weeks.  There is nothing redeeming about the character created.

And where does the writer want the character to wind up by movie’s end?  The same place… partially.  In the last scene of the movie, Vin goes outside to relax in his chair in the backyard.  He’s still smoking, the prostitute is still with him, but not as a prostitute.  She has become his live-in partner.  He still owes money for his debts, but the debt has been temporarily suspended, maybe permanently so.  He still drinks at his favorite bar.  So, what did the author do in the part of the story where all the action builds to a climax if he didn’t change the character?  Did the writer write a script for 90 minutes of action just to depict what people can see around them every day, that is with nobody changing.  You can’t change the stripes on a zebra, right?  No, people go to the movies to see characters who inspire, challenge, push through, and dare us to be better, not to show us the pathetic quality of human nature.

This brilliant writer wanted to show us subtly the true make-up of a hero.  Not the kind that saves the world in one fell swoop.  Not the kind that sacrifices his or her existence.  Not the kind that gives everything (s)he has to cause good to happen.  And not the kind that models the perfect life for others to follow.  Not at all. 

He constructs a character that rolls with the punches of life.  He has a few of those.  His wife has Alzheimer’s and has to live in a memory home.  So, Vin visits her 3 times a week to show his love and care for what there once was.  He honors a commitment when he doesn’t have to, and he does it without fanfare.  He takes on keeping a young man after school until his mother comes home even though he doesn’t want to nor did he plan to.  He even takes money in order to do it.  But, the boy learned lessons about life from Vin, all of them, both “good” and “bad.”  The prostitute brought Vin the sexual satisfaction he needed.  When she turned up pregnant, Vin didn’t ever ask who the baby belonged to.  The prostitute just chose Vin to help her give food and shelter to her new addition.  Vin didn’t hesitate to provide.  He knew he needed her and willingly made the accommodation.  And, even when the mother who left her child to his safekeeping learned from Vin that she needed to be a better parent by spending more time with him.

 

So, Vin gave, but he also took.  When he had to recover from his stroke about 2/3 of the way through the movie, he did so with the help of those whose lives he had given to.  It was a beautiful give and take.  Give a little, take a little.  So, the character that Vin started as is the character that he ended with… basically… but he learned something in between.  He learned in between about the give and take of life.  Nothing earth shattering, just something that moved an inch a year until he began changing.  It was subtle.   And, that is so true about real life.  We all change over time… an inch a year… until at the end we are essentially the same – yet somehow fuller, richer, better for the wear.  It will probably be a while before I see a movie where as true-to-life a character as Vin will appear again.

Perfect appellation

I'm thinking of a poor young 13-year-old who could have felt out of place in a new town in a lower than median income housing area.  But he didn't because his needs were met - by a man who cared for other people in a way that fit his own philosophy of life.

I was in another lifetime, one of toil and blood,
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud.
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

I'm also thinking of a woman who gave sex for money but wound up pregnant and had no place to go. She could have felt depressed and suicidal, but she didn't because she knew that the man with whom she was having sex would take her in and provide a place to live - a man who provided for himself poorly but adequately enough for him, and would include a woman and child in the same poor but adequate way.

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word.
In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm,
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

And I'm thinking of a woman who needed extra help to even survive.  But her survival was made possible - by a man who used her survival need for his own good.  In doing so, however, he supplied what she needed the most, after-school and weekend care for her son.  He did it his own way, according to his usual M.O.  He didn't break from visiting his usual bar, his trips to the race track, and his time set aside for his lady of the evening.

Not a word was spoke between us. There was little risk involved.
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

There's beauty in accommodation.  But, there's a richer beauty in accommodation without altering what you're doing - to have your circle around you, and be able to handle the way life adds and subtracts the people who join you within your circle.

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes, burned out on the trail,
hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Finally, I'm thinking of a man who structured his whole life around reacting to his circumstances without compromising who he was.  His circumstances made him stronger, but they strengthened the way he wanted to live life.  When his wife developed Alzheimer's Disease, he accommodated her and made the change he needed to continue to meet his own needs.  When he had his own stroke, he recovered in a way that suited only him at first, but he realized he would need to accommodate others as he recovered, so he did.  He did so to create his own shelter from his own storms.  He had been to war, won a medal for bravery, lost his wife,  was imposed upon by a neighbor, and chosen to house a prostitute and her newborn. Through it all, he gave shelter.  Life left him burned out, buried in hail, poisoned, hunted and ravaged.  But he had learned life's secret.  Through it all you have to be a real saint.  Right, it's his perfect appellation.  Let's call him Saint Vincent!

Beauty of the ordinary

After adulthood sets in, it's not long until a person realizes that peaches and cream are not life's theme song.  But, young adults still see Life as something to be tamed.  After a while, young people realize that Life is more volatile than the way they first looked at it.  There are moments where achievements are made, but they are only moments, not a way of life.  Highs and lows exist like a rollercoaster.  Some people, however, like the analogy of weather.  Weather is rarely even.  It comes in seasons and in a variety of forms.  The sun heats the earth, the earth follows its orbit away from the sun, Winds blow in the transition stage, the sun isn't so hot, then winds bluster, the cold follows.  Snow comes, precipitation falls, ice forms.  Then the Earth shifts in its orbit and the weather changes yet again.

Thus, life is filled with all kinds of weather with storms as the representative and salient feature of weather/Life analogy.  The key is to find shelter in the storm.  Bob Dylan has written the perfect song for this.  In the movie, St. Vincent, this song was chosen as a memorable and vivid way to symbolize all that had transpired.  Bill Murray comes out into his back yard to sing this song as the movie ends. The movie had depicted a number of life's storms in the four characters it followed. A young boy had been totally uprooted through divorce of his parents and his world had become stormy.  The shelter Vin had provided literally for the boy proved to be some of the only stability the boy experienced.  The prostitute that Vin saw had a storm of her own, and it was Vin that wound up providing shelter from her storm.  The young boy's mother, newly divorced from her husband, needed help in establishing herself again, and Vin was a key in helping to provide shelter for her storm by helping with her son.  Vin as well faced his trials valiantly, even the stroke that happened after being stressed by his money troubles.  At the end of the movie, his house was still standing as it always had been (it was hard to miss that symbol), and it appeared unchanged throughout the story.

So when Vin went to his back yard at the end of the movie, everyone appreciated the activity that happened there.  In one last scene, the writer capsulized all the storms that had happened by showing Vin getting settled in a yard that had no grass, only dirt.  He turned on a hose to water a plant that had already died.  When Vin tried to prop the hose on the pot of the plant, the plant fell off of its little table. So, Vin just returned the plant to its upright position and reproped the hose.  While this action was happening, Vin just sat in his double lawn chair, smoking his cigarette, comfortable, enjoying the pocket of time given to him to enjoy his "average" looking house in the background and his little plot of ground under the sun.  His doorframe and window sill needed painting.  The electrical wires had been placed in tubing running the length of his wall from roof to ground.  The paint was not colorful, but a humdrum earth tone tan.  Vin was singing along with the cassette as it played Shelter from the Storm.  He knew it by memory, so the viewer knew it was an important song to him, and Vin sang while smoking and watering his plant.

My hat is off to the script writer for showing a movie in which his theme and accompanying symbol were so excellent in showing the fantastic kindness, resilience, and strength of character extant in every person.  The ordinary was transformed into extraordinary. People can take heart because they provide stability for each other when they give others what they need -  a shelter's walls! It's what we would all do even though we are regular people acting in ordinary ways.  St.Vincent has to be the movie of the year for its tremendous subtlety in portraying the strength of Everybody in our ordinary, yet extraordinary, worlds!

Virtue and venom

The new film St. Vincent  gives a person a lot to think about.  Bill Murray plays a character that represents everybody.  There's nothing particularly endearing about Vincent, a person everyone calls Vin.  Vin is introduced in a bar drinking way too much.  He sees a prostitute once a week.  He bets at the local horse racing track during racing season to try to raise money for his debts.  His house is untidy, his furniture cheap, his habits sloven.  Nothing attracts us to this 65-year-old man living alone.  But he has a little bit of all of us in him.

We don't all drink - no - or have any of the other habits Vin has.  But we all have our quirks.  And like Vin, we are all comfortable with where we are in life.  We accept ourselves as we are even if no one else does.

Here's the thing about Vin.  He goes with the flow of life and does the best he can in whatever condition he finds himself.  We find out that his wife has been in a memory home because of Alzheimer's and he has been visiting her 3 times every week even when she stopped recognizing him. We see that he takes on helping raise a child even though he never had any of his own.  He teaches a 12-year-old boy how to survive in his blown-apart world that has divorced and angry parents who don't really know how to raise a child themselves.  He does things for the boy that everybody would do once in a while because he represents everybody.

We also find out that he didn't just get to be 65 without a history, and a glamorous history at that.  He fought in Vietnam and won a bronze star for valor.  He married a beautiful woman and lived with her until her disease set in.  Still he visited her and treated her royally on a regular basis.  Finally, he accepted his age and his station in life and carved out a niche for himself that he was comfortable with - as we all do and have done.

In a moving moment, the climax of the story, Vin is honored as a saint by the young boy he taught to accept life as it was.  Suddenly, everyone could see Vin for the good that he had in him.  Bravo, Bravo for the script-writer for producing a story that is the true story of all of us as human beings.  We are all a mixed bag of virtue and venom.  People love us and hate us, alternately, for who we are and what we do.  No one possesses a perfect track record if (s)he has lived for 40 years or more.  We all just hope we can be accepted for who we are - when we have moments of grandeur and moments of grunge.

Yes, yes, yes to St. Vincent, saint Everybody, because we are who we are living lives that are what they are (a significant expression used in the movie).  St. Vincent will probably not be the highest selling movie of the season, but it should be.  We can all use a nudge to see others for what they have to offer and to accept people as a total package with and without warts.  Kudos to St. Vincent for the best movie of the whole year.   It is truth in modern clothing!

When work is done

I hear a lot about people who just punch a clock for a paycheck.  They seem passionless.  They work to feed their families.  They work at a pace that insures their jobs last longer than they have to.  They never or rarely work above and beyond.  They don’t necessarily work in miserable conditions, they just don’t enjoy their jobs even if they are good or excellent at what they do.

And I hear and read a lot about people who are nuts about their work.  Every moment seems filled with tasks or results that feed people’s drive to do even better than the last goal they achieved.  Their steps have spring in them every day because they do what they enjoy so much.  Even bad working conditions are seen as opportunities to propel them to new heights.

I feel certain that I have met people that fit both stereotypes of those who work.  I have, in turn, eschewed those who work with little ambition and admired those who seemed to have the tiger by the tail.  At times, I have worked in miserable conditions, worked at a pace, and experienced little enjoyment.  At other times, I have achieved goals that caused me to strive to reach even higher.

But maybe reward from work is not found in the two extremes.   Maybe it’s found in the vitality a person has when work is done.  It’s seen in the optimism that the task at hand matters to the people receiving the product or service.  It’s felt in the comments received that reinforce that people’s efforts have been appreciated or have made a difference in someone else’s life.   The aftertaste of even one accomplishment keeps the present moment as a really sweet taste.

  

Interpreting country-speak

I have heard people say again and again, that Life doesn’t give us what we can’t handle.  I think that is country-people-speak for try harder to make lemonade out of lemons.  I don’t really think the saying is true on its face.  Life is very unpredictable and really can’t be controlled completely. 

I usually settle for little pockets of peace from the onslaught of the turn of events.  Sometimes in those pockets of controllable moments, Life seems so good, or at least as good as I am able to make my environment pleasant.  But, then, things happen that I have to react to.  That’s when I usually lose all aplomb and react in a way that shows I am not happy with the situation.  I usually stay in that state until something changes.

Most of the time, it’s not that I can’t handle the situation, it’s that I don’t like what is happening and it takes a while to work out of the situation.  I have to try to change the events back into something pleasant.  So, I have come to understand life’s events as those that are pleasant or unpleasant.  That way I can categorize my reactions to life as something I either want to change or not.  That’s a simplified view, but for me – it’s good enough to allow me to live a little.

Hasta la vista, bebe!

The commercial shows a man telling the viewers he’s looking for a car.  He speaks of an easy way to shop for one these days.  You guessed it – by internet.  He tells people to go to TrueCar.com.  He wants people to see how easy it is, so he takes a picture of the car he has found that he wants, uploads it to TrueCar.com.  The website IDs the car and gives the price he should pay for it.  “It’s that easy,” he says.  

The man didn’t type anything into any fields on the internet site.  He didn’t write an email of a car description.  He didn’t have to type a conversation with someone from online chat.  For sure, picture identification has been around for a few years already, but new applications like this one will begin popping up more and more.

If I start connecting dots, a picture begins to emerge.  Apps become available to make paying for everything and anything with your phone… money becomes unnecessary.  Online banking, direct deposit, bill pay… money becomes unnecessary.  Apps identify music and give artist, publisher, and name of tune without typing any words… typing (writing) becomes unnecessary.   Stories are told by film, thus film as literature will increasingly become the accepted mode as 3-D films increase in number and morph into holographic film when the time comes… reading becomes unnecessary…  Apps on phones, TVs, and even restaurant menus custom-design the world we want to create for ourselves.  Apps are picture-driven, even on menus for restaurants.  The last time I ordered at Chili’s, I ordered and paid from the table from an electronic tablet.  The server only brought the food… money and writing were unnecessary, including a signature.

Yes, yes, yes.  Apps are the new literacy.  Easily the world will go to coding to be able to move around in it using apps for daily routines.  Control the code, control the environment you want.  The landscape for 2017 has begun to take shape.  I love it, and it will greatly depend on the ability of the young people in the US to stay on the forefront of technology to take us into the coming environment.

Ask anyone what the environment was like in 1964.  Has it changed?  And that was a mere 50 years ago.  10-year-olds today will have a quite different world as well and it will happen before they turn 30.  50 is cut to 25 or 30, a half-life.  That's major change in one generation.

 

One theory of why the dinosaurs didn’t make it is because they developed in an environment that couldn’t support them if that environment changed even a little.  But, a meteorite hit and changed their world more than a little.  Drought happened worldwide, forest fires ran rampant across North America from the intense heat of the meteorite, darkness cloaked most of the Earth and destroyed plant life.  And, of course, the effects of the blast itself devastated about a fourth of the world in the arcs around the meteorite's diameter– destructive shock waves, tremendously forceful tsunamis, and intense heat in the immediate area.

 

I’m thinking that there are parallel conditions here for those who don’t see the emerging picture in just a few very short years and change.  My word of the day for them… Adios!

A dragon's beating

I’m reflecting on a dream I had once, many, many years ago.  I was 31 at the time.  It was more than a nightmare to me.  It had seemed real, so much so that when I had woken from my dream, I had felt very exasperated and physically tired. 

I began wrestling with a dragon, the typical dragon – long tail, spike-fins up the backbone, Tyrannosaurus Rex-style dragon.  It was about four times my height.  I don’t recall how the dream started, but fairly immediately I fell into the dragon’s grasp.  It toyed with me at first, then grabbed me in one of his claw-hands and began slinging me around.  Suddenly he started banging my body against the ground.  That hurt, of course.  

I saw no end to this slinging and banging and hurting.  I cried out to the night sky (or at least the sky was dark), begging anyone who could hear to help me.  No one heard.  I kept calling, begging the dragon to stop.  I remember thinking, “How long? How long?”  I thought I would die in the next instant if the dragon didn’t stop.

Then I woke up.  It wasn’t a startling call to consciousness, but a slow and groggy swim back to the reality that the dream had ended.  Or was it a dream?  I couldn’t tell at first.  It seemed so real.  I was exhausted from the fight.  I still felt the pain of the slinging and banging and hurting.  Distinctly, I remember thinking that if no one helped the man, he would certainly die from the beating.

After a few minutes of slowly realizing that the episode was a dream, I tried to think that the dream applied to someone.  I immediately thought of my brother.  A little later in the day, I called him to see if something horrific had happened or if he could see that something was about to happen.  No, he said.  So, I relegated the dream to the back of my mind, thinking that if I recognized that this allegorical dream matched someone I knew, then I would tell them.

I never met anyone that matched this dream at that time.  But, as I grew older, I realized that the dream would apply to a lot of different people, including me, because it was one of those universal allegories.  Most dreams represent jumbled thoughts and become scenes in a dream in order to work through situations, so it probably was something I needed to work through.

A number of years have passed since that dream occurred, but I still remember it vividly.  It could apply to a number of situations I’ve had through the years if the dream was meant to be predictive in any way.  Likely it was not.  But I certainly have had a number of symbolic beatings in my life when I thought I would certainly suffer to the point of death.  The 13 months my son had cancer and his subsequent death tops the list of a very black time in my life.   The brilliant sun of another period in my life has set in the west and night has set in.  Other times could be represented by the dream as well.

And what about that man?  Did he certainly die?  He’s still kicking, as they say, but the dragon’s beating has taken its toll.  He’s not so much reeling from the blows now because he knows the answer to the sentiment, “Will anybody help this man?  He will die if no one helps him!”

Ours to conquer

In the year 2000, when it was mentioned that reading and writing will disappear sooner than later, the reaction was not just one of disbelief, but one of ridicule.  Here it is 14 years later.  Now the reaction is one of sorrow, usually, that reading and writing will apparently be replaced.  A lot sure can happen in a short time.  Who would have thought that at the start of the 10 year battle for supremacy between reading and writing and that quantum leap to the visual, virtual world that an assault so powerful could have unseated two core values such as reading and writing.  Well, I'll tell you what - a whole generation of digital natives, virtual world inhabitants, have taken over the invention circuit and changed the entire landscape right under the baby boomers' noses.

In case there is a non-believer or two left in the crowd, here is an article from today's news.

Well, what do you know!  A bookless library!  Click here.

Yeah, reading and writing  are being replaced.  With what you ask?  Something that will lead us to a world a quantum leap away from this one now.  How so?  Click here.

And in case you think women are the ones who are bemoaning the switch from reading and writing to the visual virtual world, think again.  Click here.

Yep! By the time 3 more years go by - the end of that 10 year war to replace reading and writing - I suspect that coding will be the new writing, that libraries will contain the machinery to deliver a much more responsible and much more robust type of learning, and that women and men alike will partake in the world that has all along been theirs to conquer.

Intertwining paths

The strongest case that I know of for the idea of destiny and fate is Sophocles' Oedipus the King.  It's fiction from a really long time ago, but it lays out the case nicely for how life weaves events beyond one's control and knowing, then brings the strands together in a way that Oedipus could not do anything different than what he did.  He had a date with destiny that swamped his boat.  The event didn't kill him, but it certainly changed everything possible about his life in a tragic way.

A modern and less deterministic treatment for the idea of destiny is depicted in the film from 2001, Serendipity.  The two main characters, Jonathan and Sara lived in two different countries, and after a chance meeting in NYC, they parted again, hoping that destiny would lead them back together again.  Just when it didn't appear that a reunion would happen, their shared token of a symbol of their love resurfaces and leads them to actively pursue finding the other person again.  This fiction story had a fairy tale ending, unlike Oedipus the King.

The new movie, The Best of Me, put a bit of new twist to the old theme of destiny.  It allowed the two main characters, who had been estranged for 20 years, to appear in the other's dreams, as a foreshadowing of good things to come for them both.  Their "chance" meeting after 20 years apart healed their old wounds.  It fulfilled their dreams and their unrequited love.  The best of each of the two main characters was only seen as the two were led to a brief healing/cleansing/blending moment in time together.  The plot was not a gushing love story, but a story laced with reality and the irony of  thwarted love happening simultaneous to the greatest fulfillment of love.  The moment in which both of those ideas met happened without either of the character's planning before or after the healing/cleansing/blending moment because destiny had led them to that moment.

I have personally resisted the idea of destiny and fate, but every time there has been an intersection of my life with someone else's, I have wondered why our paths crossed.  If there really is an answer to that question, then I should stop resisting the idea.  But I have usually seen the intersection of my life with someone else's as happenstance.

I do have, however, one exception to that view, but only one.  In that single instance, I have never identified the path that led to the intersection. The point of intersection was clearly understood, but the path leading away from that intersecting point never yielded the reason for the separation of paths leaving it as unclear as the path leading in.

 However, I would say that that one intersection has altered my view because I am so much more..

Beauty exemplified

Once in a while, something comes along that is truly rewarding. Not monetarily, of course.  Just from someone who truly appreciates what has happened.  I got to witness this moment a day ago.

The woman described her childhood.  It had been traumatic.  It had a number of players and was spread across two different countries.  It robbed her of her childhood, which included her schooling.  The woman had dropped out after her 8th grade year.

As an adult the woman did what adults do - she married, bore children, and eeked out a living to survive.  But life was rough still.  A traumatic childhood turned into a nightmarish adulthood.  Finally, she divorced and continued to provide for her children.

Deep inside of her was a growing hunger.  Every passing year she understood more fully that she had missed out on an education.  It had stymied chances she had for getting a good job because in her eyes the worst thing had happened.  She couldn't mask her lack of education because she had no spelling skills at all.  She had blacked out the little bit of learning she remembered from her devastating childhood.  Not being able to spell was a notice to the world that she was marked as being ignorant, even "special ed."

She went on a 20 year odyssey trying to find a remedy for this handicap.  She tried teaching herself to read, going to her middle child's junior high teachers for help, even presenting herself to a university's education department to get suggestions for her great hunger, the hole in her heart, her badge of ignorance.  The junior high teachers referred her to a dyslexia teacher and a special education teacher to learn some techniques for spelling such as spelling in the air and in sand.  The university told her she missed third grade level material, so she bought those books to make it up.  None of these efforts led to her success.

To her great credit, the woman never gave up.  She was determined beyond normal hunger to fill the void in her life, to erase the signs that she couldn't make it in life like everyone else.

So, imagine the moment after an hour in counseling and another hour working with a basic phonic technique.  Suddenly, like a film being removed from a blind person's eyes, the woman, now 52 years old, was taking dictated words and spelling each of them correctly... on her own... with no preparation.  It was beyond rewarding.  That moment released 45 years of developing and pent up emotion.  Tears flowed freely down her cheeks in disbelief that she had just spelled 40 words on her own, flawlessly.  Remarkable.  Incredible,   Breathtaking.  There were just no words at that moment - just raw reward - for teacher and student alike.

Rolling through

I was sitting on my back porch the night before last.  It was dark of course, but the reason I was on the porch was to watch a storm as it rolled through the area.  It was late, about 11:30, cool, in the 60s, and the storms were coming in about 3 hours earlier than the predicted 3 A.M.  It had begun to rain some, though not heavily.

The skies weren't pitch black like normal.  Lightning bursts lit up the sky about every 2 seconds. The lightning didn't streak, but flashed brilliantly in the clouds.  I usually see these type of flashes above the clouds and in the distance, but not this night.  It was up close and personal.  About every 2 minutes or so, thunder rumbled deeply not far away.  I was mesmerized and sat, just watching and listening to the wind, rain, thunder, lightning and water flowing  in a nearby creek.

I didn't time how long I sat there, but it seemed like it was around 15 minutes. I was wearing a t-shirt, so the cool air finally got to me and I went back inside.  It was so refreshing.  I don't always have the time to enjoy a storm as it happens.  I get out in one if I am driving somewhere, or I catch snapshots of one if I look intermittently out a window, but to enjoy the show as one rolls across my area, is invigorating.  It restores the environment.  

Symbolically, it restores hope that all is well with the world... at least for the 15 minutes I enjoyed it... and helps me walk back in the house with the idea that I will sleep deeply for the night. And I can't help but think of some of my memories that are flashes of refreshment whenever they come to mind...  Snapshots of what has been and anticipation of what is to hopefully come.

I was asleep when the storm finally left the area, peacefully, awaiting the brightness of the morning.

An eye toward the moronic

Language behavior has been studied for thousands of years.  I would say, however, that most of the ancient people who commented on language did so notionally.  I am reminded of the Egyptian pharaoh who wanted to know what the first word spoken by a human was.  He isolated a baby who had not talked and waited until the baby spoke its first word.  The sounds were close to the Egyptian word for bread, so the pharaoh concluded that bread was the first word ever spoken.

Of course, that is an atrocious method to study language by.  But, it did spotlight people's need to know more about language.  After the advent of the scientific method, language study has improved greatly.  It still is a little sloppy sometimes, however.  I think of a study I read in graduate school of three couples who supposedly recorded all of their interactions with each other.  The point of the study was to see if men or women interrupted the other more often and why the interruptions occurred.  The study was published at a time when little was known about gender and language, so it was among the first studies in the field.  That accounts for the study being published in an edited volume by a scholar.  Still, IF one trusted that the couples didn't turn recorders off and on, IF one trusted that the 3 couples represented all couples, and IF the interactions represented all spoken interactions, then the results that men interrupted women almost exclusively for control reasons should be accepted.  Bah humbug that that study was representative of interrupting behavior by either sex.  Sloppy, sloppy research.

Language behavior can be scientifically examined, of course, and the results should dispel the notions  people try to perpetuate about such behavior.  There is a lot of merit to discourse studies, both written and spoken.  These studies patchworked together give an emerging picture of how language is really used by people.  And when the behavior is to present deception, there are methods that detect that behavior.

I am always amazed by unschooled people who think they know language well enough to practice deception.  Their notions are usually like the pharoah's and the researcher's mentioned above - sloppy.  Deceptive people's arrogance has negative consequences, though, because it keeps them from realizing how terribly transparent they are.  Fools are born every minute.  As the saying goes for these people: Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Constant

yes.
faith.
still.

The perfect bed

My granddaughter likes to pick rose pedals from one of the three rose bushes in the front of our house.  She has been doing this for about 2 weeks now.  From the beginning she wanted to bring the pedals to the entryway of our house.  And the stack of roses in the picture was only the start.  She continued to add pedals until I couldn't see any concrete below the little bed.  I sure didn't mind since the fragrance is sweet-smelling. What better way to enter the house than to have the handiwork of my granddaughter welcoming me home! 

It brings to mind a certain sentiment that I have expressed before.  Rose pedals are so soft, so fragrant, that to lie down on them would be the zenith of comfort and relaxation and desire.  I don't like all the lyrics that accompany the chorus of Bon Jovi's song, but the words in the chorus and a few others immediately before the chorus do represent the sentiment I have had.  What better way to enter a day or end a day than to have this handiwork welcoming me in each chamber of my heart!

                                         

Being true

Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea has a number of lessons in it.  It's the story about a fisherman who always dreamed of catching "the big one."  One day, late in his life, he went far into the sea and finally caught the fish of his dreams.  He hooked the fish to his boat and began his long trip back to shore.

This point in the story is where all the lessons begin.  As the man returns, the fish begins to be eaten by other larger predators in the sea.  By the time the fisherman reaches shore, he is only dragging the skeleton of the big fish of his dreams.

The most obvious theme of the book is that dreams achieved are not all they are cracked up to be.  But a number of other lessons exist.  One could be about the loss of idealism as a person matures from his/her teens to late life.  Another could be about the myth of catching the big one.  Even if you think that you have, life mitigates and diminishes the experience until you know your dream wasn't worth it or that your dream didn't ever really exist in the form you thought it did.

Other details in the story that aren't included here also bear on some of the lessons learned from the story, but the overall lessons are the most important ones.  One interpretation of the events lends itself to echoing the Socratic wisdom of "being true to yourself."  The old man couldn't let the fish go even though he knew the fish was being eaten.  He had to be true to himself (his dream represents who the man really is).  People should always be true to themselves or they can't help but be themselves.

None of the lessons really deal with happiness or happy endings.  To use this last lesson above, I suppose life is really a series of events that tell us who we are.  At every stage, our characteristics (our true colors) always show through.  But I wonder, also, what it says about us if we try to hide our true feelings.  I guess, sooner or later, the fish gets eaten.

Sunny and warm

The day started sunny, warm, and muggy.  The predicted high was about 10 degrees above average for this day.  I was braced for a much hotter than normal day.  Then, also as predicted, clouds began to assemble.  They turned from white to gray.  The temperature dropped; the wind picked up.  Rain followed.  The reprieve of the rain was very welcome.

We live pretty predictable lives.  The book Passages by Gail Sheehy outlines the stages of predictable life as one moves from one decade to another.  As it turns out, life is a lot like the weather: it has seasons and average temperatures.  The book tells about the characteristics each decade holds in Bell Curve fashion.  It's an enlightening read and is not laden with psychological jargon and statistics.

So, when the changes come, as they inevitably will, in our lives, they also come at predictable periods.  The famous 7-year itch and mid-life crisis are two of these periods.  The 30s represent the most ambitious periods of life for both sexes.  The book has many examples.

The book is, of course, reporting on generalities, and life happens rather unpredictably on occasion. These unpredictabilities are of two varieties: pleasant ones and disastrous ones.  I have experienced some of these as well.  Two represent these polar extremes.  Death of a child is the most intense negative experience, forcing one onto a dark, dark path for a period of time.  Finding true joy is the opposite experience, allowing one to enter a period of daily sunshine.

I know I have lived out the a lot of the characteristic routines of Passages.  But the reprieve from the predictable by the possibility of bright daily sunshine is so very welcome.