Tommyjournal archive December 2007
A friend's mom died recently. While talking with my friend on the phone, she asked me how I handled loss--in particular, death--and as I was in the workshop when I took the call, I made an analogy to woodworking: I said that death was an inherent limitation of life, and it's better to accept and work with inherent limitations (e.g., that wood warps, has quirks associated with its grain, and so on) rather than wishing or believing that they didn't exist. She appreciated my thoughts and said that was a rational way to look at it--a comment I had a hard time taking at face value; I wondered if she was saying yes, but we are not strictly rational beings.
What I didn't think to say to her, which is just as important to my approach (although, I suppose, just as rational), is that I prepare myself for difficult situations by developing equanimity that depends neither on belief nor on circumstances. Ideally, practice this at all times--i.e. before it is put to a hard test.
How to develop such equanimity? I've had to find my own way, and I don't presume that my way will work for everyone. It's a work in progress. I can say that music has been, and continues to be, a great aid in keeping my balance. Climbing was also a part of my personal practice; climbing gives immediate demonstrations of what happens if you don't keep cool under pressure.
Why the insistence that equanimity not depend on beliefs or circumstances? To avoid building a house on sand.
Sunday 23 Dec 2007 comment?
Putty for filling gaps in wood can be made by mixing sawdust* with a PVA glue. Disadvantages include that the putty shrinks when it cures and ends up somewhat darker than the wood the sawdust came from.
To avoid shrinkage, I tried using epoxy instead of a PVA glue. My findings: it works, but sets up muy pronto. So-called 5-minute epoxy becomes unusable even faster with sawdust added.
Just thought you'd like to know.
* by "sawdust", I really mean fine dust generated by sanding
Thursday 20 Dec 2007 comment?
From the Washington Post:
Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.This sounds like something out of Monty Python. Imagine a general giving a report to a group of people, and saying--in a deadpan voice--that the forces under his command are having a positive effect in that opposition to them is uniting a fractious country.
That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.
Sunday 16 Dec 2007 3 comments
Jeff Raikes, president of Micros--t’s business division, referring to the actions of a competitor:
The focus is on competitive self-interest; it's on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do.Had I been drinking tea or something when I read that, I would've guffawed it all over the screen.
An MS exec criticizing the strategy of undermining a competitor is just too rich.
Sunday 09 Dec 2007 1 comment
Thoughts on Into The Wild, which I saw this afternoon:
I like movies that don't have an obligatory romance plot or subplot. I like that the protagonist in Into The Wild not only isn't looking for romance, he even turns down an offer to have sex. He suggests instead one of the most sublime things two people can do together: to play music. There's a guy after my own heart. (He sought truth too.)
Said protagonist learns a bit from his experiences, and towards the end of the story he seems possibly ready to end a period of exile and reëngage the world--but he doesn't get a chance to. Before he dies, alone and lonely, he writes "happiness is only real when shared."
I used to feel frustrated when I didn't have someone with me to point out a beautiful sunset (or whatever) to. In my ten years of semi-exile in the desert, I have made a conscious effort to overcome that feeling--and in that I have largely succeeded. I still point out clouds and sunsets when I'm with someone; I just don't feel that something is missing when I can't. Happiness felt while alone is not the same thing as happiness shared with someone, but it is of value nonetheless.
So I don't agree with the message at the end of the film that happiness is only real when shared. If I can appreciate unshared happiness, it can't be that difficult to do; quite a few people are more loners by temperament than I am.
But it was a fine movie, and I recommend it without hesitation.
Saturday 08 Dec 2007 3 comments
"So serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. It just says: Use all the components of any given number of elements, don't leave out individual elements, use them all with equal importance and try to find an equidistant scale so that certain steps are no larger than others. It's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world." - Karlheinz Stockhausen
"Well, when you play ugly music, it helps to have an elaborate philosophical system to rationalize its ugliness. This has been my experience with much of the avant-garde." - Frank Zappa
Tuesday 04 Dec 2007 1 comment
This afternoon I visited with a math teacher I'd had in high school. I told him about how another (male) teacher in the school had wanted to have sex with me when I was in my senior year (a story I once recounted here in Tommyjournal). Yes, we talked about other things too, and I'll get to that--but first, the sex-related stuff (I know what gets readers' attention). This afternoon's conversation included an exchange about like this:
| Tommy: | [teacher x] wanted to have sex with me. |
| teacher: | I'm hurt. Why didn't he want to have sex with me instead? |
| Tommy: | I was young. |
| teacher: | He should have been a priest. |
I visited with this math teacher because he was (and is) great. I had learned math in his classes that is seldom taught in high schools, not even in advanced placement courses. He showed us Cantor's diagonal proof that the real numbers are uncountable, he taught us abstract algebra (group theory, rings, fields, boolean algebra, and so on), and much more. And he taught it with grace and power and style. I am so lucky to have been one of his students.
I remember my first day in one of his classes, when he told us that tests didn't count. That is, he graded students by his evaluation of their understanding, and not by how they scored on tests. Some students who were obsessed with their GPAs didn't like that idea.
He gave hard tests; if our grades on his tests had counted, lots of kids would have flunked. He wanted tests to be challenges for our enrichment, not standardized ways to gauge our performance.
This afternoon, he showed me a few letters and articles he'd written recently about the (sorry) state of education in the USA. He described a phenomenon that he likened to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; in his opinion, the more emphasis is placed on measuring (grading), the worse the education. Not everyone will agree with that statement, but I can tell you I learned a lot in his classes.
He taught at the same high school for 44 years. In his last years before retiring, he was in conflict with the administration because he taught some material in his advanced placement calculus course that wasn't on the AP test. The administration wanted him to concentrate on preparing students for the exam. He was a giant of a math teacher, and to hear that some fucking administrator said that to him makes me want to cry.
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