What There's Time For

Indulgent

The letter from school informing of the required costume parade admonished "No Halloween costumes! Costume must be of a story book character!" and kindly pointed out that the costume "need not be elaborate". Your child can be one of the three blind mice with just ears on a headband, mittens, and face paint! So easy!

But my child doesn't WANT to be a blind mouse. Or any mouse. Or a ship's crew member rescuing a dog (although he loves that book).

No, the only thing he wants to be is Smaug from The Hobbit. Smaug, the fearsome dragon with a breast of gleaming jewels and one fateful missing scale.

For a variety of reasons that I'm sure a therapist would find very interesting, I agreed and purchased fabric yesterday. Today, we started the project, but Mr. P was soon "so tired!" from standing to be draped, pinned, and basted. When will it be finished???? Nobody knows, but it'll be pretty awesome. Excellent use of gold sequins, amiright? ;)

Birds at Breakfast

DiDi helped the kids put up one of those stick-to-the-window bird feeders at Christmas, with much excitement all around. But the birds didn't show up.

Not until last week, when we saw one and then another and now Mr. P exclaims over them (in a whisper) every day at breakfast.

Amazingly, I had not guessed how very relaxing and lovely it is to share a few minutes watching birds in the morning!

We've had purple finches and tufted titmouses (titmice?) and black-capped chickadees, but to Mr. P they are all "chaffinches", as he breathlessly reported to DiDi that first day.   A case of Mr. P being his hilarious and adorable self — we've been reading The Children of Green Knowe (one of my most favorites as a child), which features a chaffinch rather like The Secret Garden features a robin.  I am always grateful for Mr. P's indulgence of my reading old British children's books to him, although he really seems to enjoy them for their own sake.

January 19th

So... it's been five years since my dad's sudden death and I was starting to compose a post in my head that I felt would have been up to the occasion, but then it got really late and I was really tired because of all the stuff I've been doing today and I was feeling bad about that, but then I realized, a whole lot of the stuff I was busy doing was entirely appropriate for remembering my dad.

I wrote a bunch of code.  Finicky code, writing out numbers into html strings so they turn into orderly tables when chucked into an email.  Dad thought computer programming was pretty interesting (he's the only reason I ever took a comp sci course) and while I don't know that he would have said he loved spreadsheets, it really looked to a lot of people like he loved spreadsheets.  I remember him carefully taping together six or eight sheets of paper so he could properly survey the family budget at the end of the year and present it to the rest of us.  So, code to print numbers in orderly tables — entirely appropriate for today.

At the playground, the kids were fine on their own and Mr. Right and I could talk but I couldn't stand still, antsy after all the coding.  Jumping jacks, running in place, stepping exercises on the beams holding in the playground mulch — very much my dad.  I remember him coming home from work and picking up a stretchy band or a compression bar and doing random exercises while chatting with us about the day.

I wore my giant overmitts.  He always had cold hands and had a complex layering system of liner gloves, regular mittens, overmitts, Gortex shell mitts for the rain...  I'm sad I got to be fast and reasonably skilled at knitting only after he died.  I still sometimes think of knitting him some mittens.  Dead loved ones are like amputated limbs; sometimes you get tricked into thinking they're still there.

And then, finally, I did some administrative tying up of loose ends.  Re-upping my developer account, adding the Linux class (that's the one I wanted!) and dropping the Theory of Computation class (kind of sad, but I can't take both), checking a credit card expiration date...  Boring but necessary and Dad was the sort to take care of that kind of thing on time and not complain about it.

He was also the sort to do a lot of reading, he always had a pile of books on the go at once and a few copies of the Atlantic magazine hanging around to be thoroughly gone through, perhaps underlined in a few places or a particularly great article clipped for sharing or saving (the one on Lincoln's depression is the one I remember most clearly).  And then he'd initial the front cover and date it so he'd remember he'd read it.

I'm not sure he'd be too into audiobooks, what with the lack of something to scrawl an initial on or stack beside the couch, but I don't let that bother me.  If he were still here, I'd be giving him a hard copy of The Antidote, which Mr. Right got for me and I'm almost done listening to.  A sort of practical philosophical book on "the negative path to happiness".  Stoicism and all that.  Dad was a stoic in the better sense of the word, the sense The Antidote examines.

 

So Many Interesting Things to Read!

I'm so exhausted from staying up late last night, but I want to take just a second (ok, an hour) to note the best things I've been reading today.

I know data mining has a mixed reputation, but the Time article today on the Obama campaign's masterful use of data and statistics is quite a read, if you haven't already seen it.  I've also really enjoyed watching the nerdy portion of the Twitterverse cheering Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who has stood calmly by his statistical poll-aggregating engines for months and came out with an essentially perfect call on all 50 states.  Score for math, reason, science.  (And worth noting that FiveThirtyEight deserves some credit for preventing a nervous breakdown in yours truly in recent weeks.)  (Ok, I have to sneak in and add this response to a "humorous" tweet by David Frum, "Horrible possibility:  if the geeks are right about Ohio, might they also be right about climate?" I was myself mulling that over last night, wondering if the idea might be dawning on some people.  Math.  Reason.  Science.  Too late?)

Bill McKibben's proposal that we start naming hurricanes after fossil feul companies and ThinkProgress's recap of five things we can now count on from Obamacare warmed my heart.  So did the victory speech I stayed up ridiculously late to hear.  And "Barack Obama and the Death of Normal" by David Simon is a symphony for the liberal soul. 

When I needed calming reading material during the wait last night, I was comforted to have my spiritual reading group's current selection, "The Wisdom of No Escape" on hand.  It's a short and wonderful book on the transcendent practice of loving-kindness.

For more on the spiritual grounding side of things, I listened to some of Krista Tippett's discussion with Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin yesterday evening after polls had started closing but results weren't yet in and I was getting way too agitated.  Krista Tippett is like an anti-agitation pill.  I also felt enobled by Jonathan Haidt's piece in the NY Times this morning (which Tippett tweeted about, which is how I found it) on getting our own minds out of partisan gridlock.  I had trouble explaining that one the first time I tried today...  I think the point, for me, is that because we can easily get so tribalized about our politics, we would do well to seek out the glimmer of light in the opposition's most sacred worries, even if it's painful for us.  Not that we have to agree, but that we would do well to recognize the worthy values at the core of their concerns.

It reminded me that a few weeks ago I was deeply moved by another Tippett conversation, with pro-choice activist Frances Kissling and pro-life activist David Gushee.  I appreciated that Kissling was willing to say that the way the pro-choice movement has talked about the fetus has often been "crass", but she remains strong in her convictions and responded firmly to Gushee's leading question, "Is abortion empowering to women?" saying that "I would not say childbearing is necessarily empowering to women, either".

But voting in an election that crushed so many arrogant men with an utter lack of moral imagination when it comes to people different than themselves?  I bet Kissling would agree with me that was pretty empowering.

What's good enough for Dylan Thomas...

"...and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds."

- Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

I'm guessing Dylan Thomas and his classmates did not use crayons at school. In fact, I'm certain the kind of education he received is not what I would like for my child or any others. But that line came to mind as I read the weekly newsletter from school, inwardly groaning for the nth time at the constant reminder about homework, "We are working hard to stay in the lines, use colors that make sense, and fill in any white space."

To be fair, school went up in my regard last week, when Mr. Pants told me his favorite things about school were "math and recess." He shows no signs of liking to color carefully inside the lines and fill in all the white space, though, and I never tell him to.

The Dustbin of History

Honor!  What a glorious word!

Or, maybe not so much.

This is a theme that's shown up in several books I've read recently, including Better Angels, that a "culture of honor" is actually a really damaging thing.  Take offense easily, take it personally... run a much higher risk of violence.

Pinker (Better Angels author) talks at length about dueling, which used to be quite common and taken very seriously, but in a matter of a generation or so became the object of ridicule and then quickly disappeared.

(As an aside, the ridicule-leads-to-vanishing idea has me thinking a LOT.  Is that the problem with climate change?  Just think about who has the ridicule advantage there.  The other side is so unstintingly EARNEST.  Not that earnestness is always a bad thing.  I'm much better at being earnest than at being humorous, myself, but this does have me thinking...) 

Anyway, I'm thinking about the news last week, the assumption in the media that "of course" an insult to Islam will lead to violence.  Of course?  Surely Colbert isn't the only one capable of pointing out (with humor!) that plenty of people respond to insults with something ranging from indifference to disgust to anger, but that doesn't mean other people die.

The violent defense of honor, Pinker says, is going the way of witch hunts.  Good riddance.

Reason and the Arts

I think I'm finally coming out of the gloom I couldn't quite shake while reading (listening to) The Better Angels of Our Nature.  

Not that the thesis was depressing!  Far from it!  Hugely optimistic thesis!

But, as the author states as part of his powerful conclusion, "In writing this book I have adopted a voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not enough understanding.  But at no point have I been unaware of the reality behind the numbers.  To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness."

In a book about violence, even if it is about the shockingly successful reduction in violence that has been achieved in the past 1000+ years of human history, there is a whole lot of violence to consider.

It clings to you for a while, like the smell of rot.

But it's been a few weeks since I listened to the final chapter and finally the miasma has mostly lifted and I the optimism is shining through!

No post could do this book justice, but I have so many thoughts about it, thoughts that keep emerging and recombining and evolving as I hear the news and consider the election and watch my children fighting, playing, forgiving, and clinging to their grudges.

My point is, my thoughts are going to have to come out in dribs and drabs.  They would anyway, but it's nice to have the excuse of being busy with school.  ;)

For today, I just want to see how succinctly I can state the main ideas:

• World-wide, violence today is orders of magnitude less common than it was through most of human existence
• Saviors:  strong states (trusted, fair, capable of restraining violence with a minimum of violence), scientific reasoning, art that invites taking the perspective of other individuals (he focuses particularly on novels and the argument is surprisingly convincing)

Just for fun, as a haiku:

Violence shrinks away,
praise reason, novels, justice,
men no longer duel!

 

Here We Go Random

We are about to jump headlong into another school year.  I'm optimistic about my workload and Mr. Pants liking Kindergarten and the logistics being a little better this semester.  Shmoogie is fully potty trained, for one.  I won't be taking Algorithms, for two.  And DiDi will be here one day a week!!!!

Another minor update to Cross It Off! for a bug fix released last night.

I have a cold.

I finally have my hands on a real copy of The Better Angels of Our Nature, from the university bookstore!  (Still a chain, but I guess with a slighty different selection than standard?)  And I'm closing in on 3/5ths of the way through the audio.  It's getting less gruesome and a little more uplifting, but I expect another nose-dive before the final ascent.

Mr. Pants cried when I left him this morning.  Second to last day of summer day care and he cried.

At his request, we're reading the not-like-the-others Little House book:  Farmer Boy.  Based on Laura's husband's memories of his own childhood, our familiar characters never appear and the vignettes are darker.  It is quite difficult to explain to a modern five-year-old why a gang of "big boys" would have been able to come to school every winter only to pile on the lone teacher, beating him near to death (actually, the last one before this story starts did die, we're told) and closing the school for the rest of the year.  I've looked ahead to the conclusion — this new teacher, who was a childhood friend of the dead one, hides an ox whip in his desk and severely lashes the "big boys" when they start to attack him.  Order restored, vengance exacted, all is well.

I wonder if I should be reading this to my child at all!  But I can't very well stop now, when he's quite engaged and concerned about the outcome, and I hope that a little thoughtful discussion and context-providing will make the net result positive, as I feel it did for the problematic Native American interactions with the settlers in Little House on the Prairie... which is something else I've been meaning to blog about.  (I also wonder what the truth is in the ox whip story— pioneergirl.com has a pdf of a short story published in 1906 that sounds very similar, so does Farmer Boy harbor a bit of plagiarism or did both fictional accounts draw from the same actual event?)

Interesting that in the chunk of Better Angels that I listened to this morning, it was mentioned that the anniversary release of original Sesame Street episodes had a label saying they were "not appropriate for children" because they depicted unsafe use of playground equipment (that was not considered unsafe at the time) and Monsterpiece Theater shows Cookie Monster smoking a pipe (tobacco!) and then eating it (choking hazard!).

At least Sesame Street never included any ox whip-weilding school teachers.  Or teacher-killing students.

Books and Where They Come From

Growing up, we got books from the library.  It was a small library and the books were generally five to ten years old (plenty of them from before I was born!  they seemed so mysteriously ancient!), but I loved going there and coming home with an armload of new information or stories or crafting instructions.

Then, a Borders opened near my aunt's house in Ohio and we would go there sometimes when we visited.  Borders was a revelation.  The books were new, the store was new, it was all beautiful and relaxing and decadent.  I remember being a little in awe, feeling like probably if the store knew I wasn't really going to buy a book every time I came in (who could afford that??), then their friendly attitude would vanish and they'd stop letting me hang out there.

And then the Internet happened.  Borders (and Barnes and Noble, both of which by then had moved into my own area) was still a delightful place to plunk down on the floor and loose hours scanning the shelves and flipping through volumes of history or linguistics or the foreign language section (I can remember spending the precious Christmas giftcard on an Old English primer once and a Teach Yourself Welsh book with cassette tapes another time).  But the Internet was serious competition.  It was a bit harder to find what you actually wanted (there was no Google and Alta Vista wasn't the greatest, but it's also probably true that there just wasn't a whole lot on the Internet), but it was a perfectly good use of an anti-social high schooler's free time to go following link after link through a web of Society for Creative Anachronism members' pages on how to brew your own meade (never tried), dye yarn with woad (tried and failed), or make your own lace (did that, but with a real book to help).

Then came Amazon.  At first, it was a strange and seemingly dangerous idea to buy anything on-line — hackers might steal your credit card! — but within a few years, it started to be that the books I specifically wanted were not on the shelves at the previously-unimaginably-well-stocked bookstore... but could be delivered to my door in a few days with a few mouse clicks.

I understand that Amazon is a tough competitor, that publishers and bookstores are near death, but the chain stores are a misery to me now and I won't cry when they finally disappear.  Filled with junk books and things that aren't even books and shelves of educational toys I must drag my children past to get at the real books that I wanted to show them, then scads of Disney and Dora and other TV-based junk books drawing their attention even when we've gotten past the toys.

So, I avoid taking the kids.  We go to the library (which has computer games and a few toy bags, but is still much better than the bookstores).

But sometimes, I want a book, in hard-copy, today.  Like when I'm listening to The Better Angels of Our Nature, an incredibly fascinating deconstruction of the history of violence (and non-violence) and there are so many numbers and so many details I'd like to refer back to again (and it is quickly working it's way up my best non-fiction books I've ever read list) that I really feel like it would be absolutely worth it to just buy the paper book even though I'm still mostly going to listen to it on Audible (plus, I'm thinking it might be easier to skim the upcoming chapter on Sadism with my eyes than with my ears (which is the only way I got through the chapter on medieval torture without breaking down)).

So, I walk briskly into the store, thinking for sure this will be easy to find because it's only a year old and the author is famous and the book was recommended by... the Economist?  I think?  Mainstream!  Important subject!  It will be on the shelf.  Several copies.  I am sure.

First problem:  which section should Better Angels be in?  History?  Sociology?  History of Warfare?  Politics?

It's not.  Not in any of those sections.  Some of what is in those sections is pretty appalling, though.  Books on how Obama is "destroying" our republic, for instance.  And the usual cram of this strategy, this battle, this war, this loss, this victory kind of narrow war history that galls me to no end.

In fact, Better Angels is not in the store.  

But we can order it for you!

Yeah.  I'll order it on Amazon, thank you.

A Disorganized and Slightly Depressing Post, but with a good link, so there's that

The less I post here, the more I fall into the trap of feeling like whatever I do post had better be profound.  Or at least funny.  Or at least beautiful.  Or something.  Anything better than ordinary.

And as a general rule, I don't like to comment on current events.  Because it's easy to get cranky, or self-important, or hand-wringy.

But I'm going to disregard all that today, for better or for worse.

The first thing I want to say is that while any human-induced death is tragic, what I find most tragic about what happened last night in Colorado is how routine this script has become.  The theatrical murder.  The public feigning of disbelief and shock.

The total lack of real introspection on how we handle gun control and mental health services in this country.

There was a chapter in The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt that really struck me when I read it a few months ago and which I've been fixated on today.  Amazingly enough, the chapter is available to read online for free.

I reread it today and although there are many nuances I would quibble with and lots of other things I would love to go on at length about on various tangents or expansions or argumentations, what I take as the central idea (every time I try to distill it, I feel I've mangled it somehow, but it comes down to the uniquely (we think) human ability to experience the self, as well as the univeral potential to experience transcendence of the self, sort of a sceptical/respectful investigation of religious feeling) is fascinating.

I'm having trouble writing down why this particular chapter matters to me today, but I suppose it's only because I these kinds of things alway feel like the supreme pinnacle of a kind of self sickness.  I suppose it's just sociopathy (psychopathy? those are way too easy to confuse) on the individual level.  But any time something like this happens, my mental state gets sucked down a bit into the mud.  If there are people who see everything as so pointless and miserable that they will kill a bunch of strangers for the momentary rush of power...

Rise above it, of course.  Look for the good.  No one is condoning this.  See the outpouring of support.

Perhaps that is my problem.  Because nothing will happen except the installation of metal detectors at movie theaters (or maybe TSA-style gopings!  oh, boy!  Maybe this is the end of movie theaters), it kind of feels like everyone IS condoning this.  And that makes society look hollow, cold, and terrifying.  Just for a moment, until the veil falls back in place and we forget until the next time.

You could argue rationally that fewer people are murdered today than used to be, even with events like this.  But just because things are better than they used to be, does that mean we shouldn't bother trying to make them even better in the future?  Why are we not fascinated by the question of why when it comes to murder and war?  Why do we let it go unexamined?