2004 December

The reason I was up at 4:30 am this morning was to attend a ‘20 minutes for peace’ meditation, which was billed as a 20-minute period of silence to take place around the world at noon Greenwich Mean Time. I usually abhor rallies and like activities, but this sounded like something I could handle. I attended as an act of recognition that all I have can be lost, and to recognize that many have experienced this kind of loss of late, whether it be from a Tsunami or a military conflict.

I was surprised to see at least a few hundred people at the event. The ’silence’ actually contained some flute playing, but I felt pretty good afterward, having contemplated the meaning of peace to me. I was happy to see that so many people cared to do the same. Then a drum began to beat, and a man emerged and performed a song, ‘Advice From a Tree,’ while leading a sort of hokey-pokey-style group dance. A shrill-voiced woman with a guitar followed, leading ‘This Little Light Of Mine’. Ann and I tried to be good-natured and play along, but we resented this push to express ourselves in a way that doesn’t suit us. When we left early, an old man handed us a pamphlet advocating the conversion of Muslims to Christianity, claiming that Muslims don’t grieve the deaths of their loved ones as much as Christians do. We were disgusted.

Peace means something different to everybody. For me, this was an example of the fact that conflict is inherent in the diversity of nature. A world without conflict would also be without diversity. I suppose in such a world everybody would be happy to sing along to the same song. I don’t want that world. I celebrate peace, but as it comes to me, as an emphemeral respite to the intense struggle of existence. A time to detach and appreciate the beauty of our roiling world before diving back into it. A hobo may know peace beneath the stars, but he appeciates it because of the struggle it took to get there.

It’s 4:30 am, time for profound thoughts. I know it’s customary in many cultures to end questions with the word ‘no’. The word ‘no’ can even be a question in itself. I just had this little dialog with Ann:

Ann: Would you like a piece of toast?
Me: No.
Ann: No?
Me: Silence. Brain stuck in infinite loop.

It really is a difficult question to answer if you think about it, no?

You would think from my Christmas post that we had a cozy, uneventful family Christmas. How nice. In reality, we nearly suffered 3rd-degree burns, lost T-Rex, flooded the kitchen, and burned ourselves and the house up in a ball of flame. I’m thankful that we’ve all survived December 25th without major injuries.

(more…)

…from T-Rex. (And from us blurry folks at Lola’s table too…)

It may be a sad statement about our collective yearning for attention. Or it may be an innovative way to discover kindred spirits out there in the blogging world. I haven’t decided, but I did join Blog Explosion today out of curiosity. The deal is simple: you look at other people’s blogs and they will look at yours. The interface forces you to view a weblog for at least 30 seconds in order to generate traffic to your own site. I tried it very skeptically, expecting to find hordes of bloggers all yelling, “Look at me! Look at me!”, just like all the advertising surrounding us does already. (By the way, if you join via my link back there I get some kickback traffic! Click me, click me!)

I’m surprised at the quality of the blogs I’ve looked at so far. Most of them I spent much more than my mandatory 30 seconds on. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but the sites I was shown were generally better written and had more interesting things to say than many I’ve looked up from the weblog review and blogwise. Some of the blogs were informative, some entertaining, and some just held the facination of peeking into a stranger’s life. A combination of voyeurism and masochism could lead me to obsessively surf strangers blogs, all the while forcing strangers to view drivel on my own blog for 30 seconds apiece!

So, is it a deal with the devil? Are we selling our souls and becoming Pavlovian blog consumers? Or is there actually some potential value here?

Enjoy your 30 seconds!

When I was living in a tent this summer I often experienced something that might be described as perspiration on the floor (though I always called it condensation). I’d never imagined any such thing could happen in a wooden house, though, much less underneath a heavy futon mattress.

I thought we’d rented a far less eccentric house than our shack in Ridgecrest. (Where is Larry when we need him?) This house has wood floors, a level ceiling, mostly square corners, and generally looks like you’d expect a house to look. We moved in, had a leaky faucet fixed, and thought we were good to go.

This week we got our first bed. When we lifted our futon and featherbed off the floor, it was all moist and moldy underneath. Our landlord insists that there are no pipes under this floor. At first he suggested the water was coming from the ceiling. When we pushed for a better explanation, he suggested that it was ‘perspiration’. This is a new one on me! Google finds no instances of floorboard perspiration. Should we be conducting a scientific investigation of this phenomenon?

Our fridge also gave out this week. A repairman came, fixed it, then 7 hours later the lights dimmed, a grinding sound emanated from the bowels of the fridge, and everything began defrosting again. There’s also a leak that makes a pool on the floor when we run the washer. The guy who came to fix our stove when it shorted out called our house’s wiring ’scary’. And I won’t speculate on the reason all the speakers in the house blurt out static now and then.

Maybe my cold, wet nights in the tent weren’t as bad as I sometimes made them out to be. I guess this must be what people who live indoors are used to. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, just like I did the tent!

Since the Radical Wacko was nice enough to ask, I did write a WordPress Plugin to help create the post viewer form in my hoboview menu. WordPress comes with template tags for creating the category selector, but I had to make the date selector and sort order radio buttons myself. I also included a tag to build the whole form for convenience. Feel free to download and try it if you like.

I’ve added a few ideas for the hobolog that have been rattling around in my head for a while now. Something new to look at, a simplified post viewer on the right, a style-switcher so you can go back to the old look if you like. Please let me know if anything isn’t working properly.

This movie ambitiously portrays an artist wielding the power of truth as a sculpting tool. It’s clearly an adaptation of a stage play, and has both gems and stinkers in the dialogue. It’s a thought-provoking film, but takes a pretty dismal view of people in general. Even the artist, the only one who sees the truth, is only able to use it to bring out the worst in people. In the end, the artist sculpts the world into the thing she’s most critical of.

This movie must have been inspired by the last great con-artist movie I saw, Nine Queens. This one, however, sports an obsessive-compulsive con man character – a stroke of genius. Nicholas Cage does such a good job with it, I started to twitch and fidget in sympathy. It makes an interesting story into an absolute nail-biter.