The debate is of course frustrating. While Obama would not be my choice for political philosophy guru, I do believe he is at least competent and pragmatic. I would point out that we do not need a CEO that is expert in the business Romney is in. These businesses are expert only in seeing where America is failing and profiting by preying on that weakness. We need investment in infrastructure that's all that ever does any good.
I don't understand why Obama doesn't use some of his time to say "what loopholes Mitt!?? Where are there 5 billion in loop holes!?!"
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Gentle vs Warlike
I was a gentle sort of child from the start. Though I spent hours with ants and magnifying glasses, and hours burning wood and leaves with hour glasses, it never occurred to me to burn the ants. When I first heard the idea I was aghast. Ditto for pulling the wings off flys, turning them into walks. Not funny. As I grew older and found people of more or less good character had done, and quite... well I never did get the gist of that except it's some sort of spiritual damage or something. Or else we are cats. I have learned cats are naturally cruel. Are humans really that way? Am I not human?
I always saw things from the point of view of the animal. Once my grandmother and I were standing on a bridge looking down into the water and we saw a fish. I was too young to remember, but she told me that she said, "look, a fish, should throw in a line and catch him?" and I asked her what the fish ever did to us. Perhaps my grandmother was making me this way, or perhaps I naturally have this perspective, but I do have it.
So the thing with a fractured family that is literally at odds with one another, one want to endorse them all, if perhaps hoping for them to calm down a bit. One sees the animal as victim of it's fright and anxieties, and it's behavior as merely a symptom of that.
Homo sapiens, the cromagnon, us... we're a pretty terrible lot. I would like to think our dysfunction is a matter of personality distress due to the traumatic stress of centuries of slavery and war, but it may be that the slavery and war is due to a built in personality distress. It's conceivable and we did kill off all the other homo species. Perhaps it is all our children's nature to treat the weaker animals cruelly, just as kittens torture animals it is said as part of a training their evolution has inclined them to for necessary reason, given their way of life.
But then, am I someone with another way of life? Does that make me not human? How social are humans, might we have evolved more than one nature, just as it takes more than one nature to fill the more than one jobs humans have discovered for our group survival? No doubt it takes a different nature to be a police officer than it does a doctor and than it does a teacher.
Am I one of those types? What is it's purpose? Or are there indeed many types, and I'm still not one of them. Is it my brain development? I have hemorrhaged from a young age ever couple years until 27, at which time the arterial malformation was discovered and cauterized. Was my war-brain not able to develop? Robbed of crucial pathways, it cannot form a coherent argument?
Or do I have the war brain but just like living things?
I always saw things from the point of view of the animal. Once my grandmother and I were standing on a bridge looking down into the water and we saw a fish. I was too young to remember, but she told me that she said, "look, a fish, should throw in a line and catch him?" and I asked her what the fish ever did to us. Perhaps my grandmother was making me this way, or perhaps I naturally have this perspective, but I do have it.
So the thing with a fractured family that is literally at odds with one another, one want to endorse them all, if perhaps hoping for them to calm down a bit. One sees the animal as victim of it's fright and anxieties, and it's behavior as merely a symptom of that.
Homo sapiens, the cromagnon, us... we're a pretty terrible lot. I would like to think our dysfunction is a matter of personality distress due to the traumatic stress of centuries of slavery and war, but it may be that the slavery and war is due to a built in personality distress. It's conceivable and we did kill off all the other homo species. Perhaps it is all our children's nature to treat the weaker animals cruelly, just as kittens torture animals it is said as part of a training their evolution has inclined them to for necessary reason, given their way of life.
But then, am I someone with another way of life? Does that make me not human? How social are humans, might we have evolved more than one nature, just as it takes more than one nature to fill the more than one jobs humans have discovered for our group survival? No doubt it takes a different nature to be a police officer than it does a doctor and than it does a teacher.
Am I one of those types? What is it's purpose? Or are there indeed many types, and I'm still not one of them. Is it my brain development? I have hemorrhaged from a young age ever couple years until 27, at which time the arterial malformation was discovered and cauterized. Was my war-brain not able to develop? Robbed of crucial pathways, it cannot form a coherent argument?
Or do I have the war brain but just like living things?
Sunday, October 7, 2012
44 Year Note: a2
The 44 Year Note is a suicide note, intended to take 44 years to write. I don't take it literally, it's metaphor. Not that I'm not going to commit suicide in 44 years, but it's sort a commentary on having suicidal ideation which is dangerous and scary (not in that order) but which nevertheless can be handled if it is, as it must be, addressed. Yet it might not be handled in the way you consider well handled. This is irony. This is an explanation. A long explanation.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
44 Year Note: a1
I was born a virgin birth baby late in 1967, meaning, of course, my conception was the result of copulation between two (previously) virgins, and subject to speculations of inevitability therein. This definition of "virgin birth", which I offer, is, if one thinks about it, the only logical material definition possible for "virgin birth" that could pertain in contexts outside pure myth.
I was gestated in the Summer of Love, conceived in the Spring of Love, and born in the Winter of Love. I am a Sagitarius by Tropical Astrology, which is an odd form of astrology if you ask me. By what logic does one use the Sun for Astro(star)ology... using the names of stars, but assigning equal segments of the Sun's year? What about the precession of Earth's axis? Siderially, that is, by the star's themselves, one's sun sign, the one usually quoted, is where the sun is, in the sky. There are 13, not 12 constellations, and the Sun does not stay in each a equal amount of time. Siderially, I am an Ophiuchan. Take that as you will, I'm atheist myself.
My parents were baby boomers and a scant 18 years old so I was in for a double dose of "unready for the world". They were also country, a property I value dearly, though in this case it was responsible for their having heard of the sexual revolution but not, evidently, of birth control, it's alleged motivation. Being country myself, to some degree, is expressed for example in my preference to urinate outside. This is indeed an gateway for even urban men to "go country". As you may find in this 44 year note, I myself span such subcultures, being also suburban and even to some degree, at least eventually, urban.
Ostensibly, or so the story-to-me went, both implicitly and explicitly, one of my parents' families was from the rich side of the tracks, and the other was from the poorer side. Each seemed to feel superior because of this. I found out only later that this was a bit of skew on reality, due to small town presumptions, country thinking, and the difference between Bakersfield values and Southwest Harbor values.
In reality both my grandfathers were stable in their career, advancing, and afforded upper middle class standards of living. My post divorce view (both my maternal and paternal grandmothers had divorced my respective grandfathers prior or near about's my birth). The story goes: my mother's family was wealthy, the patriarch a well respected if small town surgeon and general practitioner. My father's family was a working class family, closer to the earth, with my Grandfather a lumberjack, and my Grandmother a school teacher.
The truth is my father's families had in fact been working class, but has prospered in the era of the GI Bill, were well employed, and rewarded for hard work, and they did teach me working class values, but they downplayed their own situations with respect to that, compared to what I would later discover about actual sociological conditions.
My Grandfather on my mother's side, who at 13 I would find out was not my biological grandfather, was well known in town, but I found that my school teacher's Grandmother's local notoriety far outlived my maternal step-grandfather's, when each retired. I also found that my paternal Grandfather was in fact a foreman, a lumber yard manager of sorts, advancing over the years. He was at any rate was doing well, in an era of pleanty, and in fact better than your average lumberjack. The family owned their home, a pool, with a barn for the horse he kept for his daughter, and many other American comforts such as regular travel.
I had a realization there was something false about the working-class/ruling-class mythology in my 20s, when I came upon pictures of my paternal grandparents all the image of Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball, adorned with upper middle class 50s and 60s significancia, "modern" gadgets, conveniences and food technologies. By the time I was aware of such things, my paternal grandfather and grandmother had divorced, he seemed to be doing well, but my grandmother seemed to live very bare (I learned this was more her nature, as she worked two jobs (teacher and school administrator)). My father was living in Tee Pees tuning out and dropping in on riverside mining claims, which was without money more or less, my paternal aunt (a saint) was a single mother, and it was the early 70s. I was unaware of the relative wealth they had in fact enjoyed prior to my birth.
The legitimacy of this dichotomy lies in the philosophical roots of each side of the family, and in the fact that one was partriarched by "a professional" and the other, a lumber worker, albeit a manager. The well paid one was still a servant to the system, not from the sort of wealth that supports you regardless of your choices, like all working people, still dependent on continuous pay for continuous work, albeit at a better rate, and thus a greater need.
The less well paid one was nevertheless in the stable upper middle class, the beneficiary of a stronger American economy and steady advancement in the lumber mills of the Pacific Coast, and also in no small part due to his size and belligerent nature. He first advanced to management in the Pacific lumber industry as an axe man, that is, a guy that fires other guys. He was ideal for this, evidently, due to his naturally and prolifically pugilistic nature, and the crucial benefit that is to someone who's job it is to fire lumber men. Lumber men tended toward the pugilistic at the time, and also to the larger-than-average.
These and further dichotometric dynamics, of yin vs yang, the tensions between them, played a role in my childhood and life, and leads to the conclusion of this story. My parents married before my birth but divorced when I was three years old. I have a few memories of San Francisco, where I must have been three or less, with my parents, but after that family to me is a balance of alleged opposites. It is a fractal group of people with a lot of animosity to each other, all of whom I love.
I mention the rich man poor man dynamic because this dynamic played a role throughout my childhood as the families feuded after that. Further complications were that my mother, as I didn't learn until 13, as I said before, was from a previous marriage of my grandmother to my maternal grandfather, a San Francisco lawyer. That my maternal grandmother was a divorcee was evidently a family disgrace in the view of my maternal stepfather's own mother. At least I was always lead to believe she was the source of the attitude.
My mother's pregnancy was a reason for my maternal stepgrandfather to show his biological daughters the dangers of loose women, and perhaps to cut the losses, so to speak. My mother had faced a lot of outsider feelings in her family, had evidently acted out a lot, and been difficult, which one suspect may have been related to having lost my biological grandfather, her father, at 13 herself.
Although she loved dearly, and was loved dearly, by her five brothers and sisters, who she took a great part in caring for, being over ten years older than them, she seems to have felt alone, and like an outsider. Although I'm sure my maternal stepgrandfather himself was in reality unconcerned with my mother being a divorcee, he did respect at face value the racy and overly-modern nature of it. I find he was modern enough for his generation, a Californian, and that might likely have even relished the daring and socially-"unacceptable" nature of it, the act paying some respect to the propriety of the bigotries against it seemed to have weighed on my mother at least enough that she herself did not tell me about my paternal grandfather. Eventually, at age 13, my stepmother was the one that told me. She had known him well.
I don't want you to get some vague idea that I have some type of pent up resentment, some hard to pinpoint, complex, issue regarding not being told about my maternal grandfather prior to my pracically post-childhood age at the time of 13 years. Instead, you should understand I want you understand concretely and specifically, I was and remain relatively butthurt, and I acknowledge possibly or even probably over-butthurt, about not being told about my paternal grandfather prior the practically post-childhood age of 13.
Cause I am/was.
I was gestated in the Summer of Love, conceived in the Spring of Love, and born in the Winter of Love. I am a Sagitarius by Tropical Astrology, which is an odd form of astrology if you ask me. By what logic does one use the Sun for Astro(star)ology... using the names of stars, but assigning equal segments of the Sun's year? What about the precession of Earth's axis? Siderially, that is, by the star's themselves, one's sun sign, the one usually quoted, is where the sun is, in the sky. There are 13, not 12 constellations, and the Sun does not stay in each a equal amount of time. Siderially, I am an Ophiuchan. Take that as you will, I'm atheist myself.
My parents were baby boomers and a scant 18 years old so I was in for a double dose of "unready for the world". They were also country, a property I value dearly, though in this case it was responsible for their having heard of the sexual revolution but not, evidently, of birth control, it's alleged motivation. Being country myself, to some degree, is expressed for example in my preference to urinate outside. This is indeed an gateway for even urban men to "go country". As you may find in this 44 year note, I myself span such subcultures, being also suburban and even to some degree, at least eventually, urban.
Ostensibly, or so the story-to-me went, both implicitly and explicitly, one of my parents' families was from the rich side of the tracks, and the other was from the poorer side. Each seemed to feel superior because of this. I found out only later that this was a bit of skew on reality, due to small town presumptions, country thinking, and the difference between Bakersfield values and Southwest Harbor values.
In reality both my grandfathers were stable in their career, advancing, and afforded upper middle class standards of living. My post divorce view (both my maternal and paternal grandmothers had divorced my respective grandfathers prior or near about's my birth). The story goes: my mother's family was wealthy, the patriarch a well respected if small town surgeon and general practitioner. My father's family was a working class family, closer to the earth, with my Grandfather a lumberjack, and my Grandmother a school teacher.
The truth is my father's families had in fact been working class, but has prospered in the era of the GI Bill, were well employed, and rewarded for hard work, and they did teach me working class values, but they downplayed their own situations with respect to that, compared to what I would later discover about actual sociological conditions.
My Grandfather on my mother's side, who at 13 I would find out was not my biological grandfather, was well known in town, but I found that my school teacher's Grandmother's local notoriety far outlived my maternal step-grandfather's, when each retired. I also found that my paternal Grandfather was in fact a foreman, a lumber yard manager of sorts, advancing over the years. He was at any rate was doing well, in an era of pleanty, and in fact better than your average lumberjack. The family owned their home, a pool, with a barn for the horse he kept for his daughter, and many other American comforts such as regular travel.
I had a realization there was something false about the working-class/ruling-class mythology in my 20s, when I came upon pictures of my paternal grandparents all the image of Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball, adorned with upper middle class 50s and 60s significancia, "modern" gadgets, conveniences and food technologies. By the time I was aware of such things, my paternal grandfather and grandmother had divorced, he seemed to be doing well, but my grandmother seemed to live very bare (I learned this was more her nature, as she worked two jobs (teacher and school administrator)). My father was living in Tee Pees tuning out and dropping in on riverside mining claims, which was without money more or less, my paternal aunt (a saint) was a single mother, and it was the early 70s. I was unaware of the relative wealth they had in fact enjoyed prior to my birth.
The legitimacy of this dichotomy lies in the philosophical roots of each side of the family, and in the fact that one was partriarched by "a professional" and the other, a lumber worker, albeit a manager. The well paid one was still a servant to the system, not from the sort of wealth that supports you regardless of your choices, like all working people, still dependent on continuous pay for continuous work, albeit at a better rate, and thus a greater need.
The less well paid one was nevertheless in the stable upper middle class, the beneficiary of a stronger American economy and steady advancement in the lumber mills of the Pacific Coast, and also in no small part due to his size and belligerent nature. He first advanced to management in the Pacific lumber industry as an axe man, that is, a guy that fires other guys. He was ideal for this, evidently, due to his naturally and prolifically pugilistic nature, and the crucial benefit that is to someone who's job it is to fire lumber men. Lumber men tended toward the pugilistic at the time, and also to the larger-than-average.
These and further dichotometric dynamics, of yin vs yang, the tensions between them, played a role in my childhood and life, and leads to the conclusion of this story. My parents married before my birth but divorced when I was three years old. I have a few memories of San Francisco, where I must have been three or less, with my parents, but after that family to me is a balance of alleged opposites. It is a fractal group of people with a lot of animosity to each other, all of whom I love.
I mention the rich man poor man dynamic because this dynamic played a role throughout my childhood as the families feuded after that. Further complications were that my mother, as I didn't learn until 13, as I said before, was from a previous marriage of my grandmother to my maternal grandfather, a San Francisco lawyer. That my maternal grandmother was a divorcee was evidently a family disgrace in the view of my maternal stepfather's own mother. At least I was always lead to believe she was the source of the attitude.
My mother's pregnancy was a reason for my maternal stepgrandfather to show his biological daughters the dangers of loose women, and perhaps to cut the losses, so to speak. My mother had faced a lot of outsider feelings in her family, had evidently acted out a lot, and been difficult, which one suspect may have been related to having lost my biological grandfather, her father, at 13 herself.
Although she loved dearly, and was loved dearly, by her five brothers and sisters, who she took a great part in caring for, being over ten years older than them, she seems to have felt alone, and like an outsider. Although I'm sure my maternal stepgrandfather himself was in reality unconcerned with my mother being a divorcee, he did respect at face value the racy and overly-modern nature of it. I find he was modern enough for his generation, a Californian, and that might likely have even relished the daring and socially-"unacceptable" nature of it, the act paying some respect to the propriety of the bigotries against it seemed to have weighed on my mother at least enough that she herself did not tell me about my paternal grandfather. Eventually, at age 13, my stepmother was the one that told me. She had known him well.
I don't want you to get some vague idea that I have some type of pent up resentment, some hard to pinpoint, complex, issue regarding not being told about my maternal grandfather prior to my pracically post-childhood age at the time of 13 years. Instead, you should understand I want you understand concretely and specifically, I was and remain relatively butthurt, and I acknowledge possibly or even probably over-butthurt, about not being told about my paternal grandfather prior the practically post-childhood age of 13.
Cause I am/was.
Debate 1 Not Over Blog
I'm watching the debates, but doing other things. I'm recording it though to watch with a friend later, so it was easy to let myself be distracted. I'm not sure if Romney has thrown any zingers but I've seen a few temporarily promising anti-climaxes.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Back From California
My job interview did not go well. While I was able to do well on the first two technical interviews using the web and phone, the plane trip, etc., was too much for me really. I sobbed about my daughter, now gone over 3 months for most of the flight. I have a lot of things on my mind. Being in the city struck me the wrong way. My affection for my current work was heightened. I didn't care to prepare further. As a result I was unable to focus, I over thought the problems which were similar in nature to those I'd had no trouble with. Afterward I was wraught with intense grief, and faced the reality of the fact that I had used focus on that to hold back a lot of emotions. There was nothing I had not faced in kind, but there was a lot of intensity ducted to resevoirs which inevitably fill with unprocessed emotion, and fester, not unlike a chemical waste pool.
The company in question, which had contacted me with severely odd timing, just shortly before my daughters death, offered me another chance in the future even as they explained I had not done well. They said I had done especially well in the first interviews and so perhaps it was just a matter of timing, and I was encouraged not to give up. At first I thought they were just letting me down easy, but the recruiter emphasized that it's often a matter of timing, and to please keep in touch. I told her not to worry, I liked my current job and I appreciated the timine. I slept on it and realized obviously it was a matter of timing, so I explained my situation and she said to contact her whenever I felt ready.
I am not sure what I will do, I now realize I need to focus on processing this loss and I still don't know exactly what that means in practice. I am also not sure I want to go in that direction, the environment of the city is not particularly calming, the bustle of such environments can be invigorating or wearing.
At any rate all that is somewhat obscured by the fact, which I discovered, that I was using the interview to cope with the loss of June. I had thought returning to California would be good for my daughter, this company had contacted me prior to her death, and so there was also an element of holding on to things that we shared, things that existed when she was still around. And there was a perfect excuse to take a break from mourning for a few hours and prepare for the interviews.
After the interview a lot of that was let out in the form of raw emotion. It's unprocessable in words and logic, it's just stuff I cry through, memories I repeat and the like, powerful unnamed courses full of energy. Very slowly some sense seems to come from it, ideas that do have words and logic, but this feels due to be crashed into chaos again.
I also lost $500 in Reno, friendliest little city in the world. I was trying to blow $1000 so I really came out $500 ahead. That's huge for me, I like low stakes gambling and usually keep my losses to about $100. It's largely statistical after all, which means predictable in the long run.
I feel the spiritual value in casino gambling is that one has the opportunity to face loss. While there is localized victory, for those with the broad view, those are still a part of a greater loss. However, the emotions through all these experiences are very interesting, and touch the gamblers basic instincts on chance. I like craps, roulette and to a lessor degree these years, black jack. In each of these games you also face how other people face loss and victory, an emotional dynamic that much of the time is quite palpable and on everyone's mind.
My trip was a spiritual journey about loss and I feel much relieved, though also weary, from it.
The company in question, which had contacted me with severely odd timing, just shortly before my daughters death, offered me another chance in the future even as they explained I had not done well. They said I had done especially well in the first interviews and so perhaps it was just a matter of timing, and I was encouraged not to give up. At first I thought they were just letting me down easy, but the recruiter emphasized that it's often a matter of timing, and to please keep in touch. I told her not to worry, I liked my current job and I appreciated the timine. I slept on it and realized obviously it was a matter of timing, so I explained my situation and she said to contact her whenever I felt ready.
I am not sure what I will do, I now realize I need to focus on processing this loss and I still don't know exactly what that means in practice. I am also not sure I want to go in that direction, the environment of the city is not particularly calming, the bustle of such environments can be invigorating or wearing.
At any rate all that is somewhat obscured by the fact, which I discovered, that I was using the interview to cope with the loss of June. I had thought returning to California would be good for my daughter, this company had contacted me prior to her death, and so there was also an element of holding on to things that we shared, things that existed when she was still around. And there was a perfect excuse to take a break from mourning for a few hours and prepare for the interviews.
After the interview a lot of that was let out in the form of raw emotion. It's unprocessable in words and logic, it's just stuff I cry through, memories I repeat and the like, powerful unnamed courses full of energy. Very slowly some sense seems to come from it, ideas that do have words and logic, but this feels due to be crashed into chaos again.
I also lost $500 in Reno, friendliest little city in the world. I was trying to blow $1000 so I really came out $500 ahead. That's huge for me, I like low stakes gambling and usually keep my losses to about $100. It's largely statistical after all, which means predictable in the long run.
I feel the spiritual value in casino gambling is that one has the opportunity to face loss. While there is localized victory, for those with the broad view, those are still a part of a greater loss. However, the emotions through all these experiences are very interesting, and touch the gamblers basic instincts on chance. I like craps, roulette and to a lessor degree these years, black jack. In each of these games you also face how other people face loss and victory, an emotional dynamic that much of the time is quite palpable and on everyone's mind.
My trip was a spiritual journey about loss and I feel much relieved, though also weary, from it.
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