Ordinary Days

Today just sailed by without a trace. It’s one of those days that I wish I had a little something special in it–like a box all filled with the packing materials but I haven’t found the gift yet. Granted not every day can be spectacular special day–I need some days to be ordinary to make others special I guess.

I wonder at all the stories in the world, how they’re mostly filled with achieving things or losing things. What about the days where very little is achieved or lost? Kurt Vonnegut once had a speech about how our stories don’t prepare us for the ordinary. How the expectations of miracles at every turn cheapen a good solid ordinary day.

And what’s wrong with ordinary days anyway? My fourth grade teacher once said that the ordinary days will be the ones that we remember best. I don’t think that’s all the way true–memories have a way of clustering around events rather than nothingness. Maybe what she meant is that ordinary days are what we would remember with the greatest fondness.

Faith

When I was in Christian boarding school, one of the proctors came up to me and asked me what I believed in. He wanted to know if I believed in God. Only in Christian schools does a person go through this on a regular basis, as if belief in God would evaporate as soon as the mind wandered onto something else. Well I was in a bit of a cranky mood that day and I said I believed in luck, not because I believe in luck particularly, but because I wanted to be a bit of a jerk. Well his eyes bugged out and he shouted that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.
To me, spiritual belief is the most personal thing in the world, more personal than sex, or any secret. I think this because it’s so very easy to make someone else’s beliefs sound stupid. I mean, belief is always a case of faith, there’s no proof, that’s a part of the package of believing in the first place. I don’t have to base on faith things like apples are red (usually) or squares have four corners, or gravity pulls me towards the earth rather than away from it. Those things are reasonably true. Faith requires a gap of not knowing, a space where there is a big old question mark, and no matter how smart you are or how much figuring you do there’s no way to fill it.
We fill in the gaps all the time. We don’t know what other people are thinking, yet we presume we do. We work from day to day with gaps of information, but like an eye fills up its blind spots, so do we fill up the world. Very likely not the real world, as if a person could conceive of such a grand thing, but our own versions of it. A thousand rules fill our heads that govern how we see things, what we notice, what is normal and what is not. We don’t question them, we hardly even notice them, we have faith that they fill in the gaps enough for us to function.
I am not advocating for God or against him, I’m just saying there’s a whole lot that we don’t know, and isn’t it wonderful more than not.

Late August Clouds

Right now I’m enjoying the fruits of late summer. Tomatoes are best in August. On my way home I passed by this strange tree with bright orange berries just splayed out like Christmas gone backwards. Crabapples so heavy that the trees are bending down. So lucky to be away from the drought. Cracked land, cows with bony hips, sad farmers. It’s a thing that comes now and then, but it sure is unpleasant. Lucky we don’t live in hardscrabble times where a lost crop could mean people starving.
Time, tide, and television wait for no man. Lovely bamboo hedge right across my window, a grand line of trees, standing stiff like soldiers at attention. Growing like a song from the ground up. Grabbing for the sky.
A sense of direction. Aren’t there times in life where we’re lunging forward, and others where we are still. Years that follow one another as orderly as an accountants books? I remember the old style accounting books with the green covers. Big and heavy. Yellow pages.
I wanted to fill each line up with something, not math, but a real something. Like descriptions of beetles, or the ways wind can feel, or different flavors, or something.
Clouds, of course they are ships, that’s too simple to be stated. Sometimes fleets roll by on their round hulls, going from whoknowswhere to whoknowswhere, and as they develop, grow, drop water, shrink, develop again, I wonder what it would be like to follow a cloud, wonder how long it takes to drain dry. Would we see them shrink, or would they melt away like hard candy, imperceptible until they are gone?

Thoughts about thoughts

I’ve been thinking about thoughts. It’s common belief that all our thoughts are in language. I’m not so sure that’s true. Certainly language is our means for expressing our thoughts, just as I am typing my thoughts on this blog for you to read, however, is this how they live in my head? Full sentences? Each idea building on the last? Of course not.

My thoughts are more often than not unworded, unless I feel the need to put them into language, or if I’m thinking about talking to somebody, or doing something with language in them. My thoughts are also scents, images, vague emotions, watching from the back of the cave. Sometimes I imagine my thoughts are a great wheel turning and spinning, connecting this thing to that thing. Lost scents and tunes and memories that just turn and turn throughout the day, bringing something new up.

My mind is like a junk drawer, that knows that the smell of this day reminds me very specifically of the paisley pattern on my second grade teacher’s dress, and how, when she looked down, her own dress would reflect on her glasses. And that day where the wind went so hard that the hayfields sounded like a huge ream of paper tearing in half. I’m describing them now, but none of this is in words in my head, just images, sensations.

I imagine other people’s minds must be very clear places. Like a workroom, a white workroom without a speck of dust on it. Everything is orderly. I don’t know if I would enjoy that kind of mind.

News Stories that are Always There

1. Ten billion reasons you should be terrified right now.
2. Buy this right now!
3. Celebrities are stupid.
4. This Killer is Really Bad
5. Wacky Person does things their own way.
6. Politician caught with pants down!
7. Nothing is ever going to get better.
8. Today’s kids are ill-educated, disrespectful, and violent.
9. Every place is dangerous so you might as well stay home.
10. Why are people watching so much TV?
11. Stay tuned, there’s more after this!
12. Smart people are boring and you can’t possibly understand them.
13. An extremely simplified and dumbed down version of some important topic!
14. Manufactured controversy.
15. This common thing is bad for you. Not just bad–really bad. It’s the most horrible thing ever. Throw it away NOW.
16. Horrible people who don’t care about anybody but themselves.
17. What is the world coming to?
18. Mrs. X thought she was having a normal day until…
19. And now Mrs. X is horribly maimed and is sending a plea out for America to pay more attention to…
20. The weather (which is usually inaccurate)

I am glad

1. I am glad that it’s late August and the weather is so mild and pretty.
2. I am glad that my office mostly gets along.
3. I am glad I am employed.
4. I am glad all my family is healthy and well.
5. I am glad that Emily came up to visit.
6. I am glad that I get to go to New York in the fall.
7. I am glad that people seem fascinated by the Mars probe and got excited about the Olympics.
8. I am glad for my partner, who is wonderful.
9. I am glad for big fat books to read.
10. I am glad that I am healthy.
11. I am glad for lasagna today.
12. I am glad for creativity and making art.
13. I am glad for the possibilities to learn and find out new things.
14. I am glad I am in Oregon.
15. I am glad to be safe.
16. I am glad it’s peak vegetable season. So delicious!
17. I am glad for dreams.
18. I am glad for meditation.
19. I am glad for yoga.
20. I am glad for candles.

Confucius

I have lately been fascinated by Confucius, mostly because he’s one of the wise old sages whose sayings are completely relevant today. Not only did he come up with the golden rule centuries before Jesus, but the rest of his statements mostly rest on very sound sense. He is not a mystic, fundamentally being unconcerned about the hereafter, but is more concerned about practical order in today’s world. He’s well worth listening to.

Unfortunately, in popular culture his wisdom has been denigrated into pithy fortune-cookie sayings that really don’t do him justice. He believed in stability, taking care of the old, infirm, and the very young, in constant study, in cautiousness, simplicity, and sincerity. Most importantly he believed that the world that we have inherited is not written in stone, that even just one individual acting out of reflective intelligence will infect the rest with a sort of better way.

And here has my favorite quote, which is just gorgeous in its simplicity:

“Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.”

Torchwood: Children of Earth

I have to admit I’m a Doctor Who nut. (I even have a tardis cup where the tardis moves after coffee is put into it!) Lately I’ve been exploring the spin-offs, but really haven’t written about them because they’re very lightweight.
Torchwood was supposed to be a more adult Doctor Who, delving into storylines that couldn’t fit into the Doctor Who universe. On paper, that sounds pretty neat, because I would find their take on more complex themes and serious subjects fascinating. However, the first two seasons, while having some great moments, mostly confuse adult subject matter with a decidedly adolescent posture. It’s obsessed with sex and style and MTV visuals, and ends up being quite a bit less mature than Doctor Who even as it shows more skin.
Not so with Children of Earth. This Torchwood mini-series is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television and more than delivers on Torchwood’s initial promise.

SPOILERS BELOW!

When I think of mature themes (in the way that I prefer them), I would like to think they are complicated scenarios that go beyond the normal 6th grade level of storytelling that most television offers. Namely, while a good bit of television deals with black and white issues, I would rather see stories that live in the grey areas. In these places people are more than simply good or bad and life is not shown as a cowboy shoot-up but infinitely more capable of that. Also, what I would like is a more complex emotional range–just as situations would not be merely good or bad, characters’ emotional responses should be more subtle. After all, a true adult life does not normally flag everything for us with indubitable certainty. A true mature show shouldn’t be screened from children merely because of appropriateness, but also because the ideas in that show are beyond the capability of a child to comprehend.

On this front Children of Earth succeeds beyond my wildest expectations. The scenario is that aliens come to earth demanding 10% of the earth’s children because they provide drug-like chemicals for the aliens. The aliens have viruses that can kill all humans that they will release if the world does not comply. What are the leaders of the earth to do?

Children of Earth opens up this scenario admirably, by building up the story at a slower pace, the show takes the opportunity to discuss and explore the implications fully. The leaders are willing to sacrifice the 10%. They discuss in detail which 10% they will take and how they will collect them. We see what happens to the children that the aliens are using (they are hooked up to machines to the aliens and are left as numb comatose shells). We see all the duplicity by the government officials to cover their own interests while seeming to serve the interests of the world at large. We see people fighting that government, who are also at a loss for viable alternative answers. Questions are raised: to what degree is it acceptable to harm the few to benefit the many? In harming people, how does it change those who were unharmed? When is it ok to lie to protect the greater good? How does one determine sacrifice? How much sacrifice is too much no matter what the result is?

The story is chilling. While most television is escapist, Children of Earth looks straight into the human heart, and not everything it finds is pleasant. Also, Children of Earth resists giving easy answers to these questions, nearly every character’s actions are questionable, causing harm that reverberates across the entire miniseries.

I would recommend this to anybody with the caveat that this isn’t easy watching but well worth it. Ironic though, by focusing on children Torchwood finally gains the maturity it had been aiming for since day one.

The heatwave breaks

Today, with the heatwave finally over, I stepped into the day like a comfortable pair of pants and tromped around in it. No goals really, just living and seeing the world in a tolerable light.

I went to Powells where apparently many other people had the same idea because it was the most crowded I have ever seen it. Crowded with people not used to living in cities. I have this theory that people in the suburbs become so used to having space around them that being in crowded spaces instinctively stresses them out. I could see it on their faces, moms standing in the middle of aisles with visible irritation at passers by, muscles all tensed up and twitchy like a thoroughbred horse.

I don’t blame them for being stressed out, though I felt a little sad for them. How lonely it must be to need so much space, how stressful it must be that simple proximity with another human being, stranger or not, would bring out such a fearful reaction.

Goals

I do not like the word “goals.” I do not like the task of setting and making goals. I do not like achieving.

Wow, I feel like I just lit an American flag on fire.

Seriously, goals make me think of offices and charts and lists and tasks. It makes me think of being managed which I really dislike, and only do when I have to. I am no rebel. I am not shouting out rules suck and think there should be no order.

In an office environment, for one thing, goals are really a synonym for rules, or to explain a little more, goals are the entryway to make many rules that proliferate more than if there were a simple set of rules.

Second, in an office environment, what do you get when you reach a goal? More goals! Then the old goal becomes an expectation. Not exactly a booming reward.

Rather than goals, I believe in order. Maybe it’s just another word for the same thing, but order brings up nice things like flow, harmony, calm, enjoyment, relaxation. An orderly room is a wonderful place to be in; a goal filled room is not. I like to think of my day, at its best, as a time where everything has a place, and simplicity wins out. In general, the more ordered things are, the greater my enjoyment.