I had to cut myself off at 42 because I meant to cut myself off at 25, and I figured if I didn't quit at 42, 50 would look close enough to 100 to allow me to keep clicking.
Well, this is just going to have to be something that I only indulge in every few months or so; or maybe for the occasional song that I hear and decide I just have to have it. I don't listen to music very often, other than iTunes, so that's not likely to happen very often. I hope.
Okay, I had to go into the Apple Store and review my account data there. In one of the telephone fields, there was a 10-digit phone number, instead of a 7 digit one (the area code was in a separate field). I also turned on 1-Click ordering.
This is after I figured out that I had two Apple IDs, in spite of Apple saying they had all be incorporated into my .Mac account. All is well now.
Suddenly a man carrying a huge bag of peanuts called out in pain and fell to the ground. I then witnessed an astonishing piece of choreography. Appearing to have rehearsed their motions many times, a half dozen sellers ran from their stalls to help, leaving unattended what may have been the totality of their possessions. One put a blanket under the man's head; another opened his shirt; a third questioned him carefully about the pain; a fourth fetched water; a fifth kept onlookers from crowding around too closely; a sixth ran for help. Within minutes, a doctor arrived, and two other locals joined in to assist. The performance could have passed for a final exam at paramedic school.
I remain unable to register either of my credit cards with Apple's music store. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I am somewhat perplexed.
It was relatively easy to get up this morning, despite having been up late last night playing around with Apple's music store. Caitie had a bad dream that sent her down into my room at precisely 5:00 a.m. as NPR was about to give me my morning intel briefing. Caitie rarely has bad dreams like that, but a minute or so of assurance that it was just a bad dream, and she's sound asleep and I'm wide awake and on my feet.
Mandy must be sleeping in Chris's room tonight, she's not sticking her nose up under my left arm as I'm at the keyboard. The cats were pleased, they were fed a little earlier than usual.
I never did get my registration to work, so I haven't spent any money at the music store yet. I've found several tracks I'd like to buy, but it's clear I'm going to have to exercise some restraint. Dr. Vornov noted there was no Springsteen, but there is. No complete albums, just selections of tracks. Nothing I don't have. But there are a lot of songs I knew by heart and loved as a kid that I never owned on vinyl. Blood, Sweat and Tears and The Moody Blues being among them. Further revealing my utter lack of cultural sophistication, I also liked Neil Diamond and John Denver. I've sung Country Roads in more bars, in more countries than I care to remember. It's funny, the songs that come to mind when you've had a few beers in a place where everybody talks different. Well, maybe not. Anyway, I expect I'll be buying a few John Denver tracks as well.
I'm still plodding along with Nagarjuna. For all things being empty, it sure takes a lot of something to make the case. I do think I get it, and I enjoy the effort. In some ways, it reminds me a bit of Julian Barbour's The End of Time, though I'm very certain I still don't get him. While I was at Books-a-Million on Saturday, I picked up a copy of Karen Armstrong's Buddha. I'll probably wind up knowing a hell of a lot more about Buddhism than I do about Christianity by the time I'm through. But I'm not embracing any particular religion. Get people believing something in a group and sometimes bad things happen, or at least, things that have absolutely nothing to do with what the founding figure was talking about. Been there, done that, don't need to do it again. You've got to do your own work, which does seem to be something the Buddha actually said. Or maybe not.
For whatever reason, I suspect the fair weather, I'm feeling relatively angst-free these days. Not that laundry and dirty kitchen floors can't give one a good case of angst, but I'm feeling pretty good at the moment. Everybody else's problems are their own for now. It won't last, but I'm enjoying it for the time being. Like a cool, clear spring day. Impermanence. That's another thing the Buddha had down.
I got distracted by the music store opening, so I didn't mess around with getting screenshots of WebArranger. Maybe tonight, if my credit card still isn't working or I'm not mopping floors or folding clothes. No promises. Not that it matters.
Well, I've got to go pay attention to some litter boxes and do some other earthly chores that are part and parcel of a spiritual existence. Hope you all have a nice day.
Well, I got iTunes 4, but I can't actually buy any music because there is a constant "error" when I try to finish registering my credit card.
But that hasn't stopped me from having fun in the store.
I used the search function to cue up every cover of Memory from Cats!, and listened to the 30 second samples of each of them. There are only like five or six. Unchained Melody, has a lot of covers, including The King. It's kind of fun.
I don't know if the quality you get in the sample is identical to what you download, but there have been some complaints in Apple's support discussions about the sound being "hollow" or "tinny." It does seem exceptionally "bright" with some reverb at the high end, but it's probably good enough for the kind of listening I do. I expect that as the concept and the store move forward, there will be other choices in quality to address the needs of real audiophiles.
In the mean time, I'm having fun playing around with the store, and finding old songs I haven't heard in a long time. It's pretty cool.
Like a lot of other people this afternoon, I am unable to download iTunes 4 to experience the music-consumer's paradise that is the Apple online music store. I keep getting 3.0.1. What's up with that?
I played around a bit with NoteTaker 2003 yesterday. I've still been looking for a replacement for WebArranger that'll run under Mac OS X. Tinderbox had the potential to do so, but it is even more complex than WebArranger was, and people thought it was too complex. Tinderbox also lacks the Grabber feature that WebArranger had that copied highlighted text in another application to a new note in WebArranger.
NoteTaker 2003 is a Cocoa application that makes good use of OS X's Services feature. I can select a block of text in, say, Safari, and send it to a page in one of my notebooks. NoteTaker requires you to set up individual services for each page in your notebook. For instance, I imported over 400 quotations I had in WebArranger into NoteTaker. I have a page in my notebook called Quotations. Using the Tools menu item, I created a Service for that page. Now when I happen to see a quote that I think I'd like to keep, I just highlight it and select "Clip to Quotations" from the Services menu.
Now what Tinderbox has that NoteTaker 2003 lacks is a feature that allows you to organize your notes in an intelligent, automatic way. In Tinderbox, you can create an Agent that will gather all the notes that match a particular set of criteria. That Agent remains "live," such that, as I add new notes, any that match those criteria will automatically be gathered into that Agent's topic. WebArranger did something similar with a feature called "View." A View was a kind of filter for a particular topic. You could have as many Views as you wanted, and they remained "live" as well. If you added new notes that met the criteria of the filter for that view, they would automatically appear in that View. Views were saved and selected via a pop-up menu item. If I have time this evening, I'll try to illustrate with some screen shots. NoteTaker 2003 has something similar, but it has two serious deficiencies, it isn't "live," and you can't seem to specify more than one criteria. NoteTaker 2003 calls this feature "Summarize." When I first read about it, I thought it had something to do with Sherlock's V-Twin search engine function that can summarize blocks of text into a smaller block of text, but it has nothing to do with that. Instead, what Summarize does is allows you to specify a string to search for, and it will move all the notes that have that string into a new page called a "Summary" page. But if you add new notes that meet the criteria, they aren't automatically added to the Summary page, it's not a "live" summary - you have to do a new Summary each time you've added notes. Plus, the notes are copied, they aren't aliases or clones of the original notes. As a result, your notebook will continue to grow in size. Plus, you can only search on one string item. So if you wanted to search for quotations that contained both "art" and "life," you can't seem to do it. There is a checkbox that suggests you can add the result of a new search to the previous one, but I wasn't able to make that work.
So far, I have yet to find an application that matches the utility of WebArranger which is going on 10 years old now.
I swapped out the power supply in the G4 tonight and it is much, much quieter. You can't hear it throughout the house now. It is by no means silent, but it's much better. It took me the better part of 45 minutes to make the swap. It's not terribly difficult, but the instructions leave something to be desired.
I saw Bulletproof Monk tonight. Perhaps because all the negative reviews had lowered my expectations, I enjoyed it a great deal. It's not great cinema, but it's a good popcorn flick. Much of the criticism is legitimate, and it seems like it could have been a much better movie, but it was still entertaining and enjoyable. Your mileage may vary. Recommended.
Spent the morning working in the front yard, trying to beat back several kinds of climbing vines, to include Kudzu. It wasn't quite out of control, yet. But it was a near thing. I've moved a couple hundred pounds of vegetation and five bags full of leaves and other debris down to the curb for the yard waste fairies to make disappear. There's still more to do, but it's enough for now.
Today is the Opening of the Beaches, which is kind of a festival thing here. Maria is up this weekend and she's going to take Caitie and one of her friends to go visit the booths, eat some funnel cake and generally have a good time. The weather seems to be cooperating this year, which is exceptional in my memory, it usually rains on this weekend.
I'm going to take it easy for most of the rest of the day. I tested for brown belt last night, and it's been a pretty tough couple of weeks getting ready for it in class, so I'm more than the usual amount of sore. We've been doing plyometric exercises much more so than before, lots of hopping over a string on one leg, two legs, forward, backward, doing 180s and 360s (I can usually manage about 345 degrees). My right knee is a little more tender than usual. I earned my brown belt, but now things start getting more difficult. There are three intermediate tests before I'll be able to test for red, and it's going to be a several months before that happens.
Took a two hour sparring seminar last weekend, which was a lot of fun. I had a tiny epiphany on kicking. Now, this is a "blinding glimpse of the obvious," but it had never occurred to me before. The goal of course is that one never has to "think" about throwing a kick. I'm not there yet, though I am getting better. But thus far in my training, whenever I've gotten ready to kick, I've always thought about the kicking leg and only the kicking leg. During the sparring seminar, we kept repeating a particular round kick and it began to dawn on me that how well I executed the kick depended on how I planted the supporting foot. If I began my kick by "thinking" about that, it was much easier to execute the kick properly. Then the lights went on a little more and I began to think about how I shifted my weight as I planted my foot and realized that every kick is about your whole damn body, not just the kicking leg. Sure, the knee has to point the target, and your foot has to cranked back, but those are just the details. Because I still lack a great deal of mobility in my hips and pelvis, if I don't have my supporting heel pointing the target, I can't get my kicking leg high enough and in the proper orientation to execute a round kick, at least one that reaches above my opponent's waist. It usually turns out like a front kick, but at an angle. Most of the younger folks in class, especially the women, can execute a perfect, high round kick without their heel pointing the target, but I can't. But I can do much better if I pay attention to where the rest of me is, not just the leg that's kicking.
Yeah, I know, I'm a slow learner.
The power supply in the G4 is going to get swapped today. I'm looking forward to having a quieter computer. I'm also looking forward to 10.2.6, since I'm also suffering from the Kernel Panic of Doom when my USB hub is plugged in. If it's not one thing, it's another. USB, SCSI, it's the Law of Conservation of Technical Difficulties: Technical difficulties are neither created nor destroyed, they only have their acronyms changed.
Well, that's enough here. I'm going to go find some lunch and then probably plant myself at Books-a-Million for a couple of hours. I hope you're enjoying your weekend.
This is just me, thinking out loud. It very likely means nothing at all, like most of what I do here.
I'm just having a little difficulty, at the moment, trying to figure out what to write about, or if there is any reason why I should write something about anything. Ever.
Iraq seems to have fallen off everyone's radar except for the triumphalism and ceaseless crowing by warbloggers. Folks seem to have turned their attention to different matters. Which is probably good, in a way. It was rather exhausting. But you'd think for all the passion it aroused, it would have a little more staying power. I'm not sure what I think about that.
There's a fundraising effort to give Shelley Powers enough money to maintain her weblog. I think Shelley's great, and I think it's great that Jonathon undertook the effort, but I don't know what it means that we're considering giving money to someone who can afford a computer and can afford to turn down a job, when there are people we probably see every day who can't do either and probably need a little money just as much, or perhaps more, than Shelley does. I'm not sure what that means. I hasten to add that I'm normally a sucker for such appeals, I even contributed to Rogers Cadenhead's iPod gift to Dave Winer when he was ill. I've never met Dave Winer. There are people I know who've been in the hospital for whom I haven't bought gifts. What's up with that?
There's kind of a discussion about truth and sincerity and authenticity that is very interesting; but I also think it's kind of ironic that for all that, I don't know the folks who live next door to me all that well. I'm not sure what that means either. I'm sure it's wonderful that the internet facilitates these kind of long-distance friendships, but I wonder at the expense of what? And what kind of friendships are they, really? I don't know. Certainly, in recent months I've discovered that there are certain, very deep, areas of disagreement I have with some of these people, and they remain a source of discomfort to me. I suppose the same could be said for friends I've known face-to-face, but I think there's something more in flesh-and-blood friendships that gives the relationship greater resilience. Or maybe you just get a better sense, face to face, of whether or not you could sustain a friendship with certain individuals. Those cues are lacking in the online environment, and you think you've encountered someone with whom you could enjoy a sustained friendship, but in fact you can't. I'm not sure what that means either.
I think I need to find a different neighborhood. That may be a virtual cabin in the woods of Montana or something. Lately, it seems as though cyberspace is a less welcoming place. It's not the disagreements that people have, I usually enjoy those. It's the subtle put-downs, sometimes not so subtle, that are tolerated and often rewarded by a certain group of individuals who seem to maintain a particular reverence for one another, usually at the expense of others who seem to be perceived, or at least portrayed, as somehow deficient in cultural sophistication, or education, or are otherwise unworthy to be seen in the same company. There is one online entity who affects the persona of an individual who engages in the ritual humiliation of individuals for sexual gratification, and this seems to be a good thing to many people. S&M as a fetish is certainly interesting, but I don't think it's particularly amusing or effective as a basis for engaging the world at large. It provides an excuse, it seems to me, to be cruel, seemingly in the service of kindness, but I have doubts about that as well. Yet nobody seems to question this, everyone seems only too eager to "kiss the whip." This I find very disheartening. I'm afraid I'm terribly unhip or unsophisticated, probably both.
Anyway, I've also discovered that there are far more people writing far better things about the subjects that interest me than I ever could. Net, I think this is a good thing. I often have the desire, but lack both the time and the talent to do it well. So it kind of leaves me with less motivation to make whatever feeble efforts I can offer. Certainly my track record at being understood leaves a great deal to be desired. And simply recounting the mundane details of my life, the "cheese sandwich" school of blogging, isn't rewarding beyond a certain interest in keeping family members and perhaps a few close flesh-and-blood friends apprised of what's going in my exterior life.
So where do I go from here? I suppose this could be construed as an appeal for attention. "Please don't stop, Dave. We love you." But it's not. I'm not sure who I'm writing for anymore. I can write to myself without posting it on the internet. I was never very sure who I was writing for before, but I thought maybe someone would find some of it useful. I'm not so sure anymore. Mostly it's just noise, and there is great value in just being still. I'm still struggling with Nagarjuna, he's almost as bad as quantum physics, and I hesitate to offer anything about that. Certainly, if I hang this thing up, I won't have to struggle with imperfect software anymore and I'll gain back some number of hours of my life to put toward other purposes, perhaps more noble, or at least useful.
I think any conceptual notion of heaven or nirvana, if they exist, has to be beyond our apprehension. It seems to me that any familiar idea of existence must incorporate the idea of time, of a past, a present and a future and I think that the origin of suffering lies in the field of time. We either believe in a more desirable past or future, but we are never content with the present because the possibility exists that existence is better somewhen else.
I find the notion of extinction more appealing than an afterlife that remains bound in the field of time.
"The vision of one's child as a nearly useless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path," McKibben writes. Wired Magazine.
There are a couple of links I visit from his list of links. One of them is Beneath Buddha's Eyes and this entry and the one immediately preceding it also ring very true with me at the moment.
I went ahead a paid for a competitive upgrade license for Notebook, from Circus Ponies, it's only $10.00 from now until the end of the month if you own OmniOutliner or NoteTaker 2003. It lists for $100.00, which is probably too much given the feature set and the prices of it's main competitors. But $10.00 is easy to afford, even if I do complain about having too little money, and I'd like to see where they take the application.
Once again, Tinderbox has proven to be far too complicated to be an easy-to-use tool. Once again, I was bitten by design decisions I fail to understand. Some of the complexity is understandable, as in the creation of rules for agents, and I don't mind learning to work with that. Others, such as the use of templates to export HTML, are needlessly complex.
There are no fewer than three places where you kind of tell Tinderbox what template to use when exporting. I say "kind of" because it is by no means clear how each of those different places or opportunities relate to each other. Which takes priority and why? Why three? There's an opportunity in the application's preferences. There's another opportunity in the document's preferences, and there's a third opportunity - that really consists of innumerable other opportunities with each note.
This becomes an issue when you move your Tinderbox document from volume to volume, even when you move the templates along with it, the pathnames to the templates change. This causes the application to default to pointing to the Tinderbox document itself as the template. This is yet another questionable design decision, and perhaps the worst one. Maybe it's a bug. Why wouldn't the application simply generate an error message indicating it is unable to locate the template specified, instead of attempting to export itself as itself, taking forever and yielding an enormous text file that does nothing for anyone except waste time and bandwidth?
Last night I noted the problem I was having with TS being exported as HTML. I basically got the entire XML file, over and over again. I knew it was a template issue, so I went through and carefully changed each note's template pointer to the correct file, even remembering to click the "Update" button, even though I'm still not sure why you have to do that.
Some parts of the site would export correctly, but others wouldn't and rather than waiting the seemingly interminable number of minutes - and it is minutes, not seconds - for the export process to finish so I could go back into my Tinderbox document and find the offending note, I'd force quit the application and re-launch it. I would subsequently find that all of my previous template changes were lost, despite the fact that I'd saved the document meticulously after each template correction. I spent an hour and a half on this last night and finally went to bed much too late cursing Eastgate, Mark Bernstein and whatever personal failing it is that compels me to try to maintain this thing.
A too-brief night's sleep gave me the resources to recall that there were a couple of places in the preferences where you could specify a template, and that since my changes were being overridden, it had to be in the preferences each time I loaded the TS Tinderbox document. Sure enough, I looked in the preferences and the template pointer pointed to the TS Tinderbox document itself - again, that simply has to be an asinine "feature."
I think my year of free updates is over. I'm going to start looking seriously at NoteTaker 2003 as a weblog tool. No doubt that has some serious deficiencies as well. I've yet to find the ideal weblogging tool, they all suck to some extent. Manila at Editthispage was too often inaccessible. Radio would quit working and no one could help you figure out why. Tinderbox is just too needlessly complicated. I'm ready to begin just using TextEdit and hand-coding simple HTML. This is ridiculous. I really don't want to learn another quantity of trivial knowledge like PHP or Perl or some other crap like that. Whatever spare processor cycles I have left after work, taking care of two kids, two cats and a dog, maintaining too much house and too much yard on too little money, I would rather devote to actually thinking about something more important than how to make a particular application or gizmo work.
Of course, I broke the weblog moving it back over from the iBook. I had fewer problems moving it to the iBook than I did moving it back.
Anyway, it's got a new logic board and combo-drive. I haven't tried to burn a CD with it yet, or watch a movie, but I did put it to sleep and it stayed that way. I've also received the replacement power supply and CPU fan, but I'll leave that little project till the weekend.
It's nice to have the bigger screen and the greater speed. The iBook wasn't bad, but this is better.
That's probably enough for one night. More cheese tomorrow.
I also wish to direct your attention to my oldest and dearest friend, and those words don't begin to describe what she means to me, and her new website, Sandy Bell Design. Check it out.
Seconds later, his house was destroyed, cars in the garage hurled into its walls and debris flung for 300 yards. Cast into blackness, the smoke and debris so thick he could barely breathe, he crawled, managing to get out of the rubble. His father, mother, wife, son, two daughters, two sisters, brother and 5-year-old niece were still inside, all of them dead. His three other children were still in the hospital today, his 18-year-old daughter, Bidour, burned so badly, he said, that doctors might have to amputate her right leg.
But in more private moments last week in the hospital, Sergeant Alva acknowledged that he had anger that he directed inward and toward the news media that he said were too hard on soldiers and a public that he said that did not really understand the costs of war.
"There is no point in explaining how I feel," he said, "because no one really is going to be able to understand it."
When I was at Surface Warfare Officers School (Basic) back in 1979, one of my USNA classmates was there with me. His name is Glenn Zitka. We were both Springsteen fans. Glenn used to call him "Godsteen." I remember one night we came back to the BOQ (bachelor officers quarters) from a night of partying, and sat in his Chevy Blazer, complete with Budweiser Beer tap handle for a gear shift, listening to Springsteen on cassette on what was a very powerful car stereo for those days, singing along at the top of our lungs until the wee hours.
Godsteen. Yeah, it's a little over the top. But I know where it comes from.
Anyway, the other day I was listening to some show on NPR and this asshole is commenting on the lack of airplay anti-war protest music was getting. For the most part, I'm pretty sympathetic to the guy's point of view, but then he goes and does something stupid referring to Springsteen's The Rising as something like "Hallmark sentimentality" and "banal." Well, there's really nothing more banal than "rock critics" complaining powerlessly over the airwaves. I turned off the radio.
All of which would be apropos of nothing, except everything is connected. Well, from my admittedly distorted point of view, anyway.
So today I figured I'd drop by Killing the Buddha because I haven't been there in like, forever. Nothing on the front grabbed me, so I went browsing the archives and I found this article on Springsteen from 2001. I'm surprised I hadn't read it earlier when I was searching for reviews of his recent tours. I've never read anything that spelled out the nature of the experience and the relationship a fan (well, this fan anyway) has with The Boss better than this piece. It's excellent, and well worth the read.
Godsteen. Yeah.
Now, all this is kind of funny to me. I'm still wandering around in the whole compassion/empathy thing, and Joseph Campbell's propensity to not let compassion deter him from giving somebody one right in the chops if he rated it. I'm not a terribly intellectual person, so it should come as no surprise that one of my favorite books on Zen is Zen Speaks! which is kind of a comic book history of Zen. That's certainly being unfair to it, because it's much more than that, but most people would call it a comic book. In these stories, there are lots of accounts of Zen masters smacking their students when they're being particularly dense. There's even a branch, or sect, whatever the right word is, that has someone going around hitting people with a stick while they're meditating to kind of facilitate the process I guess, or keep them awake, I'm not sure which - maybe it's both. So I was just kind of looking around for some more insight into this apparent contradiction with regard to some forms of violence as a tool to promote enlightenment.
I came across the Springsteen article and recalled how I would have liked to have smacked that critic on the radio that day. Probably not very enlightened, but it made me laugh.
I went to a talk given by Phil Zimmerman, of PGP fame, at the University of North Florida this evening. The topic was the future of privacy in a world ruled by Moore's Law. He painted kind of a bleak picture.
After his lecture I went up and introduced myself and kind of played the Britt Blazer role, even though I'm philosophically more sympathetic to Mr. Zimmerman than Mr. Blazer. I asked him why there must be a presumption that government surveillance would be a bad thing? He had made the argument that the government shouldn't restrict citizens' rights to use technology, just because it might be used for bad purposes. I asked why we should, seemingly by default, oppose government use of surveillance technology, just because it might be used for bad purposes. I mentioned the thousands of kids who go missing each year and the potential for ubiquitous surveillance technology to significantly reduce the number of children who go missing and the suffering they and their families must endure. He allowed that the problem was more complex than he had portrayed it.
He seemed like a pretty nice guy. He uses a Mac and hates Windows, so he's all right in my book.
It's kind of interesting, to me anyway, how Nagarjuna's ideas about emptiness keep coming around to me again and again. garret's cloud picture the other day kind of made me smile. The log behind my fence got my attention too.
In a way, it also has something to do with compassion, empathy, faith and love.
I have a tendency to want to solve people's problems for them. In part, I suppose this comes from a genuine desire to help them, and I suppose part of it comes from some more selfish need to feel good about myself. My life may be a mess, but I can fix yours. Funny thing is, it almost never works. Which can be a little depressing.
Now, I gave up on the idea of "rescuing" people a while ago, I thought I had learned that people have to rescue themselves. I guess I didn't know how encompassing this idea is in my life.
It happens when I'm listening to someone describe how angry or unhappy they are about some event. So I'll try to explain to them how they might look at the situation differently, and from that point of view, there is little reason to be unhappy or angry. Problem solved, please give me my gold star for the day, and don't let the glint from my halo blind you. It just never seems to work.
There's a book I read some time ago called I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better. It's about the power of validation in listening. I read it, and didn't find anything horribly objectionable about it, and actually thought it would be useful in certain cases. Mostly, those cases being the people I knew didn't want my help, or I didn't care enough about them to really try. But still, validation seemed passive, suggested to me that I needed to be indifferent, and in it's worst case, it seemed enabling. So, while the book made a certain amount of sense, I had serious reservations about the value of the idea.
I'm still not prepared to say I grok Nagarjuna, but I am enjoying the work. There's an element of emptiness in compassion, that perhaps isn't present in empathy. There's a phrase Joseph Campbell uses that I love, even though I don't quite understand how it can be, "to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world." But I think emptiness is there too. Just keep in mind that there's more to the notion of "emptiness" than the literal meaning of the word implies.
Empathy can get you into trouble, if you're not careful about it. Maybe it's the first step in compassion, but if it's the only step you take, you'll find yourself in more difficulty than perhaps you deserve. There's a tendency, I think, in empathy to own another's feelings, or another's suffering. You can't really do that, even though it sure feels like you can, because it doesn't really belong to you. So it's not yours to fix either.
Now, if you think about emptiness, you can kind of get past empathy. Yeah, I feel all this person's feelings, or at least it seems as if I do, but if you realize they're not really yours, then they're not really there, are they? Then you're kind of empty, right? I know, it's a stretch, but I think it works. So where does that get you? Well, it gets you to validation for one thing. You can receive all this person's suffering, anger, sadness, whatever, and you can acknowledge it to them. Which is probably what we most want anyway. Certainly we seem to have to be acknowledged before we do anything else to alleviate the problem.
But is that being indifferent in some way? Is that like not caring? Well, we're all told we should love our fellow man, or love others as we love ourselves. I think love has its origin in faith, that love is really faith in action - which is definitely not passive, nor can it be indifferent. So by merely validating their suffering, receiving it in your own emptiness, you can also express a measure of faith in them, a measure of love, that they can solve their own problems; presumably as you have faith in yourself that you can solve your own. By trying to solve their problem for them, it's almost as if you're making the statement that you lack the faith in them to solve their own problems, that you don't really love them. I suppose that's a stretch too.
There's a bit of Taoist notion in Nagarjuna's emptiness. The Tao talks about the value of emptiness too. And I think this is an example of action without acting, which is kind of a part of emptiness. Sometimes, the most appropriate thing to do when trying to help people solve their problems is to do nothing, other than to be empty. To be a place where they can put their suffering for a moment, and acknowledge it. The love you might have for them is a reflection of the faith you have in them that, like you, they have the capacity for their own salvation; and as long as that capacity exists, there is a reason, a basis, to feel joy. Perhaps from there, one can begin to find a way to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
Anyway, that's a bit of what I'm thinking about right now. Time to go to work.
Today was election day for a variety of city and county offices. The major race I was interested in was the mayoral contest. There are several candidates, so it's likely we'll have a run-off in May. But for the other races, I simply voted for a Democratic candidate. The ballot suggests to me some of the difficulty we have in Duval county in mounting a serious Democratic challenge to what is a largely an entrenched Republican voting majority. For a couple of at-large seats, there was one Republican running against two or more Democrats. I'm going to guess that the Republican is going to pick up the seat, because Democratic votes will be spread across two or more candidates.
I don't know if this is a result of greater party discipline on the part of the Republicans, or something else. Still on my to-do list is to re-register as a Democrat and then to try to find out how this organization is run. I don't have a great deal of hope that we could elect a Democrat to the House of Representatives from this district, but I think a strong, disciplined Democratic party organization could cause a Republican congressman to feel more accountable to all of his constituents, and therefore act somewhat less as a rubber-stamp for a Republican administration.
In spite of all the gloating the warbloggers are indulging themselves in at the moment, I think we were very lucky. While I opposed the war, I certainly wanted to ensure we won it once it started. I remain somewhat ambivalent about the nature of our victory, and what lessons will be gleaned from it. I'm certainly happy and relieved that large scale combat operations concluded in the fashion that they did. This reduces the casualties all around and the amount of destruction caused by actual combat. But I'm also certain that this could have been much harder, and much more costly. This experience will be used to drive a variety of agendas in the halls of the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill, but I think what should give us pause is that our opponent was even more inept than we anticipated. We should not always count on being so lucky.
But hey, that's just my $.02. I'll leave it to the prescient and omniscient and exclusively virtuous warbloggers to write the official analysis. I don't want to rain on their parade or anything.
I was kind of lamenting the fact that I'd gotten up late this morning and I hadn't attended to anything much more than the immediate, superficial, and mostly material needs of my life. The link to the Matrix piece was kind of an effort to offer something to myself to remind me of what I think I value.
Anyway, afterwards, I zipped by Sainteros' place, and I re-read what he had posted yesterday since Pascale commented on it.
All of a sudden, it was like a flashbulb going off in my head. Sainteros wrote a koan! It's in the last two sentences of the first paragraph. It cracked me up. Of course, I think I ruined it by commenting on it, but you can ignore my comments.
Seek and ye shall find. You cracked me up this morning, Sainteros. You give good koan. (There's a pun there, if you can find it.) Made my day. Cracked me up.
I'm looking forward to The Matrix Reloaded next month. I'm kind of managing my expectations because I enjoyed the first movie so much. I'm really skeptical that they can make a movie that works as well as the original did. I'm sure I'll enjoy the special effects and the movie as an action movie, but I don't know how they're going to develop many of the metaphysical themes of the first movie.
Warner Bros. has a section at the whatisthematrix website called The Philosophy of The Matrix, here is an article from that section that illustrates the rich texture of the original film: Wake Up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix. It's a good read, though it may leave you expecting too much from the sequels.
The weather has been gorgeous ever since Friday. I'd like to say I've been outdoors enjoying it all, but that wouldn't be the case. I have appreciated it though. I did taxes, and we'll say no more on that subject.
The G4 is off to the repair shop, hopefully to have all that ails it repaired. I'm working out of the iBook, which is a little slow but has the advantage of allowing me to work anywhere I want. It's been a long time since I've done a lot of typing on the iBook. My thumb occasionally strikes the trackpad and the insertion cursor flies off somewhere near the top of the window. Keeps you on your toes.
Haven't had much time to do a great deal of reading, thinking or being still, other than about taxes, and I've got a pretty full plate for the next few days as well. That's just life I guess.
I updated the iBook to 10.2.5 with no trouble, and installed the latest beta of Safari, again with no ill effects so far. I haven't repaired permissions yet.
While Caitie was seeing Agent Cody Banks last Saturday, I took in The Core. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't know how bad. I probably would have been better off going with Caitlin. It's like a bad 50s sf movie made today, without any effort to be camp. Sucked.
I haven't been commenting at all on the war lately. I'm happy that I was wrong about the Battle of Baghdad. I'm happy if it makes others happy that I was wrong. Happy, happy, happy. You can't have too much happiness.
I've been reading the usual warbloggers' pages, and I've noted their reactions. They seem pretty happy. I've read some things that activated the ol' throbbing vein in the temple, but with one exception I haven't responded, and in that one I didn't post everything that I wrote at first in this individual's comments.
Mixed in with my weblog-reading has been continued reading of Nagarjuna and some other texts. I think I'm kind of beginning to get this emptiness notion. I've also been thinking about the differences between empathy and compassion, and I think I'm beginning to get an idea or two about that. It's kind of muddled right now, but empathy can kind of get you to some places where you might not want to be sometimes, while compassion can take you everywhere, if that makes any sense. More about that later one of these days.
One of the things that I think marks the difference between empathy and compassion is one's internal state. If empathy causes a state of turmoil, it's probably not possible to be able to see clearly and that's a barrier to compassion. One should always try to settle one's own dust first. Empathy can bring about antipathy, and antipathy often leads to criticism, and nobody likes criticism. Ignorance is a powerful thing, and whatever knowledge we possess is sometimes obscured from us by our own empathy/antipathy, our own turmoil, our own dust. Offering criticism in such a state is usually not very helpful, and criticism is seldom welcome anyway. Offering criticism is usually intended to soothe one's own interior turmoil, rather than to help another see things more clearly.
Of course, that seems to lead to questions about indifference, which is a trait I'm not crazy about. One thing I'm not is indifferent. I'll have to look for the quotation, but I liked something Joseph Campbell said about criticizing others. He said some people just deserve to get it right in the chops, and he was happy to accommodate them, or something like that. I'm not sure where that fits in with with I'm thinking about, but I will admit the idea has a great deal of appeal to me. Maybe somewhere down the line I'll figure out where that fits in, or if it doesn't.
But I'm feeling a lot better. There's a lot of shit in the world. And there's a great deal to feel compassion for; but there's also a great deal to feel joy about as well, and I'm starting to see those things again. Even if the weather does suck down here at the moment. Sucks! But I digress.
Anyway, I see some of my online friends kind of struggling a bit with some things. I know they can find their way to feeling better. I kind of wish I could help them along or do it for them, but none of us has that power. That's something that puzzles me about this Bodhisattva notion that I keep bumping into. We each have to do our own work, we can't do it for someone else; and to the extent we try to do so, we do it at the expense of our own efforts. But that's something we all have to learn for ourselves too.
The good news is that there is good news. Have faith, be still, live in the moment and rock on (which can be consistent with being still, but that's an exercise left for the reader).
These and all the other aphorisms are brought to you by the valued employees here at Time's Shadow World Headquarters - Saving the world, one non sequitur at a time.
Bummer, sleep is still broken. On the second command to sleep, the video blanked but the fans kept spinning. I don't know if the actual cpus went to sleep or not. It wouldn't wake from that state either, forcing a reboot.
First step is to get the combo-drive fixed so I can back up some files and run the Hardware Test CD. In the mean time, everything else seems to be working just fine.
A single early test suggests there may be reason to be hopeful that 10.2.5 has resolved at least one sleep issue. It remained asleep following a sleep command. I'll put it to sleep again a little later and see if it stays asleep then. If it does, that's a good sign.
I took Mandy in for her annual vaccinations today. She weighs over a hundred pounds now. She's a little overweight because you can't feel her ribs. We're going to modify how we feed her. This should be interesting - she eats everything.
It was cold and gray here today. You couldn't tell it was spring, and it sure did feel like winter.
Caitlin's got spring break next week, and Maria's going to be in court all week so I'm going to take some time off. It's not exactly how I wanted to burn vacation time, but it'll work out. I'll get the G4 into the shop for the combo-drive repair, catch up on the housework, do some more work in the backyard, and otherwise get this house a bit more in order. If I get a nice day, I may go to the beach.
Throwing caution to the winds (because this machine has to go in for maintenance anyway), I've downloaded and installed Mac OS 10.2.5. I haven't checked to see if it resolved my sleep issues, but reboot was successful and I followed that up with the now-customary permissions-repair. All seems well, I'm blogging here.
A famous decision theorist who once taught at Columbia got an offer from a rival university and was struggling with the question of whether to stay where he was or accept the new post. His friend, a philosopher, took him aside and said, "What's the problem? Just do what you write about and what you teach your students. Maximize your expected utility." The decision theorist, exasperated, responded, "Come on, get serious!"
I think we need a better word to describe the vehicles that routinely make the transit between the earth's surface and earth orbit. They're not really space vehicles, as much of their design must, of necessity, accommodate operation within the atmosphere. A true space vehicle would never see an atmosphere, I think.
I told myself I didn't want to powerlessly complain about the weather anymore, but damn if they don't call it "conditioning" for a reason. I am so sick of the frigging rain. It's not a gentle sprinkle either, it's pouring.
A new application that shares its lineage with NoteTaker 2003 is Notebook from Circus Ponies Software. I'm trying out the 30-day eval demo. At first glance, I think NoteTaker is probably more versatile, but Notebook looks like it handles the outlining function a little differently and perhaps better. More to follow as I become familiar with each of them.
I thought this was an interesting item in ScienceDaily today. What isn't clear to me, at least from this report, is if the imitation the researchers noted was volitional or non-volitional, or involuntary. When I find myself wincing when I see someone getting hurt, it's not, to my knowledge, a voluntary act. I don't think about it and then "decide" to mimic another's expression, unless I'm doing it deliberately as a kind of expression of sympathy. If it's involuntary, I think there's more to the story than indicated by this report.
Okay, that little task is fixed. It was kind of a welcome break as a semi-cognitive task. You can only read so much, both on the screen and in dead trees.
I called CompUSA about the G4 and they told me it would be a week to ten days to get it fixed. I called another service company Apple told me about and they said they could have it back to me by Monday at the latest if I get it in tomorrow. They're much further out of my way than CompUSA; which isn't exactly convenient either but I'll be having lunch up there tomorrow so I could have dropped it off then. I'm mulling it over.
Last Sunday's Malcom in the Middle had a plot thread that reminded me a lot of webloggers. The family was holding a garage sale to raise money to repair the house, damaged in last week's episode. In going through the crap in the garage, Hal found his old pirate radio transmitter, a low power FM job that he used in college as "Kid Charlemagne." Of course, he couldn't resist firing it up to see if it still worked, and it did. Naturally, Hal indulged himself in a reprise of his role as Kid Charlemagne and began broadcasting to the neighborhood his rants about government conspiracies and the things that made him angry. It was a funny episode and it reminded me that I probably take this stuff way too seriously sometimes. Maybe most of the time.
I watched movies with Caitie on Saturday. We saw What About Bob, The Razor's Edge, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. With regard to The Razor's Edge, I think I'll have to read the novel. I think Bill Murray gave a credible performance, but I think the movie left out too many important things. Who was the Indian with the boats and why did he take so much time off to escort Larry to Tibet? What did Larry learn in Tibet? I did like the scene where he began tearing pages out of his book for his fire. I think his emotional response to Sophie's death was a little too restrained, even for someone who may have been enlightened about non-attachment to the fruits of action. I liked the movie, but it felt like it could have been about thirty or forty minutes longer to develop some more of Larry's journey. I'm looking forward to the book.
The Day the Earth Stood Still looks good on DVD. I haven't listened to the commentary track yet, but I watched the "Making of..." feature, and that was pretty interesting. Patricia Neal was interviewed for the feature and she appears to have aged fairly well. As a kid, I kind of had a crush on her in TDTESS and In Harm's Way. She also played Ma Walton in the TV movie that became the basis for The Waltons, the role that Michael Learned later played. I loved her voice, though age has robbed her of some its quality.
I test for my brown belt later this month. In this TKD school, the brown belt isn't the one preceding the black, the red belt is, and the testing requirements become more rigorous. I'm having some pain in my hips, but I'm attributing that to my efforts at loosening them up. I'm hopeful that as my flexibility increases and my hips strengthen, the pain will either go away or be much reduced. I'm still nowhere near a full split, but I'm much more flexible than I was when I began.
Well, that's probably more than enough cheese for one day.
I had forgotten how I set up the RSS feed many months ago. The old files still existed on the iMac, so I went and looked for them and this should resolve the problem.
Dad's got to be pretty happy, Syracuse won the NCAA national championship. I need to give him a call soon.
The G4 is giving me some more problems, specifically the optical drive. You may recall, I had difficulty getting it to read the DiskWarrior CD, which led to my adventures in gray screens of coma, (not quite as bad as blue screens of death, but it's a fine distinction, I'll grant you.) Well, I thought I had everything back up and running. I picked up a copy of the MacWorld Digital Hub special issue, which includes all of its software on a DVD. I inserted the DVD into the optical drive to install some software and had a few anomalies, but the application I wanted installed so no big deal, I thought.
The sleep issue has gotten stranger. The computer will put itself to sleep per the Energy Saver settings following a fresh boot, and it will usually wake up fine. On the second incidence of the computer putting itself to sleep, it will usually fail to wake up properly. It's very strange, it's like one processor is awake, but the other is sleeping. The Dock won't activate when I move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen. If I select a menu item from the menu bar, the list of menu items draws, and it'll highlight if I click on one, but there it stays, and nothing happens. Can't change menu items and the menu doesn't retract when I mouse off of it. I can switch applications using LaunchBar, and I can basically use an application if I don't have to go to the menu bar. I'm not sure how that could be unless perhaps the processes or threads that govern the menu bar are running on a processor that is still sleeping.
Well, I wanted to run Apple's Hardware Test CD, but I can't get the CD door to open. It fails to open from the keyboard, from iTunes and from DVD Player. DVD Player gives an interesting error message, it says it can't find a "valid DVD drive (Error -700012)." Booting with the mouse button held down doesn't eject the CD tray. Booting the the C-key held down doesn't eject the CD. I booted into Open Firmware and tried "eject cd" and after a long pause, OF told me it can't eject the CD.
I thought the MacWorld DVD was still in there, but I just found it sitting here, so now I believe the drive is empty. In any case, I called Apple yesterday evening and the helpful woman on the other end of the line pointed out that there is an eject hole in the Combo-drive, if you open the door and look. Of course, the computer is on the floor under the table, the drive is black and it's dark, so seeing that little hole is a challenge. But I did find it. The next challenge is getting something to insert into it. There's always a paperclip or three hanging around here until I need one. I finally tried to use a straight-pin, but that was challenging too. If you've never seen one, the mirrored doors on the MDD Power Macs have a half-cylinder on the back side of them. This allows the door to open and close smoothly when the optical drive tray strikes it or retracts. That half-cylinder also makes it difficult to align a short straight-pin when you're trying to get the tray to eject.
Long story longer, I couldn't mechanically open the drive tray either. So I've got a case number and we'll be off to CompUSA soon. I also asked for a case number for the sleep issue. Once I get the optical drive fixed, I'm going to reinstall back to the factory default condition and see where we're at on the sleep issues. This may be a hardware problem, although it didn't manifest itself until I installed 10.2.4. Oddly enough, I had optical drive problems on my iMac when I first got it three and a half years ago. I took it to CompUSA and they replaced the DVD drive. Those problems showed up almost immediately, though. I've had the G4 for almost three months. I think the problem I had with the DiskWarrior CD was just a precursor to the problem I have right now. System Profiler sees a Phillips optical drive, so apparently the ROM is still visible, but the drive is not working.
Now this was a pleasant surprise. Last Tuesday, I ordered some DVDs and books from Amazon and selected the free shipping option. I figured they'd get here by Wednesday or Thursday next week. Instead, they arrived today by mail. Cool!
I received The Day the Earth Stood Still, What About Bob?, The Razor's Edge, and the restored, authorized edition of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The books were The Breakout Principle, which I heard about during an interview with the author on NPR, and The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, which is another translation of the writings of Nagarjuna.
The weather has been good so far this weekend. I applied some preservative to a section of the fence this morning, and then tried to clean up the patio some more. I cleaned out my little fountain and fired that up to listen to gurgling water while I trimmed the dead material away from the plants that suffered during our freezes last winter. It looks like over half of them are coming back, but I'm not sure about the rest.
I'm going to head over to Al's Pizza in a bit and order dinner since I don't feel like cooking. I haven't felt like cooking most of the week, which is getting kind of expensive. I don't know if Jen is working the bar or not. Mia isn't working at Al's much anymore since she got hired at Mayo as a nuclear medecine tech. Patty, who often fills in, is an actress and she's on the road this month, so I'm not sure who I'll see. It's such a nice day, I may not even get a seat at the bar, so we'll see.
All in all, it's been a pretty pleasant day. Now, if only a maid would come and clean my house, that would be a winner!
Now, many hundreds of Jewish victims of suicide bombings later, and fifty years after the Holocaust, the importance and the necessity of Jewish hate has once again been demonstrated. Perhaps there will soon be peace in the Middle East, perhaps not. But one thing is certain: we will not soon forgive the actions of a man who, as he sent children to kill children, knewÑall too wellÑjust what he was doing. We will notÑwe cannotÑask God to have mercy upon him.
In a way, the essay is a little bit resonant with Dr. Antonio Damasio's work in Descarte's Error. There is a case to be made, from a kind of physiological standpoint, for hatred. Emotion can be said to inform much of what we would call rational decision-making, and for good reason. But that's not to say it is always appropriate, and in its more extreme cases, I think we live in a world where we've learned that it is wholly inappropriate.
Rabbi Soloveichik says that Arafat, whose name he never mentions, is to be hated because he sent children to kill children, but is that enough? Is that enough reason? Is that enough hatred? Is that hatred directed to enough people? Should Rabbi Soloveichik hate the suicide bombers as well as Arafat? They had a choice. Does Arafat have some mysterious power over the minds of suicide bombers that he can compel them to do his will? It seems to me that there may be a case to be made to hate the bombers as well. And if we hate the bombers, do we only hate them after they bomb, or can we hate them before they blow themselves up? At what point do they become worthy of being hated? How about the people who help the bombers? The people who make the bombs, and the people who know about the bomber's intention, but do nothing to stop it, are they deserving of hate as well? Or just Arafat? Do they not know what they are doing? I think the rabbi makes a case for hating them as well.
But it seems to me that it's hard to be sure where to direct the hatred. If we knew, we could probably just go round up all the appropriate people and incarcerate them before they actually did anything that would make them really worthy of being hated. But we don't know. So if hatred is a virtue, is the most virtuous thing to do to hate them all?
And what would the rabbi make of the bombers' hatred? That's the kind of tricky thing about mutual hatred, somebody always wants to be on top. If I'm right, then I'm justified in hating you; and you're not justified in hating me. And if you're not justified in hating me - well, then you're just evil, right? That sort of clears things up for us, labeling unjustified haters as evil-doers. Obviously, I don't buy into the rabbi's argument, much as I would like to. There are a lot of people I hate, I just don't think I'm right to do so, and I sure as hell don't think it's a virtue.
The sad thing is, there is no necessity for hate in order to make sound choices. In fact, I believe we've known for a couple of thousand years that we often don't make the best choices out of strong emotions. I think a pretty good case can be made that hatred comes from fear and love comes from faith. It seems to me, if I were to say I hated Arafat, I would be saying I feared him, or I feared a world with him in it; because, in the rabbi's explanation, children are sent to kill children. (I really don't know where to point out that all of the figures I've seen have shown that more Palestinians are killed by Israelis than the reverse. I hope nobody thinks I'm anti-semitic for noting that.) Perhaps I fear my children being killed. Perhaps I fear Arafat, who is already an old man, leaving this world without ever being held accountable for his actions. There are a lot of ways to feel fear, and therefore hatred, in this situation.
Let me digress for a moment. I don't recall the exact figures, but I think it's something like 15,000 people who are murdered each year in the United States. That seems like a pretty big number, when we're talking about people dying because somebody else killed them. Is there someone we should hate for that? Should we hate all the killers? Should we hate the gun manufacturers? Who should we hate in the face of all that death? Are you afraid of being murdered? Who do you hate because of that fear? What is the virtue in that hatred? About 35,000 people are killed in automobile accidents every year, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. I guess because those are accidents, we don't hate the automobile, or fear the automobile. This suggests to me that it's not the outcome that necessarily drives the fear and the hate, it seems to be the perception of intent. But when the intent is dispersed in the case of 15,000 individual murders, it's hard to identify one person to hate. I think it's a little convenient to be able to identify Arafat as the source of all that intent. If Arafat is responsible, as he surely must be if we're justified in hating him, why not just kill him? Would that stop the children being sent to kill children? If not, then why is it justified to hate Arafat?
Hatred comes from fear. Love comes from faith. You don't have to hate someone to make sound, rational decisions when dealing with them, if you know they are someone who is a potential threat to you. You can acknowledge the fear, but not yield to it in the form of hate.
It seems to me that while someone lives, there is always at least the potential that they will undergo some personal transformation. It seems to me that as long as one lives, and has a functioning mind, then one has the capacity to discover something about the nature of faith and fear, love and hate, reality and illusion. It seems to me that if we're to have any faith in ourselves for our own redemption, we have to have at least the faith that others also have that capacity for redemption; and if you can acknowledge that, then I can't see where there's any room to hate. It seems to me that, ultimately, hating another has to come around to hating yourself. Denying faith in the ability of another to change, or to be redeemed, must mean denying that faith in yourself, leaving you only with fear and the hatred that eventually comes from it; and so you either wind up hating yourself, or clinging to illusions.
Is there a difference between compassion and empathy? I don't know, but I think there is. It's something I'm thinking about.
I find I have a great deal of empathy, and, I believe, compassion for our armed forces, especially the Marines. And I have similar feelings for the Iraqi people, even the ones who choose to fight, but especially the ones who do not.
Compassion literally means, I've read, "to suffer with." And it is suffering, although it's probably only a pale imitation of what most of them are feeling. This probably makes me a "bleeding heart." Whatever.
But what is especially of interest to me, and what is occupying a good deal of my thinking right now, is that I have little to no empathy or compassion for many other people not involved in this war, but people with strong opinions on either side of the issue. In fact, it's less an absence of empathy or compassion, but more the presence of genuine antipathy.
I feel like crap some of the time, but two things have really helped. First is Taekwondo, which is probably just the physical release of the stress. I find my performance is also suffering because I'm distracted, I haven't mastered my attention yet. That's the work of a lifetime, I'm sure, so I'm beating myself up too much about that.
The other thing that helps is going back and reading a lot of the things I read a while ago when I was grappling with other strong emotions. I've been reading The Tao Te Ching, and the Bhagavad Gita, a book called Zen Speaks! and something I picked up last weekend at Books-a-Million called Verses From the Center, the writing of Nagarjuna on the idea of "emptiness." I don't pretend to get it, but I think I get some of it, at least obliquely. Something else that was delightful was reading what Mira posted yesterday at Surprise. You should take a look. It's one of those clues you get sometimes that you may be on the right track. Every now and then Mira and I seem to get a vibe going.
But one of the main things I feel I have to think about is why I have no compassion or empathy for the people who I mentioned before. I've learned to ask myself the question, "What's going on inside you?" It's a tough question, especially on this issue. So mostly I'm just being still. Because otherwise I might write something like, "I am here to kick ass and eat cake. And I'm all out of cake." Which is how I feel, and I have the bruises on my arms and shins to prove it.
But I keep coming back to the notions that everything is connected, and everything happens for a reason; that I can choose to regard events from faith or from fear; and that whatever compassion I'm capable of should go to everyone, not just to some. It's just that that's not how it feels right now. So that's what I'm working on. If I figure something out, I'll let you know. Don't hold your breath. At some point, I expect I'll just let it go. I'm an authority on nothing, this I know.
Writing about the war is exhausting, and that's why I'm writing less. Though yesterday was a burst of activity for me, at least in Jonathon Delacour's and Shelley's comments, it did leave me feeling exhausted and like I am simply unable to communicate to some people.
In some ways, I'm afraid it is pointless. I have enjoyed taking some time to read and to try to be still, and I think I'll try to be doing more of that in the future.
I don't know how bad things will get before they get better. I suppose for many people, they won't get "better" in their lifetimes. I can't control any of that, but I can work on the war that goes on inside of me. So I'll work on that. Maybe even if "things" don't get better, I still can. Maybe that's enough.
Well, let's see if I have made a successful transition to April this time.
Okay, looks good so far.
Had some difficulty with the G4 last night. I wanted to run Disk Warrior on it, which I've done successfully before, but this time it wouldn't boot the CD, it wouldn't even mount it. So I tried to boot into Mac OS 9 to see if it might be an OS X problem, so I picked the OS 9 startup folder in the Startup Disk system preference pane and rebooted. All I ended up with was a gray screen with a mouse cursor. Boy, did that suck.
Thinking that might be related to the issue that caused me to desire to run Disk Warrior in the first place, hooked the G4 to my iBook via a Firewire cable and rebooted the G4 in target disk mode. I booted the iBook into Mac OS 9 and ran Disk Warrior. Five hours later, it was finished. Running Disk Warrior on the G4 booted from the DW CD is much, much faster.
Well, I rebooted the G4 again and ended up back in the gray screen with mouse cursor. I couldn't eject the CD tray, not even from Open Firmware, probably because there was no media in it to eject. I did some googling on the iMac and found a good page that described my problem and the Open Firmware commands to fix it. You may wish to bookmark this page for future reference.
After entering the appropriate command string, I rebooted into 10.2.4 and all appears well except I need to figure out why my OS 9 System folder is corrupt.
