| Journal & Weblog | Write to Save Your Life | August 24, 2003 |
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posted Sunday, June 29, 2003 » I knew I liked Howard Dean, 2004 Democratic presidential hopeful, but this just blows my mind: On Monday, June 30th, Dean will be making a speech at the Roxy nightclub in New York City, from 8pm to 11pm. If you?re in NYC, this is a pretty amazing step forward for the Good Doctor; go show your support.
» All consumption is a kind of eating, wherein we ingest some product from the external world. In the process we ourselves become more material, more heavy, more dense and dependent.
» Another Pride weekend come and gone. It felt less like Pride, however, and more like an excuse to hold Mike?s hand in public for a few days, enjoying the sun and the noise, and surveying the social landscape together, isolated in a way like two archaeologists studying a foreign country. Of course, we didn?t appear foreign at all; we blended right in with our tank-tops and camo shorts. When in Rome... Occasionally, we?d reconnect with friends that would surface from the crowd, having drifted off during the past year with new loves or new jobs or new friends, and it was strange to me that we should still have some connection based solely on our sexual orientation, otherwise having nothing in common. But it was gay day, and so that was the idea I suppose. Dave was there with Barry, serving vodka drinks at the HRC tent. Neither Mike nor I drank at the Civic Center, which was one of the main reasons we felt like oil on water, I believe. Later, we pulled Dave from his element at the Fox Hole tea dance because Mike and I were hungry and Barry was feeling equally unsociable as the crowd multiplied by the half-hour. Steaks on the grill at home. The warm summer breeze on the patio, ceiling?d by a steady roar from the interstate over the hill. Talk of work and Houston and old times when we would have stayed at the Fox Hole or actually drank at Pride. "Good times," we?d say, and that would scare me. I bought a pale-blue glass bowl at Crate and Barrel on Saturday morning, a housewarming present for Ricky. Standing at the register to pay, I turned around and spotted Mike examining candles a few aisles down. He bought a few for my friend and the gesture made me smile. Later, we drove by his first-floor apartment and peered into the open windows, but he was gone. He has a new cat -- a kitten, actually -- who pressed its ears against the screen when I walked up to call into the window. I scratched its ears and tried to figure out why I could feel so affectionate towards this cat, but not Mike?s or even the cats I see on TV commercials. I?m reading volume two of Anais Nin?s diary. It makes me wonder why I?m writing all of this stuff online.
» Never expect anything from anyone. But always give. Otherwise, a sense of dryness will overtake you. But you must not give your mind to anyone. That you must give only to God.-- Swami Turiyananda
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Update: Sadly, the charred remains of a woman found near Canny?s car were confirmed as those of Canny Ong. I know she will be missed by many.
» One day I was watching Paula clean out the small tank that sits on her desk, home to Medulla and Oblongata. They are frogs. When John came in, he also stopped to watch and mentioned, tangentially, that certain cities in Arizona now prefer salt over chlorine for maintaining public pools. The salinity is close to that of human tears and, with the help of some expensive filters, prevents biotic growth and is safe to the body. An early departure from nature to man-made chemicals, followed by a return to those rules man grew up with. How obvious. A great many things in life do not turn out the way we expect. In response, man has developed a mindset to conduct his own evolution, to harness his talents and overcome this incongruency, to control his destiny in a way. If something turns out unexpectedly, we take stock of what went wrong and try again. I can?t help but feel that as Americans, we have been conditioned to embrace this mindset and believe that, with the right amount of effort, nothing is beyond our grasp and I admire this ideal, but it occurred to me that perhaps the lesson isn?t to continually refine ourselves to the point of absolute control, but learn instead to accept things as they are or accept the way events ultimately unfold. I haven?t used antibacterial dish soap since moving in with Mike. At first this unnerved me a little, but I saw the bottle of orange gel by the breakroom sink today and imagined bottles upon bottles of the stuff being poured down drains all over the country, the cell membranes of countless bacteria being disassembled, molecule by molecule, the survivors stronger, better because of the onslaught. It?s important to note that I haven?t had a problem with infection since using non-antimicrobial soap.
» I came home to a message from Mike on Friday asking if I wanted to accompany him to the public safety supply warehouse, which I agreed to without much thought, despite the half-eaten remains of my final exam lying lifeless on the desk beside me and a buttload of unfinished research for a quarterly production analysis. Carrying this sort of weight with you everywhere can?t be healthy. Must mentally note to practice unshouldering burdens of school and work at will. And then on the drive over, Mike, obviously unsettled by my silent miserari, asked what was wrong and I said, "Nothing," even as I was eyeballing daggers of blame in his direction for my loss of time and productivity. It wasn?t until we?d finished at the warehouse ? where I learned that Level III body armor will stop six rounds fired from a .308 Winchester FMJ and that sometimes hostages suffer from a syndrome characterized by the development of camaraderie with their captor and malevolence towards the cops ? that I started to soften and take note of my unreasonable thoughts. I kept asking myself why he invited me when he knew I had work to do, when I stopped, rearranged the pieces and realized that he?d only asked because he wanted to spend time with me. Seeing the innocence in the gesture was a sudden burst of wind that toppled my angry house of cards, and I reached over to slip my hand into his. So, now he?s gone for the week, having left yesterday for training, and I was slightly apprehensive to be spending time alone in the apartment after quickly growing accustomed to his presence. Then, earlier today I realized that my anxiety didn?t stem from thoughts of being by myself, as much as from a discomfort at being unable to predict or envision his daily routine. When you date someone, you learn about their lives ? the hobbies they enjoy, where they work, what their job entails, the idiosyncracies of the people they interact with ? and you begin to form mental screenplays of their daily routine. They are actors on an invisible stage. Perhaps I?m the only one who does this, but it makes sense that we would want to fill in the gaps that form in the daily lives of the people we love. They, in a sense, become more real to us by way of imagination. On a completely different note, am I the only one who?s never heard of kudzu before? Furthermore, am I the only one who?s completely fascinated by it? Imported from Japan in 1876 and fostered to control soil erosion, the weed/vine has taken over the sauna paradisio of the American South, being observed to grow 12 inches in a 24 hour period during the summer. It climbs trees, limbers up telephone poles, shorts electric lines and clogs waterways, and while excellent at keeping dirt in its place, it kills virtually every plant in its peripheral. Kudzu was a good idea that worked a little too well. In fact, after discovering its destructive effects, researchers have spent the past 50 years trying to stop it, only to discover that some herbicide treatments actually make it grow better. Could germ warfare lead down similar avenues? With the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we could very well wake up one day to a world where jock itch and the clap are not only incurable, but fatal (to piggy back on humanist and prognosticator Kurt Vonnegut). Unrelated: thanks to an uninvited discussion on pregnancy, I am now aware of the rather less-than-desirable consequence of child birth, in which the pressure of the contractions causes fecal incontinence ? to be absolutely fair and clinical ? and, like the reaction I had to a particular anatomy story, whenever I see someone I?m not particularly fond of now, I can?t help but think: "Your mom probably took a big shit when you were born, and I?m not talking about childbirth-related fecal incontinence."
» In the wonderland of firm theory -- and it is a wonderland, let me tell you -- there were seven dwarves known as Sleepy, Dopey... oh, wait, wrong story... there were four dwarves known as Business Profit, Normal Rate of Return, Economic Profit, and Return on Stockholder?s Equity, and they all lived happily together in a big thatched cabin called the Free Enterprise System with bluebirds and rainbows all around. Just as in the previous fairytale that I almost confused with profit theory (understandably, of course), the names of the dwarves reflected a special characteristic that was unique to each one. Business Profit was the popular one, the "big man on campus" jock that was most well known, a little simple, but friendly to everyone (even those who didn?t understand his beloved sport of firm profits). He would go around all day long, whistling and explaining to everyone who?d lend an ear how calculating the residual between sales and obvious costs of doing business was the only way to play the profit game. Then there was the disheveled skater, Normal Rate of Return, the punk dwarf who did only the minimal required of him to operate in our beloved wonderland. Ask him, and the only profit that mattered was the minimum return needed to acquire and retain investors. The third little guy wasn?t a guy at all, but a shy, bookish dwarvette named Economic Profit, who philosophized all day long about costs of capital, opportunity costs, and other complicated, implicit expenditures that weren?t directly reflected in cost and revenue figures. Finally, the theater geek, Return on Stockholders Equity, or affectionately, ROE. ROE was a bit of an outcast, because she accounted for the variability of business profits, and therefore able to wear many masks. Her approach to profits was to use a rate, rather than an explicit figure, accounted for by dividing the net income of a firm by the book value of total assets and then subtracting that from the firm?s liabilities. One day, in an instance of strange, fateful circumstance, they were all assigned to detention in the library and they started to argue about how, exactly, they all related to one another. Although they started out quarreling and bickering and strutting around to cheesy 80?s music, after a brief music montage, they soon began to see that they were really all ways of measuring the amount of money a firm makes, and explained that some accounted for different business factors, but all of them focused on profits. Heck, two of them even had "Profit" as their last names! They got out of detention that day with a new-found respect for one another and each other?s view points and all four lived together, each using his or her unique perspective on profit to give firms a way to allocate economic resources efficiently, as well as give stockholders and investors various ways of calculating the economic health of the firm. Happily ever after, of course.
» I haven?t quite figured out what?s up with the ongoing love-hate relationship I have with school, conflicted about continuing, but encouraged to do so by the prospect that I?ll be finished in November. And then I wonder, "To what end?" because, considering the current economy, it seems that the only reasonable subsequence would be to enroll in something else and extend my educational boundaries by another foot in all directions, taking up something else that will add glimmer to my resume. The idealist in me likes this idea of being a lifetime student, but I?m pushing my way through linear regression models and beginning to think that this so-called idealist has officially relocated to Crazytown. And so I took a breather from my work to sit out on the green plastic lawn chairs that are strewn about the warm concrete, and take in the afternoon air that was filled with sounds of the neighborhood cricket chorus, the cicada-like hum of the air conditioners and the incessant drone of the interstate traffic that echoes off an ever-darkening ceiling of clouds, stormy clouds that I happen to take a lot of comfort in with their consistency and cooling cover, and I kicked back with a cup of Earl Gray to contemplate the air and noise of summer and the simple state of being alone ? something I haven?t gotten a chance to fully appreciate since moving in two weeks ago. Living with someone ? someone you love ? is an intensely humbling experience I?d recommend to everyone. It has the ability to clarify our perception of others and ourselves in a way that can?t really be achieved on an individual basis. I?ve noticed things about myself that I?m not too fond of, actions and reactions that would normally go unprovoked had I continued to live on my own. And the cool thing is that the discovery of these "logs in my eye" has not only provoked an intense desire towards self improvement but increased my appreciation for the person who puts up with them so gracefully on a daily basis. To think such revelations could stir such feelings of love and frustration and humility... I finished Edith Wharton?s Age of Innocence this morning. This, after the discovery Jane Austen, and I?ve come to realize I?m a sucker for period pieces, particularly ones that span generations and expend their characters on the frivolities of high society and fashion and sport (of course, ultimately discovering the deeper, underlying treasures in life such as loyalty, good humor, citizenship and love). Encompassing the turn of the 20th century, it is amusing to see how similarly older and newer generations have responded to one another, then and recently, as the latter unavoidably, simultaneously dismay and impress the former with often radical new perspectives on life. I sense a lot of the same reactions when spending time with my dad, which I?ve been doing a lot of lately, and it?s amusing to picture us repeating centuries of parent-child patterns.
Reminders My weekend hours well provided for, I?ve grown accustomed to company and an abundance of things to do: laze, drink coffee, play games, engage myself in conversation with a worthy partner, exercise, catch up on my reading, and daydream. Every once in a while, however, life decides that I?ve had enough comfort and good luck and decides to shake things up a bit. Having recently shed his skin of restrictive living in a probation house, Ricky invited us to a slew of gallery openings in Denver?s up-scaled Lodo area, accompanied by two other couples--most notable, a straight pair I met in the Springs back in ?99 or so who are beautifully matched, conversationally inspiring and well, just beautiful. I ran into Mason and a few other familiars I hadn?t seen out in a long time and wondered why I?d never been to these monthly openings before. The art was inspiring, yet frustrating at the same time because I tend to spot the obviousness of any work before I stop to consider the underlying contexts, if any, and think to myself, "I could do this." Ricky, being the true artist of the group, took everything in with an air of pure positivism, his golden face alighting on every track-lit work to praise or at least side-step any aversions. It had rained profusely all evening and we raced to the car and onto the flooded interstate, hoping to reach the house soon and dry off. On the way home, Mike and I talked about buying houses and creating some studio space, and I thought about how I?d set up my apartment dining room to house canvases and paint supplies a little over a year ago, when a mini-van that had been speeding past us in the left lane took a strange turn to the left and I saw the brake lights through Mike?s driver-side window. Instinctively, I feigned for the wheel while yelping an unintelligible warning and Mike?s face was suddenly illuminated by the headlights of the fish-tailed vehicle, now careening sideways down the interstate and facing the left side of our car. Foot on the gas, a turn on the wheel, and Mike pulled our car into the right lane, missing the side-swiping front end of the van that was now facing oncoming traffic as we sped ahead. I swung around in my seat, uttering curses under my breath, as traffic parted agilely despite the rain, a river of metal and water pulled by an unseen current around the miserable, unlucky boulder. We glanced at each other with that half-smile of surprise and incredulity, quickly averting our eyes to avoid exposing our alarm, a fear that had already thickened the air, and we dealt with the close call in strikingly opposite ways, as I sat silently stunned and Mike recounted in an excruciatingly endless stream of words what had happened, why it had happened and how it had happened, from every possible angle and in every possible permutation. And then we were home. The incident subsided from our kidneys and we relaxed into the rest of the weekend, but the violent swerving of all that metal and glass had left a definite impression in my mind, a reminder of how thread-thin close we are to the other side. Fortunately, life has ways of filling in these impressions--or perhaps we?ve discovered ways to obscure this precariousness that must have been so obvious before the invention of society and art and Play Station 2. Needless to say, I?m happy to have the reminder every once in a while, as long as it is just a reminder.
WM At work today, I ran across some math humor (you may be asking whether this is a joke in and of itself ? I assure you, mathematicians can be very funny): At Heathrow Airport today, an individual (later discovered to be a public school teacher) was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a compass, a protractor and a graphical calculator. Authorities believe he is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction. And a challenge for you fellow mathemeticians:
(Now we can add 1 to each side to get 2 = 3, and so on.) What is the problem with this logic? [7]
Gym Spotting Reluctantly, dedicatedly, we made our fourth or fifth trip to the gym last night and got pumped, lamenting the fact that the motivation to exercise is always experienced subsequent to the results ? i.e. hate it ? lift ? flex ? love it ? where it would be much easier if it were the other way around (without the hating part, of course). Then again, if it was easy, the occasional ripped, shirtless jogger on the Cherry Creek trail wouldn?t be that impressive and International Male would go out of business (or at least turn to hilite (hey, I?m not knocking it)). But all that lifting and cardio is hard work and well worth the payoff. (Glad to see you?re enjoying similar results.) It?s summer, colleges are out and the time of year has turned our gym into prime cruising territory, a habit that I?ve worked on curbing over the past few years, mainly because I?m tired of constant neck pain. Invariably, however, we end up observing the muscle parade together. Is this not a prime advantage to same-sex relationships? I?d always said that sharing a sexual preference opens the door to so many interesting topics of discussion that heterosexual couples can?t typically enjoy for reasons of disinterest or jealousy. Not that jealousy doesn?t play into the gay counterpart, but when the insecurity is overcome, it?s fantastic to be able to cruise with your boyfriend. And the best part is lusting after other guys hasn?t seemed to affect our own attraction towards each other. This would seem the path that leads many gay couples to consider experimenting or opening the relationship to a third (or more?), and though our comfort level isn?t quite to that point, it?s definitely an interesting dynamic that leads one to question the institutions, stereotypes and prejudices we have formed based on traditional, heterosexual relationships. Thoughts? [10]
» Be like an eye always seeing your own faults. But be like a blind person toward the faults of others.? Atisha
Death by Gagging We did some house hunting this weekend, and while pondering the existence of popcorn ceilings, garden gnomes and salmon bath fixtures, I also pondered my financial situation in regards to a new mortgage, finding it somewhat amusing a word and deciding that it must be of Old English/French roots?mort for death, gag for asphyxiation, followed by an e because, well, all Old English words end in e?and then later finding it not-so-amusing that my definition wasn?t very far from the truth.
The Tao of Growth Prince Wen Hui?s cook was carving up an ox. Every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every step of his foot, every thrust of his knee, with the slicing and parting of the flesh, and the zinging of the knife?all was in perfect rhythm, just like the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or a part in the Ching Shou symphony. Prince Wen Hui remarked, "How wonderfully you have mastered your art." The cook laid down his knife and said, "What your servant really cares for is Tao, which goes beyond mere art. When I first began to cut up oxen, I saw nothing but oxen. After three years of practicing, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. I now work with my spirit, not with my eyes. My senses stop functioning and my spirit takes over. I follow the natural grain, letting the knife find its way through the many hidden openings, taking advantage of what is there, never touching a ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. "A good cook changes his knife once a year because he cuts, while a mediocre cook has to change his every month because he hacks. I?ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and have cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the edge is as if it were fresh from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints. The blade of the knife has no thickness. That which has no thickness has plenty of room to pass through these spaces. Therefore, after nineteen years, my blade is as sharp as ever. However, when I come to a difficulty, I size up the joint, look carefully, keep my eyes on what I am doing, and work slowly. Then with a very slight movement of the knife, I cut the whole ox wide open. It falls apart like a clod of earth crumbing to the ground. I stand there with the knife in my hand, looking about me with a feeling of accomplishment and delight. Then I wipe the knife clean and put it away." "Well done!" said the Prince. "From the words of my cook, I have learned the secret of growth." From Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters, page 55.
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