January 2008 Archives

In a comment on my entry—2 years blogging—Brother Dan says he has had fun reading the blog (Thanks Brother Dan) and that also he is very near the anniversary (if that’s the right word) of his stroke that happened February 2 of 2007.  He also notes that the stroke might have carried him off, but it didn’t and he is very happy still to be here.  So am I: happy that he is here.

I am sure that day February 2, 2007, is much more vivid in his mind than mine.  Still funny how memory works, but I remember it quite vividly.  I was at one of those meetings the Writing Program has down in what’s called the UCEN where meeting rooms are located.  From those rooms you can look right out to the lagoon and towards the ocean.

I had stepped outside, at a break, to smoke a bit of a cigarette when my cell went off.  It was clear and bright day, more on the warm side than not.  Brother Dan was on the line, and I could gather from what he said that something had happened and he was now in the hospital.  At first I could follow what he was saying but as he continued I understood less and less; looking back I know aphasia was setting in.  But I didn’t know that at the time.

I went back in the room because the meeting had restarted.  Had I fully grasped the situation, I probably would have gone to the hospital.  But I didn’t and on the way into the room called Carol to see if she could call the hospital for me and clarify.  I sat there the rest of the meeting feel really anxious and out of it.  I was pretty scared.

I don’t remember anything else much about that day.  Just general outlines, sort of.  But funny in my mind’s eye, I can see or feel myself standing outside in the sun, holding a cigarette in one hand and my cell in the other listening as hard as I have ever listened to a phone call.  In my mind’s ear, I can almost hear Brother Dan speaking, but really I can’t.  It feels like those dreams I used to have.  I would pick up a book in the dream, and then I would start to read it, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t see the words.

I was going through my daily business of cleaning the crap spam out of my comments when I happened to think “how long have I been doing this”—blogging I mean.  I guess my unconscious was at work because as far as I am able to tell from the blog itself, January 31—two days from this now moment--will mark the end of my second year of keeping this blog.

Looking back, by January 31, 2006 (two years ago by my calculations) my brothers and I were getting really up to our necks in dealing with the health and living situations of Joan and WB.  That was a lot; there were all sorts of emotional currents running this way and that—at a time moreover when I had just turned 60.  I hadn’t realized turning 60 would be such a big deal and maybe it wouldn’t have been without having to deal also with the illness and then death of WB in February 2006.

But I think it would have been, I am now concluding, a pretty big deal in any case.  In fact, turning 60 may precipitate an identity crisis nearly as powerful as that of adolescence.  Part of that crisis, why it is so intense, has to do with the changing bodies, with raging hormones and so forth.  Who is or where is one in all those hormones and body changes.  But body changes occur or start to occur or have already begun to occur (depending on the person) also with age.  Hormones that once raged have, well, quieted down quite a bit.  One’s estrogen level (if one is a male) drops and with that so does muscle mass, and with that drop so does one’s strength drop off.  I really hate it when I find myself struggling to get the lid of some bottle or other or when I have to grab the banister going down the stairs when one of my knees start to ache.

And this is not even to mention—much—the changes that are occurring in the mirror.  At adolescence as I recollect I had pimples.  Powerful red blemishes that at the same time were a portent of things still to come.  Now I have relatively few blemishes of that kind but plenty of another: many, many wrinkles and a face that actually sags downward when I bend over the sink to brush my yellow teeth.  These changes also portent things to come, but quite different things than those adolescent blemishes portended.  Quite, quite different things indeed.

Another big shift too occurs.  While the flaming blemishes of the adolescent point towards the future, towards adulthood and goals to be achieve, and places to go and people to meet, the lines and wrinkles and sag in one’s face point one back towards the past.  I think.  Not towards the unknown future and what will be with all its attendant anxiety and expectation, but towards what has been and how that fits with who one is or isn’t and trying to locate some meaning it in all—with all the anxiety upon that.

That’s what I think I was starting to do back in January of 2006 on the blog. Sorting through things and trying to make some livable sense of it all.

Since the big rain Wednesday, the storm has abated considerably not quite living up to the projections for rain and high wind.  Nonetheless the wind has been strong; palm frawns litter the streets where non-indigeneous palm weeds are located.  And we have received about 1.5 more inches since Wednesday, putting us in the 5.5 to 6 inch range, well above the average for the whole month of January.

I went out looking around yesterday over by the campus and saw a boat that had slipped its moorings and run ashoal:

A bit further out beyond the boat, the seas were high at Campus Point:

We were discussing Karen Horney’s “Our Inner Conflicts.”  In the book she tries to define three basic neurotic strategies for dealing with deep, deep, deep inner conflict: the moving towards, the moving against, and the moving away.  The first seeks love, tends to avoid conflict, to be self sacrificing (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety); the second sees life as a jungle of all against all and tends to be aggressive and controlling (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety); the moving away moves away from conflict in the name of the of independence, seeking not to be dependent on any one or anything (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety”).

I asked students—understanding of course that in reality life is a lot more complex than any three types—to pick which type they tended more towards, or pretend to pick one in any case.  Describe the type using Horney’s theory and then provide examples from their own lives that illustrate or elaborate upon the type.

About half the class was present on that cold and wet day, so I made them sit in a circle and asked each student present to say what type they thought they were and then discuss their example.  I was half listening—because I sort of try also to listen around the edges of what they are saying—and one guy said he was the moving toward type (seeking to please others and win their approval) but then (maybe I missed something) he went on about how people are such jerks and so stupid.  So I said, I was lost and that he sounded more like the Moving Against type who sees himself as super strong and everybody else as weak or possible stupid.

Later another student read a quotation from her paper.  I am not sure if it was this one but something like it:

            …he (the moving towards type) persuades himself that he likes everybody, that they are all nice and trustworthy, a fallacy that not only makes for heartbreaking disappointments but also adds to his general insecurity.

Bingo, I said, and tapped the student on the arm (he was sitting right next to me) who had said people were jerks.  So this is what you meant; since as a moving towards type you want to see others as nice like yourself, you frequently find yourself pissed off at people when it turns out they are not nice. As a moving towards you project your own values on others; you idealize them and when the veil slips away and you see the warts you see them as jerks, etc, not perhaps because they really are jerks but because they were not quite the people you thought they were.

Bingo!  I said.  There’s a whole paper there.  Abstractions and examples make it possible for the teacher, who doesn’t understand much, to understand something.  It’s like a process.

Bingo!

A while back Cousin Lucy, in a comment I accidentally deleted, expressed a kind of apology at having found my description of my experiences with the blood panel and the urine sample hilarious.

I could not be more flattered or honored.  When I can—which is far from every entry—I try to be funny.  I exaggerate a tiny bit here or there to bring out the comic potential in an incident, word, or action.  The humor though is damn dead pan which is true also of my verbal or spoken humor. 

For example while getting to know Nephew Stephen’s little Jake when we visited down in San Diego, I asked him if all his toes had growed in yet, since we Tingles have late growing toes, and did he have an extra toe, since we Tingles sometimes grow an extra one and have some shoe fitting problems, consequently.  This was all dead pan and the poor boy looked mighty befuddled, and decided to run off when I said I would show him my extra toe if he wanted to see it.

I don’t know where this wise cracking comes from.  I did it all though school.  I would just let out something and the whole class would laugh, and it would be enough in the ball park that even the teacher didn’t get annoyed.

I still do it.  At meetings with my colleagues.  Sometimes, I must admit, quite inappropriately.  Once our head secretary was present at one of our interminable meetings and giving us the details of our piddling budget for such things as paper, and the copying machine, and envelopes. Turns out over half the budget was for the telephones.

I have this telephone in my office.  It’s useless.  It doesn’t take messages anymore and I can’t dial outside the area code with it.  So I started to get up and said I would go over right then and get my phone and give it to her if that would help with the budget. Cause I didn’t need the damn thing anymore.  And everybody laughed.  I don’t know why since I was dead serious.

Anyway I get real pleasure out of giving people a laugh even though I don’t know why or how I do it.  Humor is a tricky thing.

But if I can get somebody to laugh, I considered it my Boy Scout good deed for the day. There’s a Hebrew word, mitzvah that has come to mean an “act of human kindness.”

For me, giving a laugh or getting one, why it’s a mitzvah.

Well my subjective impression that I had not seen it rain so hard so constantly for so long in all my time in SB since 1976 appears confirmed.  Brother Steve comments to that effect and CNN reported that a long standing record for rain in one day in SB was broken Wednesday.  More than four inches recorded at the airport not a mile from where Carol and I are located.

More rain is said to be on the way as this picture suggest.  The bird upper right is a pelican, I think.

Clouds are sometimes said to "scud."  I think these clouds are "scudding" across the sky.

Between the scudding clouds and the stormy sea, a sliver of one of the Channel Islands is visible.

A dark and gloomy sky, suggesting further rain.

I sit here feeling like an idiot.  This morning when I tried to pour coffee the lid came off the pot and I managed to give my left wrist a pretty good scalding.  I have no one to blame but myself since last night when I fixed up the pot to make coffee I didn't apparently put the lid on properly.  So my left wrist hurts.  I have been applying ice to it, but it's hard to keep the ice applied in a plastic bag when one is typing.  The burn is no the downside of the wrist.  I tried to push the ice inside my sweater cuff and use it to hold the ice in place.  But that didn't work.  So I just got pissed and stupidly I attached the ice to my wrist with masking take.  That's all I could find.  Now what am I going to do.  The ice is melting and I have attached the bag to my wrist with masking tape.  To get new ice in that plastic bag, I am going to have to RIP that masking tape off my wrist, taking all sorts of hair with it.  Talk about dumb.

I need to start think more about the consequences of my actions.

But it's probably too late for that.

Why should I start now?  

I kid you not:

As previously noted, clouds--the portent of a coming storm--made their appearance over the Ellwood Bluffs on MLK Day.  Tuesday it started to rain, and then Wednesday--like cats and dogs, mice and rats, elephants and cows.  I have lived in SB since 1976 and don't remember rain coming down so hard and so constantly for six hours straight.

Out back of the condo, Lake Ocean Meadows began to form (Ocean Meadows is the name of the golf course where the water built up).  The build up of water in Lake Ocean Meadows--about a foot deep at its deepest--is one reason the golf course is not likely to be developed.  It floods and then drains out onto the lagoon.  You can't really see in this pic, but ducks have started to gather on the newly formed Lake Ocean Meadows.

Snow appeared on the moutains out back of SB:

On MLK Day, Carol and I walked out to Ellwood.  We got lucky. I had never seen the tide out this far before.  Way, way out.  People say that as Spring approaches the tides go out further.  I took this picture standing on a spot a 100 yard out from the usual shoreline.  Those things sticking up--appear to be the remains of a foundation for something--well, I had never seen them before.  I would hate to think of a swimmer or surfer hitting them.  They could get cut.

Looking back towards the bluffs--clouds.  A storm was coming in and indeed it rained later in the evening. 

Perhaps because of the impending rain, the air was incredibly clear and the channel islands--sometimes not visible at all--stood out clearly against the horizon. 

To the north.

I swear the light was just gorgeous.  We bumped into a guy taking pictures who said that this stretch of beach, extending about 4.5 miles from UCSB towards the north has officially been saved from further development.  He said this may be the longest stretch of beach so preserved on the entire California Coast.  We are lucky. 

Then I think: System Restore.  I thought System Restore last night, but once many moons ago I used System Restore and it didn’t restore a damn thing.   But I am on the verge of despair and so decide to cast my fate to the wind and take desperate measures. I find System Restore under hard drive Maintenance.  Set it to the day before my accident; and click “System Restore.” 

While I am waiting for SYSTEM RESTORE to do its business, I am like multi-tasking and phone the people who made the external hard drive that busted a couple of days back.  I am on hold but surprisingly quickly I get a tech person.  They are located in upstate New York and he says it’s just freezing outside.

I turn on the bad drive and hold my cell up to it and the guy says, it’s not the drive.  It’s the fan.  They were doing their best to make a quiet drive and the over did it with the fan; with the result that parts start rubbing.  So I can send it to him and he will fix it and send it back or he can send me a new fan and I can install it—I opt for the second option.

And as I hang up---or whatever the hell you do with a cell—since nobody really hangs up anymore—I looked around and WHAM-BAM I see my old desk top—not the whole thing; but the picture I have of the barren moon.  I have a barren moon picture as my desk top and then all the icons start appearing and then I check it out and every damn link and setting is there and working.

SYSTEM RESTORED! It’s the single best moment I have had in two days—though I should not have had to go through any of this techno-nonsense in the first place. But I am so tied into my techno-stuff especially web and word processing (and now also music) that having one of them broken is like losing a hand or something. 

I had a bad computer weekend.

I bought this fancy external hard drive to back up my songs to and what do you know but all of a sudden it starts making this grinding noise, like a hard drive does when it’s about to die.  And even if it is not about to die, I can’t use it when I record because the noise would get on the recording.

Boy, that pisses me off.  On the warranty it says they have a special overnight return, replace policy should the hard drive go bad, so I call and what do you know—but nobody home.  Hard to see how they can have an overnight return policy when there’s nobody there to take your call.

So I get worried I will lose what I have recorded and somehow manage to get the stuff transferred from that drive to another older backup drive I have.  Looks like I have managed to save it.

And I decide while I am at it to back up all the stuff on my other computer, my PC where I do all my school work and my blog because I haven’t backed it up in months.  So I do that, and the next morning when I turn the thing back on, nothing comes up….Nothing.  Then the machine starts doing something on its own, so I wait.

And bingo all of a sudden I am looking at a whole new desk top.  My familiar desk top is all gone.  I can’t locate it anywhere.  And that means too that my Mozali web browser is gone; all my links are gone—to my blog, to the place where I make the blog, to my teaching page—everything.

I am beyond pissed—I am like torpid and paralyzed by pisshood.  I do a check and I see, thank god, that everything is still there.  I didn’t lose any data.  But I can’t get my old desktop to appear.  I don’t know what I did wrong or how to set it right.  I could spend all day trying and not get it right.  So I decided to live with it and, thank goodness, because I have been doing this for some time I get things sort of operational, restore links and so on.

But in the process the damn thing apparently decided to upgrade itself or something because my Microsoft word page has all sorts of different colors on it.  It used to be sort of a grim light blue and now I am staring at a page with bright blue trim all around it.  Makes me nervous.

In the meantime, I completely forgot to check to see if Greenville got another couple of inches of rain Saturday night, as was previously forecast.

What day is this?  Monday?  I have spent the whole weekend in a daze.  Thank goodness I don’t teach today.  MLK day.

Maybe I can recover my mental faculties by the time I get back in the classroom.

I made a mistake and deleted the comments from Steve—about posting to the blog—and Lucy Dean about finding my “normal” entry in part hilarious.

But I get spammed every day.  Hundreds and Hundreds of spams sometimes each day. The spam doesn’t show up on the blog because I have a spam detector.  It automatically keeps spam from being posted to the site, for example, when the name of the person trying to post is something like “xyghtz.”  I get an amazing amount of spam from people with names like that.

Maybe these people use names like that because they are embarrassed or trying to conceal their true identities for legal reasons.  I get spam for example from people like “xyghtz” advertising midget sex sites.  Last week for example the spam for midget sex sites was out of control, as if there was some sort of special on midget sex.

Anyway the spam gives me a glimpse into the seamy side of the American libido.  It is a glimpse I could do without.  So nearly every day I try to clean up the spam in my comments.  But the non-spam is mixed right in with the spam and if I am not paying enough attention, as was apparently the case this morning, I may delete non-spam, like Stephen’s and Lucy’s comments, right along with the spam.

Just by way of explanation.  Nothing is wrong with the comment function or with the comments I deleted.  My mistake. 

Cousin Beth reported a couple days back that Snow! was headed for Greenville, SC and vicinity.

And sure enough it hit  Wednesday. 

I found this snowy picture of downtown Greenville on the web.  Looks pretty snowy to me.

Checking out the weather map, I deduce that snow did not make it down to Laurens and vicinity, though they were in for some cold, miserable rain.

I expect that if it snowed in Greenville it had to have snowed also up around Asheville where Jenny Bannister and clan live.  But I could find no pictures of snowy Asheville.

I remember snow in Ora as a child.  In my mind’s eye, I see brother Steve, all wrapped up in snow clothing, running out into the snow and suddenly disappearing because he had fallen into a sort of trench that had been concealed by snow falling on the bushes that surrounded the trench.  Or maybe it was Brother Dave.

This little picture by the late Reverend Alexander has snow in it. My understanding—perhaps incorrect—is that the late Reverend Alexander, having retired, left the Ora area, but came back and took up residence in the house WB built.  He was discovered dead in that house—I have been told—a couple days after his demise.

But that was long ago and far away—in the distant and increasingly dim past.

Sometime this Month—I think it was January 2, I went in for my yearly physical.  I sat there alone for a time in the doctor office thing room with that table you can lie back on in my nakedness covered by one of those smock things that you can tie up in the back but I didn’t tie it up, and felt so damn tired I lay back and closed my eyes and felt I would take a snooze.

But the doctor person came in pretty quickly.  Actually she is not a doctor but a registered nurse, and Carol and I have been seeing her for at least 15 years, maybe more, for our diverse flues, aches, pains, x-rays, meds and yearly physicals.  Her name is Donna and she is good at what she does: screen people to see if they need to see a doctor about something specific, like their carotid arteries or something.

I always dread the yearly physical because I figure they will find that I have cancer or that I am wasting away from some strange disease.  I start worrying about it at least 2 weeks before and by the time I get there my blood pressure is up like I am heading for a coronary.  Also I get pissed off because they always weigh me with my clothes on; like what sort of reading is that supposed to give….I mean my damn shoes probably weigh four pounds.  I insist on taking those off even though they don’t ask me to.

Donna did a med check and updated the documents and made sure I didn’t need a stool thing because last year they did the colon thing with the tube all the way up and back, I might add.  And she did the other stuff like with the finger—and she said the prostate felt fine, solid and in no way irregular.

But even though everything seemed A-OK I went away still convinced something was probably amiss, and so went in immediately the next day for the blood panel and urine test.  I went really early but still had to wait 45 minutes and when I went into the little bathroom with the sliding panel in the wall where you stick the urine, well, when I went in there I somehow lost control of the little urine cup and pissed propelled the little cup right into the toilet.  But I retrieved it and rinsed it off in the sink and urinated in it hoping that the test wouldn’t come back saying my urine had excessive chlorine in it.

Finally I got the results in the mail, and the Urine was OK.  In fact, it says the specific gravity of my urine is 1.002, whatever that means.  And after Urine Color it says Yellow.  This sort of stumps me because I would hate to think of Urine that isn’t yellow.  I wonder what sort of test they did to determine the color.  Do you think maybe they eye-balled it?

And everything else was normal.  The Comprehensive Metabolic Panel was normal; the cholesterol was better than normal; in fact I showed improvement in all categories.  Like my total cholesterol was like 155.  When I started this cholesterol stuff about 20 years ago I was at 360.  So there has been improvement in that area due both to Lipitor and diet…Also my Thyroid Reflex Panel was Normal; and my Complete Blood Count was Normal.

And my Prostate (PSA) was Normal and I am very thankful for that because I was talking with Jay at the club whose PSA was not normal, and he had to go in for an operation, and he said they did it arthroscopically though a little cut right under his Navel!  He showed the scar so I don’t think he was kidding me.  I said, Jay, but isn’t the damn thing down there between the legs and he said yes and I said how the hell did they get the thing out through that little scar right under his navel so they could work on it, and he said he didn’t know and really didn’t want to.

I don’t want to either!

I had my students do the abbreviated Meyers-Briggs personality inventory.  Interestingly, as a group, the “E’s” or extroverts outnumbered the “I’s” or introverts about 4 to 1.  I wonder if that imbalance is true of the general population.  I need to do more research.  But I had expected more “E’s” though not quite at that ratio.

I was also surprised to notice, for the first time I think, that the “J’s” or judging types also outnumber the “P’s” or perceiving type by about the same 4 to 1 ratio. 

This interests me partly because I am both an I and a P and am apparently considerably outnumbered by all those E’s and J’s.  Also while I think I know the difference between the E’s and the I’s, I am not quite sure about the difference between the P’s and the J’s.

I got to thinking if maybe my being a P has something to do with the trouble I have giving grades.  Grading is judging.  That’s for sure.  And I don’t take to it all that well.  I know some of my fellow teachers have this sort of box thing going.  They line up the criteria for a paper:  Organization, Mechanics, Unity, Paragraphing—all sorts of things like that, and they read a paper and they give a number to each category and then they add them all up and that’s their judgment.

So from this I deduce that to be a J type a person has to have in his/her head (or from somewhere) a kind of list of criteria that assists in making a judgment.  Sort of like the box scores in baseball.  These are pretty clear because they are numbers.  X is not doing so well because his batting average is .244 or something like that.  So if you have these criteria and you use numbers you can arrive at a judgment and feel pretty comfortable about that judgment.

Certainly this would be true especially of those big classes where all the tests are multiple choice and then you add up the number correct and you arrive at a judgment.

When I read a student paper I certainly use in the back of my head some criteria—like organization or paragraphing or use of mechanics—but lots of other stuff is going on too.  Say, this student has written a pretty clear paper.  It’s organized and pretty easy to read.  But I get the feeling the student really hasn’t engaged the material at all.  The student wrote it, as I put it to myself, with his or her left hand.  And then, on the other hand, I find this paper that’s pretty screwed up—the paragraphing is off, and the mechanics are on the poor side—but I get the feeling the student really has tried to engage the material, to think about it and to write about it in a different sort of way.

What am I supposed to do?  The second student seems to be trying to learn something, to move forward and go ahead.  The first student has been well schooled and knows how to do just enough to do something satisfactory.

So my P inclinations really make it hard for me to perform my J duties.

First the San Diego Chargers.  I have been following them through their ups and mostly downs since about 1964 when they played in this tiny stadium next to Balboa Park.  So I just had to watch their game against Indianapolis.  They won strangely, though in the process LT—the league leading rusher—went out with a bruised knee, and then the erratic Rivers, the QB, also went out with a wobbly knee too.  Next week I expect they will be massacred by the robotic New England Patriots. It will be like watching paper go into a paper shredder.

Then, I watched New York against the Cowboys.  I didn’t watch as much of that.  I just wanted to see the Cowboys take a lick’en.  I have disliked them since the Tom Landry days when those Cowboys (I mean what are cow boys; let’s face it they are just boys with cows) claimed to be America’s team.  I don’t like mixing patriotism with sports or with much of anything else.

Then I watched some of a movie, as I recollect…and drifted off into a nap for a bit.  And that evening I watched a Laker’s game.  I have been watching the Lakers since 1980 when Magic, with his life-giving vitality, showed up on the court.  So I just had to watch, and they are doing better than last year.  When bingo—some time in the 2^nd quarter—their new, young center went down with a knee injury.

Three knee injuries in one day.  At least ones I remember.  I expect there were a lot more than that.

So I thought, jeez Nick…this is a psychological breakthrough.  You managed to rest—or at least try to—for a whole day.  But I wake up the next morning feeling completely washed out.  We have to go to the bank to sign some papers and while I am sitting there feeling like a lump (Carol says I looked like hell) the guy there starts talking about this stomach flu that’s going around, and I become more and more aware of gurgling noises in my stomach and the fact that I have had pretty sharp gas pains lately.  I have gas a lot but usually not pains with it.  And about half way through my first class, I start having muscle aches through by back and up my shoulder and mid-way through the next class I have a headache and feel completely wiped out.

So I didn’t have a psychological break threw.  I was taking a Tingle Vacation and didn’t know it.  Getting sick being the Tingle Idea of a Vacation.

 Today—I seem to be status quo—aches, pains, fatigue, but thank goodness so far no fever.  I hate fevers.

But it’s in kairos, Stern says, that things happen.  Also this is where subjectivity unfolds, however silently or unconsciously.  I think he is right about that—the self’s experience of the self must unfold in that disappearing now; there’s no other place for it to do so. Even the memory of something for the subject must appear in the now moment and the same with anticipations of the future.

So how to get into touch with that.  In psychoanalytic sessions, to try to get in touch with that, Stern developed the “micro-analytic interview.”  Before he gave it that mysterious name, in practice in his office, he spoke of it with his clients as the “breakfast interview.”  He would ask, “What did you experience this morning at breakfast?”  Mostly, clients would say, “What?  Not much.”  But then Stern asked questions designed to get the client to move from what the had done (not much) to his or her affective experience of what had been going on beyond and behind or right below the surface of that “not much.”

For example, I think I may go through a pretty thick subjective or affect laden “moment” just making coffee.  Sometimes, yes, I do this distractedly or mechanically, with my mind elsewhere, but right below the surface of that I am aware that I don’t really like making the coffee.  For one thing, making coffee is for me a really repetitious act.  I get tired of the repetition.  First the cleaning out the remains of the previously made coffee; then he counting out of all those scoops.  Doing that requires I find the scoop to do the scooping with.

Sometimes the scoop is not there.  Usually it’s right there in the bag with the coffee beans.  Sometimes though it isn’t.  Any why I must wonder do I buy coffee beans rather than pre-ground coffee when I leave the scoop in the bag of beans and that means in turn that the beans are getting all dried out, since I usually don’t close the package tightly.  When the scoop is not there I get irritated because the scoop is lost.  And there I feel frustrated because lately it seems I am all the time losing things.  I have not yet mastered this really good idea: a place for everything and everything in its place.

Well, this is just a start of how things might look from the perspective of kiaros.  I haven’t made the coffee yet, much less made breakfast. 

I am wondering how this subjective interview thing might work from the perspective of teaching writing.  Or what the implications of what it might be for the teaching of writing.

Let’s see.  Week 1 of Winter Quarter Classes, 2008.  Done with.  I can’t remember having so many people trying to crash, or so many emails from potential crashers.  No instruction took place on the first day, what with the class given over mostly to figuring out who was there and who wanted to be there.  That was on Monday, and many of the students looked out of it and glassy eyed.

I didn’t know till I asked that the dorms—I have quite a few first year students in one class—didn’t open for re-occupation till 1 in the afternoon Sunday, the day before.  A few looked wiped out because they had just got in.  I don’t get it.  With the dorms opening at 1 students have less than twenty-four hours to get their acts together, buy books, if they know what books to buy, and figure out any problems with their schedules before they start classes.

The next session was also pretty much a bust.  A good third of the students hadn’t managed to drag their butts over to IV to get the reader for the class—and it’s not just getting over there.  Once there they have to stand in long lines.  And not just for my class but for any of the other four or five they might be taking.

Two students came up to me with printed out schedules that said they were supposed to be in this room, the one I was teaching in, but for a different class.

Since I teach MW I don’t have class on two Mondays, the one that’s called President’s Day and MLK day.  The way I figure it what with this wasted first week and the two days off later in the quarter, my class is already 1/5 over.

I don’t think this is any way to run a university, not if it is to have an educational purpose.  As it is, I suppose many students don’t mind.  After all, it’s in and out.  Education too has taken its direction from the fast-food industry.

One class—it’s called Writing 1—is filled with students who failed a writing placement exam.  Thus they have to take Writing 1, and I guess it’s not that surprising but the number of minority students in this class is much higher than my other class, Writing 2, filled with people who did pass the placement exam.

I was kidding around in W1 about how many students had not declared a major and I don’t know what I said or how it came up but one Latino student said he didn’t know what to major in because it all seemed so hard, so he was trying to find something at least that he liked.  And he came out with too: that in high school he hadn’t had to do a damn thing.  And around the room, here and there, a good number of students nodded recognition.  They too had to do nothing in high school.
 

Man!

So I went over to the Post Office and went to the spot where I had picked up undelivered mail before and having waited ten minutes was told that I was in the wrong line and should go to the main office where one picked up undelivered, registered mail. 

Registered means, I guess, somebody has to sign for it and that’s different from undelivered mailed that isn’t registered. I guess if I were shipping somebody’s mother’s ashes to them I would send it registered too because you would want to make sure you didn’t deliver the ashes to the wrong person or something.

So I go and wait in the main line for another ten minutes and go up to one of the three clerks there, and I am told that I am in the wrong line.  Instead I should go to the line for the guy who has the “key.”  How the hell I am supposed to know who has the key or even that there is one, I don’t know.  And I don’t know even what the key is for though I guess they may have a special place for locking up ashes.

I go to the clerk that the other clerk pointed at and wait behind this young couple who appear to be mailing something to somebody in a corn flake box with tape all around it, and they go on and on about how to ship it.  Finally, I get to the guy with the key and say I was sent to him because he has this mysterious key.  Then he looks at the card I brought with me—the one left by the post person—and he looks at me and concludes I am not Carol Press.

I saw no, I am not Carol Press, but that Carol Press is my wife and we have been married for like 30 years and we live right over there in Goleta by the nine hole golf course.  And he mumbles something about bending the rules, and I say, I am here to pick up the package because the package contains the cremated ashes of my wife’s mother and my wife gets upset thinking about her mother’s ashes, much less picking them up, so I am there to do that for her.

I mean what was the guy going to say to that. So he disappears and after another ten minutes comes back with this neatly wrapped package, that is pretty heavy and about the size of a slightly flattened loaf of bread and I stick it in the house somewhere where Carol will not have to see it or deal with it until she is ready to do so.

Thanks to Cousin Lucy, in a previous comment, for clearing up the mystery of the sickly white egret which turns out to be not an egret at all but a Grey Heron and probably a perfectly healthy one which only looked sickly to me because it wasn’t acting like an egret, which thank goodness, it wasn’t because that’s not what it was.

Lucy said it was a Grey Heron and the picture of one on Wikipedia sure looks like my Grey Heron except that one pictured in Wikipedia lives or lived in Africa. 

Sorry.

Thanks also to Nephew Brian for the pictures taken from rooftop of the building where he resides of the sky and the Oakland sky line where his building is located.

I don’t know that they had any philosophical motive or not but Brother Dave and Sister-in-Law Teresa passed Christmas and a good portion of the Holidays not at home by their festive Christmas tree but in their motor home at Joshua Tree, California.  Joshua Tree is located out in the California Desert near 29 Palms.  I think there was a movie called 29 Palms or maybe it was an Album.

While Joshua Tree is in the desert—it is winter—and from this picture of Brother Dave it appears the desert can get pretty cold.

Oh—I just noticed—410 pm, Tuesday—that a number of folks did the abbreviated Briggs-Myers.  Thanks.  I hope it was some fun and am sure I will have some analytic thoughts there upon later.  

For kicks, I am asking my students to take an abbreviated form of the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory.  It’s supposed to sort of tell you who you are.  Online it’s possible to find a number of sites that offer the profile, but too many of them cost money.  I found one for my students to use that doesn’t charge.  So I ran through the inventory again myself and once again—for the nth time—I came out an INFP.  What is an INFP; well, here’s what they say:

The Portait of the Healer (INFP)

Healer Idealists are abstract in thought and speech, cooperative in striving for their ends, and investigative and attentive in their interpersonal relations. Healer present a seemingly tranquil, and noticiably pleasant face to the world, and though to all appearances they might seem reserved, and even shy, on the inside they are anything but reserved, having a capacity for caring not always found in other types. They care deeply-indeed, passionately-about a few special persons or a favorite cause, and their fervent aim is to bring peace and integrity to their loved ones and the world.

Healers have a profound sense of idealism derived from a strong personal morality, and they conceive of the world as an ethical, honorable place. Indeed, to understand Healers, we must understand their idealism as almost boundless and selfless, inspiring them to make extraordinary sacrifices for someone or something they believe in. The Healer is the Prince or Princess of fairytale, the King's Champion or Defender of the Faith, like Sir Galahad or Joan of Arc. Healers are found in only 1 percent of the general population, although, at times, their idealism leaves them feeling even more isolated from the rest of humanity.

Healers seek unity in their lives, unity of body and mind, emotions and intellect, perhaps because they are likely to have a sense of inner division threaded through their lives, which comes from their often unhappy childhood. Healers live a fantasy-filled childhood, which, unfortunately, is discouraged or even punished by many parents. In a practical-minded family, required by their parents to be sociable and industrious in concrete ways, and also given down-to-earth siblings who conform to these parental expectations, Healers come to see themselves as ugly ducklings. Other types usually shrug off parental expectations that do not fit them, but not the Healers. Wishing to please their parents and siblings, but not knowing quite how to do it, they try to hide their differences, believing they are bad to be so fanciful, so unlike their more solid brothers and sisters. They wonder, some of them for the rest of their lives, whether they are OK. They are quite OK, just different from the rest of their family-swans reared in a family of ducks. Even so, to realize and really believe this is not easy for them. Deeply committed to the positive and the good, yet taught to believe there is evil in them, Healers can come to develop a certain fascination with the problem of good and evil, sacred and profane. Healers are drawn toward purity, but can become engrossed with the profane, continuously on the lookout for the wickedness that lurks within them. Then, when Healers believe thay have yielded to an impure temptation, they may be given to acts of self-sacrifice in atonement. Others seldom detect this inner turmoil, however, for the struggle between good and evil is within the Healer, who does not feel compelled to make the issue public.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I do think this captures, in its particular and peculiar language, some aspects of me.  Although I am a bit repelled at the idea that I have something in common with Joan of Arc.

The free online site may be accessed by clicking here.  It doesn’t take long.  Read carefully enough to understand the question but try not to think at all about the answer.

If you do run through the inventory, let me know what kind of person it says you are and if you agree or not.  Or if you think the whole thing is just bunk.

It would be cool to know who we are, especially us Tingles, since we seem a particular clan.

Again for the free online site click here. 

A while back I wrote an article or essay called “Death and the Writing Instructor,” and since I had written it I sent it off to a journal, but I doubt it will see the light of day because I have seen almost no articles in academic journals on writing with titles like “Death and the Writing Instructor.”

I wrote it to try to explain to myself why teaching has more recently become quite hard for me, and I am thinking about it right now because tomorrow I start up yet another quarter as a Writing Instructor.  This time Winter Quarter, 2008.

My argument—to the extent I had one—was that teaching is a temporal activity, having some how to do with the passage of information and thoughts and ideas of one generation to the next.  It has psychologically something to do with what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called “generativity,” and that has something to do with the psychological need to care for generations that follow your own. 

This is sort of an obvious thing; many parents do seek to set up situations, one way or another, that might help their children out after they are gone.  Think inheritances.  But Erikson takes this out a step further and sees signs of generativity in social institutions, policies and laws established in the present with the primary intent of preparing the ground for future generations.  Right now of course the prime example might be the attempt of organizations and governments to establish policies and to make plans to head off the massive upheavals that might result, for the next generation, from global warming.

So built right into the heart of education—of a certain kind—is the awareness of time or temporality.  The teacher, so to speak, is in the middle of the stream standing on shifting sands.  This is a precarious position I argue and full of potential for anxiety.  For an awareness of the movement of generations necessarily implies awareness, no matter how low down and unconscious, of one’s own location in time and that this time is passing (along with you).

 This may seem a grandiose notion of teaching and education, but it seems to be the one I am stuck with.  And in this position, one might try to fight off the anxiety by just throwing up one’s hands and saying, “Après moi le deluge!”  I mean, who the hell cares, since, if I am lucky, the crap that is coming down will come down after I am gone.  One could develop a whole philosophic position from this, and it would be damn hard to argue against.

That might be the position I am tempted to take.  But paradoxically, if I did so, while it might afford some relief, it would probably also take away the energy or the ideals that have fueled my work as a teacher so far.

Maybe tomorrow when I go back into the classroom I will look inside and figure out where I am, though mostly I will probably be pissed at the inadequate technical resources, taking roll, and having to turn away crashers.

Thank goodness!

No rain.  So we hoofed it out to the ocean, and caught some pelicans, who have been showing up lately in greater numbers, doing their thing.

Here they head for a wave; they glide in the updraft created right in front of the wave.

There they go! Over the Wave...

We need rain.  During the fall, rain was predicted several times but did not eventuate.  This time though they may be onto something.  A storm is a-brewing.  I find confirmation in the odd cloud patterns over Elwood.

 

  And also looking back towards the mountains this strange piano key pattern of clouds, marching across the sky.  This may portend something—at least a change is occurring.

And finally birds are behaving berserkly—moving inland—and driving home I came across this pack of crows, re Hitchcock’s birds, all strung out on a wire.

Tomorrow will tell the tale.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

While trying to find a name for those piano key clouds I came across a page with pictures of "rare" clouds.  I swear if I ever saw this one anywhere near where I lived, I would run in side, and go to the basement or dig a basement on the spot and possibly pee myself while doing so:

This time my mind was roaming and for some reason I remembered that Homo sapiens women are born with—or have present at birth—all the eggs, stored in the ovaries I suppose, that they will ever have.  And then I wondered if this was also true of chickens, but got all confounded when I realized chicken eggs appear outside of the body of the chicken and the eggs of homo sapiens women do not because they have wombs.

So then I wondered how the hell a chicken produces an egg.  Maybe a chicken does not have a womb but there must be some place in a chicken where the egg builds up like it does to a full egg size and then pops out.  I was amazed that I had never thought of this before in my entire life.  I had never given even a single second’s thought to this issue of chicken anatomy.

I have long felt the egg itself to be kind of miracle of food packaging.  Here there is this neat, white (or some other color) sort of oval shaped thing with food right inside it.  True, the oval shape makes for an unstable object. Square eggs would be better for the purposes of shipping since they could be stacked next to each other more efficiently than is now the case, but that might be a real pain for the chicken.

Out the window went my nap!  My mind was no longer roaming. I consternated myself by suddenly realizing that I had never adequately reflected on the origin of an egg.  So I went and looked it up on the web.  Turns out—and I had never thought of this either!—that the egg shell while feeling hard to the touch is actually at the microscopic level a permeable membrane.  Well, naturally, of course…the egg needs oxygen and were the shell not permeable the little chicken inside would die.  That would be pretty much a self-defeating egg, one without a permeable shell.  I could have concluded that pretty much deductively since growing things do need oxygen.  But as I said I hadn’t ever given it a single thought.

Then I found out that the chicken does not create the shell; the egg does.  The egg or oven generates the genetic information necessary to build up the shell around itself; otherwise it could not develop, lacking a womb in which to do so. So the ovum builds its own womb so to speak.

I still cannot conclusively answer the question: which came first the chicken or the egg.  Actually I hate chicken egg questions, like the nature-nurture questions, as being mostly a waste of time, fit material for philosophic pedants, I suppose.  This I call bad philosophy.  But I think I can now say conclusively that the ovum comes before the shell and the chicken with the ovum inside of it comes before the ovum, and in this way I can conclude that the chicken does come before the egg in the case of any particular chicken or egg.  But the chicken egg question—as a philosophic matter—is not about any particular chicken or egg that ever existed or ever will.

So there went my nap.

In my ongoing pursuit of a good night’s sleep, I have been led to check into circadian rhythms.  One might think that going to sleep in darkness and waking when the light comes up is “natural.”  I suppose it is, but also very complicated. 

Circadian rhythms are produced endogenously.  They are built into the body, per se, and not the result of an external stimulus, such as the sun coming up or alternately going down.  They were discovered by a French person who noted that a certain flower opened and closed its leaves when left completely in the dark in the course of a day cycle.

Or in other words, if a person was locked in a room with 24 hour light, he or she would nonetheless, with no cue from the sun, begin to feel drowsy and sleepy at one time and wakeful at another.

The clock is said to go in a 24 hour cycle, though this is not accurate since the idea of a 24 hour day is but a human convention.  More accurately one might say that the rhythm goes though a complete cycle from one sunset to the next, even though the rhythm is not stimulated by the sun setting.

This rhythm is found in all sorts of plants and animals and evolutionarily speaking must have arisen from some relation to the movements of the sun.

Why I have to wonder—did it become necessary for the body to internalize the mechanism of the cycle.  What ever the reason, it did.

Whatever the reason when a certain time of day is reached, say night, the biological clock sets in motion the release of the hormone melatonin which is said to induce sleep.  But this clock does respond to some degree to external stimuli; when for example the seasons change the clock resets itself to synchronize with the changes in light and dark.

Some believe that some sleep disorders may be related to screw ups in the circadian rhythms.  Jet-lag is the prime example; people traveling from the US to China may take a week to readjust the clock.  They feel awake when it is dark and sleepy when it is light.  Some believe that work at the genetic and cellular level may help with people whose clocks seem permanently screwed up.

Another factor leading to screw ups may be the electrical light bulb.  Most likely in the pre historic past, when there were no light bulbs, your average cave person went to sleep when the sun went down and arouse when the sun came up.  This would make sense—a perfect synchronicity between sun and the biological clock. 

Others argue that the winter blues may in part result from the abruptness of the time change produced by the artifice of Day Light Savings Time.  These people are pretty serious and believe that a good deal of mental distress, even illness may be produced by Day Light Savings Time.

Personally, I dread each year the arrival of Day Light Savings Time.  Perhaps my sense of fatigue is produced by the government of the United States that instituted Day Light Savings Time so people would have more time to shop.  Perhaps my mental health is being destroyed by big business.

 I  can’t quite figure what’s the big deal about a new year.  Maybe having lived through 62 of them I am jaded or something.  But really one is just adding a number to a number as in 2007 plus 1 equals 2008.  It’s just counting.  Hardly a reason for celebration. I guess people will take any occasion to get drunk and act irresponsibly.  But this number thing seems to me a pretty feeble excuse. 

And hell people don’t need a reason to get drunk and act irresponsibly.  They do it every day for no reason at all, except of course for whatever reasons they might personally have.  I expect just as many people will get drunk and act irresponsibly in this coming so called “year” as did in the last so called “year.”

Come to think of it but “year” is a pretty strange word; it’s “ear” with a “y” stuck in front.

Also this changing of the year number makes it more difficult for me to remember what year it is.  In one of my little bureaucratic chores, I sign petitions, maybe 200 or 300 hundred a so-called y-ear, for students wanting to substitute a class for a class sort of thing, and for the first 50 of these or so I won’t remember what year it is.  I will be sitting there, scratching my head, and I will have to call out to the people in their little offices round about, “Anybody know what year it is?” 

And somebody will yell back, “It’s 2008 or 7 or 99 or whatever year it is.”  Thank goodness somebody usually knows, and after a while it will stick in my head because I will keep hearing on TV that it’s 2008, as if that was something important to know.

I still don’t know what century it is and it’s been a new century for seven so-called years.  In class teaching, I will keep referring to the turn of the century by which I mean 1900, for 1900 will always be the turn of the century for me and I will have to correct myself and say, you know the last century, the twentieth century, not the twenty first century the one we are now in.

I find it odd to be alive in an “ought” year.  When I was a kid, people said things like back in “ought eight” the cotton didn’t grow or something like that. Or do you remember the big flood of “ought seven?”  I don’t hear people speaking these days of “ought years.”  I wonder if the old timers called 1900 “ought ought.”  Do you remember the big wind of “ought ought?”

It would have been cool to say "ought ought."  But I missed the occasion probably because I didn't know what year it was. 

So now I say goodbye to one ought and hello to another ought. Which metaphysically speaking adds up to nothing.