March 2008 Archives

Well last Tuesday—that would be March 25, 2008—I drove away from my shrink’s house for the very last time.  I suppose I will drive back to that house again, but when I do, I will do so in the capacity of an ordinary person and not my shrink’s client and she, my shrink, will be an ordinary person.

We have terminated.  That’s the word shrink people use when therapy stops.  It terminates.  

People terminate for all sorts of reasons.  Sometimes, the person goes for a while; the problem seems to be taken care of and they terminate.  Or maybe the person doesn’t like the whole process of therapy or the kind they are getting is not the kind they want, so they terminate.  Mostly people terminate, whether they want to or not, because their insurance will cover only a certain number of sessions.  Call that a forced termination. Sometimes, a shrink and a client have a big fight and call each other bad names and they terminate.  Sometimes the client moves to another town and they terminate.  Or maybe the shrink moves to another town with the result being termination.  Some times the client dies or the shrink, thus leading to termination.

I have been seeing my shrink since the fall of 1980, I think.  For years I figured we would terminate when I got a job someplace else, and then for a while I thought I would terminate when Carol got a job someplace else.  I got really pissed at my shrink over the years, but somehow that did not lead to termination.  And the way therapy seemsto have worked for me, I would sort of get over one issue, only by managing to dig up another that was deeper down that the first one.  So then I began to think we would terminate when one of us died.  I figured that would be her since she was older.  Though I did not rule out sudden death for myself, thus resulting in termination.

But my shrink beat me to the punch.  She decided to let her shrink license lapse.  I mean she decided not to renew it.  For one thing it costs money to renew the license, and then to qualify for renewal you have to take a certain number of units of classes to stay up with developments in “shrinkland.”

Of all the reasons that one might terminate I had never thought of the idea of termination by failure to renew shrink license.  That seems pretty mundane and insufficiently dramatic.  Sure I should have seen the writing on the wall.  My shrink is 85 years old, I think.  She is still pretty spry, but she doesn’t get out all that much anymore, and she has that macular degeneration thing going on. 

I guess I am thinking about it because for maybe the last six months, I would call her about now on a Monday morning to see if she would available for Tuesday (tomorrow) which is when we have been meeting for the last couple of years.  I started calling six months back to see if we were still on for 1 pm Tuesday because she started having different medial issues that sometimes interfered with the Tuesday appointment time.

But today I will not call because we have terminated.

Thanks for the thought provoking comments re: DST.

I read them over just before my evening ritual for hitting the hay.  I guess I do have some relaxation moments built into my day because part of the getting to bed ritual involves my sitting in the massage chair for a 15 minute spin.

I don’t know if I was relaxed or not but I started boggling my mind with this DST business.

Thanks for Brian and his international perspective.  I had, being USA-o-centric, just assumed everybody started and stopped DST at the same time world-wide.  Not so at all. And some parts of the world are still not on DST so that must cause all sorts of communication screw-ups.  The dates for DST are, as Brian indicates, federally mandated, but for some reason that I can’t understand Arizona, my research suggests, isn’t on DST.

In the 50s and 60s apparently local governments were allowed to set the start and stop dates for DST with the result, one web site reports, that on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles!  So while DST is not observed in Arizona at all, for some unknown reason, the Federal Government does now make everybody in the country start and stop DST at the same time.

Brother Stephen mentions the sun dial and observes that if the sun is not overhead at noon a sun dial would not work or something to that effect.  Perhaps we should all go on sun dial time.  But that would seem to me perhaps the most local of all forms of time keeping.  While I don’t really understand this matter at all could sun dials east or west of each other by say a thousand miles easily be off relative to each other.  Of course, I guess that’s the way it is anyway.

I was thinking of getting a sun dial but apparently you have to set the damn things correctly towards true north, whatever that is, as opposed to magnetic north and some sort mathematical calculation is also necessary to compensate for being either north or south of the equator.

Also Brian mentions that China has or is thinking about 1 time zone for the whole country.  Now that is an interesting, if mind boggling idea.  I hope I understand correctly.  Would this mean, say, that when the sun came up at 6 AM on the East Coast, it would also be 6 AM on the West Coast but no sun would be coming up.  It would be pitch dark.  So would that mean that dawn would occur at 9 AM on the West Coast while on the East Coast the sun would have been up for three hours already.

Evidence for energy savings produced by DST is very mixed.  But what I read suggests no energy savings.  What I read also suggests that we have DST because businesses want it; people shop more when there is more day light.  The extension of DST this last year was lobbied for (and won) in part by the National Association of Convenience Stores.

Cousin Lucy remarks—and I feel it to be true—that adjusting to DST (going on and off) becomes more difficult the older one is.  Those shifts can damage sleep patterns for weeks.  One country—I forget the name—has outlawed DST for heath reasons.

I don’t think I should have suffer major screw ups in my circadian rhythms because 7-11 wants to sell more Slurpees.

I saw in the paper Thursday morning that American as well as Delta had cancelled a huge number of flights, affecting the lives of about 45,000 people, for the purposes of maintenance.  Seems as if this might have been better arranged, but the FAA ordered it having found, so I heard, that Southwest Airways—not doubt to keep their low fares low—had been cutting back on the maintenance issue.  So as usual, everybody had to pay for the screw up of one, since bureaucracies exist for the systematic enforcement of injustice.

I guess they were just doing their job.  Seems as if from what I read that the fleet of planes for all airlines is becoming quite old.  There seems to have been no immediate danger, just you know when your car gets to 60000 miles they give it a big check up—because it is getting along in miles.  The same with the planes.  I guess the airlines are struggling.  A number are in the process of emerging from bankruptcy, one of the conditions of which (I mean getting out of bankruptcy) was the workers—should they wish to have any jobs at all—had to take cuts of up to 33% in wages.

During her layover in Dallas, Carol and a friend who lives there met up and went to lunch at a place called “Steaks and Shakes,” and guess what they specialize in steaks and shakes.

Speaking of which: food, I mean, and its side effects, a recent study shows that persons with excessive trunk weight are three times more likely to suffer senile dementia than those without said weight.  I know women don’t like getting weight on hips and thighs, but better to get it there than the trunk, which is where men, with our infamous guts, tend to get it.

Sometimes I can’t tell if the things I have to do and the thoughts I think are making me feel bleak or if I simply don’t have the energy to do the things I do or think the thoughts I think.  Today I am inclined to think the latter.  I managed, by some stroke of luck, to get almost 7.5 hours sleep last night, and I have to say for the first part of the day I felt, in any case, more perky. Perky!  Makes me sound like a cheer leader.

Made me think of an article in the LA Times a few days back.  Some health organization is thinking of declaring the night shift “carcinogenic.”  I am used to thinking of toxic materials as carcinogenic and possibly milk, what with the hormones in it.  But the night shift?  Turns out however that people who work the night shift are more at risk for obesity, cancer, reproductive health problems, mental illness, and gastrointestinal disorders. 

Those pesky Circadian Rhythms again.  Cells all over the body function as clocks--; and guess what?  They are set to respond to light and darkness, because, guess what?—life on earth, and that includes human life, evolved to respond to light and dark, because and guess what—it’s light and heat that makes things grow.  Another thing we can blame Darwin for I guess.

But to me it just seems common sense.  Something that seems in short supply today.  One doctor announces, “It’s a myth that we alone, among all the animals, have the power to sleep when we want.”  Frankly, I have never heard of this “myth” and am glad I have not. If there are people who have heard this “myth” and believed it, they are idiots, lacking all common sense.  But doctors like to go around correcting myths they make up because it makes them sound scientific. But maybe such people exist because another doctor sees fit to say, “People think of sleep as a waste of time…. But it’s essential.”

Who the hell thinks of sleep as a waste of time?  For God’s sake?  I can only believe such people have never done an honest day of physical labor their entire lives.  Admittedly, it has been a while.  But I have done on occasion day after day of unpleasant physical labor, and I can tell you what.  Sleep is not a waste of time.

This superstructure—this so-called society or civilization—has taken us further and further away from our nature as animals.  Maybe the whole thing—the whole superstructure—has been built up to keep us from remembering that we are animals, flesh and blood that dies because it lives.  And we forget that—tell you what—at our own risk because that animal being, in what Freud might call a return of the repressed, is going to rear up and bite you in the ass.

I believe—perhaps Cousin Beth will join me—we should start a campaign to outlaw daylight savings time.  This is a nationally mandated screw up of our circadian rhythms.  Some states didn’t get with the National Plan until after WWII.  Maybe we could start at the state level and work from there.

Day Light Savings Time is Carcinogenic!

While a few April showers may lie ahead, this is about as green as it's going to get out on the bluffs. 

In hot pursuit of the zen of relaxation, I failed.  But decided maybe I could get out of my skin a bit by taking our walk to the ocean, even though Carol is now back in NY, NY and not here to take it with me.  So I poneyed up and armed myself with my Ipod.  Strolling along the golf course listening to Jimi Hendrix singing, Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

Some guy on a golf cart started waving and yelling my name.  I waved back but didn’t know who he he was.  A guy from the club, I think.  Suddenly, I am known on the golf course.

I bought the Ipod classic, 180 gigs of memory.  I haven’t used a half of a half of an ounce of that.  So far though I have manged to “synch” in a collection of Jimi, and some Beatles, and Bruce Springstein, and about 17 tunes from a collection of oldies.  So there I sat on the bluff listening to Blueberry hill in one ear and the ocean in the other.  Finally I decided the ocean was best—and stopped listening to Blueberry Hill.

Suffering is big word in Buddhist thought. It is a key term and it should be thoroughly understood. The Pali word is 'dukkha', and it does not just mean the agony of the body. It means the deep, subtle sense of unsatisfactoriness which is a part of every mental treadmill. The essence of life is suffering, said the Buddha. At first glance this seems exceedingly morbid and pessimistic. It even seems untrue. After all, there are plenty of times when we are happy. Aren't there? No, there are not. It just seems that way. Take any moment when you feel really fulfilled and examine it closely. Down under the joy, you will find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension, that no matter how great the moment is, it is going to end. No matter how much you just gained, you are either going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have got and scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die. In the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory.

Funny to think but at the moment of this writing (730, March 24, 2008) Carol is in an airplane flying somewhere between California and Texas.  That’s where she will next set down in Dallas TX for transfer to a flight to La Guardia.   She is going to NY, NY for a conference, where she will participate in an international panel on creativity and dance.

I could have gone.  I like Manhattan.  But the last few springs I have traveled off to conventions, I come back and within a week I am sick with something, sometimes just a cold, but one spring I got bronchitis, so I decided a few weeks back that I would not go with her and felt bad about that, until it came time for the trip and then I was glad I had decided not to travel because I am feeling so darn pooped out.  

I am getting my usual spring allergy attack and still do not seem to have adjusted to the change in the clock.  I wake up these days at around 530 and can’t get back to sleep no matter how I try.  So I get six or six and a half hours sleep.  That’s just not enough.

I have a few days here that I might use to rest up.  The last quarter isn’t quite wrapped up.  I am waiting for the Teaching Assistants I supervise to post their grades, but I do have things pretty well set up for my class next quarter.  The problem though I am learning is that to rest up one must be able to relax.

Being tired and having a little time off might seem an opportune time to relax.  But being tired is not the same thing as being relaxed, and having the time to relax doesn’t mean one will do so.  I mean I would like to give it a go, but I don’t think I know how to relax.  I need perhaps to take some classes in the art of relaxation.  I should perhaps consult with niece Caroline who majored in Leisure Studies on some things I might read about how to relax.

But that’s a problem itself.  Reading up on relaxation isn’t the same thing as relaxing.  In fact getting up a reading list on how to relax seems a kind of chore that runs contrary to one’s overall goal—i.e. to achieve a state of relaxation.

The metaphor is low but it seems to me there should be some sort of relaxation sphincter somewhere in the psyche.  When I attend to my bodily functions I am only able to do so by the relaxation of certain sphincters, and I must say—at the risk of appearing perverse, polymorphous—that I experience the relaxation of said sphincters as very positive.  Yes, true nothing is done precisely but something is accomplished.  Or the other way around perhaps.

I should go no further with the sphincter metaphor.  But the fact that I can’t find that sphincter, if there is one, and that I can’t even conceive of relaxation as something other than a problem with possible metaphysical dimensions would seem to indicate I am pretty far from being relaxed.

Easter Day in Santa Barbara turns out gorgeous, clear skies with a little haze, and 75 degrees.

Usually Carol and I go to an Easter party a friend holds every year with plenty of food and Easter eggs stuck everywhere for the children.  But this year he and his wife did not have the party because she is recovering from major surgery.  I had been thinking about him and wondering how he was doing and his wife too.  So Carol and I went to the Farmer’s Market and bought some white roses, and we drove to their house.

Carol had called ahead the day before to ask if it was OK if we dropped by for a few minutes, and I made up some potato salad to bring along.  They have always been so generous with their food.  That was all I could think to do.  The potato salad, I mean, that I made Southern-style I think with eggs, pickles, onion and plenty of Real Mayonnaise.

I enjoyed seeing them.  But we started somehow into talking—I have known my friend and his wife for nearly 30 years—about people who had died and when exactly they died and of what and whether it had been expected or not, and if expected, how long had the end gone on exactly.  And what of the wife or husband or whoever had been left behind, and did one know if so and so was still on this earth or not.

Like that.

I wasn’t depressed or anything.  This just seems to be how the conversation goes when one reaches, I guess, a certain age.  I remember back in my callow youth being around some elderly people in a damn Jacuzzi somewhere or other—and all they could talk about on and on in the minutest detail was their most recent surgery.  This was back in the day of the triple bypass; so there was a lot to talk about with livid scars as visual aides.  And I remember thinking, Jeez, is this all these people have to talk about.  I know better now.

We were there an hour I guess.  Another couple came over too; and we started in on another round this time less about people who had died and more about people in the process of dying or suffering from some major physical problem with significant implications for continued quality of life.

 Then we drove home.  And I vacuumed the living room carpet.  The vacuum had been standing there next to the entrance to the living room for a couple of days.  I had managed to vacuum the upstairs carpets and I had vacuumed down the stairs and I don’t remember what happened exactly but I got stuck there and didn’t get into the living room.  So as soon as we got back in the condo I changed clothes back into my every day walking around duds and finished what I had started.

Still a gorgeous day.  And there’s some potato salad in the refrigerator.

I received an email with a link to Obama’s speech on racial issues, so I read all the text and watched most of the Utube video.  And was, well, unimpressed.  I had hoped to be transported, but felt very far from that.  The content wasn’t new and the deliver was far too measured and methodical.  I felt as if I were sitting in Sociology One.  Although, brevity being the soul of wit, he did manage to say in about twenty minutes what most sociology courses take ten weeks to say.

I was thankful for that.

Though probably my impression of Obama’s speech was informed by John Adam’s little speech right before the Declaration of Independence was signed.  That’s not a fair or just comparison.  Adam’s speech was transporting partly because he delivered in a situation far beyond his control and because he recognized and registered that situation as being beyond his control.  He knew the Declaration was risky business.  Should the colonies come out with the shit end of the stick, the signers of the Declaration had a good chance of losing property and life.  Either that or be signed on as collaborators when the British retook control.  Ignominy or death.  Those were his options.

Of course there was another: that the Colonies would win and probably in the innocence of his child heart Adam’s was in denial.  No, nothing really bad was going to happen.  Still when he said he would stake his life on the justice of their cause and the principles from which it was derived, I believed him.  To risk his life, limb and property for an idea or an ideal, that’s pretty heady stuff.  Of course, the idea and principle have become pretty rusted over.  But being ideas, the damage is far from fatal and they still could be burnished up.  What with a lot of elbow grease.

What would Obama die for?  What is there for Obama to die for?   So the context was not there—one that might provide a transporting dimension.  What does Obama stand to lose?  An election?  Is Obama willing to die to be president?  And if he is so willing, I must ask if his priorities aren’t all screwed up.  I don’t know honestly what I would die for, but I am pretty sure I would not die to be the President of this Republic.

Right now that office reminds me of those public restrooms you can find in Greyhound bus stations.  One enters a booth to find it so befouled by its previous occupant that no way I am going to go in there.  This stench would drive me from the room and my flesh would crawl.  I don’t think that place worth dying for, not at least without it having been previously disinfected.  And that would be the most minimal of requirements.

Last night I watched part of the show on John Adams now running on HBO.  I found particularly affecting Adam’s speech delivered just before the vote confirming the assertion of independence.  He was a learned man and able to capture the largeness of the moment.  Never before, he argued, in history, had the opportunity arisen for a country to create its own government, one moreover responsive to the will of the people, and while he was aware of the risks involved, such an opportunity he said could not be allowed to pass. 

I felt like crying.  I was raised to believe in the greatness of America.  I don’t know when I began to have my doubts exactly.  I know in high school that I had problems with a government that advocated capital punishment and our attitude towards the Reds seemed to me—I don’t know—un-Christian.  Still with Kennedy in office and great leaps forward in the area of Civil Rights, I felt the gap between our professed ideals and the actualities of life in American might be closing.  I remember when a friend told me in college that 10% of the people controlled 80% of the wealth in this country I just didn’t want to believe it.

And since that time, if I have been critical of the country into which I was born, I have been so, not because I ever felt the ideals espoused by the founding fathers were wrong but because of the failure of the government and the people to live up to them.  Sadly, the distance between the promise and the actuality has grown so great that the principles of the country now seem tired maxims, hackneyed phrases, and the stuff of jingoistic patriotism.  They have no meaning beyond the use to which they are put for the purposes of politics.  With the result that events occurring at this moment—the elections—feel to me as if they might as well be occurring on Mars.

Adam’s little speech caused me to reconnect with that younger and more childlike self that did believe in those ideals as things that might come true.  I was hurt at that moment to feel how very far the country has slipped from its initial promise.  Still I wonder if it is not better that I felt hurt.  I don’t think the young people I work with today would feel hurt.  They seem, when I ask them, to feel, to a person, that government is just not to be trusted. And in light of the events of the last thirty years, I understand why they don’t trust, not just on the basis of things they have seen and heard but in response to the prevailing view that government is somehow inherently a bad thing.

Last night, Goleta had a severe weather alert.  They were predicting waves eight feet high.  So after breakfast, we went to check things out at campus point:

I walked down the rocks for a closer look:

 

 

Midweek it felt as if spring had sprung, somewhat prematurely.  We hit the seventies in the day, but Friday the wind started blowing.

A few whitecaps: 

 

 

 Where I work, these come in two forms: statistical and narrative.  In the narratives, students are supposed to write something about the class, the teacher, and the content of the course. I don’t know why these are called “narratives” since students never write anything approximating a narrative.  They just state an opinion or make an observation or two.

As regards the statistical part, students fill out a scant Ron sheet with two questions on it:

Rank the Instructor

Rank the Course

As accordingly:

Excellent

Very Good

Good

Fair

Poor

Next quarter I will get an email saying the results of your statistical scores are in your mailbox.  So I will go over there and find these sheets with numbers on them; the little black marks that students have put down have been digitized, I guess one would say, and turned into numbers that tell me whether I have scored at the average for all of the sections of the courses I taught or above the average and by how much or below the average and by how much.

I have been getting these “scores” for over 30 years and they still freak me out every time I have to go over to the mailroom and look at them.  The whole business seems vaguely dehumanizing.  Like that bathing beauty contest in the Miss America Pageant, or as if somebody has put me into the American Idol Contest.  And I sure wouldn’t want to be in that contest.  It’s not about who wins but all the people who are humiliated in the process of proclaiming as the winner the person who has been least humiliated.

I am embarrassed and ashamed that I even care about these damn numbers.  Even when they are good numbers I am not really happy; I just heave a sign of relief—well, that’s over for now.  Anyway, I handed out those forms this week and the students filled them out and stuck them in a big yellow envelope, and now the office then and next quarter I will get his email saying the scores are in my box.  And I will feel humiliated all over again, because, you know, it is humiliating.

One of the questions of the survey that determined students entering college in the fall of 2006 were more narcissistic that entering classes previously surveyed was: “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place.”  I presume the more narcissistically inclined said “yes.”
 

My answer to such a question way back when I entered college--and still today--would have been “no,” and I was wondering why.

First, even to begin to answer that question or to take it seriously as a question would seem to require a much richer fantasy life than I have.  I remember when the lottery first came in talking with people who would go on and on about what they would do with those vast amounts should they win it, how they would divide it up and give money to relatives and charitable organizations and buy a Jacuzzi.  These people really seemed to enjoy themselves talking about these fantasy prospects.  I would sit there with my mind completely blank.  I just couldn’t entertain the fantasy much less enjoy having it. I guess I do not have a rich fantasy life.

Second, answering yes to the question would seem to imply that one would want to be ruler of the world.  Personally, being ruler of the world strikes me as requiring way too much work and responsibility.  I think being ruler of the world would be quite time consuming and even onerous.  Also rulers of the world tend to have many enemies and frequently get killed off by assassins.

Finally, being ruler of the world would not, to my mind, necessarily put one in the position to make the world a better place.  The way I see it no one person –even the ruler of the world—can make any difference to the state of the world.  Individuals can do little or nothing to improve the state of affairs on a world wide scale.  Even to think so implies pure megalomania.  If the question read, “If I ruled the world, along with a very large army, and a fanatically charged mass following, I might be able to make the world a better place (if I had exact and clear directions on how to make the world better)….well, I still would answer “no” because I couldn’t entertain the fantasy in the first place.

I am suspicious of such surveys and how much they can tell us about the psyche of the student of today.  Still, the idea that by being the ruler of the world one could make the world a better place seems to suggest a remarkable naiveté about what goes into being the ruler of the world.  Or let us say, it would appear one could answer yes to this question only if one assumes that, because one is the ruler, the world will somehow plastically and magically respond to one’s attempts, no matter how ill-informed, to make it better.

This is narcissism.  Or rather, let us say, it is primal, archaic and relatively untempered narcissism. Twenge and others suggest that today’s college students are narcissistic because they were told by their parents and in schools that they are special, and are encouraged in their specialness by such attention seeking technologies as my space and Utube.  I don’t buy it.  If today’s students retain a high degree of untempered narcissism, that has little to do with being told one is special, but rather to having the “world” in fact plastically respond to one’s needs.  Those relatively few families that reaped the wealth of the 80’s and 90’s may have produced such children.  I wonder how young people not entering college might respond that question.

All of a sudden it’s 74 degrees.  The rise in temperature, along with the change in the clock, which has completely screwed up my body clock, has reduced me to a tepid pool of inertia.  My brain is a puddle, a dark back water for whatever the hell is going on in my unconscious these days.
 

Part of whatever that is has to do with the end of classes.  I am no good at closure.  Closure?  What the hell is that?  I mean at the end of my classes I feel sort of sad and depleted.  After all I have been meeting with these people in my classes for ten weeks; I have had email exchanges with many no matter how mundane or trivial, and some not so mundane and trivial, but about deaths in the family and suing doctors for malpractice or having to go to court themselves for various reasons, or becoming deathly ill and throwing up all night, or getting the pink eye, or having their computer suddenly die and go blue screen—with all their work disappearing into some digital void.  So I have come to know these people a little bit—and then the last day of class comes around, they go out the door to wherever it is they might be going, and I am not likely to hear from them again.

 Ever.  Except if they want something, like a letter of recommendation.

It’s like a post-partum depression or something without knowing what I have delivered or if I have managed to deliver anything at all.  So I keep trying to think of ways that might round the whole class out and bring it to a sense of completion.  Some people bring cookies to that last day of class or something.  But I am not that kind of person, a here’s a cookie person.  Anyway I couldn't in good conscience hand out sugar.  If I drank myself, I would be more like, a “here’s a stiff drink person,” a “here’s looking at you, kid” sort of person as you go off into the crap that is going to befall you, because in your twenties, and let me tell you, the crap will just rain down.

I won’t see any of them again.  I am a writing teacher—; it’s not like I am a professor in their major or anything.  They have to work like hell to arrange another class with me and even then I am not going to get ten years down the line any emails or snail mail thanking me for like having totally changed their lives.  I mean what the hell—I make them write papers.  It’s not like I am teaching Zen Buddhism or something that might lift the veil of illusion from their eyes and show them the light.

I am left with loose ends and dead ends.

God bless’em each and every one.

I didn't realize when I woke that the clocks had changed.

Carol and I went out for breakfast and after having washed the car took a brief spin to the beach.

More human beings.

 

 

I was looking for a book on consumer society—to snatch a chapter—because next quarter I will be working with that subject again.  I was sure I had this book; I could see it in my mind’s eye but for the life of me not in plain sight.  Instead, plucking through books, I pulled out another because reading the book sidewise I could not make out the title.  I thought at first that it was one by Helvetius that I had taken from the library, as part of an effort better to understand the origins of sociological thought.  I started reading and right off it didn’t sound like that guy but instead something very German.

Indeed, turns out I was reading from a collection—in translation—of the works of Wilhelm von Humboldt.  I can’t remember why the heck unless I was doing further research into German Transcendental Idealism. 

I am doing my version of speed reading—by this I mean I read a line here and there and on the basis of other stuff I have read from that period begin to contextualize the thought relative especially to Kant and Rousseau (the twin pillars of German Idealism).  And then I come across this line:

 As we can imagine life neither standing still nor moved by an external mover, so does the whole universe subsist only in urge; nothing lives or exists except insofar as it strives to live or exist.

 Now I doubt very much that Bob Dylan read Wilhelm von Humboldt, though it is not out of the question that he did, but suddenly this line drew my attention to something I had not quite seen or seen only peripherally in the title of this blog, “And he not busy being born is busy dying.”—taken as I previously noted, I believe, from Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma.”

I don’t know quite how to put what I previously saw in that line but, taken in the context of the Wilhelm von Humboldt, I feel the emphasis shift to being as the busy-ness to be born.  Or following von Humboldt, the line shifts into the assertion: being is becoming or becoming is being.   That would appear itself to be a paradox, unless one concludes, as von Humboldt seems to do: that “being” is an activity and not a state of stasis. 

Funny—von Humboldt thinks of the entire universe, not as a set of pre-existing scientific laws, or something empirical, but as an “urge,” or one might say a feeling.  I think in German he may have used the word “Trieb,” which means variously “urge,” “impulse,” “driving force,” or “drive.”   

So I spent an hour with a vocal coach.  I am putting together a CD of ten of my own songs and I want to do the vocal part as best I can.

Going to a vocal coach is not part of my usual behavior.  In fact I pretty much hate going anywhere.  Going to try to sing in front of a complete stranger, on top of that, is pretty unusual for me.

But I got to see a street in Santa Barbara I had never seen before where the home of the vocal coach was located.

So there I sit with this vocal coach and she says my natural voice—if there is such a thing—more or less related to my speaking voice--is probably a baritone.  She says I have a deep voice for a skinny guy (because I am now once again really skinny). But the songs I have written are coming out more in the tenor range.

The coach had me try to find the soma of my sounds.  That is, where my voice comes from depending on the note I am trying to hit, and sure enough when I began to pay attention, I could feel the real high notes come somewhere from the middle of my forehead, and then down through the nose, and then down in the mouth/throat, and finally down in the chest—that’s where the baritone seems to be located.

And then there’s the breathing part.  I have got to get that down.  That means practice, because breathing while singing is not the same as your normal breathing.  More or less in normal breathing we take in some air through the nose using our lungs to drag it in, but if you do that even you will possibly note that the stomach pops out a little as one breathes in.

Singing requires stomach breathing.  You really let the stomach pop out as the air goes in and then you exhale by pulling in the stomach muscles—and sure enough it’s possible that way to get air in and out more quickly and also to sustain a note. 

Singing also requires good posture.  I don’t naturally have that.  I slouch and have slouched for years.  Instead—singing wise—you are supposed to stand up straight—with your center—your stomach and pelvis--acting as the pillar for your whole body, and you let the rest of your body above that go as limp as possible.

Carol says too that in dance the center of the body—the stomach and pelvis—are at the heart of the whole thing.  That’s where you start and need to build from.

I remember this pro basketball player—though I can’t remember his name—with this terrific jump shot.  From a stand still position, he really get in the air, and midway in his jump, you could see his hips and stomach—go up—as if after the initial leg movement he had a second booster rocket.

I went to the vocal coach some time this week but it feels now like an hallucination.

I had to do some paper work on campus, and was feeling so bad about my teaching that I stopped colleagues and said, I was feeling bad about my teaching lately and wondered how they were doing—and almost universally people seemed to feel they were pushing rocks up a hill.  Sure one class—perhaps was going OK—but the other one or two just sucked.  People are really having trouble with our Writing 50, a research paper writing course; many of the students in these classes are already juniors and seniors and have written many research papers and so don’t quite get the point of taking a class on how to write them.

So we have this bureaucratic pipeline mess with a backlog of students taking a course they should have taken as sophomores.   But they couldn’t get in it went they first tried.  And additionally people reported that they were just having trouble getting students to do anything.  Exercises that usually work hang-fire.  Jokes that universally kill prove duds….and of course students don’t seem to know how to read.

I talked a mile a minute in one class the other day throwing out examples, talking them through the ideas under consideration, and they were supposed to have brought a page or two of writing, but 50% hadn’t.  But I broke them into groups to have them discuss possible topics, and went from group to group.  And two people in one group said they had no idea what to write about.  So I talked and talked and said to one, look you just mentioned an example that might fit with the idea of social self and the true self.  And she said, but that’s just one example, and you said we are to try to write about only one example.  Why not two examples, she said, can’t I use two examples,  and I said, well, you did that in your last paper, and the point of the second example was the same as the point of the first, so what was the point of the second.  The point, the point really is to write an organized paper that lasts from four to five pages and you can do that with one example.

And then as I talked the student said, But it’s hard.  It’s hard!

What could I say?  I didn’t know what to say.  It’s the ninth week of the quarter; I have said everything I had to say.  I am at a loss for words.  Why, of course, it’s hard.  I said that the first day of class: what I will ask you to do in this class is hard.  You will develop your own topics; you will organize your own thoughts.  I will supply the context for doing so.  I understand this is not something you are used to doing; that’s one reason, as you will find, that I am not a hard grader.  If you are trying this for the first time—as is more than likely the case—you may mess up a little.

But the student said, It’s hard.  It’s hard.

Well, it ain’t supposed to be easy.  It ain’t a matter of filling in the damn blanks or repeating what the teacher says.  If that is education today: then the whole thing is a stinking sham.

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Here's "Fool for You" again.  This time with drums by Austin Beebe, whose day job is working with his father on an abalone farm 

I seem to have strained my writing muscle or something.  Usually when I sit down with a blank page I can stick something into it; many times I have an idea for something even before I open the blank page.  Lately, it’s been blank page and then nothing. 

Once many moons ago, back in the 80’s, I went out and played some b.b. in a pick up game.  I should have known better—some of the guys playing were like idiot guys who hadn’t played the game much and were trying to imitate stuff they had seen on TV.  So this one idiot guy dives in front of me as I was driving for the basket—in an apparent attempt to steal the ball—and low bridges me.  In an instinctive effort to protect my face which was heading for the black top my right arm stuck itself out and save my face OK, but my forward momentum caused the right elbow to hyperextend—i.e. go in the direction it is not supposed to go.

The thing swelled up so bad at the elbow that I went to the emergency room and had it x-rayed.  There was a fracture but way deep inside and nothing to be done about it except to keep the arm immobilized they said, which wasn’t that hard since the arm had immobilized itself by becoming useless.  If you stop to think about it—which I don’t encourage really—the only use an arm—as opposed to a leg—has is to have a hand attached to it.  If we were born without hands attached to our arms we would just have these sort of clubs we could use I supposed to beat on each other—but which would be otherwise pretty much maladaptive in my opinion.

So my arm was rendered useless in the sense that the strain at the elbow had the effect apparently of stretching ligaments and tendons so I couldn’t hold anything much in my right hand.  I couldn’t hold a pencil and make it work.  I could hold a glass but with nothing in it; and I took to using my left when it came to bathroom issues.  Over a couple of weeks as the swelling went down the strength came back and the right arm once again had a useful purpose—an active hand attached.

Right now my writing muscle is like that—I feel as if my head is stuffed with cotton.  I have cotton coming out of my ears.  When I was just downstairs a few minutes ago, I found myself envying, once again, our cat’s ability to flat out relax.  She had found a bit of sun in front of the window and she was just stretched out in that—as only a cat can stretch out.  She was so damn relaxed that even her tongue was relaxed because the tip of it was sticking out of her mouth.

Then she saw me and decided to start showing off how relaxed she was by rolling over her back—and stretching again.  And then she started into cleaning herself, and rolled up in this sort of posture she can get into to clean her a-hole.  Both her back legs stick up in the air, as she goes at the a-hole, pretty vigorously too.  I say to her, Good cat! Good Cat! Clean that asshole!  Sometimes, I will see her around and ask her if she has cleaned her a-hole lately, just to harass her a little.

But I am just tired, and not in a relaxed way.  Maybe that’s why I envy the cat.