Early Christmas Present

Early Christmas morning I saw a deer in the neighbor’s back yard. Quietly, seemingly comfortably, browsing under a spruce tree pruned just high enough to serve as an umbrella. The neighbor – away recovering from knee surgery – could not have left a better guest, or provided one with a more comfortable shelter. While the snow was still three or four feet deep in places, the wind had blown it away from the grass under the two, carefully pruned spruces. The yard is large enough for a bit of wandering and well enough fenced to keep out the neighborhood dogs – who were strangely silent about the deer. And there was the large, covered patio where the dear could rest between snacks and ruminate. (Puns intended.)

As long as we didn’t stare too long or make any really loud noises, the deer was content with having us for neighbors. And we were content to watch from the kitchen or bathroom window as our living Christmas card, peaceful and beautiful, enjoyed the day. At times, the deer seemed more at home in its surroundings than we did in ours – gazing around from its nest on the patio as we bumped and rushed to finish preparing our Christmas feast.

I keep saying “it” because it could have been a doe or a buck. Our ignorance of its gender didn’t stop me from calling her “she” nor my husband from calling him “he.”

Apart from gender bias, we didn’t really read anything into this Christmas vision. It was just a deer. With the blizzard nipping at her heels and ears, she had found this temporary housing. Just a lucky fluke that the neighbor was away – also safe, warm, and well fed, but away. Just chance that let an unexpected silence fall on the neighborhood which, the day before, had been the scene of our digging noisily out as we emerged from the storm-covered houses, manned our four-wheelers, and shoveled and cleared paths for our larger vehicles. We, on our street at the edge of town, were all too well tucked into our homes to bother scaring off a stray deer.

What could we have read into it? It was just a deer. The day after Christmas, it left as silently and peacefully as it had come. I miss her.

The Future Just Ain’t What It Used to Be

Back when I was young (which was probably not before there was dirt; I’m only saying I don’t remember seeing any), I thought that all problems could be solved and everybody could be nice. That was before I decided I shouldn’t be an inventor, because everything had already been invented, and after I decided I could do anything if I just tried hard enough.

You might think I became depressed upon learning that all of these things I’d decided were false. However, being mostly wrong did not dampen my optimism. (Fortunately. I’m wrong about as often as you get heads when you flip a coin an infinite number of times.) (Roughly 50% of the time, I'm told, although I've never checked it.) In fact, it took a lot more than being wrong to depress me. (Unfortunately, the “lot more” has happened, but I digress.) (Again.)

Now that I am older (than dirt, possibly), I no longer think that solutions are easy or that people, given half a chance, are nice. On the other hand, I now think that some solutions are a lot easier than anyone suspects – just not profitable. And that many people are nice even when not given half a chance. Which really says a lot for humanity when you think about it.

Nonetheless, I am still depressed about our future. This is at least in part because I am, and it seems our species is, locked into the notion that profitability is the measure of success. And that it’s a “good” measure. I don’t know much about other religious leaders, but I’m pretty sure that Jesus didn’t think that. Almost as sure as I am that many (most?) Christians do think that. Along with pretty much all of us other believers and non-believers, as near as I can tell.

What if we’re wrong about that? What if there isn't a general lack of things to invent?

What if we’re just suffering from a narrowing of the arterial thought channels?

What could we invent after we invented a different measure of success?

If we just tried hard enough.

Voting and Thinking: Do They Mix?

Seems I have so many thoughts about the upcoming U.S. election and so little talent to do them justice…

Perhaps a look at what’s already out there is best. The following are three perspectives on current politics and the upcoming election:

http://theferrett.livejournal.com/804454.html

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=128588

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1019-25.htm

And a quote, courtesy of A.Word.A.Day
(http://wordsmith.org/awad/):
“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.” -Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third US president, architect and author.

So remember, VOTE WITH YOUR VOTE.
(I know, this is yet another sound bite even though, dear readers, both of you were too polite to call me on my anti-sound-bite sound bite. In the words of the immortal Pogo, “I am covered with rue.”)

Speaking of other web pages: In a week when the stock market is reaching new heights, it might be well to look back at a commentary on other changes in the U.S. economic scene:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/08/29/
poverty.health/index.html

And another: To the exhortation for a World Day to End Extreme Poverty, Chuck Levenstein offers: “Perhaps we should ask for a World Day to End Extreme Wealth? Since inequality is linked to health, we should work away at both ends of the problem.”
Now there’s a thought.

And a final few thoughts, mostly my very own, brought to you by the Trailing Edge Dictionary of Modern American, which proudly announces two additions – the Politically Correct Section, 21st Century Bush Era, and the Neo-Conservative Section. (NB: While seeming redundant, these sections are, in fact, wholly and completely similar-but-different.)

The Politically Correct Section, 21st Century Bush Era, offers the following new definitions:

preventive war (idiom, adjective+noun) – war of aggression against a nation that holds an opposing socio-political view

NB: Not to be confused with imperial hegemony, please.

Sample Sentence: Upon reflection, President Bush declared a preventive war against the heinous dictator sitting on top of the most oil available in a non-Christian country.


homeland (noun) – geopolitical territory, constituted as a republic, in which no one may object to any word, activity, or legislation undertaken or contemplated by the Executive Branch on pain of being labeled “pro-terrorist” and/or having all available evidence of one’s free enterprise activity crushed under the wheels of large, low-mileage vehicles.

NB: Not, we trust, to be confused with the Politically Correct Section, Stalin Era, definition of dictatorship of the proletariat in which an entire political party was exempt from objection and more harmful means were used to quiet the citizenry.

Sample Sentence: Having made the homeland safe from an increasingly large number of terrorists and other dissidents abroad, the President, Cabinet, and key advisers moved on to the homeland’s internal issues, giving the same skilled attention to natural disasters, immigration, interpersonal relations, and so on.


The Neo-Conservative Section has the following new definition:

moral high-ground (phrase, adjective+compound noun) – the territory occupied by right thinkers (and far right thinkers), from which vantage point all unlike thinking is seen to be a sign of evil.

Sample Sentence: Having reached the moral high-ground, the pro-Creationists and procreationists determined that “evidence” and “faith” are indeed synonyms.


These additions put us in mind of the much older Missing Positives Section, which brought us the following definition:

munity (noun) – lack of protection, resistance, or exemption; political or legal vulnerability

Sample Sentence: Upon reflection, President Nixon granted munity to his entire staff.


And a final bit of free advice: If your logic isn’t circular, who can follow it?
And worth every penny, too.

Sound Bites, Healthy Bites, and Other Things that Bite

I am an avid reader of cereal boxes. Always have been. Always will be.

Our cereals are all healthy, nutritious, and all natural. (One wonders what an unnatural cereal would be like, but I digress.)

However, faced with a cereal box that is trying to inspire me to better myself, I am bemused. Nay, affronted. And it’s not even my cereal box. It’s my husband’s. It urges me to complete the sentence, “ I will…” – with several examples of exemplary, life-improving behavior. I supress the impulse to shout, “I will buy an expensive sportscar and use it to snub all my friends and neighbors!” This is not a difficult impulse to suppress, because my arthritis prevents me from getting into a sportscar, regardless of its cost. Besides, my husband, peacefully eating his cereal, would worry.

Nonetheless, I resent the cereal box’s presumption. Am I not in charge of what I will or will not do? Do I need the assistance of cardboard and grainy consumables? That I can’t even consume? (Arthritis is less painful if I don’t eat wheat, don’t you know.) Am I prey to the whims of market researchers and advertising copywriters? Probably. But do I need my milk and soupspoon rubbed in it? Not on your Betty Crocker coupon I don’t!

And breakfast food is not the only thing that presumes to guide my behavior. What about television shows that pretend to purvey news? What about politically-motivated science that is neither scientific nor accurate? But is truly believed and consistent with some religious doctrine? What about Internet exchanges of would-be truth that are based on urban myth? What about a whole culture that depends upon reduction of complex problems and difficult ideas to a thirty-second summary?

Sound bites bite! Don’t you know it. Sound bites bite! Shout it out, now. Sound bites bite! A little louder. Sound Bites Bite!

You know, it’s amazing how ego-centric and irritable a little constant pain makes you. I imagine psychic or emotional pain is just as bad. Worse, maybe. Luckily, the physical therapy is working and I’ll be better soon.

But I won’t be improved by a slogan on a carton! Sound Bites Bite.

Slow Viewing and Moving Experiences

Well, the view from the trailing edge is farther out of focus than usual. The Spence family moved a distance of several miles from temporary (leased) to permanent (bank-owned) housing-with-office-space. Theoretically, the move occurred on June 29. In point of actual fact, the move began in mid-June and is still under way. Naturally, the usual conditions apply:

• Dates on the calendar are closer than they appear.
• Contents of boxes trade places in the night.
• Keys, power cords, and other critical items step briefly into the Twilight Zone only to re-appear when someone else is looking for them.
• Important events such as the birthdays of yours truly and of our nation get mired in the maze of boxes.
• Much is owed to the kindness of strangers - especially the telephone and cable installation techs who went above and beyond the call of duty.

All sentient life consists of having experiences and learning lessons from them. Yep, we always learn from experience. The trouble comes from learning the wrong lesson. So you be the judge (because the learner is incapable of guessing the appropriateness of the lesson learned) - this is what Sam and Sherry have learned so far:

1. No matter how tired you get, you can still muster up enough energy to blame the other person for the current source of your irritation.
2. When exhausted and hungry, it is better to leave and go to a restaurant for an hour or so than to reaffirm the truth of lesson 1.
3. Before leaving for a restaurant - other than a cardiac-condition-enhancing-drive-through - check each other over for cuts, rips, and unusually large or strategically placed stains.
4. Do not tease your partner about any slip-up, breakage, or strategically placed stain; these are not laughing matters.
5. There is a place for everything, and if you look everywhere, you will find it.
6. "Everywhere" is an area that exceeds the square footage of your new home by some unknown and variable amount.
7. Make frequent stops for hugs and back-rubs.
8. All agreements on furniture placement or item storage are subject to change without notice.
9. Time estimates are the work of the devil; do not heed them.
10. Keep your sense of humor with you at all times; otherwise, it'll take months to find it.

I would say more, but we're leaving for a restaurant.

Back here on the trailing edge, some may be slow to react to the ever changing pattern of news. So forgive me if it's a bit late in the day (as it were) for commenting on immigration to the USA. I won't bore you with all the facts that demonstrate – and theories that postulate – that everyone in any of the Americas is an immigrant. Let's take that as a given. But let's not take as a given that the USA was built without opportunism and imperialism, OK? The French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, all fought each other and themselves for the spoils. And many of the earlier immigrants, from the North American plains tribes to the Incas, used the imperialist Europeans to help them fight each other (poor choice of allies, but oh well...).

So nobody was any rose, OK? At least not when it comes to opportunism and imperialism. And I can't see that – since then – any of us has learned much from our own experience or that of our forebears. Scratch that, we appear to have learned a lot, but maybe mostly the wrong lessons. At least, I can't see that I've studied up very much on what our religions and ethical belief systems appear to value of human behavior. At least not when it comes to practicing what those systems say about human rights or free enterprise economy. I reject human slavery while buying products made in sweat shops in countries where workers earn pennies a day – and buying them from US transportation and retail sales enterprises that cheat their employees out of the basic worker rights, which U.S. laws are supposed to assure. I buy – and tout – healthy, organically grown food while realizing that, if the whole world produced food that way, half the world would starve even faster than it is now. I whine about having to pay more than $1,000 per month for health insurance for a family of two while most of the U.S. population has little or no access to that care. And while we argue about the small percentage of illegal aliens who should or shouldn't have access to healthcare, instead of arguing about whether U.S. citizens should have that access.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world seems divided into the more-healthy-than-the-average-US-citizen (case in point: all other things being equal, a baby born in Cuba is more likely to survive its first year of life than a baby born in the USA) and the mortally unhealthy. I could go on, but it's too depressing. The readership would dwindle. (What readership?) Perhaps this all goes without saying anyway, given that our ancestors were all human...up to a point...and so are we.

It just seems to me that it's pretty cheeky of some of us to decide that our rights, morals, or antecedents are any better than those of any of the rest of us. Or that we have a right to refuse something of someone who snuck across a barren, dangerous piece of ground (and whose ancestors may have been on this continent the longest – or not) based on the idea that our desire to own and acquire more than that sneaking someone has is more "right" than that someone's desire to own and acquire more than another someone who didn't try a risky exodus. This kind of thinking is not only cheeky, it's confusing. Which someone was I?

Never mind, here's a new definition for the Trailing Edge Dictionary, used with permission of the email author, origin uncertain:
'From: Cat Bieber
'Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--erg
'Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/erg.html
'This word [erg] spawned a great one-line joke that I heard often while in school at MIT: the lesser known "arg" which is "the unit of work done incorrectly"...'
Another comment on that week's words (see http://wordsmith.org/) had to do with standardization, which the Trailing Edge Dictionary defines as, "the practice of forcing everyone in a given discipline to use the terminology, processes, and basic concepts that I learned in Graduate School." One query was whether the use of "erg" is acceptable when there is a standard, the Joule ("a rose by any other name...," said Jouliet, but I digress, and I have no energy left to ergue about it).

Memorial Day - for Real

Today is really Memorial Day (as compared with yesterday, which was "Memorial Day Observed" according to my trusty Canadian-born calendar purchased at Rocky Mountain National Park (in Colorado, USA). So I want to really puzzle, today, over the loss of lives expended in the seeking of national (or political) objectives. It's my country, right or wrong, and I honor those who died defending its right to exist, including its right to behave as a republic run by elected officials. Even while I regret, and am sometimes ashamed of, the decisions of my country's elected officials. (Who said that citizens of the USA "get precisely the government they deserve"? A Frenchman, I think.) I honor their willingness to risk themselves for causes they probably did not originate and possibly do not support, their commitment to set aside their personal lives for an unknown period of time to face an unpredictable series of sometimes unfathomable events, and their willingness to suspend feelings and see through what has begun. If the behavior of some is sometimes abhorrent, I will try, today, to remember that what they face is frequently abhorrent and mostly unpredictable. And to remember that, for most, their behavior is heroic. And that I am, every day, so sorry that the fallen warriors had to die when and where they did. Regardless of their nationality.

Debut: A View from the Trailing Edge

Well, now that I've gone and done it, here it is - what every writer fears - the blank page.

Life here on the trailing edge of the information highway is filled with mystery. You'd think that by the time the ideas got to me, they'd be all worked out - all clear - but it's not so. By the time they get to me, they aren't even ideas, so far as I can tell. They're a group of acronyms hooked together with the most unlikely verbs you ever saw: "You can't run that JAVA using XP" and "Email me the URL for my wiki." And those are the easy ones.

And I work with computers. Of course, anymore, that's a bit like saying, "I work with telephones." Anyhow, since I work with computers, either to manipulate and analyze data or to help public health professionals define what systems they want to work for them and how they should work, you'd think I know how they work, but I don't (you'd also think I could have fit one more "work" into that run-on sentence, but I couldn't - not without the help of my trusty parenthetical expressions). But, come to think of it, I don't know how the telephone works either, so I guess it's OK. It's all magic. (According to the Trailing Edge Dictionary of Modern America - copyrighted and unpublished - magic is defined as "improperly understood technology."

Back to the blank page. Coming toward the middle of my sixth decade, I have many comments on many things, some of which are shareable. So I'll start this blog out with my favorite form of expression - poetry - about some of my most deeply felt issues. There is no conceit in my not naming the issue. If you have a different name for it than I, it means both/all, doesn't it?

South San Francisco Haiku
Lock-step houses climb
The hill - look out to
See if there are any trees

Cobwebs
Caught in cobwebs,
Silver cobwebs,
Sparkling, shining, silver cobwebs.
For one problem on solution -
Shining, silver, sorry cobwebs.
Each solution traps a problem -
Shining cobwebs,
Trapped in cobwebs.
Major problems, easy answers -
No attempt to stop the deathmarch.
Silver cobwebs, shining, cobwebs,
Pretty answers, all are cobwebs.

Now, weighted down with snow the trees
Hold out their arms with heavy pride
With lacy cotton fingers pointing down
In green and white they reach
The blue white sky
Christmas card beautiful
They struggle to survive
The cold the windy beetled pestulence
Of life
Once taken in and offered back
All shelter food and warmth
Of living lives in them
Enduring all
They dure
In beauty unimaginable

If you made it this far, you'll be happy to know this will be a weekly or monthly event, not daily. P.S. Please don't copy or publish the poetry without checking with me - feel free to tag, link, comment, or critique....