| Haziness |
[19 May 2008|02:12am] |
Over the past two days I've spent some time reading old entries. I'd forgotten how valuable a record this journal can be, as a window into my past. I have a tendency to believe I've never changed. But reading back, there are differences he did not anticipate. No doubt my future self will think the same of these days. It's important for me to keep this space active, for the sake of knowing where I came from. Our memories are far less reliable than they lead us to believe.
There are all sorts of topics swimming about in my head lately, related to all the changes my graduation represents. But I've avoided writing about them since I don't feel competent to present such important subjects clearly. Whether from ongoing lab work or the decompression from school, my mind feels persistently hazy. Thoughts are half-formed and ill-phrased, a messy blend of impressions and impulses. I wish I could open my mental windows to a fresh breeze, blowing away the stuffiness. I've gagged myself because I think it senseless to write if I cannot communicate clearly. Perhaps I need to get the ball rolling, and clarity will follow.
I need not be so reserved in my writing. A journal can be disorganized and personal. Who am I trying to impress? Myself, I suppose. I'm frustrated that nothing solid has emerged here in recent months, when I know I am capable of much better. As much as I have attacked the habit, I'm still trying to meet my own standards. This is hazardous only when expectations are unrealistic. I don't know why my thoughts have been so muddled in recent months. I find it very frustrating. I'm worried that it will extend itself into my job search, and harm my prospects. Perhaps I need a good rest.
I really do need June off. I'm glad I planned it this way.
|
|
| Туийттер |
[18 May 2008|08:22pm] |
|
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
|
|
| Writer's Block: Friends and acquaintences |
[18 May 2008|05:40am] |
It's sometimes hard to say where one draws the line. An acquaintance might be someone one has met once, at a single course or conference, for example. If you meet them more than once, and keep in touch in between, they are friends. If they have visited your house or stayed overnight, and you have visited them or stayed with them, they are friends. But sometimes one counts as friends people one knows at school or work or university whose homes one has never visited.
But its one of the things that social networking sites never seem to manage to get right -- distinguishing between close friends, friends, acquaintances, close family and extended family. Among acquaintances one might include people one does business with, work colleagues and classmates one doesn't hang out with.
|
|
| wow, well I guess that's one series I won't have to bother with then... |
[17 May 2008|10:24pm] |
Hmmmm. Well, I was quite looking forward to watching this series of Heroes, but it seems that NBC's deal with BBC 2 precludes BBC i-player, meaning that should your time-displaced television watching system should suffer a failure (and what are the chances of that happening in any given 11-week stretch?) you're reduced to a single page of bewildering spoilers, guaranteed to leave you slightly aggravated and still uncertain what happened. Now, there are series this wouldn't matter with. A Town Called Eureka? Watch it out of order. Flash Gordon? Well, you might get a little confused, but the gags will still shine through.
Heroes, though, is hard enough to follow without missing large chunks of the plot.
|
|
| Tweets for Today |
[17 May 2008|10:03pm] |
|
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
|
|
| Making and Selling. |
[17 May 2008|06:06pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 creative |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Lightsaber noises |
] |
I've been having a think about making and selling things more and more. I think it's my default Don't Mention Iraq setting for my brain.
I've got a load of old clothes and stuff in a big pile ready to go on Ebay or to the Car Boot sale. I've started selling some things already, but I'm waiting for Stu to leave before I car boot, and for the 19th before I Ebay anything because you get free photos after that.
Then once it's all gone I can think about doing more crafty things.
The thing about being a freelance journalist is that I am limited with my maximum earning potential. If no one needs me then I don't get paid. I really want to do something that means I can earn as much as I want - it's just a matter of putting in the hours.
I've been looking at a lot of ideas on the internet and I really think I could start making things and selling them for some extra income. The whole thing of tax and whether I'd stay self employed or become a Ltd Business is a bit confusing at the moment but there are loads of advice lines you can ring up and ask these things on.
At the moment my master plan for the next 6 months involves:
1. Clearing out the house a bit, and getting a bit of cash and a lot of space that way.
2. Visiting friends and relatives. (The army welfare bunch will pay for 2 return train tickets which is nice)
3. Work if I'm offered it.
4. Keep looking for a perfect permanent job.
5. Go and do something abroad for a couple of weeks.
6. Possibly go on a bit of a jolly over to Basra (but this is only just going on the drawing board and I'll do an update about it at some point if it looks like it will happen.)
I might start making and selling while I am here, or I might wait till I've got a full time job to make it simpler in terms of tax etc. My plan for this involves making things from stuff that's been thrown out or is no longer wanted. So my outgoings will be minimal and my chances of making any cash will be much higher.
I think I'm going to start making stuff while here because I get excited about it when ever I think about it. Even if I only make it and don't sell it, I can experiment with different things and possibly have enough to do a craft fair in the run up to Christmas. Eep!
Right, now that decision is made, I will not update again about my crafty exploits until I have made steps toward achieving it!
( A song thing from <lj user= )
|
|
| real Internest |
[17 May 2008|06:02pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 okay |
] |
I'm kind of glad that I didn't notice until just now that there is Internet at our accommodation. I'm enjoying being away from it really, although I've been hearing bits and pieces from Twitter, although less of that seems to be friends and more seems to be the fellow educationists I added just pretty much before I left the UK. Alan Cann who I became aware of last Sept (and who in my head I think of as Mr. Web 2.0) because I was interested in his presentation at Alt twitters many times each day mostly on ed tech matters.
We're packing this week pretty full with visits, but there is still plenty of time to swim in the sea and the pool and just hang about on the beach, and each of the three days so far has been a shiny sparkly gem of a day. And as always I think to myself that I wish I did this sort of thing more often; will need to find a ch1x0r to bring on holidays because right now I'm borrowing someone else's and she'd probably prefer he was here instead of me really. There will be photos in due course of course. If I've done a lot of typos it's because I just had a very strong rum and coke; I think booze is stronger somehow outside of England, and I seem to get through much more of it.
|
|
| On Loving Our Enemies: A Postscript on Violence |
[16 May 2008|07:42pm] |
As something of an afterthought, most closely related to Parts One and Three of this series, I thought I would make two further points about violence.
First of all, I wish to emphasise that the violence that we must resist most adamantly is precisely just violence. Other forms of violence -- those forms that are oppressive or unjust -- are already transparent. We can see that these forms of violence are abhorrent and should be resisted. However, this is not so clear for the violence that we call "just". Consequently, it is precisely the violence that appears to be necessary, or justified, or moral, that must be resisted most strongly.
In this regard, a parable told by Winston Churchill (and repeated by Hardt and Negri in Multitude) may be an helpful illustration. Allow me to quote it in full:
Once upon a time all the animals in the zoo decided they would disarm and renounce violence. The rhinoceros proclaimed that the use of teeth was barbaric and ought to be prohibited but that the use of horns was mainly defensive and should be allowed. The stag and porcupine agreed. The tiger, however, spoke against horns and defeneded teeth and even claws as honorable and peaceful. Finally the bear spoke up against teeth, claws, and horns. The beer proposed instead that whenever animals disagreed all that was necessary was a good hug. Each animal, Churchill concludes, believes its own use of violence to be strictly an instrument of peace and justice.
And so, Hardt and Negri go on to argue:
Morality can only provide a solid basis to legitimate violence, authority, and domination when it refuses to admit different perspectives and judgments.
This, then, is most obviously illustrated in the discourse of just war against terror. Precisely whom is the terrorist? Is America the terrorist because of the violence and oppression it propogates around the world? In this case, is Al Qaeda justified in attacking American business interests, occupying forces, and even civilians? Or is the violence of America justified against Al Qaeda because it is they who are the terrorists? It all depends on who you ask -- an American businessman may tell you one thing -- a Muslim farmer, driven to poverty by external powers, may tell you another. Of course we could multiply examples (is Palestinian violence justified against the occupying forces of Israel? Is Israeli violence justified against the Palestinian population?) but I think the point is made.
So what is the point that is made? That any form of violence can be justified, depending on whose perspective is operative. Consequently, we must be skeptical of all justifications of violence, and must be especially wary of the forms of violence that appear to be justified from our own limited perspective(s). That which is said to justify violence is actually far more subjective than we may have first imagined, and so we must not risk imposing the death-dealing consequences of violence due to such a subjective decision (another reason why vengeance belongs to the Lord, as Paul says in Ro 12).
Indeed, I think that this observation can only lead us in one of two directions. Either we recognize all violence as just (i.e. America is justified in fighting a global war on "terror", and Al Qaeda is justified in going to war against American business, and American occupying forces) or we renounce all violence. The result of going the first direction is an unending cycle of violence. Furthermore, given that we as Christians are called to be peacemakers, we cannot offer such a wide-open acceptance of violence. Consequently, we must choose the latter of these two options.
So much for my first point. On to the second.
When discussing violence, and our refusal thereof, it would be useful to first come up with an operative definition of "violence." This is trickier than one first might imagine. For example, while violence has more traditionally been understood as using physical force against another person, more recent social theory has noted how the use of words, the imposition of limitations, and other things, can be a form of violence. Consequently, our understanding of violence has been expanded... but now it appears that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction and anything can be described as violence.
The reason why this is so important is because it relates to our understanding of crafting creative alternatives to violence. For example, in Part 3 of this series, I argued that a good way to diffuse a violent situation is to physically place one's body between the violent person and the person being attacked (or between two violent people!). Some might argue that this itself is an act of violence -- i.e. I am forcefully using my body as a shield between two people. Indeed, the use of restraints -- from trying to hold a person back, to imprisoning a sociopathic killer -- could also be described as a form of violence. So, for the moment, I still have no clear definition of what violence is, and I fear that I am drifting into a casuistic form of reasoning. This troubles me because it, too, is uncomfortably subjective (i.e. it is premised upon the belief that I can recognize what is, or is not, "violence" in any given situation).
So, I end with a question. How should we define "violence"?
|
|
|
[16 May 2008|08:37pm] |
I've been trying to keep up with what's going on in Sichuan, as I've got some friends from there, or at least they are originally from there. The whole thing is a nightmare. I came across this photo:
http://news.sohu.com/20080516/n256912038.shtml
5月16日，四川江油县公安局女民警蒋小娟在地震灾民庇护所为一名地震灾区孤儿喂奶。蒋小娟义务为一些急需哺乳的地震灾区孤儿喂奶，却“狠心”把自己才6个月大、同样需要母乳喂养的孩子交给父母照料。
May 16 - Sichuan's Jiangyou County Public Security Bureau officer Jiang Xiaojuan, breast feeding an orphaned child at a relief center for earthquake victims. Jiang Xiaojuan volunteered to feed several orphaned babies in the disaster area, having left her own child, just 6 months of age, to the care of her parents.
|
|
| Tweets for Today |
[16 May 2008|10:04pm] |
|
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
|
|
| T-V-Blood-Shed |
[16 May 2008|08:33pm] |
Photo intentionally omitted.
I shouldn't pick on TVBS (see title). All six of Taiwan's cable news channels are doing it: since Monday night, airing non-stop images of corpses, bloody survivors, mangled collapsed building parts and sobbing relatives from the Sichuan earthquake.
Most people can literally turn the tube off.
But as part of my job, I can't. I surf those six channels all day in the office to make sure I don't miss a breaking Taiwan story. If I flip off the TV, pun intended, I could get scolded by a supervisor, especially in the unlikely event of a Taiwan news story of any importance to international readers.
So the images on the air slowed down my work. First, the scenes came from China. Having lived there, I could imagine the personality types involved. I would understand their language if I were on site. I knew how the parents of dead kids were reacting, namely a blast of unbridled grief followed by a quick search for someone to blame. It would have been easier to watch if the scenes were unfolding in a country where I had never lived.
Or maybe not. Video of corpses reunited with surviving family members for the first time and shots of half-crushed bodies from any country would have forced me to pause while trying to finish my Pulitzer winners on the day's Taiwan currency fluctuation.
Why are T-V-Blood-Shed and the others on this rampage? They're doing whatever they can to compete with one another for the dopey eyeballs of viewers who have lost control of their remotes. Those channels enjoyed, as usual in Taiwan, no censorship.
But I guess the gritty exposure works for China. Myanmar, where almost 40,000 people have died from a cyclone, lets in few journalists, so nothing from there shows on TV in Taiwan or anywhere else. China, despite its reputation for blocking reporters from disasters, is suddenly letting journalists tromp all over northwestern Sichuan in hardhats to look at the gory rescue work and interview survivors. And via these TV images, China looks the way it wants, which is like a victim in need of compassion instead of criticism.
|
|
| happy friday : it's official cat decorating day |
[16 May 2008|12:15pm] |
And I, for one, intend to decorate every cat I meet.
Whoever sent me the pink roses, you forgot to include a card! On the offchance that you're reading, thank you very much, they're lovely -- as were the chocolates, which came packaged with a delightful bow. And when you've got a cat and a bow in the same room, some actions are obvious:
 |
this old thing?
Designer headgear for the little cat. |
If you click through to full size, you can see that the gentle flash I was using has left stars in his eyes!
After weeks of non-attendance, I seem to have been at gigs most evenings this week, which is a bummer as tonight Totally Extinct Enormous Dinosaurs are playing at the Cellar and I would like very much to see them, damnit.
But last night was my local for the lovely Scarlett's Well, who are like a fantastic act of cross-dimensional trickery, as if several different bands from entirely different genres (or possibly worlds) are (somehow, miraculously) occupying the same space.
And the night before that I was out on the Punt (Oxford's annual new bands festival) where Cat Matador won on both best name and most likely to feature on future compilations for everyone (not least because they gave out free CDs), while my heart was won by the supreme morosity of Elapse-o, playing to an empty basement while the scenester crowds flocked off to gather around the next big thing (Little Fish, who was missed on grounds of having been seen before). Winner of most stupidly danced to was lunatical Sikorski ... who gave me a bit of a flashback to Monday when I was getting my monthly dose of dance from Space Heroes, South Central and the Whip.
But I twittered that, so I'm repeating myself. Speaking of which -- Loudtwitter seems to be missing later evening twitters, I suppose i should probably figure out if I can fix that.
|
|
| Spring has finally arrived in Vancouver ... |
[15 May 2008|11:49pm] |
.
I guess that the last few months have been my longest period without any entries since I started my scribblings in LJ circa 2001. Maybe I've run out of things to say - although my family would roll their eyes at that. But winters seem to silence even me, to some extent. However, I have been busy this winter collecting and editing all of my 7 years of ramblings - as I had planned for inclusion in a 'family memoir' when I began journaling. I call my memoir "End Game", a collection of writings covering each of the eight decades I've been around - the 30's (I was born in 1937) through the current 00's.
I couldn't see myself having the organization and dedication to just describe each decade in turn - so I decided to randomly record various stories in a journal format as they occurred to me for a couple of years. But over seven years have gone by - so I now have some 225 pages of stories to sort out. A task for the next few months.
I've been busy in other things during the past few months - mostly dealing with my role as 'doting grandfather' for my two incredibly beautiful and intelligent (of course) grandsons - about which, more later.
But this springtime has been marked by a wonderful event - Chris Kay's ('Cobalt999') graduation from the University of West Florida a couple of weeks ago. I packed my summer clothes and flew off to the Florida panhandle for a week of summer in Pensacola and Walton Beach. Chris and his wonderful mother were great hosts and I stayed for almost a week in a place I'd never visited before.
Chris received TWO degrees at the UWF Convocation - a B.Sc. and a B.A. - in Molecular Biology and Philosophy respectively. Suddenly, the 'undergraduate grind' is behind him and better times beckon. My family is looking forward to welcoming him to this BC coast later this summer. It was a wonderful experience for me - a great friend, a 'borrowed son' achieving a goal that he worked so hard to achieve. I've been to a few graduations in my time - my own in Montreal (McGill U.) in the distant 60's, my two sons' from SFU in Vancouver in '89 and '91, Peter's MBA in France (INSEAD) in '96 - and, now, another in Pensacola, two weeks ago. The first 'two-degree' graduation!
I liken undergraduate years to 'being in an attic' - with a 'ceiling' separating a young person from the open sky. Graduation is like opening a skylight and climbing out onto the 'roof', where the sky's the limit. So, CONGRATULATIONS, Chris - and to all recent graduates I'm fortunate enough to know and care about.
I'll save the 'grandfatherly stuff' for a later post. But, this picture really says it all - Introducing BEN WOO Routledge, our new Korean-Canadian grandson: -
|
|
| Туийттер |
[15 May 2008|08:24pm] |
|
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
|
|
| Tweets for Today |
[15 May 2008|10:06pm] |
|
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
|
|
| Blogging for human rights |
[15 May 2008|09:57pm] |
Today a group of us have joined in our monthly synchroblog on human rights, posting something on the same topic, with links to the posts of the other synchrobloggers.
We also join thousands of other bloggers around the world who are also blogging on human rights.
Here are links to the synchroblog posts:
|
|
| The Day There Was No News |
[15 May 2008|02:36am] |
I'm not the sort of person to post videos. But this short clip tickled and fascinated me.
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
duke_aldhein's Friends Page