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Patience… NOW

November 7, 2011

nightfly culture, faith, this time it's personal, happenings 1 Comment

Gerard van der Leun, master of the admirable American Digest, had a major health event recently.  In his slow recuperation, he has discovered that patience is not just a virtue, but a necessity:

It is only in the last few weeks that the virtue of patience is beginning to dawn on me. That virtue is, “If you are patient with yourself, you may live. If you insist on running the 4 minute mile this afternoon, you will be checked out of here in a wicker basket.” In short, “patience” is no longer an option but a requirement. My previous reaction to illness has been to get over it and then get back to work. No such option here.

In a small way, I begin to understand Mr. van der Leun’s feelings here, because I, like him, have never been a patient fellow.  One cause is that I’ve had a very durable mortal coil for my whole life.  I have no allergies.  I’ve never broken a bone.  My only surgery was an appendectomy at 13… and after a week I was more than eager to go running around, since I didn’t have any post-operative pain anymore.  My heart and blood pressure are superb.  I’ve been stitched up a few times but nothing truly serious.  I don’t even wear glasses as I approach 40.

In short, I’m the idiot who sickens you by mentioning my stubbed toe when you talk about your cancer screenings and diabetes treatments.

This isn’t to brag, though.  The truth is that I had nothing to do with my health.  I didn’t pick out my body from the factory.* In a way, it’s like goaltending – I can’t win the game, I can only lose it.  Likewise, I can’t do much for my health except NOT screw it up.  I can smoke or get sloshed or ski off a cliff … afterward, I can quit and dry out and stay in the ICU for weeks.  But the healing is really a function of nature and medicine, not of my own actions.  I can hinder it by disobeying my doctors.  If I listen, I’m not “speeding up the process” as is commonly understood – it can’t go any faster with my help than it does on it’s own.  (If I have to move 20 soccer balls down a hill, I can simply let nature roll them for me, or I can go more quickly by kicking or throwing them down.  But I can’t do that with a natural process like healing, any more than I can digest my food more quickly.  It’s already as fast as it’s going to get.)

* Good thing too.  I’d probably wind up with something like this. [music at link]

Apoplgies to Mr. van der Leun here, because here I go about my stubbed toe… or in this case, the meniscus in my left knee.  Last month I tore it all to hell.  The doctor said that I’m actually lucky, because people with the severity of my injury usually also tear their ACL and MCL, and I only sprained those.  What could have been a months-long recovery is already well-underway for me.  But I do need surgery to fix the meniscus, if it can be fixed* – and if it is, then I have up to 12 more weeks to hobble about.  It’s driving me crazy.

* If it can’t be fixed, they’ll remove the damaged portion – and in that case, doctor says that I’m cleared for full activity.  Once it’s gone there’s nothing left to recover from, ergo, complete recovery.  The downside is that without it, my knee will come to grief in the long-term, so they will repair it if at all possible.

It’s hard for me to imagine being so badly injured or ill that I can’t even walk the dog, or go up or down stairs, or have to catch my breath just getting out of bed and to the bathroom in the morning.  It would honestly send me round to bedlam.  Reading about Gerard van der Leun, however, does something else to me.  It hurts my conscience.  I’m just a selfish little prig kvetching about my impaired knee.  It hurts, sure, but it won’t kill me.  It doesn’t even hurt as much as it did on the night.  If I wanted to be a moron, I could probably play a game tonight, though it would be painful and risk worse injury.  But that’s the thing – it would really be foolhardy; in a way it would be ungrateful to push myself.  I actually ought to be relieved I dodged worse, and glad that I have the expectation of full recovery.  The trick, though, is in being patient.  The older word for it is longsuffering, and it captures the essence more completely, I think.

To indulge in a little practical philosophy:  longsuffering is entirely out-of-favor in a culture that regards convenience and comfort to be the chief aims in life, disposed of along with many other Biblical concepts.  You could protest that you’re not a believer, and that’s fine, because on the topic of patience I am in practice quite the apostate.  But it’s also counted as a virtue in many cultures and a few decidely non-Christian belief systems.  If we wanted to be systematically rational about it, we can see why: things like convenience and comfort are quite similar to many of the things already mentioned above, in that their natural state is very difficult to improve.  We “make ourselves comfortable,” but by getting warm and dry.  It’s not so much doing a positive thing, as it is avoiding a bunch of negatives: we get out of the rain, into dry and soft clothes, bundle ourselves off to bed or the couch, and then – SIT.  Once we’re set up we don’t have to do much of anything to stay comfortable.  To take a convenient path is mostly about avoiding trouble, not making extra work for yourself.  We can’t win that game – only lose it.

My knee, however, is already injured.  The inconvenience and discomfort are a given.  Before I even react, the chief aims of this world are frustrated and I cannot possibly fulfill them.  And I don’t even have to be injured for that to happen.  No matter how comfortable I get, sooner or later I’m going to get hungry, and have to leave my comfort behind.  No matter how convenient I try to make life, something is always going to be in the way or intruding.  It demonstrates that if those are my greatest goods, I am doomed to be a failure.  Suffering has already defeated that goal.  To be longsuffering is to reorient myself and strive for a different goal.

I can’t make it better.  All I can do is use the event to cultivate good character, or bad character; to be pleasant to everyone or take it out on them.  It may not heal me any faster but I’ll be much happier one way, and much more miserable the other.  And suddenly I find that I have a real good to aim for.  I can tell it’s real because it’s something I need to strive after, not one that will naturally accrue to me as long as I avoid trouble.  It’s the opposite of the natural gifts, which I cannot really improve and that will eventually break down regardless.  These are things that require active input, and once given, their condition improves rapidly, far more than if I simply left them to their own devices.  And moreover, they endure.  I will never in this life be free of suffering; as I age I will only suffer more; this is outside my control.  The response – to cultivate longsuffering – is within my will to choose, and is something that cannot be taken from me.  As a goal in life, it makes much more sense to pursue something that is within my power to pursue, even if I am well off the pace.

When 53 > 99

October 12, 2011

nightfly almighty dollah, culture, happenings, politics, welcome to the working week 1 Comment

For a few weeks now, folks have been occupying Wall Street, and I’ve been doing my darndest to ignore the whole pathetic spectacle.  I actually have a day job, and wish to keep it, as there has been a lot of fat-trimming.  Besides, I thought that the high percentage of hipsters and wannabes and hangers-on would eventually cause it all to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity: “I was fighting the Man before it was cool.  Once we started getting on TV it became waaaaay too commercial.”

In a way, that would have been a more authentic result for a specifically “down-with-corporate-people” movement.  What we have now has bent irony back on itself in a manner more Star Trek than Starbucks:

  • An anti-corporate movement bankrolled by corporations;
  • A populist movement advocating complete top-down management of our economy and, by extension, the rest of our society;
  • Union officials and special interests whose actions are partly to blame for the problem, agitating for a solution;
  • A group of  self-descrbied decent and hard-working adults with educations spending weeks directing an extended tantrum at folks who are themselves well-educated and trying to work hard;
  • People decrying “violent rhetoric” and “uncivil public discourse” brawling with police, carrying “Behead the Rich” signs, and threatening to actually march on the homes of business executives;
  • Freeloaders coming to the organizer’s park to mooch off the original protestors, causing them to protest that people are, like, totally stealing all their stuff that other people worked to produce and then gave to them.

It’s a Möbius strip of lunacy.  Trying to grab one end of it and work it out to a conclusion seemed like a trap.  That was before the movement spread to “thousands of countries,” according to multi-millionaire corporate employee Diane Sawyer.  I can’t fault the math, since a few thousand agitators (ranks swelled by professional protestors recruited and paid for the occasion) are calling themselves “The 99%.”  Meanwhile, others have taken to calling themselves the 53% – as in, the estimated percentage of people who actually pay into the government’s coffers through taxes on their income.

One of these numbers is much smaller than claimed.  To slather another thick goopy layer of irony on, the country would be healthier if that 53% were larger – a taxpayer is someone who is earning a living and thus not whinging on their blog about having no living to earn.  The 99%, however, want that 1% – the top earners in the country – to relieve them of the burden of ever moving from the 99% to the 53%.

How did it get to this?

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Good dogs

October 4, 2011

nightfly made of awesome, pictures, sadness Comments Off

I’m taking a break from being angsty today.

BERJAYA

©2011 Barcroft Media; click for source article

Dear Tara, shown above, is one of the nearly 100 dogs who worked tirelessly amid the rubble of the Pentagon and World Trade Center, attempting to retrieve survivors, and finding only more vicitms.  Dutch photographer Charlotte Dumas travelled to take portraits of these brave dogs to commemorate their role in the recovery efforts.

“The dogs are now old and they will soon pass away. Even during the time it has taken since my first work on the ‘Retrieved’ portraits to now, three of the final 15 have died,” said Charlotte.  “These portraits are about how time passes, and how these dogs and their portraits are offering us a way to deal with the things that happened as well as relying on them for comfort.”

 And they do it for the love of their handlers and owners.  What surprises isn’t just that so many of them followed their masters without hesitation, but that many of our own unassuming pooches have similarly-loyal hearts.  Hug yours if you got one… or a neighbor’s. 

(via Ace)

Either I’m slacking or learning discretion. I can’t decide which

October 3, 2011

nightfly faith, the Sisko is angry, this time it's personal Comments Off

My gruntlement levels are plummeting faster than the markets, but yet, my promised screeds are nowhere to be found.  What gives?

To answer that in Jules terms… I’m trying real hard to be mature about this.  My life’s pretty darned amazing despite the accumulated slings and arrows of peevish fortune.  I mean, I don’t want to get all whiny and “Occupy Blog of the Nightfly” about it.  And above all, I’m trying to be mindful of Jesus’ words, that it is not what comes from outside of a man that makes him unclean – it is from the heart of man that you get all sorts of wickedness in word and deed.

The upshot is that the common run of life’s nusiances pelting about my ears right about now is less of a problem than my possible reactions.  My choices are:

  1. Equanimity
  2. MURDEROUS RAGE
  3. What you are currently reading

So I tread carefully, carefully.  I try to think before spraying acid like a carotid-slashed Alien.  I remind myself that life is not to be taken personally.  And thus far, I’ve actually gotten to the point where another one of those “brief upshot” lists looks like a good idea.  (Is “brief upshot” a redundancy? Hm…)  I’ve been able to sort the various events of the past couple of weeks into three rough-edged categories:

  1. Circumstance: stuff that happens to me
  2. (re) Action: stuff I did my ownself
  3. Consequence: stuff done in reaction to my own idiocy

This could be refined, of course.  My first insight was a 2×2 grid, a Punnet Square of Peevishness – covering whether a thing A- is or is not helpful; B- is or is not my own doing.  Two drawbacks: first, a dearth of items in the “helpful/my own doing” box; second, the open question of what came first, my chickenshit deeds or the egg on my face.

That’s when the insight came along: that lack of any positive actions or reactions is what’s really eating at me lately.  I’m really falling down on the job of being human.  It’s to the point where I paralyze myself through my self-disdain, and then disdain myself further for my lack of motivation.  Sometime in the past month I joined the cast of Daria without meaning to.

So I think this isn’t really slacking; I’m just spinning my wheels in the sand.  Step one is to throw that much out there, and see whether or not it catches something solid.  Then I can get pulled back up onto the road.

Less than gruntled

September 26, 2011

nightfly the Sisko is angry 1 Comment

Anyone out there who enjoys my grouchier writings is in for a treat for the next several days.

You know what they say – when life hands you lemons, drop them in a tube sock and start slugging life about the head and shoulders.

Guess what today is, mateys?

September 19, 2011

nightfly made of awesome, Official Dog, pictures, this time it's personal Comments Off

No, not that.  Well – ok, yeah, THAT, but not just that.  (Scalawags.)

Today is the birthday of this bundle of weapons-grade cute:

BERJAYA

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The letter of Pohl to the blogosphere

September 6, 2011

nightfly culture, faith, politics Comments Off

The good Professor attracts great comments, which is only natural since people are forced to keep up with the great posts.  His Labor Day post, replying to CNN’s ruminations on Muslims in America, is a case in point.

CNN starts us off with a “global public square” blog entry by one Steven Kull that reads, in part [with some judicious commas courtesy of yours truly]:

A particularly frustrating feature of the U.S. narrative, for Muslims, is that it divides Muslim society into a progressive liberal and secular sector on one hand and on the other a regressive Islamist sector that seeks to impose backward Islamic traditions.   America then seeks to promote the liberal forces and to undermine the Islamist forces. …

To most Muslims this American perspective on Muslim society is simply incorrect… While Americans do tend to divide the Muslim public into secular and Islamist groups, polls show that Muslims do not divide so neatly.

Overwhelming majorities endorse liberal principles, including that the will of the people should be the basis of governance, government leaders should be chosen through free elections, and that there should be full freedom of religion.

At the same time, equally large majorities say that Sharia should be the basis of government, that all laws should be vetted by Islamic scholars to ensure they are consistent with the Koran, and that Muslims should not be allowed to convert to another religion.

“Obviously there are some serious contradictions here,” the author concludes.  If you like, you can read it all, and save yourself the trouble of buying his book, Feeling Betrayed: the Roots of Muslim Anger at America.  (Just skip the comments: a vast number are profoundly stupid.)  You should know, however, that this book (and accompanying article) are the product of a five-year study involving “focus groups and surveys throughout the Muslim world.”  The author doesn’t mention if the study also involved watching the news for reports of terror attacks, honor killings, or other mayhem; nor listening to any standard “Death to America and/or Israel” speech at any time since Nixon left office.  One has to be working quite hard to miss all of them, as regular and frequent as they are… being the Director of the Program of International Policy Attitudes must occupy a lot of one’s time.*

*Policy attitudes?  They don’t study the policies themselves, just the attitudes?

Mondo tramples this small, representative snippet like Bo Jackson trampling Brian Bosworth:

In short, what we see is a call for everyone to have the freedom to agree with the Muslims. … (But remember, it’s the Dominionists and Opus Dei we should fear. OMG Krazy Kristers and even worse, Krazy Krister Katholiks!!!eleventy!)

(And if any of you out there want to play some moral equivalency card between those folks and the ones who talk about Judeo-Christian roots of American/Western culture, don’t bother. Most Christians at least know there’s a difference between what must be rendered unto God and unto Caesar. The people in the CNN article who seek a greater Dar-al-Islam don’t, because they think God and Caesar are the same guy.)

As you may have guessed from the lead, it’s one of the comments that really caught my eye: J Otto Pohl seized on the quoted section above to write this:

There is no such thing as Judeo-Christian. Theologically both Christianity and Judaism are closer at different ends of the spectrum to Islam than they are to each other. Christianity represented a very radical break with Judaism and Islam was an attempt to bring religion back closer to its Abrahamic ancestor. Both Christianity and Islam are universialistic religions. Whereas Judaism is very much the religion of a single closed ethno-confessional group. That is Christianity (a priesthood of all believers) and Islam (the Umma) are communities based upon faith. Being Jewish is a matter of ancestry or lineage, belief in God is not the defining element. Both Judaism and Islam are religions of laws whereas Christianity is a religion of morality. It would thus be more accurate to speak of Islamo-Christian or Judeo-Islamic values than Judeo-Christian ones.

This all sounds very reasonable, but it has one serious flaw: it’s completely incorrect.  Judaism and Christianity are inextricably related, value nearly all the same things, and a well-ordered society based on those values will be recognizable for it at once.

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Nightfly: the Special Edition (blu-ray)

September 1, 2011

nightfly can't ignore my techno, culture, geekerie, nitwittery, teh funny, the Sisko is angry, tv and movies 1 Comment

Y’all will remember how badly we geeks lost our minds over the terribleness of the Star Wars prequels.

That was a bitty-bit our fault, I suppose.  George Lucas re-released the original three movies in the run up to the 1999 debut of The Phantom Menace*, and these Special Editions featured some nifty spruced-up effects, but mostly they featured the restoration of redundant deleted footage, a bunch of CGI clutter blocking the view of the actual movie, and Greedo shooting first – an egregious affront on a lot of levels, not least of which was the damage done to Han Solo’s character.** Maybe we should have been a little more wary of The Phantom Menace as a… ZOMG NEW STAR WARS squeeeeeee !!1!eleven~!!

*Yeah, it’s been twelve years.

**First off, the guy’s a smuggler and a gangster who may have double-crossed his crime-lord boss. He’s not gonna wait for a pretty-please. Second, he can’t possibly be dumb enough to expect Greedo to miss a shot from four feet. Third, it’s obvious that he banks on Greedo not shooting at him at all, because then Greedo would be out the bounty money; that’s how Han gets the drop on him the first place.  The edit makes no sense on any level.

But we convinced ourselves otherwise.  We seem even to have convinced George, who actually un-tinkered somewhat when the original movies were remastered again.  Not that it stopped him from making all of the same mistakes in the other two prequels: bad characters, inexplicable choices, and endless clutter on the screen.  We just thought that he’d leave well enough alone with what he’d already done.

Well, now it’s obvious.  We only convinced George Lucas of one thing – that we’re all ungrateful peasants, and as a result he’s decided to tinker and tinker to the bitter end.

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The Man in the Beige Hat

August 30, 2011

nightfly culture 2 Comments

You probably won’t have heard of this man.  He’s David Wottle, and he’s had a long, successful career (according to ye olde Wikipædia) as the Dean of Admissions at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.  Before that, however, he was an Olympic runner, and on September 2, 1972, he won the 800-meter gold medal with a spectacular rush over the last quarter of the race to nose out Soviet runner Yevgeni Arzhanov, as seen below.

Don’t fret about the video quality; you’ll pick out Mr. Wottle very easily, as he’s wearing a freakin’ ball cap.

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How high’s the water, mama?

August 28, 2011

nightfly happenings, politics 1 Comment

Five Twenty feet high, and rising…

News 12 New Jersey reports that in some areas, they’re expecting record flooding, even higher than Hurricane Floyd’s storm surge.  The Pompton River at Pompton Plains is looking at 23′ 4″; the Raritan River at Bound Brook is expected to reach FORTY FEET by tonight.  They’re already at 28 feet.

Around the Nightfly/Bingley area, things aren’t as bad.  We lost power briefly but have it back now - he doesn’t as of about an hour ago, but he texts that he’s safe and dry. But there are trees and tree limbs and power lines lying around everywhere.  I walked the Official Dog about 11:30 and the neighborhood is rather a mess.  We’re in a higher-up spot so there’s no flooding here, but the lower-lying areas nearby are swamped.

The latest reports are that the evacuation of the Shore towns was successful.  There was a lot of damage out there.  Spring Lake lost most of its boardwalk, and there’s flooding and downed trees everywhere.  A part of Route 36 developed a sinkhole and collapsed.  Ocean and Monmouth’s coastline was badly flooded.  Route 9 is entirely closed in northern Monmouth, and there’s no driving in Manalapan.  Freehold got a little over 11 inches of rain and secions of it are entirely underwater.  So far, two people are reported killed in the storm – one woman drowned in her car in a flash flood in Salem County, and a firefighter has died after being injured atempting a rescue in Princeton.  About 600,000 people are without power in the state.

The general feeling is that we got off a litle easily, mostly because for once everyone handled things like adults.  Our Standard Operating Procedure is more like Lord of the Flies + Fran Drescher’s voice.  Governor Christie was on a press conference from the Trenton area just about noon, praising the evacuation and general preparedness, and cautioning that there’s still danger from the rising flood waters.

He had some fun with the assembled media during the questions – apparently his “Get the hell off the beach” warning, while heeded, nettled a couple of folks who asked him about his attitude. “Well, that’s just so you can cut and paste that bit into your stories,” he quipped.  “It’s F-4 on the keyboard, right?”  Then, he said that he was going to survey a lot of the damage via helicopter.  “No baseball games scheduled, though.  That’s F-5.” He then added, “We have some folks from Iowa and New Hampshire with us to help assess the damages – so there’s that.”

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