The best thing in the world

Miriam has taken to reading her board books to herself. She'll go into the bedroom, pull a book off her shelf, and sit composedly and start reading, turning the pages, looking carefully at all the pictures, pointing out animals she knows or counting flowers. She just read Hug, by Jez Alborough, which is nearly wordless, a journey of a little monkey looking for a hug, and his mother, and finding various animal mother-baby pairs along the way. She turned the pages, pointed at the pictures, and murmured something like "mam." Then she put down the book, and ran over to me, arms outstretched, for a big, big hug.

Yesterday's run destination: Washington Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Life
lunch: more chili
dinner: attempted new chickpea and veggies dish, blech
bonus: Alice Waters' recipe for oatmeal currant cookies

Open to suggestion

Minor among the reasons I am not a doctor (though the idea of becoming one has occasionally dogged me for quite a while now) is fear of learning about various diseases and imagining that I have the symptoms of something new and gruesome after every class. This morning's Intro Psych podcast got into mental disorders, focusing on depression and bipolar disorder, and at first it was just like listening to previous lectures about language acquisition or the evolutionary underpinnings of sexual attraction, and perhaps it was just the seriousness of the topic, or of the guest lecturer, but after a while I started ticking off the various DSM-listed symptoms of depression and thinking, "I've never actually experienced these, but I can imagine it." It was a little eerie, not just thinking about being manic or depressive, but seeing myself as open to the suggestion, made only by my own imagination, that I could become so.

It made me wonder how open to suggestion I really am, of my environment, of the ideas I read and talk about, of chance passings on the street and serious conversation with friends and family. The lecture on psychological disorders followed a few on social psychology and the impact that interacting with other people, and thinking about what other people are thinking about you, has on a psyche. I feel more unmoored than usual these past few months with the various and substantial changes of locale, employment, social setting, and the newly balanced relationship with those closest to me that comes of those changes, more open to new ideas and to changes in how I present myself to and think about the world around me. I have had a few similar seemingly important periods scattered through my past in which I have felt conscious of an ability to change who I am and particularly who I am to others, most notably the first couple weeks of my freshman year of college, but those pivot points in my personal development have all felt like unalloyed growth.

This one seems a little more ambiguous, perhaps because I was quite satisfied with who I was before this move and this change, and very much rooted in stable relationship to others. To change now affects not only me but those I love and who love me. Perhaps because the transition has been unexpectedly difficult and drawn out, taking advantage of the reshuffling of moving to effect a leap of personal growth is more frightening than previous changes.

I feel more confident in my ability to care for and sustain the world around me, but also more fragile and shallowly rooted than ever before. Maybe it is moving across the country. Maybe it is switching from full time office work to full time childcare. Maybe it is turning 30. Maybe it is whatever epiphenomenon generated all those other changes. (The inevitable passage of time?) Maybe my knowledge of the complexities of the world has raced ahead of my ability to understand it, to manipulate it. Manipulate isn't the right word. To make it anew.

There is a greek word, techne, that I'm trying to dredge out of my once encyclopedic knowledge of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Wrapped up in its meaning is that to understand something is to be able to make it, or unmake it, that merely having knowledge of a thing, true deep knowledge of it, is identical to being able to create and control it. That was certainly true for the 15 year old me reading and rereading that book. I think the 30 year old me is starting to separate knowledge from understanding, creation from control. It is a more awesome world I inhabit now, and I am but a speck upon its surface.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: miniwheats
lunch: peanut butter and jelly, and chocolate cake
dinner: roast chicken and cheesy potatoes

Charitable giving

A few recent references to charitable giving, in no particular order:

One of the LA NPR affiliates, more local than most, is in the midst of a pledge drive. For a $100 pledge, you can get a complete archive of the WikiLeaks leaked documents, and do your part to ensure they remain available to all

The how-to book on non-profit fundraising Becca got me out from the library says special events are a lot of work. Not surprising. It suggests that if a supporter offers his manse, or country club, or yacht, for a fundraiser, thinking long and hard before accepting. If you think you have the extra volunteer support to run it, why aren't they already employed in other fundraising activities? If you don't, just imagine how much staff time it will take to organize.

Guidestar keeps sending me update emails. I've tried to unsubscribe, but it just doesn't take.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: miniwheats
lunch: cheesy potato
dinner: pasta and meat sauce

Artist workshop

In Aaron Kramer's workshop, there are two birdcages, holding a total of four songbirds. One of the cages was purchased, one he made. There is a central worktable, on wheels, with a few leftover tin can hand cranked sculptures, a hummingbird, a pair of flowers, and a wooden bowl full of small boats cut out of mid-century wooden bowls. Next to the door is a thick bundle of steel wire of various thicknesses leaning against a band saw next to a work table with various shapes of metal in the process of being formed. There are, in different parts of the workshop, two rows of clamps, neatly attached to the edge of a shelf or table. Everything is clean of dust, rust, and grime. A MIG welding machine dominates the right half of the metalworking bench, red and black with a coil of shining wire visible inside. From the ceiling hangs huge wooden strips, in curves and circles, each piece a few sheets of veneer laminated and strengthened, waiting to be shipped, assembled, and installed as a vast mobile in a hotel lobby half a continent away. On a shelf there is a collection of old tin tops next to a drill press. Every edge of the room, a converted garage with soaring ceiling, is covered in shelves, or tables, or bird cages, but there is enough room to bring in a crowd of retirees on a tour, if not to have them sit down anywhere. A few sculptures, balls of woven steel strung with beads, hang from a rafter, like the birdcages but stronger looking.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: beans and rice
dinner: lentil soup

Tax me already

I think of myself as affluent (though apparently my household income is solidly middle class). I know quite a few affluent people, and a few really wealthy ones. We need to be taxed more.

There are major problems in this country that can be solved by time and attention and money. There are enormous problems in the world, problems of human suffering, of lost habitat and environment and culture, of violence and disease and death, that can be solved by time and attention and money. There are problems that cannot be solved by those things, too. There are inspiring things, beautiful things, important long-term numinous things that can be accomplished by time and attention and money, like symphonies and space exploration and farm fresh tomatoes.

Liberal democratic government has been the greatest tool for the diminishment of problems and the creation of beautiful inspiring important things since the invention of capitalism. It needs money to run. It does a better job of deciding where that money (and time and attention) should go than anything else, particularly when it is dealing with issues that face whole systems, like climate change, disease eradication, or full employment.

I am not suffering at my middle class income. The people I know who earn $250,000 or more are not suffering at their upper class incomes, except perhaps in loss of personal time and attention to family. People pushed out of underfunded homeless shelters are suffering. People dying of dysentery are suffering. People denied kidney transplants are suffering. I am willing to forego some portion of my material wealth to try to help some people in need. I am willing to live on less, less space, less travel, less health care and smooth roads even, to help launch humanity into space, to discover how brains and quarks and coral reefs work. I would hope that those with even more than I have would be willing to do so as well, would welcome their opportunity to contribute.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: blueberry muffin
lunch: leftover pasta and meat sauce
dinner: carnitas burrito from Taco Plus

Cold toes

A salient and memorable point in the Intro Psych lecture on memory is on the creation of false memories, particularly around cherished or significant moments, like one's wedding or the morning of September 11, 2001. For memories that get replayed or talked about, the discussed memory can take the place of the actual lived experience, so that spouses sometimes swap memories of things that they saw at their wedding, even if only one of them actually experienced, the contents of that memory, so that both "remember" the experience as if it is their own. This can be used by tricky researchers to suggest or implant memories, and perhaps by others for more nefarious purposes. And it can lead people who revisit memories to make up stuff that never really happened, with implications for situations in which accurate memory has external implications, like in the witness box. 

With that caveat, my toes are cold again. Every few years, in a writing mood in a wintry season, I find myself staring out into space and enjoying the expertise of my fingers against the keyboard and the chill in my toes beneath the desk. The first time is in high school and the desk is to the right of the fireplace, under a window, and the computer is large and beige and I need, slumped into the big black chair as I am, to look up when I want to focus my eyes and see the words my fingers have typed magically by themselves. There's plastic on the window and a tree outside, a lamp arching over me to the right and the house is dark and quiet, everyone has gone to sleep.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:

breakfast: cereal

lunch: bulgogi and bibimbap from Kobawoo

No one told me there'd be mountains

Los Angeles is known for its traffic, for its glitz and its weather, for its beaches and shopping and wealth and poverty. No one told me if it didn't have those things, it would be known for its fantastic mountains. Driving along the highway, I turn a corner and there in the distance, though I have the AC on, is a magnificent snowcapped peak. Coming back from San Pedro over a rise and suddenly seeing that downtown LA, which seems so big and substantial from within its canyon streets, is dwarfed by the San Gabriel Range behind it, a dozen times taller, leaving the skyscrapers to look like a toy Oz on a plain of gridded streets. Flying in, watching over these mountains to the north, mountains to the east, mountains to the south, and the sea beyond, I love the vastness of this landscape, on which even the enormous effort and vitality that is the greater Los Angeles metropolitan statistical region (15,000,000 people and growing) is just a film on the surface of a deep, still pond.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: leftover chili
dinner: latkes, zahtar chicken, and cauliflower, later brownies