Maybe morning should be my blogging time; it seems to be when I'm feeling suitably melodramatic.

Today for the first time I wonder if it might have been a mistake to buy the house. Like me, it wants for so much fixing. We are both high maintenance, leaky, cracked, jerry-rigged but still beautiful, needy if we're being honest with ourselves, and I wonder if there's really room in this life for the both of us; there don't seem to be enough resources to sustain us.

For the first time I remember, I've started craving sunshine so much I can't enjoy rain. I miss the overwhelming, careless plant growth that happens everywhere back east. I'm hungry for blues and browns and greens, for ultramarine and scarlet, for distilled malachite and skies so bright you can barely see. I'm hungry for wet heat that slams into you like a wall when you walk out of the air conditioning at the airport, wide lazy rivers that are barely cool at all, and the lush, dense forest that asserts itself when water is no object--where nothing chokes out life but other life.

This is better, probably--it's a different kind of sadness than what I'm used to. The old things are still present, but this is here also--carrot, tantalizing, painful but drawing me from my rut. I hope.

I missed God by no more than two days on a flight between Salt Lake and Baltimore. Sometimes I wonder who I would have been if I had found him--planting tomatoes and chasing toddlers, living a life of different struggles, a more rooted but so much less examined life.

As it is I lay awake at night and think of suicide. I'm not sure about anything, but I think there would be no answer no matter what I were to read, no way to transcend absurdity, and such a lack of endgame makes me want to die. This game isn't that much fun, to make it last forever. Still, I wake up in the morning and I do the things I would have done, if there was God, cleaning the dishes and turning the soil, just with my questions echoing in the stillness. I listen, and I try to escape them, and I'm happy for the wind and sky and sunlight through the glass.

People use each other to bury truth. This is why I'm afraid to be alone, why I shouldn't be with people. They're a refuge not an answer, a temporary peace, a short term solution to a long term problem. I'll take it but wonder what's next, and worry how to get there.

Fashion and Beauty

What isn't evil about it:

-Presenting the best of yourself; using creativity, craftsmanship, color, texture, line, drape, and function; self expression through physical appearance; fashion as one of the ultimate forms of art which is for people in an incredibly tangible and concrete way.

What is:

-Excessive valuation of physical beauty; beauty as an essential component, or even the most essential component, of identity--particularly for women

-Defining beauty as being some incredibly unhealthy and incredibly unobtainable standard

-Thereby a) generally screwing people over psychologically and b) making sexuality competitive, which diminishes the quality of sexual relationships



Solutions?


One obvious thing is an attempt at reclaiming; to use creativity, self expression, and craftsmanship to reject unobtainable standards of beauty. I see three problems with this.

First and most obviously, it doesn't address the incredibly excessive emphasis placed on appearance. This is a huge problem, and I'm unaware of any easy solutions to it. I can only suggest we try and remember that it's always more important to be amazing than to look amazing--always.

Secondly, reclaiming is not going to win the war. This kind of action alone, contrary to liberal mores, is never going to create a world where people have a healthy attitude towards their bodies, their appearance and their sexuality. The best you can hope for is to create a liberating subculture, a chance for a few people to practice democracy in discourse, a chance for a few people to have freeing experiences. If reclaiming does not win the war, and something else--say, lobbying for restrictions in advertising--possibly could, should we be spending our resources on this?

Thirdly, lots of things about aesthetics are not universal. Current aesthetic standards will influence what we find to be appealing; this is inevitable. I haven't studied aesthetics a lot, either practically or philosophically. However, it seems that to an extent, you would have to play into the current consumption-oriented aesthetic standards to successfully create something beautiful. I need to read and think more about this.


The other obvious thing is to simply disengage--to act in a way that doesn't accept making yourself an object for the aesthetic consumption of others as a value. It seems like an ineffective and unsatisfying option; it's not going to win large scale against corporate hijacking of aesthetic values, it has lots of practical disadvantages in day to day life, and it looses all of the potentially healthy things the art of personal appearance has to offer.



I have some sort of idea about the balance on this that I personally want to strike, but I'm interested in other people's thoughts. :)

Everything

If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way. -Simone DeBeauvoir


It seems I must be joining the famous echo-chamber of the blogosphere, because somebody blogged on my ellipses. I could not help but be struck by how much the photographs, to her, seemed to mean only death, only destruction, only despair.

As some of you must know, I have a predilection for certain pastimes commonly considered depressing or hopeless. One of these is the protection of the small.

If there is to be humanity, it is impossible to prevent all child abuse. From my life and involvement in the systems that govern this matter, I can only conclude that as a society we don't care. . . And not only do we not care that complete success is impossible, as a society we don't even come close to caring enough to do what can be done. I believe we will never come close. It is across this background I paint.


A twelve year old throws a physically violent screaming tantrum because the brother who raped her is about to get out of jail. For this she must sleep on the floor of the group home, and she remains on low privileges; she's not allowed to talk to her peers, eat sweet things, listen to music, play musical instruments, wake up early, wear normal clothes, or use the exercise equipment. She may read with permission. She keeps sobbing, and going on about how her father beat her and the things that happened with her brother; the staff member who supervised this tantrum does not want details, does not want details. The child must learn to take responsibility and control her emotions; she is making excuses.

A young teenager is responsible for his siblings. He has heard more than once from his parents that they don't want him. For good reason the kids are all terrified of foster care; they've been burned. Their violent alcoholic father has completed his required therapy, and the case is about to close on the day when he towers over me and yells at me not to come around, liquor bottle in hand, slamming the door in my face. The case closes on schedule, family preserved.

A sixteen year old refuses to co-operate and keeps running away. She is given only a blanket and underwear for clothing and is under observation day and night. Had she been in the program under it's previous ownership, she might have been taken out to the pond when she kicked and screamed to "work it out in the water."


Perhaps the most impressive thing about these stories, from this vantage, is their darkness, and their closeness; these are stories of here and now, America the beautiful within the past few years. It is impossible to save them; it is impossible to vanquish the darkness. I can try, but nothing I can do will really keep these children safe from violence, from neglect, from profound institutionalized cruelty, or from rape.

Somehow, though, this is not all. Between the lines there is the constant victory of survival--and the constant victory of humanity. I had an irrevocable revelation once as a CASA, squatting with my charges in the dust behind their friend's apartment. We needed a place where we could go to talk away from Mom and Dad, where they could suss me out and decide if I was OK. We talked about school, about foster care, touched a little, briefly, on when things got "bad."

These children had been kicked out of their house in the rain and told never to come home, or watched their father beating their mom, or watched their mother go on meth, or eaten only when fed by their older brother--this all besides the direct violence they had experienced upon themselves. They had been torn away from everything they knew and learned that all the world was dangerous. They had their wariness; they had sore spots. Possibly they had patterns, internally, that would damage them for the rest of their lives.


What they had more than anything else, though, was that they were simply kids; kids who wanted a princess backpack and a new football, who yelled and laughed and ran around, who picked their noses and yelled at their brother for picking his nose. They were funny and smart and playful, silly and cool, constantly teasing me for being a geek and each other for damn near everything. No matter how much trouble they were in or how much I couldn't save them, they were still people. If you had been there to take pictures of us on that day, they would have seemed to be happy ones.

And this, perhaps, is the undercurrent I see in those photographs of destruction and pain; this, perhaps, is the reason I don't see them as even a little one-sided. Human beings will be human beings, whatever their circumstance, and just as tragedy can hide behind a smile, so are profound courage and compassion to be found in death, destruction, and despair.

Some are fortunate enough to find themselves in happier photographs--but if I had chosen happier photographs, they would still be photographs of human beings quite capable of murdering and starving one another--human beings capable of hurting, of falling, of holding a bleeding stranger in the open danger of the road--capable of growing to maturity after a childhood of torture; capable of standing before a column of tanks and dying before the world in support of what they believe in, capable of burning themselves alive to stop the burning of village after village, alive.

They could not save us, and neither can I, but life is in the trying--because we are all human, capable of squatting and joking in the dust, or comforting our children as they weep upon the sand.

test # 3, Zemansky and Sears Ch. 8-10.

note to self: do not simply allow blog to become only a homage to all your favorite websites. . .


How Day hopes to pass:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_velocity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_frequency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_acceleration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(physics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_axis_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_mass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_momentum#Conservation_of_momentum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inelastic_collisions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_body_dynamics#Angular_momentum_and_torque
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinematics

How did anyone ever learn anything before the internet?


On the bright side, I've actually enjoyed lecture both times this week, and paid attention, I think, more than 35% of the total time. It's hard to resist things going-round. . . There's something very satisfying about seeing the whole world in constantly moving shapes and arrows, with different colored quantities that interact with each other in mathematically meaningful and lovely ways. Everything dances.


this was fun too:
http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/hangar/4421/#Rotational_Mechanics_and_the_Pirouette

. . .

in case any o' yall were gettin' on too cheerful out there. .

http://www.dismalworld.com/must_see/unforgettable_photos.php

It really is depressing; if you're feeling down, save it for another day. But, they really are also very historically interesting and thought provoking.

my favorite one is at the bottom of the page.



And on a fully unrelated note, Happy Birthday Mom! You rock. Exceedingly.

Ok, I'm done.

We're not going to discuss what this says about me

xkcd on revolution

Yes, I know. There's a reason this is under the category "dreams." But, to paraphrase a friend, what can be gained by asking if xkcd is “ours or theirs?” The better question is, “How can one use xkcd for some liberatory project?”

and so we see xkcd--

Exulting the joys and efficiencies of life under capital
http://xkcd.com/23/
http://xkcd.com/325/
http://xkcd.com/223/
http://xkcd.com/277/
http://xkcd.com/77/
http://xkcd.com/488/
http://xkcd.com/164/
http://xkcd.com/137/

celebrating the fruits of a high-functioning democracy
http://xkcd.com/154/
http://xkcd.com/129/
http://xkcd.com/463/
http://xkcd.com/285/
http://xkcd.com/84/

considering violence?
http://xkcd.com/81/
http://xkcd.com/101/
http://xkcd.com/279/ (the roll over text)
http://xkcd.com/393/

Don't even get me started on cultural revolution.

* just fixed the link for number 81, which is funnier than 84 over again.

portraits

Of many creatures.

rather than continuing in my tradition of posting beautiful unattributed images that I found floating around unattributed on the web, I've decided to cut you all in on one of the most lovely image sites I've found.

If anyone out there reads Russian, feel free to let me know what it says. :)

http://2photo.ru/2007/12/24/print:page,1,raboty_prizera_mezhdunarodnykh_konkursov_fotografa_dikojj_prirody_tim_flach.html

My faux imperial

Education continues next week; presently signed up for physics, and a toy ballet class. Wish me luck.

*sigh*

jam for thought

Or is it. . . better than jam?


note for my dear paranoid parent friends: mild profanity in some images.

Perhaps this is rather silly of me, but I never really considered--until Darrin made that comment--culture jam as art. As far as wholesale acceptance of herd mentality. . . well. . . that's quite a larger topic.

But I was thinking about the comment, and did a bit of poking about for images of culture jam. Certainly some of them qualify as art, and I think some of the ones I came up with that I've included here may likely not have been intended as culture jam at all.

What I'm trying to do is consider the potentially powerful use of images as a tool to goad people into thinking more, and perhaps in certain directions, about their world.

Here are my favorites from the search--images I found particularly effective, artistic, interesting, or powerful.



Deurbanization


Nike


London, after (global warming)


When we grow up




Playfulness can go a long way too. . . consider:

Live in Russia (instead of playing games)


Speeding (what's your excuse)


Clear Speech


Democracy


Abstinence


P.S. Looks like these images are cut off. The idea in most cases gets across, but if anyone knows how to fix the html and wants to give me a hand, it would still be much much appreciated. Thanks all for putting up with my learning curve.

In "when we grow up", the foot in the foreground belongs to an elderly woman.

What do you think of radiohead?

And also, what do you think of the culture jam movement?

Radiohead is the jam, by the way. I think. *snark muffled by sincere respect for radiohead. . .*

I've some pretty mixed feelings about adbusters, the organization who's page hosts this. Here's a documentary about them, if you're interested. . . I find it's a pretty good concise exposition, at about 40 minutes.

So here's my gripe about culture jam. Is it enough? Is it everything someone can do? Is it effective? At all?

And I confess, the cheerful font of the sticker that said "enjoy debt" on the ATM was pretty striking. But most of the work they do? Not so much. I don't think soundbites will ever be enough to convert someone away from capitalism. Without development of the ideas behind it--without an understanding of the reasons one would wish to deface ads, and background for the alternative message presented--it doesn't come to much.

Perhaps some of my resistance comes from the book culture jam, which is simply not well written, and the official adbusters website, a recently de-slickified construct full of what look exactly like ads and--paradoxically--selling their own brand ("black spot") of products. I believe them when they say they aren't in it for the money, but it feels very odd to support someone who uses the Exact methodology they're dedicated to fighting.

It's not that I don't appreciate what they're trying to do, but it's a superficial makeover. Alone, it's no more than a pitiful attempt to turn vast impressionist sweeps of advertiser's image building into a dialogue. .. but a dialogue where no one ever says anything that takes longer than those two seconds it takes you to look at an ad.

It doesn't work.

Is deconstructing and elaborately mocking adds the best way for a cultural revolutionary to spend their time?

And then comes another question: exactly what are they proposing instead? Economic suicide isn't useful for much, and to support only ethical companies, at this point, is still economic suicide for most of us. The votes of dollars will never be enough until supported by a real public discourse, and meanwhile the majority of our time and our dollars go to the enrichment of those same people we "jam." In perspective, it's like leaving informative little notes in bigoted history texts as a protest against their use in public education. . . except, following that metaphor, all the textbooks would have to be bigoted, and they would have to be most of what was available. Hmn.

I can see it as a useful tool, but only when used more substantiatively. . . in conjunction with a more substantiative discourse, and a more substantiative plan for action.

P.S. Also, everybody shout out a big happy birthday for my sisters number three and four, for birthdays yesterday and today, respectively. They rock, each in their own awesome way. :D

And on a related note--

the other morning I woke up

and the only remnant of my dream was the feeling I really needed to somehow get a geiger counter.