So writes Brian, on a "mini-TOEFL" style test. He's discussing the disadvantages of having a humorous friend over that of having an intelligent friend. Which is to say, funny friends will lead you astray. But it's a delightful turn of phrase, which I'm guessing is a translation of a Korean idiom that happens to work well in English.
Category: Quotable
Caveat: 제목없음
I had a terrible dream, based at core on the fiasco of last Thursday night at work, combined with the staff observatons that are coming up. And Condi Rice was there – in the role as Sarah-teacher. There were supposed to be student presentations. I was unprepared to give out the homework. The headmaster came by (headmaster? that’s from Moorestown). It was on third floor of Old Main, and too hot (Old Main? that’s at Macalester). And I was wearing a cowboy hat. What’s that about? As Condi-Sarah was leaving, she was shaking her head, saying, “He did nothing… and THAT for homework?” Pure derision. Laughter from other annonymous observing teachers.
Meanwhile.
“God will only hear your prayers if you’re in your [home] congressional district.” – Congressman Barney Frank
Caveat: Old-Style Liberalism
"The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determine." – Bertrand Russell wrote that, about 100 years ago, as the concluding words to his "Introductory" to his The History of Western Philosophy.
I'm not sure we've yet reached that "future" he references.
Caveat: “Notes for Korean”
Over the last month, I’ve been trying to get more serious and disciplined about my study of Korean. I have begun to keep little computerized notes, every single day, of interesting or useful vocabulary items, phrases, and things like that. But I’ve reached a point where I have compiled enough of these that they’re becoming difficult to keep organized; more importantly, I sometimes go looking for something I know that I put into a note, and cannot find it. Also, some of these things are things I would love to have found by searching online, in the same way that I have found other similar things.
Because of all of that, I have decided that it might be useful to post these daily notes and observations about Korean as a kind of footnote to each day’s blog entry. This will make them searchable by not just me but by anyone – although it won’t improve their level of organization. But with google, who needs organization? – just let the spiders crawl around and find it, right?
So, starting today, I will include a little, disorganized spattering of notes somewhere in each blog entry. Most of my regular readers (how many are there, really? 3? 2?) will not have much use for this, but they’re mostly going to be there just for myself, as it’s a convenient and logical place to put them – I’ll be able to access them anytime I need, and I’ll be able to search them, too. Further, by compiling them I’m helping myself to remember them, and I can express my joy at trying to make sense of this fascinating yet difficult language.
-Notes for Korean-
context: my cellphone’s “phrase of the day”: 식품 매장이 몇 층에 있는지 알려주실 수 있습니까?
매장 =department, floor (as in a dept store), store
so: 식품 매장=food floor, food court
and: 알리다=know, tell, inform, notify
context: episode 13 of 쾌걸춘향, 춘향 says to 몽룡, “금해애애!” (approximately) = “stop thaaaat”
금하다 =refrain, prohibit, or (idiomatically) stop doing something
In researching this online, I also found an interesting double negative:
…-ㅁ을 금할 수 없어요 = [I] can not stop myself from …
context: deciphering instructions in a student textbook
풀이 =explanation, clarification
찾다= seek, search for, spot
발견 =discovery, revelation
발견하다=find, discover
context: conversation of words with a coworker
나륵풀=basil (the herb)
풀=grass, herb, plant, pasturage, weed
context: trying to figure out instructions on a korean website
지나다=pass, spend, elapse… etc. (I should know this – it’s lesson 1 in most Korean-as-a-foreign-language textbooks!)
사용=use, employment, appropriation
복사=reproduction, copy
주소=address
똑=exactly, precisely
소리=noise, sound, talk, word
끝=end, conclusion
처음=first, beginning, start, cf. 첫
도우미=helper, wizard (in computers)
정보=information, report
닫다=close (close button says 닫기)
당신=a special word meaning “you” (I should know this)
context: vocab words for “blue” class
discover (v)=발견하다
energy=정력, 에너지
forecast=예보
shed (v)=벗다
source (n)=원천
stay (v)=머무르다
put on (v)=입다
until=-까지 (nominal ending)
spot (v)=발견하다, 찾다
always=항상
have seen / haven’t seen=본적 있는 / 본적이 없는
Meanwhile, in other pursuits… I rediscovered a Portuguese poet named Fernando Pessoa, who apparently wrote criticisms of his own poetry under alternate pseudonyms (heteronyms). This is interesting, cf. Borges. I vaguely recall running across him before, but, if so, I completely forgot him. I was reading the Portuguese-language wikipedia article about him, just to entertain my linguistic fancy, I guess – keeping myself challenged, and all that. And under the Spanish-language article on him, I found the following pithy observation about Pessoa by Octavio Paz: “nada en su vida es sorprendente, nada excepto sus poemas” (nothing in his life is surprising, nothing except his poetry).
Quote of the day:
“Tenho o dever de me fechar em casa no meu espírito e trabalhar quanto possa e em tudo quanto possa, para o progresso da civilização e o alargamento da consciência da humanidade.” – Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his last words: “I know not what tomorrow may bring.” I’m sure others may have said these words as their last, too, but he’s the one to whom the quote is generally attributed. It’s notable that he, in fact, wrote them rather than speaking them, as he was unable to speak at the time. And it’s also worth noting that they were in English, not Portuguese, since English was a second native language for him, because he’d spent much of his childhood in South Africa.
Caveat: Comunistas y Anarquistas
Vicente Huidobro, el poeta chileno que, seguramente, he mencionado más de una vez, escribió, "Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente la sociedad actual no sea comunista. Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente el comunismo, no sea anarquista." El hecho de que la cita ya lleva unos cuantos 70 u 80 años de edad no parece alterar su esencia verdadera fundamental.
Pero… ¿y en quién se convierte él que haya estudiado el anarquismo? Pienso en la situación de los llamados "estados fracasados," por ejemplo la de Somalia. Porque eso sí es el anarquismo verdadero, ¿no? Quisiera decir que él que estudiara el anarquismo se convertiría en libertario, pero no creo que sea la verdad, al menos en la mayoría de los casos. Parece más probable que el anarquista frustrado se vuelva al lado autoritario, sea fascista o leninista. Nos da un resultado deprimente, entonces. Y circular.
Caveat: Be Yoyr Own Brain
The other day, I saw one of those remarkably bizarre English compositions that occasionally crop up on clothing. There was a man standing on the subway platform at Gasan, down in Seoul. On the back of his shirt was the text, “GENDER BE YOYR OWN BRAIN HYSTERIC VINTAGE MODERN.” I couldn’t resist surreptitiously snapping a photograph of it – it was too unique to ignore. But now I wonder what it means.
After taking the guy’s picture on the platform, I spun around and took some other pictures from the platform, which overlooked a typically busy Seoul street. The day was rainy and overcast, and the air was thick with humidity. The tires of the cars on the street below made that subtle, sweet, hissing sound that tires make when roads are wet. It’s a sound I find weirdly peace-inducing.
Caveat: If you can’t avoid it, enjoy it!
The sentence "if you can't avoid it, enjoy it!" was the cheery conclusion of a 5th grader's essay that I was grading today. I liked the philosophical sentiment of it, though I also thought it has an unspoken corollary: "if you CAN avoid it, then, by all means, do so." Some things in life are unavoidable, and we should take those things with calm, equanimity, and even try to enjoy them. But other things in life are clearly avoidable, yet all too often, we just keep putting up with them, tolerating them, letting them annoy us, when it would be all too easy to walk away from these things, or push them out of our way and move on. Sometimes I think we possess an excessive loyalty to the status quo, whatever it is.
Which brings me back to the "why" of my current adventure – vis-a-vis my ruminations about whether to renew my contract or not. Clearly, because of the option to renew, I am in an "avoidable" situation, as far as continuing my experience here. So the question is, do I want to continue? Are the benefits I'm deriving greater than the annoyances I'm suffering? What's the calculus of my life, so to speak?
Caveat: Memorializing Insecurities
I just wrote this really long entry, and posted it, and it didn't show up.
In it, I talked (among other things) about my negative feelings about my teaching abilities – and then I said something to the effect of: I should stop memorializing my insecurities online, as it does me no good to dwell so much on the negative. So I think there's something karmic (or at the least apophenic) in the fact that the post failed to stick.
I was watching an episode of That '70's Show, recently, and the character Hyde says, "Oh my god, I've been using sobriety as a crutch!" I found this extremely funny and philosophically fascinating, too. It seems there's a human impulse to obsess negatively on almost anything: drugs or other classic addicitons, for sure, but also religion, politics, or even sobriety.
Caveat: The Supremacy Clause and Judicial Activism
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Medellin v. Texas (earlier this year), I have felt deeply troubled. The so-called "supremacy clause" of the U.S. Constitution states: "all Treaties made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the land." But the court held that unless the Congress passes specific laws implementing treaties, treaties are not binding domestic laws. How is this interpretation in any way in line with constitutional intent?
I'm not trained in law, but the supremacy clause, and our governments' disregard for it, has always troubled me. I feel strongly that the "founding fathers'" intent was in line with something U.S Grant subsequently envisioned:
I believe at some future day, the nations of the earth will agree on some sort of congress which will take cognizance of international questions of difficulty and whose decisions will be as binding as the decisions of the Supreme Court are upon us.
Essentially, I think that the Supremacy Clause must have specifically had in mind the sorts of binding supranational treaties we now see with organizations of states such as the U.N. or the E.U. I don't think that such supranational polities were in any way beyond the conception of the founders of the U.S., given that it seems very likely they viewed their own project as a supranational rather than national project – there was nothing subtle or requiring interpretation in the name they chose: United States of America. They expected more states to join, they thought they were already supranational, and they were not trying to build a nation, but rather replace it, as a concept, with something new. In this sense, the E.U. as it stands today is perhaps closer to their conception than the contemporary U.S.
That's just my opinion. So… whatever. I had a bad day today at work, so I decided to rant on about something where I'm both uninformed and singularly unempowered.
Caveat: And So On
I recently found out that the new president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, is exactly one day older than I am. This is very weird – the idea that someone my age is the president of something like Russia. I suppose Obama is only a few years older, too, should he win the presidency in the US. That's an odd thing, when world leaders start being people who are one's contemporaries.
Quote.
"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order." – Jean-Luc Godard
Caveat: The Quest for the Google-Killer
In the world of internet search technologies, there has arisen a trend where people are constantly looking for the "google-killer" – the "next big thing" in search algorithms or interfaces that will finally vanquish google's market dominance. There are problems with this quest, that render it somewhat unpredictable if not quixotic: first of all, google is a moving target, meaning they are constantly innovating their algorithms and methodologies behind the scenes; second, google, like many other large technology companies, has realized that brand-image is king, and as such, that marketing and design trump genuine innovation and genius (in this, they've learned well from Applecorp).
The technological problem of finding a better "search engine" is daunting, as we are right at the borders of AI (artificial intelligence). Thus, the next step seems to require real breakthroughs in natural-language- (and/or web-meta-language-) processing and interpretation. So-called "semantic webs" come into play – and somebody has to build these huge semantic databases, "tag" them appropriately (i.e. figure out how to automate the "tagging" process), and then spider through them effectively and rapidly.
A recent offering seems to go in the right direction: powerset.com. Right now, it's limited to a small, largely well-formed subset of the World Wide Web – namely, my own favorite haunts at wikipedia. But its ability to make sense of my "natural English" questions and find appropriate articles is pretty amazing. Try it out.
I'm listening to Jason Bentley on KCRW – he's playing The Black Ghosts' "Here It Comes Again." Great track… Jason Bentley rules.
Quote.
"I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." – President U.S. Grant, on the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, in which he served as a decorated junior officer.
Caveat: Al menos una locura por año
«Si yo no hiciera al menos una locura por año, me volvería loco». This is a quote from from Vicente Huidobro's poem, "Altazor." Roughly translated: "If I didn't do at least one crazy thing each year, I'd go crazy." The only thing I might change, in that sentiment, is to increase the frequency – maybe one crazy thing per week would be better.
Huidobro was a truly magnificent poet, and one of my personal favorites.
Caveat: Stonking Quantities of Dosh
The Tory candidate for Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, uttered the phrase "stonking quantities of dosh" (meaning, roughly, "large amounts of money") in a recent discussion on the issue of the vast income inequalities in the British capital. It's a very memorable and colorful turn of phrase, and very much worth memorializing. So there you have it.
Caveat: Blossomdrifts
I was walking to work and saw a large “drift” of pink tree blossoms on the sidewalk. Here is a picture.
“If you want to have a clear conscience, reflect on the good feeling you have toward your fellow man, but for heaven’s sake don’t do anything about those feelings. Don’t get involved because once you do you’ll be faced with conflict and decisions and the continued possibility of making mistakes.” – Robert Trebor.
Caveat: 애국심은 악한의 마지막 도피처이다
"애국심은 악한의 마지막 도피처이다" (aeguksim-eun akhan-ui majimak dopicheo-ida) => patriotism-[topic-marker] scoundrel-[possessive-marker] lastly hideout-[copula]. Does anyone recognize the immortal words of Samuel Johnson? "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
The idea also appears in a Bob Dylan song, and for a long time, I mistakenly believed he was the origin of the quote. Anyway, it's been on my mind lately, in light of the annoying progression of events in Tibet and China, and the constant posturing of ALL (yes, ALL) of our presidential candidates in the U.S. I'm sick of it!
The world will be a better, happier place when the last self-declared patriot (of any stripe) finally recants or passes away. "Patriotism" is almost always just a kindly euphemism for some brand of xenophobia or another: hating other countries and peoples, or at the least distrusting them and devaluing their common humanity. I know this is controversial, and it might get me in trouble to declare it so publicly, but on some things you must take a moral stand, right?
I made some curried pasta for dinner. Kind of a makeshift using various things I had left in my kitchen – curry powder, garlic, onion, tomato, some italian pasta, and yoghurt. It came out very delicious, and then I sat and watched the original Star Wars movie on KBS2 (dubbed into Korean) and ate my dinner, while running an upgrade to ubuntu 7.10 on my linux OS. It was a good evening.
Caveat: Crossing the Plane of Immanence
I'm re-reading snippets of A Thousand Plateaus (by Deleuze and Guattari). It's always been one of the most difficult yet absolutely central pieces of philosophy in my library. It's crucial to my efforts at re-evaluating (and re-valuing) Cervantes' Persiles.
One of my guiding philosophical quotes is from Deleuze (on Spinoza): "Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation." This sounds difficult, but it's not, really. What it is saying is nothing more than: if you think positive thoughts, these develop and coexist with "ethical" (guilt-free) happiness. Or, as I might paraphrase it: guiltlessness implies optimism, and vice versa.
And speaking of ethics. An anonymous author of the English-language wikipedia writes: "An ethics of immanence will disavow its reference to judgments of good and evil, right and wrong, as according to a transcendent model, rule or law. Rather the diversity of living things and particularity of events will demand the abstract methods of immanent evaluation (ethics) and immanent experimentation (creativity). These twin concepts will become the basis of a lived Deleuzian ethic."
Hmm… "a lived Deleuzian ethic." Guidelines for Deleuzional behavior? Let's try it.
Caveat: Quote du jour
God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation. – Thomas Keating
Despite this, I'm glad for KCRW – I'm listening to the radio and enjoying it, and a chilly April breeze drifts through my window as I drift off to sleep.
Caveat: Hanger-on-ers
Bush, to Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu, at the recent NATO summit: "It's not easy to host as many automobiles, bodyguards, world leaders, hanger-on-ers as you did."
Caveat: Inconvenience is the mother of invention
Thus writes my student Ella, in a brilliant little essay on inventions. She's perhaps the most linguistically talented of my students – not necessarily the most academically inclined, but she has what we sometimes call an "ear" for language – she is an excellent mimic of sounds, and has a great aural memory. We'd learned the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention" in class, and she adopted it and made it her own aphorism very cleverly, and with a native-speaker's grace. I was impressed – such linguistic insightfulness and creativity is pretty rare.
Caveat: Citizen Dog
I mentioned a Thai movie called Citizen Dog a while back. The other day I found it online and downloaded it (it took a while, of course – downloading movies is slow business, even with a DSL connection), and this evening, amid my general gloominess, I watched it. It was a delightful exercise in almost pure garciamarqezesque magic realism. And isn't that a cool word I just made up: garciamarquezesque?
One of my favorite moments is when the narrator says: "Now Kong is dead. But he is still here because he really likes riding his motorcycle." Kong is the character who is killed by the rain of motorcycle helmets.
Caveat: Oh Hay Lite
LOLCat is a sort of name for that weird dialect of internetchatese that is only semiliterate, is full of acronyms (such as LOL = laughing out loud) and contains lots of both deliberate and accidental "cute" misspellings. And, just as someone, somewhere, is translating the Bible into Klingon, so it is the case, I have discovered, that someone is working hard to translate that same document into LOLCat.
Here are the first three verses of John:
1 In teh beginz is teh cat macro, and teh cat macro sez "Oh hai Ceiling Cat" and teh cat macro iz teh Ceiling Cat.2 Teh cat macro an teh Ceiling Cat iz teh bests frenz in teh begins. 3 Him maeks alls teh cookies; no cookies iz maed wifout him.4 Him haz teh liefs, an becuz ov teh liefs teh doodz sez "Oh hay lite."5 Teh lite iz pwns teh darks, but teh darks iz liek "Wtf."
More internet wackiness: Check out Happy Tree Friends – but don't bring your children, these things are quite violent.
Caveat: … furiously
I continue to struggle with my alleged boringness. It's a common enough criticism that I cannot dismiss it. How do I become a less boring teacher? A less boring person. There were many things I didn't want to become, in life… and boring was one of them.
Mientras tanto, some (boring) quotes:
"We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on." – Noam Chomsky
"It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously." – C.M. Street
Caveat: No Love
"Love is not for the faint-hearted, or for the self-possessed" – I think Rumi (Persian poet) said this. Since I am both faint-hearted and not terribly self-possessed, I suppose this means that love is not for me.
Actually, it can be surprising the number times I get the question, "why aren't you married?" or its variants (such as why I'm not in a relationship, etc.). And a number of people, both Koreans and non-Koreans, seem to jump to the conclusion that I must be "looking" for a relationship, and that my coming to Korea may even have something to do with this – given the commonplace that Westerners will have "better luck" finding a significant other in Asian countries (which I definitely don't actually think is necessarily true, either).
But the facts are more complex, and the net is – I'm really NOT looking for a relationship. In fact, part of what lead me to make the decision to go off into an alien culture and go looking for new experiences was because I had reached a firm decision, last year, that I am meant to remain single. With the idea of a relationship basically ruled out, it made it easier to let go of things like "career" and "place" and just go off drifting again.
And so. "But don't you get lonely?" Of course I do. Still… I'm happier with loneliness than I have ever been in a relationship – at least over the longer term. So, it's for the best.
Caveat: Euthanasia
The writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce disappeared (and presumably died) under mysterious circumstances in Chihuahua, Mexico, while traveling with Pancho Villa's army during the Mexican Revolution. He was over 70 years old at that time. Shortly before, he had written in a letter to his niece, "To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!"
Caveat: Happy Lunar New Year
Today is lunar new year. So I had the day off. But I didn't do anything productive with myself, whatsoever. I watched some television, did some reading, surfed wikipedia.
Here's an interesting quote: "rational arguments don't work on religious people; otherwise there wouldn't be any religious people." – tv character named House, on the eponymous tv program. I'd never seen this program before. I find the premise and the main character vaguely annoying. But I'll concede it's pretty well written. And I liked that line a great deal.
Caveat: A lot of monkeys…
… does not a masterpiece create. At least not using typewriters. As physicist Seth Lloyd explains: "No matter how far into Hamlet a monkey may get, its next keystroke is likely to be a mistake." But then he goes on to explain that if you assume the monkeys are typing on programmable computers, they very well might come up with Hamlet. This is a counterintuitive distinction, but it gets at the heart of his thesis, which is that the universe's complexity is a consequence of its underlying programmaticity (I made that word up, not him).
Caveat: End of Tomorrow
Today was kind of the last official day for School of Tomorrow (language hagwon); as of next week, we become part of LinguaForum officially. We had a long staff meeting that wasn’t entirely pleasant, as we confronted the changes that we face – more classes to teach, completely changed curricula, etc.
Meanwhile, it was hard to get motivated to teach out of the “old” books for one last day – so I had the kids reading a simple little poem by Wallace Stevens, called “The Snow Man.”
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Caveat: Wisdom? Or Whatever
"Be the change you wish to see."–Gandhi
Caveat: Cake’s existence is have eat cake
My students have to keep writing journals, where they are supposed to make diary entries and/or respond to little pithy quotes with something reflective. One of my lower-level students, but still quite intelligent and talented, when confronted with a request to reflect on the idea of "to have one's cake and eat it too," wrote "cake's existence is have eat cake." This seemed truly profound to me. But that might just be the cold medicine, acting up.
Caveat: Quotes
"Oprah is transcendent; she is a cultural treasure." — David Letterman.
"when the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done." — J. M. Keynes.
"Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." — Mark Twain.
"With only 300 bits, you could assign a unique barcode to each of the ten-to-the-ninetieth elementary particles in the universe." — Seth Lloyd.
Caveat: Unclear on the concept?
My students take these regular vocabulary quizzes, one component of which is to use the word in a sentence. However, often times because of constraints on what can be covered in class, they’re left to their own devices in coming up with a good sentence to use for a given word.
The result can be some rather unusual sentences, either unintentionally funny or poetically incoherent. In the first category: “The dog appealed behind the tree.” In the latter: “this sheep is sink, soon.”
In other classroom humor, my most advanced class (an intimate five students)… we’re talking about some subject they’re not all finding terribly interesting – the US civil war, maybe? – and I look over and notice some rather insane 3-year-old-style scribbling/doodling on the broad face of the page of the book we have open. Just a mishmash of swirly lines and boxes and dark blotches all across the text. A brutal commentary on the quality of the text? Sharing his level of interest in the class?
So, I call his and his classmates’ attention to the scribbling. And without missing a beat, he says, “This is cubism, teacher. I’m expressing myself.”
This brilliant display of adaptive language skill is a genuine delight, and I can’t stop myself from laughing for the remainder of the class.
No matter how boring it is, I’m going to try to post something every single day this month. So prepare yourself, dear readers, for some truly banal content!
Caveat: “There is great chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent”
Location: Los Angeles
Soundtrack: my brother playing L7 and Echoboy on his turntable – good stuff
The quote above is from Mao Tse-tung. Many years ago (maybe 5? 6?) I had placed that quote on the home page (splash page) of my National Account Data Analysis intranet website that I built at ARAMARK (the application affectionately known as Reportomatic). At the time, it seemed very apropos to the IT/database situation there, but I’ve always assumed that the Reportomatic would eventually be upgraded or replaced.
At right is a screenshot of the page under discussion (click image to see larger).
Yet, yesterday morning I went to visit with old friends there: Joanne, Judy, Paul, Tom, Carol, and all the rest, and Joanne showed me that it was still there, exactly the same, all these years later. I was so pleased to have left such an ambiguous legacy!
Not surprising, perhaps, that things have changed so little there, but I still reflect that that company still seems so much more forward-looking and IT savvy than my more recent job, which was a sort of permanent IT disaster-in-progress.
Anyway, Paul and I went out to lunch in Burbank, and had some pretty good sushi at a place called Kabuki. Paul is the most brilliant database administrator I know, and I was surprised to learn he was still with ARAMARK at first, until I learned he’s a new father – this explains a great deal, as suddenly one’s need for stability and reliability in a job becomes more important than one’s frustration with the job’s nature, I suppose. I can sympathize if not quite relate. Anyway, he’s always great to talk with, and parenthood seems to agree with him.
My brother has the most amazing music collection – all kinds of ripped/burned CDs and tons of stuff on vinyl. He’s going through and playing stuff and it makes for a nice sound track.
Caveat: Voluptuosidad
Muchisamuchi al lado – dos jovenes se aman, se besan, pero notablemente románticos y cariñosos en extremo. Me da una alegría destacada.
Leyendo a Nietzsche: "el sendero de nuestro cielo pasa por la voluptuosidad de nuestro infierno." (our path to heaven goes through our own hell´s voluptosidad.") p 252.
Nietzsche as first evolutionary philosopher, o sea that is the geneological approach, drawing on his own genio and Lamarck – Darwin, he forges a new historicism that is not just (or only) dialectic but systematic, in that it views history as a dynamic system of evolving objects: men, cultural constructs, ideologies, etc.
"Quisiera dar y distribuir hasta que los sabios de entre los hombres volvieran a sentirse alegres con su locura y los pobres felices con su riqueza." p 256
[The "retroblogging" project: this is a "back-post" transcribed from paper on 2010-11-28. I've decided to "fill-in" my blog all the way back. It's a big project. But there's no time limit, right? The above was written one afternoon, after work. Probably in a Starbucks. I was reading Nietzsche, in Spanish.]