I think it’s time for a reboot check-in

I had decided that I wasn’t going to do these after a year, but since I’m still committed to the changes I made a little over a year ago, and I need to post something today, to keep the chain unbroken, I’m going to check in and see how I’m doing. I haven’t actually thought about these things until now, so when I give myself a grade today, it’ll be an honest grade, based on where I am right now.

If this is your first time hearing about the reboot, here’s what you need to know:

Just about one year ago, I took an honest look at myself and I didn’t like what I saw. I needed to reset a lot of habits, make some significant changes to the way I approached just about everything in my life, and keep working at it, even when it was hard.

I can’t even believe that it’s already been a year, and that it’s only been a year, because time feels like that when you’re 44, I guess.

Here are the things I decided to address:

Drink less beer.
Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
Write more.
Watch more movies.
Get better sleep.
Eat better food.
Exercise more.

Every month, I wrote a post that looked into each of those things I decided to change, and examined how I was doing with them. That was a helpful part of the exercise, because it made me look at myself and my choices honestly and fearlessly. At times, it motivated me to work harder, and at other times it encouraged me by making me realize that I was doing better than I thought.

This time around, since I haven’t done a public check-in since October, I’m going to give myself two grades on each point. One will be the overall since last time, and one will be for January. Here we go.

Continue reading… →

We have come so far, America, yet we have so far to go

Last night, while looking for a movie to watch, I said to Anne, “How about Selma? It’s timely.”

It’s one of those movies that we’d both been intending to see since it came out, but never got around to. I tracked it down and we settled in. It is a powerful, moving, beautiful film that at least one Fascist who is about to become an illegitimate president should watch.

When the film was over, I sat on the couch, and wept for several minutes. This isn’t ancient history. This isn’t fiction. This is something that happened less than a decade before I was born, and the kind of systemic racism it reveals is still happening today from Ferguson to Baltimore to towns all across America that never make the news. And now we are about to have an illegitimate president who would look at George Wallace and think he was the hero of this story.

It’s appalling to me that our SCOTUS threw out the voting rights act that Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and so many other civil rights leaders fought so hard to bring into law. It’s even more appalling that, half a century later, our country still needs it. It’s disgusting and sickening that the idiot who is about to become the least popular president in history doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, about the people who fought so hard (some giving up their lives) to ensure that their fellow Americans were allowed to exercise the rights given to them in our country’s Constitution.

I went to a hockey game today. At one point in the second period, a picture of Dr. King was put on the jumbotron with an excerpt from his famous “I have a dream” speech printed next to him. There was no announcement, there was no attention drawn to it, to him, to his sacrifices and to the entire reason today is a federal holiday. I think I was one of maybe half a dozen people in the Staples Center who applauded. I’m pretty sure I was the only one (at least in my section) who stood up. That made me feel ashamed for my country, and so disappointed in my fellow citizens. More attention was paid to the kiss cam, than to the memory of the man who we are meant to honor and remember today.

We have come so far, America, yet we have so far to go.

signal0090

It’s late, and I’m tired, but I really don’t want to break the chain of daily posts.

So here’s me, from a few mornings ago, in the early stages of my daily bootup sequence.

all we have to do is keep talking

Back in the Before Times, we’d go to a blog, read the post, read the comments, add a comment, and (usually) encounter interesting people who engaged us in interesting conversation. That probably feels like a fairytale to a lot of you, but it still happens here, because I think I’ve used a combination of no-fuck-giving and the banhammer to push away most of the idiots who would waste our time being dicks and just trying to disrupt our ability to communicate with each other.

Still, I imagine that a substantial percentage of you don’t have the time or interest to read what other people have to say, so it is for all of you that I am sharing this conversation I had over the weekend. I think you’ll dig it as much as I did.

In the comments to my post nebulat ergo cogito, Stephanie said

This is really beautifully written and I sincerely enjoyed reading it.
Nitpick/ question : If your title is “Fog therefore I think” then there’s a typo in your latin. There shouldn’t be a “t” on the end of “nebulat” because nouns in the in the nominative singular don’t change their endings. If you wanted it to be “I fog therefore I think” as a play on cogito (I think) ergo (therefore) sum (I am) I’d recommend adding an “ego” which is latin for “I” because nebula won’t function as a verb. Or for “fog is therefore I think” I might try “nebula est ergo cogito” Unless your title is meant to be something else and I missed it?

Latin grammar nazi 😀

I replied

So I love that, of all the kinds of grammar Nazis you can be, you’re a Latin one, because that’s really freaking cool! I had a friend who could read and write Latin, and it was always fun to make him do it at parties.

The title is taken from a quote by Umberto Eco, and because I don’t speak Latin, or read it, or even understand it, I just copied it from him. 🙂

She said

I love Umberto Eco! My favourite is the Island of the Day Before, although I’ve never read something he wrote that I disliked. I deeply wish my Italian was strong enough to read him in his original language, because I think it must be beautiful, but I can barely order coffee. Anyway, excellent choice in source material 🙂
Umberto Eco was also a poet and medievalist, whereas my Latin language training was classical (think medieval English versus modern), so there could be some difference there. He was also far more skilled a Latinist than I will ever be.

Basically, latin grammar uses different endings on the end of words in place of things like pronouns and prepositions, or to indicate if the verb is subject or object, plural or singular, etc. And Latin nouns never take a “t” ending so far as I know.

Given that I know the source is a poet, I’d say he added the ending to make nebula function as a verb in the 3rd person singular (he/she/it).

If that’s the case then the translation is roughly:

It fogs, therefore I think.

However, “ergo” may be static in meaning as “therefore” but “cogito” can mean: think; consider, reflect on, ponder; imagine, picture; intend, or look forward to; and “nebula” can mean: mist, fog; cloud (dust/smoke/confusion/error); thin film, veneer; or obscurity.

So there’s a lot of play with the translation, and we’ll never be able to say with 100% certainty what that translation should have been. As a writer and lifelong teacher, I’m sure Umberto Eco wouldn’t mind if you played with his words.

If you ever come across any more latin phrases and want a rough idea of their meaning this stuff might help you a little bit:

http://archives.nd.edu/words.html

http://www.dummies.com/languages/latin/declining-a-latin-noun/

Oh! that reminds me. Did you know that there’s a rule in English grammar that says it’s incorrect to split the infinitive? This is because in Latin the infinitive is a single word, so it’s physically impossible to split it and a long time ago, the original grammar Nazis decided that English grammar should adhere to the same rules as Latin. Of course that makes no sense at all, you can split the infinitive in English quite easily and its meaning is perfectly clear. The most famous example of the split infinitive? “To boldly go.”

Thus ends Latin to English translation 101.

I said

This is fascinating, Stephanie! Thank you for taking the time to share all of this stuff with me!

And she said

You’re more than welcome.

Latin is basically a math puzzle for the literary minded, so you’d probably really enjoy studying it since you enjoying programming and such. Have you ever thought about going back to school? A lot of people study things like languages and history and come away feeling like it’s just a bunch of names and dates and words to memorize, but if you have the right kind of mind for it, you’ll see that what it really is, is the study of the framework of our world. Once you learn to see the scaffolding that holds everything up, you get good at working with the shell that’s built up around it, and you realize that the anthropological idea that all history is fiction is literally true. If you spend enough time with languages then you start to see that writing is only a series of symbols which function as a kind of telepathy allowing you to read the thoughts of other people, whether it’s been hours or millennia since those thoughts were given form. Although It’s kind of weird when time loses its scope and the tragedies of 200 CE become just as immediate as something that happened yesterday.
I know you think of yourself as a creative type, but academia is creative, that’s why it produces so many people like Tolkien and CS Lewis and Umberto Eco. It also gives you a lot of free time to spend on other pursuits. Plus your performance ability would have made you an amazing professor, like really fantastic.
Things to think about in case you get bored.

Anne and I watched ARRIVAL this weekend, and that film deserves an entire post of its own, but something Stephanie said harmonically resonated with some dialog from the film. Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor, who is teaching her class about the origin of Portuguese:

So I was already thinking about how language and art are ways to express thoughts and emotions and all of those things that make us individuals. When I read Stephanie’s most recent comment this morning, it landed on me in a profound and meaningful way. Part of me wants to tell you precisely what that is, right now, but a different part of me, who I guess is in charge right now, would rather leave that thread out there for you to pull on in the hopes that you’ll share what, if anything, is makes you feel and think about … because I think that one of the biggest reasons we are staring into the Abyss right now is that we’ve started talking at each other, instead of talking to each other.