Seven Years Ago Today: Taking myself too seriously?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 6, 2011, with an additional reflection at the bottom.]

The episode of my new blog pic and its attendant quotations (from an old friend and from Henry James – another old friend of a sort) led to my realizing that I seem to have been taking myself a bit too seriously lately (and for who knows how long before that).

Sad like Jesus

Christ as the Man of Sorrows
by Luis de Morales

A meditation

By Morris Dean

Last month some “communication problems” (let’s call them) put me in touch with a feeling of over fifty years ago, when I identified with Jesus as the “man of sorrows.” An image also returned to me, or at least I assumed it was the private picture of Jesus I had in my head then.

Ask Wednesday: Editor in chief on changes at Moristotle

Morris Dean is ecstatic
about the recent changes

Ask Wednesday regularly features an interview with an interesting person on an interesting topic.

Moristotle has just added two new regular columns, for interviews and other voices, added three contributing editors, and invited queries from potential guest columnists.
    We asked our editor in chief to tell us what all this means for the blog. [Our questions are in italics]:

The addition of contributing editors is a big thing, right?

Every day of retirement?

When I retired, I expected that henceforth I would never miss a day of blogging. But a few late evenings of desperation, when I was tired from turf-turding, or just tired, or empty of inspiration—perhaps because I had some inspiration earlier in the day but made the mistake of ignoring it for later—have taught me that my daily post had better not be forced. Writing something because I "should" or because I promised myself I would hasn't done it for me.
    Posts I've written for those reasons likely haven't done it for anyone else either, for I suspect that even some posts I've written and really liked didn't do it for anyone else, but only for me.
    It would be too sad for a post not to do it for anyone at all.

Is today Saturday?

Today's the sixth day of retirement, and every one of them has seemed like Saturday. It's a good thing, except I'm never sure which column to take my pills from.
    Today is Saturday, isn't it?

Speaking of memory, I spent about an hour this morning going through most of the rest of the boxes I brought home from the office. One of the items I found was my leather-binder collection of congratulatory letters written to me and presented on the occasion of my 25th anniversary at IBM (January 16, 1992), where I remained another five years.
    I hadn't looked at them for twenty years. The comments that struck me the most were thanks for my cheerfulness, helping people, sharing everything, professionalism. They were, by and large, of the same sort I have received lately from my colleagues at the University. Very touching. But sad, too—not because I'm retired now and can't be cheerful or helpful or sharing or professional any more. I can still be all that, and I'm sure I will be, for though I may have become a bit cynical over the past few years (I think it's true), I'm basically who I am and can't change the fact that I'm cheerful, optimistic, helpful, etc.
    But being reminded how much other people appreciate these things has made me more thoughtful, more aware of an excellent reason to be cheerful and so on. That is, aside from the immediate personal satisfaction I derive from it all.

Now, after my second retirement, I'm more aware than ever that what matters most is our present moments and what we do and who we are in each of them, one by one. I hugged my wife when I came in from the garage and told her so. I almost wept.
    I've consigned all those letters of twenty years ago to the recycling bin (along with scores and scores of letters and postcards from a number of people—including school friends Jon Price, Chuck Smythe, Jim Carney, Bill Silveira, high school teachers Morris Knudsen, Lois Thompson, Al King, sisters Patsy, Flo, Anna, Mary, Mama, cousins Billy Charles Duvall, Lisa Duvall Carter, friends Thom Green, Lucia McKay, Harriet Mabbutt, Sverre Vik, Barry Wright, new Bulgarian relatives Veska & Jordan Ravnopolski, Milka K...as well as several other letter writers whose names didn't even dredge up a face at this point. It was such a walk down memory lane, it hurt after a while.
    Two things are interesting to me about the cache of letters.
    First, what were they doing in my office? I'm still thinking about that one. But I imagine that the answer will provide justification enough for letting go of them now.
     Second, the letters were from roughly the same period, with its 25th Yale Class Reunion in June 1989, Youie Summer, its aftermath of Chronic Fatique Syndrome the following year, our son's marriage and departure for Bulgaria. At times, life has taken its toll of me, and it may be taking a toll now.
    I reckon I'll find out.

Becoming too contrary?

In Frank Rich's October 27 review of Brian Kellow's new biography (A Life in the Dark) of movie critic Pauline Kael (1919-2001) ("Roaring at the Screen with Pauline Kael"), he refers to Kael's "self-dramatizing contrarianism" and writes that she should have gotten out while the getting was good, before she would "invariably flame out in...self-parody [and] first-person megalomania."
    Self-conscious about my own recent possibly excessive contrariness (see, for example, "What was that about Halloween?"), I have to stop to wonder and consider whether I'm in danger of turning into a grumpy old man, as an old friend observes with a wink and a smile. Clues that this might be so include an occasional pervading sense of unease—not entirely relieved by going back, often several times, to try to reduce a post's rough edges—and the wish that I hadn't posted something or shared it to Facebook before I'd done the sanding.
    Too late, too late.
    For those particular posts, anyway, but hopefully not for myself.

She was suffering from religion

A very strange story (strange even in the weird world of religious belief) came to my attention yesterday.
    It was reported in The Washington Post on March 31, 2009 ("Deal Includes Resurrection Clause," by Dan Morse, with subtitle "Mother to go free if son rises from dead"):

Accepting a plea bargain that her attorney described as unprecedented in American jurisprudence, a 22-year-old Maryland woman yesterday agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other defendants in the death of her son under the condition that charges against her be dropped if the child rises from the dead.

    She was charged with first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in the death of her son Javon, who was deprived of food and water because he didn't say "amen" before breakfast.
    Even more curious (perhaps) is the fact that, after Javon died,

he was placed on a couch while everyone knelt down and prayed. Ramkissoon [Javon's mother] also danced around her son, prosecutors said. The boy's body was later moved to a back room.
    At one point, two members measured Javon's body and bought a suitcase. Members believed that if the body could travel with them, it could be resurrected at a later date, said Steven Silverman, Ramkissoon's attorney. The group members left the suitcase with a man they had befriended. Police eventually discovered it in his shed in Philadelphia.

    The canny prosecutors tried to protect their part in the plea arrangement by stipulating that

Ramkissoon could not get out of her obligations if she asserted that Javon came back as anything other than himself.
    "This would need to be a Jesus-like resurrection," Margaret Burns, the spokeswoman, said after the hearing. "It cannot be a reincarnation in another object or animal."

I learned of the Ramkissoon case from Sam Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, which I am currently reading. On p. 158, he comments:

The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be difficult to discern...Despite the fact that this band of lunatics carried the boy's corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his reincarnation, there is no reason to believe that any of them suffers from a mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.

    Harris had, on p. 157, already put this in the context of what constitutes a delusion:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders...defines "delusion" as a "false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary." Lest we think that certain religious beliefs might fall under the shadow of this definition, the authors exonerate religious doctrines, in principle, in the next sentence: "The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith)" (p. 765)...As any clinician can attest, delusional patients often suffer from religious delusions. And the criterion that a belief be widely shared suggests that a belief can be delusional in one context and normative in another, even if the reasons for believing it are held constant. Does a lone psychotic become sane merely by attracting a crowd of devotees?

     Richard Dawkins, too, for his 2006 book, The God Delusion, was cautioned by the psychiatric profession about his use of the word:

The word "delusion" in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about...I need to justify my use of [the word]. The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as "false belief or impression." Surprisingly, the illustrative quotation the dictionary gives is from Phillip E. Johnson: "Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself." Can that be the same Phillip E. Johnson who leads the creationist charge against Darwinism in America today? Indeed it is, and the quotation is, as we might guess, taken out of context. I hope the fact that I have stated as much will be noted, since the same courtesy has not been extended to me in numerous creationist quotations of my work, deliberately and misleadingly taken out of context...The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as "a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder." The first part captures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion."

For the sake of "full disclosure," I'll tell you that I myself suffered from a religious delusion (involving the deity Universal Intelligent Energy, whom I knew as "Youie") during the summer of 1989, when I was so convinced that I would win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes that the day my name was to be announced that evening on network television (NBC, as I recall) I boxed up all of my personal belongings at IBM so that I could resign and leave quickly the next day.

Fortunately for Ms. Ramkissoon,

If she testifies truthfully against the other defendants...prosecutors will recommend that she be released from jail, placed on probation, and provided treatment that could include "a process of deprogramming."

    I overcame my own tendency toward religious delusion, first by learning (with the help of my wife) to monitor and control my mood swings, then, fifteen years later, by reprogramming myself through applied skepticism to finally opt out of religion altogether.

Struggling

Laocoön

I've had a sense for some weeks (or months?) now of pronounced physical decline. It got bad enough this week that I even talked about it. I wrote my son-in-law that:

I'm feeling more and more over-the-hill week-by-week of late. Some days, going to work is really difficult, in terms of my energy and how my body feels. But I think that giving in to this, saying "Enough!," would be the first day of a quicker decline to even worse levels of well-being. So I'm struggling to forestall the day. But a struggle it is.

    And now, obviously, I've decided to bring the topic here—not to ask for advice (although it wouldn't be unwelcome), but to try to clear my mind and maybe discover a better way to confront my inevitable downward journey than to just go on "struggling" in the way I currently am.
    What I'm currently doing seems to be to just keep on keeping on, or "more of the same old same old."
    A young colleague at work asked me today what I think our recently retired boss is doing. I said, "I don't know, but I don't think he's enjoying it. He's not cut out for retirement. And neither am in, in my own way."
    "But," she said, "you've got so many other interests. Books, movies—"
    And I rushed in with my working assumption about needing to keep struggling in order to forestall a quicker decline.

But maybe she's right. In checking the meaning or connotations of "same old same old," I discovered that it refers to something "especially when it is boring or annoying." I hadn't thought so, but perhaps my current occupations are somewhat boring. Maybe I think of my life as a struggle because I'm not enjoying the things I'm doing, although I like to think that I am.
    Maybe my energy would increase and my physical discomforts decrease (or become less noticeable) if I were doing something new and exciting.

At the very least, I could try reframing. Considering it a struggle to get up, get dressed, and get off in the morning might be a form of myopia, or nearsightedness, which is "when light entering the eye is focused incorrectly, making distant objects appear blurred."
    Maybe I'm not focusing correctly. Maybe I should stop focusing on my immediate feelings of sleepiness, tiredness, and aches and pains, and instead look at more distant objects: goals, things to look forward to today. Thinking continually about being tired and feeling achy is not only a downer in its own right, it's also rather boring!
    My wife probably feels a lot worse than I do, but she consistently avoids that kind of thinking. I should try to emulate her.
    And maybe I could include some new goals, some new sorts of things to look forward to, to make life more interesting....

What pain

Hogmanay 2010, revisited. I was told yesterday that my new blog picture captures me looking "pained."
    In 1965, in Edinburgh, Scotland (the city whose Hogmanay celebration was portrayed in the photo I used on January 1), as I was walking by a long mirror on a street one morning, on my way to the divinity school, I thought I recognized someone mentioned in Kierkegaard. I had a few years earlier read his essay in Either/Or titled "The Unhappiest Man," which I seem to remember he developed from reflecting on the New Testament "Man of Sorrows." I suspect that I was merely flattering myself by borrowing Kierkegaard's label from the person my mother had associated me with from my infancy. (Yes, apparently. At any rate, in our home my official baby portrait was hung alongside a representation of Jesus Christ.)

However, I seem to have been misremembering Kierkegaard's concept of "the unhappiest man," which may have had nothing to do with the New Testament. Says Wikipedia:

The third essay, called "The Unhappiest One," [even the title is apparently different from what I remembered], discusses the hypothetical question: "who deserves the distinction of being unhappier than everyone else?" Kierkegaard answers, "The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. He is always absent, never present to himself."

How, then, could I have been unhappy, or be unhappy now? I seem perpetually to be "present to myself"—unless I fail to understand what Kierkegaard meant by that; am I in some sense of his hardly ever present to myself at all?

Today, certainly, forty-five years later, I don't think of myself as unhappy, let alone "the unhappiest." But I do feel some of the sorrow of the world. I can't read about a newly elected congresswoman's being gunned down yesterday and six people's being dead today as a result without feeling some sadness over it. I couldn't even take bird feed out a little late this morning without feeling sorry for the birds who'd already arrived to find the feeders empty from yesterday. I can't think about even the concept of the food chain without some generalized sorrow over the profound injustice of Nature itself.
    Yet, I didn't recognize someone in pain when I posted my new blog profile photograph the other day. Since learning that to someone else I looked "pained," I've examined the photo more closely, and I think I might see something, in the set of the mouth, perhaps.
    At first, I "remembered" taking the photo on New Year's morning, by mounting my camera on a tripod and clicking a remote control, but when I got out the uncropped original it reminded me that I preferred the photos I had taken the night before by holding the camera up with my left hand and, with some difficulty (for the Nikon D60 SLR is a bit heavy), pressing the release with my index finger:
 

And here are two others, taken in the preceding minutes:
 

    From the angle, I can confirm that the camera was definitely not on a tripod. I was sitting as close as I could to the big lamp on the long, narrow library table I made years ago. No room for the tripod.
    So, it's possible that the set of my lips is just because of the weight of the camera—or perhaps a twinge of arthritic pain.
    I took the pictures on Hogmanay, New Year's Eve 2010, just before going to bed a little after eight o'clock. I think I might have been feeling the weight of the year. Something, at any rate, prompted me to do a few self-portraits, not something I'd ever done just before retiring for the day...
    ...or before retiring for the year, a year of unbroken days of sad headlines and the murderous operation of Nature.

Taking myself too seriously?

The episode of my new blog pic and its attendant quotations (from an old friend and from Henry James—another old friend of a sort) led to my realizing that I seem to have been taking myself a bit too seriously lately (and for who knows how long before that).
    Horace Fletcher (1849-1919) was known as "The Great Masticator," and according to something I read somewhere, Henry James followed his prescription to swallow thirty-times before swallowing. Seems to me that you should follow the same advice when reading my blog (or maybe any blog).

And, in the process, I may have hit on a third new year's resolution, if resolving to take oneself less seriously isn't a self-contradiction. (I'm not sure that it isn't.)

Formidable

Having quoted an old friend¹ in my profile on the subject of my new blog pic (craquelured in Photoshop to resemble an old painting), I thought it would be well to display Merriam-Webster's definition of formidable:

1. causing fear, dread, or apprehension
2. having qualities that discourage approach or attack
3. tending to inspire awe or wonder

A niece who commented on this and related self-portraits on my Facebook account seemed to be in with sense #1. She commented on the photos by quoting from the movie The Sixth Sense: "Be scared, be very scared...."

I don't know in what sense my friend intended the term. Senses #1 and #2 seem to me to derive from sense #3. (And, if the order of senses weren't descriptive rather than logical, Merriam-Webster might do well to renumber the list 2, 3, 1.)
    In French, the word is often used in a highly laudatory sense, and it is synonymous with

extraordinary, formidable, gigantic, huge, enormous, immense, colossal, horrible, tremendous, fantastic, wonderful, sensational, terrific, splendid, marvelous, super, mighty, smashing (fig.).

    But as About.com on the French language says on the subject of "Formidable (F) vs Formidable (E)," they're "almost opposite":

Formidable (F) is an interesting word, because it means great or terrific; almost the opposite of the English. Ce film est formidable! - This is a great movie!
Formidable (E) means dreadful or fearsome: The opposition is formidable - L'opposition est redoutable/effrayante.

Anyway, since, as I think, I bear a remarkable resemblance to Henry James² (except that I'm less bald and fat), I don't mind the controversy.
_______________

1. "Your new blog pic shows a formidable if not defiant person...."
2. Who wrote [in the precise source I have not discovered]: "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue."

A new year's resolution (two of them!)

I didn't think I had any new year's resolutions, but this morning I realized that there's one I should make and try (yet again, for how many times?) to stick to:

Talk less, listen more.

And my wife suggested another one for me:

Write less, talk more!

I accept this in the spirit of self-improvement (especially when it comes to being a more companionable spouse).

I found the following links while searching for the graphic:

• Popular New Year's Resolutions (http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/New_Years_Resolutions.shtml)
• Top Ten New Year's Resolutions (http://pittsburgh.about.com/od/holidays/tp/resolutions.htm)
• How to Make a New Year's Resolution (http://www.ehow.com/how_12077_new-years-resolutions.html)

Watching Sherlock sitting still

As I may not have disclosed in this web log, which seems to have become a story of my life, I twitch. Most of the time, or at least while I'm otherwise trying to sit still.
    "We have two Sherlock Holmeses going now, you know?" I said to my wife this morning.
    "Two? I think we have only one episode of Sherlock we haven't watched." She was referring to Masterpiece Mystery, its new 21^st century Sherlock Holmes.
    "Yes, two. Sherlock and Luther." I was referring to the British psychological crime drama. "Luther makes large deductions from minute observations, honing in on the likely serial killer."
    My wife said humph. "I guess we have one and a half Sherlocks to watch, since you fell asleep last night."
    "How did you know I'd fallen asleep?"
    "You stopped twitching"

Up to my ankles in life

I'm up to my ankles in life.
    That might not sound like much of a commitment. But, then, I'm hanging by my feet.

Brain drain

Discovering a significant truth is energizing. Rather, not discovering the truth, per se, but discovering something true or false that you think is true—like the experience of people (of whom I was once one) who "discover God" on a lonely road (or in a tent revival meeting) and walk on with delight at having "seen the light." Never mind that "God" doesn't exist and their discovery is, in that sense, a sham. They think (as I once did) that God exists (and, more pertinently, is watching over them personally).

Since a bleeding pineal tumor left me with diplopia (double vision, in my case owing to a neurological injury in the alignment of my eyes) in January 1996, I've hoped that one day I would be able to use both eyes again to fuse my right and left images into one. For over ten years of nothing happening in that direction, I put tape over my right spectacle lens and used only my left eye for focused seeing, though a cataract was beginning to cloud the light. After surgery to remove the cataract (and install a lens that all but removed the left eye's near-sightedness), I didn't have to use tape anymore; my right image was so fuzzy (through spectacles with the same thin, left-eye prescription in both lenses) that my brain pretty much ignored it anyway.
    But then, last year, my new neuro-ophthalmologist proposed that a prism in one of my spectacle lenses could render my two images close enough for the brain to fuse them. His professional enthusiasm for the project matched my personal hope. He proposed an experiment to try to prove this. I'd be fitted for a soft contact lens for my right eye that would approximately equalize its image in size with my left eye's image, and I'd wear a temporary prism patch on one of my spectacle lens for a month. It worked; I was able to fuse.
    The next step, then, was to have cataract surgery in the right eye too. It happened that the optimum lens the surgeon installed resulted not only in unrefracted 20-20 vision in that eye, but also in the complete removal of that eye's astigmatism. (The earlier cataract surgery has reduced the left eye's astigmatism, but not entirely removed it; its astigmatism must have been caused by a combination of surface imperfections, some in the original, natural lens and some in the cornea, which hadn't been affected by the surgery. Apparently the right eye's astigmatism had been owing entirely to the imperfection of its original lens.)
    I "adjusted" to the cataract surgery for a month or so, still using the temporary prism patch, then a permanent prism was ground into the right lens of my glasses (both the ones for long distance and the ones for reading). I could now use both eyes for fused-image driving, movie watching, and so on, as well as for reading and "office work" (most of it involving a computer screen).

Not quite. I soon noticed that I couldn't read a book for more than a few minutes before my eyes seemed to rebel, and I begin to see two lines of text, one more or less horizontal, the other slanting in at about five degrees from the upper right. Fusing was just too much of a strain to do for long. (I already knew this from a pin-hole experiment of my own I had conducted in the years right after the brain surgery. I must have wanted so badly lately to fuse again—regularly, day in and day out—that I wouldn't let myself remember how much of a strain it had been and might continue to be.)
    Working at a computer with both eyes was proving even less successful than reading a book or magazine. I could fuse, with considerable effort, for a few seconds only, before the two images flew apart and I had to favor one eye (virtually always my preferred, left eye) for looking at words or pictures. Making only the mightiest effort, could I get the eyes back together for a few more seconds of fusing. Without realizing it (or putting two and two together), I ended days at the office exhausted and was falling asleep on the commute ride home virtually every evening.
    My eye doctor suggested that I do some "pencil push-ups" to strengthen the eye muscles that "crossed" the eyes for close-up. Bring the pencil end towards my eyes slowly, then take it away, and again and again, thirty times or more a day for a month. The push-ups did make a difference. I could now read a book for much longer before noticing the rebellion, but I saw hardly any improvement at the computer. We tried the exercises for another month. No more improvement.
    Okay, my doctor said, the prism you have aids fusing in the vertical dimension. We could put a horizontal prism into the other lens of your reading spectacles. It needs to be slightly under-strength, so that you don't become dependent on it and your eye muscles lazy.

I've had my new reading glasses for a week. Reading a book is great, but in some ways computer work has become even worse. The horizontal prism makes it possible for me to fuse longer looking at the screen. The fact that I can do it more readily now encourages me to try harder (a conscious effort) to achieve it. The attempt is painful, and I can make it for only a little while before I want to scream.
    So. The "truth" that I think I have discovered today (through the suggestion of my wife, who proposed it and pointed out that I myself hadn't given a thought to this possibility) is that my recent almost chronic fatigue could be owing entirely (if it turns out I have no sleep apnea whatsoever) to "brain drain."
    I went to my primary care physician last November with my first complaints of being continually tired. Only today did it occur to me that that was but a few weeks after the experiment described above, my second cataract surgery, the vertical prism, my new glasses...and the apparently regained world of image-fusing....

Whether this "theory" is true or not, and whether the sleep study results will identify a sleep disorder or not, I believe, right now, that my wife may have discovered to me the primary reason I have been so tired lately. Curiously, this "truth" (whether it be true or not) gives me hope, even energizes me—I don't feel so tired right now. I don't need for my physician to call me today; I can wait until next week to be told the results of the sleep study.

Before sitting down to write this, I stuck a piece of tape over my right spectacle lens, as of old.
    The hope that I will use both eyes fully again might have been dashed, but the hope that my energy level will rise again is revived.

Not so plucky yesterday

Yesterday's "Word of the Day" from dictionary.com was:

plucky \PLUHK-ee\, adjective:
    Having or showing pluck or courage; brave.
Plucky is originally boxing slang from the 1800s, from the meaning "heart, viscera" as that which is "plucked" from slaughtered livestock.

My bleating yesterday like a sheep waiting to be eviscerated seems to me today to have been an expression of shame about being a member of the unregenerated human race. My friend Yvette (a pseudonym) commented that:

Physical discomfort can make us feel tired, weak, and sensitive. When we read or watch something that touches our heart, we understand it more deeply and might react more strongly to it. When we are weak physically, our brain sometimes becomes more active and we have deeper sympathy for the weak and poor. We may sense the unfairness of the world more. In turn, it can make us feel even tireder.

    Indeed, since Monday I have been very tired, owing somehow to ophthalmological (or neurological) symptoms I experienced that morning. There was a bright arc of white light in my left eye's image, with a faint, quick dispersion of black specks (like a fast-moving flock of crows). My wife took me to the UNC eye clinic when it opened. Doctors there told me that there was no evidence of retinal detachment. The younger one of them said that I actually had less chance of a retinal detachment than he did, for the vitreous fluid in my eyeballs has hardened enough that it has already pulled away from my retinas and so can no longer pull on them (a common cause of retinal detachment, I was given to understand).
    I went to work the next day, but realized immediately upon arriving that I should have stayed home to rest. Feeling exhausted and with a prominent new floater in my left eye, I worked steadily all day on a number of little tasks, one at a time as well as I could manage, until it was time to go up the hill to catch my van ride home.
    I stayed home yesterday, lying down much of the time. And, apparently, ruminating "sensitively" about being weighed down.

Not that I'm feeling any less sensitive today, but it occurred to me a little while ago that my usual attitude toward exploiters (whether of other people or of other animals—or of the earth itself) is anger and condemnation. In short, I fear, a sense of self-righteous indignation.
    I'm not sure which is worse to feel, the sadness of shame or the futile pluckiness of moral superiority. In either case I suffer an awareness of the incessant exploitation that seems to be woven into the coarse fabric of things.
    It doesn't help that Darwinian evolution is sometimes characterized as "the survival of the fittest"—not now that a presumably moral species has evolved.

Весела пролет [happy spring]

Our son sent us a card from Bulgaria with the traditional greeting for March 1. Inside, he writes:

Happy 1st of March and best wishes for the coming Spring!
    P.S. This card is a production of school children from the town of Rila.

    In subsequent email he explains that "Chestita Baba Marta is like Happy Grandmother Marta, or Greetings for the 1st of March." "Chestita Baba Marta" is phonetic, I think, for the "Цесмчма Баба Марма" in the photo—I'm impressing into service, as well as I can manage, letters found on the web¹, as Cyrillic is Greek to me, alas, despite having a Bulgarian grandson whose father has lived in Bulgaria almost twenty years.
    My son explains that "the Martenitsa (the red and white yarn ornaments) are like good luck charms for meeting the spring. People wear them until they've seen a stork and then hang them on a blooming plant or tree."

So, why am I publishing this greeting on May 1? The card arrived only a couple of weeks ago and I had accordingly misread "March" in my son's note. But I see now that it is dated 2.28.10. All the fortnight I've planned to wish my readers a happy 1st of May! I must have figured that "coming Spring" was appropriate for Bulgaria on May 1, but now I remember how like California's climate I thought Bulgaria's when I visited there. Or, more likely, secure in my assumption that I was receiving a May 1st greeting, this never even occurred to me. As I've said more than a few times on this blog, we humans have little trouble deluding ourselves.
    Well, let the joke be on me. You, certainly, may you have had a Baba Marta, and have a happy May! And no jokes on you in either month.

As for humans' deluding themselves, it's so easy to do, one must wonder whether it was an evolutionary adaptation, perhaps to enable us to look at things in a hopeful light and avoid seeing stark reality (so as to lessen the chance that we would kill ourselves before producing offspring). God's in his heaven, suicide's a mortal sin, and all that.
_______________

1. From the website:

   THE BULGARIAN ALPHABET—БЪЛГАРСКАТА АЗБУКА
   Before you start learning [the] Bulgarian language, you need to learn the Bulgarian alphabet.
       In Bulgarian, we use the Cyrillic alphabet. The same alphabet (with some modifications) is used in other languages [such] as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and some Central Asian Altaic languages.
       Every Bulgarian letter has an English equivalent close enough to give you a clue as to its pronunciation. In the first few lessons, every Bulgarian word I use will be followed by [a] phonetic transcription of its pronunciation. For this, I will use Latin letters—the ones in the column "Symbol" [not shown in this footnote].

Suicide is painless

In my day job, I coordinate for North Carolina an arrangement involving all of the southeastern states by which they share "not commonly available" academic degree programs with each other's residents at in-state tuition rates.
    At least, I thought I did. For years I've quoted "not commonly available" thinking I was quoting from the regional guidelines governing all of the participating states. But yesterday I discovered that the guidelines don't even touch the topic. The arrangement actually permits participating states to share with each other any of their academic degree programs they want to share, however commonly or uncommonly available they may be. The word "common" or "uncommon" isn't even used in this context. The only regional restriction on sharing is that the states can't approve another state's degree program for their residents if they have a similar program.
    There is the proviso, though, that each state may have additional guidelines based on its own needs. And North Carolina does have an additional guideline, one that was written into the legislation that authorizes our participation in the arrangement. That is, it's the law. We may

select for participation only...programs that are likely to be unique or are not commonly available in other participating states.

    I'd always read the legislation as simply codifying for North Carolina the regional guideline affecting all of the participating states. And I'd always read the regional guidelines sure that they stated somewhere that the states could share only their "not commonly available" degree programs. But I recently became aware that another of the states doesn't consider uncommonness of availability, and I asked the state coordinator, "How can you just ignore the regional guideline?" She asked me to show her what in the guidelines I was referring to.
    I pored over their every line but couldn't find the phrase anywhere, nor any language remotely like it. It was all just in my mind.

Self-deception is so easy, at least as easy as suicide is painless, a clause from Robert Altman's 14-year-old son Mike's lyrics for the song from M*A*S*H:

Suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes,
And I can take or leave it if I please.

    Self-deception, though, isn't at all easy to take or leave. Several days of email exchanges were required to bring me to the definitive reading of the regional guidelines. Self-deception hides from us, even weaves a thick web of supporting deceptions to protect itself. That is, we hide the deception, we weave the web.
    I haven't been able to discover that I had any powerful motive for deceiving myself about "not commonly available." Somehow or other I got the idea that it was in the regional guidelines, which seemed eminently sensible. How could it be otherwise? All of the states were simply sharing their uncommon programs. That was what it was all about, that's how I'd explained the arrangement to hundreds of people.
    I must have heard dozens of clues, during email exchanges or conversations or at meetings of state coordinators, that it just wasn't so, but my woven web "protected" me from picking up on them, even enabled me to neutralize conflicting statements or simply reject them as uninformed. I understood it better than they did.

If we can do this in matters with little at stake, think how well we must be able to do it in matters of love, life, and death. We believe that we're loved when we're not (or that we're loved more or more often than we really are). We believe that someone is looking out for us when no one is. We even believe that the someone is the Best Someone There Could Be.

...Few people know that most airports have houses of worship: they tend to be white, high-ceilinged, scrubbed, and soundproof, imbued with a spirituality so general that even atheists can find refuge in them. They go unused, for the most part, except in times of emergency and terror—after a crash or when a war breaks out. They're eerie little niches but also restful and perfect for catching up on paperwork....[p. 103, Up in the Air, by Walter Kirn, 2001]

...[Owners] of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion they they are god...Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a stern creator. But in return, it places you at the center of the universe and assures you that you are the personal object of a heavenly plan. Indeed, if you make the right propitiations you may even find that death has no sting, and that an exception to the rules of physical annihilation may be made in your own case....[p. xvi, Introduction to The Portable Atheist, by Christopher Hitchens, 2007]

Bless his heart

"Poor Morris," I could almost hear someone on my commute van say as I walked back to my car and they closed the van door and drove off.
    As I'd left my car to board the van, I thought I'd shoved my reading spectacles into my right inside jacket pocket, and after the van was loaded and was pulling out for our trip to Chapel Hill, I was rustling about to start reading. But I wasn't finding those glasses. I was sure I'd put them in that inside pocket. Not there! Not in my canvas bag! Not on the floor of the van! Not on the seat!
    "Oh, no," I said, "I think I left my glasses back there...."
    "Back where?," the driver said. She was in the left lane on top of the overpass, about to turn onto the freeway.
    "In the parking lot."
    She kindly got out of the turn lane and made the first convenient (and legal) U-turn (a police car was behind us).
    I checked my car, even the driver's side, which I was "sure" wasn't the side where I shoved the glasses into my pocket. No glasses on either side.
    In a fidget, I got back on the van, and we started to drive out again, me once again looking all over for the glasses, even checking my jacket for the sixth or eighth time. Fellow riders were muttering helpfully. "Do you need them at work?"
    "Maybe you need to drive today, Morris," the driver suggested.
    "Yeah, I guess so," I said. "I've got to get to the bottom of this."
    She backed up and let me out again.

At home, I checked the car again and went inside and checked all over there (even though I was "sure" this shouldn't be necessary). Then I went back out to the car again, and this time when I opened the passenger door, I saw the black case, exactly the same color as the seat, except for its shininess in this better light (the sun was farther up by now).
    I went back into the house and switched the glasses to a reddish case before preparing to drive to Chapel Hill.
    About to start the car, I checked my book on tape and saw that I had less than half of Side 4 left. Better go back in for the next tape, I thought, and did. Wasn't it ironic, befuddled me listening to an intellectual book about the production of mind and morality by the blind forces of nature? [The first book currently listed under "Most Recently Read Books."]

On the van ride home yesterday, I had fallen asleep before we even left the hospital parking lot. (Almost everyone else who rides the van works in various departments connected with the hospital or the medical school.) I'd woken up only once before we got to Mebane, when Theresa on the same bench poked me to let me know that I was falling over onto her.
    When I woke up in Mebane, Theresa had moved to the bench in back. I guess I'd kept falling over in my stupor. I don't think I'd ever been so tired on the van before. It felt as though I should go to bed immediately after dinner, and I would have if dinner hadn't revived me sufficiently to watch a movie with my wife (see "Most Recently Watched [or Unwatchably Bad] Movies & TV Series").
    And now this morning, this comedy of errors. I'll look for good things that might be possible because of having driven to work.
    In the meantime, "Poor Morris, bless his heart."

Too embarrassing

When my wife noticed yesterday that I had emptied my wallet of its contents to let everything dry out, I told her it would be too embarrassing to tell her why.
    "You dropped it in the toilet!?"
    I replied with cunning, "I told you it would be too embarrassing to tell you."

I was fortunate that she thought I'd confirmed her toilet hypothesis, for what actually happened would have been far more embarrassing to talk about. I had left my wallet on the roof of my car Saturday afternoon and it had lain in 0.42 inches of rainfall that afternoon and night.
    I know precisely how much rain it had withstood, for I finally figured out that I must have left the wallet on top of my car at Lowe's Home Improvement Center before going home and installing our new rain gauge....
    Possibly even more embarrassing is that this was far from the first time I'd left something on top of my car, although it was the first time I'd left a wallet containing cash and IDs and credit cards....

I am so lucky that I have never removed the front-rack wind baffle that my daughter had on her Honda Accord before it passed to me about fifteen years ago. That wind baffle is great for keeping things from blowing off the top!