Thoughts in Random Patterns

I is for Independence Day

I had a lovely 4th of July weekend, full of indolence and ice cream and independence.

 

And Rainier cherries. We didn't do any fireworks or grilling or any of the usual festivities, but I did pause for a moment of appreciation and wonderment at the members of the 2nd Continental Congress  for the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence.  The Sunday NY Times had a fascinating essay about their willingness to accommodate alternative lifestyles, even those that society frowned upon and tax structure punished -- those radical unmarried single men, bachelors.  Read it here.

The big "I" of the weekend is the idiocy of Sarah Palin.  The only thing more incoherent and hypocritical than the recent fascinating behavior of  Governor Mark Sanford is her resignation speech.  Investigations of ethics complaints against her and members of her administration, particularly Troopergate, have cost the state of Alaska $296,000 so far.  That's some excellent public service, Sarah.  

Her resignation comes as an article in Vanity Fair by Tod Purdam begins to circulate.  Here's an excellent and germane excerpt from the article: 

In Evansville, though, Palin concentrated on the task at hand: an emphatic defense of the anti-abortion cause. But in doing so she made a startling confession about what she thought when she learned she was pregnant at 43 with her youngest child, Trig, who arrived in April 2008, as the world now knows, with Down syndrome. “I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first,” Palin told the crowd. “While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, I thought, Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, Wow, it is easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances and no one would know—no one would ever know. Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities—oh, dear God—I knew, I had instantly an understanding, for that fleeting moment, why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances, just make it all go away, get some normalcy back in life.”

It is almost impossible not to be touched by the rawness of her confession, even if it is precisely this choice that Palin believes no other woman should ever have, not even in the case of rape or incest.

Read the rest of the article here. 

I'm always grateful that I live in this country, even with all its idiosyncrasies and parades of fools.

H is for Happiness

H is for Hiatus.

It has been an action-packed spring, and I've made virtually no time during the past four months for writing beyond my Twitter updates and a relentless flurry of email.   My artist mother-in-law, Cecelia Feld, created a piece of artwork titled "The Wall of Good Intentions" which is a phrase that comes to me often as I put my list of alphabetical blog topics back in the To Do pile without posting anything. 

Until today. 

I have finally managed to carve out a block of time over this summer without obligations to anything other than my writing work.  In addition to having large uninterrupted stretches of time to work on my novel and the non-fiction book Brad and I have barely begun (The Start-up Marriage:  Balancing Entrepreneurship and Relationship), I'm now going to go back and fill in all of those letters in my year of living alphabetically. 

And to pick up where I left off: 

H is for Happiness --

Maybe I'm a simpleton, but happiness doesn't seem all that complicated to me -- not that I'm happy all the time or anything -- but it seems to me that we already know the answers to the happiness questions.  It's like trying to lose weight; we all know how to do it (burn more calories than you eat), but the hard part is doing it.  The fundamental conditions for happiness have been expounded on for millennia.  I think the poets have a slight edge over the philosophers and psychologists . 

Here's William Wordsworth: 

_{The world is too much with us; late and soon}

_{Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers (1806)}

Freud got something right for a change when he said that what we need is Love and Work. 

And Maslow's  hierarchy of needs covers a lot of territory, too.

One of my favorite blogs, The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin, is entirely about happiness.  Check it out -- it's full of good happiness stuff.  Her book isn't available until the end of December, but you can pre-order it here, like I did.  Books and reading are a great source of happiness for me. 

I've often thought that we might all be fountains of happiness and peace and compassion if we had been raised our entire lives to believe that we were the incarnation of the Buddha like the Dalai Lama. 

For me, happiness comes from purposeful work, taking care of my fortunately excellent health, writing in a room of my own, friendships and connection, and my marriage. 

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on this earth.

_{Late Fragment by Raymond Carver, from A New Path to the Waterfall, copyright (c) 1989}

G is for Geography

I was reading the New York Times weather forecast page in my hotel room in Los Angeles on Saturday and looked at the list of Asia / Pacific cities and realized I had absolutely no idea where the first city on the list, Almaty, was located.  I did much better with the rest of the list, with only Dhaka being unfamiliar.  I'm an educated and fairly well-traveled person, but when I look at a globe I see vast swaths of the planet that I know very little about.  There's always more to learn in a lifetime.

There's an excellent Ambrose Beirce quote that goes something like "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."  I think it's unfortunate that the education system isn't the way of teaching Americans geography, but if I was given a blank map of Africa and told to fill in the countries, I don't think I'd get a passing grade -- and I've even been to Africa. 

I'm going to spend more time spinning the globe and putting my finger down in random places and see if I can educate myself about geography in February.

F is for February

Even though I know the days are getting longer, February always seems like the darkest depths of winter to me.  Fortunately, it's a short month, and jam packed with holidays, perhaps to offset the gloom that settles into the bones this time of year.  Here are some popular, as well as lesser known, February holidays:

• Groundhog Day
• Candlemas
  
• Valentine's Day
  
• President's Day
• and the quintessentially American celebration of the Super Bowl, which is a de facto holiday that falls on the first Sunday in February
•  Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent  -  a moveable feast which sometimes falls in March

I watched hours and hours of Australian Open tennis this week, even though it was only two matches - Nadal v. Verdasco and Nadal v. Federer.  For his semi-final match, Nadal played the longest match in men's singles history at the Australian Open: 5 hours and 14 minutes.  His finals match against Federer lasted 4 hours and 23 minutes and was yet another classic in their rivalry.  I remember the first time I saw Nadal was while watching a match broadcast from the Miami Masters tournament when Brad and I were in Paris in 2005.  Unlike American television coverage, which averts the gaze of the camera while Nadal adjusts his underwear between every point, the French commentators mocked his OCD rituals.  "He's looking for his socks.  Will he find them and be able to play tennis?  Yes!  He has found his socks.  Now he must find his shoes."  It's an interesting cultural difference, and it was made more memorable by the match being another 5 set duel back in the days when Nadal was seeded 29th.  Nadal's OCD has decreased dramatically in the intervening years, at least what's visible on television, and it hasn't seemed to slow him as he became the number one player in the world and the first male player to hold Grand Slam singles titles on three different surfaces simultaneously.  I feel lucky to be able to watch Nadal and Federer play in my lifetime.

Which brings me to F is for Fitness:

If I were a space alien coming to Earth to choose specimens for my Human Zoo, I'd certainly take Nadal and Federer along with me as some of the fittest humans on the planet.  It's great to flop on the couch for hours watching them exert themselves to their utmost.  I have a new GoWearFit device as my February 1st gift from Brad which gathers all kinds of data about nutrition and movement and sleep, and during the long tennis matches it sometimes thought I was asleep. 

Here are some samples of the actual sleep data reports it generates:

This is my sleep record for the night of January 31st into February 1st

 

And February 2nd to February 3rd

You can see my lovely luxurious afternoon nap, where I apparently fell asleep immediately upon lying down.  I'm an excellent sleeper.

I slept much better than Brad, who only got 4 hours and 39 minutes of actual sleep 2/2.

And even less the following night:

No wonder he gets tired sometimes?!?

For the data obsessed among us, this is quite useful information, and may yet inspire me to move my body around a bit more instead of being in full hibernation mode.  Or not.

And F is for Finishing, which is really hard for me.  I've had a draft of this post sitting in my TypePad Drafts since February 3rd, which is what the posting date will be, even though it's getting finished on Friday the 13th.  I'm going to keep practicing the habit of finishing and posting.  G is for Geography is on the way.