Tag: personal

Planting Gardens

So the clouds have finally parted and Spring is coming to northern California, I can’t say I’m not excited to see it.  I’ve missed the sun terribly since I saw it last sometime in late November.  Not everything about spring is great, my allergies have returned with the Sun and I’ve had to go back on a cocktail of drugs in order to breathe through my nose and see through my eyes.  Time will tell if this price is worth paying for.

With spring here, it was time to finally put my thoughts on gardening into more than just lines on a paper:

This turns out to have been a little too optimistic about what I could fit into the side yard and so I settled on a single 4’x10′ box instead of the two smaller ones, there just wasn’t enough room to move around with the original plan.  A quick trip to Ace Hardware, a realization that my automatic drill wasn’t up to snuff, a return trip to Ace, and a little bit of sweat and:

Soil arrives tomorrow to fill the box up, and then there will be one last trip to Ace for seeds and seedlings.  D and I plan on putting in eggplants, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, melons, beans, and basil.  Give or take.  Since this is the first time we’ve done this some experimenting is on order and so we’ve planted tomatoes, beans, and peppers in the front yard too, where they’ll get more direct sunlight than the box on the side.  It only required my butchering one of the hedges (I’d like to remove all of them and put in some sort of sage grass, but I’m only renting.)  Hopefully, between the two I’ll get something to show out of this work.

Once the box is in place, filled, and planted I’ll take some more pictures.  If everything works this site should soon be full of the garden’s progress.  If you don’t see anything else about it, I’m merely hiding my shame.

New Goals for my New Year

My goals for the next year!

IMG_1119I know that one makes new goals on New year’s day but, for me, that only insured that I didn’t spend any amount of time actually thing about what I wanted to accomplish in that year and, worse, not following through.  Last year at the end of July I wrote out a large list of goals.  I gave myself a year to accomplish some of them, others I gave myself more time (five or ten years.)  That year recently came to an end and I wrote about how I did here (the short version: pretty darn well.)  I spent the last 2 weeks thinking about what I wanted to do this year and why, any time an idea came to me I jotted it down and then went back to whatever I was doing, after it was all over I had quite the list.  I then sat down and reviewed them, using a few criteria: why did I want to do this?  Could it realistically be accomplished in a year? Is this something that should be broken down into multiple goals? Does this make me a better/more interesting/smarter person?  With the criteria I whittled it down to a list that I felt was workable for the year and wit my multi-year goals.

Here is my list of goals for the year between August 4, 2009 – August 4, 2010

1. Get my scuba diving license

2. Go skydiving

3. Become an Oddfellow

4. Brush-up on my Latin – Read Harrius Potter et Philosphi Lapis

5. Write 10,000 word story (this is for NaNoWriMo)

6. Complete my BFG fleet, Horde army, and Chaos army (maybe too much here…)

7.  Make a gaming table

8. Climb Half-dome in Yosemite

9. Get in great shape (swimming, running, cycling, maybe I should look into Triathlons?)

Things California Needs to Fix

Everyone else is doing it, why not me? Actually I’m not going to do any such thing because I realize, unlike 99% of those offering advice, that the issue is very complicated and I don’t have enough information to make a meaningful contribution to the discussion. Instead, I thought it’d be more constructive to talk about what I do know and witness everyday at work and how that in its own way contributes to the gridlock in Sacramento.

Palms_and_Power_by_umbragradiusEveryone else is doing it, why not me?  Actually I’m not going to do any such thing because I realize, unlike 99% of those offering advice, that the issue is very complicated and I don’t have enough information to make a meaningful contribution to the discussion.  Instead, I thought it’d be more constructive to talk about what I do know and witness everyday at work and how that in its own way contributes to the gridlock in Sacramento.

California’s statutes fill up 4 book shelves and is a staggering 330 odd volumes.  Each year the Senate and Assembly introduce over 2000 bills…  I don’t think any single bill gets the attention and scrutiny it deserves before it ends up on the Governor’s desk.    Instead of measuring success in terms of quantity of bills made into law, our elected officials could work on the quality of their legislation.  There exists a Commission on Law Revision in California, this group needs to be amped up and tasked with going through the entire code, instead of a few pieces, and get rid of the dross and excess…  The Constitutional Revision Commission needs to be reconstituted as well and tasked with cleaning-up California’s bloated state constitution, their recommendations then need to be heeded and acted on instead of being killed off by the State Legislature (which is what happened in the early ’90s.)  If these two Commissions recreated in a truly bipartisan way and given broad enough powers to act I thin enacting their conclusions could go a long way to creating meaningful reform here in California.

I’ve watched countless policy committees meet, and every session of the Assembly and most of the Senate’s in the past two years.  There is very little common ground between the two parties, Members here are so bent to one or the other ideology that, it seems, there is no point in listening to an alternative or opposing view because you’ve already know what is the best possible solution.  Adhering to such hard ideological standards makes working with those who disagree with you impossible. It makes compromise impossible. It makes good politics impossible. It seems that the Republican or Democratic line is more of a religion and less of a viewpoint.  There are no moderates or realists it seems in the California legislature.

I don’t see much political activism by regular people up here.  In fact figures show that Californians as voters and citizens are some of the least active.  In the absence of hearing from constituents, members only have their own staff and lobbyist groups to fall back to for commentary and input on bills, giving these groups a disproportionate power over legislation.  Furthermore citizens don’t participate in the lobbyist groups they’re members of and so a small minority of teachers, state employees, etc.. control a vast amount of money and political clout that might not be wielded bluntly if these groups accurately reflected their make-up.

In short I think Sacramento is too radical and too ideological.

Re-reading Camus: the Myth of Sisyphus Pt 3

No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution. They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing. They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.

Find the first two parts here and here.

Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus
Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus

I left you last at the beginning of Camus’ critique of other philosopher’s thoughts and rationalizations for suicide.  Camus doesn’t deal with every philosophy, ever -ism, he takes up the only existential philosopher’s and only those who have directly dealt with the issue of suicide.  This list includes: Chestov ( I haven’t read), Kierkegaard (I have), Jaspers (haven’t), and Husserl (have).  Camus states in the very beginning that each and every one of them fails, they abandon reason and escape the problem of suicide by a leap of faith, “a forced hope.” Jaspers’ is the most forthright of the philosophers in this regard.  After enumerating in how many ways Man fails to connect to the world around him, turns that failure is transcendence?!  Unable to find purpose or meaning Jasper inverts it all and says that this is meaning, “That existence which, through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as ‘the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.’ Thus the absurd becomes god, and the inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.”  How convenient for Jasper that when his reasoning got him in a tough spot, when it appeared he  might have to say that the only logical thing to do in an absurd world is to kill yourself, he declares that the complete absence from reality of meaning or purpose is a direct sign that there is!

Chestov simply states that when we reach the absurd we have found God, that “we must rely upon him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.”  Faced with the absurd we must take the leap of faith and trust to God.  Chestov rejects reason and hopes that there is something beyond it.   Camus is quick to point out that reason and this world are all Humanity has to work with and that by making the absurd God and removing them from this world into a world beyond, they’ve both lost all meaning to mankind.  Logic and reason, which if you remember were all Camus was going to use when he began his inquiry into suicide, is not these philosopher’s strong point as Camus repeatedly points out.  They’ve abandoned it when they make the hopeful leap of faith, Kierkegaard does the same as Chestov if not more so turning the Christian God of his youth into a monster of a deity that requires a sacrifice of the intellect to satisfy it.

Camus rejects all of this, he wants to know if he can live with what he knows and with that alone.  Camus dismisses the failed attempts of his predecessors with these words:

If in order to elude the anxious question: “what would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.”  everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

So what do I think about all this?  I find that without me knowing it that my thoughts on life have been heavily influenced by Camus.  The first time I read this I know there were parts that I didn’t understand and simply continued reading in the hopes of finding some clarity…  I do not recall finding it, but rereading the essay it is clear I did.  I haven’t sat down and mapped out my logic or reasoning, but I don’t need any other reason to live than that I have a life.  In a conversation with a Mormon Bishop I was asked, “Without God why do you even bother getting up in the morning?”  I honestly do not understand this question.  I suspect that those who ask it don’t either.  No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution.  They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing.  They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.  I told him this and he seemed taken aback, and then asked “What about when you die?”  I laughed out loud at that point, though I quickly apologized.  I don’t remember my life before I came in to it and I don’t think I’ll remember it afterwards.  Is your life, right now, only worth continuing if a eternity of existence is promised after you die?  I doubt it.  Living is its own reward… Camus’ thoughts are quite a bit more stylized than that, demanding that Man live life constantly rebellion against the fact that the world is absurd and that life must end…

I’ll be discussing and commenting on that in the next edition, which covers Camus’ “absurd freedom” and then moving on to the “absurd man”

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