Boy do I want to get that lamp I saw last night at Sorel's on Hawthorne. If I'm good, I'll wait -- so I can bundle it in with other tasks. If I'm bad, I'm out the door after this post.
I'm wearing shorts for the first time this season.
Tigger is stretching upward more and more. I'm wondering if s/he'll put out a big stalky bit, like the previous lamb's ear that grew in the backyard... Until my efforts to save it from being plowed and bark-dusted went horribly wrong, and it drown in the bin I'd meant to replant it from.
Here's the one big downside to morning pages that I've found so far (besides the time commitment): if you wake up in a cruddy mood, the thought of doing writing feels like rubbing it in. Not appealing.
Had a lovely day yesterday. Our local mensch mph was the first to comment on my blogger post... eliciting from me a bemused, "Oh. Here it comes." A 3-way iChat led to deciding to make a trip over to the new parents' homestead, via Oasis pizza and a lovely walk down cherry blossom filled SE Taylor. [Oh ma gawd -- so pretty! And there's a cob memorial, and a house with vampire teeth, and concrete steps that curve. My new favorite secret spot. Apparently I must never be without my camera again.]
So, a lovely evening spent with mph, Al, Benjamin (7 weeks?!), and G. Got my new email schema up and running. Talked Buffy. [Who the hell is Kennedy anyway? I'm only up to s5!] Talked about gay marriage and middle America.
...Which reminded me about how my ideological roots are in social constructionism. SC's approach to the world is to say "Hey, look! Everything has a history. Nearly everything social is at least partly artificial, touched by the hands of willful human beings who tussled over different options -- but now we've forgotten that there was ever a fight, and think stuff is just 'nature'. If the 'way things are' was made, social reality can be remade."
Nice concept in terms of analysis. However, I'm not sure how well it jibes with the practice of actual social change. People are invested in tradition; the best you can hope for is baby steps, in terms of cultural shift. If you get something started, it's more likely to pinch off into a subculture than to actually impact the mainstream. But SC makes you want to redesign everything from the ground up.
There are also issues of cultural appropriation that you have to steer clear of. Just because I can examine the history of a particular subculture, doesn't mean I get a right to intervene. For example, I wouldn't mind it if certain sects dumped their notion of god as a big patriarchal Santa Claus in the sky. But that's a fight for insiders to initiate and wage. I'm not a stake holder; it's only going to be appropriate to get involved if there's some sort of invitation. [And even then, there are further issues about the legitimacy of movement leaders to be considered. Oy!]
Yeah, during the past four years (?) my focus re social change has become much more about looking at nitty gritty legal code and reworking that. Which, in itself, is not enough. Gotta teach people about how to use the code, how to file and pursue a civil rights complaint, for instance -- otherwise it's all just ink on the page. ...I'm not of the mindset that legal victories are about "shifting attitudes", as many people seem to feel. Bigots remain unshifted by the mere existence of a law. You have to whack them with those laws until they're afraid to mess with you. And then, maybe if you're lucky, their children will grow up thinking that fair treatment is the way things ought to be.
Shifting hearts and minds one person at a time, through personal relationships? Yeah, I believe it's important... But I feel little faith. Like I said, my roots are in SC. I can't seem to unroot the desire to rework the system from the ground up... The thing is, only politicos and theory wonks actually care about "how it all fits together". Most folk aren't going to make the history of sexism, racism, homophobia... name your pet issue... into their main field of study.
And they shouldn't. Kindness is enough. If you're a decent person, then you don't need to be able to explain why you're good, and contrast yourself against a historical background.
...See, I'm kinda conflicted in my attitudes about social change. [Not if it should happen -- but how it should happen, and who's responsible for what.]
SC, by making everything look artificial, tends to drain emotional significance out of institutions that were fulfilling. Marriage -- there's a good example. Posed rhetorically: If everything is artificial, what is real enough to invest yourself in emotionally?
New topic. So, within the context of workflow, I've decided that my old mission statement of "What needs to get done?" is flawed, because it leads to me squeezing all the fun out of life. The germ of my next operating system is something like (ugh) "follow your bliss." The next operating system not actually existing yet, I won't be making an abrupt switch-over -- but I'm beginning research. Let's call this new project "JOY".
JOY: entry #1 - relational info in workflow
Work for its own sake tends to drain joy. It is numbing, because there is only blind output -- no input, sensitivity to state, or scheduling flexibility. An alt sys must incorporate emotional awareness into its process. [Addenda: awareness of both oneself and others.] This inherently relates work to other people; emotion is "relational information". To set up a schedule that rigidly requires the same workflow every morning, is to presume aloneness -- both in the morning space, and more broadly in the world. A joy-based OS will require some kind of evaluation of personal mood each morning, allowing the flexibility to redirect efforts based on how one is feeling relative to the set of friends, peers, and lovers [and self].
I'm wearing shorts for the first time this season.
Tigger is stretching upward more and more. I'm wondering if s/he'll put out a big stalky bit, like the previous lamb's ear that grew in the backyard... Until my efforts to save it from being plowed and bark-dusted went horribly wrong, and it drown in the bin I'd meant to replant it from.
Here's the one big downside to morning pages that I've found so far (besides the time commitment): if you wake up in a cruddy mood, the thought of doing writing feels like rubbing it in. Not appealing.
Had a lovely day yesterday. Our local mensch mph was the first to comment on my blogger post... eliciting from me a bemused, "Oh. Here it comes." A 3-way iChat led to deciding to make a trip over to the new parents' homestead, via Oasis pizza and a lovely walk down cherry blossom filled SE Taylor. [Oh ma gawd -- so pretty! And there's a cob memorial, and a house with vampire teeth, and concrete steps that curve. My new favorite secret spot. Apparently I must never be without my camera again.]
So, a lovely evening spent with mph, Al, Benjamin (7 weeks?!), and G. Got my new email schema up and running. Talked Buffy. [Who the hell is Kennedy anyway? I'm only up to s5!] Talked about gay marriage and middle America.
...Which reminded me about how my ideological roots are in social constructionism. SC's approach to the world is to say "Hey, look! Everything has a history. Nearly everything social is at least partly artificial, touched by the hands of willful human beings who tussled over different options -- but now we've forgotten that there was ever a fight, and think stuff is just 'nature'. If the 'way things are' was made, social reality can be remade."
Nice concept in terms of analysis. However, I'm not sure how well it jibes with the practice of actual social change. People are invested in tradition; the best you can hope for is baby steps, in terms of cultural shift. If you get something started, it's more likely to pinch off into a subculture than to actually impact the mainstream. But SC makes you want to redesign everything from the ground up.
There are also issues of cultural appropriation that you have to steer clear of. Just because I can examine the history of a particular subculture, doesn't mean I get a right to intervene. For example, I wouldn't mind it if certain sects dumped their notion of god as a big patriarchal Santa Claus in the sky. But that's a fight for insiders to initiate and wage. I'm not a stake holder; it's only going to be appropriate to get involved if there's some sort of invitation. [And even then, there are further issues about the legitimacy of movement leaders to be considered. Oy!]
Yeah, during the past four years (?) my focus re social change has become much more about looking at nitty gritty legal code and reworking that. Which, in itself, is not enough. Gotta teach people about how to use the code, how to file and pursue a civil rights complaint, for instance -- otherwise it's all just ink on the page. ...I'm not of the mindset that legal victories are about "shifting attitudes", as many people seem to feel. Bigots remain unshifted by the mere existence of a law. You have to whack them with those laws until they're afraid to mess with you. And then, maybe if you're lucky, their children will grow up thinking that fair treatment is the way things ought to be.
Shifting hearts and minds one person at a time, through personal relationships? Yeah, I believe it's important... But I feel little faith. Like I said, my roots are in SC. I can't seem to unroot the desire to rework the system from the ground up... The thing is, only politicos and theory wonks actually care about "how it all fits together". Most folk aren't going to make the history of sexism, racism, homophobia... name your pet issue... into their main field of study.
And they shouldn't. Kindness is enough. If you're a decent person, then you don't need to be able to explain why you're good, and contrast yourself against a historical background.
...See, I'm kinda conflicted in my attitudes about social change. [Not if it should happen -- but how it should happen, and who's responsible for what.]
SC, by making everything look artificial, tends to drain emotional significance out of institutions that were fulfilling. Marriage -- there's a good example. Posed rhetorically: If everything is artificial, what is real enough to invest yourself in emotionally?
New topic. So, within the context of workflow, I've decided that my old mission statement of "What needs to get done?" is flawed, because it leads to me squeezing all the fun out of life. The germ of my next operating system is something like (ugh) "follow your bliss." The next operating system not actually existing yet, I won't be making an abrupt switch-over -- but I'm beginning research. Let's call this new project "JOY".
JOY: entry #1 - relational info in workflow
Work for its own sake tends to drain joy. It is numbing, because there is only blind output -- no input, sensitivity to state, or scheduling flexibility. An alt sys must incorporate emotional awareness into its process. [Addenda: awareness of both oneself and others.] This inherently relates work to other people; emotion is "relational information". To set up a schedule that rigidly requires the same workflow every morning, is to presume aloneness -- both in the morning space, and more broadly in the world. A joy-based OS will require some kind of evaluation of personal mood each morning, allowing the flexibility to redirect efforts based on how one is feeling relative to the set of friends, peers, and lovers [and self].
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