people – Page 5 – Words' End

October 25, 2005

RIP Rosa Parks.

Thank you for your courage and lack of sensationalism. Long live your memory; may it remind us what’s really important.

October 4, 2005

Well, I was going to write up a thorough account of the rest of the summit, but am a bit blogged out – if you’re interested, see what I wrote about it on the VHL blog. A large chunk of that is my previous post to this blog, so it’s not as long as it looks; on the other hand, I also link from the VHL post to the summit notes on TADA which are long but are also worth a read.

After the summit was over, I spent the weekend in rural VA not far from Charlottesville with a friend named Free who fully lives up to his name. It was lovely; there were three dogs, a horse and many children and friends, open-air fires at night and marshmallows and hot dogs roasted on long sticks. And I got to participate in prepping the foundation for a greenhouse. The air was quiet and clear, and the stars looked alien: I couldn’t make out any familiar constellations because most of the sky was taken up by tall tall trees, it was like peering up through a window to the multiverse.

Meanwhile, some intensely cool stuff is being documented on the net. For example, here’s a Quicktime movie of the Northern Southern lights from space and an .mpg movie of solar activity, both courtesy of NASA.

Also, omigod, a new Beowulf is coming out in 2007 or so, and Neil Gaiman has writing credits. !

Having missed the opening one-two-punch weekend of Serenity and Mirrormask, I’m very much looking forward to seeing both.

September 16, 2005

what conferences are really about.

Impulsively, I’d love to go to this conference on sci-fi and pop culture.

It struck me just now that the reason I want to go is that there’s likely to be excellent storytelling there.

May 1, 2005

dreams vs reality

I dreamed about an ex-lover, a friend to whom I’m about to write email (only partly because of the dream). He’s been, to a greater or lesser extent, in my dreams for something like a week now. I’ve no idea why. All I know is that I awake happy and slightly nostalgic, that I miss him and want him and Ethan to meet.

I told Ethan about this yesterday morning. His eyes reflected the shine in my own. He smiled, the corners of his eyes creasing; he wants to meet J. too. This is important – in some ways, this is it, it’s why I treasure him so. He gets what it means to love, nurtures the depth of feelings I carry for him and for others.

I wake, and before writing email I read blogs. My legs underneath the blanket freeze as I follow links from a post. A sixteen-year-old girl is accused of being terrorist threat and imprisoned – imprisoned! – for being a teenager. For not getting along with her parents, for wanting to get married at 16, for a misunderstanding in the family that involved the police because they trust in the system, a decision which cost their daughter her freedom after the police involved the FBI.

The girl’s Muslim. As the source of my links wrote, “this is the Patriot Act in action. This is religious persecution. This is your America.”

April 21, 2005

Wanna see something weird?

Today I witnessed Escalation of Emotional Stakes on the net in a particularly colorful manner.

Ethan wrote this post in his blog, somewhat alarmingly titled “Sexist Assholes on Ye Interwebbe.” He was recounting his experience being a member of the community called themaxx: [this might be offensive]. It’s one of those places where members post found or original pictures they find interesting, and then have other members rate them and comment on them.

Ethan’s post gathered a few flames at mindlace.net; and, looking over his shoulder, I read the bunch of comments that got posted on themaxx.com directly. Many were flames. (You have to be a member to view the comments, so I don’t have the link to that.)

Then I get a new comment to a post I made in January, by one Bertram Livestock who, like a knight in shining armor, warns me away from my friend mindlace. I posted a lengthy reply to him there, and you know, it’s some of the best stuff I’ve written lately. So go read both Bertram’s comment and mine; I assure you, it’s worth it. I’m still giggling at the power of Google [which is how I’m assuming he found me].

March 9, 2005

Nuked organic spinach with olive oil and salt.

Now that’s happiness.

Wonderful spinach, too: soft, moist and flavorful. Hard to believe it had been [flash-?]frozen. Another reason to *heart* Trader Joe’s, where we’ve started going for obscene amounts of food each time, since it’s all the way in Boston. The chest freezer was so, so worth it.

Reconnected with an old friend after a decade’s worth of silence, more or less imposed by me. It’s strange to be in that phase of the email exchange when you’ve already established that you had the right email address, but no substantive conversation has yet happened. I felt strongly about him, back when we were on the same continent and for a long while after. There are some things that I couldn’t take, and so I stopped writing letters; but the memory of him has stayed with me, vivid and inextricable and compelling and good.

And now we’re suspended: how have we both changed in each other’s eyes?

And how will I deal if the answer to either is “no change at all”?

February 15, 2005

I want to be Grafton when I grow up.

Anthony Grafton, author of The Footnote: A Curious History, has also written Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800. I’m reading the latter as part of some research into the history of knowledge.

As an aside: there is no article on the history of knowledge in the Britannica, nor is it a Library of Congress category. Wild! The LoC has “Learning and Scholarship — History of,” but that’s different somehow. I can’t put my finger on how, though. Anyone?

Back to Grafton. Here’s the beginning paragraph of one of the chapters in Defenders:

Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a monster named Oannes with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil and all his works: “My father didn’t fear the Devil, neither do I. I’m worse than the devil.” Oannes, in the book that Scaliger read, climbed out of the ocean and taught humanity the arts and sciences. Devil Tempts Man was no headline to excite the Renaissance public; but Amphibian Creates Culture was out of the ordinary even in the sixteenth century.

Well, that’s a good way to get the reader’s attention. Grafton writes so engagingly! You almost forget that he’s a rigorous scholar.

So, arts + sciences = culture, huh? That’s an interesting implicit assertion.

Edit: Holy s**t! Okay, I was too excited about that paragraph above to read any further, otherwise this beginning of the second paragraph would’ve struck me as well: “The fish who gave us civilization appeared at the beginning of the account of Babylonian mythology and history written by Berosus, a priest of Bel, early in the third century B.C.” Oh, so now arts + sciences = civilization! I wonder if Grafton is just being cavalier, or subtly making an actual claim. Given that he’s brilliant, I’d have a hard time believing that this wording was unintentional.

January 30, 2005

Alexander Shulgin in NYTimes

I’ve been pointed to a pretty good article about Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin in the New York Times. It’s surprisingly sympathetic, given that Shulgin is directly responsible for most of the psychedelics that have fascinated so many curious souls lately.

Gratifying to me personally is the way that the D.E.A. is painted in the article: as people tasked with an impossible, misdirected war-on-drugs effort who have gradually bought it wholesale. People who raid homes and labs and clinics, at times doing good work but mostly employing scare tactics, propagating misinformation and hindering research. People who will destroy your property and arrest you if you give plant parts to terminally ill patients. People who help the federal government in its attempt to bully states that disagree with its stance on what’s dangerous and what isn’t.

But back to Shulgin. His contribution to the modern exploration of our own minds has been astounding. He is almost 80 years old now, and it’s unlikely that I will ever meet him; a pity, because like hundreds of thousands of people he’s affected I am deeply grateful for his insatiable curiosity and his celebration of humanity.

A few years back I borrowed PIHKAL from a friend, and it changed my life. Having never formally studied chemistry of any kind (stupid of me, but physics was more interesting and the school only required one), I began to gather an appreciation for the delicate chemical balance within which our perception of reality floats. To think that a few micrograms of a substance can make everything seem different!

Because of how little it evidently takes to alter one’s perception of reality, I became convinced (and still am) that reality has many faces, and that they’re worth exploring. Researchers claim that many of the chemicals people play with are modified versions of what’s already present in our brain; so it’s no surprise that meditation, breathing in patterns and persistent curious searching have revealed more to me about me and my world than my government’s educational curriculum can hope to.

It’s not all roses. Some substances are addictive; hell, I’ve had sleep and mental-acuity problems related to caffeine addiction, and that’s a forgiving drug. Others aren’t so forgiving. Research is needed, help is needed for people whose lives have been ruined… I always ask myself: what could possibly go wrong if we dedicated half of D.E.A.’s budget to humane rehab and to research? Instead of paying men and women with guns to go rid San Francisco of the “menace” of pot [which has been used for millennia, and look, we’re still here!], why can’t we pay researchers to find out what’s really going on?

Well, it’ll happen. We’ve already won a struggle with nicotine-distributing companies, so that at least they no longer actively make cigarette smoking look cool to teenagers. We’ve got a ways to go with alcohol, at least in this country, where making it taboo only contributes to the frat-party culture in which young people die from alcohol poisoning on a dare. There’s a longer journey for other drugs; I just hope I live to see a society where exploration of our chemical surroundings is done curiously, knowledgeably and responsibly. In other words, where humans are educated and then given some credit.

Isn’t it sad, how much we can’t blog? Freedom of speech, indeed.

January 19, 2005