Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Knee, Happy New Year

This is my knee, before the surgery I had yesterday. The picture was taken at the ski resort, you will have to imagine the snow. The bones are fine, but I tore my ACL ligament. Now I have a new one threaded inside there, taken from a cadaver and sterilized with gamma radiation. There are 6 holes in the skin. I will spare you the technicolor pictures of the inside of my knee. I am supposed to be able to walk on it with a brace, but it hurts. Maybe tomorrow! Meanwhile, I am icing it using a special machine and writing the alphabet with my toes every hour so my muscles don't waste away.

I am not sure if I should drink champagne tonight on top of the pain meds.

Anyway, I liked this version of Auld Lang Syne (links to Scotland TV):

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne ?

CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot,
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i' the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie's a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

(According to Wikipedia, these are Robert Burns' original 1788 lyrics)
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Saturday, December 27, 2008

For some reason everything makes me feel like crying

Maybe its the knee injury
although it doesn't really hurt

Maybe its because my old friend stopped by
and I can call you my friend now
because the whirlwind of emotions I felt a year ago
is gone. We talked. We stroked my dog and cat,
who were sitting on the bed.
My heart pounded when I heard your voice.

I felt teary before, though,
thinking of my friend's kindness
helping me when I was injured,
taking care of me and bringing me stuff.

I cried in the night. Mourning,
perhaps, the loss of freedom.
Like you said, I was lucky
not to have learned to use crutches by our age.
Freedom from blaming myself.
Freedom to dance.

Brights, knee injuries

So I am back to resting my knee, having torn my ACL ligament yesterday while skiing. I feel angry with myself for not being more careful, but it was a run I had skied earlier in the day without any difficulty. The view from the top was amazing, I'll post a picture once I locate my camera card reader. Clear blue skies with blue ice-capped mountains in the distance, the nearby snow crisp and white like the sheets in a laundry detergent ad. I wanted to cry when I realized I had missed the sunset. My friend skied down behind the stretcher and put his sweater around me when I was shivering in the cable car, it would have been very cold and lonely without him.

On Christmas Day, while browsing the internet, I came across the Brights. They are the proselytes of a new religion, that has Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet for prophets. The aims of this new religion are to organize around disbelief in any mystical or supernatural elements, and advocate instead a 'naturalistic worldview', to gain public recognition for people who hold this worldview, and 'educate society' toward accepting such people. At first I felt worried about this new religion, that preaches intolerance toward other religions and attempts to convert people to its philosophy. But on second thoughts it is perhaps no worse than many traditional religions. I feel sad that while paying lip service to humanitarian values their website contains no volunteer opportunites or suggestions for doing good in society, either toward other brights or anybody else. All you can do as a Bright is help the Brights by promoting their faith. I worry a little that in a few years time it may become as unacceptable in scientific circles to be non-Bright as it is now in the Bay Area to be a Republican. The following statement, quoted from their website, is one I find particularly disturbing: "The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview." It is disturbing because I believe that ethics and actions should come from consideration toward others, both innate and socially sanctioned, and feelings of love, kindness and duty. It is not clear to me how a 'naturalistic worldview' accommodates such concerns, or in fact tells you anything about how to act morally.

My own atheism is pure apostasy. I have no interest in replacing God with a 'naturalistic worldview'. Doubt, curiosity, experiential and rational inquiry seem far more important to me than finding something to believe in.

On the one hand, I am fearful of promoting their cause by the mere fact of writing about them. On the other hand, I am playing with the idea of joining them to see whether there is any openness to change from within by promoting a more humanistic agenda. Thoughts, anyone?

Monday, December 8, 2008

Aha moment

I realized the other day, as I was biking up Mount Diablo, that I still have probably most of my life ahead of me. I thought about the fact that I've only been having sex for about half my life, and how much more of that there is to come. I thought of all the things I've learned in the past 38 years, and how much more I could learn in the next forty-odd years. Perhaps I should keep a scrapbook, otherwise it might be too much to remember.

The view of the sunset as I rode down the mountain was magnificent. If I could paint a picture in words, it would be a pink sky with the crisp lines of blue hills in the distance, the red sunbeams snagging the fog in the valley as it rolls over the pale dry grass beside the orange tinted tarmac. I had a flat near the bottom and my friend helped me change the tube by the light of a bikelamp in the cold dusk. It would be nice if he noticed I love him and if he stopped wanting to date other women, but we always have such wonderful adventures together. Maybe I am too forgiving.

Today I learned a new yoga pose from a book. Garbha pindasana or womb pose involves sitting in lotus and squeezing the hands and forearms through the space between the shins and the calves and then balancing with the chin resting on the hands. I taught it to my students, who seemed to have a good lotus position.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Things I would like to change about me

1) I seem able to write only 10 pages of dissertation per day before going online and randomly reading Wikipedia or blogs.
2) I still think about you when I visit the opera to hear La Boheme or watch a romantic movie. Why can't I just enjoy the beautiful music and sentiment? Why do my thoughts turn inward?
3) Why does there always have to be a you, for f**ksake?
4) I knowingly take on more than I can easily manage, and then I regret it because things turn up that I would have wanted to do, like taking classes at this cool new acrobatics studio.
5) I need to pay more attention to detail.

Questions about the soul

I used to think I was not a dualist, taking in the critiques of Descartes with his ridiculous partitioning of mind and body and strange notions of how they interacted and affected one another. The upside-down image on the back of the retina that needs to be re-rotated for the benefit of some strange homunculus, looking at periscopically it via the pineal gland. How would he even know which way was up? Much more insidious was Descartes' identification of the self, 'I', with thought. I think therefore I am. Hegel pointed out that only stopping up the eyes and ears made this mode of existence possible. But the identification of the self with thought, and obsession over the existence of consciousness, has continued to dog Western philosophy and its latter day manifestations as pseudoscience.

Materialism posits that all facets of existence can be reduced to physical arrangements of matter and energy in space and time. I have no qualms about this idea. The problem is that we still don't know exactly how it happens in a way that produces our everyday experiencing. I venture to hypothesize that while individual consciousness manifests as the complex patterns of activation of many different neurons in the brain, together with the chemical signals that they use to communicate with one another, it is also determined by the people around us and the cultural legacy of historical brain activity in many, many people now dead who first came up with concepts such as the soul and God, and found words and language to communicate them with their contemporaries.

It would be a sad thing if our ability to transcend our individual existence once again in this same way became bogged down by neurobiological hyperbole.