I’ve been meaning for months now to do something that will make my WP blog less ugly. This means changing the WP theme. But so much could, in theory, go wrong. A backup would be a good idea, but this blog has so much information in so many files it’s almost impossible to do a directory-to-directory backup.
I need to act.
But I am afraid to act.
Must… get… over… this…
It was the end of a long day on the lake for Dan and me; and for you, dear readers, it’s been two weeks of reading and seeing photos of various attractions on Inle Lake. It’s time to head back to the hotel for an evening of relaxation, because we have to get up early tomorrow morning in order to get to the five-day market on time. But we’ve come a long way south down the lake, and as our boat heads back, the wind srops; the sun comes out; and the scenery turns from lovely to drop-dead gorgeous.
But first, a look at a few of the one-off structures we noted throughout the day, places of no particular touristic interest but which seemed unique (or typical) of the lake scenery as a whole. These are the man-made structures in their watery environment.
This attractive structure, built in an isolated location in the middle of the lake, is (we were told) a government-run guest house. Whyever they might need one of those here… Make of it what you will.
Here are a couple of rural scenes.
And a couple of pagodas glimpsed in passing from the water.
But it was the landscape of lake and mountain and sky that was the most enchanting of all, both earlier in the day…
and late in the afternoon as the wind died down.
The object below recently came into my possession. What do you think it might be?
😉
When I lived in Texas, I managed a group of twenty or so people developing and delivering custom and product software. In the group was a young woman whose work was brilliant–when she showed up. The problem with her performance was that her attendance was erratic, and sometimes when she did show up she was too sick to do much. This became enough of a problem that, as her manager, I had to have one of those discussions with her. The woman was brave–very brave–and decided to confide in me. She had, she said, been beaten by her husband. Sometimes it was so bad she couldn’t function because of the pain pills. And the pain. I don’t think it was just a story. She showed me the scabs, the bruises, and the scars. This was a woman who wore long sleeves and turtlenecks in the summer in Texas. I tried to help her find counseling and courage, but I don’t think I was very successful.
Later, after I no longer managed the group, she died. It was, they said, “a freak accident” involving a fall down a flight of stairs. I couldn’t go to the funeral because I couldn’t face her husband.
During the same period, I became acquainted with another young woman who worked in a different group in the same area. She was pretty, very young, and seemed very competent. I liked her much more than the degree of acquaintance would suggest. She died suddenly. I was told that it was “a freak accident” in the bathtub. I didn’t go to the funeral because I didn’t know her particularly well, but the loss always stuck with me.
It was maybe only last year that I put the two “freak accidents” together and began to wonder. Of course, I will never know.
The other day I read a plea from a victim of abuse who had been living in a shelter for a while and has finally qualified for housing for herself and her children. She writes under the name “Broken Dreams”. She has nothing and needs everything. I offered her whateverI could think that we have to give her, and she needs it all. And I want to find more.
This has all come back to me so hard. I can’t stop crying. This woman is so brave. Leaving an abusive relationship is one of the hardest things a woman may ever have to do. My heart goes out to her.
I found the following poem in a New York City subway car in 2007 with no attribution. I wonder how the poet is doing.
You are the man
you are my other country
And I find it hard going
You are the prickly pear
you are the sudden violent storm
The torrent to raise the river
To float the wounded doe
This past Saturday I attended a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of Eva Brann as a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. I am hoping that the speeches made at this event will be posted by the College soon, and if it is, I will update this entry with a link to them. But to give you an idea of the kind of person Eva is, I will copy here something she said as quoted by Chris Nelson, the College’s president in Annapolis, when he was explaining why she was so loved by all her students even as Dean, a position that held some disciplinary responsibility. Calling it “the higher hypocrisy”, Eva said, “Try to respect even the fairly implausible claims to virtue, since the wish to appear good is not without some grace.”
Think about it.
Why does this leave me with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach?
Person 1: “If you’re happy with your situation, don’t change it.”
Person 2: “Yes, I always say, ‘When in doubt, do nothing.'”
I was born with my two eyes functioning well, but separately. The right eye tended to cross. The state-of-the-art of ophthalmology at the time indicated a correction for this problem of operating on the deviant eye to shorten the outside muscle so that the eye would no longer tend to wander inwards. I had this operation done when I was five years old. Afterwards, I had to do eye exercises to learn to use the two eyes together. Looking into a stereoscope that displayed one picture to my right eye and another to my left eye, I was instructed to “put the bird into the cage” or “put the person inside the house”. I got really good at seeing the bird and then the cage and then the bird and then the cage, in rapid succession. But I never saw the bird inside the cage, the two of them both at exactly the same time. One of my eyes is nearsighted; the other, farsighted. This separation of responsibilities is actually quite useful. I read with my left eye, and (until recently, when I got glasses for distance vision that correct both eyes) drove and did other distance-vision activities with the right. I am, my optometrist tells me, an alternator.
What this means is that, generally speaking, I do not have binocular vision and lack depth perception. I have learned to compensate for this by using slight movements of my eyes or head and time-sequencing the images. The few times I’ve managed to make both eyes work together, the experience of true depth perception that most normal people have all the time has been stunning.
I also function reasonably comfortably in either right-brain or left-brain mode. Those little self-quizzes that tell you whether you are a right-brain (intuitive, artistic) thinker or a left-brain (logical, scientific) thinker map me onto the corpus callosum.
All of this has never been a problem, as it’s easy enough to switch to using the right tool (right brain, left brain, left eye, right eye) for the job. In fact, I’ve always felt that, rather than a handicap, I have more perception opportunities than many people, both visually and in terms of mental acuity.
But now there’s Charlie.
Charlie always leaves me a bit off balance. I don’t see him straight. He slips back and forth in time. Like the bird and the cage, I see today’s Charlie and the Charlie of 37 years ago alternating back and forth in rapid succession, and I can’t quite make them come together. One instant, he is a portly, silver-haired gentleman with damaged lung, hips, and knees; and the next instant, he is a tall, dark-haired slim, athletic sailor. He is a ramrod-straight man of honor to whom winning is important. He is an unhappy husband who would do a great deal to avoid confrontation with his wife. He is an engineer. He writes better poetic imagery than he knows. Dark–silver–dark–silver…. Charlie is one thing to one part of my vision and another thing to the other part, and there is no “right tool” for the Charlie job.
I am a person who has never before had a problem with delegating understanding to the part of me that does it best, but all the parts of my understanding lay some claim to Charlie. The confusion engendered by this experience is a pleasure.
And what I can’t figure out is if Charlie is different from other people (at least to me, perhaps in part because of the 36-year gap in our acquaintance) — or if this is simply the first time I’ve managed to see a human being with true binocular vision.
Is this the way Proust saw the world and everyone in it, all the time?
Who woulda thunk?
I went down to the bank
One day
I met a fine teller
And what did she say
“She stopped when I flashed my roll
I told her she could have all of my dough
She turned around and with a frown
She said this ain’t no circus
And I don’t need a clown
Your cash ain’t nothin’ but trash
Your cash ain’t nothin’ but trash
Your cash ain’t nothin’ but trash
And there ain’t no need in your hangin’ around”
Thanks for the lyrics, Steve Miller Band.
Thanks for the pennies, Adam, but no thanks. The bank won’t take them.
According to the Government Accounting Office, the government lost between $8 and $9 million in 1994 after considering the cost of both minting pennies (a small profit) and distributing them to commercial banks (a loss). According to me, Adam lost between $4 and $5 by leaving hundreds of pennies in his room, either unrolled or rolled in amounts not precisely equal to $.50. I lost $.10 in the parking meter and about 10 minutes driving the pennies to the bank to try (unsuccessfully) to exchange them for real money. Everyone loses!
Would somebody please remind me why we have this coin, if banks don’t take them?
The first time I actually went out on a sailboat, it was on a US-1, on a race, on a blustery, rainy day in maybe late April or early May. Which, in New England, means it was also cold once you got about 100 feet offshore. There were 6 of us on the boat, which is 2 too many. Two of us — Stanton and I — had never sailed before. Stanton, as you may recall, was Dan’s roommate at the time, and Archie’s coauthor. He is a big, funny, smart, self-centered somewhat awkward city guy. Ed McMann, the owner and skipper of the boat, put Stanton into the cabin to get him out of the way. His job was to be ballast, and to bail when needed. Now, the cabin on a US-1 is a pathetic affair about 4′ high at its greatest height and no wider than that at its greatest width and wet on the bottom. It has no amenities like portholes (or a head, for that matter). With the hatch off, Stanton could at least stand up straight. Now, the problem was that the mainsail boom stood only about a foot and a half above the deck, which put Stanton into a perilous position when he stood up straight. But never mind Stanton. On to me. I, too, had to be gotten out of the way. I was assigned a position on the aft deck. This wasn’t bad when we were on a reach or a run, but when we were heading up and the boat heeled over, I had only a small (about 1-inch-high) little piece of wood trim (one about halfway between the edge and the center line on each side) to keep my feet on and a jury-rigged line down the center to hang on to. And I had to switch feet around whenever we came about in order to avoid getting dumped into the ocean. My job was to avoid getting dumped into the ocean when we came about, since we had to finish the race with the same number of crew with which we started it. My other job was when we jibed to shout, “Stanton, duck!” So we completed the race in this fashion, and when we got to the committee boat they had a flag up that meant, “Sail the prescribed course twice.” Have I mentioned yet that it was very cold, windy, and raining? But did McMann ask anybody if we wanted to go around the prescribed course twice? No! It was “Ready about!” and “Hard alee!” and off we went around the prescribed course twice. Did I say yet that it was raining? And cold? So after we sailed the prescribed course twice and finished the race and got back into the harbor and tucked the boat in for the night and managed to hail the launch to take us back to land, Dan told me with considerable trepidation that he was afraid to ask what I thought about sailing. And I told him the truth. I told him that I loved it.
Sometimes it would dawn bright and crisp and colorful and windy as all get-out on an October morning, and I’d try to get Dan to go out sailing. But he’d say it was too windy. He’d say he was worried the mast might snap or something because we had no way to reef down that huge mainsail. (This was not an unrealistic concern. The mast on one of the US-1s did snap once in a race. So I’d argue that we could sail on the jib, but he said no, just no, but if I could talk one of the other two owner/skippers into it, then I could go with them. But needless to say, I couldn’t. A lot of perfectly good wasted autumn sailing days.
Thanks for the memory, Charlie.
That was on the 3-boat. Later, Dan and three other people bought the 2-boat, and we spent many a spring weekend day getting her into good enough shape to put her back in the water again. We sold “shares” in sailing for the season to help finance the cost of maintenance. Old wooden boats are not cheap. Usually, we got about a dozen people to chip in for the season, with the hope that we could get four or five for any given race. This was easy in June when the experience was new, but hard in August when the wind died down and a race could take all day. I never cared so much for August sailing, when it could take us three or four hours inching around the course in what passed for wind, and then after we finished and came in sight of the harbor even those pathetic little last breaths of wind would die out, and we’d sit there becalmed just looking at the harbor and not able to get to it, drinking beer and rowing when we got the energy (remember that 2-ton lead keel?) until the stinkpots came out and rescued us. They used to love doing that because we’d be so bloody grateful to them (and we were, too) when they know we really despised them (and we did, too).
The other problem is that in any given year, about half the crew had never sailed before. So there you are in the middle of a race and every second is critical, and the skipper (who is, of course stuck to the tiller) shouts, “Ease off on the topping lift!” And everyone looks at one another and wonders, “The what?!?” The only solution, of course, is to label everything. Thank you, Dymo. TOPPING LIFT, of course. Never mind what it is. Here is where it is. And not just the topping lift. Also PORT and STARBOARD. Lest we forget.