andamu

In the packet of papers containing instructions (when to take which dose of laxative, when to stop eating high fiber foods, when to drink only clear liquids with no red or purple dye, when to stop drinking all together) and information, it is mentioned that I can take along a "clearly marked" CD of music that they will play during my procedure.
And while I immediately decide that I will NOT be taking along any of my own music, it turns into an interesting question - kind of a twist on Desert Island Disks. What would YOU take along to listen to during an upper endoscopy and colonoscopy?

• Elgar's Cello Concerto with Jaqueline DuPr� and Sir John Barbirolli
• Chopin Nocturnes, with Krystian Zimerman
• Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, with Marshall and Terrani
• Ramirez's Misa Criolla, with Jos� Carreras
• Haydn's Theresienmesse...

When I break something
- my mirror, my cup, my heart -
the practical, capable me
takes charge:

gingerly picks up
the large pieces
digs around to find the tools,
- the dustpan and brush -
to sweep up the smaller slivers

But always it is

the tiny shards,
the razor sharps,

• The salad bar seems a safe bet, except the person next to you has just used the broccoli tongs to serve themselves some ham cubes, then some grated cheese, and then returned the tongs to the broccoli. OK, skip that.
• Hmm, soup looks good, Tomato Florentine, with the V for Vegetarian proudly pre-pended. Let's have a look to see what's in the ingredient list: tomato, spinach.....chicken stock! Keep moving.
• Rice and lentils cooked with tomatoes in curry spices and cumin - sounds delicious, until you reach the counter and see that the chicken breasts are arranged on top of the bed of rice and lentils.
• Surely nothing can go wrong if you order a grilled cheese sandwich or a veggie burger then? Except the same spatula is used to flip the burgers, and the turkey sandwiches are fried in the same spot, while the fries and onion rings flank the chicken strips in the same oil.

Oh no! Not again!

I thought I had beaten the bogeyman once and for all. But here he comes again, worming his knobbly fingers into my hair and into my life until he gets a stranglehold on me.

Way back then it had all started so innocently. Just a little taste. See, it's good, it's fun. Have a little more. Wheeeeeee!

It took over my weekends, from dawn until dusk, and then spread insidiously to my weekdays as well. Whenever an opportunity arose, I was hooked. My social life fell to pieces, because I never had time for anyone or anything else - everything was completely focused purely on this pleasure.

Then I got a job which exposed me even more - imagine an alcoholic becoming a waitress at an upmarket restaurant. Which is where I met an enabler who pushed more my way, which I greedily lapped up, panting for more. And I switched jobs - from the frying pan into the fire. Imagine the same waitress now becoming a bartender at an Irish pub.

It was all I ate, walked, breathed, slept, dreamt for five years, before I stopped, cold turkey.

After a while I could stand a little tentative exposure. Sure there was some interest, but not the driving, all-consuming need. I knew to keep my distance, not to get hooked again. And to be honest, there wasn't much opportunity.

And then opportunity, ample and grinning, knocked, beckoned, hollered at me. I tried to fight it, honestly I did. I walked past, I only glanced. If I had to sit down, I would do so for a disciplined few minutes and then leave, even while it tried to entice me back.
And then the few minutes stretched into a few tens of minutes and then hours and hours and hours until a whole week went by without my knowledge.

My name is Sivani, and I am a cricket addict.

Why oh why did we have to buy a house and get a satellite dish?

(For those of you who know cricket: I started out by scoring league matches on Saturdays from 8 am to 6 pm, taping the one-dayer at home. On Sundays I would watch the Sunday one-dayer, and then follow it with the first innings of the taped match. Mondays would be the second innings - that's if I made it to bed on Sunday!
Then I became official First Class scorer.
Then I started in a job* that enabled me to travel with the international teams all around the country.
*details withheld to preserve some privacy.)

I'm such a spoilt creature. I want to have my cake and it eat it too.

The apartment we used to rent is about two miles from the lab. The new house is seven miles away, which means I have a much longer commute. (Those of you in big cities, stop with the hysterical laughter already.)

I love big cities. I love the variety, the bustle, the shopping, the arts, the fact that the airport has real planes (not itty-bitty puddlehoppers that fly only to the nearest big city), the eccentricities, the cultural events, the facilities. But I hate living in them; the noise, the pollution, the crime, the inflated prices at some places.

I love living in a town that is big enough to have all the amenities, but still feels to some extent like a community, that has character, lighter traffic and space to move around in. Oh, and parking.

But I love the country although I am not that keen on roughing it exactly. It is more of an appreciative, on-the-other-side-of-the-camera-lens kind of love.

And now I live across the river from a big city with all that I love about it (literally just a bridge away), in a town big enough to be comfortable and small enough to care, and the route that I drive to work takes me through an undeveloped area of smallholdings and sports fields, with meadows and pastures and quaint ramshackle barns, woods and ponds with long stretches of magnificent mountain views.

And here I am complaining that in order to get a gigantic comfortable house for all the family, I have to drive an entire 20 minutes to get to work!

When I was a teenager the town we lived in had no ice rink. The big city, about 90 minutes away did, and it became a favorite destination for organized youth outings (through school or church or whatever).

This meant that I got to skate about three times a year, after one holiday that we spent with my cousins in the same big city where we went for one session every day for a week. Which meant that I was basically capable of staying more or less upright on the skates away from the wall, and was able to move forward in clumsy baby pushes.

Now picture this: a group of adolescents with all the bravado and mixed-up hormones that this would entail, on a group outing, all swarming over the ice rink. Which meant first that I kept going faster than speeds at which I was able to control my balance (the bravado part) and second that I kept trying to fall forward rather than backwards, because a sopping wet butt was a lot more uncomfortable and embarrassing with all the teenage boys around than damp knees.

It occurs to me that had I been less concerned with dignity and boys at that time, and had I worn knee pads at that stage, I would have needed them a lot less frequently now when I have to potter around the house or garden.

My sister and I share a lot of physical characteristics, but not our coloring. I turn a toasty brown in the sun, she resembles a boiled lobster. I have thick dark hair, hers is a baby-fine light brown that gets sun bleached to a golden hue at the slightest provocation.

Of late, since we have become aware of the harm of exposure to the sun, the golden streaks have been enjoying some slight chemical assistance. And so it was that a home highlighting kit was being applied to her by my less-than-adept hands one evening, with a significant amount left over. And the madcap idea hatched to try a little on my hair.

Since we started with her, her waiting time expired first and she went to wash it out, while I still had about 15 minutes to go. The next thing I heard after the shower started was a shriek, and then she came gallumphing down the hall, awkwardly covered and trailing soap suds, screaming at me to get in the shower now and wash off the stuff.

Too late. I ended up with broad bright orange streaks in my otherwise dark brown (and grey) hair. At 10 p.m. on a Sunday evening.

My sister had to get in the car and go to a 24-hour store to buy a shade of brown that more or less matched my own hair, because there was no way that I was going to work that way. (Her own was a little ... intense, but not too bad.)

A by-product of the brown hair color is that it covered my grey strands as well as the orange streaks. The second application of brown is starting to grow out and wash away, with the orangey streaks now somewhat muted. I might not need a third application of brown.

But suddenly seeing the multitude of silver threads was rather a shock. They had originally appeared gradually, one by one, giving me time to get used to them. Now I had been without them for a few months, and they all came back at once.

I don't think I'll be covering them up again. It is good for my humility to see them, and they tend to ground me in reality. Then again I reserve the right to change my mind should men my own age start "Ma'am"-ing me.

BridalBeer confesses that she "was in New York for long enough to miss it."
Strange how certain places have the ability to become part of our inner landscape despite a stay which is brief relative to our life. There are far corners that forever seem to be beckoning me, their sights and sounds so real that I stick my hand out to touch, only to come up with a fistful of air.
Can this be true of places that we have not lived in too? Can we know that our soul belongs in a certain place before we have stayed there?

It's late, and it's been an exceptionally long day.

BridalBeer is a lawyer who has returned to Calcutta, and started by chronicling a potential match in her parents' quest to arrange a marriage for her, the pathos and poignancy of the situation and her yearning for the other life and other place she knew.
She started blogging in January, and hers is a blog worth reading from the start. Go on, pamper yourself and start at the beginning (while there is still relatively little to catch up on) and experience the enchantment wrought by her words.

It has been a rather unusual week. I have had arrays of meetings that take large chunks out of my days, leaving only disjointed snippets of time to try and get some work done, and consequently have stayed really late at the lab.
The lights are automatically switched off at seven. There's a manual switch to turn it back on, but that goes off after an hour too, so every hour you're plunged in darkness with only the walkways illuminated, playing the waiting game, hoping that someone else is making the trek to the switch to turn it back on, and wondering at what stage you should capitulate and turn it on yourself.

Thursday I went in much later than I usually do, driving in full sunshine and noticing the beauty of everything, finished by the thick coat of frost on every detail glinting like gilded edges in the bright sun.
It made me realize that I have been missing winter, its beauty. Going in early (7) and leaving late (5.30+) meant that until recently I have been making the drive both ways in the dark.
It is better now, but still the faint morning light is mostly obscured by thick clouds and/or heavy fog whenever it is not actually raining. This is after all winter in the Pacific Northwest.
But it made me appreciate that the experience of the day (and the season) for people who come in a couple of hours after I do would be quite different.

It reminded me of my student days back in South Africa, while I was living in the same high-rise apartment block perched on top of a midtown shopping mall I mentioned in a previous post. For a student job I worked in a bakery in the mall which was a really convenient commute! But on weekends and during break my days consisted of waking up and glimpsing the grey light of early morning over the city, locking my apartment door, walking down the internal corridor, getting into the elevator, and getting out on the bakery's floor. At the end of the day I would reverse the process, the only difference that the grey light I saw when I returned to my apartment was that of early evening.
During breaks I would live for entire weeks never setting a foot outside, and never seeing more than a few brief snatches of daylight except on Sundays.

At the time I could not tell you what the source of my vague discontent, perhaps even depression, was. It was only once I moved to a different apartment that it sunk in. Just like the unusual experience on Thursday showed me what I have been missing recently.
Perhaps I should reconsider my work schedule. I am fortunate that my company allows us great leeway in deciding which hours we want to work; to some extent the main focus is getting the job done on schedule, and being available for required meetings - beyond that it doesn't matter when exactly you are there. It is a great way to help the employees make the necessary choices to maintain the work/life balance.

On the other hand if I make the choice to go in later and stay later, it would negatively impact my family. For the sake of experiencing a few minutes of pleasantness during my morning drive I would be coming home after Angel Face has gone to bed, gulp down dinner alone or, if my precious one decided to wait for me, force him to have cold or drying food as well, spend a desultory hour unwinding, making sketchy conversation, perhaps flip through a few channels, sort out the laundry, have a shower, and crawl into bed.

Perhaps then not such a good idea.

Here are some vast over-generalizations to get everyone up in arms.

Everyone knows that one of the worst mistakes is for an FOB (Fresh Off Boat for the non-Desi (Desi = (fellow) country man, used to indicate someone from the Indian subcontinent) readership) to marry an ABCD (American Born Confused Desi).

I would speculate that the reason lies tied up in the fact that both have certain expectations and fail to make allowances for the differences. I think, in fact, that an FOB-gori/gora (white girl/white guy, or in this case just generic American) marriage have a far greater chance to succeed (once the parents get over the shock, of course).
When two people of vastly different cultures get married they expect that there are going to be differences, and they prepare for the fact that they will have to work on communication and accommodation.
When two people of (ostensibly) the same culture get married, there is no preparation for such allowances to be made: the FOB expects that the ABCD will "get" everything culturally expected of them, and the ABCD who always thought that they were raised in quite a traditional Bengali/Tamil/Gujurati etc. home is shocked to discover that to a large extent they have no clue.

Having thoroughly ruffled everyone's feathers, on to topic two.

I wonder how many people (desi or non) understand how vastly different the Indian experience is in the US from that of the UK and of Canada. Yes, Canada is much more like the UK in that respect than the US.

Most of the desis that Americans between thirty and ten years ago came into contact with were either doctors or professors. Within the past ten years (give or take) add software professionals to the list. While there are some locals who might not like the foreign-ness or the color, the fact remains that most of their exposure to Indians have been with highly educated people in well-respected jobs.

In the UK and Canada, many (NOT all, of course) of the desi population had arrived as immigrants, many with little or no English and either not well-educated, or educated but without the language skills to make the education work for them in those countries. They came prepared to work their fingers to the bone to ensure a better and safer future for their children, who are now in many cases in similar positions as the typical US desi. But within the context of their situation, the parents have worked in mostly menial positions.

To draw the parallel within the States, in Canada and the UK many of the jobs that are performed here by either Latinos or African Americans (depending on the part of the country you're in) are there performed by desis. And people treat them with the same dismissive, patronizing disdain or fear or hatred as those other two population groups are treated in the US.

And just to get everyone completely discombobulated, I wonder whether the difference in desi political affiliations (both on the local front and in India) can be traced back to the fact that desis in the UK and Canada have experienced discrimination far beyond that which an average desi in the US has.

I've been getting a few questions lately related to Indian languages.
And let me start right there, after the DISCLAIMER that as always there will be gross generalizations made in this post.

There is no such language as "Indian," as in "I couldn't understand what those two guys were saying; they were speaking in Indian."

Also, there is no such language as Hindu - it is Hindi. It is also not the only language spoken in India, in fact in some places it is only understood because of the popularity of Hindi movies, and in some places not at all. But there is no such creature as a Hindi - it is purely the name of a language, not a people.

Having just erased about 8 paragraphs of other stuff, let's get back on track to more direct questions:

"What is andamu, and how do you say it anyway?"
Andamu is Telugu (another of India's languages, spoken in Andhra Pradesh, which is in South India). It means beauty, and is pronounced ahn-dah-moo (all the vowels being short, however).

"How about Sivani?"
Sivani is pronounced shee-VAAH-nee (with the ee short in both cases, think the i in winter, and the aa long, taking the emphasis). It means the wife of Siva.

"But why don't you correct people when they get it wrong and write Shivani? And anyway, I always thought it was Shiva. not Siva."
But they're not getting it wrong, they just have the misfortune of being from North India, rather than South India. (About now would probably be a good time to apply for some witness protection program, methinks.)

There are three sibilant sounds in most Indian languages: s, sh and something inbetween the two. Each of the languages have their own alphabets and within that it is perfectly clear that Siva/Shiva uses the same sound, the inbetween one with its own unique character, distinct from the other two. The problem comes in trying to render the sound in the English alphabet which has no such special character. The convention in the North has been to render it as sh, and the convention in the South uses s. (This is also a good time to remind everyone about the disclaimer.)

In fact, the requirements of transliteration between alphabets, and the long influence of the British in India have caused many a strange thing to happen.
One big casualty is the "u," especially in the North. Most Indian languages are highly phonetic - the letters always have the same sound value regardless of context, unlike English - think "though" "through" "thought" "tough."
Hence the "u" normally has the sound "oo," so Murthi would be pronounced moortee (well, short vowels, but pretty much those sounds). Except that the English used their erratic vowel behavior in forming transliteration customs, and so Punjab is not Poonjahb, but Pahnjahb in pronunciation (and should properly be written as Panjab); here think of the English word fun for an idea of where this came from.

Of course the real fun starts when you have an English word - let's say a road name given during the colonial period: Cenotaph Road. Let it sit around for a hundred years and sink into people's everyday usage, let it be used in the local newspapers in the local alphabet (Tamil in this instance) and then ask a sign painter to climb a rickety ladder and repaint, in the Roman alphabet, the name, and you end up quite logically with Sanetop Road (bearing in mind that Tamil makes no distinction between p and f).

"But why do some people say Ram, some Rama and some Raman? Are they the same or different?"
Regional peculiarities. The original Sanskrit (which is to Indian languages somewhat like Latin is to many Western languages) is Rama (RAAH-mah), which some of the Indian languages (notably Telugu, yay!) retains, but in many North Indian languages the terminal A is dropped (as in many other names and words) for it to become Ram (Raahm). In Tamil however, many words with a terminal A gets an N appended for free, so that is becomes Raman (RAAH-mahn).

Transliterating English into an Indian language can be just as weird, again due to the irregularities of English. Take a word like bank for instance. You know how to pronounce it, right? But in Telugu (as in others) the character "a" carries the short "ah" sound, not the sound of the "a" in bank. So, to try and mimic the sound, (transliterating back from Telugu to Roman alphabet what was first transliterated into Telugu), you get byank, the "y" inserted to try and mimic the vowel sound via a diphthong.

The moral of the story is that it is English that is the weird language, not any of those spoken in India - well, except maybe those missing half the consonants like Bengali and Tamil (does anyone know the number of a couple of good bodyguards, by the way?). Most of the problems with transliteration disappear when dealing with a regularly phonetic language like German or Italian or Afrikaans...

One of the networks with which I am involved periodically presents an event called a Readers Theater. We gather stories about personal experiences around a particular topic; some written by ourselves, others by colleagues and friends, each roughly a page in length.

For the event a panel of readers will read these stories to the audience, usually followed by a discussion around the topic. Not all the writers read, nor did all the readers write, and even if you both wrote and read, you might not read your own story.

For one such an event I wrote two stories. I read two stories as well, one my own, one written by someone else who elected not to read.

My heart ached for my other story, the one someone else was reading. It was humorous, but like so much humor it relied much on timing. Also, because I knew that it would be read aloud, I wrote it with the rhythms of speech: my speech. I wrote it so that it would roll fluently, rhythmically off my tongue.

But someone else wanted to read it - partly because it was the only story that got a laugh in our trials. And I could not find a way to say "No" without seeming selfish and petty.

I would flinch through rehearsals when he would trip over the lines, and murder the jokes with poor timing. The throwaways were over-emphasized, the important points were tossed aside in an almost mumble. But I sat on my hands and bit my lip, and suffered the abuse to my baby.

Because that piece did feel like my baby. The emotions around it were not so much proprietary as protective, materialistic as maternal.

In the end I suppose the experience served some purpose; it certainly encouraged me to make sure that I do justice to the words written by someone else on the second piece I read.

A little while ago Judy at Widow Shmidow wrote about the difficulties in deciding where to live, and when no longer to live there. This prompted me to try and find out what is important to me in terms of the place that I live.

Ranked roughly in order of priority (although of course I maintain the right to change my mind):

Living somewhere beautiful is important to me. There are many different kinds of beauty that I appreciate, to varying degrees, so that is not necessarily tied to one particular place. But I exult in the fact that when I drive to work in the morning, and home at night, or to the store, there is the kind of beauty around me that makes my breath catch at the back of my throat, if only I open my eyes and mind to it.

Living somewhere with a climate I like (cooler but not freezing, lots of rain, and definitely not too hot) is almost as important to me. I find my moods tied a lot to the climate, and creatures of the flesh that we are, our moods influence much of our lives.

Living somewhere where there is a significant support for some of my stances is important to me, because I cannot deny who I am, and my causes are very important to me.

Living somewhere that I can maintain a reasonably comfortable standard of living is important to me and my family whom I am supporting.

Living somewhere with good access to some conveniences (e.g. international airport) and interests (books, music, art) is important to me.

Living somewhere conveniently placed for family is important to me. This would be higher on the list but for the reality that families are composed of multiple independent members who frequently are widely dispersed, and convenience for one is across the country or the world for the others.

To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing
To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing
To come to possess all
desire the possession of nothing
To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing

To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by a way in which you enjoy not
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not
To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not

When you turn toward something
you cease to cast yourself upon the all
For to go from the all to the all
you must leave yourself in all
And when you come to the possession of all
you must possess it without wanting anything

In this nakedness the spirit
finds it rest, for when it
covets nothing, nothing
raises it up, and nothing
weighs it down, because it is
in the center of its humility

-- San Juan de la Cruz

It is 9.45 p.m. as I leave the lab to head home. As I open the door I step from the stale air in the airlocked foyer into the cool, luminous evening air. The turf on the terraced berm rising in front of me folds the earth in a dark velvet, the color barely hinted at in the evening light; the light breeze teases my nostrils with the definite yet subtle perfume from the posies of tiny white flowers on the trees where later clusters of berries will ripen from green to red, for birds to conduct festivals overflowing with food.

It is a shame to open the car door and get inside, once again isolating me from the summer's evening. The dusk is lighter in the west, but the sky has a bluish sheen to the east, and around the northern side it appears greenish, an eau de nil, fading to transparency overhead.

A hand lifted in a wave to the security guard in the guard house who looks up from the magazine she is reading in a low puddle of light, her face lit up as she mouthes "Have a nice evening."

Waiting for a girl with a backpack to complete crossing the road and join her companion who is impatiently waiting with one foot on his scooter, before taking the turn into the forested area, surrounded by ancient pines towering into the sky, so tall they seem to meet across the wide divided four-lane cutting through. Up and up and up they draw the eye until, dizzy with inverse vertigo and aching from the crick in the neck at the unaccustomed angle, the spell is broken and the eye is returned to the sparse evening traffic.

Moving northwards, the trees thin, suddenly to turn into flat; nothingness until the houses across the field, a school up ahead, and Mount Hood a presence to the right, unseen at this hour, but forceful in the way that its existence it known.

Soon after the road narrows to undivided single lanes the buildings thin, a tall, dense, long line of cypresses lining the road to the west, petering out into two or three scattered massive pines, to be intersected by the high voltage pylons spaced across the dog runs on the left, jumping the road, and then marching off to the right where the field falls away and the view is clear all the way to the foothills of the mountains, the pylons becoming tiny as ants, an exercise in perspective painting.

Nudging the nose of the car around the last pine, westward, the last splashes of color from the sunset come into view; a bright orange smear here, a reddish puddle over there, smidgens of yellow gold sprinkled around, playing through the patchy cloud.

As I keep heading west, I watch as the creeping darkening blue-green of the night sky slowly overwhelms and engulfs the last fading traces of the sun. And yet the sky is bright, luminous and transparent, the clouds like untidy pencil smudges and a blotchy copybook.

Rejoining the main road, and the traffic, and the built-up area, I head north again, the final stretch to home, albeit a long one. Halfway there the houses again fall away, with only copses of trees breaking the flat green expanse of the meadow. But unlike the earlier pastoral stretch, this one has traffic, and traffic lights. And suddenly, instead of enchanting and comforting, the red and green patterns floating in air, the white and red lights snaking in parallel, moving in opposite directions, seem obscene, out of place in this moment where a summer evening turns into a summer night, amid the meadow and trees and the foothills, the frail clouds and the sparse winking stars.

And then I am home in the warm yellow light spilling into the corners, with warm mellow laughter. And outside it is still a magical summer night, but none of us knows, none of us shares it anymore.

Warning: This is a lazy post, where I will allow others to do all the work for me.

Ramya posted some scribbles a little while ago, and one section stuck in my mind. (Well, other parts did too, but this is the one I want to blog about.):

Ever notice how the simplest things are the hardest to articulate?
I will miss you
I love you
I do
But then again, the most precious moments are made up of things left unsaid.

I quoted the poet, Elisabeth Eybers before in the blog, the only Afrikaans poet to feature here. While I had always appreciated her, I had never thought of her as my favorite poet. Perhaps action speaks louder than words?

I love words.
Not with a fetish-like obsession, or an all consuming passion, you understand. Nevertheless I delight in words. They are magic, containing hidden secrets and beauty on several different levels.

The obvious is the meaning of the word itself, which could be either obvious or obscured, readily available or requiring a commitment. This is of course related to context. (Ha! You did not really believe that I would not sneak in my hobby horse somewhere, did you?)
The accessibility is dependent on whether the individual is familiar with the words to which it relates, or from which it is derived; alternatively whether the context in which it is used adequately reveals the meaning.

A second level is the sound of the word. Now, some words are onomatopoeic and the aptness of their sounds as they relate to their definitions is clear. But the sound of every word has an internal beauty, integral to itself as well. Here context proves a hindrance. It is tough to listen to a word objectively, independent of its meaning. Say something simple like "simple" fifteen times in a row, more or less without inflection. Listen to the sounds it makes and notice how, after repetition, it almost seems to become odd, and devoid of meaning.
For a better illustration of the way context ruins the appreciation of sound, take the word gonorrhea. I wonder how many of you would be able to divorce it from its meaning to actually hear its sound?

A third level of beauty resides in the appearance of the word. Again, because of context it is not easy to appreciate this objectively without tying it to the meaning of the word, but somehow it is less difficult than hearing in isolation.
Of course, text is frequently turned into art through the use of elegant fonts, calligraphy and graphic design, but I am talking about the simple sequence of letters, the way in which they appear on a plain page.
Have you ever become stuck while writing a really simple word like "really," and for a few moments were unable to think of how to write it, then started to write a few versions, erasing each in turn because "it just doesn't look right?" If you have, then you have some idea of what I am talking about.

Of course, I am totally weird in that I can get lost in the beauty of the patterns the blank spaces between words and paragraphs make on the page of a book, so don't feel bad if you have no idea what I am talking about.

::

Coming Soon: Episode Two, "Big Words"

There are some principles that we extract from daily life through observation and experience. "Extract" might not be the right word though, because these are things that we "know" peripherally in most cases. Sometimes it takes someone to explicitly state a principle for us to experience the epiphany, acknowledging the "rightness" of the articulation by virtue of our prior experience.

A friend sent me this article, At Ground Zero, Vision by Committee by Benedict Carey, published in the New York Times. It contains these "Aha!"-moments for me:

"When making important determinations, small groups in fact often do not take into account the most relevant expertise in the room ... most small groups tend to make decisions based on information all members share about a topic, and to overlook important facts that one or several people may know but the others do not."

"... the propensity of small committees [is] to drift toward extreme decisions ... When all members of a group agree on a certain issues, ... individual members tend to one-up each other and the choices become by degrees more and more extreme."

"... groups act very much like individuals under stress, only more so ... They procrastinate, calling for further information. And they become committed to bad decisions, to save face or to protect themselves against criticism."

"The unexamined life is not worth living," says Plato. The capability for self-reflection is uniquely human, although I would not go so far as to say that therefore its exercise is imperative and definitive. If that were the case, several other less savory characteristics particular to humans would have to be viewed the same way, just because animals do not indulge in that kind of behavior.

Self-examination includes the investigation of motives and evaluation of results of actions and beliefs. It is through reflection that the opportunity for growth exists. But it is a fallacy to assume that just because someone reflects on their life that they will improve. The conclusions drawn need to be acted upon in order to effect change.

The Nice and The GoodIris Murdoch makes this point rather well in The Nice and The Good. The central character, Ducane, endlessly ponders not only the nature of "good" but also his character and conduct - he desires them to be good - but he is almost paralyzed by this agonizing, in the end acting in ways that might be nice but certainly are not good.

She also demonstrates that while "nice" is frequently popular, "good" is not necessarily so.

Now, for all of you thinking that "it sounds like a really boring book; I should remember to give it a miss," let me add that it contains two suspicious deaths and an investigation, government secrets and several love triangles, a daring rescue, flying saucers, puppy love, travel to distant countries and magic pagan rituals, not to mention several different mysteries!

PS: The title comes from a South African performer whose song was later turned into the slogan for a KFC-type outlet. It is merely a phonetic spelling for "It's good, it's nice"

A couple of years ago BBC Radio 4 broadcast a week of readings from a book that explored a series of psychological experiments and considered the various conclusions that might be drawn from the observations.

This was my first introduction to the work of Dr. Stanley Milgram at Yale. I had wanted to write about this before, but then real life happened, and the entire topic became highly politically charged. As you might have noticed I do not discuss politics on my blog. I have strong views, and I enjoy discussing ideas with informed, intelligent and non-confrontational people - even those who do not agree with me provided they meet those requirements - but this is not the forum in which I choose to do so.

For some reason I started thinking of Milgram's experiment again today, and thought that I could now raise the topic properly ... and found that impossible to do.

It does have some interesting implications for the idea that people have an independent internal moral compass, and the whole idea of free will within a social context.

If you are interested, here are a couple of articles you may wish to look at:
The Perils of Obedience is Dr. Milgram's article on the experiment, published first in Harper's Magazine.
The next is an article by Philip Meyer first printed in Esquire magazine. You will find many more articles if you do a bit of googling, some with very different views to the ones expressed in this one, but all thought-provoking.

If you've read these or know something about the study, and would like to discuss it, leave a comment so that we can take it up offline; we're liable to have a much more fruitful conversation privately than in a public forum.

You might have noticed that the email addresses of my commenters are never visible, even when they do not leave an URL, because I hate spam as much as you do. I am the only one who gets to see the addresses.

Japanese Garden

Detail

The reflection on the
rippling water looks
like impressionistic
brush strokes.

A little more than two years ago we moved halfway across the country to the Pacific Northwest. This means that most of our friends from the past have been tied to other parts of the country (not to mention other countries). Whenever they come to visit, or blogging acquaintances happen to come to town, or colleagues fly in from abroad, we get the opportunity to play tour guide.

This role is something I relish; I love sharing the things that I like, and it usually gives me the opportunity to discover something new, do something I might otherwise not have done. You know the situation: there is some attraction in your area and you keep intending to go but never quite get around to it? Well, with visitors, all of a sudden you have a real incentive to go.

Another advantage is the fact that, whenever you have to think about something hard enough to be able to convey it someone else (e.g. think of tutoring someone in differential equations) you gain new insights yourself and end up knowing and understanding it better than before.

I still think I would love to be a tour leader once in a while. Not necessarily a tour guide, because I frequently do not know the fine details, but a leader steering the course of the tour and sharing the wonder that I have found in places.

So, does anybody fancy going to India in December?

I love a good debate, and I thrive on a juicy dilemma. But there are some types that make my head hurt, make me want to run away and bury my head under the nearest pillow.

One such would be the plot of The House of Sand and Fog where a woman is left destitute after her house is sold on auction to recover (non-existent) tax debts due to a clerical error. The house is then - in good faith - bought for a song by a man who puts all his eggs in this basket and would be left destitute if he was refunded only the purchase price of this property. Whatever happens, someone gets hurt, and the people hurting are not the people who made the mistake.

There are other such issues, but the most prominent I can think of right now are all politcally charged, and we all know we don't do politics here.

But recently another such question surfaced in a different context. Rock Me Gently is billed as a memoir by Judith Kelly of her traumatic experience being raised in a Catholic orphanage. The problem with the book that sold 30,000 copies in hardcover, is that it appears to have extensive similarities to multiple other works, including Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, Antonia White's Frost in May and several works from Hilary Mantel, including her novel Fludd .

The Independent discusses the chronology and lists some of the similarities. From this source

One line from Fludd, published in 1989, reads: "'I could drink sleep,' she said, 'I could eat it. I could roll around in my dreams like a pig in mud'." In Rock Me Gently, the following sentence appears: "Now I could drink sleep. I could eat it. I could roll around in my dreams like a pig in mud."

The following emerges: Judith Kelly is not well-educated (and it is implied that she is not particularly clever by the prominent mention of the fact that she has achieved only three O-levels, and two of those only after repeat appearances). She has read extensively over the period of roughly a decade of writing the book, and she has (it is implied) a photographic memory where some passages from other works stuck in her mind and later flowed to the page. The story of her horrific childhood is true and reflects the events as she recalls them.

Mantel, as the author from whom the book borrows most heavily, it seems, feels agrieved and with regards to Ms. Kelly's work appears to have two main points. First, can the book in fact be "true" if it so extensively draws on other works of fiction, if the author "remembers" events that actually happened in other books? Second, if in fact the work is true, and merits notice because it exposed some terrible historic truths about an era and institution, surely these incidents have done a grave disservice to the mission of the book and the cause of the many others who had suffered similar episodes under similar circumstances.

The publisher has halted the paperback edition of the book before printing started, and has stated that the book will never again be published in its current form. It has accepted responsibility, denied that there had been any malice, stated that they see no legal case in this, and reported the author to be simplify horrified and devastated, terribly embarrassed by the entire situation. The author is in fact busy with a rewrite to remove all the problematic passages from the book.

Ms. Mantel on the other hand, if I understand her correctly, wants the book never to be published again in any form, and all copies in existence to be withdrawn.

Trying to make sense of all this, I am considering these:
If the story is true - the horrors suffered in the orphanage - and the book does bring exposure of ills and closure to past victims, then it is certainly a story that needs to be told.
Clearly, however, the story cannot be told with these "borrowings" intact, and to some extent it does call into question the veracity of the experiences when it turns out to be remembering other characters' memories.
But we can place ourselves in the shoes of someone with a tale to tell who does not always have the words to do it, grappling for the perfect phrase when all of a sudden it flows onto the page, tapping into a memorable passage recently read without conscious design.

Hmm. I am somewhat inclined to be sceptical of this latter, this "not realizing." If there had been a couple such passages in the entire work, I might have swallowed such a defense. But Ms. Mantel recognized ten discrete such instances relating to her work alone, not to mention all the other works affected by this.

And, to paraphrase her, how terribly embarrassing for Bloomsbury that nobody there recognized any of the passages during the entire process, not even those from Jane Eyre!

So, would a rewrite do the trick? I don't know. The book is still available through amazon and Powell's although it has not reached the public libraries around here yet - it seems not to have had its US release yet.

If the errors were truly innocent, should the story be punished? But how will the rights of the other writers be protected? Should there even be such a thing as copyright, or intellectual property rights?

Anybody have a pillow handy under which I can hide?

A crisis far away creates a personal dilemma: one is overwhelmed by the images and stories of suffering and need, eventually blunted by media overload. A theory I scanned recently mentioned that we are unable to relate to any number of people involved in a tragedy greater than 200 - after that we just lose all concept of the scale. I would have thought the number is even lower than that.

If one decides to make a contribution in response to the crisis, the next questions (apart from how much) deal with "How?" "Where?" "To whom?" "What will allow my contribution to have the biggest impact?"

I am very fortunate that the company I work for not only has made a contribution of a million dollars to the relief efforts, is working to make some of its facilities in Houston available and is coordinating volunteer efforts and product distributions from the offices close to the affected areas, but they are also matching employee contributions dollar-for-dollar, allowing us the choice of the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and World Vision.

It is of course a personal decision but if you do decide to give, using a match program through your employer or some other organization will allow your money to make the greatest impact.

No, it wasn't a planned hiatus. The problem is that, once there has been a significant break in formerly regular posting, a certain psychological pressure starts to build: the first post to break the spell should surely be a phenomenal one!

The usual excuses apply - life has been busy: work, family, interests. But the same is true for just about everyone out there.

I suppose part of it is the idea that blogging should be something one wants to do, not something one is obliged to do.

True as that might be, I have also in the past found that if you do not force yourself to write on the odd day where you feel unmotivated, it becomes more and more difficult to write again. Put differently - writing every day makes it easier to keep writing every day.

Another excuse is the dissatisfaction with the quality of writing, which suffers in favor of the quantity. Perhaps, I thought, instead of blogging, I can work at things where I actually revise after I wrote, where I might polish, and where something might grow into a worthwhile piece of writing.
Nice thought, but as you have no doubt guessed, not much "real" writing took place in the interim either.

I think the best answer is the fact that I got out of the habit of blogging, and whenever I thought I would start again, I would run into the timing problem. The time when I have the opportunity to think over things, wonder at the beauty around me, and compose pieces in my head is during my commute; the drive gives me time to reflect. The problem is that, when I step out of the vehicle, I step into either work with lots of things to do, or home, with family (and lots of things to do).

And so blogging has suffered. I have lots of posts floating around in my head - I guess we'll have to see how it goes.

In the airlock as I enter the lab hangs a cabinet. It has an electronic keypad and a large warning sign to the effect that opening the door without entering the security code will result in an alarm being sounded. The cabinet is labeled contain medical and emergency response equipment.

Passing it every day I was so tempted to peek inside - just because I was not supposed to. The temptation was particularly strong as I left the lab in the evening; I would at times smile to myself as I walked to the car. And then I would remember an incident with my father more than 25 years ago.

I was such a little prude back then -- something which no doubt made my parents very proud, and had them congratulating themselves on their child-rearing philosophy and methodology -- that I could not imagine going against any of the (big) rules.

Anyway, we were at the international airport, wishing my grandmother farewell on a trip abroad, when he and I passed a door marked "Strictly No Entry. Authorized Personnel Only."

"Oh, how I wish I were a criminal," my dad remarked.
"What??" yelped little me, thoroughly scandalized. "Why??"
"If I were I would go through that door," he explained. "Aren't you curious about what's inside?"

I wonder what (if anything) he found on the other side. Mostly, I wonder at times when I am chuckling about my temptation to open the cabinet, whether he is chuckling with me. How far I've come.

::

The post script of the story: by a long series of coincidental events I have become a member of the safety team that has the code to that cabinet, and others like it. I've seen inside the cabinet now, and I've even handled the equipment.

For a little while it was exciting, like having a secret, being in the know. But gradually the excitement has worn off, and become rather blah. These days if I think of the cabinet at all, it is with a slight trepidation that it might someday be necessary to put my knowledge to use.