“There are always those that say, ‘You can’t do it.’ There are always those that say, ‘No, no.’ ‘Now now.’ ‘Go slow.’ ‘Wait awhile.’ There are always those that say, ‘Well, we used to do it the other way. Let’s continue.’ Had we listened to the voices that guard the doors of the past, we wouldn’t have any America.”
–Hubert H. Humphrey, October 31, 1966
i go to that guy's school.
this is apparently the theme of my current thoughtlife: "tradition?"
last night we attempted to hash out the difference between liberal and conservative ideologies. the liberal said "conservative=fear of change; liberal=change is necessary" the conservative said "liberal=defaulting to legislation, conservative=not making new laws unless it is really necessary."
anybody know anybody who works in anything remotely associated with housing or economic development in vancouver? i really want to go there next summer. i'd like someone to pay me to do it.
posted by renee 11:25 AM
Sunday, October 28, 2007
on your side you have reason and against you you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia
may God bless you or whoever it is that is alone to see the best the highest possible in human hearts. you're on your way to hell, howard
-from rand
there is a question for which i have no utterable answer. but i feel it. in my bones i feel it.
it is uphill at this point, and possibly for quite awhile. but at the top of the mountain will be something, if only a different way of looking at the same problem, from above it. maybe then there will be words for it. i imagine that the distruction of all this human pride and self-satisfaction is the necessary outcome.
if tradition is pitted against lofty reason, i fear them both equally.
posted by renee 10:57 PM
Saturday, October 27, 2007
tradition in and of itself is absolutely not a good enough reason for things to continue to be as they are or have been
i am sure of it.
also: kevin, i have adjusted your link to be less insulting.
posted by renee 12:01 PM
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
what a beautiful thing shelf after shelf of dusty volumes ---mostly ignored now ----in favor of glowing, locationless, clickityclackity solitude but still heavy demanding to take up real space to be matter to matter
wandering through the rows it is overwhelming -the absolute necessity to speak --to push around, forward, back ---permanence(immortality) about whatever dewey decimal leaveatraceofmyself because your carbon will get stolen reused
it will become not you
but your ideas your putting of words in some order -notes in some rhythm --colors in some shape
may never die, may continue speaking long after you are motionlessrecycled
so six million volumes of fear-of-death pack the dirt below tighter tighter while the flesh of authors flies in the belly of a crow falls in the leaves of autumn mulls around in my brain lands as dust on someone's most important legacy and matters
posted by renee 10:16 PM
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
listening to mum confusing my brain by simultaneously adding stimulants and depressants in liquid form
my personality twin bought me lunch my tallest roomate made me dinner my shortest roommate repaid her backrub debt my mom sent me cookies and hot chocolate mix and it arrived on exactly the right day
so even though tomorrow i have a final worth 70% of my grade and a midterm for which i've taken 7 single spaced pages of notes that i must now memorize
i sure can't complain :-)
and i might just make my decision about when to begin sleeping based on when the beer bottle's empty rather than when all the formulas have been put on notecards and name/date combos have been read over again...
now i remember. this is what school is like.
[EDIT: i did originally spell simultaneously like this: "simultaneiously." hmm... hope my 4.5 hours of sleep got me at least a better grasp of the english language than that by morning....]
posted by renee 12:27 AM
Sunday, October 21, 2007
today on NPR, Oliver Sacks was interviewed about his new book, Musicophelia
he said that musicians have VISIBLY different brains than non-musicians. that you can see it with the naked eye.
that you cannot tell by looking at the two pounds of stuff in someone's head if she is a genius or an idiot, a painter or an engineer, a socialite or a recluse, but you can tell if she makes music.
i must say that i'm not at all surprised.
posted by renee 10:02 PM
Friday, October 19, 2007
adam dissed my blog on his blog i have two options declaring blog warfare or undertaking the first redesign since 09/02 perhaps it is time for an update
except: i figured out a bunch of html back then and did it all by hand. now i've replaced that skill with some less dorky ones and am therefore mostly useless.
anybody have photoshop and some procrastination they need to do?
On Good Friday late afternoon, my family and I traipsed over to our church for a “prayer walk.” We herded our three kids through a series of rooms dimly lit with images and crosses and candles, as we attemped to remember the darkness of that day. Our kids are 11, 8, and 6.
One of the last stations was our semi-darkened and empty sanctuary, where we sat near the front watching PowerPoint slides of the Passion of the Christ. The slideshow was on a loop and set at several-second intervals.
One slide looked to be a pencil sketch of the crucifixion, with Jesus outstretched on the cross. Right before the slide appeared, my oldest had asked me a historical question related to the Passion, and it led to a wonderful teaching moment. We whispered back and forth for a minute or so. But then the slide appeared, and Christian said, abruptly, “He had a nice six-pack.”
Christian was referring to Jesus, of course. The six-pack was Jesus’ tight abs, as rendered by the artist.
I couldn’t muffle my giggle, his comment so random, outrageous, pre-adolescent.
To the wonderful pre-pubescent and adolescent mind, everything is about me, myself, my self. There is no “other,” there is nothing that is “not me.” Everything is part of me and about me. I see Jesus on the cross and his body and his abs, and then ruminate on my abs and think it would cool to have abs like his.
The same is true of the adolescent spiritual self, which much of modern religion, especially that of many suburban churches, tends to perpetuate. Everything is about me. My heroism to save the world. My attempts to keep promises for God. My personal spiritual journey.
My sense is that we all struggle to break through the adolescent cocoon of Christian spirituality, the wonderful phase when we love God for the gifts of God and the ideas of God and the theology of God. But we haven’t yet learned to love God for God, because that would mean that there is something Other in the world that is “not me.”
posted by renee 12:18 PM
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
anybody wanna go see the darjeeling limited on friday at 7:30 at the lagoon?
sooo..... girlfriend interview turns out to be grossly formal and pre-emptive move to reject me.
seriously.
"we should get together sometime and talk about 'us' "
("and how there is no us and how i hope you understand that")
i spent all day trying to imagine changing into the kind of person it would make sense for him to want, the pretty little wife. i am glad that i didn't have to take a perfect-on-paper life from dangled in front of me and throw it out the window in hopes of retaining true selfhood or vice versa.
[and to think, yiling, if six months ago he had just once said "by the way, you know i just want to be friends with you, right?" i could have called to find out your funny story of the day. sigh.]
newly confident that: if i am ever to stand facing someone in a white dress in front of a crowd of the people i love, i want the look in the eyes of the person standing across from me to show that he is RELIEVED to be marrying me, not merely SATISFIED.
following graduation, i have 3 reasonable options:
1.) return to the fabric covered box, likely in the form of a government job, from which i would receive fantastic health insurance, a generous retirement package, and daily compounding cynicism.
2.) some sort of "analyst," "specialist" or "manager" non-profit job, from which i would receive fulfillment and section-8 eligibility.
3.) a phd, from which i would receive more letters after my name, a poverty-level stipend, a sense of self importance, and free afternoons for the next 5 years.
clearly number three is preferable. however, in order to get my phd, i'd have to choose a discipline which is not public policy. as of yet, i am not satisfied that any of the options both MATTER and ARE ABLE TO SAY SOMETHING TRUE.
sociology has too many caveats. economics makes unrealistic assumptions. math is pretty, but doesn't help anybody's life. geography is too broad. political science is too narrow. business (per jordan raney) has more cons than pros, considering it's all just made up.
so i'm going to have to make up my own field, i think. getting to it presently.
(thinking about this instead of the impending interview with a head hunter for the position of "girlfriend" because i have no idea what i will say despite my sense that the answer is of immense importance.)
posted by renee 1:36 PM
Sunday, October 14, 2007
amazing how little studying goes on in study groups. but i think laughter and peach cobbler make up for lack of productivity. i just hope my harvard phd econ professor agrees.
posted by renee 11:27 PM
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
a pre-emptive love haiku
bunkers on mondays you can find lots of good men "music producers"
said i was special or at least i think he did it's loud in here. what?
gave him my number he called past ten. "don't answer" says caller id
posted by renee 11:56 PM
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Organizational Culture and Learning, Edgar Schein, 1992
Basic assumptions. . . tend to be those we neither confront nor debate and hence are extremely difficult to change. To learn something new in this realm requires us to resurrect, reexamine, and possibly change some of the more stable portions of our cognitive structure . . . Such learning is intrinsically difficult because the reexamination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety.
Rather than tolerating such anxiety levels, we tend to want to perceive the events around us as congruent with our assumptions, even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other ways falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us. Culture as a set of basic assumptions defines for us what to pay attention to, what things mean, how to react emotionally to what is going on, and what actions to take in various kinds of situations. Once we have developed an integrated set of such assumptions, which might be called a thought world or mental map, we will be maximally comfortable with others who share the same set of assumptions, and very uncomfortable and vulnerable in situations where different assumptions operate.
1.) i was just talking to my friend matt about this the other day, and here it is in a book. 2.) i am not getting a degree in psychology or philosophy or anthropology or sociology, but apparently public policy is like all of those, or at least someone thinks it is. 3.) there are a lot of people in my life who operate under vastly different assumptions. that is probably why i am generally confused. i still mostly think that's a good thing, although apparently not for my "cognitive structure."
OH - and REGINA SPEKTOR wins all the prizes. Again, the venue (the Myth this time) was gross, particularly the parking lot packed with idling SUVs following a thundering cheer in response to an RS off hand global warming comment.
But honestly, she sat up there, all by herself, with minimalist piano, banging a drumstick on a wooden chair and singing her heart out, and we were mesmerized. She needed nothing else to sound full.
On The Radio
this is how it works you peer inside yourself you gotta take the things you like and try to love the things you took and then you take that love you made and stick it into some-someone else's heart pumpin' someone else's blood and walking arm in arm you hope it won't get harmed but even if it does, you just do it all again
However, she did wait WAY too long to come out for the encore, (which was four songs long and involved a beatboxer) and saved "Samson" until very very tormentingly last.
posted by renee 12:59 PM
Friday, October 05, 2007
1.) riding your bike when it's 75 degrees in october and you live in a city you love is a very good idea
2.) per conversation with kevin - is it better to pretend to be happier and more spiritual than you are, or to pretend to be more disillusioned and miserable than you really are? (hint: your answer to that question can be found in your itunes "recently played" playlist)
3.) my class had to elect a 1st year rep to the student association. (yawn...) there were three candidates, a woman and two men. the two men tied for number of votes. they had an additional vote as a tie-breaker. the two men tied again. so they're having a debate. to see who gets to be 1st year rep...
keep in mind we've been in school for only 4 weeks and no one knows either of these guys from adam. we're a bunch of proper little bureaucrats already.
BRACE YOURSELF FOR YOUR FUTURE, AMERICA. HERE IT COMES.
posted by renee 12:12 AM
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Identity Crisis
You Suit jacketed Shined shoes Reading the Wall Street Journal on the subway I am exactly what you’re looking for: --------Well read, articulate, a drinker of fine red wines
You Gauged earlobes Tattoos Dreds flying as you skateboard down University I am exactly what you’re looking for: --------Anti-establishment, vegetarian, patron of seedy pubs
You Flannel clad Steel toed boots Harvesting the bounty from the long summer’s sweatings I am exactly what you’re looking for: --------Pragmatic, hearty, dedicated, a lover of big dogs and old trucks
You Clay smeared Art schooled Taking wordless thoughts and making them into something I am exactly what you’re looking for: --------Passion, shape and color squinter-at-er, content to be the muse
You Running shorts Heath food Plotting out goals, pushing yourself to meet them I am exactly what you’re looking for: --------Label reading, calorie counting, weight lifting, vitamin eater
You Bible reader Speaking truth Stepping back from the world, what goes in is what comes out I am exactly what you’re looking for: --------Convinced, motivated, humble, repentant, hymn harmonizer
You Philosophizer Mid-brood Becoming a regular rainy day coffee house dweller. The usual? I am exactly what you’re looking for: --------Introspective, serious, easily moved, no sugar, no cream
You Will you please stand up? The real me Is waiting.
posted by renee 1:53 PM
Monday, October 01, 2007
You keep discovering new things Never sleeping ‘til the breakthrough You want to name them after yourself You want to never disappear
We spin our arms wild around We knock all these buildings down Broken glass and shards of stone Cover the ground, cover the ground
You keep uprooting and moving From places and people and machines You want to over and over create a new self The old to be forgotten
You are not brave enough to speak You are not brave enough to speak You are not brave enough to speak to me
We spin our arms wild around We knock all these buildings down Broken glass and shards of stone Cover the ground, cover the ground
All this pretense of permanence It was filth on their tongues But if this doesn’t last, then what have we done? If it doesn’t hold, we’ve nothing to hold on to
We spin our arms wild around We knock all these buildings down Broken glass and shards of stone Cover the ground, cover the ground This town will never be the same We will remain nameless But you will feel us forever, forever, forever, forever, forever, forever
posted by renee 9:27 PM
dear LCD Soundsystem: drum antics are distracting, but ultimately do not make your songs less boring. for five minutes, we might have been fooled. after thirty, you gave yourself away.
dear Arcade Fire: you already have a lot of members. i was wondering if you'd like another? or maybe if you wouldn't notice a stowaway? i want to be régine when i grow up. she plays the drums. that's hot.
dear Roy Wilkins: you suck. your beer sucks. your ambiance (lack thereof) sucks. your excessive security guard presense sucks. your all-ages policy sucks (10 year olds? really?). your stage is not high enough off the ground. your lack of box-office hours is ridiculous. if that band wasn't so good, you would have zero of my dollars.
Wake Up
Somethin’ filled up my heart with nothin’, someone told me not to cry.
But now that I’m older, my heart’s colder, and I can see that it’s a lie.
Children wake up, hold your mistake up, before they turn the summer into dust.
If the children don’t grow up, our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up. We’re just a million little god’s causin rain storms turnin’ every good thing to rust.
I guess we’ll just have to adjust.
With my lighnin’ bolts a glowin’ I can see where I am goin’ to be when the reaper he reaches and touches my hand.
With my lighnin’ bolts a glowin’ I can see where I am goin’ With my lighnin’ bolts a glowin’ I can see where I am go-goin’
You better look out below!
posted by renee 12:28 PM
OH - and REGINA SPEKTOR wins all the prizes. Again, the venue (the Myth this time) was gross, particularly the parking lot packed with idling SUVs following a thundering cheer in response to an RS off hand global warming comment.
