Archive for May 2010
Perceptions Past and Future
There are times I feel that if I became aware there were 10 minutes left in my conscious existence, I could sit in one place and allow the final seconds to pass without even realizing it. I find it interesting that having such a thought doesn’t awaken the least bit of inspiration to act toward altering the likelihood of such an outcome.
Meanwhile, looking at past evidence of how many times I haven’t failed to act on life situations tells me my perception and actually reality are not entirely aligned.
There’s always the future to consider. The following is an excerpt I wrote for a nonsense item of silliness where each post begins with the words, “In the future…”
In the future, when people’s opinions about themselves happen to approach an order of magnitude either above or below the opinions held about them by their immediate audience, the tiniest hairs on the backs of their main sensory processing lobes will warn them that if they continue to remain oblivious to the obvious evidence bouncing back at them from said audience, the good judgment of the incredibly reasonable people of the world, which as luck will have it – will have combined into a free-floating cloud of goodness that roams the planet as an incredibly helpful resource for just these kinds of situations, will strike in a lightning-like bolt of insight that stings like the dickens up and down the spine, and the inside of the eyelids will appear a blazingly brilliant, almost florescent pink on each blink. It will be great for those who have already mastered command of detecting their standing at any given time or situation.
Days
.
.
light rain
far from over
useless art
painted softly
mixed with time
under eaves
where leaves pile up
for days and a year
stretched tight
in a frame
a portrait
that captures
an edge of the wall
a pattern
of stain
a lifetime
of tears
.
.
Image Art from Chi-Town
A sampling of some images captured over the weekend in Chicago.
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A Taste for the Past
There are plenty of reasons to long for the good old days, but what I want more than anything lately is food of the caliber I was able to eat when I was young. It is not impossible to cultivate this outcome, but it would require an effort that those in my household have yet to rally toward. It would mean a change in the way we shop, the places we shop, and the planning for and preparation of our meals. Most of all, it would require that I take a much more prominent role in the process. Unfortunately, I find it easier to wish for things than to actually take action to bring about real change.
I want to go back to a time before corn-fed cows, before the development of high-fructose corn syrup, before mass production, before chemically ripened fruit. I actually want to only be able to find fruit that is in-season in my region of the planet. I want things that taste better than they look, not the other way around. I am tired of strawberries that look picture-perfect but taste like nothing at all. I don’t know why I bother having tomatoes on a sandwich any more, since it has been so long since one added any flavor to the ensemble, I have forgotten the last time I experienced that pleasure.
In the corporatization and globalization of food production, the fat and fiber have been stripped out, sugars replaced, and packaging maximized. Corporations have devised ways to extend shelf-life to an insane duration and hyper-sell image over substance. They repeatedly design ways to appear more health conscious and convenient in an evolution that seems to be building regrettable changes on top of earlier regrettable changes. Some of the modifications made to processed foods end up developing an addictive craving in the body. I find it hard to trust that these results are entirely unintentional.
Take sodium. Try eating a snack that is totally sodium-free and discover how easy it is to stop snacking, even before you approach the recommended serving size. That salt on your usual snacks makes you want more. Cover the saltiness that makes you crave more, with sweetness, and the process can be stretched out to an even greater extent. Makes a person want to just stop sodium and high-fructose corn syrup, altogether. Go ahead and try. Look at the labels of everything you currently purchase and note how pervasive these ingredients are in our diet today.
One possibility of wanting to return to the food options of the past might be that I end up getting what I wish for. The mono-culture of genetically altered foods, like corn or soybeans, could collapse when nature produces a plague or pest that wipes out entire crops. Nations going bankrupt, or transportation costs becoming prohibitive, may end global exportation of foodstuffs. I could end up hoarding what little crumbs I can muster like some of my ancestors were forced to do back in the past, back in those periods of time between the ones we like to think of as “the good ol’ days.”
Mission Accomplished
We celebrated Julian’s graduation in Chicago from the Illinois Institute of Technology in grand fashion over the weekend. The weather was wonderful and everything seemed to go just as planned and right on schedule. As I predicted, we ate more than we should, but each restaurant meal was its own celebration. Over the three days we accomplished a fine recognition of this education milestone. Cyndie’s parents said this was number 21 or 22 for graduation ceremonies they had attended for their children and grandchildren between high school, and the multitude of college degrees earned. My kids have 6 cousins on that side of the family, so if the grandparents live long enough, there will be plenty more high school and college graduations yet to attend.
Have Degree, Will Job Hunt
This would be a great place to post a picture from our weekend of celebration for Julian’s accomplishments at IIT, but I left my computer at home so I could focus solely on the family and our time together. I have written this note in advance and scheduled it to post while I am away. Trust that we are enjoying a fabulous Sunday Brunch in Chicago before saying our last congrats to Julian and heading home to leave him in Chicago for a couple more months. That will give him some time to enjoy his surroundings, free of any scholarly demands on his time and slowly wrap up this phase of his life in the big city. He plans to return to the twin cities and find a place to live with some of his old buddies. I haven’t heard yet what leads he may have on getting that first job after college. I keep seeing visions of Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” being given advice like, “Plastics!” I’m not worried that Julian will have too much trouble landing a job in the field of computers and networking in which he has studied. Time will tell whether he will be granted the luxury of picking from a variety of options or will need to accept a lone opportunity that arises in this time of slim job pickin’s.
All that time of looking forward to getting done with college, and now it’s like jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire. Welcome to the job hunt!
Congratulations!
A little while ago, Cyndie and I had a baby. Then we had another one. There was a period of time when we had kids growing up around the house. Eventually, they were old enough to go off and do their own things. Today, baby #2 walks in the commencement ceremony of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. It is a milestone we are very proud to be celebrating.
The four of us, along with Cyndie’s parents, are in Chicago for the weekend to recognize the occasion with proper mirth and repeated feasting. I’ve been to more graduation ceremonies than I can count, but this is one that I am really going to appreciate. We’ll try to leave Chicago intact by the time we head home.
We are so proud of what both of our children have accomplished! Congratulations Elysa and Julian!
Sibling Art
Thanks to Judy’s keen eye, I present a merging of our worlds of snow and sand! What a great combination, don’t you think?
Whimpering Blather
I’m sorry. I tried. I really tried. I had high hopes of not following up yesterday’s whine-free post with a whimpering blather of all the things that continue to wrest my attention from the serene calm of blissful focus on the wealth of things healthy abiding in each moment. Then, BAM!, along comes the real world.
I don’t know why I didn’t notice the Charmin-squeezing ads of my childhood as being an offensive way to sell toilet paper. Maybe it was because they weren’t offensive. Stupid, yes, but not anywhere near as offensive as cartoon bears with tp shrapnel stuck to their behind. If I live too long, will everything continue to devolve to levels even lower than society has already accomplished?
As a kid in the era when the only big admonition about watching television was to not sit too close, I learned to mimic the sounds I heard in commercials, like, swelling hemorrhoidal tissue or bronchial spasms, long before I had any clue what these things were. Maybe that was outlandish back then, but it doesn’t seem to be near as outrageous as the bodily functions now being talked about on the air. They are definitely giving me more information than I want to hear.
I won’t waste much time on the grief of television commercials now blasting at increased decibels over the regular programming, even as published reports profess they aren’t actually louder, just compressed differently so that it seems louder. Yeah.
Meanwhile, my loyalty to my old school classmates is being used by one of the notorious online sites claiming to offer to bring us together. Over time, I have come to see them as only peripherally interested in my connecting with classmates. They spend more energy on ruses to separate a person from their money than they do in actually facilitating genuine school-mate re-connections. For a while, I was a paying member. I never understood why I didn’t receive any response to my public queries at the time, until I learned from a person with a non-paying membership that you can’t respond unless you are a paying member.
My paid status has long since lapsed, yet I continue to get frequent emails alerting me that someone has signed my guest book. If I want to see who has tried to contact me, I need to become a paying member. Thanks, anyway. It’s so nice that they invite folks to register a user account for free, isn’t it? Apparently they aren’t making enough income from the ad sales on their site to allow the free accounts to enjoy anything approaching actual value upon logging in.
All this inspires me, just in time for the warm season of outdoor cycling, to put some distance between me and the source of these irritations. I have successfully broken the daily habit of watching television news. Now I need to move to the next level and break the habit of watching television. That may take a bit more effort, since that is where I fulfill my desires for hockey and baseball broadcasts lately. And in a few short weeks, World Cup Soccer will be on the air.
The online irritations are a whole ‘nother issue. I may hang on to that annoyance to allow myself continued access to a certain community of virtual friends and this here blog thing for the foreseeable future. I’ll just aim to practice a little less whining about the related things that irk me.
May 12!
Happy Birthday Mary!!
Other than that, for the rest of us, it’s Wednesday. In honor of Mary’s special day, there will be no whining in Relative Something today. What the heck, it doesn’t need to be just a regular old Wednesday for us. Let’s all celebrate the day along with Marebare. I’m gonna find me some ice cream. Woo hoo!
Hope you have a fun day, Mary! 🙂
Relative Something 