Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Mirrorless World?
Sometimes, I just can’t help myself thinking about strange ways the world might be different, if only…
What if there were no mirrors in the world?
In my opinion, the less time spent in front of a mirror, the less one becomes inclined to feel a need to spend time in front of a mirror. I don’t expect this to be something that will change anyone’s opinion about the subject. There’s no reason to believe that someone already accustomed to tending to their appearance in front of the mirror would find any reason within a silly mental exercise like mine here, to accept there exists any possible alternative in the civilized world to the tasks they perform daily before the looking glass.
First off, in a world without mirrors, think of all the time people would be able to reclaim from their daily routine of preparation. Second, spend a moment calculating how much money you could save in cosmetics and care products.
You would appear to others as the person you were born to become. What I can’t visualize is, how personalities might differ in the absence of our usual attention to appearance. Have you noticed how much better you feel when you think you look good? Would we lose that edge, or would we just always feel okay with ourselves, since we’d have no visual reason to think otherwise? People who don’t currently match the latest trends in the beauty and fashion world wouldn’t have any way to judge that they might not fit the mold and that may just prove more valuable than can be measured.
This gives you something to think about next time you find yourself doing what it is you do during all that time you spend in front of the mirror.
If only…
Curl This
Against my own inclination to choose not to write about something that is already getting more than enough attention, I’m going to toss out my thoughts about the curling event that is getting plenty of television coverage by NBC in the US this Olympics. One of the first things that surprises me is how many folks I have heard from who are revealing themselves to be great fans of what they are seeing. Even as they admit they don’t entirely grasp all the details, they are nonetheless fascinated with watching.
I have mixed feelings. The first time I was exposed to it, in a previous Olympics, I found myself mesmerized and drawn to want to see more. I described myself as a fan. This year, upon further review, I have to admit, I’m not getting it. Suddenly, I’m finding the hollering: “yep-nope-yep-no, no, yep, no, HAAAARRRDD!, HARD!, HARD!!” to be a bit too schizophrenic for me to handle. Especially when the two people yelling, one from each of the opposite ends, are giving conflicting commands.
With the action interspersed with so much inactivity, I figure it should be an event ripe for multi-task viewing. I was definitely wrong. Every time I looked up during one recent match, there was nothing there. No stones in the house. I could hear shouting and stones being delivered, but by the time I looked up, nothing. Then I hear cheering and excitement and I look to find the cheering is for another match happening on the adjacent space, off camera. The members of the team I was watching are standing around, leaning on brooms, strategizing.
As for scoring, I am embarrassed that something so simple continues to evade me. When I’m trying to figure out which stones are going to count for points, players are pulling them off and tossing them to the side, not to be counted. Other times, similar stones might be left in play. Then, somehow no points will be granted for an end. I’ve no clue.
I must admit that I am bugged that for this “sport” the network offers full audio of the participants, something that helps me very little since I can’t understand their logic or their lingo, and often times, even their language. For my whole life, I have wished for this same opportunity to hear what the discussion is out on the pitcher’s mound in baseball or in the huddles and coaching instruction circles of basketball and football.
My biggest problem is that curling is like a different version of chess. They are making immediate decisions based on what will be happening multiple moves later in each “end”. I have no sense of what will be happening later, so I take each individual delivery and result on its own. Entirely underwhelming. It doesn’t provide much in the way of what I value in a spectator sport.
As much as I want to be a fan, I am more frustrated than not. I say, bring on the hockey games. That, I understand.
Sad Reality
Yesterday, when I did the laundry, I was presented with a vivid depiction of a brutal reality I am currently facing. Happily, it wasn’t a decline of my mental balance that was bringing this to my attention.
If you research the word addiction, you can find that it isn’t automatically framed as a negative affliction. For many years I have been playing indoor soccer early in the morning, three days a week. It provides a combination of physical exercise and social camaraderie to which I can admit being addicted. It happens to be one of the primary activities that I undertake to manage ongoing depression without medication. And when I play three times a week, it creates a lot of laundry that needs to be washed on a regular basis. When I picked up the basket of dirty clothes, there was hardly anything within. It being a day of rest from the normal day-job work week, I had enough free time to pick up around the house. One area that was long overdue for attention was my mystery pile of clothes that have collected from the returning clean laundry and the things I’ve worn recently, but don’t require washing. There I found stacks of the shirts, socks and shorts that I wear for morning soccer. With a heavy heart, I put it all away for now, wondering how long it might be until I can return to my favorite pastime.
In two more days, it will be two weeks since I injured my hamstring. The first weekend after the injury was really promising and I had high hopes that the damage was minor and that I might not have far to go to rehabilitate it. But for the last week, I have suffered a confusing series of signals leaving me unclear about what’s going on. Part of what happens is I detect discomfort from other areas that are either referred pain, or irritation from ways I move in compensation, or a result of my icing and compression regimen. I’ve done some research and am encouraged over recommendations for massage to speed recovery and allow correct fibre realignment and minimize scar tissue. I was under the impression that massage should wait until later, but I would like to begin as soon as is safe. I will now set my mind to working a routine of stretching and strength building within the limits of pain-free range.
Unfortunately, it is a far cry from the fun and fellowship of which I am being deprived.
Consider This
There is hardly enough time to fully grasp the depth of each and every subtle nuance that forms the ultimate substance of all that we experience in our lives every day. What little time there is for such an extraordinary accomplishment is fractured into a seemingly infinite variety of supernatural moments that curiously become dulled by our distinctly finite ability to parse what is not only right before our eyes, but actually within our very being. Whether or not a person pauses in attempt to consider more than what meets the eye, the moments pass by in what appears to us as an ever-increasing pace. There is dust that collects on every surface available, a bright red color of a cereal box, sounds from a television that was never shut off, a rainbow spectrum refracting through icicles dangling from eves, someone is dying and babies are born. Life does not depend on our willingness to contemplate. At any given point in time the people of the world operate from a dramatically broad range of attention to detail for things less than obvious and what is obvious to one person is far from guaranteed to be remotely apparent to another. It is really a profound accomplishment that we are able to successfully communicate with even our own extended family, let alone the number of strangers we interact with as we navigate our way in the world. Most people rarely notice the miracles they are living every moment of each and every boring, regular day.
Winter Games
Enough about my silly winter weekend activities. The eyes of the world are on the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. As much as I love to watch sports, (I saw a wonderful opinion piece yesterday questioning whether a lot of what we see being subjectively judged should really be called a sport), there is a lot about these games that I fail to fully grasp.
The US snowboard star, Shaun White, was asked how his gold medal winning run of 4 years ago would stand up against the judging of today’s event. His guess was that it might barely be enough to qualify for the finals now, but that’s it. The same thing happens in figure skating. Once someone masters a new level of trick that has 4 spins instead of 3, then 4 spins becomes compulsory to challenge for the top medal. What if, when someone hit an extremely long homerun in baseball, it became the new standard and all homeruns needed to be that long? These judged events just continue to grow more outrageous every year.
How in the heck, as a casual spectator, am I supposed to discern whether a person has spun around 3 or 4 times? How am I going to notice whether a boarder spun a 900 or a 1080? If Curling can be presented as a spectator sport, why don’t they spend a little of that dead time between stone deliveries to explain to all of us who have never set foot in a venue where curling occurs, (the majority of the world’s population), what the actual rules of the game really are?
The most difficult aspect of wanting to see actual Olympic competition, especially those of us subject to receiving US television broadcasts, is surviving the overwhelming volume of advertising blasted at us throughout the hours the network has scheduled their coverage. It’s worse than trying to watch an NFL game on television, and that is a pretty drastic milestone to surpass! There seem to be more minutes per hour of ads than there are Olympics. What little competition we are granted tends to get whittled down to the medal winning performances. There is a lot more going on than we ever get to see.
Lastly, I don’t understand why there is any reason to compare how many medals each country has. If they need to do it, the least they could do is weight it to take into consideration how many athletes per country there are. Either way, it fails to provide any valuable information related to the spirit of the Olympic competition.
Regardless all my gripes, I still love to see the winter Olympic games. All the way to the end of the month, any free time I have will likely involve a large percentage of tuning in whatever coverage I can get. It definitely offers something that none of the professional or college league sports are able to conjure up during the rest of the days of the year.
Back to the Grind
Whew! After a weekend like that, I could use a weekend. I’m feeling exhausted now that I’m home. It was a wonderful time together with family of a wide range of age sharing in food and fun up at Cyndie’s family’s place in northwest Wisconsin. The weather was awesome and we fit in some boot hockey, snow shoeing, and teeny bit of sledding, in addition to the work to finish the igloo. I think I ate enough food that I can go a few days of complete fasting now and not notice.
It is both difficult and comforting, in a way, to return to the work-week routine. Part of me screams to be allowed to stay up in the woodlands to play in the snow, away from the demands of my life in town. At the same time, I can relax into the normalcy of what I tend to do everyday and find it easier, in a way, than doing the extraordinary recreational activities that I so thoroughly enjoy.
That’s not really all that surprising. It’s part of what makes the enjoyable things we do more interesting. The past weekend was interesting and so much more. I really do want to stay in that place, so even as I return to my work routine, I’m going to be reliving the highlights in my mind again and again.
Igloo Accomplished!
I’m not going to add up how much time in total was spent working on the igloo this year, but in the end, we gave up on the mechanism and resorted to placing some blocks we made separately to finally top it off. Works dandy. It helps that we experienced a downpour of snow right as we were finishing. Automatic application of mortar for the cracks. Most remarkable is that we were able to get this done despite the almost non-stop onslaught of food being served up. I don’t know how we found the time.
Nick gets credit for the finishing work
No Scrubbies
Hardly a hitch on the great winter 2010 version of Hays reunion weekend in Wisconsin except for the flat tire that appeared for no apparent reason on Elysa’s car, and the unfortunate situation that occurred in the kitchen when it was discovered we had no scrubbies to execute the cleaning chore required. Let’s just say, we have no shortage of foodstuffs to sustain us during our local winter games. Not all the games required outdoor exercise… Ask Nick about his Peggle conquests.
If Judy were here, this might not have happened
Winter Reunion
Today we wake in the wonderland of winter at a place we call Wildwood with a subset of Hays relatives that have gathered for the weekend of snow fun and cabin, …oh, wait, that’s “cabin” in quotes to clarify that this fabulous place does not fit the literal definition of a cabin, …anyway, that was a weekend of cabin fun! Some family haven’t visited here in over a decade and other young ones have never been here before. To those of you in the family who were unable to make the trek into the woods of northwest Wisconsin, here are a few early snapshots to get you started:
(Judy, Marebare says “Hi, we miss you.” Tricia thinks that by saying so, she is just trying to poke you, as little sisters are wont to do…)
Remember where we are?
Playin' in the porch on Friday night
Little cereal to tide over till the main event!
Makings of the main event before they have risen
Evidence of not much new snow here lately
An Episode of Living Life
Imagine if our lives were an all new episode. Would we wait around for the preview scenes after a word from our sponsor? Something tells me there wouldn’t be as many complications as are typically found in a 1-hour television drama. I think one of the reasons I am such a fan of post-apocalyptic stories is that they depict future societies that no longer have the television frame of reference.
Sometimes I wonder what life was truly like for people in the past who lived in a rural environment without radio or television entertainment. At the same time, I am inclined to want to compare them to the way people of today would adapt if they were put in the same situation of no radio or television. A post-apocalyptic scenario, void of electricity, creates just that opportunity for me.
I was captivated by Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “The Road” and for the most part, enjoyed the interpretation of a post-apocalyptic USA as depicted in the movie, “The Book of Eli,” but I always come away from such stories wondering about the likelihood that the way the author or film director depict the vision is anywhere near what might actually occur. I have difficulty dissecting which parts seem genuinely possible from the parts that seem overly dramatized Hollywood manipulations. Then it kind of becomes a snake eating its tail. Time to think about something else…
Like packing to go out of town for a weekend? No, I won’t think about that yet. I’ve still got a few hours before it is time to leave. Here’s to all the things I didn’t get accomplished before it came time to go. Trust me, it makes for really dreary drama. On the other hand, it is an all new episode!
