The Golden Mediocrity

Lost Causes

2012-01-31T05:56:00.002-06:00

Never underestimate the power of misplacing something important. If you can't find that passport or paycheck, this is your chance to:

trash out your car
find all the other important things that have been accumulating in piles all over your house
organize your file system

Also, remember Hunt's law:

The thing you are looking for is where it belongs, but is invisible until you have looked there x+1 times, where x is the number of times you have to look before you're absolutely sure it's not there.

Bad Index Workaround

2010-10-22T13:39:00.003-05:00

Ever tried to study the development of a theme in a book with no index, or a bad one? Here's what I do in this situation:

1. Find the book on Google Books (this works best for books in "snippet view")
2. Search for the term in its various permutations inside the book.

Works for all the books I've tried.

2010-04-29T08:14:00.004-05:00

At the end of Greek class yesterday, the prof defended his evaluation of our English-to-Greek sentences by flatly contradicting the textbook and the lexicon. My great accomplishment for the day: I knew he was wrong, but I kept my mouth shut.

2010-04-28T07:47:00.003-05:00

The President of the University just got me coffee, chatted about the business of higher ed with me, and offered to find me a job on campus. What? Am I awake yet?

Memoranda

2010-04-27T08:53:00.003-05:00

ATTN: whoever stole my bike last night

If you didn't want the helmet, you could have just left it on the patio instead of dropping it in the parking lot and driving your car over it.

ATTN: myself

Get a lock for your next bike, stupid.

Rule of Life

2010-03-14T11:07:00.001-05:00

You're not having fun until security shows up looking confused.

2010-02-23T07:17:00.002-06:00

Those of you who were concerned about the danger of English-to-Greek translation exercises propelling me beyond the measure of Golden Mediocrity, rest assured that:

I spent twenty minutes copying out and translating the wrong set of sentences
The sheet of paper I was working on caught a pool of salad dressing on the table, leaving a healthy grease spot in the upper right corner
I arrived fifteen minutes late to class to turn them in.
The sentences came back with their fair share of red ink, but
I got those bad boys done.

This morning I will be vainly striving to catch up on my flashcard repetitions (I have 400 to get through).

2010-02-19T09:49:00.002-06:00

English to Greek sentences. Go!

2010-02-18T07:53:00.002-06:00

I woke up before Bugglesworth this morning, and read Wittgenstein in peace for twenty minutes, first thing. It soothes the soul to have done a part of one's work before breakfast.

I'm told that Wittgenstein is either the most or one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. I'm not so sure what it means for a philosopher to be important, but I think he's important to me.

The Mystical Meaning of Cat Excrement

2010-02-17T08:42:00.004-06:00

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day when, each year, I wade out unprepared into the shocking obligatory waters of tradition. This year is no different: I have given no thought to Lent, despite my act of foresight of last year, viz. having put a warning of the imminence of this year's Ash Wednesday on the calendar. I do want to do more this year than the bare minimum of barely fasting on the required days. But I also want to do out of some motive more pious than a spiritual agonism.

So what makes sense is for me to pray to be made pious this Lent.

In other news, today is going to be the day when I finally change the cat litter. Now I know that changing the cat litter is something you are supposed to do everyday (unless you don't have a cat), but for me it is not that easy. Changing the litter is a symbol of rising above the everyday squalor of life and taking charge of things for once, and maybe for good. Every time I change the cat litter, I think, maybe, Amos, maybe this is only the first in a long series of days in which I ply the clumpy gravel. Maybe I am pulling myself together this time.

Two People Overheard Agreeing On An Elevator

2009-10-27T21:09:00.002-05:00

A: I don't care what the words are, if a song has a good beat, I like it.

B: Yes! It doesn't matter whether it's country or rap, or you're black or white, if the song has good words and a good beat, I like it.

I think they were agreeing that sometimes one thing's being the case does not prevent another thing's being the case.

Bad bad bad

2009-09-30T07:04:00.004-05:00

Just when I thought today might be all right, I realized there were not one but two meetings I have to go to scheduled for this evening--one right before I go to work at 6PM and one right after I get back, which means I'm booked from 5PM to at least 8PM, covering the three hours during which Buggle is at his most terrorsome. No one around here is going to be happy about this.

Haste Makes Waste:The First in a Series of Political Allegories

2009-08-10T20:22:00.003-05:00

I always think I can do a bunch of things at once because I've always been able to do it in video games. But the truth is that one thing at a time is hard enough for me and two things at once is just out of the question. Last night while clearing the table after a delicious dinner, I found myself standing in the kitchen with two Tupperware containers of chickpea salad stacked one on top of the other, all afire to seal the top
Tupperware and refrigerate both. Friday, who had her hands full with garbage, asked me to open the trash for her. I obliged without a thought for the precarious balance keeping the salad safely stacked. The consequence you have no doubt divined: I scored a clumsy but solid shot in the good old game of throwing Tupperware into the trash.

I think my wife might have been angry that I wasted her good cooking had I not explained to her that throwing away perfectly good leftovers is real good for the economy.

Questions About The Economy

2009-07-19T09:11:00.002-05:00

Would Wall Street have any money if no one trusted faceless inhuman monsters (e.g. "banks") to invest their money? If Wall Street didn't have any money, would the rest of us have more of it? If we invested in ourselves (e.g. by acquiring and developing resources for production, by using extra income to buy time to develop our skills and learn to create value), would we be freer, more independent, more capable, more productive, and therefore wealthier? If we invested in endeavors we believed in, would the world look more like our dreams?

Bring on the Student Loans!

2009-07-01T08:33:00.002-05:00

I knew the Department of Education had to be good for something.

time to blog

2009-06-15T19:34:00.002-05:00

I've been wishing for time to do a blog for the last two weeks. Tonight I am "attending" an on-line webinar, which means I have half a brain free to do other things that don't require much concentration, like...blogging! So I'm checking in here to tell you, well, to tell you that I am attending an on-line webinar.

Why would I do this? Because they are paying me to do it. As of this week I am a part time tutor for a big tutoring company, and the training process requires me to be logged in to an on-line orientation.

He admits he was wrong

2009-05-30T13:59:00.002-05:00

Well, it seems that I maligned the fates when I proposed that I might be prevented in every attempt to get my Texas driver's license. As it happened I was thwarted only one more time, by a representative at the DMV who claimed that I could get a ticket for driving my parents' Ohio-registered car with a Texas license. I sat down with the forms and called the police station, whose number I cleverly entered into my cell phone last year, and asked whether this information was correct. The woman I spoke with on the phone thought it sounded wrong and called an officer to confirm, but when she came back with the answer my phone ran out of batteries.

Not to be discouraged by a mere four fruitless trips to the DMV (It took me seven trips to get my license in the first place. Ask me about it sometime), I dared to venture a fifth, all applicable divine prohibitions notwithstanding. As a result, I am now the proud owner of a small piece of paper which declares that I will have a Texas license within six weeks.

Huh, that doesn't seem quite as triumphant as it did at the time.

Deja DMVu

2009-05-22T10:36:00.003-05:00

This morning, for the second time this year, I packed up all the necessary documents to get a driver's license into my briefcase, loaded Buggle into the car, and headed for the DMV. Actually, depending on how you count, this was both the second and third time; the first time, I had to go twice, because when I got there I found I had forgotten the briefcase. When I got back again with the briefcase, I discovered that my social security card was missing.

Today, I very deliberately packed my brand new replacement social security card in with the other documents, and was feeling pretty competent all the way to the DMV, where I bought the same cup of crappy coffee from 6th Street Donuts as last time, having forgotten that food and drink are not permitted in the DMV. Well, Daniel and I would sit outside while I finished the coffee, just like last time...wait, no, last time I was drinking the coffee on the way home to get the briefcase, which of course this time is in the back seat of the...wait, where, under that blanket? Behind the car seat? Hmmm.

Maybe I will never get a Texas Driver's License. When the Iowa license expires I will just start biking everywhere. It sounds easier than getting a few pieces of paper from point A to point B, of which I am evidently incapable.

Are we displacing behaviour yet?

2009-05-06T23:08:00.004-05:00

I just want the world to know that when I read the following passage, I had reached such a degree of vexation with J. L. Austin's article that I was in fact standing on my head:

Observation of animal behaviour shows that regularly, when an animal is embarked on some recognizable pattern of behaviour but meets in the course of it with an insuperable obstacle, it will betake itself to energetic, but quite unrelated, activity of some wild kind, such as standing on its head. This phenomenon is called "displacement behaviour" and is well identifiable. If now, in the light of this, we look back at ordinary human life, we see that displacement behaviour bulks quite large in it: yet we have apparently no word, or at least no clear and simple word, for it.

Moving!

2009-05-03T20:58:00.009-05:00

Ideally I would like to live in a big building with four wings surrounding an enclosure, with a garden and a nice fountain. Shaped like this:

My family and I would live in one wing, and in the other wings would live all our best friends.

We are not moving into that building. But we are moving into a condo in a group of buildings that looks like this:

As you can see, this group of condos is very similar to the building I would like to live in. As you can also see, there is a swimming pool, which is kind of like a very big fountain that happens not to be running. What you cannot see from this picture is that we will live here:

and that a group of some of our best friends lives here:

So that's a whole corner of my dream right there. Maybe if I dream harder it will spread until I have the whole thing.

2009-04-29T07:16:00.001-05:00

I'm trying to start journaling in the morning, but my entries always amount to cryptic variations on "I feel like crap" or "I feel pretty good." Any advice?

My Aspiration

2009-04-27T20:39:00.003-05:00

Watch (almost) every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Flight of the Conchords (possibly also The Office (either version) should be on this list), and you, too, may come to believe as I have that there is an inestimable beauty in a life of bungling simplicity. You might even have a dream like this:

I took a trip to Rome and found when I got there that although I had brought all my suitcases I had forgotten to put anything in them. I figured I needed to make a living now so I spent the next day in a cafe discussing job options with Bret and Jemaine. I think "cafe guy" (i.e. someone who sits in a cafe) topped the list, just edging out "living statue."

I believe that this dream is an expression of my desire to live more simply and fecklessly.

Why is Adam Cooper's birthday different from any other day of the year?

2009-04-07T09:06:00.003-05:00

Last night after the birthday party, around 8, we were lingering at the Lavergnes over coffee, until someone realized that nobody had eaten dinner. By a series of steps, we went from planning to go home to make Natalie's potato egg pie for dinner, to planning to go across the street to the Rathskeller (at this point Adam Cooper himself disappeared into a telephone conversation, ruling out the possibility of taking him out for birthday dinner), to my offering to scrounge up a meal in the kitchen, to Natalie taking over and making potato egg pie.

I hope Adam got some.

One of the lives I wish I were living

2009-04-04T07:48:00.003-05:00

is the life of this guy. He spent some years spending enough less than he earned that he can now live on withdrawals from his savings that total less than the interest (about 4%). He is retired, before the age of forty (except now for half an hour a day of copy editing), and spends all his time doing what he wants, and (this is the really cool part) what he wants is to volunteer his skills to add value to the world.

Every time I read this blog, I think about how inefficiently, slavishly, and selfishly I spend my time. Not that I want to accomplish anything as extreme as Jacob; I think setting myself up as a professional academic will have very nearly the same effects as would achieving complete economic freedom and then doing what I want. But I do want the level of self-mastery Jacob seems to have, instead of letting everything be dictated to me by outside demands (which in some cases include demands stemming from my past decisions, in case you were thinking of bringing up the Grackle as proof that I already have this self-mastery). I'm afraid of finding myself in the situation where I've worked to place and resenting the demands of the position (as I already often resent the demands of being a student) instead of living the life.

So, today, my focus is on bringing the love back to "love of wisdom."

puzzle

2009-03-25T07:58:00.002-05:00

Why is it that when a candidate promises to change the way an entire nation operates, people get excited, but when an online social networking company changes the way their website looks, people get outraged?

note

2009-03-05T20:59:00.003-06:00

I am going on vacation and will probably be taking a break from blogging, not that you would notice except for this post. Please eagerly await my glorious return and slowly realize that I will only disappoint you.

Sick Sick Sick and a Reflection of My State of Mind

2009-02-22T19:44:00.004-06:00

My temperature spiked to 101.9 tonight and I'm pretty much using it as an excuse to sit around internetting instead of cleaning up around the house. What is sicker: being sick, or...whatever the other choice is, you know. what? um.

Think I'll go pick up some laundry off the floor and then get back to watching the Carpet Brothers on hulu.

F(l)oo(re)d

2009-02-01T23:07:00.003-06:00

My wife has noticed that since Buggle was born, her tolerance for dropped food has increased. I found this interesting but I didn't seriously think that the threshold of sanitariness could get much lower for an inveterate five-second-rule-stretcher such as I am. But I don't think that a year ago if someone had knocked a salad off my lap, I would have picked up every single piece of lettuce and sliced-side-down tomato off the carpet, plucked out a few balsamic cat hairs and enjoyed the salad as though nothing had happened.

I'm pretty sure I have to have this

2009-01-31T06:29:00.003-06:00

The "updated classic" takes a shocking turn.

I hope this is more fun than "All the World's a Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare " turned out to be.

I am weird

2009-01-29T21:03:00.005-06:00

Some things I have done recently that have provoked remark, though I didn't see anything strange about them:

1. I shelled an egg into my hat.
2. I can't think of anything else.
3. So maybe I am not really that weird.

Furthermore...

2009-01-27T22:54:00.003-06:00

I'm pretty sure my previous two posts together constitute the shortest Menippean Satire ever written.

Second (and last?) self-referential one-liner

2009-01-27T22:51:00.001-06:00

This concept seems to be wearing thin quickly.

Secret to My (Future) Success

2009-01-25T22:39:00.002-06:00

I'm told that blogs with a new post every day or two are more successful, regardless of the length of each post, so I am going to post a self-referential one-liner every day until I think of something better.

An Exemplary Tale

2009-01-23T20:21:00.004-06:00

Buggle blew out three diapers in a row yesterday. I blame the economy.

Yes, I will explain.

As you all know, now that Barack Obama is captain of the planet there is a tremendous[ly expensive] stimulus package in the works to heal the ailing economy. What you may not know is that the program actually started several days ago when Obama commandeered Sam's Club for three days (ending yesterday) and ordered them to distribute $25 dollar gift cards to all new members, effectively bringing the cost of joining Sam's down from $40 to $15. Now, as it happens, the Club also offers a "collegiate membership" with comes with a $15 gift card. Combined with the Obama Samulus Card, this made the membership free! So you see, I had no choice.

When I arrived at Sam's, at 7:45 last night, I was in a nervous, pessimistic mood, for reasons which I will explain perhaps tomorrow. So I was not too surprised when something immediately went wrong: the lady at the membership desk tried to tell me I had to choose between the two promotions. I thought about explaining to her that the power of Change could not be limited by her preconceived categories, but decided that she was a Hope-less case and went with pointing out that the ad didn't stipulate anything about not combining either of the deals with other Sam's Club offers. After I pressed this point for a few minutes, the lady seemed to give in. She alternated between typing secret information into a computer and consulting a colleague on the other end of the counter for I think about twenty minutes, then finally took my picture. I wish I could show it to you. Somehow she managed to take the picture so that I have two necks.

Well, the time came to pay. It was 8:17. I swiped my credit card and drummed my fingers on the counter relishing the thought of those gift cards--oh how close they were! But, alas, my credit card was "invalid." It turns out Sam's doesn't take Visa. Oh, and they close at 8:30. And their ATM doesn't work very well--which is to say that pressing the "ATM" button on their multi-function machine takes you to a screen that says "Assistance Needed for Service Error," until an employee shows up and helpfully punches numbers into it until it freezes completely, and then ten minutes later someone from accounting finally arrives and explains to you that it will take 15 minutes to reboot.

In trying situations like these, as Barack Obama relates in his memoir (the unpublished one), he always involves a manager. So that's what I did. And, you know, I think the manager of my local Sam's Club might be all right. She suggested that I run over to Wal-Mart and get a $40 gift card, which would be redeemable at Sam's, and promised that someone would let me back in through the exit. It all worked, much, I think, to the disappointment of my antagonist, who activated my gift cards with a resentful air, and as slowly as humanly possible. Now the checkout counters were closing. I had maybe two minutes to pick out a box of diapers and pay for it. I paid for my 234 Pampers and headed home.

I think you know how this story ends. Yes. They were too small. Buggle has magically grown to a size 3, and the 1-2 size diapers I ended up with in my haste--let's just say they suggest a speedo on him, and not dwell on the messier consequences.

But, you know, we have friends who could use two hundred small diapers next month. Spending two hours to buy a huge box of the wrong size diapers isn't a failure if it means you can do someone you care about a favor. And that's why I'm putting this one down as a golden mediocrity.

Home Improvement

2009-01-21T14:04:00.002-06:00

There's nothing like knocking over your wife's new lamp, smashing several crucial wall plugs to little pieces and making a borrowed power drill flash and smoke to make you feel like, you know, a natural not-man.

too late + too soon = golden mediocrity

2009-01-17T10:51:00.002-06:00

Some time ago, I put a sheet of paper with the words "do a blog" written on it into my "next action" files, at a position where (in theory), I would find it if and when all of my defined tasks had been duly dispatched, leaving all my files empty and me very smug, relaxed, and ready to brag. The idea was to make blogging into a jewel in the crown of leisure rather than a distraction from real work. But that obviously would have been too excellent for this blog. Instead, I arrived at that slip of paper only by sneakily inserting new next actions reminders behind it in the folder, and also by routinely ignoring all of my online actions folders until they atrophied into annoying, disorganized collections of meaningless bookmarks. And it still took me a month.

Nevertheless (and let me just bask in that word for a while...ah, feels good!), I'm pretty happy about the fact that I've turned not updating for a month from a source of irrational guilt to a source of mitigated pride.

2008-12-17T18:19:00.001-06:00

My papers get weirder, more disjointed, and harder to write as time goes by. Am I a philosopher yet?

A funny thing happened on the way to the absolute idea

2008-10-27T21:03:00.007-05:00

If you had been at Thomas More College in Fall of 2001, you might have known me as the guy who always ran all the way from the dorms to the classroom, every morning, and not because I was late for class, nor because I wanted the exercise (it wasn't that far). I ran to the classroom because I was running away from my body. I was rushing to dive head first into "Plato's honey head," the only place in the world I cared to be, and that because it was no place.

But this particular classroom was no refuge for despisers of the body. There I was taught, if not to understand how the body is incorporated into the identity of the whole person, at least to look for that understanding. It is for this reason more than any other that I am now fascinated by the German tradition of philosophers beginning with Hegel. More than the carefully orthodox (and therefore in my view correct) but somehow unintelligible formulations of Medieval philosophers on this matter, the ways of thinking of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger seem to be affording me a way to the truth of the body. More on this later.

A wild ride

2008-09-17T20:39:00.004-05:00

This afternoon in the course of a brief study break I happened across Whiskey's blog post complaining of the pains he'd been suffering on account of Dwight's having tossed a certain seed of a notion with an as it were almost thoughtless sweep in his direction, such that he was kept up late thinking on this little wild oat, until he finally had to denounce it as a weed and root it out. And I myself am here now to put the blame in my turn on Whiskey himself for turning my day into a mockery of studiousness by drawing my attention to bear on that same thought with an uncontrollable fixity. Instead of studying I let my obsession sweep me up and flew off into yet another fragmentary dissertation on the "topic" of the language of poetry. It took me the remainder of the afternoon, and my supposed assignments all were cast aside.

You can read it here, and judge for yourself what may come of indulging one's hobbyhorse, and whether it is vanity or a true sense of duty which draws one into such intemperate excursions.

Which one of these guys takes himself more seriously?

2008-09-02T21:57:00.003-05:00

This is me in 2003:

This is me now:

Maybe I like Kanye West

2008-08-12T13:54:00.000-05:00

Disappointment

2008-07-09T23:35:00.003-05:00

This post was supposed to be titled "Look who's all organized now" and feature photos of the checklists I made to manage the packing process and keep from worrying about all the things we won't be able to do till move day.

But I seem to have packed the cable to hook the camera up to the computer.

That was supposed to be a punchline. From here it doesn't look as funny as I thought it was going to be.

I cannot stay, I came to say I must be going

2008-07-04T19:00:00.001-05:00

Let me begin by taking my leave. I'm turning off my computer for the weekend, and won't be back till Monday. This post has no function other than to allow me to enjoy the sense that I have created a personal blog, which is one of the things I wanted to do today before unplugging. However, I won't quite be satisfied that this really is a blog until I pad my post with an unnecessary, unpremeditated, and unedited expatiation, which has to be long enough that my readers get weary of it half way through and decide to bookmark it for later and never come back.

So let me continue by taking leave of my leave-taking and lingering a while. It is, after all, a time-honored custom of blogdom for authors to swear they are leaving (sometimes forever) only to reappear a short while later, perhaps under the auspices of a new URL but more often in the very place to which they said they would not return. I am only taking this familiar pattern a little further by coming back before I have departed.

This is for me an exercise in saying too much, something which has given me trouble since I was a little boy. The truth is I'm not much of a blogger because I get tired of my own words long before anyone else does. Sometimes I get tired of them before they have even got out of my head, and more than once I have found myself surrounded by people who are waiting expectantly for me to say something which has already become much too boring for me to carry through to the point. I get so far ahead of myself that I can't even follow myself, much less bring anyone with me, and where it is I would be going anyway is a mystery, and not a very interesting one.

What I'm trying to do now is to write in the manner of one who is jumping onto a moving train. I want each sentence to be tracking alongside a moving thought which is just getting out of its grasp, so that if there is no sure trail to follow at least there will be a dotted line. But this is about as hard as taking notes in a lecture in which the instructor is constantly racing from one thought to the next, following a path of suggestion visible only to him, without ever clarifying what is essential and what is only a wild diversion, or, what is more frustrating, without ever tracing himself back to explain what inspired him to jump from, say, the intellectual virtues to some detail in the life of Winston Churchill.

Is it even possible to stay with one thought and not already to be leaning into the next? I suspect from my own experience that lingering on the verge of the next thought while trying to understand the "present" one usually means falling into a kind of stupor. Consider the question, "What are you thinking?" After this question, especially if it is asked me when I am in a particularly thoughtful state, I often find myself straining to see into the darkness, and not the darkness of the present moment but of the past. Well, after all, what was I thinking? Is there another way to answer this question other than by doubling thought back on itself as something past?

I feel myself becoming obscure here. But obscurity is just the point. Exactly when I try to answer the question as to what I am thinking, what I am thinking goes into hiding, behind the thought of what I was thinking. If my explanation of this point becomes impossible to follow, it is because explaining it has required me to quit following. I've had to let go of that moving train in order to go back and investigate its past motion, which is no more there to be seen.

This post obviously doesn't belong on my personal blog, because it's exactly the kind of thing I was not going to put here, but it also doesn't belong anywhere else. So here it stays.

See you on Monday.