Om mani padme hum
Om ami dewa hrih
Om vajra sattva hum
A a sha sa ma
In death, we find release.
I bow to the jewel in the lotus
Diety of endless light
May you open the gates of samsara
And purify my companion’s life
July 24th, 2010
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Posted in ...and everything else |
June 17th, 2010
I drove out of one state, through another, and into the new state I’ll be calling home today. The entire way down, I was aware of all of my possessions, my entire home, ‘on my back’ behind me (well, in the UHaul I was sitting in). It was a somewhat eerie and odd feeling; the last four times I’ve moved, I either wasn’t driving the UHaul (on my cross-country move), or they were in-town moves where I just used my car. And the last time I did use a UHaul – a decade ago – it was before I returned to academia, and I had few books.
The process of loading the UHaul was interesting. It’s very neat and organized and orderly in the very front (Grandma’s Attic/ part closest to the cab) of the truck, but by the back of the truck, you can see that a combination of tired and fuck it has set in, and it’s all sorts of chaos and “shove it in there” mentality.
I was thinking of this, between finishing emptying out the apartment, joking about it being a bag of holding, and cleaning on the way out. (Cleaning is another topic entirely – how often do we think our place is clean without realizing how dirty it would be if we took it apart completely?) There is always a point in moving I reach, where the best idea is just burning it all to ashes and moving without whatever things it is that are inspiring this feeling. But rational thought always takes over – not greed; I threw out quite a bit this move, and I’m sure I will continue to as I reevaluate on this end – but practicality. Lamps are necessary. Clothes are necessary. If I want to continue as an academic, some concession to books are necessary. These are all items and pieces of the kind of life I want, and in two weeks when the bruises and cuts and scrapes have healed, I’ll be happy to have the tools I need to continue to pursue my academic, professional, and personal goals. (More importantly, perhaps, my body in general will be happy I still have all the concessions that I’ve made to the RSD/CRPS.)
Still, it’s hard not to remember a more flighty and carefree life, the one before I decided I wanted to pursue study as a way of life. Then again, this was also a life I had before chronic pain; perhaps the two are related.
Tags: pain | Posted in ...and everything else |
June 11th, 2010
In the six years since I started taking coursework, TAing, teaching, and eventually working in the field of bioethics, there has been one constant: the slippery slope fallacy will set me off ranting every time. In fact, as a TA and a teacher, it is one of the first things that I discuss in a classroom: why I will not abide slippery slope arguments, and just how sloppy that thinking can be.
So imagine my surprise to see a presentation of the slippery slope argument that not only was not sloppily presented, but was in fact one of the better arguments for it – and in a horror movie no less.
Yes, I saw Splice last weekend, and I was quite taken with the movie as a whole. As most reviews of the actual plot will tell you, the movie went strangely sideways in it’s last 20 minutes, and came to a somewhat more typical horror moving conclusion than the majority of the movie indicated (although in it’s defense, the final scene was quite deliciously back to the sort of psychological/thoughtful horror that most of the movie was).
What is the plot of Splice? Quite simply, that two rockstar molecular geneticists (I know, I know) decided to take their research on splicing critters together to the next level, and they created a human hybrid, a chimera of assorted animals. The result is Dren, a creature that starts off working on pushing every button in neotany-is-cute land before maturing into a startlingly beautiful, exotic adult. Roger Ebert was as taken with the movie as I was, and I recommend his review for a more thorough movie analysis. What I want to discuss here is why, ultimately, this movie presented an almost believable defense of the slippery slope argument.
The main male character, Clive (named in homage of Colin Clive and played with an intensely dark brilliance by Adrien Brody), disagrees with partner (Sarah Polley) Elsa’s desire to forge ahead with their gene splicing experiments to create a human hybrid. He argues that it’s wrong, it’s unethical, and it’s against the law so they could get into a lot of trouble. This is about all the actual dialog of the movie adds to the direct debate of human hybrids – there’s no actual discussion of why it is unethical, only Elsa’s clear ambition to do first what both characters agree will eventually happen somewhere by someone. Elsa supports her decision to create the hybrid by arguing that it could help create a multitude of cures for diseases (via some sort of protein marker, another hand-waved area of the movie), and that she and Clive should do this to do good. Enter Dren.
So far, so good – and pretty standard. It’s later in the movie where the slippery slope comes into play. Clive does something that won’t be specified here due to it’s somewhat spoilery nature, and he and Elsa get into a fight. Utlimately, he tells her that his unethical and immoral behaviour is a direct result of their creating Dren: by creating Dren, they rewrote and removed the rules that they used to govern themselves and their lives, and a world without rules was a crazy and immoral place. (I am, of course, paraphrasing in an effort to at least slightly obscure the plot.)
Now, this is interesting – not the idea that doing one small thing, like creating animal hybrids, will create some big travesty through a slippery slope that you keep sliding down, thinking that “just one more thing” won’t be so bad (after all, the basic premise of the slippery slope argument is that making change A will cause disaster X because it will be easier to take incremental steps to get to disaster X, as we become inured to each change or step). Instead, Clive argues that removing the boundaries that are created by the rules we as civil creatures agree to follow, there is nothing with which to judge right and wrong. In a way, the very idea of the slippery slope is reframed into something that I suspect would be more at home in the world of a virtue ethicist than mine. Can we judge what is right and what is wrong when we blur or erase the boundaries that we set up? How do you tell one or the other when there is no sign post to measure with?
Clive and Elsa step beyond the measuring post that their particular scientific community sets up as a moral guideline and as a way to evaluate and judge behaviour. Once they step beyond this line, they have nothing with which to establish their morals against – they’ve already gone beyond.
Is this the most convincing argument in the world? As briefly and tantalizingly presented as it was in Splice, no. While we might not have visible signposts once we step beyond the last line that should not be crossed (how many more ways can I mix this metaphor?), we still do have memory of what the previous signposts were and what they allowed and banned and why. However, I can just as easily see a movie more dedicated to exploring these issues and how we both establish and maintain our moral identity, offering a convincing argument towards this idea of destroying all the rules and having nothing left to live by. I’d like to see that movie, if only because I think it would create a lot of deep food for thought.
June 11th, 2010
help me find a reason…
I stand in the middle of the bedroom and count boxes. They’re all clearly labeled; I’ve made a point of labeling all sides so that no matter how a box is grabbed, it will be easy to see where to place it on the other side of this move. Box: Bedroom: TShirts + Tops (+sweaters). Box: Bedroom: Tanks, Tees, + Business. Box: Bedroom: Long + Business Skirts.
It goes on. There are, as a matter of fact, eight boxes of clothing. There will probably be another after I do laundry, plus a small backpack of clothing for the day or two after moving, when I am too tired to unpack.
Help me find a reason
Before my judgment day
To make some big, big money
So’s I can run away
Is eight boxes of clothing too much? I don’t know. I know that some people in the simple living community would consider anything beyond a backpack of possessions (so, I’d have to ditch the cats, too) as too much, and not true to the spirit of simple living.
I know that on the other side of the equation are people like Michael S. Rosenwald of the Washington Post, hoarders with piles and some degree of awareness of the problem.
And then there’s me – the between. Are eight boxes of clothes too much? If you want to pick up and move on a moment’s notice, probably (I’m doing this in less than a week of packing, but that’s going to be too long for people who live out of a backpack). But it’s also a concession to reality. Taking a closer look at the boxes, I see that they begin to break down into neat categories: business formal, business casual, my own casual (still rather unabashedly goth). My living choice – of wearing clothing that I am comfortable with when I am not in a professional environment, that captures what I see as the external manifestations of my own quirky personality – means that I, by necessity, have to have more clothing than if I were happy to wear business casual clothing all the time. I haven’t actually been in an environment where I’ve had to wear business clothing of any type for two-odd years; however, I have always been aware of the fact that I will move back into that world, and in fact this upcoming move is another step back into that environment. Business clothing of any type is expensive, and I couldn’t justify getting rid of clothing that I genuinely liked, knowing that if I did it would just need to be replaced in a relatively short period of time. That falls too much on the side of conspicuous consumption – getting rid of something that is fine just because you don’t need it now and can replace it later.
But there’s certainly a balance between acknowledging the reality of a life in transition (as I have been these last few years) and verging over into hoarding every small thing. Will I really darn those socks with the hole in the toe? Is that top really going to be bleached back to white? Will I use that skirt the moths got to for a pattern, ever?
In a room full of mirrors
I want to do that again
Good god what’s the reason
For this killing game
I only want everything
So far, the balance seems to be held between extremes, for which I’m grateful. I’m sure that those who advocate a stark minimalist lifestyle (mistaking it for a simple lifestyle, when in fact they are not at all the same thing) find my life one of excess. I’m sure that most people, happily in the middle with me, trying to balance their consumption with their ideals, their desire to live simply with the necessity of managing difficult public faces, merely and simply relate. And I’m sure that those who have drifted away from the balance into hoarding, and are aware of it, look at my life with some grateful envy – I have not become consumed by my possessions.
Then I look at the stacks of bankers boxes full of books neatly lined up against my living room wall – 15 or so, the last time I counted – and sigh, and the mental debate begins again.
Help me get that again
Hey hey hey
Before my judgment day
Tags: simpler living | Posted in ...and everything else |
June 2nd, 2010
There’s something I’ve been putting off doing for a while now, for no real good reason: cleaning out my bookmarks in Firefox. I had links in there from as far back as early 2007; links for tracking flights for my last boss, blog post data and background research, cover ideas for the journal I was working on at the time.
Being a relatively normal web user, who still finds links worth keeping, I had created a situation where every time I needed to find a link, I had to scroll past the detritus of the past three-odd years. And a lot of that detritus was – is – a painful reminder of all the ways my life went so badly off the rails since late 2006. I often ended up looking away as I scrolled to the bottom of a long list of links, knowing that what I wanted had to be in those last five or ten links. Out of sight, out of mind, literally implemented.
I knew that I had to clean the bookmarks out. I’ve known it for months. I’ve known it for years. But doing that meant having to look at the links; it meant having to evaluate links, having to look at things I haven’t looked at in years. Things that still sting. Reminders of when I glowed so brightly, before it all fell apart.
Intellectually, I can acknowledge that much of what’s happened was outside of my control, but people have separated emotion and intellect for a long time, and for good reason.
The thing is, by not facing the past, accepting the changes, and clearing out the detritus from that time frame, I was keeping it around. Even if I looked away from the bookmarks menu as I scrolled down in an effort to find whatever it was I was looking for, I still saw it – I still knew what I was looking away from. And in some ways, I guess that meant I was letting it control me.
I sat down earlier today, shortly after changing the title of this blog, and I cleared out my bookmarks. I created folders for themes, deleted most of the old folders and links that were there, and put other things away in categories I won’t use right now, but maybe I’ll use again some day. Was it the easiest thing in the world? No. But neither was it as hard, or as tedious, as I thought it would be. Many of the links were dead, and those that weren’t just… were. Yes, they had memories attached, but that’s all they were: memories.
It’s just the first step in the digital cleanup I need to do, both on this blog and on my computer as a whole. And even though it’s data, and the literal weight of the computer doesn’t change, I feel lighter already.
Tags: simpler living | Posted in ...and everything else |