Nostalgia is Odd

Today, I am missing drinking hot chocolate in airport waiting lounges. Well, specifically, in the parts of the Calgary and Toronto airports that became so incredibly familiar from flying to and from debate tournaments all the time while I was in undergrad. It wasn't like I was there all that often...but it was several times a year in each of them, which is probably more often than I have been to a lot of places (restaurants, coffee shops, etc.) And yes, I know being stuck in an airport is a messed up thing to miss. But there it is...

Des Bon Mots

So I continue coming across new words in random places (ok, half of them on free rice...but only half) and I figure that I'll maybe actually remember them if I throw a few up here. So, new vocabulary, take 2:

• latitudinarian - (n) allowing latitude; showing no preference among varying creeds and forms of worship
• pettifog - (v) quibble about petty points; practice legal deception or trickery
• chary - (adj) cautious, wary (generally chary of ___); cautious about the amount one gives or reveals (e.g. chary with details...)

I find it amazing that what looks at first like a particularly unlikely typo for wary is in fact another word that means almost precisely the same thing. Trust the economist to use the one nobody has ever heard of... 

Every plan is a tiny prayer

"And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time."

- Death Cab for Cutie

I want to talk a little about plans, and making them, and why we keep doing it, and why it makes us feel better to do so. I started thinking about this recently because a father of a friend of mine died, and I realised then that I'm only OK with being away from home for so long (indefinitely, really) because of a number of assumptions I have about what and who I can return to eventually. The reality is that those aren't all safe assumptions - either I'm making prayers to father time in planning on the basis of such assumptions, or I'm willfully ignoring that chaotic nature of the future. And so I wonder a little what role making plans has in that process - what it is I do when I make a plan, and why it is that it salves the anguish of thinking about an uncertain future.

It's tempting to think of plans as an assertion of control over that uncertainty, of control over your life and your future and your being. Certainly, a plan that is carried to fruition is just that: a conscious determination of a definite path through a field of chaotic and uncertain possibilities. And making plans is both a symptom and solution to control issues; when life is out of control I tend to feel an urge to make plans. But more than that, doing so takes the pressure off gaining control over the present. Plans in that sense, by giving a feeling of future control, help us to tolerate present uncertainty.

I feel, however, it would be ultimately self-destructive to think of plans this way. We have to cope with the seemingly constant fact that the even the best laid plans of mice and thingumagummies go awry. Our plans fall apart as the future asserts its chaotic and destructive power over our fragile attempts to build certainty. If we think that by planning we control the future, we deceive ourselves.

Plans, then, can be a willful deceit, but I'm not very comfortable with that. The alternative, for me, is that plans can be a willful act of defiance. Our plans are our way of screaming in the teeth of the storm or building sandcastles in the path of an incoming tide. They're our way of acknowledging the impossibility of victory, but putting ourselves to the hazard nonetheless. Certainly, if you look into the abyss it stares back at you. But that doesn't mean you have to avert your gaze. I think the only solution is to keep making plans - even to make outrageous plans. As Kipling put it, "If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss." You may lose. Scratch that, you probably will lose, from time to time. But then the only thing to do, when you "watch the things you gave your life to, broken" is to "stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools."

There's beauty in simply escaping the paralysis that comes with awareness of the fragility of our existence and our creations. There's beauty in the attempt to make something anyway, knowing it's not likely to last. And maybe, there's even beauty in the breakdown of all of that. Either way, we win some or we learn some. And out of all of that, we make something we call life.

Illocutionary Power?

So - some new words...there are lots here. Apparently this is where a certain old teacher of mine picked up a tendency to be delighted at any opportunity to use a neglected word.

A quick sampling:

1. polysemy - the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase
2. elision - omission of a sound or syllable when speaking; ommission of a passage in writing; the process of joining together or merging things, esp. abstract ideas
3. decoct - to boil down or crystallise; extract the essence of 

The point of this is not, however, to show off my new vocabulary...it's that possibly the coolest online time-wasting game of all time has appeared on the web: http://www.freerice.com/index.php

It's a vocabulary quiz game - but for every word you get right, they can donate 10 grains of rice. Not much - but it adds up. So far, enough to feed 50,000 people for a day. And its only been online since October. Check out the "totals" page and see how fast it's growing. Then practice your vocabulary and feed the hungry!

Remembrance Day

So I definitely slept through all the remembrance day stuff in this country, because their crazy debating tournaments don't end until so late. But I thought I should do something so I did a little remembrance of my own when it was 11:11 at home. I thought it would fall flat, but it actually worked really well - you can pull the last post and reveille and various poems off the internet in mp3 format and do the whole thing that way. 

No tremendously profound thoughts in my moment of silence - just that I'm really, really glad I'm not having to fight a war. 

Oh, and then we watched 300 in the MCR. And I remembered how much I disagree with it, in oh so many ways. 

Politeness

So, I've always thought of politeness as a formal of socially regulated empathy: that is, guidelines about how to treat one another kindly and with consideration. This seems to be radically at odds with the British notion of politeness, or perhaps more correctly etiquette. Here, it seems to all be about strictly following certain unwritten, unspoken rules (like about how to queue) and saying the correct things (please and thank you). There doesn't seem to be any link between saying thank you and meaning thank you, or between being polite and being kind. Hence, its perfectly OK for someone to shout at a stranger in Sainburys over a misunderstanding about places in line. I'm not sure I'll ever really understand. 

Don't get me wrong - I really like it here, and a lot of people are both polite and friendly. But they seem to be two different things. In general, I'm beginning to find Britain more and more foreign feeling. It's not that anything is much different from back home, it's that it's all almost the same but very slightly different. And like the unreal plateau they hit with almost realistic computer graphics at some point, it makes you feel a little queasy. 

Many worlds after all?

So, there's been speculation for some time that Oxford may exist in a sort of parallel universe. Goodness knows, its been the inspiration for most of the great sub-creative worlds of 20th Century fantasy. But I think whatever the conclusion is on the general question, it is clear that the Senior Common Room (and high table) is a completely different world. There's a butler. A real one. And champagne (in the SCR), then dinner (including dessert) then you keep your napkin and carry it down to a different room where there's 2nd dessert with complicated rules about the direction of passing the port and dessert wine and lovely little plates of fruit, and then from there back to the SCR for coffee and tea. The whole thing takes almost four hours. And is filled with people with titles and college benefactors and just does not seem like something from a world I am used to at all. 

Fog and Fireworks

Two kinds of creepy in Oxford:

1) The fog. When this place does fog, it does it seriously and properly. As in, you go into an event and its sunny, and you come out and its dark and you can't see more than 50 yards. And the buildings, they loom. Seriously creepy. Cool, but creepy.

2) Guy Fawkes night. Although the big city-wide fireworks were on the weekend, on the actual Guy Fawks night (the 5th) there were lots of medium-sized displays at various colleges. But you can't really see them because of all the big buildings. Instead, what you get is the noise. It sounds pretty much like I would imagine sporadic small-arms fire as like, with periodic punctuations of artillery (larger fireworks?). Anyway, I thought I was being crazy about it until I was out walking and realised the insane echo effects they get off all the buildings and college walls and things...which is why it sounded creepy and like warfare around the corner instead of just fireworks. Oh, and given that in the past there was large-scale violence between town and gown, it kind of makes you think about why exactly the colleges are essentially fortified, walled enclosures. 

Purity

I totally forgot I big one when I was meandering along about positive and negative valuation: purity. Good, when you're talking about the genuine Canadian maple syrup I manage to procure for my pancakes this morning. Scary, when you start talking about blood or the like. 

Intensity

I've been thinking a lot about intensity recently. Partly I wonder how much a lot of our behaviour comes out of a desire for intensity of experience. For those of who lead such sheltered lives, it seems like relationships can be some of the the only really properly intense things that happen to us. Whereas others live intensity day in and out - and it seems to be them that write great poetry and stories and so on. I'm thinking of the war poets, or the Zabbaleen who write poetry to process their lives, or the street graffiti on the downtown East Side of Vancouver. I realise its a gross generalisation, but I think there's something to it. And I think a lot of what we do is chasing after some sort of intensity. 

Anyway, there's not a huge amount to that thought - there seemed to be more when I was talking about it last night. But I have a question to think about - does time really heal all things, or just it just make them fade away? Does it just kill the intensity?

Wednesday's Entry

So I'm terrible at keeping up with this. Pretend I made this post on wednesday evening.

A friend of mine is doing his research on the coptic garbage collectors of Cairo, known as the Zabbaleen. He gave a presentation on it tonight that raised some really fascinating issues (for me) - as did the continuation of the discussion in the pub. On a more mundane side-note, having someone take notes on what you're saying in a pub is a very weird experience. Half-flattering and half just plain odd. But in terms of what we were talking about:

What is dirty, and what is clean? The classic definition of dirt is, apparently, "matter out of place" and, if you think about it, that probably encompasses most of what we regularly think of as dirty. But for the Zabbaleen, living constantly amidst the garbage, it isn't things that are dirty. Instead, they speak of corruption and exploitation as dirty. Which leads on to a broader question about how we express negative and positive valuation. Since western political thought fused with Christian morality, the notion of good and bad/evil has been dominant. But before that, Greek thinkers were as likely to speak about things (people, societies, and so on) as healthy or sick. And then there's beautiful and ugly (which can be interestingly applied to valuation outside aesthetics), sacred and profane, and so on. How we speak of these things - and how we conceptualise them ourselves - can give radically different outlooks on how we interpret our lives and how we think we should respond to them. And that's before thinking about the other areas where these things get turned on their head...like when dirty is seen to be desirable. 

There was more, but that's all I can remember and express (I wasn't the one taking notes...)