Raw Feeling

Well, it's the end of spring and the "meteorologist's summer" (measured June-August), but it doesn't quite feel like it here in Chicago. I was outside three days straight for a little over 2.5 hours each time (both early morning and early evening) and each day the temperature was hovering between 49 and 53. Utterly awful. Yet today as I drove home from a meet, there were literally thousands of people along the shoreline on a beautiful 75 degree sunny day. I hate the fact that when I have to be outside it is just brutal, and so idyllic on the days I am inside. Oh well, I guess I can blame Murphy for that one.

While at the meet, I had an opportunity to brag on myself when a volunteer asked me if I was still in high school. I found myself describing my life in terms of my academic success instead of merely stating my age. I told her, "No, I actually am part-way through my masters", to which her surprised response was, "In what?" This job I have now is a significant change in my entire lifestyle. I find myself more and more realizing just how different it is to be an Age Group swim coach than a Teaching Assistant and student of English. I find that each of the two disparate sides of my existence often come into conflict--the academic me, loving literature for what it is and being able to debate it on a semi-intellectual level with those on the same wavelength as I am, and the newly-formed mostly-practical coaching side.

Obviously I am well-suited to either pursuit--I grew up with kids, know how to see things outside their respective parameters, and have a constant energy that I can learn to use in motivating young children; and I read an immense amount from before I can remember, always interested in the opposite sides of arguments, beginning and ending debates, and reading some more.

I guess my dilemna is common and at this point I guess I could say I am lucky to have my life before me, but still I fear I must raise the question as to how compatible these two lifestyles are. I fully intend to return to school ASAP, yet I wish to continue full-time coaching. Should I fully dedicate myself to one or the other in neglect of the other? Or should I continue my current plan of doing both in the best way I can?

This is definitely my most personal post yet, and I will certainly follow it up with some irregular poetry (or is it the timing that is irregular? or the exposure?).

Pangramatic World News Update!!!

Forsaking monastic tradition, twelve jovial friars gave up their vocation for a questionable existence on the flying trapeze.

Two Tibetan monks represented the far east.

I caught up with one of 6 Franciscans who seemed to have found his true calling. "Really," he told me, "I felt like a stone on the ground, but now I feel light as air. Wheee!"

Here is a sketch of a Lay Brother from the Prayer Foundation, as he was moving too fast for a photo.

And this Orthodox monk seemed to have finally reached Theosis.

Etherealization

In college, a friend of mine wrote a paper on how society seeks to etherealize every aspect of life--communication, hardware, even human interaction reduced, reduced, and reduced again, with the end goal being what software is, a mere "specter", or imaginary thing. In a response to Derrida's Specters of Marx, Antonio Negri began to analyze from the perspective of the "Marxist-Deconstructionist" divide:

When the analysis passes from the hermeneutic and ontological viewpoint to the experience of the political, the picture given is terrible. The conspiracy against Marxism and the world evangilization of the free market, the construction of the global power 'without place' and 'without time', the structuring of the 'end of history', the media's colonization of consciousness and the impoverishment in the quality of work, the emptying out of meaning from the word 'democracy'--within individual countries and in international relations--these represent only a few of the hegemonic orders of capitalism in one phase of the spectral reconstruction of the real. How does one circulate within this new determination of being? .... It's at this crucial point that a discourse on ethical resisitance unravels, one that reflects on the experience of the gift and of friendship, that feels a certain affinity with the messianic spirit and reaffirms the undeconstructability of the idea of justice.

"The Specter's Smile" - Antonio Negri, in Ghostly Demarcations - Derrida, Eagleton, Jameson, Negri et al

While I don't agree with all of Negri's commentary (particularly his insistence upon the exploitaion and suffering of the Marxist agenda, though there is a certain worldwide sense of fear towards the extreme leftist end of things), one can empathize with a certain spirit of hesitancy to do away with that which is tangible. For me this was a semi-nostalgic desire to retain my cd collection and resist the wave of ipodification that swept the world in the past 5 years.

And the Fastest Way Between Two Points is...

Chapter 1, dimension two, is very elementary. Secondary school students should be able to appreciate it, but we think that, even if you know already what meridians and parallels are, you will enjoy the spectacle of the Earth rolling like a ball !
...
Mathematician Heinz Hopf explains his "fibration". Using complex numbers he constructs pretty patterns of circles in space.

My friend the Teddy Bear pointed me to this site on his Facebook account (god I hate that site!)

Comments on Location in Lear

While one can pull many quotes out of Lear to discuss and, by use of synecdoche, claim that each exemplifies the whole play, it is not as simple to do nor as defensible as in many of Shakespeare’s other plays. As in the others, the first thing to be taken into account must be the statement; second the speaker; and finally the context (an inversion of this order might be suggested, but it would not be as simple to explain, nor would it make sense until the conclusion).

However, in Lear, the latter consideration must be almost the greatest focus. For the complex situations in which the characters find themselves often lends to a confusion of context. For example, any of the statements of the Fool could be taken as such and regarded as reversals of tradition merely because of his role as the fool. However, when the situation has already been reversed (as when Lear bears “thine ass upon thy back” or makes “thy daughters thy mothers”), the role of the fool is not only to point out the situation at hand, but to create a reversal of the inverted situation.

In other words, when the fool speaks in the context of Lear’s madness, he is not merely speaking the truth in riddles, but speaking it from the midst of a riddle. Thus the role of place, context, and plot act in this play as figures of greater import than in Macbeth or Othello. In fact, location itself must be the key determinate in interpreting the statements of any character in this play.

For example, the short scene V.ii takes place in a “field between the two camps.” The exchange between Gloucester and Edgar here becomes not only representative of the “ill thoughts” (V.ii.9) in the play, but also the lack of established relationship; Edgar says, “Give me thy hand”, but Gloucester says that “a man may rot even here.” Thus, the location takes an integral role in showing the lack of safety in conventionally accepted places of truth.

By the way, my favorite Shakespeare quote of all time is in this play. I just love the last line of Edmund's soliloquy, read loudly and viciously:

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!