Project Management V

I do know who Osama bin Laden was. What I cannot do is understand him. Perhaps this is not remarkable. Why, though, can I only and ever misunderstand the meaning of this man's life?

Because, as Morrisey would say, tonight is just like every other night. That's why I have no insight into Osama bin Laden. Because it would be wholly unlike the truth of my life for me to comprehend somebody else's mind. Should I try to learn more, I could hope only to shift the sands under yet another blind step. No, information is of no use here; I need, rather, much less than that.

Time to slow things way, way down.
Read more!

Osama Who?

Via Matt Yglesias

Yglesias beat me to this, and comments "Oy!", but I say spare me the hand-wringing. Indeed, I'll do the those kids one better. Not only is it okay that plenty of young people don't know who Osama bin Laden was, but I'll also predict that those same kids aren't really improved for now knowing. Knowing about Osama bin Laden = politics. Most people = don't know and don't care about politics. This is not the big, and certainly not the new problem people suppose it to be. It really is okay. Put me down for this same conclusion about the mass of people you're not hearing about who know perfectly well who Osama was and yet aren't feeling the joy, catharsis, or anything else that t.v. and the internets are telling us we're feeling. For lots and lots of people, it was mostly just Monday, and it's bad history to act like this wasn't so.

Nothing really to add, except that I'll be watching the Yglesias comments thread on this one for the usual declensionist narratives of how we all used to know everything and now we don't know anything and any day now the Russians Japanese Chinese will be running laps around us. I call bullshit. People don't not care anymore than they already didn't care. I'm reminded of this nice little post by Jonathan Bernstein on same general topic. Makes me wanna go read about those Mugwumps!
Read more!

Project Management IV

I feel like I'm in Vietnam. All high and in a war.

I am neither. Only it feels so. The matter is highly confused, and so insistent upon me that its persistence becomes the one thing I can make stick. Its enduring character I can count on. All else seems only dressed up restatement. What this matter is remains inaccessible. Is it the fact of living, breathing, and being? Is it the awareness of dissatisfaction? Is it the problem of language itself? Every day, so far, I wake up to this eternal Vietnam. To assert more than this seems a lie.

There is no advance - no border, indeed, upon which to move. It is distinctions that make borders, but is it any use to proceed upon knowing that there is being and not-being if the existence of the latter is a mere supposition? In what direction is the first step? Were I to encounter my predicament at spaced-out and contained intervals, I might yet have some hope of comprehension. If only to be able to distinguish among kinds of experiences. I am supposing here that distraction may be valuable. Attention and not-attention. A foothold. Instead, it is all grasping at vapors and ghosts. So what's the harm, then, in re-tracing some steps? Or in taking a rest? I'll wake up all the same to the project again.
Read more!

Sounds Like a Party

It didn't occur to me to that so many people would find the competition off-putting.

And, really, I should not have allowed myself to be surprised like that. As it was, I had to wait about two minutes into the game before I saw the clicks of recognition flicker on one face and then another until an absolutely distinct minority had wordlessly, event-less-ly disengaged, drifting back into the chit chat of the day. It was as though some magic potion had worn off more or less at the same time, with the guests vaguely aware something was out of place, that they'd been plucked out of time for a moment, and yet unable to care why or how. I continued as a distracted host, and in my own way also chose to move on; indeed, in delivering my performance anyhow, but as a slightly ironic imitation of how I would have done it had I had the crowd with me, I gave much more of myself than I otherwise would have. For the first time in a long time, I was right where I wanted to be.
Read more!

From the Persistent Complaints Department

Ideology knows the answer...before the question has been asked. Don't recall from whom I stole that. Secondly, a list. I regularly get my political commentary from Talking Points Memo and Mattthew Yglesias; those are the two sources I read daily. Less often, I read Ezra Klein, John Bernstein (A Plain Blog About Politics), and Paul Krugman. All leftists. I don't read writers with whom I regularly disagree on any regular basis; less than once per week is accurate. And even then I'd say it usually takes the form of my following up on something set in context for me from one of the preceding writers.

How dispiriting. I am aware enough to know that this is simple and hopelessly unsatisfying confirmation bias at work, but listless or insecure enough not to do anything about it. Anybody have success stories about dealing with this kind of habitual shallowness?

In part, motivated to post briefly on this topic after seeing Yglesias flag this bit about patterns within this world of mental shortcuts. To repeat, any help on this?

p.s. Pardon the blog absence. I went on spring break, but am back for real.
Read more!

Blech

You know it's bad when you see used plates on the coffee table that were absolutely for sure from an hour ago and think, "Wait, did I eat? I don't remember eating...Whatever."

Nothing to add. Just unremitting tiredness from now through Friday. Birthday came, birthday went. Just running and running. Also, the indignity of being broke all the time. I'm not actually in a bad mood, just escaping into the blog for a few mins before the one a.m. to five a.m. sleep cycle begin.

In the Sisyphean sense, excelsior, my friends. Excelsior.
Read more!

Project Management III

Simplicity is hard to come by. What is not hard to come by is what is not simple. The non-simple, the confused, the self-contradictory, the multi-faceted, the rich-context-dependent, the puzzling, the incomprehensible, the non-self-same, the difficult, the disputed, and the deep: this seems more around all the time.

At the same time, the simple is often boring. It asks to be forgotten so that one can attend to other things. Is this why I am so bad about washing the dishes as I use them? Who can know a thing like this? I have been unequal to this question for years. Unfortunately, the demands of life are such that one cannot pause life to concentrate on this question of the dishes, however difficult it may be to answer satisfactorily. It is much more likely that even bigger, and much more practical demands will demand attention. Actually washing dishes, for example.

And in this time the question of dishes drifts in and out of one's consciousness. It is not always pressing, but does live on as a kind of persistent failure. And having an unresolved worry like this in the background is not consistent with simplicity of living. So which is the simpler path, then: to reject the many spiderweb-like dead-ends of wrong-headed-because-malformed-ill-informed-and-at-some-level-malingeringly-purposeless meditation, or to engage them to no good end, vainly hoping for something other than the mere performance of self-reflection, for something that was not there in the beginning, and which product of reflection changes future thinkings and doings? Of course, I've assumed without demonstration that thinking about this question from the standpoint of simplicity is the appropriate approach. How much time would it take to properly argue the relevance of that?

When I say simplicity I really only mean to invoke that which is most desirable for coming to terms with a course of action. Sometimes, the right answer is to walk away from a whole way of approaching things. Actually disinvest from rigid habits. But that takes help, I think, and there's no amounting of introspection that substitutes for what other minds and bodies can do.

Explaining the joke: is there a point to this reflection? An intended communication? There may indeed be no matter at hand, but I don't think so. The question I think I have been really asking is what is it to act as person? What are the possibilities and constraints for action? I suggest that inaction, hesitation, and self-doubt persistently frustrate purposes, and that I don't know the meaning of that moment when you find yourself at the point of reconsideration upon what to do next. I recognize, though, that I am drawn back to it again and again. So what I am doing now to grab onto something that seems like advancement or change on this project is to number these musings. How's that for progress?

Accompanying musical selection: The Talking Heads' "Road to Nowhere"

Read more!