It's a given that technology will radically alter life in the twenty-first century.
But some of the changes coming our way will be - for lack of a better word - weird.
Every wave of technology over the last 500 years has created haves and have-nots. The immunized and the sickly. The literate and the illiterate. The wired and the non-wired.
But we're not just building better machines and medicines now. We're altering reality.
We're going into realms fundamentally at odds with the lumbering, sticks-and-bones understanding that brought us through the last 100,000 years or so.
Some of the changes coming our way will be so counter-intuitive to so many people that they will leave hundreds of millions in a state of blank incomprehension.
If knowledge is power, then power is about to get much, much harder to spread around.
We're
apes. Our ability to think and talk the way we do is so recent that if
you held it up against a million years of our history, you could be
forgiven for overlooking it entirely.
We have the instincts of predators and foragers. We're wired to calculate cause and effect, expenditure and gain. We fear scarcity, loss, the unknown. We get shivers when we think unseen forces are at work
Our social instincts are for smallish bands whose souls number in the dozens, maybe the low hundreds. We crave clarity, hierarchy, certainty.
Some of us need it like we need air.
Not a good match for where we find ourselves. Ten billion of us by mid-century, most living in megacities. Multiple identities, allegiances, ideologies. Economies stretching across continents and realities, churning waves of demography.
We're stuck making the same mistakes over and over ... unless we can wrap our heads around the complexity we live in.
Simple cause and effect? Goodbye. Cut-and-dry choices? Maybe, maybe not.
Enter probability, adaptive logic, and the emergent behavior of self-organizing communities. All have been in front of our noses since the beginning of time, but we were blind to them, boxed in by common sense and connect-the-dots reasoning.
This is the realm of macro-economists, computational modeling specialists, neuro-psychologists and their ilk. Conversation killers, in short.
For how many people is this kind of understanding out of reach? For how many is it out of bounds? Who will lead us?
Have been away from Vox for almost a year, making a half-hearted go at starting a presence on Blogspot and realizing that, for all the customization and code-level access they have there, my reach was never going to be broader than it is here.
Vox.com, in short, is perfect for the casual blogger -- 'casual' being a nice cover word for 'scattered.' And the easy connection to other bloggers via the Neighborhood feature is hard to beat. Little Odd Me and Geology Byotch still draw me in, along with the rest of my neighbors, and it's good to be back among them.
A lot has changed, inside and out.The world has many shortages these days, but game-changing events are not one of them. A year of mourning has come and gone. A new job on the staff side of academia, half a head of new grey hairs. A once-in-a-lifetime trip to Sweden.
More to follow.
"As dogma disintegrates, hope appears."
Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
Seven weeks since Ma died. Seems more like seventy.
Mourning is hard work. Most of it consists of weeping, sobbing, and dragging ourselves around like sacks of bones.
At work, it's been go go go. Fires to put out, customers to take care of, vendors to deal with. And the moment it slows down, my mind turns to the shocking absence where Ma used to be.
For all of us, I guess it's about waiting for our hearts to catch up with our heads. Feeling, not just knowing, that we'll never talk to her again, never share the jokes and the ups and downs of a day. She'll never see our house, never tell us how proud she is, never call us on our birthdays, anniversaries. Now there's just silence, absence, lack.
If she had left us like this while she was still alive, we would have been gutted. Add to that the thudding finality of death, the way the cancer hollowed her out before the end, and you get something that words can't touch.
Reminders are everywhere. For years and years, she showered us with prize finds from yard sales. Five households across thousands of miles with not a single room empty of her touch.
In time, I guess all these things will be points of light to us, ways of remembering. For now, they mock us. Half the sky has gone dark, the other half still shining, reminding us of what used to be normal.
In the last week or so, there's been something close to a creeping sense peace. I can look at some of the reminders without tears, without the wounds tearing open. I can think about the future, not just the throbbing ever-present.
Moment by moment.
It's taken me six weeks to write this -- in fits and starts, getting to a point in the story, flinching, putting it away for a day, a week, waiting for it all to become less raw.
Where to start?
My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer a little less than a year ago. Her treatment went really well for a long time, and then things started falling apart in the spring. Three bouts of pneumonia on top of the ravages of radiation and chemotherapy.
She called me at work on Thursday, August 3rd, crying. She wanted to see me. She didn't know if she had a day or a week or a year left. I was on a plane the next morning.
Brian and I had just been there in April. We hung out like we always do. Ma was sporting a wig and walking around a lot, trailing an oxygen tube around her.
She was starting to show signs of what's called "chemo brain" -- drifty, confused, forgetting things. In a stubborn, headstrong woman like Ma, that can be a hard thing to deal with. She was convinced that we could bake cookies without flour in them and refused to listen to anyone telling her it wouldn't work. I got her to laugh by taking a spoon and eating some of the gloppy, caramelized mess right off the baking sheet.
Brian and I flew home and talked with her every day on the phone. Bit by bit, her speech became incomprehensible. She couldn't come up with the words she wanted. "It's okay," I would tell her. And then I'd just keep saying it. "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay."
All day every day, I kept a running mental list of funny stories I could tell her of goings on around the house, the neighborhood, at work. I would roll them off, and even though she couldn't understand a lot of the words, she would still laugh, kid me about my absentmindedness.
"Love you, Ma," I would say at the end of every call.
"I love you too, son," she would answer.
Summer
Weird things started happening in June and July. Shadowy movement of blood flow and tissue on her scans. Her tumor had shrunk, then appeared to be spreading, then maybe not.
Confusion turned to delusion. She became convinced that my father had an ex-wife living in the spare bedroom and was sleeping with her. She was sure they were both just waiting for her to die so they could get her out of the house, steal all her money, and erase every memory of her.
When my sisters came to help care for her, they told her none of that could possibly be true. So of course she believed they were in on it. She would sit in her electric recliner, lips pursed, and stare off into space when they tried to reach out to her.
My father was at his wits' end. "I want my wife back," he told me. He took her off all the sedatives and all but one of the pain pills she was on in hopes of clearing the fog. And it worked. For two beautiful days. They went out for pizza and beer. They went shopping at Wal-Mart, one of her favorite places in all the world. She got on the phone and started lecturing me about the wisdom of cleaning up around the house just a little every day. In short, she was herself again.
On their way back home that day, she winced when she got out of the car. The next day, she couldn't walk. The scans showed inflammation in her pelvic area, lymph nodes in her chest lighting up. It looked like the cancer was spreading, and her oncologist started talking about hospice care.
The delusions came back, stronger. Now the slut ex-wife had two bastard children living with her. By the time I got there, she was barely talking to my father or my sister, who had been there for two weeks to help care for her.
A Moment Alone
After the bustle of the airport and the ride home, I found myself sitting alone with her. I reached out for her hand, kissed it, and hoped for the words that people who love each other need to say when death is coming.
"I really resent that he has her living here," she said. "In my house."
Everyone had been trying to talk her out of the delusions. They wheeled her around the house, challenging her to show where this woman and her children were living. She seized on a powder-blue baseball cap a visiting friend had left behind. "There," she said. "There's my proof."
I had talked to some social workers before I left, getting advice on how to deal with delusional people. Whatever you do, they said, don't try to refute the delusions. Don't play along with them, but listen. Let her know you understand how it must be to think that your husband is cheating on you at your lowest, most vulnerable moment.
"It must be really hard," I told her as we sat together. "Especially if no one else believes you."
She turned to me, eyebrows knotted. "Yes," she said. "But actually, what really bothers me ..." Then she drifted off, stared blankly into space.
For days, she thought I was her only ally in the house. In fits and starts and half-sentences, she told me how long the ex-wife had been living there, and what a shame it was that she would lose her father's money to some slut who wasn't above muscling in on another man's wife in her own house.
"I plan on being here a good long while," she said later in front of my father and my sister.
"Good!" they said, thinking she was talking about her will to get her health back. Only I knew that to her, staying alive was her only hope of keeping the slut ex-wife from moving in.
We tried to get her up and around, take her out shopping.
"I'll do it for Michael," she would say.
We had one final, almost normal day. She couldn't abide by my sandals, a ravaged pair of birkenstocks from 2002, and we went to the mall in search of new ones. I held my feet up to show them off, and she smiled. She laughed when we were on our own in a department store and I tried on a ridiculous mauve cowboy hat.
The next day, we had an appointment with her oncologist, and we knew the news would not be good. She refused to get out of the car.
"Why should I?" she asked. "Just so they can tell me I'm dying?"
Somehow we got her in. She sat there, fuming, quaking. She shrugged off the blanket we draped over her shoulders. The oncologist told us the cancer had probably spread into the bones in her pelvic region. He told us a woman from a hospice foundation would come to the house to talk about arrangements.
"I'm not telling you to stop fighting," he told my mother. "I just want you to fight in a different way."
She glared at him. "It bothers me," she said, shaking, "that my husband is having an affair with another woman."
I watched the same moment dawn on him that had dawned on me days earlier. He turned to my father.
"I'll have the hospice people get in touch with you today," he told him.
The Unraveling
We left for home. She sat on the back porch, in her wheelchair, fuming. The rest of the day passed like that, with my father and my sister taking turns trying to reach out to her, trying to talk her out of the delusions, to get her to let them take care of her.
She sat there, stony, quivering, staring. I sat with her, holding her hand, not knowing what to say.
It went this way into the evening. My sister told us she would be leaving for home in the early morning, since there wasn't anything she could really do.
My father wheeled my mother off to bed. My sister and I sat and cried, realizing that she might never see our mother again, knowing that for the most part, our mother wasn't really with us anymore.
Then the cry came from the bedroom. My sister were on our feet in a split second, running to help. We found my father was crouched over my mother, who lay on her side, on the floor. My father had left her standing, propping herself up on the bed as he fetched her oxygen tank, just as he'd done dozens of times before. Her leg had given out.
It took all three of us to move her onto the bed, and her pain was immense. My mother was used to pain from a lifetime of back problems, but this was new. She was crying, howling, her face twisted, a pure agony I had never, ever seen. When we got her into bed, she lay there, eyes closed. We touched the places on her side where she'd fallen, and when she didn't wince or cry out, we figured she hadn't broken anything. My father gave her a dose of morphine and we all went to sleep and hoped for the best.
My sister left in the early morning, a fifteen hour drive to home and husband in Pennsylvania. My father woke me up around seven, standing at the door of my old bedroom.
"I can't get her out of bed," he told me. "I can't move her."
I went into the bedroom. "Hi Ma," I said as I kissed her good morning. "We're going to try to get you up now, okay?" She shook her head, no, but held onto my arms as I tried to bring her up while my father supported her back.
"NO, NO, NO!" the same howling pain as the night before, at the slightest movement.
We let her back down gently and strategized as she drifted in and out of morphine-sleep. Short-term, we could get her a bedpan, leave her to rest and try again later. If that didn't work, we'd have to call an ambulance and see if x-rays could tell if something really was broken.
Into the Surreal
I left for the drug store, stress-addled, otherworldly as I drove into a burnt-orange sunrise alongside people without a care in the world. I found a pink plastic bedpan, drove back, found my father standing at the doorway to their bedroom, grim. My mother lay there, face twisted up, in a pained sleep.
"We're going to have to call an ambulance," he said.
The ambulance arrived, the same crew that had come for her once before. They slid her onto a backboard, and her cries pierced us all. Even the lifting of the backboard onto the gurney hurt her.
My father and I followed the ambulance in separate cars. She was propped up in a hospital bed by the time I arrived. My mother was awake, alert, and barely acknowledged me as I kissed her on the forehead.
The first visitor was a social worker from the hospice center, the same one who was to have visited us the next day. A fast-talking New Yorker. My mother couldn't really follow her. She sat there, lips pursed, staring past her, rheumy-eyed. The social worker asked her if she knew what day it was, what month it was, what year it was. My mother just stared at her and shrugged.
She left, giving me a look of concern as soon as she was out of my mother's line of sight. In the hallway, she told me that my mother was clearly incoherent and not capable of making decisions on her own. She left to make calls in search of a bed at a hospice center.
The doctors and nurses came, told her they were going to x-ray her for broken bones.
"Absolutely not," she said, clear as a bell. "I don't have to, and you can't make me."
We pleaded with her. How could we take care of her if we didn't know whether she had broken bones, we asked. Stony, quivering silence.
This went on for at least an hour. At one point, my father was in the hallway, trying to get the staff to see that she was clearly not in a place to make informed decisions. I was alone with her, in tears, begging her to let us all help. Nothing. Then I finally said, "Okay, Ma. If this is the way you want things to happen, I'll respect your wishes."
She finally looked at me, nodded. We both heard my father and the doctor talking in the hallways. I went out and pleaded with them, "Can't we get a determination of competency?"
I ducked back into the room. "If they come and take me," my mother said, "then you will have failed totally."
Finally, the doctor came in and said that if my mother didn't allow the x-ray, he'd have to admit her just to free up a bed in his busy ER.
She scowled, threw up her hands, rolled her eyes. "Okay," she said. "Go for it."
Then she turned to my father, stared him down. "Happy?" she said, as in bitter defeat.
"No, I'm not happy," came my father's answer. "I'm not happy that you're sick. I'm not happy that you're lying in this bed, suffering. I'm not happy that we have to have you x-rayed. I'm not happy about any of this."
Something clicked behind my mother's rheumy eyes. I think this moment let some of the air out of the delusions and started her thinking that maybe all these people around her were on her side.
Which made what happened next all the more painful.
The Things that Stick with You ... Forever
The hospital where we ended up that day was a dreadful place. Things got ordered -- pain meds, blood tests, a bedpan, an x-ray team -- and arrived all out of sequence. Nobody seemed to know that my mother had an IV port near her collarbone, despite her having been admitted twice before, and they tried to stick her with needles until we stopped them.
My father was taking a break when the x-ray team arrived, and I let them take her before I remembered that the pain meds hadn't been administered yet.
I finally woke up to this knowledge in the x-ray room, standing there in my ridiculous leaden smock, as my mother cried and cried and cried at the slightest movement, lying there, shaking, tears streaming, on a cold metal slab.
"We're almost done, Ma," I kept saying. And it kept not being true.
To their credit, the techs worked fast and furious, trying to move her as little as they had to. For the last shot, they had to roll her onto her side.
"No," I panicked. "There's no way we can do that!"
They jabbered at each other in jargon, figured out they could do the side shot if they could just get my mother to hold her arms up.
Which of course she couldn't do. She was lying on that damn slab, in too much pain to do anything but cry.
One of the techs directed me to hold up her arms for her. I stood there, reached down to her elbows, tried to move them gently. She resisted.
"We're almost done, Ma," I said again, half-crying, trying like hell just to get to the end of the torture.
Then I forced her arms up. Her face, a mask of pain, twisted up harder. She writhed. Her cries cut through me. I held her there as she pushed against me.
Then it was over. She relaxed a little, still crying. The techs fussed over their monitors. I stood with there, crying, kissing her forehead.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
"How could you let them do that to me?" she sobbed. I had no answer.
Endgame
Writing all of this down, I can see an arc to the story, but of course none of us saw it.
Through all the events I've described, the only thing any of us could do was take each minute as it came. If she went to the hospice center, would she ever leave? If we took her home, would my father be able to move her on his own? Would she be with us for another day, a week, a month? Was the cancer spreading somewhere new, bringing horrific new symptoms with it?
We didn't know shit about anything that was heading our way.
After the x-rays, they wheeled her back to her room, transferred her back to her bed. I wasn't there. I was off in the hallway, on the phone with Brian, crying and crying and crying.
The social worker from the hospice center came back with the news that there was a bed for my mother in a new center about twenty minutes away. It was said to be a good place.
My mother's face fell when the social worker told her where she was going. For her, the conspiracy was moving into its endgame.
They catheterized her, releasing a day and half's worth of pee. A nurse finally gave her the pain meds, and she was asleep within minutes.
We all ended up at the hospice center later that day. It was new, spacious, more like a hotel than a hospital, a private room for each of the sixteen people who found themselves there.
I had gone to the house on the way there, packed things for both my mother and father. He would be spending the night there.
My mother's best friend Sam, a saucy Texan with big hair and big jewelry, had joined us at the hospital and now at the hospice center. She brought decadent food with her, muffins and fudge and chicken salad sandwiches.
Doctors and nurses came, evaluated her. One of the nurses, an attractive young blond woman, got a dirty look from her. My mother made it clear she had no intention of staying there. She wanted to go home, and my father wanted to take here there.
The people who worked there were remarkable. Caring, competent, coordinated. They gave her pain meds that kept her asleep most of the time. They bathed her, even cleaned her dentures, which should wouldn't even let my father do.
Between my father, Sam, and me, someone was with her at every moment. My father spent the first night by her side, napping in a recliner, then in a folding bed they wheeled in for him.
Something changed in my mother, maybe because of the sight of my father sleeping by her side in a strange place. The delusions went away, replaced by something more serene. She would wake up, look at us, smile. My mother's smile was always a shaking-her-head sort of gesture -- a mix of love, humor, and doting exasperation.
At one point, she woke up from a nap, turned to my father, grasped his hand.
"You know why I want to go home, don't you?" she said, clear as day.
He told her he did.
I have only feeble imagination to tell me what it must be like to accept your own death, to wake up to deep, certain knowledge that you will cease to exist in a matter of hours or days. Whatever my mother experienced, she was too clouded, too drugged up to help me understand.
Not that I could have. Not that it mattered. All that mattered was being there.
"Look at my beautiful son," she said to me once, closer to the end.
"I love you, Ma" I said back, and kissed her hand.
"Okay," she said. "Then let's get out of here while the gettin's good."
She couldn't sit up in bed by herself, but that didn't stop her from clawing at her sheets, at the side rails on the bed, trying to get up, get dressed, and get home. It was a mighty effort to talk her down, and it only worked because we had a concrete goal by then, with the whole team working towards getting her home by Saturday, which at that point was only about a day and a half away.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
That's exactly what happened, and within hours of being wheeled through the front door of the house, she would be wheeled back out again, this time as a corpse.
But none of us knew that at the time. We were all going minute by minute, sitting by her side, monitoring her blood oxygen, holding her hand, drinking beer, picking up, reading science magazines, doing sudoku, playing mindless online games.
I stayed at the house the day she came home, cleaning, making space for the hospital bed. My father had been resisting that, haunted by the memory of his stepmother, who died of cancer within hours of being put in a home hospital bed of her own.
"NO, NO, NO!" my mother yelled out through the pain as they transferred her out of the gurney. To this day, my father is haunted by the belief that what we heard was not the pain but my mother saying she wanted to die in her own bed.
The nurses gave her more pain medication, and she went to sleep. The nurses would be by the next day to begin caring for her.
We went to bed at around nine thirty that night. I had been popping Ambien almost every night for two weeks, but on that night, I decided not to.
Two hours later, my father appeared in the doorway to my room. My eyes popped open, and I knew.
"She's stopped breathing," he said. He had been laying in their bed, watching her, and saw her take one last, labored breath.
We went into the bedroom, and there was my mother, the first dead person I'd ever seen outside a funeral home.
We went to her bedside. I kissed her forehead, which was still warm and moist, reached for her hand, kissed it. My father took a pink stuffed elephant the hospice team had given her, placed it under her arm, and kissed her. Their little dog jumped up into the bed, curled up by her feet, and stood guard.
It sounds so poignant, but it wasn't. It felt grim. Just grim. To see a human form that doesn't breathe, doesn't move -- the first time is just shocking, I guess. When that form is your mother, there's just nothing poignant about that. Her mouth gaped open, and I saw just how skeletal her face had become. Later, her left eye slid open, and when I shut it gently, she was already cold, her skin turning waxy.
We called the hospice center, and a social worker came by just after midnight. She was ex-military, wife and daughter of military men, so she and my father had a lot to talk about. They swapped jargon-laden stories of deployments abroad as we all sat at the bar in the kitchen, performing the surreal task of cataloging and destroying my mother's opened medications, which took the better part of an hour.
The social worker called the funeral home, and a team of two people arrived, put my mother in a bag, and wheeled her out the front door after my father and I both kissed her goodbye.
We hugged, cried, and went to bed. Neither of us slept.
We started working the phones the next morning. Calling my sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, my parents' friends. Telling the story of the night before over and over and over.
Deeper into the Surreal
My mother didn't want a memorial or a wake or a church service. Her explicit instructions were for a big party, a 'celebration of life' with cold beer, hot food, and country and western music. So that's what we set about doing. My sister came back, along with another sister, and Brian.
We set about more grim tasks. Death certificates. Notifying Social Security. Cleaning out her closet and giving away her clothes. Canceling her cell phone. It probably took two solid work days to resolve the paper and electronic records that trail behind us all.
Through it all, a jarring, shocking absence where my mother used to be. We all still had the instinct to get up and check on her every few minutes. The sight of that damned recliner, empty, was like a stranger, mocking us every time we walked by. We started drinking beer at about ten thirty every morning.
I've been through my share of depression, but nothing like this. This felt like being kicked in the stomach, deep and hard, and just lying there, sucking in shallow breaths. We dragged our bones, tiptoeing around the gaping absence where this vital, central woman used to be.
We set about making a photo album for people to look at during the celebration. Brian and I were the only ones who could stomach going through boxes and boxes of loose photos from six decades. I got through a lot of them before I had to just sit there and sob.
My mother led a long, full life, with more love and more good fortune than a lot of people can hope for. The way she died gave us plenty of time to make our peace, to say what needed to be said. For her, it was an end to pain.
And still it was gutting. It was as if half the sky had gone dark, the other half still shining, reminding us of what used to be normal.
By the time the celebration came around, we were all in full gear, dealing with what was in front of us, being present for the guests, drinking a lot, escaping to empty rooms now and then to cry. We made a code word, 'osprey,' that my father would say to us when the crowd and the grief became too much for him. That would be our cue to let him go into the back yard, behind the thick clutch of bamboo, and not let anyone follow him.
The celebration was fun. My parents' dog, O'Neal, was a charmer, clearly convinced that the party was in his honor.
Two of my parents' friends are local country and western singers; they set up their speakers in the yard and sang all afternoon and into the night. There was even karaoke, and I'd had just enough vodka to lose just enough inhibition to get up and sing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky.' It was dreadful.
I had been chosen to lead a toast, the equivalent of a eulogy I guess.
"I'd like to start by asking everyone to look around you," I said. "We're here because of the love of one extraordinary woman. We're here because she brought us together, across decades, across continents, across family lines."
"We lost her," I said, starting to choke up. "And that's really hard. And for some of us, the hard part is just beginning."
"But right now, I'd like to ask everyone to take another look around you." They did.
"What you see is exactly what she wanted. Cold drinks, warm food, and country and western music," I said, raising my glass to the performers.
"So let's all toast to Cathy," I finished. "And to her extraordinary heart. I love you, Ma."
Obsess about the price of everything
Parse the measures of lives and loves
How much is all this warming, cooling, moving
Illumination costing me?
Don't get me started.
The neighbors' vexing ways and shifting alliances
The shape of tea leaves no one else can see
Happenings in closed rooms
Miles and miles away
Massacres, injustice large and small
Crying, What are you going to do about us?
Thank God it's Friday, payday, holiday
What a mess this house is
Stacks of laundry, dishes
Too damn many weeds
Above and underneath it all
Alien worlds
Unconcerned
Ages old, ages yet ahead
Jagged, churning, frightening
More beautiful than words
There are the elipticals, big globs of stars that look the same from every direction. Then there are the spirals, spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise, and knotty merged galaxies that come out of collisions of two or more neighbors (we'll be in the midst of one in a few billion years as Andromeda comes crashing in).
How can one team of astronomers classify a million galaxies without going broke or dying of old age? Crowdsourcing. Get tens of thousands of geeky volunteers to classify your galaxies for you, with each specimen getting tagged by a large group of people.
Average out the responses, and you get a classification that is bound to be at least as accurate as what you could squeeze out of some sleep-deprived, impoverished, resentful graduate student.
Wow. It's been over a month since my last post.
You know, for all the ponderous stuff I put on this blog, I'm kind of a flighty person, or at least I have been too often for my own taste. I'm one of those people who can start ambitious projects and then drop them with an arresting ambivalence.
An example? As late as October last year, I was committed to taking the first steps toward formally converting to Judaism -- another lifelong flirtation taken up, dropped, taken up again. I fasted for Yom Kippur, brushed up on my Hebrew, but then my mother's illness kinda took the wind out of my sails. I stopped reading, stopped observing, stopped going to synagogue. I just stopped.
In my youth, I had a string of relationships that unfolded and deflated in much the same fashion.
Then I learned to better listen to my own thoughts. I figured out that the best guide to where I should put my energies is in those things whose absence I feel.
I knew Brian was Mr. Right when I left town for a week after we'd been dating for only a month or so -- and felt jittery, agitated, his absence like an itching phantom limb. When we were together again, a wave of relief washed over me. I still get that, even after fourteen years.
So the moral of the story is that the Jewish Project is going back on the shelf for the next while. But I've missed Vox, missed writing, missed hearing from my friends and neighbors.
I'm still working feverishly, still immersed in opening an Internet-only nationwide extension of the regional bank where I work as a project co-ordinator. It's intense, fascinating work, and the only reason I have time to write today is that Lizzie woke us up at 2 am with some kind of doggie intestinal distress, leaving me unable to get back to sleep.
My online wanderings have narrowed a lot this month, mostly to astronomy, science news, and keeping a finger on the pulse of GLBT equality (Thank you, Massachussetts!). I had a startling religious encounter while listening to a podcast of Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith as she interviewed John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge physicist turned Anglican priest who has embraced faith without turning his back on science, especially the cloudy world of quantum physics. The closest I've come to finding a God that makes sense to me.
So despite appearances to the contrary, I'm not dead yet! Friends, neighbors, I still read your post with dedication and hope you'll keep coming back to my humble Vox.
Writing in the final hours of our trip to Denver for our first national gay square dancing convention.
Lots of pictures to show. Picture one of the newest, poshest hotels in Denver's vigorous downtown being taken over by over a thousand GLBT people. And I mean all stripes: leather daddies, bears, twinks, bull dykes, lipstick lesbians, transgender people in all stages, and infinite shades inbetween.
We take on the same breezy assuredness as our straight neighbors -- trading hugs and kisses without alarm bells going off in our heads, holding hands with our main squeezes without a second thought, talking about what we do and where we go for fun without editing. More here.
The Convention is like a mini Pride festival, only everyone has one other, big thing in common. They all know how to square through, weave the ring, and do-si-do the gay way. They can be perfect strangers to each other, with not even a language in common, but still come together in seconds and dance for hours and hours and hours, holding hands, swinging, trading hugs, woven together in one shared truth.
I guess that's the magic of dancing. It brings people together who would otherwise never find their way to each other. It weaves us together in ways that are hard to resist, hard to back out of. It puts us in the moment, hotwires our bodies past all our silly hangups, and takes us to places where we can't stop ourselves from laughing.
For someone trapped inside a crippplingly self-conscious mind, it is sweet escape indeed to dive in, hour after hour, dance after dance, knowing only what my legs, arms, feet, and hands know. Sunday night, I danced for something like four hours without stopping, just wanting more, more, more.
And as hung up on appearances as I am, knocking boobs and bellies with dancers who know no such burden is like being touched by grace -- or at least knocked around by it.
And as at every convention, there are specialty tips (for you non-dancers, a 'tip' is a set of two dances, each about 5 minutes or less). There was the Bear Tip, the Kilt Tip, the Redwood Tip (people 6 feet and taller), the Under-35 Tip (Brian and I passed, I think), the Leather Tip, the Moonshine Tip (everyone nekked). Something for everyone, in short. We even danced with a club from Tokyo; their English was of mixed strength, but they could pick out every single call.
One of the traditions at Convention is the "Fun Badge Tour," in which dozens of square dancers pile into busses and drive to notable public places -- and then dance there. These can be kind of prosaic at times -- like a gravel yard in Kansas City that happens to straddle the Missouri-Kansas border -- but in a place like Denver, the locales are spectacular.
Like Red Rock, Denver's public amphitheater high in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Brian and I can now say we've square danced at 6,200 feet above sea level. And the folks who were there at the same time we were can now say they've seen just about everything.
This whole magical experience was put together with the sweat and tears of volunteers, dedicated people from the Denver club who put a couple of years of work into putting it all together. That kind of dedication can only come out of love.
One of the ways our lives are changing in this Digital Age is that many of us find our focus shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. Feedreaders, media players, podcasts, blog communities -- they weave us together, but sometimes, they make our worlds seem bigger than they really are, and everything else fades away.
Matters of taste become matters of principle. A group of friends becomes a tiny parliamentary body. Digital navel-watching abounds.
In such a world, we're going to need frequent reminders of just how small we are. Here's a good one from the Hubble Telescope:
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is witnessing a grouping of galaxies engaging in a slow dance of destruction that will last for billions of years. The galaxies are so tightly packed together that gravitational forces are beginning to rip stars from them and distort their shapes. Those same gravitational forces eventually could bring the galaxies together to form one large galaxy.
The name of this grouping, Seyfert's Sextet, implies that six galaxies are participating in the action. But only four galaxies are on the dance card. The small face-on spiral with the prominent arms [center] of gas and stars is a background galaxy almost five times farther away than the other four. Only a chance alignment makes it appear as if it is part of the group. The sixth member of the sextet isn't a galaxy at all but a long "tidal tail" of stars [below, right] torn from one of the galaxies. The group resides 190 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens.
This densely packed grouping spans just 100,000 light-years, occupying less volume than the Milky Way galaxy. Each galaxy is about 35,000 light-years wide. Three of the galaxies [the elliptical galaxy, second from top, and the two spiral galaxies at the bottom] bear the telltale marks of close interactions with each other, or perhaps with an interloper galaxy not pictured here. Their distorted shapes suggest that gravitational forces have reshaped them. The halos around the galaxies indicate that stars have been ripped away. The galaxy at bottom, center, has a 35,000 light-year-long tail of stars flowing from it. The tail may have been pulled from the galaxy about 500 million years ago.
Although part of the group, the nearly edge-on spiral galaxy at top, center, remains relatively undisturbed, except for the slight warp in its disk. Most of its stars have remained within its galactic boundaries.
Unlike most other galaxy interactions observed with the Hubble telescope, this group shows no evidence of the characteristic blue regions of young star clusters, which generally arise during galaxy interactions.
The lack of star-forming clusters suggests that there is something different about Seyfert's Sextet compared with similar systems. One example is Stephan's Quintet, another congregation of interacting galaxies observed with the Hubble telescope. The difference between the two systems could be a simple one: astronomers may be seeing the sextet at the beginning of its interaction, before much has happened. This will not be the case for long, though. The galaxies in Seyfert's Sextet will continue to interact, and eventually, billions of years from now, all four may merge and form a single galaxy. Astronomers have strong evidence that many, if not most, elliptical galaxies are the result of mergers.
Astronomers named the grouping Seyfert's Sextet for astronomer Carl Seyfert, who discovered the assemblage in the late 1940s. Seyfert already suspected that one apparent member of the sextet was not a galaxy but simply a tidal tail stripped off of one of the other members.
The image was taken on June 26, 2000, with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.
Image Credit: NASA, J. English (U. Manitoba), S. Hunsberger, S. Zonak, J. Charlton, S. Gallagher (PSU), and L. Frattare (STScI)
Science Credit: NASA, C. Palma, S. Zonak, S. Hunsberger, J. Charlton, S. Gallagher, P. Durrell (The Pennsylvania State University) and J. English (University of Manitoba)
I've been tending this blog pretty steadily for the past few months, but now I'm heading into a hectic 30-60 days, so neighbors, you might not be seeing much of me.
The regional bank where I work as a project co-ordinator is about to open a nation-wide, Internet-only branch, and I'm essentially going to be a branch manager for four to eight weeks until we collect enough in deposits to justify hiring a real one. So long days and odd hours ahead.
But before that, we're off to Denver next week for the 2007 Gay Square Dancing Convention. It's a huge event, drawing two or three thousand square dancers from across the world. Two years ago, we never knew this world existed, and now we're totally immersed. I've written about it all on Vox in The Gospel of Gay Square Dancing.
But even when things get rough or hectic, I never stop thinking about the things that capture my mind. Here's a taste.
Cognitive Divides
I think a lot about how, in a competitive, technological society, people are getting left behind as the market puts greater and greater value on very particular cognitive abilities. Creativity, abstraction, synthesis, holistic analysis, a willingness to swim in complexity and nuance, to multitask at superhuman levels.
Adding to this, we'll soon be seeing cognitive enhancement drugs with the promise of giving the people who can afford them an even greater edge. The prospect gives me doubt in a future with any hint of equality, even as I can't help thinking about how great it would be to get my hands on some of the stuff.
And on the topic of divides, fascinating stuff here and here on sexuality and the brain, bad news for anyone clinging to the myth that gay folks can pray themselves straight. And even more here -- tempting but no doubt only partially reliable research on early childhood personality and politics:
A study published late last year in the Journal of Research in Personality reported a link between certain childhood personality traits and adult political orientation in a test group followed over two decades. As nursery schoolers, the future conservatives were described as easily victimized, indecisive, rigid, fearful and inhibited. The budding liberals were described as self-reliant, prone to developing close relationships, energetic and somewhat dominating.
I've long thought that at the heart of the conservative mindset is a contempt -- however well-tempered -- for weakness and differentness. I just hope somebody is trying to replicate this study in an environment more typical than Berkeley, California.
Outer Reaches
And as always, our own solar system continues to amaze and delight. Some finds from my star-drunk wanderings below -- my favorite is the image of Io, volcanic arc ablaze and bathed in jupiterlight, pale Europa behind it.
And Just to Prove That I'm Not a Total Nerd...
Brian and I can't stop listening to Flying the Flag, the UK's scandalously undervalued entry in the Eurovision song contest.
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