Happy Friday!

No cutesy rhymes this week. Just too tired. At least it's Friday.
Where's my coffee cup?

Deciding What to Fight, How and Why

I often disagree with what I read in David Brooks' columns in the NYTimes, but I (almost) always find his columns articulate, thoughtful and engaging. His column from February 2, How to Fight the Man, is no exception, and a particular passage has been echoing around in the back of my head:

The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.
 ...
These belief systems helped people envision alternate realities. They helped people explain why the things society values are not the things that should be valued. They gave movements a set of organizing principles. Joining a tradition doesn’t mean suppressing your individuality. Applying an ancient tradition to a new situation is a creative, stimulating and empowering act. Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux. 

In general, I would agree with Brooks that a revolution must be empowered by a belief in something that allows the revolutionaries to see the world as it should be, rather than as it is. But I think he misses a crucial piece of zeitgeist: the conjoining philosophies of many modern revolutionaries is a disbelief in the power of revolution, particularly in the pattern of revolutions overthrowing one order to establish a "new," all too similar, order.

In America, I'm thinking specifically of the various Occupy movements and the frustration stimulating the Tea Party, while abroad I'm thinking of the latest round of protests and the violent government reaction to the protests in Syria, Egypt, Russia and China. From everything I hear and read, there are undercurrents of a mantra claiming 'the system cannot be transformed or reformed, it must be entirely circumvented.' While there is no compromise and no negotiation, this refusal to articulate demands is not a form of nihilism; the unifying force behind the many revolutions is the conscious dismantling of the weapons used by institutions of power to pay lip service to reform.

In less public arenas, there are thousands of people trying to find ways to live the revolution. The proliferation of urban farmers and barter networks has been fueled by the belief that our current system is too deeply entrenched, too powerful, too seductive to change. For the modern revolutionaries, we live simultaneously in and around the capital-imperialist structure of the world. Having decided to fight "the man," we employ a strategy of non-engagement in hopes of avoiding being sucked back into the traditional power dynamics that subsumed each revolution from the Bolsheviks to the Beatniks to Flower Children to the Monday Demonstrations.

For one of these new style revolutions to be successful (and I doubt any one of them will, but perhaps the aggregate influences on our culture will give birth to the conditions to a genuine revolution) the revolution will have to grow in an organic way, one that historians can chart backwards through time, the way we chart the American Revolution back to the Enlightenment ideals of John Locke a century before, and back through European history to the Magna Carta. The revolution will be slow, but because it is slow, it might be complete.

Book 5 of 52: The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

Christopher Moore is easily the most entertaining of living comic writers I've come across. While Moore's work lacks the articulated moral philosophy that shines in Vonnegut's best work (and encumbers his weakest), the characters of his novels each cartwheel through their own surreal science-fiction world.

Moore's 1999 novel, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, is no exception. From somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and into Pine Cove lumbers an evolutionary anomaly fed by Godzilla level radiation, able to effect peoples emotions; at the same time, the local psychiatrist takes all of her patients off their meds. Constable Theo Crowe investigates a string of murders and a town worth of strange behavior. Chaos ensues.

A fun little romp for a weekend.

Happy Friday!

I wished my boss a happy Monday on Monday morning, and she said to me, "It's so odd that you always say 'happy whatever day it is'. Doesn't it diminish the days you really want to be happy."

I was caught flat footed, and I'm sure I gave an inadequate answer to explain myself.

I wish a happy everyday because that's what I wish every day. What day do you want to be happier than this?

That's Why They Call It Work

I started the week able to see my desk.
I'd like to end the week able to see my desk.

Not yet, though. Not there yet.

Not Quite Against the E-book

I am not, strictly speaking, an e-book basher. Neither am I an e-book reader. But the recent debate (inspired by Jonathan Franzen, who like most book lovers views the equation as an either/or division; who also, inexplicably, thinks "capitalists hate" traditional books because of their permanence, ignoring centuries of workers who have made the publication and distribution of books their trade) distilled a few points for me.

I'm a fairly heavy, if inconsistent reader. I can go days without picking up a book, then slam through 200 pages in an evening. I like books. I like the look and the smell of them, the color they bring to a room, the way friends notice the books lying around and the conversations this invites.

I also consume an unbelievable amount of digital text: work emails, NYTimes online, baseball blogs like Pinstripe Alley and Fangraphs and HardballTimes, the blogs of friends, g-chat, and all the corners of Wikipedia my curiosity drag me to. I don't want more electronic characters in my face, or in my life.

Carol has been reading e-books for a while now, and I think she reads e-books when she might not read the book. She likes the handling of the thing-itself less than I do, I think. She also has a harder time switching between books, grabbing a different book or the wrong one on the way out the door and then reading what you have, and the e-reader simplifies the "where'd I leave my book?" game.

I feel differently when I read. There is a climax in reaching the back cover of a book that I do not feel I would get from an e-book. The newspaper articles I read online only invite me further into the maze, drag me on to the next article. I don't know that an e-book would make me feel this way, but (so far) I have hesitated to risk my experience of a work on the new medium.

I'm sure I'll have an e-reader someday. When the books and readers are cheaper, when the copyright war is over, when they develop a satisfying way for me to annotate the text. The day will come, but it's not today.

Fitness, Balance, Limits

My favorite exercise is probably the Russian Twist.

I'm not any good at it. There are plenty of people who are phenomenally strong at their favorite exercise- they started strong in one area, so they excelled at that exercise, so they did it often, so they improved quickly, so they excelled.

The thing I like about the Russian Twist, and about most of the exercises in the Power Hour I've tried to make a part of my weekly routine, is how hard it is.

I find that difficulty inspiring, challenging and rewarding. But the reverse of that is recognizing my limits. I simply can't handle a workout at that level four consecutive days. Instead this semester, I'm trying a couple other fitness classes on my "off" days.

(How strange and surprising and interesting that I enjoy and, to a degree, depend upon the class structure to motivate me. Although I interact with and depend upon a team of colleagues at work, at the end of the day I complete my work alone, dividing and conquering vastly more often than collaborating. I find blogging a solitary sport, despite the encouraging comments left by readers. Reading, perhaps my favorite activity, is distinctly solitary.)

So, on Tuesday I attended my second ever Pilates class. It's a very different kind of workout than the cardio-intensity of Power Hour, and I suspect I'm going to have to learn how to get the most out of it, in a way I didn't have to learn in the fast paced class. The movements were challenging (in a couple cases overwhelmingly so), but I wasn't at the end of class left with the exhaustion and 'burn' feeling that I've come to equate with a successful workout.

Which needs to change? It seems that either I have to learn how to maximize my Pilates workout to get value from this new class, or I have to adjust my definition of what the evening after a workout feels like.