Hanseatic or A Fistful of Hamas

A very mere few of the gurus and soothsayers, jilted and can't be bothered, saw this one coming: that rather than celebrating another calendar-brand holiday, like the two decade old anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which incidentally was caused in part by unsustainably cheap petroleum prices wrought by changes in the way Arab states sell fuel despite the pretenders to its overthrow, we're instead looking at absolute financial-meltdown, carnage and dreaded reevaluation. Is this the bequest of Hope, the yes-we-can? The next president of the United States of America may have been handed a much-diminished superpower, which never was that much different than the Soviet Union (though neither party would want to hear that). Both sulking monsters and accomdations of survival--of unity. Now the whole world is going insane. There is nothing new under the sun, but now American empire tilts on the brink, surreptitious wars are raised, and those on the sidelines, like powerhouse Germany, say they had little to do in causing the problem and should therefore suffer lesser consequences. The former may be resoundingly true, but the latter has dire consequences.

übermensch

I know I said that New Year's resolutions struck me as somewhat wanting, lest I revisit the dreaded diary or smoking cessation program, but I imagine they're worth a second look. It would be something if we could resolve to be less human, less fallible--or at least not to forget the lessons that we've already learned. In other aspects of life, belief, people can turn to dogma, a simple set of axioms as guiding principles in religion, philosophy, business-style, since no one of us can keep all the rules in our heads at one time. There's not really something dogmatic for relationships--thank goodness--there are no adherents, at least none that I would like to meet or mimic, of this or that school of matrimonial success. Without dogma, every one of us is allowed to treat each other as unique, forgiving and forgetful, even though the occasional lapse.

coke social

It’s entertaining sometimes to skim over the shipwrecks of social networking sites—Web 2.0, and find abandoned or severely neglected homepages, blogs and photography collections. I’d like to think most of these things, like my inactive mySpace presence, littered with unread posts, die these quiet deaths because they’ve served their purpose or have been made obsolete. I hope people give up because they’ve found their perfect match and aren’t much interested in braving the wilds of the Internet dating-scene anymore. Those posts and comments do keep coming in periodically, unread but loyally broadcast for holidays and birthdays by a small tribe of true-believers (those hold-outs for landing the dream job or landing the right person by the merits of their profiles), which seems like sad, vindictive graffiti peppered on some forgotten monument to a forgotten cause or decorating a dozing relative with Christmas garland.

Linus & Lucy

Though I missed seeing any of the usual Christmas specials this year, my mother showed H and I a mash-up clip of the excellent Merry Christmas Charlie Brown. I love that little show--the Peanuts are like psychoanalysis in classic comic format, and whenever I hear Linus explaining the meanining of Christmas--I think that's the only incident one can still find that makes mention of Jesus--it just kills me. I think I can dredge for all those special memories on the Internet, though. Instantly, after seeing this and thinking about the original, a non-sequitur memory swept over me, which at the time I didn't deem appropriate to share. For starters, it was my secret deciding factor to attend the university that I did. I might have gone to Harvard, if I really applied myself during my senior year, or to a good school in state, through I shudder to imagine how that would have screwed with H's and my space-time continuum. When I visited as a prospective student, there was a big party in the dorms (as per usual) and as I took in the view from the head of the hallway, the guys and girls were dancing just like on Charlie Brown, breezy and doing their own things, not caring how they looked.

miscellany

Long before Wikipedia, textbooks, almanacs, wherein the most miniscule trivia can be tracked down in a more or less systematic manner, ancient Chinese scholars essayed the whole of scientific knowledge, arranging articles in a sort of science-dictionary format. Entries were set by order of importance, which seems rather subjective to my modern ears, but I suppose an alchemist would find a logical order to things, know to look up the Sun before Moon and Wind before Fire. It's sort of like reporting the news--in the order of importance with sports, weather, and celebrity gossip tacked on the end. Wikipedia is sometimes criticized for being a catch-all, having no sieve and mirroring fan-sights--that there is a longer entry for the Klingon language or Rankin & Bass Christmas specials than for Samuel Pepys. Personally, I like that about Wikipedia, since I feel above wading through fan-sites and nerdy anthologies to find such things and am pleased when I can come across such things at random and within the same gallery as serious, academic matters. It might be more didactic to wade through the whole compendium of human knowledge to get at the minutia, but the ability to become a subject matter expert on The Golden Girls or Kim Fields, and bypassing physics, rhetoric, geomancy and the Illiad, is certainly a remarkable thing, as well. Incidentally, the number one entry in the Chinese science-dictionaries was for the Dragon.

prodigal

I just returned from a quick and unplanned trip to the States, to attend my grandmother's funeral. I would have much like to have visited her a week prior, rather than waiting after all these years to see her in her grave. It was a sad occasion, but a condoling excuse for a family reunion, seeing aunts, uncles, cousins and associates that I had not seen in years--my own sister included. It was strange coming home, slightly unrecognizible and peering at things from a porthole of the Wayback machine. I was told my grandmother was very proud of me, and she certainly talked about me, which lent this odd weight of self-consciousness to meeting distant, long-lost relatives. Fancy. Here was the famous European cousin, returned, and a writer, too--she had said. I wouldn't want to let her down. Granny was fancy too.