Over a Candle

One more bit from the Louisville protest a couple of weeks ago. A YouTube video from still photos (including some taken by yours truly) has been put together by the organizers. I wanted to share it with everyone who might be reading here.

Please go view, comment, and add the video to your favorites.

That’s it for the moment. I’m sure that details on next year’s gathering will begin trickling out soon. Until then, you should go the Adoptee Rights Deomnstration website to see how you can help.

Whenever I have taken a personality inventory, I come out as a very high F (feeling) and hence a very low T (thinking). In the Myers-Briggs typology, this determines the kind of decision making one engages in. (In Kiersey’s sorter, this plays out a little differently, but the details aren’t really relevant to my point.)

I mention this because I’ve been thinking about my writing. It’s not that my Myers-Briggs type is directly relevant to my writing, but thinking about it shed some light, for me, on my writing process. And it has to do with my preference for F over T.

My best writing, in my opinion, comes when I let go. When I just write with little censoring or planning ahead. But too often, I write from the head. My natural inclination is to “think” from the heart, but I keep trying to write from the head.

Is this a function of being in academia, where intellect is valued over emotional response? Where everything must be explained and defended? That’s not how I function. I don’t think my way is better, but I think I have, for too long, tried to make myself into a more rational and coherent person. Maybe I’m just not built that way.

It’s okay to play pretend when I’m working at my academic job, when I’m arguing policy online or in the letters page of my local paper. But when I’m working on my passion, my writing, I do violence to myself by ignoring my natural functioning, by trying to make sense and fit into I think people need. This is not an excuse to write crap and defend it as brilliant. Rather, this is about the drafting process. How does the first draft come off the pen onto the page? Does it go through filters before it is properly born? Shouldn’t it be born, then have the chance to grow and develop?

By writing from my head, I was trying to make it come out perfectly the first time. But for me, maybe for everyone, that is wrong. I need to let it come spewing out. Then I can go back over it with a filter to get it into the form I want.

The birthing process, the writing process, matters. The more I write carefully, the more i let my head get in the way. I need to work on that.

I had a different blog post planned for today. But that will keep. There is a photo I’ve been wanting for many years, and I finally got it.

Years ago, at least five by my count, I took a series of pictures of the sun setting over Maine. I was on the western shore of Grand Manan island in New Brunswick and just began taking picture after picture.

Here is the only one I have available at the moment, though it’s not my favorite:

When I say “series,” I mean I took roughly a hundred photographs of the sky changing as the sun set. In my favorite, the sun is more obviously present, but this picture is a fair representation of the photos I took.

Ever since, I have been wanting a photo of the sun rising from the eastern shore. In theory, this should be simple. The house we stay in, the house my in-laws own, is on the eastern shore, with only the Castalia Salt Marsh between it and the Bay of Fundy.

But sunrise happens rather early in the morning, and, as many of you will realize, I’m not much for going to bed early.

Last night, however, I did go to bed around midnight or so. So when I woke up a little after six, I wasn’t shocked at all that my body had given up on actually getting some much needed sleep. It did give me a chance to get my picture, though, and I think I got the one I wanted, though I do wish I had managed to get up a little earlier so I could have gotten several between pre-dawn and this one. Who knows? Maybe I won’t sleep tomorrow morning, too?

In the grand scheme, nothing matters
It’s not nihilism, it’s that we are all connected
Only the arrangements change, only the modes
The substance stays the same
Spinoza is not a Buddhist, though he shares some of their insights
Everything changes, so nothing does
The level is everything
At one level, the level of modes, change happens
At another, there is no change, no differentiation, only Being
Being is, everything is Being, so everything Is
But events occur at the level of modes
We mistake mode for reality
We believe the superficial is the deep
Mode becomes important
Mode becomes everything
And we miss that everything Is
Nothing changes because nothing is all there is
We fight for illusion instead of embracing the real

Life happens.

It is a cute bumper sticker. Most know that ‘life’ is a stand-in for another four letter word. Yet it seems instructive that ‘life’ itself is a four-letter word.

No one asks to born. Life is thrust upon us, unsuspectingly. And we are supposed to appreciate it, be grateful for the gift of life.

Gift. Another four-letter word.

Have you ever gotten a gift you didn’t want? Yes, it’s the thought that count, but that doesn’t always mean that you want the gift itself. We may thank the person who gave it to us, appreciate that we were thought of, even though the gift itself is unwanted.

So we call life a gift and expect everyone to think of it as the best gift we could ever get. I do admit it is a necessary gift in order to receive any other, but just calling it a gift doesn’t mean everyone wants it. And I can certainly imagine someone deciding that they don’t.

Life happens. But not by choice. Make of that what you will.

Two days ago, I visited a friend. She died during our sophomore year of college, and I have gone to her grave nearly every year since.

In the last two years, an adjoining headstone announced the passing of both of her parents. Since she was an only child, the passing of her parents seems like a second tragedy. Though I had never spoken to them, I did write them once, and received a nice letter in return. It gave me some comfort knowing that they were out there, that other people remembered my friend, presumably even better than I did.

Now, I don’t know. Am I the last person to remember her? Will I be the last to visit her grave?

People vanish so unexpectedly from this world. I don’t know that I think of death as a tragedy. But that doesn’t stop me from missing people who so abruptly vanish. And it doesn’t stop me from hoping they are happy now. And I am just selfish enough to wish they were still here with me.

Yesterday, adoptees, first mothers, and other supporters marched to support equal rights for adoptees. In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, adoptees in forty-four states are not allowed access to their original birth certificates. Every year they gather at the National Conference of State Legislators for the protest. This year that meant going to Louisville.

The night before, we made signs for use in the march. Much fun was had by all.

Sunday morning, we began to march to the convention center.

There was a lot of energy and excitement as we marched.

We got to talk to a few legislators on their way into to register for the conference.

But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t hot. It was. Very. Everyone was committed, but we needed breaks from marching.

We were told not to sit on the wall, though, so we took our breaks in the park across the street. The heat index was supposed to be around 110, and it felt like it. By the end of the day, we were all pretty tired. But we were happy for what we had accomplished. Literature handed out, news interviews, people talked to, and awareness raised.

The party afterwards suffered from a lousy restaurant. Extremely poor service and a failure to provide adequate space marred an otherwise wonderful day. But once we quit the restaurant, several of us hit a nearby pub and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

The only downside to the whole event, for me, was how quickly the time passed. I didn’t feel like I had enough time to visit with friends. Being surrounded by these people was both empowering and comforting. It was almost like a two-day long support group with a healthy dose of activism thrown in.

I originally did not plan to go next year, as San Antonio in late July is not my cup of tea. But now I don’t think I can wait any longer to see this group of people. I wish I was still there. So now I’m going to try to find a way to make it again next year.

And I look forward to the day when we don’t need the demonstration anymore, and we can just plan a weekend party. But until then, I cannot imagine a better way to spend two days than protesting with my fellow adoptees.

We left by eleven to drive to the Adoptee Rights Protest in Louisville. It looked to be nearly a five hour drive, but that still got us there by four. Plenty of time to check in and eat before the sign-making party.

Plenty of time, that is, if nothing went wrong.

Twenty minutes down the road, and the engine maintenance light came on. We pulled off at a nearby gas station, and I checked everything I could, which basically consisted of the oil level and making sure the gas cap was on correctly. But neither seemed to be the problem.

There is something so typical about this, that I wasn’t even surprised. Indeed, I think I would have been more surprised if nothing had gone wrong. It seems that lately all of our trips have some kind of snafu.

This was my grandmother’s car, so we called my father, hoping he would tell us that it was normal for the car and we could ignore it. But it wasn’t to be. Instead, he offered to switch cars with us. He drove down to meet us, letting us take his car, as he drove the other to get it checked out. (Turns out, it was the air filter.)

So we were back on the road, and on target to get to Louisville by five. The rest of the trip went smoothly and we found the hotel without a problem.

We met other adoptees almost immediately. First it was Theresa, then Jeff. There is something so cool about meeting other like-minded people, especially ones you have such great admiration and respect for.

We were starving and thought we had enough time to eat before the sign-making party. We found an interesting looking Irish pub, and it would have been perfect if the service had been timely. As it was, we got to the party about half an hour late.

I think I colored in one sign over the course of the next two hours. It was too hard to do that and meet people face-to-face who I had known forever online. Jeni, Kara, Julie, Dory, Joy, Elizabeth, Linda, Jim, Diane, Cheerio, Amanda, Spencer… I’m sure I’m forgetting people, but it was so much fun.

At the end, there was a brief workshop for how to talk to legislators. Gaye and Jeff did a terrific job. As a student of strategic nonviolence, it was fascinating to hear others employ the principles in a real training session.

After that, there was much drink to be had. Maybe too much. Though, for me, I’m usually so shy around other people, it may have helped loosen me up a bit, so I actually managed to talk to people. (I hope not too much. And I hope I didn’t say anything too stupid.) We had a blast. We had been told the hotel bar closed at ten, but I think the bartender realized how much money there was to be made and stayed open until midnight.

I wish even more of my online friends had been able to make it. There is just something so amazing about meeting some of your favorite people on the planet.

And in just over an hour, we’ll be gathering to go do what we came here to do.

In case you haven’t heard, the NAACP has charged elements within the Tea Party movement as racist. I’m not interested in evaluating those charges here. What interests me are the reactions to those charges that I’ve seen online and in editorial pages.

Some of the responses are something of a red herring. They at least miss the point. These are the responses from members of the movement who claim not to be racist themselves. Of course, if the charge is, as I understand it, that some members of the movement are racist and should be purged, saying that you aren’t racist isn’t really the point. If the NAACP had claimed that all members were racist, then your response would be relevant.

What is really obnoxious, though, is the form of ad hominem that some of the responses have taken. Rather than defending those charged with racism, these response simply claim that the NAACP is itself racist. This is the tu quoque fallacy, or more colloquially, “I know you are, but what am I?”

In essence, they claim that they can be racist, and ignore charges of racism from the NAACP because that organization is also racist.

Counter-charges are as old as politics itself, I suspect, but they are a crappy way to reason.

If you think the NAACP is racist (and I’m not saying they are, but I’m not going to have that argument here), then they are being hypocritical. But that doesn’t mean you get to be a racist, too. Racism is wrong. If the NAACP engages in it, it is wrong to do so. And if the Tea Party is doing so, it’s wrong, too. It’s no defense to point out your accuser’s hypocrisy.

I don’t think the Tea Party is inherently racist, not from what I’ve seen anyway. But if there are racist elements in it, then it should seek to eliminate those elements from its ranks. Instead, its supporters seem mostly interested in giving fallacious defenses of people most of them don’t even know.

Christopher Nolan has a knack for making wonderfully engaging and rather dark films. Memento. Batman Begins. The Dark Knight. All these films were among the best films that came out in those respective years.

Inception belongs right up there with them. Nolan has crafted a tricky movie based on a tricky premise: people can go into your dreams to find your secrets. Despite the twists and turns, the dreams within dreams, the film manages to tell a coherent and comprehensible tale of espionage and deception.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a corporate spy, stealing business secrets for whoever will pay for them. Cobb is hired to do the impossible: plant a thought inside someone’s head rather than steal one. He has to put a team together, and the action begins.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling most of the fun here. The visuals are appealing. The effects are nifty, but unlike so many other films, the emphasis is on the story and the characters, not the CGI.

DiCaprio is superb here, as are his supporting cast members. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays his second. Ellen Page is the greenest member of the team, the new architect of the dreamscapes in which their plans unfold. Cillian Murphy is Robert Fischer, Jr., their target. All of them do a fine job, but the emphasis of the film is on Cobb, and DiCaprio has the chops to bring the depth to the character that he requires.

This is smart summer fare. Not too heavy, but definitely raises some fascinating questions. It made me wish I still taught Introduction to Philosophy on a regular basis; this film would be perfect for the class.