dusk sunday

sunday evening again.

a blanket of sleep covers most of the country, the east coast well into the deep dreams, the lights going out late on the west coast.  the collective energy of the country no longer focused on anything, really, just the lull before the week begins.

monday is schizophrenic.  there’s the energy of the start of the school week, the start of the work week, the attempt to re-invigorate what had been left off at the end of the last week.  plans are laid forth and serious undertakings are undertaken very seriously.  no one starts a big project on a thursday, or, heavens no, not on a friday.  but, monday, there it is, no excuses.  and that’s the other part of monday, isn’t it?  no excuses!  dive in and get it done.  and if you don’t … that’s where some get the monday blues, office space‘s “case of the mondays”.  the whole week stretched out, all that work … and maybe not everyone feels so enthusiastic or engaged in their work to feel like 5 long days of it are all that inspiring.

tuesday has a shoulder to the grindstone feel to it.  things are under way, still a lot of the week to get the lesson plan done, get the work done, still some enthusiasm for those that are so inspired.  there are no distractions on tuesday night for sports fans, no movies or plays open on tuesdays.  and when monday is taken over by president’s day or memorial day or labor day or any other manner of holiday’s that get shifted to monday since nobody likes monday very much, then tuesday fills in, and it’s not so bad, because everyone just got a three-day weekend.

wednesday … for those who look forward to getting things done, it’s the day of evaluation, how much more can be done before the end of the week.  and for those hoping to just get another week over with, mark some more Xs off the calendar, getting to wednesday means getting half the week over with.

thursday is a day full of energy.  friday is close enough to feel it, and those who have set goals for the week feel close to reaching them.  those who procrastinated see thursday and figure they have one last chance to maybe pull something out of the fire.  those who just work to get through the work week, even they feel the extra energy on thursday.  for ages, the best tv lineups have been on thursday nights.  college and pro football started targeting thursday nights a couple of decades ago, and now it’s a fairly big deal as well.

friday comes, and there’s the inevitable.  even as 40 hours is still standard, fridays see a lot of people taking the day off.  university schedules are notoriously light on fridays.  it’s the perfect early start to the weekend.  back in the procrastinators’ offices, they’ve resigned themselves to missing their deadlines, and are already pushing their projects back to next week.  politicians try to bury stories on friday because they know there will be less exposure, less coverage on fridays.  and friday night s the chance to party, to celebrate, whether it’s accomplishment or just getting through another week.  spirits are high, hopes are often higher.  a week worth of energy spent.

saturday is for catching up on whatever needs to be caught up on.  for workaholics, it’s the sixth workday.  for the rest, there are kids’ soccer games or trips to see relatives or whatever else can’t take place during the week when work & school get in the way, or to just get out of the city or into the city, out and about.  there are some big events on saturdays, and for many saturday nights are a good repeat for friday night.

then sunday … ever been up really early on sunday in a university or beach town.  the sense of peacefulness … it’s hard not to breathe deeper.  certainly, for many, sunday is a day of reflection or repentance or simply sabbath in religious observation.  and, for many, sunday brings the competition of big time sports, football in the falls, basketball through the late spring.  sunday dinner still has a ring to it.

and sunday night comes, dusk falls, and the melancholy is palpable.  is there really energy to look back at the week past?  really the resolve to look forward to all that one wants or dreads in the week ahead?  the energy and high spirits from friday night through the day sunday, the comedown back to “reality”, getting away from getting away to get back to work, to school, to life’s plans, dreams …

philosophy? eh, not so much …

there are the deep questions … like the interesting information about all of that “dark matter” that must be between the galaxies that make up the screen background on my monitor …

and then there are the really deep questions …

like why do broccoli and cheese go so well together?  nobody would ever put cheese on peas.  or corn.  or tomatoes.  (well, i’m sure if i had a readership, i’d have someone pointing me at recipes for such things immediately.)  there is cauliflower & cheese.  so one might think it’s edible foods that look a little like mini-shrubbery (mini-shrubberies?)  does cheese go well over brussel sprouts?  i don’t think of it going well over lettuce.

and what is the cat thinking, exactly?  with dogs, you can sort of tell.  someone told me of some internet thing that was going around pointing out that dogs mostly think “what a great bowl of food.”  “what a great walk.”  “what a great owner i have.”  “what a fun cat this is that lives in this house.”  “what an awesome stick.  i’ll go chase it now.”  “ball.  ball.  ball.”

but cats?  not a chance.  give ’em catnip, and most act the same.  but i have lived my whole life, most of it with more than one cat in the house, and every one seems exactly the opposite of every other cat i’ve ever been around.  which seems pretty much impossible, since if you have three cats, if one is the opposite of the second which is the opposite of the third, then the first and third should be the same, right?  but in this case, the first and third are also opposites.  having three cats helps one understand the fourth dimension and beyond, even if one still doesn’t understand the cats themselves.

then again, i don’t think cats understand us, much, either.  we have one cat who was sitting watching me tap a spoon on my knee this evening.  she just had this look on her face, perplexed, like “what.  in.  the.  hell.  is.  he.  doing?”  then amy said “get the spoon!  get the spoon.”  and the cat turned to look at her, with the same look:  “what.  in.  the.  hell.  is.  she.  getting.  at?”  and this is the cat in our house that acts the most like a dog “what a great spot this is for napping.”  “what a great life this is that this human pets me all the time.  i think i’ll purr.”

then again, she’s the opposite of every cat i’ve ever known.

why is that?

balance … moderation …

balance.

(but … first … today’s blogpost brought to you by … a shout out to http://stackoverflow.com … incredibly useful to relative newbies trying to use various technologies to get work done.  i don’t think it really counts as commercialism if i’m genuinely promoting something that is not a for profit concern without any prodding, is it ?)

(ok, back to your regularly scheduled blog …)

so … the reason i am drawn to eastern philosophy/spirituality (aside from the fact that it’s been around a lot longer than christianity) has almost everything to do with that yin/yang symbol.

without darkness, there is no light.

there’s a certain rational sense to considering that to best understand peace and tranquility, one must understand suffering and hardship.

i’ve gotten to a point where i consider the question of balance in my everyday life at all hours of the day.

i consider exercise:  i push my body in certain ways, and it responds by breaking down certain parts, consuming a certain amount of the fat, and creating more muscle.  but i must balance the amount i do with the wear and tear on the old bones, and balance the time spent doing it with time i spend doing other things.

i consider what i put in my body:  i avoid caffeine, though not religiously.  i’m lucky i never liked coffee i guess.  i try to eat a bit healthy, and i consider the minute quantities ingested every day that my body may or may not know how to get rid of and may not flush from my bloodstream.  but there are things that i like to eat, and there are certain things that my body has grown used to consuming over a lifetime that it likes and digests better than other things.  i understand that i can probably change my metabolism and what my body prefers to ingest over time.  but, like my darling wife, i still like to indulge in dairy queen and coldstone and fatburger occasionally.  so i try to balance thee things.

to manage my interaction with others … well, i don’t do facebook, and i seriously think there are so many other better and more personally managed options out there.  i’ve started dabbling with google+ for personal connections; i use linkedIn for professional connections; i am now connected to a smaller, more geeky bit of what i would like to be my professional niche through the aforementioned stackoverflow.  i get a bunch of my news about what’s going on in the world from twitter.  i’m happy with these options, and like keeping them moderately separated, particularly over the amount of control i have over the groups and distribution of information about me.

(and given the news recently about employers asking for facebook IDs and profiles, that’s another reason i like to keep all of this separated.  i’m sure you could probably find some information on the net somewhere that links johnkdoe to who i really am, but i prefer to keep my online life, my personal life, and my work life all separate.  there’s a balance that’s not always easy to maintain, either.)

in my work life:  there’s what i want to do, and then there’s what pays the bills.  this is not the first time in my life i’ve been between paychecks.  in the past, i have tried to be very careful about the reasons i was taking a job.  there have been times that i have given a particular job what i considered a fair shake, discovered that it wasn’t for me, and looked for a different kind of work.

currently, i find myself in a position of loving the work that i’m doing even if it hasn’t generated a cent of income.  i know it could eventually generate some.  i can do the math and picture it generating a great deal of income for me over time.  but it won’t do that right away.

at the very same time, i’ve tried to be rational about putting out feelers and accepting offers for help from my network.  there is one particular job that i would be willing to stop doing app work for, and i’ve tried to press this to the point of not annoying the friend who is my contact for such work.  that’s a difficult balancing act to be certain.  yesterday, i was offered the opportunity to consider work at a local firm that i only know a little by reputation; he was trying to sell me on the company doing iOS app work as opposed to the defense work i am familiar with that they do; today, i talked with a former colleague about doing some consulting work.  figuring out which of these things are things i could see myself doing long-term or short-term, and managing expectations amongst each of the people i’m in contact with … yet another pinhead on which i’m trying to maintain balance.

and the ultimate balance of these two things, the thing on my mind most today … how long do i keep at the app work, borrowing from my future savings (and from parents & in-laws who are trying to help me dip into 401k savings & penalties!) in the hope of making this app work my full-time job and life’s work for the foreseeable future.

push and pull.  this versus that.  work versus play.  safety versus stress.

a life lived in balance.  it’s what i strive for.  and even then, i prefer to use the wisdom of my dad’s cousin, who was the doctor who brought me into the world:

“everything in moderation … including moderation.”

dreams …

dreams …

i am fascinated by dreams … mostly by the concept, and how it relates to what we experience as reality when waking.  i loved the matrix when it came out, one of my favorite movies of all time.  inception is my favorite movie of all time; i went to see it twice in the theater, something i had never done before.  i have experienced dreams within dreams, lucid dreams.

dream interpretation also fascinates me, mostly because i think most of it isn’t very accurate.  i watched a PBS series on dreaming for a while, and the only thing that seemed clear was that dreams are often a conduit of creative thinking while sleeping, and that people tend to have more dreams filled with anxiety during certain sleep cycles.  beyond that, there were only just a lot of questions.  frankly, inception seemed to hit upon as many shared truths as any other source:  mostly, we don’t realize we’re dreaming, but sometimes we do.  often, we can never trace how we got to a particular place (and this is most often how i’ve come to the conclusion that i’m dreaming:  i’m in some place that makes so little sense, i figure i have to be in a dream).  i have previously experienced that i immediately wake up upon dying in a dream.  in lucid dreams, i can seem to control to some degree who appears in them and whether i can fly or whatever.

there are certainly individual dreams that i have had that have gotten me thinking.  there were themes in dreams that i thankfully rarely experience anymore.  the worst was dreaming i had come to the end of a semester and a final i needed to take for a class i  never really even remembered i had signed up for it, and thus hadn’t been attending it all semester, and felt wholly unprepared.  i had lots of dreams after getting divorced about what exactly happened to lead to that.  dreams about trying to run and feeling like i was in slow motion.  dreams about being with a particular person.  dreams about flying.  my dreams these days seem very situational, and it is rare that i don’t wake up knowing exactly why i was having a particular dream.  there are dreams i have had that i will remember forever, as much so as waking moments in my life.

it’s interesting to me that animals appear to dream, and to watch cats & dogs when they appear to be dreaming.  we have one cat that dreams and makes the same noises in sleep that she makes when she is “talking” to the birds out on the deck.  they are fun to watch when they appear to be running or fighting in their dreams.  perhaps answering the question “why do cats dream?”  can help answer the question “why do we dream?”

i also talk of dreams with amy in the sense of what do we want to do in our heart of hearts. we dream of living a life of productivity and meaning, learning and interaction.  i’m not even sure how much of our dream amy would want me to share, so i won’t.  but the interesting thing is … we don’t actually dream of this stuff during our non-waking hours (or perhaps i should only speak for myself, but i don’t think amy does, either).  these are merely things that we deeply hope happen, conditions about our future that we hope we can make come true.  is the way we all talk of our dreams of the future in this way an insight into what dreams really are?  for the most part, i don’t think this is the case.

and, no … this is not all prelude to some interesting dream i wish to share.  most days, i wake up with a sense that i had been dreaming, but don’t remember the dream upon waking.  amy shares her dreams upon waking with me fairly regularly.  but even when i remember dreams, they seem usually too personal to share.

sorry.

hard to think about, never mind hard to talk about

for months, amy & i have had the movie hereafter on our directv list of movies to watch.

it probably sat there so long because the subject matter is a little daunting for your typical “date night”.  in fact, after a good philosophical discussion after the movie, we found ourselves watching another movie that was in our list:  the 1938 classic holiday with cary grant and catherine hepburn.  what a great movie.

later that evening, catching up a little on twitter, i saw a re-tweet from one of my favorite tweeters to this article in the LA Times entitled “pondering a universe without purpose”.

these things emphasize something i do a lot, but for which there is a not-so-surprising dearth of mainstream discussion in this country (and probably worldwide):  a true debate on “why are we here?”

now, as i see it, the reasons these things are hard to think about are very different than the reasons that they are hard to talk about.

to me, what makes them hard to think about is that you have to ask yourself questions for which the answer may be “i don’t know, and i may never know.”  and for some, correlating purpose in life without a reason we are here becomes an existential conundrum, one i would guess most find somewhat paralyzing.  individuals will have all sorts of reactions.  leaders probably don’t wish to deal with the consequences of populations filled with people who give up because they don’t see a purpose.

of course, another thing that makes them hard to think about is that we live in a socio-political cultural environment that stymies such discussion.  fundamentalist religious zealots have grabbed the microphones and won’t let go, and tend not to be of a mindset that allows discussion of existential questions that we have no hard and fast answers for. individuals who don’t feel a stable underpinning for their own existence cling to whatever first story answered their questions on the topic, even if others are able to point out the obvious logical inconsistencies in their belief sets.

i don’t have answers.  only questions.  and i want to have the discussion with others who are willing to accept that their beliefs are beliefs but not answers, and who are willing to believe something else if it makes more sense … and who are willing to have discussions with me that may not answer the questions we come up with.

i want to know the answer to “why”.  and i’m willing to live my entire life in pursuit of the real answers to “what exactly is consciousness?”, “why are we conscious?”, “what is the relation between the ‘what’ and the ‘why’?”.  and i’m ok knowing that i don’t have answers to these questions now, and may never have answers to them.

and i’m okay knowing that i strive to live a just and moral life, that i strive for good in all that i do, and that i do not need to flagellate myself when i falter, and that absent answers to the above questions, if i live my life with the purpose of making the lives of those around me better through my actions and existence, it seems likely that the way i live my life will not be that far from any meaning that may truly be the answer to the unanswered questions above.