Csquared Thoughts

Ayn Rand

There's been a resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand recently, and an apparent spike in the sales of her books. This has been variously attributed to the election of Obama, the recession, or both. There's also a couple of new books about her, which I may or may not read.

Several years ago, when I was in a spiritual journey group at All Saints' Episcopal in Palo Alto, one of the members, several years older than me, described his college days and being a member of the Ayn Rand faction and hence part of the conservative minority of the radical early sixties.

I found this interesting, as did a few of us who were younger. We read Ayn Rand in the late sixties or early seventies while in high school. But to us it wasn't about political conservatism. It was about the lone individual standing up against the structure of society. I admired Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged because she was happy as vice president of operations for he family's railroad business. She didn't need or want to be president. She knew she was the one really running the railroad in the job she had.

We admired Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, the architect (supposedly modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright) for his independence and his unwillingness to conform to society's norms.

I suspect Rand would have been appalled and offended at our misappropriation of her principles.

Today, those are principles that I can't stand by, even in our altered form.

We're in this world together. We're in the church together. The lone individual out there on the cliff in the howling wind is not going to help save the planet.

The Justice Project on Facebook quoted Adam Taylor: "Too often we privatize Jesus, reducing the gospel to only personal salvation."

That doesn't work. More tomorrow. 

missing friends

You can read the title either as "friends I miss," or "friends who are missing."

In his science fiction novel Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card's protagonist, Andrew, is on a planet where he is trying to resolve a problem. As one of the elite, one of the leaders, he has an implant that allows him access to a being, part living, part machine who has access to a sort of universal database. Jane, I believe her name was. She acted as a sort of hyper-secretary. Problem was, the average citizen on the planet didn't trust those with the implant. Andrew, in order to gain their trust, switched off the connection. He gained the trust of the people he was talking to, but lost Jane. When he finally re-connected, she came back, but the relationship wasn't the same. She had been off in other realms discovering other things, and was never again his dedicated secretary.

My friend Lynn, who loaned me that book and the first book in the series, Ender's Game, seems to have disappeared. She was laid off from her job, which was in many ways a good thing for her - relieving her from a lot of stress and tension. But one of the primary connections we had, a shared life of the stress and tensions in Silicon Valley, is no more. She is looking at other things, other paths, other directions. Things to which I may not so immediately relate. And she hasn't taken the time to stay in touch.

I sent her an email with a link to my vacation pictures. She responded, but didn't even bother to look at the pictures, even with her new-found free time.

All things change, all good things come to an end (as we saw in the concluding episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation). But I don't have to like it, and I can grieve the loss.

hijacking the healthcare reform bill

We interrupt today's regularly scheduled blog for this important perspective.

shift happens

Susie Bright is a well-known writer and editor on the subject of sex. A guest on her weekly audio program on audible.com once told her she was the leader of the intellectual segment of writers on the subject. I think that was an apt description.

In a recent program she read from an essay of hers describing how being bisexual isn't the barrel of fun many take it to be. She described how she gave a talk on being bisexual in a class on feminism at Cal State Long Beach, only to be greeted by silence at the end. She says:

Finally, the most articulate student in class, the lesbian to end all lesbians, a redheaded graduate student with peerless feminist credentials raised her eyebrow and delivered my death sentence. How do you justify, she said, giving women's energy and lesbian knowledge to our oppressors and then expect any principled lesbian-identified woman to trust you?

She goes on to say:

I could not have predicted at that time that one day I would be a lesbian sex expert and this very same redhead would be living with her husband and two kinds in a suburb outside of Chicago. My politics at the time did not allow for the most important principle of all: shift happens.

We've all seen this kind of "shift," and depending on our perspective are often not terribly tolerant, labeling such a person as a sell-out. Well, I do that anyway.

But people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. I morphed from someone who didn't have much use for organized religion to a Unitarian-Universalist and Jewish-convert wannabe to metaphysical New Thought adherent and Religious Science practitioner to a Lutheran-Episcopal liturgical Christian.

Shift happens. Better not to judge.

local restaurants

The economy has been hard on small business. That's why I'm glad to see our local restaurants continue to keep their doors open. As I've written, we rarely eat out for dinner, because we love our kitchen so much. But because we both work from home a lot, we eat out for lunch frequently.

We still miss our South Philly Cafe, and whenever we go by there Terry and I both look over at the former location as if it will somehow magically reappear like Brigadoon. So far we haven't been successful.

But other local restaurants are holding their own. Our local Thai restaurant hangs on, in spite of having laid off the waitress we loved so much last December. The manager doubles as waitress, or sometimes as cook. Our Mexican  restaurant Victoria's is always busy. I swear that half of the customers are related in one way or the other to the family that owns the place.  When Terry's not around I go to La Hacienda, a place that doesn't agree with her for some reason. They know me and know what I order, so all I have to do is sit down and wait for my lunch to arrive. From time to time we visit our local Irish pub, which excels at comfort food. Not the greatest from a health perspective, but so enjoyable!

We enjoy supporting our locally owned restaurants and wish them all the best.

Sex and the City

I said I would have more to say about one of my treadmill viewing choices, Sex and the City.

It's been eleven years since the first season. After watching season 1 and part of season 2 on the treadmill, I can say it's good entertainment for 25 minutes on the treadmill, but...

• The characters, especially Carrie, are constantly smoking. Ugh! That was definitely uncool in California in 1998. Don't know about New York. (Though Terry tells me that New York was and is different.)
• Birth control is only mentioned tangentially, when it fits the story line. Otherwise sex is indulged in freely as if that were not an issue or a concern.
• And that's not to mention HIV/AIDS and other STD's, which don't exist in this world, despite the fact that one semi-regular character is gay.
• The women seem to define themselves by the men they can (or cannot) attract, and the men are defined by their sexual prowess and their ability to deliver earth-shattering orgasms.
• Being part of the Manhattan social scene seems to be the definition of success.

Still, I keep watching. The show burns up my treadmill time quickly. But I see it as entertainment, and not as something that provides any sort of definition of values or priorities,

"ain't it awful"

I find myself using that phrase with some regularity, both in my own mind and in conversation.

Sample usage: "Before all the reorganizations and workforce reductions, the four of us used to have lunch together in the cafeteria and play ain't it awful."

I guess that dates me. You have to be a certain age to get the context of that phrase. And who has even mentioned Transactional Analysis since the 1970's?

sigh

concern about friends

I love to seep in on Saturday. It's an important part of my week. But I have my old friend Lynn, with whom I like to keep in touch. Coffee on Saturday morning is the best way to do so. I took a vacation day last Friday, so Saturday seemed like a good day to meet for coffee. I got out of bed early on Saturday, took a shower, had breakfast, and headed up to our appointed espresso shop. She didn't show up. Very unusual. I called her. She had forgotten. Completely out of character. But with good reason. She had been to the emergency room just two days before with concerns about her heart medication.

Now I knew that that she had had a few heart baubles a few weeks back. But I had thought all was under control. Apparently not.

I hadn't been previously aware that she even had any heart issues. And she's not that many years older than I am.

Helps keep things in perspective and remembering the fragility and value of life. I trust and pray that all will stabilize for her.

Woodstock + 40

I have to be truthful and admit that the summer of 1969 I was between my sophomore and junior years of high school and was nowhere near Woodstock. And for many people actually being there was not a lot of fun, given that attendance was ten times what was expected and the infrastructure was not in place to support the crowd. (Sort of like attending the Rose parade in person and camping on the street, as I did Dec. 31, 1975/Jan. 1, 1976. But that's a topic for another blog entry.)

Still, looking back at an idealized version of the event 40 years later is not entirely bad. After all, the event showcased many of the great rock and roll artists of the day.

Being the Dick Cavett fan that I am, my favorite story is that Joni Mitchell's manager insisted that she cancel Woodstock so she not miss her appearance on the program. Crosby, Stills, and Nash went, for all intents and purposes, straight from the festival to Cavett's studio. (That's a great episode, by the way, if you ever get ahold of the DVD.)

A big part of our cultural history, certainly.

planning ahead

The recent news about the black spot on Jupiter, probably caused by a collision of some sort, prompted me to pull out this cartoon, which I cut out of a magazine (probably The New Yorker) more than ten years ago.

It obviously reflects the reality of how humankind tends to function, but on its own terms it just gives me a good chuckle whenever I see it.