Often when I reflect on my life, I criticize myself. I try to figure out a better way of solving the problem. But so many problems are context-specific; tied to a situation that will never repeat; tied to not knowing things that I know now.

I'll do better next time, I think ( Read more... )

Last night, a friend of mine dressed up as Raggedy Andy and attacked me with a boffer sword while I defended myself with a 40 cm wiffle bat while remaining attached by one hand to an overhead ring.

We stopped because while it was fun, striking a person who is both moving and unarmoured is not exactly safe. So he whacked me some more while I stayed ( Read more... )

This review of Greg Bear's sci-fi novel Legacy is juxtaposed to the next-to-sci-fi experience that is Transition because it is the neatest metaphor I have found to date.

It contains spoilers and probably errors.

In Legacy...

Most of what remains of humanity lives in Thistledown, a hollowed-out asteroid, where people are immortal, and have assistant ( Read more... )

[I've made a little edit]

The renaming/rite/of-passage/initiation is a little less than two weeks off now and it is dawning on me that this is a pretty big deal.

With "Sasha" I let an experimental pragmatic name hang on me to see how it affected my balance, so to speak. With "Amy," I am not only taking on a new name; grafting it on rather than simply ( Read more... )

                The hardest worthwhile things:

3rd        changing your life

2nd       being yourself

1st        trying the above, failing, then getting up and trying again

Formative moments in my sociopolitical/epistemological paradigm:

"Grade Three"

The Rule:
"You must mark each-other's papers with a red pencil-crayon.
If you do not have a red pencil-crayon, borrow one from the child in front of you."

I remember noticing:
(a) the red pencil crayons were defective, as the lead often popped out the back when you pressed ( Read more... )

Many people, often including myself, are ashamed to feel bad. Perhaps we think that we have no righ to experience regret, remorse, anger, sorrow, resentment, or even discomfort ( Read more... )

Happy New Year all.

Nineday is the close of week zero and a good time for summaries and resoultions:

This year was a trial; the second part of a lesson about Work and Love that began in 2005.

1. - An unsuccessful experiment at returning to school. Later, a more successful attempt at returning to school. I really do enjoy school, and learning, and ( Read more... )

"You seem driven."

Someone said this about Lichen, a character I was playing, but I think that's because a lot of me shows through in him.

The last year was a trial. I realized that there was no way that my life was going to get fixed unless I did it. I also realized that the world will move with or without me, that I will get old, and I will die. I ( Read more... )

Two years back, I felt inadequate because I was doing less than my share of the work: the other students were toiling harder and longer than I. I became a good student, but I forgot that that I'd done that and it was enough, so this semester I overcompensated by being a "good" full-time student and working one day a week and learning hapkido and ( Read more... )