Revived optimism

Generally when I read blogs and news and think about the shape of things now and the shape of things to come, I end up feeling depressed. We’re going down into a sinkhole of depravity and ignorance… no one recognizes the real threats… Anyway, it usually gets me down somewhat and I have to pull away from my reading to recognize that, indeed, my own rather optimistic views about the future of humanity probably have some relevance still.

Well, in short order, today, I read a couple posts that really restored my optimism about the future. Things actually ARE getting better… we’re just going through some speedbumps on the way there. I can see that… and it’s what I’ve always thought.

At Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky discusses the fact that all our anesthesizing TV-viewing as a culture has been something of a collective “bender” where we have adjusted to the new reality of having lots of free time that we’re not quite sure how to employ yet. The expected outcome: once we grow into this new reality, we’re going to be doing and seeing great things, greater than we can imagine!

And Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred has been discussing the future in a series called Transcending Youth. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) This talks about society, but in a more personal sense… gives me the feeling that retirement isn’t really an ending, but a beginning of your ability to do great things in life.

(Though there really was no question that I’d have to pursue Great Things my whole life… I’d be too bored and hate myself if I didn’t. I am far too driven to just stop at some point, unless I have a catastrophic trauma sometime!)

Then again, perhaps I’m just at a moment to feel optimistic… who knows?

not feeling neighborly

I generally have a less than enthusiastic response for neighbors, despite the fact that I’ve been living in dorms or apartments for nearly 15 years, now… As long as we stay out of one another’s way, I’m OK with that, but once your existence infringes on mine–well, it makes me cranky. I had a bit of a fit today because a neighbor took my parking spot. Not only that, but they took up almost the entire driveway, which would ordinarily be more than roomy enough for two cars. The most obnoxious part of this? This neighbor, unlike me, has an entire 2-car garage! Sigh.

Oh well. But along the theme of irritating neighbors, I’m going to post a series of songs that, over the years, I’ve heard blared at the top of my neighbors’ stereos volume capacity, on repeat… every one of these songs I know by memory, despite never having owned the CDs!

Rednex – Cotton Eye Joe

Israel Kamakawiwo Ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Dave Matthews Band – Satellite

Articulation problems

I’ve been having trouble, today, fitting words to the thoughts I’ve been having. Maybe it’s because I spent too much time “in my head” over the weekend. (I never realized, until taking a personality test last week that asked how much time you spend thinking, that most people don’t spend all their time mulling things over. That’s just my natural M.O.) But here goes:

I watch all these movies about love and relationships. They follow standard archetypal lines and, with a few exceptions, you can generally tell in the first five minutes who’s going to end up with whom by the movie’s close. Each form of emotional expression has a scripted response, such as the parent/spouse telling a frightened child/spouse in a dangerous situation, “I promise we’ll make it through this.” When you watch enough TV and movies, or read enough books, you know all the situations, all the inputs, and all the expected outputs. Even when people change things on you, it’s just a minor variation on a theme.

But more and more as I watch this stuff, I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t trust anything about it. Movies (any sort of visual scripted entertainment) and books are a form of storytelling, a way to entertain ourselves with myths and the way things should be. (Rather than how they actually are.) But the storytellers also shape our idea of what the “right endings” are, and how they should come about. A heroine who falls in love with a hero the first time she sets eyes on him will end up riding off into the sunset with him (unless it’s supposed to be a tragedy and one or the other of them dies in the course of the story).

You don’t have one where a heroine falls in love at first sight but then gets over it. If she does, it’s because her real Prince Charming was just under her nose the whole time as she “fell in love with love” and was swept off her feet by the well-spoken imposter.

No, our fiction is well-ordered and stories must be told to a certain set of guidelines. This is all well and good if we remember that these stories are just stories, just someone’s idea of how they wish things could be. It’s when you can’t distinguish reality from fiction that you start having problems.

Because each of us sees ourselves as the protagonist of our own life stories…

…no, that’s not it. Starting over:

I do a lot of learning about social interactions from what I see in pop culture. Books, movies, TV… they all help me to categorize and understand the interweavings of human social dynamics and our relationships with each other. It’s generally effective–if nothing else, you’re able to see what shared myths we participate in, here in our culture, and what we’d like to be the case.

You know there’s, True Love and there’s Destiny, kismet, also the Platonic ideal that we are mere halves of the same person wandering around, looking for the Other to complete us. The idea that anything can be forgiven when real love exists between people. The idea that if you just “let it out” when you feel something, that everything will be made right and all will be solved in the end. The idea that nothing you feel can be false, that your “gut” is always right.

None of those are true, though–or at least, they’re not always true. (Which might be worse, since it’s unpredictable.) What feels like True Love generally can be recognized as infatuation, a few years later. And one person’s love for someone else may or may not be returned, for no reasons that anyone can seem to determine. You can feel spiritually drawn to someone, and yet they feel none of it in return. And “happily ever after” actually takes a LOT of work, and often isn’t happy at all.

But in a culture where stories have replaced the community as our sources of learning by example, I think we’re not able to recognize a lot of myths for the falsehoods that they are.

Back when novels were… well, novel… in the mid-1800s and such, reading fiction was considered in pious circles to be a no-no. You were reading “a pack of lies” and filling up your head with foolishness. Instead, you should do good honest work… because idle hands are the Devil’s playground… (am I mixing up anachronistic cliches here?)

I wonder if those well-intentioned Puritans weren’t on to something. I think that, much as a diet of cakes and chocolate would be unhealthy for the body, a diet of pure entertainment is unhealthy for mental and social development. We’ve lost our ability to negotiate between the wish-world of adolescent fantasy and the meat and potatoes world of genuine reality. What is real? What is a fantasy? Where does what I wish to be true leave off and what I know to be true begin?

I’m still not sure where I’m going with this line of thought… I feel as though I’ve grasped the edges of an insight that could be all-important, but I’m not sure what the shape of the finished insight is going to be. More later, I guess!

Old Uniform Ideas

Things I could do with my old camouflage…

I really shouldn’t be given the internet and enough time to find bright ideas…

The Great Closet Purge

I think the problem got started back in 2004, the fall, when I began graduate school. I made friends; I got busy. I brought a lot of paper and books and other school stuff home, and didn’t really have the time (or perhaps the desire) to find good places for it as I should have. I got deeper into the schoolwork. I made more friends. I got involved in several social scenes, I began a relationship, the relationship ended. I sunk into a well of self-pity and must finish my thesis frenzy (the two don’t mix well, by the way–I recommend not breaking up just before you finish your thesis).

My bedroom got so badly piled with stuff that I couldn’t stand being in there anymore, and I moved into my guest room. (Probably that was the time when I should have faced the music and started the clearing-out process. But did I? No.) And when the movers came to pack things up, my house was still a mess of piles and junk and you name it. I moved in here, a much larger place, and managed to restrain the piles (some of which are still just boxes full of random junk), for a time. It even looked nice if you didn’t dig too far… You may recall me worrying while I was deployed about the mess I’d left behind, down to the basket of dirty clothes that I’d left sitting in my closet.

But with the addition of my knitting habit late last year, things have gotten out of hand. Unlike my beading craze of a couple years before, knitting takes yarn, which takes up space, and starts to overflow into living spaces. I’ve been busy again with business trips and schools and other things, and my very LARGE apartment is now overflowing with junk and piles and stuff that needs to be sorted through…

So it is time for the Great Closet Purge. I just went through my bedroom closet and filled 2 giant-sized trash bags with clothes (for Goodwill), and I’m making a start on the other random junk that needs to be tossed out. However, after two hours of that, I’m reaching the tearing my hair out, can’t make any decisions anymore point… so it’s time to pause, and begin again when I’ve had time to regain my equilibrium.

I’ve already had the chance to find things I’d completely forgotten about, and experience the, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know I still had this!” moment (before putting it in the Goodwill bag because obviously I didn’t need it if I didn’t even remember I’d had it).

I’ve also had the opportunity to discover at least one thing that I thought was lost for good–a very good thing, since the item in question was pretty expensive. I’m missing a couple other things I’ve been looking for, now, for a while (but these are not expensive, so if they’re permanently misplaced it won’t be the end of the world). Of course, I’m still dealing with a bunch of stuff that I keep for sentimental reasons… a pile of t-shirts, for instance, that I honestly can’t bear to part with, for all that I’m not going to wear them ever again. These are t-shirts I got in high school, or college, and wore religiously throughout the 90’s. I wonder if I can make a t-shirt quilt…

(Brief pause as I Google “t-shirt quilt”…) Wow! Or I could just order one and have it sent back to me!!! I may have to do this–it would get rid of the annoying pile of t-shirts I don’t use anymore, and it would be a nice warm quilt that was one-of-a-kind. I may just do this.

Oh yeah… was I writing something?

Anyway, the process has begun. It will be a long job full of much effort on my part, but if I can have all my stuff purged and ready to be packed by the time I have to deploy, I will be very happy. (Yes, this time through I plan to let go of my apartment, put the stuff in storage for a year, and figure out where I’m going to live on the other end of my deployment.)

I certainly won’t be tempted to buy any more stuff (like clothes and furniture) for a while… though for some reason I can’t seem to stop myself with the yarn and book purchases. I think that’s a collecting instinct, or something. Hmmm.

Words v. actions

Well, the wargame that we spent a week executing (including Saturday) is now officially over. It was a success… no one won, no one lost, and everyone learned what they were supposed to… officially a success in our books!

The funny thing is that this wargame required a lot of coordination between various “nations” played by different groups of students. You were supposed to concentrate on diplomatic means before you thought about military ones, and so on and so forth. It was funny, because we had a group of diplomatic types there to consult with us, and after a day’s prolonged back-and-forth with one of the nations as they were doing the run-up to war, the diplomats and the people running the game got in a heated debate.

“They just did all this hard work today,” spluttered one of the diplomats, “and you’re STILL going to force it to escalate to war?”

On the other hand, the (military) faculty member in charge of that group was saying, “They wasted all this time today… we’re going to show them what happens when they do that!”

Basically, the talking types (diplomats) wanted to have the in-game diplomacy to have resolved the (manufactured) crisis, and have the students “rewarded” for all their hard work this way. Whereas the “let’s take this kinetic” types (military) thought it’d been a day all but wasted.

I just thought it was a funny illustration of the varying mindsets of the military and the diplomatic corps. No matter how hard we work at delaying/derailing conflicts, we in the military are likely to feel that we haven’t actually “done something” unless we spring into action. If they’d “rewarded” the students by telling ‘em they’d solved the crisis with diplomacy, that entire military group would have felt cheated of the full wargame experience… which is something I don’t think the professional talkers realized (and might have been horrified if they did).

This is why I and the people I work with, probably, are so mystified when some politicians imply that if we just talk to the rest of the world, all will be sweetness and light, and we’ll never be disliked again. (Well, we might have to throw in an apology or two just to be safe.)

I am Jack’s [fill in the blank]

I keep having phrases such as “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise” crop up in my head this afternoon. Hmmm, can you tell what movie I watched over the weekend??

Anyway, I can’t think of too much to say… my brain seems to have run out of words for the moment. (Probably too hung up on the “I am Jack’s…” meme. Sigh.)

Though–it did occur to me that only about a week ago I was annoyed with yet another predictable movie, where I saw everything coming from just about the opening credits, and I wondered if good movies were still being made. And after watching Fight Club, and also (along a completely different theme) Georgia Rule, I was reminded that they may be few and far between, but there are good movies that make you think and that don’t run along completely predictable lines. OK, I’m not 100% convinced that Georgia Rule is in the same category, but I didn’t see it coming and even though it had Lindsey Lohan, it was thought-provoking (even if it tried too hard at times).

The other thing I’ve noticed lately is that with movies, I’m hyper-sensitive to the fact that they’re trying to preach to me, to “teach” me in some way. Watching Horton Hears a Who not too long ago, I was particularly frustrated by this. The whole movie felt like an extended sermon — but I couldn’t quite tell what it was trying to indoctrinate me with. Which, in and of itself, was annoying. I’m still trying to figure out why all my red flags were triggered by that movie… I’ve read one critique of it along the lines that it was sexist (the mayor’s 96 daughters weren’t as useful to him as his one son), and several references to the “a person’s a person no matter how small” that was picked up by the pro-life movement, but I don’t think that’s what was triggering my “they’re trying to indoctrinate you” meter, either… Oh well. Perhaps it will come to me.

I am Jack’s writer’s block.

Meanwhile, two doors down…

Two buildings down from my workplace this morning, Secretary of Defense Gates made some waves during an address to students from some of the schools around our “Academic Circle” (Maxwell AFB hosts the professional military schools that AF members must attend at various points in their careers).

Some points from his speech this morning (full text):

My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield. I’ve been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets into the theater.

Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth.

While we’ve doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough.

He mentions Col John Boyd, an officer who apparently rocked the Air Force quite a bit in his day, and developed many military strategic concepts that we still use today. Col Boyd made some remarks that Secretary Gates summarized:

Boyd would say — and I quote — “One day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises, and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club, and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way, and you can do something, something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors, but you won’t have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you have to make a decision: to be or to do.”

For the kinds of challenges America faces and will face, the armed forces will need principled, creative, reform-minded leaders, men and women who, as Boyd put it, want to do something, not be somebody.

And he wrapped things up with another reference to John Boyd, and the spectacular success that the AF has had in fulfilling its mission to date:

No doubt such changes will be difficult for an organization that has been so successful for six decades. The last time a U.S. ground force was attacked from the sky was more than half a century ago, and the last Air Force jet lost to aerial combat was in Vietnam.

Such success is attributable in part to the ways airmen have pushed technology to its outer limits, but it is also attributable to maverick thinkers like John Boyd.

Now, what intrigues me is what the various news articles about this speech picked up on. Most of them reference Secretary Gates “bashing” the Air Force and that he wanted more UAV support for intelligence purposes – valid, but not exactly the keynote of the speech. However, in others, notably this article from Time, they miss the point entirely:

Gates made clear change won’t be easy for the Air Force, whose key victories, he suggested, happened long ago. “The last time a U.S. ground force was attacked from the sky was more than half a century ago,” he noted, “and the last Air Force jet lost to aerial combat was in Vietnam.”

Now how’s that for twisting around success into failure? The fact that the Air Force has such a distinguished record in maintaining air superiority – nay, air dominance (follow the links for distinctions on these terms) – is nothing but an outstanding success on its part. However, because we’ve been so successful, we have, in the words of some of the people I know, “become victim of our own success”. The second that ground troops started being fired upon by enemy air assets they’d start howling for more airpower presence… (I’m wondering if it’s going to take that occurrence for us to remember the importance of the Air Force’s role.)

Anyhow, it was interesting to hear some measured, but overall constructive, criticism of the Air Force from the Secretary of Defense. I’ve heard this before – heck, I’ve said some of it before – but you get the sense that the highest levels of the organization must be taking their guidance from some completely different set of information, from the kind of things that they emphasize. It’s good to hear that they’ve actually got their heads on straight, and they’re trying to resolve some of the problems that large organizations are prone to. Five years of steady warfare have streamlined the Army and Marines to an extent we’re not seeing yet in the Air Force, mainly because our wartime role tends to require less time in the thick of battle… but I’m really seeing the signs of burgeoning change, kick and scream as the organization may in the midst of the process!

Facial recognition…

Though I’ll admit that, flattering though this may be, I don’t trust it… among my top ten (#8 and #9) facial matches were Jesse Metcalfe and Vince Vaughn, on this picture…

And the only celebrity who repeated over more than one picture was Eva Herzigova… In fact, one of my pictures showed up with Catherine Zeta-Jones as my closest facial match! (see below–again flattering, but hardly believable…)

So what does this show us? Mostly that 2-D facial recognition still needs some tweaking…

Long week…

I’m being reminded of what it’s like to have a deployment schedule, this week… I’ve been working on a wargame that we’re running, and it’s scheduled to have a normal game day tomorrow, Saturday, so my only weekend day this weekend is going to be Sunday.

Oh well–actually it’s not that bad; I’m pretty busy all day and I enjoy the challenge of having a whole new set of duties that keep me engaged and interested. I’m sure I’d get bored with it if I did this ordinarily, but for now it’s interesting and challenging (both of which are Kj synonyms for “fun”, nerd that I am!). I get up really early, get home late, and spend all my time thinking about work… and I remember what it felt like when, on deployment, I lived, breathed, ate, and slept work… which got tiring after a while, but kept me very much engaged with my life, something I don’t feel most of the time in ordinary life. (At times I feel like I’m sleepwalking through my regular life.)

So this is a reminder… a rather low-key one, too, which is a good thing, since I’m already combating sleep debt… headaches, morning grogginess and all!