Cognitive assonance

Cognitive dissonance is the distress and confusion that sane people experience when they discover that they are holding two beliefs which contradict each other.

We need a word which expresses the opposite of that for people who hold contradictory beliefs while experiencing no distress or confusion whatsoever, either because they don't understand the contradiction or because they are actively ignoring it since both beliefs serve greater ideals (using the word loosely) which they cannot bear to have examined.

A particular subset of Americans justify their ideal of reducing the power of government through the belief that their government is incompetent, ill-informed, slow to act, and clumsy when it does act.

The same people justify their ideal of freely bearing arms through the belief that their government is supernaturally competent, omniscient*, swift to act, and brutally efficient when it does act.

Discuss.

* Not that they would know the word, generally.

Black dog

The strangest thing just happened. I was lying on my back on the floor (stretching out my back after a day spent mostly sitting) meditating with my eyes closed — and I had the impression that a large black dog entered the room. I knew it wouldn't attack me, it wasn't even particularly interested in me, but still I found it hard to close my eyes again. Eventually I felt that it was not in the room any more, and went on to finish the meditation.

But it still disturbed me so much that I had to walk around the apartment, stopping in each room for a moment, to feel whether it was still here. I think it's gone now.

Very odd.

On spotting a pattern

Readers may — should — be aware of PostSecret, a kind of anonymous clearinghouse for secrets that people write on postcards and send to Frank, who posts (a selection of) them on the web. (To be clear: people post their own secrets, it's not for outing your friends or even enemies.) I read the site every Sunday (it updates once a week), and am always moved by at least one of the secrets.

For a marvellous time, there was a PostSecret iPhone app too, which did much the same thing — but without Frank's intervention, so people could and did post secrets at any time of the day or night. Since I liked the website so much, I bought and regularly read the app too.

The app had several effects, the one relevant to this story was that it increased by several orders of magnitude the number of secrets being published. This sudden superabundance made it really easy to spot patterns and commonalities. One pattern which I noticed early on, and which fascinated me, was this:

My dead [person I was very close to] spoke to me and saved my life.

Some examples (quoting from memory, obviously; the sense is correct even if the words may be misremembered):

I heard my dead father whistling in the kitchen like he used to do, so I went down to see. The stove was on fire.

The light was green but my daddy told me to stop the car, so I did. As I stepped on the brakes, a car ran through the red light in front of me. My secret: my daddy died three years ago.

My best friend died in a car accident n* years ago. I was driving across a highway bridge with my kids, when I heard her voice from the back seat telling me to change lanes. I did, and a truck blew out a tire and veered across the highway to crash into the barrier right where we had been. It would have killed us all.

Had this just been one secret of a single person, I'd have written it off as a hallucination or the babbling of an idiot. But there were hundreds of these! There was at least one every week!

I was and remain fascinated by these stories. I'd love to know what happened to these people: what exactly did they experience?

Am I saying that the dead remain on earth and communicate with us? No.

Am I saying that something inexplicable and very interesting happened to these people, which we would do well to study? Hell yes.

The app was taken down recently in an unfortunate victory of arseholism over decency. A minority of users were posting porn and/or abusive and insulting pictorial comments, taking advantage of the fact that the posting process was automated and instantaneous. A self-organizing committee of volunteers emerged who tried to dam the flood, but they were overwhelmed by the quantity of garbage that had to be found and deleted. Ah well.

* Can't remember how many years, it doesn't matter to the story.

Zatsuroku

That's Japanese for "miscellany," or so Google tells me, and who would know better? I have quite a lot of odds and ends left to report from my trip to Japan, though I've been home for nearly two weeks and will be flying to Canada on Sunday (weather-gods willing).

Many of the oddities that one notices in Japan are social, differences in the way people move and behave within society. Social space and touch are prime examples of this. All humans (at least in large cities) project an "I am alone" field when they are forced into close proximity with strangers. It's what lets you share a park bench with somebody without having to hear their life's story (garrulous drunks and Forrest Gump not withstanding). These fields are different between Westerners (by which I principally mean Anglo-Saxons) and the Japanese. Our fields say "You are not really here, you cannot touch me. I am safe." Japanese fields say "I am not really here, I will not touch you. You are safe."

Body contact is another prime example. We all know from films that the Japanese bow constantly, instead of touching, and that is actually true. The Westerner in an interacting group of Japanese (at a store, for example) is reminded sometimes of a flock of pigeons all nodding and ducking at each other. The depth of the bow is significant and finely calibrated: whether from the head or shoulders or upper body or waist; whether a subtle nod or a full right-angled bend. When I saw what I presumed to be the first presentation of a new boyfriend to the girl's parents, they bent about 30° from the shoulders, but he bent stiffly from the waist, and went so far down that his head nearly bumped the table. The opposite is also surely true: that one can express a subtle but biting snub in giving a shallower bow than is appropriate. It strikes me that the Japanese have a far greater bodily facility for expressing social relations (for want of a word), there isn't nearly that much variety in handshakes even if you count the doublehanded or biceps-clasping options.

I was never on a subway train in central Tokyo in rush hour so I didn't experience the "pushers" who force people onto the trains, but buses and subway in Kyoto were dense enough. There too, social space is very different. The Japanese differentiate between intentional and accidental touching, in a way that we don't. The head-to-toe all-around full-body contact that you get when 50 extra people get on to a bus that was already overfull by my German standards, is perfectly acceptable in Japan. Because it's inevitable and in a way impersonal, it doesn't count as contact. As a consequence, it's acceptable to push your way quite forcefully between people to get on or off of a bus.

There would have been bloodshed on a New York city (or German) bus before it got to 80% of the density that I rode home from Ginkaku-Ji in, because we don't distinguish between somebody deliberately pressing against us and somebody who is forced against us by the people behind them: after a certain point, it's all offensive to us.

But intentional touching is taboo in Japan, whereas we allow it (depending on context and the bit that gets touched and what we infer to be the toucher's motives). I realized this on the bus, after it started to empty out. At one point we went around a corner at speed and hit a pothole. The bus rocked and a schoolgirl near me staggered and started to fall. I reached out to catch her, then stopped myself in time. She recovered, simply bumping into her friends who simply stood still and broke her fall. I'm sure that she would have been shocked and offended if I'd grabbed her arm, whereas a German or Canadian would not. They would understand that I acted to save them from harm, and would be pleased and grateful.

I'm afraid I mislead you when I stated that Japanese is read from right to left. That is not generally true. Normally Japanese is read from left to right, so the streaming-text signs in the Shinkansen were correct. The exception to this is fascinating. Single-horizontal-line Japanese is read right-to-left when it is a religious inscription in a temple or shrine! The reason for this is that the inscription is visualized as an entire page of text (which is read in top-to-bottom columns, from the right margin to the left), and the single line of characters represents the first character of each column of that conceptual page. So you read at the right margin a column of one character, then move left and read the next column, and so on.

Somebody commented on an earlier post (perhaps in the bowdlerized version under my real name on Faecesbook) that the Japanese are very ecologically-minded, and in regard to water usage that may be true; though paradoxically water is one of the few natural resources that are not scarce in Japan. They have a very different attitude to paper, wood and plastics. Take as an example the little moist hand-wiper towelettes that we typically know from airplanes. Almost all restaurants and cafes in Japan will give you one of those before your meal or snack. I gradually became very uncomfortable with this because of the huge amount of waste it generates. Consider: The wrapper weighs say one gramme, so each thousand people who use one generate a kilo of plastic waste. The population is 127 million, and let's say that on average every fourth person uses one a day; this is probably a low estimate since I was given up to five of them per day. That adds up to 32 tonnes of plastic waste every day, just from the wrapping around moist hand-wipers. Factor in the towelette itself, plus the meta-packaging that those packets are shipped in, plus the carbon cost of delivering the packages and collecting the waste … I don't see how that can be sustainable, or why this status quo should be maintained.

Disposable (wooden!) chopsticks are another example. I read that twenty-five billion pairs of them are used and thrown away every year, "enough wood to build 17,000 houses" it says in the Lonely Planet guide (which by the way I can recommend). How many trees per day does that equate to? I got sick of that almost instantly, and bought a rather nice pair of chopsticks and a carrying case, and earned amused and curious glances by producing them in restaurants for the rest of my stay.

It's getting too cold to type (the boiler/central heating unit is being replaced as I write) so I will post this and update it later on.

Rosebud

U went into labour just after midnight last night (i.e. this morning), three days before her scheduled caesarian. U and daughter are fine, G is wandering around the hospital delirious with relief and happiness, Oma is upstairs with Ralph.

An odd thing: just after midnight last night, lying in bed, I suddenly had an urgent desire to figure out how I might get to their house in the middle of the night, and how long it would take to get there. I decided that waiting for a taxi would be slower than walking, and therefore that it would take me nearly twenty minutes from a lying start (as it were), and with that the urgency passed.

At about the same time, G was wondering who to call to take care of Ralph for the hour it would take U's cousin to drive Oma in from their house in the country; he concluded that I could not get there fast enough, and called Famous Photographer instead.

It's probably just a coincidence, but it is a very interesting one.

Awake

… since more than an hour now, I'd been drifting in and out of sleep for a while. It's too early and I am too tired to stay up, though: this is not yet morning. Hot chocolate is brewing.

Feeling an odd blah-ness physically, which I put down to my late cheese-and-garlic-heavy dinner last night and the half-litre of beer that accompanied it. Another good reason to go back to bed.

I've been hearing an intermittent electromechanical peeping sound for about a week now, but only at night. You'd think it would be easy enough to locate something that peeps every 35 seconds, but I cannot even state with confidence which room it's coming from. I thought that it was a low-battery warning, but have checked everything which I know uses 9-volt batteries: all fine. It's a mystery.

In other news, winter has finally arrived. It snowed overnight, the rooftops and cars are covered finger-deep (visual estimate, I didn't go outside to check).

In musical news, let me share with you a delight: the second joint-project album between David Byrne and Brian Eno, "Everything that happens will happen today," thirty years after their previous collaboration. Byrne described it as folk electronic gospel, which is a strange niche but a pretty good fit. Enjoy.

Update

Doc says "no more heparin" which is probably a good thing, and "the thrombus is measurably shrinking" which is definitely a good thing. I shall continue to bandage my leg every day for another week or so, then see how it looks. He ordered blood tests, to be certain that I am otherwise in good shape; the last such general test was made in 2001, so it's probably well overdue.

Doc also says that the vein will probably remain blocked for the rest of my life, not to worry though because the body is full of veins and the blood will find another way back into circulation. This puzzles me: is it to be considered a positive outcome?

On the other hand I am thankfully aware that my burdens are far lighter than many others' and I do count my blessings often. One doesn't wish to be as self-centered as the man who, on hearing that his barber had had to cancel their appointment because he'd broken his leg, muttered "Damn, why does this always happen to me?" However, having said that: I have become aware of the mass of twitches and twinges and flashes of discomfort in my body, which I'd never taken full notice of before. Walking home from a cappuccino at the Dead White Male Poet Cafe, I realized that I had a knot in my chest, and was able through poking and prodding to identify it as being the effect of a mildly out-of-place rib and overtense shoulder and upper back muscles.

It's been about two weeks since I started cutting down on coffee, reducing my intake from two or three cups a day to one or two a week. Having done so, I notice the effect that caffeine and sugar have on my nerves, temperament and stomach — and I don't like it. I am jingling and twitching all over, irritable and unconcentrated and easily annoyed. A resolution: I will give up sugar completely (coffee is the last holdout, I gave up putting it in tea and on cereal twenty-five years ago), and will continue to drink coffee only as a rare treat on very special occasions.

I read an interview with Peter Sloterdijk about doping scandals in sports and the Tour de France in particular. It's available in English on the website of "Der Spiegel," the magazine in which it appeared, in a very good translation. Fascinating reading, as always with Sloterdijk.

The Mauersegler are still here, though to judge by the experience of the last few years (after I began taking notes) they should be gone within a week. The days are already getting noticeably shorter, the weather seems to be cooling and calming down.

Curiouser and curiouser

Being a brow-furrowing musing on winning and losing

Regular readers with a taste for the trivial may remember that we won third prize in a competition back in November. I didn't mention at the time a very peculiar circumstance: the mayor of Smalltown himself—personally—phoned G to tell us that we'd not won. This is not a usual outcome, mayors usually do not speak even to the winners; and our previous third prize was not announced to us at all, we discovered that we'd got that one by chance.

So it was something of a puzzlement that the mayor should phone up; and even more so that he said that we would be hearing from him. Why should he want talk to the losers?

Well, a letter arrived from Smalltown today inviting us recalculate the building volume (and thus a rough estimate of its price) and submit this in person on the 21st, along with the other winners, "for discussion and negotiation." The official wording of the letter was that one of the winners' calculations—dear gods, not ours please!—could not be confirmed (i.e. were seriously wrong) and therefore that the competition result was no longer conclusive.

At this point, we all looked at each other and said "What the hell?"

Possible inferences: the town council does not want to build the first prize project. Or, the first prize was too expensive and they are looking to give the contract to the runners-up. Or, the judges screwed up somehow, in a way that would leave them open to legal challenge, and want to put the cat back in the bag.

Fascinating. Watch this space. [Teaser of a semi-update here.]

Back at work

After a lengthy Christmas and New Year's break, I was finally inspired to knuckle down and do some work on translating the Münsters' wiki, and as usual I quite enjoyed it once I got started. It seems to take roughly 90 minutes to translate a page of wiki; given that I can do three or four pages before my brain turns to mush, it would be possible to work out quite exactly when I shall be finished—if I cared to do so. This should be quite a good month financially (crosses fingers, knocks on wood, spits over right shoulder).

And with that, my dears: Shabbat shalom, good night, sleep tight, enjoy the weekend.

No: One more thing. Writing "Shabbat shalom" reminded me of a strange thing on New Year's Eve. Each of us around the table told what had been special about 2007. As I was speaking, it occurred to me in retrospect that 2007 had been a spiritually active year, what with the walk to Santiago de Compostela, and CDs by Arvo Pärt and John Tavener and Hendryk Górecki, and starting to read the Bible in German (the original 1545 translation by Martin Luther in modern type).

The particular prompter was getting a Concordance to the KJV for Christmas last year (I asked for it); at least twice a week I look up some turn of phrase or another, and that often sends me to the KJV itself to read the context. I spent most of a day in September flipping from Concordance to Bible and back, searching for an apposite quote for the back cover of the booklet to my parents' 50th anniversary party, before settling on Ecclesiastes 9:7-9 (it begins "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.")

I find it quite amusing that I, a soi-disant non-believer, should have four Bibles, a Concordance and Harold Bloom's wonderful "Book of J" in the house—and requested for Christmas this year a copy of the Apocrypha in the KJV translation, made at the same time by the same committee but not included in the "official" KJV Bible. (I would point out in mitigation, and in fairness, that I also have a Koran, the Dhammapada and two Tao Te Ching's.)

Getting back to New Year's Eve: in the course of the discussion at table I mentioned—as one does—Jacob saying to Rebekah that he was a smooth man, and his brother Esau a hairy man. The others were taken aback that I should quote from the Old Testament rather than the New. Famous Photographer in particular was quite insistent that it was wrong of me to quote from the OT: the Bible is the word of Jesus, why quote from that outmoded, obsolete, Jewish stuff? I was drunk enough to be annoyed but not enough to challenge him, so I let it pass; but I now wish that I had insisted on an explanation of what he meant.

All three would probably describe themselves in terms that an outsider would classify as "agnostic," none of them goes to church more than once a year except for weddings and funerals; and yet there is this strong, reflexive Christianity lurking just below the surface which lashes out when it perceives itself to be challenged. Odd.

What do I believe? More in the Old Testament than the New, for whatever that is worth. I don't believe in God, but the God in whom I don't believe is He of Genesis, who walks in his garden in the cool of the evening and enjoys a good meal in the company of his friends. I believe in the Protestant Work Ethic: the admonition "Get up, there's work to be done" is deeply rooted in my soul. I believe that Saint Augustine was an obnoxious prig, a hypocrite and a liar. I believe that Marx was right, and that every organized religion exists for the purpose of protecting the rich and legitimizing the powerful. Here comes the big one, and I have to confess that I hesitated to write it down: I believe that Jesus is not God, a concept that appears to confuse many Born-Agains.

My hesitation amuses me, and reminds me of the story of Luis Buñuel visiting a church with a younger artist. Buñuel spat in the holy-water stoup and invited the other man to do the same. He declined politely, and on being mocked by Buñuel replied "It is not necessary for me to spit in the stoup, Don Luis, because I do not believe in God."

Third thoughts about Second Life

I attended a seminar in Second Life yesterday on "the wounded Avatar," about the meaning of bloody, scarred and otherwise "damaged" avatars in this pixel-perfect world of idealized bodies. Fascinating in a very strange way, it made me realize that I haven't yet seen an avatar in a wheelchair or on crutches or walking with a white cane and seeing-eye-dog. I arrived quite late so cannot comment meaningfully on the issue of bloody avatars, except to report that several participants reported feeling "empowered" by choosing extreme, unusual styles of display. I found it interesting that there were no furries at the seminar: there seems to be no overlap between those who play with identity by being non-human or only partly human, and those who play with identity by being differently human.

The discussion afterwards centred around the concept of "truth" or "lies" in the appearance of avatars: is this female-looking avatar a woman in real life? It's a very strange question to be asking in a world where appearance is optional and completely malleable: What gender is that mouse or this butterfly? what gender is a lime jelly with fruit and nut bits, or a chair, or a cactus? One of the participants identified as "cross-gender" and reported with wry amusement on the confusion that she causes in SL: whichever gender of avatar she wears, somebody is upset by it.

Not to mention the fact that even "truthfully" gender-correct avatars are inaccurate and unrealistic representations: much too young, tall, thin, beautiful, healthy, symmetrically proportioned—and almost all white-skinned. My short, fat, balding old man is a more realistic human body-type, but he's nothing like my physical self (except for being identifiably male).

Why exactly does it seem to matter to so greatly to certain people—mostly men—that they know the gender and sexual orientation of the person with whom they are speaking? I think part of the amusement of SL is precisely that one doesn't know that, one knows the person one is dealing with only as a more or less consistent personality revealing itself by its words and actions (not unlike the blogging experience); and part of the attraction of SL is that one may without risk speak to people (and animals and objects) whose real-life equivalents one might hesitate to approach, whether from caution, cowardice or sound common sense.

Afterwards, M2 happened to find a group for those who cannot cope with such uncertainty: "Are you sick of meeting female avatars that are really men? Our members are certified to be of the right sex, must submit real-life identification to join, bla bla bla." (My summary.) How very peculiar to be so worried about such a simple, strange thing. After all, it's not as though you were going to be having sex with this avatar—or is that perhaps the point? My, what a shallow-water, plain-vanilla, seatbelts-fastened-and-trays-stowed-upright life I lead.

In other news I am preparing to go to Munich for the (in recent times only bi-)annual Developers' Conference of the database toolkit that I use. Still feeling rather poorly, I considered not attending but decided to "just do it," as the saying goes. (The decision was helped by having arranged to meet the Münstermeister after the conference for a discussion of the state of the world.) I shall stay overnight twice in Munich and return home on Wednesday morning.

In other words, there is a fairly high probability that I shall be unable to fulfill my NaBloPoMo obligations tomorrow. Have to hope that there is wireless available where I shall be staying (surely there must be, surely nobody lives without access to the Internets in 2007). [Updated: there is, of course. Null problemo as one says in German.]

Nineteen down, eleven to go.

Sharkey

I still dream about London, after thirteen years in Germany; in particular and most often, this place. I spent seventeen years in London, and never lived farther than two kilometers away from the centre of this satellite photo.

Often in dreams I take the bus from Euston Station up Camden High Street, get out behind Sainsbury's and walk through back alleys to Parkway and thence home. Camden is the scene of more dreams than any other place I can identify, not even my childhood home in Toronto occurs more often.

I was there again last night, a complex dream of much travelling on many buses, which began with a trainload of us (don't know who we all were) stranded in the middle of the night at Marylebone Station. A friend came by with her husband and their baby, and invited all hundred of us to come to their house which backed onto Primrose Hill Park, via a long bus ride through Highgate and York Way. Their house had a huge, hilly, unkempt garden, we all slept outdoors on the grass or at tables and chairs. I met an old lover there, though I hadn't noticed that she had been on the train with us; I cannot now identify her though in the logic of the dream I knew her well. We slept wrapped in each other's arms, naked under the stars and not at all embarrassed by the other people (very unusual for my dreams, nakedness in public is usually traumatic). I was an architect in the dream, the friend whose house it was wanted my opinion on some matter, so I and my reunited lost lover, still wrapped in each other's arms, walked around her property which now backed onto the Thames at Wapping, then went back to the garden where dawn was breaking (though it had been midday in Wapping) and lay down again.

The mood of the dream, which carried over into this morning, was of contentment and peace: a dream of being comforted. Not just the influence of my lost lover, everyone there was a friend of mine and was glad to be with me. I wish I could work out who she was/is. She had a particular way of hugging me from behind and tucking her head below my left arm, which is utterly familiar, but I just can't place the memory. How odd.

In other news I had a made-up salad for dinner, not exactly a Niçoise: half an avocado, a romaine lettuce chopped fine, half a tin of tuna, 75g of white mushrooms fried and let cool to lukewarm, mayonnaise, salt and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper; served with tap water and a slice of four-grain bread. Delicious.

This salad is called "What's in the fridge that doesn't flinch when I reach for it?"

The title of this post is a tiny musical quiz: for two points, explain its significance. Only one hint: the year is 1984.

Missed it

Damn and blast. Twice today I have failed to notice 7:07:07 07.07.07 as it flashed past. The first time was excusable, I was still in bed after having had difficulty falling asleep last night; but seventeen minutes ago I was right here faffing about, with a clock staring me in the face. Bah.

I did take note of 12:34 5.6.78, although not by my own efforts. I was a first-year student, drowsing lightly in a seminar with a half-dozen others, when the door flew open and the senior tutor rushed in to tell us the time.

1:23:45 6.7.89 passed me by completely, I cannot even work out where I would have been on that day, the summer before the Berlin Wall fell. 12:34:56 7.8.90 is as much of a mystery to me now. Only young children—and the very lucky—alive today will see 1:23 4.5.67

I wish now that I'd kept a diary in earlier years, because much of my life is now somehow unavailable to me. I cannot remember, I simply have not the vaguest idea, what I was doing, where I was working and living, at those times; and there are also many vivid images, memories of strange isolated instants, that I cannot place in time. Why would I have been sitting in a little red bus on a midday in early summer, in a traffic jam on the King's Road, opposite a pub where a young woman was setting out a chalkboard with the lunch menu on the pavement; which summer was that, and why on earth do I remember that scene?

I have kept diaries at various stages of my life, for more or less short periods of time, usually when I was deeply unhappy and (felt that I) had nobody to talk to; which is odd because one thing I am now sure of is that my life has been full of friends, or people who would gladly have become friends if I had let them get close to me. But I didn't trust them, because I didn't like myself enough to be confident of their motives: surely they were only trying to get within stiletto-striking range?

Odd

It feels odd to be on my own again, to spend a day without talking to anyone—face-to-face, that is, e-mail and telephone don't count; to be hearing German instead of Spanish or English; to be sitting instead of walking; to be in a city which is known to me, with no immediate prospect of leaving it; to be listening to traffic noises instead of the wind and birdsong; to have nowhere to go.

It feels odd to see around me normal people going about their dailynesses with the usual blend of self-absorbtion and blithe oh-the-unimportance-of-it-all, rather than the purposeful directedness of the pilgrims (whom we were not).

It feels odd to have to think about w*rk again, suddenly to have deadlines and targets instead of leisure and a very active kind of slothfulness.

It feels odd to be in the well-known squalor and disarray of my own home, the home of my making, rather than the clean, pretty and comfortable hotels (and L's apartment) of weeks past.

I am not particularly happy here.

Home, in a way

At least, that's the theory. In fact it feels oddly in-between. I recognize it as the place where I live, have lived for fourteen years, but being here is somehow strange and uncomfortable after three weeks away under such unusual circumstances. I've been here for a full day and a bit, slept well but not excessively, but still didn't manage more than a tiny bit of shopping and some blogreading. Haven't even put my dirty clothes into the washing machine; won't do that now either, because the programme runs for over an hour and I have no intention of being up that late. Nor have I written any e-mails: please wait another day, my dears.

Bought a power supply for Burton, to replace the original which I left in the hotel in Santo Domingo de la Calzada. This is of course bigger, heavier and uglier than the original Apple design: a yak instead of a gazelle. Sigh. Serves me right for not giving the room one last look-over after packing in a hurry.

Lisboa was great fun, I would dearly love to go back one day. There was a general strike called for the 30th, which was also cloudy and cold, so it became a reading day with an evening pilgrimage to the english-language-books department of Fnac. On the 31st, I walked to the cathedral and a few churches, climbed the hill at Graça stopping at a lovely bookshop and several lookout points; then took the tram to Belém and saw the monastery and monument to the Navigator, then walked along the river for over an hour looking for a train station that didn't exist. Lousy tourist map. Bah. Didn't get to Cascais, that will have to be left as a goal for the next trip.

We did indeed go to "the fish eggs restaurant," Dana, but they were out of fish eggs so I had to be content with black pork which was truly delicious, almost the high point of the trip. Lioness' lamb chops were also very good.

Yesterday's Friday Favourite is a song from the last music quiz, which had your musical educations not been so sadly limited ought to have been guessed during the initial seconds of quizzery. For shame, people! Here's the song and a link to the album. Enjoy.

Last Friday before Spain

I've noticed that the excitement leading up to a holiday often tips over into not wanting to go, and realize that I am currently approaching this point. It all seems like such an imposition; such a great effort seems to be required, out of proportion to the anticipated fun.

Why do I worry so much about such absurd things? Why do I anticipate being disappointed?

During the last few weeks I have listened often, usually late at night, to a CD that I bought a year ago and put aside as "too strange." About once a month I would play it, and each time I liked it a little better—which might be simply expressed as having understood it a little better. I have become fascinated by the work, and would love to experience a full eight-hour (!) overnight performance; for the meantime this double CD does well. (There's also a six-hour TV recording of a performance in the Temple Church, where the CD was recorded.) Today's Friday Favourite is a song from early in the cycle. It's not untypical of the whole, I particularly liked the interplay of the three bass voices with the choir. Crank this one up very loud indeed.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

On having second thoughts

I took down a post which I'd written this morning, because the first two comments (Savtadotty and Antonia) proved that it was badly written: unclear, off-topic, not thought out, factually wrong. My bad. Sorry.

I shall rewrite it and post it again, probably tomorrow.

In other news the swallows are back! I saw the first of them circling above the rooftops this evening, as I was walking around the Feuersee with an ice-cream cone, taking the long way home. They left around July 28th; this is a week earlier than their return last year.

In other, other news courtesy of the great Neil Gaiman or rather his Web Elf, the fascinating and heartwarming tale of the rat tickler.

Stomach

I have the odd sensation that everything I have swallowed since about 11 a.m. did not get into my stomach, but has stacked up in my oesophagus. The upper layers are tickling my tonsils, and I feel that I have to keep swallowing hard to prevent stuff coming back into my mouth. Very disturbing. Combine that with a dully throbbing headache and you can imagine that I've been a barrel of laughs to be around today.

Today's Friday favourite is from this album. 'Nuff said.

And with that, good night.

On having peculiar feet

Not that I'd ever known that they were peculiar, mind you. They have the right number of toes, and are located one at the end of each leg as is customary; they even both face forwards—more or less.

And that "more or less" is the problem. My toes point outwards, away from the centreline of true forwards, and my ankles bend inwards. I also stand with my feet relatively wide apart, which encourages the inward-leaningness of my ankles.

It was absolutely fascinating to see this demonstrated on-screen as I walked on the treadmill. A little lightbulb went on in my head as the orthopedist said that this posture puts an extra stress on the knees: my knees hurt like Hell after the stair-climbing this morning.

So. I have a set of exercises to perform (psychological: keep your feet straight in the direction of travel by imagining that you are wearing four-metre-long skis, and practical to strengthen and stretch the barely-used outside tendons of my knees (Lioness or Zhoen will tell us the name :-)) and a pair of shoe inlays to force encourage my ankles nearer to upright.

And I have a pair of walking boots. It's early days yet, of course, I haven't yet worn them outside or for more than a few minutes, but they were by far the most comfortable shoes in the shop: only mildly ugly, light, firm but not inflexible, good rolling motion, roomy around the toes without being loose, well padded around the ankle and Achilles tendon.

I would strongly encourage any German readers (of whom there are none, but you never know who might be arriving via Google) to patronise SportScheck: great service, the right goods at the right price, excellent advice.

Watch this space for updates, perhaps I'll put up a "kilometres walked" ticker.

Lazy, thoughtful

I have a day off again, since G and U are in deepest Bavaria on a site visit. I had thought to do all manner of pleasant and useful things today, from drinking cappuccino to cleaning the kitchen, but have done very little of anything so far. It's drizzling outside (well it wouldn't be drizzling inside, now would it?) and the energy requirement for kitchen-cleaning exceeds my reserves. So I drink coffee and poodle about in the Internets.

I'm reading an odd-but-true tale, Alan Bennett's "The lady in the van" about a woman who lived for fifteen years in a delivery van parked in his driveway. (She had already been living in the van for ten years before it was moved onto Bennett's property, at his invitation, to prevent the local authorities from having it towed away.) It's a strange story about an unusual life—or pair of lives, because the reader unavoidably begins to wonder about Bennett himself, the oddness of his own life and person that let him live for fifteen years with a stranger's van obstructing his front door. Recommended; try to get a recent edition that includes his 1994 postscript. (There's a simplistic and factually inaccurate short review online; alas, it's the best that I found.)

There aren't many things things that actively worry me, but sharing the fate of Miss Shepherd does. The billion-to-one shots like 9/11 or the bombs in the London Underground are not worth worrying about, your chance of being run over by a hit-and-run driver on the way to work or the Tube is millions of time higher than the chance that you might be there at the wrong moment. No, I worry about this radical dislocation because it happens often and easily, and I know the circumstances under which it could happen to me. It takes so very little to fall through the cracks in society, and one falls such an awfully long way.

My parents told me in September about a homeless man (call him "H") who sleeps in the recessed entry to a local video rental place. H is apparently a local man of about my age, whose parents still live in the neighbourhood; every once in a while they pick him up for a wash, haircut and change of clothes, then he goes back to the doorway. I was curious about H, because if they were right about the age, then I must know him from school or at least by sight; but he was never at his post during my two weeks in Toronto. I had my theories about who it should be were there any natural justice in the world (the bully, the thief, the various juvenile drug addicts and dealers), or who it might be were life as randomly and wantonly cruel as I sometimes suspect.

On the last day, as we went to Tim Horton's for morning coffee (my parents are self-confessed Tim's addicts) my father suddenly pointed out the window to the street corner, where H stood with his back to us waiting for the lights to change. I walked casually down to the lights, and then slowly past him and around the corner to Tim's backdoor. He was no-one that I knew, and on closer examination probably only thirty years old: he would have been a baby as I finished grade thirteen and left the neighbourhood.

What makes someone choose such a life? I could understand leaving home swearing never to return, then falling into troubles; but H stayed in the neighbourhood where he grew up and has remained in contact with his parents. It's a mystery.