Grown Ocean

There is a song I keep listening to in the daytime and keep hearing in that space between consciousness and sleep. Three nights in a row now. The melodies and inflections are, subtley, so close to patterns I've heard all my life in Eritrean folk songs. Took a look at the lyrics for the first time today:

Grown Ocean by The Fleet Foxes

"In that dream I'm as old as the mountains
Still is starlight reflected in fountains
Children grown on the edge of the ocean
Kept like jewelry kept with devotion

In that dream moving slow through the morning

You would come to me then without answers
Lick my wounds and remove my demands for now
Eucalyptus and orange trees are blooming
In that dream there's no darkness alluded

In that dream moving slow through the morning time

In that dream I could hardly contain it
All my life I will wait to attain it
There, there, there

I know someday the smoke will all burn off
All these voices I'll someday have turned off
I will see you someday when I've woken
I'll be so happy just to have spoken
I'll have so much to tell you about it

In that dream I could hardly contain it
All my life I will wait to attain it
There, there, there

Wide-eyed walker, don't betray me
I will wake one day, don't delay me
Wide-eyed leaver, always going"


 Nothing much else to add; it's just a gorgeous work. I hope it keeps seeping itself into my dreams.

the f word

I've never believed in P.M.S. I think a reasonable person would simply be peeved that for the next 4-7 days of their life they'll have to manage a leaky faucett coming from a most inconvenient place. What evolutionary purpose would this "syndrome" serve, anyway? Be careful, fellow caveman, she's probably not ovulating because she's acting like an overly-emotional, over-eating, overly-bitchy bitch right now.

But I've come to terms with the mysterious conditions feminity affords me. I make no claims to be a p.c. feminist, I can only tell you that I deal with inexlicable boughts of..."feelings" right around the time when I evoke my inner plumber once a month.

More recently, these feelings surrounded themselves around pity for the human condition in many senses of the term.

We die. Sometimes we suffer at the hands of other humans before we do.

We feel powerless and futile. These feelings are sometimes further validated when we attempt to do something to reverse them.

More interestingly, I seem to remind myself regularly that, in the grand scheme of it all, my concerns and actions will be specks in a vast universe of time and space.

This is a fear many of us turn to religion to quell. I feel I am past the point that will do much to help me. The church and the faithful were upset when Copernicus told them the heavens did not revolve around the earth, but their outrage did nothing to change that fact. 

This may be what happens when a mind that is used to being shoved with academic material is suddenly starved of focused assignments and reading.  This may be the kind of thinking that drove me to include "insignificant" portion of this blog's name.

It's just important to take stock of these feelings. I don't care how they come about, and it's a little weird when they do wrap me in their funk. I just feel a little more human when they do.

Alzheimer's, Socrates and Unemployment

This has been a favorite quote of mine for a while now:

“For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul.”

-Socrates

I studied a lot of philosophy in college and winded up reading a lot of what this guy said, (though it's usually attributed to Plato, his student).

I've, luckily, landed a job that will start in 6 days, but during my "funemployment" (it's fun because I know there'll be an eventual end to this idleness) I've been watching hours of TED talks. 

As much as the next guy, I'm a sucker for the captivating/alarming/suprising headline, so today I watched one entitled "How I'm Preparing to Get Alzheimer's."

Now, these talks are usually grounded in solutions to issues that haunt us, or revelations that should change our thinking about a given topic. I had never come across one which accepted the subject as unsolvable, inevitable and something to cope with. And the speaker - Alanna Shaikh- is not some ordinary, idle layman - she's a global development expert working on the world's toughest global health problems. It was like watching a BP engineer showing Gulf of Mexico birds how to swim in oily waters.

My mother once took care of a man who has Alzhiemer's. Eventually, he came to a point where he needed advanced nursing care. But, when asked, she returned last weekend to give him a haircut and I accompanied her. In the time since they'd last seen each other (April), the man -a former renowned doctor- had no recollection of who my mother was. She told me that he once joked with her and recounted difficult times in his life with her. After our visit she lamented that he was now far from the man she knew just last spring. It was incredibly scary to hear how rapidly the disease worked to break him down. What a lonely and confusing world it must be for him.

What Shaikh, who is convinced she will face the hereditary disease like her father before her, eventually concludes is striking.
Around 5:13 she says the following: 

"My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer's and he's kind and loving now. I've seen him lose his intellect, his sense of humor, his language skills, but i've also seen this: he loves me, he loves my sons, he loves my brothers and my mom and his caregivers. And that love makes us want to be around him, even now, even when it is so hard.

When you take away everything he has learned in this world, his naked heart still shines.

I was never as kind as my dad and I was never as loving. What I need now is to learn to be like that. I need a heart so pure that if it's stripped down by dementia it will survive."

As it relates to the Socrates quote, Alzheimer's will take away your body, and money will no longer be a conscious concern. But like Shaikh's father, what she says will endure is a fundamental piece of you that will make it easier for loved ones to relate to when the rest of "you" is gone - a soul, if you will. That is the piece, Shaikh bravely admitted she felt was deficient in her own make-up and what she said she will work on until the day comes when the "monster" of the disesase (possibly)/inevitably knocks at her door.