Take a ch-ch-ch-chance

Little child, little child
Little child won't you dance with me
I'm so sad and lonely
Baby take a chance with me

Sometimes, you DO get another chance

Ding Dong Ding Dong

Happy New Year! .... ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

... Now, I didn't make this ... These fireworks are courtesy of Anton
and downloadable from FlashKit

That Thing

Down at the bottom of Smitten's post:

Being single doesn't bother you so much, but on nights like this you miss That Thing. The guy who would say, 'To hell with your job, you're too good for that stuff.' And, 'Hey, asshole, leave my girlfriend alone.' And, 'Go to bed. I'll get you a glass of water.' Yeah, that stuff. Miss that.

Yeah, that says it all.

"Unbreakable" or, What is a hero? And what is evil?

I watched "Unbreakable" recently. Very interesting movie.

David (the Bruce Willis character) is approaching a turning point in his life, although he might not be aware of anything other than his vague discontent. His marriage hasn't been good for a while and he's trying to find a job that will entail his moving out of the house. He may be fine in his current job, but we get the sense that there is something lacking there.

Or, maybe it's just that we sense that, for him, something more general is lacking in his life... and as a result, he has distanced himself from his wife, and has contemplated change that will take him away. Which would also take him away from his son, who seems to be suffering in the coldness of the household. He has night fears which takes him to his father's or his mother's (separate) rooms. At a crucial point, when David desperately needs to get his son's attention, it is the threat of David leaving the family to move to New York that finally causes the son to break.

The movie is an exploration of superheros in comic books, and it's generally considered to be a movie to watch on different levels. But the exploration is generally seen as an exploration of the archetype of hero, the definition of superhero that comics offer.

I think there is a more human level to it than this.

I would say, David is not a superhero in the comic book sense. We might even say he is not a superhero at all, and not even a hero in the archetypal sense.

Rather, he is just a person... just a good person. If he does heroic things, those are only the things that any good person would do, given an opportunity and the resources needed to succeed.

It is those around him who make him a "hero"... that is, who define him as "hero" for themselves, who define him as "hero" because of their own needs. That he steps up to this need and performs in a heroic fashion is David doing what he is able to do on behalf of those people.

Elijah (the Samuel L. Jackson character) needs a superhero to give sense and meaning to his life. His machinations eventually allow him to turn David into the superhero Elijah needs.

Joseph (David's son) needs his dad to be a hero. The movie doesn't allow us to see a slose relationship between him and his mother. It's between the lines that we can see that, for him, the house is an empty place. His dad might be slipping away. He's growing up but still has a boy inside him too. He needs a hero, for himself. He needs to be able to see his dad as a hero, and not as a sad man who has grown distant and may soon be physically distant as well.

Does the fact that Elijah created the hero that David became make David less a hero? Is it any less true that he's a hero if it's his son that is the one that believes it?

We see Elijah as the villian, and in the comic book sense he is. In the human sense he is too -- he acts selfishly, his selfish acts cause harm to others.

But Elijah, in his own twisted way, was acting out of his needs. David responded ... acted the hero Elijah wanted him to be, and then removed Elijah from a position where his need would continue to harm others.

===========

I started out writing this thinking I would write about heros. How we all can be heros, how our acts of goodness and love can make each of us heros in the eyes of someone.

But I'm not sure that's what I'm writing about anymore.

It's the illusions I don't understand. Elijah's and Joseph's illusions that David was a hero. He WASN'T what they thought. He was skilled, he was lucky, but he was just a guy.

When is it that the illusion can become real? When you walk away from fatal accidents?

But David DID do heroic things, and by acting heroically, was a hero for two people.

If Joseph had shot the gun, proving that someting COULD hurt David, that David had some vulnerability, would all illusions have been shattered? Would that negate the heroic acts that David did and was capable of?

I need to know this, because my own illusions are so easily shattered.

Mictlancihuatl

She is the wife of Mictlantecuhtli, and together they preside over the Land of the Dead, Mictlan, in Aztec mythology.

Interestingly, not much seems to be written about either of them, and even less about Mictlancihuatl. On the other hand, maybe it's not so surprising. Thanks to our Christian background, our culture has particular ideas about what death and a "Land of the Dead" might be all about. A God and Goddess of Death, from the point of view of our culture, would have to be demons, or even the devil -- in any case, not something good.

This association, combined with "All Saints Day" / "Halloween" / "Día de los muertos", leads people to believe that Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl would have to be figures to fear. Take, for example, this guy, who would assume that Mictlancihuatl would cause him harm -- I suppose to lure him into her realm of Mictlan.

To me, all this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both death and goddess-ness.

Death is just another passage in the cycle of life. Just because it is painful for those who have not yet died doesn't mean it has to be painful for the one who is experiencing that passage and who is going to or who has reached that other state -- the state of being that is post-physical life.

Besides, if it is painful for those who have not yet died, that is because they are being selfish -- they are thinking of their own loss -- the loss of love, the loss of material resources the person would have brought to them, the loss of shared experiences with the one who has died.

If the iconography of death is "gruesome", that is because we, firmly stuck in our physical existence, feel repulsed by what happens to the physical body when it dies -- when the spirit of life no longer inhabits that physical form.

Consider also "goddess-ness".

Goddesses are representations of the feminine, the female. We are accustomed to representations of some aspects of the feminine: life-giving, nurturing, caring, comforting (the "mother"); sweet, beautiful, innocent (the "virgin"); wise (the "crone"). The fact that western imagery of the crone involves an ugly, old woman hints to us that there is something else going on that has been hidden.

What has been hidden, or perhaps what had been combined by Christianity with the concept of the wise woman, is the role of the feminine in aspects of life AFTER life has ended.

And that role is the one of Mictlancihuatl.

Imagine:

• a wise woman who nurtures you into your new existence post-physical life, instead of an ugly woman who lures you to your death
• a woman who cries on your behalf to ease your shock of moving out of your comfortable physical existence
• a woman who lovingly watches over you as you continue your existence in your new "life"

In other words: take the aspects and characteristics of the feminine, and apply them to the stage of life that comes after a person's body has died.

To me, that is the nature of Mictlancihuatl.


==============

Also, consider again the image of Mictlancihuatl above...

On first look, it might appear that she is devouring the person we can see in her mouth. But, there is another way to view this.

Notice his leg, outside her mouth. Consider: he is not being devoured... he is emerging from her mouth. Consider: she is not devouring him, she is giving birth to him.

In this view, she is assisting his emergence into his new life. That he is emerging from her mouth and not her womb is emblematic of his emergence not into his physical life (which results from emerging from her womb) but into his post-physical life (which results from his emerging from her "other end", so to speak).

Primer Acto

Escuchado muchas cosas, desde que nací
Personas que preguntan de que lado yo crecí
Aquellos que me dicen que el color de mi bandera
no está en el corazón sino adentro de la cartera

Escuchado a mis hermanos criticar mi condición,
porque hablo dos idiomas, más ingles que el español
porque piensan que no siento el dolor de mi nación,
porque piensen que a este lado no nos brilla igual el sol

Escuchado mil personas que me dicen que jamás
tendré corazón hispano porque soy de por acá
Porque tuve que venirme hace mucho tiempo ya,
a buscar en estas tierras un poco de libertad

Escuchado tantas cosas que prefiero ya ignorar,
porque patria no es un sitio es tu forma de luchar
Y aunque sigan criticando, no les voy a contestar
porque la mejor palabra es la que puedes callar.....

shhhhhhhhh


Shhh! - A.B. Quintanilla y Los Kumbia Kings

Best dream / worst nightmare

Someone's husband died recently. He was 56. They'd been married for 7 years ... he was the love of her life, having finally found each other after all those years ... finally enjoying life, a life together, with plans for both the times just coming up and for growing old together.

He fell asleep on the couch. She noticed he didn't come to bed, but didn't check, never dreaming that anything was wrong.

She woke up the next morning and found him. They say he had a heart attack. She says his eyes were black.

How horrible.

And how egotistical of me to think of this, but, you know, it could be me. If I found someone today, in 7 years it could be me.

My ultimate dream becoming my worst nightmare.

How .... ?

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

I can think of younger days when living for my life
Was everything a man could want to do.
I could never see tomorrow, but I was never told about the sorrow.

And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
How can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go round?
How can you mend a this broken man?
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again.

I can still feel the breeze that rustles through the trees
And misty memories of days gone by
We could never see tomorrow, noone said a word about the sorrow.

And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
How can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go round?
How can you mend this broken man?
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again.

There's a place

Phil Collins, Both Sides, 1993

There's a Place for Us

'...There's a place for us, somewhere a time and a place.'

So here we are together
just you and me
sitting side by side
don't know why
with time just racing by
but I don't want to go

Well I don't know much about it
'cos all I am is what you see
in front of you
there's no more
feels so close and yet so far
but I don't want to go

Here I am, take my hand
here I am, please take my hand

I'd like to sit here with you if that's alright
if you don't mind I could sit and stare all night
sit here waiting for you to hold me tight

It's sad but I know it's true
you see I know you well
you'd only laugh at me
and that would hurt me so
just look at me here
you've got me pleading with you
but i don't want to go

'Cos you know that I love you so
yes you know that I love you so

Here. I will be here love
for you love, I will always be here love

If you look real close
you'll see my heart is on my sleeve
and it'll be here waiting
waiting for you, waiting for me
someone once said that if you truly, truly believe
you can make things happen
make things appear to be all that they seem
tell me do you believe?

We'll find a hideaway
together we'll find a way
somewhere, somehow, we'll find some way
there must be somewhere
there must be someplace
we can find somewhere
where they don't know my face
believe me we can find it
yes we can find it
somewhere, there's a place for us
somewhere, a time and a place for us
somewhere

But other times

But then you find out that what you want and what you need are stuck off in some alternative universe... close enough so you feel their existence, but not close enough to touch, not close enough to be part of your real world.

Sometimes

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well you might find
You get what you need

Song of the day

Me duelen tus palabras
con que matas mis ilusiones
donde mueren ilusiones
miles de sueños, miles se mueren

le daremos tiempo al tiempo
él nos dirá que sucede
a ver si esto se muere
aunque no quiera la vida
si he de vivir sin tu amor

Yo tenía para darte
alegrias que entregarte
mil caricias para darte
y mis manos pa' cuidarte
yo tenía para darte

Head in a whirl

I've just finished a 3-week vacation from work. Maybe it was one of the best vacations I've had.

People asked what I did, and it's hard to answer. Just listing activities makes it sound like I didn't do much -- stayed home, chatted on MSN, went to a concert, visited my Mom, spent a weekend in Chicago for Beatlefest, took some photographs. But hidden inside each of those things I've found pieces of truth ... the kind that defies expression in words, but that fills your heart in inexplicable ways.

A friend unwittingly, unintentionally, and surely unknowingly was the catalyst for this. I hope I have the opportunity to get to know you better.

It's Too Late

This song popped into my head tonight. So, here's to everyone out there who's at a turning point, ready to break away, ready for a new step...


It's Too Late
Carole King

Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time
There's something wrong here there can be no denying
One of us is changing or maybe we've just stopped trying

And it's too late, baby, now it's too late
Though we really did try to make it
Something inside has died and I can't hide
And I just can't fake it
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

It used to be so easy living here with you
You were light and breezy and I knew just what to do
Now you look so unhappy and I feel like a fool

And it's too late, baby, now it's too late
Though we really did try to make it
Something inside has died and I can't hide
And I just can't fake it

There'll be good times again for me and you
But we just can't stay together don't you feel it too
Still I'm glad for what we had and how I once loved you

But it's too late, baby, now it's too late
Though we really did try to make it
Something inside has died and I can't hide
And I just can't fake it

Oh, it's too late, my baby
It's too late, now darling
It's too late

Can we ever learn?

On Salon.com there's a column called "Ask the Pilot". In this week's column, there's a paragraph that summarizes why I get embarrassed to be from the United States.

Excavated from the rubble of Sept. 11 could have been, and should have been, a crucial and instructive lesson beyond the expected hand-wringing over security and preparedness. Specifically, a call for American citizens to broaden their horizons and develop a smarter sense of the world's mechanisms and conflicts. Instead, we appear to be growing even more insular, myopic, and unimpressed with the fact that large numbers of people despise us for reasons a tad more complex than "they hate freedom." It's a path we follow at our own peril, and it is exactly opposite to what global tensions mandate. We can't tell the difference between an Indian, a Tibetan, and an Islamic radical. More to the point, we don't seem interested in learning what those differences are.

More on multiple universes

Referring to my previous post ...

"In classical physics, [Deutch] says, there is no such thing as 'if'; the future is determined absolutely by the past."

And this is still true in a multiverse model, as long as the individual universes remain independent of one another.

Adding humans into the model: as long as the humans within an individual universe remain able to only perceive the single universe they are in, this determinism also remains true. Under the presupposition of humans experiencing only the universe they inhabit, information transfer and flow remains within the closed system of the individual universe. Things happen (information flow/transfer is initiated), other things happen as a result (information is received), and still other things happen from that (information is retransmitted). Humans have generally instantiated this in the form of "linear time" and "cause and effect".

Keep in mind that these "events" or "things happening" are also instantiations, not the "real thing" -- the events and things happening are given form by humans who perceive them and then give them names, define them, and get enough other humans to agree with the instantiation so that the social weight of the group instantiation makes the humans believe it to be real. -- Thus, for example, things that are seen in hallucinations are not "real" because they are a perception that only one human shares, while the color blue is "real" because when you point to a color and call it blue, most everyone will agree with you and even those who don't agree are disagreeing on the details of the definition, not the fact that a definition of "blue" exists. The world as a flat object used to be real until enough humans shared a different perception of the Earth.

Continuing with the article I cited in my previous post: "In the multiverse, however, there are alternatives; the quantum possibilities really happen"

We can see this scientifically (scroll to the bottom to the section "Interfering with the multiverse)

You can see the shadow of other universes using little more than a light source and two metal plates. This is the famous double-slit experiment, the touchstone of quantum weirdness.

Particles from the atomic realm such as photons, electrons or atoms are fired at the first plate, which has two vertical slits in it. The particles that go through hit the second plate on the far side.

Imagine the places that are hit show up black and that the places that are not hit show up white. After the experiment has been running for a while, and many particles have passed through the slits, the plate will be covered in vertical stripes alternating black and white. That is an interference pattern.

To make it, particles that passed through one slit have to interfere with particles that passed through the other slit. The pattern simply does not form if you shut one slit.

The strange thing is that the interference pattern forms even if particles come one at a time, with long periods in between. So what is affecting these single particles?

According to the many worlds interpretation, each particle interferes with another particle going through the other slit. What other particle? "Another particle in a neighbouring universe," says David Deutsch. He believes this is a case where two universes split apart briefly, within the experiment, then come back together again. "In my opinion, the argument for the many worlds was won with the double-slit experiment. It reveals interference between neighbouring universes, the root of all quantum phenomena."

But we can also see things in everyday life that should make us stop and consider how we should understand them: as a previously unrecognized part of the individual universe we live in, or as a glimpse of a different universe. A third option might be that it's something imaginary, but that is an option that shouldn't be chosen lightly -- it's easy to use that as a catch-all category for anything that we haven't been able to understand enough to believe in -- but we need to also realize that the fact that something was imagined by someone might be enough to make it a real part of the multiverse.

And continuing from my previous post again: "'By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives,' [Deutsch] says. 'When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen.'"

I'm not sure I agree with this view of the interaction between universes, apart from the idea that spreading good is beneficial and the good you spread in your universe can seep into other universes when the universes brush up against one another.

My view at the moment is that awareness of the multiverse does other things for us here in our individual universe. For one thing, it's a useful explanation for those moments of deja vu and synchronicity that are otherwise inexplicable. It also can help us keep things in perspective: there really is only today to live in because everything else is just an echo of today. And whatever we think of our current universe, there are countless others that are both better and worse.

Also consider the question of mental illness or other memory or reality disorders... We should think of treatment as nothing more than methods for helping the person deal with the universe he physically shares with the rest of us, rather than an attempt to cure the person of whatever we think he has.

The concept of many universes also applies to spirituality and religion -- in what we call mystical, pagan, or shamanistic practices, the goal is to reach into the other universes while keeping a tie with the current one. The break from those, notably with the Judeo-Christian-Muslim practices, the goal is to close off the other universes and maintain control and clarity of perception within the current universe.

Spoke too soon

I should have read on in the article before writing:

Deutsch found that, almost all the time, information flows only within small pieces of the quantum calculation, and not in between those pieces. These pieces, he says, are separate universes. They feel separate and autonomous because all the information we receive through our senses has come from within one universe. As Oxford philosopher Michael Lockwood put it, "We cannot look sideways, through the multiverse, any more than we can look into the future."

Sometimes universes in Deutsch's model peel apart only locally and fleetingly, and then slap back together again. This is the cause of quantum interference, which is at the root of everything from the two-slit experiment to the basic structure of atoms.

More from the New Scientist article:

"One day, a quantum computer will be built which does more simultaneous calculations than there are particles in the Universe," says Deutsch. "Since the Universe as we see it lacks the computational resources to do the calculations, where are they being done?" It can only be in other universes, he says. "Quantum computers share information with huge numbers of versions of themselves throughout the multiverse."

Imagine that you have a quantum PC and you set it a problem. What happens is that a huge number of versions of your PC split off from this Universe into their own separate, local universes, and work on parallel strands of the problem. A split second later, the pocket universes recombine into one, and those strands are pulled together to provide the answer that pops up on your screen. "Quantum computers are the first machines humans have ever built to exploit the multiverse directly," says Deutsch.

And:

What would it mean for you and me to know there are inconceivably many yous and mes living out all possible histories? Surely, there is no point in making any choices for the better if all possible outcomes happen? We might as well stay in bed or commit suicide.

Deutsch does not agree. In fact, he thinks it could make real choice possible. In classical physics, he says, there is no such thing as "if"; the future is determined absolutely by the past. So there can be no free will. In the multiverse, however, there are alternatives; the quantum possibilities really happen. Free will might have a sensible definition, Deutsch thinks, because the alternatives don't have to occur within equally large slices of the multiverse. "By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives," he says. "When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen."

David Deutsch's article "The structure of the multiverse" is here

More on this

On the topic of the reality of objects in a quantum universe and the role of observation in reality:

Deutsch dismisses them all. "Some are gibberish, like the Copenhagen interpretation," he says-and the rest are just variations on the many worlds theme.

For example, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, the act of observing is crucial. Observation forces an atom to make up its mind, and plump for being in only one place out of all the possible places it could be. But the Copenhagen interpretation is itself open to interpretation. What constitutes an observation? For some people, this only requires a large-scale object such as a particle detector. For others it means an interaction with some kind of conscious being.

Worse still, says Deutsch, is that in this type of interpretation you have to abandon the idea of reality. Before observation, the atom doesn't have a real position. To Deutsch, the whole thing is mysticism-throwing up our hands and saying there are some things we are not allowed to ask.

Except, Deutsch is slightly off too. He should talk to the cognitive scientists who work in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.

It's not that observation forces an atom to make up its mind and place itself in one place of all possible places. It's that humans are only capable of experiencing one universe at a time, and so when they manage to observe an atom, what they observe is the atom in the particular universe that the humans have succeeded in tuning in to. In that particular universe, the atom is precisely where it's supposed to be and in the only place it can be.  (there's nowhere you can be that isn't where you were meant to be, it's easy...)

It doesn't matter if it's a particle detector or a conscious being that makes the observation, because, in the end, it's still a human that perceives that an observation has taken place. That perception, and, by extension, observation, is all about the human -- the interplay of our physically-based senses, our physically-based mental interpretations of our senses, and our experientially-based mental interpretations of our senses. Those three things are required for perception and observation to take place, and those three things, in turn, determine the outcome of the act of perception and observation -- that is, our decision regarding what it is that we perceived and observed and what that thing we perceived means.

Imaginary or multi universe?

Interesting article on a variant of multiverse theory -- that we all live in a computer simulation (we all live in a Yellow Submarine...).

The newspaper article gets part of it a little screwy:

Travel a trillion light years beyond the Andromeda galaxy, and you might find yourself in a universe where gravity is a bit stronger or electrons a bit heavier.

The vast majority of these other universes will not have the necessary fine-tuned coincidences needed for life to emerge; they are sterile and so go unseen. Only in Goldilocks universes like ours where things have fallen out just right, purely by accident, will sentient beings arise to be amazed at how ingeniously bio-friendly their universe is.

It's not that you "travel a trillion light years" or that the other universes lack what is needed for life. Both of those concepts are rooted in the metaphors that are inherent in the universe we inhabit and are thus, by definition, irrelevant to the other universes.

Even the computer simulation part is just another, this time more modern, metaphor. If it works as a metaphor, it's just because the people who thought up the metaphor have been able to lift the veil, so to speak.

Although I shouldn't complain ...

I came down with a cold this week. Not news? Well, for me it's the end of an illness-free streak of 4 1/2 years, so when I felt it coming on Tuesday afternoon -- a real cold, not just symptoms that approach and then pass me by -- I couldn't believe it. It hasn't been a terribly bad cold, at least not like ones I remember, but the progress of the symptoms have been interesting to observe, probably because of that long gap in experiencing them. Tuesday afternoon: tired, chilled, with looming sore throat and headache. Tuesday evening: the acute blast of symptoms. Wednesday-Friday: sore throat gone but general stuffiness, drippyness and sneezing. Thursday through Saturday: all the crap draining down my throat -- this was yuckier than I remember. Friday night-Saturday: coughing, and Saturday my voice started to go. Today, I'm no longer congested or drippy or sneezing or even coughing and I feel better, but the voice is gone. I probably should have started taking an expectorant yesterday or even Friday rather than today.

Part 2: I found out my apartment complex is lowering rent by $10 a month for renewals. This is a nice complex in a good location, or at least has been. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but having them lower the rent makes me think they're losing renewals, which makes me wonder why.

Part 3: It's 82 degrees outside and sort of humid but not very. 82 degrees is nothing -- it'll be consistently 95+ soon, and that will last until October -- but when I went out this afternoon (to get the Coricidin, see Part 1 above) it felt like the dead of summer to me.