AgPerson

Strange things happen to time when you’re reading a book. It moves more slowly, and yet passes more quickly. When you read a good novel and let your imagination roam free the experience is different than working, or watching television, or being otherwise marooned in realtime. Like dreaming, reading is an important escape, a time to reflect and reorganize the jumble inside your head. For me, at least, reading a good book leaves me feeling awed and inspired and refreshed. And so it is so odd that I find myself so easily forgetting to read, or forgetting how to, or forgetting what it is like. I spend my day in front of a screen covered in words, manipulating those words to create new words, modifying those new words to create shapes and colors and more words, words that can be sorted and searched and categorized, all electronically, always dancing from place to place. All day, with the words, but it isn’t the same. The words mean something different when they are dancing.

It is important. Important to remember the difference in the words, the difference between the words that dance and the words that sit still. Important to remember that dancing is something we do every day, but sometimes we must rest, slow time, read the words that stay still on the page. Let them dance, instead, inside of our heads, where time has a different meaning, where the dance is to a more subtle and beautiful song.

Every episode of Veronica Mars disappoints me more than the last. Not because they are bad episodes, but because then could be great episodes. Mistakes were made in season one, but regardless it was amazing and excellent television, brilliant executed, emotionally engaging and well-plotted, a neatly wrapped up novel-like story with all the trimmings. And every disjointed episode thereafter has made me like the show just a bit less.

I would love, love for Mars to turn itself around, but season three is nearing a close and while there have been signs of greatness poking through, none of them have stuck, and the consensus on the boards I read is that most people don’t really expect the show to be around for another season. I can’t point to any one thing that makes us all so unhappy — except perhaps a showrunner who seems to be at least a bit out of touch — but continue to pile on minor disappointments one after another and you’ll slowly wear a man down. At best, on balance, I think Mars has hit neutral buoyancy — its good enough that I want to watch each week, but its problematic enough that each week I finish the episode, sit down for a few minutes to think about it, and invariable start picking it all apart.

In a sad way I’m almost glad that the CW may be putting this show out of is misery. Because there are plenty of people making plenty of average television shows, and, for my money, if you’re not going to strive to be great in what you do each and every day, you might as well not even bother to show up.

We got around to registering SJ’s XO laptop on the Harvard network during tonight’s Harvard Free Culture meeting, and of course the inaugural page load was Berkman. Where the registration form asked for the operating system I typed in "OLPC" with much glee (quiet, you who says the real OS if “Fedora!”)

Rachel writes about a mitsabora (“turning of the bones”) ceremony that she attended in Madagascar. Family and friends gather to dig up the graves of the dead, converse with their bones, and then rebury them.

As we continued to bike the lovely 8 km home to Voloina along the Bay of Antongil, the teacher asked me, “what are mitsaboras like where you come from? France, is it?” “Etats Unis,” I corrected him. “Where? Oh ‘Amerika’, right,” he said. “Where I come from we do not have the same fombas. We don’t hold mitsabora ceremonies,” I told him. He looked surprised. “But what do you do when you are sad about losing a family member? Don’t you want to spend time with them again?” I explained to him that the Betsimisaraka tradition of turning the bones is, in my mind, a wonderful custom, but that where I come from we are afraid of death and it is fady (taboo) to dig up the bodies of people who have died. “When a family member dies we come together and hold a ceremony to celebrate his or her life,” I said in Betsimisaraka, “we even gather afterwards and eat a feast, sort of the way the Malagasy do. But once we place a body in the ground it must stay there.”

He looked puzzled and again asked what ‘Amerikans’ do when they are sad years after losing someone, if they do not unearth the bones of their fathers, sisters and children, and talk with them. I thought about it for a moment and then gave him the only answer I could think of, “Well, we sit at home alone and we cry”. I could tell he disapproved of our method of grieving. “Fetes (celebrations) are much better,” he said, as I nodded in approval.

Check out her complete entry to learn more about this fascinating ceremony.

I’m not into video games, never have been. When Igor got a Wii I gave it a shot, but the little sports games and such get old after a while. So I bought _Zelda_, thinking it’d be fun. Well, it is, I’m learning how to…err…fish, and blow grass reeds to summon falcons, and such. I spent something like an hour trying to convince a stupid cat to go back to its owner. (Hmm, maybe if I throw a pumpkin at it? No. How about if I build a wall of pumpkins to try and guide it? Nope. What if I float it across the river on top of a pumpkin? Hmm, that doesn’t work. Hint: the solution does not involve pumpkins.) After the cat I had to learn how to use a sword and slingshot, then went exploring a bit and got an oil lamp and did a bit of horse riding and beating up various man-eating plants. Oh, and more fishing.

Long story short, I got killed by a stupid bird because there wasn’t any method I could see to pay him for his shop goods, and since I didn’t pay him he attacked me, and when I went to get some healing potion stuff I accidentally got lantern oil instead, which you can’t drink, and in the process the bird pecked at me enough such that a black screen came up and told me “Game Over” (a little blunt there?) and that the game was over. Wow, I paid $45 for this?

Apparently — and don’t laugh at me for being an idiot, I don’t know anything about games — apparently you need to save your game every time you do anything remotely interesting or time consuming. Igor says save every five minutes. Whatever. I never saved anything, and I didn’t exactly expect to meet my early demise at the hands of a Tiki Room reject, so now I have to start back at the beginning and learn to swordfight again and slingshot again and herd goats and fish and deal with that stupid cat all over again. Bah.

Nor do I. I don’t know anything about what it is like to be Iraqi. But this post should give some indication of why it is so hard for us to understand each other. Excerpt:

The other day I finally managed to meet George. He is a man of 57 years old from the USA. I have heard about him from a colleague who praised him as “different from the rest”. So we have invited him to a late lunch around 3 pm — in our timing this is quite normal lunch.

[…] George, who works for a contracting company, said he was American but from “back east”! Which was quite puzzling. And when I enquired about “back east” he said most Americans are proud of their east coast origin. He says that long ago he’s “moved out west” and got married and then got an ugly divorce.

He later settled in California and bought himself a house and remarried. When I asked him about his family and relatives he was taken aback a bit. He said some stayed home (he meant back east) and others “moved around somewhere”! And as George carried on I realized that he always refers to people he knows as “some one I ran into” or “some one I used to know” or “that guy I met”!! And I wondered did he ever have a real friend?

[…] As time progressed I realized that I just could not figure him out. There is this man who is American but from back east. Moved out west and got an ugly divorce. His family moved around somewhere and his friends are either people he ran into or he used to know!! […] When the Iraqi tea was served I began to sympathize with George. It must be hard living like that, and I honestly was looking for ways to make him talk about some nice things that he has done in his life. And when I asked him what does he do when he wants to relax he said he would “get away from it all” and leaves his wife at home and “travels up north” with his dog to fish in a lake by the name of Tahoe. And when I asked him why go there all alone he said so he could have a piece of mind! Which it turned out to be even sadder and it felt so creepy.

I was wondering what happened to Barbara Bogaev, the co-host of Weekend America, who disappeared a couple months ago. According to a leaked internal memo, Minnesota Public Radio is moving half of the operation to St. Paul, and, presumably, Barbara didn’t want to make the move. It’s sad, because part of what makes Weekend America fun and quirky is the interplay between the two hosts, which will be more difficult to achieve when they are not physically sitting next to each other in a studio (or working in the same office). When I got to watch a taping of Marketplace back in August, they were taping Weekend America segments in the next studio over, and it was neat. I sure hope Marketplace isn’t also forced out of the Frank Stanton Studios in Los Angeles. There is something to be said for being the only daily national business news program originating from the West Coast. Not to mention it would be tough to remain affiliated with USC from St. Paul!