Oh, bother

So, i thought i had a 6 am call (9 am EDT), but they actually scheduled it for noon! Amazing. But i went to bed with my alarm set for the call and my plan to work from home on EDT. Now what? I've already started work, and i've got a bit of analysis to do, and i was happy to think i could keep my hour plus of commuting to do a personal project or two.

Insert much gazing off in the distance as i try to remember details of the moravecs in Illium/Olympus by Dan Simmons, to reply to firecat's comments on another of Dan Simmons' books. I remember that while reading i was aware that the only characters i liked were the two moravecs who were the main moravec characters. The friendship they had before the opening action was a friendship of ideas and correspondence. When they met and were thrust inti action, the friendship shifted into one of mutual care, but with a strong need for one to physically care for the other. On top of this, one was clearly the most junior of the exploration team, and was not included in the planning deliberations. Is part of the reason i found myself wondering about the gender of the moravec that caretaking role and junior status? Or was it because it had the only relationship with another creature that seemed sane.

I still haven't decided what i'm doing for my workday. ...OK, i'm working at home on EDT. *works some more*

Mom and mind

I asked Christine how she was feeling yesterday. Her mother's dementia leads her to make jokes about how a small gift can be received over and over again. After she admitted she might not be doing well, she said she was finding consolation in her current programming reading. I let it sit there: i can't imagine the slow grieving she and her siblings will be going through as their mother slips away (and oh, how healthy her body is).

In my call with my mom yesterday, she talked about about not being able to remember a word for half a day (flax). Her talking tends towards stream of consciousness, and this was a digression in the context of my father's changes for the better as he has been at home more (and letting go of worries about his job). I know from previous conversations she thinks she's going to have Alzheimer's. Yesterday she shared this "symptom" and that she was trying not to worry or dwell on it. But knowing her, she's building up in her mind a story of mental faculties failing.

One of her great aunts had Alzheimer's, another lived to a very old age without mental failings, and her own mother was sharp up to her death due to complications (heart attack) from diabetes. Mom's latched on to Alzheimer's. Part of that is due to the fear of depending on my Dad for care, i think. Sometimes i feel it's also a sort of strange dynamic in interplay with my mother-in-law's health. There's something oddly manipulative about this, particularly compared to how very very little she shared about her actual health problems with ulcerative colitis. Does she want some declaration of willingness to return and care for her from me?

Being Offended

Well, i might be offended by
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/how-to-be-offended.html

He makes two points:

* Offense is not injury. The most important step to keeping a level head in the face of serious offense is to remember that just because something offends you doesn’t mean that it hurts you in any way. Be careful to sort out your immediate, emotional response from the actual practical effect of whatever offensive situation you’re confronting – most of the time, you’ll find your life can go on just fine regardless of this offensive thing.

* People aren’t stupid. For the most part, people do things for reasons that, at least at the time, seem like good ones. And when they have the weight of tradition behind them, they’re usually right – societies that do things that are actually and truly wrong tend to be extinct. No matter how difficult it is to accept, you have to acknowledge that many practices that seem utterly impractical and stupid have endured for hundreds or even thousands of years without killing, maiming, or traumatizing the people who practice them.

I'm in the middle of a day of conference calls, so i can't process this now. However, you might want to offer some suggestions about privilege and tradition and oppression.

His context, about offense and learning, is set in the first sentence:

Whether it’s articles containing racist language in my “Gender, Race, and Class” course or descriptions of oral insemination as part of the Sembia male’s coming-of-age rituals in my anthropology course, I know that some students are going to be offended, sometimes deeply.

In comments

isa says on May 11th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I do have to take issue with one point in this otherwise fascinating article: social practices that maim and traumatize (and sometimes even kill) people can and do persist for generation upon generation. As long as they leave enough people to reproduce and continue the practice, the practice continues.

Just as in evolution, not every trait is adaptive. Some just continue to exist because they don’t do quite enough damage for natural selection to eliminate them.


Dustin Wax says on May 11th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Dias: Fair enough - perhaps I overstated that. The point is, things that look dysfunctional from the outside often make perfectly good sense from the inside, so it pays to make an effort to understand them. That’s true even if, in the end, your initial offense evolves into an activist resolve to put an end to some practice or another. Reformists who act from offense rarely do any good, and often cock things up even worse than they were to begin with.

So, it seems he's talking about something different than "offense." It seems he's describing a immediate judgement that something that is different and somehow violating familiar social norms is wrong.