Author: Sysadmin

On working from home

Read an interesting article on working from home in The Wall Street Journal. Interesting because I basically have been working from home or sometimes cafes the past few years. The virus scare caused a lot of people to do this, though I had other reasons.

I think the problem with working from home is partly self-discipline. You don’t have a  Mommy or Daddy boss to keep you in line, but you can still be just as productive, if careful.

Here are parts of the article:

“AT FIRST, the work-from-home life had the elemental thrills of a snow day, with its languid commutes from bed to sofa. But with Covid-19 variants snuffing out the light at the end of the tunnel and companies postponing returns to the workplace, W.F.H. is becoming W.T.F. for many.

…

[Advice point on working at home:]

4. Clearly defined work hours are a key burnout barrier. Delete work email and IM apps from your phone so you “don’t turn working at home into living at work,” Mr. Martin said.”

More on Stephen King’s novel The Institute

A passage:

“When he was finished–it took almost a half hour, and Luke consumed a second Coke during the telling–there was a moment of silence. Then Tim said, very quietly, ‘It’s not possible. Just to begin with. That many abductions would raise red flags.’

Wendy shook her head at that. ‘You were a cop. You should know better.  There was a study a few years back that said over a half million kids go missing each year in the United States. Pretty staggering figure, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I know the numbers are high, there were almost five hundred missing kids reported in Sarasota County the last year I was on the cops there…'”

A few thoughts:

Institutional corruption is real; King is right on this. Children as young as 12 or even younger can be abused by institutions. Adults can too. King appears to vacation on the Florida Gulf Coast. I was born and initially raised in Sarasota. It is a nice place in many ways, but the law allows you to be forcibly hospitalized and/or jailed for non-violent and legal behavior. That is wrong.

On sin

What is sin, really?

It is behaving in a way that upsets your community. Using illegal drugs, drinking too much booze, having too much sex, stealing, or un-needed physical violence. You can just be socially awkward, but I don’t think that is really a sin.

I think it boils down to what damages your body or someone else without reason. I still listen to the St. Lawrence Basilica Mass online from Asheville because I like the pastor, even though I have left the city and because my local church has not apparently re-opened yet from the virus.

On Afghanistan

From The Irish Times by a columnist named Fintan O’Toole whom I usually like, but I don’t agree with him on this point about the 9/11/2001 attacks and U.S. response to them:

“That was badly out of tune with the general mood, in Ireland as much as in America, of grief and anger. Such was the scale and savagery of the atrocities, so great was the outpouring of love and sympathy, that it seemed in bad taste to suggest that the US response might be dangerously irrational.”

Terrorists killed almost 3,000 U.S. citizens, and the the Taliban government helped them. F— them. We may have stayed too long in the  country, but they drew “first  blood.” Let them work out their own problems now. Over.

Just a few random thoughts

I was going to blog about a news piece today, but I would prefer to say that it is possible to miscommunicate with someone you respect, like, and maybe even love.

Language can be difficult, even when it is our native one. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl about the Holocaust was one of the first books they asked to read in high school. What do words really mean?

I have made a lot of joke/poems about puns on this blog and in a book. Some people don’t like puns because they play with more than one meaning for words.  It hearkens back to John Keats’ concept of “negative capability”: sometimes you have to relax and put strict logic aside. Words can mean different things at the same time.

On a recent book review from The Irish Times

“Emily Cooper’s debut Glass (£10), preoccupied with houses, safety and inheritance, has an idiosyncratic beauty:

‘Each house has its own smell, when I leave / and come home again after some time / to my mother’s house, it smells more like / my grandmother’s than when I left. / (A fountain pen slices my leg through a bin bag as I move into my new house)’

Cooper’s original voice, low-key and matter-of-fact, highlights Glass’s dream-like quality. This labyrinth is pared back:

‘I continued walking around and noting the hazards that I would / Recount to my friends later. A hidden step, a nail protruding / From the frame of a window that was glazed with plexiglass, / A nod to safety consciousness… / Feeling my way along a wall in the dark I felt a gap…  / …a bend in it… transported me…’

Cooper’s eerie dread of careless builders and her preoccupation with the guardianship of an old house are thrown into sharp relief as we realise how deep that inheritance sinks. Everything connects and unsettles:

‘Perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten that stomach ulcer / And Daddy wouldn’t have confused / His cancer for a matching ulcer.'”

This  description of a house being a sense of place reminds me of the ancient Greek notion of ethos as both personal character and sense of place. You need to be comfortable in and understand your place, or your health will be damaged.

My new apartment and neighborhood people seem good. One new new neighbor I met joked: “you can always lock the door and watch TV.” Haha. I guess so if the cable connection is working.

On mainstream media

Was planning to write about art again today but found a brief article about mainstream media personnel that was interesting. The Washington Post reports:

More on the book Doom

There is a strong wind outside my house that I can hear clearly now. It is understandable why people in the past believed in ghosts. It sounds like they are out there.

Anyway, about Niall Ferguson’s new book: it is clearly professionally edited and organized. Here is the summary of the last chapter: “We have no way of knowing what the next disaster will be. Our modest goal should be to make our societies and political systems more resilient — and ideally antifragile — than they currently are.”

Of course, Ferguson’s book requires deeper digging to better understand, but I think one of his main points is that human error plays a large role in human damage from natural disasters whether Covid-19 or something else. My Dad, who was a good federal government lawyer, had a joke from the office that “we are here from Washington, DC, and want to help.” Usually, authorities do help but not always.

On FS Fitzgerald in Asheville

One of the books I picked up while living in Asheville recently is called Tom, Scott, and Zelda: Following in Their Footsteps by Bruce Johnson, Here is one paragraph:

“Hoping to revitalize his writing career, in 1935 Scott [Fitzgerald] withdrew to North Carolina. During the next two years he careened between a series of hotels including the Grove Park Inn, the Oak Hall Hotel, the Skyland Hotel, the Battery Park Hotel, and the Lake Lure Inn, still searching for his lost inspiration. Convinced he had tuberculosis, Scott used his poor health as an excuse for his failure to regain his status as America’s most popular short story writer. In truth it was brought on by his incessant smoking, drinking, and poor eating habits.”

The author goes on to say Fitzgerald had an extra-marital affair with a woman at one of the hotels while Zelda was being treated at the time in Baltimore for her mental health problems. The author of Z, a biographical novel about Zelda, said at a speech I attended that one problem in their relationship was that Scott was better-looking than Zelda was. Beauty is subjective, but it must have been tempting for Scott to have affairs when he was handsome, famous, and successful.

My opinion about Asheville after living there less than a year is the tourism industry is so important that security and police often over-react to eccentric, non-violent behavior that they think might bother other guests. I understand why Fitzgerald left for L.A.; even though that city wasn’t good for him either.

 

On fascism

Just read an article from The Irish Times on Fascism.

Here is the first paragraph  about new book on the subject:

“January 6th, 2021, will go down in history as a day of infamy. Although Trump supporters’ storming of the US Capitol doesn’t make its first appearance until a few dozen pages into How to Stop Fascism, author Paul Mason flags it as a ‘potentially historic turning point’. It is proof positive that leading liberal democracies are set for a fascist turn.”

I don’t think Trump is Fascist or to blame for what happened 1/6/2021. His political rhetoric was crude when running for presidency, but I agree that we should control borders and try as best as possible to root out corruption. The issue of voting corruption in the last election seems open to me because I was almost turned away from my local voting poll. Of course we shouldn’t be physically violent about the issue even if upset.

Fascism seems like a violent over-reaction to the sense your culture is being invaded by others. Immigration is complicated.

Update: Just re-listened  to “In Between Days” by The Cure. I think a lot of their music has to to do with slight mental illness, and that is why some find it creepy or odd (I listened to the song almost obsessively for about a week as a teen). I think this song is about someone who has been through child abuse but found some one they loved at a proper age whom they can not have. Many child-abused have trouble forming healthy adult romantic relationships.