February 2012 Archives

i got myself a garmin forerunner 410 because my old forerunner 210 is a piece of crap. it's a nice enough watch, the 210, but if you want it to actually tell you where you are, or how far you've run, or how fast you went, as a gps running watch ought to do, you'd better not have a tree or a 3 story building anywhere within 20 miles. or a cloud. or a passing airplane. or a freeway overpass.

it got to the point where my 210 eventually wouldn't get satellites right outside my door, because there's a large tree and a 4 story building.

so i got a 410 from rei, fully intending to take it back if it didn't perform. well, it performs. it's fantastic as a gps watch. it gets satellite lock quickly, even when it's cloudy or an airplane passes (snort), and once it's locked, it's actually locked, in the sense that it doesn't get unlocked easily. that's great! it tells me my instantaneous speed which is a great heuristic.

but.

garmin just can't help but to suck. despite the wonderful functionality, the watch has an idiotic, inexplicable, totally avoidable design flaw: it will run itself down. i think i am not alone in the running community as being NOT a daily runner. that means my gps watch will have stretches of downtime -- if i'm traveling, or just don't feel the need for a watch, those stretches may exceed two weeks. so i would expect that a dingus designed for running, which KNOWS when it's been immobile for two days, would turn itself off. but no, instead, it will merrily eat up its own battery and THEN, when i am ready to go out for a run, i grab my ridiculously expensive gps watch only to discover it's unusable.

great.

so, why not just power it down after each run?

aha! what a great idea! the watch has two buttons and a "we're so clever!" touchscreen type interface. no amount of button presses will power the watch down. no, instead, i have to long-press the screen to get to the menu. then i have to swipe to "settings". then swipe more to "system". then swipe more to "shut down". THEN i have to press one of the two buttons. and then i have to swipe, and press the button AGAIN to confirm shutdown!

that required reading the manual, and i bet i'll have to re-read it next time.

it's the stupidest design possible, and it wouldn't even matter if garmin hadn't stupidly made the thing a battery suicide machine.

Onward Christian Soldiers,
Onward Buddhist Priests,
Onward Fruits of Islam,
Fight 'til you're deceased!

Fight your little battles,
Join in thickest fray
For the Greater Glory,
Of Dis-Cord-I-A!

i'm still using 10.6.8 on all my macs. i don't remember what animal name that was and i don't care. it's one release behind, and reading about the next release, i don't see any reason to upgrade.

i remember being a windows user and seeing not a single reason to move past windows XP. as a mac user, i now see no reason to get involved with the iphone-ification of my PC. i realize that at some point i will no longer have a choice. that'll be a sad day, because i'll be too old and tired to put up with the bullshit of running linux, and i can't ever go back to windows. i wonder what i'll do? perhaps quit computers altogether. or maybe go work from apple and fix things from the inside (ha ha ha).

The greatest things in the world are pleasant thoughts; and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.

- Michel de Motaigne

my aunt nin passed away a little over a week ago.

i don't necessarily believe in an afterlife. i don't necessarily not, either. i don't see much evidence for it, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. i remain undecided.

afterlife or not, aunt nin has moved on to a better place. she was undeservingly afflicted with alzheimer's, and now that i've witnessed that several times in my family, i will say with no hesitation that it's not a pleasant way to be for the afflicted or for their families. at some point, there's so little left of the person that even being dead must be better. when someone's got a fatal but not-instantly-so gunshot wound or they're bleeding out from a missing limb, they can tell you they're suffering and that it's awful. with alzheimer's, they can't tell you they're suffering. they may not even actually be suffering. but if they're not, it's only because their mind is so horribly wrong that they don't realize it's gone and left them. there's no hope of recovery. there's no way out except the end of it all.

it's horrible for everyone involved and i've explored it in my imagination far more than i would have liked to. for aunt nin, it's all over now, and whatever came next for her has to be better than what she was up to the moment before, either terrible suffering or mindlessness. you see? there's no pleasantness to be had at all from the situation. so enough about that, it leads nowhere nice.

that's why it behooves us to remember not her end but her middle. i never knew her beginning, of course. but her middle is so intimately intertwined with my own beginning that her passing marks the passing of my own childhood. besides my parents, there's no person who has had so much influence on my life. my entire childhood was shaped by aunt nin. she was there for all of it, in one way or another. much of the best of it was directly her doing. my strongest and fondest memories all revolve around her.

i can't remember much from my childhood, but i can always remember floating in her pool, waiting for someone to arrive with take-out nachos from The Islands. she'd let us drink the fruit punch and eat the nachos in her pool. in the mornings, she'd bring us supreme crescents from jack in the box -- which i still crave to this day (i had one yesterday). i can't ever forget waking her up by dropping grapes into her snoring mouth. any holiday involving gifts revolved around aunt nin. her gifts were always the best, and the most anticipated, even if they never really were living pets as she liked to pretend.

and of course, the happiest and most memorable parts of my childhood were spent on the beach in Carlsbad, where for a summer or two she lent my parents her condo (or "the beach house" as we called it). we'd walk down to the beach and feast on fried zucchini and sand, i'd boogie board and build sand castles and drag giant kelp ropes around town. at night we'd load up bowls of yogurt with kix cereal and play crazy 8's, and i'd listen to the eurythmics "here comes the rain again" on my walkman, which was very likely a gift from aunt nin.

my best friend and childhood pet was the product of an accidental breeding of aunt nin's bouvier and a hapless standard poodle.

then there is the legendary travel of the schmeck family from california to the midwest to attend my cousin's wedding. i still have, and use, the suitcase she gave me for that journey. we walked through the airports and the shuttles and the planes, my dad, my aunt, my brother, and me, and introduced ourselves as the schmeck family. we had a grand old time being ridiculous. i'm still pretty ridiculous, and that love for being silly came straight from aunt nin. i never really knew her as an adult, but i think she didn't take life too seriously, and that's why she was so great with kids.

bugs bunny said you shouldn't take life too seriously, or you'll never get out of it alive. i think that's a maxim that aunt nin and i would have agreed upon.

she had her downs as well as her ups. she was quite the adventurer before i knew her, and in many ways unknown to me at the time, while i knew her. we drifted apart as i grew older and more selfish, and i'm sorry for that. alzheimer's removes the possibility of catching up with your sick relative. remember the times when we were happy? no, not really.

but i do. the happiest times of my childhood were all with or because of aunt nin, and they outshine almost all the rest. every time i miss being a little boy, i'm missing my aunt nin. because i didn't have one without the other. they were part of one package.

life is a cruel sonofabitch, taking away everything that it gives. our one power as fragile humans is to cherish our memories while we have them, to bask in the familiarity of objects and people. every time i smile in the mirror, i see my grandmother, i've got her smile. when i bike through the streets of my home town, as i did just days ago, i remember my aunt ruby, whose house i would bike to on the way home from school, to get a soda. when i taste peanut butter, i recall my grandpa, who would make the freshest peanut butter in his beloved cuisinart. when i see blueberries or mud, i recall my nana and pop, who would feed me the one with my cereal before i'd go out to their yard to play in the other. when my hair's a mess i see my uncle john. and of course, when i remember being happy as a kid, i hear aunt nin laughing. so many loved ones have passed, but they live on with me in the only way this world lets them.

their stories have ended, and the time for tears is nearing an end. there will always be time for more tears in the future. it is best to take the moments as they come when we can live without the waterworks.

a rabbi's job is to get me thinking, and in that, the rabbi last week succeeded. my motto has long been: da lifne meh atah omeid. "know before whom you stand".

i know the hebrew god. his holy book tells me he is a god of vengeance, wrath, and destruction. i do not believe that god exists.

and yet, the jewish religion is all about peace and love. these are the things that jews talk about when they worship. they call their god a benevolent creator, and yet the bible is one long story of the benevolent creator beating the shit out of everyone, the jews and the non-jews alike. the holy books do not agree with the spoken message, even a little bit. god tests abraham's faith by asking him to sacrifice his only son. as a reward for his faith, he spawns a race of holy people who go on to be sold into slavery, freed by a wrathful god who indiscriminately slays egyptian children then leads his chosen people to slaughter women and children all over the middle east, until they reach the holy land, whereupon he kills his greatest prophet because of a minor mistake the prophet once made. a lifetime of faithful behavior is not enough to redeem moses for hitting a rock, so while the faithless jerks that crafted and worshipped the golden calf were welcome to enter the holy land, the prophet was forbidden.

the story of the bible tells us of a creator who is an epic asshole. he is not worthy of worship. this is a gnostic view, popular in the 2nd century AD, and at the time of christ, and again in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the science fiction writings of philip K dick. the notion being that the god of the jews is not at all the creator, just a sub-deity who thinks he is the creator, and behaves the way any asshole with way too much power would behave. the real god is obscured by the demi-urge yahweh, and reveals himself to those who are ready to receive his message of redemption.

that's the story, anyhow, and whether it's true or not is pretty irrelevant.

here on planet earth, "faith" is defined as believing in something absent evidence of its existence. there is all too much evidence in this life of hate, anger, destruction, wrath, vengeance, bait-and-switch tricksterisms, and the murder of the defenseless -- all favorite pastimes of the god of abraham. there is no need to have faith in such a being. if you want to worship anger, go look in the mirror and worship yourself. if destruction is the object of your worship, then good news: we live in a time of epic destructive power, and our leaders and our neighbors are all too eager to unleash it upon the defenseless.

there is no need to worship a god of destruction. we ourselves are gods of destruction with incredible powers far beyond anything moses could have imagined. how quaint the horns of the israelites, which dropped the walls of jericho. today a single missile launched half a world away can do the same thing. a destroyer of millions need not ever look upon even the hemisphere of the target of his wrath. we are gods of destruction putting sammael/yahweh to shame.

but brotherly love? universal peace? freedom from hatred, intolerance, and mindless violence? these are things to have faith in. these are things that are not abundant and innate in ourselves and our neighbors. these are the attributes of a being greater than ourselves, and worthy of our pursuit, if not our worship. we are imperfect beings, in that we can choose to be wrathful and destructive, but we cannot choose universal peace, or live in harmony -- these things require more than just our own decisions. they require cooperation, consensus, and a global desire for an end to war.

war is a small, easy thing. it can be done by a single man. peace is so much bigger, and harder to attain. it is the attribute of a true god, worthy of worship. it is something that is in no single man. it is something that does not come easily.

and so i reject any "god" who demands blood, either of his own people or his people's enemy. i think so petty and small of a god does not deserve the name "god". i reject anyone who claims to speak for such a god. they speak for no god, they speak from their own pained heart. to invoke god while harming another person is to prove that one acts only on one's own behalf. what use does a god have of humans to harm humans? he can do his own dirty work. a true god does what no one man can do by himself.

these thoughts were brought to me, with great sadness, by the speech of a hateful man in a temple of god. i sat for an hour and listened to words of love and peace, and then this man came up and claimed that the love and peace was only for a small group of 7 million jews in israel, and not for their neighbors, who were, according to him, "evil" and backwards savages. he begged us for money (when israel has already received hundreds of billions of american dollars to make war on the backwards savages that surround it) to plant trees -- but not peaceful trees. in the holy land, trees are weapons of war, symbols of ownership of land. homes are demolished so that trees may be planted, like a conquistador's flags planted firmly in a mound of skulls.

i barely consider judaism to be a part of my life. but i had always told people it was a beautiful culture of peace and love, of quiet contemplation, of faith and hope and acceptance. my wife was there to experience this first-hand for the first time ever, and her experience was spoiled by this horrid man whose angry begging wiped away all the good words of the rabbi before him. but the rabbi was the one who introduced him, and called him up to speak, and thanked him when he left. the rabbi endorsed the message. the congregation, endorsing the rabbi, also endorsed the message.

and so again, after a long absence, after testing the waters and being embarrassed to find them marred by blood and anger and divisiveness, i find i still have no use for organized religion. the loving acceptance of those who would use majestic trees as weapons, the unquestioning hatred of billions of my fellow humans, the ease with which a congregation full of children of the holocaust could be moved by a message of "us" vs. "them", the endorsement of the abandonment of hope for peace -- these things have driven me out again. i am a ceaseless wanderer in the desert, like so many jews before me. but unlike the congregation that saddened me by inviting a man to stand up and tell us that peace is a hopeless cause, so we'd better just dig in and prepare for war, i still have hope for my people.

François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, a Catholic Archbishop of all things, said, All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.

I argue that the same applies to the religion which a man has chosen. I will forgive any man the mistake of participating in a religion if he will make peace with me. This is the Hope of which the rabbis speak, no matter what is written in the holy books. This is a noble goal, not building walls to keep our bothers in misery.

this is the radical hope for which the world's most famous and vocal jew was nailed to a tree. it is no wonder they decided he was a god -- he stood for a noble and worldly peace that no man could find in himself.

went to shul with the wife last shabbat. i haven't been in years, and she's never been. we were both really digging the experience, it was incredibly positive, welcoming, and lively. i was feeling proud of my abandoned religion, and planning more temple visits, until the guest speaker got on and pitched us for money by telling us how evil and subhuman the enemies of our religion are.

that is when i thought: my god is the lord of peace, the king of love, the spirit of harmony and freedom. for hatred, for destruction, for blood and fire, i may as well worship a man.

happy valentine's day. love your sweetie, but love your neighbor as well, and leave room in your heart for those that hate you. nowadays one can say such things without getting nailed to a cross, but it wasn't always so. be thankful for the peace that you have, and consider whether it was achieved by demonizing your neighbors.