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No, seriously, cut it out.  We’re Oregonians.  We don’t know what to do with heat like this…

Yeah -that’s actually correct with official temps for today.  The predicted high was only 103.  I actually went out and bought an air conditioner today.

First I got an amazing deal on a used 10,000 BTU version that just kicked major *ss.  Until it started popping the breaker in my apt.  Stupid 1900’s knob and tube sub-standard wiring.  So to avoid burning the place down, I went out and got a very high-power saving (read crappy cooling) 5amp 5000 BTU version which isn’t really doing the same job by any means, but at least helps a lot.

Update: Got my 10k BTU air-con working by – using a better wall extension cable.  I had a cable rated for 15 amps, but it was a 50″ outdoor cable.  I went out and bought a 10″ cable rated for 20amps – problem solved.  the 50″ cable just added too much resistance to the equation and it be just enough to pop the breaker when it kicked in.  Switch to a shorter, higher-rated cable and everything worked great.  Slept like a baby in sub-zero temps.

Just rented the anime movie “The Sky Crawlers” last night.  I found it to be quite indecipherable at first – but talk about an interesting trip when I started reading about what people thought was the messages of the movie.  It led to a discussion of stagnating anime content/culture, a widely spreading Japanese social/psychological disorder called hikikomori, and the general ‘checking out of society’ by a whole generation of young people happy to float along in a society that they don’t think will be around to support them as they get older.  But more on that…

First off, the movie is about young pilots in pseudo-WWII era fighters.  The children were the results of genetic experiments that accidentally left them locked as youth forever – unable to die by biological/age/normal means.  Instead, they live what are portrayed as endlessly repetitive lives – thrown into a seemingly ‘staged’ war (that seems to only serve the purpose of being to show ‘normal’ people why their freedom is valuable) with daily battles, moving from base to base to fight in different places, and so on.  This repetition goes even so far as they being genetically ‘resurrected’ when killed in combat – and while they don’t remember their past life – everyone else around them remembers them.  The movie drags on to oblivion, and endlessly repetitive series of lives re-lived the same way each time.  The manga (book) form even goes so far as to actually have been released in the wrong chronological order – and yet it doesn’t matter as the cycles rotate endlessly.  Lovers die and are reunited, one remembers the other doesn’t, etc.

Watching the movie, however, is a lesson in near boredom.  The repetition and unknowing at times becoming very tiresome and I even found myself being bored – but that’s the point of the director.  The message gets lost a bit on US audiences especially, because the idea he’s trying to talk about is a very recent Japanese phenomenon.

In the Anime News Network forums discussing this movie was an interesting comment about the recent Japanese phenomenon/psychological disorder – and those that exhibit it are called hikikomori.  Here’s the jist from Wikipedia about hikikomori:

lit. “pulling away, being confined”, i.e., “acute social withdrawal” is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive individuals who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives.

Though acute social withdrawal in Japan appears to affect both genders equally, because of differing social expectations for maturing boys and girls, the most widely reported cases of hikikomori are from middle and upper middle class families whose sons, typically their eldest, refuse to leave the home, often after experiencing one or more traumatic episodes of social or academic failure.

Japanese commentators have also offered analysis of the hikikomori phenomenon, and find distinct causal relationships with the modern Japanese social conditions of anomie, amae and atrophying paternal influence in nuclear family child pedagogy. Sometimes referred to as a social problem in Japanese discourse, hikikomori has a number of possible contributing factors. Young adults may feel overwhelmed by modern Japanese society, or be unable to fulfill their expected social roles as they have not yet formulated a sense of personal honne and tatemae – one’s “true self” and one’s “public facade” – necessary to cope with the paradoxes of adulthood.

A decade of flat economic indicators and a shaky job market in Japan makes the pre-existing system requiring years of competitive schooling for elite jobs appear like a pointless effort to many.[7] While Japanese fathers of the current generation of youth still enjoy lifetime employment at multinational corporations, incoming employees in Japan enjoy no such guarantees in today’s job market.[8]  Some younger Japanese people begin to suspect that the system put in place for their grandfathers and fathers no longer works[9], and for some, the lack of a clear life goal makes them susceptible to social withdrawal as a hikikomori. It should be noted that hikikomori is similar to the social withdrawal exhibited by certain adults with Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDDs) in Western cultures, a group of disorders that include autism, PDD-NOS and Asperger syndrome

This was haunting echoed by a Japanese person on the forums itself:

I know it took some years to make this film, but the message couldn’t have come out in a worse time, especially with the recession.

I am currently working at the best job I could have, and it’s still shitty compared to others. I still keep it because if I leave I might not find another job, and I also have time for myself and anime of course.

My brother who’s become hikikimori became that way because he realized he can save more money by staying indoors as opposed to having a very active social life.

As the breadwinner I would want to tell him to get off his ass and find a job so I wouldn’t be the only one slaving away, then again I do envy the copious amount of time my brother has, think of all the videogames I could play.

Ideally we would go out and get higher paying jobs so we could get married to women who demand 6-figure incomes and so we can beget children who will be the future taxpayers. But you know what, I honestly don’t think there will be any social security left by the time I’m ready to retire. So I live as if there won’t be any retirement at all — that’s the reality I have come to belive in. And right now I sure as heck dislike the fact that I am helping shoulder the costs of the older generation who messed up society to begin with.

Give me an environment with stable family relationships and I will gladly slave away to support them.

But with ridiculous divorce rates and the threat of child support payments, and a lifetime of heavy taxation in the new socialist world, I have come to the conclusion that this society is not worth supporting, and if I can totally withdraw, I would.

And finally, the director himself echo’s a parallel message:

In our peaceful country, there is no more starvation, revolution, or war. We have a society where we can live out our allotted spans of lives without ever having to feel deprived of food, clothing, or shelter. Ironically, I am unsure as to whether this is a good thing. Once I read the story of a man who climbed the skies and reached Heaven, but got bored after a few days.

Isn’t this comfortable life that we have achieved, a monotonous purgatory that doesn’t end until we die?

So, is having actually worse than wanting/striving and not getting?  While nowhere near the levels/severety of Japan (and argueably very different causes/effects), Portland has its own population of youth (many call them trust-fund kids) that live bohemian lives of not working while living off trust funds left them by more wealthy parents.  Maybe Aldous Huxley is right and we’re becoming an aimless generation that will be easily controlled via our blind following of distraction?  Or the recent book by Robert Putnam called “Bowling Alone” that has tracked the huge movement of the current generations away from organized social activities in favor of markedly isolated ones.  I think these things are circling a common point – perhaps I might put some brain power to this one…

There are lots of ‘credit report’ companies out there that say they’ll get you your credit report for free.  Some even have catchy tunes on the radio.  However -they also don’t just be nice and get you your report (which you can do by yourself), but also do things like auto-sign you up for services you later need to cancel, or as part of the deal you secretly give them the permission to sell your information to others, and other scam-like-ways to milk you for money behind your back.

But there is a way to get your free credit report without getting snagged. Thanks to congress (who fought the credit reporting agencies tooth and nail to force them to do so), you are entitled to 1 free report from each of the 3 major credit reporting agencies once every 12 months.  However, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion seem to daily make this process more difficult by changing their websites and phone numbers. However, law required them to create a website that you can go to get these free reports.  That website is here:

https://www.annualcreditreport.com/

So cut to the source and go directly to the website for your report.

An additional cool thing is that by using the correct website, you can dispute and address issues right away – as opposed to third party companies that have already closed the free report and you’d have to call them and do it the more painful way.

Life is a journey of exploration and discovery.  And I’ve noticed that the advice you tell yourself, the things you learn, and your ability to hear and understand them are often tied to your age.  The Greeks believed a person didn’t reach self-awareness until they turned about 50.  I have recently been reflecting on the ‘life-stages’ – and others have written books about it.  There is a strange connection between what goes on in folks lives at different ages. See if any of these mesh up with my experiences.

Teens:
-you want to get out of school and home.  Still, you’re in that middle ground of still being tied to your parents, and not quite capable to be getting out into the world.  This varies greatly by person and situation.  But still, you have the stink of still being a kid on you.

20’s:
-You get out.  College was great – freedom for the first time.  All kinds of learning experiences as you moved out into the world – getting too drunk, messing up your relationships, etc – but you have seemingly unbounded energy to explore novel new ideas and try new things.  But you’re broke too.
-After college – I was out to make my mark.  I was going to do it all – with lots of crazy activities: snowboarding, mountainbiking, running, hiking, etc. I worked long hours at work and was very ambitious in my goals.  I reached most, if not all, the goals that mattered to me. In fact, most everything you do is about yourself and your doing stuff.  I was trading time for experience and achievement. If someone had told me to slow down or take a longer-looking approach – I doubtfully would have listened.

30’s:
-You slowly no longer need to prove things to yourself.  You know your limits better and can tell which things turn out to be meaningful or not much earlier (getting into stupid relationships slows – hopefully).  And conversely, you begin to see what things aren’t changing.  Which things in your life (personal, physical, emotional, etc) that have not been growing in the ways you want – despite your efforts.
-You stop needing to live for yourself. You feel more fully the pull to do and contribute to things outside yourself.  You become increasingly bored and unsatisfied with purely self-serving activities.

Anyone else finding these patterns in their own life?

I think I wrote about this before, but found some better wording.  It has to do with the difference between what our founding fathers talked about when writing about the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and what we seem to think of today.

See, our founding fathers were no slouches.  They were very well educated statesmen and leaders known around the world even in their day (trips of Ben Franklin to Europe are good examples).  Anyone who’s read their writings also knows this.  This means they were heavily trained in the classics and philosophy –  something we don’t do much of today.  Anyone who’s studied philosophy will immediately key off on the word ‘happiness’.

See, the ancient Greeks struggled with the idea of what life was for – something we do today.  What made a good life?  What constituted living and living well.  They started very scientifically by making observations – they saw that humans had a unique ability to reason that no other animal had – among other unique qualities.  They also had a more wholistic view of the human person as body, mind, and a ‘guiding spirit’.  They also had a much more poetic and expressive language.  We often translate their works, but unless you take the time to look up the entomology of the words or have a good instructor to guide you – you’ll rarely get the connotations right or even get what they were really saying.  This is why those that really want to study classical philosophy learn how to read Greek and Latin.  As someone that learned Latin well enough to read things in the language, it opens the works of that time period up in unbelievable fashion to whole new levels of understanding our language barely has the constructs to communicate or translate.

As an example, the word ‘happiness’ is probably one of the worst offenders.  Instead, here’s the word the Greeks used that often shows up in our translations as happiness.  It’s eudaimonia – and this is the wikipedia article on the word:

Eudaimonia (Greek: εὐδαιμονία) is a classical Greek word commonly translated as ‘happiness‘. Etymologically, it consists of the word “eu” (“good” or “well being”) and “daimōn” (“spirit” or “minor deity”, also used by extension to mean one’s lot or fortune). Although popular usage of the term happiness refers to a state of mind, related to joy or pleasure, eudaimonia rarely has such connotations, and the less subjective “human flourishing” is often preferred as a translation.

Eudaimonia, [literally ‘having a good guardian spirit’] along with “arête” (virtue), is one of the two central concepts in ancient Greek ethics.

As you see, happiness isn’t a concept related to ‘feeling happy’.  Instead, it’s a rightness of the person that lets them flourish to reach their full potential.  To have a spirit guided by good principles that helps a person live fully and best.  With this core of recognizing the good of the self, they extended that to say then the job of  government is to set itself up in a way that it orders the interactions of citizens to let all individuals flourish in a way that was good and right.  And that in turn will make them better contributors and aids to all of society.  That is why things like theft and murder are to be prohibited.  These things act to rob a citizen of their human flourishing.

It was also essential to that view that there were clear imperatives for a person who wanted to live fully and best – one didn’t just get to do whatever they felt.  While different thoughts on what those things were existed and was a subject of a lot of discussion, they did have some really interesting concepts.  Such as saying it was good and right to give your life for what is right – either in war or in speaking the truth.  For to live eudaimonia-ously was to do what was right and good – and it carried the imperatives for upholding that good and rightness.  Not to say that this couldn’t get you in trouble – especially if you’re concepts of what good and right are really wrong – but that’s why they spent so much time trying to define those very things so that one didn’t get into that trap.  What some of those values were is left to another session – for there were lots of competing (and often very strange) thoughts on that matter.

Still, I think that’s enough for our conversation.  Our founding fathers wouldn’t have said the pursuit of happiness is to be blissful and drunk all the time.  Instead, they recognized that that goal of reaching happiness – eudaimonia – was a life-long task of work.  A task that was to be treasured and protected.  They would probably have said quite the opposite of what most of us think of as happiness – much more in line with what Kennedy said when he said to ask not what your country can do for you – but what you can do for your country.  It was the freedom to do the hard work of finding the good and right – and living it.  And the government shouldn’t get in the way of that – but instead protect and treasure that struggle. I think we miss that a lot in our current state of interactions with each other, in our courts, in our policies, and what we expect our government to do for us.

Food for your thoughts.

Last night the Crystal Method did a show here in Portland last night.  I decided to go last minute – and it was a good show – but by the end of the night -I’m hanging out with the band.  No joke:

Anyway – show ends and a coworker sticks around for a t-shirt. We’re finally rounding the back of the Roseland to head to Ground Kontrol when these kids come up and slap a green wristband on my coworkers arm and tell him to head backstage. And, long story short, by the end of the night, we hang out and then start bar hopping Portland with the two guys from Crystal Method – in a group of about 10 people. I think I ended up back home around 4am. Pretty friggen sweet.
Here are some of their more famous songs to refresh your memory:
Trip like I do

Busy Child

Had forgotten about springtime in the midwest.  Everything is just so…green.

I’ve been home in rural Indiana the last few days helping clean up some family property.  Well, that and brushing up on my nail-gun and roofing skills by finishing off some aluminum siding on our back porch.

 

It’s amazing how much stuff can collect, and how many little projects there are, on several properties between two generations – one generation on a farm and the next being a family of 10. I can’t say we got everything completed, but we made a substantial dent in the important things.

In digging through the stuff, I’m constantly amazed how much farming and technology in general have moved in two generations.  My grandparents grew up when electricity finally got out to rural areas, farm machinery did 6-10 rows at a time, milking was done by hand, the phone was a party-line and was prone to throw sparks into the room if the line got hit during a lightning storm.  But now, gone are most of the old wooden barns – or they’re simply falling over.  The ones that are still in great shape are rarely actually used for farming – but are converted to display pieces or even lived in.  Those that get razed are replaced with large aluminum/steel machine sheds every bit as big as the old.  Farmers no longer have smatterings of everything: a little land, a few cows/sheep/pigs/chickens, and a home patch.  Now, land farmers have huge machinery and miles long uninterrupted fields.  Animal farmers specialize in hundreds to thousands of only one kind of animal.  Things are much more efficient and surprisingly cleaner.  Unfortunately, this also means fewer people are needed to maintain the same amount of land.  Simple economics dictates that small farmers and farms can’t do much more than subsist with $2-4/bushel corn/bean prices. Fence rows that needed to be cleared yearly and delineated property simply disappear in deference to larger and larger open areas.  Either you’re getting bigger, or you’re soon to be moving.  The small family farm, despite the efforts of Farm Aid and the various attempts to save the lifestyle, have become victims of technology more than anything else.  You just don’t need as many people to farm the same land anymore.

Still, there were all kinds of little farm implements, tools, and techniques that are simply being lost to time and technology.  Already there are some tools I used with my grandfather that nobody knew what were but me.  And there were all sorts of things you find you can’t make heads nor tails of.  The techniques of using these tools or what they were even used are quickly being lost.  Amazing to pick up something that was a key piece of equipment 50 years ago, and now nobody even knows what it is.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not nostalgic for these days to come back.  They were rough and dangerous.  People lost lives and limbs in pretty horrible ways back then – and still do to a degree today.  Farm equipment was deadly – I lost an uncle to a tractor roll-over, a neighbor lost most of an arm, and my own father narrowly averted death with a PTO shaft.  Not to mention farming with horses.  So it always gets my craw a bit when folks around the city here want to go ‘back to farming the way they did before’.  I don’t think they appreciate how hard and downright inefficient farming in those older ways was.  Regardless of the pesticides/chemicals/organic issues – it was bloody hard work and a yearly gamble to grow a field of crops and see it from planting to harvest. The penalties of failure were not bailed out – you simply lived very lean and poor for a year or two to make up the bad years.  Harvest festivals that celebrated a good harvest encapsulated an entire year of planning, guessing, planting, cultivating, and harvesting.  I think that’s where I get a lot of my own attitudes of playing things safe financially and using the good times to prepare and set up cushions for the times when you knew they’d be bad.

I guess it came down to this in the end – to remember what you came from in order to really savor the wonderful things we have now – and to take full advantage of those opportunities that were created to their fullest extent.

So, we have this little health program at work – all voluntary – and for doing a health screen/hitting various exercise/weight/smoking/etc goals – you get rewarded with $25 gift cards from American Express.  Well, this free money isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.  It only works at a handful of retailers – of which the only one you’ve likely even heard of is Amazon.  But yet, you cannot combine the use of this card with another payment option.  So in other words, you need to spend up to $25 exactly – and not over.  And, they have the card blocked so you can’t buy gift cards either.  Lame.

But here’s a site to help you stick it back to the man.  If you purchase an item, but are just shy of the $25 free shipping, use this site to help you find items of the amount you desire.

http://www.filleritem.com/

It will help you located “filler items” of a certain value to get you to the magic $25 for free shipping.