And what sex is YOUR brain?

God, it's awful grading all those exams. Today I got so bogged down with a bluebook that I began to question my innate ability to process some of the text that is presented to me for evauation. To reassure myself that I am still a thinking individual, I went to the BBC website, to see what updates they had on human intellignece.

Of course, I got distracted by little digressions and eventually I clicked on to this little gem:


Go ahead and take the test (courtesy of the Science Museum in London), but remember that it is a timed test so don't ponder your answers for too long. Then write and tell me if the gender of your brain matches that of your reproductive system.

Illusions, delusions and other such nonsense

When I work hard at them, my flower beds look stunning in the summer. All that color, texture, shape – splendid.

Gardening experts have said that after the flowers wilt, dry up and eventually shrivel into gray heaps of dead leaves and ghostly seed pods, you can let them alone and admire them in their skeletal form – they will delight you all winter long in their interesting “winter garden” presentation.

Oh, how good we are at talking ourselves into liking what is before us!

I suppose it’s like having your backyard look out on a cemetery. You can tell yourself that you really enjoy all that history, all the crosses and tombstones, right there, so inviting, so unique.

For me, a “winter garden” is more like a tableau of what life would be like after a nuclear explosion: brittle, burnt, lifeless. [Is this what would be referred to as naked art?]

My winter garden exists for two reasons only. First, I haven’t the time nor inclination to take a hatchet to it and clear it completely of debris before the frost comes. Secondly, once snow falls, the dead plants keep the ground temp steady, especially during early spring with all that Wisconsin weather merry-go-round as the days go from cold to warm, to cold again.

In other words, I save my illusions and delusions for other areas of my life, where I imagine that I am seeing continuity and beauty and never-ending potential. My garden, on the other hand, is not beautiful in the winter. I’m with the one honest farmer who tells it like it is: it is an ugly garden. It’s over and done with and will not look good again until next April when the first buds break ground again.

One small corner of yuk. 

Why is it that kids accept with equanimity every oddball thing that you do out on the ice?

Just up the hill and around the bend a deserted ice field. Very inviting. 

What'ya doing?
I’m carving figure eights.
Neat!

(This was the exchange between a little tyke on the ice field at Garner and myself at dusk today. But had he been a few years older, he may have queried further thus:)

Huh?
Figure eights. Except I’m doing it with my car key for the heck of it.

see the contours of a figure eight? 

How old are you?
Fifty-one.

Carving figure eights with a car key seems like something my little sister would do. She’s five.
Yes, well she and I have this in common.

Whom are you skating with?
Alone. I like to skate alone. I don’t do it very often, but sometimes the urge strikes and so here I am, just me and the ducks and you. Pretty empty out here, isn’t it?Why not skate with someone?Because when you skate alone you can speed! Like, go really fast! And when you get tired, you can stop.

Don’t you fall when you go really fast?
No, I never fall.

What a smug attitude! Even Olympic champions fall.
I am not an Olympic champion. If I fell, it would hurt, so I don’t fall. The day I start falling, I’ll stop skating. It’s like driving on ice: you figure out how fast you can go to stay within the margins of safety so that you do not crash. I try not to crash in cars, nor fall on skates.

Speaking of figures, can you do fancy stuff on the ice?
I can do a mean imitation of an Olympic contestant coming out onto the ice to begin a performance. You know how they lift a foot in sort of a curtsey? Yeah, I can do that well. And I can do a half-leap in an inconsequential way that lands me back on ice but resembles nothing anyone has ever done in a professional skating capacity.

Oh. Was it cold today?
Well, I had these terrific Polish wool mittens, except they were joined together with a string and I could not rip it apart so for a while I skated as if I was praying, like this (imagine the other hand in the mitten -- the one that is out at the moment taking the photo and getting frostbite all for the sake of The Blog):

tied at the wrist 

Otherwise, I was fine. Skating like a person possessed. Hans Brinker one minute, Irena Tatyanova Illyanovich (or some such Russian skater name) the next. You can let your mind wander out there on the ice.

Then what?
Then I went to Whole Foods and shopped for dinner. Skating was just an impulsive detour on the way to the store.

A smooth sheet of ice, a setting sun. Bliss. 

Dear readers: Ocean does not bite the karmic weenie

Fortune magazine’s long article on Why There’s No Escaping the Blog (linked to via boingboing – thanks) describes the impact blogs have on business. It’s tough to lie when bloggers are there to quickly spread the story of your inconsistencies and untruths (emphases are mine):

"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug."

Okay, not always. But it is at least slightly amusing that blogs, fabricated at the whim and fancy of people who may or may not themselves speak truthfully have the power to discredit someone else’s phony statements.

True, we are reminded that “these are still the early days of blogging, and the form is still morphing.” But if these are the early days, where will we be two years from now? Technorati claims that 23,000 new blogs are born every day. Fortune predicts that blogs will replace email very quickly:

Says Bill Gates, who claims he'd like to start a blog but doesn't have the time: "As blogging software gets easier to use, the boundaries between, say, writing e-mail and writing a blog will start to blur. This will fundamentally change how we document our lives."

It’s hard to believe that email is on its way out even as I sit here bemoaning the lost art of letter-writing. But then, has anyone apart from me noticed how hard it is to actually manually write things down these days? The hand is no longer positioned to hold a pen most of the time. I can see it now – a sort of revolution in our evolution as our hands become permanently curved into menacing shapes with calluses at our finger tips. All because of blogs.

Freeze is off, Freese is on

In case you haven’t noticed, the blog that continues to dazzle and chirp with wit and humor (and includes the nicest ever anniversary wishes for Ocean) has awakened from a month’s repose.

But the idea of hibernating in cyberspace has me thinking: should every blog be required to take a mandatory vacation, to invigorate, refresh and inspire anew its author? Is blogging year-round without a day’s break so commendable that I want to brag about it? Look at me! Weeeeee! I never stopped for a minute, EVEN WHEN I HAD NOTHING TO SAY! I continued, I wrote, I posted! And the band played on.

In fact, I am not ready for a blog vacation. I wrote to a friend back in December – stay tuned, I may take a break from blogging after I reach my first anniversary on January 2nd. Here I am on January 3rd, posting about it. And worse, I have to admit that my very favorite blog posting is done when I am ON vacation. My number three* job choice would be to go places and be paid to blog about them.

So, no freeze for me, not for a while anyway. If I could blog through the obstacles placed squarely in Ocean’s lap in the year 2004 (two tense times come to mind: one in Nagano, Japan where I could only post through dial up via a faulty connection to Wisconsin at hundreds of yen per minute and the other in the farmhouse in Todi, Italy where there was not even a phone to hook into, forcing me to walk the streets with my laptop under my arm and beg strangers to let me use their phone lines), I surely would not pause now when I am wired and not even tired (yet) of the entire adventure.

Enough celebrating. Time to get down to the business of grading and visualizing (as a reminder I am acquiescing to the idea that I must see myself as a writer in order to actually come closer to achieving any writing goals). Here is today’s image, fresh from a … well, you can guess:

* Number one job choice: the job I have, of course (Dean, are you reading this?). Number two job choice: leave that one for another blog post in the distant future. It’s nothing racy or original, believe me.

Yep, writing and writing, from early on, until way into the night (am I doing this visualizing thing right, Mr. Optimum Performance? -- because frankly, it's getting rather tedious). 

Looking for upbeat news from Poland in the New Year?

Here’s the headline today from the leading (liberal) Gazeta Wyborcza. The first paragraph (in bold) reads (in Polish, translation my own):

Warsaw – symbol of freedom and the promised land of free market in books and films of the new generation is changing into a hell of loneliness and unemployment. The city’s icon is no longer the Palace of Culture, but instead, the palace of capitalism.

Do I really want to identify with this? Call it my homeland? Maybe I should have been a product of…maybe Estonia? Let me read up on it:

TALLINN – Freedom House, a U.S.-based NGO that monitors freedom and democracy around the world, wrote in its latest annual survey that Estonia ranks among countries that provide maximum political rights and civil liberties to their citizens.

Jump ship now while the going’s good. Nina from Estonia. Sounds okay, doesn't it?

Birthday brunch

Is it blog-indulgent to invite people over to celebrate your blogg-iversary? No no, not at all. It is, after all, only an excuse. Just like blogging is an excuse to step back from your daily life and put forth something more spontaneous and even at times oddball-ish about yourself for the world to read.

I was greatly indulged this morning-afternoon. Of the original A B C & F blogging crowd, only one slipped off the planet into a sickroom and could not make it. My family patiently tolerated the event and we ate and drank -- they all think it was to the birthday of Ocean. But really it was to all our blogs in the New Year. May they shine. May they make us and the world about which we write just a little happier, wiser, saner.

P.S. I burned batch no. 1 of the bacon. I always burn crostini bread for dinners and bacon for brunch. It has become a pattern and Althouse refers to this curiosity in her blog. Let me say this: it will be a sad day when I do not burn the crostini or the bacon. It will mean that the company or I have become so boring that I keep track of baking minutes instead of our conversation.

Could it be that we are on the second day of January and I’m still posting about resolutions?

…It’s just that I received an email from a reader – someone whom I respect significantly (ergo a writer, because as I said earlier in the blog, few people give me goosebumps in the way that writers do) – who wrote that one New Year’s resolution he’s considering is not googling himself so much (there was a reason, but it would identify the person and so I’ll not state it here – but it was a funny reason, leading me to believe he was being somewhat waggish).

Why do I mention this? Well of course, it lead me right away to google myself – something that I haven’t remembered to do for a while. Since the better part of my legal career has been in the world of clinical legal education, I need not ever worry that I’ll bring up endless legal references. My down-and-out clients – mostly parents who allegedly abused or neglected their children – would not be writing about me nor I about them.

What I did bring up were obscure references to Ocean as well as notes and comments I made on the blogs of others. Comment, people, google brings up the comments function (occasionally)!

So it’s back to placing the post-it in front of my nose with a slight modification: I must remember not to write impulsive emails and post disgruntled comments on people’s blogs. Both will come back to haunt me.

Happy Birthday, dear Ocean…

A year ago today someone tapped me on the shoulder, as I sat reading my first small cache of blogs and said – you should write one… Someone else said sure, other side of the ocean sounds exactly you. Ocean was born.

Why is it that our blogs come to have their own personalities? Aren’t Ocean and NLC one and the same? (Hint: no, not entirely.)

Regardless, I want to say thank you, in a big way, for giving me the honor of your attention (sounds so stiff, but it is meant with such sincerity). And for writing to me. And for linking to me – in good ways and in colorful *other* ways.

I am deliriously happy to have had this chance to blog non-stop for an entire 365 days. It’s been a dream (sometimes a nightmare). Thank you, thank you for indulging me in this wild hobby. And a note toward the future: I’m hoping that with practice, things will grow and prosper (rather than shrink and deteriorate) here at Ocean. Not in the numbers it attracts, but in what it offers to those who do click on. Keep checking, and let me know when things rub you the right or wrong way.

Post-resolution questions

If practically every source tells me that the vast majority of NYEve resolutions are about eating well, drinking less and exercising more (noble but boring, all of it), why was the gym so empty this afternoon?

If it’s because people were nursing hangovers on NYDay and therefore couldn’t be peeled off the living room couch enough to make it to the gym, doesn’t that suggest that they’d already broken with a resolution to maintain healthier habits?

If the gym was empty (oh so empty) because the roads were covered with ripples of ice (pretty, in a grim-reaper sort of way) because of daylong sleet squalls, shouldn’t Borders be equally deserted? [It was not.]

Where is day one of the visualization program I said I’d indulge for 30 days in order to “embrace the new me” (see yesterday’s post on Optimum Performance and my resolution to write more)?

Here, from just this minute. I am at my computer. I am seriously writing. Pages and pages.