Life by a thousand cuts

It's so easy to become offended. It actually comes pretty natural. Someone says something.  You feel it's directed at you Strong reaction follows No need to react, it's got nothing to do with you as a person Imagine some remarks about academic work versus manual one, a bit dismissive about the latter. You don't have a degree and never wanted one. You know very well it takes years of experience and training to do what you're doing. Talent is involved too, as some people do have "two left hands".  You still feel you should add something to the conversation, but not sure if it is going to be well-received. No need to enlighten the other party right now Most people think in terms of opposites. If it's not this, it's that and it can't be anything else. Certainty of one's convictions is also a form of self-reassurance that everything is stable in one's world. Other points of view cannot be allowed because they are disruptive. Cognitive disrup...

This blog post has been left in draft since mid-July, the month of the Buck or Thunder Moon, which was also a Supermoon. One of those opportunities to keep quiet and let the view take over, or publish a couple of good photographs. For anyone interested in a minute timeline of lunar appearances, there's always  Moontimes.app

Philosophy underpinned by a kidney ailment?  Michel de Montaigne was quite a prolific essayist despite his kidney stones or was his painful condition the catalyst of his writings? When does being unwell stop being an impediment? Too many questions, admittedly, a sign of weakness in prose and poor rhetoric anywhere else. Seriously now, or "srsly" as some write nowadays, questions can be quite an effective way to jump start a monologue, and it rhymes with blog as well. Etymologists, beware, I know the two word' ending may sound similar, but they have different origins. A chat with a philosophically-inclined friend included at some point a reference to Montaigne and how debilitating a toothache can be. First the pain and then its crushing ability to obliterate any high-level thinking. Suppose that quite a few of us, bringing a vague cultural or literary reference to the table, feel a bit guilty afterwards and double-check they were not misquoting or worse, inventing. I have ...

One more "Happy Friday" greeting and someone will start screaming...Why not  "Happy Wednesday"?  No other day of the week is worth having the same treatment as Friday, let alone elicit a big smile and the thrill of anticipation. Phew, end of work, lovely weekend, all good, isn't it?  Let the fun begin. Well, no.  I'm done with anachronisms. "Happy Friday" is a relic from a pre-digital era, one with a fixed schedule, no internet and no 24/7 culture.  Add here whatever takes your fancy and think of those times without shift work, teams on 4 continents or rolling news. You would have to go back a lot, to pre-historic times even. Social historians and linguists might find it an interesting piece of research, looking for the approximate moment when "Happy Friday" entered common vocabulary. In the meantime, it is as obsolete as it can be. The only saving grace lies in being a myth. There, I said it.

What is not to hate in discovering something too late in life? It is not just resentment against poor timing. It is also a new burden on top of an already heavy load, a life lived, experience and mistakes in one bundle. Knowledge revealed which could have been so useful 30 or 40 years before, who needs it when almost down to the last mile? Would you like a new source of regret? Here is one, just for you, sing the sarcastic Eumenides.  The scene could not be more idyllic, waiting for a grandchild to get dressed, with the prospect of a whole new day of outdoor adventures. Gentle prompts are spoken suavely. Total fail. Maybe going away for a while, under a fake pretence, would work? No, it does not. If the Invisible Man would have left and then returned to the room containing the kid, there might have been some  reaction. Invisible does not mean non-existent. A small cry of impatience is trying to work its way up the vocal cords, but is suppressed. After all, it's the era of adul...

Sometimes a link is enough : A rose will bloom...  

 It used to be the Sunday morning rush, tidying up the front-room, sweeping, dusting, plumping up cushions. Guests would arrive soon and we had to present them with an acceptable environment, avoid post-visit gossip. It is every day now, having guests coming into the digital front rooms of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and all the others. Eyes are greedy and attention flickers between the best-looking vase in the house filled up with fresh flowers, always fresh, and a small unidentifiable shiny object. Glass of wine or cup of coffee, a couple of books, immaculate surroundings, good lighting provided by a smartphone's camera.  Does it matter that this camera is equipped with something called High Dynamic Range (HDR)? Oh well, it does. Unruly pixels and impossible contrasts are tamed into a picture that looks good, forever. Is this Feng shui in tidbits?  Faced with the impossibility of clearing the mess in every nook and cranny of life, we may find comfort in posting beautif...

 Google Lens is a magical tool, or should I write "magickal"? It's a very short story. Rummaging through old boxes full of long-forgotten objects brought to surface this pendant. No idea at first what it was and no memory of getting it, as a gift or an impulse buy.  Google Images did not work because it the snapshot was not in the right format. Giving up was not an option, the pendant was definitely an amulet of some sort, what if giving up the search meant giving up untapped powers? Random clicking through drop-downs has never been appealing, but curiosity is the best engine.  The photo opened in Chrome, right-click, noticed 'Search images with Google Lens' and here it was, in its full copper and bronze splendour. A Shri Yantra charm or talisman, sold by at least ten different online shops. I could get myself other kinds of Yantras or read at length about them online. Could I?   Of all possibilities opened up this morning I chose to retrace my steps and test Go...

Prequel (as they say in the movie industry): a few days after publishing this post, I came across an advertisement   that contained the very idea I had written about. Actually the very phrase, 'time-in'. Synchronicity is very real. Glad to find out others think the same. The missing toy Child has a tantrum. Child starts screaming. Parent has no idea why and prosecutorial interrogation does not work.  "Why are you shouting? Why are you not listening? Why?" Most adults don't have any trouble explaining why they are moody, irritable or simply unpleasant. "I'm stressed" is the generic label for a variety of deeper feelings and emotions, as well as pure biological reasons, such as lack of sleep. Are grown-ups being told to have a time-out when they behave like their children? God forbid, they're grown-ups. Kids are not basketball players. Time-out, shouted by the coach and meant to break a free fall in players' tactics and successive mistakes, is ...

I have to apologise to Epicurus for misinterpreting him all my life. I blame it on popular culture and philosophy teacher, who should have made me retake the exam. Fortunately, with such a resurgence of interest in classical antiquity, the often misquoted and misunderstood philosophers of yore got another chance. The Internet created a repository of writings accessible now to everyone, not just academics and bookworms. Take the  Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy  for instance, the equivalent of Github  and its treasure trove of open source. The article on Epicurus has a specific reference to friendship.  He thought so highly of it that he set up a community of the likely-minded. It was called The Garden. The Epicurean view on friendship? A blessing, a source of pleasure, a fortress of tranquility, a fountain of trust. A great fortune can never give us what friends do. Bickering and occasional bitterness, the hallmark of every family relationship, are nota...

 They are usually buried deep in official statistics folders, far away from awareness.  Death figures are not something anyone likes looking at on a regular, let alone daily, basis. Not even actuaries, presumably. It changed with Covid-19 (why 19 when the pandemic started in 2020, but that's another question). Daily death figures are everywhere. They do not make comfortable reading, listening to or talking about. For anyone who lost a relative or a friend, they are horrifically painful. If not, fear for one's own fate is a powerful enough trigger. Starting with the ancients, not just classical Greece and Rome, death was a topic to ponder and draw wisdom from. Every thing that was left undone, all the words that could have been spoken, the impermanence of life, they were brought to the forefront of consciousness, or so we like to think. It's not modern philosophers who invented "Memento Mori", nor are these two Latin words widely quoted. How could they be? They are...

  Question of the day: how come cats are so popular on every social media platform?   Answer of the day: popularity is just disguised envy. Cat owners, more acutely, and the rest less affected, due to lower exposure, all wish they were like cats. Free, independent, vaguely domesticated. Doing what they please, when they feel like it, and unflinching when confronted with an obstacle. All of the above has been already said, written and read many times. I claim discovering the feeling behind general fascination with cats.  Envy, that is. Without going all biblical about it, let us agree envy is one constant layer of human composition. This one ingredient is lurking behind an adoring gaze: if only we could be like cats. 

Good old reliable friend, the dictionary, is going to co-author this blog post. I would have posted its photo as well, but I was not too sure if it did not involve some copyright law infringement. Only half-joking. "Ambition drives us all' sounds very much like one of those insufferable sweeping statements, forgotten as soon as read or heard. I am not aiming for posterity here, just to make a point. A word's origin reveals its meaning better than long philosophical notes. Words, much more than people, are taken for granted because of their longer life span. Ambition is just an example. It comes from a Latin word, ambire, which means to go around. Going around is not a particularly interesting pastime, and that's being polite. It is frankly quite boring, a feature compounded by its obvious aimlessness. That's why no one goes around for any long period of time. Hidden or covert, there is an aim for being present one moment here and a bit later there.  In ancient Rome...

 Did you know which are the top blogging topics?  I did not, until I looked them up, using the predictable search engines available to Internet tribes. The results were quite interesting. "How to.." and "Self-development" take the lion's share of the blogosphere, which is itself expanding at dizzying speed. Is everyone after some form of competence and also keen of becoming a better version of oneself? It seems so, but why? The ancients have the answer, nothing surprising here. Aristotle's view of man as "Zoon Politikon", for instance. Often quoted and rarely used correctly,  these two words do not refer to man as a 'political animal",  such as someone who is totally enamoured of politics as understood in today's parlance. Zoon is a living creature and "politikon" comes from polis, which means city, the complex social structure where people live and do things together.  Man is a social creature, who needs to be part of a grou...

I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, including the novel "Love in the Time of Cholera".  I confess that I paraphrased his title for this blog post.

 Life’s too short for bad photos, true. Still, it’s not always possible to avoid mediocrity.  Take mobile phone cameras, for instance.            Zooming does bad things to pixels and the end result is more of a failed attempt, bravely exhibited. The owl above is such a good example. There it was perching on a cold metal bar, minding its own business. I approached it, mobile at the ready. Took a pic and turned round, in search of other subjects. All of its glorious owlish looks survived on my retina and somewhere between two brain folds. Sorry. 

What an opportunity these days to cure ourselves of the confirmation bias! Sharing the same views with someone else can be a source of comfort.  Too much of it leads to mummification. Naturally, it feels good to be part of a group, it's in our genes. No one would deny that. Apart from families, there is some strong solidarity manifesting itself among people belonging to the same generation or football club.  Does it matter they can have more men than women, or the other way round?  Same as families,  any socially formed  groups are not less of a club or association if one type of chromosome combination is represented in greater numbers.  Or not? On the internet, new types of communities spring up all the time. Gamers, baby boomers, entrepreneurs, real and fake gurus, you name it. Choice is enormous. Do men and women gravitate towards one genre or another? Podcast, video, blog? Lecture or dialogue?  It's hard to say, still early days, but there is one d...

A latecomer to the Apple fan club, I was quite pleased when they introduced the Face ID feature. I admit enjoyment must have been born out laziness and some other kind of human flaw. Let’s say it is very convenient. Or rather it used to be. All good until the Virus decided  to come and stay. I was just getting used to instant access into my mobile’s world of wonders when face masks became the new norm(al) outside our homes. Fair enough, how about raising the device to my face and realising it now wants a passcode? Embarrassing as it may be, there’s always a chance of not remembering that magic formula straightaway. Disaster always lies in ambush behind a forgotten password. Fortunately, wiser people thought of possible solutions. I have not tried any of them, you can check them yourselves if you carry out a search on Google. I, for myself, have come to the conclusion that I can survive being out and about without a mobile soldered to my hand.  As no one is sure how long the Vi...

 It's only mid-October, why are diaries and wall calendars already up for grabs?  There must be some inexhaustible demand for these memory aids and planning tools. Old style, of course, printed format. Sure, the present moment can be quite unbearable or just boring. The unknown titillates imagination. Despite later disappointments, a jump into the future fascinates, subjugates and throws open the gates of possibility. Possible is not equal to probable though. People who know the finer details of risk theories can explain the difference in marvellous ways. They also warn against mistaking one for the other. For quite a long time, I have been blind to the fact that what is possible in general can be quite improbable in particular. Day-dreamers will understand. Naive ladies and gentlemen will do too. We have been the ones buying a new diary each year and taking deep pleasure in filling in the first pages. Some of us, the adventurous-type ones, are going further. We write down rem...

  If you read this and you think it's an exercise in self-victimisation, you are so right and you should stop...  at the full stop. You came to this blog to find out something new, insightful and useful when talking to people you need to impress. Did you?  It's very unlikely that anyone would spend any amount of time reading about another inner crisis and how to overcome it in 10 steps. Where is the self-victimisation, you may ask. Hang on a minute, it's round the corner, just needs to be summoned. Let us get Cinderella first, the one and only rags-to-princess story that makes grown-ups, irrespective of gender, fantasise about miracles and chance. Has anyone felt bit Cinderelly while toiling in a very normal existence? Was there any remote possibility of a fairy godmother?  If the answer is no, you have a second opportunity to stop reading, yet again, at the upcoming full stop. What comes next is for Cinderella types, those who dance away the night, but just one nigh...