Heads or Tails

Food for thought. American Thanksgiving is coming up this week. A time to give thanks for the things in our lives that are meaningful to us.

To me, it seems like it should also be a time to reflect on what it means to be grateful. And for that matter, what is the other side of thankful? Not the opposite, but the other side of the same positive coin. I think the answer is the ideal of forgiveness.

Flip the coin.

Heads - be grateful. Tails - forgive.

This Thanksgiving week, I challenge myself to be more mindful of both sides of this potent coin.

Some of the baggage is that it's a namby pamby thing that doormats do. But from everything I've managed to read and see and understand, forgiveness is a brawny, muscular exercise that I kind of imagine someone with a great passion for life and a great hearty sort of disposition being able to take on.

~Michael McCullough on Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet, Getting Revenge and Forgiveness, aired November 6, 2008

* * *

Forgiveness, I feel, means not to forget what they have done. But forgiveness means do not keep your negative feeling towards them. So, as far as their action is concerned, sometimes you should use your intelligence. You deliberately have to take countermeasure, but without negative feeling.

~H. H. the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, in an interview with Paul Ekman

I can has heroes

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Who is an everyday hero? Firefighters. Hospice workers. People who devote their lives to saving domestic animals from neglect, or endangered animals from extinction. People who face the uglier side of society to help those most in need. Those brave, anonymous men and women who put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe, bring the lights back on after a storm, and bring us news of our world under dangerous conditions. People who stand up for the "little guy", and people who do what's right, instead of what's easy.

I have quite a few personal everyday heroes. Just off the top of my head, the first few who come to mind are: My oncologist and his nurse, Joan. My cousin, who has served our country with honor for almost two decades. My 90 year old grandmother, a strong, compassionate, and truly beautiful human being. And my husband, who has stood by me through my health problems and prolonged recovery; who plays with me, comforts me, laughs with me, and tells me he loves and appreciates me both with his words and deeds.

Memes, language, WoW and cheese

Blogger Lia of The Knitting Defective posted about being tagged to participate in a meme. This is a new use of the term to me, taking it from a viral transmission of some cultural element, to using the word to describe not even the individual meme itself. Maybe I'm just behind the times, but my Mister hadn't seen "meme" used this way before, either.

In the usage I'm familiar with one might say that Rickrolling, lolcats, dramatic prairie dog, or this kind of blogger's game of tag are Internet memes, but you'd still say "Dude! I've been Rickrolled" rather than "I've been the victim of a meme!" But here the game of tag itself is being referred to as a meme in the latter sense.

• So, Ms. Anree memed me a week or so ago. - Lia, The Knitting Defective
• EssJay tagged me with a meme. - Geek Knitter
• Sharon tagged me with a meme, my first in my new blog! - Essjay of Musings of EssJay
• The lovely Patty has tagged me for a meme. - Gimmesanity
  

This intrigued my geeky little brain, as it feels a little like watching the evolution of the language in progress.

I got the same geeky fascination watching the acronym "PST" evolve. I'm not sure if PST goes back farther than Everquest. But I'm using it as my example since that's where I became aware of it.

In Everquest, a private chat message to someone was called a "tell". So if you wanted someone to reply to you in response to a chat post, rather than say "please send me a tell," it was usually shortened to PST for "please send tell." Example, if you wanted to sell 20 bone chips for a platinum piece (a reasonable price back in my day) you might post a chat message to the zone saying: WTS bone chips x20 1p PST.

What has been interesting to me has been watching the abbreviation PST lose all of it's connection to its original source, while retaining it's understood meaning. In World of Warcraft, the private message is referred to as a "whisper". The abbreviation PST has carried over from other gamers with pre-warcraft experience, but WoW is bigger than EQ is or ever was by many magnitudes of huge. Many (most?) of the people using the abbreviation don't know the origin of the acronym. You now see people using it as though it was the sound "psst" for getting someone's attention quietly. This makes sense in the context of "whispering" to someone. So now, instead of ending a chat post simply with PST, you might see "please pst me". This always makes my eyes cross a little, because to me that says "please please send tell me." But in this context I'm vastly outnumbered. It still means "send me a private message," but has become a word rather than an abbreviation.

Anyway, back to the meme thing... The tag game/meme that Lia was referring to has the following rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 or more pages.
2. Open the book to page 123 and find the fifth sentence.
3. Post the next three sentences.
4. Tag 5 people and task them with doing the same.

Curious, even untagged as I was, I decided to give it a go, and here's what I found.

Nearest book with required number of pages: The Cheese Plate by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. Page 123 is a photograph, so I moved on to page 124.

For example, if you're looking for a pairing with Queso de la Garroxta, the rustic Catalonian goat's milk cheese, and you know from experience that it marries well with a Meursault, the superior white Burgundy, try it with another classic Chardonnay-based wine--an elegant, sparkling, dry Blanc de Blanc Champagne. By gradually branching out like this and exploring different pairings, you'll discover some unconventional but beautiful marriages. This is always a thrill.

I'm not going to tag anyone (I am not very good at following that kind of rule). But if you'd like to play along, grab your nearest book with 123 or more pages and post a comment.

Going Boldly

Going Boldly
Photo posted to flickr by WilWheaton

Seconds before this photo was taken, I typed my fingers across the Okudagram, using the same series of commands that I made up to send the ship to warp speed.

~ Wil Wheaton

One of the blogs I read regularly is Wil Wheaton's WWdN: In Exile. If you've not already discovered this for yourself, he's one of the coolest dudes in the pantheon of Geeks, period. Seriously.

He recently posted this spiffy shot on his flickr page (and his blog) taken of himself at Start Trek The Tour. (Click on the image to see it on his flickr page and read the rest of his comments about it.)

Not only is it a nifty photo, but flickr member tlong commented on it, pointing out:

I just love the concept of pretending to be yourself.
I'm going to try it today in my cubicle at work.

My brain stopped for a second, rewound a bit, and processed that idea a bit more slowly than the rest of the stuff that floats past during the course of a quick browse through flickr.

I absolutely love the idea.

It's obvious how you could pretend to be yourself in the past, by reliving a moment from your youth.

But how would you go about pretending to be your current self, as tlong suggested?

And to add another layer of overthinking this... aren't most of us busy each day pretending to be someone we're not? So what happens if we stop the one, and begin the other? What would we reveal?

Every morning, I put it on
I walk outside, and I am gone
And I don’t seem to mind anymore
I can’t think what it was like before I wore it all the time

In the evening, I take it off
But there’s another one underneath
And I can’t seem to find the bottom of the stack

~Persona, The Blue Man Group

* * *

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

~Albert Einstein

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Among Buddhist schools there is consensus on the point that "self" or "I" must be understood in terms of the aggregation of body and mind. But as to what, exactly, we are referring when we say "I" or "self," there has been divergence of opinion even among Buddhist thinkers. Many Buddhist schools maintain that in the final analysis we must identify the "self" with the consciousness of the person. Through analysis, we can show how our body is a kind of contingent fact and that what continues across time is really a being's consciousness.

~ From verse one of Eight Verses of Training the Mind, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama