Autoimmune diseases

I feel in images. And right now I feel the ground shaking at a beach side resort. Guests who a moment ago were in the unquestioning bliss of paradise stare towards the ocean confused. Then, from beyond the horizon, it comes. And the confusion turns to terror as a growing wall of water eclipses the sun, with a violent roar it casts a momentary dark shadow over everything before a thousand tons of water come crashing down, devouring everything in their wake. I feel myself tossed around, arms and legs flailing in the dark waters; debris zooming all around. I need air but even if I wasn't completely helpless against Poseidon's fury I wouldn't know which direction was up. So I feel my helpless flailing and wonder how much longer I continue before I just give up and allow the darkness to completely swallow me.

My emotions are a tsunami and I just may die from a broken heart. But this heart isn't the usual analogy of a mortally wounded spirit, the victim of a cruel world's machinations. This is a cold, hard broken heart. Its jagged edges are the weapon not the casualty. My self is conspiring to destroy me, my uncontrollable emotions unsatisfied until all my joy, my peace, even my hope is gone. No pithy statements will suffice. I have an autoimmune disease; a betrayal by my flesh, my heart. My defenses are on the offensive, and as my soul is tossed around in this nefarious milieu, I'm acutely aware that I am moments away from the end... I need one much greater than I to fight this battle.

So, with the last of what is left in my I cry, "Salva Me", and then allow myself to fall limp. We'll see who won in the morning.

Business School and Big, Blind Decisions

I want to go to business school. I really do even though I can't really tell you why. Convention tells me that this is a bad thing; I am making decisions on faulty logic that I leave inscrutable by my reckless willingness to "go with my gut". Convention is probably correct. I woke up this morning to discover that someone had decided to throw a rager in my brain, and the party was still going strong, including what felt like a thousand tiny feet jumping up and down on my cerebellum to a nauseating beat. Bad, bad decisions.

From Wings and Milkshakes to Sushi and Wine

Thursday night in a hotel room, wine glass in hand, dark soy sauce spots and wooden chopsticks are the only evidence of the vegetarian sushi and seasonal lettuces that was dinner. I am continuously reminded how much of a cliche my life has become. A far cry from the penny-pinching late night hot wing and milkshake runs of my college days, another cliche I suppose.

Egalitarianism and Hierarchy II: or Hierarchy and Hierarchy?!?!?

I have an idea that I don’t like. It is an idea I feel downright guilty for even having. I have alternately attempted to ignore, suppress and disprove it with limited success. I am usually able to quash it under a heap of other, nobler, cognitive concerns, but like the pernicious weed that it is, it finds a way to creep into the most innocuous of thoughts. And, despite my better judgment, I find myself dwelling on it yet again. So I am going to have to resort to confession, that age-old sacrament that can at first feel as burdensome as the transgression to be confessed, in the hope that it will grant me some respite from my torment.

The idea is this: socio-political egalitarianism, at least in its purest form: the unchallengeable supremacy of equal individual human dignity (not necessarily equal situation), is not a stable equilibrium. And, in the long run, it will find itself overrun by more stable socio-political organizations.

Egalitarianism and Hierarchy I: The airport metaphor

I love airports. Anyone who knows me will know how surprising this is because I hate waiting. And airports, much to my chagrin, seem designed to maximize the amount of dead space they can drag out of every activity. Whether it is the impossibly clueless person at the counter; or the guy ahead of you who has to go through the metal detector 15 times because you forgot to take off his belt, and his keys, and his cellphone and...; or the way calls that weather will delay takeoff seem to occur just after all the passengers have loaded the plane; or how wireless is priced just high enough to never justify you going online to make the most of your time, until you find that your flight has been delayed, but by just long enough to ensure that purchasing wireless at that point will still be profligate. I have a lot of gripes with airports but I still love them. I love airports because of how similar they are all over the world.

Time Well Spent III: Now is all I have

In my first post on Time Well Spent, I attempted to discern how my vacation should be spent. I saw it as a liminal space, special in its potential to give me insight I wouldn't otherwise receive. To facilitate this, I determined a priori that my vacation would be about "rest" and came to define "rest" as reflection and rejuvenation. It quickly became clear that a discussion on the significance of rest was only a part of a larger discussion on the significance of time.

In light of the nuances in how time could be perceived, approaching rest as solely reflection and rejuvenation seemed incomplete. I had thought my definition was cool and counter-cultural because it was in opposition to our future time oriented culture. But as I took a critical look at how I viewed time, I realized that if this vacation really was a liminal space, something key was still missing.

Time Well Spent II: A detour for perspective

The first part of this dual post treatise on how to use my time well, ended on a note of concern. I pointed to the danger of relegating great ideas to trite truisms by refusing to grapple with their implications for daily life. This is a very personal concern. I've only been posting for three weeks, yet already, I sense the pernicious temptation to abandon the posture of a curious learner for the "sage on a stage" persona. The tendency to spout out ideas as mere entertainment (if only for an audience of one), abandoning the potent call to ponder and be transformed that they give. Much like using an inherited, hand-knit scarf as a doormat, failing to truly contend with the ideas we discuss is not only improper, it is an insult - to those we are in conversation with and especially to those to whom we owe the ideas.