I'm beginning to think that there have been more fictional cases of amnesia than real ones.

Not that I blame the writers. Amnesia is a brilliant device. What is identity? How do you know who you are if you can't remember?

Americans move frequently. Our identity is not tracked by our neighbors, as it would be in small and more stable towns. These days, electronic reports follow us. Credit records, lists of traffic infractions -- somehow these seem to leave out the essentials of a person. Even if you have one of those supermarket club cards, tracking your grocery buys, your personality -- what is essentially you -- may not be contained in analysis of your purchases. There has to be more.

In many amnesia stories, the protagonist loses his or her memory and becomes a better person. This has to be reassuring -- we don't want to think that when the skill that makes someone a doctor or the shared past that held a relationship has gone there is nothing to replace it.

And, your identity makes a compelling MacGuffin. If it's lost, what is more urgent than to regain it? What would you risk or sacrifice to know who you are?

By its suddenness, amnesia makes a more dramatic story than the slow reforming, day by day, and choice by choice, that is the way we make our own identities.

It's an old joke: there are two types of people in the world -- those who divide everyone into two types, and those who don't.

There are many different choices as to what axis to divide the two types along. The one that has held the most meaning for me is the xenophile/xenophobe division, played with at length in Robert Anton Wilson's original Illuminati trilogy. While strict usage might keep these words to their root meanings of love of foreigners and fear of foreigners, he spread them to a wider sense.

In that usage, xenophiles enjoy the new and strange, and like change; while xenophobes fear change, and want the known and stable. Because it defines attitudes towards change rather than positions on particular, ever-shifting issues of the moment, this division seems more precise to me than one along the conservative/liberal line.

I'm largely in the xenophile camp. I have the work and hobby history of a dilettante, the kind of list of previous activities you used to see in the author notes on the back covers of book jackets. My favorite part of any project is the beginning, where there is plenty to learn. Endings -- well -- there is reward in seeing something completed.
It can be a challenge to work for that reward instead of the glitter of something new.

We live in a time of very rapid change, and in a time when few can avoid encounters with others who are different. A little xenophilia eases greeting the new.

Meanwhile, the xenophobes put on the brakes, and give us a chance to catch up. This, too, is useful.

So the best outcome requires a balance between fearing and encouraging change.

But xenophiles are more willing to appreciate those creating the other end of the balance.

True character flaw -- the "Weird" Al Yankovic song that continues to delight me the most is "Calling in Sick Today". And I found myself humming "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom" all day the last day of the last time I was an employee.

Emode tells me I'm not really a slacker -- I'm only fronting. Probably so. I've been known to simplify my upkeep and household routines, but I have my standards. I have a few things I want to get done in the world. I'm just not overly blessed with ambition.

It's a theme that keeps coming up in my life. I still remember discussing whether ambition or contentment was better with my French host sister. She was of the ambition position, and now has two boys in a two income home, with a responsible career using her love of languages to arrange international orders for a French manufacturing concern. I figured contentment -- what's the use of all that ambition if you don't have time to enjoy the results? I have no kids, work as a homemaker (and hyphenate writer if I'm feeling like a little more respect), our house suits me better than hers would, and I'm having a good life.

Perhaps this is because I am very lucky. I met and married a man who fell into a career that he enjoys and that pays well. He has an easy temperament, and doesn't push me to earn more money for us. On a higher level, I was born in a rich country, where living is easy, and in a time where more people have more leisure than ever before -- consider that in earlier centuries, only 2-4 % of the population could be spared from raising food if everyone was to eat. Now, it only takes 2-4 % to raise our food, and everyone else can create other kinds of wealth. I love the complexity of available activities in our civilization. These are sweet times.

Still, I like to think I had a little to do with arranging my life so pleasantly. Subtle habits of thrift that gave us the credit rating to buy the lovely house. Sufficient household industry to keep it attractively orderly to the eye. Skills in relationship maintenance so that my marriage is even more fun than it was sixteen years ago.

After all, it is my life. If I don't own it, who does?

Words are cheap. I've been browsing other blogs recently, and there is a huge volume of interesting verbiage out there. I even found myself blasé about books, browsing last night at Portland's reader's mecca, Powell's. I think I have developed an allergy to blurbs -- if I find it described in two excitable sentences, it doesn't sound worth reading.

Of course, my time is expensive. I have unfinished projects and unread books to keep me busy for weeks if not years. I have friends to write and family to visit, cats to feed and entertain, and all the daily business of maintaining health, home, and my primary relationship: with my husband, Doug.

Today's blog is under siege from the kitten in my lap. I'm visiting Doug's parents, and they have a 12 week kitten named Dandy Lion. She crawled in my arms and purred, effectively interrupting my typing. Now she's on my lap. I've just made my fourth grab to keep her from rolling off. She plays and cleans herself all oblivious to rolling her center of gravity over the edge. Couldn't let her fall -- that just wouldn't be right.

Well, it's always about choices, isn't it? We live in times rich in possible words, rich in activities. I'm glad you're reading me. And I hope you are awake as you make the choice to do so.

I've been engaged in the entertainment today of making my living room astonishingly clean. I picked up the pieces of the stereo and dusted underneath them. I rubbed the spots on the dining chairs with White Wizard until they disappeared. I removed all the clutter, and sprayed and wiped away the black line where the cats scratch their cheeks against the corner of the wall. I ventured into the fridge and cleaned the door, but I only noted that a more thorough cleaning later might be a good idea.

There are, in the world, truly excellent housekeepers. They clean up messes as soon as they occur, and dust and wipe and vacuum on a schedule to catch anything that slips past their eagle eyes for immaculacy. They wash pots and knives as they go when cooking, hand rinse their underwear daily, and twice a year switch out their seasonal wardrobes. I am not one of these people.

I am more apt to clean when something gets dirty enough to bother me and I have the time. Excellent housekeepers reap the reward of a continously lovely and clean home -- I settle in with a house that slowly declines to fall below my comfort threshhold, and then leaps for a few glorious hours into radiant, company-worthy shine before beginning another decline. Perhaps someday the pleasure of bright surfaces and visual simplicity will convince me to move more into the immediate action style of housekeeping. Meanwhile, I am comfortable. I seldom feel encroached by object chaos and never at risk from illness via squalor. The house remains good enough to suit me.

In fact, I may not be comfortable in conditions of excessive neatness. I have been in a few homes where I felt that to sit down was an imposition, to pose a book, a transgression. I had a feeling of restriction more severe than entering other homes where dirt crusted the sinks and dog hair coated the couch. In the latter homes I certainly did not want to eat or drink -- but I still felt good about myself. An untouchable home leaves me feeling an unwanted intruder, small, and inadequate.

Feeling better. Awake at odd hour.

Just searched Google for my homepage. No connection. At the moment, I do not impinge on net consciousness.

I appear to be central in Pike consciousness. One of the benefits of having a cat. This one alternates periods of feline independence with fits of neurotic fear and blissful periods stretched out sleeping on my lap. I have another cat, Pumpkin, more self-assured. She is neither so frightened of strangers nor so adoring of me. She cleared our first home of mice in two weeks when first she adopted us, and still collects residuals.

A glass of water, affection from a cat, a bit of web browsing, and a few paragraphs writing -- all is well with the world, I think I can get back to sleep.

Neil Gaiman, an author of such grace and generosity that he has signed for hours beyond his schedule, and posts courteous replies to people who ask strange, repetitive or irrelevant questions, is mad. And this is why. A clerk in Texas has been sentenced to six months jail for selling an adult manga to an undercover adult -- a comic marked over 18 only -- because the prosecutor convinced the jury that comics are for kids. Only and always. And, therefore, art expressed in panels of pictures and words does not gain the first amendment protection of text or images alone.

The Comic Book Defense Fund will appeal this ruling. Offer them your support at www.cbldf.org. Or see Neil Gaiman's web journal Neil Gaiman for his own explanation.

Haven't been feeling well this week -- dreary, draggy, achy, angsty, bleary, blechy, twitchy, teary. You know. Generally not well.

I hope it's a healing crisis for this recovery from the car accident process. I'm entirely ready to be done with that.

Most things are going well. My husband is playing Final Fantasy X in his off hours, and I'm enjoying watching him. My nephew visited last week, and we repainted the balcony and played a lot of games, and generally had a good time. I'm satisfied looking out at the fresh color and even coat of the new paint job. My house is still beautiful and airy, my cats are still graceful and affectionate, my car remains reliable and comfortable.

I do hate summer, though. Too much heat, too much yardwork. As soon as I can -- which looks like about three years from now if I do without travelling vacations -- I need to arrange for someone else to take care of the yard.

A wait of three years is not much comfort today. Nothing for it. Today I suffer, either prickling skin and aching muscles if I do the work or oppressive weediness and the censure of my neighbors if I don't.

Testing.

I know several definitions of wealth. The simplest is having a lot of money -- say, one million dollars in liquid assets. (See here.) Throwing some figures around, if you work for 40 years, say from 25 to 65 at $25,000 per year, a million dollars will pass through your hands. Of course, you won't be able to keep it. If you could earn 50,000 instead, and save half of it, then you'd end with a cool million at retirement -- more, if you earned interest on it instead of pushing it under the mattress.

So much for that. Economists like to think of wealth differently. Wealth is capital -- resources that can produce other income without becoming exhausted -- such as land, factories, or cash. Or a wealthy nation is one that has a high production per person. Or, wealth is the result of work beyond what subsistence requires -- art, luxury cars, computers -- anything unnecessary to survival, especially if durable -- so quilts increase wealth and musical performances do not -- unless they are recorded and turned into a tangible artifact, like an eight track cassette, or something.

So much for that. My favorite definition I have paraphrased from Peter Carroll -- wealth is being able to spend your time enjoyably. I think most people want money so that they can improve the way they spend their time. They'd like to buy a more indulgent car, or shop in more beautiful stores while dressed in more beautiful clothing, have someone else do the tasks they hate, and not spend time worrying how to meet their bills. They'd like to buy excitement by travelling or privacy with more space. Or freedom by not having to give someone else control of eight or more hours a day to earn the money to eat and pay the rent.

If you think of wealth in this way, there's a limit to how much you need. After all, you can only spend each moment once -- after a certain point, more money won't improve those moments.

And -- if you have work you enjoy -- you are already wealthy enough all the hours you spend at it.

May you all live well. Anna

Extreme heat calls for extreme measures. It's been around 100 here the last several days. The first night, the house cooled well, as night time temperatures outside fell substantially. However, the last two evenings, it has clouded up, allowing much less night time cooling. We have no air conditioning -- my husband is even now searching the web for solutions. I'm not sure adding a machine to the house is the answer. If global warming continues, we may yet wish to. Neither of us sleeps well in the heat.

So what can we do without an air conditioner? If night time temperatures fall sufficiently, opening windows at night, and closing them during the day works quite well. For best results, set a box fan in a window blowing out -- air is more like a rope than a wheelbarrow, it's easier to pull than push. We've tried blowing air in across our steaming bodies -- the movement feels good, but the house does not cool effectively. It's a clear case of trading momentary relief for long term discomfort. Far better to aim the fan out.

Two days ago, we scheduled a massage at a local spa so they would let us use the pool.

This morning, I rose at dawn and started the sprinklers. I also sprayed water into the air near our bedroom windows. It helped.

Later, I plan to hang wet laundry all around the patio. Our patio is underneath a balcony, so with a sufficient quantity of laundry adding evaporative cooling to the shade, I expect the patio to be quite comfortable.

And finally, both the local library and my husband's work place do have air conditioning. Worst comes to worst, seek a public place with cooling.

Ah, dawn -- the only time of the day that really belongs to me. Quiet, free, cool -- it's enough to make me glad I can't get back to sleep.

Very busy recently. Last week I worked at the Amaranth fireworks stand. Then we had guests, and I barely brought the house within standards before they arrived. And Mom left at the last minute, and wanted me to check on Grandma. And Doug had his worst migraine in years. Too much going on. Yet, now that it's over I feel a little aimless. It's hard to move back from responding to external demands to following one's own star. My body was complaining that I had pushed it too hard for this point in my recovery from whiplash even while I felt empty from lack of activity. Logically, I should have been glad for the rest.

I'm often unsure of where to balance rest and activity. The recovery process makes the comfort zone smaller. My muscles stiffen more easily when they don't get enough movement, and complain more quickly when I overdo it. So this period would educate me on the right balance if that balance weren't a moving target. It changes as I regain the reserves lost to the shock.

No point in stressing myself to reach for perfect balance. Just dance it daily, moving in awareness, and it will take care of itself.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

I read Heinlein before I became a critical reader. Much of his philosophy seems self evident truth to me. If you consider that quote as a quick quiz on your competence as a well-rounded human being, how did you do? Do you think these standards are too high?

Doug and I talk about "Heinlein heroes". They are remarkably competent -- whatever it comes their way to do, they manage. He had none of this fashion for flawed heroes! His books contain plenty of conflict without any arising from the heroes' incompetency -- a plot style I'd like to see more often filmed.

Now that I am a more critical reader, I notice that Heinlein spanned several axes of accomplishment in that quote. "Change a diaper, plan an invasion" suggests infancy to war, birth to death. "Pitch manure, program a computer" spans rural, biological, low tech to urban, electronic, high tech. Note also that the list that begins with "change a diaper" ends with "die gallantly", while "write a sonnet, balance accounts" covers what we call right and left brain activities. If you look for more, you'll find it. All from a man writing in 1973 before computers were widespread and right brain/left brain had become a popular concept.

So, returning to the discussion of adulthood in my previous post -- do you have to be a full-spectrum Heinlein hero to be an adult? No, though it's nice to have models to aspire to. But you won't trip my adult meter unless you have a competency in at least one work skill, one relationship skill, and something outside yourself that is important to you.

I recently finished Final Fantasy X. This game is a creation of such art, truth and beauty that it would be a crime not to play it. I'll post a more complete review to Paradox World Reviews.

Doug had played ChronoCross, and I had played Final Fantasy IX. A little ways into FFX, I realized with a start that there were adults in it. Auron and Lulu pegged my adult meter, and none of the characters in previous Square Soft offerings had done so.

And then I had to ask, what makes them adults? There is more to it than fully developed physiques and deep voices. More to it than backstories reaching further into the past than the other characters' and having continued past losses.

I spent a while with the question, and I think the essential aspects of Auron and Lulu's adulthood are these: they are competent and knowlegeable, and they lend themselves to a cause more important than themselves -- that is, they have chosen a responsibility and they carry it out.

I can imagine you with your eyebrows raised asking "she's looking for adulthood in a video game?!!"

If our art doesn't show us adulthood, how will we learn to value it in our lives?

Summer's here. Leaving Costco with an oversized receipt, I suddenly remembered how much I used to enjoy fluttering paper in the wind. I would tie strands of crepe to my bike, or pull a length of printer tape behind me on a string. I remember a kite contest. We climbed near the cemetery on the west hill overlooking town, where the wind blew strongly, a little dusty, with the sagebrush clumping beside the road. Was it one of those competitions where everyone ends with a prize? I only remember the judge's skeptical look as my very small diamond twisted its string following my fingers in circles, the wind on my skin, and long streamers fluttering.

June 14, 2002. Can you believe it? I’m staying at a friend’s house, and he doesn’t have internet access at home. So, I’m typing to a document for later cut and paste.

My watch the skies policy paid off handsomely last night. Driving west across the cascades, we saw the crescent moon with the limned disc in her arms, turning her back to petitioning Jupiter, all perfectly framed between two peaks. A little later, an opening between trees framed it again. At one point, heavy raindrops fell thick and hard enough to bounce on the asphalt, while the moon and planet still shone clearly ahead. Later, haze and city glow abbreviated the crescent to a short vertical segment. Fewer clouds and fewer trees leave more sky to be seen east of the Cascades.

Bend has also adopted measures to reduce light pollution. Outdoor lighting must shine down and only onto one’s own property. It gives Bend archetecture a subtle, modest and enticing look by night, and helps protect the nearby observatory’s seeing. I enjoy the more velvety and restful nights, and would like to see more cities adopt similar measures.

I think it's from spending my formative years in the decade of Truth -- I'm an inconsistent mailer of Christmas cards. How does this follow, you ask?

We wanted to avoid hypocrisy. Is there sincerity in sending a barely personalized, mass produced greeting card to dozens I've had no other contact with all year? What meaning and worth attach to that?

So, we limited our card mailings to those we could supplement with an actual note, at least, too. The result is that we send few and receive few.

I've since thought of a few uses for impersonal Christmas cards. They serve as a yes, this address is still live handshake when they don't return. And even the very small remembrance of an unsigned card can be better than no remembrance at all.

And so it goes for many of the polite formalities called empty in that decade. Perhaps they proceeded from the lips rather than the heart, but they served their purpose in connecting people, smoothing relations, and allowing business, when the frank truth would have alienated, irritated, and generally degenerated into a focus on itself rather than some other matter at hand.

Or elevated into a focus on itself -- for the living exchange of heart truth is the most thrilling intimacy of all.

June 11th, 2002

Dreck. I missed a partial eclipse yesterday.

The problem of getting the right information is quite a complex one. For a while, Doug and I woke to the radio. Our local radio hosts were entertaining, and I enjoy discovering the occasional song worth adding to my collection. They gave us a small selection of news in the hour or so we left the radio on -- enough for me to feel confident that I would learn of anything really critical.

However, I tire of radio. And giving my first thoughts of the morning to someone else seems a sheepish way to start the day. And waking without an alarm leaves me feeling more rested. So, we stopped.

After a couple weeks, I began to feel too disconnected from the wider world. Doug recommended Yahoo news, and it offers at least as much information as an hour of variety radio, fewer and less insistent commercials, and links to anything I want to know more about. And I can hit the headlines, and follow a few links for only a few minutes investment.

Now I have time to think, and fewer pushes to think of buying whatever may be touted today. So I can consider:

What is the right amount of information? Who should choose what I should hear and therefore spend my mindshare on? Are there community disadvantages to personalized news that outweigh the personal advantages? Can Web providers, who offer me the greatest control yet of my information intake, gain the resources they need to keep doing so? Does this web log offer value to anyone but me?

And then, I can stop considering it, and go make Grandma and Doug breakfast.

June 10th, 2002

Have you looked at the evening sky recently?

Tonight I emerged from a meeting at that luscious hour when the sky glows the deepest blue. Two planets near the western horizon have been dancing the path of a very slow bolo for the last several weeks. And by day we've had Maxfield Parrish clouds.

The moon can still take me by surprise. The last time it rose full and large, I didn't see a face. Half of the Atomium, perhaps.

I'm not that fond of the smell of roses. Perhaps I will stop and watch the sky instead.

June 11th, 2002. Age and youth.

Grandma Gilson is staying with us while Mom is on vacation. So this is what it's like to be old. At 88, her hair retains a few strands of black among the beautiful thick white strands, her skin is loose and spotted, energy and ambition low. She can walk, and she's pleasant company, likes to tell jokes. I could live with this. Only let me keep my mind so long as I live!

I spread my energy as a net rather than an arrow. I'm not driving towards a single goal, as an Olympic athlete or Dr. Frankenstein might -- I support a family member here, learn something new there, build friendships, maintain and enjoy my marriage, my house, and multiply my hobbies. Wouldn't you want to be connected and have pleasant surroundings?

Took a look through the self help and business success areas of the local B&N recently, wanting to find an appropriate gift for my sister-in-law's graduating son, whom I know only slightly. I wish him success in his own terms and wanted to offer what support a book gift could. It seems you can choose a book to further whatever ideas of success you already have -- from living the simple life to becoming a millionaire, from verbal self-defense to winning through intimidation. I choose the pocket version of Success for Dummies, for ease of fitting in a card and attention to choosing what type of success you want. Good luck, Chris.