The personal commitment I made late last week to boycott stores that might develop on the Hayes Arboretum land here in Richmond has gotten a bit of attention. The signatures of folks who share my commitment have been coming in steadily, with more than a hundred after just a few days. Bill Engle from the Palladium-Item called yesterday to interview me about the petition. He was friendly and understanding, but he seemed to have a hard time figuring out why I wasn't better fitting what I suspect was his profile of an "angry activist," which I'm not. Perhaps it would have been an easier story for him to write if I'd just chained myself to a tree? He did note that he was glad we weren't actually attacking the institution of Frisch's Big Boy itself...I take it he's a fan.
Continue reading "Follow up on Hayes pledge"
Category: personal
I attended my first film festival ever this past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. As someone who generally enjoys movies and sees the art as an important cultural phenomenon (not to mention being interested in writing and making them myself), it was a real treat to participate in an event that is shaped entirely around that phenomenon and the people who love movies.
Continue reading "Report on Madison, Wisconsin Film Festival"
You may or may not notice that I've incorporated some Google Ads into my weblog. It's my unabashed attempt to make whatever moo-lah I can off of this exercise in public writing (which does not, for what it's worth, have moo-lah generation as a primary goal). I'm not sure if I'll keep the ads: the concept in general already grates against my sense that there's too much advertising on your average website, and because of my affiliation with a certain company that does webhosting, it's not like I'm trying to cover any expenses of having the thing online at all. And yet, I haven't yet felt the need to take such a principled stand that I can ignore the allure of 5 minutes of HTML rearranging work translating into some level of income that wasn't there before. In any case, if they offend your (and here I am addressing the imaginary person who reads these ramblings with regularity because they are just SO inspiring) sensibilities, please let me know. Conversely, if you enjoy this stuff and want to cheer me on - financially or otherwise - I'll appreciate that feedback too!
I always look forward to seeing the speakers that my alma mater, Earlham College, brings to Richmond, Indiana because they often bring perspective, insight, and experience that you just can't otherwise get living in a small Midwestern town. Tonight's event was no different: William Kristol (neo-conservative pundit, editor of the Weekly Standard, Bush/Quayle advisor, and member of the American Enterprise Institute) would be giving a talk entitled "America's Foreign Policy After 9-11" on campus free to the public. I appreciate that Earlham makes the effort to bring speakers and thinkers like Kristol who are so diametrically opposed (e.g. Ann Coulter) to so many members of the Earlham community on campus to present alternate, challenging and often infuriating points of view. And I usually appreciate that the Earlham community handles these encounters in such a principled and respectful way.
Oh wait, did I just say "principled and respectful"? I must have made a horrible mistake somewhere, because at tonight's talk, about 30 minutes into Kristol's speech, a student-looking person got up on stage and smacked Kristol square in the face with a pie.
From 1962 to 1965, well before I was born, my father served in the U.S. Army. Most of his time was in Germany based at Bad Aibling Station, a military intelligence listening post, which was closed in 2002. During this time he wrote many letters and postcards to my grandparents and other family members, which they took care to preserve. In 2001, I took the time to transcribe these letters into a database and then into a navigable set of HTML documents. Despite some trepidation about making them globally public, I'm now posting these letters on my website in hopes that they will be interesting or useful to visitors here. As I mention in my editor's notes, it was pretty amazing for me to learn about my father through this medium, and to follow his adventures which, in some ways, I have mirrored.
Enjoy!
Well, as I celebrate my twenty-seventh year on spaceship Earth, I thought I should acknowledge that milestone here. Last night a friend made me write down some of the lessons/rules of life that I've learned in that time, and they seem worth recording.
- Always tell the truth and always seek the truth, no matter what.
- Heart comes before mind.
- Don't sweat the big stuff or the small stuff. The best outcome will prevail.
- Assume that people are acting out of good intentions until they show otherwise.
- Make no small plans.
- Don't be reckless with other people's lives/hearts/minds/spirits.
There ya go. Words to live by. Well...they're working okay for me, anyway.
I use more words than I should
More than I mean to
I wish I could just mumble
and be understood
Just smile quietly
And ignite a connection.
Words have meaning
But meaning is life force
And it's a shame to
use it all up just
getting acquainted
When the real joy
Lies ahead
In the unsaid
I've just concluded my adventure of getting a seed-starting area set up at my house. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, but I think the combination of missing the crops at Elkhorn Ranch as spring approaches, paying an arm and a leg for a few withered basil leaves at the grocery the other day, and seeing Hopi's setup inspired me into action. A few hours at my local home improvement superstore, a few hours putting up the table and equipment, and a bit of cursing later, I'm ready to get my garden going. (I have issues with instant gratification - I could have bought the equipment tonight, gone to bed at a reasonable hour, and installed it tomorrow, but no...) Now there's just that whole "not murdering the plants" part to worry about.
It's been a while since I've posted. Lately, meaningless bits of miscellaneous commentary have been occurring to me at random moments, and I haven't had an outlet for them. So, what was once considered criteria for admission into a mental institution, is now the heart of the blogging phenomenon. Let's see what happens. (Look, I'm already back into successful blogging: a self-referential blog post about nothing at all!)
I've resisted the weblogging phenomenon as long as I could, mostly because I knew I would obsess over doing it right once I started. You're now reading the initial stages of that obsession: announcing that I'm blogging within a blog. Okay.
Anyway, it's not my intention or desire to spew random and intimate facts about my personal life that might make both of us uncomfortable next time we see each other. Rather, I'm looking forward to using one of the most casual mediums available to publish whatever thoughts I'm tossing around on a given day without committing to writing a formal essay or publishing a whole separate web page on my site. Maybe this is a product of laziness, but I wasn't doing a lot of public writing anyway, so let's see how it goes.