Category: Ramblings

First the 2023 Review

Run 500 miles: Fell short of the goal. Only ran 400 miles.

Become fluent enough in Italian to read a couple chapters of an Italo Calvino novel: Fell short of this one, too. Did become marginally more fluent in Italian. Rather than a pair of Calvino chapters, I translated the first two chapters of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Dove mi trovo. Much shorter chapters.

Read Saint Augustine of Hippo: Read two of the three books I intended to read, On Free Choice of Will and Confessions. Did not start City of God. No apologies, here, though. Pored over Confessions. Was worth the slow, thorough read.

Sail: Made it out on the water so seldom it was disappointing. Made it back to shore every time, though.

Visit Hawaii: Budget and schedule did not allow me this one. Did visit Milan, Italy and the French Riviera for ten days with Marie, though. That trip was wonderful.

Feed the hungry: Opened up the wallet for this one, which was a half-measure, as far as I am concerned. Volunteering my time in addition to my money would have been much better.

Reduce: Reduced in every way imaginable, it seemed. Still, the mountain of clutter continues to cast its shadow on my life.

Well, then, I fell short of every goal. Better than achieving every goal, I suppose. I mean, if I had achieved every goal then I did not aim high enough, right?

On to the 2024 Preview

OK. Going to recycle a 21/22/23 goal. Run 500 miles. Ten miles a week.

Travel appears on my list again this year. Instead of Hawaii, though, it will be New Zealand. Mary and Marie went there at the beginning of 2020, just before the real start of the pandemic. They have been raving about it ever since. I have already set aside money for the trip, inherited from Marianne. She would approve.

Read Augustine’s City of God, at least some of it. It is long and dense and requires quite a bit of thought and reflection. So, my idea is to read as much of it at the pace I can to absorb as much of it as reasonable this year. It is composed of twenty-two books. Maybe I will read one a month, roughly. Perhaps more, perhaps less. Also plan to read the Letters of Saint Paul, all of them.

Write a chapter (or short story) a week.

Learn to sail well enough to attain at least one certification.

Finish translating Dove mi trovo. And then what? Some chapters of Calvino?

Do something unplanned, unexpected, something that I will treasure for the rest of my days.

Live the skux life.

Here are my Goals for this year, in no particular order, with some brief thoughts on each.

As I did last year, I am re-recycling one of my 2021/2022 goals, which was to run 500 miles. That’s still 42 miles a month or 10 miles a week. When will I run this week’s 10 miles? That is the question to ask myself each week. The year will take care of itself.

One thing I very much want to improve upon is my Italian language skills. I really love the language and want to enjoy speaking and listening to it. To help move me along in that, I am going to learn at least one new verb each week. Learn the verb and use it a lot to make is stick within me. Additionally, I plan to be able to read at least the first two chapters of Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno, un viaggiatore.

I plan to write at least one thousand words a week. The only impediment to me doing this is me setting aside the time to do it. Once I actually sit down and start, the thousand words materialize without much effort. It all comes down to setting aside the time.

I want to read, really read and understand, three writings by Saint Augustine of Hippo. The first of these three is one I have already started, On Free Choice of Will. I also plan to read Confessions and City of God. Augustine’s style of writing, at least in On Free Choice of Will, takes some getting used to. He must be the patron saint of double-negatives. But if I slow down and read carefully, he is much easier to follow. It is well worth the effort.

Now that I have my boat and have sailed it a few times, I plan to put it in the water sooner in the water this year than last year and sail it more. Also, my plan is to acquire the first three ASA certifications, 101, 103, and 104, this year. Learning to sail well does require some study, but it also requires actual time sailing. I will do both.

Another goal, or plan, really, is for Mary and me to visit Hawaii. This is something we planned to do a couple of times in the past and both times our plans were scuttled. This time we’re going.

I also want to volunteer in some capacity to feed the hungry on a regular basis. The few times I have helped out in this way felt really good, really worthwhile uses of my time. I want to do more and do it regularly, make it a part of my life.

This last Goal or Plan is to Reduce. Reduce paperwork, reduce the clothes in my closet, reduce the tools and other accumulated things in my garage and basement, get rid of all those things that clutter my life. As they say, “Property is Slavery.” Losing these shackles will give me the time and the space to actually follow through on all my other Goals. I guess that makes this Goal a Synergy. Whatever. I’m ready.

Disappointment.

That is how I would describe my 2022. Disappointment. Primarily with myself.

I didn’t do anything. I didn’t change. I did not grow as a person in any apparent way.

And it’s not that appearances are the point, here. Inner essence is the point. But an essential change in someone really should become outwardly apparent.

I had no change within myself for others to see.

A waste of a year.

It was not a lack of goals that was my problem. I had goals. Attaining, or at least pursuing, those goals should have occasioned some type of real improvement within me. But it didn’t.

I simply must do a better job with 2023 than I did with 2022.

First, a review of last year’s goals.

• Run 500 miles: At 400 miles, I fell well short of my goal. But I learned a thing or two by it. First, you don’t run 500 miles; you run one mile 500 times. Or five miles one hundred times. Or four miles a hundred twenty five times. Or whatever. Need to make those one hundred or two hundred or however many runs happen. Each one. Individually.
• Read Classics: Read enough to form an idea of what was going on with those ancient Greeks and why they influenced Western thought so much, for better and for worse.
• Master beginning Italian: I picked up a bit, but not nearly as much as I wanted to. One has to be able to do more than count up to twenty and ask about the train for Naples. I have gotten somewhat past that, but not far.
• Buy a sailboat: Done. “Four O’Clock” is mine, now, although her name will change. Have not decided what her name will be, though. She’s a twelve foot cat boat a “Beetle-Cat” from Wareham, Massachusetts. Needs to have her keel repainted, which I will do this winter.
• Learn to sail her: Only managed to get her in the water once. This spring I will sail her much more and take some course or another in sailing.
• Submit a book for publishing: Didn’t even come close to finish writing it. Probably should have made the goal to finish writing it, instead.
• Povitica for all my siblings: Done. Even got some useful feedback from Rudy. Dough needs to be thinner. Something to work on.

I blamed 2020 on the pandemic. 2021 was my own doing.

So, what are my goals for 2022? How do I plan to achieve them?

Let’s start off by recycling one of my 2021 goals, run 500 miles. If I really learned something by falling short of that mark in 2021, then I’ll have to put that lesson to use this year. It’s not 500 miles a year, it’s 42 miles a month, 10 miles a week. When will I run this week’s 10 miles? That is the question to ask myself each week. The year will take care of itself.

Reading, even classics, is a pleasure for me, something I do as a matter of course, and probably should not qualify as a goal. So this year, classics or any other type of reading is off my list of goals.

While I did manage to pick up some Italian, attaining some fluency in the language remains one of my unattained goals. By the end of this year I aim to be able to carry on at least a simple conversation in Italian.

Sailing was another area where I set out a goal that was unmet, largely because it was poorly defined. “Learn to sail” is too vague of a goal to measure for success or failure. Attainment of some certification in sailing is much more definite and included in this year’s goals.

Finish that novel AND submit it for publishing.

For my final goal I am going to choose something that might appear to be too vague, as other goals have been too vague, but this one really is not. When I look back on my life thus far, some of the remembrances that bring me the most satisfaction and happiness are the ones where I did something unplanned, spontaneous. This year I want to do one thing that I have not planned and, perhaps, have not yet even imagined. It needs to be something that will, when I look back on it ten years hence will leave me with that same sense of gladness that I did it as I have with some of the other things in my life. Big enough to look back on a decade or more later and something I did not expect at the outset of the year, which is now.

Now is when I start.

Some years back, while rummaging through a drawer, I came across a collar from our old dog, Rusty. When Ryan, our golden retriever, who was by my side, saw the collar in my hand, he nosed at it, curiously at first, then aggressively. Ryan’s tail started to wag furiously and he became quite animated, paws dancing. I took off Ryan’s collar, a leather one which had become tattered and smelly over time, and put Rusty’s collar on him.

He wagged his tail some more.

Rusty was a rescue. A golden retriever perhaps mixed with something else, Rusty was sick when we brought him home. Bad joints from Lyme’s disease and underweight, he was basically an old dog from the get-go, even though he was quite young. He lived his entire life with us slowly plodding along. There was no rushing Rusty.

Ryan, on the other hand, was a typical eight week old puppy when he joined the family one December. Clumsy, rambunctious, and affectionate, he chewed, as puppies chew, on everything, including Rusty a few times. Rusty quickly let him know that was not appreciated, but that did not seem to stop him or even slow him down. More than once, Rusty looked up at me with a look that seemed to be an exasperated plea for help.

Our walks around the neighborhood were often a source of amusement for the neighbors. I usually walked both dogs together. Ryan would have one leash stretched out in front of me and Rusty would have the other stretched out behind, pulling him along by the neck. Ryan was always trying to pick up the pace. Rusty was always trying not to catch up.

As Ryan approached his first birthday, he showed no signs of slowing down.

Rusty, on the other hand, became sick and started to turn frail at that point. Lumps scattered around his body pointed to the reason for his decline. His appetite left him and he wasted away incredibly quickly. He got to the point where he could not walk or really even stand. I carried him outside a few times a day in the crisp October days to pee and poop and take in a bit of fresh air. Other than that, he just rested in his bed.

For Rusty’s last day the weather turned warm and sunny, a cloudless eighty degrees with a very slight breeze.

I scooped up Rusty and took him to the edge of the shade of his favorite tree in our back yard, a towering maple. As I laid Rusty on the grass, Ryan quickly scampered about, gathering his toys and some sticks and his rock collection. An indiscriminate chewer, Ryan was fond of chewing on rocks and we were always careful to never let him have any stones small enough to swallow. Somehow, though, he managed to accumulate or find a bunch of rocks, some as big as his head. I was not even sure how he carried them.

What he did with all these toys and sticks and rocks was to array them in an arc about six feet from Rusty, all in front of Rusty where he could see them. From the house I watched on. Ryan would chew on one of the toys or sticks and rocks and then, every few minutes, would bounce over to Rusty and touch his nose to Rusty’s. Rusty would wag his tail and Ryan would chew on something else for a few minutes and then touch Rusty’s nose. All the while, Rusty watched on, lying on his belly with his head between his front paws.

He seemed to enjoy the show.

This went on for a couple of hours, it seemed. Then it was time to bring them in.

That night, Rusty seemed unsettled so I stayed up with him in the living room. Ryan slept off and on there on the floor with us. After waking from a couple of dreams, Rusty went back to sleep and just a bit past three in the morning, breathed one last quiet sigh.

After the sun rose, it was time to take Rusty away. They gave me his collar to take home. It went in the drawer.

Ryan, of course, searched the house for his big buddy that morning but didn’t find him. It quickly became apparent that Ryan’s world had been tumbled. He spent the day confused. By that night, he stopped looking for Rusty.

The next day started still, quiet. First thing in the morning when I let Ryan out into the back yard, he immediately trotted to the middle of the lawn and peed, as usual. Then he found a large flat rock near the house and sat on it. He lifted his snout to the sky and for about a half minute Ryan let out a pitiful howl, something he had never done before. He sighed, looked briefly at the ground and then came to the back door to be let in. Inside, he found his bed and laid down.

This routine went on every morning for a couple of months.

He missed his big pal.

Eventually, though, Ryan settled into being The Only Dog. And that’s how things continued.

Until years later when I rummaged through that drawer and came across Rusty’s collar.

Ryan is an old dog now. He has slowed down and a lot of people remark on how well behaved he is. He does have his moments, though, when he doesn’t listen. But I cut him a bit of slack on those occasions because of what he did for Rusty at the end.

As I have said, and wrote, everything important in life is personal.

Justice is personal. There are two forms of justice. Proportional, or distributive, justice is the notion of receiving what one deserves or what one is worth. Think of equal pay for equal work. Absolute justice, or corrective justice, holds that an injustice against someone is an injustice, regardless of the victim.

George Floyd and his family received some measure of justice today. What Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd was a severe injustice and today it was publicly recognized as such. Many people will try to put this into a larger context and try to make some inference about what this means for society, but at the bottom of it, Derek Chauvin was held publicly and personally accountable for the death of George Floyd.

Justice was served.

That has not always been the case.

I do not take New Year’s Resolutions very seriously; they seem to fade and are often too nebulous in that they relate to a person’s state of being rather than to actionable activities. Goals, on the other hand, tend to be much more concrete. Even if a goal is not accomplished in its entirety, the effort spent toward that goal often yields some tangible good. Ironically, sometimes the good that comes of the goal is the realization that the goal is not worth the effort of accomplishing it. In that case, you can discard that goal and it no longer distracts you from your other, real goals.

Last year I set down in writing a number of goals for me to accomplish throughout the year. I put those goals in the context of something that one of my high school teachers, Mr. Zimmerman, laid out for our eleventh grade English class at the beginning of the school year. His model for life was corny then and it remains corny to this day. It was, however, fun to reminisce about Mr. Zimmerman, one of the best teachers who ever tried to impart some amount of knowledge and wisdom to me. Thinking about my goals for this year, however, some do not fit neatly into Mr. Zimmerman’s PIESMC Model of a Life Well Lived, and so I am setting aside Mr. Zimmerman for this year.

Some of my goals for the year are resurrections of unmet prior year goals. That just means that those goals were worthy goals that need more of my attention and energy. Others are updates of goals that can persist from year to year, even if partially or wholly met. Some are new goals.

So here they are.

Run 500 miles. Last year the goals were to run 700 miles and maybe take up yoga. I did neither. 500 miles is much more attainable. I was a bit shy of that in 2020, but should be able to reach that this year. Given my schedule and responsibilities, 500 miles is something I can reach, but only with a good effort. Yoga moves to the back burner for this year.

At the outset of last year I remarked that staying focused was a major challenge for me, intellectually. I spent the rest of the year proving just that. I had intended to read a number of works by a range of people, but of the ones I intended to read, the only one I actually did read was Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, once I found a suitable translation. I followed that up with Aristotle’s Politics, particularly apropos of last year. I also read a number of other books, most of them very worthwhile. This year I will continue with the classics, although I have decided to put off Shakespeare for some other year.

One goal I have found renewed enthusiasm for is to master beginning Italian. Last year I proposed a vague “expanding upon the limited amount of Italian I learned in 2019” but that came to naught. Almost. What I did accomplish was devising a much more definite plan. I replaced my missing Learn Italian CD lessons, for one. I also obtained both an Italian and an English copy of Italo Calvino’s Se Una Notte D’Inverno Un Viaggiatore. Common Italian, written by and Italian, for Italians. What could be better. Bello! I have even started reading both.

Next on my list of goals is to buy a sailboat. A small one. Something that can be sailed locally.

Of course, the next goal is to learn to sail it.

I also intend to submit a book (novel) for publishing. I finished a rough draft on one manuscript a while back, but when I read it, that one just does not seem all that good. Not something someone would want to publish, in my opinion. And I am not being a perfectionist, here. It is more along the lines of it being the output of someone who is not yet good at his craft. I might try to re-work it some and send it off in hopes that someone will find it publishable. Additionally, though, I have already started on a second novel, which ought to be better. After that is in reasonable shape, I will send that one off. And then write another. Until I write good enough for others to read.

One last smaller, much more accomplishable goal I have is to bake a loaf of povitica for each of my siblings and give it to them for their birthdays. I have made a couple of loaves from a recipe I found and those two efforts turned out surprisingly not-so-bad. Since my older four siblings are part Croatian (as is my wife, Mary, and, hence, our two kids) it seems like a personal present from me to each of them. Hopefully, this pans out.

I did not achieve most of my goals which I set out for myself last year. I allowed a pandemic to take my eye off the target. The days became less distinct than they had in the past. Without the usual cadence of weeks to use as signposts, I let the year slip away. Because of that, my writing suffered neglect. To combat all that, I will take a daily reckoning and a weekly reckoning. I will use each of those to keep myself focused.

Now, since we are at the end of January, not the beginning, I have left myself with eleven months rather than twelve months to do the things I want to do. However, as Leonard Bernstein once said: “To achieve something really great, all you need is a good idea and not quite enough time.”

That means I need to start NOW.

Mr. Zimmerman, one of my high school English teachers, presented our class with his paradigm for life at the beginning of the school year, as, I am sure, he did for each year’s class before us. I imagine he continued this tradition for each year’s class after us until he became Harry S. Truman High School’s principal. Despite it being one of the cheesier life plans one will ever encounter, I remember it fondly.

He first drew on the chalkboard (yes, we used chalkboards back then) a circle and then drew three lines through the circle, dividing that circle into six equal sections. In the top three sections he wrote the letters “P”, “I”, and “E” and he filled in the bottom three with “S”, “M”, and “C”, like this:

Mr. Zimmerman went on to explain the meaning of this diagram of his, maintaining that each slice of the “pie” represented a different aspect of our lives and that the slices ought to be all about the same size and that we ought to devote equal attention to each slice.

So, in memory of Mr. Zimmerman, here is what I plan for my slices in 2020:

Physical – Mr. Zimmerman was not really big on the physical fitness aspect of life. He was, after all, a high school English teacher. He did, though, recognize the importance of being physically active and physically engaged. I have a number of physical goals for this coming year. I want to continue running and aim to compete in a half marathon, at least. I also plan to run 700 miles over the course of the year, quite an increase over what I ran in 2019. Who knows, maybe I’ll even take up yoga.

Intellectual – The need to stay focused and not wander randomly is my main intellectual challenge. For 2020, I will keep my reading centered largely on classics which I have heretofore neglected. I will start with Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy and Richard III. To those I will add just a few current novels and finish Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and read Plutarch’s Lives. This past year I read Republic and a few other works by Plato. I would like to follow that up in 2020 with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, if I can find a translation that makes sense to me.

Emotional – I am a fairly even person emotionally, not out of control on the upside nor the downside. So, for 2020, I guess it will be steady as as (s)he goes. Or, perhaps, what would do me some good would be more emotional involvement in the world around me and, with it, more emotional maturity. Maybe I need to open myself up to experiencing life’s highs and lows more. Laugh more, cry more. More weddings and funerals in 2020?

Social – While I am not a very social person, I am not anti-social, either. I guess you could call me “asocial” if you want to call me anything. As I become more emotionally involved with the world around me, I expect that I will shorten the social distance between myself and others. I know I should want to be more social, but, in reality, I am happy as I am now.

Moral – The more I look at myself, the more I see the need for a more moral me. Morals, after all, are the animating force behind a person’s actions, or at least should be. A more moral me would be a more outraged me and a more compassionate me and a more socially engaged me and a more emotionally charged and mature me. It will begin with a more moral me.

Cultural – I feel that the cultural part of me is the part that presents one of the biggest opportunities for growth. After 2019 slipped by without me being all that culturally active, I have decided to be much more culturally active this coming year than last. Reading plays is one thing, but there is nothing like seeing them performed. I will be taking in a modern re-telling of Richard III, the play Teenage Dick by Mike Lew, which will be at Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theater in June. That should be a nice wrap-up to reading the bard’s plays. I also have a number of other live performances planned. Additionally, I will be expanding upon the limited amount of Italian I learned in 2019 before visiting Rome and Cinque Terre. I am committed to more travel abroad in the future, but for now that is a hope, not a plan.

I am quite sure I have not done justice to Mr. Zimmerman’s “pie” but at least I have a start.

Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman.

Read the photo essay (if you can call looking at photographs “reading” them) from Issue 148 of Granta, the Summer Fiction issue, along with the accompanying commentary. The photo essay was on H+, transhumanism, by the multi-talented Matthieu Gafsou. Each photo dealt, in some way, with mechanical and electronic and software augmentation and supplementation of humans. The pictures were mostly stark, cold, clinical. This starkness enhanced the effect of the technology and dampened most real human elements in the shots. In one photo, a rat looks more human than the human technician, who appears to be more of a component of the technology than a person.

Of course, the visuals, along with Daisy Hildyard’s commentary, got me thinking. The aim of transhumanists, generally, is immortality, to live forever. To me, this seems like a totally worthless, empty goal.

First, consider the practicalities of immortality. If you can make the body and the mind durable enough to last forever, you had better not be the only one to do so. To be the sole immortal would be to isolate you from the rest of humanity in unimaginable ways. Unimaginable in that no one would understand you and you would understand no one because neither you nor the rest of humanity could imagine what it is like to be the other.

The opposite situation, where everyone is immortal, would be scarcely better. The person you most detest would be around, forever. There would be no escape. The same would be true for other fates: they would last forever.

Then, of course, there is the absurd conclusion to a life that never ends, outliving the earth itself. (I know, I know, we’ll inhabit other worlds.)

A more subtle problem also arises. Anyone with a moderate understanding of mathematics knows quite well what an inverse relationship is. The relevance of this is that the worth we attach to things, how much we value them, what they really mean to us, is inversely related to how often they occur and how long they last. What if you were to only hear your favorite song one more time in your life? Wouldn’t you listen to it more intensely than ever? And wouldn’t it be memorable? Conversely, if you were going to hear that same song an infinite number of times, the joy of each listening would shrink to zero, and, no matter how many zeros you add end to end, you still have zero. Your very most favorite song would become worthless.

Same for your best friend. In fact, you would have no friends because you would attach zero worth to any time you spent with any of them because, after all, that time you eventually spend with them over the course of eternity would be infinite and the inverse of infinite is: zero.

The only escape from this infinite morass of absurd meaninglessness would be, of course, death. The irony there is that, after spending all one’s energy and time and resources on living forever and, ultimately, missing out on really living at all, one would throw in the towel.

I’m in no rush, but when it’s time for me to go, I’ll just go.