sent to the Chicago Critical Mass email list:
Had a bit of a surreal ride tonight. First off, a friend of a friend whom I hadn’t met yet (we’re supposed to have coffee on Wednesday) contacted me this afternoon to see if I had a bike I could loan. I actually had an extra bike at work that I thought would work so she met me and while it was big, she made it work. So here she is knowing no one, first mass, on my too big bike, so I felt resposible to stick by her, ya know? Which is great, talking a bit and getting to know each other. Then a former roommate starts talking wtih me and telling me some really horrible crazy stories about what’s happened in his life since I saw him last. He really needed someone to talk with and there I was. For miles and miles. I kept my eye on Sarah to make sure we were still together but couldn’t really talk wtih her as Matt really is in a bad spot.
Often my mass conversations go back and forth between non-biking stuff and noticing cool things about the mass itself and neighborhoods we’re going through and interacting with cagers and peds. Tonight was none of that. Tonight was just about avoiding running into people while I tried to focus on what Matt was saying and trying to find something helpful to say.
And then at one point he was gone. Up ahead, I think. Don’t really know. Got to see Kelly and Travis and Evan. And then after seeing the smashed in cage windshield on Irving, Sarah and Sam were on the corner saying they were heading home. Sarah (with my bike) was ready to leave as well so I bid her farewell and she took my bike to the Irving Brown Line stop while Sarah and Same and I rode south on Damen, all the way to Cermak, meeting Ross and Julie (did I get those names right?) who live in McKinley Park, quite near our place at the Hub in Little Village.
Anyway, Matt, I hope you’re okay man. Send me a note if you see this.
Everyone else, thanks for the great night!
peace,
ted
–
Humanize the Earth! http://tedernst.com
I’m really getting excited about this trip. The WikiSym Conference in Santa Barbara is going to be really cool, even if I’m actually more excited about the journey than the destination.
I’m going to get to stay at Brandon’s house and meet his wife, I’m going to get to meet other Portland folks (haven’t talked with Grimes yet – he’s on my hit list). I’m going to get to spent 4 days on the road with some really cool folks interested in lots of cool stuff, with a plan to hear about each of our passions and see how we can work together going forward. I’m going to get to see cousins in Portland and some cousins once removed! :-)
I was initially worried that I’d have a really hard time plugging myself into an academic-type conference with speakers from the front and all that, after experiencing so much open space. I decided the only thing to do was to take my own personal open space attitude with me and not worry about the format, using the Law of Two Feet liberally, and maybe not attendingn sessions at all if they didnt’ seem to be serving me.
And then a curious thing happened. I went through the conference program in detail and found something I was interested in for every time slot of the conference. Sure, I may still be wrong and need to wander out, but there aren’t any unscheduled blocks for me, and that’s a surprise.
So off I go in two weeks, on a new adventure to the northwest and then southwest and everything in between.
This summer I’ve been sharing a box of Angelic Organics veggies with Sarah and Sam, also members of the Hub Co-op where I live. This means once every 3rd Wednesday, I need to ride by bike 9 miles from my downtown office to the drop-site in Oak Park and then another 6 miles home. Tonight was my night. It was chilly and rainy and windy as I left the office and I seemed to be in for a very long miserable bike ride. So I started singing at the top of my lungs about the long bike ride ahead of me in the rain, against the wind and all that, cold ears and all. Before I knew it I was in Oak Park and loading the veggies into the trailer. I didn’t sing as much coming home with the wind at my back and the rain stopped, but did sing a big more. And before I knew it I was home.
So I got to thinking about this and realized that on my weeks to pick up the veggies in the past I ended up with a really sore body afterwards and I think it’s due to riding with the goal in mind, and thus with tension in my body. Tonight I certainly knew where I was going so it’s not that I forgot the goal, but I occupied myself with expression instead of concentrating on the physical sensations of riding. And my body feels great! Could it be that I was more physically relaxed tonight? I think that seems like a pretty good explanation.
So on tonight’s conference call we discussed # 7. The Principle of Immediate Action
“If you pursue an end you enchain yourself. If everything you do is realised as though it were an end in itself, you liberate yourself.”
Seems to fit with that biking story, doesn’t it?
I tend to get caught up in whatever I’m involved in at the moment. I find balance quite difficult.
I had some web stuff open in tabs of my browser ready for blogging, when I got the chance. And then firefox came out with a new version and I upgraded and lost those tabs in the process. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.
My current endeavor is learning the Ruby programming language. Before August, I hadn’t written a computer program in over 12 years. Yet here I am, learning a language. And I’m having a good time with it.
I’m planning to get myself a timer of some kind, to remind me to look up at least, and preferably walk around for 5 minutes every half hour. I think a kitchen timer is too loud. Any suggestions?
In case anyone’s interested, the Ruby project I’m working on at the moment is to convert restructured text marked up word to html. And back. Restructured text is used as a way to allow people editing text to “mark up” their words with bold and italics and whatever else, without having to learn html. That’s great until you try to port that text to another system that uses a different method to mark up it’s text. The larger project my programs will fit into will use html inbetween any two markups so we can copy and move text back and forth.
I’m learning a lot! About Ruby and about myself. Good stuff.
More and more people seem to be predicting the end of civiliation as we know it. From GlobalResearch.ca via mousemusings
what happens when trucking companies go belly up from gas prices, when truckers can no longer afford fuel, and when their axles break because interstates are in dis-repair as a result of the prices or shortages of the petroleum needed to build roads? What happens when the housing bubble bursts, when massive unemployment engulfs the nation, and when hundreds of thousands or millions of people must walk away from their mortgaged homes? Add to this, the likely crashing of the U.S. dollar and the certainty of more natural disasters. Anarchy may not even approach the description of such a scenario.
I tend to agree. My view is that the next 5-15 years are critical for the future of humanity. In my mind, we either die out as a species or we make some pretty big changes which result from us moving from pre-human to human (that process will likely take much longer, but this decision-time will be a quantum leap.
I find it quite funny that when you do a Google Search on the word “failure,” Google feels the need to explain in an ad on the side that the result is not politically motivated on their part. If you search for “miserable failure,” however, the other side has managed to answer the prank (Google still explains their lack of bias.).
I’m leaving Chicago on the 13th of Oct for Portland, OR. Early the next morning we’re WikiVanning towards Santa Barbara, expecting to arrive there on the 15th. We’re attending WikiSym the 16, 17 & 18th and then returning to Portland around the 20th. I fly out on the 23rd to return to Chicago. Not sure if I’m going to make it up to Seattle to see folks or if people can come see me in Portland. In any event, let me know if you’d like to see what fits.
I’m not big on political solutions or spending vast amounts of time lobbying. That said, this news, via Mousemusings and Common Dreams, that Congressman Dennis Kucinich today reintroduced legislation to create a cabinet level Department of Peace and Nonviolence is good news.
The legislation, first introduced in the 107th Congress, embodies a broad-based approach to peaceful and nonviolent conflict resolution at both domestic and international levels. The Department of Peace and Nonviolence would serve to promote nonviolence as an organizing principle in our society, and help to create the conditions for a more peaceful world.
Saw this and wondered how the Happy Tutor feels about this in his dumpster.
Natural law theory typically is invoked to establish the sanctity of private property. But as Rutherford said, it contains the seed of this exception too. Here’s John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, which is a bible of the property rights camp. It is a “Fundamental Law of Nature,” he said, that the property claims of the rich man “must give way to the pressing and preferable Title of those who are in danger to perish without it.”
Last week’s This American Life radio program is amazing. Take an hour or whatever time you have and go listen. Skip the first couple of minutes if you don’t want Ira Glass’s editorial about federal responsibility. The rest is stories directly from people involved:
Surprising stories from survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. A woman who was at the convention center talks about some things she says were widely misreported and misunderstood. Two people explain how armed police from Gretna actually prevented them from leaving New Orleans at the height of the crisis. A teenager talks about what it actually feels like to go without water for two days. And more.
One of the teenagers interviewed in “After the Flood,” Ashley Nelson, is the author of an amazing book called The Combination, about her neighborhood in New Orleans. All the copies that were available are now underwater. But The Neighborhood Stories Project, which collaborated with Ashley and several other New Orleans teenagers on books about their neighborhoods, plans to print another run as soon as possible.
Episode 296 from 9 Sept 05
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