This College Football Saturday I'm targeting two games to follow: with an 11:00 kickoff scheduled I'll listen to the Wisconsin Badgers vs the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, then with a 2:30 PM start I'll listen to the Stanford Cardinal vs the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

posted Saturday, Oct 12, 2024 at ~9:47 AM #QNOCT2024

For my mother, and her long-term supporter, who happens to be my father.

I first started volunteering with Homeless Hearts of Singapore (HHOS, for short), in late 2022. I had read an article in Channel NewsAsia, about this organisation. I looked up their website, and filled in a registration form, and then received a call from Derek shortly.

I'm a barista by profession – in my job, I am expected not only to brew coffee for customers, but also provide some kind of listening ear. The conversational skills that I learnt, on the job, would help to prepare me to meet our homeless friends.

Over the past two years, I have been to various outreaches – in the areas of Chinatown, Paya Lebar, Yishun, Jurong East, Aljunied, Changi Airport... the list goes on. Who are the volunteers that I meet?

There are undergraduates and retirees. Some are visitors from overseas, who depart from Singapore after a time. Everyone has a different reason for showing up at an outreach.

Walking alongside them on the streets of Singapore at night, I realise: I am spending time with complete strangers. Perhaps city life has alienated us from each other so much that a volunteering activity becomes a rare opportunity to embark on a shared adventure with someone who exists outside of our usual social circles.

And, of course, there are our homeless friends. (Derek told me, very early on: “this is how we refer to them: not homeless people, but our homeless friends”). Not a few are divorcees, whose shared house had gone to their ex-wives. There are middle-aged men, but also young men too. They are mostly male – though I have met a handful of female homeless friends. Again, among the females, there is a mix of ages: some are middle-aged, others are young (my guess would be twenty-something).

I still remember one Uncle who sleeps under a fly-over. (I shall not reveal his location for privacy reasons). He said he struggles to find enough money to afford one plate of cai fan (loosely translated as economical rice), every day. Three Singaporean dollars, for one meal a day – that is a stretch for his budget. My mind was flooded with questions when I first met him: Where does he go to, when he has to use a toilet? Isn't he scared of some thief in the night, when he sleeps in such a obscure area – or cockroaches or stray dogs, for that matter? His words still haunt me: “I want a house. When can I get a house?”

Then there is another Uncle who had spent most of his life-time sailing all over the world. His job had been to repair engines on sailboats. He had visited Thailand, Europe, and probably more countries than I would ever see in my life-time. When asked why he didn't remain overseas – he sighed and struggled to form the words – we, a rag-tag team of volunteers, didn't press the matter further. Again, his words echo through time and space: “I want a house. I can't stand the way that the passers-by look at me.”

Clearly, this is not just my story alone. “Homelessness is a complex, interlocking issue,” a keynote speaker said at a conference recently (titled: Homelessness Learning Forum, held in a compound known as Kampong Siglap. It had been the 10th day of October, World Homelessness Day). “Homelessness is not solved by providing houses. Homeless people who have received a house – they report that their house is a soul-less place.”

I wonder to myself: what can really warm someone's heart? Is it money, material possessions, fine clothes, or a fancy job title? I am reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald – renowned author of the semi-autobiographical novel, “The Great Gatsby” – who seemed disappointed and weary, even when he was surrounded by all of those.

I think of Derek, our volunteer leader, who always says: “our homeless friends are not a problem to be solved. They are people to be loved.”

Yes, no matter the time and place, all human beings, everywhere, desire to feel loved and valued. They respond positively when others treat them with dignity – and hit back when their dignity is violated.

Dignity – something money may not necessarily buy, these days. Can we, as a society, give dignity to one another, without money being involved? A big question.

What are the values of a society that we all want to live in? Can we be more patient, kind, and compassionate?

Some young people have already given up. “You'll never find compassion in Singapore,” one young man said to me recently, with no small hint of bitterness.

I look forward, after ten years of HHOS, to a collective challenge in the future: to give dignity to our homeless friends. To spend time together – no agenda, only love and presence-of-mind. Can we do it, in such a outwardly messed-up place like Singapore, where the weather is so humid, construction noise never stops, and commuters poke into each others' bodies on the MRT?

An older, wiser female has told me: “let us not choose the tasks that are equal to our powers; let us gain the power that is equal to the tasks.”

And what is this power? Is it my conversational skills? Or is it Derek's always-online routine, where he responds personally in a humongous number of WhatsApp chat-groups? Or is it Mr. T.S.'s car, which he uses to ferry volunteers to and fro, during outreaches?

Whatever it is, I know I cannot do it alone. None of us can. We are interdependent – you have something I don't, and I have something you don't. Can we pool our resources together, and work together for a more live-able future? I don't know with 100% certainty, but I have hope. Join me in this hope, where you are – on the other side of these ubiquitous electronic screens – or wherever you are reading this from.

To me, hope is not a nice-to-have. It is a necessity. It is a necessary hope for our friends' baby children – as hurricanes and earthquakes rock and crush our planet.

Allow me a quote from the Holy Bible: “These three remain: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.”

Let us challenge ourselves to love one another – homeless or not – in a world that is so lacking in love. I have faith in our shared humanity.

Thank you.

en septembre je veux me rapprocher de la nature je fais genre je connais le nom des plantes je chasse les guêpes et je cours, tous les jours tous les deux jours je crache mes pas sont lourds le vent fait mur contre moi avec moi ça dépend à l’intérieur j'entends mon corps ça grouille ça fait mal c’est bien si ça pique c’est que ça agit

la forêt résonne, je ne sais pas d’où vient l’écho

pour la première fois de ma vie je vois un marcassin, on se fout de ma gueule t'as jamais vu un marcassin – enfance immeubles centre ville pavillon périurbain non j'ai jamais vu leurs petits corps juchés sur des pointes ou entendu leurs couik couik adorables, pendant des heures je parle de leurs p’tits sabots puis de leurs p’tits museaux puis de leurs p’tits dandinements trop mignons

le lendemain je croise des chasseurs dans leurs remorques deux cadavres empilés qui rebondissent à chaque nid de poule, l'un d'eux s'arrête, claque le pick-up puis ouvre sa braguette jambes légèrement écartés et pisse sur une maison

la nature ne me guérira pas je répète la nature s'en fout de ma gueule, si je me réincarne je serai pas un marcassin je serai un tardigrade

les tardigrades peuvent vivre dans l'espace ils construisent un cocon de cire qui n'est pas une chrysalide mais un tonnelet puis ils tombent dans une sorte de coma puis ils attendent que l'environnement leur soit plus favorable ça peut durer longtemps

ils résistent aux radiations à la pression au froid ils sont pas résilients pour un sou juste ils dorment

est-ce que l'espace c'est la nature si oui alors je crois que

je suis guéri.

A decade ago I embarked on a journey to Rashidieh, a mixed but primarily Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. I spent three months there as a volunteering youth envoy of ‘Palestinakomiteen i Norge’ together with the close friend who had invited me along.

Though it’s referred to as a ‘camp’, Rashidieh is a dense city of brick & cement, housing over 30,000 people, same as Molde, the biggest city an hour away from my tiny home town. Established in 1936, Rashidieh camp is nearly a century old. As such it is an unusual place with its own flow of time.

I had done this type of longer-term stay abroad a handful times before; a rare privilege afforded to me as a worldly Norwegian citizen. While I do believe in the genuine altruism of myself and others, these journeys have always been for a selfish reason at heart. An escape. A search.

This time I was searching for meaning in the wake of my mother’s passing a year prior. In that community I was met with heartfelt compassion from people for whom the loss of family members – whole families even – was a brutally regular occurrence of life. There was no comparing my bereavement to theirs, yet we grieved together all the same, and in that grief we were equals.

---

For the past year I’ve kept a certain distance to the apocalyptic destruction of Palestine. I joined some of the protests and read some of the articles, but for the most part I retreated to my work for the sake of my sanity: Stay the course and focus on what you can control. Grow strong enough to lift others up when you’re able.

The invasion of southern Lebanon however shook something loose in me. So much of my work in my adult life has been driven by a desire to give back to that place, down in the south, now under siege. I had dreamed up some Big Plans for how I was going to be a good little helper. It seems now I may be too late.

Earlier this week I spent half a day just staring into empty space, sobbing. In the midst of all that sadness, it felt good and right to be emotionally connected to that place and those people again.

---

Yesterday I participated in the first call for the Post Growth Entrepreneurship incubator. In a small breakout group where we were encouraged to check in with each other, I spoke those feelings aloud for the first time and teared up once more.

By the end there was relief. I realized this is something very real that I’m processing, not just some imagined empathy borne out of good-boy solidarity with the oppressed.

I’m not done with that place. I haven’t given it my all yet. But I may have missed my opportunity to be the giver I imagined myself to be, and there’s a deep, heartbreaking sense of inadequacy in that recognition.

Hence the words on this page, to make space for the guilt, the anger, and the shame. I can’t do my work in the world as an ally before I’ve let these emotions pass freely through me – not to be shed as waste, but rather to be integrated with the whole of my being, like tattoos on the heart.

There’s no quick resolution to be found here. The plan failed, but my resolve as a waking citizen of the global village remains unshaken.

A URL is associated with a WebCard card of type Web at creation time but it may later be necessary to change or take action on the URL. For example, to correct a typo or visit the URL again if its web browser tab was closed since an earlier visit.

For such situations I added the items Visit URL and Edit URL to the title bar menu of Web cards. This is the menu:

The card holds the URL shown in the text area. Left-clicking on the title bar brings up the menu with the new items Visit URL and Edit URL at the top.

The NoteCards API function NCP.AddTitleBarMenuItemsToType adds items to the menu of a specified card type. It's easy to use but it wasn't clear to me what arguments the item callback functions are supposed to take. Some experimentation with throwaway code revealed the system passes only one argument to callbacks, a window.

To prepare for the new functionality I factored out the initialization of the Web card type into the function WCD.InitWebCard that also calls NCP.AddTitleBarMenuItemsToType.

Functions WCD.VisitURLMenuCmd and WCD.EditURLMenuCmd carry out the actual menu actions and are straightfoward. In addition to updating the URL property of the card, WCD.EditURLMenuCmd substitutes the new URL for the old in the text area.

#WebCard #Interlisp #Lisp

Respuesta visual a la pregunta ¿Cómo sientes que es el sistema educativo?

2017

#001962 – 11 de Outubro de 2024

Amanhã começamos a rota GR50.

Two nights ago, the Aurora Borealis was visible unusually south. We could see a subtle glow from the garden, so decided to travel out to a nearby airfield to maximise sky and minimise light pollution.

We were lucky in that the first marked activity spike of the evening happened soon after we arrived.

We stayed for about an hour, and when we were home, the northern lights were still putting on a good show.

I took some photos — both at the airfield and when we got back, and put them on Instagram.

I also posted a timelapse reel. This was too short to capture the pulsations / fluctuations / undulations of the aurora, but you can see passing planes, car headlights coming and going, and, I fancy, a satellite.

I was lucky enough to travel into the Arctic Circle a few years ago. Though we did see the lights, they were dimmer, and green only. (Apparently red is rarer.) But we didn’t have the cameras to capture them well.

This was a welcome reminder of how good iPhone cameras are. After banking a few safe pictures, I got experimental in the settings. But nothing I tried did a better job than what the camera could figure out for itself — with the 1x lens especially.

The old of our two iPhones is an 11 Pro (I think) and still took excellent photos. Interestingly, the greens skewed bluer on the older iPhone. More beautiful, to my eyes.

I sometimes toy with the idea of binning off iPhones and getting a dumb phone with a camera. But I think iPhones are my cameras now. That’s not unusual, I know. But as someone whose main creative hobby is photography, perhaps it is?

I can make do with old ones — my vibe’s pretty lofi. It’s just a case of battery and attention management. Plenty of guides out there on how to dumb-phone-ify an iPhone.

Apologies for linking to Instagram photos directly. Not a good web experience — and an impossible one without an Insta account. I’m open to better solutions, but life is short.

#photography

A Coruña es una ciudad que está a 1.000 km de mi casa, quizá por eso me atrae tanto, quizá por eso tengo allí un muy buen amigo, quizá porque soy mediterráneo, el Atlántico me parece el yang que me completa. He vivido temporadas cortas y la he visitado muchas otras veces, tratando de completar mi yang mediterráneo.

Fotografías de 2017.

I think I realized while under the influence that I have a pretty bad social anxiety, but the good news is I can now finally articulate what my problem is to my therapist in a way that’s actionable!

Living on the edge... where the winds of limbo roar

Veteran of the Psychic Wars Blue Oyster Cult – Fire Of Unknown Origin 1981

You see me now, a veteran Of a thousand psychic wars I've been living on the edge so long Where the winds of limbo roar And I'm young enough to look at And far too old to see All the scars are on the inside I'm not sure if there's anything left of me Don't let these shakes go on It's time we had a break from it It's time we had some leave We've been living in the flames We've been eating up our brains Oh, please, don't let these shakes go on You ask me why I'm weary Why I can't speak to you You blame me for my silence Say it's time I changed and grew But the war's still going on, dear And there's no end that I know And I can't say if we're ever- I can't say if we're ever gonna be free Don't let these shakes go on It's time we had a break from it It's time we had some leave We've been living in the flames We've been eating up our brains Oh, please, don't let these shakes go on You see me now, a veteran Of a thousand psychic wars My energy's spent at last And my armor is destroyed I have used up all my weapons And I'm helpless and bereaved Wounds are all I'm made of Did I hear you say that this is victory? Don't let these shakes go on It's time we had a break from it Send me to the rear Where the tides of madness swell And been sliding into Hell Oh, please, don't let these shakes go on Don't let these shakes go on Don't let these shakes go on

---

Welcoming comments and critique since 1984 #music #swsw

The ongoing attempt to seed something of my self in place

The near ritualised act of daily observation

Reminded that language can work like a spell

A spelling (1644)

See also: conjuration (1398), incantation (1412), fascination (1626)

I discover new words for marsh and mire and mud

(but not enough for all four corners)

Intone them as ceremony (nonetheless)

Under-lair (1340)
Gog-mire (1583)
Quake-ooze (1898)

Because every intentional act is a magical act

▽ | #auto #writing

I leave for Japan on Monday but I’ve been under the weather this week. I feel like there’s a lump in my stomach that won’t go away and my entire digestive tract stiffens after eating. I’m notorious for falling ill during life transitions. A few years ago, shortly after my separation, I was about to do a job interview when I suddenly vomited all over my office floor. I’d just eaten a kiwi, maybe too fast, and felt it stuck in my esophagus. I panicked and drove to urgent care, but it had passed by the time I arrived. The interview was rescheduled and I ended up getting the job. This should pass too. Fucking chia seeds.

All that I ask of myself during the next two months is to be curious and open to new experiences. My birth chart says that it’s a time of new opportunity, but there are a series of dates of significance waiting to stir the emotional pot: my would be wedding anniversary was a couple of days ago, my one year divorce anniversary is at the end of the month, my ex is getting married shortly after, and then comes the doozy – at the end of November comes my one year anniversary of a mental health crisis that is still too difficult to talk about. I know now that all I can do is move forward, even when I don’t feel like I can, and I have, but I’m embarrassed to talk about how scary it still feels.

Honestly, I don’t grieve for these changes, but I grieve for the person I was before knowing that the floor could fall under me at any moment. Everything is just too fresh to be 100% excited for this trip. But it’s my time, you know? Whether I’m ready for it or not, the universe put me in this position and to exert any control over it is to play God. I’ll be okay if I swim with the current instead of against. Look at me getting spiritual.

I miss you friends!!

He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another's deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.

– Transit, Rachel Cusk (p.24)

Friday 2024-10-11

Prayers, etc.: * 04:30 – Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel * 06:40 – praying The Angelus * 07:00 – praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, followed by the Memorare. * 12:00 – praying The Angelus * 14:00 – prayerfully reading The Athanasian Creed, followed by today's Daily Meditation found in Benedictus Magazine. * 18:00 – praying The Angelus * 18:50 – praying the hour of Compline for tonight according to the Traditional Pre-Vatican II Divine Office, followed by Fr. Chad Ripperger's Prayer of Command to protect my family, my sons, my daughter and her family, my granddaughters and their families, my great grandchildren, and everyone for whom I have responsibility from any demonic activity. – And that followed by the Friday Prayers of the Association of the Auxilium Christianorum.

Health Metrics: * bw= 217.60 lbs. * bp= 144/79 (65)

Diet: * 06:00 – ½ pb&j sandwich * 06:50 – cheese * 08:10 – applesauce * 11:30 – biscuit and jam, sausage, hash browns, pan cakes, little cookies * 15:30 – pizza

Chores, etc.: * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 11:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:30 – begin following live broadcast from President Trump's Rally in CO on RAV * 16:30 – watch Bannon's War Room * 17:00 – local news and weather * 18:50 – have tuned into Northwestern Wildcats Radio Network ahead of their game vs the Maryland Terrapins, opening kickoff is just minutes away.

Chess: * 08:00 – moved in all pending CC games

posted Friday, 2024-10-11 ~20:00 #DLOCT2024