not happiness

My neighbor is remarkably restrained.  But when he or she is there, if they speak, I hear them. Not that I can understand every word, but I know they are there.  When there is one person there, I may hear an alarm clock or a door close.  When there are two of them I hear them talking, laughing, enjoying themselves.  And I secretly envy them for their friendship and the pleasure each takes in the other's company--a natural joy that I seem to experience less frequently with each new day. 

Yet, they don't play a loud stereo or seem to have a TV.  Thank God!  And if, rarely, I do hear more than two voices, they stop early enough in the evening so that I've really got no reason to complain.

Occasionally I hear music---thump-thump-thump-thump----from downstairs. But I cannot tell exactly where it comes from.

Then there is that odd shower--sounding like it will drown me---seeming to come from above my head.

Most days the noise of traffic from the nearby busy street is constant.

Sometimes drunk students sing and shout during the night.

A brightly illuminated billboard ( a source of income for the university) shines through
the thin curtains of my flat and often wakes me at night.

Noisiest of all is the cleaning lady who uninhibitedly shouts.  She inhabits the building during working hours from Monday to Friday.  Sometimes I feel that she is more owner-proprietor than an employee.  She is more comfortable with her presence than I am.  She seems be a stereotypically indifferent worker of the Communist period---able to carry out the assigned task with a minimum of enthusiasm and able to do what's necessary without strain.  Don't get me wrong.  I think her restrained performance is less full of bad faith than the feigned enthusiasm of an American coffee-seller, wrapped in the mumbo-jumbo language of happy consumers and individualized products.

In my building, the apartments radiate out around a central core.  That large core, containing a stairwell and elevators, is a marvellous amplifier. The voices of people on the stairs echo and are amplified.  This is disturbing and unwanted.  The cleaning lady unnerves me with her free-spirited, loud conversations.

I see dogs of all sizes pooping on the grass.  Their owners stand nearby.  They must live in a building like mine.  I cannot imagine it.  A dog of any size barking in the central core of the building would be deafening.  There are too many dogs in this city.  --Too many dogs, bicycles, roller bladers and cars.  (But cramped into small apartments, perhaps the dogs too --like their owners---yearn for weekends and holidays, trips outside of the cramped confines of the city, and the crowded apartment.  So, finally, life is lived in small portions.  You aim always at that weekend in the country or that beach-sun-sea holiday, and stop noticing the intervening misery.  --A tremendous, but necessary, act of the imagination.)

When I walk on the pedestrian path I am every bit as nervous as if I were driving on a crowded freeway.  Bicycles approach behind me, traveling fast, quietly.  It doesn't help to have rollerbladers and any other sort of swiftly moving persons.  In the end, the pedestrian path is crowded and chaotic, and a simple walk to the store is unpleasant.  The better the weather, the more crowding; and consequently I dread the arrival of real spring and summer.  I expect someday to be run down by a rollerblader or a new form of travel which allows swift, silent motion.  Or, perhaps, I shall one day only have a sore neck from constantly glancing behind me, fearful that I'll be run down. When I walk, I am in a constant state of awareness, approaching terror.  I don't want to be run down.  It's not nice....... I can't relax.

I don't like looking at the billboards along the road.  Some seem to be planted in the grass along the path, destroying any tranquility the lawns might otherwise communicate.  The billboards are garish and tasteless.  Either they represent a fantasy world or they are crude and loud with their slogans and colors.  Six or eight scantily clad beauties would entice me to a night club.  A shining car promises me happiness. An athlete wants me to use his bank. Etc., etc., And I don't like the sound of the cars flying by.  There's nothing nice about it. It is irritating. This is not beauty.

When I lived in Vienna, I lived in a building much older than the one I currently inhabit. It might have been two or three or more times as old.  In the past they did not know how to build such thin walls without the building falling down.  (Or, so I surmise.)  And consequently I did not hear my neighbors through the walls---unlike my current accomodation.  So, you see, there's an example of so-called "progress" that has nothing to do with our actual quality of life.  Like so much else in the world.

We are all of us drowning in a sea of commodities (dogs, cars, bicycles, bicycle trailers, rollerblades) while the happy shore toward which we all aim during weekends and holidays (because, after all, that's the only time we really live) recedes ever further from our grasp.  And in a frantic effort to reach the shore, we accumulate ever more vehicles and noise-makers, which only push us ever further away from our destination, now no longer even visible, but only a faint memory.  Our efforts are self-defeating, but we resent anyone who dares to point it out.

Physical Therapy at its worst

I spent three years living with my elderly parents.  During that time, both my father and mother acquired walkers--metal frames with wheels, a seat, a basket to put things in, and brakes.

Recently my mother began visiting yet another physical therapist.  He immediately told her that her walker is the wrong size.  It is too tall for her, with the consequence that she is forced to walk toe-ball-heel and not heel-ball-toe.  And, in the process, her Achilles tendon will have been shortened, increasing her chances of losing balance.

Note well:  In two and a half years, other physical therapists and their assistants have seen that walker, and seen my mother use it. Not one realized it is the wrong size. ---And who the hell ordered it in the first place? A private company that contracts with Medicare who paid for it. 

So, I figure two or three (maybe more therapists) and equally three or four therapist's assistants saw that god damn walker that didnt' fit---and they did not notice that it is too tall.

That's a very bad record for the actual delivery of services.  Were I not trying to polite, I could find much harsher words for this negligence.  My god!  This is my mother, and she's not getting what she deserves in the capitalist USA.

What's more, if my mother is getting treatment from incompetent or negligent therapists, you can bet that she is not alone.  Indeed, given the size of the USA, it would not be far off the mark to guess that millions of people are similarly being deceived in order for private companies to gain access to their Medicare funds.  (And I really don't care if the companies all themselves "not-for-profit".)

my personal failure

I've got a marvellous grammar book.  It's got a million examples.  Everything fits into a finite number of categories---which,errr, each  have a certain finite number of sub-categories.....  And, err, when I try to lead it, I get lost.

I forget what the original category was, and then, (I apologize for my lack of emotional conrol)
I come across truly idiotic examples......

Idiotic in the sense that the actual thought behind the sentence is idiocy.

And the textbook authors are proud of the fact that their examples are living, genuine language.

Alas, if only the sentences they have chosen said something interesting; the thoughts themselves are not interesting thoughts but merely recycled trash!

This is, I confess, my personal problem. (Sorry to impose, dear reader!)  Obviously (possibly) the grammar textbook has been used by many generations of students who have thereby mastered this complex subject.....I, evidently, am no longer a student, but am possessed of deep aesthetic and other prejudices.  Sigh.

what governments can do

As I sit here, during a time when an insane opposition between the bad government and all that is good---mythologically markets and private enterprise (yccch)-----I noticed that on the title page of a certain novel I've begun to read (in Czech) there is a small acknowledgment of finanical support from the Ministry of Culture.

The book is a complex attempt to understand a complex past, hence its title, "Germans; Geography of Loss".

What would an analogous book look like in English?  Of course, since the USA has not been invaded, we can't construct a perfect analogy.  Yet, we can imagine: the story of a Vietnamese or Mexican family living in the USA, and the lost memories of the new generation.....the inescapably fragile nature of a family's history and the rapid degeneration of memories as they are replaced by myths and half-truths.....and the enormous magnitude of the forgotten realities......

How ironic that a Czech can imagine that the problem is a foreign power, an external force, an intrusion from outside--though surely that is a crude distortion, a half-truth, whose inaccuracy is exposed in Katalpa's novel----while in the USA it is economic tyranny at home which ruins lives.--A domestic tyranny, not an external force, dominates everything.  --And it also dominated culture and ordinary life during the mythological post-war years.  Not that people did not live, or have never lived, but it is possible to see from another perspective that perfectly possible human things --not things requiring a divine intellect or enhanced cognition, but things allowable with our fragile frame--were excluded, silently, and without discussion about their exclusion.....

In the USA everything is overwhelmed by a frantic need to justify what, perhaps, can't really be justified.

Reference
Jakuba Ktalpa, němci, Host, Brno  2012

social media

Let's see, does social media (so called---as if we weren't social prior to their expansion)
actually allow us to see the other person's face?

I am a bit cautious about endorsing the views of Dacher Keltner because he seems to me to be rather over-enthusiastic about the results and methods of Ekman, however, I do think he has a point when he complains that such "media" bypass our ability to read faces, a tool developed by long years of evolutionary history....

a solution to the crisis

Part One:
A solution to the Crisis; Reagan-style

When the air-traffic controllers didn't do their job (when they went on strike)
Ronald Reagan fired them.

Today, wealthy investors are on strike. They are not doing their job. They are not investing, creating jobs, etc.

ERGO, we should follow Reagan and fire those bums who are not doing their jobs.

Part Two
A Solution for Greece: Intellectual Property Rights

The Greek people should assert their intellectual property rights and demand payment
for all of their words that we have borrowed.

You can't even say 'crisis' without speaking Greek. In fact, if we stopped using words we borrowed from Greek, we couldn't even have an educated conversation. So, it's time to pay back what we borrowed.

punishing the victims........in Cyprus

Let's see...
There's a worldwide economic crisis because.....

The capitalist class is on strike,
refusing to invest.

And taxes on working people (who did not cause the crisis) go up....
And government services for working people (who did not cause the crisis) go down,
And the pay of working people (who did not cause the crisis) goes down.

And, in Cyprus,
bankers made bad decisions.....

And then there are working people,
who have been saving their money for retirement.

So, since Cypriot bankers made bad decisions,
there may still be (according to what i just read in today's "Guardian")
a tax on the savings of working people
to pay for the bad decisions by the----not the bad decisions of working people, but the bad decisons that they did not make....... The tax is to pay for the bad decisions which were made by un-elected bankers.......

Something is wrong here, very wrong.
Something stinks.