Fun Stuff

Cartwheels

We were never acrobats.
In particular, me
convinced a summersault constituted
an aerial feat
of stunning quality
as foes shied away
from my twice-broken
plastic sword.

It had been reforged
in the fires of superglue.
A leap onto the couch
scaled cliffs
which would have taken hours
for lesser men.

And you applauded,
fought along side me
when the script required
and switched seamlessly
to villainy when I got bored
of chopping air.

We threw in a cartwheel
every so often,
editing the scene
(the camera panned in
so you couldn't tell
other action had ceased
for focus on the stunt work).

In everyone's mind their cartwheels are perfect.
Nobody from that upside-down disorientation
knows their legs are off to one side
or that their back is bent.
Which is to say, that sometimes ignorance is bliss,
imagination taking over.

Poem:
Just a recollection of childhood. Not much to say about it other than that.

Observation:
Another interesting discussion in my philosophy class resulted in today's little insight. As everyone knows, liberals and conservatives tend not to get along very well. But the discussion we were having concerned the distinction between being liberal (or conservative) in a political sense and being the same in a judicial sense. Now, there are obviously some similarities and overlap between the two. Conservatives, by definition, favor the status quo, resistin change. In a judicial sense this means that they tend to side with precedent, and in general resist attempts to overturn old laws. Furthermore, conservatives believe in strict interpretation, meaning that the letter of the law is what should be used in passing judgments (as opposed to intent, or some new formulation or application). Now, if you're like me, you're thinking this sounds an awful lot like political conservatism as well. But as my professor pointed out, there are plenty of cases where political and judicial conservatism (and liberalism) come apart. The most obvious of these is Roe v Wade. If you ask a political conservative what the right thing to do regarding that decision is, if they abide by the party line they will tell you that the decision in favor of pro choice should be overturned. Obviously, this flies in the face of judicial conservatism, which says that once a precedent has been established, that is what should be used in the future. Deciding to overturn a decision that establishes legal precedent is a decidedly liberal thing to do as far as the judiciary is concerned. On the other side, it is obvious that liberals arguing to let the decision stand are not judicial liberals, since saying that something is right because it is precedent is a conservative idea.

Exercise:
You meet a man in a bar in a strange town. He has a cat on his lap, and he orders a cup of coffee, slowly spoons sugar into it. He strokes the cat's black fur and says, "This contact is illusory. The cat and I are separated as though by a pane of glass, because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant." What do you say back to him? And he to you? What does the cat do? What happened to this man before he came into the bar?

"It seems odd to call the cat magical in that case," I reply. "Just living in the instant doesn't seem like an altogether magical thing."
"It is a power unknown to me, to us as humans, always planning, being taken over by the sequence of events, never starting the sequence ourselves." He seems half lost in his own crypticness. The cat twitches its ears, and with a brief glance at me, hops onto the bar, where it walks to the nearby corner and sits, an egyptian sculpture, serene and proud of its magical qualities.
I'm having trouble seeing how the fact we don't live in the moment separates us physically, but I'm willing to let it go. His overcoat has seen better days, and the rain outside seems to have found its way to every part of him. His long, dark hair shines black with water, and almost has an oily reflectivity in the dim bar lighting.
"Take my very being here, for example," he begins again. "I have no interest in establishments such as these. Rife with rowdy, good for nothing squanderers of intellect. But my humanity, my dependence on being effected by what comes before, dictated I stop."
I'm guessing this translates to "I got wet, so I came in to dry off."

Me:
Another exercise from the newer source. These might take longer than five minutes. I cut this short.
I'm typing this blog entry on an iPad, and so far I'm enjoying the experience quite a lot. I might have to download a designated document editor, since the note-taking application I'm using, while awesome for class notes, keeps insisting I want to do something other than type on the keyboard. But I'm having no trouble with the keyboard, which was an issue I was slightly concerned about. And I have a way to sync documents between my phone and my iPad, which should allow for mobile uploading no matter where I am. Also, I have been using the iPad for almost an hour, and it still says I have 100% charge remaining. I can only assume this is one of the many magical qualities Steve Jobs was talking about when he went gaga over his own device. And with the new one coming out tomorrow, I got this one for about 200 dollars less than retail.
Also, I just got back from playing an hour and a half of ultimate frisbee, which was really fun. It turned out I wasn't even that out of shape. Or that everyone was out of shape. Either way, it felt good to run around for a while. Handball courts don't seem cramped until you play a sport on a field. All that open space was actually a bit disorienting.