Saturday, January 13, 2024

Moving to Northampton


I see from looking at my previous (infrequent) posts that I never talked about moving to Northampton. I moved on August 31st, 2023. The biggest reason was to be near my two daughters and my one granddaughter, who live close by. Cost of living was another factor, where I have a 1-bedroom here for $1400 as opposed to the $2500 my landlord had proposed for the coming year in Waltham. I had lived in the greater Boston area since 1978. (I moved into my Cambridge shared apartment on a Saturday evening of Labor Day weekend, and in those days supermarkets were closed on Sundays and also on holidays -- two days in a row. Remember those days? For 2.5 days I was getting by on what the 7-11 carried.) But after 45 years, there really wasn't anything holding me in Boston any more. I never did take advantage of the cultural opportunities, I had been drifting away from the FUSN community over the course of years, and had hardly any friends in town, and even with them most of the communication was by email, which can be done from anywhere. One small amusing fact is that whenever I moved, it was from one city/town to an adjacent one. Cambridge, Brighton, Brookline, Newton, Watertown, and Waltham. I was in Newton 27 years.


I'm in a condominium building, and have no complaints. And yet it doesn't feel like home.


The last time I felt excited about where I lived was when I moved to 38 California Street in Watertown, back in August of 2016. I had been living in a rather cozy in-law apartment the previous 4 years. It was perfectly adequate but not exciting. But the California Street place was in a converted attic, with high, sloping ceilings, skylights, and an airy feel. It was right by the Watertown falls of the Charles River, and had a lovely view. I enjoyed walking along the Charles on the MDC paths. I like many others was excited at the prospect of our first female president, following two terms of the decent and classy Barack Obama. Donald Trump was repulsive, but he would be soundly defeated and the Republicans taught a lesson about nominating someone like that. But it didn't turn out that way. The afternoon of Tuesday, November 8th was the last sunlight on an era of hope.


For the first few months at California Street, I was aware every day of the falls and the river. That naturally faded with time. Then came Covid, and then the news that the landlady would be selling the place so it was time to move. After 5 years I moved to a one-bedroom place in Waltham. It was adequate, but the landlord was weird and intrusive. At the close of the first year he told me my rent of $1,888 a month had been a special, introductory rate and after lots of back and forth, decided the next year's rent would be $2,200. My daughter Becky volunteered to be an intermediary because I hated dealing with his aggressive style. He suggested I should start paying the higher rent two months before the end of the current lease, and he wanted me to add money to the security deposit -- which is apparently illegal, and Becky talked him out of both. That sort of weirdness. The question became not whether I would leave, but when. I stuck it out one more year. Now there is every reason to think I can stay in this place in Northampton as long as I can live independently. I was anxious about what would happen if the owner sold the condo, and daughter Becky told me I could afford to buy it from her. Owning something was not a goal of mine, but if a place is known and comfortable, I would be happy to do it so I could stay put.


So while I can stay put, it doesn't feel like home. "Home" implies a certain ease and comfort and attachment to place. For me this is just a place to live. I shouldn't make it sound like Donald Trump was the cause of my no longer feeling like a place is home. It was a long, slow process of caring less about that sort of thing.


I suffer from chronic depression, and for some 20 years now it has been pretty well controlled with bupropion and lamotrigine -- but that is not to say I am happy. I try to focus on bright moments, and pass the time with computer games and an active online life. But it would be a stretch to say I am happy.


In other news, I got a hearing aid shortly after moving here. My right ear is so bad that a hearing aid can't help it, but the device in my left ear is good for such things as conversing with people in noisy places. One thing I didn't expect, though, was that I found the improved hearing at higher frequency sounds to be unpleasant. I only wear the hearing aid when I go out -- which might be once or twice a week. Even listening to music at home, I enjoy it more without the hearing aid. This is apparently a rather common reaction.


Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Being honest about capital punishment


I'm strongly opposed to capital punishment, though not as passionately as a lot of "liberals".


Over the years I've read a series of articles about how the victims may suffer during execution, or how things can go wrong and get botched. Here was the latest to come to my attention:


https://apnews.com/article/death-penalty-alabama-nitrogen-hypoxia-3aa41ad4da3f719e9f06425798e1c6a5


It deals with the perils of a proposed new execution method which involves having the condemned breathe pure nitrogen.


What the articles never mention is that the medical technology exists to execute people with zero risk of getting botched or feeling pain. We routinely give the necessary painkillers to those with terminal cancer so that they do not suffer, and medical ethics allows giving a dose that is sure to eliminate the pain even as it becomes virtually certain that the medicines will kill them. The same technology could be used to execute people. There are probably a dozen equally effective variants.


The reason these methods are not used is the refusal of the medical profession to cooperate in carrying out executions -- to the point where those who do cooperate face professional sanctions. I believe I read that certain drug makers have prohibited the use of their products for carrying out executions. Any individual helping to carry out executions risks stigma from liberals who discover this. It reminds me to some extent of the perils that doctors who provide abortions face from passionately anti-abortion zealots, though I am not aware of any capital punishment collaborators fearing for their lives.


As a result, the ones carrying out the execution may understandably be "stressed out" -- at least one article mentioned this. And stressed out people are more likely to make mistakes.


A refusal to participate in any way in carrying out executions is morally defensible. Seeing that individual victims do not suffer is less important than the goal of doing everything they can to make capital punishment politically less appealing.


But it would seem far more honest to explain as part of the story that the danger arises not inherently from the technical problem of how to kill people but from the fact that those who could effortlessly solve those problems have chosen not to participate. Capital punishment proponents probably would cite this as a reason to discount stories of botched executions -- it's the fault of those anti-capital punishment elites, not an inherent problem with capital punishment. It's not a political argument those opposed to capital punishment would like to get into, but it's true. If you see the capital punishment question as a war, where the only goal is to prevail politically, this is the choice you would expect to see. If on the other hand you have the quaint view that issues should be discussed honestly with a goal of achieving understanding, it's a truth we would do better to discuss honestly.


For some historical context, it is interesting that the guillotine came into use in France in the late 18th century as part of this new idea that people being executed should not be made to suffer, but the desire was simply to end their lives. Before that time, "breaking on the wheel" was a common method. And it interests me today that no matter how much some group reviles a class of criminals, no one seriously argues for torture, and especially not public torture. This seems like a lasting shift in values that came with the Enlightenment that is not in danger of being reversed (unlike much of the rest of it).



Monday, August 14, 2023

Illusions That Make Us Dread Death


In the usual course of events, children and teenagers contemplate the big questions of life, determine they have no good answers, and get on with the mundane business of living. This most definitely includes death. We will all die, there's nothing we can do about this inevitability, so wisdom suggests there is little benefit to fretting over what you cannot change. Of course we can and do put considerable effort into extending our lives and improving their quality by way of exercise, diet, and medicines, to name a few. But we know we will fail in the end.

I feel a bit self-conscious writing a post on this subject. I was a teenager a long time ago -- why dig into the inevitable again? Didn't I grow up? And yet while well-adjusted people don't spend much effort on the inevitability of death, some people may recognize that there is inside of us a slow small feeling of dread when our thoughts pass that way. One way I heard it phrased was that no matter how perfect our life might be at any given time, the worm in the heart of the apple remains -- we will die.

I think the dread is fed by some illusions. I'm hoping that by finding them and considering them, I can tame a bit of my own dread when it surfaces, and if it helps any others, so much the better.

1. Whatever vestige of a person remains after death has no existence over the course of time.

If you are buried in a graveyard in the usual fashion, your corpse lies in the silence and darkness, several feet underground. It's tempting to think of that corpse as being "you" -- where else would you be? When scientists perform sensory deprivation experiments, the subjects ultimately feel very distressed. So the idea that you are lying in a box underground, getting no information from the world outside, which continues without you, even for days and weeks (let alone millenia or eternity) sounds like torture, and so it would be. But a corpse looks and feels completely bereft of life. It is not a person. People who know they will be cremated may be protected somewhat from this illusion since cremation so clearly creates something that has no resemblance to living flesh.

I have spent very little time with corpses, but my sense is that concepts like "brain death" may have good scientific backing, but there is a much more certain and unmistakable change. There comes a point when the heart stops beating, blood stops circulating, and all of the tissues in the body die. Not long after, the smallest child can plainly see that this is no longer a human being. It is a collection of dead tissue -- as inert as mud or stone. That is what gets buried, not a person.

But even if you don't think of yourself as located in a grave, you are tempted to think of yourself as located somewhere. Perhaps you can't say exactly where. It might be in some other dimension of reality. But a critical question, I think, is whether you conceive of time passing. Time passing while any vestige of "you" is in this state would be a form of torture. For some comfort in contradicting that idea, you can consider how things were in the millenia before you were born. Were you bored? No, you didn't exist. And the key concept to resist this illusion of existing over time is to truly get that you cease to exist. As living beings we typically do wonder about what the future will bring in the course of years or even centuries. People who think in grander terms may think about the sun turning into a red giant or in some other way making life on earth completely impossible, or go on to think about entropy creating a cold fog of dust after billions of years. But as those events unfold, there will be no "you" tucked away somewhere as it happens. You won't exist, and your nonexistence lacks every vestige of a temporal dimension.

2. Frustration about not knowing the future does not live on after death.

In our ordinary lives, sometimes the movie ends in the middle, or we lose the book or the magazine, and we want to know how it turned out. We may carry a nagging frustration with us, perhaps for years. We may more generally wonder, "What's going to happen to everyone and everything after I die?" This is entirely appropriate, and we can in advance feel frustrated knowing we will not know how it turns out. But this frustration at not knowing is also extinguished at death. There is no entity left to wonder about any such thing.

3. Struggling against death may be all-consuming, but once death comes things are totally different.

Evolution has programmed us, in all ways and at all levels, to live as long as possible. Heights, snakes, and fearsome predators terrify us because they might kill us. Using our human cognitive skills we also put effort into planning months or years in advance so we have food and do not freeze to death or die of thirst. We devise defenses against others, whether animals or fellow humans, who would do us harm. Yet as our bodies actually do get to the point of giving out, our heart beats frantically fast in its last efforts if it can't do its job properly. We gasp desperately when we can't get enough air. In its last acts, the body is screaming that there is severe danger, something to be avoided in any way possible, and when it finally does stop working and die, its message is that we have met the ultimate failure.

You might think that we humans with our cognitive skills could arrange for suicide reliably, but a great many methods are highly uncertain, as the other layers of our biology call forth every trick they know to survive. We will vomit up poisons. When our air supply is cut off, we will by reflex thrash violently in an effort to breathe again, enough to thwart many suicide attempts by that means. You may bleed from a deep cut, but your body tends to limit the loss of blood enough to survive. The prospect of jumping from a high place or throwing yourself in front of a moving vehicle both awaken the deepest instincts of self-preservation. 

And while the body's deeply rooted, desperate attempts to stay alive tell us something horrible is at hand, we can use our human cognition to get past that. The dying is quite possibly painful and distressing, but we knew it was inevitable, and the passing of the pain and distress is equally inevitable. There is no longer anyone to be distressed. They do not go to some better (or worse) place, and they do not hang around as a ghost. They may appear in some form to the living, usually in the form of memories. Occasionally they appear as hallucinataions, but this is entirely a phenomenon of the mind of the living. The dead person is not there. There is no dead person. The comforting thought that the dead person has achieved eternal rest is equally wrong -- there is no vestige of a person who exists in time. Non-existence precludes any concept of "rest".

4. Coming at it from a different angle

Years ago a friend sent me a quote along the lines of, "How strange and unusual life is -- how totally unlike anything else!" What's humorous is that "conscious life" is in its own category, and there is nothing that could possibly be like life. When contemplating that, I feel no particular unease. But then I can consider one of the excluded states that is not like conscious life -- and that is death. I suppose if I had any intuitive sense of an afterlife, I might have questioned the original -- maybe an afterlife, where we are assumed to be conscious and aware of our continuity with a former living being, is sort of like life. But lacking any such intuitive sense, "death" as an excluded state can be contemplated peacefully.

5. Summary

Thinking of ourselves as having any location after death is unhelpful. One vital element to the non-existence of death is the absence of any form of duration or passage of time. A day after death, the non-existent dead "person" is exactly the same non-thing that it will be in a billion years. A non-thing without any trace of existence in time.

Our longing to know the future beyond our death dies with us.

The body's deep-rooted and desperate attempts to put off death as long as possible, and the pain and distress that often arises as parts of its final failure, is naturally something we fear and that is simply "bad". But the final state of non-existence, which we humans can grasp with our big brains, is totally different. It is not pain, failure, or decay. It is simply nonexistence.

Of course I'm not saying I've solved the problem. I suspect death will still feel just plain wrong to many or most of us, from the depths of our souls, and that most definitel includes me. But perhaps some of the dread can be set aside.

And my readers may well ask why I never grew up, or why I have regressed to consider big questions that have no good answers. Sorry. When I look inside, that's one of the things I see.



Thursday, May 11, 2023

Daughter Music: Two In a Garden

 

I was never the greatest dad, when my girls were young, in saying that everything they did was terrific just because I was their dad and they were my kids, independent of the actual merits. I wasn't terrible at it, but I wasn't great either. My mother felt feedback should be honest (so sometimes negative) from quite a young age, so I had to break with a family pattern to do it at all.


But now with Becky having passed age 34, such concerns are all gone. She and her friend Nicole self-produced an album in the fall of 2021 called 'Two In a Garden". At first I wasn't particularly taken with it, but at some point early this year I really got into it and now like it a lot. I asked for a description of the genre, and there was no simple, single label. I think it was roughly "a capella quirky folk-trad-song".


She said none of the songs are original compositions, but they did their own arranging and harmonizing. In earlier music experience, she had several sessions with Village Harmony, including trips to Georgia, Ukraine, and South Africa. In college she was a driving force behind making Chaverim into a group focused on international music (https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/chaverim/). She has become an active presence today in the Sacred Harp community. Her day job now is as a writer/editor/manager for Devoted Health (https://www.devoted.com/).


This is Becky and Nicole's Bandcamp page: https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/


I think Becky said you can listen to 3 or 4 tracks for free before they want you to pay. And if you did, these are my recommendations:


https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/the-old-churchyard


https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/witch-hazel


https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/fields-of-wonder


https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/give-me-wings-been-in-the-storm-i-will-meet-you-in-the-city



Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Turning pages, and getting back to the home position


Also, as a bonus paragraph, a few more linguistic quirks of aging. I know when typing I used to look down every time I returned my hands to the home position. I thought the little bumps on the "f" and "j" that help you determine this by feel were curiosities that I didn't feel the need for. Now, I can't imagine doing without them! It's hard to remember the sort of mental energy and focus that made looking down and back up so trivial


Another quirk has to do with page-turning. Naturally we've all had the problem of turning the page in a book but being unsure if you managed to get two pages instead of just one. Until recent years, I could easily resolve this by feel. But more and more lately, my solution to this problem is to look at the page number I am turning from and the page number that shows up after my tentative page flip. If it is one or two higher, I'm fine. If it is three or four, I'm not so fine. This would have seemed ridiculous to me before the age of 50, I believe. It's handiest when I am pretty sure I've only turned one page, since if it was two I have to separate them anyway.




My father, sex, and natural childbirth


My father taught a course at the University of New Hampshire from roughly 1960 to 1980 called "Human Reproductive Biology". He found in 1960 that students at UNH were woefully uninformed on this subject. Times being what they were, this was a controversial step. Sex should be taught in the home, not as an elective at the university! His connection with the subject was that he was a professor in the zoology department who did research in endocrinology (with frogs mostly, I believe). The course met a science distribution requirement, for the first several years. As you can imagine, this was a very popular course! (I like to think my father's teaching was appealing as well as the subject matter.) At its peak, his lectures were shown by closed-circuit TV in a total of three lecture halls, and he had roughly 2,000 students enrolled. Apparently it also came to include "drugs", meaning recreational drugs, which was another subject of immediate practical interest to students.


My father was a self-effacing man who sought to avoid conflict, but this was an area where he was willing to take some heat. Later a woman was charged with indecent exposure for walking naked through town (with, I believe, a plastic replica of a penis worn as a pendant). Against the advice of legal counsel, he volunteered to testify that in the course of walking, a woman was not exposing any sex organs. Why she was doing this is something that eluded me then, as it does now.


Anyway, the reason for bringing this up has to do with natural childbirth. At some point a group of female students encouraged my father to show a film on natural childbirth, and it showed a woman showing considerable distress while in labor. He declined to include it in the course, saying that he thought if women had to see that they'd never have children! This was probably a common view for its time.


I have the modern view, in most respects. Women should be fully informed about natural childbirth and other options, and choose for themselves what they want. No opinion of mine should influence what any woman decides to do. However, if I imagine myself as a woman planning for labor, I would not be inclined to choose that option. Without intervention, labor is extremely painful. Why would one choose to go through that? Many causes of death involve increasing pain towards the end. Are there people who choose to forego painkillers because they want it to be natural? I suppose there are a few somewhere, but I doubt they are anywhere near as common as those who choose natural childbirth.


I can see that being awake during the event, as opposed to the general anesthesia that I believe was common at one time, would definitely have an appeal. But I believe that all methods where you stay awake do involve a considerable amount of discomfort anyway. Does someone really need the whole nine yards? It's not for me to say, but that's my take on the issue.


Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Pictures on the Wall Reconsidered


When decorating a home, it is customary to put things on the walls. Large expanses of bare wall are unusual. Visitors will note the blank space as a peculiarity.


For the past year and a half I have lived in an apartment with a rather eccentric and demanding landlord, who asserts that any screw holes or nail holes must be patched up perfectly to avoid a charge against the security deposit. My solution has been to just leave the walls bare. For the five years before that, I lived in a converted attic with slanting walls which do not allow putting up pictures in the usual manner. I elected to leave the very few suitable vertical wall spaces bare as well. Although external factors led me to this situation, I find I like this arrangement.


I am of the opinion that thoughts should be guided from within. We should choose what to think about. Of course this is usually originates with our senses. Whether we use old-style books or magazines, or look at screens, we usually start with words and images to guide our thoughts. (The battle over advertising's imperative to impose their own agenda on our minds is the topic for a different day.) In the internet era it is more and more possible to actively choose. A TV channel was much more passive. The only options were to look for a new channel or turn it off. Even there, the TV screen was constantly changing, showing us new things. Today, clicking different places on a screen in sequence can lead to a stunning variety of different destinations.


Pictures on the wall never change. When we look at them they interrupt anything else we were thinking about and our perceptions of them take a place in our minds. Is there really anything that we want to endow with that power? Is even a picture of a beloved deceased parent really helpful? Perhaps you do want to remember them, but do you want your memories to be guided by looking at that particular patch of wall at that particular time? Most pictures do not tie us to something of such powerful emotional significance. Why should we think about that particular thing (yet once more) when we were in the midst of a train of thought we recently chose to start in on? The mind wanders plenty as it is, but do we really want to give another nudge to the wandering? We may feel we get so used to what's on the wall that we don't really register it any more. But more of our thoughts are governed by automatic processing than we are aware of. And if we really don't see it, there's surely no strong reason for it to be there.


Then there are visitors. What a first-time visitor sees when looking at our walls gives them an impression of us. But does a series of pictures, however carefully chosen, really convey what we want to convey? If we follow the standard rule that walls should be covered with things, then they can judge us compared to the other things we might have chosen to cover our walls with. But perhaps we would do better to escape that paradigm entirely, and with mind uninterrupted by anything on the walls, hope they listen more carefully to what we say, or think more carefully about what they say to us. If we want them to concentrate on a particular set of images, we can show them a photo album in some format or other (phone, tablet, paper book).


I recently saw at someone's home a sort of intermediate arrangement, which is presumably quite common. A large-screen TV had a looping slide show of pictures from a recent vacation. Presumably they enjoyed being reminded of that vacation. But they quite likely replaced it with a different set of pictures after the next vacation, or perhaps simply shut it off and had a blank large-screen TV on that section of wall.


Compare this to places outside your home. If you have your own office, the same considerations would apply, if to a lesser extent. If you go into a restaurant, the décor has likely been chosen to help set a particular mood, and quite possibly you chose the restaurant in part because of the "ambiance" for that particular block of time while you're eating. If you go into something like a Target or Walmart, you have put yourself in the world of retail commerce and probably aren't upset to be inundated with advertising -- some of it might actually be useful! If you go into the sanctuary of my Unitarian-Universalist church, you are typically wanting to nudge your thoughts in the direction of the profound or spiritual. Stained glass windows are in line with what you want to be thinking about.


In your own home, whatever is on your walls is bound to be relevant to a much smaller fraction of the things you want to be thinking about at any given time. Likely so small that they hinder rather than help you in your life goals. Maybe bare walls would serve you better.