Baslow’s Eclectic Omniumgatherum

Fans of truly wretched videography (sorry, Ruth) and lousy acoustics will want to be sure to catch this video of my daughter, Ruth, singing "The Saga of Jenny" and "Don't Fence Me In":

This is the raw, unedited .wav (about twenty minutes worth) of the drunk guy who sat next to me on the evening of April 7, 2008 on the 1 train.  This isn't the first time.  The last time I resolved that I would document his performance for the world and now I have.  Maybe, if I get ambitious, I will try to edit it, play around with processing the sound (something I've never done), make it a soundtrack to a slideshow...who knows.  If I get ambitious.  You're welcome to take a crack at it yourself (as long as you credit me with the original recording

and your use is non-commercial).

In January, our daughter Ruth will be performing the role of Orgon in her high school's production of Moliere's Tartuffe.  Yes, Orgon is a male role.  Not enough boys signed up and Ruth is tall...

In January we will be hosting a Turkish exchange student (whose home Ruth will be visiting in April) for three weeks.

In January, our son Joel will be spending his one-month Winter Term here in New York, living with us, studying Blues Guitar.

In January, our son's girlfriend will stay with us for a week before she departs for Africa to spend her Spring term doing biological research.

We live in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan which has one bathroom.

Can't hardly wait.

I fear I have been neglecting my duties as instigator and chief pot-boiler of Fine Ideas at the Academy for far too long.  To atone for my inattention I would like to pose the following challenge:

In comments below, please explain what part the phrase "fully evolved" plays in contemporary scientific discussions of biological evolution.  Please expound on the conception of evolution which allows the description of either an individual organism or a population as "fully evolved".

You may start your engines.

The fall production of the Pied Piper Children's Theater was "A-Haunting We Will Go".  It was a comedy/mystery/horror/thriller sort of thing that looked to be written strictly for amateur theater productions.  Ruth was not overly impressed with the script and, since this was the first year of her college-level studies at Bard High School Early College, decided that she only wanted a small role.  She auditioned for and got the part of Miss Crisp, a slightly odd psychiatric nurse. 

When we helped her with her lines we could tell that there wasn't much to the character; she had only one big scene and a couple of small scenes and wasn't particularly well-written.  Ruth didn't express much excitement about the role although she has developed enough pride as an actor to approach any role she undertakes determined to find as much as she can in it. We decided it was best not to invite the people we usually invite to come see Ruthie perform; no sense traveling all that way to see her in such a small and undistinguished part.  Still, we were looking forward to seeing her do the role.  We knew she'd bring something to it.  She's smart and imaginative, always thinking about things like this, and we expected her to have at least a few surprises for us.

Damn!

Our daughter created a memorable character out of...nothing!  She wore a curly blonde wig, purple cowboy boots and a take-charge Southern accent.  From the minute she stepped onto the stage the audience knew she was doing something special.  Strangely enough it was easier for us to see how much of the acting craft she has learned in this not-well-written play than it has been in better-written, more entertaining works.  The summer internships, the classes at Stella Adler...she was really LEARNING.  We were thrilled.

My pictures simply cannot give any idea of what Ruth was doing up there on stage but they are at least some record of the event:

PicasaWeb has this embeddable slideshow feature which I thought I'd try.  These photos were taken in the summer, at the Popover Cafe, just before Ruth departed for Verona, Italy for a month. 

A retrospective perusal of this blog (or, in fact, any of my previous blogs on the web) will reveal that I don't tend to post my innermost thoughts and feelings for all to read.  It happens sometimes, to be sure, but it has not been my primary reason for blogging.

On March 15 I entered into a prolonged period of fairly uninteresting self-absorption; I was laid off from my job of 19 years and four months.

As misfortunes go mine was pretty mild.  I was pretty certain that I would get a new job and, indeed, was in that new job by mid-May.  I took a large cut in pay, in vacation time and in seniority but otherwise fared pretty well.  We have had to do some belt-tightening around my house but that is hardly a tragedy. 

At a time when people die every day due to starvation and malnutrition, due to disease, to floods and to improvised explosive devices, when people are pushed around their governments in , for example, Pakistan and Myanmar, and detained and abused indefinitely by the U.S. government on grounds so shaky that they threaten to forever warp our legal system -- my troubles just cannot seem very important.

The nervous system, however, is not at its base a very just measuring tool.  It almost always judges the self as paramount and evaluates everything else in relation to the self.  It is only with the accretion of many layers of neural complexity, I think, (unless you believe certain evolutionary psychologists) that one adds sophisticated senses of "justice" and "altruism" to one's world view.  When stress is placed on that world view, when the organism is shocked, those sophistications may be rendered temporarily unavailable. 

I went into a kind of shock for a few months although I didn't quite realize it at the time.  Losing my job, mulling over the experience for over a month, plunging into a new job in an unfamilar setting with very different rules and a much more chaotic environment...all of this dazed me.  I managed to function both in my job and with my family but I "turned off" everywhere else.  I went blank.  I seemed to spend every spare minute just wildly processing everything that had happened and was happening to me, trying to figure it all out.  Trying to figure myself out.

I am trying to figure myself out.

I would not call it a mid-life crisis, exactly, but I am re-evaluating what makes me tick.  I find I don't fully know who I am or what I like.  I don't know what motivates me these days.  I don't quite know what I want to be when I grow up.  I'm 55 years old.

I haven't posted to Vox most of this time, though I've checked in to see what's been going on.  I don't know what all of this means with respect to my future involvement.  I don't know if anyone will even read this and, if they do, if anyone will care.

What kind of conversation do I want to conduct with the world?  What kind of conversation does the world want to conduct with me, if any?  Is this the place to do it?  I don't know, we'll see.