Here is my nephew Jared struck by the true spirit of Easter!  What he is trying to say is that Entrepreneurial City has temporarily moved here.  We don’t know if we are staying there.  Let us know what you think, though.

 Today I told my friend that the streets in Palo Alto are very clean.

 His response: You know, the police there are mean to homeless people.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, the streets are filthy, and the police are still mean to homeless people.

Picture from seadipper 

I ate a veggie-meatball sub underneath this structure near the medical school on campus today.  Were the architects deliberately attempting to evoke a prison aesthetic, i cannot say. 

Today was the first day of our book drive outside the Stanford bookstore for the Prisoner Literature Project.  We had a surprisingly generous day and many people, after learning we’d be there for the week promised to return tomorrow with books to donate.  Most people that stopped to talk to us, more often professors and workers rather than students, were curious where the books were going.  "They are going to San Bruno Jail." 

People wanted to know this, I think, because they knew someone in prison somewhere and perhaps were wondering, after seeing our sign in front of the table, if somehow by chance, the book they’d like to hand to us could one day find its way to their loved one. 

A woman told us of a close friend of her husband who shortly after arriving in the United States from Korea was involved in a criminal charge that has now sentenced him to life in prison in Pasadena.  Her English was broken and she pieced together sentences with difficulty, but also with the utter conviction one conveys when one relives a story.  She paused for breath and stood still, then asked me, "are there Koreans in San Bruno jail?"   

A possibility: if she could come to the aid of someone from her home who is now away from home and locked away from everyone, her question wondered, was this act possible at all? 

Afterwards she walked away from the bookstore watching the ground a few feet in front of her and thinking again, maybe for the 100th time, of her husband’s close friend.

I biked today from our house to the beach on the Western edge of Golden Gate Park. San Francisco on a sunny weekday feels like an underemployed city. There are people in the street at all hours with apparently time on their hands. People don’t seem to be in a rush to get anywhere. Being on Spring Break, I joined those leisurely people today. Old habits die hard, though. I pedalled furiously until I got to the park, as though I had a deadline to meet. Of course by then I had a tight ache in my lower left back, and my backpack was starting to chafe on my bare shoulders.

Biking through the park was quiet, although about halfway through, the road took on a noticeable negative gradient, meaning I started to speed, and so the wind created this everpresent rumbling in my ear. As I approached the ocean, the air got cooler. Although the day was perfectly clear, it felt a lot like riding into fog. You know how when you bring cold clothes into a warm room, sometimes they feel wet, even though they’re not? It was like that, except it was cool air on a warm day.

Without a map, I navigated with the sun. It wasn’t hard. Avoid exiting the park, and try to head west.

Getting to the beach, I was surprised at how grey it looked. The sky, perhaps, was too blue for its own good, and the vegetation behind me too lushly green, making the water and sand seem dull in comparison. Sand, after all, should be white or golden.

There were the perfect number of people on the beach, but I stayed on the sidewalk, not wanting to get sand in my bike’s gears. I then slowly performed my post-cycling ritual of relaxation, which I shall detail here:

First I got off the bike (immediately the relief of not having to balance). Then I carefully leaned it against the bench (the relief from controlling a heavy, dirty thing). Next, the helmet came off (self-evident relief). Then the underwear-adjustment (this step may be interchanged with the previous one, depending on temperature, humidity, layers, degree of crotch-discomfort). The removal of backpack comes next (exposing sweat-soaked back of tank-top to sun and wind for the first time this trip - what a feeling!). Finally, the sitting and stretching.

Without ritual, after all, it’s not relaxation. It’s just collapse.

I sat and watched the clouds and gulls. I ate a trail mix bar. I got asked by some stoner-types if I had a lighter (I did not). I got eyeballed by a ruddy-faced young man in a wetsuit, wet from the sea. His arm dripped water down the side of his surprisingly white surfboard (whiter than the sand, anyway). It was surf meets turf, sea-soaked meets sweat-damp, nature-rider meets bike-rider, cool-dude meets grad-student.

A young nuclear family (mommydaddytwogirls) took turns sitting next to me on the bench to put on their shoes before getting into their car. The parents helped the two girls ensure they did not have sand in their shoes or on their legs. They did not acknowledge my presence, and, by the time I thought about this, it was too late for me to acknowledge theirs. How would I do it, I wondered. It was impossible. "Oh, I didn’t see you there for the last 5 minutes!" In retrospect, I could have waited for some minor unusual event (localized minor unusual events happen all the time. A bird calls, a child throws something, someone jogs past talking on a cellphone) and then made some kind of witty, friendly or ambiguously-passive-aggressive comment about it. ("It sounds lost"/"Ooh that went far"/"We all have cellphones, nowadays!").

I wonder if they thought I didn’t speak English and were too embarrassed to say anything to me, in case that was so. There were a number of people speaking non-English languages at the beach that day. I heard, from my bench, French, Russian (or some other Eastern European language), Mandarin, and Spanish. There was also some kind of Southern U.S. accent. You see and hear a lot more people sitting still than walking. When you walk, you still encounter people coming the other way (although because of your increased relative velocities, and your urgent agenda of forward movement, you have much less time to pay attention to them), but all the people behind you going the same way are just completely unavailable to your senses.

Images (in order) are from: 1. cloudsoup 2. Chronochaser 3. Mikebaird

All images are of the Pacific ocean, as far as I could tell, though not of the beach at Golden Gate Park. The second one was taken near Pacifica.

I went to a picnic today in Dolores Park, the two-block-square park in the mission with tennis courts, a barbecue area, and a playground. I learned that up on the hill was a "gay area," but the rest of the park seemed pretty mixed gay and straight anyway.

On a post in fluentinfag, I talk a bit about the thoughts on shirtlessness that I had in that park.

Here I want to talk about the role of fog in San Francisco.

Prior to the picnic, John and I drove down to Ranch 99 in Daly city to pick up some noodles and mushrooms for our dish. On the drive, I noticed that the hill south of us was particularly dramatic in the sunshine, the trees on top looking dark and lonely, being so sharply black on a glowing green slope. I had that same feeling of being overwhelmed that I had when I was in the foothills on the peninsula, looking out on the bay.

Is this sense of being overwhelmed the Kantian experience of the dynamically sublime?

Here is what Hannah Ginsborg on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say about the dynamically sublime:

Kant says that we consider nature as “dynamically sublime” when we consider it as “a power that has no dominion over us” (§28, 260). We have the feeling of the dynamically sublime when we experience nature as fearful while knowing ourselves to be in a position of safety and hence without in fact being afraid. In this situation “the irresistibility of [nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion” (§28, 261-262). Kant’s examples include overhanging cliffs, thunder clouds, volcanoes and hurricanes (§28, 261).

Yet, in San Francisco and the foothills, nature does continue to exert an irresistible power over us, and reminds us of this power periodically with its minor quakes, avocado-destroying frosts, and unseasonably cold or warm weather (whatever "unseasonably" might mean in the Bay Area).

Fog allows me to contemplate small pieces of nature. Too enormous and sharply defined a piece and I am reminded of my own frailty. Nature through a mist of vapor here has its beauty diluted. At least, it no longer has the kind of bold beauty that says here you are in this wonderful place, but soon you will be gone, who knows when, and nature will remain.

In the park, we sat on a slope overlooking the city.

"You can see the East Bay from here," John noted.

Again I was overwhelmed.

I’m only happy in the fog. 

I found the Unofficial Stanford Blog. And I like it.

But I don’t know why. See for yourself. Sure the first post is about football (I think), and thus, incomprehensible to me, but other posts are oddly appealing.

The tone reminds me of The Daily. 

Founded to undertake the Manhattan project, the Los Alamos National Laboratory today is managed and run by teams of scientists from the University of California.  A pattern of recurring nuclear safety violations involving "improper handling" of radioactive substances in 2005 caused federal nuclear safety regulators to charge the University of California with a $1.1 million penalty, the largest penalty ever assessed by the federal government. 

However the University will have not have to pay the penalty,

because the 15 safety violations cited by the National Nuclear Security Administration date to 2005, when UC ran the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico as a non-profit.  As a non-profit, the university was exempt by Congress from paying civil penalties for safety violations. Last year, the university was made to share management of the lab with a team of corporations, meaning it would have to pay fines for any future violations.

Yes, today the sovereign city-state of the University of California rejoices in its for-profit partnership with the Los Alamos National Laboratory where it now, thankfully, is much more difficult to enable access to such federal investigations. 

In December 2004, Google announced an agreement with five major research libraries to digitize 30 million volumes from their collections for access on the internet.  "Universal availability," once again, were the key watchwords.  In the meantime, broadcasting, cable, computer technology companies enage in a race for competitive market advantage through mergers, strategic alliances, cross-marketing, reaching an unprecedented level of concentration in the consumption and distribution of media content.  This means the way you check out a book from Green library could be very different in about three more years.  Microsoft IBM Cisco, all those companies in the race for these network convergences, will be perfectly poised to deliver corporate degree programs, much like the University of Phoenix does today, only with access to the country’s top library collections. 

Its easy to imagine that the commercial sector will deploy all of the major teaching innovations in over the next decade: for example, lessons and entire classes taught by the most celebrated faculty at wholesale prices on Amazon.  Higher education will be viewed as one more source of easy profit, much like health and social services already function today in America.

There is a possibility that this technologic situation will create a new ‘common-sense’ in which "knowledge" becomes so media-dependant, commercial, universalized, and standardized that "the academy" will once and for all loose any sense of integrity as an institution. 

Such a future gets those on the left, who already recognize the campus as a corporate environment, stuck in the headlights asking themselves, "is that such a bad thing?"  In the 1960s, campuses across the country and globe served as the battlegrounds for civil rights organization and strategy.  But today, its quiet on campus; is the university still a site worth fighting for?

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me; you say it wearies you.
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

- The Merchant of Venice, Act I Scene 1.

In the opening lines of TMoV, Antonio ponders his mysterious sadness. Later on in that conversation, his fellow merchant, Gratiano, gives his diagnosis:

You have too much respect upon the world.
They lose it that do buy it with much care.
Believe me, you are marvelously changed.

Recently I told my friend John that I have begun to take slights very personally. When people act meanly or condescendingly towards me, I feel put off, annoyed, discomforted. I attributed it to being in law school. My internal unconscious monologue, I hypothesized, must be, "I’m a future lawyer. I don’t deserve to be treated this way! I’m going to have some social power, damn it! Dont’ fuck with me."

John reported that he felt something like this as well, since becoming a lawyer, but he chalked it up to his belief that if someone disrespected or was mean to him, it meant that person might be disrespectful or mean to others as well, and confrontation would help those other people. Lawyers are advocates for others, after all. A somewhat nobler (if perhaps less convincing, for that same reason) explanation for his similar state of mind.

In any case, we have too much respect upon the world. Take these worldly losses too seriously, and you end up feeling sad. We cannot live in this world without losing material things, and without coming under criticism, some of it unwarranted. Place too much store by what the world deals you, including what other people do to you, and you are setting yourself up to be sad.

Still, I wonder if previously, I was not taking such things seriously enough. I’ve lived a relatively carefree life, materially speaking. In addition, until law school, I got by with very little interpersonal conflict. Most people I know are conflict-avoiders. So perhaps I’ve never actually known what my reaction would be to being criticized.

Is there a graceful way to take unfair, unconstructive criticism? What is the line between self-respect and self-regard?

Some people are just never happy

But Antonio does not necessarily agree that being invested in the world has anything to do his sadness. Instead, he chalks it up to preordination:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano—
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

Even when I didn’t take personal slights so seriously, I wouldn’t say that I was happy. I remember being happy for about a year. It was junior year, in fact. I think it had something to do with feeling secure in my position in school. Declaring philosophy, having a decent on-campus part-time job that I enjoyed, deciding that I was happier not doing the dating/boyfriend thing. Two years later, I was dissatisfied with analytical Anglo-American philosophy (thank you Existentialism), working three part-time jobs that I sort of tolerated (thank you Silicon Valley), and recovering from falling in love/infatuation and entertaining all the old nuclear fantasies (thank you social programming).

It seems like so far, the only way for me to forget about the world is to be doing "well" within it. You only notice things when they are broken. I guess I still subscribe to Gratiano’s view.

On the other hand, I’ve recently been suspecting that I am just an inexplicably sad person a la Antonio or (if I’m feeling self-congratulatory) Hamlet. Perhaps accepting this is part of not being so sad. Sometimes the requirement of happiness is the most cruel thing of all.

Turn that frown upside down. Or else.

Gratiano, in fact, tries to talk Antonio into being happy, just after Antonio has declared that he is terminally unhappy.

In summary, he says that some people think that being unhappy and silent is constitutive of wisdom, when in fact they are just as foolish as everybody else, but unhappier. Far better to be openly a fool and happy than silent, considered wise, and miserable. Since we are all fools, it is against our nature to be unhappy.

This does not do very much to convince Antonio. In fact, he suspects that Gratiano is merely making excuses for his own flaw - talkativeness.

Lean on me

Soon after this, however, Bassanio comes along, and Antonio’s spirits seem to pick up. He is genuinely interested in helping Bassanio, and ends up promising him the money that becomes one of the central plot points of the play. It’s not laid out explicitly in the dialogue (as it is in the first part of the scence - perhaps a parody of Socrates?), but Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that one way for us to (at least temporarily) ward off sadness is to concern ourselves with the problems of others, and to feel that strange human feeling of connectedness and shared goals.