Watch.

I’ve had Emily to myself the last two nights, as Andrea is getting back into work via special events. The first night, she yelled continuously from after dinner until midnight. Last night, she played and had fun. Go figure.

She’s a pretty smart little cookie, too. She knows she’s not allowed to climb the stairs by herself, so last night she wandered over to them and yelled “Daddy, daddy, daddy!” to get me to come watch her climb. A first both for calling me, and for not just saying her usual “Enh! Enh!”

I’ve gotten an Android phone, and it’s nice, except for not being small enough to fit in my pants pocket. But having games and net access on the bus is cool. I haven’t gotten around to exploring development, yet, as I am trying to get my latest project to properly find all its frameworks on the Mac.

– John M. Ford

My office is right under the approach path to runway 26L, so I see CF-18 Hornet fighter jets

CF-18

and CH-146 Griffin helicopters

CH-146

flying around several times a day.

Rumor has it that two Halifax-class frigates

HMCS Vancouver

will be anchored offshore to provide extra air defense.

Note that this side of the conversation is female, and in a loud and business-like tone. At first I thought that it was a business call. The tone did not vary at all, even at the end.

Hi, I’m calling for Achmed. Is he there?

…

Achmed. Is he there?

…

I know he’s there.

…

Hi! I bet you didn’t think I’d be calling you!

…

So you’re not in Morocco after all . . . you’re in Italy? Who are you staying with?

…

I miss you. Do you miss me? … Do you miss me?

…

I’m doing ok, thanks for asking. Things are looking up.

…

I have a bill here from Revenue Canada for $250.00.

…

I guess I can go myself.

…

No, I paid him some more money to stay, because I don’t know where to move.

…

He didn’t call me, I called him. But I think he has some problems of his own, I think he might have a drug problem or something.

(followed an extended discussion of the merits of the drug problem theory)

…

Listen, now that I have you on the phone, I need to ask you something. Do you still love me?

At that point I was eternally grateful that my stop had arrived, as I couldn’t bear to listen any more.

The Market for Liberty, Linda and Morris Tannehill.

The Body in Yoruba, Mark Dingemanse.

Reading Greek, Joint Association of Classical Teachers.

παγὶς γὰρ θανάτου ἡ διγλωσσία

There you have it. Diglossia is a deadly snare :-)

Update: even better:

τέκνον μου, μὴ γίνου … μαθηματικὸς … εκ γὰρ τούτων ἁπάντων εἰδωλολατρία γεννᾶται

“My child, do not become … a mathematician … for from all that comes idolatry.” Could have used that advice before I went to university!

I know a tiny bit about being a refugee — my family and I lived in the small West African country of Liberia until a few months after its civil war began in late 1989. We left with only what we could carry. We were priviledged to have Canadian citizenship and a network of friends and family in Canada to help us rebuild our lives.

Most of the 67 million displaced people around the world do not have those luxuries; they must endure endless waiting in camps, wrangling with faceless bureacracies, and starting a new life in a strange land with no resources.

If you would like to sponsor me, visit my sponsorship page.

Canadian donors will receive a tax receipt.

I have also changed themes. I’m working on adding tags to old posts so the tag cloud on the sidebar reflects something of the topics of this blog.

The Atlantic writer exemplifies values that seem to me unfortunately all too common these days:

* The tendency to evaluate one’s life and the life of others in light of archetypes: the ideal metrosexual husband, the career wife, the suburbanite, the rage-against-the-Man radical. If we think we wouldn’t fit into a slot in Central Casting, we feel like failures. Why not evaluate our lives as unique and valuable in their idiosyncracies, rather than as instances of shared templates whose main purpose seems to be competition? I’m a better Ideal Husband (TM) than Joe, so I must be doing OK. If the Atlantic writer’s marriage is humdrum, and she becomes attracted to another man, then she switches parts, from the Ideal Wife to the Liberated Woman of Eat, Pray, Love (whose behavior, by the way, if indulged in by a man, would elicit universal condemnation).

Who cares if I’m the Prototypical Hacker or the Ideal Husband? I enjoy playing with computers at home and at work, my wife brings me happiness and I hope I bring some to her, we have a little girl who is bright and energetic and growing and changing every day. Who cares if our life might not make a prototypical Hollywood domestic drama?

* The idea that one’s feelings must be acted upon immediately to obtain some nearby pleasure or avoid some current pain. My perspective on this is informed both by being an introvert prone to introspection and having experienced lengthy periods of depression. On any given day I have to evaluate my feelings in light of the whole context of my life. What would happen to me, and those people and things I am committed to, in the long run if I acted on those feelings?

People seem to think that one is being “untrue” to oneself by not immediately acting. But what if the feelings go contrary to those things that bring me good in life, and those ways I am committed to bringing good to others?

The author of the New York Times article recognized that her husband’s emotional pain was in fact untrue to his whole self — the self that was defined by the trajectory of his life — that it was blinding him to those things that had been for the good in the past and would again.

This is of course predicated on the idea that all parties are of good will. The writer’s husband was not an habitual abuser of their relationship, in which case, good riddance. His feelings were temporal and contingent and a form of displacement, and what he needed was exactly what the writer gave him: time. So often we want to resolve things right now. This is natural — we don’t like living in uncertainty and irresolution.

But sometimes we need time to evaluate and let our “self” — the sum of the trajectory of our experiences and choices — and our new experience of pain or desire, settle into a new synthesis, as it were. When they did for the writer’s husband, he realized that those things he had found valuable in the past about his marriage and family were in fact still valuable to him.