WHAT'S "NEW"IN A NEW YEAR?

RESOLVE TO ACHIEVE THIS IN 2012

Now, there's a question?  There are many things afloat in the ethersphere these days, but not too many of them are really original.  For me the "NEW" in a new year is the day to day experience of  the passage of time.  Since I was about 32 years old, passage of time has interested me.  It is not a preoccupation with age, it has everything to do with the inner responses that I experience along the course of time.  It is mysterious to me how my reactions, intellectual and emotional vary from day to day and sometimes from hour to hour.  It hasn't been a New Year's thing for me, it has been more a time flow thing.  I have noticed that as time flows, so flow I, if that can pass for comprehensible language construction.  I, for instance, consider myself to be a fairly open-minded person.  Just as I am patting myself on the pat for that virtue, I find myself reacting negatively to a new behavior on the streets of the urban area in which I live.  Or, I find myself being insulted at the idiot who is texting when listening and learning from immediate contact with intelligent people in a sincere conversation.  I doubt that I will change in the coming twelve months.
Milestones are what we make them out to be.  They make it easier for us to comprehend the life we lead.  Nothing really changes rapidly enough for us to really make perceptible changes in ourselves to accommodate the changes that happen on a day to day basis.  Everything stays so much more the same that to change into something different on a day to day basis that it takes a long time for us to realize that we have fallen behind.  I must say that it is nice to have some markers though.  They tend to make life more interesting.
Here, therefore is a list of "sames" for me:
I am not Anglo Saxon and I am proud of it.
I am Catholic, and have stood up for it in some dangerous situations.  I would do it again.
Because of that, I am not leaving just because of some idiot priest(s).
I hate unions.  That hasn't changed and never will.  
I am not a "politician" and I choose not to respect them.  I am convinced that they are all immoral beings.
I am "anti abortion", and I am not pro-life at all costs.
I do not believe that changing "sex" to "gender" makes any sense at all.


I do have a list of changes...I have to be fair, right?
I like the electronic revolution.  Like so many other things, it gets abused.
I like the medical advances.  Imagine, human spare parts.  There too there are huge abuses.
I like the speed of travel.  
I think that the United States as a society is too stupid to admit that it could make things better in many areas, like travel and like in electronics.
Yep, I used to think that we were the BEST.  Now I know different.  Not from the TV.  I've been there.
I have come to the conviction that we have too much easy credit for our own good.
I no longer support capital punishment to the extent that I once did.
I now know that the Latin Language has absolutely no place in the prayer life of the Catholic Church.  


That's enough.  You got the point.  So, we all officially one year older now than we were ten minutes ago.  Some of you reading this are already about 24 hours older than the rest of us at this point.  Oh, well, time marches on, as we used to say.
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!
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RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME

DIFFERENT VIEW OF LIFE, BECAUSE...

At one time or another, we all get into a position that we didn't expect.  It is not an accident, but it is not planned.  It just seems to happen.  We get up in the morning, get through the day until a certain hour, an then things change and we are at a different place with a different perspective than we had.  Some of these changes are powerful enough to cause radical changes in our outlook on life.  Those of us who are spiritually oriented defer the change to an all-knowing God who is the Master of the Universe.  Even then, the humanity in us still steps aside and tries to analyze the string of causes that came into play in bringing such a change about.  It is especially intriguing when it is clear that another person, just as virtuous and just as capable as we should have been the one in the order of the universe that has now become our place.  It happens more than we know because some of the changes are minor and the change that they effect is of very small consequence.  Every now and then we see our planned calendar of events for the day change.  We step aside and take what comes and we get though the day none the worse for wear...and some times even, better and in a better mood.  Those are the easy ones.  Those are the ones when we say, "Phew, somehow I dodged that bullet!"  Sometimes we don't dodge the bullet and we get home after the day and we are very grumpy and full of blame and vituperation for things and people who contributed to the discomfort.  That is still small, and the next day we get up and start all over again from scratch.  Lately, though, a big one happened to me and it changed my life.  For the better, I might add.  It is akin to having got a promotion after a fairly well-liked colleague got his walking papers.  I was the beneficiary of someone's misfortune and happened to be at the right place at the right time.  I happened to be there because of a string of events that fell into place because of a complicated ball-of-string background existence that led to my being there  in the first place.  When the situation changed and I found myself in a place that I had not foreseen, especially since I had pretty much played by the rules, I felt some remorse for the person who was on the negative end of the change.  I still think of that.  I still have to run to the spiritual side to try to understand the cold, hard truth of the whole matter.  It resembles the complex feeling that is described by psychologists when they talk about the adjustments that survivors have to make.  Somehow it feels weird to benefit from someone else's sudden change of factual life requirements.  Especially when it is clear that the change has prevented a very hotly desired outcome from happening.  It is not easy to think of how scarred the other person could be because of the appearance of a sudden fork in the road of life.  
My outlook on life has been changed in the last six or seven weeks.  Not just from the fall-out from the positive experience that fell into my life, but from the experience itself.  It is challenging.  It is also so sweet.  I pray every day that the other person has been blessed with something good along the way.  It is difficult for me to imagine what it could be, but somehow I am convinced that this is so.  I have to tell you, this is the greatest switcheroo that has ever come into my life.  I like to think that it was about time, but then I wonder about the person who was left on the other tine of the fork in the road.  I have made it a resolution to do the best I can with what was given to me so that the good that I can make happen will somehow, secretly but surely, be attributed in part to him.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES --- 86,400 SECONDS

Why wait a day?  What's with the "day" business?  What if Google had to wait a day before a difference happened?  Why hasn't "difference" been described?  Has anybody got the courage to say what a "difference" is?  Oh, OK smarty pants, I mean other than the answer to a subtraction calculation.  Besides, has it ever taken you a day to make a difference in subtraction?   I'd be willing to take a bet that if it did, you'd still be in second grade trying to figure out how to make a difference a lot fast than in a day.  Let me tell you how fast it takes Google to make a difference.  I'm going to put this question to Google right now: "Number of cities that have a "Hartford Street" in them".  DONE  --> I want you all to go outside right now and shout that Google is a fraud.  After five minutes of  search and switch and all that kind of stuff, it became clear that Google doesn't know the answer to my query.  It's got to be the Russian influence.  I'll bet that there isn't a single Hartford Street in all of Russia.  But I digress...
The real reason why I was asking the question about difference is that this thought sliced through the carapace of my coconut today.  I have taken about 1,100 photos over the last 15 days.  Besides, I have been given another 700+ from the technician who worked with and for us in France.  So, nearly 2,000 photos.  Many of them taken seconds apart.  All of them so similar, yet each one distinct and ineffable in its own existence.  Like the two featuring the Voice from the Kitchen, taken not five seconds apart.  Those of you who may know a thing or two about photography know that 5 seconds is like waiting the proverbial 24 hours.   (A day, right?)  In those two pictures, some of the discrepancies are gross, others are quite fine and almost subtle, but discernible just the same.  It turns out that mother nature has her quick turns just like her children.  I am mentioning this because as we go through life, we rarely stop to think about this phenomenon.  We rarely stop to think that from one fraction of a second to the next there are millions of distinct changes that have taken place.  In the past there were deep thinkers who accepted this as being the truth.  Intellectually they had come to know that there is almost no measurable time between one state of being and the following one, in the same entity.  (The phenomenon of flowing water was the basis for their comparison.  Like "Pantha Rhe) In this day and age we grow up with "instantaneous" change.  We don't even act surprised when Google tells us that it collected 752,376 responses to our query in .0003 seconds.  The only time we would be affected is if the measure increased to .0006 seconds.  Then we would get nervous and start doing all kinds of loopy things to make our computer go faster.  
I therefore have decided to just live with it.  If things really ever slow down, I'll be glad.  It will give me the opportunity to not be late for my funeral.  That will be good.  You can't cry at a guy's funeral if he gets there on time, right?

CHANGE -- NOT NICKLES AND DIMES -- LIFESTYLE

OK, brace yourselves.  I slid a bunch of deep philosophy thoughts in on you a couple of times this week.  Not this time.  This is going to be nothing but sheer common sense that we can all believe in.  Oh, Yeah!
Two or three days ago I got a long email that I had received many times before.  When you're old like I am, you receive emails that resemble editorials that you read 40 years ago.  Those who send them to you over email think that they are new and revolutionary.  As a matter of fact, they are, for the most part, nothing but history repeating itself.  The worst part of it all is, we old people think it has been email all along.  Now, you know the email I am talking about.  The one that starts out, "Changes are coming..."  No?  You don't say?  Change?  Oh my goodness!  We haven't had any of that for a long time.  Hhmmm, let me see.  When was it the last time you mailed a post card for $0.01?  How many of you can remember the difference between 1st and 2nd and 3rd class mail?  Can you remember the last time the United States Post Office hired high school Juniors and Seniors to help with Christmas deliveries of Christmas Greeting Cards?  Was that change, or do we still do that but just don't get to see it any more because we're too old to look out the window?  How many of you can remember when the daily newspaper was delivered to your home for six straight days for $0.15?  Better yet, how many of you remember the trauma it caused when the price went to $0.25 for the same service?Now that I think some more about it, it's been so long since I have bought a newspaper that I can't believe there's been any change at all.  Except that I don't read newspapers any more.  I got over that habit when I lived in a third world country where newspapers didn't reach out further than the government building anyway.  There was no "news" in them either because reporting was against the law.  I could go on and on, but I'll leave it up to you to wait for the next time this email will rattle your CRT.  Right now I am going to propose what can be done to save this country ship loads of money with a minimum of discomfort.  I mean, besides recalling the military home.
The Post Office has to go.  Three year plan.  1. By end of fiscal year 2011-2012 (June 30, 2012) absolutely no more "junk mail."  If you want to advertise, use Craigslist.  2.  By the same time, delivery on Tuesday through Saturday, only and only in  urban areas the definition of which I leave up to those smarter than I.  3. By June 30, 2013, No more Saturday delivery.  4. By June 30, 2014, bye, bye.  Gone.  Don't tell me it can't be done.  If you want more paper, buy another fax machine.
Along with the absolute abolition of junk mail, all franking privileges will be abolished as well.  If the government is going to continue taking bribes from insurance, pharma, comm, oil, etc.  let 'em use the bribe money to get their lies disseminated.  That's what's happening now with the TV and such.  They don't need mail.
You don't really want to know what I think about the rest of this "memo" do you?  There are some interesting thoughts in my brain about some of this stuff.   I have lived in some rather unique places under some rather interesting conditions.  I'm able to tell you all that there are MANY things that we could do without in this country and still be comfortably happy.  But I'm getting long winded here, so I'll spare you.  Maybe I'll mail you a $0.32 post card.  


I'll end with the change that just hit Apple computer today with the de-mission of  Steve Jobs.  Don't worry, Apple will be around as long as Microsoft has a well that needs poisoning.  


That's it for now.