Neolefty

Today, Khalil was wearing a brand-new green Mario mushroom baseball cap, backwards, with the visor in the back. Georgia got down Bahiyyih‘s #2 baseball cap from its hook by the front door and put it on, just like Khalil. She ran down to the basement to show him, pointing out that she was wearing it just like he was.

Georgia: Now I’ll put it on the wrong way. [turns the visor around to the front]

Me: Actually, that’s the right way. This thing [pointing at visor] is supposed to protect your eyes from the sun.

Georgia: But there’s no sun down here.

So which way is the right way?

Maya and Georgia ask a lot of questions. And Bahiyyih and I (and all of our friends in earshot) do our best to answer them. One that they like to ask often is, “what is your favorite color?”

So I would like to pause for a moment to appreciate the beauty of simple colors, so easy to demonstrate on such a white website.

Orangish Ruby

Dusky Green

Lavenderish

If you like colors, here’s something you really have to look at: Colr Pickr, a page that lets you pick a color, and then pops up a bunch of photos that match the color, taken from Flickr. It’s really beautiful and funny.

Bahá’í are to refrain from politics, in order to promote unity (and not encourage chaos, havoc, or fruitless intellectual meleé), but what are we supposed to do when we think of a great punchline for a political bumper sticker?

Not say it. Or certainly not post it on a publicly-readable website.

Which internal dialogue continues with “but I want to say it; how often do you get to actually use something like this?” What’s option #2? How about try to neutralize it by removing the context?

Suppose that a government was, for whatever reasons, and I have to say that it happens pretty often, running a deficit, and, maybe, the things that the money was being spent on might or might not actually bear useful fruit for future generations who would probably have to pay off that deficit. Consider also that people hadn’t yet forgotten the music of the Rolling Stones. You might make up a bumper sticker that looked kind of like this:

All he left me

was a loan.

Fortunately, very few people will ever read this.

Someone is asking: Which is more important, IQ or self-discipline?. What’s self-discipline? According to the article, it includes the ability to delay gratification:

Walter Mischel and colleagues found in the 1980s that 4-year-olds’ ability to delay gratification (for example, to wait a few minutes for two cookies instead of taking one cookie right away) was predictive of academic achievement a decade later.

It makes sense, but self-discipline is very under-studied, compared to IQ (the article points out a more than 10-to-1 ratio of studies of IQ to studies of discipline).

Is this related somehow to Accustoming children to hardship?

That study sounds like a great idea. And it makes me think of so many other subjects to study. What other qualities are measurable? Compassion? Fair-mindedness? And what outcomes can be measured, beyond academic performance?

Do you ever think back to what you were like when you were younger? How about feeling back to try to reconstruct your emotions and sense of self? I’ve been afraid that in some ways, age 14 was my best — I was spiritually awakened, doing well in school, and generally happy. And that since then, I haven’t done quite as well, due to various bad habits and insistent selfishness.

Of course, that decline can’t be real, since in some essential way, we are always advancing — learning, developing, seeing more than we did before. So I must have made progress since then. That was a big year, though, and I have to mention that spiritual awakening thing again, because it was the first time I felt a deep responsibility for my own choices, rather than following along (or not) with what I was told to do. I’ve thought back to that awakening many times, trying to hold on to its momentousness, to remind myself what a huge responsibility it is to have free will, and what the consequences are of using it properly or wasting it.

But there are other times that are also important to think of — other me’s that I need to reach out to and remember — and sometimes they surface unexpectedly. Like this morning, when I woke up early (because I had gone to sleep at the same time as Georgia and Maya, rather than staying up late). I had the time (and energy) to say the Bahá’í Long Obligatory Prayer, which I haven’t very often lately, what with all this family-raising going on. Anyway, I felt an old, old state coming back. An early feeling of conscious choice. It was unexpected, and probably worth paying attention to, since it wasn’t forced (unlike my attempts to remember being fourteen). I remembered the feeling of choosing, as a small child, probably three or four years old, between “doing good” and “not doing good”, and deciding that I really had nothing to lose by “doing good” — after all, if God, my soul, et. al. really existed, then I was indubitably better off doing good, but if, on the other hand, life ended arbitrarily with death (a worst-case scenario), then I really didn’t have anything to lose by doing good. So what the heck, there was no logical reason not to do good, and very possibly a good reason to do it. It may actually not have been so much a reason to do it, but a rationalization for doing good — that it was reasonable behavior and therefore acceptable — and a reason to not experiment energetically with the alternatives. In short, I remember making a conscious choice to do good, aware that it may deprive me of some interesting experiences.

It sounds kind of guarded when I describe it, but my feeling about it was very open and innocent. And more than the particular line of reasoning, it was that openness and innocence that I remembered this morning — the feeling more than the thoughts or any specific memories. It was very refreshing. And it meant that that feeling still exists within me somewhere. I think the combination of prayer and being around my own children, who are approaching the world just as innocently and openly, helped bring it out.

We’re selling our house and buying another one just up the street, as reported in Bahiyyih’s Webble. And although we scoured Champaign and Urbana for a suitable home on our own and then with professional help, in the end neither transaction included a Realtor (TM). First, David and Heidi didn’t need much help finding and investigating our current place, and second, the sellers of our new house decided to try For Sale By Owner before for a couple of weeks before they sought professional assistance; we found and committed (informally) to it on the first day that it was on the market.

Which means that we’re doing a lot of the work ourselves. For David and Heidi’s purchase, there aren’t even lawyers involved, which I guess is not uncommon these days. I was trying to fill out some paperwork with the help of the Reference section of the Urbana Free Library—specifically a Warranty Deed—and came to the section in How to Avoid Lawyers about selling a house. It said something like, “Your closing will be handled by your lawyer.” So much for that. So I went to our lawyer, whom we hired for the purchase of the new house, and she helped with the Deed (which I had already mostly filled out, but was intimidated by the

____, ____ of ____ of the ____ of ____ (State)

parts. And some of those ____’s were actually multiple lines long. I wasn’t sure whether they were supposed to be something like

The Hon. Bob Thornton, Chief Custodian of Records of the Second Prefecture of Illinois (State)

or if it was more like

Bahiyyih J. and William B. Baker, owners of said property of the cutest widdle house of Illinois (State)

I was pretty sure about Illinois, at least, and I think I got that one right).

Which leads me to the other part of visiting a library, which I don’t do nearly often enough: the books you run across accidentally that are much more interesting than the books you are actually there to peruse.

• How to Hide Things in Public Places

  Theme: you can hide all kinds of things in public places—the backs of guard rails, inside unused newspaper vending boxes, in the weeds next to rarely-trafficked sides and backs of large buildings.

  Specifically: in large buildings, especially in basements, but really anywhere you might find a hallway whose walls are cinder blocks, you will find occasional utility cages and boxes (water meters, security system junction boxes, emergency equipment, etc.). You can stick your stuff inside them for safekeeping, or, better yet, why not put up your own, with an “authorized access only” and a nice combination padlock? The book even suggests places to buy suitable metal boxes. Now that’s useful.

  Sure, it seems obvious now that someone has mentioned it, but honestly, I hadn’t thought of it before I saw it in that book.

• Winning Through Intimidation, which started off by praising Ayn Rand, which I shall refrain from saying more about. It seemed autobiographical, based on the table of contents, and had three successive chapters whose titles were something like this:

  1. I didn’t intend to cut off your fingers, but you were reaching for your chips
  2. I did intend to cut off your fingers because you were reaching for your chips, and I warned you
  3. I did intend to cut off your fingers because you were reaching for your chips, even though I told you that I wasn’t going to

  To be fair, I’m not sure, in retrospect, whether the book was a warning to people who might be on the receiving end, or an instruction manual for the doer. I was loath to find out.

• The entire oversized book section.

  Wow, you could pick almost anything from there, and it would be interesting to any person in our family, from Teresa to Bahiyyih. If it’s worth publishing an oversized book about, it’s probably pretty photogenic. Astronomy, Geography, Travel. Basically, in the Urbana Free Library, an entire wall of coffee table books.

  I didn’t look for the Encyclopedia of Poo (note the missing h—it is purposefully omitted), which we discovered at Liz and Nate‘s last time we visited, but that’s the kind of thing that the wall was covered with.

  At any rate, it was well worth visiting—if you’re getting a DVD, you should also pick out an oversized book, because it will probably be at least as entertaining and informative.

  The Reference Librarian commented that most people don’t realize the treasures that are back there, because they’re kind of out of the way against the back wall.

I took down my rant about nobody benefitting from racism. It was just too much of a red herring. After all, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that people who are not directly harmed by racism should be discriminated against just to be fair — obviously the goal is the opposite, that discrimination should be eliminated instead.

And if I truly want to overcome racism and demonstrate the oneness of humanity, then I think I need to cultivate patience. After all, an ill that was inflicted by hundreds of years of brutal slavery, systematic destruction of families and cultural institutions, followed by decades of legislated discrimination and hostility, cannot be cured overnight. And not patience to wait for things to get better, but patience to accept and forgive any anger or bitterness that people may feel, rather than belittle it as irrational or misplaced, and yet still work to realize universal brotherhood. No need to argue.

Here’s a story from today’s local newspaper:

Records show police use Tasers more often on blacks

If someone’s mad about that, it’s not helpful to ask them not to direct their anger towards me. Obviously, a sympathetic ear will go much further.

When my brother David (the father in these pictures) was younger, he and Zivar, our sister (who has even less biographical material on the web than David — the best I can find is this snippet from her high school’s alumni page, and here’s a picture of her, third one down, in our back yard) were extremely nice to each other. Their resources, however were limited. David explains:

Zivar had been making me treats and snacks and stuff, so I wanted to
make a special snack for Zivar and me. A special snack That I knew
would be yummy. I stuck some olives (the green kind — not the black kind) onto some cheese and poured powdered
sugar over it. Because cheese is good, and olives are good, and
powdered sugar is good.

He was probably 5 or 6 years old. He found that olives and powdered sugar are best eaten (or fed to one’s sister) separately.

So today, I thought, “I like peppermint tea”, and “I like decaf coffee”, and “mint chocolate is pretty good, so what about mint coffee?” Well, I’m sure it tasted better than olives and powdered sugar, but the first sip was a bit of a shock. I don’t really know how to describe it. Sweetener helped, but I’m not sure whether I’d try it again.

However, David informs me:

I mix coffee and tea bags quite a bit. Flying J coffee is actually a
good quality coffee, but it’s so weak that it’s disgusting. So if you
put a teabag in it, it actually makes a decent flavor. It passes as a
drinkable flavor.

He even endorsed peppermint. Flying J: David is a truck driver, and Flying J is a chain of truck stops with amenities such as showers and hot coffee.

So finally, he asked,

Have you tried the Ramen noodles and coffee yet? Because I’m not
going to.

I haven’t. I had talked to David about it when someone left some old Ramen packets (someone was cleaning out their office) sitting in the coffee room at work. Without David’s help, I may never know how they taste together. It will have to wait for a future generation of experimenters.