Resolution: write

My New Year's resolution is to write more or rather to write. Here are a few ideas that have been floating around my head or just in this moment came to me:

Icelandic arcs: A story about Iceland and its people; the financial crisis; tourism boom; and society's shifting landscape. I'd approach these ambitious topics through a profile of Hadda and Haurkur, who own and operate Hrifunes Guesthouse and Iceland Photo Tours. I stayed with H&H at their guesthouse in November. I want to explore the tension between hard work and gambling: how H&H worked to build things, and in contrast how hot shot bankers profiteered from gambles that eventually landed the 300,000 Icelanders with billions in debt. The premise is that individuals, including those that head up institutions (i.e. banks, governments) operate by principles. Haurkur and Hadda reflect good principles; many bankers reflect bad ones. Most clearly, the latter ended up living large on borrowed money and dropping their debts on the likes of Haurkur and Hadda. However, now H&H are thriving on the unexpected result of the speculative investing: the weaker krone has precipitated a tourism boom that is reshaping Iceland's many contours.

Dying migrations: A ruminative encyclopedia of migration with a focus on extinct, perishing, hampered, and mutated migrations (are there any?). The unit of analysis here is the migration itself, the periodic, ritual journey of procreation and renewal. I'd build up from the journeyers to the journey, synthesize across journeys, and then delve into dying migrations. I'd interrogate first, what is the purpose migrations? Who journeys and why? What is the salmon's motive, the goose's, the whale's, the antelope's? Are there human migrations? Why? I'd close with philosophical thoughts, untethered to great thinkers, on the loss and mutability of things. 

Dormant connections. In the mid- to late-1900s, the University of Pennsylvania partnered with a technical university in Shiraz, Iran called Pahlavi University, since renamed Shiraz. Penn worked extensively with Pahlavi to redesign the university in the American model. Students and teachers shuttled back and forth. Professors collaborated. Pahlavi awarded President of Penn, Gayord Harnwell, an honorary degree for his work. Then the Islamic Revolution happened, ended the collaboration, dug a nigh-uncrossed chasm between the universities and the countries. I'd like to explore the dormant connections and the potential for reconciliation in the political dynamics. I don't want to harken back to a better era. The earlier intercourse rested on imperial, autocratic, and unequal foundations. The Penn-Iran connection betrays a similar inequality of flow, an unevenness, elements of paternalism and imperialism. It was beautiful but it was imperfect and perhaps it fed the discontent that drove the revolution. Nonetheless, I'd like tot talk about the relationship, current political events, and prospects for reviving the lost relationship between Shiraz and Penn and Iran and the US.

Notes to self

Sometimes I think "Everyone admires what in me I don't think highly of" referring to my higher education, my work, and my travels. But when I said something of this to my Dad, he said, "Society doesn't care about you," and a little later, "You're not different than anybody else."

My dad's observations light up how in overfocusing on myself I end up in the absurd. There is no society. Even if there were, it wouldn't give a damn about me. Nobody cares. My friends and family care but only in that they want the best for me. And if I please one person, it ought to be me; the rest will follow.

My dad pointed out how little I've committed to anything in my life. Which is too true. I'm a dabbler, a dilettante, a tourist of trades and travels. I loathe this about myself.

I've sunk years into toil that I despise. Is this my idea of how to live a life? Then again, whose idea is it? My parent's? Well, yeah, there's some of that. They convinced me to stay the course when I strayed from economics and "wanted to read more Shakespeare." Yet here I am again.

I guess I would retrace my steps, for the most part, not knowing where other paths might have swept me off to. I just wish I'd built up all the while some reserve storehouse of skills and knowledge that I respect. I'm very much an asshole to myself, but partly because I've let myself down so.

I must also laugh and say to myself, "You goof, you self-immolating, ass-backwards, self-befuddling son of fortune. How now this gloomy navel gazing when sun is for basking, seas are for soaking, soulful souls are for loving? Seriously, why so serious? Late, inherited Christian crisis mentality has you by the cobblers."

"Get over yourself. Looking within has only confused you; time to turn outward. Record, depict, shape, impact. Be as a child, new to the world. Revel in its strangeness. Look to others. Cast your net outward and find solace in action."

"Make a break. Start. Start small. Just do it. Things have a way of carrying you away, which is what you want and need to get back your self respect."

Technological travails

Life has taken a sharp turn for the worse. I've been in a Stop n' Shop for about 2 hours. Ideally I'd never enter a Stop n' Shop or a Walmart or a McDonalds, among other omnipresent, obtrusive centers of commerce and diabetes. Stop n' Shop isn't even all that bad; it's more a matter of principle.

Nonetheless, I ended up here. What happened is this: I screwed up synching my iPhone with iTunes and, since I don't have wifi at my apartment, I had to venture forth to restore the phone's operating system. Stop n' Shop boasts wifi internet and Starbucks and cookies so here we are.

Then when the restore was on the cusp of completion, the computer lowed an emergency low battery distress signal and summarily died. Devastation! I had to restore the blood sucker and re-synch all of everything and I'm mid process. My life resides on that devilish device.

All of this has served to remind me why I don't have wifi in the apartment in the first place: technology--at least high technology--does not by and large make my life easier, let alone better.

It does, but it doesn't. I must, as always, blame myself first and foremost. I am me. And I am not an adept, precise, or meticulous problem solver when it comes to technological complexity. I'm all thumbs. My neurons are wearing oven mitts.

I believe this is because I harbor a more romantic, synthetic, gestalt-based sensibility. I mean, I want things to work and be beautiful. I want beauty to surge muse-beckoned out of my pure and unhindered soul. Things should work, should they not? I'm no concrete, technological, engineering, analytical fixer. I can't fix a chicken sandwich let alone a faulty circuit or corroded whatsit. Thus, rather than master my technology my technology masters me.

This may be a tolerable state of affairs. It depends on what I'm aiming to optimize for: poetry, motorcycle maintenance, financial analytics, journalism, funk music, teaching, child rearing. What do I want, and what do I want to do, and what do I want to do well?

I need to iron out the factors in production here, because it's not like understanding the technical, analytical relationship between factors in a poetic form inhibits poetic expression. Perhaps the dichotomy is false and quality inheres in a fusion. Let's see if unstructured intuitive creativity will solve this.
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PS I hate how Facebook pushes its push notifications and friend lookup and other crappy crap. It's basely procreative but annoying nonetheless. And YouTube commercials now induce in me a rage that's rapidly overwhelming any pleasure I get from the site's music, comedy, Ted Talks and junk. And what about the latest iTuneses? Insidious monstrosities that make me want to commit technical seppuku. Someone save me from these technology travails