You never fully appreciate just how interconnected we all are until some event on the world stage impacts your life. Take the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for example. As a program manager in the information technology field, working in Kansas, you wouldn’t expect my life to be directly impacted by heinous human rights violations half way around the planet. But, as it turns out, my life was impacted by that scandal.
I work on a contract, held through a series of intermediaries, for a large government agency. This agency worked with GSA (the General Service Agency) to manage contracts and make payments against them. GSA also oversaw funds being transfered between various branches of the military and independent service providers in Iraq. Some of these funds were used to hire interrogators who abused prisoners in Abu Ghraib. When the prison scandal broke this summer the Inspector General was brought into GSA to address the problem there. The executive management layer at GSA was fired and all contracts were examined with a fine tooth comb.
The new managers were loathe to have anything to due with existing contracts, as those contracts were all suspected of carrying leprosy now. One of the problems that came to light was overspending on contacts. The existing rule of requiring a contract to be re-scoped and re-bid if any year’s expense went over the budget by 25%, had been ignored. The new management is now enforcing this rule. The contract that ultimately pays for my job was projected to be more than 25% over for the base year ending in January. So “resource activities” were undertaken to bring the contract’s actual expenses inline with the budgeted amounts. Friends of mine lost their jobs. My future here was put into question.
So, a bunch of over-stressed, under-trained, poorly managed soldiers; fighting an immoral war thousands of miles from home, over-reacted to their stress and abused other human beings. And the ripple effect of their actions impacted my life. We are all living on one planet, and no one country or group of people is immune to the actions of others; nor are they immune to the reactions of others to their movements. The sooner we all learn to live together rather than at odds with each other the better.
I have worked for over twenty-one years as a professional in the information technology field. Two times, earlier in my career I was faced with being in a union or labor bargaining unit as a programmer. Both times I resisted because I had bought into the media myth about unions. Today I am ruing the lack of representation I have with my employer.
My present engagement has me working as an employee for a small consulting services company. The company provides 7 paid holidays and 10 paid vacation days per year. Far from generous and unfortunately typical in today’s marketplace. The client where I am assigned observes 11 holidays annually. I am not allowed to work on their holidays, and I can’t work at the home office those days either. In some cases we have been allowed to work some overtime the week of the holiday to compensate, but recent budget shortfalls have ended that practice. I am have to take a “vacation” day to cover the 4 holidays my company doesn’t give me.
So I really get 6 vacation days that I can use at my discretion. Well actually 2. You see the client shuts down for the week between Christmas and New Year’s so there’s another 4 days of “vacation” spent.
Labor unions fought for, and died for, worker rights in this country. We all benefited from better working conditions, health care, retirement pensions, and yes, paid vacations. The media and the corporate interests in the United States have convinced everyone that unions are somehow bad, that they are somehow hurting our economy. Slowly the protections and gains won by the unions in the last century are being eroded.
After twenty-one years of work I have no pension, no retirement, minimal health care that doesn’t even cover a root canal, and only 2 discretionary vacation days each year. The land of opportunity has become the land of opportunists who willingly sell the rest of us down the river to make a few more cents dividend on the next quarterly report.
Why do I think there are some in Redmond who are facing some sleepless nights these days?
Here is the default start page for the 1.0 release of Firefox on Google.
The death of Michele’s father last weekend has given me a sharper focus on what is really important and what isn’t. In spite of my efforts to be otherwise, I am still driven at times by the need for material possessions or wealth. I can easily produce a list of objects I would like to own, from a home of my own design down to new books and movie DVDs. Hardly egregious stuff to be sure, but the crux of the problem isn’t the object desired, but in the desire itself. Unrequited desire is an indication of a need not being met. Repeatedly feeding the need for new objects, only to find acquisition hasn’t satiated the desire, is just a form of insanity. Stopping the cycle of blindly feeding an obsessive need is the path to truly feeding the desire underneath.
In the harsh light of Dan’s death I have been thinking long and hard about my own life, wondering what will happen upon the occasion of my death. When I sit back and I look at the physical accumulation of objects that clutters my life I find that they are meaningless. Precious trinkets that have huge sentimental value from my perspective will be just so much junk for my survivors to throw away. For years whenever I moved I had piles of boxes, some of which hadn’t been opened since the previous move, to cart along with me. This past spring I managed to throw away and estimated 3000 pounds of accumulated crap. And even after that effort we still have two 5 x 10 x 10 storage lockers stuffed with belongings; books, tapes, CD music, DVD movies, clothes, and furniture. The physical presence of these things is an indication of a deep unmet need for fulfillment, for safety, for comfort.
Not that I don’t have fulfillment in some areas of my life, or that I don’t have safety and comfort available to me. It’s just that I am not really listening to my self and addressing the deepest needs I have. It is easy to meet the surface needs of affiliation and fellowship. Anyone can put on a good show and maintain a surface relationship with family, friends, and work acquaintances. The real trick is stripping away all the surface obfuscation and exposing your true self to yourself. Most of us are so good at fitting into the surface deep world that we stop there and lie to ourselves that any unmet desires are our fault for not fitting in to the world well enough. Don’t believe me? Look at all the diet books on the shelves, or all the makeover shows on television. From early childhood we are taught to fit in, to “go along to get along”, and most egregious of all, “to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” What a miserable way to exist.
I am human and therefore frail and given to failure. Life is nothing if not a huge experiment in trial-and-error learning. I would like to promise to myself that the experience of Dan’s death has given me not only new clarity about the truly important, but also renewed impetus towards meeting the goal of living for myself and meeting my true needs. I would like to do that, but I suspect that the constant weight of the world will wear me down again. Before long I’ll be trying to meet my desires through objects and attachments to possessions. I’ve put all this down into words so that when I start to feel helpless and tossed about in the choppy surface water of life, I can once again trust myself to deeper, smoother currents of truth that lie beneath the surface.
TiVo has released a list of the Top 100 season passes, based on 20,000 anonymous samplings. The few shows that we have season passes for are bolded.
Rank : Title
1 : The Apprentice 2 : CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 3 : Desperate Housewives 4 : Lost 5 : Survivor: Vanuatu, Islands of Fire 6 : Joey 7 : ER 8 : The West Wing 9 : CSI: Miami 10 : The Sopranos 11 : Will & Grace 12 : CSI: NY 13 : Law & Order 14 : Oprah Winfrey 15 : Las Vegas 16 : Six Feet Under 17 : Nip/Tuck 18 : Scrubs 19 : Law & Order: Special Victims Unit 20 : 24 21 : Without a Trace 22 : Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 23 : Everybody Loves Raymond 24 : American Idol 25 : Enterprise 26 : Saturday Night Live 27 : Law & Order: Criminal Intent 28 : The Simpsons 29 : Monk 30 : Alias 31 : Cold Case 32 : Smallville 33 : The Bachelor 34 : Sex and the City 35 : NYPD Blue 36 : The Daily Show With Jon Stewart 37 : Rescue Me 38 : Chappelle’s Show 39 : Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 40 : Boston Legal 41 : Friends 42 : Joan of Arcadia 43 : LAX 44 : South Park 45 : Third Watch 46 : Stargate Atlantis 47 : Medical Investigation 48 : Gilmore Girls 48 : The O.C. 50 : American Chopper 51 : Dr. Phil 52 : That ’70s Show 53 : The Real World 54 : Stargate SG-1 55 : The Amazing Race 5 56 : Entourage 57 : Father of the Pride 58 : Crossing Jordan 59 : Two and a Half Men 60 : Last Comic Standing: The Search for the 60 : Curb Your Enthusiasm 62 : JAG 63 : Deadwood 64 : Charmed 65 : Arrested Development 66 : Judging Amy 67 : North Shore 68 : 60 Minutes 69 : The King of Queens 70 : American Dreams 71 : The Shield 72 : NCIS 73 : Newlyweds 74 : The Wire 75 : Fear Factor 76 : Everwood 77 : Mythbusters 78 : The Dead Zone 79 : Wife Swap 80 : Da Ali G Show 80 : Big Brother 5 82 : Days of Our Lives 83 : Jack & Bobby 84 : Hawaii 85 : Seinfeld 86 : Family Guy 87 : The 4400 88 : The Ellen DeGeneres Show 89 : Blue Collar TV 90 : Reno 911! 90 : Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy 92 : America’s Next Top Model 93 : Malcolm in the Middle 94 : 7th Heaven 95 : Navy NCIS 96 : General Hospital 97 : Airline 97 : dr. vegas 99 : The Casino 100 : Dead Like Me
I voted for John Kerry.
The death of my father-in-law on Saturday has filled my mind with numerous thoughts. This is not the first time I have lost someone in my family, but it is the first “parent” I’ve lost. No matter how well prepared you think you maybe for the death of aging loved one, you never are really ready. Death isn’t like saying goodbye and driving away, or hanging up the phone. Death is final and most of us during our lives don’t have to many events that are well and truly final.
As Michele and I have talked over the past few days, trying to put words to the emotions we are each having, we have both come to realize that this is not an intellectual process. Death is a powerful emotional process, one that we are ill-equipped to handle. Michele has explained to me her model for how we humans deal with stimulus that has an emotional component. As children we experience emotions for the first time, and over time repeated emotions create places of recognition within ourselves. How we were able to react to fear, anger, loss, hope, joy, love, et cetera as children greatly effects how we are able to react to those same emotions as adults. For example: if as a child you were never allowed to express your anger appropriately, it is likely that you can’t express it appropriately as an adult either.
By the time most of us are emotional adults we have experienced most of life’s major emotions. Except perhaps for death. Even if we experience death as a child our cognitive ability isn’t able to process it completely. Your first lost loved one as an adult puts you in a unique situation of having a powerful emotional stimulus with no place of recognition to handle it.
I believe that this accounts for the surreal quality everything takes on in the days following the death of a loved one. We have felt anger or happiness many, many times in our lives. The combination of our consciousness, spirit or soul, intellect, and emotional self know how to handle everyday stimulus. Death is a stimulus that we aren’t prepared for, and one that most of us (hopefully) don’t get to practice for, either.
Michele and I each are dealing with her dad’s death in our own ways. Life is suddenly fragile and tenuous where before it seemed solid. Mundane daily tasks are no longer important or meaningful. Clear thought and introspection are faint memories. Death forces us to deal with life for a time without all the filters and illusions we normally use to get through the day. Death is like a violent storm that cleanses the air and leaves the air clear and devoid of distortion. In some ways the living we do immediately following a death is a truer form of living because the higher abstractions are stripped away, leaving us bare and exposed.
We will move forward from this event. Slowly our filters and illusions will return to the fore, our abstractions about how life really is will comfort us once again. But our understanding of the deeper, underlying truth of life will be a bit stronger. In moments of solitude and quiet we maybe able to strip away our carefully constructed artifice and touch the world with our true selves.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “dan.jpg” }} 1921 - 2004 Son, Husband, Father (left to right) Thomas McAvoy, (Sharon) Michele McAvoy Nichols, Daniel McAvoy ((Michele, age 2))Michele’s Goodbye to her Dad
Thursday morning Michele woke up and immediately told me that she had a sense of dread, of foreboding. Given the lingering effects of our move to KC, apprehension over the upcoming election November 2, and fourth and final dental visit for her abscessed tooth, neither of us thought to much about it.
Friday evening I was sitting at my desk working on the computer and she was sitting in the overstuffed chair watching television. At the edge of my vision I saw someone move from right to left between me and the television. I was very startled and looked up to see who it was. No one was there. Knowing that Michele can some times see people who have moved on I asked her if there was someone in the room with us. She saw someone in uniform standing behind me, but she didn’t recognize him.
Saturday morning about 8 we got an email her brother telling us that Dan, her father had been in an accident and was in the hospital. We call Lee and learned that Dan was in “serious” condition. We weren’t entirely sure what to do next. A few minutes later Lee called back and said that he had just learned their dad was on life-support, that the accident had caused severe brain damage. They were keeping him alive only until we could arrive.
We immediately left for Knoxville, a 750+ mile drive. Late in the afternoon we called Lee on our cell phone to update him on our progress towards the hospital. He had to tell us that Dan died about 12:30 eastern when his heart stopped. After talking to Lee on the phone for several minutes we made the decision to return to Kansas. Her father had for years said he didn’t want any service, and that his cremated ashes were to be spread at sea.
We arrived home about 12:30 Sunday morning and almost immediately collapsed into bed. This morning Michele called Dan’s widow (his second wife, and by no means a “step-mother”) and talked to her. Bobbie explained that the accident had happened on Thursday, originally we were told Wednesday. It seems that Michele’s premonition was about her father’s accident.
And now we know who it was we both sensed here Friday evening; it was Dan in his dress whites. Usually I am not one for seeing through the veil of this reality to the next one, but I did on Friday.
Today we are just hanging out close to home. Dinner tonight will be one of our favorites - Arroyz con Pollo. Tears have been shed, and will be again. Perhaps a nap later this afternoon. It is going to take time for the truth of Dan’s death to sink in completely.
Remember the Apple switch ads? These are in the same vein only better. Real people talking about their disenchantment with the Republican party in general, and George Bush in particular. These are real votes that the GOP counted on four years ago that they have lost through arrogance.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “kerryswitch.jpg” }}
[via Kottke]