Newsy stuff

Kara and I are both up in NY now which is just amazing. Having Kara here is so very, very good. I think the apartment is going to be a good fit for us. Our downstairs neighbors are fantastic and really friendly w/ all sorts of tips about where to get stuff. I think it will a good living situation with them. Moving went really well w/ many thanks to Dad Morse and Drew w/ whom I packed the truck until 11:15 pm on Friday night which enabled us to be on the road by 10 am on Sat. This was the scariest drive I've ever done. The truck was only 16 foot but there were a handful of times where the back started swaying like some giant hand was rocking the load back and forth. I'm not going to lie-these were times that very short, direct, vocal prayers were uttered. I was not going especially fast 55-60 but the bumps in the road apparently were not congruent with the truck's load. Serious kudos also go to Jeremy Finn, Hanan and Brent from 1st Presbyterian for helping us unload after spending the morning doing hard labor elsewhere. (Hanan is about 6'2'', 225 lbs. plays defensive tackle for SUNY Brockport and has quads that are bigger than my chest. He was running up and down the sidewalk w/ boxes, basically treating the whole thing like some sort of football drill-it was awesome!!) It was also excellent to have my mom lay out some serious food for us afterwards.
Kara and I went with Jeremy and Alisha and Alisha's parents to walk through a building in downtown Endicott that Jeremy and Alisha are contemplating buying in order to turn it into a community center/outreach place/youth center/apartments/music lessons which we are planning/hoping on being invovled with. The building is huge. It's two storefronts but zoned as one building w/ both buildings measuring 29'x90' and three stories. At the very least the heating pipes and system would need revamped, the electrical needs revamped and some very serious cleaning/painting would need to be done. There's all kinds of volunteer labor lined up but this would be a lifelong investment for Jeremy and Alisha (Endicott real estate sells even slower than hot coffe in the Sahara and has approx. the same value) so please pray for them as they contemplate this decision. This building has some tremendous potential but it would require an porportionally great amount of energy and work.
Kara is working two nights a week at the barn where our two (2) horses are being kept in order to help pay for their board. It's a pretty sweet barn and the owner is quite nice and cool even though I almost let Johnny (our horse) out bc I didn't close the stall door all the way and after taking off his halter he pushed past me and the door and went galumphing around the barn. Bah.
Work has been seriously awesome. Davis College is working towards establishing a elementary educaiton program next fall and they gave me a serious chunk of change to buy books w/ so my office is currently invaded by stacks of ya/juvenile ficiton. The difficult part is not to read them all-there are some seriously good things being written. We're also weeding our cassette and VHS collection to make more space on the main floor for students to study and hang out. There were 6,000 tapes of which there are about 300-400 left to delete. I finished up removing the unwanted VHS tapes today, of which there were about 500 so those will move upstairs. All this to say I'm really pleased with the schedule. However I wanted to upgrade the library catalog system to Koha 3.0 and I haven't even come close to touching that and I'm also teaching two sections of a freshman computer course next semester and so far I have a rough outlined schedule and the syllabus mostly done. Got some work to do on that.

Things approaching
We are headed up to Maine next Friday for a glorious 9 days in Maine.
I, finally and for real this time, finish my masters at the end of July.
Kara and I are headed out to the Newport Folk Festival on August 1st w/ Lori and Geoff.
Please note that FLEET FOXES, Iron & Wine, The Avett Brothers, The Low Anthem, The Decemberists and Pete Seeger are going to be there on Saturday.
There is a DFW conference in November for which I'm working on a paper that needs to be submitted by Aug. 8th; got notes but need to do a bit more research and writing for that to be ready.

Dave Eggers Interview

Via Steve Schenkberg's blog/site here's an awesome interview with Dave Eggers from The Rumpus. He talks a lot about his new nonfiction book coming out soon named Zeitoun which, based on the interview, looks likes it going to be a good read. The best part of the interview, in my estimation, is toward the end where Eggers is talking about print and Internet.

"Eggers... I have optimism about print because I see these kids [students from Egger's 826 groups] and how much they love to read. And they work on our student newspapers and anthologies and a dozen other print projects. They really have a thing for print. And I do too. I fear sometimes we’re actually giving up too soon. We adults have to have faith. And we have to rededicate ourselves to examining what in any given issue of our daily papers is really speaking to anyone under 18. That’s a challenge. I was just in Chicago, and the Tribune there does all kinds of very interesting stuff to reach out to younger readers. It’s something that we all have to think about.

Rumpus: So you’re not looking at a post-paper world.

Eggers: My admittedly strange opinion is that we need to try harder with print. We can’t just give up on it. Inevitably there will be some loss of newspaper readership, but even that will stabilize. Not everyone wants all their news online. Do we all want to look at screens from 8am to 10pm? There’s room in the world for both online and paper. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. I guess that’s one of the things that’s always frustrating to hear, that the rise of the Internet means the death of print. There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality will be more nuanced. I think newspapers that adjust a bit will survive and still do great work. But we do need to give people reasons to pay money for the physical object. The landscape right now does require that we in the print world try harder. We have to think of the things that print does best, and do those things better than ever before. We need to use the paper, maximize the physical product."

Happy Bloomsday!!

Bloomsday is the name given to June 16th which is the day that James Joyce's book Ulysses occurs. Around the US, and I think the world, people get together for a whole day of reading through Ulysses. People will also sing the several musical sections as well.(These are not regular people either-these are individuals from the Phila Academy of Vocal Arts and from the Philadelpiha Opera. So when they sing it's tremendous.) I had the distinct pleasure of going to the Rosenbach two years ago for the last three hours of Bloomsday there and it was awesome! Most, if not all, the readers bring their own copies of Ulysses and follow along in their own copies. The Rosenbach gets permission to block of the street setting up a large semi-circle in front of one of the steps of the row homes directly to the right of the museum. The orators then read from the podium.(Here's a list of this year's orators. Passerbys, wondering what a large group of people sitting  in white metal/plastic folding chairs or standing, squatting, leaning against walls, crouched on curbs while a man appears to talking about being in a pub w/ no apparent pub in sight, swing by for a short listen and then move on. There's also a Bloosmday newspaper of which I do not recall the exact name. This newspaper contains events from Leopold Bloom's day as well as the schedule of reading and a crossword puzzle which, if you win (the crossword puzzle) you are then offered the chance to read a section at the following year's Bloomsday festivities. I did find out that Syracuse has a James Joyce society and is much closer than Phila so I'm going to try to plan for next year to head up to Syracuse. There's a decent section of Ulysses that is marked Ithaca but I've have not done any hard-core research to see if Itahca, NY (also close to me) fully appreciate this with a day-long reading.
I was hoping to go this year but that didn't quite fit with the schedule of moving at the end of this week.Since I cannot bring Bloomsday directly to you, please enjoy the following Bloomsday rag.

Bloomsday Rag

Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon

My favorite sentence from this article: "Google’s move is likely to be welcomed by publishers who have expressed
concerns about the possibility that Amazon will dominate the market for
e-books with its aggressive pricing strategy." Wait a second. So the same company that 1) maps our streets, 2) has the highest used search engine available 3) tracks/records/remembers you and your searches 4) creates sidebar ads in gmail that attempt to be related to the email text are now not only selling e-books but in selling e-books are helping to prevent a monopoly? I'm not entirely sure that excitement about one gigantic company dominating another gigantic company in a particular area is really cause for celebration. Yes it is good that Amazon has competition but does it have to be from Google? Maybe instead of releasing e-books maybe they could get one of their projects out of beta-testing. (cough*GMAIL*cough) Just a thought.

revisting the medium is the message

(This is a little jumbled and is a sort of practice run for something else I'm working on so please feel free to comment/share/critique-thanks.)
"...the medium not only structures what one will see and believe, but is in fact, inseparable from what one sees and believes."(101-Postman/Weingartner from Teaching as a Subversive Activity) AKA the medium is the message.I think this is brilliant on all kinds of levels and that it has been largely forgotten how much the medium is actually the message which is a distinct problem in an era where the medium of the web/Internet is so prevalent (esp. in the use of the metaphor of the word "web").
however my focus is slightly more lighthearted in that this idea of the medium structuring what one sees and believes plays out in Barnes and Noble (B&N) on a regular basis for me. It typically happens right when I walk in the first set of double doors into the postage stamp size foyer which hold, as I have termed them, "the stealable stuff". (These are called the stealable stuff bc they are on the other side of the sensors thus implying, in my mind, that if you really want to steal something from B&N this is what should be takend b/c it is already halfway out the door. Admittedly this is not a hip title so I'm open to suggestions) B&N puts out two types of items into this area. The first being gift-type books i.e. books for Father's Day, books for Mother's Day, books for your cat's birthday, etc. (I'm using the word "book" in the sense that there are paper/plastic pages of text/images between two cardboard/conglomerate of other materials occ. w/ dust jacket. Any other relationship of these items to books that actually contain real content is purely coincedental.) The other type of book is the castoff, the books have been tossed off even the clearance rack space and are now awaiting their final resting place at the bottom of some Chinese garbage pit.
How does the medium of location effect how we look at these books? Consider that these
books are placed closer to the door(s) then they are to their topically-related companions who are being sold for much higher prices. Ironically the logistically closest books to these items are, at least in this particular B&N, the new books. The attitude of the placement of these books is one of departure. The point of this display is to structure the buyer's pereception, whether or not the store means to, that these books are pretty much worthless and the possible reason they are out here is because there happened to be some shelves built in the foyer and there were not quite enough gift books to fill them so the selected "filler" is the stealable stuff. Please note that I have rescued at least one (maybe two my memory's faulty here) Douglas Coupland hardcover(s) from this shelf; a hardcover that would have ordinarily retailed for $23.99 I scored for $4.98. One has to ask does the location of the book in the medium of the stealable stuff affect the buyer's view of the book?
What I'm trying to say is that I believe placing legit books in this section, such as Douglas Coupland, in w/ titles that are consigned to this stealable area affect how we/I see and think about them. The context (or medium?) deteremines how we see or how we read situations. This is important because much of the time, if not all the time, we don't realize it or think about this transparency of medium, unless of course part of your living is based on the sale of purloined gift books and castoffs. We/I see through our medium(s) particularly, if not entirely, the medium of language. I.e. above mentioning gift books you probably have a good idea of what I'm talking about but I'm assuming you share a similar language/metaphorical frame of reference(s) w/ me. We experience it and talk around it rather than talking about the medium in which we are operating which can cause some interesting issues especially when interacting w/ certain types of media w/in a particular medium.

Chrysler Cures a Bankruptcy, but Tests Loom

"Chrysler Cures a Bankruptcy, but Tests Loom" (original article here)
This is an article heading/title from the NYT  today which apparently indicates that Chrysler is moving from car production to blanket weaving. Maybe they will take up car blankets to push back into the market?

Maps of the Seven Deadly Sins

Maps of the Seven Deadly Sins
"Geographers from Kansas State University map the spatial distribution of the seven deadly sins in the United States. These types of maps are always kind of iffy as they draw from data from various sources gathered with different methods and usually use some kind of researcher-defined metric. Still interesting though...right?" Actually not so much. As there are 1) no criteria what actually determines the parameters of the sins listed, 2) what the actual point of this study was 3) and how in all that is good and right in the world did these people get money to conduct this type of study? Who does this actually benefit? This type of thing comes across more as a sort of ridiculous mucking about with a weird conglomerate of statistics made to do what the researchers wanted it to do. This is simply an empty exercise to distract us from the true issue threatening our country-zombies. Hopefully KSU will have a map on the spread and impact of that issue soon....

UPDATE: Here is an article from the LasVegas Sun which has the best sentence in describing this entire project. "This is a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data."

It's Coming! Footnotes: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies

Footnotes: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies

This looks seriously awesome! More details below:

"The critical discussion of David Foster Wallace has thus far been
limited to a few aspects of his most popular works. Our conference
seeks to expand the response beyond the popular imagination’s
categories of “difficult,” “postmodern,” and “genius,” and beyond the
author’s own articulation of his project as a response to irony. We
invite a reconsideration of Wallace with an emphasis on new
perspectives of his entire oeuvre.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is pleased to
announce a one-day conference devoted to the discussion of Wallace’s
work, to be held Friday, November 20th 2009, from 9 am to 5 pm. Please
send your abstracts of no more than 250-words by August 15th, along
with contact info and institutional affiliation (if any), to: footnotesconference@gmail.com.

We welcome papers exploring any aspect of Wallace’s work. Some suggested directions:

1) Reconsideration of Wallace’s Oeuvre: Papers examining Wallace’s
neglected early works Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair;
new perspectives on Infinite Jest; the direction of Wallace’s later
work.

2) Wallace’s Literary Context: The reception of Wallace’s work and
the way his image has been shaped by his fans, the media, and the
academy; examinations of Wallace’s relation to his literary forebears,
both 20th century and earlier; Wallace outside the bounds of
“postmodernism”; Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature.

3) Theorizing Wallace: Wallace’s treatment of language and formal or
figurative qualities in Wallace’s writing; applications of narrative
theory to Wallace’s texts or consideration of his narrative
innovations; Wallace’s analytic, phenomenological, or existential
contexts; treatment of the self and subjectivity; relation to
ethics/values/morality; feminism and gender issues.

4) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Wallace: The use of math, logic,
philosophy, science, technology, politics, sociology, psychology, law,
etc. in Wallace’s work; pedagogical issues related to Wallace’s work."

David Foster Wallace-Kenyon Commencement Speech 2005

This speech was originally transcribed and posted at Marganlia.org until recently (though it is still available elsewhere) In order to help keep this speech that was free, and can still be found here, here is the originally transcribed version.

"(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck."