2015 — 17 June: Wednesday
In most areas of my life these days the answer to "Where the heck is...?" is "Wherever the heck you left it" — hard though that can be to accept. Linux1 is different. One can never quite be sure where the cursor is going to be within a file when you resume an Ultra Edit session (on reloading) after some overnight downtime. Still, at least the last set of files is re-opened for me.
There's an early walk...
... pencilled in, but not before breakfast (and certainly not during the "Bach before seven" section of my morning BBC Radio 3 music programme).
Philosophers, heh?
Always navigating gulfs:
The Geneva-born Rousseau traveled across Europe on foot, fathering and abandoning at least five children. Kant rarely left his native Königsberg and never married. Between them, they mapped out what Neiman takes to be the essential predicament of maturity, namely the endless navigation of the gulf between the world as we encounter it and the way we believe it should be.
I always regarded my essential predicament more to do with feeding, clothing, and housing my little family unit. And/or deciding what I wanted to be if or when I grew up. But that's probably just me. I skimmed Rousseau's "Confessions" (published, naturally, only after his death) but admit I have never attempted Kant. Bite me.
Rousseau looked back at his life in 1731: "I had preserved my physical, but not my moral virginity. The progress of the years had told upon me, and my restless temperament had at last made itself felt. Its first quite involuntary outbreak had caused me some alarm about my health, a fact which illustrates better than anything else the innocence in which I had lived till then... This vice, which shame and timidity find so convenient, has a particular attraction for lively imaginations."
Moral virginity? Now there's a vanished philosophical concept. The date engraved (at her specific request) on the little gold first anniversary necklace...
... I gave her in 1975 that Christa then wore every day for the rest of her life — it now lives in my bedside drawer — was certainly significant to us, but I'd never have described it as "moral"... My photo dates from 19th July 2007 — the corkscrew hazelnut bush / tree was most recently trimmed by Peter's g/f just the weekend before last.
What was I thinking?
I mean, why would dear Mama have chosen a bank that employed any counter staff with an ounce of initiative? Silly me. I just wanted to make an appointment for some time this afternoon to set in motion the last bit of her estate's probate-related business. (I naïvely assume a linked pair of current and savings accounts present little or no problem — particularly to a bank so recently proven adept at manipulating currency exchange rates to its private advantage — so I've been letting them fester at the bottom of my list of Things To Do.) You have to work at it to be as good a procrastinator as I am, trust me.
"But I can't book an appointment for you without a contact number. See?2 It won't let me."
"I'm afraid that's a bank process problem, not mine."
Blank stare
"Well let me leave this letter of explanation with you."
"You're not allowed to leave any paperwork with me."
"I'll be back," as Arnie remarked.
Still, at least it means I've now got time to grab a spot of late lunch. Perhaps that will put me in a better mood for the next assault.
I estimated...
... I'd need 10 minutes to sort things out (having assembled all the paperwork in advance). It took 14, but can now take another 10 to 15 days to put all the arrangements in place.
[Pause]
Listening to Brian Eno's fourth "Ambient" title ("On Land"), and specifically, to the track "The Lost Day", it's amazingly reminiscent of some of the more contemplative bits of the score to "Bladerunner". Or perhaps that's just me.