jameswharris

A Zune Christmas

My wife got me a blue 8gb Zune for Christmas and I’ve been spending this morning downloading albums to play on it. I bought the Zune Pass which lets me have access to almost everything for $14.99 a month. I’m used to subscription music because I’ve been a Rhapsody subscriber for years, but I never had a compatible player. iPods don’t work with subscription music services. I was intrigued by Zune when I read the new 3.0 version allowed subscribers to keep 10 songs a month as part of their monthly fee. The ten free songs a month aren’t DRM-free MP3 songs though, but Zune locked songs, although they promise these songs will play even after I stop paying the rent. Well, we know how that works, don’t we. Still it’s a nice try.

So far I’ve downloaded:

Quicksilver Messenger Service
Quicksilver Messenger Service – Happy Trails
Pavement – Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed.
R.E.M. – Murmur – Deluxe
Genesis – Foxtrot (new reissue)
Joan Baez – Day After Tomorrow
David Bowie – Live in Santa Monica 1972
Arcade Fire – Funeral
Nirvana – Nevermind
The Priests

I considered getting the new box set of the complete Creedence Clearwater Revival albums, but figured I’d save that for later. I wish they had a check box for “Add to Memory Queue” for these subscription services. All-you-can-listen-to musical gluttony is hard to manage.

I’ve found a great way to pick new albums to load – I go to The Rolling Stone CD Album Review page and look for 4 and 5 star reviews. This is a fantastic way to discover new albums, and to rediscover old albums and box sets when they are re-released.

Even if I only listened to one new album a day, $300 a month value at $10 an album, the $15 a month fee still makes me feel like I’m robbing them blind. Nothing is stopping me from listening to 10 new albums a day. It’s all legal and on the up-and-up. And I think it’s a fair price. For most albums, I will only listen to them once. I doubt that I will find 10 perfect songs a month that I will want to play over and over again enough to make them worth the trouble to isolate from the rental songs. As long as I pay the monthly rental fee I’ll have access to them as long as they don’t go out of print.

I think a fun project would be to find 1,000 perfect songs. A perfect song to me are ones I would listen to over and over again without getting bored. It would be fun to have 1,000 perfect songs on the Zune and hit random play.

The Zune works with Wi-Fi and I can call up albums directly from the player, but I find it easier to just load them from my Zune library on the PC. I haven’t figured out how to delete albums yet. And there are rare delays in playing music through Wi-Fi that I avoid by downloading the album through the computer. The Wi-Fi feature will be great for when I’m away from home.

The Zune now supports Audible.com files and Overdrive library files, so I can use the Zune as a replacement for my iPod Nano that I use for listening to audio books. The players are about the same size and weight. I haven’t checked how well the Zune plays audio books, and whether or not it has a good resume feature, vital for listening to audio books. Overall, I’m very impressed with the Zune.

The earphones that come with the Zune seem nice enough, but I’ve read they aren’t as good as they could be, so I’ll start looking for reviews on some low-cost great bang-for-buck earphones. I find the Zune earphones better than the ones that came with my iPod. They are more comfortable and sound better. I’ve never acquired the habit of listening to music through earphones though, and that will determine how how I use my Zune, but I like it very much right now.

JWH 12/26/8

Out of Print – The Bad Side of Digital

There is a downside to digital music, especially if you’ve moved completely to digital downloads and have given up on CDs and LPs and want to be completely legal. Most albums only stay in print for a certain period of time. Famous records from artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones tend to stay in print forever, but not so for the work of most performers. If you love a less famous band, say Quicksilver Messenger Service, most of their albums are out of print.

I would love to hear three QMS albums again, Shady Grove, Just For Love and What About Me on my Zune or iPod. They aren’t available from Zune Marketplace. Nor can I buy them from Amazon on MP3. Nor are they for sale at iTunes. I can get them from Amazon as Japanese import CDs for $15 each. Or I could track down the original LPs on eBay for less and then convert the tracks to digital. Just when I thought I had left the physical world of LPs and CDs, I’m dragged back in.

What this means: If you REALLY love an album buy a physical copy. Rip it, make backups, and store away the original for safe keeping. You never know thirty years from now when the nostalgic mood hits you and you’ll moan pitifully, “I’d give a hundred bucks to hear that album again.” Otherwise, Zen up, accept the fleeting quality of this world, and stop trying to clutch desperately to the past.

You’d think with digital record stores everything that was ever recorded would be for sale, but for legal reasons that’s not true. Like I said, if you’re criminally minded, just steal what you want off the net. iTunes, Rhapsody and Zune Marketplace should have everything because production costs shouldn’t be an issue. If the pirates can offer everything from free, why should the legal dudes have any trouble providing it for money?

I could wait and maybe Shady Grove, Just for Love and What About Me will be legally reprinted in the Zune Marketplace and Rhapsody libraries. But what if the contract is only for five years, and I want to hear those albums again when I’m 88? That’s the problem with subscription music – it’s ephemeral.

Why even have a publication period for an album in this digital age? Why can’t artists just sign up with publishers and have their work always in print and constantly available? That might happen in the future, but I can’t trust it now.

Nothing is for sure. I could buy those three Japanese imports and twenty-five years from now CD players could be as rare as turntables that play 78 rpm records. There might be technological reasons that put music out of print too. Owning a MP3 file, free of digital rights management, might have a longer useful life span than a physical album, but only if you backup like a compulsive fiend.

But this is also sadly funny. I just got a new Zune, I have access to hundreds of thousands of albums I’ve never heard, more than can fit in any record store I’ve ever visited and I’m crying over three albums that probably, if I had them, I’d only play once because there’s a reason they are out of print. Why don’t I make an effort to discover new albums to love rather than whining about old forgotten albums?

Over the years I’ve owned thousands of albums, many of which I can’t even remember, but every once in awhile will pop back into my mind and I’ll wish I had them to play again. I guess that’s human nature.

JWH – 12/25/8

Random Blog Reading

A couple weeks ago I noticed that Auxiliary Memory was getting a bump in hits and discovered the reason: AlphaInventions.com. This site, the invention of Cheru Jackson was designed to randomly show blogs from around the world, and promote blog reading. If you visit AlphaInventions you can sit and watch a new blog pop up about every 10 seconds, like a blog slide-show. There’s a pause button in case you want to stop and read, and a input box and button to submit your own blog.

I’ve manually done this in the past with blog hosting sites like LiveJournal that used to have a random button, and Blogger which currently has a “Next Blog” button that takes you to a random site. I wish all blog hosting sites offered this feature. It’s a fun way to see the world. Hitting the random button is like teleporting into an unknown home and asking the people, “What’s happening?” At Blogger, over half the sites are in language that’s not English, but the pictures still tell a thousand words each.

I’ve looked at hundreds, if not thousands of sites in this random fashion and I’ve never found a person like me. There are a few bloggers that have similar interests to mine, but we have discovered each other in non-random ways. Most people discover other blogs through googling a topic, from social bookmarking sites, or from the links presented at a blog site they like. This tends to hide the diversity of the blogosphere because people tend pursue more of what they already like.

Patterns do emerge, but it’s surprising how different people are around the world, or even just nearby. All over the web people have tried to estimate how many blogs there are, with some estimates running as high as 200,000,000, which I can’t believe. Here are some numbers from different blogging sites:

WordPress.com – 5,056,620
Blogger.com – unknown
LiveJournal.com – 17,600.000
OpenDiary.com – 566,956
TypePad.com – unknown
Vox.com – unknown
Windows Live Spaces – unknown
Famous blog hosting sites in other countries – unknown

Still, even if there are only 20,000,000 bloggers, that’s quite a cultural expression of diversity. Evidently millions people on this planet have an inner-journalist in them. Those sites with unknown numbers are really big ones, so we could be talking about a major cultural phenomenon.

It only took a couple of weeks to realize that AlphaInventions was failing. The first time I looked at it a high percentage of pages caught my eye as being readable and interesting. Now it’s overwhelmed with crap. There are a couple kinds of blogs that turn me off, but they tend to dominate. The first are people trying to make money in some lame-ass way. The second, and more common, are bloggers who like to jot down a few vague lines each day. Don’t put up a public website unless you’re going to make a serious effort to provide content. I hate hitting the “Next Blog” button and finding a site that says, “We went to the movies and then went out to dinner.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to write about going to the movies and out to dinner, but you’ve got to make it into a story, or at least a movie review.

There could be tens of millions of bloggers, but there might only be a few hundred thousand serious ones, and if we distilled those down to just the ones you would love to read if you had the time, there could be hundreds. Finding them is a problem, but as fascinating problem. Think about it, there’s almost 7,000,000,000 people in the world, and blogging has the potential to connect you with the most perfect friends.

I think Cheru Jackson will need to rethink his concept. The blog slide-show idea is great. Letting anyone submit is bad. I’d like to see the blog slide-show feature combined with RSS feeds and StumbleUpon like technology so the random blogs were all high quality sites with a reader rating button. In other words, I want random great, rather than random everything. StumbleUpon is excellent for finding great reading from all types of web sites, but Jackson’s intention was to help the little-guy bloggers, and that’s a good intention.

I think Blogger.com’s “Next Blog” button is the step in the right direction. If they would add a rating button to their top navigation bar, allowing visitors to rate blogs on the Blogger site, then that could be used to show random sites with positive ratings. The social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Technorati allows pros to compete against amateurs, and that’s good for that they do, but I’d also like to see an all amateur competition too.

For some reason I mainly read sites from WordPress and Blogger users, with a sprinkling of LiveJournal users. There are many more blog hosting sites around the world that need to get in on the competition. Many advanced bloggers hide their community blog hosting services with personalized domain names. This makes their sites look more professional, but tends to hide their affiliation with their blogging community. I love being part of the WordPress world, and wished WordPress.com had a random button like the Blogger “Next Blog” button.

Of course, for Blogger.com to offer that button requires their users to show an ugly navigation bar at the top their site. I don’t know if WordPress users would like that or not. I see an admin bar whenever I visit my site for administrative purposes, which by-the-way allows me to see a random post of my own. Maybe blog hosting services could make a custom visitor bar at the top of sites an option.

Blog hosting sites do collaborate with standards like OpenID, so it might be possible they could create a random referral standard. I like that people at Blogger or LiveJournal have a certain look and feel, because it makes me feel like I’m visiting a country of bloggers with their own shared characteristics and flavor. I’d like to randomly visit other blogging countries. What’s needed is a central guide like Fodor’s, or a United Nations of blog countries to start a visa process.

Of course, these suggestions would put poor Cheru Jackson out of business. He had a good idea, but each blogging host site could easily recreate it, and in the future, with standards, the cross-border random visits could be set up too.

JWH 12/22/8

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

A Case of Conscience by James Blish is the 1959 Hugo award winning novel that was recently produced as an unabridged audio book by Audible Frontiers, the science fiction and fantasy publishing imprint from Audible.com. The book is wonderfully narrated by Jay Snyder. When I became addicted to audio books back in 2002 I constantly searched for classic science fiction books on audio. There weren’t many available. For about a year now Audible Frontiers has been cranking out far more SF audio books than I have time to listen to. Even today, when I go through the audio sections at book stores, I seldom see many science fiction titles for sale.

You can buy A Case of Conscience as an audio book through Amazon, via a link back to Audible, or from the iTunes Store, for $17-19 dollars, but the cheapest way to get it is to join Audible.com. To get those bargain prices requires committing to a 1 or 2 book-a-month plan. I buy an annual 24-pack deal and get books for $9.56 each. To get some idea of why you might want to join Audible.com, look at Hugo Winners on Audible and Heinlein on Audio. The catch is you have to be tech savvy enough to listen to audio books on your iPod or MP3 digital player. Audible.com does allow you to burn CDs, but that takes some tech know-how too.

Now, do I recommend you go buy A Case of Conscience? I enjoyed the book, but I’ve got to warn modern readers about 1950s science fiction. A Case of Conscience is a fix-up novel, combining the 1953 novella set on the distant planet Lithia, with newer material, with the same characters back on Earth continuing the story. Many classic science fiction novels, like Foundation by Isaac Asimov, and City by Clifford Simak, were fix-up novels. They feel like reading short stories rather than novels. The second warning I have to give is about the nature of classic SF, especially books from the 1950s. They are idea driven, rather than plot driven. My guess is young people today who love action driven science fiction might grumble about these older cerebral stories.

James Blish does some excellent world-building with Lithia. It’s a planet poor in heavy metals like iron, but the intelligent beings there have learned alternate routes to scientific discoveries and have engineered a technologically advance society. The Lithians never discovered magnetism and electricity, but have created technology based on static electricity, and pushed the limits of biology further than we have. Blish did a great job creating a fascinating planet and culture, but that’s only the setup for the real idea that’s central to the book.

A Case of Conscience combines science fiction and religion to make for a philosophical story. A team of four scientists are sent to evaluate Lithia, but the biologist, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, is a member of the Society of Jesus, a Jesuit, and he makes a startling claim about Lithia and the Lithians. The Lithians have no concept of God, afterlife, sin, or even things like fiction or lies. They are logical. Their culture is an atheist’s utopia. I love what Blish does with this, and I won’t spoil any of his story. I’m very appreciative to Steve Feldberg and Audible.com for bringing this book to audio. I tried to read A Case of Conscience twice before in my life and didn’t get into it either time. This wonderful audio reading made it completely accessible to me. Blish’s style was too dry for me to read, but lovely to listen to. I don’t know why.

The real reason I want to recommend this book is because we should think about contact with alien culture and religion. What if SETI makes first contact and our new friends have never even imagined the concept of God? That is possible. What will they do when we tell them about our spiritual theories? What if they have theories about the origin of the universe that we never thought about?

Most fundamentalists cannot handle even minor variations in their own religion, much less deal with ecumenical diversity of world religions. Their narrowly focused personally held concepts would probably be blown away by ancient ideas in the many dead religions in our history, so how would they react to a true alien spirituality? So what happens if the nightly news programs are bombarded with religious ideas from light years away? What if these alien missionaries have existed for millions of years and know a lot more about everything? Will we form cargo cults in reaction to these superior wisdom, like primitive people in the 20th century when encountering modern westerners for the first time?

In the next ten thousand years we will probably never meet any aliens face to face, but there’s a good chance of finally having some success with SETI, and initiate interstellar texting sessions with dialog response times in the decades, centuries or even millennia. Even if we detected an alien signal today, it could take so long to respond and develop a way to converse that it could be centuries before we get down to chatting about vague philosophical concepts. The novelty of the alien existence will wear off before we know what they think.

Today, because of science fiction, I believe most of the world assumes that there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe. We also assume we’ll share the same mathematics, physics and chemistry, but will probably diverge with biology. But what kind of overlap will be possible for philosophy, religion, art and music? Music has a relationship with mathematics and physics, so it is possible there could be strange alien music we could hear and think of as melody. Art connects with vision which also connects with physics. The idea of creating beautiful objects that nature didn’t could be common.

Alien religion and philosophy are harder to imagine. James Blish essential creates an alien world and then forces a John Milton like Catholic interpretation upon it. Mary Doria Russell explores the same ground in her magnificent novel, The Sparrow. Is it possible to evaluate an alien religion without seeing it through our own glasses made from our religion? Can we even see a religion without being religious? Do dolphins and whales have religion? They are the closest thing we have to alien intelligence and we know so little about them.

Is worship the defining characteristic of religion? Is it possible to have religion without gods, either seen or unseen? If all aliens have the same image in their homes, do we consider that a sign of religion? Would aliens exploring our world think of religion when they count all the photos of Brittany Spears?

We often talk as if God is the same deity whether the Earthy believer is Christian, Muslim or Jew. Would our alien friends see that? Would they assume our God is their God? For most of this planet’s history, our believers believed their God made this world, but they never knew it was just one of billions upon billions of worlds. Does each world get their own creator? Or is their one God that knows about every sparrow on this world, also know about every sparrow like creature on every other world?

In the end, we have to judge James Blish on how he handles his religious problem in A Case of Conscience. Does the ending imply that Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez was right in his judgement of Lithia? If that is true, then we have to believe that Blish does believe, at least for this story, that it’s possible that our God is supreme, that our Earth is the center of reality, and that all the rest of the universe is part of a lesson to teach us about God’s word. Isn’t it rather strange that God would build such a big school-house just for us?

What would a universal religion be like that covered a universe fourteen billion light years across and was home to billions of intelligent life-forms and their planets. Knowing as much astronomy as I do I find it hard not to be an atheist, but I could be wrong. I believe religion is only practical at the tribal level, but again I could be wrong. But if there is one God and his territory covers all of the cosmos, then I can’t help believe that mathematics, physics, chemistry and all the other sciences is the true Bible of this God.

JWH 12/21/8

Losing My Modesty

One thing about getting older is you go to the doctors more often. Another thing about getting older is doctors want to examine places that you’ve tried to keep hidden all your life. So far, I’ve been lucky, and all my surgeries have been out-patient procedures, but I’ve seen the generation ahead of me spend more and more of their dwindling time in hospitals, and I know a lot of painful and embarrassing adventures are in store for me. I never worry about dying, but the thought of peeing, but especially dumping, in a bedpan gives me the willies.

Recent excursions with the medical profession are preparing me for what’s to come, and I’ve decided that getting used to things little by little is the way to go. A few years back I had a hernia surgery. Beforehand, I was all worried about getting naked in front of so many people, but when the time came, being a turkey on the dinner table surrounded by six masked men and women didn’t turn out to be as embarrassing as I thought.

I was also worried about being put under for the first time, but all I got was twilight sleep and it was a truly fun experience. One moment I was the naked guy trying to joke with six strangers and BOOM, the surgeon was rolling a giant plastic band-aid over my belly-button area. Literally, no time had passed. The recovery room turned out to be a bummer with frightened people coming out of general anesthesia, crying, screaming, puking – leaving me afraid of getting more than twilight sleep in the future. So that’s another big fear I have. I’m afraid of intubation and heavy knock-out drugs.

Another anxiety is having my below the belt hair shaved. I went in for a heart procedure last year where the plan was to snake some kind of roto-rooter up my leg vein and into my heart and zap it. I thought for sure they wouldn’t need to shave me, but I was wrong.

I was lying on a gurney in a staging area when a cute young nurse came in carrying a toolkit that looked like her job was blood collecting. I said, “You here to collect blood?” And she said, “No,” and pulled out a little washcloth size towel, looked aside while throwing back my covers, slapped the towel over my genitals, grabbed on good, and then whipped out a plastic disposable razor with her other hand and quickly began shaving me.

“Wow! You have quite a method for protecting my modesty,” I said.

“I don’t want to see anything, and I know you don’t want to show anything,” she said while dry scrapping the hair off my thigh and across the top of my crotch.

“I am a little modest,” I admitted, “but I mostly don’t want to gross young people out with naked oldness.”

“Thank you,” she said with an appreciative smile. “And oh my god,” she suddenly remembered, “I know what you’re talking! The first woman I had to work with was old and wrinkly, and before I had a chance to glance away she just let it all hang out for me to see. I sure wished she hadn’t shown me that future.”

“I don’t even want to imagine that,” I said think about all the old women I still wanted to see naked. This cutey and I went on to have a very pleasant conversation about not seeing old naked body parts. It was an entirely fun experience talking with this girl who was clutching my package with a little rag and chatting with me. I realized then hospital adventures wouldn’t all be horrors. I’m still scared of going in a bedpan, but who knows maybe it won’t be as bad as I imaged.

Like I said, I’m working my way up to the big stuff, like a heart bypass, or brain surgery, and the dreaded bedpans. Each little adventure with doctors and nurses chip away at my modesty and fears. Like a few weeks ago when I went to see my doctor about cholesterol drugs. I timidly wanted to ask her about an annoying mole on my inner thigh but was going to chicken out and wait to see my lady skin doctor. Then my doctor asked, “While you’re here, can I do a regular physical?”

A little while later, when my doctor had her finger up my exit hole, I started thinking maybe I should ask her about that mole. Then she had me turn around and she began playing ball with mine trying to determine if I had a hernia, so I figured this was as good a time as any to ask her to look just a little closer at something I didn’t want her to see in the first place.

“Where?” she replied when I meekly brought up the topic.

I pointed behind the right sack she was holding to a place on my leg.

“Hey, I can slice that off in a jiffy. Wait here,” and she pulls out a green paper robe and handed it to me.

Great I thought, now I won’t have to expose myself to my lady dermatologist. I’ll get everything done today. She leaves and I take off the rest of my clothes and put on the paper robe on backward so it feels like a dress, a mini-dress. I figured my doctor went to get her scalpel. Then a nurse comes in with a kit of stuff.

“Where are we cutting?” she asks with a nice friendly smile.

I’m trying to imagine what the etiquette of legally exposing oneself to a strange young woman is and all I can say is, “down there.”

“Show me.”

So I hike up a leg, hold my dress up like a little girl showing off her underwear and push aside my testicles. She gets a needle out and sticks it into a little vial while giving me a casual look. Then another woman comes in, the physician’s assistant, and I flop my dress down. Just how many young women get to see me naked today? When the door is opened I worry that some mother walking her kid to another exam room will see the big fat nude bearded man and traumatize their poor kid’s psyche and ruin any fantasies the mom might have about fun with older men.

“Let’s get you on the table,” the assistant says pushing me over as the doctor bustles in. The room is about half the size of a tiny bedroom, and now there’s four of us in there. Three women and a naked fat man with a paper dress that’s so short that it’s not much protection for my modesty at all.

So I climb on the table, and the nurse flips up my dress and grabs me around one leg, the physician’s assistant moves between my legs, and the doctor grabs my right leg. I feel like my legs are in stirrups made of women. The doctor tells her buds, “Move him around so I can see better.”

I’m thinking, dear god, and I don’t believe in god, by the way, don’t let me have an erection in front of these women. The nurse and assistant both grab by genitals and try to shove them out of the way. It’s not unpleasant The doctor whips out the needle and looks at me in the eyes. “Please, do not, and I mean, do not, kick me in the face when I stick you,” she says very seriously.

Needles don’t bother me, and so far in my life have never caused any real pain. “Is this going to hurt enough that I will kick a woman in the face?”

“Some patients have,” she replies warily, still staring me down.

She stabs me quickly with the needle and I barely feel anything, but wonder where that inch of steel went. Then I notice that the nurse isn’t wearing much of a bra. In fact, I notice I’m getting an excellent sense of the shape of her breasts. She rests them on my side and then pushes them against my back. Then rests them on my side again. My mind is creating wire-frame models of their shape on my inner computer screen. I mentally plead with myself, “No wood, no wood. no wood.”

Luckily, seeing a tall blonde with a razor in her hand struggling to get a good aim keeps me tiny. Hey, not too tiny, I now worry. The nurse and assistant keep losing their grip and struggle to keep my sensitive parts away from the blade. I ask them if they want help.

“This sure is a lesson in modesty,” I say weakly and try to laugh and they all laugh good.

The doctor jokes about her brother-in-law getting ‘snipped’ with six women in the room.

“Do you know what I mean,” she asks grinning at me.

I said I did and felt my genitals wanting to retract like a turtle’s head.

“Open the bottle,” the doctor finally says and the assistant did, and my doctor dropped a small bloody clump of flesh inside. It was all over. Except, that night I had trouble with my wound bleeding and I had to come back the next day and expose myself to a fourth woman.

I was getting used to it by then. She led me back to a little room and when the door was shut said, “What’s the problem?” Again I was troubled by wondering what were the rules for politely exposing myself. She seemed like she was in a hurry so I just dropped my pants and pulled out a bloody rag I had sandwiched between my right testicle and right thigh. “It won’t stop bleeding.”

She pulled out what looked like a paper tablecloth and handed it to me. “What’s this for?” I asked. I wondered if I was supposed to cover the table with it before I sat down on it and got it bloody.

“It’s for your modesty,” she said like I was being silly. I couldn’t see how it would help since I was standing clearly showing her what I normally hide from all other women but my wife, and I was even holding a bloody rag I had just removed from between my legs. Tell me, what was I going to shelter from her eyes?

She quickly bandaged me up. I felt no qualms of modesty. I was just a car in for some work, is how I imagined she saw me. Or maybe I was a dog on the vet’s table to her. Either way, my modesty didn’t matter. These four women probably saw hundreds if not thousands of naked people every year. I doubt if I was the grossest or ugliest, or even the fattest. I know I wasn’t the manliest – I just hoped they hadn’t seen very many potential porn star guys.

Getting old means losing control. I don’t like that. I know if I live long enough I’ll have to spend some real time in hospitals, and each time I’ll become more and more a hunk of body and less like a person. My sister once made a clever observation about life. She said we start out life spending most of our time in bed and we end up spending most of our time in bed. I could elaborate on that. We start out having people change our diapers and we end up having people change our diapers. As we get older we get more freedom and we travel further and further, but then we get old and travel less and less, until we’re confined to a room again, sleeping in something very much like a crib.

Maybe I never was really all that modest. Maybe what really bothers me is losing control and having to let other people treat me like a child. We dress and undress kids like they have no modesty and never worry if they care about being naked. Going to the doctors is like being a kid. We have to do what the big people tell us. We don’t get any say in the matter. And crying doesn’t affect the outcome.

Can it be that modesty isn’t about being naked? And rather it’s about losing control? It’s like those dreams of being naked in a high school class. Do we wake up afraid of being laughed at? Or do we wake up afraid of getting into a situation beyond our control?

JWH 12/18/8