jameswharris

Flirting Among the Wrinkled

When I was young I didn’t think aging would be much of a problem. I imagined it was just a matter of becoming wrinkled and losing hair. “Geez, I can handle that,” I thought at the time, but boy was I ever wrong. I was reminded of those thoughts the other day when my friend Janis told me about one of the side effects of aging she hated.

I was telling her about Miss Austen Regrets a PBS biopic about Jane Austen, explaining it was essentially several theories about why she never married. One theory appeared to be she didn’t want to give up flirting. Janis said that was something she didn’t like about getting old, and I asked her to elaborate. She said life was more thrilling when she was younger and got so much more attention. She said it was depressing to be ignored more as her age increased.

I replied that I was very attentive towards her and weren’t other guys our age still flirting with her? She said, yes, but it wasn’t the same. I quickly shot back, “Oh, yeah, it’s only the young Mr. Darcy types that count,” thinking to be funny, but realizing it was masking a stab to my ego too, when I realized that all my flirty communiqués had probably fallen on her limp and impotent because I was not young and dashing.

Since I moved into my fifties I’ve tried to reign in my natural tendency to pay attention to women under forty and focus more on women my own age. Now Janis was essentially telling me I was wasting my flirting time. I had already discovered that post-menopausal women had a declining interest in sex that was directly proportional to a growing desire for independence and self-sufficiency.

Biologically this makes sense, because if the reproductive system shuts down why would women need any stinking men. I use that last phrase because I have heard more than once women friends say, “I no longer want to put up with any stinking man in my life,” and then go on to describe supporting a husband being very much like taking care of a kid. Many times I have talked to a woman my age who related fantasies about life without husbands.

I remember asking one lady what this freedom would bring. She said she could go shopping after work. I replied, you could go shopping after work now. No I can’t, she said, I have to go home and cook. I’ve learned not to ask “What’s for dinner” at my house after my wife has expressed suicidal rages at those words.

In the end, I think Janis is atypical. I know lots of women my age and older that still like the attention of men, even if we’re bald or wrinkled. Now they mentally may be putting a paper bag over my head and painting a picture of Mr. Darcy on it. I tried to cheer Janis up by suggesting that getting old means adapting to new ways of flirting but she seemed to want to cling to the idea that if you’re female you’re only a target if you’re young.

There were scenes in Miss Austen Regrets where you could dramatically see this. Jane was besotted by a young doctor who admired and intelligently flirted with her, but her face would pain when the doctor’s attention shifted from her to Jane’s niece, a girl half Jane’s age. I tried to convince Janis we could have a flirting society just among our own kind but she didn’t buy that. Do women need to be pre-menopausal to value the attention of men?

This might be another explanation of why older men chase younger women, and another reason why older women hate them so much for it. The obvious assumption that I have always lived with was old men chase young women because they thought young women prettier. As I got older I thought old men chased young women because they were the ones that put out. Now I have to wonder if it’s because its the young women who value flirting and attention.

When I continued to try to convince Janis that flirting could exist at a different level among the wrinkled set she kept insisting it wasn’t the same thing. I finally decided, at least with Janis, flirting is only exciting when it’s part of that whole gestalt of choosing Mr. Right.

I pictured a hot steamy pond with hundreds of croaking he frogs flirting with the she frogs and imagining a lady frog amused by all the bull frog attention trying to pick just the right Mr. Frog for reproduction that season. The tension would be great. Among humans it would be even greater because we mate for life, or so we think at the moment.

I have to wonder if my conversion with my friend wasn’t really Miss Janis Regrets. I hated to see her unhappy over that, but I also realized that I had something new to be unhappy with too. If women reach a point where they devalue flirting because of biological changes, and men don’t go through those same changes, then we become out of sync with women our own age. I think this is one of the many reasons why women hate getting older more than men do. We’re still game and they’re not. That’s going to be painful.

Jim

The Lights in the Sky is Space-Time

When I wrote “The Lights in the Sky are Stars” I was trying to remind people we live in this far out universe but most people fail to look up and notice. Sadly, light pollution has destroyed the impact of the night sky thus diminishing our sense of wonder. Now I’m reading Einstein by Walter Isaacson and its like a lesson in astronomy on LSD.

Over the years I’ve seen many documentaries and read many books on the theory of relativity and other ideas discovered by Einstein but I never really got them. I still don’t get them, but this book by following Einstein step by step as he grows up and then works on each problem helps me visualize the immensity of his discoveries better than anything so far. Coming to grips that space and time are not absolute and that they are really one thing called space-time is hard.

Einstein often uses vivid thought experiments to teach his concepts and one of my favorites is trying to imagine people living in a two dimensional world like the classic book Flatland. This is a great metaphor because for most people on Earth we only see the universe in a very limited way, and the genius of Einstein was he looked intensely at reality and said to everyone, “Hey guys, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I took many physics and astronomy courses in college but I never achieved orbit with them. I am like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon in that I once had a bit of smarts and got a tiny glimpse of reality but now it’s all forgotten. I’m like a woman of 56 trying to recapture her beauty of 22, so I don’t know if its physically possible to facelift my brain, but I keep trying. Hell, there’s got to be more to life than watching Lost on my HDTV (not that I don’t love that show).

Plastic surgery only succeeds so far with the body, so I don’t know how much I can push my brain at 56 to rejuvenate. Awhile back I bought The History of Science: 1700-1900 on DVD from The Teaching Company. I’m going to start watching those lessons again and study physics again. Einstein wrote his own popular science book about special and general relativity and I’m also going to buy that and try to “see” into his world using his own words.

Science is weird because a few really smart people study reality and make discoveries, and then they tell everybody and the rest of us go, “Oh yeah, I get that,” and then go on with out lives. We’re all taught in school that the Earth orbits the Sun even though when you look outside it sure does look like the Sun moves around terra firma. Most people live their lives like ants unaware that our little hive and its activities is part of something much bigger. The Earth is like an atom in an Apple.

Cosmology is the science of describing the whole enchilada. When Einstein first theorized the nature of space-time Hubble hadn’t even made his breakthroughs to explain galaxies. By trying to understand the nature of light and gravity he became the father of cosmology. Einstein’s brain and mathematics brought forth our whole spooky universe of quantum physics as if we were born out of his thoughts.

It didn’t take long for other scientists to see what Einstein saw. He quickly became movie star famous. A hundred years later we take all of his discoveries for granted, but not really. How many people really think about their place in the cosmos?

Now, at 56 I wonder how much I can see if I try? My memory is already a sieve. One reason I write these essays is to exercise the mechanism in my brain that processes words. Since working on this blog my brain is just a bit better at finding words, so maybe thinking about physics will be gym for my mind.

Jim

Heinlein on Audio

I love audio books. One of the first things I wanted to hear when I discovered audio books was stories by Robert A. Heinlein. And the first books I wanted to hear the most were all the Heinlein juveniles. I joined Audible.com at the beginning of 2002 and my first two monthly selections were The Menace from Earth by Heinlein and Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson.

At the time they didn’t have any of the juveniles, unless you count Starship Troopers, the intended thirteenth book in the Charles Scribner’s Sons series that was turn down causing Heinlein to leave the publisher, and I assume give up on writing juveniles. Podkayne of Mars was probably the 14th and last one written. Variable Star written by Spider Robinson and recently published was inspired by an outline of Heinlein’s. Finally, I consider Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin the closest thing you’ll ever get to another Heinlein juvenile, so I’d like to hear an audio edition of it.

Right now, [updated October 4, 2012], if you join Audible.com you can get the following books by Heinlein, including all four of his books to win the Hugo Award, and all twelve of the Heinlein juveniles. The list below are those audio books available through Audible.com in the USA. Other editions might exist.

Assignment in Eternity
Between Planets
Beyond This Horizon
Citizen of the Galaxy
The Door into Summer
Double Star
Farmer in the Sky
Farnham’s Freehold
For Us, the Living
Friday
Glory Road
Have Space Suit-Will Travel
I Will Fear No Evil
Job: A Comedy of Justice
Methuselah’s Children
Orphans of the Sky
Podkayne of Mars
Red Planet
Revolt in 2100
Rocket Ship Galileo
Six Column
Space Cadet
Starman Jones
Starship Troopers
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Cat Who Walks through Walls
The Menace from Earth
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
The Number of the Beast
The Puppet Masters
The Rolling Stones
The Star Beast
Time Enough for Love
The Green Hills of Earth
Time for the Stars
To Sail Beyond Sunset
Tunnel in the Sky

In the future I still hope to hear:

The Man Who Sold the Moon
Waldo & Magic Inc.
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag

We’re getting very close to having all of Heinlein’s books on audio. That’s pretty significant. It shows that Heinlein is still well loved – and I hope by new readers. It would be a shame that these audio books are selling only to old fans like me who want to hear his stories once again.

JWH – updated 10/4/12

In Defense of Microsoft

Those cute, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, commercials really irritate me. Now I don’t want to get into the whole PC versus the Mac thing although at times it might seem like I am. What I want to explore is our love-hate relationships with our computers. No matter how much you love your computer and OS, they can be throw-out-the-window annoying at times. For instance, Word 2007 crashed just after I started this blog entry. Office 2007 sometimes crashes on me on this machine, which happens to run Vista. I use Vista at work and Office never crashes, and I help support hundreds of machines and I’ve never got one support ticket for Office 2007 crashing like this. Service pack 1 didn’t help either. If I told this to my Mac loving tech friends at work it would excite them no end because it would be fuel for their anti-Microsoft philosophy.

John Dvorak, a famous computer pundit, regularly writes columns about the doom of Vista. He’s not the only one, there seems to be a tidal wave of attacks on Vista and Microsoft. I think Vista is superior to XP, and I love Office, especially 2007, even though it conks out on me at times on my home computer. My Mac friends will gleeful attack the faults of Microsoft for hours and I’ll mention I have a user with Leopard that keeps crashing and they’ll just quickly admit Leopard has some problems and go back to attacking Vista or Exchange. How weird is that? It’s like having a wife that tries to kill you from time to time, but since you love her you don’t want to divorce her. I think with Mac fanatics, they say she’s so beautiful, how can I give her up. PC fanatics say she does everything, takes care of the kids, cooks great meals, keeps a beautiful house, I couldn’t live without her. Linux fans brag how their computer wives never try to kill them while ignoring the fact that none of their friends find their wives attractive.

One reason I hate those I’m a Mac commercials is because they are as honest as a political campaign commercial. And I can’t understand why Microsoft doesn’t slam Apple with counter commercials. I’ve always been a loner, and should have been a Mac person. I even used a Mac for years. But I know who pays for my livelihood, and in the world of work, PC computers are the team player. And since I have to support hundreds of computers and users, the concept of team playing is quite obvious to me, even though I’m a loner type. Macs are like opinionated movie stars. Arty types are just not known to be team players, so I can’t understand why Macs even want to be part of the corporate world of team playing.

When I listen to my Mac friends they want to overthrow the government and establish a radical new political system. If makes me feel old and conservative. When I hear PC pundits scream for the return of XP, it makes me think I’m living with creationists. I ask my Mac friends what should we do and they say get rid of all the PCs. And I say wouldn’t Apple become the new Microsoft? At least Windows runs on any personal computer including Macs. Why would corporate America want to switch to a system where computers only come from one company? I tell my Mac friends if I was to dump Microsoft it would be for Linux. It’s more universal than Microsoft running on anything from the smallest to largest computers.

I’ve installed Linux once or twice a year since 1993. Every time I discover I can’t do what I want with Linux and go back to Windows, but each time it gets closer. Currently, if I was to switch away from Windows I could do the most of what I do now with a Mac, but I refuse to buy into a system with only a single source of hardware, and very expensive hardware at that. And even though Mac fanatics promise Nirvana, I support Macs at my job and I well know how unhappy some Mac users are at times.

The truth is we’re all unhappy with our computer systems. Sure PCs are plain-Jane machines that are as glamorous as shovels but we’re all able to work with them. Now that the PC pundits hate Microsoft, as well as the Mac and Linux users, I have to wonder should I give up on Microsoft. Is it time for a new computer world order? Now that the major music companies are all agreeing to sell music as MP3 files without DRM, it means any computer system can play them. Now that Amazon bought Audible.com, maybe I could get my audio books in a file format that isn’t dependent on my OS. If everyone used the same file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases, sound files, etc., then it wouldn’t matter which computer system I used.

But is that really valid? Some of the countries getting the OLPC computers are complaining that it doesn’t run Windows like the people use in the rich countries. When I ask kids from India and China coming over here to go to school about Linux they go huh? They want to study Microsoft and Oracle. Where Linux succeeds best is in the corporate world where it does unflashy server work. Logically, having an OS like Linux, with its free and open source philosophy, should become the world standard and be the replacement OS for PCs and Macs – and that might happen. But success might not be about logic. For my day-to-day use Vista is the champ because it offers me more variety of services and works with more online services and is more secure than XP. Are there things about Vista I don’t like? Sure. But to switch to any other system means a lot more aggravation. Even Microsoft and Windows must evolve.

Microsoft should make a series of ads where the hippie Mac kid walks into situations where teams of people are working and propose radical solutions. Imagine today at the Super Bowl the Mac kid walking out on the field and telling the quarterbacks “Hey, football sucks – soccer is the game for America.” Or have him walk into some corporate skyscraper and go up sixty floors to the CIO office and tell the top guy he should replace his 80,000 computers with Macs, retrain all his workers and rewrite billions of lines of code so his customers use Apple friendly programs.

I like my Mac and Linux friends, but I get tired of all the Microsoft bashing. And now that all the PC computer magazines and websites are starting to bash Microsoft too, it’s getting depressing. Computers are very important to me. It’s like my last blog entry about living without electricity; I wouldn’t want to live in a world without computers either. I want my computer to work faithfully and not annoy me, but I don’t want my OS to become my religion or political party or philosophy.

Jim

Living Like Jane Austen

My power went off Tuesday afternoon just as I was getting home from work and didn’t come back on for twenty-six hours. It was cold and dark outside and I sat bundled up in blankets thinking about what I would blog. My two cats struggled for the warmest place on my lap while I listened to the loud winds. We sat in candle light and I imagine this is what it must be like living in Jane Austen’s time. That old saying about only missing stuff when it’s gone is brilliant because I sorely missed electricity. No cooking, no heating, no television and most of all no computer. The only gadgets that worked were battery powered like my iPod Nano and flashlight or the wired phones. I had just finished listening to Northanger Abbey this weekend, so the early 19^th century was still on my mind.

Because I’ve also been thinking about lunar habitats I imagined what it would be like living underground on the Moon and having the power go out, or on a space station. It would be as black as a photographer’s darkroom. Out my window the low hanging clouds glowed dimly white from the sky glow of all the distant houses that had power, and I could see the black silhouettes of trees against them. On the Moon or Mars if you were underground it would be painfully dark. Of course emergency systems would cut in with light, or at least I hope. I’d assume they would have backup systems. Tuesday night I wished I had a backup system. But what if all systems failed? Imagine being in such a situation and wondering where the candles and matches are? When technology heads south we fall back on old ways.

Then I started wondering about backup systems for my home. The next day the annoying sound of two generators filled the air. In 2003 during Hurricane Elvis as we Memphians like to call a storm of straight-line winds that knocked out the power to hundreds of thousands homes, I had thought about buying a generator too, but didn’t. My wife and I went without power for thirteen days in hot humid August. Years before that we had an ice storm that knocked out our current house’s electricity for a week or so, but then Susan’s parents lived here. From ten stories up, my Memphis neighborhood looks like a sea of trees with an occasional rock of a tall building jutting up. We’re very susceptible to high winds and ice. So is it worth buying a generator for outages that happen every three years? I’m starting to wonder.

Between global warming, aging infrastructures, growing power demand, increased energy costs, frequent droughts and more bouts of strong weather, the idea of being energy self-sufficient crosses my mind more often. Certainly an old fashion wood stove would have helped during this blackout in the freezing cold. I have a gas fireplace, but it’s more for looks than heat. I wished I had solar panels for energy and heating, but the aforementioned trees put the kibosh on that solar tech. I’ve written about my desire for a solar energy tree collector before. However, unless I had an electrical storage system, that wouldn’t keep me from sitting in the dark at night.

We’re very depended on civilization. I don’t know how many times during that twenty-six hours I walked around my house instinctively trying to flip on a light, or grab something to eat that required a stove. Jane Austen sure does overlook those details about how they lived without electricity. Of course her characters were all dependent on servant power. Servants arranged for candles, heated water, cooked with coal or wood. I was amused by Jane’s references to modern living as opposed to the primitive living in the gothic novels her characters read.

This brings me back to generators. I wished 1950s science fiction was true and we all had a small nuclear power plant in the basement – or if cold fusion had panned out. Gas generators are noisy. So Tuesday night I sat in the dark and cold and imagined how to make gas generators less noisy. I suppose there are more expensive ones than those cheap jobs at Home Depot that might be quieter. I do know rich people can buy fall-over systems that go to work instantly when the power goes out, but alas, I’m not rich. I wondered if I could build a little soundproof concrete bunker with good ventilation for not much money. My goal would be to set aside one room in the house that had a small energy efficient air conditioner and heater and make it into my lifeboat room for when we had power problems.

I don’t want to live like Jane Austen’s pre-industrial world. I want to have my own little spaceship home that is self-sufficient during bad times. I know I’ll never get to live on the Moon or Mars, or in a space habitat, but in the end we all live like Jane Austen’s world of family and friends looking for relationships and love, even the people who will live in outer space. That’s why we read Jane two hundred years down her timeline, and why future men and women living on other planets will be read her books too.

The scary ideas of global warming, grid failures, economic downturns, worldwide pandemics, etc. make us fear losing the security of our homes. That’s why I like the idea of renewable energy and living off the grid, or having the grid as a backup. In one sense we all need to build self-sufficient lunar colonies in our own yards. Maybe I won’t be a space pioneer, but I might be able to be an energy self-sufficient pioneer.

There’s a wonderful book, The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840 by Jack Larkin, about rural life in America before industrialization. Someday someone will write The Reshaping of Everyday Life 2010-2050, and it will be about how we adapted to the current problems. Let’s hope it isn’t about how we had to de-evolve technologically and all live like Jane Austen again.

JWH