Category: Time

What Gives Me A Sense of Accomplishment at Age 71

by James Wallace Harris

When we were little kids grownups would ask: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That plants a seed in us that we should have a goal for the future, to plan to do something and accomplish things. When we were little, we’d tell the grownups we wanted to be astronauts or rock stars, because those were the exciting glamourous occupations we knew about.

As we got older, we learned that becoming an astronaut requires getting advanced science degrees, and becoming a rock star means learning how to play the guitar and sing which takes ten thousand hours of practice, neither of which we really want to do.

As we got older we learned that just finishing doing anything had its own rewards. The trouble was learning what we like to do. I had to work at many shit jobs before I was 25 to learn what I actually liked doing, which was working in a nice office, messing with computers, and having coworkers who would become friends. Helping someone else accomplish their goals by programming a computer was what I eventually discovered I like doing. I found working at a university that helped other people to become what they wanted to be fulfilling to me.

Before we retire we think about all kinds of big things we want to do after we quit work. I thought about moving to New York City or living in England, or moving to a retirement community with a lot of social activities. But those things were like dreaming of becoming an astronaut when I was a kid. The reality of retirement was quite different. Susan and I decided to stay in the home we had. And my health problems made me not want to travel.

However, the urge to do something is still there. And even as I get older and can do less physically, I still have this desire that I should have a goal for the future, and to accomplish something. What’s rather fascinating is where and how I get my sense of accomplishment every day.

Nowadays, the future isn’t so far off. It’s either, “What am I going to do tomorrow,” or “What will I do today.”

My goals have become smaller and smaller too. A big one recently was cleaning out the attic. Our friends Anne and Tony came over and helped us get everything down, and now Susan and I are going through all the boxes and suitcases stacked up in the dining room to get rid of that stuff. When that task is done it will give me a reasonably big sense of accomplishment.

But I don’t need big things to accomplish to find satisfaction. Even going to the grocery store provides a satisfying sense of getting something done. It involves Susan and I planning our meals for the week, making a list, going shopping, and putting things away. All of that might take just a couple hours, but it wears me out and leaves me feeling I did do something worthwhile. Me and my old friends joke about how doing one thing like going to the grocery store makes us feel like we’ve gotten something done for the day. And the common joke is, “How did we ever have time for a job?”

If I look at my ToDoist app on my phone, I see a list of things to do that will make me feel good when I get to remove them from my To Do list. And most of those little goals are rather mundane: clean out the file drawers, find a new dermatologist, hire an electrician to install the new Blink security camera and light, cull out DVDs I’ll never watch again, get my eyes checked, and so on.

This is a long way from becoming an astronaut. We never hear people ask: “What do you want to do when you get old?” Theoretically, my retirement years could be longer than my work years. At one time I had big ambitions about what I would do with them, but like a kid growing up and discovering the reality of the work years, the reality of the retirement years is very different too.

A lot of what you can accomplish in retirement depends on money and health, and health really becomes the defining factor. I no longer have a bucket list of things I want to do because at some point the scope of life changes. My sister Becky once told me, “You start out life by living mostly in one room with someone changing your diaper and end up living mostly in one room with someone changing your diaper.” At the time that was funny, scary, and depressing. But as you get older, it becomes, “I can see that.”

I could still have a decade or two, or even three. That’s a lot of time. Unfortunately, it’s time when I’ll have dwindling energy and health. But I don’t think I’ll lose a sense of wanting to accomplish things.

I’m reminded of a short story by R. A. Lafferty called “Nine Hundred Grandmothers.” In it, a space explorer visits another planet and learns the beings there are immortal. However, they get smaller and smaller as they age. He is taken to a cave where the ancestors live on shelves in the wall. The further back he goes the tinier they get. That’s what life is like getting older. The scope of every day slowly gets smaller and smaller. You live with it.

Right now I measure accomplishments by how many books I read or essays I write. I like waking up in the morning and thinking of a goal and then achieving it during the course of the day. At 5:55am this morning I imagine writing this essay. It’s now 7:53am and I’ve almost got a first draft. I hope to finish it soon and eat breakfast. It’s great to start the day having completed a goal early.

Before I got up I also pictured cleaning up the house so our friend Leigh Ann could come over and Susan, Leigh Ann and I can spend the afternoon playing Rummikub. It’s not much of a goal, but it is satisfying.

And I look forward to tonight when Suan and I will watch another episode of Call the Midwife and A Place to Call Home. This might be silly, but I find watching complete series from pilot to finale gives me a sense of accomplishment. So each night I feel like we’ve done something by watching another episode from those two series.

Sometimes I even give myself big goals, ones that are daunting to me now. Ones that I have to push myself to finish. Like cleaning out and organizing my email and computer files on my hard drive. You might laugh, but I have thousands of emails and tens of thousands of computer files waiting to be examined.

Finally, there’s a weird symmetry to getting old. Susan and I have collected a lot of stuff in 45 years of marriage, and now we’re getting rid of all that stuff a little bit at a time. I have thousands of books that I still haven’t read. Ones I bought thinking that one day I’ll get to read. Well, that one day is here and I’ve got to get busy reading them. Finishing each one gives me a sense of accomplishment.

JWH (another thing done – 8:35am)

I Wish All My Family and Friends Blogged, I Wish Everyone Blogged

by James Wallace Harris, 7/16/23

What if everyone who ever lived kept an indestructible diary. Imagine reading what all our ancestors thought throughout their lifetimes. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but this could be the form of one. I’ve often wondered what my parents thought as they were growing up and got older. I’ve also wondered about my grandparents and what they thought about their lives. If they had written down their thoughts and were saved in some way, I could read them now. I wish I had a magic lamp and three wishes. This is how I’d use one of them.

I’ve always been somewhat interested in genealogy. However, just seeing names with dates of birth and death isn’t good enough. Whenever I see a genealogy chart I ask: Who were they, what did they think, what did they do?

The past is gone, so we can’t worry about that now. Although I have read accounts of people wanting to program an AI based on everything they could find out about someone they loved who died. The theory is if we programmed everything we know about a person, say Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway into an AI, it might act like those men. That sounds creepy. On the other hand, one of my favorite science fiction stories, “Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss involved the protagonist finding memory cubes by two people who had been married and died years apart and putting them on a shelf so they talked to each other. It was both moving, tragic, and pathetic all at once.

Reading books by famous writers and biographies about them does convey a sense of who they were and how they reacted to their times. And biographies about famous people who left no writings of their own lack something. Look at the four Gospels — if only Jesus had written something himself.

Blogging offers the potential to do what I’m talking about. What if the Library of Congress archived all blogs. Would people in the 22nd century find our blogs interesting? What about the 43rd century?

If you pay attention to serious fiction and films, much of the trouble conveyed about the characters and interactions with other characters is due to a lack of communication. A good example is Celeste Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You. Think about every person you ever loved, hated, or worked with, and what it would mean if you read their inner thoughts? Or at least the thoughts they wanted to share?

Also, it’s important to know that our thoughts are not coherent. Writing is the way we learn this. You’ll never know yourself only by thinking. Writing is a way to sculpt thoughts into something recognizable. Writing is the way to learn about yourself, and reading is the way to learn about other people.

Remember being back in school and all the emotional turmoil and conflicts caused by relationships, perceived relationships, and lack of relationships? Would we have been better people, kinder people, more self-aware people, if we had all blogged back then and read each others’ thoughts? Weren’t a lot of our problems as kids because we hid inside of ourselves and only speculated about our classmates? Would there be more or less school shootings if all the kids knew each other better?

Not only would growing up blogging help with self-expression, and communication, but it would have made us better learners and scholars. I’ve already written about “Blogging in the Classroom.”

I also wrote, “77 Things I Learned From Writing 1000 Blog Essays” which was mostly about how blogging is a great self-improvement tool. One of the main reasons I blog is it helps keep my mind together.

But I mostly wish everyone I knew blogged so I could learn more about them. Lately, I’ve been noticing how little we really communicate with one another. We have our public persona, and we hide the rest. I’ve noticed how many people as they grow older withdraw into themselves. We tend to just chat. Is that because we have given up on relationships? Or because we have more worries about ourselves and don’t want to worry about other people?

For some reason, we consume fiction hours a day. And it’s not the kind of fiction where we learn about people. It’s the kind that helps us forget and hide. Wouldn’t our lives be better if we learned more about real people and not imaginary people?

On the other hand, we are bombarded with personal problems and information overload every day. Maybe we watch television because we had enough of reality and real people? Even extroverts who crave constant social activity often stay at a shallow level of communication. Could the fact that we don’t all blog, or communicate deeply imply that’s what we prefer?

JWH

Why Didn’t I Hear The Beatles in 1963?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/25/23

I’ve been playing The Beatles all this week and I noticed something that has me thinking about it a lot. The first two Beatles albums Please Please Me and With the Beatles came out in 1963 in the United Kingdom but I didn’t hear them until after February 9, 1964, when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Obviously, some Americans heard Fab Four songs before then because there were mobs at the airport and 73 million people watched Ed’s show that night.

When do you remember first hearing the Beatles? I got interested in those dates because I was going to write an essay about what I remembered about The Beatles from 1964, but it bothered me I was recalling my 1964 but the tunes were from 1962 and 1963. America and England were out of sync by over a year.

Why hadn’t I heard the Beatles on the radio in 1963? Starting in 1962, I listened to Top 40 music several hours a day on WQAM and WFUN AM radio stations in Miami, so I should have heard The Beatles’ songs if they were released. I just don’t remember hearing them at all in 1963.

“Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You” was released in England on October 5, 1962, but not until April 24, 1964, in the U.S., when it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Beatlemania could have started in late 1962, or early 1963 — why didn’t it?

“Please Please Me/From Me To You” was the Beatles’ 2nd single in England, released on January 11, 1963. It reached #1 on the New Music Express and Melody Maker charts. “Please Please Me/Ask Me Why” was the first Beatles single released in the United States on February 25, 1963, but failed to chart. Some radio stations around the country played this single but it got no screaming fans and was forgotten. “Please Please Me” reached #35 in Chicago on March 8 on their local charts, and again on March 15, but disappeared after that.

“Please Please Me/From Me To You” was re-released in the U.S. on January 3, 1964, and made it to #3 on Billboard. Again, it was obvious that Americans loved the Beatles, but why did we wait until 1964 to love them? This makes me want to write an alternate history science fiction story about Beatlemania hitting America during Christmas of 1962. And it can’t be all Capitol’s fault.

Three more singles by the Beatles were released in the U.K. in 1963: “From Me To You/Thank You Girl” on 4/11/63, “She Loves You/I’ll Get You” on 8/23/63, and “I Want To Hold Your Hand/This” on 11/29/63. Did Americans visiting England bring back these singles and albums? Weren’t there any word-of-mouth from the jet setters?

According to Wikipedia, 34 songs were recorded by the Beatles in 1962 and 1963. Capitol turned down the opportunity to put them out, and a little label, Vee-Jay snapped up the rights. Vee-Jay planned to release Introducing… The Beatles, a repackaged of the UK album Please Please Me in July of 1963, but Vee-Jay didn’t get it out until January 10, 1964. Then Beatlemania hit and Capitol took back the rights.

Theoretically, I could have heard some of the Beatles songs in 1963 on WQAM or WFUN in Miami, but I don’t think so. What if Beatlemania had arrived a year earlier? Would that have launched The Sixties sooner? The 1960s up until the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, never felt like the legendary times we call The Sixties. 1960 to 1963 felt like the 1950s.

The Sixties, at least to me, began when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. Seeing them that night felt like Dorothy opening the door in The Wizard of Oz when the film went from black and white to Technicolor. The magic of the Sixties ended for me with Charles Manson and Altamont. In 1970, The Beatles broke up, my father died, and I moved from Miami to Memphis. That’s when I felt The Seventies began.

I was going to write an essay comparing The Beatles’ first two albums against their competition. In America, our first two Beatles albums in 1964 were a mixture of songs from the UK 1963 albums and 1962-1963 singles plus some cuts from the third and fourth British Beatles albums recorded in 1964. It’s all rather confusing if I wanted to understand music as a product of its times.

Here’s an overview of what The Beatles were doing in 1963. As they were writing those songs, or doing covers of American songs, it was 1963. But they made a social and psychological impact on us in 1964. That delay fascinates me.

This week I played all the Beatles albums from Please Please Me (UK 1963) to The Beatles (White Album) (UK/US 1968). I can play all the albums through Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) over and over and did this week. All the songs appeal to me. Each album was a unique masterpiece. Things completely fell apart with The Beatles (White Album). (George Martin and others thought it should have been a single album. I agree completely. The White album feels like a single album with a bunch of outtakes and demos.)

Even though I loved all those Beatles albums through 1967, I’ve only put a few of their songs on my Top 1000 playlist on Spotify. I’ve been wondering why for a long time. I want to compare The Beatles’ songs to the hits that came out at the same time that I love better. But when I saw the dates when the first two albums came out were from 1963, I wondered if should I compare those songs to songs coming out in 1964 when I first heard those Beatles songs, or to songs that were coming out in 1963 when The Beatles recorded their songs?

As I listened to the Beatles’ albums this week it was obvious with each album John, Paul, George, and Ringo progressed in creative sophistication. But then so did pop hits each year. In America, those 1964 Beatles releases stomped the 1964 American releases. But shouldn’t they be compared to 1963 songs?

Finally, could I have heard some Beatles songs in 1963 and they just made no impact on me? Did it take Beatlesmania to get us to love The Beatles? And could the reason I put so few of their songs on my Top 1000 playlist is because Beatlesmania and The Sixties ended in 1969?

JWH

Developing a Healthy News Diet

by James Wallace Harris, 5/21/23

Michael Pollan created a small book about eating healthy called Food Rules. As an analogy, I’d like to create a set of sensible rules about consuming the news. Pollan distilled his list of rules down to three simple sentences, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” but it really takes reading his book to understand that mantra.

What I would like to do is develop a similar simple mantra about my daily news consumption but I’ll have to work out the details first. Pollan emphasized eating whole foods rather than processed foods. Is there such a thing as whole unprocessed news? “Not too much” is an obvious target since we obviously consume too much news. Finding an analogy for “mostly plants” will be interesting.

What would be the equivalent of nutritious news? Experience has taught me that some news is unhealthy, and I often get news indigestion. I also admit I’m bloated and overweight from too much news consumption.

Like whole food and junk food, we prefer junk news over whole news. I spend several hours a day nibbling on news from many sources. Most of which is forgotten immediately. I wonder if my first rule should be:

#1 – Ignore easily forgettable news

We’re used to clicking on anything that catches our fancy while idling away moments on our smartphones. Essentially, this kind of news is gossip and titillation. Basically, we’re bored or restless. We should use that time in better ways, especially if it exercises our minds. Read real news instead. Or, do something active. Playing games, listening to music, or audiobooks, is more nutritious than never-ending bites of clickbait.

Everyone bitches about information overload but who does anything about it? I’ve learned from intermittent fasting that my body appreciates having a good rest each day from eating. I believe I need to apply the same idea to news consumption.

#2 – Limit your hours consuming the news

I find 16:8 fasting works well for eating. I’m thinking of a 22:2 fast for news is what I’m going to aim for at the moment. Two hours of news consumption a day might sound like a lot, but if you add up all the forms of news I consume including television, magazines, online newspapers, YouTube, and news feeds, RSS feeds, I can easily go beyond two hours.

We should also separate news from learning and entertainment. Learning something new could be considered a form of news. I’m not going to count educational pursuits in my news time. And if you enjoy reading nonfiction books or watching documentaries on TV, that shouldn’t count as news either. However, shows like 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, and The Today Show can be considered informative entertainment news. Some people just prefer news shows for fun rather than watching fictional shows. I’m not sure if they should count or not.

What we really want is to stay informed about the world so that we interact with reality wisely. Humans have an extremely difficult time processing information. We think we’re far smarter than we are. We constantly delude ourselves. And we think our opinions matter when 99.999% of the time they don’t. Most people think they are experts on countless topics after having consumed just a few hours of news. They think they know better than real experts who have put tens of thousands of hours into studying their specialty.

#3 – Stop assuming you know anything

I believe the real key to understanding the news is being able to tell the difference between opinion and significant data. The real goal of news consumption should be finding the best data, and that means getting into statistics.

Unfortunately, the news industry is overwhelmed with talking heads. Everyone wants to be an expert, and all too often most news consumers tend to latch onto self-appointed experts they like. News has become more like a virus than information processing.

I read and watch a lot of columnists and programs about computers, stereo equipment, and other gadgets. Most are based on personal impressions of equipment individuals have bought or been loaned from manufacturers. These tech gurus are a good analogy for what I’m talking about. Most of the news we take in daily is from individuals processing limited amounts of information and giving us their opinion. What we really want is Consumer Reports, Rtings, or the Wirecutter, where large amounts of data are gathered from a variety of sources, and statistically analyzed.

This is just a start on designing my news diet. I want to keep current on a long list of topics, but that’s like learning about all the vitamins and nutrients my body needs. News nutrition will be a vastly more complicated topic. What are the essential vitamins I need every day? Is it politics, national and international affairs, economics, crime, immigration, ecology, etc?

Do I need to know about everything? Is that what an informed citizen needs to do? Take immigration. Is anything I think about immigration affects the situation at the border? Does voting liberal or conservative even affect anything at the border? I can barely maintain order in my house, why should I believe I can organize all of reality on Earth? Maybe my last two rules should be:

#4 – Know my limitations

#5 – Pursue the news I can actually use

Like nutrition, news is a complicated subject that’s hard to understand and can easily confuse.

JWH

Why Do I Want Old Issues of Rolling Stone Magazine From the 1960s and 1970s?

by James Wallace Harris, 3/26/23

The other day I got the hankering to read old issues of Rolling Stone from the 1960s and 1970s and started trying to track them down. This morning I decided I needed to psychologically evaluate why I was doing this because I realized as I was still lying in bed that I don’t have enough time in life to read everything I want to read. So why waste reading time on these old magazines? That got me thinking about a Reading Bucket List and focusing on reading the most important books rather than just trying to read everything.

I might have ten more years, or it could be twenty or thirty, but the time to get things read is dwindling. For practical purposes, I’m going to assume I have ten years which will put me in the average lifespan range. Since I average reading one book a week, that’s 520 books. My best guestimate suggests I already own six times that many in my TBR pile. Or, put another way, I’ve already bought enough books to keep me reading for another sixty years. I need to stop chasing after more things to read like hundreds of old issues of magazines.

So why want to read a bunch of old magazines? Since I started contemplating the idea of a Reading Bucket List, I realized it’s not the number of books. This was my first useful revelation today. It’s the number of topics I want to study, including fictional explorations on those topics too.

Lately, I’ve been reading about the creation of the atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere, how the general public felt about nuclear war in the 1950s, and 1960s, and how all of that influenced science fiction novels and short stories. If I explored that subject completely I could use up my 520 books easily. Because I want to explore a number of topics before I die, I also need to limit how deep to get into them.

I see now that my Reading Bucket List won’t be a list of books, but a list of topics to study. So I need to change my bucket list name from Reading Bucket List to Topics to Study Bucket List. My fascination with topics usually doesn’t last long, just a few weeks or a couple of months. However, most of the topics I’m interested in are reoccurring. I’ve chased them my whole life and keep coming back to explore them some more.

(It might be valuable to make a list of these topics, but that’s for the future. Another project: see if I can create a timeline of how often these interests resurface.)

Let’s get back to the magazines. I believe writing the above paragraphs have already helped me see something important. I want to reread old issues of Rolling Stone with a specific goal. (One reason I write these blog posts is to think things through and see into myself.)

I want Rolling Stone magazines to find albums and groups I missed when I read Rolling Stone the first time they were coming out. This is part of a larger project of studying I’ve been piddling away at for decades. I started haunting record stores in 1965, but I never could afford to buy many albums each week. As I got older and had more money I’ve always tried to catch up by buying older records when I bought new ones, filling in the past. Now with Spotify, I can listen to almost any album from the past. But I need to know about the group or album to search for it and play it. I thought I’d read old record reviews and look for albums that are forgotten today but got good reviews back then.

My ultimate goal is to get a solid understanding of popular music from 1960 to 1980. Eventually, I want to add 1948-1959 and 1981-1999. And if I have time I’d like to learn about classical music. But I’ll define this topic as: What Were the Best Albums When I Grew Up? I figured Rolling Stone magazine from 11/9/67 to 12/31/80 could help me.

There are plenty of books on the best albums of all time, including from Rolling Stone, and I have many of them. But they tend to focus on the same famous albums and artists. I love when I find a song that’s been forgotten that really excites me. For example, recently I found “Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl from back in 1963. I was listening to AM music at least eight hours a day back in 1963, but I don’t think I remember this song, at least not distinctly remember it. The title is familiar, and some of the lyrics, but then this song has been covered a number of times, including by The Rolling Stones.

Yesterday, I played “Harlem Shuffle” several times very loud on my big stereo with a 12″ subwoofer and it sounded fantastic. Boy did it press some great buttons in my soul. And that’s also part of my Topics to Study Bucket List. I grew up with certain buttons I liked pushed. I want to understand them. Studying music from 1960-1980 is working toward that. Studying science fiction that came out from 1939-1980 is another. But like I said before, making a list of all of them is for another day.

And wanting old issues of Rolling Stone is not a new desire. Back in 1973-74, I bought three huge boxes of old issues of Rolling Stone at a flea market. God, I wish I had them now, but I wouldn’t have wanted to drag them around for fifty years either. And earlier this century I bought Rolling Stone Cover to Cover, which featured every issue from 1967 to May 2007 on DVD. I still have it, but the discs have copy protection and the reader software stopped working after Windows 7. I’m thinking about setting up a machine, or virtual machine, and installing Windows XP on it to see if I can get it going again. But that will be a lot of work.

With some help from some folks on the internet, I’ve gotten the first 24 issues of RS on .pdf. I’m hoping to find more. If you have them and wish to share them, let me know. Or if you know of any other source. I’m also interested in learning about other magazines that reviewed music from 1960-1980. And I’ve already gotten some recommendations of less than famous bands to try. If you have a favorite forgotten album or group leave a comment. And now that I think about it, if you’re working on a similar project, tell me about your methods.

Ultimately, I want a list of all the albums I love most from 1960-1980. I might even buy them if I don’t own them already. I enjoy listening to one or two albums a day. Recent great discoveries were the first albums by Loretta Lynn and Etta James. I was surprised by how well they were produced, and how well everything sounds on my latest stereo system.

This week I discovered Amazon is selling CD sets that feature 3-8 original albums from certain groups for about the price of a single LP. Yesterday, I got in a set of Buffalo Springfield that was remastered under the supervision of Neil Young. 5 CDs for their three albums. (2 CDs are copies in mono.) I also ordered the first 6 studio albums of the Eagles, 7 albums from Fleetwood Mac’s middle period, and five albums of Weather Report. But these are famous albums. The real goal is to find forgotten albums I love as much as the classics of rock music.

JWH