my home is in empty spaces.

For once, just once more, I would like to know that passion of freshness, of ...hearing other people speak enchantedly throughout of the beginnings, middles and completions of projects they love, with the same love and commitment to change usually associated only with good marriages. I want to see whole people, living all parts of their lives with verve and vigour, for them to know that graciousness comes from within, and that we all struggle with it each day and that the struggle does not diminish us. I want you to know that there is no measure of a life well-lived other than one's own measure, no matter what people say. I just wanted you to know.

I just wanted you to know hope.

This is way too .... surreal for words.

Some differences between men and women, expressed in a way I haven't heard before:

Settersten RA (1997). The salience of age in the life course. Human Development 40:257-281.

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Hernes (1987) even suggests that men and women may have different needs for predictability and order, and that they naturally experience different kinds of time. Men's lives, Hernes says, are bound to linear time, while women's lives are instead bound to cyclical (or at least nonlinear) time. Cyclical time is time in which human planning is limited, and is influenced more by 'nature and deep cultural rhythms'. Linear time, on the other hand, is man-made clock time, and runs independently of nature; it is future- and goal-oriented, easily manipulated, rational time. Hernes' ideas mesh well with the work of others who argue that the lives of women are more intimately tied to the lives of other people and therefore experience more contingency, less predictability, and more discontinuity ([more refs]).

It is not surprising, then, that different social spheres have also been associated with different modes of time. The traditional lives of most men have been caught up in the economic and political spheres; those spheres seem anchored in linear time; and the male life course is therefore more constrained by age. In contrast, the traditional lives of women have been more tied to the sphere of family; the temporal experience of the family sphere seems nonlinear; and the female life course is therefore less constrained by chronological age, with the exception of imposing biological clocks around reproduction. If we buy Hernes' argument, then part of the 'contradictions' of parenthood ([another ref]) that many working women, in particular, experience may result from the fact that men and women live on different kinds of time, and that these temporal modes clash as individuals move between work and family spheres.

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I have bopped around the Internet and FOUND GOLD!!!! An interview with Robert Pirsig, who is, you know, that guy who wrote that book that was painfully difficult to read when I was 15 years old but which might make more sense now if only I had the inclination to set aside time to read it.

Link via strangeknight.

I really, really want to write, but I don't know what to write. So I will just have to write rubbish somewhere (say, here?) to prime the pump, so to speak. The 2,000-word essay assignment handed in a couple of days ago has sort of dislocated my brain.

A question: What do you people think of salsa dancing?

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(continued 7 hours later) I have managed to locate my brain again.

Programming languages are like women. (for my own reference)

Hilarious. T, you will love this.

Link via Lucian at tribolum.

"Gaia is made of living organisms and the material Earth and she regulates herself."

Am not dead. Settling some work issues.