chez pim

Dave (the other dave) said

Dave (the other dave) said this to me today..."man, your brain must hurt a lot"
I'm taking it as a compliment.

at the Sashas' having a

at the Sashas' having a lovely birthday celebration with four of my best friends in the world.
and they say....

Benjamin: Let me be the first to say, "Happy Happy Birthday".

Here's Val: Let me be the second to say, very glad you were born and decided to move to san francisco, we are fortunate, and i'm not just saying this to get more bath balm and good tea, to have such a wonderful, special person here to remind us what is truly good in this insane world. tu es magnifique!

David: (a little too out-there to say anything eloquent now, he said)

Linda: i must agree that the world is a much sweeter, better place with you wandering the planet. i wish for you the best of all things, and may you get all that you need and most of what you want. i know that if sasha could express himself by typing he would say yipee! pimmie is fun! eieio. love and kisses

and of course Sasha: jkdjflkaopq mdslkqjfpoqv jdfjffff lll4455iwq98r xxoo

The story of the New

The story of the New York firefighters and police who ran up the stairs of the burning World Trade Centers while others were evacuating still brings tears to my eyes, even after hearing it a hundred times.

I found an address today for the New York Firefigthers 9-11 Disaster Relief Fund.
If this is not a good cause I don't know what is.
So go ahead, send money.

NEW YORK FIREFIGHTERS 9-11 DISASTER RELIEF FUND
C/O IAFF
1750 NEW YORK AVENUE N.W.
WASHINGTON D.C. 20006

I woke up tuesday morning

I woke up tuesday morning to unspeakable horror, and come wednesday I was back at work. A new day arrives and passes on by like any other.

On reflection I came to see what an absurdity normalcy has become.

At dinner last night, Val, Dave and I were talking about just this. How can we go along with our normal lives while so many will never be the same? How seemingly selfish of us to get back to focusing on our own lives and work in light of this carnage! At the same time, how futile any imaginable act on our part appears!

A friend pointed me to an essay by C.S. Lewis. Though the context in which Lewis penned the piece was the last great war, I find his words most timely and fitting.

Here is the timeless Mr.Lewis.......

"The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil... turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.

...

Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man and, perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to lifesaving in the sense of giving it his total attention -- so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim -- he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for."

-- C. S. Lewis ("Learning in War-Time", in The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses)

In graduate school and in

In graduate school and in my work I am trained to look at objects in a peculiar manner.

When I do my fieldwork in network operation centers I look to devices, charts, papers, and other tools, to help reconstruct work practice of the people using those artifacts. It has become a second nature for me to look at things and see beyond them to the people and communities of practice built into them.

I can hardly bare to watch the news report of the past few days. The remnants of papers and other objects scattered into the winds. To me those are faces and communities. Attached to each one of those now neglected things are people whose grave prospect I do not dare imagine. And inseparable from these lives that may now have been lost forever, there are yet more people who knew and loved them.

The media have been kind in not showing the more gruesome pictures of the human disaster.
Sadly, I am not spared.

I have neglected my blogs

I have neglected my blogs for a while, distracted by my busy life. Two days ago I was awaken to horror of unimaginable proportion. And today we are all still stuck in this nightmare.

My thoughts and prayers are with us all.

Hatred never ceases by hatred
But by love alone is healed.
(words of the Buddha, found on Spirit Rock)