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Wednesday, May 18th, 2005
In the middle of our life's walk
I found myself in a dark wood
for the straight road was lost Happy Birthday Matt Yglesias! Reading his post reminds me that it's my birthday too, yeah, I am to the day, 11 years older than Matt. So I am as old now as the narrator of the Inferno.
posted afternoon of May 18th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, May 16th, 2005
A lot more work yesterday on Sylvia's playhouse -- I shingled the roof (in a kind of half-assed way which involves nail heads being visible at the top of the roof) and put up the railing along the sides and back. Today I am quite sore. Next step is to put a railing on the front (only halfway across the front) and a ladder. It seems totally possible to me that the house will be finished by next weekend in time for my birthday party.
posted morning of May 16th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, May 13th, 2005
Frank and I got roof up on Sylvia's playhouse last night -- it looks good and all that is needed now is a ladder and a railing.
posted evening of May 13th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, May 8th, 2005
Today I made practical use (for I think the first time in my life) of that most vital bit of mathematical knowledge (according to the folks that write the standardized tests), that a right triangle whose legs are 3N and 4N will have a hypotenuse of 5N. (Seriously, if you're planning to take the GRE soon make sure you know that -- about a quarter of the math questions reduce to it.) I was trying to figure out how long to cut the sticks for the edges of the roof of Sylvia's playhouse. Thinking I can use trigonometry but unsure about what angle it ought to be at -- I'm trying to mimic the garage which is nearby, it has a pretty steep roof but it does not look like a 45 degree slope... I was drawing different triangles on paper trying to get one that looked nice when it hit me -- the horizontal leg is 32" (which leaves a nice amount of eaves), if I make the peak of the roof be 24" above the eave then I have a nice 40" long hypotenuse. Cut everything up and a couple of hours later I had roofs. (They are currently lying on the lawn, waiting to be mounted -- this is a task which requires some pretty heavy lifting and I am getting my neighbor Frank to give me a hand with it on Wednesday Thursday.)
posted evening of May 8th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, May 6th, 2005
Here is an essay William Gass wrote for the New York Review of books on the occasion of a new and complete translation of The Man Without Qualities -- nice piece but poorly formatted. (Note that I am reading the older, abridged translation -- only even learned today that that's what it is.)
posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond
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Note on the below: "treating someone as a means rather than an end" is the same as "objectifying" the person, and the thought I am trying to develop about Ulrich can be rendered as that he "objectifies himself".
posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond
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For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious, and perhaps even too a private one; he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man everything, with one exception; he may not take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the very thing that ought to be the filling of him. -- The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil: Chapter 8, "Kakania" I have been getting my first inklings of sympathy for Musil's characters, I started to notice it around Chapter 14 -- specifically for Ulrich but also Walter and Clarisse. With Ulrich my thinking has run sort of like this -- that Ulrich, there's something weird about him... I have heard calculating people described as "treating others as means reather than ends" -- could that be applied to Ulrich? Maybe, but (a) I am not concretely sure what the phrase means (NPI), (b) Ulrich hasn't even interacted with that many other people yet (at the time I was thinking this, about Chapter 12, only 2 other characters had been introduced, both very briefly). Aha! But Ulrich has been relating to himself quite a bit in this story. Could it be that he is "treating himself as a means rather than an end"? That sounds promising, though with the caveat that I am still not so sure what I mean by it. But let's pursue... I am feeling a good deal of sympathy for Ulrich -- could the point of identification be reducible to the (still not-well-defined) attribute of "treating oneself as a means rather than an end"? When I started sympathizing with him it was in connection with his desire to become "an important person" and cluelessness about how to achieve that -- such a vague, shapeless ambition has been characteristic of my Bildung. It is something I am really thinking I need to grapple with in approaching my Master's Degree.
posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, May third, 2005
Okay the current Ulysses attempt is officially over -- it's just not moving me enough to be worth the effort. (Except for that "Calypso" episode, that one's really nice.) Moving on... I'm flirting with the idea of reading The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I read the first 20 or so pages yesterday and found them funny and engaging. For some reason I am reluctant to commit to that book though.
posted evening of May third, 2005: Respond
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Honorifics will be the death o' me. Just sent an e-mail to a professor, realized after I clicked Send that I had addressed her as "Ms" steada "Dr" -- something I hardly ever do when addressing male professors. The hidden sexist strikes again!
posted morning of May third, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, April 30th, 2005
I have many projects in my woodworking portfolio that took longer than they should have taken -- furniture pieces generally take me two months minimum and it's always been a source of frustration for me. But tonight I built my first piece of furniture (well, more "finish carpentry" I guess) that I finished in a single session -- 3 hours from a board to installation. It is a built-in shelf in our new bathroom. The main time-consuming part of it was carving out a recess in the surface of the shelf -- basically I wanted the shelf to have a lip around its edge, so I chiseled out the area inside the lip with my new set of gouges*. I was able to get it quite flat except for one corner where the grain is funny -- there is a rise and a depression there. But everything is quite smooth. The shelf is mounted between the moldings of two doorways. I had been thinking for a few days, that a shelf would be nice there, but could not figure out how to do it. This evening it hit me -- pocket screws! I have never used pocket screws before; but I cut pockets for them out of the board with a chisel, and it worked just great. After we finish the painting in Sylvia's room I am going to post some photos of various home improvements we have been doing; I will be sure to put a shot of this up. (Here is a post I wrote at Woodcentral about the technique I used to hang the shelf.)
* I really want to recommend these gouges by the way. If you enjoy carving wood they are going to add dramatically to your enjoyment. They are 18 fishtail gouges in various widths and sweeps, plus two parting tools, available at the low low price of $200 from Woodcarver's Supply. I say they are "new" but I actually bought them about a year ago and have used them lightly a couple of times since; this is the first heavy work I have done with them. When I saw them I found them too good a deal to pass up; plus I love fishtail gouges, and I only ever see straight gouges for sale elsewhere.
posted afternoon of April 30th, 2005: Respond
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