"Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now."

pro·cras·ti·nate >(prō-krās'tuh-nāt', pruh-) v.
To put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness.

An early pleasing discovery in high school Latin was that "cras" meant "tomorrow." Combined with "pro," meaning "for," one arrived at "procrastinate," a fancy word meaning to put stuff off "for tomorrow." This discovery was especially delicious, because made while putting off doing the next day's translation by thumbing idly though the vocabulary at the back of the Latin book.

My beloved uncle, when later writing a reference letter for me to his own alma mater, saw fit to mention that I had a weakness for often putting things off to the last minute. I got in anyway. The folks in Admissions, weary after reading thousands of applications from absolutely perfect students and their doting relatives, were probably curious to see what this strange lad, from an impossibly honest family, could possibly look like.

That was then, this is now. For the past five weeks I've known that I had an appellate brief due on Monday, April 2. But more urgent matters -- or more interesting matters -- always stood in the way. The weeks flew by. The cold implacable deadline hovered, shimmering on the horizon, growing ever nearer. Averting my gaze did not work. The dread final weekend was upon me.

Friday -- yesterday -- I vowed that I would devote the entire day to roughing out a first draft. Or at least researching all of the case law. Right. You bet. My phone rang incessantly, all day. People dropped by to chat. Emails, all marked "urgent" crowded into my in-box, giving off annoying "pings."

By day's end, I had completed a one page "Introduction" section. Going home, an icy wind blew metaphorically about my collar.

But this morning I was up early and at work. My desk overflowed with documents and books. My adrenaline surged. My mental gears spun well oiled and swift, emitting an efficient hum that sounded throughout the quiet, deserted offices. My steely and terrified gaze pierced the omniscient eye of my computer monitor. My fingers flew over the keys.

Oh joy. Oh relief. I'm about half way done, and I see the pathway ahead. I can finish it up tomorrow -- assuming I get past the NY Times book section and the local comics in the morning -- and spend Monday polishing up my logic and language. And dump it, just in time, still warm from the printer, into the evening mail.

Tonight, I can actually come home and relax for a couple of hours.

But I reflect. Yes, to myself, I really do. What is it about me, so unchanged from my earliest days? That ... puts ... things ... off? I know people who, two months before a deadline, actually draft summaries of their projects, and set aside the final week to touch up and polish their opera magna. These are despicable people, you understand. Monsters. I really would sneak into their office and delete the files from their hard drives. If I could ever get around to it.

So yes, I stand in front of you and declare: "My name is Don, and I am a Procrastinator." I must seek a twelve-step path to rehabilitation. But first, maybe I'll just write another tiny post for my blog.

Oh, I think I just did!

Do you feel happy, oh so happy?

Are you happy?

I suspect that anyone who spends time wondering how to be happy, isn't. And maybe something in his brain chemistry actually precludes such a fellow from feeling that very subjective sensation of "happiness." Happiness (and even more so, unhappiness) is an experience that is uniquely human, as are other such peculiar human sensations as depression, envy, nostalgia for the past, fear of aging, and free-floating Republican anger. It is unlike more simple reactive emotions, shared by other animals, such as fear, contentment, focused rage, and lust.

Where's the evolutionary survival value of happiness? Happy folks don't seem to spawn more kids than unhappy folks, or to live more frequently to a reproductive age. Nevertheless, happy parents do, disproportionately, have happy children, it seems. This fact may suggest, at least at first glance, that the capacity for "happiness" is a genetic trait, of unknown use and origin. But, in fact, it does not resolve the issue of nature vs. nurture -- are we born happy or do we learn happiness from our parents? (Some of you bright folks may know of genetic or psychological studies that have completely resolved these muddled mullings of mine, but I prefer to mull in the abstract, undisturbed by any actual scientific findings, thank you.)

These thoughts are prompted by a pop psychology article in -- once again -- that on-line cyberpop journal, MSNBC. Their financial editor, Jean Chatzky, reaches the startling conclusion that -- once you have food, shelter and basic clothing -- money cannot buy additional happiness. Well, that sure calls into question the structural integrity of my entire life! Not to mention the continuing value of her weekly financial advice.

But, no, she isn't that radical. Money itself cannot buy happiness, she observes, and "things" purchased with money have a limited and temporary ability to boost your endorphins. But money, wisely used, can smooth the way to what I relabel her "Six Paths to Happiness." I paraphrase them, for my readers' increased happiness, thusly:

1. Pay attention daily to all the little things that make you happy. Smell the roses. Hug your kids and your friends. Keep a "happiness diary." Much of unhappiness results from ignoring our many reasons to be happy.

2. Getting there is half the fun. Those weeks dreaming of getting your drivers license were more fun than actually driving. Smelling the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven beats the dinner itself. Standing on the front porch, waiting to be invited in for a drink, is more exciting .... well, no need to belabor the point. Don't wish your life away, waiting for future pleasures. Enjoy the anticipation itself.

3. Do something new. Go to the same old boring tropical paradise every year? Poor baby. This year, try a week in New York.

4. Do something selfless. One of the best kept secrets. Doing someone a quiet favor can trump, by a league and a half, the pleasure of buying yourself a wide screen TV. Our grandparents knew all about it: "It's more blessed to give than to receive."

5. Do work you love, not just work that pays. Once you finish school, you spend at least a third of your hours working. Do something that makes you feel excited about getting up each morning.

6. Do something physical. Happiness, however caused, is accompanied by hormonal changes. A good run in the park can itself make those hormones flow. Some studies show that regular exercise is as effective at fighting depression as commonly prescribed anti-depressants.

Nothing new here, is there? We already knew all of these tips. But maybe it's handy to see them all collected together in a tidy list?

Or maybe not. Again, if you need a recipe for happiness, you may be congenitally inclined toward unhappiness (or suffer from clinical depression, which is a whole different subject and may require medication). Ms. Chatzky's list may serve mainly to remind happy people of why they are happy. But genetics is not destiny. Even with bad genes, you are not doomed to misery. Happiness is not a goal, but a by-product of other accomplishments. Focus on your outward life, not your inward emotions. Remember the "Six Paths." Be curious about the small wonders about you, form future plans that you can look forward to, be open to novelty, care about people who need your care, get excited about your work.

When all else fails, run a marathon.

While your attention is fixed on these goals, "happiness" may well sneak in through the back door, and catch you by surprise.

"Portez-moi à votre chef!"

PARIS - On an August day in 1967, two children tending a herd of cows outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and trail of sulfuric odors.

--MSNBC, March 23, 2007

So begins today's news story on MSNBC. You see, the French government apparently decided to throw open all its files regarding investigions of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO's), from the 1950's all the way to the present. The story above, describing a sighting by a 13 year old boy, while tending his folks' cows, and by his 9 year old sister, in the little village of Cussac, is called a "very credible" sighting.

"'No rational explanation has been given to date of this exceptional meeting,' the investigation concluded."

Yikes!

The proud civilization that brought us the three musketeers, Versailles, Monet and Renoir, good eats, great wines, and, as the Republicans would add, "cheese eating surrender monkeys," now brings us an even more other-worldly set of experiences. Meanwhile, the United States continues to classify all UFO investigations as top secret matters of national security. How strange. Will the battle for Iraq be threatened if we discover that, to those in a broader Universe, we are as insignificant as the African pygmies were to European civilizations of the 19th Century?

(I visualize leaders of a 50-person forest tribe suppressing rumors of strange palefaced traders seen a hundred miles down river. "A matter of tribal security," the chief whispers to his top advisers. "Bad juju!")

Well, we're part of a big universe. It shouldn't surprise us if other so-called intelligent life exists somewhere besides here on our insignificant and rapidly warming planet. I believe that God, however you wish to conceive him, was ultimately responsible for all of creation. But he seemed to waste an extraordinary amount of material, and used up an awful lot of space, if his only concern was getting men and women up and moving on our little spherical rock.

On the other hand, I can't even figure out how my next door neighbor thinks. So, it may be a bit presumptious for me to try to read God's mind? "For my thoughts are not your thoughts; nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord." Isaiah 55:8. Ok, ok, fair enough. I'm not going to argue with Isaiah. Still -- if I'd been creating the Universe in my own workshop, and all I'd been interested in doing was cobbling together a home for the human race -- I think I would have put together an altogether tidier and more compact universe, one you could vacation around in a bit and still return home in time not to be fired by your boss. And I would have left a helluva lot less lumber lying around when I was finished.

So I'm willing to accept that "small black beings" may actually live out there, and may even have visited Earth on occasion. And, certainly, if they are intelligent small black beings, you would expect them to land in France rather than, say, Fargo, North Dakota. But, over the centuries, there have been enough mistaken, if not actually fraudulent, reports of miracles, wonders, ghosts, witchcraft, sea monsters, hidden continents, Martian canals, and Stanford football victories, to make me suspicious of alien sightings that are verified only by a couple of French country kids bored out of their skulls from watching cows all day.

So, let's keep an open mind, certainly, but a healthy skepticism as well. Be trusting, as the saying goes, but keep one hand on your wallet.

Bertrand Russell: A personal hero

Bertrand Russell was one of the great mathematicians and philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His life spanned 97 years, much of it dedicated to social and political ideals. Although he was a militant atheist, and his conduct was not always "saintly," he wrote a summary of a life well lived that often inspires me:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Like, 1984, or whatever

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. … In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

--George Orwell

The only critic to date of this, my new blog, has urged me to write something "profound." Immediate stage fright was the predictable result. Profundity on demand has never been my strong point. But then I began thinking, as I’m wont to do, about Bush, Cheney & Co., and their heroic efforts to create an Imperial Presidency. Perhaps, I thought, some startling epiphany from Orwell’s 1984 might be an appropriate starting point.

Well, I didn’t find the quotation I was looking for, but I did come up with the interesting insight quoted above.

George Orwell had the Soviet Union of Stalin’s day in mind when he wrote 1984, back in the 1940's, but his observations aren’t merely a criticism of that Communist regime, or of Communism in general. His book provides a handy dandy manual, in the form of parody, wide open to any person or group hoping to gain total control over a society. "Big Brother," and the leaders of the world’s other two, supposedly competing empires, realized fully that a nation mobilized to fight an enemy is a nation willing to sacrifice much to avoid defeat, just as a fox with his foot snared in a trap will, in desperation, bite off its foot to escape. They then concluded – correctly -- that continuous war would result in continuous sacrifice. The enemy might change from time to time, to prevent any slackening of interest among the citizenry, but war itself always went on. Sacrifices from the masses would always be required, and would always be given by their frightened subjects.

The war in Iraq serves the same function. Democrats, disturbed by the “business as usual” money-making on the home front, complain that the Bush administration demands no sacrifice in time of war from anyone other than our soldiers overseas. But Bush, in fact, has sought and won far greater sacrifices from us than food rationing or higher taxes. He has asked us to surrender our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. And out of fear and political timidity, we have handed them over.

From 9/11 to the present, Bush has used the war to justify one increase in executive power after another, at the expense of both Congress (simply ignoring Congress’s right to declare war and participate in war planning) and the Judiciary (depriving the federal courts of jurisdiction over claims from all persons designated by the Administration as “enemy combatants”; permitting surveillance of our mail and our phone conversations without court warrant).

“I am the decider,” President Bush reminds us.

Precedents do exist for significant increases in executive power in times of war. President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus (a suspension, it should be noted, that is explicitly permitted by the Constitution), and President Roosevelt ordered evacuation from the West Coast of all persons, citizen and non-citizen alike, of Japanese ancestry. These events did not represent our proudest moments as a nation, but they arguably could be justified as extraordinary actions at a time of extraordinary peril.

But, as President Bush fondly reminds us, we are now protagonists in a war that may never end. War is now continuous, to hearken back to Orwell, and extraordinary peril exists now and will continue to exist , tomorrow, and every day for the rest of our lives, and every day of our children’s lives. If we “win” in Afghanistan (which we certainly haven’t yet), we still confront massive bloodshed in Iraq. If we finally subjugate Iraq, we will face nuclear threats from Iran. If we nuke Iran into oblivion, we can only assume that China, India, other developing powers that we call allies today will be enemies, understandably, threatening us tomorrow.

When extraordinary peril exists every day, justifying extraordinary dictatorial measures as a matter of routine, then the extraordinary is no longer extraordinary. It is ordinary. And we then live under a government possessing attributes of dictatorship. Perhaps we can view it as a benign dictatorship today. President Bush himself, feckless frat boy that he is, probably enjoys a jolly weekend clearing brush on his Texas ranch more than he would signing orders for the torture of dissidents. But the power gained today by a bumbling fool can be used far more shrewdly by a “commander in chief” of a malign administration tomorrow, a President who will be neither bumbling nor a fool. And when that happens, we will no longer laugh at funny cartoons in the newspapers, or jokes on late night television, at the expense of those who control the executive branch of our government.

Because one does not laugh at Big Brother. As Orwell wrote, it is not enough that Big Brother's subjects consent to obey him. They must be compelled to love him. And we will not laugh at the leader who, finally, we have been taught to love and obey.

Memo to a Boy on a Haystack

Ok, my friend. Now that you've spent too much time deciding how this blog page should appear esthetically, and even more time deciding how best to present to the indifferent world an idealized description of your ever-important Self, you really might want to decide what it is you're going to write about. Don't you think?

Gosh and golly ... I stare off into space ... and await inspiration.