daily words

nonagenarian

At the age of ninety what would you look back on in your life and remember fondly? Somebody entering into that exclusive club of nonagenarians now would have been born in the year 1918. It's kind of difficult for me to even imagine what their life would have been like, what they would have seen over such a long period of time.

What would it have been like to be a kid back then? I t must have been totally foreign, the vernacular different, the appearance of everything, the technology. I find it so easy now to take for granted everything I've got, so much so that I find it even a little difficult to imagine what life would have been like before all these things were common, easy and nearly free.

What would it have been like to witness the rise and spread of first the radio then television and now the Internet? Is it naive of me to think that the accelerating pace of advance through my youth has better prepared me to deal with a lifetime of changes coming at a still faster rate? I think it probably is.

My grandparents aren't yet part of this group and I can only hope they do manage to join. But even if they do, will I really manage not to squander more opportunities to talk with them? They've had so much opportunity to see and to do so many things and I never really asked them about it. So many vacations and visits, even living with them for a few months I never thought to stop, take a seat and just talk to them.

Is this arrogance now, for me to think that they would even want to sit there and subject themselves to a string of what i can only imagine to be inane questions from their point of view? What was life like when you were my age? Is that a stupid question? I am not even sure what I'd want to know, maybe it would be wiser to simply ask them to tell me about their lives, about everything that happened before they had grandkids, before they had kids even.

What do they make of the so-called issues today? What were the hot topics for them, and what do they think of them now? How much truth is there to the statement "youth is wasted on the young"?

Would they mind frittering away a meal on this talk? An afternoon or evening? A whole day? A week? How old were my parents when their grandparents died?

I wonder, with the life expectancy increasing as it is, might nonagenarians become a less and less exclusive group? Pretty much by definition I guess they'd have to as people live longer and longer. But that's just so amazing to think about, ninety years living their lives, taking in the world. What am I going to do with my time?

What's next? What happens if at some point ninety becomes middle age? The prospect of so much more time seems daunting, a little. I guess it'd have to be a slow change and people would adjust in a natural way, as it seems we do in all cases.

Well, maybe not all, there are of course still these vestigial behaviors and quirks that seem to belong in an earlier age but I imagine in time those too shall pass.

inculcate

When I was in high school I took a couple classes in which assignments were regularly given to go out and collect definitions and examples of a whole bunch of different terms. Things like vocabulary quizzes, mainly.

Every week, before we had to have these lists prepared, we would all be sitting in our respective homes, chatting on AOL Instant Messenger (the instant messenger of choice for no other reason than the fact that everybody we knew was using it too) with our dial-up modems, probably downloading a few low bitrate mp3 files through Audiogalaxy Satellite or enjoying the early days of Napster.

I am quite confident when I say that nobody actually liked putting those lists together. More importantly though, I knew that I was not the only person who thought it was a tremendous waste of our collective time to have each person individually find each term and examples of its use and whatever else might have been required.

And so like any good team player would, we started cooperating. It started out with just a handful of us, me and a couple friends with a little bit more computer savvy threw up a forum and blog on some free hosting (hypermart), used one of those old ad-supported free domain registrations and so inculcation.net was born.

The practice of rote memorization of vocabulary through repetition made the choice of name incredibly simple, and being the insufferable adolescents that we were, we found the prospect of being taught down to in such a manner utterly offensive.

Things were great. Every week we would be assigned a list of terms. As I recall, in our Economics class we were even encouraged to collaborate. As soon as I got home, I would transcribe the list of terms into the forum and people would start claiming them, either individually or in blocks.

It got so that we were dividing them up before even leaving school. I remember one time where the class came before lunch, and we'd divided up a big chunk of them during lunch period, and in one of the few times I actually did work before the last minute, I had started getting my part done during a study hall later that day.

Truly, everybody benefited from this arrangement. We, the students, spent less time doing mind numbingly tedious work, and the quality of research generally improved as there was simply more at stake for something wrong. Evidenced by the fact that I actually did work long in advance of its due date for this occasion, I obviously cared more about my esteem among peers than I did my grades.

Things got messy though, as they often did at the intersection of the internet, collaboration and high school, when the teacher of a different class explicitly forbade collaboration on his vocabulary list assignments.

Fearing his wrath, many started abstaining from participating in the collective effort to do less work. The core group who'd gotten this together in the first place, along with a few committed slacker inductees carried on however it had gotten trickier because now we could so brazenly show off our collaboration.

I think I must have been accused personally at some point. I think it happened when I had asked him why we couldn't collaborate on an assignment for which the entire body of work consisted of flipping through a dictionary and taking down what we found. I tipped my hand even mentioned that in similar assignments in other classes, we'd been given the ok on collaboration. Though I don't know any more what I said then, I can only imagine that I made some poorly constructed but impassioned plea for him not to sentence us all, his students, to another night of tedium because he didn't like the idea of us working together.

Whatever I did do, and whatever he did say, I do remember coming away from the experience feeling like I had been personally attacked, that I had become the martyr for this cause in the eyes of that one teacher. As an aside, the year after, when I was applying to colleges, I (now realize quite stupidly) asked him for a letter of recommendation, and he promptly declined. That was a good lesson to learn, albeit a rather unpleasant one.

But that was only the beginning, because soon after we heard that some students had been suspended from using computers for having participated in our little collaboration effort. We took it all down out of fear. We'd gotten other people in trouble, that's not how it was supposed to happen.

A few months later though, we came back, and with a vengeance. The frontpage was revamped, new forums with more security were created. We saw ourselves as committing a grand act of civil disobedience (a topic we'd recently covered because of Thoreau in our English class). I wrote a ridiculous mission statement and we were back.

Of course I never took responsibility for any of this. Even the name I'd registered the hosting under reflected this. Being the thesaurus-happy student that I was, I called myself the "non compos mentis insurgent" which I took essentially to mean that I didn't know and wasn't really in control of myself as I participated in these acts of supposed insurgency.

Ultimately though the effort fizzled out. We were seniors then, and about halfway through the year, once all the applications were out, everybody just stopped caring. Some of us had tried to cultivate some interest among underclassmen but this was high school and we barely knew any underclassmen. So we just let it fade away, and that was the end of it.

It was a lot of fun. We were in it together, sticking it to the oppressive teacher regime. I don't regret any of it, and I kind of wish we'd kept it a little more light-hearted. Although, with a motto of "all work and no play, sucks" how serious could we really be?

For history's sake, I've reproduced here the "mission statement" I had written:

It is our goal here at inculcation.net to alleviate the burden on students from monotonous repetitive tedious and wholly unnecessary assignments and tasks. The menial nature of having an entire class of students type out their own seperate vocabulary lists simply consumes more of the little free time high school students have. Unfortunately, collaboration is often construed as "cheating" even in these cases. Inculcation provides a means of exchange of information regarding these assignments, and encourages collaboration and organization as a group in order to reduce the workload for everybody significantly. The goal here is not to encourage cheating, but instead to foster good teamwork skills, and allow for students to spend their time on more meaningful pursuits.

I even spelled "seperate" wrong. Nice. We were just ahead of our time.

primogeniture

What is the duty of the first born child? It seems that there is some importance for the first child for some cultures, and more specifically the first born son often, but I'm not really sure how that would have come about exactly.

I guess there's something to be said for the idea that it stems from some deep rooted patriarchy and that people under such a regime would then put a premium on having sons, and so simply because it's easier or because there may only be a single son among a group of siblings, that the first of them would get preferential treatment.

So given that there were or are rights given to the first born, what then are the duties that come with them? It seems that often the benefit of extra rights comes also with some duty or obligation, be it filial or otherwise. In our modern and enlightened society have we done away with this preferential treatment of firstborn children?

Speaking from the position of a first born I think there are certainly a lot of things that I find I have in common with other first born children from families with more than one child however they are not typically connections of similar rights and obligations. Instead they are stories in which we are treated differently from our younger siblings in similar ways.

These commonalities are something I find among most people I know who grew up in Western cultures, a term I use to mean mainly places that are not Asia or Africa. This I think is more a consequence of not having met nearly so many people who are the oldest of many children from any of those places than it is of those places cultural differences.

This remains a boring stream of consciousness with no real coherent theme much less anything to hold interest for another few hundred words. Neither informative in an interesting way or compelling as a piece of fiction what then is the point of me writing this drivel?

It's just navel gazing. The previous entry is marked by a number of paragraphs that all start with "I" while this one is only a shade better, and not appreciably because it's still boring. Me sitting and typing through my random thoughts is not a very good way to achieve the goals I've set for myself in this project.

Actually a story where this figured very prominently in the narrative was _The Chosen_, which was a pretty good read. The Malter kid befriends the other one and the other one who is the eldest son ends up giving up his duty as the first born child (he was the first born child but would this have applied to his sister had she been the first instead? I am not sure) and it hurts his father.

I feel lucky that there is not so much of this pressure on me, there is no specific and well defined role that I am aware of that I will need to fill to live up to my family's expectations. That's not to say that I am without expectation on me, simply that it is not so strictly defined in any one particular direction.

I wonder in cases where such a heavy responsibility is laid on the first child what steps the parents then take to prepare the child. I can only imagine that the larger the... inheritance, for lack of a better word, is, then the more the parents would be concerned that they need to prepare their heir. In cases like these it seems rather silly that they'd go by birth order alone, as presumably if there were multiple children and one of them displayed an interest of aptitude greater than the others, it would make sense to put the responsibility on them.

Continuing though, what kinds of things can you do to ready a child to have this kind of life dumped onto them? And when would that transition come? Of course in the event of some unforeseen catastrophe it would be a double burden of the surprise of having this new obligation and to grapple with the absence of the parents.

But assuming this grim situation isn't the case, how then would things proceed? Would it make sense for the parent to start at some point to transition responsibility to the child? What if the child had little or no interest? I can only guess that the parent would want to put the burden of work onto the child so as to be able to enjoy support from the child and a leisurely retirement from whatever it is that was passed onto the first born.

The practice of assigning any elevated privilege to a person based on whether or not they were born first among their siblings strikes me as a silly thing to do. It may make sense in a case where there is some sort of age restriction which they would then naturally reach first, but even then I would probably be suspicious of the age restriction and its basis. Presumably a sufficiently developed or mature child even if below the arbitrary age limit would be able to do whatever it is that has the restriction, even if they're not the eldest child.

As much as I'd like to think myself more important for having been the first of my siblings to be born, there isn't really a compelling argument that I can think of in support of that. And with that said, I am going to bring today's attempt to a close, such that I might even try and get ahead a little on tomorrow's.

supplicate

I'm not really sure how I want to start this.

Supplicate, for me, is the word I use when I think of somebody who's trying in what I imagine to be the wrong way to woo somebody they're interested in by wholly putting this other person before themselves. It doesn't quite seem like the right word to me, but it does fit with the definition.

I say this seems like the wrong way because I think I've done that kind of thing before and in doing so I'm not sure what it really communicates about me or how I see myself. What kind of person goes so far out of their own way to do favors or whatever else for somebody who's basically a stranger?

Thinking back on it now, I don't think very highly of myself then. I feel like I did those things with some sort of naïve hope that by doing these nice things for people they would want to do nice things for me and that somehow this reciprocal niceness would be a fun and worthwhile use of time.

I'm not really sure that's so true. By supplicating as I did, I put myself in a decidedly lower position, and why would that be appealing? I don't think I'd want to spend time with somebody who was trying to draw my attention by doing random things they thought I'd like. I feel like I'd probably be a jerk and simply take advantage of that for as long as they were willing to subject themselves to that.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this and I don't particularly want to spend a lot of time rehashing my own insecurities and misgivings about my relationship history.

I imagine there are times where it is appropriate to supplicate, to lay one's self at the mercy of another and put on such a display of weakness for the sake perhaps of the stronger party or maybe some spectator. I think I would like to try and avoid such situations though because I have this suspicion that things just go better for people who can put forward a unerring display of strength.

It's probably something to do with the state of mind that would presumably follow. To be so be unrelentingly self assured is something that I still finds takes a considerable effort to do.

I'm off to a weak start.