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Tuesday, April 2, 2019
It’s hit the fan.
Several high-stress lives coalesce.
Three hours of packing, loading, traveling, and unloading of cases of every description, stacking them against any free walls in my apartment, so helping a neighbor with her vacating premises for one month.
Long days of apprehension of a three-day testing in Chemistry, Biology, and Cell biology come to fruition with the first exam, today. Chemistry. And my cousin’s heart pound-pound-pounding with anxiety as she chomps into a bagel, cheese, and lox sandwich I prepared for her.
And my old friend with whom I grew up prepares for her cremation.
And my old friend with whom I grew up, whose wife just passed, joins me daily for a coffee break, coping with the loss of the warmth and companionship of the last sixty years.
And another of my friends of long-standing spends long days of anguish and discomfort in hospitals keeping his wife company as she undergoes most painful and weakening chemo-therapy.
Several high-stress lives coalesce.
It’s hit the fan.
Chinese Fried Rice
Archon6812 - Own work
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Postings Count, Weather Brief, and Dinner
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
My 361st consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 361 posts we’re at the 7.20% mark of my commitment, the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Time is 12.01am.
On Tuesday Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 48* with a feels-like temperature of 43* under mainly sunny skies.
Dinner of London Broil with Chinese Fried Rice.
The next six days show one in the mid-forties and the others in the fifties.
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
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Question of the Day:
What is the human condition?
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Chuckle of the Day
Can’t think of one off-hand.
My mood precludes researching one.
Sorry.
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Love your notes.
Contact me at domcapossela@hotmail.com
This from Kali L re: loss.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44724/lament-56d223eed5de0
I remember thinking about what is left behind when we die ( our artifacts) keys, shoes, papers etc
I read this poem a decade ago - it both soothes and haunts
Thinking of you
Web Meister Responds: Thank you for your lovely and timely thoughts.
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Answer to the Question of the Day:
The human condition is "the characteristics, key events, and situations which compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, and mortality".
This is a very broad topic which has been and continues to be pondered and analyzed from many perspectives, including those of religion, philosophy, history, art, literature, anthropology, psychology, and biology.
Nowa Huta in Kraków, Poland, serves as an unfinished example of a Utopian ideal city.
As a literary term, "the human condition" is typically used in the context of ambiguous subjects such as the meaning of life or moral concerns.
Each major religion has definitive beliefs regarding the human condition.
For example, Buddhism teaches that life is a perpetual cycle of suffering, death, and rebirth from which humans can be liberated via the Noble Eightfold Path.
Meanwhile, Christianity teaches that humans are born in a sinful condition and are doomed in the afterlife unless they receive salvation through Jesus Christ.
Philosophers have provided many perspectives.
An influential ancient view was that of the Republic in which Plato explored the question "what is justice?" and postulated that it is not primarily a matter among individuals but of society as a whole, prompting him to devise a utopia.
Two thousand years later René Descartes declared "I think, therefore I am" because he believed the human mind, particularly its faculty of reason, to be the primary determiner of truth; for this he is often credited as the father of modern philosophy.
One such modern school, existentialism, attempts to reconcile an individual's sense of disorientation and confusion in a universe believed to be absurd.
Many works of literature provide perspective on the human condition.
One famous example, from As You Like It, a pastoral comedy, is Shakespeare's monologue "All the world's a stage" that pensively summarizes seven phases of human life.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Above is :
Richard Kindersley's sculpture The Seven Ages Of Man in London
The photo: Lonpicman - Own work
Psychology has many theories, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the notion of identity crisis.
It also has various methods, e.g. the logotherapy developed by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl to discover and affirm human meaning.
Another method, cognitive behavioral therapy, has become a widespread treatment for clinical depression.
Ever since 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the biological theory of evolution has been significant.
The theory posits that the human species is related to all others, living and extinct, and that natural selection is the primary survival factor.
This has provided a basis for new beliefs, e.g. social Darwinism, and for new technology, e.g. antibiotics.
So many lives intertwined with.
My list, which I keep right here, with a pen, keeps getting marked up with adds and scratches.
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Good Morning on this Tuesday, the Second Day of April.
Today we talked about the coalescing of several stressed lives.
About the weather, calendar, and dinner.
We deliberately didn’t post a joke but we did post a perceptive comment and a link to an appropriate poem, from a new contributor, Kali L, a poet in her own right.
And we asked and answered a question about the human condition.
And now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your Love