Comet landing Blues
As I was returning from a visit to Rivne, Ukraine > I alternated between napping and trying to get a mobile data stream from twitter, which is slightly addictive in a good way, a new style of learning current events, the road to Kiev is bumpy and the Mashrutka seemed to go off on a lot of side roads into the little towns off the main highway : bumpy ride and uncomfortable seats, guess I should have taken the express Mashrutka.
I got in rather late , 8:40 despite leaving at 3:45 the map looked like it would be 3.5 hours, but it took 5.
As I caught the Tuesday night Metro, there was an interesting mix of people's emotions, playful, conspiratorial, serious, thoughtful, quizzical. Ascending the escalator, I got an Alert about the European Space Agency's live coverage starting for the Philae Lander....'
I went out with friends to get some cafeteria food, it wasn't great, but decent. Slept.
But one of the things from last night, was worth the replay is from a friend who is a young refugee from the city of Donetsk. I told some serious Ukrainian Nationalist friend of mine that I had done some things to help this young friend of a few years. That my friend, his father had gone to Moscow when all this bad stuff started to go down. And my Nationalist friend ask what my friend's father thought about this stuff.
My friend said his Dad in Moscow felt "above these things for the most part", but that he made a serious effort to study his own internal feelings when he was exposed to all this information on the internet and Television about this crisis, that he tried to be truly aware of the shifting of his internal feelings based on this external stimulus. SO essentially, his father's feelings were focused on an awareness of the potential for manipulation, and the opinions were adjusted according to his impressions of those feelings when studied in the context of self awareness.
Waking this morning, a call to the family in California, an extraordinary moment not worth a replay.
Gathering the stuff I need for the chores and duties of the day, I bolted out the door, taking the stairway, observing the badly done patches on the outside of the fancy new building where they finished some little remodel project, noticing a couple of serious looking police men going off to investigate something, led my a man with some sort of information about something, then I was dashing across the cobblestone roadways to the metro : I gave the wrong payment to the attendant, in coins, I wanted to use some change but it was 1.75, so I gave over a ten and got 5 tokens, apologized for my mistake. '
Going down the metro today , really I never witnessed a worse case of group psychology. Every face on the escalator looked worried : out of maybe 220 people, every face looked concerned, worried, not a speckle of joy, other than one couple sort of joking and that one guy who had to be German or Austrian or something like that who had that sort of insular European positive buoyancy they take everywhere with them.
News I get about government workers, is everybody is close to people who are resigning, getting fired, and the value of their salaries is clearly sliding dramatically. I do hear it's been a solid turn around as far as corruption goes, but that doesn't mean people's feelings aren't emerging from the corrupted way of life . The new paradigm begs the question if it isn't better to have kept a little of the corrupted syntax?
Even doing charity work here, it feels impossible to reach any results in these times : it's like I am Jonesing
( Craving, desirous ) for some way I can pay a bribe to reach some results to my objectives, my time is worth money : it's worth money if I can get done in 2 months what it would take me 4 months to stagger step my way through this jumble of weird perceptions about why is it that you are trying to do all this alone, by yourself : everybody thinks I am a spy, except spies all have cover stories, some sort of job and a little paycheck from some group, company, foundation, religious organization/ I am none of the above, just a guy (actually I am an ex-professional dish washer, and I take some pride in that, even did some emergency dish washing last night)
In other words, you can't impose a totally new structure on the program of how business gets done in a hierarchical context. But the problem appears to me, in my humble opinion, that the formerly privileged elites are thinking they can regain their former status through some form of transparent corruption, that they can work the juicy margins between business and government and find ways to take profits, and payouts with absurdly huge margins.
Perhaps they want to maybe hybridize between American and Russian styles of open, transparent corruption that just teases the boundary between what is legal and what isn't : in other words this will become an economy dominated by lawyers and advisers. In the old days they could get away with blatantly illegal conflicts of interest, now they are perhaps working to sort out what is barely acceptable, and not worth the hassle to prosecute.
Rivne, these are working people, worried about what the winter will bring, how the spring might shape up, they probably don't have much more than a little jar of money at home, and the money in that jar got worth a lot less in the last 6 months. I have to say that my heart lies with these working people, and I have no sympathy for those who scheme about the wealth they can take away from this disruption and war on this land.
I got in rather late , 8:40 despite leaving at 3:45 the map looked like it would be 3.5 hours, but it took 5.
As I caught the Tuesday night Metro, there was an interesting mix of people's emotions, playful, conspiratorial, serious, thoughtful, quizzical. Ascending the escalator, I got an Alert about the European Space Agency's live coverage starting for the Philae Lander....'
I went out with friends to get some cafeteria food, it wasn't great, but decent. Slept.
But one of the things from last night, was worth the replay is from a friend who is a young refugee from the city of Donetsk. I told some serious Ukrainian Nationalist friend of mine that I had done some things to help this young friend of a few years. That my friend, his father had gone to Moscow when all this bad stuff started to go down. And my Nationalist friend ask what my friend's father thought about this stuff.
My friend said his Dad in Moscow felt "above these things for the most part", but that he made a serious effort to study his own internal feelings when he was exposed to all this information on the internet and Television about this crisis, that he tried to be truly aware of the shifting of his internal feelings based on this external stimulus. SO essentially, his father's feelings were focused on an awareness of the potential for manipulation, and the opinions were adjusted according to his impressions of those feelings when studied in the context of self awareness.
Waking this morning, a call to the family in California, an extraordinary moment not worth a replay.
Gathering the stuff I need for the chores and duties of the day, I bolted out the door, taking the stairway, observing the badly done patches on the outside of the fancy new building where they finished some little remodel project, noticing a couple of serious looking police men going off to investigate something, led my a man with some sort of information about something, then I was dashing across the cobblestone roadways to the metro : I gave the wrong payment to the attendant, in coins, I wanted to use some change but it was 1.75, so I gave over a ten and got 5 tokens, apologized for my mistake. '
Going down the metro today , really I never witnessed a worse case of group psychology. Every face on the escalator looked worried : out of maybe 220 people, every face looked concerned, worried, not a speckle of joy, other than one couple sort of joking and that one guy who had to be German or Austrian or something like that who had that sort of insular European positive buoyancy they take everywhere with them.
News I get about government workers, is everybody is close to people who are resigning, getting fired, and the value of their salaries is clearly sliding dramatically. I do hear it's been a solid turn around as far as corruption goes, but that doesn't mean people's feelings aren't emerging from the corrupted way of life . The new paradigm begs the question if it isn't better to have kept a little of the corrupted syntax?
Even doing charity work here, it feels impossible to reach any results in these times : it's like I am Jonesing
( Craving, desirous ) for some way I can pay a bribe to reach some results to my objectives, my time is worth money : it's worth money if I can get done in 2 months what it would take me 4 months to stagger step my way through this jumble of weird perceptions about why is it that you are trying to do all this alone, by yourself : everybody thinks I am a spy, except spies all have cover stories, some sort of job and a little paycheck from some group, company, foundation, religious organization/ I am none of the above, just a guy (actually I am an ex-professional dish washer, and I take some pride in that, even did some emergency dish washing last night)
In other words, you can't impose a totally new structure on the program of how business gets done in a hierarchical context. But the problem appears to me, in my humble opinion, that the formerly privileged elites are thinking they can regain their former status through some form of transparent corruption, that they can work the juicy margins between business and government and find ways to take profits, and payouts with absurdly huge margins.
Perhaps they want to maybe hybridize between American and Russian styles of open, transparent corruption that just teases the boundary between what is legal and what isn't : in other words this will become an economy dominated by lawyers and advisers. In the old days they could get away with blatantly illegal conflicts of interest, now they are perhaps working to sort out what is barely acceptable, and not worth the hassle to prosecute.
Rivne, these are working people, worried about what the winter will bring, how the spring might shape up, they probably don't have much more than a little jar of money at home, and the money in that jar got worth a lot less in the last 6 months. I have to say that my heart lies with these working people, and I have no sympathy for those who scheme about the wealth they can take away from this disruption and war on this land.
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