Frozen Toothpaste

You’ve probably noticed, if you visit this site often, that I’ve essentially dispensed with my old schedule. The write-about-this-today workings of that schedule were rather easy to attend to when I (thought I) had wealth of interesting ideas.

Recently, I’ve have a dry-spell in that category. And coupled with an even more stifling inability to sit down and put ideas into a multiparagraph essay-like format, I’ve been finding that rigid schedule rather difficult to adhere to. Instead I’ve done my best to stick with the content that would be generated in a given week were I actively following the schedule, but publishing whatever I’ve got when “print time” comes on a given day.

This too, is sometimes difficult. It’s been difficult to varying extents through my whole time writing on this site, but it seems to have been especially bad recently. I’ve even been thinking *preemptive gasp* of cutting back from publishing five-times a week.

I’m not without reservations about the thought. I have some well-founded fear that without a schedule this project will soon become grossly neglected. Almost everything I’ve tried to do in my life has been chronically delayed unless it had strong forces to keep it on track.

But I’m pretty certain I can manage a schedule of three posts a week (probably Monday-Wednesday-Friday) with the option to post more frequently when I feel so inclined. That schedule worked fine for me this week, and seems like it can work well in the future. All the features and topics that have been prominent on this site in the past will, certainly, remain. But by scaling back I won’t have to spend time worrying when I don’t have anything to review, or anything to say about politics, or any new poem or quotation that I like enough to share.

But I’ve gone on longer than I needed to: suffice to say that though posting will be less frequent, my commitment to the idea and reality of this site is undiminished. And if, indeed, my posting schedule changes again in the future, don’t be surprised when I completely neglect to mention it. I’m getting rather bored with vanity posts like this one (which likely means that readers are too).

So to end on a different note, this site was accepted into 9rules, a site that aggregates quality content from many great sites. If you’ve never heard of it, you could do worse than spending a few minutes giving it a look.

Current figures suggest that more than 22,000 perished in Myanmar (Burma) this weekend. Now the story seems to be the most consequential in the world.

Yesterday’s figures suggested that more than 350 perished in Myanmar (Burma) this weekend. Then the story seemed like a regrettable natural disaster.

There’s that old axiom, attributed to Josef Stalin, that “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” I think there’s undeniably something to that. But I also can’t deny that I’m staring in the face two different numbers that make two very different impressions on me. In this cases, 20,000 deaths are a tragedy and 300 is a statistic.

It’s an ugly truth that I willfully ignore disasters when damage estimates are small. Unless you know someone who lives near the site of a natural disaster, it’s easy to ignore all the reports of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis. It’s probably smart not to get too worked up over natural disasters we humans, by definition, have no ability to control. It may even be wise.

And yet I can’t escape the fact that doing so seems terribly, inhumanely callous.

People who’ve known hard labor know calluses. That toughening of the skin so that the pressure so often put upon it starts to cause no injury. Perhaps even no feeling. The toughening can be unsightly, but it’s the body’s natural and necessary response to pressures that would otherwise cause tissues to rip and bleed. Given the choice between a callus and an injury requiring attention and rest, our bodies will usually choose to toughen rather than tear.

Perhaps, in our concern for the welfare of others, we need a similar amount of callousness. A similar detachment and unconcern that allows us to get on with what needs doing in our lives. That allows us to get up after hearing about five American deaths in Afghanistan, or the death of 30 Iraqis in an explosion, or 20 in a tsunami, or one in an industrial accident.

We have no time to mourn all these losses. We cannot, perhaps, spare the time and energy to consider, regret, and mourn every loss of life anywhere in the world. We cannot even spare the time and energy to mourn every loss of a fellow citizen of our country. Or even of every loss of a fellow citizen of the city, province, or state in which we live. Sometimes, it seems like we don’t even have the ability to mourn those family member we lose.

I see the necessity of this callousness. I think it makes good practical sense as a means of survival. But that doesn’t make me any less disappointed to notice it within myself or others. Any less sure that it’s wrong to stare at immense loss and be unable to shed even a tear. Any less disappointed that I only see a tragedy when the death toll reaches 22,000. Any less sure that 350 is a tragedy. Any less disappointed when I overlook the tragedy of one.

Today is one of those days.

I’ve been thinking about taking a week off from this space for a while, and I finally reached the point where such thoughts become the official plan. I shall be back next week, same as ever.

I’ve become a parody of myself. I think it started — the day I was born is too easy an answer — on August 16, 2007. That was the fateful day when I made a posting schedule for this site.

Then I made the mistake of following said schedule. Looking back on what I wrote that day, I find it terribly ironic that I fiercely fought against an anonymous boogie man who would hold me to that schedule. It turned out he didn’t need to hold me to it, I do that myself.

So on Mondays I dutifully write reviews. Bad ones. About movies I’ve seen that are old enough to be easy to get my hands on and obscure enough that their age isn’t easy for the public at large to remember. If I haven’t seen any movies that fit that bill recently, I usually scramble together a review of something random that needs no reviewing. I don’t review books because, well, I don’t know how to read.

And then on Tuesday’s I usually write something about the weather. Though the day’s ostensibly reserved for “everyday” topics there are only two things I can manage to fit onto that idea: self-help tripe that I think myself better than, or harmless (and thus meaningless) blather about how the weather’s been. For someone who disdains to talk about the weather in person, the irony of this is inescapable.

By Wednesdays, I’ve usually found a moderately consequential topic of national or international significance on which I can offer vague platitudes that befit my modest level of understanding. I have a strict prohibition against saying anything that will betray my ignorance, and thus tend to say nothing at all. When I come close to saying something, I always make sure to preface it with 100 self-deprecating statements about how “this is just how it looks to me.”

On Thursdays, I desperately hope that I’ve come up with an idea strange enough to write a relatively easy installment of Dispatches. Failing that, I tend to bluff my way to “long enough” by writing something about writing, especially writing on this site. In case you’d forgotten, this was written for a Thursday.

Fridays are meant as a day where I have to do nothing. In order to fulfill that goal, I almost always steal poems from The Writer’s Almanac or passages from books I used to read when I still knew how.

When the weekend comes, I’m ready and waiting to start the cycle of unintentional self-parody all over again.