Batfort

Style reveals substance

Author: childlike empress (page 1 of 67)

Life Hack: Keep a Vase of Flowers on Your Desk

There are two things that make an interminable Zoom meeting slightly better.

One is a standing desk. Being forced to stand through hours of talkingheadedness gives me time to engage different muscle groups. If I’m not standing, I’m usually lounging. I rarely sit. So standing is good.

The other, which I discovered quite by accident today, is keeping a vase of flowers nearby—preferably in the sightline of your webcam so that you can gaze at your blooms without your eyeballs straying and betraying the fact that you’re no longer paying 100% attention to whomever is speaking.

Today I spent quite a long amount of time admiring the intricate small ruffles inside a peone. It’s quite beautiful how small and frizzly they get inside the softer, larger petals around the rim.

I found myself wondering how I might paint them—realistically or no. Studying the shadows, how the color changes with the light.

I’ve been carrying this bouquet of peones around with me, from my after-work station in the living room, to my standing desk in the kitchen. I feel quite indulgent doing so.

One of those habits that makes life feel a little more luxurious.

Warmups

I like the idea of warming up. Maybe because the idea of dropping straight out of sleep into a packed day is a bit bewildering. Maybe because I grew up doing ballet, where half the ballet class is warming up, practicing essential movements.

We can apply the idea of warmups to many domains. Getting your blood moving and stretching out muscles before taxing one’s body physically. Reading a psalm before composing a prayer of one’s own. Journalling “known” thoughts & feelings before writing to explore something new; or externally, rehearsing a speech to oneself before giving it to others. Vocal warmups. Math problems. Logic and geometry.

School stuff. Because the stuff we learn about in school—the “essential movements” of life—are only as good as what we apply them to later in life.

The danger, as always, is that we forget that the “essential movements” are to be put into motion—brought to life—in the dance. We practice so we can perform. Or more accurately, participate.

We do not practice for practicing’s sake. That way lies recursion and futility and frustration.

I have come to believe that this life is a warmup, in a way. Our time on earth is a chance to practice the “essential movements” of living, of choosing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True—so that we, too, can join the dance.

The parallels between metabolic dysfunction and university budgeting

We were all taught that losing weight is a simple matter of eating less. If “calories in equals calories out,” all you have to do is eat fewer calories when you want to lose weight.

That’s true, mostly. You DO need to eat fewer calories than you expend to lose weight.

BUT. 

The CICO model doesn’t account for things like satiety, hunger, insulin resistance, and general metabolic dysfunction. It assumes that your body is functioning properly, that all systems are go.

CICO also assumes that all calories are the same. That carbohydrates are used by your body in the same way as protein or fat.

Those are both big assumptions.

When you take actual reality into account—instead of assumptions—you’ll find that most people have some form of metabolic dysfunction. That’s why lots of people find that they can lose weight and keep it off on a low-carb diet.

Often, during the weight-loss journey, people discover what foods they can and cannot tolerate. And as their bodies heal, they become healthier.

Other people can explain this better than I can.

Meanwhile, the CICO people favor putting more or fewer calories into a system that is already broken—without changing the system—and expect a good result.

It works if you’re generally healthy, but if you’re not? Good luck.

That’s health.

I see almost exactly the same thing happening around budgeting—especially budgeting around university operations.

“We need more money!” University Presidents cry. “We need to put more calories money into our system!”

Similar to calories, not all money is the same. Federal funding, especially grants, can only be spent on pre-approved activities. Universities try to skim off the top (F&A, I’m looking at you) but usually that money goes back into getting more grants. Even the way that tuition money is allocated, it follows so many arcane-sounding rules that the President or financial officer is prevented from distributing money into the places that need it.

Similar to metabolic disfunction, often the system of budgeting—and calculating ROI—within the university is either nonexistent or broken.

For example:

As higher education budgets have been reduced over the past decades, colleges and universities have been forced to rely on institutional grants to pilot programs designed to reduce achievement gaps and increase overall student success. Difficulties often emerge, however, when the grant comes to an end and there are difficult financial decisions regarding the transitioning of processes, offices, practices, and personnel.

AHEE.org

So you have a broken system, and people trying to get support for stuffing more money into it, instead of sitting down and doing the (hard) work of figuring out how to best distribute the money into the most critical parts of the system.

More money isn’t going to help until you FIX where the money is going and how it’s being used. Otherwise, you’re just limping along with a system that can’t make the best use of what it has.

The university gets fat, and malnourished, with administrative bloat instead of people teaching and seeking the truth. With students who can pull in $ instead of students who are the best fit for the university’s mission and research objectives.

Universities have financial diabetes.

What if I come back

It’s interesting, how words stick with you. How a question lingers around your ears like a cloud.

“Where can I read your writing?” A friend asked.

Immediately: Batfort dot com!

I said: I’m not ready to share that yet.

I thought about my initial challenge, to write and publish every day for a year. I thought about how it’s been over a year since I stopped pushing myself, daily, to distill words out of myself and display them for all the world to see.

I think now about how much of this blog feels like a “coming out,” of sorts. The coming forth of ideas and wishes that previously were known only to myself and my God.

I know how much writing reveals about a person—I’ve read books and blogs and tweets—and I’m embarrassed to put forth words knowing that I’ll reveal my innermost guts and give you something to hate.

So much has changed in my life since I first started posting here. My circumstances are almost entirely different: city, type of dwelling, dayjob, friends. (And currently: global pandemic.)

But some things I rarely talk about in my real life, and those are the things that come out here: a well-crafted aesthetic bubble, admiration for a sub-set of political movers, a metaphysical view of the world that is off the beaten track (and still very much under revision), my lifelong obsession with the interplay between the structure of an idea (or thing) and its outward expression.

Putting words around my thoughts is sometimes the only way to escape them. Putting them on a blog—pushing them out into the public square—feels like the most shameful, scandalous thing one could do with the contents of one’s mind.

Yet here I am. And here you are.

Shall we?

Links 2

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/09/just-create-just-do-it.html?m=1

Just create. Just do it.

About

http://www.socialmatter.net/2017/07/16/the-university-empire/

Full transcript: Defense Secretary James Mattis’ interview with The Islander

A Sense of Belonging

It’s happening

The Reader: Peter Thiel shows up TWICE in this one

 

Life, I have discovered, is more like a tango than a sprint. Two steps forward, one step back. Toe-heel, toe-heel, turn in a circle. Something something rose in your mouth. Every time I get confident in how far I’ve come, I’ll lose some of what I’ve gained. Sometimes it’s just a little stumble. Other times, I find myself back at the bottom of the hill, dizzy from all the somersaults.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this. The only solution is to get back up and try again. Trajectory is what matters, more than any one data point.

Now, in completely totally utterly unrelated news, let’s go to the links so I can clear off the 2948723987423 tabs that are open in my browser.


 

» Overcoming the “One More Year” Syndrome

» After reading this you’ll never want to eat GMO food again (Yep…he’s right)

But of course nobody really knows what the long-term health effects will be once humans start eating “synthetic proteins” on a massive scale.

And once these gene-edited organisms start spreading their genetic material in the wild, it could be a complete and total environmental nightmare.  According to Rebecca Burgess, these food companies are “not considering the future of genetic pollution”

» Winning the Information War

» After Academia

Peter Thiel has given a uniquely scathing critique of the insanity of this system. He questions whether higher education, as an economic exchange, represents much of an investment anymore—the student defers gratification to reap higher rewards in the future, or the student enjoys a four-year party as a consumption good. Thiel says he originally thought of higher education as consumption masquerading as investment, but now thinks of it as an even crazier combination of concepts: as insurance against failure in life in general, and as a kind of Veblen good that is priced uncompetitively so as to confer status on those who can afford it. This produces a ridiculous situation in which insurance is desirable, not because something disastrous is prudently insured against, but because the disaster would be the ignominy of failing to purchase insurance in the first place. It is effectively a Ponzi scheme. No wonder Thiel calls college administrators subprime mortgage brokers. They get a cut on selling pieces of paper that are only as valuable as we all pretend they are.

» 5-HTTLPR: A POINTED REVIEW [Disclaimer: I haven’t read the whole article yet]

» Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, and that’s great

Unspoken but evident in these condemnations is Ellis’s most serious crime: He was seen as a man of the left, but is now somehow a convert despite essentially being the same person. American Psycho was controversial when it was published in 1991, and remains so today, but was and is largely seen as a criticism of the Reagan-era capitalist resurgence, and thus, of use to the Left. Turning the same unforgiving pen against today’s obsession with identity and victimhood is rather less helpful to progressives.

Despite not being primarily about politics—White is fundamentally a critique of recent art and culture—the book manages to capture something fundamental about Donald Trump that neither his detractors nor supporters appreciate. Ellis didn’t vote for Trump (or Hillary), isn’t a fanboy, and positioned Trump as Patrick Bateman’s false idol in American Psycho. But Ellis grasps that Trump’s biggest impact is as much cultural as it is political: “The building that had been inhabited by liberal identity-obsessed elitists was now, after eight years of an Obama hep-cat style and sensibility, being deconstructed—in fact, decimated—by disruptors who’d taken over and were playing by an entirely new set of rules. Not only that, but these disruptors were telling those confused by these new rules to go fuck themselves…”

» Borrowed vs Owned Power

» No idea of this is legit or not, but apparently you can hide from AI with digital camo?

» Church podcast: Defecting from Bethel [Disclaimer 2: Also haven’t listened to this one, although I’ve seen some of her Facebook posts]

» Homeschooled children are far more socially engaged than you might think

» Cerno podcast: The 3-5 book rule and how to master life

» Why are Silicon Valley billionaires starving themselves?

» Carrie Grant: Childbirth is nothing compared to the agony of Crohn’s disease

» The Architecture of Self-Hatred

» More corporate grubbing around in legislation. Gross.

» Basics of Traditional Chinese Medicine


 

 

 

Boundaries

This morning, I was thinking about positive space and negative space.

The call and the response.

The masculine and the feminine, if you will.

Between any of these things is a boundary.

In order to have true negative space, you must have a clear border.

A gradient will not do.

At a certain point, it becomes simple:

Yes, this is the object.

No, this is not the object.

That requires discernment, the ability to differentiate between That Which Is and That Which Is Not.

Discernment is a lost art these days.

And we all grow poorer for a lack of negative space.

Hospitality

I will never get over the fact that doing dishes takes, like, 5 minutes.

My brain is still filled with a conception of time that is based on being sick. When you’re sick, and have zero energy, basic tasks take F O R E V E R.

When just stacking the dishes and filling the sink with water makes you tired, household chores become herculean tasks.

When you have to marshall every fiber of your being to accomplish a task, that task takes up so much time and mental energy.

Clock-time may be constant, but our personal orientation to time can change.

Unlearning my old conceptions of time has been part of my healing journey, and will continue to be a challenge moving forward.

Old limits don’t apply to new me.


On Tuesday evenings, I sometimes host a group of ladies in my home. As part of our commitment to each other through the church, we carve out dedicated time to come together to talk about things that are on our hearts.

The space that we create together isn’t just my living room, but a loosely-but-tightly knit weaving of intentionality.

Space to share, and be vulnerable. We are each heard, prayed over, and sometimes given advice.

This is time to rest, and recover. It’s time to process, time to grieve, time to celebrate.

We carve out this space, and this time, for each other.

I try to make my living space a welcoming place. Plants, soft lighting, beautiful textiles.

But really, what makes the space is the people.

And the love we have for each other.


One thing that I love about being part of the Christian family is that no matter how much or how little you know someone, you always have something in common.

The trust you can feel—almost palpably—shaves months off the ‘getting to know you’ process. For me, at least.

Hospitality isn’t simply a sparkling service experience, or a well-manicured home. It’s the time, and the support, and an open environment created by people gathered for a purpose.

Mistake

It was a mistake to let myself off the hook from posting every day on this blog.

I got lazy, and the excuses set it. If I was tiiiiiiiiiiiired, it was okay not to write a post. We went from “a challenging goal” to “scraping by with the bare minimum.”

With the stumble in post frequency, the need for perfectionism came back. I’m back to holding on to ideas, hoarding words, rehearsing blog posts in my head that don’t ever come to fruition.

In March, I did a crapton of writing for myself. Journalling, yes, but also the beginnings (hopefully) of a book. In April, I got distracted by a contest and a new possible future. Now, in May, my mental cobwebs are growing again.

It’s crazy to me that there is *that* much of a difference between writing for myself and writing in public, but here we are.

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