David Foster Wallace, giving the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, among many other things, said:
I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.and:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.and:
The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us...He expressed, in a painfully coherent way, a sharp dilemma that he saw: between his own strong drives, needs and desires, and an awareness and compassion of others that could detach him from the fact that he would never be able to satisfy those drives or desires. What he argues for is a recognizably Buddhist approach; compassion and awareness, but you hear the despair in how it's described.
There's a good deal of evidence from an excerpt from his unfinished book, The Pale King (about a man that works for the I.R.S.) that he was thinking along these lines:
Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk's row in the rotes group's wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once, except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays, where the cart boys could get them when they came by.What is this other than a painful attempt at meditative practice? And when he says the below in a manuscript note, it's even more explicit:
Bliss -- a second-by- second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious -- lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
Of course, Wallace calls such awareness and compassion 'unimaginably difficult' in his commencement address, and when he says he is not claiming any special knowledge or authority on how to do it, he's not being modest. He is talking about his own struggle, a struggle that few are conscious or smart enough to try, and almost no one (especially not these smug Zen monks) would be able to express in such clear and heartbreaking terms.
Those who practice Zen, I think, would say they strive to achieve a "mind as the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement. 'I wonder what this is? I wonder what that is? I wonder what this means?' Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgement, just asking 'what is it?'" Undoubtedly, this is a wonderful way to exist, and I would myself very much like to live that way.
But imagine Mr. Wallace, bristling with talent, supremely gifted with words, aching to wrestle with a good chunk of what people have done with literature. Could he actually do any of that while detaching himself in that way? It would be like cutting off an arm, or at least a finger. Buddhism seems to offer one track of fulfillment, but it doesn't seem like it encompasses enough for someone like him. Maybe he needed two tracks, one for his life and one for writing, each with different rules. I wish he was still around, so I could see what he would undoubtedly have figured out.
Recently I've found myself having very unpleasant conversations with people about work. Often, both of us are in a bad situation, and there is no easy way to make the project better, only 'least bad' answers. It's a negative situation. Dealing with the disappointment and upset in this situation often leads people to act badly, myself included. I push too hard, questioning people's conclusions too much, and generally am a nuisance. One might even say an "
I've been taking pictures for a long time (far too long to have learned as little as I have!). When I was a teenager, I developed and printed black and white film, at the Salt Lake Art Center (now I can admit that I should have been paying for the darkroom time, but I simply walked in and used the equipment and chemicals, for months). In those days, they taught the 
The Zone System is (and here, people who know more will cringe) a way to plan how a picture's lights and darks will be captured and printed. Spot meters that older cameras had (like my Minolta SRT-303) just measured the exposure off the part of the image in the middle of the frame, so if there was another part of the picture that was much darker or lighter, that part would be way too light or dark.
Now, meters in cameras are using the entire image to decide the exposure, basically building in the Zone System into the camera's exposure calculation (this is the "evaluative" mode my camera has). If you are interested in more direct exposure control, then, it seems that you are left with:
This has produced the most satisfying results so far; without any special software or too much worry about exposure, I can still use my Zone System knowledge to peg parts of a picture to particular values of light and dark I choose.
Sarah is becoming a big girl at a torrid rate! When I think of how fast it's all happened I get into a weird emotional state of bliss and regret that I can't hold on more tightly to her days as a baby. We're so, so lucky to have her. I never knew what a wonderful person was waiting for us.
