#SelfVsCommon #SomeClarity

I have always attempted to be as humble as I can while knowing that this is somewhat paradoxical. Bragging about being humble? For me though humility is a process and not a characteristic i.e it is something I am always becoming, not something I am. What this means is I do not want to draw attention to myself but rather to be part of a larger process of bringing attention to other people or other things. Somewhat hard then for me to navigate the world of social media.

@Castabulan

As you can see from just looking at the dates of these posts, I am not comfortable with posting on a blog because it becomes something about yourself even if you try to make it about others. I am more comfortable extolling the virtues and accomplishments of others and also supporting the opinion of others. This is evident by my Twitter feed of @Castabulan. I do not usually have my comments but amplify others' thoughts and opinions. It is a bit uncomfortable for me to presume I can say things others are not or cannot. I believe most people are better than me and am proven right everywhere I turn.

But there has been a shift in my motivation and understanding given the current state of affairs in both America and the world. There are historical and monumental happenings everywhere that will be important to understand for future generations. I want to write to those people who will be looking through the historical record of this time two hundred and fifty years from now. I want them to know that people were fighting and struggling to make the future a better place.

My Current Shift

The shift occurred because of much of the reading I have been doing during the Coronavirus Pandemic Lockdown we are experiencing right now. I am still reading the Malazan Books of the Fallen and my comic book of the moment is the delightful Rat Queens. Both these fantasies have something in common that has inspired me to frame my blog and Twitter in a new way. At one point in Rat Queens, the female adventuring heroes are in a bar getting drunk (a common occurrence in Rat Queens). One of our motley crew is hit on by a man. She lets him know she does not date bards and bards are not welcome in their adventuring party, the eponymous Rat Queens. He then explains that he is not a Bard but a Chronicler. A Bard creates his own stories, a Chronicler records others' stories for posterity. This reminded me that one of my favorite characters throughout the Malazan Books is the Imperial Historian who chronicles the stories within Steven Erikson's Malazan series shared with the reader. So this has given me a better way to find peace with being more active online. I was never comfortable being a Bard, but I do see the import of being a Chronicler.

Twitter as a Chronicle of the Times

So this then is the way forward. My Twitter can be best seen as a chronicle. I, like most, do not post original content but pass around already existing content created by the Bards throughout America and the World. And the Bards I listen to reflect who I am. Some of this will become more clear when I continue the task I am setting for myself; explaining the hashtags I have created on my Twitter for the students in my classes. That way the Bards and just the general audience they tell the stories to can have insight into at least my chronicle.

#SomeClarity

As we in higher education continue to experience the necessity of moving things online, I still have a lot of residual resistance. I am not alone. I am really a lecturer, needing to be in front of and with my students in order to help them learn and grow. I joke that I feed off of the energy of my students. Behind every joke though is some truth and my students are my energy, my motivation, and the source of my eternal life as they keep me young. I craft my lectures around providing #SomeClarity during a time in the political life of the planet that is very difficult to understand and stress-inducing. What this means in our current context is that this is all new to me but I will do my best to move my lectures, or at least some of the understandings of the chronicle I may have.

So I will use this forum to explain my hashtags that you can then explore on Twitter to come to your own understandings. I encourage you first to simply search @castabulan and then the hashtag or hashtags that may interest you. Then drop my delimiter and look at what others have crafted around the hashtags that currently occupy the comfort of your mind.

#SelfVsCommon

There is some method here about the order of presentation of the hashtags. Bear with me and let us get started. My broadest possible hashtag is #SelfVsCommon. This identifies debate and discussion items. I teach at Folsom Lake College and am the Chair of the Department of Political Science. I am the only full-time faculty being supported by many accomplished adjuncts. Through the years, I have been fortunate to teach across our discipline and have taught all core sub-disciplines, American Politics, InLabels
ternational Relations, Comparative, and Political Theory. The common teaching thread throughout these courses and, in Political Science in general, is how we as a species make decisions together. When we do so we are confronted with the reality that we are all self-interested actors.

We are alive; there has never been nor will there ever be people exactly like ourselves and, while we are here, we hope to have a meaningful life. We have dreams and aspirations. But we do not live in a vacuum. We are surrounded by other self-interested actors and that fact compels us to also process how we want others to be treated and ho we want to be treated by others. Hence the necessity for always balancing the self-interest with the common interest. All political science explores this from different perspectives and frames. It certainly unites all my classes and I hear from old students it gives them a good way to understand their other political science courses when they leave Folsom Lake College bound for larger schools and departments.

So when using the #SelfVsCommon hashtag I want to open the topic for discussion. What is your self-interest (needing to go out and get a haircut)? What is the common interest (continuing social distancing and obeying our stay-at-home orders)? I am usually not one to put much of my own opinion as a Chronicler using the hashtag #SelfVsCommon. Sometimes I do want to insert an item that I think needs to be part of balancing the self-interest with the common interest or believe that there is a crucial missing issue within the broader issues being discussed. And this is not a way to delimit discussion nor is it vetted or screened by anyone else. It is just I from the future prospective of trying to help others form their own opinions on things that I often do not understand entirely or understand differently than most.

Addendum: My hashtags are designed to be accessible and that is why I write them as I do. Computer readers for the visually-impaired need to have the capitalization that you may encounter. When you use my hashtags or any other hashtags, I ask that you know and follow this. And yes I know not all the hashtags I use are "mine." 

Pop Celebration

On Saturday March 23, 2013 my Father passed away. It is one of the hardest things I have ever gone through in my life. It is never easy to say good-bye forever to anyone. I have seen the passing of a close friend, my Grandmother, and a brother-in-law. During those times I was saddened and I could even say I experienced grief. This was the first time that I have been grief-stricken. Grief for those who are grief-stricken is the bitter guilt you feel about being here when a loved one no longer is. It is living in a world without. It is never again being whole.

A father is special, the death of one's own father then is especially difficult. It is difficult to share with someone who has not gone through it, and yet the point of this post is not just to give myself an outlet, but to help anyone who is processing grief that has stricken them.This is potentially something that most of us will go through. In fact this is something that we fathers hope you all have to go through. One of my Pop's dreams for his children (as we all share) is that his children outlive him. For the most, save one, my Pop got what he wanted.

I try to teach my students to avoid false dichotomies and I try to live up to that as much as possible. My father was neither a good or bad man, none of us are. To celebrate him by lying is to not celebrate him at all. My father was both a good man and a bad man. In that way, he is like all of us; an everyman. A very human man. What I do believe made my father special is that he was a big man. He was the epitome of the man who lived large. This bigness contributed to both the good things and the bad things. My Pop had big appetites when it came to liquor and women. This got him into trouble more often than not. It was symptomatic though of his desire to truly live a big life. Ultimately it is this desire that led him to do some truly good things that far eclipsed any bad things. It is this balance that serves as an example that my Father can serve to everyone. If, at the end of your life, you have done far more good that bad, then you also have led a big life. My Father learned through the course of his life how to be a good person. He sometimes wasn't the best at being good, but the point was that he kept trying and ultimately succeeded. The good things are his incredible love of his family. My family is big both literally and figuratively thanks to Pop. Now his definition of family was multidimensional. First was his immediate family which he prioritized over all. But also for my Father was the larger Human family. He presented himself as an curmudgeon but for his family, especially his children; we knew him as the caring, compassionate, and considerate man he really was.

In fact that is his greatest legacy, one that we should all try to emulate. At the end he had created a family that, despite their tendency to criticism, shares and extends those qualities my Pop lived big to everyone. As long as there are those who care about others, are considerate of others, and are compassionate for all, my Pop will live on.  


It is that legacy that I celebrate. I have seen others write about how my Father was a family man. What this means to me is that first-and-foremost he considered his family. This consideration played itself out in actions by prioritizing his family. This did not come immediately to my Father, it is a skill he worked on developing all his life. At the end of his life he was much more of an exemplar of this skill. How this manifested itself is that he always had an opinion about his children's lives because he wanted them to be good lives. That is what he wanted more than anything, a good life for his children. That is why is loss has been particularly hard on his children. Now this is not to sugar-coat it. Sometimes his opinions were not wanted, sometimes they created more problems then they solved. But for all of this children, we could always sense the underlying concern in his interest in us. I bet if my siblings were being honest they would all share that they felt that they were his favorite. I understand that fathers are not supposed to have favorites. What my father taught me is that there is a way to make all of your children feel like they are your favorite. For me it was that of all of my siblings, I look the most like my Father. In fact there are some picture of my Father when he was my age, and it is indeed like looking in the mirror. My Father also dragged me along on a lot errands when I was growing up that mad me feel a special bond with him. For instance, I often accompanied him on his Christmas Eve shopping spree through Macy's to get everybody he had to buy Christmas gifts for a gift. I am sure my brothers and sisters can tell similar stories of the special things that they shared with Pop that made them feel like they were his favorite. That is the point, he made all of us feel like his favorite. This made his family big. All of his offspring have inherited his innate consideration, almost to a fault. Sometimes we consider others before ourselves. If a family can be too considerate, it is the Reese's. That is my Father's Legacy.

Of course my Pop had one last lesson to teach and that is how to grieve. I have been grieving with my family now and I wanted to share some things. Grieving is about trying to understand that which is truly impossible to understand. I can believe where he is now, but I can never know where he is; all I know is that he is not here. That is the burden of grief. On The Walking Dead, Lori once said of grief, "You can never get rid of it; you just have to make room for it." What she didn't explain is that it takes a long time to renovate your spirit. This is when I envy those who have more faith than I. I am constantly haunted by, to use a book/movie, the unbearable lightness of being. I have never handled mortality well. The thing that has given my life some heaviness since my Pop's passing is the very family that is my Father's legacy. My family is my number one consideration. Family in this case is not about blood, it is about those who you consider. As I have gone through this, I have felt the love and support from all that I consider important in my life. I can never thank you enough but what I can do is tell you that in doing so, you all are living the legacy of my Pop. So celebrate, be big, and live large.

My final conversation with my Father will always and forever be etched in my memory. Here it is:

Me holding my Father's hand, "Are you scared?"
Dad:  "Noooo." Smile.
Me: "I am so proud of you. You have created a legacy, your family"
Dad: "I'm proud of you to, Son. Here I have something for your boys."
Me: "Oh Pop, you don't have to worry about that......" Then I held his hand for around ten minutes, he was too weak to hold my hand back. Finally he opened his eyes.
Dad: "Get out of here now, I love you Son."
Me: "I love you too, Pop." I gave him a kiss on both the hand that I was holding and his forehead while I gave him a gentle embrace.
 

The Diamond of Your Life

This I believe… I believe that at the beginning of our lives we are a diamond in the rough. Throughout our lives, our diamonds are carved by Others. Each person we get to know carves a facet into the diamond that is what our life becomes. Some people carve deeper facets than others. The more people we allow to carve our diamond, the more valuable it becomes. If you know much about diamonds, you will know that the more facets that you can carve, then the more valuable your diamond is.

"Your Love is King" by Sade

Sade. What can I say but I love the music of Sade. When I was in High School, I was like any other teenager in that I was looking for something to call my own. And like a lot of other teenagers I thought that the key to discovering who I was lay in finding some really cool band. Now I hung around with the ‘alternative’ crowd and we prided ourselves on the bands that we liked. Looking back now it is all very silly. In looking for a band that was new and interesting, we often chose the same band. So in discovering our individuality we flocked like lemmings to the same bottom forty. I was a little different though in that I understood what was happening and actually began to like the hunt for new music rather than the bands that I still have in my CD collection (I know it should be somewhere digitized but I still don’t have cyber-space room for it and in addition no time to go through all of my back catalog.

So I would read magazines like Q and Rolling Stone and really reach for those bands that I had never heard of. I am happy to say that I was one of the first (that I knew of) to ‘discover’ the greatness that is Sade. At this time she had had one hit and I had read about it from the English magazine Q. I then started to search for anything of hers and it was not until about a year later that she collected most of her singles into her first album. Then she took off and became what she is today; a popular songstress. So the world stole my music from me. To give you some idea about the freshness of Sade at the time I was hanging out with my older brother M (first initials only to protect the identities of my social network. M had a radio show on the local college radio station KUNR. Every Sunday M would play the most contemporary modern jazz, what I now know of as San Diego Jazz. I gave him my cassette tape of Sade and he loved it right away and subsequently put it into heavy rotation on his show. (I would later go to the same college radio station for my own show, “The Mood Mode” that I will write about someday.
So the world took the music but they could not spoil what the music meant to me. One of the things that I took from Sade is that music can convey so much of the mystery of the world. One mystery that it certainly helps with is love. Even though I, like all teenagers, liked to kid myself that I understood love; I didn’t. We understood lust, infatuation, and desire, but not love. Even then I knew this. Listening to Sade I could feel the love in her music. I remember thinking that here is someone who is in love in her life and lets me feel it. Here is someone who has discovered something about love that I can only try to understand. Try as I might though, I felt it without understanding it. I wanted to experience that love but was never able. Women are so shallow in high school, at least the vast majority. So are men at that age. I wanted to go deeper into a relationship than any young high school girl was willing or able to go. Instead, my intensity seemed to scare them off.

I have always been more concerned with the temporariness of life and knew that I would one day be able to feel that love when I found the right person. The only was to understand the love found in Sade’s music is to be in love like Sade. I never found that love, until I found A. I do not know how my Editors know these things, but it was very appropriate when D chose “Your Love is King” to write about as my first idea. Sure D shares his Birthday with our anniversary (a story that I will tell someday) but could he have known that October 4th is A’s birthday and on October 10th it will be our 20th Anniversary. I like to think D knew or if he did not it is just good kismet.

Because it was A who taught me how to love and be loved. It is A who continues to teach me about how to love and be loved. I do not know, and indeed do not want to know, what my life would have been like without having found A. By all the facts and evidence, I do not deserve the wife that I have. I had never felt love the way I felt it when A is looking at me. And that is the reason I asked her to marry me. So the first dance we had as a couple at out reception was “Your Love Is King” by Sade. So then that idea that it is the one who you love who is the King of your heart, the idea that you could spend your life together with someone, the idea that another is necessary for you to have a good life, that love is a mystery that can only be solved as a couple. That is the Idea I have when I hear that song and when I look at my Beautiful Wife. Happy Birthday.

So my Editors have been given the following list and have been asked to make choices that I cannot, like what to write first. The first of the Editors to choose gets to choose the topic of my next IdeaMan post, and so on.

Comic book ideas: Roof, Lifeguard, Nowhere Found, IdeaMan & the Editors. (Choose one).
Book ideas: Brian Kando
Television Series ideas: The Belle Époque, The Mood Mode
Movies: Timeshare
Music ideas: “Your love is King” by Sade, “Forbidden Fruit” by the Blow Monkeys, The Mood Mode (Choose one)
Explaining “The Matrix” Trilogy
What is political science fiction?
Why I am into my students.
Why I call myself a liberal republican.
Why I call myself a feminist and collect comics about women.
The carving of the diamond of your life
Environmentalism for me.
My favorite bands and why: Trash Can Sinatras, Prefab Sprout, The New Radicals, Jack’s Mannequin (Choose one)
My favorite artists and why: Remedios Varo, Eyvind Earle, Christo, Michael Parkes, Ashley Wood, Kenneth Rocafort, Humberto Ramos, Partick Woodroffe, Nick Bantock (Choose one)
The scientist in me and the Republican Party.

I had an idea

So I have been reading a lot of comic books lately and was recently thinking about the subtle superpowers that we seem to all have if we only are attuned to what is special inside of all of us. If I were to discuss my superpowers it would be that I am relatively smart and, because I read a lot of science fiction, comic books, and graphic novels, seem to have some good ideas on occasion. Not earth-shattering ideas mind you, but good ideas nonetheless. These ideas can be anything; ideas regarding interesting stories that I would want to see written or developed in any medium, ideas about the future and how we can make the future a better place, ideas about politics in America., ideas about love and relationships, ideas about parenting,

And I also understand that in the 21st Century ideas are easy to share. One of the ways that we refer to the world we are currently living in is The Information Age. In such an age, ideas are king. Just look at anything within the entertainment medium. It all begins with an idea. Just think about all of the new companies that began with a simple idea. So I know ideas can be powerful things. That is why I started this blog; to share ideas. While I have good ideas all the time, I never know what to do with them. I am so busy trying to prepare my students here at Folsom Lake College for the success that seems increasingly out of reach, trying to raise two beautiful boys, spend time with my wife of twenty years, and seize any opportunity I have to read and watch news, that I simply do not have the energy or time to do anything with these ideas. But I am sure that something can be done with some of them. Even those that do not lead to anything substantial or are not intended for any purpose other than to be read are still worth something because I have gained a little wisdom (not much but some) in my time on this planet.

You all know what I am talking about. We all imagine inventing something or creating something that will lead to fame and riches. For instance, I played that game in the past about inventing something so I do not have to work. What I came up with around twenty years ago was the idea that cars should have a ‘U-Turn Light.” Now if I had had this blog up and running back then (not that it was possible because it was before the Internet) I would be sitting pretty because now they are making cars with signals indicating a U-turn. Doh! Somebody had my idea and was also a doer. So they get the rewards. So at this blog I will have some record of some ideas that might benefit me or someone else in the future. Other ideas will just bring some more insanity to the world. One of my other ideas is a comic book reading light, but I get ahead of myself.

So the way it is going to work is I am going to use my social network, which remains quite small, to edit my ideas. My friends and family on Facebook are going to be given a list of ideas that I have had over the years. This list will be continually updated with any new ideas I may have. So my friends and family are my superhero sidekicks known as the Editors. I will ask them to choose which ideas I should explore here at this blog with the larger universe and which ideas I should only share with them. Not all my ideas are good and some should not be shared because I do have a public life as a Professor of Political Science Fiction. I don’t always know which are which, so the Editors will choose for me. They are here right now on the internets, watch out. The first to choose from the list sets me on my purpose and on down the line. So we will see how it goes and hopefully both the editors and any others who might find me will be intrigued, entertained, and enlightened. Maybe a few of us will collaborate on making some of these ideas realities.

Next post will explain some of the rules for any who want to participate. Rules that will be necessary so my students and others can also use and comment on these ideas.

So let us get to superheroing.

Hearing is Wonderful

So I have, for three weeks been wrestling with a loss of hearing. Most people when asked to choose to give up hearing or sight, would choose hearing. Sight allows us to maintain more of our independence. I would still choose to lose my hearing...but now I would hesitate more. Not being able to hear was extremely isolating and, while I usually feel more alone than most, I felt extremely cut off from the rest of the people in my life. I have since had my hearing restored and I cannot express how great it is to hear my boys, my wife, my students, and my music. I would love to hear all of your voices too.... if only Facebook had some audio capabilities. Still give me call and say Hi I would love to hear your voice whoever you are. IT is like my ears have been born again. Two band that you must hear are Jack's Mannequin and the Postal Service.