How did I live to be 50 before I watched this classic movie?  Bill Murray plays a sunovabitch who because of a glitch in time learns to be a decent human.  The glitch: every day is the same day, Groundhog day.  He is a TV weather man who is accumstomed to being rude, selfish, and sarcastic to everyone.  He discovers along the way that one of the people he gets to relive this day with is a truly wonderful woman, and it takes him a long time to become a man worthy of her.  People told me it was a great movie but for some reason the groundhog part turned me off.  Funny, maybe I'm learning.

The problem's not that the truth is harsh but that liberation from ignorance is as painful as being born. Run after truth until you're breathless. Accept the pain involved in re-creating yourself afresh. These ideas will take a life to comprehend, and hard one interspersed with drunken moments.
--Nagui Mahfouz in Palace of Desire

So much has been happening lately that I can't even come close to keeping up with my journal. This weekend I'm attending a conference at NCNM on "Transforming the Mind" and the presentations today were fascinating. I think the most interesting one for me was this wild mathematician guy who has decided to represent aspects of dynamic living systems in three dimensional moving lines as drawn by his computer. But I don't want to write about this too much now. There will be more of this conference, and I'll have more insight after I finish the whole thing.
( long and rambling, about movies, studying, Governor Kitzhauber's talk on the future of healthcare and the Archimides Movement, and a couple of vocabulary words (grok and transmogrify)Collapse )