It’s morning in Philadelphia. I woke up again at like 5:30 and watched the light grow brighter on the horizon, the el train start to move about its morning business; the city stretched and yawned. Yesterday the same thing happened, but just before sunrise, and the moon was low in the western sky. I explained to J yesterday why that happens, that the moon isn’t specifically a night time thing, but it goes around the earth every 29ish days, but the earth spins every 24 hours, and the clockwork of our planetary system puts the moon in all kinds of celestial positions. Which is what she said.

We’re tiny, Ben. I read about the Pale Blue Dot photo every now and then. I pretty much always feel something akin to vertigo. But what if someday I feel that aching void reserved only for a man who looks at something that excited him in his youth, but now stirs nothing? I’m glad it didn’t happen last time I watched Rushmore, and it pretty much never happens when I read about Voyager I & II, and zeppelins, and that video game P told me about where they ran out of program space to create a certain monster, and so they just allowed the code itself to get rendered as raw data on the screen.

But I guess in the spring time I start feeling emotions again. And the place I’m in now I can only describe as pre-nostalgia. I love my friends, Ben. You and just about everybody has said, after upgrading to Philadelphia 2.0 (New York, LA. I consider Portland a lateral move), that the people they knew there were still the best. And they’re the ones I get to see every day. I’m contented these days, things are very easy. But I definitely look around sometimes, particularly on the kinds of simple fun nights that you remember forever for some reason, despite the fact that you just went to a bar and played pool. Despite the fact that you didn’t get any phone numbers. I look around on those nights at the people I’m drinking with, that I feel comfortable with, and I’m afraid I’m going to blink and suddenly be looking at a sepia photo of it from a kitchen with a wife and screaming kids, bald and tired. Trapped. Then I feel like I need to preserve these people somehow, that I need to make sure these moments never stop. But my cryogenic plant is maybe 45% operational, and my interest level wanes.

All joys have a finite lifespan. A specific start and stop point and after that they’re gone forever. You can take a picture of what it looked like, but you can’t take how you felt with you. And looking at that picture later can make you feel something different entirely.

This letter is a perfect example. I thought I was getting somewhere, but that last paragraph sounds like it should be a voiceover on a doctor show. It cheapened the whole thing, until I wrote this paragraph to save it with the life-raft of contextualization. So, I’ll leave you and get another day started. Low-frame rate slow motion… Doogie Howser journal-save-and-close… fade out. Credits, and cue the instrumental version of the theme.

I don’t know what it is about programming, but it really gets my autonomic nervous system going. I started my newest assignment last night – a simple die rolling game - and I was so worked up I couldn’t go to bed. I laid down but after fifteen minutes was back at my desk hacking away.

When it finally came time to get some sleep, I tried to do some breathing exercises. Breathe in, breath out. In. Out. In. Out. Off. On. Off. On. Zero. One.

As my brain patterns transitioned to the slower, more synchronized alpha waves, I imagined, no more like I understood myself as just one bit in a vast system whose purpose was beyond my ability to grasp. I just make sure I do my part. Zero. One. Zero. One.

I know I’m part of something, Charlie, but I’m not sure what.

-Ben

I’m getting sick. Not that I can complain, after abusing my body for an entire weekend of caffeine-fueled video game mayhem. I’m talking of course of my 27 hour birthday lan party marathon. I’m really glad you and T could come.

The hangover I had Sunday was a really specific kind of hangover. Because it’s not like you abused your liver all night with hard-drinking. It’s more of a slow orbit around the binary stars of Beer and Red Bull, fueled by Doritos. You just spiral outward and outward, see-sawing between the two to keep your orbit stable. Anyhow, I went to bed at about 7:30am, woke up at 11 to play more video games and see my remaining guests out. I didn’t feel sick or nauseated in the usual hangover sense. It’s more like my body was picketing me, on strike, demanding fair treatment. I called in the Pinkertons (Excedrin Migraine) and spent the morning with Roomba cleaning up, which was an ordeal. I was glad I wasn’t alone, though. I was comforted to hear my robot friend taking care of the living room while I did dishes.

But I’m glad we’re peers again. It’s always weird for those few days in February when you’re my elder. You start giving me advice and making me take out the trash, and I just have to do it for some reason. Not anymore, though. Now we’re equals again.

-C

Happy Valentinesbirthday. Your very existence is a pale, fleshy arrow from Cupid’s quiver.

WNYC marked the holiday by playing a beautiful story of romance between a man and a woman and two golden records containing artifacts of a grand and diverse culture, a declaration of cosmic citizenship. I’m sure you know who I’m talking about. They had Ann on to talk about falling in love with Carl. They agreed to get married on the same phone call in which Ann and Carl first revealed their love for each other. And I don’t mean first time they said, “I love you.” I mean the first time they acknowledged any romantic interest at all. “A eureka moment,” Ann says, “like a scientific discovery.” Or so the story goes.

Two days after the sudden engagement Ann wondered aloud to Carl, do you think if we recorded my brainwaves, an alien culture could reconstitute the data back into thought. And Carl says, “well, a thousand million years is a long time. Who knows what’s possible.”

So they did it. Ann recorded her thoughts not only about the history of civilization and its intellectual heritage, but also about love. She got engaged only two days prior, Charlie, and it’s not absurd to think that her nervous system was still responding to the excitement. In some ways it may be the truest recording of any manifestation of love. Truer than any song or poem. And the most romantic part of all – Jad Abumrad, the host, sums it up nicely - some billions of years from now the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun, yet floating in the vastness of space, there will still exist a remnant of the their love.

After I heard that story, the card I’m getting T-bot seems kinda like a let down. But how do you compete with that? You can’t.

See you tonight.

-Ben

I’ll admit: I totally didn’t get through your last letter. Too much politics. Where’s the heart?

I’m sorry I missed your birthday party this weekend. I hope my phonecall did something to smooth things over. We got walloped with snow this weekend, police cars careening all over the place, children tunneling deep into the white, forming their own philosophies and morals, the sun a weak and distant speck of light, looking on with a kind of apathetic curiosity.

Also, my car is buried. And I mean buried, so I’m going to let it stay there for a while since parking is at a premium. I took the bus in today and listened to Van Morrison and constantly moved out of the way of obese people who wanted to get off at every. single. stop.

But I had a quiet moment while Jackie Wilson Said played, and I smiled at a girl that walked past, and looked up at the Peco building and realized that I’m still in Philadelphia after all these years. I felt okay about it.

-Charlie

First off, let me apologize for having not written you in over a week. I’ve been busy with school and work and well, you know the spiel. In any case, it just so happens that my current assignment for University Writing is to write a letter so I thought why not kill two birds with one stone. Of course this means that this particular letter will not be what you’re used to, stories about living with girls and cats and trying new shampoos. Instead I’ll be using you as a sounding board for an essay on international justice and my Israeli heritage.

I accept your forgiveness in advance.

Let me begin by introducing the central text of my essay, a piece by Martha C. Nussbaum titled Compassion & Terror. Nussbaum is a philosopher of ethics with a special interest in classical texts. Also, judging from this picture (http://exiledonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/martha_nussbaum3.jpg), she works out. In the essay Nussbaum frames terrorism, specifically the 9/11 attacks, within the philosophical argument over which approach best leads to justice on both a local and global scale. In short, she argues that compassion is our best bet; however, she freely admits that compassion has its own pitfalls. The same emotional base that leads to compassion can also incite anger and fear. Taking her example of the World Trade Center attacks, we can see that it elicited a compassion in Americans for those killed but also fueled a fire of jingoism and hate towards Arabs worldwide. Compassion can lead to the sports-fan mentality, us versus them. Also, emotions, being so immediate and so present in their manifestation, tend to apply themselves locally. How can compassion be used globally within those limitations? Well, to be honest, Nussbaum doesn’t exactly clear that up except to say that we can train ourselves to feel compassion on a larger scale through storytelling (specifically tragedies). I’d also recommend travel.

But despite these flaws, she feels that compassion trumps the next best alternative which she claims is the principle of human dignity. The principle holds that all humans, no matter race, class, or creed, are equal in dignity and therefore deserving of justice. It’s basically the idea of human rights on which most contemporary theories of international justice are based. Sounds good, right? Well, not to Nussbaum. One, it doesn’t include animals. Human rights. Clearly, any true foundation of justice includes cats and dogs and I guess other less cute animals, so right off the bat the idea of dignity becomes too anthropocentric. Two, the Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome argued that dignity must be separate from fortune because if it wasn’t then someone could lose dignity through bad fortune and therefore not be deserving of justice since justice is a right of those with dignity. As you can see, the logical flow can get pretty tricky pretty quickly, but basically Nussbaum takes their argument to the extreme and claims that if dignity can’t be taken away by fortune than no behavior is off limits. Why not rape someone? They still retain their dignity, right? So what’s so bad?

Anyway, she goes on for the better part of her essay following a logic that seems less than useful if our goal is to talk about actual global problems. But eventually, in the last few pages she finally lets on to the complexity of the matter. She admits what we need is in fact “compassion within the limits of respect [for human dignity]” and that each of us must ask ourselves difficult questions about our responsibilities regarding social justice. How much do I owe the world? The people of Haiti? The poor in my neighborhood? How much wealth am I allowed to have? To me, these are the important questions concerning both local and international justice.

Okay, so I need to take Nussbaum’s point of view as well as my own and analyze what we’re calling an exhibit. A story, an object, a perspective, a thing, you know. Not like in court, more like in science class. We need to put something under the microscope. But in this case, just as Carl Sagan flies around the universe in his spaceship of the imagination in Cosmos, I need to use a microscope of the imagination. A microscope that will put my exhibit in context. It’s one of those microscopes that has multiple lenses on it, I know you know what I’m talking about. You may even have one. One lens is my point of view, the other is Nussbaum’s. In some ways you could argue that an exhibit can’t even been seen without a lens. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve decided to examine something you’ve probably never really heard me talk about. And not just because you rarely listen to me, but because it’s not something I wear on my sleeve. As you may know, I’m an Israeli citizen. To be accurate, I have dual-citizenship. But what you may not know is that my parents, on the scale of member of Hamas to West Bank settler, fall much closer to the West Bank settler. To put it in perspective, they feel the Palestinians are getting what they deserve. The argument goes something like this: if the Palestinians don’t want to be attacked, then they need to stop attacking Israel. All violence, both structural and physical, visited upon the Palestinian Arabs is a direct consequence of their own actions and therefore just. Nussbaum does talk about this sentiment. She calls it the judgment of nondesert. One can only feel compassion for another if they believe the other isn’t deserving of suffering.

Well, that begs the question, do the Palestinians deserve their lot? Well, my good friend, that is a very touchy question. I spent last summer reading several books on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of the Middle East in general. My goal was to educate myself to the point at which I could answer a question like this with some certainty. What I found was a complex history with no clear moral orientation. Both the Jews and the Arabs have a claim to the land and both have committed deplorable acts. Nussbaum makes no clear reference to situations of this sort. What happens when it is not clear who is right and who is wrong? She does write that “there will still be important sources of good to be protected from harm, and there will still be justified anger at damage to those good things.” In other words, the good will be hurt, justifiably angry, and presumably in a position to retaliate. But who or what is good? Which acts of retaliation are justified?

As mentioned, my parents see much less ambiguity in the issue. My father was raised in Israel. He was brought up in a small country surrounded by enemies. Israel goes to war with one of its neighbors about once a decade. As you may know, the military is a mandatory part of Israeli life. Like all Israeli citizens who live in the country, my father was conscripted into the army at eighteen. He fought in the Six Day War. He was taught from an early age how to feel on these issues. Here, Nussbaum does make a point that resonates with me. She calls for all people to be educated in compassion at an early age. Children should learn of their own weakness and through that knowledge hopefully understand the humanity of others. In essence, children should receive an education opposite to that which my father received. An education of humility and understanding. Nussbaum hopes that such educations would allow people to feel compassion over large distances. In the case of Israel and Palestine, that distance isn’t so great.

So where do I stand, you ask. Well, it’s hard to say. There are so many complicated issues. I fancy myself a compassionate person. But that compassion leads me to feel for both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Also, there are individuals on both sides of the conflict that act immorally. It’s hard to reconcile many of the facts into a clear position. I certainly believe that Israel, with its superior resources, has some responsibility to the Palestinian people. Also, I believe that Palestine has some responsibility to educate its own citizens. It’s my opinion that peace is a noble cause and therefore both sides should drop their grudges in the name of a better future. But I also recognize there is naïveté in that hope. When Nussbaum writes about human relations, she seems to share that innocence. She never takes the time to discuss the realistic side of international affairs. There are more factors at play than simply a lack of love. Filling that void may be one solution, but it may not really be the best solution. I think I may side more with the Stoics – at least generally. It’s not necessary in my mind for the Israelis and Palestinians to love each other. It’s necessary for them to grow up and realize that people are suffering. It’s necessary for my father to see that an endless grudge match is futile. Instead of pointing to Euripides’s The Trojan Women as Nussbaum does, I would point to Aeschylus’s Oresteia in which a cycle of revenge is ended by an impartial jury. In this case, the ingrained resentment may be too much for the emotions to overcome. Instead what may be needed is a call for humanism.

And what about me as an individual. What is my personal responsibility? As an Israeli citizen do I owe the Palestinians anything? Do I owe Israel anything? Do I have a responsibility to do anything at all? To speak my mind. To try and make things better. And what about shame. Should I be ashamed of my heritage? If I were to take Nussbaum’s lesson to heart and exercise compassion, maybe I should be ashamed. At the moment though, I’m not sure. I guess I have about two weeks to flesh it out.

Alright, Charles. Thanks for bearing with me on this one. I apologize for the lack of organization and roughness of my thoughts (and also the lack humor in this letter), but I think I’ve made a lot of progress working out my ideas . I’ll be sure to send you a copy of the final draft of the essay, ‘cause I know you’re dying to read it.

Anyway, how’s it go down in Philly? Made any progress on your robot or the pieces for the show in Portland? See you in two weeks for your epic twenty-seven hour birthday party. I’ll be sure to bring Mountain Dew, Doritos, and other such accoutrements that you video game players love so much.

- Ben

I don’t want to talk about Massachusetts. Suffice it to say, I threw J out of my apartment last night over a political dispute, and we’re both democrats, at least I think so. Suddenly I knew I would hit him if I heard any more words from his mouth, and then he’d hit me and have to make me dinner for a few weeks while I convalesced. So I said, “I think you should go,” and left the room and started turning off lights. It was real.

J is more of a Non-Partisan. Ultimately, I think we just want different things out of political discussion. I was drunk and angry and basically looking to talk baseball. “Damn Yankees,” that kinda thing. When I’m talking politics, I wanna have opinions. When J talks politics, he wants to make sure you know that if you have opinions, you’re probably oversimplifying something. Also, that he’s way less partisan than you, and that you’re just as bad as they are. At least that’s the only thing that I get from him.

Here’s the thing: saying “they probably say the same thing about their ideas” doesn’t make mine wrong. Two sides can say and feel the same way about their respective plans, but that fact itself doesn’t invalidate mine. We can both look at each other and say, “you’re wrong”. But one of us is right. And it’s us.

Republicans are bad for America, and constantly obstruct progress. That’s all I’m saying.

Love,
Charlie

I saved a man’s life today. Well I didn’t necessarily save his life, but I helped him briefly during some sort of physiological event. At first it looked like he was just a slow moving old man, but then his body started folding towards the floor. Another kid and I caught him and moved him out of the way.

He was heavy for an old man. Maybe he would have been over six feet standing straight. Of course we asked him if he was okay. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I just need to get on my feet.” We tried propping him up on his cane, but we could feel him still using us for support. “I need to catch the train to White Plains.” At this point a few other people had come over. “Oh, that’s the MetroNorth,” someone chimed in. “Maybe we can get him a cart.”

Getting him on the train didn’t seem like the best plan. “Has this ever happened before?” I asked him. “No, no. First time.” “Maybe we should get a doctor or someone to come over then.” He was both disoriented by his predicament and embarrassed. Someone went and found a police officer while now three of us remained holding him up. Within a few minutes there were five police officers, two with machine guns and helmets. They’d convinced the man to lay on the ground and told him there was an ambulance on the way. One of the armed officers gestured with his machine gun for us to back up. “Thanks to everyone who helped, but please back up.” I stayed and watched the old man briefly insist on getting on the train but eventually relent to being taken to the hospital.

As I walked away to buy some sherry for tonight’s risotto I thought that perhaps the man had a sudden neurological problem that disabled his motor cortex. Maybe this also explained why he was so confused. I liked the feeling of diagnosing him. And helping him too. Should I go into clinical neurology? You don’t have to answer that.

Time for bed. My backpack is packed, my lunch is made, and my clothes for the first day of school are laid out and sitting just by the heating vent on the floor so they’ll be nice and toasty for me in the morning.

-Ben

I’ve got a project I’m working on. At last! It sprang to life last night for no reason while I was talking to SW. We all know that I am at my best when utterly obsessed by something specific. Well, for the next 36-72 hours, I will be! Unfortunately, this means that by the time the Sega CD gets here, I’ll probably already have moved onto something else that’s NOT building a robot that can play Desert Bus. C’est la vie.

I’ve also been trying to write a song about Voyager (the craft, not the 3rd rate Star Trek series) for the new Housewives and Hard Drives album. I think the hardest thing to write about is something you’re sincerely passionate about. Everything I write feels pretty trite. Is that because I’m trite? Or am I tricking the idea into being casual and aloof? Regarding your last letter, I don’t want this to turn into a cutesy Juno Moldy Peaches thing. That’s the last thing I want on Earth, or on the outer edges of the solar system.

-C

Do you know a movie that stars Jesse Eisenberg and the little girl from Little Miss Sunshine? It has a scene where Jesse Eisenberg reacts awkwardly to being seduced by a girl more sexually confident than himself. Sound familiar? Probably, right?

Anyway, some guy was watching it on the subway this morning on his iPod Touch – behavior severely frowned upon by David Lynch – and I, in turn, was watching it over his shoulder. For a second I thought one of the actresses was Ellen Page and then I started to imagine a celebrity deathmatch royal between Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Cera, Ellen Page, and the girl from Little Miss Sunshine whose name I’m not even going to spend the ten seconds to look up.

This fantasy was very satisfying. I took the liberty of ending the fight by having Diablo Cody fly in on a bunker buster bomb, killing the insufferable brood along with herself and ending a decade of people dressing like off-beat teenagers but acting like they’re defeated fortysomethings.

I mean what do all these pseudo-ironic, pseudo-dorky, pseudo-independent movies even tell us? That sad, quirky people who go through life’s challenges and adventures with indifference and hesitation will be rewarded with either a return to the status quo or a fleeting moment of local stardom and then a return to the status quo. I mean, look, to be fair, I’ve barely even watched any of these movies. I can’t do it. I can’t watch anything with Michael Cera that isn’t Arrested Development. So maybe I’m wrong. Let me know if I am, but I have a strong intuition that I’m not. Case in point, there is an article on the web explaining just what the difference is between Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera.

I don’t know why I’m so worked up. I think I just got myself there so I could write a remotely interesting letter that wasn’t about what I had for dinner last night, which was really amazing – homemade bread, homemade ravioli, homemade sauce (even home-canned), and locally grown veggie salad (mostly thanks to T-bot) – or my subway commute this morning – oh wait, I guess that’s how this letter started. Fuck me.

-Ben