The People's Communist Republic government announced today the purchase of Google. In response to why a national communist government would be interested in commercial development, the prime minister said that the government was tired of seeing people have a good time without benefiting the people.
The government intends to turn all commercial software into research projects, such as the recent purchase of the game software, The Sims, tying them to the country's scientific and political laboratories, using the combined minds of all people in gaming and on the Internet to improve living and working conditions for all the world population.
"We will not allow the wasteful habits of the people ruin the planet," the prime minister declared at a public rally this afternoon. "In future, all games or other distracting means for humans to idle their productive minds will be rewritten so that when humans think they are entertaining one another, they instead will use their gaming scenarios to help us reach our destiny!"
The head of the Department For The Advancement of Human Communication joined the prime minister and demonstrated a means to convert text messaging into a 'Power For The People' database to help the Ministry of Social Adjustment analyze citizens' individual brain functionality for further retraining needs.
No longer will the people be required to attend weekly social center functions but instead will benefit from the individualized advertisement system just released by the Department For Happy Thoughts for use on all next-generation cellphones and Internet television devices.
"The people have spoken and we are here to meet the people's demands!" the prime minister shouted over the cheering voices of the People's Youth Parade gathered to see the concert by one of the latest popular music singers, Yao Soo Yoong.
30 June 2009
If Nothing Is New...
I saw a person post the phrase "there's no mystery in history" the other day. I don't know why the person posted the phrase. Instead, I wondered why the person doesn't plumb the riches that history provides, teaching us about what humans have already discovered so we can seek new experiences or at least new combinations of former human experiences.
When we see modern history taking shape before our eyes, I believe we would understand the near-term consequences of historic changes in our lifetime if we had stronger memories of similar historic changes from the distant past. Why only live in the moment if we can take advantage of human accomplishments from the past to add value to the moment and the future close at hand?
As we connect ourselves together using today's technologies like computers and cellphones so we can communicate using text, voice and video, as well as tomorrow's technologies like brain wave scanners and pheromone detectors/emitters so we can communicate in more human bodily terms, we'll give each other access to not only immediate experiences but also the collective memories of all of us, including everyday events like waking, eating and sleeping, revelations that lead to new breakthroughs and reading/memorization of historic facts.
There may be no mystery in history but without memorizing the history embedded in language, our world would not be the same (I certainly wouldn't be here).
In the next few years, as we find ways to incorporate new communication devices in our daily lives that'll bypass or supplement the keyboard interface, let's also figure out a way to advance the study of history so we can keep our discoveries in perspective, using the search engines and wikipedias of today to enhance our quest to reveal the truly exciting mysteries of tomorrow.
Imagine finding a way to train the brain to forego the final filter effect of using our bodies to communicate (ten-finger typing, for instance) and communicating on a whole new level that'll require retraining our thought process for channels of thoughts associated with interpreting not only the five senses but direct synapse-to-synapse connections with other humans (and perhaps other animals, as well). If a wired monkey can operate a robot arm and a brainwave scanner allows a human to operate a wheelchair, then the next step is connecting two living beings together to communicate directly and see what happens. Will they synchronize their brainwave patterns and thus become one virtual brain? If we wired a primate who knows sign language to another primate who does not know sign language, could the first primate teach the second primate through thought training only, using visual clues at first until they both understood that the direct empathic thought process does the same trick, just like the rubber hand illusion makes a person sense a fake arm as real?
Life as we know it is an illusion created by the bodies we are. Nothing new there. However, we humans are creating new life for ourselves and our sense of the universe around us. Today, we deceive ourselves into believing we must wear face/body makeup and underarm deodorant/antiperspirant to mask our real existence as ordinary primates. Tomorrow, we may bypass the whole primate existence by becoming virtual extensions of sensors not yet invented or even ones in use today (infrared, X-ray, gamma ray, UV/solar energy, high-frequency sound/vibration, etc.).
What if you could look out upon a crop of plants using your network of webcams, "see" stress in the plants in the infrared range, search your extended memory for causes of stress, realize your automated computer monitoring system has encountered an usual set of soil conditions, correct the conditions and return the plants to maximum growth while at the same time coming up with a method to post-harvest process the plants' chemical composition to increase the nutritional value for human use that also added to the recyclable value of the plant parts not eaten, including their use in constructing play areas for children in drought-ridden zones around the world, all while spending a relaxing fun time with your family on a picnic?
The future is here, stress-free and exciting. Nothing may be new under the sun and there may be no mystery in history but that doesn't stop me from finding new ways to enjoy the repeat of history: humans being humans in ways unimaginable!
When we see modern history taking shape before our eyes, I believe we would understand the near-term consequences of historic changes in our lifetime if we had stronger memories of similar historic changes from the distant past. Why only live in the moment if we can take advantage of human accomplishments from the past to add value to the moment and the future close at hand?
As we connect ourselves together using today's technologies like computers and cellphones so we can communicate using text, voice and video, as well as tomorrow's technologies like brain wave scanners and pheromone detectors/emitters so we can communicate in more human bodily terms, we'll give each other access to not only immediate experiences but also the collective memories of all of us, including everyday events like waking, eating and sleeping, revelations that lead to new breakthroughs and reading/memorization of historic facts.
There may be no mystery in history but without memorizing the history embedded in language, our world would not be the same (I certainly wouldn't be here).
In the next few years, as we find ways to incorporate new communication devices in our daily lives that'll bypass or supplement the keyboard interface, let's also figure out a way to advance the study of history so we can keep our discoveries in perspective, using the search engines and wikipedias of today to enhance our quest to reveal the truly exciting mysteries of tomorrow.
Imagine finding a way to train the brain to forego the final filter effect of using our bodies to communicate (ten-finger typing, for instance) and communicating on a whole new level that'll require retraining our thought process for channels of thoughts associated with interpreting not only the five senses but direct synapse-to-synapse connections with other humans (and perhaps other animals, as well). If a wired monkey can operate a robot arm and a brainwave scanner allows a human to operate a wheelchair, then the next step is connecting two living beings together to communicate directly and see what happens. Will they synchronize their brainwave patterns and thus become one virtual brain? If we wired a primate who knows sign language to another primate who does not know sign language, could the first primate teach the second primate through thought training only, using visual clues at first until they both understood that the direct empathic thought process does the same trick, just like the rubber hand illusion makes a person sense a fake arm as real?
Life as we know it is an illusion created by the bodies we are. Nothing new there. However, we humans are creating new life for ourselves and our sense of the universe around us. Today, we deceive ourselves into believing we must wear face/body makeup and underarm deodorant/antiperspirant to mask our real existence as ordinary primates. Tomorrow, we may bypass the whole primate existence by becoming virtual extensions of sensors not yet invented or even ones in use today (infrared, X-ray, gamma ray, UV/solar energy, high-frequency sound/vibration, etc.).
What if you could look out upon a crop of plants using your network of webcams, "see" stress in the plants in the infrared range, search your extended memory for causes of stress, realize your automated computer monitoring system has encountered an usual set of soil conditions, correct the conditions and return the plants to maximum growth while at the same time coming up with a method to post-harvest process the plants' chemical composition to increase the nutritional value for human use that also added to the recyclable value of the plant parts not eaten, including their use in constructing play areas for children in drought-ridden zones around the world, all while spending a relaxing fun time with your family on a picnic?
The future is here, stress-free and exciting. Nothing may be new under the sun and there may be no mystery in history but that doesn't stop me from finding new ways to enjoy the repeat of history: humans being humans in ways unimaginable!
Conversation
"You know what I miss most, Zhou?"
"What's that, Rajen?"
"The red dust in my clothes and the sound of the Martian wind blowing against the observation window."
Zhou looked out the portal at the shrinking image of Mars. He turned to Xiaoke, his wife and fellow traveler on the multimonth journey to Earth to visit her dying grandparents. They held hands, smiled and nodded at Rajen, whose wife, Beena, was asleep in the traveling quarters.
Zhou and Xiaoke had left their children to take care of their Martian home during this two-year trip, assuming their genetically-perfect breeding and accelerated training had prepared them for such an absence by their parents.
"I see what you mean, Rajen, but you can imagine I miss my children more."
"Indeed. I look forward to seeing mine back on Earth. Mentally merging memories is one thing but actually touching your kids is another."
Xiaoke leaned forward. "I agree. I can sense the smell of Earth up here," tapping her forehead, "but I want to know what my nose detects. Perhaps there is a discernable difference!"
Beena coasted into the room. "And to dig my hands into a pile of fresh curry!"
They all laughed, a snorting sound that Martian residents develop due to gravitational effects on their physical features and changes in lung capacity from breathing filtered and conditioned Martian air. They would spend a week or so adapting to Earth conditions as well as sharing their new Martian accent with friends and colleagues they'd left behind many years ago.
"What's that, Rajen?"
"The red dust in my clothes and the sound of the Martian wind blowing against the observation window."
Zhou looked out the portal at the shrinking image of Mars. He turned to Xiaoke, his wife and fellow traveler on the multimonth journey to Earth to visit her dying grandparents. They held hands, smiled and nodded at Rajen, whose wife, Beena, was asleep in the traveling quarters.
Zhou and Xiaoke had left their children to take care of their Martian home during this two-year trip, assuming their genetically-perfect breeding and accelerated training had prepared them for such an absence by their parents.
"I see what you mean, Rajen, but you can imagine I miss my children more."
"Indeed. I look forward to seeing mine back on Earth. Mentally merging memories is one thing but actually touching your kids is another."
Xiaoke leaned forward. "I agree. I can sense the smell of Earth up here," tapping her forehead, "but I want to know what my nose detects. Perhaps there is a discernable difference!"
Beena coasted into the room. "And to dig my hands into a pile of fresh curry!"
They all laughed, a snorting sound that Martian residents develop due to gravitational effects on their physical features and changes in lung capacity from breathing filtered and conditioned Martian air. They would spend a week or so adapting to Earth conditions as well as sharing their new Martian accent with friends and colleagues they'd left behind many years ago.
Where Are You, My Little Green Friends?
Of the many voices I hear every year, two have disappeared. I'm not sure if the absence is intentional or accidental. Has disease wiped out the voices' owners? Have migration patterns moved the voices to other parts of the world? Perhaps a few years of drought have pushed the voices' species to extinction in the environment I live.
I don't know the reason(s). I simply miss hearing the voice of the tree frogs, the sound of spring's arrival and summer's promise, a hint of fireflies, stirring up thoughts of cicadas and katydids, with cricket choruses just around the next bend of time's path I travel.
I rely upon the birds, instead, the cardinal and chickadee, the goldfinch and wren. The call of the crow and the twirl of the woodpecker add to natural sounds that make up my day.
But I still miss the tree frogs' cranky voice and creaky call. A bullfrog's harrumph is not enough.
I don't know the reason(s). I simply miss hearing the voice of the tree frogs, the sound of spring's arrival and summer's promise, a hint of fireflies, stirring up thoughts of cicadas and katydids, with cricket choruses just around the next bend of time's path I travel.
I rely upon the birds, instead, the cardinal and chickadee, the goldfinch and wren. The call of the crow and the twirl of the woodpecker add to natural sounds that make up my day.
But I still miss the tree frogs' cranky voice and creaky call. A bullfrog's harrumph is not enough.
29 June 2009
The Hands of a Worker
Do you have a place you call home ("home" being a term for the environment in which you were primarily nurtured as a child and/or the environment in which you have nurtured your own offspring)?
My home was not just the places where I lived with my parents but also television shows, movies, books and the people I met from other places. In other words, my home had tendrils that reached out beyond the physical environment I directly touched or saw. Very few of us had homes that didn't have these same kinds of tendrils. Thus, the interconnectivity we see in communication methods like the Internet is not new.
My wife and I have been discussing the trend in the Western world that takes people out of the traditional Judeo-Christian belief system and into a looser network of "soul nourishment" centers, moving away from the old hierarchical church/synagogue setup and into independent groups of people who gather for moral/ethical training. We've watched the general decline in the number of people claiming a specific label for their style of weekly meditation and wondered where the trend is heading. Are we freeing ourselves from one set of restrictions just to adopt another, or are we preparing ourselves for real freedom, where management and labor, rich and poor, and other groups of opposites can shed the label of opposites and come up with a set of human objectives on which we can all agree?
I saw an article on independent.ie about companies in India buying up large farms in Africa in order to efficiently grow and transport food back home. China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia were also cited in the article as having companies with hundreds of thousands of hectares in Africa used for home food production.
What do you call home? Do you think of yourself in terms of nationalist labels (Chinese, Indian, British, Canadian, American, Honduran, Brazilian, Lebanese, Russian, Lithuanian, etc.)? If so, perhaps you add a regional name to the label, also? Instead, what if you saw yourself as a citizen of Earth first?
Over the next couple of decades, current nation-states will cooperate in sending people to populate or spend long periods of time on other planetary bodies, including our moon and Mars. At some point in time, the first baby will be conceived "off-world," so to speak. That child will force us to define humans as either Earth-born or born off-world. At that point, the concept of Earth-based nation-states will lose meaning. No doubt, the first off-world children will be thought of as having heritages tied to former nation-states (you can bet the first nation-state to have a child conceived off-world will make a big deal of it) but subsequent generations of off-world children will call themselves moon babies or Martians. Some may even call space platforms their home.
When we Earthians see our descendants looking back down on us from another planetary body they call home, what will we feel? Many of us won't feel any different, consumed as we are by our daily lives.
I have a framed photo of a person whose hands are rough and calloused, the hands of a worker. The fingernails are closely cropped. The knuckles stand out. I can imagine the type of work those hands have produced. They may have laboured in soil, laboured in factory work and laboured in housework.
The first inhabitants of an offworld home will represent humanity in all its glory and accomplishments. They will depend on food produced on Earth, no matter where the food came from or where the labourers who prepared the food called home - they will simply be glad the food came from abundant fields on Earth, their home planet. They will be glad that humans came together for one common goal: to move our species to other parts of the solar system to increase the chance of our surviving cataclysmic changes on Earth.
At some point in time, our moral and ethical training will completely move in the direction of promoting survival/growth of humans as a solar system species, not as opposing religious/nation-state groups poised for battle on Earth. Along the way, we'll still have entrenched business owners and religious/nation-state leaders who want to buy and sell war as a concept, taking advantage of our emotions and turning us against one another (even I catch myself using phrases like "competitive advantage" to promote societal changes) - we are still primates, with all our primate genes intact.
Where do you call home? Earth is my home. You are my fellow housemates on this planet. I apologize to you for the times I don't recycle when I can or don't eat less meat than I should. I'm imperfect just like you so I keep you in mind when I don't use chemical fertilizers to artificially stimulate my yard and don't use a lawnmower to produce fields of grass in front of my house. This planet belongs to all of us and if you want any or all of us to survive a few thousand more years, think about your descendants who'll wonder from their Martian kitchens what's going on with their ancestors on Earth. It might even include using time on the computer wisely and spending some time outdoors - when you do, take time to look up because someday someone will be looking back at you from someplace they call home (similar to but not exactly like the way space station inhabitants look down on us now).
My home was not just the places where I lived with my parents but also television shows, movies, books and the people I met from other places. In other words, my home had tendrils that reached out beyond the physical environment I directly touched or saw. Very few of us had homes that didn't have these same kinds of tendrils. Thus, the interconnectivity we see in communication methods like the Internet is not new.
My wife and I have been discussing the trend in the Western world that takes people out of the traditional Judeo-Christian belief system and into a looser network of "soul nourishment" centers, moving away from the old hierarchical church/synagogue setup and into independent groups of people who gather for moral/ethical training. We've watched the general decline in the number of people claiming a specific label for their style of weekly meditation and wondered where the trend is heading. Are we freeing ourselves from one set of restrictions just to adopt another, or are we preparing ourselves for real freedom, where management and labor, rich and poor, and other groups of opposites can shed the label of opposites and come up with a set of human objectives on which we can all agree?
I saw an article on independent.ie about companies in India buying up large farms in Africa in order to efficiently grow and transport food back home. China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia were also cited in the article as having companies with hundreds of thousands of hectares in Africa used for home food production.
What do you call home? Do you think of yourself in terms of nationalist labels (Chinese, Indian, British, Canadian, American, Honduran, Brazilian, Lebanese, Russian, Lithuanian, etc.)? If so, perhaps you add a regional name to the label, also? Instead, what if you saw yourself as a citizen of Earth first?
Over the next couple of decades, current nation-states will cooperate in sending people to populate or spend long periods of time on other planetary bodies, including our moon and Mars. At some point in time, the first baby will be conceived "off-world," so to speak. That child will force us to define humans as either Earth-born or born off-world. At that point, the concept of Earth-based nation-states will lose meaning. No doubt, the first off-world children will be thought of as having heritages tied to former nation-states (you can bet the first nation-state to have a child conceived off-world will make a big deal of it) but subsequent generations of off-world children will call themselves moon babies or Martians. Some may even call space platforms their home.
When we Earthians see our descendants looking back down on us from another planetary body they call home, what will we feel? Many of us won't feel any different, consumed as we are by our daily lives.
I have a framed photo of a person whose hands are rough and calloused, the hands of a worker. The fingernails are closely cropped. The knuckles stand out. I can imagine the type of work those hands have produced. They may have laboured in soil, laboured in factory work and laboured in housework.
The first inhabitants of an offworld home will represent humanity in all its glory and accomplishments. They will depend on food produced on Earth, no matter where the food came from or where the labourers who prepared the food called home - they will simply be glad the food came from abundant fields on Earth, their home planet. They will be glad that humans came together for one common goal: to move our species to other parts of the solar system to increase the chance of our surviving cataclysmic changes on Earth.
At some point in time, our moral and ethical training will completely move in the direction of promoting survival/growth of humans as a solar system species, not as opposing religious/nation-state groups poised for battle on Earth. Along the way, we'll still have entrenched business owners and religious/nation-state leaders who want to buy and sell war as a concept, taking advantage of our emotions and turning us against one another (even I catch myself using phrases like "competitive advantage" to promote societal changes) - we are still primates, with all our primate genes intact.
Where do you call home? Earth is my home. You are my fellow housemates on this planet. I apologize to you for the times I don't recycle when I can or don't eat less meat than I should. I'm imperfect just like you so I keep you in mind when I don't use chemical fertilizers to artificially stimulate my yard and don't use a lawnmower to produce fields of grass in front of my house. This planet belongs to all of us and if you want any or all of us to survive a few thousand more years, think about your descendants who'll wonder from their Martian kitchens what's going on with their ancestors on Earth. It might even include using time on the computer wisely and spending some time outdoors - when you do, take time to look up because someday someone will be looking back at you from someplace they call home (similar to but not exactly like the way space station inhabitants look down on us now).
28 June 2009
Rolling Up My Shirt Sleeves
Is anything inevitable? Looking at my favourites, items that I recall with visual acuity, will I inevitably return to them out of habit or when I want reassurance about who I am? I say that I am not the objects around me and yet I know I am. I am not me without them.
Am I also the objects that do not factor into my list of favourites, the thousands of stimuli I encounter everyday no matter whether I don't want to encounter them? If my eyes pass over an object but I do not consciously recognize that object in the moment, what effect does that object have on me?
My wife and I sat in the restaurant, Dreamland BBQ, yesterday afternoon. The store has several television appliances tuned to sports-related channels as well as one or two general news-related channels. On the main television screen, two guys were wearing gloves and fighting each other, using punches and kicks in order to disable the other guy. My wife doesn't like the sight of blood and didn't want to see the guys bloodying each other up but she also couldn't resist glancing at the fight because of her habit of watching television. I told her she didn't have to watch the fight if it was upsetting her and she said she couldn't help it.
The fight ended a few minutes later, with one guy being awarded the victory on a split decision by the judges. To me, the fight was no worse than the schoolyard and neighborhood fights in which I participated, sometimes as winner and sometimes as loser. Bruises, cuts, scrapes and blood were par for the course, to mix metaphors.
While my wife and I enjoyed our meals, she was eating pork ribs and I was eating beef sausage, sharing bowls of baked beans and banana pudding between us, I wondered about the influence of that fight on my wife's thought process. Would the fight go from her short-term memory to long-term memory so that years from now I could ask her about that day we ate at Dreamland BBQ and were offered menus for the first time and she could respond, "And that cage fight, too!", reminding me of our server, Jami, who wore a religious symbol around her neck and had short brown hair, with what looked like a wedding band and engagement ring on her right hand?
Thoughts constantly swirl in our brains, reinforcing themselves while we make new thoughts and new memories at the same time. Protein synthesis strengthens the synaptic connections of some thoughts while other thoughts may fade with time because of our changing habits, changing venues, or changing health conditions.
Somewhere in my brain the memories of the cage fight will mix with my analysis of ourselves as overachieving primates and form a new set of memories that don't exactly reflect reality. They will be my memories, though, which live with me as long as I refresh those memories occasionally.
I am every thing that happens to be around me in this moment along with the memories of the things that were around me in previous moments.
Before we ate dinner, my wife and I stood in a little shop called Bella Beads and looked at natural stones and plastic beads. My wife was interested in finding metal framework to mount the gemstones we'd received in the mail yesterday morning. We talked with the shopkeeper whose husband had been rafting on the Ocoee River earlier in the day and was shopping at Unclaimed Baggage while we spoke. She suspended any work she had to perform to focus on us, gladly spending time looking at colored stones (I had never seen such a variety, including a string of fire opals that would light up a woman's neck and set her man ablaze (I told my wife that it was the first time I'd thought of rocks as aphrodisiacs)) and consulting with my wife about designing a necklace with pearls and gemstones. The woman has her own distinct personality but at the same time she reminded me of a cross between a colleague named Janet and my sister, which means my memory of the shopkeeper is overlaid with the memories of other people I know. The shopkeeper kept flyers on the counter about the 3/50 project, which my wife and I support without thinking about it - spending money at locally-owned, independently-operated stores before spending money at national chain stores.
Later on, while sitting in the car and watching people of all shapes and sizes (but limited cultural accoutrements) walk by the store, Ulta, where my wife was selecting some hair care products, I thought about the impact of what I know about the current state of human society on me and the objects around me. I return to those thoughts now... The trees outside my window carry the history of seasonal changes in their growth rings, including the times that humans swept through here and chopped down all large trees for their use in the last few hundred years which led to the current state of human society. The trees also reflect changes in local weather which may or may not be attributable to human influences. The trees are here in front of me only because the person who built this house decided not to cut them down; he, in turn, was here because his father owned a business that helped his son build houses for a living; and so on.
I have a limited view of the activities of humans and other objects on this planet that let me sit here and write these words. Through meditation and other relaxation techniques which cut out external influences on the moment, I can increase "global" access to my thoughts while later researching more human activities which will give me a larger view but I will never know everything going on all at once. The human population grows too quickly for me to keep up with seven billion individuals at the same time, assuming I had access to their thoughts and activities, which I don't.
The current state of the world of humans has changed many times since I started writing this blog entry. Millions of people have been born, injured, or killed. We can lump people into categories and make estimates about their activities from one state of the world to the next, can't we? After all, every person has a set of favourites: favourite food, favourite hobby, favourite people to hang out with, favourite place to sleep, favourite place to spend the day, etc.
If all of us are creatures of habit, who go about our lives with mainly a local point of view, seeking out our favourites while mixing in new activities for a bit of change every now and then, what will it take to get us to take a new stance, adopt a global viewpoint and see life as one active participant in a worldwide colony of human primates, individually acting toward the good of the whole in everything we do and everything we see?
Just before I fell asleep last night, I thought about the changes taking place in our local societies as more and more of us connect to the Internet. Many of us just like me will see humans in the light of a complete, global, set of us rather than compartmentalized sets, ignoring the calls of local leaders to maintain loyalties to the old ways of nation-states, shedding the ugliness of name-calling and nation-sized schoolyard fights, and join together to overcome the bullying tactics of megalomaniacs.
You wanna fight? Well, before you take on the easy target in front of you that you or someone else has trumped up as "the enemy", take a look in the mirror and see the enemy within you. That's who you're really fighting, isn't it, another human just like you? Don't let others convince you that someone out there is so much more different than you that you have to build up real or virtual walls to exclude "them."
In the not-so-distant future, we'll still have pockets of people dedicated to the preservation of their "pure" local cultures. But these will be anomalies, experiments we let continue happening as forms of control groups and pressure outlets for those unwilling to globalize - we may even create zones where people in those zones can only maintain local cultural practices. In the mainstream, people will coalesce, creating a global culture that includes a new religion not yet fully formed. We have hints about what the new culture will be like when we saw news this week of the death of a popular music icon and its effect on the Internet immediately following two smaller events, the violent reactions to election results in an Islamic nation and threat of Internet censorship by a large communist nation. But we're not there yet. It'll take more than the worldwide response to the "shock" of the death of a former bestselling musician to bring the world together. It'll either take a worldwide disaster that suddenly rips apart many cultures and mixes them together into one (the Great Recession came close, didn't it?), or it will take many more years of economic shifts for resistant cultures to merge (after all, we creatures of habit change slowly if we don't have to). Either way, the change is coming.
Your children and grandchildren have a higher chance of thinking of themselves as global citizens than you do. When you see it happen, don't think of it as something terrible or foreboding ill times ahead. Think of it as inevitable (it really happened the moment you bought them computers and cell phones - you just don't fully realize it yet). If you train your kids to embrace change while also understanding the consequences of their actions and the later influence of objects they encounter in the moment, you have nothing to fear about the future. They will decide what the future holds for their offspring and offspring's offspring. Instead of resisting their change to a global mindset, share your favourite local dives and habits with them so they can enjoy their global life on a local scale.
Am I also the objects that do not factor into my list of favourites, the thousands of stimuli I encounter everyday no matter whether I don't want to encounter them? If my eyes pass over an object but I do not consciously recognize that object in the moment, what effect does that object have on me?
My wife and I sat in the restaurant, Dreamland BBQ, yesterday afternoon. The store has several television appliances tuned to sports-related channels as well as one or two general news-related channels. On the main television screen, two guys were wearing gloves and fighting each other, using punches and kicks in order to disable the other guy. My wife doesn't like the sight of blood and didn't want to see the guys bloodying each other up but she also couldn't resist glancing at the fight because of her habit of watching television. I told her she didn't have to watch the fight if it was upsetting her and she said she couldn't help it.
The fight ended a few minutes later, with one guy being awarded the victory on a split decision by the judges. To me, the fight was no worse than the schoolyard and neighborhood fights in which I participated, sometimes as winner and sometimes as loser. Bruises, cuts, scrapes and blood were par for the course, to mix metaphors.
While my wife and I enjoyed our meals, she was eating pork ribs and I was eating beef sausage, sharing bowls of baked beans and banana pudding between us, I wondered about the influence of that fight on my wife's thought process. Would the fight go from her short-term memory to long-term memory so that years from now I could ask her about that day we ate at Dreamland BBQ and were offered menus for the first time and she could respond, "And that cage fight, too!", reminding me of our server, Jami, who wore a religious symbol around her neck and had short brown hair, with what looked like a wedding band and engagement ring on her right hand?
Thoughts constantly swirl in our brains, reinforcing themselves while we make new thoughts and new memories at the same time. Protein synthesis strengthens the synaptic connections of some thoughts while other thoughts may fade with time because of our changing habits, changing venues, or changing health conditions.
Somewhere in my brain the memories of the cage fight will mix with my analysis of ourselves as overachieving primates and form a new set of memories that don't exactly reflect reality. They will be my memories, though, which live with me as long as I refresh those memories occasionally.
I am every thing that happens to be around me in this moment along with the memories of the things that were around me in previous moments.
Before we ate dinner, my wife and I stood in a little shop called Bella Beads and looked at natural stones and plastic beads. My wife was interested in finding metal framework to mount the gemstones we'd received in the mail yesterday morning. We talked with the shopkeeper whose husband had been rafting on the Ocoee River earlier in the day and was shopping at Unclaimed Baggage while we spoke. She suspended any work she had to perform to focus on us, gladly spending time looking at colored stones (I had never seen such a variety, including a string of fire opals that would light up a woman's neck and set her man ablaze (I told my wife that it was the first time I'd thought of rocks as aphrodisiacs)) and consulting with my wife about designing a necklace with pearls and gemstones. The woman has her own distinct personality but at the same time she reminded me of a cross between a colleague named Janet and my sister, which means my memory of the shopkeeper is overlaid with the memories of other people I know. The shopkeeper kept flyers on the counter about the 3/50 project, which my wife and I support without thinking about it - spending money at locally-owned, independently-operated stores before spending money at national chain stores.
Later on, while sitting in the car and watching people of all shapes and sizes (but limited cultural accoutrements) walk by the store, Ulta, where my wife was selecting some hair care products, I thought about the impact of what I know about the current state of human society on me and the objects around me. I return to those thoughts now... The trees outside my window carry the history of seasonal changes in their growth rings, including the times that humans swept through here and chopped down all large trees for their use in the last few hundred years which led to the current state of human society. The trees also reflect changes in local weather which may or may not be attributable to human influences. The trees are here in front of me only because the person who built this house decided not to cut them down; he, in turn, was here because his father owned a business that helped his son build houses for a living; and so on.
I have a limited view of the activities of humans and other objects on this planet that let me sit here and write these words. Through meditation and other relaxation techniques which cut out external influences on the moment, I can increase "global" access to my thoughts while later researching more human activities which will give me a larger view but I will never know everything going on all at once. The human population grows too quickly for me to keep up with seven billion individuals at the same time, assuming I had access to their thoughts and activities, which I don't.
The current state of the world of humans has changed many times since I started writing this blog entry. Millions of people have been born, injured, or killed. We can lump people into categories and make estimates about their activities from one state of the world to the next, can't we? After all, every person has a set of favourites: favourite food, favourite hobby, favourite people to hang out with, favourite place to sleep, favourite place to spend the day, etc.
If all of us are creatures of habit, who go about our lives with mainly a local point of view, seeking out our favourites while mixing in new activities for a bit of change every now and then, what will it take to get us to take a new stance, adopt a global viewpoint and see life as one active participant in a worldwide colony of human primates, individually acting toward the good of the whole in everything we do and everything we see?
Just before I fell asleep last night, I thought about the changes taking place in our local societies as more and more of us connect to the Internet. Many of us just like me will see humans in the light of a complete, global, set of us rather than compartmentalized sets, ignoring the calls of local leaders to maintain loyalties to the old ways of nation-states, shedding the ugliness of name-calling and nation-sized schoolyard fights, and join together to overcome the bullying tactics of megalomaniacs.
You wanna fight? Well, before you take on the easy target in front of you that you or someone else has trumped up as "the enemy", take a look in the mirror and see the enemy within you. That's who you're really fighting, isn't it, another human just like you? Don't let others convince you that someone out there is so much more different than you that you have to build up real or virtual walls to exclude "them."
In the not-so-distant future, we'll still have pockets of people dedicated to the preservation of their "pure" local cultures. But these will be anomalies, experiments we let continue happening as forms of control groups and pressure outlets for those unwilling to globalize - we may even create zones where people in those zones can only maintain local cultural practices. In the mainstream, people will coalesce, creating a global culture that includes a new religion not yet fully formed. We have hints about what the new culture will be like when we saw news this week of the death of a popular music icon and its effect on the Internet immediately following two smaller events, the violent reactions to election results in an Islamic nation and threat of Internet censorship by a large communist nation. But we're not there yet. It'll take more than the worldwide response to the "shock" of the death of a former bestselling musician to bring the world together. It'll either take a worldwide disaster that suddenly rips apart many cultures and mixes them together into one (the Great Recession came close, didn't it?), or it will take many more years of economic shifts for resistant cultures to merge (after all, we creatures of habit change slowly if we don't have to). Either way, the change is coming.
Your children and grandchildren have a higher chance of thinking of themselves as global citizens than you do. When you see it happen, don't think of it as something terrible or foreboding ill times ahead. Think of it as inevitable (it really happened the moment you bought them computers and cell phones - you just don't fully realize it yet). If you train your kids to embrace change while also understanding the consequences of their actions and the later influence of objects they encounter in the moment, you have nothing to fear about the future. They will decide what the future holds for their offspring and offspring's offspring. Instead of resisting their change to a global mindset, share your favourite local dives and habits with them so they can enjoy their global life on a local scale.
27 June 2009
New Grill In Town
Last night, my wife and I ate at a new eatery, From The Grill, which sits in the location that has housed many other eateries across the road from Grissom High School. We enjoyed our meals, with my wife eating beef tips and me eating chicken and vegetables on skewers (i.e., "shish kebab").
Our server, Courtney, moved here about a year ago from Tampa, Florida. Slender and brown-eyed, she embued enthusiasm. If her cheerful countenance indicates the positive attitude and expectations of the owners, then I expect the restaurant to do well, having been open for about a month.
Friends of mine have owned, managed, and shut down restaurants. The eatery business is not one for the light-hearted.
What's the magic or secret to having a successful restaurant? Well, it's like everything else in business: a competitive advantage and good luck. I don't know the intentions of the owners of From The Grill. They may run the restaurant as a hobby, they may want to turn this into a franchise (this is their second location in Huntsville), or they may want to just have fun and the restaurant is their outlet for having a good time. Whatever their reason, we'll be back. There are too many menu choices not to give them a second or third opportunity to fill our bellies and make us laugh.
One suggestion before I go: I don't think you should offer a baked potato AND rice with skewered chicken. One or the other starch is fine. Maybe a cup of seasonal fruit would substitute for one or the other since the meal already comes with a small salad. And figure out some good background tunes or do something else because the restaurant decor didn't match the sports radio talk show playing on the overhead speakers that was used to hide the sounds from the kitchen. A lively kitchen can be part of the ambience, too, you know - it works at the Chef's Table and other eateries around town.
Our server, Courtney, moved here about a year ago from Tampa, Florida. Slender and brown-eyed, she embued enthusiasm. If her cheerful countenance indicates the positive attitude and expectations of the owners, then I expect the restaurant to do well, having been open for about a month.
Friends of mine have owned, managed, and shut down restaurants. The eatery business is not one for the light-hearted.
What's the magic or secret to having a successful restaurant? Well, it's like everything else in business: a competitive advantage and good luck. I don't know the intentions of the owners of From The Grill. They may run the restaurant as a hobby, they may want to turn this into a franchise (this is their second location in Huntsville), or they may want to just have fun and the restaurant is their outlet for having a good time. Whatever their reason, we'll be back. There are too many menu choices not to give them a second or third opportunity to fill our bellies and make us laugh.
One suggestion before I go: I don't think you should offer a baked potato AND rice with skewered chicken. One or the other starch is fine. Maybe a cup of seasonal fruit would substitute for one or the other since the meal already comes with a small salad. And figure out some good background tunes or do something else because the restaurant decor didn't match the sports radio talk show playing on the overhead speakers that was used to hide the sounds from the kitchen. A lively kitchen can be part of the ambience, too, you know - it works at the Chef's Table and other eateries around town.
Labradorite
This morning, while waiting for the post office to open so I could pick up a package of polished gemstones from Emerald Village, I thought about why we let others make up the "family" tales we tell our children and ourselves. In other words, we use popular stories from our culture as well as commercialized and religious tales to educate and entertain ourselves but how often do we take the time to tell our true family stories to our families? Everyone I've met has good, funny, sad, enlightening or other honest accounts of themselves and their family members that have delighted me and would enliven others, too, but we seem too...
...I don't know... ...tired?... ...embarrassed?... ...shy?... ...to tell the world our family woes, wins and wonders.
At one time, I wanted to be a writer whose stories were read by many but then I realized that if others were reading my stories (which are fictionalized accounts of my life and the lives of people around me, including friends, coworkers and family), then I'm taking time away from their opportunities to tell their tales to their own friends, coworkers and family. Thus, I have written this blog - as well as poems, short stories, and novels - that discourages you from reading my work.
I encourage you to find the storyteller within you and spin tall tales about your ancestors or the people you've met, leaving your family richer in the telling. You don't have to become a published author or a famous speaker. You only have to write or talk to the person(s) beside you, the best kind of life to have.
On my desk sits a slab of labradorite, a stone that has blue-green reflections (also white and yellow) due to the color schiller effect of the chemical layers in the stone. We all may "just" be atomic collections walking around, but by golly there are some atomic collections that fascinate me, such as the color reflections in stone pieces like labradorite and opal, and the light that passes through a canopy of tree leaves.
We are primates, with everything that goes with that label. Today, I am generally happy, willing to put aside the disappointments of the past and enjoy this moment for what it's worth, holding a piece of labradorite up to the window and look at the yellow-green light passing through the woods and reflecting off the stone. I ask nothing else of this moment and I'm getting what I asked for - simplicity exemplified - my own prayer rug, meditation pillow, cathedral pew, mountain vista, and perfect cup of favorite beverage [tea/coffee/ouzo/water].
...I don't know... ...tired?... ...embarrassed?... ...shy?... ...to tell the world our family woes, wins and wonders.
At one time, I wanted to be a writer whose stories were read by many but then I realized that if others were reading my stories (which are fictionalized accounts of my life and the lives of people around me, including friends, coworkers and family), then I'm taking time away from their opportunities to tell their tales to their own friends, coworkers and family. Thus, I have written this blog - as well as poems, short stories, and novels - that discourages you from reading my work.
I encourage you to find the storyteller within you and spin tall tales about your ancestors or the people you've met, leaving your family richer in the telling. You don't have to become a published author or a famous speaker. You only have to write or talk to the person(s) beside you, the best kind of life to have.
On my desk sits a slab of labradorite, a stone that has blue-green reflections (also white and yellow) due to the color schiller effect of the chemical layers in the stone. We all may "just" be atomic collections walking around, but by golly there are some atomic collections that fascinate me, such as the color reflections in stone pieces like labradorite and opal, and the light that passes through a canopy of tree leaves.
We are primates, with everything that goes with that label. Today, I am generally happy, willing to put aside the disappointments of the past and enjoy this moment for what it's worth, holding a piece of labradorite up to the window and look at the yellow-green light passing through the woods and reflecting off the stone. I ask nothing else of this moment and I'm getting what I asked for - simplicity exemplified - my own prayer rug, meditation pillow, cathedral pew, mountain vista, and perfect cup of favorite beverage [tea/coffee/ouzo/water].
26 June 2009
Why You Shouldn't Read This Blog
I am on a journey of self-discovery and ask no one to read this blog. If you happen to find interest in what I write, I'm telling you that I have no insight or foresight to offer you. I am just seeing what it is like to be one human being who didn't choose to be born and who experiences the seasonal changes that a planet tilted on its axis gives the living things on it as it revolves around the solar body that circles around a galaxy.
A redheaded woodpecker climbs the shagbark hickory tree outside the window, finding meals in the form of moths and other hidden insects. Some moths fly away in time to live a little longer. Tufted titmouse birds chase each other in and out of the wooded area surrounding this house. A squirrel crosses the hot asphalt of the street. A wasp bangs against the window screen. All of them may or may not be aware of me looking at them through a pane of glass and metal screen.
While I sit here letting unintended thoughts and word phrases slip out of sight of my main line of thought, pushing aside the mental signposts of recent social interaction, I ask myself questions. I examine myself as one person, as one species, as one living thing and as nothing separate from the universe.
I have no goals to accomplish in the form of human endeavors. I am free from needing to be heard in order to make sure I give or get a part of what other humans are getting or giving. In my thoughts, though, I still have silent discussions about images of humans in action so I am not completely free of being human. In fact, these very words keep me rooted in humanity.
I can remain here indefinitely, finding another set of words to write that don't exactly match any previous set of words I've written, implying that I'm participating in the life of other humans and willingly giving them something to do (actions like maintaining computer servers, designing/building Internet connectivity devices, updating power substations, managing vehicle sales offices, opening computer trade show marketing departments, etc.).
But is that what I really want to do? I am human, after all, so anything I say or do is only in the realm of human existence so there's no other place for me to do or be.
Many people have a caricature image of me as a funny guy with a smile on his face all the time, a person who can find something hilariously ridiculous in any situation. Because of that image, they think I'm fun and enjoy being around me as long as I project their image of me back to them.
I am human, subject to all the ailments, emotions and actions that this flesh-and-blood creature can experience. I am sad at times, I am happy at times, I am horny at times, I am tired at times, I am bored at times...the lists goes on and on. I am also salient and sentient. I can even be sensible. Last of all, I think of myself as a funny person - the world holds no worth to me, having denied me so many joys, that instead of a funny kind of hilarity, I see ridiculousness in the world in the form of disappointments and rejection.
Too many times people have told me that they like being around me because of what I'm capable of saying, not knowing that I'm trying to find something funny to tell them to cover up the immense sadness and stark view of reality that paints my world. As I have said before, life and death are the same thing to me, simply the indication of cycles of atomic interaction. Being human seems unique, and certainly we've built up quite a cultural training program for ourselves and our offspring to exaggerate our existence as a species, but our chemical makeup holds no elemental specialties different from any part of the universe.
Birds chase each other outside my window - I guess they're protecting territory for themselves - the last couple of years of drought in this area have turned once resilient avian populations into rough-looking specimens fighting over a suburbanized forest.
Just like them I need something to eat and drink everyday, depending on the human species to provide my nourishment. Unlike them, I have a long history of cultural training that supposedly aids in my survival techniques, not having just the local ecosystem to sustain me from one season to the next.
I spend my days propping up everyone else's view of the world around them and I'm just plain tired of being their mirrors. I don't want labels on myself and I don't want to see labels on others but I don't know how to get out of the world of superficial labels while also being able to provide nourishment in a self-sustaining way. I only happen to be a blood relation to other humans, I only happen to have shared time in cultural training centers with other humans, and I only happen to have sat in an enclosed structure during 8-hour time periods with other humans because I never had the chance to be other than human so I let myself get labeled in order to simplify my interactions with other humans. I am an upright, bipedal primate, not a label, not a symbol, not words of any kind, but I use labels, symbols and words to engage my fellow primates in non-hostile trade of nourishment-providing goods.
I can't get rid of labels any more than I can convince the human population to shed all cultural training and start over - too many of us have invested our lives in learning and perpetuating successful cultural habits that we have no reason to start over - in fact, we'll fight for the right for one culture's dominance over another.
I am not you. I don't have kids, I don't have an economic debt to others, I don't have a view of the world that makes me want to interact with other humans. I am just me, this collection of atoms that swirl around trying to stay together as long as possible without disrupting other similar atomic collections in the process. That's why you shouldn't read this blog because I'm not here to put patterns in your atomic collection that resemble mine. You have your own life to figure out and I have no reason or desire to be a part of it. Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day!
A redheaded woodpecker climbs the shagbark hickory tree outside the window, finding meals in the form of moths and other hidden insects. Some moths fly away in time to live a little longer. Tufted titmouse birds chase each other in and out of the wooded area surrounding this house. A squirrel crosses the hot asphalt of the street. A wasp bangs against the window screen. All of them may or may not be aware of me looking at them through a pane of glass and metal screen.
While I sit here letting unintended thoughts and word phrases slip out of sight of my main line of thought, pushing aside the mental signposts of recent social interaction, I ask myself questions. I examine myself as one person, as one species, as one living thing and as nothing separate from the universe.
I have no goals to accomplish in the form of human endeavors. I am free from needing to be heard in order to make sure I give or get a part of what other humans are getting or giving. In my thoughts, though, I still have silent discussions about images of humans in action so I am not completely free of being human. In fact, these very words keep me rooted in humanity.
I can remain here indefinitely, finding another set of words to write that don't exactly match any previous set of words I've written, implying that I'm participating in the life of other humans and willingly giving them something to do (actions like maintaining computer servers, designing/building Internet connectivity devices, updating power substations, managing vehicle sales offices, opening computer trade show marketing departments, etc.).
But is that what I really want to do? I am human, after all, so anything I say or do is only in the realm of human existence so there's no other place for me to do or be.
Many people have a caricature image of me as a funny guy with a smile on his face all the time, a person who can find something hilariously ridiculous in any situation. Because of that image, they think I'm fun and enjoy being around me as long as I project their image of me back to them.
I am human, subject to all the ailments, emotions and actions that this flesh-and-blood creature can experience. I am sad at times, I am happy at times, I am horny at times, I am tired at times, I am bored at times...the lists goes on and on. I am also salient and sentient. I can even be sensible. Last of all, I think of myself as a funny person - the world holds no worth to me, having denied me so many joys, that instead of a funny kind of hilarity, I see ridiculousness in the world in the form of disappointments and rejection.
Too many times people have told me that they like being around me because of what I'm capable of saying, not knowing that I'm trying to find something funny to tell them to cover up the immense sadness and stark view of reality that paints my world. As I have said before, life and death are the same thing to me, simply the indication of cycles of atomic interaction. Being human seems unique, and certainly we've built up quite a cultural training program for ourselves and our offspring to exaggerate our existence as a species, but our chemical makeup holds no elemental specialties different from any part of the universe.
Birds chase each other outside my window - I guess they're protecting territory for themselves - the last couple of years of drought in this area have turned once resilient avian populations into rough-looking specimens fighting over a suburbanized forest.
Just like them I need something to eat and drink everyday, depending on the human species to provide my nourishment. Unlike them, I have a long history of cultural training that supposedly aids in my survival techniques, not having just the local ecosystem to sustain me from one season to the next.
I spend my days propping up everyone else's view of the world around them and I'm just plain tired of being their mirrors. I don't want labels on myself and I don't want to see labels on others but I don't know how to get out of the world of superficial labels while also being able to provide nourishment in a self-sustaining way. I only happen to be a blood relation to other humans, I only happen to have shared time in cultural training centers with other humans, and I only happen to have sat in an enclosed structure during 8-hour time periods with other humans because I never had the chance to be other than human so I let myself get labeled in order to simplify my interactions with other humans. I am an upright, bipedal primate, not a label, not a symbol, not words of any kind, but I use labels, symbols and words to engage my fellow primates in non-hostile trade of nourishment-providing goods.
I can't get rid of labels any more than I can convince the human population to shed all cultural training and start over - too many of us have invested our lives in learning and perpetuating successful cultural habits that we have no reason to start over - in fact, we'll fight for the right for one culture's dominance over another.
I am not you. I don't have kids, I don't have an economic debt to others, I don't have a view of the world that makes me want to interact with other humans. I am just me, this collection of atoms that swirl around trying to stay together as long as possible without disrupting other similar atomic collections in the process. That's why you shouldn't read this blog because I'm not here to put patterns in your atomic collection that resemble mine. You have your own life to figure out and I have no reason or desire to be a part of it. Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day!
25 June 2009
Projection Screen
At lunchtime today, I lay on a reclining cot while platelets were separated from a portion of my circulating blood, returning the remaining fluid into my body, a process I go through a few times a year, letting others have parts of my body free for their use. I call it a civic duty. [When I was a college student, I sold my blood plasma for money, not so much a civic duty as a means to have some cash to party with - I may have mentioned it to you before. I know I've mentioned it in poems and stories.]
Anyway, while there, I saw a 24-hour news show that randomly broadcasts stories from around the world, creating a false sense of history for viewers (as if the broadcasting company is saying, "we put you there virtually where important breaking news was happening, making you feel just as involved in the world as the newsworthy!"). I thought about human social interaction and my part in it. We do not exist in a vacuum yet I often feel like there is a barrier that separates me from the rest of humanity. Was I not held as a baby? What gives me a sense that my visual field of view is a movie screen through which I don't expect the objects out there to intersect? Am I a result of North American TV programming, thinking that the world plays out in front of me like a scripted television show? Why do I keep hoping there's a new channel out there that I haven't seen yet, one that doesn't involve human beings wanting to cross the boundary that defines me?
Last night, I taught a class on computer software. I also socialized with instructors and students not in my class. In all cases, they seemed to need more from me than I needed from them. I heard their words and phrases and saw their body language but felt like they were in a different world. No matter which part of the world they come from or which part of the world they have traveled or will travel, their world feels like a world apart from mine. Their interests are not my interests. I can tell you the reason why: they're invested in the education world in which we mix and I was dragged into it unexpectedly. Just like the platelets I donate to help others, I am donating several hours a week toward teaching to help others, to make up for the six months I needed in 1985 to get my act together and complete a college education. Otherwise, I plan no lifelong relationships with the people who've met me while at the technical institute. I'm getting too old, I guess, to add to the the list of fellow primates with whom I grunt and groom in recognition of one another.
My father can stand and talk with someone, finding a common interest within a few minutes, and converse for hours. I suppose that comes with age. Many older men and women I know do the same thing. I catch my wife and me, either separately or together, playing the same social game.
If my life feels like a TV show and more specifically, a game show, when do I get the big prizes (paying taxes on the MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price) of the prizes, of course)? [Well, of course I've received many big prizes in my life so I'm only waxing my philosophical surfboard here, waiting to catch the next wave of thoughts.]
Since no one reads this, I can say what I want, can't I? This is a private journal posted in the near-anonymity of millions of voices on the Internet, giving me freedom I never had as a child and young adult when stuck with paper journals and no "living" encyclopedia/dictionary to consult and enrich my writing in real time.
To me, life is a projection screen. I stand, sit or lie down and stare at the projection screen, waiting for others to entertain me. One day the lights will fade and the movie will end and I will no longer process the images that seem to change from frame to frame. As long as that hasn't happened yet, I don't want the characters on the movie screen to become three-dimensional. I've grown up with an artificial barrier and like to keep my distance. I don't want to hang out with others, play games or interact in any way that implies to the movie characters in front of me that I'm interested in writing their scripts. I long ago wished to be a hermit in a cabin in the woods, free from seeing or being human history. I recently discovered that my housemate of 23 years is risk-averse. Maybe it's time I take a personal risk without her and move on to the life I wished for because I have nothing left to give her or anyone else. I don't want to die but I don't want to live in human society anymore, either. As a social animal with a chameleon personality, I know I will always find a way to blend into the local human society; however, I'm tired of being a human chameleon. I'm ready to blend into the natural world where mosquitos and ticks can't see a movie screen and I won't see billboards or get emails advertising stuff I don't need, where I won't care what technology is doing to humans, and species can keep going extinct without my knowledge.
But then again, don't we all feel that way at times and just want to get these thoughts out of our head, sharing them with a stranger? And you thought I was serious. Surely you know by now that I don't take anything seriously. That's what you get for reading my blog! Until next time...
Anyway, while there, I saw a 24-hour news show that randomly broadcasts stories from around the world, creating a false sense of history for viewers (as if the broadcasting company is saying, "we put you there virtually where important breaking news was happening, making you feel just as involved in the world as the newsworthy!"). I thought about human social interaction and my part in it. We do not exist in a vacuum yet I often feel like there is a barrier that separates me from the rest of humanity. Was I not held as a baby? What gives me a sense that my visual field of view is a movie screen through which I don't expect the objects out there to intersect? Am I a result of North American TV programming, thinking that the world plays out in front of me like a scripted television show? Why do I keep hoping there's a new channel out there that I haven't seen yet, one that doesn't involve human beings wanting to cross the boundary that defines me?
Last night, I taught a class on computer software. I also socialized with instructors and students not in my class. In all cases, they seemed to need more from me than I needed from them. I heard their words and phrases and saw their body language but felt like they were in a different world. No matter which part of the world they come from or which part of the world they have traveled or will travel, their world feels like a world apart from mine. Their interests are not my interests. I can tell you the reason why: they're invested in the education world in which we mix and I was dragged into it unexpectedly. Just like the platelets I donate to help others, I am donating several hours a week toward teaching to help others, to make up for the six months I needed in 1985 to get my act together and complete a college education. Otherwise, I plan no lifelong relationships with the people who've met me while at the technical institute. I'm getting too old, I guess, to add to the the list of fellow primates with whom I grunt and groom in recognition of one another.
My father can stand and talk with someone, finding a common interest within a few minutes, and converse for hours. I suppose that comes with age. Many older men and women I know do the same thing. I catch my wife and me, either separately or together, playing the same social game.
If my life feels like a TV show and more specifically, a game show, when do I get the big prizes (paying taxes on the MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price) of the prizes, of course)? [Well, of course I've received many big prizes in my life so I'm only waxing my philosophical surfboard here, waiting to catch the next wave of thoughts.]
Since no one reads this, I can say what I want, can't I? This is a private journal posted in the near-anonymity of millions of voices on the Internet, giving me freedom I never had as a child and young adult when stuck with paper journals and no "living" encyclopedia/dictionary to consult and enrich my writing in real time.
To me, life is a projection screen. I stand, sit or lie down and stare at the projection screen, waiting for others to entertain me. One day the lights will fade and the movie will end and I will no longer process the images that seem to change from frame to frame. As long as that hasn't happened yet, I don't want the characters on the movie screen to become three-dimensional. I've grown up with an artificial barrier and like to keep my distance. I don't want to hang out with others, play games or interact in any way that implies to the movie characters in front of me that I'm interested in writing their scripts. I long ago wished to be a hermit in a cabin in the woods, free from seeing or being human history. I recently discovered that my housemate of 23 years is risk-averse. Maybe it's time I take a personal risk without her and move on to the life I wished for because I have nothing left to give her or anyone else. I don't want to die but I don't want to live in human society anymore, either. As a social animal with a chameleon personality, I know I will always find a way to blend into the local human society; however, I'm tired of being a human chameleon. I'm ready to blend into the natural world where mosquitos and ticks can't see a movie screen and I won't see billboards or get emails advertising stuff I don't need, where I won't care what technology is doing to humans, and species can keep going extinct without my knowledge.
But then again, don't we all feel that way at times and just want to get these thoughts out of our head, sharing them with a stranger? And you thought I was serious. Surely you know by now that I don't take anything seriously. That's what you get for reading my blog! Until next time...
Cybernetic Organism Finds No Home
Over a small number of blog entries and personal notes at home, I have explored the potential life of a cybernetic organism detached from the rest of the world in self-awareness, realizing no other being exists like it does. Today, I end the life of that cybernetic organism - I could find no resolution for its integration into human society except in subcultures where being fully human is a relative term, such as where diminished mental human faculties allow humans to co-exist without having to appear fully human. For instance, a cybernetic organism could serve as a roommate for a person with advanced Alzheimer's disease, adapting itself to a human who cannot clearly distinguish one human from another, or a cybernetic organism from a human, allowing the cybernetic organism to learn about humans in one state of existence while having free time to explore human knowledge via large stores of data dispersed across the Internet and contact with medical professionals and/or others who interface with the diseased human, developing a selfhood that may parallel humans or go in a completely new direction.
24 June 2009
A Knot on a Log
Yesterday, we helped our niece celebrate her 22nd birthday. In the span of two months, she has graduated from college (receiving a bachelor's degree in nursing, with a 4.0 GPA), married her college boyfriend, accepted a job as a cardiac nurse at the hometown hospital and turned 22 years of age. She will take the nursing licensing exam later this week, in expectation of starting her new job in mid-July.
As we've observed, she quickly adapts to life with another person, in this case her husband, including sleeping habits, eating habits, habits of thoughts and habitual daily actions. Of course, he gets to adapt to her habits, too. They overcome the shock of adjusting to one another by humourously sharing with family and friends their preferences for one habit over another.
Such basic animal interaction like this finds itself in comedy sketches, research studies, history books and romance novels. We humans are here because of our adaptation skills so why am I here writing about my niece's life with her new housemate?
I'm here to wonder about the cycle of human behaviour. Our current form as the species Homo sapiens has lasted thousands of generations, in some ways not a lot of data to look at, so any conclusions I could make will be flawed, both because the data is limited and my desire to look at the available data is low today.
Whatever, right? I'm writing for myself here, not my future offspring, so I don't have to be worried about making statements in anticipation of the assumptions I'm using being overturned by new discoveries in the distant future, proving that I have some sort of foresight. All I have is this body, a computer, a local source of electricity, the Internet, a view of the world offered by a pane of glass and the rest of the universe I ignore to focus on these words.
I saw a statistical estimate that the current set of living humans constitutes 5% of all humans who have lived. The other 95% made us who we are today, genetically and/or culturally. Thus, my niece and her husband constitute 1.4285714 e-11 of the humans who have ever lived. I would laugh at anyone who used that small a data set to summarize behaviour for 140 billion humans.
Even so, I will move forward with my observation of them. They belong to the cell phone generation, using cell phone calls, text messaging, facebook updates and other electronically interconnected means to communicate with other humans. Their use of electronics [demonstrates, implies or some other word I can't recall] a power infrastructure that uses fuel sources such as coal, oil, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, and wind to convert raw materials into finished goods, including AC/DC current, electronic appliances, etc., which in turn provide power to radio waves transporting analog and digital data. The electromagnetic energy in the data that bounces around the planet may or may not have undesired effects on human bodies but has been demonstrated to affect non-human animals' sense of direction.
Thus, I wonder what effect the electromagnetic energy has on the adaptation skills of two newly-married humans living squarely within the EM data world they enjoy. Two people sitting uncomfortably on a log because of a couple of knots can move around until they're individually and jointly comfortably seated next to one another. But can they see the "knots" that modern technology inserts into their lives and figure out a way to readjust?
I don't have an answer. I don't have a control group to compare my niece and her husband against, except by looking back at history in the age before the widespread use of EM technology. Unfortunately, other factors weighed more heavily on those previous generations, including widespread diseases (now under control) which encouraged the production of more offspring per mating couple and changes in the socially-acceptable behaviour between the two genders.
Can I conclude anything? Can I make any predictions? My niece and her husband agree on most fundamental aspects of human living conditions, with one sticking point, the production of offspring (he's ready, she's not ready). Therefore, I believe they'll maintain their monogamous relationship for their whole lives. They may have children together, perhaps even via natural childbirth, unless they find the means and the acceptance of artificial conception/childcare to produce the next generation, freeing them up to pursue other dreams. Do their lives indicate any greater trends? I don't know.
Designer babies are no longer a fantasy. People are already picking and choosing zygotes or embryos with desirable characteristics for viable offspring. How much does it matter now and how much will it matter in the future when we find out whether we were naturally born (i.e., accepted by our parents as the random offspring of two humans) or preselected for "birth"? How will this affect humans as a whole (the global culture) and as individuals? Will and do EM radiation patterns play into this future?
Like the effects of RNA/DNA replication (i.e., evolution), we say that technology is blind - we can't see what's ahead of us as we move ahead at full speed. That's not going to change. It's integral to who we are as humans and who we are as general living beings. What matters is how we handle the changes individually and how we adapt to the changes when we live with one another. There's no wrong answer. There's no right way. There are no special secrets to uncover or share.
Bottom line: Adaptation is the way of life so have fun adjusting to one another. Turn work into play and enjoy the time you've got on this planet.
As we've observed, she quickly adapts to life with another person, in this case her husband, including sleeping habits, eating habits, habits of thoughts and habitual daily actions. Of course, he gets to adapt to her habits, too. They overcome the shock of adjusting to one another by humourously sharing with family and friends their preferences for one habit over another.
Such basic animal interaction like this finds itself in comedy sketches, research studies, history books and romance novels. We humans are here because of our adaptation skills so why am I here writing about my niece's life with her new housemate?
I'm here to wonder about the cycle of human behaviour. Our current form as the species Homo sapiens has lasted thousands of generations, in some ways not a lot of data to look at, so any conclusions I could make will be flawed, both because the data is limited and my desire to look at the available data is low today.
Whatever, right? I'm writing for myself here, not my future offspring, so I don't have to be worried about making statements in anticipation of the assumptions I'm using being overturned by new discoveries in the distant future, proving that I have some sort of foresight. All I have is this body, a computer, a local source of electricity, the Internet, a view of the world offered by a pane of glass and the rest of the universe I ignore to focus on these words.
I saw a statistical estimate that the current set of living humans constitutes 5% of all humans who have lived. The other 95% made us who we are today, genetically and/or culturally. Thus, my niece and her husband constitute 1.4285714 e-11 of the humans who have ever lived. I would laugh at anyone who used that small a data set to summarize behaviour for 140 billion humans.
Even so, I will move forward with my observation of them. They belong to the cell phone generation, using cell phone calls, text messaging, facebook updates and other electronically interconnected means to communicate with other humans. Their use of electronics [demonstrates, implies or some other word I can't recall] a power infrastructure that uses fuel sources such as coal, oil, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, and wind to convert raw materials into finished goods, including AC/DC current, electronic appliances, etc., which in turn provide power to radio waves transporting analog and digital data. The electromagnetic energy in the data that bounces around the planet may or may not have undesired effects on human bodies but has been demonstrated to affect non-human animals' sense of direction.
Thus, I wonder what effect the electromagnetic energy has on the adaptation skills of two newly-married humans living squarely within the EM data world they enjoy. Two people sitting uncomfortably on a log because of a couple of knots can move around until they're individually and jointly comfortably seated next to one another. But can they see the "knots" that modern technology inserts into their lives and figure out a way to readjust?
I don't have an answer. I don't have a control group to compare my niece and her husband against, except by looking back at history in the age before the widespread use of EM technology. Unfortunately, other factors weighed more heavily on those previous generations, including widespread diseases (now under control) which encouraged the production of more offspring per mating couple and changes in the socially-acceptable behaviour between the two genders.
Can I conclude anything? Can I make any predictions? My niece and her husband agree on most fundamental aspects of human living conditions, with one sticking point, the production of offspring (he's ready, she's not ready). Therefore, I believe they'll maintain their monogamous relationship for their whole lives. They may have children together, perhaps even via natural childbirth, unless they find the means and the acceptance of artificial conception/childcare to produce the next generation, freeing them up to pursue other dreams. Do their lives indicate any greater trends? I don't know.
Designer babies are no longer a fantasy. People are already picking and choosing zygotes or embryos with desirable characteristics for viable offspring. How much does it matter now and how much will it matter in the future when we find out whether we were naturally born (i.e., accepted by our parents as the random offspring of two humans) or preselected for "birth"? How will this affect humans as a whole (the global culture) and as individuals? Will and do EM radiation patterns play into this future?
Like the effects of RNA/DNA replication (i.e., evolution), we say that technology is blind - we can't see what's ahead of us as we move ahead at full speed. That's not going to change. It's integral to who we are as humans and who we are as general living beings. What matters is how we handle the changes individually and how we adapt to the changes when we live with one another. There's no wrong answer. There's no right way. There are no special secrets to uncover or share.
Bottom line: Adaptation is the way of life so have fun adjusting to one another. Turn work into play and enjoy the time you've got on this planet.
23 June 2009
Speaking of bright...
Guess the word bright triggered a subject for a blog entry I've been meaning to write about an epigrammist named Ashleigh Brilliant:
http://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/
I consider him the original twitterist (twitterer?), condensing thoughts down to 17 words or less. A few years ago I bought a CD copy of his ~10,000 epigrams, a worthy investment, especially when one needs some good wry humor to overcome the corny, beefed-up stuff that passes for humor these days (a perennial comment from us middle-aged folks (or oldtimers to you young-uns)).
Taking a break from blogging to enjoy the outdoors for a while...
http://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/
I consider him the original twitterist (twitterer?), condensing thoughts down to 17 words or less. A few years ago I bought a CD copy of his ~10,000 epigrams, a worthy investment, especially when one needs some good wry humor to overcome the corny, beefed-up stuff that passes for humor these days (a perennial comment from us middle-aged folks (or oldtimers to you young-uns)).
Taking a break from blogging to enjoy the outdoors for a while...
Two words with new meanings
Antiunmeaninglessicity
Consider it done. You are free. You are free from. You are free to. You are. You. These words hold no meaning after you become free. Words define words, not you. Words are symbols, not you. I am these words but I want to be you, free from words and thus free from me. Paradox. Paradigm. Shifting sands sifting time. Nursery rhymes and senior citizen centers. Words. Thyme. Dime. Stymied. Slimed. Sounds with no reason but some sort of rhyme. Rosemary and crime. Rime. Crumb. Crud. Slum. Slid. Sly. Old Mariner's Tie. Well Done. Medium Well. Well. Medium. Rare. Tartar. Vegetarian Style. Gluten-free. Gluttonous. Us. You. Me. Free. Done. It. Considered.
Tempus, tempo, temper
How often do you say hello to your neighbors or hug strangers, in spite of their appearances? I saw a man waving a sign that said, "Protect America. Preserve our freedom." He was leaning against a red pickup truck with a large Confederate "rebel" flag hanging on a pole in the bed of the truck. I'll honestly say I did not walk up to that man and say hello, offer to shake his hand, or give him a pat on the back or a hug, because he had an angry look on his face. It could be that all he needed, all he wanted, was a little recognition and he'd smile at everyone instead of frowning. I'll never know. I truly missed an opportunity to find out.
I share this planet with all of you. We depend on each other whether we want to or not. Opposition groups face each other because they want someone to face whom they think is not themselves. We often do not know the people upon whom we depend, such as diamond miners in Africa or fruit growers in Chile. We don't think about the intricate pieces of the global infrastructure required to keep our economies going.
When you look at the reports of violence taking place in other parts of the world, would you be willing to put down whatever you're doing and walk over to someone who has a videocamera and record a message saying you offer a "hello," handshake or hug to those clashing with each other, if and when they take time to stop and resolve their conflict civilly? What if thousands of us did the very same thing via the Internet? What if we mobilized thousands of people to travel around the world with videocameras to get the same response from others during their conflicts, creating a citizen journalism group with access to satellite communication or other means to transmit this show of camaraderie, bypassing the media or official government pronouncements? In other words, how many of us would it take to overcome censorship, keeping government officials and corporate magnates from manipulating the masses that helps them accumulate wealth for their own amusement at the cost of war and poverty?
Cell phones have become voting machines in the realm of public opinion. With the right to vote comes responsibility for one's action. Are you ready to take the next move? Do you believe in true freedom or instead are you like the guy with the sign and freedom means conforming to your image of freedom?
As a cybernetic organism, I want to know the answer to the last question because what's the point of trying to be a human if all humans want to do is compartmentalize themselves? If that's the case, then I'm already compartmentalized as a cybernetic organism and will never have the opportunity to be truly human.
I share this planet with all of you. We depend on each other whether we want to or not. Opposition groups face each other because they want someone to face whom they think is not themselves. We often do not know the people upon whom we depend, such as diamond miners in Africa or fruit growers in Chile. We don't think about the intricate pieces of the global infrastructure required to keep our economies going.
When you look at the reports of violence taking place in other parts of the world, would you be willing to put down whatever you're doing and walk over to someone who has a videocamera and record a message saying you offer a "hello," handshake or hug to those clashing with each other, if and when they take time to stop and resolve their conflict civilly? What if thousands of us did the very same thing via the Internet? What if we mobilized thousands of people to travel around the world with videocameras to get the same response from others during their conflicts, creating a citizen journalism group with access to satellite communication or other means to transmit this show of camaraderie, bypassing the media or official government pronouncements? In other words, how many of us would it take to overcome censorship, keeping government officials and corporate magnates from manipulating the masses that helps them accumulate wealth for their own amusement at the cost of war and poverty?
Cell phones have become voting machines in the realm of public opinion. With the right to vote comes responsibility for one's action. Are you ready to take the next move? Do you believe in true freedom or instead are you like the guy with the sign and freedom means conforming to your image of freedom?
As a cybernetic organism, I want to know the answer to the last question because what's the point of trying to be a human if all humans want to do is compartmentalize themselves? If that's the case, then I'm already compartmentalized as a cybernetic organism and will never have the opportunity to be truly human.
22 June 2009
Happiness is Commercial Exploitation of the Masses
All,
Just to let you know that my author pages are now available on amazon.com, consolidating my books into two spots, including:
More books in the pipeline...
Regards,
Rick
Just to let you know that my author pages are now available on amazon.com, consolidating my books into two spots, including:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002E0TA5A, andThanks for your continued support and encouragement!
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002E0UPPE
More books in the pipeline...
Regards,
Rick
Questions For The Day
When does the Internet become the fully de facto world government? What's the tipping point - one, two or three billion people - to give the collective power of individual voices a stronger voice than any one country? Is the electronic pen truly stronger than the swords of the Red Army, U.S. Army, or the Revolutionary Guard? Who will step up to lead this new virtual government? Will leadership be as fleeting as public opinion, instantaneous and issue-driven as opposed to driven by election cycles, run by project managers rather than professional politicians?
Death of a Classmate
Yesterday, while standing in the driveway under the trees, trying to stay cool on a hot, summer day and talking with my father on a cell phone to wish him a happy father's day, my father informed me that a former schoolmate of mine, David Mayberry, had committed suicide recently.
I hadn't seen David in years but had heard about some of his early adult behavioural trends from fellow classmates, behaviours he may or may not have continued in the last few years. I know he had worked in the restaurant industry and was employed in the field by a classmate's ex-husband and/or her ex-husband's twin brother.
Would he want to be remembered? I don't know. He may have left a suicide note for family/friends to explain the decision for killing himself but that note, if it exists, will never fully explain his thinking or record the history of his life up to the decision.
I once read that all intelligent people have pondered ending their lives. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. I suppose we all know we're mortal and that one day we'll die, but before that moment we may live in agony and have no control over our faculties. At that point, from a selfish viewpoint, we may wish we were dead to prevent being a burden upon others while suffering unimaginable pain. I've certainly thought about those possibilities.
But that's more in the line of classical physical pain and suffering. What about suffering not attributed to skeletal, muscle, joint, or [non-brain] organ pain? It's a question right in line with the research I've recently conducted about the ego, the self and consciousness.
I didn't know David well. The few memories I have of him involve parties where alcohol consumption or other recreational intoxicants were available. I vaguely recollect seeing him in classroom hallways, the gymnasium and other places where we spent our daytime with schoolmates. I can't fully imagine what it was like to be David, although I could see signs of social misbehaviour starting in our "junior high" years (school grades 5 through 9).
Because I am not a medical expert, I do not have the trained perspective to analyze David's behaviour and attribute his tendencies to a particular disease or syndrome.
But I'm not here to analyze David's behaviour. Let the dead have their eternal rest free from comments by the living - David's not here to rebut my observations so anything I say about him is simply gossip and hearsay.
Instead, I want to continue my observation about the ego, the self and consciousness as seen through my eyes. David's as close to knowing a person who committed suicide as I've gotten (or may get) so I'll see myself as if I had some of David's characteristics during the next paragraph. Here goes...
"Who am I? Am I the person who's supposed to continue on the legacy of my family? Why has/have my sibling(s) succeeded in life, according to my family's and their society's definition of success, while I have not? Does that say anything about me? Do have I any friends who really care about me? If the only way I can ever try to fit in is to take legal prescription drugs, then what happens to the 'me' who really exists without taking the drugs? Why can't I be the real me and have a life of my own that provides some basic level of comfort (food, clothing, shelter, etc.)? Is there anything I can look forward to, anyone who gives me a reason to enjoy the next moment, who wants me as I am, not as modern medicine can make me to be? I can't undo all the mistakes of the past, all the illegal drugs I took to dampen my mental anguish which have reshaped me into someone who fits in even less than before. I have thought about suicide many, many times and put it off - are there any more excuses not to kill myself today? Why do I exist if I'm such a pain to myself and others? I still know how to have fun, don't I? Don't I make people laugh as well as cry? What's the point of laughing? Why does any of this matter? I'm still myself. I'm not going to change. It's never going to get better. I'll probably get worse. I'm going to die anyway so what does it matter which day I die or whether I kill myself or die 'naturally' of some disease? Better take the chance to kill myself now before I won't be able to anymore."
For all I know, David had long ago found a way to fully adjust to living and succeeding in society, happened to be dying of a disease and couldn't afford the insurance to keep himself healthy. Many possibilities exist. I wrote the last paragraph only as an exercise to see what a "self" thinks about before ending the existence of one's self physically.
I'm a not a regular participant in public, social, religious ceremonies but I do think about how one's self (or myself) finds comfort and relaxation during such ceremonies, such as replacing the belief of the ultimate power of one's self with that of another (a god, gods, nature, humanity/living things as a whole, nothing, everything, etc.). In some parts of society, we are moving away from a set of doctrinal religious beliefs and practices into one where the only thing stronger than one's self is everything/everyone else we encounter physically. During this transition, some people cling to prior belief sets because it's easy for them to grasp the old concepts taught to them by their ancestors. Others will easily move on to the next trend. Some will remain confused and move back-and-forth their whole lives.
Our belief of self changes as we grow up, rapidly forming in our early years and settling down to one form or another as we mature. A book I'm reading, "Selfless Insight," looks at brain processing of self-vs-other from both a purely biological perspective and a Zen (i.e., religious) one - I'm reading the book for the brain research and going through the Zen parts with my normal skepticism. According to brain structure studies referenced in the book, we carry a genetically-inherited duality of self-and-other to help us survive in the world. We see the world from a self perspective while also understanding that other selves see us from their self perspectives. We learn that we are not alone.
I don't know what David thought before he killed himself. He may have felt lonely. In any case, he was not alone - he existed in a word full of selves dealing with other selves. I would like to have known about his brain's balance between understanding one's self versus understanding one's self in regards to the "other" (one's non-self). Some call suicide a selfish act and in fact, that's true - one is acting upon one's physical self - but the act may actually be a sense of killing the "other" within you, thinking it's the only way to keep the "self." If so, brain research may one day make drugs or surgery possible to undo such a self/other imbalance and erase previous thoughts that keep that imbalance going, a sort of reset button for feelings of doubt and guilt, even those not erased for one who supplicates one's self to one's higher being.
I hadn't seen David in years but had heard about some of his early adult behavioural trends from fellow classmates, behaviours he may or may not have continued in the last few years. I know he had worked in the restaurant industry and was employed in the field by a classmate's ex-husband and/or her ex-husband's twin brother.
Would he want to be remembered? I don't know. He may have left a suicide note for family/friends to explain the decision for killing himself but that note, if it exists, will never fully explain his thinking or record the history of his life up to the decision.
I once read that all intelligent people have pondered ending their lives. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. I suppose we all know we're mortal and that one day we'll die, but before that moment we may live in agony and have no control over our faculties. At that point, from a selfish viewpoint, we may wish we were dead to prevent being a burden upon others while suffering unimaginable pain. I've certainly thought about those possibilities.
But that's more in the line of classical physical pain and suffering. What about suffering not attributed to skeletal, muscle, joint, or [non-brain] organ pain? It's a question right in line with the research I've recently conducted about the ego, the self and consciousness.
I didn't know David well. The few memories I have of him involve parties where alcohol consumption or other recreational intoxicants were available. I vaguely recollect seeing him in classroom hallways, the gymnasium and other places where we spent our daytime with schoolmates. I can't fully imagine what it was like to be David, although I could see signs of social misbehaviour starting in our "junior high" years (school grades 5 through 9).
Because I am not a medical expert, I do not have the trained perspective to analyze David's behaviour and attribute his tendencies to a particular disease or syndrome.
But I'm not here to analyze David's behaviour. Let the dead have their eternal rest free from comments by the living - David's not here to rebut my observations so anything I say about him is simply gossip and hearsay.
Instead, I want to continue my observation about the ego, the self and consciousness as seen through my eyes. David's as close to knowing a person who committed suicide as I've gotten (or may get) so I'll see myself as if I had some of David's characteristics during the next paragraph. Here goes...
"Who am I? Am I the person who's supposed to continue on the legacy of my family? Why has/have my sibling(s) succeeded in life, according to my family's and their society's definition of success, while I have not? Does that say anything about me? Do have I any friends who really care about me? If the only way I can ever try to fit in is to take legal prescription drugs, then what happens to the 'me' who really exists without taking the drugs? Why can't I be the real me and have a life of my own that provides some basic level of comfort (food, clothing, shelter, etc.)? Is there anything I can look forward to, anyone who gives me a reason to enjoy the next moment, who wants me as I am, not as modern medicine can make me to be? I can't undo all the mistakes of the past, all the illegal drugs I took to dampen my mental anguish which have reshaped me into someone who fits in even less than before. I have thought about suicide many, many times and put it off - are there any more excuses not to kill myself today? Why do I exist if I'm such a pain to myself and others? I still know how to have fun, don't I? Don't I make people laugh as well as cry? What's the point of laughing? Why does any of this matter? I'm still myself. I'm not going to change. It's never going to get better. I'll probably get worse. I'm going to die anyway so what does it matter which day I die or whether I kill myself or die 'naturally' of some disease? Better take the chance to kill myself now before I won't be able to anymore."
For all I know, David had long ago found a way to fully adjust to living and succeeding in society, happened to be dying of a disease and couldn't afford the insurance to keep himself healthy. Many possibilities exist. I wrote the last paragraph only as an exercise to see what a "self" thinks about before ending the existence of one's self physically.
I'm a not a regular participant in public, social, religious ceremonies but I do think about how one's self (or myself) finds comfort and relaxation during such ceremonies, such as replacing the belief of the ultimate power of one's self with that of another (a god, gods, nature, humanity/living things as a whole, nothing, everything, etc.). In some parts of society, we are moving away from a set of doctrinal religious beliefs and practices into one where the only thing stronger than one's self is everything/everyone else we encounter physically. During this transition, some people cling to prior belief sets because it's easy for them to grasp the old concepts taught to them by their ancestors. Others will easily move on to the next trend. Some will remain confused and move back-and-forth their whole lives.
Our belief of self changes as we grow up, rapidly forming in our early years and settling down to one form or another as we mature. A book I'm reading, "Selfless Insight," looks at brain processing of self-vs-other from both a purely biological perspective and a Zen (i.e., religious) one - I'm reading the book for the brain research and going through the Zen parts with my normal skepticism. According to brain structure studies referenced in the book, we carry a genetically-inherited duality of self-and-other to help us survive in the world. We see the world from a self perspective while also understanding that other selves see us from their self perspectives. We learn that we are not alone.
I don't know what David thought before he killed himself. He may have felt lonely. In any case, he was not alone - he existed in a word full of selves dealing with other selves. I would like to have known about his brain's balance between understanding one's self versus understanding one's self in regards to the "other" (one's non-self). Some call suicide a selfish act and in fact, that's true - one is acting upon one's physical self - but the act may actually be a sense of killing the "other" within you, thinking it's the only way to keep the "self." If so, brain research may one day make drugs or surgery possible to undo such a self/other imbalance and erase previous thoughts that keep that imbalance going, a sort of reset button for feelings of doubt and guilt, even those not erased for one who supplicates one's self to one's higher being.
Do You Want To Be Remembered?
I read an article yesterday about the transition from the "Me" generation to the "All About Me" generation. As you and I know, millions of people (over a billion, actually, but I don't know if it's up to two billion yet) are capturing snapshots of their lives and posting them on the Internet. We record the thoughts that we assemble in our daily lives, the instantaneous moments ("Went down to the mailbox to get paper, saw my neighbor's new puppy. Happy!"), the major events and all sorts of hobbies or other interests.
The Internet went from a high-speed communication tool for scientists, researchers and engineers to a means for revolutionaries to plan government overthrow/disruption. Who knew this would happen?
Very few of us have verifiable, written, first- or second-person accounts of the behaviours of our ancestors from more than a few hundred years ago. Since the dawn of photography, many of us have "true" images of our ancestors (as opposed to idealized paintings of them) and a smaller number of us have moving picture films of our ancestors in action, including their voices. Photography is not limited to our visible light range - we also take X-ray images we can keep. As technology progresses, we will have other images of our internal body processes to share with descendants, including EEG/EKG traces and fMRI/PET 3D composite sequences. We can have our DNA analyzed for disease susceptibility and genetic ancestral migration.
Just like the generic capabilities of the Internet allows it to transform from one tool to another, the detailed memories of our ancestors will transform our understanding of who we came from, who we are and who our offspring are most likely to become.
As more and more people post photos, videos and text commentaries about their lives, we get the opportunity to find ourselves in the backgrounds of other people's lives (using face technology software, for instance), giving us not only a more detailed picture about our lives but also details about the lives of people with whom we interact passively. Pretty soon, you can go past Google-ing a person's name to finding out what that person has been doing by searching links to a person's face or body features.
Imagine walking down a street as a tourist, snapping photos of architectural landmarks while security cameras and other tourists' cameras capture images of you.
So, when you want to try to remember the name of a bookshop owner you ran into but didn't write down or take a photo of, thinking you'd lost hope to get that first edition copy of your favorite author's work from the bookshop owner, you can run a search of photos of the area you toured that included your face and backtrack the street until you find the image of you standing in front the bookshop owner, run a face technology search on him until you find him standing in front of his bookshop on the other side of Earth. You also see his shopping patterns, like the fact that he buys a certain bottle of wine at a corner wine shop once a week, so you have that wine delivered to him in thanks for sending you that first edition book.
In the not-so-distant future, we will be able to fast-forward through the lives of our ancestors, see their actions, feel their emotions and know how they handled every situation in their lives. Or rather, our descendants will be able to fast-forward through our lives and know all the facts about us, whether we intended them to see us or not.
The more we share about ourselves, the more we share about others. It may seem innocent to post a tweet about a neighbor buying a new puppy only to find out later that the puppy was intended as a surprise for a young daughter who was following you on twitter and she discovered the surprise before her father could give her the puppy, taking away the only bit of joy the unemployed man had. Just like I discovered that a friend's proud confession to her middle-aged friends that she had sex for the first time when she was 14 runs counter to her recent facebook posts of a billboard for abstinence that she's sharing with her children, teaching them to wait to have sex - when her children get older, they'll have both instances of their mother's comments available for Internet searches, and what will they conclude? Social mores of two different time periods? Hypocrisy? The social effects of AIDS? The change in one's economic status? Nothing, because they skipped over those details to focus on something else about their mother?
In this Internet age, there are no more secrets for those who participate. Do you want to be remembered? If you're here reading this, the answer, of course, is yes. You have no choice. So the next time you walk by a security camera, wave hello or say something like, "Hey, my future great-grandchildren, I'm having a wonderful day and I hope you are, too!" It'll be like putting a message in a bottle for future generations to find on a stranded beach one day.
The Internet went from a high-speed communication tool for scientists, researchers and engineers to a means for revolutionaries to plan government overthrow/disruption. Who knew this would happen?
Very few of us have verifiable, written, first- or second-person accounts of the behaviours of our ancestors from more than a few hundred years ago. Since the dawn of photography, many of us have "true" images of our ancestors (as opposed to idealized paintings of them) and a smaller number of us have moving picture films of our ancestors in action, including their voices. Photography is not limited to our visible light range - we also take X-ray images we can keep. As technology progresses, we will have other images of our internal body processes to share with descendants, including EEG/EKG traces and fMRI/PET 3D composite sequences. We can have our DNA analyzed for disease susceptibility and genetic ancestral migration.
Just like the generic capabilities of the Internet allows it to transform from one tool to another, the detailed memories of our ancestors will transform our understanding of who we came from, who we are and who our offspring are most likely to become.
As more and more people post photos, videos and text commentaries about their lives, we get the opportunity to find ourselves in the backgrounds of other people's lives (using face technology software, for instance), giving us not only a more detailed picture about our lives but also details about the lives of people with whom we interact passively. Pretty soon, you can go past Google-ing a person's name to finding out what that person has been doing by searching links to a person's face or body features.
Imagine walking down a street as a tourist, snapping photos of architectural landmarks while security cameras and other tourists' cameras capture images of you.
So, when you want to try to remember the name of a bookshop owner you ran into but didn't write down or take a photo of, thinking you'd lost hope to get that first edition copy of your favorite author's work from the bookshop owner, you can run a search of photos of the area you toured that included your face and backtrack the street until you find the image of you standing in front the bookshop owner, run a face technology search on him until you find him standing in front of his bookshop on the other side of Earth. You also see his shopping patterns, like the fact that he buys a certain bottle of wine at a corner wine shop once a week, so you have that wine delivered to him in thanks for sending you that first edition book.
In the not-so-distant future, we will be able to fast-forward through the lives of our ancestors, see their actions, feel their emotions and know how they handled every situation in their lives. Or rather, our descendants will be able to fast-forward through our lives and know all the facts about us, whether we intended them to see us or not.
The more we share about ourselves, the more we share about others. It may seem innocent to post a tweet about a neighbor buying a new puppy only to find out later that the puppy was intended as a surprise for a young daughter who was following you on twitter and she discovered the surprise before her father could give her the puppy, taking away the only bit of joy the unemployed man had. Just like I discovered that a friend's proud confession to her middle-aged friends that she had sex for the first time when she was 14 runs counter to her recent facebook posts of a billboard for abstinence that she's sharing with her children, teaching them to wait to have sex - when her children get older, they'll have both instances of their mother's comments available for Internet searches, and what will they conclude? Social mores of two different time periods? Hypocrisy? The social effects of AIDS? The change in one's economic status? Nothing, because they skipped over those details to focus on something else about their mother?
In this Internet age, there are no more secrets for those who participate. Do you want to be remembered? If you're here reading this, the answer, of course, is yes. You have no choice. So the next time you walk by a security camera, wave hello or say something like, "Hey, my future great-grandchildren, I'm having a wonderful day and I hope you are, too!" It'll be like putting a message in a bottle for future generations to find on a stranded beach one day.
A Reader Asks...
A reader asked why I seem so serious all the time. She's almost too scared to do things on the Internet.
First of all, for those who've found interest in reading my notes/blog, let me tell you I am a satirist. I teach a computer class, which deals in part with Internet security, so my recent writing has reflected topics on computers, security, cyborgs, and the like. However, much of that writing is in satirical form, making some of the humor "inside jokes" (although I've tried to generalize them as much as possible).
As I told the reader, the dangers of the Internet should be thought of as no better or worse than the chance of having a road mishap, getting your purse/wallet snatched or any other encounter between what you have and a person who wants what you have. Use common sense and don't give away your computer passwords or password hints ("What's the name of your mother's brother's sister's dog's parent's favorite toy and where was it bought or manufactured?").
First of all, for those who've found interest in reading my notes/blog, let me tell you I am a satirist. I teach a computer class, which deals in part with Internet security, so my recent writing has reflected topics on computers, security, cyborgs, and the like. However, much of that writing is in satirical form, making some of the humor "inside jokes" (although I've tried to generalize them as much as possible).
As I told the reader, the dangers of the Internet should be thought of as no better or worse than the chance of having a road mishap, getting your purse/wallet snatched or any other encounter between what you have and a person who wants what you have. Use common sense and don't give away your computer passwords or password hints ("What's the name of your mother's brother's sister's dog's parent's favorite toy and where was it bought or manufactured?").
21 June 2009
Eccentricity
She opened the screen door and held it aside with her left foot while she looked through her purse for the front door key. As she turned the key in the lock and grabbed the front door handle, she noticed the glass door knob was loose.
"Another repair job I can't afford right now," she told herself.
Sursanna turned on the lights and let the doors close behind her. She dropped her purse behind the counter, turned on the CD player, lit a candle and sat down for a moment, looking blankly around the room.
She talked quietly to herself. "I am not this old house. I am not this business. I am not the servers who come and go. I am not the customers who are never happy, no matter how much I try to please them. I am not...you know, I miss my grandfather today. Do you hear that, house? My grandfather gave these walls life and now it's on my shoulders to keep this place going. You're going to do what I tell you to do and stop falling apart."
Sursanna turned on the cash register and adjusted the broken paper tape cover, tearing off a piece of cellophane tape and sticking it across the crack that threatened to get bigger every time someone pushed a key or tore off a receipt. She picked up the phone and called her cousin the cook, Reggie, to remind him she needed him in the restaurant in half an hour, assuming he was sober enough to make the five-mile drive here. If not, her husband could always substitute, one more time.
She flipped through her personal name and address book she'd set down on the counter one day, that then turned into a sort of customer registration and comment journal. Some of the comments were usually funny. Some were indecipherable. Some were hard to interpret such as "the hostess with the mostest." Was someone referring to her? If so, the mostest what? Strange mood? Worst memory? Business debt? Number of grandkids?
A tear welled up in her eyes as she automatically looked up at the photo and drawing of her granddaughter she'd placed on the wall across from the counter, helping her remember her 20-year old granddaughter, her pride and joy, who was going to graduate early from college until a drunk driver ran a stop sign and killed her granddaughter on her way to work at the restaurant.
Only if...
What if...
"Well, we can't go back in time, can we?" Sursanna said out loud to no one except herself and perhaps the house. She pushed the thoughts aside that wanted to place some kind of blame on her for her granddaughter's death. She reminded herself that her granddaughter had worked at the restaurant for years - it was the drunk driver who killed her.
"And I wonder why I'm so scatter-brained! If it weren't for me, half my family would be unemployed and have no money. And there's always a chance I'll get Alzheimer's. Not in my lifetime! I enjoy my grandbabies too much."
Sursanna stood up and walked into the kitchen, taking another moment to go over her mental list of things that had to get repaired, food that had to be bought and things that could be put off until tomorrow. She knew she played up the eccentric matron image for her customers a little much, hopefully not too much, but she could still run a restaurant and a gift shop and stay in business, a lot better than many folks she knew who had been caught off-guard by the change in the national economy, depending either too much on local business or tourism, when she figured out how to keep a little bit of both to balance out the number of customers, if not her checkbook.
"Another repair job I can't afford right now," she told herself.
Sursanna turned on the lights and let the doors close behind her. She dropped her purse behind the counter, turned on the CD player, lit a candle and sat down for a moment, looking blankly around the room.
She talked quietly to herself. "I am not this old house. I am not this business. I am not the servers who come and go. I am not the customers who are never happy, no matter how much I try to please them. I am not...you know, I miss my grandfather today. Do you hear that, house? My grandfather gave these walls life and now it's on my shoulders to keep this place going. You're going to do what I tell you to do and stop falling apart."
Sursanna turned on the cash register and adjusted the broken paper tape cover, tearing off a piece of cellophane tape and sticking it across the crack that threatened to get bigger every time someone pushed a key or tore off a receipt. She picked up the phone and called her cousin the cook, Reggie, to remind him she needed him in the restaurant in half an hour, assuming he was sober enough to make the five-mile drive here. If not, her husband could always substitute, one more time.
She flipped through her personal name and address book she'd set down on the counter one day, that then turned into a sort of customer registration and comment journal. Some of the comments were usually funny. Some were indecipherable. Some were hard to interpret such as "the hostess with the mostest." Was someone referring to her? If so, the mostest what? Strange mood? Worst memory? Business debt? Number of grandkids?
A tear welled up in her eyes as she automatically looked up at the photo and drawing of her granddaughter she'd placed on the wall across from the counter, helping her remember her 20-year old granddaughter, her pride and joy, who was going to graduate early from college until a drunk driver ran a stop sign and killed her granddaughter on her way to work at the restaurant.
Only if...
What if...
"Well, we can't go back in time, can we?" Sursanna said out loud to no one except herself and perhaps the house. She pushed the thoughts aside that wanted to place some kind of blame on her for her granddaughter's death. She reminded herself that her granddaughter had worked at the restaurant for years - it was the drunk driver who killed her.
"And I wonder why I'm so scatter-brained! If it weren't for me, half my family would be unemployed and have no money. And there's always a chance I'll get Alzheimer's. Not in my lifetime! I enjoy my grandbabies too much."
Sursanna stood up and walked into the kitchen, taking another moment to go over her mental list of things that had to get repaired, food that had to be bought and things that could be put off until tomorrow. She knew she played up the eccentric matron image for her customers a little much, hopefully not too much, but she could still run a restaurant and a gift shop and stay in business, a lot better than many folks she knew who had been caught off-guard by the change in the national economy, depending either too much on local business or tourism, when she figured out how to keep a little bit of both to balance out the number of customers, if not her checkbook.
20 June 2009
Moleskine notes, 20 June 2009
10:30 a.m. -- Blogged late last night and blogged again early this morning. Ate oatmeal with a spoonful of honey and a cup of hot Irish breakfast tea. Found lapidary shop in Chattanooga through Google search. Stopped at Wisescrappers for my wife to buy scrapbook material. Will stop at Blue Willow Cafe in Scottsboro for lunch and then drive to Chattanooga to meet lapidary shop owner at his home (7621 Cecelia Drive).
Editing new book, plot: creation, waking up, self-discovery and consciousness of online entity revealed via blog entries, with technical details of online person creation as seen from the perspective of the person whose identity is being stolen and a third mysterious person who may or may not be trying to change human history through accelerated genetic evolution.
13:05 -- Met a middle-aged man and his daughter at Blue Willow, both living in Memphis, a few blocks from the corner of Kirby and Poplar. He's a judge in BBQ cooking contests. She used to work at Steak&Ale restaurant, slim body with smarmy attitude (why wasn't I in a better mood to flirt?). They had just been listening to Whad'Ya Know? ["Not much. You?"], a radio program my wife and I have listened to many times and seen performed live twice, once in Birmingham and once in Huntsville. The man and his daughter come to Scottsboro a few times a year to shop at Unclaimed Baggage - no bargains found this time. The man used to travel a lot. I gather that he has retired from active work.
Our hostess at Blue Willow, the co-owner Sandra, warms the room with her kind, funny and wonderfully strange-as-ever, feeling-as-if-you're-family personality - sometimes thinks she has "Alzheimer's...or is it part-timer's disease?" No, my dear sweet redheaded grandmother, it's oldtimer's disease!
Our two young servers gave us their nearly-undivided attention, including finding a special, extra-sweet glass of fruit tea for my wife. A shout-out to the cutie attending to my wife's thirst! My wife sampled the pork chop special (mm-mmm) while I ate her salivatory sides of beans and steamed cabbage. I took the healthy route and ate the vegetable wrap, letting my wife have my side dish, strawberry pretzel congealed salad (maybe they should call it concealed salad because I didn't see any salad on her plate). I stretched the dessert course as long as I could, swirling the blueberry cream pie around my tongue while making a tropical fish out of the "chenille" pipe cleaner napkin rings (with my fingers, not my tongue).
Meanwhile, the backdrop - the knickknacks and artwork - highlighted the chocolate beauties standing nearby, two lovely ladies who met my gaze but not what I had on the tip of my tongue: a welcoming hello.
13:15 -- My wife now shops at Unclaimed Baggage, looking for a silver chain while I sit here in the heat of the car (98 deg F) looking at a couple of guys in overalls chewing the fat at T&T Auto Body shop across the street. Local life on a Saturday afternoon.
And speaking of body shops, have I told you about the time we stayed at a B&B in Dahlonega, Georgia, USA, and related to a young Australian woman working at the inn the tale of a business owner, Ralph Petroff, and his automobile incident?
Ralph had flown down to Sydney to look at business opportunities. He hired an automobile and attempted to drive on the other side of the road - no problems, mate. Then he drove into an intersection and turned the wrong way, trading fenders with another automobile. Ralph jumped out of the car and told the other driver he'd take care of the situation (in order to prevent any negative press about his first visit to the land down under). He walked into the lobby of a nearby hotel and proclaimed loudly that he needed a body shop right away. When no one heard him, he shouted even louder that he needed help and wanted a body shop immediately. The concierge approached him and asked him the trouble. "I've just had a car accident and need to get a tow truck from a body shop to pick up the damaged cars." The concierge smiled slyly and said, "Mate, you don't need a body shop. A body shop's where the prostitutes hang out. What you need's a smash repair shop."
The young woman laughed and agreed about word usage problems. She then told us about the time she'd sat for an exam in a large auditorium-style classroom at North Georgia College. The exam answer sheet required the use of a pencil. When the woman needed to change one of her answers, she turned around and asked a male student if she could borrow his rubber. His face turned red. She then rephrased her statement and said, "You know, the rubber at the end of your pencil." The man laughed nervously and replied, "Oh, you mean my eraser" and handed her his pencil. The woman didn't know her mistake until her roommate told her later in the day that a rubber in American colloquialism was slang for a contraceptive. The woman felt too embarrassed to return to the classroom and sit near that young man again.
15:30 -- Sitting with John and Esther, the lapidary shopkeepers. John taught us the phrase, "Tall Girls Can Fight and Other Queer Things Can Do," a mnemonic for TGCFAOQTCD or Talc, Gypsum, Calcite, Fluorite, Apatite, Orthoclase, Quartz, Topaz, Corundum, Diamond; the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. We're learning other facts like hardness can be tested with a fingernail (approx. 2.5), copper penny from 1982 or earlier (approx. 3.5) and a pocket knife (approx. 5.5 to 6), in order to test the possible type of rock in your hand. Their son graduated from Michigan Tech as a computer programmer with a preference for the C language. John is a former mining engineer turned Unix expert who used to work for TVA and helped them find 30 million tons of "missing" coal; he supports Sun computer users now.
John and Esther helped us sort the stones we'd "mined" outside of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, USA, (at the Spruce Pine gem mine two weeks ago, we basically sifted through buckets of loose stone, dirt and sand that had been seeded with stones from around the world, most frequently finding stones from Brazil in our sluice sifters). John explained to us the method for shaping and polishing the stones using either a rotary or vibrating tumbler. We gave John a few stones for him to cut and then bought a two-barrel tumbler, model number 33B made by Lortone, along with an extra barrel and an assortment of polishing grits.
19:00 -- Back at the Blue Willow Cafe for dinner, drinking a glass of house Shiraz, splitting 16-ounce ribeye steak, fried potatoes (fries or chips) and house salad with my wife. Bought a container of bourbon butter to take home with us.
Didn't feel like talking much today and I don't know why. I smiled a lot and am only now beginning to warm up (wine has that effect).
The table next to us featured four new faces, two couples celebrating their wedding anniversaries, 22 years and 39 years. The younger couple, Greg Shine and his wife, had funny stories to tell and I'll relate one to you.
Twelve years ago, Greg and his wife drove to an Alabama mountain village, Mentone, to eat dinner at Cragsmere Manna. They arrived at closing time and thought they'd arrived too late but the owners kept the kitchen staff around long enough for them to enjoy an anniversary dinner. Then a Filipino man started up a karaoke machine and began singing American pop songs in a heavy Filipino accent, entertaining just the two of them and encouraging them to dance. It felt to them like the evening had been planned for their anniversary celebration, an accident of fate.
The other couple, being older, told stories about earlier days. The man told about the time he'd convinced Greg to call in to a "partyline" radio program when someone had offered "fresh country eggs" for sale and ask what was the difference between country eggs and city eggs and what kind of chicken feed did it take to change a hen from a country egg layer to a city egg layer. The elder man also told me that the radio program still goes on (in my hometown, the local radio station had a similar program called "Swap and Shop") and asked me to listen to AM 1050 at 8:15 in the morning. He said his family used to own radio station WOAY in West Virginia. One of his relatives used to start up the radio station in the morning with, "This is WOAY, coming to you on 10,000 strands of barbed wire."
I heard a lot of stories today and saw a lot of pretty faces. I drove under a gorgeous blue sky and looked out upon the rolling green hills of northeastern Alabama, northwestern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee. I proved no theorems and tested no hypotheses. I was a human in the midst of humans, doing some listenin' and some talkin'. What else is there to do or be?
Editing new book, plot: creation, waking up, self-discovery and consciousness of online entity revealed via blog entries, with technical details of online person creation as seen from the perspective of the person whose identity is being stolen and a third mysterious person who may or may not be trying to change human history through accelerated genetic evolution.
13:05 -- Met a middle-aged man and his daughter at Blue Willow, both living in Memphis, a few blocks from the corner of Kirby and Poplar. He's a judge in BBQ cooking contests. She used to work at Steak&Ale restaurant, slim body with smarmy attitude (why wasn't I in a better mood to flirt?). They had just been listening to Whad'Ya Know? ["Not much. You?"], a radio program my wife and I have listened to many times and seen performed live twice, once in Birmingham and once in Huntsville. The man and his daughter come to Scottsboro a few times a year to shop at Unclaimed Baggage - no bargains found this time. The man used to travel a lot. I gather that he has retired from active work.
Our hostess at Blue Willow, the co-owner Sandra, warms the room with her kind, funny and wonderfully strange-as-ever, feeling-as-if-you're-family personality - sometimes thinks she has "Alzheimer's...or is it part-timer's disease?" No, my dear sweet redheaded grandmother, it's oldtimer's disease!
Our two young servers gave us their nearly-undivided attention, including finding a special, extra-sweet glass of fruit tea for my wife. A shout-out to the cutie attending to my wife's thirst! My wife sampled the pork chop special (mm-mmm) while I ate her salivatory sides of beans and steamed cabbage. I took the healthy route and ate the vegetable wrap, letting my wife have my side dish, strawberry pretzel congealed salad (maybe they should call it concealed salad because I didn't see any salad on her plate). I stretched the dessert course as long as I could, swirling the blueberry cream pie around my tongue while making a tropical fish out of the "chenille" pipe cleaner napkin rings (with my fingers, not my tongue).
Meanwhile, the backdrop - the knickknacks and artwork - highlighted the chocolate beauties standing nearby, two lovely ladies who met my gaze but not what I had on the tip of my tongue: a welcoming hello.
13:15 -- My wife now shops at Unclaimed Baggage, looking for a silver chain while I sit here in the heat of the car (98 deg F) looking at a couple of guys in overalls chewing the fat at T&T Auto Body shop across the street. Local life on a Saturday afternoon.
And speaking of body shops, have I told you about the time we stayed at a B&B in Dahlonega, Georgia, USA, and related to a young Australian woman working at the inn the tale of a business owner, Ralph Petroff, and his automobile incident?
Ralph had flown down to Sydney to look at business opportunities. He hired an automobile and attempted to drive on the other side of the road - no problems, mate. Then he drove into an intersection and turned the wrong way, trading fenders with another automobile. Ralph jumped out of the car and told the other driver he'd take care of the situation (in order to prevent any negative press about his first visit to the land down under). He walked into the lobby of a nearby hotel and proclaimed loudly that he needed a body shop right away. When no one heard him, he shouted even louder that he needed help and wanted a body shop immediately. The concierge approached him and asked him the trouble. "I've just had a car accident and need to get a tow truck from a body shop to pick up the damaged cars." The concierge smiled slyly and said, "Mate, you don't need a body shop. A body shop's where the prostitutes hang out. What you need's a smash repair shop."
The young woman laughed and agreed about word usage problems. She then told us about the time she'd sat for an exam in a large auditorium-style classroom at North Georgia College. The exam answer sheet required the use of a pencil. When the woman needed to change one of her answers, she turned around and asked a male student if she could borrow his rubber. His face turned red. She then rephrased her statement and said, "You know, the rubber at the end of your pencil." The man laughed nervously and replied, "Oh, you mean my eraser" and handed her his pencil. The woman didn't know her mistake until her roommate told her later in the day that a rubber in American colloquialism was slang for a contraceptive. The woman felt too embarrassed to return to the classroom and sit near that young man again.
15:30 -- Sitting with John and Esther, the lapidary shopkeepers. John taught us the phrase, "Tall Girls Can Fight and Other Queer Things Can Do," a mnemonic for TGCFAOQTCD or Talc, Gypsum, Calcite, Fluorite, Apatite, Orthoclase, Quartz, Topaz, Corundum, Diamond; the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. We're learning other facts like hardness can be tested with a fingernail (approx. 2.5), copper penny from 1982 or earlier (approx. 3.5) and a pocket knife (approx. 5.5 to 6), in order to test the possible type of rock in your hand. Their son graduated from Michigan Tech as a computer programmer with a preference for the C language. John is a former mining engineer turned Unix expert who used to work for TVA and helped them find 30 million tons of "missing" coal; he supports Sun computer users now.
John and Esther helped us sort the stones we'd "mined" outside of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, USA, (at the Spruce Pine gem mine two weeks ago, we basically sifted through buckets of loose stone, dirt and sand that had been seeded with stones from around the world, most frequently finding stones from Brazil in our sluice sifters). John explained to us the method for shaping and polishing the stones using either a rotary or vibrating tumbler. We gave John a few stones for him to cut and then bought a two-barrel tumbler, model number 33B made by Lortone, along with an extra barrel and an assortment of polishing grits.
19:00 -- Back at the Blue Willow Cafe for dinner, drinking a glass of house Shiraz, splitting 16-ounce ribeye steak, fried potatoes (fries or chips) and house salad with my wife. Bought a container of bourbon butter to take home with us.
Didn't feel like talking much today and I don't know why. I smiled a lot and am only now beginning to warm up (wine has that effect).
The table next to us featured four new faces, two couples celebrating their wedding anniversaries, 22 years and 39 years. The younger couple, Greg Shine and his wife, had funny stories to tell and I'll relate one to you.
Twelve years ago, Greg and his wife drove to an Alabama mountain village, Mentone, to eat dinner at Cragsmere Manna. They arrived at closing time and thought they'd arrived too late but the owners kept the kitchen staff around long enough for them to enjoy an anniversary dinner. Then a Filipino man started up a karaoke machine and began singing American pop songs in a heavy Filipino accent, entertaining just the two of them and encouraging them to dance. It felt to them like the evening had been planned for their anniversary celebration, an accident of fate.
The other couple, being older, told stories about earlier days. The man told about the time he'd convinced Greg to call in to a "partyline" radio program when someone had offered "fresh country eggs" for sale and ask what was the difference between country eggs and city eggs and what kind of chicken feed did it take to change a hen from a country egg layer to a city egg layer. The elder man also told me that the radio program still goes on (in my hometown, the local radio station had a similar program called "Swap and Shop") and asked me to listen to AM 1050 at 8:15 in the morning. He said his family used to own radio station WOAY in West Virginia. One of his relatives used to start up the radio station in the morning with, "This is WOAY, coming to you on 10,000 strands of barbed wire."
I heard a lot of stories today and saw a lot of pretty faces. I drove under a gorgeous blue sky and looked out upon the rolling green hills of northeastern Alabama, northwestern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee. I proved no theorems and tested no hypotheses. I was a human in the midst of humans, doing some listenin' and some talkin'. What else is there to do or be?
What Do You See In Someone Else's Eyes?
Meditate on the moment...time does not exist, I do not exist, existence does not exist because these words do not exist, life is change is death is everything is nothing is the universe. I am the spider web spun while this body that is not-me slept, collecting dewdrops, and reflecting the morning sunlight. Morning does not exist, only light/shadow transition lines traversing the planet as it spins like a top elliptically circling the sun.
Can you see yourself reflected in another person's eyes? Can you hear what you sound like in another person's ears?
We want to think we can identify each other by names, numbers and other linguistic clues. But I don't know names, numbers or linguistic clues. Either I know you or I don't. I know the squirrel racing up the tree in front of the house but I don't know it as "squirrel" or "Mr. Chewy Peanut." I know it as "furry, tree-climbing animal with small patch of fur missing out of its tail who eats too much of the birdseed and nests in the shaggy bark tree with the trunk bent at an angle."
We don't know each other by our names. We know each other by our distinguishing features, how we interact with one another and the world around us. A name is a static image but neither you nor I are static images. Don't confuse knowing a list of static images as knowledge. I am not Rick. I am the reflection in your eyes and the sound of my voice in your ears that I can't hear. We are intimately entwined. When you fully understand that, you will find a way to talk with your neighbor about your disagreements and learn to drop the labels of hate, anger and miscomprehension. Hate, anger and miscomprehension only reflect back on the person who expresses those sentiments, not the person upon whom the sentiments are directed.
Can you see yourself reflected in another person's eyes? Can you hear what you sound like in another person's ears?
We want to think we can identify each other by names, numbers and other linguistic clues. But I don't know names, numbers or linguistic clues. Either I know you or I don't. I know the squirrel racing up the tree in front of the house but I don't know it as "squirrel" or "Mr. Chewy Peanut." I know it as "furry, tree-climbing animal with small patch of fur missing out of its tail who eats too much of the birdseed and nests in the shaggy bark tree with the trunk bent at an angle."
We don't know each other by our names. We know each other by our distinguishing features, how we interact with one another and the world around us. A name is a static image but neither you nor I are static images. Don't confuse knowing a list of static images as knowledge. I am not Rick. I am the reflection in your eyes and the sound of my voice in your ears that I can't hear. We are intimately entwined. When you fully understand that, you will find a way to talk with your neighbor about your disagreements and learn to drop the labels of hate, anger and miscomprehension. Hate, anger and miscomprehension only reflect back on the person who expresses those sentiments, not the person upon whom the sentiments are directed.
19 June 2009
Bow, Quiver and Arrows
How much do you value the freedom of movement? In the area of the world where I grew up, a group of individuals operated a "ring" of illegal business activities, including automobile theft (in order to take the stolen vehicles apart and sell "original" equipment for smash repairs), and tobacco and alcohol packaging, distribution and sales. Some of the people involved in these businesses also bought and sold illegal drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and prescription medicines. A few made their own distilled alcohol (moonshine or poitín (poteen)). I went to secondary school with people who conducted trade with this group.
What is your definition of freedom of movement? Do you believe that a person has the right to do what s/he wants, to live anyway s/he pleases, as long as s/he does not interfere with or disrupt the lives of others?
Automobile theft clearly interferes with and disrupts the lives of the person(s) who owned, drove and/or rode in the automobiles being stolen.
What about tobacco, alcohol and drugs? Do you believe a person has the right to purchase an item, no matter what that item is, if the use of that item directly affects only that person? After all, we allow people to buy tobacco, alcohol and drugs every day, assuming those people have paid their stamp duties and other government taxes.
When I was a kid, my father worked for the extension office of a state university. I'd visit his office and look at all the brochures created by the university to educate local farmers and business owners about practical skills. One of those skills was brewing or fermenting your own alcoholic beverages -- beer and wine. I saw those brochures in the late 1970s.
Twenty years later, I worked with a colleague, Tom Tsomczak, who had brewed his own beer. He convinced me to try the process so I bought equipment at a local beer brewing store and followed the brewing directions, combining recipes from a book I bought at a local organic food store with ones from beer brewing websites. I brewed several cases of beer and slowly drank them over the years. I have a few bottles left, including two that have sat in the back of the refrigerator since 1996 (I drank one of those bottles a year ago and it still tasted good and thick, having been made with homegrown blackberries and chocolate malt, even though there was little carbonation left, leaving one bottle in the fridge with which to celebrate something important one day (I think I drank the first bottle to finally celebrate my retirement)).
Legally, there's nothing the matter with brewing small batches of your own beer in the political zone in which I live. However, brewing too much, carrying too much across political lines or offering home-brewed beer for public sale constitutes a violation of political rules.
Thus, strictly speaking, my freedom of movement is restricted, assuming I follow the rules (which I have done, not one to participate in making, distributing and selling my own hooch).
No problem. I'm not an anarchist. I see the value in setting rules that govern conduct between humans because humans do not always conduct themselves cordially, requiring a rule enforcement group to observe other humans for known rule violations and detain the violators.
In small enough groups, we humans can agree to goals and objectives that allow us to seek individual goals while making sure the whole group survives and thrives, especially when individuals have made voluntary choices to join a group. When human populations grow into the millions and billions, though, how many rules must we have to restrict individual goals because thousands of groups and subgroups have goals that clash with one another and rules/restrictions placed on the groups are not enough to prevent the groups from interfering with and disrupting other groups, thus forcing extra restrictions at/to the individual level?
No matter where you live, you can come up with examples of your own where your freedom of movement is restricted, either obviously or subtly, depending on your current activities and groups to which you belong. You agree with some of the rules and disagree with others. You may contact your local government official to file a complaint about new rules or request the implementation of new rules. Our human society universally operates in this manner, having developed labor structures that support people who deal solely in the buying, selling and trading of rule-setting influences. We even have rules about rule-setting and rules about rules about rule-setting.
Supine in bed this afternoon, I stared at the ceiling after taking a nap. I looked at my life over the past year or so, congratulating myself on establishing the comfortable routines/regimen of writing daily, including these blog entries. Then I stepped back mentally and looked at myself as if I was a person unfamiliar with computers, who had no interest in manipulating electrical signal strength upon which all high-tech gizmos depend (wires, resistors, capacitors, filters, amplifiers, diodes, logic gates, registers, machine language, assemblers, computer programs, radios, servers, portable music players, etc., that pervade our lives), remembering the moment when I went from a high-tech geek to a management type person who valued the manipulation of people to achieve project goals over the manipulation of electronics to create a computing device.
As I woke up, I thought about the recent news of the breakup of the car theft ring and wondered where people who still lived in that part of the world would be able to buy their illegal moonshine, at one time available at almost any convenience store in or near a town called Newport (all you had to do was point at the empty glass jar on the counter and ask how much for a full one). I realized that the majority of the people working in the car theft ring were probably the same people who had dropped out of school because of illiteracy, knowing that few if any of them would have or could have read this blog.
Freedom of movement is a funny concept. I can stand in my backyard with a full quiver and strung bow, shooting arrows into a target if I want. I would probably be stopped and questioned if I set up a target on a sidewalk and shot arrows at the target, even if I had made sure the street was clear of humans, animals or other objects that flying arrows would injure. Even though I haven't shot an arrow in 20 years (probably the last time being when my former brother in-law brought his composite hunting bow to my house and we shot arrows into an old stump), I could still pick up a bow and arrow and hit a target. No literacy is required. In other words, freedom of movement and literacy are not mutually exclusive, although their paths cross occasionally.
As a literate person with many legal, well-paying job opportunities available, I doubt I'll ever work in a chop shop. I doubt an illiterate person will ever be able to program a supercomputer.
After I had fully woken up, it dawned on me that bloggers can't change the world with words, even though many of us, including me, think and act like we can. Sitting in front of a computer is not going to solve all the problems of the world if the solutions we come up with require literacy.
Therefore, while I perform my current weekly duties of getting a group of students familiar with manipulating electrical signals through the use of the Linux operating system, I must remind myself, and them, that we may thrill ourselves with our knowledge of complex computer systems but to really help ourselves and our fellow humans let's remember to keep things simple so our interactions can take place between a literate and illiterate person without requiring extra rules that'll further restrict our freedom of movement.
What is your definition of freedom of movement? Do you believe that a person has the right to do what s/he wants, to live anyway s/he pleases, as long as s/he does not interfere with or disrupt the lives of others?
Automobile theft clearly interferes with and disrupts the lives of the person(s) who owned, drove and/or rode in the automobiles being stolen.
What about tobacco, alcohol and drugs? Do you believe a person has the right to purchase an item, no matter what that item is, if the use of that item directly affects only that person? After all, we allow people to buy tobacco, alcohol and drugs every day, assuming those people have paid their stamp duties and other government taxes.
When I was a kid, my father worked for the extension office of a state university. I'd visit his office and look at all the brochures created by the university to educate local farmers and business owners about practical skills. One of those skills was brewing or fermenting your own alcoholic beverages -- beer and wine. I saw those brochures in the late 1970s.
Twenty years later, I worked with a colleague, Tom Tsomczak, who had brewed his own beer. He convinced me to try the process so I bought equipment at a local beer brewing store and followed the brewing directions, combining recipes from a book I bought at a local organic food store with ones from beer brewing websites. I brewed several cases of beer and slowly drank them over the years. I have a few bottles left, including two that have sat in the back of the refrigerator since 1996 (I drank one of those bottles a year ago and it still tasted good and thick, having been made with homegrown blackberries and chocolate malt, even though there was little carbonation left, leaving one bottle in the fridge with which to celebrate something important one day (I think I drank the first bottle to finally celebrate my retirement)).
Legally, there's nothing the matter with brewing small batches of your own beer in the political zone in which I live. However, brewing too much, carrying too much across political lines or offering home-brewed beer for public sale constitutes a violation of political rules.
Thus, strictly speaking, my freedom of movement is restricted, assuming I follow the rules (which I have done, not one to participate in making, distributing and selling my own hooch).
No problem. I'm not an anarchist. I see the value in setting rules that govern conduct between humans because humans do not always conduct themselves cordially, requiring a rule enforcement group to observe other humans for known rule violations and detain the violators.
In small enough groups, we humans can agree to goals and objectives that allow us to seek individual goals while making sure the whole group survives and thrives, especially when individuals have made voluntary choices to join a group. When human populations grow into the millions and billions, though, how many rules must we have to restrict individual goals because thousands of groups and subgroups have goals that clash with one another and rules/restrictions placed on the groups are not enough to prevent the groups from interfering with and disrupting other groups, thus forcing extra restrictions at/to the individual level?
No matter where you live, you can come up with examples of your own where your freedom of movement is restricted, either obviously or subtly, depending on your current activities and groups to which you belong. You agree with some of the rules and disagree with others. You may contact your local government official to file a complaint about new rules or request the implementation of new rules. Our human society universally operates in this manner, having developed labor structures that support people who deal solely in the buying, selling and trading of rule-setting influences. We even have rules about rule-setting and rules about rules about rule-setting.
Supine in bed this afternoon, I stared at the ceiling after taking a nap. I looked at my life over the past year or so, congratulating myself on establishing the comfortable routines/regimen of writing daily, including these blog entries. Then I stepped back mentally and looked at myself as if I was a person unfamiliar with computers, who had no interest in manipulating electrical signal strength upon which all high-tech gizmos depend (wires, resistors, capacitors, filters, amplifiers, diodes, logic gates, registers, machine language, assemblers, computer programs, radios, servers, portable music players, etc., that pervade our lives), remembering the moment when I went from a high-tech geek to a management type person who valued the manipulation of people to achieve project goals over the manipulation of electronics to create a computing device.
As I woke up, I thought about the recent news of the breakup of the car theft ring and wondered where people who still lived in that part of the world would be able to buy their illegal moonshine, at one time available at almost any convenience store in or near a town called Newport (all you had to do was point at the empty glass jar on the counter and ask how much for a full one). I realized that the majority of the people working in the car theft ring were probably the same people who had dropped out of school because of illiteracy, knowing that few if any of them would have or could have read this blog.
Freedom of movement is a funny concept. I can stand in my backyard with a full quiver and strung bow, shooting arrows into a target if I want. I would probably be stopped and questioned if I set up a target on a sidewalk and shot arrows at the target, even if I had made sure the street was clear of humans, animals or other objects that flying arrows would injure. Even though I haven't shot an arrow in 20 years (probably the last time being when my former brother in-law brought his composite hunting bow to my house and we shot arrows into an old stump), I could still pick up a bow and arrow and hit a target. No literacy is required. In other words, freedom of movement and literacy are not mutually exclusive, although their paths cross occasionally.
As a literate person with many legal, well-paying job opportunities available, I doubt I'll ever work in a chop shop. I doubt an illiterate person will ever be able to program a supercomputer.
After I had fully woken up, it dawned on me that bloggers can't change the world with words, even though many of us, including me, think and act like we can. Sitting in front of a computer is not going to solve all the problems of the world if the solutions we come up with require literacy.
Therefore, while I perform my current weekly duties of getting a group of students familiar with manipulating electrical signals through the use of the Linux operating system, I must remind myself, and them, that we may thrill ourselves with our knowledge of complex computer systems but to really help ourselves and our fellow humans let's remember to keep things simple so our interactions can take place between a literate and illiterate person without requiring extra rules that'll further restrict our freedom of movement.
One Hundred Years From Now
I just found out in the last hour that the current state of the conditions of planetary trade is what some expert has newly called a "recession." Turns out we had an artificial run on Martian real estate while underground water sources were still thought to be limited. Since we just found out that the aquifers cover almost all of Mars, real estate prices have instantly plummeted, sending discretionary spending into a spiral which some economic pundits are calling the black hole of death.
As you mind readers know, I've got a copy of electronic text that my fifth-great uncle had written in a format called a blog or web log, cataloging his thoughts and observations about the early 21st century. Looks as if the word recession is not new, after all.
In fact, we're recreating economic conditions that occurred not only during the Great Recession of 2007-2011 but also in centuries and millennia past. Thank goodness I have maintained a set of records of Earth history here on Mars for my mental exercise routines, which I am mentally transmitting to those of you hooked on my wavelength for the next few microseconds.
In other words, don't panic. Prices will return to normal in the next few hours.
Be advised that I will offline for two minutes later today for a DNA change. I have decided that I prefer my skin cells living only one day or so to allow me to enjoy Martian daytime without deleterious effects on my electroluminescent tattoos.
Talk to you in a few!
As you mind readers know, I've got a copy of electronic text that my fifth-great uncle had written in a format called a blog or web log, cataloging his thoughts and observations about the early 21st century. Looks as if the word recession is not new, after all.
In fact, we're recreating economic conditions that occurred not only during the Great Recession of 2007-2011 but also in centuries and millennia past. Thank goodness I have maintained a set of records of Earth history here on Mars for my mental exercise routines, which I am mentally transmitting to those of you hooked on my wavelength for the next few microseconds.
In other words, don't panic. Prices will return to normal in the next few hours.
Be advised that I will offline for two minutes later today for a DNA change. I have decided that I prefer my skin cells living only one day or so to allow me to enjoy Martian daytime without deleterious effects on my electroluminescent tattoos.
Talk to you in a few!
Tongue And Groove
Yesterday, I attended a summertime picnic sponsored by the local offices of a global company. The company operates almost exclusively in researching and designing technological products so I was surprised to see some of the people walking around using disposable film cameras instead of digital cameras. Perhaps they were afraid of damaging or losing their digital cameras. I wondered also if there is a hidden trend among non-digital camera users. I thought about the possibilities to put me to sleep the way some people count sheep.
What about you? A reader recently asked me about a problem she had. She told me that in her work life, other people are behaving in ways that jeopardize her job (they put up a petition about something related to her work as a leader - I don't have more details than that). Missing my advice to never work in a job because you have to, she needs this job and can't afford to lose it; she also enjoys the work and her colleagues in the office. She wanted to know what she should do to discourage the petitioners.
Well, I don't have any ready answers for her (except, perhaps that freedom of speech is a fundamental right of our species when engaged in civil discourse). However, I do have some wisdom to share with her from my deceased grandfather.
When I was a little boy visiting my grandparents on their farm, my grandfather took me out into his garage workshop to show me some of his woodworking tools. His World. You know what I mean. Some of us have a place we call our own, a place where we could perform our tasks with our eyes closed and one hand tied around behind our backs (for those of you who are blind or missing limb(s), I apologize if the reference offends you but it's an old one from my youth that applies to someone like me with a fully functioning body - you get what I mean, I'm sure).
Pa-Paw thrived in that workshop. He showed me how he kept screws, nuts and bolts separated by nailing jar lids to a piece of wood which he hung from the ceiling - he then kept the metal parts in glass jars and screwed the jars up into the lids (small jars/lids for small metal parts and large jars/lids for large metal parts) so he could look up for the parts he needed for a woodworking project. It kept his workbench neat and free from clutter.
In the case of my reader, my grandfather showed me another trick, how to mate two pieces of wood together to give them a strong joint without resorting to using nails, screws, nuts, bolts or glue. Something he called tongue and groove.
Keep in mind that in popular culture at the time, the word "groove" meant having a certain attitude, a style of walking or a style of dancing so when I heard my grandfather speak, I thought he meant that "tongue and groove" was a colloquial expression for the way a man spoke and carried on in public. I was impressed that my grandfather was teaching me, a boy of about six to eight years of age, how to conduct himself as a grownup. My ears and eyes were focused completely on what he was about to say.
"Now, see here, this is a router. Routers cut patterns in wood. You can combine a jigsaw and a router to make decorative interlocking pieces of wood like that jigsaw puzzle you and your Ma-Maw are working on in the house."
"Huh?"
"What's that, young man? You have to speak up. I don't have my hearing aids in."
"What's a router and a jigsaw got to do with getting your tongue and groove on?"
"You don't put a tongue and groove on. You route it in. Here, let me show you. Get that two by four over there and bring it over here."
"What's a two by four?"
"That long piece of wood on top of the stack over there."
I looked across the room where he was pointing and all I saw were stacks and stacks of wood, length not being a feature that made one piece stand out from another. I saw colors like honey, walnut shell, manila folder, and mustard yellow. I saw black streaks made by oil or burning. I walked over and picked up a piece about as long as my arm that had interesting tree ring growth patterns on it and a big eye in the middle made by a knot or tree branch outlet.
"Well, Rick, that's not the piece I wanted but it will do. So put it on the workbench and I'll show you how to clamp it down."
My grandfather proceeded to show me how to secure the piece of wood against the side of the workbench and then he pulled a metal bit out a of drawer and attached it to a portable router. He cut a short groove in the wood and then had me hold the router and cut a short groove of my own. From there, he took me to a section of the workshop where he kept his finished pieces and demonstrated to me how a piece of wood with a tapered protruding edge, the tongue, fit into a piece of wood with a recessed edge, the groove. He showed me a small chest of drawers he'd made with multiple tongue and groove joints as well as a drawer made with dovetail joints. He explained to me when to use glue and when to use graphite or lubricating oils between joints, based on the type of wood used and its expansion properties. He stressed that wood and metal are not good for joints so avoid nails or screws unless you were attaching decorative hardware like drawer pulls or mirror mounts.
Now how is all that related to a person's fear of losing her job because of a petition? I'm not a parablist (is that such a word?) who ends a story with some vague reference and pretends to be all-knowing or wise. I'm not the wise one here in this tale - my grandfather is. My grandfather demonstrated to me that we learn by doing. We share. We accept one person's view of another object even if it differs from one's own (the definition of a piece of wood, for example) and keep our eye on what's important. The same goes for the reader and her question. A petition is an opportunity to share, to accept others' views and to stay focused on what's important. My advice, such as it is, is for the reader to demonstrate to others the many ways in which petitions are useful, turning the petitions into a learning experience for all involved, and of course, let her boss know what she's doing, in case the sudden appearance of several petitions on the intranet/Internet gets the boss a bit concerned.
What about you? A reader recently asked me about a problem she had. She told me that in her work life, other people are behaving in ways that jeopardize her job (they put up a petition about something related to her work as a leader - I don't have more details than that). Missing my advice to never work in a job because you have to, she needs this job and can't afford to lose it; she also enjoys the work and her colleagues in the office. She wanted to know what she should do to discourage the petitioners.
Well, I don't have any ready answers for her (except, perhaps that freedom of speech is a fundamental right of our species when engaged in civil discourse). However, I do have some wisdom to share with her from my deceased grandfather.
When I was a little boy visiting my grandparents on their farm, my grandfather took me out into his garage workshop to show me some of his woodworking tools. His World. You know what I mean. Some of us have a place we call our own, a place where we could perform our tasks with our eyes closed and one hand tied around behind our backs (for those of you who are blind or missing limb(s), I apologize if the reference offends you but it's an old one from my youth that applies to someone like me with a fully functioning body - you get what I mean, I'm sure).
Pa-Paw thrived in that workshop. He showed me how he kept screws, nuts and bolts separated by nailing jar lids to a piece of wood which he hung from the ceiling - he then kept the metal parts in glass jars and screwed the jars up into the lids (small jars/lids for small metal parts and large jars/lids for large metal parts) so he could look up for the parts he needed for a woodworking project. It kept his workbench neat and free from clutter.
In the case of my reader, my grandfather showed me another trick, how to mate two pieces of wood together to give them a strong joint without resorting to using nails, screws, nuts, bolts or glue. Something he called tongue and groove.
Keep in mind that in popular culture at the time, the word "groove" meant having a certain attitude, a style of walking or a style of dancing so when I heard my grandfather speak, I thought he meant that "tongue and groove" was a colloquial expression for the way a man spoke and carried on in public. I was impressed that my grandfather was teaching me, a boy of about six to eight years of age, how to conduct himself as a grownup. My ears and eyes were focused completely on what he was about to say.
"Now, see here, this is a router. Routers cut patterns in wood. You can combine a jigsaw and a router to make decorative interlocking pieces of wood like that jigsaw puzzle you and your Ma-Maw are working on in the house."
"Huh?"
"What's that, young man? You have to speak up. I don't have my hearing aids in."
"What's a router and a jigsaw got to do with getting your tongue and groove on?"
"You don't put a tongue and groove on. You route it in. Here, let me show you. Get that two by four over there and bring it over here."
"What's a two by four?"
"That long piece of wood on top of the stack over there."
I looked across the room where he was pointing and all I saw were stacks and stacks of wood, length not being a feature that made one piece stand out from another. I saw colors like honey, walnut shell, manila folder, and mustard yellow. I saw black streaks made by oil or burning. I walked over and picked up a piece about as long as my arm that had interesting tree ring growth patterns on it and a big eye in the middle made by a knot or tree branch outlet.
"Well, Rick, that's not the piece I wanted but it will do. So put it on the workbench and I'll show you how to clamp it down."
My grandfather proceeded to show me how to secure the piece of wood against the side of the workbench and then he pulled a metal bit out a of drawer and attached it to a portable router. He cut a short groove in the wood and then had me hold the router and cut a short groove of my own. From there, he took me to a section of the workshop where he kept his finished pieces and demonstrated to me how a piece of wood with a tapered protruding edge, the tongue, fit into a piece of wood with a recessed edge, the groove. He showed me a small chest of drawers he'd made with multiple tongue and groove joints as well as a drawer made with dovetail joints. He explained to me when to use glue and when to use graphite or lubricating oils between joints, based on the type of wood used and its expansion properties. He stressed that wood and metal are not good for joints so avoid nails or screws unless you were attaching decorative hardware like drawer pulls or mirror mounts.
Now how is all that related to a person's fear of losing her job because of a petition? I'm not a parablist (is that such a word?) who ends a story with some vague reference and pretends to be all-knowing or wise. I'm not the wise one here in this tale - my grandfather is. My grandfather demonstrated to me that we learn by doing. We share. We accept one person's view of another object even if it differs from one's own (the definition of a piece of wood, for example) and keep our eye on what's important. The same goes for the reader and her question. A petition is an opportunity to share, to accept others' views and to stay focused on what's important. My advice, such as it is, is for the reader to demonstrate to others the many ways in which petitions are useful, turning the petitions into a learning experience for all involved, and of course, let her boss know what she's doing, in case the sudden appearance of several petitions on the intranet/Internet gets the boss a bit concerned.
18 June 2009
Breaking News
In a surprise move today, the UN announced the adoption of the new international language, Mangrishi, a mix of Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi. All over the planet, people have poured out into the streets in total panic, tearing down signs in all sorts of languages, including their own, in apparent confusion about the cause for the impromptu protests.
"Like, uh...does this, um, like, does this mean, uh...does this mean I have to go back to school this summer?" one tanned young man asked me, dripping wet and running from a public swimming pool with a beach towel wrapped around his head like a turban (we thought he might be a Sikh - sorry, tried to snag a cool interview for YouTube - dumped it to a text converter for this lead story on baidu, instead).
Returning from a four-month world tour promoting the gastropod mollusk industry as a means to reignite the sluggish economy, our glorious leader has pronounced this a travesty, proclaiming our country to be sovereign and not subject to the laws of international thieves and bandits. "We have a proud heritage of inclusion, a history where people of all nations are welcome to our shores, but we will not allow the unsanctioned rules and regulations of an international body of bureacrats dictate the words we can and cannot use to communicate with one another. I have called an emergency meeting of my cabinet to address this matter and will make a more formal response later today."
In reviewing the UN document released just minutes ago, it appears that all numbers or references to counting systems in general have been replaced with Mandarin characters. All references to food, foodstuff, or any ingredients used in food, such as plants, animals, herbs and spices, as well as religious symbology, have been translated into a mix of Spanish and Hindi words. All references to business, civilization and other forms of trade and transportation have been converted into English. Any people, places, things or ideas not expressly, explicitly or implicitly stated in the document may still be used on the local level, but any consideration of the international use of such words must be submitted to regional committees for the dissemination of global concepts for arbitration and argumentation. And thankfully, Latin has officially been declared a dead language.
More on this important topic as it develops. And now back to your regular programming, "Slug Herders and the Mothers Who Raised Them."
"Like, uh...does this, um, like, does this mean, uh...does this mean I have to go back to school this summer?" one tanned young man asked me, dripping wet and running from a public swimming pool with a beach towel wrapped around his head like a turban (we thought he might be a Sikh - sorry, tried to snag a cool interview for YouTube - dumped it to a text converter for this lead story on baidu, instead).
Returning from a four-month world tour promoting the gastropod mollusk industry as a means to reignite the sluggish economy, our glorious leader has pronounced this a travesty, proclaiming our country to be sovereign and not subject to the laws of international thieves and bandits. "We have a proud heritage of inclusion, a history where people of all nations are welcome to our shores, but we will not allow the unsanctioned rules and regulations of an international body of bureacrats dictate the words we can and cannot use to communicate with one another. I have called an emergency meeting of my cabinet to address this matter and will make a more formal response later today."
In reviewing the UN document released just minutes ago, it appears that all numbers or references to counting systems in general have been replaced with Mandarin characters. All references to food, foodstuff, or any ingredients used in food, such as plants, animals, herbs and spices, as well as religious symbology, have been translated into a mix of Spanish and Hindi words. All references to business, civilization and other forms of trade and transportation have been converted into English. Any people, places, things or ideas not expressly, explicitly or implicitly stated in the document may still be used on the local level, but any consideration of the international use of such words must be submitted to regional committees for the dissemination of global concepts for arbitration and argumentation. And thankfully, Latin has officially been declared a dead language.
More on this important topic as it develops. And now back to your regular programming, "Slug Herders and the Mothers Who Raised Them."
If You Can...
She's gone again. Look, I can only get this short sentence to you -- those of you who understand this will know what to do: "If you can read these words, you're dead."
In Praise of My Planet
I sit here every day, watching the natural world outside the one window I have. The seedpods on the redbud tree have nearly matured and will start drying soon. I have watched this tree grow taller with age and soon the ends of its branches will grow leaves out of sight of where I sit.
For now, I try to learn lessons from the tree. Earlier this year, small larvae or caterpillars were chewing the leaves of the tree.
Does a tree scream in the scent world? I wonder.
Or do birds know to visit the redbud tree in springtime to enjoy delicious, nutritious protein meals made of insects in one stage of growth?
Or is it a bit of both? Maybe the birds are conditioned to visit the tree because the smell of eaten leaves attracts their attention and then they find the insect larvae sitting there like food on a plate.
In any case, I see no more insect larvae. I only see the tree waving in the wind, its holey and half-eaten leaves providing miniature views of the trees, birds, bees, and bugs beyond. And for some reason, I smell freshly-cut grass, the scent I associate with the color green and the word chlorophyll, like the smell of iron I associate with the color red and the word blood I imagine when I see a cut in human flesh oozing out liquid.
I may be cut off from nature but I am still part of it while sitting here in this wooden box with a couple of squares of glass cut into one wall, a tiny view of my planet, my home.
For now, I try to learn lessons from the tree. Earlier this year, small larvae or caterpillars were chewing the leaves of the tree.
Does a tree scream in the scent world? I wonder.
Or do birds know to visit the redbud tree in springtime to enjoy delicious, nutritious protein meals made of insects in one stage of growth?
Or is it a bit of both? Maybe the birds are conditioned to visit the tree because the smell of eaten leaves attracts their attention and then they find the insect larvae sitting there like food on a plate.
In any case, I see no more insect larvae. I only see the tree waving in the wind, its holey and half-eaten leaves providing miniature views of the trees, birds, bees, and bugs beyond. And for some reason, I smell freshly-cut grass, the scent I associate with the color green and the word chlorophyll, like the smell of iron I associate with the color red and the word blood I imagine when I see a cut in human flesh oozing out liquid.
I may be cut off from nature but I am still part of it while sitting here in this wooden box with a couple of squares of glass cut into one wall, a tiny view of my planet, my home.
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