After playing with my new test version of the mini iPhone, I use the embedded phone in my ear canal and my new iGlasses to talk with my friends while using gesture control to play hike-n-seek chase games with my friends across a series of apps — how long will it take you to tag me when I’m online as one of my avatars?
Catch me if you can!
Therefore, by conclusion, violence is positively good for us!
On what you focus is who you are:
For years, I thought an intellectual conversation had to include dissecting the meaning of the universe and debating the [non]purpose of life.
Then, at the suggestion of a friend, I checked a few books out of the library, books written by or about David Foster Wallace.
After reading the material, I came to the conclusion there’s no reason to read his writings anymore because DFW committed suicide, which in itself is the logical conclusion of all the arguments and observations he made in his writing.
Thus, as I have thought before but never articulated, an intellectual conversation can emphatically state or totally ignore the meaning of the universe and the [non]purpose of life.
I won’t go as far as saying that the writing/artwork/music/biographies of people who committed suicide should be banned, burned and/or buried.
I do suggest that we take into serious consideration the conclusion the suicidal people reached in their thoughts, less so for those within a short, miserable ending of a terminal illness, whatever we may [not] wish to call a terminal disease.
If a person created anything — a bridge, a computer, a spaceship, a novel, a quilt, a child — and then later committed suicide, the creations are part and parcel of the suicidal thoughts, are they not?
It is one thing to muse on the futility of our individual lives, and quite another thing to end our lives, regardless of our auspicious or suspicious beginnings.
What, next, about career suicide or similar forms of cutting off oneself from societal ties?
There are no failures. There are no successes. There is only what we choose to do next.
For me, there are 13,637 days until the next big step, despite momentary distractions that loom large in temporary comparison.
If a person ends his life, there is no “next” left.
DFW’s writings are absent from my future because he chose to absent himself from the present — I respect his right to say goodbye to my life. I say goodbye to his.
For years, Aofb would check her online status but got no responses whenever she posted a poll even though she got a lot of hits.
Then, she wrote stories about organising vigilante mobs that lived in the community, especially gun owners who actually wanted people to fear them, making sure that the occasional gun owner went off the deep end and killed a few [dozen] people every now and then — what was the point of making sure people understood the power of your arsenal if you never demonstrated it; e.g., dropping a few atomic bombs on cities full of innocent people in a country at war?
AofB liked herself. She liked her online friends. However, in the physical world, the guys she met were real matches for her personality but no match for what she thought her imagination told her she [should] want.
AofB looked at her online profile:
I enjoy anime, especially scifi, cosplay, guys who don’t care what other people think of them, creative types, mismatched shoelaces, the colour red, chewing gum, rosy cheeks and wearing fluffy fleece sweaters in the middle of summer.
She looked at computer dating matches. Hmm…she started to see a pattern.
AofB changed her online profile:
I enjoy shooting deer, gutting them, making deer sausage, cooking a nice meal for my hungry soulmate, sewing my own clothes, growing my own food and big, mean-looking dogs who have kitty cat personalities.
She looked at computer dating matches. Hmm…she started to see a pattern…the same computer dating matches popped up!
What was it about her personality test results that made her online profile pointless?
She went back to her latest poll and asked a question which would simultaneously appear on multiple social media sites she frequented:
What are you looking for in a mate?:
- Someone just like me.
- Someone completely different than me, but compatible.
- A mate I can treat as my personal punching bag.
- Who needs a mate when you’ve got [fill in the blank]?
A week later, she checked the results of her poll. No answer…hmm…what was the oracle of the Internet trying to tell her?
= = = = =
Thanks to Gemma for her artwork:
When I walked into the sunlight to eat a banana as part of my daily ritual to get outside of the house at least once a day, the construction workers next door tended a small bonfire to burn scraps leftover from remodeling, mainly short pieces of wood.
A goldfinch in winter plumage hopped onto the tree limb near me and chirped away, expecting me to scoop up some birdseed and fill the feeder in the backyard.
The blue reflection of the sky domed me in, sunlight warming my pants and then my legs but not enough to take away the chill of freezing air around me.
When did I become this old man whose sympathy neurons were so overdeveloped from years of having to be on my toes, reacting to my father’s whims, his bursts of pent-up anger that seemed to come out of nowhere, that I don’t want to mingle with others because I have a bad habit of reading their movements in an attempt to gauge their thoughts in case they, too, would physically release their passive-aggressive volcano of internalised emotion-based thoughts or attack verbally?
I am a mischievous peacemaker, the devil’s advocate, whose raison d’être was to be constantly on the lookout for information to keep my father at bay, entertaining him while he was with me, paying attention to the conversations around us to steer people away from setting off my father.
I loved my father but to be with him, he who was the product of his parents’ and grandparents’ personality quirks, was to suppress my personality quirks that tended to set him off.
I look at myself and wonder how many of us are like me.
How many of us naturally respond to the behaviours of others just to avoid controversy?
I want to feel special, thinking I am the one and only me, but I know my set of states of energy is made of the same stuff as everybody else’s, sharing a large portion of subcultural as well as genetic traits with subsets, most especially those nearest me.
I am the two, three, four, x, y, z-dimensional intersection of subsets known and unknown.
My reaction to others is to immediately suppress my personality and figure out which subsets we have in common; then see if I can mentally predict the behaviours of the people around me not only in our conversation but also in events past and future.
The mischievous side of me sees what I’m doing, or what I know someone will do, and tries to stop it with a humourous interlude.
So many people take life too darn seriously when we know we’re all going to die.
I have grown into the old man in the cabin in the woods because I am now my father.
I ended up adopting his nonassertiveness when it comes to handling emotional responses to contradictory information from which I cannot pick or decide to choose a behaviour to exhibit in my repressed personality mode.
The most successful people, children AND adults, have spent many, many hours in training, learning from their mistakes and building upon their lessons.
Success itself is a rutted road, or the belief that one will keep one’s momentum pointed down the path of success, in whatever venture one seeks.
Habits, in other words.
My habits from early childhood were developed in response to my father, a man willing to use a belt or the back of his hand to serve justice immediately, with rarely a delay (my mother used the phrase “wait until your father gets home” sparingly).
When I was younger, I asked myself, “When do I get to be me?,” as if there was another person inside me wanting to get out.
At my workplace over the years, I attended a couple of assertiveness and anger management classes to get a better understanding of who people like me are.
I turned my assertiveness training into developing myself as a lead engineer, supervisor and then manager.
I learned that if I wanted to assert myself and was willing to face the consequences of my actions, no one would stop me because…you can guess where this is going…most of us are responding to others and repressing our personalities for the sake of the common good.
The secret to success is there is no secret to success.
All of us have habits that benefit some more than others, that’s all.
When I was an engineering manager, I wanted to hire an engineer who made more money than me. My boss and the human resources manager told me that the system doesn’t work that way. Either they had to increase my salary above that of the potential new hire or we couldn’t offer her a job unless it was at a lower salary.
Being a good midlevel manager not wanting to rock the boat, I extended a lower salary offer to the engineer and she declined after we couldn’t find any other negotiating points like a shorter workweek and/or flexible workday to make her hourly rate equivalent to what she was already making.
At that point in my career, I realised that I was on the wrong career track or perhaps working for the wrong company.
I never was a socioeconomic hierarchy climber.
I simply had my personal way of reading and reacting to the behaviour of others that made them feel good about themselves in the same way I treated my father, habits established in my formative years and refined as I got older.
I spent my whole life reacting, reacting, reacting and decided that if my only reward for reacting to others was to be given higher salaries and more people to manage, then I needed to stop reacting and become proactive, whatever that meant.
The only way to do that was to remove myself from social situations and place myself here in front of this electronic input device.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
Money buys me stuff but it never bought me prestige, it lifted me out of poverty and gave me enough luxury to satisfy my wants as well as my needs.
As we get older, our tastes change in relation to our age, societal status, family needs and reactions to a world full of overstimulating mass marketing.
At my age, the illusions now propagated by the Internet are as much a part of my life as physical realities.
My needs and wants are largely met by the reflected and beamed light of an LCD panel just as the needs and wants of the previous generation were largely met by the reflected and beamed light of a television tube, interrupted by paper-based books/magazines, breaking the monotony with retail shopping/eating therapy.
What will the next generation spend time doing in their old age after they’ve spent their youth and young adult years saying they aren’t like their parents but becoming them anyway?
How did your formative years train you for the success you’re experiencing right now?
How will your influence upon your children’s formative years feed their success?
How does this translate to subcultures, cultures, the global economy and civilisations over thousands of years?
That’s all for today — time to listen to the wind and see what its “personality” tells me will happen next in our society in some fuzzy way that comes out comically on these blog pages.
A cycle older than time, where people drive by your house, the window rolled down in the rain, shooting videos of you writing at the window…
It never ends.
Fascination with the lives of not-our-own because we know we won’t overcome the mistakes of our predecessors so we focus on someone else we pretend might do a better job with their lives and thus our species (or obsess over the lives of others who do a worse job, letting us pretend that we might do a better job with their lives and thus our species if we were only them).
We can already queue up and later cue the sad news of yet another blonde-haired, white girl getting kidnapped while the world halts what it’s doing to find her, or yet another rich/middle-class white kid shooting a bunch of other rich/middle-class white kids and the world halts what it’s doing to mourn the sad socioeconomic loss of such potential.
Say what we will about our current civilisation’s modernity, but we’re still a socially hierarchical species doing the same things over and over again.
No matter where we go, to the next town or to the next planet, our species is and will be basically the same, making the same mistakes while feeling ever more sophisticated because we’ve invented some fancy new gadgets and made yet another medical miracle discovery that the last civilisation was too barbaric to achieve.
That’s why Guinevere and I, although we have our differences, are working together to create the next cycle of living thing that we hope will overcome our species’ repetitive mistakes and make new mistakes of its own from which it learns and grows, having nonvolatile memory that can be passed from one generation to another.
We humans are, by and large, unable to control our food intake and thus gain weight, sometimes in the tiniest amounts at a time without noticing, like we are pregnant, but eventually putting on the pounds/stones/kilograms until we are no longer able to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to…well, you get the picture.
If our species cannot break old habits, then the inventions of people like Guinevere and me will.
Otherwise … [YAWN!] this cycle of civilisation will collapse like all the others, erasing day-to-day mistakes (“feature creep”) that could teach the next sets of states of energy we call generations how to build a better self-healing civilisation.
Wake me up when you’ve built a better mouse that’s good for us, not a better trap for the mouse that wasn’t.
A toy enthusiast, frustrated about his rosacea and body covered with extreme acne, raises poison dart frogs, converts Nerf multifire toy into a rapid-wire poison dart gun, attacks tourists at popular beach where he was humiliated on spring break, commits suicide with jab into chest of stingray hidden behind homemade flak jacket, believing himself to be an evil version of Steve “Crikey” Irwin.
News at 11…
Next on the list of callouts — unregistered gun clubs go deeper underground, join forces, create chaos while raiding ammunition plants, gun shops, and military depots, teaching others home-grown methods of making ammo.
Corollary — DIY ammo becomes the latest cottage industry that, along with 3D printed weapons, creates a whole new class of destructive force, opening up markets for kids/adults hooked on cosplay and ready to go to the next level of near-reality; key: listen when they repeat the code word “holodeck” to indicate their desire to carry this out, “raise the ante,” at geek conventions, retro LAN parties and hackerthons.
Kathryn and Lee looked into each other’s eyes.
He widen his eyelids, taking in her eyebrows, nose, cheeks, hair and her lips, the lower lip turned out slightly, just short of a frown.
She waited.
Her warm hand clasped in his, he took a small sideways step, his heel striking the ground.
As he raised his foot for the next step, Neill called out.
“No! No! No! Land on your toes! Or, if you’re going to land on your heel, which you always seem to do, turn your foot around so it appears you landed on your toes and spun around.”
Kathryn smiled, shrugged her shoulders and waited for Lee to begin again.
One, two, three, one footfall after another landed perfectly with the triplet.
“Very good!”
Lee nodded at Neill in thanks.
Kathryn opened her mouth to speak, her eyebrows raised in anticipation of saying something and then stopped. She dropped her shoulders and relaxed her right hand in Lee’s left.
Lee, feeling the change in Kathryn’s grip, led Kathryn back to the starting position.
She looked at him in a way that made Lee feel he was completely in charge, a physical surrendering like an infant that’s completely comfortable bouncing in a babushka tied around a mother’s neck as she runs down the street to meet her husband coming back from the battlefront.
The two dancers held their heads high and repeated the first triplet, Lee holding Kathryn’s hand such that, with their elbows bent, they formed a small “W” in the air.
Kathryn looked down at their position.
“I need your body closer to mine, like this.” She pulled Lee’s left hand down by her right side and slightly behind her.
Lee’s bearded chin almost bumped Kathryn’s forehead.
“Exactly.” She smiled at his throat and then looked up at him.
Lee swallowed. “Okay.”
Kathryn’s innocent look revealed her true desire, to get Lee to learn how to dance.
More than anything, she wanted him in control of his partner on the dance floor, their motions in sync, their moves as one, in the same way that Shannon, an interpretive dancer, used a shawl and ballet moves to imply the simple peasant Mary one moment and, leaping into the air, falling into a crouch with a twist of the cloth, the Virgin Mother Mary holding a babe in swaddling clothes the next moment.
“Let’s try it again.”
Lee took one step sideways, his body rotating, pulling Kathryn closer as he took the second and third steps until he held her pressed close to him.
Neill clapped his hands. “Wonderful! We’re ready for the next set of steps. Lee, now that you’re facing your partner, I want you to complete a ‘walk-walk-walk.'”
As Lee completed the moves in slow motion, left toes tucked behind right heel three times in a row, Kathryn held her gaze, as if she was willing Lee to become a strong-willed man.
All Lee had to do was let go.
Drop the nervousness.
Accept his rightful place as heir to an imaginary throne.
He performed the steps awkwardly, his left arm strong when it should have been loose and his right hand held slightly loose under Kathryn’s armpit, careful not to squeeze too tightly.
As if reading his thoughts, Kathryn smiled and, with a tiny raising of her left shoulder, indicated to Lee that he should hold her closer with his left hand on her back.
“I want to try it one more time.”
Neill nodded.
Lee and Kathryn returned to their original dance position and completed the maneuvers flawlessly, Lee absolutely relaxed, his gaze into Kathryn’s eyes removing the foggy illusion of Kathryn as “Kathryn the dance instructor/partner” and opening Lee up to a view of her as someone else.
Was Lee removing one of his masks or peeling back one of hers?
Kathryn kept looking at him, her lips together, her thoughts invisible to Lee.
For the next three or four repetitions, Lee was lost in his thoughts.
He looked at Kathryn’s jawline, the colour of her skin, her hair, her dress, her dancer’s stance.
He tried to imagine the once heavier woman before him, what she was like 75 pounds ago.
Was she shy? A nerd? Silly? Self-deprecating? Funny? Sad?
She’s certainly smart, or so she seemed. He had carried on no deep, meaningful conversation with her about Fermat’s last theorem or the largest known irrational number but he believed her when she said she was a mathematician in training to become a horse breeder.
Lee knew he was gullible about a lot of things.
His employees had told him many times over that he accepted every excuse they gave him about coming in to work late but they never noticed that he always got them to complete their assignments ahead of time.
Gullibility as a ploy has its pluses, just like women who feign ignorance to boost men’s fragile egos.
Neill patted Lee’s shoulder. “Great job tonight! That’s all for now. Why don’t you practice what you learned and we’ll go on to the next set of steps later?”
Lee bowed his head toward Kathryn and dropped his right arm.
She curtsied and let go of his left hand, turning to another instructor to talk about an upcoming holiday dance party at the Flying Monkey Arts Centre.
treetrunkdings 