Thrice he cried

Could it be that it’s already time for installment three? Perhaps, I seem to be compelled for some reason to blog lately. I have been implored to maintain a journal from time to time and have tried on occasion. However, I really find it difficult to put my thoughts on paper (or into bits as it may be) for a number of reasons. First of all, finding the time every day or once a week is often difficult. A minor reason I know but they get better. Second, I don’t feel that what I have to write about is all that important. My children will likely not have enough interest in me to warrant the intake of thousands of pages on my mundane life. Furthermore, they will undoubtedly be strongly opinionated about their own convictions and my wrongness by the time they are of an age capable of reading that much. The only possible benefit it may advance them with is having something nostalgic to look at after my death. The third, and most important, reason is that I have a lot of thoughts. I mean a lot of them and many of them are not acceptable for public consumption. Having these thoughts in a form which may be used against me (in a court of law or otherwise) is not something I am willing to subject myself to. Not to mention, if you put it down in written form, you may have a difficult time repealing that opinion later on. Kind of like in the game of politics where if you EVER change your opinion on ANYTHING it’s not seen as a virtue of newly acquired knowledge, it’s seen as being wishy washy and changing sides because you never looked at it thoroughly in the first place. I do not know what the future holds for me in terms of politics and/or any officiating chair or otherwise, and as such I cannot voluntarily add fuel to the fire of self hatred. Admittedly, I would have to be persuaded pretty hard to take any kind of public office (for a lot of reasons, one being that I don’t care much for people in general). I suppose that my blog here could be seen as a type of journal, however the things I post here are often sanitized against my inner self and phrased in a semi-socially acceptable way. Anyway, moving onto the next topic. I have never liked large cities. They may be fun to visit every now and then, but their novelty dies off pretty quickly. Even Salt Lake is a little too busy for me most of the time. It seems that when you get that many people living and existing that closely together, sanity runs in short supply. I think that sanity may be a concept like an electric field. You have a given space (say the size of a city) in which this electric field exists. The field is not infinite, but as long as the supply of electricity is greater than the demand for it by the insane occupants of the area (again, the city) then you’re fine. However, if the city gets large enough and the population density grows to exceed the supply of sanity, you don’t generate more sanity to go around, and that which exists doesn’t even get distributed equally. What you get is some that are well adjusted and capable of living in the provided conditions, while at the same time you get others who are very maladjusted and cannot handle the conditions, yet are unable to compose enough sanity to leave. Therefore, people get hurt. Now, you may be commenting on the seemingly unexplainable phenomena of insane people out in the sticks. This has to do with an individuals capacity to utilize the sanity supply, and there may at times be dark spots on the globe in which sanity does not exist at all, either permanently or temporarily (see Washington DC and most of the Middle East). Now I cannot understand people who think it’s a romantic notion to live in a large city for an extended time period (namely my wife). It is not know to what extent television sitcoms have perpetuated this idea, but city life is not fun, easy nor desirable. I tend to equate it to living like a small community of king crab in a very large pot of water which is slowly rising in temperature. To make it worse, the other crabs are cannibalistic and have an eye on you. When I met the Nikkinator, she held this notion that city life was everything there could possibly be. She wanted to remain single for a while, go have some crazy girly adventures in conquering the world… and I changed that. I did not WANT to change that, but it happened. I’m sure that if one were to ask her, she’d have nothing but good things to say about the choice she made to marry me and accept the unknown life together verses the unknown life in her own private Gotham. That’s the point I want to get at really, that my mere existence in her life changed her dreams and altered her perception. I wonder to what extent this happens every day without us realizing it. To what extent can the presence of one individual effect the course of another life, even if the two never meet face to face. I think it’s effects are more than we realize, and what’s even scarier to think about is how YOU have been effected by the decisions of others. Looking at things from a third person perspective can be helpful at times, but it’s imperative to realize that none of us are in any way impartial observers. We inject our own biases and beliefs into everything we do, including observe. I am reminded of an interaction I once had with a homeless man who would not leave me alone. I was 17 and all I had on me was an empty wallet, my keys and a pocket knife. When the guy asked for money, I told him that I had nothing except a pocket knife. He instantly related a story in which all of his “homeless buddies” had pocket knifes but he didn’t have one. I hesitated, but under the pressure of being alone and aggressively beseeched, I caved and gave the man my pocket knife. It was not until later, upon reflection, that I came to the conclusion that he had undoubtedly lied to me and manipulated me. I hated him for it because I really enjoyed that knife and have never found a suitable replacement for it. Not to mention it in no way improved his lot. Since then I have a starkly suspicious eye on every homeless person I see and refuse to give them money (not to mention all the fraud stories you read about people making a good living off of begging). Furthermore, I think this may have contributed considerably to my hatred of salesmen and their pushy tactics (I refuse to cooperate when I am pushed by salesmen, often ending in me leaving angry and under unreasonable circumstances). This was an example in direct contact, but like I said it doesn’t have to be. For instance, all I need to do now is see a homeless guy standing at the end of a freeway off ramp and I get to thinking about my past experiences with beggars. I try not to let it effect me but I will inevitably be put in a dampened mood. Another example is that of helping people on the side of the road. I used to help about half of the people I saw (mostly out of time constraints). A flat tire or a gallon of gas are so easy to take care of and will only put one out about 10 minutes if you know what you’re doing. However, I had two really bad experiences in a row with people who felt that I owed them something (I guess they had to wait too long for someone like me to pull over) and one of them was remarkably concerned that I’d mar up her rims with the metal star wrench that came with her vehicle. So I stopped helping. I no longer stop to help people on the side of the road (unless it’s very obvious that they are in serious trouble and have no idea what they are doing). These are two lame examples I could think of off the top of my head, but it illustrates the point nonetheless. When we allow other people to incite changes in our lives (with or without our permission or even our knowledge) we are handing a little piece of ourselves to them. In some cases, we don’t have a say in the situation and pieces of us are taken by force (rape, abuse, etc.). However these are comparatively rare. In many more cases, we do it voluntarily, in little tiny increments, thinking that we are in control and still have a grip on things. It is easy to say at this point that you will one day wake up and realize that you’ve given a significant portion of yourself away, but I don’t think it’s like that at all. I think it’s far more likely that if you’re content with having given part of yourself away, probably to things which you feel are good and honorable, you’ll never be presented with a reason to challenge that sense of security. If you happen to realize it, you are still quite likely to justify everything you’ve done. After all, you’re an intelligent being who can’t be fooled very easily… right? You list out the reasons for why you are who you are, and are unaware of those outside factors which have influenced your life in remarkable ways. You simply ignore underlying assumptions, because they are either so basic that you feel they don’t need to be justified with a response (they’re “obvious” or “common knowledge” or “someone you love and admire assured you this was the case”) and as such, they are left out of the equation. When in a situation like this, in which a person is reflecting on their fundamental beliefs and the real core of who they are, they are not looking to upset the apple cart (so to speak). They are looking to validate their own opinions and justify their currently held views. They look for the positives and avoid the negatives (both consciously and unconsciously). It is this that scares me the most. I wonder what assumptions I have overlooked, and fundamental “truths” I’ve had handed to me rather than coming to the conclusions myself. How can I discover these kinds of assumptions and where should I start. Furthermore, SHOULD I even try to do something like that, realizing that if I do happen to find something which needs changing, correcting it may have repercussions which cannot be foreseen. Is it healthy for a person to delve so deeply into their own Psyche and start making changes? What’s the best possible outcome of such an adventure, and conversely what is the worst? How do these two extremes compare with one another and to which side is the scale weighted? What is the relative probability of ending up at either the worst or best possible scenario? Is it a smooth and normalized bell curve, with the highest probability at the center, or is it heavily skewed to one side. Are there any areas which I feel are “off limits” and if so, why (Isn’t that just ignoring the problem and lying to myself?)? If the changes enacted within myself are seen as positive and I move forward, how will it affect my relationship with other people (spouse, family, friends, etc)? Is this something which should be documented and made public or should it be kept self contained and held within so that the situation is as much under control as possible? Am I strong enough to keep it all in, or will I burst at some point (or develop noticeable neuroses as a result)? What if the changes are bad, what if they have unexpected side effects? What if I get lost and don’t know what to do or how to come to a conclusion? Is there anyone who can help (sadly, I feel the answer is no)?

State of Mind

To continue the topic with installment two here, I’d like to talk about music and entertainment. As many of you may know, I enjoy music from pretty much every range of the spectrum, with only a few exceptions. I find very little worth listening to in the realm of Hip Hop and Rap (primarily for reasons of the perpetrators reeking of teenage angst, anger and poor education), and I think most all of you would agree. With that in mind, I can appreciate a great deal of the remaining categories including: Classic Rock, Country, Rhythm & Blues, Ambient, Alternative, Pop, Heavy Metal, Soft Stuff, Musicals and Opera, Classical, and many others. I have recently been on a kick to expand my music collection and have come across a few new categories that I didn’t know I liked before. Evanescence has a pretty decent sound and I have enjoyed several of their songs in the past, but only recently have I learned that they are classified as gothic rock. In the spirit of curiosity, I have been exploring some of the bands associated with this genre and am pleased to report that I like a number of them. Generally characterized by a darker tone and subject matter, they fit right in to my scheme. Further, I have expanded my search to include other dark music styles and have managed to find a few which more than just a deep voice mumbling incoherently into a microphone. Nox Arcana had become one of my new found favorites, partly because it reminds me of Christmas in a dark and brooding way (as I’m sure you all know this corresponds greatly with how I perceive Christmas). The Nikkinator says it makes for great Halloween music, and I can’t deny this claim though I tend to pick up hints at something deeper in the music. One of their albums is heavily influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe (right down to some of the lyrics and the albums title, The Raven). In essence, I have found some interesting music in a place where used to think there was nothing but awful grunting and laughable lyrics which are supposed to be all satanic and what not (really, it is hard sometimes to listen to some of these without laughing, even more so when the individual actually believes in what they are doing). Another area into which I have been exploring lately is meditation. I looked into a few “guided meditation” CD’s and downloaded a couple to try them out. Some were a bit odd and kinds hard to take seriously while others were a little too emphatic on the listener’s relationship to The Buddha to apply to anyone who is not Buddhist. Still, there were a few that actually have some good things to say and have become enjoyable. One thing I do have to say is that having played D&D for some years now, and having an overactive imagination to boot, has really made it difficult to extract benefits from mentally visualizing myself doing some of the things suggested in these meditation courses. The whole “mental projection” thing id sort of “old hat” by now though I’m sure that there are other individuals out there, perhaps cubicle slaves in some large city, that don’t exercise their imagination’s much and have become entrenched in the mundane and these types of exercises will doubtlessly provide some benefit for them. In the meantime, I listen because it’s relaxing and allows me to put school and work away for a while and just be content. This brings me to another topic, namely that of business. I am the king when it comes to being busy (or at least a lower level duke of some assortment) and I think it has begun to wear on me. As I mentioned last time, I am closing in on 30 (seemed so old when I was young, mainly because my parents were in their 30’s when I was in my teens) and am not feeling too good about it. I still have a few years before I hit that dark milestone, but the fact remains that it’s approaching much too fast for my tastes. Now with a child and still the likelihood of several years left in school, I find myself without personal time. It seems every spare second is taken in meeting the expectations of others (homework, family, general household maintenance, etc) and at the end of the day I find myself just wanting to go to bed so I can at least dream about having freedom. The really tragic thing is that whereas I used to dream of crazy crap like being chased by large carnivorous dinosaurs (this was even before Jurassic Park came out, though was certainly aggravated by it) or flying without wings or anything, my dreams lately have become sad any pathetic. For instance, the other day I dreamt that I was a little older and had 3 children (Adria at about 7, another younger girl and a baby girl) and we were struggling to get them ready so we could go to the store. I suppose in many ways this could be considered a nightmare, and indeed this was the impression I took away from it, since the prospect of having three children scares me. Nevertheless, it shows a complete lack of initiative. I mean what could be more boring than dreaming about family life? I miss the dreams I used to have about adventuring in outer space, or existing in an M.C. Escher drawing and having to find a way out, or turning into a 60 foot tall horned demon at school and burning the shredded pieces of all the kids who ever made fun of me (comprising about 2/3 of the school populous) before engaging in an epic Godzilla style battle against the US armed forces. I used to have a number of recurring dreams, in one of which I would be on the top floor of a massive sky scraper (like really huge) in a room which took up the entire floor and was windowed on all sides. In the middle of the room was a colossal table made of black wood, and had no chairs around it (just the table). On the table was a pile of toys several feet high and covering the entire surface of the table. All kinds of toys, every type you can imagine (or at least the ones I could imagine at the time). I remember I would always walk over to the table and, after searching for a moment, pull out a Gyroscope to play with (yea, of all the remote control cars and various other toys, I picked the gyroscope). I would take it and walk over to the window to look out. It was always night outside and there was a snowstorm to rival any before seen in history taking place just on the other side of the glass. I would watch the storm for a moment, fascinated by its power and beauty before I felt the building begin to sway slightly from the hurricane force winds. The building would sway a little at first, then slowly build up tremendous harmonic rhythm and begin to sway violently. As I stood there, staring out the window, the building moved so far that it began to topple. I would always be on the side which broke so that I was looking out the window facing the ground as we screamed toward the streets below. I don’t recall ever having had any reaction to this, just watching out the window as we fell to the streets below. In classic dream fashion, I would always wake up fractions of a second before impacting with the ground, my heart racing. Why can’t I have dreams like that any more? I miss the excitement they used to bring into my dull life. No, I am predisposed to dream like Arnold Rimmer in Better Than Life, taking all my friends down with me to the point that we all end up buried neck deep in wet sand with our faces painted with strawberry jam in anticipation of approaching killer ants. Sometimes I get weird, like that dreams are an inter-dimensional mode of communication between various alternative versions of yourself. In some ways it makes sense, and I’d like to devote some time to showing it’s possibility mathematically (that is if I had any reason to believe that it wasn’t just my imagination running wild again). This brings me to another subject I wish to talk about for a bit. That is, to what extent does an active, or overactive, imagination play into ones ability to grasp and thoroughly comprehend some of the bizarre concepts presented in relativistic and quantum realms of science? I found it kind of unexpected that people would have such a hard time grasping that as things moved faster, they shrank in the length of motion, or that time is not an absolute, but can be manipulated given certain criteria. Topics like these seemed a little strange at first, but when you begin to comprehend how your preconceived notions are playing into how you think the world should work, it becomes much easier to see no only how these strange concepts could be possible but also how the human mind would think it unnatural given our evolutionary state in small gravity, medium size, and comparatively slow motion. What else were we to expect to see? Anyway, I’d better stop here before I launch into another 6 pages of elaboration on why I love science and math so much and the power they have to explain everything we see.

It's life Jim, but not as we know it...

So Halloween is creeping up on us again (you like that? creeping up on us… BWAHA!) and Christmas crap is already starting to flood its way into a retail outlet near you. Soon, we’ll all being asked to pay homage to the gods of commercial advertising who will admonish us all to forfeit our earthly monies in exchange for cheap poisonous merchandise from China. Nevertheless we will all be merry because that’s the attitude the season calls for and we’ve all apparently lost our originality and uniqueness in favor of a hive like mind and an automaton like relationship with “The Man”. However, some of us have stayed behind to guard the ever decreasing echelons of sanity and reason and will tend the fires in anticipation of those who may wish to return some day. Having our first snow “storm” (more like a light piddling from a young puppy) of the year, it’s apparent that we’re heading into an early winter. We’re approaching the halfway point through the semester, and while I haven’t been on the top of the scores list, I am certainly doing well enough to pass all my classes. Lately it’s been fairly difficult to find motivation, and I don’t mean just for school either. I’ve found it hard to get excited about work, school, hunting, camping, driving, walking, cooking, eating, sleeping, and pretty much everything my ample body is required to do. I’m not sure what this lack of inspiration could be stemming from, but it seems to be trickling its way into all areas of my life. I can speculate on possibilities, such as my age rapidly approaching 30 and the fact that I am now a parent and thus have completed the cliché middle aged white male stereotype. If I end up buying a minivan, it will officially be time to grab a razor blade and take a dirt nap in the tub. A few weeks ago, I was recalling some of my aspirations from high school (spurred on by my mother giving me a bunch of my old school stuff). It’s interesting how you think life will be when you’re young and have no idea what life is REALLY like. I was reading some of my papers from the lithe SEOP (Student Education & Occupation Planning) meetings where I listed what I wanted to do when I was out of school. Apparently, and I vaguely recall this, I wanted to be a prosthetic engineer, which is to say that I wanted to build replacement limbs for human patients. I think what I had in mind was that I wanted to build war machines for military uses, and the narrow minded, lackluster counselor wrote down the closest thing they could grasp to what I was trying to explain. Nevertheless, things have changed considerably since then. I think it’s funny that when you’re in high school you’ll hear people say that they’ll be a brilliant computer wiz with a huge chain of stores and a massive portfolio, a private yacht and a small harem. You’ll never hear a them say that they want to be a mid-level shift supervisor at a computer parts retailer, still lives with their parents and is doinking one of the girls from the shipping department. It makes me wonder to what extent we set our selves up for failure by our own unreasonable standards. It is pumped into us from a very young age that we can do anything and be anything we want to be if we try hard enough. By the time you’re 35 or 40 you’ve realized that it’s no longer possible for you to achieve what you wanted, all the pieces are now in place for a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. I think about where I am and the dreams I currently have, and then I retrospectively observe the path I’ve trodden so far and how I have fallen far short of pretty much every dream I have ever had, it makes one tempted to project current trends into the future. I still have some dreams (though they pale in comparison to where I thought I would be at this point) and can’t help but think that I am not going to be able to acquire those dreams within the time available to me. I would like to see myself finishing my degree, moving on to graduate school and obtaining an advanced degree (probably still a PhD in Nuclear Physics) and then moving forward into the world with great plans of working with some of the greatest minds on the planet on fantastic projects which will hopefully yield vast improvements in human technology and understanding of our universe. Then I think about things from a realistic standpoint. I am an average guy with reasonable intelligence who is still an undergrad in an infantile physics program at a barely established university in the Midwestern US and has to work full time to meet his obligations to his family. Many of the more interesting problems relating to fields I am interested in have already been solved and by people with much higher intellects than I, leaving me to likely fill positions in the “just-above-peon” category. I haven’t made any friends with terrific political relations I could exploit to advance my status nor am I privy to sensitive information which could be used to blackmail my way up the chain. Basically, I am average and it appears that I’ll be staying this way for quite some time. Now I am sure that you all are thinking about all the good things that I have, like a lovely wife and daughter, a nice home, a good job, etc, and I recognize those things fully. I’m not complaining really, I guess I’m just disappointed in myself for having the audacity to dream so large that I was inevitably setting myself up for a shortcoming. So the point of the lesson is when a teacher tells children that they can become anything they want to become, she’s only telling half of the story (a common theme I’ve run into in EVERYTHING lately, half truths are the norm). Now for all you feminists out there, the only reason the “teacher” in my little side note was female is because most all of my early teachers WERE female and I got into the habit of saying “she” when talking about it. I have a lot more to say, but I am running out of time so I’ll post again later so you all can listen to me bellyache some more (as though there is anyone left who actually reads my stupid blog).